#i'll do it but probably only for like well reviewed stuff you can read in omnibus or trade form that i want physically anyway

[ambassadorquark]

people who read a lot of comics where do you find them. or is my ass just going to have to Purchase that shit

[xoxo-ren-xoxo]

Hermitcraft / Life Series Fic Recs

Because I love so many of them...

I'll split the fics into completed and updating fics, and try to only recommend currently updating fics (i.e., not abandoned). I'm going to write a little about why I like each fic and what the general vibes are - so this is also a kind of review I guess?

I've tried to @ the authors if they have a public tumblr. Sorry to anyone who didn't want to be tagged, I can remove any @ if you ask (or if I have embarrassingly tagged the wrong person). Anyway, enjoy, and I appreciate reblogs because I want as many people to see these fics as possible!!

This ended up being incredibly long so I'm putting a divider here. Click to keep reading!!! Also, fair warning: shipping ahead! Some fics will have mild sexual content, please read the tags if you are unsure <3

Updating Fics

I have already recommended Help Me To Breathe, lost in the dark (he's got a heavy heart), and There Are Monsters Nearby in this post, so I won't explain why I like them a second time, but definitely check them out!!

Death's A Good Gig by @mawofthemagnetar is probably going to be finished by the time this post gets to you, reader, but I'm putting it here anyway. It's short and sweet, one of my favourite representations of Zedaph (or, Zedeath) I've read, and just a joy to experience. If you like grim reapers and discussions of unions, this one is for you. Also I need more Zedaph in my life.

Look, I'm Sorry, Please Stop Scaring Everyone by @cat-in-the-desert reminds me a lot of a particular TV drama I liked when I was younger, which followed a similar premise. This fic follows Mumbo (vampire) and Grian (ghost) as they get up to various housemate shenanigans and meet their local magic-expert and salesman Scar. This fic is fun, but still includes a nice amount of Feelings and hinted-at Angst which I really love. It's lighthearted, but never boring.

It Hurts To Hope by Inquillitory is my favourite of the "Grian crash lands into Hermitcraft and causes problems for everyone" genre. Seeing how many fics there are with that premise, I think that says a lot. It handles Grian's weird Watcher stuff really well. Honestly, I just want to know what happens next!

killing the boy in the tv by @raspberrystruck is like a sickfic on steroids. If you want Grian with so much past trauma he forgets how to function in society, this is basically the fic for you. I really love how hybrid traits affect the characters' interactions in this fic, and how everyone is kind of messed up because of the imbalance Grian brings. It is wonderfully descriptive in all the right places!

Love Me Like I'm Dead by @daniofcrows is such a gem. You know how hard it is to find good Xisuma whump? It's impossible. I absolutely love how Xisuma and Evil X are characterised in this, and I am obsessed with the unique take on hanahaki disease which I have never seen handled in this way before. The balance between flashbacks and present day is maintained wonderfully and I cannot wait to continue reading this one. Wow.

Oh, you wanted me to do a verse? by @bugbbear is... kind of indescribable. It's horror. It's comedy. It's the apocalypse. It's boatem. Scar eats someone. One of the most interesting and unique apocalypse stories I have read. Slowly updating but worth the wait, in my opinion. This one NEEDS more attention.

So Much For Stardust by @a-plethora-of-peters is basically one of my all-time favourites. Which is a damn good achievement seeing as I don't usually read ZITS fics. Like, ever. In this fic, Skizz is a human abducted and hurt badly by aliens, now recovering in the care of good aliens who don't know how 'sentient' he is. Every update of this one makes me smile, it is wonderful. I love how the characters are written and how the different perspectives are shown. It is just great.

Solar Waltz by @raspberrystruck and aroundtheclock is a brilliant and very very sad regression fic. I love fluffy regression fics as much as the next guy, but this one just... hits different. The hurt/comfort levels are off the charts. Grian is so damn cute the whole time, while also being harrowingly complicated and sad. I am so ready for whatever comes next.

Tango's Castle of Cards by @evilrat-sabre is the one where Tango is a BUG. He's just a little guy (horror). This one is so beautifully written, with poetry-type interludes and perspective changes that really make everything feel so much more impactful. Finding out your buddy is a murder bug isn't the easiest thing in the world. I love this so much.

Traveling Thieves {Dark Fantasy AU} (series) by @amethystfairy1 is basically one of the series of all time. I know I keep saying that but it really really is. I love a good fantasy au, and I love an au with hybrids even more. In this world, hybrids are treated like slaves, but it isn't all doom and gloom for the main characters of each installment. There is a lot of hurt/comfort and the different stories feed into each other in really interesting ways. I try to read as much as I can, though I've missed a few because my emails are buggy. Definitely worth reading these fics, especially since now they're all starting to come together!

Completed Fics

Solving Counting Sheep by @theminecraftbee might have rearranged my brain chemistry a little. Another strong contender for 'fics that inspire me to kill Grian', this time with a more concrete notion of "replacement". Three is my favourite fucked up living weapon. It's so rare to find Evo fics in this day and age, too. This fic had me immediately clicking on every update as soon as I got the emails.

Rescue Fire by @imaginethat0327 is one of the most unique takes on a fictionalised life series game that I have ever read. The whole concept is explained in a realistic and easy-to-follow way, as we learn what's happening with the characters. There are several brilliant storylines happening in this one, but my particular favourites are Jimmy & Tango, Joel, and of course Scar & Grian. This fic is full of whump and, well, read the tags, it isn't always pleasant, but those are my favourite things ever. Definitely worth checking out this fic and its currently updating sequel.

don't you know about me? by takenbadgering is a wonderful comedy of errors with just the right amount of angst for a realistic setting type of fic. If you enjoy polyamory miscommunications, rave aesthetics, kandi, school teacher dynamics, and a lovely blend between grumbo, cubscar, and mumscar, this is the one.

Eventually the Birds Must Land by @milo-hypno follows a polyam ship I would have never thought of, and I cannot believe how much I loved it. This married-as-friends fic premise is wonderful, and captures the main trio (Grian, Mumbo, Impulse)'s personalities so well, while balancing them with the incredibly terrifying descriptions of the Watchers and their power. There's a lot of angst here, but it is ultimately hurt/comfort to the maximum degree. I loved reading it as it updated. Yay for gay marriage!

From The Archives (series) by @sixteenth-days was the absolute inspiration for my own Comms AU, and I will never forget its influence on me. As someone basically unfamiliar with TMA, I thought this series might be hard to follow, but it was not! I read all 57 parts in the span of two days, and I think it altered my brain chemistry. Please read it, even if (especially if) you don't know anything about TMA. The Cleo and Grian storyline lives in my head rent free. I mean it. This is horror at its finest. Also there's an audio series of this fic being released rn, which is very cool.

SUPERCRITICAL by @masque-of-plague hits different. It is such a wonderful take on the superhero/HotGuy trope, and it gets so super dark at some points! This one really takes swings at it's fictional government, which of course I love, while at the same time building this brilliantly emotional relationship between Scar and Grian. I do enjoy a bit of enemies to lovers, but the actual plot mixed into the story makes this one extra special. It is thrilling, with action that I don't get to see too often! Great work.

I am weary with contending! is one of the mumscarian fics of all time. From 'this house has people in it'-type horror, to magic gone wrong, to childhood trauma, to attempted assassination, to gender fuckery, this fic has it all. Usually I don't go for convex siblings, but this one is good enough to get a pass from me. Amazingly detailed worldbuilding alongside a brilliantly creative story.

It Spreads by @foxxology may not count as a fic, actually. It's a comic. But it's posted on ao3 so it counts. I was obsessed with this one as it was updating, honestly. It rocked me to my core. The art is phenomenal. The writing is brilliant. I love sculk.

Luck of the sea by Sleepy_Duck is a lovely take on mermaid and human interactions, with Grian as a marine life conservator and Scar as a very neglected mer. This one takes us emotionally in all sorts of directions, and offers lots of hope for the future of the characters. I heavily enjoyed this fic - if you like mermaids and marine biology, check it out.

there are many downsides to being a marine biologist by donnerstag is another mermaid fic but with a pretty different vibe. First of all, it follows what I would consider a rarepair Doc/Martyn. Second of all, reading this as it updated was a thrilling experience that nearly made me cry at certain points. I love how the relationship builds in this fic. It is honestly amazing. The whole idea of experimenting on a sentient sea creature, learning that he can communicate, then losing funding and having to save him from being dissected?!?! It's crazy. I love it.

Thus concludes my fic recommendations. I hope you enjoy at least some of these, and consider reblogging to spread these wonderful fics around <3

[the---hermit]

05|06|2024

New day new struggles working on this history paper. I cannot stress enough how stressed I am about how bad the new research interface of my uni is, I feel like ever since they did the big update it's super complicated to get results that have to do with what you are looking for and that are accessible too. Moreover no one cares about this topic because I genuinely cannot find anything. I have found a couple of articles to help me with context but not much. By the end of the week I plan on finishing reading and highlighting what resources I have found and then I'll see what I can make of them, and get back to the professor. I am procrastinating emailing her back because I have no idea what to say tbh. My English lit review on the other hand is going pretty well, and reviewing in the afternoons seems to be a good plan. Since I am a bit more tired having to review out loud helps me with staying focused, and I also don't have to read historical sources all day, or else I'd lose my mind. This afternoon I struggled to stay focused anyway, but at least I got some stuff done, if I had to continue my history research I wouldn't have done anything probably. My brain is just very very tired again.

Today's productivity:

started my morning with an audiobook

more struggling looking for historical sources (I found a couple more but I am keeping those for the very end because they are once again not 100% relevant to what I have to do)

read and highlighted quite a few sources I downloaded at the beginning of the week (a couple were more or less useful a couple were a waste of time, but maybe I'll quote a couple of context details in the end, who knows. At the moment I only need to read two more and then I am done with my first round of secondary sources, but one of those might get deleated because I'm pretty sure is totally useless)

got to practice my French because of a couple of said historical sources, and wrote down the new words I learned today (surprisingly my understaning is better than I expected giving that I have not used my French in years, I should really get back to it more seriously)

continued my first outloud review of all my English lit materials (today I started working on the Shakespeare part, it will take a couple of days to finish it, especially bc today I didn't do as much as I had hoped)

wrote a little summary of a couple of sentences for all the scenes of The Merchant Of Venice in order to review it without having to reread it for the fourth time

[mysticficti0n]

hey girlie I have a question!

sooo I rlly rlly love ur writing and literally I read most ur stuff every night 🤭 but I was wondering maybe if you could write one about Colby Brock.... and just any idea but like I rlly want to see what you could do

from

Bun

I do not mind one bit! I grew up watching Sam and Colby so ofc!! For this I am gonna make up a place because I feel like it heheheh but this is my first Colby fic so don't judge pretty please <3 Ive tried my best and checked for mistakes and hopefully there's none (or very little)

Haunted house

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

warnings- ColbyBrockxFem/Reader, swearing, mentions of death, death of children, fire, hanging, fluff/teasing, Y/H/T= your home town, smut!! kissing, smut, P in V, no protection,

words- 10k (sorry ☹︎)

"sooooo are you gonna come tomorrow?" Sam asked me over the phone, it's Halloween tomorrow and he, Colby and some friends had been working really hard the whole of October and decided on the 31st they wanted to do a haunted house sleepover, and this house was in the middle of fucking nowhere, 4 hours away, and miles from the nearest town "because we need to leave like... 9am ish tomorrow to get there in time to meet the owners" I waited a few seconds mentally reviewing my life and really asking myself I wanted to do this

"umm- yeah okay" I agreed and already regretted it "I'll walk to yours and be there for like 8-8:30?" Sam made a noise as if he was talking to someone else then made a huh sound to me "I said I'll walk to yours-"

"ohh- Colby said he can grab you but you'll have to go to the store with him"

"okay no problem, what time though?" Sam said 8am so I set my alarm for 6:30, enough time for a shower, get ready, pack then get in the car with Colby, our conversation continued until another voice interrupted telling the boy he needs to get ready "alright then, see you tomorrow"

"Bye-Bye" he sung and the phone cut. Tomorrow was about to be very interesting...

BEEP BEEP BEEP

I opened my eyes to find my room dark, and my phone reading 6:30am "ughhh" I groaned rolling out the warm covers and slowly made my way into my bathroom, I switched the light on and then put the shower on, turning the heat to the warmest it could be, sleepily I pulled my clothes off and jumped into the shower humming as the water washed over my skin. My morning went quick, at one point it was 7am and I need to still pack and now its 8am and my front door is being knocked because Colby is already here "shit shit shit" I chanted quickly stuffing chargers, torches, batteries and whatever else I could quickly grab before I sprinted to the door "morning!" I panted

"good morning, you okay?" he laughed putting a hand on my shoulder

"fi-fine yeah" I smiled standing to look at him properly "you good?" he nodded walking in "I've just gotta put a few last things in my bag, wanna come sit in my room?"

"oooh" he cooed, I slapped his arm as we made our way to my room, he walked in and quickly jumped onto the bed that was freshly made and crumpled the sheets which I made a face to, a cheeky smirk painted the tatted mans face as he shuffled creating a larger mess "you excited?"

"oh yeah- cant wait" I sarcastically answered grabbing my card "how like- bad is it?" I asked which I probably shouldn't have with the wide smile that crept onto the mans face

"well its known to have had 6 people hang themselves in the attic, two of those were children like 10 years old" my stomach sank, eyes widened "i'm kidding! only one 10 year old was hung" I sighed again regretting agreeing to going to this place and mentally slapping myself

"you're not helping the nerves I have right now" he laughed lying himself back, grabbing a pillow to go under his head "what are you grabbing from the shop?"

"water, snacks, any like little bits we need, plus were not filming it so we don't need much, oh and Amanda is coming, you guys will get on great" I smiled, I had seen Amanda in a few videos with the guys before and she seems really fun and interesting to work with as she's a medium

"okay well I'm ready now" with a breath he stood, fixing my bed and giving the pillow a slap to make it 'comfy', I pulled my little suitcase of the bed and onto the floor to follow me

"you'll love It once were there" Colby spoke grabbing my bag off me, carrying it down the stairs and walked to his car to put it in his trunk as I locked my door

"I've been told that one to many times" we shared a look before a laugh spilled from both of us

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

The shopping was done, some water, crisps, and some lollipops, I sat myself in the front and waited patiently for Colby to get back in "oh another thing- one of the spirits at this place has a thing for touching girls backs and leaving like little bruises"

"great! gonna get molested by a ghost man" I grinned sarcastically looking to the dark haired boy "as long as I don't get like pushed down stairs or something I'm good-ish"

"well-"

"ugh" Colby laughed starting the car, sending me a quick smirk before we drove back to his house. It was a quiet drive, only the radio playing some songs, and the noises of traffic around us, It was defiantly the calm before the storm tonight.

We arrived at the house and went inside, I saw Sam and a blonde sat on the sofa talking but quickly stopping as we entered "Ayyyy she's here!" the man called holding his hands in the air "Amanda this is Y/n, Y/n this is Amanda" I looked to the girl

"hey how are you!" she asked sending me a warm smile, she was really pretty, dressed in a white knitted jumper, blue skinny jeans

"hi i'm great, how're you?" she looked a little taken-back but still with a smile

"Oh you're British?" I nodded "ohh- where are you from?"

"Y/H/T (if you're not from England just chose somewhere to be from), grew up there then moved to Kansas when I was like 14" she smiled and looked back to Sam, I turned to Colby who was stood leaning up the door way staring back to me "what?" I mouthed and he shook his head with a smile

"right guys, we need to leave like in 5 minuets, it's a 4 hour drive- and I have to drive" he groaned "who's sitting in the front with me?" I watched as Amanda quickly placed a finger onto her nose "Amanda is sat with me then!" she grinned grabbing her bag

"Looks like were together then" I said looking to the dark headed man still behind me, he giggled before quickly hurrying away to the stairs and went up, he's so weird sometimes "okay before we go ima go for a piss" Sam threw me a thumbs up and I went to the bathroom. I finished and washed my hands, I looked into the mirror and stared at my make-up, I hadn't put much on but my lips looked slightly chapped so I pulled out my lip gloss and swiped it onto my lips, with one last look I walked out and was met with the blue eye gaze of Colby

"that for me?" he looked to my lips and back up

"of course" I smiled, biting my lip jokingly, I walked past hitting his shoulder slightly, but the feeling of his grip on me pulled me back to be in front of him, I turned to look to his face but he nodded to his free hand, the one not still holding my other hand that was gently drawing circles on with his thumb, I looked to his hands and saw him holding something "whats that?" he opened his palm and revealed two cross necklaces

"one for me and this one is for you" I smiled at the gesture taking mine from his hand and putting it into my pocket, but that made me think- how bad will this place be if I need to wear a cross...

"right come on were going!" Sam called and hurriedly I grabbed my bags to now put in his Tesla, we didn't all have that much, just some extra clothes, food, drinks, and equipment for the investigations we'd be doing, everything was in and I climbed into the left side of the car, fastened my belt and took off my shoes getting comfy, Amanda got in after me and turned to me passing me a bag of something

"try one!" she offered, my hand dipped into the purple bag and pulled out a yellow boiled sweet "mango and passionfruit" my eyes widened at the tase, it was great

"holy shit" I laughed "please tell me you have another bag?"

"I have three- they're my favourite sweet in literal world" we high-fived in agreement and she sat back into her seat, the boys joined us, Sam in the front, Colby with me. As the car turned on some random song began to play which Colby let a huff out, throwing his head back in some sort of protest

"Dude put something good on" he complained "put- Christina Aguilera on" Sam flicked his head back to his best friend who just shrugged

"why her?" he asked with a confused grin

"first name that came to mind" Soon the sweet voice Christina came on and our journey began, I went into my pocket pulling out my phone, flicked onto snapchat and quickly felt my phone pulled from my hands and Colby turned the screen to him "pose bitch" he yelped, I quickly sat forward putting my hand on his shoulder and my head rested next to his, he thew up a peace sign and the picture was taken "I look so sexy"

"sure you do" I sat back feeling the gaze of him fall on me, crossing my legs and letting my head fall back "so whats up with this place? I asked this dickhead and he told me basically people hung themselves and me and Amanda might get touched by a ghosty man" the group laughed before the girl in front turned to me

"okay so the house is called Elgor Manor House, it was passed through around like six generations of the Sails family, the one of the last known member of the house walked out to find a women stood at the gates, she said she had red-ish eyes, very boney and long dark hair yelling it was on fire, and when she turned around she saw smoke and flames eating the house, she ran in to try find her children and they were found in the hall crying pointing to the attic, she supposedly ran up and found the attic door open and matches up there- her husband Charles Sails had done it" I nodded taking in all the information "Charles was known to have some mental issues... so assumed, but she said when she saw him, his eyes were black, skin very white, and his shirt was ripped open and where his heart was a huge red mark was there, like as if he'd been clawed. Cherrie, the mom then just ran out with her children but sadly- 3 out the 5 died but when she got out the women wasn't there but Cherrie believed it was a saviour as without that women she would've been able to save the children she did despite her appearance being quite devil like- thats what she told the newspaper anyways, and then she died about a year later; Charles was never seen again so he was told to be dead, and then the 2 children she escaped with both were mysteriously shot two days apart the day after their mothers death" my jaw dropped "all under 18 years old too" I couldn't believe what I herd, and Amanda just nodded

"fuck- when did that all happen?"

"1926, but thats not even the weirdest bit, Charles' great granddad, Stephan Sails was told to always let the children start fires around the land as if they got out of hand many times it resulted in some servant dying and never landed back on him, there's still a tree there thats all ashy, but anyways, the way he died was getting into the attic, and then there was a fire, and when they found his body- even though he was so badly burnt- there was a huge red mark over where his heart was" Sam added, pulling to a stop at a light "the odd thing is though, so many people died in that attic, Charles, Stephan, the other 4 and then one of those were a girl named Marlie, from what we know she was about 10 and was Stephans Grandmothers sister, and she was found hanging off the 6th rafter with a rope, wrapped 6 times on her neck, and 6 of her toys surrounding her, and one of those toys still remain in the house after the fires and over about 200 years" I sat astonished, no words able to leave my mouth

"so 6th rafters, 6 times around her neck and 6 toys around her? could this mean something maybe... took over her? because well 666 is the devils number" Amanda agreed sending me a knowing look "holy shit" I breathed

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

"anyone hungry?" Sam asked looking back at everyone "there's a McDonald's over there" we all agreed to go grab something to eat, we still had a while to go till we got to the house anyways, the blonde pulled into the car park and all got out. The four of us walked in and went straight to the touch screens

"whats everyone having?" Colby asked, Sam quickly chose his food and Colby went after him, Amanda went next then me "ooh they have ice cream" he hummed in a childish tone, clapping his hands excitingly

"shall we all get one?" I asked and everyone nodded, so I added 4. I grabbed the receipt, me and Amanda stood waiting at the counter for the food while the other two went to find a table

"so how did you get to know the boys?" she asked

"oh I joined there school when I was 14, so... freshman year? because I had just moved from Y/H/T to Kansas because my mom got a job there, and I was in a few lessons with Colby but I was mostly with Sam, and they knew each other because of band that they were forced to do, then we started talking more and more until I found out we didn't live that far apart, started going to Sam's more, Colby was there a lot and then yeah, just stayed being their friends and we all moved here together but I bought a little place like 5 minuets away" she nodded, grabbing the one bag of food while I grabbed the two trays of drinks and ice cream

"to be completely honest when I first herd about you it was through Colby and I thought you guys were together from how he was saying it, he kept smiling while thinking of things to tell me and showed me photos of you, even blushed when I said you were pretty but I can see you two are just like really good friends" we laughed as I shut down the allegations, we were just best friends, every best friend sometimes have little flirty games together right?. We found the guys sat in a window seat laughing over something and me and Amanda sat across from them

"Whats funny?" I asked passing out the drinks

"just watching you two gossip like girls at school" Sam giggled red faced, him and Colby began impersonating us with high pitch squeals, I looked to the girl next to me and we just sighed ignoring them.

