#fighting inertia

[plumingpoetree]

Shaky First Steps

[cryptocism]

"escape plan: Fly Outta There" is so chill and cool and normal in theory

[theholeyness]

[outeremissary]

The framing of "what if our guys met and interacted" as "OC playdates" is very cute and sweet and makes me smile, but it also just instills such a sense of "sorry my kid can't come over today she's in trouble for biting again" in me when I think about Carmen. You couldn't have her around for cute, casual interactions because she uh. Changes the tone of things around her quite a bit and is often very unpleasant to be around.

[licnheartedd]

i think i’m gonna take the vigilante au off ao3 for a while 🫡

[illegiblehandwriting1]

FUCK inertia it's the last day of the year and i WILL update if it fucking kills me

[thedragonagelesbian]

I need to get back to da2.... but the corypheus fight.................

[soft-serve-soymilk]

Cannot sleep :/

[transandor]

oh andor does the speech. and gets away with it too he fucking hits the bricks. tom sets off a bomb right as he's done (remotely mind you), tucker helps pull al away with blood magic subtlely, sonja and wag are spreading void rumors amongst the townsfolk to help them escape and support andor. jordan just starts fucking with the water under the dock and provides him a clean getaway by absolutely just dowsing helgrind in frozen water

[pocketramblr]

I like to think of 3rd as a former bodyguard of All for One, maybe he wasn't born with a quirk too. Maybe he received one from All for One and dedicated himself to serving him as a result only to come to his senses later on.

There was a bit of time when I thought that the ponytailed masked bodyguard of AfO was going to turn out to be the same as the pineapple silhouette one, (the indents on one's mask being similar to the shape the other's headband made from the side) and that like, he put his hair up when he changed sides and wore slightly new clothes and that he was the one to either get Yoichi out of that vault or pass information onto Second so he could get him out. But then we got more clear shots of Third with lighter hair and it seemed more likely Giga was the fate of the bodyguard... But I'll always have a fondness for former AfO guard Third. Perhaps his turning is why Yoichi is glad to see Izuku trying to save Tenko, perhaps that's why Third kept away from Izuku, shame or sure that he'd fail because at least Third was an adult at the time, and what hope do they really have, and why drag the kid in further... Love that plus I think we really should have more former villains in the OfA lineup

[cryptocism]

Chapter 18: Two's Company

You know what they say about best-laid plans.

[aspenartist]

Finally did this

Attack me please I wanna see art

[astralleywright]

i have made the "orym read theory" joke like three times today alone but. i think it would genuinely be very helpful for him to develop an overarching philosophy through which to understand the world and the structure of power, because the simplistic "nice guy" approach to morality has utterly failed him in this moment.

[blujayonthewing]

I kinda wanna try to start sketching my characters before dnd, just as like... a semi-structured prompt to draw something quick and loose with no particular expectations, BUT the last time I tried this I only managed one half of one vaguely cheeky sketch of aubree before remembering I needed to cook dinner and then running out of time before we started playing sgdhkshs so I guess we'll see what I can manage

[wasteland-wrecker]

TW: blood - Nuka World dlc spoilers

Toby was not prepared for the Gauntlet at all.

When he ran into Harvey, he hadn’t expected anything like that.

He could have turned back before getting on the monorail, but after the destruction of the Institute he felt lost, overwhelmed by a sense of inertia, of passivity.

He had only brought a few grenades and Kellogg’s gun. He hadn’t even bothered to wear any armor, just a shabby road leather outfit.

And then, Nuka World? Fuck, he had yet to see it.

After realizing he had walked into a trap, Toby wasn’t surprised at all.

Just another group of radiers who think they’re dealing with the last of idiots, he thought.

The Gauntlet certainly put him to the test. Whoever created that game had some time to waste.

The hardest part of it was the final one, the fight with the raiders and the walk through hand grenades hanging from wires, that lead to the fight with Colter.

