#like minds ao3 tags

[laurelwen]

Like Minds Textposts: AO3 Tag Edition part 2/? Like Minds Humor Masterpost

[erinwantstowrite]

"i want jason to murder skip" boy do i have news for you: that ain't too far off from LoF canon

[calmlb]

can we as a society please stop calling Dazai the “demon prodigy” like it’s canon??? IM BEGGING

his canon nickname is so underused too… i mean c’mon, the “black wraith of the Port Mafia??” idk if i’ve ever even seen it used in a fic 😭

[elodieunderglass]

is PCRF still where you recommend people donate, or do you have another recommended group? I would like to donate but haven’t had time to do research.

(In reference to fundraising campaign I did for PCRF)

One of the most important things I have learned about conflict and healthcare and devastation, from someone who deals with them for their living, is that it is fractal, each piece of it containing unimaginable complexity, and that as a human you can’t really deal much with fractals that get more complex than, like, ferns. I am oversimplifying here. But the thing is that you cannot get bogged down endlessly in debating the nature of fractals. You decide on the level of complexity you can manage , perform an action and move on. You cannot take responsibility for every mathematical pattern that follows from your action; if you were a sort of cosmic weatherman, affecting the fates of people you’ve never met through some vague alchemy of intention, you’d know about it already. Therefore do not obsess too much over The Good Place levels of ethics and research, spiralling into fractals in search of the perfect. Therefore, also, if you want to give £2 to someone, feel free to ignore people who say “ah but if you give £2 to that guy they’ll spend it on something bad, and the whole fractal is rotten and broken.” You can only ever claim your own actions, a small piece of the fractal: to insist on your power over distant pieces of mathematical patterns is bonkers. It is religious nonsense. This is what I’ve learned and I thought it was pretty good, from someone who’d know.

So I believe the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund is not able to operate in Gaza at the moment, like many non-profits; I believe Medeciens Sans Frontiers aren’t in Gaza at the moment and that’s pretty dire indicator. However, they are mobilised in Lebanon.

The reasons why I selected PCRF to support include the fact that they have been able to deliver material aid, had pragmatic routes to evacuate children, and were reporting some success in providing/stabilising healthcare infrastructure. They have stated from the beginning that their intent was to support, and ideally restore, healthcare infrastructure, without which you cannot run a nation. I have known healthcare professionals who traveled with PCRF to work on complex cases prior to this conflict and I personally know/respect one of their prominent supporters, which helped me to make this choice. I also was hoping in the future that Gaza would have restored healthcare infrastructure and PCRF had stated their commitment to doing so.

I have received and listened to criticism about this choice, and I firmly believe that no matter what choice you make to support a cause, you’ll receive some measure of criticism (the fractal! Elodie you must consider the fractal nature of reality at all times! Scrupulous frantic morality is necessary at all times !), and that this should not stop you. To explain a bit about this, the criticisms I’ve received have mostly fallen into two camps:

- “the wrong sort of charity” - one concern is PCRF are not able to promise that their work will never support Hamas supporters or their families. This has been raised as “PCRF support Hamas”. but genuinely, given the realities of conflict, it is not practical or sane to require that people bring proof of political affiliation when seeking healthcare for their children. I’m comfortable saying that this, like other risks of fundraising/donation, is always possible but not a major consideration for me.

- “the wrong sort of fundraiser” - conversely some people stated they’d prefer I support individual families seeking evacuation through GFMs. This is also fine but my choice in the charity was partly in thinking about families who do not have GFMs, and children who do not have families. I also felt, at the time of fundraising, that supporting healthcare infrastructure was very worthy in a different way - after all, at the time the same people doing GFMs were also using/needing what healthcare was available.

My shoulders are broad, and I’m comfortable with these criticism. I am fully aware that this is not a complete solution but I personally continue to support the charity. I am explaining this to indicate that there will always be criticisms; you must accept that you can only take a small piece of the fractal, and you must accept that quite a lot of the fractal was never in your gift to control.

The situation is constantly changing and with the departure of organisations there is genuinely less hope of materially restoring the infrastructure in Gaza. At the moment donations to PCRF will likely be mobilised to Lebanon. It may be that this speaks to you. It does still speak to me.

Ultimately while it’s important to do research, it is always going to become fractal, especially in conflict situations. Nobody’s ever going to be able to point to a perfect thing that will fix everything and absolve us of criticism, you know? You will always only be able to pick up a piece of the fractal.