We all finished and got back into the car, I flicked my shoes off again and placed my legs over Colby who gave a stare to which I just smiled, placing my hoodie behind my head and laying back "really?"

"mhm" I yawned closing my eyes "feel free to give me a massage" he pretend heaved, but still placed his arms over my legs leaning back himself, the feeling of his rings felt cold against my skin, even through my jeans as he softly rubbed my legs. Slowly my body began to feel lighter, and the chatter and music became quieter.

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

"Y/n.... Y/n/n" my eyes fluttered opened to the smiling face of Colby "we're here" he sung pulling me up, I turned to look out the window and saw the sign, a concrete block engraved with 'Elgor Manor' and soon the house came into sight. Sam parked the car and we all got out, a chill ran down my spine despite the warmth of the day. The exterior of the house seemed to loom over us, casting an eerie shadow across the grounds. The structure, though grand, appeared worn and weathered, as if the weight of centuries pressed upon its dark, aged wooden frame.

Massive, gnarled trees surrounded the property, their branches reaching out like skeletal fingers, seemingly trying to grasp onto the last remnants of life. The overgrown bushes and tangled ivy obscured much of the house, adding to its air of neglect and foreboding. The windows, adorned with tattered, moth-eaten curtains. Despite the expanse of land stretching out around the manor, it felt suffocatingly claustrophobic, The overall appearance was not shabby but uncannily surreal, as if the passage of time had twisted the reality of the place. It was as though I had stepped into a realm where the laws of nature and perception bent in unsettling ways.

"woah" I sighed "this is....creepy but beautiful" I spoke looking back to the group, they nodded staring back to the home, soon the noise off tires scraping along the rubble drive appeared behind us, we all turned and were greeted with two people, one walked up, a grin put across his thin lips covered by a white beard, his matching long hair tied into a pony tail, the next to come out was a women, black hair, freckles, and bright red lipstick painted on her lips, with a pearly white beaming smile.

"Hey there!" the man greeted shaking all our hands "I'm Jack, this is my wife Mary and welcome to Elgor Manor" his wife came over shaking our hands again then finding a spot next to her husband "so Elgor Manor, is a very very old house, built around 1798 from what we know, past through many generations of the Sails family but nobody has lived here since 1940's, We found out in about 2020, our friend, Timothy, is actually a distant relative of this family, he was Charles Sails fourth great-grandchild and his great-aunt was the last to own the house-which is now a great new fact we can tell you all" he laughed

"yeah we've herd so much about this place its crazy the history behind it." Colby spoke to the two "We herd about Charles and Stephan"

"Oh oh- they're just the start of it all, its when you hear Marlie's story and her mother Carol-Anne" we all went quiet "you haven't herd about her have you?" we all shook our head no "you'll learn" I gulped, a cold feeling running through me "what're all your names by the way?" Mary asked

"Y/n"

"Colby"

"Amanda"

"Sam" she smiled nodding

"so Y/n, Amanda- you being girls need to be careful tonight, if you go into the back dining room or sometimes in one of the bedrooms there's a man there, his name is Christopher Sails- he was very well known around here for being quiet the player, a playboy you may say in the late 1800" Me and Amanda shared a look, one of slight fear "he's known for touching girls back, leaving marks, and sometimes you may feel your cheeks get warm but then in the middle cold- thats him giving you a kiss... but he is... nice... just be- careful" she sounded slight unsure, I gave a look to Sam who sent me a small unsettled thin lip smile

"well we will get to the tour -we are going to quickly unlock the doors but anyways after that we can take you round!" Jack smiled walking away with his wife, Sam and Amanda went back to the car to grab different bags and I turned back to Colby

"I am terrified" he laughed wrapping an arm around me, giving me a slight squeeze "if I get fucked by a ghost or some shit I'm going home"

"eh don't worry- a ghost wont fuck you" I looked up to the man who smiled back

"who will then?" I hummed walking away from him feeling his eyes follow my moves

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

It was time to go into the house, Colby and Amanda went in first and me and Sam followed behind, we walked into the hall and it was grand, gold accents everywhere, two huge mirrors, little objects protected by glass coverings "this part has been restored to how it would've been in 1910's, as you can see lots of gold and dark oak, this rug you see here has been here since 1890 and has been seen to move or make noise like its being slapped against the floor which is what the maids would've done" The couple went into another room, one with green-washed walls, plaster pulling from the walls, two sofas, wooden details decorating the outline, and a TV, we were told about the objects that have been told to move, especially one called Jessies Glass, it was a piece of glass with some spikes coming out

"so this is Jessies glass, so you see all the spikes- this was used agaisnst misbehaving children and staff, either they would stand on It or it was pushed into their backs" Mary commented making all of us do a collective groan "we've had experiences of people hearing screams by children and mostly maids as the heads of the house would usually punish those who didn't do their job right"

We carried on the tour around the house till we reached the last door on the third floor, it was shut, locked and had a sign reading 'Do not enter' I didn't even have a handle "so this is the staircase upto the attic. Obviously where Charles, Stephan, Marlie and others died" we nodded looking back to the ominous door "just- don't go up" we all nodded again and followed the guides down the stairs back to the last room

"think they'll know if we go up?" I hushed Colby who had a playful smirk twitching the sides of his lips "I know we all thought it" he whispered as we walked

We all walked into the dining room and stood around the grand oak table "so see that rocking chair in the corner, thats Christopher's, he's not here right now but That'll start rocking when he's in. He usually -in the day visits the yard, sits in the swinging sofa" all our eyes cast a gaze outside to the yard "mh doesn't seem to be out there either- odd" Mary spoke "well, thats everything, please call if you need anything, keys on the table so yes, just be careful, and respectful"

"thank you" Amanda spoke, the couple said a quick goodbye before leaving us in the house, we went back to our car pulling out all our things: EMF reader, music box, tap torches, spirt box and cat balls, then our things "Y/n wanna stay in one of the rooms up stairs or down here?"

"I think we need to sleep upstairs"

She agreed and the two of us ended up running up two the second floor "which room, Yellow or blue do you think?"

"oh defiantly blue!" as I spoke I herd a dismissive noise from below "what was that?"

"we want the blue room!" Sam yelled coming up the stairs "it's literally the most active, you herd what Jack said- we want it"

"we've already dibbed it" I sassed looking to the blonde

"fuck you" he pouted walking back down the staircase "Colby they're having the blue room"

"NU UH!" the other groaned as a smile crept on mine and Amanda's faces as we placed our things on the bed

"tonight it going to be amazing, do you see anything yet?" I spoke out of interest as I pulled on my hoodie

"no not yet, not even had any feelings either- might just have to wait a bit" I hummed listening to her explanation "why don't we go into the garden, see if Christopher is out there?" quickly we made our way down the stairs and into the kitchen to get to the garden, we stepped out and the warm air hit us, my eyes looked to the swinging seat, it was still.

"maybe we should try sitting there" I spoke making my own way to the cushioned seat, I sat back looking round while Amanda came over, I swayed gently on the swinging bench, my gaze wanders across the garden, taking in the peculiar blend of beauty and eerie ambiance that surrounds me. The garden appears deceptively tranquil at first glance, with an abundance of vibrant flowers in full bloom. Lush, colourful petals dance in the gentle breeze, painting a picturesque scene that should be serene.

The fragrance of the flowers hangs thick in the air, a delightful mixture of sweet scents that should evoke joy, yet there's an underlying sense of foreboding. It's as if the very essence of the garden is intertwined with an unspoken mystery, a silent narrative woven between the petals and leaves. Then I see a pond, the pond, nestled amidst the blossoms, reflects the azure sky above, mirroring the beauty of the day. Yet, despite the shimmering water's surface, there's a certain depth that seems to hold secrets, as if it conceals more than just fish and lily pads beneath.

"its really nice for a place thats meant to be extremely haunted" the girl spoke next to me "maybe... maybe it wont be bad" I hummed relaxing more into the seat

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

The time ticked away, 2pm, 5pm and then the time finally hit 9pm "nothings even happened" Sam groaned "we've been around the whole house with all the equipment and nothing this is so stupid" The four of us had sat In the living room, Amanda in the arm chair, Sam, and Colby on the two seater and I sat on the floor flicking through channels on the TV "I mean even you haven't seen anything" he argued, I finally settled on some random sitcom and sat back leaning against Colby's leg for support

"it might just take some time" the brunette behind spoke

"fuck it taking time- we've been here since fucking 1:30 and nothing, I'm calling bullshit" Sam got up from his place and stormed into the kitchen grabbing a water bottle and basically gulping the whole thing muttering some words, I looked back to Colby who gave me a smirk then looked back to the TV

"well I'm gonna go change" Amanda said standing "come?" she gave her hand to me, pulling me up to meet her height, still in hand we began to go up the stairs, running like children to our room "Sam is so pissed off"

"I know, I've never seen him like this" I laughed pulling off my jumper "like he's never this angr-" I was cut my a creaking sound, then a thump "fuck was that?"

"probably the guys?" she spoke walking to the door "Sam?! Colby?!" she called, no response, then another bang- above us

"that was upstairs..." quickly I pulled my hoody back over me and walked out the room up the small crooked staircase, I looked down the hall, Amanda stood close behind me "nothings moved-"

"Y/n- there's a little girl, ran into the door down there" the blondes voice was small "red hair, blue bows, light blue dress" I looked to where she was gesturing to

"that...no- that fucking door is open" my heart sank "we need to grab the guys" the two of us hurried down the first flight of stairs then the second "the doors open!"

"what door?" Colby asked sitting up

"the door with no shitting handle and the don't enter sign" we all shared a look before they quickly came up past us running to the door, I quickly grabbed the Rempod and followed, switching it on so It was ready when we got to the door. I crept up the steps and was met with the back of Colby, I let my arm creep around his waist

"FU-fucking hell Y/n" he breathed turning to look at me, I gave him a quick sorry smile before squeezing past with the Rempod, I walked past the other two and went face to face with the door "be careful" he warned

"If there is anyone here... please touch this antenna" I spoke stopping the conversation between the two blondes , I took a few steps back looking at the machine intensely "we're not here to cause any stress, harm, anything negative- just want to talk" I spoke again. the box began to beep, red light flashing, I took a glance back to the group who's faces lightened "who are we talking to, erm can you touch once for a child, twice for adult" and there again it beeped once

"she's back- behind the door" I looked up facing the door, slowly I went to my knees, holding a warm smile on my face

"hi" I whispered and the box buzzed again "are you Marlie?" everyone went quiet "Marlie Sails?" the Rempod beeped again, I tried to not seem terrified and kept my stance, hands shaking by my sides

"She's gone... I'm guessing up the stairs" I stood going to take a step through the door

"wait" a hand gripped my forearm, I felt all the cold rings press against my skin, the same familiar feeling from earlier in the car "be careful- have you got your cross?" I nodded going into my pocket and pulling out, Colby took the necklace from my grip and gently moved my hair to the side, lifting the dainty metal over my head and clipped it around my neck "okay" I looked back seeing a tent pushed into his cheek, eyes low looking to me, sending me an unspoken message, Slowly, I pulled the door open more listening as it creaked, revealing deformed, water-damaged steps that ascended steeply to the attic. Each step groaned and protested beneath my weight, as if the old wooden structure itself was begging me to turn back.

With each step, the protest of the wood grew louder, a cacophony of distress that reverberated through the dimly lit corridor. The air felt heavy and suffocating, as if the very walls were watching, waiting for my next move.

Reaching the top, a chill slithered down my spine, instantly sending shivers across my skin. The attic lay engulfed in darkness, besides the faint glimmer of moonlight that seeped through a small window, casting elongated shadows that danced along the floor.

I squinted into the darkness, my eyes adjusting slowly. Shapes emerged, barely visible in the dim light, and among them, the faint outlines of rafters became visible. Counting softly, my voice barely audible in the oppressive silence, "One, two, three, four, five... six." My gaze fixed on the sixth rafter to my right, the very beam from which Marlie's life had been stolen. As I extended my hand to touch the wood, a shiver of uncertainty coursed through me. "You were so young," my voice quivered, barely louder than a whisper. "Why?" The words hung in the air, swallowed by the quietness of the attic.

A sudden change in the atmosphere sent a wave of warmth around me, a stark contrast to the chilling aura just moments before. My hair prickled on the back of my neck, standing as if trying to flee the unseen force that enveloped me. "Is... is that you, Marlie?" I stammered, my voice faltering as the air grew thicker, charged with an otherworldly energy.

"Y/n? everything okay?" Amanda called, I turned my head to look down the staircase where her voice was coming from

"can you come up?" I asked and herd the quiet steps coming up the stairs and then the face of the blonde girl appeared, her smile quickly dropped "what?"

"the little girl is down there- by the window" I turned my head looking to the window, it seemed blurred unlike before "she's looking directly at you"

"H-hi Marlie" I spoke "how are you?" I felt my stomach flip, my head going misty "does she look- happy?" I asked and Amanda looked back her eyes flicking around the girl

"she seems- okay? not happy but not anything else, almost emotionless, I...oh" my head went back to Amanda who seemed worried herself "she's gone"

I felt a cold chill run through my body as if something walked through me "shit" I spoke feeling my body quiver "shall we go back down?" I asked seeing Amanda's shadow nod, we began back down the staircase, we left the last step and looked to the two boys who stood silent looking to us "she was up there"

"I've never seen something like that- so....so clear" Amanda breathed scratching her head

"Marlie?" Sam asked and we nodded "woah- maybe we should take the spirtbox up, or at least stand here and do it, maybe she could speak?" we all agreed, Sam hurried down the stairs to the first room grabbing the things

"I need a drink before we do this" Amanda spoke looking to us "you guys want one?"

"please" I spoke looking back to the door, the girls footsteps wondered away leaving me and Colby again "this is crazy"

"Are you alright?" His words were barely audible, whispered with a gentle concern that wrapped around me like a comforting embrace. His arm extended slowly, encircling my waist and drawing me closer. I hummed softly, shifting my gaze toward him "you had me worried going up there" and a wave of reassurance washed over me as I met his eyes. There, I found a small but warm grin gracing his lips, instantly soothing my unease and bringing a sense of safety and care. Our eyes met, his piercing blue ones looking into my Y/C/E, Our breaths seemed to halt as we watched each other, our faces inching closer and closer, my heart stopped, falling but in the best way possible "can I-"

"Y/n grabbed you a water" hurriedly we pulled away, turning to see Amanda holding three waters, and Sam not far behind "have you felt anything since?" she asked handing my the bottle, I couldn't tell her the hot feeling that ran through my body was because I was close to kissing my best friend of 13 years

"er- no, nothing" I answered quietly pulling away from the man next to me to grab the bottle

"mh strange" she spoke

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

The four of us now sat in a small circle as the clock struck 3:30am, little tea lights surrounding us, the spirit box in the middle "anyone wanna do the Estes method?" Sam asked

"can I try?" I wondered seeing everyones eyes flick to mine

"are you sure?" Colby said, I nodded picking up the blind fold and bringing it to my eyes, I held it behind me and faced my back to the brunette boy, he took the silky material out my hand, slowly he tied the knot and it tightened to my head "okay here are the headphones" he put the pair in my hands and I put them on, the static noises filling my ears almost defining me, I kept listening waiting for some words

"up..........tight..........sick..........momma..........help me..........waiting..........Rosa..........Dining room..........blue..........you..........Samual..........ten..........no care..........duck..........help..........kill..........he did..........made me..........devil man..........father..........fire" My breath began to pick up, chest heaving up and down, my body rocking trying to catch breath, 'he made us die' voices breathed into my ear I ripped the headphones from my head, pulled the material from my eyes "fuck that" I shuffled back from my place clutching the sofa behind me

"what what happened?" Sam looked to me with slight panic in his eyes

"something- something whispered 'he made us die' in only the left ear- and it was like multiple voices said it" I cried, eyes filling with tears "like a little girl and loads of others too but I could hear her the most"

"we do think it was Marlie we were talking to a lot" Amanda said gently, my lip kept quivering, I couldn't stop it was all to real "I saw her twice, peaking around the door" I smiled weakly

"need a break?" Colby spoke, I nodded I really needed some air, I got up walking to the front door and stepping out onto the porch, I let myself hang over the railing catching my breath while wiping away the tears that kept falling down my cheeks, I looked out into the pitch black landscape "drink?" I freaked turning to see the tatted man holding my water bottle

"thanks" I breathed taking a sip "that was terrifying" the warm feeling of his hand cupped my back, standing closely behind me, comforting me after the fright. I sucked another breath and leaned into him resting my head on his shoulder

"every question we asked got answered you know- but at one point you started rocking and...eh doesn't matter" I looked up to him, questioning him with my eyes "I was gonna grab you but didn't wanna ruin the experiment... yeah the experiment " he answered avoiding my gaze

"mh, maybe you should next time" I followed looking back to the darkness

"only if you let me" he whispered into the shell of my ear making my body go from freezing to burning

"maybe I will" I teased, I turned to meet his gaze, a smile teasing the corners of my lips. "So, what were you going to ask me earlier, upstairs?" I inquired, leaning in slightly, feeling a rush of excitement as Colby's head fell closer to mine, our breaths meeting in the air between us. Our lips were tantalisingly close, the anticipation crackling like electricity, a teasing tension building with each passing moment.

"you really wanna know?" I hummed, nodding my head gently "I was wondering if maybe I could-" before he finished his sentence another person walked out

"oh should I" Sam coughed, we tore apart going away from the sides of each other "erm me and Amanda are gonna go to bed its like 4 am so" I pulled my jumper straight and gave the blonde boy a quick smile

"yeah I'll go up- night guys" I said quickening my pace back into the house and up to mine and Amanda's room "hey" I called walking in

"hi- feeling better?" she asked settling into the sheets

"much" I grinned going to the bed and pulling my side open "first day meeting and already in bed together" I joked hearing a laugh come from the girl "anyways goodnight" I smiled one last time before I turned my lamp off and closed my eyes

"night"

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

"Y/n....Y/n" I heard a whisper shout in my ear "wake up.... Y/n please" my eyes flickered open "someones in here" her voice was small

"what..who?" I asked sitting up, the room was pitch black, I grabbed my phone turning on the flashlight "one of the guys?"

"no...well its a man, he's In the corner watching" I turned my head to the corner of the room, shining my light there and there it was again a hazy mist "Y/n I see things like this but he seems different- I cant get anything from him, he seems.. I don't even know"

"shall we leave?" I asked pushing the covers off my body

"yeah- erm let me just grab my paper quickly" rapidly I left the bed, grabbing my jumper I seemed to have taken off and waited for Amanda to come to me, she followed me as we left the room and went next door, I pushed opened the door to reveal the two sleeping boys tucked untidily in the sheets "should we wake them up?"

"yeah- Sam, Colby" I called seeing neither of them shift, I went over to the bed shaking Sam by his shoulder and his eyes opened

"what the fuck Y/n- what?" his whispered, voice full of sleep "its like- 6 in the morning" the covers on the other side shifted and a murmur came from the boys mouth

"Amanda saw a man in our room" I spoke being quieter, I turned back to see the girl sat In the small desk chair looking to her notepad

"what do you mean? a real man?" Colby spoke up, the covers fell from him showing his toned body

"no- it was an older guy, green robe, little hair, and like I kept getting the words like 'ladies' 'kiss' and 'beauty'" Amanda told with a breath

"sounds like that Christopher guy" I shook my head feeling my cheek go hot then cold in the middle "Y/n whats wrong"

"I think you're right" I answered "he kissed me, like I felt what Mary or whatever told us" I sat myself on the bed setting back onto the frame "my cheek felt hot then ice cold In the middle"

"why has he followed you guys into here though? he must really like you" as soon as Sam finished a huge bang rattled the house "fuck was that" he called

"did you follow the girls in here Christopher?" Colby asked "Knock once for no, knock twice for yes" we all went quiet listening to the two thumps that filled the room

"you have no right to touch us- don't ever do that again" Amanda warned, her tone slick with anger "its wrong to follow girls like that- or anyone for that matter. Never do that again you hear me Christopher" the sound of footsteps rattled through and soon faded down the stairs, he left thankfully

"fucking hate this so much" I muttered looking to my phone, I unlocked it I switched onto snapchat, soon the dark outline of Sam Colby appeared on my screen "smile" I voiced, trying to take my mind from everything thats happened seeing the two sleepily posed and I pressed the button snapping a picture, it loaded back onto my screen and I went to look "no- fucking - way!"

"what?!" the three asked scrambling over to see, I pointed to in-between the two "is that a face?" Sam yelled, hands gripping to his hair, and there it was two eyes, nose and mouth "who is that?"

"let me see" Amanda said taking my phone "it looks like...Carol-Anne? like the painting in the living room, thats gotta be her"

"we never learnt anything about her" I spoke "is that you, Carol-Anne?" I felt a nudge next to me "oh" I called looking over my shoulder "is that a yes?" I felt the push again "Okay- erm why don't we get the spirt box out again" I said

"yeah but no Estes this time" Sam answered going into his bag and pulling at the box switching it on, the static taking me back to only a few hours earlier

"what happened to you?" I asked

"daddy" we all looked to each other

"your dad did something?"

