#hello there kind person!

[frikus-nom-haven]

Aww that's cute

Ayy, thank you! ^^

[aroaceleovaldez]

i have suddenly become obsessed with a theme that HoO established but never proceeded to extrapolate on, which is:

You are Percy Jackson, and you have been swapped with a boy who was allegedly everyone's favorite person, but they have decided to replace him with you. They just met you. You stand next to his best friend and the people he's known his entire life. In his home. In his cloak. In his place. They stopped looking for him.

You are Jason Grace, and you have just found out you have a long lost sister who completely replaced you in her life with this girl you just met. Your lives and personalities are mirrors. She is you, living the life you were robbed of.

You are Annabeth Chase, and you have just become starkly aware that you have been inhabiting the void left behind by your best friend's long lost brother. You and Luke were just replacements for him. Now you have to look him in the eyes when he has nothing and know you took that life from him.

You are Piper McLean, and you have just found out your relationship is fake and built entirely on the memories of Annabeth Chase. You have been given a boyfriend when hers has been taken away. You have no idea how much of it is real or not but regardless you feel like if your relationship isn't exactly in their image that you have failed.

You are Leo Valdez, and you have just learned that you are the echo of your great-grandfather. You are not your own person. You just exist to be a mirror of him. A doppelganger. An actor and stunt double facing all the danger he never had to but wearing his face. To be there for his best friend decades later simply because he couldn't. You are playing a role. A seventh wheel and a pawn for a goddess who carefully sculpted your entire life for her own purposes.

You are Hazel Levesque, and the only reason you are alive is because your brother couldn't save your his sister. You are a consolation prize. An apology. Your existence here is misplaced in every way but you inhabit it anyways.

You are Frank Zhang, and you are a shapeshifter. Inhabiting your own body feels strange and clumsy when you could be literally anything at any time. You are anything and everything and live your life with the simple certainty of knowing exactly how you will die.

[hinamie]

binding vow

[lowkeyren]

it's SO funny he's terrible at cooking

[surfacage]

noire and lokha would get along! too much actually. its terrible

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Party of one (divided into four)

[lgbtlunaverse]

While I think the moment in cql where Meng Yao– still bleeding from a stab wound in his chest btw– realizes Lan Xichen is in danger and decides to save the man who was so kind to him in cloud recesses is cute and all, nothing will ever beat the book for me. Little bookkeeper civilian Meng Yao, who has not had a serious chance to make his dreams of being a cultivator come true in fucking years, out of nowhere gets the fucking sect leader of Gusu Lan dropped right in his lap?

It's such a great example of Meng Yao's multilayered motivations to me. Because is civilian Meng Yao thinking of all the ways he can use this? Of the fact that having a great sect leader in his debt is the best thing that could happen to him? Duh. Obviously.

Is he very purposeful about appearing to Lan Xichen as a kind young man full of untapped potential, brave and willing to put his life on the line even though he really doesn't know so much about about cultivators, no sir, except a little he picked up here and there, because you see his father– 👉👈 Of course he is!

But the way through which he does that is... by actually saving Lan Xichen's life, at no doubt significant personal risk. The way he makes Lan Xichen believe he's kind and selfless is by... being kind and selfless. Just because he's doing it on purpose doesn't mean he's not doing it.

Is it lying if you want people to think you're nice and so you're nice to them? Isn't that just called being nice? Yes, he is very purposeful about how he appears to people, and very carefully crafts an image based on what he wants them to think of him, but most of the time he does that simply by... actually being the kind of person he wants to appear as. He still did the kind things he did, regardless of his motivations for doing them.

[ohmygraves]

it's your first day on your new job and you're really struggling.

of course, you've been told what to expect. above average pay for entry level, simple secretary/assistant job, and yet there's a lot of things to deal with since the company deals with government and the military.

right, you're working for shadow company, as phillip graves' assistant.

his old assistant quit after a few years, and you applied. she warned you that he is strict, has a high standard and everything must be perfect. no mistake. and lots of secret you have to keep since all the documents are both sensitive to the company but also the government itself.

it's a high risk, high reward desk job that you're definitely not used to.

honestly, that terrifies you. what would he do if you make a mistake? shoot you in the backyard?

you hope not. you tried your best to make as little mistakes as you could as you try to get a handle on the job, learning as much as you could from his previous assistant. but of course, your efforts could only go so far.

