#he's pretty much throwing himself under a bus in this chapter. it shows how he worries for her and tries to take care of her.

[sovamurka]

Demonslayer Vol.2, ch.14 or “A very, very bad day for Balor, who is straight up not having a good time”

[bethanydelleman]

So many people judge Elinor Dashwood for accepting Willoughby's "apology" (it's really just a sob story where he throws every female in his life under the bus), but she doesn't really forgive him AND she is in a very delicate emotional state and dead tired when it happens. For a full defense, I've taken the quotes that show what Elinor is thinking during Chapter 44-46 of Sense & Sensibility. (This is really long)

He arrives right after Elinor is finally assured that Marianne is going to live, after some very trying moments where Mrs. Jennings was predicting that her sister would die. She is waiting for her mother to arrive, and then he walks in. Her emotional state is intense:

Never in her life had Elinor found it so difficult to be calm, as at that moment. The knowledge of what her mother must be feeling as the carriage stopt at the door—of her doubt—her dread—perhaps her despair!—and of what she had to tell!—with such knowledge it was impossible to be calm.

She is not happy to see him, she only barely agrees to hear him out, she is mostly pissed, "Miss Dashwood, at this point, turning her eyes on him with the most angry contempt" And this is Elinor! Who usually controls her expression of feelings.

Elinor remains pretty annoyed with him throughout:

“I have,” returned Elinor, colouring likewise, and hardening her heart anew against any compassion for him, “I have heard it all. And how you will explain away any part of your guilt in that dreadful business, I confess is beyond my comprehension.”

But as Willoughby goes on, Elinor wavers:

Elinor’s heart, which had undergone many changes in the course of this extraordinary conversation, was now softened again

“You are very wrong, Mr. Willoughby, very blamable,” said Elinor, while her voice, in spite of herself, betrayed her compassionate emotion

She does agree that his explanation at least makes him a slightly better person, but her language is hedged, a lot:

“Yes, you have certainly removed something—a little. You have proved yourself, on the whole, less faulty than I had believed you. You have proved your heart less wicked, much less wicked. But I hardly know—the misery that you have inflicted—I hardly know what could have made it worse.”

And even when she is admitting this, she's going over in her head what could have made him such a terrible person:

Elinor made no answer. Her thoughts were silently fixed on the irreparable injury which too early an independence and its consequent habits of idleness, dissipation, and luxury, had made in the mind, the character, the happiness, of a man who, to every advantage of person and talents, united a disposition naturally open and honest, and a feeling, affectionate temper. The world had made him extravagant and vain—Extravagance and vanity had made him cold-hearted and selfish. Vanity, while seeking its own guilty triumph at the expense of another, had involved him in a real attachment, which extravagance, or at least its offspring, necessity, had required to be sacrificed. Each faulty propensity in leading him to evil, had led him likewise to punishment. The attachment, from which against honour, against feeling, against every better interest he had outwardly torn himself, now, when no longer allowable, governed every thought; and the connection, for the sake of which he had, with little scruple, left her sister to misery, was likely to prove a source of unhappiness to himself of a far more incurable nature.

Now we have the ending:

He held out his hand. She could not refuse to give him hers;—he pressed it with affection. “And you do think something better of me than you did?” said he, letting it fall, and leaning against the mantel-piece as if forgetting he was to go. Elinor assured him that she did;—that she forgave, pitied, wished him well—was even interested in his happiness—and added some gentle counsel as to the behaviour most likely to promote it.

So she ends the conversation/whine fest with a lecture on how Willoughby could improve himself! This may be a great example of Christian forgiveness, but she certainly doesn't think he is a good person.

Now Elinor is alone and she reflects on how his charm overcomes her knowledge of his faults:

Willoughby, he, whom only half an hour ago she had abhorred as the most worthless of men, Willoughby, in spite of all his faults, excited a degree of commiseration for the sufferings produced by them, which made her think of him as now separated for ever from her family, with a tenderness, a regret, rather in proportion, as she soon acknowledged within herself—to his wishes than to his merits. She felt that his influence over her mind was heightened by circumstances which ought not in reason to have weight; by that person of uncommon attraction, that open, affectionate, and lively manner which it was no merit to possess; and by that still ardent love for Marianne, which it was not even innocent to indulge. But she felt that it was so, long, long before she could feel his influence less.

and slightly later:

But the rest, which one night entirely sleepless, and many hours of the most wearing anxiety seemed to make requisite, was kept off by irritation of spirits. Willoughby, “poor Willoughby,” as she now allowed herself to call him, was constantly in her thoughts; she would not but have heard his vindication for the world, and now blamed, now acquitted herself for having judged him so harshly before. But her promise of relating it to her sister was invariably painful. She dreaded the performance of it, dreaded what its effect on Marianne might be; doubted whether after such an explanation she could ever be happy with another; and for a moment wished Willoughby a widower. Then, remembering Colonel Brandon, reproved herself, felt that to his sufferings and his constancy far more than to his rival’s, the reward of her sister was due, and wished any thing rather than Mrs. Willoughby’s death.

I think wishing Willoughby a widower is the most damning line here, but the sentence prior make it clear that it is for Marianne's sake, not Willoughby's, that Elinor wishes he was free to marry. And she repents almost immediately. Also, and importantly, Elinor is still not sleeping! So she is still running on anxiety and no sleep when she wishes Mrs. Willoughby dead.

Later, when she does tell Marianne about the encounter a few weeks later, we can see her opinion of Willoughby has definitely soured:

“The whole of his behaviour,” replied Elinor, “from the beginning to the end of the affair, has been grounded on selfishness. It was selfishness which first made him sport with your affections; which afterwards, when his own were engaged, made him delay the confession of it, and which finally carried him from Barton. His own enjoyment, or his own ease, was, in every particular, his ruling principle.”

To summarize: Elinor was tired and emotional when Willoughby arrived and under the influence of his charm, she did begin to think better of him. She did forgive him, but while still dwelling on his faults. When she has time for rest and reflection, and without him present, she thinks more clearly and knows that everything Willoughby did was selfish.

[rubberduckyrye]

I'm not gonna say that he was "Doing the right thing" or anything like that. But there is one little distinction that I think factors into why people are slightly more sympathetic to Nagito than to Kokichi in Chapter 4. When Nagito tricked Teruteru and Chiaki into killing, he was trying to get them off the island. In the first trial he makes a big show of being the culprit. And then when suspicion starts to turn on Teruteru, he goes out of his way to be Teruteru's advocate and punch holes into Hajime's logic. Until it becomes pretty much impossible to create any more doubt about Teruteru's guilt. Meanwhile with Chiaki, he did as much to obfuscate his cause of death as possible and made it look at a surface glance that he wanted a randomized killer.

Kokichi meanwhile...well, he was planning to throw Gonta under the bus once he figured out what Miu was trying to pull. Which does come across as a bit more callous. But it is understandable, since they're in a Killing Game and its every person for themselves. Though an idea I read on another blog that kind of interested me was that it might have felt more tonally fitting with what we learn about Kokichi later on if Miu's death had been an accident instead. Kokichi underestimating how far Gonta would go and then being like "...Er, yeah I totally meant to do that!"

....

-sighs-

-inhales-

You must be new here.

You are making the assumption that Kokichi's actions were solely to throw Gonta under the bus. This is not canon.

There are, granted, many ways to interpret what happened, but I do not subscribe to the idea that Kokichi was just throwing Gonta under the bus for the sake of himself. In fact, I think he was acting as a partner in crime to accomplish a mass mercy kill, something that lines up with the tropes of the series (every game gets one group kill attempt) that I am not here to argue about so if you start being weird about my Mercy Kill Theory I'm going to just ignore you because I've had enough of people being weird about it.

Nagito's motivations for helping Teruteru and Chiaki were, if I recall correctly, selfish in nature. He wasn't trying to help them escape, but rather, trying to control a bad situation and create a stepping stone towards hope for Teruteru, and trying to kill a group of terrorists with Chiaki. The latter is more noble (even if he wanted to be acclaimed a hero for it) but yeah.

You can argue Nagito's intentions were more sympathetic all you want, but as someone who believes that Kokichi and Gonta worked together to create a Mass Mercy Kill Plot to spare their classmates the pain they were suffering through? Yeah idk.

[reflections-in-a-critical-eye]

Chapter 2 is showing a lot of us that things aren’t as rosy and pretty as Bangtan want us to think. The ugly side was always going to surface. Whether that’s solo flying and competitive nature of the members or the relationships and fickle nature of those. But such is life. There’s always some ugly, and you deal. Not the point of my ask 😄

I’ve noticed that since YoonMin grew closer, YoonKook have distanced. Or perhaps even before? During the JK ‘concert’ live, JK was talking about everyone except Suga. He even messed up Suga’s iconic Daechwita song! And complained that he wasn’t invited to Suchwita. I found that a bit surprising. What are your thoughts around it?

Anon, you are on to something 👀 I thought I was the only one, ready to brand myself crazy. I did notice the weirdness, but everyone is acting like everything is fine. When it's not. This chapter two really shows us which friendship is actually real. Not that yoonkook wasn't, but it seems they're not actually as close as we might believe. Yoongi and JK get along really well on camera, but there are obvious signs that real life is not really like that. Yoonmin are definitely closer and I noticed how Jimin is name dropping Yoongi as much as he can. What can I say, perhaps it's time to accept this and stop living in the past. And I say this mostly for yoonkookers. They are definitely stuck in the past and mostly on a fictional depiction of their relationship. It's quite sad if you think about it. But they shouldn't be delusional.

And we need to pay attention to what they say and do. Yoongi said JK is a genius, while JM can achieve all that through hard work. Way to throw JK under the bus, Yoongi! Also, he always said he likes JM's voice, he listened to JM's songs. All he ever does say about JK is that he grew up. Wow, after a decade, that's all? I feel a bit sorry for JK. I think JK didn't mention Yoongi during his wlive "concert" because he's perhaps hurt, but he also can't let go, which is why he self invited himself to the show. It sounded desperate and I wish he wouldn't be like that. But the worst thing is that Jimin is doing this to him. The Busan bros, his brother from another mother (or actual siblings?👀). He doesn't care that JK might suffer, for him it's more important to wanna do legos with Yoongi, watching his shows, doing the tiktok challenge with him and many other similar situations.

I love Yoonkook, but it's time to accept that they're no longer close and Yoonmin get along really well. They were the first to be announced as brand ambassadors, so they are on a similar career path and that's one of the things that helps nurture their bond.

[teotalksaboutstuff]

Thoughts and Predictions for Danganronpa Despair Time

So I’ve been getting super into DR Despair Time of late, and I’ve decided to make a post outlining my thoughts thus far. Spoiler warning for all mainline Danganronpa games, both games of the Danganronpa Another series, and the Prologue and Chapter 1 of DRDT, as those were the only items completed at the time of posting this, with previews of Chapter 2 out. Bonus content for DRDT is also mentioned and spoiled in this brain-dump.

Thoughts So Far

I can’t say I actively dislike any of the characters, which is a good sign for things to come in my book. I will begin, thus, with my thoughts on them.

I am of course going to start with our protagonist, Teruko Tawaki, our Ultimate Lucky Student. I find her to be a nice subversion of the hopium protagonists we’ve had in the mainline games (especially Makoto), and even the Another series does have this to some degree (mostly with Utsuro though Sora does show these tendencies to a degree as well). I like how she is actively willing to distrust others and call them out on their hollow and hypocritical words after the trial. Considering they were willing to vote her dead without a second pause, she saved all their lives when none of them (except maybe Eden but we’ll get to her) deserved it, at least in her eyes. I am of the belief she is justified in how she acted, especially when Xander did try to kill her first. She is an innovative protagonist in my eyes, because she would have been the antagonist if Danganronpa Tradition (TM) had been stuck to. I am ever so glad that this one doesn’t with its protag, and I look forward to seeing her arc of what I believe will be re-learning to trust people.

Next up, speaking of the devil, is Xander himself. I find many similarities between him and Sayaka Maizono, mostly concerning their respective trials. They attach themselves to the protagonist relatively early on only to die first. Now, as most people who have seen DRDT have seen DR1, including myself, I can say I saw him dying first coming a mile away. What I did not see coming is that he would attempt to kill Teruko. While I did just say Teruko was justified in how she acted, I do not think it is completely fair to throw Xander under the bus here and call him a snake like some of the fandom do with Sayaka (and I don’t believe her to be a snake either, for anyone wondering. If anything, there are less logical arguments to call her one than Xander but we’re getting off topic). It is pretty much confirmed he was ordered to kill Teruko by an unrelated party, and I don’t think we’re going to find out who until the final trial or what they might have on him. I suspect it has something to do with the death of his parents as revealed in the bonus episode. That said, Xander’s actions are reasonable considering that important tidbit, and we’ve seen that he has a more emotional temperament. Thus, his emotions definitely pushed him to go ahead with the murder without the need for a MonoTV sanctioned motive. 

Now for his murderer, Ultimate Student Min Jeung. I didn’t really find much of note with her until just before the body discovery, and when the trial comes around, hooooly shit does her hypocrisy become fascinating. She’s clearly conflicted between wanting to live herself and wanting to save Teruko, though it’s implied they’ve got some Divine Luck-style force going on that compelled Min to do so. I don’t think she would have tried to help the victim, if Xander had been ordered to kill literally anyone else. Part of the appeal is how morally grey everything is, of course, and I would be remiss for saying she’s completely unsympathetic. She didn’t exactly want to murder Xander, she just happened upon the crime scene and realized she’d have to defend herself, and she did in a very inventive way that ultimately caused her downfall. 

I said I’d be getting to Ultimate Clockmaker Eden Tobisa in a minute, and that is because I believe she is going to fill the support role. I think her and Teruko especially bounce off of one another very well, and for her to be as much of a cinnamon roll as she looks makes for a fitting enough contrast. Teruko, through Eden, can learn that not everyone is a snake in the grass waiting to pounce on you when your guard is down, and she can likewise learn through Teruko that not everyone is a cinnamon roll like her and that she needs to doubt people sometimes in order to be able to solidify her trust in them. I think she’s going to either survive the whole thing or die near the end.

Moving on, we have our Ultimate Zither Player, Hu Jing. She has done a lot to keep the class as a united front throughout Chapter 1, and it feels as if she is keeping up the facade of a perfect person. Due to this, I think she’s going to end up being a culprit, possibly even the next culprit if my theory about her being a spin on the Kirumi Toujo archetype is proven true. If she is, I think it would be nice if she wasn’t hung as part of her execution, that trope for musically inclined talents within DR and its fan projects is quite tired.

We move now to J Moreno, the Ultimate Effects Artist. I am really liking her character so far, and her Free Time Event with Arei is especially doing her favors (I’ll discuss this when we get to Arei herself). Immediately she puts on display that people are putting on an image with how they appear to us, and the events of the game prove this initial statement thematically salient to the themes I believe the game is going for, that being those of Trust vs. Doubt. I say this because it is true that everyone puts on a mask for the public, and no one can truly know how someone feels, unless they trust someone else enough to let them know this. 

Next up is Veronika Grebenshchikova the Ultimate Horror Fanatic, and oh boy do I have things to say about her. Her DR references in the prologue are so blatantly obvious that I believe she is either the Mastermind or a herring as red as blood in that department. She mentions herself to be interested in the psychology behind why horror movies make us feel how they do, and it is for this reason I find her actions at the trial so interesting. I think that her excitement at Min’s culprit breakdown is especially notable, and almost gives off the vibe of Junko Enoshima. In fact, a lot about her is similar to Junko in design as well: her hair is not dissimilar to Junko’s, not to mention the eye hairclips that could possibly represent the audience watching the killing game. This does form a recipe for a compelling mastermind; it would show just how deep her fascination with human fear, terror, and horror goes and be a fascinating dive into someone willing to do anything to study these and possibly other emotions (i.e. Kokoro Mitsume if she had been the mastermind in SDRA2).

Next in line is David Chiem, the Ultimate Motivational Speaker. Xander stanning him is pretty funny, but there is some thematic salience to it as well, considering the both of them are concealing hidden depths that are revealed either almost immediately or much later on in Chapter 1. David doesn’t seem to like his talent much, evident with his mask slipping almost right off the bat when Xander leaves briefly. It falls off completely at the end of Chapter 1, which shouldn’t be too much of a surprise if we consider this in conjunction with what J said in her intro, and I do wonder where they’re going to go with his character after this, as it would seem wrong for him to die just yet.

Arturo Giles, the Ultimate Plastic Surgeon, is regrettably the character I would have to rank the lowest in terms of how much I like the characters, but there is some significance to what we’ve seen of him so far (which isn’t much because he thinks the entire cast is fugly and is literally only helping in the infirmary bc he’s the only one with medical training). I do see his idolization of celebrities specifically for their external appearances to point to the significant sub-themes of how beauty is perceived, and if true beauty exists at all. We can frame this as External Beauty vs. Internal Beauty, or perhaps Appearance vs. Character. The talk of us putting on masks for the public seems appropriate here, as Arturo literally wears a mask, plus what I’ve already mentioned with J and David. He is obviously masking his own insecurities about his face, and it would make sense for there to be a reveal of what exactly is under this mask at some point during the game. It would be especially thematically salient if this were to be a complete accident on his part, to see it literally slip and fall off his face, like what we saw in a more proverbial sense with David. Such is to say, when we take off our proverbial mask that we all put on, some might see the embodiment of beauty itself, or at least sublimity, but others might be repulsed by a vision so ugly it burns itself into their mind for the rest of their life.

Levi Fontana seems like the perfect foil to Arturo, largely as he seems to believe external beauty to be subjective. He is the Ultimate Personal Stylist, and it makes sense as he states, not in exact words admittedly, that his goals with this talent are to help people express their truest selves. He seems like the most ‘mask-off’ person there from the start, and he wants people to be able to let off their figurative masks, to show their internal beauty, by styling their external beauty in a way that does so. I do think there is significance in him being the one to attack MonoTV, as well as his attitude towards Ace. It shows that he is unafraid to express the parts of himself that others would deem ugly, and does so shamelessly without much regard for the consequences until after he’s already done it. He’s probably going to die in the mid-to-late game considering he’s the buffest person here.

-Speaking of Ace, we move on to Ace Markey, our Ultimate Jockey. He also seems very mask off, though it isn’t completely willing as he is simply scared of everything. And I do mean everything. Like, I wonder what the hell happened to him that made him like this. Perhaps we’ll get backstory on this later, perhaps not. I think he’ll make it to at least Chapter 5, if not survive the whole thing, as he hopefully learns to steel himself somewhat. It would make for a nice character arc.

Next in line is Whit Young, Ultimate I Love You, You Little Shit Matchmaker, and by far my favorite character so far. There’s admittedly more thematically significant characters than him, but I think he’s funny and I love him. Actually his relationship with Charles is probably going to be important later, considering that he knew significant information about him that did ultimately clear him of the crime, namely his traumatic experiences with gory death scenes like Xander’s. Also, he genuinely seems to have good intentions as a comic relief, meaning as much as he seems to be Kokichi Ouma with pastel colors at first, I find Whit infinitely better due to him immediately establishing compelling relationships with the rest of the cast. I’m deluding myself into thinking that he will survive.

Speaking of Charles, our Ultimate Chemist is next, and I have a feeling he’s going to die next, as unless the murder directly involves chemicals or a lack of bloody external injuries, he’s basically useless in trials. It also doesn’t help that he’s already had a ton of screentime with Teruko being his investigative partner in Chapter 1. Even if it fits, it would be a shame for him to die here as his relationship with Whit does have some significance in connection to the theme. It is Whit that must have helped him take the mask off at some point, or it was forced off him in little pieces when he found the body and Whit was the first to put the pieces together. 

