#i've had this sitting in the drafts for so long good lord

[lurakha]

Rise of the Tomb Raider (10 / ∞)

[pinescent-and-gingerbread]

Wip! (Fantasies in the dark)

I know I've not posted recently and there are a few of you who are still waiting for their ask, I'm sorry it's taking so long! I know I'm probably repeating myself but I don't have time to write anymore considering my degree is extremely demanding and completely absorbs all of my free time. Anyway, have a little snippet of a one-shot that had been sitting for way too long in my drafts! I just need a moment to proofread it and it should be published soon. Have a taste of Arthur not being able to sleep because he caught an intimate glimpse of you... Good Lord, I love tormenting that poor man.

Lately, Arthur had a problem. An incessant, disturbing, haunting problem.

He can’t sleep at night.

This could have been related to the gang’s precarious situation, being hunted down by the Pinkertons and surrounded by enemy gangs, O’Driscolls and Lemoyne raiders everywhere. Or even because of some older wounds, the loss of Eliza and Isaac, reminded almost every day by the complicated family portrait John was painting with Abigail and Jack. Or the hurtful thought of the life he never had with Mary that was always following him since he had seen her again near Valentine. Life doomed by his inherent violence and the mountain of corpses he was responsible for.

Arthur had plenty of reasons not to sleep at night. But this wasn’t because of any of that.

Arthur couldn’t sleep because of you. 

Not that it was your fault. In fact, you didn’t even know about any of that and Lord have mercy, he was praying that you’ll never find out; because he would never be able to look at you in the eyes after this.

A few weeks ago, the gang had settled at Clemen’s Point. A rather pretty spot just near the lake, and not so far from town. But it wasn’t exactly the place that was causing him trouble. It was the unexpected view he was having from his tent. For some unknown, mystical reasons, Ms Grimshaw while deciding the camp’s ajancement had decided to place your tent right next to his. Not so big of a problem at first sight, right?

Except that you’re a night owl combined with the suffocating warmth of the place.

Making you get to bed naked.

Oh, Arthurs knows you do, because every night, every single one, you let a candle lit to read or write or God knows what before sleeping. The light casts your shadow against the tent’s canvas. The shadow of your very much nude body.

[...]

He sits down on his cot. Mumbles to himself orders and curses to try and stay reasonable. Takes off his hat, runs a hand through his hair, sticky with sweat and dirt from his busy day. Scratches his beard and his ears, tells himself he needs to take a swim into that lake. That he’s as dirty on the inside as he’s on the outside. Pulls down his suspenders before stretching his shoulders, a pained groan escaping him. A cigarette joins his lips, a match lights it, and he breathes in slowly. He tries to calm down, focusing as always on this homey feeling it brings him. 

But his brows furrows. His lips tighten. He knows he won’t be able to hold on much longer. He needs to rest properly. Even being the all-mighty Titan he is, he still needs a good night of sleep to keep his body fueled, and you have kept it from him for days.

He lies to himself promising this is only for his health.

That this is the only way for him to stay focused during the day; the only way to rest properly and be at his best again tomorrow.

That this will be the only time he’ll do that.

His only moment of weakness. 

The still-lit cigarette and his good conscience fall to the ground as he lies on his cot, settled on his left side, his right hand already roaming on his lower belly.

His eyes drop on the scene he had fantasized about for what seems like years to him at this point.

Lord have mercy…

[d1xonss]

Hi! I was thinking about a run that ends up being too long because of something like a heard , were Daryl and the reader have to stay the night in a library. The reader is a big fan of books and she knows a lot about literature (maybe you can say she was a student of a literature degree back before the outbreak). Daryl is like 'I've never really read any book' or 'noone read anybook for me when I was little' and reader ends up reading one of her favourites to him while he lays his head on her lap and she tuches his hair or something fluffy like that. Some of my favorite books include Carrie, The Picture of Dorian Gray and Lord of the Rings; just if you wanted inspiration for the book that she reads him.

I hope you like the idea!

Bedtime Stories

✧ Pairing : Daryl Dixon x Reader

✧ Era : Season 2 (time jump)

✧ Pronouns : she/her

✧ Genre : Fluff

✧ Word Count : 3.1k

AN ~ This idea is so cute, I love it! But I am sorry to the person who requested this because I took way longer to write this than I usually would. It’s just been sitting in my drafts for a while now, but I finally got around to writing out the idea. Thank you for being patient and I hope you enjoy!

Your lungs started to burn, your legs beginning to weaken as you continued to run as fast as you could, desperately trying to keep up as the two of you quite literally ran for your lives. Somehow the run you both volunteered to take just turned into one giant disaster, one thing falling apart after another.

It was the dead of winter, the group hopping from place to place ever since the loss of the farm, and everything always running low. All the supplies you managed to have saved went out the window in a flash, leaving you with almost nothing when you had numerous people to feed. So desperate times called for desperate measures, leading to you and Daryl leaving early that morning, trudging through the cold weather and into a small town nearby in hopes that they had at least something to bring back for the others. But luck wasn’t really on your side.

There were a couple small buildings the two of you came across, a few cans of food here and there that you could easily toss into your bags. Though none of it was nearly enough to feed all the people you had. The thought alone saddened you to no end, coming to the realization of how complicated everything was now that you were out on the road constantly. You found yourself not even really knowing how good you had it back when you had sanctuary, a safe place to sleep at night, food…it was all very frustrating.

But you knew you were preaching to the choir as everyone else was easily feeling the same way as you, defeated and exhausted twenty-four-seven now. Though that wasn’t necessarily the only thing going wrong at the moment. The group itself was much more tense than it ever was before, the whole atmosphere seeming to change ever since that night Rick broke down completely. The loss of Shane and Lori being pregnant was taking a toll on him that no one else could understand, leading to him taking it out on everyone else. A part of you almost wondered if you and Daryl subconsciously took this run on purpose just to get away from all of that for a few hours.

Though that wasn’t the only reason you wanted to go, another part of you wanted to be able to bring something back. You wanted to be the one to lift their spirits, hoping that you and Daryl would come across something that would bring back that light. But then again, luck wasn’t on your side.

Unbeknownst to the two of you as you searched, a large herd of walkers were slowly limping their way down the streets of the small town, making even more noise the closer they approached. Eventually you both perked up at the sudden familiar sounds, walking out of the building you were once in to see the group coming straight towards you, their jaws hanging and their arms stretched out with the intention to tear into you.

“Go.” was all Daryl said as he pushed you to run first, sprinting down the narrow streets in hopes to find somewhere to hide. Most of the stores you came across were completely locked up tight, and it was too late to turn back into the one you once occupied. So according to you, you were pretty much fucked. 

The two of you looked around frantically as you ran, adrenaline pumping through your system as your heart pounded roughly against your chest. There was close to nothing else around, nowhere else to shield yourselves behind as they slowly crept up closer, surprisingly fast with how slow they appeared to move. It now seemed that last bit of bad luck had wiped out all the hope that was left in your being.

That is until Daryl came across a door neither of you had tried before, tugging at it as it surprisingly flew open loudly. Relief filled your chest as you didn’t hesitate to book it inside the space, Daryl following in close behind you before he slammed the door shut again. The two of you then frantically looked around for only a moment, before shoving a few pieces of furniture near the double doors to block off the walkers that would surely try to push their way inside. As expected, they began to pound on the structure from the outside, sending the two of you flying back a few steps as you caught your breath, making sure they weren’t strong enough to push through.

Though after listening for a few passing seconds, it was clear they weren’t getting inside anytime soon, leaving you able to slightly relax as you hunched over to place your hands on your knees, your breathing still heavy.

Daryl noticed out of the corner of his eye, reaching out to place a hand on your shoulder, “You alright?”

You nodded as you stood back up straight, “Yeah…that was just…too close.” you sighed, running a hand stressfully through your hair.

He huffed, “Yeah…shit’s messy all over the damn place apparently.” he commented, clearly referring to how much had happened in the span of only about a month, or maybe two. You weren’t totally sure, but what you did know was that the whole thing felt like an eternity.

You found yourself wordlessly nodding in agreement, turning away from him momentarily as you grew curious as to where you had ended up. It had grown dark outside with how long the two of you stayed out searching, leading the place being completely pitch black as well. Nothing but a brief glimpse of moonlight shining through the small windows.

You reached back to the side of your backpack, pulling out your flashlight and flicking it on to see a plethora of bookshelves lined up in the large space, your face also seeming to light up in the process. It had been way too long since the last time you came across so many shelves stuffed full of mountains and mountains of books.

But apparently Daryl was less than amused, scoffing to himself as he looked around as well, “Great…we’re stuck inside some damn Barnes and Noble.”

You gave him a look, “It’s a library, Daryl.” you said in an unimpressed tone.

He raised an eyebrow towards you in response, “Yer tellin me there’s a difference?” he asked in amusement.

Your mouth parted to respond, but your mind came up blank as you slowly came to the realization that there really wasn’t much of a difference at all. He chuckled as he watched you grow silent, nudging your side before taking out his own flashlight. “You go ahead and take the left, I’ll take the right. Gotta make sure this place is safe.” he muttered before slowly walking off.

You followed his lead as you turned to head in the other direction, shining your light in different parts of the area to make sure there weren’t any lingering walkers nearby inside with the two of you. Though you couldn’t hear anything besides the corpses still banging on the outside, it was better to be safe than sorry. But everything was eerie and quiet as you passed by the many tall bookshelves, the scene itself almost making you more paranoid that something was going to just jump out at you out of nowhere. The area looked almost untouched however, causing you to smile a little to yourself at the thought of raiders and survivors just passing this place by because well…it was just a library. But you found yourself just the smallest bit excited, always knowing you were a bit of a bookworm at heart.

Your gaze continued to lazily scan the space for any danger, when all of a sudden, a certain section to your right caught your eye and made you stop in your tracks. The sign read in big blocked letters: Horror. That brought a big smile to your face as you found that was your favorite genre to read back when you actually had the time to read. You loved the thrill, the suspense, everything it had to offer as it left goosebumps on your skin. Something about those kinds of books always drew you in, in a way you couldn’t really understand.

The covers and titles easily had you distracted, hovering toward them just to take a peek at what this place had to offer. And to your surprise there were a fair amount of good finds. The Exorcist, Rebecca, Frankenstein, Salem’s Lot. You found yourself going deeper down the rabbit hole as your eyes scanned the spines of them thoroughly, wondering how many you would be able to actually fit in your bag to take back. Because the truth was you missed being able to read, wanting something simple like this again to pass the time like you used to.

“The hell you doin?”

You physically felt yourself jump out of your skin at his sudden presence, holding a hand up to your chest as you let out a shuddering breath. “Holy shit…don’t do that.” you said as you reached over to push his chest gently.

He laughed softly in response as he raised an eyebrow at you, “I can tell ya what yer not doin.” he hinted, “How’s the left side lookin?”

You shrugged, “It seems...safe enough…” you smiled sheepishly.

“Uh huh.” he muttered.

“I got distracted, okay?” you said with a light laugh before your gaze fell back on where you were once looking, “I mean I can’t even remember the last time I saw this many books.”

The man paused for a minute as he watched your expression, how it seemed to light up even more in the darkness as you looked back to all the covers you still had yet to pick through. A sense of fondness washed over him as he watched you obviously gush over something you were passionate about. He wanted you to speak more about it, wanting to listen to your voice go on and on about the things you loved most about them, but he was almost too embarrassed to ask.

Though after a few moments of silence, his frame leaned up against the shelf to his left as he continued to stare, “Didn't know you were a reader.” he commented.

You shrugged as you didn’t break your gaze away from the book you pulled out to look at, “I guess I just never mentioned it…” you trailed off as you read the short summary on the back, before placing it up in it’s place again, “But I used to read all the time. What about you, you got any favorites?” you asked as you looked back towards him with a small and exciting smile.

It was an innocent question really, but all Daryl could do was pathetically shrug, not really wanting to go into depth about the real answer.

But you tilted your head at him as you wanted to know, genuinely growing curious, “Oh come on. You have to at least have one.” 

Daryl scoffed as he looked back up to you, “I…I ain’t ever really…” he trailed off again before letting out a harsh sigh, “Look, I ain’t ever read anythin before, alright? I don’t got no favorite.”

You were slightly taken aback, almost not believing him at first. But his face and tone were nothing but serious, showing you that he was telling the truth about having not read a single book in his life. “...Really?” you asked softly, “Not even in school or anything?”

He huffed out a small chuckle, “Ya mean when I actually went ta school? Yeah…don’t really think readin was at the top of my priority list.”

You rolled your eyes playfully, “Okay, fine. But seriously, no one ever read anything to you? Not even your…”

The two of you froze when you trailed off, though it was obvious what you were about to say. You knew of his past, how hard things were on him when he was a kid, you honestly didn’t even mean to let that last part slip as if you had forgotten. You hadn’t. But now you just wished you could take it all back as you felt ashamed and utterly embarrassed, a part of you also feeling terrible that he had never had that kind of comfort before.

In your childhood home, it was somewhat of a nightly routine that your parents would read you a short story every night before bed. You always loved that part, getting all snuggled up while your eyes slowly fluttered closed, hearing the soothing sound of their voices as they spoke until you were fast asleep. Now realizing that Daryl had never even had a sliver of that, brought a small frown to your face. But in a way, it also made you a little determined to make it up to him somehow.

Your eyes slowly trailed back to the bookshelf for a moment or two, before your eyes widened ever so slightly when you caught a glimpse of an all too familiar title. Carrie by Stephen King was one of your favorite books of all time, the plot being so interesting it left you at the edge of your seat as you went on. It was almost like some sort of sign to you as an idea formed in your head.

“Well…” you spoke quietly as you reached up to grab it, “It looks like we could be stuck in here for a while.” you mentioned, jutting your thumb back towards the doors where the walkers were still lingering. “What if I read to you?”

His eyes whipped back up to look at you, his face almost unreadable as he processed what you had just said. At first he wanted to decline, not because he didn’t want to hear the gentleness of your voice reading aloud to him, that sounded like a damn dream. But he didn’t want you to do something like this out of guilt, like you pitied him for not having that kind of luxury you used to have. It honestly wasn’t that big of a deal, something he hadn’t really thought about until now. But not even he could deny that as he stewed over it, he found himself missing out on something else from his childhood that he could never get back.

“Nah,” he shook his head as he stood up a bit straighter, “You don’t gotta do that, it’s alright.” he assured.

But your brows furrowed as you shook your head, “But I want to. I think it’ll be…nice.” you said honestly, wanting to reassure him that you actually wanted to do this.

He took in a breath as he studied your facial expression, seeing you were truly being genuine and sincere, and that warmed his heart more than you were able to imagine. You truly were the sweetest person he had ever met, constantly treating him with kindness ever since you had first met. And that only made his tough exterior soften in an instant.

“Alright…if you’re sure…” he finally agreed hesitantly.

You smiled brightly at him, “I’m sure.” you promised, nodding your head back for him to follow you to find a place to sit for the time being. Neither of you knew how long you would be trapped in here. A few hours? Overnight? You weren’t sure, but one thing you did know was that the two of you did not want to go back to the group just yet. You could almost feel the tension radiating from all the way over here when they were miles and miles away.

The flashlight in your hand shined down towards a spot where there were a few cushioned seats, causing you to pick the one placed in the corner before you plopped down, removing the bag from your shoulders in the process. As your body was turned away for just a brief moment, you then felt Daryl sit down beside you, before he adjusted himself to where his head was gently resting in your lap. Your eyes quickly glanced back down to look at him, catching the small smile he had on his face as he stared up at you softly. You couldn’t help but smile back, shaking your head a little to try and focus. But it was hard to do when his eyes were piercing, so clearly full of gentleness and care.

“Okay, so this right here is a classic.” you said as you pointed to the cover, “It’s one of my favorite horror novels, and I actually think you’ll really like it.”

His eyes moved over the cover as he nodded along, “Do I get ta hold yer hand if I get scared?” he suddenly teased with a small smirk.

You laughed quietly, “Sure, tough guy, you can hold my hand.”

He chuckled lightly as he nodded, watching you intently as you opened up the book, using the light of the flashlight you placed behind you to be able to see the tiny words on the pages. You squinted a little at first, before your soft voice began to read out loud to him, already feeling himself relax a little more at something so simple. If he was being completely honest with himself, he didn’t really care what you were reading. You could be reciting words from the English dictionary for all he cared. There was just something about hearing your voice in general that sent a wave of peace through him.

Eventually as the minutes flew by with the two of you engrossed in the events happening, your other hand traveled down to his hair, running your fingers through it gently. Daryl felt his heart flutter in his chest at the mindless action, almost as if it was second nature to you, making his eyes involuntarily close as he sighed deeply. He hadn’t felt this calm, this comforted by someone he cared about deeply in quite a long time. In fact, he seemed to question to himself if he ever had this feeling. The realization seemed to hit him then, but he almost didn’t care. He was just happy he had someone in his life now that was willing to give him all of that and more.

You noticed quickly however how his breathing seemed to change as he still laid beneath you, your eyes moving down to look at his face and see that he had fallen asleep after only barely getting through about three chapters. A small smile stretched across your face, closing the book and placing it back down beside you as your hand continued to gently run through the locks of his thick hair. Your eyes moved over the calm features of his face, taking in the fact that you had given him something that you once used to cherish. The unwinding feeling of someone reading you to sleep.

“Thank you…” his voice suddenly spoke quietly, moving to get even more comfortable in your lap as he drifted off.

In an instant your eyes seemed to glisten with tears at the simple gratitude, seeing how precious he really was. “Of course.” you whispered back, blinking away your tears as you hesitated for a moment, before leaning down to place a soft kiss on his forehead.

And after that night you two spent together, you found yourself always trying to do the little things for him to make him feel safe. Because those were the things you found that mattered the most.

~ Thanks for reading!

[chryseis-lxve]

🍸 NEW YEAR GREETINGS

💬 if i'm being honest, this year has been a wild fucking ride, lol but all of you little pies have been a huge help by simply popping up now and then and being a little ray of sunshine, or by having stuck around for a long time. i genuinely appreciate all of you, and wish you all a lovely year ahead! also, please note that the order of names doesn't matter here XD

@floraldresvi i sincerely appreciate you a lot. when you mentioned that you were grateful i stumbled upon that writing blog of yours, i wanted to mention that such was the play of fate but ig it's too obvious to be worthy of mention. i still hope you write sometimes on that blog, but i can understand why you don't. you always tag me in the loveliest stuff and ask me the most intriguing questions, but sometimes my responses get so long that i forget about it after saving them in my drafts so i hope you know that's not me ignoring you! 😭 i wish to express that both your words and actions are extremely touching and i'm always grateful you entered my life. you're like a ray of soft sunshine, yk? the kind that comforts you and heals you, and i'm always so happy to be around you. your presence itself is a harbinger of joy. after a long and tumultuous year, i just want to remind you that you're also worthy of love and care and affection. please don't forget that.

@rightfate-posts shiro, my lovely!! your words are srsly the most impactful ones. i still remember that day i was feeling depressed as hell, but the words you sent me where like an angel showing light to me who had forgot what it felt like. it was like being reintroduced to love and appreciation, yk? and it isn't just about that specific time either, it's always. your words always have an impact on me, and i often think about you, your health, your likes and dislikes, what you'd appreciate, what you'd love. it's like a spiraling loop, but i'm glad to be stuck. your boundless optimism is contagious, and the way you express yourself and look out for others is heart warming. in a way, you're like a worried friend whose always smothering others with care in spite of their own struggles. i just want you to look after yourself this year, and i wish utmost happiness and joy to you!

@meimeimeirin mei!! our fellow granny 🤝😂 no, but i have stated this many times, and i will state it once again- your sense of responsibility, your optimism, your upright nature and your mindset are all genuinely inspiring. sometimes when i'm sulking i just scroll through your blog for the positivity XD the way you interact with others is proof of your radiance. i just think you deserve the whole world. you're the first friend i made here, and even though we don't interact as much anymore, our convos and laughs remain fresh in my mind. you're of those people you can't get enough of, yk? the best part is that you're a good influence XD i just hope we remain together as friends for a long time!!

@beloved-brynn what should i say about you, you little meme lord. words fail me with the kind of joy i feel when it comes to you. i just don't know what exactly it is about you that makes you so attractive but i've genuinely always thought of you as this shiny little pokémon who didn't know how to perceive itself because it didn't have other shiny little things around itself. i know you're not the best with sappy stuff, but let me be rn, i'm getting emotional 😭😂 on the lighter side, you're a little bundle of joy wrapped up in jokes yk? literally my favourite combo. when you describe the things you like i want to sit down and listen to you forever, because your passions seem to all stem from genuine love and interest. you're one of those people who don't pull too much sarcasm, so you can just be honest and open with them. i trust you a lot, and i srsly love you. like love love you. the reason i emphasize it is because we don't really talk too much emotion, but i just want to let you know because i have the chance to yap rn. i love you a lot, and your works are awesome.

@circeappxteer rhea!! it's always so lovely to speak with you, i can't even describe it. your words are always so laced with care and empathy that i can feel it even when they are just words on a screen yk? i really appreciate you reaching out to me, speaking with me and stuff because ngl i'm not very good with checking up on people and going out of my way to speak with them so i genuinely appreciate you a lot 😭❤ you're a very kind person! unfortunately, we haven't had many opportunities to interact this year, but hopefully the coming year will be kinder to us in terms of free time and opportunities! here's to an year of happiness and lasting memories 🥂

@naraven ven, you're like. CRAZY TALENTED, i hope you know that!! your works, compositions they are all so awesome i just don't even know in what words describe my adoration. i used to learn music when i was younger, a sitar and i always loved it. unfortunately, i couldn't connect with it the way i connected with art but it continued to fascinate me, regardless. in a way, the lack of connection was actually a lack of ability to express myself in notes, strings, tunes and melodies but you can, and i'll never have anything less than pure admiration for you. aside from that, you're an AWESOME person literally 10/10 you're so cute i just want to squish your cheeks XD we didn't have many personal interactions or deeper convos, but i look forward to new moments spent together! let's hope the next year will bring more with itself :D

@cherieiu you cutie pie xue XD if there's any complaint i have against you, then it's that you're always busy so we can rarely interact D: BUT!! i appreciate and respect your sense of discipline a lot! be focused on your studies, it is greatly rewarding! you always get back to me though so i love that XD and you're SO polite and well mannered it's so cute!! regardless, i wish utmost success to you for this coming year! do well in your studies, and go far in life ✨

@pranabefall anya, to me you're like the mutual XD i always think we just get each other, yk? maybe it's because we have very similar backgrounds, but regardless of that i appreciate the connection we have! i always feel like i could say the craziest stuff and you would still get me XD but you also remain dignified, so i appreciate that very much, too! you're a very hard working person, so it's always lovely to see you having fun and letting loose. we haven't interacted a lot, but let's hope it's better in the following year! do take care, though! this year wasn't the most stable, so please look after yourself <3

@euniveve eun, i got to know you only this year, but to say that you're the most intriguing person regardless would be an understatement for the kind of curiosity i hold for you. the way you manage to hold on in spite of all difficulties, the way you outshine struggles, the way you make even the harder things appear simple is simply awe-inspiring to me. your sense of responsibility and the way you carry yourself is genuinely amazing. you're srsly like an elder sister figure to me, and i admire you a lot. above everything else, i relate to you on a lot of aspects and in our thoughts towards various things as well. i really enjoyed the convo we had about ghosts and stuff, so i hope we get more chances like that one! regardless, i hope the next year brings relief from so many responsibilities, or at least gives you the strength to bear them. my best wishes are always with you!

@mochinon-yah YOU!

jokes aside, you're a cutie pie!! literally my baby istg, i read your message on my christmas tree and i wanted to hug you so hard!! i appreciate you in ways i can't describe, mochi. when i said i see you as a younger sister, i was being SO fr i can't even describe it. really. i just want you to be happy and flourish like you deserve! if you ever need advices, any help, any info, know that i'm out there, ready and willing to help to the best of my abilities! and ofc, over everything else, you have my best wishes <3 i hope success, joy and love become your closest companions!

@shinchansbitch you're such a boundless bundle of energy i don't even know how to describe it XD when you express deeper feelings, which is again pretty rare but always welcomed, i always wanna listen to you, understand what you mean and express my own ideas as well. we haven't had a lot of chances to interact previous year, but i hope it gets better in this one. you're literally one of the funniest people i've ever seen! your ability to be authentic, and the small windows of genuinity and vulnerability are cherished memories in my heart. i've been busy so i couldn't interact much with you, but i always end up laughing whenever you pop up on my dash with another of your out of pocket posts. srsly, love you sweetie pie <3

@teabutmakeitazure // @haven-avalon // @harmonysanreads // @stickyspeckledlight all of you are literally amazing people! we don't really talk much on tumblr, but you guys' interactions on the server never fail to make me laugh or catch my attention. hopefully, we have more chances at closer interactions this year! but really, all of you are genuinely nice and kind people, too.