Now moving away from “what I personally support” there are many people more informed than myself and I would like to direct you to them as well. @gothhabiba is someone I follow who has posted several very useful posts about this and has been extremely informative, and spent a lot of time and attention on this, so I would defer to the resources and fundraisers they’ve put together. Her response to a similar question has been “pick 1-3 personal fundraisers” - this is a piece of the fractal. At the moment if what you want to do most is “materially help people in Gaza” that seems like the best option.

Also he doesn’t post much on social media, but when you get the opportunity to read a scientific article or anything by https://x.com/sullivanprof it’s worth stopping and processing. To me, Richard’s life work really shows how a piece of the fractal unpacks to reveal the whole world. I think if you have emotional space to research, it’s honestly a good investment to read some of his “manifestos” on intersections of healthcare and conflict.

[wisteriagoesvroom]

happy "breaching the top 10 f1 rpf pairings on ao3" day to landoscar nation 🎂 because it's all about.... two people that are so much the same yet so different. australia vs the uk. oscar's cool collected calm versus lando's ricocheting personality. twitch streams and side hustles and multiple endeavors vs singlemindedness of racing. purity of craft vs embracing everything life throws at you and trusting that it'll all work out. the rivalry that isn't (well it is, but not really). pushing each other to be better. making heart eyes in a taylor swift video, reaching out to your teammate in silverstone after surviving a media maelstrom and him being pleased and stepping closer because he's been given permission to. making fun of your resident weeb for reading the words "kit kat" but just in a japanese accent.

it's being so ridiculously competitive that you'll hide in a burning bin in the name of fun for a game with made up points and then squinting at your teammate ringed with the bright light of the sun and laughing at how stupid this all is. it's making fun of your teammate's music taste that you can hear through the thin walls of the drivers' rooms. trusting the journey. mimicking each other's body language. knowing it's for the marketing but winking at the camera together anyway, like we're all invited to be in on the joke. two parallel lives woven in two different garages with almost identical specs. being so comfortable you have this weird rapport that is kind of a cipher and unknowable to anyone outside of the immediate network or team, but it's so assured and quiet that for the first time the person who's been the person who was once the younger teammate steps up, acts older now, and becomes comfortable with the silence.

it's knowing your best friend was on their renault team and not saying anything about it in public but the motorsport world is so small and specific and the experience so surreal that surely some laylines are just strangely predestined. it's about growing up together. it's watching the brit upstart in a generation of two other brit upstarts chase his dream and give up everything to win and get velcroed to the seat because he's kind of small, just like you, but you dream bigger than anyone dares to dream and you identify with the other's self belief that says you, too, could stand on that top step one day. it's you following the little blue-suited guy racer on social media and liking sooo many of his posts over the years, and not even bothering to hide that fact when you've probably become that goalpost for someone else one day, too.

it's chapter 2, with 3 more to go. it's watching your teammate win his first sprint race and finding it in yourself to be happy for him even when you're sad that it wasn't you. it's publicly saying that the rookie is not a threat, he's a threat who makes you race better. it's making fun of newbie's first day at mclaren and finding him unknowable. and he arrives with all this hype and pressure so what can you do but focus on you and step up your game, but he's always in the background and the periphery, chasing and chasing with this hunger that is unbelievable and unfamiliar because it's always humming in a way that made you mistake stillness for idleness in the past. but now, you know: still waters run deep, so you swim harder, too. drop the dj-ing. become more disciplined. train more. do things that don't matter, less.

because the future is vast. the future is happening constantly if you're ready to meet it. and maybe destiny will be kind, and your names will be remembered. your name, inked on a trophy in the precious metal of kings, and dreamers. your name, inked in gold.

but today, you're 22. you're 24.

you're driving a car as fast as you can, and everything that's possible, feels like it could be possible, right now.

