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gallusrostromegalus · 2 years ago

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oh my god I am frothing at the mouth PLEASE tell us about how Unohana is SO WEIRD ACTUALLY

(her reveal is my favorite thing in the whole series and I was obsessed with Bleach for a good long time)

I love Unohana. She's magnificently insane and deliciously fun to write so far.

My take on AEIWAM Unohana is that fundamentally, she just wants to be happy.

Oh, that doesn't sound too nuts. I hear you say.

Yeah, but I also headcanon that she has ADHD. We joke a lot about it on this site, but if you have the good fortune to have functioning dopamine factories, allow me to explain the worst part of it, for me.

There's no passive happiness.

Most people, as I understand it, if left to their own devices without undue stressors like capitalism or any particular stimulation, tend to be able to feel pretty okay most of the time. Which fascinates me because if I am left alone without undue stressors but no stimulation, my malfunctioning dopamine factories will shut down and I will rapidly develop a terrible black depression and paranoia that life is cruel and I will never experience happiness again and also my appetite vanishes and sleep cycle collapses and I will end up mentally and physically distraught, sometimes in less than an hour.

So I've always got to be doing something, or The Horrors get me.

So imagine Unohana, and with a brain that wants to die if she gets bored... living in fantasy magical ancient japan. Not much to do, out in the early days of the soul society, besides being attatcked by monsters, or participating in warfare, or starving to death. the first two, at least, get the blood pumping, but the first is difficult to come by regularly, so as a young woman, the most interesting thing that happens to her on the regular is Mortal Combat.

And how exciting it is! Adrenaline! Dopamine! And on the rare occasions she meets a fellow combat enthusiast, she also gets one of the best things about ADHD- Recognition Responsive Euphoria. You know that great feeling you get at Con or meeting another person with your special interest and you guys just VIBE and it feels like you've been best friends for life in less than five minutes? Yeah, apparently Non-ADHD people don't get that.

So naturally, she develops her skill in combat, not in pursuit of Honor or The Art or something nebulous like, that, but in the simple Pursuit of Happiness. She gets very good at it, and a lot of people die.

But she starts getting... too good at it. The fights don't last, there's nobody willing- let alone able, to meet her on her level and the previous joy she felt fades and fades until she is once again left in the darkness.

Then, a Miracle happens! Some punk stabs her in the lung :)

Man, what an evening for her. Kills a hundred men with barely a stroke and there's no more joy in the world for her when suddenly some barely-legal scarecrow looking bastard with a raggedy sword he pulled out of someone else's corpse appears at the top of the pile of bodies and then goes Ape. Fucking. Shit. on her.

It's the most fun she's had in ages! He's strong and fast and his moves are inefficient but delightfully unpredictable and by the GODS the STAMINA! Alright, she might be 1,000 years his senior but in the soul society age really is just a number and she can't help but be charmed.

So she flirts back by nearly cutting his face off. This DELIGHTS him!

And there it is again, that sudden feeling of intimacy between like-minded individuals, only these two ships aren't passing in the night, there' here to make Titanic 2: Electric Boogaloo. They make eye contact, and know-they're just like me.

True Love is a wonderful thing.

It's also a great opportunity for a surprise thrust and she only sort of manages to block it, and despite the feeling of blood pooling in her lung, she returns the blow full across his chest.

She staggers back, coughing.

He, miraculously, sits up, coughing. He won't die if he can crawl off somewhere to lick his wounds, but he can't continue the fight either.

She stands up, teeth gritted through the pain, and sheathes Minazuki. "What's your name?" She asks. "So I may find you to fight again."

"Don't have one." he wheezes. "But I'll never forget yours."

She's had men spit that as a threat to her before. It sounds very different as a declaration of love.

"Yachiru." she says, trying to not cough up blood. "Unohana Yachiru."

A Year later, there's a problem.

Soul Society has a bit of a problem with lungs. They can make entire fake bodies for shinigami to travel the living world, but individual organs, especially lungs... never seem to transplant well. Perhaps it's the fact they're already dead.

Her left lung is "healed" in the sense that it no longer has extraneous holes in it, but... Godsdammit, she still has all the power but none of the stamina. Barely 10 minutes into a fight and she's wheezing worse than The Old Man. 20 minutes and her hands are starting to shake and she's seeing spots in her eyes because she can't breathe well enough to keep the oxygen in her veins. Her fights usually last seconds so functionally she's still one of the most powerful people in the afterlife but it's a far cry from where she was before.

She can no longer be the 11th division's Kenpachi. Hell, she can no longer be the woman she was before.

"Unless you figure out some new medical miracles, this is as healed as it's going to get." Explains the chief medical officer after yet another frustrating checkup.

"...If that's what it takes." She decides.

The next morning she re-enrolls in the Shinigami Academy, under the name Unohana Retsu. The sole change she makes to her appearence is to braid her hair down the front of her chest because people WILL ask about the scar, and she doesn't want to think about how badly she's letting down that warrior with no name.

Either she needs to learn how to get back to his level, or find a new rival and learn to heal them to actually last the 20 minutes she has, or she'll die.

She studies.

To her vast surprise, bodies are actually fascinating. She'd previously seen that there were lots of interesting organs inside people but now learning what they are and how they work and the fact that the human body is already astonishingly death-resistant compared to most animals AND a carefully balanced meat sculpture minutes away from catastrophic failure at all times delights. She learns about the extreme ways humans can survive and the bizarrely mundane ways they can die, and she starts to form an idea- not an image, not a philosophy per se- but a working theory of how to keep someone alive and moving for as long and far as they will go, and what they need to stay upright.

This idea shines so brightly that it can keep that terrible darkness away.

The century practically flies by, and one night she stays up manually pumping the mechanism on a device used to keep the also-failing lungs of a young boy going after the power goes out. He's been blessed by A God that he's lived as long as he has, but even Gods can fuck up sometimes and she effectively has to breathe for him for twelve hours until the God gets its shit back together and he can breathe under his own power again.

"Hell of a fight you put in, keeping him alive." says one of her colleagues, collapsing beside her out in the 4th division medical garden where all the doctors go to smoke.

Retsu slowly exhales the smoke, fatigued but still coming down from the high of success. She cocks her head. Her body aches and her mind races and her heart thrills, just like- "I guess it was. " she realizes. "Interesting fight, going 12 hours in the ring with a dying child and winning because he walked away at the end." She laughs, and hands him the cigarette to share.

"You weirdo." he colleague laughs. He's far too young to remember when she was Yachiru. Most of them are these days, and it's a weird sort of peaceful anonymity and personal joke. "You weren't fighting the kid. If we were actually allowed to fight patients, I'd've stabbed the Kuchki hypochondriac decades ago." he grumbles, taking his own drag.

She snorts. "Who was I fighting then?"

"Death?" smoke billows out as he laughs, like it's the most obvious thing in the world.

She freezes. Oh. Oh. That's why she likes this so much. She's gone from fighting mere men to the one opponent she knows she can win battles with, but never the war, and who will defeat her personally someday.

