#it's of course much more logical that he has at least some degree of independent wealth he uses to fund his experiments

[bambiraptorx]

I know that logically Draxum probably got away with making the mutagen and oozequitos because he was very careful about hiding his research and whatnot, but the much funnier explanation is that he's already so weird that when he rolled up to an academic conference two months after his lab exploded the first time with his 200 page paper on how he's going to bioengineer mosquitos to be the size of his hand (without giving a single reason as to why he wants to do this), the most he was met with was maybe a few raised eyebrows and a couple people wondering how he still gets grant money

[astaroth1357]

The Brothers Have Been Multiplied!!!

Lucifer

Look. In his day-to-day life, Lucifer has always had to struggle with being one of, if not the only, capable person in the room. His brothers don't always try to help him and even if they do their help may just make things worse…

So this should be a dream come true right? Not only does he have competent help, they'll all also himself! Who better to trust his more difficult tasks to, right? Right??

Well… wrong. Unfortunately for as much as Lucifer is, there is one thing Lucifer and his clones just aren't… Good minions.

Complain as he might about his brothers, they know who's in charge. As it turns out five Lucifers in a room can only screw in a lightbulb after they agree on who's giving the orders and being the "original" means nothing at all!

Poor MC gets saddled with mediating the most confusing squabbles in their life between Lucifer, Lucifer, Lucifer, Lucifer, and OG Lucifer (the name dubbed to him by Levi)

So aside from this being a trainwreck for anyone not named Diavolo (who's thrilled to have so many Lucifers to talk to!), it's also a headache for himself too!

The next week is spent with Lucifer literally arguing with himself over who's doing what while the brothers all cower in their rooms to keep from incurring their wrath… Five angry Lucifers is a sentence for certain death, somebody hide Mammon…

Mammon

Lucifer's worst nightmare has been realized… Not only does he live in a world with one Mammon, now there's five! Five!!! Five Mammons!! The world isn't ready for this, no one is!

Of course, a pack of Mammons absolutely get into as much trouble as you think they would. The moment he realized there was more of him, the secondborn was already scheming up what kind of ploys he could pull off with five of himself...

Barbatos is upping the Castle security as we speak...

To his credit, you can't say that the Mammon-squad doesn't have hustle either. It may be either a blessing or a curse to go to five different stores and see a Mammon working there all at the same time, depending on your preference.

(Unfortunately for the brother and anyone with pickpocket-able wallets, it's mostly a curse).

Honestly, the biggest downside for poor MC is that they're all. so. clingy!!

If the MC wants even a minute to themselves, they'll be swatting away Mammon's like a swarm of mosquitos! Better learn an invisibility spell quick, or else their greedy companions will never, ever leave…

Leviathan 

Holy cow, it's a gamer's dream come true!! Screw underwhelming AI and goodbye unreliable party members, he has all the team he needs right here!! They should go national or even pro!!!

Ah yes, Levi was truly elated for like, a couple days over this development. Why shouldn't he be? Having a whole herd of himself was a blast!

They're all great at gaming, they like the same things, they dislike the same stuff, and (most importantly) he's not any better or worse than any one of them! There’s nothing to get jealous over, right?

Well slap a big fat wrong on that because there's one thing to always get jealous over and their name is MC!

MC could come home from class one day to find five Levi's all wanting them to do five different things and NO THEY'RE NOT SHARING-

Unfortunately for Levi, the poor guy is so prone to jealousy that he can't even cope with it when he's jealous of himself…

It is at least a little entertaining to watch a pile of otakus fight themselves, it's kind of like watching a deadly game of high-stakes LARP-ing. Just less imaginary spells and more giant sea monsters popping out of nowhere… Someone grab some sponges…

Satan

Which is more likely to rule the world, one Solomon or five Satans...?

Having five Satans around is kind of terrifying… Just one can scheme up a storm and cause a lot of damage so add on four others and you got a recipe for a bad time… 

If you're Lucifer, anyway.

In truth, the band of Satans are all about as independent as their original counterpart, so they don't often do things together as a group.

This can create a lot of deja vu scenarios where the MC will swear they've already passed by a Satan in the hallway… like three times.

Unfortunately they also get the urge for affection around the same time, so the MC may go a whole day without seeing them then suddenly get surrounded by needy and bickering Satans at all sides...

When the pack does work together, however, they're a well-oiled machine. Capable, logical, practical: basically everything the Lucfier-squad wish they could be without all the pesky pride in the way!

… until someone ticks them off and they become their own angry mob, but hey, still better than a pack of Mammons.

Asmodeus 

… We all know an orgy is happening right? Like, it may not be the first thing he thinks of, but it's on the list. He'd never pass up the chance to selfcest when possible. Never.

That being said, the Asmos actually get sick of each other surprisingly quickly… Only a few days in and they'll be squabbling like crazy!

Why you might ask? Well not for any particular character flaw or anything - it actually boils down to the clothes… and makeup… and face… and attitude... and-

Basically, how in Diavolo's Hell is he supposed to stand out as the world's most singularly beautiful creature if there are FOUR OTHERS that keep stealing his style?? It's a nightmare!!

It didn't take long for the Asmos to start trying to find their own, completely distinct identities like Goth Asmo, Sporty Asmo, Hipster Asmo, etc… All claiming to be WAY better than the original, of course.

As entertaining as it may be to see a bunch of Asmos go through an identity crisis, he wants them GONE and he wants them gone NOW!! He's blowing up Solomon's phone every hour of the day until it gets fixed so better sit tight for a while…

Beelzebub 

You know, this is actually one of those, "Worst Case Scenarios" that Lucifer and Dia drew up shortly after they had their Fall: what does one do with five Beels exactly...?

You can't possibly feed them all, at least not all at once… and letting any one get too hungry is asking for trouble.

Do you let them run through the city streets and chomp up its citizens like a game of Pacman? Scatter them to other realms and hope that they don't do a ton of damage? Pit them against each other in "There-Can-Only-Be-One"-style gladiatorial combat?? 

Well… there isn't really a good solution. Food is still a finite resource but the Beels TRY to be understanding and TRY not to push their luck at mealtime...

It has varying degrees of success, but hey, it's sweet that they're even trying...

Aside from the ever-present threat of being eaten out of House and realm, everybody kind of likes having so many Beels around. They're easy-going and helpful, which generally makes life easier for everyone and like… it's Beel. Who doesn't like hanging out with Beel?

The Beels even get along with each other so they regularly go to the gym and games together. Though it’s not super sportsmanly to switch out Beels between quarters in fangol, it's not technically against any rules either so the past few games have gone very well! (It's he'll, who even reads the rulebook anyway?)

Belphegor 

It actually took a little while to notice that there were even two Belphies, let alone five…

MC would walk into a room and see a Belphie sleeping on the couch. Perfectly normal.

Then, they'd go into another a few minutes later to see Belphie napping a chair… A little off, but still okay.

Well sure, but in the next room he's also apparently on the floor too and….

Wait a minute.

Turns out five Belphies is either a breeze to deal with or absolute hell and there's no in between.

If they're all asleep, things are fine. Just artfully pile them on top of each other like dead bodies in a stealth game and move on.

If they're awake, then there's just way too much Belphie! And they play off each other in just the worse ways… The Anti-Lucifer League has never been so active, much to his brother's dismay...

This can be mitigated slightly by pawning a few off on Beel (who is more than happy to mind his duplicated twin) but that solution doesn't work forever… 

Moreover, the MC can't sleep anywhere without them all gravitating towards them so even the shortest nap results in waking up under a dogpile of cow-men… It's a wonder they don't suffocate...

[6blackfilin9]

I love your Anko fanart! Tell me, what are your views/headcannons on Anko X Kazuku?

hThank you so much for the ask, finally I can answer it

here is my big thank you for the waitng

In a nutshell, the shipp was created by accident while me and my buddy were working on our first Naruto AU in 2019, where Kakuzu and Deidara survived their shitty plotholes end eventually ended up in Konoha

Yeah

so, the shipp’s birth date is july the 1, 2019

anything like classy, aristocracy kind of tension-filled passionate gothic romance with playful, psychological games & hurt/comfort vibes with slight scent of rivalry is KakuAnko

Basically, they are: a very, very old man with absolutely horrendous background who’s trying to finally have his mother*cking 10 or 30 years of peace, and a rather young lady with a rocky youth who’s being good & noble yet has very strong antihero tendencies

You know, I think they do have potential, since, in fact, they seem to be very similar, at the core

They are both very pragmatic realists, the people of logic and reason, yet if Kakuzu’s irritability doesn’t affect him a tiny bit due to his ideal self-control, Anko’s can lead her to quite bad places, sometimes. They put their interests in the first place, and even though she tries to attach them to Konoha’s, she still has ‘personal’ things (I’ll write ‘bout it lower*). Their mindsets are so complicatedly organized that, at some point & way, it prevents them from having many close people, and makes them very hard to see through and predict

Both of them are very flexible & adaptive, independent individuals with similar outlooks on plenty of things and high intellectual level. They clearly can find plenty of traits that they would highly respect and adore in each other

Here I will speak mostly for “why and how” kind of things, bc both of them are terribly tricky to accurately figure out. But there will be some headcanons too

So, there are still some odds about them, due to the strong difference in their occupation, like, in plenty of cases they are really tricky to be brought together, because:

- Of the job

In original, Anko is a Konoha’s special jounin, and she is very dedicated to serving the country. Independently of whether she likes her job or not (depends on the plot), she orienteers at the people, at society’s gain from her work. So, accordingly, in any other AU her job is somehow connected to civil service, whether it’s something police-like, connected to science, or something like CCG in Tokyo Ghoul

Kakuzu, on the other hand, is a hitman and a persona non grata in literally all the five big countries, Konoha too (which makes it barely possible to bring them together in the original universe without hard complications or heavy drama. But still possible). He orienteers on his own gain alone, but, depending on the job, it can include others’ gain, too.

This detail makes him a saint once he holds supervising position in some company or any high position in the government (the better the working conditions of the staff now- the more money in the prospective), and the sheer nightmare once he has it on the opposite side of the law. Him as a mob boss is a complete different topic for discussion, but to get the point, in this case, the trouble isn’t him increasing the level of criminality (its rather vice-versa), but taking hold of too much control in the high and underground structures. Even as an ordinary hitman he’s rather tricky, since everything depends on the case

In most of the stories, they come to some sort of compromise, and how hard it is to reach it depends on how shitty his job is and how attached they are to each other at the moment

Like, in the above mentioned Shippuden AU and Harry Potter AU (which I also wrote with my buddy) everything went like clockwork, because there they are both more or less on this side of the law, in Tokyo Ghoul AU (which I also wrote with my buddy) it is a bit more complicated, with her being in-law and him being very much outlaw, in the Avatar AU (which I also figured out with my buddy, but we never happened to write it) it is also pretty smooth, with both of them being outlaws and then jumping out to the glory after all the shit is done, but in another Shippuden AU of mine, this all would be just a motherfucking bloody disaster

- Kakuzu is actually a hard nut to get attached to anyone

He lived too long to be truly afraid of anything, though. Its mostly because he doesn’t really need to get attached to or become close with someone to satisfy his need for communication. The man can get along with anyone once he wishes to, he can have countless acquaintances and plenty of buddies, but he doesn’t have many comrades and barely can call anyone a friend. Because he is used to lose everything and everyone he ever had or happened to have, because of his inhumanly lengthened lifespan.

It requires time for him to get used to the person, and then, eventually, in some cases, spend plenty of it to get attached

Plus, for him, due to his profession, each close connection is a really great responsibility for him. In most cases, he’d think twice of weather he is ready to take it or not

Though it of course has the personal factor, too

In Anko’s case, she has a grand privilege by being a very intelligent and keen woman, not just in cognitive plane, but in emotional, too. High emotional intellect is actually a rare trait, so she automatically stands out of the crowd for him. Even though it won’t guarantee his alliance, it will grant her his high respect and some sort of sympathy

- Kakuzu is, technically, an asshole

He does have his moral compass, which includes a great amount of common social morality, but he also has that “I am working” state

Even though Kakusu has a set of professional principles, and he still acts accordingly to what he thinks is right, one and the very same situation can be solved diametrically different once the context changes from working to casual and vice versa

This, and him being very independent and quite antisocial, makes the degree of assholeness depend on various factors

This can lead to major conflicts of interests, and if they are possible to have any compromise or not is strongly attached to the circumstances. After all, both are very, very prideful and dignified people

- In other words, the only major issue for them would be morality questions. It’s possible to make the case acceptable for Anko, since both of them ain’t truly squeaky clean, along with Kakuzu being willing enough to watch his borders

- She is provident and doesn’t really need a lot of money on a daily basis, which is much of a joy to him lol

- *they both seek for the stable ground, first of all

Taking in consideration the life conditions Kakuzu had in his youth (despite war state, he still stably had family, friends, grand respect from everyone, home, warmth and food) and how terribly he was torn out of his secured social environment, I believe what he seeks through all his bounty hunt and other money-connected manipulations is stability. Sustainability he had back then. The only way to have it in the conditions of our existent world order is to have money (and a very good mind and luck)

Anko has indeed much more altruistic motives, yet it’s still not that simple. It seems to be, on the first sight, yet considering the “Orochimaru related cases” and her very wayward behavior toward them, it’s clear she keeps her own motives and needs in mind oh so well. The service she has is very well payed, it allows her to do what she likes or believes is right, and to have the living conditions she finds comfortable. And only here, relying on the made sustainable basis, she does what she does

- Thus, they both illustrate the principle “first help yourself, next help the other” just right

- She knows she can keep an eye on him, yet it’s clear for her that her influence isn’t borderless, as well as telling him off some stuff is kind of a not wise thing to do. So in the majority of cases, she never interferes

- This is not common, yet he can actually change some plans if the situation is serious and the compromise can’t be found. He is that kind of person who works on a further prospective, and in this context, this would be the relationship with his loved one

- While Kakuzu is quite conflicted and has very reserved controversial persona, Anko is both controversial, conflicted, and sort of two-faced, on top of that

She is a very sincere, cheerful and humbly honest human being, yet she has some darker natural traits of her character that became rather strong with age and traumatic experience. Cunningness, guile, ways-depend-on-the-case and a bit of ruthlessness, that is. Moreover, she has some unsolved personal issues, which makes her even more twisted.

Like, remember the time when she confronted Orochimaru during the exam? And Kabuto, on the war? Getting rid of them is indeed beneficial for Konoha, but it’s clear that for her it is personal vendetta in the first place. She wouldn’t have tried to do this alone, otherwise, because these two are rather dangerous ones, to say the least.

She uses greater good to cover her real motives (even though it is not truly complete bullshit), and seems to have a terrible habit to keep silence about really important things, which makes her quite prone to lying, in some cases

And sometimes it very badly pisses Kakuzu off, since it makes her prone to doing useless but dangerous shit too

Yet this not any kind of separate hidden side, it is integrated into her personality, and coexists with her bright one. That’s where her violent humour comes from, for example.

But Kakuzu, on the other side, is completely monolith individual, yet sometimes his mindset can create contradictions when it comes to something important to him. but it's another topic

And seeing these layered constructions, and motives, they can pretty finely predict each other’s behavior. Not super-neatly, but they for sure see the basis. This is what helps Kakuzu to prevent Anko from doing some stupid shit, sometimes

- Anko has a role of an indicator for the people who don’t understand and see the changes in Kakuzu’s mood sometimes, since she usually reacts quite openly. Yet, when she has the same unreadable mask of cold, or one of guile, it’s a nightmare for them

- They prefer the non-verbal way to show their feelings, even though Anko is obviously the more chatty one

- They don’t say things such as “I love you”, or other sensual stuff like that really often, believing it to be some sort of cherished words that shall not be spelled mindlessly

- Anko isn’t majorly into PDA, but she fancies it much more than Kakuzu does. She has her whole moments of studying something with her hands, whether it’s a hand, scar or face. He’s more into passive display of affection, like wrapping an arm over her waist or leaning to her or something of this kind; they can allow themselves to (not sexually) kiss in public though

- She knows he doesn’t like to walk hand in hand due to considering it a youthful thing, so there are times when she intentionally walks holding on to his sleeve; generally they walk separately in order not to bother each other, but sometimes they walk arm in arm (like an old Victorian couple lol)

- Being older and wiser, Kakuzu eventually upholds some kind of mentoring position, yet he never considers himself any kind of a teacher or master to Anko, believing her to have a good head of her own. He is just insightful enough to break something through to her or give a word of advise

- This, combined with his highly powerful demeanor, also makes him have the leading position in their relationship

- Anko respects him much enough to fortify this, entrusting with plenty of life questions (like organizing the family budget), even though they make the majority of decisions together. Mostly because he is truly wise and highly experienced individual.

- This makes him one of the very few people Anko would actually listen to and take their opinion in consideration

- So basically they have equal relationship with some tendency to patriarchal order

- And it is, really, mostly economically-based disbalance, with him earning much more than she does

- Yet they never have any financial-based issues, since both of them keep in mind and respect the contributions of each

- There is major power play here, too. He has the absolute might, she has seduction. Anko loves how he makes her want to submit to him, let him have all the power, so she likes provoking him. And she knows he adores it, loves the subtle control she has over him

- They don’t have conflicts in their everyday life. Each knows how to avoid pissing one another off

- He cherishes her playful demeanor, her intellect. Combined with her cunningness, it allows her to rival him, in social sphere. The way she constructs her phrases, the way she speaks, mimics, moves, how bewitchingly it suits her feminine snaky features makes his blood boil and heart melt

- Both of them, actually, have rather specific kind of dry, dark humour. Kakuzu’s is very cynical, satirical, quite often menacing and subtly demeaning; Anko’s is very sarcastic and quite dirty, even gruesome and rather violent

- Sometimes they “fight” verbally as a form of a play. In some circumstances they may sound pretty vile, so some unobservant people mistake this for display of hate

- In general, Anko is the one to heat things up with her playful demeanor, which can include provocation and rivalry, and Kakuzu is the one to keep this energy in borders, accumulating it up to much more intense states

- They both put the comfort in the first place when it comes to household. Everything must be cozy, useful, silent and super clean

- Yet they are both very unpretentious and modest, really

- She absolutely adores when he is showing his serious, severe side, or powerful demeanor. She finds it incredibly suitable for him. She also likes how his real age is sliding out in this or that way. Like, even though he has rather young face (that of 37-40 y.o.), his eyes give away that he’ve seen oh so much more than it seems; the grumpy noises and grunts he makes, the lazy attitude in movements and the way how rapidly he finds a comfy pose once he has a chance to take a seat

- They are both rather patriotic, yet while in the most stories Anko’s feelings mostly lay towards the country she lives in, Kakuzu’s more often lay towards some places, so called small motherland.

- Kakuzu actually could be a source of deep, strong admiration and delight for her, despite all of his bullshit. The unbreakable will he has, mighty burning heart, all the wisdom, talents and mind. Being sent to fight god damn Hashirama, clearly a genius of his times, financial & management genius at the least. And, still, after all the hard times he’ve been through, he maintained the very strong sense of dignity and nobility, even though slightly twisted due to the profession and abnormal lifespan

- And the very same things can serve as the source for her chagrin: with all those traits, he could have been so much more rather than a criminal. With all the gifts he’ve got, he could have been of great use to society. He’s much easier about this, since his prospective is much wider and embraces decades (and in some universes even centuries) instead of months & years, and he knows that he’d be switching sides throughout his life, being on this and that side of the law, yet he still is a bit uncomfortable once it’s brought up

- They are deeply into science, which makes them atheists. He’s into medicine and human biology, she’s into chemistry and reptilian biology; both of them are nuts for physics, history and psychology

- They solve complicated physical and mathematical problems together time to time. She is the first one to have tea-breaks due to losing her temper over it, he tries to figure things out right until you can sense the smoke coming off his head

- Actually, they do have a stumbling stone aside from job & morality complications. And this is Anko’s attitude towards Orochimaru

What she does is basically ruins her life very-very slowly, maintaining the issues she has and planning to make him pay for all he’s done

Kakuzu knows exactly what is really going on with this attitude and why, but he can’t really do anything about it. Like, he knows he can’t make her change her mind or put something into her head

All he can do is really nothing but try to explain how those things are working, and even this option is basically a landmine field for him. At some level she does understand that he could probably be right, yet she just refuses to go back on her mind. And this is actually really dangerous, so at some moments they can fight quite badly about it

- He’s scared shitless to lose her, though; especially like that, even though he knows clearly that he will, anyway, sooner or later

- he knows that losing loved ones ends up with sheer disaster for him, yet he isn’t afraid to pay such a high price for those six, five or four decades of being with her. Because these decades are that of a paradise ones for him. Wife and family, as well as stable job, incomes and life conditions, are some sort of physical definitions of sustainability he craves. Especially family, yet it’s far ahead to plan

- The fact that he will have to bury her one day makes her rather depressed, as well as the knowledge that the only thing she can really do about it is to try to bring him as much happiness and comfort as possible before she dies

thank you, i'd say more, but it's too much already

[thefilmsimps]

Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (dir. David Leitch)

-Jere Pilapil-

Rewatching this one for our The Vaxxed and the Furious on twitch.tv/filmsimps.

It’s rare that I can actually pinpoint where things go wrong with a movie, but I absolutely can with Hobbs & Shaw, but here it is: Our heroes - Hobbs (Dwayne Johnson), Shaw (Jason Statham) and Hattie (Vanessa Kirby) - concoct a plan to break into the bad guys’ lab. Shaw says they have 45 minutes to complete the mission, at which time a bomb he set will go off. Up to this point, the movie has been laser focused on finding the blerp a derb that will bibbity bip, therefore saving the world.

Once a script introduces a countdown, that’s a Jedi Mind Trick that makes the audience aware of how much time has passed, and how much in-movie time should be left. It’s a shortcut to creating a sense of urgency. The problem with Hobbs & Shaw is that it does this mid-way through the movie, during a scene that logically should be the big action climax. It’s a scene of many escalating setpieces. A sane movie would call it a day. By doing this and somehow continuing on for another 40-plus minutes after the scene is over, it creates a sense that the movie is just dragging along endlessly.

It doesn’t help that this movie is jam-packed with little excursions and side trips Mostly, it’s good stuff: there are some major cameos from professional comedic actors who are better at being funny than the actors in the mainline Fast and Furious entries. By focusing on a trio of main characters (and a villain) rather than a “family” means there’s less to be done to justify taking every character on this adventure. But, it also pitches Hobbs and Shaw as equals, doubling up on exposition scenes to create parallels between the two of them while they hate each other’s guts (didn’t they make nice in F8 of the Furious?). The comedy bits all last just a few beats too long, as though the director trusted the actors to edit their lines. By the midpoint, it feels fair to ask “And we’re going to another location? Still?”

And listen, I know all of the Fast & Furious movies, on some level, are geared toward toxic macho men who have problems expressing emotions, and they just happened to find a way to a wider audience through some wild alchemy that turns irony to sincerity. But the Hobbs/Shaw tandem is terrible: two brutes who hate each other, can’t stop insulting each other, and the longer it goes on (we’re now in the third movie of this), the less fun it is, and the writers seem to run out of insults/threats. Thank God for Vanessa Kirby as Shaw’s sister Hattie, who is excellent as an MI:6 operative infected with a deadly virus (not that one, a fictional one from early 2019). She seems at ease in the spotlight, owning her scenes with more charisma than either of the titular characters. I’m very happy she’s been cast in the next two(!!) Mission: Impossible movies, where she will at least meet nicer men. (Plus, those movies won’t be weirdly insistent that I want to see her kiss Dwayne Johnson, a man with whom she has “friendly coworker” chemistry and nothing more.)

And it’s an action movie! Of course! The action is good, but it’s in a very modern blockbuster/Marvel way where it feels too CGI-reliant. It’s more imaginative and more memorable than anything in the previous Fast and Furious movie, but I miss the ambition of Fasts and Furiouses 5-7. Here, director David Leitch shines as a guy who should have directed a solo Jason Statham movie by now, with solid fight scenes and big ol’ ‘splosions. Nothing here comes even 1/10 of the way to his work directing John Wick, but it’s all handsome with each scene having at least one “Wow! So cool!” Moment that I can remember.

But Hobbs & Shaw mostly suffers by being a spin-off of a bigger franchise, one where Dwayne Johnson is not getting along with the main star. This movie seems poised and ready to continue independently of the main Fast and Furious movies, introducing character after character to varying degrees of memorability, but all being useful for specific things that The Next Adventure might require. Several feel like placeholders where Dom Toretto’s friends might have come in handy. The end result is a movie that is very well done for what it is, but winds up overstuffed by try to build a world from scratched, like a divorcee starting a new family.

7/10

[awastelandheart]

Sebastian’s personality analyzed through his theory-crafted natal chart: The perspective of a professional astrologer.