[nightwingsgirlfriend]

i hate golden child Dick Grayson. everyone ignores how ANGRY this kid actually was. We rarely get accurate dick grayson, all the teen titans shows have been so off on his personality (you cannot tell me they accidentally made the character tim and realised halfway through wrong robin) and the fandom sees him as "oh everyone finds him attractive + he's Bruce's perfect angel and Jason hates him because of that"

no he literally killed the joker.

why do we skim over that he KILLED THE JOKER. He didn't even know Jason; bruce was his father and he not only refused to kill the joker, interfered when someone else tried to but hit jason in the same way after he came back. His SON. But dick felt so strongly about a kid he regretted not getting close to that he killed a man.

and then if you think that was a one off

in that panel where he fully BEATS Bruce's ass in gotham war? served. ate.

people dumb him down way too often like he wasn't the first robin. you cannot out do the doer so they gotta drag him down to bring others up.

not to mention the fanon portrayal ignores the trauma he has from liu, mirage and tarantula. it looks at that and goes "ok! cool but he IS a flirt :3" he isn't allowed to grieve in the comics either because SOMEBODY (devin) won't let him because he "didn't say no"

and give jason his own friends DC please stop giving him handmedowns he deserves more (i do love him and roy i just wish they also maintained the roy dick friendship because it's usually one or the other)

thabk yoau and gooenight

[necrotic-nephilim]

@profandomhopper i was going to reblog the original post this comment was left on but i felt it divorced itself from the original topic so much, you get your own post for giving me delightful permission to ramble about this. buckle in people this is long.

so, DC is a big fandom that expanses a lot of different types of content, and like anything, is subject to crossovers. the obvious ones like Marvel are for the reason of being a similar and equally popular superhero world, so it's easy to transpose the worlds onto each other and overlap the characters. both of these worlds deal with multiverses and endless, endless heroes. it makes sense and there's no real stretch to think Batman and Spider-Man could co-exist. i mean, there have been canon crossover comics. and even some more random crossovers like White Collar have pretty easy to trace origins, being an actor in WC was a popular Dick fancast back in the day so there was some bleeding over that led to a well-loved niche crossover space.

but Danny Phantom and Miraculous Ladybug are where it gets interesting. because at a surface, MLB sort of makes sense. it's a superhero world, you're following a teen girl superhero and sure the mechanics are pretty contained, but the crossover should make sense. but when you compare it to the crossover numbers of other superhero media like say My Hero Academia, Ladybug takes the *crown* with such a bizarre popularity. and of course, DP feels like it makes even less sense. sure, you *could* lump it into at the very least, superhero-adjacent media, but it's not a true hero world like MLB or DC is.

but, the thing to always understand about DC, *especially* the Batfamily (which is where the crossover content propagates the most) is this: a *very* good chunk of fans don't interact with the comics. i would venture to say even most Batfamily fans don't read the comics and actively talk about it. we've all read a very fandom big Batfam fanfic where the author's note mentions the writer has never touched a comic in their life. typically, these fans are either cobbling together their understanding from fandom content, or by frankensteining unrelated DC adaptations to understand each character. you take Bruce from Batman: TAS, you take Dick from the animated Young Justice, you take Jason from Batman: Under The Red Hood animated movie, you take Damian from the DCAMU Batman vs Robin, and you read some fandom metas to fill in the rest and well, you've got some sort of an understanding of these characters. read enough incorrect quotes, some genfic, a couple of character metas, and boom, you understand the Batfamily fandom enough to start creating your own content. and of course now. now you have Wayne Family Adventures so it's even *easier*. a pretty easy to pick up webtoon that's filling in all the gaps for you. but i've been in this fandom long enough to remember before we had WFA and even then, this was still a common, if not the most popular way, to ween yourself into the DC fandom space. you cherry-picked the canon you liked and then plunged into the depths of fanon.

i'm not here to make in depth commentary on if i think this is a good or bad thing. trust me i have that commentary in my head, but that would need it's own post. i'm very split on it and my feelings are complicated. my feelings on WFA are even *more* complicated. because oftentimes, the attitude expressed by these fans who are frankensteining this version of the Batfamily/DC world they have in their head is they don't *want* to read the comics. the comics don't contain the content they're after. and to an extent, i understand that. if you're looking for light-hearted vibes of the Batfamily all getting along and having the occasional hurt/comfort moments but in the end, they hug and make up, you're right. largely, you won't find that in canon. of course there are so many comics to recommend for Batfamily interactions, but you have to get specific. you'll find them interacting in small groups, Tim and Dick bonding here, Duke and Cass bonding there, but largely, the comics don't care to balance the ridiculously large cast they've given themselves. but fandom does. it's easy to toss them all in a blender and ignore the parts you don't like. the default argument to ignoring the comics or writing something OOC is always "well the comics are OOC and inconsistent too" which, while a flawed argument that massively misunderstand how comics work as a medium, isn't an entirely incorrect one. you could serve on a silver platter to these fans, an easy and accessible way to get into comics and they wouldn't be interested. it's not what they're here for. fandom is always character-driven above all else. it's driven by character relationships and dynamics. if someone wants to consume content where Tim idolized and stalked Jason as 'his Robin' and now is trying to help him rehabilitate and they're super complicated but have this long epic forgiveness arc, why *would* they read the comics? because they're sure as shit not going to find that dynamic in the comics. it's laughably OOC and not canon at all, but that doesn't matter. what matters is the sandbox. most Batfamily fans care *far* more about the sandbox canon gives them than the actual canon itself. feel how you feel about that, this really isn't being negative toward that attitude, but it is a common attitude.

