#i’m going off the deep end in the Mariana’s trench of my psyche

[foxybouquet]

Ok—theory # 3,972 as to the new upcoming Ghost lore!

Copia does not have a twin at all. Just as the ghosts of his mother and father and the child- twins are a figment of his fevered imagination, so is this fraternal twin of his. As a matter of fact, the twin is a manifestation of Copia himself. I don’t know what the current terminology is, so forgive me if I get this wrong, but it used to be called ‘dissociative identity disorder.’ What if that is what is going to happen? It’s still Copia, but it’s not Copia. It is another identity in his system.

[micronecro]

KHR fanon VS DET: The Tragedy And Darkness Of Sawada Tsunayoshi

<<KHRF VS DET Part 2: The Station Location

Now that DET is over, I can FINALLY talk about how I broke a minimum of 3 fanon!Tsunas over my knee out of spite because I’m a bitter, bitter person who bathes in plot bunnies 24/7. This one is really long, because Tsuna is the main character and one of the most consistent elements in fic I’ve read.

So let’s talk about fanfic based around Tsuna’s tragic backstory.

From the outset, fics that try to make Tsuna tragic don’t really work. Tsuna already has a coping mechanism for emotional abuse, it’s his loser complex, created to cope with the fact he internalizes other people’s opinions of him and thus struggles to deal with the concept of him being an innate burden to society, a natural-born failure who will never amount to anything. This is the kid who goes “haha, I’m so dame” and committed so deeply to acting like this is comfortable to him that his mom picked up on it, even though he directly mentions how much he doesn’t want to end up like his father, who he perceives to be doing the exact same thing. This kid has issues, is what I’m saying.

And I get wanting to write Tsuna differently; his attitude means he’s a complete self-satisfied buzzkill unless you go to cartoonish extremes. If you keep telling him he’s awesome instead, he’d instantly switch to being an egoist (a la Mochida), but it’s not exactly easy to get an emotionally battered and socially isolated teenage boy to internalize ‘if you try harder, people will be comfortable with you’. It’s like telling him ‘if you REALLY get into it, you can make rejection feel even MORE painful and scary’. Reborn pretty much had the right idea when he went with “fuck you, these people are your friends now, and there’s nothing you can do about it”. AU Tsunas are pretty natural, here, because Canon Tsuna really only works in a select few kinds of fic. Less of a dark drama character and more of a ‘awkward guy in your coffee shop who struggles to speak to people and is uncomfortably willing to prostrate himself to the guy who spilled coffee all over his shirt’ character.

The problem is that people treat Tsuna like he’s a completely ordinary delicate flower and try to fly by on that concept alone.

And to make interesting AUs from that, they give him a tragic backstory.

The tragic backstory is always the same. His peers don’t just reject him, they beat him up. (Presumably because Enma got beat up..........by irrelevant high-schoolers.) His mom neglects him and never shows him affection. His dad is is, in Reborn’s words in at least 16 different fanfics, “Idiot Iemitsu”, who is incapable of noticing the blatantly obvious. A lot of the time, there’s an abusive twin brother soaking up the attention. Neglect is often involved. Something traumatic might have happened to drastically change Tsuna’s personality, like a kidnapping.

Now, I have to remind you, there’s nothing actually wrong with drastically changing Tsuna’s personality. DETsuna is completely unrecognizable. 

The problem is that the fics use that tragedy as excuse to stop treating Tsuna like a person.

Type 1 - The Wilting Violet

So your Tsuna has well and truly broken.

 This is the Tsuna that appears most often with ship fics written by Teens, because Teens are the type of people least likely to understand how acute stress affects people; that level of empathy can only be achieved by personal experience, acute research, or extended exposure to media that depicts trauma in empathetic ways.

