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casualotptrash · 3 years

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Fixes to the Persona Series- Social Links

This was originally going to be the whole point 6 in my Fixes to the Persona Series post, but it was basically the same length as points 1-5 combined so I didn’t want to make the post mega-huge.

Link to the whole post about this topic.

(Spoilers for a lot of P3 things, including the plot and second awakenings)

I’ll start off with this point, something that needs to be fixed for all of the games is that you shouldn’t only get social link points for saying what the person wants to hear. I get the train of thought that if you say what they want to hear they will like you more, but that’s not how real friendships work? Obviously you shouldn’t be saying something that offends them and think it will raise your points, but sometimes people just need to hear things?

I can think of three standout examples: Nozomi in P3 (Gourmet King), Mishima in P5, and Shinya in P5. Nozomi’s link is a hot mess in of itself, but it was very frustrating to at one point just be like “Hey can you chill?” when he’s trying to induct you into a scam/cult or whatever, and it reverses the social link. Like ok buddy fuck you too, I was just trying to say no and that you need to stop scamming people?? For Mishima in P5 (I’ll go more in depth on him in a later post), it’s just kind of strange that you can clearly see him starting to obsess about the PT’s but you can’t really tell him he needs to stop until the social link demands it. Even then, the only way to get points is pretty much to go “Wow Mishima, you’re the best! You’re the reason we exist! We love you!!!” and it just feels kind of wrong. Shinya’s is very much along the same line as that, except you basically have to do something even worse and encourage him to keep being a bully? Thankfully P5 doesn’t reverse confidants, but I probably would have done so with Shinya because I kept telling him he shouldn’t bully others until I realized how to get points with him. It just feels wrong to encourage such behavior until the character suddenly realizes they’ve been acting wrong. No shit, I’ve been trying to say that.

I think social links need quite the fix to them, but this is definitely one of them. Strong, real relationships are not just built upon telling the other person what they want to hear.

Now I’m going to go into the structure of how social links are made and how they affect the characters. I have so much to say about this it’s not even funny. There are two major parts to this, but the second heavily ties into the first, so I’ll just go through them one at a time while trying to make sense.

The first part is that, simply put, integral character growth should not be tied to social links. The completion/tipping point of a character’s growth seems to be signified by their second awakening taking place. For example, in P3, all of the cast members awaken after a big event happens in game which causes them to grow. Most of this is them learning how to move on past the deaths of their loved ones, but still the idea remains the same. The game still has some pretty significant social links with party members too, so it’s not like the social links really suffered from this. In fact, I would say it made the social links even better, and it did this by fleshing out the characters further.

For this example, I’m going to use Akihiko’s growth from the story and social link in P3P because I feel like I know it quite well and it’s one of the best examples of this.

In the main story, it’s clear that Akihiko has a couple of problems. He’s quick to fight, reckless with his own health, and cant let go of the past. Along with these traits, he also cares very much about his friends. He considers Tartarus to be a training ground, is actually injured for the first few months of the game, scolds the MC, Junpei, and Yukari a bit for going out to the alleyway (where Shinji saved them) because it was dangerous, and desparately wants Shinji to rejoin SEES. Him and Shinji, on multiple occasions, talk about the incident where Shinji killed Ken’s mother. Akihiko says that Shinji needs to let go of the past, and Shinji echoes the same sentiment back at him.

What all of these problems step from is the death of his sister, Miki. They were both young and orphans, along with Shinji, and one day during a fire Shinji held Akihiko back from running back into the burning building. Inside the burning building was Miki, who Akihiko was trying to get to, and sadly she died in the fire (I’m pretty sure all of this isn’t revealed until P3P with his social link, but in any version of the game we find out that Miki is dead). Because of this, he felt powerless and from then on strived to be powerful enough to save those around him, which is why he’s obsessed with training to such a degree that he doesn’t care about personal harm to himself.

All of this eventually comes to a head when Shinji dies in the story, and Akihiko isn’t able to save him. At a memorial for his death, Akihiko says this:

“I was too obsessed with power. Ever since I lost Miki, that's all I've cared about. I thought that if I was strong enough, I could protect anyone. But I was wrong... And now You're gone too... I'm such an idiot. In battle, there's always a chance of dying... I knew that! But I was so focused on fighting that I didn't notice anything else! It didn't matter how tough I was! Look what happened!”

He cries for his friend, and then is reminded that this is not what Shinji would want. He would want him to keep living his life, and finally let go of the ghosts of his past. So, this is what he does. At that point, his character growth basically reaches its climax and he awakens to Caesar. This all happens in the main story of the game.

Now, how did they decide to do his social link in P3P? Personally, I think it was genius. Due to all of that growth being integral to the main story, they could not just take it out and shove it into a social link. They had to find another thing to make the social link about, and instead of making it about something pointless they connect it to the main growth in the game. (Note, this social link is only available in the FeMC route)

In general, what his social link is about mirrors his growth in the main story a lot. In the beginning, he treats the MC with an overwhelming sense of care, almost to a condescending degree. You’re always going out to eat, him saying how much you need to eat to grow strong, and jogging/running with him. Taking out the more romantic parts of the social link (although they are *chefs kiss*), eventually it progresses to the point where he asks you if you can stop being the field leader of SEES. Of course, he immediately takes this back and laments that you couldn’t just do that. You have the option to question if he thinks you arent good enough for the job, and he quickly says that the MC is capable, and he didn’t mean to imply that you werent, but he doesn’t want you to be in danger. The social link is frozen after this, as Akihiko doesn’t know how to balance his overwhelming worry and concern about the MC being hurt.

After Shinji’s death, the social link continues and he reveals the event of Miki’s death. At one point even says he feels like he doesn’t deserve to live because she died. It’s a very sad event, but because of his resolution from the main story with Shinji’s death he is able to open up to the MC. In the end, he comes to the conclusion that he’ll never get over the anger and sadness he feels for his sister’s death, and he accepts that she is dead, but he feels guilty because he wanted to ask you to bear this burden with him. He also starts to wonder what his feelings toward the MC mean, because he is very conflicted, and admits he might be seeing Miki in you (hence the overwhelming protecting nature he has for you in the link, and slightly condescending big-brother tendencies).

In his rank 9, he admits that he was tired of losing what was important to him. He thought that it would be better not to let things get too important, rather than risk losing them. He realizes this is wrong, and says he now knows he needs to work to protect everything precious from him. If the romance route was taken then he sees you as a precious loved one, while if the romance route is not taken he likens you to the status of Miki, aka a precious sister to him.

As you can see from the synopsis, a lot of what was in the social link is directly tied into his main growth in the story, however it is also not integral to his main growth. It stems off of it, not the other way around. Whoever made the extra social links in P3P did an amazing job at doing this exact thing, perhaps because they couldn’t change the growth in the main story. Either way, it’s a perfect example of how social links should be done.

If you’re interested in watching the growth from the social link directly, here is the link: Akihiko social link rank 1-10

You might be thinking, how is this issue really that big of a problem? Akihiko was a great character before his P3P social link, so if the growth is there either way (in story or social link) then it should be fine. My answer to this is in short, as the series progressed from P3 this problem got worse to the point where it negatively impacts the characters. The reason this got worse and impacts the characters so much, especially with the ones from P5, is because of the nature of how social links are set up. Obviously, social links are optional. They have to be, because not everyone is going to finish all of them in one run. This presents the unique issue of needing to make social links meaningful, but also not necessary. I would think anyone who reads that sentence would immediately understand how those two things do not mix well, especially when almost all of the important character growth is pushed into the social link. I’ll be using the social links (party members specifically) in P5 as my example to illustrate this because they’re the best for this.

At the very best, party member confidants in P5 feel like they contribute a good bit of character development alongside the story (on the surface). At the very worst, confidants in P5 feel like they actively contradict the story. Ann is probably the best example of this, but it happens to the rest of the main cast too, to varying degrees. I’m not as familiar with Ann’s confidant as Akihiko’s, but I’m going to try and do my best.

Essentially, Ann’s confidant is about finding her passion, becoming a stronger person, and overcoming her guilt. Outside of the occasional discussions about Shiho, how strong she is, and Ann discussing how she needs to become strong for her, one of the main things you do in the confidant is help Ann use various methods to be a better model (because she comes to the conclusion that she wants to be serious about modeling, her hobby, since Shiho is trying so hard to get back to her normal life). I have played Persona 5 vanilla twice, and Royal twice, and every time I have completed Ann’s confidant. That being said, it’s kind of sad that I could do it four times and barely remember the “becoming a stronger person” and “overcoming her guilt” part of it (outside of Ann saying Shiho is strong, and Ann asking us to insult her to make her stronger). She does have a very good conclusion with Shiho, and it’s is really sweet to see them hug on the roof and everything, but other than that the main outcome of the confidant is that Ann is going to really try for her modeling career and needs to change her habits because of this. Some of those habits she changes is by eating less junk food, exercising, etc.

Here’s where the issue comes in. You go through this whole confidant and have Ann come to that conclusion, and then throughout multiple scenes (and the rest of the story) Ann adheres to none of it. It’s the most whiplash I’ve ever experienced when one day Ann says she’s going to cut the sweets, and then the next something happens in game and she’s just chowing down on all of the food. To be clear, I do not care if Ann is eating a lot of a little in the grand scheme of things. Like I said, this is just an example that illustrates the total tonal dissonance present from the social link to the main story.

The whole reason this occurs is because, like I said earlier, the confidant has to be meaningful but not necessary to the plot. This is a major problem when pretty much the whole reason for her character growth, the plot with Shiho, is in the confidant. No matter if you do the confidant or not, in the story the characters will always act as if the confidant plot has not happened at all...because they physically cannot write it into the main story as it is optional. The reason this worked with Akihiko was because he had his main growth outside of the social link, and the social link tied into his growth, and the reason this doesn’t work for the P5 cast is because their growth is set up in the opposite way. Instead of tying their main growth in the story to the confidant, the story acts as a stepping stone for their main growth in story of the confidant.

I predict some people might read what I just said and counter with the point “You cant just expect their whole personalities to change,” and they would be right, if that was what I was explaining. It’s not. Obviously base personality traits are always going to be present, but the reason for having character growth is for the characters to grow. Futaba can always be more shy and timid around others, but if you go through her whole confidant where she learns to be more independent and then later on have her go somewhere and completely shut down? That is not growth. Her change can manifest in her being shy about going somewhere new, but adapting to it a lot quicker than she did before the confidant was completed. But, like I said, because of how the confidants are set up this is just not possible.

It took this long to get here, but we finally arrive at how the second point ties in. The second point is that, because of this issue with tying in integral growth with the social link, the characters end up being very one-note in the story (if you take out the inclusion of the social link). In my opinion, P3 doesn’t really suffer from this (although there still are bland characters in that game. Sometimes the writing is just not that exciting. Sorry Fuuka, you’re better in the spinoffs), P4 suffers from it a little (Teddie talking about girls 90% of the time, Yukiko laughing at everything, Meat Chie, etc.), and P5 has the most rampant cases of this.

This doesn’t mean that the characters are not well written, it just means that the game is going to be way more enjoyable if you are able to max everyone’s social link in comparison to only maxing a few. Putting aside the gameplay benefits, I usually love my NG+ runs more than my first run because it allows me to see all of the characters so much more.

I know that all of the characters could be shoved into stereotypical boxes if we had to, but we basically don’t need to for P5. If you do not do any confidants with party members in P5, tell me how many times Ryuji shows his remorseful and caring side for the trouble he has caused the track team in the main story. Oh wait, you can’t! He’s pushed around as the proverbial butt-monkey for almost the entire game, and at least Junpei and Yosuke got some deeper interaction with the story when they were in this role. If you only experience Ryuji from the main plot, you’d probably want to throttle him with how many times he ogles at Ann, argues with Morgana, tries to pick up girls, and shouts about being a Phantom Thief and wanting fame.

I will admit, they do have some deep moments here and there, when the main story calls for it, but other than that (again, without doing the social link) the PT’s kind of have as much characterization as a piece of cardboard. This is a big problem, especially when the cast is full of great characters! I played P5 4 times, and it still isn’t my favorite cast. There are some really good characters in there, but they just could not compare to the P3 cast for me (even though P3 was filled with a lot of highs and a lot of lows). Yukari was kind of a bitch and I didn’t like her for a long time, but at least I felt something! Poor Haru is just shoved off into a corner and characterized as the “team mom but would kill you, sad her father died, also has a crush on you” for the whole game unless you do her confidant.

Jury is still out on the P4 cast, because I see a little bit of what P3 had going on and what P5 does in them. Every time Yosuke is talking about something serious or profound I get really excited, only for it to be followed up with some dumb (usually homophobic) joke. I like the extra interactions the P4 cast has in comparison to P5, but even in those situations it feels like each member is kind of cast into their stereotypical role (Teddie want pussy, Yukiko laugh, Chie meat, etc.). I imagine once I do finish P4G and get to do my NG+ I will like the cast a lot more, but only because I will be able to do all of their social links.

Despite all of this, whether a character from the game has great growth or not, you can always count on Atlus to flanderize each character into their one “defining” (aka memed) trait to hell and back in any spinoff.

Sorry, don’t mind me crying in the corner with how Akihiko was massacred from a deep character into a protein junkie.

#long post #persona 3 #persona 3 portable #persona 4 #persona 5 #persona series #p3 #p3p #p4 #p5 #shush just shut the hell up about protein for five goddamn minutes #please god he only mentioned it once in p3 #maybe twice who knows #AND IT WAS COMPLETELY BY CHANCE TO SEE IT #Atlus why do you massacre your great characters #it's not funny anymore #I want d e p t h

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mistresseast · 4 years

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A big thing too is there is no guarantee Atlus will do anything with what they baited in Royal and I know that's why I'm frustrated. I know a lot of people don't have confidence because nothing they've done with Goro makes sense, and its based on getting fans to spend money, not because they care about a character, so it feels like sunk cost? He's still left out of things and I wouldn't feel negative about Royal if I knew for sure they would bring him back. Ppl are tired of being baited.

