#hero monarchs

[juantheashura]

Hey, since in a recent ask you mentioned potentially adding a Aki x Lat x MC poly in book 2 I wanted to say firstly I wholehearted support this as choosing between them when they are both so dang wholesome is the worst and they also have a cute dynamic both with each other and the MC so I think it would totally work. But that being said I think with Aki being so inexperienced both with romantic relationships but also seemingly with just normal health social relationships you do need to go about it super carefully. In my own experience poly relationships need to be super equal and have really good communication. And I feel like if do you want to add that relationship you need to make sure to set it up early right because otherwise if we romance Aki or Lat in book one then start a poly in book two it makes the third person be a bit of a third wheel who is coming into this already established preexisting relationship and especially in the case of like romancing Lat in book 1 then starting the poly in book 2 with Aki like this would still presumably be Aki's first relationship and her first experience being joining a preestablish relationship as a third feels vaguely exploitive. Like you can mitigate that to some degree by how you write them and their interactions but even still for it to feel real or like relationship that would actually work long term I think you need to set it up in book 1 and either have a separate slower burn romance with them both wherein nothing more serious happens until the poly or I think limiting the poly to those who romanced Aki in book one would also work because she's really the part you need to be most careful with how you write given her inexperience. That isn't to say you absolutely can't have book 1 romanced Lat MC start a poly with Aki in book 2 you can but its just I do think you need to be extra careful if you want it to feel like a real healthy stable relationship that would work long term. Like I said I wholehearted do think a poly between them could work and I hope I didn't scare you off doing this I just wanted to add some thoughts based off my own experiences.

Also I've a separate question on a completely different topic, so I know you've said we for sure won't surpass BK or BQ in in the books but I am curious since some of what you have said about why we won't surpass them seems focused mostly on the seer amount of experience and time they have had to grow in strength could the MC given a decade or two eventually reach them or surpass them given even longer?

Also also sorry for any spelling or grammar errors I tried to proof read but my brain is terrible at doing that so chances are high there are more than a few I missed.

Don't worry- I feel relatively the same on the poly aspect of it. I'm very likely not adding a third route in Book 1 for romancing both, I think (at least, not anything directly), but my idea has always been that it'd be a poly dependent on romancing Aki in Book 1, that'd be the only way to be able to get Lat in a relationship as well. Aki needs a little experience with things first, before she starts considering if she wants something more.

I appreciate hearing your thoughts though! I've... definitely never been in a (well, consensually, anyway) polyamorous relationship myself, so I'd be flying relatively by the seat of my pants and what I manage to read about the dynamics. I am definitely thankful for knowing how people with more experience than me feel or think about these things.

As for your second question, it's... a bit more complicated than that, but I'll try to make it a little short:

The Broken King and the Blitz Queen both started off stronger than the MC- as in, their base powers before training were of a higher 'tier' than the MC. That already establishes a gap, but then you have the fact that the two of them had each other to train with as well, meaning that they had a direct challenger through which to better themselves, something the MC doesn't at the moment.

Then you come to the matter of experience. The Blitz Queen, compared to the (current, at least) MC lived in a more unsettled time, which I think we can all agree on. She had to fight more often, and had her powers for longer than the MC (she got them as a toddler, basically), which means she started growing stronger than the MC from earlier.

Then add to that the fact that she had 50~ years to further grow in strength.

Now, consider all that for the King as well, but add the fact he's been using his powers every single day since the Queen died.

All this combined means: Catching up within a decade or two is most likely impossible because the starting gap is oh so huge. You might become someone the Queen or King would have considered a worthwhile companion, but you're definitely more the... say, Piccolo to the King's Goku, or the Sanji to the Queen's Luffy.

[perplexi]

Day 20: Crossover!! (they're besties ofc 🥂💖✨)

[emsylcatac]

Part of me will always mourn that we didn't get to see Chat Noir fighting Monarch, his father, in the finale battle. That's always gonna be nagging in the back of my mind.

At the same time, it was a little predictable, and what the writers chose to do instead makes a lot of sense when you think about it, and is maybe more satisfying for Adrien's arc regarding his relationship to his father than if he'd had to fight Monarch knowing it's Gabriel. (Not talking about the whole "he still doesn't know his father was Monarch" bit, I'm strictly talking about the fights here - that one's another topic entirely)

I say "predictable", because of what happened in "Representation". Adrien got here his moment to fight his father, as a seemingly akuma victim, and this on his own without Ladybug.

With this set-up we have here: Adrien confronting and fighting his father as in Gabriel Agreste, and Marinette confronting and fighting her nemesis as in Monarch. That's always what we envisioned as the finale fight against Monarch would be: Adrien vs his abusive father and Ladybug vs her enemy. It just didn't happen in the same fight, so both could separately have their moment and their thing to say.

