#its because he has seen his family be and even been himself in danger/kidnapped multiple times

[purpleandstarlight]

Rereading an early DLTD chapter and getting hit with a nostalgic feeling over how (mostly) easy things were for the characters back then...

[csparkles123]

Kinn as the KIng

Since this show was heavily influenced by chess, I think it is interesting to look at all the characters and see what role they play. Obviously Korn is just the player of this game. The very first scene set up that he was no longer a chess piece playing the game due to his health condition. He also has multiple scenes where he is playing his own game of chess and he is clearly doing this to the people around him as well. Throughout the show, Korn influenced the characters and their moves, but, as the player, he never took action himself. 

Next, is the King who is Kinn. In the official trailer of the series, Kinn is highlighted as the King with his line "Everyone wants me killed."

He is the most protected in the series because he is the most important. As the most important piece, the King is often called "lazy" because everyone around him does the work in order to protect him. He's limited in where he can go and what moves he can make. Now, the show has shown how Kinn is powerful, but it has also shown how limited he is and how little he does in comparison to others, up until the final stages of the game at least. 

Now, I've seen people say the King is the least powerful for the majority of the game and honestly Kinn also fits this. Despite being the most powerful person in the series as the head of the main family, Kinn is rarely the one who’s taking action because it's too dangerous to risk the King in that way. In episode 7, this is shown when Vegas and Kinn's bodyguards are the ones to handle the threat. Also, in episode 10, Kinn only showed up at the last moment for the final blow, but before that he didn't do much on his own. Although he had a plan, it didn't matter in the end because Vegas’ plan kind of fell apart on its own. However, Kinn producing his own plan and showing up to the conflict himself did show that they were entering the final stages of the game since Kings tend to start taking more of an offensive role in the endgame. For the final fight in episode 14, we see this play out. After Kinn loses his bodyguards, he is on offense and he shows how capable he is. To me, Kinn’s story has perfectly aligned with how Kings in chess act and are treated

In episode 1, Porsche had to save him in their first meeting. Then, in episode 2, Porsche had to save him again, although very poorly. In episode 3, the man was looking to kill Kinn and his bodyguards, Porsche, Pete, and Ken, protected him. Episode 6 then showed how as the King, Kinn is limited and can’t act and do what he wants freely because he has an image to maintain. During episode 7, he was the most limited he's been all season due to his injury. Then for episodes 9 and 10, Kinn was the one Tawan and Vegas were trying to get to one way or another. Now, even though Kinn has been limited throughout the series and hasn’t done a whole lot, there are moments where Kinn shows why he is one of the most powerful pieces. Like episode 1 when he threatens the Italians and then in episode 14 with the people who came to have a meeting with him.

As for his opponent, I've seen people say that Vegas is the opposing King, but I don't see that since he doesn’t really align with the characteristics of a King chess piece. He has far more freedom in comparison to Kinn, so he's more hands-on and has been actively involved in all the missions he's planned so far. In episode 4, when he drugged and kidnapped Porsche, he tried to mark him himself, putting himself at risk if anyone were to catch him. Then in episode 7, he saves the mission by coming to casion himself, he tortures the guy for information by himself, then he played a crucial part in the plan against the Italians. In episode 10, he is shown to be the mastermind in the plan against Kinn and he tries to kill Porsche and plant the fake evidence himself, which was a risk to his life when Kim and Big showed up. Also, throughout the series, he goes by himself almost everywhere without any protection. 

While people always try to say Kinn is an awful boss, he does care for the people working for him and he has shown this on multiple occasions. His reaction at seeing Big dead was one of sadness and although he did forget Pete, he later tried to check on him and even went as far as calling his grandma to know his whereabouts. Also, in the final fight when Pol got shot, Kinn made sure to move his body out of the way to protect him from getting shot again. 

Vegas' lack of concern for his own safety in these high risk situations shows that he wouldn't be a good King. He doesn't seem to have a lot of concern for his life, which is a terrible trait for a King in chess to have because if he dies the game is lost. Now, if Vegas had shown this lack of care for himself alongside a care for his people and their safety, it would look better, but from what I’ve seen, Vegas doesn’t seem to truly care about the people working for him. On more than one occasion now, we have seen Vegas pulling his bodyguard to him and using their body as a shield against bullets. Once, in episode 10, when Kim and Big are shooting at him, and in episode 14, we see him do this in the final fight twice. For someone who heavily tried to imply that his bodyguards are his friends and family, he really seems like he could care less about them, which is the difference between him and Kinn. While Vegas forces his bodyguards in front of bullets, Kinn’s bodyguards willingly choose to do so. Hell, Big even jumped in front of bullets to save Porsche because of how much he loved Kinn and wanted him to be happy.

Another difference between Kinn and Vegas when it comes to being the King is how they fight. Despite Kings being protected the entire game, a time may come where they need to take an offensive role and from what has been shown, Kinn is far more capable. We already know that Kinn is an amazing fighter since he was able to beat Porsche, who is one of the best fighters. Also, the way that he was fighting alongside Porsche in episode 14, showed how skilled he truly is. As for Vegas, we have yet to see him in a fair fight. So far, we’ve only seen Vegas interact with people he has drugged, tied up, tricked, or tortured. In episode 4, Porsche couldn’t fight back because he was drugged and tied up. In episode 7, we know that Vegas was working with the Italians, so him being there most likely kept the Italians from being on guard because they trusted him, which he used to trick and kill them. In episode 10, Porsche never got the chance to fight back against him since he was already tied up. Then, for almost the entirety of vegaspete’s storyline, Pete was tied up and tortured, leaving him unable to fight back. Lastly, in the final battle he only gets the upper hand on Kinn and Porsche after he kicks Porsche, who is already fighting multiple other people. There has been a clear theme in this series that Vegas only attacks people after they are not in a position to fairly fight back, which is a terrible quality for a leader or King to have because your opponent won’t always be weak. 

The series following the chess metaphor so heavily made it inevitable that Kinn would come out victorious. From what we’ve been shown in the series, he has no true opponent because the antagonists, Gun and Vegas, are poor excuses for Kings and don’t have all the pieces they need to win, mainly a Queen. By having a Queen at his side, the King is made more powerful. Currently, the only Queen in this story is Porsche, who is firmly on Kinn’s side. In chess, the Queen is often regarded as the most powerful piece and Porsche embodies that. During episode 14, it is clear that Porsche entering the battle is what changed the tide. Vegas was quickly closing in on Kinn, who had lost his bodyguards, but when Porsche came, they were easily able to take down almost all of the minor family’s men. 

If KinnPorsche does get another season, I can see a more suitable opponent rising, most likely Kim, but for right now, Kinn is alone at the top with no one to challenge him and if he continues to have Porsche by his side, he’ll likely stay there.

[morsking]

is shirou a mary sue? the guy is universally well liked, cooks like a pro at 17, has the most op power from all fate (and arguably one of the most cool powers on media), nothing ever happens to him on the true/canon path of each route, he does many stupid things but no one cares 5 minutes later, other times like in salter vs rider he is just a tactical genius out of nowhere

he is not.

shirou is well-liked but he isn't particularly popular. he is known at school for being helpful and handy but otherwise not that many people are aching to get to know him or involve him in their lives. most people only know shirou very superficially. he is not sought after as a person, only as a handy man. there's a really neat scene at the beginning of hf1 where people are talking about shirou in the dojo and see that while he's earnest, hard-working, and talented, he's a bit odd and intense and that makes him a little difficult to approach casually. the only people who really like him are those who sit down and actually spend time with him. apart from the heroines of the story with whom he has time to develop a romantic bond, you don't see other girls falling head over heels for him. in fact, in hollow ataraxia the homurahara trio and mitsuzuri are quick to write him off as someone they are vehemently not interested in romantically whatsoever.

he only cooks like a pro because he had to teach himself to cook since he was 8. it's vital to understand that since kiritsugu became increasingly disabled and was utterly incapable of living as a normal human being, shirou was forced to grow up well before he was ready to take care of his adoptive father. he learned to cook, do the dishes, do the laundry, and clean the house because there were no other real adults in the house. shirou's domestic usefulness didn't come out of nowhere, it's a set of skills he took on out of necessity and came at the expense of his emotional growth.

shirou's power also isn't op. it's stated multiple times in the story how difficult it is for him to tap into it. he's not a natural mage with strong magical circuits, and neither does he have any real "useful" magical alignments that would make it easy for him to use conventional magecraft. every training session shirou has is a life-threatening act where he pushes his body and mind to the utmost limit for the low chance he might succeed at strengthening or projecting something. whenever he grabs hold of an ability that elevates his combat skills, it's either a) done with saber's help in the fate route, b) acquired as his soul inherits experience from his proximity to archer in ubw and receiving mana from rin, or c) obtained at the expense of the integrity of his mind and body as archer's arm starts to supplant his existence in heaven's feel. and even then, there's limits to what he can trace and project. he can't trace divine constructs normally as seen with ea, and his projections eat through his mana. think about what happens in heaven's feel too. every time he projects something with archer's arm he leaps closer to death because he can't handle the strain.

to say nothing ever happens to him in canon is also disingenuous. he doesn't die in a permanent sense, but take a moment to consider the amount of mental and physical pain he suffers that forces him to confront something about himself and change. did "nothing" happen when he faced gilgamesh and heracles with saber? is growing closer to her to find the best way to help her assert her personhood "nothing"? did "nothing" happen when he fought archer? is realizing the truth of your ideals and grasping the resolve to realize them anyway in a healthier and more self-aware manner "nothing"? did "nothing" happen when he fought heracles, saber alter, and kotomine? is saving your loved ones and claiming your life as your own after years of not seeing yourself as a human being to protect those dear to you so they too learn to love and accept themselves "nothing"?

take a moment to consider in what ways shirou is stupid that aren't contradicted by him being smart in others. shirou is socially inept and utterly incapable of asking for help because he is a traumatized teenager who doesn't know what a normal life is. he has few friends. he survived a fire. he is constantly trying to make up for being unable to rescue anyone in the calamity that destroyed his childhood. he constantly jumps in front of danger to save others for that very reason and refuses help because he doesn't want others to get hurt because of him until he learns to overcome that fear of being destroyed and seeing others be destroyed. he is dumb at being a person because he's never let himself be one. he is smart in a fight because he's at least been able to process his stress and trauma in a way that helps him rationalize his way out of a crisis.

i feel the need to stress that a protagonist having special qualities fit for the narrative isn't them being a mary sue. it's them simply being a main character with agency, a main character that is engaging and interesting. how boring do you think shirou and the story would be if he was really a shit-ass mcnobody with no talents, personality, qualities, or meaningful connections to the setting? he'd be no different from every other harem protag the cishet male audience can use as a self-insert. he is supposed to subvert ideas of masculinity by being domestic. he challenges conventional ideas of heroism by showing how his ideals are flawed and how important it is that he self-actualize.

shirou faces consequences for his inaction and inexperience multiple times too. saber gets frustrated because he won't (tell her why he really won't) fight and that causes a rift in their relationship he must fix with honesty and mutual understanding. shirou's inability to protect himself from hypnotic suggestion gets him kidnapped by caster and forces archer to rescue him, and in turn their shared stubbornness elevates their conflict to deadly levels until they're forced to fight to work out their differences. heaven's feel shows you how his unwillingness to forsake who he is to properly scold sakura and save her makes the situation worse when sakura loses faith that shirou will keep his promise to her until he decides he will fulfill it for both their sakes. people do care! saber cares when her master doesn't see eye to eye with her! rin cares that shirou is too willing to throw away his own life for others! archer cares that he is at risk of becoming that which archer can't forgive himself for being! sakura cares because seeing the man she loves come home bruised and bloodied every night is wrong! illya cares because he is her only true family! rider cares because if shirou can't be sakura's ally then she's as good as dead! everyone cares because shirou has to learn to care too, and he does!

i'm going to ask you to try to engage with media without trying to uncover flaws under rigid standards like this because all it does is keep you from properly understanding what is being shown to you. you cannot hope to judge a story and its characters for all their flaws or merits if this is how you approach things.

[seattlesea]

Why Percabeth Isn’t a Good Ship (Sorry 2x)

I’m definitely getting cancelled- 

1. Annabeth is physically abusive. The fandom makes this point seem controversial and debatable, but it’s really not. The definition of abuse is hitting someone. Annabeth hit Percy. Therefore, Annabeth abused Percy. Is that really that hard to understand? Annabeth hit Percy for the first time in The Titan’s Curse when she, Percy, and Thalia were looking for the di Angelo siblings. She punched him in the gut when he asked her who he should ask to dance with him. Annabeth knows that Percy can be oblivious at times...but punishes him when it benefits her? The second time was in The Mark of Athena, when she judo-flipped him because she missed him. That’s...what?? Usually when people are worried about someone else, they hug or kiss them, not flip them over their shoulder. And yes Annabeth kissed him first, but the judo-flip was completely unnecessary. Annabeth punished Percy for ‘leaving’ her despite him being kidnapped and his memory wiped. And everyone’s like ‘But Percy didn’t feel any pain!!11!!1!’ The chapter wasn’t in his point of view, so that claim is a guess. Just cause he didn’t say ‘Ow’ doesn’t mean he wasn’t in pain. Also- Annabeth slammed him on a stone pavement on his back. That definitely hurts, even if Percy is a demigod, physically strong, and has gotten hurt a lot. There’s a difference between ‘playful hitting’ and actually hurting someone. Yes they trained a lot, but this isn’t training. This is Annabeth punishing Percy for being traumatized with yet another life-threatening quest and being kidnapped. I don’t remember Percy judo-flipping Annabeth after he saw her again when she got kidnapped in TTC. Besides, the Romans were about to take out their weapons when they saw Annabeth attack Percy, so if all of them thought it was an attack...it was most likely an attack. Even Annabeth said herself “I only attack my boyfriend like that”. The thing is, if it was Percy who flipped Annabeth over his shoulder and slammed her on her back or punched her in the gut, all the fans immediately would’ve freaked out and cancelled him, calling him a horrible and abusive boyfriend, but because it’s the girl hitting the guy, it’s fine apparently. Nothing wrong with it, right? And then Riordan (and the fandom) had the audacity to romanticize that abuse. Abuse isn’t a sweet, romantic gesture. Stop making it seem like it is. That’s disgusting. 

2. Annabeth is also verbally abusive and toxic. Annabeth canonically lowered Percy’s self-esteem, constantly insulted him and his intelligence despite knowing he was insecure about it and always getting kicked out of schools and getting bad grades (even with her so-called ‘endearing’ name for him ‘Seaweed Brain’), and the overall idea of Percabeth is a super smart, pretty girl making a guy with below average intelligence feel insecure about himself. Percy’s self-esteem has plummeted since he met Annabeth and her behavior is never called out or even noticed, which implies some manipulation going on. Annabeth is shown to be extremely capable of manipulating her enemies and anyone else she pleases, and there are quite a few signs she’s using it against Percy (his feelings of obligation, fear, and guilt of and over her, questioning himself, having strings attached, always only thinking of her and no one else in his life, etc.), especially since Percy begins to gradually stop noticing Annabeth’s wrong and toxic behavior as the story progresses. 

3. Annabeth only likes Percy cause he’s the chosen one. Annabeth only hung around Percy since The Lightning Thief cause she thought he was ‘the one’ and so she could finally go on a quest. She literally used Percy to go out to the mortal world and ‘prove herself’ cause really, all she cares about is glory, which is shown multiple times throughout the series with all her pride and ambitions. Plus the fact that Chiron made Annabeth swear on the River Styx that she would keep Percy from danger is a pretty clear sign she didn’t stick around him just cause she wanted to, but because she felt obligated to and cause it would benefit her. Take all of this and it’s kind of obvious Annabeth only hung around Percy cause he was the chosen one of the prophecy, a son of one of the Big Three, and was destined to go on multiple quests and play a big part in the mythological world, which is what she always wanted since book one.

4. It was forced. Since the beginning of book one, it was so obvious that Percy and Annabeth were going to get together that their relationship ended up being boring, dull, and flat. Riordan made it so obvious they were going to be a couple that nothing that happened to their relationship really mattered, cause everyone knew it would work out in the end (which is probably why everyone *wrongly* hated on Rachel) so what happened in between didn’t matter. Their relationship was the typical ‘male lead and female lead’, ‘bad boy trouble-maker skater and nerdy good girl’ power couple that was way too clear. And Riordan made it worse by pushing their relationship and shoving it into the readers’ faces way too much. In MoA Annabeth states that she’s always had a crush on Percy (since they were twelve) which immediately rips all the development their relationship (which was supposedly ‘friends to lovers’, but not anymore) had away. Riordan made up a bunch of honestly dumb scenarios that were legit cringe to make Percabeth seem like ‘OTP’ that really didn’t make sense.

5. It ruined their characters. Percy and Annabeth would’ve been way better off as just friends. After they got together in HoO, all their personality and everything else that made them independent was destroyed to make room for more ‘Percabeth’. All of Annabeth’s skills, bravery, intelligence, pride, ferocity, judgmentalism, and all the other traits and flaws that made her a well-written character were never utilized or even mentioned. All she thought about was Percy, and the same goes for him. His loyalty, sarcasm, humor, obliviousness, etc. disappeared to make room for arrogant Annabeth fanboy. In PJO, they were amazingly well-written and great role models for younger readers (especially Annabeth), but in HoO their characters were exclusively ‘Annabeth’s boyfriend’ and ‘Percy’s girlfriend’. Their characters were completely dependent on each other, and they were way better off as just friends. 

6. Annabeth is way too possessive. And creepy. It’s fine and honestly normal for people to get jealous when another person likes someone they do, but Annabeth’s jealousy was downright creepy. Not only did she not know if her feelings for Percy were reciprocated or not, but she also didn’t know if Percy and Rachel liked each other, either. The very first time she met Rachel she immediately hated her. That’s not ‘I’m jealous cause this girl likes the guy I do’, that’s ‘I’m jealous cause the guy I like has another female friend’. She had no reason to believe that Rachel and Percy liked each other and has no say in who they can like, either. She thought that she and Percy absolutely had to be in a relationship and that he couldn’t even have friends with different genitals than him. And remember when Annabeth literally stalked Percy in The Sea of Monsters? Like when she creeped by his window, constantly watched him, and kept tabs on him just cause she ‘couldn’t find the right time’ to tell him something cause he was ‘never alone’ despite him being alone multiple times and despite the fact that she literally could’ve just knocked on his door like a normal person instead of creeping around his cabin and staring at him through the windows? Again- switch the roles. If it was Percy who was stalking Annabeth, everyone would’ve immediately called him a creep. If- according to Tumblr and almost everyone who read Twilight- Edward is a creep for stalking Bella, then Annabeth is a creep for stalking Percy. 

7. It’s mostly fan love. Honestly, the fandom is the only thing that fuels Percabeth. Riordan just destroys it. He shoved it down the readers’ throats, forced it way too much with really dumb and honestly unrealistic scenarios, and made it abusive and toxic. On its own, Percabeth freaking sucks. The fandom’s version of Percabeth is 1000x better than whatever the hell Riordan was doing, but even that version is toxic. Like, I’ve seen way too many jokes about Annabeth hitting Percy (as if abuse is hilarious and amazing meme fuel and not an extremely sensitive topic that triggers multiple people who actually went through it). Half the time, the fandom fixes Percabeth and the other half of the time they over-glorify and ruin it. The fandom over exaggerates and over glorifies it way too much. It’s not that great of a relationship, to be honest. Most of y’all only like it in the first place cause Riordan made it canon.

8. It was cringey. Like I said above, Riordan wrote some really dumb scenes for Percabeth. I mean- the matching gray streaks in their hair despite Atlas and Artemis not getting any? Percy’s tie to the mortal world while bathing in the River Styx being Annabeth and not his mom, Grover, etc.? Percy only remembering Annabeth, the girl he’s only known for four years and not his mom, the only woman who actually cared for and took care of him or Grover, his best friend who protected and continuously cared about him? Percy turning down immortality only for Annabeth and not even bothering to mention the pain of leaving behind his life, friends, family, memories, etc. behind if he accepted it? The romanticized judo-flip? The whole ‘dark-haired rebellious bad boy/nerdy blonde good girl who can be bad’ trope? Even the boring predictability of Percabeth is cringe. 

9. It’s a bad influence on younger readers. Basically the lesson of Percabeth is ‘Once you get a love interest nothing else in your life matters’. Besides that one single scene that took like three lines in The Son of Neptune, Percy never even thought of his own mom, nor did he think about any of his friends or passed allies like his dad, Rachel, Grover, Paul, Silena, Luke, Ethan, Bob/Iapetus, Tyson, Calypso, Charles, Michael (whose death he accidentally caused), Bianca, Zoë, etc. Even when in Tartarus with the curse of the Arai being forced to remember all the people he forgot and feeling guilty about abandoning Bob and Calypso, all he thought about was Annabeth. Even when faced with the man who broke the heart of the girl who sacrificed herself for him, Percy didn’t even think of her, only his jealousy of Jason. Same thing with Annabeth. She never thought about her mom, Luke, Thalia, her step-mom or step-brothers, etc. It was all about Percy. Cause yes, Riordan, that’s exactly the lesson you should teach your younger readers- forget everyone you ever knew the moment you get a partner. Besides that, it also teaches readers that being rude to people who like the same person as you is completely okay cause no one will care and once you start being rude, bitter, and possessive you’ll get exactly what you want (that’s literally what happened, with Annabeth and with Calypso, too). He also teaches that after you get a partner, everything that makes you you will disappear and you’ll be completely dependent on them and nothing in your life will matter, even your own independent life and personality. 

10. The fandom tries to excuse and explain Annabeth’s behavior??? What??? Since when does explaining and excusing hitting people put you in the right again? And the excuses aren’t even good, too! Percabeth fans use-  Annabeth was full of emotions/mad and doesn’t know how to deal with emotions. Annabeth really loved Percy. It was only one time. Annabeth was worried about Percy and mad that she left him. Annabeth didn’t mean to hurt him. Annabeth didn’t know what she was doing cause she was full of emotions. ??? Annabeth was full of emotions/mad and doesn’t know how to deal with emotions- Annabeth was seventeen years old, the daughter of the wisdom goddess, and is supposedly the smartest character in the series who is shown to be extremely good at reading people and their emotions. And y’all are really trying to say she doesn’t know how to deal with her emotions?  Annabeth really loved Percy- SO? A mother might really love her child, does that excuse her for hitting them for dumb reasons? It was only one time- actually, it was twice, and so what? If someone was slapped across the face ‘only one time’, does that mean they weren’t abused? ‘Abuse’ doesn’t mean ‘hit constantly’, it means ‘hit’. If someone was hit, they were abused. Is that really not a known fact in this fandom? Annabeth was worried about Percy and mad that she left him- last time I checked, people didn’t hit others when they were worried about them. If I was worried that my friend was going to get hurt, I wouldn’t hurt them myself. That literally makes no sense. And again- Percy didn’t leave Annabeth. He was kidnapped. Do y’all not know the definition of that, either? Annabeth didn’t mean to hurt him- yes, cause that’s why she decided to flip him over her shoulder, slam him on a stone pavement on his back, and punish him for ‘leaving her’.  Annabeth didn’t know what she was doing cause she was full of emotions- Annabeth??? the daughter of the wisdom goddess??? not knowing what she’s doing??? huh??? I mean, would any of you really, legitimately try to use any of these dumb excuses to excuse a man from hitting his wife? Hopefully not. And if you did, you would immediately get hated on and legit cancelled. So what makes this any different? Also- I see the excuse ‘Annabeth didn’t know Percy lost his Achilles Heel and thought he was still invincible’. Under different circumstances I’d accept that, but Annabeth knew that Percy’s Achilles Heel was on the small of his back...BUT SHE SLAMMED HIM ON HIS BACK. If Percy hadn’t lost the Achilles Heel, Annabeth literally would’ve killed him. Abusive enough for y’all? Or is attempted murder excusable and still ‘OTP’? 

11. They had no chemistry whatsoever. Was I the only one who felt...absolutely no chemistry between Percy and Annabeth? Like some of their moments were cute, their friendship was really good, and they had a lot of potential, but they didn’t feel right for each other. Remember- opposites don’t attract (they just argue, and no one has ‘another half’ that needs to ‘complete them’, everyone is their own person), they cancel each other out. I mean, Reyna and Annabeth had more chemistry in that one chapter of the New Rome tour in MoA than Percy and Annabeth had in 12+ books. They’re just...not right for each other, I guess. 

I’m definitely getting cancelled-

Edit 2: Sorry if I offended anyone with that last note. Just wanted to let y’all know that I am not here to start any drama, hurt anyone, or disrespect any Percabeth shippers. I respect your opinions 100% and only ask you do the same for me. Like I literally only wrote this at 12 am when I was bored and had nothing else to do and couldn’t sleep (same goes for pretty much everything else I write about PJ). Besides, why argue and start drama over dumb stuff like that when we can just find something we agree on? Don’t like Piper McLean? Let’s talk about that. Think Reyna Avila Ramirez-Arellano is a queen? Let’s talk about that. Think Nico di Angelo is freaking amazing? Let’s talk about that. Think Theyna would be adorable? Let’s talk about that. Want someone to vent to about writer’s block? Why the hell not? Want random writing advice and tips for writer’s block? Sure, I got plenty. Instead of arguing and starting beef over trivial fictional ships. 

[gthreepio]

i’ve been thinking about the future of the mcu and realized there’s a LOT that i didn’t know/didn’t remember in terms of where things are going so i figured i’d sum it up incase anyone else was in the same boat!! 

quick recap of (unresolved) mid-credit scenes:

doctor strange: mordo (a sorcerer that is one of strange’s mentors, who by the end of the movie becomes disillusioned with magic/the ancient one and quits) confronts pangborn (the paraplegic who healed himself with the mystic arts, who tells strange about mystic arts in the first place) and steals his magic because according to mordo, there are “too many sorcerers." of note, this guy is typically a villain in the comics but hasn’t been thus far...

gotg2: ayesha (leader of the sovereign, a golden skinned alien race obsessed with genetic purity), after spending most of the movie chasing the guardians for stealing some stuff, is revealed to have created an artificial being named “adam” which is presumably, adam warlock. (other stuff that is less relevant: kraglin appears to take up yondu’s mantle; the ravagers regroup and several old and obscure comic book characters are introduced [charlie-27, aleta, martinex, mainframe]; the watchers are watching things.) 

far from home: j jonah jameson basically tells the whole world spider-man’s secret identity, and frames him for what happened with mysterio....making him public enemy #1. ALSO, turns out nick fury and maria hill in the movie were ACTUALLY the two skrulls from captain marvel (talos and soren) attempting to do their job, while the real fury (and presumably hill) is ... up in space on some spaceship!!!

wandavision: monica (who we can assume is photon) is called by “an old friend of [her] mother’s,” up in space, which presumably means fury, talos, or carol. ALSO, wanda sits in the middle of nowhere reading the darkhold and hears the voices of her children who.. by all accounts, should not exist. 

aaaaand what we know about future movies (i’m not even going into the tv series.....): 

black widow: 

takes place after civil war

nat confronts a “dangerous conspiracy with ties to her past,” likely has to do with taskmaster who has apparently taken over the red room where nat was trained as an assassin

prominent new characters: yelena belova, who will take over the mantle of black widow after this; alexei shostakov aka red guardian, an ollllld marvel hero analogous to captain america except for the soviet union.

tony stark will make an appearance... SOBS

shang-chi and the legend of the ten rings:

shang-chi has never been seen in the mcu before, but he is, essentially, a superhero that is a master martial artist, and in some adaptations can also create duplicate (fake) versions of himself to confuse opponents

main villain will be the the mandarin who we have *sort of* seen before... he is the leader of a terrorist organization called “ten rings” whose main goal is to destroy world peace. brief history -- in iron man 1: one ten rings cell kidnaps tony stark and tries to force him to make weapons (he of course, makes his suit instead). stark and ten rings become enemies and fight a bunch. nat and nick fury fight them too. in iron man 3, the villain aldrich killian hires a dude to pretend to be the mandarin and claim responsibility for a bunch of stuff, but its not the ten rings or the mandarin at all. this makes the mandarin v mad and he has a dude kidnap the faker to punish him. they also briefly show up in ant-man, when a ten rings agent tries to buy the yellowjacket suit that darren cross is selling. BUT IN SHANG-CHI....... looks like we are FINALLY going to see the real mandarin after over a decade!! 

the villain razor fist will also show up, he is lesser known... he has no superhuman powers but he has surgically replaced his hands (1 or 2, depending on the version) with a steel blade, and is highly skilled at hand to hand combat.

besides the presence of these characters, the only bit of plot we know is “shang-chi is drawn into the ten rings organization and forced to confront his past.” so... yeah. we don’t know much at all.

eternals: 

quick explanation: the eternals are an immortal alien race who have been secretly living on earth for thousands of years. they were created by the celestials, who are most prominently in gotg2. 

more entirely new characters!!! their names are: thena, who can form any weapon out of cosmic energy; gilgamesh, who can make a super strong exoskeleton out of cosmic energy; ikaris, who has superhuman strength, flies, and can project cosmic energy out his eyes; kingo, who can shoot cosmic energy projectiles from his hands; makkari, who creates sonic booms, has super speed, and is deaf; phastos, who has enhanced intelligence, and is also gay (and married with a kid!); ajak, who has healing powers; sprite, who can project illusions; sersi, who can manipulate matter; druig, who can mind control; and dane whitman (black knight), a human with a mystical sword. 

regarding the plot... it seems the eternals have kind of dispersed, but have to come together again to fight the deviants, who are their “evil counterparts” (also created by the celestials, though i’m unclear on why). thena and gilgamesh have apparently been in exile, unclear why; sersi, who is posing as a museum curator, has apparently been in love with ikaris for centuries and it seems as if their love story may be central to the film; and kingo is a bollywood film star in his spare time. aaaaand that’s pretty much all we know.

directed by chloé zhao of nomadland fame! 

spider-man no way home: 

based on the post-credits scene in far from home, peter parker will now be known as spider-man to everyone. unclear if he’s going to be seen as a bad guy due to mysterio framing him, but i guess we’ll see! 

jamie foxx is electro, and alfred molina is doctor octopus; which is VERY interesting considering they played these roles in other spider-man franchises, once again stirring up excitement for possible multiverse. 

there have been *multiple* reports that andrew garfield, kirsten dunst, tobey maguire, and emma stone will be in the movie but tom holland has repeatedly denied this... so... who knows. 

there are also rumors that matt murdock / daredevil (from netflix) will be in several scenes! not confirmed though. 

