#i could honestly just post the linked universe part on its own and link back to this

[justpoliteconversations]

Comfort [Mer!Warriors + Reader]

All it takes is a single moment for everything you think you know to flip on its head.

I originally had different plans for this AU continuation, but I came across a post of someone asking for a comfort fic and thought I'd try.

Masterlist

Part: 1 / 2

TW: Maybe? Hard to tell sometimes.

Disclaimer: Don't own The Legend of Zelda franchise. Linked Universe is the fan creation of jojo56830.

---

It had been a long day. Between back breaking work and the weariness of too long spent fighting to maintain your composure, the weight of all your hardships seemed to have finally caught up to you. You were just so tired, but even the promise of escape sleep offered seemed impossible to achieve.

Not with this overly spoiled creature screeching (elegantly, somehow. God damned elegantly. like a fully accompanied angel's choir) for your attention. As though this was something you two routinely did (for the record, it wasn't. you didn't know what his damned problem was). And ignoring him wasn't working, as it was going on the second hour now and he had somehow only gotten louder.

You honestly just wanted to cry. You just wanted to sleep.

You just wanted a break that didn't make you feel guilty. Guilty for not wanting to live up to everyone's expectations for once. For just wanting to sit down, eat something horrendously unhealthy, and then maybe nap for a few hours before dinner. And then go right back to sleep without everyone expecting you to fix every damned problem that blew their way.

The perfect day (but it wouldn't be. not really. because you couldn't even imagine closing your eyes when there was still so much to do). And it was being thoroughly destroyed (it was never something that existed anyway) by the unceasing, unholy (ethereal) screeching of the Center's resident golden boy.

How the mer knew just when to start acting up when no one but you was around, you'd probably never know. But it was damned concerning, and annoying. Especially when he decided to be difficult. Like now (oh God. why'd it have to be now when you were at your lowest).

You'd give in eventually, you knew. It was inevitable, and both him and you knew this. You couldn't afford to leave him to his own devices for too long, especially when he had a habit of taking out his frustration on your co-workers when ignored (and not even in an obvious way either. but underhandedly. like 'accidently' splashing water on their phones and equipment during his more enthusiastic performances).

You heard his screech again, but this time you could hear the low edge that entered his cry. Like the threat of a blade gliding delicately under a silk cloth, smooth and lilting and deadly in its sharpness. A dark, foreboding promise all wrapped up in a beautiful symphony of sweet nothings.

"I'm coming! Just give me a moment!" You finally called out, wincing at the way your voice nearly wobbled. Frustration and exhaustion mixing together into a singular moment of weakness.

It was silent then, and a form of primeval dread filled your stomach at the sudden stillness in the air. Because there was no way he hadn't heard the shake of your voice, nor the emotions that caused it. There was absolutely no way he didn't realize how vulnerable you were at the moment.

Numb. Suddenly, you were numb all over. From your ears to your toes, you could feel the cold pinprick of tingling nothingness itching just below your skin. But through it all, even as your feet took you to the bottom of War's tank ladder, you felt oddly detached from your body.

Ah. You were afraid. As tired and as emotionally drained as you were, you still somehow managed to drudge up enough self-preservation to be afraid of Wars. And you weren't sure how to feel about that. You hadn't really thought about it in a long time. Just how much power he now had over you, after that fateful day you'd come to his tank and cut him a deal.

You still didn't want to think about it. You just wanted to get this over with and go to sleep. You didn't even care that you'd regret this later, when you could finally think past the numbness that had settled over your limbs.

And there he was, from one step on the ladder to the next. Quiet, still as death and submerged up to his eeriely shining, dilated eyes in the dark water of his sleeping tank. The inky blackness of the night around him fading the long, billowing ends of his fins into a smoky wisp of shimmering starlight.

You'd forgotten how beautiful he was at night, when the faint luminescence of his fins and scales ran golden fireflies across the darkened navy of his elegant blue fins. How his enchanting, predatory eyes caught even the faintest hints of starlight and built entire galaxies along the darks of them. How he smiled so prettily when he rose from the water, even if you knew it was a lie (fake. dangerous).

The smile was different this time though. There was something sharper about it, so similar yet so different from the charming upturn of plush lips he so often used to entice the unwary into his clutches.

It was enough to unnerve you, this unknown expression that had settled so distinctly upon his pretty face. Enough even to pull you from your exhausted haze and into something almost approaching alertness. Your nerves firing with renewed unease, even several meters above the water and (allegedly, though you didn't believe that for a second) out of War's reach.

And then he lifted a single, elegant hand. Raised a single, elegant finger. And beckoned you to him in a gesture so human it nearly drew a blush to your cheeks (much to your shame).

If you ever discovered who taught him that gesture, you'd skin them yourself. You swore it. But that was for later, because right then you were frozen in shock. Not even because of the connotations behind such a gesture while an attractive male such as him was behind it.

No. It was the meaning behind the gesture.

"No." You said, so pumped full of adrenaline you didn't even feel the exhaustion that'd been weighing down your bones just moments before. "I'm not that far gone, Wars. No matter what you think you heard."

His eyes narrowed just the slightest bit, condescending and frustrated both. Flickering. Dilating. Contracting.

It would be almost funny, to see a mer as smug and put together as Wars showing anything other than slight annoyance (and honestly, it usually is). But right now, with the darkness closing in from all sides and the weight of everything haunting your every step, it was a reminder. A reminder that for all you had managed to keep your composure around this predator, you were still afraid.

You were afraid. And you always had been. From the moment you set eyes on him and knew (just knew, when no one else could see it) that this creature was hunting you and everyone else around him. Even bloodied and mangled and trapped as he was, he had never stopped hunting. That he watching you, just as you were watching him. Always.

He gestured again, tilting his head slightly. Another gesture that sent warning signals straight into your brain, causing your breathing to pick up and a light sheen of cold sweat to start forming on your shoulders, back and forehead. His eyes had fully dilated by now as well, adding an even more alien quality to his unnaturally beautiful features.

You swallowed, trapped between your self-preservation instincts screaming at you to turn tail and run, and the logic of your mind quietly reminding you that this predator would have killed you already had he wanted (that he could kill someone else too, if he felt the need to call your bluff). Because he would. You knew that. Accidents happened all the time. What was one more? (He'd probably fake tears too. the bastard.)

You glanced off to the side, the hairs on the back of your neck standing on end under his unnatural stare. "Wars I- You know that's not how this works."

You were met with silence. You were too shaken (too compromised) to even think of meeting his gaze. The sharp, unfaltering, stunningly inhuman gaze.

The faint rippling of water. A slight swoosh. And then.

A great, echoing splash. The catwalk under you shaking and nearly tilting as a great weight was suddenly upon it. The flash of shimmering gold across a sea of dark blue. And suddenly he was in your face, so close you could see the ring of blue, blue, blue encircling the dark pools of his eyes.

You couldn't move. You couldn't scream. You couldn't even breathe. Not when he leaned further into your space (so close now you could see the glitter of scales under his eyes. like gold dust). Not when a clawed, webbed hand came up to your fear stricken face. Not when your skin touched for the first time (warm. soft. supple. nothing like your mind had always imagined it).

Not when his powerful (deadly. predator's. killer's) arms gently (so gently. almost tenderly. but that can't be it because he's him and you're you) pulled you into his chest. Not when he pulled you both down until he was laying along the catwalk with you laying flush on top of him. And not when he buried his face (his mouth. his lips. his teeth. teeth. teeth.) into your hair and just...breathed.

In. Out. In. Out. Steady. Even. Inevitable. His large, warm hands on your back, claws delicately kneading into your clothes. His chest rumbling, so faint you'd have missed it entirely had you not been tucked up under his chin (had he not been pressing you into the place in his chest the vibrations were strongest).

Slowly, your breath returned to you. You began to calm. Your mind begun to clear. And you realized, with sudden clarity, what it was that was happening. What this behavior was.

The gentle nipping at your hair. The tender kneading of his (sharp) claws into the thick ruffles of your clothes. The way he had cradled your significantly smaller body into his larger form and curled his silky (thick, powerful) tail fins around you as best he could with so little space.

The way his whole chest seemed to vibrate. The sound so low it was nearly nonexistent. An action you hadn't known Wars was even capable of, let alone willing to utilize. For a human of all things.

You swallowed, not daring to take your eyes off the gleam of his collarbone (shimmering, even in the dark). "Are you trying to comfort me?"

He pushed you harder into his chest, under his chin. His face nuzzling deeper into your hair, until his mouth was pressed softly against the shell of your ear. His hot breath fanning against your sensitive skin.

"Mine." He cooed (disjointed and raw, unnatural but hauntingly beautiful), one hand having found its way up into the fine hairs at your nape. Just holding them between gentle fingers, thumb caressing your exposed neck. "Strong. Brave." He hummed.

He nosed at the delicate lining of your ear. Nuzzling you. "Beautiful." He purred, pulling away just enough to force you to meet his eyes. His gaze so black you saw yourself reflected in them. "Always mine. Give me. Everything bad."

Looking into his liquid night, blue-mooned eyes. Feeling his hands cradling you protectively, possessively, trying to separate you from the world beyond. You finally understood. Everything.

Wars was territorial after all. Of his space. Of his food. Of his resources. Of anything, everything that was his. That he'd claimed.

Knowing that, how could you have forgotten the most important resource a mer can ever possess? When it had been staring you in the face this whole time?

Warmth began to build behind your eyes, and try as you might, you felt the gates you had held so tightly closed for so long beginning to slip from your grasp. And you just couldn't believe it. That this was really about to happen.

In front of Wars of all creatures. The one predator that had everyone fooled.

But that was the thing, wasn't it. From the very beginning, for all his smiles and sweet nothings, never had he truly tried to hide his fangs from you. Never you. Even as he kept the rest of the world at an arms length away.

He had let you in (had reeled you in). He had let you see (had forced you to see) the dark shaded colors of his heart. His truest self.

Honesty, completely and utterly, from a creature that thrives off deception. How could you have been so blinded by your fear you'd not noticed.

The first few tears finally escaped down the curve of your cheek, and when a gentle, tender, loving thumb came to wipe them away. You broke, and it all came pouring out. In the arms of the predator you still feared so much, but knew, without question, would never allow harm to befall you.

Because he is a territorial mer. And there is nothing a mer covets more than their pod. Their family. Their reason for everything else that follows after.

And Wars, the mer who never wanted to leave. Who, after all was said and done, was still a mer like any other. Had no one but you. Only you. By choice. By fate.

By design.

You'd been hunted. And you'd been caught. And now he would never let you go. And he would protect you from everything.

For as long as he lived.

---

Back to the shadows.

[sable-skies]

thought abt an au i doodled up months ago but never fully explored, so here's some concept designs for that. im gonna ramble about it now

+ height comparison under the keep reading!

god okay i gotta admit: i, unfortunately, kinda love game of thrones. truthfully i dont care for the sex and inc*st part of the show, but i really enjoy the interconnected weaving plot lines, drama, and utter bullshit that happens in that show. its amazing, i love it, its so fucking stupid. so earlier this year i doodled up some ideas for a game of thrones inspired post-totk au. those are here, and here!

I then dropped it and didnt return to it until now, because i started season 2 of house of the dragon and yknow. why not.

as for actual details about the au: i said in the past it was a got-loz au, but im gonna go ahead and say that i misspoke then because i mean more like, post-totk/loz au INSPIRED by got, because i would never want to do a 1-to-1 au of that god awful show. i mostly think exploring a hyrule that is peaceful, but secretly on the brink of civil chaos and how bad humanity could truly get would be really fun to explore!

i struggled to pick a single role for link to have in such an au, so i said fuck it and divided him up into four parts, in universe the hero's spirit has been split amongst four brothers. to nod towards this, and because i'm cheeky as hell, the first letters of each of their names spells link. Laurent, Irving, Nymos, and Kiran. (im so fucking funny (<- is not funny))

they're all noble born to Arthur Hearth, current lord of House Hearth which basically controls and sits on the Great Plateau, and their mother was Eyla, a member of the Sheikah from Kakariko Village who unfortunately passed away shortly after Kiran was born. Arthur btw is named after the King Arthur legends from Europe, as those served as inspiration for the series in general!

I think a plot would follow them all after the death of their father and how they cope with it and move forward, and how they combat suddenly being labeled traitors to the kingdom for their father's acclaimed crimes.

this is getting long, so I'll do some misc bullet points next on their personalities:

Laurent, as the oldest, had to mature pretty quickly after the death of their mother, Eyla. Which has caused him to grow protective of his younger brothers almost to an overbearing degree. He gets nervous when they're not home, which sucks because Irving is a knight, Nymos studies in Kakariko often, and Kiran wants to explore the world via the survey team. Other then that, he's responsible, quite serious in most situations, and still very kind hearted. After his father's death he starts to spiral into a rage-filled depression, determined to get his brothers back and make the king pay for killing his father.

Irving is the most middle child ever. Due to Laurent being in line for lord of their house and is never gonna back down from that, he sought his own purpose in being a royal knight / royal guardsman / kingsguard. It hasn't really worked out well for him honestly, his higher ups hate him for being Arthur's son, seemingly so naturally talented in combat, and charismatic amongst the ranks that some knights ignore their orders just to follow Irving's instead. So as punishment he's been assigned as the former princess Zelda's bodyguard / retainer. While it disappointed him to not serve his full duties at first, he's come to accept it and treats her kindly. He's proud, a little over-confident, just, and secretly a bleeding heart. After the death of their father, he's forced to choose between his family and Zelda, and knowing that Zelda will most likely die without him, he stays with her.

Nymos, oh poor fucking Nymos dude. As a child he fell into the depths and somehow survived, which was fine, but then he came across a patch of gloom that seemingly never faded, and ever since he's been cursed with doomed visions of the future and a talent for magic. No one believes him about the lingering gloom, and claims that he simply has PTSD from the incident in general, but he knows what he saw. He's sought out magical-based physical therapy in Kakariko because of this, and he's pretty much regarded as a local there. He's quiet, a bit withdrawn, pessimistic, but has a strong sense of justice and genuinely wants the best for those around him, even if he doesn't know how to say it properly. When Laurent and Irving are away, he's the one looking after Kiran and keeping him safe. When his father dies, he immediately starts to investigate the current monarchy for signs of dark magic tampering, which leads him down a rabbit hole he never even knew existed, all the while he's being tormented by visions of his brother dying gruesome and horrible deaths. he's forever an internal nervous WRECK

Kiran!! The baby!! Might be the most dangerous brother of the four, but we'll cover that later. As the resident youngest sibling he's naturally gotten away with pretty much everything and anything, because who can say no to those big baby blues. Thankfully he's not actually that destructive or ill-mannered, but he isn't above pulling a prank on someone for the fun of it. He yearns to leave home and explore the vast continent of Hyrule though, and shortly before everything goes wrong he's accepted into the Survey Team and gets to enjoy it for a bit. He's excitable, energetic, optimistic, and somewhat a handful (get this teen a child leash please) but he means well and is determined to get whatever is on his mind done and finished. He's the last to be told his father is dead as his team didn't tell him about the incident until suddenly there's a group of bandits attacking them and demanding they had Kiran over for ransom. Kiran goes willingly of course, as he doesn't want his team members to get hurt. He later falls into the depths and survives via the sail cloth around his shoulders and meets a strange little fox he calls Todd.

I have so many notes in my head about these guys but again, i'll shut up for now :] here are the heights!

btw; they're all based on a previous incarnation of link and a got character, if you figure it out I'll shake ur hand.

[sunderingstars]

simulated universe addendum: ace trash digger

— i can’t believe i came across this occurrence literally the day after i posted my simulated universe analysis (talk about timing), so here’s me yapping about it!

— written during 2.6

— word count: short, list format

not only is this occurrence in every single simulated universe update (wow!) but it seems to be a more belobog-connected piece of potential sampo material!

— “he” pronouns. matches with sampo koski as we know him.

— he’s carrying a trashcan and the name of the occurence is “ace trash digger.” this is a pretty easy link to belobog since that’s the planet that has the most trashcan-related shenanigans. also, since he’s carrying it i can almost see the trashcan as symbolic of belobog itself — i.e. sampo and his little garbage planet he cares about and likes to carry around.

— “treasured trashcan.” once again, i can pretty easily see the trashcan as belobog, so the occurrence might actually be referencing sampo and his “treasured jarilo-vi.”

— he has a collection of “pitiful love poems.” this could connect to sampo’s theme of love, particularly broken hearts, as seen in things like his e4 and heart-bomb burst. these love poems may be written to aha as part of some lingering attachment, or may also be written towards belobog itself since he seems to care about the place so much.

— “put your waste in it, and the items will evolve into an advanced awareness, then come running out energetically on their own!” if the trashcan is symbolic of belobog and the person is supposed to be sampo, i would take a doll theory reading on this. with how much doll theory relies on the “betrayal” of a creator towards its creation, i almost see this as meta commentary on how aha may have betrayed or “discarded” sampo.