"push"

"he pushed you? where did he push you?" Amanda asked grabbing her note book again writing something dow

"woods"

"pushed you into the woods?"

"dark...cold"

"where in the woods did it happen?" I questioned

"grave"

"holy shit was she buried alive?" I turned to Colby who's jaw was open

"yes"

"OH MY GOD" we all called horrified by the response

"why?"

"Naughty baby" it answered

"naughty baby? maybe she was looking after the baby and it did something?"

"moved"

"did you hurt it by accident?"

"poorly head" my eyes widened "speak no more" it finished and the static got louder and louder

"fucking hell" I sighed "well thank you" Sam reached over turning off he box

"well I'm not sleeping anymore" we all laughed "and why dod everything touch me!" I called flopping down into the bed

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

the time ticked by until it reached 9am, we all decided to get ready for the day and wait down stairs until Jack and Mary returned, Me and Sam sat slouched in the living room looking around at the different history in the room "did we ever check if that other door closed? the one in the attic?" I asked looking up the the blonde

"me and Col checked- its closed and I couldn't even pull it back open.. do we tell the owners it opened?"

"maybe but just don't say me and Amanda went up" I told sitting back up "speaking of I think they're here" together we got up, watched as their range drover pulled onto the gravel drive

"Hi guys" Jack called walking into the house with Mary in hand, we all greeted the pair again before they led us to sit in the dining room. I pulled a chair between Amanda and Colby, across from the couple

"So what happened?" Mary spoke crossing her hands

"well nothing happened till about 9pm, erm me and Manda went to change or something up stairs and then we herd a massive noise from the third floor... we went up to see and you know the do not enter door?"

"did- did it open?" Jack asked with a worried tone

"mhm and we promise we did nothing to it, we hadn't touched it or anything, we put the Rempod there and it beeped, and I saw a little girl, red hair, blue bows..."

"Marlie- she doesn't come round much" Mary smiled "did she speak to you? she's often very shy" we all nodded telling her what we knew "was there anyone else?"

"we had Marlie, Christopher and Carol-Anne" Colby answered "can you tell us what actually happened with her before we tell you what she said?"

"sure, so she was the mother of Marlie, Kelsie-Rose, Robert and a toddler we believe the name was Marcus or Marc, one day while looking after the children she was struggling and Marcus kept misbehaving and while in her arms and she dropped him and he passed out but her father caught it happen, bare in mind she was 20 with 4 children, and her father was so angry he made the servants of the house dig a grave in the woods and she was buried alive because of it on January 9th, but the wood was chopped away for the garden and her grave is actually in the pond" my heart skipped- I knew there was something wrong with that pond

"thats what she told us" I said, my voice barely above a whisper

"its a horrible story- poor girl" Mary told looking down "when did she tell you?"

"this morning, around 6ish"

"thats when it happened, 6am she was buried, we found it in a diary that was brought up from the old basement- obviously that basement is gone now though" the group as a whole let out a breath, one of pure shock

"fuck" Sam groaned

Soon it was time to go, we all went up grabbing our stuff saying our good byes to the house, Jack and Mary too, we all went out to Sam's car, putting all our things into the back. I opened my door getting into my back seat and looked to the floor, the same sweets from the day before, I picked up the pack tipping a few into my lap.

"guys were going to do no stops so if you need a piss then fuck it" Sam called staring his car

Soon everyone was settled in and the trip began again, Colby looked over to me sending a quick smile my way as I toyed with the sweet pack in my lap , I handed him a sweet and he happily opened it putting it into his mouth

"good?" he nodded letting his head fall back leaning onto the window "I'm so tired" I jawed, Colby looked over to me again, patting his lap "you sure?" he nodded not sharing any words but turning himself to be comfier for me, I leant down letting my head rest on Colby's thigh "goodnight" I joked, I closed my eyes feeling a soothing warmth come over me, subtly I felt Colbys hand stroke down my arm, stopping near my wrist and his other going to my scalp drawing small circles around my head, slowly I felt myself become lighter and soon I was fast asleep

･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆

"look at them" someone spoke "they're gonna laugh at this when they're awake" someone else said, my eyes flittered open to the two smiling, staring faces of the two blondes "hello" Sam cooed

"mor-morning" I hummed stretching slightly, my hand hit something and I looked up to see the other sleeping face of Colby above me, I couldn't stop the shy smile from appearing on my face "Col" I called shaking him slightly

"no babe I'm tired" he muttered turning away, my heart stopped 'babe'? he was asleep, he didn't know he said it.. but everyone else herd

"he's gonna regret saying that" Sam sinisterly grinned with a wicked laugh

finally we all got out, Colby sleepily shuffled inside the house, scratching his hair out his face "that went fast" he huffed falling onto the sofa

"indeed it did babe" Sam giggled looking to me and back to Colby

"what?" he spoke looking to us

"nothing- anyways I've gotta take Amanda to the airport" I looked to the blonde girl who pouted coming over to me, I wrapped my arms around her

"thanks for the last day it was so cool, and it was great meeting you, we'll, have to hang out again" I grinned coming away

"absolutely! I loved this so much, see you soon Colby" the boy stood hugging her too and we both waved goodbye as Sam and her pulled away, we both walked back into the living room flopping into the couch with a sigh

"gonna come to the next haunted place?" he spoke looking over to me

"hm maybe- just don't wanna be kissed by a random ghosty man again though" I giggled facing Colby again, I hadn't noticed how close we were, our shoulders grazing against each others, faces inches away

"maybe you could get kissed by someone else?" he questioned, eyes falling to my lips then back up to me "...can I tell you what I tried to tell you this morning?" I nodded, no words able to leave my mouth "I was wondering if maybe I could...if I could kiss you?" I looked to the boy, paralysed by his words

"yes please" I answered, it came out my breathy then I imagined but the smile that crept onto the boys face made me realise it wasn't a bad thing. Gently Colby's hand slithered up to my jaw, cupping my face pulling me in lightly

His breath hitched, a low, deep moan escaping as our lips melded. It was a soft collision, yet every touch carried an electric charge, as though our mouths were destined to be together. Each motion felt instinctual, a choreographed dance of desire. Sensing Colby's longing, his tongue traced a path along my lips, a silent plea for entry that I welcomed eagerly. The kiss intensified, a symphony of heat and passion, a growing ache in my stomach got so much needier.

My actions became thoughtless, almost instinctive as I straddled him, our connection unbroken. ''God, you're incredible'' he murmured, his hands finding their place on my waist, his voice a deep, gravelly whisper that sent shivers down my spine. The air crackled with an intoxicating blend of desire and appreciation, his lips moved from my lips to my jaw and then my neck

"Mhmm Co-Colby" I whined as he reached the sweet spot, hearing my sigh he kept going, sucking deeper and harder "agh fuck" my hands gripped his shoulders, scrunching into his shirt, my back arching making me come away from his lips

"if you keep acting like this we might need to go somewhere else" I smiled looking down to the boy "my room?" he spoke and I just nodded jumping from his lap watching him intently as he stood grabbing me again, lifting me to meet his lips, I curled my arms around his neck pulling him as close as I could.

We began climbing the stairs, Colby's hands keeping me steady around his waist until we reached the top, he set me down softly and my hands went quickly down to his waist, fingers curling around his his shirt lifting it above his head and threw it to the floor, his actioned mirrored mine, my shirt quickly being on top if his crumpled on the floor, his hands quickly found the underneath of my thighs again and lifted me up carrying to his room.

"you're so beautiful" he whispered, as he set me on his bed, my fingers went to my jeans, pushing the button out the hole and soon down my legs and onto the floor, as soon as they were off Colby crawled above me, eyes eating every inch of me "look at you" he cooed, hand drawing up the side of me until it met my bra

"take it off?" I teased, a playful glint sparkling in my eyes as I curved a seductive smile on my lips. A subtle nod from him and I propped myself up, stealing a swift kiss before turning around. I could feel the warmth of his gentle fingers as they skillfully unhooked my bra, his lips tracing a tantalizing path against my bare skin, sending shivers down my spine. I turned to meet his gaze again, a coy expression playing on my face, silently inviting him to continue

"holy shit" He gazed in awe, his eyes tracing down my body as his head dipped closer. With a delicate motion, his lips caressed my breast, the tantalizing touch of his tongue flicking along my nipple sent shivers cascading down my spine, igniting a thrilling sensation that lingered

"fuck fuck fuck" I sang as he sucked harder his hand massaging the other "Colby- please fuck I need you" I cried, hand wrapping into his hair pulling him up "please" I begged, I pulled his hand from my waist to my heat letting him feel my need, his pricing eyes glared into mine with the most lustful grin play along his lips

"shit" he smirked, quickly he stood pulling down his cargos revealing the tent that had formed in his boxers that were tightly pulled on his skin, he sat back onto the bed and I couldn't help but crawl onto him again, my heat meeting his bulge, my lips went to his jaw, sucking as sweet mumbles fell from his lips. Unintentionally I let my hips grind against his, I couldn't help but create some sort of friction "fuck doll" his head lulled back, his body hitting the mattress moments after, my hand lay against his abs keeping me up while I pushed harder onto his tent

"Colby?" I asked seeing him look to him again "I really need you" my voice was shaky, needy. My finger traced a path from his v-line to his boxer strap, toying with the underneath begging for entrance

"fuck- need to be in you" he spoke, as he sat on his elbows, I grinned taking that as a yes to pull off the restraint from his cock "ughh" he quivered as it sprung to his stomach

"fuck me" I breathed, it seemed to light a fire in the boy, I felt our position switch, Colby towered above me, his arms reached above my head

"let me take care of you Y/n" he asked, peppering my face with small kisses, I nodded feeling his fingers go to my hips pulling my panties from my skin, the cold air hitting my burning core.

his fingers sweep my entrance "unnngh" I sighed eyes clamping closed, I reopened my eyes to watch the boy stick his slick fingers into his mouth, sucking off the reminiscences of me off

"you're so sweet baby girl-just like those fucking sweets" Colby looked to me, and without any words shared my mouth opened, and his two digits entered my mouth "mm"

It was enough teasing, we knew we couldn't keep teasing each other, it was torturous, his hand grabbed his cock slipping it gently between my folds "Col-Colby please" before I could even finish my pleas his tip pushed in me "aghhh" I called, my finger tips dug into the sheets, slowly he pushed deeper, incoherent noises fell from my lips, he stopped, our bodies meeting as he bottomed out

"shi-shi-shit Y/n... fuck" slowly the brunette pulled back achingly slow, feeling every inch of my inside before plowing back in, moans, groans, yelps of pleasure started to seep from us as he found a fast pace, the sound of sex filling the room, Colbys hands gently groping the skin

"Colby- Colby" I chanted, I grabbed one of his hands leading it to my neck, delicately his hand held me, not restricting my breathing but enough to make me want more of him, I traced sharp lines against his skin until my grasp fixed to his hair, every time his tip brushed my core my body shivered and pulled a tuft of his brown locks

"thats it Y/n- Take it take it take it!" Colby growled, his cock disappearing into my body "shit-" he swallowed

"Deeper Col- Fuck- Dee-deeper" I cried as I curled my hands around his head. Colby's eyes snapped to mine, those god damn blue eyes- the ones I stared at for years but never got to see them like this before, half shut but open enough to see his pupils growing larger with every hit

"say my name-" he moaned, I took one last gasp of air before the name 'Colby' flowed from my mouth sending rhythmic shivers down his back "ugh- Y/n I need you to keep doing that for me" for the first time since we began the pace slowed, his cock barely coming out of me "Fuck Y/n/n I'm so close" he whimpered sending a chill through my burning body "are you?" I nodded, no words escaping my mouth, our eyes locked, his eyes seeming to be darker and more lust filled than before, his hands moved from being around my neck to caging around my face "I cant hold it any longer babe" he moaned, his hips stuttered each time hitting my g-spot

"Co-Colby I'm going to- fuck- I'm gonna cum" I purred, hands scratching into his skin making him hiss in pleasure, soon we both groaned, his head falling into the crook of my neck

"ffffuuucckk" he cried as he pumped his load into me, I rolled my hips against him gently, riding out my high before I felt myself come down to the soothing feeling of lips against my face

"fuck you were so good sweetheart" Colby breathed, looking at my face checking I was okay

"I... I cant even speak" I smiled, hands holding onto his face, tracing his features

"fucked you that good?" he smirked jokily, slowly he pulled out, his hand rubbing over my stomach

"shut up" I grinned. The two of us lay there quietly for a moment, his arms coming around keeping me embraced to his side.

"you wont believe how long I've waned to do this with you" he soothed, pressing a kiss to the corner of my lip

"I always thought it was just me" I spoke

"wanna go grab a drink?" I nodded standing going to grab my panties off the floor "need a shirt?"

"yeah I think someone through mine onto the floor"

"Oh who was that?" I shook my head taking the t-shirt the boy handed me, I slipped it over my body taking in the cent of him, I went to take a step by my body felt shaky "you okay?" he laughed, hands gripping my arms

"mhm- just need a second" I giggled standing myself back up, soon we made it down stairs walking to go in the kitchen, my view was full with a blonde giving the most evil look, but not evil in a bad way, the way were straight away I knew the both of us were in for it

"so?" he spoke cocking his eyebrow up

"when did you get back?" Colby asked, pulling the fridge open and getting two bottles of something out

"about 10 minuets" I sighed, closing my eyes trying to ignore the blush from burning a hole in my face

"I called it years ago" Sam grinned coming from his place and hitting the back of the other boy before walking away

"aha don't go all shy Y/n- it's fine" the hands of Colby wrapped around my waist pulling me into a hug "you know he's only playing- but he isn't wrong, he called that we'd be together one day"

"Together?" I asked looking up to meet the eyes of the boy

"well- that was my next question" he sighed, lips pressing against mine "what do you think?"

"mh- I think its a good idea" my arms wound around his neck, pulling him to kiss my lips again "what do you think?"

"I think calling you mine sounds perfect"

[studentbyday]

week 1. a stuttering start.

i can't believe autumn is already approaching. i feel like i haven't done much to truly live on my own terms this year... (the majority of my time was spent either chained to my desk, living the studying hermit life as usual, or...and this is a new one for this era of my life, feeling like a child following the real adults around on my travels which @zzzzzestforlife documents way better tbh. the travels, that is...)

in addition i've been feeling very unmotivated and numb this school year. even more so than usual. i've never been as zesty as...well, Zesty when it comes to new school years, but it has slowly been getting worse since i started uni and i think i'm getting dangerously close to falling off some cliff i'll later realize was an important cliff to not fall off of. do you get what i mean? i'm only speaking vaguely because i myself do not quite know.

i oscillate between wanting to be extraordinary and extra ordinary. i have fallen back into bad habits, which do not set a good precedent. and overall i feel lost. so so lost that i started reading designing your life. and dulled by the isolation of school i can hardly focus. it's not a new problem, i've just finally been able to put words to it after all these years. engaging and/or cathartic verbal conversation brings me back to life, whether i'm listening or speaking, but i don't get enough of that in my daily life...this is just a very weird mundane state to be in. don't get me wrong, i was relieved to get back to this life with a very predictable pattern after the hectic-ness of travel, but something about it always felt off and i almost can't believe that only now i've realized why.

anyway, feelings pass. and i have overcome the jet lag, so i am that much more energized (and perhaps a little more desperate) to bulldoze through this problem.

Study:

Read/skimmed all the syllabi for anything new (much of it is the same year-to-year as they're all courses in the same faculty and i am resigned to the fact that there will be weighty group work in at least one course out of every year)

Caught up on course announcements

Finished microbiology module for this week (hmmm i read like half of this module last year when i attempted and then dropped this course so it wasn't the most interesting the second time around but i think it'll get better as i get to the new stuff and the nitty-gritty details 🔬 mwahahaha 🦠 i also decided last minute to make flashcards for these and had to transfer my notes to anki. i wish there weren't so many isolated facts or similar but distinct processes i need to remember.)

Made flashcards for half of this week's immunology content (seems to be a memorization-heavy course and i think i really need the active recall since i barely remember the pre-req info 😅 luckily they review it in the module... 🤭)

Reviewed some of the flashcards made this week

Worked on (but didn't finish) global health slides for this week (i'm...not entirely sure what i should be taking notes on or how because...this all seems either very common sense or kind of..."woo-woo" based on my way of understanding the world...but ig that's my own biases talking? i hope they'll just test us on the common sense stuff. that will be easier for my brain 🥴)

Around half of pathology slides are left from this week (probably the most work intensive course i'm taking rn based on the timeline 😵 but also it's shaping up to be my favorite subject this semester because the modules are so well designed AND it's large processes or, even if it's smaller concepts, they're all connected to each other so i don't need flashcards!...i think! i can just pull on the thread of memory and it all unspools (...ideally...)!)

Wrote down due dates for all assessments this semester

Other life things: (yeah idk what to call this section)

I became a 6AM girlie!!! 🥰🥰🥰

Unpacked

Washed my water bottle

Caught up with a friend 💗

Health:

Yoga x2

Journalled x2

Early morning walk in nature x1 (the air smelled so so fresh i was so glad i went out...and even gladder that i went out when i did because after that the air quality got super bad from wildfire smoke 🥺)

Pilates x1 (i made it! in 2 split sessions, but still! and i feel great!!! 😃 i'm so glad i found this channel because she explains the moves in a way that i can get it even with my bad coordination 😅 she also goes slowly and there is no annoying workout music so i can completely focus on the movements and how they feel, it's perfect. 😊)

Music in My Head:

Blue Danube Waltz (OG piano version)

Treat People With Kindness

On the Sunny Side of the Street

Hikaru Nara (the perfect song for my current ambivalent mood because the whole theme of the anime, which is reflected in the sound of this arrangement, is the need to reignite your spark for the things that mean something to you and make the absolute most of it because life is short)

a few dark academia playlists that i put on loop to study to (links under the cut) (somehow the ones with new age music are the only ones i can listen to...light/quiet enough that it doesn't interrupt my thoughts but intense and melodic enough that it puts me in the mood to focus 😅)

[lizzaneia-elizalde]

Honestly if you could , how would you rate your yandere cooking for Darling (notably the yandere set 2). Like who would be at the tier having the most divine cooking , very talented to mediocre but still try hard for their darling to being banned from entering the kitchen forever cause of fire hazard from frying an egg?? (⁠人⁠ ⁠•͈⁠ᴗ⁠•͈⁠)

Also do you mind if i become 🐧 anon??

Yandere men and their cooking

I'll be answering this and my last ask, then i'll go write my last 3 yanderes, then opening inbox again! I'm still sick unfortunately, so it'll take some time.

YAN! DELINQUENT: 8/10

Liam is a good cook! He definitely prepares the meanest lunch meals out there. Househusband material, he literally has to feed himself by living through his wage and the money his parents give him, so he might as well enjoy! So rest assured he will feed you homely foods that you'll enjoy.

Fav food to cook: pepper beef on rice (quick, efficient, and tastes good!)

YAN! BULLY: 2/10

Eh.. Uno is pampered a lot. What he can probably only make is a scrambled egg, and that's on accident cuz he broke the yolk and mixed it to say "it's intentional". So, unfortunately, you have to cook, or a personal chef. Nothing in between. Unless you're okay with eggs everyday, every time to eat.

Fav food to cook: eggs. (That's the only thing he can cook)

YAN! NSFW ASMRTIST: 9.5/10

Rose definitely cooks the best stuff out there. He's been living by himself for a long, long time so he had time to read cook books, and he definitely watches Hell's Kitchen in his free time. So, expect food for the gods when he cooks for you.

Fav food to cook: Low and slow stew and soups. Meaty, hearty, and pairs well with rice (Full of love, affection, and time.)

YAN! ISEKAI'ED ADVENTURER: 5/10

Aeron is basic when it comes to cooking. He basically only cooks to make sure it's edible, non poisonous, and fulfilling. If he had a choice really, he would just do eat fruits and veggies raw. And when he does cook for you, unfortunately it's not anything remarkable. JUST LIE THOUGH AND SAY IT TASTES GOOD.

Fav food to cook: none... (It's a hassle)

YAN! PLAYER: 10/10

Surprised? He's blessed by the gods. How can this man be awful at cooking? Sure, he would prefer to not cook anything at all, but Amor would be extremely good at it despite not really cooking much because of his blessings. He would be really happy to cook for you though. Anything you want will be miraculously made close to perfection if it's not perfect already.

Fav food to cook: Any of your favorite foods gourmet style (he loves to spoil you while boasting about his... Ill-gotten skills)

YAN! PARASITE:6/10

Acheron knew how to follow instructions, so food is above average at most. As long as the recipe was good, and reviews are nice, then you know you are in good hands. Acheron will cook you food from your favorite cookbooks, so please, don't be shy and send him a link, or gift him a book. He'll be more than happy to cook for you.

Fav food to cook: The simple recipe ones (less chance of messing up the flavor)

YAN! EMPEROR: 0/10

"No. I will not do something like cook."

YAN! COLLEGE STUDENT:8.5/10

Alpheus is a great cook actually, but he never really enjoyed it. He usually does the cooking when Ignatius comes to his home to hang out or teach him how to adapt socially. But, he'll be happy cooking for you.

Fav food to cook: squid ink pasta, and margarita pizza (sharing food for when you or Ignatius eat with him)

YAN! DEEP SEA CREATURE: 0/10

"What is... Cooking?"

