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avengerscompound · 4 years ago

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Moving On - Chapter 3

Moving On: A Falcon & Captain Marvel Fanfic

Masterlist PREVIOUS //

Buy me a ☕ Character Pairing: Sam Wilson x F!Reader, Carol Danvers x F! Reader

Word Count: 2003

Rating: E

Warnings: just a little canon complaint drama this chapter

Synopsis: You thought Sam Wilson was the love of your life. You had planned to do it all with him - marriage, kids, see the world. Even when you’re life gets turned upside down, and you both end up international fugitives, he’s there by your side.

Then Thanos comes.

When Sam is one of the many turned to dust, leaving you alone and pregnant, you don’t think you’ll ever stop grieving. Yet, everyone tells you that Sam would want you to move on and live your life - that he’d want you to be happy. Gradually you open your heart up to another. Carol Danvers has lost people too. First her daughter, then her wife. As the two of you lean on each other, feelings grow and you move on together.

So what happens when Sam is returned to you?

Chapter 3: The Accords

When Sam had left on his mission to Lagos, you had been worried but not in a major way. You had thought maybe he might come home bruised up or with a cracked rib. The last thing you had expected was for a lapse in attention would allow Rumlow to detonate a block leveling amount of C-4, and that when Wanda had tried to contain it and it had taken out a floor of a building instead, she’d get the blame.

Still, while that was bad, it wasn’t something that you had thought would directly affect you. It might mean there was some argument with governments about Wanda being in the custody of the Avengers and how training should be done to prevent things like that from happening again. You were fairly sure the insurance policy the Avengers held for such things was going to be hit hard. But for you and Sam - life and love and wedding plans wouldn’t have been affected.

And then Tony Stark had shown up with General Thaddeus Ross.

Ross had dropped a bomb into the compound and run. Not a literal bomb, but one that had the potential to be just as damaging. The Sokovia accords had been dropped off - a document stating that any enhanced individual would have to register themselves with their country's government and the UN and provide them with biometrics as a way to keep tabs on them. Along with that, anyone working for facilities such as SHIELD, SWORD, or the Avengers as operatives, and any of these enhanced individuals were unable to act on matters of security without the go-ahead from their countries government or the UN.

While that didn’t change too much for you, according to the document, Sam’s wings counted as enhancements. Steve Rogers and Wanda Maximoff were also both enhanced and would need to provide DNA to the government. Wanda would be registered as a weapon of mass destruction.

It meant you and Sam had to decide what you wanted to do. You knew there was no way Sam would sign. He had already left the airforce, he wasn’t going back to working for the government again so soon. Especially not with the added condition of registering humans with them. You also knew he was unlikely to stop fighting - it just wasn’t in his nature.

Unfortunately, you didn’t have a chance to even talk about it before Sam was out the door again.

“Look,” Sam said as he got his best suit out of the closet. “This is a big deal. It kinda changes everything for us. So maybe decide what you really want to do and what you’re okay with? I mean… worst case scenario I could end up an international war criminal.”

“How likely is that though?” You asked as you watched him zip the suit into a suit bag.

“I doubt it’s very likely but you gotta consider it, babe,” he said. “I love you. I want a life with you, but I don’t want you to end up resenting me because we end up on the run from the law together or something.”

“Right,” you said with a nod. “You wouldn’t consider… I dunno… retiring?”

“Of course,” Sam said, moving on to the underwear drawer. “And if these things go through and they make me sign, that’s what I’m gonna say I’m doing. But you know me, I’m never gonna take some back seat when a big bad goes down.”

“No, I know,” you said. “Me too. You sure you don’t want me to come to this?”

Sam shook his head. “This is Steve’s thing,” he said. “I didn’t even know Peggy. I’m gonna be there for him. I’ll be back in a couple of days. You think while I’m gone.”

“You know I’m just going to do whatever you do,” you said. “Right? I mean, the whole premise sounds a little -” you paused and rocked your hand back and forth “- the whole ‘registering people for being different’ thing? And then to muzzle them and treat them as dangerous weapons. It’s fucked up. And besides. You’re my man. Where you go, I go.”

He smiled and came over and kissed your forehead. “I’m your man, huh?”

“Mm-hmm… my fine man,” you hummed.

He laughed and touched the tip of your nose with his finger. “Stop trying to distract me, woman. I’ve got a funeral to go to.”

“Alright, alright,” you said, zipping up his bag. “You’ll call me when you get there?”

He kissed your forehead again. “Of course.”

You grabbed his t-shirt before he could pull away and dragged him down into a deep kiss. He hummed softly and caressed your jaw, before pulling back and grabbing his bag. “You think on it. Okay? No rash decisions.”

You agreed you would and watched him leave, not realizing how this was the point where everything would change.

You had been watching the news in your room when the word about the attack on the UN at the Vienna International Centre. It hadn’t taken you long to realize if the number one suspect was James Barnes that Steve would be quick to take after him. Sam had been on the trail of the infamous Winter Soldier since the day you’d met him, there was no way that Steve would let anyone else bring him in.

You also knew that if Steve went, Sam would likely go too. Not because Sam was Steve’s shadow, but because they both had their moral compasses so inline that they ended up having the same thoughts at the same time.

Which would mean they were breaking international law and that unlikely scenario where they would become fugitives was a little more likely than you thought.

You needed to contact him, but you knew it was dangerous. You sent him a text. The two of you had gotten into the habit of sending large groups of emojis with little messages hidden inside. Most of the time they were for no reason. There would be a string of eggplants and peaches and then a random egg and milk carton to let the other person know you needed eggs and milk. It was a habit that was built out of the paranoia you had drilled into you as a spy. If something happened and you need to message each other covertly, seeing a string of random emojis would at a passing glance just look like the cute-coupley thing you both always did. It wouldn’t withstand any deep probing, but it would be enough to let each other know that one of you was in trouble or to go grab the burner phone and run.

You texted Sam a string of hearts in kiss emojis with an American flag, a bird, a jogging emoji, and a snowflake mixed in.

He texted back a similar string with a thumbs up in the mix.

You replied with the more sexual emojis, eggplants, peaches, the droplets, the tongue, and among them was the girl with the hand raised in the air.

Sam replied with the same only instead of the girl was a thumbs down.

Yes, they were going after James Barnes. No, he didn’t want you to come.

You didn’t hear from Sam again for two days. Two days that only seemed to make matters worse.

Steve had indeed tracked down Barnes, but so had just about everyone else. It ended with a car chase through the streets of Romania where Steve, Sam, Barnes, and weirdly the new king of Wakanda had been arrested by Rhodey of all people.

Sam called you when they had been taken back to Germany.

“I know you’re antsy, baby,” Sam said. “But you need to stay put. Right now they’ve confiscated my wings and Cap’s shield, but we think we’ll be let go. We went after Barnes. He’s captured. That’s it. Slap on the wrist, don’t do it again, type of bullshit. Worse comes to worst… well, it’s not the first time they’ve tried taking my wings off me, is it?”

“Sam!” You yelped. “This line…”

“I’m joking! I’m joking!” Sam said, holding his hands up in front of the screen. You knew he wasn’t.

“Anyway…” Sam continued. “I think Tony’s trying to talk Steve into signing the accords. I dunno if he will or not. Maybe just to keep the peace. But there’s no way I’m going to.”

“I want to be there with you,” you pouted. “I could help.”

“It’ll just make things messy,” Sam said. “Trust me. You’re better off there. It’s not like I can get in any more trouble now Barnes is captured.”

He was wrong.

The next you heard Barnes had broken out and Sam and Steve had taken after him. You received a text not long after the news broke with a series of hearts and a cellphone emoji.

You went to your closet, grabbed the burner phone, and went out for a run. You were just leaving the perimeter of the compound when the burner rang.

“Sam?” You said, pressing the phone to your ear.

“Yeah, baby,” Sam said. “It’s me. Did you hear?”

“They’re saying you’re on the run with Barnes,” you said. “Please tell me you were just recapturing him.”

Sam laughed. “That was the idea,” he said. “This shit is going deep and we need help. There’s this guy - wanted to get to Barnes to find out about some other Super Soldiers and where they’re kept. So now we might have a bunch of really psychotic super soldiers being released on the world by someone even more psychotic than they are.”

“Where are you? What do you need me to do?” You asked.

“I’m tempted to tell you to stay put,” Sam said.

“Sam, I’m not…”

“No, I know,” he said. “But think about it. You do this - you come after me and we’re fugitives. We can’t go home. All this talk of weddings and babies? It’s not happening. It’ll be you and me on the run from everywhere. Best we can hope for is one day when we’re both too old to run we settle in some country that doesn’t extradite.”

“I heard Montenegro didn’t sign,” you half-joke. “It looks pretty nice there.”

Sam laughed. “See I was thinking Cape Verde.”

You let out a breath and smiled a little. “Always thinking, you are.”

“You know it, baby,” Sam said. “Now, Clint’s coming…”

“What? But his family?” You yelped.

“I know… but like you, you can’t tell him no,” Sam said. “He’s going to grab Wanda. When you get back, go to her, but say nothing. Just a little girl’s bonding time. Okay? I’m sure Vizh will be hanging around her. He always is. Don’t leave her side even if they do make it clear that you’re third-wheeling.”

“Should I pack?” You asked.

“No,” Sam said quickly. “I’m even a little worried you grabbing the burner might be too much of a giveaway to what’s going on.”

“I did it while I changed into my jogging gear,” you said. “Nabbed it with my heart rate monitor.”

“Good. Well hopefully that covered that gorgeous ass of yours,” he said. “But aside from deciding you want to hang with Wanda you’re not doing anything strange, okay? Clint will get there and you go. Tony’s an asshole, but not that big of an asshole, I don’t think he’d burn our things, so we’re gonna have to trust that the compound will act as our storage until this is sorted out. If it ever is.”

“Okay,” you said with a sigh.

“I love you,” Sam said softly. “You take care of yourself.”

“You too, Sammy,” you said. “Don’t do anything dumber than you already have until I get there and can join in.”

Sam laughed. “You got it. I’ll see you soon.”

“Yeah. See you.”

You disconnected the call and shoved it back behind your heart rate monitor and turned to run back to the compound. You had a fight to prepare for.

// NEXT

#sam wilson #carol danvers #sam wilson x reader #carol danvers x reader #falcon #captain marvel #falcon fanfic #captain marvel fanfic #fanfic #fanfiction #reader insert #moving on

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thepapergirlandthespiegelman · 4 years ago

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Might stop reading Worm.

Content warning: bugs/insects/arachnids and related horror, body horror mention, miscellaneous violence mention, sexual violence/assault mention

My thoughts on the first ten arcs of Worm. (contains spoilers)

So, I finally got around to reading Worm. It was kinda big when I was in high school, and I still know some people who are/were into it, so I thought it was time that I gave it a serious shot. I did actually try to read it in high school once, but I couldn’t get into it and stopped reading after the first chapter. I tried to be a little more persistent this time to give it a fair evaluation.

When I started reading Worm this time around, I kind of just breezed past the warning at the beginning (“This story isn’t intended for young or sensitive readers. Readers who are on the lookout for trigger warnings are advised to give Worm a pass.”) I don’t consider myself someone who really gets triggered by media. I think it’s important to talk about stuff, including fucked-up stuff. It’s uncomfortable, but that discomfort is part of the point. I think it probably should bother you to read about terrible things, even fictional ones, given that those fictional atrocities almost always have real-world counterparts.

I think I vastly underestimated the amount of fucked-up-ness that is in Worm. When I read that warning, I thought, “Okay, this story’s probably dealing with some dark themes, and there might be some particular scenes that are really disturbing.” After reading the first ten arcs, though, I feel it’s more accurate to say that fucked-up-ness is Worm. It is the core of the story, and there is really very little else.

So it’s not that any particular thing that happened in the story triggered an immediate, strong, psychologically-damaging reaction in me, but as I continued reading, I began to notice that not only was I not enjoying myself, I was actually finding it subtly unpleasant. When I read about something bad happening, I get hit with a small dose of negative emotion. As it turns out, that adds up over time, especially when there aren’t any positive scenes to balance out the negative stuff. Without me even noticing for a long time, Worm was making me unhappy.

Here’s what I did like about Worm:

Impressive world-building - Wildbow is exceptional at inventing different locations, groups, and individual actors and thus creating a detailed ecosystem of capes and civilians.

Lots of characters, lots of superpowers - Directly related to the previous point, Worm contains a lot of characters...arguably too many characters. I generally prefer stories that focus on a smaller number of characters in order to give each character more room for development, but I appreciate Wildbow’s talent for coming up with vivid, if simplistic, characterizations. There are also some really interesting superpowers and interesting takes on common powers.

Inventive use of Taylor’s superpower - Taylor is always coming up with new uses for her power: having black widow spiders spin silk for her suit, using her bugs are a sixth sense to keep track of her enemies and environment, using venomous bugs to take hostages, covering her body in bugs as a disguise, coating her bugs’ stingers in capsaicin for extra punch, using human-shaped swarms to fake out her enemies...The list goes on and on, and I really appreciate how Wildbow took this oft-overlooked superpower to the next level.

Danny Hebert - The only character in the story who I can say I genuinely like. Danny Hebert is a union organizer whose pet project is getting the ferry up and running again so that there can be more interaction between the poorer and wealthier parts of Brockton Bay. I also loved the scene where he supports Taylor in the “mediation” with her bullies and their parents at school. Even if he was impotent, unable to protect her, I could tell he was on her side. His one screw-up is when he locks Taylor in the living room and tries to force her to talk to him, but it definitely makes sense with his character (a little bit of a pushover) and the story (Taylor was shutting him out and seemed to be putting herself in danger) that he would end up letting Taylor’s grandma convince him to take a forceful approach. Don’t get me wrong, locking up your kid is a horrible thing to do (I should know, my parents did it to me, and it fucked me up), but I still ended up feeling bad for him when Taylor just up and disappeared. She didn’t even call her dad to let him know that she was still alive after Leviathan! I mean, on the one hand, I do actually appreciate that she started making an effort to protect her father from the dangers of her cape life, something that I was kind of appalled to see that she never even considered before. But damn, did I feel bad for Danny.

Here’s what I didn’t like:

Way too much fucked-up shit happening - Name an atrocity, Worm’s probably got it. The plot is mostly just terrible thing after terrible thing and reveals of how terrible all of the characters are, with many terrible things that aren’t directly treated in the plot peppered in along the way.

Lots of capes, no heroes - This is one of those themes that sounds deep on paper but is really just cynical and fatalistic. Even if all the capes are corrupted by power (or by the toxic power dynamics between capes), what about civilians? Where’s the thoughtful therapist or the brave fire-fighter? Danny Hebert is one notable exception to the “Everyone is terrible” rule, but we don’t see all that much of him. Other than him, the only person I can think of who could possibly fit this “civilian hero” role is Aisha’s social worker, who I don’t think even has a name.

All superpowers are evil - This is arguably just a rephrasing of the previous point, but I think it’s important to mention. Worm contains so many superpowers, but it seems like they’re all being put to evil purposes. Panacea, the superheroine with healing powers (really just dominion over health and illness of the human body in general), makes some really despicable threats (e.g. giving someone cancer with a touch, or giving someone a disorder that will only manifest at an unknown time in the future, leaving them to anguish over their fate). Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing inherently wrong with writing a character using this type of power for evil ends. There’s a lot of interesting stuff to explore there, and I actually love that Panacea is a character that acknowledges the burden of having a healing power, feeling unable to take any time for yourself while simultaneously growing to resent those you feel obligated to help. My issue is not with Panacea but with the fact that literally every superpower in the story is painted in a negative light. It just feels absurd to suggest that, for example, someone like Gallant couldn’t use his power (carefully and thoughtfully and with consent) to heal people with emotional trauma. Superpowers in Worm are only for violence and conflict and crime, and I just don’t understand that. Again, the rogues form a token exception, but we rarely actually see them, and one of the first rogues we meet, Canary, is immediately subject to harsh and unjust punishment and never heard from again.