@kazuinvocation os, although we met at a very busy time, and for a very work-kind of purpose, i still appreciate you a lot. i srsly loved your message on my christmas tree. yk, i'm just glad to make others happy so i just felt really happy when you said that. i'm glad to have you in the team, especially because you're also particularly responsible. thank you os, for all the things you do behind the curtain. they're all noticed, and lovingly appreciated!

@pneumosia welcome back yona! we didn't interact at all the last time we were mutuals lol so i don't have much to say, except, let's hope we have more chances this year to come together and interact. i hope you've been doing well, and that the coming year will bring joy and success to you in your endeavours! don;t get too distracted, and focus on your studies. you're running various servers so it makes me concerned sometimes, make sure to study properly. i wish you success!

to all of you: a very happy new year! regardless of how much we have interacted, let's hope the next year brings joy, success and lovely memories for all of us. may the wheel of time bestow joy upon all of us! let's remain together and have many more moments of happiness together!

[tumfullofblue]

OKAY sorry for the delay, I've been busy, but here's the nsft casey hc's

-oral fixation. especially if he's a lil drunk. will overstimulate his partner until they're begging for him to stop before he even touches himself.

-has never really explored kinks or being top/bottom. in his marriage the bedroom was... dead at the end. He has to really trust his partner to be vulnerable like that but he IS willing to try things. he likes it a little rough when he's stressed but will kiss every bruise and bite mark. also: tie him up with his own necktie and you'll have him whimpering! he feels safe exploring his wants and needs with his partner.

-7 inches, slightly curved upward, and uncut. keeps it neat and trimmed but not completely hairless. nice balls too (please suck them please please please).

-loves to finish inside. so much so that if his partner doesnt have birth control he WILL get the snip. doesnt want kids but the fantasy of impreg really, really, really gets his primal brains gears turning. he likes to sit inside his partner until he goes soft before pulling out and watching his cum drip from them.

-PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE kiss his neck and jaw.

-thought he had no sex drive.... turns out he just needed a good partner. he's so horned up so easily, he almost feels like a 20 year old again. as long as there's privacy and his partner is game, it's hard for him to keep his hands to himself....

-speaking of age, he likes to try positions to the best of his ability. He's thrown out his back like, three times. But it's okay because his partner always gives him back rubs and some icy-hot afterwards.

-his partners pleasure is HIS pleasure. very much likes to serve and provide, even in a dominant role.

-alan wrote book!casey to lowkey have a daddy kink (there's a snippet where book!casey is talking about a woman and says he's going to "show her who her new daddy is"), take of that what you will.

thats about all.... for now. i will invade your inbox again soon >:)

~☕️

ʕ≧ᴥ≦ʔ The Coffee Anon is back yall! Honestly it's getting hard for me to add anything else, you are basically gifting me those wonderfull headcanons! I find myself agreeing with most of them and I'm finally playing FInal Draft so you KNOW more Alex Casey (book included!) stuff is coming (and Sam Lake too, because I know some of yall freaks would enjoy banging the big man himself. And hey, not that he would mind!.. I'm sure.)

Anyway, feast your eyes on those hcs! And dammit if nonnie didn't made me all hot and bothered by saying that Book!Casey has a daddy kink. Whoo lord I need a cold shower. ʕ ◕ᴥ◕ ʔ

[selene-and-the-cold]

Taking a Ride (OCs, M/M)

Good evening, snzblr.

I successfully talked myself into fleshing out that Victorian carriage ride scenario a bit more. In a perfect universe, I would take enough time to make it the perfect fic. In that universe, I would write a first draft, then edit this, let it rest for a few more days, then re-edit, and edit some more until it was perfect, but since these past few weeks are the first time I've written anything in AGES and I don't trust this muse to be around forever, I am currently working on the premise: getting it done "ok" is better than getting nothing done at all.

Therefore, I do present the very fresh and un-beta-ed version of this little ficlet, featuring two spanking new OCs Silas and Albert, who did not exist 12 hours ago, yet here they are, making out in a carriage.

Thank you so much @empresskaze for solving my name-conondrum. I literally spent half the day not writing, but fussing over the name for one of the main characters and probalby wouldn't have gotten anything done if it weren't for your wonderful suggestion!

***

Taking a Ride

"Alright, but you've got to promise to be quiet, Bertie“ Lord Silas admonished, and was rewarded with another giggle from his dear friend the Honorable Sir Albert Percival Wardington. Perhaps they should have left their Gentlemen's Club one drink sooner when Albert had still been mainly sober. But it was no use lamenting now that the damage had been done and Albert sat opposite him in the carriage, all tipsy giggles.

"My coachman has excellent hearing, so we've got to be quiet to be discreet.“

"I know, I knowwwww, I'll be as quiet as a mouse, you can trust me, Sy, I promise!,“ Albert declared, then pretended to lock his lips with an invisible key, hiccuped and giggled once again.

“Alright, I believe you. You are in luck that I've been missing you so terribly while you were away on business in Cardiff, my dear Albert... Otherwise I might not have agreed to take you back to your town house in my carriage with me tonight.”

Albert sniffled thickly. “Mbuch obliged...”

“Ah, but I presume I have to come over to your side of the carriage, my dear,” Silas mused, “Otherwise this wouldn't be a true reunion, would it~ ?”

It was scandalous enough as it was that Albert was so visibly, undeniably tipsy, but now to be sharing his carriage with him, doing what they were... well... planning to do? Many a good God-fearing Christian matron would be utterly scandalised.

Fortunately, no good God-fearing Christian matrons were present at the moment, so Silas proceeded to sit on Albert's lap, straddling him, and holding his silken cravat as a kind of rein to keep himself steady.

„Now Bertie, that's much better, isn't it?“

Albert nodded, then sniffled suddenly and rubbed his nose against his palm before he answered.

"Mbuch better. You were so very far away all evening, especially during that awfully boring game of charades.“

"Alas, they assigned me to the other team or else we could have been seated next to each other,“ Silas agreed, making himself comfortable on Albert's lap. Albert grinned, his gaze only a little bit out of focus, then grabbed Silas' buttocks to steady him as well as to make up for all the time without the opportunity of touching each other. Silas gave a little high-pitched squeal, at which Albert tutted. "Sshhhhh.... you've got to be quiet, Sy, or your coachman will hear you! snfff Don't you remember?“

Silas playfully swatted Albert's shoulder at his reprimanding words. "Oh, you! Perhaps you should attempt finding a way to ensure that I'll be quiet from now on, then...”

"With pleasure,“ Albert murmured, his lips so close to Silas's that he could feel his hot, urgent breath crest against them. Albert smelled of brandy, lavender and sandalwood, topped off with some of the cigar-smoke that permeated the Gentlemen's club, and that special something Silas couldn't quite place, but that was Albert's very own scent, which reminded Silas of long walkds through the forest. In short – like a heady, absolutely delicious mix.

The next thing he knew, Albert closed the gap between them and kissed him passionately, hot lips burning against his, while Albert's fingers dug a little deeper into his buttocks.

Silas smirked into their kiss as he could feel Albert's reaction to his closeness grow underneath himself. It seemed that Albert could not restrain himself as good as he usually could while he was tipsy. Or perhaps Albert had missed him just as much as Silas had missed Albert.

“Careful, we cannot afford getting too carried away. You need to be in a state that allows you to leave the carriage as a respectable man once we arrive at your town house,” Silas admonished still the voice of reason despite how much he wanted Albert. It had been weeks since they'd spent a night together. Silas longed for Albert's familiar weight next to him in bed, but it was tricky to steal a night for themselves without it being too obvious. Fortunately, they were both bachelors, so there were only neighbours and servants to worry about, not wives.

“Mmhmm.. I don't want to be respectable,”Albert protested, sloppily kissing a trail down Silas' neck. “I want to be thoroughly wanton and outrageously indecent-...ehh....hehh... Heh'SSHHuH!”

Without much warning, Albert had sneezed all over Silas's neck, who sat stock-still for a moment, his pulse throbbing in his veins. Hell's teeth, this had felt surprisingly good.

“B- Bless you,” Silas stammered after a few moments, relaxing once more.

“I'b sorry...” Albert sniffled thickly against his neck, his voice sounding decidedly stuffy all of a sudden. “I think I caught a bit of a chill id Cardiff. It was ghastly cold 'n rainy while I was there.. Hehhh....ESSHhhTsshU! Ugh... pardon mbe.”

Another sneeze muffled right into Silas, who sighed in a sudden bout of pleasure, then pulled away afterwards to take a proper look at Albert's sniffly face. This close, he could see the dark circles under Albert's beautiful blue eyes, and the slight touch of pink around the edges of his nose.

“Mhm.. it seems you did indeed catch a chill, my dear Bertie,” Silas cooed, taking Albert's face in his hands to study it with more scrutiny. ”Judging from the way you look, it is no small chill, either... but don't fret, I'll keep you warm and distracted until you're home~”

With that, Silas tugged at Albert's cravat to reel him in for another kiss, deep and slow this time. A little voice in the back of his head told him that sticking his tongue down the throat of a sick man was probably not the best idea, but this was his Bertie, who had been gone for far too long and who was in dire need of some comfort, so sod all the qualms about getting sick as well.

The carriage rumbled over the cobblestone streets while the two men continued to kiss and caress in the back of it. Hands and mouths traveled through soft hair and warm skin, dipped under folds of expensive fabric to explore, tease, and tickle as the two men celebrated their reunion.

A few times, Silas had to shush Albert, whose usually calm demeanour somehow melted away in the throws of passion. So much so that Silas had had to resort to stuffing a cravat in Albert's mouth once before. Fortunately, no such measures had to be taken today, and Albert could be silenced by hushing and kisses alone.

As the carriage rolled over a particularly bumpy part of road, all the jostling created an interesting friction between Silas' and Albert's laps, their bodies rubbing delightfully against each other. Albert giggled yet again, then bucked his hips with Silas on top of him, before he asked with a most seductive little pout: “Dod't you think you could sndeak out of the carriage and come home with mbe, Sy? Just for tonight?”

Albert's voice was heavy with congestion by now, and he had barley finished his question, when a pitiful sneeze shuddered through him, sending both himself and Silas a little forward in his seat.

“Hehh'ERRrrSSHHU'!!!”

“Mhm, bless you again,” Silas purred, pulling a fine handkerchief from his suit pocket to dab at Albert's nose. It had started to run considerably at some point during their heated kisses, but there simply just had not been the right moment to take care of it. Silas had been far too distracted by Albert's hands, lips, teeth, and tongue all over him. Now that things calmed down a bit, Silas took a moment to take in Albert's features. He was quite pale, except for he wonderful blush that their shenanigans and perhaps the slightes touch of fever had painted on his cheeks. He looked utterly delicious and adorable and Silas regretted more than anything that he would have to decline.

“I'm afraid I can't, Bertie. There is an important meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning. My father wrote to inform me that he'll travel down from our country estate to meet me tomorrow morning. Apparently, he wants to have a word regarding some urgent business. I'm sure it's terribly boring, but I am obliged to attend.”

Being a second son, Silas mostly had the pleasure and leasure to do as he pleased. No one excpected him to marry and produce an heir. This was all taken care of by his older brother Reginald, thank God! In fact, no one expected anything much of him, but Silas was not the type of person to waste his life away in complete idleness, so he took an interest in the family affairs and supported his father and brother in running the family estate as well as managing their land and tenants.

“Besides, I do belive you should take some time to rest, my dear. If I were to join you, you'd surely not get remotely as much rest as this cold of yours demands.”

Albert pouted, then sniffled dramatically, congestion shifting audibly as he did.

“Promise you'll get plenty of rest tomorrow?,” Silas asked softly, cupping Albert's cheek. Their joined carriage ride was almost over as the carriage had just turned into Albert's street.

“Only if you prombise to visit mbe od mby sickbed as soon as that dastardly business with your father is done and dealt with.”

“I will, I promise,” Silas assured, then stole one last tender kiss before the carriage began to slow down.

The two men hastily smoothed away any signs of disarray from their clothes as well as their faces, so that Albert emerged a few moments later from the carriage with his usual mask of bland disinterest in place, seeming for all the world that nothing noteworthy had happened that night – except for a few too many drinks and the early stages of a terribly contagious headcold.

[sparrow-in-the-field]

10 Question for 10 Writers

Thanks for the tag, @strangethings-everywhere!

1. Is writing a hobby or a way of life?

I mean technically it is a hobby, but can it not be a way of life too? Lol. Seriously though, I get like, grumpy or really down if I go too long without writing; it's my passion/creative fuel in life, so yeah.

2. A journal full of notes or a clean completed manuscript?

Clean manuscript. I don't really journal much; I have some stuff jotted down in my notes app in my phone, but most of my brainstorming just happens in my head lol, so then I write it down and edit it in manuscript.

3. Who or what inspired your writing?

I'm not really sure! As a kid I had a huge imagination, I loved playing pretend more than anything, so I think as I grew up, since I couldn't play anymore, I took to writing down the stories I thought up instead. In general though, I find music incredibly inspiring; I get my best ideas (and best writing too) while listening to good music.

4. Which is worse: Someone you ‘idolize’ reading your first draft or listening to you sing?

Oh lord, listening to me sing is worse. I can't sing! Lmao. I'm pretty happy with my writing, though, and like, if the person knows it's a first draft, they should be more lenient anyway lol.

5. Has writing from someone else’s POV changed your perspective?

tbh I don't super understand this question. Like I'm still the one writing it? so it has to be my perspective to a degree? I guess writing different POVs makes me consider things on a deeper level and to explore things maybe I don't instinctively think, but like, I still got there, so it's still kind of my perspective?? Maybe my brain is just broken lol sorry.

6. Tumblr, AO3, LiveJournal, or FFN?

ao3 my beloved! It's the only ff site I've ever used (I was a late bloomer to entering the world of ff, I didn't get into it until my mid twenties) and I can't imagine going elsewhere. Tumblr is fun to post shorter/less edited stuff on too though.

7. AO3 word count? And are you satisfied with it?

On my sparrow-in-the-field account it's 220,866. On my older ao3 account it's 944,120 (figures I lost inspo for that fandom so close to a milly lolol; maybe someday I'll get back to it). Yeah I'm satisfied! Who cares lol, I just write what I wanna write and it ends up however long it's gonna end up.

8. What movie/book gripped you irrevocably?

Ohh that's tough! I mean besides the obvious grip that tbitb has on me currently...I guess I'll say The Series of Unfortunate Events (the books). I'm kind of unusual as a writer in that I actually didn't like reading as a kid, and this series was like, the first time I truly enjoyed and was captured by books.

9. What’s the highest compliment you could ever be given, and have you been given it?

I'm lucky enough that it's happened a handful of times throughout my ff writing, but when people share with me that my fic was healing or gave them needed comfort during a hard time. I genuinely can't think of anything that means more to me than that; writing is so cathartic and healing for me, that passing on that love and support to the reader is just so incredibly special to me. I literally sit and feel so thankful when people share something like that with me, I never want to take it for granted.

10. What defines your writing style?

Dialogue. I write such dialogue heavy stories, it's what comes naturally to me. Long descriptions are the enemy lol. Trope-wise, I'm big on hurt/comfort and angst with a happy ending.

I definitely don't have ten people to tag lol but I'll at least tag @dogwooddiaries ! (no pressure though ofc)

[starlightkun]

sorry if you've gotten this ask before aljrksjd

you don't have to answer this, but I just wanted to know how you write longform fics or just long pieces in general. it's one of the things I've struggled with as a writer, and I'm having a hard time trying to figure out how I could go about it or do it.

I'd be so grateful if you could provide some advice or suggestions 🥹🥹

i want u to know that i saw this ask when u sent it, but i had a 5hr drive today and wanted to make sure i had time to answer this!! it's under the cut bc i yapped a bit <33

so one thing that i feel the need to say up top is that i never go into pieces with a "goal" length/word count (often times my fics end up being longer than i expected/intended). because i never really write with the goal of a specific length in mind, these are things that i think have helped me write more cohesive and narratively fulfilling pieces in general, which tends to make my fics longer

my first thing is planning/outlining!! i used to just write my fics start to finish in one go with little to no planning, and since i've started slowing down and taking my time outlining/planning beforehand (and even during the drafting process i continue adding to my outline), i've seen the average lengths of my fics go up a lot. you don't have to have every single scene, moment, and piece of dialogue planned out before start writing (lord knows i never do), but you should have a pretty good idea of the major story beats, character dynamics, and any important conflicts, and make sure it's written down in a way that's easy for you to refer back to while you write. never think you're gonna keep it all in your head

build out your characters' lives!! i love introducing a good b-plot involving the main character's friends (see: strawberry sunday) that doesn't take too much attention away from the main plot that it seems out of place, but instead complements the main plot and allows there to be space in between those major plot beats for the readers and the characters to breathe. it also helps make your characters feel more well-rounded and real to the readers if you throw in a scene of their daily life at school or work or with their friends/family both to add texture to them but also to your world. it can also be good to use an establishing scene towards the beginning of their daily life, then a similar one towards to the end that shows any character development, or some other impactful change that happened during your story. instead of just telling us that everything in your character's life changed, show us how it did (or didn't! or maybe it only changed a little, but the little change was important, too)

in a similar vein, build out your world!! im not saying to spend ten pages describing an intricate magic system to us that has little bearing on the plot itself, but feel free to weave in extra details about where/when we are and how the characters interact (or dont!) with the world around them (even if its our normal old world in the modern day)

and i mean i guess my last thing that's really helped me is just sort of getting out my head when it comes to writing? like, not forcing myself to write everyday, not having any sort of word count goals, no posting schedule, etc. just letting myself sit with my ideas for a while and really play around and have fun with them. it's made writing fic something that i look forward to doing when i come from work, or when the weekend is approaching, and i genuinely am making probably my favorite things that i've ever made right now. and they happen to be pretty long!!

i've talked some more about my writing process in some other asks (x, x, x, x, x, x) and i have a writing tag where i post about more general writing stuff if you want to hear me yap some more

[amnevitahwritesstuff]

ACOTAR Writer Tag Game

Hi! I thought I'd make my own tagging game for everyone to play (if you're up for it of course)! There are so many talented writers in this community and I thought it would be fun to find out more about them all.

If you'd like to play, the template for it can be found here.

I look forward to seeing your responses! ❤️

I guess I'll start us all off. 🥰

Introduce yourself. What are your socials? Where can people find you?

My main blog is @sajirah, my AO3 can be found here, and I'm also semi-active on bluesky if you just want to hear me yap.

Who is your favorite character(s) to write for?

Rhys. What can I say? He is Daddy. 😌

What is your favorite ship to write for? What is it about them that draws you in and gets your mind going?

Feysand. Which shouldn't be a surprise looking at my fic masterlists. It's very Feysand heavy. 😂 I just love their dynamic. There's nothing more fun than a feral gremlin of a woman and the overpowered old man that simps for her.

What is your favorite genre to write for?

I think it's a toss up between Horror Romance and RomComs. I am a mess of contradictions.

What is a genre that you’d love to write for but just haven’t gotten around to yet?

Sci-fi? I love science fiction but I don't think I've ever actually written anything for it. It's a little intimidating if I'm being honest. One day.

What is a tried and true trope that always finds its way into your fics?

Hurt/Comfort and Daddy Kink.

What trope do you love reading in other fics but struggle to write yourself?

Pure, sugary sweet, rot your teeth fluff. I love reading it but it's so hard for me to write. Maybe because there's not enough conflict or tension?

Alternatively, what do you love writing but struggle to read?

Tragedy and unhappy endings. Though, admittedly, I do love reading it. It just has to be a very particular kind of tragedy. But writing it? I live for that shit.

What is your greatest writing strength?

I like to think I'm pretty good at creating an atmosphere or a vibe with only a sentence or two. I'm great at keeping things succinct.

What is your greatest writing weakness?

On the flip side, I'm terrible at describing the same thing for several paragraphs or even pages. It's like pulling teeth for me. This is probably why I have such a problem writing long fics.

Any WIP projects sitting in your drafts you want to tell us about?

I have a yet unnamed project in the works which is a sort of spiritual sibling to my fic Take Care of Business for Me. Not a sequel or reimagining per se, but it has a very similar vibe and a lot of the same tropes that I think people will be into.

What is the longest fic you’ve ever written?

From Lands Beyond, a Lord of the Rings fic I put into cold storage. I think it had around 40k words before I finally called it quits.

Which of your fics was the most fun to write?

Come Away O Human Child. I wrote the first 2/3 of it in a chaotic fugue, staying up multiple work days until 2 am just trying to get it out. I felt like I was possessed. It's the first time I ever had a fic that just demanded to be written...wether I liked it or not.

Which fic did you struggle with writing the most?

The Prison's most recent chapters have been kicking my ass for the last year. I hope to finish it someday, but for now I think it'll stay on hiatus until I can figure out how to move the story forward.

Have you ever abandoned a fic? If so, can you tell us which one and why?

From Lands Beyond and What We Do In The Dark. Neither is an ACOTAR fic though. The Prison is probably the closest to this question but I still plan to finish that one and have only put it on hiatus.

What do you consider to be your magnum opus? And if you don’t have one, tell us about the one you want to write one day. :)

I think most people who read my work will probably say Take Care of Business for Me but personally I think it's going to be my Time Traveler's Wife AU fics Let Us Cling Together As The Years Go By and The Nights Grow Long.

Anything or anyone you want to shout out?

@starfall-spirit you are my rock and I'm still reeling over you being my secret santa. You're so sneaky. 😂

@reverie-tales you are the sweetest person in this entire fandom and I hope everyone is telling you how amazing you are all day, every day.

@whatishowedyouinthedark thank you for always being everyone's unhinged cheerleader. We love you.

@zencetera your comments always bring me joy and I love seeing you pop up all over my notifications.

---

Tagging: @reverie-tales @starfall-spirit @whatishowedyouinthedark @zencetera @popjunkie42 @climbthemountain2020 @berd-nerd @tunaababee

[angstyaches]

i’ve been thinking about a halloween prompt for donnacha because i’m so incredibly obsessed with his and henry’s relationship dynamic.

i know you’re not big into overeating, so you know how when you don’t eat, you eventually start to get a little woozy and gross feeling? donnacha hasn’t eaten in hours cause he’s been busy running last minute halloween errands (can you get more candy? we have to have this very specific sweet! that place was out? oh no! can you try here?!) for everyone and he’s starving by the time he gets home.

he’s staying in with henry this year because he doesn’t like going out and hen doesn’t really go out anymore either. plus, donnacha doesn’t want to see a repeat of last year where he walked in on henry anxiety puking on the bathroom floor after snapping at lucy. so he beats a hasty retreat to henry’s room to get away from the mayhem happening in the shared space after he gives everyone their stuff, and he’s got a bag of his favourite junk food with him that he starts to munch on while he jabbers on to henry about his day. everything is going great!

only… his belly isn’t really liking all the sugar and it isn’t really helping his headache go away and he’s getting quieter and quieter until henry finally asks him what’s wrong.

-🐭

Yes, it's December 2nd, and yes, I know this is late.

Thank you so much for this lovely, detailed, thoughtful request, anony 🐭, I appreciate you so much and I hope you're well.

I've had this draft for so long and I'm a bit tipsy right now as I'm posting it, so I'm sorry if there are typos/inconsistencies, or if it just straight up isn't good 👍

CW: overthinking, stomach pain, mention of cheating, mention of breakup, overindulgence (sugar), mention of chronic pain, platonic caretaking.

Word Count: 4,200+

___

Donnacha barely had a second to breathe as he stepped through the door, before he was being beckoned through to the living area by someone who didn’t even live here. 

Autumn was dressed as Belle from Beauty and the Beast; her outfit was casual, nothing extravagant like the yellow ball gown from the movie, but he could tell that was who she was. He felt a pang of recognition at the lace detail on the collar of her yellow blouse. Had she worn that on a date once? Had he been with her when she’d bought it? A second pang, this one tinged with loss. 

It still sent him reeling, sometimes, that she wasn’t his, and he wasn’t hers. 

“What is it?” 

“Get in here.” 

Donnacha sighed. He’d been running on empty all afternoon, actively ignoring the rumbling in his stomach and the tension in his brain for hours now. Now that he was home, he felt like wilting. 

He blinked in bewilderment as he stepped into the living area. Lucy had been stringing up Halloween decorations since halfway through September, but she’d really doubled down at some point since he’d left this morning. He could barely see the mouldings for the amount of fake cobweb and crepe paper streamers filling the corners and tapering off across the ceiling. 

But it was the unfamiliar faces that really threw him. 