If you were just after commiseration: ugh! I know!! It’s so frustrating! Atlus is bad in general about payoff and the problem is on glaring display with Goro. You’d think with a whole ass remake and all the money Vanilla made, they’d have the resources to figure out how to handle a complex character in a satisfying way, but those homophobes couldn’t write their way out a wet paper bag and the brilliance of Goro Akechi was almost certainly a happy accident.

If you want my more tough love advice and analysis: expecting a big company like Atlus (ESPECIALLY one with Atlus’s reputation) to deliver on the very specific stuff that fans like us want is indeed a one-way ticket to frustration. I won’t go into speculation about how the character of Goro came to be, but I will say that he feels like a character who was developed for one purpose and then as the writing went on he adopted more importance to the story but the initial plan for what happened to him didn’t adjust to match. Stuff like that happens in writing all the time, and particularly in stories as complex and with as many people working on them as p5. So when I feel like something about Goro’s handling doesn’t make sense, I try to look at it from that perspective. It’s not a deliberate mishandling or a disregard for the character; it was just an early-development failure to accurately predict what would be necessary for his specific arc. And imo Royal put a lot of work into fixing that, but the simple fact is that a truly satisfying outcome for this character would require some significant rewrites and adjustments to the basic fabric of the game, and the devs just aren’t in a position to do that, for lots of reasons. So no matter how much I like the third semester, nothing we were going to get was ever going to feel as complete as it could. So if you are holding out for canon content to somehow justify or validate all of the energy you’ve put into this character and shuake as a ship, then I’m sorry to say you’re probably right and that nothing we get will ever feel like enough. If you feel like that means being engaged with the story and characters isn’t worth it, then you should consider putting your time into something else, to save yourself the frustration. I can’t say how much of the “baiting” around Goro’s character is intentional, but I don’t have any confidence that this lingering feeling of incompleteness is going to be resolved, and I know that people do leave fandoms for that reason. Personally, I am pleased and compelled enough by what we have to stick around, and in fact I might prefer Atlus leaving well enough alone at this point. They’re notorious for wrecking character arcs and tbh I don’t trust them not to ruin Goro Akechi. They can just hand him off to us, it’s fine. We’ll treat him better.

As for Goro being left out of stuff, maybe I just don’t pay enough attention to the tie-in media, but I’ve never been as upset by that as I know a lot of people are. It’s disappointing that he’s not in Scramble, it really, really is, and I wish he could have had at least a cameo, but I also understand why he’s not there and it’s not a malicious choice by the company. Scramble was in development at the same time as Royal, so characters whose very presence would spoil Royal obviously couldn’t be included, which also leaves Sumi and Maruki in the lurch. It’s not ideal but it is understandable. Goro is in the dancing game, as well as pq2, and he just got to be a major part of the train mystery AR game that happened a while ago. He’s even getting a lot of love in the musicals, showing up early and getting more attention at this point in the story than he did in the actual game, almost like the writers are realizing his importance should have been seeded earlier and now, with hindsight, are able to correct some mistakes. He gets a lot of fun stuff in the anime, which I generally don’t like, but their handling of Goro is one of the things I approve of. Rokuro Saito, who writes the Mementos Mission manga, obviously likes him and puts effort into his appearances. I suppose I’m not really sure what he’s been “left out of” other than promo material and like,,, some official art. Due to the nature of who he is in the story, he’s a difficult character to work into things. The people creating this content walk a thin line between not wanting to spoil Vanilla OR Royal for folks who might still spend money to buy the game, and knowing that Goro’s status as a “traitor” means it’d be weird for him to just be included in group shots of the characters. Do I wish there was more content of him? Yes, but I also don’t really see a concentrated effort to leave him out of stuff.

I’m not trying to invalidate your feelings at all, of course. I see sentiments like yours all over the fandom from people who clearly enjoy the story and care deeply about the characters, and I know exactly how frustrating and pointless it all feels. I toss and turn at night thinking about all the ways the game could have treated Goro better, treated Akira better, treated its own themes better, and sometimes I just want to claw my own skin off at all the wasted opportunities, But ultimately, I channel that discontent into my own creativity and appreciate the folks who work to make sense of the nonsense. It’s not a dealbreaker to me. These negative feelings only serve to remind me how much I love these characters, and I know none of us would rage so hard if we didn’t connect to this story in some way. But I can’t count on the source material to make me happy. That’s not the source material’s job. And in the end you have to ask yourself if it’s worth it to you to stick around for something that’s only going to keep disappointing your specific needs.

I don’t want to discourage people from coming to me to vent, but just know that I've been through the gamut with this fandom and I’ve got opinions about Everything, so if that’s not what you need, sorry! I just want to soothe negativity if at all possible but I know not everyone is interested in a lecture <3

#ask tag #anon #isablogging

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magioftheseas · 5 years

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Stirring

For @i-demand-a-hug

Summary: In a post-canon AU where Akechi was temporarily an amnesiac after almost dying, Akira visits him at his work. Things are a little nostalgic for reasons.

Rating: T (?)

Warning: None really except for references to the plot. I guess. Akechi’s a little bitchy but I mean...

Notes: This might seem out of the blue because I’ve never really posted about p5. I haven’t fully played the game. I haven’t fully watched the anime. But I am interested in it because of a friendly friend who I’m writing this for because sOME WEIRDO was harassing them over their valid ship tastes. I may not know much, but I do know shuake is legit, so like, here’s a fic. Also, I’m using Akira Kurusu instead of Ren Amamiya because the former sounds nicer. It’s got that edge.

***Alternate Ao3 Link***

Commission? Donate?

It’s a bad idea to keep coming here.

It’s not the first time he’s thought that. It won’t be the last either. It’s also neither the first nor the last time he found himself in front of the same cafe, staring through the window where a certain waiter was washing tables. When that waiter glanced in his direction, he offered an achingly friendly wave.

And there was the slightest twitch at his lips.

Akira tries not to react, tries to keep his own usual grin as the other walks towards him and opens the door.

“Welcome, again,” is said oh so cheerfully. Perfect waiter behavior, and it never gets less amusing on this person. With their chestnut-brown hair tied back and that auburn gaze now striking. “I’m starting to think you’re obsessed.”

“Am I that obvious?” He fakes sheepishness, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I’m actually still gathering up the courage to ask you out.”

Another twitch to those features. And maybe, just maybe, Akira’s heart leaps a little.

“Ha-ha.” The waiter shakes his head. “Well, you haven’t tipped into harassment yet, I suppose. Unless you actually plan on loitering.”

“I’m good with actually paying for something,” he said.

“Then hurry up and come inside.” It was almost snapped at him, but the waiter was back to gentle smiles and a friendly demeanor as Akira followed his lead. He picked up a menu, leading Akira to his usual table, offering that same vapid smile as before. “The usual, I presume?”

“Yeah,” Akira replied, almost absently. “The usual. But maybe something sweet to go with it? Or maybe something spicy. What do you think? Pancakes or curry?”

The waiter froze momentarily, face tightening for a moment. Akira noticed this, and they both reached the threshold of how much they were willing to overlook. If not for the setting, things between them would have erupted on the spot.

Instead, the waiter inhaled sharply, fingers going briefly to his nametag. The name printed on there was just another obvious lie.

“Curry,” was said through gritted teeth. “I think curry suits you best.”

Akechi spun on his heel and stomped away before Akira could say anything else. And he’s really not surprised. He’s nervous as hell, but not surprised. It’s not like brimming tension was unfamiliar when it came to one Akechi Goro.

How nostalgic. He really hasn’t changed from back then at all. Still all fake smiles and broiling with fury. That’s my Akechi alright.

Akira does straighten up, hoping that Akechi doesn’t take this moment to flee the scene. But when he squirms to try and see into the kitchen, there’s not much to look at. Just a bland set piece. Clean, but boring.

When Akechi stepped back out, he avoided his stare. He just went straight to making coffee as if on autopilot, although Akira could definitely criticize his technique. Too much of a shaky hand. Too hasty with the pouring. Not nearly enough creative flair. Clumsy in how he still seemed intimidated by syrup. Endearing in how he was now considerably flustered in handing him the cup.

“I don’t know why you even come here,” he remarked with a huff. “It’s clear I’m still an amateur.”

When I first came here, he was pretty earnest. It was unsettling. Adorable, but unsettling.

“I’m pissed you lied to me, by the way,” Akechi said. “Remember? When I first asked how it was? And you said it was great? Spineless coward.”

Akira shrugged, sipping at his coffee. His face pinched a little at the bitterness of it. Akechi’s messed up the flavor before, and his taste buds are still too refined to overlook it. Still, he offers Akechi an easy grin.

“It’s great. Delicious. I love it.”

“I hate you.”

He can’t help but laugh, especially at how Akechi’s cheeks were steaming red. When Akechi sat in the chair across from him, it was with enough force to cause the table to rattle. The coffee spilled a little onto his lap. It definitely burned through his pants. And Akira kept smiling at him stupidly.

“Your service skills are slipping,” he pointed out. “At this rate, you’re going to get fired.”

“This place is going out of business,” Akechi retorted. “As you no doubt noticed, it doesn’t exactly compare to LeBlanc.”

“I mean, few places do.” Akira shrugged again. “But, I mean, that’s still a shame to hear. I’ll miss ordering from you.”

Akechi’s eyes rolled irritably.

“I’m sure. You definitely weren’t coming here for the food.”

“It wasn’t bad. Do give the owner my regards.”

“I’ll be sure.” Akechi waved his hand. “Considering you were one of the very few regulars, it’ll be appreciated. Although you were also just one of many shallow idiots who only stopped by because you saw a pretty face.”

“You are pretty,” Akira hummed, almost admiringly. Akechi scowled at him.

“Well, great news. I have other jobs you can harass me at. I’ll have to get another to replace this one soon. Bills have to be paid, after all.” Akechi sighed. “And the living expenses just keep building. Just last week, my bathtub broke. Quite the fall from grace, wouldn’t you say?”

“Cheers to adulthood,” Akira chirped, lifting his cup. “You should see my student debt. So many zeroes it could make an old man cry.”

Even now, he got a little weepy remembering. And of course, Akechi giggled at the idea of him in pain. Adorably, at that.

He wanted it to last. He desperately wanted that more than he wanted a lot of things. Of course, Akechi’s smile drops as easily as it comes.

“So,” Akira can only say. “How much do you remember now?”

“Enough.” With a rather cold expression, Akechi pinched at his fringe. “It’s gross, remembering. Like wiggling your way into a second skin. It’s also not fun waking up from the nightmares. The worst part is that there are still things missing. I don’t know what they are and I dread finding out, but I can tell they’re there. Like...there’s some old bastard I’m supposed to hate with every fiber of my being, right? Even more than I hate you.”

“Yeah.” Akira nodded. “There was.”

“Oh yeah, you and your little posse were in the business of mind control, right?” Akechi asks almost saccharinely. “I remember snippets of that. But I feel like it’s still far beyond my current understanding.”

“I mean, it's complicated,” Akira mutters into his coffee helplessly. “It’d take a while to explain, but it’s impossible these days. For what it’s worth.”

“Mmhm.” Akechi’s gaze was lidded. “Whatever those means were, I did terrible things through them, too.”

Akechi didn’t wear gloves anymore. It’s not the first time this has struck Akira as odd. But he does cast a glance at the other’s fingernails, noting how he had a tendency to pick at them. When he takes and squeezes Akechi’s hand, his first thought is marveling at how cold the skin is.

Akechi’s expression is a complicated one. His eyebrows are knitted, his face pinched like he’s anxious. Akira’s thumb running over his knuckles only causes his brow to furrow more and get his face that much closer to distorting. It’s nothing like in dreams or romantic fantasies, to be sure, but that Akechi has yet to stab his hand with a fork is progress.

“You still haven’t told me where else you work so that I can check up on you,” Akira said. “Will you keep your hair tied up?”

“Yes, but because of the wind not because of you.”

“Ooh, outdoor labor.” Akira crooned. “Will I get to see you lift?”

“I direct traffic, dumbass.”

“Oh, that’s actually terrifying. Too much power.”

Akechi snorted before slipping his hand out of Akira’s grip. Akira lets him, although his eyebrow waggles.

“One sec. The food should be ready.”

Akechi does wipe his hands off before going on his way. Perhaps out of spite. Perhaps out of habit. Maybe he actually was self-conscious about it. If he brought it up, he’d just get shut down so he was stuck pondering. There were many things he could only wonder about these days.

Like what he was doing right now, exactly? What was he hoping to accomplish? With Akechi mostly revived and his memories mostly restored, what was supposed to happen between them next?

“Our relationship is purely about equal terms.”

There was no reason to fight anymore. There was also no reason to see each other. And yet, the idea of just letting Akechi go and turning his back like none of it ever really mattered as if their interactions had only ever been out of necessity...and maybe some of them were. Maybe there were utilitarian exchanges between billiards and coffee.

If he really believed that, he wouldn’t have approached Akechi again in the first place. The sentiment of closure only held so much weight when it came to the messy relationships between messy human beings.

“If we had only met a few years earlier.”

Someday, it’ll be a few years later.

“Eat up,” Akechi announced, setting the plate before him. “Also, hurry. You’re the last customer for today and closing hours are coming up.” Akechi checks his watch. Akira notices that it’s pretty cheap. That the face is cracked. “I have another shift after this.”

