#completely random and makes no sense? now obviously in this case it's not as straightforward as 'they just picked things about me that are

[thornshadowwolf]

Damn I thought maybe I was just being weird and sleep deprived about it last night but this morning I was genuinely hoping that anon would be back to elaborate.

[gojology]

— Gojo and Nanami | Their Insecurities

pairing : insecure gojo x gender neutral reader, insecure nanami x gender neutral reader warnings : unedited, probably some misspellings, maybe some cursing, i probably dont make sense at all wordcount : 1703 a/n : this is so bad dear god please forgive me for deeming this as content

GOJO SATORU ‧₊˚✩彡.

☆ Gojo’s insecure about his lack of bodyhair. His lack of facial hair and arm hair worries him. Being babyfaced wasn’t something positive in his eyes- no, he wishes he was physically more masculine.

   Your eyes meet his, the sun rays bathing both of you in an orange filtered light. His mouth is slightly opened, skin flush to the touch. After a night of intimacy, your ready for another round, pushing your palm towards his forehead. “Good morning, Satoru.” you say, voice slightly wavering even in the most private presence, without the formalities and what not, he’s surprisingly normal, and it’s taken you a bit to adjust to that. He’s warm, but it’s the good kind of warm, and it shows on his silly, dopey smile.

    You guess it wasn’t the time for more sex, so you resist your urges, directing the energy to something else.

    Gradually, your palms find themselves on his cheeks, and you pinch them slightly, giving him a look you hope is loving- because you really do mean it. Your rest assured, as the curve to his swollen lips grew even wider. The sounds of bird chirped as your fingers danced across his jawline, finally at your final stop, his chin. 

    You tip his chin up, and sure enough, hickeys are adorning his neck. A feeling of joy and honor fills you for a brief second, you were the one that was allowed to see him vulnerable, given the pass into his locked up heart. He finally breaks the silence between the two of you, pushing away your slack hand delicately. 

    It’s peculiar, there’s a tremble to his lips, like he’s scared, or about to burst into a fit of tears. You think it should be the other way around, but here you were, arms held close to your chest, looking at him with a mixture of curiosity and anticipation, bated breath preventing you from questioning the sudden change in tone. 

    “Hey, um, Y/N, weird ass question, but, am I hairy? Like, wooly mammoth hairy?” 

    You can’t tell if it’s sarcasm or not.

    Trying not to make a face, you shrug your shoulders. “Well, I mean, not really. You’re actually pretty nonhairy, in terms of uh... The average-” you pause, realizing how drastically his face fell. “-But I do like non-hairy guys! Who would wanna date a wooly mammoth anyways? Hey, baby..” you coo, giving him a tiny peck on the cheek, fluttering your eyelashes.     “What’s this about? Hey, you know, you can just be straightforward with me, I don’t mind.” 

    He doesn’t take a moment of hesitation, exasperatedly blurting out, “Does my lack of.. Hair, bother you?” but it seems he regrets it, your cheeks puffing up, stifling a giggle. Yet, he maintains the bone-chilling eye contact, his eyes are as vivid as ever, so blue it looked like the entrance to heaven. Your immediately lulled, whatever he was going to say was definitely urgent.

    “W-What? Are you being serious?” covering your mouth, your voice is muffled, but his face looks absolutely terrified, and you relish in how funny he looked. It wasn’t everyday that he was genuinely frightened, well, maybe he didn’t show it often.    “Of course not! Why would I be even remotely worried about bodyhair when I have something way more eye-catching in front of me?”

    The shock turns into a sheepish smile, returning for a second time, your heart melting instantly. He takes a long, deep breath, exhaling the tension away, tugging at the covers to go over his chest. You hadn’t realized that he had stolen more than half of the blanket for himself, but you don’t make a fuss about it. 

    For all the weight he carried on his sagging shoulders, you’re sure the warmth is appreciated. 

NANAMI KENTO ‧₊˚✩彡.

☆ Nanami thinks he’s a boring person, through and through. Outside of work, he doesn’t see why anyone would want him. Some days, he wonders if he should pick up on Gojo’s personality, telling jokes and being sarcastic and what not.

   The fine, white porcelain Nanami had gifted you was beautiful, to say the least. Nanami frequently shone it until it glimmered in the light, wiping any smudge or speck of dirt that dared to get on his beloved tea set that he gifted to you a few months prior. Gold trim, alongside depictions of birds fluttering about, and your favorite flowers. It’s perfect for you, and that’s why he had gotten it. His eyes had instantly brightened, picturing your beaming face as you served the two of you some tea.

   But he wonders, would you be happier if he perhaps gifted you something more up to date in comparison to the porcelain? He had enough money to buy you the world, bags, jewelry, he’d often used to hear stories of his co-workers giving their wives expensive, well, anything, and they’d be over the moon. A sudden realization grew inside of him at the thought of this:    

   Was he too out-of-date?    

   The thought went rampant in his usually collected mind, twisting and turning at night, only the sound of you, deep in sleep, could calm the troubled man down. As a consequence to his overthinking, he got little to no rest, and if he got little to no rest, his eyebags would turn their ugly, sneering faces in his direction.

     And so, as he’s baking tea cakes to go along with the afternoon tea the two of you would routinely drink, he’s going deep into depth of himself. He’s a good worker, good at...

     What was he good at? Aside from work, he can’t see why he’d be of use. Nanami acknowledges he’s stoic, which may be good in some cases, but often, everyone runs away from him because he appears as scary with those cold, calculating eyes. As opposed to Gojo, everyone enjoyed how lenient of a teacher he was. Well, Nanami isn’t sure on that, maybe aside from Megumi, Nobara, and Yuuji, everyone hated that. Regardless, him and Gojo don’t share something in common.

     Gojo has humor, and he doesn’t. 

     So why did you like him? 

     Nanami’s subconsciously drumming his long, bony fingers against the counter, eyes studying the ceiling like it’s the last thing he’ll ever do. Steadily, an acrid smell completely overwhelmed your senses- now, you’re hacking into your arm, and finally, Nanami comes back to Earth. 

     He blinks a few times, like he’s drinking in his surroundings, before he realizes the tea cakes are completely burning into a crisp.

Now, he’s on heightened alert, yanking open the handle to the oven and fanning out the flames with a random oven mitt he had hastily grabbed for. Beads of sweat are developing on his skin, before finally, you rush in, still hacking up a storm with a large pot of freezing water in your shaking hands.

     Nanami curses himself for ever appearing as informal, but then he remembers he’s infront of his significant other, he didn’t have to put on an act. His face relaxes, and he opens his mouth to speak, to apologize, but he’s paused- by you. You raise your palm up at him, the other hand opening up a window looking over the garden.

      “Nana.” he freezes completely, the affectionate nickname was specially reserved for confrontations like this. You spoke softly, which, for some reason, was significantly worse than you screaming into his ear. Your eyes follow suit, staring at his collar, loosening his tie. He winces, but Nanami’s not sure why he does. You had touched him millions of times, so why was it now that he didn’t accept it?

     “Yes, my love?” he finally breathes out, wrapping a strong, gentle arm around your waist just loosely. You place your thumb just below his lower lip, your index finger rubbing his plush lips all at the same time. The exchange is purely affectionate, yet, he’s still tense. 

    “What has gotten into you?” you murmur. 

    “I- Nothing, darling, I’ll bake another-” 

    “No.” is all you say before you grab him by the chin, unwavering. Usually, those piercing eyes of his are emotionless, something shocking. The eyes are the gateway to the soul, so why is it that it’s blocked off? But you guess it wasn’t the case here, he stared back with the same level of intensity, fear and peculiarity. You stay in that position for a little, savoring just how much you must mean to him, it wasn’t everyday he was vulnerable and let you inside.      Your breathing is heavy, eyelids heavy as well due to his routinely ruckus every night, but you’re determined to erase any trace there was left of that.       You kiss him. It’s sloppy, yet chaste. A fight for dominance usually occurs between the two of you, and almost routinely, Nanami wins, but this time, he lets you do the work. 

   Your lips never once trail away from his own. Heavy breathing through nostrils, hands roaming where it shouldn’t at such an early time, but who gave a fuck about the rules? It wasn’t a workplace, and you’d never let it be one. He clings onto your figure, you savor his muscular physique. Not once do his hands not roam, your flesh was his, and his was yours. 

    Finally, you pull away, heat rising to your cheeks, tears are beginning to dawn on your glassy eyes. “I’ve listened to you roll around in bed every night, mumbling shit about how you don’t see why I’d want you. You better donate your eyes and brain to charity right now.” 

   This wasn’t the reaction, or beatdown he was expecting. He flinches at the vivid image he got of you gouging out his eyeballs. “...Why must I do that? 

   “Because, you don’t use them, obviously. If you took a fucking second of your life to look deeper into your personality below the surface level, you’d see how fucking amazing you are and I love you for that.” 

   Shaking your head furiously, you shush him up yet again when he finally decides to speak up, tears are beginning to spill down your cheeks. “Shut up, Nana. Shut. Up.” pulling him in for another kiss, your hands grabbing at his shoulder like he was going to let go. 

   But he never did. 

[hakasims]

Shitty Luca Movie Recap, Episode 4

Can’t Watch Nina, Even For Luca?

Don’t Worry, Me Neither. Goodbye.

.

..

...

Ok, fine, I’ll talk about the damn thing.

So it’s a warm September night, and I’m in the mood for a Luca Marinelli feature. In my infinite wisdom I choose Nina. “It’s directed by a woman,” I reason, “and women know what’s up.” ‘What’s up’ in this particular case is code for ‘how to frame beautiful men for the female gaze’. Because women can be auteurs, too, and being an auteur means making movies about your own personal wank material.

Turns out, sometimes a woman’s wank material consists less of a gorgeous male form and more of fascist architecture. We’ll discuss the former in due time, but for now, what’s Nina even about? Well, at its core it’s a simple story about a young woman who doesn’t know what she wants, set against the backdrop of the Rome that is almost entirely empty due to most people leaving for the summer. This could have been a fairly straightforward coming-of-age film, but Nina is too indie and up its own ass for that. Literally nothing of note happens in this movie, and it’s all long static wide shots of empty streets, endless stairs, and domineering largeness of Rome’s most famous fascist buildings such as the Palace of Italian Civilization, the Sapienza University of Rome, Palazzo dei Congressi, and, most prominently, the Fountains Hall. (Google what they look like if you don’t know.) Now, I’m guessing those locations weren’t chosen by accident. They could have easily added to the creepiness of the movie — and I’m assuming creepiness was intended; otherwise how do you explain these hoverboarding nuns?

Anyway, the employment of the locations could have been atmospheric and thematic had the shots not been so bland. But they are. Bland, flat, and always looking the same no matter what is happening in the scene. Usually audiences are willing to sit through slow uneventful movies because of interesting visuals or characters worthy of attention, but Nina has neither. The titular character herself is tedious. Even her bad fashion sense is bad in a boring way that doesn’t tell you anything about her. Is she stuck in perpetual adolescence? Is she searching to get in touch with her sensuality? Who knows. The only thing I’m certain of is that she needs to learn to tuck her tops into her bottoms.

Nina spends her days giving singing lessons, going to Chinese calligraphy classes, eating cake, exercising and taking midnight walks in the empty city. She wants to go to China in September — it’s the closest thing to a goal she has — yet she’s done no preparations, and instead of learning Mandarin she’s studying calligraphy. And she’s real bad at it, too.

There are reoccurring visual elements in the movie besides the vast emptiness: stairs, white columns, a jogger, a red dress, animals… You’d think those were very straightforward symbols, but they’re used too sporadically and inconsistently to hold any meaning. For example, animals. Nina is tasked with both helping out in a pet store and house-sitting an apartment with a German shepherd (a good boy named Homer), a guinea pig and a tank full of fish. The instructions she’s given are absurd, like feeding the dog sleeping pills and putting the guinea pig on a diet. And then there’s a supposedly American TV show always playing in and out of diegesis about dogs living in cages and swimming happily in pools, and it looks and sounds like a video off the political section on the dog version of YouTube. It contains timeless classics like “You are a dog born in the age of consumerism” and “Depression is an evil illness now spreading amongst dogs of every breed, dogs belonging to every social class.” The butter commercial from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend could never. And I wish the whole movie was as surreal as this TV program but unfortunately it’s as bland and directionless as Nina herself.

And boy is it directionless. There aren’t any subplots in the movie, no cause and effect, no acts, no structure, no flow; only scenes that happen, and I can’t even find any reasons for the order in which they happen. The scenes also don’t start or end; they just interrupt each other, not leaving any emotional impact. For example, there’s a scene where Nina sees her future self. She’s on one of those midnight walks with the good boy Homer when she sees a couple being romantic. The woman is wearing a long red dress, and the man is in all black. The shot is wide, so it’s impossible to see their faces, but the woman is obviously Nina:

And the man is definitely Luca. I recognized his ass. I’m not joking, guys. It’s his ass:

Also I was later directed to the website of the photographer who took the set photos, and yes, it’s Nina and Luca.

I never forget an ass.

Anyway, Nina, who at this point hasn’t properly met Luca’s character, Fabrizio, sees herself from the future acting romantic with him, and doesn’t react. We don’t even know if she recognizes herself or him or whether it’s even a real scene or a dream. How are we supposed to empathize with a heroine who isn’t allowed to react to her environment?

Whatever, it’s time to talk about Fabrizio. He plays the cello and he’s obnoxious. That’s it. He first appears as a patron of Caffé Palombini, the real-world café Nina frequents (and buys her cakes at). She’s drinking her usual milk shake and reading. At some point, their eyes meet, but neither says anything, and then Nina gets up and runs after the good boy Homer who decided to take a little stroll by himself. She leaves all her things behind: her milk shake, her handbag, at least three books, a whole stack of paper for calligraphy, and her diary. It’s obvious she’s going to come back as soon as she gets the dog. And yet before her feet are even out of frame, Fabrizio gets up, goes to her table and fucking steals her diary!

His next several appearances are random and sporadic, and it looks like he’s stalking Nina, but by the time of his first actual scene she is following him for some reason. Obviously, he can’t let a woman outcreep him, so he ambushes her:

He tells her blankly, “You’re following me,” but I think this scene deserves better dialogue. Thankfully, we have a whole well of predator/maiden media to pull from.

Though I personally believe this is the most appropriate line:

Fabrizio lets Nina know he has her diary in the dickiest way possible: he quotes from it to let her know that he’s read it. He then informs her that he’ll only give it back to her if she continues following him. And it’s not blackmail; “it’s an agreement.” What an asshole! I’m weeping for the dignified cuckoldry of Joseph.

And what was the purpose of that “agreement” plot point if the next time they meet is by chance? Quirky love interest writing, duh. So quirky that the accidental meeting happens when Nina is walking past a phone booth where Fabrizio is… doing a phone prank? I don’t know, I got nothing. Anyway, he’s annoyed their meeting is unintentional on Nina’s part, but he returns her diary, and I guess they start dating? He watches her sing once with what could only be described as a complete absence of emotions:

In the next scene she watches him play the cello after which they go on a date. Nina is wearing the red dress from the vision, but Fabrizio’s shirt is different. I fucking give up.

Their next (second?) date is a romantic dinner on Nina’s roof, and they’re dancing for entirely too long. She then tells him she’s scared of how much she’s enjoying his company, gives him a ridiculously chaste kiss goodnight and… completely ghosts him afterwards. And if you didn’t dislike Fabrizio before, you will now as he starts calling Nina at ungodly hours (including 5:30 am) and leaving her very whiny and increasingly more passive-aggressive, entitled, and accusatory voicemails. At some point he even leaves a voicemail for the fucking dog! He’s like, “Homer, I’m worried, meet me at the café.” Again, quirky love interest writing: extortion, phone pranks and a voicemail for a dog.

Fabrizio then lets Nina know he’ll be leaving town in three days in case she’d like to see him one last time or whatever. And she never fucking does! In any other movie she’d be chasing through the airport, but here she just drops him like he’s a well-tucked shirt! She tells the kid she’s befriended (she hangs out with an eleven-year-old boy the whole movie, don’t worry about it) that she’s afraid to be “like everyone else”, with a job and a boyfriend, so she doesn’t even say goodbye to Fabrizio. At some point she goes for a walk with the good boy Homer, and Fabrizio is also there, and they just miss each other. Even fate isn’t interested in that romance.

And then all the fascist buildings get covered in gigantic paper figurines, and the red-dressed Nina runs into Fabrizio’s arms. Because of course.

Nina is one of those movies where the main theme — a struggle to grow up — is obvious, but the rest of the elements are a mess only the writer-director could decipher. And I don’t really care. Again, I had to read Japanese postmodernists at university. What I do care about is the male form I mentioned at the start. I know I have no one but myself to blame for my expectations of how the director should have framed Luca’s body or face, but it’s one thing to frame him blandly and a completely different thing to isolate him as the only character (or actor) she’s deeply uninterested in filming competently. Everyone else in the movie gets their fair share of close-ups and decent lighting whilst Luca — whose name is literally second in the credits — gets, um, neglected.

This is his introduction:

These are literally all his close-ups:

Should I even count this last one? What’s with the lighting? Like, this is as well-lit as his face gets:

Oh, the shot is too wide and you can’t see his face properly? Well, tough poop:

Are you kidding me with this shit?