“Donnacha, this is Dixon,” Autumn said, gesturing towards the Asian guy dressed as Legolas from Lord of the Rings, and then to the dark-skinned girl in the ladybird costume. They were both sitting on the couch, flanked by a seated Claudette on one side and by Autumn standing at the other. “And this is Leigh. We’re in the musical together. Guys, this is Donnacha, my –” 

She didn’t falter as she spoke, but in between her words, Donnacha’s heart did a sickening flip. Was she about to bring up the fact that they were exes? He wasn’t sure he was comfortable advertising that with these people he didn’t know – 

“Oldest friend,” Autumn finished. 

Donnacha let go of a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding. “I mean, I’m not that old.” He smiled; both Dixon and Leigh had beautiful smiles, so it would have been a little difficult not to. “Great to meet you both.” 

“You, too,” they practically said in unison, which led to Leigh curling her lip and softly backhanding Dixon’s leg. Next to Dixon’s knee, there was a glossy pride pin that caught Donnacha’s attention. It was attached to the strap of a side bag that he was holding firmly in his lap. 

Donnacha breath caught in his throat as he thought about the flat cardboard packet that was currently sitting in the top drawer of his bedside table. Inside, still wrapped in plastic, was a bisexual flag pin. He’d been a little drunk and dizzy when he’d ordered on Etsy, and it’d seemed like a great idea at the time. He’d even smiled proudly to himself when it had arrived, but as soon as he’d started opening the package, as soon as he’d started thinking about actually wearing the pin, a pain had bloomed in the pit of his stomach. It just seemed as though advertising his identity was unnecessary. Maybe dangerous. Undoubtedly more trouble than it was worth. 

He understood it now, though; he felt himself wanting to be seen, to be recognised, like Dixon. 

Shit, he thought. Maybe he should have mentioned his pronouns after Autumn had introduced him – 

It was too late now, because Lucy was scampering up to him, hands outstretched. “Thanks, hon.” 

She relieved him of the shopping bags that had been testing the limits of his shoulder sockets for the past hour. He smiled at her tiredly and looked at her skinny denim jeans and plaid shirt, wondering if she hadn’t gotten changed yet, or had poured so much Halloween spirit into decorating the flat that she had none left to fuel a costume. 

“You kept the receipts, right? I’ll pay you back tomorrow afternoon,” Lucy said. 

“What are you dressing up as tonight?” Claudette asked from the other end of the sofa. Donnacha realised she was addressing him. Their eyes were pinned on Donnacha’s face over the rim of their cup. Autumn had promised – of her own volition – that she would never tell anybody that Donnacha had kissed someone else during their relationship, but he could never quite shake the feeling that Claudette knew something more than they let on. 

“Eh, nothing.” Donnacha shook his head. “I’m… I’m actually not coming out tonight.” 

“Oh, you’re not?” Autumn looked genuinely crestfallen, which gave Donnacha yet another strange pang in the centre of his chest. He didn’t know what to do with it, so he boxed it up, tucked it away in the back of his mind, and tried to stop thinking about it. 

“Jesus, Donnacha!” Lucy called out from behind him. She’d propped the bags on the edge of the coffee table and was fishing things out, one by one. “You let us boss you around on the phone all day, and you’re not even partying with us? Why didn’t you say something!” 

“Lu, it’s grand, seriously,” Donnacha smiled. He edged a little closer to her as some familiar packaging caught his eye. He’d almost forgotten that he’d grabbed something just for himself amidst all of the bossing around. “These are for me,” he chuckled sheepishly, reaching for the packets. 

Lucy just nodded and shrugged. “Yeah, fair enough.” 

“Anyway, I’d already promised I’d drive to the shops before this other plan came up…” 

“Ooh-ooh, other plan?” Lucy lowered her voice, though everybody could still hear her, clear as day. “A hot date?” 

“Oh, yeah.” Donnacha smirked. “I’ve got a date with this floppy-haired lad who works in web design and never leaves his bedroom.” 

As soon as he made the joke, he wanted to snatch it out of the air and swallow it back down. It had somehow sounded like an unnecessary dig at his friend, and implied that it really was a date. How the hell had that happened? 

“No – I just… Me and Henry, we’re just gonna watch a movie and hang out. You know, after what happened last year, I didn’t think it’d be good for him to be, you know, overwhelmed…” Donnacha couldn’t believe it was his own mouth that was saying these things. Nobody needed him throwing about reminders of Henry’s meltdown last Halloween, least of all Henry himself. 

Autumn gave one of her politest smiles and turned to say something off-topic to Leigh. Claudette was still eyeing Donnacha with a curiosity that bordered on disgust. Even Lucy didn’t seem to know what to say, which was never a good sign. 

Donnacha frowned, irritated. He’d spent all afternoon hunting down everybody’s requests for the Halloween party, edging through traffic jams, bothering staff members about their stock. He hadn’t expected to be hoisted up onto anyone’s shoulders like he’d scored a winning try, but shouldn’t he at least be allowed to be himself? 

He pushed that feeling aside, packing it up alongside his confusing feelings about Autumn, and his reluctance about his identity, and his nervousness about Claudette, and his guilt about Henry. 

He cleared his throat and rubbed at his stomach, which delivered to him a nasty twinge to remind him that the last thing he’d eaten had been a pathetically small, dry article that had barely passed for a blueberry muffin at 10am. The packaging of his chocolate bars crinkled in his other hand, and he couldn’t help eyeing the half-empty plates that were scattered throughout the room, holding mini spring rolls and spicy wedges and breaded cheese sticks. 

“There any food left?” he asked, feeling oddly grateful for the opportunity to change the subject. 

“Yeah, lots.” Payton. 

Donnacha turned around. 

They were sitting at the dining table, and had been quiet and staring at their phone since Donnacha had come in. They were wearing a navy jacket and had curled the front of their hair, but Donnacha didn’t care to contemplate their appearance any further. 

They half-smiled at him and nodded towards the kitchen. “Help yourself.” 

Help yourself. Of course, Payton would know all about helping themself, since they’d helped themself to Autumn less than a fortnight after the break-up – 

“Thanks,” Donnacha said, making a beeline for the kitchen. 

Everything edible was spread out on baking trays and was dried out from the oven and cold from sitting out too long. It was hardly an appetising site, especially while Donnacha was already thinking about tearing into his Macaroon bars. He’d been hit with a wave of nostalgia when he’d spotted them on his hunt for Lucy’s obscure requests, and he’d bought them thinking they would be his desserts for the next few weeks, but who was going to stop him from making them into his dinner tonight? 

His stomach gurgled quietly beneath his hoodie. On top of the sharp hunger pains, it felt knotted with tension. He couldn’t believe how easily he forgot how skipping meals affected him, making him shaky and emotional. It’d been a mistake to let it get this bad. 

After tossing a small handful of wedges and some ketchup onto a plate, Donnacha tucked his chocolates under his arm and swept through the living area one more time. 

“Happy Halloween, have a good night,” he smiled, and he didn’t stop to let anyone’s expression or response sink in. 

___ 

“Oh,” Donnacha deadpanned, “you’re working?” 

Henry didn’t turn around at first, and Donnacha realised it was because he had his noise-cancelling headphones on. He must have seen the light from the hallway reflected in the computer screen though, because the further Donnacha pushed the door open, the more Henry’s attention seemed to twitch away from his work. 

He took off the headphones and swung his chair into a half-turn. “You’re late.” 

That face was a relief to lay eyes upon. Henry had washed his hair, there was some colour in his cheeks, and the circles under his eyes were barely a smudge. His eyebrows were scrunched up in a frown, but that was hardly unusual, and Donnacha knew that Henry could be frowning himself into a knot and still be genuinely content. 

He didn’t understand it, but he knew it. 

“Did you say something, by the way?” 

“Yeah.” Donnacha tossed his Macaroon bars onto Henry’s bed. He sat down on the mattress, his plate of wedges on his lap. “I was trying to ask what you’re playing at. Working? I thought we were watching a film.” 

Henry’s mouth slid into a thin, stretched line, his expression taut with unvoiced laughter. 

“What?” Donnacha asked. He thought for a second about what he’d just said, popping a mini spring roll in his mouth and crunching down on it. Then he sighed, replaying in his head what he’d previously said, hearing it through Henry’s ears. “Seriously? Fil-um?” 

Henry cracked a smirk. 

Donnacha pointed at Henry’s computer screen. “Switch that off.” 

“I want to finish what I’m working on.” Henry held up his hands, pre-emptively stopping Donnacha from protesting. “This is on you. I had to start something to occupy myself, and now I have to finish it. You were very late.” 

“Yeah, I’m extremely aware. Bloody starving as well,” Donnacha said over a grumble in his stomach, dipping a cold potato wedge into the little pool of ketchup on the side of his plate. “So, are we not actually watching this movie anymore?” 

“Of course.” There was no little amount of judgement in Henry’s gaze as he adjusted the bridge of his glasses. “I still can’t believe you’ve never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas.” 

Donnacha chewed without much relish. He took in, for the first time since entering, what Henry was wearing. “I still can’t believe you own a... baby-grow.” 

Henry glanced down at his orange one-piece pyjama set. “It’s a onesie.” 

“Same thing.” 

Henry held eye contact with him for a few seconds as he pulled the hood of the onesie up over the top of his head. A Jack O’Lantern face was stitched into the hood, and a little green stalk sat at the crown of Henry’s head. “It was a birthday gift from Lucy.” 

“Was it? All she gave me for my birthday was scratch cards.” 

“Try being her friend for ten years.” 

Eyeing the pumpkin pyjamas one last time, Donnacha shook his head. “You know, I think I’m good.” 

“Mmhmm,” Henry grunted. Hood still pulled up, his attention had already been drawn back to his computer screen. 

Donnacha let him work in silence for a couple of minutes, slowly chewing his way through his pile of wedges, but eyeing his chocolate bars with much more enthusiasm. He hadn’t had a lot to eat yet, but having calories inside of him had improved his mood drastically. 

Licking a smear of ketchup from his thumb, he glanced up at Henry. “Did you get some food?” 

Without tearing his eyes away from his work, Henry pulled his hunched shoulders further back into his chair, unblocking Donnacha’s view of a paper bag that sat next to his keyboard. “I secretly ordered Thai noodles while I was waiting for you. You were very –” 

“Very, very, very, extremely late,” Donnacha finished for him. It brought a smile to his face, to picture Henry in his pumpkin onesie, creeping down the hallway to collect his food at the front door without alerting anybody else in the apartment. 

“I have some leftovers, if you’d like to warm them up.” 

“Nah. Thanks.” Donnacha reached over to put his half-full plate on Henry’s nightstand. The scratching sound of ceramic on wood made Henry’s gaze jerk to the side. 

“Hmm. Thought you were starving?” 

“I am.” Donnacha rubbed his palms together. 

“Then, what are you going to… What are those?” 

Donnacha grinned broadly as he tore open the first packet, and the wrapped chocolate bars fell onto the bedspread. He felt a spark of pride upon seeing Henry half-turn his chair again. “Come on. Don’t tell me you don’t know what these are.” 

Henry’s head bobbed from side to side. 

“They’re Macaroons!” Donnacha exclaimed. “They’re a classic. Don’t tell me you never had these as a child?” 

“My mother didn’t care much for sweets.” Henry touched the bridge of his glasses again. 

“Want to try one?” 

Henry shook his head. “I’m full.” 

“Alright, but you’re missing out.” Donnacha picked up one of the bars and laid it to the side. “Know what, I’ll save you one.” 

“Save me one?” Henry’s voice rose. “How many are you planning to eat?” 

“Never you mind!” Donnacha waved a hand towards Henry’s computer before his fingers began wrestling open the wrapper on the bar. “Don’t you have graphics to design, or something?” 

“I do.” 

The first mouthful of the bar seemed to melt away on his tongue, but after the second, Donnacha began to feel the warm, giddy sensation of sugar settling in his belly. Mentally, he was right back in his hometown – or rather, the closest village to the remote area where his father’s farm was located – surrounded by crumbling stone walls and single-lane roads and the smell of vegetation. 

Donnacha happily burned his way through three more of the bars, and was fishing the next one out of the packet when he let out an involuntary sound that Henry clearly found distracting. “Mmm.” 

“Enjoying yourself,” Henry observed. Maybe it had been intended as a question, but there was no doubt in his voice. 

Donnacha shook his head in a way that meant yes. “You have your cartoons and your old films, Hen –” 

“Fil-ums,” Henry repeated incredulously under his breath. Every time, he acted as though it was his first time hearing Donnacha pronouncing that specific word in that specific way. 

“But this – this right here –” Donnacha flattened the empty wrapper between his thumbs and stretched it tight, so that the words lay flat and the pattern unrumpled. “This is pure childhood joy for me.” 

Henry’s desk chair creaked as Henry shifted his weight, bracing his hands on the armrests. He looked vaguely uncomfortable, and Donnacha was about to ask him if something hurt, but was cut off. 

“You had those a lot,” Henry asked, “as a kid?” 

“Every weekend, after mass,” Donnacha nodded, chewing quickly so he could swallow. “Da’d stay at the church because he’d be talking to the priest, and Mammy had this group of friends who would stand and smoke just down the road, and they’d – they’d give me and Aoife some pocket money, and…” 

He took a break to swallow again, saliva filling his mouth as the sweet aftertaste lingered. 

“And the two of us, we’d hightail it down the road, to the corner shop,” he said. “The shop owner was called Mrs. Breathnach, and she always took her time coming down to open up after mass, but me and Aoife were always the first ones waiting for her, and she used to know our favourites off by heart, so she’d be unlocking the shop and rattling off, ‘a Dip Dab for Aoife Ní Mhurchú, a Macaroon for Donnacha Ó Murchú, and one carton of milk’. Mammy always got us to pick up the milk as well, so there’d be milk for Sunday tea…” 

He was quickly realising that there was no satisfying end to this story, no way for him to whip up the words to properly convey why these were such important memories. 

Henry had stopped working altogether and was looking at him from the desk chair. His dull green eyes were unreadable as always behind his glasses, especially in the low lighting and with the computer screen glare reflected in the lenses. 

“Sorry.” Donnacha swallowed again, realising his cheeks were burning and his stomach was doing flips. He took a bite of chocolate. “I’m rambling like my Uncle Seán at Christmas dinner.” 

“It’s okay –” 

Donnacha gestured towards the computer screen. “Do you not need to get your work done, so we can watch this movie?” 

Henry was silent for a couple of seconds. Donnacha genuinely didn’t feel like chatting anymore, and he was really hoping that Henry wouldn’t push the subject. But he thankfully turned his chair back towards the desk and took the computer mouse in his hand. 

After a little while, Henry reached for the chocolate bar that Donnacha had placed aside for him. He undid the wrapping so that there were no tears down the side, no damage done to the text or the design. His careful precision brought a private smile to Donnacha’s face. 

“Want to finish it?” Henry asked after eating the quarter that he’d broken off. 

“Aw. Do you not like it?” 

“It’s nice,” Henry said, “but I’m still full from dinner.” 

Donnacha pressed his lips together as he eyed the chocolate in Henry’s hand. His throat was dry, and his stomach was now pulsing with pain. “Wrap it back up. Have it later.” 

Once again, he expected Henry to refuse, especially since he didn’t seem overly enamoured with the bar in the first place, but thankfully he nodded and folded the wrapper down over the open side. He went back to tapping away with his computer mouse. 

Donnacha sank back a little on the bed, trying to find a comfier position that didn’t place too much pressure on his stomach. He started to reach for another chocolate bar but stopped himself.  

“You’ve gone quiet,” Henry remarked after a notable amount of time had passed. “What’s wrong?” 

“What d’you mean? You asked me to be quiet.” 

“Never usually stops you.” Henry sat back in his chair, reaching up under his pumpkin hood to scratch his scalp. “Can I ask you a question?” 

“’Course you –” 

“Why did you stop telling the story about these bars?” 

“Because – because it wasn’t really a story,” Donnacha frowned. “There wasn’t anything else to tell, and I didn’t want to just keep… you know, rambling on.” 

“That word again.” Henry’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Do I ramble on when I talk to you about work, or movies, or my life, or whatever?” 

Donnacha frowned. “No?” 

“But that’s what it felt like you were saying. Do I tell you too much? Because it feels as though you never tell me anything about yourself.” 

“There’s… not much to know –” 

Henry scoffed loudly, a sound Donnacha had not expected to hear from him. It set his teeth on edge, and the sensation was uncomfortably similar to the hurt that flared up when he thought about Payton and Autumn. 

“You don’t tell me shit either,” he said. He was trying for a calm, measured tone, but somehow managed to sound like a sulking child. Like he’d gone into the corner shop and they were all sold out of Macaroons – 

“What?” Henry choked out. 

You – you never told me why you stopped going out, why you stopped being Lavender, why you stopped bringing dates here… Donnacha’s stomach turned over, and he was hit with the sudden realisation that he might be sick. The back of his hand hovered towards his mouth. How the hell could he even have considered saying that? How could he compare the details of his silly little life story with... whatever it was that had kept Henry locked up at home for so long? 

He was just grateful he’d managed to bite his tongue before speaking. 

“I’ve upset you.” A dry hitch in Henry’s voice. “I’m sorry.” 

“No, no, Hen, it’s not – it’s not about that.” 

His breath caught in his throat, heat swelling in his cheeks, as his insides gave an uneasy shift. It mightn’t have been so bad – in fact, it relieved a little pocket of pressure in his belly – if it hadn’t sounded like a lawnmower engine trying to take off. No denying it now. 

“Pain in my stomach,” Donnacha admitted, massaging his side. “Right here.” 

Henry turned his head, just slightly, and Donnacha caught sight of the look on his face. Something more than a sneer, something less than an eye roll. And his eyes were trailing close to the packets of chocolate bars that sat next to Donnacha on the bed. 

“What?” Donnacha demanded. 

“No comment.” 

“You think I did this to myself.” 

Henry turned back to his screen. “No comment.” 

“And no sympathy either, I take it.” Donnacha sighed and pressed a little harder into his belly as he rubbed. The pain was warm, tight, tucked right up under his ribs. It felt a little like bloating, without feeling overly full. Like all of the chocolate had clumped together in his stomach and was sitting like a dead weight. 

“I never said that, now, did I?” 

Donnacha looked up to see that Henry was actually shutting his computer down. “Oh... you’re done?” 

“Mmm. Yeah. Let’s go with that,” Henry said, which suggested to Donnacha that he wasn’t actually finished, but Donnacha was too relieved to make an argument. He hadn’t really acknowledged it, but the main thing getting him through the day had been this – time with Henry, time in which neither of them had to pretend that they were something they weren’t, or less than they were. 

Henry spun his hair to the side and eased himself to his feet, wincing as he unfurled his legs. It suddenly felt silly – insensitive, even – for Donnacha to be complaining about something as fleeting and, yes, self-inflicted, as a belly ache. 

“Are you okay?” Donnacha asked, half-rising from his position on the bed. “Is – is your hip...?” 

“My hip’s fine,” Henry said as he sat down heavily on the edge of the mattress, one arm extended in Donnacha’s direction. “Come here.” 

Donnacha exhaled and allowed himself to sink into Henry’s embrace, to enjoy the feeling of soft waves of hair brushing against his own. His own was short, aerodynamic, clipped and primed for always being on the move, while Henry’s had an air of messiness, of softness, of a way of living that involved no urgency.  

Good, Donnacha thought with an odd flare of protectiveness. With all the pain and hardship that he’d been through, Henry deserved that kind of life. 

A hand pressing against his belly made Donnacha groan and cuddle in closer, but shame pushed against the warmth in his chest. 

I was supposed to be taking care of you. 

Donnacha heard himself let out a whine, and his cheeks flushed. In an almost instantaneous response, Henry wrapped his arm tighter around Donnacha’s waist, tucking his face into Donnacha’s hair. 

“How about you just try to get some sleep.” Another question that wasn’t a question. An offer that Donnacha wanted to sink into. Henry’s arm trembled against his ribcage, but he kept the hug going. 

Donnacha shook his head, hair bristling against Henry’s stubbled chin. “Let’s watch The Nightmare Before Christmas.” 

“Are you sure?” 

“Yeah.” Donnacha rubbed at his eyes and tried to sit up a little, resisting the urge to let his body curl around the sickly pain beneath his abs. “I might need a few more belly rubs, though, if you’re up for the job.” 

Henry clicked his tongue in the back of his throat and pressed a quick, passing kiss to the side of Donnacha’s forehead. “Of course you do.” 

[zarvasace]

PROGRESS POST

(10/4/23)

This is partly for accountability and partly just to get all this out of my head! This last month or two have felt so hectic, getting used to a new work and sleep schedule and all. I'm still not quite there.

If you're curious about what I've been working on and what my plans are in terms of writing and art for the rest of the year, read on. :)

I will say, though, that if you want more of a specific AU or story, the way to get it is by asking questions and leaving comments! Asks and comments remind me about things I'm doing and get me excited about them again! I have these plans, but I also am very good at chasing inspiration to unknown (and sometimes unimportant) corners!

By Fandom

Linked Universe Projects

I've been feeling less motivated to work on LU stuff, but I still plan on at least finishing what I have open, so you can look forward to some of that!

Writing

Disability AU—one small mobility trio fic in the works. A few vague ideas for doing backstory fics.

Council (1931 vampire AU)—this is still the "backburner to backburner" fic, but I do have some fun ideas. I just have been distracted with other things! I think this AU is a lot of fun and I'd love to do more with it. We'll have to see.

The Marvelous Misadventures of Wind and His Merry Band of Maybe-Human Misfits—chapter 7 (out of 9 or so) is in progress. I have it all outlined out, and it's fun to work on, but I have (again) been distracted! This is, I hope, going to be my main December project. It'd be nice to finish before it turns 2 years old next summer. Oops.

I have several other WIPs that aren't very exciting and probably won't see daylight, but they're there if I feel like them

Art

Coloring book—I'm part of the coloring book project! :) I have already finished 1/2 drawings, and they went so well, I'm considering doing more.

Shatterproof manga page—still on my radar! I'm doing the end scene from dazzling diamond danger, and my ambition keeps outgrowing my time.

Four Swords Projects

Writing

Fairytale AU—man I've started this Vidow BatB fic literally five times. I have an almost-complete draft sitting at like... 20k?? iirc, but I kind of hate a lot of it. I also like a lot of it. It's a bit difficult for me to work on rewriting something in that situation. Anyway. Another December thing probably.

Fright Fight—I have ideas for every week, but am currently unsure if I want to draw or write for them. Most of my October will be focused on filling these prompts!

Vampire Lords AU—I have strange as severe is this my fate open right now, with a fair amount of material... it just needs to be edited a bit. I do want to keep working on that, I've just... well. Distraction. A common theme. XD I might be feeling another little bite fic coming on, too.

Art

Fright Fight—see above

Fright Fight part 2—I have a few side things to do for this, like making graphics that I haven't quite finished yet. They shouldn't take long, I just gotta do em!

Non-Fandom

Stickers—I am in the process of drawing some stickers! Yay! These are for my work, but also just for me. I want some Halloween stickers. This is a backburner project.

Nanowrimo project—I need to spend some time figuring out a few things to really get going on my princess-verse. I'm going to be doing Nanolympics this year, so hopefully some of their preptober stuff will help!

Hearts Linked Together—my super-cool Linkverse. XD I love my dumb timeline, and all the characters, they're just filler drawings that I haven't had time to continue.

Secret Zelda project—I really really need to do this! I can't say much right now, but it involves a fair amount of work, both writing and art. I think I haven't gotten very far on it yet because I'm intimidated. Stop that.

Zine edits—I worked really really hard on an art piece for a LoZ zine coming up! This week is critique, and I anticipate a few edits later.

By Month

Facebook posts—a lady I know wants to commission pretty quote images to post on her Facebook. I need to reply to her text. And do them.

September

I primarily worked on the fic Blood-Sucker's Guide to High School. I also worked on and submitted one fic and one piece of art to two different zines, which I hope you'll see soon.

October

If you care, you may have noticed I'm not doing Whumptober this year! Part of this is because I'm a bit burned out from the above, and part of it is that the prompts just didn't seem very inspiring to me this year. Maybe that's just my mindset. I haven't been in a very whumpy mood.

I'm planning on filling weekly prompts for @fsfrightfight this month and maybe chipping away at some other fics, in addition to one more zine contribution. I'm also going to be planning for November and doing some scattered art work here and there.

November

NaNoWriMo! I considered skipping this... but I'm feeling really inspired and motivated to do it, especially with October as a break. I'm going to write some original work, and that will be the focus of my November. I'll likely get some other art done, too.

December

I hope to dedicate this month to finishing things up from this year! That means working on "backburner" projects.

[prythiansprincess]

CHAPTER ONE

home | chapters | playlist

🤎 pairing: azriel x reader.

🤎 song inspiration: dark matter by rivals.

🤎 author’s note: surprise! it feels strange to be writing for azriel again after such a long break, but here I am returning to my roots. this series has been sitting in my drafts for a year and now i've finally got it fully fleshed out. let's just pray to the cauldron that I actually get the motivation to finish it all the way through.

Every mission required you to play a part.