For the Type 1 OOC Tsuna crumples, acts shy, and does a bunch of self-conscious stuff, often in ways that don’t really make sense for the abuse he experiences. People who don’t understand abuse tend to be hyper-correct, like small children learning how English works (using words like “eated”); someone being physically abused is going to be hyper-vigilant for possible attacks. It’s not logical for a person to flinch when someone raises their hand to grab something off the shelf, but it happens anyway. And even if the author has the character act irrationality, they still love making it seem like it’s Correct behaviour, with the abused character acting like they genuinely think they’re about to be struck, even actively thinking about the assumption, rather than a kneejerk jolt of fear at a familiar gesture, completely separate from conscious thought, like you can somehow convince someone to stop doing it if you make sure they trust you.

It pretty much works this way for Wilting Violet Tsunas. Tsuna is just a trembling woobie, and he shies away from others, but holds a Great Kindness. People who open up to him are like people baiting a wild animal with food, coaxing him into comfort. He’s constantly set to ‘slight fear, occasional happiness’. He’s nothing but a hurt/comfort vehicle. Wilting Violet Tsunas are completely incapable of anger unless it’s on behalf of his friends, and are never petty unless it’s against bad characters who deserve it. 

In DET, Tsuna is demure, self-loathing, and ‘broken’, but he’s mean.

He’s spiteful and easily frustrated, gets bored all the time, is unreasonably petty and often really catty. He compulsively talks back. His personality is riddled with flaws.

Tsuna is more or less aware that he’s pathetic, but all that does is make him feel powerless to stop his own flaws. He, too, listens to people when they tell him he’ll never amount to anything and is deeply scarred by this concept, but most people just tell him he’s really creepy and emotionless. Tsuna kicks off the series genuinely thinking he doesn’t have feelings because emotions don’t come quickly to him and his lack of external reactions made people Assume that of him, and because he's devastatingly lonely, he’s more willing to listen to them.

As stress is added, he does wilt, but it’s not just a crumpled pathetic little baby to dote on, it’s a kid with a very strong idea of what his Normal is struggling to balance out the negative buildup through his life. The thing is about Giving Up is that that is, in of itself, a type of coping mechanism, a way to reduce stress so no matter how bad things get, the person is always on the exact same level of Rock Bottom. It’s the reaction of someone who’s decided they don’t have the strength or footholds to risk dancing on the edge of the Marianas Trench. 

 In DET, Tsuna starts out with that caution, that pathetic baby attitude that makes you want to take care of him, but he’s not hiding some deep, untouched purity and kindness. He’s hiding ugly shit, the kind of tumultuous emotion that comes from trauma; anger at innocent people who are dealing better than he is, pushing people around so they don’t get anywhere near his actual psyche, abandoning people so he doesn’t have to deal with actually addressing his problems, and just being a snarky little bastard in general. 

Tsuna’s wilting personality isn’t just sad emo crumpling, it’s turning into something ugly, rotten, and unappealing.

But the important thing is that he’s still likeable, he’s still kind-hearted, and deep down, he’s the type to fight back his stress with teeth and nails, clawing his way back up until he ruins himself. Tsuna’s emotional coping mechanisms are always extreme, violent, and unstable, but the amount of effort he puts into them is alluring to people not used to dealing with any sort of stress. That’s true for both the characters that interact with him and the readers themselves.

Type 2 - The BAMF

But wait, you say. All this anger sounds a lot like the BAMF! The hardass that is angry that they’ve been wronged. They’re snarky, forceful, and tend to be bitter. And when that goes into unhealthy territory, the character funnels their rage into a fighting spirit.

This one is actually a more accurate representation of dealing with trauma, but it also kind of reeks of liberal Suffering Is Fake and How Dare You Hurt.

In fics, BAMF Tsuna has been wronged, and his abuse made him stronger. He’s powerful and competent now. Everyone who wronged him? They were mistaken. Tsuna is actually quite strong and awesome, and now he’s pissed.

The BAMF is a power fantasy, pure and simple.

This is actually reflected both in Hibari, who is being actually actively physically and psychologically abused, and Tsuna, who has his negative self-image and PTSD reinforced at every turn. 