"Are. Are you crying?" he asks, a little worried.

"I- yes." She laughs, tears streaming down her face. "I just fell in love all over again."

"Ouch." he nods sympathetically, offering her the cigarette back. "Who with?"

"Death's own Angel, apparently." She giggles, feeling positively prepubescent with this crush.

And thus she goes on, for centuries, learning everything there is to know about bodies and minds and how the two keep each other going and the ways she can help. She gets very good at it, and a many more people do not die.

But there is a special, secret place in her heart for that nameless warrior that defeated her in battle, and made her stronger than every before.

Nearly 1,000 years after she stopped being Kenpachi, she is supervising the annual "see if you can kill the captain" tournament. Her colleague Kaname is there, a walking anxiety disorder with undoubtedly real but strangely hard to diagnose phantom pains, but he's still easily in her top 10 coworkers of all time because he made her a new medical record filing system so functional they were actually able to recataloge three millennia of medical records into a usable format in under a decade. He can come twitching into her office any time he likes, especially if it gets her that mass vaccination process for the Rukongai he's been biting The Old Man's heels for.

Then

as suddenly as he had appeared the first time,

He's back.

He's older now and larger, having matured into a spectacular bastard, but there's no mistaking that cutting edge on his reiatsu (which, oh, that has gotten much, much stronger since last time) or that scar running down his face as he turns from where he had just cleft the previous Kenpachi in twain, and stares out into the crowd in the shower of blood, challenging anyone to do something about it. Hell, even when Yamamoto appears to congratulate him on his promotion, Death's own angel's first reaction is to turn to fight the old man without hesitation.

He then promptly picks three different fights with four captains in under five minutes, tells Yamamoto to shove the job up his ass, imply he's had a WILD collection of vocations in the last millennium and furthermore, he has to get home to his daughter.

...Named Yachiru.

Hilariously, Unohana is only having the second weirdest time about this here, because Kaname and Kenpachi are, somehow, even weirder than she is.

#AEIWAM #An Elephant Is Warm And Mushy #Everyone in this fic is a freak and I'm having a great time

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lowkeyrobin · 8 months ago

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Hello lovely! I'm back with another request 😰 I was just wondering if you could do the handsome bros with an s/o with tattoos? Thank you! And as always I hope you have a great rest of your night/day🫶

ooooo yes of course!!! I loved doing this w quackity so doing this w them is gonna be fun :) ; and have a good day/night to you too 🫶 ; if you came back and see no tubbo, I don't write for him anymore and I'm slowly deleting stuff w him in it + if you request this group, there won't be any tubbo

HANDSOME BROS ; tattoos for days

includes ; tommyinnit, ranboo, badlinu

warnings ; language, talk about needles

masterlist

TOMMYINNIT

bro the sleeves you got? holy shiet he's so swooned

always complimenting your tats & trying to get you to show them off

if you have any neck or back tattoos... good lord it's over, he can't not stare at them 24/7/365

he also likes coloring the hollow/non colored ones in with washable markers

you're a walking coloring book for him, he's gotta be moving all the time there is no break, even if he's chilled out

always taking sneaky pics of your tats up close LMAO

you take him to one (1) appt for a new tattoo and he's literally cringing in fear for you

like fuck you mean that's what you gotta deal with for the next six hours?? that needle is huge wth

he'll gladly help you with caring for it after though, but not without complaining about it all feeling weird on his fingers

"you better never suggest matching tattoos, there's no way I'm ever doing that"

RANBOO

again, you're a walking coloring book to them

definitely colors the same tattoos a million times and has a washcloth nearby for erasing lmao

also loves showing your tattoos off online and stuff

need a hand to squeeze when you're getting another? he's there, squeeze as hard as you need too lmao

relatively calm about the needles but are they getting one? hell no

theyre absolutely obsessed with any tats on your arms or neck, always zoning out looking at them lol

he tends to send you those tik tok reddit stories, mostly the tattoo fails ones 💀

"Jesus fucking christ how can you make a blowout that bad?"

"the tattoo wasn't even good in the first place either. cut it all off, start over"

they also like to hear you rant about tattoo stuff and recommendations, soft spots etc, not that they're getting any tattoos soon, they just like to learn shit

FREDDIE BADLINU

absolutely loves showing them off online because he's so proud, like this is such a fucking cool way to express yourself??? he's jealous bc no way he's getting a tattoo anytime soon

he's normal about the needles as long as it's not near him

he likes coming along w you when you get new tats because the place you go to has a little art station and you know the person who owns it and is totally fine with him using their art stuff

so while you're getting some fresh ink, Freddie's drawing with professional level utensils and having fun lmao

also the type to color your tattoos in when he's bored. he seems like he has the random urge to color but doesn't own coloring books because he'd never use them

also makes a playlist that reminds him of all your tattoos, one for each specific one and another for the fact you have tattoos and look badass

always showing you tattoos from pinterest like "omg that's so cool" and "dude color is insane"

also uses a sharpie to draw on your fingers when he's bored or a little anxious

and there's so many pictures of you/you together where you can see the sharpie as well 💔🫶

#lowkeyrobin #mcyt x reader #mcyt x gn reader #mcyt oneshot #mcyt preferences #tommyinnit oneshot #tommyinnit x reader #ranboo oneshot #ranboo x reader #freddie badlinu x reader #badlinu x reader #gn reader #gender neutral reader #they/them reader #handsome bros x reader

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frictionpress · 18 days ago

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Writing Advice: Is It a Craft Issue or a Story Issue?

Reposting this piece of advice from my substar!

My evergreen advice to all writers: learn to understand the difference between writing and storytelling, so it’s not as upsetting when they don’t perfectly mesh for you. Writing is a craft, a tool to be used however you like. Storytelling is an art form that you can express with writing.

(This applies to everyone whether you’re writing sfw novels or insane toxic yaoi.)

Writing is an inherently slow craft. You can only really do that as fast as your brain and body allows you to do. There are rules to learn that will help you, like grammar and structure, and tricks you can teach yourself so prose feels fresher, but writing is a lot like hiking. You’ll get there when you get there, one step at a time.

Telling a story is difficult because you have to marry your craft of choice with the art of storytelling. The same is true for comics and plays and video games and novels. If you’re able to identify the difference between a craft issue and a story issue, it will help you so much! This is how people can more effectively self-edit.

I often think about stories like a graph with both X and Y axes. Craft and art should theoretically be functioning together to get your optimal results. That’s a real fuckin’ boring way to talk about the beauty of art, but you need to work with the tools you have in order to get to that “holy shit that was so cool” moment. You need to understand the difference between the failure of a boring sentence and the failure of a boring character. Good craft can only get you so far if your storytelling instincts haven’t been honed enough to recognize how best to implement these tools you have.

Is this scene not working because the prose isn’t doing a good job of conveying the emotions of the story? Or is it that the content of this conversation doesn’t function as a good bridge between this scene’s emotions and the last? You need to see both levels to diagnose problems. The writing supports the story! These two things can harmonize through style, but they can also work against each other when you’re unsure about either element.