YAN! HUNTER: 7/10

Orion is one of those grill dads. Most of the time it's seafood too. But you can guarantee that it will be the most delicious grilled seafood you'll eat. Other meats? Meh... It's more or less okay. His specialty lies by the sea. He will not be opposed in cooking land or sky meat though, just say the word.

Fav food to cook: grilled oysters with cheese or caviar, and lobster with butter baste (best tasting food with low effort)

YAN! KING: 0/10

"A king doesn't cook."

YAN! GOD: 4/10

Well, Liviticus can't cook unless it's very simple like rice and eggs, or like... Ramen. Basically only 1-3 stepped cooking. Cuz essentially, with him being a god, he can just summon the food from thin air. So like, he's your automatic food dispenser. If you want to teach him though, then he would love to.

Fav food to cook: Ramen (Technically not cooking)

YAN! PROSECUTOR: 9/10

Yuta, of course, knows how to cook and he cooks well. Surprisingly, he's into baking. And that's his mastery. He just doesn't have time to cook or bake at all due to being a prosecutor. But if you ask him to, then he will gladly bake or cook for you.

Fav food to make: macarons (time consuming, delicate, and needs his full attention that can distract him from his job and reality)

-----------------------------

So ranking from basically perfect to definitely not

PLAYER>ASMRTIST>PROSECUTOR>COLLEGE STUDENT>DELINQUENT>HUNTER>PARASITE>ISEKAI'ED ADVENTURER>GOD>BULLY>EMPEROR=DEEP SEA CREATURE=KING

[alongtidesoflight]

so here's my honest thoughts on dragon age: the veilguard, after ~40 hours of playing. i finished the main quest after having finished all companion quests and major faction quests. just to clear up what content i saw, i played as an elven transmasc rook who is a member of the lords of fortune. he romanced lucanis (although after finishing the game i'm now leaning towards taash). i don't know what's happening in playthroughs that have a different race, gender identity, romance or faction going on.

full spoilers ahead, i mean it. don't read further if you want to avoid them. i don't want complaining about it in my asks.

oh and also, if you're worried because of a few negative reviews online i can comfort you by saying don't give a fuck about a certain big name youtuber who is very much tied to bethesda franchises giving this a negative review. i'll explain why.

i'm starting off with the things i liked

the game looks really pretty. i was worried it wouldn't feel like thedas anymore (with them trying to "focus on northern thedas only" i thought they'd make a clear cut in environmental design. they do and they don't. it's complicated. i'll elaborate on it when talking about the negative stuff). anyway it does. minrathous feels like kirkwall. treviso enchanted me like the winter palace did. the hossberg wetlands reminded me of the hinterlands and a couple other inquisition maps. arlathan looked like... arlathan. the crossroads were different, but familiar. overall i like the way it looks and feels. it's thedas, with a twist. it's a good one, and gives everything a solid but unique feel.

combat is top tier. if you're a hardcore dragon age player you WILL miss the tactical aspect of it for a bit, but i promise you, once you're used to the way the combat works, you will be lapping that shit up. and once you get to ability combos you'll mourn the control you used to have over your companions in battle a bit less

the MAIN quest and its story. i expected worse, way worse. and for a while the game even had me tricked (harr harr you'll get it in a second) it is Really That Much Worse. but holy shit was it good. i walked away satisfied ngl.

your choices have SOLID weight. there's consequences, good AND bad. i got minrathous blighted, ruled over by venatori, and the leader of the shadow dragons ultimately died because of my decisions. i made those at the beginning and throughout the game. he died at the end. DAVRIN died because i didn't expect what i was saying to have that much weight. i thought i was in the clear. he had hero status. well turns out, your choices can still get your companions killed even if you do everything right. i fucking love him. he shouldn't have made that sacrifice just because i told him to do everything it takes once.

the inquisitor, morrigan and dorian being there, surprisingly. there's also negatives to this though, see below.

speaking of companions dying and the inquisitor playing a bigger role: the final quest feels like me2's suicide mission. i was blown away by it and the fact that i got to see the results of all my efforts playing out in front of me.

bioware are NOT trying to redeem solas. they love him as a character yes, but i wasn't forced to see any good in him. he betrays you. he fucked my rook over twice. he fucked him over right back, for good this time (the veil wasn't torn down, i anchored it by binding him to it, he's doomed to uphold it). but solas really lives up to his name as the trickster elven god. rip to all the people who grew really attached to him over the years.

varric died. if you like him that's probably as hard reading it as it was watching it. varric died and the game lies about it until the very end. when the realisation hits, it hurts. but in the very best way.

the amount of care they put into gender expression and trans identities this time around. (i'll add onto this with negative points as well too).

rook feels very much ingrained in the world of thedas. he doesn't ask questions that expose the player to lore through dialogue as if he's stepped foot into thedas for the first time. those conversations feel very solid and good. i hope other faction players got as much joy out of this as i did.

and the things i didn't like and boy there's a lot unfortunately

the music. let's just get that out of the way holy shit. it doesn't feel like it belongs in this universe. it gets so incredibly sci-fi-y at times you'd think it's taken straight from mass effect andromeda. there's not a single song unique to veilguard that i really enjoyed. it broke my immersion, real bad. hearing a busker play the tavern songs from inquisition on a lute right after i killed some venatori with wobbly bass songs playing in the background is just odd. weird tonal shift. don't like it. it's made for people who like flashy light-weight cinema.

tevinter nights is required reading. the podcasts are required listening exercises. the game is so fast paced, especially at the start, that there's no time to introduce you to characters and how much weight their names carry in-game. i would not have known who half these people are if i hadn't skimmed over tevinter nights. i'd care even less about them than i already did. there is no time to get properly attached to them. people will act as if you're talking to a legend personified and you'll be thinking man goddamn which chapter of tevinter night were they in again and what did they do???

there's a weird mismatch with the animations. you'll have beautifully fluid ones, like emmrich casting spells. and then you'll have rook's face animating in the most unnatural manner that's sorta reminiscent of mass effect andromeda's "my face is tired" addison, when their emotions SHOULD be landing with the player rn instead.

i'm not vibing with the art style. sometimes it works. most of the time it doesn't. at points i felt like i was watching tangled.

that also brings me to some of the dialogue. same issue. i am watching frozen. i am watching tangled. someone on the writer's team really likes the adorkable trope. bellara is its victim.

for all the talk about identity, bioware sure doesn't like theirs. the grey warden armor got a redesign again and it just makes them look like a generic army. i hate it lol

in general, i don't like the armor design. the wardrobe/appearances system is fine, but it's just not helping if all the armors are just... kinda bland or downight bad looking? and don't get me started on the lords of fortune armor. that is orientalism personified.

the world states should have been carried over, full stop. i know they said they didn't because they want to separate what happens in the north from what happens in the south, which... i could have lived with that. but the inquisitor sends you letters that keep you up to date on... the south of thedas. you learn that there's a blight again, that people are standing strong but it's difficult, denerim's fallen, the rulers are taking care of it, orlais is fighting and they're successful for a while, etc etc. what's good bioware. i thought we don't care about the south this time around. why are you feeding me so much boring generic information. if you're not gonna show any of it and just write letters, then carrying the world state over should not have been an issue. i have a game dev background. those few lines of code would not have broken your budget or pushed your engine's limits. fuck right off.

this gripe of mine carries over to all the cameos. as a lord of fortune you have to deal with isabela a lot. it's fun. i missed her. you get to go drinking with her and taash and bellara! also my hawke romanced her. she's not mentioned once. they had the opportunity to put a sentence or two about her in there with not a lot of effort, trust me.

when varric dies, all she has is a single line about it. for gold, for fortune, for varric. she only says it if you interact with her on your way to the final push. that's not mandatory.

morrigan is there. kieran isn't. the old god soul that mythal and then solas absorbed? who cares at this point, the gods are dead now and solas is locked away for eternity. i suppose? why is morrigan there. she feels unneeded. i wish they'd just left her down south, at least that way i wouldn't have had to witness her god awful redesign.

dorian at least feels as if he belongs in this story. the shadow dragons are a crucial part to protecting minrathous. he's also weirdly underutilised. isabela and morrigan had more lines than him in my playthrough.

on the topic of romance: bro that was underwhelming. no, genuinely. you know when romance picked up a bit? after the point of no return. i heard maybe two lines of companion banter about it before that. maybe i missed something which i honestly doubt, but romance did not play much of a role in lucanis's storyline. i saved his grandmother as he wished me to (and if you read tevinter nights you know she was rather abusive and their relationship not the healthiest) and told him to focus on his family. a reunified family my rook wasn't even introduced to as a partner at the end of all that.

really, do not buy this game if you're only in it for the romances. others might be better, lucanis's basically gave me nothing. except for an outing (the second coffee date i had with him, it was getting repetitive) all of it played out once i committed to the final quest. the sex scene was a fade to black. annoyingly right after davrin died. if you're looking for well paced and good spice, pick up something else. the sweet talk and the final goodbye were nice though.

for all the good the ever-presence of gender identity does, it is brought up in such a disruptive manner too. it doesn't even play out naturally if you CHOOSE the lines that are meant to be said. hearing the words trans and non-binary in this setting doesn't feel right, and i'm saying this as a trans guy. i think it could have been handled more gracefully. the amount of times my rook went "i'm a MAN" as if he's about to start drumming on his chest and roaring any second now got super nerve-grating. "i'm so glad you're into me... the me who is trans. remember?" just. tell me one trans person who'd talk like that to a person they've grown close with and are trying to romance. this game doesn't handle sexuality well, so all this hey my body might not look like the way you're expecting it to look talk amounts to nothing anyway. i feel about this the way i feel about krem: this is partial exposition to trans experiences... packaged up for cis consumption. the ONLY exception to that is interacting with taash. holy shit was all of that heartwarming and bro did it feel good and natural to talk to them about theirs and rook's gender.

rivain and nevarra are new locations added by veilguard. they're also incredibly underwhelming, small and constricted maps. rivain is a coastline with a few ruins. the hall of valor is a partial ruin nestled into a cave on a beach, with a fighting pit. isabela is there in her skimpy outfit commentating your pit fights. that's it. i'm sorry if you were looking for a bustling pirate cove or whatever. you're not gonna get it. the nevarran crypts btw are a long ass dungeon crawl. that's it.

speaking of maps. i thought people were being dramatic when they said you're gonna be fighting the same enemies on them again and again. i thought they were figure of speeching it. they're not. you WILL fight the same amount of enemies. in the same spot. every time you reload the map. best to stay on a map and clear out the enemies and do as much questing on that map as you can before leaving, because you WILL have to do it all over again once you return.

the three choices i made for my inquisitor didn't matter lol she didn't have to face solas and therefore couldn't stop him at any cost as she had sworn (maybe because my rook tricked solas into binding himself to the veil, there was also an option to fight him. would she have stepped in? who knows). blackwall wasn't mentioned. and either her using a small amount of her forces in the final fight was the reason the civilians of minrathous fared so well..... or it just didn't matter. ultimately i think she had very little impact on anything

[holocene-sims]

next // previous

september 1, 2021 5:00 p.m. newcrest hospital

[five hours later]

[dr. winters] so, you’re an interesting case.

[grant] don’t i know it?

[dr. winters] fortunately, the excellent news here is that your physical exam is overall outstanding.

[dr. winters] all your blood work and vitals are great, your eyesight’s correctable to normal, and you have no other underlying disease besides the autoimmune stuff.

[dr. winters] disclaimer that you should lay off the cigarettes, but...

[dr. winters] still, based on these factors, i see no real reason to deny your medical on physical grounds. the MRI of your spine was very concerning, but i did read the letter from your rheumatologist clearing you for work again, and you passed all my exams just fine, so it’s not an issue in my eyes unless your disease and/or functioning significantly worsen.

[grant] well, that’s...good?

[dr. winters] not so fast. don't get too excited. as much as i'd like to send you out with your medical today, i can’t.

[grant] alright. fair enough.

[dr. winters] i'm not denying you, to be clear. i'm deferring your case to federal administration.

[dr. winters] this is the unfortunate part. because you suddenly admitted to having previous substance abuse issues, have brand new mental health diagnoses, and are on some medications that are neither approved nor banned, it’s out of my hands.

[dr. winters] you would need a special issuance medical, which is only something the administration can give out.

[dr. winters] if you’re granted one, it is a full first-class medical and will clear you to fly and hopefully approve your current medications with no issues, but it will tag you as having health conditions, and it’ll probably place restrictions on your medical, like more frequent medical exams and no flying if you’re having x, y, and z symptoms.

[grant] okay, sure. what should i do next?

[dr. winters] well, i'll forward all the paperwork from you to them along with my reports from today. at some point, the administration will send you a whole bunch more paperwork in the mail, and they’ll ask you to explain all your medications, your psychiatric history, and why the hell you were diagnosed with multiple psychiatric disorders all at once and so late in life.

[dr. winters] whatever you say, be as honest as possible. i will gently remind you that lying to them is a felony.

[dr. winters] you’ll mail all your responses back to them, and then they’ll tell you to submit to a neurocognitive screen and a psychiatric evaluation. i can go ahead and refer you to doctors who can offer you those screenings. they'll also want statements from any psychiatrists and therapists you've seen basically confirming they think you're stable enough for this kind of employment.

[dr. winters] and finally, after they review all the new materials plus your flight records, you’ll either get approved or denied.

[grant] there's some hope?

[dr. winters] yes. you have held a medical before. you'll just have to jump through more hoops this time to prove your capabilities. worst case scenario you lawyer up and sue until you get results. and no, i'm not joking. in complex cases like yours, i often recommend a lawyer.

[grant] i don’t want a lawyer.

[dr. winters] at least not yet. don't count the legal route out. the worst worst case scenario is that you're denied. if they deny you and you feel that's unfair, the law is the only solution you have left.

[grant] got it. well, um, thanks for all your help. i guess i'll wait for new paperwork from the administration then. how long should the whole process to take, assuming it all goes smoothly?

[dr. winters] oh, it won't go smoothly. your case will sit on someone’s desk until the file rots or the sun blows up, whichever comes first, unless you call incessantly. so, do that. call, call, and call again until someone does something with it.

[dr. winters] and maybe you’ll get a final decision in...

[dr. winters] six months? a year? hopefully not longer than that.

[stillness-in-green]

On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XXI-B + Conclusion, Final War-B: The Hospital Attack)

To preface before I start documenting these final four chapters, there’s been a lot said (not least by me) about how wildly out of touch the resolution to this plotline is.  While I didn't set out to rehash all of that again, it turns out I can't actually talk about how the series portrays heteromorphobia without talking about how it resolves it—if I'd wanted to do that, the place to stop would have been with the last post. This whole piece is also destined for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be readable for those who don't follow me on tumblr. Therefore, if you've been following my #heteromorph discrimination plot posts for a while, there are portions of this post that will be pretty familiar territory!

If you're new and want my full breakdowns, you can find them in my Chapter Thoughts posts or in this pair of posts rounding up the asks I’d gotten on the topic.  Here, I will simply say that I don’t think Horikoshi’s fumbling of the plot can be read to mean that all the stuff I’ve documented thus far was just me reaching too hard, reading stuff into the manga where nothing was intended.  While I’m sure some of it is—I definitely went out on a few limbs!—I think the main answer to, “How can heteromorphobia be such a well-thought-out depiction of a logically foreseeable form of discrimination while also having such a terrible resolution?” is, “Because the mainstream opinion about how best to handle discrimination is wildly different in Japan than it is in progressive American circles.”

That doesn’t mean I’m willing to wave the wand of Cultural Differences over this resolution and forgive everything—there were plenty of Japanese fans critiquing it as well![1]—but it does somewhat modulate my feelings about it.  In any case, let’s get to it.

1: Most of what I saw was on Twitter, but there’s a Japanese site called bookmeter that’s kinda goodreads-esque, and which had several critical reviews posted for the volume, including one that felt like every point laid out was something I’d complained about as well.  Super validating, but a shame it was necessary!

(I'll be changing up my formatting just a bit in hopes that I can find a way to present sub-sub-bullet points that tumblr won't choke on in this 13K post. Pray for me.)

Chapter 370: 

O We open with a scene which we’re led to believe is about Spinner but which the end of the chapter will reveal to be about Shouji.  It’s shockingly open about the extent of the discrimination Shouji faced, and there’s worse yet to come, but here we find people throwing stones at him, telling him to die, saying he has dirty blood that will defile the land, that he should stay inside the house, and that no matter how much time passes,[2] they will never accept “his kind.”

2: Viz renders this as “no matter how much society progresses,” but the word jidai means something more like “the times”/”the age,” and the progression term used can mean improvement, but in the circumstances, probably just means forward movement.  I think the intention is more like, “No matter how much the times march on,” if only because it would be very odd for the people yelling this vitriol to frame it as themselves resisting progression.  After all, bigots don’t typically think of themselves as “regressive” compared to everyone else’s progressiveness; they think of themselves as normal or valuing tradition compared to everyone else’s moral laxity/perversity.

So, remember how I talked about the spiritual/religious charge to the language the CRC used to talk about their “sanctuary” and the League/Spinner’s presence in it?  Here’s the full scope of that.  It’s about kegare, a Shinto concept of uncleanliness associated particularly with blood and death, and while that’s normally something that can be purified simply by undergoing the proper ritual cleansings, when something is, in itself, intrinsically unclean, no amount of purification will fix it; you can only keep it sealed away.  Hence the yelling at Shouji not to leave the house.

The spirituality-based discrimination calls to mind the burakumin, originally an outcaste group of people who made their living working with all the aspects of life Shinto considered kegare—butchers, tanners, executioners and the like.   They were made to dress and cut their hair in ways that identified them on sight, barred from entering temples or schools, and lived in their own villages.  The laws mandating much of this were abolished in 1871[3] and urban sprawl gradually rolled over burakumin villages, turning them into slum areas.  While today it’s not uncommon for people to not even know they’re descended from burakumin lineage unless they’re specifically told,[4] more subtle discrimination does endure.  While it’s clearly not the only inspiration, there’s a lot about anti-burakumin bias that’s reflected in heteromorphobia.

3: Albeit not without considerable and violent protests against the liberation of the burakumin/the idea that they were henceforth to be allowed to hold other occupations and become ordinary citizens.  Arson, destruction of villages, attacks and deaths—all things considered, the anti-Kaihourei riots are probably a decent place to look for inspiration on the historical massacres Spinner’s #2 will be talking about shortly.

4: Or find out because someone who knows the significance of those old neighborhoods finds out first and they’re suddenly on the bad end of some discriminatory act or another.

O We find out that the group Spinner’s leading consists of fifteen thousand people, that number split between PLF remnants and ordinary civilians who support the PLF’s cause.  It’s unknown exactly how that split breaks down, but based on how the rest of the attack goes, I think it’s probable that the group is mostly civilians—if it were more PLF, it probably wouldn’t be so wholly defanged by Shouji’s big plea for peace.  So that’s what we might call a “bad look,” that fifteen thousand ordinary civilians feel so incredibly hard done-by that they not only flock to join a known terrorist, but that they do so for the purpose of attacking a hospital.

O They’re opposed by about two hundred police and heroes, the relevant of whom for our purposes are Present Mic, Rock Lock, Officer Gori, Shouji, and Koda.  With the exception of Present Mic, who will in any case be heading inside very shortly, they’re all minorities of some sort, with Rock Lock being very visibly, obviously Black, and the others being heteromorphs.  None of them are immediately thinking about the composition of the crowd, but rather about how difficult the crowd is being to handle.

O Rock Lock yells out that the rioters are too organized to be some random mob, a dismissiveness that gets him shouted at by the Spinner fanboys—tragically their only appearance in all of this!—that, “Folks with human faces just don’t get it!”  I have to assume that putting Rock Lock in this scene is no accident, but rather is there to make the rioters come off as short-sighted, so deep in their own pain that they lash out at someone who, if HeroAca!Japan is anything like present day Japan, almost certainly understands better than they think!

The phrasing, in any case, points towards the dehumanization that heteromorphs, especially animal-associated ones, are subject to.  After all, as Re-Destro might point out, in the post-Advent world, isn’t it the case that any given heteromorphic human’s face, no matter how strange it may be, is de facto a “human face”?  Yet the vitriol from the Spinner fans clearly reflects how internalized it’s become for them, that they don’t look “human,” despite the fact that “looking human” means nothing at all in the time of quirks.

O Koda gets called a traitor by an elderly beaked heteromorph from, apparently, a rural area, underscoring what’s been alluded to a few times prior to this, and which will be laid out explicitly in a few pages, that heteromorphobia is far, far worse in the countryside than it is in the cities.  Mr. Beak assumes—correctly, it seems[5]—that Koda’s a city kid, because why else other than ignorance would a fellow heteromorph stand against them?

5: Koda’s from Iwate Prefecture, which is only above Hokkaido in terms of population density; a bit of research suggests that its largest city, Morioka, is considered to be a mid-sized city.  So that’s definitely the hard upper limit on exactly how “big city” Koda could reasonably be.  That said, Shouji also identifies Koda as someone who grew up in a city, for which I assume he must have at least some basis.

O Spinner’s #2 fulfills the promise of his early shorthanded characterization of being a fiery, well-spoken zealot by standing on top of a building over the mob and exhorting them onward with revolutionary, inflammatory rhetoric.  And boy, does he bring up a lot to talk about!    

