#grudging cameo

[williamshamspeare]

Nothing brings a community together like thrashing on a Cryptobro. NuCope and NuSeethe

[peridyke]

That hairstyle and your glasses frames? Cuties alert.

I like the use of a plural here because it implies there's multiple people in the photo

[theimpossiblescheme]

#i wonder if an in canon explanation was they were separated on purpose as a final twist of the knife in the gut so to speak#by de guiche because he knew they were friends

Okay, I have been thinking about these tags ever since I first read them, and I need to go feral for a few minutes, bear with me...

When de Guiche first pulls Le Bret aside in the guardhouse and says that he's separating them, Le Bret's first instinct is to tell him to piss off and just walk away. But all the fight goes out of him when de Guiche reveals that he knows about Cyrano's exploits in Arras--did you know he was risking his life every morning just to post a letter? Did you encourage him in this? Or did you just sit there and do nothing while the cadets' finest swordsman put himself in needless danger time and time again? Between this and Cyrano jumping in front of a Spaniard's blade for him, de Guiche makes it clear that he will not have his Captain enabling Cyrano's worst impulses--"there are more men besides that one who need you. And if I have misjudged your leadership capabilities, I expect you to start proving them to me." And through all of this Le Bret starts to think... shit, maybe he was just letting Cyrano walk into harm's way. Maybe he hasn't been doing as good a job at protecting him from himself as he thought. After all, what has he ever done to stop Cyrano outside of bitching and moaning about his foolishness? And besides, what kind of Captain would he be if he ended up neglecting the rest of his men and letting them walk into the same danger? So as much as he hates it--and he hates himself for it--he concedes de Guiche's point.

From that point on, de Guiche has him working at his side more and more often, discussing strategy and coordination of other regiments, even taking reports to the Cardinal whenever appropriate. And while Le Bret's learned how to speak the courtiers' tongue in his twenty years of service, it will never come as naturally as his native Gascon. He still hates these pompous idiots on high who hold his and his brothers-in-arms' lives in their hands, and the more he hears de Guiche suppressing his accent to keep up with his uncle's inner circle, the more he feels a grudging sympathy for the man. Working alongside de Guiche eventually becomes less of a chore, much to his own chagrin, and it's a disturbingly mundane moment for them both when Le Bret actually learns his commander's first name. Meanwhile, he sees precious little of Cyrano anymore. It seems like every time they might have a moment alone together, de Guiche is demanding that moment for another of their discussions. Le Bret wonders how he's doing, how he's coping without Roxanne and Christian. How his new method of distracting himself--namely throwing himself into training the new batch of cadets--is working for him. Seeing these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed young men, so eager to rush out and throw their lives away, is a melancholy experience for Le Bret every year, and there's a part of him that always wants to say, I'm sorry some of you will never make it home. From afar, he's starting to see that same look in Cyrano's eyes, and he wonders if letting that Spaniard stab him would've been less painful.

He finally gets to fucking talk to Cyrano one night at Ragueneau's shop, when de Guiche goes alone to Paris and the cadets get to spend it enjoying themselves. After letting Cyrano carry the conversation for most of it, Le Bret alludes to his own work at their commander's side in vague terms, trying not to divulge the more delicate details. At one point, Cyrano gives him a very wry look--"Have the planets finally aligned to seal Earth's doom, then, that Le Bret is keeping secrets from me?" And with that, Le Bret cracks. He admits that de Guiche has been deliberately keeping them separate, that he believes they've been a bad influence on each other. Almost instantly, he can see that goddamn self-loathing streak of Cyrano's take over, and when his best friend tries to apologize for leading him astray, he's not having a word of it.

"If you insist on such an insulting presumption, Cyrano de Bergerac," he says after shocking them both by yanking him into a fierce and all too brief hug, "I will personally drag you out of this place to demand satisfaction."

"And have us both arrested for public dueling when you've so recently found favor with the Cardinal?" Cyrano's laugh is warmer than Le Bret's ever heard it as he pulls away. "I would never dream of it, my friend." Le Bret remembers a certain comparison to a dog making friends and decides not to question this change in attitude. Absence really does make the heart grow fonder, he's found.

He makes Cyrano promise to take care of himself, and thankfully Cyrano seems to hear how loaded the request is, after so long not being able to make it to his face. But even as Cyrano assures him that Ragueneau won't let him do anything stupid and the night ends on a relative high note, there's still that uncertainty in the air of when they'll be able to talk like this again.

Fourteen years pass like this, with both of them running agonizingly parallel to each other, only to intersect on rare, short occasions. One evening, a now silver-haired de Guiche--now the Duc de Gramont, but Le Bret barely bothers with it--excuses himself to go and visit an old friend. It doesn't escape his notice how his companion, usually so proud and upright as he moves through the world, carries so much weight and tension in his shoulders now and how his head seems to sink beneath his new wig... and all of a sudden Le Bret feels very old indeed. Over forty years he's been doing this, all the while outliving most of his friends and barely keeping up with those who remain. He's tired, and every extremity of his body aches with half a dozen old wounds complaining of the oncoming chill, and he just wants to understand how there are still young men out there who are so quick to follow in his footsteps. They could never be expected to understand...

He misses Cyrano. If anybody out there could understand, it would be him.

That's the evening, when Le Bret finally steps out for some fresh air, that a frantic Ragueneau comes running up to him with the worst news possible. That's the evening he regrets listening to de Guiche more than he's regretted anything in his life.

Never off my bullshit about these characters... please know that I am constantly thinking about Le Bret's absence from the last act of the 1950 Cyrano movie. How Carnovsky's Le Bret was such a secure anchor for Ferrer's Cyrano (how Cyrano always managed to find him in a crowd full of strangers and how Le Bret ran to find him even with an army of cutthroats on his heels), how the last time we saw them together Cyrano had saved Le Bret's life at Arras... and how Le Bret only reappears when Cyrano is about to die, with Ragueneau taking over his role as confidante. I am constantly thinking about what could have kept them from each other's side, when they had been so inseparable before. I am thinking about ways the director and actors must have justified it and wondering about how they could have broken my heart more than the original play already did...

[astronicht]

Hi I hope this isn't presumptuous, but so, that post you made about Tolkien making the lads leave their weapons outside the hall and CS Lewis thinking the hall was gonna get burned down by a lady who also wanted to kill herself... what's the historical precedent for that? Is there a trope in medieval lit where people like... do that? I ask because uh. I am obsessed with Children of Hurin and there's a scene where that like, happens. And I'm obsessed with that scene, and would love to know if there's like, cultural/mythic context that would enrich my knowledge!

OH BOY, sorry I'm getting to this late, it's been uhhh a summer, but one, this is a very good question!! And two, yes there is absolutely precedent, particularly in early medieval literature, and high medieval literature set in the early medieval (circa 500-1100 AD) past. I'll let someone else debate how often people actually historically locked their enemies into a hall and burned them, but especially in Old Norse literature (and if Fellowship felt like it leaned a little more on Old English literature, Two Towers, where Eowyn appears, felt a little more Old Norse) this is common. Off the top of my head, you've got many Icelandic family feuds ending in burning the whole family in their hall, like Njal's Saga (Old Norse), Attila the Hun dramas (yeah he's a big guy in the burning halls circuit, but actually not in the way you might expect) like his cameos in Volsung Saga (Old Norse) and Nibelungelied (Middle High German), and my vague recollection of a few Irish and Welsh versions that no search engine is giving up for me right now.

This, predictably, got long and slightly off topic.

Disclaimer: As usual, I should say I come from an Old English-centric background, and Old English literature is actually notable among all its neighbors for not burning down too many halls. Second disclaimer, all links are not proper citations, they just go to wiki.

Hall-burning in literature is, to my understanding, part of the concerns of a few early medieval cultures in which revenge is not only expected but in many cases legally reinforced and codified, and one in which conflicts could spiral to engulf -- figuratively, or literally and in flames -- entire families. Many medieval Icelandic sagas are focused on this exact type of destruction of whole families or friendship/community units. Most relevant of these to Eowyn, Two Towers, and the vibes of Edoras (since alas I am only partway into RotK and can't speak to Children of Hurin yet!) is Volsung Saga, which is set on the Continent, not Iceland, and actually has to do with Attila the Hun. As mentioned before, an incredible amount of stuff turns out to have to do with Attila. We will come back to him!

So, on the particular post you're talking about, a few people iirc have replied pointing out that the hall in TT is clearly supposed to be based on a hall from Old English literature, namely the hall in Beowulf, which famously did not actually get burnt down. And that's all true! I was not posting with much nuance; I was mostly having a joke at the expense of CS Lewis. However, I was also referencing a very very common trope in Old Norse/early medieval stories, and I personally think JRR was as well (AND I think Beowulf was also very consciously referencing the exact same motif anyway) (no one has to agree with me, a tumblr blog, on any of these points).

The thing about the hall when our heroes approach is that the scariest damn thing in that hall is Eowyn. Certainly not every hall-burning story requires a woman with no other recourse to set the fire (in fact, the "warrior band approaches unknown hall which might have a grudge against them" is a trope that can get you killed in a pretty homosocial environment, as I guess Aragorn at least was aware, being a big reader). Still, the presence of a woman who is swiftly running out of options does fit what I'd consider one of the or perhaps The best known version of the early medieval burning hall trope: Gudrun, who shows up in at least a dozen different texts in both the Scandinavian and the German language traditions, including Volsung Saga, a text which itself often gets paraded around as the basis of lotr (which I'm sure it is, in that JRR appears to have simply and very fairly based lotr on every piece of early medieval vernacular literature I can think of).

In a portion of Gudrun's story (which of course changes a bit in each retelling), after her first marriage she is unhappily married to Atli, who is none other than our main man Attila the Hun. After Attila kills her brothers for reasons (in one version, her father), seeing no other way to take the necessary revenge and no other way out, she kills the two sons she had by him, serves them to Attila for dinner, has Attila killed, and then sets fire to the hall with everyone in it. After this, she attempts to drown herself.

The self-destruction of this act is a really important beat, and has only gotten more-so as a comparison to Eowyn the further I've read into RotK (currently, I'm at the houses of healing after merry and eowyn take on the witch king). It's a lot clearer in the book than the films, for me, that Eowyn going off to battle was not so a straightforward empowering and/or freeing move, despite allowing her some agency, but more the one path she saw as available to her with which to die with honor (which was pretty much exactly what Gudrun was facing as well). Like Gudrun, whose first husband was a great hero but has died, Eowyn's romantic choice is a hero who is presumed dead (sorry Aragorn they did Not believe in your ghost skills). In fact, in some versions Gudrun does put on armor and fight with her brothers before they're killed. She kills Attila with her own hand, with the help of another man who needs to avenge a blood feud against Attila.

So while Eowyn didn't get forced into marriage to Attila Wormtongue (with apologies to both historical Attila and that one historical skald also called Wormtongue who was reportedly hot) and burn the whole place down, she's still trapped, and like Gudrun chooses destruction alongside her household.

Reading her arc feels so much like watching Tolkien write a fix-it for Gudrun. What if she got this one little chance, and this one other little chance, and this one more -- tiny little shifts in the narrative that allow her to get out, and not through fire, and not through death.

Anyway, this got away from me. I hope it added some context to the Children of Hurin arson case! Thanks for the ask

[fallenclan]

who are all of the starclan cats in the most recent update? and if you don’t mind, what’s their relations to the four chosen cats?

i'll put this under the cut since there will be images, here's a quick walkthrough :)

Silverbelly You know her. yes. she's there for Feathersight!! he was very very close with her as an apprentice/young cat, and she would always visit him when he'd come to the Glowcave before Ravenstar.

Salmonskip No significant relation to any of the cats joining! Before I drew this moon I asked the discord if there were any Starclan cats that they wanted cameos of, then I picked a few that I missed drawing and smacked 'em in there. Salmonskip was one of those cats

Spiderclaw he died as a young warrior but I really loved him before, so I was happy to find an excuse to draw him again. No significant relation to any of the four.

Nick he was a cat that joined the clan Very early on (moon 37 i think) and was a fan-favorite on account of being a Bloodthirsty Kittypet which is just. admittedly a little funny. He was a single father of one (Wormshade) and was probably more there to support his grandson (Spiderclaw) than anything else, though he was probably wishing that Snailpetal would be there, as she's his only surviving descendant

Sleepycloud father of Sleepydawn (and others but. Sleepydawn is the one he's mentioning in the update). he was one of my favs when he was younger and I was happy to draw him again, plus I wanted a nice nod towards his feelings about Sleepydawn going down a dark path partially because of Sleepycloud himself (in a roundabout way. trying to escape his father's shadow etc)

Fernslug Also a cat that died young. She passed in the dog attack I believe, and was a fan favorite due to her Autistic Powers (loving slugs). I wanted to draw her again, and it felt fitting to slip her alongside Sleepycloud, her father. i always forget that she's Sleepydawn's sister, since they never got the chance to meet.