MJ is still his girlfriend and i hope it stays that way!! 

doctor strange will be featured in the movie, taking on the mentor role now that tony stark is gone :( this will be interesting as i.. haven’t really seen them interact much before. because of this inclusion some people speculate that the film may draw inspo from some comic storylines where peter’s secret identity is restored with magic. 

doctor strange in the multiverse of madness: 

scarlet witch is essentially co-starring!!! it’s going to be really interesting to see if they bring vision or the twins into this at all, though i’m not counting on it. 

seems like mordo will be the main villain -- recall the ds1 post credits scene where he is apparently running around trying to steal people’s magic.

america chavez will make her debut!!!!!! i have no idea how this plays into anything but i am so excited!! 

regarding the plot, all we really know is that strange has been researching the time stone, mordo messes with him, and this results in him accidentally unleashing “unspeakable evil.” presumably there will also be heavy involvement of the multiverse, and who knows what kind of craziness that will bring!! 

initially was going to be directed by scott derrickson who did ds1; however he stepped down to being just EP due to “creative differences.” i am presuming this is because derrickson really wanted to make this more gothic and horror than disney was comfortable with. i REALLY hope they keep some of those elements though and don’t erase the idea entirely! anyway, it will be directed by sam raimi now (of evil dead and spiderman 2002 fame). 

the film also reportedly ties in with the loki series (will loki show up!?) and spiderman 3 (which is obvious enough, given that strange is in that movie and those curious electro and doctor octopus castings...)

thor: love and thunder

directed by taika waititi again, hell yeah!!! and he has stated, the film will be “so over the top now in the very best way" and would make ragnarok look like a "run of the mill, very safe film" .... so.... oh god

so many great returning players!!! including.... valkyrie (now the king of new asgard), jane foster, lady sif, korg, star-lord, mantis, drax, nebula, and kraglin (takes up yondu’s mantle after he dies in gotg2)

in this movie, thor isn’t thor anymore.... it’s JANE!!! she gets cancer :( and is undergoing treatment while simultaneously being thor. i’m a little nervous how this will be handled, but i’m excited. (it’s based off an amazing comic series by jason aaron) 

the big bad: gorr the god butcher, played by christian bale! the gist of it is, this dude HATES gods because nobody helped when his family was dying and in need. his weapon is “all-black the necrosword,” forged from the head of a celestial, and allows the user to create wings and fly at extreme speeds. honestly, he sounds cool as fuck. 

valkyrie is going to be made canonically bisexual!!! 

it will explore more of korg’s backstory, and also include... space sharks!?!?! an alien race from the comics.

taika has called the script “very romantic” so take that as you will 

black panther 2

will again be directed by ryan coogler

not much is known at this point, does not have an official name

t’challa will NOT be recast (which i’m happy about) so..... honestly no idea what to expect for this one. i think we can probably expect shuri to have an expanded role. all we know so far is they will be “exploring the world of wakanda.” not clear to me how this is different from the upcoming wakanda D+ series. 

tenoch huerta has reportedly been cast as a villain, but no one has any idea who. there’s also rumors that donald glover is in “informal talks” to play a role. note all of this is unconfirmed.

captain marvel 2

will be directed by nia da costa (candyman!) and written by megan mcdonnell, who is one of wandavision’s best writers! 

will take place in the present day 

will feature kamala khan / ms. marvel, monica rambeau / photon!!! this will be so interesting.... kamala is a huge fan of carol’s in the comics, she is her mentor/idol. the ms. marvel series will also resportedly lead into cm2. and monica, well, monica knew her when she was a little kid. wandavision implies that there’s some bad blood between carol and monica though, not sure why. maybe because carol left and never came back? (until endgame) 

post-credits scene of wandavision appears to tie into this, having monica go up into space at the reqeust of her “mom’s old friend.” again, not clear who that is. this could also be a tie in to secret invasion though, so we’ll see. or both.

zawe ashton has been cast as an unknown villain... a lot of people are actually speculating that she may play rogue? which would be fascinating, as there’s a comic arc where rogue steals her powers and memories. BUT there’s still no confirmation that X-men exist in the MCU so for now i remain skeptical.

they are looking to cast a ‘john boyega’ or ‘michael b jordan’ type which makes me wonder if they are going to create a new character, a “younger” war machine to be her love interest? (note: carol and rhodey are a huge thing in comics!) carol obviously does not look her age but her and don cheadle.... that just doesn’t work. which is why i wonder.

ant-man and the wasp: quantumania 

in addition to scott and hope, pretty much all the major players are returning including: luis, hank pym, janet van dyne

cassie lang has been recast with an actress 5 years older, which is really making me wonder if they are going to make her stinger in this movie! (aka one of the main young avengers)

the villain: kang the conqueror! this dude time travels. original name nate richards. in the comics, kang travels back in time to rescue his younger self (nate) from an attack that would help shape him towards a life of villainy. kang also gives him some fancy armor. his younger self actually is like, what the fuck dude? and renounces his destiny, becoming a hero. and he makes his armor look like iron man, calling himself iron lad. who is a young avenger. which also makes me wonder about cassie lang.

otherwise not much is known! 

guardians of the galaxy vol. 3

james gunn is returning, i’m mixed about this...he really does *get* the guardians though. 

based on the gotg2 post credits scene, i think we can assume adam warlock will be a HUGE part of this. there are multiple versions of him, some villainous and some heroic, but no idea how this is gonna turn out.

no word yet on whether thor will be involved, or if those ravagers they introduced will be involved. 

fantastic four 

will be directed by the spiderman guy, john watts.

otherwise we know literally nothing.

aaaaand that’s the roundup! 

[bonkers-4-hatter]

Coils of Love

This is part of a yandere commission from a lovely dear! Please read at your own risk, some of this could be triggering to some. Read the warnings below before moving on. Thank you! Also, as always, all characters are 18+

Fandom: Free! Iwatobi Swim Club

Pairing: !Yandere !Naga Rin Matsuoka X Reader

Word Count: 1,436

Warnings: Kidnapping, Yandere themes, physical assault, mentions of sexual thoughts/talk

Humans were vile, they needed to be eliminated.

That’s what Rin has stuck to for many years, every time a human came into his woods, he killed them no questions asked. He felt no sympathy for those he killed, they caused nothing but destruction and misery.

Glancing down at the scars running up and down his exposed arms, he grimaced at the memory of the humans that hurt him years ago; slashing at him with knives and even trying to shoot him before he could even utter a word to those damn trespassers.

No matter, he killed them like the rest and from that day, no human has been able to leave his woods alive...except you. You were different.

You moved into one of the few cabins littered around the woods, turns out it was a cabin that has been passed down in your family. It was a bit run down, but you’ve been out there doing work on the small cabin.

Rin’s watched you for hours on end, so far it’s been eight months since you moved into the cabin and he knew your routine by heart. You kept to yourself, read a lot, gardened and just minded your own business. The few times he heard you talk, it was beautiful, like a Siren singing their song. Every time he went to go and kill you, he just couldn’t. Each time he’d loom above your bed, his golden eyes racking down your body; memorizing the curves and dips of your body, slivers of skin on display for his pleasure as you slept soundly in what you thought was the safety of your house and bed.

No, he didn’t want to kill you, he wanted to keep you. You’d be his own little human pet. He already knew your routine, so capturing you wouldn’t be an issue and after watching you for months, he knew what he would have to grab to take so you would feel a little better - hopefully. After getting his cave ready for you, he was ready to take what was rightfully his. Slithering up the stairs, a few creaks emitted from the weight he put on the old wood, but you were a heavy sleeper so he paid no mind to the haunting sounds of the cabin as he made his way in.

Setting off, he moved around your place grabbing some of your things and placing them in a sack carefully and after that was done, all that was left was you - the most important thing. Entering your bedroom, he smiled as his eyes lingered on your sleeping form. Clad in nothing but a tank top and shorts since it was Summer, he had to restrain himself from ravishing you on the bed right here and now, but he didn’t want to wake you up.

There was plenty of time to pleasure you once you both were back home. Quickly grabbing some clothes from your drawers, Rin put them in the sack with your other things and turned around to find your bed empty. Red eyes widened at your empty bed before a shrill yell echoed through the silent house and something rushed him, hard metal hitting his chest multiple times. Rin knew you were feisty, but this was unexpected. With a wicked grin, he turned around, his Red eyes easily adjusting to the darkness as your shaking figure stood there, metal rod in your hands and a determined look on your face. “Get the hell out!” He could hear you gulp as you gripped the metal rod, reeling it back and swinging it forward intending to hit him again. Smirking down at you, Rin easily grabbed the metal rod and ripped it from your hands.

It was actually adorable, thinking you could hurt him that easily, but he did give you props for trying. The bewildered look on your face was wonderful to see, the fear in your eyes was the icing on the cake, you knew you were in danger and there was nothing you could do about it. “Nicccce try (Y/N), but we both know I have the upper hand.” Chucking the metal rod to the side, he noticed how you tried to be a bit sneaky by slowly inching back toward your only exit - your bedroom door, but Rin was superior with his enhanced seeing and hearing.

Before you could even make it three steps, Rin slithered quickly over blocking the door, and as a split second decision just to instill a bit more fear into you he wrapped some of his tail around your ankle and brought you crashing down onto the floor.

Seeing you thrashing around so helplessly as you were awakened something in Rin. Of course, he wished you were thrashing around for another reason, but that can be for later. A smirk made its way to Rin’s face as you tried to kick his tail off and undo it from around your ankle.

With his smirk still plastered on his face, he tugged at your trapped ankle to make you inch closer to him.

“Sssstop ssstruggling, we both know you’re not going to get away.” For a brief moment, you stopped struggling and looked up at him, your eyes trying to search in the darkness for something. Without taking his eyes off your still shaking form, he flipped on the light to your bedroom.

Your eyes squinted as the assault of light, but thankfully you could see properly and hopefully find another escape route. Surely your eyes were playing tricks on you���In front of you, was a snake...a man....a mixture of both, something that you’ve never seen before.

“Why?” That was the only thing that slipped from your mouth as you continued to stare at the thing standing in the middle of your room with its tail wrapped around your captured ankle. It didn’t answer you verbally and just tugged you closer to his towering form. Your arms flailed about hoping to grab something that you could use to defend yourself with, but alas, nothing was within your reach.

You were suddenly pulled from the floor, warm hands grasping your flesh as you were promptly thrown on the bed. You felt the weight of his tail pin you down onto your bed, you could feel the roughness of the scales rub against your exposed skin.

Towering above you as he continued to pin you where you were not even ten minutes ago, he just smiled down at you, showing off his sharp teeth to you. Honestly, you weren’t sure if it was a type of power move on his part or not, but, either way you knew you were not going to get away from this....man easily. He cupped your face with one of his free hands and stroked the skin, his hands were cauloused and even the pads of his fingers had some variance of a scale to them, the mere stroke of your cheek from his fingers brought a chill down your spine.

“Why am I taking you,” He only laughed and licked his lips, his eyes skimming over your pinned form as if you were his prey. “That’sss easssy (Y/N), because you’re mine, my darling, lover… play thing, whatever I ssssee you fit for.”

With his verbal claim on you, he sealed the deal by capturing your lips with his, of course, you tried to struggle, but once he wrapped a hand around your throat and squeezed the sides you decided to stop.

With his hands still in the same place, he rose up once more, this time a more menacing look was present on his face. “If I sssqueezed hard enough,” His hands tightened around your delicate neck emphasizing his point as it became more difficult to breath. “I could easssily ssssnap that pretty neck in half...that’sss ssssomething you ssssshould remember before doing anything brasssh.”

With a smirk, Rin added just a bit more pressure, making you grasp his hand , nails digging into his rough skin; as sign, a silent plea for him to stop. Sharp red eyes made contact with your terrified ones, tears were appearing at the corners of your eyes, he knew you understood his point crystal clear. Releasing your throat, you greedily took big gulps of air.

Your hands flew up to feel your neck, it was sore and tender of course and a few places hurt and you knew you were going to have some bruising show up. This...man was crazy enough to carry out his threat, you knew that for a fact. You didn’t see a way out of this mess.

You could feel his hand run up and down your waist, nails scratching the supple flesh; a gentle reminder that he could instantly kill you if he wanted...a reminder that you were his and there was not a damn thing you could do about it.

“Now,” Your eyes snapped up to meet his own piercing Red ones. “My name’sss Rin, you’ll get to know me better sssoon my dear, and don’t worry, I know everything about you, after watching you for a few monthsss, I’ve come to know every sssssingle detail about you...even the intimate onesss.”

A chill ran up your spine at his words as you tried not to make a disgusted face at the realization this man has been watching your every move for the past few months. All the times you thought you were alone...was a false facade.

Before you could say anything, Rin hoisted you up and over his shoulder, your eyes were met with even more scales red and black shimmered back at you. If you weren’t in this dire situation with this maniac of a man, you would even say that his scales were beautiful, but you knew any form of a compliment would only fuel his insane desires.

“Now, let’sss get home...dear.” With those words, Rin slithered out of the room, his beloved in his grasp and you trying to come up with a plan to escape this new life...but, deep down you knew there was no way out of this snake’s coil. 

[thevoidable]

Why did Dabi let Hawks into the League? (major manga spoilers ahead)

This is a question that’s been plaguing my head ever since Dabi proudly announced to Hawks that he’d known all along that he was lying.

If that was the case, what was the point of bringing him in? Surely Dabi must have seen this coming by enabling Hawks to continue his infiltration? What exactly was Dabi’s end-goal here???

It’s unclear whether or not if this will get explained eventually, but after giving it a lot of thought, I think I have a pretty good answer to the question regardless. Essay under the cut.

What is Dabi fighting for?

First, we have to address Dabi’s motivations. They run deeper than just making Stain’s will a reality - he’s taking steps that Stain never even considered to make, because even he was blinded by something that Dabi despises more than anything: hero idolization. Stain saw All Might as a true hero, someone worthy of the title, but in Dabi’s eyes, All Might is one of the biggest contributing factors to why there is such a huge problem with the hero system, and aside from All Might allowing other heroes to become complacent, it’s all because of Endeavour.

Hawks and Dabi are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the new no. 1; Hawks grew up seeing Endeavour’s ambition to surpass All Might as impressive and heroic, mostly due to the fact that Hawks himself lacks the drive to become so great, because all he wants is to live life comfortably. But for Dabi, Endeavour’s need to surpass All Might was nothing but a blinded greed for power, the need to be the best of the best for his own selfish desires rather than to actually save people. It was a path that led him to horrifically abuse his own family in order to achieve it, because he saw Quirk breeding as the only way to fix his own flaws. As such, Dabi, AKA Toya, suffered greatly at the hands of it. He knows firsthand just how much the hero system is unjust, allowing for people with unhealthy mindsets like Endeavour to gain positions of power. He knows that people admire Endeavour for his heroism, but are unaware of the monster that lurks behind closed doors, even when his temper comes out during public patrols. This is a man who is the very definition of a false hero, a man who let his eldest son die and traumatized his entire family.

Dabi goes on to claim in chapter 267 that there are no true heroes - this, however, does not mean that true heroes cannot exist. All he means is that there are simply no heroes currently present and he plans to change that, because in the system that society has right now, it’s near-impossible. Hero idolization forces heroes to become perfect images that people can admire, and it also enforces the mindset that only the greatest heroes can come from schools like UA and Shiketsu. This results in a flood of people longing to become heroes for reasons other than saving people. Uraraka, for example, while she is gentle and kind-hearted, is still only becoming a hero so she can support her family. It’s a well-paying job, and that kind of promise will most certainly lure anyone in who is desperate enough. Yes, she has good intentions in mind, and she does want to save people, but saving people is not her ultimate goal. So, by Dabi’s definition, she is not a true hero.

Becoming a hero should also not be as easy as it is, and becoming a hero certainly should not start at such a young age. UA and the other hero schools are putting teenagers between the ages of 15 - 19 at severe risk, and we’ve seen worst-case scenario results of this twice over the course of the series, and it’s terrifying to think that there are most likely more that we haven’t heard of.

First you have Shirakumo who died before he had even graduated, an incident that led him to becoming a nomu working for the League, who would then go on to cause the second result.

By placing children in such a dangerous training course, it automatically places targets on their backs for villains before they even get their licenses. The League proved just how incapable the staff are at protecting their students by not only successfully attacking a location within the school, but also kidnapping one of said students later on, even after UA’s attempt at keeping the location of the training camp hidden and Dabi himself had revealed their basic plan to Aizawa.

This is all fuel for Dabi’s fire in his journey to rip hero society apart at the seams, and while he is absolutely planning to kill every false hero he comes across, he also has a secondary plan in mind, and that is for the students.

In One’s Justice 2, Dabi has this particular voice line to Hawks: “We’re working for the glorious future where those UA kids are hollowed, and brought down to earth. We’ll have to see what you’re working for.”

Dabi knows that while they are all still young, there is still time to prevent them from falling into every hero’s brainwashed mindset: villains bad, heroes good, no matter what either of them do. 

Something extremely important that the MVA and the current war arcs do is flip the black and white narratives on their heads, showing us just how human and empathetic the villains can be, while the heroes are doing nothing but making unheroic choices and opting for making the violent move first. We’ve seen all of the heroes do nothing but dehumanize Shigaraki, calling him “it” and “thing” like he’s just some monster that they have to kill. We’ve had to watch Hawks murder Twice in the name of “justice” simply because Twice refused to come quietly and be forced back into a life he felt miserable in. Even X-less chose to focus on the machinery next to him rather than getting a near-dead Shigaraki medical attention, and we all know how karma decided to treat that.

And this is where I would like to bring your attention to Tokoyami.

We’ve seen multiple times before how Dabi seems to have no interest in actually harming the students - initially, anyway. He leaves Aoyama alone even though he saw him; he taunts Shoto but doesn’t attack him to get him away; and lastly, Tokoyami first showing up to rescue Hawks actually calms Dabi down. Dabi shows no intent of hurting them because they’re still just kids, not heroes.

Calling back to how the heroes are currently being depicted as the ones making all the disturbing decisions, Dabi doesn’t hesitate to be the first to call out their decision to bring the students into what is essentially a covert-ops assassination mission that has turned into an all-out war. He first recognises that the boy in front of him is just that: a boy, and instead of attacking, Dabi gives Tokoyami a chance.

But what chance, exactly? To escape? Absolutely not.

The first thing Dabi does is make Tokoyami aware of the crime his so-called mentor just committed, and carefully wording it so that the stakes were made clear.

Twice was trying to run away to protect his friends.

But Hawks still killed him.

Dabi is giving Tokoyami a chance to recognise that the hero system he admires hides many skeletons in its closet, and is something that is severely corrupt. He’s giving Tokoyami a chance to rethink his working relationship with Hawks and everything Hawks has taught him.

But Tokoyami doesn’t take it.

As soon as Hawks speaks up again, Tokoyami returns to being obedient, ignoring everything Dabi just said and focusing only on the task at hand regardless of the moral dilemma presented before him, and that’s when Dabi’s intention for Tokoyami changes, because as Dabi put it, “You’ve stopped thinking for yourself.”

And indeed, Tokoyami has. Tokoyami is now cemented in the brainwashed mindset, blindly putting his faith in that Hawks’s decision to kill Twice was right, simply because Twice is the villain and Hawks is the hero, and Dabi realises this.

Tokoyami is now a false hero, and thus on Dabi’s kill list.

So, we have established that Dabi fully intends to wipe-out existing false heroes, while simultaneously trying to save those who have the chance to recover/escape from the brainwashing before it’s too late.

“Keigo Takami!!”

It’s no secret that Dabi clearly knows exactly what kind of situation Hawks is in. The fact that he knows Hawks’s real name alone tells Hawks that Dabi knows far more than he is comfortable with. So, seeing as Dabi was able to see through Hawks’s lies so easily, let’s assume that Dabi knows most, if not all, of what we the readers know about Hawks and how the HPSC groomed him.

Considering that Dabi came from the no. 1 hero’s household, there’s a high chance that he knows quite a bit about the HPSC and just how shady they actually are, especially if the theories are true that they had a hand in covering up his own death. Dabi is well-aware then that the HPSC is responsible for the hero system being so broken, and the reason they do nothing to fix it is so they can stay in power. They are not afraid to make questionable decisions which they know is only making the villain situation worse, because villains are what’s keeping them in business. And what’s sad about this is that even when the decisions they present are clearly morally wrong, the heroes are in no position to argue, because the HPSC is in complete control of their jobs. The HPSC governs the hero system, so whatever they do must be just, right?

Well, Dabi definitely knows the answer to that.

The HPSC deliberately manipulated the heroes to believe that the UA students were needed on the front lines for this mission, and so far, we’ve seen that they really weren’t, actually. The evac team remains the best place for the students to be, because while the pros with all the combat experience can focus on the villains, the heroes-in-training can focus on the smaller task of getting people to safety. Sure, Kaminari, Tokoyami, and the other front-liners helped, but the pros absolutely overwhelmed the PLF on their own. All the front-liners did was just kind of...pave the way, make things easier, and then they were sent back to rejoin their classmates. And the heroes didn’t question the decision at all.

What’s even more disturbing is that the students weren’t even aware of what they were getting into, and most of the pros weren’t aware that the students weren’t aware.

But, as mentioned before, Dabi doesn’t hesitate to call this out.

It’s highly likely that he’s able to connect that the HPSC were the ones who organised this attack and sent the kids out onto the battlefield, which also means that he’s unfortunately no stranger to the HPSC reducing talented children to nothing but weapons, a concept he is also personally familiar with.

Toya was bred with the intent of creating a Quirk superior to Endeavour’s, and then put under extremely harmful training that abused both his mind and his body. We already know that Dabi is heavily against valuing a person’s Quirk over their individual worth, thanks to his fight with Geten.

And in the world of heroics, this unhealthy mindset is unfortunately in abundance, especially in Hawks’s case.

What makes Hawks an especially tragic character is that he started out with the same longing to be a great hero that every child has. He wanted to be a comforting sight to those in need, and his innocent mind thought that the HPSC would help him make that reality.

Instead, the HPSC presented him with a life-changing decision that a child his age has absolutely zero mental capacity to consent to, and it’s heartbreaking that Hawks’s grooming began right from the second they met. The HPSC forced a child into intensive training at an age even younger than students training at proper hero schools, and they ever-so-gradually began chipping away at Keigo’s hopeful dream, starting with the erasure of his own name, the first step in disconnecting him from who he once was.

Over the years of the hero Hawks growing up under the HPSC’s wing, he had been stripped of his childhood and moulded into the perfect image of a hero, one that is loveable to the public, obedient to his handlers, talented in his work, and completely self-sacrificing to his missions.

The HPSC has successfully groomed Hawks so that his selflessness is now their trump card that they hold over him - instead of using his selflessness to save others no matter who they are, he’s been manipulated to believe that he has to give up everything in his life to be a great hero, that he’s not suited for being a “shining light”, thus bringing about his new goal of creating a world where heroes have free time, a goal that he is unfortunately pursuing in the wrong way. He’s been brainwashed to not think about villains too much, to not sympathize with them and dig into where they came from and why they became villains, which is why he’s targeting the wrong problem when it comes to making his dream a reality. He believes that he has to solve every case as fast as possible, and eventually there will be virtually no more villains left to hunt down, but the League has already shown us that the roots of villainy stretch much further down than that.

We catch a glimpse of how Hawks even acknowledges that he’s being held down by hero society, caged, and yet he does nothing to change it.

The result of his grooming has left him stuck in a thoughtless state, where it’s easier to believe that everything he is doing is right, and the villains are wrong.

And this is unfortunately something that he has spread to Tokoyami, as evidenced earlier.

Hawks is a hero who was groomed and manipulated from a young age, being thrown into training just so he could become a tool for those in power to use.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

Dabi can read Hawks like a book

It’s wonderfully ironic how Hawks prides himself in being capable of fooling anyone and everyone, making himself the hardest person in the room to read while simultaneously being able to read everyone else, and yet the one person that he couldn’t predict ends up being the only one who knows him better than anyone else.

Throughout all of their interactions, Dabi has always been two steps ahead of Hawks, able to catch him off-guard and ruffle his feathers. Keeping in mind that Dabi had known all along that Hawks was faking his desire to join the League, it’s interesting just how long Dabi kept stringing him along. Was he simply doing it for his own enjoyment?

Maybe a small part of him was, but in the long run, Dabi was absolutely still testing Hawks’s worthiness. What makes this great, however, is that Hawks was unaware that Dabi wasn’t testing him for what he originally thought.

Loyalty was absolutely out of the question for Dabi, since he knew from the start Hawks wasn’t planning on being as such. So, what exactly was Dabi looking for?

Looking through the tests that we know Dabi put Hawks through (the battle with Hood, and taking out a hero of Hawks’s choice), we can analyse what Dabi was impressed with, and what he wasn’t.

First off, there’s not a lot that Dabi didn’t like about what Hawks did. The most he complained about was Hawks simply bringing along Endeavour to the Hood fight instead of someone else.

It appears that he also complains about Hawks not letting anyone die, but Dabi is always quick to point out when heroes are prioritising lives, and this will become important later.

Then, we have Dabi asking Hawks to take someone out who isn’t the no. 1. When Hawks brought him Jeanist’s body, Dabi was genuinely surprised, but pleasantly-so. 

Now, Jeanist’s death here serves multiple narrative purposes:

It shows us that Hawks won’t hesitate to kill for a mission (RIP Twice),

It shows Dabi that Hawks is capable of killing anyone, not just villains,

And lastly, it serves as blackmail for Dabi in his pursuit of bringing down false heroes.

(There’s also Bakugo’s whole thing with his hero name, but this isn’t about him.)

That last point is what granted Hawks access into the League, contrary to Hawks believing that the only reason he got in is because the merging of the League and the MLA suddenly made it easy to do so. 

Dabi wasn’t going to let Hawks in without making sure he had a backup in mind in case Hawks tripped up.

But, blackmail wasn’t the only thing that Dabi was looking for. If anything, it was just a bonus.

What the Hood battle and Jeanist’s death showed to Dabi were the two sides that Hawks possessed: a bird of prey that isn’t afraid to kill for a cause, and the innocent child who just wanted to help people. Dabi was searching for both of those qualities within Hawks, because they’re both qualities that Dabi himself has.

Dabi relates to Hawks

As previously mentioned, there’s no doubt that Dabi is aware of how Hawks was trained and forced into a life he didn’t want. He’s very aware of how much Hawks longs for freedom but still wants to help those in need, but what separates them from each other is that Dabi has achieved the freedom that Hawks wants and is pursuing his dream in a way that works.

Dabi kills for his cause, but that cause is ultimately to prevent the future suffering of innocent lives at the hands of false heroes. In his own twisted way, he too wants to save lives. He wants to stop the possibility of another him from being created. He is choosing to be the unfriendly reminder that something is very wrong with the current system, and it needs fixing ASAP.

And that is exactly why Dabi can see through Hawks’s lies, because he recognises that Hawks too is a victim of the same system.

Dabi’s plan for Hawks

With Hawks presenting himself in front of Dabi, it offered up a multitude of opportunities for him. Dabi not only had a new connection to Endeavour through Hawks, but here was a hero who was prepared to get his hands extremely dirty just for a way to bring down the League. 

Dabi’s prior knowledge of Hawks and his past allowed him to constantly have the upper hand, but not in case Hawks attacked.

Through testing Hawks to see what qualities he possessed, Dabi was able to see if Hawks was worthy not for joining the League, but for undoing the brainwashing he’d been subjected to.

Dabi let Hawks into the League because he was giving him a chance, the same chance he gave to Tokoyami, to see hero society for what it really was and decide to do something about it. Dabi saw the potential in Hawks to be a true hero, to return to the boy he once was and save people for the sake of saving them. He saw Hawks’s potential to kill false heroes and that he wasn’t afraid to do it, and the idea of someone thinking the same way as Dabi, of understanding him and his goals wholly, would have absolutely been enticing to him.