Hibari is unstable, and his unwillingness to show weakness doesn’t do much but make him incredibly annoying to deal with. Hibari is an asshole, and he has no motivation to do awesome stuff, and the actual BAMF stuff he does (like beat Zeni to death) are poisoned by his selfish motivations and awkward (and on some level horrifying) execution. Tsuna’s running commentary on his baddassery sounds like like ‘UUUGGGHHHHHHH’ than any acknowledgement of him being cool.

Mirroring this, Tsuna is, again, pathetiiiiiiic.

Tsuna is constantly doing badass stuff, but he doesn’t just poison the image, he actively sabotages it as much as possible. He talks casually with the feared Hibari Kyouya, but he’s scared shitless of the guy and the only reason he sounds casual is because of his blunted affect. He throws down with Hibari, but only because Hibari is forcing him to do it; he doesn’t like it, and the only reason he doesn’t quit the DC is because he enjoys the high of having some sort of power because dodging Hibari just feels so awesome, in theory.

Tsuna kills someone to save his friends, but it’s not rational; it’s an extreme self-destructive impulse, tempered by his lack of respect for his own self. There’s nothing cool about it. He’s scared, but doing his best to galvanize himself by telling himself he’s worthless so there’s nothing wrong with throwing himself at someone who will definitely kill him. Protecting Hana barely even factors. He just feels like it’s the most sensible thing for him to do because he values his own life that little.

Combined with the fact he’s still bitter and petty, you get the picture of...someone who is unstable, and hard to use as a power fantasy. His triumphs don’t give you a rush, they’re at best comedic and at worst emotionally exhausting.

Type 3 - The Dark character

But wait, you insist, isn’t that what a dark!Tsuna is?

Oh boy, my dude, you sure hit the mark, because parodying dark!Tsuna fics was the entire point of DET to begin with. They are an epidemic and I’ve had enough.

An important part of understanding how this is is knowing what dark characters are, and how they work in relation to an intertextual narrative. I’ve used this phrase before; You see, an intertextual narrative is when one story’s narrative is influenced by knowing about the progression of other narratives. CLAMP’s xxxholic and Tsubasa Chronicle are intertextual narratives, for example, but in the context of fanfic, it’s something closer to, say, BBC Sherlock or CBS Elementary’s relationship with the original Holmes canon. Their very existence is intertextual, their texts being influenced by knowing the text of the Holmes canon exists at all.

A Dark character AU is an extremely intertextual trope. The entire appeal is giving a normally harmless character an edge. Dark characters have very few moral compunctions, are very Machiavellian in nature, and aren’t limited by their strength; they can be destroyed by their demons or rise above them with a vicious kind of of ambition. The point is simply that they go against the grain of comfortable social standards and break away from complacency. You may recognize this from ‘way too many Harry Potter fics, please god stop, I’m so tired’.

A badly written Dark character is a loosely-strung-together collection of concepts that seem cool and Dark, and with Tsuna, those concepts are often stereotypical canon stations mixed to be edgy. Tsuna often runs away from the world that’s limiting him to excel in his ambitions. Sometimes, an event turns him cold and calculating. Most of the time, the world feels afraid of what they’ve done to make Tsuna like this.

And here’s how DET breaks this trope:

The things that happen to Tsuna are infinitely darker than Tsuna himself, and Tsuna is funny.

Rape is quite possibly the most uncomfortable thing for the average person to think about. It hasn’t been normalized by society and media the way torture and domestic abuse has. It’s used as an atom bomb of tragedy and horror, a shocker to create cheap villains and cheaper drama. If you’re depicting rape as bad in your story, it’s bad. Child rape is the most dramatic possible thing anyone could write. This is true darkness. True horror.

Tsuna does not care.

That isn’t to say that what happened to him somehow doesn’t matter, or that he wasn’t horribly traumatized and had his spirit broken and shattered into itty-bitty pieces. That definitely happened. The fact he was already broken was a huge factor in how he reacted to the Seal. 

The most important thing, though, is that people are still people, no matter how bad the things that happen to them get. They’re complex and constantly striving for some semblance of normality, and they’ll often do literally anything to achieve it.