Over the years, you have worn many faces. The thief. The seductress. The assassin. The dagger in the dark that no one ever saw coming. 

Tonight you were a tavern wench from the Western Isles, eager to attract the attention of a nobleman who hailed from one of the oldest families in the Night Court. Given his societal standing, his voice of dissent against Rhysand and Feyre’s rule and rumored sympathies towards Hybern’s cause had not gone unnoticed. Certainly not by you nor the High Lord and High Lady themselves. 

For Rhysand to send you out to personally deal with the lordling meant that the situation required your level of skill and discretion. The High Lord usually preferred to keep you close to home so you could monitor any potential threats in Velaris, but this pesky little lord had caused enough trouble to warrant your involvement.  

For centuries, you had served the Night Court well. Even before Rhysand assumed power, you moved in the shadows like a phantom, setting matters straight when threats arose and making sure your beloved city was safe.

At present, the threat before you took the shape of a High Fae male, who in all honesty, had a rather lofty opinion of himself. You could tell he was unseasoned and unblooded from the way he carried himself, moving with the ease of someone who had never seen the toils of war and strife. The lordling likely lived in the luxury of grandiose balls and palaces filled with servants tending to his beck and call. No was not a word in his vocabulary. 

He had a pretty face and a cruel mouth, those gray eyes of his raking over your figure with unabashed scrutiny. The dark veil covering your face reveals a sliver of your amber eyes, concealing your identity and drawing him into the mysterious aura you perfectly crafted with ease. 

You had dealt with his type a thousand times over. Males who looked at you like a challenge, a prize to chase after and inevitably conquer before tossing you to the side for the next pretty little thing that crossed their path. Little did he know that once you set your sights on him, his fate was as good as sealed. 

Judging from the finery of his clothes and the gold rings adorning his fingers, this one was a rich little lordling, probably the heir of some cranky old bastard who would have known better than to engage with someone like you. It was glaringly obvious that the male had never learned how to spot an enemy, so he didn’t know any better when he sidled up next to you, completely unaware of the blades concealed underneath the simple cotton dress you were wearing. 

A small smile graced your lips, playing the part of the shy and demure maiden who was unfamiliar with being approached by handsome lords.

Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent underneath it. 

“What does a lord have to do to get a pint around here?” He greeted with a smirk as he slammed down his empty glass. You didn’t miss the way his oily gaze lingered on the swell of your breasts peeking out from your tight corset. 

“It’s on the house, my lord,” you said sweetly while you poured ale from the flagon in your hands, filling his glass with amber liquid. 

The lordling threw the drink back in one gulp and slammed his hand down on the wooden table with a loud smack. From the far end of the tavern, his companions hooted and hollered at his little performance. 

In the three days that you’ve been tracking him, they’ve never left his side. Two of them were his personal guards — trained soldiers who you would’ve liked to toy with if you had the time, but unfortunately your schedule wouldn’t allow for deviations no matter how much you would thoroughly enjoy carving those traitors up. Instead, you settled for incapacitating both males for the rest of the evening. The rest of the lordling’s company was inconsequential, too busy gambling and pulling females into their laps to take note of you. 

“What about you? Are you on the house as well?” 

Your fingers itched to reach for the twin blades sheathed on your hips, but you resisted the urge and offered a smile instead. “I’m afraid not.” 

He grabbed your wrist, pressing his lips close to the shell of your ear. The heady scent of ale was heavy on his breath. “Don’t you want to know what it feels like to lie with a nobleman? I promise I’ll treat you like a lady.”

You tucked a loose strand of hair behind your ear, surveying the boisterous crowd in what appeared like self-consciousness, but in reality you were assessing whether or not you would be able to slip out with your mark without anyone noticing.

“But what will your companions think?” 

The lordling chuckled. “They think whatever I pay them to think.” His arm snaked around your waist, pulling you into his lap. “But you need not worry, I have a room all to myself upstairs.”

With one last look at the crowd, you lured the male right into your trap. Pushing those golden curls out of his eyes, your fingers traced the outline of his lips. “In that case, lead the way.”

Compared to the boisterous tavern downstairs, the dark room he ushered you into was quiet and intimate. Clothes were strewn all over the wooden floors and his sheets were unmade. Moonlight streamed in through the glass windowpane, leaving half the room shrouded in night. The male wasted no time and pressed you against the closed door, his eager mouth nipping at your neck impatiently. His hands sidled up your spine, deft fingers tugging at the veil tied behind your head. 

You caught him by the wrist, preventing him from untying the fabric before pushing him towards the bed. “Not so fast, my lord. I need you to savor this.”

Dark, lustful eyes drank you in as you crawled across the mattress, straddling the male and effectively trapping him in a vulnerable position. You lifted his arms over his head, tutting your disapproval as he tried to reach for you. He was so drunk with desire that he didn't even question the rope you pulled out from beneath your skirts.

“Be patient and I promise I’ll make it worth your while.” 

He inhaled sharply, his body thrumming with anticipation beneath you. “You’re no lady, are you?” 

At his words, you unleashed a glimpse of your true self as your lips curved into a seductive grin. “You have no idea.” 

You tied his hands to the bedpost, twisting the rope into a secure knot. Slowly, you unbuttoned his shirt, trailing your fingers down the hard muscles of his chest. The male shivered at your touch, bringing a smile to your lips. He was making this way too easy. 

“I’ve been watching you for days.” You discarded his shirt to the side, making your way down to unbuckle his belt. The bandolier of knives secured around his waist fell to the floor with a soft thud. “You never go anywhere without one of your sentries. You’ve made it very hard for a girl like me to get you alone, my lord.”

“I’m here now,” he responded in a low voice. The fog of lust dancing in those sharp gray eyes clouded his vision.

“Indeed you are. I’ve been waiting a very long time to get you all to myself, Lord Covington.”

At the sound of his name, his eyes narrowed with suspicion. “I never told you my name.” 

You laughed mockingly. “No, but I know exactly who you are. Declan Covington, heir apparent to the Western Isles. An avid supporter of Hybern’s cause. A loyalist through and through, hiding in plain sight. Your family provided the gold for weapons and supplies to our friends in the West, did they not?” 

He bucked underneath you, pulling at his bound hands. “Who the hell are you?” 

“A friend of the High Lord and High Lady,” you said with a devilish grin. The sharp edge of your blade gleamed against the moonlight as you traced his torso with it. “Rhysand sends his regards.” 

Panic set in his features. “Whatever he’s paying you, I can double it. My family has great fortune. We have connections. Name your price and it’s done.” 

This was always your least favorite part. The bargaining, the pleading. It was all so tedious. 

“You couldn’t afford me if you tried.” Your fingers threaded through his golden hair as you tugged his head backwards. “What you will give me is the name of every family who helped support Hybern’s cause.” 

“Over my dead body,” he said defiantly. 

“I can arrange that, my lord.” Shifting your hips on his lap, you examined his face. You almost felt sorry for him. He looked so young and naive. The lordling didn’t stand a chance against you. “Though I’d hate to waste such a pretty face. Give me their names and I’ll grant you a swift death.”

Anger came next. He spit in your face, which only made you throw your head back in laughter. You always liked the feisty ones. Watching the fight go out of their eyes brought you a sick rush of power. 

“My father will hear about this! He’ll drag your lifeless corpse through our lands and gift your head to me on a golden platter.”

As far as hateful vitriol goes, the little lordling was rather creative, but neither he nor his father could stop what was about to happen. These males were all the same. They never recognized the danger you posed until it was too late. It was a weakness that brought you great pleasure to exploit. 

“I’m afraid your daddy won’t be able to get you out of this one, Lord Covington.” 

Deciding his fate, you untied the veil and let it fall to your lap. His eyes widened in fear and for the first time since he laid eyes on you, the severity of his situation settled into the worried lines on his pretty face. A silhouette of fire materialized from your body as you unleashed the beast within. Your true form was a nightmare personified, murderous and bloodthirsty, composed of the fury and vengeance that you tried so hard to restrain. Tonight, you loosened the reins to give her what she wanted. 

Mine, she whispered as fiery tendrils caressed the lordling’s pretty face. The victims who saw her never lived to tell the tale. 

“You’re her,” he breathed, his voice full of trepidation. “The fire priestess. I thought you were a myth.” 

The crimson slash of your smile served as confirmation. “I’m no one and I will stay that way even after you’re long gone.”

Lord Covington narrowed his eyes. “You weren’t always, were you? You’re the exiled priestess of the Autumn Court. Lady Thorne.” 

Kill, your transfiguration hissed. She hated that name and so did you.

Silence fell upon the room. Whatever pity you might have felt for him vanished at the mention of the girl you used to be. The one who died the minute you crossed the Autumn Court’s borders. 

“Like you said, I’m no lady.” 

You pressed your blade into his cheek and crimson droplets dribbled down the front of his chest. The male shivered as you licked away the blood, savoring the sweet taste of his fear. With crimson dripping from your lips, you opened your mouth and sang. The lordling fell into a daze, his silver eyes clouding over with fog as your voice wrenched through his mental defenses. With a jolt, you invaded his thoughts and drew out his deepest fears. 

Everyone was afraid of something. This little lordling’s weakness was snakes. The spell of the song took hold, making him see what you wanted him to see. Serpents appeared all over Lord Covington’s body, crawling through his arms, tangling in his limbs, and twisting around his neck until he was gasping for air. The illusion was plucked from his own personal version of hell.

A nightmare, that’s what you were. 

The veil of the illusion slipped, swallowed by the living flame of your true form. Whatever fear the serpents invoked paled in comparison to what he felt as he looked upon the monstrosity of the reality before him. A creature of fury, a demon of vengeance.

Lord Covington screamed and begged for his life, but the ward you cast in the room swallowed the sound. No one was coming for help. 

Just then, a pulse of magic thrummed against your wards. You stopped singing and reigned in your flames. Your true form hesitantly retreated into the darkest pits of your heart, rattling against the cage you kept her in. Even as the flames receded, you could still hear the echo of malice. The small taste of blood wasn’t enough. 

It was never enough. Someone was going to pay for the disruption.

Out of instinct, the dagger in your hand sliced through the air. Without missing a beat, the male who materialized out of the darkness caught the blade with precision. He hurled the blade back at you swiftly, making you twist in an uncomfortable angle to snatch it out of the air. 

Glowing hazel eyes appraised you with scrutiny as the familiar silhouette of wings darkened the room, belonging to the tall and lean figure of the warrior standing before you. Cold, beautiful, and utterly lethal, Azriel flashed you a smile that chilled your bones. 

The shadowsinger briefly took in the male squirming beneath you. With a voice like cold death, Azriel’s drawl made your skin crawl with irritation. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you not to play with your food?” 

Your head whipped in his direction. “What the hell are you doing here?” 

The Illyrian warrior moved in a shroud of darkness, shadows twisting across the dark leathers adorning his powerful form. The blue siphons on his armor glowed brightly, bathing the dark room with a soft cobalt light. Azriel paused at the edge of the bed, leaning against the wooden bedpost with a bemused smirk.

“It’s nice to see you too, princess.” 

The nickname grated your nerves. In fact, everything about Azriel had the same effect. He seemed to have a special talent for getting under your skin.

“Bite me, shadowsinger.”

Whatever sarcastic remark was dancing on the tip of his tongue was interrupted by the male pinned between your thighs. Distracted by your hatred for the spymaster, you nearly forgot that he was even in the room. Freed from the spell of your song, he returned to consciousness and thrashed underneath you. 

Lord Covington released an ear-splitting scream that ravaged his throat. His silver eyes flickered to the shadowsinger, fear and trepidation undulating from him in violent waves. 

“Please,” the lordling pleaded. “Please, get it away from me. Kill me if you must, but please don’t leave me with her — don’t leave me with it —”

“For Cauldron’s sake.”

You drove the hilt of your dagger against the lordling’s forehead and he fell slack, mouth hanging open with unspoken pleas. Rising from the bed, you marched towards Azriel and shoved an accusatory finger at his chest. The action failed to even startle the shadowsinger. If anything, the cock of his head displayed nothing but amusement. 

“Why are you here?” 

“I need you to come with me, Thorne.” You paused for explanation, but none came. Azriel only stared at you as though his vague words were enough to make you drop the mission and go traipsing off with him to the Cauldron knew where. 

You waved your blade in the direction of the unconscious male. “What about him?” 

“What about him?” 

The glare you directed at the shadowsinger would’ve sent lesser males to run off with their tails between their legs, but the Azriel only repaid you with equal venom. Needless to say, the dislike was mutual.

Without warning, Azriel disappeared into a shroud of darkness and the void of his shadows swallowed the lordling along with him. He reappeared a moment later with his arms crossed. The red and golden membrane of his wings shimmered at his back, blocking the only source of light in the room. 

You balled your hands into closed fists. “Where did you take him?” 

“The dungeons.” 

“You had no right! I’ve been tracking him for days. He’s mine.” 

You shoved at his chest again, but Azriel was immovable. His gaze dipped down to your shoulders and you realize with a start that the laces of your corset had come undone, leaving your collar bones exposed. The bloodstone necklace that you never took off peeked out from the swell of your breasts. The shadowsinger’s eyes lingered for a split second before his unrelenting stare flickered back up to your face. 

“There’s other pressing matters at hand. We need to meet the others.”

You fumed with anger. You’ve been working on your mark for days and now thanks to Azriel, you wouldn’t even get to reap the benefits of the hunt. 

“I don’t answer to you, shadowsinger. Rhysand sent me here for a reason and I don’t intend on coming home empty handed.” You screamed in his face and though you’ve always been on the taller side, you barely reached Azriel’s shoulder. He had the nerve to blink as though you were merely conversing about the weather. “Now return the lordling at once or you and I will have a very unpleasant discussion with the High Lord.”

You blanched as he closed the gap between you, his eyes darkening with something unreadable. His voice was smooth and steady, washing over you like shadows given form. 

“Who do you think sent me here?” 

Your mouth fell slack as the shadowsinger held your gaze. You hated it when Azriel looked at you like that. Like you were some sort of puzzle that he was on the verge of deciphering. 

One of his shadows darted towards you, but before it could touch your cheek, Azriel took a step back. Without a second glance, the shadowsinger held out a scarred hand in your direction. 

“Come, princess. The High Lord has need of you.”

[theindependentfox]

Labour in reverse

It's Wednesday.

6:30pm tonight will mark the end of day three in detox. I stare into the sun, feeling the cold pavers under the balls of my feet and seaweed between my toes. There's sand on my laptop - I don't care. Peppermint floats into my olfactory senses; I'm starting to get my smell back. My mind overflows with thoughts, but it's a little easier to organise them now, to focus on them. Birds chirp. I stare into the sun. I'm surrounded by surfboards, festoon lights and whitewashed furniture. There are flannelette sheets on my bed, blinds that block out the daylight, pillows that make me feel like a Queen. Family photos line the walls, flowers and fruit trees line the veranda. When I sit outside, all I can hear is the wind, the house creaking in the salty air, and the birds serenading one another.

It's like I've rediscovered the world.

I'm sad that I gave it up for so long.

I've tried to write. When I looked at my drafts today, I had scattered bits and pieces everywhere, not unlike how I felt as a person. My jittery finger's kept jumping all over the keyboard. I had to keep backspacing my mistakes and typing out the smallest thought took longer than I care to admit.

When a woman is in labour, her symptoms amplify as time goes on, until it finishes with the birth of a child. I tried to think of my experience detoxing as labour in reverse. Honestly, knowing that my current stage was worse than what was to come was the only thing that motivated me to stay calm and ride the waves.

I've had two and a half days of haziness, pain, binge eating and very low-energy thinking processes. I've lost parts of my vision, being unable to focus on anything in my sight. I felt like my eyes shook in their sockets and rolled around in the back of my head. My hearing wasn't much better. I would go deaf mid-conversation with someone. At first I thought it was because I didn't care but I soon realised my brain couldn't process what was happening. I shook and shuddered so often it was easier just to lie down. I couldn't think. My brain froze every time I tried. It literally stopped me mid-sentence. I've had a head fog the size of Uluru, crushing me further and further down into soft pillows. It throbbed when cravings came. My body twitched in ways I can only imagine looks foreign. It mostly felt like my head, and my mind kindly took moments to remind me of how Lord Voldemort twitched when he was frustrated. Awkward, involuntary, irked. My brain would freeze when it didn't know a word, then my mind reacted by being infuriated, then disappointed. Cravings came in waves of anger and sad, dark blue struggling. I couldn't cook. I had severe constipation and diarrhoea from the junk food I was binge eating but it was the only thing that held off cravings. I was so fatigued, I napped on and off the entire time.

How do you know that life sucks if everything feels good all the time? If you're escaping into a feel-good realm? You don't. That's where I got caught. When people asked me 'what do you do in your spare time?' or 'what do you do outside of work?' I couldn't give them an answer I was proud of. Because everyday, I would look up at the sky, say to myself 'thank god that's over', I would blaze up, binge eat, give my dog a half-hearted walk and expect him to nap with me when I knew he'd already napped all day. I was wasting his time as well as mine. I felt guilty every day.

I've been thinking more about the concept of "what happened to you?". I think it's starting to make more sense, that the way I acted is a choice I made in a hard situation. I wanted to feel good at a shitty time in my life. I chased the dopamine train. It will only define me if I let it.

I've been practicing having conversations with locals in town, starting off small and leaving the interaction when I need to. My brain keeps freezing but I'm getting better. They probably just think I'm a little off, a little weird. Which isn't totally untrue. My best interaction so far was this morning. I recognised when my brain switched off. I re-directed it. I haven't been able to do that until today. A turning point.

[randomvongenerico]

HELLO!

It's me, randomvongenerico. I'm finally getting around to replying to you again. 😅 Sorry about this incredibly belated response. Like, ridiculously late 😓.

I had started writing down my reply to you, and had made good progress (there were a lot of things I wanted to say, add and ask), but I was writing late at night and had to go to sleep, so I noticed I could save my comment as a draft and thought "oh, cool! I'll do that and continue later".

Except I don't know where it got saved. So I lost what I had already written down which made lose the incentive to continue because I'd have to start again. It took me this long to finally sit down again and give it another go. So once again, sorry for this super late reply that you probably don't even want to see anymore.

But anyway, I'll get on with going over the points of interest of your last reply to me and what I have to say about them. Btw, as a heads up, at some points I'm going to go on some rambles here, and at points I'm just going to start venting about some things that I've been wanting to get off my chest for some time. I just want to clarify that none of my ranting is directed at you, it's just me shouting (or I guess angrily typing) at the wind. So don't think I'm getting angry at you or anything, okay? Good? Good.

Anyway without further ado:

Sure, he still presents a huge threat to lots of people, but given that we’d just seen proof that AFO did not know about Shinsou’s power,[2] they could also have used Machia to, for example, rapidly transport the heroes to some place they could set up a second ambush to trick AFO into responding to Shinsou.  I mean, good god, AFO’s the chattiest villain in the comic; Hawks lured him into at least two extended conversations even after he’d resolved that he needed to leave.  He’s a Demon Lord and thus categorically incapable of shutting up.  And that would have been that, really.  Take control and let the clock run out; end of problem.

While that sounds like a good use of Shinso's Quirk, I can't help but feel like it'd end up being useless because then Horikoshi would just be like "oh, AfO has a Quirk that makes him immune to brainwashing or something", or simply say that AfO is THAT strong that he can break out of it. AfO, Midoriya and Shigaraki are the three characters that completely bend around any rule that they need to when they need to. The only time they don't, is coincidentally when they're facing eachother (although the plot still has them pull out curve balls anyways).

I’ve observed this problem in a few different areas, that Horikoshi sometimes writes the heroes, particularly Hawks, as not taking actions or drawing conclusions that, from their perspective, should seem sensible, well-reasoned, and with solid chances of success; instead, they simply disregard possibilities they should logically be considering but which the reader knows are dead ends, or they benefit from things they could not have known at the time they acted.  That hurts immersion because it gives the heroes victories, both tactical and moral, that they simply haven’t earned.  Shinsou’s control of Machia is a particularly egregious example.

Okay, so I'm having a bit of trouble following the first half of what you just typed there (english is not my main language, so that doesn't help), but I think I got it(?): You're saying that when a choice is going to lead to a dead end, the heroes conveniently don't follow it, even though it would've been a logically sound decision and no one from the readership would've faulted them from making said choice, even though we the readers already know it's a waste of time (well, a lot of readers would give them shit about it, actually). Did I get it right?

To be brief about it (because I’ve talked about this at length elsewhere), I don’t think the heroes should have known where all the PLF bases were, I don’t think they should have been as effective in disordered mass combat as the PLF, I think the advisors should have put up a better fight in all cases, and I think there should have been enough members of the PLF in significant positions of influence or power that the HPSC couldn’t uncover them all, leading to complications when those members realized their organization was under attack.

On one hand, yeah, things didn't get as bad as they could've. In retrospect too many things went smoothly (well, except for the massive property damage, countless dead or injured, and the whole system crumbling, but the story doesn't focus enough on that, so to the readers it feels like things didn't get bad enough).

On the other hand, I remember at the time those chapters where coming out, just how schizophrenic everyone was being. As far as the fandom was predicting, it was going to be revealed that the PLF had actually known that Hawks was spying on them the whole time, so they had been prepared for the heroes attack. But Hawks actually knew that the PLF knew that he was spying on them, so he had infromed the heroes of all the counter measures the PLF had prepared to resist the attack. But in another twist, it would be revealed that the PLF knew that Hawks knew that they knew that he was spying on them, so they fed him false information. But then things get even CRAZIER when it's revealed that Hawks knew that the PLF knew that he knew that they knew that he...

You get where I'm going?

I'm kinda glad things didn't get THAT complicated in terms of both sides one upping eachother.

That has repercussions going forward, as well: heroes clearing the board of all the (named) PLF members save Skeptic leaves the bulk of villain forces in the subsequent arcs to be prison escapees, and man, if the PLF’s moral nuance has been squandered, the depiction of the prison escapees is even worse.

I don't know how controversial this is going to be for you, but imo, the MLA already lost it's moral nuance from the moment they got absorved into the LoV. I firmly believe the MLA should've remained a completely separate faction that the heroes had to deal with on top with having to deal with the LoV and AfO.

Because a lot of things get muddled with having the MLA and LoV becoming a single group. For example, I would see a lot of villain enthusiasts being discontent with how Horikoshi wasn't devoting any time in the story to have Shigaraki, Dabi and Toga "spread their message/agenda". But the thing is, the LoV doesn't have a "message". Shigaraki, Dabi and Toga are all mentally and emotionally unwell individuals lashing out at the world for the pain they've been through. They don't have some agenda or plan for a "brighter future".

The MLA are the ones with a concept for what they want the future to be. What society they dream of. Sure, the fact that it's based around Social Darwinism is off putting (and it has some little touches of fascism), but at least it's a conceived idea and plan for a different societal structure.

I don't believe any of the original LoV members are in a mental state where they could, or would even be interested in envisioning some "new society". Maybe Spinner, but his whole character is him jumping into causes that only sound good on paper without actually understanding them or fully believing in them, so I don't think he'd be able to (or want to) either.

I have significantly more issues with the second one, but most of that boils down to the fact that the divide and conquer/Tempt and Trap plan feels crueler, meaner, and much more openly aimed at extrajudicial murder.

Mmmh. Interesting. What exactly is "crueler" about divide and conquer? I'm assuming that you're referring to specific beats in the story and not the strategy in itself. Because it is a sound strategic move. And had the story been better at making the heroes feel outnumbered it would even be the only logical course to take, and the one that would give them a fighting chance.

And like, that would all be fine and in-character for Hero Society in general and Hawks, the main planner, specifically, but with Deku, Shouto and Uraraka all starting to think Save Villains thoughts, and fresh off the traitor reveal, the kids should never have been as collectively okay with the second war’s tactics as the story has presented them as being.

Once more, this is probably something I'm missing. But why should the kids have been opposed to the plan? Again, I'm guessing you're referring to specific parts in the plan, I just can't figure what it is you're referring to.

To echo an older complaint, good god, what universe is Horikoshi living in that he thinks the people that converted a place of learning into an arena they call a “coffin in the sky” are the heroes?

Maybe he didn't make the connection? It wasn't supposed to be taken literally? It's just a name to sound cool and dramatic? I don't know. There's many things that sound wrong to us that to the japanese probably don't sound wrong due to the language barrier, or because they don't have the same perception as us.

Like, remember we're talking about the man that introduced the kickass hero name "Alien Queen" for one of the female characters just as a little movie reference, and then instead he gave her the less respectable name "Pinky". And I'm still mad about that, btw.

I’m not sure from this if you’re explaining how you read Hose Face’s attack on Midnight at the time, or if you’re maintaining that that’s an accurate read

I'm explaining that's how I had read it. That's why I asked you for clarification. I wasn't trying to claim that was fact.

