#five stack

[pizzazz-party]

Day Six! Peachy, as requested.

[pinkrose05]

Sudden realization that we now have a Smol Cloud Quintet of kids on the Luofu.

Warning: contains minor spoilers for version 1.5 content.

After Huohuo's debut and the recent Trailblaze Continuance + Event, I've noticed that a few recurring faces seem to parallel the good ol' High Cloud Quintet of the Luofu, be it by accident or on purpose. And if you know me, then you may have noticed I really like to connect the dots (or in some cases, make up headcanon dots for funsies), so I had to put these thoughts into words.

Going clockwise from the center, we have:

1) The High Elder of the vidyadhara, well-known for proficiency in healing arts, designated mother hen, and.... significantly shorter than everyone else in the group. Poor Bailu. At least she gets to be a short gremlin, and that's neat! Go cause mischief, queen!

2) A talented swordsman who aspires to be the Sword Champion and has an affinity for ice. And for throwing sharp objects as an attack. Kinda funny how Jing Yuan is the only one of Jingliu's disciples that doesn't do that, and yet his own apprentice picks up the habit anyway.

3) A newbie Cloud Knight of somewhat traditional upbringing, who happens to be really impressed by their superior and gets noticed by them in turn at some point (see Sushang's About Yanqing line, and the latter calling for assembly when he joins a team with her specifically).

4) A foxian who's known to be very good at her job, but gets into a lot of trouble and earns a nickname for exactly that (Cursed One for Huohuo, Starskiff Killer for Baiheng), and still miraculously scrapes by every unfortunate encounter.

5) A crafty, short-lived outlander whose home planet was destroyed in their childhood, with them being taken to the Xianzhou as a result, and then rising to fame thanks to their creativity and fiery spirit. They also befriend the aforementioned newbie Cloud Knight, except there's lots of squabbles and teasing involved.

Personally I think they should all be friends. A silly lil group that circumvents the law and gets up to shenanigans. Half of them are already besties in canon too, so it's not particularly farfetched, and the potential interactions between the rest are fun to think about!

Bonus:

Oh my god, they know.

[spittinwatches]

hello chat. i am back with another banger.

mlp art collab with @vanillaflowerstuff

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

Howdy, Syn! Hope you’re doing well. I’ve got a fun little ask for you:

If you’ve got some spare time on your hands, I was wondering if there was a little (non-spoilery) detail in—well, any of your stories, I’m obsessed with all of them—that you really enjoy but don’t think anyone’s picked up on yet. If there is, I’d love to hear any ramblings on it 👀

Have a good one!

This ask is ages old but I’m working on chipping away at my backlog little by little. Since I’m in a pez dispenser debris kick right now, let’s look at that.

I honest to God can’t remember if I’ve discussed this before, so sorry if it’s redundant, but one of the main points of pez dispenser debris is that the conflict is Man v. Self to the exclusion of all else.

Like, to an extent, there’s a secondary conflict of Man v. Society, but that 1) primarily (but not entirely) exists in Izuku’s past and 2) feeds into the Man v. Self conflict by being the primary driver behind both Izukus’ actions.

I decided to eschew any kind of genuine conflict between Izuku and the people in his life because I didn’t for a second want the narrative to get confused by considerations about whether it was safe to have told his loved ones about his past.

I very easily could have chosen to explore a plot line where the people around him feel betrayed or question him. At the very least, Mirio could have had a moment of “what the fuck, man, I’ve spent my whole career being looked down on as the world’s Quirkless hero and you didn’t think to fucking mention you grew up Quirkless?”

Close to the entire class has been vulnerable with him. Todoroki told him about being abused his entire childhood. He knows about Uraraka’s financial traumas. Iida nearly killed that guy the one time. Kirishima made him look at that suspicious bump in the unfortunate place.

These are kids who have spent the past three years in the trenches together. They’ve been in actual, life or death scenarios since the age of 14-15, and the only thing that they could count on was each other. And then here they are, at the very end of it all, and they find out that the guy they’ve been trusting with their back the whole time seemingly didn’t trust them enough to tell them a single detail of his life before they met him.