PART ONE: SUN SIGN.

i apologize in advance to any capricorns i unintentionally read to filth in this post.

          i think out of all the bachelors   &   bachelorettes, Sebastian has the oddest, most abrasive post-marriage dialogue. i’ve heard plenty of people over the years complain about how awkward being married to him is   &   i, myself, tend to not marry him when i play since locking him in pelican town like that when he so clearly wants to leave feels bad. even before marriage as well, he has a lot of almost cringey   &   certainly concerning dialogue. Sebastian’s not a man that’s made for marriage or long term relationships i think, at least not in his early to mid 20s which is how old i believe he is in canon. unlike the rest of the bachelors   &   bachelorettes, his character arc   &   development don’t do much for melding him into someone worth being with. even Shane who is troubled in a much more obvious way than Sebastian has more moments of reflection that convince the player that he’s a good person despite his flaws. Sebastian may seem to be gentle in his internal struggle, it’s easy to believe that, at most, he’s rude   &   depressed, but i think there’s a lot more to unpack here that suggests he’s violent, angry to an awful degree,   &   possibly the worst marriage candidate, if not just the worst townie out of the whole cast.

          to start off with, i believe Sebastian’s sun sign is Capricorn. my reasoning for this is a blend between a post on reddit i found that used a simple algorithm to convert the in game dates to real dates. taking into account the slightly flawed method that gives each date 2-3 days worth of wiggle room,   “ january 17th ”   implies he’s on the Capricorn side of january. to be honest, when i was first thinking about what sun sign i wanted Sebastian to have, i was leaning towards Aquarius since he has several lines about escaping the town   &   wanting his freedom   ( both being very Aquarius-like qualities ),   however i think the case for Capricorn is much easier to make. to start off, i’ll give a run down of the most defining Capricorn characteristics, then i’ll move onto showing in-game examples of how Sebastian demonstrates these traits   ( while leaving room for his other natal positions that i’ll extrapolate on in more posts to come ).

          Capricorn is an earth sign, reveling in stability with a handful of almost toxic traits to display if that stability isn’t achieved. ruled by saturn, or kronos if you wanna get greek, Capricorns are at a constant war with themselves between the general human experience   &   cutting out as much superfluous expression   &   feeling as possible. the story of kronos is very reflective of the Capricorn struggle:   it’s the tale of a man   ( god, but that’s not important )   whose wife is predicted to bear a child who will surpass him   &   take his legacy. kronos, in his anxiety to prevent this change, begins eating each of his wife’s children as they’re born until one day, his wife replaces one of the newborns with a rock so that it will survive kronos’ consumption. of course this leads to the child growing up   &   indeed surpassing kronos just as the prophecy foretold. the lesson to be learned from kronos is one of restriction   &   the inevitability of time.

          between their earthly reliability   &   love of practicality, Capricorns are viewed as the traditional fathers of the zodiac sphere. they guard their values of yesteryear close to their chest. anything too different is cast far away from themselves or, rather, consumed until all traces are disposed of. thankfully not as stubborn as poor Taurus   ( another earth sign ),   Capricorns have a touch of adaptability in all their logic. their modality is cardinal, implying they take charge of situations. they are the leaders next to Cancer, Libra,   &   Aries:   any good leader knows when to give up their morals for the betterment of their charge. to boot, Capricorn is represented by the mythological creature, the sea-goat   ( a creature created by dear old kronos, himself, consisting of the torso of a goat   &   the tail of a fish );   the goat half delivering on that steady earthly nature of an unrelenting climb to the top of a mountain called life, yet the inclusion of the ocean in this aesthetic implying an amount of emotion only water signs can relate to.

          in the typical male-dominated, fatherly way, however, emotional expression does not exist for Capricorns, resulting in this implied depth to lurk well below a Capriorn’s surface. they are deeply independent in a way that leads to intense loneliness. they must do everything for themselves, another thing lovely kronos has taught us here. why look for a different solution to this problem when i so clearly have found one for myself, the ruler of saturn proclaims. a Capricorn’s independence is almost panic charged in this way. they so dearly want to be seen as capable that they will shred their own livelihood as a price. they are masters at self control for it, each having taught themselves the art of stoicism from a young age. Capricorns are at best, friendly in a superficial way. knowing their loneliness is created by their own hands but never knowing how to move passed their own cold   &   distant heart to enact any change necessary to improve their relationships.

          something that is often associated with Capricorns   &   the other earth signs is the act of earning money. while Taurus enjoys earning money to support their lavish, venus-ruled lifestyle   &   Virgo sees money as something to worry over thus resulting in them hoarding it, Capricorns crave for their income to be stable   &   plentiful in order to provide for their loved ones, or for the more lonely Capricorns, to provide for themselves.

          saturn is the first planet to take a substantial amount of time to complete its cycle through all the signs. compared to earth, which takes one year to complete its solar rotation   &   jupiter which takes 12, saturn takes upwards of 30 years. we astrologers take that as symbolical for how Capricorns get significantly better with age, as well as their   “ slow   &   steady wins the race ”   attitude. Capricorn is a sign of wisdom but only at the hand of experience. young Capricorns frequently find themselves discontented with their environment   &   lifestyle, craving a stability that cannot exist without first having established themselves in the world. every seven years it’s said, a Capricorn reaches a new level of understanding   &   maturity, as it is about every seven years that saturn completes 1/4th of its solar cycle.

          Capricorns, like Scorpios, love their privacy. regarded as one of the more shady signs of the zodiac, a Capricorn is the type of person to have everyone believing they know everything there is to know about them while simultaneously only ever revealing surface level knowledge about themselves. Capricorns love having friends   &   spending time with their loved ones, however they lack a sense of trust that would allow them to form deeper connections. while a Capricorn does experience their emotions as thoroughly as the rest of the zodiac, they have an equally intense insecurity about expressing them. a Capricorn lives their life wanting to be depended on or at least wanting to provide for those that do depend on them. emotions are seen as a weakness that cannot be spared.

          with the basic personality of a Capricorn outlined, i’ll now go through some choice quotes that demonstrate these traits   &   then talk about a few parts of his heart events that do the same.

“ if i just disappeared would it really matter ? ” “ i was thinking... people are like stones skipping over the water. Eventually we're going to sink. ” “ what am I going to do today ?   probably nothing.”

          when the player first meets Sebastian, he is overtly depressed   &   never goes out of his way to hide it. there is a solemn dark cloud filled with rain, ready to burst constantly following him   &   it’s difficult to ignore. this seriousness is very characteristic of many signs, Capricorn being one of them as it is ruled by Saturn, an outer planet with a very melancholic tone.

“ hey, don't let me stop you from getting your work done. if you aren't busy i don't mind if you stick around. ”

          this quote demonstrates the productive mindset of a Capricorn. compared to all the other bachelors, Sebastian is the only one to ever really consider the player’s work schedule.

“ i was so close to screaming at mom for throwing away my old comic collection   ...  but something stopped me. hmm   ...   with age comes wisdom. ” “ the older i get, the less i'm drawn to the city. ” “ sometimes i feel so angry  ...  but when you show up i always start to calm down. maybe i'll mellow out with age. ”

          while these quotes are also depicting other personality traits, for now i want to emphasize Sebastian’s constant referencing to the passage of time. time is always on a Capricorn’s mind, even the less self aware ones always feel the effects of its passage harsher than other signs. after dating   &   at points in marriage, which is when these quotes are from, Sebastian begins to view time as something more positive   &   optimistic. he recognizes that he has anger issues, at the very least,   &   hopes they’ll get better as time goes on. it’s quite the feat to make a Capricorn see growing older as something positive instead of something anxiety inducing, so from this alone we can really tell that Sebastian is absolutely in love with the player, without a doubt.

“ i couldn't sleep last night so I went for a night ride on the motorcycle. i need to stay independent, even though we're married. that's just how i am. i still love you, though. ” “ hey   ...   want some coffee ?   i needed some   ...   woke up early from a nightmare   &   i just couldn't fall back asleep. ” “ hey. i couldn't sleep last night so i took a walk to the caves. ” “ i'm going to take a walk today. i need some time to myself. i'll see you in the evening. ”

          Capricorns tend to be almost predisposed to sleep issues due to their immense amount of anxiety that comes with the disconnect between productivity   &   incapability, or craving emotional connection   &   viewing emotions as unnecessary. Capricorns are also fiercely independent, so independent that it’s no surprise Sebastian’s the kind of person to sneak out of bed   &   go off alone when feeling anxious instead of waking his partner up for comfort.

“ i don't want to get soft now that i'm a married guy. maybe i should start eating more hot pepper   &   working out ?   just an idea   ... ”

          while i’d also be willing to chalk this expression up to Sebastian being anxious about not passing as masc, i’m also willing to attribute this to a Capricorn being afraid of time passing   &   “ missing out ”   on life. growing soft can be a fear of a sign so dedicated to seeming tough   &   dependable.

“ i don't really feel like doing work today. maybe i'll see what's on tv. ” “ i did some work on the laptop today. ” “ i'm debating whether i should work or just read comics all day. ” “ you know, i should be doing something productive right now. i just lose focus too fast   ...   maybe i should drink more coffee ? ”

          Sebastian references his work so frequently, in typical Capricorn fashion because the urge to justify one’s pleasures by mentioning the fact that they’re also being productive is something ever-present. they are a very guilty breed;   on top of their other burdens, they feel especially bad for moments of relaxation or times when they should be doing something, but cannot bring themselves to.

“ you’re probably making a lot of money on your farm, huh ?   i guess i should get a job soon   … ” “ we should raise more slimes. in big quantities they can be really profitable. ” “ i did some work on the laptop today. i was actually brainstorming some ideas for a game i want to make. with your farming income, i can afford to do what i want with my life. it’s pretty amazing. thank you. ” “ hey. look at me. never forget that i love you   ...   you’re everything to me. now go make us some money. ” “ are we doing okay on money ?   i don’t want to have to sell my laptop   ... ” “ *sigh*   ...    if gas wasn’t so expensive i’d ride my motorcycle to the city today. so what do you do when you aren’t working ? ”

          Sebastian talks SO much about money   &   to me, it’s really hard to imagine concernedape didn’t intentionally make him a Capricorn with this much dialogue about income when no other bachelor or bachelorette has any mention of the topic   ( except for harvey who mentions he’s afraid he’s not bringing in enough money from the lack of people in town ).   the biggest one that jumps out at me to really signal a significant change in his personality after marriage is when he mentions having the freedom that comes with a steady income, a freedom that now allows him to do what he really wants which is, apparently, to make a video game. another one that jumps out at me here is his immediate association with feeling like he should get a job after assuming the player is making a lot of money. since income is such an important subject for Capricorns, it’s easy to imagine Sebastian feels inferior in comparison to the player since he’s   “ just ”   a freelancer.

“ i often felt unappreciated at home   ...   but here i feel like i really belong. ”

          this quote kind of hits Capricorn’s need to be appreciated   &   useful directly on the head   &   is a good transition for me to talk about the fact that Sebastian never progressed very far in his career while living at home with his family because he felt unappreciated. compared to how he almost immediately has a dialogue line after marriage where he tells the player he’s been inspired to make a video game, it’s easy to see the almost instant maturity Sebastian obtained just from moving out;   something he had assumed was in the far off future, implied by his heart scenes.

now let’s break down Sebastian’s heart events.

          his first heart even opens with him busy working, already a very Capricorn setting honestly, as i’ve said a few times now since Capricorns are prone to productivity. Robin enters after a moment   &   informs Sebastian that Abigail is looking for him, to which Sebastian responds to ask if his mother had informed Abigail that he’s working. Robin says that while she had, Abigail still intends on visiting Sebastian at some point today. Sebastian’s next piece of dialogue is very important.

“ *sigh* no one takes my job seriously. ”

          this is an incredibly Capricorn thing to say, both because Capricorns always feel the need to be taken seriously   &   also due to their signature insecurity about income.

          the scene continues so that the player can ask Sebastian what his career goals are. he explicitly says:   “ well, i’m trying to save up so i can move out of here. probably to the city or something, ”   which by itself is obviously very Capricorn, both nailing their need for income, their constant validation that they deserve what they want,   &   their desire for independence, however his dialogue continues for another textbox that contains the most Capricorn lines i’ve ever heard.

“ you know, if i went to college i’d probably be making six figures right now … ”   

          Sebastian is so very   &   obviously obsessed with money, it’s crazy to think he’s any other sign but Capricorn. this portion of the heart scene ends with him saying, 

“ but i just don’t want to be a part of that corporate rat race, you know ? ”   

          this dialogue i’m willing to attribute to another one of his signs at a later date in another post, but in my experience, i’ve known several Capricorn suns that feel the same:   that while they strive for a stable income, they hate participating in capitalistic culture.

          this first heart scene ends with Sebastian dismissing the player, saying he   “ has to get this module finished by tomorrow, ”   indicating he has a very set schedule when it comes to his work. organization being yet another characteristic trait of Capricorn.

          Sebastian’s second heart scene opens with the player catching him working on his bike. after a moment of introspection, Sebastian starts talking, again, about how when he saves enough money, he’s going to get out of the valley, just him   &   his bike. this scene doesn’t have anything specifically Capricorn about it   &   i plan on revisiting it when i talk about his other placements.

          likewise, Sebastian’s third   &   fourth heart scenes don’t have anything outrageously Capricorn in them   --   in fact neither scene tells us very much about Sebastian in particular aside from pointing out that he likes tabletop games   ( which obviously isn’t exclusively Capricorn by any means, but i’ve known so, so many Capricorn suns that have been hardcore into dnd over the years   ...  )   &   has social anxiety. i’ll most likely dip into his fourth heart scene a little more when i talk about his other placements, though.

          Sebastian’s fifth   (   &   final before marriage )   heart scene is, of course, important,   &   probably the most memorable for anyone who’s played Sebastian’s route, but it honestly doesn’t tell us much about his core personality. what it does tell us is how he acts   &   feels when he’s in love, so i’ll definitely come back to this scene when i talk about his venus position.

          &   that’s on his heart scenes !

          so, in summary, i believe Sebastian has a Capricorn sun because he shares many qualities with how astrologers perceive the position. of course this is all just my personal interpretation, but i hope this was an interesting read   &   shed some light on the kind of person Sebastian is !

[cookinguptales]

I've a small query (if it doesn't float your boat, no worries!) I was interested in how you got into learning languages, what led you to it? I've become curious since learning a new language as an adult has only increased my awe of multilingual folk (additionally, I vaguely remember a post about a request in exchange for a donation to charity, and wondered if there were any you'd like a donation to)

First of all, good luck with the language learning! It’s not easy as an adult, but I do think it’s worth it, both in terms of cultural fluency and brain elasticity.

My answer to the language thing is actually extremely complicated, so I’ll be putting it under the cut. I’ll put the charity stuff above the cut so more people can see it.

— I’d just like to warn you, though, before I start, that I have been locked in this house for over a month with no respite and I HAVE A LOT OF WORDS AND FEELINGS IN ME SO THIS POST HAS SO MANY OF BOTH OF THOSE THINGS!!

anyway

There are so many charities that I want to donate to now that it honestly makes my head spin. Every time I look at a site like GoFundMe it kind of makes me want to cry. So a lot of donations I’ve made have been to like local businesses, restaurants, etc. who will close down without help. (Also a lot of local native groups, who are disproportionately suffering right now.) I’ve also been donating to various food banks — Philabundance, a Philly-centric charity that deals with food insecurity in general, is a good one. That was a regular of mine even before the outbreak. I’ve also donated to a lot of the local services in the small town where I’m in now, though you’ll need to PM me if you want the name of that. (It’s… very small.) 

Off Their Plate is another great charity that’s been working with small restaurants (who can’t open for business) to get food to first responders. They’re partnered with World Central Kitchen, which is another fantastic charity that helps out during disasters. Plus well-known ones like Feeding America, No Kid Hungry (important while school is out and kids aren’t getting breakfast/lunch there), Direct Relief, etc.

(I uhhh may have overstrained my charity budget the past couple months. It’s odd how that adds to stress and relieves it at the same time.)

I tend to avoid religious charities, especially Salvation Army, because they’re occasionally discriminatory in how they distribute resources and we no longer have laws & oversight to make sure they don’t do shady shit. So I just avoid them in general now. I also avoid the American Red Cross because they’ve been known to misuse funds. Research is key!

I also worry about some of my regular charities, like Immigration Equality & Rainbow Railroad (helps LGBTQ people in dangerous countries immigrate to less dangerous ones), the Native American Rights Fund, various local abortion funds, RAICES (provides legal services to immigrants & refugees), the ACLU, Dysautonomia International, the Rainforest Action Network, etc… A lot of them are getting fewer donations than they’re used to because we’re in the middle of such life-shattering events.

If you are really interested in making a donation (please, please, please do) those are all good options. I also fully recommend looking up needy organizations, services, people, etc. in your own area. I try to donate to a healthy mixture of national/international organizations, local needs, and temporary issues du jour. (Disaster relief, bail funds for protesters, fighting new discriminatory laws, etc.) I would genuinely appreciate any donations, especially if you find a cause near and dear to your heart that I would never even hear about. Anything along these same lines, y’know? If you have anything you’d like me to do in return, just hmu.

I constantly stress about who to donate to — there are so many good organizations and so few dollars to give them — but at a certain point, every dollar to a cause you believe in counts. Every dollar you donate helps to make the world a little bit better for at least one person. That’s what I have to tell myself to calm myself down, haha. So even the smallest donation you make to any of these groups would mean a lot to me.

Anyway, onto the language stuff:

For me personally, I grew up bilingual. Deafness runs in my family, so I learned sign language from a very young age. Note: I say “sign language” rather than ASL. I learned sign language kind of organically, which ended up making a mess later in life. My parents mostly taught me, but so did my daycare (at a deaf school) and so did my babysitters and so did other family members, etc. The point is, not all of them used the same sign language. There was a wide mixture of ASL, SEE, and home signs and my current signing style is… problematic. lmao. My family all understands it (hey, they taught it to me) and I can have conversations with American sign language users, but I know they can’t love my signing lmao. I’ve considered sitting down and taking a legit ASL class for years, but there are so many classes I want to take… I don’t know.

After that, it largely became a case of taking languages whenever they were made available to me. I’ve always liked them. We moved around a lot when I was a preteen so I went to a lot of different schools. (4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th grade were all different schools.) It was rough at home and hard to make friends so I guess I threw myself into academics a lot. My sixth grade school was an odd one; it was a 6-8 grade school and you were supposed to take a crash course in three different languages in sixth grade so you could choose one and take it in 7th and 8th grade. I ended up taking Spanish, French, and German that year. I liked French best! But then we moved so it was kind of moot. (And I hated German, sorry Germans. My mouth doesn’t like the noises. It didn’t help that my teacher was weirdly sympathetic to Nazi-era Germany…? But I guess that’s another post.)

When we moved to Florida, you had to have special permission to take language classes in 7th grade. (FL doesn’t have great academics.) But since I’d already had some Spanish in NC, they let me take it! And then I moved schools again. This new school, my 8th grade school, I’d be in until I graduated 12th grade years later — but the employee turnover at that school was almost comedically bad?  I took Spanish for like a year and a half there and had three different teachers. So at this point I’d had 5 different Spanish teachers, all from different countries (where they spoke slightly different Spanish!), all reteaching the same ideas over and over again because they didn’t know where the last teacher had left off. In the end, my last Spanish teacher sent me to the school library with some textbooks because he felt like I was very good at languages and he couldn’t adequately teach me in the environment he’d been thrown into. (My high school was very terrible. So he was right.)

SO I SWITCHED TO FRENCH. I took French for 3-4 years in high school (can’t remember when I started) but the same shit started happening. By the last year, my French teacher had the French I, II, III, and IV students IN THE SAME CLASS and she just put the advanced students in small groups and had us do independent study. Sigh… Around this same time, I started three other languages. At this point, I was getting kind of accustomed to self-study so I applied for a Latin class in the Florida Virtual School and took a year of that. I also spent a summer studying at the University of Chicago when I was 16-17 and learned Middle Egyptian then. (Yes, I was an ancient cultures nerd even back then.)

The Japanese has always been an odd case. Like I said, my 8-12 education was fairly terrible. They had this thing where they used a computer program to teach kids math and the teacher kind of taught along? When I transferred to the school in the middle of 8th grade, the teacher didn’t know what to do with me so he just plopped me in front of a computer and told me to do as much as I could. They started me in… Pre-Algebra, I think? Which I’d already taken in sixth grade. So I ended up getting through Pre-Algebra, Geometry, Algebra, and Algebra II, which… wasn’t in the teacher’s plans. I’d kind of finished several years of math in like a quarter. And then they didn’t have any more classes. So he just told me to like. Sit quietly and amuse myself for the last few months of school?? (Terrible, terrible school.) So I went to the library and found a book about Japanese and started teaching myself that. I really, really liked Japanese! Like it’s a language that just clicks really well with the way my brain works, I think. It’s very logical, I like the syllabary, etc. And I think growing up signing helped me with pictographic languages like Middle Egyptian and Japanese. My brain easily connects visual symbols with concepts.

When I went to college, the plan was honestly to learn more Egyptian and start translating, and I kept taking French to help me read old research in various ancient study fields. I ended up transferring out of the NELC major, though, due to some ethical problems… I guess that’s another post. Several years into my RELS/FOLK degree I went to my parents like. Look. I love learning this stuff but none of it’s useful. Remember how much I loved Japanese? Can I go back to learning that? I could translate that and that’s a legit skill. So I applied to a program through my school and studied in Japan for a while and ended up really doubling down on that language. Weird how I came back to it years later, but I guess it was always the one I loved best.

I have a mind that’s very pattern-based, so I guess I’ve always loved learning languages and the patterns behind them. (This may be why languages with a lot of rule exceptions, like French, irritate me.) They’re like puzzles that I’ve always enjoyed teasing out. Unfortunately, the way my education bounced around meant that I never got a good grounding in most of those languages, so I’ve largely lost them. I can still read French fairly well and my Japanese is good… My Spanish is like. Enough to get me around in the southern US. My German is abysmal. I remember very little Latin & Middle Egyptian. (It’s been over 10 years, I guess.)

So I guess what I feel the need to say to you is that if you don’t use it, you will lose it. I did well in all my language classes. They’ve always been fairly easy for me. Like. Straight As, no problem. I don’t say this to brag. I say it so you know that even for someone like me, whose brain is fairly well-wired for languages, it’s very, very difficult to retain languages when you’re not using them. If you’re not used to taking languages or you started late in life, it’s even harder. So even on the days you don’t want to practice! You gotta practice! Ganbare! Bon chance!

[per-ineptia-ad-astra]

@trek-tracks

I'd read your rant! Also, you should see Beyond. I haven't seen ID, but I'm confident Beyond is WAY better than ST:2009 and, from what I've heard about ID (that it is a garbage fire), Beyond is not the one of the three to not see.

Yeah, I have heard that about Beyond, and I keep meaning to watch it. I’m not like actively avoiding it, it just sort of...hasn’t happened. I have a To Watch list about five miles long at this point that I just keep foregoing in favor of watching gaming videos on YouTube. It’s a sad life.

But here’s the rant (feel free to skip if you didn’t follow this blog to hear me complain about AOS):

My strong impression from the first two movies was that the writers misunderstood--or just, for whatever reason, chose to discard-- the dynamic that Kirk, Spock and Bones actually had in TOS.

In TOS there’s a very deliberate balance wherein Spock and Bones are on opposite ends of a spectrum of logic vs emotion/ lawful vs chaotic, and Kirk sits in the middle of that spectrum, getting the input from both ends and then turning that into balanced decision-making. (I know it’s deliberate because of that whole “I took one man and wrote him as three people” quote from Roddenberry.) It’s a great setup when it’s being used correctly because it gives you a built-in method of examining any situation that comes up in the show from multiple angles without sacrificing the drive of any of the characters.

Trying to write one single character covering the same total perspective as Spock, McCoy and Kirk can create combined would necessarily result in either a character who appears to be wildly indecisive at best and lacking in any consistent characterization at worst, or in paring down the range of that perspective to avoid the first thing happening. This is all especially important in a show with the set-up of Star Trek, where not only do you not have much time to deliberate because everything has to be solved in under 60 minutes and no we will NOT be revisiting any of it later, but your lead character is in a position of formal command, meaning you have very little room to allow him to be hesitant or indecisive in his decisions before he starts to look like he shouldn’t be in that job. Indeed, it’s made explicitly clear multiple times that any sign of hesitation on Kirk’s part will be taken by not just him but most of the crew and Starfleet as a sign that he’s losing ability to command. Because Spock and McCoy have different roles not just as characters but as crewmembers, they can give full attention to their respective angles in a way that Kirk alone could not without it looking like he was dithering, with the bonus that you can write it all as a natural (and entertaining) conversation rather than it coming off as forced exposition. You don’t need to have those kinds of discussions all the time--there are plenty of times when one or more of the trio is absent and things tick along just fine--but there are also times, IMO, when someone being missing or just poorly written makes things falter quite obviously, Where No Man Has Gone Before being the biggest example that comes to mind.

But instead of having Kirk be in the middle of this spectrum I may have just sort of made up, the AOS movies seem to take the tack of having Spock be at one end and Kirk at the other end. They’re portrayed as being complete opposites to such an extent that they’re at odds practically the minute they meet, and spend the entire first movie at each other’s throats because AOS!Kirk’s brash, reckless, emotion-driven, rules-ignoring personality clashes incompatibly with Spock being deliberate, logical, and law-abiding to the letter. There’s absolutely no indication in TOS that Kirk and Spock ever had that kind of relationship or that they had to get over any sense of rivalry before they became friends. Granted, TOS had such a lackadaisical approach to backstory that we don’t really know anything about how they did become friends, but we are told on more than one occasion (which, for TOS, is practically hammering the point in) that Kirk was himself was so serious and focused as a student (”positively grim”) that he attracted bullying for it. In other words, for as little solid backstory as we get, one thing TOS is clear on is that Kirk did not have an arc of being reckless and wild and having to learn some patience and sense--if anything he seems to have had an arc in the complete opposite direction, although not so much that he isn’t still a total workaholic.