We finally get to Ultimate Bowler Arei Nageishi, meaning I now get to talk about her bonus content. She is definitely a textbook Hiyoko Saionji kinnie, though I quite like the angle they took with her especially concerning her relationship with J. This could correlate to the subthemes of beauty through the lens of femininity, namely in how J and Arei choose to express theirs. Arei leans towards the more traditionally and stereotypically feminine down to being the Queen Bee stereotype during her high school years by her own admission, and J prefers to present herself decidedly less so expressly because she has had a bad experience with traditional femininity. This speaks to the subjectivity of femininity, as J is no less feminine than Arei for presenting how she does, and Arei is no more feminine than J for her own experiences with her gender. Both are happy with their self expression, and that is what matters to themselves. They see their own internal beauty differently, and choose to express it in a way that suits their identities.

Nico Hakobyan, Ultimate Pet Therapist also hasn’t done much of note. Which is fair enough, as he is quite the shrinking violet and prefers to keep to the back. I do like him though, as I have quite the soft spot for catboys, even if he isn’t actually a full-blown catboy.

Last but certainly not least, Ultimate Art Forger Rose Lacroix is interesting, and I really hope she survives. It makes sense, however, that someone with her kind of info would die. She clearly had knowledge that most times we only find out at the end and was willing to reveal it off the bat, such as the class being sealed away for years before the events of DRDT. This makes me wonder what she’s going to do to fight the mastermind, assuming she does choose to do this. Alternatively, she is a traitor or maybe even the Mastermind herself. This could also make sense as DRDT is a fanganronpa and she is making a copy of Danganronpa, a sort of art she loves.  

Predictions

Here is how I predict the death order to go, assuming a traditional Danganronpa structure is followed

Chapter 1 Victim: Xander Matthews

Chapter 1 Culprit: Min Jeung

Chapter 2 Victim: Charles Cuevas

Chapter 2 Culprit: Hu Jing

Chapter 3 Victims: Arei Nageishi

Chapter 3 Culprit: Arturo Giles

Chapter 4 Victim: Levi Fontana

Chapter 4 Culprit: Whit Young

Chapter 5 Victim: David Chiem

Chapter 5 Culprit: Eden Tobisa

Chapter 6 Victim: Rose Lacroix

Mastermind: Veronika Grebenshchikova

Survivors: Teruko Tawaki, Ace Markey, J Moreno, Niko Hakobyan

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 291: The Endeavor Pamphlet

Previously on BnHA: Dabi showed up atop Gigantomachia’s back and was all “you’ll never guess who I really am!” and the readers humored him and were all “who?” and he was all “TODOROKI TOUYA” and we were all “WOW └(・。・)┘ OH MY GOSH I WOULD NEVER HAVE GUESSED”, except for Shouto and Enji who were GENUINELY SHOCKED. Anyway so Touya was all “and guess what I’m doing right now!” and before anyone could even try, he was all, “STREAMING MY EMMY-NOMINATED MINISERIES ‘HELLO, I’M EVIL BUT ALSO TRAGIC AND SEXY, NOW LET ME TELL YOU ALL ABOUT MY DAD WHO SUCKS’’, THAT’S WHAT.” And everyone was all “oh my god” and Touya was all “ヽ(⌐■_■)ノ♪” for basically the rest of the chapter, and that’s pretty much it! Oh, wait, except for the part where he also doused himself in bleach in a fit of pure theatrics, which is actually pretty much the main takeaway from the entire chapter really because it was just wild af. ANYWAYS.

Today on BnHA: Horikoshi introduces Baby Touya, the world’s most enchantingly sweet character, and is immediately all, “I sure can’t wait to tell you guys all about how his fucking jaw burnt off.” Thankfully he doesn’t (YET), and we cut back to the present pretty quickly, where Dabi explains how he took all of his brain cells that should have been used to stop him from pouring bleach over his head, and instead put them all toward his big brain plot of releasing an elaborate video detailing Endeavor’s various abuses and crimes, and even throwing Hawks under the bus as well because WHY NOT. He then leaps off of Gigantomachia’s back (like I said, no brain cells) all set to blast them with a Prominence Burn, only to be stopped by none other than THE LEGEND HIMSELF, MOTHERFUCKING BEST, PRETTIEST, NICEST, MOST OUTSTANDING MOTHERFUCKING JEANIST. Who’s no doubt outraged by the crime against hair he witnessed only moments earlier. GO GETTIM JEANY BOI.

so I haven’t had time to answer any of them because this has been the stupidest week, but I just wanted to tell you guys that I received no fewer than nine asks about Dabi’s hair. which, in a week filled with election memes and tumblr’s most cursed fandom briefly rising back up from the dead, is a pretty impressive feat for him if you ask me. like, I know I was making fun of it basically nonstop, but it sure did generate a lot of discussion so maybe I should rethink my opinions on Dabi’s PR strategies now, idk

anyway. it’s Saturday. time to catch up on this shit. let’s see how fucked the Todorokis are

OH NO HE’S CUTE

HOLY SHIT THIS IS TOO MUCH TO FUCKING PROCESS. I’M JUST TRYING TO ENJOY MY DAY HORIKOSHI, ARE YOU REALLY GOING TO TRAUMATIZE THIS POOR CHILD RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY SALAD

“thanks for being all right” the fuck

who allowed this child to be so cute. I’m serious. who signed off on this

how could a child this adorable possibly want to murder his equally adorable baby brother. please, your honor. there must be some mistake here

guess how prepared I am to read all about Touya’s tragic past. mm. that’s right. zero ready. none ready

anyway. TWO THOUSAND DEGREES LOLOLOL. NO TRACE OF A CORPSE HOW CONVENIENT. A PIECE OF HIS LOWER JAW BONE FFFFMSGHKLSh. LOVELY. LOVELY

LMAOOOOO

listen you guys. I just want to take a moment to appreciate that Horikoshi Kouhei did one of two things here. either (1) he planned it out FROM THE VERY START that Touya would be born with red hair Because Fire Powers, but would then have his hair turn white due to trauma, thus making the Dabi/Touya connection very slightly less obvious, although Let’s Be Real Who Are We Kidding. OR, (2) the anime got it wrong and gave him red hair, and rather than allowing this plot hole to continue to exist, Horikoshi took it upon himself to concoct this elaborate storyline and pretend it was never a plot hole at all! in which case I sure hope someone at Bones is sending him a VERY nice Christmas card this year. got this man sweeping up all your messes for you. you’re just lucky he has some sort of wild compulsion to address these things

anyways!!

FATHER AND SON. how sweet. :| still zero percent ready for any of this btw

STOP BEING CUTE

THIS IS RIDICULOUS. I’M SO MAD RIGHT NOW. HE IS THE SINGLE CUTEST CHARACTER IN THE ENTIRE SERIES, and do you even know how many other baby characters I’m betraying in order to say that?! baby Kacchan, baby Deku, baby Ochako, baby Shouto, Eri, baby Hawks. I’M LOOKING YOU DEAD IN THE EYE RIGHT NOW AND TELLING YOU THAT BABY TOUYA IS CUTER THAN ALL OF THOSE PLEBS. AND YOU’RE LOOKING BACK AT ME RIGHT NOW ALL “YEAH IT SURE IS A PITY ABOUT HIS JAW MELTING OFF THOUGH.” THAT’S IT, I QUIT THE SERIES

and Enji’s smiling at him. he’s so proud of him. but then Touya won’t be able to do it, and Enji’s gonna stop training him, and Touya’s gonna feel like a failure and keep pushing himself in order to try and win his dad’s affections back, because that’s all kids fucking want, all they want is just love, that’s fucking it, you couldn’t just give him that?? and then he’s gonna immolate himself fflkdlskfh THERE YOU SEE HORIKOSHI, I KNOW THE WHOLE STORY ALREADY, YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THE WHOLE “SHOW THEM THE DEAD DOG” THING YET AGAIN YOU PIECE OF SHIT

OH SNAP THERE GOES THE TWIN THEORY. R.I.P.

BABY FUYUMI. PRETTY CUTE. NOT AS CUTE AS TOUYA THOUGH. HEY LOOK, NO REASON TO GET MAD AT ME I’M JUST STATING A FACT HERE

YEAH THIS IS GONNA GO REAL WELL OH BOY

I keep pressing the emergency stop button but this industrial tragedy machine just keeps on chugging along anyway, I’m pretty sure this thing is not up to code

:| I am so sorry sweet boy, Horikoshi is only getting started with you

FUCKING HELL WITH THIS NARRATION

but he wasn’t actually a child to you, he was just a little puppet child for you to live vicariously through!! and then you went and did the same fucking thing with Shouto afterwards and never learned your lesson until just six months ago!! fucking hell, Enji

so now he’s all “Touya is dead, that’s an unforgivable lie” fflkdhflk motherfucker does he look dead to you. if you really think that, tumblr and twitter have got a little over five years’ worth of archived theory posts to show you

oh shit Touya’s countering with “it’s an unforgivable truth”, which, damn. I actually think Horikoshi’s dialogue is one of his weaker points as a writer a lot of the time, but that comeback was snappy as fuck

actually guys, now that I’ve seen how ridiculously fucking cute baby!Touya was, I can almost understand why Shouto and Enji never put the pieces together before lol. any passing similarities would have easily been dismissed on account of he’d need to be at least 10x more adorable in order to get the full resemblance

OH MY GOD

NOW YOU SLEEP??? SO YOU POINT BLANK REFUSED TO PASS OUT WHILE YOU WERE BUSY MAIMING ALL OF MY FAVORITE CHARACTERS, BUT NOW THAT THERE’S AN OPPORTUNITY TO SEE YOUR REACTION TO THE “YOUR LIEUTENANT WAS SECRETLY RELATED TO ONE OF YOUR WORST ENEMIES THE WHOLE TIME” BOMBSHELL, YOU FINALLY DECIDE TO GET YOUR FORTY WINKS. I SEE

WOW DABI

I’M SURPRISED YOU DIDN’T ALREADY HAVE YOUR ANCESTRY.COM RESULTS PRINTOUT READY TO FOLD INTO A PAPER AIRPLANE AND ZOOM ON DOWN TO HIM

LOL NEVERMIND

gotta say, so far The Endeavor Pamphlet is just about as spicy as I could have hoped

(ETA: Natsuo’s face as he watches his beloved dead brother come back to life only to literally and metaphorically set everything on fire in one fell swoop is :/. why must you do this to me Natsu. can’t you see I’m trying to throw a Welcome Back Jeanist party here.)

HAVE YOU READ THIS?! TODOROKI ENJI ABUSED HIS OWN HEIR, AND DABI WROTE IT DOWN RIGHT THERE

WELL HE’S NEVER GON’ BE NUMBER ONE NOW / NEVER GON’ BE NUMBER ONE NOW / THAT’S ONE LESS THING TO WORRY ABOUT / THAT’S ONE LESS THING TO WORRY ABOUT

btw I neglected to mention this last week, but yes I do recognize and appreciate that this is Can’t Ya See-kun himself whom Horikoshi has chosen to be the face of this existential crisis which the general public is about to experience. rip CYS-kun

OOF

excuse me. putting aside the implications of Dabi sharing this context-less murder video of Hawks with the entire world for a moment, I just have to pause for a sec here, because when exactly did he get a chance to edit this all in?? complete with voiceover that seamlessly ties in with the prerecorded footage of him with DNA test results sans shirt?? you’re telling me this motherfucker, with all the smoke that was in the room thanks to his own quirk, somehow got a PERFECT SHOT of the PRECISE MOMENT when Hawks drove his feather knife into Jin’s back, using his MAGIC CAMERA THAT HE I GUESS HAD THE ENTIRE TIME IN THE POUCH RIGHT NEXT TO HIS BLEACH BOTTLE, and then immediately somehow got this very next shot as well FROM AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT ANGLE

ALL THE WHILE IMMEDIATELY RUNNING THROUGH SCRIPT REVISIONS IN HIS HEAD, WHICH HE THEN PROCEEDED TO RECORD... WHERE, EXACTLY?? WITH SKEPTIC, WHILST RIDING ON MACHIA’S BACK??

AND THIS IS ALL YOU HAVE TO SAY FOR YOURSELF???

and this after I just wrote that whole long paragraph positively GLOWING about this man’s ability to plug up a plot hole. jfc. just scratch out every damn word I said lol. just forget all of it

are you fucking kidding me, the footage was from the cameras Skeptic planted on Hawks??

that’s... actually... okay you know what, it still doesn’t make any sense in the slightest, but the determination to address it nonetheless... just, dammit... I feel like I’m constantly at war with myself over whether or not I want to shake this man’s hand or slap him lmao. whatever, then!!

anyway, since Shouto and Enji can’t actually see the damage that Touya is dealing to the hero industry even as they speak, Touya is taking it upon himself to give them the highlights

I think it’s a testament to how much Endeavor cares about Hawks that he managed to zero in on that comment even amidst all the craziness of his eldest son returning from the dead to announce how he’s been carefully plotting their destruction for years and years. like, he heard “Hawks” and his face immediately went like that. you think he’s worried that Dabi did something to him? because he’d be right to worry lol

so the Endeavor Pamphlet narration is now explaining all about how Hawks totally killed the Number 3 Hero Best Jeanist as well! yep... he sure did... totally...

OH MY GOD WE’RE CUTTING TO HIM AHHHHH

Hawks, that is. lol. not Jeanist. NO, JUST MY POOR HALF-DEAD WINGLESS BABY SON

NOOOOO HIS LITTLE WING STUMPS. BUT SOMEHOW HIS FACIAL HAIR IS STILL INTACT. OH TO BE AN ANIME PRETTY BOY BEING SET ON FIRE. “HEY, TAKE IT EASY, WATCH THE FACE”

EXCUSE ME WHAT

interesting! we suspected as much, I think, with the clues that Ending dropped, and the little flashback right after the name reveal. still not clear how Dabi found out about it though!

looooool okay here we go, breaking out the heavy-handed holier-than-thou shit now

you know, I do find it interesting how trying to model themselves after All Might’s noble Symbol of Peace image has kind of ended up being the heroes’ undoing here. like, I could write a whole essay on this, but what it basically boils down to is that they were all trying too hard to be perfect. All Might went out there and did his thing and was amazing, and so the powers-that-be built an entire system centered around this seemingly-infallible person, and they acted like the system was infallible as well. and so most of the population ended up becoming complacent over the years, and meanwhile the people who were unfortunate enough to fall through the cracks understandably wound up disillusioned and perceiving the heroes as these false idols

anyway, but I think one positive takeaway from this is that the new up-and-coming generation of heroes represent a breakaway from that system. like, imo what we’re witnessing is the downfall of the Perfect Hero, and the rise of the imperfect hero. and this new generation doesn’t shy away from their failures or pretend like they never happened. they pretty much can’t pretend, because their failures are all right out there in the open for everyone to see. Bakugou Katsuki, just to name one example off the top of my very biased head, has had his own personal character journey basically play out right in front of the media’s eyes. his humiliation at the sports festival, his kidnapping by the League, and all of the fallout afterward. this isn’t someone who can ever go out there and convince the world that he’s perfect. but what he can do, instead, is show the world that he’s trying. that he’s trying with everything he has to do his best, to be the best. rather than this untouchable godlike image, it’s instead the image of someone painfully human who is nonetheless striving with everything he’s got to keep moving forward, flaws and all, and work his way to the top

and ultimately I think that’s going to be a much more positive image to send out to the world when all’s said and done. because rather than merely inspiring awe, heroes like that inspire people to take action themselves. or at least that’s what I hope! and not just Bakugou, but the others as well. we’ve got Shouto, whose own personal trauma is being aired in front of the whole nation even as I sit here ranting. we’ve got Deku, who cries at the drop of a hat, and who fought to become a hero despite being quirkless (and I think it’s only a matter of time before that eventually becomes public knowledge as well). tl;dr because I’m getting way too long-winded here, but these kids have effectively been humanized in a way that the old generation never was, and I think that’ll go a long way towards building trust between them and the people they’ll someday be protecting, and inspiring the next generation in hopefully a much healthier way

anyway so where were we. ...oh yes, Dabi was explaining that heroes only protect themselves, and is presumably building up to his grand conclusion of “therefore you should all just let the villains take over and burn down the world”

omfg. YOU GUYS

DOES CAN’T YA SEE-KUN’S SHARK FRIEND ACTUALLY CALL HIM “CAN’T YA SEE-KUN.” HE HAS A NAME YOU KNOW!! UNLESS HE LEGALLY GOT HIS NAME CHANGED TO CAN’T YA SEE-KUN. OH MY GOD

ALSO, IS THAT CAN’T YA SEE-KUN CRYING IN THE BOTTOM RIGHT THERE OMG. GIVE THIS CHILD A HUG. EVERYONE STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING RIGHT NOW AND HUG HIM

BAKUGOU IS BARELY HANGING ON THERE LOL. GOTTA STAY CONSCIOUS... SO MUCH TEA BEING SPILLED... FOCUS... CONCENTRATE

IIDA’S ANGLING HIS HEAD IN A WEIRD WAY, LIKE DUDE. LOOKING SUSPICIOUSLY SNUGGLY THERE. MMM THESE IIDABAKU CRUMBS

HADOU IS ALL “WHAT EVEN IS ACTUALLY GOING ON” LMAO

LASTLY, POOR SHOUTO OMFG. WHEN YOU’RE ALL FINISHED HUGGING CYS-KUN THIS CHILD NEEDS YOUR ATTENTION!!

so now Dabi’s leaping off of this ninety-foot-tall gargoyle man like that’s a normal, smart thing to do. unless he can fly too now? saw his dad doing it back at Fukuoka and was all “hmm”

OH MY GOD SOMEONE TELL ME RIGHT NOW WHAT WORD SHOUTO IS USING TO ADDRESS ENJI, THESE TRANSLATIONS LOVE TO MESS WITH MY HEAD

ENJI GET MOVING DO YOU NOT SEE THOSE TEARS!!! SNAP OUT OF IT YOU BIG TREE

AHHHHH

OH KACCHAN YOU WOKE UP A LITTLE MORE THERE, HUH

lol he and Deku both look so determined but they’re basically sitting ducks. their “oh shit” faces do look remarkably like their “TIME TO SWING INTO ACTION” faces but don’t be fooled, they have one good arm and about six pints of blood left between the two of them. looks like this one’s all on you Shouto

-- AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH --

BAH GOD... WHAT’S GOING ON HERE... THAT’S BEST JEANIST’S MUSIC

y’all. can’t even talk right now, my brain has completely shut down lol. just. ...

  °˖✧◝(￣▿￣)◜✧˖°

[watermelonlipstick]

Dreams, Chapter 11

If you haven’t read this series before, you might want to start on Chapter 1, or check out the Dreams Masterlist! Here’s the series description:

When Dean dies for good leaving Sam and his girlfriend (the reader) behind, they must figure out how to carry on without him. Alone, reeling, and unsure what to do next, trying to honor Dean’s memory and follow their hearts gets even more complicated when their nightmares become dreams that feel a little too real.

Title: Dreams, Chapter 11

Pairing: (past) Dean Winchester x Reader, (eventual) Sam Winchester x Reader

Word Count: 2616

Summary: Another dream makes things more clear for the reader and less clear for Sam.

Warnings: angst, fluff, swearing, s l o w  b u r n

           The booths are those plastic-coated pressboard swoops that are so easy to clean, one row down either side of the long room once you walk past the counter to order. Like other pizza places, there are red pepper flakes and grated parmesan on the table, but they also keep ranch dressing in a minifridge behind the counter as a concession to Midwestern sensibilities. You know you’re just outside Dayton just like you know the pizza shop is run by a family, father and two older teenage daughters deftly throwing dough and scattering cheese evenly over it in a way that shows their years of practice. Dean sits across the table with his elbows on it, one forefinger and thumb picking through a plate of nachos between you. His black t-shirt, amulet, and lack of flannel make you notice the hum of the air conditioner in the background, straining over the 90’s alternative radio and reminding you that you’d been here in a heat stroke the summer after you and Dean had gotten together, his golden freckles and lightened tips of his slightly messy hair underlining the memory.

