#not really any point to this just a stream of consciousness rambling sorta thing. does anyone else do this or do i just suck

[databent]

it is so hard for me to motivate myself to do anything when im tired. like at some point i will hit a level of exhaustion where everything i need to get done becomes a "tomorrow problem" and there is no reasoning with myself past that point. but the problem lately is that im fucking always tired so before i know it one day becomes two days becomes five and the next time i think about it its been so long ive basically completely missed my chance to do it at all. and this is how i end up forgetting to schedule appointments or realizing its friday and i havent done any work all week or that i was supposed to do my t shot four days ago and now its been so long that im better off just waiting until my next normal shot day. you understand.

[peepingtoad]

OKAY SO. 

It’s not that often that I talk about what I really think about Jiraiya, and I guess I mean more how I feel about him, since I always try to write my ‘deeper’ headcanons/metas from a more... idk, trying not to get too emotional about it point of view. Basically it’s because I know how controversial he is, and I pretty much ritually avoid a lot of takes because I don’t want to get irritated about something that really doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme, because we’re all entitled to our opinions and I largely get my say through the act of writing and developing him how I see fit.

Which is enough for me, mostly, but for the purpose of reinforcing/building upon how I see my muse’s plight, working through some of my Sannin-feels and also to dip my toes into why I find blindly judgemental/single-faceted takes of him, his priorities and the Sannin’s bond so exasperating, I kinda feel like rambling my thoughts (feelings) anyway! 

Politely sticks this stream-of-consciousness mess under a cut.

So sometimes I do think about the fact that Jiraiya kinda, lmao, forgot about Everything Else in the world because of Orochimaru and his (frankly) obsession with him/them. And the fact that a ridiculously significant portion of bad shit that happened is down to his actions/inaction. And the fact that he really did go and leave the likes of Naruto (and maybe to a degree Kakashi, although there’s zero actual evidence he didn’t get involved given the strong indications of a great rapport in the canon), just because he was so hellbent on pursuing Orochimaru, who was not even shown to be affectionate towards him at the best of times. When I think about it in terms of Jiraiya being gone and the main reason we’re given for it, things suck for a number of people, and quite largely because of potentially unrequited/horribly communicated/obsessive JiraOro pursuits, in essence :’)

(And for all it’s still quite the rarepair, Jiraiya does express on accounts that he was destroyed when Oro left. I mean... this is the guy who rarely acknowledges his sadness so... It’s not my bias at all I sware)

Of course JiraTsu is very real in my eyes too, albeit a very different kinda tragic, as is OroTsu. And the messy poly ship? Ohohoho, even better, but... yeah. Tsunade does at least go her own way for a long time, as messed up as that is in itself, for reasons including the fact she seems to pointedly not heal or move on from her grief. And given the absolute debacle that was her and Jiraiya reuniting... and both her and Oro even discussing a possibility of sacrificing him... and just, them in general for that whole arc :’))) yeah. They are without a doubt messy and troubled, but even despite how fraught things become I genuinely think all the furtive expressions and the undercurrents of longing and the evasion of their past exhibits a history much deeper and full of lost love compared to many other team dynamics we get (otherwise the Three Way Divorce wouldn’t have been quite so horrible on them, would it? That and they’d probably have split up after Team Hiruzen was no more, if they really hated each other/just tolerated each other out of familiarity like I sometimes see speculated).

But yeah, back to our main man. Jiraiya’s intense (and frankly very Scorpio of him) love for our first series Big Bad kinda did ruin him and what he was setting out to do in some ways, to the degree that the actual story of Naruto wouldn’t be very much without him in terms of drama. I mean, he always loved a good story, right? So art imitates life, and innit just pathetic poetic.

And in so many ways it is incredibly tragic and pitiable that he’s Just Like That. Idealistic and warping everything terrible, no matter how bad, into adventure in his mind! As growth! As pain that makes you TOUGH and makes you a stronger man! As something to be pushed aside while you just keep on truckin’! Whatever anyone you love throws at you, it’s Totally Fine!