— it makes sense, after all, that aha would get bored with their creations quite easily (at least given the whole worm debacle), and what else to do than to discard it? it may be that sampo was not always like this, but evolved to become more “aware” after being abandoned on jarilo-vi, which aha may have seen as just some backwater junkyard snow planet.

— (honestly, the idea of jarilo-vi being seen as a cosmic junkyard is so funny to me. like, aha basically did the equivalent of driving their pickup truck to the scrap heap at the edge of town and tossing everything in. very mundane to them, totally traumatizing to sampo.)

— from there, i would interpret this occurrence as saying sampo slowly rejoined the wider universe — i.e. “running out energetically” on his own. this likely included becoming part of the masked fools or trying to re-contact aha. (alternatively, this could be what is going on currently in canon, with belobog and, by extension, sampo, becoming more present on the galactic stage.) this may have actually surprised the aeon themself (if they even cared anymore), as it would essentially be the equivalent of throwing out a stuffed animal halfway across town, only for it to get up, walk, and find its way back to your house weeks later talking like “why have you forsaken me, father?”. this may even be how sampo became an emanator — aha may have found the whole situation so hilarious they decided to promote sampo on the spot.

— overall, if the trashcan is meant to be belobog and sampo is meant to be the waste (like “hazardous waste” in the friendship is magic event), then this occurrence may be hinting at sampo’s backstory of being discarded by aha on jarilo-vi.

— hunt option (swarm disaster). mean, why are we being so mean?! i would never steal from sampo, i’m simply built different.

— remembrance option (swarm disaster). “you recall the past lives of these discarded objects” implies a sort of sentience and agency. even though the objects may not be at “advanced awareness” yet, they clearly still have past experiences and lives. comparatively, i would say this may mean that sampo, although only recently evolving into a unique kind of sentience, has always been “alive.” for me, i see this as gaining personhood, or perhaps new perspectives on life. he may have started as a toy with no real agency of his own, but he’s been able to find some sort of autonomy for himself on belobog, even being able to reach beyond the love and find the “hate” for a creator who treated him cruelly.

— erudition option (gold and gears). erudition once again! man, erudition and elation love going hand-in-hand. “even trash has its unique ‘value’” seems to send a deeper, general message. not only is it the erudition doing what the erudition tends to do when confronted with something new — find its value, either through experimentation or dismantling — but it communicates the idea that even though something may be seen as worthless or forgotten, it still holds purpose. even though sampo may be seen in the eyes of his creator as a “discarded doll,” he still has value. he’s still a person. he still has his own hopes, thoughts, and dreams. although the erudition likely means this phrase in a more troublesome “let’s take him apart to see what he’s made of” way, a nice message can still be gleaned.

— normal option. as with all other options, there’s a big theme of “transaction,” or exchanging items for more. i don’t have a lot to say about it, other than it fits right in with sampo’s con-man trade and propensity for bargaining.

— i found it a bit surprising at first that there was no elation option, given how that would’ve been a more solid link to sampo, but perhaps there isn’t supposed to be. perhaps, aha stuffed toy having an elation option is meant to be symbolic of a time aha cared enough to turn their gaze of sampo, but here the occurrence is dealing with the period of and after his abandonment. in this case, there may be no elation option because aha quite simply does not care enough for there to be one. he’s all alone. sad :((

overall, i can’t believe this one almost slipped under my nose while doing my simulated universe analysis! the irony is not lost on me that i almost passed over it in a similar way to others in-universe; i guess the “cosmic junkyard” planet really did its job !! i think this has some nice little tidbits for the potential timeline of doll theory, and gives some insight into what sampo’s “betrayal” might have been! (also, of course aha would do something like this. of course lol)

thanks for reading!

© analysis by sunderingstars. do not copy, repost, translate, modify, or claim my work as your own.

[yourgrantaire]

im rewatching the smosh liveshow and i wanted to keep track of my favorite moments so they are below the cut

angela's tippy tappy toes of joy at amanda's new jersey voice

amanda's "LOOK IT UP" for increasingly unrealistic things, and ending it with "are you at peace are you at peace are you at peace hello areyouatpeaceareyouatpeaceareyouatpeace anthony areyouatpeace DON'T GOOGLE ME"

tommy's "only a tragic life could lead to looking like if a motorcycle was gay ... i can say that, i'm a motorcycle" and him saying the meaning of anthony's tattoos was so that he could fuck goth girls. oh and how could i forget describing angela as an "amber alert on rollerblades"

the cool ass music when the guests came on, made by tommy bowe i think? i honestly would listen to the music from the show all on its own

brandon rogers' "let's. eat. anthony!" and then making a very emphatic pitch as to why it would be a great idea

THE HALF-TIME SHOW OF COURSE. i know that they mostly won't post the show on youtube but i really really hope they post the half-time show

also a detail i just noticed is josh playing that escalating carnival "do do do do!" when chanse and keith got iced

dan and phil's extremely explicit video message with dan's repeated references to jerking off onto anthony's sexy calendar

courtney as bikini girl while still wearing doc martins. and there's something about the rhythm of "get you a girl who can do both two things two one time! :D" that is so funny, as well as "women are so scawwy ooohh!! what's under your blouse, two perfectly round GUNS? OHH!!"

rhett and link showing up standing menacingly in the doorway, and their tag line being "A Jesus and a Lesbian Woman"

the multiple "ian loves drinking breast milk" jokes

the chosen: "you're probably wondering why i look so badass right now. its because we are on the cusp of the greatest battle in the entire history of the universe.

and also i got queso on my three wolf moon shirt.

and i fell off my razor scooter on the way here."

i am glad that even though they made him look cool as fuck, shayne still emphasized that the chosen is not nearly as cool as he thinks he is.

"worst of all, anthony padilla HAD SEX!" and then quoting the star wars prequels lmao

also shayne singing without any self consciousness was very funny to me, but i can't put my finger on what the song was

ian saying i love you but having to say it in a silly voice (and in the after show anthony saying he can say i love you back to ian because unlike ian, he's actually said it before)

anthony's joke about how he expected everyone to roast him about his "dick piercing" and the entire audience going "wait wait, go back to that, what did you just say" and him moving on with no further comment

anthony to shayne: "i won't talk about how you were once known for your promising tv career and now you're known for wearing a t-shirt with limes on it''

chanse just full on horror movie screaming when anthony said arasha was in an ad for a republican dating app. also arasha's faces for everything were so great

keith full on responding whenever someone addresses him (and sometimes reacts out loud just because), he did this in the other funerals as well but it delights me every time

anthony saying chanse slides into his dms all the time, and chanse immediately replying "you respond, bitch!" (and then later anthony saying that chanse can go with mythical and he "can call link daddy now" but "watch out, [chanse] dms")

i loved anthony's reference to tommy's show serving cunt

anthony to amanda: "you're like if jessica rabbit drove a mini van"

anthony to ian: "one thing we all know about ian is he might have some trouble showing emotions" ian proceeds to stare deadpan into the camera. it was fun watching ian's reactions because often he wouldn't react to a lot of it or he would react as part of the bit, i've already forgotten the one thing that he really reacted to, fuck so i might have to rewatch it again

and then my favorite part of the aftershow was amanda and tommy continuously leaning in to make out and then saying "no save it for the parking lot, save it for the parking lot", and no they were not going to go anywhere, they were going to stay in the parking lot at smosh and make out in the car

[neonscandal]

Thanks for answering my ask from a few weeks ago @neonscandal ..... If you don't mind me asking (again), what are your top 10 (or top 7) favorite media (can be books/ manga/ anime/movies/tv series)? Why do you love them? Sorry if you've answered this question before....

Thank you for asking in the first place! ❤️

Not at all unique is the fact that, as soon as I get asked a question about my top faves, I immediately draw a blank on everything I've ever enjoyed or watched, ever. 😅 I'm sure that's not the first time you've heard that. No need to apologize, as you can probably tell from other asks, my answers change regularly. This is my anime/manga blog so without any regard for order:

Life Lessons with Uramichii-Oniisan (anime) - depending on how old you are, there's a cognitive dissonance that occurs when you're no longer younger than nor the same age as your favorite protagonists in the stories you grew up with. This is the anime that eases the blow of that like the ibuprofen you now keep at home, at work and in your purse. And it's hysterical.

Attack on Titan (anime/manga) - There is something to be said for the eloquence of the exposition in this story which, when you know Isayama spent years shopping his art around to no avail because of the roughness of his style, makes perfect sense. While refining his art, he had all this time to pore over the story, hide little easter eggs so there'd be one string that gathered up all seeming loose ends. Just an incredibly interesting story to unfold. It's the kind of thing you wish you could read again for the first time but that's laughable because, every time you read it, you notice something you hadn't the last time.

To Your Eternity (anime) - This is the Grey's Anatomy equivalent in anime. Like, oh. You're emotionally constipated and need a good cry? Pick an episode at random. Watch a whole season if you're really about that life.

Sasaki to Miyano (manga/anime) - TBH I tied between this or Horimiya. They are not the same story but hold similar places in my heart. What I love about Sasaki to Miyano is how delicate it is. Yea, slow burn, whatever. But no, it just kind of gives Miyano space to come to terms with himself and Sasaki is the safety net that accepts him in all forms. Can love be this sweet?

Goodbye, Eri (manga) - Fujimoto is off the wall. Chainsaw Man is an excellent representation of that. Seemingly unfocused and always good for some sort of shock factor. I've been wanting to write, for some time, about how Fujimoto is like a trickster of a genie but I'll shelve that for the time being. Goodbye, Eri's disjointed narrative as if told in photographs and the art style which shows movement despite its static medium. It's a really elegant piece with a plot twist you don't see coming because, of course you don't. That, in fact, is part of the whole message of the story, isn't it?

Ranma 1/2 (anime) - Nostalgia. This was the first anime I ever watched that I locked into. It started me on a path of drawing, it encouraged me to seek out other shows.. this series is what started it all wayyy back then (okay, not that far back then, this was in the 00's). Tsundere x tsundere, yes but also just the immediate identification with characters who couldn't authentically be themselves because they kept bending and breaking under external pressures. I could very much relate and empathize even if the chaos of their universe was too fanciful for my own. Also, pretty sure Rumiko Takahashi is the longest running mangaka with consistent chapters in Shonen Jump for the last 40+ years is wild.

Vinland Saga (anime) - I honestly don't even know what to say about this story. But I think my favorite observation is a post I saw someone make where they wrote "No one will know the violence it took to become this gentle" with a picture of Thorfinn. And they were so poignantly right. Phenomenally twisted revenge story that is not at all satisfying. 10/10.

Link Clink (donghua) - This show is a vibe. If it hasn't been on a recommendation list yet, it's coming. The music, the art, the unfurling back story of the main characters as they untangle the lives of others? It manages to be both gutting and cerebral at the same time. Like every time I watch I'm like... I need to read the source material because the complexity of the concurrent storylines makes it such a head scratcher as to the larger plot.

Jujutsu Kaisen (anime/manga) - *Gestures vaguely to the rest of my blog.* We're still in the throes of how this story is going to play out which is nerve wracking and exciting for all its possibilities. I hold out a lot of hope that we'll see some stunning exposition in future chapters that we won't see coming.

Belle (anime) - It's just beautiful. 😘👌🏾 I talk a lot about my niece and nephew because I've turned them into my dorky little mini-me's. Also, being an aunt is like the best job. Belle is a movie that had them both gagged with the animation. If a show or series can get both of them to put their ipads, books, art supplies, etc. down, then I know I put them onto something special. Honestly, anything I enjoy with them makes it that much more special to me, personally.

This was lovely. I'll get back to posting lists soon, feel free to check out other recommendations!

[just-some-random-blogger]

hello!! i hope your day has been well

i wanted to ask if you knew any daemon x reader fics thats concerned about reader being lonesome? and like its an angst-comfort? if you know any, could you please help me navigate them? feel free to include your own work as well if there is, your pieces have been very delightful to binge read, you are really talented!

HELLO MY LOVE. my tumblr crashed while i was replying but thats ok because it gave me the opportunity to be the complete yellow belly and rethink whether or not i wanted to tag anyone or just link their fics HAHHAAH (im so insane i was thinking if it was possible to tag someone but block them from the post AHHAHAAH)

anyway you can tell what i decided. tbh i honestly dont fucking remember reading any and i mean any of these. literally 0 of these T_T HAHAHAHAH it's not a slight on anyone its just a me thing im head empty all the time. also i mostly read freaky smut pieces of daemon because, well, im a freak (: that's probably why i dont remember any of these tbh. im rotten in the head T_T. i digress

Fury of The Dragon by @drakoneve (hello i love you) ok this one isnt exactly what you're looking for and i only vaguely remember reading it cos BONK🤠 it be like that. judging by my reblog i was mad petty after reading it and that's a me thing because im mad petty but im sure this is lovely and vivid because it elicited such a response from me.

Ānogar Hūra by @author-morgan ([heavy breathing] hi there) again have only white noise in my head dont remember reading this if not for the reblog BUT WHAT I DO REMEMBER IS LIKING HER STORIES SO MUCH THAT I OBSESSIVELY WENT THROUGH HER MASTERLIST HOPING SHE'S MAKE MORE FOR DAEMON. if you ever read this im not saying you should cos im not in the business of telling people what to do but if you do i would love to read it fyi lol

this ones untitled but its by @gay-dorito-dust (hello hi how are you) again dont remember a thing but judging by my reblog its soft... which in hindsight is the opposite of angst AHHAHA but it has some of those angsty comfort fics kinda so yuh you might like this one

Bleeding love by @blayresmuses (hihihi hi there hihih) once again HAHAHAH cant remember anything about anyone. judging by my reblog its really sweet in the end HAHAHHAA 404 BRAIN NOT FOUND. it does explore the whole child birthing aspect. idk what you feel about that nonnie.

this ones also untitled but its by @floweringfics (HI HAHAH) i also dont remember shit about nothing but i have a longer reblog for this, which is telling COS I KNOW FOR A FACT. A FACT. THAT ITS GOOD. SHE IS AN AMAZING WRITER SO LOVE HER SO MUCH

im just going to throw in @em-writes-stuff-sometimes (HEY *wink wink*) cos she a baby girl and i love her. she is so good at writing, get this, she made her own fucking universe (which most definitely has the themes youre looking for) and she also studies high valyrian and all that queen shit i can't wrap my head around. she's insane. im telling you a she's a hotd writer idc idc i will die on this hill.

@ewanmitchellcrumbs ([BARKING] HELLO) is also a really great writer although i dont think she does angsty comfort fics. she does make fics that make me gol feral after so theres that. interact with at your own discretion cos it changes your life fr and then next thing you know youre a barking dog.

that's about it i think T_T i hope all these lovely people just know i love them because i do i- HA:DHASFHLASFLASB

anyway next are my fics and wow i kinda feel weird by how many fics of myself i put HAHAHAH. but anyway you asked and you said i was talented and im flattered you binge them [pushes hair back] so i gave.

Want You Dead has that, but it's a three part series, so idk how you feel about that. part 2 in particular VERY much hits the nail on the head for this one (update: does it? i am questioning myself rn). also yn was a pirate for a while HAHAHH and it gets pretty graphic at a point so idk how you feel about those

Mine is also a p2 (to Ten & One) and the hurt/comfort is over yn being unable to conceive so there's and theres prett obvious smut so HAHAH

Lies Are Treason is very much hurt/comfort with some angst ig BUT IT HAS SMUT

Stone Cold is really angsty and im only adding it cos there's a smudge of like hurt/comfort there HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH but its imo one of the more tragic tales ive written AHAHHAAHHAHA

Cold Killer AHHHH I TOTALLY FORGOT ABOUT THIS ONE THIS ONE IS PRETTY GOOD THIS ONE I THINK IS SMTH YOU WOULD LIKE YA KNOW ANGST + COMFORT YEAH THIS ONE THIS ONE

Kiss it Better... NGL I TOTALLY FORGOT I EVEN WROTE THIS HOLD ON LET ME REREAD IT RN HAHAHAHA. update HAHAHAAH I REMEMBER i wrote this when i had a bad day and i was like grrr i need the evil man to comfort me HAHAHAHAH THIS ONE IS ALSO REALLY GOOD

Moon Cycle kind of has a hurt/comfort aspect just a smidge ya feel. it's mostly, well, smut HAHAHAH also its a part four to a my stark!universe series lol

Waiting For A Lifetime has that in its p2 kinda but this is a modern au so idk how you feel about that.

thats all i think. off to go read some more daemon fics i think HAHHA

[just-a-little-silly]

also wanted to take a moment to answer some questions from @eye-cri againn quite honestly reading these made me so happy^^

ughrgh kajal my girl🩵

(note: this is quite a long post so yk just fyi^^)

yes indeed the skirt was a nightmare to render but was it worth it? absolutely. and yeee the earrings are such an important part of her design (shes hardly ever seen w/ out them :>>) and yes, they do ring!! (trust zeus teases her for it when they’re initially meeting) the glove is actually tied to her story, she uses it to cover a symbol on her hand linked to her powers (ill go into detail about that in a bit). also kajal is of fae descent, (hence the pointed ears, i think i also meant to add a tail to her design but we’ll see abt that). as for how she got in to the academy, she just applied to the academy for fun (fae court stuff bored her- i have so much fae lore for this universe i.) and got accepted into the night class- she wanted to get away from home for a bit and thought some fancy boarding school/ academy in gedonelune would be interesting (i honestly forgot how getting into the academy works and haven’t gone back to check in a while so. i hope that works TT). she’s close friends with caesar, leslie and hiro. (i personally like that hiro and kajal both have special unique skills- ill touch on it later.)