           “They don’t serve nachos here.” It’s half statement and half question.

           “Babe, it’s your dream. They’ll serve whatever you want. Does the pizza suck in Wisconsin or something?”

           The two sisters are whispering to each other as they look over at your table, an almost-argument that ends with who you suspect is the older sister poofing a pinch of flour into the other’s face. They’re both cute girls but she’s adorable, soft cherubic cheeks and messy bun piling impossibly glossy hair on her head as she walks over to the table with a gigantic pizza. “Can I get you anything else?” she asks in a perfect welcoming cheerleader pitch.

           “I think we’re good for now, sweetheart,” Dean purrs with a wink. That you remember; you’d playfully chastised Dean for dazzling the teens, laughing in his face when he’d said it wasn’t on purpose, that he couldn’t help it if chicks dug him. The wink had proved your point then and now it makes the girl’s cheeks flush red.

           She catches herself remarkably well, the stammer almost slipping under the radar as she assures you that you can “holler if you need anything!”

           Dean brushes his fingers free of nacho debris and loosens a piece of pizza from the melting cheese of the ones next to it. “Last time you had all kinds of sweet nothings and questions for me and now you’re Silent Cal?”

           “I don’t think this is real, but I’m pretty sure if I push it you’ll either die in this dream or I’ll wake up, so my plan is to stay here as long as we can.”

           He drops the pizza back into the box and wipes off his fingers on a napkin before slouching into the booth, arm stretched across its length. “So test me then. Gimme a question only I would know or something.”

           “Well if I ask you something that I know the answer to, my brain will just project you knowing it. See the problem?”

           Dean squints and pouts in consideration, touch of a smile dancing across his face and if it isn’t the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen may you be struck dead right now. “Then ask me something you don’t know the answer to.”

           You think about explaining how that too could just be some part of your subconscious recreation of Dean but you don’t want to keep pulling at loose strings in the event that it wakes you up. It’s too hard to keep from smiling, seeing Dean charming and relaxed like this, and when you grin it makes Dean bite his lip. “What’s something I don’t know the answer to?”

           “Ah, ah—I thought I’m just a hologram, how would I know?”

           “Projection, but okay,” you stall. “Wait, here’s one. Sam said when I first started going on jobs with you guys that you had to have a conversation about staying focused. What was that all about?”

           He runs his tongue along the inside of his lower lip. “Man, why would he tell you that?” he says under his breath, smirking mostly to himself before leaning forward to meet your eyes. “Fine. I’m not even sure that you’re going to remember this. There was a vengeful spirit in Indiana, some like homesteader guy, ring a bell?”

           You have only the vaguest sense of recollection and sort of waggle your head to show it.

           “It was way at the beginning of when you started coming on jobs with us. You and Bobby got into it because he wanted you to bring your own car so you could ditch us if we were ‘acting like cretins’ or some shit like that?”

           That fits the last puzzle piece in for you and makes you chuckle. “He ended up giving me like $250 of mad money in case I needed a new room or a bus ticket, yeah. I remember.”

           “I didn’t know that part but that’s gotta be the same trip. The whole thing was really stupid. Basically we were supposed to have your six but both me and Sammy wanted to carry a shotgun instead of doing that protection spell because it looked cooler. We were arguing about it when the spirit whipped a chunk of the barn’s scaffolding at you and we didn’t catch it in time. You heard it coming and ducked so nothing ended up happening, but it fucking demolished the wall behind you. It was a huge fuckup—thing could’ve taken your head clean off, you know? Sam was so broken up about it he was wasted for like a week solid after we dropped you back off at Bobby’s.”

           “Really? That doesn’t sound like him at all.”

           “I know, usually he does some kind of pouty baby bullshit. But I mean both of us felt really guilty that bitching at each other could’ve taken you out.”

           Dean’s eyes rake over your face, seeming to linger over every inch like he’s going to draw a topographical map of it later by memory. You can tell he’s waiting for you to say something but you can’t think of anything other than tracing each of his freckles where they dust across his nose.

           A hand reaches over the table to run his fingertips along the back of yours, and that certainly feels real enough to send an ache into your gut. “What if you ask Sam? If he says that’s not what happened then you can keep saying I’m not real and you don’t have to listen to me.”

           “But he already basically told me that. The only thing I probably wouldn’t have guessed about that is Sam getting drunk about it—these could’ve been just well-informed guesses about when it probably was or the kinds of things it seemed like he was implying.”

           His lips press into a firm line and the barest touch of pink rises in his cheeks. “We, um, we pinky swore on it.”

           The adorableness of his embarrassment makes you grin teasingly as much as the divulgence does. “A pinky promise? You guys must’ve been pretty serious to take such a sacred oath.”

           He rolls his eyes at your ribbing and throws his hands back in his lap with a defeated smirk. “Laugh it up. Would that be good enough proof for you?”

           It seems like Dean has figured out a loophole in the system, but you’re sure the light of day and Sam’s scrutiny will figure out why it isn’t actual evidence of communication with Dean beyond death, and you tell him that.

           A curtain of suspicious confusion falls over Dean’s face. “Sam being weird about it is what’s keeping you from trusting this? Kid, I’ve been talking to Sa—”

           And you woke up.

           The bed was empty next to you but you could smell something sweet in the air and hear the light clinking of pots or pans Sam was trying his best to keep quiet. You blinked back a few tears of frustration—who even cared if it was real or not? Reliving a great memory with Dean was more than enough and instead of enjoying it you’d wasted a chance at some small respite from your constant ache of grief. And even then, you hadn’t used any of your time to figure out how the whole thing worked, how you could see him again.

           But the most pressing issue was what you thought Dean had been trying to say before disappearing; that he had gotten through to Sam. Sam, of course, deserved to have secrets, but if he had been sitting on the resolution to all the angst you’d been struggling through in the last weeks (months?), you couldn’t imagine a reason why that wouldn’t hurt. Nothing would be solved by laying in your bed to sulk about it, though, so you threw on some clothes and went to brush your teeth.

           When you came out, Sam was hunched slightly, the standard stove highlighting his decidedly non-standard height as he shuffled a pan’s handle. He had a dishtowel over his t-shirt clad shoulder, a habit from the bar that sometimes held over when he was in the kitchen at home, and bare feet under old jeans. They were wearing through at the knees, and you knew they were absolutely pajama-soft from having periodically thrown them in with your own laundry. Through the kitchen window, enough snow-brightened sunlight came into the room to cast him in a halo glow that gleamed off of his hair. As long as it had gotten, chunks still swept into his face as he looked down at the stove, and he tucked one behind his ear as he looked up, half-singing a Buddy Guy song that was playing softly. It was stunning—he was stunning, statuesque and strong and right there in front of you. Cooking you breakfast while you slept in, of all things, chocolate chip pancakes he had to have remembered were your favorite from ages ago. You couldn’t even remember the last time you’d had them and right now, nothing in the world sounded better. He beamed and tilted the pan toward you. “Morning! I made pancakes, you want some?”

           And you should’ve just let the moment rest, sat in the rare bright winter morning and eaten chocolate chip pancakes and relished how well the boiler was working, maybe later in the day read a predictable murder mystery or taped off the living room to be painted and listened to REM until your shoulders were sore from running rollers up the walls all afternoon. Instead, about as stupid and weird a flop as if a toad had come out of your mouth, you said, “Have you been talking to Dean too?”

           Sam’s face fell but not in the right way. There was too much angle in his brow and that confirmed it. “What?” he asked, but it didn’t land.

           “How long have you been talking to Dean?”

           He kept that curious smile for a second, like maybe he could push through by playing dumb and you would forget, but finally his lips flattened and his jaw clenched as he stacked a finished pancake on top of its predecessors. “Just because I’m having dreams about him doesn’t mean it’s really him,” he finally answered, softly and as though he was telling the bubbling pancake batter in front of him, unable to meet your eyes.

           You felt the lump forming in your throat and tried to get the words out ahead of its solidifying. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

           “For what?” He let go of the pan and turned toward you, supporting his weight on the countertop. “So we can both—”

           “Both what? Be delusional? Is that what you were going to say?”

           Sam didn’t answer, but the set of his jaw was firm and he kept his eyes locked on yours.

           “He told me you were drunk for a week after the hunt you were talking about.” You watched as Sam’s pupils widened a touch. “And that you didn’t just promise each other to buckle down, you pinky swore.” Sam’s Adam’s apple jumped in his throat. “It’s true, isn’t it? I can see in your face that it is. Did you already know it’s really him?”

           He looked down at the floor and clenched his jaw. “I was pretty sure. Or at least I really hoped I was pretty sure.”

           You felt more than consciously allowed your mouth’s falling open. “How? How long?”

           “It just—I don’t know, it just felt different. I—uh, the first time was after we made those cupcakes; he asked about the cupcakes.”

           You slumped against the countertop opposite him, speechless. He shoved the pan off the hot burner a little too hard, put a palm on either side of the stove to brace himself. The two of you stood like that for a long minute, the smell of chocolate not matching the stiff heaviness in the air at all.

           “I don’t—what if it’s not real?” His throat sounded bound even though you couldn’t see his face, hulking mass of him spread across the tiny kitchen.

           He seemed so defeated, so young, and then you couldn’t believe how selfish you’d been, not putting two and two together that something challenging Sam’s grip on or understanding of reality must shove him back to the brain melting torture he’d endured in the cage and the months—years, maybe, he was always so tight-lipped about it—afterward. What the fuck were you thinking, not seeing it before, how this could seem like a perfectly laid trap for Sam, the most poetic way to whip his mind into stiff peaks of meringue. It made so much sense why he would need time to really suss it out, see the situation from all angles and investigate, check and re-check. Tears pricked the corners of your eyes but you blinked them away. This was not about you or your complicated need for him, it was about Sam, what he’d been through, what he was likely putting himself through even now.

           “The, um, the pancakes smell really good.”

           “Yeah?” There was half a laugh behind his words, humorless as it was. “I hope they’re okay, I know they’re your, uh, your favorite.”

           “I’m surprised you remembered.”

           Sam leaned on one arm to rub his face with his other hand. “Yeah, well.”

           “Can I help?”

           After a beat, he stood up and offered some space next to him on the stove. You worked hip to hip, sprinkling the chocolate chips while Sam flipped. He was scraping the last of the batter into a last little runt pancake with a spatula when you couldn’t help yourself and wrapped your arms around his waist. He seemed surprised, if sad, before setting down the bowl and covering as much of you as he could, folding over you like a protective shell. It reminded you of that dirty motel room, months and months ago, when Sam held you together as you cracked in his arms. All he could do then was be steadfast in reminding you he was still there, if nothing else was, and you hoped you were able to give him the same now.

           You silently laid two place settings on the kitchen counter while Sam set the food out. He sat next to you and had picked up his fork when you touched his wrist to still him. “If it’s not real for you then I’m losing it too.”

           Sam thought for a second, then raised his forearm and kissed the back of your hand where you held onto him before cutting into his pancakes.

-

Continue to Dreams, Chapter 12

Thanks again for reading! If you liked it, check out my Masterlist or send me a request!

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[twisted-leader-of-something]

As a Leona stan who has more brains than other Leona stans out there who likes him for being a hot jerk, I had alot of things to justify his behaviour and his lack of change. If you pay attention closely on his birthday SSR, Leona has a different behaviour compared to his usual vulgar attitude. He has a calm and normal tone in his voice and seems to be ok in talking about his family and the things he do, he answers them all with no problem at all, heck he even teases the MC.

Continuation 1: His behaviour on his bday gives off a different impression on him and is proof that Leona can be a decent person depending on his mood. Also, I found out in this story too that he and Farena had a 10 year age gap. Which is kinda messed up to think that he was being compared to his brother at the age of 5 or 10. Just the thought of it, I understand why Leona grew up to be bitter and pessimistic. Even on his Bday at home, he was treated like he aint supposed to be born.

Continuation 2: People always overlook the fact Leona was lazy and spares no effort in anything if it doesnt benefit him. Well it might be true, they forgot in his backstory that Leona did work so hard to prove he is just as important as his brother only to be shoved aside again and again. It had been that way to the point he possibly suffered from depression and becomes hopeless in life. He starts losing interest in effort and sleeps his pain away.

Continuation 3: He'd also become so close off to other people and treats them as either a nuisance or servants simply because the people in the palace outside his family, treat him like he is no important, so he treats everyone like he is no important to them. BUT, its not likely the case at all anymore. Despite being a jerk, Leona does showcase signs of kindness too albeit much more subtle.

Continuation 4: Its pretty evident on his Bday story how he treats MC well compared in EP 2 and 3. He becomes more proactive and starts to work at EP 5. He even provide some foods for his dorm mates at the Halloween event and even saves Jack. Leona has alot of good points in him despite being a jerk, the only problem is, that he has troubles moving on in life because he was stuck in the past, he refuse to open up to others because he thinks emotions are a weakness.

Continuation: Despite all this he still cares for his family, he just doesnt show it. He still respects his brother even if he is jealous of him. That somewhat makes him the opposite of Scar because Scar himself could never do that. Out all of the people who had a hard time changing, Leona is the one who is the hardest to change because of years of pain being compared by the people of his home. He can change, but its a milestone of change. Maybe not now but later on. Thats all sorry its too long

For Context, Anon is most likely referring to this part of my last post: 

I thought Leona in a similar regard to Vil, even after Chapter 2 because. . . Leona just. . . didn’t express he wanted to change or reflect on his past actions. And Honey, I have pretty bad depression, possibly on par with what Leona has, maybe even worse. And, I have younger siblings who have to live in my shadow at my middle school and they’ve told me it’s hard to fit into the model I’ve made being a teacher’s pet and overall good student the teachers favored highly.  But being depressed and living in someone’s shadow that does not excuse Leona from his actions. And, at the time, we knew nothing about Leona’s past besides that and how his attitude changed after Cheka was born. Depression is different from person to person but that’s not an excuse for trying to kill a fellow classmate, getting several people injured, throwing your dorm under the bus and taking no responsibility for it quite literally throwing in the towel the minute he faces issues, and not doing anything overall and making it other people’s problems.  Depression isn’t an excuse to be an asshole. Neither is being in someone else’s shadow.  And, until the Fairy Gala, Leona showed no true signs he had changed and care for anyone besides himself.  Sure, Chapter 2 hinted at Leona taking a hit for Savanaclaw by making a deal with Azul for Ruggie’s sake, once again to try to kill someone, and Chapter 3 kind of expands on that by giving out generally what must have happened. But honey. That isn’t much to go off of, and Chapter 4 kind overshadows that part with, well, Ruggie saying Leona’s only helping MC in destroying Azul’s contracts because he doesn’t want to deal with the contract he made with Azul anymore. So, imagine my surprise and happiness when the Fairy Gala shows that Leona cares for Ruggie, Grim and MC when he comes and saves the three when they’re in trouble during the event. It showed me that Yana and the staff at least kind of understood the side of people like me, who don’t like Leona because he treats others badly.   Do I like Leona? Not really. Still think he’s not a great guy, but I at least know he’s capable of being a decent being when he wants to be and now I can tolerate him, and with new information that has come out about him thanks to his birthday story, I can say I’m more on the fence with him then I was with him when I first read through his chapter.

 It's quite alright Anon! I think this sums about pretty my change in feelings on Leona, besides the fact I'm not a Leona stan at all.

I mean, I can understand where Leona’s coming from, to a certain degree. 

Your whole life is thrown to the side by others no matter what you do, and then once you’ve gotten used to that messed up way of life, your life kind of messed up by a single thing that isn’t exactly isn’t in your control. And, to the degree I can empathize with Leona with that. The circumstances are wildly different between me and Leona, but I think I understand Leona’s feeling of hopelessness and the depression he felt, and why he sleeps his life away. 

My depression is much different than his, so I don’t do the same things as him, but I understand his feeling of hopelessness, to an almost painful degree. I won’t get into the details of what happened to me, because I really don’t want to here since I don’t want this to be a pity party for me, but in essence, I think I felt what Leona did when Cheka first came into being. 

He felt he had no one now that Cheka come into being, because now he was, well, a spare for the throne. Since people already didn’t treat him right for something that wasn’t something he could control, Leona was most likely always in a pretty bad place, mentally. A part of him knew that he was in a bad place, but he dealt with it, because that’s what he knew. I think Cheka’s birth was a breaking point for him. He was living basically on something he knew wasn’t good, but trying his best but then Cheka’ existence came into being, and now Leona’s going to be treated worse.

I don’t think he blames Cheka for it, from how he treats Cheka, he’s just trying to push Cheka away because Cheka’s existence, unfortunately reminds him of his fate, that he’s basically a spare for a throne he’s probably not going to get. Leona pushes Cheka away despite how much Cheka love him because Leona is trying to protect himself for getting hurt again. Leona’s never hurt Cheka, and has more or less been nice to Cheka despite his hate for the cub, all things considered. Lions are known to kill cubs to take over a pride, but the closest thing Leona’s done to hurting Cheka is throwing Cheka away from him, to be caught by Ace and Deuce (which is kind of sketchy if it’s canon, but eh. I count it.). 

Which, is why Leona most likely jumped at the chance to go to Night Raven when he realized he had a chance to get out, and I think his time at Night Raven is actually very good for him. 

Leona, even if he is kind of a huge jerk, is away from the toxic environment that was his life, and is now genuinely respected by others for who he is. He has room to grow as a person without people pushing him down and degrading him, and in a place where his actions have next to no effect in the world. Leona clearly has people around him that respect him, like Jack and even his dormmates that respect him for who he is as a person (Not sure about Ruggie. After Chapter 2 I kind of question if Ruggie cares for Leona like he did back then). And, like Anon said, we are seeing Leona start to try to change, it’s subtly, but it’s there for sure. For one, in the main story, he’s more proactive than before, and showing he can be a leader and a decent being when he wants to be. While I’m not sure how long Leona has before he has the leave Night Raven, I’m happy for him at least he finally got the help he needed. It took an Overblot, but it seems Leona is learning to deal with his depression. And, that makes me happy. Still not happy he’s an ass to others, but I’m more okay with it now I know that reason behind it. 

From Leona’s character line, I think Yana might be going for The Tale of Two Brothers version of Scar and possibly leading into The Lion Guard version of Scar. I can’t prove why I know that Yana might do this or how she’ll do it, but based on Leona’s backstory, The Tale of Two Brothers version matches with our Leona right now. Leona is pretty troubled, like Taka was. But, I think after Leona has had his time with MC, he turns more into Askari more, making him a better person and then the kingdom sees him more as a figure that got the short end of the stick that made his way in life then an unwanted second prince.

I’ll all for it. But, I’d be interested in hearing Farena and his wife’s side of the story, as well. Purely just because I wanna know how they feel about him, too. Maybe Farena and his wife know something about Leona he don’t, and give us insight on Leona’s scar on his eye. 

[moonlightlullaby]

Joining the call, we’re welcomed by the amigops, Brooke, Karl and Bretman.

“So, everyone, this is my older brother, Dylan!” 

“What’s up, guys? Nice to meet y’all!” variations of hi’s and hello’s hit our ears all at once.

“Hey, Dylan!” Karl chimes after them “Good to see- well, talk to you again, man!” 

“Oh yeah! Thanks for helping us the other day.” Corpse sounds much more relaxed now - I mean, eveyone does… Bottom line is that streaming, however authentic and open you are with your viewers, does put a strain on you, so hearing everyone - myself included - more loose doesn’t really come as a surprise.

“Yeah, wish I could’ve done more. It sucks that you still lost.”

“Hey!” I elbow his side, causing him to dramatically gasp and fake cry and everyone in the call to laugh.

“Yeah, about that, you shouldn’t mention it around Alex. He’s still super bitter about it.” I giggle at Karl’s remark and, on cue, none other than Alex joins the voicechat.