Dabi claims to not care about the League, but even if that were true, Dabi recognises that the other League members are important to each other, especially when it comes to Twice and how eager he is to make friends. Dabi introducing Hawks to the League was his chance to show Hawks that they’re all human, and gain sympathy for them and what they stand for. It would have been the ultimate power move on Dabi’s part for Hawks to turn on the heroes and go villain, undoing what hero society did to him, providing him the freedom he always wanted and ultimately proving Dabi and his ideals right.

But, unfortunately, that wasn’t how things went.

How Dabi’s plan backfired

When Hawks first joined the PLF, it was obvious that Dabi was sticking close to him, both to keep an eye on him and to be genuinely friendly and accepting.

It’s rare to see a smile like this on Dabi when he’s around heroes, and he never smiles around the League, but for Hawks specifically, Dabi is always smiling. I think it’s safe to say that Dabi did genuinely enjoy Hawks’s company and that he was the only one Dabi actually liked, which is probably what led to him being comfortable with leaving Hawks to his own devices for the next few months, especially when he started a budding friendship with Twice.

Dabi must have been confident that Twice would be the one to break through the last of Hawks’s walls, because if we were seeing genuine smiles from Hawks, then Dabi must have seen them too.

However, it’s clear that Dabi severely underestimated Hawks’s capability to kill anyone. 

Hawks leaked the information to the heroes, an attack was launched, and Dabi immediately knew why.

And he was, understandably, incredibly pissed.

Upon confronting Hawks and hearing how he was about to kill Twice, Dabi used what he’d learned about Hawks during the Hood fight to his advantage and triggered Hawks’s rescue response, prompting him to subconsciously save Twice from Dabi’s flames, because Dabi knows deep down that a hero is who Hawks really is. What he was most likely hoping was for Hawks to maintain that response, but he instead made a mistake and directly caused Hawks to go back into mission-mode.

And it’s just a downward spiral from there, with all of Dabi’s last-ditch efforts falling flat. In one last desperate attempt to reach through to Hawks, he called out his name. His real name.

Dabi’s final chance to bring Hawks to his senses was to try and reconnect him with his past self of whom the HPSC had carefully erased, and it almost worked. Dabi let Hawks know that he knew everything about him, everything that he once was, but just like with Tokoyami, Dabi learnt the hard way that Hawks was beyond saving.

With Twice’s death, Dabi completely lost it, scolded Hawks for not focusing on him, and dropped one last bomb on Hawks before ending yet another false hero.

Until, yet again, that too backfired due to Dabi’s hope that he could save an innocent mind from the hero system’s brainwashing, and Hawks escaped with his life.

We get a glimpse of Dabi’s defeated expression, the knowledge that he can’t cry, and that he just lost two friends within the span of just a few minutes.

What next?

Honestly, if there’s one thing that is going to break Hawks, it’s knowing the truth about Endeavour. My hope is that Dabi is going to have a chance to make his reveal public to the entire nation, and exposing Enji Todoroki for the abuser he is will really shake things up.

At the moment, it’s still not clear exactly what Dabi told Hawks in his redacted bubble, but it was obviously something relating to his identity. Only time will tell what Hawks knows once he regains consciousness.

[prettywordsyouleft]

Forsaken | Part 14

Summary: As one of the Forsaken, Jinyoung had no right to covet anything as his own. When he stumbles across you standing in the middle of the village he had plundered, the memories of old make him risk it all, clutching at the past in hopes for a better future.

Pairing: Park Jinyoung x reader

Genre: warrior au / star crossed lovers / angst / romance

Warnings: death, kidnapping, cursing, a myriad of emotions - this is a really sad love story. In this particular part, there is a detailed battle scene resulting in injuries and fatalities.

Index: Prologue | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15

“They’re going to live.”

It didn’t matter how much you voiced your statement, even you were struggling to believe in it now. You had managed to escape, though there was no slowing down for some time. The air was tense, the sacrifice given for the six of you to get away from Argo and his men hung over the heads of everyone. Dusk arrived and the decision to continue onto the docks throughout the night meant there was no time to rest and recover.

You knew Mark was sporting a minor injury from combat and yet he continued as if it didn’t bother him. Perhaps it didn’t. And yet, you worried about him joining Jackson in his evident pain. Jackson travelled in and out of consciousness, letting out whines and grunts sporadically.

The plan to leave the base hadn’t seemed this grim, even when everyone had spoken about it in depth. You felt ridiculous for being so naïve. The past two days had felt more like two years in length and the waves of emotions had truly taken their toll on you.

“Rest,” Jinyoung said into your ear but you shook your head stubbornly. His arm that hadn’t shifted from around your middle curled further into you, pulling you back into his armoured torso.

You fought his instruction and sat back up, fingering the dark strands of the horse’s mane instead. “I’m staying awake.”

“Don’t resist rest when you need it.”

“No one else is resting.”

“We’re used to this,” Jinyoung refuted and you heaved a troubled breath.

“I’m not. I’m not used to this at all.”

“I know and that’s why you need to rest so you can face tomorrow as best as you can.”

“Why? When Mark’s injured and acting like it’s fine to be.”

The fellow rider glanced at the pair of you and then winced. “It’s not my first injury, Y/N. It’s just a light cut, I’ll be fine.”

“Until you’re not and then it’ll be you in the cart next to Jackson!”

“Y/N,” Jinyoung growled warningly and you tore your gaze from Mark’s stunned expression and down to the hairs you were holding within your hands. Your tears fell upon your fingers, soaking the strands. The man behind you softened at your spilling emotions, sighing heavily. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, it’s not your fault I’m not cut out for this.”

“I don’t want you to be accustomed to any of this.”

“I’m no help to any of you. I couldn’t do anything when they surrounded us and now we have no idea if BamBam and Yugyeom are-”

“He was the spy.”

You nodded sadly. “I knew already. Jackson spoke of his suspicions.”

“And yet you are worried about him? We wouldn’t be in this mess with Argo hunting us down if it weren’t for him sharing information over the radio.”

“Of course! He risked his life for us to get this far. He could be hurt or…”

“He could be dead,” Jinyoung finished your statement. “He would have died with no regrets then.”

“I don’t want him to be gone from this world!” you admitted tearfully. “He was too young to have completed everything he was destined to.”

“Life isn’t so clear cut for us, you know that. We’re lucky to even make it to adults. Most Forsaken don’t live that long.”

“It’s all so cruel.”

Jinyoung held you more tightly. “We have each other, we have a life ahead of us that we can live in gratitude for the choices the others made for us to have this. Let’s not think so horribly anymore, hm?”

“You sound like me,” you mentioned with a watery chuckle. “It’s me who is always looking for the brighter side to everything.”

“Well, I’ve got to start trying now too.”

“Why?”

Pressing his lips to your crown, Jinyoung nestled his head into your neck. “Because I’m no longer a warrior. Just a man in love who wants to settle down with his family away from all of this.”

You smiled. “I love you, Jinyoung.”

“I love you even more, Y/N.”

You had been lulled into slumber in the early hours of the morning, the continuous movement of the horse rocking you back and forth and easing your concerns. However, you were woken with a jolt, Youngjae’s scream echoing within your mind.

Eyes now wide, you looked ahead to see the horse and cart sliding on the path dangerously, the majestic animal falling to the ground with a groan.

There laid an arrow in its chest.

“We’re under attack!” Jaebum cried as another arrow hurtled towards your convoy from the east. Jinyoung’s horse came to a stop and you leapt out of his grip, running towards the cart now on its side.

Youngjae was cradling Jackson’s head in his arms. “Is he okay?!”

“I’ll check!” you exclaimed, your hands shaking as you reached to search for a pulse. You nodded rapidly when you found it. “He’s still with us!”

Your attention turned to the new battle in front of you. It was a much smaller group, some twenty men with a battered and bloodied leader riding towards you all. Jinyoung dismounted his horse and pulled out his sword, swinging away any arrows that came his way. Mark and Jaebum brought down four attackers before running out of arrows themselves, reaching for alternative protection.

“You bother me greatly, cat.”

“Still alive, are we? I didn’t know dogs had multiple lives as well,” Jinyoung grunted, his face contorted in a deadly manner. You had never seen him look this dark and it worried you when he smiled wickedly.

The trained warrior in Jinyoung wouldn’t back down no matter what happened next.

Glancing at Youngjae and then back to Jackson, you clamped your eyes shut. You heard nothing of the pre-fight banter that occurred or the roars from Mark and Jaebum as they charged forward. You didn’t pay any mind to Youngjae crying out for clarification of what he should do.

You cleared your mind of everything, searching deep within. You faced your timid self, looking at her determinedly. She shook her head. “I cannot do this.”

“You can.”

“This is the end for us, isn’t it?” your inner voice questioned with fear. Reaching out for her, you jostled her around.

“Snap out of it, we can do this together.”

“Why are you so sure of yourself? Argo has lived. That means all those who tried to stop him have failed. The men before you are exhausted and injured. You’re just a noblemen’s daughter. That’s all.”

“I am more than that,” you voiced calmly. “I can be more than that.”

“I’m scared.”

“I need you to help me. I need you to try.”

Slowly opening your eyes with renewed clarity, you turned to Youngjae panicking beside you and put your dagger in his hand. “Protect Jackson.”

“What are you planning to do?!” he enquired desperately as you reached into the crumpled supplies for Jackson’s sheathed sword. Pulling it out, you gripped at the hilt and stood up, immediately aware of the fight coming your way. Swinging the weapon as best as you could, the blade connected with flesh. You allowed only the slightest tremble to make its way through you as you thrust the weapon at the man to ensure he wouldn’t reach Youngjae and Jackson before you continued forward.

You knew you weren’t the tidiest, but with your senses heightened, you were able to swing when you needed to attack and duck when you needed to back off. Your presence wasn’t lost on the others and Jaebum instantly flanked your side, his gaze unfaltering from the battle.

“Don’t be rash, Y/N. Only attack who comes your way.”

“Jackson cannot defend himself, I’m merely here in his place!” you exclaimed, spinning around and jabbing out fruitlessly at an enemy. Refocusing, you managed to connect with him a second time, not without him knocking your sword out of your grip in the process. You cried and this alerted Jinyoung, the man swiftly clashing swords with Argo whilst backing up towards you.

“I can do this!” you stated loudly at him, ducking at the attacker’s approach again and reaching for your discarded weapon, elbowing the man viciously. You sliced at his arm before spinning around again, striking him in his back.

“Y/N!” Youngjae screamed and you moved back now that your attacker had relented, trying to reach the cart before the enemy did.

It was too late, he aimed his sword right through the small gap of armour and into Jackson’s abdomen, Youngjae managing to make the man drop to his knees with the dagger and you swung at him and killed him on the spot.

Dropping the weapon, you pushed your hands under the amour to put pressure on the wound as Youngjae loosened the protective layer off. “He’s losing too much blood!”

“Where’s Jaebum’s kit?!”

“Y/N! They’re still coming our way! Go! I need you to give me time.”

If your clarity before had given you the drive to step forward, anguish only made you more ruthless. Your swings were more desperate yet precise, and you managed to keep the attackers away from the cart. Brushing aside the tears, uncaring of the blood you streaked over your face from doing so, you glanced back at Youngjae before running forward. There was no relent in their onslaught, the others fighting endlessly. Jinyoung was battling between Argo and his men who tried to take him down and you attempted your best to get closer to the activity, hoping to take some of the heat off of Jinyoung.

But you weren’t made to be a fighter.

Hot tears ran down your face when a man thrust his sword at your thigh, causing you to drop to the ground in pain with a cry. Before you faced further injury, Mark leapt around and took off their head in a single swing, kicking away another that came at your back. He looked at you and then back at the cart, trying to decide where you needed to be.

“I can do this!” you continued to exclaim, taking Mark’s hand and using the sword to get yourself up. Finding an inner strength you hadn’t believed possible to garner until this moment, you continued despite the searing pain.

However, you tired more easily than the men did, and once again you were knocked off your feet, this time by Argo himself.

“You are a cunning little witch. I should have taken your head off before you had the chance to speak.”

You smirked. “And you’re an absolute fool.”

“Bold words for a warrior now kneeling before me.”

“At least you see me as someone formidable to label as such,” you mentioned tiredly, blinking slowly when the man disappeared. You knew the swift shadow moving in front of you belonged to Jinyoung.

“Do not touch her!”

“Why, worried you won’t be able to keep her alive, boy? Look at her, she’s already done for. We could stop this here. You could join me and we could lead a new army.”

A clashing of swords showed Jinyoung’s response. They battled it out some more and another man jumped at Jinyoung, causing him to pause with Argo to fight him off. It was a cheap tactic and you watched in horror as Argo knocked Jinyoung down to the ground, putting his boot on top of his shoulder, grinding his toe right into him.

The wail was deafening.

“Not so powerful now, are you, kitty cat?” Argo motioned victoriously, pointing his sword at Jinyoung’s throat.

He resisted the man as best as he could but Jinyoung knew he was trapped, his gaze falling to yours. You shook your head, pleading with Jinyoung to regain that harshness to his expression that he held before. You scrambled to your feet, limping your way through the chaos towards them.

Jinyoung was losing hope.

“Good, you can watch me slay the man you love from this world. Or should I kill you first and then him? Decisions, decisions.”

You noticed how tied up both Mark and Jaebum were still, their injuries now slowing them some.

It seemed as if there was no way out.

You wouldn’t give up yet. Repositioning Jackson’s sword, you held it out at Argo. “Get off him.”

“You don’t scare me, poppet.”

“I SAID GET OFF!” you screamed, stunning all that were in the vicinity.

“Y/N,” Jinyoung said, gasping when Argo moved his foot closer to his throat. You barely tore your eyes away from the assailant to glance at Jinyoung before glaring again at Argo.

“Remember what… I said when I taught… you to fight?”

Your mind slipped back to your first lesson with a sword.

“Jinyoung, I’m not a killer.”

“I do not want to make you one but there may come a time where you need to choose to fight. What will you do if someone cuts me down?”

Gripping the sword more tightly, you looked at your situation and then at Jinyoung. He nodded. Driving Jackson’s sword directly into the foot oppressing Jinyoung’s ability to fight back, you burst into tears, knowing you had gone far enough to rest the soil underneath Jinyoung’s shoulder as well. Jinyoung smiled encouragingly despite instantly paling, whilst Argo screamed in pain and lost his footing. Argo’s sword dropped onto Jinyoung and he reached for it, immediately embedding it in his side.

And before you could move any further, a bloodied figure came into view, reaching down and sliced at Argo’s neck, his gurgles soon ceasing as the life left him.

You glanced up at Youngjae who had put an end to the tyrant before turning back to Jinyoung, his breathing coming to a halt then as well.

“No!” you wailed, cradling his limp head in your lap. “You can’t leave me. Not yet! Please stay with me!”

_________________

Part 15 (Final)

All rights reserved © prettywordsyouleft

[GOT7 Masterlist] | [Main Masterlist] | [Request Guidelines]

[blackfemmecharacterdependency]

10. X Confirmed

Death had never been especially hard for Xander to accept. His mother died in front of him when he was young. He found it scary at first, but then curious. He didn’t know what an overdose was at the time. He’d been told at school that in case of an emergency, call 911, but his mom looked mostly the same way that she usually did. Sometimes, when she put the white stuff in her nose, she did weird things. 

When she began to shake and flop around, to choke and gargle, he called out to her a few times, but then… she went to sleep. Which, in hindsight… usually happened whenever she carried her bottled drink. But, as far as her laying on the floor, eyes fluttering for a while, even the vomit wasn’t that strange for her… Usually she turned the other way… but if she was asleep, that wasn’t an emergency. Besides, he wasn’t supposed to call those people anyway. School rules and house rules were different and house rules mattered to his mom more. He was supposed to go to the neighbor’s and ask them to call his dad.

This was no emergency!  

He went to school the next day and she was still there. He set breakfast next to her. Some toast and milk. He came home and she was still there. So was breakfast.  Was this an emergency?  He picked up her nose stuff and tried to give her some. She would probably jump right up. No. She didn’t.  Maybe this might be an emergency.  He headed to the neighbor’s, still had Mom’s nose stuff with him. The neighbor looked scared when she saw it. She tried to take it, but Xander insisted it was for his mom, but she was asleep on the floor and had been since yesterday. 

So, she called his father and walked over to go check. When she did,  she  called 911. Xander’s father had not been around for a while. He would get mad and swing his fists at people… at Xander’s mom… at Xander. So, he didn’t live with them. That day, Xander found out that his mom wasn’t going to wake up from her sleep. “She was a cokehead. It happens,” his dad told him. Xander didn’t know what that meant, but what he figured out from swinging his fists at things when he got angry was that they went to sleep sometimes. Little animals. That meant that nose stuff wasn’t the only way. It also meant that when his dad got mad… it could happen to him. 

By the time he left home and ran into his steward, he had fists swung at him more times than he could even count up to. If he was gonna go to sleep forever, he didn’t want it to be because of his dad.  This was an emergency. 

He never faced death again that up close and personal until his own life was on the line and Grace tried to get him out safely. He was terrified in the field by himself. Where could he go? He had no sense of direction. His dad probably wasn’t looking for him. His mom was asleep forever, and Grace was probably gonna get caught and killed too. He just sat in the field and cried. Insects kept crawling on him. He ignored a lot of them. Maybe he could just stay here forever and nothing would happen. Maybe… he could just lay down and go to sleep and not wake up again.  Maybe there were no emergencies. Maybe death was a way to be free from emergencies..

Whenever Grace called him, he was still afraid, but happy to hear her voice. Was she coming to leave with him? To stay with him? 

She was covered in blood. He had never seen so much. Not from fights, not from animals, and definitely not on people… Whenever they took the heads, he wondered, “Should we do something with those bodies? In the movies, they would hide them.”

“No. No. No… Wait… Yes…” She thought, “No. I read a crime story not too long ago. If they take fingerprints, you have to be a criminal for them to match them. We never did crimes before.”

However, whenever they did start to do crimes, Xander wondered, “Remember that field? Do you know where that was?”

“Near the abandoned train, right?”

“They’ve moved the train, now, but… maybe the field is still there.”

It was still there, but it looked different. It seemed greener than Xander remembered. It would still do. He grabbed a shovel and opened the trunk, sighing whenever Grace began to speak in her soft, but urgent voice. “We have to get a better system. You can’t just hit somebody in the head with a shovel and toss them in your trunk.”

“He was a steward. I confirmed it myself.”

“Well, as confident as I am in an X confirmed steward… We need to be careful.” The man started moving and she gasped and took the shovel to smash it into him to make him stop moving. She blew air from her lips and thought for a moment.  “If you ever do this again, I need them researched, receipts created, and confirmation solid. Don’t just fly off the handle.”

“He kidnapped Jalicia with the intent to sell her. She was 3.”

“I know, I know… BUT, what I’m saying is… somebody is gonna be looking for this guy and nobody knows he did that, probably.”

“Who would look for this guy? He’s a loser.”

“A zero.”    “Less than zero.”

She gasped, “He’s a null!” She laughed and grabbed the other shovel. “Dude, we also will need to be wearing something else. I love this Blood Orange shirt, and it’s ruined now. I’ll have to burn it or something.”

“Should… should we call Jalicia?” He wondered. 

“And stress her out? No.”

“If I was her, I’d wanna know.”

She thought for a moment and looked around. Where this place was, she didn’t expect much traffic, so they probably were safe to move forward and still let their friend know about this. “Check with Heath. He’ll know whether or not that’s best.”

.

Heath and Jalicia met them out there and Jalicia looked at the man, “Yo… what the fuck, Xan? I’ve never seen this man before in my life, Bro. Did you kill him? Can we just drop him at the ER and dash?”

Xander shook his head at her and raised up the man’s sleeve to show a tattoo of a scorpion and a scar. “This is where you bit him.” They recognized the tattoo, and that did look like a bite mark. “I asked him what happened there and he said a kid bit him a long time ago. No… He said, “my kid bit me” a long time ago…” Xander was fuming again. 

“I’m sold,” Heath said, his own jaw clenching as he grew protective over his girlfriend. “Who… owns this land? Because if they’re gonna farm it or something, they’ll find him.”

“But, if we buy it and it gets found some other way, then it points to us,” Grace said. “I’ll find out tomorrow. For now, we gotta bury this null.”

“The what?” Heath wondered.

“Null. Less than zero. I read it in a book once...” 

She was always reading. She could read in multiple languages, and multiple avenues. She could read body language, social cues, people…  why the fuck couldn’t she see how not okay Simon was? 

As he recorded the dude’s address, he thought about the stern talking-to that Grace had given him about that first X on the way to the Field of Nulls. If they were going to be hunting predators and burying them, they needed to look into them, verify that they were either at the warehouse or into the crime scene within that time frame, and get as much information and dirt on them for it to be undeniable. Grace would look at the information to determine and if she wasn’t sure they were guilty, if there was a single chance that an X was not confirmable;  she made a circle around them and held onto their information. There was likely a reason that they came up in shady business.

Sometimes, the proof came around. A few times, she just couldn’t stomach a mistake. They had been taken away from homes and families for years. She didn’t want to do that to someone else if she couldn’t say for sure they were responsible. He knew that he certainly couldn’t get an X put on Simon without proof, if  even then. 

Grace had gotten REAL cozy with her new little lap dog, and Xander did not like that. He didn’t like her bringing him into the fold, even if he was still in the dark. It was sloppy! They hadn’t vetted this guy! In fact, they didn’t  let people in! Simon was the first outsider to have crossed over… since Hazel! Xander looked at Sunny, asleep in his bed, curled up with a pink narwhal stuffie, with an eye mask over her face and a bonnet on her head as he scribbled a note and slipped out of his apartment.

There was no doubt in his mind - the man was dangerous. He’d most likely escalate if openly challenged. Xander  would just put him in the field… but he doesn’t lie to or keep secrets from Grace; and putting Simon in the field would make her very upset. Xander wasn’t quite prepared to risk that type of upset from her with nothing backing his suspicions. But, you couldn’t convince him that Simon wasn’t a serial killer!!! 

Or… someone unsafe for them all, but mostly for Grace.

Whether it was the fact that it takes one to know one, just Simon being so strange in comparison to other people Xander had observed, or him just feeling threatened that Grace had a new person around… That she got close to him when Xander wasn’t there. That if he hadn’t slipped up again, this might not even still be a problem. That she was in danger and it might be HIS fault! 

Initially, Xander told her to give Simon a chance, but he felt the dude proved that he couldn’t be trusted with boundaries and space… yet… there he was… in her life even  deeper. Xander needed to confirm for himself and for Grace that Simon was simply a harmless creep and not a dangerous one. 

Potential X: First - Observe the potential X in its natural habitat. How it walks and talks. Does it have friends and family at home or live alone? How often is it there and what does it do in it's free time?

“Potential X appears to live alone, has one pet as indicated on social media bios, and from a quick overview through the window - minimal security in place beyond a locked door. Background check came up clean, so if it is a danger, it is a crafty danger, because it hasn’t been caught or suspected of anything yet. It leaves early in the morning and goes… to the bookshop. Right. Everyday.” 

Xander went across the street and ordered, then opened his laptop and watched the bookstore. He saw whenever Grace came in to work, Simon had rushed to open the door for her and… she…  Kissed him??? On the cheek, but… she doesn’t DO that.  This might be harder than Xander thought. 

“Grace is very attached to X. Does she love him? It.” The X. Xander didn’t like to humanize the potential X. Grace would do that later, and highly likely go above and beyond for this one. 

Xander ordered some lunch for Grace and went across the street with her known order. She came from clocking out and almost ran into him. “Whoa! Xan!” She cheered and tackled him into a hug. “Did you spring up to see me???” 

“Yeah, I got your stupid lunch from the deli.”

She was eyeing him suspiciously. He knew why. He’d left this morning and Sunny most likely hit her up as soon as she found his note. He had technically been ‘missing’ that entire time, because none of his babysitters had eyes on him. But, she was soon comforted by the fact that she knew him well enough to know when something wasn’t right. Something wasn’t, but she knew it wasn’t drugs. “That’s super awesome, but I was actually gonna head out of work early and go to Le Bistro Parfait!”

“Le what?”

“Simon’s mom’s place. I told you about it.”

“Right. Where is he?”

“Waiting,” she said with a huge smile.

“Like a good little lap dog.”

Grace booped his nose, “Don’t be jealous. You’ve got BOTH of your exes wrapped around your little finger.”

“Debatable. Also irrelevant.” He paused and looked at her solemnly. “ They’re  Apex.”

“He’s good to me, Xander. He understands that I have all this stuff going on and he still likes to be around.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Because, I’m charming and beautiful,” she said through her teeth.

“Right, but you’re also aloof, inconsiderate, self-absorbed, noncommittal, highly, HIGHLY traumatized, problematic, pretentious…”

“OH MY GOD, XANDER!” She said. Those things were true and were often reasons that she didn’t have successful real dates and never had a boyfriend, but with him just saying them like that… Shit was a little hurtful. Especially considering that Simon never said anything bad about her, ever. Fortunately, he showed up right when she was ready to fucking lose it on Xander.

“Xander,” Simon said and held his hand out to shake, an unreadable expression and wide fake smile on his face.

“Dude, you do this every time. I’m not shaking your hand, for all I know, you just rubbed one out so that you don’t get a hard on for Grace in front of your mom.” Xander said it very casually, but they all knew that he was 100% serious and he even looked disgusted for emphasis.

“Oh,” Simon said, pulling his hand back. “I absolutely didn’t do that, but I won’t offer you my hand again, Xander.” His eyes glinted as he lowered his forehead just a little bit…

The X is trying to intimidate me!  Xander stepped forward and Grace stepped in front of him to give him a silent look to back down and took the lunch, “I will put this in the break room and have it for tomorrow. You wanna come to Le Bistro?” Her voice didn’t indicate anything, but Xander knew that face and he was on thin ice if he didn’t keep his wits about him with Simon. Simon  obviously  was much better at being fake than he was. Grace didn’t even acknowledge the way he’d just  challenged him.

“Yep.” He stared Simon down as she vanished to the break room, still giving him her warning look. Xander rolled his eyes and asked, “How long has your mom had her place?”

“Oh… Since I was 10 or so. I definitely lost the spelling bee in 5th grade and she was there by then, because I’d practice over and over in a booth.”

“You did spelling bees?” Xander asked, raising an eyebrow.

“I was a spelling bee champion,” Simon bragged.

“When you were 10.”

“No… I lost that year, but it made me work harder for the next time. So… 11.”

Xander nodded, “When I was 11, I was sucking strange dick so somebody else could get paid, and smoking pot so I wouldn’t worry so much about sucking strange dick.”

“Oh… I’m… sorry… I’m presuming that no one would ever joke about something like that… So… Just… sorry.”

“Hey, it taught me a life skill that I’d need for money later sometimes,” Xander shrugged his shoulders  and winked at him.

“How uh… How did you and Grace meet?” Simon asked, uncomfortably changing the subject.

“She hasn’t told you?” Simon shook his head.  Grace has not opened up to the X about our troubled past. This is a sign that she is not as far into his deceit as I feared. “Then, I guess she has her reasons.”

“Okay. Well, we’ve covered ‘strange dick’ now… what’s the next conversation topic in Xander’s world?” Grace reappeared and Simon exhaled, “Oh thank God.” She laughed and locked arms with both of them. They gave each other fake casual looks, two sets of eyes studied every single detail in the other’s face and both noticed that fact, and that fact only. But, while Simon smirked and faced forward, Xander frowned, and she marched ahead, guiding them both. 

She and Xander both rode with Simon. Xander was studying the backseat and the lock. If he had to sneak in here to grab Simon, he wanted to see if he could estimate success. “Your music sounds mad stalkerish,” Xander said. Simon tensed up and of course he noticed. 

Grace threw Xander a look in the backseat, “Be nice, please.”

“I’m always nice,” Xander said and leaned forward to smell the seat. “Did you recently clean out your car?”

“I have a person who does that,” Simon said. Xander glared and Simon shook his head, “I didn’t mean to sound like that. I mean… It’s a regular service that I get done…”

“What is this scent?”

“I smell mandarin,” Grace said, with a smile.

“Huh. You love that smell. That’s a nice coincidence,” Xander said, staring at Simon in the rearview mirror. Simon wore that same smirk from earlier… he knew what Xander was doing. They got to the bistro, Xander got onto his phone and told Grace, “A thing came up. I guess I have to leave you with him.” 

“Well… Do you need us to bring you back to your car?” She wondered. 

“No. Enjoy your lunch date.” Grace gave him a hug and he noticed Simon shift a little, almost like he was coming forward. It was impulsive. He held the hug longer than necessary simply to gauge if it would have an effect. 

“Please call somebody if you need anything,” Grace whispered, pulled back and cupped his face, then walked through the door that Simon held open for her. 

For the last time that day, Simon and Xander stared at each other. “Good luck, Xander,” Simon said.  What makes the X think that I need good luck? He went inside and stared at Xander through the window on his way to the booth with Grace. 

Potential X: Survey the X’s personal spaces. Car, exceptionally clean, seemingly with all functional capacities of the vehicle’s expectations. Home… 

Alexandria picked the lock, with furrowed eyebrows and checked the time on her phone. When he went inside, wearing gloves, of course, he noticed things, some immediately.  “X is a massive nerd… with disposable income. Some of these figures definitely look expensive…”  he recorded several of them. Simon had an entire wall of shelving dedicated to very detailed and realistic figures from various fandoms, grouped together by fandom. They were all handcrafted, but Xander couldn’t be sure if they had been purchased that way or if Simon had made them himself. The living room was spotless.  Maybe it has a person for that, too. 