A misguided focus on only certain types of crime/violence - Worm deals with gang violence, robberies, and general chaos-inducing terrorism. It focuses on crimes perpetuated by working-class individuals and small to medium size illicit groups. There’s some commentary on state-sanctioned violence in terms of the corruption of the Protectorate and Dragon’s worries of having to obey a despot should one take over the government, but it’s not exactly framed in a way that highlights the struggles of the average person; the focus is almost entirely on capes. Worm doesn’t discuss things like wage theft, illegal rent hikes, or, dare I say it, the inherent violence of capitalism, which, while less flashy, are important problems with far-reaching consequences. It’s weird, and honestly kind of unrealistic, that there’s not a single anarcho-communist cape. Whether you agree with that kind of politics or not, it’s still a glaring omission if the setting of the story is trying to emulate real life. Again, Danny Hebert’s role as a union organizer and interest in restoring the ferry and reintegrating the city pay token attention to some of these ideas, but the vast majority of the story is unconcerned with addressing the source of, or solutions to, poverty and crime in Brockton Bay and the wider world of Worm.

So those are my thoughts. There’s a part of me that still thinks, “But so many people like this so much! Maybe it’ll get better!” I have a really strong drive to understand why others like the things that they do, to be able to share in their appreciation. But from what I’ve seen in a couple memes I happened upon, things are getting worse, not better for the world of Worm. And even if things start to resolve at some point, I’m not sure it would be great for my mental health to continue reading up to that point.

The breaking point for me, if you’re curious, was when a main character was just casually revealed to be a serial rapist. That wasn’t even the point of the chapter, it was just kind of thrown out there as an extremely-not-fun fact. So I was still reeling from that reveal while also experiencing all of the atrocities said character was committing in the moment, and after that was when I realized, “Hey, maybe this is not the kind of content I should be reading.” It even took reading a few more chapters into Arc 11 for it to really sink in, but I had this weird revelation of like, I get to choose which fictional worlds I spend my time in, and the world of Worm isn’t one I relish.

If you do enjoy Worm, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on what makes it appealing to you.

#text #long text #review #thoughts #web serial #fiction #Worm #superpowers #parahumans #superheroes #supervillains #morality #evil #violence #capitalism #systemic violence #grimdark

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seb-uh · 3 years ago

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Hello! Can you please explain what's going on in Brazil, cause I really don't know and I want to be informed about this (just if you want to, no pressure or anything)

Hi anon! It's no problem at all to explain, don't worry about it!

I have a feeling this is gonna be long, so I'm gonna put it under a 'read more', alright?!

So, our president (and I use the term 'our' very loosely here, because I honestly cannot consider that very poor excuse of a human being as my president at any point in time) is someone who really is not worth of the position he occupies. Jair Bolsonaro was part our army when we were under army dictatorship (between 1964-1989). He was been involved in politics for 27 years before he was elected president of Brazil, and did not do a single good thing for the country during that time, believe me.

In 2016, our president at the time, Dilma Roussef, was impeached under very loose accusations and, in 2018, Bolsonaro was elected president because the other politicians did a very good job at convincing the people Dilma and Lula's party was involved in corruption (whether or not they were is a different history altogether). So, Bolsonaro was elected and that is when our country started going down the hill (not that we were ever at the top of it, but we were getting there).

Bolsonaro is very much like Trump, but a bit worse, if a may say so myself. He has absolutely no regards to starving people, to the lack of safety, to protecting our forests and enviroment. He literally only cares about rich people and their agendas. All of his sons are involved in politics as well and they are all rich as hell (I'm pretty sure you can imagine how, yeah? Politicians just don't earn enough money to become millionaires like that legally).

Bolsonaro has been treating the pandemic as a joke since the beginning, doing absolutely nothing to help and laughing (yes, LAUGHING) at the almost 600k lives we lost until this day (believe me, as a med student, it fucking kills me to talk about this, because I know for a fact at least half of these deaths could have been avoided if we have had a decent person leading us during these hard times). He has also taken advantage of the pandemic to pass laws that allows the agrobusiness to explore our natural resources as it sees fit and without consequences, like the Amazon deforestation, fe. I will not go on about how he promoted medical treatments which do not work at all, how he is letting vaccines go bad even today, how Pfizer tried for months to get in contact with the government and he simply ignored them, only to buy vaccines at triple the original price (and of course there are some of his 'minions' who won a lot of money with that). He is making absolutely everything in his power to make everyone's lives even more difficult and you can imagine how much the country is suffering economically because of him.

In short, over the last couple of years, Bolsonaro has made it possible for rich people to buy guns and land to make themselves even richer, but also made it impossible for poor people to buy food to survive. Everything here in Brazil now cost at least 200% more than it did two years ago, there are millions of people starving, homeless and unemployed, and basically going without any help from the government. The public programs we have today are from the time Lula and Dilma were presidents, but they are not enough to make much of a difference by themselves.

What you have to understand, anon, is that politics which center on poor people being able to go far in life don't go well with rich people. This kind of politics may not change the world, but they make people who were not born in golden cribs able to grow, have a good life and afford things rich people consider themselves entitled to. This is true for basically every country in the world, unfortunately, but here in Brazil it is especially true. Bolsonaro is mainly supported by the rich (like the Piquets and other people who benefit monetarily from his politics because they don't care about anyone else) and prejudiced people. His followers share so many fake news on social media that he passed a law yesterday to make it extremely difficult for platforms like Facebook and Instagram to track them and shut them down (fake news played a huge part on his election as well).

Today we celebrate Independence Day here in Brazil, but to be honest with you, we have absolutely nothing to celebrate. Our people are the best and we have so many beautiful things to show the world, but it makes me absolutely devastated to see such a beautiful country being wasted away like this.

There was a pro-coup protest in Brasilia today (that's our capital, btw, it's not Rio or São Paulo). Bolsonaro is losing some of his followers and it feels like he is trying to implant a new military dictatorship in Brazil (he tried it when the first one was ending, but thankfully it did not work out). Something tells me he will not accept defeat in next year's election and this is very dangerous. He wants to be a dictator, he wants to have the last word in everything and go after everyone who does not agree with him. He is also very childish and very rude to everybody.

This is the guy Nelson Piquet was driving around today. This is the guy Lucas DiGrassi, Felipe Massa, Sérgio Sette Câmara and even fucking Neymar supported and campaigned for two years ago. So, yeah, this is the reason I don't want any of them to win anything ever again. Absolutely no one who continues to support a genocide today deserve to win anything in life.

Sorry about the long post, but apparently I needed to get it out of my chest. Also, sorry if I made any grammar mistakes or if something was not clear enough, I double checked it but something may have slipped me. I am much more articulated than this in portuguese, but I hope you understand the picture now, anon. If you have any more questions, please feel free to reach out, I will try my best to answer them!

#anon #brazilian politics #i love this country but i also absolutely hate it here

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jougogo · 4 years ago

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young & beautiful - iwaizumi hajime

a/n: hello. this broke me when i wrote it. literally, 3am and full on sobs. also, a large part of this fic was inspired by a book called hotel on the corner of bitter and sweet by jamie ford. it provides a lot of insightful views about japanese internment camps in the united states during wold war 2, so if you’re interested i would highly recommend reading it! this is a songfic to young and beautiful by lana del rey but i would recommend listening to summertime sadness as well, also by lana del rey. CLARIFICATION; this fic is set in the ww2 time period! and i like to think that iwa is a lil younger here, so maybe like 15-16? anyways ENJOY MWAH

warnings: mentions of war, racist ppl >:( and v angsty!!

wc: 2.1k

I've seen the world, done it all

Had my cake now

Diamonds, brilliant, in Bel-Air now

Hot summer nights, mid July

When you and I were forever wild

The crazy days, city lights

The way you'd play with me like a child

he knew that this would be the last time he sees you.

you.

the same one wearing those new blue jeans even though it’s mid-july and the air is sickeningly humid, sitting with bare feet dangling over the edge of the rooftop at 4am, with hair softly rustling from the occasional cool breeze that made the hot california summers more bearable.

"hey, i guess this is the last time we’ll meet on this rooftop, huh?" you said, looking out at the sleepy city.

"don't say that! you know it’s not true," he quickly chided you, but the break in his voice told you the opposite of what he was trying to convince you. what he tried to convince himself

hajime put his arm around your shoulders and sat down next to you

the two of you looked out peacefully at the quiet streets of san francisco from the top of your shared townhouse building.

it was almost like little stars, the way that spots of brightness from the city lights were scattered sporadically through the darkness.

"you know, if we get caught for being out this late at night, we would probably die. if the police catches us for not respecting the curfew, we would be in so much trouble. especially with the new relocation orders that the president signed, and the war hysteria, and not to mention the curfew that the government set-" he started, but was interrupted by your dreamy voice.

"i know. but i've seen the world. i've had my cake, you know ? i'm content if this is the way it ends, even if it's not me wearing diamonds and having a mansion in bel air, " you chuckled.

"hey! those were movies. they don't count as seeing the world. and also, diamonds and bel air? pfft, as if you could ever," he rebutted playfully. ever since he was a kid, he would always make it a point to take you downtown to the movie theatre and watch whatever happened to be playing that day. to be honest, he would've never stopped if it weren't for the war.

"oh, hajime. just let me dream a little, alright?" you huffed dramatically, earning a small smile from him.

the dim streetlights from the road provided just enough light to illuminated your features. oh, how he wished he could burn this memory into his mind forever. the way your eyes reflected the moon, the corner of your lips turned upwards just so slightly, a couple wisps of your hair framing your face with the rest pulled back into a lazy braid, held together by a single red ribbon.

red.

the color red.

it brought him back to one of his favorite childhood memories; when the every neighborhood in their little japantown would come together to celebrate new years.

the popping firecrackers, the festive lanterns and fiery signs hanging by the doors.

a time when he would explore the different stores, hand in hand with you, and later chasing you down the sloped streets for taking a bite out of the snack he bought. giggling as adults scolded them for being reckless and wild. his mouth watering as the women of the neighborhood carry out trays upon trays of delicious food, the feeling of present a warm meat bun in his hand, chimes of “itadakimasu” ringing around him. not a care in the world, just pure joy and happiness. it was always what he looked forward to as a child.

oh, what he wouldn't give to go back to those days

Will you still love me when I'm no longer young and beautiful?

Will you still love me when I got nothin' but my aching soul?

I know you will, I know you will, I know that you will

Will you still love me when I'm no longer beautiful?

"will you still love me when i'm not young and beautiful?" you asked softly, pulling him out of his thoughts. he felt your small fingers wrap around his, clasping his hand. "what if the next time i see you, i'm old and wrinkly like a raisin?"

"well, i'd be a wrinkly old raisin too. so what? it doesn’t make a difference in how much i love you, " he replied nonchalantly

"then will you still love me when i’ve got nothing left but my soul?"

upon hearing you ask yet another question, hajime stiffened

"stop asking silly questions," he finally managed to mumble out, hugging his knees closer to his chest.

"you know. they force you to leave behind all your belongings. they take everything away, iwa-chan." you spoke softly. "i'm leaving behind all my important stuff at the basement of the panama hotel. they're really nice people, you know? for letting us keep our stuff there. maybe, if we both come back, they'll still be there and we can look through our old pictures together." you said quietly, twiddling your hair ribbon between your fingers. your hair was wavy from being in the braid all day, and now they were finally freed.

free. how he wished he could be free from all these restrictions again.

he tried to think about happier memories, but everything became painful as the realization dawned on him that he will lose everything. it was inevitable. the little grocery store around the corner owned by that old married couple his mom always talks to? they were escorted away weeks ago. the ice cream parlor he loved because they would always give him extra whipped cream for ordering in japanese? shut down by the government's order. he remembered the harsh words he had heard from a group of protesters when he biked past the golden gate park on his way to run an errand for his mother.

"all japanese are dangerous. they are traitors to the country,"

and that’s when he noticed their pointed glares at him.

“i was raised here! i’d never be a traitor!” he so desperately wanted to yell. but his body told him to keep pedaling away, as fast as he possibly can.

seeing people with these horrible prejudice against him, a stranger, even a kid whom they’ve never met, felt like a stab to the heart

but it also angered hajime to no end

it was the biggest lie he's ever heard. dangerous? that's not true. ok, maybe there were a few pervy geezers, but he knew that this community that he loved was anything but dangerous.

so why are they the one being punished?

he knew he would lose everything eventually. he just didn't think he'd lose the love of his life so soon.

her family had gotten the notice two days ago.

"sacramento. and maybe oregon. probably washington, even idaho" you had told him.

somewhere far, far away from him

he had heard that the concentration camps, or "relocation centers," as the news had put it,

were cold.

the images of concrete, barbed wire and cramped spaces, the stories of families working relentlessly from day to night only to be treated like prisoners, and the thought of sleeping on the freezing floors filled his mind. just thinking about it made him shudder, but the scariest thing was that he doesn't know when his family will be next

growing up, your family and the iwaizumis had been neighbors. he lived on the first floor, and you lived above him. the two of you had bonded over your parent’s chatting, and having each other for dinner was a common occurrence. his parents treated you as their own child, and your parents did the same with hajime. heck, no one would bat an eye if you announced that you were going to sleep over at his house because you two practically lived together.

you were his first love. his best friend. every moment of his childhood, had been spent with you.

you were the ribbon that held him together through his messy life, and now he was losing you

overwhelmed, he could feel his throat began to tighten. his breathing became heavier as he tried to blink back the tears that welled in his dark green eyes.

"hey. you can cry on me, if you want." you comforted him. it was like you could read him like a book, because he frantically sputtered out an excuse

“what are you talking about? and also, to answer your dumb question, i'll love you no matter what. i don't care how long it takes, or what we look like, or-"

you hovered your finger above his lips, gently shushing him.

"i know you will, haji, i know that you will," you said softly as you caressed his cheek. he looked away, but he couldn’t help but choke out a sob

you patted his head and pulled him into a hug, burying his face into the crook of your neck. warm tears dampened the sleeve of your shirt.

"please. please. i don’t want you to leave," he mumbled into your shoulder as you ran your fingers through his messy black hair.

Dear Lord, when I get to heaven

Please, let me bring my man

When he comes, tell me that You'll let him in

Father, tell me if You can

All that grace, all that body

All that face makes me wanna party

He's my sun, he makes me shine like diamonds

“maybe, one day we'll see each other again.” you said when he finally lifted his head.

you stood up and held out your hand to him, an offer to help pull him up since he was probably sore from sitting for so long

however, he didn’t let go of your hand once he stood back up.

“dance with me?” he asked, sniffling and wiping away the last tear.

you nodded, and he began to sway to the faint sound of jazz music coming from the nightclub a few blocks away.

“hey, this is our swing dance routine from PE in 7th grade,” you smiled fondly at the memory as he twirled you around him, only to twirl you back into his arms. nodding in confirmation, he dipped you gracefully, his strong arms wrapped around your waist.

that’s when he noticed the tear trickling down your cheek. it faintly sparkled in the moonlight, similar to how a diamond would.

“i’m going to miss you, hajime iwaizumi from the first floor. thank you for making me happy,” you whispered, looking up at him. he pulled you back up, and held you in his warm embrace.

“even if we don't see each other again in this life, i'm sure i'll find you again. if you’re good, maybe i’ll see you in heaven. be good, haji. be good for me. promise?” you muttered into his chest before pulling away to look him in the eyes.

“no promises. you might have to beg god to let me in.”

“ok. i’ll see you in heaven, hajime,” you whispered, cupping his cheek

and that’s when you pulled him down for a kiss. it was a light, almost featherlike, brush across his lips. your elbows were resting on his shoulders, and your forearm crossed behind his neck. hajime leaned his forehead against yours, the tips of your noses just barely touching

“can we stay like this, for a little while longer?” he asked breathily, still reeling in shock from his first kiss

“mhm. i love you, hajime.” you answered, gazing into his pretty green eyes as they fluttered open.

in the distance, you could see that the had sun begun rising over the horizon, enveloping the two of you in the warm light of morning. you basked in the serene orange glow, admiring every feature of the beautiful boy in front of you.

“i love you,”

he can’t wait to find you again.

tags!! @deadontheinsidebut (ilysm mwah ty for supporting me!!) @aka-a-shii (here you go i hope you enjoy bby!!!) @toshisgarden (mwah mwah ilysm)

#haikyuu!!#iwaizumi hajime #hq iwaizumi #iwaizumi x reader #iwaizumi oneshot #iwaizumi angst #haikyuu angst #iwaizumi imagine #iwa-chan

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diaryofabeautyfiend · 3 years ago

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Small Time Witch (32)

S I X M O N T H S L A T E R

Vanaheim had been kind to you but it was time to make your next move. Loki had been pardoned on Asgard. The convergence was nigh and preparations for Malekith had begun. Asgard was fortified as a precaution. You thought maybe Malekith wouldn’t bother since the entire universe knew you had the stones. The small council was not so sure. They wanted you locked away in a secure location where he couldn’t find you. You wanted to fight. That’s all you seemed to want these days.