I think in the end it's significantly more important that Adrien got to fight Gabriel Agreste as Psycauchemardeur focusing solely on him as his father, than have him fight Gabriel Agreste knowing it's Monarch. Because everything that happened in Representation, everything Adrien told his father as Chat Noir and everything Adrien was angry about regarding his father's behaviour with him, that all comes down to how Gabriel has acted as a father to him independently of him being a city terrorist.

If Adrien had had the realisation that his father's actions were terrible through the discovery that he was, on top of an abuser, a supervillain, then the whole "terrorising innocents" would have overshadowed in Adrien's anger all that Gabriel did to him personally as an abuser & shitty parental figure.

What I mean is that Adrien realising his father is shitty independently of knowing he's a terrorist and confronting him about it in a fight is part of his arc and is more impactful than Adrien confronting his father for his supervillain acts. He didn't realise Gabriel was a terrible person because he was a supervillain, but because he understood he was an abusive father and that's amazing

And that's why he got his moment in Representation while Marinette had hers in the finale - Gabriel is a shitty person both as a father and by being a magical terrorist. Adrien confronted him about the "shitty father" bit, and Marinette about the "magical terrorist bit", and both these things make sense with their respective character arcs & respective relationships to Gabriel

[bugsandboos]

how am i supposed to live laugh love when the london special exists

[the-meme-monarch]

i barely know charmy bee but if you hate charmy bee we can't be friends

[zoethehead]

Well, i just came up with my own cookie run cookie wishlist, because why not?

[mobageheroine]

Female Lord - 여로드

【Lord of Heroes】

[greenerteacups]

oooh please someday tell us what you think of GOT

oh, no, it's my fatal weakness! it's [checks notes] literally just the bare modicum of temptation! okay you got me.

SO. in order to tell what's wrong with game of thrones you kind of have to have read the books, because the books are the reason the show goes off the rails. i actually blame the showrunners relatively little in proportion to GRRM for how bad the show was (which I'm not gonna rehash here because if you're interested in GOT in any capacity you've already seen that horse flogged to death). people debate when GOT "got bad" in terms of writing, but regardless of when you think it dropped off, everyone agrees the quality declined sharply in season 8, and to a certain extent, season 7. these are the seasons that are more or less entirely spun from whole cloth, because season 7 marks the beginning of what will, if we ever see it, be the Winds of Winter storyline. it's the first part that isn't based on a book by George R.R. Martin. it's said that he gave the showrunners plot outlines, but we don't know how detailed they were, or how much the writers diverged from the blueprint — and honestly, considering the cumulative changes made to the story by that point, some stark divergence would have been required. (there's a reason for this. i'll get there in a sec.)

so far, i'm not saying anything all that original. a lot of people recognized how bad the show got as soon as they ran out of Book to adapt. (I think it's kind of weird that they agreed to make a show about an unfinished series in the first place — did GRRM figure that this was his one shot at a really good HBO adaptation, and forego misgivings about his ability to write two full books in however many years it took to adapt? did he think they would wait for him? did he not care that the series would eventually spoil his magnum opus, which he's spent the last three decades of his life writing? perplexing.) but the more interesting question is why the show got bad once it ran out of Book, because in my mind, that's not a given. a lot of great shows depart from the books they were based on. fanfiction does exactly that, all the time! if you have good writers who understand the characters they're working with, departure means a different story, not a worse one. now, the natural reply would be to say that the writers of GOT just aren't good, or at least aren't good at the things that make for great television, and that's why they needed the books as a structure, but I don't think that's true or fair, either. books and television are very different things. the pacing of a book is totally different from the pacing of a television show, and even an episodic book like ASOIAF is going to need a lot of work before it's remotely watchable as a series. bad writers cannot make great series of television, regardless of how good their source material is. sure, they didn't invent the characters of tyrion lannister and daenerys targaryen, but they sure as hell understood story structure well enough to write a damn compelling season of TV about them!

so but then: what gives? i actually do think it's a problem with the books! the show starts out as very faithful to the early books (namely, A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings) to the point that most plotlines are copied beat-for-beat. the story is constructed a little differently, and it's definitely condensed, but the meat is still there. and not surprisingly, the early books in ASOIAF are very tightly written. for how long they are, you wouldn't expect it, but on every page of those books, the plot is racing. you can practically watch george trying to beat the fucking clock. and he does! useful context here is that he originally thought GOT was going to be a trilogy, and so the scope of most threads in the first book or two would have been much smaller. it also helps that the first three books are in some respects self-contained stories. the first book is a mystery, the second and third are espionage and war dramas — and they're kept tight in order to serve those respective plots.