“Can I come?”

“Only if you can keep up with a bike.”

“I definitely can.”

Akechi gives him a look but the corner of his lips twist the slightest bit upward. With a faded smile, Akechi taps his broken watch. Akira takes his first bite.

The curry was pretty unremarkable as always, but there was still that bit of spice he liked. There was nostalgia to this moment that helped sweeten the deal. It was overall pleasant, even if it, of course, wasn’t going to last. Still.

“It’s quite the run,” Akechi was muttering into his palm, looking away with a light pink dusting his cheeks. “There’s room on the bike. Just this once.”

He had a good feeling about the future.

#shuake #akeshu #goro akechi #ren amamiya #akira kurusu #Magi fics #I hope friendly friend likes it #I'm trying to write more non-dr stuff this month #lemme know if I'm doing this well #There's half a second referencing royal but it's not a spoiler #also yes I very much could've fleshed out this au #maybe I will #MAYBE #I'd have to actually ask friendly friend for advice though #or actually get through the game...and I'd prefer to wait for royal's eng release...#yeah

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greywindys · 4 years

Note

what do you think of Folklore? personally i think it's one of Taylor's best

Hi, anon! I’ve been giving myself time to digest Folklore (been alternating between it and Gaslighter - also SO good - for the past week) and so far I’d say it’s in my top 3. I don’t want to see anyone coming for her songwriting ever again! Lmao. My only critique - and this is more personal taste than anything - is that it’s a little long. I start losing focus/wanting to switch to something else around “Mad Woman”/“Epiphany,” not because they’re bad songs, but because the album has such a specific tone that I feel like I reach my full of it by about 11/12 tracks in.

Standout tracks for me are: “Exile” (Bon Iver!!!), “August”, “This is Me Trying”, “Invisible String”

To keep this on brand, I also want to say that there are some lines on this album that are very 2Doc. I almost made a separate cursed post about it, but then I received this ask and thought I could just write it out here 😂:

But I knew you // Dancing in your Levi's // Drunk under a streetlight // I knew you - Pre-phase 1 2Doc, 2D remembering early memories of Murdoc towards the end of the night when the pubs are closed and they’re walking back to 2D’s place. Maybe you don’t see Murdoc as Levi’s guy, but it’s more about the sentiment.

Do you remember? // Remember when I pulled up // And said "Get in the car" // And then canceled my plans // Just in case you'd call // Back when I was living for the hope of it all - More pre-phase 1 2Doc. Murdoc remembering the days getting together with 2D for rehearsal. Of course, he was dropping everything if 2D was available (then again, what else did he have going on?), he wanted the band to be a success, he wanted to get out of Stoke, he (though he might not admit it, it’s probably subconscious) wanted to the man who might have been his first real friend.

I didn't have it in myself to go with grace // And you're the hero flying around saving face // And if I'm dead to you why are you at the wake? // Cursing my name // Wishing I stayed - I’m jumping ahead to P5 now. We always assume Murdoc listening to TNN resulted in a positive breakthrough for their relationship. But what if it didn’t? What if Murdoc was angry? What if he called 2D out for how he mocked him in interviews while he was in jail, but contradicted himself with his songs about missing him? I’ll be honest, I always thought the songs were sweet, and I still do, but I could see Murdoc taking it poorly and perhaps perceiving the indirect confession as cowardly (might want to play around with this one).

I've been having a hard time adjusting // I had the shiniest wheels, now they're rusting // I didn't know if you'd care if I came back...They told me all of my cages were mental // So I got wasted like all my potential // And my words shoot to kill when I'm mad - More P5 angst. These two selections read like internal Murdoc thoughts in the first few days after his return.

And I've been meaning to tell you // I think your house is haunted // Your dad is always mad and that must be why - This sounds like 2D pre-phase 1, referencing Murdoc’s dad, and in the same song (it’s like they’re mid-conversation): And I think you should come live with // Me and we can be pirates - This sounds like Murdoc, like something he might say in one of his happy drunk moments pre-phase 1. Of course (more angst) we know how terribly that turned out (PB).

There are probably more, but I’m still getting used to the album. It’s taken me longer than usual because, as of now, I’m not skipping any tracks!... Which is like, SO refreshing. I’m not sure where it’ll fall in my final rankings...but it will be high.

#asks.#long post #I feel like I just came up with a handful of one-shot ideas here lmao #Anonymous #you can find 2Doc songs anywhere if you try hard enough

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theexistentiallyqueer · 5 years

Text

"but he murdered people”

This is a post about Goro Akechi, murder, its aftermath, trauma, and two things that are in real short fucking supply around here: critical thinking and empathy.

Listen, I’m a veteran of the Dragon Age fandom. If you want to talk about toxic fandoms, they’re your Bible. As far as your Judas Iscariots and Nebuchadnezzars go, I was one of them. I’ve seen it, I’ve done it, and I’m done with it. It’s exhausting to carry that much rage inside of you, to live it actively every second of every day, and to inflict it on other people and laugh about it. So I’ve been disengaged, largely, for a few years.

And now I’m in the Persona 5 fandom and find myself enthusiastically appreciating Goro Akechi, because who doesn’t love complex, morally flawed, ambiguously gay-coded characters? Shit, maybe you’re not on board, but I’ll sign right up. I’m a relative newcomer, despite being a longtime Persona fan and playing P5 around when it came out, because I didn’t engage with the fandom then. I jumped back in with the Royal announcement and absolutely saturated myself in this vibrant fan space. Invested in the idea of Akechi being explored as a fully fleshed-out character, I find myself following Goroboys. Which is great! Because so far, they’re all great! Nicest bunch of people you could ever hope to meet!

Except there’s Discourse. There’s always been Discourse, I find, but this is my first exposure to it in this fandom. This weekend was my first week of seeing Goro antis active, seeing people I follow, people I like and appreciate and some I considering genuine friends, actively attacked and harassed because they like a fictional teenage character who killed some other fictional people in a fictional world where you, playing as the main character, have the ability to perform a metaphysical lobotomy on people who literally can’t consent. Here I thought the only people who hated Akechi were white cishet men who saw his rage against a parent and said, “Nah, too bitchy for me,” because they’re too afraid to look in a mirror and see Masayoshi Shido’s fascist, misogynistic mug staring back.

Are you awake yet? Have I woken you up to the fact that Persona 5′s premise is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of “what if I could make the person who took advantage of me when I was a teenager apologize in front of the entire world by using an alternate fantasy dimension to completely violate their brain”?

I see my friends saying, “Wow, it’s amazing how people who hate Akechi can’t leave people who like Akechi alone,” and within an hour they have replies saying MURDER IS MURDER as if they know what murder actually is.

We’re about to get real personal up in here because maybe, only then, will some of you people take the hint that your behavior borders on actively bullying other people on the internet over a fictional character.

Ready? Here goes.

Murder is your mom picking you up from summer camp three weeks after your ninth birthday, driving you to your grandparents’ house, and telling you that when daddy was at work today, someone tried to steal the money, and they had a gun. Daddy was brave and Daddy died.

Murder is blacking out when you’re nine years old and coming to to yourself two houses away on a neighbor’s swing set with crickets chirping in your ears and the crushing reality of never seeing your father again turning your brain into static.

Murder is asking your mother if she asked for the death penalty, and your mother telling you, in a pleading voice, that she didn’t because he was mentally ill and it didn’t feel right. Murder is feeling angry afterwards because you feel like something was taken away from you, and something should be exchanged for that. Because that’s how fairness works, right? If you steal candy from the store, you have to give up your allowance for the next five months.

Murder is realizing you’re an atheist at fourteen and driving past the cemetery where your father’s remains are interred, and having the gut-punching, soul-suffocating realization of what never ever ever actually means. Murder is building an internal cosmology where forever means my atoms and yours, creating new life in perpetuity as the comfort you drag out of the west’s cold, uncaring atheism that never found its own poetry.

Murder is your first two years in college, when you discover social justice and realize the world is bigger than your own life experiences, and that violence at the bottom is a reactionary symptom against violence at the top. Murder is understanding the fact that the man who killed your father was himself a victim of a racist, ableist, capitalist society with a morally bankrupt healthcare system, and that every single one of those things is in and of itself is more hateful than the act of your father bleeding out in the parking lot, in the ambulance, on the operating table.

Murder is your mother confessing to you in college that your father was physically abusive of her and that she had threatened him, only weeks before he was killed, that she would leave and take her daughters with her if he didn’t change. Murder is knowing that your father ran after an armed robber because he was raised by a Sicilian father in a household overflowing with toxic masculinity, and what killed your father wasn’t a man with a gun: what killed your father was the patriarchy whispering in his ear, This theft emasculates you.

Murder is looking your own mother in the eye and telling her that one day you want to visit the man who killed your father and open your heart to him, because all you can think is, He didn’t plan this. He can’t have wanted this. What must it feel like to kill someone without intending to and then have to live with that for the rest of your life with no one to help you? Murder is the sound of betrayal in your mother’s voice when she responds, disbelieving.

Murder is spending years wanting to at least write to him, and then forgetting, and then going back, because you are a fluid, impermanent, imperfect person with your own flaws and failures and mental issues that hold you back from being the paragon you want to be. Murder is throwing yourself into the left and embracing prison abolition so hard it hurts, because you know that if the state can lock up someone who doesn’t “matter,” the state can lock up anyone.

Murder is throwing away or selling every childhood thing you ever possessed because you are not by nature a sentimental person, but never giving up that doll you were gifted, the doll you coveted and wanted more than anything else, three weeks before your father was shot and killed. You have no pictures, no mementos, no nothing, but she sits at the top of your bookshelf to this day, a weighty child goddess, the symbol of your torn and labyrinthine childhood.

Murder is having to see a bunch of petty-ass people using actual trauma that real life people have experienced and continue to experience to directly and repeatedly harass your friends online (and yourself, indirectly, by tagging their hateful shit) because you and your friends like a fictional fucking character who, by nature of being fictional, did not actually murder any real existing people.

Murder is building your entire identity around how you sympathize, deeply, with the person who killed your own father, because that takes hard work and deep empathy and the ability to see past a lot of bullshit just to get to that point, and having some fuck-ass anons act like none of that matters because there is (apparently, I must assume) some omnipotent god of justice saying “Fuck you and everything you’ve been through” that apparently only these bullies can hear.

Murder is seeing fandom moralizers talk about murder like they understand it. Like they’ve read this, plus the last ten-plus paragraphs, and decided they know best anyway because mommy and daddy always told them Criminals Are Bad and walked wide-eyed and innocent into a social network overrun with TERFs, exclusionists, and a rotten segment of the political left that acts like some extras straight out of The Crucible.

I have never once been triggered by anything relating to my father’s murder. I cried at the Resurrection Stone scene in The Deathly Hallows, I cried when I completed when I completed the DA2 DLC Legacy after the end of act 2. When I see a parent die, I have an emotional reaction, because it’s familiar.

But the Akechi antis who all say “but he killed people!”, The Akechi antis who say “murder is still murder”?

The murder of my father is still murder. The man who killed him, his murderer, is still regardless a human being, the man who killed him deserves sympathy and compassion and understanding and respect and, above all, a chance.

I am a living example of what’s left behind when someone is murdered. You can walk into the mausoleum where my father is interred, face his headstone, and let the earth open up beneath you and drop you into hell.

So most sincerely, from someone who lost their father to gun violence, to armed robbery, to murder: Stop fucking using our lived experiences as your justification to harass and bully people online for committing the Grave Moral Sin of just liking a video game character.

Between the fact that the American government is keeping real people in concentration camps and a bunch of strangers on the internet liking a twiggy teenage anime boy who used a fantasy world to kill people who don’t exist, which one is actually important to deserve your moral outrage?

You’ll die eventually; fascism won’t kill itself.

#persona #persona 5 #p5 #goro akechi #if you tell me you're sorry for my loss i'll literally hunt you down and eat you #this one goes out to the goroboys #pour one out kids #real tired of having a bunch of dungeon dwellers insinuate that i #a person who has experienced firsthand the trauma of losing a loved one to murder #am apparently delusional for liking a character who murdered people #you people probably all think tony stark is the best avenger #you probably watched the game of thrones finale and thought dany going mad queen was good writing #you probably think ''split'' is a good horror movie #you probably thought lala land should have won the oscar #you probably like ed sheeran #this is rebloggable fyi

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tothedarkdarkseas · 5 years

Note

Headcanons about what Stu got up to when Muds was in jail? Headcanons about how the Now Now came about?

(Thank you so much! I’m getting looney today, it’s nice to have a distraction. Behind a cut again for length!)

So while Murdoc’s banged up in merry old England, the band seemingly relocates to California for at least a part of this phase, which is interesting. I do wonder how Stu liked that Venice lifestyle and I do wonder how much he can compartmentalize being on the Pacific. (Better by TNN’s inception than by The Fall’s inception, I would assume.) Being both a shipper and a Sad Sack I don’t necessarily subscribe to the idea that Stu was living his very best life, but I don’t buy that he was cooped up crying in his room all day. I don’t think he’d give Murdoc that much, for starters. I think coming back together around the start of Humanz was… sort of morbidly nice. No one’s doing anything too drastic, Murdoc’s older and more remorseful and Stu’s older and less emotionally volatile, but there’s a palpable sense of Everything lingering, there’s an understanding of things likely never being “right” between them. If we’re sticking semi-closely to canon and Murdoc’s really just gotten locked away unexpectedly for parking tickets, I’m not too sure Stu was devastated by the news– if anything I think he was irritated and inconvenienced, it was a reminder of what Murdoc is like, the sort of person he’s been all his life, and who he might just be too set in his ways to quit being. I don’t think Stu’s glad for it, but I don’t think his life stops.