Malekith and Frigga have long been enemies. His brute murdered her when the dark elves invaded Asgard. You would only hide if she hid with you. Being ever stubborn she declined. You didn’t tell her what would happen but, because of your insistence, she could guess. “If it’s my time, it’s my time. I won’t hide.” Everyone in this family was ridiculously stubborn. You fit right in.

Loki fought you ad nauseam about expelling the stones. You refused to even entertain the thought until the convergence was over. He thought the stones were overtaking you. They changed your personality. You argued they just made you stronger and perhaps he was threatened by you. That never failed to spur him into a tirade about how dangerous they were and how no one knew what they were doing to you. The voice in your head told you otherwise. He would prattle on about how they seemed to speak for you. How you had changed. You never listened.

“Mortal are you listening?” It drove you insane when he called you mortal. Just a constant reminder that you were beneath him.

“I am. And I’ve asked you to please stop calling me mortal.”

“Well aren’t you? Are you now unable to die? Have I missed something?”

“As long as I have them I am.”

“And that’s why you shouldn’t have them. Where is my wife? You were not this war mongering battle hardened warrior when I first met you.”

“You prefer me weak? Too afraid of my own shadow?”

He knelt in front of you to look in your eyes. “I have never known you to be weak, Y/N. You were powerful enough.”

You laughed but the smile on your lips never met your eyes. “Just enough that I couldn’t ever take you.”

“Stop it. That’s never mattered to me.”

“Until I became stronger than you.”

He picked up a pillow off of the bed and smashed it into his face. He let out a deep growl out of sheer frustration. “Your new found obsession with power is exactly why I am worried. They need you. They are like parasites and you are their host. You feed them, darling. Of course they don’t want to give you up.”

“And what if I do release them? What then? Do we just wait for the next maniac to use them against us?”

“Then we keep them locked in the vault.”

“Oh yeah, because Odin’s vault has never been breached.”

“Only by me.” He hated fighting with you. Absolutely loathed it. You kept putting off the release of the stones but he wouldn’t give up. You were scared they would fall into the wrong hands. He was afraid they already had. The only other person who was in your corner was Odin.

Loki knew his father all too well. He was not interested in what you wanted but what your power could do for him. He treated you like his own sentient weapon. Your daddy issues completely clouded your judgement in regards to Odin. He doted on you. Called you his daughter. You lapped it up. When Loki or Thor would say something he would laugh it off and say they were jealous that he had a new favorite child. After Asgard was safe, they thought it was time for you to go back to Midgard for a while for an extended holiday. Maybe your family could talk some sense into you.

“My love. My little queen. Please don’t be cross with me. I am simply worried for your safety and sanity. Don’t you want to leave all of this behind? Perhaps we can start our family. I’ve longed to see you with child.”

Your voice was quiet, “That’s not my dream. It’s yours. You know how I feel about having children. Can’t we just go on forever having adventures?”

“Pet, I have had my fun. I just want to start a family and be settled. I don’t care if I ever ride into another battle. Children or not, I just want this constant upheaval to end. I quite liked our life on Midgard. I actually miss television. Why don’t we go back and rebuild our little cottage? Will you at least think about it?”

You kissed the tip of his nose, “I will. When this is all over, I will agree to take extended leave and visit my family.”

—————————————————————

The day Malekith invaded was like deja vu for Loki except he was not in the dungeon. The dark elves were unable to breech the outer reaches of Asgard so they moved on to Greenwich where he and Thor would meet. Against your better judgement (and certainly Loki’s), you jumped the portal to help Thor. You served as nothing but a distraction. Thor was nearly crushed by Malekith’s ship. Had it not been for Dr. Selvig, Thor would have been killed.

Your magic destroyed half of a library and a lot more property. When law enforcement arrived they thanked Thor for his help. You, on the other hand, were put in shackles and taken into custody. Thor tried to stop them but they were under strict orders from the World Security Council to take you in.

You tried to break free for your bonds but your magic wouldn’t work. “Stop resisting, Princess.” one of the Interpol officers shouted. They didn’t have regular guns pointed at you. They looked like ray guns or something you’d see in a sci fi movie. Thor rushed behind you asking where you were being taken. They muttered something about an Air Force base as officers held him back.

“I’m coming, little sister! Just hang on.”

They had you locked in the back of a van that was caged and padded. A thick metal partition separated you from the driver. The doors on the back were also thick metal. Three officers wearing helmets rushed in in a practiced military style drill. Keeping their weapons trained on you, one officer stood in front of you and pressed a button that magnetized your restraints. He stuck your hands to a small but sturdy loop on the bench you sat on. Another officer put a mutant inhibitor collar around your neck while the third jabbed a needle in your arm. “Nighty night, Princess.”

When you awoke your head was pounding. There was a jumpsuit on the small table next to you. On the floor were socks and slippers. The collar was pretty heavy and seemed to grab at your skin when you pulled. “It won’t come off Mrs. Odinson” a voice said. There was a speaker just above the door.

“Where am I?”

“Change into your jumps.”

“Where am I? Don’t make me ask again.”

“Change into your jumps, prisoner.”

You tried to use your magic but only a tiny spark flickered between your hands.

Your cell doors opened and a familiar face stood in front of you. “Ma’am. I’m Coulson. Come with me.”

“Wait. Aren’t you...”

“Dead? As in your husband killed me? Yeah. Something like that.” He stood in the doorway looking at you expectantly. “Unless you’d rather stay here.”

You followed behind him flipping off the speaker when you left. “Can you remove this collar, Coulson?”

“Please forgive me if I’m not super trusting.”

“Understandable I guess. Where are you taking me?”

“New York. Into S.H.I.E.L.D. custody. It’s the only way the US government will release you. Part of the MCA.”

“MCA?”

“Mutant Control Act. You’re an unregistered omega level mutant. Your powers, as defined by the government, are unlimited. You’re dangerous.”

“So when I’m on Earth, I am a prisoner?”

“When you’re on Earth? You think you’re leaving? You belong to us now.”

He took you along to an airstrip where you boarded a small plane. He helped you into your seat, shackled your wrists and ankles and bid you a safe flight.

——————————————————————

Thor was too scared to tell Loki you were captured. He would have been pissed at the both of you. If he thought you were in danger he would rip Midgard apart to find you. The only person he knew to contact was Steve Rogers.

In Tony’s infinite wisdom, he named Steve his successor of sorts. He called him the Chief Moral Compass of the company. That gave Steve all kinds of contacts and diplomatic immunity in 46 countries.

Steve met your flight at the base in New York. Coulson was thrilled to see Steve again but he wouldn’t release you. He got into the backseat and went with you to the facility where you’d be staying.

You waited for several hours in a holding room. You hadn’t eaten in a couple of days and your body was exhausted without the stones to prop you up. You fell asleep with your head on the table. Finally Steve came in to wake you.

“Hey, Y/N. You’re free to go. Get this collar off of her now!” he said to an agent.

“Can we grab something to eat? I haven’t had anything in a couple of days.”

He planted his hands on his hips and clenched his jaw. You were freaking Asgardian royalty and a human being. Surely that earned you some respect. He was livid. “Seriously, guys? You couldn’t have gotten her food? My apologies, Princess.”

“I would kill for a slice. Ever hear of Joe’s Pizza in Brooklyn?”

He smiled, “Best in New York. How do you know about that place?”

“I was in love with a guy from Brooklyn once.”

“Yeah? What happened?”

“He couldn’t handle who I was.”

Steve chuckled to himself, “Then he didn’t deserve you.”

——————————————————————

Pending a hearing, you were released to your mother’s care. You absolutely could not prevent Loki from coming any longer. When he landed you were sitting in the open space where your house would be built.

“This is the perfect spot isn’t it?” You were picking blades of grass and letting them fall through your fingers.

“Afelheim has ample space for cottage building. No cable though. I guess this rules out our extended holiday.” He sat next to you and you rested your head on his shoulder.

“I think this is our extended holiday. My hearing isn’t for another month.”

“You know what you did was careless and stupid right? Also incredibly arrogant. Thor didn’t need your help.”

“I know. I don’t know what came over me. It’s like I wasn’t thinking.”

“You weren’t. The stones were. While we’re stuck here, I’d like to get as many people as possible involved in removing them and healing you. That’s even if you can be healed. Your body could be riddled with cancer like poor Jane.”

“Well I’ve saved her from that fate.”

“Not yourself. If I lost you....”

“You’re not losing me.”

You snuggled against him and he kissed the top of your head. He no longer tried to hide his feelings from you. He was afraid. You just found each other again and he was afraid he would lose you. The old Loki would have run screaming. This Loki would fight for you. And, if he had to, he would follow you into Hel. Maybe he was selfish in that regard. He lost you once. Never again.

#loki of jotunheim #loki fanfic #loki of asgard #loki odinson #loki x you #loki x reader #loki smut #witch #mcu witches #small time witch

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carmen-sandie-go · 3 years ago

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COVID-19 : The past, the present and the future

11th of march 2020 - a day that will go down in history books marking the start of one of the deadliest pandemics in the history of mankind. COVID-19 : CO for corona, VI for virus, D for disease and 19 for when the outbreak was first identified. December 2019, Wuhan saw the occurrence of the first case of a highly infectious, often fatal respiratory virus. It proliferated faster, killing thousands and spreading all over the world.As of present day more than 168 million cases have been recorded along with about 3.51 million people losing their life to this disease.

WHAT IS COVID-19 ?

Contrary to popular opinion, coronavirus is not a new type of virus. Coronaviruses are a category of closely related RNA viruses that infect birds and mammals. In humans and birds, they cause upper-respiratory tract infections which may be of varying degree from minor to fatal. The earliest case of coronavirus infection dates back to North America in the late 1920s.

When an acute respiratory infection of domestic chickens emerged.This infection was characterised by breathlessness and gasping and high mortality rates. Human corona viruses were first identified in the 1940s and new coronaviruses have been discovered since then which includes the SARS-CoV-2 (virus that causes Covid-19) in 2019. Most human coronaviruses originate from bats. There are seven known human coronaviruses that cause respiratory illnesses. But COVID-19 is caused by a new virus that has not been observed in humans before.

BACKGROUND :

The exact origin of the virus to this day remains unknown. The first outbreak is believed to be in Wuhan, Hubei , China in late 2019. Most early cases are related to the people who consumed meat in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. However it's possible that the spread had been going on long before this incident.

A lot of conspiracies surround this topic from people believing that this is a man made virus and leaked from a laboratory. However nothing concrete can be said as of now. America’s top infectious disease expert Dr.Anthony Fauci says that he is not convinced that the virus is natural. Many scientists have again called for an in depth investigation. American Intelligence agency has reasons to believe that The Wuhan Institute Of Virology, Chinese Academy of Sciences has some relations to the virus although there is no concrete proof as of present time.

HOW DOES THE VIRUS SPREAD : TRANSMISSION

Covid-19 is an air-borne, droplet infection that enters the body from the respiratory tract. While speaking, breathing, talking the infected person may release droplets that enter the atmosphere and can be breathed in by a non-infected person resulting in a successful transmission of the virus. The probability of transmission depends on the time of interaction, their relative proximity although researchers prove that infection can occur over long distances particularly indoors. Small airborne particles tend to stay in the environment for longer periods of time while larger droplets either fall on surfaces or stay suspended for a while. In poorly ventilated areas, the droplets stay in the sir for minutes or hours. In september 2020, it was established that on an average an infected person spreads the disease to one to three people. Covid-19 spreads in clusters hence “ super-spreader events” have a huge role in the transmission.

Surface transmission i.e. spread through touching contaminated surfaces is also a likely yet rare possibility. The virus is not known to spread from animal carriers, faeces, urine, breast milk, water etc.

ASYMPTOMATIC CARRIERS

In medicine, any person who tests positive for the disease but fails to show any symptoms is termed as an asymptomatic carrier. When someone gets infected with the virus, it takes about five days to even two weeks to produce symptoms varying from mild to dangerous ones.

Current research suggests that most of the transmission occurs from symptomatic people and not from asymptomatic people. However a vast majority of people are asymptomatic. The reason is yet unknown

WHAT ARE THE WAYS TO END THE PANDEMIC

The WHO is likely to declare the pandemic as over when the infection is contained and the transmission rates drop around the world.

The governments around have 3 main options : Race through it, Delay and vaccinate, or coordinate and crush.

Race through it : In this the global governments do little to nothing to contain the spread of the infection therefore exposing people to the virus.The results of this would be ghastly; millions of people with compromised immune systems will die around the world, health care systems will collapse. In a couple of months most of the people would have been infected and either survived or died. Around this point herd immunity will kick in resulting in the virus to fizzle out as it can no longer find new host bodies.

Delay and Vaccinate: In this the global governments give researchers time to study the virus to produce vaccines and effective ways of treating the infected. They employ methods like masking, planned lockdowns and contact tracing to reduce the spread of the virus. However the virus will spread slowly leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths. And in about a year or so many vaccines would have been developed and after vaccinating about 50-90% of the population the pandemic will end.

Coordinate and crush : The principle here is to starve the virus around the world but instead of each leader acting according to their own jurisdiction, everyone will coordinate and work together treating the world as a huge family. With a combination of social distancing, restricted travels, social distancing the pandemic could be ended with minimum life loss and in a considerably small amount of time.

The best way is to delay and vaccinate with as much global cooperation as possible. It is a tried and tested winner amongst the methods. It's slow, steady and reliable. Even if the herd immunity kicks in before the vaccination is done and the pandemic starts to fizzle away. It may resurface later and vaccination will protect people and from the situation ever escalating further.

WHAT IS A VACCINE ?

Vaccine is a biologically prepared typically containing an agent that resembles the pathogen.

The antigen is prepared from the weakened or the dead form of the disease-causing microorganism or its toxins or the surface proteins. The basic principle of it is that the vaccine works as an antigen stimulating an immune response leading to the formation of antibodies.

The body recognises the agent as a threat, destroys it and further recognises the agent and destroys any microorganism that associates with it in future.

HOW WILL THE VACCINE HELP END THE PANDEMIC ?

Vaccination is critical for reaching the herd immunity threshold which will help us go back to normal life.

Herd immunity or mass immunity is an indirect form of protection from an infectious disease produced when enough people become immune to the disease either through the mode of vaccinations or through getting infected.

This helps us disrupt the chain of transmission since the people who are immune to the disease are unlikely to transmit it further.Some of its effects are that it helps us protect those who can't get vaccinated due to underlying medical conditions or are unable to develop immunity.

Even help us protect our young ones who can't be administered a lot of vaccines.

Herd immunity acts as a method of creating evolutionary pressure and encourages viral evolution. If herd immunity is reached and can be retained for a long period of time, it would eventually lead to the eradication of the disease as a whole. For example- smallpox etc.

Keep hope all this shall pass too.

@influencedgenetics

#random post #ignore

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scottymcgeesterwrites · 4 years ago

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Final Fantasy VII Review

Year: 1997

Original Platform: PlayStation One

Also available on: PC, PlayStation Store

Version I Played: PlayStation One

Synopsis:

The Shinra Electric Power Company rules over the city of Midgar, and the eco-terrorists AVALANCHE stop at nothing to try and prevent the life essence of the planet from being used as energy. Barrett, leader of AVALANCHE, hires a mercenary named Cloud Strife for their bombing mission on a Shinra Mako Reactor. Cloud doesn’t care much for the greater cause and only wants his pay. But then, after a mission goes awry, he meets Aerith, a flower girl who is the descendant of the Ancients. He quickly finds himself wrapped up in the greater conflict against Shinra.

Gameplay:

Final Fanatasy VII utilizes magic spells via Materia – little orbs that come in a variety of colors pertaining to the natural elements. You can mix and match them on your weapons and equipment, which gives you access to different spells and stats. All your equipment varies with the number of slots for how many Materia orbs you can put in. Leveling up not only upgrades the character but the equipped Materia as well.

Final Fantasy VII also uses an ATB system but is known for introducing Limit Breaks – finishing moves that build up after the character gets hit over time. Final Fantasy VI had a prototype called Desperation Attack – but it was very rare as it only appeared when your character had 1/8 of their total HP, and there was a 1 in 6 chance of performing the Desperation Attack after selecting Attack. I actually had no idea that was a thing until long after I finished the game, and never experienced it when I played Final Fantasy VI.