Also, in the thematic/meta sense, I expect the heroes to either conduct themselves as heroes—admirable, upright, heroic—or face the narrative consequences when they fail to live up to that ideal.

And what is that "hero" ideal, for you? Are we talking Superman levels of altruism, with complete lack of self preservation, or nothing that extreme? I already know that's not the case, but I just wanted to pose the question anyway to get your thoughts. Cause even though the story sells Midoriya's behaviour as "truly heroic", that level of self destruction just for the sake of others is deeply concerning.

It reminds me how Stain's ideology is just plain wrong.

I kinda wish the story had focused on that. It would've been interesting being simultaneously presented how while the system dehumanizes "villains", fanatical and extreme ideologies such as Stain's also dehumanize heroes. The angle of both heroes and villains being victims feels like something that should've been followed more.

But I don't know. Anyway.

The hyper-encapsulated version of this conundrum is the recurring idea that attacking Shigaraki never actually prevents Shigaraki from coming back worse and more dangerous next time; the heroes are never going to achieve a different result by attacking him again but harder this time, and that’s why Deku is set up to finally try something different.[3]  I would just like it if what’s true on the micro-level could even be attempted on the macro-level.  Or, in other words, if the narrative is going to tell us that saving villains is the correct path, it can’t only demonstrate that for the villains with known-to-the-heroes sympathetic backstories.

That's actually a thing I don't get at all (or at least didn't, until the most recent chapters. Oof. Although, honestly can't say I'm surprised). The whole concept of "saving villains". What does that mean, actually? I'm interested in hearing what your take might be, since you have a nuanced take on the story and characters, even if you lean more towards the villains, you still take into account that they're criminals and their actions are not okay. Almost everyone else has too biased of an opinion, everyone leans in too heavily to one side or the other, and that's just not realistic or goes completely against what the themes of the story are. What does "saving the villains" mean to you?

The reason why I can't wrap my head around the whole thing is because there are some questions that I just can't decipher. Does it mean they all get to go free and face no consequence for their crimes, and people act as if nothing happened? That doesn't sound sensible. And if they do face consequences. Doesn't that directly undo and oppose the whole "saving villains" thing? Or is it fine? Are you still saving them if they face justice, or is granting them complete amnesty required?

I just can't understand it. So that's why I would like to know what "saving the villains" entails, in your view.

I would just like it if what’s true on the micro-level could even be attempted on the macro-level.  Or, in other words, if the narrative is going to tell us that saving villains is the correct path, it can’t only demonstrate that for the villains with known-to-the-heroes sympathetic backstories.

Yeah, but how do you achieve that, narratively? And how do you reach someone if you don't know them?

How could a high school student reach a fanatical member of a shadowy cult hell-bent on establishing a new world order?

As we saw in chapter 383, the Skull Mask villain completely ignored Mina's words. And I don't think there's anything she could've said that would've swayed him to surrender peacefully.

I just don't know if it's feasible to get every single criminal to stop with only words and diplomacy. Rehabilitation should be possible (for those that are willing to be rehabilitated at least), but you're still gonna run into criminals that simply will refuse to surrender and will require to be incapacitated.

If I had to take a guess as to why Horikoshi’s so staunchly avoided letting Mina cut loose—other than regressive gender politics—I’d say it’s that acid simply feels nastier or more morally dubious than fire.  Fire has positive as well as negative connotations; acid’s a lot more, shall we say, unilateral in the collective imagination, especially given what’s going to turn up if you run a web search for “acid attacks.”

Yes, that's exactly what I was trying to say. That's what I meant when I said that it's harder to dowmplay. I was referring to the moral implications.

Perhaps, then, because readers are somewhat conditioned to think of acid as particularly dangerous and nasty compared to fire, and because there’s a limit to how morally dubious Horikoshi is willing to (consciously) write the students, especially the girls, Mina’s sharply limited in how she’s allowed to use her acid.

Well, can't say I fault him for doing that. I would imagine the majority of the readers, if not all of them, would give Mina a lot of shit if Horikoshi wrote her using her acid more freely. It makes me sad. I imagine everyone would be wishing for her to suffer a horrible and gruesome demise, and actively rooting against her at every opportunity.

And in case you think I'm talking crazy, let me remind you that a considerable portion of the fandom gave Mina shit for "torturing Mineta". So if people hated on her for what was essentially just a silly slapstick gag that you're not meant to take seriously, then I can imagine the fandom would really be calling for her head if she used her acid to attack in fights.

That honestly made me so fricking mad. In case you're wondering what I'm talking about, people were giving Mina hate for rightfully punishing Mineta after he pulled one of his usual pervy schemes and deliverately took advantage of her in a moment of vulnerability. When Mineta harrases the girls and is a total pig they go like "it's just a joke, don't take it so seriously", but then the ridiculous slapstick moment that is the obvious punchline to the whole joke of Mineta being a pervert, THAT they decide to take seriously.

It honestly feels like there's some sort of conspiracy against Mina. Seriously, all of the other girls in the class have physically punished Mineta whenever he was being a total pig, and no one batted an eye but then when Mina does it everyone suddenly calls her a vicious monster for getting angry at him over a "little accident" and that she's being ungrateful to Mineta after he "selflessly" saved her. Did they actually miss the part where Mineta openly states that he PLANNED to smash into Mina's breasts?

I swear, this fandom makes me so fucking mad. 😤

That’s a big oof, all right.  I know about the Midnight non-connection and the issue of Mina’s anti-vengeance words having first been delivered by Shouji and relayed to the audience by Koda (it being his flashback, rather than Shouji’s), but I didn’t know there was no indication of Kiri-Mina connection until after his flashback.  Wowzers.

The only connection between Mina and Kirishima prior to his flashback was that both of their character infos mentioned that they went to the same pre school. That's literally it.

I will have to disagree with Reddit User That Guy that Shinsou’s quirk should be viewed as less villainous than Bakugou’s.  It sounds like he was conflating heteromorphobia with the bias against villains/"villainous" quirks, and while there is overlap, they’re still distinct categories.  Shinsou’s quirk inherently subordinates one’s physical body, allowing him to force his targets to act against their will, or potentially take the fall for things they didn’t willingly do.  Of course people are nervous about it or think it’s more villainous than heroic!

The guy wasn't correlating "villainy" to heteromorphia, actually. He just simply couldn't get it into his head that mind controlling someone is a morally questionable thing to do. He was saying that Bakugo, Tokoyami and Mina should receive prejudice instead because their Quirks are destructive. He was even suggesting that Shinso's Quirk would be super valuable to be used during interrogations. I'm no lawyer, but mind controling someone during an interrogation doesn't sound like something that would fly in a court of law.

Even Dabi’s fire is that ethereal blue, like spirit fires, instead of everyday orange-red!

Dabi's fire is actually blue because it burns hotter 🤓. Like the fire from the stove in an oven. I know you know that already, I'm just being silly.

Ahaha, very fair.  Honestly, Class A would have benefited tremendously from more kids with bite to them.  A Mina whose competitiveness had some real fervor to it, or a Mina who had some heaviness in her backstory she was faking her way through dealing with, would have been a good contribution to that.

That I'm not so sure of. Like, a lot of people complain that the heroes are too boring, and say that the villains are more interesting and that's why the readers tend to root for the villains more.

But I honestly just don't get how having the heroes be more flawed would make the readers like them more and root for them more.

Like, in my mind, if people already don't care for them when they're perfect goody two shoes, then I don't see why if they had actual flaws or shitty personality traits people wouldn't be actively rooting against them. You get what I'm saying?

Like if Momo was your typical cold hearted, rich mean girl, or Mina was an annoying and disrespectful gossip that invades people's privacy and spreads nasty rumors, or if Todoroki was racist towards heteromorphs, I don't see how the fandom would like them more. I think they would despise them. Would you like them more? Would you actually find yourself rooting for them like that when they're facing adversity?

I just can't see it.

Like sure, Bakugo and Endeavor are some of the most popular characters and they're heroes with serious flaws. But they're also the two most hated characters in the story. Even though Bakugo's bullying of Midoriya hasn't really been relevant in the story since ages, people still won't let that go.

That none of the students other than Shouji have ever even imagined that heteromorphs can still be victimized in this way represents an over-the-top ignorance that I have to read as either a bleak condemnation of the shallow focuses of heroes or reflective of Horikoshi’s own beliefs about discrimination and the understanding of it possessed by those who aren’t immediately threatened by it.

Or maybe Horikoshi doesn't know how to write a plot about discrimination. It could also be that the japanese perspective is so different from the western perspective that we were never going to get a story that completely aligned with our beliefs.

But I'm no expert, so I don't know.

Well, I'd still say that, feeling as strongly as I do about how morally dubious this whole second war has been, even if I were telling this scene with the same components, I probably wouldn’t be writing towards a hero success because I don’t think the heroes have earned it.

Oh, interesting. So you would write the villains winning here? I have so many questions about that.

Like, what would happen then? Would Midoriya and the other kids flee the country and train for years and return to free Japan after a time skip? I remember that was a popular theory and prediction that many readers had back when the first part of the war was happening.

If that's what you would do. What would happen to Japan then? Like, what would the villains do with the country? If you actaully have something thought up, I'd actually be interested in hearing it, since I've seen you have pretty nuanced takes.

Although, there are a couple of other things in the story that you'd have to change to allow for a time skip, because as the villains are in the actual story, if they win I don't see how there would be a Japan left to save years later. You'd completely have to rewrite Shigaraki, since his main and only goal is to destroy everything.

Also, if the PLF does create some new form of "society", I imagine it wouldn't be some perfect utopia where everything is good and fine. I actually picture them turning into a worse HPSC.

The latter would offer a less awful read on Hose Face’s personality: He’s not bringing up the death out of pure sadism, but as a psychological tactic.  The former would give him some real characterization and motives while also giving the kids something to argue against, rather than the easiest possible reaction of, “Hay did u kno Might Makes Right iz bad?”

Mocking someone's death in front of their loved ones as a psychological tactic is less awful how? 🤔 Just wondering.

So, in a scenario where Machia is up and not falling prey to Shinsou, but rather prioritizing getting to New Master Shigaraki, and the PLF is likewise loyal to Shigaraki and not AFO, I’d just let it work, because I’d be slanting this whole combat towards an overall heroic loss.  Give Mina a face to obsess over until next time but also let Kirishima get a good eyeful of it so he at least knows there’s a serious problem with his best friend and one of his hero inspirations.

"A face to obsess over until next time"? So she'd get to try again further on and kick his butt later?

Also, and this is likely just me having come to resent Kirishima for how Mina was used as a tool to further his character development at the expense of hers, but I don't like that last part much. To my cynical mind, it sounds like another "let's make Mina look bad so Kirishima can look good" situation. I know that's not what you meant, and it's all on me and my pessimism, but I can't help it.

Mineta would have a chance to weigh in, too, as he's a good middle ground: he's got his own anger about Midnight, who he adored, but he's also worried about how that anger looks on Mina. Mineta always worries about his classmates, but he's shared a pretty fair amount of incidental screentime with Mina specifically over the course of the series, ranging from her sweetly offering to put a harem moment into the band performance just for him to stuff like the Clockwork Orange gag, as well as more serious stuff like Mineta being the first one to ask aloud if Midnight's dead, with Mina warmly, and with a confidence it turns out she doesn't truly feel, reassuring him that Midnight's fine.

Can't say I like the sound of that either. Sorry, but because of how the story has always sidelined the girls in favor of the boys, this again to me sounds like "let's give Mineta development by using Mina as a tool to further his character", as well as also sounding like it makes her look bad so he can look good. Just like with Kirishima, I've come to lowkey resent Mineta, specifically for the Clockwork Orange gag that you mentioned. As you could probably tell by my previous venting, I was really annoyed at people giving Mina hate for it. So I'd rather not see her interacting with him either. Sorry. 😓

I've said before that Mineta should have had more to do in the confrontation with Midnight's killer, but that's not just about his fondness for her. It's also about him being the first to question if the heroes didn't just make the whole situation worse, and, if Mina really took Midnight's death so hard it had her thinking about revenge, it should also have been about Mina and Mineta's shared experience surrounding that death.

Since I'm not sold on the idea of Mina and Mineta interacting, how about instead we see Mina and Aoyama interacting? That could be interesting, huh?

His relationship with Mina—the ways he’s trying to live up to her example, as well as his desire to support her when she falters—is a profound motivator for him, something we see much more explicitly and from his own perspective than we do Mina's feelings about him.

Please don't remind about how Mina is used as a mere tool for Kirishima's character progress. I used to love their relationship, but now I actually resent it. It's even worse because Horikoshi gives Kirishima all the attention and all the cool moments, and then still tries to present him as the underdog when compared to her, which only makes Mina look even worse. SHE SHOULD'VE BEEN THE UNDERDOG! 😤 Every time I see Kirishima praising her I get upset. Feels like the most pàtronicing thing ever, even though I know it's not meant in that way.

That being the case, if anyone were going to be able to make an impression on Hose Face via appealing to his sense of camaraderie and desire for strength, it seems to me that Kirishima has the better groundwork in place to sell the moment, regardless of whether he could successfully “reach” Hose Face in the way that’s being attempted with Shigaraki/Toga/Dabi.

I'd put my money on "not manage to reach him". Not everyone can be talk no jutsu'd

Assuming we’re stuck dealing with him, I’d probably let the Class B kids do it.   Have Mount Lady—who was there for the Sludge Villain’s rampage using Bakugou, and therefore knows what Sludgey looks like and that he can possess people—yell for people to stay away from him.  Let there be a moment of panic and confusion, where it looks for a moment like a repeat of the mess in Chapter 1 where no one had the exact right answer to deal with him, so no one’s willing to step up.

Then, in a 1-2-3 combo move that reminds everyone why Class B is said to have advanced more quickly than Class A, and just as Sludgey lunges for someone, have Yamagi use Poltergeist to manipulate him into a steel drum barrel being held by Yui, let her shrink it down to a good tight fit before dropping it, then have Juuzo soften the ground to half-sink it, top down, then resolidify the earth, trapping Sludgey for later removal.  Ta da, a neat demonstration of the next generation outperforming the old generation when it comes to on-the-fly teamwork and decisive action even when no one individual has the perfect quirk for solving a problem.

So you think class B is better than class A?

Btw, that thing you mentioned with the teamwork actually answers one question I had. I remember, back when Death Arms returned and helped after he had quit, you stated that you loved the premise, but that you were left disappointed that he solved a problem that he was suited for solving.

Now, I gotta be honest. I thought what you wanted was for the heroes to solve problems that they were 100% not the right person to be dealing with. Like someone with a fire Quirk having to put off a fire, or something like that.

I was actaully going to question how that would be possible, since MHA has set up it's power sytem in a very "rock, paper, scissors" sort of way. The only exceptions to this are Deku and Shigaraki, who just do whatever they want. But what you were talking about turned out to not be as extreme as I thought. 😅

Although, I'm gonna play devil's advocate here for a second. Wouldn't the 1-B students trapping the Sludge villain through teamwork still count as the right people with the right Quirks solving the problem they were meant to solve?

Wouldn't it need to be a success from people whose Quirks aren't suited for the job at all, and don't even synergize well when put together?

Then again, that's asking for the impossible. Or just straight up plot armor.

So that just leaves Machia, Mina, and Shinsou.  And honestly, rather than having to power through it, I’d rather see Mina, in particular, talk her way out of it.

Me: Asks how they would write Mina's moment better.

Stillness-in-green: Tells me how he would write better moments for everyone except Mina.

Me:

I'm merely joking.

Although it is a little disappointing. This is essentially just Mina doing what she already did once before. There's nothing noteworthy, admirable or impressive about it. I would even dare to say there's no character growth.

I obviously don’t expect her and Machia to wind up breakdancing together when the stakes are as high as they are, but Mina would have at least a bit of an opening—her encounter with Machia in middle school wherein she lied to him about where the Springer Agency is.  I don’t for a moment think that Machia’s forgotten her smell—I doubt he forgets anyone’s, though he may or may not care about them otherwise.

For this version of the scene, I’d probably play Machia as more ambivalent—tired of being abandoned over and over again by the people he’s tried so hard to be loyal for, so not immediately inclined to run off after them, open to a bit more dialogue.  He doesn’t fall for Shinsou for the same reasons I outlined above, so Shinsou and Mina have to talk Machia into acting—or at least stop him from just rumbling off to bury himself under a mountain for the next decade or two.

I don’t know how they’d go about making that argument.  Honestly, I don’t really think there’s anything in the story for Mina or Shinsou to fall back on (by which I mean earlier panels Horikoshi’s assistants can look up and copy/paste into the storyboard to accent a dramatic speech).  Maybe they could ask him why he’s so loyal to All For One and find some commonality, either through heteromorph discrimination or bias against villains.

Maybe Machia is torn on his loyalty, betrayed by AFO one too many times to want to help him but not sure where that leaves him on supporting Shigaraki.  Hearing this, Mina brings up that AFO is threatening Shigaraki right now, but also that a friend of Mina’s is trying to stop AFO/help Shigaraki,[12] so maybe Machia could help them with that and then decide?  Machia doesn’t trust her due to the Springer Agency thing, but that same experience does lead him to believe her when she says she just wants to help people, not hurt them.

That last bit has the benefit of providing an explicit reason for why Mina uses her quirk nigh-exclusively as a watery defense barrier or to take out inanimate objects: She long ago made an active choice not to use her acid against sentient people.  This would give her some room for a little motivation-establishing flashback of her own—maybe canonize that theory about her chipperness being at least in part a front!—and provide a nice alternative to the current state of Mina’s narrative, which has spent nearly 400 chapters refusing to allow her the same free hand people like Bakugou and Kaminari take with their quirks for no established reason.

Yeah, I don't know. Doesn't sound like what I would've liked either.

One major problem I immediately see, is that letting Machia go would make her look really bad. I can already imagine the fandom making memes dunking on her, calling her useless and making fun or her for failing everyone and possibly getting multiple people killed by letting Machia traverse across the city.

It wouldn't be the first time it's happened.

Remember in Kirishima's flashback, when she gave Machia random directions? In the anime they actually changed the line. Instead, she gave him directions to a police station. Why did they change it? Idk, maybe Bones and Horikoshi thought it was more responsible of her to send him to the police instead of giving him random directions. Whatever the case, "being responsible" was not what people took out of that.

People begun shitting on her and making jokes about how she got an entire police station killed.

I was so mad. I remember I was looking forward to the anime getting to that part. Finally, one of the only praise worthy things she's gotten to do in the series getting adapted. I couldn't wait to see what people had to say about her, to see them gushing over how she was so brave protecting her friends... and then the fandom reminded me why I fricking hate it here. 😤

This doesn’t give Shinsou much to do, but that’s okay: his moment comes against AFO instead.

Oh, of course. Mina only gets to talk and do nothing heroic. But Shinso gets to face off against the story's Big Bad. Sounds just like something that would happen in the manga.

Don't mind me. I'm just gonna be here, sad.

Just kidding, btw. Well, maybe I'll cry a little.

I realize that Mina's fans want her to have a big badass moment, and simply talking down a confrontation is not the kind of thing that tends to get viewed as "badass" in a shounen battle manga. Sorry about that.

Yeah, that was kind of what I was hoping for, unfortunately. 😔

Eh, it doesn't matter. It's only natural that you would have difficulty thinking of something for a character that you're not particularly interested in. Thanks anyways. Even though it's not what I would've done for Mina, it was fun reading your ideas.

She can still jump around and dodge a lot while giving her pitch? Maybe she could get a big badass moment later on?

Well, if this had happened in the story, I would've been left expecting for her to still get her badass moment. Cause that wouldn't have looked like one to me. Not after how they did her dirty with chapter 280.

What were you thoughts on that chapter, btw? And has your opinion on it changed with time? What did you think of the color page of chapter 280? I thought it was unintentionally (at least I assume it was unintentional) mocking and patronizing.

Anyway. Now, regarding the whole thing about Midnight's killer and what you said about how you feel about him getting arrested. It's completely understandable that you'd feel that way if you have a bias towards the villains. It makes complete sense. I'm the same way with the characters that I care about (as you've probably noticed from my deranged ramblings 😳. Sorry about those).

Me? I'm glad he's arrested. I just want to have every single plot thread tied up in a neat bow. Leaving Midnight's murder unresolved would be just as disrespectful as her funeral not being addressed, imo. And the way she got killed was already plenty disrespectful. Especially since Torino survived getting turned into a donut.

Disclaimer: I obviously don’t spend much time in the hero-fan circles of the fandom, so this is just my perception.  I’d be curious to get your perspective of Kaminari’s relative popularity, rvg!)

Eh, I don't pay much attention to Kaminari, he's alright, but not one of the characters I gravitate towards. But he's one of those characters that you see people calling underrated, and at the same time they have a decent amount of popularity. So I'd say Kaminari is in the middle. He's liked well enough by the fandom, but he's not crazy popular. Probably very popular with fujoshis though.

Then, when the actual traitor reveals landed (first the fake-out and then the real one), fandom deemed Hagakure an ungrateful bitch and Aoyama a whining coward.

Saddly, that would've happened to anyone that ended up being the traitor. The fandom is sucky like that. It's why I used to be so worried Mina would turn out to be the traitor, because I knew it would just get her even more flack.

Mineta is, by any measure, more problematic, and it's even worse that U.A./Aizawa are so blasé about him, but, at least from where I’m standing, he’s still more layered, more compelling, more dynamic, and speaks in more interesting ways to the world around him than Kaminari ever comes close to matching.

Well, you do you. Personally, I still don't like him much (I have my reasons, as I've already told you. They're petty, I know, but they're my reasons).

Having you tell me how you would've written Mina's part differently makes me want to do the same.

Would you be interested in that? I was actually planning on doing it all on this one post, but I've been writing for a while now (the whole day 😱), and I'm getting tired. I kinda feel like I should leave it for another post. Only if you would be interested in such a thing, of course.

There are a couple of things that I would change from the story. Unfortunately I'm not as drawn to the villains as you are, so I don't really have much to say regarding them, so I probably won't have much to say that interest you. Although one big change to the story I would make involves Chitose Kizuki, aka "Curious".

You have seen SalvagesMHA posts about their attempts to give each of the students a nemesis, right? He pits Mina against Curious, which coincidentally is something I was thinking of.

What did you think about that matchup, btw? I thought it sounded very interesting. And I liked the parallels that he drew between the two.

Would it be racist to pit the two characters of color against one another though? 😲. Silly joke. Ignore me, I'm dumb like that.

Anyways, thanks for reading again through my dumb ramblings if you did, and sorry once more for taking several months to reply.

Do let me know your thoughts. Or don't. If you're busy and there's other things you'd rather do, please tell me, so at least I know I shouldn't expect another lengthy reply.

Anyway, Bye. Have a good day, afternoon or night, whichever it is when you're reading this.

More and More on Mina, Machia and the MLA

For my readers other than @randomvongenerico, please have this peremptory list of this very lengthy post's contents to help gauge your interest:

Some more discussion on what is or isn’t, would or wouldn’t be blameworthy about various characters’ actions (or hypothetical actions) during the war arcs.   

More discussion about Mina, chiefly about how (and why) her acid powers are handled compared to all the male characters with fire powers, and the way her plot points are poorly set up by the narrative, with the result of shortchanging her development.   

Yet More Complaining About How The Story Is Handling Heteromorphobia, this time featuring a compare and contrast on quirk-based bias as it might affect Mina, Bakugou and Tokoyami, as well as a dissection of Shouji’s contention that the only possible way to know about the violent bigotry in the rural areas of the country is to be from them.   

Some fairly extensive spitballing in response to questions about how I would have handled the scene at Machia’s prison compound if I were writing it, as well as why I have trouble conceiving of anything Hero Society could do to Hose Face for killing Midnight that would actually feel like justice.   

A little bit of basic talk about Tumblr, its functionality and some relevant slang.   

Buried at the very bottom, I stand up in front of God and everyone and explain in brief why Kaminari is a worse character than Mineta, with some particular focus on Kaminari as emblematic of the conflict between what the series tells us versus what it shows us about the legality of quirk use in careers other than heroism.

Hi again, rvg.  Because it's been forever since our last post exchange, let me say again that I appreciate the apology and want to thank you for being such a good sport about it.  Last time I had something like your initial response, that person told me straight out that they’d been condescending and antagonistic on purpose, though they regretted having done so after my reply.  I appreciated the regret, but would have preferred they take a day or two to cool off in the first place!  That’s the experience I was bringing to your comments, but I’ll keep in mind what you said about lack of experience with initiating chats and Tumblr in general.

For what it’s worth, yeah, there is a character limit on both asks and replies, so that’s the trouble you were running into there!  You might also consider using a cut next time before a really long post, though if you’re on mobile, I recall that being a difficult-if-not-impossible feature to find, and it’s not as important as it used to be ever since Tumblr’s started adding default Expand drop-downs on long posts.  That aside, welcome (belatedly) to Tumblr!  I hope you find some good people to chat fandom with; I’m always open to some back and forth about things I know well enough to talk about, though I’m, er, decidedly unprompt with replies.  And, as noted, definitely more of a villain fan, so probably not the most fun person for discussions on the kids.