Demagoguery for Fun & Profit

O Quirk counselling and quirk education?  Phony nonsense, he says.  That’s a fairly confusing grievance to bring up in this context, so let’s consider what he might have in mind.

• For quirk education, I would contend that BNHA has shown very little of it, in spite of having Academia right there in the title.  The academics in question are about Heroics, after all, not quirks in and of themselves.  Here’s the complete list of what I would say the reader has seen that could be qualified as actual education about quirks:

Aizawa telling the kids(/low tier villains at USJ) some broad generalities, things like a very basic explanation of how quirks work on the genetic level or how they’re classified.  Most of this is delivered in the context of how his quirk works; the only outlier that immediately comes to mind for me is his explanation of how quirks are like muscles, and can be strengthened via training.    

Mirio and Tamaki’s middle school class doing “quirk training,” which is framed as a P.E. class and is specifically aimed at finding ways for each kid to be “useful to society,” not about them learning anything about quirks in a broader sense.    

Endeavor’s recent reference to Nedzu’s alleged “quirk morality education,” about which I have already registered my skepticism.    

The bit in Re-Destro’s monologue to Shigaraki where he mentions he was taught not to judge others by their quirks.  It’s hard to judge how applicable this is to normal society because Re-Destro was raised in a cult, and the book shown during this sequence was released by Curious’s publisher.

So of those options, what is #2 talking about?  I’d say the last one is probably closest to what he means: don’t judge others by their quirks.  But of course, people judge others by their quirks all the time.  Family, classmates, teachers, people in the same neighborhood, heroes and police—we see examples from literally the first page of characters who are being judged by their quirks or lack thereof.  While that judgement doesn’t apply only to heteromorphs, they are, by dint of their visibility, going to face it everywhere they go, regardless of whether any given situation—say, going to the grocery store or on a date—involves quirks or not.  So, whatever lessons people in this society are getting about quirks and judgement, they clearly aren’t absorbing them.

It also bears pointing out, of course, that #2’s personal affiliation is with the Metahuman Liberation Army, and he definitely shows signs—as I’ll get to in a bit—of the quirk supremacism that group is so unanimously painted with in the endgame.  So while the supremacy he’s preaching is about heteromorphs rather than quirks more generally, he could well be saying quirk education is phony because he’s all for judging people on their quirks!  However, his criteria for that judgement differs from both forms of judgement taught by the society he’s railing against—what they practice and what they preach.

• Then there’s quirk counseling, a practice the story most prominently associates with Toga, who’s barely a twitch of the needle away from baseline (though her abuse is not wholly without reference to her appearance, in that her natural smile is repeatedly branded as scary or deviant).  So why bring it up in association with heteromorphs?  My suspicion is that a heteromorph—especially a heteromorph with an animal-associated quirk!—being visibly “different” in some way makes the people around them hyper-sensitive to behavioral “deviations.”

For a start, you see that hyper-sensitivity brought to bear against Toga.  Curious contends that Toga’s sense of “admiration” was a perfectly normal thing, but it was the tie to blood that made it wholly unacceptable.  It’s notable that, before she snapped, Toga was never shown to actually want to hurt people: the bird was already injured when she found it, her friend got a scrape the way any child might, Saito was involved in a fight Toga had no hand in.  She hurts people now because a lifetime of rejection and dehumanization, but Toga’s admiration of blood was not intrinsically indicative that she’d grow up to be violent; people treated it that way because of cultural attitudes towards blood and blood-attraction.

So, might the same sort of thing be true of e.g. animal-associated heteromorphs?  That they might exhibit behaviors which would, in different circumstances, be totally fine, but which they’re judged for unduly harshly because of cultural beliefs about the animal they resemble?  Let me just spitball a few possibilities:

A cat heteromorph who, as a child, showed affection by nuzzling.  That’s fine when a literal kitten is doing it, and funny and cute when a baseline child sees a cat doing it and imitates it for fun, but when the cat heteromorph does it, he makes people uncomfortable, makes them wonder if he lacks self-control, comes off as weird and too-forward.  So his parents rebuke him and bring him to a quirk counsellor to break him of the habit, leading him to feel ashamed and alienated from a harmless natural impulse.    

A snake-headed girl is the first heteromorph in her family line and the way she stares at people so fixedly, never blinking, creeps them out, makes them feel like she’s dangerous.  She isn’t and has no intention of being so, but she’s sent to quirk counselling anyway and the lesson she learns is to just never look people in the eye at all.    

A condor heteromorph develops a morbid interest in corpses in middle school.  He doesn’t want to eat them, he’s not some kind of cannibalistic animal—at least that’s what he told himself before quirk counselling, where his counsellor, like his teachers, assumed that his interest had to be tied to animal instincts.  He wanted to be a mortician, or join the police and get into crime scene investigation, but when he told people that they just looked at him like he was already holding a fork and knife.  (He ends up getting into photography, and just has to live with the fact that now people have two excuses to call him a vulture.)    

Two children—one with a plant-based emitter quirk, the other an eight-eyed spider heteromorph—are caught in the act of killing some insects by a local police officer.  It’s the sort of innocent childhood cruelty you might find anywhere, and, indeed, when the officer calls their school about it, that’s what gets decided about the emitter—he was just a child who didn’t know any better.  But the heteromorph gets recommended for quirk counselling instead—after all, spiders kill insects.  What if this is an early warning sign for instincts towards predatory behavior?  It’s important to nip these things in the bud.

That’s all off the top of my head or taken from some conversation with friends on the topic, and maybe it’s a reach, but it’s also a very plausible explanation for why a heteromorphic idealogue might bring up quirk counselling as a specific grievance—because, like the Villain-designation for criminals, it’s unevenly and unfairly applied.

O The next point #2 makes, and definitely the one that made the biggest splash in fandom at the time, is his invocation of a pair of historical incidents, possibly both but at least one of which was a mass murder targeting heteromorphs, carried out by a bunch of baseline types.  He names them as the 6/6 Incident and the Great Jeda Purge.  These are both stealth Star Wars references, though the former is disguised a bit better by being in the same format that Japan sometimes uses for naming events like attempted coups.[6]  Given the image we see, it’s fair to assume the event in BNHA was similar.

6: See for example the May 15 Incident or the February 26 Incident, called the 5・15 Incident and the 2・26 Incident respectively in Japan. You see this in China as well, with the Tiananmen Square massacre being referred to there as the 6/4 Incident.

Notice that the perpetrators here are mostly holding weapons.  Were they quirkless themselves, or were they avoiding using quirks such that they couldn’t be branded as Villains?  Knowing the answer to that would give us a timeframe for this.

He goes on to declaim, on the basis of these events, that the history of the paranormal is one of persecution and oppression of those with “differing forms.”[7] The term in Japanese there is kotonaru katachi, 異なる形, which uses a different reading of the kanji in igyou (異形) and muscles in a verb conjugation, which has the effect of softening the harshness of 異 somewhat.[8]  This would be a great catch-all term for those with heteromorphic bodies who might or might not have heteromorphic quirks[9] if it weren’t for the fact that literally the only person we ever hear using it is an anti-social zealot.  No one on Team Hero ever makes this kind of distinguishment.

In any case, #2 is obviously over-simplifying to play to his audience—recall the baseline woman we saw back in that shot of Persecuted Early Quirk-Havers back in Chapter 59—but, as I’ve discussed extensively, being more visible does make one a more ready target.  Also, of course, the presence of the CRC in the story lays the groundwork for this sort of historical horror story even long after the worst days of the Advent.

7: I provide my own translation here because the Viz one, “those who don’t fit the mold,” is vague to the point of uselessness.

8: The koto reading, as best I can tell, seems to be pretty rare, often tagged as archaic in words including it.  The i reading is far more common, in words that denote wrongness, divergence, abnormality, and so on.  But it may be less about the reading and more about the fact that adding the verb conjugation makes the term more of a descriptive phrase than a direct noun.  As ever, take my talk about Japanese language minutiae with a grain of salt.

9: “Differing forms” is broad enough, however, that it could also be read as covering, say, people with amputations, congenital anomalies, or other sorts of non-quirk-related disfigurements from accidents or disease.  As in real life, navigating the linguistic space between specificity and Othering can be tricky.

O Next, #2 rhetorically demands what excuse was given by those who perpetrated these slaughters?  He answers his own question with the quote, “They give me the creeps.” Note how this ties in with my earlier suppositions about the likelihood of discrimination worsening the farther one is from baseline, as well as those about the necessity of putting up a good, positive, appealing front.  It’s a perfectly intuitive leap, that more extreme variants of heteromorphy, or those who evoke negative associations—animals tied to rot or bad luck, people made wholly out of green ooze—are going to be more likely to be found “creepy” than those who look like e.g. sexy bunny girls or straight-laced guys who just happen to have pipes jutting out of their calves.  Of course, that’s on something of a sliding scale; the more biased an area is against heteromorphs in general, the easier it will be to find oneself on the wrong side of that line.

O #2 presents the idea that society has reflected on their actions and made amends, or at least that’s how society’s narrative goes.  Illustrating this, we see two of the three heteromorphs in the police force, as well as Nedzu.  Interestingly, the panel does not include any heteromorphic heroes!  I might guess that this is because heroes are meant to use their quirks to serve others; they’re really just enforcement tools, lacking any particular authority beyond a quirk-use license and some admittedly broad soft power courtesy of the social contract.[10] Conversely, a school principal and a police chief (Gori remaining the outlier here) have actual authority, such that the average heteromorphobia-denier can point to them as evidence that heteromorphobia doesn’t exist anymore.

10: Which is to say, I don’t get the impression civilians are required to take orders from heroes, such that they would actually get in legal trouble for disobeying.  The fact that people do typically follow those orders speaks more to the power heroes wield via their association with the police force, as well as the general tendency of people to assume that someone in a uniform giving orders during an emergency is probably a professional whose orders it would be safe and wise to follow.

In the same panel, we also see a baseline guy palling around with a vaguely murine heteromorph dude (he looks more like a mascot suit mouse than an actual mouse, but he’s certainly nowhere close to baseline!), illustrating another way society wants to pretend it’s moved past heteromorphic discrimination.  I can’t help but note, in regards to this specific pair, that the manga uses faces the readers know to illustrate the point about heteromorphs in positions of authority, whereas to make the point about baseline/heteromorph friendships, it has to make up a new pair to show us because the series hasn’t made the time to actually build any (heroic) relationships that actually look like that!

Now, one could argue that using familiar faces to underscore #2’s speech would imply that he’s aware of those faces, and while that’s fine for figures of authority, there’s no reason for him to be aware of e.g. Natsuo and his mousey girlfriend.  However, the same would apply to anyone placed to demonstrate a random urban friendship crossing the “differing forms” line, including those two strangers.  Who are those two, after all, that #2 is any more familiar with them than he would be of Natsuo and mouse gal?

Honestly, I think the best relationship candidate we have—a pair who would both communicate what the panel needs to communicate to the reader and who would feasibly be enough in the public eye to get pointed at for rhetorical purposes by an in-universe speaker—would be Kamui Woods and Mount Lady.  Unfortunately, they don’t work because Horikoshi has never seen fit to actually reveal Kamui Woods’ real face, so they’re much less visibly “a baseline person being emotionally close with a heteromorph” than the random two Horikoshi made up.

O The oratory continues into discussing the divide between city versus rural views on heteromorphs, and this is, to me, the first clear sign that the series is beginning to lose the thread of this plot.  Taking #2 at his word asks us to concede the heteromorphobia has been completely wiped out in cities, eradicated with that wonderful antidote called “education.”  But discrimination very much does exist in cities!  It may be less violent, less extreme, less vocal, but in the form of things like law enforcement bias, housing discrimination, microaggressions, the quirk counselling #2 himself brought up, it’s very much still there!  Now, it could be that he’s just downplaying that discrimination to focus on the really ugly stuff you don’t see in cities, but I don’t know what his reasons for doing so would be?  Not when there’s so much else he could say that would be equally inflammatory without alienating urban heteromorphs by dismissing their still very much present, modern suffering.

O He then brings up the talk of “light”—echoing Skeptic’s earlier rhetoric—and it not reaching those gathered at the hospital, so they must make their own, for people who’ve never once regretted the quirks they were born with can never be their heroes.  What this primarily puts me in mind of is Hawks’s background with heroes prior to his father’s arrest—that heroes were only on TV, not present to save him in his actual life.  Keep that in mind for Shouji’s response later on.

O Towards the end, #2’s speech finally tips over the line from what could plausibly be read as protesting unequal treatment to an outright call for supremacy.  Notably, he doesn’t call for quirk supremacy, but rather for heteromorph supremacy—for the tables to be turned, the cards reversed, for them to not merely be equal, but rather to be superior.

It’s unclear how much of this he’s sincere about and how much is just convenient rhetoric disguising views that are more quirk supremacist in actuality.  For many reasons, I want to read him in good faith: because the MLA originally struck me as being written in good faith throughout MVA and the first war arc; because #2 never once uses his quirk in this mini-arc, casting doubt on him having such an amazing quirk that he’d benefit overmuch from quirk supremacy anyway; and especially because it would be incredibly bad faith on Horikoshi’s part to make a character delivering a speech like this a total bad faith, manipulative outsider.  Unfortunately, #2’s inner monologue in later chapters will make a good faith read all but impossible to sustain.    

O Halfway through his speech, #2 unmasks himself, revealing both his face—dominated by four pairs of pedipalp-esque mouthparts, though the markings on his head are pretty eye-catching, too—and his scar.  We’re never told how he got it, but the implication is certainly that he was attacked for his appearance.  That may just be a conclusion it serves him to let people make, given his bad faith elsewhere, but thankfully the manga doesn’t go so far as to say that explicitly.  In any case, his deliberate reveal turns his wound into a form of performance art, drawing attention to it, forcing it to be a part of the conversation—the polar opposite of Shouji covering his scars because he doesn’t want them to be a part of the conversation about him, and those scars being revealed because his mask is torn off against his will.[11]

11: This also fits a larger pattern of villains, by and large, choosing their expressions of vulnerability, making deliberate shows of agency in how their weakness is perceived by the broader world—Shigaraki taking his hand off for the first time, Dabi’s video, Toga approaching heroes with genuine questions, and so on.  There are certainly exceptions, but generally if a villain shows his “true face,” it’s because they’re making a conscious decision to do so, and may be actively manipulating how that reveal is going to land.  Conversely, heroes want to present a powerful, confident, untarnished image to the public, so their shows of vulnerability all have to be forced out of them after pitched battles or acts of violence.  Heroes don’t make themselves vulnerable to the public on purpose, which feeds into the way the public then treats them when they are forced into vulnerable positions.

O Spinner’s a mess at this point, and the reason he’s a mess is all tied up in his faith in/desire to help Shigaraki.  It’s not explicitly about heteromorphobia, but on the other hand, given that the thing that drove Spinner to be here at all was his horrifically low self-esteem caused by heteromorphobia, maybe it’s not so irrelevant after all.  It may have taken Spinner longer than the Tenkos, Touyas, and Chisaki Kais of the world to reach the “fall victim to a dark influence due to the neglect and abuse you faced at the hands of Hero Society” plot, but he certainly got there in the end![12]

12: I call this The Sekoto Peak Problem, and it’s a big criticism of mine about how the final arc is framing all these conflicts as being solely brought about because Bad Faith Villain Men like AFO are scooping up vulnerable people and driving them towards violence, without acknowledging the much worse circumstances those vulnerable people might be in if they were just left to their fates.  Touya, for example, if not for AFO’s timely rescue, would likely have simply died on the mountain long before Endeavor was able to find him.

O Shouji takes the mob to task for attacking a hospital without ensuring the safety of the uninvolved innocents within, a laughable bit of sophistry[13] that accurately foreshadows how disastrous his reasoning will be throughout the rest of these chapters.

13: It’s laughable sophistry firstly because the heroes knew this mob was coming but chose to leave Kurogiri at a hospital anyway; one can mount a very reasonable argument that Kurogiri’s teleportation power qualifies him as a military objective, which would make stashing him at a hospital an actual war crime in an international conflict, as well as negating the hospital’s protected status as a civilian object.  It’s laughable sophistry secondly because it criticizes a Villain-led mob for failing to evacuate the building, as if said mob had exactly the same social cachet possessed by heroes, that they could freely walk in the front door of a hospital and start shouting evacuation orders with reasonable confidence that they’d be obeyed.  Finally, it’s laughable sophistry because Shouji is quite simply wrong about the order of the actions he’s describing—the heroes’ evacuation of Ujiko’s hospital was concurrent with their invasion of said hospital, not precedent to it.

   

Chapter 371: 

O Shouji accuses Spinner of taking actions that will set them back thirty years, which is just a really egregiously victim blamey sort of thing to say, placing the responsibility on heteromorphs for the crimes of those who hate them.

O Koda’s perspective gives us a flashback to Shouji telling his classmates about his history—his town and his scars and his reason for wanting to be a hero.  It’s all material that works in the context of all the set-up we’ve gotten—the CRC and the religious inflection of their specific brand of hatred, the rural heteromorphobia, the hints about Shouji’s own discrimination, the attack on the Ordinary Woman, and so on—but that would have been far better served to have been integrated into the story more naturally.  Koda has no specifically established relationship with Shouji (seriously, there is absolutely nothing; it’s shocking how out of nowhere his sudden deep dedication to Shouji is), nor does the scene he remembers have any specific flags for when it might take place,[14] leaving the memory feeling less like a natural extension of their arc than it is a graceless sequence muscled in to attempt to rouse some emotion in the audience when Koda has a quirk awakening he is not otherwise remotely in dire enough straits to have rightfully earned.[15]

14: Shouto and Bakugou being missing might suggest that they’re off at their remedial license course, which would put the scene somewhere in late September up through December (stretching from the aftermath of Overhaul to the introduction of the MLA), save that there are several other students missing as well—Sero, Iida, Sato, and Aoyama, none of whom where in the remedial course.

15: Nearly every other inarguable quirk awakening[※] we know of in the series has as a chief component serious physical injury: Bakugou, Ochaco, Toga.  Geten’s is the only exception, and his is tied to the strength of his feelings for Re-Destro, which are clearly and overridingly his most significant character trait!  Shouji is not anywhere near that central to Koda’s life, and he sure as hell isn’t injured enough to have gotten it that way.

※: By which measure I exclude stuff like the change in Shigaraki’s Decay or Mina’s acid attack against Gigantomachia.  Shigaraki was explicitly just breaking through a mental block to access power he already had.  Meanwhile, if Mina’s Plus Ultra moment had been a sudden quirk evolution, she wouldn’t already have an attack name picked out for it, nor would her horns have gone back to normal after it.  Acidman: ALMA is an Ultimate Move, not Mina having a quirk awakening.

O The flashback itself calls for another subsection.    

Ignoring the Difference Between the Personal and the Systemic for Fun & Profit

O The big thing here the description of the whole town coming out for a “blood cleansing” whenever Shouji touched someone.  This is depicted as Shouji, probably a preteen in this sequence,[16] being savagely attacked with farming tools, the most visible of which is a pitchfork.  This visual, as well as #2’s invocation of historical slaughters, is the darkest heart of heteromorphobia: a child being ritualistically assaulted in the open street as a matter of course, as a consequence for touching someone.  This is the image you should hold in your mind as The Problem through all of the potential answers and responses that get trotted out through the rest of these chapters.

16: Visibly older/bigger than, say, Kouta, but also visibly younger/smaller than middle school Deku.

Before moving on, I do want to examine this image in just a bit more depth.

This is, firstly, the moment that Shouji got those scars, and it’s very important to note that what we’re being shown is likely not a random, representative sample of what the town “coming out in force for a blood cleansing” looks like.  The strong implication is that this is in the immediate aftermath of the sequence we’ll see shortly of Shouji saving the girl from the river: he’s wearing the same clothes and shoes,[17] he’s the same size, and there’s a spray of blood from where he’s being struck across the mouth where he didn’t have his distinctive scars when he saved the girl.  Does that mean the blood cleansings were typically not this violent?  That’s hard to say.  On the one hand, we don’t see any other scars on Shouji, and he wears his arms pretty bare!  On the other hand, we never see any part of his body bare except his neck and arms, and since he can regrow his arms,[18] they’re not exactly conclusive evidence that he’s never been scarred there.  Also, he does say talk about his situation—the scars he bears—as something other children in the country have to bear, suggesting that the norm is rather worse than a little symbolic gash across the palm or something!     17: In fairness, he may not own very much different, as I’ll discuss shortly.     18: The duplicated ones, at least.  I seem to recall reading once that he could regrow the base set as well, but I’m still working on tracking down a citation on that.    

Secondly, as was the case with the image of the historical massacres, the adults here are using tools/weapons in the assault, not quirks.  As I mentioned in a footnote last time, them not using quirks to carry out this attack makes them merely criminals, not Villains, and therefore not nominally a Hero’s job to deal with.  While I can’t imagine any Hero in the manga these days would stand back and let this go on, the absence still stands out—no Hero is participating in this, nor observing from the sidelines, nor trying to intervene.  Heroes simply don’t figure into this picture at all.    