We keep chatting as more people join us, introducing themselves to my brother - and Dave to both of us since it’s our first interaction ever. I’m really intrigued to see how he plays.

Dyl and I have decided to megazord today and play as one - not without some whining from Alex. He’s claimed it would be unfair and disproportional - even though no one else seemed even slightly bothered by it - and has only agreed with it after I’d exposed my brother’s pathetic skills in among us - earning me a glare and a light punch from Dyl - and reminded him of how much better a victory would feel knowing he didn’t trick eight people, but nine.

With Tina’s arrival, we all agree on who will be playing the first round and get the game started. CREWMATE flashes on the screen. Alright, let’s try and stay alive.

Yeah, that didn’t work out. 

For some reason - read: lack of functioning braincellls -, Dyl wanted to do simon says first and, since the universe loves screwing us over, of course Ludwig would walk in and shoot our astronaut just as we’re about to finish the task - after having already failed twice, may I add. Both of us just stop and stare - I, at the ceiling; Dyl, at the white little guy flopped over - before we burst into laughter. 

“Of course this would happen!” he shakes his head and, being his persistent self, opens the task to start all over.

And just in case you’ve ever doubted Murphy’s law, you should definitely reconsider it because guess what happens next: right before Dyl presses the last button, an emergency meeting is called. 

“Alright, fuckers, who did it? Who would hurt my baby girl Y/N like this?” although I feel very honored to see Brooke defending me with so much passion, I can’t contain the giggles that escape my mouth at the contrast between how threatening and intimidating she’s trying to sound and how she actually sounds.

The meeting is not productive at all. No one is sussed and everyone skips. “Don’t worry, D and missy Y/N, we’ll get whoever had the audacity to do this. I promise!” Sweet, Bret, sweet!

When “No one was ejected. (Skipped)” takes over the screen, a low, soft sound fills my ears. However, by the time my brain catches up, the sound’s stopped. Corpse was humming ‘cheater’! Yes, the infamous 2008 nightmare of a song I was stupid enough to share with him!

“Did you show him?” my wide-eyed brother whispers to me. I immediately shush him while muting ourselves at the speed of light. “Dylan!” I whisper-shout, turning to face him. This asshole is smirking! 

I narrow my eyes and furrow my brows, mentally throwing daggers at him and setting his body on fire. I open my mouth, but, before any sound can leave it, a notification pops up: a private message from the one and only boyinaband. A glance at my brother tells me his mind is somewhere else already as he pets Fiyero - I mean, our family’s never been known for our impeccable attention; who would’ve expected it to be any different now? -, so I open his message.

hey, y/n!

don’t mean to make things awkward at all, but i’d like to thank you for whatever you’ve told corpse

yk, he tends to shut off when things get hard, but he reached out the other day for help and company

so thanks

Why is he-? How does he-? What-? I’m…

Has Corpse said anything about me to Dave? Why would he do that? 

No, no... No, Dave might have just guessed it since Corpse and I are constantly talking

...right? 

Yes, yes, it has to be it.

oh also, it’s great getting to meet you and play with you!

you’re really cool indeed :)

Y/N: oh there’s nothing to thank me for, really

but i’m really glad we’ve met too!

i love your content btw and you’re funny af

Dave: thx! 

so it’s lud and...?

he killed me so gracefully idk how to feel

Y/N: jshdfgjhdgfkwfgjewv

fuck idk either

Speaking of imposters, all of our tasks are yet to be done, I should get back to them.

After that round - in which, by the way, Brooke was the other imposter and carried the entire thing after Lud vented in front of Tina, wasn’t able to catch her and got ejected -, the afternoon went on pretty smoothly.

Dylan and I arguing every 2 minutes about what strategy we should follow and ending up with a no-strategy approach. Friends killing - and being killed by - friends, lying to friends, throwing friends under the bus… you know, very friendly things. Dylan and Bretman basically ignoring everyone else and isolating themselves in their own bubble for half of the time. Everyone just vibing to miscellaneous tunes - from Dolly Parton to Wilbur Soot, from CORPSE to BLACKPINK -, and chatting, laughing and having a good time as Toast had proposed.

Without the distraction of an audience and the pressure of being funny or 666 IQ, I got to actually talk to and learn more about Leslie, Dave - who (I was right) is a sweetheart and with whom I hit it off instantly -, Sean, Toast himself and, well, pretty much everyone. 

It’s so crazy how, in a little over one month, you can connect so much with these many people! Some who were complete strangers to you until then and others who you already admired and looked up to… and now, you can call them all your friends. It’s insane!

✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧

🐝 bee-girls are ruining my life 🐝

chapter 12: what friends do

✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧⋄⋆⋅⋆⋄✧

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A/N: Hi! I wasn’t sure if I’d post today, but, quite frankly, writing’s the only thing I can get myself to do lately and knowing that there are some people out there who want to read what I have to offer really warms my heart 🤍 Sorry for the sappiness and for any typos heheh See you on tuesday hopefully!

Taglist: @callmemaeve-y @victoria-a567 @the-thighs-of-betrayal @tclegane  @hydrate-tion @neenieweenie @clubfairy @cherry-piee @summerbbygirl @officiallyunofficialperson @a-dot-dev @that-chick212​ @bellomi-clarke

[thesmokingguns]

warning: smoking, slight smut, drug use

Wendy and The Lost Boys

CHAPTER FIVE

Sasha sat in class, her notebook open and pen in her mouth as she looked out the window. It had been two weeks since she had been back to the apartment.  After she had hooked up with Nikki she had tried to not be around the guys. Even when she worked at the club she’d call a taxi or Len would pick her up after her shift. She was aware that she was avoiding Nikki but she wasn’t sure what to do to fix it. After she had slept over a couple weeks ago she had worn so much cover up or scarfs to cover the marks Nikki had left on her. When she undressed she had seen the purple hickeys and angry looking bite marks. He had done it to show her not to make him jealous or he’d mark what was his. It wasn’t like she was hooking up with anyone at school. Len was a good boy towards her and she knew he was trying to take it slow before weaseling it to get her. He was one of the guys who were looking for a girl who came to school for a wife degree. But Nikki had made it impossible to even think about fooling around with someone else. All she could think about was the feeling of his mouth on her body and how when he kissed her she couldn't even think. She had known she had a crush on him but it was becoming apparent to her it meant more than she had expected

The sound of books shutting made her aware that the seminar was over. It was a Friday afternoon so everyone was hustling around campus heading home or off to get ready for the night. Sasha was working that night and was scheduled for an earlier afternoon shift the following day. She was only working two days a week unless she picked up other shifts but the money was better than most places. As she slipped into the blue costume she’d be wearing that night she looked around her dorm. With her schedule she needed to stay at the apartment. It made the most sense. She threw everything in her overnight back and headed to the bus stop. She’d need to call Tommy to give him a heads up about staying over.

“Sasha is staying over tonight. I’m going to grab some beers for her because she said she won’t come out with us.” Tommy said headed to the window to leave the apartment Nikki looked up from where he had been writing a song on the couch trying to process what he was told. After they had hooked up Sasha had vanished. She called Tommy sometimes but she wasn't around at all. He had thought about calling her or even driving the fifteen minutes away to her dorm room but there was nothing to really say.

Nikki loved the rockstar lifestyle. He loved the attention women would shower on him at shows or pretty much anywhere on the strip. He loved always having someone giving him booze or drugs when he wanted them and even when he didn’t. He loved all the eyes on the stage watching him and his band play the songs he created. The rush of it all was everything that he had dreamed of in his life. The problem with how much he loved the rockstar life meant that he wasn’t going to settle down. Sasha was a good girl and if there was someone who was worth settling down with it would be her but not now. Now when the band was putting out their first record and she was finishing her first semester of college; it wasn't the time for either of them to commit.

But Nikki hadn’t stopped thinking of her. Even though he knew he couldn’t be with her he still remembered every inch of her body and wanted more of it. He could feel her kiss still racing through him throwing him off balance. He could smell her on his sheets and feel her against him in his dreams. He was hooked on her with constant thoughts that no amount of alcohol or drugs seemed to numb. And now she would be in the apartment tonight and he would know she was there. How was he supposed to hit the Strip thinking of her in the house alone? He groaned, kicking the table sending bottles shattering onto the carpet. The fucking apartment was a mess and he was sure she would start cleaning it without anyone asking her to

They needed to move out of this dump. It was only him and Tommy living there now. Mick had moved in with a girlfriend; he was sick of the constant parting going on, never giving him a break to rest his back and the fact the place was always a mess. Vince had gotten married to his girlfriend Beth and they were renting a place together, playing family in the house well he would come out with the band most nights and run astray, Nikki didn't get the point of getting married and sleeping around like Vince did, They were too young to be worried about having old ladies keeping them in check. He even worried about Mick missing out and he was the old man of the group.Tommy was the youngest and he always managed to have a girlfriend because he thought he loved every other woman he met. Maybe, Nikki though, I’m just cut from a different cloth. He had been by himself for so long he didn’t know what value there was in love.

Sasha shook her head as she lit a cigarette. Tommy had told her that he was going to pick her up after her shift but it was 1120pm and he was twenty minutes late so she didn't expect him to come. She lit her cigarette headed down the strip to the apartment. She hated walking down the strip by herself, not that she was scared but more because she was so used to doing it with one of the Crue boys by her side. She was glad she had changed into her Keds before leaving but made a mental note that she would need to throw her bag at the apartment before her shift or take over one of Tommy’s draws. She yawned as she turned past the Whisky to the apartment hoping that there wasn’t some party going on. She was pleasantly surprised to find the house empty.

“Jesus fuck.” she gagged, her hand flying to cover her mouth at the smell. “I’m going to fucking kill them.” she said to herself. There was trash everywhere and it smelled like they hadn’t done any basic cleaning in months. A ripped up map was hanging outside of the bathroom and she peaked inside and wanted to scream. It had been two weeks since she had been there but a couple months since she cleaned the place. “Fucking children.” she moved into Tommy’s room stepping on a used condom and literally gagging. She was going to kill all of them.She changed into her pair of shorts, even though it was cold and tucked in a sweatshirt with the UCLA logo on the front. If she was going to sleep here she needed to clean it up.

The trash hadn’t been taken out since god knows when, and when she started moving the pile she ran with the cockroaches that came rushing towards her. It took her over an hour to get the trash into the apartment's garbage and by then she was crashing. Sasha took a half of one of her pills that she usually used to help her focus when she was studying. She wanted to get a few hours of cleaning done, not sure that it would actually really do anything to the house but at least someone should put in the effort.

It was three in the morning and she was still going strong, a warm bucket of water and bleach as she cleaned the walls in the living room. Hall and Oates were blaring on the record player as she danced around to the song. She had done all the laundry, dishes, cleaned the bathroom including buying toilet paper, made Tommy and Nikki’s bed, and was still going strong. She clapped her hands as she dropped the rag into the bucket. The sound of the needle skipping had her turning, looking at Nikki. She hadn't heard him come in so her heart had skipped a beat.

“Do you understand people know this is our apartment and we have a reputation to keep up with? You can’t be listening to this shit in the apartment.” he picked the record up, snapping it in half, watching the way her mouth fell open. She was shocked he had gotten so mad that he broke her record that he knew she loved. “Imagine if someone came by and here you are pretending to keep fucking house with your shitty disco music. For someone in college you should use hit fucking head.” she was staring at him, blue eyes watering. Nikki was notorious for being the asshole of the strip but he was never like this with her. Her mouth was open slightly as if she didn’t even know what to say to him yelling at her. She hadn’t been yelled at since the last night with her ex. Nikki moved over only stopping when he saw her flinch at him advancing towards her, her arm coming up like she was going to cover herself. He realized at that moment that he messed up. The tears were falling now and she wiped them with the back of her hands, noticing they were shaking.

“I’m sorry. “ she stepped back, fumbling as she picked up the bucket of water. She was moving to the sink, her heart racing. The water got dumped out and she placed the empty bucket under the kitchen sink. “Can I have my record?” she asked her hands out wanting the two pieces that he was holding. He handed them over not sure what to say. “Thanks.” Sasha stuffed them into the sleeve and headed to Tommy’s room, shutting the door behind her. She wanted to leave the apartment but she was afraid

He knew that he had fucked up as soon as he grabbed the record, snapping it like that and then yelling at her was overkill. The whole night he had been thinking of her back in the apartment. He had been so distracted that he barely realized what or who he was doing. He had thought about staying at the girls house who he had slept with but the idea of leaving Sasha alone in the apartment had him stumbling home. And when he saw her through the window, God she was beautiful. All her blonde hair and her ever present shorts drove him crazy.  The way she was so in her world as she cleaned up all the shit that they had left, taking care of them in a way that only she could care enough to do. He stumbled into his room stopping when she saw the bed made, the empty beer cans cleared out, clothes hanging on the hangers in the closet. So he had fucked up even more because she was just trying to help.

“Fuck.” he was turning to go knock on Tommy’s door before he could talk himself out of it. The door opened and she answered it looking up at him, “I’ll go to Tower Records tomorrow and get you a new record. I shouldn’t have broken it, even though it sucks.” He ran his hands over his head feeling the knots of Aquanet teasing not allowing him to run his fingers through it. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.” he didn't want to look at her and see her upset.

“You don’t have to buy me a new record. I shouldn’t have left it here.” there was a tension between them and it was just heightened with the fight they were just having. “And I’m sorry I cleaned the apartment. I just wanted to do something nice since you guys let me stay here.” Of course was doing something nice for him, that’s who she was.

“Are you going to be okay sleeping by yourself?” he looked at her, seeing the way that her eyes flashed almost annoyed at him when he asked that question. Sasha could see the lipstick down his neck and knew if he was coming back to the apartment at 3am that he had been with some girl.

“Yeah. I think I’m getting to be like you, Sixx.” the way her tone was turning bitter surprised the bassist, “I mean you didn’t have to come back here tonight But you like being alone and I respect your space.” She knew where he had been and now he knew she wasn’t going to be the one that acted like he hadnt been fucking someone else.

“I came back here because I knew that you would be here.” Nikki told her, his hand on the door to block it from closing. She was angry at him for hurting her feelings again and mad at how he always was. He thought he was speaking volumes to her but she just looked mad at him.

“So you decided to come here to start a fight with me and break my record. That’s good to know. Now I know where you stand with me.” she was mad at him and her stomach was turning. He was such an idiot and Sasha didn’t know why she liked this moron who never said the right thing. He reached out and she closed her eyes, “I don’t like smelling some other girls perfume on you.” She told him and that was true. Knowing what Nikki did and having to experience it was a lot different.

“So why don’t I go shower and you meet me in my room?” He asked her to look at him so he could kiss her. She shook her head stepping back from him. The fact he was so casual about if made her even more mad.

“We can’t, Nikki. I want too much of you and you don’t want enough of me.” Her words meant nothing to him, despite it being kind of true.

“I think we both want the same thing. Even if it’s just for tonight.” She looked at him giving Nikki the opportunity to kiss her. Once their lips were locked, it was like a free for all. He lifted her easily slamming her into the wall. Her legs were around his waist and her hands buried in his hair. This fire between them as they both were starved for the other.

“I can’t have sex with you.” She managed to get out, making Nikki chuckle his mouth on her throat well he used one of his hands to get up her shirt. The feeling of her breasts in his hands had him pushing into her so she could feel how hard she made him. Sasha was pressed against the wall with him rocking into her wondering if she was going to cum from him dry jumping , “Wait, I’m serious.” She moaned out watching as his green eyes held hers.As much as she wanted to there needed to be a shred of self preservation, “I won’t have sex with you if you’ve slept with someone tonight.” He knew she was serious now and rolled his eyes.

“It’s past midnight. I should get a do over.” She was already wiggling her way to her feet. “You aren’t going to do anything?” He asked, watching her. She shook her head and Nikki wanted to punch something but his temper had already flared once. “What am I supposed to do?” He asked as she moved to go back into Tommy’s room.

“Use your hand and imagination.” The door was almost closed, “Like I’m going to do.” She shut the door hearing him groan and smiling.

“Okay, angel.” Sasha heard him outside the door. “I’ll play by your rules, just for tonight. But I want to either see you or hear you explain everything you’re doing.” She gulped because she couldn’t play games like this with Nikki. He knew more than her and wanted things she didn’t know how to give to him. Nikki couldn’t look and not touch. She knew that as much as he did but she was opening the door anyway letting him pull her into his room already breaking his no touch rule. Sasha was vaguely aware at this point that her feelings were going to get really hurt.

His mouth was on hers, her clothes being discarded before she could even figure out what he was doing. It was like she was falling in a spiral. Nothing made sense and she would collapse if Nikki had his hands on her back pretty much keeping her steady.

“Why does everything feel so good with you?” She whispered as his mouth went lower. He was nudging her on the bed. “Maybe because I feel safe with you and I trust you.” She sighed out wiggling under his hands. His lips were on her hips but when she spoke he stopped looking up at her blue eyes.

“You trust me?” He asked her feeling frozen in the moment. Sasha pushed herself up on her elbows looking at him.

“Of course I trust you. You’re always making sure no one touches me at shows and during the summer you’d split your food with me. You always tell me how things are and don’t sugar coat it. I like that.” Nikki almost fell on his ass. His hands slid up her body moving to kiss her, this time slowing things down instead of rushing her. Sasha surprised him when she rolled on top of him pulling off his shirt. Nikki hadn’t had anyone trust him before. When she confided in him it was like it made something realer between them. There was no doubt in his mind that he wanted her but now he could lose something he didn’t know he valued.

“That’s just how you should treat people.” He said his hands in her hair. She was five years younger than him but they both evened each other out in areas the other didn’t. If he was going to settle down it would be with her. He just needed her to get college so she could sow all her wild oats. She laughed at him and he frowned, “What is funny about what I just said?” he asked her, his hands behind his back. There had never been a time where a girl was naked on his lap and he talked this much. Usually he saved the pillow talk for,...never.

“Nikki, you’re literally one of the rudest people I have ever met in my life. “ he frowned at that and she touched his cheek. The small motion had him looking up at her, redirected, “You literally pissed on someone outside of The Roxy the night of my birthday because you didn’t like his shoes.” he smirked remembering that night. “And I haven’t had the best track record with people so when someone is nice to me it just means a lot.” she seemed to realize that she was naked on top of him but the way his fingers were dancing over her back.

“Do you think I should be mean to you so people don’t know?” he asked her, his hands on her hips pushing Sasha into his body. He did try to be a little mean to her to keep her on her toes and he did have a shitty personality.

“Don’t know what?” she asked, licking her bottom lip as she leaned closer into him. She could drown in kissing Nikki and wouldn’t even ask for a life raft. He did his side smirk, his hand sliding down her cheek and into his hair.

“I think we’ve talked enough, Angel.” he wasn’t going to tell her he liked her and set her up to be hurt even more but Sasha wasn’t going to let him go that easy. Her hands on his shoulders as she looked down at him.

“Tell me.” she was giving him this look, “Or do you want me to guess?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow. His hands were running up and down her sides and she knew that she was getting distracted.

“Forget I said anything, Angel.” he laid her down moving so he could be on top of her. Nikki put his lips on her. She was wiggling again and he sighed. “Why don’t we just sleep if you’re not going to let this go?”he asked her. He rolled holding her in his arms. She was quiet.

“I like you too. Even though you’re a huge asshole. And sometimes you stink from not showering.” She whispered. Nikki listened to her, frowning. The last thing he needed was to hurt her. But Sasha was smart, ambitious, good looking, and Nikki didn’t want to be the one to ruin her shine. Yet he was pulling her closer burying his face in his his as he fell asleep. Everyone was going to get hurt by this.

