#in all of its entirety

[s0up1ta]

toxic yaoi or something idk i haven't watched gravity falls

[0fps]

JANE DOE ❖ undercover r&b

The big bad daddy who cussed you out every day is gone and yet you still miss him. What are you, a bunch of daddy's boys?

[sorrelpaws]

They make such a nice couple. The king and queen are pretty nice too. Heheheh.

[keii]

Drew a nalu sketch bc for some reason my old ass art of them is making its rounds again on here lol

[haminjago]

All might dressed as Jack skeleton, thoughts?

my honest reaction

[chocostrwberry]

Some concepts for my au!!

Lila if she unified all the miraculous and became like a monster abomination as her body slowly started to die as a grand attempt to destroy the miraculous and Paris in the process

And Marinette who unifies the cat and ladybug miraculous to stop her!!

I don’t have names for these forms yet so suggestions are appreciated! :D

[thedaythatwas]

on nagito komaeda and love

I just think it’s sort of funny that for a character whose (arguably) most well-recognized CG is this: 

komaeda’s narrative so heavily centers love. and I don’t just say this because I’ve had komahina brainrot for years (though this is true!!). even if you don’t care about komahina, it’s tough to deny komaeda is a walking tragedy in large part because of the role that love plays in his life. his characterization is driven by the way his luck has denied him love, and how he seeks it out regardless. in that sense, I think that without understanding komahina as at least one-sided, you miss out on one of the juiciest, most miserable pieces of komaeda’s character development.

tldr; a love-centered reading of komaeda makes sense, recognizing komahina as “a thing” in DR2 (whether you ship it or not) is pretty important to understanding how komaeda operates, and I’ll try to prove it right here under this page break!!

Part 1: Komaeda’s Love Life (or, his life without love)

I think it’s safe to assume that if you clicked here, you know about komaeda’s absurdly miserable, tumultuous childhood, but I’ll do a quick recap just in case! meteor kills his parents on a plane, he inherits a ton of money. he’s kidnapped by a serial killer, he finds a winning lottery ticket in the garbage bag he’s thrown out in. he’s diagnosed with terminal cancer and dementia, he gets into hope’s peak.

in his free time events, komaeda *explicitly* frames his luck cycle as something that takes away the people he loves. it only “takes action” against him after his relatives have died (for the sake of this essay, let’s assume that komaeda loved his parents, or would have at least been hurt by their passing). by way of other close connections… well, his wording here implies that by the time of his diagnosis, he didn’t really have anybody in his life. 

either komaeda didn’t allow himself to get close to anyone after the meteor incident, or he did, and they were taken away by his luck. at some point during his childhood, komaeda learned he should view himself as a death sentence.

so, how does this loss of love shape the komaeda we know? I’ll talk about this in terms of four of his defining (and connected!) traits in DR2 canon – the ones that really make his actions make sense: his self-loathing, his hope-seeking, his learned helplessness, and his certainty that his existence poses a threat to those around him. komaeda’s experience with loss makes him view himself as a source of death, which in turn fuels these tenets of his character. ultimately, his loss and the complexes that arise from it give him good incentive to push people away.

his self-loathing

komaeda hates himself. he views himself as worthless outside of his potential to serve as a “stepping stone” for the hope of the ultimates. he claims that this is driven by his beliefs around talent, which are in turn linked to the way his worldview rests on viewing hope as “absolute good.” the talentless (himself included) are only good for advancing the hope of the talented. still, his self-loathing is a bit more personal than that. take what he says and dig just below the surface, and it’s a clean cut trauma response all the way down. which leads us directly to…

his hope-seeking

komaeda is willing to do literally anything to serve hope. on the island, this (in short) means dying. this is where I prod at komaeda’s reasoning a bit more: komaeda’s willingness to act the way he does in canon also stems from his belief that his dying would be a net good for the world. his existence kills the people around him. his illness will kill him anyway. he has less than no value, and hope is invaluable. to go out for the sake of hope would give his wretched life purpose; it’s his dream come true.