on your first day after the assistant's last day, not only that you got hit on by the mercenaries around the office left and right, you made lots of mistakes and ended up spilling coffee on both your boss and his super important tablet that holds all the important files. the coffee stained his baby blue shirt and jeans.

of course, he yelled at you. of course, you tried to hold back your tears. of course, you brought him a change of clothes and he told you to go get it cleaned immediately.

this feels so much worse than your previous job where you deal with border regulations.

thankfully, the tablet was okay. and you ended up cleaning his clothes by hand in the bathroom since you were free, so you returned it the next day. his clothes smelling nice, stain free, and no wrinkles.

surprisingly, graves thanked you, apologizing for the way he yelled at you. he also asked if you're holding up okay after being left to do everything by yourself.

you told him that aside from getting hit on by a few of his men, you're getting the hang of everything. you kept notes and all, you can always go through his routine and schedule if you forget. he told you to go out and get some coffee for him (since he wanted some from the coffee shop outside of the office, for some reason), and told you that you can get something too, on him. you agreed, leaving the office.

you didn't know that he decided to "set things straight" with his men that they can't flirt with his new assistant. you're off limits. for him only.

[cakemoney]

the speed with which brennan/evan decided to not only kill philtrum but to snap his wand to do so felt so satisfying (and hot), but also the way he did it (leaning into influencing the mind, directly shutting down the brain without any fanfare) draws a sharp contrast to the way philtrum chose to use magic, which is... not in an advantageous way given their location, right? if this was about getting them away from her/seizing the magical objects, she could've just as (or, given the rules as we understand them, much more) easily used some mind control/confusion spell to send them walking away. she wasn't casting intelligently given that magic is an extremely scarce resource there and also given that they're on the Mind magic island; she kind of just did exactly the sort of spell that was used to try to kill evan during the game in season 1, which makes sense given aabria's explanation of this being a group of people who would sacrifice anything to maintain their way of life and their sense of self.

and it just adds to the sinister energy to the island; it implies (perhaps unfairly, we have a sample size of one) that even after all this time on the island, they don't know what the island is about and why it costs them so much magic to do the things that used to be easy. they truly have no idea that they're on the fuck with your head island, probably because the island is fucking with their heads to keep them here and keep them hungry for magic and keep them from questioning if they should be living like this and make them spend every drop of magic that they can squeeze out of everything they have and everyone around them. this island is a like a massive parasite living in their minds pushing them to harvest resources that they think is necessary for their survival but is really being surrendered to feed the parasite. fuck man i KNEW the pretty green-grass blue-sky island was going to be the most fucked up one

[daily-hanamura]

[lovelyrotter]

ill probably delete this in a minute but ive just been fuckin boggled by what ive seen across tumblr in the last few days in particular. its why i havent really been around. like holy fucking shit, its really like some of yall just dont want a chunk of the trans community to exist. like some of yall are thisclose to saying it verbatum. way too many already have. 'shut up sit down be quiet and smile for us' type shit, gee where have i heard that before. oh yeah my entire life cause i was forcefully gendered as someones daughter. shock horror i know. you might be surprised to remember and/or learn that very few trans folks know theyre trans before we're 5, or even 10, and that that gendered experience stays with all of us in both/either small or large ways. either bc we literally dont have a solid identity yet (bc we're very small children), dont have the words, we're repressing it out of fear from how others will treat us, we're actually enjoying or enjoyed being another gender in our childhood, or we just genuinely didnt fuckin know until shit lined up later in life. weird isnt it that transmascs dont pop out as 6'1 brick shithouse cis men when we're born so yall know for certain that we're confused lost girls/women oops i mean big dangerous scary men. its almost like we're transgender too. none of yall actually know what intersectionality is or means

[vaguely-concerned]

somehow enchanted by the detail that odo specifically gives himself (makes himself into??) a latte. he's thought about this. he has Colour Coordinated.

[pandorem]

Okay so I don’t feel the most qualified to talk about this, especially to make any value judgements on how any of this was handled, so I would love other people to add in if they feel like it, but this is eating my brain actually so.

Esther Finch is a funny villain. She’s a joy to watch on screen, even if part of that joy is in hating her. But there’s something that feels very deliberate in the fact that the only two girls (barring in the animated flashback) we see her target are black girls. Becky Aspen and Crystal. I don’t think we’re supposed to infer from this that she only ever targets black girls, but the casting of Becky feels deliberate. While there’s plenty of in universe explanation for why she wants to use Crystal to feed to her snake afterwards and doesn’t ever say, specifically target Niko, it’s still there. And though Niko was just hurt because she got in the way, she’s also another woman of colour we see Esther hurt.