Graphics:

Out of all the Final Fantasy games, I have to say that this one has not aged well. It has the worst graphics of the entire series. The battle and cinematic graphics are passable.

(Most of the graphics power seemed to be put in Tifa’s, uh, bosom.)

But the characters in towns, the overworld, and in-game cutscenes are incredibly blocky. PC versions are supposedly sharper, but the PlayStation One version makes it nigh impossible to see any facial expressions.

The graphics are definitely a product of its time. I always say that the beginning of 3D gaming was essentially like puberty – awkward and full of zits. It wasn’t yet at that stage where it could be aesthetically pleasing. We marveled about it when it was first released, yes, but then we cringed in retrospect.

The environment backdrops however are probably the strongest points, where they capture the industrial nature of Midgar, the reactors and other such buildings.

Story:

Final Fantasy VII became legendary the minute Square released it. Every aspect was memorable. Part of it could be due to the fact that it was the first Final Fantasy game to enter the 3D realm. Another part was Tetsuya Nomura’s character designs, which hit the cool meter to the point of sub-zero.

The cinematics blew our minds. The opening action scene with Cloud, Barrett, and the rest of AVALANCHE attacking Shinra’s mako reactor is the most memorable opening to a Final Fantasy game. Period. Final Fantasy games really do know how to start at the right spot, no matter how good or bad the overall game is. The opening is always the best part.

Then there was the motorcycle chase. Cid’s airship. The gun fights. Battles with Sephiroth. The extra stuff to find, like summons and extra bosses. So much was jam-packed into the game.

But the story was the primary factor in making VII famous. It’s definitely one of the better ones. Man, the story became so famous that even gamers who haven’t touched a Final Fantasy game knew the major spoilers. It is the equivalent to knowing Darth Vader’s line, “I am your father” without having actually watched Star Wars.

Aerith (Aeris in the English releases) Gainsborough – the innocent flower girl who holds the secrets of the Ancients – develops a romance with Cloud and fucking dies at the end of Disc 1 by the main villain – Sephiroth. The scene shocked everyone and practically made headlines. Everybody has seen the horrible image in one way or another.

It seems to me that since Final Fantasy V, the stories have gotten more and more used to main character deaths, ultimately transforming into a heavy-hitting TV series rather than simply a video game series. In other words – it matured. Looking back, Final Fantasy IV appears to be child’s play and a prototype of later dramatic storylines with fully realized worlds.

Final Fantasy VII was also the first Final Fantasy game to create a world much like ours – one with cars and trains and airplanes and machine guns and even cellphones. The main city of Midgar reflects industrialization at its worst, with miles of slums and claustrophobic cities. Shinra Electric Power Company is a reflection of capitalism at its worst - a single entity in charge of so much that it’s pretty much the government. For the first time in a Final Fantasy game, you play as characters who dance between the morally ambiguous line of terrorism and activism. Funny enough, the theme of neglecting the planet resonates with us now more than ever. This game ended up being rather prophetic about the uncontrollable growth of corporations.

While the story is memorable with many intriguing elements, the plot itself is a tangled web. In my opinion, they really hashed in so many things that it’s easy to forget crucial details. It’s not straightforward, but at the same time everything does connect by the end. While Shinra is the driving force as a whole as the villain, Sephiroth takes over, then you learn about his backstory and then with the evil scientist Hojo and the extra-terrestrial Jenova and then “Weapon” and then the planet’s history and this and that and the other thing.

If I were to put Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy VII together and contrast them, as many gamers do, I would find that Final Fantasy VII is the summer blockbuster and Final Fantasy VI is the Oscar winner. Final Fantasy VII started introducing the sappy romance subplot to the series. A love triangle forms among Aerith, Cloud, and Cloud’s childhood friend Tifa. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with having a love triangle, the writing is like watching middle schoolers trying to express their feelings. Final Fantasy VI and Final Fantasy IV treated any romance with dignity and realism.

But maybe I’m being a bit harsh. After all, Cloud Strife did go through some suffering as an adolescent. His backstory clearly drives his antisocial behavior, so that becomes a good arc.

The goofiest but memorable part of the story deals with Don Corneo and Wall Market and running around store to store doing tasks in order to free Tifa from Don Corneo. It ends with Cloud needing to cross-dress as a woman to get inside Don’s mansion. Because, you know, it’s not like Cloud can just break in with his sword and Aerith’s magic or anything like that. But whatever. It’s anime.

The recent Final Fantasy VII Remake for the PS4 seems to streamline the story, and actually enhances the emotions they were trying to deliver in the original. I will be talking about the remake in a separate post altogether since I’m almost done with it at the time of this writing. But there’s a lot that I want to say about comparing and contrasting the remake and the original.

The latter half of the plot takes a couple weird turns. At one point, Cloud became catatonic and confined to a wheelchair.

That part of the game became the sluggish part for me. Sephiroth also tries to confuse Cloud, which confused me. Cloud apparently suffers from some alternate subconscious mumbo-jumbo and like. . .ungh. I get an aneurysm thinking about it sometimes.

Complicated plotlines like Final Fantasy VII start showing up from here on out in the Final Fantasy series. The trend of bishonen characters also begin here, bishonen being the Japanese term for “beautiful boy.” Cloud and Sephiroth have that look. The series starts hashing in sappier romances and much more of an anime feel.

Final Fantasy VII ultimately marked the start of a new era for the series – introducing both cool and overused tropes.

Music:

Hands down the best Final Fantasy soundtrack of all.

The entire soundtrack of this game is memorable. The opening tune, with its light twinkle when the stars show up, is enough to make any gamer know exactly what that’s from.

With a story set in a more modern world, we have music that is more modern. After Final Fantasy VI had a more serious and operatic score, Uematsu displayed his love of progressive rock here. The motorcycle chase incorporates a lot of synth, which was fitting for zipping through the streets of Midgar. However, Final Fantasy VII is the first Final Fantasy game without that familiar starting bassline for the battle them. The battle theme is instantly recognizable but also radically different from its predecessors. It’s dramatic and displays danger.

Meanwhile, the boss theme is one of the best boss themes in the series, or any video game really. It’s an electrifying progressive rock piece, and it’s my personal favorite boss theme.

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The more instrumental pieces are somber, given the dreary atmosphere of the planet. The world map music is very different from its predecessors. It’s romantic one moment, soaring the next, and then dips into foreboding terror. I guess that sums up the story of Final Fantasy VII.

And we cannot leave out One-Winged Angel, which I will talk about below.

Notable Theme:

Without a doubt, One-Winged Angel – played during the terrifying final battle against Sephiroth – is the most memorable piece of music in Final Fantasy VII.

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It may very well be the most popular song of the entire series. Nobuo Uematsu was inspired by Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It’s a whopping 30 something minute classical piece. If you look it up on YouTube and browse through it, you can definitely note the similarities. However, Uematsu didn’t want some boring classical introduction to the piece. He wanted to add the destructive impact of rock. The theme has a very distinct stamping-your-foot-down quality to it.

I had noticed a certain piece-by-piece feel of the song and that’s exactly how Uematsu composed it. This is the only song that Uematsu has composed where he created several tunes in his head and then rearranged them to make a single comprehensive song.

If you want to get technical, One-Winged Angel is the first Final Fantasy song with lyrics. The chorus sings in Latin about Sephiroth’s burning anger, with some lyrics actually taken from the medieval poem Carmina Burana. It sounds fantastic when fully orchestrated.

In Advent Children, the animated sequel to Final Fantasy VII, the music is accompanied by hardcore metal. This new rendition really illustrates the destructive power of Sephiroth. Uematsu changed the lyrics for Advent Children. They are more original now. I specifically noticed the lyrics “Veni, veni, mi fili”, which translates to “Come, come, my son.” Sephiroth is inviting you so he can kill you.

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Uematsu has stated that the original orchestration didn’t sit well with him. As I suspected, Advent Children’s hardcore metal version is the one he preferred, the one he would have composed had he the technology at the time of Final Fantasy VII.

Verdict:

Another must-play for any RPG fan, even if you think it’s overrated. It’s a must-play because of its popularity, in the same way that people are wide-eyed when you say you haven’t seen Star Wars or such-and-such other popular movie. It’s a whole lot of fun, especially in the scenes that involve other forms of gameplay, such as the motorcycle chase and even a battlefield strategy game in protecting Fort Condor.

Direct Sequel?

Yes – first there was the CGI movie Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children.

I actually watched Advent Children before playing Final Fantasy VII. I had already known most of what happened in the game and Advent Children became a monumental craze when it first came out. Everybody was talking about it. Watching the sequel before playing the game skewers your interpretation of things. My first impression of Cloud was that he was always whiny and angsty, and meanwhile Tifa kept nagging him to move on. I felt really bad for Cloud losing Aerith.

Then when I actually played Final Fantasy VII, I saw that Cloud starts as this badass mercenary. Tifa is spunky and clearly is the better choice (IMO) but Cloud is enamored by Aerith after only meeting her briefly. WHAT? Cloud. Bro. Make a move on Tifa, you nitwit. Tifa is AMAZING.

Square Enix then continued the story with Dirge of Cerberus – Final Fantasy VII. This video game sequel focuses on Vincent Valentine, a fan favorite of the original game.

Let me remind you about something – the original game revealed Shinra’s inner deep secret experiments, namely with Sephiroth and Jenova. Dirge of Cerberus introduces an even deeper research team within Shinra called Deepground. I don’t know about you, but it already sounds like the start of a terribly redundant string of sequels, like how the Jason Bourne movies keep revealing an even deeper level of conspiracy theories. Vincent’s mysterious background is now fully revealed. He is defined by – guess what? – another angsty lost lover story, this time with a woman named Lucrecia. Now, okay, look, maybe I’m just being a dick about these types of love stories. But when it keeps popping up within the same series in the same manner, I start asking if you have anything else to offer on your menu.

Lastly, there is the prequel for the PSP – Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. Of all the games in the Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core has received the most positive reception. If anything, play that after playing Final Fantasy VII before bothering with anything else.

Oh, and of course there is the Final Fantasy VII Remake, which we thought wasn’t going to happen for the longest time but they finally released it in April 2020. More on that later after I finish it, and after I post my entire series of Final Fantasy reviews!

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ymirhistoriafan · 4 years ago

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Ymir Post Time Skip. (Part Two)

So continuing on from my last post. Again this is all just my own ideas, with the intent of sharing them and maybe giving you all something fun to read.

Historia approaches the Farmer who has been helping her who threw stones at her as a child and has shown genuine remorse for his actions. Ymir not happy, goes along with it as she decides it would be better him then someone Historia is close with since this is happening. Ymir gives the guy credit, he’s been very supportive of Historia and has stuck by her. However Ymir is now feeling the rift between her and Historia. Historia doesn’t marry the Farmer for Ymir’s sake, and Ymir despite it all sticks beside Historia knowing she needs all the help and support she can get.

After Eren is brought back to the Island along with Zeke, the uneasy calm before the storm feeling is filling the air and Ymir knows some bad things are going to happen very soon. Ymir hears through the grapevine of Sasha’s death and shows genuine sadness for her. As this goes on Ymir observes Historia depressed and distant glances and attitude, even the coldness she seems to be presenting to the father of her child. Ymir tries to council her, and reminds her this was her idea and it’s too late to back out now or show regret. Historia doesn’t really give Ymir a response and Ymir drops it.

While they remain in hiding, The Yeagerist carry out their rebellion for Eren and kill the Key Members with in the Government, and carry out the plan of the Wine Spiked with Zeke’s spinal fluid. When words reaches them of this, Ymir is caught off guard and this part of the plan was not something she was aware off. Without pushing the subject too hard, she confronts Historia who doesn’t give her a direct answer. Ymir now (much like us the audience lol) is unsure just how much Eren and Historia really talked about and how much Historia knows. Still, she sticks by Historia knowing if it came to it, Historia’s safety must come first in Ymir’s mind. However it is starting to take it’s toll on Ymir as her mind is being pulled in all different directions.

The Rumbling begins as Eren reveals his plan to all the Subject of Ymir Fritz and how he plans to destroy the entire world outside the Island. Now understanding the full scale of what is going on Ymir is feeling very angry, however before can consider her options and who’s side she really wants to be on, Historia’s water breaks and she goes into labor. While unhappy, Ymir gets her priorities in order and stays beside Historia’s side while The Alliance do battle with Eren trying to stop The Rumbling.

Everything pretty much goes as we see in the ending, and Historia gives birth to a heathy baby girl. Ymir is happy for this but now has time to think about everything. She knows the island could now be in even more danger than before, even with all The Titans gone. The Yeagerists seem to have taken control and are willing to keep on fighting the rest of the world. Historia plays along as not to put herself in risk, but this is not an easy thing for Ymir to do. Knowing Ymir, she’s mouth off from time to time and it would get her in trouble, and while Historia might be able to get her out of it, Ymir’s life line is running out. While Historia would prefer to marry Ymir, she sadly faces the fact it will put their lives in danger. So for herself and the sake of her daughter, she marries The Farmer. This does gut Ymir a lot, but Ymir understands. Knowing Historia is safe Ymir decides to go off on her own for a bit, she needs to get away and really process everything. Plus she has grown to trust The Farmer and accepts Historia is in good hands with him.

Ymir over the next couple of years doesn’t become a stranger or memory, and always visits Historia and her family. As the Alliance is returning for peace talks, Ymir goes to stand by Historia in hopes the war can be resolved in the best way it can. They arrive home and Armin shares the story as he knows it with Historia and the people of the Island. I can’t picture how Ymir can be happy with any of this upon hearing it. Maybe Historia is unsure what to believe anymore but has put so much faith in Eren until now, so she’s ignoring a lot of the truth. I can see Ymir lashing out at this point and maybe pointing out how stupid they must be for treating Eren like some kind of hero. By now any respect Ymir may have had for Eren is zero, and she struggles to see why people are holding him in such high regard. She doesn’t want to add any more troubles for Historia though so leaves while the peace talks begin. Ymir does have a better grasp on how cruel the world is most, but even this has shocked down to her very core. She knows it’s going to take much longer for the world to heal than most of them think, and after clearing her head returns home to Historia. She admits her feelings for Historia will never change, but after everything that has happened they are both now unsure about many things. The two talk all night and know they are still bonded for life. In a way Ymir is proud of Historia for being selfish, but feels as if Historia has unwillingly played a pawn throughout the whole endeavor. Still, Historia is a mother, a better mother than Alma. As Queen Historia is doing her best to bring peace and taking care of her friends. Ymir wishes they could live in a world where they can be together freely as they both would like, but promises to always be there for Historia. But things have changed between them, and it’s just the way it has to be. Still, Ymir is glad to be part of Historia’s life, and is happy with the second chance of life she got since she gained The jaw Titan. And that, is I feel Ymir’s story may have gone during the events of the final arcs of Attack on titan. Thanks for reading.

#freckles ymir #historia x ymir #aot #yimuhisu #yimukuri #fan idea #ymir #ymir headcanons

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naturecpw · 3 years ago

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How a New Hampshire libertarian utopia was foiled by bears

Seriously, this happened. You should absolutely read about it.

By Sean [email protected]@vox.com Dec 10, 2020

Every ideology produces its own brand of fanatics, but there’s something special about libertarianism.

I don’t mean that as an insult, either. I love libertarians! For the most part, they’re fun and interesting people. But they also tend to be cocksure about core principles in a way most people aren’t. If you’ve ever encountered a freshly minted Ayn Rand enthusiast, you know what I mean.

And yet one of the things that makes political philosophy so amusing is that it’s mostly abstract. You can’t really prove anything — it’s just a never-ending argument about values. Every now and again, though, reality intervenes in a way that illustrates the absurdity of particular ideas.

Something like this happened in the mid-2000s in a small New Hampshire town called Grafton. Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, author of a new book titled A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear, says it’s the “boldest social experiment in modern American history.” I don’t know if it’s the “boldest,” but it’s definitely one of the strangest.

The experiment was called the “Free Town Project” (it later became the “Free State Project”), and the goal was simple: take over Grafton’s local government and turn it into a libertarian utopia. The movement was cooked up by a small group of ragtag libertarian activists who saw in Grafton a unique opportunity to realize their dreams of a perfectly logical and perfectly market-based community. Needless to say, utopia never arrived, but the bears did! (I promise I’ll explain below.)

I reached out to Hongoltz-Hetling to talk about his book. I wanted to know what happened in New Hampshire, why the experiment failed, and what the whole saga can teach us not just about libertarianism but about the dangers of loving theory more than reality.