Across from the figures wall was a workspace with a computer and… Xander looked at the desktop… Everything seemed set like it was getting ready for some photo shoot or something.  “The X is meticulous in organizing it’s personal space. Everything is extremely clean and orderly, even this desk that’s totally decked out for gaming… but, he’s put away everything in a specified spot and left nothing even remotely off.” He turned and looked at the book shelf. The top row were his own works, with framed photos of himself and who Xander presumed were his mother… mothers? Maybe she was a lesbian, and a red headed sister. There were two photos of him and the sister (an old one and a current one, one of the whole group, one with him and his mom, and one of just the blond mom… so… that probably was merely a friend or cousin or something. He didn’t have a photo of just the two moms. But, the rows beneath his own books and those photos were all alphabetized.

Xander explored further. The kitchen was just as clean, just as orderly. It was a pretty big kitchen for one man who likely didn’t have many friends, and it sort of reminded him of a movie set of a spaceship. The appliances were mostly chrome or white, with lights and stuff. The refrigerator was definitely new and fancy. He peeked inside and it was fairly empty (or possibly it appeared that way because it was so big). There was an absurd amount of different milk in there, oranges, gouda… raspberry jam, cotton candy grapes… He slammed the fridge.  “Grace has been either stashing groceries here or he’s been accommodating her when he shops. I refuse to believe that the few things that she has to have in her own fridge at all times just happen to be the things that he also keeps in his! The fuck is the bread?” He went to the pantry and groaned at how it was both a walk in, and also as neat as everything else. He found the bread and there it was… Marbled rye from her favorite bakery… Xander clenched his fists and left the pantry, slamming it shut. 

Why are you so angry? You KNOW that she’s seeing him. She’s been seeing him now for damn near half of a year... He entered a room that confused him. There were all these… costumes… Some of them were on stands, several things on a few racks… He walked a little further in and saw a table with a sewing machine and a side table with various tools and a figurine on it. This room was less neat than the others, and there was corner with a three way mirror, a shelf of wigs, and a rack of weapons… “LARPing!” Xander said, “Or something like that. These are all… costume things…” He saw a mannequin that was formed remarkably like Simon (like he probably was under his clothes). “Did he have this made in his image?” He picked up the figurine and noted it was a dragon of some sort. He didn’t know from what. He set it back down and moved on to the next room.

The bedroom wasn’t as neat either… but Xander had a feeling that wasn’t necessarily Simon’s doing. Because those were Grace’s Date Night boots at the foot of the bed and the book on the nightstand was one that she had been reading recently. He rushed to see if she had already taken a drawer in his dresser. Neatly folded clothes in each drawer, with the exception of a locked one. Alexandria had to keep watch outside, so he had to see if he could break into it himself. Whenever he did, he wasn’t expecting to see  that… Xander turned up his nose at what he presumed was Simon’a sex drawer… Well, the dildo was a dead giveaway, and the strap… there were women’s underwear and lube, and other… things. He shut it and tried to rig the lock back into place, grumbling, “Grace better not have been in this drawer with him!”

For years, Xander had been telling Grace to just rip off the bandaid and bone somebody. If she waited until she found the weirdest creep in Seattle to do that, he would never forgive himself. But, there was nothing there to help him. All that he had proved was that this guy was an Extreme Nerd Olympics gold medalist, into pegging, and most likely a simp… because housing her favorite groceries? 

He opened another door and a white cat came running out, startling him. She rushed into living room and Xander chased her. That room was ridiculously clean. He couldn’t remember seeing any cat fur in it, and he certainly didn’t want to leave any. He caught up with her quite quickly and picked her up by the back of her neck. She struggled with him and he said to her face, “Listen, you little shit. I already don’t like cats…” He peeked into the room she’d come out of and saw it was an entire room set up like some type of cat paradise… He tossed her in and closed the door. Somehow THAT was the weirdest room that he had seen in the place. 

He had run out of time. He was getting ready to leave whenever he heard somebody knocking on the door. Alexandria would have still been out there, so… it must have been her, signaling to him to leave. He rushed out of the back and made his way off of the property, waiting around the corner for her and texted her where. 

“Hello?” Simon said. 

She turned around and looked confused at him. “Hi… are you… here for Luca too?” He stared at her for a bit, looked her up and down, sizing her up, figuring something. “Sir? Is this where you’re going?” she pointed at the door.

“This is where I live. Who did you say you were?”

“I’m here for Luca Magnus.”

“Ah. Magnus. They’re next door,” He pointed in the direction and she laughed and gestured with her fingers shooting herself in the head. “Simple mistake for a stranger. The addresses are very similar. You don’t look like any company that I’ve ever noticed them have. I’m pretty observant.” He blinked his eyes and her and gave her a very small smile that she could tell was not friendly.

Still, hers was as she said, “I’m the new masseuse. Are they gonna send me right back where I came from when they see me?”

“If you don’t have your supplies in your car, probably.” he said, looking around for her car. His driveway was uphill and if she had parked down below and walked up, it was suspicious for her to not have a bag with oil in it, or something.

“I can’t drive up these hills and I wanted to make sure it was the right house first. Thanks for your help.” He watched her rush off and head towards the Magnus house. She didn’t get into a car or go to the house, and he hurried to unlock his door, pausing only to notice that the lock looked scratched up and he couldn’t remember it being that way before. He came inside and walked through, eyeing everything. It looked fine. Maybe she hadn’t accomplished getting inside. Maybe he caught her before she had a chance. She looked familiar, but he was more concerned about making sure that the house was clear and safe. He reached behind his bookshelf and retrieved one of his guns, readied himself as he peered through his home, room by room. Samantha rushed out of hers. Nobody was in there, not in her closet full of supplies, either. He went into the bathroom, all clear. The bedroom… he noticed that the drawer wasn’t straight. He shook it and it was loose, but still locked. He  knew that he would have noticed if that drawer was off in any way. He checked his closet, only his daily wardrobe. He checked his hobby workroom, and it seemed fine too, but his dragon… it was facing the wrong way. He always set them down facing himself. It was turned around. He turned it back and let out a frustrated breath.

Somebody had been in there, but they were gone, now. He put his gun away. If it had been that woman, he must have caught her coming out. But, why was nothing missing? Why would she break in and not take anything? Why did she look familiar?

He texted Grace.

Simon: Might have to skip coming over tonight. Someone broke in my house.

Grace: WHAT? Are you okay? What did they do?

Simon: Nothing appears to be missing, but I want to be sure to change the locks, and I have a drawer to fix. I don’t want you to come over, because I’m not sure why they were here and I don’t want you in danger.

Grace: Awww, that’s adorable. No offense, but if danger were to come through, I think I’d be a little more likely to have to keep you safe, Mon Beau Petit.

Simon smiled and blushed. He didn’t know if she was being condescending or flirting, but he liked it. Whatever it was.

Simon: I would never allow it, My Doll.

Grace smiled so brightly that Simon hit her right back with an affectionate nickname that her face felt pained. 

She was sad that they might not be getting together tonight. Simon had become a bit of an anchor for her. He comforted her without pressuring her, judging her, or pitying her. It was like he knew just how she worked, just how to treat her for the best results. She left work with her coffee in hand, it was chilly, but not cold yet and the florals of her rose, lavender and chamomile coffee were flooding through her sinuses and senses. She loved the tingling it sent through her, like a little cleansing at the end of a long day.

The train ride home felt lonely. She was never really alone. She often felt like she was being followed and usually, by demons. Other times, she hoped it was an angel. She smiled and opened her social media up as she sat on the vehicle, playing music and seeing what Xander got up to after he left her and Simon. 

Alexandria texted her earlier that she was going to be with him today. That was reassuring, as something was going on with him. She didn’t know if that was simply how he was now, or if it was a cause for concern. But, she was  not  going to browbeat him and make things worse. Instead, she checked out his media, saw nothing. Checked Alexandria’s. Saw even less. She groaned. If they were sleeping together again, she might honestly lose her chill…

But, then she saw something on Simon’s page. It was a computer drawn image of someone that he probably got his friend to make for him (because, she didn’t think he was that quick with a computer, even having apparently been pretty good in school), but what she noticed was the bomb tattoo on the neck of the image. 

It was a white woman with a ponytail and a hoodie pulled over her head, but she had a tattoo on her neck of one of those circle bombs from the cartoons, lit… Grace took a screenshot and sent it to Alexandria. “Explain this,” was all that she typed.

Alexandria’s bubbles showed up and stopped several times before she finally replied several minutes later with, “Please ask Xander.”

Grace opened a thread with the three of them and sent the very same message into it. 

Xander replied: Can’t chat. Observing an X.

Grace: Why was Alexandria at Simon’s house earlier and…

Xander: Going dark.

Grace: Somebody better answer me.

Alexandria: I’ve got a client. If he doesn’t get in touch with you by the time I’m done, I’ll call you.

Grace texted Simon: Come over whenever you’ve finished with things. Bring a bag. Stay the night.

.

Simon didn’t really get to stay the night at Grace’s. The longest he had been there was that first time that she needed an alibi. Just the thought of being invited was everything to him, even with his preoccupied mind. He had to get to the storage unit and make sure that video cameras were able to record. It wasn’t that he intended to catch anything dirty (they weren’t like THAT, and he wasn’t even sure if he wanted them to be), but he did like having moments to relive over and over, where she smiled at him a certain way, or they held hands and you could just *see* the chemistry felt in the moment. He had opened the storage unit and went to set his bag down, figuring that he could simply set the recording and then dash out. He wasn’t expecting anybody to be at the storage at night, as they usually weren’t. He certainly wasn’t expecting to be met with a voice, and turn to see a face, and have it be Xander Helstrom, 747, Grace’s right hand, but…

“X marks the spot.”

11. This is Fucked Up

[temporoom]

As promised : the angry post about TPN’s last chapter. Read at your caution under the cut. (I really don't want to bother the people who enjoy the manga or enjoyed this chapter). I want to also mention that I tried to avoid spoilers as much as possible before reading this chapter (and never looked at raws). So no bias.

I can summarize that chapter in one word : pointless.

Now, most of you thought : “It is an emotional chapter that made me cry and I love it a lot, why do you think it was pointless?” You fool. A story doesn’t need to make you feel strong emotions to be good, a good story keeps you engaged in it, not obviously makes you cry over it. And to be honest, the chapter made me teared up a bit, it doesn’t change the fact that I was angry.

Now, to explain why this whole scene was poor scenaristic choice I need to go back to the beginning of the manga (and I don't want anyone telling me : yeah you are angry because you wrote that fanfic about Isabella trying to be a mother to Ray post-story. No, it’s not that.).

In the first chapter, we learn a few things about how far the story can go:

First of all, TPN doesn’t shy away from killing innocents, and especially children. This is an important point.

Second of all, TPN wants to subvert your expecations as many times as needed in order for you to stay engaged and to be unable to predict the rest of the plot.

This first chapter set a basis for the rest of the story. And overall, at least in the first arc, it was well-respected. Characters die very suddenly, but logically. And in the end, the remaining children still survive. We can all agree that the first arc was perfect. 

Then we get to the Forest arc and Goldy Pond arc. The Forest Arc was a transition so I won’t talk about it much since its main point is to give you new basis for this new adventure. But the Goldy Pond arc is very interesting because it’s the reflection of what the GF children could’ve become.

As for deaths, unlike many people, I think it would’ve been rather unproductive to have killed any of the main Goldy Pond cast in the sense that we never had any development for them and it wouldn’t follow Yuugo’s and Lucas’ arc. Yuugo and Lucas lost all their companions during their first attack of Goldy Pond, the goal of this arc is to show them tthat they are allowed to live and go on despite their deaths. Them failing by letting one of the children die would be pointlessly dramatic. 

Then Yuugo and Lucas die. Again, it follows a certain logic, but this logic has a terrible risk that the author seemed to have failed to notice. I’ll explain later. In any case, their deaths were, despite their arc, well executed. They stay together until the end instead of being separated, and do everything possible to protect their new family. Even the fact that Andrew actually didn’t die is also incredible because it feels to children as if it was pointless while it’s not.

When Yuugo and Lucas are stucked in the bunker, the group is divided, ultimately leading to the few children going out and being caught by Andrew. In the end, this scene shows that the group still needs to be cohesive to survive, as everyone’s been affected by the events of this. (The Goldy Pond part lost their father figure and multiple comrades, whil the GF part also lost a father figure and have one of their youngest child in a coma)

Then we go to the Paradise Hideout Arc. If you know my posts well, you know it’s my favorite arc, so I don't have much to say about it. Even when looking at it in retrospective I think it was overall very good. And to anyone thinking Norman’s end of the arc was rushed (the whole part where he ends up listening to Emma), do I have to remind you that Ray’s development arc was also rushed? Yeah. Anyway, no important deaths this time except demons we alreday know were assholes… The only thing it would’ve benefited from was just spending more time with those demons and on how far Geelan lost it.

Then we get to what I call the “Last Queen’s fight” Arc or, with more affection: “The Useless” Arc. THIS WHOLE FIGHT IS STUPID. I don't mind the queen actually being like… an unkillable bitch with two cores (also those gore-horror thing were creepy as hell so good job on that). What I mind is the placement of the flash-back indicating her motivations. At that point in the story, we already knew that she was a bitch… We really don't need another flash-back to just show us how much of a bitch she was. The flash-back could’ve stay, but it just needed to be placed before Norman’s attack on the capital. That way, we would’ve ultimately root for Geelan after knowing the truth, but be even more desesperate when seeing that he did not succeed instead of feeling like we just stumbled on two lynx shouting at each other. Also being given more details about the Royal Family could’ve help for the rest of the story and explain better what happened after Legravalima’s coup d’état.

Anyway, she dies. As expected.

Then everyone goes back to GF because the children have been kidnapped… I have a question tho… WHERE IN HELL IS CHRIS. That kid was in a coma for Demon God’s sake ! (spoiler: we still don't know where in hell they put him). This is the first mistake… Of the numerous mistakes of this last arc.

Peter appears as a dangerous threat with Isabella. We expect that she will betray him because she had her character development. Vincent presumably die until we reveal he is not. I don't mind that one because seeing the fandom panic because they made so many posts about his death was hilarious. And also because I felt nothing when he died so I was revealed to actually see that he survived. Then Peter is revealed to not actually be that much of a threat. Unlike many, I didn’t had the Peter hype, so I don't mind. I had always seen him as a rat and a mob (definitely not the final boss). But the bitch then had the nerves to die!

I know that Lewis was revealed to have survived (and even with the hints I still think it was a dumb as hell idea too), but they didn’t had to kill off Peter. The story would’ve benefited more of him surviving and finally acknowledging his responsability towards the children rather than fleeing his desitiny by killing himself. Especially with what is about to come. (we are not talking about the demons choosing Mujika as a queen, because that whole chapter was a rushed mess)

AND THEN ISABELLA DIES. No. I really don't want any “But it was sad!” because no. Just no. It’s not that she is one of my fav character… It’s just perfectly and ultimately pointless.

As I explained earlier, all deaths had a certain logic.

Conny was to show the overall theme of the story.

Krone and Norman were logical actions taken by the villain and a way to motivate the characters to go forward despite the adversity.

The kids at Goldy Pond was again made to set the tone.

The demons there because it’s the plot duh.

Yuugo And Lucas were to get rid of any parental figure capable of giving advices to the children.

Geelan to show that he came to a point closer to madness than reason. As well as showing how powerful is the Queen.

The Queen as she is the main antagonist of Norman’s arc.

But then...

Peter because he doesn’t want to accept his responsabilitie.

Isabella because… Because…? BECAUSE...????

To get rid of an adult figure that could give children advices? It’s the end of the story. To complete her redemption arc? This is a middle finger to all of us. To show that we can leave things to the newer generation?! THAT IS ONE OF THE WORST MESSAGES TO ANY STRUGGLING ADULTS OUT THERE.

Do you understand? Isabella died because they wanted an emotional moment. That’s it. There were no points in it except tears. It was an incredible and well-done emotional moment… But it was pointless.

Without forgetting this replica :

And I love Emma: BUT NO ONE THINKS OR SAYS THAT IN REAL LIFE. 

Re-reading this chapter helps me appreciate it more, and I look forward to how the rest of the manga will go because despite everything, I love it.

I love this manga so much.

But let me tell you this: deaths aren’t supposed to be here for emotional matters, they are here for a purpose, or to show a reality of life. Not just to cry over them, no matter how emotional they can be, they must serve a purpose.

Isabella was just a robbed opportunity. 

[thunderbird-one-ai]

Restraint

Fandom: Thunderbirds Are Go

rating: Teen

Characters : Scott, Alan

Alan was always the brother who got smothered the most. The one who was protected, who was saved for getting caught out. But now, Alan was the one doing the saving.

So I’m starting off my first @badthingshappenbingo​ for @kenzie-running-free​ with the multiple points of ‘Kidnapping’, ‘Cradling someone in their arms’, and ‘cry into chest’ which includes the youngest of the brothers Alan. 

I can’t believe the response I got from uploading my bingo card and I’m super excited to start writing more. I hope this one is a good start off! I’m also going to make each prompt semi related to one another like a mini series all on its own! 

International rescue always came with difficulties. Why wouldn’t it? Having to travel across the world at supersonic speed, getting into dangerous situations to save people in need would always have a risk of injury somewhere. Alan felt like he had less chance of being injured. The reason for this was because he had four older brothers always looking out for him. Four older brothers that would easily get in front of him or move him out the way before the harm even got close. He was used to this type of life. Yes, he went on missions that were more dangerous than others, but his brothers were always there for him. It was somewhat of a comfort to Alan, to know he was never truly alone. But things were different right now. International rescue had been hit hard. A seemingly simple mission, to which Gordon politely jinxed in saying ‘When is a mission ever this simple’, had gone horribly wrong and Scott was missing. Two days had gone by. Two days of Virgil keeping constant communications with John trying to find the oldest brother in the family. Two days of the family almost breaking apart. They all knew it, but it was never said. Scott kept this family together. He was the super smother hen glue that never failed to keep everything just as it should be. But now he was no longer here, and the family was breaking. By the third day, everyone was on minimal sleep. Virgil, Gordon and Kayo were needed on another rescue despite Scott missing. John was the first to say that Scott would still want them to help the public, even if he was in trouble. This left Alan, alone on the island feeling completely useless. He walked into the main room, sitting at their fathers’ desk. The desk that Scott had taken over since their dad went missing. Despite everything, sitting here, he felt he was somewhat closer to Scott, but it felt wrong to sit here. Alan agreed to himself that he should never sit in this chair, something felt so utterly wrong about that thought. He sighed, leaning back in the loved leather chair, looking over the splurge of information that was projected in front of him. John had clearly broken a lot of laws to get some of the information Alan was seeing. Under better circumstances, he would be teasing John, saying how he was being more like the younger Tracys’ with their rebellious natures. But this was another worst-case scenario. The last time a family member went missing was almost eight years ago, and Alan would know everyone would break knowing that Scott was gone too. Alan shook his head. He couldn’t think like that. Not now, every other brother was breaking apart at the seams, he couldn’t do that too. He needed to help, wanted to help. As if on cue, a blue hologram lit up in front of him.

“John! Did you find anything?” Alan said quickly, preying this wasn’t just Johns older brother instincts to check on him since he was alone. “I might do. I’ve been tracking some very strange communications happening under most of the GDF’s radars. At first, I thought it was small amounts of jargon before I kept seeing the same initials pop up over the course of two days,” John said calmly before Alan saw him do a few hand movements and more images appeared in front of him. How John could read any of this was a miracle to Alan. Even looking at what was in front of him made Alan's own head hurt. But what John was trying to get across soon stuck out like a sore thumb. Two letters together, even on their own people would recognise what that abbreviation meant. I and R. Alan's eyes widened, hope starting to fill the chasm that had been getting bigger over the last three days. “Scott…” Alan mumbled, looking back to John and received a nod from him. “I’m almost certain, I haven’t found any other references, and this was very well hidden. Whoever did this, didn’t want anyone out of their known group to know about this,” “So, what now?” Alan immediately thought of contacting Virgil, Gordon and Kayo, saying that John had probably found Scott and they should mobilise immediately. But Alan guessed John knew what he was thinking. “The others can’t leave the site, another seven-point-three magnitude earthquake just hit off the coast of Japan, causing the already damaged structures to start collapsing. They can’t leave that many people in danger,” John said with a slight frown. “Then let me go. I take Thunderbird three to wherever Scott is and bring him home,” Alan said almost immediately after John finish. But if Alan was being honest, he expected a ‘no’. That he was too young and inexperienced. That is was too dangerous. There were a few seconds of silence. “Get suited up, I’ll relay the position of the messages to Thunderbird Three once you are in the air,” “F.A.B,” Alan had never run so fast to the sofa in all his life. TBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTB “ETA fifteen minutes John,” Alan stated, once he was clear of the island. Those fifteen minutes were going to feel like hours, but he wasn’t going to let his mind wander, not this time. “Once the others have finished up, I will send them your way as well. We don’t know what the situation is going to be like, the building I suspect Scott is in is heavily shielded. These guys mean business. This was no fluke that Scott was taken,” “They knew what they were doing. They targeted him,” Alan added and hollo John nodded. “I think he was,” Alan landed quite a way off from the building, making sure to stay under any radar, which for Thunderbird Three wasn’t exactly easy. But this was Alans Thunderbird, he knew how she worked, how she flew through the sky. It took another thirty minutes to eventually see the complex John has discussed in the flight over. It was well camouflaged in the dense forest surrounding it, he doubted that without radar you wouldn’t have seen the building at all if you flew over it. As he got closer, he noticed there weren’t any guards outside. Not even surveillance. But with how dense the forest was, Alan doubted they got many ‘visitors’ here. Getting into the building would be easy, getting out would be the hard part. “Once you get inside Alan, I can’t guarantee I can contact you. Be safe,” John said, and Alan nodded. “I bring him home John, I promise,” “I know you will, I never would have agreed if I didn’t think you couldn’t,” John gave a small smile to Alan, but Alan saw the tell-tale signs of worry. This wasn’t just a normal semi ‘dangerous’ mission. Alan shut his comms off and began the first task of getting inside. The walls were unusually thick, Alan guessed the inner walls were no different, roughly thirty centimetres of concrete which would be heavily reinforced if even John couldn’t penetrate the walls. There were no signs on the walls, no indication on whether he was going the right way at all. This place was a maze, a maze designed to thwart any chance of a rescue attempt. But Alan wasn’t just any rescuer. “Where could you be?” Alan mumbled to himself, searching all the rooms he came across, in hopes of seeing his brother. He heard hushed voices coming down another unmarked corridor, though this one had some outlining factors. The main one being large steel type doors on each side. He silently made his way down, hearing the voices grow louder, confirming he was going in the right direction. Once he got close enough, he could make out some words. ‘Information’, ‘regret’, ‘dead’. Those words causing alarm bells to ring in Alan's head. His brother could only be a few metres away and it pained Alan to wait, knowing his brother was in danger. The corridor gave little in terms of safe hiding spots, so Alan walked back, finding an open and disused room. The dust has settled everywhere meaning no one had come in here…yet. But this was the best hiding place Alan was going to get until it was safe to approach the room that he just knew his brother was in. He chanced an opportunity to try and contact John, but as he stated earlier, there wasn’t a link. This place was too shielded. So, he waited, hearing the distinct sound of someone hitting something solid down the other end of the corridor. Alan shut his eyes, he knew what was happening to his brother and couldn’t do a damn thing about it right now. This situation was messing with Alan’s head slightly. Knowing he was only a few metres away, hearing his brother probably getting beaten for information about International Rescue, was driving Alan closer and closer to the edge of insanity. He was standing there in a corner in mental anguish knowing Scott was in physical pain. A blessing finally occurred when the faint noise of metal sliding on concrete passed into his ear. The voices growing louder the closer they got to the room Alan was situated in. He held his breath, hearing their heavy footsteps walk past. He heard them joking, joking about how they almost felt sorry for beating a retrained prisoner. Alan found himself snarling in the darkness. He moved swiftly and silently over to the slightly ajar door, the only ajar door in this corridor. With a huge amount of restraint to just fling it open, Alan moved it slowly, causing minimal noise. The sight that was in front of him, made him gasp in horror. Scott, his oldest brother, the one who for so many years Alan thought was invisible, untouchable was slumped over in a chair. His face bruised, lip bleeding, wrists bloody from the rope keeping him in place. It was an image Alan knew would be in his nightmares for many weeks to come. He slowly walked forward, kneeling in front of his brother, placing a hand over his. The flinch Scott replied with almost broke Alan right there and then. He’d never seen Scott flinch like that before, not even when he’s accidentally called him ‘dad’ from time to time. “Scott, it’s me, Alan,” Alan said quietly. Scott’s head lifted slowly, giving Alan a better look at his face. Apart from the busted lip and bruises, he now saw one of Scott’s eye had completely closed, refusing to open. “Oh Scott.” Alan set about working the ropes, forcing the tears that threatened to spill outback down. Now was not the time. After a few painstaking minutes of undoing the first rope knot, Scott’s left side was essentially free. Free enough for him to lean forward, and Alan having to grab hold of him to stop causing more damage to his right wrist and more importantly, not make any noise. Scott seemed conscious enough when Alan first checked him over, but with how much of a dead weight Scott was now, Alan worried that there was much more wrong with his brother than he initially thought. With some skill and a bit of luck, Alan managed to untie the last knot keeping his brother to the chair and helped him to the floor, holding Scott close to his chest. He checked his pulse, slightly elevated but it felt strong, some of the best news Alan had got in the three days he’d been searching for him. His brother was alive, he wasn’t gone. After giving him the once over to make sure there wasn’t any more physical damage, Alan set about thinking of a way to escape. He didn’t think Scott would be hurt this bad to the point of being cradled in his arms as Alan used to when he first found out his dad had disappeared. Scott was always there, waiting, arms open allowing Alan to curl up. Now the roles were reversed, and Alan didn’t like it at all. “Come on Scott, we need to get out of here, the others will show up soon and Virgil will get you properly checked out. We’ll be home. Me and Gordon messing around, you sitting in dads chair looking over us like you always do,” Alan couldn’t help but let a single tear fall before wiping his face quickly. Damn it he was on a mission he couldn’t let emotion get in the way now, he still needed to get Scott out of here. Alans head shot up towards the door, hearing footsteps come closer. He couldn’t move Scott into the other room he had found earlier, Alan was trapped. He couldn’t do anything; he couldn’t protect his brother for the men that had already done so much harm to him. They were so close until the building visibly shook. Debris fell from the ceiling and Alan covered Scott with his own body. He would not let his brother get hurt more now. This was his mission, to be his brother’s keeper. The footsteps hurried away in the opposite direction and Alan heard another sound that gave hope to anyone in trouble. The unique sound of Thunderbird Two’s engines. Alan felt a small movement in his arms. Even though Alan knew Scott was out of it, he was sure Scott was reacting to the sound of Thunderbird Two, the sound of safety and help. “We’re almost home Scott…Almost home,” TBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTBTB To say the week went by like a blur was not an exaggeration when Scott said it. When he woke up in the island infirmary, he believed that he was probably hit around the head due to falling rocks. One day, not wearing his helmet will be the end of him. But when Virgil filled him in that four days has passed since then filled Scott with dread, and worry. He wasn’t worried about himself; he was worried that his brothers had to help him, regardless of the situation. Scott was meant to be the team leader, the brother to lead the way, to help all his younger brothers, stop them from getting hurt and now he was the one being suffocated by every one of them. All but one, the youngest who he was trying to find late at night. If Virgil hadn’t gone for a nap, Scott never would have been able to escape the infirmary unattended, but he had to find Alan. John had filled him in on most of what happened. How Alan found him, dragged him from his confinement and outside to Thunderbird Two. Apparently, Alan never left his side during the journey and that night, leaving the room when Scott started to stir. Scott slowly made his way into the main room; he didn’t have to see properly to know where to walk. This was his home; he knew every placement of every item. He also knew that his brother wouldn’t be in the house. Alan was always good at hiding when not wanting to be found, but Scott was equally as good at finding him, eventually. He stopped at his dads’ desk to take a breather, his body not quite recovered after three days without food and water but a lot of beatings. He looked around the darkened room as well as looking out the window to see if Alan was near the pool. But it was deathly silent, no little brother insight. Unless that’s what he thought. “He’s in the hanger, last seen heading to Thunderbird One,” Scott jumped slightly, he hated jumping but his body was only having negative reactions to being startled now. He turned around and looked up to, seeing John leaning against the stair bannister and small smile on his lips. “You should also be in bed still Scott,” “I need to see him,” was all Scott could say. “I know,” John replied and walked down the stairs. “He’s been there for a while as far as EOS has told me,” Scott nodded in appreciation, before slowly making his way to the hanger. The hanger was lit at all times since International Rescue never really slept, but John had done a good job in redirecting the calls in from today to the GDF. John would only ever do that if he was concerned that they weren’t fully up to the task. Scott silently admitted to himself they weren’t, and he was to blame. He’d got himself caught, got himself beat up to the point that his youngest brother, the one he should be caring for not the other way around, had to rescue him. Scott’s mind went into autopilot as his body lead him over to Thunderbird One, he’d done this long walk many times to conduct repairs or see the latest system update. He could do it blindfolded. Once he turned the corner, he got a glimpse of Alan, sitting down against a wall, starring up to Thunderbird One. The bridge to his beloved bird was outstretched and the cockpit open. Scott concluded Alan was sitting in the chair for a period before eventually coming out and sitting down nearby. He didn’t understand why though. Scott made his way over as quietly as he could seeing Alan staring blankly at Thunderbird One, clearly distracted, not realising what was going on in his surroundings. Just how long had Alan been sitting there for? Scott’s luck eventually ran out as Alan turned his head, looking Scott straight in the eye. Alan went to stand up, but Scott was now too close and held onto his arm as he slid down the wall, a sigh escaping his lips as his aching muscles were now allowed a moment of rest. Alan pulled his arm a little, but Scott made sure to hold on as tightly as he could. Scott couldn’t recall how long they had sat there in silence, his backside slowly getting numb was a good indicator though. “John gave me a rundown of what happened,” Scott said finally breaking the silence, but Alan didn’t budge, his eyes still fixated on Thunderbird One. “You did good kid…” “I didn’t do anything,” Alan snapped slightly causing Scott to look a little surprised. “Alan, breaking into a reinforced building with armed men and not getting caught isn’t nothing you know,” “Yeah? And then what? I find you barely responsive beaten and battered because I let that happen. I heard them, Scott. I heard what they were doing to you and I just…. I hid in a corner doing nothing. I was useless,” Alan said, his bottom lip trembling as he looked away from Thunderbird One. “Alan, you weren’t useless. John was able to pinpoint our location thanks to you. Once Virgil had destroyed the main generator area that housed the jammer, John traced your signal to find us, mine got busted. If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be there,” Scott squeezed Alans' arm though he saw it didn’t help relax him at all. “You were gone for three days Scott. Three days this house felt…empty. Everyone was at each other’s throats they didn’t eat, sleep. Do you why that is? Because they all have fresh memories of dad and how hard it was for them, realising they couldn’t make more of those memories. I don’t. When mum died…dad threw himself into work, coming home late when I was forced to go to bed because of you and the others. I didn’t see him for days on end sometimes, and the rare days we did sit down as the family….those memories I cherish, that I cling on to because I have nothing else. I don’t remember spending time alone with dad. I don’t remember him telling me tales of space expeditions. I don’t remember the pain of him leaving our lives,” Alan said, and Scott heard his voice tremble at certain parts. “But I remember you. I remember you reading me tales of dad’s adventures and yours. I remember you coming back from meetings and sitting down with us having dinner, talking, laughing. I remember our first mission together. Just us, in space, doing a boring ‘safe’ mission. I remember all of that and it reminded me of how much I was going to lose if I lost you,” Alan looked over to Scott and he noticed that Alan’s eyes were red, tears collecting in the corners. Scott frowned slightly before holding his arm out and Alan moved over, pushing himself up against Scott’s chest. They didn’t speak for a while after that. Scott moved a hand through Alans' hair slowly whilst he felt his top slowly get damp with tears. Scott knew he couldn’t stop Alan from crying, he knew he couldn’t stop the pain and he so desperately wanted to. He held Alan close, his grip not once faltering whilst they both let out their emotions in different ways. Scott didn’t cry, he didn’t feel like he had the right, but he held onto what was dear to him. Moving a hand through Alans' hair further proved that he was here in this moment and not back in that dreaded room, alone without anyone. “Don’t leave me….” Alan said into Scott’s chest. “I’m not going anywhere Alan, I’m right here because you saved me,” Scott replied, planting a soft kiss on top of Alans' head before going back to running a hand through his hair. This wasn’t over, both of them would need to recover after this. But they would be able to recover together, as a family.