Thirdly, we can see a few children in the background, both there with adults, I assume their parents.  The child on the right is a passive observer, clinging close to their mother and simply watching; their father has one hand supportively on their shoulder.  Neither parent seems distressed, insomuch as we can tell from their somewhat indistinct features and rather clearer body language.  The child on the left is being actively held back by their mother, who’s standing with her back to the violence, her body interposed between it and her child.  The kid is reaching out towards the scene, but it’s unclear what the intent is.  Are they trying to intervene or do they want to join in?     Neither child appears to be the little girl Shouji saved—the one on the right is dark-haired, and the one on the left—the more likely prospect just going by the body language!—is wearing a long, dark T-shirt instead of the little girl’s overalls.  I suppose the left one could be the little girl if we assume she was hustled out of what she’d been wearing by her parents, eager to get her out of now-tainted (and also soaking wet) clothes and into something dry and warm and, in more ways than one, clean.  However, that seems like the sort of thing that would take longer than what looks to have been a pretty impromptu, disorganized bloodletting, unless everyone just held off on assaulting Shouji right out on the street until the “victim” could be present.    

Finally, there’s the pair of adults right at the center of the background.  If anyone in this picture is actually related to Shouji, I’d put money on them being here, watching but not attempting to intercede.  I don’t think it’s conclusive, though; the woman is thin and hunched, making her look older—I’d guess Shouji’s grandmother before Shouji’s mother.  That hunched posture and her hands being raised to her mouth do give her the most obviously distressed appearance of any of the adult, though, to the extent that the person with her is focused on supporting her rather than watching what’s going on in the foreground—and forward attention is what I’d expect if the dark-haired figure is related to Shouji.

So that’s the image we have of the crowd—actively taking part or observing with varying degrees of reaction running from distress to indifference to, potentially, enthusiasm.

O Next, let’s talk about Shouji’s parents.  He implies they were baseline—at the least they were significantly more baseline than Shouji himself, as they lacked arms “like his.”  That makes it quite telling that Shouji’s parents are nowhere to be seen in his story beyond the simple mention of how they were different than him.

Now, I don’t want to suggest here that Shouji’s parents are completely irredeemable people.  While I would imagine that—at least initially—they shared their town’s bigotry, having a heteromorphic child themselves would have exponentially increased the hardship of their own lives.  In a town like that, I’m sure that many if not all of their neighbors must have come to regard them with suspicion of wrongdoing or transgression—recall the first page of the last chapter, where Shouji is accused of tricking the town in his having brought dirty blood to it.  Hie parents almost certainly lost friends and likely became ostracized themselves, and ostracization in a small Japanese town can be a horrifying thing to deal with.

And yet, even with all that being the case, they didn’t abandon Shouji or give him up; they didn’t commit family suicide with him.[19]  Assuming he wasn’t removed from their custody after the incident, they’re presumably paying his school and living costs;[20] likewise, unless he just ran away from home or is carrying out an incredibly elaborate deception about what school he’s attending, they almost had to support his desire to attend a hero school to begin with.  In his situation, parents who support his desire to be a Hero is a big fucking deal.  After all, between the winning and the saving, heroes will de facto be touching people all the time!  If Shouji’s parents still live in his hometown, how do you think those people will take it when someone first realizes the Shouji family sent their kegare-riddled monster off to be a Hero?

19: The history of honorable suicide in Japan casts a very long shadow, and when it’s combined with the meiwaku culture, you get an underreported epidemic of things like parents who can’t see their way out of a bad situation taking their lives and their children’s as well, so as not to leave messy loose ends that others will have to bear the burden of dealing with.

20: I won’t get into whether or not the U.A. students’ parents are paying for any given thing on the following list, but here are some potential costs to consider, assuming that Shouji, like Uraraka, was commuting from an apartment prior to the dorms being implemented: tuition, school uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, school meal plan, food not served at school (e.g. breakfast and dinner or meals when the school is on break), non-uniform attire, personal care and hygiene, housing and transportation costs, a measure of spending money for unanticipated expenses or culturally expected gift-giving, etc.

All that being said, it’s obviously not a glowingly loving relationship, either.  Think back to Shouji’s absolutely barren room in Chapter 99 and consider it in the context of the information we get in this chapter.  Is he really so ascetic by inclination, or is he just used to making do with as little as possible?  After all, it goes without saying that if him coming into contact with someone called for blood purification, anything he himself was in regular contact with was also to be considered incredibly impure.  That includes his clothes, personal belongings and living space; even setting aside his parents’ view on it, who in his hometown would even want to provide or sell things to the family that they think will go to the child with the dirty blood that’s defiling their land?

Shouji’s parents’ absence is also glaring in other ways.  For example:

They’re either not in the beating scene image above at all or they’re that central background couple hanging back and just watching; whichever is the case, what they’re assuredly not doing while their son is being beaten so badly he will still have glaringly visible scars years later is “trying to stop the violence or take the blows themselves.”    

Shouji says he has one single good memory about his body, but his parents are nowhere to be found in that memory.  Ergo, his parents have not given him a single moment of positivity about his heteromorphic form.    

Parents of U.A. students were evacuated to U.A.—not just the ones near it, but even ones like Uraraka’s parents, who live at least a two hour drive away, in a wholly different prefecture with a third prefecture in between them and U.A.  Every student we see in the departure scene in Chapter 342 is shown with their parents except Shouji.

To sum all that up, Shouji’s family situation is not maximally bad, but it’s certainly proximally bad.

O Next, we get Shouji alleging ignorance on the part of heteromorphs raised in cities, that there are still parts of the country in the modern day where stories like his happen.[21]  It’s a milder version of the same assertions made by #2 and the beaky heteromorph last chapter, in that Shouji doesn’t suggest heteromorphobia doesn’t exist at all in cities, simply that there are extremes of violence that can only be found in the country.  It still feels off, however, to suggest that absolutely no one else in Shouji’s class might ever have heard of this through any channel at all: being from similarly small towns, reading about an attack in the news, reading about factors that impact the public approval ratings for Heroes, going through a morbid phase in middle school and researching it, being talked to about it by their parents, etc.

21: The suggestion of the Viz translation of this suggests that city-raised heteromorphs do know this, but only because they’re read about it in textbooks.  My sister-in-law, who does professional translation, tells me this was a subtle mistranslation of the original text, however; the textbook framing is supposed to imply a remove of time, not merely of distance.

It’s not as unrealistic a story beat here as it would be in an American comic, as Japan does tend more towards using silence as a weapon against bigotry—children won’t learn what they aren’t taught, and similar reasoning.  Still, to portray the class as so unanimously ignorant reflects a deep incuriosity, be that in the kids themselves about the world around them or in their author about how the knowledge/perpetuation of discrimination spreads.

This is particularly the case when you consider the story’s handling of the Ordinary Woman—attacked in her own town because people were suspicious of a heteromorph out after dark, turned away from multiple shelters because of her heteromorph status.  It’s certainly true that things got worse for heteromorphs after the first war arc, but for discrimination in that specific form to emerge, there needed to be something for it to draw on.  The fear of villains and the association of villains with heteromorphs are the foundation for the upswelling in anti-heteromorph sentiments in cities.

O Mina’s reaction to all this is one of rather theatrical anger.  That is, no one around her takes her broad declarations—that the world would be better off without the people who hurt Shouji—as anything more serious than hyperbole.  This is, it would seem, the only sort of anger that’s acceptable to show in response to hearing a story like Shouji’s—empathy to the wronged, sure, but no real intent to confront the wrongdoers.

O Mineta stares into space for a second before emphatically apologizing for calling Shouji an octopus once—a call all the way back to his microaggression in Chapter 6!—and asserting that it wasn’t his intention to say Shouji was gross or anything.  Shouji responds gracefully, saying it’s “only natural” that his arms would make people think of octopus.

He doesn’t go on to say, “But that doesn’t mean people have to say it out loud,” but it’s possible that Mineta’s apology is meant to suggest that regardless.  At least, one certainly hopes this isn’t the author’s way of quietly absolving his more popular characters of all the times they’ve done the same thing!  It’s notable, however, that none of the other Class 1-A kids that have done this are in the scene.  Shouto and Bakugou, who have both used that kind of language in anger (and in the latter’s case, also just with no provocation whatsoever) are the missing elephants in the room, and even Sero, who was the actual person to call Shouji an octopus, is, in his absence, Sir Letting The Gag Character Handle This Apology So I A More Serious Character Don’t Have To.

O Shouji brings up the Heroes Who Look Like Villains rankings.  We know the Number 1 on that list is actually Endeavor, per a movie bonus booklet, but bringing it up in this context does implicitly confirm that said rankings have an unseemly slant towards heteromorphs, and what did Skeptic say about Villains and heteromorphs again…?

O Shouji says he wears the mask because he knows that if people see his scars, they’ll wonder about them, and fear he’s out for revenge.  He doesn’t want people to think that, so he covers them up.  He’s praised for this by Tokoyami, and the narrative pretty clearly also thinks it’s admirable and cool.  I have serious issues with this—chiefly that it’s prioritizing the oblivious comfort of the baseline citizens over the fellow feeling and affirmation of other persecuted heteromorphs—but I’m also curious to see if the mask will come back now that its meta-narrative purpose of hiding Shouji’s scars from the reader has been fulfilled.  I note, for example, that Shouji is not wearing the mask in the color spread for Chapter 394, and the color art does have some precedent for being an early predictor of stuff in the body of the manga.[22]

Incidentally, while I’m talking about Shouji’s mask, I do wonder how effective it would even be for him to cover his scars up?  I have my doubts for two reasons.  First and most obviously, heroes are such celebrities, all over the news all the time, such that if Shouji really does get as popular as he intends to, there will be people who want to know what he looks like.[23]

22: The big one is Aizawa’s eyepatch.  It showed up in two pieces of color art (the popularity poll results spread for Chapter 293 and the new art announcing the BNHA Drawing Smash Exhibition) before it was revealed in the manga.  Both pieces released within days of each other in early December, 2020, three months after Shigaraki raked his hand down Aizawa’s face during the war and almost two months before the latter showed up in bandages in the hospital, with another two months to go beyond that before the eyepatch itself made it to the manga in late March.  In a more stealth spoiler, the same popularity spread revealed Shigaraki’s blackened, burned face-hand two chapters prior to Spinner digging it out of Shigaraki’s pants.  The 394 spread is also my basis for asserting that Mina’s horns have gone back to normal after her attack against Gigantomachia, compared to Shouji lacking his mask and Koda having his new horn in the same spread.

23: Edgeshot’s character profile page notes that his fans are split into two factions: those who’re mad to see his real face and those who think the mask is what makes him cool.

O More importantly, though, heroes have to be licensed, and Hero Licenses are photo IDs.  Photo IDs don’t typically allow face coverage because not being able to provide a visual reference to what the bearer looks like defeats the whole purpose.  While we don’t know what full-fledged hero licenses look like to say if they’re taken in or out of costume, we do know the provisional licenses the students carry showed them in their school uniforms, despite the fact that they definitely had working costumes by then:

Pardon the sudden screenshot. The manga has this shot, too, but the anime fills in the details of the text a bit more.

It seems probable to me that the photo on a Hero License must show the bearer’s face, so that if they’re tooling around a crime scene and a cop who hasn’t seen them around before asks for their license, it can reliably be used as a form of identification.  (I wonder how Hagakure manages?)

Also, think back to the press conferences we’ve seen in the story, most recently the one post-war: at every one, the heroes are in serious, solemn black suits, not their costumes.  So at any press conferences Shouji ever has to speak at in the future, he’ll have to show his face there, as well.

O We see a direct flashback to Shouji saving a little girl from drowning in a choppy, swift-flowing river as he says in voiceover that he’d rather cling to the single good memory related to his body than dwell on the bad memories.  He very much uses his quirk to do it, with his right set of limbs used to hold onto the bank while his left ones reach out to the girl, extending out another few “nodes” of arm-length when he at first can’t keep hold of her fingers.  As they sit and catch their breath afterward, the girl clings to one of his tentacles and cries.  This is not quite what his entry in the Ultra Analysis databook was hinting at[24] when it said he wears the mask due to his scary face making a little girl cry; that’ll be next chapter.

24: My apologies for not bringing this up before; it’ll be covered on AO3.  The gist is as detailed above; the databook came out circa the Endeavor Agency arc, so this was a known factoid about Shouji by the time this chapter came out three years later.

O Wrapping up the flashback, we’re left with Koda’s memory of Shouji saying that he knows it’ll take longer than a generation to tear down a wall that’s stood for over a century, so, just as previous generations have done, he’ll keep paying it forward, being the coolest hero the world’s ever seen, “to give good memories to generations to come.”  Which sounds really nice when he says it that way, as opposed to the broader implication that people whose children have been or are in danger of being maimed by bigots should just keep their heads down and “keep paying it forward.”

The whole “be a cool hero and give good memories” bit is particularly egregious to my eye, for a few reasons.

How much good did cool heroes do for Takami Keigo when they were just on TV?  Which is where Shouji will be, because in order to be “the coolest hero the world’s ever seen,” he’s going to have to be at the top of the rankings, and being at the top of the rankings means prioritizing cities, which means all those heteromorphs out in rural areas are never going to see him in person.  And anyway, what’s stopping all those bigots from just changing the channel or going on a rant about Woke Mutie Agendas every time a heteromorphic hero crops up on TV?    

How much did the visibility of previous generations’ cool heroes do for Spinner?  Does Shouji think Spinner was super inspired and uplifted by seeing e.g. Gang Orca on TV using the emitter-like hypersonic waves his quirk gives him to beat up Villains, an undue percentage of whom are also heteromorphs?

It’s certainly nice that Shouji was inspired enough by heroes on TV to want to emulate them, but he is demonstrably not the norm when it comes to wildly disadvantaged and victimized heteromorphs.  Also, I have to wonder how much his admiration of TV heroes would have done him if he’d gotten to the girl just a little later—say, in time to get her out of the river, but too late to be able to save her life without knowing CPR.  As bad as it was for him when he saved a little girl but had to touch her to do it, can you imagine how much worse it would have been if he’d touched her and then failed to save her, being found or having to walk back into town with her body?

I realize that's incredibly dark, but it's the kind of question that presents itself when the story is so insistent on Shouji's exemplary behavior being the model for heteromorphs to follow in their own lives.

   

O Exiting the flashback, when Shouji calls out to the heteromorphs, we finally get a straight-out look at how disastrous this conclusion is going to be in the way he shouts that no, the people who hurt them weren’t justified, but that there has to be a better way, that they should think about how to use their rage—but offers exactly zero suggestions himself for what that better way might be, or what they should be using their rage to do instead.[25]

25: I have seen the argument put forth that Shouji is one (1) teenager, and one (1) teenager cannot fairly be asked to Solve Bigotry.  To this, I would counter that if Shouji doesn’t have even one (1) single idea to offer, why is the camera lens holding him up as the hero who quelled a fifteen-thousand-strong mob with only words?  He doesn’t have to Solve Bigotry, but if he’s going to be used as a counter for other peoples’ misguided but at least active attempts to address the problem, he needed to be better than a mere white knight for the status quo.

Spinner’s #2 calls Shouji out on this directly, saying that if the situation were that easy to resolve, it wouldn’t have come down to this, and accusing Shouji of having no feasible solution to offer, just childish and naïve egotism.  And call me a hopeless MLA Stan and you’d be right, but truly, where’s the lie?

His efforts in this regard, however, wind up pushing Koda to what certainly has all the markings of a quirk awakening because it upsets Koda to see Shouji being “mocked.”  Man, sure is a good thing quirk awakenings are just a dime a dozen and definitely don’t require life-threatening injuries and/or incredibly severe emotional distress over someone who means more to you than your own life, right?

O In a last little stroke of ugliness for the chapter, Spinner calls Shouji gross.  Just to, you know, make it really obvious that the villains are all totally bad faith representation for this cause and thus can be safely dismissed.  (Christ, I hate these chapters.)

   

Chapter 372: 

O We get the flashback of Shouji and Koda asking All Might to assign them to the hospital defense group.  Points of note:

Neither Shouji nor All Might can be bothered to use the Ordinary Woman’s real name, instead just referring to her by her size.  Seriously, I get the intent behind insisting that she’s just an ordinary woman, that there’s nothing in particular stand-out about her in the current age; it’s pretty much the same deal as Shinomori saying that OFA can no longer be wielded by an “ordinary” person, with that phrasing being used to ironically emphasize that quirks are now seen as ordinary, while those without quirks are the unusual ones.  However, it obviously wouldn’t work in-universe for characters trying to specify who they’re talking about to say, “That ordinary woman,” with the end result being that they have to grab for what stands out about her if they want to be understood—in this case, her obviously unusual height.  In trying to emphasize that she’s normal, Horikoshi forces his characters to define her by what makes her stand out.    

Koda says that if Shouji’s going, he is too, a moment that would really land much better if they’d had literally any interactions of note at literally any point prior to this exact moment.  Frankly, even last chapter’s flashback is pretty thin on that front, since Koda is not one of the students who gets speaking lines when cuddling up to Shouji to comfort him.  (I’m not even convinced it’s very in character for Koda to be one of the kids diving in for cuddles—he’s usually pretty shy!)    

Shouji says that he could never call himself a hero if he were to stand back while the hospital attack plays out, implicitly emphasizing the role his reaction to his own oppression plays in his heroic motivation.

O Another flashback[26] gives us Koda’s mother discussing the possibility that he might get horns like hers someday, and what those horns can do, as well as mentioning that she used to have to put up with considerable mistreatment herself, and, lastly, telling her son to grow up into a man who gets angry when people mock those dear to him.

26: The sheer number of them crammed into this mini-arc really says a lot for how rushed it is, but complaining about the structural problems of the last few arcs would be a different essay.

Breaking those down, we’ve got:

The fact that Koda’s mom says he might grow in horns like hers suggests to me pretty strongly that her own horns are a quirk evolution she just doesn’t have the language to name as such.  If it were just a matter of maturation, something that came in with puberty, there’d be no “maybe” about it.  Given what we know about the context of quirk evolutions elsewhere, this in turn suggests that she did not exactly get her horns under peaceful, wholesome, uplifting circumstances!    

This is backed up by her mention of the “real cruelty” she faced.  Interestingly, this kind of raises some questions in relation to Shouji’s assertion last chapter that people like Koda who grew up in cities lack an understanding of the extremes of heteromorphobic violence that endure elsewhere.  Did Koda’s parents move to the city from the country at some point when Koda was young/before he was born, and the “real cruelty” was out in the country?  That might track with the overalls she was wearing.  And of course, Koda’s mother was a younger woman then, so maybe it’s just the fact that heteromorphic discrimination was worse at the time.  Either way, Koda’s mother is clearly open with him about the fact that she was mistreated because of her appearance, though she may have downplayed the severity of it.    

The idea of Shouji being “dear to Koda” is immensely frustrating for how utterly groundless it is, based on absolutely no prior grounding within the story other than the general bond among the 1-A students.  That’s just me complaining, though—more pertinent for this essay is the problem with how this moment frames anger.  Like, the whole mini-arc has the same problem, but this chapter is particularly rotten with it.  To preview: Koda’s anger is portrayed as righteous, as was his father’s, because their anger is about protection, about defensive reaction, about intervening with harm currently in progress—basically all the stuff Heroes are supposed to do.  It is notably not about action based on past harm or proactive attempts to prevent future harm.

O Koda’s bird attack knocks Spinner’s #2 off the roof in one of the most egregious examples of, “I can’t come up with an actual counterpoint for his arguments, so I’ll just shut him up through force,” I’ve ever seen.  Sure, there’s something to be said for not engaging bad faith parties in good faith arguments, but like…  That guy already had a platform of his arguments—he was standing on the roof of a tall building!  The author gave him several pages to make his pitch; the argument’s already out there in the readers’ minds!  The only thing getting rid of him does is guarantee that the person the taciturn Shouji actually has to argue with is…Spinner.  Who is not exactly a born orator at the best of times, and he’s very far from even that level here.

Now, #2 will get a few more lines next chapter, but they’re against one of the people on his own side.  No heroic character has to argue #2 down; instead, they get to match wits with the literally drooling Spin-zilla.  Which is a bit like stepping into the wrestling ring with someone who’s had a bag thrown over his head and his hands zip-tied behind his back.

This confrontation is, woefully, not the only place in the endgame where a heroic character gets all the time and freedom in the world to make their big pronunciations while their opponent gets shut down by some outside factor—interference from other villains, psychological decay, literal possession—but it’s in particularly stark relief here.

O Shouji contends that the crowd is letting their pain be exploited, which is a fair cop, but will become difficult to square with his praise of them next chapter.

O He says that these peoples’ children might be the next targets, presumably because of their actions here today.  This is particularly maddening because it’s coming from someone who was, himself, already targeted as a child!  Not because of anything his parents did, and certainly not because of anything bad he did, but simply because of the bigoted, backwards views of his town.  Children already and still are being targeted!  Shouji’s backstory is all wrong for this stand, and there’ll be another angle on that next chapter as well.

O Here we finally fulfill the promise of Shouji’s databook entry and see the Little Girl Crying Because His Face Was Scary.  She wasn’t crying because she was just scared of his face in isolation, but rather because she sees his face being scary as her fault, directly correlating his wounds to her rescue.[27] Those wounds stand in marked contrast to what happens when other people save small helpless children from danger, and underlines the biggest problem with this whole resolution: the idea that simply Being An Hero will create change.

27: My big question is, “Given that him being in contact with her was so bad it got him scarred for life, how did she even sneak out to see him again to give him this tearful apology?  Did young Shouji even want this apology, or would he have preferred she not risk the two of them being seen together again for both their sakes?

Now, it’s certainly likely in Horikoshi’s world that this little girl will, herself, grow up to be different from the people around her, that she won’t think heteromorphs are tainted.  And like, that’s at least one less person being awful, right?  And doesn’t every one count?