How would you describe the “Free Town Project” to someone who doesn’t know anything about it?

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

I’d put it like this: There’s a national community of libertarians that has developed over the last 40 or 50 years, and they’ve never really had a place to call their own. They’ve never been in charge of a nation, or a state, or even a city. And they’ve always really wanted to create a community that would showcase what would happen if they implemented their principles on a broad scale.

So in 2004, a group of them decided that they wanted to take some action on this deficiency, and they decided to launch what they called the Free Town Project. They sent out a call to a bunch of loosely affiliated national libertarians and told everyone to move to this one spot and found this utopian community that would then serve as a shining jewel for the world to see that libertarian philosophies worked not only in theory but in practice. And they chose a town in rural New Hampshire called Grafton that already had fewer than 1,000 people in it. And they just showed up and started working to take over the town government and get rid of every rule and regulation and tax expense that they could.

Sean Illing Of all the towns in all the world, why Grafton?

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

They didn’t choose it in a vacuum. They actually conducted a very careful and thorough search. They zeroed in on the state of New Hampshire fairly quickly because that’s the “Live Free or Die” state. They knew that it would align well with their philosophy of individualism and personal responsibility. But once they decided on New Hampshire, they actually visited dozens of small towns, looking for that perfect mix of factors that would enable them to take over.

What they needed was a town that was small enough that they could come up and elbow the existing citizenry, someplace where land was cheap, where they could come in and buy up a bunch of land and kind of host their incoming colonists. And they wanted a place that had no zoning, because they wanted to be able to live in nontraditional housing situations and not have to go through the rigamarole of building or buying expensive homes or preexisting homes.

Sean Illing

Wait, what do you mean by “nontraditional housing”?

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

As the people of Grafton soon found out, a nontraditional housing situation meant a camp in the woods or a bunch of shipping containers or whatever. They brought in yurts and mobile homes and formed little clusters of cabins and tents. There was one location called “Tent City,” where a bunch of people just lived in tents from day to day. They all united under this broad umbrella principle of “personal freedom,” but as you’d expect, there was a lot of variation in how they exercised it.

Sean Illing

What did the demographics of the group look like? Are we talking mostly about white guys or Ayn Rand bros who found each other on the internet?

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

Well, we’re talking about hundreds of people, though the numbers aren’t all that clear. They definitely skewed male. They definitely skewed white. Some of them had a lot of money, which gave them the freedom to be able to pick up roots and move to a small town in New Hampshire. A lot of them had very little money and nothing keeping them in their places. So they were able to pick up and come in. But most of them just didn’t have those family situations or those 9-to-5 jobs, and that was really what characterized them more than anything else.

Sean Illing

And how did they take over the local government? Did they meet much resistance?

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

When they first showed up, they hadn’t told anyone that they were doing this, with the exception of a couple of sympathetic libertarians within the community. And so all of a sudden the people in Grafton woke up to the fact that their town was in the process of being invaded by a bunch of idealistic libertarians. And they were pissed. They had a big town meeting. It was a very shouty, very angry town meeting, during which they told the Free Towners who dared to come that they didn’t want them there and they didn’t appreciate being treated as if their community was an experimental playpen for libertarians to come in and try to prove something.

But the libertarians, even though they never outnumbered the existing Grafton residents, what they found was that they could come in, and they could find like-minded people, traditional conservatives or just very liberty-oriented individuals, who agreed with them on enough issues that, despite that angry opposition, they were able to start to work their will on the levers of government.

They couldn’t pass some of the initiatives they wanted. They tried unsuccessfully to withdraw from the school district and to completely discontinue paying for road repairs, or to declare Grafton a United Nations free zone, some of the outlandish things like that. But they did find that a lot of existing Grafton residents would be happy to cut town services to the bone. And so they successfully put a stranglehold on things like police services, things like road services and fire services and even the public library. All of these things were cut to the bone.

Sean Illing

Then what happened over the next few years or so?

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

By pretty much any measure you can look at to gauge a town’s success, Grafton got worse. Recycling rates went down. Neighbor complaints went up. The town’s legal costs went up because they were constantly defending themselves from lawsuits from Free Towners. The number of sex offenders living in the town went up. The number of recorded crimes went up. The town had never had a murder in living memory, and it had its first two, a double homicide, over a roommate dispute.

So there were all sorts of negative consequences that started to crop up. And meanwhile, the town that would ordinarily want to address these things, say with a robust police force, instead found that it was hamstrung. So the town only had one full-time police officer, a single police chief, and he had to stand up at town meeting and tell people that he couldn’t put his cruiser on the road for a period of weeks because he didn’t have money to repair it and make it a safe vehicle.

Basically, Grafton became a Wild West, frontier-type town.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling

#bears #libertarian #utopia #libertarian utopia

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newstfionline · 3 years ago

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Saturday, August 28, 2021

With wildfire threatening, Lake Tahoe prepares for emergency (AP) The decision to flee their home Thursday in the mountains above Lake Tahoe became clear when Johnny White and Lauren McCauley could see flames on the webcam at their local ski resort. Even as ash rained down under a cloud of heavy smoke, the couple wasn’t panicked because they had an early warning to leave their home near Echo Summit, about 10 miles (16 kilometers) south of the lake, and wanted to avoid last-minute pandemonium if the wildfire continued its march toward the tourist destination on the California and Nevada border. Firefighters were facing changing weather conditions that could push the fire closer to the Tahoe Basin, a home to thousands and recreational playground for millions of tourists who visit the alpine lake in summer, ski at the many resorts in winter and gamble at its casinos year-round. Fires in California have destroyed around 2,000 structures and forced thousands to evacuate while also blanketing large swaths of the West in unhealthy smoke.

The Western air crisis (NYT) “We have had smoke in the sky literally since the third week of July,” Amy Ginder, a 47-year-old resident of Reno, said. “We have been inhaling toxins for five weeks now. You can’t be outside. You can’t breathe. You can’t see the sun.” In response, Ginder has stopped jogging outdoors. “If it were just this summer, you’d just suck it up and move on,” she said. “But it isn’t. It’s the realization that this is our future.” Smoke-clogged air has become a regular part of life in the American West. Climate change has increased the frequency of droughts, extreme heat and, by extension, large wildfires. The smoke then drifts across large parts of the Pacific Coast and Mountain West. Sometimes, it even reaches the East Coast. One measure of the problem: In several places yesterday—including Bend, Ore.; an area north of Sacramento; and Lake Tahoe—air pollution reached levels that can damage lungs when people spend time outdoors. Phil Abernathy, a Lake Tahoe resident who decided to flee the area in search of cleaner air, told The Times that simply inhaling can feel like a “sizable man is standing on my chest.”

Tropical Storm Ida Forms in Caribbean, Heading for Louisiana (Bloomberg) Tropical Storm Ida has formed in the Caribbean and is forecast to a grow into a powerful hurricane in the days ahead, wreaking havoc across the Gulf of Mexico and ultimately crashing into the U.S coast. Ida, the ninth storm of the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season, is swirling past Jamaica, with top winds of 40 miles (64 kilometers) per hour. It’s forecast to strike Cuba Friday, reach hurricane strength over the gulf Saturday and make landfall in Louisiana or Mississippi late Sunday or Monday. “Sunday is the anniversary of Katrina—it seems like a particularly cruel date for a hurricane landfall in Louisiana,” said Ryan Truchelut, president of Weather Tiger LLC. said in an interview. The storm’s winds are forecast to peak at 110 miles per hour (177 kilometers per hour), which would put it just below Category 3 major hurricane status on the five-step Saffir-Simpson scale, the National Hurricane Center said Thursday. Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency ahead of the storm.

Nowhere To Go (AP) The earthquake in Haiti killed and injured thousands, and wiped away thousands of homes. Now, a more grim reality is setting in for those who survived and were hospitalized—if released, they have nowhere to go. 25-year-old Jertha Ylet came to the hospital on August 14, unconscious and with a crushed leg. Her 5-year-old daughter survived unharmed, but her father and two other relatives were killed, her brother seriously injured and her house destroyed. A surgeon had put a metal rod in her lower left leg, but Ylet hadn’t been out of bed or tried to walk since she arrived. Ylet was discharged Thursday—the hospital needed her bed for other patients. “I said to the doctor, ‘I don’t have any place to go,’” Ylet said. Medical staff is sympathetic, but pragmatic. The beds are needed. “After someone gets well they have to go.” In the first days after the earthquake, the hospital was overwhelmed with patients. The injured lay on patios and breezeways awaiting care. Now there are still people in those areas, but they’re discharged patients or others never admitted at all but who are coming for the donations of food and water and clothing arriving at the hospital daily.

Biden: ‘We Will Hunt You Down’ (Foreign Policy) Hours after the Islamic State launched a coordinated suicide bomb attack among the desperate crowds gathered outside Kabul’s international airport on Thursday, U.S. President Joe Biden vowed to continue evacuations—and to retaliate against the perpetrators. “Know this: We will not forgive, we will not forget,” he said in a speech from the White House. “We will hunt you down and make you pay.” The attack killed more than 70 Afghan civilians and 13 U.S. troops in at least two blasts, leaving the area around the airport in chaos. Members of the Islamic State group’s local branch, known as Islamic State-Khorasan, detonated suicide vests at the airport’s Abbey Gate and outside the nearby Baron Hotel. Taliban spokesperson Zabihullah Mujahid condemned the attack, which underscores the security challenges the group faces as it formally establishes a government in Kabul. It remains unclear whether a military response to the bombings is already being undertaken, and if the United States has adequate capacity on the ground to carry it out. [Note: The death toll has been updated to as many as 169 Afghans.]

As NATO countries end their Kabul airlift, many interpreters, embassy staffers and drivers are left behind (Washington Post) Thousands of Afghans who put their lives at risk to work with America's NATO allies have been left behind as the military evacuations wrap up and they hunker down in fear over Taliban reprisals. Britain became the latest nation to announce an end to its airlifts on Friday, as Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told LBC radio that evacuations would end in hours. The military has airlifted nearly 14,000 people out over the past two weeks, but “the sad fact is that not every single one will get out,” he said, with up to 1,100 eligible Afghans who “didn’t make it.” Other countries fell further short of their targets. Germany, whose last soldiers flew out of Afghanistan on Thursday evening, said it had rescued around 4,000 Afghans—far shy of the 10,000 people it had identified as at risk. From Berlin to Ottawa, questions have been raised as to why more was not done to save those who were vulnerable sooner. “I think humanity has fallen apart,” said one employee of a local nongovernmental organization contracted by the German government. He shared a photo of what he said was one of his colleagues, beheaded by the Taliban when they took over his neighborhood. “It feels as though I am so alone,” he said, his voice breaking as he spoke. European governments have said they were left with little choice but to end their military rescue operations as the United States pulls out.

Afghanistan’s Islamic State (AP) The Islamic State offshoot that Americans blame for Thursday’s deadly suicide attacks outside the Kabul airport coalesced in eastern Afghanistan six years ago, and rapidly grew into one of the more dangerous terror threats globally. The Islamic State’s Central Asia affiliate sprang up in the months after the group’s core fighters swept across Syria and Iraq, carving out a self-styled caliphate, or Islamic empire, in the summer of 2014. The group started as several hundred Pakistani Taliban fighters, who took refuge across the border in Afghanistan after military operations drove them out of their home country. Other, like-minded extremists joined them there, including disgruntled Afghan Taliban fighters unhappy with what they—unlike the West—saw as the Taliban’s overly moderate and peaceful ways. As the Taliban pursued peace talks with the United States in recent years, discontented Taliban increasingly moved to the more extremist Islamic State, swelling its numbers. Many were attracted to the Islamic State’s violent and extreme ideology, including promises of a caliphate to unite the Islamic world, a goal never espoused by the Taliban.

Afghanistan got just 5 minutes of coverage on the network newscasts last year, analysis says (The Week) The current chaos in Afghanistan may be dominating the headlines, but in 2020, the war reportedly received just a handful of minutes of network news coverage throughout the entire year. According to analysis from the Tyndall Report via the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the national evening newscasts on CBS, ABC, and NBC in 2020 devoted just five minutes to Afghanistan coverage. The coverage came in February 2020, when the Trump administration announced the Doha agreement with the Taliban to end the war. "Five minutes!" Andrew Tyndall writes. "Such were the demands on the news agenda of the looming coronavirus pandemic in the early spring of 2020. Coverage of all other developments was eclipsed by COVID. The networks had long since given up covering the war as a war." [Since 2014] they "have treated the role of the military there as an afterthought," he said.

New Zealand extends virus lockdown (AP) New Zealand’s government has extended a strict nationwide lockdown through Tuesday as it tries to quash its first outbreak of the coronavirus in six months. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Friday the government expects to keep Auckland, where most of the cases have been found, in full lockdown for at least two more weeks. But she expects most other parts of the country can ease restrictions slightly from Wednesday. The announcement came as health authorities reported 70 new daily cases, the most yet in the outbreak, which has grown to nearly 350 cases in total. Ardern said there was evidence the lockdown was working and new case numbers were beginning to level off. She said she remained committed to the strategy of eliminating the virus entirely.

Gunmen release students in northern Nigeria 3 months later (AP) Gunmen have released some of the children kidnapped from a school in northern Nigeria back in May, some of whom were as young as 5 years old, the school’s head teacher said late Thursday. He could not confirm the exact number freed. Authorities have said that 136 children were abducted along with several teachers when gunmen on motorcycles attacked the Salihu Tanko Islamic School in Niger state. Other preschoolers were left behind as they could not keep pace when the gunmen hurriedly moved those abducted into the forest. The release came a day after local media quoted one parent as saying six of the children had died in captivity. The government has been unable to halt the spate of abductions for ransom. As a result, many schools have been forced to close due to the concerns about the kidnapping risk.

Gig apps for a pandemic economy (AP) For months, Gabrielle Walker had been looking for a part-time job. Then one day, Walker, a 19-year-old student at University College London, was scrolling through TikTok and stumbled on a video about an app called Stint, which helps students earn money by working brief temporary stints at places like restaurants and bars that require little training or experience. Walker downloaded the app, took a 15-minute intro course and days later snagged a job polishing cutlery at a Michelin-star restaurant in London—for one day. Between May and June, she took on several other gigs, squeezing them into her class schedule where she could. Stint, in use across the U.K., has grown in popularity, alongside similar apps in the United States like Instawork and Gigpro, as one response to the peculiar ways in which economies have been rebounding from the pandemic recession. In contrast to Stint, Instawork and Gigpro are suited more for skilled or experienced workers who want or need short-term shifts. Collectively, the newer apps represent a variation on the many gig apps that sprang up in recent years—from Uber and DoorDash to TaskRabbit and Thumbtack—that typically serve households in need of a one-time service. What distinguishes the latest apps is that they link workers with employers that have a steady need for labor but don’t necessarily want to commit to permanent hires given the uncertainties from the pandemic.

#headlines #news

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lovelyirony · 4 years ago

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this is just a re-do of a post with a prompt from anonymous, so don’t worry if it looks a bit familiar!

As Bucky is running away from government agents trying to snipe him for killing a politician, he supposes Natasha’s argument for him being suicidal might have the tiniest bit evidence behind it, which he previously argued it didn’t.

As he slides underneath a car, he debates whether or not she’ll find out about this one. He feels a buzz from his phone in his pocket.

Yeah, she knows.

He shoots one of the agents, nicking him in the knee. Oof, that’s gonna be a fun story to tell his grandkids about why they can’t climb on his lap. But he needs to get away, and that involves potentially shooting through a car.

Potentially turns into definitely and there’s enough of a distraction that he can commandeer a car, drive at least ten blocks away, and ditch it to run on foot, calling Natasha.

“You got my location, right?”

“Of course, you fucking idiot,” Natasha curses. “You…god I hate you sometimes. The job’s at least done, right?”

“Yeah. I’ll have to lay low, though. Which sucks because my apartment is right in the city.”

“I already have a punishment and idea for you in one.”

“I…what is it?”

“Sam’s picking you up. Tell you when you get to base. Bye.”

Bucky groans.

She must be really pissed at him.

Sam picks him up in the shittiest economy car in the world.

“I hate you for picking this one,” Bucky groans.

“A stupid decision grants a stupid car, that’s why you’re getting picked up in the 1995 Ford Fiesta of shame,” Sam says. “Nat’s real mad. And I also think you’re going to hate your next assignment.”

Bucky’s not sure what’s gonna happen. He’s hoping he’s not on latrine duty.