[avengerofiron]

the people who built me || danny & tony

summary: tony has a choice to make when he encounters iron fist during an enforcer patrol. he chooses family. (solo incoming when lola gets time about The Consequences TM - sorry tony)

when: a few days before the siege

word count: 10,094 (we thought we were brief. we were not.)

trigger warnings: torture mention, abuse mention, death mentions

featuring: danny rand

TONY: Everyone made mistakes. It was a fundamental part of life — a fundamental part of science — to do something once, find out where you went wrong, and improve on it for the next situation that came your way. That innovation was what Tony lived for, what he breathed every single day in Stark Industries or as he acted as Iron Man. It was innovation that other people boasted about, too, until the point where mistakes became too much for them to simply brush off, when mistakes were too large to sweep under the rug, that’s when things got dicey.

Tony Stark had a habit of making things dicey.

The Sentinels weren’t his doing, though. For once, he wasn’t the guy in the room to create the targeting system, or the artificial intelligence, or even the giant, maniacal robots designed for one purpose and one purpose alone. These robots were created by men before Tony was even born, years before most kids would remember their first appearance on the scene just after the events went down in Cuba.

Their design needed a little work. Tony could say that with certainty. Their morality needed a complete overhaul, and if Tony could see that, if he could spot it a mile off with no hesitation, he didn’t see how they were going to spin it to make the public agree — but they did. They did, even if Ross stepped into every meeting with a face that looked like he’d been chewing on a wasp because his ass had been well and truly handed to him by the World Security Council. . Security. Sometimes it came at the cost of what really mattered in life. Sometimes, in the process of making a better world, you destroyed the old one that was perfect in its own unique way. Sometimes, people needed a little bad to make the good worth it.

Tony was still learning that. Of course, it was a little hard to learn with Ross breathing down his neck, the warning lingering on the horizon of every decision he made or didn’t make in the field.

He couldn’t afford to mess up. He couldn’t afford to make a dicey mistake, couldn’t afford to pull a Tony Stark.

Inevitably, that was exactly what would happen.

The Sentinels tracking system picked up an anomaly that wasn’t significant enough to investigate, but enough to suggest that something not entirely above board was going down in Hell’s Kitchen. Someone had latent powers they were aware not to use was one of the suggestions thrown around the meeting room. Others said it could be a fault with the system. Either way it needed checking out, and enforcement agents had been put on clean up duty while the robots handled the real, perceptible threats that they didn’t need to negotiate with. . Not just enforcement agents — Tony, specifically. Iron Man, glorified janitor, delegated to the bottom of the pile for the past month because he dared not to disclose some minorly crucial facts to his employers.

Bastards.

“You’ve reached the point of the fluctuation, boss,” FRIDAY informed him through the helmet’s sound system. “So far I’m picking up a single heat signature other than your own.”

“Tell me it isn’t burning up,” Tony replied. “I’ve had enough of fire people for one lifetime.”

“I wasn’t with you during that one, boss. Must’ve been the other computer.”

“Must’ve been.”

“The temperature signal appears human. They’re moving slowly — no adrenaline spike as of yet. I would suggest landing before things get nasty.”

“When have you ever known my missions to get nasty?” Tony asked. FRIDAY remained conspicuously silent, but her presence was noted. Tony could almost imagine her rolling her eyes. “Alright, darling. Let’s get this show on the road.” . He landed on the pavement in the alleyway, hand up and palm glowing. “Hi there,” he announced, voice robotic but not nearly as warped as he would like it to be. (Doing things you fundamentally disagreed with was easier when you were wearing a mask, he had found — Iron Man had always been more of his true self than Tony Stark, billionaire playboy.) “I’m Iron Man, you’re in breach of the Sokovia Accords, and we’re going to need to have a little chat. If you don’t mind, come easily and this’ll all be—”

The figure turned. The way he moved was as familiar as someone stepping around Tony’s kitchen counter, or pulling Tali over on the couch onto his knee, or messing around with Colleen in the gym, clearly holding back while Tony was watching because Tony didn’t know, couldn’t know, the truth.

The truth that was staring him in the face now.

He was wearing a mask, of course. Even Danny wasn’t trusting enough to know that running around with his own face in New York City in the current climate would result in anything but trouble. Tony still knew him, though. He knew him when he was a kid, chasing after him at galas. He knew him as a man, talking about a plane falling from the sky and snow surrounding him. He knew him as a cousin, broaching a subject, a word, Tony had always dodged, backing off the second Tony didn’t bite.

(Sometimes he wondered what would’ve happened if he did. If he gave Danny the truth in that moment, if he opened himself up, if he admitted something to both of them that he’d been carrying since he was fifteen years old. Sometimes he wondered, but not tonight. He was a little preoccupied.)

The man in the mask, the man on the Sentinels’ system, the man on FRIDAY’s tracker, the man he was sent to arrest …

It was Danny Rand.

DANNY: Over the last few years, Danny had had a few very close calls in his life of vigilantism. He’d been stabbed (multiple times now), shot (though only by Harold), kidnapped (also multiple times, which was worrying), maimed… The list went on and on. He had plenty of personal experiences to tell him just how dangerous this life was, plenty of scars and near-death moments to inform him just what he was risking every time he pulled that bandanna over his face.

He’d only recently come to consider the law to be one of those potential consequences.

Danny had never been arrested before. He’d certainly come close a few times in his early days back in the city, when his heart beat too quickly in his chest and he swung his fists at anyone who looked at him too closely, but he’d never seen the backseat of a patrol car. Thanks to Harold’s meddling, he’d even found himself on a federal watchlist for a moment or so, but Jeri took care of it before it could lead anywhere substantial. The closest Danny had come to prison was his forced stay in Birch, an experience he desperately wanted to avoid repeating.

If he were smart, he supposed, he might have scaled back the vigilantism to prevent an arrest. It was what Ward had advised him to do, on more than one occasion. Money can do a lot of things, Danny, he’d warned, but this isn’t one of them. If they catch you, they will send you to the Raft. Not some nice prison for tax evaders, the fucking Raft. And he was right. Danny knew he was right, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to hang up his worn hoodie and yellow bandana. Every time he tried, Ward’s voice was drowned out by a thousand others.

Protect my city. Matt, who hadn’t died for him but almost did, who’d trusted him to save a city he hadn’t even managed to stay in.

Danny Rand failed an entire city. The place he was sworn to protect. Sowande, who had been cruel and ruthless and right. . You should never have borne the Fist. Davos, angry and bitter and hitting the nail on the head every time. Danny had power, and he didn’t deserve it. He hadn’t earned it. Not really, not in the ways that counted. If he did nothing with it, if he failed New York the way he’d failed K’un Lun, what was the point of him? What did any of the sacrifices made to get him where he was mean?

So he didn’t stop. He kept fighting, kept roaming the streets with his Fist glowing as if there weren’t robots out to drag him in and enforcers less understanding than Colleen looking for a high profile collar. Because he needed to make amends. (Because he didn’t know how to stop.)

Tonight had been quiet. He hadn’t seen any sentinels, hadn’t run into any enforcers. He’d barely even seen any crime, only taking out one mugger by well into the morning hours. He probably should have been glad for it, but his skin itched and his chest was tight and he wanted to hit something. When he heard a quiet tang of something unmistakably metallic landing behind him, he was almost relieved. Finally, finally, a chance to let out some of that pent up rage on something he didn’t have to feel guilty for breaking.

But then he turned around, and the world tilted on its axis.

Everyone knew who wore the Iron Man suit, but even if he hadn’t there was no mistaking Tony’s voice beneath the modulated tones. Danny had been following Tony Stark around since he was a little kid, been clinging to his pant legs since he could walk. The fifteen-year gap in their relationship amounted to surprisingly little when he crashed on Tony’s couch as often as he did as an adult. Tony was there in good moments and bad, there on Christmas and in hospital rooms, at family dinners and in the moments when he couldn’t scrape himself off the floor. Tony had been there for all of that, and now, he was here for this.

And Danny froze. . Tony was frozen too, and though Danny couldn’t see his face, he had a feeling the wide-eyed expression beneath Iron Man’s mask was a pretty close match to the one he wore on his own face right now. Uncertainly, Danny shifted. Half of him wanted to walk towards Tony while the other half screamed at him to move away. He didn’t know which half was right. Maybe neither of them was.

“Hi,” he said experimentally, as if checking to see if his voice still worked. “I don’t… Uh, I can’t go to jail.” He bit his lip, barely stopped himself from adding, ’Please, Tony,’ because if Tony didn’t know who he was now, there would be no hiding it after something like that.

TONY: At least Batman roamed the rooftops of Gotham with a voice modulator. At least Daredevil pulled off that dark, mysterious, brooding, silent vigilante type. At least for the few weeks Tony himself managed to keep an alter ego on the down low, he wore a mask that covered the entirety of his face, his whole squishy human body, and his multitude of self worth issues all in one handy package. Danny was out here in a hoodie that wouldn’t have been out of place in Rhodey’s grungy backpack in MIT and a bandana that was riding up on his entirely too familiar nose, his voice breaking through in a weak attempt at a different pitch that Tony could see through in an instant, because he wasn’t a moron.

He was a genius, a fact that he often lamented over, and a genius who loved Danny Rand, at that.

Christ, it was looking at his own heart staring back at him, wide eyed and about to bolt, feet two seconds away from running down the alleyway and never looking back. Tony could catch him, of course. The suit could catch a rocket, if it wanted — but the question was whether he wanted to. The question was whether he wanted to see for himself, up close and personal, what Danny learned in the years he was gone, what knowledge he shared with Colleen that made the woman utterly terrifying. The question was whether Tony was willing to put someone else he loved in cuffs while the man he’d asked to marry him remained on the run, being fed intelligence from Stark systems, being told that if it came down to it, Tony would make the hard choice because it was the right one. . Making the right choice always seemed so difficult. Tony told himself that he needed compasses, like Steve or Sharon or Jarvis, Yinsen or Rhodes or Rumiko (not all of them were good compasses, but that was beside the fact), in order to make them. He told himself that he didn’t know the difference between wrong and right, because when he looked back at his extensive list of personal defects and lifelong tendency towards making mistakes, he figured that was proof of some void in his chest that other people had filled, something his parents failed to cultivate or he burned away with liquor.

But he knew, now. He knew it as much as he knew when Steve looked at him he’d burn down the world to put things right. He knew when he looked at Danny, he could never put cuffs around his wrist. he could never let anyone touch a hair on the kid’s goddamn head, and he wasn’t a kid anymore, Tony knew that, but he was. He always would be.

Tony lost him once before. He wasn’t losing him again, not by choice, not like this.

Of course, of all the words Tony could have chosen to put that sentiment into the universe, he went with something completely …

Well, completely Tony.

“Yeah,” he said, helmet retracting quickly. “No shit you can’t go to jail.”

“Boss,” FRIDAY interjected, “perhaps we should shut off the Panel communication servers-”

Tony clicked one of the panels on the suit’s arm, and FRIDAY faded into nothingness — along with Ross’ feed to this conversation. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tony demanded, taking a step forward. “Do you just think you can go around the city in … in not even spandex. You’re in less than spandex. You look like you raided a Goodwill and then they kicked you out because you were making the babies cry. I … I do everything I can to try and stop you from getting into shit, Da— Iron Fist, and you and all the, uh … the other ones, you all keep doing this!”

DANNY: Surprisingly, this wasn’t actually a situation Danny had been in before. When he first returned from K’un Lun, he had seen no reason to lie to people about where he had been and what had been done to him. He told the Meachums everything, didn’t understand why they didn’t believe him immediately because it was real. He knew it was real, had the scars and the nightmares to prove it. He told Colleen who, while more receptive, still spent the first few hours of their acquaintanceship looking at him like a bomb about to go off. He told the doctors at Birch, positive that they would understand what he was saying and let him go, so sure that it would reinforce his sanity. He told anyone who would listen about the Fist, and everyone looked at him like something inside of him was broken. Like it was some wild story invented by a child’s mind in order to avoid accepting the truth.

Danny had never wanted Tony to look at him like that. He’d looked up to Ward as a kid, sure, but back then, Tony had been his hero. He’d wanted, so badly, to do everything Tony Stark did. He remembered saying as much to his mother one night as she was putting him to bed, remembered barely stopping for air as he launched into an elaborate retelling of what he’d done at the Starks’ that day, adding animated hand gestures to the conversation as he went on and on about Tony’s games that only he really knew all the rules to and the way he was never angry when Danny and Sharon made up their own rules on top of them, the way the three of them laughed and played and no one flipped the gameboard over when they were losing the way Ward always did and no one cried like Joy used to. The Meachums were family, but that had always been more because of Harold than the children. The Carters and the Starks were family because of Tony and Sharon. Because of Danny.

And now, he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d be the reason they stopped being family, too. . He didn’t think Tony would arrest him. Not if he knew it was him, not if he recognized the eyes staring back at him. On a logical level, Danny knew that Tony never put him in cuffs, never take him to the Raft. But old paranoia told him he was assuming too much, old anxiety clawed at his gut and demanded to be free. Ward had put him in a mental institution, had paid people to hurt him while he was there. Harold had traded him to the Hand, had pointed a gun at him and pulled the trigger. Joy had hired someone to kidnap him, knowing he might not survive the experience. Davos had cut into him, bled him out over a clay pot, shattered every fucking bone in his leg twice for good measure. Danny loved his family, he really did. But he had a lot of bad experiences with trust, a lot of scars he could have avoided if, for a moment, he had loved less.

Tony Stark was not Ward Meachum. Danny knew that. Tony never would have hired guards to chase him down the street with guns in hand because he was afraid of losing money, wouldn’t have hurt him over and over and over again to save his own reputation. Tony wasn’t Joy or Davos, either, and he certainly wasn’t Harold. Tony was a good man who loved Danny, who had always treated him like a person instead of a billionaire, who had let him be a kid when no one else seemed interested in doing so. The Carters and the Starks and the Rands, they were a different kind of family than he’d had with Harold and Joy and Ward. They were less cutthroat, less money-hungry. Sharon and Tony had never wanted anything from him except for him to be himself. Danny knew that. . But that old paranoia still hovered for a moment as he and Tony stared at each other, both still as they assessed the situation. Danny stood lightly on the balls of his feet, ready to bolt if he needed to, as if it would make a difference. He couldn’t outrun Tony when he was wearing the suit, and even the intimate knowledge he’d gained over the last few years of vigilantism wouldn’t help him much against Iron Man. He was pretty sure Tony had some kind of x-ray vision in that thing, so hiding in a dumpster would only end up embarrassing him.

Danny didn’t realize he’d been holding a breath until Tony spoke and he let it out, a quiet exhale as a wave of relief hit him so hard it threatened to knock him off his feet. Tony didn’t sound like Iron Man, enforcer of the Accords right now. He sounded like Tony Stark, exasperated older cousin getting ready to gear up for a pretty intense lecture. . Tony did something with his arm that Danny thought might mean the higher-ups couldn’t eavesdrop anymore, and Danny’s shoulders relaxed just a little. He still carried some tension in his shoulders as Tony launched into his lecture, but he was pretty sure he wasn’t getting arrested for the moment. It allowed him to relax enough to look mildly offended, if nothing else. “Hey,” he said, “Je --- uh, my friend said spandex is lame. And this is comfortable! I need to be comfortable.” Not that the outfit was the point, but it was the principle of the thing, wasn’t it? He had to defend his style choices. “Look, you’re mad. I know you’re mad. Can I just --- I can explain. Okay? It’s just, uh, it’s a really long story, and I ---” He broke off for a moment, searching for words momentarily before continuing, “I punched a dragon! And now I’ve got --- I’ve got control over my chi, and I --- A building fell on Daredevil! And he told me, he said, ’Protect my city,’” his voice got momentarily deeper in a poor imitation of Matt, “and I couldn’t say no, because he was gone! And then --- And then my brother did a sacred ritual on me and I broke my leg and went to China, which you knew that part because of course you would have noticed that I was in China, right? And now I’m back! And, um, yeah. That’s it.”

It was an utterly nonsensical explanation, a series of stories strung together that, from the outside, seemed completely unrelated. Danny had never been the best at setting the record straight, especially not under pressure. Tony knew that, of course.

TONY: He wasn’t his father. Tony had never been his father, and recently, he’d stopped feeling inferior about that fact and started feeling grateful. He rarely gave over to anger. His rage, when it was prompted, came relatively smoothly. It built in him, gathered in his chest, curled around in his mind until he found the way most appropriate to put it to good use. There were rare occasions when Tony lost his cool, at least in that regard.

This was one of those rare occasions.

He was pissed. He was pissed off, and he was angry, and he was every word that he could think of to describe the rising heat on the back of his neck, the way his hands balled into fists. Any other man in a metal suit would use the mask to its fullest potential at this moment and hide his weakness. Tony had never been good at covering the emotions on his sleeve, not when it came to enemies, not when it came to strangers, or the press. Definitely not when it came to family.

He was angry, but he was terrified, too. His throat felt tight as he spoke, his voice raising but not nearly strong enough to have any kind of weight behind it.

“You know I’m mad?” Tony repeated, raising an eyebrow. “You know I’m mad? Are you fucking joking me?” Danny stopped talking, and Tony held up a hand. “Listen, this is the moment where you zip it, alright? This is the point where you stop talking, because I have a lot of things to say to you, and you just—”

Danny kept. On. Talking.

(Jesus, that ran in the family.) . The words that were coming out of Danny’s mouth were quick and panicked, and suddenly Tony was having flashbacks to when Danny was nine years old. Sharon assisted in the breaking of one of Tony’s vases, entirely accidentally, and Danny had a hundred and one excuses for Tony, not one of which included any form of a lie. At that stage, the kid had been utterly incapable of keeping a single detail from Tony. Secrets weren’t something that existed between the three of them.

Except they had. Except every time Sharon and Danny walked into his house in Malibu, Tony had to clean up weeks of evidence of his real life, the life he led on a daily basis. He had to hide the people he spent time with, the things he wasted time on, the things that kids didn’t want to see and he would die before he admitted to, because they, for God knows what reason, looked up to him. Cared for him. Loved him.

Danny was talking fast, and he’d never lied to Tony before except for when he had, but when he said dragon Tony couldn’t find even a piece of his heart that doubted the validity of what he was saying. “A building fell on Daredevil because he chases that,” Tony interjected, before Danny could go any further. “I don’t know the guy as anything other than a dot on my threat analysis, but come on. He goes out in a mask and he tries to make a difference, and that’s honourable and heroic and all of those things, but it’s also fucking stupid.” . What Iron Fist was doing was stupid. FRIDAY was in his ear reminding Tony that he was stupid, that there was a timer on this conversation and Ross would realise before long that Tony had tapped out, and that only spelled trouble when Tony was already on the shitlist …

“This life,” Tony said, taking another step forward, gesturing at Danny’s gear, “this life only ends one way. It ends with you in the ground. It ends with someone taking joy in putting you there. And that’s … I do this because I killed people. I killed innocent people for decades. I killed people, and I need to make up for that but Christ, you …”

Tony sucked in a breath, and all pretence went out the window.

“You had ten years.” He was yelling. No, yelling would be easier — he was trying to scream, but the words were barely coming out. “You were ten years old and you were dead. You were dead and that damn near killed all of us, you know that? You ever wonder why Sharon’s mom worries more than is even close to normal about her coming home in a box? You ever wonder why I … I was in a cave and I was seeing so much shit, and they were going to kill me and I saw you. I saw you and you weren’t even dead. You weren’t. You were alive the whole damn time.”

Tony stepped back, then, heart beat pounding loud in his ears. “You can’t do that to us again.” He said it the same way Pepper had, pushing herself out of bed, shooting him a glare on the way down to the couch. He said it like there was no other solution, like Danny would stop or he wouldn’t, and Tony would be able to walk away — but he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t even be able to stop himself if Danny asked him to. “If it wasn’t me,” he continued, “if it wasn’t me here, tonight, things would be different. You know that, right?”

DANNY: There were days when Tony reminded him so much of Ward that Danny ached with it, moments when his cousin got a look on his face and it felt like Danny was looking at his brother instead. This moment, with Tony clearly and understandably angry and Danny standing in front of him with some dangerous stunt only faintly in the rearview mirror, was one of them. Danny couldn’t help but think back to the thousand and one times he’d had this conversation before. In Ward’s office, when he and Danny were slowly making their way back towards being brothers. On his couch, bloodied and beaten, with Ward quietly trying to pretend not to be terrified. On the runway of a private airport, Ward threatening to lay down in front of a plane to keep Danny from going off on his own.

He’d had the conversation with other people too, of course. Colleen, who waited up until he stumbled home at five in the morning with bruised knuckles and blood on his hands, who asked him quietly how many times he’d lit up the Fist, how many hours of sleep he was running on. Claire, who told him how terrified she was that his obsession with being something he wasn’t would take away everything good about what he was. Jessica, Matt, Luke, Misty… Danny had people who loved him, people who knew what he did and tried desperately to convince him to do it in a way that wouldn’t kill him in the end. And Danny wished he knew how to do it for them. He wished he knew how to be the sort of man who might get a happy ending, the sort of man who could die peacefully of old age someday instead of the sort destined to bleed out in a back alley gasping and wheezing and waiting for help that would never come. He wanted to be that person for them, but he couldn’t. Most days, he still wasn’t confident he knew how to be a person at all. . Tony was talking to him as if he was one. Tony was talking to him like he was a child, perhaps, but he was talking to him as if he was a person all the same, like he was more than a weapon, and Danny had to remind himself that that meant something. He opened his mouth to say more, to dig his grave a little deeper, but Tony told him to be quiet and Danny had always wanted to do pretty much anything Tony told him to do.

It was Tony’s turn to talk now, Tony’s turn to talk about how buildings didn’t typically fall on men who didn’t run into them when they were already shaking, and Danny winced just a little. “A building fell on Daredevil because I ---” He cut himself off, taking a deep, shuddering breath. How much should he reveal here? How much did he tell Tony about the things Iron Fist had been a part of, the things that happened because of him. As far as the police knew, Iron Fist had been nowhere near Midland Circle. Danny Rand’s involvement in the collapse had been swiftly covered up by Ward, who made a hefty donation and requested that his brother’s trauma not be capitalized on to a very receptive commissioner with a very big check. Danny could tell Tony, right in this moment, that it wasn’t Daredevil’s stupidity that dropped a building on his head --- it was Danny’s. He wondered if that would change Tony’s perspective or make him angrier. . “I know how this ends,” he said instead, quiet and apologetic and utterly unafraid. Danny had always known how this would end, had thought he’d seen the end of it more than once, with Bakuto’s blade slipping silently between his ribs or Harold’s gun aimed firmly at his head or Elektra’s face inches from his own or Davos carving him up or Rhyno’s gang watching him shiver and shake and vomit blood onto the warehouse floor and laughing. Danny knew how this story ended, and he’d made his peace with it. If he died tomorrow, he still would have lived far longer than he had expected. He’d accepted death at ten years old with a plane shaking around him, accepted it again a few months later with sweat beading on his brow and boys his age hitting him over and over and over again because there was no mercy in K’un Lun, not even a little. He’d accepted his death at the mouth of a cave, welcomed it when he stepped inside with nothing but his clenched fists and his aching muscles to face a beast he’d only heard of in storybooks. Death was nothing new, nothing scary. Danny had known it for years.

Tony went on then, talked about why he put on a metal suit, and Danny took a shuddering breath, closed his eyes for a moment as the words rushed out before he could stop them. “So have I,” he blurted, sudden and thick and full of grief. “I’m --- I had a job. I had people to protect, and I failed them, and they’re --- I have things to make up for, too. I have scales to balance.” You are nothing. Danny Rand failed an entire city. The place he was sworn to protect. Sowande’s words echoed in his ear, and they were true. They were true, no matter how many people claimed they weren’t. . When Danny’s plane went down, he’d never considered how it affected other people. He’d been ten years old, had his father’s body and his mother’s screams burned into the forefront of his mind, and thoughts back to New York had never been to think of how the people he’d left behind were coping with his presumed death. He remembered Joy talking about it shortly after he came back, quiet and mournful. He remembered the way Jeri looked at him with more emotion in her expression than he’d ever seen her wear before or since. He remembered Sharon showing up to his office and threatening to kill him for disrespecting the memory of a person she’d loved. He’d heard all those stories, but he’d never really stopped to ponder them.

Not until now.

Tony’s words rung in his ears, and Danny flinched. “I wasn’t…” He started, trailing off because what could he say? I’m sorry my plane went down? I’m sorry you thought I was dead and it broke you? I’m sorry you had to lose me? Danny had been a ghost for a very long time, a child haunting the people who had loved him, sainted by his death. And he was alive now, he was back, but they were still haunted. The ghost of the boy they’d known still hung in the corners of their minds, still rattled chains in the basements and made the floorboards groan. You couldn’t undo fifteen years of grief. . “I’m not trying to,” he said quietly, and it didn’t feel true even if it was. Danny didn’t want to die. He’d realized it all at once in Rhyno’s hideout, when BB crouched beside him and they’d both understood with abject certainty that the gang would be disposing of a corpse by nightfall. Danny didn’t want to die, but he’d still gone after Davos mere hours after he was rescued from that warehouse. He’d still gone out, alone and unarmed, to fight a man who’d already beaten him once, still landed himself in the hospital with doctors who whispered in voices they thought he couldn’t hear about the probability that amputation would be required to save his life. Danny didn’t want to die, but he didn’t know how to stop chasing death, either. He didn’t know how to walk away. “I know.” He said quietly. If any enforcer but Tony had found him, things would be different. Things would be worse.