Nina may not be objectively the most terrible of the movies Luca’s been in: I’d argue both Mary of Nazareth and L’ultimo terrestre are worse, as is Slam, whose time’s a-coming. Nor is it the movie where Luca appears the least (The Great Beauty’s literal one minute of screen time is saying hi). But it’s the only movie I have no reasons to watch: it’s blandly shot, poorly structured, badly themed — and it’s actively obstructing Luca’s beauty and charisma. So no matter which film you’ll ask me to do next, at least in terms of the visual component of my posts, we have nowhere to go but up.

[makeste]

this is pretty random and you don't need to answer it, haha, but could you share your personal hcs regarding platonic todobaku with me??? 🥺🥺🥺 i'm in need, LOL, and your takes on characterization and relationships on bnha are always so spot on, so... i hope you're having a good day/night!!!!!!!💖💖💖

thank you so much! sorry it took a while to gather all of these; my TodoBaku headcanons weren’t as immediately forthcoming as my general Baku headcanons were. but here goes. the first half of these ended up being more just my general thoughts about their relationship than actual headcanons, but I eventually steered myself back on track.

first of all, this is important to note: when Katsuki says in ch. 241 that “there’s no correlation between time spent [together] and friendship”, it’s not purely out of denial. this is something he genuinely believes, having learned it the hard way growing up. for someone who seemingly led a pretty charmed life for most of his childhood, Katsuki hasn’t actually had a particularly sunshiny experience when it comes to his friendships. all of his closest childhood friends eventually left him (Tsubasa), turned on him (Deku -- from his perspective lol. obviously this wasn’t actually the case at all, but it’s how he interpreted it, and it definitely had a big impact on him emotionally), or abandoned him (that long-fingered kid, who notably fled and never looked back when the sludge monster tried to eat Katsuki back in chapter one. like, thanks for nothing, my dude).

so it’s not surprising that all of these experiences would have a profound impact on Katsuki’s ability to trust other people and accept them as real, genuine friends. in its own way his childhood was almost as isolating as Deku and Shouto’s. it’s only since coming to U.A. that he’s started to make real friends again for the first time since kindergarten. and even then, in the case of Kirishima and Kaminari and Sero, even though I think he does consider them friends, he still isn’t very open with them. because he’s learned the hard way that that can lead to hurt, and I think he’s very hesitant to ever let himself be vulnerable to that again.

but having said all that, Shouto is still absolutely correct when he says that they’re friends. and the thing is Katsuki knows it too, but he’s just reluctant to admit it. partly because the part of his brain that processes everything as rivalry isn’t sure whether Being Friends With Shouto = Losing To Shouto (IS THIS A TRAP??), and partly because of everything else I just explained above. even though by this point he knows Shouto pretty well, well enough to be reasonably sure he’s not just gonna be another fakeass groupie who turns tail at the first sign of trouble, there’s still a part of him that’s hesitant to admit that connection is there, because doing so opens him up to potentially being hurt again at some point. goddammit. why is this shit so complicated.

meanwhile on Shouto’s side of things, this poor lil bubba never had any friends growing up to begin with, so he’s not nearly as paranoid or prickly as Katsuki is. instead, he’s still discovering for himself just what friendship is all about. the interesting thing about Shouto is that since he never had any childhood friendships, in a way, the friendships that he’s making now at U.A. are his childhood friendships. and so they tend to be straightforward and uncomplicated in much the same way that very young children’s friendships are uncomplicated. “I like this person; I am going to make them my friend.” boom. done. friendship is mad easy yo.

and he does like Katsuki! sure, his personality is a bit unconventional, but there’s a lot to admire about him even so, and they actually have a lot in common! they’re both rather introverted. they’re both very serious, and I think this is something that Shouto particularly appreciates, because jokes and idioms and playful insincerity sometimes fly over his head just because he doesn’t have a lot of experience dealing with other people. but Katsuki NEVER jokes around, and he is never insincere. he says what he means, with the exception of insults, which are 90% more bark than bite. and so once Shouto figured that out, it became very easy to figure out how to interact with him. aside from that, they’re both close with Shouto’s Other Best Friend Midoriya, they both have incendiary quirks, and they both tend towards the quiet side (yes, even Katsuki) with the occasional burst of hotheadedness (maybe a bit more than “occasional” when it comes to Katsuki’s end).

and like I said, there’s a lot that Shouto admires about Katsuki as well. he really respects how determined Katsuki is, because he himself lacked any sort of clear goals for quite a while growing up. all he knew was that he didn’t want to end up being like his dad. but Katsuki is someone who has always known what he wants, and he goes after it with a singlemindedness that Shouto is almost envious of. he’s also very intelligent and quick-thinking, and Shouto knows he can rely on him in a tight spot. he’s also honest, and surprisingly principled, and while he’s definitely not the nicest guy around, I think Shouto can recognize to some degree those same types of walls that he once spent so much time building up around himself. and so he knows that to a certain extent, Katsuki’s hostility is just a front. and I think he’s both intrigued by that, and drawn to it. because every so often when Katsuki’s guard does drop and his better self briefly shines through, Shouto can see that he’s someone worth getting to know.

anyways, but enough of my rambling about their relationship, and on to the actual headcanons. first of all, I firmly believe in my heart of hearts that at some point during all of those mentally and physically taxing weekends spent training for their provisional exam, they have each fallen asleep on the other’s shoulder during the ride home. Katsuki was actually the first to do it, and it was only for a couple of minutes, but when he woke up he was absolutely mortified. but much to his relief, Shouto never said another word about it. (and if Shouto still remembers the warm, cozy feeling in his chest during those few brief minutes when Katsuki was dead to the world, with his face smoothed out and completely trusting and his breathing strangely in rhythm with the movement of the car, and if doing so brings him a sense of calm that’s hard to describe, well then, that’s no one’s business but his own.)

anyway, so because life is Just Like That, eventually of course the reverse happened. and with anyone else, Katsuki would have violently shoved them aside without a second thought, and he was almost gonna do the same here, but then he remembered he owed him (because he really did keep his mouth shut about the earlier incident, thank fuck), and so he didn’t. for almost two whole minutes, anyway. whatever. that’s more than generous, really. meanwhile no one else knows about this except for Aizawa, who was chaperoning them that day, and took mild notice at first on account of it being unusual behavior on Katsuki’s part, but then immediately forgot about it afterwards. he was proud of them both for upping their napping game, though. he respects naps.

both Shouto and Katsuki were actually scared shitless during the test of courage at the forest training camp, and if Katsuki hadn’t been kidnapped and everything had instead gone on as normal, they would have both had trouble getting to sleep that night. Katsuki actually can’t stand scary movies or ghost stories (fyi this is canon according to the third light novel, and EXCUSE HIM FOR HAVING A HEALTHY RESPECT FOR THE SUPERNATURAL. you wanna go and get your own dumb ass cursed or dragged to hell or whatever, BE HIS GUEST). whereas Shouto has next to no experience with them and doesn’t really see what’s so scary about ghosts because GHOSTS AREN’T REAL DUH, but even he feels a little unsettled when an undead swamp girl suddenly rises from the depths and crabwalks towards them in the middle of the woods.

Katsuki has on rare occasions been so drained by provisional lessons that he goes into autopilot and forgets to pretend not to be friends with Shouto, which can result in them having completely normal conversations for minutes at a time before he eventually regains enough of his senses to realize he’s fraternizing with the enemy. this is how Shouto learned about things like Katsuki’s favorite foods, and his love of hiking. the latter is actually one subject that Katsuki can go on and on about if you get him started, and Shouto very much enjoys hearing about it and never tries to stop him.

by contrast, Katsuki never intentionally seeks to gain any new knowledge about Shouto because he feels like he already knows way more than he ever wanted to. however, this doesn’t stop him from absorbing knowledge against his will by simple osmosis, and then discovering to his dismay that he’s retained the information afterward. this is why he also knows Shouto’s favorite food in return (although to be fair, I think everyone in Japan knows Shouto’s favorite food), as well as other tidbits like the fact that he likes strawberry-flavored things (because he always gets the same brand of strawberry milk from the vending machine during their lunch breaks). he hates himself a little for both noticing and remembering these stupid little details, and would rather be kidnapped again than ever admit to Shouto that he does.

Katsuki thinks of Shouto as “Todoroki” in his head rather than “IcyHot” or “Half n’ Half”, and has to make a conscious effort to use the nicknames whenever he addresses him out loud. more and more often he finds himself forgetting to do so nowadays, much to his dismay. Shouto was pleasantly surprised the first few times it happened, but quickly stopped taking notice of it, as he’s come to realize that the way Katsuki addresses people carries very little meaning regardless, since something like 75% of his actual feelings are conveyed through his actions rather than his words.

Katsuki does wish that Shouto had had the decency to choose his surname as his hero alias rather than his given name, though. he lives in fear that one of these days he’ll be required to call him “Shouto” while on duty. number one hero or not, there’s a good chance he would resign from his internship at the Endeavor Hero Agency before he ever willingly agreed to that.

and last but not least, the number one thing that Katsuki would rather jump in a freezing lake than admit to Shouto or even himself is that he actually cares about him too. and has even mostly forgiven him for wussing out at the last minute during the sports festival. he still doesn’t fully understand why he did it, but he gets that Shouto was Going Through Some Stuff, and okay yeah, he can admit that his family situation is pretty fucked up, so whatever. there’s an uncomfortable feeling he gets whenever he’s reminded of this; sort of a weird, squirmy feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever the subject of Endeavor comes up, or whenever he sees Shouto talking to the man himself. it makes him feel restless and on edge, and he never knows what to say or do afterwards, especially if Shouto goes all quiet and sullen and reflective. he wants to scream at him, or slap him on the back of the head, or grab him by the shoulders and shake him; whatever it takes to snap him out of it and ease the tension. but he knows that’s not the right way to handle it. and more to the point, he knows that he’s not the right person to handle it. and sometimes, if he’s not quick enough to squash the feeling when he senses it coming, he wonders how Shouto would react if he ever found out what Katsuki used to be like back in elementary and middle school. and he wonders whether Shouto would still be so dead-set insistent on calling them friends. and then he does squash out the thought, as viciously as he possibly can.

anyway so that turned weirdly angsty towards the end whoops. not even sure what happened there, since this is supposed to be my cute and funny ship, while BakuDeku greedily hogs all the angst for itself! lol my bad. but don’t worry, they still love each other, and Shouto is still fond and soft and equipped with bullshit-radar, and Katsuki is still rabid and in denial and a dumbass.

[thenamesseven]

Word count: 3.2k

Warnings: Some swearing! And Jaebum being a jealous bean.

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To say you were panicking was a complete misunderstandment.

With your heart pounding against your chest and your voice stuck in your throat, it turned almost impossible to stop Jaebum from leaning closer and closer, in fact, you just accepted your fate when the distance between the two of you turned non-existent and your lips met. You swore your heart stopped beating right there and then, somehow you were still alive when his lips moved gently and slowly against yours but your heart had stopped moving for certain. You felt how heat crawled up your neck, turning your skin red in the process, you probably looked like a panicking tomato right now. 

Jaebum on the other hand had his eyes closed, one of his hands gently resting on your left cheek as his thumb traced random patterns on your skin. He could sense how your face was starting to get hotter and hotter and even though he knew that he should probably back up and apologize for being so straightforward, he just couldn’t move away from you. By the way you stood there, frozen and tense, he could only guess that you were too shocked by his actions, Jaebum couldn’t blame you though. Who wouldn’t be after being kissed by a complete stranger?

You snapped out of your trance when Jaebum slowly guided you back, making your body meet the wall. His hands had abandoned your cheeks and were currently moving down your body, fingertips feather-like touching you, sending not so innocent shivers down your spine. Jaebum tilted his head, feeling brave enough to deepen the kiss even more but he knew he had fucked up as soon as he felt your little hands on his chest, using some of your strength to force your kiss to come to an end.

“What’s wrong?” He asked almost in a whisper, not moving away completely. His lips were still too close, near enough for his warm breath to caress your skin. Jaebum’s eyes opened and instantly scanned your red face, the smirk that appeared on his lips made you feel even more embarrassed and that, apparently, made the situation funnier for him “There’s no need to be shy, trust me”

His lips brushed against yours teasingly, arms pulling you into his chest without hesitation. Now he could surely feel how your heart had come back to life to hammer against your ribcage, being so close to him was definitely not good for your health.

“W-what are you doing?” You asked once again, hands back onto his chest as you used all of your strength to push him back. Jaebum didn’t budge, he simply looked down at you genuinely confused “Jaebum, get off me” This time, when you pushed him again, he finally took a step back and put some space between the two of you. 

“Fine, fine” He replied quietly, hands sliding into his pockets and eyes moving down to his shoes. Finally being summoned and saved by somebody had had him feeling so excited that he never stopped to think that you wouldn’t be okay with this. It didn’t make sense though, if you had recited the words to summon him then why were you freaking out now? “I’m sorry, I should have asked for permission”

“No offense but, first of all, you should have rang the doorbell” You told him, hands going to your hips as you rested most of your weight on one of your legs “How did you even come in?” Your second question was the one that was bothering you the most, you always made sure to lock the door and windows when you were at home at night alone and you would have surely heard him if he picked the lock then....How did he make his way inside without you noticing it?

“You called me, I didn’t need permission to come in, did I?” He asked, crossing his arms on his chest. Jaebum didn’t understand what you were talking about and that was starting to slightly frustrate him. “It’s like….If you gave your boyfriend a spare key!” His example made you frown, he noticed your dislike towards his comparison “What?”

“You’re not my boyfriend” You instantly replied, arching your eyebrows when he looked shocked.

“But we just kissed!” He exclaimed as if he could not believe what you were saying.

“You broke into my house, Jaebum!” You whisper shouted those words, afraid that Youngjae would manage to hear what the two of you were talking about and ended up calling the police or something similar “I didn’t even know you existed until I saw you there standing in the corridor! H-How are you...Why are you...Why are we even dating? When did we start dating?”

“We started tonight” He answered nonchalantly as if that would calm you down “Although the fact that you summoned me means that the spell or whatever you did to bring me back from Hell knew we were destined to be together”

That sentence made you lose it, everything that got out of his lips was pure nonsense and you were starting to believe that this was some kind of horrible prank Jinyoung had prepared for you as a revenge for that one time you sneaked into his house at 3 am and made him scream like a girl when you woke him up.

Frustrated, you started pinching the bridge of your nose, a headache would appear later for sure “Did Jinyoung send you?” You asked, just willing to be over with all this. Maybe he had somehow managed to find out about you and that blog where you found the spell to find a boyfriend, Jinyoung always worked hard on his pranks and definitely took them to the next level when it was about taking revenge but giving the spare key you gave him to a complete stranger was something else “Where’s the key he gave you?” 

“Who the fuck is Jinyoung!?” Jaebum raised his voice absolutely frustrated now, communication between the two of you was being a disaster, a total mess and he was starting to think that there might have been some kind of mistake and he had been summoned by the wrong person.

“Lower your voice Jaebum, we don’t need Youngjae rushing back downstairs being all worried again” You warned, scolding him as if he was a four year old.

“If he shows up again all worried for you I’ll punch him in the face” You would have thought he was just messing around with you if it wasn’t for the determined look in his eyes.

“Jaebum!” You exclaimed, almost whining since you were really frustrated with him.

“What!?” He exclaimed back, sounding as frustrated as you did.

“You’re not going to punch Youngjae!” He pouted at your words and if you had been in an entirely different situation he would have looked cute, right now, he simply looked as if he wanted to distract you from the conversation the two of you were having.

Jaebum knew this conversation was not going anywhere and despite his will to punch your neighbor, he knew you would probably calm down as soon as you got some explanations as to why he was there or how he had managed to find you. Although, he had the feeling you wouldn’t believe what he was about to tell you, he could just hope you wouldn’t kick him out.

After all, you were the only thing he had right now.

“Fine!” He finally agreed, hands going to his jeans pockets as if to show you he wouldn’t be using his knuckles any time soon. You relaxed at that, feeling calm for your own sake and Youngjae’s. You didn’t know what Jaebum wanted exactly but you were almost sure that if he had wanted to hurt you he would have already done it instead of wasting his time arguing with you “Want some explanations?” He asked, sounding a little hesitant but calmer too.

“Please” You answered, muscles not tense anymore, you weren’t even scared of his presence at this point.

“Okay, take a seat and I’ll explain everything”

Not willing to waste more of your time arguing with him, you decided to do as Jaebum told you. Sighing you walked past him and into your small living room, a smile coming up to your lips when you saw how clean and organized it was, you honestly were kind of glad that you had cleaned yesterday because if that hadn’t been the case, Jaebum would have walked straight into the mess your apartment was whenever you had exams. 

“Cozy” You heard him mutter as he followed you into the room. He had never been a huge fan of small apartments like yours, Jaebum was the type to spend money in luxurious houses with incredible views but for various reasons, the little living space you probably called home looked incredibly comfortable for him. Maybe it was because of the furniture or the warm colors you used to decorate the room, whatever it was, it pleased him.

“It’s not bad” You replied with a small shrug, plopping yourself down onto your couch and letting the worn out cushions swallow you.

“We need to buy a new couch” He instantly said when he sat down and felt how he started to drown slowly.