As for P5, all his quotes are gold and Peak Stu, this is how I’d like to think he really is all the time. I think he and Murdoc both intentionally say things in interviews to annoy the other, they mischaracterize each other and their relationship purely for the satisfaction of knowing the other will see it and say “oh, piss off” out loud. Whether he’s out shagging girls in LA is irrelevant, but he is. Stu really should’ve had a string of C/B-list dates over Phase 5, that would’ve been great. In my perfect world, Stu in Venice buys a longboard and starts making his own kombucha (and makes himself very sick, at which point Noodle coincidentally starts fermenting and sharing) and has a few flings, none of which he’s lying to Murdoc about. There’s an understanding. They still aren’t really something, they’re just… not nothing. I guess my thoughts sort of break off from what is common and logical here because, in my mind, he’s already had this time apart between PB and Humanz to be on his own and be his own person, and it did ultimately still lead him back to Gorillaz and to Murdoc. This time, it’s… different. There’s a foregone conclusion to this. The band is still happening, right now, and there’s a certainty, a finality to having a clear-cut date for when Murdoc will be released and back in his life. There’s not such necessity in finding himself, because he’s already had damn near 10 years between the island and Detroit and he’s found that unfortunately, Murdoc’s fingerprints are burned down to the bone. So… I think he does what he can to enjoy it. He has his fun with the girls, has his time re-acclimating to the beach, does yoga and drinks nasty craft beer sometimes and performs. He enjoys not the process of finding himself, but the vacation from being someone he’s already, with much reluctance and a failed escape, come to terms with being.

With that said, I do think there’s a certain… “suspended” nature to their relationship at that point, and there’s some focus toward making it something a little less nebulous. They’ve been back in each other’s orbits and they’ve grown weary enough to accept certain things, and as his journal and all of TNN would imply, Stu’s definitely spending some time during the phase reflecting. A huge portion of this time clearly does go to deciding how he wants stay with Murdoc (as he knows he will, in some form or another) and what that means about him, where he is, the person he’s shackling himself to being. I think the album just comes from that, both from resentment and frustration over the situation, from the “freedom” his history with Murdoc has made him feel rather alienated from, from wanting to make a statement, to Murdoc, to himself; it is somewhat to the public, but at the end of the day, the very act of making a public statement is still for him.

It’s tough to give great answers because I’m of conflicting opinions on where exactly their relationship was when the incarceration happened. It’s pretty hard to deny that TNN is an album about Murdoc, and it’s an album with quite a few love songs on it– but for me, the bigger (and wonderful) thing is that those love songs don’t really make TNN a romantic album. There’s absolutely a confession in there, but… maybe it’s just me being committed to their maladjustment, but I don’t strictly hear it as a confession of something good. In a lot of ways, it’s more about finally saying what he doesn’t want anymore, what he isn’t satisfied by, and what he doesn’t want his life to be forever. For my purposes I think it’s fitting that the album Stu made for Murdoc, the gift Stu made for Murdoc, would paint a picture that quite honestly condemns them in many ways. One that is teeming with regrets and discussion of isolation, of personal failure, of distance, of feeling inhuman, of wanting to try something else to feel human again. It doesn’t paint everything they’ve been through as an epic romance but a broken relationship. And then it leaves where that goes open. I’m a bad 2Doc fan and I’ve gone on record as having Souk Eye Fatigue for a couple months there, but on its face I do think it’s super interesting that the sentiment of their big love song isn’t explicitly “I miss you” but “I still think about you.” There’s no denying this is still something very honest and something that matters in how they acknowledge themselves and their relationship, but I’ve got messed up priorities, and I hear the driving sentiment of the album as “I can’t get rid of you.” However, it’s also an acceptance of that being on both of them, for better or for worse.

I just really enjoy the fact that, while I agree it is a shippy album, TNN is also an album written to and for Murdoc where the chief message is “I am not happy.” I don’t think it’s necessarily suggesting Murdoc will “make him happy” but I think it’s… a reality he’s finally willing to admit. That all of this doesn’t work for him at 40. That living without Murdoc isn’t better for him now, not the way it might’ve been better 20 years ago, and the clinging to that idea of might’ve, the blaming, the running away, it’s just not doing him any good. It’s not making him happier. It’s putting their past on a shelf, still in view and in reach but off the table they’re sitting at. For me, TNN’s about simply saying, with neither joy nor hatred, that Murdoc is too much a part of him and he knows being rid of Murdoc just isn’t what he wants, and he doesn’t want the rest of the life he’s bound to to always look the way it does now. And maybe that’s not quite romantic enough, haha, maybe I look like a dour Daria-type to interpret it that way, but I think there’s a beauty in honesty and in not sugarcoating things to yourself and the people in your life. I think there’s something very cathartic about writing and releasing an album that feels like a slap in the face as much as it is an offer to finally… be something else. Something more than just not being nothing.

#Anonymous #long post #2doc tag//#headcanon posts

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mikauzoran · 5 years

Text

Lukadrien Drabble: Nachtmusik Chapter Seven

A Little Night Music (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik) Chapter Seven: Appreciation

At least Marinette appreciated his jokes, Adrien thought as he set up the Couffaines’ keyboard and made a masterful pun out of the multiple meanings of the word “key”. (As in a “key” concept, the “key” to a door, piano “keys”, and the “key” a piece of music was in.) Very ingenious, if he did say so himself.

Marinette seemed to think so too judging by the way she laughed uproariously.

Adrien had actually been granted permission to play with Kitty Section at that year’s Music Festival, so—for once—he hadn’t had to sneak out to come visit his second home, the Liberty. (He owed a huge thank you to Nathalie for grinding away at Gabriel until he agreed.)

Adrien was hard at work helping to set up the stage area, and Marinette had been right by his side the whole time, assisting with the heavy lifting (she was incredibly strong from moving flour sacks at the bakery), chatting with him, and, of course, laughing at his jokes.

It was a perfect day of spending time with friends…well…almost perfect.

Luka seemed to be in what Juleka described as “a mood”. He was being as antisocial as possible on the busy deck, and whenever Adrien went over to talk to him (Marinette on Adrien’s heels), Luka put on a fake smile, chatted for the minimal required time not to seem like he was avoiding Adrien, and then came up with some excuse to be somewhere else. Plus, every time Adrien looked, he spotted Luka quickly looking away, trying to cover up a hurt expression.

Adrien was determined to get to the bottom of this. If he had done something wrong to offend Luka or hurt Luka’s feelings, he was going to fix it. Luka was second only to Nino as the best friend that Adrien had ever had in all of his life, and Adrien was not going to let anything come between them.

After the keyboard was securely in place, Adrien turned to Marinette and smiled disarmingly. “I’m sorry to bail like this, but will you excuse me for a few minutes? I really need to ask Luka something in private, if you don’t mind.”

Marinette gave a start. “Oh! No. Of Norse caught—uh—course not,” she laughed, waving away his concern and nearly knocking over a mic stand in the process.

Adrien caught it before it could hit her and chuckled fondly, giving her a reassuring smile. “Be careful, Marinette. I would hate for you to get hurt.”

Marinette’s face glowed as she smiled dreamily. “Awww. You’re so sweet, Adrien. Thank you.”

Adrien laughed with a wink as he took his leave, heading for where Luka was working in the sound booth.

“Hey there, Orpheus,” Adrien purred, making Luka jump.

“Oh, hey, Perfect Fifth.” Luka looked up and smiled affectionately. “What’s up?”

“Can I borrow you for a sec? There’s something only you can do for me, and it can’t wait,” Adrien exaggerated. Desperate times and all that.

Concern flooded Luka’s face, and he removed the headset from around his neck. “Of course. What do you need?”

Adrien grinned and crooked a finger, turning to head below deck.

Luka followed obediently as Adrien led him to the living room and took a seat on the couch.

Adrien slipped off his shoes, tucking one leg underneath himself while he hugged the other to his chest. He patted the space on the couch next to him, and Luka took a seat.

“What’s wrong, P5?” Luka prompted.

“I was hoping you’d tell me,” Adrien confessed, wearing an oddly serious countenance. “It feels like you’ve been in ‘a mood’ all day. Are you mad at me? You’re acting like you don’t want to be around me. You keep making excuses to get away whenever we’re talking, and I keep catching sight of this wounded expression on your face. Orpheus, if I’ve done something to hurt you, please tell me so I can try to make it right. You mean too much to me for me to mess things up.”

“Oh, Adrien.” Luka winced, mentally kicking himself. “No, Angel. I’m so sorry. It’s not you.”

“If you say, ‘it’s me’, I’m going to hit you,” Adrien threatened dryly. “If you’re breaking up with me, I want a concrete list of grievances, not a load of clichés.”

A frown slowly stretched across Adrien’s brow. “Do friends have breakups?”

“They most certainly do, but that’s not what’s happening here,” Luka chuckled, mildly amused and mildly horrified at the mix up. “Adrien, who has been practically attached to your side all day?”

“Marinette?” Adrien looked expectantly to Luka for clarification on the relevance of this piece of information.

“Adrien, who am I really avoiding?” Luka prompted.

“Ooooh,” Adrien sang in a gliding melisma of realization. “Marinette. Oh, good—well, not good, but I’m happy that it’s just that you’re having one of your Marinette Days and not that you’re upset with something I did.”

“Sorry for the misunderstanding.” Luka grinned sheepishly, reaching out to give Adrien’s hair a customary tussle.

Adrien leaned into the touch. “…Are you okay?”

Luka shook his head. “Sorry. I know it’s stupid, but…when it’s just the two of us, she’s…it feels like she and I are a viable option…but then she just drops me as soon as someone else shows up, and it’s like…am I that cheap and replaceable?” Luka laughed.

It wasn’t a happy laugh.

Adrien frowned, letting his hand rest on Luka’s thigh.

“Am I only good enough to kill time with until someone better comes along? I mean, I realize that the guy she likes is…” Luka smiled sadly as he turned to gaze into Adrien’s eyes. “He’s a walking miracle. He’s sweet and kind and smart and brave. Even his flaws are perfection. I completely get why she’s crazy for him. I think I get it even better than she does, but the point is…” Luka sighed. “…What was my point? I got sidetracked with the gushing.”

“Marinette makes you feel unappreciated, like you’re not good enough,” Adrien muttered, hurting on his friend’s behalf. “And you have a masochistic crush on her crush, so you can understand why she doesn’t give you the attention and adoration you deserve.”

Luka pursed his lips, trying not to crack up. “Masochistic crush, huh? Well…maybe. …Good to know you’re not completely oblivious, just lacking in self-awareness.”

Adrien’s forehead scrunched up. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I adore you, P5,” Luka chuckled.

“So forget Marinette and her crush and marry me already.” Adrien shrugged. “I would never let you forget how amazing you are.”

Luka scooped up Adrien’s hand and whisked it to his lips for a kiss. “Adrien Agreste, are you proposing to me?”

Adrien frowned. “…This isn’t very romantic, is it? I should have hired a string sextet, and there should be flowers and candles. Can I have a redo?”

Luka rolled his eyes, squeezing Adrien’s hand before letting go. “Thank you for cheering me up. I know I shouldn’t let the Marinette Situation get to me because we’re not dating, and it’s not like she’s the only person in the world I could ever be happy with, but…seeing her with you today was like a double dose of misery. You two make a cute couple.”

“Marinette and me?” Adrien echoed incredulously. “But we’re not interested in each other like that.”

Luka shook his head. “Maybe not, but you two still look beautiful together, laughing and joking around. My Chanson and my Perfect Fifth… Today, it just…didn’t look like there was any room for me in that equation, and it made me kind of melancholy.”

“Hey,” Adrien called, gently tugging on Luka’s sleeve. “There’s always room for you. Luka, you’re beyond amazing. You make things better just by existing. If Marinette can’t see what you’re worth, then, stellar as she is, she doesn’t deserve you. You are one of the most genuinely good human beings that I know, and your compassion and willingness to take care of others and meet them where they are is outstanding. I admire you so much, and I am grateful every day to be a recipient of your friendship. The fact that you’re not with someone who makes you feel loved and valued makes me heartsick. Your worth is beyond measure.”

Luka angled to face Adrien and closed his eyes, leaning in to rest his forehead on Adrien’s shoulder. “Thank you,” he finally managed to get out, voice thick with emotion.

Adrien wrapped an arm around Luka and patted his back soothingly. “…I know I’m not Marinette, but…I’d pick you. I know it’s not an exact comparison, and I know my opinion doesn’t have the same weight as hers, but…out of all the guys I know, if I had to pick one, it would be you.”

“Trust me, the sentiment is appreciated,” Luka assured into Adrien’s neck.

“I hope you find someone who makes you feel adored like you deserve,” Adrien whispered. “You’re so special, Orpheus.”

Luka hummed softly, reveling in the feel of Adrien’s hands, the warmth of his skin, and the tickle of his breath on Luka’s neck.

He didn’t tell Adrien that he had already found such a person and that it was only a matter of holding onto them and hoping one day for more than friendship.

#Adrien Agreste/Luka Couffaine #Miraculous Ladybug #Miraculous Ladybug Fanfiction #Lukadrien #Adrien Agreste #Luka Couffaine #Marinette Dupain-Cheng #Hurt/Comfort #Friendship #Fluff #Angst #Flirting #Mikau's Writings #A Little Night Music (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik)

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sombrz · 5 years

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Please imagine me just delivering these on a platter to ur sickbed: akira, minako, ochako, iida, (tries to think of a marvel comic person) uhh flash

thank you, thank you. who needs cough medicine when you have shipping.