And then at the end Crystal, who many have pointed out has been a voice for women throughout the whole season, stands in front of Lilith, the goddess of wronged women, and screams to her about who gets justice for all the little girls Esther hurt. And then Lilith, played by a black woman, is the one to drag Esther away.

Crystal says to Esther that she knows how anger can poison you. Esther says she learned to be predator instead of prey a long time ago. Do I think that the show literally wants us to think that Esther is a racist who deliberately targets black girls? No. Do I think the casting choices that they made bring up themes of the kind of people who, because they have been hurt or marginalized, want to push others down to have others that they can have power over instead? Whose problems with societal oppression is not that it exists, but that they aren’t the ones who get to benefit from it? I think so.

[unanchored-ship]

WHO ARE YOU 😭

[moretheta]

Honestly at this point i'm pronouncing "hxh has no noteworthy female characters" to be an ice cold, bottom of the barrel take. 

Come on a journey with me. 

Anyone who knows me in real life (which is hopefully almost no one on here) knows how insane I am when it comes to female characters getting shafted in media- and in shonen manga specifically. No doubt a side effects of being a girl who's favorite character was sakura in the 2015 naruto fandom- but that's another story. The point is I'm not coming at this from a "boo hoo why so woke" standpoint, or an "it's really not the deep" mentality. I care about this shit- truly i do. which is exactly why the way people talk about this issue bothers me so much. 

I distinctly remover being 13 or so when I saw HxH pop up on netflix (or some other streaming service, i don't remember) and looking at the title card with Gon, Killua, Kurapika, and Leorio and thinking "huh. no women?" bc damn, even nart had women (they were written misogynistically, shafted from the narrative, and treated like fucking pariahs by fans... but they were there), and at the time i had a disease where I couldn't dedicate time towards watching something unless it had a prominent female character for me to latch on to. that disease is called ~being tired of misogyny~ and i'm still a carrier to this day. so this past version of me wanted to do some research, so i looked up something like "does HxH have female characters." I saw one of two responses: 1) sadly no. and 2. no, shut up snowflake.

I honestly don't remember what finally pushed me over the edge to start watching it, but i'm so so glad i did. had several queer awakenings. a very formative time for me, etc. aaaaaallll that is to say: I get it. I’ve been there. i don't withhold criticism from a show just because i like it. 

Because it's true that HxH had no female characters... in 1998, when it's started it's serialization. like there were a few background women and also Mito, but that's it, that's all we got. and for a while that's what we would continue to get: every female character introduced seemed to exist as a cog in the wheel of one of the main male characters' storylines. even characters who i love very much and think have a lot of potential, like Canary, only seemed to show up briefly to supplement Killua's narrative and then leave. all of this is true. 

But the thing people need to realize about Hunter x Hunter is that it has been going on for a long time.  The chimera ant arc concluded it's serialization in 2012. and with the hiatuses that became necessary due to Togashi's health, it meant publishing continued really slowly. this current arc of the manga- the succession war- has been going on since 2017- (arguably longer, if you count the expedition arc as a prelude which i personally kinda do), but either way we have over half a decade of real time years that have passed. and one of the things i really admire about Togashi is his ability to grow as an author- to take in feedback and improve where he needed to improve. We can see it, for instance, in his history of writing queer characters- trans characters in particular. See this great video for a further breakdown.

There’s more to be said on this topic but that’s for another day. This isn’t an “in defense of Togashi” post, he’ll be ok. It’s the female characters themselves that I must rise up and defend. I fight an endless war on an empty battlefield, population Me, and this is my life’s purpose.

What I am trying to say is this: HxH is not the same series it was in 1998. It’s not the same series as it was in 2011. And what we have seen as the series progressed, was the introduction and elevation of more and more interesting female characters. This has culminated in what very well might be my favorite arc in the series -unfinished as it is- the succession war. and, without giving away any spoilers, I just have to say……