Sandsnap you know him. he was just there

Lionsong Another case of dying young, Lionsong was Antbite's mate who died before even reaching 30 moons, from yellowcough. Honeysong grew up seeing his ghost following Antbite around, so she does consider him her dad, though she never really "met" him.

Eris (left) & Cedarberry (right) Darkstone's moms! Eris died in a greencough outbreak, and Cedarberry just a few moons ago during a Shallowclan battle. Darkstone is not the type to linger on his emotions or even process them much, but he missed his moms. a lot.

Poppyfeather Ravenstar's first victim. The former deputy that he killed, partially in revenge for her "failing" to protect Littleleaf, and partially so he could take her place as deputy. Mostly the former, the power-hungryness came later on. Always had a bit of a temper (hence being so short and bitter in the update) but was fantastic at her job and loved her clan fiercely.

Cherrystar Ravenstar's second victim, poisoned by nightshade berries. equally as passionate as Poppyfeather, but not really one to hold grudges. Still, very pissed about the shit that Ravenstar has done to her clan. hates his gay ass

[nyc3]

Hey I have a question. I never saw the movie nor I want to see it +Nine sounds cool as fuck but....bk is in the movie) my question here is......why shig killed Nine?

When that scene was reblogged on Twitter I had the impression it was smth like "nine was using his name and shig wasn't pleased" ...can't be that bc this makes sense. Too much sense.

So did shig just kill the guy bc yes?

Maybe afo or the Dr evil asked shig to do so... which is plausible but damn...what waste. And it cements once again shig as a npc.

I'll try to explain this the best I can, because tbh nothing about this situation makes sense to me even today. And some context of the movie as well.

The movie starts with a scene of the LOV transporting Nine while he was still on a medical capsule inside a truck. There's a reference to this situation in the manga when the doctor request Shigaraki to deliver "something" for him.

But here's a thing: neither the movie or the prequel chapter Horikoshi made explain where Nine was being delivered or what the doctor intended to do with him in case he arrived to destiny. It feel that missing context is important.

In any case, the heroes attack the truck trying to arrest the league. The truck is destroyed in the battle and this allows Nine to escape and go back with his team.

Then we got a couple of scenes were Shigaraki seem to be tracking Nine activities, also using Hawks to do the research job for them (it's worth mentioning the events of the movie are supposed to happen at some point after MVA).

And after all this... nothing really, the movie drops this subplot and Shigaraki only appears again in the end when he comes out of literally nowhere to kill Nine. Allow me to ask how they even know his exact location? The black goo teleportation quirk doesn't even work like that btw.

Just like you my first assumption was Garaki ordered him to do so, maybe because after the spectacle Nine did in the island the doctor decided to eliminate him for security reasons. But we never got any indication of this being the case, in fact there's a scene when Garaki explicitly tells Shigaraki to not touch "it" (Nine).

Things became more confusing because in MVA when Shigaraki gives Garaki one of his edgy speeches about destroying everything he hates, there's a small cameo of Nine among the things crusty boy hates.

On a side note: this is technically Nine's first ever appearance, even before the movie itself was released. A sort of foreshadow for what it coming.

But going back to the point: why Shigaraki hates Nine so much in the first place? We never got a clear reason for any of this, isn't like they ever interacted, the only time before the movie they have some kind of contact was the prequel chapter focused on Nine, and that was only Shigaraki looking at Nine through a window.

Also the final scene when crusty boy kills Nine for some reason makes it sounds the situation is very personal? Like if Shigaraki hold some grudge against Nine for some reason.

And the line "I agree, there only can be one king" doesn't make any sense because isn't like Shigaraki knew about Nine's ideology and his desire of rule the world. The writers makes it seem to be like they both interacted and had a long term rivalry for some reason, but that never happened.

Oh and it's extra hilarious how Shigaraki killing Nine for no reason directly contradicts this other little scene:

If crusty a**hole always intended to be "a hero for villains" (as the story seem to pretend) what about Nine then? Idk but for me killing a defendless man while he was crawling on the ground doesn't seem too heroic.

Let's not forget Nine was a real hero for villains without presume about it. He saved the life of Chimera, Slice and Mummy in a way Shigaraki wish to be able to do with the lov.

Honestly is funny to think all this one directional hate Shigaraki feels for Nine could be just crusty boy being jaleous, which won't be surprise considering Nine is superior to him in everyway possible.

But well, thinking about this on a perspective outside the story itself an explanation of why Nine was killed maybe is because Horikoshi just needed a reason to get rid of him, as his presence might be problematic for the course of the main story. I mean it would be a bit suspicious to have another AFO possible vessel who happens to be better than Shigaraki, and Nine is the only movie main villain to be permanently killed on screen, while all the others like Wolfram and Flect survived.

Anyway, all this festival of bs let a bitter taste in my mouth.

Needless to say, such a good villain like Nine surely deserved way better than he got.

[tarczar]

Another shared voice actor between the two franchises I like is Shigeru Chiba being the voice of Robo-Ky in Guilty Gear Xrd and Aku-Aku in the 5th movie!

Guilty Gear is 2 degrees away from Keroro Gunso

Takeshi Kusao, Joji Nakata, and Takehito Koyasu voice Ky Kiske, Sol Badguy, and Zato-1 in Guilty Gear respectively

Takeshi Kusao, Joji Nakata, and Takehito Koyasu voice Dororo, Giroro, and Kururu in Keroro Gunso respectively

(There are definitely more links than this! these are just the ones I knew off the top of my head, and I didn't see a point in searching out the other links if I already knew these lol)

[enixamyram]

Just Saw Deadpool and Wolverine!

It wasn't as bad as I feared it was going to be. In fact, it was really quite good! Not perfect, unfortunately, but still really good.

Spoilers bellow:

Let's just get the bad things out of the way:

Why. Do. They. Keep. Splitting. Up. Couples. In. Between. Movies. Just. To. Get. Them. Back. Together. All. Over. Again?! Genuinely, they have Vanessa and Wade split up off screen before this film, they're still good friends so she still hangs around, he still has feelings for her and at the end of the film it's implied they're getting back together again. And it is so pointless! It would make no difference to the plot if they had stayed together throughout the film. It actually would have made certain moments stand out a bit more. It's just a completely unnecessary random trope that I am so sick of!

Channing Tatum as Gambit sucked... But he was kind of meant to... So I dislike Channing as an actor, I love Gambit as a character, so I was always going to have a bias about this. But genuinely I cringed at every moment of him on screen, but I think I was supposed to? I don't know if it really was intentional or not, but it seemed to me that the film was definitely playing up making fun of him. So while it was awful, it wasn't soul crushingly awful.

The NicePool dying joke went on for too long. I think every Deadpool film has that one joke that I laugh at. But then it keeps going and eventually my laugh gets a little awkward and it's still going so my laugh kind of dies. Not that big a deal, just something that really hit with this one.

OTHERWISE!

It was a really good film! It was funny in all the right moments. Ryan Reynolds continues to be supreme as Deadpool. Hugh Jackman is still the best Logan of all time. And I think the Deadpool films in general just mastered the act of upping the stakes in a way a lot of other trilogies fall down at. What I mean is, Deadpool 1 - the enemy was personal to Wade. Still a threat to others but the focus was on Wade's grudge. Deadpool 2 - the time travel aspect made it a little more intense than last time but it was still fairly personal and contained to Wade. Deadpool 3 - world ending drama that made this time really stand out against the others. It felt properly like the films before this were prepaing Deadpool to be the man he needed to save not just this universe but every universe.

Highlights:

X23!!! I was so damn excited when she came on screen! I love her, I love her comics, I love her movie, I'm just sad we probably won't get to see more of her but the stuff we did see was still amazing!

The Cameos I hated the Spiderman's film cameos because they felt cheap and pandering, but the ones in this film felt like they were done right! So it was a lot of fun seeing familiar faces popping in and reliving old stories or throwing out old lines (legit laughed hard at Blade's ice skating uphill throwback XD).

The Songlist Every song sequence, even the ones purposely out of place somehow worked so perfectly. It was hilarious in the right moments but even more than that, it was beautiful in all the right moments as well (I'm talking about you, Like A Prayer XD)!

Cassandra Nova A fantastic villain who I loved seeing on the big screen for the first time! She was delightfully psychotic and powerful and just perfect for the role as the ultimate big bad.

I think this is a good sendoff the Deadpool and the X-Men as a whole. I don't know if that's the plan, I don't know if Deadpool or any mutants are supposed to come back but I probably wouldn't rush out to see them to be honest. This feels like the right way to say goodbye. (At least until the MCU stops overdoing it and let's others remake superhero films on their own again. Not everything has to connect to the MCU for pete's sake.)

[surgepricing]

RWBY Final Thoughts: Legacy

Very rarely would I ever consider a fandom on its own worth its own section of a Final Thoughts. ... [Basically,] they behave like a cult.

This is a repost of a post I made February 1st, 2024 on another site. At the time, it was the final post of a deep-dive recap of RWBY and the history of the show, its fandom, and its direction under Rooster Teeth.

I felt this out with some of my peers and the feedback I got in relation to posting in on Tumblr was that, well, why not? It was my main haunt to begin with, and I may as well, since Rooster Teeth is closing its doors. I'm posting this mainly as a shot in the dark just to see how it gets received. Only minor edits have been made; I'm sure there's some stuff in here that would make people mad, but that applies to pretty much anything someone could say about RWBY. Click the read more to get a glance at how my time with RWBY ultimately wrapped up.

Nine years ago today, Monty Oum died of an allergic reaction. Today is a day of mourning for fans of his work, including RWBY. There’s no sense in waiting. Let’s finish this and heal.

The Showrunners

Miles and Kerry often received the brunt of the attention when it came to RWBY. As the writers of the show, they bore responsibility for the largest chunk of why it eventually went into the shitter, and fan anger against them was almost certainly not helped by the damn near idolization heaped on them by fervent stans. They are, undoubtedly, the focal point of RWBY fans’ parasocial relationship with the show.

Of course, despite sharing about the same credits space as his partner in crime, Kerry tended to fly under the radar a lot, with it being Miles who received the brunt of the fandom’s fury with each successive volume. It’s not hard to see why; the character Miles voices has been consistently over-exposed and is in many ways an obvious creator’s pet, with denials as to this fact falling on deaf ears as Jaune’s screentime continued to balloon past its merits, whereas the character Kerry voices could just about wrangle an average of ten seconds of screentime every three years. Certainly Miles has been in trouble with fans more often than Kerry for the shit he’s said and done. The Ruby body pillow and the Tifa Lockhart ‘prostitute’ comments come to mind. Oh, and the slurs, that one too.

But perhaps the reason Miles gets so much more flak than Kerry is that Miles just...acts like an asshole a lot of the time. Even aside from above examples, Miles’ flaws come out in his writing: he’s petty, holds grudges, can’t take criticism, and just overall has way more power over the story than someone of his caliber should. He’s very poor at disguising his real feelings and often lets them bleed through, and when he actually decides to voice them on purpose, things get ugly—refer to that Cameo about Ironwood.

But as tempting as it is to treat Miles as an out-of-control cockwaffle on the rampage and Kerry as his sympathetic ineffectual shadow, the reality is that they’re co-writers, have been for ten years, and anything Miles gets away with doing is as much Kerry’s fault as his. If the Gray Haddock situation has taught us anything, it’s that more people tend to harbor blame than the one individual that makes an easy scapegoat.

Since aside from aforementioned n-word business, Miles and Kerry are almost never connected to moral outrage, this makes it easy for the stans to uphold them, since all they really have to defend them from is accusations that they didn’t honor Monty’s “vision” for the series. This is only easy because the stans are fucking insane, but that’s for later on down the page.

“Vision” is in quotes because that’s how fans treat it, we all know they don’t really care. Miles and Kerry’s vision matters, and we know that much because of Calixyn’s interview where she all but begged to be told that RWBY Volume 5 was as bad as it was because the “good bois” had control of the show ripped from them. Nope, turns out all that racism, homophobia, and plain shitty writing is all on them. But at least they’re nice!

(Miles was 26 when he said the n-word. I’m 26 now when writing this. I think it’s pretty fair to call him an asshole.)

But the truth is that it’s objectively stupid to think that the direction of RWBY hasn’t changed since Monty’s passing, it’s impossible for it not to have. There are more writers on board than before, and it’s been a long time since he was alive to contribute his thoughts. The real question is whether they at least tried, and I don’t think they did.

I mean, Shane Newville never names Miles and Kerry in his letter, but he does state several times that the choices made for the show were not only not what Monty wanted, but “straight up just shitting all over what Monty made”. I find it very difficult to believe that that insinuation, and all of the people caught up in the net it casts, wouldn’t include those two. And like it or not, but the person who is able to compile tons of clips and interviews over the years as some sort of seeming immutable proof that “CRWBY” are good-hearted people determined to preserve Monty’s vision, isn’t really looking at any more evidence than the person who’s come to the conclusion, based on what they’ve seen, that that the opposite is true. And they’re certainly looking at less evidence than the people who actually did work there around Monty, Miles, and Kerry. The facts sometimes boil down to ‘if it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, and is implicated in the walls of text like a duck, it’s probably a duck’, guys.