They could have been a little more conflicted about the revelation. At the very least, they could have questioned deeper how their friend went from 0 Quirks to a suspicious amount of Quirks when they spent their entire time at school with Guy Whose Entire Thing Is Transferring Quirks And Like. Trying to Murder Kids Who Are Specifically Them took personal issue with every single field trip they’ve ever had.

But every single outside POV is like “obviously we can trust him. It’s Midoriya. Anywho I will now be questioning my own character because he can’t be the problem so it must be me.”

If I explored plot points like that, it would have divided the conflict’s attention between Man v. Self and Man v. Man. The plot would have to devote time and focus to resolving Izuku’s issues with his loved ones and regaining their trust, and that would have detracted from a major theme of this fic, which is that this wasn’t about not trusting the people around him. He didn’t tell them because of an internalized issue.

Midoriya trusted his friends with his life. This wasn’t about fear of them rejecting him because he grew up Quirkless. The conflict is with himself.

I also eliminated sources of external conflict by having it all come out to the entire class all at once. I didn’t want to waste plot resources on what Izuku would naturally do in this situation, which is try to hide the little shit by all means necessary and quarantine his very existence. There would be too much time and energy wasted on slowly revealing the truth to select members of the class one by one.

And don’t get me wrong, that could have been an interesting plot—it just wasn’t the one I wanted to write.

This fic is about having to grapple with the part of yourself that is still hurt and angry about it. The part that cannot process the past to the point where you fear it endangers your future. You want your trauma to just go away and not exist anymore, because things are better so it means you shouldn’t have to be them anymore.

The older Izuku wants the younger one to be gone. He wants him to, at the very least, stop talking about what happened in the past and accept the future for how it is, because he doesn’t want to lose what he’s gained. But in doing so he mirrors the denial of self his younger counterpart is being far more explicit about.

Because both versions of Izuku are refusing to believe the other is them.

Young Izuku is doing it in a very literal way. That guy ain’t me. He killed and replaced me. There is absolutely no way I am him. He refuses to accept that there is any version of him who could become like his older self.

But the older Izuku is doing the same thing, just in a less literal sense. Hes almost acting like his old self is somehow legitimately a distinct entity. He slips and says it to Aizawa—stop looking at me like I’m him. The older Izuku wants to just bulldoze over his past and pretend like it doesn’t belong to him, but it just doesn’t work that way.

That’s the conflict I wanted to capture for this fic. Just this absolute refusal to reconcile your past and your future because to do so would require processing the trauma you’ve been through. And so I cauterized off all other sources of conflict, because they’d just detract from what needed to be center stage.

[keldabekush]

Coruscanti air traffic control droid that flirts outrageously with every vessel coming into its airspace because it finds it funny. Another oc i wont talk about enough.

[im-okay-unless-im-not]

Ya know, as a neurodivergent European I gotta admit the Americans have it right with the weird comparisons. Like if you tell me how big something is in like meters or kilograms my mind will just try to picture a really big ruler or scale with that number on it but i will still have no reference as to how big the thing actually is.

But if you tell me in comparison to something else (like ten schoolbuses long or five giraffes tall) i can picture that. Oh boy oh boy can i picture that! I'll just stack those ten buses in my mind like Legos and I know how big a bus is compared to me and like compared to a house or something.

The problem is when I don't know how big a reference item is like the american football field but that's just cause they play the wrong football send post

[fictionadventurer]

So many types of books that have strong summertime associations that I spend all my time cycling through cravings for certain genres or books.

Within the last month, I have wanted to read/reread:

Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery

The Electrical Menagerie by Mollie E. Reeder

Valiant by Sarah McGuire

Retellings in general (especially Cinderella retellings)

Golden Age mysteries, especially Josephine Tey and Agatha Christie

The Moon-Spinners by Mary Stewart

Books set in locations that are not America or England, especially warm climates

Books set in wintery/cold weather settings

Science fiction/space opera

Superhero stories

Civil War history/Presidential history

D.E. Stevenson books (and other mid-tier vintage light fiction)

Wilkie Collins books

Graphic novels

And I'm sure there are others that I'm forgetting

[zeb-z]

Thinking about Pac and his self worth issues that stretch for miles, who will always be self sacrificing if there's a chance to save his family. He's twice repeated this risk taking for Forever, taking the pills to find a cure, and now going through the portal to find some stable way to get him back. Both times there is no guarantee for his safety, the process is entirely experimental, and the stakes are high - but that's okay, because it's only his life on the line, and in the grand scheme of things it isn't valuable (to him at least).