Sure, of course—but what happens when she runs up against that prejudice herself?  Will she try to intervene the next time she sees a blood cleansing?  Will she simply abstain from such action and teach equality in her own household without trying to change the village around her?  Will she simply move away and leave her hometown worse for her absence?  If she does stay in that town, will she herself become an outcast for her views—a form of silent, passive harassment that can be absolutely life-wrecking in those small Japanese villages?  If she gets married and has children, will her husband have her back in trying to raise those kids free of hatred?

For that matter, isn’t there a chance that, being surrounded in people who think heteromorphs are tainted, that she’ll just internalize something like, “It was my carelessness that got that poor heteromorph boy beaten so badly.  He was trying to help, and it only got us both hurt—him for the beatings, me for being in contact with his filth.”  Like, she’s so young in that scene; she’s got a whole lotta years of having the anti-heteromorph narrative reaffirmed at her before she’s old enough to do anything different herself.  It feels to me like the kind of thing that she could easily fall back into as she grows up, only to have a huge spiritual crisis about it once she hits her late teens to early twenties.

In any case, it's just a lot to put on a single child—on her and Shouji both!

O Spinner rallies enough to yell out a message of his own, but it’s just a quote of what he told his followers when he first sent out the call, not anything new to rally them, nor tailored to respond to what Shouji’s saying.  This has been the danger of the plotline all along, and here it comes to fruition: in putting bad faith villains with ulterior motives[28] up against an underdeveloped character who’s hidden the evidence of his mistreatment from Day 1, someone with no apparent intention to ever speak up for others like himself, no one comes out looking good.  Truly, heteromorphs deserve better rep.

28: #2 is the obvious one, but Spinner’s here in bad faith, too.  While I’m sure he’s not totally indifferent to the matter of heteromorph rights, it’s self-admittedly not his current priority.

O That said, if what Spinner says is old hat to the crowd, it is new to the audience, and it serves to sharply up the ante on from what we knew previously about the persecution he faced in his hometown!

But it would have gotten better if he’d just put on a mask and dealt with it, amirite?

Recall that Spinner has previously only said that people in his town called him names—this is self-evidently many steps worse.  Note, though, that it’s another example of the violence heteromorphs face not involving anyone using quirks—that is to say, nothing that’s a hero’s jurisdiction to deal with.  That being the case, how much could Spinner get away with fighting back or running before the “it’s okay to use quirks in self-defense” stops holding?  After all, is it still self-defense if biased cops[29] can accuse him of “escalating” the conflict?  How far away can he get by climbing on walls before it becomes, to some small-town local Hero, unlicensed public quirk use?

29: If policing in HeroAca Japan still works basically the same as it does in IRL Japan, then in truly backwater areas, ones too small to afford the upkeep of a police department, an officer would be sent in from another area to live in a home attached to the police box.  That being the case, it’s not a given that the officer would share the locals’ bigotry.  That’s where we come back to the whole “what percentage of Villain-designated criminals are heteromorphs” statement and what it implies about bias in the law enforcement system.  Also too, building a strong relationship with the community is absolutely essential to rural policing, and there are, oh, so many stories about what happens when someone new in a small Japanese town gets between the inhabitants and their “traditional spiritual practices.”

O Pig Nose Guy starts making an impression by noticing the doctors—most prominently Dr. Yoshi, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a baseline nurse—forming a human chain in front of the hallway leading to the Inpatient Ward.  This drama is undercut on both fronts by the fact that Spinner is not looking for the Inpatient Ward, and in fact barrels right on past that hallway without even glancing in its direction.  So, the mob stops because they’re struck to hesitation by a group of people protecting a part of the hospital that the mob was not even intending to assault in the first place.

O As part of stopping, Pig Nose Guy seems to have some sort of flashback to a time he saw Dr. Toad caring for an elderly baseline man.  This raises a lot of questions to my by-this-time hyper-critical eyes.

What past circumstance brought Pig Nose Guy—presumably fairly rural, as most of this crowd is implied to be—to Central Hospital, the most technologically advanced hospital in the entire country?    •  If Pig Nose Guy is not rural, but was still so fired up about heteromorphobia that he joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital, wouldn’t that suggest that a lot of people in the story have been misleading us about the extent of anti-heteromorph sentiment in cities?    

If the person in the bed is someone related to Pig Nose Guy—perhaps someone with a rare illness that requires specialized treatment?—why is the guy entirely baseline?  If it’s just a friend, then they must be very close, given that PNG was willing to take a trip to the Tokyo metropolitan area to visit him.  But if PNG is that close to a baseline guy, why did he ever believe that baseline folks are such a lost cause that he, again, joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital?    

Why is this important, impactful memory one of a heteromorph in a caretaker role instead of being taken care of?  To elaborate on why that question matters, a common issue you’ll see minority groups raise when talking about representation in media is the role any given minority character performs in their narrative—the gay best friend there to give the straight female lead advice, the Black person there to help a white person self-actualize, that sort of thing.  This is not so much a critique of any given, specific character as it is criticizing the restrictions on of what demographics are allowed to be portrayed as full, rounded individuals in popular media versus which are relegated to stock stereotypes or supporting cast.     This isn’t something BNHA addresses explicitly, but I do think we have some precedent for suspecting heteromorphs in this world have similar problems—think of the image for Class B’s play in Chapter 173, Gang Orca playing the Villain at the license exam, and, most egregiously, the Hug Me Corporation and its all-baseline-all-the-time image of bystanders and victims.  That being the case, it really gets to me that Pig Nose Guy’s memory here has the man in the hospital bed being baseline while it’s the doctor who’s the heteromorph.     Like, what does that communicate about his mindset, exactly?  “Oh, I remember this time I saw a heteromorph who’d managed to actually kind of Make It in society and he was nice to the baseline guy in his care.  But the spider guy leading us, he didn’t sound like he wanted us to be very nice at all.  Is that what I am?  Not nice?”  On the other hand, if the whole point of this memory is to remind PNG that there can be peace and support between heteromorphs and “people with human faces,” why in heaven’s name isn’t this a memory of a heteromorph being cared for and supported by a baseline person?  Why does the person doing the labor in this picture have to be of the oppressed class?

I hate this panel so much.

   

Chapter 373: 

O The last conversation plays out between Pig Nose Guy, #2, and Shouji, revealing #2 to be a bad faith idealogue who thinks of Shouji with microaggressions and his followers as meatshield patsies.  It’s real bad.

O Shouji says that the feelings that led the mob to come today are neither useless nor wrong, and that their willingness to keep thinking about everything makes them look like a bright and shining light to his eyes.  However, he carefully does not engage with the fact that those feelings, which were previously aimless and directionless, were only stirred up and stoked to the point of “coming today” by the villains.  It’s the same sort of thing the villains always get told, really—you may have a point, you have suffered, but when you act on that point, that suffering, then you’ve gone too far.  All you’re really supposed to do with that pain is—what, exactly?  Thinka bout it and choose to Nobly Endure?

O The last little bit of insult to this chapter, to my eye, is #2 getting an apology from some anonymous hero we’ve never seen in our lives, who says, “We’ve heard your voices loud and clear today.  Sorry for not realizing sooner.”

Remember the bit where the person who apologizes to Shouji for the octopus comment is Mineta, the gag character, instead of Sero, the serious character who brought it up in the first place?  Remember the conspicuous absence of Bakugou and Todoroki, who have actually used that language with conscious demeaning intent?  This apology is the systemic version of that absolute unwillingness on Horikoshi’s part to let his sympathetic/popular/important characters look bad.  It’s the same thing that led to none of the heroes who retired after the war being heroes the readers know and care about, the same thing behind the total collapse of the series’ critique of All Might.  Heroes are allowed to be ignorant, but they are not allowed to be complicit.

Notice, too, what this random hero does not say, what Shouji does not offer, the absence that damns this resolution: any promises of concrete change.  We’ve finally gotten to the crux of Horikoshi’s point, as delivered by Shouji, and it really does all boil down to this:

And I can’t overstate enough what a terrible resolution this is, especially given how Shouji’s own experience puts the lie to it.  Remember, Shouji saved a child from drowning, one of the absolute most prototypical actions someone can do and get called a Hero by the bystanders/victims/evening news.  The only thing he could have done that would have been more stereotyped would have been saving her from a burning building!  He saved that little girl from drowning and the townsfolk attacked him with farming tools for it.

How much more heroic would he have needed to be?  How much more of a shining light could he possibly have been?  In what universe could someone with that backstory possibly think that the answer to systemic bigotry—violence that goes wholly accepted by the community and wholly unpunished by the broader society—could be this Model Minority bullshit?

Ultimately, for Shouji’s backstory to realistically have given him the motivation he professes, his actions needed to have changed the people in his village for the better.  If the reader is meant to believe that Shouji’s “answer”—the premise that selfless heroism can change the hearts of bigots—then we have to see it.  And, you know, even if that had been what we got, there would still be grounds to criticize it!  It would still be a perhaps-too-idealistic depiction of fighting oppression; it would still put too much responsibility on the victims!  But at least it would justify Shouji’s own stance.

As it is, we have Shouji choosing to believe in the changeability of people who specifically shouted while throwing rocks at him that, no matter how much the times advanced, they would never accept him.  His answer does not entail a single non-heteromorph working to bring heteromorphs living in the darkness a light; it entails them kindling their own.  As with Pig Nose Guy shutting down in the face of a memory of a heteromorph doctor, this resolution asserts the life-changing power of…being told that heteromorphs have to do all the work to make baseline people feel better.

   

Conclusion

Do I think that this terrible resolution means heteromorphobia was poorly set up or retconned?  No, I don’t.  I just think it means that Horikoshi is a Japanese man writing a Japanese story from a position of demographic privilege in Japanese society.  I think he’s fully capable of setting up a detailed, intelligent, thoughtful discrimination allegory, a logical, internally consistent extension of the discrimination in the world around him to the alternate future he’s created—and then coming to a completely different resolution than I would because his context led him to different answers than I wanted or found acceptable.  Compared to the U.S., Japan as a culture is more communal, more collectivist; they have less history with successful protest movements, more history with protest movements turning violently extremist or just being ignored by those in power.  The idea of “not making trouble for others” is an incredibly deeply engrained value.

I have a decent idea why this resolution is what it is.  I can try to make myself view it through the more generous, forgiving lens of Cultural Differences; I can fail to do so and instead conclude that this is portrayal is much less about Cultural Differences than it is yet another in a long chain of Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Author Writes Discrimination Allegory, Fucks It All Up Because of His Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Centrism.  That doesn’t mean I believe heteromorphobia came out of nowhere, and I hope this essay has at least demonstrated that much, whatever you might think of its resolution.

——————————

Thank you so much for taking this journey with me, all! At 42,000 words and 93 pages in Word, there's definitely more I'd like to do with this, chiefly taking a spin through the Vigilantes spinoff, which I've always found to be very good at grappling with practical questions and concerns BNHA Core largely ignores. The character of Kamayan is particularly relevant to this topic.

However, for now, I'm going to take a break on this subject and turn my attention to something else. I'm not sure what it'll be quite yet, but meta projects that have moved towards the top of my list concern the ridiculous series of nerfs Toga has been subjected to in this endgame, arc thoughts on everything I hate about the stupid, stupid All Mech fight, and an organized argument for the endgame being chock-full of retcons that are obvious if you look at them for more than the five minutes it takes to read a chapter each week.

You may notice that all of those are pretty negative-sounding, and you would be right. Given that the whole reason I stopped doing my chapter posts is that I was weary of the constant negativity, the actual next thing I do will probably be to get back to one of my neglected MLA fanfic projects.

'Til next time, all!

[penguwastaken]

This is the review I wrote for my Danganronpa Togami fan translation that I am currently working on, which I figured I might as well upload to Tumblr.

In June of 2023, after reading Danganronpa Togami for the first time, I wrote a review of it on Twitter. I want you to pretend like that review doesn't exist. Completely disregard it because BOY was I wrong.

When I first read Danganronpa Togami last year, I absolutely despised it. I was miserable almost the whole time. But I'm not the same person I was a year ago, I was naive and stupid, but now I have an IQ comparable to Albert Einstein! So basically what I'm saying now is I'm smart enough to understand it now. I couldn't disagree with my original review any more as I am now a based and enlightened Danganronpa Togami enjoyer. That's right, ME, the person who for a year made fun of this novel trilogy, finally sees the light I would like to issue a formal apology to Danganronpa Togami for being so stupid and blissfully unaware of its peakness.

Jokes aside, the more the novel sat in my head, the more conflicted I began to feel about it. I felt pretty mixed about it when I first read it, but those feelings only grew. Were my criticisms warranted? Did Danganronpa Togami really deserve the treatment I gave it? I picked it back up and gave it a second chance, and I was surprised to discover that it was... really good? I thought you were supposed to be this edgy, nonsensical, stupid book, that's how I remembered it at least, so what happened?

I'm going to try to keep this review as spoiler free as possible, because something I realized is that Danganronpa Togami isn't something that can really be explained. It's something that has to be experienced, beginning to end. The summaries don't really do it justice, which is part of why I started this project in the first place. Though at some points I may dive into some minor spoiler territory, so I'll make sure to mark those parts. So consider this my apology and defense of Danganronpa Togami, because I have to admit that in my blind hatred for it, I probably did end up harming it's perception. So maybe, if just a little, I can rectify it here and maybe convince you to give it another chance like I did.

I will say, Danganronpa Togami is probably one of the darker entries in the series. It features a lot of sensitive content, such as graphic and violent imagery, assault, incest, and abuse. If that's enough to turn you away from it, that's fine and perfectly understandable, especially given Danganronpa's track record with those topics. And I will admit, there are absolutely times where Danganronpa Togami borders on being edgy. But I don't think it's without purpose, and it's handled with more severity than most entries in the series. Once again, if that's enough to make you not want to touch it was a 2000 foot pole, that's perfectly reasonable.

Everyone knows Danganronpa Togami is like, REALLY weird. Octopus suits, lightsabers, fortune telling human-cows, you name it. This all seems a little out of place, even for Danganronpa, but it starts to make more sense as you proceed with the story. These weird things aren't real, they're the result of an unreliable narrator. Contrary to what idiot me from 2023 says, I don't think having an unreliable narrator invalidates a story. Even with it, you can still piece together the events of the story and it creates what is honestly one of the best plot twists in the series that ties everything in the novel trilogy together.

If I have one critique of Danganronpa Togami, it's Byakuya's characterization. It makes sense in the context of the novel for him to be perceived as some kind of god due to circumstances and Blue Ink's POV and stuff, but that's not my issue. My main problem comes from the fact that some of his actions are just bad, plain and simple. He is NOT a good person in this novel. I guess it makes sense, this is before his character arc in Trigger Happy Havoc after all, but it just feels kind of weird and out of character sometimes. You could chalk it up to just "more unreliable narrator nonsense," but I feel that misses the point a little.

Danganronpa Togami takes full advantage of its medium, it's twists are something that you can really only put in a novel. It's difficult to explain without going into spoilers, but unlike something like Danganronpa Zero or Danganronpa Kirigiri, I genuinely couldn't imagine Danganronpa Togami as anything else. It's also filled with a lot of fun and witty banter full of references and charming characters.

Danganronpa Togami has some really interesting themes of identity and how one's past or situation can change their perspective. This is seen all throughout the novel trilogy, whether it be the protagonist whose a victim, an idol forced into a popularity debate, or its version of the despair disease, acting more as a placebo effect here. Its themes are a bit more subtle than other entries, not even I'm sure if I fully get them, but they're certainly interesting.

Unlike Danganronpa Kirigiri, which feels like a completely unrelated story with a few elements from the games and Kyoko (not saying that as a bad thing btw), Danganronpa Togami feels like it takes as many elements as it can from the games and stuffs them in. It takes place during the tragedy, features characters from not only the first two games but also the novels, has references to Ultra Despair Girls, brings back weird plot points like the despair disease from Danganronpa 2, and so much more. In a way, it's kind of like a big Danganronpa crossover (also featuring Kagami Family Saga because Yuya Sato couldn't help himself lol).

At some point, you've probably wondered: "is Danganronpa Togami canon?" Due to elements from in it and the divisive nature of Danganronpa Togami, you can't really find a straight answer about it online, so I figured I'd weigh in on the discussion. If you asked me back when I originally read it if it was canon, I'd probably give you a hard "no." But it's a bit more complex than that. It's a little more complex than just a simple "definitively canon" and "definitively non-canon." Disregarding the unreliable narrator, there are parts of the story that we do reliably know happened.

The closest thing to a reference to Danganronpa Togami in any other piece of media in the series to my knowledge is Byakuya saying "by the dignity of the Togami name" once in episode 7 of Danganronpa 3 Future Arc, however Byakuya swearing on the Togami name has been around before the novels even if it is prominently used in them. However, a more definitive piece of evidence towards its canonicity is in episode 11 of Danganronpa 3 Despair Arc, where you see Sonia leading an attack on Prague with a graph of a satellite in the corner. I think this is a pretty cut and dry confirmation in favor of Danganronpa Togami being canon, albeit told through an unreliable narrator's perspective.

And that about wraps up my review and personal thoughts of Danganronpa Togami. It's definitely one of the more weird, yet fascinating entries in the series. I don't think it's on the level of Danganronpa Kirigiri (I don't think any entry in this series is), but it has its merits and hopefully I could convince you to maybe check it or appreciate it a bit more.

[ebonysplendor]

The Science of Staying Awake Review 👁️

TL;DR: Sleep is often for the weak, but having, what is likely but claims not to be, a hallucination being violently in love with you is something that is not for the weak. Apparently, it's not for the living either...

Game Link: https://viscereye.itch.io/the-science-of-staying-awake

Notable Features: Gender Neutral MC, Unnamed MC (referred as "You"), Yandere LI, Choice-heavy storyline Spiciness: 0/5 -- Not exactly wholesome because violence but no option to buss it open so no spice LI Red Flags: 1.7/5 -- Physically abusive, Crosses boundaries...other than that, he be's a touch starved boi who just wants cuddles

Wanna know more? Well, let's get into it!

Before I say anything, I just want you to read this:

Let me tell you, I had no idea how accurate that description was until I played it. That is a damned accurate description, and quite frankly, the only way to describe the experience that this was.

Anyways, I had ran across it when going through my game files, and I was like "Oh yeah! This game exists!" and decided to write a review on this one. I played this game many moons ago, and frankly, I don't see many people talking about or referencing this one; I honestly feel like more people should know about it, because there is a game to be played here. I mean, how many people are actually going to run across this review, I have no idea, but shit, hopefully it'll get a few extra downloads, because as "cheesy" as it may look, this was actually a pretty damn good game!

Honestly (and respectfully) speaking, you know how you look at a game, and you're like "This is probably going to be bad, but I'm curious"? From looking at the backgrounds they used, the description itself, and how they described the game as "cheesy" and a "creepypasta fanfic", I honestly thought this was supposed to be one of those "intentionally bad but funny as hell" games for jokes, but...yeah, no. If it was meant to be that way, I didn't get that at all.

I'll explain more in the actual review portion, but I'm going to go ahead and cut to the chase. As always, I give you the disclaimer that -- and those that have been vibing with me since the start of all of this already know -- I'm going to tell you as much as possible about the game without ruining the game itself.

Just as a side note, I think I do say that verbatim every time I write a review -- between that, "so boom", and the whole "drink water, don't be dumb" thing lol. I might switch it up one day, but that's honestly how I talk in real life. Like, can you not tell that I type the way that I speak? I mean, if it was something for college or work or something, yeah, I'm going to code switch, obvi, but for stuff like this? I'm pretty much talkin' to y'all like y'all are the squad because...well, y'all are lol.

Anyways! Enough chitchat, let's get summarizing.

So, boom (lmao ya see?).

We're in class, and we're tired as fook. Like, it's not even that "Damn, this class is boring" type of tired; it's that "I deadass haven't slept in 2 days, and I'm starting to hear colors and see sounds" type of tired. That "Ayo, why does this hard ass desk feel mad comfortable all of a sudden" type of tired. That plain and simple "a bitch is TIDE not tired" type of tired. Anyways, we recognize this as a current problem, and we know that we've gotta do something about it. Expeditiously. So, we hit up the vending machine, get something to wake us up a little, and then head on home.

When I say that it took everything to get up those stairs and to our bedroom...listen.

Like, as soon as we got through the door, we dropped that backpack to the floor, and we dive -- you hear me, dive -- into that bed. Now, with the way that we were feeling, dreamland should've been immediate. To be real with you, we were probably asleep by the time we were mid-air, but like, when we landed, we landed on something, and this something -- or rather someone -- goes "Ow". Like huuuuuuuh?

Again: Huuuuuuuuuuuuuuh? Fuck you mean, "Ow?" Like who the hell is yooooooooou?!

No, like, we literally ask who he -- ...it? --- is, because clearly, he was not here when we left, let alone just chilling in our bed, but he's just super casual about it, like, "Oh! I'm Vance!". Like, oh, right, Vance; that suddenly makes this whole situation totally normal and nothing to worry about -- as if that were even slightly true.

Here's the thing though, oddly enough, it actually is kind've true. See, we're not scared of him as a...whatever he is, but something about him is just...not right; something is very clearly off. Like, when he had introduced himself, he had shook our hand, and we immediately got this mad intense feeling of dread that we couldn't describe, and something about it just kind've made us feel like we were, quite literally, spiraling into insanity.