After so long narrating through his personal lens, I’ve come to realise he truly is so convinced that everything bad that happens, is sort of just... something he has to deal with and feel big and guilty and feelsy for while spinning it in ways that enable him to keep going. He just loads it on himself and sorta holds it. The fact he’s so sad and filled with sickly pining grief that he has to try and exorcise it with impulsive bouts of decadence? Fine. And it’s not abnormal at all, how he approaches things with such broad scope and just kinda... thoughtlessly wrecking-balls his way through everything he thinks is a great idea at the time. He experiences the fallout of these things and simultaneously feels the entire ravages of it acutely while compartmentalising it ever so neatly away. The crazy thing, too, is that he’s exceptionally convincing at making everything he does and how he handles things seem so grand and noble and romantic and tragic... but in a humorously self-deprecating and still ultimately very hopeful way, to the degree that I as a mun get caught up in his relentless optimism and forget he actually is a sad and heartbroken guy wrapped up in all this grandiosity.

Sometimes I do step back and look and I just think yeah, fuck, he really is a total disaster! He’s a walking disaster and he’s been so damaging to himself and others in so many ways, all because of acting on emotions and impulses without really thinking about the impact! He really did kinda give up on those who needed him and for what? A love that will never love him or prioritise him back? 

A wonderfully tragic theme that I do love with him, don’t get me wrong.

But then at the same time, there’s always more nuance to be had than just ‘he is a disaster and made bad choices, as tragic and romantic as it is, he was actually just selfish and kinda sucked in the end, pathetically whipped by his friends and unable to let go of what they had’. There’s more nuance to be had than reducing him to a purely romantically-inclined character, who just snubs everyone else for a doomed love... because in the end, I think a huge part of JiraOro’s demise in particular was that Oro felt immensely snubbed by Jiraiya when he stayed in Ame, when his loyalty to Konoha (as a place and people, not necessarily a system) and of course loyalty to his own ideals was prioritised over Oro.

To an extent, I feel like Tsunade could have been a similar case, were she not preoccupied with already having lost so much, and besides I really do think she and Jiraiya were quite firmly in best friend zone at that point. With Tsunade not being able to get comfortable around Jiraiya or to pursue any underlying affection for him because of the dumbass way he always behaved (understandably of her tbh), probably until she got with Dan, by which point I reckon Jiraiya started to really come through by showing how he valued her for her, where we see by them having each other’s backs so closely in the second war. Not to mention him generally respecting that his feelings for her have no place by the time he gets her back to Konoha.

In terms of that first split in Ame, Jiraiya, I feel, simply didn’t think him leaving was going to be a big deal, because the three were always fiercely headstrong people who had their own shit going on (simultaneously independent while also being, perhaps not to their knowledge, So Very Codependent). Not only that, but his overly affectionate ways and incessant jolliness were probably considered such a joke that he was basically like ‘they’ll be fine without me’. I certainly don’t think he felt needed by them, which I don’t think is their fault or a point of angst and ‘waaah poor blameless Jiraiya’, because quite honestly, the strain on their relationship was something I fully believe even he didn’t realise he needed out of at the time. His one-track mind was just on ‘save kids, teach kids, this is right, must seize opportunity to be the change I was told I’d be, not continue with this godforsaken war’

Selfish? Maybe. Well-intentioned? Certainly. Intended to hurt anyone or imply he stopped caring? No.

In essence, when it comes to why in the end Jiraiya seemed to be so horrendously bad at being around at the worst of times, at being responsible, whatever else (and I’m not even going to go into scenes intended to be comedic because, they are comedic)... I’ve got to look at it from more than just one view. It’s easy to say ‘he’s ridiculous and terrible because he pretty much flaked on what was important based on his whims/a doomed love/his dick’ (which I have seen said lmao) but there are so many other things at play here.