So that of course very much impacts Kirk and Spock’s characterizations and dynamic, but it also impacts McCoy, because by sticking Kirk in McCoy’s usual role, McCoy himself is now left with very little to do but make snarky comments and stick hyposprays in people from time to time (which he does very well, but, still). Which is sort of both cause and effect, because the fact that the writers put Kirk in that position to begin with indicates to me that they didn’t understand and/or didn’t value the importance of McCoy, specifically, being in that spot in the first place. But it is important that McCoy is in that spot because I love him and he deserves it because McCoy as a character is in a much more natural position to serve that role than Kirk is.

This may seem like a tangent, but stick with me here: McCoy inherently has a different perspective towards Starfleet than Kirk. Than everyone in the main cast, really, but especially Kirk. Kirk’s character, his perspective, his role in life, his arc, his backstory, all are closely tied to his being in Starfleet. Kirk’s position in relation to Starfleet is so important that it’s part of if not the entirety of practically every bit of story or backstory he has. When we hear about Kirk’s history, we mostly hear about it in terms of where he was in Starfleet at the time: at the Academy, serving his first assignment as an ensign, being a lieutenant on the Farragut, etc. Kirk’s career is very much on his mind all the time and threats to it are the subject of conflict multiple times, not because he cares about climbing in rank for rank’s sake but because he needs that career, and that good relationship with Starfleet, to do the thing he is most meant to do in life: be a starship captain. It’s not a position he could have outside of Starfleet--maybe he could go command an independent ship of some kind, but it wouldn’t be the same thing, not really. Kirk’s not meant to be doing supply runs or carrying passengers or what have you; he wants to explore, he wants to be out there checking out the weirdest shit the universe has to offer, he wants to be doing something important. This is why it’s such a big deal that Kirk is willing to sacrifice his career to save Spock in the movies, because that career is his life.

Yes, Kirk doesn’t always agree with Starfleet, and he’s willing to break their rules if he really has to. But Kirk could never exist in the position he is in TOS, and he certainly couldn’t maintain that position, if he couldn’t agree with Starfleet on most things, and conduct himself in a way that they in turn found agreeable. You don’t get to be the captain of one of the most important ships in the fleet by fucking around. And he didn’t. He worked his ass off to get there! TOS Kirk might be a bit young to be a captain but not so much so that he didn’t have to climb up the ranks the old-fashioned way to get there. Meanwhile AOS had to have Kirk sneak onto a ship he wasn’t supposed to be on and then get rid of practically everyone else on said ship, right up to provoking the acting captain into a fistfight, to get Kirk into a position where it would be remotely plausible for him to be in command of the Enterprise. In AOS Kirk is characterized as being so at odds with Starfleet and the Starfleet way of doing things that it takes some very extreme circumstances to get him in a position to command the ship because there’s no way Starfleet would have actually chosen for him to do that.

The reason I’m putting all this emphasis on Starfleet is that in TOS, when it comes to questions of Following The Rules vs Doing What’s Right, Starfleet is the rules. If it’s a matter of Lawful vs Chaotic, Starfleet is going to be the law. Any time the characters are in a situation where they have to ask “Is it the right thing to do what the rules say we should be doing here? Could the rules be wrong?” the rules they’re debating are almost always going to be Starfleet rules. (When it comes to following non-Starfleet rules it’s usually not so much a moral matter as “okay following the rules might be the only way we’ll get this done but we’re not going to act like we like or agree with those rules.”)

So when it comes to putting a character in the position of being the one who’s emotional rather than logical, who’s the voice of Hang The Rules, I’m Doing The Right Thing, who’s there to say things that need to be said but aren’t really appropriate to just say in the societal rules we’re working under here--Kirk can do that to some degree, but it really doesn’t make sense for him to be the one on the far end of that spectrum. To have been in the Starfleet environment as long as he has, and to have been as successful in that environment as he has, he has to be someone who can thrive in that environment, who finds it more acceptable to work with than not, or at least can do a good job faking it.

But McCoy? McCoy’s coming at it from a completely different angle. McCoy didn’t join Starfleet out of any kind of lifelong pursuit, he basically did it on impulse because fuck it, he had nothing better to do with his life at the time. Being in Starfleet informs McCoy’s characterization far less than everyone else’s in the show; mostly it just informs his current physical location. His identity isn’t really wrapped up in being Starfleet personnel. His identity is wrapped up in being a doctor. He was a doctor long before he was Starfleet, and when being in Starfleet stops being a viable option he goes to be a doctor somewhere else (and to make regrettable fashion choices but that’s another topic entirely).

There’s a lot of little ways that McCoy shows that he doesn’t care a whole lot about the Starfleet way of doing things. He’s casually insubordinate to people who seriously outrank him. He inserts himself into situations and discussions that aren’t what his actual job calls for--there’s no real reason why the CMO would need to hang out on the bridge all the time but there he is. He complains about the dress uniforms. He usually forgoes referring to other crewmembers by their ranks if he can get away with using their first name instead. He doesn’t even sit right.

[ID: 1. McCoy sitting on the edge of Spock’s console on the bridge, 2. McCoy sitting on the edge of the briefing table with a cup of coffee, 3. McCoy sitting sideways in a shuttle chair while talking to Spock.]

And he has very little interest in his own rank, or in commanding anyone, or in generally behaving as if he’s a member of a military organization, something reflected in the fact that he in turn hardly ever gets referred to by his actual rank. McCoy is okay with ordering people around as a doctor--he’ll pull rank to get someone in for a physical, or make them sit down and rest when they’re injured, Jim, and since he has to he’ll run the rest of the medical department, whatever there is of it. But I think he sees that first and foremost as being a doctor, who just happens to have a few extra tools at his disposal to make his patients behave so hey, might as well use ‘em. But on the one occasion* when he’s called upon to actually act as a ranking officer in a completely non-doctoring-related matter, he gets so flustered about the whole thing that he has to ask the person he’s supposed to be ordering if he did it right. He’s not really interested in being in charge of anyone in any formal sense.

*The one occasion in the main show, at least, which doesn’t take into account Diane Duane’s extremely excellent novel Doctor’s Orders, in which McCoy winds up in charge of the Enterprise because Shenanigans, and spends the rest of the book having a massive extended anxiety attack about it. It’s so great.

So McCoy doesn’t look at things tactically in the same way that Kirk does. He doesn’t have to. It’s not his job. Not to say that McCoy never has to make any hard decisions, but as a character he functions much better than Kirk as the one who’s looking at the emotional aspect of things because most of the time, McCoy’s not the one who has to turn The Right Thing To Do into standing orders for 430 people that can actually be practically acted upon. He tends to have a more immediate, short-range focus, contrasting the way Spock tends to look at the biggest picture and Kirk, again, lands somewhere in the middle. McCoy thinks about individual people first and foremost. If the Enterprise is about to get into a skirmish with a Klingon ship, Kirk has to be thinking about what the outcome of that battle will mean for Federation-Klingon relations, about what he can do now that might save more lives down the road even if it puts some in danger right now, but McCoy will be thinking about the people who are about to be hurt, maybe killed, right now. Which is a great perspective for a doctor to have, and an important perspective for a captain to keep in mind, but it could never be the only perspective for a captain.

McCoy’s viewpoint is a very important one in the Watsonian sense that it’s useful for Kirk and in the Doylist sense that it contributes to the specific tone that TOS wanted to achieve. But it’s a viewpoint that has to be balanced for it to be effective both practically speaking and in story-telling terms. AOS missed that balance; by putting all their emphasis on Kirk and Spock being opposites they made McCoy more or less redundant. Which is a crying shame, because it’s an unforgivable waste of Karl Urban’s goddamn amazing performance. The thought of what he could have done if he’d had something more to work with is heartbreaking to me.

But McCoy goes unappreciated far too often in general. You know I once went looking for a TOS McCoy Funko Pop and they didn’t have one? They had a generic Andorian but they didn’t have McCoy. It’s an outrage! I had to make my own out of a Munny.

[inkribbon796]

Live form Downtown Ch. 2

Written for Bim’s birthday, in the Superhero AU this is his first real public appearance.

Summary: As Bim celebrates his birthday, the Heroes decide on a plan of action.

This is chapter two of the story

<= PREVIOUS

Chapter 2: He Says He Doesn’t Tip

    Inside the police station, Abe was with a couple of the heroes. The three heroes were all in uniform. Logan had already watched the entire segment. Roman and Jackie, however had not. One of Abe’s contacts had gotten him an early pilot showing of Bim’s show, and it was remarkably similar to the episode that had aired tonight.

    “And you can confirm that all show contestants are hale and healthy?” Logan asked after the segment concluded, adjusting his glasses.

    “Yeah,” Abe answered. “First thing I checked out. As much as I want to slap the guy as a serial killer, we’ve got no physically proof he was in the city.”

    “I saw him with the other villains,” Roman reminded. “My money’s on him being the Dorm 5 Killer.”

    “I’d love to take that as gospel, but I don’t think the court’s gunna take a magical out-of-body experience as hard evidence,” Abe reminded.

    “We should strive to have multiple pieces of independent evidence,” Logan added.

    “However Dark and Wilford found the kid it can’t be that hard to get information out of him,” Roman scoffed. “I mean you said it yourself that you got one of Dark’s Lieutenants on our side.”

    Logan tapped his knuckles to his chin, his mouth thinning into a tense line. “As Dark and Wilford’s apprentice, it stands to reason that there will be much heavier security around him than the rest of Dark’s enforcers.”

    “Yeah, in case yah haven’t noticed, Dark’s not an idiot. This is the first time Silver an’ I have seen this kid in almost twenty years,” Jackie reminded. “He kept him buried so deeply I thought we hallucinated the whole thing.”

    “That might not be entirely accurate,” Logan rewound the recording to the last clear image of Bim’s face. “Amenities and resources to raise a child do not some out of thin air. If your numerous fights with those who can use the Void have proven anything, the objects have to first enter the Void for Dark, Wilford, and Anti to use them.”

    “What you thinking, Pocket Protector?” Roman asked.

    “How young was the child that Dark and Wilford had?” Logan demanded, looking in Jackie’s direction. While the heroes were talking amongst themselves, Abe was staring at the screen.

    Jackie sputtered for a bit, “That was twenty years ago, remember?”

    “You must remember something,” Logan responded with exasperation. “Anything.”

    “The kid was little,” Jackie answered. “Real little. Couldn’ta been more than a couple of months or something.”

    Logic went quiet for a bit. “Detective, I believe you said there were no missing children’s reports before or during that time.”

    “No,” Abe didn’t take his eyes off the screen. “But now that I can get a half-decent look at the kid, it just crossed my mind that he looks a lot like Wilford.”

    “Seriously?” Roman balked.

    “Look, Warfstache is a serial adulterer,” Abe looked back at them. “It’d surprise me more if he hadn’t somehow made a kid with all the married folks he’s banged over the years.”

    “That doesn’t explain Dark,” Logan muttered under his breath.

    “What was that?” Roman asked.

    “Just a thought,” Logan summarized. “We might be able to get additional information another way.”

    “How?” Jackieboy Man scoffed. “We just gunna swoop inta’ an abandoned warehouse an’ beat ‘em up ‘til they tell us what we wanna know?”

    “I need to run tests and stimulations to see if I am wasting our time or not,” Logan evaded, already turning towards the door.

    After that Logan tuned the others out as he headed back to the base. It was close enough to the base that it wasn’t too bad of a walk, and it gave Logic time to think and plan. His brain running through possibilities and options.

    Logan walked into the base and went to the basement, if anyone tried to stop or talk to him, the logical side didn’t notice. Finally the elevator opened into an impossible big, and impossibly dark basement. Logic stepped out and waited for the elevator to close behind and plunge him into the darkness.

    “Logic,” the Host’s voice seemed to purr from the darkness and a single candle was lit in the distance. “Greetings.”

    Carefully Logic made his way to the candle, thankfully there weren’t any bookshelves in his path and he made it to the Host’s desk with little incident.

    At first Logan wasn’t sure how to start, the Host could see the future, and had probably seen him coming down days ago. “Salutations, Host, I am certain you know why I am here.”

    “The Host is aware of many things,” the Host smiled at Logan, his face eerily lit by the candle. “It is astounding to the Host that the rest of the Egos haven’t enlisted his help in finding their Dorm 5 Killer.”

    “The local governing body of Egoton have made it clear that your visions do not count as “admissable evidence” so we will have to use more standard legal methods,” Logan reminded.

    “The Host would like it to be known that the judge is just afraid that the Host will make his affair with his wife’s assistant public knowledge,” the seer dismissed.

    “Be that as it may, you are capable of masking your presence in the city,” Logan reminded the Host. “Can you do the same for others?”

    “What was Logic thinking of doing with the Host’s abilities?” the Host asked, tilting his head and looking at Logan as if he could still physically see him.

    Logan would be minimizing if he didn’t admit that that type of stare didn’t worry him at least a little.

    “It is in my opinion that I am the only individual capable of the task,” Logan began. “Bim Trimmer is working with Dark and the rest of the League, he might even be the Dorm 5 Killer.”

    “Of that, the Host doesn’t doubt,” the Host dismissed, staring at Logan with a bit less intensity. “Logic wants something from the Host, what does Logic want the Host to do?”

    “I need you to help me go undercover inside Dark’s network,” Logan responded. “I need to be so thoroughly undercover than even Deceit or the Duke won’t recognize me. I believe that someone of my skills could be useful to Dark’s army. He has even stated as much. I could also bring useful information back.”

    The Host leaned forward, steeping his fingers in front of his face, “How fortunate for Logic, the Entity is in need of a new assistant. He recently turned his old one into a Lieutenant.”

    “Good,” Logan nodded, trying not to be nervous.

    “If Logic accepts, the Host will not be able to protect him from so far away,” the Host warned. “Once he starts, there is no going back.”

    “It is a necessary risk,” Logan reminded.

    “But not one Logan need take, they could simply arrest Bim Trimmer,” the Host reminded.

    “I have to do this, we don’t have enough evidence,” Logan reminded.

    “Fair enough,” the Host smiled, and his hands went up as if he was sitting at a typewriter.

    “Name: Logan Thomas Sanders,” the Host began, blood began trickling out of his empty eye sockets, staining his bandages and running down his face.

    The Host continued. “Age 30, birthday: April 24, 1989. Attended Stanford University. Double majored in Computer Science and Bioengineering on a full-ride scholarship. He was picked up by the Entity’s talent scouts. After his schooling moved to Egoton in November of 2019, he was enlisted to work for the Entity.”

    As the Host began to talk, Logic began to feel different, the world around him graying out, but the Host and his voice was always clear.

    Then finally the Host added, “Will periodically return to the Heroes to report to the Host. He continues in his hero work, no one is the wiser, not even Logan.”

    With the last syllable, Logan’s world jolted and he found himself at a desk, about five books in front of them. He blinked, as if disoriented, looking around himself. He was tired, his eyes hurt. Probably from staring at Dark’s books all day.

    Last thing he expected to use his degree for was to work a dead guy’s books, but it was a five figure salary, and he wasn’t going to complain.

    Taking his glasses off, Logan rubbed at his eyes and groaned.

    Darkiplier appeared behind him and Logan jumped a little, he was getting better at expecting Dark’s presence and predicting it. “How bad is it?”

    Logan groaned, picking up the top book. “You have to stop letting Warfstache kill his contestants.”

    “I tried that twenty years ago,” Dark groaned, rubbing at his face. “Once you’re done with that book I need to discuss something with you. Full discretion, as always.”

    “Of course, Sir,” Logan put back on his glasses and looked his boss dead in the eyes. The bookkeeper liked to think he’d been hired for his general fearlessness. “I’ll lock these back up and be right into your office.”

    “Good,” Dark told him and left, disappearing back into the Void.

    Logan sighed and got back to the books in front of him.

NEXT =>

[ardenttheories]

So do you hate the epilogue or love it? Also I feel like the exposition provided on Hope was interesting in Candy. Besides that I’m curious as to what your full thoughts are

So, I’m still kind of torn on this. I’ve tried to think it over a few times, to really chew on my thoughts while I was reading the two Epilogues into a singular coherent idea, but all I’ve really come up with is a sort of mushy, oversweet mess that’s pretty indistinguishable from roiling confusion.

I still stand by my mentality that the Epilogues are really well written. There’s something about them that, although it sometimes doesn’t read like Homestuck used to, still really comes across as enticing and interesting. Even when the characters are at their worst - and even though a lot of them have had weird character developments or evolutions - the actual characterisation within the foundation of what’s been set in the Epilogues is believable. I can believe that a Dirk who acts like Meat!Dirk does would think and feel that way; that a Roxy who’s under the sort of narrative pressures of Candy!Roxy would end up as demure as she does. It’s believable, in the same way a well written fanfic is believable - which is, ultimately, the point. 

But do I like it? As an English Literature university student, yes. Oh, yes, I love the Epilogues. There’s so much to think over, to sink your teeth into, to really and thoroughly enjoy on a literary level. 

The inter-connectivity between the texts is fantastic. You can get an idea from both on their own, but only when they’re put together does the full picture come out. Knowing that Alternate!Calliope has influence over the narrative in Meat gives you a good chance to realise that she’s bringing canonicity back into Candy well before she even confirms it herself.

For instance, the reason Roxy’s so wildly offbeat that even John notices it is that they’ve departed so far from canon that her canonical developments and foundations have become worthless. She doesn’t bother going through her identity stuff because there’s ultimately no point in focusing on it; character development doesn’t matter anymore, and without anyone to help her focus on it, there’s just no reason for her to think about it. It’s only with the presence of Alternate!Calliope that things slowly start to get better. It’s why, when Alternate!Calliope is at her most present, Roxy starts to become herself again - why during her conversation with John she’s able to stand up for herself and admit that something has been wrong the whole time. Alternate!Calliope brings them back towards a faux sense of canonicity, and as a result, Roxy’s development suddenly becomes relevant again (even if it isn’t allowed to flourish fully, because that goes against what Calliope is trying to do). 

The sort of narrative theory it brings up is incredibly interesting, too. Having to read both sides of the same story isn’t exactly new, but this sort of interconnectivity is incredibly rare. The way that Meat and Candy work as concepts are also beautifully interesting; as I’ve said before, Dirk’s logic on Meat is that without a plot, there’s no relevance or importance in anything that they do, but the inhabitants of Candy frequently remind John that even if what they’re doing is inconsequential to the plot, it still matters to them. Maybe Jane being a fascist in Candy isn’t going to have a rippling effect on Paradox Space, but it matters to every single inhabitant of Candy’s Earth C. Calliope sees the importance of these moments; Dirk doesn’t. It brings about a firm point that if you try and make a story too plot-focused, you’ll ultimately make a story that’s too much of a slog to read, too depressing, to heavy - but if you try to make the story too fluff-based, then nothing of relevance will happen, you’ll have characters that never grow or develop down a natural path, events will happen in ways they were never meant to or don’t happen at all, and might be interesting but won’t be enough.

Plus, just reading through how A!Calliope explains the narrative voice and how it can be used is phenomenal, and I think a lot of literature should start to question that. Even in a text without a specific narrator, is the text completely without a narrative speaker? She basically explains what Dirk does in the sense of the boiling frog; he allows the narrative to seem like it’s speakerless so that everyone he’s whispering in the minds of don’t recognise that something is wrong until it’s too late, and he’s fully in control. He puts everyone in the cool waters of nonbiased narrative and slowly turns up the heat of his own opinions and inflections until he’s boiling their self identity and independence and free will alive with biased narrative. 

In that sense, I love the Epilogues. 

For thoughts on the actual story, though… I kinda love it. 

For what it is, it’s incredibly interesting. The dichotomy of Dirk controlling Meat while Alternate!Calliope controls Candy, being the respective narrators, is oh-so incredible. A!Calliope even says, in her dialogue to Aradia on page 40 of Candy, that sometimes narrative voices don’t bring themselves forward; sometimes the narrative is speakerless, sure, as we think Candy is - but that sometimes the speaker of the narrative simply doesn’t want to show herself. As much as Dirk overtly influences the events of Meat, I think A!Calliope influences the events in Candy - she just hides her narrative voice, and lets us figure out if it’s actually her doing the talking, or if there’s no narrative voice at all. 

It’s clear that in Meat, Dirk is the only reason there’s any sort of canonicity. He’s forcing events to happen to keep everyone relevant in the way they’re not in Candy - and Candy is what he actively fears, because Candy is A!Calliope’s answer to Meat. Dirk needs plot and relevance to exist; A!Calliope specifically needs that void of plot and importance for her plans to work - and both directly influence the other. Dirk is literally so scared by the concept of Candy that he over-controls in Meat because the idea of irrelevance just doesn’t work in his mind. There has to be some bigger picture, something to work towards - but for Alternate!Calliope, the simple concept of existing and allowing things to play out naturally, without interference, is the better way, even if there’s no bigger picture to strive towards, and irrelevance is left in her wake. Both Epilogues happen side by side to allow both narrative players their chance to reach their full potential, to present what they think is the best form of narrative. Meat is Dirk’s answer to Candy; Candy is A!Calliope’s answer to Meat.

To borrow from the previous ask, “In his suicide, Dirk destroys the last piece of narrative importance in the Candy Epilogue. He is the narrative importance in Meat after all; with him gone, there is no narrative entity to keep it going.” Without Dirk, the characters slip so far away from canon that everything becomes meaningless. All those foundations the characters are based on disappear, and they become horrific caricatures of themselves. A!Calliope brings stability back to this unstable, noncanon world. This is why Roxy’s gender reveal ends up being less “I’m able to decide who I am, and I am more comfortable using he/him pronouns and presenting as masculine” and more “I’m not feminine, and I don’t need to cling to the feminine gender; my body is a machine of flesh, and nothing more”. She still comes to the same sort of conclusion, but it’s only half way there - because A!Calliope isn’t bringing a full plot back to that timeline. Just enough to stop it from self destructing. 

Additionally, the fact that the black hole wasn’t so much of a black hole as a wormhole from canon into non canon. That brings up so much interest. Does Dirk even realise that’s what happened? I don’t think so. He seems to think that Davepeta really did complete a suicide mission, but if the same thing happens to them as happened to the troll ghosts then all that’ll happen is they’ll come out the other side, still clinging to Lord English, into the Candy timeline. Does Dirk realise that he’s been played? He essentially set into motion what needed to happen for A!Calliope’s plan in Candy to work. But maybe that’s the beauty of the duality? They’re opposing each other, but they also rely on each other for their own parts of the Epilogues to work. 

I’m interested in seeing where this goes. At this point, I’ve read enough to be invested. I’ve gone on about some of the Meat aspects in depth, so I won’t really go over that much more, but I love Candy’s portrayal of relevance. How fatalistic John becomes when he realises that everyone’s just completely fake - fake to themselves, fake to who they were, fake to what they could become - and how (Vriska) goes on to talk about John’s overall importance - that he’s probably one of the most powerful beings going because he has the ability to decide the entire fate of canon without even realising he’s doing it (as we’ve seen in Meat and Candy; both are a direct consequence of actions he taken without realising the dire effects it will have on the timeline).

But do I love it as a fan? 

I definitely enjoyed the exposition on Hope. It essentially confirmed a theory I had on this blog ages back; that Hope’s Belief was sort of the other side of the coin for Light’s Truth, and that the Belief of something to a strong enough degree is ultimately what makes it True. Maybe that’s why everyone was acting so fake? John believed with his whole heart that everything was wrong, and fake, and impossible, and he let that overwhelm him. Of course, the fact of the matter is that these things really were taking place, but I’m at least 87% sure that it was worsened by John’s own morbid attitude towards his fate and the lives of everyone around him. 

There are some parts I definitely liked. Confirmation about Jade’s weird gender situation in Candy, confirmation that Callie is they/them and Roxy is he/him in Meat (and that, regardless of the timeline, he’d always recognise that he has some sort of issues regarding his gender and figure out some way of understanding himself and his identity), the canonisation of DaveKat in Meat (although I firmly believe it could have ended up as DaveJadeKat if she’d still been in the picture, but a much healthier version than we see in Candy), the relationship between John and Terezi, the exposition we get on Candy!(Vriska) (finally realising a lot of the things fans have said about her for a while, especially in regards to (Vriska) in the comic), and now that I’m coming to terms with it, the plot’s pretty okay, too. For what it is, and the route they went down, I’m getting through the stages of grief to reach acceptance. 

But no, I don’t really like the Epilogues. 

Fundamentally, I hate the route they chose. I hate that after three years, rather than just be told “you can decide whatever you want, because even the noncanon things have validity and we’re well aware that we can’t please everyone, so making your own ending to suit your needs not only works best but also fits the theme of Homestuck well”, they went to all this effort of making a plot and characterisation that ruined so many of these characters we love. 

I have a lot of issues with Dirk. It’s bad narrative crafting to set a character so far back in his development. I can understand how the development works in the way that they’ve done it, but I’m also very aware of the fact that this, in no way, had to be canon. For all that Bro is a splinter of Dirk, and that emotionally stunted Dirks must also exist across Paradox Space, there are also plenty of other splinters and versions of Dirk that must have gone through beneficial emotional development. Out of every outcome that Hussie and the team could have chosen, I’m disappointed and upset that this is the route they took - after three years of waiting. 

