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motheatenscarf · 4 months ago

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Alright, well, I still have to do the last trial for Dawntrail but I'm averaging at C to B- territory. There are genuine A-tier moments but they are infrequent and fleeting and with one shining exception, almost entirely due to the buildup of familiar moments with familiar characters we've known for years know.

Alas. They... tried?

Nothing specific, but spoilers discussing the themes, pacing, and general opinions on Dawntrail to follow, you've been warned.

General impression is that the overarching story feels afraid to commit to itself. You can feel where the writers maybe wanted to take bigger swings but then held themselves back for... whatever reason. It could have used a script doctor to marry the first and second half together better and tie in the themes to the characters and make certain motives a.) more compelling and b.) more believable.

There's been a real lack of focus between what the story clearly wants to focus on and what it needs to hurry up and get out of the way so it can show you the cool shit and it SHOWS. About halfway through the 4th zone I realized what I would do as a writer if I were telling this narrative and the further I got into the story, the more I got angry that they didn't do this obvious thing, and I will talk about that in its own post, but god, it seemed so obvious to me.

But anyway, yeah. The second half is more engaging than the first half to be sure, but also makes the first half feel like... a fucking waste of time. And I don't mean that in the sense that "hurr burr, I don't understand RPGs start slow" the way bad faith detractors and diehards have been talking about, I mean in the sense that I know how fucking stories work and oh, wow, this is a BAD example of how to manage your law of conservation of characters. Almost none of our main cast have anything to do while they're here and NONE of these cute little NPCs tied to each of the first 3 zones are going to come back and matter.

Like, y'know how selling fish with Matsya was kinda boring, but it was only one mission and it served the vitally important task of making you familiar with him and his struggles so you would care when he came back in one of the most harrowing scenes in Endwalker?

Yeah, imagine if you went to help sell fish for Matsya and all he did was say thanks, and then like, idk, Thancred or whoever was there was like, wow. Really makes you think, huh? That guy's fishing business. He works so hard. Just a normal guy with a beautiful culture and faith that brings him comfort. This is who we do this for :)

And then Matsya never came back except at the end to say thanks for helping me sell fish.

Now imagine that's half the expansion.

Frustrating. It's frustrating. I want to buy in and care about these people but despite the focus clearly being on getting you to care about these people (an emotional hook they've managed to sink previously with much less effort and focus when being economical with their focus and screentime), it also so clearly wants to just go "ANYWAY, here's the real cool thing we wanted to show you, but no spoilers :))))"

Do these characters matter or not? If they matter, then let them matter to the actual story, not as some generalized "People of Tuliyollal" to serve as a fetish object for the Real Characters, our claimants to the throne, to argue about and fixate on in the second half of the story.

And don't even get me started on the villains. At least Gaius van Baelsar had a consistent internal logic you could follow and understand, and even freaks like Zenos were at least FUN in their unhinged cartoon villainy! Like, Christ, at least we've got tragic lesbians speed running through the WoLEmet parallels, I guess. The speedrunning is what makes it feel weak and unearned because we wasted so goddamn much time in the first half of the story, but hey, the bones are there to work with and like... interpret ANY kind of meaning if you squint hard enough.

Also, wow, lol, they do not... have any interest in even pretending to try to make Krile into a character. This was their shot. They could have done something with her, finally, given her any kind of meaningful internal world, shown her struggles, her unique take on things, her fears, her doubts, her.... fucking anything.

Nope!

We learn information about her past, which she has never cared about and barely expressed any interest in throughout the entire story, but nothing at all to do with how she feels about it, what it means to her, what she wants this information for, whether or not this will change her perception of herself, nothing. She just. Hears things and accepts them as true and we don't get to learn anything meaningful about her other than factual data.

Oh well.

Got some great moments with the other Scions at least, few and far between though they were. Alisaie and G'raha in particular get some great moments with the WoL specifically, but all get their moment to shine and it made me miss them that much more. I have conflicting thoughts about how to resolve this issue, but alas.

Of our newer characters, or at least spotlight characters, Erenville was the standout. Internally consistent AND he has a compelling emotional arc coming to terms with his own homecoming? Congrats, Erenville, you get my gold star for this expansion. Not an S-tier, but definitely A-tier. Also, I know he has no combat abilities, but the Scions could use a ranger and I feel like he'd be very well suited for what I've heard of this beastmaster limited job they'll be releasing at some point, PLEASE can we keep him? I need to see him join Y'shtola and Urianger in picking on Thancred, we have to keep him humble.