and it’s no mystery why komaeda cares so much about hope: again, it’s a coping mechanism! komaeda’s belief that all bad luck is a necessary precursor for good luck and that hope will always triumph over despair is (as he himself says!) the only reason he’s managed to stay alive. I’ll say it again because I really can’t emphasize it enough – komaeda thinks that just by existing, he kills the people he loves. ouch!

learned helplessness / his existence as a threat

komaeda has, essentially, learned to submit to his luck cycle. all bad luck is good luck in the end – isn’t that amazing?! almost paradoxically, he’s hyper-vigilant about the negative impact his luck has on those around him. this is a tricky one. I make sense of it this way: komaeda’s perception of how much his luck impacts the people close to him isn’t inflated, like, at all. the supernatural way the world bends around komaeda to screw him over really does pose a danger to himself and others, and he takes measures to minimize that danger. his stated acceptance of his luck cycle is… well, again, he’s coping. 

if komaeda really thought that all bad luck is ultimately good luck, he wouldn’t try to protect his classmates from his bad luck. but, as we see in island mode, he does!

but really, who could blame komaeda for lying to himself? I’ll restate the facts. komaeda thinks that luck is absolute power. he says that he’s powerless against it. his luck has taken his family, and it’s left him with nothing but money that he doesn’t want. he’s certain he’s a curse, and there’s no end to that in sight: so long as komaeda exists, he’ll keep on losing – murdering – everything he loves. 

in the face of all of that despair, what can you do but abandon your self-esteem and pray for something good to come out of all of it? how else could somebody possibly survive carrying that burden, truly believing that load will never be lightened?

tldr; komaeda thinks his existence is a threat, and a big chunk of his personality is a frankensteined way of surviving the pain that comes with that. still, we should question how much of his worldview komaeda has really internalized without inner conflict. 

Part 2: Enter Hajime Hinata

we get some answers on that front when we see that despite the clear and obvious danger it poses, nagito komaeda still finds himself falling hard for hajime hinata. that’s really, really loud.

I’ll preface this part by saying that you don’t need to actively ship komahina to understand what I’m trying to get at here. this said, I’ll be recapping an argument you’ve almost definitely seen before: komahina is definitely “a thing” – at the very least as a one-sided thing. to this, I’ll add the (perhaps bold?) claim that without recognizing that much as true, you’re missing out on a big part of what makes komaeda so interesting.

komaeda’s FTEs make it abundantly clear that komaeda has feelings for hinata. apart from his famed failed love confession, the fact that komaeda is willing to allow hinata to get close enough to learn about his views on hope and luck is telling. 

(the smoking gun here hinges on trusting that komaeda was telling the truth during the time you spent with him; in so many words, that he only lied about lying. so, for the sake of argument, let’s assume this is true! there’s good proof for it, anyway.)

if you read his final FTE as komaeda flashing his soul to hinata and making a decision at the very last second to retreat, turning to old coping mechanisms to protect hinata from his luck, it’s sort of a komahina bombshell. that capitulation spells out for us that komaeda understands sharing his life experiences with hinata to be one of the most intimate things he could possibly do.

he recognizes the exact moment he lets hinata get too close – when his life story is finally told – and he does what he’s learned he needs to do to get them both out of that situation safely: he tries to make hinata hate him, and tells himself (and hinata!) that he did it for the sake of hope.

(and yet, komaeda let hinata approach him every FTE, knowing damn well that they were both playing with fire… very interesting.)

now, let’s say you don’t consider the FTEs to be integral to canon. I mean, you can really easily miss out on all of komaeda’s content if you choose not to hang out with him in chapter 1! so, for the skeptic, in the unskippable main story, komaeda tells hinata this:

komaeda cares about hinata despite everything. and I really, truly mean despite everything. at this point in the story, the fact that he still cares about hinata calls into question basically every single one of his core beliefs. he’s read his final dead room prize – not only does hinata not have a talent, we can presume that komaeda also knows hinata became ultimate despair along with the rest of them. 