“Yeah, maybe we should also buy a Queen size bed since we’re apparently dating” You scoffed, obviously using as much sarcasm as you could but the way Jaebum’s eyes glinted told you he had took that sentence seriously “You’re not sleeping here” You deadpanned

“Why not?” Jaebum panicked, you could see it in his eyes and for some reason, you truly believed that he wasn’t lying to you “I don’t have anywhere else to go”

“I don’t even know where you came from Jaebum” You sighed exasperated, not wanting to argue again but kind of tired of this scenario. The entire situation didn’t make sense, anything that Jaebum said  didn’t make sense and yet, you hadn’t kicked him out of your home for some reason “Get on my shoes for a second” Looking at him, your eyes met and you saw how he had turned a bit more serious, confidence was slowly vanishing from his features “You show up out of nowhere in my apartment, want to punch my neighbor and after making out with me, you tell me we should buy a new couch because apparently, you want to live here too”

“I just came because you called me” He said tiredly, sliding his fingers through his own hair, messing it up a little “The spell, you must know what Im talking about, there is no way I got sent here by mistake (Y/N)”

“You’re talking about that stupid spell I found in that internet blog?” You asked with your eyes opened as wide as plates “But that-”

“It’s not that stupid” Jaebum cut you off, that spell was more important than you thought it was but he couldn’t talk about that now, not yet at least “I mean, I showed up after you said those words right?” 

“So what? You teletransported yourself here because I said those words? Where are you from?”

“Hell” 

That was the last straw and Jaebum saw it in your eyes. Maybe he shouldn’t have been that honest with you but wasn’t honesty the key to successful relationships?

“I’ll show you” He said seriously kind of desperate for you to believe him, clearing his throat. The way he rubbed the palm of his hands against his jeans told you he wasn’t as calm as he wanted to look, Jaebum was anxious and you didn’t know if that was a good sign or a bad one “Get closer”

“Jaebum if you kiss me out of nowhere again, I will be the one throwing hands” You warned, seeing how the corners of his lips slightly tilted upwards “Not joking” Jaebum laughed softly, shaking his head as you scooted closer to him while you sat straighter.

“I won’t kiss you again without permission” He said gently, reaching out to take your hand in his “Now look me in the eyes” The two of you turned a little, eyes staring into each other’s so intensely that you could see your own reflection on his dark irises “Concentrate on me and only on me, no matter what you see or hear remember that we are in your apartment and that you are safe, okay?” He asked, sounding truly serious about what he was going to do, you doubted something was going to happen but still nodded at his warning “Alright”

Jaebum proceeded to close his eyes allowing you to examine his features closely this time. He seemed delicate but manly at the same time, his skin was entirely perfect and the two little moles above one of his eyes made him a bit cuter than you initially thought he was. Some wrinkles appeared in his forehead when he started focusing even harder, his pink lips puckering and his sharp jaw getting tense.

A couple of minutes passed and nothing had happened but you still gave him the benefit of the doubt, in fact, you were sure that by the time you moved your hand away from his ten minutes had already gone by.

“That’s weird” Jaebum whispered looking down at his hands, his eyes avoiding yours “Why can’t I..-

“So? What was supposed to happen?” You asked curiously, he looked genuinely confused as if he had truly been expecting his trick to work. He was either nuts or a really good actor.

Jaebum opened his mouth to say something but closed it again when he thought about it. If you didn’t believe him when he told you he came from Hell, you wouldn’t believe him if he said he was going to show you some of it “You know what? Maybe it’s better if I just leave” 

That’s exactly what you’ve been wanting to hear all this time but unexpectedly, when Jaebum said those words sounding so disappointed and confused, your chest tightened. What kind of reaction was that? He was a complete stranger that had shown up out of nowhere, Jaebum had intruded in your apartment and acted as if he had lived with you this entire time, any normal person would have called the cops to get him behind bars.

Then why haven’t you? Why did you feel worried now that he said he was leaving?

“Where do you live?” You asked quietly, resting your hands on your lap, not sure of what to do.

Jaebum scoffed as he stood up, fixing his jacket “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you” He muttered in such a small voice that you barely managed to hear him, he seemed truly upset and that only made you feel worse. “I shouldn’t have been this direct” He mumbled, more to himself than for you to hear “Guess I’ll see you around?” He asked, turning his head to look back at you with a small smile on his lips.

Then you realized you didn’t want him to go, you wanted him to stay even though it was crazy. How could you let a complete stranger into your apartment, into your life like that was an absolute mystery but again, the thought that if he had wanted to hurt you he would have done it already popped into your mind.

“Stay” Your lips acted before your mind could convince them to stay closed, a sigh accompanying those words as you stood up too “If you really don’t have anywhere to go then stay here” You finally said, heart fluttering a little when you noticed how his entire face lit up at your invitation.

“For real?” He asked, his whole body facing you. The sadness that had been there a few seconds ago had been replaced by pure happiness “I can live with you?” 

“Just until we find you a place or something but yeah, I guess we can be roommates from now on” You shrugged, not really believing what you were agreeing to. Maybe you simply were as crazy as him.

“Thank you so much (Y/N)” He went to hug you but you placed your hands on his chest, keeping him away from your body successfully. Jaebum smiled a little, not forcing you even though he could have easily outdo your strength and touched you “Okay, hands to myself” He said obediently, smile small even though it was obvious he was holding himself back from giggling.

“Good” You smiled back at him, fingers twitching from holding yourself back since you felt like patting his head “Now if you excuse me, I’m going to head to bed, today has been a really long day and I’m exhausted” 

Jaebum nodded at your words and before he could say something else, you started walking back to your room. Before getting in bed you would get some blankets and another pillow for him so he would sleep comfortably on the couch, that’s why, when you noticed he was following you down the hall you didn’t say anything.

Assuming he would just stand outside, you opened your wardrobe without paying too much attention to him and when you grabbed some of the spare blankets and pillows you saved there for the rare occasions your friends stayed over, you turned around to hand them to him. 

Everything fell from your hands when you saw him shirtless and in the process of taking his pants off besides your bed.

“What the fuck Jaebum?” You asked frowning, heat rising to your face again as it turned as red as a strawberry “Get dressed!” Youngjae had heard that shriek for sure, oh God, you weren’t sure how you would face him after everything that has happened in the last few hours.

Jaebum froze like a kid that has been caught doing something they shouldn’t and looked up at you with a mix of confusion and guilt in his eyes “It is uncomfortable to sleep in these jeans” He muttered with a small pout not pulling them back up but not taking them off either, he just kept it at his knee high which made everything more awkward.

“You’re sleeping on the couch” You told him, in case he had understood he was sleeping in the bed with you.

“What?” He asked, even more confused now “I know you hate me a little bit but you surely don’t hate me enough to let me sleep on that�� 

“It’s not that uncomfortable” You tried saying but even you, the owner of the couch, didn’t believe that.

“I’m not sleeping on that couch” He said determined, kicking his jeans off, the sound of his belt hitting your floor only making your cheeks turn redder. Before you could say something else, Jaebum picked his t-shirt from the floor and put it back on “I’ll keep this on since it makes you feel really uncomfortable but you know, I’ve always prefered a little skin on skin contact” You couldn’t say anything, you simply watched as he pulled the sheets back and slid himself into your comfortable and fluffy bed. 

You were already regretting your decision.

“Jaebum?” You asked, approaching your bed.

“Mhm?” He had his eyes closed, already zoning out and almost asleep.

“I won’t be sorry if I kick you out of bed” You stated sliding under the blankets next to him, body laying as far as it could. You decided to face the wall since you didn’t know if you would be able to get some rest with him being so close to you. “Try some funny business and I’ll break your hand” You threatened, closing your eyes as you heard him chuckling amused.

“Don’t worry kitten” He whispered quietly, turning the light off so the both of you would be consumed by darkness “You’ll be in my arms soon, there’s nothing you can do to avoid it”

Taglist: @gold--gucciempress​ @harringtonsblackgf​

[moeyy-writes]

Here and Now - Part 1

Zak Bagans x Reader

Warnings: hints at family issues, mild fluff.

Word Count: 1,822

A/N: Great, what have I gotten myself into? This started as a random idea that was in no way planned. I didn’t even think it would be something worth posting. Now, it’s becoming a series that I’m praying I’ll be able to update regularly. I don’t really know where it’s going yet. I guess we’ll find out together. Please let me know what you think. Thanks!

My Master List || Also on AO3 || Series Master List

“Yes Mom.” You sighed. “No, I won’t be. I’ll be filming that week.” Another sigh. “No, I’m not going to be looking for another job.” You rolled your eyes and leaned your head back over the back of your folding chair. “Mom, this is what I want to do—Okay. Love you too.”

You tossed your phone over onto the table in front of you and sighed. You loved your parents, but they didn’t quite understand when you told them you were leaving your cozy job as a nurse to hunt ghosts. Your mom blamed your long-time friend, Jay Wasley, for “luring” you into the field. Every time you talked to her, she begged you to rejoin the medical field, but there was nothing that could convince you to do anything else than be a part of the Ghost Adventures team.

You loved joining the guys on investigations, being the main audio-visual tech for the last year. That allowed Billy and Jay to be more involved in the investigations, which was especially helpful when investigating the larger sites.

Not to mention, you were working with some of the nicest people you had ever met.

You never second guessed the career change. When the guys asked you to be a part of the team, you jumped on it without even giving it another thought. Jay and you had both taken film classes in college, but you changed majors after your family urged you to find something “more career friendly”. He knew you loved working with different types of cameras and had a very keen eye for the slightest hints of evidence on the screen. And the other men on the team couldn’t agree more.

As you let out a long sigh, you heard footsteps to your left. You glanced over to a tall, spiky-haired figure illuminated by the sun behind.

“Hey Zak,” you greeted the leader of your team. He lowered himself down into the chair beside you and smiled. His sunglasses were sliding down his nose, and the wide brim of his hat shielded your eyes slightly from the sun.

“Hey, what was all of that about?” he questioned, nodding towards your phone. You just shrugged and huffed out a frustrated breath.

“It’s just my mom. You know, same shit, different day. She’s constantly questioning my ‘career choice’ and telling me that I don’t know what I’m doing.” You closed your eyes. “She only sees a job for the money.”

Zak nodded. “Yeah, well some people see that. Some people do something because they know the pay check is going to be awesome, and the title is going to make them look good to everyone else.” You laughed.

“Yeah, well, the pay check isn’t too shabby for you, is it?” you both laughed and turned to the building in front of you. It was another location, and the interviews were going to start shortly. You decided to make a small station to set up and charge cameras between interviews, and keep a few pieces of equipment handy for any impromptu investigating.

You glanced away, trying to ignore the intense set of butterflies in your stomach whenever Zak was near you. Sure, you had met him several times before you became part of the team. Hell, he was one of the people who fought for your spot on the show. But, you didn’t know a whole lot about the man at your side. Jay had filled you in on the basics of his life, but that was about it. Sure, he was goofy, nerdy, and a little bit full of himself. But, he was also a kind and friendly guy, something you weren’t really expecting.

He had welcomed you with open arms, as they all did. He made sure that you always felt included when you wanted to be and checked in with you whenever there was an emotionally heavy case. You wouldn’t tell anyone in the media, but he was secretly the caretaker of the group.

So, it was no wonder he was sitting beside you after hearing your phone call. He could sense when something was off about a crew member. It was definitely something unique about Zak Bagans.

“Do you ever second guess being here? Leaving the nursing field?” You shook your head adamantly.

“Not for a second. I became a nurse because my dad is a doctor and pressured me into joining the same field. I liked it, don’t get me wrong, but I wanted to help people in another way.” You peered over at Jay, who was fiddling with Aaron’s camera. “Thanks to Jay, I’m here doing just that.”

“Well, we all agreed for you to join. To be honest, it’s been really nice having a different perspective on everything. You always find the best positions for the static-vision and x-cameras, and always find logical reasons for our equipment malfunctions. You have a gift, Y/N.” You could feel your cheeks redden at Zak’s words. You ran your fingers through your hair.

“Thanks, Zak. That means a lot.” Your gaze flicked back to your phone for a moment. “I know my parents love me and want what’s best for me. I just wish that they knew I’m at the age where I can find that out for myself.” Zak nodded, loosely crossing his legs.

“They do love you. There are plenty of people who love you, Y/N. And we’re all here for you.” You leaned back a little, raising a brow.

“Plenty of people? Like who?” Your heart fluttered, secretly wondering if he was implying something more behind his words. Could he be? No, not Zak. That wasn’t like him.

Zak smirked. “Well, I freaking hope you know by now that the crew loves you. Jay’s known you for what, at least a decade? More? Aaron and you have that never-ending prank war thing that I swear is going to be the death of one of you. From the second time you met, I knew you were pretty much platonic soulmates. And watching you and Billy geek out over equipment together makes me smile. Nerds.”

You nodded, practically beaming. Zak always knew what to say and when to say it, at least most of the time.

“And I think you’re a great addition to the team. You’re smart, fun to be around. It’s like you’ve been with us since the beginning.” You didn’t know what else to do but smile. Where the hell was all of this coming from? Sure, Zak was usually sweet and uplifting, but this was a lot coming from him. He was rarely this intense.

“That means a lot, Zak. I’m really glad to be working with everyone. I really do love you all too.” You and Zak stared at each other for a moment before he spoke again.

“You know, you’re really a special person, Y/N. Your parents know that, the team knows that, And I definitely know that.” He pushed his glasses up his nose, then cleared his throat. Was he nervous? Zak Bagans, nervous? Huh.

“Uh, thanks Zak. Really.” He was kind of repeating himself, like he was trying to hint at something he was too afraid to say. You had never heard him talk like this before. He was always super straightforward and blunt, never talking in code or hiding meaning behind his words.

“And, I was wondering if you were, um, interested in hanging out more outside of here? You know, outside of the show?” You furrowed your brow.

“We do hang out. I mean, we all meet for lunch or dinner, and meet at each other’s houses—”

“I know, but I meant you and me. You know, just the two of us.” Your brow shot up as your stomach swirled.

“Um, are you asking me out Mr. Bagans?” No fucking way. He couldn’t be. There’s no way Zak Bagans would be asking you out.

“Yep. Yeah, I am.” Oh, you stood corrected.

“Well, I, uh, yeah. That sounds awesome.” You studied his confident smirk.

Zak nodded to himself. “Awesome,” he repeated. “Let’s focus on this lockdown, then we’ll work out the details. But, I know of a great place I want to bring you to.” He reached over and gently placed his hand on top of yours.

You flipped your hand over and wrapped it around his. “I can’t wait.” And that was the God-honest truth. Your whole life flipped in the best possible way over the last several minutes, and your head was reeling as you tried to accept your new reality.

You were dating, or about to date, Zak Bagans.

“Hey, Zak, we’re almost ready to go!” Jay called over. Zak perked his head up.

“I’ll be right there!” He squeezed your hand, then pulled away. As he stood, he offered his award-winning smile, then made it over to his friends.

You really needed to get your camera ready, but you couldn’t move. Your brain was still struggling to process. Not only was this whole thing something you never dreamed of, it completely came out of left field. Zak was a natural flirt, but you didn’t think he flirted with you more than any other woman he met. He was respectful, avoiding any type of sexual jokes, and making sure he called out the others if anything made you noticeably uncomfortable. That was half the reason your brain was still currently malfunctioning.

Your phone buzzed in your hand, shocking you from your thoughts. You unlocked your phone and opened your messages.

New Message: Jay Wasleyyyy

You studied the message, which was a simple thumbs up emoji. You glanced up at your buddy, who shared your gaze, standing beside a grinning Aaron. Great. Sure, Jay knew about how you felt towards Zak. It was hard to keep it a secret sometimes, especially from someone who had known you as long as Jay did. He obviously knew that Zak was up to something too. Sneaky bastard.

But, now Aaron wasn’t going to leave you alone about it. Joy. All you needed was your goofy friend poking at you as singing ridiculous songs about love and shit.

Another message pinged, forcing you to glanced back down at your phone.

New Message: Zak Attack

It was another wordless message, with a black heart and a winking face emoji. Totally Zak’s dorky yet oddly suave style.

You stared at the message, suddenly giddy with excitement. Now that your brain had come back down to Earth, you were nothing but excited about what was to come. You had no idea what Zak had up his sleeve, or how the two of you were going to do in a romantic relationship, but there was an odd exhilaration in not knowing.

With a long exhale, you silenced your phone and slipped it into your pocket. Then, you lifted your camera from the table in front of you and headed off to join your team.

Thanks for reading. Feedback is appreciated! <3

[avoutput]

Final Fantasy VII Legacy || Nomura, Complex?

This is the 3rd out of 3 articles. Find the second here.

It’s time to get down to mythril tacks. At this point, I have talked about what this game meant to me when it was released and how it’s newest installment fared as a game. Finally, it’s time to talk about the impact the Remake has on what has unexpectedly become a robust and diverse universe. What does this mean for us at large, the players? This is a no-holds-barred SPOILER frenzy about anything and everything in the Squaresoft/Square-Enix pantheon. This means not just the games in the orbit of Final Fantasy VII, but the entire catalog at Square-Enix. To be honest, this is just the introduction, I don’t know if I even have an intent of going so far beyond the purview of the Remake, but in the spirit of the Final Fantasy gatekeeper, Tetsuya Nomura, I refuse to limit myself.