In my experience, it is a thousand times easier to fix prose/craft issues than story issues, so I always advise people to figure out their story issues first. I’m also a writer who tends to let stories evolve as I write them, but even I have notes and outlines. I have a vision for what it is I want to accomplish. Sometimes I have to do some writing to figure out the best way to build that story, but I always know what I’m trying to build. I know the skeleton. The way the muscle and fat sits on the body is much easier to adjust than the bone structure beneath the skin.

If I’m writing a scene that I know is important to the narrative, but the prose is coming out too weak to realize my original vision, I will simply leave it in its minimized form, continue on to a scene I’m better prepared to write, and then come back to shore up that weak scene so it can better match what’s around it. Editing is easier when you have those highs and lows to work off of. It’s a very good skill to be able to say, “this part of the piece is weaker, I’ll come back and fix it later” and not drive yourself mad trying to perfect it right then and there when you don’t even have the end written.

If I begin writing a scene and I have a character opening their mouth to say something important, and then I have no clue what they need to say that’s going to solve the plot problem, I will stop and go back to my story notes to better understand the emotions I’m conjuring. This is a moment that I don’t want to skip over and come back to, because it is substantive! This line may get referenced later on by another character. I don’t want to write more load bearing scenes reliant on this one if I don’t know how this particular scene is actually carrying the emotional weight. Substantive problems are far more likely to create more problems down the line if you don’t straighten them out.

I am deeply, deeply against perfectionism in every form. Perfectionism kills art, it stalls your process, it gives you art blocks, it makes you miserable with impossible standards. Stories get written one word at a time! They are simply too long and too much work to get correct on your first try, and pretending like anyone can be perfect on their first try is doing yourself and literally all other artists a disservice. Which is why it’s super important to figure out what kind of problems your piece is presenting with.

There’s a time to just keep writing, and there’s a time to stop and consider what you’re doing. Boring prose does not need to be addressed right away. That can wait. Oftentimes, I find it’s way easier to punch up past scenes after I’ve finished a first draft, because I suddenly have clarity on how the emotional weight is being distributed across the whole piece. I know what comes up at the end, so I can pull those threads back to the beginning. I know which scenes are unbalanced and which scenes are strong on their own.

My general rule of thumb is this:

Is this a substantive-story problem? It’s okay to stop and figure that out.

Is this a craft-prose problem? Put it off. Fix that in the editing stage when you have a completed first draft that can support its own weight.

Plenty of people, myself included, will reread pieces when we come back to them, to re-familiarize ourselves with the piece before starting on the new prose. When I do this, I intentionally limit myself so that I’m not rereading the entire piece every time. I will read roughly a page at most leading up to where construction stopped. I don’t want the new prose to feel totally out of alignment, but I also can’t agonize over every single detail. There is so much work in writing that you can safely put off for later!

For first drafts, it’s good to focus on the parts that make a piece sing: the characterization, the action, the emotion. Figure out your full vision for the piece, get a good skeleton down, and then go back in and use your craft tools to elevate the writing to match the story.

#writing advice #craft vs story #writing craft #storytelling

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ventismacchiato · 2 years ago

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˗ˏˋ balladeer & friends ´ˎ˗

scaramouche x g!n reader

scaramouche — film major, childe got him into streaming and everyone thirsted over his hands when his camera accidentally pointed towards them, gained popularity from being in childe’s videos first, uses the name kunikuzushi irl so nobody figures out his online persona, goes by scara online, horror game fanatic, loves story games and gets rlly invested in them, ppl love his voice and snarky attitude.

childe — business major, kinda like mr beast and throws a lot of money away in streams for entertainment. just lookin for a good time and has scara in the back of his videos but always slaps a giant eggplant emoji on his face to not expose him. already had a following because of the insanity of his videos as time went on and gave scara a jumpstart, closest friend of scara #chiscara4lyfe

heizou — criminology major, started streaming as a side project for class and then never stopped, known for his conspiracy videos like those game theory ones and loves mystery games but always figures out the ending, also does those buzzfeed unsolved/watcher kinda videos, SUPER flirty to his chat omfg so many edits of him saying the most outlandish shit, joins kazuha’s streams and attempts to flirt via donations

tighnari — botanic science major, has a bunch of compilations like “tighnari roasting his friends for 10 mins straight” very blunt with his chat and will judge them. does those judging my viewers confessions videos a lot, will play story based games solely to judge the writing, does garden tours during streams and his fans like to send him rose petals through his p.o. box, has a long geoguesser streak

albedo — art major, art streams and youtuber, does a lot of drawing tutorials and known for his unique art style and talent. lots of edits since he’s rlly attractive and has a sexy voice, has a segment where he lets his fans send in their hw and he does it for them when he’s bored, he and tighnari get shipped a lot for their compatible personalities, his sister klee streams with him when she visits and he lets her win in all the games and tells his chat to keep quiet about it

behind the lens !

masterlist — prev | next

teyvat university, junior year of college, age 20-21

everyone lives off campus together

scara doesn’t have a face icon for now cus he’s a faceless streamer he’s so sexy and mysterious

both groups tend to collab but usually stick to their own, kinda like content houses but less douchey lmfao

tighnari is so sexy but pretend he isn’t a furry in this modern setting ☠️

synopsis - , better known as STARDUST, and BALLADEER have always been in competition for the top streamer spot on twitch, which is especially impressive since the two of you have never shown your faces. you’ve never been on good terms, constantly one-upping each other in matches and getting into petty arguments on twitter, causing your fans to also dislike each other. that’s until BALLADEER does a face reveal that breaks the internet with his good looks…which makes you realize it’s the same guy you went on a date with last night. the type of date that made you crave to see him again. the only problem was he didn’t know you were STARDUST and he was way different behind the lens than he portrayed himself online to you. should you keep your identity a secret to salvage the relationship or just let him go?

author’s notes - planned out the au for the most part will start it when i feel like it 🤗

taglist is closed — @captainzep @elysiumarchieve @plinkuro @sakkakuu-squared @eliqusgenma @vuvulia @kunikuzushiit @heehooyeslol @stxrgxzxr @lilneps @uma-umie @lynnforever @mitsukifilms @caesars-bubbles @wheneverthesunrise @its-like-twilight @kazuhalvrr @camiluvsreading @cloudxemoji @thenightsflower @p1utto @caesars-bubbles @lxry-chxn @orbitscara @court-jester-stuff @lauragalliart @veyu002 @kaeyas-eyepatch-69 @leathernourishingshoepolish @satowaluverr @lexlapis @drunkwithfever @remiikoe @exhaustedcommunist @vincanzu @just-here-reading @amoguz @ainlaw @ovaliz @depressedwhore @kitsuvil @whatamidoing89 @bunny-x-sakura @scarasaver @kazioli @xiaosoneandonly @vinskypuff @cridtiins @cherrybeomgyu @asukahiriko [1/3]

name in bold means i can’t tag you

#genshin impact #genshin fluff #genshin imagines #genshin smau #genshin impact x reader #genshin impact headcanons #scaramouche x gender neutral reader #scaramouche x reader smau #scaramouche smau #scaramouche x reader #scaramouche x you #scaramouche x y/n #scaramouche x oc #kunikuzushi smau #kunikuzushi x you #kunikuzushi x reader #behind the lens smau

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surgepricing · 7 months ago

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RWBY Final Thoughts: Legacy

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

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

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

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

The Showrunners

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

F, N, D, M

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

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

RWBY��s Fandom

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Legacy

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

Bumbleby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bigotry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Good Days

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

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

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

The Scandals

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monty Oum

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That powerful phrase we all associate with Monty.