I know I'm harping on what didn't work pretty hard, but in all honesty, it is.... passable. It's a serviceable expansion. If you want to turn your brain off and just enjoy exploring an MMO, taking in beautiful scenery, have fun gathering and FATE grinding and just existing in the world, the first half of the story is great. The NPCs are charming if hollow, and the first 4 zones are truly beautiful and atmospheric and I love being in those locations. The dungeon and trial fights are also really inspired throughout the whole expansion! Lots of fun environments and mechanics. A lot of cutscenes felt like they should have been duties and a lot of shit happening off-screen should have been cutscenes, but idk, maybe they ran out of money with the graphics overhaul. I don't have any issue with the focus being on Wuk Lamat, but I do take issue on not letting the player participate more, it's a game, the interactive bit is kind of the point. The music is, as always, fantastic (although I will say I think we're starting to lose some sense of musical identity with how often some of these themes are being re-used, and it's ESPECIALLY telling when I hear Endwalker music for the big Scion huddle break to plot the resolution out, and not, y'know, Dawntrail music).

If those are the things you're here for, you'll have a good time and a lot of fun. If you are here for the story and the narrative standards they've set with the last couple expansions, you'll be a little let down.

I know this was a challenging expansion to write because it's a tone setter for the next 10 years, it's trying to balance a familiar cast of characters we all know and love with a new batch of characters to tell this expansion's own story, it wants to be light and fun and breezy but also maintain the same elevated atmosphere of grand stories that Final Fantasy is known for, and rather than. Y'know. Commit to any one of those, they tried to straddle the line and the expansion was worse for it. I know this was a hard expansion to write, but, well, to be blunt, better writing could have easily done this without it feeling hamfisted, clumsy, or unearned.

I'm disappointed, I won't lie, but I did still ultimately find it... fine. My expectations weren't high going in and for as flat as it frequently fell, it does still have it's charm. I do like just seeing a lot of these characters exist and do their thing and it serves its function in that capacity as well. It's by no means bad, just... not as good as it could have been. Not as good as it should have been.

And definitely not as good as it would have been if they'd hired ME as a script doctor, making Wuk Lamat disabled in some way and giving Zoraal Ja ANY humanity would have fixed this whole thing, you've got themes of family, eugenics and transhumanism, and colonialism as a world devouring system that literally requires one's humanity be purged to abide by, these TWO things would have fixed EVERYTHING! YES, post to follow, I have opinions on this!

#Caitlin Plays FF14 #FF14 spoilers #ffxiv spoilers #Dawntrail spoilers #7.0 spoilers

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yougoadedme · 2 years ago

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Vague references to leaks for 4x09 and 4x10 below the cut! But this is mainly waxing about the differences between what fic gives us vs. what the show is trying to do, from the perspective of someone who's excited about where S5 will go from here.

For starters, I'm quite ok with where S4 ends and I'm excited to see where they take this family's journey next. I love that this is not a linear story, but one with ups and downs and learnings and heartache and mending all along the way — and the thing underpinning it all being what these people mean to each other. As Harvey has said, we're not where we're going to end up.

Now, fic. Fix-it fic is popular for ongoing shows at least in part because of the uncertainty of canon. Things happen at the end of seasons that turn the story on its head by design, and that's hard to digest when you're looking for resolution rather than a thousand more unknowns. People want resolution, we want things to be tied up, we want everyone to be ok and we need it to happen as soon as possible. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, and fic does its duty so well to deliver on those things. We find it hard to conceive of where these canon arcs could go if they didn't immediately wrap up where we wanted them to, so that we can enjoy the safety of a conflict-free world for our blorbos to do cute stuff like go to the beach, etc.