It’s been almost exactly a month since I started writing this article. It took so long to come back to this because I kept finding more and more content related to Final Fantasy 7 that I either forgot about or didn’t even know existed. On my own shelf sits Advent Children, Dirge of Cerberus, and Crisis Core. I decided to watch Advent Children immediately after beating Remake. As a movie fan and amateur critic, the film is littered with terrible film decisions and was clearly the work of people who spend much of their time penning and creating video game stories. It’s a series of cutscenes without a controller attached and at a certain point, you realize Advent Children was never meant for film fans, but for fans of the game. Specifically for fans desiring an epilogue and more directly fans of Cloud, Tifa, and Sephiroth. The story is almost unintelligible because there is tons of connective tissue left to be assumed by the viewer. It is at once too far removed from FF7 in both linear real time and in-game universe time to be recognizable, and simultaneously inexplicable in what has transpired and why. It takes a crack at explaining it from moment to moment, but largely, it looks like they were looking for excuses to push the characters to act. I am not trying to review the film but rather my intent is to create a modus opendai for the gatekeeper, Mr. Nomura. The more I learned about the world of FF7 that was being created over the years, the more it seemed to lean on the stylings of this one man. In a way, Nomura launched Squaresoft and himself into a whole new stratosphere of fame and broke all expectations. In my first article, I mentioned that for a certain generation of fans, it was the perfect storm, but I would later find out the cause of the storm was Nomura breaking open lightning in a bottle, releasing his brand of design on the world with a multi-million dollar international company backing him.

If I may, let me take a parallel series by the same creator infested by the meta of his own other original creations, namely Kingdom Hearts. In its inception, it looks like two producers at Square were trying to make a 3-D adventure platformer game with characters as popular as Mario, but only the biggest brand on earth, Disney, could possibly beat the king of platformers. Nomura was… walking by and pushed himself into the conversation, and they decided if they could do it, they would let him direct. (Read more here) Yada yada yada, Kingdom Hearts was created. While I can’t seem to find (and didn’t look too hard to find) proof, I can only imagine that with KH having a tenuous new relationship with big-corp Disney, they focused more on a simple game that was straightforward. KH is very much a disney product with a little bit of artificial Nomura sweetener. With its unbridled success, Nomura was unleashed. Kingdom Hearts 2 would go on to be, in my opinion, one of the most unintelligible video game stories ever inscribed to plastic discs. But the power of Nomura’s story-telling is that we all understand it differently. He creates bedrocks, little story islands of unshakable facts that are connected via a salty sea of undefinable liquid moments. Cast out to sea, rudderless and deprived, you try to bring to your mouth this brine only to be dehydrated faster than if you had just sailed the sea and died in the sun between fact islands or lived long enough to tell the tale. And that metaphor is my tribute to Nomura. Long, winding, hard to remember, and just clear enough that you think you got it, but you still have problems with its construction.

It has now been over two months since I have last visited this article. What is keeping me from continuing? The incomplete nature of my knowledge of Final Fantasy VII lore. Unlike the Kingdom Hearts sea, VII is like a series of interconnected caves, and the more you unearth the more you learn. And therein lies the problem. The Nomura-verse is composed of both his methods and his circumstances. His methods, we have discussed, but his circumstance is game development. Unlike movies or books, games obviously have an interactive capability, but they also have a variable development cycle. Some titles come out quickly, others span decades. They also consist of different teams, story writers, directors, and a myriad of producers. This in turn can make it much harder to make a solid universe, especially when new additions start off in a place where a continuous story was never meant to exist. Nomura is at once hindered and strengthened by his circumstances. He can’t tell a better story because the development cycle of his vision is variable, and success is based on sales and popularity. Without success, he can’t create a new addition, and often in games, the end is meant to tie the whole thing up. Were there to be a sequel, a whole new story is thought up and tacked on wherever it fits. Gamers are pretty forgiving of this concept. Still, at the same time, Nomura probably wouldn’t make a concise story because it's not his style. For comparison, see the Dark Souls series. A game that both has deep lore and an involving story, but at the same time, the game doesn’t require you to know a single point to continue moving forward. This is almost the antithesis of Nomura’s style. In Souls, they let the player decide to explore its story caves, but doesn’t confront them with it to continue advancing. This is a strength of  video games. A strength that Nomura keeps using to his disadvantage.

Yet, Final Fantasy VII still excelled to unparalleled heights. It engages you in the same way all of the previous games in the series have, but with a slight departure on the strict fantasy theme, instead a merger with steampunk or semi-future. The series was changed forever, and so was gaming. Instead of doing the Dragon Quest method, expanding on the same universe design with different stories, Final Fantasy was emboldened to try completely random approaches with vector entries like VIII and X. For longtime fans, or fans of their original design, Every future title, MMO or Single Player, would go on to be successful, but not fully realized in their original context. Even the return to form in IX was much more playful than any of the original six entries. Gaming franchises have since become playgrounds for developers. Once they are accepted by fans, developers are emboldened and experiment with what would normally be a new IP, but instead use the financial shield of the famous namesake to move forward with new ideas. And in the case of Final Fantasy, when this concept of change works, it means that every numbered game becomes a wildcard. It’s a double edged sword for a gaming franchise that dates back to the 8-bit era. It has fans over 40 years old by this point and they may be willing to buy anything new. But this isn’t new to you and it isn’t a revelation for me. Final Fantasy VII Remake causes me to reckon with these demons I had buried years ago. It rips off a scab I thought had healed. I had given up on the past, a past where I was excited for a singular story, contained in a single universe, in a single title. I had given up on the glory years of Final Fantasy, but the Remake took me back and said, what if we told you everything you remember about the original was true, and everything we added after that was also true, even though you probably didn’t play it or even know it existed. Even if you do your very best, you probably won’t be able to track the story or interconnected characters if you aren’t in the know. It’s like joining a group of long time friends that are constantly referencing inside jokes, all of them just winking at each other, nudging you in the ribs and asking, “Do ya get it?” Truly, the Remake series thus far makes me feel lost at sea when what I wanted to feel like was coming home.

This retrospective has left me feeling broken. Based on the end of the FFVIIR, I sought out to reconcile all of the loose ends to all the connected media. However, spending time with the prequel Crisis Core for over around 40 hours, I realized this was a crapshoot. None of it mattered. It didn’t enrich the characters, it only made the story longer. It just added wibbly-wobbly, timey-whimey “facts” to an otherwise complete(ish) origin point. The FFVII universe can’t handle the weight that is put on it. It’s a faulty bridge over a treacherous pass. On the other hand, that same bridge for some is a point of excitement. You tread the boards, one by one, testing your weight, hoping to get to the other side intact. And I think that is why we keep trying these games and why they keep getting made. We don’t want the fun to end, despite the fact that it has nothing left for us to be excited by. It’s a closed loop that we keep looking for something new in. By the end of the Remake, we are somewhere between ⅓ or ½ way across the faulty bridge, dangling between where we have been and where it is taking us. At this point, I am too mentally exhausted from trying to make sense of it all. Yet I am incapable of not enjoying it, the mental somersaults one does to understand the interconnected mess that is Final Fantasy VII. It’s too dear to me. I got on the bridge for so many reasons, but the biggest one is to be on the other side with all of the other fans who dared to play and dared to complete the game. To be in the know, to wink across the room. I want to be in that hyper-critical utopia where we all have one thing in common: We played Final Fantasy VII in 1997. And we all have something to say about it.

[kinetic-elaboration]

December 14: 1x28 The City on the Edge of Forever (Also I’m 32)

For my birthday, I watched an ep of Star Trek, because I can. It was very good and I enjoyed watching but now I’m starting to get some pretty bad evening anxiety, so!! I’m going to try to ignore that.

Here are some thoughts:

I love this wavy camera work. Space turbulence.

I recognize that this intro really doesn’t have anything to do with anything but it’s still really, like, sudden--weird time things are happening and the ship keeps shaking!

Sulu’s looking damn good today. (I say this in every ep with a closeup of Sulu.)

That was a real rookie mistake on McCoy’s part there, stabbing himself with the hypo. (Harlan Ellison voice lol.) (Still better than the original script.)

“They’ll never catch me!”

Sulu and Spock have been trading eye shadow secrets obviously. It’s a real shame that the AOS movies didn’t give people awesome makeup. I mean heck if you couldn’t force yourself to give men obvious makeup (the horror!) you could have at least done something cool with Token Girl Uhura.

Kirk sounds very formal today. Idk why, but his tone is just slightly different--calling Scotty “Engineer” and something about his log... Probably just me being weird or an effect of there being so many writers on this thing.

Damn, McCoy was almost as good as Spock, the way he knocked that guy out so efficiently.

I’m pretty sure this is Uhura’s first landing party. And she barely gets to do anything because this is the Kirk and Spock Show today.

“Unbelievable.” / “That’s funny.” Is it though?

Legit laughed out loud when Bones popped up from behind that rock, right after Uhura said he wasn’t there.

I don’t think Spock likes the Guardian. “Primitive science knowledge? Excuse you, Sir.”

The Guardian really is just like hand-wave-y sci fi lol. Uh it’s really old and really advanced so it can’t really explain itself, the point is, time travel!!!! I mean I don’t hate it but still.

Kirk is very quick to want to play with time. A little vacation away from his usual work. Getting to satisfy his curiosity and be his nerdy self and learn things. Can you even imagine TOS Kirk in AOS???

Love the dramatic moments: Kirk looking very suddenly when the Guardian says “Behold.” Jumping into the sand as he fails to catch McCoy.

Kirk’s biggest fantasy--a vacation that’s also exploration--turns into his greatest nightmare--loneliness.

“No star date” Can you even imagine Starfleet HQ getting this? “Whoops we just destroyed literally everything. Don’t worry, we’ve probably fixed it if you’re reading this.”

History nerd Kirk. Correctly identifying the Great Depression. If Spock thinks THIS is barbaric, what would he think about today?

“I’m going to be difficult to explain in any case.” Truly, only Kirk, and his love goggles, would choose the ONE alien in his crew to take with him on the first expedition into the past. This was completely foreseeable guys.

Spock’s like “That’s a cool car. Let me examine it now. In the middle of the street. While people yell at me.”

This ep starts out so dramatic and now all of a sudden it’s a comedy, right down to the music. (Again, a sign of how many writers had their hands in this.)

“I’m going to like this century. Simpler, easier to manage.” LOL.

“You’re a police officer. I recognize the traditional accoutrements.” Spock is having such a good time watching this.

Really relying on American racism to explain the alien, huh? “I know you don’t know what Asians look like so.... he’s Chinese.”

“I double dog dare you to put together a computer, Mr. Spock.” Effective.

Put on the hat, the hat!!!!

Starfleet’s greatest Captain couldn’t come up with a fast fake name for Spock.

Kirk looks good in this outfit. Actually the outfits in general are great.

Honestly what does Edith think of these weirdos?

Kirk hears trash talk: “Shut up. SHUT UP.” No talking badly about women in THIS house.

She should have been living in our time. I wonder if she always thought space was cool or if Kirk (and uh literal actual alien Spock) inspired her.

Spock’s eye roll at “I find her most uncommon.”

Kirk definitely did manual labor in high school.

Spock really is building a whole-ass computer.

“I’ve brought you vegetables? What else do you want??” Is this the first reference to him being a vegetarian?

And there was only one bed...

Edith’s reaction to Spock’s sass is hilarious. She’s really not confused by him at all.

When Spock’s straightforward, honest answers about why he stole the tools don’t work, Kirk steps in with the charm offensive.

“By his side, as if you’ve always been there and always will” is basically the toast at their wedding.

Favorite thing about Edith remains that she meets an actual alien and says eh, not so weird, and then looks at the Iowa Farm Boy and is like ????????? does not compute.

“Why don’t you want to talk about the war? Are you a war criminal?”

I feel like Kirk gets a weird kick out of saying he and Spock “served together.” And like it’s literally the truth? But he has this little smile like he’s getting away with a cool lie.

Only about 10 years until we get the cool alien book about love!

Spock bringing out the big guns with today’s requisite “Jim.”

Imagine meeting McCoy like this: weird-ass uniform, rambling and paranoid. Thinks he’s met a humanoid alien. Getting so upset about 20th century hospitals he starts crying and rolling on the ground. He’s so empathetic. I love him.

What a way to go, killing yourself accidentally with a future weapon you steal from a 23rd century time traveler you mistake for a drunk.

Bones is so good at not being seen. That’s straight up comedy how he just passes by behind Spock. There are really weird, random comedy elements in this.

“She was right but at the wrong time.”

Kirk’s in love with Edith... I mean he’s not lol but that IS what a romantic such as him would say.

“I’m a surgeon, not a psychiatrist,” says the man who testified as a psychiatrist at a court martial in a previous episode.

How convenient that U.S.S. is an abbreviation she’d recognize.

“I don’t believe in YOU.”

I know this isn’t actually true, but it feels like Spock literally just came out of the room to be jealous while Kirk and Edith kiss.

Spock’s lesson “do[ing] as your heart tells you to do” is wrong.

So McCoy just got over it, I guess. Kirk was all ready to manipulate time to stop the accident but all they needed to do was find him, catch him, and sedate him a while I guess.

“My young man.” So cute.

The reunion hug with McCoy is adorable. I watched it 4 times.

Yet another Kirk vacation fantasy foiled.

No final talk on the bridge... Very dramatic and sad.

This IS a really good episode but I just still can’t get behind calling it the BEST Star Trek episode. To me, it doesn’t feel enough like Star Trek to be the best. It’s a really great story, and it’s entertaining to watch, but it’s not representative. Too few of the crew--not even really that sci-fi-ish at the end of the day. Like I said, the Guardian is really generic and ill-explained, just a prop for the main story. And while that main story is obviously all about time travel and the effects of time travel, even THAT is incidental to the real point, which is the moral question: save one or save many? But it’s not even a conundrum, like in TWOK/TSFS,because there is no real choice. Obviously Kirk is going to let Edith die. To do otherwise wouldn’t just damn many more people in the 20th century to death, it would damn his crew and his ship and, in a way, himself. So it’s more like, well, inevitably, she will die, and he will let her, but it will be really sad. So the point is just this tragic, doomed love story. Which is not a bad story in any sense, but it’s not what one generally primarily associates with TOS.

I’m not sure this is making sense because I’m just working out my thoughts as I type.

I do think there’s some interesting stuff here: I think one could do a lot with what this ep does for Spock’s development, since we don’t hear too much from him but he’s pretty intimately involved in all this. And the lessons it’s teaching him about feelings and vulnerability are...not great.

Also Uhura saying “at least be happy” in the beginning ties in interestingly to the rest of the narrative--he could have chosen his happiness, in a way, at least fleetingly. Perhaps it would have been more interesting if Kirk had ever really considered letting Edith live--but then, would he be Kirk if he ever considered it, seriously, out loud? Am I being dense by thinking the narrative should have said this in so many words, when it’s obvious enough as is?

I’m also not totally sure about the... message. I’d prefer to say there isn’t one, honestly, because of the way the conundrum is set up: as a non-conundrum. Because, obviously America should have entered WWII; if ever there was a war that was worth fighting, this would be it. Hence there’s no need to really interrogate whether or not Edith’s death was right. There’s no way it was not right. There’s no complication there, allowing the story to focus on the tragedy of Kirk’s inevitable decision instead. It could have been a different story, about weighing the pros and cons. And then possibly also a story with a moral lesson attached to the decision Kirk makes: about the many versus the few, for example, or about war specifically, since obviously this is airing with Vietnam as a background.

It could also have been a story about fate. Obviously, McCoy can and does change time. But you have all 3 of them ending up at the same place/time, right near this Big Event. You have the almost-fall on the stairs, implying death is out for Edith. You have the total set of circumstances around her death: as it actually plays out, she’s only there BECAUSE of Kirk and Spock. Were they always there? Does she get killed in a slightly different circumstance in timelines without them? The way the story plays out, all of these details seem so beside the point--again, the story uses time travel but isn’t really ABOUT time travel; it uses sci fi tools but is not telling a sci fi story--so it’s not even really worth interrogating.

(Other than just now, when I did.)

I think it’s pretty obvious that a lot of people had their hands in this story: Kirk’s very IC romantic nature is first and foremost and I like seeing this part of him, but the Command part is kind of hidden; there are moments of tragedy, in the traditional sense of the word, but also other parts that feel like Tomorrow Is Yesterday in terms of the style of comedy; the sci fi stuff is really random.

None of this is really criticism, just thoughts. It’s definitely a really interesting episode.

Next is the FINAL EPISODE of S1, which is RIDICULOUS imo. I’m fairly sure Operation Annihilate was one of the first TOS episodes I saw. I have a real soft spot for it so I’m looking forward to watching.

[skip-to-my-lup]

that’s not my name pt. 5

Previous

The fifth time hurts a bit.

It's been over a month and Taako has yet to hear from this Lup girl.

He shouldn’t be all that disappointed. There was also a part of him that understood all of the logical reasons why. They didn't even know if they were really related.  They were effectively strangers. And, if they weren’t actually related. Then, there was no real reason for them to include each other in their own lives.

It's just... there's another part of him, a small part mind you, that's almost worried. Did something happen to her? Did she second guess all of this?

Is he not worth her time?

No matter how much he's tried to reign in his hope, it had grown ever since that first old man first mistook him for this Lup girl. And while he has gotten used to forgetting about his childhood hopes to find his family (a family, really). The thought that he isn't completely alone in this world has rooted itself deep in his heart and refuses to let go, despite his doubts and attempts to get rid of it.

Waiting it out takes a lot out of him, though. And Taako was already tired from his job all of the time. So he does his best to forget about all of it.

Kravitz and his son, Angus, fill a lot of his time, which helps. A lot.