Danny ran a hand through his hair, eyes burning. “I can’t stop, Tony. I can’t --- The way I was raised, after that plane went down, they taught me… I wasn’t a person to them. I was --- I’m a weapon, Tony, a, a thing, and I don’t --- It was expected there. That I’d… They expected it.” They expected him to die. Some of the kids took bets on it, in the beginning. ’If he lives more than a month, I’ll do your chores for a week.’ ’You can have half my rations for three days if he makes it a year.’ They hadn’t even tried to hide it, had spoken about it clear and outright well within earshot. Danny had grown used to that, over the years. It was how things were. He wasn’t supposed to live. He wasn’t meant to.

TONY: He’d been pretending his entire life. He’d been wearing masks since he was a child, going to galas with his father’s hand digging into his shoulder, leaving bruises in the shapes of his fingertips that expensive material always managed to hide. He’d been pretending from the first second he put on the metal mask in that cave, pretending that he was capable of becoming something bigger than former warmonger, Tony Stark, the boy turned man who was so naive as to believe that the person who helped raise him was incapable of hurting him, incapable of ordering his death.

Obadiah loved him, Tony had reasoned. Obadiah loved him, and he couldn’t possibly have known about any of the deals under the table, couldn’t possibly be the mastermind Pepper said he was. Obadiah loved him, and that was exactly why he wanted Tony dead, because loving Tony Stark had never been easy, not for anyone.

Rhodey’s career almost ended just by associating with him. Pepper was dropped into a blazing fire. Rumiko’s family all but disowned her, Tiberius’ stocks dropped, Sharon was forced to pick him up off the floor and discharge him from hospital, driving home silent and pretending that there wasn’t this large, unspoken thing sitting in the space between the driver and passenger’s seat. Loving Tony meant Maria cried every damn night. Loving Tony was so damn difficult that it made Howard want to hurt him, and he had. . ‘You’ll understand when you’re a parent.’ He’d uttered that more than once. ‘When you’re looking at someone you watched grow up, someone who has disappointed you, lied to you, failed to become what they should be — when that happens, Anthony, you’ll understand that it isn’t as black and white as you seem to think it is.’

Tony was looking at Danny. He was looking at Danny, and he felt like his heart had jumped out of his chest and was spluttering on the pavement between them, sustained only by the muddy water in the puddles of the alleyway, but he didn’t want to hurt him. He didn’t want anything to hurt him.

All Tony wanted, in that desperate, aching moment, was to bring Danny to a place where they never needed to have a conversation like this again, a place where they didn’t need to dance around the truth for months and years, because the Starks might have lied, the Carters might have made their name out of mistruths, the Rands may have misdirected, but their kids were honest. The three of them, they’d always loved each other different.

They’d always loved each other right.

(Tony was capable of that, after all — of loving someone in the correct way, of not turning into his father. In other circumstances, he may have been relieved. He had other things on his mind at this point in time.) . “Is that how you want it to end?” Tony would understand that, too. He would understand it more than almost anything else, that desperate need to go out in a blaze of glory to prove himself, to tip the cosmic scales, to cleanse his hands, to make himself worthy of being called hero by kids and parents alike. He’d tasted a human death. He didn’t much care for it. He would understand.

Just like Danny understood him.

I have scales to balance. Tony shifted, feeling like the conversation was on a Dutch tilt, like he’d had a few too many and the world wasn’t that blissful blur anymore but something far more disconcerting.

“Okay,” Tony breathed. It took him three attempts to make the word audible. “Okay, you can’t stop. That’s … we can work with that. We can make that happen, but you— if you want to do this, you have a chance now to do it right. Legitimise yourself. Get the protection of the Panel. Think of the good you could do if you didn’t need to look over your shoulder every five minutes for the cops.” Tony sucked in a breath, taking another step forward. “Register that weapon. I know you. I know what you stand for. Other people might not. They wouldn’t get it. If you …”

(It was Maria at the bottom of the marble staircase, head in her hands, shaking it gently when Tony asked if they were leaving after all. It was Steve, looking up, meeting his eye, putting the pen back in its case and walking away, taking the air in the room with him. It was Natasha on that balcony, or Rhodes in a plane saying hanging out with you is bad for our friendship, or Pepper asking what the hell was wrong with him that he could think, even for a moment, she would be okay with…)

“Please,” Tony said, reaching out a hand. “Come with me. Let me fix this, for you. Let me fix all of it.” We don’t have much time.

DANNY: In the months after he was brought into K’un Lun, after the wounds from the plane crash had healed and he had learned to breathe around the biting cold of air far crisper than even the coldest winters in New York, Danny had developed a habit of running away. It happened often in the beginning, so much so that sometimes he’d find Chodok waiting for him at the edge of the city with a knowing expression on his face, sad and disappointed and utterly unsurprised. He never got far, of course --- there was nowhere to go. There was no way out of K’un Lun, wouldn’t be until the gate opened fifteen years later, but Danny hadn’t wanted to believe that back then. He’d struggled to understand the complexities, had a hard time wrapping his mind around the new rules that seemed so strange compared to what he’d grown up with. How could something be there and then not be there? How could there be a way out one day and nothing the next? How could he exist for the rest of his life in a place that had made it so abundantly clear to him just how little he belonged?

He remembered Chodok, on one of the occasions he found him waiting at the gate for the next grand escape, looking especially exhausted. ’Why do you do this?’ He’d asked, frustrated and at his wits end and sounding more like a father than anyone else in the city had ever bothered and Danny had felt a rush of anger and grief so unexpected it had nearly knocked him off his feet. He’d wanted to scream, wanted to pound his tiny fists against the ground as if he had the strength to bend it to his will, to make it into something familiar and safe and home. His throat had felt tight and Chodok’s hand’s gripping his shoulders had been the only thing keeping him upright. ’I was trying to go home,’ he’d said, quiet and mournful. ’I’ve been trying to go home, I just want to go home and no one will let me. Why won’t you let me?’ . The outburst was embarrassing in hindsight, so childish that Danny felt humiliated at the memory, but the sentiment remained. There were days, even now, when he looked out into the city’s skyline and the thought would cross his mind, strong and certain and utterly nonsensical. I want to go home. Why can’t I go home? It reminded him of sitting in a helicopter with Colleen, of coming back to New York after months away, of looking down at the lights and feeling nothing where he should have felt safety. ’That’s the beauty of it,’ she’d said, ’it can be whatever you need it to be.’ ’What do you need it to be?’ He’d asked, because maybe if he knew her answer he could puzzle out his own. And she’d said home, like that was all there was to it, like one word was a complete sentence, and Danny felt nothing. He’d fought like hell to get back to New York, had nearly died for the city a hundred times over, and he felt nothing.

It took him a long time to understand why. It took him years to realize that it wasn’t buildings or sidewalks that got him out of bed in the middle of the night to run barefoot through the snow, desperate for a way back. It wasn’t his family’s old brownstone or his father’s office that tightened his chest with grief and rage and confusion when Chodok asked him why he insisted on running away time and time again. It was never New York that Danny was trying to get back to. It was Ward. It was Joy, it was Sharon. It was Tony.

Tony, who was looking at him like he’d ripped his heart out of his chest. Tony, who had accepted him back into his life as if he’d never left it, who had never once questioned where he had been or why he was different or why sometimes it seemed to hurt him just to breathe. Tony, who must have known all along that Danny had a nighttime hobby but who had never quite let it come to the surface because knowing meant he’d have to act on it.

Tony, who looked just as frustrated and tired now as Chodok had back then. . It occurred to Danny, quite suddenly, that there had been more than one driving factor in his grief that day with Chodok’s hands on his shoulders. It occurred to him that he’d spoken of home, but that hadn’t been all he’d wanted to say. The words hit him now all at once, quiet thoughts soaked in a child’s anger. Why didn’t you let me stay with you? Why did you give me away to Lei Kung? He doesn’t even like me, but you do. You’re the only person here who’s ever been nice to me, and you gave me away. Chodok must have known, when he’d found a boy in the snow, what would happen to him in K’un Lun. He must have known what he’d go through. He must have known they’d warp Danny into a weapon, must have known they’d beat him and berate him and hurt him, and he’d still done it. Danny thought, back then, that Chodok was the only person who’d never hurt him, but he had. Maybe not directly, but he had.

And now here was Tony, with that same expression on his face, and one key difference Danny recognized with ease --- Tony would never hurt him. Tony loved him the way Chodok couldn’t, the way Lei Kung and Harold couldn’t, the way maybe even Wendell couldn’t. Without consequence. Without condition. Danny had gone against him in a way that would have been punishable by death in K’un Lun, in a way that would have made Tony well within his rights to put him in cuffs and take him to the Raft, and Tony didn’t. He wouldn’t. There weren’t many people who loved Danny like that, and he thought Tony might have been first. He thought Tony might have been the first person to look at him, before K’un Lun and the plane crash and everything else, and decide he was worth loving.

He hoped letting him down wouldn’t change that. . “No,” Danny said, too quickly for it to be true. He paused for a moment, closing his eyes and swallowing before amending. “I don’t know.” He knew how it was supposed to end for him. He knew he’d been meant to die on that mountainside, when the Hand’s soldiers invaded the path he was supposed to guard. The Iron Fist was always supposed to die an honorable death in battle, and there was no K’un Lun left to die for but there were still battles to be fought. If he lost his life in one, maybe it would make up for the battle he’d missed. Maybe the only way you could find redemption was through death.

Tony went on then, offered options, and Danny felt like he was suffocating just a little. Register that weapon. Could he do that? It left a sour taste in his mouth, twisted a knot in his stomach that he didn’t understand. “Tony…” The name fell from his lips in a whisper, and it sounded like an apology, even to him. How could he explain it? How could he talk about K’un Lun, about the lasting damage done to him there? He’d belonged to someone once. He’d been a thing, and they had owned him. He existed for them, bled for them, would die for them, and they’d treated him with as much respect as they treated their swords. You kept a weapon sharp, you kept it clean. You gave it a sheath to rest in, you recognized its power when it was in your hands. You showed a weapon respect, you understood the danger it represented.

You didn’t love it. . You didn’t call a weapon by its preferred nickname. You didn’t ask it how it felt about the solution you used to clean it with. You didn’t value its opinion, you didn’t tuck it into bed at night, you didn’t hold it close when it woke up screaming, didn’t wipe away its tears when it cried. When a weapon had an owner, it couldn’t be loved. And Danny wanted, with the same childlike desperation that inspired his outburst in Chodok’s arms more than a decade ago, to be loved.

If he signed the Accords, it wouldn’t make people love him less. He knew that. On a logical level, he knew that. But the heart was not a logical organ, and his was beating so quickly in his chest that some paranoid part of him feared his ribs might break. “I can’t,” he said quietly. “Tony, I just can’t.”

TONY: He wasn’t talking half as much as he was ten minutes ago. Danny wasn’t arguing, wasn’t trying to plead his case. He wasn’t putting the pen back in the case like Steve, or reaching a hand out to him like Sam had on the grass that day. He wasn’t looking at Tony how Obadiah used to, like he was exhausted and frustrated and disappointed all in one, like he couldn’t understand how Tony could be so intelligent and still unable to grasp what he conceived to be simple facts of the universe, and he sure as hell wasn’t looking at Tony like Howard used to.

He was looking at Tony a little how Maria used to, though — a little like Tony was breaking his heart. Tony decided not to think too much into that.

Maybe this would be easier if Danny was arguing. Maybe it would be easier for Tony to say he was convinced to let Danny go, or that he was persuaded to break the code that he’d signed up to enforce, if his cousin was standing in front of him in a goddamn bandana making a case for his vigilante activities that Tony had been resolutely ignoring for the past six months (years, really. Not just months. Years, since he came back).

Tony could’ve been dead in Afghanistan. He could’ve been dead and he wouldn’t even have the chance to stand in front of Danny and make a decision that should be difficult.

It wasn’t difficult.

“Stop,” Tony said, raking his fingers through his hair. What he’d give to be a few shots down right now — and with that thought, memories came flooding back of Sharon, barely out of high school, coming to sign him out of the hospital because he didn’t want Obie to see him, because of the shame that came with it. Memories came flooding back of Pepper, and of Rhodes falling, and of Steve in Siberia, and … . He turned from Danny. A tactical misstep, undoubtedly, but Tony wasn’t thinking tactically. He knew Danny wasn’t going anywhere. He knew that, because he knew Danny.

He also knew something else. He ran his hands down over his face, eyes burning, and turned back to meet his cousin’s eye.

“Just because you love someone,” he started, swallowing thickly around the lump in his throat. “Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you’re good for them, right? Just because … I mean, I’m not good.” The suit whirred as his hand went to his chest. “This thing, it’s never— I’ve never worked right. I’ve always been hard, you know, difficult to …”

Tony sucked in a breath. FRIDAY was in his ear, despite the mute order. (He really needed to work on obedient artificial intelligence — but like his friends, Tony always preferred having bots around him that were willing to call him out. A moral compass of his own creation.) They didn’t have much longer.

They didn’t have any longer. A holograph appeared from the arm of Tony’s suit, detailing several targets (colleagues) a few metres from the alleyway.

He looked up once more. “I want to be good for someone. I need that.”

A long sigh, and the helmet formed over his head. “No wonder I’m in permanent heart failure,” he muttered. “Come on, idiot. My co-workers are coming, and if they get a shot in on us, I’ll die of embarrassment before I get to kill you.”

DANNY: When Danny was ten years old, his childhood ended in a heartbeat. He was a boy one moment, sitting on a plane and listening to music that was probably a little too old for him, staring out the window at mountaintops that looked so small. Then the world started to shake and the plane started to groan and all at once, life as he knew it was over. His mother was sucked into open air, his stomach bottomed out, his father’s voice grew more and more desperate until he couldn’t hear it at all. Danny hadn’t died in that crash, but the boy he’d been when he stepped on that plane? He was gone the moment the debris hit the snow.

There were no children in K’un Lun. It was Davos who told him that, Davos who sat beside him when he was terrified and desperate and trying to understand what was going on, why he was being beaten and pushed and hurt even when he hadn’t done anything wrong. We’re kids, he’d said, almost pleading as he gripped bruised ribs and tried not to cry. Why are they hurting us? We’re just kids. And Davos, if anything, had been confused. He hadn’t understood that, in other parts of the world, things were different. He hadn’t been familiar with cultures that saw children as precious things to protect. There are no children in K’un Lun, Danny, he’d said, in what Danny figured now was a tone as close to gentle as he’d known how to make it. We’re weapons. And so he had been. For fifteen years, he had been a weapon instead of a child, a thing instead of a person. . But he didn’t feel like that now. Standing in this alley, with Tony across from him, Danny felt like he was nine years old again. He felt like a child, being scolded by a parent. He felt like he had when he’d knocked his mother’s wine glass off the table and shattered it against the floor, when his father sat him down and lectured him on caution. It’s so easy to break things, Danny, he’d said, it’s so easy to do damage. It’s hard not to. It’s hard to be good. We have to try anyways.

Danny’d broken something much worse than a wine glass now. He’d broken a law, broken more than one law, actually. He’d broken Tony’s trust, too. (And he’d broken more than that. A quick flash of a memory popped into his mind --- the Reaper, blood on his lips, grinning up at Danny. This is my favorite part. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. Danny’s throat felt tight.)

He’d opened his mouth again, to explain or to argue or to beg forgiveness, but he snapped it shut quickly when Tony told him to stop. Obedience was an easy habit to fall back on after K’un Lun, especially when he was on edge. Tony wasn’t Lei Kung or Priya, wasn’t Yu-Ti or Master Khan. He wouldn’t beat Danny into submission if he didn’t comply without question. But Danny’s mind was split between two places, and there was some comfort in doing what you were told when you were at a loss. There was some comfort in silence, too. . Tony turned away from him, and Danny squeezed his eyes shut and took a breath. He was disappointed, he knew. He’d disappointed Tony, and that was the last thing he’d ever wanted to do. “You’re one of the best people I know,” he offered quietly, because it was true. “I’m not…” he trailed off, chest aching. “I’m not what anyone wanted me to be. I don’t know how to be what anyone wants me to be. Not you, or Ward, or Sharon, or Colleen, or…” He trailed off, smiling tightly and giving his head a self-deprecating shake. If he listed all the people he’d let down, he knew, they’d spend all night in this alley.

Something was happening inside the suit, and Danny wasn’t a smart man but he could guess what. Tony had been here too long, and enforcers didn’t work alone. Someone else was going to come soon. Someone who wouldn’t want to talk things over, someone who didn’t love him enough to forgive his transgressions.

For a moment, the whole world seemed to hold its breath. Danny was pretty sure Tony wouldn’t arrest him, but he didn’t quite relax until Tony told him to come on. His shoulders slumped and he nodded his head slightly. He moved to follow Tony before hesitating, pausing with one foot still lifted in a half-step. “You’re going to get in trouble for this, aren’t you?” For helping him. For loving him.

TONY: Being a good man always came with too many terms and conditions for it to be something Tony genuinely strived for. Being a good man meant making choices that cost people their livelihoods. It meant dropping bombs in foreign countries and focusing purely on the statistics of such a move instead of the human impact. It meant saying no when you wanted to say yes, saying yes when you wanted to say no. It meant hurting the people you cared about and spending your entire life following those you didn’t, because they’d offer you a leg up the career ladder, or get you that coveted contract.

“No,” Tony said, holding his hand up. “We’re not doing that, okay? We’re not. I … I’m not the guy people put weight on, alright?” Tony was the fixer. He always had been for those he cared about, for those he didn’t, for his family and friends and strangers all in one. He was the guy people went to when they needed out of a bad situation, but the second people started loving him, the second they shifted into thinking of him as more than just a means to an end, the second they started looking at him like he knew Danny was behind that bandana, things changed. That was when people could really hurt you, when they could get inside you and twist you inside out, when they could let you down.

He’d already dragged Steve down with him, a truly good man, a man who deserved so much better than anything Tony could give. He wasn’t going to do the same thing to Danny, not without a warning. Not without a comprehensive list outlining all the reasons why Tony Stark wasn’t someone to consider a hero. . “You don’t need to know who you are,” Tony replied. “You don’t. You … I know you’re going to hate me for saying this, but you’re young, Danny. You’re so fucking young. You’re … I was still selling weapons when I was your age. I still believed Obie wasn’t trying to put a hit out on my head. I was still calling Ru every time I got drunk, and you, you didn’t even get your childhood. You didn’t get to be a teenager. You’re young. Your mistakes, they still count, but they’re not … you’re not irredeemable. You’re not.”

No one was. Not even Tony, not even when he found that hard to accept.

You’re going to get in trouble for this, aren’t you? Tony hesitated, just for a moment, then shrugged a shoulder. “I’m already in a shit load of trouble, Danny,” he said. “Helping you isn’t going to be the thing that drags me down.” As it had always been, Iron Man’s greatest foe was himself.

And then the Enforcers arrived, providing a rather convenient outlet for the anger that particular thought prompted. “Keep tight,” Tony called over, “but the second you see a gap, you get out.” With that, and trusting that for once Danny would listen to a word he said, Tony sent a blast towards one of the Enforcers, knocking them back before their weapon could fire.

This was going to be so much paperwork.

[countessrivers]

do you have any headcanons for Bruce and his (many) father figures? would love to hear them if you do!!!

Canon era:

The first one, and it’s not so much a head canon as it is just canon but some people are idiots who clearly didn’t watch the show, after his parents’ death, Bruce got 2 new dads who co-parented him over the next 6-7 years. Their names are Alfred Pennyworth and Jim Gordon and they explain so much about who and what Bruce Wayne turns out to be.

They both parent/treat Bruce quite differently. Alfred very much treats Bruce like an adult. He lets Bruce take charge of his own life and make significant decisions about his health and well-being on his own (decisions that arguably 12 year olds, especially grieving 12 year olds maybe shouldn’t be making but w/e). He encourages Bruce to take responsibility for his choices, and for the consequences of his crime-fighting, and often focuses on the practicalities and limitations of what they’re doing, and in a wider sense, how Gotham and the world works. Things like trying to keep Bruce focused on preparing for Ra’s, rather than helping the city, warning him against getting other people involved and that it will be on Bruce if they’re hurt helping him, scepticism that anything good can get done within the law with all the corruption in Gotham, telling Bruce to buck up and move on after Selina lies to him/hurts him, letting Bruce reject therapy and grief counselling, etc. I think this stems at least in part from Alfred’s role as the family butler for the first 12 years of Bruce’s life. Bruce is both his ward and employer, there is a distance and a formality there, and this idea that Bruce is in charge of his own destiny as it were, and should be treated as such, with all the responsibility that goes along with that.

Jim, for all that he sees Bruce as a kind of moral true north, someone that he looks to for guidance and a purpose, views Bruce very much as a child, and treats him as such. And it’s probably because Bruce is a child, but maybe also, as the years go on too, because he’ll never get the image of 12 year old Bruce, in that alley, out of his head. Jim sees Bruce as someone who should be protected from the worst of the world. He’ll be honest with Bruce, but he’ll also try and shield him from as much as he can, like when he hesitates over him not being long for this world because Oswald is alive and Falcone/Zsasz are after him. Bruce will often ask or demand the truth, and while Jim often caves, he does what he can to protect Bruce from the harsher parts of reality. He clashes with Alfred quite regularly over this - over Bruce being exposed to the idea of killing Matches, over Alfred letting Bruce run around and put himself in danger (Jim actually tells Alfred that he’s the adult, and so he is allowed to search his son’s room and go through his stuff and read his diary if it keeps him from getting into trouble), things like that. He’ll often try to alleviate any guilt Bruce might be feeling, particularly when it involves someone getting hurt helping them, insisting that it wasn’t Bruce’s fault. I also see Jim as encouraging Bruce’s more idealistic side - he often tells him not to give up hope when they hit a wall and things look bleak, and their talks often involve the idea of the good that can be done, and how Gotham and its people can be helped, because I think that’s what drives Jim too - ideals, and a devotion to helping people, rather than practicalities. And these “parenting styles” kind of balance each other out, or at least Bruce picks up bits and pieces, and they noticeably shape him, but I actually find it hilarious that the show has multiple scenes, across multiple seasons, of Jim and Alfred arguing over how best to parent Bruce. 

Jim had a troubled youth after the accident/losing his father, and coped with it even worse than Bruce does, which is why he gets it. He looks at Bruce’s coping mechanisms, the way he’s hurting himself, his breakdowns, etc, and he gets it. He wants Bruce to stop, wants him to get help, to do better than he did, but he gets it. He knows how it feels. He did all of that, and more, and he knows you can’t just flick a switch and be better. He knows that the guilt and the anger and the pain eats away at you. He also knows that there’s a light at the end, and that’s what he tries to give Bruce from the start. Hope, and understanding that Bruce is struggling, desperate to feel or not feel, and it may be unhealthy, but Jim at least understands why.

Harvey’s not entirely sure when he started looking at Bruce as more than just that random kid whose parents died and that Jim was weirdly fond of, but at some point he did. The kid’s sweet, if a bit odd, freakishly smart, and all the worst best parts of Jim. He’s a good kid, and Harvey sometimes worries about what Gotham’s going to do to him. He worries about that goodness being ground out of Bruce, the way Harvey’s seen it ground out of so many people.

Lucius loved Thomas, and that’s not the only reason why he helps Bruce (Lucius himself is a good man, who wants to make the city better) but it’s part of it. He wants to keep Thomas’ boy safe, wants to help him grow up into a strong, beautiful, good man. Sometimes he looks as Bruce and he’ll see Thomas, sometimes he’ll see Martha, but he knows that both of them would be so proud of who Bruce becomes.

Jim and Bruce try as much as they can to get together for lunch or dinner or something, just to catch up (Jim eventually made it over to the manor for dinner at some point in S4). Alfred and Harvey meet up for drinks on the regular.

During No Man’s Land, Alfred, Harvey and Lucius took turns dragging both Jim and Bruce away from work to get them to eat and/or sleep. They’d work themselves into the ground if they could. They’d also both insist on the other getting some rest, even as they stubbornly tried to carry on themselves.

Idk who gave Bruce the sex talk, but I know that whoever it was, it would have been terrible and awkward (was it Jim and did he warn Bruce about the perils of falling for beautiful people who were also crazy and/or evil and at least a little homicidal? Not that Bruce, or Jim for that matter would ever take the advice).

When Jim tells Bruce off for risking his life or putting himself needlessly in harms way, Bruce has to try really hard not to shout “I LEARNED IT FROM WATCHING YOU DAD!”

The show kind of dropped the ball on exploring this, but there’s no way Bruce  didn’t pick up at least a few detective skills from Jim.

Bruce and his various father figures are just basically that one cartoon where two people are stretching and bending over each other to put themselves in front of a gun.

They all miss Bruce terribly when he leaves.

Bruce would have liked the moustache.

Future (Batfam) headcanons:

Babs feels like she knows Bruce long before she meets him because she’s spent the first 9 years of her life hearing Jim talk about him.

Bruce comes over to the Gordon-Thompkins for dinner not long after the finale, meets Babs properly for the first time, and immediately falls in love. Barbara Lee Gordon has Uncle Bruce wrapped around her finger (she has them all wrapped around her finger).

Jim knows Bruce is Batman, that’s established in the finale, but for a while they dance around the subject, not saying anything outright. He talks about it a bit more openly with Harvey, Lucius too maybe, but both him and Bruce avoid talking about it directly. He does thank him though, to his face, for saving Babs.

That night at the circus, Bruce tells Dick the same thing that Jim told him. He sits down next to him, tells him his name, tells him he understands, and tells him that one day, there will be light.

I can’t decide who ultimately puts the symbol on the floodlight, but Jim’s the one that starts using it to call Batman.

Bruce has stuck tracking devices in all of them, long before he starts doing it to his kids. Jim in particular is prone to kidnapping, and it’s honestly such a time saver.

Jim and Bruce both start not so secretly planning the wedding once it becomes clear that Dick and Babs like-like each other. They’re thrilled about it (if the wedding does happen, then Harvey’s officiating).

The cops, especially those that work in whatever building the Commissioner’s office is in, know the various Wayne kids about as well as they know Babs, because they’re in and out and always hanging around. Particularly Cass, who splits her time mainly between Bruce, and Babs and Jim.

There are regular dinners over at the Manor. The Waynes and the Gordons, usually, but often enough Harvey or Lucius will be there too. For any big holiday they celebrate early, given that they’ll all need to be ready and on hand because of course the Rogues are going to try and ruin Christmas by poisoning the water supply or something else over the top and ridiculous. 

So much of what Batman is stems from that original conversation with Jim. Bruce never forgets, never stops thinking about those words. The trauma of his parents’ death shaped him, but he was shaped just as much by a single cop sitting down next to him, being kind, and promising not just justice, but light and hope as well. Bruce wanting to be that, whether as Batman or Bruce Wayne. Offering it to the city, the victims he saves as Batman, his own children.

They’re family okay. They’re all just one big loving family that also happens to fight crime, sometimes while wearing a cape.

Bonus: Oswald is by no means a father figure to Bruce, but he’s undeniably fond of him, admires his good, kind heart. He sees a lot of Jim in him, which is part of it, but he also, for everything that he himself is, just appreciates that in others (it part of what has always drawn him back to Jim).

[insanely-creative-things]

Big Hero 7: The Series

Big Hero 7 S2

City of Monsters PT 1

*'At the private lab of 'Liv Amara, the woman is waiting by the capsule of the real Liv Amara. This has not been going at all with her plans: Not one bit had gone her way. 'Liv' groaned internally as she recalled all the gold confiscated by Nozako Mizichio, and that's because she had fallen behind her payment to the Madame. To which she and Chris learned about the healing potion and seen just how powerful it truly is. That is when Big Hero 7 just had to barge in along with... the thing..

'Liv': *Shudders* Keep it together... that thing can't talk.

* Now all that is left is this: get the herbal medicine from Cora's family... by marrying into her family. She could still hardly believe that Mizuchi Mizichio is the long thought dead son of Nozako, thus making him the current lord of the clan. But here he is, living like a pauper along with the old hag and his daughter... his daughter Cora.*

'Liv': I'm running out of time, *To the real Liv* Please, hold on a little longer...

*The doors open to reveal Chris coming back with a slight frown on his face.*

'Liv': Well? What does Mizuchi think of his new bed?

Chris: Well...

*He then went on to explain that the presents he sent to Mizuchi over time had done the opposite effect: Instead of making him curios and seek out his admirer, he chose to ignore it and spend time with his family... especially his daughter.*

'Liv': UGH! That's all he ever thinks about! Just about how his daughter!

Chris: I did look in a little bit. I think he's so attached to Cora because she's whats left of Akemi.

'Liv': Akemi?

Chris: Mizuchi's first wife... and Cora's mother... And I have to admit... She was quiet a beauty, no wonder he's not interested. If I wasn't dating Lenny and she was still alive I'd totally do-

'Liv': Chris keep your brain off your pants and focus! Of course... *Sighs frustrated* Well, if receiving gifts from an admirer isn't enough... I may just go in face to face and court him personally...

*'Liv's' face scrunches to a frown as she pulls out an old Sycorax ID card of Cora, awkwardly smiling... this girl.. this little girl had grown from a simple tool she thought she could use had now turned into her greatest adversary: if Nozako were to learn of her granddaughter, there will be no doubt the Madame would arrange that all the power and money after her passing, shall go to this little pest, unaware of her own bloodline.*

'Liv': After I get the medicine and marry your 'Papa'... You're gonna wish you were never born!