Thinking about how Pac took the happy pills cure while sobbing, how Cellbit told him he couldn't stop him from being sad but he wouldn't let him be alone - and now Cellbit has managed to leave him alone in legitimately the worst way possible. Not by getting lost or kidnapped, but by losing himself. Becoming so similar to a version of himself that Pac has to separate into an entire different person because of his trauma around their time in prison. Becoming someone Pac builds walls and barbed wire and lava traps to avoid, to push away. Last time he had Cellbit to finish what he started - and despite all those promises, this time all he has is himself.

Thinking about Tubbo and Pac's conversation while he was on the happy pills - "what are you learning?" "I'm learning that happiness has a price. and it's kind of worth it." How he is no stranger to the consequences, how he's aware of the dangers, and still he will pay for them time and time again. Anything for Favela 6. Anything for family. Happiness has a price, and for him it's everything.

Thinking about how it all worked out last time, but this time is different. Forever returned without even having seen Pac. This risk did not pay off, and now the guy who would burn himself to keep others warm is in literal hell trying to find someone who isn’t even there.

Thinking about a ship called Hope, and how Pac set off to find it, alone. About the Fed operation room he walked into, alone. About the portal he stood in front of, alone. How there has to be significance in this symbolism.

Thinking about Pac and his odd taste in men and his terrible self esteem and his loyalty and love for his family, and the way he can’t seem to catch a goddamn break. How despite all that’s happened, he’s pulled off the impossible before - surely, surely he can do it again.

[beetle-blogging]

On one hand, Lydia's co-existence shtick would have interfered with Betelgeuse's business and lost him clients whenever they came across each other at work, while Betel's hauntings might have been very good for Lydia's show.

However, that's assuming that he usually left enough living witnesses that could still call Lydia. And from what we've seen, that's not his usual M.O. He will let Breathers live if his potential clients absolutely insist on it and he's desperate to make a deal, but he finds it more efficient to just murder people, maybe leave one alive to frame them for those murders.

But there would have been Maitland-ish clients (and I like to think most newbie ghosts would still retain their morals) who insisted on him going low and slow on the haunting, and those cases had a higher chance of making Lydia show up. And Betelgeuse would have noticed that. It would have encouraged him to excercise some self-control.

And I don't know if word can spread between house ghosts - or maybe Betelgeuse did some advertising - but if ghosts got wise to the idea that hiring Betelgeuse for a loud-but-non-lethal haunting (which you need to specify) can get you that Nice Medium who can make Breathers listen, that would have been excellent for Betel's business. He'd have needed to start taking payment up-front because the more peaceful way wouldn't always be effective in either getting rid of the Breathers on the first go (but hey, his clients can always decide to make another deal) or getting the Medium that they actually want to help them, but he'd have made more deals than he had been because more people would have been willing to hire him.

[fivveweeks]

started arknights and got enamored with uncle babygirl

[bookishfreedom]

bestie came to spend the day by the pool with me and couldn’t decide what book to bring. i’ve never been so proud

[bookishlyvintage]

Quarter One Favorites:

The Fury, Alex Michaelides The Book of Doors, Gareth Brown The Last Lost Girl, Casey L Bond The Death of Jane Lawrence, Cailtin Starling

[unma]

I don't think I ever shared this. Start of raid -> after fedluwoh phase 1 Hexa.

Fediel and Lu Woh asked to leave after reportedly creating worst phase in gaming ever, Fediel asked to stop bring zombified stacks to parties.

Genuinely who came up with this phase? I just want to talk to them. I just want to talk.

[thegreatyin]

Caeru feels like someone you could take to the mall and leave him at the massage chairs for an hour. He def needs a massage, and he won't have to tell a person what he wants / how he feels. Thoughts?

this is the most based and correct caeru take ever made

[momentofmemory]

“cute barista remembers MC’s order” this and “black coffee vs eleven pumps of syrup person” that. no. tired. where are my “bonding bc an absolutely insane convo is happening at the table between us” coffee shop aus

[maretriarch]

putting one of these in a pillow case and swinging it around my head to defend myself from home invaders