[yan-twst]

CYOA - Twisted Wonderland

aaand here it is, finally! Chapter one of my choose your own adventure fic for twst! This is the very first chapter; it’s a bit of a slow start, establishing the plot and all, you know? As was decided by the poll, the reader is in Diasomnia (however, I’m sure y’all can probably figure out a way to worm out of the dorm quickly and meet more characters). Anyways, without further ado, here’s the fic!

You sometimes wished that your dorm wasn’t so… Gloomy. Sure, Diasomnia had some cool things; the whole “Valley of Thorns Castle” aesthetic was cool, and the fact the hallways were lit with green torches always looked cool at night, not to mention the TVs and games in the common room, but… As you tried to study for the upcoming quiz, you quietly cursed the controlled climate. Yes, you knew that rain and storms were natural in the area; but didn’t the school control the dorm’s climate with fae magic?! It was way too difficult to concentrate on your potions notes when the rain outside felt like it was lulling you to sleep as it fell against your windows.

Your roommate was snoozing in his bed- either he’d already studied, or he’d given up on the quiz. Either way, you couldn’t deny that it was alluring to just forget the damn thing and go to bed. It wasn’t that late, but you’d been going to sleep at awful hours lately, and your body sorely demanded you get some sleep. And yet, glancing down at the recipe for the minor memory erasing draught you’d have to concoct tomorrow, you knew that if you went to sleep now, you’d be dealing with Crewel’s biting critique and a terrible grade tomorrow.

A snore from your roommate broke your concentration, and you glared at the sleeping boy. Usually you and him got along just fine, but in this moment, it felt like he was testing you, as he slept sweetly and your sleep deprived self stressed over a notebook. Hearing another snore, you decided to move to the common room- maybe there you’d concentrate a bit better, and also not be tempted by the siren’s call of your bed. Picking up your phone and your notebook, you left the room, closing the door softly so as to not disturb your roommate, and made your way down the eerie halls of the dorm.

“Vice dorm leader…?” immediately, you noticed that Lilia was in the common room. After that your nose registered a smell so odd it almost made you turn around and leave. It wasn’t a bad smell, just… Incredibly odd and off putting: and you quickly pinpointed the source of it to be some charred, blackened and bizarre dish that your vice dorm leader was holding. 

“Oh? Hello there.” he said with a chuckle. You wouldn’t call Lilia a close friend by any means, but you did know him well. As a vice dorm leader, he did his best to help out the Diasomnia students, and he was also fond of pulling small pranks here and there; you’d been a victim of his tricks and also gone to him for help a couple times in your two years of being at NRC. “It’s an odd hour to be hanging out… Or could it be the smell of my cooking that brought you here?”

“Your… cooking?” so that charred thing he was holding was… food? You’d been warned- mostly by your fellow second year Silver- that Lilia was not a good cook (in fact, Silver had made it seem like his food was somehow a health hazard), but you’d imagined the usual cooking oopsies. Too much salt, not enough seasoning, maybe burning some of the food; the usual mistakes people made when cooking. However, looking at the blackened and mysterious substance in the plate he held… You wondered if perhaps Silver had been right in making Lilia’s cooking sound like some sort of biohazard.

“Indeed, I’ve been cooking some cookies. I wanted to cheer Silver, since he’s been studying hard for a quiz. And there’s nothing quite like some cookies to snack on while studying, right?” said Lilia. Cookies…? You walked closer and squinted at the plate; so those were Lilia’s cookies…? You were pretty sure you could see eggshell shards on the otherwise charcoal black pieces of what you hoped was dough. Did he… Did he not see the problem with them?

“Oh, the potions quiz for tomorrow? Yeah, I’m sure he’s been studying… I doubt Crewel is going to go easy on us.” You said with a nervous laughter, trying to divert the topic from the so-called cookies. The last thing you wanted was for him to ask you to taste test or something. A bite of those cookies would probably take you out of commission for a good week or two, and while being sick to miss class tomorrow and avoid the quiz was tempting, you really weren’t sure if it was worth it to risk some crazy horrible food poisoning for that. 

“Fufu, you’re also working quite hard, I gather? Did you come to study here?” asked Lilia, pointing to your notebook. You nodded. 

“Mhm, my roommate was being a bit loud, so…” you shrugged with a smile. You weren’t gonna throw your roommate under the bus and tell Lilia he was snoring like a train and that drove you out of the room, you were at least kind enough to omit that particular piece of info. “Well, I’m probably just going to look over the notes a bit and then go to sleep. I can only study so much to make a potion without actually being at the lab, after all.”

“Ah, Silver did mention that Crewel was making you all make a draught from memory.” Lilia hummed. “Are you having trouble with this? I can always try to help, after delivering these delicious cookies to Silver.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly bother you with this, it’s ok, vice dorm leader!” you said, quickly shaking your head. You didn’t want to waste Lilia’s time; he was a third year, after all… If your work was hard as a second year, he was probably drowning in schoolwork and studying, right? Not to mention you kind of felt like you should show more respect to him: he was an ancient fae and you were pretty sure he was a war veteran despite being in high school. 

“Oh, please call me Lilia. We’ve known each other for too long for you to be using titles, (name). I still remember the day the magic mirror sorted you into Diasomnia, right after my dear Silver was sorted.” he said with a smile, his pointy fangs catching your eye. “You’re close friends with Silver, aren’t you? I’m quite grateful you spend time with him, he’s a good boy.”

“Oh, um, well… Then I’ll call you Lilia, if that’s really ok…” you said, a bit bashful. You didn’t miss how he talked about Silver; you knew that the 2nd year did constantly refer to Lilia as ‘old man’, but you’d brushed it off to perhaps him being close enough to Lilia to use that as a nickname, but… The way Lilia spoke, it almost sounded like a father being happy his son had found a friend. “Yes, me and Silver are close. We’re in the same class, I usually give him my notes when he falls asleep in the middle of lectures. He also helps me study, sometimes.”

“Oh, you do? I must thank you, then. It’s quite kind of you.” Lilia said with a smile. “Oh! How rude of me, I haven’t offered you a cookie, have I? They’re freshly baked, you should try them. It’s the same recipe I made for Silver when he was younger.”

“Er-!” you paled. Crap, this was what you’d been fearing. The stress of the request made you not even stop to think about the odd wording of ‘making cookies for Silver ever since he was younger’ or the implication Lilia had somehow raised Silver; your brain was blaring alarms telling you to NOT put those… Things anywhere close to your face. But at the same time, Lilia was smiling so happily as he picked one of the charred objects and stuck it out in your direction.

“Lilia. You shouldn’t be giving that to humans.” a deep voice made you freeze before you accepted the cookie with a reluctant hand. You quickly turned around to spot the dorm leader entering the common room, arms crossed as he stared at Lilia. “You’re going to kill them if you make them eat that.”

“Oh, come on Malleus, don’t say that! My cookies are delicious.” Lilia sighed, taking back his baked treat and taking a bite for himself. You internally cringed at the noise of what you now absolutely knew to be chunks of eggshell and god knows what else in the object. “Don’t you see you’ll give (name) a bad impression of my cooking if you say that?”

“... It’s my duty to protect my dorm members.” said Malleus, walking closer to you and warily eyeing Lilia’s cooking. You held back a sigh of relief- yup, he’d definitely saved you. If even Malleus Draconia was scared of Lilia’s hellish cookies, you probably would have keeled over and died if you’d put that in your mouth. “Besides, it’s late. Why were you baking?”

“I was making a treat for Silver, since he was studying. This little one just happened to walk in when the cookies were ready- they’re studying for the same quiz Silver is cramming for.” said Lilia, gesturing to you. “It seems Crewel is having his fun in stressing out the first years, fufu. What potion is he making you all make?”

“Oh, um, it’s… A minor memory loss draught. It’s got a lot of steps and ingredients, and it’s way too easy to mess up, so…” you said, a bit nervous. You felt… A little bit silly now, for stressing so much over it. Right now, you were surrounded by one of the strongest mages in the world- who was also the prince of the dark fae- and an ancient and wise fae who had probably fought in great wars and aided the Valley of Thorns royalty. To them, making a weak potion was probably as easy as blinking. 

“A memory loss draught… That does indeed have many steps to its preparation, if I’m not remembering wrong.” said Malleus. His words made you relax a little- you’d half been expecting some comment like a minor memory loss draught? That’s child’s play, why are you stressing out? or something. Your dorm leader was known to be a bit haughty at times. “You look exhausted. I assume you’ve been studying a lot?”

“Wait, I look tired…? Crap, is it showing in my face?” you said, cursing internally. You had a few friends in Pomefiore and you just knew they’d be fretting over you if your eyebags and exhaustion were so evident your dorm leader, who was not too good at picking up clues, could notice.

“I’m afraid so, my dear. You look like you’re ready to drop any second now- I know you’ve got a lot of work, but perhaps you’re pushing yourself too hard.” said Lilia. You grimaced; great, now you’d somehow managed to worry the two of them. It felt… Wrong to have two powerful and important beings even express concern over your wellbeing: you were just… Some puny human who got sorted into Diasomnia, you weren’t even particularly close to either of them. Hell, you’d only spoken to Malleus a couple of times before, for fuck’s sake.

“Hmm, Malleus, could it be that you still remember how to make that potion?” said Lilia, tilting his head. The taller fae nodded, making Lilia hum in understanding. “I see, I see. Well, (name), I’m sure you’d get an amazing grade if you were to study with Malleus. He’s quite good in potionmaking when he concentrates, I promise you. Besides, it wouldn’t hurt at all for him to get closer to his own dorm members now, would it?”

“That’s-!” you visibly stiffened, looking at Malleus. Sure, you weren’t as scared of him as some of the other students were, but…! You still couldn’t just treat him all willy-nilly like some random kid; he was one of the most powerful mages in the world and crown prince from the Valley of Thorns. The mere idea of dragging him off for a study session that benefitted only you made your gut twist. Although the idea was anxiety inducing, you couldn’t help but notice a spark of… Curiosity? In Malleus’ eyes, almost as if he was entertained by the idea of it all; still, you couldn’t just accept something like that.  “I couldn’t possibly-!”

“... or you could go study with Silver. I was going to go check up on him, so you could come with me.” said Lilia, perhaps sensing your panic. 

--- time to make a choice! vote in the poll linked below to choose how to advance in the story!

poll: https://www.strawpoll.me/20971117

[jamestrmtx]

Fairytale Complex - [Undertale | Sans x Reader]

[Gender Neutral, Frisk's Parent Reader | Slow Burn]

Chapter Sixteen | Dummy! (Part 3 of 3)

[First] | [Previous] | [Next]

Dinner is about as awkward as waving back at someone you think's waving at you, only to then realize they're actually waving at someone else.

Frisk stares at your guest from beginning to end, only looking back to their bowl when they’re done with it. They grab a piece of bread and soak up what little soup remains at the bottom and say, “You’re not a bad cook", after. They take a bite off the bread; the rest of it disappears in three more. “Is this ren's way of testing whether you'll be a good boyfriend or not?”

Sans swallows hard and coughs once to recover as he sets his spoon down. “Well, uh… Somethin’ like that, I guess.” He casts a subtle glance at you, his gaze asking for help.

“We’re not dating,” you intervene. You take some soup, but end up throwing it back in the bowl when your hand shakes, too tense to continue eating. “You and Jerry just so happened to walk in at the wrong moment, making it look like something else.”

Frisk frowns, and a dull expression reaches their eyes. “I can tell you’re lying, ren. You’re bad at it.” Their gaze moves back towards Sans, who’s now finished with his bowl and trying to move away from the conversation. “What about you, then? Why’re you chickening out if you still wanna date (Y/N)?” They furrow their eyebrows and glare at the monster. “Why are you-“

“That’s enough, honey.” You stand up and face down at them. “This isn’t his fau-“

“So then, it’s yours?” Their voice breaks as they're the one to rise next; their hands thump over the table and their frown quivers as they attempt not to show any weakness. “He… He flirted with you, so that means he’s also responsible for it!”

“I said that’s enough, Frisk (L/N),” you snap, crossing your arms. “I’m okay with talking about this with you, but not during dinner. And even less when we have a guest over.” You plan to pick up the dishes, though the skeleton beats you to it, excusing himself off to the kitchen. “I’m not dating him, and that's final. That only happened ‘cause we kind of like each other. But I refuse to date anyone until you’re all grown up.”

“You’ll be old by then,” they whine, flailing their arms. “Grandparents can’t date!”

“Yes, they can.” You go along with the ridiculousness of the conversation, too caught up in it to fully assess their words. “And ten more years won’t make me a grandparent! I’m still young.”

Frisk huffs and switches for sign language, saying, “That still doesn’t mean you have to live like this.” They grimace, eyes wetting as they sniffle once. “I like seeing you happy… But right now, this just makes me feel like I'm bothering you.”

Your anger falls with that last sentence; panic replaces it.

In a haste, you try approaching their side, though they run off to their room just as you’re ready to bring them in for a hug. Their steps are quick and the door shuts with a subtle bang, their composure still showing through. You stay in place as their words replay on your mind over and over, gloom arriving. Dismissing them is an impossible feat; your mind continues to subject your thoughts into negativity, restraining you from acting quickly.

If you’d been doing a poor job at raising them this whole time, then what had been the point of it all?

Needing a distraction, you head to the kitchen and join Sans by the sink, no words spoken between you.

He washes the dishes while you dry and store them away, keeping up a rhythmic pace until only the pot’s left. Your gaze focuses on his arms, jacket’s sleeves lifted all the way up to his elbows, revealing the oddity of who you were growing attracted to. His shirt's a bit loose by the neck, presenting you with his collarbones as you spare a peek under it. You're still adapting to the strangeness of having someone look so similar to a human skeleton, yet so different all the same. He could breathe, laugh, move, talk... and even kiss based on first-hand experience. His skull wasn't entirely solid, allowing him to blink, eat, and drink -- besides from what you were thinking of whenever you stared at his face and down at his teeth. You tell yourself it’s wrong to be befriending him, and even worse finding any attraction in him. You’re not sure how to interpret his words from earlier ago, and just what it meant to see him break down like he had.

He’d revealed he disliked who he used to be, but did he remember having said it?

From your experience, moments like those were hard to keep clear.

“Do you… remember what you said to me, Sans?”

His hands stop what they’re doing, one grabbing the knob -- ready to open the faucet -- and the other holding the pot, now coated in suds. He looks up at you, saying, “I cried, didn’t I? Don’t really remember word-for-word, but I know I meant what I said.”

You take a breather before responding with, “Even the part about hating who you used to be?”

Sans turns the knob, letting water pour down. “Yeah.” He nods, heaving out a sigh. “The more I look back and reflect on who I used to be, the more I understand why you don’t trust me.” The pot’s close to overflowing, though he doesn’t notice. You step in and place your hand over his, closing the faucet. Unaddressed tension remains as you stare down at his hand, yet you refuse to let it show, repelled by the idea of taking advantage of his vulnerability. You don’t want to engage in anything like your stay at the hotel again until you sorted out your mind and its jumble of thoughts, nor do you wish to romanticize his self-hatred by fulfilling your wants. “...I, uh, I get it now. And I promise I’ll stop flirtin' now that I know it.”

The monster pulls his hand away and takes the pot with both, emptying the soapy water down the drain. He does it little by little, preventing a flood in the sink. “Did Jerry say something about this?” you ask, taking the pot when he gives it to you. You hang the current towel and take a dryer, cleaner one from the rack. Then, you continue, finishing with the job. “He looked at you weird.”

He chuckles and meets with your eyes. “Maybe ‘cause I was all over you for a second there?”

You glare at him, lips doing the opposite by tugging into a grin, one you try to fight back. “Cut the sarcasm.” You jab his waist, smile growing. “You know what I mean."

“Let him think what he wants to think. I knew you before I knew him, and you guys haven’t been together for years. You’re your own person, and so’s him. If he doesn’t want to keep being friends, then that’s fine with me.”

You glance over to the time on the wall clock, seeing it’s already seven. With the frequent rain, the monster was forced to store his motorcycle away while it cleared out some more, and -- to make up for it -- his brother was now the one to either lend him his car, or take him where he needed to be. In short, letting him go back home would mean calling Papyrus two hours right before his sleep schedule. Either that, or it was sending Sans all alone off to the nearest bus stop.

You settle on neither, saying, "Want to stay over? It's late, and I've got a guest bedroom you can use."

He snickers and replies with, "Worried 'bout me?" When he notices, his grin falls, and he quickly makes up for it by adding, "Sorry. Doing that's pretty much a reflex now."

You smile and swat his shoulder, keeping your hand there. "...I don't really mind you flirting that way. I like it better than when you're straight-up obvious about it."

"Like the Mx. Serif thing?"

"Exactly." You shift on your feet, remembering one of his older comments. "That, and the ones you used to make about my... appearance."

"So you want me to be less invasive," he says, nodding. "Got it." He tries not to look down, a slight tense present in his grin. "I apologize if I ever made ya uncomfortable. I'm surprised you didn't just whack me over the head back then. Feels like I deserved it sometimes."

"Violence is not the answer." You pause, face regaining seriousness. "...Unless you cross borders you shouldn't be crossing."

"Kinda like what happened on the couch today?"

"No." You feel your throat ache the longer you talk with him, still too awkward to relax around him. "...I wanted it back then."

Sans washes his hands and gives you space to do the same. Then, he brings his sleeves down and waits until you're done washing up to accompany you to the living room. "Touch-starved?" he jokes, though you're far from taking it that way.

Seven years.

Not that you were completely, utterly desperate for a relationship, but good company was still good company. You could still use the warmth of someone else, even if it was purely platonic or familiar -- like a tight hug, or just someone else to have around the house. Wanting to depend less on Jerry's support and more on your own funds, you proposed to yourself working extra hours for as long as it was necessary. The rest of your day was either used up in chores or in spending more time with Frisk. It's only now that the monsters help you out with your child and their growth that you have additional time to do stuff like this.

"...Yes," you reply, looking away. "But that can wait."

You excuse yourself and head over to the fridge, needing some water to cure the sudden soreness to your throat; that, and you didn't really want to keep tangling yourself up in that mess.

When you've just about drank more than half a gallon, you stop and take in a deep breath, bringing yourself back to calm.

Regardless of what Frisk and Sans himself had said about living for yourself every so often, you had your set of goals already planned out. Speed-running through a relationship wasn't one, and even less considering the subject's past. You needed to know him and his intentions better before throwing yourself into it -- more than usual.

Two years of pointless arguments between you and Jerry had been enough to last you a lifetime; one of them was even more than pointless, considering you divorced by your first year. You never understood the point of submitting a child to the sight of continuous arguments if you could just find a way to stop becoming involved in what was causing that. You didn't want Frisk to feel like the root of all your problems, nor did you wish to make them feel as if they had to redeem themselves for something that wasn't even their fault to begin with. It was difficult to comprehend the thought-process behind calling out how many finances were spent on them, unless they were being a spoiled brat about it. Guilting them over the good things they had and belittling their troubles through constant comparison wasn't what you wanted, either.

But did it all have to be done by you limiting your own life and enjoyments?

Sans's advice and Frisk's words get to you, these you try to brush off for the moment being.

Fixing your situation with the monsters was more important than that.

"Ren?" a familiar voice calls out, stopping your speeding train of thought. "Is Sans staying over tonight?"

Your body freezes up, face doing the opposite.

Out of all the people you could’ve chosen to be attracted to, it had to be a person whose existence you were barely aware of until a few months ago, who you would've sworn was a contradiction to science as you knew it, and whose flirting techniques were about as low quality as a school lunch's ‘pizza’ Friday. “Yes,” you say, drinking another glass. You’ve already drank more than enough, but stress makes you want more. “It would be rude to send him home with how late it is.”

“You just want him to stay longer, don’t you?”

“That’s none of your concern, dear.”