so, you have Batfamily fans playing in the sandbox and building their own narrative. common fandom headcanons are so common, you could practically write a guide on how the fanon Batfamily works with how consistent people are about it. or you could just read WFA, which is practically the new manifesto of it. even now, with this sudden spike in people talking about canon accuracy and "actually this happening in the comics", they don't actually care about the comics, just what they can cherry-pick for fodder. (even if they rob it of so much context they're just as OOC as they were before. see specifically: the recent phenomena with Tim Drake going from the woobified weakest member of the Batfam who everyone needs to save constantly and he's the smart boy but he's also the one with a sad tragic neglectful past who gets overlooked being the way Batfamily fandom played with Tim for years. but recently, people seem to be pushing this idea of a ridiculously badass Tim, Tim who *totally* has a kill count because of his actions in RR (2009) if you take them completely out of context, Tim who bested Ra's and is even more badass than Jason and he's the 17 yr old CEO of Wayne Industries being cool and flawless it becoming the new fandom zeitgeist. neither of these versions of Tim are canon, and the second fundamentally misunderstands his arc in RR (2009) but the shift has undeniably happened and it's been fascinating to watch. the same thing happened with people suddenly deciding Jason isn't the "angry violent Robin", he was a sunshine sweet boy who was perfect as Robin. neither of these are true, but the second feels more transgressive and new to fandom from cherry-picked panels.) the point is largely, Batfamily fans would rather build their own canon than play with the actual canon.

and then, you have Danny Phantom. i'm not into DP and have no interest to get into it, but what i know about it via fandom osmosis is this: DP fans sort of also don't give a fuck about canon. once again, the canon of DP is a sandbox, not a rulebook. the concepts and the characters are the draw, not the plot itself. i've seen DP posts explaining characters who are essentially OCs, but have become so dominant in the fandom via fandom osmosis. there are concepts and ideas about how Danny's powers work and potential concepts with his ghost nature that either aren't in canon or only happened once in canon and fans decided to expand on that and doesn't care about it's own in-universe logic. i've seen a lot of DP fans also express they haven't seen the show and they don't have plans to see the show. because the show is just some children's cartoon with some inconsistencies and a simple plot, as you'd expect from CN. the show isn't the point. no one cares about it's plot, they care about it's characters. they care about pushing the concept of half ghost boy to a logical extreme and seeing what you can get out of that. can you make it weird and fucked up. how much can you highlight on his trauma and body horror. what identity crisis can you give him and how can you build his interactions with other characters in his world around that and also make those characters fun and unique on their own. sure, the skeleton of canon is there, but the meat lies all in the fanon.

Miraculous Ladybug also exists in this similar vein. the characters, the concepts, those hold intrigue. and not even mentioning the fact the original concept for this show was supposed to be aimed to an older audience, so you can see the bones of something a bit more mature and nuanced under this typical, villain of the week magical girl transformation show. the show itself is a bit shallow and that's not a *bad* thing, it's just the medium it exists within being aimed towards children. but the concepts of a teen girl who's basically a sort of chosen one, a boy who doesn't know his father is the big bad of the show, and their weird identity porn love... square thing. those dynamics are *so* complicated and such a fun sandbox to play in with character-driven fandom.