*The pressure from her hand cracks the ID before falling into pieces underneath her feet.. and surveyed by Liv Amara's capsule, the same blinking light recording for its user... Lenny frowns at the image before he walks down the hall of the castle, where the doors of the Madame open for him to enter.*

* A sunny day of San Fransokyo is passing along normal for the teen couple Hiro Hamada, and Cora Mizichio… well.. slightly normal. They two are chatting to themselves over minute events of their lifes and even potential projects they could build together. And just following behind them is a familiar, stocky, build of a man in green wearing a motorcyclist helmet. The couple passed by a bus stop when they heard soft footsteps behind them, and so when they turned around all they could see were a couple of alley cats yowling as it launches itself to some poor dude. They continue walking together and turn right to a corner... but when he tried to take a turn as well.*

Hiro: Wasabi, why are you following Cora and I?

*Wasabi yelps as he jumps back by the sudden greeting of the couple.*

Wasabi: *Taking helmet and fake mustache off* What? I haven't been-Well-

*Cora pulls out her own phone and shows the pictures of Wasabi around the places they had gone to throughout their hangout.*

Cora: The street car? Our robotics class, lunch with Aunt Cass, and even from my house!

Hiro: Whats going on?

Wasbai:... They're onto us guys!

*The teen couple blink as soon enough they see the rest of the gang come out of their hiding spots and rip off the fake mustaches off their faces. *

Cora: OK... this clearly needs some talking to...also... why didn't you bother taking proper disguises if you are all wearing fake mustaches?

*They all unanimously agree to group up at Hiro's room to talk about the older people's behavior.*

Hiro: So you all been following Cora and I?

Honey Lemon: Yeah.. and more specifically Cora.

Cora: What? why me?

Gogo: Well for one: Noodle Burger Boy trying to kidnap you multiple times.

Fred: To which leads to *Hums out Obake* kidnapping you himself.

Wasabi: There was also the fact that Sparkles captured you guys for views.

Gogo: The time you were poisoned by a yellow diamond back snake. Why did you think I went to the woods with you two and Krei?

Honey Lemon: And the fact Orso Knox took you through out the city?

Cora: Orso Knox only took me cause he thought I was gonna be hurt by Liv Amara! So it isn't technically kidnapping.

Wasabi: Even so, we're noticing a pattern and we just want you two to be safe.

Hiro: Guys, its fine, we can handle ourselves! Baymax, tell them we don't need protection.

Baymax: *Lighting belly with images of the couple in danger* That would be untrue.

Hiro: Really Baymax? Really?

Honey Lemon: And Liv Amara is out there and she's been a little to forward with you Cora.

Gogo: And we promised your dad that we would protect you...And we promised Tadashi too.

* Hiro and Cora look at the team with widened eyes before looking at each other and both recall their own promise to be by each other's side...and Hiro's mind went to the open house where Cora is screaming for help in the clutches of-*

Cora: Hiro?

Hiro: *Snapping out of it* Wh-what?

Cass: Heyn kids!

*Cass comes up to Hiro's room holding a tray of cookies and a glass of milk. She places the tray onto a space of Hiro's desk before leaving downstairs to continue working. The gang took this as a time to leave the couple be and talk later. And so after they left, the two teens are left on their own, thinking over their past kidnappings before Hiro spoke.*

Hiro: *To Cora* They're right..

Cora: What?

Hiro: I mean... they have a point. You remembered what happened with all of that!

Cora: So do you, and you were kidnapped too.

Hiro: Cora , Liv Amara is out there and who knows what's she's planning. I-I can't risk loosing you again like in the open house! I can't...

*Cora blinks before she lets out a soft smile to which she kisses his cheek, causing the boy to snap out of his melancholic frown to a surprised blush.*

Cora: Babe, whatever comes next, we're here for each other.

Hiro: Yeah.. *Wraps arm around Cora's shoulder* We are...

*'Liv' is currently walking down the hall of her building, turning her head to see how everyone's process is going. She shakes her head at Karmi's lab, at work with a set of 'viruses' that needed to be used for a cure. She should had realized how much of an idiot that Karmi was when she learned that the teen believed that viruses are living organisms rather than non-living set weapons that only attack other living cells.*

'Liv': *Wondering out loud to herself after passing through* Why did I ever give her that internship?

Chris: *Appearing right behind* You thought it would be funny.

*'Liv' couldn't help but chuckle at that.*

'Liv': Anyway, you got things ready?

Chris: Yup. It should be ready to use by the time of your*Winks* 'date'.

'Liv' nods as Chris heads out to complete his other tasks while she pulls out her phone to see that the text she sent has been replied. After reading it she smirks as she types out a response.*

Meet me at La Moulin Rouge Café at 8.

That's when she gets a response*

OK. Done.

*Later on in the day, Hiro and Cora join up the rest of the gang at Fred's patio accompanied by none other than-*

Gogo: What are you doing here Kage?

*Kage rubs his arm gingerly as he looks around the patio with the gang accompanied by his Baymax at his side. Cora steps up and speaks.*

Cora: Papa and Grandmama are busy tonight so Kage will be with us for a while.

Wasabi: Where exactly?

Hiro: Cora's grandmother said something about checking on the ocean for Orso Knox and Mothra-

Fred: Mothra? That's the name you guys came up with?

Cora: Well we can't just keep calling her the creature. And its a name she likes... Papa is...he's...

Kage: *Sighs* The stalker wants to meet up with my brother tonight.

*The gang look at Kage in surprise at hearing those words.*

Fred: Hold on, giant dad is gonna go ahead to meet up his stalker tonight?

Cora: *Disheartened and sarcastic* Yup. *Sighs* hopefully Papa could make the stalker stop it... he's been getting uncomfortable with all these expensive presents.

Kage: Well... *Clears throat* Lets just focus on now. If you try to think of something you have no control of you'll drive yourself in circles. Besides, I do recall Ice-Frost taking over night patrol while you all train am I right?

Cora: Yeah... you're right! We just need to focus on our training right now!

*Hiro nods in agreement with his girlfriend as they whisper to each other. Kage lets out a small content smile until he spots Gogo's suspicious stare directed at him.*

Gogo: *Low voice* We're watching you Kage...

Kage: *Neutral* Understood...

Hiro: OK, while we're still not thrilled about the secret babysitters service, you were right about new threats out there so...

Cora: We-

Fred: *Jumping in front of them excitedly* Did you guys make upgrades?! Tell us you made upgrades!

Baymax: Hiro and Cora made upgrades.

*Soon afterwards the skymaxes arrive carrying their upgraded suits to the foyer. Kage slightly hums, curios about how Hiro and Cora had integrated to their suits to tackle more dangerous foes. They all dress up in their suits and for the most part.. it looks relatively the same.*

Fred: Hold on... they look the same.. so whats different?

Cora: You'll see~*Sing song*

Hiro: Wasabi? Press that button.

*And when Wasabi does he got himself a plasma shield and a plasma dagger coming from both his armor.*

Wasabi: Ooh~! I got a Plasma shield and a Plasma dagger!

Cora: *To Gogo* Wanna try out your disc Gogo?

*Gogo tries to takes the disc from Cora's hand only for the blue haired teen to drop it... and turn into a hover disc.*

Gogo: Hover disc, nice!

Fred: Woah! That is too cool!

Honey Lemon: *Looking at her boots* New boots?!

Hiro: Chem boots!

*Honey lemon squeels in delight before hugging Hiro and Cora tightly. After the bubbly chemist lets go she tests out her chem boots and found to her excitement she could indeed let out any type of chemical compound by the stomp of her boots. She stomps her boots to create an ice slide to which she happily glides through.*

Honey Lemon: *To Gogo* Sweetie look! Oh boy, I can't wait until Miyuki sees this!

Gogo: I do... and ya know. It would be interesting if we three could race? My new wheels versus Miyuki's ice and your chem boots.

Honey Lemon: Sounds exciting!

Fred: *To Hiro and Cora* What do I do?

Hiro: How do you feel about head lights?

Fred: Head lights?

Cora: See that little button in between your costume's eyes? You'll see.

*Fred manages to find the button as he turns around, and soon his costume's eyes let out a bright light that had temporarily blinded the others.*

Fred: Sorry guys! But oh my god this is awesome! I need to come up with a good battle quip just for this... maybe face bright justice!

Gogo: *Using her hoverdisc as a shield* Turn it down! *Softly* Idiot.

Fred: Did Gogo just call me an idiot?

*Soon voice replays of Gogo's description of Fred rings inside his suit... and that could only mean one thing.*

Fred: Do I have-?

Hiro and Cora: Super Hearing?

Fred: This is like Christmas, and my birthday, and the human fist punches up the mirror all rolled into one! Lets jump for joy Honey Lemon.

* Fred and Honey Lemon join hands as they do indeed jump up for joy. Kage hums again, impressed by the work put into their suits. He turns to the teen couple and note somethings similar between their own suits.*

Kage: So, I see you added a lot of new equipment to their ultra suits. If I may ask, what did you two add to your own?

Hiro: Simple, We added over some of the powers Sora helped us create along with a new ultra powered magnetic disc.

Cora: My own gloves can now ooze to escape tight grips and *turns to her back to see the back plate armor sprout a shark fin* open up fins to swim through water easily. *To everyone else* And all the suits are made by a counter-bioluminescent fabric and coating!

Kage: Hmm... that is very impressive... I'm proud of you two.

*The teens look up when they heard that, but when they do Kage is by his Baymax's side talking. But even so, they heard his words clearly... he's proud of them...*

Hiro and Cora: *Slowly giving a small smile to Kage* Thanks.

Honey Lemon: Oh wait! What did you give Baymax?

Cora: ITs a surprise.

*Mizuchi is staring heavily into the café window, his eyes furrowed as he thinks about all the possibilities that could happen if he does go inside to meet his... admirer. Days. Days of presents and love notes, with poems connected to biology and marine biology. flustered as he is to receive such notes and tokens of... affection. This was uncomfortable on so many levels. Besides, as of now his focus are on his brother and his daughter. He just needs to talk to them so they never bother him again.*

Mizuchi: OK... Here I go...

*Mizuchi enters inside the café, looking around until he founds the clue the person left on their message: A bouquet of roses adorned with yellow carnations. He goes to the table and sits on the opposite side. The person lets down their bouquet.*

'Liv': Its so nice to be out on out date isn't it Mizuchi?

Mizuchi: *Shocked* M-Miss Amara?!

________

Mizuchi: You-You were behind-

'Liv': All those presents left on your doorstep? My apologies but I've been so busy with my schedule that I couldn't think of any other way to contact you for this date.

Mizuchi: A date... Of course...

'Liv': Why don't you sit down Mizuchi?

*Mizuchi looks at the chair before he does, his brows still furrowed as he thinks over what he should do next. This is Liv Amara: The woman who had been a bane to his daughter, her boyfriend, and their friends. He knows by know that Liv Amara is more than guilty for all the crimes she committed. But he also shouldn't let her know about it unless he risks all of their lives.*

'Liv': So.. tell me all about your week. I would love to hear it.

*At the remote beaches of San Fransokyo Kaguya is with Orso Knox and Mothra as they converse over their thoughts.*

Kaguya: That was a close one when my Cora fallen ill... her mermaid blood is of dependent of the sea as mine.

Knox: I know. At least once a month you go to the ocean and swim as to hydrate yourself and continue building white cells while you thrive on land.

Kaguya: I had hoped Cora's sudden illness was not related to it.. but I was wrong.. it has gotten stronger. More unpredictable. Now with the witch running around and Mizuchi dealing with his stalker, who knows what else could be revealed about cora's blood?

Knox: I agree, so long as that witch roams freely, no one would ever be safe.

Mothra: *Chirp*….

*Kaguya turns her attention to Mothra, who is staring down at her hands with drooping feelers.*

Kaguya: Are you alright Mothra? Do you need to sleep?

*Mothra gives out a chirp that sounds similar to a child muttering 'I don't know'*

Kaguya: Hmm... I will give my healing tea for you two once Big Hero 7 defeat Liv Amara. You have my word.

*Mothra chirps happily as she hugs the old mermaid tightly, to which Kaguya chuckles slightly while Orso Knox lets out a smile. After some discussion, it was decided between Big Hero 7 that they go out in the field while Kage and his Baymax look for any evidence to corner Liv Amara. Soon enough, they all managed to catch up with Miyuki Frost, already dressed in her super suit.*

Fred: The city was dark...but their hearts were.. light!

*Fred turns on his headlights while Ice Frost and Gogo were jumping round the roof tops with Fred. Miyuki is quick to create a puff of snow to land on safely.*

Fred: Oops! Sorry Gogo! Sorry Miyuki! But you guys have to admit, the quip is getting better.

Wasabi: *Via Comlink* Everything OK over there?

Gogo: Define OK.

*At Wasabi and Honey Lemon's side they were at the top roof of Noodle Burger Boy restaurant while Hiro and Cora are on Baymax flying through the sky.*

Honey Lemon: At least we know we're all out there for each other. *To Hiro and Cora* Now remember you two, if you guys are facing any of Liv Amara's monsters-

Hiro: That we contact you guys immediately and stay close to Baymax.

Cora: We know Honey Lemon, thank you.

Wasabi: At least with all of us out there we could catch each other's backs.

Miyuki: You got that right. So far everything is fine over-

Fred: Wait! I'm getting something!

*Fred turns up his volume to hear what Fred is hearing.*

Wendy: Get away from me! Help!

Fred: I can hear her screaming all the way across the city!

Miyuki: Then lets get a move on!

Gogo: Couldn't agree more.

*Wendy Wower didn't know what just happened. She was just locking up her building for the night when she was confronted by some fungus looking little man. When he grabbed her wrist she simply ripped his hand off her.. only for him to grow in size, appearing like a cross of his old Mayoi and his disgusting smile.*

Wendy: Let me go you fungus freak!

Sparkles: Nope, lets just focus on the abduction right now.

Wendy: I'm not going with you freak!

*Reaching for a small vial she manages to spill sodium chloride onto his hands to which he yelps in pain as Wendy takes this as the time to run. But she really should have accounted for another thing... the growl of the rock bear chimera is enough to stop Wendy in her tracks. Mizuchi and Amara sit quietly at their table as they wait for their own orders to arrive. So far tonight was not going so smoothly, for both Mizuchi and 'Liv Amara'. Neither of them could talk beyond simple topics like the weather or their work. Their talk about their work is especially brief. Mizuchi could not find an appropriate time to tell her to leave him be without appearing to be threating while 'Liv' can't make him more relaxed for her plan to work. *

'Liv': So.. how is your daughter?

Mizuchi: Hmm?

'Liv': Cora, how is she?

Mizuchi: she's fine right now. She had gotten over a very hard fever and is taking it slow.

'Liv': Oh,poor girl! Well, I'm glad she's OK. She was my favorite intern at Sycorax you know... she delivered very interesting notes.

Mizuchi: I know... How have you been recovering since the Orso Knox attack Liv?

'Liv': I'm happy to say that our repairs are finished and I am close to finding the motherload of cures.

Mizuchi: Is that so?

'Liv': yeah. It may appear something so ordinary like tea... but one look closer and it opens up a world of possibilities for this cure... it makes it seem like magic.

*Hiro and Cora are soaring through the sky the rest of Big Hero 7 try to track down the helpless victim trapped in whoever's clutches its in tonight.*

Cora: OK, its seems that Hiro and I have the best chance to catch up to save her!

Honey Lemon: But you guys are still faraway!

Hiro: Its fine! We thought of a back up.

*Hiro presses a button on his chest and soon an extra set of turbos comes flying through and ready to land on Baymax. Hiro and Cora climb down before getting back up. Once they charge up the turbos, they were ready.*

Cora: Blast off!

*And blast off they did. The extra set of turbos sped through the air as Hiro and Cora scream in a mixture of fear and delight, a scream associated with rollercoasters. Before they knew it they were all at San Fransokyo bridge where they see in front of them... a very large, stocky build of Sparkles holding Wendy Wower in his hand.*

Fred: Woah! Have you been hitting the gym?! You look jacked!

Sparkles: Haha! Thank you!

Miyuki: Never mind that! Its time you freeze where you stand!

Hiro: Big Hero 7 has beaten you before Sparkles. And we'll do it again!

Cora: You can bet on it!

Sparkles: A bet? Ooh~ Very interesting. And you are right, seven heroes and one villain... boring.

Momakase: But three villains~

*The team look around to see that Sparkles is not alone. Joining him soon are none other than Momakase, and the rock bear chimera.*

Cora: Oh no...

Sparkles: Plot twist!

_________

Sparkles: Ladies and gentlemen! Its the entertainment event of the season! The defeat of Big Hero 7... plus one Ice Frost.

Fred: That's kind Big Hero 7 Phase three stuff, and we're only in phase two right now so-

Cora: Fredzilla duck!

*Momakase launches through the air to slice apart Fred but he dodged in time. Momakase gave a brief look that spelled out the following.*

Momakase: Once I'm done with him, You're next Bastard Child!

*The other members of the gang see the rock chimera of Bessie come charging up towards them.*

Cora: We can't get near it or our gear is fried!

Miyuki: Then leave him up to me!

Hiro: Ice-Frost wait!

*But Miyuki is already zooming forward to fight head on, turning her head briefly to tell them what she's doing.*

Miyuki: Bessie here can only deactivate tech right? Well lucky me my powers are au natural! So you guys focus on Momakase and Sparkles!

Hiro: You got it!

*Fred continues to hop away from Momakase until she kicks him on the side and is ready to strike down when Wasabi's plasma shield gets in her way. *

Momakase: Ooh~ I see you brought new toys.

Gogo: Sure did.

*Gogo and Honey Lemon choose to go after Sparkles with Gogo throwing her disc at the guy while Honey Lemon uses her chem boots to skate to Wendy Wower in his clutches. With quick thinking and a great aim from her chem bazooka, Honey Lemon freezes Sparkles while Gogo snatches Wendy before she is encased in ice along with him.*

Wendy: Nice shot Chem Princess!

Honey Lemon: Thank you doctor wower!

*Wasabi continues his sword fight with Momakase, both giving their all before Wasabi exhausts himself from dodging so much.*

Momakase: You're not much a challenge are you?

Hiro: Nope, but he is!

*Momakase turns around to see Hiro and Cora jump off Baymax while Miyuki continues to freeze and dodge the chimera.*

Hiro: Over Drive mode Omega Danger!

*And so, with his new ultra armor, he transformed into his new and improved over drive mode.*

Momakase: Oh how cute, don't you remember what happened last time? It didn't go over so well.

Baymax: With Kage's assistance, Aqua Girl built me an extra battery reserve.

Momakase:...Did you just say Kage?

Cora: Baymax rocket fist!

*And soon enough, Baymax charges forward and knocks out Momakase down for the fight.*

Gogo: Wait a minute... Kage helped you on making the battery reserve?

Hiro: I was there! Nothing bad happened.

Miyuki: Guys!

*That's when they all remember Miyuki and her fight with the rock chimera. She is clearly near exhaustion as her body starts to warm up. With quick thinking Hiro contacts Miyuki.*

Hiro: Ice Frost! I have a plan. I'll set up a trap while Cora gives the signal for you to come over where I am!

Miyuki: Alright!

Hiro runs off to the clearing of the traffic where he shoots out two magnetic discs that pin to the sides of the bridge. Cora gives the signal by having her suit reflect the light from the street lights.*

Cora: Come on!

*Cora joins Miyuki as they both run to Baymax as the rock chimera charges at Hiro. But before its very aura could destroy his upgrade, Hiro is quick on his feet and uses the magnetic pull to fly himself up in the air... while Bessie the rock chimera crashes through the gate and into the sea below.*

Wasabi: Woah...

Fred: haha! I am impressed!

Honey Lemon: *To Wower* Are you alright?

Wendy: Woweroos always are.

*That is when the ice casing of Sparkles breaks off and frees him... but at the cost of his jockey build. Now he is back to being his short, pathetic self. He quickly runs off along with momakase, who turns her head and glares at them.*

momakase: You all got lucky...

Cora: Is it really luck? Or are we just good at kicking your ass?

*The two finally leave as the rest of the team check over Wower.*

Wendy: Thanks you guys.

Cora: No problem, lets just get you home.

*After delivering Wendy back home safely, they all meet up at Fred's place to recover from their late night out as Kage now finds himself, along with his own Baymax, in charge of their rest. He remembered the shocked faces the rest of the team expressed when they revealed that their Baymax told momakase that he built the battery reservoir with Cora and Hiro. But after more reassurance and talking, they are cool for now. Chris is at the building checking over the injuries Sparkles and Momakase had gotten.*

Chris: She's definitely not going to like you failed to destroy Big Hero 7.

Momakase: Oh bite me. Where is Liv Amara anyway? You do know we are due for our payment as well!

Chris: Oh.. she's getting there.. Oh! Look at the time!

*He soon uses a syringe to inject Momakase to sleep before she could utter out a question towards him. It had been a long night for Liv and Mizuchi as they now leave the café where news of Big Hero 7 winning is sprawled across every billboard.*

'Liv': *Under her breath* Damn it you had one job!

*But she is quick to hear Mizuchi's sigh of relief... Looking closer to Aqua Girl and the man... They do look similar...what if..*

'Liv': I say you must be really proud of your daughter saving the city again, aren't you?

Mizuchi: *Distractedly* I'm always proud of my Cora, no matter what she does.

*When those words leave his mouth he is frozen still. Soon the weight of what he revealed comes crashing down as he sees 'Liv' smirk at him. She points to an alley down the road as to chat in private, to which he reluctantly followed. Once at a distance where no one would hear them Mizuchi is the first to speak, and with a dangerous glare soon growing on his face.*

Mizuchi: If you lay a hand on my daughter or her boyfriend Hiro-

'Liv': So Electro-Magnetic Alpha is Hiro Hamada? huh.. it fits. Anyway, if you want me to be quiet, then there's one little bit I need you to do... a proposal of sorts.

Mizuchi: I would rather die then be mutated by the likes of you!

'Liv': Oh no... this isn't a business proposal, I already have goons for that... What you need to do Mizuchi, if you want your precious daughter and her wittle boyfriend safe... is marry me.

*mizuchi's eyes widen in shock at her words, not expecting this to be the blackmail.*

Mizuchi: Marry you?!

'Liv': Yes... by marrying you, I can be in line for your mother's gold and power!

*Now his heart is beating faster than mach 2.*

Mizuchi: Y-You know about-

'Liv': I was admittedly shocked to learn that you are Nozako's son and that you lived your life in squalor with your family. But that can change.

Mizuchi: And what makes you say that?!

*That is when Chris hops up to mizuchi's shoulder and injects him with a paralysis serum to which the tall man falls down to his knees before 'Liv' and Chris. Chris then hands 'Liv' an object... a lipstick. After applying them on she walks up to Mizuchi and holds up his head.*

'Liv': ITs alright... by the time we say I do, you'll be wrapped around my finger.

*Morning is rising up at last as the first to wake up is Cora. She notes how she is cuddling next to Hiro with a blanket over them as they slept on their fully charged Baymax. The gang had been given separate mattresses to sleep on, courtesy of Heathcliff, while Kage sleeps on with his baymax. Cora then sees her phone with a text from her grandmother, explaining she got home last night but couldn't find her or Mizuchi. Slightly confused, Cora explained that she had stayed up all night and is recovering at Fred's house, though she points out that her papa could simply be at work already.*

Hiro: *Yawning* Hey... morning.

Cora: Good morning..

*Soon the rest of them wake up before Cora receives an incoming call... from Grandville..*

Cora: Professor Grandville?

Hiro: What's she calling us about?

*Hesitantly Cora answers the phone.*

Cora: Professor Grandville?

Grandville: Cora! Have you and Hiro seen the news?

Cora: News? What news?

Grandville: Look at Sycorax's blog right now! A new post is up and about!

Cora: Grandville.. whats going on?

Grandville: I had just gotten to work when I saw Miss Karmi muttering on about a wedding at Sycorax! I checked over myself and my god! Cora you are in danger!

Cora: W-what? What wedding?

*Hiro is quick to pull out his phone and look up the blog and immediately finds what is this post Grandville is talking about. And immediately... his heart freezes still.*

Fred: Hiro? Hiro? Cora? Whats going on?

*Wasabi turns the TV on to show Bluff Dunder on the new with a picture of Liv Amara... and Mizuchi Mizichio, smiling together happily with the border drawn with hearts and flowers.*

Dunder: It has been 10 hours since the post on Sycorax's blog has announced that not only is Liv Amara engaged to this dashing... fellow.. Mizuchi Mizichio,but that the wedding shall be in three days and invites all to join for this joyous union. Here is a small clip of this announcement.*

*The clip shows Liv Amara, held close by Mizuchi like a couple, as he looks at her tenderly before she smiles*

'Liv': I know that it is a huge surprise to learn of my fiancé, but the moment I met him I knew that we were meant to be. He is a great man with a lovely daughter.

*Cora is shaking in fear even with Hiro holding her still, with the team staring in fear as Kage could only gape flabbergasted and scared. But while their expressions are of fear, everyone else has been congratulating Liv Amara on her upcoming wedding. Karmi delighted over the fact that she could play a role on her idol’s wedding day, at the moment not caring that the man Liv is marrying is infact Cora’s father. The whole city blissfully unaware of the lives she had destroyed... and the ones coming her way.*

'Liv': *Smirking evilly* I do know for sure that in the end, we'll be one big happy family.

A.N: Dun Dun DUUUUUUUUNNNNN! Yup, didn't see that coming huh? thank you for reading Big Hero 7! Love you!

[lady-griffin]

Crypt Teaser

I’ve been wanting to talk about promo since I first saw it, but work has been overwhelming and I needed time to write my thoughts down. So sorry, if no one cares about this promo anymore.

I’m going to be talking about what I think the Crypt promo is hinting or foreshadowing at. But first…

It is very interesting Sansa is made to be in the center at the end, especially since Jon is at first in the center - standing between both Arya and Sansa as the three meet up.

But then as they walk to their statues, he moves around Sansa to be on her side, which puts her in the center. This is a 100% deliberate choice, they could’ve easily had them all walk straight towards their own statues with no rearrangements.

They literally have Jon stay behind Arya and Sansa and then move around Sansa, so he wouldn’t be in the center.

So why?

One reasoning, is that it might actually be to avoid certain Targaryen imagery -- specifically Aegon the Conqueror who in official art (?) and fan art is often flanked on both sides by his two-sister-wives.

The second, I imagined Jon being in the center, flanked on either side by his sisters, my mind went to Aegon and his sister-wives… so perhaps, it’s best to avoid that idea altogether. Especially if you don’t want your audience to be weirded out by Jon and Sansa (if I think what is happening is happening).

It could also be that visually Sansa is the tallest one, so it creates more of a symmetrical aesthetic.

Especially, when both Jon and Arya draw their swords to face the upcoming danger.

If Sansa was on the side as both Jon and Arya pull out their swords, that would’ve sideline her from the action – keeping her in the center, keeps her in the scene.

It could also just be to cement the idea that Sansa is a major player to this season and to the end of the story.

Basically, from just a promo standpoint, it makes sense to put Sansa in the center, though this promo is all about Jon. Either just to avoid certain Targaryen visuals or to reinforce already existing ideas.

Now let’s go into some of the story/plot-driven reasons for this promo and its choices (foreshadowing).

One idea (and I’ve seen this a lot) is that this promo is hinting at the Winterfell Crypts residents waking up and attacking. Now there are many theories about this, so I’m not going to go into all that much. But that seems like a possibility…

Winterfell’s Crypts are mentioned a great deal and the Big Bad is a being who can raise the dead and we know Winterfell will be a major setting so it  all adds up. But in all honestly, I think this a more of red herring idea than actual foreshadowing.

One of the main reasons is that “realistically” most of the bodies in the crypts are just ashes and pieces of bone, so what exactly is going to be reanimated?

Really, I think this season is all about the politics and the Walking Dead is a red herring/false start, so that’s what this promo is potentially foreshadowing for us, not the old kings literally coming back and attacking, but more who will become the next “Stark Kings" or those remembered by history (more about that later).

But reanimated old Kings would be fun to see. 

Jon, Arya and Sansa's meeting or their walk coverging is very nice. It gives the impression of the Starks being a united front and it’s also a nice homage to when Sansa and Arya were first reunited in front of Ned Stark’s statue.

But really, the meet-up/convergence of these three, is reflecting the past tension between Sansa and Arya in the past season(s) (and when they were young).

Their past fights and “stand-offs” are no longer important or relevant when the three walks converge as the two sisters have a new mission when Jon enters the scene. They can’t find amongst themselves, when they have Jon to protect.

But yet, the promo doesn’t end indicating that Sansa and Arya will protect Jon. But instead, that Jon and Arya will protect Sansa.

The idea of Sansa potentially being kidnapped is a possibility and Arya and Jon drawing their swords to protect her, could be hinting at this. But this moment could also just be showing that Sansa is more vulnerable to outside threats, but nonetheless is protected by the Stark family.

The two Starks that might be viewed by outsiders as “wild-cards,” the King who bent the knee and the girl who grew up to be a “Faceless assassin,” have no hesitation in standing against the upcoming threat and protecting their own.