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

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

Snipped here.

#rwde #rwby

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keresnotceres · 1 year ago

Text

MW2 CHARACTERS: School AU

[sfw] cw(s): none !!! As a girlie who has been reading fanfiction for god knows how long, it was inevitable that I came through with a High/Secondary School AU. As a reminder, I don’t know shit abt the British school system so we’re going with my experiences with the American public school system. enjoy dovies <3

Ghost is that one upperclassman in every single one of your co-grade classes that just sits there. He doesn’t say a damn word and you don’t even see him writing down any notes, but somehow, he has the best grades in the whole fucking school. Principal’s honor roll, scholarship recognization galore.

It takes so long for you to work up the courage to talk to him and ask him for help on an assignment and when he admits he doesn’t know they had an assignment to do, you’re a bit dumbfounded. You realize that he quite literally just sits there and vibes the entire time. He proceeds to turn back to the window and stare out of it.

Eventually he warms up to you, though. It takes, like, three months of pestering him until he actively begins conversations with you and you find yourself with a very stoic cheat sheet. He has kept all of his tests and is perfectly fine with just giving you them bc what are morals???

Gaz is the local “i know him but we aren’t friends” kid. Literally everybody knows his name, he’s on the school’s soccer (football, i guess) team and is relatively well known as a nice person, but he only has a few close friends. His grades are also insanely high, you don’t understand how he manages to ace every test while also spending most of his time practicing sports.

He’s the type of person to forget a pencil, however, and usually ends up leaning over to whoever is next to him and asking for one. He usually gives it back, unless it’s someone he doesn’t particularly like. When he tries to give it back to you and you just tell him to keep it, he likes you automatically.

He’s always inviting you to watch his games after the two of you get closer. He also sits with you during shared study halls or lunches regardless of if you or he has other friends in the lunch. Gaz is also the type of person to lean over and ask if you wanna share the copy of an assignment document or swap essays to proofread.

Soap is absolutely the really loud jock kid that people either really like or really hate, and there’s just no in-between (i’m so sorry Foap 😭). Despite this, he’s actually one of those really nice sport boys that will start punching if someone disrespects his friends. He’s also in an abundance of art classes.

In class you can see him scribbling down notes until he gets bored and starts just doodling in his notebook, tuning out the lecture. However, if your science teacher decides today is not a teaching day and puts on something like Bill Nye or The Magic School Bus, he is enraptured. Is also the person to quietly chant “Bill! Bill! Bill! Bill!” during the theme song. Used to hate the Amoeba Sisters until he binged their videos before his Biology final lol.

You start being friends with him on complete accident after you help him with a question on a pop quiz. He gave you puppy eyes! How could you refuse! He proceeds to talk to you the next day like the two of you are best friends and you are now stuck with him until graduation. But hey! You basically have a bodyguard now.

Price is an Honors English and AP Literature teacher through and through. He originally wanted to be a history teacher, but the English position was open and he took it with little complaint. He’s absolutely the teacher you can launch into tangents for the entire class and will take half a point off of your essays for misusing a comma.

If you're his favorite student, he tends to grade your FRQs and other assignments much harsher than he would others, but it ends with you having well rounded essay skills afterwards and acing your assignments later in the year. Will let you hang out in his room during your study halls and is always open to helping you on assignments if you ask.

Hangs thank you notes from students on his walls, has a wild collection of them and shows them off any time another teacher asks him about them. Has cried reading some from students he liked having in his classes.

Laswell is a Geometry, Pre-Calculus, and Calculus professor. Idc what u think she is absolutely a math teacher and would absolutely have a doctorate. People who don't like math probably go into her class also not liking her, but come out at the end of the year wanting to be in her class next year.

If you're one of her favorite students, she absolutely gives you little notes on your graded tests like 'good job :)' and always says she's proud of you if your grades improve during the year. She also lets you and your friends eat lunch in her room because she understands why you'd rather be in a math room than the cafeteria.

Has never been seen without a coffee during the first four periods of the day and a random beverage during the last three. She always has a drink with her and it's become a bit of a game between a few of her students. Sometimes she'll give someone who asks a drink as well. A student she particularly liked tried to pay her to bring them coffee; she gave them their money back and brought them a coffee.

Nikolai is a history teacher that also coaches the school golf team. And yes, golf team; that man radiates golf energy and I cannot be told otherwise. He doesn't understand the kids' obsession with things like Kahoot, but makes them because it keeps kids engaged with the class and mostly keeps grades up.

Being one of Nikolai's favorite students is hard if you don't golf, but if you are a favorite, he tends to give you extensions of assignments if you're struggling to find time/motivation. Also will give you candy under the table if you win a Kahoot, or if you visit him during a study hall he will also give you candy. He gives out Smarties (the American version) because he thinks the name is funny.

If you show interest in learning Russian and ask him how to roll your Rs or how to pronounce the Cyrillic letters, he will automatically like you more than the others. As long as he feels like you're earnestly learning it out of interest and not just to make him like you, that is. If you already know Russian he'll like you anyway. Sometimes it's nice to speak his native tongue.

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zuzuzuko · 4 months ago

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What do you think of Gates of Gotham? Interactions, the ending, you know?

I generally really like Gates of Gotham. I think the writing is really well done. There are a lot of themes and conversations that happen earlier in the story the come back in at the end of the story which is nice to see. I do love a parallel...

(the rest under a cut because I talk too much and post too many panels)

Also love how Dick doubts himself as Batman throughout this story and is basically constantly telling himself that Bruce would have solved this already. I love Dickbats so much.

Love love love this conversation with Dick and Cass (and how the writer comes back to it at the end and ties it in)

Batman: Gates of Gotham #4

I think Damian is especially well done in Gates of Gotham.

Batman: Gates of Gotham #2

Damian feeling the need to say mean things to his siblings because he's insecure about his own place in the family always makes me go insane (in a good way). Bruce... you're giving them all complexes...