so, at the core, you have three fandoms that care more about the culturally accepted fanon than the canon, with a good chunk of people often not even consuming the original canon content. and well, DC is an *easy* world to transpose just about anything onto. a boy who's half ghost and fighting supernatural threats? that makes sense, DC has ghost heroes like Deadman already. a girl who has this magical item that gives her animal themed superpowers? i mean that's practically the same thing as Vixen's Totem so that one makes sense too. they fit in pretty easy, no needing to change the world to accommodate them. and of course, if you're a fan of *one* fandom where you don't care for the canon content and only like the fandom sandbox, chances are, you'll get drawn in pretty easily to another fandom with similar mechanics. if you can teach yourself the DP fandom rules/concepts, you can teach yourself the Batfamily fandom rules/concepts. and well, since there's so much crossover in fandom members, why not write the fanfiction? crossover fics will always exist, but with such a shared member base, you have a really big boom.

it's why the characters you see DP interact with in DC are *always* characters who are far more driven by fanon than canon. Danny and John Constantine is a *massive* concept. for people who don't read Hellblazer comics. my poor partner, @divine-dominion has lamented to me pretty often about finding DP content in the Hellblazer tag that is essentially turning Constantine into an OC. because whatever version of Constantine is being written about isn't one bit comics accurate, and really, isn't trying to be. and the same thing happens with Shazam. you watch Young Justice and understand him well enough, you get drawn in by the character concept that you just run with it. people put their favorite blorbos in the same place because hey, wouldn't ghost boy be pretty cool in a city like *Gotham*. how would Batman even react to him. and then, the shipping. because ages for the Batfamily can be easily hand-waved and moved around based on where you plop Danny into the timeline, you have your pick of the litter with him, and same with Ladybug. of course there are the most popular ships but largely, the world is your oyster.

i don't think this is the worst thing in the world for either fandom. it's not hard to filter out the crossover tags and scroll past content i don't like. and sure, i see the appeal of making your blorbos from two different places meet. i've got my drafts *full* of DC/MHA crossover ideas because well, i like them both and think that would be cool. i think my only gripe with it is when DP or MLB crossover content seeps it's way into the wrong tags. using the above example, if you're writing about Danny and Constantine but there's zero content of the actual Hellblazer comics, i don't think you need the Hellblazer tag, just the Constantine character tag. tbh i wish this extended onto Ao3 and people utilized fandom tags better. if you're writing Batfamily fanfiction that is very clearly and obviously WFA driven in characterization and concepts, i would far prefer those fics be tagged with the WFA fandom tag rather than the Batman (comics) fandom tag. because well, you're not writing about the Batman comics. and there's nothing wrong with that, but it helps if you don't confuse yourself for content striving to interact with canon more. (this especially extends to Young Justice, by the way. if you're writing for the Young Justice tv show please, please stop using the Young Justice (comics) fandom tag. i'm at my wit's end- /lh)

the whole thing is fascinating. i've got zero interest in entering DP or MLB as fandoms because that's not my speed, but witnessing it as an outsider is my favorite pastime. i see a *lot* of posts going around the DC x DP space that are helping explain to people who's who, what's what, and understanding the canon/fanon of both of these properties so others can better enter the space. which is not something you'd need in a fandom driven only by it's canon content, but it is sweet watching others try to help newbies enter the space. it's a very inviting fandom space, i think, whether you lament it's existence or not. they're just sitting in their corner with their blorbos, and i gotta respect that. the posts explaining the Batfamily to DP fans are always fun for me to read, even if i disagree with some of the characterizations in them because it helps shine a light on what the fans of this crossover regard as "important" enough about each fandom to be worth including those sorts of primers. very fascinating stuff.

[ryssbelle]

Poppy for N2 au, it took me so long to make her design cuz I didn't really know what I wanted to do only because I feel like her design is pretty perfect.

But then I just thought about fun outfits to give her or outfits that I would find comfortable if I was wearing them and it all came together.

Poppy here is pretty much the same as here movie counterpart, as nothing really changes on her end of things other than having more insight on Branch through his brothers, and through Lief. Shes also a bit more understanding a bit earlier on because of it but it doesnt do much to change her own character arc I would say.

Bonus

Part of Poppys design was based off a design I had made for previous rulers of Troll Village/Tree

Namely Queen Protea who I designed as Poppys grandmother

Named after the Protea flower which part of her design is based off :D

In the context of this Au Protea was the one who conceptualized the tunnels while her son, King Peppy, was the one to follow through after her death

[myokk]

Eloise is really, really bad at chess😐

(this is a scene from my fic & I typed it up here:)

"Milady, you cannot send him there! He will surely die a terrible death, and Murdoch is our finest knight!"