THERE ARE SO MANY WONDERFUL WOMEN. DO YOU SEE THEM?!!? DO YOU SEE MY BEAUTIFUL WIVES?!? MY LARGE AUTOMOBILES MY-

I cannot fathom how anyone who is caught up with the manga continues to parrot this take. Why would you say that. Why would you do this to our women. There are soosososo sososoooo many fantastic female characters, old and new, and more are added literally every chapter because togashi loves it when I (me specifically) have to make more flashcards. There are female protagonists, antagonists, supporting characters, antiheroes, etc. women with all different kinds of personalities and motivations that don’t feel like a copy-pasted trope. Women who (gasp!) come in different shapes and sizes!?!? Women who don’t fit the traditional standards of beauty are just as important and just as beloved as those who do. and because I’m a crazy person I have gone around and calculated “screen time” (page time?) as well as ratios of male to female characters and folks the numbers are looking good. There was a point in time when I tried to memorize the names and faces of every single female character on the wiki (see above note on flashcards) because again, I’m a crazy person, and it just made me realize how incredible this ensemble cast is looking right now and how excited I am to see more of them. I am the succession war’s biggest glazer so yes, obviously I come with a bias; but here me when I tell you this: you want more well-written, prominently featured, multidimensional female characters in your little shonens (bad place to look, but unfortunately I am the biggest offender of this) please for god’s sake. For god’s sake read the manga.  

So yeah. Sick and fucking tired of seeing people say “HxH has no women” They’re there babe!!!! They’re there!!! You wanna say some shit like that, at least put a caveat of *up until the end of the anime so that people know that information is eight years out of date. yeah watch me be petty. It just astounds me that someone could look me in the eyes and tell me that Melody, Bisky, Theta, Morena, Oito, Woble, Kacho, Fugetsu, Camilla, Machi, Pakunoda, Alluka, Komugi, Kite(yes welcome), Cheadle, Canary, and now Longhi have no importance in the narrative.

It’s true that there is always a time and a place for criticism…  but why does it seem like there’s only five of us trapped in here in this room who are excited to talk about the potential for Theta x Vorksen work situationship... on the ethics of Morena's class war, or an Oito Phantom Troupe connection, or the thematic implications of the madonna being juxtaposed with the antichrist and also maybe satan. Yeah so we're trapped in this room and it's great but occasionally I'll hear shouting from the outside and it's some horrible take or the same unfunny, super gross joke, or some guy who thinks netero setting off a nuke was "peak aura" or smth. And we're still in here, beckoning, offering shelter from the storm.

All you gotta do is open the doors and start taking notes.

[beanghostprincess]

Sabo still struggles with memory loss. He had his childhood back, of course, he remembers Ace and Luffy and everything they did together. But he doesn't remember some stuff. Some anecdotes Luffy tells oh so excitedly? He can't recall that those happened. And if he does, it's all blurry and never at all like Luffy says. But he never says anything because that would break his brother's heart, to know his older brother isn't fully back with him, so he nods and smiles and pretends he knows what Luffy is talking about every time.

His room is filled with Post-it notes. Stupid, really. Dumb stuff. But he has all the meetings he needs to remember and the missions he has to do, along with everything he wants to write down at some point properly. The walls are covered in pictures of the people he loves (Luffy, Ace, Koala, Robin... All the others that have ever meant something to him because he refuses to forget somebody again).

He keeps writing dumb stuff down. Anything. He refuses to forget. He denies the possibility of doing it again.

But he forgets. Sabo keeps forgetting important dates. Important parts of his life, like his past with his brothers (he forgets a random adventure they had that he swore he had talked about the day prior) and crucial things he has to do. He has a hard time picturing his memories. Putting them in his brain. Turning them into images. Saying it's frustrating is a huge understatement.

Koala helps him out, of course. She's hard on him so he finishes his paperwork, but she knows it's difficult sometimes. She's his personal calendar and diary. She informs him of what he has to do during the week and always tries to talk and talk about anecdotes that she knows he still remembers but knows he loves to hear again.

His mental health isn't the best either, but he refuses to acknowledge it. There's a revolution at hand, he can't stop working. And fighting. And doing more and more and more. But sometimes it's just too much. Sometimes he goes into depressive episodes he can't control, and the medication is either addicting or the worst thing that has ever happened to him. Sometimes he's a bit too intense. Koala says he needs to calm down, that he has a problem with his fixation on the revolution and his past. Sabo keeps saying that it's fine. But he sometimes forgets or has blurry images of the fights and the people he has killed, filled with energy and excitement and like he has the power of a God. He doesn't like those. Enjoys the moment. Hates to forget it. Hates to know what he did during it too, even if it was for a good cause. Despises the look Koala gives him, also. Makes her promise not to tell Luffy about all of this.

But it's fine, he keeps saying. Sabo will keep trying to never forget anything ever again.