ALSO YES. ZEUS. KAJAL. ZEJAL. IM. THEY- 💕🥺🩵✨❤️ zeus nationnnnn YES. hes just so🥺🩵🩵.

i truly cannot put into words how much they mean to me. zeus as a character is just so so wonderful and i. cannot. describe. how much i love him :>> anyways zejal (the ship name :PP) has been my precious lil thing for YEARS now im. (i’ll try to keep this brief so i dont go on forever)- zeus and kajal are very much rivals to lovers. they start out as classmates and spend most of their first year trying to one up one another. they do eventually start to begrudgingly respect one another and before he knows it, zeus is whipped for her. she too forms her own budding crush but isn’t really sure what to do about it because she doesn’t think zeus would ever feel the same way sooo she bottles it down and ignores it- subsequently (and perhaps inadvertently) ignoring him too. he doesn’t take that too well and it stays pretty tense between them for a bit until everything boils over and zeus ends up confessing followed almost immediately by kajal. thats just a ridiculously brief summary lmaoo- theres a lot to their story TT.

as for styling her uniform, i think she keeps it pretty simple just a regular night class uniform- she will however sometimes be spotted with a large floofy orange scarf (she borrows zeus’s- she likes how soft it is and he honestly loves to see her wear it)

the type of magic she specializes in are ancient curses and incantations. girl has LOADS of ancient grimoires she could spend hours translating and decoding the spells described in them. In fact she ends up using her knowledge of ancient magic to formulate her own unique spell (a concept i might have borrowed from twst in all honesty). she calls it, “evil eye” and its basically a magic circle w/ an evil eye design in the middle - it defends her from malicious intent however, considering that shes supposed to be rather powerful i took it a step further and made it so that using it, kajal can temporarily shut down people’s magic if they intend to do her any harm. she has the symbol marked on her right palm so she can activate it faster. (smthn smthn hiro and kajal bonding over having unique abilities- hiro would actually approach her bc she knows a lot about sealing magic away + she tries her best to help him research his own curse and whatnot) i also just love how both she and zeus work with magic circles i. ugh💕.

—> also the thought of her, caesar and leslie having get togethers where they gossip about random things while drinking chai she prepares hasn’t left my mind.

[the-far-bright-center]

Definitely my target audience—thanks for responding! :')

As you can probably tell, I’m an Anakin fan and thus focus on Prequels/Clone Wars era a lot, but I’m also a lifelong OT fan and die-hard believer in its happy and transcendent ending. I personally don’t have any interest in continuing the story beyond RotJ (because I view the Skywalker saga as Anakin’s story, and once he dies and brings balance to the Force, the story is over). That being said, I’m cool with things like Han and Leia’s kids from the Expanded Universe, and prefer that infinitely to anything in the fake-sequels.

I totally understand that a lot of fans have things they can handle when it comes to Disney SW, and then things they can’t, and we all have to find our happy place. Even though I had major problems with Disney’s interpretation of SW ever since TFA, I didn't immediately forgo all Disney material right away. I’d already been watching Rebels for a year before TFA came out (at the time, I’d assumed that Rebels was the only way we’d ever get resolution for certain Clone Wars characters), and I stuck with it until midway through the final season (when I became too annoyed by certain elements and quit). In contrast, Rogue One was something I’d dreaded initially as it was the first live-action entry post-TFA, but Carrie Fisher’s death led me to watch it as I needed some kind of closure (especially after the horrible memory of TFA), and thankfully I didn’t regret it. Rogue One worked so well for one simple reason: it respected the saga. It even incorporated themes from the iconic RotS novelisation by Matthew Stover—the entire film was one big riff on the famous ‘in the heart of its strength lies its weakness’ and ‘love can ignite the stars’ lines. In this way, it acted as thematic link between the PT and OT. If anything, Rogue One should have been the film that Disney started with, imo. And they should have made it into essentially an ‘interquel’ trilogy of films (followed by Rogue Two and Rogue Three). That way, they could have had their precious ‘nostalgic’ Dark Times aesthetics without having to reset the entire galaxy and destroy two whole trilogies of storyline and character arcs just to have an excuse to use the throwback visuals they wanted. Sigh…

But everything else since those two things I have completely ignored. I won’t get into detail here about why, but ultimately I just can’t trust Disney with ANY part of SW anymore, and it makes me physically ill whenever they co-opt yet another favourite character or story element into their fake version of events. So, unfortunately at this point I can’t handle any of it, and that includes the Obi-Wan show and Mandalorian. If others enjoy those, great, but for me…the more that the Disney content messes with my fave characters, the more I need to stay far away from it. I’ve refused to watch a single piece of Disney SW media since early 2018 for this reason, despite multiple people practically begging me to, and honestly I think it’s the best decision I’ve ever made for my own sanity.

The downside is that for years now I’ve been almost completely alienated from the SW fandom, but I’m trying to remedy that a bit by more actively reaching out to likeminded fans. Thanks for reaching back. :)

Looking for fellow non-Disney SW blogs

Tumblr is getting very lonely these days, and I'm looking for Star Wars blogs that don't post the non-stop stream of Disney content (and/or that only post it minimally and tag it well enough that it can be filtered easily).

I crave fandom interaction but it's almost impossible these days to find SW blogs that ignore Disney. Since this year is the 40th (!) anniversary of Return of the Jedi, it would be nice to be able to celebrate with fans who share my view of it as the true ending of the Skywalker saga.

[tortilla-of-courage]

The Hylian written languages are a mess, man. But it’s nice seeing how they vary and how that’d affect how the Links communicate. I thought it’d be fun to share this since apparently written Hylian isn’t like, common knowledge in the fandom. Might be useful for art or the alike maybe? not sure

(really long post so. under a read more it goes! TL;DR of what’s in here: talking about and showing the written Hylian in almost all Zelda games, similarities between some, brief appearances in other games, and what writing system each Link would use according to all of this (basing it on the LU AU’s Links, but it could apply to any other Zelda AU out there), plus me trying to Connect The Dots™)

Written Hylian jumps from English-based to Japanese-based then back and forth, so in theory they could also sound completely different between each other, but that’s another issue. 

Anyways, here’s a totally-not-messy timeline of the games with their respective written languages (note: when i say english or japanese, i mean english/japanese-based Hylian, except in Link’s Awakening where it’s literally just those languages)

for convenience i’m gonna show and kind of explain each Hylian here really quick

First off, “English 1″, or the Skyward Sword Ancient Hylian alphabet

The first one chronologically. The start of a language-evolution nightmare. Anything you find in SS with this can be translated to English simply by replacing them with the latin alphabet.

Then we have “Japanese 1″, or the most common Hylian syllabary (syllable-based language) across the games

For some reason, Hyrule decided to switch to a syllable-based writing system all of a sudden and everyone said ok. With this one you can translate anything in Minish Cap, Four Swords/Four Swords Adventures, Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks to japanese. It can be a bit difficult because of a lack of distinctions japanese has (double consonants and half-sized syllables for example) but it can be done.

(As a fun note, this one can be found in Ocarina of Time 3D in the carpet of the Temple of Time, and in Square Signs! And also in Twilight Princess, in some of Kakariko’s Gravestones)

Then we have “Japanese 2″, in Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask.

Alright still syllable-based. That’s cool. Though this one’s way more square-ish than the last one, and it’s missing some syllables, so it complicates translations. The missing syllables are the ones with the variation marks “Japanese 1″ had. So, for example, in this syllabary, “ha/ba/pa” are the same symbol.

Going by the Fallen Timeline first, in A Link to the Past we’re shown a variant of Hylian that is referred to as “Mudoran”... which is gibberish, basically.

As far as I know, there’s no visible Hylian or other in the Oracles games, but we can assume they’d speak/write whatever language Labrynna and Holodrum have.

Link’s Awakening seems to just... have English and Japanese. At the same time.

In A Link Between Worlds and Tri Force Heroes, we’re introduced to a new alphabet, “English 2″, which is also used in Breath of the Wild and Age of Calamity, often called “Modern Hylian”.

It’s really similar to Skyward Sword’s Hylian, to the point of sharing many of its characters... except they’re all mixed up and/or slightly modified. 

Here’s a messy comparison between the two for funsies. You can technically crossread between the two but it won’t make sense for the most part. The only word i’ve found that’s the same in both is “NO”

In Zelda I and II there’s no written language to be seen like, anywhere because of the game’s limitations. While we’re at it, Hyrule Warriors doesn’t show any distinct Hylian either.

So! Child timeline! Termina uses the same “Japanese 2″ syllabary as OoT. That one’s easy.

Twilight Princess introduces a new alphabet, “English 3″, that’s the most similar to the latin alphabet out of the others.

TP’s many signs with this alphabet though seem to use it with English, Japanese, and/or gibberish. It really depends on where it’s being used. Most one or two word signs base it off english.

Also, this alphabet can be found in... Skyward Sword! Yeah, all the way back there. You can find it in the Sealed Temple and the Sky Keep (though it’s gibberish), as well as on one of the game’s covers:

Then Four Swords Adventures, and all the games in the adult timeline (Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, and Spirit Tracks) use “Japanese 1″.

So. What does this mean for the Links, you might ask? After that stupidly long exposition text wall, I can finally go to that.

i’m basing these on the Linked Universe AU’s Links, but the info above could be used for the Links in any other Zelda AUs. For people unfamiliar with the AU, “Hyrule” here is the Zelda I/II Link, and “Warriors” is the Hyrule Warriors Link. “Legend” covers all the other games in the Fallen Hero Timeline, and “Four” is the Four Swords and Minish Cap’s Links. The rest I think are more obvious.

Sky uses “English 1″. He could, in theory, see Twilight’s Hylian and have the vaguest feeling of knowing it, but since it was on the doors of the Sealed Temple i’m not sure.

Four and Wind use “Japanese 1″.

Time uses “Japanese 2″. Like Sky, he could potentially see Four and Wind’s Hylian and think he’s seen it before, but since it was just on the carpet I don’t think he’d have paid much attention to it.

Legend and Wild use “English 2″.

Also besides “English 2″, Legend also knows Mudoran, English, Japanese, and Labrynna’s and Holodrum’s languages. Multilingual king.

Twilight uses “English 3″, and if he ever paid attention to the gravestones in Kakariko Village, might recognize Four and Wind’s Hylian too.

Warriors could use any of these tbh, considering the mess his game is.

I have no idea what Hyrule could use either. Probably English 2 like Legend? Something else entirely?

Sky, Legend and Wild look at each other’s writing like “oh that looks familiar :)” but when they try to read it it makes absolutely No Sense.

I’m pretty sure I had more points to this when I started this post but I seem to have forgotten about them and i’ve already spent maybe 6 hours on this.

Conclusion: Written communication isn’t really a viable option for the Links unless they teach each other their respective writing systems. Chaos ensues.

Bonus! Both “Link” and their nicknames in each of their writing systems (using “English 2″ for Wars and Hyrule as placeholders)

[inbtswethrrust]

MINDHEIST MASTERLIST

Hey guys! I've recently received some asks regarding mindheist deleting their ao3 account, along with all the works. Someone was kind enough to send me pdf files for all of the works published on ao3 by mindheist, and so here is a compilation for all of them with the links for the files!! Enjoy your reading. By the way, if at any point the writer themself would like me to delete this post, I will.

So the post doesn't get too long, i'll put up a divider! Happy readings!

JIKOOK:

The Ocean at the End of the Universe It's hard to find just one person in a sea of stars. (space au)

Wish I Would've Known The worst part isn't hatred. The worst part is not talking anymore, and never understanding why. (based on the song we don't talk anymore)

You're My Genie, Lamborghini (You're My Teeny Weeny Meenie) You know those people saying technology is driving people apart? Yeah, fuck them. (twitter au)

with it's sequel... You Got the Best of Me (Synth Riff) Two social media sweethearts get married. Baby boomers crash and burn in the distance at this flagrant display of millenial culture. (continuation of ^^)

JINMIN:

Galaxy S♡ we all have those memories that don't end, even when everything is over. Some call that critical error. Others call it human existence. (androids/robots au)

Watchers of the Eternal Flame Jimin goes to Rio de Janeiro to live his passion. He leaves Rio da Janeiro having found his dream. (summer olympics au)

NAMGI:

In My Blood Sometimes fate is a flat tire and a crushed bumper. (a/b/o au)

TAEKOOK:

i try to picture me without you (but i can't) "You think relationships last in the village? You want one with me? You think you'll be happy?" Maybe Taehyung did think that they could be happy. (sequel to Watchers of the Eternal Flame, summer olympics au)

And, Home (Will Feel Like Home Again) Between the oily residue of night market tables and the rickety steps of the Hakone mountains, there is a little bus station in the fog. (travel au)

Fool Me Once (Shame On You) Fool me twice, shame on me. (established relationship)

Ghost Story It was an untold story with no ending, until now. (ghost au)

Invisible People The most important things are the hardest of all to see. (ballet au)

Let Us A relationship is a two-way street. (strangers to friends to lovers)

Never Let Me Go Sometimes, reaching out and taking someone's hand is the beginning of a journey. (soulmates au)

Pour Up (Drank) If you can read this, take another shot. (frat au)

Rich Bitch When you make six figures a year, Valentino isn’t that big of a deal. (the au is,,, tae is rich)

Shark In the Water As far as fairy tales go, this one doesn’t have a lot of faeries. Tales, yes. Tails, that is. Just the one. One (1) tail. (mermaid au)

Terrible Things Happen (Sometimes, They Save You) Min Yoongi wakes up from a nightmare on a sunless afternoon to a reality more twisted than his dizziest daydreams. (american horror story au)

The Day The Earth Stood Still Somewhere in New York, Seoul, Florence, Los Angeles, is a tale as old as time. (pre-apocalypse au)

起死回生; To Live Again Fiction gives us a second chance that life denies us. (historical au)

SERIES: I'm feeling electric tonight

(fake dating au.)

Kiss Me Hard Before You Go Dramatization. Do not try at home.

I Just Wanted You to Know (That Baby, You’re the Best) If you experience headaches, nausea, or heartbreak, discontinue use and talk to your doctor because relationships might not be right for you.

Think I'll Miss You Forever Happy endings sold separately.

SERIES: Interstellar (historical fantasy au)

Give Me Your Hands (I Will Pick the Stars for You) I miss you like the moon misses the sun, destined to chase you until the end of time.

Perihelion Perihelion: the point in the orbit of a celestial body at which it is closest to the sun.

SERIES: Moonrise (werewolf au, abo au)

Bad Moon Rising Taehyung has always wanted to be a superhero. Jeongguk has always been a supernatural.

I Fear the Fever, It Runs Electric There are some perks to having Jeongguk as a boyfriend. For one, he makes procrastination impossible.

Shaking Inside My Bones For better or for worse, everyone gets better at this. It’s practice. It doesn’t quite make perfect but it gets pretty damn close.

SERIES: The Ones Who Watch Us (horror au)

They Can See Us There are two things that you should hope always follow you. Number one: your shadow. Number two: your reflection.

Why Aren't You Scared of Me? (What Do You Know?) There are much worse things to be scared of.

SERIES: Where You Go, I'll Go To (grim reaper au)

In the Blind The world, as most people see it, is only half the story.

Time would envy us (part two, by nikkumeul) This is the other half of the story. This is forever. OBS: same link as above, starting from page 26)

SERIES: You bring good to my lonely life (honestly) (hollywood movie star au)

Love Will Always Be A Lesson (Let’s Get Out of its Way) Lesson 1: It's not real

Pizza Magazine Love is a strange, strange thing. (OBS: same link, starting from page 156)

YOONKOOK:

We Who Hide From the Sun “It’s the oldest story in the world. One day you’re seventeen and planning for someday. And then, quietly, and without you ever really noticing, someday is today. And then someday is yesterday. And this is your life.” (childhood friends to lovers au)

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Admin's Note:

Okay, i'm back now. these are all the mindheist fics i've gotten the links for, thank you to all who sent them to me, very much appreciated! the links lead you to a pdf file on google drive, owned by my own account. i'll have those up all the time, but in case something happens and they get removed i advise you to download the ones that you want to keep personally! hope you enjoy the read babies, love you all!! and thank you again!! and thank you to mindheist in the first place for writing all of these amazing fics.