"I have to admit- I'm not impressed" is such an excellent Damian-ism

Also Cass is SO over his shit here it's so funny.. just look at her face 😭 she really said "i'm walking away before I punch you" huh

Batman: Gates of Gotham #2

Tim and Cass commiserating about Damian over the comms is so funny. "yeah he's irritating sometimes but we can't kill him because killing is bad 🙄"

Batman: Gates of Gotham #2

This part where Damian sets off the deadman switch of the bomb and Cass saves him and he's so mad about it. This is peak Damian to me. Whenever Damian feels the need to prove himself (normally to Bruce even when Bruce isn't even there) that tends to be when he makes mistakes. He gets so set on trying to fix an unfixable problem (bomb exploding) that he almost gets blown up. We love an overachiever...

But this moment versus the last issue where he recognizes the deadman switch on the bomb and he and Cass work together to save everyone. It's just... so good.

Batman: Gates of Gotham #3

This is one of my favorite Tim and Damian interactions. Also I felt like this was just good writing. It's a way to show how Damian is feeling to the readers who didn't read-between-the-lines during the Damian and Cass interaction but without making anything out of character and actually spelling it out.

I think the Tim and Damian vibes are done really well. Like they still make comments at each other but they work together and I think it shows a lot of growth from when they met. Not gonna post like the full three pages where they save each other again but that is such a fun moment to me.

Batman: Gates of Gotham #5

Very funny thing to say for someone who has ALSO blown up the batboat, TIM.

As far as the art: I liked the art most of the time but there are some panels/pages where it looks kind of weird and I don't know how to describe it.

My only real criticism is that I generally think the "oh the bad guy is just crazy" thing is such a boring cop out. I wish there had been a more satisfying conclusion than that but other than that I have always really enjoyed this comic.

#comic panels #ask #armed-with-a-waffle-iron #damian wayne #tim drake #cassandra cain

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horizon-verizon · 16 days ago

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Sorry, but I really have to say it, I can’t take it anymore.

A lot of anons you’ve been getting and answering are so incredibly annoying and disingenuous. It’s not a you problem, it’s those weird people. Aside from the fact that they clearly did not read the pov chapters of the characters they hate, they also tie themselves into tight knots because of theories not rooted in canon. Drawing half-assed parallels between characters that don’t have anything in common, coming up with baseless theories and then foaming at the mouth about them as if they’ve been confirmed by George himself. This is weird. Obsessive, even.

While disheartening, it’s understandable when people start hating characters because of said character’s annoying and vocal fans. But let’s not pretend that just because you can come up with theories where you villainise a character or other to justify your weird hatred that it somehow makes sense.

And to be clear, I’m not saying you can’t have absolute favourites, that you can’t be ride of die for a character. You can even ignore any other pov but the one of your fav. I have my favourites as well, it’s normal. But how can you talk stupid shit about a character that you don’t care to read about? You call the antis of your favourite “brainless”, but you act just like them towards other characters and their fans. This is called hypocrisy, btw, and you’re contributing to the disease in this fandom just as much as them.

Truly, I don’t want to be rude or whatever, and this is not meant as an attack to you personally. I’ve just seen like 5 of those insane anons in the asoiaf tag and I had to say something. I hope I did not somehow hurt you, though, tumblr user horizon-verizon, that was not my intention. I wish you a very good day.

Since I don't know exactly which "antis of Dany" you're saying I'm acting like, I don't know if I can take this ask's points to heart, anon. I was under the impression that I've been fair to Jon Snow, Helaena, Alicent, Catelyn, any of these characters that you could be saying that I am not very fair towards; the last Jon snow post (at least my own answer) was about him not being TPTWP...bc he isn't. It's quite obvious in-text. If that anon who said that he was boring offended you and you were offended that I didn't say that they were being too extreme, I can't really help you there. I still said in that post that Jon was important...just not in the way some people try to say. And yes, i still read his PoV chapters, I have said that I just tend to read Dany's and reread them more often. Not that I never read him, that's a gross exaggeration.

Jon Snow is not and never will be Azor Ahai. And never was/never will be TPTWP. This is fact, not "opinion". It's not about "favorites", it's about reading the books and understanding patterns of thoughts and references and reading mythologies and seeing patterns of human behavior within the text. And this isn't "extremism", it is simply reading the books. (As if I ever tried to tail Dany antis in the first place?)

If not about Jon and about how I refute TG's numerous and various points about Jaehaera or Helaena or Alicent, do you expect me to agree with their factually incorrect statements? you know that some even think Jaehaera was supposed to be Azor Ahai or GRRM means to invalidate his entire years worth of writing Daenaera to be mother to Aegon III's kids, right? Am I supposed to say nothing to these egregious absurdities?

All to say that since you still remain vague about what exactly your point is coming from and which character(s) you think I'm being grossly unfair to, I can't really take your points under any advisement. It certainly makes it look like I don't bring up material to back up my claims for all my thoughts about ASoIaF and its fandom, which is certainly not the case. You may look under my "example of green stan nonsense" to see what people say from their own posts.

#asoiaf asks to me #fandom critical #asoiaf fandom #fandom debate #hotd fandom #jon snow #the greens #jaehaera targaryen #helaena targaryen #alicent hightower #fire and blood characters #agot characterization #agot #fire and blood #asoiaf #awoiaf

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stealerofthe2ndbraincell · 1 month ago

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ask and you shall receive: top 5 inside n9 episodes please!

Thank you!!! I had so much fun thinking this up.

This kind of involves more my top 5 favourites then the top 5 best, cause there are some episodes that I think are genuinely excellent and some of the best of all time, but that I wouldn't call a favourite because I often have a really hard time rewatching them (e.g. Wise Owl<333 which I absolutely adore).

5. How Do You Plead

God it was difficult to pick between this and two others for this slot, but I think I'm happy with my decision. Up until Steve appears as the LITERAL Devil, it really feels like a two act between Urban and Webster and the dynamic is written so well. Their dialogue flows well, Reece and Jacobi are excellent in this and the little fake court get up is one of my favourite bits in the whole show.

Urban is utterly fascinating and my favourite fella here but I always feel like slightly out of depth figuring him out. It's superb.

THE LIGHTING DIRECTION IS INSANE ON THIS and I love it. The shift is done so subtly and so well. This and Mother's Ruin are some of my favourite examples of night time scenes that are still kept realistically dark but also still very visually interesting. That whole turquoise (?) hue near the end is perfect.

Also Steve as the literal Devil cannot be mentioned enough. Excellent.

4. Diddle Diddle Dumpling

This is one I always really liked, but only ended up loving when I was showing a friend the show for the first time. It became their favourite so quickly and being able to watch it with them and hear them talk about it really made me reflect on it and holy shit it's excellent.

David's spiral is so well done, so well paced and builds to such a devastating conclusion.

I'm a sucker for symmetry irl and this episode delivers so hard on that for such good thematic reasons.

Everything about this one feels like it's a decision that's been laid out with such care and thought with the careful use of Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons" really tying the atmosphere together, if that makes sense.

3. The Last Weekend

Despite how much I've talked about this episode before, it's really hard, for some reason, to articulate why I love it as much as I do.

The rewatch value of it is insane and the twist really recontextualises practically every interaction. I love the character writing so much and honestly Chas is one of my favourite written characters in the whole series.