Naturally, we pull ourselves away from him and step back -- that spiraling feeling and anxiety is instantly gone. As you've probably guessed, it didn't take us long to put together that it's not good for this "Vance" creature to be too close in proximity, let alone anywhere near us.

He kind've picks up on this, and he's adamant that he's not going to hurt us. Still, we try to explain to him that, while we're not really threatened by him, we get this weirdly intense feeling whenever he's nearby, and he essentially needs to stay a little more than an arm's length away at all times; frankly, the further away, the better. Well...

He didn't take that well, and now, we feel threatened by him.

I hadn't mentioned this before, but Vance was already pretty upset that we wouldn't really let him come near us, let alone cuddle with him, but now he's extra pissed because we're essentially rejecting him altogether, even though he's, quite literally, driving us insane.

So, now that he's like this, we've got to get the hell out of there because, now, we aren't sure if he's still on the whole "I'm not going to hurt you" energy like before. That being said, we completely bolt, and he's like "Nah, bring that ass here, boi". Panic. Big panic time.

So, we do. We run off, but it does no good, because he finds us.

Granted, he doesn't know exactly where we are, but it doesn't matter because we're completely cornered. What are we going to do?

Well, let me rephrase that I know what I'm going to do; better yet, I know what I did. Now you guys on the other hand? Lol, I'll guess you'll have to play it for yourself to see what y'all are going to do.

I had honestly forgotten how good this game was until I had replayed it to grab some screenshots and to get a refresher on what actually went down. I'm not even kidding about that. My love for the game had literally re-sparked, and I can't believe that I forgot how good it was. If you've read my past reviews, you know that I mentioned at one point that I become an absolute slut for a choice-heavy game -- this is a choice heavy game and a damned good one. Speaking of choice-heavy...

Just to get off topic very slightly, you know what was crazy? When I went to replay it, apparently, I had done something different than when I had first played though the game and lmaoooooo, do you know that I had ended up finding THREE more endings? Wanna know something even crazier? One of them was a secret ending that I didn't even realize that I had gotten to!

Now mind you (lol you know the story is about to get a lil' spicy when that's said)! I had already unlocked like...if I remember right, like, 14 endings at this point, so when I found these other endings -- again, by total accident because, at this point, damn the review! I'm legit replaying the game for me, now -- I was now sitting at a grand total of 17 endings. So, now, I'm like "Ayo, what the hell?". Like, my mind is blown, because I was so sure that I had found all of the endings and completed the game. Remember, I hadn't touched or thought about this game in literal months because I was that confident that I had finished it. So, it's like, how many endings are there if I'm still managing to find more?

Naturally, I sprint to the dev's game page to conduct research on this burning question, and I am reading everything that there is to offer, but there was nothing. No "hey, this game has x amount of endings", no walkthrough map, no nothing. Did that stop me, though? Nah, because surely someone had experienced something similar to what I just had and was also like "Damn, how many endings are there...?". Lmaooooo well, I was right. You know what the answer is?

19. There are nineteen endings in this game.

I already knew the answer, but I go back to count the amount of endings that I have; there's 17. I dig into the game files for some more hints, and I find two icons (you'll know what I mean when you play it) that I've never seen before. Oh, okay. So, it's confirmed, but let me make sure that I've got the details straight:

Are you seriously telling me that, not only had I incorrectly assumed that I had all of the endings and finished the game because I had gotten all of the achievements, but the fact that I found three other endings -- again, by accident! -- doesn't even matter because I'm still missing two more because there's NINETEEN ENDINGS total?!

Wild. Chaotic even, and you're damn right that I'm here for it all. I LOVE that there are so many endings. I love even more that I have other endings to look for because I'm totally in love with this game all over again. Even though, lol, it was the deadpan, nonchalant "19" from the dev for me. The dev said "I said what I said, and what about it?". We love to see it.

Anyways, I'm a huge advocate for this game. If you've got some time, definitely give it a try. I highly recommended, and Vance is a pretty sweet dude, if you can find that side of him, I mean. Also, just for a very light spoiler but not really, the real ending was so sweet to me. Like something about it, it just...I don't know. It was just a warm feeling that washed over me when I had read it, and I was just like "That was actually really cute?" Bittersweet, even. Like, ugh, I am honestly really pushing for more people to play this game. It was genuinely so good, and I hope that the dev comes out with more visual novels. I truly forgot how in love with this game I was until I replayed it. This has, highkey, been a great experience.

Anywho, it's time that I stop my rambling and end it here. If you'd like to give this game a go for yourself and discover all 🌟nineteen🌟 endings -- which I highly recommend that you do -- a link to the game is at the very bottom of this post as well as at the very top. Hell, I'll even put the link right here so you can get to it quicker. If you're feeling extra motivated, visit the dev's page and post a comment telling them how great of a job they did and give them that extra validation to let them know "Hey! You're pretty good at what you do! You should keep doing the thing!". I didn't see where you could donate to them, but assuming I just missed it, remember that monetary validation is always helpful as well.

That's all from me though! Drink water, don't be dumb, and hope to see you around~!

The Science of Staying Awake

[ailichi]

reading since around august (selected)

Antigone, Jean Anouilh - French play based on the ancient Greek play by Sophocles, from 1944. loved it. I always love Anouilh's stuff.

Coal Dark Mornings, Brett Anderson - first autobiography of Brett Anderson, taking you up to the time when he formed Suede. I think you could read this even if you weren't into his music, it's well-written and gives a very good description of the time and place he grew up in while still being very quick to read.

The Coffee-House of Surat, Leo Tolstoy - short story by Tolstoy because I guess I'm trying to 100% his work.

Prophet Song, Paul Lynch - it's alright! it gets better and better very steadily as it goes along; I liked it much more on page 250 than on page 150, that kind of book. it seems to be out on the display tables of bookshops across Europe - not sure it's that much of a sensation really. but it takes like 2 days to read, not a waste of time.

Everyone Loves You When You’re Dead, Neil Strauss - I read most of these interviews and they're good but the book exists to record the Liam Gallagher one for me.

Getting High: The Adventures of Oasis, Paolo Hewitt - it's good!! I think I already posted a quick review but if you're a fan and want to read One book about Oasis, it's the perfect choice.

Shout!: The Beatles, Their Life and Times, Philip Norman - dear Lord, is this comprehensive. and it continues after 1970 - post-Beatles stuff is like half the book. I did enjoy it, but especially the first few hundred pages (yes), where he talks about each member before they joined, the other people in that Merseyside scene, etc.

Supersonic: The Uncut Interviews, Simon Halfton - interesting to see how they edited the band interviews for the documentary.

Remembering, Sinéad O’Connor - she can really write, wow. obviously parts of this book are very heavy, and it did make me cry. I'm glad I read it though.

Hadji Murad, Leo Tolstoy* - I'd read this before and apparently forgotten large swathes of it. it's fine, nothing crazy good, very much hampered by the noble-Oriental thing he's got going on. every day I realise I am the world's most unenthusiastic Tolstoy fan. like I'll read it but Jesus Christ.

The Horse, The Wheel, and Language, David W. Anthony DNF - if this is the intellectual standard expected of US undergrads, that's shocking. forget student debt cancellation, they should be giving them money back with interest. lmfao

Ulysses, James Joyce - it's Ulysses, it's great. but there were bits I subjectively didn't like (predictably, the grimy sex scenes, all that tackle). um. a masterpiece, clever, etc., didn't exactly have me weeping. it IS brilliant and very enjoyable to read on a pure prose level.

Do You Believe in the Power of Rock and Roll? John Robb - good interviews :)

Solenoid, Mircea Cărtărescu - been reading this on and off since the translation came out in 2022. interestingly weird until it's weirdly not interesting. probably excellent for someone, but not for me. which was really disappointing, because I was excited for it.

Regenade, Mark E. Smith - absolute masterclass of an "autobiography". I loved it. is there a lot of 'information' about his life story? of course not. can you necessarily believe that things happened as he writes? not really. (but then, the way the story is told is telling in itself). starts in media res. essentially the only story he tells from his childhood is Japanese Prison Camp, and yk? I'm pretty sure we used to play something like that too. obviously the whole book is hysterically witty. so good at having opinions, it's outrageous. made me laugh at jokes at the expense of Noel Gallagher, so it really is that charming as a book. "charming" in the slightly sinister fairy-tale sense. MES o7

[lovecolibri]

https://www.tumblr.com/lovecolibri/763019097825050624/am-i-a-loser-for-fearing-that-this-will-be-like-bt

I also want to say for this anon, because if they are just seeing that fandom bragging then they probably didn’t see the fact that Tim didn’t just share a review from a BT positive reviewer. Nor did he go looking for it. One of them once again decided to bother him and sent it to him.

But even then, it truly wasn’t that bad. They still reviewed the entire episode and all of the characters and was honestly pretty fair in the review. But when it came to Tommy’s scene in 8.1, yes you had no doubt they were pro Tommy because they reviewed what happened but also injected their hopes for his character.

But that said, it’s not the only review Tim has shared. He has shared multiple other reviews of 8.1; including one from Whitney, a very pro buddie journalist. And they have upon going to look as I write this, all gotten more engagement then the one from the pro BT reviewer. It’s also not new for Tim to share this. Last season he was sharing multiple reviews of the episodes on Facebook as well. And like you mentioned, it’s doubtful he reads them all in full if at all (we can gather this form the man himself since he confessed when thet fandom was trying to say him sharing their string theory video was game over for buddie that he just shares things sometimes that he’s sent to be polite but doesn’t actually look at them)

Another thing to point out is for the ratings of the episode, Tim’s first post about them was using the fan run 911 news (not to be confused with 911bts who is neutral) post, and the person running that is very much pro buddie and what feels like public enemy 1 to that fandom these days.

These are all things if you’re only seeing what they brag about you won’t see because it goes against their supposed “win”. Trust me today was not the big win they claim it to have been lol. (Also looking at you Oliver resharing the video and cutting it off right before that man showed up 😂)

Hey, thanks Nonnie! As I said in my post, I don't really know or follow what that man says or does because I tend to doom spiral and I need to Not Look for my own sanity and peace of mind. I see some things and what my trusted mutuals post about it, so I didn't know a lot of this!

Thanks for the info and for clarifying some stuff and this is also a friendly reminder that if you block those people and filter those tags you won't have to see any of the shit they are saying which can be nice! I know some people worry about only seeing one side of things and then getting blindsided by the show doing something they may have been prepared for otherwise, but blocking and filtering is always an option! (Honestly, my biggest fear is that I'll go into the tag or be poking around and reblog something from a T stan blog that I didn't know was being awful all this time just because EYE never saw any of their shit because I have it all blocked 🤣)

The lesson here is curate your experience however you need to have the experience you want to have. Some people WANT the drama and want to know what the other side is saying and that's valid! But if it's not working for you, find something that does! If you just need a hit of positivity before going back to the trenches, check out some posts in the Buddie tags or read some Buddie fics! It's never all doom and gloom OR sunshine and roses on either side, don't let anyone fool you!

Thanks for popping over with the info, Nonnie!

[kitsaystransrights]

It'sa me, Kit!

Woah, hey, you can make pinned posts! I totally didn't forget about this feature. I should probably do that, huh?

Weeeeell anyway, howdy! I'm Maddie, I go by Kit online sometimes, you can call me whichever you prefer. She/Her pronouns only, please. I'm a 22 year-old trans furry who is chronically online and geeky, so if you have a problem with that, I'm putting you in a box and then launching that box into the sun. I'm a YouTuber, Twitch streamer, filmmaker, and game dev, so I'm basically every stereotypical geeky trans-girl thing except for an artist. Can't draw to save my life.

On my YouTube, I usually make reviews or video essays about games I like, though I occasionally do stuff on other media as well. Currently, my big long-term projects are the "Splatoon 3 vs Splatoon 2" series, which is AAAAALMOST finished at the time of writing this, and my series on Leilani Wilson's Elancia Chronicles novels, (which are REALLY FREAKING GOOD and you should check them out!) I've linked a few of the videos I'm proudest of down below :)

I also stream pretty frequently on Twitch! I have a PNGtuber of my fursona, Stormy, with art done by EmmalemmaMewmew on Twitter. Stills of her will also start showing up in my YouTube videos eventually, hehe. Currently, the schedule is every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday, with each day being a different game. These streams always start at 7 PM Mountain Time (that's 9 PM Eastern and 6 PM Pacific) and go for around 4 hours. Sundays are Splatoon Sundays, currently the Anarchy Challenge, where I attempt to win an Anarchy Series with EVERY SINGLE WEAPON in Splatoon 3. It's hell lol. Then there's Triple-A Tuesdays, where I'm currently marathoning the Zelda series, and Indie Thursdays, where I work through my back catalog of indie games! There are also occasional bonus streams, usually around the releases of new games I'm interested in or events in ones I already play (like Splatfests!) Below is a link to my Twitch channel and my current stream schedule. I'll try to update this post as often as I can, but uh, no promises haha.

Last but not least, here's some of the other stuff I'm into/working on! Currently working on a Secret Game Project that I can't tell you about yet >:) But if you know, you know.

I'm a big fan of video games and animation (clearly), with some of my favorite stuff being, in no particular order... Sonic the Hedgehog, The Legend of Zelda, Persona, Fire Emblem, Pokemon, Elancia Chronicles, Super Lesbian Animal RPG, Splatoon, Hazbin Hotel, Helluva Boss, The Owl House, Gravity Falls, Amphibia, Steven Universe, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Spider-Verse films, Dreamworks animation, Pixar animation, Insomniac's Spider-Man gams, Ratchet and Clank, aaaaaaaaaand that's all I could think of off the top of my head but I'm sure there's more junk buried in there somewhere lol.

Anyway, thanks for reading all the way to the bottom! You must really have nothing better to do with your life XD. Here's some links to my other socials, if you wanna follow me there. Here I'm mostly just be posting random rambling and updates for my YouTube and Twitch. See ya around!

https://www.instagram.com/kitthegoddess/

[bomberqueen17]

a lil mini sew-along

So @sassaffrassa and I and a couple of friends decided to do an informal kinda sewalong just to get ourselves moving on I'm Gonna Sew Stuff One Day I Promise.

Sew Liberated was having a sale, so we decided to try the Matcha Top, which at the time was like eleven bucks. Why not. So we got the PDFs and each went through our various travails of printing them out and whatnot. And I'm just gonna talk about the process here, in case anybody else was thinking about getting into sewing, and kind of a review of the pattern. Day 1: Prepare the pattern, and look up other reviews, and figure out what the heck you're getting yourself into.

So, the Matcha Top. it's one of S-L's older offerings, and it only goes up to a size 24. Which is a 48.5" bust, by the measurement table. But it also says there's twelve inches of ease at the bust in the finished garment. Okay so yeah no, this will fit my 50" bust then, no worries. It goes on to say that the only real important measurement is your shoulder measurement. So I measure my shoulder, from where I'd want one sleevehead to be to the other, around the back of my neck, and I get 16", which puts me in a size 10. Uhhh.....

I read a bunch of reviews, which all agreed this thing fits real boxy so you can size down pretty freely, and then I looked at the pattern pieces. Well, the only thing that really matters is that shoulder fit, and the collar. I draped the collar piece around my neck and decided I did want the biggest size there, so I just. Went ahead and cut a straight size 24, and I figure I will take in excess in my toile. I am making a nice wearable toile though, with nice fabric, it's just not expensive fabric. Because I figure, it's a boxy top in flowy fabric, whatever size it ends up being will probably be fine.

Looking at the pattern pieces I am slightly skeptical of the grading. I'm used to seeing like... contours, but these are just straight-up every single pattern piece is expanded in size the same amount from one size to the next, regardless of things like... a plus-size person's skeleton is not larger than a straight-size person's, so it is bonkers to scale up the shoulder at the same rate as you scale up the squishy areas like the bust. So the pattern direction to just cut the size that fits the shoulders is probably correct. The size 24 shoulder is not actually knowledgeably scaled to fit a human being. Somebody "graded" this with a rolling ruler. Ah well. Reviews suggest the more recent patterns by this company are better, so I won't get too mad. But do keep that in mind, as you look at this.

Well, so I marked on my shoulder detail piece where the size 14 line would be, and expect I will trim it down, and use that to place the sleeve, and there'll just be a lot of excess fabric at the armscye that I'll have to trim off. I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. Or I'll, idk, put some pleats in under that shoulder detail. It has you attach it pretty early. I might be prepared to unpick this thing a few times.

I fondled my fabric stash, decided on a drapey rayon-cotton(?) mystery challis, and the collar and shoulder details in a contrasting cotton-poly solid. Got that cut out one evening when nobody was around. (It does say in the pattern instructions to use something with good drape. I looked at pattern reviews and yeah anyone who used linen or a stiff quilting cotton got a boxy fit out of it. You really want drape here.)

Then I lost my mind due to the stress of house remodeling, and after I'd ironed interfacing onto the collar and shoulder details, I embroidered on them. Why? IDK but it gave me something to fixate on for a couple of hours while there was demolition happening in my house and I couldn't get to my sewing machine.

[image: two stiff black pieces of fabric with blue swirls embroidered on them, and chalk marks visible where I've futzed with sizing and the embroidery design. yeah they're wildly different sizes but whatever it's handmade charm *jazz hands*]

So anyway.

That's where I'm at, and I'm hoping this afternoon/evening I'll have time to do some sewing.

[hamofjustice]

Julinemo Week, Day 3: Study Session

(This could probably be better but this week is an exercise in just posting without being a perfectionist and I wanna go to bed, so)

The late afternoon breeze streaming through Nemona's window kept her room smelling as fresh and alive as a new adventure, as she and her favorite guest did something quite a bit less exciting: reviewing their Battle Studies homework.

Nemona was on her bed, leaving just enough space for her napping Pawmot, while Juliana and her Gardevoir were down on the plush green rug she'd picked out for Nemona the previous week (which Nemona insisted on paying for). The Battle Frontier Channel was on the big TV as familiar background noise, though Gardevoir at least seemed more interested in looking up at that than the open books.

"Uhhh… question nine… 'Which kind of Terrain protects from ailments instead of powering up attacks?'" Juliana read out.

"Oh, um… Misty Terrain! I was just thinking about that one. It might help you remember that one's different 'cause it's not called Fairy Terrain."

"Oh yeah, huh. Good point."

"It's not teeechnically correct to say it's the only one that does that, 'cause, like, Electric Terrain keeps you awake, and Misty Terrain does power up Terrain Pulse and Misty Explosion, but… I think you can safely ignore those since there's no 'none of the above' options… right?"

"Uh… nope, there's not. Wow, Mona… you know more than these books do, huh? Hehehe…"

"Heh. Nah, they're probably just tryin' to keep it simple. I've never used Misty Explosion in my life!"

"Oh. Well, I appreciate trying to keep it simple, 'cause some of these things have so many arbitrary little details to remember…"

"I know, right? I guess it's not like anybody sat down and designed 'em all elegantly like a video game, though." Nemona pointed out, before starting to tap her pencil eraser to her chin and then her temple as she looked up at the ceiling. "I wonder if Misty Explosion might be decent BECAUSE no one expects it…"

"Maybe? Mmm, I dunno…"

"I've actually gotta figure that out soon. When you get into Advanced Battle Studies like me, you'll have to--"

"IF I get into Advan--"

"WHENNN you get in, 'cause you're smart and cool and attr-- attentive, and a Champion like me, and have me helping youuu…" Nemona insisted, briefly pointing her eraser down at Juliana as if it were a threat. Pawmot kept sleeping, fully accustomed to its Trainer's volume. "… You've gotta make theme teams for all these field conditions! It's kinda fun, but… I dunno how good some of these would be. They start ya off easy with Rain, but… hmm…"

"Oh, is that what you're working on up there?"

"Eh, sorta. I've got the Psychic Terrain one for this week figured out ahead of schedule, so I'm getting started on the Misty Terrain one now."

"So you could just… not be doing homework right now, if you wanted?" Juliana prodded.

"I mean… I guess, but then I'd probably just be bored and houndin' you to go out with me. Uh, f-for battles and stuff."

"Mmm. Yeah, probably. Well… thanks for matching my pace, then."

"Always."

"Hehe… "

They both smiled at each other for a bit before getting back to work. Each of them sighed happily and gave their partner Pokemon some petting. But eventually…

"Uh… I'll be right back. Gotta use the bathroom." Juliana quietly announced.

"Mmmkay. Be my guest."

Nemona looked up from the page and gazed off into space as Juliana stepped out, but then…

"Hey, Gardevoir." she whispered.

"Devoira…?" Juliana's companion answered sleepily, turning its head up to Nemona.

"Can you… show me how Juliana feels about me?"

"Garde." the Embrace Pokemon said with a nod. It rolled its neck a bit before scooting a bit closer and reaching out to Nemona with its green hand.

"Ooh, are we gonna do a mind meld? Heh…"

Almost as soon as she took its hand, Nemona's eyes shut and brows shot up like she'd once again misread a teaspoon of Spicy Herba Mystica as a tablespoon. After a few moments, however, she seemed to become accustomed to whatever had been put in front of her mind's eye. Her expression became one of curious awe, then wholesome warmth, then giddy delight as she wiggled her feet happily behind her. She opened her eyes back up as the emotional transmission ended, needing a moment to refocus on reality. "Oh… oh man… th-thanks bud. I, uh… huh…"

"De gara, devoira."

Juliana came back into the room to find Nemona blushing and giggling, and immediately looked down at herself to try and find a reason for it, to no avail.

"Hehehehe… Hey, I think I might be moving down to the floor with you, actually." Nemona decided, picking up her book.