Eloise blinked her bleary eyes at the wizarding chess board, not really comprehending what the tiny pieces were yelling at her. The one that seemed to be doing the most talking was gesticulating wildly and jumping up and down, trying to get her attention. When she had taken the pieces out of the box Sebastian had lent her, they had immediately recognized her and started protesting, appealing to 'their benevolent lord's innate sense of goodness', but their protests fell on deaf ears. Eloise was positive that Sebastian took some sort of perverse pleasure at watching her lose at chess.

In the background, she could hear Ominis's laughter echoing through the Undercroft. His own pieces were quite happy at the moment, preening and occasionally sending rude gestures towards Eloise's, much to Sebastian's amusement. He was narrating their every action to Ominis, whose laughter was egging on his soldiers even more.

"Eloise," Sebastian said, propping his chin up by one hand (entirely too amused, infuriatingly so, why did he have to look so handsome when she was trying to be annoyed at him?), "maybe you should move the knight..." his other hand pointed to an empty space on the board, "...here."

This declaration caused an uproar. There were shouts of betrayal, tiny pieces gesticulating wildly to the carnage surrounding the board as they shouted in vain. She didn't see any other viable moves, so Eloise sighed and ordered the brave little Murdoch to where Sebastian had suggested. Chaos immediately ensued and Ominis's queen gleefully knocked his head off with a violent swing of her scepter. Eloise's pawns all doubled over, sobbing as their most valient knight fell, and her remaining bishop shook his tiny fist in outrage up at her.

After a few more minutes, much to Eloise's ashamed relief and the boys' disappointment, her pieces refused to move for either her or Sebastian. They solemnly collected the remains of their fallen comrades with as much dignity as they could muster and marched off the board and back into their box in a mourning parade of sorts.

Sebastian joined Ominis's pieces as they jeered the losing team off the board, causing Eloise to glare fiercely at him. "You were the one telling me what to do, and they're your pieces! Show some loyalty."

He shrunk away from the intensity of her gaze and held up his hands in protest. "I was suggesting the moves as a joke! After last week's fiasco, I didn't think you'd fall for it again."

Ominis was laughing so hard he was gasping for breath, and the two of them turned to watch him. Even through her irritation, Eloise couldn't help but smile at him - he was always so solemn and these bouts of mirth were few and far between. He managed to speak between bouts of laughter. "I...I couldn't...I couldn't believe it when you sent your bishops one by one into my trap! It was so obvious! And then...and then you..." Ominis dissolved into fits of laughter again and couldn't finish.

Eloise turned her angry glare to him. "We can't all be chess geniuses!"

"I've tried teaching you and you don't listen! For the next time, I'm only going to give you one piece of advice: don't listen to Sebastian." He chuckled once more to himself and then turned slightly to the board, addressing his men (and queen) and giving them a debriefing. He always did this after he won the matches; it was a strange sort of ritual that he seemed to look forward to.

[harrowscore]

can't believe a show based on a videogame (usually games adaptations are notoriously bad, which isn't the case here tho) gave me the beauty and the beast/twisted mirrors/enemies to traveling companions/ruthless antihero+optmistic but still badass heroine who takes none of his shit/age gap but make it sexy dynamic of my dreams. as much as i love maximus and i think he deserves the best writing ever because 1. he's a clever deconstruction of the aspiring Knight bro who's actually a bit of a loser and, as much as lucy, sees the world in black&white at first and then doesn't get what he thought he wanted but what he needs (or at least i hope he'll eventually get it), and 2. he's a cutie and i want an epic love story for him too, it's very funny how they tried to give us a puppy kind of romance and the tumblr girlies still fixated on the "toxic ~she bites his finger off and he cuts hers off and sews it on his hand in what we'll pretend it's a symbolic marriage rings exchange or whatever~ asshole who used to be a nice guy/good girl™ with a lot of spunk and hidden anger but unshakeable morals" kind of relationship.

[laurelwen]

Like Minds Textposts: AO3 Tag Edition 1/?