So I’m thinking, while he was shirking duties (godfatherly mainly)... did he actually consider that his most important duty? Was it anyone’s place to tell him it was? Minato didn’t, as I recall, and when he sacrificed himself he specifically left it to the Third because he (presumably) respected what his teacher was about and knew he wasn’t for staying put. Did Jiraiya not consider his primary duty to be to the prophecy, and in a more general sense fixing the big wrongs and trying to foil big dangers to his home? Were these things not pretty much what he existed for (as much as his faith wavered and went off the rails at times)? Was that not the main source of any real purpose he ever had, being a kid who showed practically no ambition before? Did he not pretty much redesign himself as being ‘from Mt. Myōboku’ rather than Konoha after two devastating wars, and thus is it not understandable for him not to focus solely on Konoha—not outright destroying it, still ultimately loyal to his home and not about to let anyone destroy it, but seeing that the world is in fact so much bigger than just his little town? Is that really something that’s so bad and wrong of him, in a story where the main cast’s country has a pretty fucking nasty system and is established to do so very early on? Is he not pretty revolutionary in his own brand of not blindly serving, but not going on a destroy-it-all frenzy either?

Also, was he not the only one who actually bothered to investigate Akatsuki and the forces that would see Naruto dead, in time? For all he did help bring Akatsuki into existence in ways, it was inevitable from before he even met the orphans that they were going to be groomed/moulded into what they became, regardless of whether Jiraiya came onto the scene. Jiraiya leaving them was just a different kind of suffering to what they were inevitably going to suffer anyway, and hell, with his influence at least there was a time where they might’ve stood a chance of going totally against Madara/Obito’s path, especially while Yahiko was still around. Jiraiya didn’t know that the whole thing with the Ame orphans was, by a design out of his control, doomed to end horribly. So while he felt personally responsible not knowing this, and it’s taken as a given that he was... actually, was he, when there was a master manipulator at play? Was it wrong to want to give some kids a chance?

With regards to all those things I see people say he should have stayed and fixed, that he should have been there, he should have done x y z... Is it not the responsibility of everyone not satisfied with their lot to step up to the plate and make where they live better? Jiraiya wasn’t the only adult. Tsunade, and I absolutely love her, does seem overwhelmingly to be absolved of leaving Konoha because... ??? Kicker is that she too is related to Naruto, of course. 

So... was she not also needed for the very material ways she could’ve helped at numerous points? Was she not also placing her grief and lost love before everything else? Are some reasons inherently more ok than others to ditch? As Kakashi’s generation grew up, was it not also then up to them to decide whether they’d change the status quo? Were Minato’s own generation, presumably his own peer group, not complicit in Naruto’s ostracisation? We got a slight taste of rebellion with Asuma, Hiruzen’s own son, but the fact is many Konoha-nin were overwhelmingly complacent with how things were. And yet never get demonised at all for it. Because it’s Jiraiya’s fault for... not staying and giving it all up to be a guardian who could well be depressed and unfit to raise a child... or just being a flaky as hell one that’s never there anyway because he has shit to do? (and in doing the former would let too many things go unchecked by a completely tuned-out Hokage, not gathering all that spicy useful intel, y’know... essentially he wouldn’t have ended up largely doing his job along with the personal shit in between).

Basically when I see claims saying that Jiraiya as an individual should have done pretty much everything better, and somehow been there for everyone that needed him at any given time, and that (mostly Naruto’s) suffering was a failing on Just His part because of his selfish whims... I feel like the point of his tragedy is absolutely missed. That tragedy being that barrelling through things alone is definitely a failing and harmful in numerous ways, as we see with Itachi shouldering everything alone too, and we see them both miss out on Naruto and Sasuke as a result... but at the same time, is just settling down and leaving everything else to chance not also a huge failing, when there are so many other circumstances and enemies acting against you, when you do have the power to change tides, and when so many other people refuse to or can’t seize their own agency? Jiraiya does put his faith in a lot of people too, and a lot of people fail. Don’t fail him, but in a general sense many, like Minato, fail to make the change they wanted to. That’s life in this world, it’s tragic, and after losing a lot of loved ones yeah, he retreats and goes at it alone. 

But how can he win? How does he do what’s right, other than by chasing what he thinks he can do to actually help the world, which happens to be bigger and not centred on individuals, even those he cares about?