[snowdice]

Creased Hoodies (Chapter 9: Preparations) [Folds in Time Universe]

Fandom: Sander Sides

Relationships: Logan/Virgil, Janus/Patton (background), Remus & Roman  (background)

Characters:

Main: Logan, Virgil

Appear: Patton, Roman

Mentioned: Janus, Remus

Summary: Virgil just wanted to go on his planned summer research trip to do an anthropological study in 2005 America. However, when he is taken off course by an unknown enemy, he ends up stranded in the summer of 2018 with no way to get back the the 44rd century. Luckily, 2018 happens to be where a certain illegal time agency is based, and he might have an in with one of its agents.

This is the intermission for the story Folds in Paper. It takes place between Folds in Paper Book 1 and Book 2. It also takes place after the first 5 chapter of “Messages for a Hacker” which are side stories in the universe. Check all of this and more out on my Folds in Time Master Post.

Chapter Summary: Everyone gets ready for the trip to Cuba.

Notes: Time travel AU

This is a fic I’ve been writing on study breaks that you have probably all already seen at this point. I’ve slightly edited it for wording and grammar, but not for content from my previous posts. Feel free to send in asks to direct it because I’m not 100% sure where this is going and you can help decide if you feel so inclined! You can see the process I went through to build this at this link.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

It took a little over two weeks for Logan to get everything in order. He’d already been in the process of updating all of their equipment for quite some time, and their current situation spurned him to complete these improvements even sooner. That was easy.

What was more difficult was trying to meet all of Patton’s demands for his new survival kit. His list had already been quite long when Logan had started, but Patton had continued to add to it. It seemed like the list would be endless for a short while as Patton had been adding things as fast or faster than Logan could address them.

He’d even slipped in a request for a boat at one point despite Logan’s protests that Camaguey was nowhere near the sea.

Virgil, thankfully, didn’t seem to mind the delays too much. In fact, he may have had a hand in causing some of them. His natural inclination towards anxiety seemed to infect Patton who had already been stressed given his last trip through time. Patton’s request for the boat had come after one of their brainstorming sessions.

Virgil and Patton were spending a good amount of time together, actually, as Logan worked on supplies. Virgil had offered to help Patton with researching. While Patton was fairly good at doing his own research for time travel destinations at this point, Virgil was undeniably more experienced with that sort of thing considering his profession and his involvement with the TPI. Patton seemed to appreciate his input.

Roman, on the other hand, decidedly did not appreciate Virgil’s input on things. The two of them were prone to arguments about clothing which had gone beyond talking about Cuban clothing days ago. They were currently refusing to speak to each other after a discussion about the fabric composition of Ancient Greek clothing over dinner the night before.

Logan honestly… could not tell if these fights were friendly debates or not. There seemed to be a lot of anger around the topics, but they also seemed to enjoy their arguments to an odd degree.

Logan had inquired after Patton’s opinion on the matter, but he’d shrugged and claimed he also could not tell.

Neither Roman nor Virgil’s responses when asked directly about the nature of their relationship was helpful either, but Logan had noticed Roman slightly change the design of the outfit he’d made for Patton’s trip to Cuba.

Virgil was helpful in preparing for the mission, taking some of the stress of research off of Patton and Roman which was nice. He was not much help to Logan’s endeavors unless you counted the original intel. He had a basic understanding of mathematics and physics, but not enough to help in that regard.

He was, however, very good for company. It helped that his sleep schedule much more closely resembled Logan’s own in those weeks unlike the other occupants of the apartment. Typically, Roman and Patton went to sleep at a much earlier hour than Logan did himself and Logan would work alone in the living room. However, with Virgil living in the apartment, there was constant companionship while Logan worked. If it was less volatile company than he was used to working with, that was just a bonus.

Virgil fit into their little group in a way that Logan had not anticipated. (Well, socially he fit. Physically, there were simply not enough beds and Logan had been sleeping on the couch for over two weeks now.)

Eventually, with all of their combined efforts, everything was ready to go. Patton was supplied with three different time appropriate outfits, a good amount of knowledge about the festivities he was about to step into, new time travel equipment, and a survival pack that could help him survive in an apocalypse if needed.

Patton planned to arrive in Cuba two days earlier than the TPI protocol would dictate Janus be sent in. That way, he would have more than adequate time to get set up and acclimated before the TPI sent in their agents.

For now, however, he was busy examining his new and improved timepiece.

“This is cool,” Patton breathed, flexing his fingers to see the hidden screen on his palms light up with a map of the area.

“The controls are the same configuration as on your previous device. The only thing new is the control panel to control the cloaking technology and the button to access the survival kit features.

“It looks great, Lo,” Patton said, still flexing his fingers to get used to it. He changed it to its default state of a metal band projecting the screen and then back to the time appropriate bracelet Roman had designed. There weren’t many options for the device’s form yet, but more could be designed and added in the future. For now, it only had the default band, the bracelet, and a simple wristwatch.

“I’ve already tested it a good number of times, but you should familiarize yourself with it anyway before your trip.

Patton nodded, flicking his fingers. He disappeared for a moment before reappearing in the same place. Then, he did it again and reappeared directly next to where he’d been standing. He did a few other simple mini trips before predictably growing bored and starting to do ‘tricks’ which mostly involved landing in ridiculous poses and “accidently” jump scaring everyone in the apartment at least twice.

Eventually, Logan confiscated the device for the evening so they could have dinner in peace.

Patton went to bed early after dinner, planning on leaving the next morning. Roman also retired to his room shortly after leaving Logan and Virgil alone in the living room.

Despite knowing his calculations were perfect, Logan still found himself sitting on the couch and checking over them one last time, just to be sure. Virgil sat on the floor with his back against the couch watching videos on Logan’s cell phone with headphones borrowed from Patton’s collection.

He glanced up when Logan shifted positions and Logan flashed him a smile.

Virgil removed the headphones to speak. “Thanks, by the way,” he said. “I already said it to Patton and will again in the morning, but thanks for helping me out with all of this.”

“It wouldn’t have been particularly kind of us to leave you stranded,” Logan pointed out.

“Sure,” Virgil said, “but you still all have been working really hard. Right now you’re up at 3am working on it.”

Logan shrugged. “I’d likely be up working at 3am on something anyway,” he replied.

“Maybe,” Virgil said, “but this time you’re doing it for me, so yeah, thanks.”

“You’re welcome then,” Logan replied. “Any time.”

Virgil titled his head and grinned at him. “Was that a time travel pun?” he asked.

Logan scowled instantly. “No.”

“It sounded like a time travel pun…”

“It was not intentional. I will never intentionally say a pun,” Logan said.

“You’re telling me you live with Patton and never make any puns?” Virgil asked.

“I, unlike my roommates, am a responsible adult,” Logan insisted.

Virgil seemed skeptical. “Is that why you’re drinking forbidden coffee out of an orange juice carton at 3am?”

“Not so loud!” Logan hissed instantly. He leaned forward to put his hand over Virgil’s mouth while glancing back towards the hallways to see if anyone was about to come storming into the living room with yet another intervention.

Logan’s hand was bit.

“Ow!” Logan exclaimed, tearing the hand away.

Despite his childish violence (or perhaps because of it), Virgil’s eyes were shining.

“How do you know?” Logan asked in a whisper. The ruse had been working on Roman and Patton for years as neither of them liked orange juice.

Virgil rolled his eyes. “I can smell it,” he said. “I’m not dumb.”

“It’s worked on everyone else,” Logan said.

“No,” Virgil said. “It’s worked on one dramatic idiot and one man who trusts people not to lie to him way too much. I, however, am a paranoid bastard with a doctorate degree in human bullshittery. You cannot fool me.”

Logan couldn’t help but smile. “I suppose I have met my match then,” he said.

Virgil titled his head back all the way, so his skull rested on the couch cushion, and he was staring straight up at Logan with his piercing hazel eyes. “Heck yeah you have,” Virgil said with a grin.

Logan was not much for sentimentality, especially not romantic sentimentality, but there was something about the shadows softening the edges of the rooms and the almost golden glint in Virgil’s eyes from the reflection of the lit lamp that suddenly made it more difficult to breathe.

Virgil was relaxed here in Logan’s apartment at 3 in the morning. His eyes were softened with sleepiness as he looked up at Logan with a smile on his face.

He fit here, Logan thought. He slotted into Logan’s life with an ease Logan could never have anticipated. He’d found Professor Virgil Eran interesting from the moment he’d first heard him speak over the telephone. He’d found him endearing when they’d corresponded through emails and occasionally one-sided video chats. Yet it was different with him right here in front of Logan.

Logan could reach down right now and touch him with ease if he chose to. He could brush his slightly unruly hair out of his eyes. Logan wondered what Virgil would do. Would his eyes shine the same way they had after biting Logan earlier. Would he grin wider than he was now? Would he get embarrassed like he did the first day in the coffee shop after oversharing?

“You… good man?” Virgil asked, pulling Logan from his musings.

“I am perfectly well,” Logan replied, clearing his throat. He glanced away from Virgil. “I think perhaps my roommates have a bit of a point when it comes to caffeine.”

“What do you mean?” Virgil asked.

“I find myself a bit disconcerted at the moment.”

“Well, maybe a carton full of iced coffee at 3am is not the best choice,” Virgil said in good humor. “You aren’t a college kid anymore.”

Logan glanced down at the college professor on his living room floor. “Well, thank goodness for that,” he mumbled.

Virgil gave him an odd look but didn’t comment.

“You know,” he said instead. “I think your calculations are probably fine anyway,” He reached up to gently taking the papers out of Logan’s grip. “Why don’t you put the coffee away and we do something else?”

“Like sleep?” Logan asked.

“Do you think you’ll be sleeping anytime soon?” Virgil inquired with an eyebrow raised.

“Fair point,” Logan replied ruefully.

Virgil grabbed the television remote from the coffee table. “Why don’t we watch a bit of that time inappropriate copy of the Epithet File I know you have.”

“Sure,” Logan agreed. He glanced down at Virgil who was already turning on the television. “You can come onto the couch if you like.”

“Nah,” said Virgil without looking at him. “You can come to the floor.

Logan sighed. “Very well,” he agreed and slid to the floor.

Want to read more? Click below!

Folds in Time Universe Master Post

My Main Masterpost

[shihalyfie]

Hi :) If it's not too much trouble, could you please share your take on why they'd continue the Adventure brand after tri. was such a flop? (and a tangent: what does "dark history" even mean?). We got Kizuna, the reboot, and a 02 movie. Logically, it doesn't really make sense they'd keep investing in it.

This is a thorny topic, and I'd like to reiterate that although I've ended up making more posts related to this series and the discourse surrounding it recently (probably because it's even more on the mind now that another movie is on the horizon and a lot of people are apprehensive for various reasons), I do not want this blog to be making a brand out of being critical of this series. I’m writing this here and in public because I figured that there is a certain degree I need to clarify what I mean about audience reception/climate and how it might impact current or future works, and I’m admittedly also more than a little upset that I occasionally see Western fanbase criticisms of the series getting dismissed by people claiming that the only people mad about it are dramamongering or ignorant Westerners (which could not be further from the truth). However, this is mainly to address this and to answer your question, and is not intended to try and change anyone's existing opinion or impression of the series as much as it's me trying to explain (from my own personal reading of the situation) what practically went down with critical reception in real life; no more, no less.

The short summary of the matter is:

The series was a moderate financial success (albeit with some caveats; see the long version for details) and definitely outstripped a lot of prior attempts to revive the franchise;

However, the overall Japanese fanbase-side critical backlash from tri. was extremely and viciously negative to the point where even acknowledging the series too much could easily result in controversy;

Kizuna’s production and the PR surrounding it very obviously have this in mind with a lot of apparent “damage control” elements.

The long version is below.

Note that while I try to be diligent about citing my sources so people understand that I’m not just making things up wholesale, I’m deliberately refraining from linking certain things here this time, both because some of the things mentioned have some pretty crude things written there -- it’s not something I feel comfortable directing people to regardless of what language it’s in -- and because I don’t want to recklessly link things on social media and cause anyone to go after or harass the people involved. For the links that have been provided, please still be warned that some of them don’t really link to particularly pleasant things.

I am not writing the following information to suggest that anyone should agree or disagree with the sentiments being described. I know people tend to take "a lot of people like/hate this" as a signal of implication "it is correct to like/hate this" when it's not (and I especially dislike the idea of implying that Japanese fanbase opinions are the only correct ones). There's a reason I focus on "critical reception being this way" (because it influences marketing decisions and future direction) rather than how much this should impact one's personal feelings; this is coming from myself as someone who is shamelessly proud of liking many things that had bad critical reception, were financial failures, or are disliked by many. As I point out near the end, the situation also does seem to be changing for the better in more recent years as well.

Also, to be clear, I'm a single person who's observing everything best I can from my end, I have no affiliations with staff nor do I claim to, and as much as I'm capable of reading Japanese and thus reading a lot of people's impressions, I'm ultimately still another “outsider” looking in. These are my impressions from my observation of fan communal spaces, following artists and reading comments on social media and art posting websites, and results from social media searches. In the end, I know as much as anyone else about what happened, so this is just my two cents based on all of my personal observations.

A fanbase is a fanbase regardless of what part of the world you're from. There are people who love it and are shameless about saying so. There are people who have mixed feelings or at least aren't on extreme ends of the spectrum (as always, the loudest ones are always the most visible, but it's not always easy to claim they're the predominant percentage of the fanbase). That happens everywhere, and I still find that on every end I've seen. However, if I'm talking about my impressions and everything I’ve encountered, I will say that the overall Japanese reaction to tri. comes off as significantly more violently negative on average than the Western one, which is unusual because often it's the other way around. (I personally feel less so because the opinions are that fundamentally different and more so because we're honestly kind of loud and in-your-face people; otherwise, humans are mostly the same everywhere, and more often than not people feel roughly the same about everything if they’re given the same information to work with.)

This is not something I can say lightly, and thus would not say if I didn’t really get this impression, but...we're talking "casually looking up movie reviews for Kizuna have an overwhelming amount of people casually citing any acknowledgment of tri. elements as a negative element", or the fact that even communal wikis for "general" fandoms like Pixiv and Aniwota don't tend to hold back in being vicious about it (as of this writing, Pixiv's wiki refuses to consider it in the same timeline as Adventure, accusing it of being "a series that claims to be a sequel set three years after 02 but is in fact something different"). Again, there are people who openly enjoy it and actively advocate for it (and Pixiv even warns people to not lord over others about it condescendingly because of the fact that such people do exist), and this is also more of a reflection of “the hardcore fanbase on the Internet” and not necessarily the mainstream (after all, there are quite a few other Digimon works where the critical reception varies very heavily between the two). Nevertheless, the take-home is that the reputation is overall negative among the Internet fanbase to the point that this is the kind of sentiment you run into without trying all that hard.

I think, generally speaking, if we're just talking about why a lot of people resent the series, the reasons aren't that different from those on the Western side. However, that issue of "dark history" (黒歴史): there's a certain degree of demand from the more violently negative side of the fanbase that's, in a sense, asking official to treat it as a disgrace and never acknowledge it ever again, hence why Kizuna doing so much as borrowing things from it rather than rejecting it outright is still sometimes treated like it’s committing a sin. So it's somewhat close in spirit to a retcon movement, which is unusual because no other Digimon series gets this (not even 02; that was definitely a thing on the Western end, but while I'm sure there are people who hate it that much on their end too, I've never really seen it gain enough momentum for anyone to take it seriously). If anyone ever tells you that Japanese fanbases are nice to everything, either they don't know Japanese, are being willfully ignorant, or are lying to you, because there is such thing as drama in those areas, and in my experience, I've seen things get really nasty when things are sufficiently pushed over the edge, and if a fanbase wants to have drama, it will have drama. This happens to be one of those times.

(If you think this is extreme, please know that I also think so too, so I hope you really understand that me describing this sentiment does not mean I am personally endorsing it. Also, let me reiterate that the loudest section of the fanbase is not necessarily the predominant one; after all, as someone who’s been watching reactions to 02 over the years, I myself can attest that its hatedom has historically made it sound more despised than it actually is in practice.)