[erinwantstowrite]

Are you okay with people making edits with your art?

yeah sure! as long as it's credited properly I don't mind edits. but if someone reposts my art, especially without permission, that's what i'm not okay with. i stopped making art for fairy tail because people kept stealing it 💔 but edits are fun and they go back to the og source!! i'm completely ok with y'all devestating me or making me giggle

[montypng]

out here in the desert, your shadow lives on without you (otherwise known as grief, in five acts)

[ID: a digital drawing of the girl from a high angle —her head is tilted, eyes tearing up angrily. large, shadow-like figures of the fabulous four stretch out behind her, each of them faceless and pictured in the position of their death. party poison’s chin is tilted upwards, jet star is outstretched, limbs askew, fun ghoul raises his arm, aiming their ray gun, and kobra kid falls backward, arm limply falling to his side and head turned away./end ID] 

inspired by @graffitibible / @omegalomania’s incredible fic i’m not a messiah (just a mess)

[corviiids]

sparknotes for chapter 9 of as you like it because a very kind commenter asked for a breakdown and if theres one thing im good at it's breaking down

(spoilers for the fic obviously)

tihs chapter gave me so much trouble. i sat on it for so long i literally hated it by the time i posted it but im starting to forgive it now. it was, as ive said, originally way longer, and the next part of the fic was supposed to be the second half of this one... but it was starting to get absurd and i realised that neither part would have the weight i needed them to have if they were lumped in together. (with some relief, honestly, because i kind of had wanted them to be separate initially but didn't think they'd be long enough. i dont know myself very well.) anyway, the next chapter should be a bit of a doozy now although hopefully not SO absurdly long.

this chapter picks up where the previous cliff hung off, which is to say, after the 'shadow' akechi reveals that he's actually just the real ass guy. akechi in the palace what will he do. the chapter doesn't immediately kick off with ren's reaction though and that is because ren is the most repressed man alive and does not know how he feels about it.

so, akechi disguised himself to enter his palace, which is significant for a few reasons:

1. he's disguised as himself

which i think is ironic in a fun way, but it's also just a very basic nod to the fact that akechi pivots between which of his personae is his default. this isn't necessarily super meaningful, but he does later refer to the black mask suit as

a costume, instead of an outfit. i mean, don't read into it too much, he's just talking, but i did think that probably points to how he feels about his appearance generally.

2. more importantly, his disguise involves taking off his mask.

so he's disguised, yes, and he's disguised as himself, yes, but that disguise is a literal unmasking, which is also kind of ironic. in presenting himself this way he has literally and figuratively made himself vulnerable. they're inside his heart, and the entire time he's in the palace, he is exposed... again both literally and figuratively because he also starts sharing more with ren than he ever has. look, i just think it's fun to have a character who has so many layers that he has to lie so hard that he becomes himself again.

i only want to point this out because (this is also part of larger meta about mona lol) akechi knew about the metaverse, but there is no way to intuit the method of stealing hearts without guidance. it's such a specific and involved process. thje most akechi could work out on his own was that if you killed a shadow, that person would have a mental breakdown. no way to guess that if you send a calling card and then go in within the next 24 hours and take a physical manifestation of a thing that you didn't know existed (process) would lead to that person ahving a change of heart (result). so even if akechi had a palace and knew about it, even if he wanted to do something about it, he would have assumed there was nothing he could do about it - i also have no idea what the process would be for sending yourself a calling card, even if he DID know about the process. so basically in this fic akechi found his palace and just assumed that was it. he was like, fucked up lol. anyway

this just straight up isn't true HAHA so i put in the silly little dichotomy of akechi gently taking ren's arm to protect him from slipping on the ice while telling him that he lied about caring about him. i think in this chapter as akechi begins to openly explain more and more of his thought process, this is probably the first truly clear glimpse you get of exactly what akechi's distortion is and how deep it runs.

the things akechi says with total conviction in this chapter are just... not true, not a fair or founded way to view the world (or the art of performance haha), but he says them with total conviction, and hopefully it should show off how unreliable he is as a source of exposition. one commenter asked about this moment of akc's eyes going yellow and if it was somehting that happened in canon - not really, i was just thinking about those little moments in the game after you send a calling card where the game cuts from the person to their shadow to do a little oneliner about their distortion.

akechi's IN his own palace, so i thought it would be fun to kind of make it a physical thing that can happen to him where he sort of merges with his shadow for a brief second in the moments when the distortion is strongest.