The Starks are a unit or pack.

Also, while I’ve brought it up, it is important to note that Jon was in the center, but moved to Sansa’s side. This might be a stretch, but this might indicate that Jon is not the key to get the Stark Alliance.

Daenerys and her camp (as well as Cersei) both focused on Jon being the key to getting the North (which makes sense, he was the King). But Jon moving to the side, putting Sansa center and front, shows the audience who the central figure to the Stark Family is.

Which leads into the idea, that Sansa is central to the Starks’ Future.

Multiple times she has been referred to as the Key to the North and has been viewed as the legitimate heir to Winterfell. And both Tywin Lannister and Roose Bolton (and Littlefinger) believed whoever sired a child with Sansa, would be in control of Winterfell as that child would be the future Lord.

So, Sansa is definitely a key to the future of House Starks in several ways.

The real interesting thing though, is this promo isn’t about Sansa or even House Stark as a whole.

It’s all about Jon.

All the lines pertain to him and it’s about who he really is and his story, and yet Sansa still gets a lot of attention. More so than Arya, as the time between them isn’t split evenly. Hinting that Sansa plays an important part to who Jon currently is, but also where his story and future are going.

And I know I keep repeating this, but it’s odd to make Sansa the central character in the end – as

A. The Promo isn’t about her B. Jon is a more central character to the story

But really a main idea that I think some people are overlooking, is that Jon is heavily connected to the Starks and their present and future. He is an integral part to the Stark Pack.

The Intro Walks of Jon, Sansa and Arya.

Jon’s 1st walk is 17/18 seconds long Jon’s 2nd walk is 9 seconds long 

26/27 seconds altogether

He gets the most time and two separate walks to boot.

This makes sense, as he is the focus of this promo and is one of the biggest focuses of the show’s overall story.

Jon walks right past Lyanna’s statue. This is a reflection of Jon always wanting to know who his mother was, but was blind (lied to) about the truth. He walks right past the truth and his real mother and later pauses and stares directly at the man (Ned) he based so much on who he is now.

It is telling that Lyanna’s line is spoken before Ned’s though.

Indicating, that Jon will learn of his true parentage, falter in his identity, only to be reminded (by Ned’s line) that he’s never been a Stark in name and yet, has always been a Stark in blood.  

When Ned’s Line is spoken and Jon is looking at Ned’s Statue, it really does come across that Ned is directly talking to Jon in that moment. While Sansa also looks at Catelyn’s statue, it’s different as we don’t get the impression she can hear Catelyn’s words.

Jon can hear Ned’s words.

Also Lyanna’s line, while I think is reminding us of who “Jon really is” isn’t the one where she told Ned that Jon was Aegon Targaryen, instead it’s her begging Ned to protect Jon.

Though Robert, who Lyanna afraid would hurt her child, is now gone. So who is this past plead about now? The Starks? Maybe. Or perhaps, another Targaryen who might see Jon as a threat.

Lyanna’s line is also interesting, because her pleading is connected to Jon being taken in by Ned and Ned claiming him as his son, which caused a rift in Ned’s marriage and in the Stark family.

Finally, I think both Lyanna and Ned are indicators of who Jon will choose in the end. Jon is a Stark through Lyanna, but also chooses to be a Stark through the father he chooses.

This is further emphasized by the statue of Jon in the end. As in the books, the statues are really only reserved for the former Kings and Lords of Winterfell, but will get to that in a bit.

Jon’s parentage reveal will have a big impact on Jon, as it should.

A big portion of Jon’s identity is constructed around him thinking Ned is his father and he himself is a bastard. Learning that he’s not Ned’s son is going to shake Jon’s world, no matter what, but also learning that he is a Targaryen and has a claim to the Iron Throne is a whole other thing on top of that.

Before Jon’s first walk ends, he looks back and pauses, almost as though he heard the feather fall, only to turn back to continue forward.

This could be interpreted as many different things, but for me it really comes down to Jon “hearing” Lyanna. Everyone is so focused on Rhaegar being Jon’s father, that they forget Lyanna is the mother Jon never knew he had and has wanted from the very beginning.

I think there will be a moment where Jon is in front of Lyanna’s statue, perhaps finding a connection to a woman he never noticed all the times he was in the Crypts of Winterfell as a child. Always so focus on the Old Kings of Winterfell and how he would never be one.

Jon turning back to continue walking leads into Sansa’s walk beginning – at first this makes it seem as though she is just following him down the same corridor, but she is not.

But nonetheless, the feather falling ends Jon’s walk and begins Sansa’s. 

Sansa’s Solo Walk is 6/7 seconds long

Her walk is less “dynamic” than Jon’s, less overall shots and plot info being laid out, but she looks back onto her mother’s statue as we begin to hear Catelyn’s voice and the beginning of her quote --

“All this horror that has come to my family…”

Catelyn’s full quote is about how all the tragedies that have fallen upon the Starks was because she couldn’t love Jon.

What has happened to the Starks has nothing to do with the fact that Catelyn ostracized Jon, but it is still an important character moment for Catelyn and one of the few lines she has about Jon.

It also puts a certain idea into the audience’s head –

The salvation for the Stark family, the future where they won’t be the victims of countless tragedies, is contingent on them embracing and loving Jon.

However, unlike Cat, who couldn’t love Jon because she thought he was Ned’s son, the Stark children (Arya and Sansa), might have the opposite problem.

Finding it difficult to accept Jon when they find out “he’s not one of them.” Though that might be more Arya and less Sansa, but will get into that in a bit.

I would like to point out that both this teaser and the Tapestry one, bring to the forefront the pain Catelyn felt for Ned bringing Jon home and the rift it caused in their relationship.

You could easily bring up Jon’s parentage without that aspect, so it’s interesting that idea keeps being mentioned. But back to the walk -

Jon’s walk ends with him looking back as the feather (Lyanna) fell to the ground.

Sansa in the show has been associated with both the feather and Lyanna’s statue as well as sporting if not the same hairstyle in the promo, one very similar to Lyanna’s when she was married to Rhaegar. Possibly indicating a bridal future for Sansa, but also -

That Jon’s connection to the Starks are through his mother and Sansa (possibly his future wife).

Overall the emphasis on the feather is quite interesting.

Though it makes sense, since it’s the only iconic item to Lyanna Stark within the active narrative of show, the blue rose is hinted at in the promos, backgrounds, and extra featurettes of the show, but it’s not as prevalent in the show as it is in the books.

When I first watched the promo, I really thought Sansa was going to pick the feather up from the ground –

Showing the connection between Lyanna, Jon, and Sansa, as while as telling us that Sansa will carry on Lyanna’s dying wish of protecting Jon. And connecting aunt and niece as connections for Jon to his Stark family.

The first part of Catelyn’s quote is the end of Sansa’s walk, but the second part is the beginning of Arya’s quote.

Arya’s Solo Walk is about 4 seconds –

Arya’s walk is shorter than both Jon and Sansa’s and she doesn’t look at any statues (past figures). So, you might think there’s less to discuss.

However, the second part of Catelyn’s voiceover is over Arya’s walk.

“…it’s all because I couldn’t love a motherless child.”

Catelyn line being over both Arya and Sansa, connects the two sisters to not only Catelyn, but also Jon and put forth the challenge of them being better than their mother in how they treat him.

However, the part of how Catelyn couldn’t love Jon, could be hinting at a future struggle for Arya.

Arya has certainly changed from the girl she used to be.

In many ways, her world view has become more than a bit severe. And Arya has grown a strong sense of place with her identity as a Stark and seeking revenge for those who’ve wrong the Starks in the past.

She slaughtered the Freys for the Starks and was more than willing to behead the Northern Lords in order to protect Jon.

While that last one might indicate Arya would never “turn” on Jon, it also shows that Arya’s loyalty might not be exactly to who Jon is now, but to her memory of him. To her family.

If she feels he doesn’t have the same loyalty, then….

Arya is also not exactly the most open person anymore, nor understanding – especially when it comes to political games or shows.

Sansa might be willing to give Dany Winterfell or at least be willing to say as much and bear and grin it, but Arya might have a harder time swallowing her tongue.

While Jon and Sansa take after who Ned really was, someone who was quite capable of deceiving those he loved and doing dishonorable things for a greater purpose. Arya (and Robb) seem to take after the image of who their father was, the honorable man who never strayed from the path of what he believed was right (though Arya is a much darker and twisted take on that idea)

And Arya also has gained some of Catelyn’s less than admirable traits, so...

Plus, Catelyn’s struggle was that she couldn’t love Jon, because she believed he was Ned’s bastard. So, it would be interesting that Arya might struggle with her relationship with Jon, because he’s not Ned’s bastard.

Perhaps not that literally, but --

Arya and Jon always got along, as the two outsider children and Arya found comfort in Jon being different in how she thought she was different (though arguably young Arya was likely projecting onto Jon).

But Jon being revealed to not being her brother and him possibly playing the political game and showing more loyalty to Dany, even just for show, might not go over well with Arya.

I’m not saying Arya is going to hurt Jon, but there might be some tense moments. Especially since…

Jon and Arya’s reunion has been built up so much by the fans and the characters within the show as being this wonderful and sweet reunion to happen - so there being tension between these two wouldn’t surprise me.

But while I think this might a struggle for Arya and the seed for some tense moments, Arya will protect her family, no matter what.

The Statues in the crypt are great in my opinion. Doing the wonderful surface-level job of hinting at their deaths (like many of the season promos have done). Especially since, Jon and Sansa, walked past fallen characters who now have their own statues.

Perhaps this is telling us these three will die in the upcoming battle, or perhaps the statues are telling us who will be remembered in history.

You can’t have a legacy until your dead (and you will die in the end).

Jon, Sansa and Arya will be remembered. The Statues to me don’t really signify their upcoming deaths, but that they are immortalized by their actions and the present for future generations. 

Bran being absent is very telling. Showing us what role, he might play in this story.

Bran and his story are strongly tied to magic and the Night King, his own absence from the trailer and his lack of statue, indicates that while he might be integral to defeating the Others (him, not dragons), he won’t have a role to play afterwards.

He might not be remembered as an important figure in history or at least not in the political history. While Jon, Sansa and Arya will be remembered just as Arya remembered Aegon, Visenya and Rhaenys.

Its also possible, Bran might get his own promo highlighting his importance to the story, but separating him from the Stark narrative.

Basically, I believe, the statues are telling us who will be important in the history books. Those three will be the ones who future generations remember when they’re playing with each other as kids and who the future songs will be about.

The Torches Going Out

This is far from new. The candles, torches or fireplaces going out representing the Others and Winter coming has been a stable to GOT promos, since pretty much the beginning. But it’s also starting to take on a different meaning, or not different, but clearer.

Fire may destroy the wights, but we’ve seen within the show itself that even dragon fire is nothing to the Night King. Fire (the dragons) aren’t effective when it comes to White Walkers.

Actually, and this is random, but when I saw this and when I was thinking about it, I thought of the matching phone game – Empires & Puzzles. In the game,

Fire is effective against Nature and Nature is effective Ice and Ice is effective against Fire.

Fire (dragons) can destroy the Weirwood Trees (Winterfell)

The Weirwood Trees (Bran) can destroy the White Walkers

The White Walkers can destroy the Dragons

Similar to the Tapestry Promo, this may be less of a war between two opposing force, but three forces.

Either way I think promo worked really well and I’m excited to seeing the Starks once more (which is the true goal of a promo). Sorry for the messy writing and analysis. 

[diloph]

Pardon me, but it seemed from some of your posts on KOTM that you didn't like Mark Russell that much. I know he was a cliche everyman type, but what exactly made him any worse than others in these movies?

I apologise if this isn’t my most coherent answer. I’m a little bit stressed at the moment, trying to finish the next chapter of IIID and create relevant, if poorly assembled memes before the Invader Zim movie is released.

To be honest, some of it is a bit tongue-in cheek. Making fun of the most visible character in the film, considering that he hates Godzilla with a burning passion, is just a little bit of fun. It’s like how I refer to Rick Stanton with disdain sheerly because he’s somewhat based on Rick Sanchez, who I don’t dislike either.

The film isn’t about Mark: King of the Fathers anyway, so if I completely despised him, I could just zone out during his scenes, or skip them when the DVD comes out.

But… some of it wasn’t so jokey. He’s still an okayish protagonist, I’ve got nothing against the actor himself and his acting is fine. Still, Mark was loud, abrasive and hated Godzilla; you know, things that grate on my nerves when it comes to a 2+ hour Godzilla movie and that made the character… trying.

We’ve had them before, but Godzilla was generally more villainous and obviously, we feel sympathy and camaraderie with him as the title character and we are here to see him do cool things. Having a human protagonist who hates our cool monster protagonist makes sense in universe, but ultimately, it’s not what we’re here for. We can tune that out.

As for what makes me dislike Mark… for starters, he’s kind of a prick. I once saw somebody describe him as the type of guy who thinks that if he speaks loudly enough, shouts enough, he’ll get his way. I can’t say I blame them, in that first meeting with MONARCH, he’s downright hostile.

He’s also, for whatever reason, the guy that everybody turns to in the crisis. He might have a background in bioacoustics like his ex-wife and animal behaviour besides, but apparently nobody else at MONARCH is capable of doing things without the express instructions or approval of everyman Indiana Jones. Military procedures, common sense, the desperate plan to revive Godzilla; everybody seems to defer to him really quickly.

It took me out of the movie. I understand that he’s meant to be our relatable protagonist, but it’s a little bit jarring and it happens multiple times. Mark is either issuing instructions or is along where he shouldn’t be, given control of a situation where by all rights he shouldn’t have any other than spur of the moment hero stuff.

It’s like he believes that nobody has any common sense and frustratingly, a couple of times the narrative agrees with him or at least proves his actions right. For example, when Colonel Foster tries to brief MONARCH on the actions of Jonah and the terrorists, he shoots down her theory and proceeds to go on a rant as to why we should Destroy All Monsters.

He’s right, as Jonah wants to free King Ghidorah, but he has this frustrating “protagonist only” habit of noticing threads that other characters really should (nobody seems to notice that the Titans are attacking capital cities or at least very densely populated areas until he points it out), then speaks about it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

Which when MONARCH is meant to be staffed with scientists of multiple disciplines veers back into the incredulous. I can suspend disbelief when it comes to giant monsters, I don’t excuse people not seeing what’s in front of them.

And as for the moments where he really shouldn’t be issuing instructions, take a look at when Rodan is freed by Emma Russell. Serizawa instantly defers to him (I think that Mark might have been his senior before he left MONARCH and BOY do I want to talk about that plan later on) to cook up a plan instead of… himself (Director of MONARCH, or at least I assume so) or again, Foster, who controls the planes and men he wants to send at the giant pterodactyl that just shrugged off a molten lava flow.

Given his characterisation as an angry, driven father who is desperately looking out for his family after being bereaved by monsters and is butting heads with the scientists at MONARCH, I think it was an attempt by Legendary to recreate Joe Brody. Bryan Cranston’s character in the previous film was killed off too early and was featured in a lot of the trailers, giving a wonderful performance. When he died to be replaced by his son, Ford, it caused a backlash as a result.

Mark being that angry, snarky character definitely shares some similarities. But while Joe was a crusader for the truth and more than a little bit obsessive, he was trying to pierce the veil as to why his wife died, without realising that it drove his son away from him. He was trying to reveal this great coverup to the world and spent the rest of his life doing so with such conviction that he appeared crazy.

Mark… doesn’t have this driving force. He lives in a post-San Francisco universe. Monsters Exist and everybody knows it.

Now, that’s not to say he doesn’t have reasons for acting as he did. He lost his son and has driven a wedge in between his family via his drinking problem (but let’s face it, compared to unleashing the Titans by starting off with Space Dragon Satan, he’s taken it comparatively well) but he acts as if he’s the only person who has ever lost something to Godzilla and the rest of the monsters.

Even when that happens to characters in the film, Mark still acts like that and it doesn’t make him look like the grim, determined hero, it just makes him look like an obnoxious dick. It isn’t his way of coping with the trauma of loss, he just… does it.

Part of me does get why he’s annoyed and angry with MONARCH’s attitude towards the Titans. He’s correct that they’ve been keeping secrets, dangerous ones at that, but equally the kaiju are living things. They’re dangerous and unpredictable, yes, but MONARCH have been taking precautions; killswitches are present in even the supposedly benevolent Titan’s chambers like Mothra and as far as they know, all of the Titans bar Godzilla are dormant and those that aren’t are kept in check by him. Had the Ghidorah Crisis never arose, we may never have seen any other Titans for the rest of human history.

But he treats everybody around him like an idiot with little to no prompting. Mark is brought on as a consultant and he then proceeds to dominate the scene, either through his decisions in universe or the part written for him out of it. He gets the last word, the last say on a plan or a witty remark or whatever.

And some of that costs lives. Actually, no, a LOT of it costs lives.

So, to start off, when the operation in Antarctica goes tits up, Mark grabs a handgun and goes into Outpost 32 by himself (though what he and the central nervous system of MONARCH were doing on the ground and not supervising from the Argo remains to be seen, but I digress). He stops Jonah and the terrorists on the walkway… screwing up Foster’s attempt to take down Jonah, forcing her to snipe his henchman in order to save Mark’s life.

This leads to King Ghidorah waking up. Not going to extend him a great deal of blame for this one, as with a sniper present, Emma or Madison would have been forced (or “forced” in the former’s case) to retrieve the detonator and the Six-Eyed, Six-Horned, Flying-Golden-People-Eater would have gotten loose regardless. Hell, I spotted clues that he was gearing up to wake up without Emma Russell’s help.

In a narrative sense, its his character that also sets up Vivienne Graham’s death. If he hadn’t been stuck in the tangle of wires and metal aboard the Osprey, she would never have needed to stay behind to help and subsequently got singled out by King Ghidorah.

I’d definitely agree that this is more of a personal thing on my part, as I’d wanted to see more of Vivienne’s character thanks to her actress’, Sally Hawkins’ work in The Shape Of Water and that in the previous film. But in a way, he is still sort of responsible for her being written out and replaced with the vastly less interesting replacement characters of Rick and Mor- erm, Sam.

That said, I know that Ghidorah is 100% to blame in universe. He killed her because he was a bastard and I wanted to him to be a bastard, so the monkey’s paw curled a finger there, so that’s egg on my face. It certainly did wonders for establishing him as a monstrous villain who we love to hate.

I’m not wholly unsympathetic to Mark. Like I said before, the pain of loss over the 2014 attacks hurt him badly and the film doesn’t shy away from this. Mark’s descent into alcoholism is noted by both himself and his family as a rough time for all involved, part of the reason he left MONARCH in the first place. Having his daughter and ex-wife seemingly kidnapped by dangerous ecoterrorists who plan to unleash giant monsters to mass-cull humanity also wears his patience thin, as you might expect it.

But he keeps this… horrible attitude throughout the movie. The world is literally going to shit, another monster is about to be unleashed and he asks if MONARCH have had enough common sense to evacuate the town of Isla Del Mara and if Rodan has had a cutesy name all picked out from mythology for him ahead of time.

Fuck me, if I was Serizawa, having just lost my protégé and quite a few well-meaning soldiers who were trying to rescue somebody who turned out to be a massive ecoterrorist nutjob, I would have floored him. There is a time and a place for snarky comments and it is not after at least twenty people you worked with are dead and BILLIONS MORE MAY FOLLOW.

But now, one of the points that really got me disliking Mark Russell follows here. The scenes that start at Isla Del Mara and the luring of Rodan to King Ghidorah, all the way up until the detonation of the Oxygen Destroyer.

Rodan emerges from the volcano and asides from spreading his wings and roaring, doesn’t do much. He spots the incoming Argo and its entourage and narrows his eyes. Uh oh! Surely, at this point, the dastardly destruction god would leap from his perch in an attempt to chase this challenger from his territory?

Um… no. No, actually, he stays put.

Now, I get that Rodan might not have stayed that way for very long. From the ensuing chase scene, I can gather that the Monsterverse’s version of Rodan is a bit of a dick, but he still didn’t start the fight.

Instead, what happens is that Serizawa asks Mark what they should do and Mark comes up with the plan to get Rodan to fight King Ghidorah in the hopes that one will kill the other and that would at least solve one of their problems.

Sound in theory, yes, but it is not sound in execution. At all.

So, that little town that Mark kicked up quite a fuss about? As you might have noticed, it’s lying between Rodan and the Argo and is part of the reason that the big ol’ bird should be lured away, to complete the evacuation.

Mark’s brilliant plan has the jets surrounding the Argo to blast Rodan and 180 the superplane in order to get him to chase… without factoring in THE TOWN BETWEEN THEM AT ALL.

I get King Ghidorah was closing in. I get that Rodan is a wild, unpredictable animal who could go off the chain at any moment. But there was absolutely no time to get the ARGO to move a little ways around the island before beginning the attack? At worst, Rodan would make a dive for them anyway, but that’s what the jets are sent in to distract him are for. To grab his attention and then lure him to the Argo, which would then take him to Tricephalopathic Terror Town anyway.

As a result, Rodan utterly OBLITERATES Isla Del Mara simply by passing over it and so many of the people they were trying to evacuate die a horribly pointless death. It never once passes his mind (or let’s not beat him down solely) or that of anybody aboard the Argo that a creature with wings that size that can fly would generate an unbelievable amount of force simply by flapping once to create lift? He’s also dripping lava, so even if the hurricane level winds that follow him weren’t an issue, having something with that amount of residual molten rock passing overhead doesn’t seem like a healthy thing to expose Isla Del Mara to.

Further dislike ensues when one of the miraculously surviving Ospreys issues a mayday during the Rodan/Ghidorah fight and the cargo doors are jammed. Mark the Hero leaps up with gritted teeth and desire to get things done, asking the way to the hangar. After all, he’s had miraculous problem solving abilities so far, why not?

“Which way to the hangar?” he asks.

Sam, a character who I’m even less fond of, stands up and offers to show him the way. Fairly brave, considering that the Argo is rattling like a leaf in a thunderstorm as two daikaiju battle nearby. I found the character annoying and sort of… pointless, but I admire that bit of bravery.

“Anybody else?” Mark asks, making a face.

Dude. The man just offered to help you and people need that help. Get off your high horse, swallow your pride and just go without comment. God knows how many people your stupid plan just got killed.

The two run to the hangar and a crewman explains the door is jammed. Mark decides to drop a hanging Osprey onto the doors to get them off… without suggesting it to the crewman. He just fucking goes for the buttons, expecting his usual “my plan will work” attitude to succeed.

At last, one of Mark’s harebrained schemes is met with reasonable resistance for the first time and the crewman attempts to wrestle him off, before Mark Is Proven Right Again. But even suggesting it, getting a refusal and then doing it is more heroic than just going for the damn buttons like a lunatic.

He would have looked damn stupid if the weight of the Osprey wasn’t enough to open the doors and it instead just blocked them. The falling aircraft also almost hits the airborne one with its civilian payload as it also wasn’t warned, so again, he took an unnecessary risk that came off lucky because he couldn’t find the time to say “I have an idea”.

To round out the trifecta of what makes me dislike Mark in these scenes is what happens when the rest of the scene plays out:

Gravity Beams spew from Ghidorah’s mouth and blast Rodan into the ocean, defeated. Not satisfied with just this victory, the Golden Demise locks his terrible gaze on the Argo and with a sickening, gleeful cackle, closes in on the plane and its freshly arrived civilians.

All are stunned into a horrified silence. Even Mark, who has been having Unreasonable Protagonist Luck up until this point, bricks it.

“Oh, God.” he pleads.

God answers and he erupts from the ocean.

With a deafening roar, the mighty form of Godzilla slams into King Ghidorah with the force of a collapsing mountain. His dynamic, mid-air leap is enough to drag the foul hydra into the depths of the ocean and Godzilla proceeds to hold him there.

Ghidorah attempts to resurface and fly away, or at least lash out at the Argo in spite, but there Godzilla is again, yanking the head back underwater, biting and rolling like some mountainous crocodile, pinning the alien dragon under his weight.

Unbeknownst to our hero (Godzilla, obviously), the military has deployed the terrible Oxygen Destroyer in an attempt to Destroy All Monsters, giving only a cursory warning to the Argo to get out of there and fast. Mark makes his way onto the bridge and is informed of the decision.

“But he… he just saved us!” says Mark.

No, wait, he didn’t say that. Hold on…

“They… they didn’t even let us get clear?” says Mark.

Uh, no, sorry, trying again.

“Well, it’s not the worst idea.” he says.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUCK. YOU.

I get that you’re mad with Godzilla. I get that as the title character with a long history, we root for the kaiju more than anybody else. I get that he took your son from you, but twice… TWICE NOW, he has saved you and the people around you with PERFECTLY TIMED ENTRANCES. Even if it was just a coincidence, I’d be at least slightly more forgiving of the lion that killed my brother by accident if it jumped in front of a tiger that was slaughtering people left and right before it leapt at me.

Twice.

There’s not even a hesitant “oh, but he did help us”. Not even a shocked disbelief that the military has a weapon that they think will kill not just one, but two (because I’m willing to bet he thought Rodan was dead) Titans, much less them firing it without warning right on top of their position. Just a “well, fuck ‘em” shrug.

Godzilla nearly dies, Ghidorah seizes control of the Titans and sets about starting the apocalypse. Finally, Serizawa says what I’ve been thinking for quite a while and says “Well, it looks like you got your wish, Mark.” with a mixture of anger, sadness and disgust.

I could go on; the Titans are rampaging and Mark goes to leave Castle Bravo to strike out on his own and rescue Madison, despite the fact that he knows that Emma will probably try to keep her safe in whatever secure hidey hole she and the Kaiju Cultists have holed up in. In the novel, he’s outright going to steal one (also his first instinct when confronted by an alpha wolf in the novel, is to blow it away with a sidearm, before realising that’s absolutely callous and horrible and tries submissive behaviour tactics instead. So hey, Movie Mark is a slightly better person than Book Mark).

Mark suggests the nuke plan and goes down with Serizawa, Chen and Rick Sanch- Stanton. Everything goes sideways and he doesn’t even fucking blink when Serizawa decides that somebody’s gotta do it manually.

Back aboard the Argo? How does he break the news to Sam, the only member of the MONARCH team that wasn’t there? Shoving Serizawa’s notebook into his chest, saying that they better not screw this up and not even fucking pausing to tell him what happened.

Mark’s self-centred attitude keeps coming back and it gets people killed. My second time viewing this film, during the two confrontation scenes with Godzilla, I wasn’t getting the “There is a massive threat in my territory!” vibe from the King of the Monsters, I was getting a “Who the hell is this asshole and why does he hate me so much?” feeling from Our Glorious Boy.

It’s a recurring theme too. Mark experiences loss, but he feels as if his loss is the only one that matters. Both he and Emma do this to Madison and it makes me mad that in trying to cope with their own loss, they shunned the one remaining child they had left. By the time they realise that, the world is literally about to end and they’re still bickering at one another.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m very vocally critical of Mark and Emma’s treatment of Madison. Both she and Mark decide to put their own ways of coping with their son’s death (constructing a device to allow for the orchestration of mass human death and convincing oneself that it’s the correct course of action/drinking booze) above Madison’s own well being.

When the chips are down, of course, they care for her and ultimately risk their lives to save her, but… congratulations for the bare minimum parenting, guys? Physically, they want her out of harm, but mentally she should either fall into line with Emma’s thinking or be there for Mark.

Godzilla and Mothra feel more like her bloody parents in this film (Godzilla saving her life when she was facing down the literal fucking devil and Mothra’s gentle interaction at the temple and reviving her from death when she appeared to have died in the novel) than the other Russells do. Both fill the archetypes of “Father” (tough, stern, but ultimately your protector) and “Mother” (gentle, nurturing and wonderful) better than the people do.

…yeah, alright, that one is a stretch, but I had that idea a while ago and I wanted to put it to paper.

In short, I’m mad at Sad Mad Dad because his character shoves the waaaaaaaay more interesting, compelling and sympathetic characters of Serizawa, Graham and his own daughter (and the actual goddamned non-monster hero of the movie), Madison out of the way of main character-ness, just so we can have somebody who is about as pleasant to interact with as a cactus.

King of the Monsters is a film that has a lot of sacrifice in it, good and bad. Emma wants to sacrifice most of humanity to save the planet. Serizawa sacrifices himself to save Godzilla and thus, the planet. Mothra sacrifices her own life to save Godzilla from King Ghidorah and so does Emma, to save her family and as redemption for her sins.

Even Madison was also ready to at least risk her own life to distract the Titans and King Ghidorah if it would even slightly disrupt his efforts to conquer the planet. She goes against terrorists, her own mother and a demonic, nigh-omnipotent being of malicious intent and faces him down with a defiant roar of her own when it looks like the end.

But Mark doesn’t sacrifice. He wants his daughter back, but he never takes a hit. Other people die for him, as a result of him and he doesn’t even recognise it. The world is at stake and he keeps his focus on his own desires, ignorant to the people around him because only his loss matters.

He might not be the genocidal monster in the film that Emma was, that Jonah and of course, Ghidorah certainly were. But he has a very narrow and dispassionate world-view and outside of certain cartoons with comedic circumstances, I don’t care much for that at all.

TL;DR: Madison should have been the central protagonist, because I like her more.