This was an outcome that could happen, yes, but it didn’t have to be the official outcome. Regardless of how much anyone prattles on about canon and non-canon, people are always going to regard something that’s official as The Most Canon. If the point of these Epilogues is “you can make your own, valid ending”, then it’s overshadowed by the notion that this ending, these endings that we’re being given, are the ones that Hussie himself devised, and sees as most plausible. You can’t scrub the Official ™ mark from the Epilogues. You can’t get rid of the connotations of canonicity that comes from that. 

It’s a bad ending to Homestuck. No matter how you look at it, viewing just Meat or just Candy or both together, it still sucks as a fan to try and reconcile with the idea that this is how Homestuck’s officially going to finish. I’ve got no doubts that there’s more to come - cliffhangers like these are just begging to be finished, and if Hussie’s going to this much effort to make an interconnected story then it’d be weird to leave it hanging - but I’m still slightly bitter about the fact that this is what we get. Two relatively unhappy, upsetting, triggering endings that really give across a good statement, but not as much of a good conclusion to the people who have been following this story along for ten years. They’re hard to read - emotionally and physically - they’re unpleasant to try and get through, and although I’ve read both and am glad I did… I’m well aware of the fact that I could have not read the Epilogues and probably been better off. 

I actually go more into this aspect of it in a few other posts. I’ll link them below, so please give them a read, because they’re more eloquent and definitely explain what I mean a bit more. But that gives the overall gist of how I feel. I’ll also be including a few posts that explain how I feel a bit more, not written by me, because hell yes I want to share that good shit. 

So, yeah. I’m accepting of the Epilogues at the moment; I love them in a literary sense; I hate them as a fan. 

“Thoughts On The Upd8; Honestly Strikes Me As A Cop-out” - Kienansidhe

“The Dirk Thing And Why It’s Bad Storytelling” - Stormsbourne

“A Common Defence Of The Epilogues” - Unionhack

My thoughts on Candy

Why I hate the Epilogues (3 year drop) 

My thoughts on Meat

[enneagramspam]

ISABEL LOVELACE

8w7

“Don't die. Be a big girl, and don't die.“

Isabelle Lovelace is a textbook Eight; as a Captain, she is authoritative, resourceful and strong-willed, but also prone to domineering and confrontational behaviour. Upon her return to the Hephaestus, she demonstrates the ruthless, authoritarian streak of a deeply disintegrated Eight, but over the course of the series she is able to integrate back into a healthier Eight, a heroic figure who is genuinely able to protect her crew. 

Basic Fear: Of being harmed or controlled by others

“Oh, I'm not following one of your orders? Gee, must be Monday…”

In comparison with the rest of the cast, who grow to reasonably distrust Goddard after betrayal, Lovelace has never been good with authority of any kind; it’s simply a facet of her personality. This is made clear in Greensboro;

“There's been times when I haven't seen eye-to-eye with my superior officers. Like all those times they gave me stupid orders. On those occasions, I was inclined to carry out my orders with a bit of... creativity.”

Lovelace remains her own ultimate authority, following orders only when they suit her, and as such, she is not truly beholden to them at all. Interestingly, there are pages of glowing testimonials from those who served under Lovelace, while those above her in the chain of command found her to be disobedient and punished her as a result; being a good leader and a bad follower isn’t at all uncommon for an Eight. 

Lovelace takes great pride in her independence, and expresses contempt for those that, in her eyes, allow themselves to be controlled, particularly her rules-obsessed second in command Officer Lambert, who effectively represents this basic fear- she calls him “an asinine teacher’s pet,” and repeatedly admonishes him for a lack of “a mind of his own,” even ridiculing him in front of the rest of her crew. Lambert is in fact the perfect foil to Lovelace, because while he is endlessly obedient to Goddard, he repeatedly undermines her, as Hilbert observes;

“You are perhaps needing someone who... questions superior officer? Who does not immediately do what is told? Who will fight for what they think is right way of doing job?”

Taking all this into account, it’s no wonder Lovelace dislikes Lambert so much when he both represents the control she so fears and the disobedience she cannot tolerate. The anger he provokes causes her to slip into the role of the intimidating Eight, which causes some friction with the rest of her crew, who describe her as “scary,” and observe that her personality is fundamentally combative; “she’d be bored without something to fight against.”  

Lovelace’s preoccupation with control is part of the reason that her discovery that she is an alien replica of her previous self subject to the whims of the aliens who created her is so distrubing for her- this is the avenue the habitually manipulative Kepler takes to try and unsettle her, preying on her basic fear;

“Are you sure that it's you that made the choice? Less than two days ago you were speaking words that weren't your own. … Maybe they're always in control, and they've made it so you can't tell. What if everything you think you're doing for yourself is just our friends out there pulling strings? What if your thoughts aren't your own?”

For Lovelace to even admit that this bothers her is difficult; Eights natrual tendency is to avoid vulnerability. It’s not until her control is completely taken away when she is trapped in a time loop orchestrated by the same aliens in Out of the Loop, driving her to disintegration and essentially forcing her to do so in the hopes of moving on.

“I - I'm sorry. I... Maybe Kepler's right. Maybe I'm not in control of what I'm doing.”

Ultimately, Lovelace is forced to live her basic fear, again and again, to begin to overcome it. Her arc culminates in her worst possible scenario- Cutter, the manifestation of the insidious control she has been raging against throughout the series, gaining direct control of her by manipulating the psi-waves that affect her alien physiology;

“If you have enough psi-waves in the air … you can control all sorts of things. What do you think, Isabel? Pretty neat, isn't it?”

Lovelace can’t wrest herself from Cutter’s control entirely- she shoots Minkowski, and is unable to fire at Cutter. She is, however, able to distract him for long enough for Minkowski to kill him. Not only is this a direct confrontation of Lovelace’s basic fear, with her being forced to accept that sometimes the situation is out of her control, this scene forces her to eschew her basic desire, and instead, rely on someone else to protect her; as an Eight, this is the logical conclusion to her arc.

Basic Desire: To protect themselves (to be in control of their own life

and destiny)

“There’s something I needed to remind myself of. That you're not just what you were made. That you can grow. At least... when you assholes don't interfere.”

Repeatedly, Lovelace cannot stand seeing others allowing their destiny to be decided for them- even when she particularly dislikes the person in question. When Eris announces her intention to self destruct on behalf of Goddard, she is furious;

“You can't just let these people delete you! You should fight this! ...Just because someone made you something doesn't mean that's all you're going to be. You can be more.”

She reacts similarly, if far more explosively when Hilbert is unfazed upon discovering that Goddard were planning on betraying him;

“What... the hell... is wrong with you? (BEAT) I will never understand you. How are you not angry? How are you not revoltingly angry? They were going to leave you up here. To rot … Listen to me, you despicable waste of a soul: that's not how you react to this. Humanity 101: when someone lies to you, when someone betrays you, when they leave you to die, alone, in the cold, you DO NOT FIND IT PERFECTLY EQUITABLE! You get angry, and you do whatever you have to in order to show them they have made the worst mistake of their lives. It doesn't matter what you have to give up, who you have to hurt, how far you have to go -”

Indeed, Lovelace goes to every length to be the one in control of her own destiny and to protect herself and those that she cares about. Aside from her dead man’s switch, there’s her response to Kepler’s game of “eeny-meeny,” when he is deciding who to shoot in Desperate Measures- she interrupts him with a “fuck you,” and then proceeds to insult him and spit at him. What could be mistaken, though, for an outburst of pure aggression and resentment is clearly shown to be an attempt to deliberately provoke him and thus control the situation in the only way she can, and an attempt to protect Eiffel; 

EIFFEL: “Captain... why did you - you didn't have to - 

LOVELACE: “Yes, I did. I did. It's fine.”

She smiles at him. Sadly. 

Inaction- and particularly, feeling helpless- drives Lovelace to distraction. She’s desperate to try to take control of the situation in Pan-Pan, repeatedly dismissing Minkowski’s plan to make a distress call, “The only way we're going to get off this station is if we do it ourselves.” On the other side of things, Lovelace’s mini episode, Greensboro, is markedly different from those for each other character. Critically, she doesn’t interact with Cutter, who has a pattern of exploiting the cast’s basic fears, and in reflection of this, it’s her basic desires that Rachel, who is interviewing her, praises and tempts her with;

“You. Deep space. Mission command. You've got … Glowing recommendations from practically everyone you've given an order to. And when you're multiple light years away from your superiors? It's probably good to have someone who can think for themselves.”

It’s easy to understand why Goddard took this unique approach with Lovelace specifically; threatening to control her would result in automatic pushback and rebellion from her, whereas promising her a degree of the control that she so craves was the perfect way to ensure that she agreed to work with them. 

Disintegration to Five:

“I invented being paranoid on this station.”

Enneagram Institute describes deeply disintegrated Eights’ actions as “vengeful, barbaric, murderous.” This is particularly true of Lovelace- the first time she flees the Hephaestus, she leaves behind a message promising to exact revenge against Goddard:

“So if you're listening to this: Run. And. Hide. Because by the time that I'm done you will feel more helpless and more alone than all the innocent people you've ever hurt. See you soon.”

Like an unhealthy Five, she is secretive and fearful, leaving her paranoid. She initially admits to turning on Hilbert without proper cause;  “I was so paranoid by that point, I think I would have turned on anyone who was with me.” This indiscriminate destructiveness is a hallmark of a disintegrated Eight, and when Minkowski confirms, “You attacked him?” Lovelace simply answers, “Best defence.” She goes on;

“I figured it was just a matter of time before he tried to kill me. So I incapacitated him and I ran. I got on the ship we'd constructed and left him behind. (beat) Not my proudest moment.”

Her violence continues when she returns to the Hephaestus- pouncing on Hilbert on sight, choking him and bashing his head against a wall. Like an unhealthy Five, she is suspicious and information obsessed- planting a gun with a hidden listening device so that she can eavesdrop on Minkowski and Eiffel. 

In addition, Enneagram Institute says of disintegrated Eights, “If they get in danger, they may brutally destroy everything that has not conformed to their will rather than surrender to anyone else.” This repeatedly holds true of Lovelace;

““I hope you don't think we'd go down without a fight.”

Indeed, she threatens to invoke the “Taking You With Me,” trope on multiple occasions, to the point that it becomes something of a running joke for her; 

“Believe me, kids, right now I'm up for killing everything and everyone on this boat.” 

Perhaps the most serious example, though, is the explosive she wires to activate should her heart stop or increase too much which she reveals in the episode aptly named Mutually Assured Destruction, a failsafe she describes, unfeelingly, as “insurance.” When Minkowski doubts her, “You’d be killing yourself. I don’t buy it,” Lovelace simply answers; “Then you’ve never been as scared as I have.” This neatly demonstrates Lovelace’s complete unwillingness to surrender or be subjugated, willing to completely self destruct in order to avert this outcome. Additionally, she uses this threat as a means of seizing control of the station, becoming the ruthless, dictatorial disintegrated Eight;

“There's a new sheriff in town, and I am not taking suggestions, complaints, or objections. Here’s what’s going to happen… Whatever game Command is playing with this station is over. Welcome to my Cold War, kids. Fasten your seat belts, stay out of the way, and don’t try me. Any questions?” 

Integration to Two:

“I realized something. The whole epic rampage of revenge thing? Isabel Lovelace wouldn't do that. The terrible wretch that you people made Isabel Lovelace into? Oh, she'd do that. But... I'm not going to be that person anymore. (BEAT) I'm going to be Isabel Lovelace again. Even if I never have before.” 

When integrated, Lovelace’s has the sincere care for those around her of a healthy Two, using her own strength of character to support them. A good example of this is when she quite generously agrees to take over for Minkowski when she feels unable to command the station. It’s significant that Minkowski convinces her by appealing to her own respect and need for control;

“ I... I did what I did because I lost control. And until I get it back, I don't think my hands are the best ones for this crew to be in.”

Also notably, Lovelace is demonstrably reluctant to take control, establishing it only happens, “on the very clear understanding that this is a temporary situation, and that [she is] going to sort [her]self out and kick [her] out of [her] chair ASAP.” This Lovelace, genuinely looking forward to ceding control to a person she respects and trusts, is a far cry from the control obsessed woman she is introduced as. Additionally, she uses her strong authority with the goal of actually meeting the needs of her entire crew- for instance, in Theta Scenario;

LOVELACE: “I'm not making that call for everyone. We're voting, and we're not doing anything until we have a unanimous decision.”

EIFFEL: “Fine, lets v-”

LOVELACE: “No. We're not gonna make an informed decision until we know as much as we can about what the hell has been going on here.”

EIFFEL: “Why?”

LOVELACE: “Because I'm the Captain, that's why. That call I will make.”

As aforementioned, Lovelace is also able to depend on Minkowski during her most dire moments during the finale. Early in the series, Lovelace clearly felt that it was her destiny to personally take revenge on Cutter on behalf of her crew, with her promising that outcome to him as an inevitability;

“I'm going to really mess you up someday. You know that, right?”

Allowing Minkowski to be the one to take him down instead is a subtle but incredibly important demonstration of her growth- she thoughtlessly sacrifices an opportunity she would have been unlikely to have given up on without a fight earlier in the series. This courage and self-sacrifice is far more along the lines of what one would expect from an integrated Eight. 

w7:

“Let's just say that I am very eager to be a private citizen again.”

Maintaining her own freedom and happiness is a big priority for Lovelace, which is indicative of her Seven wing. She dislikes ruminating on painful subjects, and while she generally copes by being action-oriented; her refusal to confront her grief is explored in Variations On a Theme, where she has no tolerance for herself slipping into present tense when speaking about her past group;

“No. Focus. Work. Be here. Be now. Don't stop to remember. Don't stop to think. Stay away from the ghosts.”

And, in Need To Know it’s revealed she was deliberately getting high on painkillers after the disastrous events of Who’s There?;

“I got a broken an arm trying to save one of my crew members. It was a very difficult time.”

Turning to addiction as a form of escapism is not uncommon for a Seven in disintegration.

Additionally, despite her extreme fury towards Goddard, Lovelace is also driven for much of the series by an extreme desire to return home; 

“I want to go back to earth.”

It’s only in her internal monologue- presented as fragmented and scattered, as many disintegrated Sevens can feel and behave- that she acknowledges the painful truth that returning to earth won’t truly fulfill her desires- earth is longer home, and home is gone;

LOVELACE: “I will do this. I'll do it faster. Better. Deal with crazier. Won't die harder. Fix this goddamn engine. Get them out. Go home.”

SECOND LOVELACE: “You can never go home. You were home.”

THIRD LOVELACE: “And now you're back. And you can never go back.”

LOVELACE: “I know. I know.”

In fact, Lovelace’s powerful desire to get off the station is more reminiscent of the blind claustrophobia of a disintegrated Seven- the desire to escape a painful atmosphere- than a draw towards a compelling, satisfying one. Towards the very end of the series, this changes. Significantly, she mentions earth not just in the context of revenging on Goddard or escaping the Hephaestus, but as presenting the opportunity for revitalizing, healing experiences, with something close to the optimism of a healthy Seven;

“Oh, there are so many choices. Look up some old friends, take apart Goddard Futuristics brick by brick... maybe go to Disneyland? But first, I'm going to take a long vacation, somewhere warm and quiet, where nobody has any idea who I am.”

Ultimately, though, her wing isn’t very developed- she’s more than willing to stay on the station late in the series to try and learn more about the aliens and their wants (and by association, about their control over her), and doesn’t try to flee the situation in the same way that Eiffel wants to at that point. Similarly, she’s willing to die to protect him in Desperate Measures- her core desires and fears as an Eight will always overpower the aversion to pain associated with her wing whenever both come into play. 

[sol1056]

multipart ask on Keith

I would honestly love your thoughts on Keith’s character development, specifically him leaving for the Blades in S4. Personally I’ve always been on a fence with how they wrote Keith’s character after that. For one, he started as a lone wolf and I always thought they would subvert that along the way with more character interactions and team building episodes like in S1, but apparently S4 throws all of that away. I thought him forcibly being the leader of voltron would be a great opportunity for development but Shiro takes his place in the black lion and Keith just leaves. 

It really didn't help with all the signs pointing as him as the true leader of voltron when he barely even interacted with the team personally (except for shiro) after that point. To top it all off his “maturation” was a two year time skip montage with his mom and he suddenly became level headed and ready to fly Black. So when he finally returns and become the leader of voltron it felt a bit underwhelming and hollow. To be honest I also find his interaction with the team afterwards kinda out of character [...] 

I just wanted to hear from a writers perspective if Keith leaving was a good idea for his character in general. He had some really good scenes in his time with the Blades but i personally think in exchange it took way too much [away from] his development with the others. I also wonder if it's even possible [to execute well] leaving for the Blades and then becoming the leader of Voltron. 

Here’s a general rule: avoid leaving any of your protagonists at a bus stop. 

A few chapters is already pushing it; the equivalent of 1.5 seasons is out of the question for all but the most superlative of writers. I’ve met superlative, and believe me, no one on the VLD staff qualifies. If they did, they wouldn’t have been writing for VLD in the first place. 

The start of S4 will forever baffle me. Had S3/S4 been broadcast as a complete season, I might’ve assumed there was a technical error, and would’ve tweeted at Netflix and not returned to watch until I got word this really was the midpoint episode. No warning, no foreshadowing, not even a peep out of Keith, and suddenly he’s working with the Blades. 

In an ensemble cast, the point is that it’s an ensemble; you don’t forget one of your core cast at the bus stop while the story-bus trundles on. If Keith were meant as a protagonist, then sidelining him for 1.5 seasons is an even worse crime. If the intent of the story, thematically, is 'stronger together’, shoving one of them out of the picture is pretty much the antithesis. 

This is not to say you can’t do it; in hindsight, I think the clone should’ve been shelved and the real Shiro returned at the end of S3/S4. But that comes with the assumption that a) the team would struggle a great deal more in his absence, b) prompting development that would create a new dynamic once Shiro returned, and c) that Shiro himself would change in some degree, from/during his absence: one that, by definition, that would need to be complete.

In other words, if you’re going to remove a protagonist, two things must happen. One, they must be removed, which Keith wasn’t. The story checks in on him irregularly, and each time, he's treading water while the story moves on. Two, the absence must become a driver: in a sense, the absence is a presence of what’s missing, and regaining the character must be paramount. 

VLD put minor effort into recognizing the impact of Shiro’s absence, limited mostly to the torture-porn of watching Keith isolated in (and by) grief. It couldn’t even be bothered to do that much, when it was Keith’s turn to fall off the team. No one missed him, no one needed him. The result was a clear message there was nothing Keith brought to the team that couldn’t be done by someone else. There was no presence in his absence. 

Consider the few scenes in S4-S6 with anything of Keith. His storyline did nothing to push the main story forward. In S4, the Blades are focused on tracking a new quintessence, a subplot that discovers nothing, provides no twists, and goes nowhere. In S5, despite Keith being with the Blades, the two groups have dropped communication to such degree that neither is aware of the other’s participation in the Kral Zera. 

If you’re determined to leave a protagonist in another castle, for heaven’s sake, use that distance to allow them to continue to impact the main storyline. Make their absence into a working presence that can link the two groups; the complete radio silence just underlines how meaningless the story considers Keith, in the overall plot. 

In that light, Kolivan’s left-field decision for Keith to extract Krolia feels like VLD was grasping at straws, trying to find something to occupy Keith. Worse, that mission contradicts S4: the quintessence is no longer blue, no longer notable for its energy levels, and no longer transported to secret bases in massive quantities by major warships. It’s back to the usual maroon, carried on small cargo ships in limited quantities, and now a dangerous substance with questionable side-effects. 

In a nutshell, VLD left Keith mired in pointless actions with no bearing on the rest of the characters (hello, suicide attempt never mentioned again). Late S5, VLD realized it needed to get a move on, if Keith was to get an upgrade. So it took the easy way out: an overload of exposition flashbacks that neatly evaded any emotional beats between Keith and Krolia. VLD had no idea how to get Keith from point A to around point K, so it settled for just telling us Keith had grown up. On a space whale.

Had we been given a better reason (or any reason) for Keith joining the Blades, had we been given a hefty sub-plot for Keith that led him back to the team in an organic fashion (or at least dovetailed with the main throughline), had the story used those seasons to show us Keith learning with the Blades in a way he couldn’t or wouldn’t with the team... well, for one thing, it’d still contradict the ‘found family’ and ‘stronger together’ themes, since it’d be even more clear that Keith was stronger elsewhere. 

But setting that aside, at the very least, Keith wouldn’t have returned feeling he’d gotten a personality transplant. We would’ve seen his progression, such that any given point along the way would’ve been recognizably Keith, even if the starting and ending points were almost a one-eighty. It’s called character development; most stories do it as a matter of course. 

I’m left concluding that the creators genuinely don’t grasp that characters will change per their experiences. It’s a crucial element in storytelling, because characters are the core of any story. If you can’t figure out what would make a character choose A this time and B next time, you’re failing on one of the most fundamental aspects of characterization. In fact, you’re missing the entire point of a story: character choices are the plot.

I do have to take exception to ‘signs pointing to [Keith] as the true leader.’ I’ve posted before about the mentor trope, and how Shiro’s S1/S2 arc contradicts Keith as Black Paladin. I suggest you read those before coming at me with the assumption VLD did any of the work required to establish Keith's leadership as inevitable. 

It’s possible to have someone strike out on their own, learn valuable lessons, and return grown-up and able to handle the situation they’d originally fled. It’d be a very different story, though, one that isn’t focused on a titular robot, but on a single protagonist’s journey. It’d also be a story that has nothing to do with ‘stronger together,’ as the movement away (to learn) and back (to reclaim) means the protagonist only became stronger when they weren’t with the rest. 

Keith taking command of Black in S6 should feel like a victory in terms of his arc: where once he’d recoiled, now he steps forward. But since we never saw how or why his perspective changed about leadership, all it would’ve taken is a subtle shift in Yeun’s delivery and we could be talking instead about how Keith returned and was still in his ‘you want me to lead, this is how I lead’ pique. 

Shiro’s return creates another turning point where the question would be logically raised, and it’s almost as though (once again) there’s an episode or two we didn’t get. It’d be reasonable for someone to raise the question of whether the team now swaps again. Yet no one does, and we’re supposed to expect Keith --- who waved the little ‘Shiro is Black’ banner far more and for far longer than any other character --- is now content to command Black, with no need to even broach the topic. 

That’s a radically different perspective Keith shows in S7 onward, and it’s a problem created by the lack of development for Keith, in S4-S6. In the course of a single episode, we literally went from Keith being his slightly out-of-his-emotional-depth awkward self, to someone clear-eyed and commanding almost to the point of arrogance. It’s not helped when his original characterization returns for the duration of his fight with Shiro --- only to blip out again as soon as Keith returns to the team. 

And forcing that abrupt shift on Keith’s part meant the rest of the story (and the characters) got shoved around into their respective places and out of shape, as well. Stories are made of characters, and characters are dominos. You knock one over, and it has a cascade effect. Changing Keith from the character we knew to someone else wearing his face could not happen in isolation, and every character around him suffered as well. 

Like Shiro and Lance, Keith had major potential to be a groundbreaking character. He was introduced as the kind of independent, socially awkward, spitfire character usually pushed to the forefront in American media, yet S1/S2 gave him a solid place as Shiro’s greatest supporter. Keith had all the makings of a hero we rarely see: someone who truly believes the title of leader is beside the point, that the team is what matters.

I’m used to Gundam, which almost always strives for a resting place of five (or four) protagonists standing shoulder-to-shoulder. There might be one among their ranks who gets the central position, but the narrative is firmly consistent that should the team lose any one person, it would fall apart. There’s no need to ever tell us the team is ‘stronger together,’ we can see that lesson play out, over and over, whenever the team is divided, split up, or loses someone. 

AtLA followed a similar pattern; by the end, it’s obvious the strengths each person brings to the final battle. There’s no question that every single one is crucial for victory; there’s no point where someone leaves and there’s not immediate and significant impact on the remaining characters’ successes. Sure, Sokka may not be able to bend like the rest of them, but without his brains, they’d be sunk. Katara, Toph, and Zuko might not be able to bend every element, but if any one of them isn’t there, the team is going down. Aang may command the central position, but he can’t do it all on his own. 

While AtLA shone in having characters who visually broke the mold of our usual white-dominated, male-dominated American cartoons, it also broke away from the lead hero + band of intrepid (but far less capable) sidekicks. Like Gundam, it presented a group of characters who grew into a true team. The pictures might show Aang in the middle, but every one else contributes an equal amount, in their own way.

VLD had the makings in its first two seasons to go that route. But its EPs wanted dark and edgy, a perspective too cynical to embrace the optimism inherent in a team-based story. Sure, their deconstruction of VLD’s S1/S2 trope-subversions brought the story to a point where Keith was declared the definitive top guy, the true Black Paladin, head of the paladins. 

Thing is, pushing Keith into that position required altering his personality beyond all recognition, destroying the team dynamic, and gutting any chance of recognizing the other characters as equally integral to team success. In effect, making Keith the de facto leader required destroying the team: and what’s the point of leadership, then?