Even in the best case scenario in which the work of Monty Oum turns out to have been treated with dignity and respect (and was just really shittily written from the beginning), the fact remains that Miles and Kerry did not put a quality product into the world. I will be very surprised if either of them manages to get a lead writing position ever again, because once the popularity of RWBY fades, so too will the goodwill they’ve somehow amassed among its fans. RWBY, much like Twilight, is inevitably going to taint the people who were in charge of writing it.

But Miles and Kerry are just two dudes. What exactly is going to happen to those fervent fans who hung on their every word and insisted they were the embodiment of everything pure and innocent? What, exactly, is going to happen to the RWBY fandom that once seemed to be unavoidably populous on the internet?

F, N, D, M

We already went over “constructive criticism” and “worldbuilding”, so let’s add another eternally-misused word to our roster. You know, something I’ve occasionally thought about in terms of online spaces is that no one knows what a “comfort show” is. It’s one of those terms that became too popular almost as soon as it was introduced, to the point that it became meaningless, much like “hyperfixation” and “anxiety”. I see people refer to RWBY as their comfort show and I’m just like...how? A comfort show is supposed to be the show that always puts you in a good headspace, a show you rest easy with because you’ve always connected with it because the love was always there. A comfort show is a show that you watch in your down moments to feel better, not a show you think is just the greatest thing ever, the bees’ knees if you will.

A comfort show is not a show you force yourself to like, it is not a show you defend at all costs, and it is not a show you only still cling to because enjoying it once coincided with a time when you felt popular and among friends. Which, increasingly, seems to have been the case for RWBY fans.

RWBY’s Fandom

Very rarely would I ever consider a fandom on its own worth its own section of a Final Thoughts. But I’m doing it now because the RWBY fandom, though now it’s a shadow of its former self, is still a sizable chunk of people and took a lot longer to die than most other fandoms.

The RWBY fandom itself was an especially big and very online fandom, and the show produced an abnormally large amount of big name fans who continued to use their own influence to push its success and keep its momentum going. As I’ve said before, the RWBY fandom is something that Rooster Teeth were able to extract an excessive amount of praise out of for minimal effort; it simply seems to be in RWBY fans’ nature to speculate and theorize and over-analyze and fill in blanks, and to perceive good writing and animation where there is none. But you know how fandom operates—the bigger its size, the more infamous it becomes.

Long since famed for being especially toxic, those who are in the know consider RWBY fans a different breed, really. They create and move narratives at high speed and act quickly to correct any perceived dissent in the ranks, casting out anyone that feels disillusionment with the product and insisting everything is peachy even as their world crumbles around them. To RWBY fans, the “CRWBY” are always separate from the “problematic” aspects of Rooster Teeth (which is basically the whole company) and it doesn’t matter how many of its flaws get highlighted; RWBY and the people that make it are always great, innocent of any harm done and fantastic, and anyone that dislikes them is a villain—even if those people were at one point part of the “CRWBY” themselves. Loyalty is everything. In other words, they behave like a cult.Those acronyms themselves have always bothered me, and I’ve grown a strong distaste for them. Originally they were just a quirk of the show; a format for team names that spawned the name of the show and eventually stopped being relevant altogether. But RWBY fans are simply unable to not use them. It’s not “the fandom” it’s “the FNDM”. They’re not “the RWBY team” or “the RWBY crew”, they’re “CRWBY”. Even people that the fans are actively trying to shame, shun, and harass don’t get to simply be people—they’re “RWDE” and, when that became an actual community of sorts unto itself, was switched to “HTDM”, short for “hatedom”. They remind me distinctly of code words that get formed and passed around in cult movements, identifying terms that quickly provide boxes to put people in and make it easier to sort loyals from disloyals. “Hatedom” itself is another one of those terms that spread and got so prolific it really doesn’t carry any meaning anymore. Real hatedoms are surprisingly rare, guys. Every fandom that becomes big enough for its respective product to become criticized eventually comes to believe it has a ‘hatedom’ because how could someone dislike something I like so much? But a hatedom on its own arises out of very specific circumstances and environments, and causes the spread of hate for a product based on broad foundations that are often unfair to the product and which creates perceptions that spread faster than the work, so that the work is often talked about in mocking reference rather than true dissatisfaction.

RWBY doesn’t have a hatedom guys, it never did. The Last of Us doesn’t have a hatedom. Fairy Tail didn’t have a hatedom. Blackpink doesn’t have a hatedom. Even Marvel doesn’t have a hatedom.

Paris Hilton had a hatedom. Nickelback had a hatedom. Hell, the website Tumblr itself had a hatedom. These were examples of people or products whose reputations spread too quickly and eventually swallowed rational perception of them, with people who have never experienced them or their work dismissing them and the fans who enjoy it wholesale.

Using the term “hatedom” is understandably common because (and in spite of the fact that) it allows for easy miscategorization. A hatedom is not composed of people that were actually exposed to the work, found it lacking, and expressed that. A hatedom does not occur in the wake of a product that was so bad it pissed off its fans and caused them to walk. People don’t hate Metroid: Other M because they can’t stand the sight of a woman being vulnerable and don’t understand challenging drama, they hate it because it was poorly written, badly designed, and tarnished a long-running and highly cherished gaming heroine’s reputation. People didn’t hate Fifty Shades of Grey because of some bias against women expressing their sexual freedom, they hated it because it was a wildly misogynistic and badly-written piece of dreck. People didn’t hate The Last of Us Part II because of homophobia and transphobia, they hated it because it was a misery fest with a tired moral theme that posited itself far more deep and compelling than it really was. And just because people with the above disingenuous views also hated these things does not discount the fact that the works got the reputations they did because they were getting back the exact amount of love and respect that was put into them.

Similarly, RWBY doesn’t have a hatedom. It does, in fact, have an ex-fandom. Those are also things you don’t see very often, but when you do, they almost always follow the same pattern, don’t they? A work which got wildly popular very quickly, took really deep nosedives afterward, and became disowned by the people that had formerly propped it up.

But that’s a discussion for later. What exactly makes RWBY’s fandom so toxic and cult-like, and why and how did it get that way? I think it’s a combination of several key factors that were baked in and collided badly.

The first was ease of access. RWBY was sold extremely well early on, and shared enough similarities with both anime and video games that it attracted many curious people from those communities. Combine that with vibrant colors, an attractive visual aesthetic, an air of badassery, and good music, and it gained a lot of loyal fans quickly—fans of anime and video games, specifically, being fans that tend to get more attached than to other mediums and are known for spending a lot on merchandise. These, in turn, morphed into nostalgic elements ripe for misremembering—people often have difficulty acknowledging that something they once liked isn’t good anymore even on its own, and I think RWBY fans in particular put way too much energy into the show to be able to admit that all the time they spent defending it (and harassing people who criticized it) was for nothing.

That skyhigh rocket to fame early on, of course, was attached to the reputation of Monty Oum, and once he died, he quickly became a martyr, which galvanized the loyalty of the show’s most toxic fans even further. To this day, talking about Monty at all, even for the right reasons, is seen as disrespectful or distasteful unless you’re trying to use him to prop up Rooster Teeth, a double standard I’ve unfortunately run into even in seeming safe spaces. I think if we’re comparing RWBY fandom to a cult, then Monty Oum and his memory can be compared to a central mythologized figure, the center around which are formed all of the pretty lies the members of the cult will tell you. Monty’s name is irreplaceably tied to RWBY, and as such, in order to defend Monty, its fans have to defend RWBY...and you can see where this leads. Attempting to talk about the mistreatment Monty and his family went through at Rooster Teeth is seen as using his name as a weapon—nevermind the fact that Rooster Teeth and their fans regularly use his name as a shield.

Of course, what this really reveals is that many such people don’t care about Monty, who he was, or who he went through, but rather his name alone. In fact, I’ve straight up seen RWBY stans say that people shouldn’t “take Monty’s name in vain”, as if Monty were in fact some sacred religious figure. It’s both bizarre and harmful.

A third factor was popularity. For a lot of the same reasons as, say, Supernatural, the perception of RWBY skews much more broadly between fan and ex-fan than that of the typical over-hyped show. The truth of the matter is that when a show gets popular, or really any work gets popular, enjoying it becomes a cliquey sort of thing. People that enjoyed being into something well-respected and widely known and basically the hottest trend are far more prone to become overly attached, put too much of themselves into it, and remain unequipped to deal with the fact of that trend’s eventual passing, especially if it’s a fall into disgrace rather than a quiet entrance into history. You can still find certain especially toxic big names from the RWBY fandom active and posting, pretending not to notice that their audience has become smaller and smaller over the years. Let’s face facts here, a lot of people that enjoy being part of the “in” crowd never manage to figure out how to accept losses and will do anything to try and regain lost popularity, or fool themselves into thinking they’re still on top of the world.

But we can reason and explain all day. Another truth of the matter is that it shouldn’t be other people’s problem that fans can’t accept reality and adjust, and that the RWBY fandom quite honestly deserves its reputation as abysmally toxic. The way terminal fans of the show have treated anyone who dissents, most prominently Shane Newville and other ex-employees, let alone other ex-fans of the show, is quite frankly disgusting. RWBY stans are difficult to look at in all of their bewildering, teeth-gnashing toxicity and forgive...so I’m not going to. People that still insist there’s nothing wrong with this show or the company making it are, as far as I’m concerned, beyond help, and are part of the problem. Many an ex-employee certainly thinks so.

In a lot of ways, you could call the fandom one of the driving forces of the show’s failure, mostly because they had an abnormally large amount of influence over the show. Pleasing the fans has always been a major goal of the RWBY team (unless you like characters Miles Luna doesn’t, I guess), but it’s almost disturbing how the Rooster Teeth strategy has been to lead them along and bat their eyelashes at every turn and how the fandom laps it up.

Of course, Rooster Teeth feeds the parasocial engine by engaging with the fans as equals, and I was given a disturbing reminder of how many of the people who worked on the show—the ones who aren’t pissed and digging themselves out of trauma ditches—behave exactly as the fans do, tweeting twenty times a day about their favorite ships and memes. By creating the perception that RWBY’s team is just like the RWBY fanbase and wants the same things they want, they tap that line of excess energy that’s kept this fandom going so long despite how far it’s fallen. It’s that “hey! my friend said my ship is going to be canon and he works on the show” feeling.

Of course, a probable reason as to why so many employees who worked on RWBY behave the way RWBY fans do is because a lot of them started out that way. As in, student hires. This has long been an open secret of Rooster Teeth’s M.O. for a while now, hiring people who look up to them and engage heavily with their content. Many an ex-animator has lambasted this tactic because it’s insidious, and purposely designed to make the incoming staff feel honored and indebted and excited so they won’t notice how they’re being fucked over. Arryn Troche, who made the ‘gays greenlighting volume 10’ tweet, rings up as a particularly eerie example considering they have the same rather-uncommon and unconventionally-spelled name as the voice actor for a ship they’re obviously very attached to. A quick search reveals them to have been a longtime fan and cosplayer for the show before being signed on as a junior animator.

And it is the fandom who ultimately makes the legacy for any given work or body of work. So what is RWBY ultimately going to be remembered for?

Legacy

I thought about it for a little while and found five things that are most likely to be associated with RWBY in the public’s memory after its death. The first should come as no surprise to anyone.

Bumbleby

The only part of RWBY that will likely be carried on by fans who stuck with it until the end is, of course, the only part of it that mattered, to many of them. You’ll know from my earlier recaps that shipping was always a big deal in fandom, but due to key choices (or if you prefer, mistakes) made during Volumes 2 and 3, one ship grew larger and more promoted in fandom circles than any others.

This is a combination of the unique features of the RWBY fandom and their one-track mind. The fans are well-known, as I said, to fill in the blanks in a pattern that best suits their narratives, and this works out with Rooster Teeth because it means that any sudden changes in direction they make will always be excused and praised rather than critically examined. Unsurprisingly, Bumbleby’s fandom, now that their victory has been cemented, have doubled down on their narrative that this was the intended goal from the beginning, despite it being plainly obvious that early RWBY was angling for Sun Wukong as the love interest and threw the occasional bones to Blake/Yang shippers to try and play nice.

This used to be one part of the fandom, of course, but as the show continually bombed with viewers and made more and more decisions that pushed them away, all competitors were slowly filtered out as their fans left, until Bumbleby shippers were the fandom. It’s no coincidence that Blake and Yang suddenly started acting unusually touchy and sentimental in Volume Six, following on the heels of a volume of RWBY so wildly unpopular that it woke up the company execs and forced them to acknowledge that the biggest part of their fanbase was only going to remain loyal in exchange for one thing: their ship.

The sad thing is that you can tell Rooster Teeth wanted to explore other options. Volume Five features a rather sudden shift into Yang and Weiss interactions in what I remain positive to this day was an attempt to sway shippers into a potential second choice while Black Sun was still in the oven, and this really represented one of the major errors of Rooster Teeth, in that they failed to understand the audience they were trying so hard to please.