The 5 stages of grief are included very tastefully in my opinion with the part of Mollie deconstructing really prepping you (imo) for that incoming twist and for who or where the stages are applicable for. Elements such as that, the lack of "I love you" reciprocation, the constant bug shots etc. feel like they're so in your face obvious on rewatch, but they really slip by so well and I have to applaud that.

Finally, the ending is fucking visceral and I don't think I need to hark on how excellently acted that was for both.

2. Zanzibar

I love me some Shakespeare.

I feel like a sort of Shakespeare pastiche like this could easily come across as pretentious or boring, and this script refuses to be either of those at every opportunity.

To me, this is probably the most charming episode of the show, and it's so self-aware of what it is, which only makes it better. It takes itself just about seriously enough to be entertaining and to throw these more ridiculous of tropes from that period in with the reckless abandon it needs.

The set design in it is also really well done. It feels both taken straight out of some theatre production and close to a typical posh hotel environment.

It's also a lot more raunchier than I remembered it being. That piss sublot (?) was nuts.

Also Henry is so <3333

Cold Comfort

This is one of the earliest episodes I tend to introduce people with both because I think it's a great episode to introduce some very consistently good elements of the show as a whole and so I can yap about it as soon as possible. I have rewatched this one so many times, and I lost count so long ago.

The method of filming is absolutely excellent, just generally and for that setting specifically. For example, I think that kind of cold and objective forward-facing camera really helps establish Andy's lack of preparedness, and it's an underrated Steve performance all around, imo.

George is also probably my original favourite character because, GOD there's so much going on with him and they peel back just enough that it's almost satisfying but you're still left with a lot to chew on. I am so not normal about him. I need to put him in one of those bug cages kids use to observe butterfly metamorphosis.

Also, a bonus silly reason is that it made me like the song Shine. I hated it for years after it was one of the songs I had practice constantly for a dreadful school play back in primary school and this episode finally broke my hatred of it. (Haven't stopped hating Fix You by Coldplay yet though lol).

#hopefully for that made some sense #thank you sm for the ask!! :)#i talked about direction way more than i thought i would lol #inside no 9 #in9 #how do you plead #urban bedford #diddle diddle dumpling #the last weekend #chas gregory #joe maddison #zanzibar #cold comfort

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evilmagician430 · 1 year ago

Text

boyfriends but awesome (and instead of a webtoon its an independent webcomic)

design notes and 3ds flipnote concept art below the cut

general notes abt their designs and what the comic would be like in my head:

>they dont have names in this version cause i think that was one of the good things they did originally. i imagine they refer to eachother as "that one" "the other guy" etc like the dhmis guys when talking about eachother.

>they are not in a defined romantic relationship with eachother because i think thats more interesting, the polyamory aspect would be kept (im not polyamorous btw so im not gonna try to write an established polycule) but its more vague in that they all kind of have a thing for eachother but also hate eachother and want to rip eachothers guts out. and theyre all roommates and bffs. if you asked them what they were the answer you would get would be "friends who are boys". they are the height of male friendship, hate, love, etc.

>instead of focusing on sexualizing them in strange ways and doing boring moe shit it would lean into the comedy aspect BUT NO MEMES OR LATE 2010S SLANG !! this was something i could not fucking stand when reading the original (if you couldnt tell by now i did used to read boyfriends. it was a regrettable time and in redesigning and overhauling them i hope to make something good out of this wasted period of my life) like even when it was current boyfriends always made memes feel.. out of place. like as soon as they said it it wasnt cool anymore. it was the unfunniest shit ever

>i wanted the characters to look less WHITE and also more distinct from eachother and also less young cause in the original its like the same twink 3 times in different haircolors and their Chad. said chad is the best character only by way of not being annoying. so yeah i'll be more specific later but none of them are white and i gave them all different eye and nose shapes and distinct physical traits and bodies etc.

>mostly i just did this cause the "nerd" and "goth" ones piss me off so bad like thats not real. thats not a nerd thats just a nondescript waify femboy with glasses. thats not a goth, thats a tiktok eboy. and i felt bad for jock being trapped in this comic. and the prep one i feel nothing towards hes the most accurate to gay preps irl because they really are that annoying. but i tried to make him a little interesting atleast. anyways

nerd - black, brony, always aggressively corrects the others when they state an incorrect fact, really into playstation eyetoy and obscure playstation games. insanely autistic. usually pissed off if hes not indulging himself in something he likes (yaoi, games, ponies, figures, etc). i just wanted to overhaul him completely to make him almost nothing like refrainbow's nerd because nerd type characters are always the ones i tend to see myself in and are my favorites but reading the webtoon that guy just pissed me off fr.

jock - 2nd gen chinese american, one of the things i liked in the original actually was when they sexualized the jock (probably cause hes the only one who doesnt look 14 in that comic) and his big tits. hes a very genuinely kind guy, not the brightest, has a voracious appetite, he also still bakes cause thats cute i think.

prep - he looks different here because i was originally going to make him white but i decided to make him a light/medium skintone black guy (he just wears a blonde wig and contacts). when companies make their pride month merchandise and advertisements this is the exact person they imagine in their head who is going to buy these products. hes a million percent one of those swifties who thinks taylor swift is secretly a lesbian. trust fund kid btw obviously. his only redeeming quality is that hes good at makeup. jokes in the comic are usually made at his expense.

goth - 1st gen latino american, specifically peruvian because i am a self serving motherfucker. hes a really big numetal fan and listens to like 2000s evil wolf amv music in addition to legitimate gothic. his face changed a little too between this and the final design. his outfit completely changed but its only because i realized everyone else was dressed for relatively warm weather so it wouldnt make sense for him to be wearing multiple layers of black. if i do cold weather outfits for them id def reuse this look for him. hes still trans but i think all of them are in my version. also they dont use labels for their sexual/rom orientation. except prep hes homosexual gay.

congratulations for reaching the end of this incomprehensible bullshit 👍 hope someone enjoys this but idrc if its just for me either

#images that are horrid to see and look at #mspaint #boyfriends #boyfriends webtoon #boyfriends redesign #redesign #character design #boy-friendz #nerd guy #jock guy #prep guy #goth guy #boyfriends slander

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storiesforallfandoms · 2 years ago

Text

into fiction ~ hannibal (nbc)

word count: 3235

request?: yes!

“I was wondering if you could write Hannibal x gn!reader. Where the reader is a fan of the character Hannibal (TV series and/or books) and by some unknown or weird or accidental circumstance found themselves in Hannibal universe. They are confused, panicked, or even excited. Maybe the reader popped up in less than ideal situation (will it be a therapy session, in between appointments, a crime scene or something). What would be Hannibal's reaction?

I'm sorry if it isn't something you'd write. But I really enjoy your writing.”

description: when they wakes up in the world of their favorite tv show, they must try to blend in the best they can as to not draw too much suspicious attention to themselves

pairing: hannibal (nbc) characters x gender neutral!reader

warnings: swearing, mentions of cannibalism, mentions of murder and death

masterlist (one, two)

You awoke from your sleep with a start. You were sat up in a chair in an unknown room. You didn’t remember falling asleep. Actually, you didn’t remember anything at all. Where had you been last? Were you in your bedroom? Had you fallen asleep on the couch?