Oh, it’s so much worse.

“Protection detail?” Bucky asks. “And undercover? All at once? Nat, come on. I bet we don’t even need undercover.”

“You both are doing undercover because you both fucked up,” Natasha says. “And since apparently you don’t know how to act, maybe this will get you better lessons.”

“Cold,” Sam hisses.

“I will legally ask you to shut the fuck up,” Bucky growls out.

He packs his things. Realizes that Sam got to choose the name so his name is Roger Stevens. Fucking shit. (Steve, of course, approved this. Because Steve is an asshole.)

“Why does she even need a protector?” Bucky growls out, driving to the house. It’s in suburbia.

“Because she fucked up and whoever she pissed off might send more than she can handle,” Natasha says.

“We’re hinging my being here on a ‘maybe’?”

“And because you got caught by government agents, which would be a rookie move,” Natasha says. “There’s a reason that I can still go my same nail salon for five years and now you have to get your hair cut somewhere else. And why you got a wedding china set and you have a backstory of being married.”

“I hate you.”

“A lot of people do, take a number.”

If it helps (and it mostly doesn’t), Sharon Carter is also not happy. She is in the house with the most dangerous look Bucky has seen.

“So I’m stuck in this fucking hell house with him?” Sharon asks.

Maria Hill is her boss. Woman is a scary, competent human. Bucky wouldn’t cross her.

(Then again, you also shouldn’t cross a certain redhead who could make you disappear within twenty minutes, maybe thirty if it’s a surprise. But he did.)

“Keys are by the front door, hope you know your address! Bye!” Natasha says. “Don’t kill each other or we lose the deposit!”

Maria Hill smiles. Of course the only time Bucky’s ever seen her smile is at the suffering of others. How typical.

So then they are left alone.

“Let’s read the cover story,” Sharon says. “And I don’t need protection, Maria’s just paranoid.”

Bucky snorts.

“Yeah, okay, let’s go with that.”

Sharon sends him a sharp look.

They meet while on a cruise.

Bucky fucking hates his life.

“A fucking cruise,” he mutters. “As if I would ever step foot onto any of those fucking–”

“We had a beach wedding?!” Sharon cries out. “Oh my god, I can’t believe it!”

They are both in a bad mood.

It’s also awkward because this is a house. They have decorations. They have tea towels.

And a neighbor comes to visit.

“Welcome to the neighborhood!” she says brightly. “My name is Karen Tent, so lovely to meet you both!”

She then invades the house with her Tupperware. Literally speeds past them and it’s not like Sharon judo-chop her throat or anything.

“What a lovely house you two have!” Karen cheers. “Of course the color palette is a little bit drab, but I’m sure you’ll change that soon enough. When Linda told me we had new neighbors, I could hardly believe it myself, but here you are! Now, how did you two meet? Have you married yet? If not, I hope that you are living apart, you know.”

“The rings are in boxes,” Sharon answers smoothly, noting that they’ll need to ask Maria where the fuck the rings are. “You know how move-ins are. I’m Melanie Stevens, this is Roger Stevens. How nice to see you so very unexpectedly.”

“Well, that’s what neighbors are for!” Karen answers, her voice shrill as ever. “I brought over my famous cookie bars. Everyone says they’re good, and I believe they always are. Tell me Melanie, what do you like baking most?”

“Yes dear, tell her,” Bucky answers, smiling. “I seem to remember…lemon bars?”

“That’s right,” Sharon says, sending Bucky a smile. “They are really good. Just delightful.”

“Oh you’ll have to bring some over!” Karen responds. “Now, let me tell you a little bit about the neighborhood…”

She talks for a fucking hour. Bucky wants to drink. So badly. He saw the wine on the counter.

Sharon, to her credit, keeps trying to use certain “end” phrases. Karen either knows it and knows she won’t be budging, or will not ever take a hint in her lifetime.

“And you simply must not ever play loud music in your backyard,” Karen says. “We’ve had a couple of problems with the Richardsons, but nothing a few calls won’t fix.”

“You called the police?” Sharon asks.

“Well yes!”

“Oh my god,” Bucky mutters.

“I am sure that’s not exactly the measure I would have done,” Sharon says. “But I am tired and don’t want to get into it now,” she says quickly, noticing Karen’s “confused” expression.

“I say we need some time to rest, today is gonna be a lot of moving,” he says. “So nice of you to stop by, Karen. I’ll return your dish as soon as possible.”

Karen is ushered out the door, placated with two waves, and they both groan.

“I’m gonna fucking hate everything after this,” Sharon mutters. “My name is fucking Melanie. Maria knows…” she trails off, facing the very real boxes that were obviously packed with dishes and miscellaneous items.

Bucky finds four spatulas. He doesn’t know why there are four.

“What the fuck,” he mutters, noting the incredibly cheesy salt-and-pepper set.

“Welcome to married life,” Sharon says sarcastically. “We’re gonna have a blast.”

Dinner is spent with Sharon trying to convince Bucky that she’s “fine” and in “no danger” at all.

“Who did you piss off?”

“Sitwell.”

“Oh my god. You’re screwed.”

“He’s a lapdog, I’m not screwed.”

“He’s the lapdog of Pierce. You’re screwed.”

Sharon thunks her head on the table.

“Can we at least repaint the bedrooms? They suck.”

“If you think I’m sleeping in a separate room you’re dead wrong,” Bucky says. “You have a target the size of New York on your back. Uh-uh.”

“You will sleep on the floor and get out when I shower or change,” Sharon threatens.

“Of course.”

“Good. Then it’s settled.”

Married life is not so bad. Except when Karen and the rest of the neighbors tend to visit or talk to them for about fifteen minutes on the lawn.

“It’s your turn to cut the grass,” Sharon groans, flopping on the couch. “If I have to hear Kevin tell me one more time that you should be treating me better, I’m going to explode. He’s trying to lecture me on how to cut grass.”

“On it,” Bucky says. “Your turn to go get groceries, I ran into Karen and her kid last time. I think she wants me to stop buying so much hummus.”

“Not our fault it’s good,” Sharon mutters.

And then, of course, avoiding the various assassins that are sent out at random intervals and at public locations (including their own house) while convincing the neighbors that there’s nothing going on.

This involves pretending an agent of Hydra is their cousin.

“This is Jen, she’s visiting for the day!” Sharon says, squeezing “Jen’s” wrist hard enough to make her stay quiet. “We have so much to catch up on, you probably won’t see me or–or Roger again for the day! Ha ha!”

“Well where’s her car?” Linda asks, looking around the neighborhood. “I don’t see anything…”

“She’s a hippie environmentalist, she walked,” Bucky answers. “Jen, let’s go catch up in the house, yeah?”

“Yeah,” the agent squeaks out sadly, knowing exactly what is going to happen.

She’s delivered tied up in rope on the steps of Maria’s office with a note of “please stop this from happening we’re planting azaleas.”

Maria snorts.

Bucky starts to think they’re getting too attached to this. It’s been four months.

He started a garden. They’re growing tomatoes.

He also notices Sharon a little bit differently.

Because she drags him out of bed.

“Legally? You have to go to brunch with me. Illegally? You like the breakfast burrito too much.”

She’s scarily competent with anything that could be classed as a weapon. Or their groceries.

“Are you kidding me?” Bucky yells at her as she throws the jar of tomato sauce. “I am not cleaning that up!”

“Tough shit!” Sharon answers, dodging a bullet. “It wasn’t even the good kind of tomato sauce!”

“It was fine, sweetheart!” Bucky growls out.

“Don’t ‘sweetheart’ me in the middle of a battle!” Sharon yells. “Strictly after!”

“You’re the weirdest fucking married couple,” one of the agents wheezes out as Bucky is holding him as a sort of shield.

“Thanks,” they say in unison, grinning.

The punishment for them both doesn’t exactly turn out as planned, both Natasha and Maria agree. In fact, it is almost worse.

They are both reckless, subvert orders, and get along like a house on fire by the end of it.

“You can still be together, we just need the house back,” Natasha says.

“Thank god,” Bucky groans. “I get to stop being Roger and I get rid of Karen in one fell swoop.”

Sharon untenses her shoulders while she’s sitting at the kitchen table.

“Can I keep the knife set?”

“No,” Maria says. “I’ll send you a link to where I got it.”

“Why can’t I keep it if you can get another set?”

“Steal it,” Bucky stage-whispers. Sharon grins back at him.

“You have the best ideas, babe.”

“You are not stealing anything,” Maria scowls.

“Sure we aren’t,” Bucky says easily.

“You stole my heart,” Sharon sing-songs, knowing damn well it’s going to make Maria barf.

“Aw babe…” Bucky says, holding her hand. Natasha fake-retches.

“I hate you both,” she declares. “And I won’t be there for your actual wedding.”

“You made us tell people we had a wedding on a beach, were you assuming that you were getting an invitation?” Bucky asks.

Sharon snickers, getting the last of her bags out into the car.

“Where to now?” she asks him.

“I think that there are some apartments we can look at…”

“We’ve made a collective monster,” Maria decides, blinking. “We Frankensteined this.”

“We did,” Natasha says, staring at the house. There are still little bits of glass. An unfortunately busted can of beans where someone had been knocked out and they had “conveniently” forgotten to clean it up from yesterday.

Well. Sharon and Bucky are going to cause havoc on the world. Maria and Natasha just hope they can cover the other while doing so.

#fake married au #fake marriage au #sharon carter #bucky barnes #winter13 #winter soldier #agent thirteen #lovelyirony writes #maria hill #natasha romanoff #yes i made the shitty neighbor a karen what else would i have done #AND YES THEY DID START A GARDEN AND PLANT AZALEAS #I SAID WHAT I SAID

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dlamp-dictator · 4 years ago

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Allen X Rambles about Chapter 7

“I hope Episode 7 is focused on only 2 or three characters with little distraction... Amiya maybe finding out that Ch’en is slowly becoming Infected and helping her come to terms with that. Ch’en revealing her past to Amiya and the two connecting over losing so many close to them due to Oripathy. The two standing up to the political corruption of Lungmen, shoulder to shoulder, as women that refuse to see another life lost due to the indifference of a city’s politics.”

-Allen X, October 2nd, 2020, Rambling about Chapter 6

Man... I’m starting to believe it when they say Arknight’s story mode is longer than the Harry Potter series. Things are getting crazy in Chapter 7 and crazy-long to in terms of length. This chapter really had me on the edge of my seat as I read through it and as I played through because 7-16 and 7-18 were a bitch to get through that require some of the most precise timing I’ve seen in this game yet. That aside, I enjoyed a lot what I read and experienced.

And I wanted to talk about it a bit.

But first, as always, a synopsis.

Coming off the heels of Frostnova’s death and the realization of Wei Yenwu’s purging of the Lungmen slums, tensions are high and trust has been fractured between Rhodes Island and Lungmen. However, in the midst of Ch’en hot temper and Amiya’s cool head, Reunion is plans to send the Russian Ursusian city of Chernobog on a collision course with Hong Kong Lungmen, giving Ursus a cause to make war against Lungmen and its great region of Tawain China Yen. However, through some rather amazing political maneuvering and passionate words by Wei Yenwu’s wife Fumizuki, Rhodes Island agrees to mobilize in order to save Lungmen, the Infected, and the beloved daughter of Lungmen, Ch’en. But beyond Chernobog lies Patriot, Reunions greatest commander next to Talulah herself, who’s rage toward his daughter’s death is only matched by his disciplined mind and even more disciplined soldiers. It’s a fight to the center of the Chernobog to save as many lives as possible, even at the cost of this great general’s life.

An Addendum to 7-18

So between my venting about 7-18 when I talked about some fun Arknight’s lore a handful of people wanted to give me some advice on how to conquer that stage. Admittedly that venting was said out of anger and was much more acidic in tone than my usual essays and opinion pieces. I have since beaten that stage and I can give some of my thoughts on this advice. Some of it was helpful... some of it.

“AmIyA cAn TaNk PaTrIoT’s SpEaR tOsS!”

This is technically true and I was technically wrong. When Amiya’s S3 is active she gained increased Max HP and can in fact survive with a sliver of health. However, Amiya’s S3 takes quite a long time to charge even with her talent, and unless someone is actively blocking Patriot her can honestly spam his spear through for how long it takes Amiya to get prepped for her S3. This is more of an issue of Amiya’s balancing than with the game, but I’ll talk about that later.

“jUsT sTaLl PaTrIoT tO kEeP hIm FrOm UsInG tHe SpEaR tOsS!”

This would be pretty viable advice if Patriot didn’t one-shot my units. Yes, defenders like Cuora, Nian, Hoshigumi, and even tankier vanguards like Zima and Siege can tank at least one hit from Patriot without dying, meaning a squad of healers can just focus-fire on them while they do chip damage to Patriot and stall him out. However, Patriot’s phase 2 has him do constant damage to nearby units with his aura ability, so if he can get lucky enough, he take someone down to a sliver and let his poison damage finish off your staller before they get a chance to be healed. That strategy needs luck and some damn smart unit placement. Neither of which I honestly have.

“uSe SpEcTeR aNd DeBuFfErS!”

Again, this is also a pretty good strategy. Specter’s S2 makes her immortal for a limited time and pairing that with healers like Breeze and Celycon who reduce stun damage isn’t a bad idea. Characters that ignore or lower defense like Pramanix, Shamare, and Meteor are also good. This doesn’t work for me however since I only have Pram and the other debuffers are way too underleveled and not on my priority at the moment, and E2-ing units this late in the game just to take out one boss feels like madness.

“f12 CaN dOdGe ThE sPeAr ToSs!”

F12, W, Jessica, and FEater have a dodge chance. Their dodges are not guarantees. Yes, Patriot will target the ranged operator furthest from him and there are range tiles pretty close to his spawn point for that purpose. However, some of those operators have some pretty damn expensive DP costs and waste that on a chance to survive isn’t worth.And feeding Patriot ranged units that take over 30 seconds to redeploy is a waste of DP in general. And those either dodge chances aren’t viable. Them surviving isn’t a strategy, it’s a fluke, and you can’t depend on flukes in auto-deployment.

“Allen, you’re being kind of an asshole to what’s actually sound advice.”

Yes, I am.

I don’t care.

7-18 does things to a person, man. That stage breaks people. I lost sanity IRL just doing that stage or 20 times with a guide... dear lord this stage.

Anyway, moving on.

Story Notes

My, this story sure was thick, wasn’t it? It’s been while since I’ve been on a ride that wild. And this time around I don’t have any small issues to bring up. All the characters felt in character without breaking my suspension of disbelief. There weren’t multiple character arcs going on at once. And I even tolerated Kal’tsit berating the Doctor for reasons beyond his understand since she wasn’t discussing too many things that were above my head as the player.

No... I only have big issues.

But before that, I wanted to hit on some actual important notes that were very good and smartly written.

Rosmontis and Child Soldiers

This was probably the biggest takeaway for me. I know the Arknights community likes to poke a lot of fun about the child soldier thing and how Kal’tsit is harboring slave children, but... man, it makes so much since now.

These kids aren’t just kids, they’re all infected people with some rather scary abilities. Popukar has a history of mental instability coupled with monstrous strength. Ifrit has powers she can just barely keep under control and could set Rhodes Island ablaze at any point. Frostleaf and GreyThroat are deeply traumatized from their past. The Ursus Self Government are full of kids with hatred, resentment, and fear of both the world and themselves. The list goes on, but the fact is that these kids all either have abilities that would be a danger to themselves and others if they aren’t trained, or have emotional hang-ups that might very well have them lash out at innocent people if not put on a leash. Wouldn’t it be better to at least give them some training and let them hack and blast away at the actual bad guys? Wouldn’t it be better to at least make them a weapon for some kind of greater good? And would anyone else really treat these broken, powerful children as anything but weapons and warriors anyway?

I know this is about chapter 7, but I remember in Children of Ursus Rosa asked Zima why she fought, and Zima casually answered that she just liked fighting. It’d be far better to have someone with that mindset working for an organization like Rhodes Island than ending up in Ursus’s fold and blindly hacking at something she shouldn’t.

And I think it’s important to remind everyone that Amiya is the head of Rhodes Island and not Kal’tsit. She’s a big part of the organization, but it’s the bunny in charge. And the bunny that is herself close to a living nuke and is also has empathetic superpowers understands this probably better than anyone else, which is why she okays it.