My impression is that the primary core sentiment behind why the series so much as existing and being validated is considered such an offense (rather than, say, just saying "wow, that writing was bad" and moving on) is heavily tied to the release circumstances the series came out in during 2015-2018, and the idea that "this series disrespected Adventure, and also disrespected the fanbase.” (I mean, really, regardless of what part of the world you’re from, sequels and adaptations tend to be held to a higher bar of expectation than standalone works, because they’re expected to do them justice.) A list of complaints I’ve come across a lot while reading through the above:

The Japanese fanbase is pretty good at recordkeeping when it comes to Adventure universe lore, partially because they got a lot of extra materials that weren’t localized, but also partially because adherence to it seems to generally be more Serious Business to them than it is elsewhere. For instance, “according to Adventure episode 45, ‘the one who wishes for stability’ (Homeostasis) only started choosing children in 1995, and therefore there can be no Chosen Children before 1995” is taken with such gravity that this, not anything to do with evolutions or timeline issues, is the main reason Hurricane Touchdown’s canonicity was disputed in that arena (because Wallace implies that he met his partners before 1995). It’s a huge reason the question of Kizuna also potentially not complying to lore came to the forefront, because tri. so flagrantly contradicts it so much that this issue became very high on the evaluation checklist. In practice, Kizuna actually goes against Adventure/02 very little, so the reason tri. in particular comes under fire for this is that it does it so blatantly there were theories as early as Part 1 that this series must take place in a parallel universe or something, and as soon as it became clear it didn’t, the resulting sentiment was “wow, you seriously thought nobody would notice?” (thus “disrespecting the audience”).

A lot of the characterization incongruity is extremely obvious when you’re following only the Japanese version, partially because it didn’t have certain localization-induced characterization changes (you are significantly less likely to notice a disparity with Mimi if you’re working off the American English dub where they actually did make her likely to step on others’ toes and be condescending, whereas in Japanese the disparity is jarring and hard to miss) and partially due to some things lost in translation (Mimi improperly using rough language on elders is much easier to spot as incongruity if you’re familiar with the language). Because it’s so difficult to miss, and honestly feels like a lot of strange writing decisions you’d make only if you really had no concept of what on earth happened in the original series, it only contributes to the idea that they were handling Adventure carelessly and disrespectfully without paying attention to what the series was even about (that, or worse, they didn’t care).

02 is generally well-liked there! It’s controversial no matter where you go, but as I said earlier, there was no way a retcon movement would have ever been taken seriously, and the predominant sentiment is that, even if you’re not a huge fan of it, its place in canon (even the epilogue) should be respected. So not only flagrantly going against 02-introduced lore but also doing that to a certain quartet is seen as malicious, and you don’t have as much of the converse discourse celebrating murdering the 02 quartet (yeah, that’s a thing that happened here) or accusing people with complaints of “just being salty because they like 02″ as nearly as much of a factor; I did see it happen, or at least dismissals akin to “well it’s Adventure targeted anyway,” but they were much less frequent. The issue with the 02 quartet is usually the first major one brought up, and there’s a lot of complaints even among those who don’t care for 02 as much that the way they went about it was inhumane and hypocritical, especially when killing Imperialdramon is fine but killing Meicoomon is a sin. Also, again, “you seriously think nobody will see a problem with how this doesn’t make sense?”

I think even those who are fans of the series generally agree with this, but part of the reason the actual real-life time this series went on is an important factor is that the PR campaign for this series was godawful. Nine months of clicking on an egg on a website pretending like audience participation meant something when in actuality it was blatantly obvious it was just a smokescreen to reveal info whenever they were ready? This resulted in a chain effect where even more innocuous/defensible things were viewed in a suspicious or negative light (for instance, "the scam of selling the fake Kaiser's goggles knowing Ken fans would buy it only to reveal that it's not him anyway"), and a bunch of progressively out-of-touch-with-the-fanbase statements and poor choices led to more sentiment “yeah, you’re just insulting the fanbase at this point,” and a general erosion of trust in official overall.

On top of that, the choice of release format to have it spread out as six movies over three years seems to have exacerbated the backlash to get much worse than it would have been otherwise, especially since one of the major grievances with the series is that how it basically strung people along, building up more and more unanswered questions before it became apparent it was never going to answer them anyway. So when you’re getting that frustrated feeling over three whole years, it feels like three years of prolonged torture, and it becomes much harder to forgive for the fallout than if you’d just marathoned the entire thing at once.

For those who are really into the Digimon (i.e. species) lore and null canon, while I’m not particularly well-versed in that side of the fanbase, it seems tri. fell afoul of them too for having inaccurately portrayed (at one point, mislabeled) special attacks and poorly done battle choreography, along with the treatment of Digimon in general (infantilized Digimon characterization, general lack of Digimon characters in general, very flippant treatment of the Digital World in Parts 3-5). If you say you’re going to “reboot” the Digital World and not address the entire can of worms that comes with basically damaging an entire civilization of Digimon, as you can imagine, a lot of people who actually really care about that are going to be pissed, and the emerging sentiment is “you’re billing this as a Digimon work, but you don’t even care about the monsters that make up this franchise.”

The director does not have a very positive reputation among those who know his work (beyond just Digimon), and in general there was a lot of suspicion around the fact they decided to get a guy whose career has primarily been built on harem and fanservice anime to direct a sequel to a children’s series. Add to that a ton of increasingly unnerving statements about how he intended to make the series “mature” in comparison to its predecessor (basically, an implication that Adventure and 02 were happy happy joy series where nothing bad ever happened) and descriptions of Adventure that implied a very, very poor grasp of anything that happened in it: inaccurate descriptions of their characters, poor awareness of 02′s place in the narrative, outright saying in Febri that he saw the Digimon as like perpetual kindergartners even after evolving, and generally such a flippant attitude that it drove home the idea that the director of an Adventure sequel had no respect for Adventure, made this series just to maliciously dunk on it for supposedly being immature, and has such a poor grasp of what it even was that it’s possible he may not have seen it in the first place (or if he did, clearly skimmed it to the extent he understood it poorly to pretty disturbing levels). As of this writing, Aniwota Wiki directly cites him as a major reason for the backlash.

In general, consensus seems to be that the most positively received aspect of the series (story-wise) was Part 3 (mostly its ending, but some are more amenable to the Takeru and Patamon drama), and the worst vitriol goes towards Parts 2 (for the blatantly contradictory portrayal of Mimi and Jou and the hypocritical killing of Imperialdramon) and 4 (basically the “point of no return” where even more optimistic people started getting really turned off). This is also what I suspect is behind the numbers on the infamous DigiPoll (although the percentage difference is admittedly low enough to fall within margin of error). However, there was suspicion about the series even from Part 1, with one prominent fanartist openly stating that it felt more like meeting a ton of new people than it did reuniting with anyone they knew.

So with all of that on the table: how did this affect official? The thing is that when I say “violently negative”, I mean that also entailed spamming official with said violently negative social media comments. While this is speculation, I am fairly certain that official must have realized how bad this was getting as early as between Parts 4 and 5, because that’s where a lot of really suspicious things started happening behind the scenes; while I imagine the anime series itself was now too far in to really do anything about it, one of the most visible producers suddenly vanished from the producer lineup and was replaced by Kinoshita Yousuke, who ended up being the only member of tri. staff shared with Kizuna (and, in general, the fact that not a single member of staff otherwise was retained kind of says a lot). Once the series ended in 2018 and the franchise slowly moved into Kizuna-related things, you might notice that tri.-branded merch production almost entirely screeched to a halt and official has been very touchy about acknowledging it too deeply; it’s not that they don’t, but it’s kind of an awfully low amount for what you’d think would be warranted for a series that’s supposed to be a full entry in the big-name Adventure brand.

The reason is, simply, that if they do acknowledge it too much, people will get pissed at them. That’s presumably why the tri. stage play (made during that interim period between Parts 4 and 5 and even branded with the title itself) and Kizuna are really hesitant to be too aggressive about tri. references; it’s not necessarily that official wants to blot it out of history like the most extreme opinions would like them to, but even being too enthusiastic about affirming it will also get them backlash, especially if the things they affirm are contradictory to Adventure or 02. And considering even the small references they did put in still got them criticism for “affirming” tri. too much, you can easily see that the backlash would have been much harder if they’d attempted more than that; staying as close as possible to Adventure and 02 and trying to deal with tri. elements only when they’re comparatively inoffensive was pretty much the “safe” thing to do in this scenario (especially since fully denying tri. would most certainly upset the people who did like the series, and if you have to ask me, I personally think this would have been a pretty crude thing to have done right after the series had just finished). Even interviews taken after the fact often involve quickly disclaiming involvement with the series, or, if they have to bring up something about it, discussing the less controversial aspects like the art (while the character designs were still controversial, it’s at least at the point where some fanartists will still be willing to make use of them even if they dislike the series, albeit often with prominent disclaimers) or the more well-received parts of Part 3; Kizuna was very conspicuously marketed as a standalone movie, even if it shared the point of “the Adventure kids, but older” that tri. had.

(Incidentally, the tri. stage play has generally been met with a good reputation and was received well even among people who were upset with the anime, so it was well-understood that they had no relation. In fact, said stage play is probably even better received than Kizuna, although that’s not too surprising given the controversial territory Kizuna goes into, making the stage play feel very play-it-safe in comparison.)

So, if we’re going to talk about Kizuna in particular: tri. was, to some degree, a moderate financial success, in the sense that it made quite a bit of money and did a lot to raise awareness of the Digimon brand still continuing...however, if you actually look at the sales figures for tri., they go down every movie; part of it was probably because of the progressively higher “hurdle” to get into a series midway, but consider that Gundam Unicorn (a movie series which tri.’s format was often compared to) had its sales go up per movie thanks to word of mouth and hype. So while tri. does seem to have gotten enough money to help sustain the franchise at first, the trade-off was an extremely livid fanbase that had shattered faith in the brand and in official, and so while continuing the Adventure brand might still be profitable, there was no way they were going to get away with continuing to do this lest everything eventually crash and burn.

Hence, if you look at the way Kizuna was produced and advertised, you can see a lot of it is blatantly geared at addressing a lot of the woes aimed at tri.: instead of the staff that had virtually no affiliation with Toei, the main members of staff announced were either from the original series (Seki and Yamatoya) or openly childhood fans, the 02 quartet was made into a huge advertising point as a dramatic DigiFes reveal (and character profies that tie into the 02 epilogue careers prominently part of the advertising from day one), and they even seemed to acknowledge the burnout on the original Adventure group by advertising it so heavily as “the last adventure of Taichi and his friends”, so you can see that there’s a huge sentiment of “damage control” with it. How successful that was...is debatable, since opinions have been all over the board; quite a few people were naturally so livid at what happened with tri. that Kizuna was just opening more of the wound, but there were also people who liked it much better and were willing to acknowledge it (with varying levels of enthusiasm, some simply saying “it was thankfully okay,” and some outright loving it), and there was a general sentiment even among those who disliked both that they at least understood what Kizuna was going for and that it didn’t feel as inherently disrespectful. (Of course, there are people who loved tri. and hated Kizuna, and there are people who loved both, too.)

Moreover, Kizuna actually has a slightly different target audience from tri.; there’s a pretty big difference between an OVA and a theatrical movie, and, quite simply, Kizuna was made under the assumption that a lot of people watching it may not have even seen tri. in the first place. An average of 11% of the country watched Adventure and 02, but the number of people who watched tri. is much smaller, in part due to the fact that its “theater” screenings were only very limited screenings compared to Kizuna being shown in theaters in Japan and worldwide, and in part due to the fact that watching six parts over three years is a pretty huge commitment for someone who may barely remember Digimon as anything beyond a show they watched as a kid, and may be liable to just fall off partway through because they simply just forgot. (Which also probably wasn’t helped by the infamously negative reputation, something that definitely wouldn’t encourage someone already on the fence.) And that’s yet another reason Kizuna couldn’t make too many concrete tri. references; being a theatrical movie, it needs to have as wide appeal as possible, and couldn’t risk locking out an audience that had a very high likelihood of not having seen it, much less to the end -- it may have somewhat been informed by tri.’s moderate financial success and precedent, but it ultimately was made for the original Adventure and 02 audience more than anything else.

I would say that, generally, while Kizuna is “controversial” for sure, reception towards the movie seems to be more positive than negative, it won over a large chunk of people who were burned out by tri., and it clearly seems to have been received well enough that it’s still being cashed in on a year after its release. The sheer existence of the upcoming 02-based movie is also probably a sign of Kizuna’s financial and critical success; Kinoshita confirmed at DigiFes 2020 that nothing was in production at the time, and stated shortly after the movie’s announcement that work on it had just started. So the decision to make it seems to have been made after eyeing Kizuna’s reception, and, moreover, the movie was initially advertised from the get-go with Kizuna’s director and writer (Taguchi and Yamatoya), meaning those two have curried enough goodwill from the fanbase that this can be used to promote the movie. (If not, you would think that having and advertising Seki would be the bigger priority.) While this is my own sentiment, I am personally doubtful official would have even considered 02 something remotely profitable enough on its own to cash in on if it weren’t for this entire sequence of events of 02′s snubbing in tri. revealing how much of a fanbase it had (especially with the sheer degree of “suspicious overcompensation” Kizuna had with its copious use of the 02 quartet and it tagging a remix of the first 02 ED on the Hanareteitemo single, followed by the drama CD and character songs), followed by Kizuna having success in advertising with them so heavily. Given all of the events between 2015 and now, it’s a bit ironic to see that 02 has now become basically the last resort to be able to continue anything in the original Adventure universe without getting too many people upset at them about it.

The bright side coming out of all of this is that, while it’s still a bit early to tell, now that we’re three years out from tri. finishing up and with Kizuna in the game, it seems there’s a possibility for things improving around tri.’s reception as well. Since a lot of the worst heated points of backlash against it have a very “you had to have been there” element (related to the PR, release schedule, and staff comments), those coming in “late” don’t have as much reason to be as pissed at it; I’ve seen at least one case of a fanartist getting back into the franchise because of Kizuna hype, watching tri. to catch up, casually criticizing it on Twitter, and moving on with their life, presumably because marathoning the whole thing being generally aware of what’ll happen in it and knowing Kizuna is coming after anyway gives you a lot less reason to be angry to the point of holding an outright grudge. Basically, even if you don’t like it, it’s much easier to actually go “yeah, didn’t like that,” not worry too much about it, and move on. Likewise, I personally get the impression that official has been starting to get a little more confident about digging up elements related to it. Unfortunately, a fairly recent tweet promoting the series getting put on streaming services still got quite a few angry comments implying that they should be deleting the scourge from the Internet instead, so there’s still a long way to go, but hopefully the following years will see things improve further...

In regards to the reboot, I -- and I think a lot of people will agree with me -- have a bit of a hard time reading what exact audience it’s trying to appeal to; we have a few hints from official that they want parents to watch it with their children, and that it may have been a necessary ploy in order to secure their original timeslot. So basically, the Adventure branding gets parents who grew up with the original series to be interested in it and to show it to their kids, and convinces Fuji TV that it might be profitable. But as most people have figured by now, the series has a completely different philosophy and writing style -- I mean, the interview itself functionally admits it’s here to be more action-oriented and to have its own identity -- and the target audience is more the kids than anything else. As for the Internet fanbase of veterans, most people have been critical of its character writing and pacing, but other than a few stragglers who are still really pissed, it hasn’t attracted all that much vitriol, probably because in the end it’s an alternate universe, it doesn’t have any obligation to adhere to anything from the original even if it uses the branding, and it’s clearly still doing its job of being a kids’ show for kids who never saw the original series nor 02, so an attempt to call it “disrespectful” to the original doesn’t have much to stand on. A good number of people who are bored of it decided it wasn’t interesting to them and dropped it without incident, while other people are generally just enjoying it for being fun, and the huge amount of Digimon franchise fanservice with underrepresented Digimon and high fidelity to null canon lore is really pleasing the side of the fanbase that’s into that (I mean, Digimon World Golemon is really deep in), so at the very least, there’s not a lot to be super-upset about.

[thewhizzyhead]

a non-filipino's guide to trese: ep 1

So some of my mutuals decided to check out Trese aka the Netflix adaptation of the Filipino horror comic book series that I keep rambling about here and then since well um most of my mutuals aren’t from the Philippines fshfs I decided to make a long-ass post that basically consists of me rambling about the cultural context present in Trese with fun little tidbits about Filipino folklore. I’m not an expert on Filipino mythology so um I just typed out the stuff that I know and the stuff that I looked up on Wikipedia so um take this with a grain of salt aaaaa I’ll save the extensive google scholar research ramble on folklore present in Trese for another day.

I’ll try to find the sites where I got some of the information from cause um yea I kinda had a bit of a hard time finding the other shit so um once again, take the stuff here with a grain of salt. Also, feel free to add more info if you guys got any!

SO ANYWAYS ENJOY ME RAMBLING ABOUT EPISODE 1 OF TRESE WOO

+ MRT and LRT (Manila Metro Rail Transit and Light Rail Transit) are train systems in NCR (the capital region) and yea them suddenly stopping and malfunctioning in the middle of the goddamn rail is a daily occurrence and we have been trying to deal with this bullshit for years but alas, corruption and negligence are sweet sweet drugs.

+ When the MRT broke down, you'd see a red bee in the flashing billboard right? Well that's Jollibee and that's probably the most well-known fast food restaurant chain here heck there are even branches of it abroad!