If Taako is being honest, involving himself with someone who has a child scared him quite a bit at first. He's more of the free-spirit type. And he didn't usually do the whole kids... thing.

Much to Taako's surprise, though, Angus is easy to get along with.

It helps that the kid is smart. And not even just book smart, which he very much is, he is also, oddly enough, quite street smart. He's always looking into mysteries and his ability to suss out a situation could be downright terrifying if the kid wasn't also kind of cute.

And, to top it all off, he only got annoying when Taako was tired. Which, all things considered, isn't because Angus was actually annoying. It's not like the kid can help Sazed's worsening attitude or something.

And Kravitz...

Kravitz is a godsend.

Granted, their first date alone had been pretty... awkward to say the least. Not like he could really blame the guy. He loves his kid with all of his heart. It was only natural that he had to make sure Taako wasn't going to just waltz in and out of their lives leaving a brokenhearted kid behind. It's something that Taako respected immensely that night and can't help but admire more and more as the days go by.

Once he knew that Taako wasn't going anywhere anytime soon, though, he warmed almost immediately. Now he gushes about the things he loves (mostly Angus). And, to top it all off, he isn't afraid to give Taako the best hugs that he's  ever received.

Best part was that they didn't have to do the whole song and dance thing that usually came with dating someone. No awkward kiss after the third date. No posturing to appear to be so much cooler than either of them really were. Since Kravitz and Angus are a packaged deal, skipping to just chilling at the McDonald house just... made sense. And felt so much more natural than any sort of dating formula that Taako used to follow.

They did go on a fancy date or two. But it was probably going to be an infrequent thing. Which would make them special. And Taako adores the idea of planning a special night instead of worrying about if he can afford lavish dates. Not that he wouldn't take Kravitz on as many wonderful dates as he could. There just wasn't any rush.

Today, though,Taako is out and about with Angus.

Kravitz had mentioned needing to find a baby sitter for the kid so that he could go to an event or something for his job. He'd also mentioned how he'd love it if the two of them bonded on their own. Now, Taako isn't a genius, but sometimes he comes up with baller ideas. And, the idea of killing two birds with one stone was almost too easy to come up with.

Kravitz was ecstatic when he mentioned it to him

Taako had been so proud of himself for coming up with the idea. But, now that he's out with Angus, by himself. It scares him a bit (a lot) to be wholly responsible for another person's well-being. Also, impressing this kid seems super impossible.

But, in the end, it's surprisingly easy, all things considered.

All of the places they visit are places that Taako normally wouldn't go to by himself: the park by the lake, a local cafe, and the library. Taako'd had no idea how to entertain a kid, so he'd asked Angus to take him to all of his favorite places. And the kid had delivered, quite enthusiastically. And, while they're all in wildly different places in the city, he couldn't bring himself to be annoyed. Despite how much his feet hurt from the day before...

The kid's excitement is far too infectious for its own good.

They're in the library now. Angus can't stop talking about the latest book that he wants to read. He looks around as he gestures wildly. And while Taako can only follow along so far, he’d have to read one of these books to really get what this kid was saying, it's still pretty adorable to see how excited it makes him

After a while, Angus turns to Taako, smile wide. "I have to show you a book, sir!"

Taako tries to tell him that he can drop the sir shtick, but Angus is suddenly pulling him towards the back of the library with more force than he’d expected from such a small child. He can't help but notice that, while the kid is still talking excitedly about this book, his posture is stiff and there’s an urgency in his steps that wasn’t there before. It's quite suspicious.

Once they're in a secluded part of the library, Angus picks up a book at random. Then, under his breath, he says:

"Someone is following you, sir."

Taako goes to check for himself, but Angus shoves the book into his hands and mimics pointing something out on the page. Taako look down at pictures of plants, unfocused on the page.

"Don't be so obvious," the boy chastises. As if he's done this before. Which, he probably has, from what Kravitz has said about his sleuthing escapades.  

"Who is it?" Taako asks. He pretends to be interested in what's on the page. Something about poisonous plants, he half notices a picture of bella donna in the corner.

"I've never seen her before. But, she's been following us at least from the cafe.

Which had been two hours ago, half of which they’d spent riding a bus from the other side of town.

Taako turns to Angus, was this kid nuts?

"Why didn't you say something earlier?!"

Angus shushes him and mimes pointing to another picture, bell flower.

"I wasn't sure if it was a coincidence or not until she followed us into the library." Angus looks up and nods. "You can look now, sir."

Taako follows Angus' gaze and find a woman pretending to be overly interested in a book. There's a shock of white hair on her head (he'd kill for a dye job that good) and her clothes are conservative in a way Taako could never wear, but this woman pulls off really well. Maybe a business professional?

"Sir."

Taako turns. "Yeah, Ango?"

"I think I can cause a distraction if you want to make a break for it."

Taako's blood runs cold.

Was this kid suggesting that he just leave him here?!

Ok, he's definitely going to have a discussion with Kravitz about allowing Angus to read any more detective books. Didn't matter that the kid wasn't technically his, he really didn't like that his first response to a would-be stalker was to run interference for him, the adult, leaving him, the child , vulnerable to bring abducted.

"We're not chancing a kidnapping today, kid."

"I can take care of myself! Besides, she's not paying any attention to me. She's only been watching you the whole time, sir"

Taako frowns. If that's the case...

The likelihood that she's a part of that weird-ass group of people that he keeps running into seems pretty likely the longer he thinks about it.

Well, if she wasn't going to seek him out, then it's on him, he supposes.

Better to get it out of the way so that he and Angus can get back to hanging out.

"Yeah, well Taako can take care of himself, too."

He doesn't give Angus any warning before he walks over to the odd woman.

"Can I help you?" He asks once he's nearby.

This straightforwardness throws her for a loop. She looks to be the type to not be easily flustered. But she's obviously never met Taako before so...

She clears her throat and composes herself in record time.

He'd have been impressed if she hadn't been stalking him all day.

"I'm not sure we should really do this now," she says, looking at Angus, pointedly.

"Pretty sure the kid can handle hearing about whatever beef you have with me. Right?"

Angus nods.

The woman sighs. "Alright. I wanted to handle this with delicacy, but if you insist..."

Taako raises an eyebrow, inviting her to continue.

This ought to be good.

Giving up all pretense of pretending, she shuts the book in her hand and places it carefully back on the bookshelf. She takes a deep breath and turns to Taako anger burning coolly in her eyes.

"I have to admit. I thought better of you. Did you know that Barry's actually been planning to propose to you? Do you even care about his feelings, Lup?"

Hachi Machi.

It takes everything in Taako not to laugh in this lady's face. He can feel a stitch in his side form from the effort, but valiantly keeps his composure. Mostly.

"And all of your friends!" She continues. " Did you even stop to think about how your... your adultery would look to them? No one is going to side with you on this!"

She takes a deep breath and collects herself. She hadn't yelled, but her composure had broken.

"Did you... Did you even think of how I would feel?" Her voice breaks on that last one.

He really should stop her before she goes much further. He can't fully empathize with what she's going through, but he does feel some semblance of pity. Also it’d probably be a dick move to ruin this Lup girl’s life without reason.

And he doesn't need boy-wonder here getting any wrong ideas.

"I think you've got the wrong tall, blonde, good-looking person here, lady," he says, not unkindly.

Her brown eyes narrow, but he cuts her off before she can ingest any more of her foot via her open mouth.

"When was the last time you talked to... what'd you say his name was? Barry?"

"Last week."

"He ever mention meeting a Lup-look-a-like named, Taako a couple months back?"

Her face scrunches up. "No... Lup. I really don't think—"

"Give him a call."

"Lup. If you just promise to break things off with that man and promise not to meet up with him again, then I won't—"

"Call him."

The woman sighs. She pulls out her phone and presumably makes a call.

"It's your funeral, Lup."

"Pretty sure you're the one that's going to be embarrassed to death here, but go off I guess."

Taako looks over to Angus. He's furiously taking down notes. Great. He really hopes the kid is objective with his note-taking.

"Yes. Hello, Barry?" She starts. "Yes, I'm okay. I was just calling to see if you couldn't help me debunk something. See, I have Lup here, pretending—"

The woman's eyebrows knit together.

"What do you—" She turns to Taako. She looks him up and down.Trying to make sense of him and whatever Barry must be telling her.

Then, mortification settles on her face.

Bingo.

"Oh. I see."

Taako can't help but burst out laughing. He laughs so hard that his sides start hurting again and everyone stares at them.

"Well, tha—" He can see the embarrassment morph into annoyance. "Yeah. Yeah he is."

She rolls her eyes as she extends her phone to him. "Here."

"What?" He asks, staring at the proffered phone.

"Just take it," she says.

He does.

Then, a voice that sounds familiar, but not too familiar speaks.

"Hey, we've really gotta work on this whole phone number thing.

[purplesurveys]

800

.·゜゜·. Holy Cow A Survey .·゜゜·.  (and holy cow, it’s my 800th on here) by junkie_dreams

1. What made you pick up the last book you started reading? I started reading it for a while, then thesis made me too busy to read it for a few weeks, then when I was finished with that I realized I’ve left the book alone so I continued it and proceeded to finish the whole thing.

2. Have you received any bad or troubling news lately? All things revolving around Covid19, George Floyd, & Trump < Pretty much, though replace Trump with Duterte. He’s being such a cranky ass about hastily passing this new bill that will essentially allow warrantless arrests to anyone complaining about him on the internet, so everyone’s kinda stressing out about that right now. 

3. When was the last time you were relieved about something? Since Tuesday, every day that I’ve woken up without a fever is a relief. Another thing is that it’s Gabie’s birthday today and I was relieved to find out that she loved the surprise I made for her :) I pooled all her friends together and made them do video birthday greetings and submit photos that they have with her and I compiled it in a simple short film. It turned out super cute!

4. What about your life concerns you the most? Anything job-wise. They say 2020 graduates are heading into the worst job market in a very long time, and I think that’s pretty straightforward information.

5. Is there a common thing most people seem to do without trouble, but it scares you (talking on the phone, driving, interviews, etc)? When was the last time you had to do one of these kinds of things? Talking on the phone, ordering in a restaurant, and asking for help in any kind of store. I had to talk to a Grab delivery driver the other day to help him with directions going to my house; andddd I don’t usually have to recite my order or ask for help at a store myself because my girlfriend will often be the one to speak for me HAHAHAH.

6. Is a pen pal something you would enjoy? If so, what kinds of little things would you send your pen friends? No, only because writing exhausts me these days. I only enjoy writing for people I already know very well and love, and I wouldn’t feel invested enough to write to people I don’t know all that much yet.

7. Describe a time when you were there for a friend? Angela was sad the other day so I dropped her short messages to let her know I was there for her. She never replied, but it’s okay; it was just important to me that she knew I wasn’t going to leave her alone.

8. When was the last time you went somewhere for the first time? I dunno, I obviously haven’t gone around the city in months...though I’m thinking it’s the milk tea place we have at campus, called Nomu. I was there to pick up a drink a week before lockdown.

9. What is a situation that makes you feel especially confident? If it’s a situation that I know I can handle, like a test I studied a lot for; or if it’s a situation where I have a lot of support.

10. What was the subject of your most recent conversation? My dad was asking if he can have one of my soju bottles (my mom recently bought me five) and was also asking what flavor is really good. That prompted me to walk over and hesitatingly point out the good flavors, until he said, “Just kidding, I was just checking to see if this will make you stand up. You’re so predictableeeeeeeee” hahahaha

11. Hypothetically and generally speaking, how would you go about breaking up with someone? Is there anything you would make sure to say, or perhaps not say? I’d do it personally, say everything there is to say, and let’s face it, I see myself crying a lot too because I can never have serious conversations without tearing up lol.

12. Are you more of a night person or a day person? What is it about the night/day that you favor? I like the nightlife more. I hate the sun and when it’s bright out, so I’m most active when it’s evening and the lights and stars are pretty.

13. What do you find particularly offensive? Would you say you’re easy or difficult to offend? Mostly anything racist, misogynist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, biphobic, acephobic, and anti-poor. I’m very alert about these things and will call out anyone making insensitive sentiments about any of them.

14. Is there a belief you have that most others around you don’t have? Do you share this belief with others, or do you tend to keep it to yourself? Have you ever offended anyone with this belief? Ok so it’s technically the opposite of belief but I am atheist in a predominantly Catholic country. I’m very vocal about it except with my family. I probably have offended some people by stuff I’ve said or shared, but I don’t care. If they choose to ignore the myriad of issues surrounding their religion, they’re part of the problem and the reason why I’m so wholly against it.

15. Do you consider internet friendships as important as offline friendships, or do you view them differently? I value offline friendships more.

16. When was the last time you visited relatives or friends of the family? Is visiting family something you enjoy? I visited my lola, aunt, and cousins last Sunday when I was sick, since the doctor we were heading to lives in the same village. I hadn’t seen them since December I think? so my lola cried when she saw us walk through the front gate :’) I love visiting family, whoever it may be. It’s always fun to catch up, as long as conversations don’t turn into politics lol.

17. What did you do for the last holiday or event you celebrated? For my birthday we were stuck in lockdown so I couldn’t really do anything, but we had lots of food which is the easiest way to make me happy anyway. My parents and sister bought a blueberry cheesecake but had the blueberry part scraped off and then they crushed a whole pack of Oreos to turn it into an Oreo cheesecake lol; and Angela sent me a box of sushi.

18. If you’ve moved out from home, what was the scariest thing about it? What was/is your favorite thing about it? I haven’t yet.

19. Are there any fictional characters you like even though they’re “bad” or “evil?” What qualities draw you to a character? Yeah. Many antagonists speak the truth, and that makes it so easy to root for them. It’s this case very often in pro wrestling.

20. What are your thoughts on “forgiving” murderers, rapists, attackers, etc? Do you think it’s even possible to forgive these people? I don’t even forgive friends who betray me, so much less would I forgive assholes like the ones you listed. It’s definitely possible; I just choose not to do it because that’s my way of being in peace.

21. What was the last series you finished watching? Do you have any plans to begin another? I’m awwwwwwwful at finishing series man. I’m still on Descendants of the Sun but I also started a rewatch of The Big Bang Theory lmao. I want to finish DOTS first though and then maybe move on to Crash Landing On You, another Korean drama. Big Bang’s not really a priority for me and just something I wanna watch when I don’t want anything too heavy.

22. What is one way in which you are different from a year ago? What is one way in which you are still the same? I’m a lot less afraid of dealing with people (and been better with it) thanks to the stuff I’ve had to do in the last year, like my internship and heading external relations for my org. I’m still the same in the sense that I’m still deathly terrified in the last few moments before I do the aforementioned dealing with people lol. Once I jump into the conversation I’m perfect, but I take f o r e v e r to get prepared.

23. When was the last time you had to walk somewhere in the rain? How about the snow? I don’t like walking in the rain and we don’t get snow.

24. Are there any types of survey questions you dread or don’t like answering for whatever reason? What kinds of questions do you like best? Questions that make me think too much or are too deep. I also don’t like basic surveys. Random is where it’s at. Ask me what I got at the last restaurant I was at, places I plan to visit soon, the last time I got mad, stuff like that.

25. If you could learn about anything without the stress of grades or cost, what kind of classes would you take? Law.

26. What was the last item of clothing you purchased? Do you wear it often? Two identical tops in different colors. I haven’t gotten the chance to wear either a lot because lockdown happened shortly after I bought them.

27. Has anything made you feel nostalgic lately? Sure. When I was compiling stuff for Gab’s surprise video, I came across some very old photos of us and of her and Angela.

28. What was the last chore you completed? Wash my plate from breakfast.

29. Name a song you’ve listened to today? 7/11 by Beyoncé, heh.

30. Is there anything you’ve promised yourself you’ll never do again? Drink buko juice. I had to drink it for the first few days of my UTI treatment and it’s so disgustinggggggg.

[hopevalley]

S6E3: The Queen of Hearts (Episode Write-Up)

You can also read this on my website here.

Can you believe the next episode has come and gone already? Time sure flies. I’m typing this up from work, so please pardon me if you find any mistakes/errors/etc. I’ll try and proofread it as well as I can and add the pictures in when I get home, but…well, you know, time is money.

(Though I guess…if I’m typing this at work…it could be said that I’m being paid for my time…)

Last episode was pretty low-key: a nice entrance into the new season. This episode ramped things up a bit; there are quite a few threads of drama starting up already, and, well, we’ve only just begun.

So without further ado, let’s jump into it!

The Pedals on the Bike Go Round ‘n Round

Bill and Fiona vs. Lucas

Investing 101 ft. Henry

Carson ‘Foot in Mouth’ Shepherd

Clara Stanton Takes a Stand

Sorry in advance; I barely proofread this. :’)

Plot #1: The Pedals on the Bike Go Round ‘n Round

Elizabeth was kind of just…around in this episode. She didn’t do a whole lot and didn’t have too much to say. She did, however, get a plot. Kind of a weak one.

More or less the plot boiled down to “Elizabeth teaches Timmy how to ride a bike.” You may have forgotten who Timmy is, and if so, he’s Wilma’s son. Wilma, Kurt, and Timmy came in for the Christmas film in S4E1: When Calls the Heart Christmas.

On the positive side, the plot was fairly well-acted. I probably couldn’t pretend to need help riding a bicycle if my life depended on it, but you’ll notice in all the scenes where Timmy is ‘learning,’ his front tire/handlebars get kind of jittery—enough that it made me feel a little uncomfortable just watching! He did a great job with that.