But! Fix-it fics do exactly the opposite of what an ongoing series is trying to achieve. A fix-it fic is trying to, well, fix it! And an ongoing series is trying to achieve ongoing conflict. That's true for a number of reasons, including story ones (conflict is an essential component of story, a story can't be ongoing without conflict) and business ones (neatly wrapping a season, a possibly even the entire show's narrative, in a finale episode is a recipe to get your shit cancelled). But at the end of the day, so long as the show is going to have further seasons, the types of wrap-ups that feel oh so satisfying in a fic simply can't happen in any season finale. Not only will they most likely leave plot threads and emotional arcs hanging, they introduce a swath of new ones! All this, to continue exploring the nooks and crannies of the characters, relationships, and themes.

I say this partly for expectation management. A lot of fan theories for how some of S4's threads might have instead wrapped up in a satisfying way, Nandermo or Colin&Laszlo or otherwise, are by no means incorrect. If S4 was the final season of wwdits, we most likely would have seen a lot of them play out on screen. But that's not what happened, and that's on purpose. The show intends to continue to knead and explore everything S4 put on the table in S5, rather than close all of those capital P Problems in order to play in a perfect-world sandbox next season — like a one-shot fic might.

We care about these characters and what happens to them. That's why there's a fan urge to cut off uncertainty by pulling the plug on conflict at the earliest juncture. That's why many fics, fluff especially, are so short. It's not a story, it's a scenario (and scenarios I greedily slurp up, don't get me wrong, fluff sustains me because I need those sweet and cute situations). But for a fluff one-shot to be a story, it would need conflict, it would need for things to go wrong so that the final act can pull it back together. Even rom com movies, designed to be funny and sweet indulgences, stick hard to this rule. And even fics with plot, save for some really gorgeous novel length ones out there in this fandom (kisses you and kisses you), we're working with a much tinier narrative window than the wwdits canon is. The show has to figure out how to pace itself through what is an undetermined period of time due to show seasons are greenlit by networks, which is much harder. It means they have to make hard choices about what emotional threads they are going to resolve and which they need to sustain, if the show itself is to be sustained (looking at you, Nandor and Guillermo conflict & romantic tension. Looking at you, Laszlo and Colin). Without those conflicts, without things going wrong, there is no show, the story has ended before it could fully blossom. I say this knowing people wanted the Nandermo arc to wrap up in 3x10, before all of their fantastic development in S4!

Anyway. Final point. Big thing about conflict: it leads to development. Deepening. Ultimate solidification of the themes once all is resolved eventually.

#wwdits leaks #wwdits spoilers #wwdits #what we do in the shadows #nandermo

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pynkhues · 3 years ago

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if you dont mind me asking, what was it about the batman that you didnt like?

I don’t mind at all, anon!

It’s an interesting movie in a lot of ways and I genuinely do appreciate parts of it. In particular, I’m enjoying this shift away from the Lucas / Spielberg / Whedon school of blockbusters at the moment with The Batman and Dune where genre-based blockbusters aren’t required to be edited at a breakneck speed or full of quippy one-liners. While I haven’t loved either film, I do appreciate that they’re bringing different tones and paces back to the genre. Diversity of voice and feel is a part of what cinema’s all about, and the fact that that’s been lost in the blockbuster genre film for a while now has been a bit of a tragedy of industry to me.

My issues with The Batman overall really stemmed from what I felt to be a failure to balance the ingredients of its own recipe, and to fall into this sort of trap which mistakes ‘dark’ for ‘good’, which…y’know. Is definitely not the case and I think is a trap a lot of for-want-of-a-better-phrase ‘edgy’ blockbusters (i.e. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets, King Arthur, The Dark Tower, Hotel Artemis, etc) fall into.

I actually don’t even dislike all these movies – in fact I quite like Hotel Artemis – but I do think they suffer similar issues to The Batman in how they work the blockbuster film model, because I think that making a blockbuster is ultimately a series of checks and balances. Bigger can be better, but whatever that ‘bigger’ is, it always needs to be measured against something that’s it’s equivalent in another area.

Basically I think the bigger the explosion, the tighter the character arcs need to be.

To explain this properly, I probably need to explain my personal three ingredients of genre film. For me, genre film encompasses everything that’s not a straight drama – so it includes action, sci-fi, crime, romance – but it especially includes movies like The Batman which straddles genres like noir detective and superhero as well.

SO.

I like to call these three ingredients the Three S’ of story:

Scale

Scope; and

Stakes.

And yeah, what this looks like film-to-film is different (gosh, you’d hope it was), but I think personally that it’s in this balancing act that makes a genre movie work. Sooo, let’s break that down a bit.