+ According to many youtube comments along with other social media posts that I am way too tired to link here, the opening theme is an Ifugao ethnic song called Balluha'd Bayyauhen but with modern accompaniments and I think the song is about a fruit called a balluha that the character in the song tries to it but cannot swallow. (someone please correct me if I’m wrong here fjkfs)

+ The first um monster that we see Alexandra interact with is the White Lady of Balete Drive. White Ladies or “Kaperosa” are a type of female ghosts typically dressed in ghostly white dresses or similar garments. According to legend, she died in a car accident while driving along Balete Drive (a two lane street formerly lined with Balete Trees which are said to be a home for spirits and mysterious creatures) in Quezon City while other accounts say she died waiting for the arrival of her lover; others also say that she was a teenage girl who was run over and killed by a taxi driver at night and then buried around a Balete tree while another variation of the tale claims that a student from the University of the Philippines was sexually assaulted and killed by a taxi driver nearby and so said ghost haunts the street in search of her murderer. There are many other variations but according to local rumor, the legend was fabricated by a reporter in 1953 in order to make an interesting story. What remains consistent in many variations is that apparently taxi drivers would be stopped by a beautiful lady asking for a ride and if one would look at the rear window, they would see that the white lady in question is bruised and drenched in blood.

+ There are a lot of mentions about "lakans" and stuff in reference to Alex and her father right? In precolonial times, the term is used to refer to the paramount ruler or the highest-ranking political authorities in Tagalog communities (so um NCR and some parts of Region 4). In Muslim communities, they are called sultans while communities with strong trade connecitons with Indonesia or Malaysia called them Rajah. Datu is umm the more generalized term though when it comes to discussing the leaders of the precolonial Filipinos.

+ So, Alex’s mom is a babaylan and back in the pre-colonial period, each barangay (which a native filipino term for a village or a district; said term is still used today to describe um divisions in municipalities like) had them and these are basically Philippine shamans and they specialized in communicating with the spirits of the dead. To my knowledge, the role of babaylan went to women and yea people assigned male at birth but then identified as female were also allowed to become babaylans and they would be treated with the same respect given to any woman back then (honestly I dunno much about lgbtq+ stuff back in the precolonial times but all I know is that precolonial Filipinos were much a lot more welcoming towards trans identities bUT THEN THE SPANIARDS CAME AND UM ERR RUINED THAT); also the writing Alexandra's mom did in that one scene with the dagger is in Baybayin - preHispanic Filipino script. I dunno what she wrote down though. .

+ Also I kinda find it funny that the people here esp those who were at the White Lady scene are um,,, not at all surprised? Like yea quite a number of filipinos have their own superstitions and beliefs and all that but um yea the people in Trese seem very used to the bullshit,,,which in retrospect, isn't at all inaccurate fsdfd I MEAN WE DEAL WITH UNSURMOUNTABLE AMOUNTS OF BS ON A DAILY BASIS SO I DON’T THINK DEAD GHOSTS WOULD EVEN FAZE MANY FSKJDS

+ The one that appears right before Alexandra talks with the duwende (the one in the manhole) is called Laman Lupa (which i guess translates to um "What is in the earth"? just um YEA THEY ARE DIRT CREATURES). normally this is an umbrella term for duwendes and nunos but in Trese they are servants of these aforementioned creatures.

+ Duwende (which came from the Spanish phrase "dueno de case" which means "owner of the house") or dwarves in Filipino folklore are known to be mischievous and magical environmental guardians. They are believed to reside in trees or under earth mounds (those that live in the latter are called nuno sa pundo or old man of the mount) which is why quite a lot of Filipinos say "tabi tabi po" or “excuse me” when wandering around a forest or earth mounds as a sign of respect and in the hopes the duwende won't torment them. If the person is friendly, the duwende can also be friendly in return and will bring that person good lucl; otherwise, those who destroy their homes by stepping on them will face their wrath in form of heartless curse and predictions of ominous and disastrous fates. A duwende's color also depends on their budhi or conscience: to my knowledge, white duwendes are kind, red ones give protection amulets, green ones are firnedly with children and the black ones give nothing but trouble.

+ Chocnut aka the snack Alex bribes the nuno with is a very yummy chocolate snack made of coconut milk, crushed peanuts and cocoa powder. They are umm about an inch in length and maybe half an inch in width so it's fairly small; that being said I WANT THE CHOCNUT THAT ALEXANDRA HAS CAUSE HOT DAMN THAT'S A BIG CHOCNUT

+ In Trese, the creatures in the MRT scene and in the warehouse Alexandra visits after she talks with the duwende are called "aswang". In Philippine folklore, it is an umbrella term for any kind of monster so um an aswang in Luzon would be very different from the aswang in Mindanao. According to what I saw on wikipedia, they can be classified in 5 categories: the vampire (self-explanatory um they drink blood), the viscera sucker (the manananggal, i'll get to that next time), the weredog (cats and pigs are also possible but um yea they target pregnant women), the witch (self-explanatory boom curses and stuff) and the ghoul (they gather near trees in cemeteries to feast on human corpses). Aswangs are often described to have a long, hollow tongue, sharp claws and sharp teeth, although they do also have human forms.

+ To my knowledge, Ibwa, the leader of the aswangs in the warehouse, is a creature from Tinguian or Itneg mythology (they, like the Ifugao, are an indigenous ethnic group in northwestern Luzon) though I could be wrong about this dksfsf Ibwa seems like an ethnic filipino term tho wah I can't remember where I once read that. But anyways, Ibwa often stalk sthe house of a dying person to steal its body. In order for the ibwa to NOT succeed in that, some people burn holes in the garments of the dead and put a sharp iron object on top of the grave since those are most powerful weapons against aswangs which is what Alexandra uses to subdue the Ibwa and kill all the other aswangs (the knife alex uses is named Sinag which means "ray of light".)

+ ALSO I AM SO SO GLAD THEY KEPT THE FILIPINO SWEARS IN THE ENGLISH DUB YES YES THIS IS A VERY GOOD JOB so lemme discuss the versatility of tangina-

+ Also umm Bossing is a nickname of Vic Sotto - one of the three pioneer hosts of Eat Bulaga! which is the longest running Philippine noontime variety show. Over time, most probably due to the show's popularity, the term "bossing" then became um slang for "boss" or "chief"

+ Translation of what Alex says when she's stirring the eye inside the cup: “In the eyes of others, secrets will reveal themselves.”

+ Sidenote: The English dub's pronunciation of many of the tagalog lines are um yea they r pretty good but they could use a bit of work but then again I'm really not that good in speaking in Tagalog so who am I to judge gkdkf sorry po guys conyo po ako-

+ Maria Makiling is arguably the most famous of all the diwatas (ancestral spirits, nature spirits, or deities) in Philippine Mythology; she is associated with Mount Makiling in Laguna as the guardian spirit of the mountain. Mount Makiling is said to resemble a profile of a woman and people associate the profile with Maria herself. She is also known as a goddess by the name of Dayang Masalanta and people would pray to her for safety and to stop storms and earthquakes. That's the goddess Alexandra's mother mentions right when she tells Alex to hide. (Translation to what she said there: Maria Makiling, goddess of the mountain, bless us.)

+ ALSO YEA THAT MAYOR IN THE MRT STATION IS UMMM RATHER REMINISCENT OF MAAAANY POLITICIANS AND PUBLIC SERVANTS HERE LIKE BELIEVE ME I CAN THINK OF SO MANY NAMES RN. THEY WOULD FLAUNT THEIR MACHISMO AND PROMISE THAT THEY THEMSELVES SHALL PUNISH THE PERPETRATORS HARSHLY BUT IN THE END THEY DONT MEAN SHIT AND ARE IN OFFICE TO SERVE ONLY THEMSELVES AND TO SHIT ON THE REST ESP THOSE OF THE POORER SECTORS AND *NOTHING IS DONE ABOUT IT*. WE LIVE IN HELL OKAY. also hmm how the police are represented here is umm,,,interesting,,, like i know there are sOME good police officers like the ones alexandra assists but like,,,our current sociopolitical climate + the many cases showcasing the corruption in the police force + tHE SHEER AMOUNT OF POLICE BRUTALITY HERE would ummm beg to differ. but um anyways-

+ Also Mang Inasal posters can be seen in the MRT station backdrops and um it’s a very famous restaurant chain here and they serve lots of barbecue and other filipino stuffs and i miss them a lot God their halo halo is very yummy

+ Santelmo - oki so this is the fire face thingy that Alexandra summons inside the ruined train. This is the shortened version of the term "Apoy ni Santa Elmo" or "St. Elmo's Fire" - this is a weather phenomenon wherein plasma is created from an electrical discharge from a rod like object in an atmospheric electric field. This phenomenon was used to warn of imminent lightning strikes or storms (there is a chapter in Noli Me Tangere where Pilosopo Tasyo talks about that bUT I'LL SAVE THE NOLI ME TANGERE RAMBLES FOR ANOTHER DAY). But according to Philippine folklore, santelmos - which are said to be souls of people lost as sea - are balls of fire that appear where accidents or big arguments happen. In Trese, santelmos (alex's santelmo being "The Great Spirit of the Binondo Fire") can be called to assist in supernatural investigations

+ Translation of what Alex says when she draws the circles to meet with the purple ghosts: "Souls, where are you off to? I'll be entering too, so please open the door."

+ Remember the scene at the train with all the purple ghosts and the woman in a veil? Yea the woman is an emissary of a goddess named Ibu and she is the Manobo (again, another indigenous ethnic group but this time they're from Mindanao; fun fact we have around 134 ethnic groups) goddess of deceased mortals and the queen of the underworld; she also serves as a psychopomp and guides the newly deceased souls to the other side (having an MRT be the ride to the underworld isn’t in the legends tho so fkkjsf)

+ The aswang in the top hat is called Xa Mul and according to the Isneg/Apayao people (yay another ethnic group but this time in northern Luzon - the Cordillera regions to be specific), they are an evil spirit known to swallow people whole.

+ Alex has two henchmen right? Yea they are named Crispin and Basillio and No I still don’t know who’s who and I'm really sorry about that fsfjs so anyways the names Crispin and Basillio are actually those of two brothers featured in the Noli Me Tangere and El Filibusterismo novels (Crispin is younger and Basilio is older) which are basically the national novels here cause um yea written by national hero Jose Rizal as sociopolitical commentary about the Spanish regime here. I don't know if I want to spoil this cause I kinda want other people to read the novel too fskfs BUT ALL IN ALL, ONE OF THEM DIES IN LIKE THE 10TH OR 11TH CHAPTER OF NOLI ME TANGERE (and the novel has 64 chapters btw) AND UM YEA-

+ OKI SO TO ADD MORE CONTEXT TO THE SQUATTER STUFFS MENTIONED IN TRESE (we r gonna use the tiny font here because holy shit this rant is long): So,in the Philippines, especially in the capital region, there are lots of slum areas called squatters. These are dense urban settlements made of compact makeshift housing units that aren't really officially recognized by the government. This is um very reflective of the poverty situation here and there are maaany factors that come into play here and if i were to go into depth about this topic, that rant would probably turn into an academic paper so for the sake of brevity, let's just say that Things Are Fucked Up Here. Oftentimes the poorer sectors are being ignored and left to their own devices despite tons of campaign promises to make things better and easier for them. The communities that live here are incredibly vulnerable to floods, fires, and the like and afaik no concrete solutions have been in effect to protect these people and their settlements. There have also been many times where squatter areas are dismantled or demolished despite protests of people living in those areas and yea I understand the need to make space and the need for renovation but the people should still be offered some sort of temporary settlement or financial compensation thingy that doESN'T fuck them over but alas, we have an anti-poor government. That being said, I really like Trese Ep 1's portrayal of governmental negligence, but I also have some thoughts, especially in regards to the mayor being arrested THAT FAST which um believe me, NEVER FUCKING HAPPENS BECAUSE MANY MAYORS AND A LOT OF POLITICIANS HAVE THE POLICE IN THEIR POCKETS SO UM ERR YEA JUSTICE IS RARELY A THING HERE BUT UM ANYWAYS YEA THE GOVERNMENT LIKES TO SHIT ON THE POOR WOO LET'S SAVE THE USE OF SOCIOLOGICAL LENS ON THIS MATTER FOR ANOTHER DAY

+ The news channel reporting the arrest of the mayor is ABC-ZNN WHICH IS AN OBVIOUS REFERENCE TO ABSCBN aka the top media conglomerate here (that has been fucked over by the government so many times to the point that they had to shut down operations last year which is all sorts of unfair so seeing them being referenced here kinda made me happy gksfks)

[acciokaidanalenko]

Taking on the Universe, Chapter One

Happy N7 Day, everyone!! I've been working on the rewrite of Taking on the Universe for almost a year now, and oh boy am I nervous to finally be posting the first chapter!!

I'll be doing this fic in Parts, so that it'll be easier for me!

Part One will include the Prologue/Eden Prime chapters! I hope all this work is worth it! I'm honestly so happy with how this has turned out!! I hope you all enjoy it 🥰

PS, next chapter will be up in two weeks (11/21)!!

Summary: It's Natasha Shepard's 29th birthday and she's celebrating with her mother, Hannah, in Vancouver. An old friend interrupts their lunch with a proposition for the young commander.

CW/TW: None

Preview of chapter below. AO3 Link: here.

Hannah had found a rare moment of peace as she sat amongst the other patrons at her favorite cafe. The sound of steady chatter filled the air, providing the peaceful ambiance she was now enjoying. She closed her eyes and let the light from the sun shine down on her, warming her bones in a way she simply couldn’t feel while stationed on a starship in space. The breeze blew gently against her face, moving the few stray strands of dark red hair that had managed to escape her ponytail. She’d almost forgotten what it felt like to have fresh air in her lungs, as opposed to the recycled oxygen she was more than accustomed to. She could almost forget the true nature of her surroundings here. That was, until the sharp sound of skycars flying nearby cut through the chatter.

She’d never been a very big fan of Vancouver. She hated that it was always bustling, and that it got even busier the closer one got to Alliance Headquarters. But, she’d been called here for a series of meetings before her next deployment. She’d be joining the crew of the SSV Kilimanjaro as their Executive Officer in just a few short weeks. They’d be returning to the Terminus Systems, where she’d already spent most of her military career.

Even if she did dislike Vancouver, she loved this cafe. She visited it almost every time she was forced back to HQ. That it was within walking distance of the giant building was a major bonus. The menu was small, but it had exactly what she was looking for on this particular occasion…

Cake.

Perfectly baked, decadent chocolate cake. With a light buttercream frosting that she could’ve eaten on its own. This was the kind of cake you just couldn’t get while serving on a starship or on an uncharted planet for some classified mission. It was exactly what they needed today.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Recommendation engines and "lean-back" media

In William Gibson’s 1992 novel “Idoru,” a media executive describes her company’s core audience:

“Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”

It’s an astonishingly great passage, not just for the image it evokes, but for how it captures the character of the speaker and her contempt for the people who made her fortune.

It’s also a beautiful distillation of the 1990s anxiety about TV’s role in a societal “dumbing down,” that had brewed for a long time, at least since the Nixon-JFK televised debates, whose outcome was widely attributed not to JFK’s ideas, but to Nixon’s terrible TV manner.

Neil Postman’s 1985 “Amusing Ourselves To Death” was a watershed here, comparing the soundbitey Reagan-Dukakis debates with the long, rhetorically complex Lincoln-Douglas debates of the previous century.

(Incidentally, when I finally experienced those debates for myself, courtesy of the 2009 BBC America audiobook, I was more surprised by Lincoln’s unequivocal, forceful repudiations of slavery abolition than by the rhetoric’s nuance)

https://memex.craphound.com/2009/01/20/lincoln-douglas-debate-audiobook-civics-history-and-rhetoric-lesson-in-16-hours/

“Media literacy” scholarship entered the spotlight, and its left flank — epitomized by Chomsky’s 1988 “Manufacturing Consent” — claimed that an increasingly oligarchic media industry was steering society, rather than reflecting it.

Thus, when the internet was demilitarized and the general public started trickling — and then rushing — to use it, there was a widespread hope that we might break free of the tyranny of concentrated, linear programming (in the sense of “what’s on,” and “what it does to you”).

Much of the excitement over Napster wasn’t about getting music for free — it was about the mix-tapification of all music, where your custom playlists would replace the linear album.

Likewise Tivo, whose ad-skipping was ultimately less important than the ability to watch the shows you liked, rather than the shows that were on.

Blogging, too: the promise was that a community of reader-writers could assemble a daily “newsfeed” that reflected their idiosyncratic interests across a variety of sources, surfacing ideas from other places and even other times.

The heady feeling of the time is hard to recall, honestly, but there was a thrill to getting up and reading the news that you chose, listening to a playlist you created, then watching a show you picked.

And while there were those who fretted about the “Daily Me” (what we later came to call the “filter bubble”) the truth was that this kind of active media creation/consumption ranged far more widely than the monopolistic media did.