Bumbleby became what I call a “Big Red Button” ship, and it is only the second of its kind that I’ve seen. The first? Destiel.

Yes, there’s a reason I kept comparing RWBY to Supernatural whenever Blake and Yang’s relationship came up. I admit I wasn’t a part of the Supernatural craze in its heyday and have never really enjoyed the show, but I’ve watched enough of it to connect the dots from what cultural osmosis I had to the eventual downfall we saw in November of 2020.

Both Bumbleby and Destiel were held up as the gay ship that would change everything, the biggest ship in the fandom and the one that would’ve been a major push for LGBT visibility, at least during their heydays. The problem was that its fans were not really that interested in LGBT visibility and were simply obsessed with the ship itself, applying it value as a win for LGBT audiences purely to bolster its perceived importance. Fans like this were not ever going to accept any alternatives regardless of the sexual orientations or gender conventions involved. Hence, the metaphor that is “the big red button”. You have a big red button that says “canon gay ship but not the ship you want” and ask the fans you’re trying to court whether they’d press it or not. Whatever they might say out loud, you know none of them is pressing that fucking button, ever.

Both of these Big Red Button ships became what they were due to showrunners being forced into courting an audience they really didn’t care for, and how could you blame them when both were infamously very, very over-active and annoying in general. Just like with RWBY’s well-intentioned but misguided Freezerburn phase in Volume 5, Supernatural also tried to gently shut down fans who then managed to obliviously ignore any and all hints that their ship was not meant to be endgame, and I can say that because “he’s like a brother to me” in any fandom but Supernatural would’ve been a tactical nuclear strike that sent the shippers packing. Once it failed, the gay bait came out in full force. It’s well known by now that, contrary to what one would imagine, the CW was not pulling a profit off of Supernatural’s minor mainstream success pushed by a cult following, so it’s no wonder they eventually resorted to desperately baiting the one audience that was going to stick it out no matter what, provided they had the right relationship dangled in front of them. RWBY went through the same thing.

The main problem with these two ships is that for all its diehards insisted that it was all about the gay representation, their respective shows teased and baited for so long that the world outside the little bubble these shippers lived in had moved on by the time they came to fruition. Gay visibility in media these days, at least western media, is easily available, to the extent that sometimes people believe homophobia is totally over when it really, really isn’t. If you’re looking for gay representation, you can find it plenty of places, and the first place you look probably isn’t going to be Supernatural or RWBY. So the huge wave of viewers that these shippers expected upon their victories was never going to occur, which might could’ve been avoided if the writers had simply grown a pair and made moves towards canon much sooner than before the shows were on their last legs and due to be scrapped.

Or, you know, just been honest. Diversions and alternatives were never going to work. The only thing that these shippers were ever going to understand was a hard no, a “sorry, this ship isn’t going to happen”. But the execs in charge of these shows were never willing to take a hit like that, so instead they dug their own grave.

And where does that leave the shippers, those people who devoted their whole lives to these fictional characters, only to find the show that bore them into the universe dead in a ditch? Well, nowhere good. Much like Supernatural, RWBY is heavily associated with its booming period, the heavily online portion of these shippers’ lives in the early and mid-2010s when it was all the rage, and yet in modern day, it’s seen as a bad neighborhood to hang in, an abandoned mansion at the corner of the street where awful things happened. These shippers don’t have many friends except each other.

Just like RWBY, Supernatural also exists primarily as an ex-fandom now. Much of its former fanbase remember the good days fondly but make no secret that they stopped following it once the writing tanked, and this left the shippers without many allies to associate with since so many of them had been pissed off with the way their shows ultimately became the Destiel Show and the Bumbleby Show, respectively. Contrary to an unfortunately popular idea, these shows did have actual LGBT fanbases, only a lot of their LGBT fans were not on kool-aid and avoided being sucked into a trap called “if you don’t ship this, you’re homophobic”.

You will find that the Bumbleby fandom are often looked on with disdain by quite a number of viewers of RWBY who have accused them of speaking over minorities, sexual and otherwise. Many fans have noted that, aside from Blake’s bisexuality being a seemingly late addition (Arryn Zech is noted to have cast her as straight when discussing Ilia Amitola’s ill-fated crush on her as late as 2019), Blake was very swiftly removed from all faunus characters who held romantic connotations in favor of Yang, implicitly saying that Blake was better committing to a white human woman than to an ethnic faunus male. There are obvious reasons why this left a bad taste in peoples’ mouths. Not to mention, other LGBT fans that invested in the show were not exactly welcomed with open arms.

Fair Game, or as I tend to call it, Qrowver? Qrow x Clover? Yeah, that was huge in Volume 7’s airing days. It very much experienced a rapid ballooning in fans and fandom love...but we all know how that ended. Many a fan who felt heartbroken and, importantly, betrayed by Clover’s sudden and rather pointless death turned on RWBY and Rooster Teeth and accused them of gaybaiting, which is of course exactly what happened. They received no sympathy from Bumbleby shippers—because of course they wouldn’t. If Rooster Teeth would gaybait with Qrow, a popular male character, that would mean they could potentially be gaybaiting with Blake and Yang, too. That was unacceptable, and so ironically the part of the fandom that had always crowed about the importance of extending a hand to LGBT viewers turned on LGBT viewers, valiantly defending Rooster Teeth as they always had.

And because Bumbleby fans had no room in their hearts for anything about RWBY except Bumbleby, and were hostile to anyone who didn’t ship it, they ended up being their own best friends and everyone else’s bad memories. When RWBY has faded from the public’s memory and is no longer a source of active income at all (so, basically right now), one of the only relics you’ll find of this show will be the two women making out in all the fanart you’ll find on the occasional Tumblr blog.

The Bigotry

You could call this section “the Racism” since that’s the biggest part of it, but we’d be remiss in neglecting the harm done to other minorities as well. We’ll get to them in a minute, but race is the thing that’s going to pop to mind when we talk about one of the other things RWBY left behind in the common memory.

One of the longest-running subplots that RWBY ever went through with was the racism subplot. Its basis is one of the things that so severely dates RWBY: creating an in-universe stand-in for people of color through the existence of people with animal traits was something you would absolutely not get away with after 2020, and even by 2016 was something liable to be seen as tacky. Nonetheless, RWBY openly used the faunus as stand-ins for black Americans and the struggles they faced in a white world.

Except that the company, based in Texas and headed largely by white staff, did not feel the importance of that. What slowly started out as a main character’s attempt to redeem an organization she felt had been driven too far and was no longer her home was slowly transformed into a means by which some incredibly racist people could spout off about what they felt were the real issues to be talked about, which were the condemnation they felt was deserved by activists that turned to violence, labeled, a little too quickly, as terrorists.

The 2010s saw a shift in social values, and much as with gay audiences and gay characters, black audiences and black characters—as well as other racial minorities—were experiencing something of a renaissance, with efforts to put the voices of these people into the public’s feeds. It wasn’t just George Floyd in 2020—the unexpected and frankly traumatic reign of Donald Trump as president of the United States galvanized the divide in America and social awareness became a bigger thing than ever, and since Trump was a flagrantly racist person with racist beliefs who enacted racist policies and was uplifted by racist Americans, people pushed back as they felt their lives and existences being threatened by a racist establishment...an establishment which Rooster Teeth came down on the side of very firmly.

No quarter is given to the fictional stand-ins. Sienna Khan’s policies are never examined in-depth, and the only close looks we get at the sorts of activism the White Fang does are at Adam, who is obviously condemned by the narrative and made into everything but a mustache-twirler, with delusional and frankly baffling beliefs of faunus superiority spelled out at length. No matter what concessions Rooster Teeth might’ve tried to make with Sienna’s beliefs before they stuck a sword in her, the fact of the matter is that their beliefs came through in the voices of Ghira and Blake, who made it very clear that the individual motives and experiences of people like Ilia, Corsac, Fennec, Yuma, and the rest simply don’t matter in the face of what they’d been driven to do by them. The whole ‘blacks can be racist’ tone of the final scenes involved in this subplot are both miles removed from the more cautious and neutral tone of early RWBY, and also just a very alarming red flag overall.

I went over this in my Volume 5 Final Thoughts: the shoddiness of the volume does not lie solely with the animation department. Miles and Kerry are known to have had generally sole control of the show up until Volume 7—but we also know that they didn’t have to, if they were writing anything company execs felt wasn’t to their tastes. The sudden twisting of Adam into a homicidal incel ex-boyfriend, along with his mutation into a faunus supremacist, when he was the face of the faunus movement as a whole, along with Sun’s blatant ill will towards the White Fang when he’d previously been willing to give them a chance on Blake’s word, all imply that Miles and Kerry endorsed the worst possible interpretations of racial activists and felt free to condemn them and place responsibility onto the faunus—and by extension, the real-life minorities they represented—to take a stand against the bad seeds within their causes, and the fact no one stopped them from airing this implies the higher-ups felt the same way.

People didn’t just leave RWBY after Volume 5 because of some really badly animated fights—they left because they’d felt too much of the authors’ racism coming through in the narrative and couldn’t comfortably continue watching. Every member of the faunus that had “bad” views was either killed (Adam, Sienna, Fennec), arrested (Corsac, Yuma), or “redeemed” by choosing to fight the first two (Ilia). All of these combined factors, with no room for charitable interpretations…not a good look.

And once Adam was defeated in Volume 5, and the White Fang reformed, that was the last anyone saw of that subplot, which had taken five years to wrap up and somehow still ended too early. Miles and Kerry had washed their hands of it, and references to Blake’s place in society were sparing from then on. This subplot’s inescapable presence throughout the show, combined with how it was dropped out of existence, left no room for redemption, either. No one was going back and saying “maybe this looks really, really bad”.

And so, that’s what a lot of people carried with them as their final and most relevant memories of RWBY: it’s astounding levels of racism. This is a bitter subject for many an ex-RWBY fan, many of whom aren’t white and, even among those that are, it’s simply inexcusable. Meet someone on social media who talks about RWBY at all, and isn’t one of the Bumbleby stans we’ve already discussed? You will find some mention or other of RWBY’s racist elements somewhere within their sphere. And so, that becomes a part of RWBY’s legacy, as a feature of the show that was simply too big to ignore and too poorly-handled to forgive. People don’t get over this shit, man.

This is of course not to mention the well deserved shitty reputation RWBY has for its other bigoted elements, as well. Bumbleby, as we’ve discussed, encompassed pretty much every RWBY stan left standing by 2020, but that left quite a few ex-fans that were fed up with the company’s obvious ploys when it came to sexuality and gender. Remember when I talked about Qrowver up above? Its ballooning and immediate fall from grace was a much-condensed version of RWBY as a whole, and pretty much featured as Rooster Teeth blowing their last remaining patience from LGBT fans to smithereens. The fact of the matter is that when you get down to it, every RWBY volume after Volume 4 was not a good time to be a minority. If you were gay, the show seemed to either ignore or despise you—between the background gays that warranted mockery, the mixed reception Ilia generated, and the outrage that finally boiled over when Clover bit it, part of RWBY’s legacy is how utterly unpleasant it has been for LGBT fans who expected and deserved better.

And so despite entering the scene in 2013 as a supposedly progressive show all for being led by four women, the show died known as a low-effort half-baked cringefest whose politics were always on display and always several years behind the trend.

The Good Days

Of course, another major part of RWBY’s legacy is the early days when everyone actually liked it. This is, again, something the show creators brought on themselves and something fans assisted with. I did mention the nostalgia for the Good Ol’ Days as a significant part of the RWBY fandom’s more cult-like elements, after all. The fact of the matter is, on some level, everyone knows that RWBY has spent several years going downhill. The ex-fans lament this fact, and the diehard stans insist that it’s all just as good as it used to be, primarily by doing what they do quite a lot, and linking completely coincidental elements back to things characters said or did in previous volumes as some sort of evidence that this has been the plan all along.

I’ve run polls on this matter before; even though I’ve recapped Volumes 1-3 thoroughly and shone lights on some pretty significant flaws, you ask anyone what they think the best volume of RWBY was and they’re gonna tell you Volume 3. Yes, even with all of the stalking incel Adam and the deaths of Penny and Pyrrha. It’s the last time RWBY felt cohesive and even though some obvious derailing was in effect, and Shane Newville has openly said that the behind-the-scenes matters were pretty ugly, it’s still the golden child. Shane’s only one person, and it’d be a while before RWBY scandals would become consistent and begin to overshadow the show as a whole.

The RWBY team themselves have certainly nurtured that very much on purpose. That tactic started with them, of course. Many elements that were either unpopular or predicted to ruffle feathers were stated to have originated in earlier volumes, even in situations where this wouldn’t have made sense or where it’s an obvious lie—such as Maria Calavera. They know full well their seasons post-Volume 3 were unpopular and receiving blowback, and tried to minimize it by linking them to more well-respected seasons. Suffice to say that this simply didn’t work. But it does make people remember those earlier volumes. Because so many ex-fans lost their energy for RWBY after its most active period, much of the hype from the hype era is all that you’ll see when you encounter one. Nostalgia wins out in the end, and at least RWBY can say that, as a show, it had enough of a headstart to leave an impression that lasted in a positive way. Although that’s only one side of the coin...