Scale

I actually first really started thinking about scale because it’s something that a good friend of mine is pretty obsessed with when it comes to action movies. For her, it’s entirely what they hinge on, and while I agree with her in part, I disagree they're the crux. That said, it’s definitely a crucial ingredient.

Scale can be summed up by two pretty straight forward questions:

How big is the story? And who and what are impacted by the events that take place in it?

Your scale isn’t your emotional arcs, nor the personal stakes, which we’ll get into later, but rather the depth of the implications of the events of the story.

The original Star Wars trilogy is about Luke, Leia and Han, and they’re who the stakes are tied to, but the scale is the entire galaxy, right? The first Avengers movie is about whether this team of ragtag heroes can work together, but the scale is Loki’s planetary takeover (although it starts and ends in New York), just like The Matrix might be about Neo and Trinity, but the scale of who’s impacted by the events of the narrative is, well, everyone.

Blockbusters aren’t always big scale. One of the things I really love about Spiderman: Homecoming is that it’s actually pretty small scale – yes there’s broader implications to the weapons distribution plot, but the scale is actually only a small corner of New York – which is pretty rare for a blockbuster these days, similarly with something like Ex Machina, where you’re in a lab in the middle of nowhere, and while the robot experiment might have broader implications, the scale in the film is really tied to the characters that exist within it.

Scale itself is rarely a problem in a blockbuster (although I do wish movies would learn that the world being at stake is rarely that interesting), but it’s really important that they’re balanced because the bigger the scale, the bigger the distance between the audience, character and consequence, which does lead to problems.

But before we get into that, let’s talk about:

Scope

I tend to think about scope as what the story is actually about. In that sense, who’s the protagonist and antagonist, what are the relationships the story wants us to care about, and what does the story want the audience to take away from it?

Basically when I say scope, I’m looking for the point.

What do you want me to leave the cinema thinking about?

I think scope can be the hardest for a lot of films because it’s a pretty big question, and a lot of the time, movies are balancing a lot of ideas and can lack the throughline.

But all the best blockbusters have really clear scope: Edge of Tomorrow is very clear in this sense – it has two lead characters, one a woman who’s been fighting doomsday for a long time, the other who’s established in the first act as a coward and has to grow to be a hero. They’re the relationship the story wants us to care about, and the story knows it’s themes of time travel are about allowing the latter to grow enough to be that hero. Very simple scope for a movie that can appear quite complicated because of it’s use of a lot of extra stuff i.e. aliens and time travel.

Mad Max Fury Road is another excellent blockbuster with a clear scope – it has more characters to care about than Edge of Tomorrow, but you’re still grounded with a central two in Max and Furiousa, and while the others get strong arcs, they’re usually in relation to the two of them so we know that Max and Furiousa are who we’re meant to care the most for. Their relationship is one of traumatised people rebuilding trust and rediscovering hope, and that’s clear, and everything in the movie ultimately exists in service of that, because your scope is (or at least should) always be tied to your stakes.

Stakes

Okay, so where my friend would always scale, I would always say stakes.

Stakes to me are the difference between a good and a great movie – you can have the perfect sense of scale, incredible relationships, terrific themes, but if your audience doesn’t know what your characters have to lose, then a story’s never going to land where it should.

Stakes are what should be driving your characters, and funnily enough, I think unlike with scale and scope, they’re often best when they’re a bit messy. A character being driven by an underlying sense of heroism (Captain America: The First Avenger) is much more boring than a character being driven by an underlying sense of heroism and a friendship with someone who’s simultaneously their only connection to the past and someone who’s now a brainwashed murderer (Captain America: The Winter Soldier) because it marks a moral compromise that creates a narrative grey area driven by genuine emotional stakes.

That’s exciting, and interesting and creates texture not just in character, but in story and theme too.

Stakes are at their most compelling when they’re personal, and in that sense they should be a bullet through the meat of scale and a guiding force of scope. Stakes are what’s interesting, scale and scope are ultimately there for context and grounding.

A quick word

Just taking off my Stakes fangirl hat for a moment, haha - - look, all of these things work together narratively. None of them exist in a vacuum.