The real “bubble” wasn’t choosing your own programming — it was everyone turning on their TV on Thursday nights to Friends, Seinfeld and The Simpsons.

The optimism of the era is best summarized in a taxonomy that grouped media into two categories: “lean back” (turn it on and passively consume it) and “lean forward” (steer your media consumption with a series of conscious decisions that explores a vast landscape).

Lean-forward media was intensely sociable: not just because of the distributed conversation that consisted of blog-reblog-reply, but also thanks to user reviews and fannish message-board analysis and recommendations.

I remember the thrill of being in a hotel room years after I’d left my hometown, using Napster to grab rare live recordings of a band I’d grown up seeing in clubs, and striking up a chat with the node’s proprietor that ranged fondly and widely over the shows we’d both seen.

But that sociability was markedly different from the “social” in social media. From the earliest days of Myspace and Facebook, it was clear that this was a sea-change, though it was hard to say exactly what was changing and how.

Around the time Rupert Murdoch bought Myspace, a close friend a blazing argument with a TV executive who insisted that the internet was just a passing fad: that the day would come when all these online kids grew up, got beaten down by work and just wanted to lean back.

To collapse on the sofa and consume media that someone else had programmed for them, anaesthetizing themselves with passive media that didn’t make them think too hard.

This guy was obviously wrong — the internet didn’t disappear — but he was also right about the resurgence of passive, linear media.

But this passive media wasn’t the “must-see TV” of the 80s and 90s.

Rather, it was the passivity of the recommendation algorithm, which created a per-user linear media feed, coupled with mechanisms like “endless scroll” and “autoplay,” that incinerated any trace of an active role for the “consumer” (a very apt term here).

It took me a long time to figure out exactly what I disliked about algorithmic recommendation/autoplay, but I knew I hated it. The reason my 2008 novel LITTLE BROTHER doesn’t have any social media? Wishful thinking. I was hoping it would all die in a fire.

Today, active media is viewed with suspicion, considered synonymous with Qanon-addled boomers who flee Facebook for Parler so they can stan their favorite insurrectionists in peace, freed from the tyranny of the dread shadowban.

But I’m still on team active media. I would rather people actively choose their media diets, in a truly sociable mode of consumption and production, than leaning back and getting fed whatever is served up by the feed.

Today on Wired, Duke public policy scholar Philip M Napoli writes about lean forward and lean back in the context of Trump’s catastrophic failure to launch an independent blog, “From the Desk of Donald J Trump.”

https://www.wired.com/story/opinion-trumps-failed-blog-proves-he-was-just-howling-into-the-void/

In a nutshell, Trump started a blog which he grandiosely characterized as a replacement for the social media monopolists who’d kicked him off their platforms. Within a month, he shut it down.

While Trump claimed the shut-down was all part of the plan, it’s painfully obvious that the real reason was that no one was visiting his website.

Now, there are many possible, non-exclusive explanations for this.

For starters, it was a very bad social media website. It lacked even rudimentary social tools. The Washington Post called it “a primitive one-way loudspeaker,” noting its lack of per-post comments, a decades old commonplace.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/05/21/trump-online-traffic-plunge/

Trump paid (or more likely, stiffed) a grifter crony to build the site for him, and it shows: the “Like” buttons didn’t do anything, the video-sharing buttons created links to nowhere, etc. From the Desk… was cursed at birth.

But Napoli’s argument is that even if Trump had built a good blog, it would have failed. Trump has a highly motivated cult of tens of millions of people — people who deliberately risked death to follow him, some even ingesting fish-tank cleaner and bleach at his urging.

The fact that these cult-members were willing to risk their lives, but not endure poor web design, says a lot about the nature of the Trump cult, and its relationship to passive media.

The Trump cult is a “push media” cult, simultaneously completely committed to Trump but unwilling to do much to follow him.

That’s the common thread between Fox News (and its successors like OANN) and MAGA Facebook.

And it echoes the despairing testimony of the children of Fox cultists, that their boomer parents consume endless linear TV, turning on Fox from the moment they arise and leaving it on until they fall asleep in front of it (also, reportedly, how Trump spent his presidency).

Napoli says that Trump’s success on monopoly social media platforms and his failure as a blogger reveals the role that algorithmically derived, per-user, endless scroll linear media played in the ascendancy of his views.

It makes me think of that TV exec and his prediction of the internet’s imminent disappearance (which, come to think of it, is not so far off from my own wishful thinking about social media’s disappearance in Little Brother).

He was absolutely right that this century has left so many of us exhausted, wanting nothing more than the numbness of lean-back, linear feeds.

But up against that is another phenomenon: the resurgence of active political movements.

After a 12-month period that saw widescale civil unrest, from last summer’s BLM uprising to the bizarre storming of the capital, you can’t really call this the golden age of passivity.

While Fox and OANN consumption might be the passive daily round of one of Idoru’s “vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organisms craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed,” that is in no way true of Qanon.

Qanon is an active pastime, a form of collaborative storytelling with all the mechanics of the Alternate Reality Games that the lean-forward media advocates who came out of the blogging era love so fiercely:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/06/no-vitiated-air/#other-hon

Meanwhile, the “clicktivism” that progressive cynics decried as useless performance a decade ago has become an active contact sport, welding together global movements from Occupy to BLM that use the digital to organize the highly physical.

That’s the paradox of lean-forward and lean-back: sometimes, the things you learn while leaning back make you lean forward — in fact, they might just get you off the couch altogether.

I think that Napoli is onto something. The fact that Trump’s cultists didn’t follow him to his crummy blog tells us that Trump was an effect, not a cause (something many of us suspected all along, as he’s clearly neither bright nor competent enough to inspire a movement).

But the fact that “cyberspace keeps everting” (to paraphrase “Spook Country,” another William Gibson novel) tells us that passive media consumption isn’t a guarantee of passivity in the rest of your life (and sometimes, it’s a guarantee of the opposite).

And it clarifies the role that social media plays in our discourse — not so much a “radicalizer” as a means to corral likeminded people together without them having to do much. Within those groups are those who are poised for action, or who can be moved to it.

The ease with which these people find one another doesn’t produce a deterministic outcome. Sometimes, the feed satisfies your urge for change (“clicktivism”). Sometimes, it fuels it (“radicalizing”).

Notwithstanding smug media execs, the digital realm equips us to “express our mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire” by doing much more than “changing the channels on a universal remote” — for better and for worse.

Image: Ian Burt (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/oddsock/267206444

CC BY: https://creativecommo

ns.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[shortnotsweet]

Bakudeku: A Non-Comprehensive Dissection of the Exploitation of Working Bodies, the Murder of Annoying Children, and a Rivals-to-Lovers Complex

I. Bakudeku in Canon, And Why Anti’s Need to Calm the Fuck Down

II. Power is Power: the Brain-Melting Process of Normalization and Toxic Masculinity

III. How to Kill Middle Schoolers, and Why We Should

IV. Parallels in Abuse, EnemiesRivals-to-Lovers, and the Necessity of Redemption ft. ATLA’s Zuko

V. Give it to Me Straight. It’s Homophobic.

VI. Love in Perspective, from the East v. West

VII. Stuck in the Sludge, the Past, and Season One

Disclaimer

It needs to be said that there is definitely a place for disagreement, discourse, debate, and analysis: that is a sign of an active fandom that’s heavily invested, and not inherently a bad thing at all. Considering the amount of source material we do have (from the manga, to the anime, to the movies, to the light novels, to the official art), there are going to be warring interpretations, and that’s inevitable.

I started watching and reading MHA pretty recently, and just got into the fandom. I was weary for a reason, and honestly, based on what I’ve seen, I’m still weary now. I’ve seen a lot of anti posts, and these are basically my thoughts. This entire thing is in no way comprehensive, and it’s my own opinion, so take it with a grain of salt. If I wanted to be thorough about this, I would’ve included manga panels, excerpts from the light novel, shots from the anime, links to other posts/essays/metas that have inspired this, etc. but I’m tired and not about that life right now, so, this is what it is. This is poorly organized, but maybe I’ll return to fix it.

Let’s begin.

Bakudeku in Canon, And Why Anti’s Need to Calm the Fuck Down

There are a lot of different reasons, that can be trivial as you like, to ship or not to ship two (or more) characters. It could be based purely off of character design, proximity, aversion to another ship, or hypotheticals. And I do think that it’s totally valid if someone dislikes the ship or can’t get on board with his character because to them, it does come across as abuse, and the implications make them uncomfortable or, or it just feels unhealthy. If that is your takeaway, and you are going to stick to your guns, the more power to you.

But Bakudeku’s relationship has canonically progressed to the point where it’s not the emotionally (or physically) abusive clusterfuck some people portray it to be, and it’s cheap to assume that it would be, based off of their characterizations as middle schoolers. Izuku intentionally opens the story as a naive little kid who views the lens of the Hero society through rose colored glasses and arguably wants nothing more than assimilation into that society; Bakugou is a privileged little snot who embodies the worst and most hypocritical beliefs of this system. Both of them are intentionally proven wrong. Both are brainwashed, as many little children are, by the propaganda and societal norms that they are exposed to. Both of their arcs include unlearning crucial aspects of the Hero ideology in order to become true heroes.

I will personally never simp for Bakugou because for the longest time, I couldn't help but think of him as a little kid on the playground screaming at the top of his lungs because someone else is on the swingset. He’s red in the face, there are probably veins popping out of his neck, he’s losing it. It’s easy to see why people would prefer Tododeku to Bakudeku.

Even now, seeing him differently, I still personally wouldn’t date Bakugou, especially if I had other options. Why? I probably wouldn’t want to date any of the guys who bullied me, especially because I think that schoolyard bullying, even in middle school, affected me largely in a negative way and created a lot of complexes I’m still trying to work through. I haven’t built a better relationship with them, and I’m not obligated to. Still, I associate them with the kind of soft trauma that they inflicted upon me, and while to them it was probably impersonal, to me, it was an intimate sort of attack that still affects me. That being said, that is me. Those are my personal experiences, and while they could undoubtedly influence how I interpret relationships, I do not want to project and hinder my own interpretation of Deku.

The reality is that Deku himself has an innate understanding of Bakugou that no one else does; I mention later that he seems to understand his language, implicitly, and I do stand by that. He understands what it is he’s actually trying to say, often why he’s saying it, and while others may see him as wimpy or unable to stand up for himself, that’s simply not true. Part of Deku’s characterization is that he is uncommonly observant and empathetic; I’m not denying that Bakugou caused harm or inflicted damage, but infantilizing Deku and preaching about trauma that’s not backed by canon and then assuming random people online excuse abuse is just...the leap of leaps, and an actual toxic thing to do. I’ve read fan works where Bakugou is a bully, and that’s all, and has caused an intimate degree of emotional, mental, and physical insecurity from their middle school years that prevents their relationship from changing, and that’s for the better. I’m not going to argue and say that it’s not an interesting take, or not valid, or has no basis, because it does. Its basis is the character that Bakugou was in middle school, and the person he was when he entered UA.

Not only is Bakugou — the current Bakugou, the one who has accumulated memories and experiences and development — not the same person he was at the beginning of the story, but Deku is not the same person, either. Maybe who they are fundamentally, at their core, stays the same, but at the beginning and end of any story, or even their arcs within the story, the point is that characters will undergo change, and that the reader will gain perspective.

“You wanna be a hero so bad? I’ve got a time-saving idea for you. If you think you’ll have a quirk in your next life...go take a swan dive off the roof!”

Yes. That is a horrible thing to tell someone, even if you are a child, even if you don’t understand the implications, even if you don’t mean what it is you are saying. Had someone told me that in middle school, especially given our history and the context of our interactions, I don’t know if I would ever have forgiven them.

Here’s the thing: I’m not Deku. Neither is anyone reading this. Deku is a fictional character, and everyone we know about him is extrapolated from source material, and his response to this event follows:

“Idiot! If I really jumped, you’d be charged with bullying me into suicide! Think before you speak!”

I think it’s unfair to apply our own projections as a universal rather than an interpersonal interpretation; that’s not to say that the interpretation of Bakudeku being abusive or having unbalanced power dynamics isn’t valid, or unfounded, but rather it’s not a universal interpretation, and it’s not canon. Deku is much more of a verbal thinker; in comparison, Bakugou is a visual one, at least in the format of the manga, and as such, we get various panels demonstrating his guilt, and how deep it runs. His dialogue and rapport with Deku has undeniably shifted, and it’s very clear that the way they treat each other has changed from when they were younger. Part of Bakugou’s growth is him gaining self awareness, and eventually, the strength to wield that. He knows what a fucked up little kid he was, and he carries the weight of that.

“At that moment, there were no thoughts in my head. My body just moved on its own.”

There’s a part of me that really, really disliked Bakugou going into it, partially because of what I’d seen and what I’d heard from a limited, outside perspective. I felt like Bakugou embodied the toxic masculinity (and to an extent, I still believe that) and if he won in some way, that felt like the patriarchy winning, so I couldn't help but want to muzzle and leash him before releasing him into the wild.

The reality, however, of his character in canon is that it isn’t very accurate to assume that he would be an abusive partner in the future, or that Midoryia has not forgiven him to some extent already, that the two do not care about each other or are singularly important, that they respect each other, or that the narrative has forgotten any of this.

Don’t mistake me for a Bakugou simp or apologist. I’m not, but while I definitely could also see Tododeku (and I have a soft spot for them, too, their dynamic is totally different and unique, and Todoroki is arguably treated as the tritagonist) and I’m ambivalent about Izuocha (which is written as cannoncially romantic) I do believe that canonically, Bakugou and Deku are framed as soulmates/character foils, Sasuke + Naruto, Kageyama + Hinata style. Their relationship is arguably the focus of the series. That’s not to undermine the importance or impact of Deku’s relationships with other characters, and theirs with him, but in terms of which one takes priority, and which one this all hinges on?

The manga is about a lot of things, yes, but if it were to be distilled into one relationship, buckle up, because it’s the Bakudeku show.

Power is Power: the Brain-Melting Process of Normalization and Toxic Masculinity

One of the ways in which the biopolitical prioritization of Quirks is exemplified within Hero society is through Quirk marriages. Endeavor partially rationalizes the abuse of his family through the creation of a child with the perfect quirk, a child who can be molded into the perfect Hero. People with powerful, or useful abilities, are ranked high on the hierarchy of power and privilege, and with a powerful ability, the more opportunities and avenues for success are available to them.

For the most part, Bakugou is a super spoiled, privileged little rich kid who is born talented but is enabled for his aggressive behavior and, as a child, cannot move past his many internalized complexes, treats his peers like shit, and gets away with it because the hero society he lives in either has this “boys will be boys” mentality, or it’s an example of the way that power, or Power, is systematically prioritized in this society. The hero system enables and fosters abusers, people who want power and publicity, and people who are genetically predisposed to have advantages over others. There are plenty of good people who believe in and participate in this system, who want to be good, and who do good, but that doesn’t change the way that the hero society is structured, the ethical ambiguity of the Hero Commission, and the way that Heroes are but pawns, idols with machine guns, used to sell merch to the public, to install faith in the government, or the current status quo, and reinforce capitalist propaganda. Even All Might, the epitome of everything a Hero should be, is drained over the years, and exists as a concept or idea, when in reality he is a hollow shell with an entire person inside, struggling to survive. Hero society is functionally dependent on illusion.

In Marxist terms: There is no truth, there is only power.

Although Bakugou does change, and I think that while he regrets his actions, what is long overdue is him verbally expressing his remorse, both to himself and Deku. One might argue that he’s tried to do it in ways that are compatible with his limited emotional range of expression, and Deku seems to understand this language implicitly.

I am of the opinion that the narrative is building up to a verbal acknowledgement, confrontation, and subsequent apology that only speaks what has gone unspoken.

That being said, Bakugou is a great example of the way that figures of authority (parents, teachers, adults) and institutions both in the real world and this fictional universe reward violent behavior while also leaving mental and emotional health — both his own and of the people Bakugou hurts — unchecked, and part of the way he lashes out at others is because he was never taught otherwise.

And by that, I’m referring to the ways that are to me, genuinely disturbing. For example, yelling at his friends is chill. But telling someone to kill themselves, even casually and without intent and then misinterpreting everything they do as a ploy to make you feel weak because you're projecting? And having no teachers stop and intervene, either because they are afraid of you or because they value the weight that your Quirk can benefit society over the safety of children? That, to me, is both real and disturbing.

Not only that, but his parents (at least, Mitsuki), respond to his outbursts with more outbursts, and while this is likely the culture of their home and I hesitate to call it abusive, I do think that it contributed to the way that he approaches things. Bakugou as a character is very complex, but I think that he is primarily an example of the way that the Hero System fails people.