That said, to your replies!  Other readers should note that, while I wrote all this roughly in response-order to rvg’s points, I reorganized everything after the fact to group together the broad topics.  I’ve tried to provide some bare minimum context for anything that would otherwise be too much of a zero-context non-sequitur, but if anyone wants to see rvg’s comments in their intended order and context, their reblog can be found here.  Otherwise, hit the jump!

  

Would You Have Held It Against ___?

But would you hold it against Mina if she had actually done more substancial damage to Machia? Let’s say, not the face, but Machia’s fingers instead of his claws. Machia still doens’t feel any pain. Would you chastise Mina for it? Even though she’s actively saving Mt Lady by doing that?

It’s hard to say for sure, since I imagine that if Mina’s acid had hit Machia’s fingers instead of his claws, we probably would just have seen them abraded and singed, like how Dabi’s fire damage was drawn on Hawks, not with chunks of skin melting off and exposing naked bone.  Physical damage in BNHA just doesn’t work like that, at least not against named characters.  If Mina were doing realistic damage, I imagine everyone else would be too, and then I’d be criticizing all of them, because, holy shit, that is not okay to do to people, any people, and especially not when you’re acting as an agent of the state.

But hypothetically, no, I think I would be more lenient even if she did do concrete and permanent damage to Machia’s hands, and it’s because she’d be doing it to save Mount Lady.  Shinsou could have taken control of Machia and then just had him lie still while whoever was in charge of this facility redrugged him,[1] and that would have been fine by me—disappointing, sure, but only because Machia’s interesting and I’d like to get more on him than we do, not because I’d be critiquing Shinsou’s actions.

It’s specifically Shinsou and the rest choosing to weaponize Machia against AFO that I object to.  Mina harming Machia would be taking that action herself, to protect someone that’s right in front of her, risking no one’s life but her own in doing so.  Shinsou throwing Machia up against AFO—which he’d made the decision to do before hearing Machia’s angry grumbling—is risking Machia’s life, without Machia’s consent.  And it’s not even for the sake of saving anyone, at least not anyone that’s right there in that moment—AFO is fleeing.

Sure, he still presents a huge threat to lots of people, but given that we’d just seen proof that AFO did not know about Shinsou’s power,[2] they could also have used Machia to, for example, rapidly transport the heroes to some place they could set up a second ambush to trick AFO into responding to Shinsou.  I mean, good god, AFO’s the chattiest villain in the comic; Hawks lured him into at least two extended conversations even after he’d resolved that he needed to leave.  He’s a Demon Lord and thus categorically incapable of shutting up.  And that would have been that, really.  Take control and let the clock run out; end of problem.

It would have been anticlimactic as hell, so obviously that was never going to happen, but there’s no reason the heroes couldn’t try for it, you know?  Instead of the bone-headed decision to just hand AFO his most loyal soldier on a silver platter on the thin chances that they could either prevent the brainwashing from being broken at all or that Machia’s upset would translate to both the capability and willingness to attack his master.

I’ve observed this problem in a few different areas, that Horikoshi sometimes writes the heroes, particularly Hawks, as not taking actions or drawing conclusions that, from their perspective, should seem sensible, well-reasoned, and with solid chances of success; instead, they simply disregard possibilities they should logically be considering but which the reader knows are dead ends, or they benefit from things they could not have known at the time they acted.  That hurts immersion because it gives the heroes victories, both tactical and moral, that they simply haven’t earned.  Shinsou’s control of Machia is a particularly egregious example.

  

Speaking of Monoma. Since we were talking about the morality of Shinso’s Quirk. Would you say Monoma using his Quirk to copy a villain’s Quirk and use it on him and his allies, would also qualify as something that should be criticized? I’m curious.

Nah, I don’t think so.  Taking an opponent’s weapon and using it to subdue him is a perfectly valid tactic, especially since Monoma’s method doesn’t actually deprive his opponent of their weapon, just replicates it for his own use.  It really all does boil down to Shinsou’s method forcing people to fight and hurt their own allies.  Mina causing Machia physical harm, Monoma using a villain’s own weapon against them, even the heroes’ surprise attack: none of those are remotely on the same “holy shit that is a literal war crime” level as what the heroes planned in advance to have Shinsou do to Machia, and what he willingly agreed to do well before he found out that Machia was not as opposed as the heroes thought.

  

I mean, I get what you’re getting at. I’m just wondering. If the heroes hadn’t launched a suprise attack, and had left the villains do the first move and come to them, would you then be criticizing them for being irresponsible and incompetent instead? Sorry for going on a tangent, it’s just something I’ve noticed when it comes to readers criticizing the heroes. It’s either people complaining that the heroes are too ruthless, or that they’re too nice, naive or not pragmatic enough.

(This is in response to some discussion of the heroes' actions in the first war arc's raid on the villa+hospital lab, not the second war's divide and conquer plan.)

I actually don’t really have a huge problem with the surprise attack in principle—I might criticize Cementoss ripping the building in half when there could well have been people on those upper floors, but otherwise, it’s hard to imagine what else the heroes could generally have done to deal with the numbers they were dealing with.  I mean, it’s basically just a scaled-up version of the attack on the Hassaikai base, and I don’t have any moral quibbles with the way the heroes and police handled that.

Rather, my problem with the raid is that I thought the heroes were too effective given the way their forces and those of the PLF had been set up.  It’s not the tactic itself that’s the problem (though individual acts of worse violence within the attack, like Hawks killing Twice or the attempts to outright murder Shigaraki in the tube, are still an issue), it’s the finality, the totality, of how effective the attack was.

To be brief about it (because I’ve talked about this at length elsewhere), I don’t think the heroes should have known where all the PLF bases were, I don’t think they should have been as effective in disordered mass combat as the PLF, I think the advisors should have put up a better fight in all cases, and I think there should have been enough members of the PLF in significant positions of influence or power that the HPSC couldn’t uncover them all, leading to complications when those members realized their organization was under attack.

As it is, the heroes handily win every fight they have with the sole exception of Gigantomachia and Shigaraki.  The PLF is neatly swept off the table save for a few “remnants,” with no attention given to the practical difficulties of detaining tens of thousands of combatants with no motivation to let themselves be quietly arrested, much less how the justice system is going to handle trying and sentencing them all.  That has repercussions going forward, as well: heroes clearing the board of all the (named) PLF members save Skeptic leaves the bulk of villain forces in the subsequent arcs to be prison escapees, and man, if the PLF’s moral nuance has been squandered, the depiction of the prison escapees is even worse.

The raid is, of course, only the first of two big surprise attacks the heroes manage.  I have significantly more issues with the second one, but most of that boils down to the fact that the divide and conquer/Tempt and Trap plan feels crueler, meaner, and much more openly aimed at extrajudicial murder.  And like, that would all be fine and in-character for Hero Society in general and Hawks, the main planner, specifically, but with Deku, Shouto and Uraraka all starting to think Save Villains thoughts, and fresh off the traitor reveal, the kids should never have been as collectively okay with the second war’s tactics as the story has presented them as being.  To echo an older complaint, good god, what universe is Horikoshi living in that he thinks the people that converted a place of learning into an arena they call a “coffin in the sky” are the heroes?

  

I was under the impression Midnight was off to the side from where the MLA minions were passing by, and the Skull Mask guy took a detour to kill her.

I’m not sure from this if you’re explaining how you read Hose Face’s attack on Midnight at the time, or if you’re maintaining that that’s an accurate read, so just to clarify, here are the panels in question:

As you can see, the PLF guys’ path through the woods has them coming in from directly behind Midnight.  Hose Face calls out that he’ll take care of her once they get close enough for the reader to make out who they are, at which point he gets out in front of Scarecrow and hits Midnight from the same direction as their initial approach: directly behind.  He most certainly doesn’t take a detour of any kind, but rather chooses the action that is going to get his group through the obstacle with the least amount of time and effort possible—entirely his prerogative as the highest-ranked member of the Guerilla Warfare regiment on-scene.

  

But if we classify this entire conflict as a war, wouldn’t that mean that both sides are free to use whatever tacticts and methods they feel like as long as it’s not a war crime?

If we classify it as war is irrelevant if the side aligned with the current ruling authority hasn’t done so themselves.  I imagine the Japanese government is in no hurry to validate the terrorists on an international stage by acknowledging that they’re numerous and dangerous enough to declare actual, formal war against!  Calling it a war drags in a whole pile of wartime conventions Japan has signed numerous treaties about; it grants the opposing side some legitimacy as a cohesive, organized force that will need to be negotiated with down the line.  As long as you’re calling it a police action, you don’t have to negotiate shit until you get to the plea deals!  Team Hero never declared war here, so yeah, I still expect them to carry out their plans and actions accordingly.

Also, in the thematic/meta sense, I expect the heroes to either conduct themselves as heroes—admirable, upright, heroic—or face the narrative consequences when they fail to live up to that ideal.  The hyper-encapsulated version of this conundrum is the recurring idea that attacking Shigaraki never actually prevents Shigaraki from coming back worse and more dangerous next time; the heroes are never going to achieve a different result by attacking him again but harder this time, and that’s why Deku is set up to finally try something different.[3]  I would just like it if what’s true on the micro-level could even be attempted on the macro-level.  Or, in other words, if the narrative is going to tell us that saving villains is the correct path, it can’t only demonstrate that for the villains with known-to-the-heroes sympathetic backstories.

  

General Mina Points

Regarding your analysis about Mina’s acid being underpowered because it’s harder/less believable to downplay the effects of acid than fire/explosions/etc. in Shounen Damage Logic, I think we’ll have to agree to disagree.  I don’t see anything wrong with just showing the Nebulous Abrasion Damage that’s the ubiquitous, default mode of illustrating nonspecific injury in this comic for Mina’s acid the same way we get it for the boys.

I can see your argument, but like, just for example, when Endeavor first encounters a Noumu, he bathes it in fire under the assumption that it’s a normal villain and then says he’s surprised it’s still up because he’s never seen anyone stay conscious after that attack.  Bathing someone in flames in real life is not a “knock them out” kind of attack; it’s a “severe burn ward for months” kind of attack.  If Endeavor’s been throwing that around at random criminals for thirty years, we are plainly very far away from realistic damage, and I’d be perfectly satisfied with treating Mina’s acid the same way.

If I had to take a guess as to why Horikoshi’s so staunchly avoided letting Mina cut loose—other than regressive gender politics—I’d say it’s that acid simply feels nastier or more morally dubious than fire.  Fire has positive as well as negative connotations; acid’s a lot more, shall we say, unilateral in the collective imagination, especially given what’s going to turn up if you run a web search for “acid attacks.”

To look at it in JRPG logic (and I don’t care if AFO’s admiration stems from a comic; that comic was clearly playing with Dragon Quest tropes), acid is pretty much the same thing as poison, and poison effects are chiefly the realm of enemy characters.  It smacks of underhandedness or cowardice in anything more cognizant than roving toxic plants or venomous beasts.  Certainly you see the occasional party member specialized for status effects who can inflict poison damage on enemies, but I can’t readily think of a main character that does.[4]

Perhaps, then, because readers are somewhat conditioned to think of acid as particularly dangerous and nasty compared to fire, and because there’s a limit to how morally dubious Horikoshi is willing to (consciously) write the students, especially the girls, Mina’s sharply limited in how she’s allowed to use her acid.

That said, I got a very hearty laugh from, “Just look at Dabi.  He can’t even kill himself with fire,” so thank you very much for that.

  

It’s as if Horikoshi only ever figures out what to do with Mina retroactively instead of in the moment (e.g. there were no interactions between Kirishima and Mina until AFTER Kirishima’s backstory, we never got any hint that would connect Mina’s and Midnight’s characters until AFTER Midnight died, when Mina speaks about not giving in to vengeance she references SHOJI’S WORDS which happened in HIS FLASHBACK, and then this whole chapter is technically a flashback too when you think about it).

That’s a big oof, all right.  I know about the Midnight non-connection and the issue of Mina’s anti-vengeance words having first been delivered by Shouji and relayed to the audience by Koda (it being his flashback, rather than Shouji’s), but I didn’t know there was no indication of Kiri-Mina connection until after his flashback.  Wowzers.

  

But also, in one of my comments I had left a link to a post analizing Kirishima’s and Mina’s characters and their dynamic. I don’t know if you checked it out or not, but it was a pretty interesting read. If you did read it, let me know your thoughts on it.

Apologies for not responding to that; I hadn't clicked it because I just wasn't terribly interested in the topic. Having checked it now, I can say that I'm unlikely to read it because I've encountered this person's meta before and, even at a glance, found it to be flawed for reasons I am not comfortable gabbing about in a public space. I'm sure they make some valid points, but I will have to respectfully bow out of reading and commenting on it here.

  

But what about Mina telling Kirishima that “now they’re even” though?

(This is re: my contention that Mina saves Shinsou, not Kirishima, from the Sludge Villain, and that Kirishima was never in any danger from the Sludge Villain.)

I mean, she can say it, but that doesn’t mean I have to believe that she/Horikoshi are accurately portraying the stakes involved.

  

Just for the record, you’re not saying that Mina not giving in to revenge isn’t noble in and of itself. What she does is indeed good.  You’re saying it doesn’t have any emotional weight because Mina has always been a morally good character, so you never thought she would ever give in to revenge in the first place. Correct?

Correct!  As I’ve said, Mina has perfectly healthy emotional regulation: when she experiences negative emotions like anger, guilt, or grief, she doesn’t dwell on them; she vents them to friends and finds healthy ways to channel them into bettering herself and the world and people around her.  She’s got a great head on her shoulders!  But all of that means that her giving into anger about Midnight’s death was never a remotely convincing threat to me.  Of course she wouldn’t; there’s never been a moment that foreshadowed that she was in the slightest danger of harboring that kind of obsessive, vindictive grudge.

That being the case, it feels unfair of Horikoshi to pin a big dramatic monologue on a desire for revenge which Mina was never shown to possess to any greater degree than any of her classmates.  She’s one of the last hero-aligned characters I’d have guessed if you’d asked me who was going to get a beat like that in the endgame.

(To anticipate the obvious question, Aizawa would have been my first guess; he’s even been written for it properly in the way he and Mic have responded to Shigaraki—clearly holding a grudge for something that would have happened to their classmate when Shigaraki was all of six years old.  Conversely, while plenty of the 1-A kids could have believably carried a “struggling with vengefulness” plot if they’d been written with it from earlier on, I don’t think there’s a single one of them who feels like a good match for it in their current incarnations.  Iida’s moved on from his Stain days too smoothly to buy it from him, Bakugou’s only real obsession is Deku, and Deku already had a whole arc of being obsessively negative and driven by dark desires to find and deal with a villain.  If any student was going to show up to the fight with bloody-minded revenge on the brain, it should have been Shishikura.)

  

But What About the Heteromorphobia, Tho’?

(Warning: Incoming off-topic harping about Shouji and the inane resolution of the hospital attack.)

I have even seen someone make a post on Reddit arguing that Shinso being discriminated for his Quirk makes no sense because it’s not villanous, and that it makes more sense for characters like Bakugo, Mina and Tokoyami to be discriminated because they have more villanous looking Quirks. I don’t really agree with everything that guy said. But he did bring up a good point. How come Mina doesn’t get side eyes from people due to her Quirk like Shinso does?

I will have to disagree with Reddit User That Guy that Shinsou’s quirk should be viewed as less villainous than Bakugou’s.  It sounds like he was conflating heteromorphobia with the bias against villains/"villainous" quirks, and while there is overlap, they’re still distinct categories.  Shinsou’s quirk inherently subordinates one’s physical body, allowing him to force his targets to act against their will, or potentially take the fall for things they didn’t willingly do.  Of course people are nervous about it or think it’s more villainous than heroic!

Conversely, the Number 2 Hero has been attacking criminals with fire for decades now, so I think the BNHA general public is more than ready to accept a hero whose quirk lets him fire off explosions.  The commonly accepted idea in the fandom is that “flashy and offensive quirks” are the ones most valued in heroes.  I think that’s a bit oversimplified—Crust was the Number 6 Hero and his quirk was neither—but it’s certainly true that purely elemental quirks (fire, lightning, wind, earth-shaping), no matter how damage-dealing they are, don’t tend to get treated as villainous in nature.  The real “villainous quirks” in the series tend to be the ones that are more creepy, dark, invasive, or impure.  Even Dabi’s fire is that ethereal blue, like spirit fires, instead of everyday orange-red!

Bakugou’s quirk is much closer to the “pure elemental” category than anything very villainous and, indeed, when he got kidnapped from the training camp and that one journalist was suggesting that he might have turned to villainy already, he based that suggestion on Bakugou’s behavior, his conduct during the Sports Festival.  Nothing was said about his quirk at all, but rather his recent public demonstrations of violence and “mental instability.”  That’s perfectly consistent, I think, with the biases we see elsewhere.[5]

Tokoyami has the potential to get hit by both the villainous quirk bias and the heteromorphobia, but I think Japan seeing ravens as emblematic of wisdom rather than death and rot would mean his bird head is less ill-seen there than it would be in the West.  I don’t think it would take much more than the proverbial One Bad Day to get him to a very bad place indeed, though—there’s a reason Mr. Compress judged him a good potential recruit!  Tokoyami was rescued before it became an issue, but if he hadn’t been, I’m sure we would have seen the same journalist mentioned above making similar statements about Tokoyami and his dark quirk/mien.

Mina’s an interesting case study in not experiencing a lot of the same sorts of discrimination others in similar situations do.  She has three distinct heteromorphic traits—her skin, her eyes, her horns—as well as having a potentially extremely deadly quirk which, as I discussed above, could easily attract judgmental side-eye because of the cultural view of acid.  So why doesn’t she seem to face discrimination?

As I said in the post you’re replying to—and as you mentioned is a common headcanon—I think a lot of it boils down to her relentlessly chipper attitude.  If she had, for example, Mustard’s personality, or Muscular’s drive to violence, would people be quicker to say that her Acid is a “villain quirk”?  If she glared more, would people be more creeped out by her eyes?  It’s possible, I think, that we would actually see her facing some of this if we spent more time with her, but the narrative doesn’t make that time, at least not anywhere Kirishima can see it.

  

Well, if I had to guess, I’m sure you would say that would make her a more interesting character. You might get to be interested in her character, which then would probably mean you would be even more upset and disappointed with this chapter.

Ahaha, very fair.  Honestly, Class A would have benefited tremendously from more kids with bite to them.  A Mina whose competitiveness had some real fervor to it, or a Mina who had some heaviness in her backstory she was faking her way through dealing with, would have been a good contribution to that.

  

It really sucks that Horikoshi had to justify Shoji being the only one to experience prejudice by clarifying that heteromorph discrimination is only still prevalent in small villages. I feel like it robbed characters like Tsuyu, Mina, Tokoyami and Koda of being part of an actual narrative and get more depth and development.

Before I talk about this, let me clarify something: Shouji’s line about what his classmates know about heteromorphic discrimination is an example of very crucial nuance being wildly different between translations.

The fan scanlation suggested that Tokoyami and Koda, who grew up in cities, must feel like such violent heteromorphobia resembles something out of a textbook, with the implication that the textbook in question is a history book.  They’re presumed to think that blood-cleansing rituals and children with scars like Shouji are artifacts of a terrible past, not a modern-day concern.

The official Via release suggested that Tokoyami and Koda could know that stuff like this still happens in rural areas because they might have read about it in textbooks.  They’re presumed to know that such rituals and scarred children do exist as modern concerns, but only out in the boonies.

Those are completely different propositions!  Which one was accurate was far beyond my capability to judge, but the official translation did feel a little off to me, so, as I usually do in such situations, I brought it to my trusty Translator Sis.  For possibly the first time ever,[6] she told me that Viz had this one wrong—that Shouji’s implication, to her eye, was indeed that T&K would think such violence was limited to the past, not that it was limited to rural areas.

That established, I was actually talking about that line from Shouji with a friend the other day!  I was aggravated that the writing would portray city-born heteromorphs as so oblivious to the problems facing them in other parts of the country when that seems so counter to my (American) perception of the ways members of threatened groups communicate danger to one another.

My friend reminded me that silence is a much more common Japanese way of addressing (or attempting to address) minority discrimination: trying to make a problem go away by starving it of conversational oxygen, treating oppression like an infection that needs to be quarantined until it dies out on its own.  In that light, it’s entirely possible that Tokoyami and Koda might not know this stuff because no one around them thinks it would be helpful to tell them if it’s not a problem they’re directly dealing with.  A lot of people propose the same approach to burakumin issues in real life, for example.

Also, technically Shouji doesn’t say that Koda and Tokoyami don’t experience heteromorphobia at all, just that the idea of fear and hatred that extreme, that violent, must seem like something out of a textbook, rather than something that happens here and now in certain parts of the country.  Also too, Tokoyami and Koda are teenagers; I can forgive them not having much understanding of life outside their own circle of experience.

That all said, it still feels more than a little telling that Horikoshi thinks everyone in Shouji’s whole class, including and especially all the other heteromorphs, could never have heard in their entire lives about acts of bigotry-driven violence against heteromorphs being carried out in the here and now.

While it’s true that silence is a widely accepted way to address these sorts of issues in Japan, they’re hardly universal!  Activist groups are out there trying to raise awareness, trying to get their issues on the floor of the Diet in hopes of getting laws passed about them.  There’s not some kind of media blackout on talking about it, and, indeed, I’ve read any number of articles from Japanese publications online covering such topics.

In BNHA, however, silence does seem to be universal.[7]

No one but Shouji is from a remote enough place that they knew about violent heteromorphobia.  No one recognized it as a thing that e.g. disadvantages heteromorphic heroes in the public approval ratings.  No one tripped over a magazine article about it and got curious enough to look the topic up online.  No one’s heroic mentors or family members have talked to them about it (particularly egregious with Koda, given the fairly strong implication that his own mother suffered it).  No one had a patch of morbid interests (Tokoyami) that led them to dabble in reading about real-life horror stories of human hatred, or an interest in how their society came to be that might have led them to reading about the CRC and realizing it still exists in the modern day.

They attend a hero school, and yet Shouji seems to be the only one with an inkling that there are heteromorphs out there who need, and have been needing, heroes.

That’s all a lot to ask of the reader, but what really pushes it past plausibility to me is what happened with the Ordinary Woman.  How close to the surface must violent heteromorphobia be even in the cities if the current state of Japan brings it all right back into the open in a matter of weeks?  That none of the students other than Shouji have ever even imagined that heteromorphs can still be victimized in this way represents an over-the-top ignorance that I have to read as either a bleak condemnation of the shallow focuses of heroes or reflective of Horikoshi’s own beliefs about discrimination and the understanding of it possessed by those who aren’t immediately threatened by it.

Whichever is the case, and with Spinner’s higher brain functions out of commission, it leaves Shouji carrying the whole plot on his back and he just can’t do it, both because the audience hasn’t had enough time with him to buy it and because the answers the series uses him as a vehicle to deliver are facile, victim-blaming nonsense.

...And here’s where I admit that even if the hospital attack had climaxed with a whole bunch of heteromorphs from Class A and B and the Pro Hero ranks acknowledging the mob’s feelings while pleading with them to not give into hatred and to stand down, I would still have issues if the resolution didn’t involve concrete suggestions and promises about how the heroes would address the mob’s grievances going forward.  Which canon very much did not, and just adding more voices to Shouji’s wouldn’t have changed that.  But my whole rant about that can be found in the relevant chapter posts, so I’ll not repeat it further here.

  

How Would I Have Done It Instead?

Let’s be real here for a second. Even if Mina had been the one to stop Machia. How would she even do that? I remember back when people were talking about when Mina would get her moment to shine, and that it would involve Machia again, I had serious doubts about that idea ever becoming true because I couldn’t think of a single thing she could do against him. I thought for sure Mina’s moment was going to be relegated to fighting Midnight’s killer, since that seemed more within her capabilities. In the end her shinning moment did indeed involve Machia, and no one really had a confrontation with Midnight’s killer. I actually want to hear your thoughts, if you happen have a thing in mind that you think Mina could’ve done to be the one to stop Machia. I’d love to hear it.+ Btw, since you brought it up, in what way could she have defeated the Sludge villain that would’ve been witty, or skillful? If you don’t have any ideas you don’t need to answer. It’s not that important. I’m just curious of the posibility.

Okay, so, this is the part that hung me up for the longest, because there are a few wildly different possible answers here.

The real truth is, if I had been writing this whole shebang from the start, this confrontation would never have happened this way at all.  Just off the top of my head, I think there’s no compelling reason AFO couldn’t have sent Toga into the hospital to activate and retrieve Kurogiri weeks ago, and with Kurogiri back in play, getting Machia would obviously have gone differently.  I would also never have disposed of the MLA as comprehensively as Horikoshi did; I would have had at least one or two instances where an MLA member who didn’t get uncovered by the HPSC in time was in a position to shift the balance in the villains’ favor—maybe one would have been with the police somewhere.