We’ve always seen this balance tip. After all, a lot of filmmakers and studios I think assume that spectacle closes the gap between these three things when they don’t, whether that be Dwayne Johnson flying a helicopter through collapsing buildings in San Andreas or Meryl Streep as an alt-right president in Don’t Look Up. Spectacle can work when it serves to underscore scale or bolster stakes, but as someone who watches a lot of movies, it’s pretty much just set dressing.

What matters is the way these three things work together because the scope of a story always informs and contextualises scale, while the stakes provide the emotional throughline. The bigger the scale, the more you need a human and emotional scope to ground you, and stakes that re-emphasise that.

Take Armageddon which might be about an asteroid hurtling towards earth, but the emotional scope the audience invests in is the Bruce Willis and Liv Tyler father-daughter dynamic, and the stakes become tied to their lives moreso than the planet’s.

Or Iron Man, where the scale is global, but the scope is marked by three pivotal relationships that identify Tony’s past, present and future: Tony’s relationship with Obadiah as a father-figure becomes a symbol of Tony’s bad behaviour and a villain he must overcome to become a better version of himself (which, in Obadiah, is ultimately a version of himself), his present is in his relationship with Yinsen in the cave who becomes the catalyst for Tony’s growth, and the future is marked by his relationship with Pepper, who transcends his past and present and becomes a relationship he strives to be worthy of. This scope allows for the stakes to be tied directly to Tony’s character, and whether or not he’s capable of the change he says he wants to be, but without the scale, Tony never would’ve had the context of the character he is, nor the crucial narrative scenario to change in the first place.

Scale, scope and stakes need to work together because they’re pivotal to story regardless of genre, but I do think they’re the most important to blockbusters because blockbusters are usually the genres with the biggest scale, so anything out of whack - - well.

You feel it.

The Batman

Like I said at the start, there were things I liked about this movie, but ultimately I never felt it really balanced this trifecta of S’. I think we understood the scale as Gotham only because it relied on you as an audience member to know it because of it’s status in pop culture, and that made the movie lazy with exploring what that meant for the scope. I didn’t feel like I knew this Bruce’s attachment to the city, which should feel pivotal to his arc in a story like this, just like I didn’t like how the movie felt really unfocused with it’s treatments of Bruce’s relationships.

I don’t love the Christopher Nolan movies either, but I do think Nolan has a strong sense of scope, and knows how to balance out relationships which I don’t think Reeves does. I didn’t know where our primary investment should be – in Bruce’s new relationship with Selina, his old relationship with Alfred, or with Gordon, his father, The Riddler, The Penguin, Falcone or Mayor Real – it became to me a revolving door of characters the story never seemed to know how to prioritise, and as a result the movie lacked to me a solid throughline.

Bruce bounced between these characters, which is fine, but to me, what’s bad is that he often responded similarly to them. Different characters should reveal different aspects of the protagonist, and we got that a little in the way he got physical with The Penguin and intimate with Selina, but it was in such broad strokes, I didn’t really feel the emotional response they were asking for was earned.

Which is all to say, I didn’t really feel the stakes of it were there for any of the characters. We didn’t know his relationship with his father well enough to understand what the shattering of his image meant, we didn't know this Bruce's relationship with Alfred well enough to understand the hurt of Alfred's injury, we didn’t understand his relationship with Gotham well enough to understand his drive to protect the city, nor a clear sense of his celebrity to understand why the Riddler fixated on him. On top of that, we didn’t have any background understanding of him prior to his relationship with Selina to know what that actually meant, just like we never got anything to Selina and Annika’s relationship beyond vague allusions, which made that arc impersonal, and the entire situation with her Falcone felt undercooked to put it lightly.

There were interesting scenes, and some really fun fight sequences, but to me, all of it was undercooked and unfocused, creating a sprawling story that never really knew what it wanted to say. It never contextualised its scale, never was entirely sure of its scope, and didn’t really seem to understand what its stakes were, and the impact was a movie I found unbalanced and ultimately lacking in emotional authenticity.