[plagueamon]

Code Geass MBTI Challenge Turn 9: Kyoshiro Tohdoh - ISTJ

With the exception of Anya and a few members of the Akito the Exiled cast, Kyoshiro Tohdoh is the character on our list with probably the least amount of information about his personal thoughts, views and experiences. With that in mind, I still think that the show gives us just enough of a glimpse into his personality in order to be able to type him accurately, to the point where I actually had to retype him a few times and overall was given more to think about than I originally expected. Before I start explaining this character’s functions, please keep in mind, that this post will contain heavy Code Geass spoilers, so consider yourselves warned. With that out of the way, let us analyse why Kyoshiro Tohdoh is an ISTJ.

Dominant Introverted Sensing/Si

Tohdoh’s Si is actually very comparable to Ohgi’s, because they value very similar things, but diverge in what further conclusions they do with those values based on their auxiliary and tertiary functions (this is coincidentally perhaps the best opportunity we will ever have to compare an ISFJ to an ISTJ). Much like Ohgi, Tohdoh largely bases his values around Japanese tradition, however he does not see them as something to be explored and shared with others (Ti and Fe), so mach as he uses it to dictate the rules he wants to see himself and his surrounding world world to develop in accordance with (Fi and Te). This sometimes makes him appear much more narrow-minded than he actually is, simply because he has a very specific idea of what he wants to achieve for Japan and for himself and is very determined to make it a reality. In truth he is actually very capable of applying this personal system of principles to others, which is what makes him a competent teacher and role model for Suzaku.

A common trait of dominant Si-users in fiction is that they can be both idealistic and practical in their mindset, with Si being tied to tangible evidence and facts by being a sensing function, while also being introverted and therefore highly subjective and personal to the user. Tohdoh himself embodies this balance quite well: we often see him talk in ways that are sentimental, with topics like honour and his hopes and fears for Japan’s distant future being brought up a lot, but, as Zero mentions during his prison break-in in R1, all of Tohdoh’s legendary success comes down to careful planning and intelligence work. In fact, it seems that Tohdoh himself understands this very well, as we never really see him refer to his work as “miracles” in a non-ironic manner, despite being seen as such by his followers. At his core Tohdoh still very much prefers to deal with factual details, planning out his operations and insisting on taking part in them personally, solidifying him as both a skilled and passionate tactician and leader, and, much like with Ohgi, this is the potential that Lelouch sees in him.

Auxiliary Extroverted Thinking/Te

As stated above, Tohdoh’s success as a leader mainly comes down to methodical and meticulous work combined with a fairly tactical mindset. His Te is certainly an important component of this, as we see him rely on it when he has to step out of his Si comfort zone. We see several examples of this happening when Tohdoh doesn’t see an obvious answer to a problem: his usual response is to trust in Zero’s judgement even if he has to blindly follow orders without a clear understanding of what his leader is planning. This demonstrates a healthy use of auxiliary Te, as it shows his willingness to abandon his immediate instinct to systematically observe the situation by himself (Si) when there is clearly no point in doing that, instead going with a more conventionally rational Te approach and trusting Lelouch because he has proven to be effective in the past. This is both supported and kept in check by his Fi, which gives him a degree of confidence in his judge of other people’s character as well as stops him from being a blindly devoted follower with no clear direction of his own. Compare this to Ohgi, who trusts others (Zero in this example) based on his perception of their sense of morality and trustworthiness (Fe), while his tertiary Ti balances this notion out by making him question his own judgement and thinking of the benefits of a given decision that is independent of ethical questions.

To put it in a somewhat simplified manner, Te is a form of generalist logic, developing a systematic “one size fits all” way of looking at a problem for the user, as they mature. The higher Te is in the functional stack, the more its logical system is complex and willing to account for exceptions, meaning that the kind of over-generalising behaviour that Te-users are often stereotyped for is much more commonly seen in unhealthy, immature or low (in terms of the stack) users. A much more healthy use of Te is comparatively rare in fiction or isn’t recognised nearly as often, however Tohdoh’s tactical ability and respect for authority provide good examples. Neither of the two are things he carries out blindly or out of principle, in fact he demonstrates a high degree of autonomy when deciding to trust his comrades and his superiors - instead these choices come from an understanding that this kind of trust the most reasonable course of action in most difficult situations.

As a soldier these qualities make Tohdoh outstanding.

Tertiary Introverted Feeling/Fi

Tohdoh’s Fi comes out in most of his unhealthier moments, meaning that he enters a Si-Fi loop. Whenever he finds himself in a difficult situation with no apparent solutions provided by his first two functions and nobody else to follow, Tohdoh is prone to giving up all hope and surrendering to his fate. The excuse he uses to justify this is also very evident of an unhealthy use of Fi: in his mind he chooses death to preserve his honour and deserves his fate for his personal failure. With Fi being a function that focuses on very personal values, this is an example of using it defensively instead of finding the inner strength to maintain hope and readiness for an opportunity to improve the situation. This almost causes him to reject a chance of freedom that Zero is basically handing to him in R1. It usually takes an external perspective (Te) such as Zero’s or that of his fellow Holy Swords pilots to “snap him out of” this internally focused state and show him that he can still find a reason to continue fighting without sacrificing his life and that his honour is not compromised by such a choice.

On a somewhat healthier note, Fi also puts an interesting spin on the direction of Tohdoh’s dominant function, giving him a firm belief that a person should keep true to their goals and principles no matter the cost. This is why his initial disappointment in Suzaku disappears to a large degree, when he learns that his former student’s life choices are in full accordance with the ideals he holds. While he still sees Suzaku as an enemy, Tohdoh develops a respect for his willingness to follow the path he chose despite being seen as a traitor to the Japanese by almost everyone and even encourages him to continue. While his Fi isn’t high enough in his stack to make relating to others necessarily easy, it does give him the ability to readily acknowledge that there are subjectively justifiable reasons behind everyone’s actions, no matter how different the person in question may be from himself.

Inferior Extroverted Intuition/Ne

Tohdoh does not get as much screen time or opportunities to speak as some of the other characters on our list, however because of his brutal honesty and overall being based on a fairly common fictional archetype, it isn’t very difficult to understand his fears and weaknesses as a human being. Dominant Si is a function rooted in personal experiences and principles (both moral and logical) that are very personal to the user and allow them to find a place for themselves in the world they inhabit. A common way for inferior Ne to oppose this is the fear of loss of one’s self and the personal principles that make us who we are. This makes Tohdoh reluctant to make decisions that contradicts his ideas about the kind of person he should be and the ways in which he should act. This kind of insecurity provides an understandable explanation for his Si-Fi loops: trying to avoid execution to him is similar to refusing punishment for his failure to liberate Japan, and that would go against his understanding of what he should stand for. This is why he only agrees to escape his prison when offered a chance of redemption.

On a more general scale, inferior Fi makes it hard for Tohdoh to truly understand other people’s motivations and plans when he doesn’t see the evidence leading up to them. Given that Lelouch is Ni-dominant and hence much more willing to rely on theoretical approximations and calculated risks rather than playing it safe and going with the facts, this tends to happen often and Tohdoh is often left having to trust in his leader’s competence without actually knowing what he is up to. Being mature and relatively healthy, however, Tohdoh does not tend to be bothered by this too much, recognising when his life is in capable hands instead of giving in to a fear of uncertainty, as unhealthy or immature Si-doms can often do.

However, please keep in mind that this is only my opinion on the matter and I will welcome any criticisms or alternative opinions to discuss them. If this article was interesting for you, stay prepared for next time, when I shall discuss the MBTI type of Diethard Ried.

[autokratorissa]

Considering that civilizational collapse may happen within 100 years, do you think people can justify having children? I've seen some people get upset and call anti-natalists 'post-modern christians' but they never clearly answer why we should keep having children. Never mind that "be fruitful and multiply" is a central tenet of Christianity. Anyways, I'm curious about your thoughts on this matter.

While procreation is obviously very proactively encouraged—arguably even demanded depending on the denomination and period one’s talking about—in Christianity, it’s not exactly unique in that regard; all religions tend to have a pro-reproduction (a ‘natalist,’ you could say) message somewhere in their canon. Many early Christian heresies, though, especially those influenced by the Gnostics and Hellenistic schools like the Platonists and Pythagoreans, did ascribe some kind of negative value to birth owing to their identification of God/Yahweh as the demiurge, and so his creation—the world—being inherently imperfect and flawed, so, even though Gnosticism can hardly be considered the flourishing worldview it once was, “be fruitful and multiply” cannot, in good faith, be considered the final word in Christian attitudes to reproduction. And antinatalists are not ‘post-modern Christians’ (what would that even mean? It’s a patently ridiculous term); anyone saying that is operating under precisely the kind of Christian-dominated thinking they’re accusing antinatalists of. Early manifestations of philosophical antinatalism were predominantly Buddhist (in India and China) and secular (in the Hellenistic world), and from a time before Christianity existed at all, all of which clearly refutes that kind of criticism, at the very least in a strictly historical sense. We should always be mindful of the cultures we exist within, however, and certainly for those in Europe and the Americas, the hegemonic power of the Church and Christian ideology cannot be ignored, even if it is seemingly less powerful and all-encompassing now than it once was.

What are my thoughts on the matter? I think people who don’t know better think antinatalism would consider them as somehow morally wrong—evil, even—for having children, but that this just isn’t true. Similar to a lot of the common responses to nihilism, these people have a knee-jerk reaction based on very little actual knowledge but plenty of emotional baggage, and in this case literally millions of years of biological and social pressures making them view childbirth positively. They think the antinatalist would consider them, individually and as a person, to be bad for having a child, and even that that child itself would represent a moral evil, and not that it is the act, the process, the socio-cultural and biological urge, that is being critiqued. There are also obviously degrees and variations to all things; antinatalism is not a position which can typically be considered to paint in absolutes and categorical imperatives for moral action. Antinatalism isn’t even a doctrine that necessarily seeks to stop all procreation; it simply applies negative value to the act of creating life. On one level, the consequences of such a philosophy are radical and perhaps difficult for many people to stomach, but more often than not it leads to undeniably rational ideas that benefit us all. A good example of this is the very simple and quite common (see, for example: Vetter, The production of children as a problem for utilitarian ethics, de Giraud, “Mobiles et Mécanismes réels de la Procréation,” c. Narcissisme, L’art de guillotinerles procréateurs: manifeste anti-nataliste, and Rulli, The Ethics of Procreation and Adoption) antinatalist observation that, while there exist children without parents but who do want them (those in foster care; orphans, those unwanted by their biological parents, etc.), for people to make the active decision to have a biological child of their own and not adopt is simply unjustifiable under any ethical framework: the act of adoption reduces the amount of misery in the world; childbirth, adds to it.

The creation of sentient, self-aware beings is cruel, unnecessary, and fundamentally and irrevocably based on a complete disregard for the interests and autonomy (see: Shiffrin, Wrongful Life, Procreative Responsibility, and the Significance of Harm, and Singh, “Shiffrin’s (Reluctant) “Anti-natalism”” and “Objections to Shiffrin,” Assessing anti-natalism: a philosophical examination of the morality of procreation)—which has often been considered the basis of all morality (cf. Christman, “Autonomy in Moral and Political Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)—of the hypothetical, unborn child. There is no way to avoid any of this. The world is a bad place, we know this to be so. By having children, we condemn them—by force, by an act of violence against them—to a life that knows some quantity of misery, suffering, angst, pain, and all the other things we think best to avoid. Therefore the unavoidable truth is that we are knowingly causing a suffering being to know misery and pain, when we very easily could have not. It’s extremely hard to even attempt to justify that kind of relationship and act.

As with pretty much anything in pessimist and other allied philosophies, I think Schopenhauer represents an excellent starting point—though by no means end point—for someone interested in antinatalism. It should be stressed that, as a Kantian (more specifically as a transcendental idealist), Schopenhauer thought that the creation and destruction of life was mere phenomena, not Ding-an-Sich [thing-in-itself; noumenon, that is, what exists independent of perception], and so did not place as much of an emphasis on actually avoiding and stopping procreation as an act as other, non-idealist antinatalists may advocate, but nevertheless I do think he does, in his typical style, express the kind of reserved whimper of philosophy that I can’t help but feel belongs to antinatalism:

“If you try to imagine, as nearly as you can, what an amount of misery, pain and suffering of every kind the sun shines upon in its course, you will admit that it would be much better if, on the earth as little as on the moon, the sun were able to call forth the phenomena of life; and if, here as there, the surface were still in a crystalline state.

[…]

“If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence? or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood.”

Schopenhaur, qtd in “On the Sufferings of the World,” Studies in Pessimism

Schopenhauer saw procreation as a weakness; not an evil thing, it should be stressed, but a weakness, brought about by the cravings of the flesh. The urge to have children and likewise the way in which we all too easily create pregnancies without even planning them results from our being, in effect, tricked by the Wille zum Leben [will to life; the thing-in-itself]. As I say though, Schopenhauer was working in the Kantian tradition, and so all life as we understand it, in his philosophy, is simply appearance; true freedom, that is, the only escape from not just procreation but most suffering of any kind, can only come from a rejection and overcoming of the Will. Poetically beautiful as this line of thinking may be, suffice to say few of us are committed Kantians today.

To specifically answer your question about whether it’s possible to justify having children now, in 2019, as the very world burns around us, yes, of course it’s justifiable. We as a species can consistently find justifications to support whatever we want. Only rarely does justification proceed action. Personally, however, I cannot justify it. No amount of logical contortions or moral arguing seems to affect that. But will people have children, and not simply as sporadic accidents and in unavoidable situations, but by the millions and through predetermined planning? Of course they will. And would I give a different answer if I were alive at any other point in history? Unlikely. All we can do is try and make life as pleasant as possible for those of us that are here, and, yes, to try and stop those that come after us from making the same mistakes we have, the first and most significant of which always necessarily being our creation itself.

[allisondraste]

As you know genetics in bioware are baffling in they make NO sense. Point ABC&D: If Elven genetics aren't as dominant or whatever when combined with human Genetics, why doesnt Alistair look pretty much exactly like Cailin? He has skin tone, eye color, and hair tinted, bringing in a lot of Fiona's Traits. So why would height, ears, body build be different? Same with Feynriel, traits from his mother and not his father except he looks human. So with all of that how are human genetics stronger?

Okay, so sorry for taking so long with this.  This is kind of a complicated question (at least in regard to my stance on it), and I wanted to actually have time to answer it  properly.  Full disclosure:  My degree is in psychology and all of my genetics background comes from high school integrated science courses and that one gen ed. biology class I took in undergrad, so if I say something absolutely off the wall, that’s why. I’m going to put this under a read more because I have very strong opinions and it is going to be a bit bioware critical and maybe fandom critical too, and I want people to have the option to not read my ranting.

First and foremost, I agree with you that Bioware genetics make no sense.  It seems to be “whatever fits the narrative we want,” is how genetics work in Thedas.  I personally think that this can all be answered by one answer: Bad Genetics and blatant erasure of biraciality. However, if we’re going to try to rationalize the genetics of the game with what we know from the real world and real science, then I think that there are some very…uh flimsy ways to do so. 

In real life, each elven feature such as larger eyes, pointed ears, etc etc, would be determined by a different allele, gene, or set of genes.  From what we know of Bioware Genetics, it appears that “elfyness” (as I will refer to it) is caused by a single gene of it’s own and it is “recessive,” which means that it is only expressed when both parent are elves. Other features that are not exclusive to “elfyness,” such as Alistair/Feynriel’s  eye, skin, and hair color, personality traits, etc., are going to be determined independently by different genes (you know, like normal inheritance…how elven features should also be determined).

In the real world, traits that are dominant only completely mask recessive traits if they are inherited through a simple Punnet-Square fashion.  That’s not the case with a lot of physical features.  For example, skin and eye color are determined by polygenic inheritance, other traits by incomplete dominance (or a blending of features), etc.  IMO, it would make more sense for elven features to determined in a similar fashion, resulting in some slightly pointed ears. It would make more sense genetically, but you know… that’s not what we got. Instead, we have simple punnet-square science applied to a complex set of features that doesn’t really makes sense, and it can leave room for some flaws in the logic.  As far as I know, humans who have “elven blood”  always have “human” children too.  Which is only always the case if they reproduce with another human.  If a half-elf were to have children with an elf or another half-elf, then there *should* (and I emphasize the should part) always be the possibility that a child will be born as an elf. 

TL;DR- Bioware Genetics are Bad Genetics and they don’t make very much sense

- Even assuming that they do, there are still holes in the logic that don’t make sense.

- Let characters be biracial dammit. 

[savedurlforliv]

𝓌𝒶𝓈𝓈𝓊𝓅  𝓁𝑜𝓈𝑒𝓇𝓈 !   it  is  i ,  𝐫𝐮𝐞 ,  bringing  to  you  my  two  idiots :   𝐣𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧  𝐚𝐝𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐬  &  𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐥𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐞  𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐧 .   their  intros  are  under  the  cut ,  so  check  'em  out !   oh ,  &  if  you're  down  to  chat  or  do  some  plotting  that  will  completely  ruin  me  &  make  me  cry ,  don't  hesitate  to  hit  me  the  fuck  up !   my  ims  &  discord  ( watch euphoria on hbo#3011 )  are  open  anytime !

𝐌𝐄𝐄𝐓  𝐉𝐎𝐍𝐀𝐓𝐇𝐀𝐍  𝐀𝐃𝐊𝐈𝐍𝐒 .

( jacob  elordi .   cismale .   he/him . )     i  think  i  see  jonathan  adkins  over  on  that  street  corner !   the  twenty-two  year  old  is  a  photographer.   i’ve  also  heard  that  he  is  a  virgo  -  that  might  be  what  makes  him  so  optimistic  &  spontaneous,  but  also  critical  &  meticulous !   i  wonder  what  sort  of  secrets  his  family  is  keeping…     ( artist  +  #4 )

*  𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥  𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 .

he  hails  from  the  sweet  cornfields  of  ohio .   

he  was  born  to  loving ,  practical  parents  james  &  lily  adkins .

he  has  a  younger  sister ,  jennifer  "jenny"  adkins .   ( wanted  connection ! ) .

from  a  young  age ,  he  was  obsessed  with  pictures  -  capturing  moments  &  creating  eternal ,  tangible  memories .

he  kind  of  always  had  his  life  planned  out  in  his  head :   he  would  finish  high  school  in  ohio ,  get  into  a  good  university  to  major  in  photography ,  move  to  a  big  city  where  he  would  find  different  scenarios  &  new  inspiration ,  work  with  what  he  loves ,  meet  the  love  of  his  life   &  live  his  happily  ever  after .

his  parents  humoured  his  dreams ,  bought  cheap  cameras  &  film  for  him  to  play  with ,  encouraged  him  to  apply  for  different  universities  across  the  united  states  &  even  drove  him  to  a  couple  interviews ,  but  expected  that  would  never  really  happen .

or  so  they  thought .

*  𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭  𝐝𝐚𝐲 .

he  was  accepted  in  columbia  university  &  later ,  accepted  in  school  of  visual  arts ,  attending  workshops  &  bootcamp ,  being  in  direct  contact  with  an  array  of  international  image-makers .

his  instructor  guided  him  on  building  his  very  first  portfolio ,  one  that  landed  him  a  photoshoot  for  a  magazine  with  a  famous  actress  &  kick-started  his  career .

he  graduated ,  moved  out  of  campus  &  into  a  house  with  four  of  his  favorite  people  so  the  constant  mess  isn't  all  that  bad .

he ,  currently ,  freelances .   magazines ,  newspapers ,  instagram   models ,  you  name  it .  it  pays  the  bills .  

though ,  really ,  his  passion  lies  in  playing  with  a  good  camera  &  different  types  of  film ,  capturing  landscapes ,  people ,  moments .   having  a  flexible  agenda  with  freelance  allows  him  to  do  just  that . 

*  𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲  /  𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐧𝐬 .

he  is  the  human  embodiment  of  sunshine  &  a  golden  retriever .

also  has  the  energy  of  a  golden  retriever .

&  is  completely  goal  oriented .

he  sets  his  mind  to  something  &  it's  his  no  matter  what .

he  is  very  stubborn  &  has  a  hard  time  giving  up  on  things  he  dedicates  himself  to .

he  is  a  bit  of  a  control  freak .

having  a  child  at  the  age  of  22  while  sharing  an  apartment  with  four  other  people  wasn't  in  the  life  he  planned  out  in  his  head ,  &  while  it's  a  happy  surprise ,  he's  completely ,  utterly  lost .

so ,  expect  a  few  freak  out's  coming  from  him .

overall ,  decent  kiddo .   10/10  boy .   deserves  all  the  love  in  the  world .

please ,  for  the  love  of  god ,  someone  teach  him  text  slang  &  how  to  use  emojis .

𝐌𝐄𝐄𝐓  𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐎𝐓𝐓𝐄  "𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐋𝐈𝐄"  𝐌𝐀𝐍𝐍 .

( zendaya  coleman .   cisfemale .   she/her . )     i  think  i  see  charlotte  "charlie"  mann  over  on  that  street  corner !   the  eighteen  year  old  is  a  high  school  senior.   i’ve  also  heard  that  she  is  a  gemini  -  that  might  be  what  makes  her  so  sharp-tongued  &  independent,  but  also  rebellious  &  abrasive !   i  wonder  what  sort  of  secrets  her  family  is  keeping…     ( mann  +  #4 )

tw :  drug  mention .

*  𝐬𝐦𝐚𝐥𝐥  𝐛𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐠𝐫𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐝 .

she  was  born  &  raised  in  new  york  city .

she  is  the  youngest  of  three  &  became  quite  the  tomboy  in  everything  she  did ,  even  though  her  mother  tried  to  impose  femininity  in  her  life  -  from  girly  dresses  to  expensive  barbies ,  she  never  cared  for  that .   ( also  the  reason  as  to  why  she  goes  by  charlie  now .   charlotte  was  far  too  serious  &  presumptuous ,  sounded  like  it  came  straight  from  a  gossip  girl  character . )

she  learnt  that  she  was  supposed  to  set  example  for  all  the  kids  in  the  playground  &  kindergarten  -  she  never  really  understood  why ,  but  then  she  used  to  do ,  say  &  act  the  way  her  parents  told  her  to ,  never  questioning .

the  pressure  to  be  perfect  would  break  her  any  second .

&  it  did ,  at  the  age  of  fifteen ,  to  be  exact .   accompanied  by  a  panic  attack  &  a  bike  fall  that  scraped  both  knees  and  tore  her  pink  dress  off  the  shoulder .

she  cried  for  five  hours ,  slept  for  two  days  straight  &  didn't  leave  her  bedroom  for  a  week .

she  couldn't  be  their  perfect  daughter  any  longer ;   no  more  fake  smiles ,  pink  dresses  &  hand  picked  boys  to  date .  

*  𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐧𝐭  𝐝𝐚𝐲 .

high  school  is  a  mix  of  ups  and  downs ,   mostly  downs .

the  pressure  coming  from  her  parents  didn't  wave  upon  her  rebelling ,  hell  -  it  only  got  worse . 

she  fell  into  the  wrong  crowd  after  her  breakdown ,  started  to  drink  &  using  drugs  to  keep  her  anxiety  at  minimum  ( or  at  least ,  to  forget  about  what  triggered  it ) ,  &  with  that ,  her  grades  took  a  huge  dive ,  going  from  straight  a's  to  barely  graduating .

she  knows  her  parents  expect  nothing  less  than  excellency  from  her ,  knows  the  dreams  they  have  for  her ,  &  knows  that  her  going  to  a  university  and  getting  a  degree  is  unquestionable  to  them ,  but  she  is  going  to  dodge  their  plans  for  her  as  much  as  she  can .

she  wants  to  own  her  life ,  not  be  a  mere  spectator .   

*  𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲  /  𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐜𝐚𝐧𝐨𝐧𝐬 .

nowadays ,  she  acts  on  impulse  rather  than  logic .   of  course ,  living  in  the  moment  often  has  its  repercussions ,  but  she  can't  reign  in  her  impulsiveness .

she  always  struggled  with  forging  deep  &  meaningful  connections  with  others  -  she  never  really  learned  how  to .   she  sucks  at  maintaining  friendships  &  more  intimate  bonds  with  others .

she  hasn't  had  many  real  /  serious  relationships  &  kind  of  likes  girls ,  will  hook  up  with  boys  on  occasion .

she  has  been  going  through  a  self-destructive  mode  ever  since  her  breakdown .   catch  her  sneaking  through  her  bedroom  window  in  the  early  hours  drunk  as  hell ,  destroying  her  own  body  with  drugs  that  makes  her  temporarily  happy ,  ruining  any  relationships  she  has  ever  come  close  to  having ,  skipping  tests  &  missing  family  dinners .

she  is  kind  of  a  mess  right  now .

[zoroism]

The Strawhat’s Deja Vu

This is my entry for the @opbigbang 2019! This is actually my first long fanfic (or fanfic in general) and I hope you all would like it! I had so much fun writing this and I hope you’ll have fun reading it too!

A big thank you to my partner @babblebuzz! for the amazing animation they made for the fic! And for being so understanding bc my work schedule is crazy xD Check out their artblog @junonboi! (You’ll see amazing art please go and check them out)

The day was perfect. The sun was shining, the wind was blowing through his grass hair and there were no signs of rain coming anytime soon. A very good day for a road trip indeed. They say Roronoa Zoro was king of the road trips. Why you ask? Since he absolutely didn't know where he was going most of the time. Though he knows where he needed to go he just doesn't know how to get there even with the best GPS apps. He just keeps on getting lost and the man is very sure that he was not the problem. It was those stupid apps. So when you want a short adventure just tell Zoro to maybe go to the nearest McDonald's and you'll most certainly be on a highway going to the next city.