hinata has continually sought out komaeda’s company, even though komaeda knows himself to be worthless at best, lethal at worst. komaeda was willing to let him get closer, even though he knows how dangerous that is for hinata. he can’t help but let hinata try to know him. 

isn’t he awful? to want what he knows he can’t have, even though that wanting has never done anything but cause pain? he’s really the lowest of the low, to love someone who destroyed the world, who makes him question the views that will allow him to do the only good thing he’s ever been able to do for it: to die for hope. 

and yet, it’s a nod to how incredibly capable of love komaeda is that he’s still willing to reach out for it, no matter how many times it’s burned him in the past, and how much it hurts him in the present to want it. he understands more than anyone that his feelings can only result in disaster. reading komaeda as someone who can’t help but go on loving anyway makes his story hurt so much worse. 

but, you miss a whole lot of that without an eye for komahina. seeing hinata as the eye of komaeda’s emotional hurricane (and keeping tabs on their connection accordingly) allows us to glimpse past the cracks in komaeda’s front. we see that komaeda’s worldview is less stable than he presents it as – hinata is where komaeda’s coping mechanisms, for better or worse, run up against a wall. that tends to be uncomfortable for a guy who’s just barely coping in the first place. then again, growth is supposed to be uncomfortable, isn’t it?

Part 3: The Future He Chooses

so, all of this considered, I think one of the most interesting ways you can flesh komaeda out post-canon is by asking how he’d find himself willing to accept love. whether that love is from hinata or the ultimates, whether it’s platonic or romantic, love is the thing that komaeda wants AND fears in equal measure more than anything. it’s the source of his self-loathing and his obsession with hope. it’s the reason he’s lived the way that he has for so long – lonely, and afraid of being anything but.

getting into a relationship wouldn’t solve komaeda’s problems for him, and that’s a good thing. it would force him to confront old ones, and probably create dozens of new issues for him, too. writing him through that makes for great character study!

hinata (or anyone else, for that matter) can’t love komaeda into loving himself, but he can give him a shoulder to cry on while he works through 22 years of fear and sorts through the wreckage of a worldview that’s long since stopped serving him. I don’t think his progress would be linear. but, I think that he could do it. komaeda learning to accept care is what his healing looks like. 

(well. and physically recovering from cancer and dementia. but that’s neither here nor there!)

a post-canon komaeda learning to love narrative is also in line with the themes of DR2. hinata leads the survivors out of the neo world program because he makes the decision to choose his own future, creating a new version of “hope” for himself and his classmates. likewise, komaeda can make the decision to save himself. that is, if he trusts himself enough to actually touch and hold the thing that he’s never been able to stop reaching out for, anyway.

after all, hinata is lucky too. (and if it turns out he isn’t… y'all like angst fics, right?)

(shoutout to @cynopter for looking this over and confirming that I'm not spouting nonsense <33 thank you for reading my thesis of the week <33)

[peacockrulz]

N tries to tell another joke (gone wrong)

Sequel to This

[astralzeraphias]

“he was mentally ill. this monster was a- was a sick fantasy. a product of his dementia.”

“…i saw it too. does that make me disturbed? demented? does… that make me sick too?”

[ayphyx]

Fanart for @skelavender’s lovely fanfic series Fall into Place :3 (you can read it here on tumblr btw)

(Edit: I FORGOT MULDER’S RING AKIHABHIAOBIHAHBIOWHOIBWOWB OK I FIXED IT)

[huginsmemory]

One of my favourite things about Ford is that he's like WAIT SAFETY about somethings when he disagrees (the Fiddleford becoming president thing, him being like it's too stressful for Fiddleford) BUT when it's something he's interested in he's like endangering my life is fine and normal (ie, him jumping into the abyss of the alien space ship with a magnetic gun; which is also a ship that has a security system).