(edit: i’m 99% healthy. it took me that long to finish this mess.)

AKIRA: okay, i think i remember telling you how i was pretty chill with akira ships. like, if done right, i don’t mind any of them, except for futaba (because they’re siblings, fu). besides our collective issues with atlus and their inability to not be weird when it comes to the girls. also, i feel like what makes the p5 kids feel the most like actual friends is also what makes it harder for me to fully invest in any individual dynamic - they all meet throughout the course of the game (even ann and ryuji aren’t close friends beforehand, and there’s definitely no drama between them) and they help each other heal and get past their abusers so that they can have a fresh start and feel free to be normal teenagers. so there’s little to actually grab onto when searching for….anything layered? like, compared to the p3 kids who have so much inner turmoil that they take out on each other - or the p4 kids, who can’t be completely truthful to themselves or each other. the p5 kids do have baggage, but not with each other. which makes for healthier bonds but also more boring ship dynamics lmao. all very cute and fluffy, but not a lot of substance.

point is, i don’t really have much to say? like akira/yusuke is fun and silly. akira is eccentric and cool enough to go along with yusuke’s antics, and even though p5 always gives us an option to be mean, i can’t imagine akira ACTUALLY thinking that kind of stuff? like, he’s a weirdo too so he just. gets it. yusuke basically takes akira out on dates during his social link. they lend themselves well to model/artist headcanons and aus. they don’t realize they’re dating until a few months into their relationship - one of the others had to point it out and yusuke’s like ‘oh? is that what this is??’ and akira’s like ‘thank god’ bc he was too awkward to bring it up himself. futaba makes fun of them a lot.

akira and ryuji are cute too. i’ve gotten a bit fond of the boner squad (br)ot3 too. just ann/ryuji/akira being dumbasses. or ann/shiho+ryuji/akira being dumbasses while going on double dates. there’s also not really much to it - just the usual persona teen boy ‘no-homo-bromo-but-it’s-actually-homo’ fare. ryuji’s less possessive and repressed about it than yosuke is, though. which is good (ie more healthy) bc it’s more like akira found himself a human puppy jock boyfriend, and it’s cute! ryuji instantly decided he liked akira and started planning their secret handshake and selecting their cool delinquent hangout spot. and akira just smiles through it all bc he’s charmed. morgana gives akira the most judgemental stare ever when he finds out though.

i like akira/haru bc she’s who i dated in my playthrough. they’re soft and sweet and i think a slow relationship built on patience is good for both of them. and they have the most obvious phantom thief couple aesthetic, tbh. they also have the ‘demure wallflower by day, trigger-happy hellion by night’ thing going on. i love the idea of them opening up a coffee place together (their futures align! this is the SO that sojiro approves the fastest lbr!) and akira being haru’s trophy husband (let this man be someone’s trophy husband).

akira/goro’s the one with the most depth lmao as our boy akechi gets the short end of the stick re: what everyone else got - to defeat their abuser and come out the other side a new and improved person. INSTEAD, it’s all about deep-rooted envy and what-ifs. when i replayed p5 for my friend’s benefit, she kept being like ‘wow ok akechi’s got….the most obvious crush on mc. why is he always here? why does he talk like that? omg?’ and my sentiments exactly. AKIRA’S thoughts exactly, tbh, bc what else is he supposed to get out of some of the things that come out of goro’s mouth. but it’s like….he DOES like akira, but he also resents his existence because akira gets to have real bonds and happiness despite the crappy hand dealt to him. and their own bond is based on careful lies and observing each other for any cracks in their armour. but there’s that undertone of wishing that they’d met in other circumstances, where they COULD have a normal relationship and get to know each other in a way that’s not ‘we levelled up our relationship when you shot me in the face with the intent of murdering me and framing me for my own death but really, i tricked you and you didn’t actually kill me & now we can defeat you and your dad! ha! checkmate!!’ but i love that that’s actually part of the dynamic so lmao.

MINAKO: you know, despite minako and minato being considerably different (both their external personality/appearances > emo boy/preppy girl - and the changes in their dialogue choices > again, minako is a lot more confrontational and energetic), i pretty much just ship them with the same people?

the only exceptions of this being i ship minako with shinjiro and yukari but can’t really fathom either of them with minato. (it’s bc yukari is a lesbian and shinji does not deal well with sullen people. like, what’s he supposed to do? pat minato on the back?)

i will also warn that it’s been….forever since p3 so i’m kinda fuzzy on details.

anywhoooooo, AIGIS. main protag ship is aigis. idc which protag, but i must give atlus my once-in-a-blue-moon compliment because they kept aigis’ social link and her blatantly romantic feelings for the protag the exact same in portable. so minako/aigis is just as canon as minato/aigis, buahaha. anyway. robot girlfriend who starts off being somehow programmed to feel protective/indebted to minako but then starts developing real genuine feelings as she explores her humanity, minako wanting to show aigis how to enjoy herself while putting the emphasis on aigis’ feelings and opinions but also being so amazed and grateful for aigis’ love and attention. also, the difference between protags here being that while minato is silently intimate, minako is loudly loving. the utter tragedy that is aigis not being able to save the person she cares about, the imagery of minako’s head in her lap while they wait for the end is….A Lot. i think in a lot of tragic robot/human romance fiction, the robot gives up its life for their human partner so i like the reverse here - with aigis having to experience the emotions of loss and depression and overcoming that because she truly loved mina(k/t)o and now they’re gone. it’s heavy! it’s a lot! i just remembered i never finished the p3 movies! i should do that!

there’s ryouji. again, don’t care which protag - just like the idea of our mc flirting with death. literally flirting with the avatar of death. the double sides of the ship: goofy teenage flirting vs warning of impending doom. ryouji just being like ‘yeah just kill me it’s for the best i’m actually here to destroy the world or w/e’ to his gf (or bf) out of nowhere on christmas eve lmao. it’s fun, idk.

yukari! honestly, taking out all the forced hetero ship teasing made me ship her with minako more lmao their social link was just better! no offense! and their personalities mesh better too - i feel like yukari would get way too frustrated with a closed-off partner and i love concept of: the huffy takes-no-shits girl being soft for her cheerful outgoing gf. also, i spent way too long imagining the answer with minako - the aigis/minako/yukari would be heartwrenching and we deserve it.

shinjiro! can i start off by saying it’s a good thing shinji was in p3, which did the best job of showing the characters apart from the protagonist and main plot (prob bc on the other hand, it did the worst job with social links seeing as none of the guys had them) - i feel like in p4 or p5, we wouldn’t have gotten to know him nearly as well before he died. anyway, his social link with minako is really sweet and a romance between them hits my ‘tsundere/flustered boy not knowing how to deal with affection from pretty girl he respects a lot’ checkpoints. and i need to talk about this: i feel like the decision to make him comatose instead of dead if you romance him was a double edged sword disguised as a blessing lol. because he was still DYING before he got shot, and also he wakes up just in time to find out his girlfriend died! fhdhfgdjd!

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uraraka……okay: i ship her with tsuyu, bakugou, iida, mina and toga.

oh, here’s a story. before i got into bnha, i stumbled on a bunch of deku/uraraka amvs and they were so precious. like, really, deku and ochako are the cutest goddamn things in this series. seeing them side by side makes me want to channel my inner grandmother and pinch their cheeks. it was, like, the only thing i knew about bnha at first, so i just figured i’d end up shipping it whenever i eventually got to watching it bc i’m easy to please like that. but ha. nah. it’s sad bc i love their dynamic when it’s focusing on their actual friendship but then the actual romantic hints made me want to roll my eyes so hard. it’s so BORING if you take it at face-value, and i’m so boggled by it if you look deeper bc i don’t understand what hori’s planning here. it’s irritating bc even uraraka admits that her borderline obsession (and that’s what it is, since it’s compared to TOGA’S CRUSHES…y’know, our resident yandere serial killer?) is detrimental to her growth as a hero. and i know it’s partially bc she’s a teenager but its blown so out of proportion. it’s a crush!! relax!!! like, compare to deku’s crush on uraraka where after he got over his initial anxiety of talking to girls, he - at most - just blushes a little when she stands too close or dresses extra-cute. every other time, he treats her no differently than any of his other friends. but then uraraka’s crush is treated like. this weirdly twisted admiration she doesn’t even WANT. she relates to a villain’s desire to imitate and become the person they like, she gets ridiculously jealous every time he looks at another girl, she keeps fucking up because she focuses too much on him and how to be like him. it’s weird. idk. typical fiction tropes lead me to believe i’m supposed to root for them to get together (and bnha will end with an epilogue where they have a child named after a food) but the story i’m being told makes me want to root for uraraka to succeed at getting over those feelings! idfk!!!

also, i have to laugh at the way horikoshi decided to tell us and uraraka herself that these feelings were romantic. by having aoyama just be like ‘oh you were thinking what would izuku midoriya do? could it be you love him?’ when we see multiple male friends of deku’s (iida and todo, in particular - hell, even aoyama himself) have similar WWMD thoughts and he, in turn, instantly imitates bakugou whenever he hits a roadblock (taking inspiration from to downright copying bakugou’s moves, trash talking his opponents, etc). am i supposed to see only uraraka’s feelings as romantic? why? because she’s a girl and deku’s a guy?

i like it better when iida’s involved. both iida and uraraka are so sweet and enthusiastic to counter deku’s more nervous personality, and they’re a very good trio! i tend to prefer them as a brot3 but as i said, i do ship iida/uraraka seperately! i don’t have any big reasons for it except i enjoy how contagiously energetic and silly they are around each other? dramatic too - remember the ‘REACH FOR MY HAND’ scene when all the UA students were freaking out? it’s just a simple best friend dynamic like what they have with deku but there’s no weird one-sided jealousy/competitiveness involved (luckily, iida got over it after the stain arc haha). they don’t end up feeling bad or unworthy of the praise they get from the other - which is great, because they’re very complimentary towards each other! iida is so understanding (his immediate reaction to uraraka being self-conscious about her reason for pursuing heroism) & uraraka is usually the one who vocalizes how cool and talented iida is (while also giggling her ass off whenever he gets all extra-dramatic)! tbh, curse their aborted moment after iida’s match with mei! let them praise each other!!! i like that their seats are so close to each other too - i wonder how horikoshi decided on the seating plan. but uraraka’s tendency to shake iida by the shoulders is precious & i bet you he breaks his staunch ‘follow-every-rule’ mentality when it comes to uraraka writing him little notes in class. also, maybe uraraka just deserves a sweet+rich boyfriend. it’s that easy. lmao.

i already talked about bakugou/uraraka. it’s great, dripping with potential, needs more canon interaction. i only trust a portion of its fanbase to do them properly. but this is the case for almost every big ship. (where’s that one fandom meme where one of the questions was like ‘what do you hate seeing in fanfic/content for them’ bc NOW THAT I’M ACTUALLY READING FANFIC AGAIN, LEMME TELL YOU. BEING A MULTISHIPPER IS HARD.)

tsuyu and uraraka are just genuinely a good match? i like the contrast between uraraka - who is emotional and upbeat - and tsuyu - who is calm and rational. but they’re both very perceptive? their first night at the dorms is a good indicator of how their dynamic works. the others are quick to accept that tsuyu doesn’t want to play along with the room competition, but uraraka both provides the excuse and lingers behind with worry. she probably had to convince tsuyu that it was okay for her to vocalize her feelings to the bakugou rescue squad, and volunteered to be with her during said confrontation. compare to the forest where tsuyu sweetly and calmly offers uraraka her hand because she sees her friend is scared, without actually needing to say anything else. they’re sweethearts. i absolutely adore them. oh, and i dig their earth/sky + pink/green aesthetic clash.

uraraka and mina are based on two things: 1) they’re always hugging and hanging out in official art/sketches (mina even has a selfie of them hanging on her wall of pics in her room) so i can only assume they’re super-close gal pals that should kiss, 2) i love shipping silly idiots together and it’s hard to find ships like this that are f/f but these two fit that specific chaotic mold!!! and 3) AESTHETIC DREAM!!! PINK SPACE GIRLS!!!! DO I NEED ANY OTHER REASONS? NO. NO, I DO NOT.

HOLY SHIT, CAN YOU BELIEVE IT’S OFFICIALLY CANON THAT TOGA HAS A ROMANTIC CRUSH ON URARAKA? again, i could write an essay on coding and how frustrating it is for characters like toga to usually be bi/pan. but no one’s claiming this a win for rep. and i’m FASCINATED by this dynamic. toga loves stain-sama for his ideals and how that enables her nature to kill. she loves deku-kun out of curiousity for his ideals and the fact they met when he was beaten to a pulp lmao. and she loves ochako-chan because she sees herself in her - she thinks that they share ideals. again, i have no idea what the long-term meaning for this development is but it’s clearly pitting them against each other? and adding a romantic element to that is hmmmmmmmmm. we’ll see, we’ll see. and like i mentioned above, it’s shocking and worrying and makes me ship uraraka and toga more that uraraka ALSO sees the similarity between her and toga. she’s horrified by the implications of it but she hears toga’s spiel and tries to fruitlessly deny that ‘yeah, she’s right. that’s how i am. we’re the same.’ if i were to ever write a traitor!uraraka fanfic (which i would if i could ever FINISH a writing project), it’d be uraraka/toga and uraraka trying to convince herself she’s better than toga, that she still has a moral code and her reasons for joining the league have more weight to it, and she doesn’t!!! care!!! what toga thinks of her!!! and expecting a rivalry but toga doesn’t meet that head-on because instead, toga wants to be close and connected to uraraka. toga has this kind of mature soft side we’ve seen before (with twice) that shows how she can see you at your core (her fight w/ uraraka also showed that) and i want to see uraraka to be on the end when she thinks she doesn’t deserve it and doesn’t trust toga and just being frustrated and confused over it all.