Actually, this looked like neither of those rooms. It was far too big and fancy to be a room in your apartment.

“(Y/N)?”

That voice sounded familiar.

You lifted your head to find yourself sat across from none other than Hannibal Lecter.

You gasped and jumped a little. “Hannibal?”

He gave you an amused look. “Yes, that is my name. I’m sorry if our session has bored you so much you had to fall asleep.”

No, there was no way this was happening. You had to be dreaming. There is no way you are actually sat across from the most notorious fictional serial killer in history.

You moved your hand discreetly to punch yourself, hard. You stifled another gasp at the sharp pain.

He was watching you. You weren’t sure what you were doing here. You had absolutely no idea how you got here or what happened before this moment. It was like your memory had been completely wiped.

“I-I’m sorry,” you finally said, realizing he was waiting for you to speak. “I just...I guess I was tired?”

“Have you been sleeping?” he asked.

I think I’m asleep right now. “A little.”

“That’s normal after what you’ve been through. Most patients who have been in your situation tend to struggle with sleep for a long time. It may be like this for weeks, months even. If it becomes a problem, I can get in contact with your doctor about prescribing sleeping pills.”

“I...I don’t think that will be necessary.” What happened to me?

Hannibal was still watching you. You wondered if he could tell something was wrong, besides the obvious of whatever this bad thing that landed you in therapy was. He would definitely think you were insane if you started talking about him being a fictional character and how you thought none of this was real.

“You go back to work tomorrow,” he commented. “How do you feel about that?”

“Uh...it’s about time, I guess,” you responded. He raised an eyebrow at you. Shit, wrong answer. “I mean, I know I needed to be away from it, but there’s only so much time someone can be stuck at home before they get restless.”

“So you’ll be trying to return to the field?”

The field? There’s no way...

You shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s not up to me.”

“Jack told me he gave you the choice.”

Shit, there is a way.

You shrugged again. “I guess I just haven’t decided yet.”

Hannibal leaned forward. You started a little, but tried to play it off. Don’t let the cannibal know you’re afraid of him, you had to remind yourself.

“I know you want to return to work and pretend like nothing happened so you can go back to normal,” he started, “but what happened is not something that you can easily forget. That man attacked you in a position you once felt safe in, and you had to kill him. That is not something you can get over in a matter of weeks.”

What?!

Okay, this could not get any worse. So, you woke up in a fictional world where your therapist is a serial killer (but you can’t let him know you know that), you’re an FBI agent, and apparently you were attacked by a suspect that you then had to kill.

At least I don’t remember any of that.

“I’ll be fine,” you assured him, although you weren’t sure if you would be.

“I’m sure you will be. Nevertheless, I want to continue with these sessions as you start to work again. Is that something you’d be interested in?”

You nodded, unable to speak.

Hannibal saw you out at the end of your session. Somehow, you knew which car in the parking lot was yours and you quickly got in, grateful to finally be on your own.

This was so much to take in. How did you get here? How were you supposed to blend in with a life you didn’t even remember? Especially when you knew the Hannibal series so well, so you knew what was likely going to happen if it hadn’t already.

You unlocked your phone and opened your GPS. Luckily, the “home” address was saved in there. You loaded up the address and drove towards the place that was supposedly your home in this world. It was still a small place, but it was definitely a lot nicer than your old apartment.

You went to your bedroom and shed yourself of your unfamiliar clothes and got into the unfamiliar bed. You were hoping to go to sleep and wake up back in your own bed and all of this would just be one big, realistic dream.

~~~~~~

You were awoken to the sound of a phone alarm. You rolled over and blindly felt around the nightstand to turn it off. It took a while for your body to fully wake up, and when you opened your eyes, you gasped.

You were still in the unfamiliar room of your Hannibal world apartment.

“No,” you whispered. “No, no, no. This cannot be real.”

You pinched yourself again, but there was still a sharp feeling of pain when you did so. It was starting to set in that whatever was happening was real, but that realization just made you feel more dread. If this was real, what did that mean for your family? Were they here too, or were you the only one pulled into this world? And if they hadn’t, did that mean you were alone in this universe?

You didn’t have enough time to delve into this existential crisis. If this was your life now, you would have to try and blend in. Maybe you could figure out how you got here.

You prepared yourself to go into work. You figured your nervousness would be mistaken for hesitance on returning after a traumatic event, which would work in your favor. You just needed to prepare yourself for any questions that may be unanswerable for now.

You surprised yourself by knowing how to get to the office without needing the GPS. You must’ve had some muscle memory despite not remembering anything else. Hopefully that meant your memories of this world would come back just as easily eventually.

You could feel everyone’s eyes on you as you entered the FBI building. You knew they were all looking at you because of the event that resulted in you having to be away from work for some time, but you couldn’t help but worry they were looking like they because they knew you were an imposter. Like maybe they sensed your unease in this world and knew that you weren’t meant to be here.

The minute you stepped out into the familiar office you had seen on TV a number of times before, you were met with a hug that caught you off guard. You stumbled slightly, trying to figure out which character was hugging you. The minute you realized it was a female, you knew exactly who it was: Beverly.

She’s not dead yet. Thank God.

You hugged her back, squeezing just a little more than you would’ve for anyone else. Knowing what Beverly’s fate had in store for her made this one a little more special to you.

“Don’t overwhelm her on her first day back, Beverly,” came another familiar voice.

You looked up to see none other than Jack Crawford approaching you. Beverly pulled away from your hug and, despite his comment to her, Jack pulled you in for one as well.

“Good to have you back, (Y/N).”

“Good to be back,” you said, and you almost believed it. You had zero recollection of this place or what kind of work you did here, but it felt good to be here. To be surrounded by characters that you loved so much, for real, instead of just watching them on a screen.

Jack pulled away from your hug and nodded for you to follow him. You gave Beverly a small smile before following Jack towards his office. He closed the door behind you and gestured for you to sit at the chair across from his desk.

“I’ve been talking to Doctor Lecter about your sessions leading up to you coming back,” he said once he had sat down at his desk.

Your brows furrowed together. “Isn’t that against doctor-patient confidentiality?”

“Only if he tells me the specifics of your sessions, which is not what I was asking him about. I wanted to know if he thinks you’re ready to be back in the field.”

“And his response?”

Jack sighed. “He thinks you need to keep up with the sessions, and he believes you may need some aid for sleeping. He said you seemed very tired and out of it yesterday.”

You shifted in your seat. “Yeah. I...I was having a...weird day to say the least.”

“I told you that when you came back, it would be your decision if you wanted to be in the field or if you wanted to wait,” Jack said. “Despite having spoken to Doctor Lecter, I am still giving you that choice. Do you think you’re ready to be back, (Y/N)?”

You knew that the answer was no. You didn’t know the first thing about being an FBI agent. If you said you weren’t ready for the field, you gave yourself an out to try and figure out more about your role here before being thrown into it. But, for some reason, you heard yourself saying to Jack, “Yes, I do.”

Jack seemed skeptical, but hearing your certainty he said, “Well, let’s go to your first crime scene back.”