You serve them a glass of milk, kiss their cheek, and shoo them off to bed, slumping against the fridge when they’re gone. The sound of the television being turned on follows when their footsteps grow faint, and you can hear them exchange a few words with the skeleton, though none of these you can get to understand clearly, standing so far away. “That’s their favourite movie!” is the only sentence you can decipher from them, words exclaimed. “Have fun!” They run off, footsteps echoing down the hallway.

Finally left with Sans again, you return to the living room to see him resting on the same side you’d been pinned to on the couch. You try not to remember, yet your mind proves to be cruel as it reminds you over the subtle warmth of his hands, the scent of your soap on him, and him being so close to take initiative by being the one to almost kiss you on the lips. You’d been the one to do that the first time you kissed him on the cheek back at Mettaton's hotel, though you tell yourself it was nothing special. It was mostly the heat of the moment that had caused you both to take it easy, after all. Today was an entirely different story. Compared to your approach, his was a much more complex and slow building one, waiting for you to better process his intentions and reciprocate his actions with far more sincerity compared to your stay at the hotel.

In short, you wanted to kiss him, but for real this time.

“You doin' okay?” Sans asks, seeing you arrive; he scoots further away, a simple gesture for you to sit down and join him.

“I’m... I'm okay,” you reply, nodding. “But are you really gonna watch that?” You point with your eyes at the television, your favourite movie still playing. “It’s a little lame.”

“Don’t lie.” He grins and hangs an arm behind the couch again when you settle next to him. “I’m pretty sure the kid said it’s your favourite.”

“Out of that particular genre, yes.” You stare at the screen, displaying a scene not too fitting for your situation, yet not completely out of touch either. It gives space for you to talk with him, no awkward romance scenes happening at the moment, and no loud, action-packed scenarios occurring either. Without a word, you move closer to him, letting his arm wrap around your shoulders as he brings you nearer, face resting against his chest. “Have you watched it before?”

“Today’s my first,” he says, hand lowering to your waist. He does nothing else, giving space for you to cozy up next to him the way you best deemed fit. “Feelin’ better now? You can stay for s’long as ya need.”

Aware the monster's referencing your no short of embarrassing confession from before, you shift to a straighter position, meet his irises, and glare up at him. Rather than throwing a remark back at the skeleton, you figure it’s now best to kill him with kindness. You take his cheekbone, smile, and stroke his face, smiling to better accomplish your payback.

When he looks at you -- far too earnest and warm for your liking -- you flinch and have a sudden, unconscious change of plans.

“You’re enough, you know that?” you comment, words practically slipping from your mouth. “Maybe I don’t fully understand what happened at the Underground, but... But I'd say you’ve shown you care enough to improve things you don’t like about yourself. And you've also been pretty blunt and honest with me so far, so there’s that, too.” You kiss his cheekbone, ending on a note far more wholehearted than you originally intended your payback to be. “Try to remember that next time you start criticizing yourself like that again.”

[First] | [Previous] | [Next]

• • •

Hello!

Before getting into some important stuff, this was meant to be yesterday's update, but I didn't have my laptop available at the time, hence the delay! I was able to update on other sites, but here I use the "keep reading" feature, which can only be accessed through a computer. (As far as my knowledge of that goes, of course -- I'm still learning how to use Tumblr!)

Now, moving to the important stuff:

A few changes will be going underway soon, such as adding the chapter navigation at the bottom of each update from the Prologue to Chapter Ten. As I mentioned in a previous author note about how late I realized I was missing something necessary for clicking on the next chapter more easily: I'm a dumbass, lol.

Also, I've made the decision of creating separate fanfics for the 4 other characters tagged in this story, along with a poll to decide which one I should work with first (as it was shown at the end of Chapter Fifteen, we've finally reached the exposition part of this fanfic, meaning other relationships will be introduced soon)! The reason why is not only to avoid coming off as misleading for those who're looking for a fanfic of that specific character only, but because rewriting this story led to it becoming much more slow burning, thus delaying the relationship development with plenty of characters. As a result, I'll modify the tags to all 16 chapters that've been published so far!

Hopefully, all those changes will be finished by next Friday. :-)

As always, take care and stay safe!

• • •

Tag List (Comment or message me if you want to be added to [or removed from] it!)

@the-simp-express

@nektotersh

@disastrous-l0vebug

@therealchickenjoe

@mintyflakes025

@pandaquick

@timelock97

@candle-creeps

@paperb9gs

[ad1thi]

henlo adi tis i with a request for some stevetony fics,,, angsty if you have 'em 💓

okay so this rec list is mainly classic stevetony fics, but i assure you - there’s angsty ones in there (ive marked the angsty ones with a 😞 so you can identify them quicker) just a general note that a lot of authors are going to repeat, because there are some authors that (imo) are stevetony staples (so if you see an author more than once - thats a sign that ALL of their stevetony is good and ive cherry picked the ones i love the most) (ive also marked those authors with a 🌟) 

//

in the light of limerence:  @shell-heads

It's the final game of the season, their biggest one yet, and there's only one question on everybody's mind: who the hell is Captain Steve Rogers' boyfriend, and why does Cap keep dodging questions about him?

"You gotta admit it's suspicious that only Bucky and Sam have met your boyfriend, dude," Clint points out as he shoves Pietro away with a smirk, pulling the uniform over his head and tugging it down. "We've known you, what-two years? We've never seen the guy even once."

"And your phone mysteriously only has pictures of Tony Stark," Johnny Storm adds as he joins the conversation, knocking knees with Thor when he sits down on one of the benches. "Tony Stark, who has at least ten fansites and personally assured me he's had a boyfriend for the past five years."

"I can't believe Cap is actually out here acting like Tony Stark's boyfriend," Luke says with a smirk, resting against a wall without a care.

"I can't believe you guys still think this is a joke," Sam throws back while tossing his other dirty sock at Luke, who dodges it smoothly.

In little more than ten minutes, the biggest question of Shield University is answered with much aplomb by none other than Tony Stark himself.

almeno tu nell'universo: @silkspectred 😞 🌟 (funfact: this is the fic that got me into stevetony) 

Tony drives off.

Well, he wants to.

But he can’t.

Because.

Steve Rogers is in front of his car.

Steve fucking Rogers. Is in front of Tony’s fucking car.

Rookie and Jailbait Take On The World: @theapplepielifestyle 🌟

“You really should be in school, you know.”

“Why would I be there when I could be here, solving crimes with my favourite rookie?” Tony flashes a grin, and Steve’s stomach twists like it did on the first day.

Teenager, Steve’s mind supplies. Definitely not legal, stop doing fluttery things, stomach.

Thumb, Index and Pinky Extended: @/Eudoxia 😞

Tony Stark is twenty-one when he loses his voice. It shouldn't matter, but in a world where the first words your Soulmate says to you are marked on your skin, it can be pretty damn annoying.

I (created from fantasies) exist solely for you: @mizzy2k

Six years ago, without the Avengers Initiative there to save the day, scientist Dr. Eric Selvig sacrificed himself to save the world, the almighty demi-god Thor was lost to a terrible storm, and vigilante Iron Man – spotted with a nuclear weapon trying to take advantage of the situation – was forever labelled an enemy of SHIELD.

This is a comic book office AU, where Steve is defrosted a year too late, Thor has forgotten who he is, and no one knows Tony is Iron Man.

Also includes: office pranks, inappropriate post-it notes, and superheroes who like pina coladas and getting caught in the rain.

Celestial Navigation: @sabrecmc

Celestial Navigation: 18 year old Omega!Tony finds himself Bonded to Captain Steve Rogers. He isn't happy about it until he is.

By request, here is CN in one place without other stories and artwork.

Ironsides: @copperbadge 🌟

Antonia Carter Stark takes no shit and no prisoners.

Paved With Good Intentions (I’m On The Road To Hell): @itsallavengers 😞 🌟

When the mysterious group of vigilante assassins known only as 'The Avengers' are tipped off about the dirty secrets that lie within Stark Industries, Steve Rogers has his heart set on taking out Tony Stark for good in order to protect the rest of the world from his evil. He's seen the footage, after all- Stark is a man who fights only for himself. And of course, when a job arises as chief bodyguard for Stark, to protect him from the growing threat of an ominously infatuated stalker, the opportunity is way too good for him to miss out on. It's the perfect placement, and the perfect way to find out whether or not their tipoff is genuine.

But as Steve falls into rank as the new bodyguard for Mr. Stark and he spends time getting to know and protect him, his initial hatred begins to falter and merge into something different, something far more terrifying than the prospect of killing the face of Stark Industries.

Steve Rogers may just be falling in love with him instead.

The Problem With Communication: @itsallavengers

Steve is terrible at flirting, but when he finally picks up the courage to talk to the adorable barista who makes his drinks, he finds himself hitting a small snag:

That being, Tony is deaf. He doesn't know what Steve is saying.

But never say Steve Rogers does not rise to a challenge.

Killing Me Softly (With His Song): @itsallavengers

Steve is Tony's whole world. Tony couldn't imagine life without him. They've grown up together, after all.

Steve gets cancer.

Open Field In Front of Him: orphan account

Steve Rogers's football season is functionally over after a loss to Rutgers, but he finds a distraction in Tony Stark (yes, THAT Tony Stark). A college AU Stony fic.

Good For You: @orbingarrow 😞

Steve doesn't understand why Tony dates people who abuse him. Tony doesn't understand why Steve cares.

The rest is bad choices, good choices, rehab, milkshakes, paintball, YouTube videos, couples therapy and learning to put the past in the past. Or: How Tony finds his happy ending.

COMPLETE 5/27/16 Edited to add art as last chapter on 6/23/16

Wrapped Up In Clover: @festiveferret

It's been seven years since Steve and Tony split up, and Steve's sure he'll never see Tony again. He's finally managed to put their failed relationship behind him and move on, focusing on his friends and building his business. But then his best friends, Bucky and Clint, decide to get married, and their wedding week at a cabin resort in Vermont turns into a minefield of heartbreak for Steve.

little green soldiers: @/nasa 🌟

“Rhodey,” Tony says. “I’m not stupid. He’s shipping out in three months. I’m not going to fall in love with him.”

Tony is a student at MIT; Steve is a soldier. They meet at a house party six months before Steve is set to deploy. This is their story.

flesh and bone: @/nasa 😞

“You or Rogers?” they ask, brandishing a knife or a gun or a flame.

“Me,” Tony says, over and over again. “Me, me, me,” always me.

Buried: @not-close-to-straight

When Howard Stark demands Tony work at a dig site in S.America one summer to "build character" and "learn about life", Tony is furious. But then he meets soldier/archeologist Steve and falls in love with blue eyes and a perfect smile. 

Just as they are ready to move forward together, Steve leaves abruptly with no explanation and breaks Tonys heart. Ten years later, Tony stumbles across the file for the old dig site. He's determined to visit and shut it down, but discovers that instead of a village, the dig has uncovered a temple and actually needs MORE money to stay open. A security team is hired to protect the staff and the artefacts they find, and Tony comes face to face with Steve Rogers all over again– except Steve is bearded and BIGGER and way more dangerous than he used to be...And Tony likes it.

When the camp is attacked, Steve jumps into action, snatching Tony and running into the jungle to escape and work their way towards safety. But long days and nights together bring back old feelings, and one day Steve takes a risk and asks Tony to give them another chance. Will Tony say yes? Or is his heart buried too far for the soldier-turned- archaeologist-turned-mercenary to find it?

don’t know why it took me so long to see: @3799steps 

“Oh, watch this,” Natasha says, propping her chin against her knuckles and turning a sweet gaze on him. “Tony, what’s it like dating a superhero?”

Tony bristles in irritation. “We’re not dating,” he snaps. “Captain America probably thinks he can get into anyone’s pants just ‘cause he’s got a mask, costume, and reputation, but not me, buddy. That shield? Gotta be overcompensating for something.” He adds, a bit petulantly, “Oh, and all that blue? Definitely more Steve’s color than his.”

- In which Tony is a genius in all matters except recognising his boyfriend past a mask

Heartlines: @nanasekei 🌟

“Let me,” Tony repeats. He regrets it deeply, so much, he wants to stick the words back into his mouth again, and it must show, in the way his voice wavers. He feels exposed, all of a sudden, as if he’s asking something bigger than what he can actually say. Let me touch you, let me take care of you. “Just… Let me do it.“

Feel Whole Again: @thepartyresponsible

Steve turns to leave. It’s easier to talk, somehow, when he’s not looking at him. “If you need anything,” he says, “I’m just a few floors down.”

“Might regret that, Cap,” Tony says to his retreating back. “I’ve been told I’m needy.”

Steve doesn’t know who the hell said that to Tony. It’s probably for the best that he doesn’t.

“It’s an honor,” he says, a little helpless, out of his depth and out of his time. “It’s an honor to be trusted with something like that, Tony.”

Attack Dog: @/salytierra

Steve doesn't swim in self-delusion. He knows that he is sick and that his owner is even worse. He is aware of it every time he rips some nameless guy’s throat out and feels the crunch of bones under his fingers. He is aware of it every time the rush of adrenaline at seeing life slip away from a stranger’s eyes hits him and gets him bothered and panting in ways that have nothing to do with physical exhaustion.

But it feels so good…

His owner’s approach is less personal. His shots fall clean and take out several foes at a time, his figure elegant and so graceful he looks like a god among savages. He is power incarnated, cold and burning like a sun at the same time… and Steve tries not to focus on him when they are fighting together, least his knees go weak and his technique falters. It’s fine though. They will go home afterwards and his owner will fuck him on the hard floor, with most of their gear still on and a vicious grip in his hair.

[twisted-leader-of-something]

You seem to kinda had a legit dislike towards Vil. I can tell, despite that he was one of my faves, he does had alot of flaws that he himself also notice but not do a decree. I agree the fact he was very strict, to the point being a prick but I dont think he is toxic. Yeah, I hated how he was so hard onto others to the point its suffocating, but the reason why he acts like that initialy not because of his upbringing but the Devs had to make Vil as villainous as possible.

 Continuation: Just like how the other boys who went Overblot, who took the path of villainy, Vil has to be as antagonistic as possible so we know who is the true villain here. It make sense if you think about it. I eventually feel bad for him when the masses prefer Neige over him. It’s a proof that what becomes of the antagonistic Vil in the first chapters was the result of both Envy and Insecurity. We thought he was a narcissist and prideful, but heck we were wrong.

Aha. I’ve been caught by Anon. I won’t say nowadays I hate Vil, because after seeing him at the end of Chapter 5 showing he at least was willing to make a change in his behavior, or explain his reasoning (*looks at Leona*) because that would more apply to me when Chapter 5 first kicked off and before Vil’s jealously was shown. But, I do agree with you, Anon.

Though, I’m probably not in a position to say Vil’s not a great character, since I myself used to suffer from Envy and Insecurity, and I still do. l am a pretty jealous and insecure person, and I used to express it in. . . not so good ways. I wouldn’t say I was on Vil’s levels of being mean throughout the story, but I was not a nice person to be around when I was younger, from what I remember and what people tell me I was like as a kid. I’d like to say I’ve a different person than what I used to be, but I don’t quite know because, well, I can’t look at myself objectively that well due to self-esteem issues. Which, maybe another reason why I don’t like Vil that much, because he reminds me of what kind of person I was to others.

But, this isn’t about me. Anyway. Back to Vil and my personal thoughts on him.

When I first met Vil, I didn’t like him purely based on his personality. I’m one of those people that doesn’t really judge a character or even a person based on appearance, because I think it’s superficial and hollow to do. So, when I see Vil treating others with little to no regard and seems to be a pretty bad person overall. . . I just kind of go. ‘Okay. I don’t like him. I’m going to dread his chapter.’

I do something similar with most of the characters. Leona, Jamil, for example. 

What does Yana do?

Um, kind of throw me out of the water. 

I thought Leona in a similar regard to Vil, even after Chapter 2 because. . . Leona just. . . didn’t express he wanted to change or reflect on his past actions. And Honey, I have pretty bad depression, possibly on par with what Leona has, maybe even worse. And, I have younger siblings who have to live in my shadow at my middle school and they’ve told me it’s hard to fit into the model I’ve made being a teacher’s pet and overall good student the teachers favored highly. 

But being depressed and living in someone’s shadow that does not excuse Leona from his actions. And, at the time, we knew nothing about Leona’s past besides that and how his attitude changed after Cheka was born.

Depression is different from person to person but that’s not an excuse for trying to kill a fellow classmate, getting several people injured, throwing your dorm under the bus and taking no responsibility for it quite literally throwing in the towel the minute he faces issues, and not doing anything overall and making it other people’s problems. 

Depression isn’t an excuse to be an asshole. Neither is being in someone else’s shadow. 

And, until the Fairy Gala, Leona showed no true signs he had changed and care for anyone besides himself. 

Sure, Chapter 2 hinted at Leona taking a hit for Savanaclaw by making a deal with Azul for Ruggie’s sake, once again to try to kill someone, and Chapter 3 kind of expands on that by giving out generally what must have happened. But honey. That isn’t much to go off of, and Chapter 4 kind overshadows that part with, well, Ruggie saying Leona’s only helping MC in destroying Azul’s contracts because he doesn’t want to deal with the contract he made with Azul anymore. 

So, imagine my surprise and happiness when the Fairy Gala shows that Leona cares for Ruggie, Grim and MC when he comes and saves the three when they’re in trouble during the event. It showed me that Yana and the staff at least kind of understood the side of people like me, who don’t like Leona because he treats others badly.  

Do I like Leona? Not really. Still think he’s not a great guy, but I at least know he’s capable of being a decent being when he wants to be and now I can tolerate him, and with new information that has come out about him thanks to his birthday story, I can say I’m more on the fence with him then I was with him when I first read through his chapter.

So, after Yana and the TWST staff had prove me wrong with a few characters, I thought, ‘Hey. I made the mistake of thinking one of the TWST characters where one thing and they where not. So, for now on, I won’t make that mistake again for the others characters. I’ll give them time for the TWST staff to show their personalities.’

So, when Vil’s chapter rolled around I was like, ‘Alright Vil. You have Pomefiore's and Ignihyde's chapter to me. I’ve read through your personal stories, and I think you’re sallow jerk who has no problem stepping others to get his way and I lowkey hate you for your behavior and I hope you get kicked out of your spot as Dorm Leader, but you have Pomefiore and Ignihyde chapter. But that’s all you’re getting’

So, when Vil was the biggest jerk to the First Year Squad, treated Epel and Deuce pretty poorly throughout the chapter, ordered his fellow dormmates to hindrance the VDC cast during the first part, took Ramshackle dorm away from MC and Grim with the promise of money (which is hypocritical, since he said to his manager to not buy his feelings with money, but he did that to MC and Grim basically when he took over the dorm), seemed to favor Rook to an almost unfair degree compared to the rest of the cast, was a general spoil sport and rained on everyone’s parade, and generally was not a great character that the TWST staff gave no explanation for this, I was frustrated, to say the least. 

I remember struggling to get through that chapter. I had a hard time even being excited for the updates because the staff gave literally no hints he was a jealous person, he just seemed like an egotistical person from what his personal stories and the main story pointed towards.

Sure, you can point out his ‘Mira, Mira’ can be counted as jealously, but in the first few times Vil did it, it didn’t mean anything because we knew nothing of his grudge against Neige, and out of context with what we knew of Vil at the time, it just made Vil seem like one of those influencers who constantly looked at his follower count because it made him feel better than everyone else. It just seemed like Vil cared about his popularity more than anything else.

it only really clinked with me that Vil was jealous of Neige when we first saw Neige on screen during the commercial the group saw. 

The minute I saw Neige, it instantly clicked with me what the situation was with Vil. I then did let Vil off the hook a little bit, but after going through the whole thing, I’m left with basically the same thing I had with Leona. 

I felt that Vil isn’t justified in his actions purely based on that chapter alone, and now I have to wait to be explained more information about Vil. 

Yes, Envy and Insecurity leads you to believe crazy things, been there, done that, wrote the book, sold the movie rights. Hell, I can’t even dispute that because I’m in a similar boat as Vil to some degree. 