He listened carefully the advice of that voice from the intercom, that Gage guy. He wondered where the catch was, what was the reason behind all of that mess.

Then he prepared for the fight, after catching some breath in the locker room. In one hand he held the Thirst Zapper, in the other one the revolver of the man who took everything from him.

It all seemed so absurd and ridiculous.

He stepped into the arena and fought following Gage's advice, using the water to deactivate Colter's armor and the revolver to finish him off.

During a close encounter Colter vigorously pushed him against a bumper car, opening a large wound on the side of his face. At that point it seemed all over, but Toby managed to escape again and gave him the final shot.

An earthquake came from the stands: applauses, whistles, screams. Some of the crowd’s comments were directed at the man who had helped him earlier, the man who now stood before Toby, behind a thick glass wall.

“Welcome the new Overboss,” he heard Gage say, or something like that.

He turned to him, and staggered forward a few steps.

That was the first time ever they saw each others face to face.

And then, well…

Toby asked for water.

(He drank some from the Thirst Zapper but he was still thirsty af)

[artbyblastweave]

A tool I find generally pretty useful for thinking about and classifying superhero systems is the Wild Talents Axes of Design, a worldbuilding tool from an RPG that I have not and most likely will not ever play. The system categorizes and ranks superhero settings on four axes:

The Red Axis measures Historical Inertia, how much the existence of superhumans causes the timeline to diverge from our own. A high-red setting represents the standard implausibly-recognizable like-reality-unless-noted world-outside-your-window model. A low-red setting is a total alternate history.

The Gold Axis measures Superhuman Inertia (talent inertia in their internal jargon, but we've all got our own names for these assholes.) This one measures how closely superhumans hew to classic paradigms of heroism and villainy, as opposed to branching out into other societal roles or life outcomes. A high-gold setting is the prototypical endless monthly game of cops and robbers; A low-gold setting would be something like Wild Cards or Top 10, where career superheroes are a rounding error (or even a downright oddity) compared to people with powers.

The Blue Axis measures what they term The Lovely and the Pointless- essentially how much weirdness exists outside the superheroes themselves, or, more practically, how unified the setting's cosmology and power sources are. High-Blue settings are the bizarre and irreconcilable genre kitchen sinks full of aliens, gods, magicians, one million ways to get superpowers and three different kinds of time travel. Low Blue settings would be The Boys, Worm, or Wild Cards- any setting where there's a discrete reason that superhumans happened and nothing supernatural going on outside of that point of origin.

The Black Axis measures Moral Clarity, which is about what it sounds like. High Black Settings are the cartoonishly-clear-cut battles of good and evil, low black settings are omnidirectional amoral clusterfucks where the participants have superpowers.

(The joke, of course, being that if you crank all four colors up all the way, you end up with a full CMYK print, and a reproduction of the aesthetic of classic golden and silver age superhero faire.)

Obviously this isn't a perfect system- it suffers from the perennial, probably inevitable issue that the four of these don't granulate equally well but they feel the need to articulate five nodes for each of them, just to keep it neat- and consequentially it sometimes feels a little like they're struggling to justify why some of the arrangements that they're describing are meaningfully distinct from the nearest tick up or down the axis. I'm also not entirely sure how it integrates this fifth axis I think is pretty important- the question of the degree to which the public is aware of superhumans at all.

But it does provide some interesting and useful language for quick-and-dirty compare and contrast work. Watchmen is Low Blue, Low Black, Mid-Red High-Gold. Invincible is High-Blue Mid-Black High Red Mid-Gold. Worm is Low-Blue-Mid-Black-Low-Red-Mid-Gold. I don't even stand by these ratings necessarily, I just think it would be super neat going forward if I were able to throw out a phrase like "High-Blue interpretation of Superman" and successfully convey that it means we're finally gonna get to see Superman fight a wizard in live action, for example. I think there's slept-upon terminology available to us here