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iida…….i think deku, todoroki, uraraka and aoyama are my biggest ships for him. also, i don’t ship it myself but momo/iida/todoroki’s rich kid squad is A REALLY FUN DYNAMIC AND OT3.

LET’S BE REAL: IIDA/DEKU IS SO UNDERAPPRECIATED IN THIS FANDOM. ALL IIDA SHIPS ARE BUT….IIDA/DEKU. iida’s goddamn….tucked deku into bed. threw his hat in the ring of rivals. there’s official art of iida giving deku a shoulder ride. he punched him to make him see how his actions are affecting him - “haven’t you thought about how *I* feel [about you putting yourself in peril]?!” like. bro. okaaaay. i still laugh that they got on the wrong foot initially - deku was so scared of iida sjfhhf like he was equally worried he’d be stuck in the same class as iida as he was about kacchan. thankfully, iida’s a sweetheart who cares with all his heart, and he sees all that there is to admire about deku, so they became instant friends after that. and iida means SO MUCH to deku. i pay a lot of attention to how future!deku talks in his narration, because he normally interrupts the narrative to move the story along - by talking about minor time skips, the movement of the villains, etc. but he also tends to wax a bit poetic about his friends. like when he interrupted everything to give us a side-story about how and aoyama became bffs. so we can assume that aoyama’s friendship means a lot to adult izuku. or how comforting and important it is to me that even as an adult, he refuses to stop calling bakugou ‘kacchan’. it’s sweet. in that same vein, it strikes me that deku still holds an amount of guilt for not supporting iida better during the whole ingenium-stain debacle. it ended….much better than it could have, and that experience was what strengthened iida/deku/todo’s relationship. yet as an adult, deku still wishes he could have done more. offered iida the help he needed before he went rushing in. hoo. but anyway, yeah, they’re cute! wholesome nerd boys! cute height difference! also yeah, i’m glad that iida got over his sports-festival-era feelings of inferiority towards deku. deku loves competition, but you can tell that he didn’t want that out of his relationship with iida (compare to how he outright covets a rivalry with bakugou and accepted it from todoroki w/ his head held high). it wasn’t based on healthy feelings and they’re so much better as supportive bfs.

iida and todoroki have a lot of stuff in common as legacy heroes who were trained from childhood to be heroes - with the major difference that todoroki faced horrifying abuse that prevented him from having a close relationship with his siblings and made him want to reject his legacy, while the iidas are good folk and iida’s brother means the world to him and he’s so far one of the only heroes we know to reuse a superhero identity based on legacy. and even the painful bullshit (like the ‘take out your muffler and a new, stronger one will grow in’ thing) was something that iida went through on his own accord and with warning. and todoroki’s words of encouragement during the stain arc were based on his own life lesson! they both come off as very serious and abrasive elites at first glance, but they’re actually dorky and socially awkward! but i think they get each other - i imagine they have a very calming friendship, no need for pretenses and judgement, and they deserve that! they probably think the other is hilarious too even though absolutely no one else gets the joke! they had a lot of cute moments recently since they were paired in the same 1A vs 1B match. like iida can just…tell the minute differences in todoroki’s expression and demeanour apart and knows when there’s something wrong. and they’re just so humble and sweet and can’t handle the other being self-deprecating. they’re good boys, brent.

already talked about iida/uraraka. they’re cute, i love them.

AOYAMA THOUGH. knight boys! they were so good during the exam! it really got me that aoyama didn’t even consider the idea that iida might not abandon him, might want to help him and win together instead of just use him to get ahead himself - and iida didn’t even really get the emotional realization aoyama went through there but he was still like ‘YEAH WE DID GOOD! I’M GLAD YOU FEEL BETTER! THUMBS UP! :D’ they’re both very dramatic and - i don’t know how to describe it….they pose a lot, talk with their limbs. they’re silly, is what i mean. and maybe aoyama ALSO deserves a loving, rich boyfriend. MAYBE IIDA SHOULD BE EVERYONE’S LOVING RICH BOYFRIEND. but in this case, aoyama’s boyfriend who will carry him bridal-style everywhere, much to aoyama’s glee lol. except when he’s dragging him along via his cape. whatever works.

also, side note, i find it kinda interesting that fandom pairs him up with girls like mei and camie - when i just….feel like he’d be so out of his element and sooo overwhelmed? i’m wincing just thinking about it lol poor iida.

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i’m glad you specified marvel bc if you’d just said ‘comic’, i would have assumed you meant THE flash and i would be forced to sit here and think of every dc speedster ship…..well, it wouldn’t be as bad as spidey ships (honestly i’m very basic with speedsters - it’s just like ‘speedster/their spouse’ with the adults (even wally - linda or bust, tbh) and ‘speedster/their best friends’ with the teens), but we’d be here longer.

BUT FLASH THOMPSON? i already mentioned my two big ones, with venom and peter but i’m def willing to talk more about them.

flash/venom, a man and his gooey alien husband. i love that it’s a relationship based on self-growth and healing from past hurt and stopping destructive habits and cycles (both that cause self-harm and harm onto others). one of my favourite panels is still where flash pleads with peter to not let his anger seep into venom because venom’s gotten past all that. he’s a better person (being. alien. thing.) now and doesn’t want to turn to feeding on rage ever again. and that’s true for flash (a victim of child abuse who bottled up all that sadness and rage and took his aggression out on other kids) as well. it’s just so….nice. and venom credits all this to flash. and a thing i find about venom is that its unhealthy dynamics are all about control - you’re just its host, it possesses you against your will, you become an out-of-control villain. but with flash, venom sees a partner and home - they need and belong with each other, they communicate and cooperate, they became a superhero. also i love how they’re seriously affectionate and intimate - that’s just kind of a given with venom, i think, because you have to invite & accept it as part of yourself. but flash is so soft with venom - while he’s not as….hm, vocal about it as eddie ‘ooh my love my darling~’ brock is (he’s also a bit less obsessive haha sorry eddie), he’s so protective and likes giving venom headscratches and kissy faces to the point others react to it like they would witnessing PDA. i just want flash to be all cute and smooch his husband when they’re not like. one singular entity. CAN YOU BELIEVE THE HEALTHIEST DYNAMIC FOR FLASH TO BE IN IS WITH A SYMBIOTIC ALIEN GOO CREATURE? I CAN. AND I’M THANKFUL FOR IT.

i also ot3 them with eddie for the sake of my peace of mind where everyone’s happy. where venom’s not torn between two loves, and eddie doesn’t feel the need to think things like ‘it’s tough being someone’s second best’ and ‘i’d like to think he’d do the same for me but part of me knows that would be a lie. it’ll always be flash.’ and having those thoughts because he literally FEELS that pull towards flash? like he inherited those feelings, he KNOWS what it’s like to love flash thompson. LIKE, YO????? GIVE ME THAT SYMBIOT3.

then there’s flash/peter, the funniest super/civvie id love triangle in the world. flash having the biggest hero crush on spider-man in high school - so many superheroes to choose from but spidey is the best, because he’s an underdog, because he gets pushed down and refuses to give up, because he’s SO GODDAMN COOL - while simultaneously thinking peter is frankly, the worst? but in that terrible way where he fixates on peter even when he’s not part of the conversation. waiting for him to leave school so he can be mean to him, feeling frustrated whenever he tries to be nice to the guy and peter either ignores, rejects or insults him in return. peter just being like ‘Sigh’ whenever flash insults him by gushing about spidey, but that’s also why he can’t dislike flash no matter how bad their relationship is. how can he hate spidey’s biggest fan? and also he probably gets a good amount of pleasure out of flash’s gf liz allen having a crush on him. peter also does this to johnny and his gf, dorrie evans - they’re frienemies in high school and kind of obsessed with each other,,,,’heRE’S MY LIST OF 500 REASONS WHY I HATE THE HUMAN TORCH’ OK PETE RELAX. so yeah, peter, despite having genuine feelings for betty brant, hits on liz and dorrie whenever they cross paths and lets them use him to make their hot blond boyfriends jealous. (peter, maybe you ARE the worst. stop it.) and then when they get to college and end up in the same friend group, flash slowly realizes that peter is like. hot now? and like, kind of a cool dude who went through a lot! like, he thought peter was a jerk in HS but he’s actually really nice when he wants to be and is always in your corner! ‘wow, i really like and respect pete! i’m proud to be his friend!’ flash thinks while staring at peter’s biceps. meanwhile, peter has no idea what’s going on because he keeps expecting flash to turn back into a dick (and steal one of his girlfriends lmao) but instead, he just keeps proving he’s a great guy! and keeps confiding in him! and uh, complimenting him a lot? and still fanboys over spidey and that’s really endearing! and oh, he’s really gonna miss him whenever he’s on tour and the idea of flash dying is unthinkable and he really likes being his roommate and he’s who he wants to be his best man and he doesn’t get why flash doesn’t seem to realize how great he is, and welp, he just punched captain america in the face for not telling him flash was agent venom. anyway, bottom line: i like dynamics that are very….long-term and constantly changing? so i tend to fall for the enemies/rivals to friends to lovers thing. or friends to enemies to lovers. but this is a former situation for sure.

also, i’m convinced every corner of the college crew pentagon happened. flash and harry MUST have at least made out once and neither was sure how to deal with the aftermath of that for a couple of months. he’s kissed and casually dated gwen AND mj - but i find it interesting that it seems like neither girl really ever considered him a contender. gwen cares about him but sees him as a shoulder to vent to about her issues with peter, and mj has a lot of fun with him but also considers him the male version of her (outgoing and bright but unwilling to commit and act serious). and he interestingly backs down quickly when peter decides to make a move on the girls. like, compared to his love triangle with liz and peter where i feel he was pretty resistant to letting her go - especially to someone like puny parker, he responds to peter’s accusations re: gwen and mj with ‘hey, relax. it’s not like that. i wouldn’t do that to you.’ i take it as him growing up and not feeling the need to overcompensate to impress his dad and also maybe the fact that he’s a bit more aware of how closeted he is. but it’s weirdly different with harry (*cough* cause it’s the first dude aside from peter he had any romantic interaction with *cough*) so he just……..dances around those feelings (on top of both of their feelings for peter) until harry starts dating liz (BECAUSE EVERYONE DATES EVERYONE IN PETER’S CIRCLE OF PALS, I GUESS) and he’s just like ‘???????????? well okay then’.

i like his dynamic with felicia as much it also pains me - that felicia went into it thinking she could use flash to hurt peter (’i’ll break your heart like he broke mine!’) but then ended up legitimately falling for him and started hoping for a normal life with him. also that they liked hanging out in terrible workout clothes. nerds. (alas, it didn’t last bc….FLASH, BUD….BUDDY….I CAN’T BELIEVE MARVEL HAD FLASH SAY THAT AND THEN PROBABLY SAT BACK AND THOUGHT ‘YUP PETE’S BEST BUD FLASH IS TOTALLY STR8′) and i need to read more of him and betty to get a handle of that but. what i’ve gotten from the panels i’ve seen that it’s very dependant on the writer and has the same problem flash’s relationships with liz, gwen, mj and felicia had where there’s a lot of love there but the actual romantic element is….lacking? falls short? fizzles out? where he seeks out a connection to peter(/spidey) through his romantic relationship with a woman peter used to be involved with and pushes said woman away when she starts getting in too deep?

anyway, that just turned into an essay about how flash thompson has been gay since his conception and only like, 20% (maybe less) of writers in charge of writing him have actually realized it.

#persona 3 #persona 5 #ochako uraraka #tenya iida #spider family #sociallinkmax #questions #reply

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guyfierisrealwife · 5 years

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1,2,9,26-30

What do you identify as and what are your pronouns?

I’m bi! I use she/her pronouns.

How did you discover your sexuality, tell your story?

I was in middle school and it kind of just ..., happened? I went through a bunch of different labels before I found the one that makes me feel good. I was helped greatly by one of my friends in middle school who I had a big big crush on. She asked me out at the same time that she asked out another friend and the other friend answered first :-) I’m not salty this happened years ago.

Who are your favorite lgbt+ ships?

Hmm.... from danganronpa probably kaito and kokichi? i love the height difference and theyre foils bro...

and shiho/ann from p5 are *chef kiss*

What identity advice would you give your younger self?

Uhhh don’t worry about what other people think of the labels you choose.

What do you think of gender roles in a relationship?

I don’t like them. I think they’re dumb and toxic to any relationship and put unnecessary pressure on the people in them to achieve a heteronormative standard of maleness and/or femininity when it’s so much more freeing to be yourself and not be what this stupid construct tells you to do.

Anything else you want to share about your experience with gender?

In middle school I struggled with it a lot I probably won’t share more than that but rn I identify as a cis girl

What is something you wish people knew about being lgbt+?

i wish they knew our Gay Humor is literally just jokes and didnt throw a fit every time someone was like “all dogs are gay” or something.

Why are you proud to be lgbt+?

i had some sentimental crap written but its because i like being bi a lot!!

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languages-and-first-world-war · 8 years

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Wipers or Vipers 2

Research into the origin and indeed the authenticity of ‘Vipers’ as a slang name for Ypres continues. There are a number of leads and possibilities: was it a mistake; a transcription of a slang German name for the place; a projection by Anglophones of a slang German name for the place; a name marking bitter feelings towards the place; or something else? The appearance of the term in the Publishers’ Circular in 1920 means that this merits a thorough investigation.