The Scandals

Let’s face facts here, the biggest part of RWBY’s legacy, period, is that it fucking died. It didn’t die instantly, but rather took hit after hit, blow after blow, and slowly had its image tarnished alongside that of the company, which failed to contain repeated scandals as ex-employee after ex-employee after ex-employee spoke out about the abysmal ways they’d been treated.

RWBY is Rooster Teeth’s biggest IP by far and, really, their only one worth talking about. Every other show was either eclipsed by it or unofficially canceled after bad reception. So when Rooster Teeth suffered the consequences of their actions, so did RWBY. It really can’t be overstated how the last few years of RWBY’s existence have been absolutely bombarded by a barrage of terrible Glassdoor reviews and bombshell exposure letters. Fans managed to stay strong through the first few rumblings of ill will, but after Volume 5 shook the fandom loose, discontent entered enough of the fandom sphere to be normalized, and once that happened, it was all downhill. Once people were actually allowed to talk about not liking Rooster Teeth’s content, they sure as hell weren’t going to be dissuaded from talking about not liking Rooster Teeth as a company or its practices.

Separating the art from the artist is a very difficult thing to do and only really appropriate in certain situations. Don’t fall for any kool-aid, guys, it doesn’t make you more mature or ‘above all the drama’ to actively ignore the damage done to real people in the process of getting fictional content out into the world.

If you’re still able to enjoy the Harry Potter books and look back on the good times they gave you in fondness, then fine. If you actually purchased and played the Hogwarts Legacy game programmed by antisemites and which puts money in the pocket of the transphobic owner of the franchise, then yeah, people will be right to give you shit for it. There’s a difference between quietly enjoying a product in a manner that doesn’t hurt anybody, and actively ignoring the people hurt to make that product while feigning concern. The gap in the fandom widened as the repeated leaks and scandals continuously ate away at the protective bubble around Rooster Teeth and it became clear that whatever fans might bleat, Rooster Teeth wasn’t going to ‘learn their lesson and do better’. The habitual cycle of using whatever recent scandal had occurred to cast disappointment and anger on a particular figure and uplift the rest of “CRWBY” (see also: the Gray Haddock issue) gave diminishing returns as the bombs kept dropping. This is part of why RWBY has such an ex-fandom, because if they aren’t enjoying the product and people were hurt to make it, why stay?

Crunching employees so hard they struggle to sleep and suffer debilitating health issues? Writing the n-word on a white board knowing a black employee will see it? Goading someone into trying to kill themselves? Calling an LGBT employee a slur and then making up a public-friendly nickname in place of that slur just to get away with continuing to call her that? Laying off people without warning or a means of letting them stay afloat until another job is found? Not paying or crediting employees and cultivating an environment where those in charge do what they want and those in the public eye reap all the benefit while those without a consistent spotlight get treated like dirt?

Just some of the things I thought up off the top of my head. There’s plenty more in the details. And you can’t blame Fullscreen, you can’t blame Warner, you can’t just write it off as something that happens at animation studios, because it isn’t. Yeah, the work environment in general for animation studios in America is lacking because, ya know, late-stage capitalism hellscape, but that’s dismissive of the point. Rooster Teeth are a bad company and hurt their employees and lie when called on it. It’s impossible to separate RWBY from Rooster Teeth (despite stubborn stans’ best attempts, which themselves have been called out by these same ex-employees) and because of that, RWBY’s legacy is one of corporate abuse and utterly vile behavior towards people that just wanted to make something cool.

People have refused to associate with the show over these things and honestly, they’re right to. RWBY’s ultimate legacy, if we’re honest, is the show that became a shadow of its former self, still trying to dazzle with reminders of its former glory and promises of gay relationships, all while trying to squeeze money out of both the employees who made it and the fans who upheld it. It’s the show that cost hundreds of people their physical and mental health and didn’t even have anything to show for it at the end of the day. It will live on in history as the most bitter of pills to swallow, that something you once liked and wanted to succeed can and will be ruthlessly twisted for profit margins and might actively hate you on the side. And speaking of…

Monty Oum

The biggest travesty of RWBY’s legacy is that Monty Oum is ultimately only the smallest part of it. He’s there, but barely—he’s a name in the credits that quite frankly is only there to keep up the facade of loyalty, when the show had stopped being Monty’s show before he even died and by now can be safely said to resemble nothing he would’ve made.

It’s a shame that for all that Monty was held up as a genius of his craft and a genuinely good man who inspired so many people, all he’s going to be remembered for is...this. A show people only attach his name to in an effort to insist it’s actually worth sticking by. Yes, Monty did other things, had other works, but none of them ever achieved even a fraction of the fame and respect that RWBY had from its first baby steps in 2013.

Maybe this could’ve been avoided if the real carriers of Monty’s legacy—Sheena, his wife, and Shane, his pupil—hadn’t been cast off as they had.

Shane seems to have found a new life and is working with Dillon Gu on animation, but I think we’ve all noticed his name hasn’t gone mainstream yet. I’ve tried to get in touch with him; from what I’ve gleaned, I frankly just advise leaving him alone. He wants to move on and I don’t think the RWBY fandom, which was so awful to him for telling the truth, is ever going to be a place he can feel welcome.

Sheena has mostly been quiet and done her own thing, cosplaying and watching anime and hopefully enjoying herself, although I notice posts on her Twitter feed from last year calling for a New Deal in the animation sector and castigating corporate abuses.

She also plays Hades, a much better product than RWBY with more love put into it and much better LGBT representation, which means her taste is excellent. She has a site now that you can go to, and the about section doesn’t mention Monty, her late husband, at all, for obvious reasons: Sheena doesn’t want to be connected to RWBY. Though, there is something there that’s noteworthy, in the last paragraph:

Still desiring a social element to her career, the animator turned professional cosplayer also has a history in the live stream world. Past broadcasts have included creating costume pieces, playing games with community members and subscribers, RPGs and more. No matter the project, peers or problem, Sheena strives to keep moving forward.

That powerful phrase we all associate with Monty.

It’s a shame that this show had to be Monty’s legacy, and that years off from now, his name isn’t going to mean anything to the public because the project he was passionate about and died making outlived him and his passion. It feels like his legacy was stolen, and his own part in the show’s legacy is held up purely as a pedestal on which the show should rightfully shine.

Every time I think about Monty, I think about how much I don’t want that to be me. For all the years I’ve spent here, with my graphics certifications being wasted since I earned them while I slave away in retail, I wonder if I’m the lucky one. If I were to enter the workforce and do what I loved, would it be worth it in the end? Would what happened to Monty and Sheena and Shane happen to me? Not sure I wanna know.

Snipped here.

[see-arcane]

Checking the Hellsing wiki it says

In Volume 8 of the OVA and manga, Harker was not listed within the members of the Vampire Hunters Alucard had listed during his fight with Anderson. This could however, be a mistake made by Hirano.

So even in the manga and OVA they forgot him? Damn.

Funny you mention that! I've been looking up some blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo references for secret reasons. Here's Abraham van Hel(l)sing:

This is the coat and cravat Alucard is seen wearing throughout most of the manga. Or at least he borrowed that style from Abe, opting for his signature red rather than Mystery Grayscale.

And then we see someone implied to be Mina Harker with...

["""UNKNOWN""" PROTECTIVE MALE CHARACTER EMBRACING MINA HARKER. WHOSE LAST NAME IS HARKER. FOR MARRYING JONATHAN HARKER REASONS.]

Who is also wearing a certain familiar hat. And do you recognize the coat?

It's the first coat Alucard wore in the manga before he swapped to Van Hel(l)sing's!

I don't see the ba(t)stard adopting his vintage Victorian fashion and/or lookalikes from just any rando. He'd only copycat them if he had the same weird grudging respect he has for this version of Hel(l)sing. So for character and Mina-hugging reasons, I'm inclined to think the man in the panel with Mina is Jonathan and Hirano accidentally pulled a Stoker mistake--just like with Renfield's group interview, he just forgot he'd put Jonathan in the scene.

Plus, how would it even be explained away in the context here?

'Oh yeah, we're heading off to hunt Dracula to save Mina Harker. Who is married to Jonathan Harker. Who is vibrating with so much Archenemy Energy he's going to cause earthquakes if he doesn't do some vampire violence. So obviously we'll just have Jonathan sit out the entire climax of the original story centered entirely around rescuing his soulmate! Makes sense!!'

(Yeah this could only be a flub.)

As a side note, look what else I found:

Even though she lost the Eucharist burn, Mina's skeleton shows she still had fangs. Very minor post-mortem Monster Mina rights!

[leahnardo-da-veggie]

My OCs Majour Historical Figures

Part 3 of my world building posts! I'm gonna arrange these guys in order of their importance to the Plot™, and how much I dote on them.

So, without further ado,

The Godhuntress, Ina

She's literally my PFP :)

Lived: 2000-4050AC

Height: 3.5m (11'6 for Americans)

Pronouns: She/Her

Race: Angel of Nature (her halo is just flowers)

Was completely loyal to the Gods until her husband got killed for abandoning his post to pluck some flowers for her

Then she went completely apeshit and genocided the gods

Possessed a secret Voidic ritual to drain magic from others, which gave her the power to defeat the Gods

Killed her daughter, Isobel, in a fit of rage after Iz tried to stop her from killing the last goddess, the Goddess of Dreams, who was just a child

Massacred the Fae, elves, and forest spirits

Jumped into the Void out of grief when she realised she had become a monster like the gods (see it here)

Speaks like she came out of the bible

Basically the biggest deity in modern Triworld

Been living rent free in my head since I was 6

2. The Spirit Emperor, Hans-el

Obsessive midgeted psycho

Lived: 3595- AC

Height: 130cm/4'3 (145/4'9 in his high shoes)

Pronouns: He/Him (caps included)

Race: Forest Spirit

Has an everlasting grudge against Ina for killing his best friend, the Goddess of Dreams, in front of him

Knows her power ritual because he saw her do it, and used it to gain enough power to become Emperor for vengeance

After she died, he set all the souls of the gods free for the heck of it

Like Ina, is power-corrupt and evil. Unlike her, he doesn't give a shit about it

Bastard has his little fingers in every bit of the Plot™

No seriously, if the story's set after Ina, it's events are probably his fault

You'll find him cameoing as either Hans or just 'the spirit'

Will murder you if you call him short (he is, even by spirit standards)

Inexplicably in love with Hash

3. Hash Brown

Nobody knows her real name

Lived: 1998- AC

Height: ? (145/4'9 in his favourite form)

Pronouns: she/he (and never it)

Race: Shapeshifter

Possibly the oldest being alive in Modern Triworld, not that she'd let anyone know it

Wears an elf body because that's what she pretended to be during the Runic Wars

Goes by Hash Brown because the Lich-Queen said it would be cool, and he's possibly forgotten his own name by this point

Actually pretty smart but pretends to be a ditz

Pathological trickster who feels bad getting people in trouble

Moved into Hans' castle one day, became his partner in crime (and everything else) and never left

Feels bad for deserting his people during the Ruinic War (cos he couldn't accept genociding humanity) and as such looks after the remaining shapeshifters

Drinking buddies with the Luxatian Exorcists, who all actually believe she's an elf

Fakes an incredibly strong Paliodaen accent

Secretly, deep within his heart, a good person

4. The Lich-Queen, Iraela Foundling

Cracker of bad quips

Lived: 2800-4003

Height: 165cm/5'5

Race: Human turned Lich

Found in the End of the World along with her sister, Ramaeria, and brought into Ceredellian Royal society

She showed no powers so she stayed hidden away while her sister, an Oracle, danced with nobles

Met and fell in love with a minor duke

When she discovered she was a necromancer of epic proportions, she tore Ceredell apart and remade it into the Deadlands

Has a god-awful inferiority complex and deep rooted jealousy

Still somehow trying to live up to her dead sister's image

Cannot stop cracking jokes at the worst possible timing

Thought it was funny to tell a young shifter to name himself Hashbrown

Main proponent of the Ruinic War, because she hates humanity (she doesn't want to be reminded that she was one)

Bonus: Luna Iverius Delacroix, Mind-mage

Absolute tech boomer

Age: 6012-

Height: 150cm

Race: Human

Actually pretty important to the Plot™

Main character syndrome in every meaning of the word

Make-up fiend

Ran away from home at age 11 and made herself a cult of personality

Cannot drive, cook, use a phone or take care of herself

Insanely lazy, but skilled enough at magic to make up for it

Does not know the meaning of playing fair

Neither booksmart nor streetsmart, but a secret third option (not smart)

By the way, all the images were made on picrew.me ! Go check it out, it's super fun to play with!