(and remember, nobody knows Naruto is special-reincarnation-prophecy-boi, which is why I tend not to blame-game any characters for him being treated like so many orphans were because... while it’s not morally right or nice at all, it’s tone deaf to how the world is, to the fact all characters having different degrees of knowledge and priorities, and it’s insensitive of the fact most the characters had their own struggles and were just doing their best with a bad lot gdi). 

Hell though, Jiraiya even does put Oro, his big obsessive wild goose chase that whisks him away into selfish pining hopelessly devoted land, on the back burner at points. Maybe not in a lasting way, particularly by the last databook where he’s inspired anew by Naruto, but he does prioritise other shit on numerous occasions. And there’s a lot of shit to try and prioritise.

What I’m trying to say is, Jiraiya can’t solely be held responsible for people. Sure, he’s a character whose decisions were pivotal to events, but what of every other character in the story? Why are they not held to the same crazy high standard of doing and protecting and preventing and somehow doing everything ‘right’ that would have also meant him fitting neatly into the Konoha mould? Would other characters really have been that much better in the position of The Big Guide/Martyr/Tragic Hero/Force For Change character? And also is having a tragic Chaotic Good bastard of a hero not a sign of a damn good and interesting character, that at the very least tried where so many others didn’t? Would Naruto not have been a boring as hell story, whose main protag didn’t really have much conflict to make him compelling, without Jiraiya (among others) being a mess with the best intentions? Without so many other characters having failed him, for him to overcome it and still be able to love and inspire change (albeit through sometimes-clumsy talk-no-jutsu)? Was I missing the point of the story?

............. Hmm!

No longer sure where else I’m going with this now, so.... here, I guess, ends my ode to why character hate (especially that reduces them to One Thing) is dumb, why demonising truly well-meaning characters doesn’t feel particularly woke to me in a cast full of flawed characters and horrible circumstance, and why I’ll defend this poor bastard with far too damn much hinging on him to the end I guess :’)

TL;DR HE’S A DUMBASS AND HE TRIED, OKAY?!

[flamereign]

so i’ve always sorta wanted to make a short (ish) overview of lea’s mental/emotional state during & post kh3,  as the game in all it’s Disney Is For Kids!!! fashion glossed over a lot of the results, repercussions and consequences of going through the kind of trauma axelea went through. of course, this is based on my view of events ( i.e. lea did not relinquish his heart willingly and did not cope well at all to his heartless state as axel which does have repercussions on lea’s state of mind once he got his heart back ) and what i’d imagine that would do to a guy who spent about a decade in a really emotionally toxic environment basically suppressing his emotions / memories and even his past identity.  as i just want to give an overview, i tried keeping it as short and to the point as possible, but it did still get a tad long thanks to my tendency to ramble so sorry in advance ... 

in any case, thanks for reading!  here goes

during and early post kh3 lea gets easily overwhelmed by emotions. as i stated earlier, he did spent about a decade believing he couldn’t feel,  even resulting in him gaslighting himself whenever he did feel something. because he essentially lost his heart around age 15-16 you could say he’s basically still stuck in puberty, only with some added ptsd to the mix: lea literally has to relearn how to process and identify emotions within himself after a decade of suppressing them*. emotions, therefore, tend to hit him hard and fast, can take him utterly by surprise and he has difficult getting them back under control. this can lead to either an overreaction of a certain type of emotion ( for example laughter that turns to unstoppable giggles,  tears that turn to uncontrollable sobbing, mild anxiety that can flip to a panic attack at even the smallest triggers ),  contrary emotional reactions ( crying when happy, wanting to laugh when actually feeling angry or nervous, or even just a lack of emotional response when he's feeling sad ) loss of temper / anger due to embarrassment or even complete dissociation / a feeling of numbness. *see also point 3

this emotional overload leads to hypersensitivity especially if there are added outside stimuli; if it gets really bad even the touch of clothes against his skin feels like too much. in some cases, it can also result in a feeling of extreme depersonalization**, a feeling like he’s not part of his own body anymore,  like his consciousness is torn in every which direction and he’s about to splinter apart. his usual reaction is to isolate himself to a contained space with little to no outside stimuli ( so a dark, quiet and small space ) until he can come back to himself. if for any reason he can’t,  it will result in an anxiety attack or even him flipping to rage form and lashing out. **in this case, it actually helps him a lot of there is a weight placed on top of him to ground him back into the here and now: sometimes this means he’ll go sit in the shower under a really hard stream of water,  or he’ll go huddle into a really tight space or, if there is someone around he trusts, he’ll even calm down if they lay down on top of him as it also reassures him they’re real and they’re there.  anyone else touching him is a big no no in this situation, however. 