#there were a lot of vibes~#and relying on prior knowledge of batman to inform the narrative basically #which CAN work #but i don't think did in this case #anyway this got very long haha #just for the record i think there are a lot of marvel movies that fail in this regard too #but yes haha #the batman #the batman crit #welcome to my ama #writing advice #kinda i guess?m #i feel like that tag will be useful for me finding this post later though

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mexicancat-girl · 4 years ago

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Sooo I read your take on the bakugou vs uraraka in the sports festival. i personally agree that you’re right when it comes to bakugou being overpowered (like when he fought todoroki, his quirk shouldn’t have worked at all with all the ice) and the fact that the females here are underrated and are not written well enough. Also I hate that fan service scene with the cheerleading outfits. However when you called him entitled and said that the narrative is favoring him, i dont agree there. horikoshi has made it blatantly clear that he wrote bakugou with the intent of making fans hate him on purpose. It’s why he’s portrayed as such a asshole in the first place, then horikoshi proceeds to show us that bakugou has complexity later on. He basically wants to humiliate him and make him slowly see his errors, and then basically give him slow character development, which is apt for bakugou since he’s been like this for 15 years. Like you said, bakugou logically should have been tired out near ochako’s fight, owing to quirk weaknesses and all, but honestly, it would also be unlikely for bakugou-trained-since-the-minute-i-got-my-quirk to also lose to ochako, owing to the fact that she wasnt as experienced as him or as physically fit, also for her to win by fighting a “weak” bakugou would make fans claim sexism too due to the fact that he still had to be weak for her to win. Also having him win again would have the same issue. So I didnt mind bakugou winning, and appreciated that ochako did her utter best to do so and nearly won, which I felt was a realistic move by horikoshi to avoid as much as possible a sexist situation. Tho not gonna lie, why isnt there another female like bakugou or todoroki in this class? Makes me upset thinking about it but like you said, horikoshi cant write good female characters, so he does as much to avoid so. Unlike miraculous ladybug which has so much crap going on with so called female strong leads and is slowly becoming so cringey to watch.

Horikoshi may claim he writes Bkugo for fans to hate him…But Bkugo is literally a fan favorite. He keeps getting top 3 in the popularity polls, if not outright winning them.

Bkugo is Izuku’s childhood friend/rival, making him a core part of the series. He’s inescapable if you consume the media (manga, anime, promo materials). He’s presented as an equal to Izuku, and yet never once actually respects Izuku as a person. But Izuku keeps making excuses for him, as do the other characters, painting him in a better light than what’s actually shown.

Bkugo keeps having very small glimmers of moments where it seems like he’s learning from his mistakes. But then he goes right back to square one.

(rest under cut)

During the license exam, he storms off on his own because of his belief he’s better by himself. He ends up having a plan to work with Kaminari and Kirishima, but only because they followed him and put themselves in a dangerous situation alongside him. Then during the last phase of the exam, he tries to take things on his own again, which results in him not getting his license.

Which is a great moment, it seems like he’s getting actual development here! He has to work on remedial exams, puts some ounce of teamwork into getting his license…but it’s all for his own benefit. Everyone praises him over out of their asses over how he’s changed during the training with 1-B, but he still treats everyone like shit. He just sees the benefit of using people on his teams to help him instead of tearing them all down, because he can’t win if he does that.

He still makes everything about himself. Even when something doesn’t revolve around him, he keeps inserting himself into the narrative. He forces more of Izuku’s secrets from him, forces himself to be there when Izuku talks to All Might about One For All, not for Izuku’s benefit, but because he feels entitled to know about Izuku’s quirk. Even during a discussion which should center around Izuku asking questions and finding out more about his legacy and quirk, Bkugo takes the reigns and takes nearly all agency away from Izuku.

As for the Sports Festival, Bkugo would get more humbled by losing. It would show both Bkugo and the viewers that not just offense-based Quirks (or the male characters) are capable of winning fights. Things like planning and pacing yourself can help just as much. Which would tie into Izuku not knowing how to control OFA during that stage as well, using his mind and ingenuity to get himself to the Third Round without needing his Quirk. It would’ve worked really well narratively! And tied things together!

It also would’ve provided more tension for Bkugo if he’d lost the Sports Festival. When he’s kidnapped, the LOV could’ve used that loss in order to entice him to join them. The only reason he didnt join was because he thought they were ‘losers’, both because All Might stopped the USJ attack and Bkugo has a strong quirk that won him the Sports Festival. If he’d lost, he’d be vulnerable and have had do show some struggle over whether he was going to take up their offer, and gotten some character growth from that. Because he’s cocky and strong, we already know from the beginning he isn’t going to actually accept their offer in canon.