[bird-inacage]

I was thinking about Sand and Top, and why Sand is hanging on so hard to the past, and what that might say about Sand (and Boeing). One thing I've seen floating around is that the way Sand fixates on Top having "stolen" his ex could indicate some ugly things about Sand re: possessiveness, maybe a controlling nature in relationships, like Boeing is some kind of prize to be won. And that could mean that Boeing leaving him for Top might be less about Top and more about not getting what he wanted from Sand. Alternately, it could be that Sand blames Top because it's easier to do than to acknowledge Boeing's fault in the decision, because it feeds into Sand's fears of inadequacy because of his poverty and the ways his circumstances (time and obligations) restrict what he's able to offer in a relationship. Which might mean Sand hasn't really gotten over Boeing because he's idealised him and blamed everything on Top. Which could be fun if Boeing comes back! Another fun thing I've been thinking about is the Checkov's Gun of whoever Sand's father turns out to be. If it's Top's dad, well, that would play in really nicely to Sand's inadequacy issues with Top - my brother who has the things that I should also have a right to has used those things (status, wealth, freedom) to steal away someone I loved. And on Top's side of things: did he love Boeing? Did he just pursue Boeing because he could and then get bored later? I'd personally love it if Boeing was seduced because Top was pursuing him and it was interesting and fun and exciting but then Boeing left Top because he was bored and unsatisfied in the actual relationship and said some choice words about Sand being better on the way out. Let me have Top with a chip on his shoulder about Sand! That would be delicious! Anyway, I trust Jojo to deliver some tasty spicy drama on this front. What would you like to see out of this plotline?

Hey Anon! :)

I'd almost forgotten about that little clue we'd been dropped a few episodes ago. For the sake of contextualising this for anyone else, I'm assuming you're referring to the little model airplane that Top had in his hotel apartment with the letter 'B' on it (as below)?

I haven't personally read any theories on 'Boenig' (aka whoever gave Top that airplane) being the same person as Sand's ex. In regards to the whole Sand VS Top dynamic, there have been very little concrete clues given to us so far. I try to make predictions based largely on what we've been shown and what I understand of these characters at this current point in the series. So for that reason I'll just discuss my thoughts on Sand's ex.

One thing I will definitely agree on is there's more to this story. Episode 6 confirmed that for me. In order for Sand to be so driven to seek revenge on Top, that he would disregard and risk how Ray may respond, said to me that this grudge runs truly deep.

For Sand to be so disgusted makes me think that either Sand's ex was a very important person in his life (a la Mew for Ray), or the way in which Top seduced or caught his ex's eye was really vile and underhanded.

Due to the fact that Sand's ex is no longer associated with Top meant that it either wasn't serious (maybe they both screwed Sand over), or it didn't work out. However the way Top behaves with Mew suggests that's the first attempted "serious" relationship he's tried to have. So the former may be more likely.

The interesting thing for me though is that Sand and Top clearly look like people who operate in different circles. So Sand's taste in romantic partners I imagine differs quite significantly from Top's. What is it about Sand's ex that would have caught Top's eye in the first place?

I also can't get this out of my mind:

When Sand said this, he looked like he was thinking of a specific memory, very likely the whole debacle with his ex.

Something you did mention, which I thought would be really interesting, is for Sand's ex to return. The cast have been alluding to a special cameo by a familiar face. But especially if they were returning in an attempt to patch things up with Sand and rekindle. Because that would also provide a great source of conflict for Ray/Sand.

As soon as Ray sees Sand possibly being 'taken away' from him, he'll realise how important Sand is. Which would align with the below scene and make sense with Ray's personality. He doesn't want Sand when Sand wants him, but as soon as Sand may be swayed, Ray does want him. Again, classic brat temperament.

In regards to Sand and Top being related - I'm not a huge fan of that theory. I don't see what purpose or additional depth it would add to either of their characters or story arcs in terms of writing.

The 'who is B (aka Boeing)' question is still very much at large for me. I can see why people may think B is Sand's ex, but I'm not convinced Top would keep a memento from someone he "conquered" and "won" from someone else. That doesn't suggest a relationship that has particularly sentimental meaning attached to it.

But thank you for reminding me about the B mystery. There is definitely more to come...

---birdie

[blood-injections]

Saw killjoy au infodump post!! Its danger days but my special little bloody guy is there! When I eventually write it it'll be centered around Adam and it mmmight be chainshipping I'm still deciding.

So the bathroom trap. still happens. adam lives in battery city and to make ends meet he takes pictures of people for people, doesnt matter who, he doesn't ask questions. He's taken jobs from better living to follow suspected rebels and hes taken jobs from rebels to follow some high-profile better living person to get more information on them before they take them out. He stays just off the rader and keeps himself just barely useful or not suspicious enough as to not be put into scarecrow training or something. Because he doesn't like better living, but he has to make ends meet. Jigsaw picks him because he thinks hes pathetic and hates how he doesn't pick a side, his tape says how he doesn't take his pills but he cant even bother fighting for anything. he could do anything with his free will and he chooses to throw his life away and this pisses jigsaw off. so will adam watch himself die, throw his life away once and for all, or will he finally use his free will to fight for something? Because in this au jigsaws motive of teaching people to value life comes from being under better livings control instead of having cancer, because better living is a cancer, really. so yeah jigsaw and co. are technically killjoys lol.

Lawrence is still in the trap too. hes a scarecrow who has stopped taking his pills and is becoming aware of his actions for the first time ever as well as coming to to a family, to a wife he cant remember falling in love with, they were probably set up by the city. He has a family, he has a kid, but its all been fake, does he even love them? can he? and hes haunted by the blood on his hands but he wasn't into control he cant really be a murderer if he wasn't in control, right? right. jigsaw even agrees. but hes also a sick bastard with a grudge against better living so he doesn't care. maybe Lawrence wasn't a murderer, not really, but now he will be. by the end if the day there will be blood on his hands that he can no longer deny or write off as someones elses actions. because to jigsaw it doesn't matter who was in control, lawrence still pulled the trigger. No matter what lawrence does, if he kills adam or not, there will still be deaths on his conscience, because he needs to learn a lesson, how it feels, how to be scared. he kills adam and his family will be spared. Don't kill adam? its his family that will die instead. but how can he choose? two people or one. two he thinks he loves, hes supposed to, but he hardly knows them, or one person that he might be falling in love with the more that adam begs for him to stay.

in the end he doesn't have to choose(well. not completely. the shoulder bullet prob still happens lol) and they both make it out because fuck you. also just so you know, in this au jigsaw is Dr Benzedrine and the apprentices are the suitehearts and that will absolutely come into play down the line with a possible frankenghoul cameo, the franken bit the result of being a victim of a trap of his own.

anyway adam, after nearly dying, after realizing he wants to fucking live, has never had plans before but now hes like fuck it, im getting out of here, im getting out of this freaky city with creeps like jigsaw apparently running around. he isnt taking any more chances. So he gets out, he becomes a killjoy. and theres the whole trauma bonding thing so he probably takes lawrence(who is still struggling with the am i a murderer or not thing and thinks he doesn't deserve this second chance. he'll accept it eventually) with him. i dont have any of lawrence's killjoy thought out yet i'll come up with some stuff later it also probably depends on if i decide its chainshipping and if hes even out there or not like i might just fucking adam stanheight final girl it like fuck it he wasn't doomed by the narrative his hacksaw didnt break or he found another way out of his chains and the roles are reversed or maybe he even fucking killed lawrence before lawrence could kill him who knows, i dont lol. theres so many possibilities.

anyway adam stanheight killjoy. his name Hacksaw Jagger(working title) because hacksaw. you know. and jagger because a jagger is another term for a vouyer and i think thats clever. also adam could be a fan of the rolling stones and hed be like lol reference. but yeah, Hacksaw Jagger. depending on how things went in the bathroom he may or may not have a prosthetic leg. he dyes his hair at some point and to me personally. its the worst brassiest ugliest bleached tips youve ever fucking seen and probably like little liberty spikes at some point because. punk adam as well. you agree. anyway he looks pathetic and i love him. he definitely gets into racing at some point and also learns he has a thing for arson and explosives. so yknow. hacksaw+fun ghoul besties at first boom at some point. i also think it'd be fun if he joined/started a band but thats a conversation for another day maybe another au.

anyway thats it for now. also yes, i absolutely fuck with his gender. you're welcome.

[chthonicgodling]

AN ELYSIUM DRAMA UPDATE!

via clip show✨ HEY! Did you miss one??! THE PREVIOUS UPDATE, HERE, IS SOOO IMPORTANT!!

starring: Neo & Raz! Maci & ELoki & Tory! And cameos by Celos & Pyralis, and even Skio!!

phew!!!

ha ha AHH I’m still playing really fast catch up on Elysium shenanigan updates before this baby is here!! HIII THE TAKI FUEGO BABY IS TECHNICALLY DUE ANY DAY NOWWWWW!! but I’ve been nerfed by my own brain so hopefully I can get back to the modern day before he’s actually here cause fgkfkfkg I’m dragging along artwise—

WELL! Rewinding back to June again!

After the DRAGON REVEAL🐉🐉🐉 about their SON (AGAIN, THAT UPDATE IS HERE LOL) and now that EeL’s back and situated nicely, it finally came time to tell the baby’s OTHER halfsibling pod about what was going on. Maci assembled a gathering of her and Tory’s kids (sans Chal/Eisa/Myra who were. all busy) for a formal announcement at long last! Amongst their two oldest - Raz is THRILLED! Dragon baby that’s so cool?!?!?! And Neo is—

😶🙃🙃 Ummm Neo issssssss….

Though Neo has no grudge against Loki *specifically,* she WAS there, at the age of 8, when Loki had Eisa and Einmyria with Tory a decade ago and thus bore witness to the explosive drama triggered at the time BECAUUUSE OF LOKI’S INVOLVEMENT. And!! Everyone knows he and Maci usually hate each other so!! What the Fuck is going on?!!! What sort of scheme is this?? WHAT’S HIS ULTERIOR MOTIVE?!!!!! NEO’S ONTO HIM AND NOT GONNA LET HIM GET AWAY WITH THIS—

(Idk how much of this I’ll really get to draw since my time is RUNNING OUT but) Tory at least did clock Neo’s DEATH GLARE OF SUSPICIOUS IRRITATION and has talked her through her worries (though Neo refuses to admit they’re worries. SHE doesn’t worry 😒…she said while actively worrying. It is quite unlike her!) and at this point in time PLUS a mental deep dive interrogated out of Ty and Bel to assuage her concerns Neo… has tentatively moved on…. But she’s Watching Him.

🤨 hmm.

Well!! The next formal Elysium Drama Update is already drawn but I have to see if I can fit something in the middle of it 🫢 MAYBE, mood & time willing! But… in the meantime here’s some choice clips grabbed from this much longer Canon Convo….Raz nd Neo both have such good faces in here ffkfk

Raz and Tory and all their orange dialogue together is aaallll @fenixethekid (Raz moments are sooo rare and this was SO GOOD) - I’ve got all these other wackos and all dialogue in pink and greeen!

[violetjedisylveon]

Birthday Celebration

Little Star chapter 10

Summary: it's Chao-Xing's first birthday! The entire mountain celebrates in Shuilian Cave. Featuring a cameo from 4 yo MK and his parents. And a secret third character

Word count: 4.4k

Warnings: pretty chill chapter honestly, until the end, then there's some death stuff and implications of unsavory behavior

A/N: MK is in this chapter, but he is described with feminine pronouns and the name Yawen because he is trans in all my aus. He's not figured it out yet.

Cracked Family AU Masterpost

____________________________________________________________________________________________

“Oh I'm sorry, I didn't know you wanted to offend a goddess on our daughter's first birthday!”

“It's not that big of a deal, Mihou, Nuwa doesn't expect anything from me. She doesn't deserve it either.”

Liu'er clenched his fists at the extent of his mate's ability to hold a grudge. He silently prayed their daughter didn't take after him with that.

“Put your problems aside and pray for your daughter’s sake.” he gestured towards Chao-Xing sitting next to him.

“Bà! Hi!” She waved happily.

“Chao-Xing, do you want Papa to sit?” Liu'er asked his daughter.

She nodded eagerly with a delighted squeak. He looked at Wukong, watching his mate fold to the power of their adorable daughter.

“Do it for her, peaches.” He said.

Wukong let out a loud, exasperated groan, he trudged over to their ancestral shrine. It was a very small shrine, they only had three parents between them, and only one of them was dead.

“It won't kill you to be polite.” He teased.

“I actually think it will.” Wukong shot back.

“So that's how you kill Sun Wukong. I'll keep it in mind.” He snickered.

Liu'er closed his eyes and let his hands rest on his thighs to pray. He heard his sunshine’s tail twitch in agitation. He didn't even need to look to know Chao-Xing had heard it too, he knew the little cub was waiting for the right moment to pounce.

“She's going to attack your tail if you don't stop that.” He whispered.

“Shouldn't she be praying too?” His mate muttered.

“Wukong, she's one year old and knows three words.” Liu'er flicked him gently.