Firstly, how did people feel about vipers at the time? There is ample evidence that actual vipers were treated as pests, to be killed. ‘At North Park, Tedburn, recently, Mr W Coldridge killed a viper which measured 2ft 6in. in length. On being opened seven young ones were found inside, as well as a fully grown mouse. The viper is regarded as a very fine specimen’ (Western Times, 9 April 1915, p14). ‘A large snake was found in a farmhouse at Southery Ferry one day last week, and a viper has been killed in the middle of Southery village’ (Thetford and Watton Times and People’s Journal, 20 February 1915, p4). But some documentation reveals some unsureness as to the identity of the animals: ‘Mr F. and his son on one day killed eleven vipers, two snakes, and one adder. On another occasion they destroyed eight vipers and two snakes’ (Exeter and Plymouth Gazette, 30 April 1915, p5).

In this context it is easy to see how the epithet ‘viper’ would be applied to anyone hated, particularly if there was an element of deception involved: thus in Rome the Grand Master of the Freemasons described pacifism as ‘a viper which lay hidden, but whose head must be crushed’ (Dundee Evening Telegraph, 27 November 1917, p1). Turkey, in siding with the Central Powers ‘has acted like a viper to us her old friend and ally’ (Warwick and Warwickshire Advertiser, 13 March 1915, p5). The submarines that sank the Aboukir, the Hogue and the Cressy in September 1914 were described by René Milan as ‘submarine vipers’ (Vagabonds of the Sea, 1919, p48).

‘Viper’ was a straightforward term of abuse against the enemy: a Belgian citizen living in Britain, who took his own life at the beginning of the war, left a note describing the Kaiser as ‘that ferocious human viper of Germany.’ (Newcastle Journal, 2 August 1914, p8). ‘Kaiser-Americans’ were ‘A Nest of Vipers in the States’ (Nottingham Evening Post, 3 August 1915, p3). Following the sinking of the Lusitania, the Dublin Daily Express called for ‘the stamping out of the Prussian vipers or the effective removal of their fangs’ (10 May 1915, p4). German rage against Britain was exemplified in ‘torrents of abuse, floods of fantastic falsehoods, and an ineradicable conviction that the British people are a race of vipers, dastards, bloodsuckers, liars, thieves, murderers, and traitors!’ (Liverpool Echo, 17 January 1917, p3).

British citizens could also be vipers: professional footballers who did not enlist were ‘traitors’ and ‘vipers’. (Manchester Evening News, 7 April 1915, p7). George Lansbury, the socialist politician, condemned the Pall Mall Gazette for describing ‘all those who advocate peace as “vipers”’ (Daily Herald, 3 July 1915, p3). Elsewhere pacifism was equally treated: The critics of Sir Douglas Haig were ‘The Vipers at Work’ – ‘he treated [their] viperous attacks with the contempt they deserved.’ (Globe, 17 December 1918, p2).

Yet the term could also be employed for the animal’s attributes of sudden striking in effective places – in 1899 the Navy’s first turbine destroyer was HMS Viper, though the Navy soon abandoned the use of snake names for ships (though the Western Mail, 11 March 1915, p8, implied that there was a still an HMS Viper in use). Thus ‘viper’ as a term could have useful connotations; but during the war it was generally a negative epithet.

As previously discussed, Ypres occupied a special place in British sentiment, typifying stubborn resistance, loyalty to an ideal, and the projection of these onto a place. But the Ypres League, the Ypres Times, Ypres Day, were post-war constructs. While there is a string tendency to interpret The Wipers Times as lightheartedness in the face of death, it can equally be read as cynical gallows humour, a shout of rage at the futility of the soldier’s situation: there is no love for Ypres in its pages. The patriotic bombast of The War Illustrated might announce that the ashes of Ypres were ‘impregnated with the spirit of Albion’s immortal glory’, but it was still ‘The Dead City’ (p1180, July 1915), a place that ‘smells of lilac and of death’ (S Macnaughtan, A Woman’s Diary of the War, 1915). Already by June 1915 people in Britain were aware that Ypres held a special place of fear for the soldier: David Lloyd George made a speech in Manchester on 3 June, in which he urged the need for greater efficiency in the manufacture of weaponry; particularly the labour force had to work where it was needed, not where it desired, just as was the case for soldiers – ‘The enlisted workman cannot choose his locality of action. He cannot say, “Well, I am quite prepared to fight at Neuve Chapelle, but I won’t fight at Festubert, and I am not going near the place they call ‘Wipers’”’ (The Times, 4 June 1915, p9).

Looking again at the documentation we have for the use of ‘Vipers’ for the place-name, we have the following:

Thanet Advertiser, 23 January 1915, p3, reporting a speech given by a vicar during an evening of talks: ‘Mr Tonks remarked that in connection with this town one was reminded of the optimistic humour of the British “Tommy”. For him, the pronunciation of the town is “Vipers”, and the spirit of lightheartedness revealed by such nick-names must surely assist our men in their struggle for victory.’

The Middlesex Chronicle 26 June 1915, p3: ‘Private E. W. Smith, of Whitton, who writes, under date of June 13th, sends two verses composed by a member of his brigade, … He says “I know those at home are only too delighted to hear and know what ‘Tommy’ sings, even if it only light parody.”

Far far from Ypres (vipers) I long to be.

Where German snipers can’t pot at me.

Think of me crouching where the worms creep

Waiting for something to put me to sleep.

The Manchester Guardian, 29 December 1915, p7: ‘Frenchmen who call Ypres ‘Wipers’. This includes the statement: ‘The gallant army of France has for generations pioneered military progress, yet today the poilu is assimilating British ways and British methods in an extraordinary manner. He is even carrying it to the length of pronunciation. When the French soldier speaks of “Wipers” in the most natural manner imaginable as though he had never called it anything else and sings “Tipperary” as frequently as his own glorious anthem, we may be prepared for anything.’

Imagine how ‘Wipers’ would be pronounced in a French accent: it would probably depend whether the speaker were imitating spoken English, in which case it would be more like ‘ooïpers’, or speaking from the written form, more likely to be ‘vipers’ (as in ‘wagon-lits’).

Evening Despatch, 14 February 1916, p1: a cartoon of German soldiers, with the caption ‘It is stated that German soldiers have a dread of being sent to the Ypres front [see Lloyd George’s speech above]. Some have committed suicide rather than face it. Soldiers’ chorus on being ordered to Ypres :-

O Faderland, my Faderland,

Thy face I never more shall see;

The Englishes at Vipers vos-

Dis is der place for me.

The Publishers’ Circular, 3 January 1920, p7: ‘Ypres, or “Vipers,” as Tommy called it, is a name which will long be remembered by the families of the men from all parts of the Empire who fought and died there. …’

So we see a projection of the term as German pronunciation – critically, no slang name for Ypres in German has been found -, as a projected French pronunciation, one military and two civilian documentations of ‘Vipers’, one of the civilian usages being post-war. There is a possibility that any of the last three were mistakes or individual usages; it is likely that the two civilian usages were acquired from soldiers, the Publishers’ Circular one possibly being from a former soldier. There is also the residence documentation of Private E. W. Smith, Whitton, near Hounslow, now part of Greater London, but then a village to the west of London.

A change of direction: also in the Globe, on 19 January 1916, p2, there appears this:

The “vipers” alluded to in a morning paper as circulating traitorous and disloyal leaflets and circulars must be a kind of pen-viper, as Mr. Sam Weller would say.’ What the writer is alluding to here is the by then centuries-old phenomenon in the London accent of the v/w merger, whereby ‘v’ was pronounced as ‘w’ and vice versa: Sam Weller in Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers is the most well-known exponent of this (“All good feelin’, sir—the wery best intentions, as the gen’l’m’n said ven he run away from his wife ‘cos she seemed unhappy with him”).

There has been considerable argument over the authenticity of this transcribed accent. William Matthews in Cockney Past and Present ([1938] 1972) quotes B Smart (Walker Remodelled, 1836) as saying that it was outmoded in the 1830s, and that A W Tuer, author The Kawkneigh Awlminek (1883), claimed that Weller was ‘exceptional in his pronunciation’ (p180); Ernest Weekley, born in 1865, claimed that though he had heard ‘weal’ for ‘veal’ and ‘wittles’ for ‘victuals’, he had never heard the reverse substitution of ‘v’ for ‘w’. Comedians such as Gus Elen were using the ‘w’ for ‘v’, as in ‘wery good’, well into the 1930s. Peter Wright quotes Henry Wyld as hearing people say ‘vild’ for ‘wild’ as a joky imitation of speech from about 1850 (Wright P, Cockney dialect and slang, London: Batsford, 1981, p137). Supposed to have died out in the nineteenth century, there were remnants of the accent still to be found in the south-east of England: George Bernard Shaw in a note to Captain Brassbound’s Conversion (1900), wrote: “When I came to London in 1876, the Sam Weller dialect had passed away so completely that I should have given it up as a literary fiction if I had not discovered it surviving in a Middlesex village, and heard of it from an Essex one.” Note ‘in a Middlesex village’.

Peter Trudgill in Investigations in Sociohistorical Linguistics (Cambridge, 2010, p65) offers the following: ‘Wakelin [1972: 95-6] writes that the Survey of English Dialects (SED) materials from the 1950s and 60s) show that “in parts of southern England, notably East Anglia and the south-east, initial and medial [v] may appear as [w]’. One of the examples given is ‘viper’. Thus, well into the twentieth century in parts of southeast England ‘viper’ was being pronounced as ‘wiper’.

Now, going back into the nineteenth century, the example frequently given to show the use of this merger of sounds is ‘an old cockney conundrum’ (Wright, p137). This is to be found in Errors of Pronunciation, and Improper Expressions, Used frequently, and chiefly by The Inhabitants of London, published in 1817. On page 34 we find, under V:

V, for W; and W, for V. This error is constantly committed by the vulgar. Veal and Vinegar are by them pronounced Weal and Winegar; whilst, Wine and Wind are sounded Vine and Vind. There is an old cockney conundrum which exemplifies this error:

Why is a pocket-handkerchief like a species of serpent? Answer – Because it’s a viper.

So a) there is anecdotal evidence of the v/w merger surviving in the southeast of England into the twentieth century, often but not always as joke or performance;

b) its exemplary form appears in a joke which specifically mixes ‘wiper’ and ‘viper’;

c) the cockney/London/southeast England accent was recognised as the dominant accent of the British Army on the Western Front: much evidence supports this claim, from ‘Ole Bill to the large number of London street names used as trench names. As an example of how this was translated to the Home Front, the boys’ comic The Dreadnought marked its recognition of the importance of the war to its readers with the announcement, (29 August 1914) 25 days after the declaration of hostilities, that it would be printing a war story every week, followed on 3 October with the beginning of its first war serial, which is centred on the main character of ‘Bill Stubbs, the Cockney Hero’.

Thus it is possible that the use of ‘Vipers’ for ‘Ypres/Wipers’ was an application, self-conscious perhaps, of a vestigial phenomenon in the all important wartime London/southeast England accent.

As a note here, an article in the Sunderland Daily Echo and Shipping Gazette 13 June 1917 (p2), not only indicated that the use of ‘Wipers’ was disappearing, but that it was seen as ‘uneducated’: ‘Now that there are more educated men in the ranks the pronunciation “Wipers” is dying out; in fact it is almost resented’. This is the reverse of what is implied by most of the evidence, that ‘Wipers’ was officers’ pronunciation, and had educated class connotations. ‘Educated’ men may have been more equipped to pronounce Ypres using the French pronunciation, but resentment was more likely to have been at civilians, and especially journalists, using the term.

The three instances, the Thanet Advertiser of January 1915, the Middlesex Chronicle of June 1915, and the Publishers’ Circular of January 1920, are the most noteworthy. The first two document local SE England pronunciation – the Rev Tonks in Thanet may have heard it from a local soldier on leave or convalescing, and though this can never be more than conjecture, he does link it with the well-documented terms ‘Jack Johnson’ and ‘Black Maria’. Recently another instance has emerged in the Publishers’ Circular, in an article published on 25 September 1915 (p271) in a review of S Macnaughtan’s A Woman’s Diary of the War: ‘… relating experiences in Antwerp during the siege, Furnes, the first battle of Ypres – or “Vipers,” as our “Tommies” call it.’ Compare this with the 1920 text: ‘Ypres, or “Vipers,” as Tommy called it’. Close reading of Macnaughtan’s A Woman’s Diary of the War shows there is no instance throughout that book of the use of ‘Wipers’ or ‘Vipers’ or slang names for any Belgian or French towns, though she does self-consciously use slang terms, such as ‘it “bucked one,” as schoolboys say’ (p44) or ‘with “Jack Johnsons” still whizzing overhead’ (p46). So this use of ‘Vipers’ is clearly an inclusion by a Publisher’s Circular editor, quite possibly the same person using a close variation five years later. After reading through every issue of the Publisher’s Circular from August 1914 to July 1916, I think it is unlikely that the source for this usage will appear.

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auburnfamilynews · 5 years

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Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

We don’t even have all the facts yet, but that’s never stopped us.

The 2019 season isn’t even cold yet, there’s still football to be played as bowl season comes to a close, and we’re looking ahead to what the Auburn Tigers have to negotiate for next year. While sentiment heading into the offseason may have been much different based on what could have happened two days ago, there’s still a need to break some trends in 2020 if Gus Malzahn doesn’t want to waste the goodwill he engendered from November’s Iron Bowl win.

Thankfully, the schedule sets up pretty nicely. Yeah, the even year gets us road tilts in Athens and Tuscaloosa, and there will be storylines galore in some of the other games, but it’ll be a longshot for us to play six eleven-win teams again. The schedule should be easier. I think.