Elizabeth did nicely enough plunking away at the piano pretending she was bad at it to try and help Timmy learn that learning is a process. There’s always someone out there who is better than you at something, but 1) that doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to do it, too, and 2) it’s okay to mess up, because that’s part of the process of learning!

Overall, a cute plot. I didn’t mind that it stayed in the background and wasn’t exactly center stage.

That said, I think I could have really gone for something a little less shallow? At the very least, it might have been nice to see Elizabeth ask Robert or Cody to borrow the bike at lunchtime. (I’m under the impression that they belong to them, and not the school.) Instead of Timmy having fallen on a random (?) bike and scraping up his knee, how about something with a little more substance?

Maybe his parents scraped up their hard-earned money to buy him a bike for his birthday because he’d been admiring Cody’s, but when he tried riding it in town, he faceplanted into a horse trough—something legitimately embarrassing! A few grown-ups laughed at the spectacle (even as they helped him up and made sure he was okay), making him afraid to fall in front of others again. But he really wants to learn because his parents worked hard to buy the bike for him…and they can’t teach him because they don’t know how to ride.

A short lesson on balance, and why it’s impossible to stay upright at a standstill (but very easy to stay upright in motion) could have been really fun, too.

And I think it might have been nice to see a few of the kids encouraging Timmy, or at least speaking with him about this. “Nobody’s watching” my foot! They’d definitely be paying attention, if only out of the corner of their eyes. Opal could say she’s too afraid to try, but if Timmy could learn maybe she wouldn’t be so afraid to learn, herself (something that could encourage Timmy to want to learn more); Cody and Robert could offer to help Timmy but their methods, while well-meaning, are a little too harsh. (Maybe they could be the reason Timmy fell into the trough.)

I wouldn’t have even minded someone fashioning Timmy some training wheels to try out! Maybe his internal balance isn’t very good and he could use the assist until he feels more comfortable (and then later in the season, in a couple of episodes, he could get the hang of it and it’d be super sweet). Then the moral of this story could be more about the process of learning and how learning new things takes time and effort (for some people different things take longer than others), and it’s okay if Cody learned in five seconds but it takes Timmy a few weeks to really get comfortable.

Still, I like what we got. Timmy hasn’t had much of a role in the series in the last couple of seasons, so it was nifty to see him getting something! And of course, Elizabeth got to help without it being too over-the-top, which I can really appreciate.

Plot #2: Bill and Fiona vs. Lucas

Overall, this plot wasn’t bad. I enjoyed Fiona and Lucas. There seems to be some tension between the two of them; there should be a pretty serious reason for this. The story flow doesn’t feel very natural without reasoning in place. Unfortunately this isn’t something I can talk at length about; it’s a wait-and-see sort of situation. It’s possible it’ll get addressed later, especially if Fiona is intended to stick around for most/all of the season.

But to explain what I mean about story flow and reasoning, though, it just doesn’t make sense to me that Fiona would care enough about this town to rat out Lucas to Bill—another complete stranger to her. Sure, Bill is the law, but it feels like there’s just a tiny bit of something missing between their meeting and Fiona immediately going to Bill about Lucas.

Now, it’s totally possible the writers weren’t going for anything deep. Maybe what we see is really what we’re getting: she’s a bit of a gossip à overhears that Bill is concerned à Bill is the law à then she overhears Lucas and thinks Bill’s root worry is legitimate and does The Right Thing (which is report her findings to him).

Bill might find the arrangement satisfactory for now, but it means nothing he says on the phone is private. I really appreciated that Bill brought this up in a very straightforward manner, e.g., “Doesn’t your company have a policy against that?” It still leaves it open for future issues, though.

Fiona’s gossipy tendencies don’t bother me at all. I think they make her a better character than some we’ve had; she’s not 100% wholesome and pure. I dig that. Right now I’m just wondering what about Lucas bothers her so much. Maybe she doesn’t like how smooth he is. Can’t say I blame her.

Lucas himself is a fun character. He’s suave as heck, he can laugh at himself, but he’s vaguely suspicious. Overall, I’d say he’s a smooth operator, a smart schemer. I really enjoyed his conversation with Elizabeth, but the one with Rosemary was awkward in…kind of a good way. I’m fine with getting characters who don’t say what they mean or even lie (without it obviously being a lie).

And so far, my favorite thing about Lucas is how he comes across to the various townfolk.

Some people really like him, think he’s sooo nice for doing these kind things…but then you have the people who are put off by his attempts at kindness. I can see both sides of it, and I know which side I’d be on! He seems like he might end up being a fairly complex character, which I’m really hoping for. Some people might view what he’s doing as a general kindness/attempt to look good right off the bat, but others feel he’s trying to buy affection/a good name; if things get bad, people will say he’s good and they trust him because he’s more or less paid them to feel that way. It’s got a lot of room for good stuff!

(I’m not sure how I feel about the saloon name change, but I think it’s weird that people don’t really care about it? That said, I’ve noticed they all call it “the saloon” so a name change doesn’t really matter. Meanwhile, Abigail’s Café is often referred to both by just “Abigail’s” and as “Abigail’s Café” so the distinction might matter a lot.)

Now...we’ve gotta talk about Bill.

I’m sure nobody really wants to hear more about how much I hate the way he’s been written lately, but just for the heck of it, I’ll dive in for a few paragraphs. My stance is thus: Bill is severely out of character and has been getting worse for the last two seasons. The things he does are cringey and out of character. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to laugh at him or wince at the things he says and does, but if this is intentional, I’m hoping they address it soon.

The most likely bit of reasoning might be the same reason Henry dove into the stock market: he’s restless, bored, feels useless, doesn’t know what to do with that energy. In Bill’s case that energy just comes out in these unconstructive ways: everyone is suspicious until proven otherwise. The judgeship plotline could take care of this, but obviously I don’t know that it will. It’s just a consideration/possibility.

The problem is, they started getting wobbly with Frank’s character in S4, too, with him snooping around on Carson. They’re more or less doing the same exact thing to Bill right now for no reason, so…it honestly seems like they just don’t know how to write him, and I don’t know how they can be at such a loss when they have 4 good seasons of Bill to look back on for character tidbits and plot ideas.

But seeing Bill devolve from a sharp investigator to little more than a joke in the last few episodes? It really grinds my gears. I can’t even enjoy the bits that are supposed to be funny, like when he told Lucas he’d pay for his own drink and then took his money back the second Lucas’s back was turned and let the bartender put it on the house. It’s not funny because that’s not something that Bill of S1 through S4 would even do. When someone refused to tip Abigail more than a few cents, Bill put his own money on the table to ensure she was tipped (five bucks, by the way!). He’s not stingy, he’s not stupid. He chased the same case for literal years of his life and did so quietly, so he’s also very patient. He wouldn’t have called that woman directly, he’d have contacted someone he knew to trace the location of the phone and the name of the household being billed for it. He has the know-how and the power, and he’d use the best way to get his information that he had available that wouldn’t also give him away.

I don’t know why they chose to do this with his character, but I definitely disagree with it.

That said, he has a reasonable enough reason to be suspicious of the man. After all, he’s seen everything. I’m just worried the narrative won’t be sympathetic toward him at all, and in the very end he’ll be wrong about everything and end up in an even worse place than where he started.

Plot #3: Investing 101, ft. Henry

Shockingly, I don’t have too much to say about this plot. It was nice. Henry has a hobby that feels exactly like the kind of thing Henry would do, so props there. I also quite enjoyed seeing Lee stick up for Henry more, and Abigail reluctantly coming around to the idea of investment being a little different than gambling (but honestly not by much).

Even though my stance on Henry and Abigail as a potential romantic end-game is a giant thumbs-down, I could really appreciate the whole plot. Henry lies, but it’s because he feels partially responsible for Abigail’s lost money.

Earlier this year I predicted that maybe he’d lose her money, but I didn’t think he’d lie about it and tell her she’d doubled it. That’s…a bit much. I want to say that that doesn’t sound much like Henry (I could see him giving back the original amount and saying he pulled it before it could go down), but at this point it’s fair to say he’d go a bit overboard because he doesn’t want Abigail to lose faith in him.

After all, he knows she’s the reason he got a second chance at all, and he definitely didn’t deserve that kindness from her; the last thing Henry wants to do right now is make her regret it. It’s a little sad but perfectly believable. It was nice of Abigail to straighten things out the way she did; she was very straightforward about it.

So hey, the air is cleared and we’ve learned that investing is a form of gambling, but not exactly the same thing? Huh.

Plot #4: Carson “Foot in Mouth” Shepherd

This plotline wasn’t deep enough that I feel the need to comment heavily on it, but I can appreciate a few small things about it.

First, it was really awesome that Carson went to Lee with his problem.

Sometimes I feel like this series does a pretty bad job of matching up conversationalists: people go to whoever the plot deems the best person to go to, and usually that person is part of the “main” cast and hasn’t had enough lines in the episode yet, so they get the part. Due to this, at times it feels like roles are just being filled by whatever actor is free to fill the spot. So it was nice to see this happen because Lee was definitely appropriate person to go to for this conversation. 1) He knew about Rosemary’s plan, 2) he seemed exasperated by Rosemary’s plan, and 3) he’s married currently so he understands and might be sympathetic to Carson’s little problem of, you know, putting his foot in his mouth.

One thing I wanted to see addressed that didn’t get addressed (because this show has people “fix” problems with weird dialogue choices) was the reason Carson said what he did. He probably said it because he didn’t want to put any pressure on Faith, or on himself. As he said later, they work together; it’s not a good idea to even consider it.

Now, I personally haven’t felt any real chemistry between these characters, like…at all, so I’m not really on #teaminfirmary, but I do think they show some promise. Right now my biggest criticism has been the lack of chemistry. For me, the doctor/nurse trope just doesn’t do it, not on its own. After Carson’s quick attraction to Sofia, I guess I was kinda wanting to see something spark between them!

But I liked Faith being the one who felt awkward after Carson put his foot in his mouth, and then she kind of took it out on him by being short and snippy. That feels pretty in-character for her to do.

I’m looking forward to seeing what they do with them in the future, though. Like I said, there’s potential there!

Plot #5: Clara Stanton Takes a Stand

Another small plot, but I like the drama baked into this one. Jesse’s always had some self-esteem issues, so it was pretty cool to see that coming back. He has a bad past, he just does okay for himself (not super well), he’s not smart or well educated. You know he thinks Clara’s just about too good for him… I mean, he wasn’t always that way; before she agreed to court him he acted pretty cocky. But he was probably acting that way because he didn’t think she’d really go for it. And then she said yes and he was like, “NOW WHAT?”

I don’t like that he tried to tell her what to do (and I’d argue the dialogue choice there could be a lot better), but it felt vaguely in character. I think I wish they’d gone more the “I should be providing for you” route. And the “you work hard enough” route. They skirted around those a little bit, but if they’d landed on them a little harder I think it’d be easier to swallow. But it was still kind of understandable. He already has issues with feeling like he’s good enough and this makes him feel that she thinks he can’t do it by himself.

I was hoping for a dialogue between them eventually about this (not Clara working two jobs, but Clara working at all after they’re married), but I think what they settled on is going to work really well, and hopefully open up the two of them to talk about their feelings a little more deeply—especially Jesse being more vulnerable with regards to his low self-esteem.

My favorite part was definitely Clara taking the job anyway and Jesse trying to kind of accept it, but we all know that’s not gonna work out. ;P I’m really looking forward to seeing what they do for these characters over the course of the season!

Overall? Another reasonably fun episode. I’m having a lot of fun with the new characters; I just hope they don’t throw Bill under the bus for the duration of the season. He’s got the potential to be one of the best characters on the show if they’d just take the time to give him decent storylines. But hey, maybe the good stuff is all coming soon for him. :)

[zendozebra]

All the Time in the World Chapter 7

He's gonna have to kick Yamada's ass next time he sees him. Sure, come in to Majima's office unannounced, that's fine. Talk non-stop for 30 minutes while Majima desperately tries to ignore him, that's alright. Spill your stupid iced coffee thing all over the notes Majima made for today's lecture, then run away before you can be forced to clean up your goddamn mess, that's fucked up. Now he has no notes, no plan, no lecture, and most of his students are staring at him, waiting for him to begin today's lesson. He doesn't even remember what today's lecture was supposed to be about. Now what is he supposed to do? Sure he could just use time stop to get a new set of notes together, that would be easy. It would be trivial. But Majima really doesn't want to. Should he just make it up as he goes along? Yeah, that sounds good. He could probably bullshit his way through just one lecture, or at the very least 45 minutes. Alright, let's get started. He stood at the front of the room, already in full costume. The cloak ended up being more of a poncho than a cloak, but the mask was right, so he gave it a pass. Wasn't wearing that part right now, though, it was laying on his desk. The boots Nezu recommended actually fit pretty well, so that's a plus.

"Okay, about 200 years ago, give or take a handful of decades, quirks happened. Alright? We got that, that's been covered in your other schools. Quirks have been a thing for…" Oh god, what year did quirks start? What year was it now? "… Quite some time now. The hero society was created out of a necessity to stop everyone with a quirk from going full asshole because someone forgot to put ketchup on their omurice." They were looking at him weird. This plan is falling apart faster than he'd thought it would. "Okay, I am obviously oversimplifying this. Basically, the laws that prevented the public use of quirks were implemented, but that clearly wouldn't stop anyone with even a lick of determination."

"So, what do you do? Obviously, ya got to fight fire with fire, so they created the original hero registration procedures. Only the brightest beacons were allowed to even take the tests, and even fewer passed them. Those that failed but still received a high enough score would eventually go on to become some of the first sidekicks. From there, they would follow in the footsteps of the hero they were assigned to, and would sooner or later become a hero themselves. Those heroes would then get sidekicks themselves, and would perpetuate the cycle."

"Back to the topic of villains, though. Early on, it was realized that there were three types of villains. Sure, these would often bleed over into each other, and you would rarely find a villain that would be a pure form of just one aspect, but I happen to have been a witness to a pure form of each. Now, all of the shit I'm about to tell you guys has been struck from the history books, and for a good reason. I don't expect you to understand that reason, but the fall of the non-quirked society was… Ugly. Riots, mobs, protests, both violent and non-violent. Fuck, there was even a small war over in the states."

"Alright. The three core principles of villainy are as follows: Trauma, Career, and Power. The three examples for these principles are The Echoed Mind, All or Nothing, and All for One. Uh, Midoriya, you doin' okay?" The hell is up with the kid, he jumped up in his seat at that last name. Sure, All for One wasn't the best name, but if ya knew what his quirk was, he was down right terrifying. He should probably not tell the students just what ol' All for One used to be capable of, regardless of the fact that the man's been dead for quite some time now.

"I'm fine, Majima-sensei. Just wasn't expecting hear names quite like those." Izuku explained, which made sense. Codenames back in the day could be weird. Hell, Majima's original codename wasn't all that great, he was just copying the naming convention that Akira and Jin were using. Did Aimi ever give herself a name before everything went tits up? He knew she eventually took Jin's name when everything was said and done, but he never kept any tabs on her after he ran.

"Alright then. Now, as I was saying, each of these villains were a rare example of the pure embodiment of one of these Echoed Mind was trauma. Their true name was Fujita Jin, and they-"

"Majima-sensei!" Holy shit, Ashido is actually raising her hand in his class to ask a question. He guessed that Izuku's study session with her yesterday did more for her confidence than he'd thought it would. Okay, act natural, just acknowledge her question.

"Yes, Ashido, do you have a question?" Nailed it.

"Is this the same Jin that you're always talking about?" Goddamnit, at least she's asking questions. And seeing how old he was, that's technically a legitimate question. Judging by the look on the faces of Kaminari and Ojiro, she wasn't the only one wondering about that.

"No, my old friend Jin and Fujita Jin were not the same person, but that was a good question regardless." Majima Kokiri, helping boost student morale. Didn't think that would ever be a thing in his life. "Either way, Fujita started as a young child with an immensely powerful telepathy quirk. When used, it would implant a single thought in the victims mind that would echo on an endless loop. This thought would grow more powerful as time would pass, until it would completely consume the victims entire thought process. It would drive them to madness, and depending on what the implanted thought was, they would become more frantic and aggressive in an attempt to remove the thought. Fujita would implant within his victims incredibly violent urges and hostile intentions, which would drive them to commit increasingly violent crimes as they tried to remove the horrors he would give to them."

"No one was able to connect these strings of random crimes and murders until Fujita was already an adult, but once they realized that it was a quirk user that was responsible, they started to do some digging. And boy, the shit they found was like something from the most terrifying Stephen King novel." Yep, damn this generation, not knowing all the good horror writers. Wait, Sero looks pretty excited. He knew about King? There's a few conversations to be had there, if that's the case. "When they looked through the registry, which was very limited at the time, they managed to narrow it down and they eventually got themselves some information, none of which looked good. In and out of orphanages and foster homes, reports that he had been abused both physically and sexually, multiple hospital visits. It was a mess. The boy had been broken, unmade, and the only thing left was a violent husk that lashed out and everyone around him. He was traumatized, and he acted without goal or reason, simply reacting to a world that was made too harsh for him. "

Some of the students were starting to look a bit pale, which was good. This was an important topic. The world is fucked up, and Aizawa could use some help in making sure these kids understand that. "The second classification is career, and back in the day, nobody had a better criminal career than All or Nothing. Hell, to this day, he remains at the top of whatever fucked up scoreboards that exist for this type of shit. A hitman for hire, All or Nothing had a very weak quirk that was put to a dangerous use. All he could do was nullify weak electrical fields. Couldn't make them, couldn't control them, he could only nullify them. Altogether, not that dangerous. Hell, it's actually almost completely harmless. That was until he found out that he could nullify the weak electrical force that held together atoms. No electrical field, the atoms fall apart, which means that the molecules fall apart, so on and so forth. He would touch his victims and disables this force, which would turn them into a pile of dust. All he had to do was touch them, anywhere. Walking down the street, alone in their house, in the halls of their workplace. He was quick, he was efficient, and he was the best there was."