"Zoro, I'm hungry." A teenager with curly brown hair and freckles running across his cheeks groaned. He was sitting in the passenger seat with his phone on his hand checking the map if they were going in the right direction every minute.  

"Sorry Chopper, we'll get there soon," Zoro answered with an apologetic expression. He saw the discomfort on Chopper's face that tells him that the boy was indeed very hungry. Zoro couldn't blame him, after all, they were driving the Red Line Highway for eight hours now and their snacks were all out.

   The two of them were headed to Marie Jois City. They were moving there since Chopper got a scholarship to Marie Jois University for a degree in Medicine. Zoro was still in shock that the boy was going to college at an early age but he did know that Chopper was a genius. The boy was already doing adult stuff like paying the bills, budgeting their money and cleaning the house while Zoro was at his job. He was very responsible for the age of fifteen.

   Zoro and Chopper were orphans. They met at the orphanage where they both grew up. The place took care of them very well but potential parents that interviewed them didn't want them. Maybe because Zoro dyed his hair green and maybe because he looked like a delinquent that no one wanted him and thought that he was too "rough" for them since parents did want a more "cuter" and "nicer" kid. For Chopper's case, he was always around Zoro. So when someone tries to talk to him Zoro gives them a deep stare. He was just checking out if they were nice people, it wasn't his intention to scare them away. Maybe. He just wanted to make sure Chopper was adopted to a nice family.

   So when Zoro turned eighteen, he left the orphanage with Chopper by his side. Of course, the orphanage didn't allow this at first since they needed to make sure that Zoro had the means to pay for the bills. He first got multiple jobs to show that he was capable and Chopper showed the people in the orphanage that he was responsible enough that he might be the one taking care of Zoro instead even if he was just twelve years old. In the end, they were both allowed to live together as brothers with the help of some convincing that Zoro did. That was three years ago. And of course, during those three years, they had a hard time adjusting to their new lives as independent people but they were moving to a brighter future now.

"We don't have to do this now you know." Chopper whispered barely audible for Zoro to hear. "I can get some job first then work my way up."

"Don't think about the bills or anything related to that. Just go and live your dream." Zoro answered with his eye looking directly at the road. He had to leave his job back at Shimotsuki City and he knows that Marie Jois is an expensive city since people call it the "City of Dreams" where rich ass people live. Though he knows Chopper got a scholarship at the university, there were still some school expenses they needed to pay plus their rent and food money.  

"We got this okay? Things will work out. I'm the adult here let me handle the money matters, I want you to focus on what you want." The man said again shaking those thoughts out of his head, he knew things would work out in the end. He wanted to do this for his brother.

"Well at least let me drive. You're getting lost again!" The teenager exclaimed while pointing at the map on his phone.

"Like hell you'll drive! You're underage!" The green haired man exclaimed.

"Wow! Coming from a man who certainly follows the "street rules"" Chopper did quotation marks with his hands to emphasize his point. "You know I know what your true job is!"

"Are you seriously bringing that up now?" The man question with a pained expression. Zoro knew working at retail won't pay the bills. He knew it wasn't enough for both of them so he had to do something else and that way was the only way he could earn some quick cash.

"Did you seriously think I'm that dumb to not know? How could I not notice the car you're driving?! It's a new car! You even bought me the newest Samsung phone, the best laptop AND we're moving to Marie Jois. Given that we still don't have enough right now BUT NOT JUST ANYONE CAN MOVE THERE!" Chopper was technically yelling at the last part because he still thought it was amazing how Zoro's job could pay all these and of course he was very thankful for Zoro's hard work. Well, he was especially amazed at how Zoro could do that job given that the man was directionally damaged, he actually really wanted to know how Zoro could do it. "Plus I know what really happened to your left eye you know. You got in an accident during a race didn't you?"

   Zoro glanced at Chopper to see his sad expression. Zoro felt bad for worrying the boy that night. It was two years ago during the Summer season. Zoro got the chance to race with a man known to be the best at Shimotsuki City, Dracule Mihawk. They decided to race from the top of the mountain to the bottom. During the first part of the race, Mihawk was in the lead. In a sharp turn, Zoro tried to overtake Mihawk but he actually got lost during his drift. Zoro was able to be in the lead when he got out from his little "detour" and jumped out from a small road and landed in front of Mihawk. Nearing the end of their race, there was another curve and his opponent saw this opportunity and bumped him at the back of his car. It caused his car to spin but Zoro still got his grip on the wheel, he thought about Chopper and he knew he couldn't die there. He directed his car to hit the mountain wall which caused rocks to break his window side and the glass hit his left eye which was the reason why he couldn't open his eye and how he got a big scar on the left side of his face. He was still able to calm his car down and finish the race. Mihawk was impressed with his skill and luck and told Zoro that he would await him until he was ready to fight him again. It was then Zoro swore to himself that he would beat Mihawk one day.

"Being a street racer has its perks you know." Zoro grinned and shuffled Chopper's hair with his right hand. The boy smiled and said, "One of the reasons why I wanted to be a Doctor.".

"But how can you be directionally challenged but still be a street racer at night?" Chopper genuinely asked putting his index finger and thumb on his chin with a thinking look on his face.

"Stop that you look like that stupid thinking emoji. Just don't ask, things work out in the end." Zoro himself didn't know how he wins his races besides knowing he had the skills and a stroke of excellent luck on his side.

"I will stop questioning this logic. It pains my head." Chopper agreed. When he glanced at his window, Chopper's eyes grew big and he immediately shouted "ZORO YOU MISSED THE EXIT! OUR EXIT WAS 10 EXITS AGO!".    

When the boys finally got to the right road to Marie Jois city they were amazed by the big castle they see in the distance. It was literally a big medieval castle surrounded by tall buildings that had the same style as the castle. The road they were traveling through was a straight road where you can see if you squint your eyes enough, that it goes until the entrance of the castle. You would think there was a border around the city since before you get there the only thing you'll see is grasslands, farm animals, and crops but it was open for anyone to enter.

"I was not expecting a castle to set the bars of how rich the people at this city are." Chopper said with his mouth open ready for that fries he has on his hands. They went to a drive-thru before they continued their road trip to the city. It was nice timing since they felt like they were about to puke even though they didn't have anything in their stomachs. They were driving half a day now since Zoro missed their exit.

"That's probably the city's government office or something." Zoro answered before sipping his coke.

"Probably. Since this road leads straight to there. Maybe they want us to pay before we find our new house?" Chopper turned his head to face his window. His eyes were greeted by trees that lined up perfectly beside the road. It goes on until they got to the castle where it is placed at the center of a big roundabout with three exits that were simply named, North, East, West, and judging from the names he concluded that they came from the South road. Chopper was in awe about how big the city center was. Besides the big castle, there was a small park with mini stalls surrounding it where he saw people walk and talk with each other. There was a big fountain where kids were playing with the water, teenagers had water guns that they were shooting others with and some people were even bathing in it?!  

"You're not thinking of joining them are you?" Zoro teased the boy. Though he knew Chopper was a genius, the boy was a teenager after all. He still wanted the kid to experience what normal kids do, he wanted him to have fun and enjoy being a kid. Just not the dark side of those "fun" things though.

"O-of course not!" Chopper answered trying to hide a blush creeping up his cheeks. "It's not like it looks fun or anything!" The boy was trying to hide the fact that he indeed, wanted to play with those kids but Zoro knew him well enough to know what he truly wanted. He might push Chopper to go to the center after they finish unpacking their stuff.

"Well, it looks fun. Find some friends and go have fun. I'm not gonna stop you unless you're hurting yourself. Not that I needed to remind you. I know you." The man said with a soft smile. "You should go and meet kids your age. Don't get cooped up in the house and do all those housework again. You're not a maid. We're in this together."

"I know that." Chopper became quiet and gazed at the scenery outside, he was starting to drown in his own thoughts. It wasn't like Zoro was forcing him to do those things, he just wanted to do it since he saw how Zoro was working so hard for him. He was the best big brother anybody could ask for. And he was constantly worried at night if Zoro will come home again with blood all over him like how he did when he raced with Mihawk.

"Well, now we need to find the East exit." Zoro said disturbing Chopper's racing mind. Chopper looked at the window and slapped his forehead.  

"Zoro, We've been circling this roundabout five times now." He respected his big brother so much but just, damn his directionally challenged brain.

"Well, this road keeps on moving!"

"Exit the next one! This roundabout has just four exits and we came through one! How can you get lost?!" Chopper exclaimed and sighed when the man was turning to the right exit. When they turned to enter East Road they were greeted by a long straight street with three-story buildings that also looked medieval but had high-class stalls that looked new at the first story. It was almost dark so they could really appreciate the lights the whole street emitted. Not to mention the road wasn't asphalt or cement, it was pebbles which was a nice complement to the medieval theme of the city.

"This is a beautiful city." Chopper said with excitement in his eyes. He was truly in awe about how beautiful and lively the city is. The boy loved Shimotsuki City but the city was small and dark compared to Marie Jois. The city just breathed new opportunities everywhere.

"This is a city that never sleeps. I expected it to be like this." Zoro answered while he was trying to fiddle his phone with his right hand. Chopper took the phone from his hand and looked at the address on the screen.

"Give me that! I know you're an awesome street racer but it's still not safe to use your phone while driving. Plus we don't know what the rules here are yet!" The boy read the directions they got from their new landlord. "It says here that we should turn right on the third street then we'll see a red brick building there."

Zoro followed Chopper's instructions and they got to their new house safely. He parked on the street just beside a small three-story building that had red brick walls. Each floor, besides the bottom one, had a balcony in the middle that aligned on top of the big antique brown door with wood carvings that looked like the waves on the first floor. There was a small parking lot just on the right side of the building but Zoro figured it was best to knock and great the landlord first.

"Wow, Zoro this looks really nice!" Zoro saw the sparkle on Chopper's eyes. He was happy that his little brother liked the new place he got for them.

"This is the cheapest one here you know."

"This is the cheapest one?! This actually looks like one of the most expensive apartments in Shimotsuki City!" Chopper was waving his hands in the air as if he was emphasizing how impressed he was with the difference between their old home and the new one.

"Well let's go check it out." Zoro grinned and shuffled Chopper's curly hair.

The boys rang the doorbell and waited for a few minutes. They heard footsteps and the door opened. They were greeted by a beautiful black haired lady with blue eyes that smiled at them with delight.

"Are you Zoro?" She asked in a sweet voice.

"Yeah, I'm here for the apartment?" The green-haired man nodded. Chopper hid behind Zoro's back as he was very shy with other people. He was very open to Zoro but when it comes to other people or at least strangers, he was very quiet.

"Come on in, I'm the landlady. My name's Nico Robin." Robin opened the door widely and gestured for the brothers to enter their new house. When they entered the apartment they were greeted with a hallway full of bookcases and statues that look like it was from the ancient times. There were two doors on the right side of the hallway, one was open that showed the staircase and the other was closed and the brothers assumed it was the landlady's apartment.  

Chopper observed the bookcase near the main door and his eyes lit up with delight. "Zoro! These books are old medicine books! There are different techniques that I could learn from here! Maybe I could combine them and develop a better technique?!"

"Woah there buddy those aren't hours." Zoro patted Chopper's back and pointed at Robin to let his little brother know that they were hers.

"Are you interested in my books?" Robin chuckled and looked at Chopper.

"Y-yes..." Chopper was startled with the question and hid behind Zoro's back. There was a blush creeping up his cheeks.

"He's really shy but he's a sweet boy. This is Chopper, my brother. He got a scholarship at the Medicine course in Marie Jois University." Zoro said with a proud tone on his voice.

"How wonderful! You can borrow my books anytime you want. You can knock on my door and I'll show you my whole library." The lady smiled and there was an aura she was emitting that made Chopper feel safe and at home and he felt like he immediately warmed up to the lady. He moved from Zoro's back to directly talk to Robin.

"Can I really?" He asked with his big cute eyes.

"Of course, You're a cute doctor after all." She answered with a sweet smile.  

"It's not like your compliment made me happy!" Chopper smiled and started to clap his hands and buried his face on his palms hiding how red his face turned. Robin chuckled at Chopper's reaction and appreciated how cute the teenage boy was.  

"I should show you your apartment. You'll be living on the third floor." Robin gestured for the three of them to climb up the stairs. Robin went first while Zoro and Chopper followed. "The only apartment mates you'll have here are me, I live on the first floor, as you guessed and Usopp who lives here on the second floor." Robin gestured at the door they were facing when they climbed up the first set of stairs.  

There was a loud explosion that surprised Zoro and Chopper. Zoro immediately pushed Chopper behind his back out of instinct while Robin just chuckled in amusement.  

"Don't worry, Usopp's a mechanic you'll get used to it." Suddenly they heard running and shouting from the inside of the apartment. "Oh I think he's burning himself alive," The landlady said with a smile on her face.

This surprised both Zoro and Chopper, they couldn't hide the horror on their faces. The door swung open and they were greeted by a comical face that had both his eyes and tongue out in a spiral manner.  

"ROBIIIN!" Chopper shouted in surprise and Zoro instinctly grabbed the face and to his surprise, a mask was in his hand and he gazed at it for a few seconds before looking at the man standing at the door.

The man with curly black hair tied in a bun and long nose laughed. "That was an amazing greeting, wasn't it? That was how we used to greet worthy people who didn't need to go thru a trial to live with us." The guy pointed himself with his thumb and he looked very proud of his obvious fake story.

"Really?!" But Chopper didn't know it was a lie. He was impressed with the man because even though he nearly scared Chopper to death it was still a unique way of greeting new neighbors.

"Yeah! I got a whole bunch of tools inside from my adventures, Do you wanna see?" Before Chopper could say anything, Zoro stopped him because he knew Chopper would say yes. His whole face lit up with excitement when he heard the word "adventure" come out from Usopp's mouth. "Okay buddy, let's unpack first."  

"I'm Usopp by the way! Just come back later if you want!" Usopp grinned and waved goodbye to Chopper. Robin, Chopper and Zoro climbed the stairs once again and when they got to the top they were greeted by a blue door.

"Now this is your apartment. It's a two bedroom apartment which also includes a balcony." Robin keyed the lock and opened the door. She gave a key to Zoro and smiled. "We can talk about the payment some other time. Just settle here first. I can see you both look like you need some sleep. You can park your car anywhere in the parking lot on the right side of the building"

"Thanks, We'll knock once we're done with the unpacking."  

"The moving truck already arrived here first so your things should probably be already inside. Well then, I'll go down now. Just knock on my door when you need something" Robin once again smiled and winked at Chopper before she climbed down the stairs.

"Let's get inside then." Zoro and Chopper slowly entered the door. When they entered their new apartment they were first greeted by the shoe rack and a door for the closet. If they look at their left side, they saw a hallway that leads to a small bedroom. The boys decided to check what was behind the wall of the closet first. The apartment had an "open concept" type of feel to it since the walls were white and the living room area was connected to the kitchen and dining area in an L manner. Their furniture was placed on the corner and was covered by a large white cloth to protect it from the dust. There was a glass door that gives the place a natural light, though it was getting darker since the sun was setting. When they walked towards the tail of the L part of the apartment, they saw their kitchen lined up at the left side of the wall. It was the usual kitchen with a refrigerator, cabinets at the bottom and a sink, it was all white and black though. What wowed them the most was the oven and dishwasher, they didn't have one of those back at their old place. They went back to the hallway and they were greeted by two doors on the right side. They opened the first door and saw a washing machine and dryer inside.

"Zoro! We don't have to go outside to do laundry anymore! I'll take that off the budget now." Chopper exclaimed and made a mental note. He surely was loving the new apartment.

They got to the next door and it was the bathroom. They got to the end of the mini hallway and was greeted by the first bedroom. It was a small bedroom with a window in the opposite wall of the door. The moving guys placed Chopper's bed, study table, and bookshelf on the corner under a white cloth. There were about five boxes beside it too.  

"You like it?" Zoro asked with a smile on his face. He already knows the answer. It was all over Chopper's face.

"I do!" Chopper ran inside and started opening the boxes beside his bed to start unpacking and start decorating his room.

"Remember to wipe the dust first okay? I packed cleaning supplies on one of the boxes in the living room." Zoro reminded his little brother since he saw light dust on the walls.  

"I know!"

Zoro chuckled and continued to his room. It was the door at the end of the hallway. It didn't really look that much different from Chopper's except he didn't have a whole wall of closet, just a small one, and his window was at the side of their apartment balcony. Zoro looked at the scenery outside his window and saw that the sky was already dark.

"Chopper let's check the balcony first." Zoro knocked on Chopper's door where he saw him sorting out his clothes in his closet.  

The boys went outside and were mesmerized by the view. Living on the third floor, of course, had its perks and this was definitely one of them. They could see the city lights that were like stars that were twinkling in the sky. It was very different from their old city where at this time people were already turning off their lights to sleep, here in this city people were still outside getting to where they needed to go.

"I'm starting to love this place." Chopper said while gazing at the beautiful view in front of him.  

"So do I."

Zoro was awakened by the light coming from the window. He slowly opened his eyes and the first thought he had was where the fuck am I? He sat up and looked around his room and finally realized where he was at, oh right we moved. He slowly stood up, stretched his body, did some "light exercise" of a thousand push-ups to warm up and left his room. The smell of bacon filled his nose and he immediately knew Chopper already cooked breakfast for them.

"You should've just relaxed today." The man said as he entered the kitchen and saw Chopper cooking pancakes which were a great partner for the bacon.

"I'm just cooking breakfast Zoro, and it's already pass nine and I'm very hungry." Chopper answered as he flipped the pancake. "You do remember that I'm supposed to go to the university today right?"

"Oh shit, was that today?" Zoro couldn't hide the oh shit expression he had on his face. Of all the days he would forget it was the day they would visit Chopper's new campus for the first time. Chopper placed the last pancake on a plate and Zoro picked it up to place on their table.

"Yes, it's today at 1 pm" The boy took a bite from his food and picked up his phone from the side of his plate. He scrolled through his emails and showed Zoro the message he received from his new school.

"So you've got admission things you need to do." Zoro read the email and saw that Chopper needed a guardian since even though he was a college student, he was still underage.  

The boy nodded and they silently finished their breakfast. Zoro told Chopper to get ready while he washed the dishes. After finishing the dishes, Zoro sat at their sofa and was in deep thought. Now that they were at Marie Jois city, he needed to find a job to support their finances. He still had backup money that could maybe last for a couple of months but after that, they would be broke. That money was what he won from his races the past few months, he started racing like crazy before they moved since he knew they needed money. He could apply for part-time jobs around the city to cover up for their bills but he knew he still wanted to race. There was a certain euphoria he felt every time he was on the wheel and he certainly liked that winning feeling he had whenever he comes first place. It wasn't an official racing match like the world cup but it was so rewarding to win a race. If he wanted to race around this city he needed to see what type of racers this city had. He knew that Marie Jois City was known to be a racer's den at night, racers from around the world come to the city and race to be the best. Despite its government to be very strict with their road rules, the roads here were definitely a good place to train himself and tune his car up to be able to beat Mihawk. To introduce himself to the racing community, he needed someone to show him where the race usually takes place and fill him in about who was the best.

The knock on their door interrupted Zoro's thoughts. Zoro stood up and opened their front door and the first thing he saw was a long nose.

"Hey there! I know you're new here and you don't even know where the bus stops are. I've got some free time today. Do you want the Great Usopp to tour you around?" Usopp wiggled his eyebrows. Zoro was unsure of what he should answer. He was very cautious of whom he interacts with since he didn't know if the guy was a bad guy that could be a bother to their lives.

"Usopp! Maybe you could show us where Marie Jois University is?" Zoro nearly facepalmed himself when Chopper easily accepted the man's invitation. Chopper just got out from the shower and he had a towel over his curly hair. Not that he was judging so badly since when Zoro double looked the man he didn't have any bad aura coming off of him.  

"Oh right, Robin told me you were accepted for their scholarship! That's amazing but not as amazing as me!" Usopp said with a grin. "I can take you there. What time do you need to be there?"

"Did you just call me amazing?! I'm not that amazing! " Chopper tried to hide his face with the towel he had on top of his head. The boy just couldn't take compliments.

"We need to be there at 1." Zoro answered and accepted Usopp's invitation. There's nothing he could really do here since Chopper seems to like the guy and maybe even Usopp knows how the street works.

The three of them were finally ready for their errand of the day and their first trip together as a group. They said goodbye to Robin and headed outside to the parking lot and stopped in front of two cars that were under a brown and violet cloth.

"We take our cars here very seriously, they're our babies. That's Robin's car under the violet one." Usopp grinned, a very proud one at that. It was like he was preparing for this moment his entire life. He was just going to show them his car.  

The cloth revealed a dark red car, the same color as the Doritos nacho cheese flavor. The car's hood was long and big that even without opening the hood you could already determine that the car's engine was a different class from normal cars. The headlights looked like they were the eyes of a robot and the brake lights had three of those faces that scared Chopper and Zoro yesterday. The mirrors were shaped like wings. The hubcaps of the wheels were colored gold and were shaped like a star. The top of the trunk also had a small spoiler attached to it. Finally, there were only two doors on the side of the car that makes it look like a two-seater car but when you take peek on the inside there was a seat that could fit two people on the back.

"Isn't this a Toyota Supra?" Zoro said with awe as he eyed the car from the hood to the trunk. "Weren't they faced out during the early 20's?"

"Yeah, the base is a Toyota Supra but I changed the inside completely. I also added some touches on the appearance as you can see." Usopp winked. "This baby..." He slapped his car roof to emphasize his next phrase. "Can run faster than a jaguar."

"Wow! That's amazing Usopp! Are you a street racer?!" Chopper asked with sparkles on his eyes, clearly amazed by Usopp's car and Usopp himself.

"Hmmmm... Am I?" The long-nosed man placed his thumb and pointer finger on his chin, as if he was thinking of something deep. "I know you're amazed by me and have a lot of questions but we should get going. You guys might get late."

Usopp unlocked his car and opened the driver seat. He bends the seat to let Chopper enter the seat at the back. Chopper happily entered his car and was amazed by how comfy his seats were. The ride to Marie Jois University was filled with funny stories Usopp told that were not lies. He told them of a time he was driving his car so fast that he was able to climb the mountain walls by driving upwards.  

"You're a street racer aren't you?" Zoro asked randomly since his curiosity was eating his brain. Besides the obvious fact that his car was pumped up, there were multiple buttons beside the wheels and the shift had an additional gear.  

"I'm the best one out there!" Usopp answered proudly. Zoro rolled his eyes, he knew he was lying but Chopper believed him. "I do race, but I don't always do it. I enjoy racing but I enjoy building cars for racing more." There was silence between the three of them as Usopp made a turn and entered a gate that had a sign above that read "Marie Jois University". They were met by an intersection that had signs which directed to the buildings of the different majors that the school offered. Usopp made a right turn to lead them to the Medicine Building. Along the way, Chopper saw students walking at the sidewalk with a pile of books in their arms and he never felt this excited to learn new knowledge about medicine.

"If you're interested I can upgrade your Civic but you have to meet my crew first." Usopp said barely audible but Zoro understood what he said. The car was slowing down indicating that they were at their destination.  

"I don't deal with crews." Zoro sternly answered. He prefers to work alone. He was a lone wolf and thought that crews were troublesome to deal with since those type of groups usually got into fights more often and he wasn't in the position for those since Chopper might get into the mess.

"At least just meet them first, they're not that bad." The long-nosed man said with a grin. "You have my number now right? Just text me after you're done with the admission process and we can meet up."

"Thanks for the lift Usopp!" The small curly-haired boy exclaimed with an excited expression on his face. He was basically beaming. Zoro got down first and bent his seat down to let Chopper out of the car. He waved goodbye to Usopp as the man drove away.

When they turned around to face the school they saw a large white building that looked like a coliseum. Large words were printed on top of the door that said "Marie Jois Medicine Department". There was a fountain in the middle that has a statue of two snakes winding around a winged staff, a symbol of medicine, in its core. Students were walking around with multiple books on their hands and their eyes were as black as a panda. Everyone and everything looked different from high school and Chopper suddenly felt overwhelmed by everything.

"Zoro, I think everyone here is on a different level." Chopper said with an intimidated expression on his face.  

"And you're a level above them." A simple sentence like that was enough for Chopper's worry to fade. His brother always knew what to say when he felt lost and he knew that Zoro was always there for him and it made him feel like he could do anything. Zoro slapped Chopper's back to slam the boy with confidence again. "You've got this."

"I've got pain in my back." The boy joked as he rubbed the place where Zoro slapped him. Zoro was a tall and muscular man so a simple slap on his back was enough for Chopper's lungs to come out.

The two brothers entered the school building and the inside was just as amazing as the outside. Though the outside had an old but elegant feel to it, the inside had a modern design.  The entrance hall had a huge staircase that leads to a second floor where they saw students were reading books and lounging around. There were four huge doors that lead to different departments on the first floor. The first thought Chopper had was that he needed to hold his big brother's hand or he wouldn't find the guy for a week.  

"Where do we go?" Chopper said his thought out loud, he was worried that he would be late for his appointment, it wasn't a good image to start with after all.  The building had different hallways and rooms and it might take ages for them to find the admissions center. The only way they could get there on time is to ask how to get there.