lea has a mild case of alexithymia as a result of the decade long suppression of his own emotions and feelings.  though this condition is defined as a personality trait,  in lea’s case it’s more of a result of that very specific trauma ( see also the point 1 ), and will get less impacting as time goes on and lea learns to readjust to life with heart and emotions once more. alexithymia is mainly characterized by: a) difficulty identifying feelings and distinguishing between feelings in the self and in others, b) difficulty describing feelings to others.  point a) also results in point 1 and 2 while point b) results more in point 4 below and actually makes talking about his experiences and his feelings quite taxing for him.

as a result of all of the above, he still shows a lot of avoidance behaviors:  deflecting ( mostly with humour or self depreciation ),  distracting himself w/ something else instead of letting himself process ( like, throwing himself immediately into training to become a keyblade wielder and saving his friends rather than, yanno, give himself some fucking time to breathe ),  becoming defensive or angry when people push ( exceptions here roxas / xion / isa / others, depending on plotted relationship, but even then it’s difficult for him to fully open up ) and he’ll rather avoid talking about the heavy stuff altogether for as long as possible, preferring to act like things are fine even if his body language and facial expressions clearly show things are, in fact, not fine. 

to add to the above:  unlike axel,  who had a kick ass poker face, lea has a really hard time hiding what he feels,  but that still doesn’t make it easier for him to express what he feels.  he may be an open book to others,  but it’s not as obvious to himself. of course contextually or depending on the situation he can infer whether his own state of mind is happy or sad or anxious and he does still have previous experience to draw on,  but if the context or situation can’t help him it could be that he cries but will not be able to say if they’re happy tears or sad tears,  if he feels unsettled he won’t be able to easily discern if it’s anger, if it’s frustration, anxiety or simply because there’s something physical going on ( lack of sleep / eating / oncoming illness etc etc ).  as you can imagine this is very frustrating to him and does not help the bullet points i already expanded on above. 

regardless of the motivations and traumas that guided axel’s behaviors and actions ( which i will make a separate post about ),  getting his heart back has been a quite eye-opening experience to lea to the extent he’s willing to go to survive,  to all of his worst qualities and sides and to the fact that he’s capable of doing the things he’s done:  his past as axel and the things he’s done are causing a tremendous amount of guilt, identity issues*** and even self-loathing culmulating in mild depression.  in short, the confidence he used to have as a kid and as a nobody have taken a big ass dent.  despite the fact that the keyblade has chosen him,  he often doubts and second guesses on whether he’s even worthy of it and had it not been for his determination to save his friends and fix past wrongs,  he might’ve even renounced that power all together thinking he doesn’t truly deserve to be a wielder.  this self-doubt and lack of confidence caused him a lot of issues in his training even getting the keyblade to appear and is, imo, one of the big reasons why he was overpowered so easily by xemnas in that final confrontation.  ***in my opinion, the traits of the nobodies can be seen as that actual person’s worst traits magnified -- in a way, axel can be seen as lea’s inner darkness: the selfishness, the impulsiveness, the temper, that manipulative side, the ruthlessness and the dishonesty are all traits that were already there, but were always balanced out and trumped by his positive traits. lea post kh3 has gotten to know a lot more about himself and essentially does not like the things he found out:  quite understandably he’s having a hard time accepting and reconciling axel with who he is as lea now and as a result he subconsciously tries to suppress the parts that are axel while consciously trying to accept them, which causes him to feel like he’s not sure anymore who he is and who he is supposed to be.  this only adds to the guilt and self-doubts he already experiences.  this is also why i thought that him letting other people use the name axel for him so easily was a really weird decision in the game. 