The irony of it is amusing to me, but it's also I think it's a very good example that as much as Ford likes to say he's a Scientist™ and governed by Logic™... He's actually first and foremost driven by his emotions, and the logic is something that comes secondhand when he needs an explanation. Case in point with him drawing his relationship and contact with Bill in a way of him making new discoveries for mankind... When in TBOB it becomes very plainly obvious the main reason why he called on Bill was because he was desperately lonely (driven by emotion), less so about his scientific discovery (driven by logic). And I think there's a very human, relatable aspect to it because we all do this. That's why arguing with climate deniers and citing study after study about climate change, or even dealing with racist people and talking about equality and abstract morals doesn't work; there's an emotional aspect that drives people, always beyond our tower of cards of logic...

[bacchuschucklefuck]

way late for lny but hey the brain makes the connection when it does. aka caducean/asclepian

[the-cassandriad]

i've not written poetry in years (i'm more of a novelist) but i allowed myself some cassandra thoughts (as a treat). i actually had a lot of fun with this and i'm desperate to do more with the idea in the future so we will see.

inspired obviously by my own muses, @two-bees-poetry for the brilliant contrapuntal poems about greek myth, and anne carson, specifically when she talks about cassandra's speech being split in two and her bridging of past and future!

more of my logic in the tags because i'm annoying!

[mythalism]

im actually kind of surprised how at peace i am with this unofficial but inevitable end of dragon age. obviously im sad. for the people who just lost their jobs with seemingly very little notice, and also just a general sense of sadness for how capitalism is so relentlessly dedicated to crushing every last shred of human creativity and passion under its bloody boot. but personally, i actually think dragon age served its purpose in my life, and i'm not sure how much more i could have continued to get out of it. outside of providing satisfying closure on a story i waited 10 years for, which was a necessity, in order to actually carry on and reignite the passion i had for the franchise and reincarnate it into something that could last another decade in my mind palace... da4 would have had to have done something really groundbreaking for it to resonate with me at 26 the way it did with me at 16. even if i really enjoyed veilguard and thought it was great, i am not sure it would have carried over into the next phase of my life unless it was really special. think it could have easily been possible, for example i think if they went back to the full da2 greek tragedy vibe that would have absolutely gagged me and had me by the balls, but i also didn't necessarily ever expect that. i would have loved to see it, but i was never counting on it, and as i waited for the game to download on the morning of the 31st, even then it felt a long cycle finally coming to an end, rather than the exciting beginning of something new. what excited me was finally getting closure and catharsis, not starting a new cycle. loving dragon age primarily from ages 16-22 was genuinely so profound, the stories were so meaningful to me as a young adult and carried me through so much. it was exactly what i needed when i needed it, and though these games got me to this destination of who i am 10 years later... i'm honestly not sure they could have carried me any further. veilguard was the last leg of a very long trip. a cigarette-smelling, reckless-driving, overpriced Uber ride following a wonderful life-changing vacation and a 10 year long turbulence-heavy flight, but it got me where i needed to go in one piece. it could have been a much more pleasant ride, of course, but i made it. and now i have to find new destinations to travel to

[neodiekido]

can't stop thinking about how maki became a sidekick before she told kaito (+ shuichi) about her talent in utdp/danganronpa s. definitely would change the dynamic up a bit but it'd be incredibly funny. kaito drags along his grumpy "child caregiver" classmate to his workout group thinking she's just got some stuff she needs to work through and then like a few months later she just goes "im actually the ultimate assassin" unprompted in the middle of kaito talking about space

[luka-is-slightly-odd]

Currently obsessed with the concept of mutual and acknowledged hanahaki. Like two people who both have hanahaki for each other, and who both know about it, who both know that the other loves them and still aren’t cured.

The flowers stay, not because their love isn’t reciprocated, but because they don’t belive in it, or because its temporary, because the other deserves better, because they have complicated history, because they both already have significant others, perhaps the love isn’t enough because they both can’t put that love first, maybe their ideals and lotalties come first for both. Its not unrequited love, but its not quite enough.

just kinda love the image of two lovers-but-not-yet-maybe-never-lovers sitting together, picking flowers out of each other’s throats.