"You're blocking the way." The boys turned around to see a black haired man with a very deep and black eyebags who had tattooed letters on his fingers that when put together spelled "DEATH".  

"You can just walk past us, there are no people around!" Zoro raised his eyebrows and looked around him to check if there were other people in the large entrance of the building. There were none, and the man could have just avoided them and went on his day.

"Zoro...  We are blocking the way..." Chopper said in a low voice. He didn't want trouble before he could even start going to classes.

"Oi Law, don't scare them." A man wearing a white lab coat came up to them. He was wearing eyeglasses and he had blonde hair on top of his head but the sides were completely bald. Somehow, he reminded them of a pineapple. "I'm guessing you're looking for the admissions?" He questioned with a smile.

"Yes." Chopper answered the man. The boy glanced at Zoro, who was having a staring contest with Law.

"I'll take you there. I'm Marco, a professor at this university and this..." Marco placed his hand on Law's shoulder and gave it one light slap. "is Law. Despite him looking like a criminal, this guy is a graduating student and the top one at that." Chopper looked at Law in a different light. At first, he thought the guy was a delinquent but now he sees him as a star student. He thought the guy must be very grumpy because he was staying up all night to study and do school work, he can see it in the guy's eye bags.

"Go to your class, Law. You'll be late." Marco looked at Law and shooed him away. Law gave the brothers one final look before he turned his back and walked to his class.  

"Don't worry, he's a pretty nice guy if you get to meet him better. He's not in a great mood this morning because of school work. Now then, shall we?" The professor smiled and gestured that they climb the stairs. He escorted them all the way to the admission area where he told them to sit down at the reception and wait for a while. Marco gave Zoro a clipboard to fill up Chopper's personal information while they were waiting.

"This is it Zoro." Chopper whispered while watching Zoro filling up the form. Zoro grunted to acknowledge what Chopper said. They knew they would move to Marie Jois City but it felt like a dream that when they wake up it would go away but now that they're here with their fancy new apartment and Chopper's new amazing school everything finally felt real for the both of them and they're proud of how far they come. They both waited patiently on their seats and after thirty minutes Marco came back and asked for the clipboard.

"Sorry, the dean got busy with work so he asked me to process your admission instead uhhh..." He looked at the clipboard to see the name of his client. "Mr. Chopper?" Marco questioningly looked at Zoro because he thought the name didn't quite fit the guy. Zoro made the no motion with his head and pointed at the actual Chopper beside him. The professor made a questionable expression with his face at first but then he immediately lit up like he remembered something.

"Oh! You're that genius kid the faculty's talking about!" Marco exclaimed with a huge grin on his face. "Everyone's excited to meet you!"

"Don't call me a genius! It doesn't make me happy!" Chopper hid his blushing face in his hands. He couldn't take the compliment that the whole faculty knows about him and recognizes his talent. The thought gave him a confidence boost. Marco looked at Zoro to ask if Chopper was okay and the green-haired man nodded his head in response. The pineapple-haired man chuckled.

"We'll just do a short orientation." Marco leads the two boys to an office where they talked about the requirements for Chopper's scholarship. The man explained that the boy needed to maintain an above average GPA to maintain his scholarship and that it only covers the whole tuition for his years at the university. So the money to buy for books and medical equipment needed to come out from their pockets. If the school also needed a student volunteer they'd need Chopper to be there to help them.  Marco showed them the school curriculum and available subjects they had for the semester. He suggested that Chopper shouldn't rush since they still had a month before the semester starts but he also told him to pass the schedule he wanted two weeks before. Marco made Zoro sign a contract about the conditions for Chopper's scholarship. The school knew Chopper was still underage so they made his guardian sign for him and included him to the orientation just to be sure that they know what the boy was about to go through. After a short two hour talk with Marco, they finished the first step of the admission process and told them to come back with the schedule.  

"I'll see you in class then, Chopper." Marco said while shaking the boy's hand. After their exchange, the brothers left the room and walked to the exit of the school building where they texted Usopp to come and pick them up.

"Well, that went well huh?" Zoro ruffled Chopper's hair as if telling him that he did a good job and that he was very proud of him. Before Chopper could answer there was a loud grumble from his stomach.

"Hungry?" The man asked and Chopper nodded in agreement.

"I've got packed lunch in my bag, we could eat it while waiting for Usopp." Chopper opened his backpack and took out the lunchboxes he made, he figured that they might get hungry while waiting and that a homemade lunch would cost cheaper than eating outside. The two brothers found a tree near the road where they sat down and ate their lunch. It was a nice spot where Usopp can easily spot them. Usopp replied that he might be late because he visited a friend on the campus and that he was still with them which was fine for the boys because they didn't have anything else to do that day and a short picnic was nice. They ate their lunch while talking about how the university will be for Chopper and after they had their fill Zoro fell asleep laying on the grass while Chopper read the curriculum and available subjects Marco gave him.

It was silent until a loud screeching sound of tires and explosive sounds of engine disturbed their peace. Chopper looked around to see where the noise was coming from but all he saw were students, who were also chilling on the school grounds, shook their heads and facepalmed and just had this expression of "not again" in their faces.

When Chopper faced the road, he saw a small white car speeding. The bottom half of the car, as well as the hood and side mirrors, were colored black. It was too far away to see most of the details but he saw that the windows weren't tinted so you could see a silhouette of a person with a strawhat sitting on the driver's seat. There was a red Ferrari behind him trying to catch up but the white car suddenly burst speed as flames from the back of the car erupted. The car suddenly stopped on the nearest tree to where Chopper and Zoro were sitting under. There were tire marks on the road and Chopper could hear laughing from the white car. The Ferrari stopped beside the white car and rolled down the window in the passenger's seat and started shouting. It was amazing how Zoro was still asleep during the whole act.

"REMEMBER THIS STRAWHAT." A man with blue hair and a big red nose stuck his head out for a second to look at the white car's driver and stared at him to try and intimidate him. But Chopper could hear a loud laugh from the white car, the clown man looked irritated and just drove away in defeat.

"I'll beat you as many times as you like Buggy!" A boy with a stawhat stuck his upper body outside as he shouted and waved goodbye to Buggy. Now that the white car was closer, Chopper saw the plate on the back of the car that said "KING" and taillights that had three X on each side. There were three exhaust pipes on the back and the hubcap was also shaped like an X. Chopper stood up and walked to see the details on the front side of the car. He saw that the headlights were slanted on each side and that the hood was wider than most cars but the thing that interested him most was the word "TRUENO" in the middle part of the bumper.  Overall, the car looked old but the thing still beat a Ferrari at full speed.

"You wanna race me?" Chopper didn't notice but the boy at the driver's seat got out of his car and was watching the boy while he was examining his car. The freckled boy noticed that the driver had black hair and a scar on his left eye. A huge X scar was also visible on his chest under his white thin shirt. Chopper was curious about the scar since he looked too young to have such big injuries but he was a racecar driver after all.

"Ah! I'm not a racer so..." The boy looked disappointed with Chopper's answer but before he could say anything a loud grumble could be heard and Chopper looked at the boy.

"I'm hungry, do you have any food? I'm Luffy by the way!" The sudden change of topic surprised Chopper but the expression of hunger from Luffy's face was something he couldn't resist. Chopper scanned the place where Zoro was sleeping, looking at the lunchboxes that were spread near the man and remembered that he still had some fried eggs left, it was food for dinner but it seemed like Luffy needed it more. "I think we've still got some food left."  

Luffy clapped with joy and followed Chopper to their picnic place. Chopper handed him the eggs and he looked at the food with sparkles in his eyes. It was like he saw fried eggs for the very first time. He positioned himself to sit on the grass not noticing a certain green-head sleeping right below him. Before Chopper could warn him, Luffy sat on Zoro's face and like right on cue Luffy felt some air he needed to release and right there and then he did.  

Zoro immediately woke up and pushed Luffy away coughing for some fresh air. Luffy not only laughed at the sight in front of him, which happened because of what he did but also because he didn't know a man can blend so well with the grass. Zoro layed on the grass again taking deep breathes to rejuvenate his nose that took a huge bomb from some asshole. He was about to kick someone's ass for that.

"I like you both! You should join my crew!"  

Zoro stood up and walked towards Luffy. He grabbed Luffy by the collar and looked directly in his eyes with a menacing look but Luffy kept on laughing. Chopper knew where this was going and he was scared for Luffy. Most of the time Zoro was calm but when he gets angry, he really gets angry that he can beat up a person until they can't walk anymore. To avoid the worst to happen, the boy tried to calm his brother by pulling his shirt. It was a small gesture but it was something.

"Oi, Luffy!" As if an angel came down from heaven, Usopp came just right on time to stop the fight that was about to spark. The long-nosed man closed his door on the driver's side and walked towards the group. "You like them? They're the two brothers I was texting to you about!"

"They're funny! This guy..." Zoro released Luffy from his grip and the strawhat boy patted his hair to emphasize his next statement. "looks like the grass! And that little guy there gave me food!"

"So you do like them?" Usopp asks again not really getting the answer he wanted from Luffy.

"I do! And I want them to join the crew." Zoro swatted Luffy's hand out of his head.

"We're not going to join your crew! What crew do you even have?! A pirate crew?!"

"As I said before that I AM the captain of my own crew, Luffy here is the captain of another crew that I am in, I took pity on them because they need my greatness!" Usopp answers while pointing himself with his thumb. Zoro knew he was lying but Chopper still believed him and even Luffy did too! Now that he thought about it, Zoro confirmed that Usopp was a streetcar racer and if this boy was their captain then he must be the best one in their crew. It would be a good idea to race Luffy to warm up to the racers of Marie Jois City.  

"Whatever, I don't care about your crew. Let's just race to see who's the best one here."

"I won't take no as an answer. Whatever you might think, you and that small guy there are in our crew now." Luffy answered confidently. It was like he didn't understand what Zoro was saying and just kept on making the decision for them.

"You don't have to join the crew if you don't want to, Luffy’s just a bit stubborn" Luffy looked at Usopp with a scrunched face, obviously disagreeing with what he said. "What do you mean they don't have too? They're already in the crew!" Usopp looked at Luffy again in disbelief but sighed in defeat and facepalmed to try to slap the headache away. "Forgive him, he's just like this."

“Are you sure he’s just a bit stubborn?” Zoro mocked Usopp’s statement earlier. They looked at Luffy who was picking his nose reaching far for a treasure inside his nose. He was really a stubborn man.

“He’s a pain in the ass but he’s a good captain, not like me though, but anyway! You guys should meet our crew!”

"I want to meet them they seem fun!" Chopper said in a nearly inaudible voice. The boy was quiet for a while that Zoro almost forgot he was there. The look in his eyes tells Zoro that he seems excited to meet these people, it was new since Chopper was a very shy boy and he doesn’t open up to just anyone. Maybe this crew was a good thing for Chopper’s development. Although they still won’t join Luffy but maybe they might hang out with them sometimes.  

“That’s it! They’ll like you little guy!” Luffy agreed giving him a wide grin and a thumbs up.

"Let’s go then." Everyone was looking at Zoro and waiting for his approval. It was really hard to say no at this situation especially when Chopper asks for something, he rarely asks for anything after all. When they all heard his approval, they all cheered like little kids who got candies.  

Zoro didn’t agree to ride with Luffy since this was the first time they met and he really wasn’t sure if he was a safe driver not for him but for Chopper. So, the two brothers were sitting in Usopp’s car while Luffy was right in front of them to lead the way to their crew hideout. During the car ride Usopp was telling them stories about their crew. They were called the "Strawhat Crew" and they were well-known within the city and they were gaining popularity outside. He told them that one day Luffy was visiting his city, Syrup City, and he beat some street racing punks that were causing trouble within the city. The punks then left the city alone after Luffy confronted them. A funny thing was that Syrup City wasn't really fond of street racers so they didn’t see him as a hero but acknowledged the deed he did. Luffy then asked Usopp to join him and he decided to come with him to Marie Jois City to start a new life and live his dream of building fast race cars and that was the reason why he was living at the best city in the world.  

The two brothers were amazed by his story. It didn’t seem like it was a made-up story like what Usopp usually tells all the time the details seemed too real. Whatever the case was, what Zoro got from the story was that Luffy wasn’t that bad of a guy. He seems like a great guy to be Chopper’s friend.  

Their ride ended when they got to the far end of Marie Jois City where the road meets the sand and the sea. Usopp’s car stopped in front of a huge building, the top part had a big lion head with rays that were supposed to be the fur surrounding the face in a circle. For a hideout, that large thing pretty much gave them away. There was a huge garage door that automatically opened and following Luffy, Usopp entered and parked his car inside. When the two brothers got out of Usopp’s car they saw multiple cars parked inside a huge gray garage and the cars were hidden under a cloth like the mechanics didn’t want anyone to see what they were making.

"Our builder likes to keep his projects hidden so you'll see a lot of those here." Usopp pointed to a row of cars under clothes and each cloth had different colors. It was like the cars were coded for a specific person. He gestured the two brothers to follow him towards a door. They opened the door to find a huge room with wooden walls that makes them feel like they were inside a ship. It really felt like the crew hideout was a legitimate pirate crew from the seas. There was a long bar with different alcohol drinks displayed, a huge U shape red sofa in the center of the room with a large flat screen TV in front of the seat. A large aquarium on the wall where a variety of fish can be seen got Chopper’s curiosity. The feel of the room was homey and Chopper and Zoro felt comfortable and hungry because there was a delicious aroma of food coming out of the door on the other side of the room.

"SANJIIII! ARE YOU COOKING? I'M HUNGRY!" Luffy burst from the door behind them surprising the two brothers. "Sanji makes good food." Luffy told Chopper with saliva falling down from his lips. With a statement and expression like that and with an amazing aroma within the room, how can Chopper not believe him. The boy followed a hungry Luffy to the kitchen door where they disappeared.

"Don't worry about them. The only thing you should be worried about is Chopper getting too fat from good food." Usopp chuckled thinking about a cute little chubby Chopper. He walked towards the sofa and sat down and gestured for Zoro to come sit with him. Zoro took Usopp's word and felt less worried about where and what Chopper was doing at the moment. The boy knows what to do if something comes up anyway. Besides for Chopper to make friends, he also had another agenda why he came with them. He needed to meet these people and see if he can get any information about the different crews and who needed to beat to be the best in this city.  

"Oh, hey Brook! Where's Franky?" Zoro didn’t see the old man sitting on the couch, not until Usopp talked to him at least. He was very thin that he almost looks like a skeleton, he had a big afro black hair, and he wore a nice suit. Overall, he looked very fancy.  

"Ah! Usopp! He's with Nami. They went to get some gears for Nami's car." Brook looked at Zoro and gave him a warm welcoming smile. "Who might this be?" He questioned as he acknowledged Zoro’s presence.

"This is one of the guys who moved in the apartment above me. This is Zoro." Usopp patted the green-haired man’s shoulder who only grunted in response, he wasn’t really feeling chatty that day.  

"Are they the guys Luffy texted Franky about?" Brook stood up and walked towards the corner of the room to get a violin case. He removed the instrument from its case and started checking if the tune of the violin was in perfect shape.

"Yeah! They are." Usopp answered.

"Well then, I should play a song for our new friends." The old man started playing his violin and a soft song can be heard inside the room, it was relaxing and Zoro felt peace after a long crazy day but the short moment of relaxation was interrupted when they heard a scream coming out of the kitchen.

"LUFFY! YOU'RE EATING ALL THE FOOD BEFORE I EVEN GET TO SERVE IT." A man's voice echoed throughout the whole house. Luffy was then thrown out across the room with a huge steak on his mouth and another two on both of his hands. "I jufst whantedf toof tasfte ift." He said while chewing his food, they really couldn’t understand him because of the food on his mouth but they knew he was just trying to defend himself.

A man with blonde hair covering his right eye, which Zoro thought was really ridiculous, came out from the kitchen with plates on both of his hands. Chopper was right behind him with a single plate too. They went to the bar and placed the food on top of the counter.

"Thanks Chopper, you're a good boy." Sanji said with a smile. The man got a fork, knife and plate from the counter drawers and gave Chopper a slice of the steak. Chopper was shy to receive the plate of food at first but Sanji looked persistent and the boy gladly accepted it. The first bite of the steak brought Chopper’s taste buds to heaven because the meat was so soft and the juices were oozing out of the meat that gave it additional taste that he couldn’t resist.  

"I take it that you like it." The blonde man chuckled and lighted a cigarette that he placed on his mouth. Chopper’s expression gave it away, he couldn’t talk because of how good the food tasted like. This was the first time he tasted anything so good.

"This is really delicious!" Chopper said while he was slicing the steak into pieces. He couldn’t wait for another bite. "I never tasted something this good in my life before!"  

"Right? Right? Sanji makes the best food in the world!" Luffy spread his arms out to give emphasis to his statement. Sanji kicked him in the head because he knew the reason why he spread his arms like that was to get food from the plate again.

"So, are you going to introduce these two new friends to us Luffy?" Sanji looked at Luffy expecting him to act like a captain at this moment. Although he respects his captain’s decisions, he still needs to be wary of the two new recruits.  Though Chopper looked too pure to be a bad addition, he was actually happy that Luffy asked him to join.

"I never asked their names yet." Luffy answered with a laugh.  

"Why do you do this." Sanji facepalmed not really knowing what he expected because Luffy was their captain after all.

"I'll introduce them to you!" Usopp stood up from his seat and pointed at Zoro. "This is Zoro." He then pointed at Chopper. "And that, I guess you already know, but that is Chopper! He got a scholarship at the Medicine Department at Marie Jois University! And he’s only fifteen years old!"  

"So, you're a genius boy." Sanji ruffled Chopper's hair who was still enjoying his piece of steak. Chopper choked and looked at Sanji with a blush on his face. He still didn’t know what to do when someone compliments him.

"Don't say that! I'm not that smart!" Chopper said while he hid his blushing face on his hands.

"He can't take compliments," Usopp answered Sanji’s confused look and the blonde man nodded, understanding a part of Chopper’s personality.

"Oh what! You're a doctor?" Luffy looked at Chopper with sparkles in his eyes, clearly impressed with what he said. "That's so great! Now we have a doctor in our crew!"

Chopper dropped his knife and fork to bend down on his knees, hide his face and kept saying. "I'm not that good!" Everyone except Zoro were laughing at Chopper’s cute reaction. The phrase “joining the crew” were words Zoro didn’t want to hear from anyone in the room since they really weren’t going to join. It was a dangerous world and he didn’t want Chopper to get caught up in something that might ruin his life.

"We're not joining your crew." Zoro interrupted the fun and had a stern look on his face. Luffy looked at him and studied his expression for a while then he grinned, the next thing he said surprised everyone inside the room. "Want to race then? If I win you'll join us. If you win, I'll let you go." There was silence in the air as it got heavier and intense.

"Zoro, they're not bad people." Chopper stood up from his crouching position and looked at his brother. He was trying to coax him to join the crew without any race or fight. It didn’t really seem like they needed persuading because he himself, wanted t to join the crew.

"Things might get dangerous and you still got a huge future ahead of you." Zoro was trying to be a responsible brother for Chopper at the moment. This was a decision he had to make for themselves. "I'll race you tomorrow for it. But Chopper's out of that bet. You got it?"

"I better be out of that bet because I'm joining this crew! I believe I’m matured enough to make my own decisions now." Chopper looked at him and Zoro saw how upset his brother was getting. This was the first time he answered him like this. It wasn’t like he didn’t trust Chopper to make his own decisions, Chopper was the one making the household decisions after all. But he knew the world of street car racing more than him.

“You can’t race you’re too young!” The green-haired man shouted making the air in the room heavier since this was a fight between family.

“I’m only saying that you both should join the crew, not race with the crew. Everyone here has their own thing that helps the crew move forward to be the number one.” Luffy spoke like how a captain would respond to the situation. Everyone looked at him in shock because of how responsible Luffy sounded, he wasn’t all food and games after all.

"Fine. Do your own thing." Zoro said as he was looking at Chopper who was sending a thumbs up sign to Luffy. This was his defeat, Luffy and Chopper had their points and he knew that whatever happens he will be there at Chopper’s side.

"Let's race tomorrow night then." Luffy grinned returning to the challenge at hand. The strawhat boy had a look on his face that said that Luffy was so sure that he was going to win the race. It fired up Zoro's determination to win and beat Luffy’s grinning ass so bad. If he was going to join this crew, even if he didn’t want to but the opponent won fair and square, the captain needed to earn his respect anyway and the only way he could do that is if he beat him in a race.

"If you want me in your crew, you need to earn my respect." Zoro stated his condition and looked at Luffy in the eyes to try and intimidate him but the boy laughed, he looked amused by the whole situation.

"I really want you in my crew now."

The door suddenly opened and revealed a man with blue hair who was wearing speedos and a woman with long orange hair wearing jeans and a plain black shirt. They stopped and looked at each of them with a confused expression. Both of them could feel the tension in the air.

"What's with the heavy atmosphere?" The blue-haired man said removing his sunglasses and putting the box he was holding on one hand on the floor.

"NAMIII!" Sanji bent his knee in front of Nami and held a rose he grabbed somewhere in the room. "You still look beautiful as ever." Nami rolled her eyes not interested in Sanji’s rose but she looked at Luffy who was still grinning from ear to ear. She followed her gaze and found a man staring at Luffy and a boy who seems scared. "I'm guessing those two are the "two new friends" you found this morning."

"Yeah! Chopper's joining us and he's a doctor." Luffy dragged Chopper in front of Nami. The teenage boy gave Nami a small wave too shy to say something but Nami gave him a warm smile, welcoming him to his new home. "Zoro wants to race with me first before he joins." He said again pointing at Zoro. He was still so sure that he's going to win and Zoro didn’t like that one bit.

"Are you the boy Robin's talking about?!" Nami clasped his hands and pinched Chopper's cheeks. "You are so cute!"

Chopper slapped Nami's hand away and hid his blushing face in his hands "I'm not that cute!"

"Wait, you know Robin?" Zoro asked Nami curiously.

"Yeah, she's in the crew too." Nami answered. Zoro looked at her in disbelief he never thought Robin was a type of person that raced. He turned to face Usopp with a confused face to get some explaining he wanted to hear.

"I told you we take our cars seriously. I thought you'd get the hint." Usopp said shrugging his shoulders.

"I didn't think you were so dense, Zoro"  Zoro heard Robin’s voice and a chuckle after her sentence. She entered the main door and looked at him with amusement.

"Alright! We're all here!" Luffy raised his hands and ran to the counter aiming for the food but Sanji kicked his face away before he could devour everything again.

"At least Introduce us properly to the guests..." Sanji danced over to Robin and took her hand and placed a sweet kiss. She doesn’t seem to mind his actions. Robin just looks at him and chuckles. "Right ROBINNNN" He said with those heart eyes again, so does he do this to every woman he meets? Zoro thought how stupid that blonde guy was.

"I’m gonna go first! I'm Franky, The engineer of the crew. Just tell me what you want and I can make the modifications to make your car extra SUPER!" Franky said as he placed his two arms together above his head completing his star tattoo. Chopper’s eyes sparkled because of how cool Franky looked in front of him. He wanted to get to know him more since he looked like a chill guy he could hang out with and maybe he could learn a thing or two about cars.

"I'm Nami, I'm a cartographer. I can make it easier for you to win a race with secret roads but you'll need to pay me." She said while doing an okay sign but obviously it meant money. Zoro could benefit a map from Nami he thought how it would make memorizing the roads at his new city easier for him. Maybe he could talk to her later about the price.

"I'm Brook, I'm a musician. Luffy said he wanted to have a musician in the group! I understand him because music makes everything fun!" The old man laughed as he played a brief piece on his violin. Luffy was nodding in agreement to what Brook said. Zoro guessed no one understood why Luffy wanted a musician in a street car racer crew since all they could hear during races were their engines.

"Sanji. I'm a chef." Sanji didn’t seem that interested in his introduction but he did give Chopper a smile since he was getting too fond of the boy.

"I know you know me but I'll tell you my role here. I'm a mechanic. I help Franky with the modifications!" Usopp said while pointing at himself with his thumb.

"I'm a historian and I just find this crew very interesting." Robin chuckled as she got confused looks from Zoro and Chopper. But it gave Zoro an idea how and why she joined the crew, maybe she was one of those who stood on the sidelines to get information.  

"I'm Luffy! Captain of this crew and the future king of the roads." Luffy said with a grin on his face.

"Everyone's so great! I'm Chopper and I'm going to start studying as a Doctor and that's my brother Zoro, he's a street racer." Chopper pointed at his brother who just stood there silently. Though they were introduced a million times they still needed to introduce themselves, it was different and seemed appropriate.

"Luffy, I think you'd be happy to know that Zoro's one of the 11 rookies that popped up two years ago with you" Robin said with delight on her face. Zoro was surprised to know that the woman knew about him. But it wouldn’t be that surprising since she was a historian, they get information everywhere and maybe she uses her connections to get information of racers outside their city.

"What?! I didn't know you were that good!" Zoro was his brother but he didn't know that his big brother was one of the best. Chopper knew why though, he knew Zoro wanted him to live in the sidelines. But there wouldn’t be no harm in knowing your directionally challenged brother was a top racer in the whole wide world!

"If you're aiming for the top then it'll be troublesome if you're in my crew." Luffy had a serious expression on his face for the first time after they met. He looked like a lion who was defending his title in his pride.