the trouble begins with A Feast for Crows, and arguably A Storm of Swords, because GRRM starts multiplying plotlines and treating the series as a story, rather than each individual book. he also massively underestimated the number of pages it would take him to get through certain plot beats — an assumption whose foundation is unclear, because from a reader's standpoint, there is a fucke tonne of shit in Feast and Dance that's spurious. I'm not talking about Brienne's Riverlands storyline (which I adore thematically but speaking honestly should have been its own novella, not a part of Feast proper). I'm talking about whole chapters where Tyrion is sitting on his ass in the river, just talking to people. (will I eat crow about this if these pay off in hugely satisfying ways in Winds or Dream? oh, totally. my brothers, i will gorge myself on sweet sweet corvid. i will wear a dunce cap in the square, and gleefully, if these turn out to not have been wastes of time. the fact that i am writing this means i am willing to stake a non-negligible amount of pride on the prediction that that will not happen). I'm talking about scenes where the characters stare at each other and talk idly about things that have already happened while the author describes things we already have seen in excruciating detail. i'm talking about threads that, while forgivable in a different novel, are unforgivable in this one, because you are neglecting your main characters and their story. and don't tell me you think that a day-by-day account tyrion's river cruise is necessary to telling his story, because in the count of monte cristo, the main guy disappears for nine years and comes hurtling back into the story as a vengeful aristocrat! and while time jumps like that don't work for everything, they certainly do work if what you're talking about isn't a major story thread!

now put aside whether or not all these meandering, unconcluded threads are enjoyable to read (as, in fairness, they often are!). think about them as if you're a tv showrunner. these bad boys are your worst nightmare. because while you know the author put them in for a reason, you haven't read the conclusion to the arc, so you don't know what that reason is. and even if the author tells you in broad strokes how things are going to end for any particular character (and this is a big "if," because GRRM's whole style is that he lets plots "develop as he goes," so I'm not actually convinced that he does have endings written out for most major characters), that still doesn't help you get them from point A (meandering storyline) to point B (actual conclusion). oh, and by the way, you have under a year to write this full season of television, while GRRM has been thinking about how to end the books for at least 10. all of this means you have to basically call an audible on whether or not certain arcs are going to pay off, and, if they are, whether they make for good television, and hence are worth writing. and you have to do that for every. single. unfinished. story. in the books.

here's an example: in the books, Quentin Martell goes on a quest to marry Daenerys and gain a dragon. many chapters are spent detailing this quest. spoiler alert: he fails, and he gets charbroiled by dragons. GRRM includes this plot to set up the actions of House Martell in Winds, but the problem is that we don't know what House Martell does in Winds, because (see above) the book DNE. So, although we can reliably bet that the showrunners understand (1) Daenerys is coming to Westeros with her 3 fantasy nukes, and (2) at some point they're gonna have to deal with the invasion of frozombies from Canada, that DOESN'T mean they necessarily know exactly what's going to happen to Dorne, or House Martell. i mean, fuck! we don't even know if Martin knows what's going to happen to Dorne or House Martell, because he's said he's the kind of writer who doesn't set shit out beforehand! so for every "Cersei defaults on millions of dragons in loans from the notorious Bank of Nobody Fucks With Us, assumes this will have no repercussions for her reign or Westerosi politics in general" plotline — which might as well have a big glaring THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT stamp on top of the chapter heading — you have Arianne Martell trying to do a coup/parent trap switcheroo with Myrcella, or Euron the Goffick Antichrist, or Faegon Targaryen and JonCon preparing a Blackfyre restoration, or anything else that might pan out — but might not! And while that uncertainty about what's important to the "overall story" might be a realistic way of depicting human beings in a world ruled by chance and not Destiny, it makes for much better reading than viewing, because Game of Thrones as a fantasy television series was based on the first three books, which are much more traditional "there is a plot and main characters and you can generally tell who they are" kind of book. I see Feast and Dance as a kind of soft reboot for the series in this respect, because they recenter the story around a much larger cast and cast a much broader net in terms of which characters "deserve" narrative attention.

but if you're making a season of television, you can't do that, because you've already set up the basic premise and pacing of your story, and you can't suddenly pivot into a long-form tone poem about the horrors of war. so you have to cut something. but what are you gonna cut? bear in mind that you can't just Forget About Dorne, or the Iron Islands, or the Vale, or the North, or pretty much any region of the story, because it's all interconnected, but to fit in everything from the books would require pacing of the sort that no reasonable audience would ever tolerate. and bear in mind that the later books sprout a lot more of these baby-plots that could go somewhere, but also might end up being secondary or tertiary to the "main story," which, at the end of the day, is about dragons and ice zombies and the rot at the heart of the feudal power system glorified in classical fantasy. that's the story that you as the showrunner absolutely must give them an end to, and that's the story that should be your priority 1.