Tsuna isn’t preoccupied with what happened, and doesn’t strive for revenge, and doesn’t consider his behaviour in terms of the all-consuming influence of his tragic backstory. This shit was normal to him, and he strives to maintain that normality. It’s the same rhetoric that makes people crave their abuse after leaving it, but he funnelled into healthier things. He knew what happened was wrong and he felt he was wronged, but the most important thing to him was that he had been ‘gullible’ enough to manipulated and used by someone he thought cared about him, and then was subsequently ‘abandoned’. It fed into his conformation bias of things that are horrible to him, specifically, which is abandonment, isolation, and neglect. Since the neglect is what spooks him the most, Tsuna’s reaction is less on overcoming tragic backstory and more on doing his best to keep it from happening again by never doing anything to jeapordize his positive relationships. If someone’s decided to treat him a certain way, Tsuna is dead-set on making them keep that opinion, even if it would improve if he was more proactive. He is TERRIFIED of rejection, and he will do ANYTHING to avoid it, up to and including actually abandoning his friends before they can do it to him.

And above all, he’s funny.

He’s cold and bitter and angry and prone to backtalk, he’s shy and meek and submissive and puny and cute, but his headspace is a screaming wreck. It’s almost impossible to tell that he doesn’t emote on the outside for most of the fic, because he spends so much time overreacting and overthinking, picking at the scabs lining his train of thought, and losing himself in his ideas. He reacts to everything. It’s a constantly-jumping series of surprises, and surprises are the heart of comedy. Tsuna’s actions are unexpected to even Tsuna himself, and it drives him nuts. His attempt to deal with sudden fear is to scream at it in his head until it goes away. His attempt to deal with confusing new circumstances is to go to unnecessary extremes to make the situation completely unfamiliar to him, and he hates that he does this, but he feels compelled to do it anyway.

Tsuna knows that he’s dark, is the point. He knows, and he doesn’t like it, and not unlike a teenage Spiderman, his primary reaction to it is to sass it to gain some level of power over it, to shine as much light as humanly possible onto himself just to maintain the illusion of normality, and most of the time, he does it so loudly that it works. His urges to do things that make him happy are just as ludicrous as the things that make him feel stable, and Tsuna has decided that YOU KNOW WHAT, MAYBE THAT’S A GOOD THING ACTUALLY. MAYBE IT’S AN OKAY THING???? EVER CONSIDER THAT?????

It’s not. It’s terrible. It fixes nothing and without a second Roof Scene he’s going to burn out. It’s pretty clearly exhausting him. But the internal conflict and brazen unpredictability is, by nature of all absurd things, very funny.

It makes him complex. It makes him tangible. The Reaction To Self is the most important aspect of writing, as a three-dimensional character, and in DETsuna, it’s brought to its most logical extreme.

I mean, canon Tsuna does this too. That’s why his attitude isn’t completely insufferable. The self-awareness is what’s causing his problems to begin with. KHR wasn’t popular for it’s compelling plot, after all. But sometimes, you just wanna be a little Extra.

[yurionparadise-blog]

About Me Tag

@purplepuggy thank you for tagging me!! I don’t usually do these, but why not it’s 2017 ANYTHING IS POSSIBLE

(continued under break cause this got long yikes)

Name: Elena

Nickname: Mittens, Jolene, Scelena (I have weird af nicknames)

Gender: Female

Star Sign: Sagittarius woo (transforms into a centaur and rides off into the night)

Birthday: Dec 9th

Relationship Status: …single…very, very single (2017 don’t let me down fam)

Pets: A black and white cat named Oreo…7-year-old me was apparently very creative with names 

Height: 5′2″

Favorite Color(s): I don’t really have a favorite color, but I like generally like shades of blue and purple…and black heh

average amount of sleep: HAAHAH on school nights I get like 6 if I’m lucky, and on breaks I pretend like I’m gonna sleep for a lot longer, but it only ends up being like 8 hours