But Vil seemed to be more than aware of his jealously-induced actions being wrong to some degree, but he didn’t have the self-control to stop it from happening, nor had the self-esteem to apologize for his actions. (This part is debatable, for sure, as Vil’s actions can be interpreted millions of different ways, I understand. But as a person who deals with jealously, from what I get of Vil’s actions in Vil totally knew what he was doing was wrong, but did it anyways.) But he knew it was wrong to do. Hell, he had a mental breakdown because he realized he almost killed someone because of his jealous actions, which is what caused his Overblot.

So, if that’s the case, why didn’t he at least try stop himself at all during the course of the chapter if he regretted his actions? Or have Rook speak on his behalf saying he’s sorry instead of Rook letting Vil suffer and leaving it up to the characters if he meant what he said? Or Vil show regret for his actions in front of the other characters until after the chapter is over? Does he have façade to keep up or something?

Why was Vil so obsessed with being the hero of the story when being a villain when there are stories of anti-heroes or villains who to some degree are better than the hero? Why didn’t he focus on that? Was he blinded and couldn’t see those chances?

Why didn’t he just admit he’s wrong throughout the chapter in front of the other characters, or make any attempt to apologize throughout the chapter? 

Now, yes. There probably is an argument to be made about how self-aware Vil was throughout Chapter 5, and that’s a fair point. If Vil was only self-aware to a certain degree or realized it long after the fact, that’s different, I know. 

But from what I got of Vil’s character, Vil was self-aware, understood what his actions meant to the others characters, but just couldn’t seem to control it. Which, if so, why didn’t others step and help Vil out during this time? 

Because Rook did not help Vil out and purely left it up to the characters to decide if he was telling the truth or not, even calling Vil out on his behavior. Which, look, I get it. Vil does deserve to be called out for his actions because he was an ass throughout the chapter, but this just enforces Vil’s world view that he can only rely on himself, which is extremely unhealthy for Vil at that time. And, yes, Rook does backtrack later, but it’s kinda too late at that point since Vil’s Overblotted and they have to wait til later to get the reconciliation over with.

I just. . . Feel that Vil did so much wrong throughout Chapter 5 to the main cast, and basically he doesn’t have any punishment for what he’d done in the past. He’d got off scott-free for doing pretty bad stuff to people.

It could be that I missed something about Vil during the chapter, or something that got lost in translation, but for the most part I just felt that Vil wasn’t great throughout Chapter 5, or in past events and didn’t show much remorse for his anger-induced actions. 

But, I’ll give him Chapter 6.

Maybe he’ll do something or something will be revealed that will change my mind about him or I find something that shows he can show remorse for being a jerk to others. We’ll see in late August, hopefully. 

[nikkoliferous]

Phase One: Thor

Since I was looking up my past live-blog of the novel and realising how annoying and repetitive reading through it all is because of my having structured it as a bunch of reblogs, I’ve decided to organize it all into one long-ass post instead. In case anyone else wants to read it in the future. Or in case I decide to re-read it. Because I’m hilarious. 😅

SO WITHOUT FURTHER ADO

My Hilarious Yet Wrathful Overview Of Phase One: Thor, Redux

—

If your son who’s to become king requires a babysitter to not screw it all up and also the idea of him being king is stressful enough to put you into a coma, maybe, uh… reconsider doing that? Just a thought.

But you see here why Odin was so deadset on Thor becoming king, despite him being ill-suited for the role. It’s not about what’s best for Asgard; it’s about personal legacy. Thor is Odin’s mini me, and Loki is very much not. There are places within the text where Odin laments Thor “lacking his father’s wisdom” (he’s definitely inherited your humility, though, Odin!), but he hopes for Thor to grow into a “wise king” like himself. Whereas he holds no such illusions (lol, pun) that Loki will ever take after him.

now with tag commentary! #this scene is in the script and both novelizations #(though in reading this novel seems to just be a more complete version of the junior novel? #idk i'm confused because they're supposedly written by different authors but so far the text is identical) #and it drives me insane each time i read it

“Haha, I’m a warmongering piece of shit, isn’t it funny?”

I know, I know. I try to cut Asgard some slack for being such a militaristic culture because social changes happen slowly and when you live for thousands of years per generation, it makes sense that your views on things like war would be regressive. The text says Odin has ruled Asgard for tens of thousands of years (so much for taking Loki’s “give or take 5,000 years” line literally; sure, the Odinsleep would have extended Odin’s lifespan, but by that much? Idk).

Still, fuck Odin. Especially since he’ll eventually try to shame Loki for doing the same thing he’s fucking boasting about here. And on a much smaller scale too.

…is it, though?

I actually think Loki’s relationship with being the centre of attention is really interesting in its complexity and we don’t discuss it enough. I’ve said this before, but he strikes me as the sort of person who craves attention but also wouldn’t really know what to do with it if he had it. He craves it as a result of neglect, because he’s never been shown recognition or validation. This is why he seems to revel in it in Stuttgart, even in (or maybe especially in?) his brainwashed state. But he also frequently comes across as pretty introverted and has horrible self-esteem, so I think on another level, sustained, genuine attention would make him feel kind of uncomfortable. Loki seems to believe that in order to be loved or respected, he has to literally be Thor, though. And Thor has always been the centre of attention, so for Loki, attention is synonymous with respect.

I find Loki’s relationship with wanting attention especially fascinating because I too both crave and fear it. As a borderline, I need it. When no one is paying attention to me, I lose my sense of identity. I feel as though I literally cease to exist. It’s excruciatingly painful. And yet, I have no authentic sense of self; I’m just a chameleon, and the closer people get to me, the more likely it is they’ll see behind my mask. They’ll realise it’s all a show and that I’m actually no one. And then they’ll leave. I can’t help wondering if that’s how Loki feels sometimes too.

Wait, what? You mean goat. His horns are shaped like a goat’s. This is a ram: 

This is a goat:

This is Loki:

Do you see now? They’re like a goat. Not a ram. Not a cow. A GOAT.

This book was written before Ragnarok was a thing, so it may be unfair to connect the two, but it still seems worth noting that it was Thor who reduced Loki to being no more than a trickster to begin with. “You could be more,” my ass. Loki’s problem has never been that he was one-dimensional; it was always that the people in his life, including Thor, refused to see any other dimensions to him. Which makes those words particularly cruel—as if they aren’t cruel enough already, what with the physical torture and all. 

Always happy to have cause to point out that

Loki was on Thor clean-up duty their whole lives; he certainly was not trying to kill Thor.

People like to point to Loki’s attempted genocide of the Jötnar and attempted(-ish? lol) conquest of Earth as proof that he’s some kind of violent maniac. But in a little place I like to call reality, Loki was historically far less aggressive and bloodthirsty than his peers.

Question: why is one conqueror evil and the other is righteously entitled to ruling over the Nine Realms?

Asgardian exceptionalism FTW

I can’t even begin to imagine what would lead you to expect such a thing, Odin. 😂

Uh, ‘cause it is?? And also their planet is MELTING without it??

This is all only within the first two chapters, btw. Lmao

—

—

—

“Looking for answers,” my foot.

YOU WOULD THINK SO, WOULDN’T YOU??

#i mean unless you knew heimdall #he only commits treason on days that end in y

—

—

What’d I say? Thor clean-up dutyyyyy 

Just wanna remind everyone that this 

is why he’s smiling during this scene 

because it makes me laugh every time. 😂 

—

My heart breaks every time I remember that second excerpt because literally ALL OF IT happened to him when he survived falling through the wormhole. My poor boy. 😭

But also of note… Loki gets cold (and also does not like being cold). This interests me because 1) as many are aware, the prevalent headcanon that Loki has a low body temperature irritates me and 2) it possibly(?) lends weight to the theory that he may not be fully Jötun, whether by virtue of his birth or Odin’s spell.

Haha, look at this Feminist Icon™ trying to take credit for his female friend’s accomplishments! Truly inspiring. 

#for some reason the ragnarok lovers have somehow decided that thor is both a feminist and lesbian icon #whatever that means 🤷‍♀️ #and i'm still trying very hard to figure out why #is it literally just because he *says* he respects women or whatever in that dumb rambly conversation with valkyrie?

Ooh… you were so close to getting the point, Volstagg. So close. Take your tongue off Odin’s boot for just a couple minutes longer.

Also, the author just forgot the name of the Casket. How did this book get published? 😂

JUST LOOKING FOR ANSWERS, HUH?

Because fuck Loki, amirite? He, uh… he’s a prince too, you know.

Also… Fandral, you dweeb 😂

…am I reading too much into this, or did Odin just literally forget that Loki exists?

On the other hand, the author also seemed to forget Loki existed for most of this chapter, so who knows. 🤷‍♀️

lmao @ Jane immediately trying to convince herself she’s too rational to be attracted to a stranger 

Honestly, though, big mood. 

Just your periodic reminder that Thor’s sycophantic friends KNEW Loki was right and decided to throw him under the bus anyway. 

Just as I’ve always said: That was it. That was their ENTIRE rationale. That Loki *could* have done it, therefore he must have. Please tell me these people have nothing to do with Asgard’s justice system.

…lol, jk, Asgard has no justice system.

Ok, first of all, no.

Second: thank you, Fandral. You’re a self-absorbed cad, but also evidently Thor’s least stupid friend.

Thirdly, how…? First, it was, “Loki arranged all this because he’s jealous of Thor.” Now they’ve suddenly jumped all the way to, “All of Asgard is in danger.” What exactly does Sif think Loki is planning? He’s gonna, what… assassinate Odin and then sell Asgard to the Jötnar?

—

Please stop hurting me.

Just so there’s no confusion: this one sentence explains everything Loki did for the rest of the movie. It explains how a person who has been historically non-aggressive suddenly transforms into a warmonger. To prove himself a real Asgardian, like his brother and father and grandfather. 

—

…why did Odin fall into the Odinsleep in two completely different scenes in this book? I’m super confused.

Also, we really need to talk about how cruel it is of Marvel to keep forcing Loki to prove his loyalty again and again and again when he’s been doing so almost literally since we met him. And by “we need to talk about it”, I mean I need to tie Kevin Feige and co. to a chair and spend a minimum of five hours lecturing them on how poorly they understand their own fucking character.

Let’s just be clear here: they’re talking about Loki. They’re saying Loki, their LEGITIMATE king, is an enemy of Asgard, based on evidence so paper-thin it’s practically invisible. Just… please, let that sink in. Take a moment to appreciate how utterly fucked up that is. 

I’m sorry (not really), but Thor was so much funnier before Ragnarok.

This scene has always kind of bugged me. If Odin removed Thor’s powers, how come he can still control the weather? Confusing.

So what exactly was Thor’s plan anyway, before he realised he couldn’t lift Mjölnir? He was just gonna call on Heimdall to help him commit treason AGAIN, show up on Asgard against the expressed command of his king, and… Odin would just shrug and be like, “You got me, son! I guess I can’t keep you down. Welcome home!”?

…I mean, I guess that more or less is what happened in the end, but it’s hard to imagine it would have still gone down that way without all the stuff that happened with Loki. Idk.  

#look what i'm saying is... thor is not exactly a thinking person #no one on asgard is a thinking person #except loki but he's crazy now so he's also thinking somewhat poorly lol

Cool, Thor. Now imagine feeling that way for ONE THOUSAND YEARS and develop a little fucking empathy for your brother.

But you won’t.

You’ll brush off his feelings of worthlessness as “imagined slights”. 😒

Nice that somebody knows how the royal line of succession works, I guess… 

That sound you hear? Yeah, that’s just my heart breaking. NBD. 

First, they mislabelled it the Casket of Eternal Winters. Now it’s the Cask of Ancient Winters. Author must have been thirsty when they wrote this. Lol 

Look, not to nitpick, but this is not the recommended procedure when you see a storm that you don’t believe is of supernatural origin coming. I’m just saying. Lol 

Uh… ‘cause he is?? And your pals are committing treason AGAIN, Thor, so it technically is responding to a threat to Asgard. Just FYI.

Anyways, this is an important point that doesn’t get made often enough. People want to act like Loki illegally usurped the throne somehow, but even without the deleted scene that explicitly shows Frigga passing rulership to him (a scene which is, for some reason, entirely skipped over in this book, but whatever), understand this: Loki could not have controlled the Destroyer unless he was legitimately King of Asgard. The fact that he’s able to do so is irrefutable proof that his rulership is valid.

lmao you little shit

So… here’s my issue with this scene (and with Thor as a character): He always assumes that Loki’s acting out specifically to hurt him. That Loki’s entire life and thought process revolves around Thor. He does it in this scene, he does it in The Avengers… it’s just a chronic thing with Thor. Everything is viewed through the lens of Loki inexplicably hating him.

But that’s… just not accurate. Yes, Loki harbours a lot of jealousy towards Thor. But that’s not what’s happening in this scene. Loki is not trying to kill Thor here because he wants him dead; he’s doing it because Thor (and his friends) are getting in the way of Loki completing his ultimate goal. Loki tried to solve this problem non-violently, by lying about Odin being dead. It’s Thor’s friends who all but forced his hand by going behind his back and trying to bring Thor back to Asgard against Loki’s (and Odin’s!) direct orders.

For all the humility he’s learned in the past few days, this entire speech is still really all about Thor. About assuming that Loki’s doing this for personal reasons, because he holds a grudge against Thor for some unknown reason. This is implicit in his request to “take [my life] and end this.” It never even occurs to him that his friends are traitors to the Crown and Loki, as King of Asgard, is perhaps justified in pursuing them.

It also needs to be acknowledged that Thor’s apology here is hollow, even if it’s ultimately coming from his heart, because he has no idea what he’s apologising for. “Whatever I have done to wrong you” is not an apology. An apology addresses specific hurtful actions taken and commits to not repeating those mistakes in the future. Thor cannot commit to not repeating the hurtful things he’s done, because he doesn’t know what he’s done. Despite his best intentions, what Thor is doing here is actually kind of manipulative. He’s not addressing any substantive issue between the two of them; he’s just trying to talk Loki down. And it ultimately fails not because Loki doesn’t care or because he wants Thor dead, but because it doesn’t actually change anything.

Finally and only semi-relatedly, we should maybe at some point talk about the fact that Loki, who is stated to be a master tactician, has displayed a weird pattern of hardly ever being as lethal as he could be. He freezes Heimdall in place instead of killing him outright; he backhands Thor with the Destroyer instead of incinerating him; he, well… *gestures vaguely at almost the entirety of the first Avengers movie* Anytime the violence is even a little bit personal, he seems to hedge. Odd behaviour for somebody who’s supposedly super evil.

I’m sorry, I know I’ve pointed it out at least a hundred times before, but I just can’t encounter this scene in any form without taking a moment to appreciate how underrated and hilarious it is.

I also genuinely wonder how many Ragnarok stans who have accused me of having no sense of humour, have failed to laugh at moments like this one. Kinda feel like if you need to have the comedy spoonfed to you in the form of ass jokes, maybe you’re the one whose sense of humour is lacking. 🤷‍♀️

Let’s be super clear: this is not what happened. Loki did not betray Odin; he was betrayed by Odin. He did not open Asgard to its enemies; he attempted, misguidedly, to destroy Asgard’s enemies. And he most certainly did not commit suicide out of a sense of guilt.

I’m not saying Loki did nothing wrong, nor am I saying he feels no regret for the lives he has taken. What I’m saying is there’s no indication that he believes he betrayed Odin or Asgard in the process. Which makes perfect sense, because he didn’t. Everything he tried to do was for Odin and Asgard. It was misguided and horrible, yes, but it can hardly be classified as a betrayal.

The insurmountable burden on Loki is not that he did terrible things, but that no matter what he does or how hard he tries, Odin will never look at him with anything but contempt. Consider once more these passages from the very beginning of the book, at Thor’s coronation:

—

Consider that this book goes to great pains to point out that Odin favours Thor because Thor is a warrior like him. And yet even when Loki embraces that, even when he acts more war-like than ever before, Odin rejects him— just as he always has.

There is a reason why this moment is the last time Loki will ever call Odin his father. Because he realises once and for all that, no, nothing he tries will ever be good enough; no, Odin won’t ever look at him with pride. That is Loki’s burden. That is why he lets go.

The epilogue is really just two pages of making me want to vomit. 

There’s your party where Thor and a certain subset of the fandom insist that Loki was mourned. There’s barely an indication here that anyone even perceives his demise as a negative thing.

“[Sif] could see Frigga thought [Loki was dead] as well” also contradicts the tie-in comic for TDW, so I don’t know what the author is on about there. Unlike the majority of Marvel comics, the tie-in comics are canon to the MCU, so it’s a bizarre statement to make.

COULD YOU SMEAR THE DEAD* ABUSE VICTIM A LITTLE HARDER, PLEASE? Fucking hell.

No matter how many times I encounter this scene, in whatever format, I still fail to become desensitized to how disgusting it is. I realise there’s a good chance that whatever version of events Thor has been told was twisted at best; but how you can look at a man whose son has just committed suicide under any circumstances and say there will never be a better father than that guy, is utterly beyond my capacity to understand.

And Odin’s “you’ve already made me proud” line just feels like extra salt in the wound because, again, Loki let go because he realized Odin would never say those words to him. And yet they come so damn easily when it’s Thor.

Fuck this entire family so much. I think I hate them more than Loki does. Sometimes I wonder what he would think about that. How he would react to knowing that not only is he actually loved, but that he’s so loved that people are genuinely furious at the way he’s been mistreated. That there are people who regularly devolve into full-on rants because they just can’t contain how much anger they have towards the people who hurt him. I think he’d have a hard time wrapping his head around that concept, tbh.

Anyways, to end on a not-completely-depressing note, I’m still waiting for someone at Marvel to explain how Loki knew what Thor said in this scene after plummeting into a wormhole. ‘Cause he references this conversation as Fauxdin at the end of TDW. So like… ?? Did he steal Odin’s memories before he erased them? Because that would be… kind of neat, actually. And very clever. Not entirely ethical, of course, but it’s Odin, so fuck ethics.

WELP, THAT’S IT. Thanks for following along with my dumbassery, hope you enjoyed yourselves. Lol

[stillness-in-green]

Part 2 of the response to this ask:

Part 1 was about where I think Geten’s story is going, and if I think it’s likely that Dabi will kill him; it dealt mainly with how those characters are set up in canon. Part 2 is far more about the fandom, and the assumptions people make that lead them to theories like the one above--specifically, the assumption that the League was always planning on bailing on the PLF. Hit the jump below with me and I'll go over why I think the common arguments for that are misguided at best, and willfully misreading the text at worst.

WARNING: Contains some generalizations about parts of the fandom that I have mostly taken steps to avoid seeing on my dash, so some of my characterizations may be out of date. I’ve tried to desalinate this post as much as possible, but as an unapologetic fan of the MLA and of Spinner (who I do not bring up incidentally), this is a topic I feel particularly strongly about. Apologies, but I Have Seen Things.

DISCLAIMER: I like Geten better than Dabi. I don't think he's better developed; I don't think he's a better character--I just like him better. This is largely down to the fact that I find the MLA fascinating from a worldbuilding perspective and its members compelling personally, whereas I’m less interested in Dabi personally than I am the Todoroki Drama on the whole, and have been tired of Fanon Dabi for approximately 83 years. I’ll also be the first to admit that my take on Dabi is pretty mercenary--hardly the irredeemable psychopath the Hero Stans on Twitter see, but nothing close to Secretly Soft Big Brother Touya, either. If that’s not your bag, you may want to skip this one.

So, here's a bullet point list of the reasons I have personally seen on why the League was always planning to turn on the MLA:

Dabi and Toga mention "getting started early," and Shigaraki mentions a plan, suggesting that the League had a plan in place independent of the one they arranged as the PLF.