“Hey- ow!” Wukong's retort was cut off by their cub pouncing on his tail.

Liu'er opened his eyes to watch his daughter play her favorite game. Chao-Xing viciously attacked her baba’s tail, clawing and biting with an unrelenting fury. Of course, she couldn't do any real damage, she was still far too small for that, but that sure as hell didn't stop her from trying.

“Alright fluff ball, enough of that.” Liu'er plucked his daughter off his mate's tail.

She gave him her cute pouty face, he tapped her nose lightly, her eyes crossed as she watched his finger.

“You can do it later.” He promised 

“Hey!”

“It's not my fault she likes to chew your tail more than mine.” He defended himself.

“Let's just get this over with.” Wukong sighed in defeat.

They finished up what should have been a much quicker prayer, but a certain rambunctious cub made it take a bit longer.

Liu'er scooped his daughter into his arms, she giggled happily when he tossed her gently.

“You are such an adorable distraction, yes you are.” He cooed.

She cooed back. He flipped the hood of her tiger sweater over her head, grinning at her giggle as she pushed it back out of her face.

“She likes that more than the boots.” Wukong commented with a chuckle.

Their daughter chirped insistently at them. She made her little “hungry” motion, tapping her stomach while looking directly at him.

“Looks like someone wants breakfast.” Wukong cooed, kissing the top of her head.

“Want some lychees?” He asked.

Chao-Xing nodded eagerly, Liu'er let his mate whisk their cub away from him off to the kitchen for her favorite fruit. He watched them go with a smile on his face.

Whoever let us have this, thank you.

“Bà!” Chao-Xing chirped for him.

“Coming!” He followed them into the kitchen.

He entered the kitchen to see his mate trying to cut up some lychees and kiwis while keeping their daughter contained with his tail. She was trying to sneak over to the fruit bowl, she looked at him hopefully once she heard him.

“Did you call your Baba on me?” Wukong gasped, holding his hand over his heart like she'd insulted his mother.

The cheeky little cub grinned at her father then wriggled free of his grip. She scampered across the floor, hiding behind his leg. He scooped her up with his tail around her waist.

“I'm not going to help you, your Papa is getting breakfast ready. Wait a little bit Lychee.” He told her.

The year old cub scowled at him, unhappily resigned to doing her time in air jail while Wukong finished cutting up her fruit. He released the little cub from her time out once his mate had set the bowl of fruit on the table for her. Chao-Xing eagerly shoved her little face full of fruit.

“She looks like you when you want peaches.” He commented.

“I don't look like that!” Wukong squeaked.

“Yes you do, peaches~” he teased.

Wukong covered his blushing face, Liu'er tried to hide his laughter. He didn't do a very good job.

“You're mean today, Mango.” Wukong complained.

“Pointing out the obvious isn't mean, Wukong.” he said.

“Bà!” His daughter chirped.

She was pointing to the living room where Ma was standing.

How did she-?

“How long have-”

“Long enough. You do know the whole mountain has been waiting for you all morning, right?” The albino monkey prompted.

“The whole mountain?” Liu'er 

“Yeah, pretty sure everyone is here.” Ma nodded.

“Can they all fit in the cave?” Wukong asked 

“The cave used to have a massive stone palace in it, we fit many more in there before it was destroyed. One thousand will fit just fine.” She said.

“Oh, right.” His mate mumbled.

Ma snagged a mangosteen from the counter. Liu'er cleared his throat awkwardly.

“I didn't think everyone would be so excited.” He said.

“You say that like you don't call yourselves grandpa Sun and Liu'er.” Ma popped a piece of fruit into her mouth.

“Of course, everyone is excited that your kid is having her first birthday.” She said.

“And it means we're one year closer to someone else being in charge around here.” She added with a snicker.

“Isn't that right, bǎo bèi?” she asked Chao-Xing.

The little girl chirped happily, reaching her sticky hands out to her aunt. Ma picked their cub up, tapping her nose lightly.

“Yes, you are going to be a great queen one day.” She said sweetly.

“Whoa, hold your horses, Ma, she's got a long way to go before that happens.” Wukong said, grabbing their daughter out of his sister's hands.

“Alright, I'll put my plots on hold.” Ma flicked his mate's nose with her tail.

“Now c'mon, we've got a thousand monkeys waiting to celebrate this little one's birthday.” She said.

The moment they stepped out of the house, a quiet chorus of cheers and congratulations came from the crowd. Chao-Xing squeaked, happily clapping her hands. Liu'er glanced down at his daughter.

“You're going to cause so much trouble today, aren't you?”

The cheeky cub gave him a big smile.

XXX 

“Shí Hóu, the cubs are getting awfully close to the food.” Liu warned.

The stone brain barely acknowledged her comment. In fairness to him, he was busy answering questions of their visitors.

Of the one hundred immortal demon monkeys who lead troops off of Flower Fruit Mountain, twenty had made the journey to visit, the other eighty had sent messages and well wishes to their king's daughter.

“They're going to knock it over.” Mochou sighed.

“I have a back up.” Liu told her daughter.

“We're going to need it.” Liang said.

The cubs were playing a very active game of tag or hide and seek, they were running all over Shuilian Cave, including right by where the food was cooking.

Lots of fruit and meat were being slowly roasted over a big very fire pit that she and all the other elders were staying far away from, several large bowls of soup were bubbling away, and they had seafood cooking on a separate fire pit for the sake of those who couldn't stand the taste of it. That was all most of them needed or wanted.

The majority of the troop didn't share their kings, or her, fondness for the more human foods they made. It was definitely an acquired taste. The most they would indulge in it was the occasional holiday or festival treat.

They grew enough of the human crops on the mountain that those who did like them, such as Liu herself, would have access to it.

The cubs were currently playing close to the cooking area, the cooks were hard at work trying to manage the rambunctious cubs. Chao-Xing was in the thick of it, the little shit was using her shadow to dodge and grab her friends, sometimes dragging them into the shadows with her.

It was adorable, but they were going to cause a problem soon.

But it's not my problem. Liu thought.

She spotted her old friend Min break away from the crowd of visiting elders.

“I’m gonna say hi to Min before that ends in disaster.” she gestured to the cubs.

Liang nodded and resumed her conversation with their cub.

“Hey Min!” She called out to the other monkey.

“Liu! How've you been?” The smaller monkey hugged her.

“Great, it's been going well here, how’s it been with your troop?” She asked.

“The troop is doing well, we had a very successful spring, we didn't lose a single mother!” Min said.

“That's great! How many cubs did you get?”

“Thirty in total, so far we've got twenty six.” Min told her happily.

“I wish their parents well.” Liu murmured softly.

“I’ll let them know.” Min said.

“What else happened with your troop?” Liu asked.

Min smiled, her tail swished excitedly.

“Liling is expecting, it was a job and a half convincing her to stay, she so wanted to come see the little ones.” Min told her.

“Will they cub be a spring or winter baby?”

“Early spring.”

“Then I'll have to come visit once the cub is born.” Liu said.

“Wonderful, I can't wait for you to see the troop.” Min grinned.

“Oh! How is RinRin doing these days?” She asked.

Liu rolled her eyes fondly at her little sister's mention.

“She's still living on the moon with Yùtù.” She said.

“That's great, tell her I say hi-” Min broke off with a startled yelp at the loud crash that came from the food area.

Liu turned to the source with a sigh. The cubs had indeed knocked over some of the food, luckily none of them were hurt or all that dirty, but it was a big mess.

“Knew it.” Mochou giggled.

Liang glanced at her with a knowing grin.

“Liu dear, didn't you place an order at that noodle shop?” she asked oh so innocently.

“I did. I'll go get it.” Liu said.

“Hey Mihou! Think you can open a shadow portal for me?” she called out.

The six eared monkey shot her a tired glare, he snapped his fingers and a glowing shadow portal appeared near her feet.

“Thanks! I'll be back in an hour!” She said before jumping into the portal.

She came out in Daiyu’s house, the dragon let her use her residence as a safe space to travel to and from the city. Liu quickly shape-shifted into her human disguise.

She checked her reflection, she was taller with a more human face, her shape shifting hid most of her primate features, her eye markings remained in the few forms she knew. She applied a glamor over pinkish red eye markings, making them look like the makeup humans wore.

Her hair was still thick and unruly, that had never caused her a problem before, the humans of this city were used to demons and demons glamoring themselves to make going about their daily business easier. Shape shifting was harder to master than a simple glamor.

With one last check, Liu stepped out of Daiyu’s residence into the busy streets of Megapolis.

The city was bustling with activity, people were running around getting ready for the upcoming Qixi festival. 

Soon, she spotted the familiar, adorably drawn sign of a pig chef holding a bowl of noodles.

Liu entered the noodle shop quietly. It was luckily empty aside from the pig, his mate and their daughter.

The little girl was coloring at the counter next to her human father, sticking her tongue out as she he concentrated on what was likely another drawing of the pig chef.

Yawen looked up at the sound of the door’s bell ringing and her big brown eyes brightened.

“Liu! Liu’s here Baba!” She tugged on her father's sleeve, excitedly pointing her out.

The scholar turned to her and waved, she took it as an invitation to come in.

“Hi Tang, how's the kid doing?” she asked him.

“I'm great!” Yawen said before her father could answer.

“Really? Wanna tell me while I wait?” She prompted.

The girl's eyes lit up, she practically shook with excitement.

“I turned four a few days ago! Dadsy made special noodles and then we went to the zoo! Tài pó and nǎi nai were waiting for us! We got to see the monkeys! They got a new baby monkey! It's a little baby with no parents cause they're dead and they brought him in and one of the mama monkeys adopted him and she's really protective and doesn't let people see the baby but she let me see him! He's a cute little baby!” Yawen said in one breath.

Liu smiled at the kid despite the poorly hidden nervousness on her father's face.

“That sounds like it was a lot of fun.” She said.

“It was! And tài pó took me to the gift shop and got me a monkey! I call her Coco cause she's fluffy and brown!” Yawen said.

She suddenly gasped and looked at Tang with big pleading eyes.

“Can I show her, Cocoa? Please?” She begged sweetly.

“S-sure! Just be quick.” Tang nodded.

Yawen squealed happily, the adorably pig ear shaped bangs that hung over her eyes flopped and bounced with her excitement. The little girl took off upstairs, promising to be back down soon.

Liu waited a moment to make sure the kid was out of earshot.

“I don't know what you're so nervous about, I'm a monkey demon ” She said.

“I didn't know how you would take it. I know most monkey demons don't like things like that.” The scholar explained.

“Hmm, fair enough.” she shrugged.

Yawen came running back down the stairs, she nearly tripped over her own feet in her rush down.

“Kid! Be careful on the stairs!” Pigsy called out from the kitchen.

“Sorry Dadsy!” Yawen shouted.

The pig chef muttered something about how reckless the kid was under his breath. It reminded her of Yuze quietly venting how accident prone Wukong and Ma were.

“Here's Coco!” Yawen shouted.

The little girl held the floppy monkey toy up to her.

“Coco is very cute.” Liu said.

“And I got this! Miss Yu let me pick from one her stones for free cause it was my birthday! I got this one! Isn't it pretty?” She shoved the object in her face.

The stone was cut into a six pointed star, the center of the star was yellow and it smoothly transitioned to a rich purple at the tips.

“It's beautiful.” Liu told her.

“Yeah! Miss Yu said it was super special too and that I always had to make sure it was safe!” Yawen said.

Liu glanced at Tang, the man just shrugged. She turned her attention back to Yawen.

“You wanna know something special?” Liu whispered to the little girl.

“What?!” She gasped excitedly.

“It's my niece's first birthday today.”

“Really?!?! That's so cool! We're practically birthday twins!” Yawen shouted.

“Yeah, it is cool.” Liu agreed

“Are you having a party?!” Yawen asked.

“Of course, I’m picking up the food for it.” She nodded.

“Speaking of food, your order is ready.” Pigsy said.

He set the large order down at the counter, Yawen gawked at the amount of food.

“Whoa, you have a huge family!” she exclaimed.

“Yep, sure do.” Liu agreed.

She picked the order up with little difficulty, amazing the little girl again.

“You're so strong Liu! I bet you're as strong as Monkey King!” She said.

Ah, there it is. The kid's fascination with her brother was adorable.

“Why thank you, Yawen.” Liu gave the girl a little bow, holding the flat of food with just one hand instead of two, eliciting a squeal from the child.

She turned to pay for her order with the current human currency, they changed so often it was annoying to keep track.

“Thanks for the food Pigsy, you're a lifesaver.” She told the chef.

“Just doing my job.” The pig grunted.

Gruff and tough as always. She liked Pigsy a lot more than Zhu Bajie.

“And it's always great!” She called out as she headed for the door.

“See you around kiddo.” She waved to Yawen.

“Bye Liu! See you soon!” Yawen called after her.

Yawen was one of the sweetest human kids she'd seen in a long time, she loved getting to hear the kid just talk about anything whenever she came by…

Though there was something less than human about her. She didn't feel naturally human. Something, on some level, was being hidden.