Barring a top-to-bottom rewrite of the whole arc, however? Well, I'd still say that, feeling as strongly as I do about how morally dubious this whole second war has been, even if I were telling this scene with the same components, I probably wouldn’t be writing towards a hero success because I don’t think the heroes have earned it.  The baby steps the kids have taken towards Saving Villains don’t go far enough for me to want to see the villains defeated here.  The biggest changes there would have been twofold:

1) Shinsou’s voice changer play shouldn’t have worked on Machia.

Machia has a sense of smell so incredibly acute that, if I were trying to logically explain how it worked, I’d make it a psychic ability that just happened to manifest as scent-based.  We’re talking about a guy who could track down Shigaraki after a teleport of over 270 miles, who could smell AFO’s vestige stirring from almost fifty miles away.  There’s absolutely no reason he should think for even a second that AFO is standing right outside his prison.

Now, we do know replications of AFO’s voice has an effect on Machia—we saw as much as the beginning of MVA!  But I would contend that back then, he didn’t have a big loud response to the recording, just curled up around his radio and started loudly purring.  In the scene with Shinsou, he actually responds as though he thinks AFO is there, but again, I don’t buy that Machia should have fallen for that, especially since he was woken by Hose Face’s device emulating AFO’s voice, which would have given his unbelievably keen senses enough time to register that it’s only the voice, not the man, that he's hearing.

But, with Machia up and not immediately prey to Shinsou’s ploy, the other big change I’d make with him becomes apparent.  The series has proved willing and eager to shitcan everything Shigaraki gained in MVA, but not me.  Shigaraki won Machia’s loyalty at the end of MVA, and if Machia’s cranky with AFO for leaving him behind again,[8] that doesn’t mean he couldn’t still have loyalty to AFO’s successor.

Given that his loyalty to Shigs is predicated on his loyalty to AFO, it might seem logical that AFO squandering the latter would free Machia of obligation to the former.  That’s a fair take.  But if it were me, I’d capitalize on Machia’s keen senses and what he was present for in MVA—Shigaraki saying that his followers should do whatever they want.  Hell, if the endgame likes flashbacks so much, let’s have a flashback of Shigaraki and Machia actually talking in ways that would let Machia distinguish Shigaraki and AFO.

In other words, I think Machia’s loyalty should supersede his anger.  If he gets free, his first reaction should be to go to Shigaraki, not to focus on his anger.  That way, it’s not a hero win rewarding their gross sky coffin tactics, but AFO doesn’t get quite what he wanted out of it, either.  This would be one part of focusing the narrative back on Shigaraki and his allies, rather than ruining Shigaraki’s hard work by letting AFO take over and piss it all away.

Incidentally, I will concede that, just because Machia shouldn’t have responded like a dupe to Shinsou mimicking AFO’s voice, that doesn’t mean Machia might not have responded at all—he could have rebuked Shinsou for trying to emulate Master, and that would have worked for Shinsou’s purposes just as well!  So to avoid that, I would add one more element to a flashback showcasing Shigaraki and Machia’s relationship post-Deika: have Shigaraki showing Machia a picture of Shinsou and warning him to be on the lookout for this kid, and to not respond to anything he says.

Horikoshi loves to tie back plot beats to pre-established elements, and one such element is, as I footnoted earlier, that AFO and Shigaraki watched the U.A. Sports Festival together, so they should both know good and well who Shinsou is and what he can do.  Knowing Shinsou’s SF-era capabilities doesn’t predict the voice changer, of course, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that, if the heroes are pushed to a point of desperation and they have access to a brainwasher, even a non-licensed one, they will try to use that brainwasher on whoever they think is their highest priority target.  Quite frankly, all of the higher-ups and key players should have known about Shinsou.

2) The kids shouldn’t have been tipped off that they were facing Midnight’s killer, or it should have come up in a different context.

Nothing interesting comes of the way the canon deploys it, thanks to Mina’s vengeful feelings having no grounding in the story, and the blunt way it’s brought up serves only to make Hose Face easy for the reader to write off.  As I said in the chapter post where he brought up “that U.A. teacher,” there’s no real reason for him to be focusing on Midnight specifically unless he has a personal reason to think she’s emblematic of the things about Hero Society he hates, or unless he was tuned in enough to U.A. personalities (knew who was teaching there, watched the Sports Festival to get a handle on its students, etc.) to realize that he was facing students he could potentially rattle by bringing up their teacher’s death.

The latter would offer a less awful read on Hose Face’s personality: He’s not bringing up the death out of pure sadism, but as a psychological tactic.  The former would give him some real characterization and motives while also giving the kids something to argue against, rather than the easiest possible reaction of, “Hay did u kno Might Makes Right iz bad?”

Alternatively, if Hose Face has nothing personal against Midnight at all, and doesn’t have an encyclopedic memory of hero wannabe high schoolers, he has no reason to specifically mention Midnight.  Even if the narrative must see her death “answered” in some fashion, it still doesn’t follow that the kids must get emotional closure for someone they lost to the undeclared war they were drafted into.  The audience can take some solace in perceived karma, but lacking a naturalistic way for Mina and the rest to connect those dots, the kids should just have to deal with him as they would any other opponent they come up against, because, surprise surprise, when you’re fighting in a war, you’re not guaranteed to see and know who’s on the opposite side of the gun that just shot down your best friend.

As another alternative, if we go with the idea that Mina was struggling with dark desires for revenge, maybe she should have brought it up!  Not as an accusation—again, she has no way of knowing she’s facing Midnight’s killer without him saying it—but just out of generalized fury with her opponents as a group, the same way Aizawa and Gran Torino hold the pain of their loved ones against Shigaraki when Shigaraki is not the one responsible for causing that pain.[9]  Maybe a more openly vengeful Mina could just freely state that her aim is to take down the PLF to avenge Midnight, only for the enemy in front of her to answer, “Midnight?  You mean that woman I killed in the woods on the day of Liberation?  Here’s your chance, then, girl.”  (Or whatever.)

Of course, Shonen Jump is not in the habit of validating heroes craving revenge, so Mina in that scenario would fail because rage would make her sloppy, same as with Deku, Iida, and so on.

So, in a scenario where Machia is up and not falling prey to Shinsou, but rather prioritizing getting to New Master Shigaraki, and the PLF is likewise loyal to Shigaraki and not AFO, I’d just let it work, because I’d be slanting this whole combat towards an overall heroic loss.  Give Mina a face to obsess over until next time but also let Kirishima get a good eyeful of it so he at least knows there’s a serious problem with his best friend and one of his hero inspirations.

Mineta would have a chance to weigh in, too, as he's a good middle ground: he's got his own anger about Midnight, who he adored, but he's also worried about how that anger looks on Mina. Mineta always worries about his classmates, but he's shared a pretty fair amount of incidental screentime with Mina specifically over the course of the series, ranging from her sweetly offering to put a harem moment into the band performance just for him to stuff like the Clockwork Orange gag, as well as more serious stuff like Mineta being the first one to ask aloud if Midnight's dead, with Mina warmly, and with a confidence it turns out she doesn't truly feel, reassuring him that Midnight's fine.

(I've said before that Mineta should have had more to do in the confrontation with Midnight's killer, but that's not just about his fondness for her. It's also about him being the first to question if the heroes didn't just make the whole situation worse, and, if Mina really took Midnight's death so hard it had her thinking about revenge, it should also have been about Mina and Mineta's shared experience surrounding that death.)

That all said, I suspect that what you really meant is, how would I have handled this scene if I had to use all the same pieces and be writing towards a heroic victory?  So let me at least touch on that.

As far as Hose Face goes, I actually think Kirishima might have been better suited to talking to him?  Like, Mina’s been friendly with people, sure, but I don’t really buy her most pivotal, “shining moment” scene being a bunch of talk about the strength of the weak coming together.  As best I recall—though do correct me if I’m wrong—it's never been shown that Mina regularly struggles with feelings of weakness or inadequacy.  It would be perfectly natural for her to do so after flubbing against Gigantomachia, to be sure, but the series doesn’t make the time to show it, so her lines about forming packs with others does not feel like a natural evolution for her arc.

Likewise, while she’s obviously been depicted as friendly and sociable from the beginning, her lines in 383 suggest that her sociableness has, and always has had, an ulterior motive: covering for her perceived weakness.  The lack of focus on her relationships from her own perspective makes that impossible to verify or even predict, so it just feels like it comes out of thin air, grabbed almost at random by the author in his attempt to find something, anything, Mina could say that would give Hose Face even a moment's pause.

Kirishima, on the other hand, has had a focus on his relationships, places where they’ve been pivotal to his own arc and the greater plot.  (I’m sure I don’t need to harp on this to you, rvg, but I’ll go over it to lay out my perception of these things.)  His relationship with Mina—the ways he’s trying to live up to her example, as well as his desire to support her when she falters—is a profound motivator for him, something we see much more explicitly and from his own perspective than we do Mina's feelings about him.  Meanwhile, while his relationship with Bakugou isn’t given that level of psychological exploration, it’s a critical factor in Bakugou’s rescue at Kamino, and we also get that bit of Bakugou specifically giving Kirishima some advice that leads to the latter’s Unbreakable mode.[10]

So like, we do get an angle on Kirishima and his sense of his own relationships with others.  That awareness allows him to demonstrate what is, I believe, the first unabashed moment of empathy for villains that a hero demonstrates in the entire series!  Specifically, I’m talking about that low-level gang mook he comes up against during his internship with Fat Gum.  That guy does a bunch of yelling about things that speak to Kirishima—fears of weakness, desire to be stronger, a need to help his “bros”—and Kirishima tries multiple times, even after being attacked, to express his understanding and sympathy for the man.

That being the case, if anyone were going to be able to make an impression on Hose Face via appealing to his sense of camaraderie and desire for strength, it seems to me that Kirishima has the better groundwork in place to sell the moment, regardless of whether he could successfully “reach” Hose Face in the way that’s being attempted with Shigaraki/Toga/Dabi.

As to the Sludge Villain, I’d probably either not have him there at all, given how much he claims he just wants to pretend to fight for a minute before getting the hell out of there.  He very much seems like he didn’t want to be here to begin with, so I can only assume that, despite AFO claiming the jailbreakers didn’t need to do anything for him but rampage, he very much did summon a bunch of them back anyway[11] for his final dramatic attack on Deku and Hero Society.

Assuming we’re stuck dealing with him, I’d probably let the Class B kids do it.   Have Mount Lady—who was there for the Sludge Villain’s rampage using Bakugou, and therefore knows what Sludgey looks like and that he can possess people—yell for people to stay away from him.  Let there be a moment of panic and confusion, where it looks for a moment like a repeat of the mess in Chapter 1 where no one had the exact right answer to deal with him, so no one’s willing to step up.

Then, in a 1-2-3 combo move that reminds everyone why Class B is said to have advanced more quickly than Class A, and just as Sludgey lunges for someone, have Yamagi use Poltergeist to manipulate him into a steel drum barrel being held by Yui, let her shrink it down to a good tight fit before dropping it, then have Juuzo soften the ground to half-sink it, top down, then resolidify the earth, trapping Sludgey for later removal.  Ta da, a neat demonstration of the next generation outperforming the old generation when it comes to on-the-fly teamwork and decisive action even when no one individual has the perfect quirk for solving a problem.

…This, of course, is assuming there’s no good way to actually get the Sludge Villain to talk in more depth about why he didn’t want to be here from the beginning and had to be threatened into doing it at all.  It would be nice if someone could broach that topic!  Maybe a quick not-too-serious handful of lines from Mineta, who has his own history of running in terror from fights he doesn’t think he can win.  But even with some sympathy, I imagine Sludge Villain would try to run away regardless, on the (well-grounded) suspicion that heroes are going to want him to go back to prison and finish his sentence, and that’s when B-tachi could step in.

So that just leaves Machia, Mina, and Shinsou.  And honestly, rather than having to power through it, I’d rather see Mina, in particular, talk her way out of it.  This draws on two things.  First, there’s the fact that she’s one of the kids who failed her Final Exams, with her and Kaminari being unable to figure out how to utilize their strengths to get out of Nedzu’s rat maze.   I’d love to see her demonstrate that she’s grown from having no plans but to brute force her way through obstacles!  Second, there’s this sequence:

This is a bit exaggerated, obviously, but the quick demonstration of how quickly and smoothly Mina is able to approach, scold, bond with, then deescalate people in tense situations is rightly portrayed as remarkable.  But where is that facility in real confrontations with villains?  Nowhere, really, save that airless stab at remarking on common ground with Hose Face and the PLF.

I obviously don’t expect her and Machia to wind up breakdancing together when the stakes are as high as they are, but Mina would have at least a bit of an opening—her encounter with Machia in middle school wherein she lied to him about where the Springer Agency is.  I don’t for a moment think that Machia’s forgotten her smell—I doubt he forgets anyone’s, though he may or may not care about them otherwise.

For this version of the scene, I’d probably play Machia as more ambivalent—tired of being abandoned over and over again by the people he’s tried so hard to be loyal for, so not immediately inclined to run off after them, open to a bit more dialogue.  He doesn’t fall for Shinsou for the same reasons I outlined above, so Shinsou and Mina have to talk Machia into acting—or at least stop him from just rumbling off to bury himself under a mountain for the next decade or two.

I don’t know how they’d go about making that argument.  Honestly, I don’t really think there’s anything in the story for Mina or Shinsou to fall back on (by which I mean earlier panels Horikoshi’s assistants can look up and copy/paste into the storyboard to accent a dramatic speech).  Maybe they could ask him why he’s so loyal to All For One and find some commonality, either through heteromorph discrimination or bias against villains.

Maybe Machia is torn on his loyalty, betrayed by AFO one too many times to want to help him but not sure where that leaves him on supporting Shigaraki.  Hearing this, Mina brings up that AFO is threatening Shigaraki right now, but also that a friend of Mina’s is trying to stop AFO/help Shigaraki,[12] so maybe Machia could help them with that and then decide?  Machia doesn’t trust her due to the Springer Agency thing, but that same experience does lead him to believe her when she says she just wants to help people, not hurt them.

That last bit has the benefit of providing an explicit reason for why Mina uses her quirk nigh-exclusively as a watery defense barrier or to take out inanimate objects: She long ago made an active choice not to use her acid against sentient people.  This would give her some room for a little motivation-establishing flashback of her own—maybe canonize that theory about her chipperness being at least in part a front!—and provide a nice alternative to the current state of Mina’s narrative, which has spent nearly 400 chapters refusing to allow her the same free hand people like Bakugou and Kaminari take with their quirks for no established reason.

This doesn’t give Shinsou much to do, but that’s okay: his moment comes against AFO instead.

I realize that Mina's fans want her to have a big badass moment, and simply talking down a confrontation is not the kind of thing that tends to get viewed as "badass" in a shounen battle manga. Sorry about that. She can still jump around and dodge a lot while giving her pitch? Maybe she could get a big badass moment later on? I dunno; that's just what I would do, and obviously my priorities for what it would be cool for the kids to do are not the same as the broader readership's.

I'm also not sure where that leaves the confrontation with Midnight's killer; I suppose that depends on how things go between him and Kirishima in this scenario. Maybe they leave without him when he tries to protest Machia accepting the temporary alliance, or maybe he's soldier enough to take the help where he can get it and worry about later conflict later. Obviously, at any rate, this is happening in a scenario where he hasn't immediately blabbed that he killed Midnight; that can come up as a nasty surprise later on.

  

But does that mean you think Midnight’s killer should totally get away with it scott free and suffer no consequences?

Hnnnngghh that’s a tricky one because I am an unabashed MLA stan and villain supporter and therefore deeply biased about this.  Like, I don’t think soldiers should be put on trial for killing enemy soldiers, no, even high-ranking officer-types.  Obviously it’s different if they attack civilians or are otherwise breaking the codes surrounding conduct during warfare, but I do think Hose Face killing Midnight was basically a soldier killing someone he perceived as another soldier, with no undue cruelty or misconduct.

However, obviously the series itself—and the state authority the PLF is openly trying to tear down in-universe—would disagree with me!  In that context, I can’t even really call the guy “a high-ranking officer” because that would, as mentioned earlier, convey more authenticity to his position than his government wants to grant him.  As far as they’re concerned, he’s probably more like “a key figure in the recent anti-government actions carried out by the terrorist group calling themselves The Paranormal Liberation Front.”  People like that tend to get executed in prison a few years after their short, perfunctory trials.

I suppose the problem for me is that the series wants me to believe that the MLA is Very Bad and they all deserve to be Locked Up Forever, whereas I want more nuance from them than that?  Even setting aside the probable cult upbringing, I have significant trouble unabashedly blaming the PLF for their actions because the series has done nothing to convince me that less drastic avenues for change are available or even survivable for them.

This was a huge issue with the hospital attack sequence, but it applies to all sorts of the setting’s problems: Other than, “Insist that victims of oppression should focus on providing a good example to future generations,” what methods for addressing inequality does Hero Society have?  I want to know what the villains should have done, what they could have done, about systemic inequalities and repression that would have been effective against a government that employs agents like Lady Nagant and Hawks.

The picture Nagant paints is of a society waging a war against anyone who sought to change the Hero System, a war that many people who sought change never even knew they were already in.  The examples she provides of her targets are, of course, corrupt heroes and would-be terrorists, but what her HPSC President said was even farther reaching: that the purpose of her killing was to “preserve hope and faith” in heroes.

The HPSC legitimately does not seem to believe that any system other than the current one is feasible for maintaining stability, and that any attempt to shake or besmirch that system is no different than throwing the country back into the chaos of the advent of quirks.  What’s a few missing activists or tragic accidents compared to that?

Horikoshi seems desperate to have us pretend he never told us that the government his protagonists are defending actively grooms assassins to enforce the status quo, but that’s not a genie he can put back in the bottle.  I see the current events of the series as, in some form or another, basically inevitable because of Hero Society’s active, even violent resistance to change.  Midnight’s death for that cause is thus something I have tremendous difficulty thinking of as a crime that needs to be punished.

Does that mean I think Hose Face should get off scot-free?  Eeehhhhhhhhnnnngh I hate to say it this plainly, but…

Maybe it does?

The thing is, I know that Hose Face is, canonically, a quirk supremacist trying to violently overthrow the rule of law.  In real life, I have no sympathy for people trying to institute fascism, regardless of whether they’re using legal mechanisms or armed force.  But in the fictional world of BNHA, I have nothing but disdain for the way the MLA has been turned into a caricature of themselves in this final arc.  In that sense, my dissatisfaction with Hose Face’s treatment is really based on the ideal version of him and all the rest of the MLA I have in my head—the MLA that’s allowed to have nuance behind their extremism, the one overflowing with members motivated by their lived experience with the flaws in Hero Society, with a generous helping of radicalization from the fact that they’re a cult as much as they are an army.

BNHA has scrapped all that potential and left us with nothing but naked quirk supremacy to fill the void.  In an endgame that’s trying so, so hard to sell the readers on Saving Villains, that’s just poison to the story’s themes, and my villain stanning comes directly from that issue: demanding consistent treatment for the characters whose tragic backstories we haven’t been permitted to see.

Hose Face is clearly a bad person—heck, I was headcanoning him as a hard-edged, ruthless killer even when all we had to go on was him killing Midnight, long before he showed up to espouse open quirk supremacy and gloat about killing a schoolteacher, so it’s not like I ever thought he was a super nice dude or anything!  But I guess I just have trouble with the idea that the current system deserves to be the one to decide his fate, when it has, to all appearances, gone to extreme lengths to stamp out any perceived threats to itself, to the point that the narrative itself is now openly delegitimizing everyone who might otherwise offer cogent critique.

It would be different if we had never seen the dark side of the status quo and the villains really were all just shallow, two-dimensional monsters.  It would be different if the narrative had shown us legal, nonviolent and effective avenues for protest and change.[13]  It would be different if Hose Face had killed some rando uninvolved civilian.

As it is, though, Midnight was a combatant for a terrible, terrible status quo.  She might not have been using lethal means herself, but she was defending a demonstrably lethal, openly acknowledged as repressive, system.  I just can’t find it in myself to demand justice for the fact that she died for it.

But with all that being said, I also don’t think Midnight is a bad person.  She never knew about the government assassins, after all; she’s a member of the system she grew up in, the same way the kids are.  She presumably never saw the extent of the system’s flaws because she was never victimized by them.  At the end of the day, she still deserved to be properly mourned and remembered and it is a crock and a crime that we never got to see her funeral.

If anything, I think Midnight’s funeral would have been an excellent setting for a scene where the protagonists start asking questions about how things came to this, what went wrong and where, that their teacher had to die.  What is it about Hero Society that’s led to tens of thousands of dissidents, and why haven’t they ever heard of this discontent before now That would have given us considerably better set-up for a nuanced PLF, an opening to talk about Shouji’s experience of heteromorphobia, foreshadowing for Lady Nagant, and, to bring this back on-topic, the opportunity to really show Mina struggling with everything that happened as set-up for her later confrontation with Midnight’s killer.

  

Tumblr, How Does That Work?

Honestly I was expecting some sort of notification about your answers if and when you replied to me. Is that not a thing?

Making my reply a fresh post, or just posting replies in the comments section of the post you originally commented on, would not have notified you without me specifically tagging you, which at the time Tumblr wasn’t letting me do.  This problem seems to have cleared up, so you should have gotten a notification about this post going up because of your name being tagged at the very beginning!

What you see for people answering asks depends on a few things. If you send asks anonymously, you won't get a notification if/when the person answers them; you'll just have to keep an eye on their blog. If you send them with your name attached, as you did originally for me, I could choose to answer those asks privately, sending my replies back to your Inbox, or answer publically, posting my replies to my blog. Either way, you'd be notified!

For this round of responses, if I'd just replied to your reblog in comments as you did with my original post, or reblogged your reply with a reply of own instead of staring a new post, you’d have gotten notifications about either!  But I don’t want to put this much wall ‘o text on my followers’ dashboards without a cut, so I haven’t been responding directly, for which I apologize.

(Disclaimer: Notifications can be configured in your Settings menu; you can toggle them on and off for loads of stuff! You might wish to check what you currently have them set for rather than just taking my word for it.)

On the topic of cuts, I mentioned at the beginning that the cut option is hard to find on mobile, but just for reference, it looks like this in the post editor on desktop:

It's the same icon on the mobile post editor, it's just on the far right of the bar of icons along the bottom of the app. My screen cuts it off, so I have to scroll the bar over to find it.

Like I said, the Expand dropdown button Tumblr instituted a little while back has reduced the need for this somewhat, and you can certainly do whatever you prefer, but as I believe having the Expand dropdown automatically clip long posts is still an optional configuration in Settings, I'd feel better about reblogging from you directly if you put the bulk of your reply under a cut.

  

Don’t know what “blorbo” means. Kinda sounds like a demeaning term, but I’m going to assume it’s not.

Sorry, it’s not intended to be demeaning!  It’s just a slangy affectionate term for “character you really like.”  In my experience, I’d say it also has a connotation of protectiveness or self-identification, though I can’t speak for the whole of the internet.  I like plenty of characters, but I wouldn’t call them all my blorbos, just the ones that I really and truly love and want to explore/share/defend their honor to the death.

  

Thanks...? Is, is that a compliment?

(Re: my telling rvg that we seemed to have similar issues with the way Mina was being handled, but they were more willing to do the mental legwork on her than me.)

It’s mostly just an observation, but not a critical one!  As someone who’s very ready to read into the canon every little drip of information the canon will give me And So Much More, I have a tremendous amount of fellow-feeling for people of like minds, even if our taste in characters is different.

    

Buried At The Bottom, Why Kaminari Is A Worse Character Than Mineta, Yes I Said It And I’ll Say It Again

>>I have observably positive feelings for about a third of Class 1-A and only particularly negative feelings about Deku and Kaminari. What’s up with Kaminari?

My irritation with Kaminari boils down to two main things—and forgive me, I know you didn’t ask about Mineta, but Mineta’s pretty important to my feelings on Kaminari being what they are, so he’s a part of this answer.  This is all going to be pretty openly dismissive of Kaminari, as a fair warning, on top of being based on not-exactly-rigorous familiarity with the student material, so apologies to anyone who likes him and finds him an enriching, valuable character. But man alive, that is not me.  And but so:

1) Kaminari is a watered-down Mineta, with watered-down versions of all of Mineta’s flaws, but because he’s watered down, the growth he experiences stands out less than Mineta’s.  More on this in a second.

2) Despite Kaminari being a redundant character who brings virtually nothing to the table that other characters don’t do better—with the only things that are unique to him going underdeveloped in canon—fandom loves Kaminari.  (Disclaimer: I obviously don’t spend much time in the hero-fan circles of the fandom, so this is just my perception.  I’d be curious to get your perspective of Kaminari’s relative popularity, rvg!)