Shigaraki says he won't forgive the Liberation Army for messing with peoples' feelings, so he would never really mean it when he forges an alliance with them.

The MLA is quirk supremacist, like Endeavor, so Dabi would never work with them.

Dabi is just using Skeptic against Skeptic's will; it’s not a willing partnership.

Mr. Compress rejects the PLF moniker for Shigaraki, ergo Mr. Compress didn’t genuinely associate Shigaraki and the League with the PLF.

Toga hated Curious, so she wouldn't want to work with the MLA either.

Twice would never forgive them for what they did to Giran.

[Error: argument about Spinner's opinion on the PLF not found.]

So, let's go over those, shall we? Note that a lot of what I'm going to lay out below isn't conclusive. What I want to establish is simply that the canonical evidence isn't conclusive, certainly not as much so as the people who support this view espouse.

|| Dabi and Toga mention "getting started early," and Shigaraki mentions a plan, suggesting that the League had a plan in place independent of the one they arranged as the PLF.

In responses to my recent Overhaul post, I defended Viz’s official translation as an accurate rendering of the dialogue in question. In general, I feel like Caleb Cook is pretty reliable in his translations, if sometimes kind of stiff or dry in localization. However, there are times he makes assumptions about lines--as indeed a translator for a currently-running series will sometimes have to--and sometimes, those assumptions don’t pan out. This is one of those times.

Dabi's line, "Shall we get started early?" is based on an assumption Cook made about a line that doesn't have an actual subject. In the original dialogue--Hayame ni hajimaru ka--there is no “we,” not even in the form of some implicit collective in Dabi’s grammatical inflection, nor is there a question of "should." All Dabi’s doing is musing that the start (again, there’s no subject, and so no indication of the start of what, or the start as initiated by who) is happening early.

Toga's line communicates much the same, save that she does specify that the schedule/plan/arrangement is happening earlier than expected--which is totally true, since her line is in response to Dabi observing that Machia moving must mean Shigaraki's awake, and Shigaraki was supposed to be down for another month.

Shigaraki's line, like Dabi's, lacks a subject to describe what exactly is supposed to start as soon as Shigaraki wakes. He's saying something that would, in a more stilted way, be, "I wake up and then it's the start, right?"

None of these lines suggest that the characters are necessarily talking about any plan other than the one the PLF laid out. Yes, it looks somewhat damning that Shigaraki's first action (after getting himself a cape, anyway) is to have Machia bring him the League, but heck, maybe that was always the plan. Just because Shigaraki wants to rejoin his comrades doesn't mean the rest of the PLF didn't already have machinations that they were supposed to set into motion the moment Machia left. After all, the plan as Hawks understood it did involve simultaneous attacks on major cities--maybe the League was going to be spearheading one of those attacks. Further, Shigaraki knew something was wrong from the moment he regained consciousness, and we don’t know how that knowledge affected the call he made. Hell, maybe the original plan was for the League to be brought to meet him somewhere in a chartered limo; we don’t know.

It's telling that this idea that the League had a Secret Plan to screw over the MLA rarely seems to account for Mr. Compress and Spinner being confused over the suddenness of events. The response to questions about this seems to be that the "villain trio" knew about it, so the ignorance of the rest of the League can just be handwaved--the important members knew, and that's enough. This is ungenerous towards both Twice and Mr. Compress, but I have got particularly little time for Spinner, the narrator of MVA and guy who decided to devote his all to Shigaraki, being disrespected in this fashion. More on that later.

|| Shigaraki says he won't forgive the Liberation Army for messing with peoples' feelings, so he would never really mean it when he forges an alliance with them.

Shigaraki does say he won't forgive the MLA, but consider what he did to the MLA and its leader. He destroyed most of their stronghold, killed scores of them, is directly responsible for Re-Destro losing his legs, and saw that vaunted descendant of Destro about six inches shy of full forehead-on-the-ground dogeza. The League Shigaraki commands killed a great many more of them, including one of their inner circle. He commandeered the Liberation Army, its resources, and its grand cause. I think it’s safe to say he’s more than responded in kind!

I'm not saying Shigaraki feels for the MLA the same way he does about the League, far from it, but I do think he's practical enough after two hundred chapters of character development not to throw them away out of spite. In Chapter 246, he tells Ujiko explicitly, "When someone offers me something, I take it," and, "I'm done taking the heroes lightly. I'll use everything I've got to obliterate the dregs All Might left behind." From a purely practical standpoint, if he intends to throw everything he has at the heroes, he has no reason to throw the MLA under the bus, and 116,000 reasons to keep them around. I'm altogether sure that, so long as they stood to be useful to his plans, he would have kept them around.

|| The MLA is quirk supremacist, like Endeavor, so Dabi would never work with them. + || Dabi is just using Skeptic against Skeptic's will; it’s not a willing partnership.

I hadn’t seen the second point in the wild, but I suppose it must be how the “The League will betray the MLA” theorists are getting around Dabi and Skeptic’s clear collaboration and how that collaboration totally scuttles the first point, huh? Hilarious.

Anyway, setting aside the fact that Dabi showed up to the one planning session we were shown when even Geten didn’t, there’s evidence in the canon that Dabi was working with Skeptic since even before the raid. Consider that Dabi’s video was filmed at the villa (the wall paneling and the style of the couch both match) and ask yourself where the camera he used came from. Once the filming was complete, where was the video stored such that Skeptic could access it from his laptop? If Dabi’d had it on an SD card and Skeptic was seeing it for the first time, why didn’t Spinner, Compress and Toga watch it alongside him? Surely Skeptic would need to watch it through at least once to know when to splice in the footage of Jin’s death for maximum dramatic impact? On that note, by far the most telling piece of evidence is this: if Dabi wasn't already working with Skeptic, then why was he wearing one of Skeptic's body cameras during his confrontation with Hawks?

Further, Skeptic's protest when he’s pulled onto Machia isn't that he doesn’t want to be with the League; it’s that he doesn’t want to leave Re-Destro behind. Once he's resigned that it's going to happen, though, he's cocky about his talents and complimentary of Dabi's big reveal, even if he is exasperated about the League's antics. It's ambiguous, I admit, but given that Dabi's wearing his cameras, he had to have known Dabi had a reason for them--and given that he is both abrasive and mouthy, I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have demanded to know what that reason was.

Hell, Dabi even thanks Skeptic for his editing work, which is more direct positive approval than he's ever shown anyone in the League (give or take the high-five with Twice, which, genuine or not, he would have known he was doing on camera). That much-vaunted panel of Spinner telling Toga to come back to the League? Dabi's grinning, which in isolation you could read as a certain rueful affection, but with the full context of the chapter, it becomes apparent that Dabi is grinning at Skeptic's laptop, seconds after telling Skeptic to "hurry up." Skeptic is, at that moment, probably gearing up the video to project nationwide, and Dabi’s more focused on that than he is Toga’s crisis, even when Compress directly appeals to him for aid. He tells Compress he doesn’t care, the same way he told Hawks he doesn't give a damn about the League.

Let me be clear here: I'm inclined to take Dabi at his word. I think Dabi hangs around the League because, for all that he says one man's conviction can shake the world, he also knows his own limits, and the League offers safety in numbers and an avenue to pursue his revenge. Maybe he finds them acceptable enough company, maybe he even does like them a bit despite himself, but I think any affection he might have for them is entirely incidental to his views on their usefulness. In the same way, while he's willing to bail on the MLA when the heroes attack, I don't think it was his plan to do so, especially not given his apparent immediate regard for Skeptic, as seen in the deleted scene here. Sure, he dislikes Geten, but ultimately, Geten is a stupid kid too tied up in his care for Re-Destro--who's now worshipping the ground Shigaraki walks on--to really be getting in Dabi's way.

Maybe if the MLA really were as quirk supremacist as Geten makes them out to be, Dabi would be actively looking for a way to see ‘em burn, but as I’ve said countless times before, Geten is not a reliable narrator vis a vis the MLA's doctrine. Now, obviously I don't expect Dabi to give them an unearned benefit of the doubt,(1) not after what he heard Geten say, but if Dabi has been working with Skeptic, it doesn't take a genius to realize that while Anthropomorph is a perfectly good quirk, it is categorically not what primarily defines Skeptic’s "worth" in the MLA societal microcosm.

Nothing that Skeptic does reflects the way Geten talks about "elevating one's ability" or "sheer strength" in the way that HeroAca fandom tends to understand as referring to flashy and offensive quirks. And yet, Skeptic is a ranked advisor warranting an introductory panel with RD's inner circle and Geten is not. Perhaps, just perhaps, this might have led Dabi to reevaluating his initial assessment just slightly?

|| Mr. Compress rejects the PLF moniker for Shigaraki, ergo Mr. Compress didn’t genuinely associate Shigaraki and the League with the PLF.

So, this one's pretty wild, because, in the same chapter that had people crowing about Mr. Compress's dialogue, Mr. Compress's actions show the exact opposite of the conclusion this theory would demand. Specifically, if it was always the League's plan to ditch the MLA, Mr. Compress would have darted right past Skeptic, ignoring the man's cries for help. He doesn't--he picks Skeptic up on the way past and (at least in the volume corrections) deposits him safe with Dabi in Spinner's scarf. Of course, Skeptic still stands to be useful, but if one acknowledges that Skeptic's usefulness is reason enough not to abandon him, then what exactly is the argument for leaving 116,000 perfectly useful warm bodies behind?

But let's set aside Compress rescuing Skeptic and focus on the actual point, because that point in itself is still flawed. Mr. Compress's thoughts on the PLF in the specific talk bubble in question are somewhat ambiguous. It's another case of the Viz translation making a couple of assumptions that are just that--assumptions.

Compress's words in the Japanese are as follows:

Chōjō Kaihō Sensen.… Viran rengo no Shigaraki Tomura ga…

Viz then renders the line like so:

The Paranormal Liberation Front's… No, the League of Villain's Shigaraki…

Note that in the Japanese, the possessive no is only included once, to indicate Shigaraki's association with the League. Further, the original doesn't indicate any negation in Compress's thoughts. Yes, he could be rejecting the PLF association for Shigaraki, but he could as easily be narrowing his scope to Shigaraki as the figure he represents to the League, rather than the figure he represents to the PLF--not rejecting wholesale, but rather becoming more specific. Compress might also be thinking first of the PLF as a general organization, then narrowing down to Shigaraki specifically.

Rather than reading this line as an indication that Compress regards the PLF as temporary, I was heartened by the fact that Compress thought about the PLF at all! If the League really had been planning to discard them this entire time, then there's no reason for Compress to have ever taken the Front seriously enough to have thought about them in that moment of crisis. You can carry this back further, too. In Chapter 258, when Twice is asking Hawks for help, he says that Spinner and Compress have been in meetings for days. Coupled with Compress's first thought about the entity that will carry out Harima's desired reformation being the Liberation Front (or possibly "the Liberation Front's Shigaraki"), this indicates to me that Compress was taking it seriously, not just gorging himself on sushi on the MLA's dime.

Indeed, back in Ujiko's lab, when it was just Shigaraki talking about his backstory and his dreams of destruction, Compress looks the opposite of impressed; we know from his narration in 294 that he liked the League because they didn't place any importance on one another’s pasts. Yet, at some point, his view shifted to believing that fulfilling his ancestor's ambition, his bloodline’s duty, really might be back on the table. We as readers don't quite know when that shift happened, but given, again, his initial mental invocation of the PLF, I think we can assume that it's tied to that alliance, those resources. And sure, when the moment of crisis happens and he's really defining who and what Shigaraki is to him, and where his values and priorities lie, it's with the League and Shigaraki as the leader of the League. But that doesn't mean he never had his hopes for the PLF at all, or was partaking in plans to ditch them.

Also too, this is a man who was lamenting the loss of their partnership with Overhaul, a man who personally maimed him, on top of killing a comrade. You're telling me the guy who shrugged off his animosity towards Overhaul would willingly allow the League to plot sabotage against even wealthier collaborators against whom he has even less reason to hold a grudge? Come on, guys.

|| Toga hated Curious, so she wouldn't want to work with the MLA either.

This one's easy: Toga pretty explicitly hated Curious, but she's even more explicit that she likes the MLA because she thinks the world they want to create is wonderful. She says this verbatim at the end of 225, after Curious has spent the entire chapter hounding her with explosions and intrusive questions. What turns her animosity on Curious is not some reveal that the MLA's world would be terrible after all, but Curious calling Toga's "normal" miserable and tragic. Essentially, she doesn't object to the world the MLA wants to bring about; she objects to being turned into a martyr for that world, especially when that martyrdom requires that the things that make Toga happy be characterized as horrific misfortunes.

Toga doesn't like Curious; she kills Curious. And then she comes into a position of leadership, and we don't know a lot about how that position takes her, but she seems delighted to be walking out onto the stage to be announced as such, and she makes active contributions to the discussion of the PLF's plans in Chapter 245. We are, again, given no indication that her lethal response to Curious means that she's planning to ditch the MLA on the whole.

Incidentally, Curious asserts what she does about Toga only in the context of the world as it stands. The world's rejection of Toga's normal, and the extremes that rejection drove Toga to, are what Curious considers tragic and miserable, not Toga's fascination with blood in and of itself. She clearly believes that, in the world the MLA envisions, Toga's life would not be so miserable because she would never have been oppressed to the degree that she snapped. And frankly, Curious isn't wrong. The only reason she is a villain in that scene is that she's willing to murder Toga to project that tragedy to the world. If she'd been willing to sit down and have a civil interview with Toga to print it in a relevant magazine, she would have been fine.

|| Twice would never forgive them for what they did to Giran.

You know, this is a totally fair point. It is, however, somewhat complicated by the fact that Giran himself never left the PLF. Now, there’s almost certainly something to be said about Giran’s whole information broker shtick being terminally compromised by his capture, his maiming, his client list being hacked, etc. He had a bunch of identifying items strewn all over the country that were covered in the national news, items that people who associated with him closely certainly would have recognized. Maybe he’s laying low for a while?

I don’t know why Giran was still around by the time of the raid. I can theorize about his pragmatism or what have you, but the canon really doesn’t give us anything to go on. Still, if he really hated the MLA all that much, as he would be totally justified in doing, it’s pretty bizarre that Horikoshi showed him twice in PLF crowd scenes post-Deika looking nothing worse than kind of confused and uneasy. Heck, you’d think he would at least have merited a better seat in the crowd for the big merger announcement.

Giran aside, the fact that Twice never does hit it off with anyone in his regiment is, I think, telling. If there’s anyone in the League that intentionally kept himself at a distance from the MLA because of hard feelings, it’s likely Twice. After all, if he had befriended anyone, he presumably wouldn’t have needed to go to Hawks for tutoring almost an entire month after Deika. That said, the fact that Twice does go running to Hawks for tutoring shows that he’s at least doing his best to act in accordance with what he thinks Shigaraki and the rest want. That doesn’t preclude the League having a secret plan that he’s either in on and playing along with, or hasn’t been told about because he might not be able to stop himself from vocalizing about it. Still, while absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, obviously absence of evidence is not evidence of presence. So, lacking any sign that the rest of the League is planning treachery, I’m not inclined to assume Twice’s lack of forgiveness is indicative of anything other than his own feelings.

|| [Error: argument about Spinner's opinion on the PLF not found.]

:: INCOMING SALT WARNING :: INCOMING SALT WARNING ::

This is the one that really gets to me. I have never seen an argument that the League is planning to betray the PLF that convincingly explains the fact that Spinner, to all available evidence, threw himself wholeheartedly into trying to make the PLF succeed. To be more precise, I have seen one explanation, and that explanation is that the plan to ditch the MLA was a secret that only Shigaraki, Dabi and sometimes Toga knew about, and to reiterate, that is bullshit.

In my experience, this is an explanation proposed by people who care about Spinner only insofar as he can be a Soft Gaymer Boyfriend or score them rhetorical points, but have little to no interest in his ongoing--and, indeed, increasing--importance to the League generally and Shigaraki’s arc specifically. The dude who talked about how Twice’s home was the League, who got through to Toga while still respecting her choice when no one else could, the guy who recognized the hollowness within Shigaraki but also bonded with him over video games, the man who Mr. Compress said was Shigaraki’s most devoted follower(2)--this man did not do all of that for people in this fandom to say, “Oh, well, the others probably just kept it a secret from him because they thought he’d be bad at lying.”

Really? “Bad at lying?” And that’s an adequate justification, is it, for Shigaraki letting Spinner toil for months under false pretenses? For lying to the man who adores him the most? Of course it isn’t, but the people who theorize this don’t really care about Spinner’s adoration for Shigaraki, or the fact that Shigaraki rewarding Spinner’s feelings by allowing him to dedicate himself unstintingly to something Shigaraki was planning to discard from the beginning would be a blatant abuse of Spinner’s trust.

I have never seen anyone try to argue that Spinner was in on a plan to betray the MLA all along. That’s because it’s patently obvious that Spinner--forthright, direct Spinner, who named the merged organization with Re-Destro, spends all his time in meetings, has a direct exchange with Re-Destro about the state of their plans, and is probably the reason RD started wearing polka dots--went all-in on the PLF. But for the people who propose the “the League was always going to bail” theory, Spinner and his labors are an afterthought.

Spinner is not an afterthought. Where Mr. Compress has been captured, Toga could hypothetically be peeled away from the League via Uraraka, and Dabi almost certainly will be peeled away via the Todoroki plot, Spinner’s driving motivation at this point is Shigaraki himself. He connected to Shigaraki’s nihilism, his hatred, but also his humanity--the humanity in Shigaraki Tomura, not in Shimura Tenko. His empathy didn’t spring from contrived psychic glimpses of crying 5-year-olds, but from long months of observation, doubt, and gradually deepening wonder. He’s the only person currently with Shigaraki that I can see caring enough about Shigaraki’s welfare that he might sacrifice his own goals and desires to help Deku save him.

Spinner is not an afterthought, and I refuse to build or entertain theories that treat him that way. So as to his opinions on the MLA? Despite having his own reasons to be leery of them based on how shabbily Trumpet treated him, he was obviously trying to make the Paranormal Liberation Front succeed, which means he must have believed that Shigaraki wanted it to succeed. Therefore, unless you’re prepared to assert that Shigaraki (and everyone else who was in on it!) was cruel enough to lie to Spinner about something he was devoting so much time and energy to, the inescapable conclusion is that Shigaraki also wanted the Front to succeed.

(Note: After letting a friend pre-read this, I have been informed that there is, in fact, one explanation offered for Spinner knowing the League was going to abandon the PLF but working his ass off on the venture anyway, and that explanation is, “Something something wants to prove himself because low self-esteem.” This is so ridiculous I can’t even bring myself to edit this post accordingly. Low self-esteem! Because nothing would alleviate Spinner's low self-esteem like toiling for months over something that holds no worth to the people he actually cares about, right? Right?? Bah. Humbug!)

And but so, to wrap all that up: I fundamentally disagree that the League viewed the Paranormal Liberation Front as a temporary arrangement, at least to the extent that they were actively planning to betray their newfound--new won--allies. The fact that I don't think the League intended to discard the MLA out of hand does, thus, influence my opinion that, whatever Geten's fate will be, I'm pretty sure it's not going to be, "He gets murdered in a way that resembles nothing so much as a sick revenge fantasy dozens of chapters after the last point when such a death would have been remotely tonally appropriate."

Thanks for the ask, anon! Sorry about-- *waves at all of this*

-------------------------------

(1) Not that Mr. “Burns Random Delinquents Alive For Not Measuring Up To His Standards For Villainy” has any moral standing to criticize others for how they determine the value of peoples’ lives, mind.

(2) Other translations for the verb in Mr. Compress’s Japanese line of, “You are the one who ____s Shigaraki the most,” include yearn for, long for, pine for, miss, love dearly, adore, idolize, and revere. “Most devoted follower” is accurate enough, but considerably less homo than some of the things we could have gotten there.