"So, how did they catch him, Majima-sensei?" Wow, even invisa-girl was asking questions, wasn't today just swell. Then again, this was probably the most interesting lecture he's ever given. Wasn't he supposed to be talking about arms dealing today? Back to the subject at hand, he looked at Hagakure, or whatever.

"Whoever said he was caught?" Eyes went wide all around at that little tidbit. "Over a course of 37 years, All or Nothing killed an estimated 10,000 people, both innocent civilians, police officers, politicians, pro heroes, and even a fair number of villains. After the 37th year, there were no further reports of any homicides that matched his modus operandi. He disappeared, no longer took any jobs, and is believed to have enjoyed a quiet retirement before eventually dying of natural causes."

He gave the class a moment to let that sink in before he moved on. "The last classification is power. What I mean by this is the desire for power in its purest state. Not a desire to rule, not a desire to cause harm, or to destroy, but straightforward, untainted, simple power. Power, simply for the sake of having it. And no one in the last 200 years has ever displayed this desire so purely, than All for One." Again, Izuku seemed strangely interested about this one. There's no way he's heard about this guy, he's been dead for a long, long time. "I am not at liberty to tell you what his quirk was. Not only was it purposely scrubbed from the annals of history for a damn good reason, I truly don't think that most of you would be able to understand his quirk. I'm not insulting your intelligence." That last part was said as he held up a hand, as Iida, Yaoyorozu, and even Bakugou started to argue with him. "It has nothing to do with how smart you are, but about how you were raised. This society has taught all of you a few base rules that can never, ever be broken, no matter what. The power that All for One held spits in the face of just about every single one of these rules."

"His true name has been lost to time, hell I'm probably the only one who knows what it was, and that's only because I did a few jobs for him back before he came up with the name. All you need to know, is that All for One was probably the greatest villain to have ever existed. His mere presence brought even the mightiest heroes to their knees, his views on philosophy could topple even the best arguments crafted by the world's leading scholars, and the power he wielded granted him the unofficial title… Of the world's Symbol of Evil." There we go. His students looked much more than simply scared, the looked horrified. Scarred, even. "He possessed a desire for power that could rival even the most determined man, and he would plunge his soul into the blackest, vilest pits of the last and most horrific circles of hell in order to achieve his goals."

No one asked him. No one asked about the fate of such a monster. They were too scared to know the answer. They've been through enough today, so he'll cut them a break. "Midoriya," He nodded at the boy, catching his attention, "What do you think happened to All for One?"

"He… Got away, didn't he? Just like All or Nothing, didn't he?" The boy was shaking like a leaf, as was a fair number of his other students. Hell, even Bakugou seemed to be pretty freaked out. But of course, he can't tell them that Midoriya was right. If these kids knew that a monster like All for One might still be running around, then word might get out that he's still kicking, and it would cause a panic. He hates doing it, especially when he's talking about important stuff, but he's gotta lie. So, what should he tell them? Make something up? Tell a partial truth, and just withhold some of the really important stuff? He very obviously can't talk about his own involvement in that whole mess. He'd get more than fired, he'd probably get arrested. Alright, partial truth it was.

"Thankfully, no." The whole class looked at him confused. "The hero society, at the time, was still just an idea. The hero system that was in place at the time was just an experiment. It wasn't cemented until one hero, greater than any who had ever walked the Earth, would one day kill All for One. That heroes name has also been removed from history, at the request of his fiancee, as the hero himself had died in his effort to take down All for One. Just like with everything else, I'm gonna keep that hero's name a secret. But this time, I'm doing it out of respect for the sacrifice of that brave hero."

They were quiet. Every last one of them, as quiet as the dead. Majima sat at his desk, taking a look at his now dried notes. Oh hey, they were supposed to be talking about how seemingly useless quirks could be used for evil in the hands of villains. That would have been a good topic to talk about. Hell, Majima could have had fun with that topic. Damnit, if only Yamada hadn't fucked up his notes, then maybe he would have been able to teach these kids something useful today. The bell rang, and his class quietly shuffled out the door. He took a drink of his now cold coffee.

He was going to get chewed the fuck out by Nezu later, he could already tell.

[paubari]

Mobile Game Check! Occidental Heroes

*Disclaimer: This blog post is my opinion on the matter. If you have a different opinion on it, I respect it all the same.*

MABUHAY everyone and welcome back to my space on the internet!

Mobile Game Check! is a new blog series I’m starting where I talk about and review mobile games. Now, hold up. Before you start pelting me with rotten fruit keep in mind that there are Mobile Games out there that are actually worth your time. Mobile Games that, dare I say, is enough to challenge the awesomeness of old console games.

I will be judging this game and all future games under 3 tenets which will be GRAPHICS, GAMEPLAY, and STORY. Though I might sneak in what I like to call COMMENDABLES. These are qualities that a game has that adds to their uniqueness, charm, and overall playability. Afterwards I shall be rating the game 

BLANK out of 10 Smartphones. Obviously 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest.

So let’s check out Occidental Heroes!

For starters, what is Occidental Heroes? According to the game developers Ensit Media, Occidental Heroes has

“No hand holding, no reloads, no mercy. Explore the Occident and its bustling towns and ancient ruins. Learn about your heroes and guide them a comfortable retirement.”

GRAPHICS

Occidental Heroes is a 2D Pixel game. As far as pixel games go in the Android play store, it’s not too shocking to the eyes and gives that old-school feel of playing choice-based games. Nothing too revolutionary but they use what they have at full capacity and that in itself is worth nodding at.

As far as I know, their art is all original. Attached are pictures of what the game looks like as you play it.

GAMEPLAY

The way the game plays is a turn-based strategy RPG that balances resource management and equipment.  Though the main resource you think you have to check is supplies and gold, the only thing that truly matters is Resolve. The Resolve resource is the most important resource you have to manage in this game. 

RESOLVE DOES NOT GO UP, I REPEAT RESOLVE DOES NOT GO UP.

If you get dry on supplies, you lose resolve.

If the character gets damaged for more than half their health, they lose resolve

Why is resolve so important? Well, the only way to get 100% game completion is by completing ALL the story events of each mercenary. If a Mercenary gets to 0 resolve, they will forcefully retire and flavor text shows how sad and miserable their lives are. (no joke) At first this irked me but after a while it actually made sense. This ain’t for casual completionists.

When it comes to combat, it’s pretty straightforward except for the Archer. Archers in this game were poorly designed. Their attack mechanic is hard to predict at first so newbies beware.

Random Encounters exist here too, from military deserters to cultists. You’ll meet a wide range of enemies, all of which you have to utilize different type of tactics. For example, military deserters have stronger gear than you and.move more coordinately compared to wild animals who just run at you, fangs snarling.

You gain a lot of gold from accepting quests and it’s fun to read the flavor texts at first but it gets repetitive later on.

STORY

There’s not much of a story in the game per se, it gives emphasis to the stories of the mercenaries you hire and your character themselves. Though there is some semblance of a hero arc but in the Occident, reality is king. All of you are just mercenaries battling your inner demons,your past, and earning coin all at the same time. 

There is a subplot of natives v.s. settlers but you have to play it to know about it.

COMMENDABLES

Character customization actually changes the appearance of your sprites.

Customize every aspect of your Mercenary Group. From name to banner!

Remember skulls in Halo? That’s the best way I can describe these added challenges you can subject yourself to.

The most commendable is the starting screen, when you first open the game.

The devs know what they’re doing!

Final Verdict:

Occidental Heroes is a unique case of finding a diamond in the rough. As most mobile games are just cash cows designed as games, this game is an actual game. What really sets it apart aside from the classic RPG elements and just generally being a good game is that it has almost no ads. Thinking back on it, I’ve barely had a run in on ads and I played this game for 10 hours straight. (Unlike some games who bombard you with ads)

Because of this, Occidental Heroes gets an 8 Smartphones out of 10!

Thank you for taking the time to read my blog post! If you like what I do here, feel free to give me a follow to stay up to date with my other blogs. 

Always remember to make something amazing~

[borrestrauss8-blog]

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[recentanimenews]

THE GREAT CRUNCHYROLL NARUTO REWATCH Gambles Away in Episodes 85-91

Hello there! Once again, it's the Great Crunchyroll Naruto Rewatch! Noelle Ogawa here, and this week I'll be your host as we make our way through the many arcs of the shonen giant Naruto. Last week, we covered episodes 78-84, and this time we're going to sweep episodes 85-91. 

This time, we have new introductions and new threats, starting off with the mysterious Akatsuki retreating and ending with Tsunade contemplating a tough choice. We get a little glimpse of the last of the three Sannin, and how that bond has fragmented over the years. Most importantly, Tsunade is confronted with two life-changing decisions, neither which are easy to make. This arc is a pretty heavy one. Let's see what the team has to say about this batch!

The Akatsuki have retreated for now, leaving us with an uncomfortable feeling of something greater out there. What are your impressions of the group, especially Itachi and Kisame?

Paul: I want to know what the political goals of Akatsuki are. Both Itachi and Kisame wear their Village headbands with the symbols defaced, so I'm wondering if – despite being obviously cruel and evil villains – they're also the heroes of their own story, because the current entente system that turns children into weapons in order for rival nations to publicly flex their military muscle is pretty messed up, yo.

Kevin: Early on, Itachi seems like there’s some kind of frailty to him, that he’s incredibly strong but can’t fight for long. Kisame also seems like a competent fighter (albeit with a strange weapon), but otherwise is Itachi’s henchman. Having seen how their characters develop, this is an interesting starting place.

Carolyn: Yeah, it seems to me that they believe in what they are doing. That seems to be a common trope with this show so far, though. Lots of characters who may or may not be bad guys but they have a tragic backstory and a firm belief in what they think is right. David: I understand why it happens for dramatic reasons, but I do kind of wish there were just slightly more straightforward foreshadowing about the motivations for our villains, and this the introduction of the Akatsuki makes the best case for this. On the positive side, Itachi serves as a solid example of what Sasuke should probably not become, complete with a skillset they both can theoretically share. “Look out, Sasuke!” Or so I would tell him, if he wasn’t put completely out of commission in multiple ways so that the plot could move on without his obsessions getting in the way.

Joseph: I’m a big fan of introducing villains and painting them as irredeemably evil only to turn that notion on its head later, so I’m excited to watch them develop. Kisame looks more like he belongs in Arlong’s crew from One Piece, but I dig how they only partially revealed the power of his weird shark sword.

Danni: A shadowy group of super powerful villains after the main character sounds pretty cool, so I don’t really know why I’m not all that interested in the Akatsuki yet. I think I’d like to learn more about their motivations first. For now, though, I’m pretty satisfied with the continued conflict with Orochimaru.

Jared: There’s certainly still a number of unanswered questions surrounding the group. Who else is in it and why are these two out and about by themselves? What’s with the headbands being defaced? Those will get answered at some point I’m sure, but from what we’ve seen thus far, Itachi seems like a pretty big deal with how he quickly he dispatches Sasuke and comes up with a way to escape Jiraiya’s trap. Kisame seems more like his muscle, but has that pretty wild sword.

Kara: This was yet another case of seeing the cosplayer before the character, so now I have at least some context for those coats. Also, Itachi’s presence has been in the background of the story for… 80-something episodes now? This has been a slow burn finally getting to him. I wasn’t disappointed; there’s a lot here I’m looking forward to exploring.

Here we encounter another training arc, where Naruto is trying to master the Rasengan. How do you think this compares to previous training, and do you think it’s being handled well?

Paul: Although the completed Rasengan technique is visually impressive, I'm already sick of seeing Naruto playing with balloons. I wish there were some other aspect to the three stages of the training.

Kevin: During the tree climbing, it seemed like Naruto and Sasuke mastered the technique very quickly due to competing against each other; and during the water walking, Naruto caught on in less than a day, then mastered it when Jiraiya undid Orochimaru’s seal. Mastering the Summoning Jutsu was better, since Naruto had to keep practicing, but it realistically became training for drawing out the Nine-Tailed Fox’s chakra, which boiled down to “run out of energy, then put your life in danger.” For me, the Rasengan training is the first time the show has successfully conveyed how difficult and time consuming ninjutsu training is supposed to be and just how hard Naruto pushes himself to grow faster than anyone else.

Carolyn: As always, I was impressed with Naruto’s dedication to learning and advancing his craft. He is very dedicated despite all of his obstacles and it warms my heart.

David: I was honestly just going to say what Kevin said, so I guess I’ll elaborate a little bit instead. The first time we see Rasengan performed is against a random yakuza guy, which works well for introducing the technique while also not giving away just how important it is. Jiraiya’s explanation to Naruto about how the technique fits him well because it doesn’t require hand signs demonstrates both Jiraiya’s understanding of Naruto’s strengths while also serving as a valid cover-up for how powerful he realizes Naruto can be. Seeing in small, increasing stages what exactly the Rasengan does, while grounding that all in the mechanics of the show we’ve been taught so far, makes the whole process feel much more satisfying than a general “power-up”. And, most important, the scenes where Naruto is just walking around practicing on his balloons are endearing as heck. I’ve been there too, little buddy.

Joseph: I appreciated the mundanity of his practice sessions. It may not make for the most compelling television, but, like Kevin said, it got the point across well enough. Now we can sit back and be duly impressed when he unleashes his full Rasengan potential.

Danni: It’s a little mundane, but I appreciate it. The mundanity of it is helping Naruto mature a bit since he’s beginning to realize that he maybe shouldn’t have been goofing off so much in school. I also like how the balloons provide a good tangible example of what the Rasengan is and how to control it.

Jared: There sure is a lot of Naruto just hanging out in the woods struggling with this portion of training, but it fits considering how big of a deal Jiraiya makes the technique out to be. Plus, using balloons and rubber balls seems like a strange choice, but really works with what Jiraiya wants to teach Naruto so he can understand the technique.

Kara: I really enjoy the fact that Naruto learned the Rasengan in a way that made sense to him — the whole thing with the cat, for example — to the point where even Tsunade looks at it and, while recognizing what it is, also recognizes that it’s different. That’s something I’m liking about Naruto’s progress in this set of episodes: he may not be by-the-book, but he’s working it out for himself in a way that makes sense to him, which is a valuable thing no matter what you’re learning.

We have a fair chunk of time devoted to Jiraiya and Naruto’s mentor-mentee relationship. What do you think of this particular dynamic?

Paul: I don't have much of an opinion about it yet, because Jiraiya has a very “hands off” approach to instruction, and he's not exactly a very supportive or nurturing type. He may be extremely skilled as a ninja, but as a teacher, he kinda sucks. I don’t feel like he’d stick his neck out for his charges in the same way that Kakashi and Iruka would.

Kevin: I am liking Jiraiya more and more as he spends time as Naruto’s teacher. He’s more hands off than Naruto would necessarily prefer, but he knows that Naruto learns best by figuring things out himself, and still keeps on eye on his student to check up on progress and probably make sure Naruto doesn’t do anything too reckless. He’s still not great as the father figure Naruto seems to be looking for, but they’re both still warming up to each other.

Carolyn: Man, hands-off style could be cool. And Jiraiya doesn’t necessarily have to be a father figure to Naruto (though it makes me sad he’s not). But overall I just find him to be a giant jerk. I got very upset about Jiraiya blowing all of Naruto’s money. (He wanted to be responsible and save it!) Good for Naruto for letting that Pervy Sage have it.

David: It’s a trade-off that serves a few purposes. Jiraiya is completely correct to recognize Naruto as being mostly self-motivated; it’s hard to imagine a Naruto who improves because he is constantly coddled, right? At the same time, Naruto clearly desires that kind of relationship, because it’s something he’s been denied almost his whole life (thank goodness for Iruka). And for Jiraiya’s side, it plays into something I think I see developing among the Sannin as a whole - a theme of strong latent abilities not being realized to their fullest potentials. Orochimaru is obsessed with progress, but only to the extent that is helps him, which is why he tries to sabotage the village instead of support it. Tsunade is more capable than anyone else to help others, but also too scared of failure to help anyone but herself, which is why she is hesitant to become Hokage and willing to consider Orochimaru’s current proposal. Finally, Jiraiya is ridiculously charismatic, but so empathetic that he can only see the disadvantages to his presence, which is why he refuses the proposition to become Hokage and can’t commit fully to Naruto’s growth.

Joseph: Despite the fact that he blew Naruto’s money, I feel like there’s a hidden lesson in everything Jiraiya does. Remember when he first started trying to summon and kept bugging Jiraiya to “watch his training?” Even then getting him to do so was like pulling teeth, but the way he leaves Naruto to his work now shows how he’s attempting to foster his independence and prevent him from leaning too heavily on the desire for praise and exterior encouragement. He still has a ways to go, but Jiraiya is improving as a character each installment.