Patriot and Reunion

As much as I despise, and I do mean despise, how cagey this series can be with it’s portrayal of Reunion’s morality I can understand why a lot of its members can see the group as being just. Patriot is a warrior of such renown and praise, and Talulah has so much charisma and power that I can see the group overlooking characters like Mephisto and W when the other two do so much for their members and general people. The Guerillas under Patriot behave like soldiers. They don’t rampage, loot, pillage, or harm everyone in sight, only those that halt, stagnant, and harm the infect. Talulah has a charisma about her and attracts people, and seems to come from some sort of royal/noble line to match. And while Faust wasn’t mentioned much in this chapter, he was a soldier that started at the bottom, worked his way to the top, and made sure to play by rules that kept his moral high ground. Mephisto seems to be the only outliner here for some baffling reason.

But... there are some major issues with this story. I hint at them every time I talk about Arknights’ story, but I’ll go into depth here. And I’ll present these two issues I have in the form of a two question:

Who is the Doctor?

I don’t mean this the sense of the story, but what is his function as a character? Is he a self-insert for the player, or his own character to be explored and examined?

And either answer, to me, is wrong.

The Doctor Isn’t a Self-Insert

It’s straight up impossible for the Doctor to be a self-insert character. Most self-inserts are blank enough to let us place our own personality onto them and the situations their in the choices they make are meant to be more or less choices we’d make or at least a general audience could make barring some specifics. Their personalities tend to be blank or at least bland to let us, the players, live through them and project our personalities onto them.

The Doctor isn’t this.

There are too many moment where our choices are clearly pointing to one conclusion and most choices, though varied, give a clear idea that the Doctor is someone that care about the operators’ wellbeing deeply and hates seeing them used, abused, or manipulated. They are strategist and commander, but they have enough humanity to not see people as tools. They are passionate when they see other operators and especially Amiya in harms way and tries to come up with strategies to minimize lost and causalities. Awhile we, the player, feel the same in this regard the Doctor has dialogue that feels more conversational and toward specific directions than what a player would likely want and gives us some bits and piece about what they’re actually like.

The Doctor hates Kal’tsit and wants little to do with her, only tolerating her presence as much as she is with the Doctor. The Doctor is a bit of a bleeding heart that doesn’t fully grasp that they are constantly in a warzone despite their strategic competency. The Doctor has an extremely weird diet and eating style, devouring live animals and ingesting foods that would probably need to be probably mixed and brewed before consumption. The Doctor still sees Amiya as a child despite her mature nature.

The list goes on, but there’s enough there for me to say the Doctor is more like Hakuno Kishinami of the Fate/Extra series, a character that seems like a self-insert but has a number of traits and character tics that keep them from fulfill that role. However Fate/Extra, for all I have against it, makes Hakuno work by giving them their own internal thoughts outside of the player’s actions that explain their dialogue choices and actions outside of the player’s control. The Doctor doesn’t, so them being a self-insert feels really weak and irritating when the dots stop connecting.

But despite this...

The Doctor Isn’t Their Own Character

Too much of what the Doctor does is passive. For a clear as their personality is, at least to me, they don’t have much agency in the plot. Not enough for me to call them their own character at least. They commander the battlefield, but they don’t have a place on it. They don’t have much reason to interact with characters like Patriot and Talulah unless its on the metaphorical and literal chessboard we’re playing on.

Every time the Doctor says something that advances the plot in some way I feel like it could be said by another character and work better. Amiya trying talk down Patriot and explain that Frostnova fought bravely did not need the Doctor’s interjections, especially when Patriot shoots them down in the same manner. In chapter 6, being trap with Frostnova would had worked much better with Amiya since that chapter was giving them parallels anyway. The only thing that really works is the Doctor trying to call out Kal’tsit for her treatment of Rosmontis as a soldier despite her age, as that’s only something that someone who didn’t have the full context could do.

But... Jessica, Frostleaf, Frostnova, Melantha and several other Operators are young teenagers and even children. Specter and Lappland are clearly just as mentally damaged and still going into battles. The Doctor knows the kinds of people that fight for Rhodes Island, so isn’t this just another young fighter like Popukar and Suzuran? Hell, in chapter 6 we canonically had Beagle and Fang in a stage where they had to fight and tank Faust, why is the Doctor so surprised that someone like Rosmontis exist and works for Rhodes Island?

See?

See how trying to give this character separation from being a self-insert and actively slot them in the active story does more harm than good?

I think games like Girls Frontline and Honkai Impact 3rd do this better, where the player character is clearly more behind the scenes and is only a passing influence, if any.

But that leads me to my next question, which is...

Who is Amiya?

Amiya falls into the trope of being a cute anime girl with a mysterious past and dangerous powers. More accurately, she has a mysterious past and powers to the player, but everyone in Amiya’s inner circle seems to have a clue about it. I don’t mind this being a mystery, but... when our main character’s plot revolves around things the player doesn’t know, it’s curious at best, and infuriating at worse.

Folks, I’m not someone that looks to theory-crafting. I’m not someone that reads every scrap of dialogue in this game to find out more about its lore. The lore, to me, is just fun and interesting. I honestly do not have the time and energy to spend on making theories and predictions that could be wrong and a waste of mental energy. However, with all this stuff about the King of Fiends just feels like a waste of time, or at least a last minute addition to something I could had been added properly in Chapter 8.

A lot of it feels like you had to know about the Darknight Memoir side story to really get a feel for what’s going on. The Sarkaz civil war, Theresa, W’s role back when Rhodes Island was Babel, a lot of things that don’t come up in the main storyline. Especially with that bombshell about the Doctor maybe killing Theresa.

I don’t like it when a story expects me to have read the spinoff to understand the mainline story. This is why I don’t like the Dragon Age series and I’m really getting annoyed with Arknights right now.

This bombshell of the King of Fiends also kind of sours a bit of Amiya’s character as this young child who rose through the ranks of Rhodes Island as a charismatic leader being able to steel optimism with the reality of war to forge ahead as a proper leader through her abilities as both a commander and an empath. Instead it’s beginning to come across that her skills as a leader comes from something more supernatural, or at least something more forced than "small child is a good leader and can lead an army,” which is surprisingly more believable and nuanced given how seriously the series takes Amiya’s character.

That said, I recognize this criticism is more my wish of what was rather than an issue of what is. I completely understand that essentially wishing for my own fanfic and limited fan theories to come true isn’t a sound criticism, but it's a criticism I have regardless.

But moving on, there’s one more issue that bugs me.

W’s Importance

I’ll keep this brief since I already discussed my bigger issues of the story and this is an admittedly small portion of the story:

W wasn’t utilized much in this story despite being a main feature of it in the promotional material. She has a pretty lengthy intro, disappears from the story for most of it, then reappears at the last bits of chapter 7 to make mean looks at Kal’tsit and the Doctor before being literally shoved offscreen again. I’ve already discussed my issues with the Doctor’s agency so I won’t bother here.

W’s banner should had been during Darknight Memoir, it just makes more sense given she was the feature character of it and her high physical damage would had been a goodsend among all the arts-resistant Sarkaz units of that series of chokepoint-heavy maps, similar to Weedy’s inclusion her is helpful as a lot of these maps could use a good pusher, especially 7-16.

Speaking of, Weedy, the other operator on this limited banner, has no presence in the story at all. Need I remind you in the last limited banner Aak and Hung at least had cameo-esque appearances in the Ancient Forge event. Weedy’s inclusion feels like an afterthought because they didn’t want the limited 6-Star to have a good chance to be pulled for the whales.

Anyway, I believe those are all the big issues I had with this story, so...

In the Future

As I always tend to say, I don’t like the idea of trying to fix something that has already been made and has already passed. It’s too late to change the past, but I see nothing wrong with asking for things to happen in the future as a way of giving feedback.

To that end, I still have hope that Chapter 8 will have a focus on Amiya and Ch’en tackling Talulah together. From my understanding of some spoilers this is more or less what is going to happen. I also hope that we’ll have a more detailed idea on this whole King of Fiends thing is about. As much as I personally don’t care for it, it’s already be discussed in the story so I at least hope we get the full idea on what’s going on with that plotline.

I also hope the Doctor either plays less a role or becomes their own character outright away from any player influence. Us speaking through a character that already has a personality feels weird to me and I’d rather not have it at all.

Anyway, that’s it for me folks. Next time... maybe I’ll talk about anime or something, who knows.

#your dictator is speaking #arknights

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makeste · 5 years ago

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BnHA Chapter 259: Jakku General Hospital

Previously on BnHA: We chilled with Hawks and Twice, who filled us in on the various different facets of Pliff’s plan to fuck over the world. For starters there are like a dozen new bad guys who are each heading different Pliff regiments, just in case anyone forgot that this is a literal army we’re dealing with here. Hawks also reminded us of the fact that Twice can clone basically any one of the bad guys as many times as he wants now, so that’s a nicely terrifying thought to sit and mull over. We learned that once Tomura is done powering up, the villains intend to attack all over the country simultaneously and basically destroy society as we know it. Oh and also kill all the heroes of course. But I think we already knew that. Anyway, so the one bright side in all of this is that Twice naively let it slip to Hawks where Tomura was currently undergoing his Frankenstein procedure. And so the chapter ended with basically all of the heroes in Japan launching a surprise attack in the mountains of Kyoto, while the kids waited on standby to help with the evacuations. And I know that doesn’t sound very safe, but... well... shit.

Today on BnHA: A quiet morning in the Kyoto suburb of Jakku. All is peaceful -- or so it seems. Little does the elderly CEO of Jakku General Hospital (a stand-up citizen, philanthropist, and caretaker of orphans all across the country) know that lying in wait just outside his doors is a group of wicked and immoral HEROES ready to -- okay lol you know what, I can’t. Not sure what I was really going for there anyway. So! Meanwhile in the woods outside the ol’ villain hotel, a second group of heroes led by Edgeshot and featuring several child heroes in training, including KAMINARI WHO WAS LITERALLY JUST BORN YESTERDAY AND SHOULD BE AT HOME IN HIS NURSERY WATCHING PAW PATROL AND NOT OUT HERE IN THE WOODS WHERE HE IS IN TERRIBLE DANGER, is gathered and ready to attack the League’s main forces. So things kick off with Death Arms apprehending the traitorous Slidin’ Go, while elsewhere the heroes bust into Jakku General Hospital to capture Ujiko. Show of hands, who here thinks this is going to go smoothly? ...Yep. Yeah. That’s what I thought.

okay guys, before we get started I’m gonna answer a couple of relevant asks from last week. first:

I’m almost hesitant to talk about this, because I’m paranoid that Viz and co. could pounce on these sites again at any moment, and so I feel like this sort of thing is better left to private messages and discord servers. but I guess one little mention of it won’t hurt. so the site currently doing the scanlations is readheroacademia.com, which has been around for a while. and there are several other sites which also host the new chapters and have all of the old chapters archived as well. kissmanga is a big one which I know a lot of people use, but my personal favorite is readmha.com (idk, I just feel like its layout is... cleaner? if that makes any sense)

also do keep in mind that all of these sites are pretty ad-heavy, so I wouldn’t recommend visiting without a good adblocker at the ready (I generally use Chrome on both desktop and mobile, and have uBlock Origin and Disable HTML5 Autoplay enabled on my desktop browser). that being said, I’ve never had any issues myself

good question! I was actually thinking about doing a weekly follow-up post on Sundays after the official Viz translation comes out, but obviously I did not end up doing that last week lol. so now I’m thinking it might be easier for me to just post any subsequent thoughts/remarks in the following week’s chapter recap, since I’m already committed to doing those anyway and so it makes it harder to flake out

so that said, my one follow-up thought about chapter 258 is that the fan scanlation seems to have mistranslated that whole “AFO’s resurgence” part. in Viz’s version Hawks was instead saying that the PLF’s plans would “throw the world into chaos and enthrone Shigaraki atop the rubble.” and he then referred to Tomura as the second coming of All for One. sooooo, pretty much exactly the opposite of the other translation lol. this is a big blow to my continued effort to search for evidence that AFO is gonna come back and be the final villain, but I am still not deterred. we will continue to fight on until AFO either actually dies, or does come back like I keep predicting he will! please try to work with me a little better here, AFO

one other thing, instead of “New World Movement”, Viz used the same “Vanguard Action” regiment name that was used during the forest training camp arc. Caleb said that the wording (“kaibyaku koudou”) was exactly the same. so I’ll be using that too moving forward. I guess that means that Pliff is still on the menu though, pity

anyway so let’s get started now

so it’s a house... no, holy shit, wait, it’s the house!

THE NEW TODOROKI HOUSE OH MY GOD. ahhhhh lol what the fuck is this. Todofeels coming up to slap me in the face out of nowhere?! here I thought we were gonna just dive right into the Shigaraki raid and the resulting carnage

I’m... not really sure how I feel about this? like, right now I’m not trusting anything Horikoshi does lol. “quiet beginnings” you say? this is just a sneaky new way to bring me more pain. isn’t it

(ETA: I guess “quiet beginnings” also summarizes the other activities of this chapter pretty well. also is that Natsuo’s girlfriend??! at first I thought it was Rei, but those look like quirk-related ears? so Natsu then really is living his best college life huh.)

oh hey everyone it’s a brand new character!

(ETA: wait, is he actually quirkless? or is that just another LIE. you big LIAR.)

I’m so curious what the kanji is for this latest name. can’t wait for Caleb to enlighten us. I wonder if it’s “shi” as in “death”, just like with Tomura/AFO’s name. and no idea at all what “Maruta” means. basically I just want to know if there’s some pun or something, since yet again he’s obviously using a fake alias here

(ETA: so someone informed me in an anon ask that this is a reference to Unit 731, which was a Japanese unit that undertook lethal human experimentation during WWII. basically the people who conducted the experiments referred to their human subjects as “logs” to dehumanize them. and the Japanese word for log is, you guessed it, maruta. so that’s an extremely powerful and disturbing association for this name, and it’s obvious now why Horikoshi went with it.

that said, the anon said that some people were really upset by this name choice, and while I guess I can understand that, I also think that’s kind of the point, though? like, it’s supposed to be horrifying. anyone with a human conscience and any kind of empathy whatsoever should be horrified. and atrocities like that shouldn’t be forgotten, and I actually think that for someone born and raised and living in Japan like Horikoshi to be making a reference to this is fairly ballsy. because my understanding is that, like a lot of Japan’s other war crimes, it was more or less hushed up by the government afterwards, and isn’t really taught in schools or mentioned in history textbooks other than in passing. so while I can understand people maybe finding it disrespectful, I don’t think it was meant as such. it seems to me that if anything, Horikoshi wants people to look into it and be educated about it. and again, obviously he’s associating it here with easily the most reprehensible and morally sickening character in the entire series, which is fitting I think. anyway so those are my thoughts on that.)

anyway, guess what guys? looks like we’ve got ourselves another Star Wars reference! let’s just hope this particular Jakku doesn’t wind up as wrecked as its namesake when all’s said and done. it’s gonna be a loooooong day

you guys. Maruta is such a nice guy

he’s a philanthropist! and he runs orphanages all over the country! wow! what a great person!! and nursing homes as well, where residents presumably die on the regular (of old age and other natural causes no doubt), at which point they are presumably cremated, and I wonder who runs the cremation facilities? I’m sure whoever it is is definitely on the up-and-up

and “quirk-based community healthcare.” I wonder if they’re selective about who they treat based on what their quirks are. all the better to make sure people with particularly strong and/or unique quirks get the specialized treatment they need!

anyway. see, this is more like what I expected. some super dark shit, and finally some answers to a few long-established questions as well, but not without a price. that price being the churning feeling in my gut right now lol. oh man. well I just ate, so that might have something to do with it. but I tell ya, nothing makes you vaguely queasy like trying your best not to think about a massive conspiracy to kidnap and torture innocent children in the pursuit of ultimate power! so anyways I sure do hate this!

fffff like, really hate it. I HATE IT SO MUCH

[reluctantly goes ahead and slides AFO down one notch on my list of people I need to see die the most] well there it is. we have a new champion

so now we’re cutting to a hero briefing!

y’all is that THE SHERIFF. PLEASE. IT’S BEEN SO LONG. BUDDY I MISSED YA

so Nao says he had one of his guys go undercover to investigate, and they found that this hospital’s blueprints included a giant suspicious unlabeled place that nobody knows anything the fuck about

oh my god. you guys. forget Tomura, could that also be where they’re keeping the Noumus?? omg. omg omg omg. omgggggggggggg. omg

-- AHHHHHHHHHH

IF THE NEXT PANEL ISN’T JUST A CHORUS OF EVERYONE IN THE ROOM ALL SAYING “WHAT THE FUCK” SIMULTANEOUSLY, I’M GONNA DEMAND SOME ANSWERS, BECAUSE LET ME TELL YOU, HAVING ALREADY KNOWN ALL ABOUT POOR JOHN-KUN AND ALL THIS FUCKED UP SHIT MYSELF, I STILL AUDIBLY SWORE OUT LOUD. AND YOU KNOW WHAT? I’M GONNA DO IT AGAIN TOO, BECAUSE WHAT THE FUCK

come on, is Pixie Bob the only one of you here with normal human reactions or what?!