To hit the second point first, Kaminari has a more conventionally attractive cute anime boy face than Mineta, so Kaminari’s pushing of his female classmates’ boundaries gets mostly ignored, while Mineta gets so many fics written about him dying that there’s a dedicated Dead Mineta Minoru tag on AO3 with almost 350 hits. 

Fandom built a whole tottering edifice of fanon about Traitor Kaminari despite the howling absence of compelling evidence in the manga[14] for, so far as I can tell, the sole reason that people wanted the cute anime boy to have crunchy angst.  Then, when the actual traitor reveals landed (first the fake-out and then the real one), fandom deemed Hagakure an ungrateful bitch and Aoyama a whining coward.

So like, the fandom discrepancy is what pushes me over the edge from the bottom end of neutral into active dislike.  But I would be awfully close to it anyway for the whole “redundant-ass character who contributes nothing to this story we couldn’t get better from someone else” thing.

Kaminari being kind of leery and unpleasant about his female classmates would be a lot more glaring if it weren’t stacked up against Mineta’s actual sexual harassment, even though Kaminari is a frequent co-conspirator!   

Kaminari has a brief tussle with fear at the beginning of the war arc, but it’s neither as sustained nor as convincing as Mineta’s frequent wrestling with cowardice, present from USJ all the way up through his terrified confrontation with All For One.   

Mineta is frequently, openly envious of his classmates, a whole extra flaw that Kaminari never demonstrates in more than fleeting glimpses.   

Kaminari’s quirk is redundant next to the other high offense types in the class.   

Kaminari’s personality is not distinct enough to add anything irreplaceable to the classroom dynamic.  That’s not to say he brings nothing to the web of relationships amongst the students or the ways the class as a whole reacts to the events of the series, just that what comes to mind for me is mostly extra layering to existing dynamics, not anything truly original and unique to him.  Which would be fine—I love extra layers!—if he were contributing more as a character on literally any other fronts.

I can think of only two things that Kaminari uniquely brings to the table, but both of them are mentioned once and then never come up again.  Firstly, he’s the only one in the class to voice open admiration for Stain, a willingness to admire cool traits in Villains that never leads him to any interesting conflicts with people (classmates or otherwise) who hew to the more standard flat refusal to consider that a Villain might have or express positive aspects.

The other thing is less about Kaminari himself and more about how he’s one of three places where the story brings up the idea of people using their quirks for non-hero jobs and then refuses to develop that premise.[15]  It’s interesting worldbuilding, but as far as I’m aware, it’s never directly shown—everyone we see using their quirks (legally) in the series is doing it as a hero.  We never get much sense of what other options there are for quirk use because heroism and villainy are the only contexts we ever see it in!  This would be a little annoying on its own, but I also find it undermines a lot of other established facts and characterizations.

(Bear with me and I promise I’ll loop this back around to Kaminari.)

My interests being where they are, the biggest problem for me with the fuzziness about the legality of quirk use is that it leaves Destro and the MLA with no coherent cause.  They want free quirk use, but are they really so incredibly averse to just getting a license that they’re willing to become terrorists over it??

You could argue that naked quirk supremacy is what the MLA is currently after, and that’s obviously incompatible with the laws as they stand, but Destro Classic is never really framed as a quirk supremacist, so why did he so virulently despise the quirk use prohibitions if all they really did was require people to get a license to use quirks in public, no different than a driver’s license or a permit to serve alcohol?  Sure, you get small clutches of people sometimes with that kind of “any government oversight is bad government oversight” black-and-white thinking, but the original MLA was a powerful enough force to stand against the government for years, which doesn’t exactly scream “a handful of malcontents” to me.

Rendering the MLA’s cause mindbogglingly asinine is my biggest problem with the “other jobs can get quirk-use licenses too” tidbit, but there are also things like how totally invisible the entertainment or sports industry is.  That would make perfect sense if quirk use is illegal in those fields—people want to see cool superpowers getting used, so industries that bank on public attention dollars but can’t have their celebrities use their quirks are going to decline when they can’t compete with industries/celebrities that can.

If quirk licenses can be gotten for all sorts of jobs, though, then why have sports and entertainment become so invisible?  If “frivolous” fields like those are not aren’t seen as “contributing to society” enough for quirk use permits, then which fields do?  Why does HeroAca!Japan still mostly look and behave like IRL!Japan if quirks are in use in “all manner” of industries?  And if it isn’t the case that heroism—a dangerous job which sometimes gets people killed and which generally requires cultivating a socially demanding public brand/identity—is the only path to being able to use the special power you were born with to earn a livelihood, why does every single middle-schooler in Deku’s class and countless other classes across the country want to become a hero?

I just feel like the way the world looks and operates, the kinds of repressiveness described by even the heroes, the structures that drive people into heroism and villainy alike—the former because they don’t see any other viable way to achieve the happiness they’re looking for, the latter because they can’t become heroes but still have desires that their quirks could help them achieve—all of that makes much more sense in a world that has super powers but has tightly restricted their use to a single job class of person.

So, tying back, obviously that’s not a fault of Kaminari’s, but he is the character where that gap is most apparent.  If there aren’t many lightning heroes because lightning is in high demand in other industries, it would shed significant light on who Kaminari is as a person if the manga would tell us what those other industries are. 

What other paths could Kaminari have chosen?  What’s so much better about those other industries that people with quirks tailor-made for heroism,[16] in a society that worships popular and powerful heroes, are so willing to choose those other industries instead?  Why did Kaminari not make that same decision?  What does heroism mean to him personally that he chose it when so many others in his situation did not?

Kaminari could present a huge in on that angle of the worldbuilding, but instead he’s a complete dead-end.  Mineta’s motivations are base as hell, but at least we know what they are!  Further, it tells us interesting (uncomplimentary, but interesting!) things that people like Recovery Girl and Deku hear said motivations from Mineta’s own mouth, and shrug and accept them as perfectly valid.

And that’s just his professed motivations!  His final exam scene actually drops an early hint about the admiration for Deku he’ll later wholeheartedly declare in the 1-A vs Deku fight!  I don’t remember Kaminari ever getting anything a fraction so revealing; he just coasts through the story contributing nothing unique or meaningful.  He’s hardly the only 1-A character with that particular lack of depth—Sato, Sero, Hagakure and Ojiro are all similar blank slates in terms of their motivations or histories—but then, none of them are a fraction as popular as Kaminari is in the fandom as I experience it, either.

So to sum up, I dislike Kaminari because he’s a wishy-washy nothing of a character, a generically Inoffensive Anime Cutie Boy adored out of all reasonable proportion compared to more compelling and equally underdeveloped classmates alike.  Mineta is, by any measure, more problematic, and it's even worse that U.A./Aizawa are so blasé about him, but, at least from where I’m standing, he’s still more layered, more compelling, more dynamic, and speaks in more interesting ways to the world around him than Kaminari ever comes close to matching.

(…Kaminari’s thing with Jirou is fine.  Perfectly reasonable character relationship building material.  I just don’t count it one way or the other because it’s a self-contained relationship dynamic that has no bearing on the way either character engages with the broader world/system the series’ overarching narrative is challenging.  They motivate each other in small ways, but that motivation doesn’t lead them to truly grow or change as people, only to overcome modest internal confidence hurdles blocking them from things they already wanted to do anyway.)

--

And that's it! Thanks for forging through, good lord, over twenty pages of this, rvg and anyone else who did! I hope you were at least moderately entertained, give or take my blatant Kaminari slander. See you next time, and enjoy the Footnotes.

---------------- FOOTNOTES ----------------

[1] We’re not shown any personnel or drugs or anything, but I assume they’ve been keeping Machia drugged since Jakku, same as Kurogiri in between interviews.  It’s the only thing that worked on Machia before, so why wouldn’t they have more on-hand?

[2] Despite watching the Sports Festival with Shigaraki, natch.

[3] I would like it if he would do that with a lot less insufferable power scaling bullshit, you understand, but I’m spotting the comic its plot arc here.

[4] Outside of, say, the Persona games, where the MCs can change ability sets by swapping out what companion spirit they’re packing, but even that doesn’t make them specialized for status effects, merely capable of using them.

[5] Interestingly, while Bakugou fought off the villainous sales pitch with as much verve as he brings to all his fights, if he had fallen off the righteous path there, we might have observed that his pridefulness was explicitly fostered by the people around him giving him excessive praise for his powerful quirk and ignoring his resulting violent arrogance.  That is to say, Bakugou would have fallen under the same, “Villains are created by the failures in their society,” pattern that BNHA applies to all of its sympathetic villains.

[6] There was one other instance, but iirc it was an error in the translation C.Cook had done for the BNHA databook.  It would not surprise me that he was being less careful or was more pressed for time when translating the reams upon reams of text in one of those.

[7] At least until the fifteen-thousand-strong mob shows up.

[8] Which frankly should be all he’s sore about.  As others have pointed out, Machia’s anger about being abandoned is kind of incoherent.  Yes, AFO left him on the battlefield, but he didn’t exactly leave him to rot in prison forever.  The moment AFO made his big push, he sent people to spring Machia, so in what sense exactly does Machia think AFO abandoned him?  If it was just the last straw after a string of abandonments from both AFO and Shigaraki, the manga could have stood to make that much clearer.

[9] AFO and Ujiko created Kurogiri out of Shirakumo—as a babysitter for Tomura, yes, but Tomura didn’t choose that.  And as to Shigaraki’s very existence trampling on Nana’s memory and causing All Might pain, well, Shigaraki didn’t ask to be brought into the world, abused by his father, neglected by his family, and then raised by a supervillain, did he?

[10] And speaking of Unbreakable, compare how explicitly we’re shown Kirishima’s growth and the foundations of it with how the inspirations for Mina’s attacks are relegated to passing mentions, not direct depictions.  She just casually tells Kirishima that his Unbreakable inspired her Acidman, and likewise only internally reflects on asking Bakugou and Todoroki to teach her their training method, which let her develop her Max Power Acidman Alma move, without so much as a single scrubbed in doodle depicting said training assistance.

[11] Somehow.  The story is unclear on whether he disseminated threats, contacted them directly, or just used the combination of Search+Warping to drag them all back into his presence, and that last option in particular runs into complications given the limitations of both quirks.

[12] In this AU, we would have gotten to see the class have an actual discussion about Saving Villains, prompted by the way the reveal about Aoyama solidified Deku, Shouto and Uraraka’s desires to help their respective villain foils.  The class would carry that resolve forward not only for those three villains alone, but also Shouji for Spinner, Kirishima when talking to Hose Face, Mina, here, with Gigantomachia, etc.

[13] None of the things I can think of that might be considered evidence of protest meet all the criteria.  The original MLA became violent, Harima Oji was a lawbreaker and also ineffective in the long term, the small group that yells at Endeavor and the rest in Chapter 311 is not portrayed as linked to any broader efforts to unseat “fake heroes,” and the group that “condemned” the newscaster Miyagi Daikaku was ineffective and didn’t even seem to rise to the level of open protest.

[14] "His grades are poor but he namedrops a Hemingway novel! He must be concealing the fact that he's actually super-smart!" "He's doing a Liberation salute! He must be the traitor, even though the Liberation salute uses the other hand, and Kaminari has been using finger-gun gestures to fire off his lightning attacks since at least the License Exam if not earlier, and the League had no connection to the MLA at the time when the traitor was most active!"

[15] A blurb about Kaminari in, iirc, one of the volume extras, Suneater’s flashback to a teacher telling his class that they can “make fine use of their quirks at any number of jobs,” and Uraraka’s early mention that she’d considered “getting permission” to use her quirk to help with her parents’ construction business.

[16] See the previous discussion about the kinds of quirks that are popularly accepted as “good hero quirks.”

[juyeoniemyhoney]

All My Love

And though he knows that he will never be able to do for you as much as you have already done for him, Lord knows Juyeon will spend this life loving you. A love he will carry from eons to oceans, to inches, back to you.

-pairing: lee juyeon x reader, ft. the boyz

-genre: fluff, idol! juyeon, established relationship

-warnings: none, but this is so stupid i'm so sorry

-word count: 1909 words

-A/N: hey guys! this has been sitting in my drafts since the kingdom finale and i've been sitting on it because, frankly i think this is really badly written. but i've finally decided to post it because the second part to Rent A Boyfie is taking a little longer than i expected so here's something for you guys in the meantime. i'd also like to add that the last line of this fic is a direct quote from Lang Leav's poem September Love so like, idk. don't charge me for plagiarism? HAHAH yea, i guess.

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As you stare at the screen, a flurry of emotions run through you; sadness, disappointment, but most of all, worry. You wonder if the smile he sends to the camera and all of his friends is genuine, or if he is just putting up a front so as to not ruin the joyful atmosphere. You determine it's the latter. His eyes do not curl in merriment like they usually do when he is beyond joyful. You point out the way his eyes almost seem empty, devoid of all emotion, the usually brilliant brown, dull. Nevertheless, he congratulates the winners, gives hugs out to everyone before he is silently exiting the stage with his members.

When you see them leave the stage, you stand up from the couch like you are possessed, not even registering anything at the moment, moving purely on instinct. You rip the door open to the waiting room and make your way through the flurry of staff, who rush about backstage, tending to different matters in a rush. You bump into people multiple times and every time, they give you annoyed looks because you are not supposed to be here, you are just in the way. But you don't care. You have to get to them.

And when you finally near the entrance to the stage, you see them, looking like they've just lost a war and then some, and your heart breaks.

"The Boyz!" you shout, earning you their attention and the attention of almost everyone around you. You shout it sternly, tone almost desperate when you see their disappointed expressions. And you know they are questioning their abilities right now, questioning if they are even any good at what they do. They must be beating themselves up for every single little mistake they have made. And you will not allow them to do it. You will make every effort to make sure that they know their worth, that they know that their loss on this stupid show does not define them in the slightest.

"Y/N?" Juyeon says with a tilt of his head. He sends you a small, sad smile, and your heart breaks all over again when you see the way his eyes gloss over in the slightest.

"Why do you all look so sad?" you ask sternly, hands on your hips as you look up at the eleven boys, who all look like they're puppies who have been kicked to the curb.

"You guys are winners! And as long as Deobi knows that, as long as you yourselves know that then that's all that matters!" you scold them in the middle of the corridor. You know you should not be scolding them, that maybe you should be more gentle with your words but you're actually a little mad right now. Why don't they already know this? That nothing in the world matters as long as they believe in themselves? Why don't they already know that they are amazing and talented and loved?

A silence follows your words. The boys look at you intently, expressions of surprise raising their eyebrows, replacing the defeat that had coloured their sad eyes moments before.

"Y/N," Eric almost whines, stretching out his arms as he makes his way towards you before enveloping you in a hug. Then, like a pin to a balloon, the silence bursts, and the remaining ten of them all come together in a group hug with you in the centre.

"You're all mulling over your mistakes, aren't you?" you continue to scold. It is quite a sight to behold, really. You wouldn't say you are short, per se. In fact, you think that your height is quite average. But now that you are basically swarmed by eleven giants, your head is tilted up for air, and you are on the tips of your toes, struggling to remain above this sea of The Boyz you are currently in the middle of.

The silence that follows your question is answer enough and you sigh in frustration. "How many times do I have to tell you boys that making mistakes are fine? You're humans for Pete's sake!" you continue to scold.

"So stop beating yourself up over stupid things like this! Okay now let go of me. I'm tip toeing and my calves can't hold on for any longer."

This earns you a few laughs and immediately, the men let go of you and you stumble back down onto your heels with a sigh. But almost immediately after you are released from the group hug, a pair of arms find your body again, circling around your waist as he presses his face into your neck. You do not even have a moment's hesitation to know that it is Juyeon and like it is your nature, your arms come up and around his neck, pulling him further down into you.

"Thank you," he murmurs into your skin and you can feel his lips curl into a smile. You hear the rest of the boys whisper loudly, words teasing at your public display of affection. But Sangyeon, ever the sweetheart, cuts them off and ushers them onward and back into their waiting room, leaving you and Juyeon to bask in each other's embrace.

"Don't thank me," you reply, hand moving up to pat his head, hair feeling crispy due to the copious amounts of hairspray his hairstylists use.

"No," Juyeon denies, "if it weren't for you, we'd be sad the whole night, for sure."

Your hold on him tightens when you hear his words and you feel his smile widen against your skin. He knows you're worried for the boys still, more so him, and Juyeon finds it absolutely endearing that you worry so much for him and his family.

"You don't have to worry so much," Juyeon says, pulling away from the hug just enough to see your face. When you look into his eyes, your breath catches in your throat and your heartbeat picks up. Relief washes over you when you note that his eyes do not seem devoid of emotion anymore. Instead, the brown of his eyes are warm and dripping with honey and sweet adoration as he gazes at you. Your gaze softens too and you feel like you're melting into mush with the warmth of his arms and the loving way with which Juyeon looks at you.

Your arms move from the back of his neck to hold his face in your two hands, saying, "But I know that you're still sad. And I know you're still beating yourself up for whatever reason you can come up with.". Your frown deepens and Juyeon's smile widens into a grin as his hand comes up to smooth over your frown, using two fingers to push your brows back into their original position, his other hand still firm on the small of your back.

"I know, I know," he says almost dismissively, but you do not take it to heart, knowing and understanding Juyeon well enough to know that he just doesn't want you to worry and he just doesn't want to talk about it. Despite the fact that you think he should talk about it, despite the fact that you want him to depend on you and to share the burden of his feelings and emotions with you, you know that he is better off dealing with them alone. After all, two years of dating does not mean nothing. The two of you have navigated enough, long and treacherous fights and misunderstandings to trust and understand each other fully, to know each other like the back of your own hands. And so, you remain silent and just go back in to hug Juyeon again.

When you hug him, he laughs sweetly and hugs you back, pressing a sweet kiss to the crown of your head as the two of you stand in silence, the corridor much more silent and empty that it was minutes before. You're thankful that no staff or any of the other groups had cared to watch the two of you have such an intimate moment in an otherwise rather public place. And you are sure that gossip and words passed in hushed whispers are spreading about the different staff and the other groups but, quite frankly, you don't really care and it seems as though, neither does Juyeon, as he quietly bids goodbye to the friends he has made with other idols as he holds you in his arms.

Your moment is cut short, however, when Hyunjae comes back out to you guys, barefaced and changed into his casual clothes, bag slung on his shoulder, expression annoyed and impatient.

"Lee Juyeon, not to be an ass but we take the same car and Eric, Jacob and I have been waiting for like ten minutes already so can you, possibly rush the hugging, or maybe hug on the go because I want to go home and sleep for the next week," Hyunjae says with a tight smile, and though his tone is sweet, you realise it's sarcastic, and you immediately let go of Juyeon and urging him to go and get changed.

"Thank you, Y/N," Hyunjae says when Juyeon leaves to change. The two of you slowly make your way back to where Eric and Jacob are waiting patiently as Hyunjae talks to you. "For being our cheerleader. And for being Juyeon's personal cheerleader.".

You flash Hyunjae a smile and he smiles back at you, giving you a pat on the shoulder. "Oh, it's nothing. The praise comes easy because you guys did so well. Like seriously, how do you guys dance so in sync? It was mind-blowing."

Hyunjae's grin widens and he thanks you once more as Juyeon comes rushing out of the waiting room to where the four of you wait for him. And as the five of you make your way to the car, Juyeon's hand reaches for yours on instinct. And you secretly like the way you do not have to ask Juyeon if you can go with him or not, and you do not have to ask him if the members are fine with having you over. You like that it is expected, that if you don't go with Juyeon, the members will wonder why. And Juyeon likes it too. Likes that you are always with him, likes that you cheer him and his friends on so easily, likes that you are always there to love on him and cheer him up when he gets down.

To a certain extent, he feels a little guilty. Because it is always you cheering him on and trying to make him smile again when he is down. He knows that he hasn't done as much as you have done for him. You ground him and keep him from tearing himself apart and he knows that he has so much to do in order to make up for the extensive amount of times you have sacrificed yourself for him. But at the end of the day, he is most willing to spend his entire lifetime and all the time after that with you. And though he knows that he will never be able to do for you as much as you have already done for him, Lord knows Juyeon will spend this life loving you. A love he will carry from eons to oceans, to inches, back to you.

[bookwyrminspiration]

Hey Quil!

There's literally so much to say here my dude. Like-I just physically cannot put into words as to how much I love what you do for this fandom.

I have never in my life, met such an incredibly talented creator like you. /gen

The way that you can put words down on a page is so elegant, it's a talent that is just simply unfathomable to me. You just kind of suck me in with your writing--I have to clear a time to read the next chapter of the wings au because of how deeply you're able to weave your words to pull me into the narrative.

The world that you've built in your head, and the ideas that you churn out onto the page are so very incredible. And that's not just about writing either.

Seriously!! When I found out you could draw my reaction was pretty much. Well I guess it's over now, Quil's over here, hoarding all of the talent and stylistic choices of writing and art. /lh

I remember vividly when I first saw the wings AU. I was actually on my phone, at school, in the hallway (no shame apparently) and I saw Shattered Upside Down on the list of things. And I read the description and I sat there for a minute and I went.

Huh. That seems kind of weird. And I clicked off of it.

Can I just say!!! How funny that is!! Like I think I've been this invested in two fics ever, and my first reaction to seeing this was "eh I'll pass" ?!?!?!

Past Tobi this is literally right up your ally. It is dystopianizing + dragonifying your kotlc. Why the fuck would you want to pass on it????

Anyway, it was only three days later that I came around and gave it a shot (after seeing the one chapter and the word count.) And let me tell you. I knew I was hooked.

I knew it.

I remember so well sitting in the dark, on vacation, excitedly stimming on my bed after the fourth chapter came out. I had the Wiggles from a story!!! This had never happened before. I'd gotten squirmy yes, but I had to stand up!!! Because whew this story was really fucking good!!!!!

And Quil. Quil I cannot tell you how much the wings AU means to me. Like as a story but as an idea as a whole. And ik we're getting to the ah ha moment, and I know this means that it's ending, and while I'm so sad to see it go I'm also really excited to see how you write a conclusion to this.

Anyway if you want to see my shitty doodles of the wings AU from like...omg over a year now. (Quil it's been over a year since I drew those) just let me know.

Anyway, enough talking about my lord and savior (Shattered Upside Down) /hj

Thank you so very much for inspiring and writing every day. You're honestly such a cool human being, and it's been so fun getting to see you create on here <33

Oh my gosh this is so incredibly kind of you I'm at a loss of where to start to try and articulate back how much this means to me and how much I appreciate it.

Hearing that my words just kinda suck you in because of how I weave my stories makes me laugh a little because it feels wildly out of proportion with my writing approach. I think I've said this before, but I basically don't edit like at all. Everything you read is what I first wrote; it is the first draft. So you saying is both greatly appreciated and also amusing because I'm just winging it

And thank you for the compliments on my drawing, as well! You're not the first person to say that (discovering I could draw later on), which is wild because there was a time in the fandom where I was foremost considered a fanartist compared to...whatever I am now.

I love that you clicked off the wings au because if I am being 100% honest...I probably would do the exact same thing. I think if I saw the wings au out in the wild, I wouldn't read it. I'd go "huh, I don't really like aus, and this is too long" and just move on. Because it's true! I don't really like aus (they're great! just not for me most of the time) or long fics, so if it wasn't my story I'd absolutely skip right past it without a second thought.

I'm incredibly flattered to hear you were hooked, like that is such an amazing thing to hear as a writer than someone is that invested in your story--and giving you the wiggles!! You are giving me the wiggles right now as I'm reading through this just in awe. I'm thrilled you think the story is good because it's truly expanded beyond what I ever thought it would be, which is terrifying, but also so excited to watch (I say as if I'm not writing it). And I can't believe you were reading it on vacation like please enjoy your vacation the wings au can wait

Tobi. I cannot explain to you how much it means to me that the wings au means something to you. I started this story purely self-indulgently after I started mindlessly associating characters with wings, making the joke "well no fandom is complete without a wings au" to cover up how invested I was getting in such a "silly" concept. Like really? A wings au? Could it get any more basic?

And while the story is starting to come to a close (there's a lot left to write but like timeline wise...we're getting there), I really hope that I can live up to the rest of the au and the expectations. I've known what I wanted the final message, the final hurrah to be since I started; it's all been working towards that, but I don't know exactly how we'll get there or what shape it will take.

I'm both terrified and ecstatic to see what the wings au will become and I just hope I can do it justice.

Also I would absolutely love to see any doodles you're comfortable sharing. Seeing art of the wings au always makes my day and I'm incredibly honored that my story inspired you to create something.

Thank you so much for everything you've said, I don't know how to explain my appreciation for this. I hope to continue creating things and sharing them and having fun with everyone here for as long as possible, so thank you for being so receptive and encouraging about it all, this seriously made my day <33