AUBURN TIGERS 2020 FOOTBALL SCHEDULE

SEPTEMBER 5th - ALCORN STATE (Auburn, AL)

Is Steve McNair suiting up? No? Okay. Auburn should be able to work on the new offensive line and ease into the Chad Morris offense with a seasoned Bo Nix at quarterback. Big win, it’ll be hard to tell anything from this game at all.

Chance to win: 99.9999999999999999%

SEPTEMBER 12th - vs NORTH CAROLINA (Atlanta, GA)

Thankfully we get the big non-conference game after a warmup, but OF COURSE the team we play will get a ton of hype during the offseason. The Tar Heels will likely be a top fifteen team based on Sam Howell’s bowl performance and UNC’s near-upset of Clemson. They’ll be hailed as a division favorite and they’ll definitely make noise in the ACC. We should - should - be the more talented team, but there will be some question as to how we handle a P5 team with new faces across both lines.

Chance to win: 70%

SEPTEMBER 19th - at OLE MISS (Oxford, MS)

If we stub our toe against the Tar Heels, you can bet that Lane Kiffin is going to throw everything he has into this game. He’ll probably do that anyway. Ole Miss will be better and more dangerous on offense. After a close game earlier this year, I really don’t know what to think about this one. The Rebels will be close to an unknown quantity under Kiffin, but they could very well be the spoiler the SEC West doesn’t want to see. John Rhys Plumlee ran for more than 1,000 yards, and Kiffin’s influence could make him a supremely scary guy to gameplan against. Still, Ole Miss won’t have a whole lot else around him.

Chance to win: 69%

SEPTEMBER 26th - SOUTHERN MISS (Auburn, AL)

We played a close game with these guys in 2018, but they’ll always be a complete talent level below Auburn. If we take a loss in the first three games and then struggle with the Golden Eagles, it won’t be good. I don’t think that’ll happen. Auburn wins easily.

Chance to win: 95%

OCTOBER 3rd - KENTUCKY (Auburn, AL)

Get ready for the buildup to this one. Joey Gatewood (if he gets that waiver) is going to roll back into Jordan-Hare Stadium wearing royal blue instead of navy and he’ll be leading a confident Kentucky team. The Wildcats will likely be 3-1 heading into this game with EMU, Florida, Kent State, and South Carolina on the slate before Auburn. If they spring an upset in Gainesville, then we’ll be nervous about this one. I don’t think Auburn’s defense will be susceptible to what Kentucky’s going to want to run, and we definitely know Gatewood, but he also knows us. This game could turn out to be the biggest game in the conference that weekend, depending on how Ole Miss is doing. The Rebs host Alabama that weekend.

Chance to win: 64%

OCTOBER 10th - at GEORGIA (Athens, GA)

Ready to feel weird? Auburn plays Georgia in Athens in October. The last time that these two met before November was 1936, when the Tigers got a 24-13 win over the Dawgs in Columbus on October 24th. The back to back at Georgia and at Alabama was difficult to manage, and now it’ll be much easier. What’s even better is that we can hope that Georgia isn’t settled at all by this point. The NFL Draft took a toll on the Bulldogs — no Jake Fromm, the entire offensive line gone, no running backs, and only one returning receiver. The defense will be great. Still, Athens is tough no matter when you visit. If CBS still has the TV rights, we’ll be part of a doubleheader on this day with LSU @ Florida also on the docket.

Chance to win: 40%

OCTOBER 17th - TEXAS A&M (Auburn, AL)

I dunno, man. Is Jimbo good? He’s definitely not worth the $75 million unless he wins the next couple of national titles in a row. Although, A&M finally got a little of what we all thought Kellen Mond might be in the Texas Bowl, when he ran through Oklahoma State for the game-winning touchdown from 67 yards out. He should be pretty solid next season, but despite good recruiting, everyone’s still waiting for the Aggies to truly put it together. Traditionally, this game would have been an automatic loss since it’s in Auburn, but the Tigers have won three straight in the series. Bo Nix was steady in his first real road start, and I think he’ll have plenty for the A&M defense in this one.

Chance to win: 65%

OCTOBER 31st - at MISSISSIPPI STATE (Starkville, MS)

Oh, great. We play these clowns on Halloween and now they’ve got the Mad Pirate running the show? Thankfully, the Bulldogs shouldn’t be very good under Mike Leach since they have, uh, no quarterback, no receivers, and not a whole lot coming back from the 2019 team. Kylin Hill will be returning at running back, but there’s really not much that I can see MSU putting on the field that we won’t be able to handle, especially after a bye.

Chance to win: 77%

NOVEMBER 7th - ARKANSAS (Auburn, AL)

Like Ole Miss and Mississippi State, the Piggies will be breaking in a new coach. Unlike those two, it’s a guy that 99% of college football fans have never heard of. Georgia offensive line coach Sam Pittman made the move to go lead Arkansas, and while his recruiting has been fantastic, that won’t help anyone in year one. Chad Morris clearly wasn’t cut out to be a head coach, and with his departure, the cupboard is as bare as it gets. Pittman will take his lumps for at least a couple years before he starts to get the ball rolling (if he’s given that much time).

Chance to win: 90%

NOVEMBER 14th - UMASS (Auburn, AL)

Is Marcus Camby playing? No? I see.

Chance to win: 99.999999999999999%

NOVEMBER 21st - LSU (Auburn, AL)

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. Meet the new Amen Corner, same as the old Amen Corner. Instead of Georgia, we get LSU. The benefit is that there’s no longer two away games in a row. We get to split the home and away matchups, which will even things out without changing the caliber of the opponent.

Obviously, LSU just wrapped up one of the greatest seasons in college football history, but let’s give you a list of what will be different in 2020 for the Bayou Bengals —

Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow

Running back Clyde Edwards-Helaire

Offensive tackle Saahdiq Charles

Wide receiver Justin Jefferson

Safety Grant Delpit

Center Lloyd Cushenberry

Linebacker Jacob Phillips

Linebacker Patrick Queen

And that’s just the juniors plus Burrow. LSU will also lose a handful of seniors, and there are still some decisions to be made from guys like K’Lavon Chaisson. However, that might not be the biggest loss from Ed Orgeron’s group. He’ll have to replace both coordinators in 2020, as Joe Brady made the move to run the offense with the Panthers, and Dave Aranda is now leading Baylor. It’s no secret that the reason that LSU took off this year was largely thanks to Brady’s offensive influence, and now the playmakers plus the chess players are gone. It’s going to be a completely different team in 2020, and now Auburn gets them at home. With the game in November, they’ll certainly be in more of a rhythm, but there’s no way that Myles Brennan replicates Burrow’s performance, especially with a new guy running the show.

Chance to win: 50%

NOVEMBER 28th - at ALABAMA (Tuscaloosa, AL)

In similar fashion to what’s happening at LSU, Alabama lost a ton as well, but I don’t think they’ll feel the sting quite the way they will in Baton Rouge. Tua’s gone, but I’ve said before that he wasn’t the most important player on that team by far. What’s a little more pressing is the fact that Jerry Jeudy and Henry Ruggs have departed as well. Now, you don’t have to stick your third best cover guy on Devonta Smith, and your fourth best on Jaylen Waddle. Unfortunately, Alabama will still be solid. Mac Jones is good enough to utilize the talent, especially with Najee Harris returning (can’t take that paycut by going pro). While the offensive line may take a bit of a hit with Jedrick Wills leaving, Alex Leatherwood is back, along with Landon Dickerson.

Defensively, don’t be surprised if Alabama is good again. This year was hilarious, watching them trip all over themselves, and at times, their offense even had a poor scoring defense. Dylan Moses returns after missing all of last year, and all of those freshmen they played are now experienced. Losing Xavier McKinney is probably a positive, and Trevon Diggs made a ton of highlight reels for Jamar Chase, so there are probably some Bama fans excited to see the backups.

Look, anyone saying that Bama is going to fall on hard times has to know that a 10-2 regular season is likely the floor for them every year. Only with an absolute murderer’s row of injuries and the rare year when they play a real schedule would they hit three regular season losses. This year, they get Georgia... after the Dawgs lose everyone, and it’s early in the year. Watch out for the stretch in October — at Tennessee, bye, at LSU. We have to go to Bryant-Denny, so...

Chance to win: 30%

We’ve still got a few NFL decisions left to be made, but at this point we know roughly how everyone will look roster-wise in 2020. It’s not nearly the schedule we had last year, but it is always going to be difficult with Alabama, Georgia, and LSU on the slate year after year. Let’s see what you’ve got, Gus.

from College and Magnolia - All Posts https://www.collegeandmagnolia.com/2020/1/16/21048359/2020-football-schedule-way-too-early-outlook

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tothedarkdarkseas · 4 years

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So, if I'm not mistaken, you called yourself a Stu stan. How did you become a stan of the numbskull? Why do you stan Stu? Don't worry, I'm sure we all ask ourselves this question.

Have I said that? If I did I meant it a little tongue in cheek, stan’s a pretty strong word, haha. I definitely do favor Stu though, he is my favorite and currently the character I’m really invested in! But I wouldn’t say I have a very flattering image of him or that I’d ever fight for his honor– I’d fight for his dishonor, maybe!

Here is the actual answer: because I like to be difficult, haha. When I first got into Gorillaz Stu wasn’t my favorite, but I knew eventually he would be– not necessarily because of the kind of character he is, but because of my own pattern with character preferences. I absolutely have a “type” but it has less to do with any actual character traits and more to do with fandom traits. It’s contrarian and hipster and I know it… but I’ve always favored characters I didn’t think were getting their fair dues. Especially if there’s a ship involved and one character is more prominently featured than the other, it’s guaranteed that I’ll like the other one more and want to see more of their experiences and perspectives. Stu certainly is still popular, I’m not arguing that he’s ignored at all– if anything, Stu gets more attention than Russel and Noodle combined– but of the Stu/Murdoc relationship specifically, while Stu may be present, he isn’t always fleshed out like Murdoc is.

I can’t say how the Gorillaz fandom always felt and how deep the fan content was, but getting in later in the game I liked Murdoc and was on the pro-Murdoc side of the way-too-serious Murdoc hate that went on around the start of P5… and I could also tell Murdoc would get a lot of focus, and that redeeming Murdoc would be a popular sentiment. I’m not saying anything against that, I just mean that… you know, if you’ve been around fandoms in general for a long time, you know that a mean-but-troubled character like that is going to be divisive and is going to pull a lot of focus in fan conversation, both good and bad. And he does! I definitely felt some defensiveness for Murdoc because of things I’d see in the tags from people who just really, really hated the guy. Add the ship lens to that, though, and you’re narrowing it down to just pro-Murdoc. When that desire to make Murdoc sympathetic through a ship isn’t handled well, Stu ends up just feeling like an accessory. He’s just a key that allows Murdoc to feel guilt, make amends, and therefore be a good person– how Stu is allowed to feel or react isn’t always taken into consideration, and who Stu is without Murdoc isn’t important. Stu exists to play a role for Murdoc. And I wasn’t even really invested in the ship yet, but I could tell that when I found that entry point into Stu as a more rounded character, the other shoe was going to drop.

Enter, as I’ve mentioned many times before, Yearz by @elapsed-spiral. This was the characterization of Stu that fit in best with what I wanted for him, and it gave all my vague thoughts shape or just gave me thoughts to rip off in general. I know I bring it up pretty often, but I think credit should be given where credit is due, and I think Yearz is chronically under-credited. You can see places where it’s had influence all over the fandom, but it’s like a game of telephone where the influences or ideas get passed along and stop being connected to one source. Speaking for myself, I learned more about modern Britain (within the last 30 years, I mean… “modern” as in not Victorian) reading this fanfic than I’d ever known, and Danni was always happy to answer questions or fill in more blanks for me (and still does.) I also think Danni is just a phenomenal writer who maintains a great balance between the humor so essential to these guys, and the darker faults and histories that really tint the relationship with drama. I wouldn’t have started writing if I hadn’t read Yearz or without Danni’s guidance on British things, but even taking a step back from that, I might not have pursued an interest in these characters and in seeing or creating more content with a flawed human Stu if I hadn’t read Yearz.

I guess the long and short of it is that I started to have more interest in Stu because I was interested in leveling their dynamic and making the relationship feel more equal. That’s the goal of most fanfiction or meta: humanizing these absurd cartoon characters. There was already content out there that achieved this by lifting Murdoc up and making him a better person, focusing on his humanity. Human pathos! That’s well and good, but I just personally felt more compelled by doing the opposite– evening them out by pulling Stu down, shining a light of his faults, exploring how certain suggestions about his character early on could’ve unfolded had they not been mostly ironed out. I don’t think you make a man human by ignoring where he’s gone wrong. I’m not arguing the version of Stu I like is closer to canon, he isn’t really, I’ve just cherry-picked the opposite details to focus on. And I’m not arguing against the merit in having redemptive stories or exploring improvement either, I just think variety is important. I think a Stu who is imperfect and nasty is a really compelling idea, and I think he deserves to get that same in-depth treatment as Murdoc.

Sorry, I guess I got off the question there! I stan Stu because he’s fun for me to think about and write about. I like the directions his story can go in, I like imagining his perspective, and I find him really rewarding to write! Despite how slowly I write in Gorillaz, I hadn’t written anything at all in years and years and years, and I’d never “consistently” written fic for another fandom. Sad as it is to say, considering how meager my output is, I’ve been more inspired and followed through on more writing for this than anything else, and that wouldn’t have happened if I didn’t like a certain idea of Stu, so I kinda owe the bastard. As they say… we have no choice but to stan.

#behind the cut: arguably some negativity about the fandom so please feel free to skip over this one #i have no interest in stepping on toes #just giving fuller context to my answer #Anonymous

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