Lucky Number: 1 

last thing I googled: “yuri on ice wiki” 

number of blankets I sleep with: One extra blanket, but if you also count sheets and stuff then 4 (I’m always either really cold or really hot there is no in between)

met a celebrity: The glorious ten seconds when I met Dan and Phil, but I barely remember any of it because my brain went into fangirl mode and my memory temporarily shut down 

favorite fictional character: Oh no don’t make me choose I’ll literally explode

Favorite Book: …thanks to a combination of school and procrastination I don’t read too many books, but I’m always a sucker for some John Green or James Patterson

Favorite Band: yikesyikesyikesyikesyikes I love too many to choose one, so off the top of my head…twenty one pilots, P!atD, Marianas Trench, All Time Low, Daughtry, EXO, Imagine Dragons…I’m gonna stop myself there

song stuck in my head right now: History Maker– Dean Fujioka 

last movie I watched: I watched The Exorcist with my friend a few nights ago, which was exciting to say the least 

last TV show I watched: *sigh* Yuri on Ice…it’s now like my third time watching it fully through I’m trash

last song I listened to: September– Marianas Trench

Dream Trip: JAPAN 

Dream Job: Oh no I’m gonna have an existential crisis cause i literally have no clue…maybe a visual effects artist or a voice actor (basically anything to do with film), and I’m especially interested in writing, but I hardly ever have the motivation or time to do it a lot rn

what I’m wearing right now: I haven’t left the house today so leggings and a green t-shirt…I’m treasuring the last few days before I have to go back to school

time right now: 8:23 pm

what do you post about: technically anime in general…but atm it’s all Yuri On Ice let’s be real

any other blogs?: Funny story, okay *deep breath* so I have my “main” blog (@yuri-on-paradise) that used to be is dedicated to SPN, but then I found YOI so I was like, “oh why don’t I make a sideblog for anime stuff, i probably won’t become more invested in it than SPN”…HHAHA PSYCH yeah YOI took over my life, but I had already started the sideblog and I couldn’t make it my main, so now I have two blogs that have virtually the same name because I changed the name of my main to match this one out of frustration and now I don’t use my main one barely at all anymore…that made zero sense I’m so sorry

NOTE TO SELF…stop making sideblogs ya shiz and just annoy your followers by reblogging 80 different fandoms it’ll be fine

when did your blog peak?: like two days ago lol hello all my new followers, I hope your day is going well <3

do you get ask on a daily basis: nah I haven’t even gotten one yet, but to be fair I just started this blog a month ago so *cries*…but hello again followers who I already said hi to like five seconds ago. If any of you ever need advice/to vent/to talk to someone I’m here!!…literally always…i live on tumblr

why did you choose your url?: All of the good YOI pun usernames were taken so @yurionparadise was born

lemonade or iced tea: lemonade,,??,? maybe?? 

cats or dogs: cats because I have a cat and i love her, but dogs are a very close second

coke or pepsi: *whispers* i have actually never had coke or pepsi in my life oops 

day or night: ooo the night…I love the stars and just the overall mystery of darkness (wow, me, very poetic) 

call or text: texting because I’m generally too socially awkward to have proper conversations with people face to face

makeup or natural: On other people I have absolutely no preference, but I personally wear a fair amount of makeup every time I leave the house….it’s sort of just become a calming routine and I usually listen to music while doing it

light or dark hair: I have naturally lightish brown hair, but rn it’s dyed like a dark burgundy red color 

shorter or taller: I don’t really have a preference because I’m fairly short, so most people are already taller than me

intelligence or attraction: intelligencé

city or country: probably the city because I was born in New York and lived there for most of my life (unfortunately I don’t anymore *sigh*)

Tag 20 followers you want to know better: (I’m only gonna do around 10 because I’m awkward and I don’t want to overwhelm people) @mysteriousangst @destielwaffle @iamnotaweeb @makka-viktuuri @skatiing @theangelstolemygrace @shackledbyackles @kissandcryviktuuri @crazythundergod @justanotherwritingaddict @foutrelamerde 

The tagged followers absolutely do not have to do this, I just wanted to thank you for following me!!

Thanks for reading, and I hope 2017 goes well for everyone!