OKAY this is one of my favourite bits of the chapter HAHA the deep soda lore. i dont expect anyone to remember all the way back to chapter 3 but:

literally nobody asked about this but i love the phantom thieves!!! i dream of all the little silly moments of being a team that they must have that we don't get to see in gameplay, for obvious reasons of it wouldn't really work in a game, but i can imagine them in my brain. i can imagine their trickshot contests that get their asses kicked. i can imagine them chanting at each other to chug while joker and oracle compete to down an entire bottle of brand neutral mountain dew baja blast. i can dream.

soda lore is gay.

i dont honestly think it's inherently a bad thing necessarily but this part does kind of set up like... you can see akechi very early on in life forming this worldview that the truth isn't always what you want, you know? this was a 'lie' he and his mother both bought into, they both knew what the truth actually was, so it wasn't real dishonesty, but they just had this little fantasy. i just thought it would be fun for akechi to have a way to bond with his mother and feel closer to her, and that way is by buying into this white lie. idk

akechi's mother isn't really a character and i don't want to form her into too much of one because i think it's very much the point that, like... he made this point in an earlier chapter but having lost her at a pretty young age i think it's quite crucial that akechi doesn't really have a fully formed image of who his mother is outside of what she was to him as a child. so i actively don't want her to feel too real or defined. im not interested in making an oc out of her because i think it defeats the purpose. that said, this line exists to maybe gesture very vaguely at the notion that akechi's mother was a very bright person who similarly was stuck in circumstances that didn't serve to foster her real potential. just the image in my mind of a person who's clever enough to get across algebraic notation in chess by flipping through a book in a few minutes, but was never exposed to the opportunity to learn chess until this moment in someone else's house, and also the particular situation of learning this skill WHILE at someone's place as a call girl, i dunno . i hope im treating this with the grace it deserves but i wanted to build just this particular image in vivid colour while also keeping the reality quite blurry and vague, just to give the reader a sense of where akechi came from while still preserving his limited pov.

my thoughts on the phantom thieves' methods (and how they compare to maruki) are definitely too long and involved to put into a post about this fic chapter specifically, but maybe one day. i also wanna stress im not like... strictly anti-phantom thief or anti-heartstealing lol but i do have thoughts about the philsophy of it and the thieves' hypocrisy WHATEVER that's not for this post. i bring this up only to crow about finding a way to bring up the experience machine (ie maruki's reality) in this fic without it being royal compliant and have it be... hoepfully... sufficiently relevant to the plot. wa hoo! the experience machine came up for the first time back in chapter 4 and im just delighted that i finally got to close that loop. by the way, that experiment is also called the lotus eater machine after the lotus eaters in the odyssey! i dunno that it's actively my favourite thought experiment but it's definitely up there and i think about it a lot.

TITLE DROP

i think i spoke once about what 'as you like it' means. it's obviously the name of the shakespeare play from where 'all the world's a stage' comes, but it has a couple more layers to it as well - akechi's palace is a place where he performs to what he believes other people want or need to see from him - so his appearance is as you like it. and his accusation of the thieves' heartstealing methods is that they twist a person's internal reality to suit their vision - that's the meaning he's taking here, claiming that joker is turning akechi into an unfamiliar new thing, as [joker] like[s] it. you get it.

this running joke of ren really hating vents wasn't something i planned but im attached to it now. prayer circle for his knees

ive basically given up on making sense of samerecarm, which is par for the course for any rpg or video game really where reduction to 0hp/revival are mechanics. like, im inclined to think 0hp is more equivalent to unconsciousness, because... well... otherwise it's pretty cold that they left akechi dead in the engine room without even looking for a way around the wall. lol. but one of mona's revival lines is 'being dead isnt easy!' or something like that, so i kind of just give up and assume it's video game logic you'r enot meant to look at too hard lol. the way i reconcile it for my purposes is to say it's a sort of metaverse-exclusive state of being which is not quite dead but sort of in a limbo state wher eyou can be brought back with specific revival magic, which i refer to as being down. that's uhhh, that's different from the battle status of down... which you get after being hit with a crit/technical/weak skill... look, don't think about it. joker in crow's arms.

this is literally meaningless i just wanted to include a cameo of my very favourite persona q2 battle theme.

[read-write-thrive]

https://archiveofourown.org/works/59621026

newest dbda fic — definitely explicit and potentially part one of a series (once I get my shit together and actually finish my coursework jfc)

[flores-desyatov]

🩷🤍💚