with his tendency to doubt his own worth also comes paranoia. one big example is the automatic suspicion he feels at nice / friendly gestures, actions or words -- a suspicion mainly borne from the thought that he doesn’t really deserve those,  or that it shouldn’t be as easy. especially during kh3 this will largely center around the other wielders of light or really anyone who’s known him as axel. 

a large part of the paranoia is also linked to his ptsd; he is very hyper-aware:  this can be hyper-awareness in specific situations -- for example he’ll feel uncomfortable in large crowds, or in spaces with low visibility, he’ll flinch at loud & sudden noises, will go from relaxed to ready to attack in the span of a second if someone or something startles him and he will shy away from touch from people he doesn’t know -- or even in a general sense meaning that in any given situation where things seem to be going well or he’s feeling happy he’s always in some part waiting for the other shoe to drop or for the situation to blow up in his face as some kind of karmic retribution. as a result, there’s part of him that has become very sensitive to change as any signs of abrupt and inexplicable change in his life will be interpreted as a sign of impending doom, to put it very dramatically. this in turn can feed into the emotional overload and bodily hypersensitivity i described further above. 

for that latter part, the same can be said about his relationships with other people. i don’t think it’ll come as a surprise to know that with everything he’s gone through and the losses he’s faced as axel, his part of the blame in that aside for a moment, lea has some major abandonment issues.   this also ties in with his low confidence, self-doubt and guilt complex: it’ll take a long time for him to trust that someone will actually want to stick around and part of him is also hypersensitive to signs of behavioral changes in others towards him -- in short, part of him is also always waiting for the people he cares about and who obviously also care about him to wise up about what a failure he is and consequentially leave him. if by any chance this does happen, even if it is through no fault of any party, he’ll always instinctively place the blame on himself, putting it down as something he’s said or done to make that person go.  as a result, if that person returns lea will be both clingy as well a avoidant as he a) wants for them to stick around and b) doesn’t trust them not to leave again, so it’d be better to simply keep his distance. 

the above also results in him not wanting to show his flaws, his doubts and weaknesses: he loathes failure, internalizes and bottles up a lot of his negative emotions towards himself and others and pushes himself beyond his boundaries often just to try and prove that he can ( despite not truly believing that he is ). he’s afraid that if the people he cares for and respect know about his doubts and fears, it’ll increase the risk of them leaving him behind. this is especially apparent in kh3 towards his fellow keyblade wielders: despite having his doubts about being worthy of the keyblade, it’s not something he would’ve ever said or shown, believing that if he showed any signs of not being able to handle the weight of the keyblade, they’d sideline him or boot him out completely. considering a big motivation for him joining the battle in the first place was to atone, to fix past mistakes by helping to save his friends, the idea of having that chance taken away caused a lot of fear and inner stress, resulting in frequent bouts of exhaustion and depression, more self-loathing, defensiveness and even anger if someone tried to critique his actions or question his motives. 

due to the above described symptoms of his ptsd, depression and emotional instability, he has issues with insomnia. whenever he does manage to get sleep, he also frequently experiences very vivid nightmares and night terrors. whereas as axel he’d turn to sleep to pass the time,  as lea he tends to avoid sleep altogether unless absolutely necessary.

obviously i realize that reading all of the above combined makes it sound as if lea’s struggling under huge emotional and mental strain every day ( and technically speaking he sorta is because this is not something that turns off from one day to the next ),  but i also want to add that lea himself doesn’t particularly think of himself as unhappy or depressed 24/7 ( or even at all ) so it’ll not always be super apparent in his attitude or the way i write him in threads. imo, lea’s strength has always come from his empathy, his mental fortitude and his ability to adapt --- and i don’t want to forget that on top of all the negative, he’s finally experiencing all the positive sides of having his heart back as well. this, plus the fact that, unlike axel, he actually has a support system to fall back on, friends that support him and who he can support in return, definitely help him a lot in his day to day activities. 

nevertheless the above are all factors i take into account to determine the way axelea thinks and chooses to react to certain situations and in his interpersonal relationships and are thus important to my portrayal of him. so to anyone who’s read this entire thing:  i love you from the bottom of my heart.