Danni: I appreciate Jiraiya in this batch as more of a goofy grandpa and less of a wild horndog. He seems like a good fit to be mentoring someone like Naruto. Their shared goofiness plays well, and Jiraiya’s apparent callousness is just a front help Naruto become more independent. In the end, he always rewards Naruto for his accomplishments.

Jared: Jiraiya becoming less of just the prototypical perv character has been better and I like how Naruto and him are able to almost keep each other in line. Like they’re calling each other out on their own bs. He’s certainly different as a teacher as it’s more hey, you’ve got to figure this out on your own, I’m not going to hold your hand, which is certainly something that Naruto will need to learn in general. So I think overall it isn’t what Naruto would’ve wanted at first, but it works.

Kara: It was a lot easier to be a Jiraiya fan this week. Like I said before, we’re seeing a lot more of how Naruto learns, and that he and Jiraiya were a lot the same. It was a little thing, but I loved the exchange between them about being the the type that has trouble focusing in class. I think all of Naruto’s teachers so far have been good for him and connected with him in some way, but Jiraiya really seems to “get” him and what he needs to grow.

Your closest loved ones returning from the dead in exchange for dooming your home- Orochimaru delivers a harrowing proposal. Is this a good deal in your eyes? If you don’t think so, what’s something that would tempt you?

Paul: As the audience, we've already seen one example of Orochimaru's Resurrection Jutsu, and it was clear that the people brought back to life were just an image of the departed, dancing like puppets while Orochimaru pulled the strings. Tsunade didn't witness that, and her trauma isn't helping her to think clearly, because the likelihood of Orochimaru betraying her is 100 percent.

I honestly don't know what would tempt me. I'm a pretty simple person, and I'm generally happy as long as my basic needs (food, water, shelter, clothing, etc.) are met. Maybe if the villain threatened my loved ones, I'd be forced to comply, but I can't imagine voluntarily striking a deal in exchange for some good or service knowing that the end goal was the destruction of my entire community.

Kevin: I legitimately don’t know what I would do in that situation. Sure, the many should outweigh the few, but the few are people who I care about more than anyone else. I would definitely be tempted, and shows how good the character writing in Naruto can get. Put in Tsunade’s position, I could seriously see myself going either way.

Carolyn: I suppose it depends on the situation. It might sound terrible, but I’m sure I would take the deal for my kids in a heartbeat. David: Hard to admit, but I also completely sympathize with Tsunade here, and it’s hard not to see her gambling addiction as a coping mechanism for how her powers that should have been ‘definitely’ useful ultimately failed her twice.

Joseph: It’s a solid proposal from Orochimaru, and I think it’s reasonable for anyone’s gut answer to be “it depends.” With that said, Tsunade knows Orochimaru. One would think despite her emotions she would know he’s a walking monkey’s paw in this situation.

Danni: Why on earth would anyone ever trust Orochimaru?

Jared: I dunno, I think it’d be hard to accept a deal like that when the person offering is saying he’s going to do some big ole terrorism afterwards. Although, if the offer was that my student loan debt was wiped away, I might think differently.

Kara: I actually sat with this for a few minutes, because there are people I’ve lost whom I’d give just about anything to have more time with. That said, not only do I know a Monkey’s Paw when I see one, I also don’t trust people of even a fraction of Orochimaru’s badness to hold up their end of a deal. It’d either not happen, or happen and be awful. I’d probably buckle faster to threats than promises, because I can see him delivering on those.

Jiraiya reveals that Tsunade doesn’t just need to return to heal Sasuke and Kakashi, but also to become the new Hokage. She has a lot of reservations about the position, considering she has a complicated past with the world of shinobi. If you were in her place, would you take the title? Why or why not?

Paul: Tsunade, just like Jiraiya, clearly doesn't want the job. I think both of them realize that to be Hokage means always being willing to sacrifice one's personal well-being for the good of the Village, and neither of them are ready to do that, because Jiraiya is too self-centered, and because Tsunade has already lost so much already. I wouldn’t want that kind of responsibility, either. I can barely look after a pet goldfish, let alone a whole community.

Kevin: In short, I would probably take the position, mostly out of a sense of being able to change things for the better so that history did not repeat itself. Tsunade’s idea for medical ninja in every team was eventually implemented and shown to be effective, and adding in that she clearly wants to keep as many shinobi alive as possible, she would probably try to keep the ninja villages as peaceful as possible, and if war broke out minimize the Leaf’s losses. So even though she has a lot of baggage concerning the position, in her position I would try to use that baggage as my motivation to change how the village operates.

Carolyn: I think I would take it, if only because of some sort of misplaced “I’ll show them” attitude and because it would kill me to think I couldn’t help prevent other people from going through the same thing. Which … is super hypocritical in light of my resurrection answer, but there you go.

David: Pretending I was in Tsunade’s position right now, I would take it, but for entirely selfish reasons - I know that jerk Orochimaru is out there trying to tempt me and do even worse, so being the leader of essentially a nation of ninjas would be the ultimate revenge. Definitely not the best reasons to do anything, though.

Joseph: The practical me knows I don’t want that kind of position, but the part of me that wants to be the center of attention would probably win out.

Danni: As someone who doesn’t know any ninjutsu, I think I’d make a pretty bad Hokage overall.

Jared: It’s a bit of a mixed bag because the village is basically demanding she take the position regardless of her feelings. Considering how complicated her feelings are about the village and all of that in general, it makes sense why she’d be like nah. I think to really get into the headspace for that kind of position, you’d really need the type of drive that Naruto has.

Kara: In her exact position? Big nope. Her grandfather was Hokage and she had people around her who fully understood the real responsibilities involved. Between their demises and the way things went in general for the village, I’m not sure I could step into a role I’d held to a certain ideal in very dark, very different conditions. Adding insult to injury. That said, I like Tsunade so far, so I’m hoping she goes for it regardless.

Last up, what are the high and low points for this week?

Paul: My high point was the reveal that Tsunade is absolutely terrible at gambling, because I like it when heroic characters are really bad at some morally dubious activity. My low point was how thoroughly destroyed Sasuke was by his confrontation with Itachi. The poor kid gets physically and mentally traumatized and put into a coma, and Itachi didn't even break a sweat in the process. Sasuke doesn't deserve that kind of treatment.

Kevin: High - Jiraiya coming forward as Naruto makes progress in his training after hiding in the shadows to silently observe. He’s still kinda of a dick to Naruto a lot of the time, but we are seeing more of his caring side that eventually makes him everyone’s favorite ninja grandpa.

Low - I honestly really like the vast majority of this arc so… people not being much more vocal about how the town’s castle is suddenly gone? Sure, we get a few people running away, but that’s the kind of thing that should’ve made much more of a general panic, especially since a giant snake exploded out of it.

Carolyn: High point: Naruto giving Jiraiya the third degree for stealing his money. Tell him what’s what, Naruto.

Low point: The Sasuke meme, actually. It was harder to watch than I was expecting. He seemed very broken.

David: High: Jiraiya wakes up hungover and asks Naruto to fetch him some water, to which Naruto responds by blowing up a water balloon over his face. Low: Honestly this was my favorite batch of episodes so far, and I don’t remember disliking anything, but Jiraiya’s character flaws are very frustrating to watch because Naruto is honestly a great kid who deserves a ton of respect and attention. So, that.

Joseph: High: The gradual development of Jiraiya and Naruto’s relationship is fun to watch. Low: I find it hard to believe the ninja clans had never thought to have a freaking medic on the field until Tsunade suggested it.

Danni: The high point for me this batch was when we found out Tsunade is 50. The low point for me is when anyone acted like that was at all a bad thing and not an incredible bonus.

Jared: High point would be when Tsunade was constantly winning and instead of celebrating, immediately knew that something was about to go very badly. Low point, I kind of felt like parts of how Tsunade was written was very generic in a way that felt too tropey and just taking from a list of bad things that can happen to characters and slapping them on her. With how the series handled Sakura in the beginning and has kind of forgotten about her recently, I’m not that surprised it feels like it’s happening again.

Kara: High point is Tsunade going outside to scrap with a kid. I can respect that, I don’t care if Jiraiya thinks it’s immature. Low point is once again having action take place in an animal interior or reasonable facsimile thereof. I don’t cope with that mess well at all.

COUNTERS:

"I'm gonna be Hokage!" count: 6 (32 total) Bowls of ramen consumed: 0 bowls (33 bowls, 3 cups total) Shadow Clones created: 0 (297 total)

  With that concludes this week! Please join us for this rewatch, anytime, especially if you haven't already watched the original Naruto!

  Here's our upcoming schedule:

-Next week, on April 19th, NICOLE MEJIAS will show us the deadly and legendary faceoff in episodes 92-98.

-April 26th will have DAVID LYNN take us to the Land of Waves in episodes 99-105.

-March 3rd features PAUL CHAPMAN, who will walk us through the inevitable Naruto vs Sasuke in episodes 106-112.

  CATCH UP ON THE REWATCH!

Episodes 78-84: The Fall of a Legend

Episodes 71-77: Sands of Sorrow

Episodes 64-70: Crashing the Chunin Exam

Episodes 57-63: Family Feud

Episodes 50-56: Rock Lee Rally

Episodes 43-49: The Gate

Episodes 36-42: Through the Woods

Episodes 29-35: Sakura Unleashed

Episodes 22-28: Chunin Exams Kickoff

Episodes 15-21: Leaving the Land of Waves

Episodes 8-14: Beginners' Battle

Episodes 1-7: I'm Gonna Be the Hokage!

  Thank you for joining us for the Great Crunchyroll Naruto Rewatch! See you next time!

  Have a question for next week's batch of Episodes 92~98? Drop it in the comments and you might find your answer in next week's installment!

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Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[itbeatsbookmarks]

(Via: Hacker News)

Suppose that you're a doctor who studies human sexual behavior. You want to run a study with all the patients that you can find, but you don't find a lot of volunteers. You only end up with about 40 subjects.

After you've ran your study and collected data, you want to share this data with other researchers. You look at the attributes, and deduce that ZIP code and age are likely to be used in reidentification attacks. To share it in a safe way, you're thinking of \(k\)-anonymity.

When trying to find a strategy to obtain \(k\)-anonymity, you find out that you would have to lose a lot of information. For \(k=10\), a rather small value, you end up with buckets like \(20\le age\lt 50\). That makes sense: you have only few people in your database, so you have to bundle together very different age values.

But when you think about it, you start questioning whether you really need \(k\)-anonymity. Who are the attackers, in your scenario? The researchers with whom you share the data, and possibly unknown parties if the data ever leaks. None of these people have background information about who is in the dataset. Thus, the attacker doesn't just have to distinguish between different records, but to actually find the real identity of a record based on its information. This attacker has significantly weaker capabilities than for \(k\)-anonymity!

Let's look at two different rows in this database.

ZIP code age 85535 79 60629 42

At first glance, the amount of information for this two individuals seems to be the same. But let's take a look at the values…

85535 corresponds to a place in Arizona named Eden. Approximately 20 people live in this ZIP code. How many people do you think are exactly 79 years old in this particular ZIP code? Probably only one.

60629 corresponds to a part of the Chicago metropolitan area. More than 100,000 people live there. How many of them are 42 years old? A thousand, at least, and probably more!

It seems that it would be very easy to reidentify the first row, but that we don't have enough information to reidentify the second row. But according to \(k\)-anonymity, both rows might be completely unique in the dataset.

Obviously, \(k\)-anonymity doesn't fit this use case. We need a different definition: that's where \(k\)-map comes in.

Definition

Just like \(k\)-anonymity, \(k\)-map requires you to determine which columns of your database are quasi-identifiers. This answers the question: what can your attacker use to reidentify their target?

But this information alone is not enough to compute \(k\)-map. In the example above, we assumed that the attacker doesn't know whether their target is in the dataset. So what are they comparing a given row with? With all other individuals sharing the same values in a larger, sometimes implicit, dataset. For the previous example, this could be "everybody living in the US", if you assume the attacker has no idea who could have this genetic disease. Let's call this larger table the reidentification dataset.

Once you picked the quasi-identifiers and the reidentification dataset, the definition is straightforward. Your data satisfies \(k\)-map if every combination of values for the quasi-identifiers appears at least \(k\) times in the reidentification dataset.

In our example, this corresponds to counting the number of people in the US who share the quasi-identifier values of each row in your dataset. Consider our tiny dataset above:

ZIP code age 85535 79 60629 42

We said earlier than the values of the first row matched only one person in the US. Thus, this dataset does not satisfy \(k\)-map for any value of \(k\ge 2\).

How do we get a larger \(k\)? We could generalize the first value like this:

ZIP code age 85*** 79 60629 42

ZIP codes between 85000 and 85999 include the entire city of Phoenix. There are 36,000+ people between 75 and 84 years old in Phoenix, according to some old stats. It's probably safe to assume that there are more than 1,000 people who match the quasi-identifiers values of the first row. We saw earlier that the second row also matched 1,000+ people. So this generalized dataset satisfies 1000-map.

Attack model considerations

Wait a second, why does this feel like cheating? What happened there, to give us such a generous number so easily? This comes from the generous assumptions we made in our attack model. We assumed that the attacker had zero information on their target, except that they live in the US (which is implied by the presence of ZIP codes). And with only the information (ZIP code, age), you don't need a lot of generalization to make each row of your dataset blend in a large crowd.

To make this attack model stronger, you could assume that the attacker will use a smaller reidentification database. For example, suppose that your genetic disease you're studying requires regular hospital check-ups. The attacker could restrict their search only to people who have visited a hospital in the last year. The number of possible "suspects" for each value tuple gets smaller, so the \(k\) of \(k\)-map decreases too1.

\(k\)-map is inherently a weak model. So when choosing the quasi-identifiers and reidentification dataset, you have to think hard at what an attacker could do. If your attacker doesn't have lots of resources, it can be reasonable to assume that they won't get more data than, say, the voter files from your state. But if they can figure out more about your users, and you don't really know which reidentification dataset they could use, maybe \(k\)-anonymity is a safer bet2.

And now, some practice

OK, enough theory. Let's learn how to compute \(k\)-map in practice, and anonymize your datasets to make them verify the definition!

… There's one slight problem, though.

It's usually impossible.

Choosing the reidentification dataset is already a difficult exercise. Maybe you can afford to make generous assumptions, and assume the attacker doesn't know much. At best, you think, they'll buy voter files, or a commercial database, which contains everyone in your state, or in the US. But… then what?

To compute the maximum \(k\) such as your dataset verifies \(k\)-map, you would first need to get the reidentification dataset yourself. But commercial databases are expensive. Voter files might not be legal for you to obtain (even though an evil attacker could break the law to get them).

So, most of the time, you can't actually check whether your data satisfies \(k\)-map. If it's impossible to check, it's also impossible to know exactly which strategy to adopt to make your dataset verify the definition.

Exception 1: secret sample

Suppose you're not releasing all your data, but only a subset (or sample) of a bigger dataset that you own. Then, you can compute the \(k\)-map value of the sample with regard to the original, bigger dataset. In this case, choosing \(k\)-map over \(k\)-anonymity is relatively safe.

Indeed, your original dataset is certainly smaller than the reidentification dataset used by the attacker. Using the same argument as above, this means that you will obtain a lower bound on the value of \(k\). Essentially, you're being pessimistic, which means that you're on the safe side.

Even if the attacker has access to the original dataset, they won't know which records are in the sample. So if the original dataset is secret, or if you've chosen the sample in a secret way, \(k\)-map is a reasonable definition to use, and you can compute a pessimistic approximation of it.

Exception 2: representative distribution

This case is slightly different. Suppose that you can make the assumption that your data is a representative (or unbiaised) sample of a larger dataset. This might be a good approximation if you selected people (uniformly) at random to build your dataset, or if it was gathered by a polling organization.

In this case, you can compute an estimate of the \(k\)-map value for your data, even without the reidentification dataset. The statistical properties which enable this, and the methods you can use, are pretty complicated: I won't explain them in detail here. They are mentioned and compared in this paper, which has references to the original versions of each of them.

Exception 3: using humans

For the case of our doctor earlier, if the dataset is small enough, a motivated data owner could actually do the job of an attacker "by hand". Go through each record, and try to map it to a real person, or estimate the chances of it being possible. We pretty much did that in this article!

This is very approximative, and obviously not scalable. But for our imaginary doctor, it might be a reasonable solution!

Implementations

ARX implements the methods from exceptions 1 and 2. Documentation for the first one can be found here. Instructions to estimate the number of unique values assuming uniformity can be found here. Originally, μ-ARGUS was the first software with this feature, but I couldn't run it on my machine, so I can't say much about it.

Conclusion

You might wonder why I wrote an entire article on a definition that is hardly used because of how impractical it is. In addition to the unique problems that we talked about in this article, the limitations of \(k\)-anonymity also apply. It's difficult to choose \(k\), non-trivial to pick the quasi-identifiers, and even trickier to model the reidentification database.

The definition also didn't get a lot of attention from academics. Historically, \(k\)-anonymity came first4. Then, people showed that \(k\)-anonymity was sometimes not sufficient to protect sensitive data, and tried to find stronger definitions to fix it. Weaker definitions were, of course, less interesting.

Nonetheless, I find that it's an interesting relaxation of \(k\)-anonymity. It shows one of its implicit assumptions: the attacker knows that their target belongs to the dataset. This assumption is sometimes too pessimistic: it might be worth considering alternate definitions.

Choosing a privacy model is all about modeling the attacker correctly. Learning to question implicit assumptions can only help!