so you do a hack and slash job, and you mortar over whatever you cut out with storylines that you cook up yourself, but you can't go too far afield, because you still need all the characters more or less in place for the final showdown. so you pinch here and push credulity there, and you do your best to put the characters in more or less the same place they would have been if you kept the original, but on a shorter timeframe. and is it as good as the first seasons? of course not! because the material that you have is not suited to TV like the first seasons are. and not only that, but you are now working with source material that is actively fighting your attempt to constrain a linear and well-paced narrative on it. the text that you're working with changed structure when you weren't looking, and now you have to find some way to shanghai this new sprawling behemoth of a Thing into a television show. oh, and by the way, don't think that the (living) author of the source material will be any help with this, because even though he's got years of experience working in television writing, he doesn't actually know how all of these threads will tie together, which is possibly the reason that the next book has taken over 8 years (now 13 and counting) to write. oh and also, your showrunners are sick of this (in fairness, very difficult) job and they want to go write for star wars instead, so they've refused the extra time the studio offered them for pre-production and pushed through a bunch of first-draft scripts, creating a crunch culture of the type that spawns entirely avoidable mistakes, like, say, some poor set designer leaving a starbucks cup in frame.

anyway, that's what I think went wrong with game of thrones.

[fluffypotatey]

I find it deeply aesthetically pleasing, character-wise, that Arthur and Merlin are both very much like their mothers, which is especially meaningful in Arthur's case since he's never known his mother beyond a single painfully brief meeting in "Sins of the Father."

Not only does Arthur look like Ygraine (which adds several layers to the clusterfuck of his and Uther's relationship) but it's clear that he takes after her temperament, too. Yes, he sometimes shows his father's temper, and yes, he does stupid things when he's in a temper, but unlike Uther, who literally took his prejudices to his grave and beyond, Arthur never stays mad at people, and he's overall a far more caring and kind person than his father, which is an interesting case of nature vs nurture.

And then on the other hand, we have Hunith, who told a mounted, armed brigand to go fuck himself, later fought another (also armed) brigand with a twig broom, harboured fugitives on multiple occasions, and raised an illegal magic child out of wedlock, and Merlin "Fuck the Police" Ambrosius, who got in a fistfight, got thrown in jail for the fistfight, called the prince a bitch to his face in a public market square, got in a second, armed fight all within his first 48 hours in Camelot, and then committed treason on a daily basis for the next 10+ years, compared to Balinor, who became a weird antisocial hermit that lived in a cave for twenty years.

couldn't have said it better myself bestie

also, there's a reason hunith and ygraine never met in the show. their dynamic duo would outshine everyone, they'd be unstoppable, untouchable, I FEEL ROBBED

[primoresplendens]

Image stolen from @sheepcatowl for resolution but I CAN YOU BELIEVE WE ARE SEEING LORD'S LIMB SKINS THIS IS SO INDECENT 😭😭😭 THE PUBLIC IS NOT READY THIS SOCIETY IS NOT OPEN ENOUGH FOR THE SIGHT OF THEIR WRISTS AND THEIR ANKLES 😩💦💦💦

[duckapus]

Idea: one of those "Ash somehow ends up in a group chat (usually with the Champions or Legendaries, sometimes with other characters) the first day of his journey and it messes with the series" AUs that've been popping up on AO3 lately, but instead it's a group chat made up of alternate versions of himself. One of them's the canon version (or at least close to it), the rest are AU versions, at least one of them is Ashley (not sure if trans or just genderbent. leaning towards trans), and all of them are from post-series and trying not to give too many spoilers because they don't want to overwhelm their "mini-me" or make things too easy for him 'cause if they do he won't grow as a trainer and person like they did (not that he'd want them to coddle him like that anyway. He's always wanted to get through on his own merits not have victories just handed to him). Also Arceus told them not to (who else do you think would've set this up?).

Granted, sometimes even when they do give spoilers it doesn't help much between them not having perfect memories, being from alternate timelines so a lot of the details are different between them, and forgetting just how stubborn and bull-headed their Kanto Era self could be.

I call it the "Self-Help Hotline" AU

[lavulabi]

devastating day for f2ps 💔💔

[spittyfishy]

A bunch of different slice-of-life-ish drawings I’ve done with my super hero characters! I thought doing more domestic scenes would be a good way to better flesh out the world and characters in my head lol

[razbotz]

"Hello. I am Baymax; Your personal healthcare companion."

Baymax - Big Hero 6 (2014)

🩹 - 🩹 - 🩹 | 🩹 - 🩹 - 🩹 | 🩹 - 🩹 - 🩹

(FINALLY. FINALLY. FINALLY. FINALLY- ahem, sorry this stimboard was giving me trouble lol. anywho thats the main cast down! im gonna do some bh6ts characters next :3!)

[sammywolfgirl]

This is more random stuff but still shinanigins

[the-meme-monarch]

spades king better either genuinely make it up to his son or rot in that cell for the rest of the game