~~~~~~

You tried not to seem too fidgety as you and Jack drove to the scene. You didn’t want to give yourself away, but you weren’t exactly jumping at the chance to see a murder scene, especially not one as gruesome as a Hannibal crime scene. You were squeamish watching them on TV, let alone seeing one in person.

The scene seemed relatively tame (for Hannibal standards anyways) as you pulled up: a bunch of police officers were walking around near the edge of a river, yellow tape crossing off most of the forest-like area on either side of the river so no one would trample the crime scene. One of the officers nodded to Jack as the two of you approached and held up the tape for the two of you to duck under.

Waiting for you was the one person you had been hoping to meet: Will Graham.

“Welcome back, (Y/N),” he said, giving you a subtle nod before turning to Jack. “Body was anchored down to stay at the bottom of the river. It might not have been found if it wasn’t for a hiker and her dog.”

“Are they still here?” Jack asked.

“Over talking to some police.” Will led the two of you towards the river’s edge. A black body back was at the edge of the grass, zipped tight to hide the body inside of it.

“Do we know what the cause of death was?” Jack asked.

Will shook his head. “This body has been down there long enough that whatever fish or aquatic creatures are in the pond have eaten away enough of the body to make it unrecognizable. We can’t even get an identity off of him right now until we send him to forensics.”

You braced yourself as Will reached down to the bag to unzip it, but nothing could’ve prepared you for the body that was inside. Actually, “body” was putting it too generously. What was inside the body bag was mostly bone and some muscle, with almost all of the skin having been eaten off or otherwise washed away by the water.

Your stomach lurched and you quickly turned away, covering your mouth in case you did throw up. Jack was quick to follow you, putting a soothing hand on your back.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

You nodded, but didn’t feel as though you were able to speak just yet.

“Close it up, Will,” Jack said.

“You’ve never been queasy around bodies before,” Will pointed out.

“Just do it!”

You heard the body bag zipping closed. You took a couple of deep breaths to settle your pounding heart and your weak stomach before standing up again. Even though you knew the body bag was closed, you refused to turn back around. You couldn’t face it, or Will and Jack for that matter.

“Maybe you should go back to the station,” Jack suggested.

“I’ll be fine,” you lied.

“(Y/N), as your superior I am giving you an order to go back to the station. Will and I will take care of this, you can help back at the lab with whatever data we can recover.”

You nodded and headed back to the black SUV that you and Jack had arrived in. You sat behind the wheel for a moment, taking a second to recover from what had happened by the river, before turning on the vehicle and driving away from the scene.

However, despite the orders Jack had given you, you didn’t drive back to the station. Instead, you found yourself back at Hannibal’s office. You walked in, not thinking of how Hannibal was likely with another patient, and starting banging on his office door. Luckily, when he opened it, he was alone.

“(Y/N),” he said, surprised by your appearance. “I thought you were returning to your job today.”

“I don’t remember a single thing that has happened before I woke up in your office yesterday, and I’m convinced I’m in a different universe where you and everyone in here are fictional characters and I somehow landed here as an FBI agent who killed someone.”

He looked at you for a long time before stepping aside and gesturing you into his office. No doubt he was trying to think of the phone number for the best mental asylum to send you to as he closed the door behind you and followed you in.

“Let’s start with the memory loss issue,” he said, sitting down in the same chair he was in the day before when you arrived. “You say you don’t remember anything before our session yesterday? Not even how you got here?”

You shook your head and sat across from him. “Nothing. I mean, I have some muscle memories, like I knew how to get to the FBI office today and I knew how to get here from the crime scene I just left, but other than that I don’t remember anything. I don’t remember my job, I don’t remember that attack that supposedly landed me in therapy, I don’t even remember my apartment or if my family is really my family.”

“Do you think this may have something to do with the trauma from the attack?”

You shook your head. “No, there’s no way. If that was it, I would have just that moment repressed and not my entire life before now. But it’s all gone. I can’t even tell you how I got to your office yesterday for our session or what we were talking about before I woke up.”

You started to pace around his office while he watched you. “And, besides, if it was just trauma from the attack, why would I believe that all of this is fake? Why do I think certain things are going to happen, bad things, to the people who are supposedly my colleagues, because I thought I saw them on TV already?”

“It could be that your mind is trying so hard to repress what happened that it has created a false reality that you believe to be true,” Hannibal explained. “Maybe you fell into that delusion yesterday before our session and snapped out of it while here.”

That explanation made sense, but it also terrified you even more. What was real in that case? What wasn’t? And why could you still not remember anything if you had potentially snapped out of the delusion?

“What kinds of things do you think are going to happen to your colleagues?”

You froze. How do you respond to this? What you knew all linked back to Hannibal’s secret - if that was even a real thing and not just another delusion. But if that was real, you couldn’t let him know you were onto him, unless you wanted to become his next victim.

“Beverly is killed by a serial killer,” you started, trying to be as vague as possible. “Killed and left on display for Jack to find. Will goes to prison for a murder he didn’t commit. You and Alana...” You trailed off and let out a slight chuckle, “You start a relationship.”

An amused look passes on Hannibal’s face as well. “A very imaginative mind you have. Is that all?”

You shake your head. “There’s so much more. There’s...well, there’s three seasons worth of plot I think I know about everyone.”

“And yet Beverly is still alive, Will has not been to prison, nor do I think he ever will be, and Doctor Bloom and I have a professional relationship that I do not see changing any time soon. Perhaps you are just trying to deal with the trauma you have gone through by creating these false scenarios where you are a viewer instead of partaking in the violence.”

You could feel tears starting to well up in your eyes. It was all becoming too much to think about. “Doctor Lecter, am I going crazy?”

“We do not use that type of language here,” he responded. “You are dealing with something very distressing, something that has never happened to you before and that can be very traumatic to remember. It is very likely that your brain is trying to protect yourself from those memories by repressing them and trying to come up with a safer reality for you.”

You nodded your head along to what he was saying.

“I believe we should up your sessions to twice a week so we can discuss this,” he said. “Would you be okay with that?”

You nodded again.

Just like the day before, he saw you out of his office. You were shaking and still trying to wrap your head around everything.

“Before you go,” he said, pulling your attention back to him. “Was there anything else in this fantasy version of our lives about me that you saw?”

You couldn’t tell if he was genuinely curious in an amused way, or if he was trying to get something out of you. You tried not to let your face give anything away as you shook your head.

“No. Just that you were Will’s therapist at one point, and then you and Alana started dating. That’s...that’s all I remember.”

There was a skeptical look on his face, one that made your skin crawl.

He nodded. “Just wanted to make sure there was nothing that should be discussed prior to our next session.”

As he closed the door, you felt yourself dreading that next session.

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