RIGHT?! YOU ALL ARE LOOKING AT A TINY MOUND OF FLESH WITH VEINY BULGING EYES JUST OGGLING BLANKLY OUT FROM ITS EXPOSED BRAINS. NOT TO MENTION IT’S GOT TWO OF WHAT VAGUELY RESEMBLE EARS, BUT WHAT I’M PRETTY SURE ARE ACTUALLY NOSES?? AND A SEVERED SPINAL CORD TAIL DANGLING OUT FROM BEHIND. ALL OF WHICH IS PLASTERED TOGETHER LIKE A LUMPY MOLD OF CLAY ATOP TWO CHILD-SIZED LEGS, which are wearing fucking sneakers, with fucking velcro and shit. fuck. fuck

lol Nao

oh yes, not difficult at all. I’m sure he’ll come along real quietly. hey, let me know how that one works out, okay

“we have the trauma of Hosu and Kamino still haunting us.” thanks for that reminder. gonna have another city to add to that list real soon aren’t we. preemptive r.i.p. Jakku

oh man you guys. can you feel this tension building up

interesting how he says “destiny.” I wonder if that’s the actual dialogue. at any rate this overconfidence is terrifying and I would really like for you all to stop jinxing shit my dudes

-- WHAT DID I JUST SAY

holy shit. please tell me this is a separate group from the Endeavor group we saw at the end of the last chapter

but that doesn’t make any sense though, because this group has Midnight and Kamui, two of their deadliest and most efficient capture specialists. not to mention Edgeshot the literal ninja who can break into anywhere. so this really should be the vanguard here based on what I’m seeing, but if that’s the case why are the eighteen-year-old Tamaki and the sixteen-year-old Toadette right there with them?? can we not, you guys. can we not

fucking shit. at least they’ve got Ms. Joke there too to back them up. if we actually get to see her quirk in action I can die happy. and so, presumably, will the villains

so the “hospital team” (is that the Endeavor team??) said they’re gonna eliminate the villains’ warping ability, which presumably means John-kun. do they even know it’s him that does it?? they don’t seem to actually know who Ujiko fucking is so I have my doubts?

on the bright side though, it seems like this Midnight team is actually going to be raiding the mansion, and won’t be involved in the hospital raid. but on the less bright side, the mansion is arguably almost as dangerous. :/ that’s where Twice is!! and probably most of the League! but at least they don’t have a dozen Noumus in the basement just waiting to be unleashed

god. people, if we don’t get moving on this action soon I am going to give myself a damn heart attack. this is way too much suspense for a chill Friday night

son of a bitch that guy behind Toadette is Honenuki, I just realized. what the fuck, U.A. ?? “hey kids! guess what! we’re going on a field trip!!” ...

-- NO!!!!!!

IT WILL NOT BE ALL RIGHT!! DON’T YOU LIE TO THEM!! WHAT ARE YOU DOING!!!! Tamaki, fine, okay, he’s experienced, and arguably more powerful than half the people there. Toadette, she’s just a kid, but she also tried to kill Tokoyami back during the joint training arc and I’m still not sure how I feel about that so whatever! Honenuki is probably the most responsible person in this entire group so fine. Tokoyami needs to be there to have a lot of angst about Hawks

but Kaminari. Kaminari fucking Denki. no. no, sir. excuse the fuck out of me. how fucking dare you. he is a five-year-old boy in the body of a high-voltage adolescent. and he’s maybe, just maybe, more powerful than anyone else in this fucking group but that still doesn’t give you the right to put this little baby boy RIGHT ON THE FRONT FUCKING LINES!! holy shit! HIS BLOOD IS ON YOUR HANDS!! I DON’T LIKE ANY OF THIS

OH MY GOD

RIGHT?!?!? omg omg omg omg omg

he’s literally wailing “I miss class 1-A” so loudly that it’s echoing all the way through the forest. see now that’s why you DON’T TAKE KAMINARI WITH YOU ON YOUR SECRET STEALTH ATTACK MISSION!! would somebody please point me towards whoever’s fucking idea this was so that I can go kick their fucking ass please and thank you

and here are the rest of them oh my god

Momo, Mina, Jirou, and Kiri at the forefront. okay, fine. this, I do like

so Edgeshot says they’ve surrounded the villains on all sides. man, no wonder they’re so worried about their warping capabilities. this is basically their one chance to capture all the bad guys in one fell swoop. I guess it makes more sense why all their capture specialists are in Edgeshot’s group, then

now I’m starting to wonder exactly what task lies in store for the Wonder Trio’s group, though? because they said evacuation, but is that really all there is to it? it’s no secret that Bakugou, Deku, and Todoroki are the three strongest interns they have. so you’re really expecting me to believe that they put baby Denki there on the front lines and yet plan on keeping their heaviest hitters in reserve? Nao is there more to this plan that you’re not telling us

oh shit Endeavor wants to know where his adopted chicken son is at

it genuinely does warm my heart to see Endeavor worrying about Hawks. I’m glad Hawks has at least one person out there who actually gives a shit about him. even if that person is mister father of the year here. the plot thickens

I wonder if Enji would actually die to save Hawks, if it came to that. which I’m not saying it would. but we all know some fucking shit is about to go down so I’m just having these thoughts here okay!

Nao always looks so tired nowadays. man

so he clearly does know who Endeavor’s talking about, though. one of these days I’d like to get a clearer understanding of what exactly Naomasa’s rank is and how high he is in terms of clearance, because the idea that he’s actually privy to more information than the number one fucking hero is kind of bonkers to me, ngl. this guy is literally just a detective, right?? not even a commissioner or anything. and yet he’s involved in everything. I used to suspect that he might be the traitor lol, and while I’m pretty sure by now that’s not the case, I’m still curious as to exactly what his deal is. does he even have a quirk?? anyways

so now Endeavor is hmphing and stomping off, and meanwhile there are some closeups of Mic and Aizawa

is that a whistle. do you guys think Mic could literally kill a man with his voice. shit. why do I kind of want to see it happen

as for Endeavor, I wonder if he was the one who made sure that his son and his friends weren’t on the front lines with the rest of them. sometimes it’s good to have some influence in these things

looooooool as if on cue

well. that sure doesn’t sound like he intends to keep them out of harm’s way. does he really have that much faith in them??

serious question, why exactly are all of the heroes seemingly so confident that this is going to work? it scares me because it makes me feel like in spite of Hawk’s intel they still don’t have a clue what they’re truly up against

so now we’re cutting to some random street somewhere and WOULD YOU LOOK WHO IT FUCKING IS

Slidin’ Go Suck An Egg. oh how I hate this man

look at him

I hate his stupid face!

OH SHIT

TRAFFIC CONE MAN, ARE YOU FINALLY GOING TO REDEEM YOURSELF FOR NOT RESCUING KACCHAN ON THAT DAY TWO YEARS AGO BECAUSE YOU WERE AFRAID OF A LITTLE SLUDGE? BECAUSE I’M HERE FOR IT! IF YOU WANT TO JUST GO AHEAD AND SNAP HIS NECK, I WILL TURN THE OTHER WAY AND ACT LIKE I DIDN’T SEE, I PROMISE

wow, Burnin’s team really is just evacuating people

I mean they’re obviously going to run into a Noumu, and just like that they’ll be in more danger than anyone, but at least for now it really does seem like the minds behind this raid wanted to keep them relatively out of danger. so yeah, for now I’m gonna chalk that up to Endeavor’s influence that they’re here rather than in the forest with the rest of their class

and here comes the hospital team!

well that answers my question about Nao’s rank. so he’s not even a chief. that really is fucking ridiculous but whatever

and why do I feel like this poor undercover subordinate is mere seconds away from becoming the first casualty in what I think is about to become the most violently snafued situation we’ve seen in this manga to date. like this shit is going to make Kamino look like the fucking state fair. fuck

...

I really wish I could believe that he was about to go down and it really was going to be just that easy

HERE WE GO!!

(ETA: so then they do know that he’s the guy who made the Noumu? including the one that nearly took him out in Kyushu? and they’re still acting like this is going to be a walk in the park? ?? what??)

knock knock, who’s there, JUSTICE

YESSSSSSS

(ETA: sure hope Endeavor’s light here doesn’t go summoning any darkness. welp.)

YOU’RE UNDER ARREST FOR CRIMES OF BEING TOO HORRIBLE TO EVEN FUCKING CONTEMPLATE, LET ALONE JOKE ABOUT! YOU SON OF A BITCH, GET FUCKED

oh my god. we’re really just gonna end it like that. well I guess next chapter we can all play a fun game of “let’s all count the pages until everything goes horribly wrong.” won’t that be a laugh. 10 to 1 the Noumu really are in the secret room and they’re all gonna be set loose by next week’s cliffhanger. remind me to have “Into the Trap” by John Williams cued up and ready to go lol

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ziracona · 4 years ago

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Anytime I see the legion im picturing urs so now in a trial im like "fukn idiot loser babies" *pallet smacks*. Reading ur meta(is that the term??) on Julie just now I'm like. So mad for her!! Get them kids some therapy!! How could the adults in their lives let them get to such a shitty point.. >:( Also, another thought I had with Adiris. The buzzfeed video is more her holding a bunch of cats. Because the survivors are like herding cats. Chaos children they are (im looking at you meg.)

Hahdjsdk god what a mood. Every time I see an Anna I’m just like “!!! MOM?” And get a hatchet between the eyes rip. And yeah! Meta is right.

For real, for real. Julie and all the Legion kids had some real shit going on. Joey by far had the best home life and family, but even he had a bunch of struggles in school because his family didn’t have time or in many cases experience to help him study, and it was crowded and poor, and because he had no help most kids got, he got treated like he was stupider, and even when he had skills in other areas, everyone at school expected him to perform well at sports and not much else like that was fine & he was meant to be valuable exclusively as an athlete, when he much preferred and actually really liked things like shop and ceramics and building/making stuff. But most people treat trade classes like easy As dumb kids pick (back when shop was still a thing), and like it was a worthless skill, and like. That doesn’t sound as bad as like, being bounced through foster homes as Frank, but pain is relative, you know? Bad is just bad. And things grind on you. It was hard to be taught constantly he was only worth something as a skill he didn’t even really care about, and get treated like he was dumb just because he had less help built in to school than most kids there did. People don’t talk about this much but like, having parents or sibs who help with homework? It’s a huge factor. So is just having family who are college graduates (if you go to college), because first gen student means walking in blind & alone & accountable to no one but bills, and like, college is initially overwhelming with two parents with Masters who are helpful. Any time what you value about you and what you love doesn’t match up with what people who have more power than you tell you is valuable about you/should be your goal, it’s hard. Especially as a teen still trying to like hack out an identity. Overly enthusiastic and impulsive, and has been mocked and hurt and turned on for it, but can’t shut it off. Big heart, but the luck to stand up usually just in time to get laid flat again.

And then Susie, with the parents who don’t care for her or pay her much mind other than disappointed looks and an occasional snap or suggestion or urging to try something different that what she’s doing. Bullied for her sexuality, nervous, and in a small town in the late 90s, probably the only lesbian (at least that she’s aware of existing) in that entire like couple hundred people mountain town, and sort of unbearably alone and misunderstood and isolated feeling. God, feeling like there’s just no one like you are out there is one of the worst feelings, isn’t it? Buried in the things she knows people whisper about her and a thousand tiny microinteractions a day that drain her armor. Loves Julie, but is so isolated Julie is her entire world to an unhealthy, co-dependant, and worryingly usable/manipulatable and non-independent nature for Susie. Because she’s so desperate to keep her she’d do anything not to be alone. But the struggle to never be alone by chasing Julie’s shadow means there’s no time for Susie and her own hopes and dreams and choices and developing personhood. But the worst part is that she’s genuinely happy this way, trailing after the girl she loves, which makes it so hard for either of them to confront and stop even enough to just make it healthy again. But she’s built her whole identity on one person like a precarious janga tower that could fall any second if the wrong piece goes, and that can’t be sustained forever, and who is she when it does crumble?

Then you got Julie, hot, popular, ignored personality disorder, proud parents who want her to keep being ideal and their little princess, than can’t handle her as a teen when she’s not in the box they expected anymore and they can’t just live and be proud vicariously through her all the time. Hit puberty early & dated way too physically way too young with way too much older men. Hit on by teachers, by men three times her age in parking lots. Quickly taught it’s safer to say yes than no and sex and love are a battlefield where you use the other as a stepping stone & the trick is to manurver so you’re okay once it’s over and got something while it went on. Had fun being hot and physically developed young because she suddenly had admirers and people were nice, then realized way too late that it came with constantly being in danger and under pressure to keep performing sexiness, and there wasn’t a livable choice to back out and fail those expectations anymore & be okay in her social circles. Knows she’s not emotional or loving in the way her loved ones are distressed about it, but can’t tell why, and gives up trying to ‘fix it’ and just pretends she doesn’t care and leans into being the sexy bitch and the power that comes with it. Doesn’t even know who she is herself beneath any of the ways she lives anymore, maybe she just is the act, maybe that’s fine. Trusts no one and that’s fine it’s just smart. Caught between liking the power of sex and intelligence and coldness, and the emptiness of not really being somebody. Needs to be loved and idolised and eternally aware how much people would hate her for that if they knew it was the truth, so she just keeps it to herself and makes herself someone they have no choice but to love and adore, so it’ll all be okay. Caught between worried she is cold and unfeeling and selfish and proud, and liking the power that goes with that, and the lack of desire to change, and the fear she doesn’t know how to do it. So she mostly just doesn’t think about any of the turmoil anymore and lives Julie instead of being her.

Then you got Frank, tossed around a myriad of foster homes, stolen by the government from the only one he ever was loved in over race, abused in every way foster parents have learned to abuse the kids they were supposed to love, and convinced since he was a kid that he’s a bad seed and a monster at heart, until he leaned into the violence of that to protect himself when no one else did. Harsh and strong and a fighter, a survivor, lonely and a loner, too much past, no future, not much present. Angry, god, so angry, and nothing to do with it. No skills, or money, or future, or any of it. No love, no family. Just the things he taught himself to survive. Just a good liar, a good fighter, adaptable, fast, tactical, enduring. Knows how to pick locks and lift wallets and hoard food that is least likely to be noticed. How to vanish, how to look real scary and real big, how to get stabbed and get back up, and take a fall, and bide his time. How to find north. Which makes for a good what? A thug, a conman, a drug runner, a loan shark or a hitter or a bouncer maybe? A guard, a killer, a thief? No love, no ties, no one. And only a borrowed, angry, violent sense of self, and all the other versions that didn’t live to adulthood but aren’t quiet dead yet buried beneath it.

God, the opening line to the original lore for Darkness Among Us really was beautiful and memorable. The kind of first line you hope for. “Frank Morrison was ninteen, and had little to show for it.” Like, fuck. It’s so understated, and common, and painfully mundane, but that’s it, that’s his whole life. And how fucking painful that is. To be the end of teenagehood, stepping into adult life alone, and be able to be summed up in just eleven words, as a marker of your lived timespan up to now, and the annotation that you from all of it have gained almost nothing that could be worth any note. I fucking love that line. God. It’s so empty, and cruelly mundane and undramatic and unimportantly scored and marked, like it doesn’t even matter that he’s down nearly two decades of life with nothing worth taking into the next two.

Lord, all the Legion kids really do need help, and therapy, and like, one decent parental figure. Thank god for Jeff. He really is out here doing the real work. Love that man. TuT

And you’re right w Adiris lol. 🤣 It’s a mix of cats and dogs, magbe even. Some of them aren’t trouble, but oh, oh some most definitely are. Side note: I fkn just reallly love cats. Poor Adiris out here tryin her best, and I’m sure she does too.

#ask #anonymous #in living memory (fic)#in living memory #dead by daylight

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