"I don't plan on being the king. I just need to beat the guy who gave me this scar." Zoro briefly showed the whole crew the wide long scar he had on his chest. Luffy looked at him curiously that prompted Zoro to go on with his story. Why Zoro was explaining these things to someone he just met he doesn't know himself either. He wasn't planning on joining the crew but he was opening a private part of his life. "Mihawk's known to be the best driving a Civic and I want that title. I challenged him two years ago but he beat me and told me he finds potential in me and that I should come back and challenge him when I'm prepared."

Luffy once again became silent and looked at Zoro for a little while and grinned ear to ear, he was impressed with the man's determination. "Is that so? Then you're in my crew again." He said with his hands on his waist while he laughed a giddy laugh. "Enough with this and let's have a party for our two new members!" Luffy grabbed Zoro and Chopper in a tight hug. Chopper was laughing with his new friend but Zoro had a pained look on his face.

"I said I'm not joining!"

The party started with beers in their hands, besides Chopper, of course, he had apple juice. Brook played his violin while Luffy, Usopp, and Franky danced and sang with him. Chopper wanted to join the fun of course but he was cornered by the two women who were interested in dressing him up that they were already planning when they were going shopping with the boy. They also asked questions about his interests and how he got into medicine. Chopper told them that when he and Zoro were still in the orphanage he met two doctors who came to their place for a random check-up. They told stories of what doctors do and he got fascinated by their tales. Since then, Chopper started reading medicine books and made it his goal to treat every disease in the world.

"So, are you and Zoro not blood-related?" Nami asked curiously.

"Nope, but we're brothers." Chopper said with a grin and Nami lightly ruffled Chopper's curly hair. He was right, being brothers weren’t only about being blood related but about how they treated and respected each other. "If you'd let us, this crew can be your family too."

"Why did you join the crew?" Chopper asked while sipping his apple juice, it was to hide the huge blush creeping up from his face and tears that were forming in his eyes. He really liked the crew and thinking that the crew can be his family made him feel warm and safe.

"Luffy invited us and like how he's doing with your brother, he doesn't take no as an answer." The orange haired woman sighed while Robin chuckled beside Chopper. "But Luffy helped us..." Nami played with her glass of wine with a happy expression on her face. "Just know that even though Luffy’s an idiot, he’s the best idiot captain. We've got different stories about him but we’ll tell you about it another time. Let's just enjoy the night." She grinned and dragged Chopper to where the boys were dancing and they joined the fun.

Zoro was happy that Chopper was having a nice time with his new friends and maybe, possibly, his new friends too. Even if he didn’t join the crew, they can still be his friends, just with different ideals. He was silently drinking his beer while sitting on the couch, chilling, watching the whole crew having the time of their lives. His peaceful time by himself is going to be ruined soon because Sanji sat down beside him.

"Luffy will beat your ass so just accept his offer already." The blonde man said as he was giving his cigarette a huff. He was pretty chill for saying such an offending statement to Zoro.

"What the fuck did you just say?" Zoro looked at Sanji and he was ready to punch the person in front of him because no one in his entire life disrespected him like that and got away with it

"I'm not saying you're a weak little shit, which probably you are," Sanji smirked earning him a murderous glare from Zoro. "But Luffy seems to like you and he won't stop until you just give up and say yes."  

"Well, he better gives up unless he wins tomorrow." The green-haired man answered. He was considering if he should beat the man up but for Chopper he won’t. This was a night of fun for his brother and he doesn’t want to ruin it for him so he decided to change the subject by asking a question that was bothering him ever since they got to the place. "How did you guys find this hideout?"

"This is a garage my friend used to have." Usopp slid down the couch and joined in their conversation. He drank a few gulps from his beer and wiped sweat out of his face. The man probably got tired of dancing and needed downtime. "Her name's Kaya. She gave this to us because she wanted to support the crew. I let Franky live here because he basically lives here anyway since he works on the cars day and night. It’s better for the building too because someone will take care of it."

"The hideout's location is far away from the city center so no one randomly knocks on the door. I can work in peace here." Franky sat down beside Usopp and chilled with the men sitting on the couch. The dancing stopped since Luffy and Chopper went to the bar to get some food to energize themselves while Brook chatted with the ladies probably about how nice the new additions to their crew were.  

"I can add modifications to your Civic if you'd like." Franky wiggled his eyebrows like it was a physical way of telling Zoro to accept his offer. Zoro was actually considering it because if he wants to beat Mihawk, he needed to upgrade his car and skills. Franky looked like he knew what he needed to do and with the addition of Usopp’s ideas, the car would have awesome enhancements that would exceed any civic model.

"These two are the best mechanics in the world! So, you really should let them upgrade your car!" Luffy jumped behind Usopp and Franky and pulled them into a hug. It was like he was showing how proud he was of his crew members.

"Sounds promising," Zoro agreed to what Luffy said.  

"Great! We'll start doing the blueprints after your race tomorrow." Usopp did a thumbs up with his hands. It was a done deal and Zoro couldn’t be more excited to see what upgrades they would do to his car. Luffy then dragged Usopp and Franky back to the dance floor and continued to party. Sanji left the couch to join Brook and the ladies and he had those heart eyes while he was talking to the girls. He looked really stupid to Zoro. When he saw his big brother alone again, Chopper went and joined him on the couch.

"Sorry if I'm being a hard-headed kid today." Chopper said in an almost faint voice. Zoro didn’t know what Chopper was being sorry for, the kid was having fun with new people he met. He was growing and spreading his wings and bit by bit tearing down that wall he made to keep strangers away. It was a proud moment for Zoro.

"I don’t know what you’re sorry for but whatever it is just forget about it. I do see that this crew seems different from the other crew I interacted with, they’re nice people and a good environment for you." Chopper's face lit up since it was rare for Zoro to warm up to people. "But I still need to see how capable their captain is."

"Whatever, do your thing. I know myself that I’ll feel at home here because I can feel that they’ll treat me, us like family”

Maybe. Just maybe, Zoro thought the same too.  

Zoro started his day with a quick workout in their living room. If he wanted to win that race, he needed to be in his top shape today. He even did a minimum of 1000 pound weight for an hour. After he did his morning routine, he cooked breakfast for him and Chopper. The boy was still sleeping because they partied until 3 AM and that was past his usual bedtime so Zoro let him sleep until noon today. His race with Luffy was set at 7 PM near Merry so he still had time to tune up his car.

"G'mornin" Chopper said with a yawn as he entered the kitchen with messy hair and puffy eyes from his sleep. The boy sat down and Zoro put his plate in front of him but the boy's head was still nodding off.

"If you're still sleepy you should've just stayed in bed." Zoro grunted not really understanding why Chopper ate his breakfast while his head was still in dreamworld.

"I wanted to do my schedule today." Chopper sleepily lifted his fork and started picking up his eggs.

"You've still got a month to do those." The man had a confused face.

"Yeah, but I wanted to check if I can get classes with Dr. Hiluluk and Dr. Kureha. You know they're one of the reasons why I applied to Marie Jois University." How could Zoro forget about those two names, Chopper didn't stop talking about them since that check-up they had like seven years ago. He kept up to date about their achievements and even decided to go to the school where they taught at to see them again.

"Do what you gotta do, I'll just be downstairs tuning up my car." Zoro quickly finished his meal and politely asked Chopper to wash the dishes which the boy happily obliged to do. The man spent his entire afternoon checking if his engine was in top shape and if his car still had gas and if his tires were still good. Three hours before his race, Zoro went up to take a bath and meditate in his room. Now that his car was in top shape and that he physically felt that he was in his best form, the next thing he needed to do was mentally prepare himself. He needed to stop thinking about anything else and clear his mind. He can't race with a troubled mind after all.

"Zoro, we need to leave now." Chopper knocked on his door and slowly opened it to peek inside. He saw Zoro half naked sitting on the floor cross-legged and meditating. The man opened his eyes and looked at his baby brother. It was finally time for his first race in Marie Jois City. “Usopp said he’ll show us the way to the race track.”

On the way to their meeting place, Zoro rode alone in his car following Usopp who was in front of him. Chopper was with Usopp because he didn’t want to bother his big brother that much and he wanted to hear more stories from Usopp. The boy did warn Usopp that Zoro was directionally challenged and this surprised the long-nosed man since Zoro was a street car racer, how does he win races if he didn’t know where we he was going? As they were talking about Zoro, Usopp glanced at his mirror to check if Zoro was still behind him but not much to his surprise he didn’t see Zoro’s car. They looked for Zoro and herded him to the right path. That cycle went on for about three times before they got to the place.  

They passed by the hideout and kept following the road until they got to the end part of the beach where they saw a mountain beside it. The whole strawhat crew were already there and they were all looking at the cars that stopped in front of them since they were already late for about an hour. Chopper, Usopp and Zoro got out from their cars and joined the group.

“Before anything, I just want to say that this guy is unbelievable.” Usopp was the first one to speak, he pointed at Zoro to emphasize how bewildered he was about the guy. He was the first one from Marie Jois City to experience Zoro’s unusual talent.

“Whatever! Let’s just start the race!” Luffy looked so impatient from waiting too long.  

“Let’s start the race first before we talk about what happened.” Nami agreed with Luffy because she wanted the race to finish quickly.  

“How do we do this?” Zoro asked Nami since she looked like she was the one officiating the race.

“Since this is an unofficial race, we won’t need any judges though a contract has been set. If Luffy wins you join the crew if Zoro wins Luffy leaves him alone.” The girl looked at both the racers and they nodded in agreement with the “prizes” the race had.

“Unofficial race?” Chopper didn’t know that street racing had rules they had to follow. He looked so confused that Usopp explain everything to him.

“There are two types of racing in street racing, the official and unofficial races. Unofficial races are usually the fun racing where they won’t bet anything big that might destroy their reputation so these races don’t need judges. Official matches are the ones where crew fights happen and this is where “contracts” happen. Contracts are what each side place as bet, most of the time captains bet their cars, money or their hideouts. Though there are times where they fight for a title that brings them closer to challenging the yonko or the top four racers where when you beat them you become the king of the roads. Judges come in the official races to make everything fair, to make sure no one cheats.” Usopp finishes his explanation and now Chopper understood the world of street racing better.

“The race type will be a sprint, the first one to come down the mountain wins.” Nami points to the top then to the makeshift finish line they did. “Both of you should get into positions.”

Zoro and Luffy started to drive towards the top of the mountain. The night was silent except for the noise from their car engines. The road was dark but the street lights gave enough light to see what was in front of them. It built up their excitement for the race. When they got to the top, Zoro was in awe when he saw the view. Marie Jois City was indeed a city that never sleeps because he could see the city lights from the top and the starry sky added a little sparkle that made the whole scene in front of him more beautiful.

"It's beautiful huh?" Zoro heard Luffy shout from his car. He looked at the boy from the driver’s seat and saw his goofy smile. "We'll have a picnic here with the whole crew next week!"

"As if I'm going!" Zoro quickly answered. It’s not like he has all the time in the world to relax, he needed to find a job to pay the bills after all. Luffy grinned ignoring what Zoro said and closed his car window.  

"You two get into your position!" Nami's voice startled Zoro. He looked around to see if she was there but the only thing he saw was a drone that was above their cars. Luffy reversed his car and got into his position while Zoro did the same.

"Ready?" The two boys showed a thumbs up sign in the rear-view mirror so the drone can capture their signal to let Nami know that they were ready for the race.

"START YOUR ENGINES!" Nami’s shout echoed throughout the empty road. They could hear the cheers from the crew as they both geared up their cars. This was Zoro's first race in this city even if this wasn't an official race where money or reputation was involved, he would still take this seriously. This was a good warm up for him.

"IN 3..." He cleared his mind and stared at the road in front of him. This was really it. It was really happening.

"2..." Zoro clutched his steering wheel tightly and he could feel his palms sweating from excitement.

"1..." He could hear his heartbeat not from fear but from the thrill to be on the road again.

"GO!"  

Zoro and Luffy dashed from the starting line at the same time. Their cars darted from the starting point to the curve ahead of them in seconds. The incline of the mountain road added a little more speed to their cars. For normal drivers it was dangerous and they needed to slow down to be careful but for racers the incline was a natural boost. Zoro could feel his palms sweating from his tight grip on his steering wheel.  

The two racers got near to the first curve of the road. This was a part where he could gain the first spot easily by drifting ahead. As they approach the curve, Luffy grinned and pressed a button beside his steering wheel that gave him a speed boost. Zoro could swear he saw rockets come out from the side of Luffy's car. With the speed boost, Luffy easily took over the race and passed the curve in just a few seconds and he was in front of Zoro.  

As Zoro passed the curve Zoro saw the two rockets from the side of Luffy's car fold and go deep inside somewhere within the vehicle. Zoro grinned, this was a thing that Marie Jois city racers had, rockets and power-ups and he was excited to beat this challenge without any of those powerups. He shifted his gear and pressed his pedal at full and his car was blasting the road away like how Luffy's car did, though he was still behind the strawhat boy. He could see another curve coming up from the road. The man couldn't remove the grin from his face, this was his chance.

As Luffy drifted at the curve Zoro saw an opening and shifted his gears, pressed the break and swerved right in front of Luffy. As he looked at his side mirror, he couldn't see Luffy and he smirked knowing that he was going to win the race. As Zoro continued driving he got confused because he couldn't see the city view from his right side like he used too. All he could see was trees and darkness and he swore this wasn't the road they passed by when they drove up the mountain. Maybe the road changed? or maybe he accidentally took a shortcut?

He kept driving and driving which felt like it took him hours until he saw the whole crew's back. Zoro could hear shouting from the distance and some loud engines that was nearly drowning the voice of the shouting person. Were they in trouble?

He parked his car behind them and got out of the vehicle and slammed his door shut. It was loud enough for the crew to know that he was there because he saw Chopper running towards him.

"What's happening? Are you hurt? I told you joining a crew was a bad thing! Just stay behind my back." Zoro instantly turned into big brother mode. The shouting and engines made him worry for the boy. It wasn’t like he wanted to diss crews so much but he was doing it for Chopper’s sake.

"I'm not hurt Zoro, I was more worried for you because Luffy got here first and said he didn’t see your headlights behind him. He told us when you drifted around the second curve you disappeared." Chopper answered calmly and crossed his arms. There was amusement in his face. How can he not be amused?  "So, you got lost. How do you even win races?"

"Oh, just shut up, I'm not used to the roads here yet." Zoro answered and an old red truck passed by their side followed by two other cars that seemed like they were in pursuit. Zoro got worried and pulled Chopper to his side but the boy seemed unbothered. Chopper pulled Zoro’s shirt and pointed towards the crew, he nodded and they walked to join the small crowd.

"BUGGY! JUST GET OFF THE CAR ALREADY."  A mysterious voice shouted from one of the three cars in pursuit.

"Shouldn't you all be worried about this?" Zoro asked Nami as he stood beside her, she had this unimpressed look on her face and as Zoro observed the others they all had the same bored expression.

"Well, we should be, but they're all idiots so I don't bother," Nami answered and looked at Zoro. Her bored face change to a delightful look as she saw something that interested her. "So how are you a racer if you get lost mid-race?" You can see the amusement in her eyes. Zoro rolled his eyes to ignore her enjoyment in his situation. He watched the cars again to understand what was going on.

"Who are they anyway?" He asked.

"That old red truck is Ace's car, one of Luffy's older brothers. Buggy stole it, he's the one driving it right now." Nami pointed at the red truck going circles around beach. "Those two behind him are Sabo, Luffy's other older brother and Marco, a very good friend of Ace, they're on the same crew called the Whitebeard Pirates."

"Whitebeard Pirates? That's one of the most popular crews! Isn’t their captain one of the Yonko?" Zoro was surprised to know about Luffy’s ties with a member from a well-known crew. Not that it intimidated him but more like it didn’t look like Luffy was someone who had connections. "And didn't Luffy beat Buggy in a race a few days ago?"

"Yes, and Ace and Marco are one of the top members in that crew." The man from Chopper’s school, who he almost had a fight with, stood beside Zoro and casually joined their conversation. Zoro was confused to see Law at the beach with them. "Buggy probably wanted to take revenge on Luffy. I was with Marco and Sabo when Buggy stole the car, I came with them here but I’m not stupid enough to mindlessly follow Buggy in circles. Does that answer your question?” Before Zoro could say anything snarky they were interrupted by Luffy’s loud voice.

"Oi Zoro! Where did you go? But you lost anyway so you're in my crew now!" Technically Luffy did win the race and Zoro was officially in the crew. He had to accept that fact since he did agree on the bet so he had nothing else to do Zoro wouldn’t back down on his words but he still didn’t consider Luffy as his captain, the boy needed to do something to earn his respect.

Luffy jumped and wrapped his arms on Zoro and Law's neck. "Zoro meet Torao! Our crews are good buddies!" The two men in Luffy’s grip were struggling to get out from his hold but he was strong for a thin boy.  

"OI STRAWHAT!  RACE ME!" Luffy released the two men when Buggy stopped the truck in front of them. He rolled his windows down and glared at Luffy.  

"Sure!" Because they knew Luffy so well, it didn’t surprise the whole crew to see him accepting any challenges their captain gets from his enemies. Luffy gave Buggy a thumbs up to physically show that he was up to the challenge.

"Luffy?! Are you just gonna ignore the fact that he stole Ace's truck?!" The two cars that was follow Buggy pulled up in a corner and the drivers got out to join the commotion. Sabo gave his little brother a light slap on the head to wake up some senses in him.

"Ace is strong, why should I be worried?" Luffy looked at Sabo with a confused expression. They both know that their brother was strong and that he was capable of beating Buggy into a pulp himself so why Sabo was so worried Luffy didn’t understand.  

"He's only strong because of the power-ups of this car" Buggy said with a sly grin on his face. Luffy's mood shifted from happy to angry in just a few seconds and everyone became silent.  They all knew that when someone talks badly about the people that’s important to Luffy he gets ballistic. It was very sweet of him to protect his loved ones even if they weren’t there. Luffy looked furious when he returned his attention to Buggy, it might have scared the blue-haired man for a bit but he kept on going in his act.

"What did you just say?"  

"You know you heard me."

"Even if he isn't using that car Ace could still beat your ass." Luffy slowly walked closer to the truck to get nearer to Buggy. He was itching to punch some senses to the clown’s head.

"I doubt it" Buggy laughed at his own joke but his cheerful moment was stopped when Luffy punched the side of Ace's truck to get his attention. That punch might have made some dents to the truck but Luffy really didn’t mind though a silent Franky was already planning on how to deal with the small damage his captain has done to Ace’s car.

"Let's race Buggy, I'll show you even with all those power-ups you can't beat me or Ace. It's not just about the boosts it's pure skill and Ace has that, you don't." Luffy challenged Buggy and the clown was up to the challenge, this was his revenge plan after all. He wanted to rile up Luffy and beat him in his most serious mode to show the world how weak he was. Buggy knew he wouldn’t beat the boy if he used his own car so he stole Ace’s car to add chances to him winning and to rile up Luffy. It was a win win situation.

"I thought you'd never ask."

The match was set at the road between the strawhat’s hideout and the mountain where Zoro and Luffy raced. The Strawhat crew placed a finish line sign at the end point of the decided meters of the race and Luffy and Buggy's car were already at the starting point. The whole crew knew that this race was different from the 'casual races' Luffy usually does so Franky double checked Luffy's engine and tires if they were in top shape. He was almost done with his 'last minute enhancements' for the car while Buggy was fiddling with the controls of Ace's car when Sabo called the two racers.

"Buggy, Luffy, come here." Luffy and Buggy walked towards Sabo and faced each other not once backing down from the intense eye contact they had. "Shall we make this an official race?"

"Yes." They both answered simultaneously.  

"Then with Me, Marco and Law being neutral we will become the judges of the race. What will you place as your bet?" Sabo nervously looked at Luffy, although he was considered a 'neutral' person at this event because he wasn't in Luffy nor Buggy's crew, he was still Luffy's brother and he knew exactly what Luffy will place as a bet for the race. And he really wasn't sure if that was a good idea.

"Ace's car." Luffy smirked and everyone around him sighed. Sabo facepalmed himself, this was his brother after all. He knew what was in Luffy’s mind at this point.

"It isn't your car but you place it as a bet?" The clown was laughing his ass out. He couldn’t believe the unusual contract he was making with one of the craziest racers in Marie Joise city. "I bet this car too but if I win, I also want your car."

"Sure."  

"WHAT, LUFFY?!" Usopp shouted and you could hear the dismay in his voice. Both he and Frank had done so much work on that car that they’ll trade their own cars for it. "WE WORKED SO HARD FOR THAT CAR?!"

"Like I'm gonna lose." Zoro was impressed with Luffy's confidence in his skills. If the boy showed a bit more of his respectable aspects Zoro might just consider him his captain and pledge his loyalty to him. The fact that Luffy fought someone because they dissed his brother was already commendable. Zoro fully understood what Luffy felt.

"With the contract done, get inside your cars!" The racers had one last look at each other then slowly walked to their cars. They got inside and made themselves comfortable in the driver’s seat when Sabo walked towards the center of the starting line with a flag in his hands.

"Start your engines!" Luffy keyed his car and riled up his engine. He needed to be serious this time, though he was always serious during a race.

"3!" Luffy breathed in trying to calm himself down and to prepare himself for his competition.

"2!"  

"1!" Though the racer themselves weren’t nervous the audience outside felt the excitement.

"GO!" Sabo waved the flag and both the cars passed by so quickly that he felt his hair got messy, which it actually did.

The race started with Buggy and Luffy neither in the lead. They were in equal standing but the quick sprint would end soon and both needed to make their move immediately if they wanted to win. The clown felt his sweat dripping from his forehead to his face, he glanced at the wheel and saw the different buttons that had different commands. He knew that those were his key to winning the race but he didn't know which one he should press.  

Buggy gave a quick glance at his left side and he saw Luffy grinning from ear to ear like he knew he was going to win the race. He bit his lip; he knew he had the best car in this race why was Luffy still catching up to him? A mere lemon can't compare its engines to a powered-up truck! Luffy’s crew did say that they did upgrades to his car but Ace's car also had upgrades that were greater than his and with the most advanced technologies the mechanics could touch.

In his moment of self-doubt, he didn't notice Luffy was going faster than him. He panicked and pressed a random button on the wheel. The car then had four rockets come out of its side and gave him the extra boost he needed. Buggy started laughing and thanked his great luck.

Luffy grinned as Buggy was passing him quickly. He pressed on his clutch and changed his gears to gear third and slammed his right foot to the accelerator to give him a boost to catch up. The strawhat boy was just warming up after all. The boy then flipped a switched on his stick and different gears were added to his arsenal. On the side of the fourth gear came out "Boundman", "Tankman" and "Snakeman".

It was the middle of the race and Buggy was still on the lead but Luffy was at his tail. Luffy once again changed from the third to the fourth gear and he was faster than before. He could distinctly hear Buggy laughing. The pace both racers had was consistent until they were near the finish line. When Buggy saw the finish line he changed his gears and pressed another button that gave him a nitro boost and he aligned his car in front of Luffy so he couldn't speed his way up. Luffy grinned at the challenge.

At the finish line, Chopper was waiting with half of the crew members since the other half was at the starting point but they were in a car behind the racers so they had the full view of the race themselves. They were watching the race from afar and they were feeling nervous about the outcome of the race since they saw Buggy was on the lead.

"Luffy would win, right?" Chopper asked Nami who had a blank expression on her face but her eyes were glued to the two cars.

"He will." She answered. Nami was quiet but she knew her captain would win.

Luffy looked directly at Buggy's car with a smirk on his face, he knew Buggy was looking at him at his rearview mirror. When both of them were just seconds away from the finish line, Luffy moved his stick from the fourth gear to the "Snakeman" below it. It gave his car an immense speed boost and he swerved to the right and quickly passed Buggy. He pulled his handbrake to drift in front of the clown to cross the finish line first. Everything was a blur for a moment and Buggy's jaw just dropped in surprise.

"The winner of the match is Monkey D. Luffy!" Sabo got out from his and announced the winner loud and clear. Everyone cheered and ran to Luffy to congratulate him. As everyone cheered Buggy quietly slipped away. Law saw him and told Luffy.

"The clown is running away Mugiwara-ya." He pointed at Buggy's running form.  

"Buggy! Thanks for the great race! Let's race again someday!" Luffy shouted loud enough for Buggy to hear. It wasn’t the reaction they were expecting, Law thought that Luffy would run after him but he guessed that beating Buggy in a race was enough for Luffy.

As everyone was talking to Luffy, Zoro contemplated for a second, he was impressed by Luffy's way of racing. Luffy had the skills that could beat anyone and the boy was someone Zoro could actually follow and swear to him until he was the king of the roads. He cared for his crew and family too. His crew wasn't all that bad either, they were like family and Chopper and him would enjoy that type of companionship. The green-haired man had finally decided.

He walked towards Luffy and everyone became silent. Zoro held his hand in front of Luffy for a handshake. "Nice race, Captain." Luffy grinned and returned his handshake. It was a simple sentence from Zoro but the whole crew knew that he was officially a member not only because he was forced to but also because he saw how capable Luffy was.

“So, we’ve got a new family?” Chopper stood beside Zoro as they were looking at their new crew in front of them.

“Yes, we do.” Zoro ruffled Chopper’s curly hair.  

This was only the beginning of their new life at Marie Joise City.