Seeing past the barriers others put up was not her strong suit, detecting that things were hidden was, and she could barely get a sense for it. It was so heavily hidden.

I doubt even Wukong could see what's underneath that. If I could get him to come here. She thought.

Her parents had to know, they were very quiet about where their daughter came from, she was adopted after all. Liu had managed to learn that Yawen was given to them for her sake, a conversation she was probably not supposed to have heard.

Whatever it is, she's lucky to have them as her parents. Yawen was a good, sweet kid, a home full of love was exactly what any child needed.

Maybe I can convince Wukong and Mihou to let me bring Chao-Xing here, I'm sure she and Yawen would be friends.

XXX

“Chao-Xing! You're making a mess.” Wukong scolded his cub.

The little monkey stared innocently up at him.

“Nice try, I know you understand “mess”.” He said.

She grinned and continued making a mess of her food. He sighed and went to pick her up, or he tried to since the little shit dropped into her own shadow and reappeared a few feet away. She still had the peach bun Liu had gotten from the mainland, and was still making a mess of it.

“You're going to get a bath later!” He threatened.

She giggled happily, making an even bigger mess with the bun.

“You like baths too much for a stone monkey.” He muttered.

He kept an eye on his cub as she ate and played with her food, he knew the second he looked away she would disappear. She couldn't go very far yet, it was still a hassle to track her down.

“Hey peaches, what do you think of the food?” His mate asked as he came out of his shadow.

“It's good, Liu likes the place for a reason.” he said.

“Honestly, I didn't expect Bajie’s great-something grandkid to be such a good cook.” Liu'er commented 

“What?!” Wukong sputtered.

“Yeah, Caihong told me when she visited, he got the shop from his grandmother I think.” Liu'er shrugged.

“That is a crazy coincidence.” Wukong murmured.

His pilgrim brother’s descendant made the food he and his troop were eating on his daughter's first birthday. 

“The sure universe works in mysterious- where did Chao-Xing go?”

Wukong snapped his head around to where he last saw his daughter, sure enough, she was gone. She left her peach bun behind. 

He transformed a few hairs into clones, they spread out through the cave. He heard the troop take notice of his clones.

“Shí Hóu? Something up?” Ba asked.

“We lost track of Chao-Xing.” Liu'er told him quickly.

“Oh, shit.” Ba said.

“She can't have gone far, she probably hasn't even left the cave.” Wukong said, ignoring how his heart started pounding in his chest.

“I'll let the troop know to keep an eye out for her.”

“Thank you.” He called after his brother.

He turned to Liu'er, his mate's beautiful ears were spread out to search for their daughter, the luminous petal-like ears created an ethereal glow around his moonlight’s pretty face. The echoes of the cave sometimes messed with his moon's hearing, and the amount of people in the cave could confuse him.

“Do you hear her?” he whispered.

“She's nearby, she hasn't gotten into any trouble as far as I can tell.” Liu'er said.

His ears returned to their neutral state, a much gentler glow came from the all hearing ears. He's so beautiful. His mate grinned smugly at him.

“Peaches, I know I'm pretty but we have a cub to find.” he said, snapping him out of his thoughts.

He covered his blushing face as he quickly walked away from his mate, it got worse when Liu'er giggled behind him. Ma approached him with a shit eating grin.

“Don't say anything.” He hissed.

“Why? Is my baby brother embarrassed by his pretty husband?” she teased.

“Stop! We have to find Chao-Xing!” He said.

His voice came out in a much… whinier tone than he would have preferred.

“Aww, Xiao Shí Hóu is embarrassed, poor baby.” Ma snickered.

“I hate you so much.”

“Love you too, xiǎo dí.” Ma flicked his nose with her tail.

“Now, stop being a flustered mess, we've gotta find your cub.” She told him.

“You're the one who-” she covered his mouth before he could finish.

“Zip. Find your kid.” She instructed.

He glared after his sister as she went off to search.

They spend the next half hour searching for Chao-Xing until they finally found her asleep underneath a cushion on the porch bench.

The little cub had tired herself out with all the mischief she got up to during the day. Wukong picked his sleeping daughter up, careful not to wake her, she was like her baba when she got woken up too early.

“Looks like this party is over.” Liu'er chuckled softly.

They bid farewell to their visiting guests and their troop, then headed into their home for the night.

They took Chao-Xing to the bathroom to get a quick bath. She woke up just enough to enjoy bath time, splashing around sleepily in the warm water.

Wukong swaddled his cub in a towel while Liu'er set the nest up for the night. She made tiny little squeaks and chirps at him as he dried her off, the towel was her least favorite part of bath time, she would rather air dry. Tonight she was thankfully too tired to put up much of a fight.

“See? Drying off isn't that bad.” He told her once he was done.

She gave him a tired pouty glare, too sleepy to make a fuss.

He brought her into their bedroom, Liu'er was already in the nest grooming his own tail. He climbed in, setting their daughter between them, she cuddled up in the blankets with a happy purr.

He ran a hand through her fluffy hair, he still couldn't believe she was a year old. Liu'er placed a hand over his own, their tails twirling together.

“We should probably take her off the mountain soon.” Liu'er murmured.

“Have your sisters been asking?” He asked.

“Yeah, RinRin and Yùtù too, they all wanna meet the baby.” Liu'er yawned, patting Chao-Xing lightly.

“That'll be an eventful gathering.” Wukong sighed.

“Hmm… shouldn't do it here…” Liu'er mumbled sleepily.

Wukong smiled at his mate, big gatherings like today tended to tire his moon out. He scouted closer, placing a gentle kiss on his forehead.

“We'll figure that out later, let's just sleep for now.” He whispered.

“M’kay… love you sunshine…”

“Love you too moonlight.”

XXX

The chained demon stirred at the cold blue fog floating into his prison.

“Witch.” the demon growled.

An eerie giggle came from the fog.

“Look at how the mighty have fallen.” Her voice rang out through the emptiness around the chained demon.

“You used to be a king, a conqueror, you had the lives of millions at your fingers, and look at you now, rotting in the underworld.” she snickered.

The demon growled at her. He was a prideful fool, but she could use him on the board. And if he got a little revenge on her enemies in the meantime, she wouldn't say no to that.

“I suppose you haven't heard, being trapped down here and all, but it's quite the talk of the realms.” she whispered.

“Today happens to be the very first birthday of the daughter of Sun Wukong and the Six Eared Macaque. Isn't that nice?” She prompted.

That got the chained demons attention. As an old foe of the Monkey King, and, well his disgusting affinity for the Six Eared Macaque she did not care for, regardless, he was an enemy of her enemy.

She could use him.

“Yes, they have a cub, the little princess has never left the mountain. She must be so much weaker than her parents, she's not solid stone after all.” She hissed.

The gears were turning in the chained demon's head, she had her claws in him, all he needed was a little extra push. His hatred for the Monkey King would drive him right into her clutches.

“Wouldn't you like to meet that weak little cub? I can free you.” She offered.

“What is the catch?” The demon hissed

“All I ask in return is that you free me when the time comes, you're free to do as you please until then.” She said.

The chained demon was silent for much too long for her liking.

“Well? Don't you want to be a king again? Don't you want to get back at the Monkey King who slayed you?” She prompted.

“You have a deal, Lady Bone Demon.” The once king said.

“I look forward to our partnership.” She said respectfully.

She ripped the demon’s soul from the underworld, she reforged his body, he had been dead long enough there was nothing but bones left of it. It would be a painful return, but necessary to ensure her destiny.

The demon King of Havoc had returned to the mortal plain, assured to wreck destruction upon the Monkey King and his family.

[bliss-wily]

More hcs from my silly little head - seems to be the direction this is going in and I’m going to run with it. Using this as my space to let me thoughts run wild as I deal with lovely headaches~

This time? Frieza and maybe his family! Read below to find out~

Note: In my mind Cooler and Kuriza are canon. I know they aren’t but this is my version so meh.

•Smooth yet scaly skin.

•Don’t talk to him until he’s had his grape juice.

•And yes, grape juice.

•No wine for the space lizard - his father wants all the wine for himself.

•King Cold is a wine mom. And maybe a soccer mom, Freezy Pop is his little boy.

•”MY FATHER WILL HEAR ABOUT THIS”

•”JUST WAIT UNTIL MY FATHER HEARS ABOUT THIS”

•Also, definitely still calls King Cold ‘daddy’.

•A daddy’s boy.

•Frieza had Kuriza simply to have an heir.

•Ends up loving the little brat but won’t admit it.

•Zarbon is designated babysitter.

•King Cold definitely had Zarb babysitting his two boys as well.

•And yes, every elite is older than Frieza~

•My proof? Broly! I took plenty of screenshots of one part of that movie because…Frieza Force! Can’t find the rest of my screenshots but just some cans several of the elites are present.

(Also for some reason Jeice’s arm is not covered in his spandex? Oh well, think it’s an error as he is covered in other parts of his cameo. Also Zarb has white shoes instead of brown. Ah excuse my rambling!)

•Anywayyy…Berryblue was basically the nanny for the two boys (Frieza and Cooler).

•Also, Freezy Pop is very insecure of his height - hence why his aides are shorter than him.

•Zarbon and Dodoria are his right hand men, they are allowed to be taller.

•Despite being expendable, I think Zarbon was Frieza’s closest confidant.

•And by god - no one insults his two right hand men. Sorbet got an earful for comparing Tagoma to them after all, only he gets to speak bad about them!

•If you’re good to him, he will be good to you. Unless you become a threat and stand in his way of course! Can’t have that!

•Heavily relies on Zarbon and Berryblue respectively. I think Zarbon is tasked with anything and everything, whether that’s changing the emperor’s bed or helping him with his sense of style.

•The two are friendly BUT IT IS VERY CONDITIONAL.

•Keeps Zarbon close as I feel the two would agree on certain things: skincare, presentation, aesthetics…plus both nepo babies in my opinion. They’d have plenty to talk about.

•Dodoria can be Karen, it’s like space Mean Girls.

•Future Warrior from Xenoverse can be Cady.

Now I’m getting off track…I’m sorry these are always rambly, I’m very unprofessional.

•Frieza still acts like a child and the universe to him is his toy box.

•His favourite toys are closest to him though.

•Blinded by his obsession to beat Goku.

•And due to this blindness I think Cooler has the potential to be stronger.

•Cooler I imagine is the more mature and less sadistic of the two.

•Cooler is more well rounded; better to his men, and despite the fact he would and could kill Frieza - anyone else touches his little brother? Oh there’s hell to pay! Only he’s allowed.

•Highly unbothered that Frieza is the favourite - if anything, to Cooler, that just means more freedom to an extent.

•Actually takes his role seriously.

•Salza is his Zarbon in this scenario - he doesn’t need a Berryblue though as Cooler is mature enough to lack a babysitter.

•I think Cooler would be a good uncle to Kuriza, I don’t think he would hold a grudge towards the little one.

•Speaking of Kuriza…this boy I imagine to be a ray of sunshine!

•Just to totally go against Frieza’s personality - Kuriza loves sports, art, games, playing with toys, etc.

•Just a sweet kid but has combat prowess.

•And his cuteness means the members of the Force let the little Lord get his way.

•Zarbon especially, he wouldn’t let anything happen to that boy.

•Nor would Ginyu, I think he would be the honorary sixth member.

•Although I think Zarbon, Frieza, and Bonyu would discourage the posing aspect.

•Kuriza will be the only ‘sane’ member of the family.

•Loves his daddy, uncle and gramps - and his other uncles and aunties in the form of the elite force members.

•Well mannered and behaved.

•I will assume much like the Namekians, Frieza’s race/Icejins/Frost Demons reproduce asexually. Sure Cold and his two sons are highly attractive but I doubt they have the time.

•Now for Cold! Wine mom as I said. Loves wine, loves retirement.

•Calls Cooler by his name, Frieza gets all the nicknames from ‘Princess’, ‘Freezy Pop’, ‘Prince’, ‘Free’, ‘Freezy Baby’, etc. super embarrassing dad vibes.

•At all royal/political/whatever events the PTO are involved in just know this man is coming with all the most embarrassing pictures of his two boys. Frieza especially.

•A very proud daddy, doubt he ever let Frieza out of his sight when the tyrant was young.

•Also, raising Kuriza most of the time. I don’t think he wants to see his grandson getting hurt.

•Rarely sober, always at least a little tipsy.

•Very refined, expensive taste, probably had Zarbie as his favourite minion as well.

•His private residence is family photos, definitely had to bribe Frieza into behaving.

•Also…loaded but in an old money sense.

•Could be stronger than his two boys, but who’s got time for that? Or need? Nah…wine, luxuries; and his boys. That’s what matters most.

•Wine snob - whole family are. Well apart from Frieza and Kuriza - expensive grape juice!

•Sees Cooler as an adult, sees Frieza as his precious little baby.

It’s like nearly 3am here; these are all over the place and I should probably sleep, but that’s my contribution for this early morning~