I don’t think we can write off the things he’s done, especially using the line of reasoning that “He didn’t mean it that way”, because in real life, children who hurt others rarely mean it like that either, but that doesn’t change the effect it has on the people who are victimized, but to be absolutely fair, I don’t think that the majority of Bakudeku shippers, at least now, do use that line of reasoning. Most of them seem to have a handle on exactly how fucked up the Hero society is, and exactly why it fucks up the people embedded within that society.

The characters are positioned in this way for a reason, and the discoveries made and the development that these characters undergo are meant to reveal more about the fictional world — and, perhaps, our world — as the narrative progresses.

The world of the Hero society is dependent, to some degree, on biopolitics. I don’t think we have enough evidence to suggest that people with Quirks or Quirkless people place enough identity or placement within society to become equivalent to marginalized groups, exactly, but we can draw parallels to the way that Deku and by extent Quirkless people are viewed as weak, a deviation, or disabled in some way. Deviants, or non-productive bodies, are shunned for their inability to perform ideal labor. While it is suggested to Deku that he could become a police officer or pursue some other occupation to help people, he believes that he can do the most positive good as a Hero. In order to be a Hero, however, in the sense of a career, one needs to have Power.

Deviation from the norm will be punished or policed unless it is exploitable; in order to become integrated into society, a deviant must undergo a process of normalization and become a working, exploitable body. It is only through gaining power from All Might that Deku is allowed to assimilate from the margins and into the upper ranks of society; the manga and the anime give the reader enough perspective, context, and examples to allow us to critique and deconstruct the society that is solely reliant on power.

Through his societal privileges, interpersonal biases, internalized complexes, and his subsequent unlearning of these ideologies, Bakugou provides examples of the way that the system simultaneously fails and indoctrinates those who are targeted, neglected, enabled by, believe in, and participate within the system.

Bakudeku are two sides of the same coin. We are shown visually that the crucial turning point and fracture in their relationship is when Bakugou refuses to take Deku’s outstretched hand; the idea of Deku offering him help messes with his adolescent perspective in that Power creates a hierarchy that must be obeyed, and to be helped is to be weak is to be made a loser.

Largely, their character flaws in terms of understanding the hero society are defined and entangled within the concept of power. Bakugou has power, or privilege, but does not have the moral character to use it as a hero, and believes that Power, or winning, is the only way in which to view life. Izuku has a much better grasp on the way in which heroes wield power (their ideologies can, at first, be differentiated as winning vs. saving), and is a worthy successor because of this understanding, and of circumstance. However, in order to become a Hero, our hero must first gain the Power that he lacks, and learn to wield it.

As the characters change, they bridge the gaps of their character deficiencies, and are brought closer together through character parallelism.

Two sides of the same coin, an outstretched hand.

They are better together.

How to Kill Middle Schoolers, and Why We Should

I think it’s fitting that in the manga, a critical part of Bakugou’s arc explicitly alludes to killing the middle school version of himself in order to progress into a young adult. In the alternative covers Horikoshi released, one of them was a close up of Bakugou in his middle school uniform, being stabbed/impaled, with blood rolling out of his mouth. Clearly this references the scene in which he sacrifices himself to save Deku, on a near-instinctual level.

To me, this only cements Horikoshi’s intent that middle school Bakugou must be debunked, killed, discarded, or destroyed in order for Bakugou the hero to emerge, which is why people who do actually excuse his actions or believe that those actions define him into young adulthood don’t really understand the necessity for change, because they seem to imply that he doesn’t need/cannot reach further growth, and there doesn’t need to be a separation between the Bakugou who is, at heart, volatile and repressed the angry, and the Bakugou who sacrifices himself, a hero who saves people.

Plot twist: there does need to be a difference. Further plot twist: there is a difference.

In sacrificing himself for Deku, Bakugou himself doesn't die, but the injury is fatal in the sense that it could've killed him physically and yet symbolizes the selfish, childish part of him that refused to accept Deku, himself, and the inevitability of change. In killing those selfish remnants, he could actually become the kind of hero that we the reader understand to be the true kind.

That’s why I think that a lot of the people who stress his actions as a child without acknowledging the ways he has changed, grown, and tried to fix what he has broken don’t really get it, because it was always part of his character arc to change and purposely become something different and better. If the effects of his worst and his most childish self stick with you more, and linger despite that, that’s okay. But distilling his character down to the wrong elements doesn’t get you the bare essentials; what it gets you is a skewed and shallow version of a person. If you’re okay with that version, that is also fine.

But you can’t condemn others who aren’t fine with that incomplete version, and to become enraged that others do not see him as you do is childish.

Bakugou’s change and the emphasis on that change is canon.

Parallels in Abuse, EnemiesRivals-to-Lovers, and the Necessity of Redemption ft. ATLA’s Zuko

In real life, the idea that “oh, he must bully you because he likes you” is often used as a way to brush aside or to excuse the action of bullying itself, as if a ‘secret crush’ somehow negates the effects of bullying on the victim or the inability of the bully to properly process and manifest their emotions in certain ways. It doesn’t. It often enables young boys to hurt others, and provides figures of authority to overlook the real source of schoolyard bullying or peer review. The “secret crush”, in real life, is used to undermine abuse, justify toxic masculinity, and is essentially used as a non-solution solution.

A common accusation is that Bakudeku shippers jump on the pairing because they romanticize pairing a bully and a victim together, or believe that the only way for Bakugou to atone for his past would be to date Midoryia in the future. This may be true for some people, in which case, that’s their own preference, but based on my experience and what I’ve witnessed, that’s not the case for most.

The difference being is that as these are characters, we as readers or viewers are meant to analyze them. Not to justify them, or to excuse their actions, but we are given the advantage of the outsider perspective to piece their characters together in context, understand why they are how they are, and witness them change; maybe I just haven’t been exposed to enough of the fandom, but no one (I’ve witnessed) treats the idea that “maybe Bakugou has feelings he can’t process or understand and so they manifest in aggressive and unchecked ways'' as a solution to his inability to communicate or process in a healthy way, rather it is just part of the explanation of his character, something is needs to — and is — working through. The solution to his middle school self is not the revelation of a “teehee, secret crush”, but self-reflection, remorse, and actively working to better oneself, which I do believe is canonically reflected, especially as of recently.

In canon, they are written to be partners, better together than apart, and I genuinely believe that one can like the Bakudeku dynamic not by route of romanticization but by observation.

I do think we are meant to see parallels between him and Endeavor; Endeavor is a high profile abuser who embodies the flaws and hypocrisy of the hero system. Bakugou is a schoolyard bully who emulates and internalizes the flaws of this system as a child, likely due to the structure of the society and the way that children will absorb the propaganda they are exposed to; the idea that Quirks, or power, define the inherent value of the individual, their ability to contribute to society, and subsequently their fundamental human worth. The difference between them is the fact that Endeavor is the literal adult who is fully and knowingly active within a toxic, corrupt system who forces his family to undergo a terrifying amount of trauma and abuse while facing little to no consequences because he knows that his status and the values of their society will protect him from those consequences. In other words, Endeavor is the threat of what Bakugou could have, and would have, become without intervention or genuine change.

Comparisons between characters, as parallels or foils, are tricky in that they imply but cannot confirm sameness. Having parallels with someone does not make them the same, by the way, but can serve to illustrate contrasts, or warnings. Harry Potter, for example, is meant to have obvious parallels with Tom Riddle, with similar abilities, and tragic upbringings. That doesn’t mean Harry grows up to become Lord Voldemort, but rather he helps lead a cross-generational movement to overthrow the facist regime. Harry is offered love, compassion, and friends, and does not embrace the darkness within or around him. As far as moldy old snake men are concerned, they do not deserve a redemption arc because they do not wish for one, and the truest of change only occurs when you actively try to change.

To be frank, either way, Bakugou was probably going to become a good Hero, in the sense that Endeavor is a ‘good’ Hero. Hero capitalized, as in a pro Hero, in the sense that it is a career, an occupation, and a status. Because of his strong Quirk, determination, skill, and work ethic, Bakugou would have made a good Hero. Due to his lack of character, however, he was not on the path to become a hero; defender of the weak, someone who saves people to save people, who is willing to make sacrifices detrimental to themselves, who saves people out of love.

It is necessary for him to undergo both a redemption arc and a symbolic death and rebirth in order for him to follow the path of a hero, having been inspired and prompted by Deku.

I personally don’t really like Endeavor’s little redemption arc, not because I don’t believe that people can change or that they shouldn't at least try to atone for the atrocities they have committed, but because within any narrative, a good redemption arc is important if it matters; what also matters is the context of that arc, and whether or not it was needed. For example, in ATLA, Zuko’s redemption arc is widely regarded as one of the best arcs in television history, something incredible. And it is. That shit fucks. In a good way.

It was confirmed that Azula was also going to get a redemption arc, had Volume 4 gone on as planned, and it was tentatively approached in the comics, which are considered canon. She is an undeniably bad person (who is willing to kill, threaten, exploit, and colonize), but she is also a child, and as viewers, we witness and recognize the factors that contributed to her (debatable) sociopathy, and the way that the system she was raised in failed her. Her family failed her; even Uncle Iroh, the wise mentor who helps guide Zuko to see the light, is willing to give up on her immediately, saying that she’s “crazy” and needs to be “put down”. Yes, it’s comedic, and yes, it’s pragmatic, but Azula is fourteen years old. Her mother is banished, her father is a psychopath, and her older brother, from her perspective, betrayed and abandoned her. She doesn’t have the emotional support that Zuko does; she exploits and controls her friends because it’s all she’s been taught to do; she says herself, her “own mother thought [she] was a monster; she was right, of course, but it still [hurts]”. A parent who does not believe in you, or a parent that uses you and will hurt you, is a genuine indicator of trauma.

The writers understood that both Zuko and Azula deserved redemption arcs. One was arguably further gone than the other, but that doesn’t change the fact that they are both children, products of their environment, who have the time, motive, and reason to change.

In contrast, you know who wouldn’t have deserved a redemption arc? Ozai. That simply would not have been interesting, wouldn’t have served the narrative well, and honestly, is not needed, thematically or otherwise. Am I comparing Ozai to Endeavor? Basically, yes. Fuck those guys. I don’t see a point in Endeavor’s little “I want to be a good dad now” arc, and I think that we don’t need to sympathize with characters in order to understand them or be interested in them. I want Touya/Dabi to expose his abuse, for his career to crumble, and then for him to die.

If they are not challenging the system that we the viewer are meant to question, and there is no thematic relevance to their redemption, is it even needed?

On that note, am I saying that Bakugou is the equivalent to Zuko? No, lmao. Definitely not. They are different characters with different progressions and different pressures. What I am saying is that good redemption arcs shouldn’t be handed out like candy to babies; it is the quality, rather than the quantity, that makes a redemption arc good. In terms of the commentary of the narrative, who needs a redemption arc, who is deserving, and who does it make sense to give one to?

In this case, Bakugou checks those boxes. It was always in the cards for him to change, and he has. In fact, he’s still changing.

Give it to Me Straight. It’s Homophobic.

There does seem to be an urge to obsessively gender either Bakugou or Deku, in making Deku the ultra-feminine, stereotypically hyper-sexualized “woman” of the relationship, with Bakugou becoming similarly sexualized but depicted as the hyper-masculine bodice ripper. On some level, that feels vaguely homophobic if not straight up misogynistic, in that in a gay relationship there’s an urge to compel them to conform under heteronormative stereotypes in order to be interpreted as real or functional. On one hand, I will say that in a lot of cases it feels like more of an expression of a kink, or fetishization and subsequent expression of internalized misogyny, at least, rather than a genuine exploration of the complexity and power imbalances of gender dynamics, expression, and boundaries.

That being said, I don’t think that that problematic aspect of shipping is unique to Bakudeku, or even to the fandom in general. We’ve all read fan work or see fanart of most gay ships in a similiar manner, and I think it’s a broader issue to be addressed than blaming it on a singular ship and calling it a day.

One interpretation of Bakugou’s character is his repression and the way his character functions under toxic masculinity, in a society’s egregious disregard for mental and emotional health (much like in the real world), the horrifying ways in which rage is rationalized or excused due to the concept of masculinity, and the way that characteristics that are associated with femininity — intellect, empathy, anxiety, kindness, hesitation, softness — are seen as stereotypically “weak”, and in men, traditionally emasculating. In terms of the way that the fictional universe is largely about societal priority and power dynamics between individuals and the way that extends to institutions, it’s not a total stretch to guess that gender as a construct is a relevant topic to expand on or at least keep in mind for comparison.

I think that the way in which characters are gendered and the extent to which that is a result of invasive heteronormativity and fetishization is a really important conversation to have, but using it as a case-by-case evolution of a ship used to condemn people isn’t conductive, and at that point, it’s treated as less of a real concern but an issue narrowly weaponised.

Love in Perspective, from the East v. West

Another thing I think could be elaborated on and written about in great detail is the way that the Eastern part of the fandom and the Western part of the fandom have such different perspectives on Bakudeku in particular. I am not going to go in depth with this, and there are many other people who could go into specifics, but just as an overview:

The manga and the anime are created for and targeted at a certain audience; our take on it will differ based on cultural norms, decisions in translation, understanding of the genre, and our own region-specific socialization. This includes the way in which we interpret certain relationships, the way they resonate with us, and what we do and do not find to be acceptable. Of course, this is not a case-by-case basis, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who hold differing beliefs within one area, but speaking generally, there is a reason that Bakudeku is not regarded as nearly as problematic in the East.

Had this been written by a Western creator, marketed primarily to and within the West (for reference, while I am Chinese, but I have lived in the USA for most of my life, so my own perspective is undoubtedly westernized), I would’ve immediately jumped to make comparisons between the Hero System and the American police system, in that a corrupt, or bastardized system is made no less corrupt for the people who do legitimately want to do good and help people, when that system disproportionately values and targets others while relying on propaganda that society must be reliant on that system in order to create safe communities when in reality it perpetuates just as many issues as it appears to solve, not to mention the way it attracts and rewards violent and power-hungry people who are enabled to abuse their power. I think comparisons can still be made, but in terms of analysis, it should be kept in mind that the police system in other parts of the world do not have the same history, place, and context as it does in America, and the police system in Japan, for example, probably wasn’t the basis for the Hero System.

As much as I do believe in the Death of the Author in most cases, the intent of the author does matter when it comes to content like this, if merely on the basis that it provides context that we may be missing as foreign viewers.

As far as the intent of the author goes, Bakugou is on a route of redemption.

He deserves it. It is unavoidable. That, of course, may depend on where you’re reading this.

Stuck in the Sludge, the Past, and Season One

If there’s one thing, to me, that epitomizes middle school Bakugou, it’s him being trapped in a sludge monster, rescued by his Quirkless childhood friend, and unable to believe his eyes. He clings to the ideology he always has, that Quirkless means weak, that there’s no way that Deku could have grown to be strong, or had the capacity to be strong all along. Bakugou is wrong about this, and continuously proven wrong. It is only when he accepts that he is wrong, and that Deku is someone to follow, that he starts his real path to heroics.

If Bakudeku’s relationship does not appeal to someone for whatever reason, there’s nothing wrong with that. They can write all they want about why they don’t ship it, or why it bothers them, or why they think it’s problematic. If it is legitimately triggering to you, then by all means, avoid it, point it out, etc. but do not undermine the reality of abuse simply to point fingers, just because you don’t like a ship. People who intentionally use the anti tag knowing it’ll show up in the main tag, go after people who are literally minding their own business, and accuse people of supporting abuse are the ones looking for a fight, and they’re annoying as hell because they don’t bring anything to the table. No evidence, no analysis, just repeated projection.

To clarify, I’m referring to a specific kind of shipper, not someone who just doesn’t like a ship, but who is so aggressive about it for absolutely no reason. There are plenty of very lovely people in this fandom, who mind their own business, multipship, or just don’t care.

Calling shippers dumb or braindead or toxic (to clarify, this isn’t targeting any one person I’ve seen, but a collective) based on projections and generalizations that come entirely from your own impression of the ship rather than observation is...really biased to me, and comes across as uneducated and trigger happy, rather than constructive or helpful in any way.

I’m not saying someone has to ship anything, or like it, in order to be a ‘good’ participant. But inserting derogatory material into a main tag, and dropping buzzwords with the same tired backing behind it without seeming to understand the implications of those words or acknowledging the development, pacing, and intentional change to the characters within the plot is just...I don’t know, it comes across as redundant, to me at least, and very childish. Aggressive. Toxic. Problematic. Maybe the real toxic shippers were the ones who bitched and moaned along the way. They’re like little kids, stuck in the past, unable to visualize or recognize change, and I think that’s a real shame because it’s preventing them from appreciating the story or its characters as it is, in canon.

But that’s okay, really. To each their own. Interpretations will vary, preferences differ, perspectives are not uniform. There is no one truth. There are five seasons of the show, a feature film, and like, thirty volumes as of this year.

All I’m saying is that if you want to stay stuck in the first season of each character, then that’s what you’re going to get. That’s up to you.

This may be edited or revised.