As for Horikoshi’s lack of female characters–especially those that actually battle or do anything significant to the plot–I’m not 100% surprised. Shonen anime in general has a bad track record of writing female characters, if they’re included at all in the narrative.

My problem is that Horikoshi has a decent cast of female characters with unique powers, and he goes out of his way to sexualize them and make them damsels/nearly useless in fights and scenes that actually further the plot. Just. Goddamn, let the female characters actually do something instead of standing around being support for the male characters, or having catfights with female villains (ala Ochaco with Toga).

Even Ochaco, the main female character of the series, barely gets any development other than “struggling with crush on Izuku” and “I saw someone die and don’t want that to happen again”. Izuku, Shoto, and Bkugo get entire character arcs and countless chapters devoted to them, and we only get a few pages for Ochaco, if we’re lucky.

Miraculous Ladybug is another beast entirely ngl. I’m not going to touch that for now.

#ochaco uraraka #bnha meta #anti bakugo #bnha #bnha spoilers #at least for the anime #mexicat asks #submission #long post #anyways tldr thank you for the submission #but i am tired of bakugo and how he doesnt actually develop

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scapegrace74-blog · 4 years ago

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Ginger Snap, Chapter 2

A/N I am breaking probably the only rule I gave myself when I started writing fanfic, which was Don’t Ever Post a WIP. But lord knows I’m not immune to peer pressure and the narcotic that is reader feedback, so here it is, the second chapter of what is now an open-ended modern AU story about Jamie the Chef and Claire the Kitchen Disaster. Still a first person Claire POV, so I apologize in advance for any stray pronouns.

For the first chapter, I recommend reading it on Ao3, since I’ve made some minor edits since I first posted it on Tumblr. See above re. not planning on posting a WIP.

Oh, and funny story. When I decided to check the location of the real Ginger Snap catering company in Edinburgh, it was squished between “FrazersOnline” and “McKenzie Flooring”. If that’s not kismet, I don’t know what is. The location I describe below, however, is based on a catering venue here in Ottawa called Urban Element, where I’ve attended a few team-building events. I have yet to set anything on fire, though.

I checked my phone for the third time, confirming I wasn’t lost.

Frank and I moved to Edinburgh over the summer, just in time for him to start his position as Associate Professor of History at the University of Edinburgh. Despite our years spent in America, neither of us cared overmuch for driving, so we chose a flat (or rather, Frank chose a flat and I concurred) not far from campus. Therefore, this was the first time I’d ventured as far afield as Leith, a maritime enclave just to the north of the capital that couldn’t seem to decide if it wanted to be grittily working class or artistically hip.

When I finally reached the address, I had to smile. No main street pretensions or non-descript commercial frontage for Ginger Snap Catering. Before me stood a two-story red brick fire station, still emblazoned with the crest of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Services. The two massive truck bays were now enclosed by see-through doors that could be drawn back on a sunny day. Through these a warm yellow light could be seen, spilling onto the grey, damp pavement.

A petite woman with dark hair manned the small reception area, a red-haired toddler clinging to her like a marsupial. She held a phone to one ear while simultaneously pacing the polished concrete floor. I stood as unobtrusively as possible near the door, but in such an open space it was impossible not to overhear her side of the conversation.

“... they willna take ‘im back until ‘is fever goes down... aye, an hour ago when I picked him up but it hasn’t... nay, i dinna think it’s... tis jus’ terrible timing with two weddings t’morrow... Could ye? Och, I owe ye Mrs. Fitz, a million times o’er... Anytime, we’ll be here. Alright, soon.”

The speaker turned to me, the harried look of a working mother sharpening her already honed features.

“I apologize fer keeping ye waiting. What can I do fer ye t’day?”

Before I could respond, the young boy, probably no older than two, began to fuss, rubbing his flushed cheek against his mother’s shoulder.

“Och, mo ghille, Mam kens ye’re poorly. Mrs. Fitz is coming as fast as she may.”

Unable to quell my instinct to diagnose and then cure, I spoke up.

“I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Based on his age and the way he’s holding his head, it may be an ear infection.” At the woman’s penetrating look, I hastened to explain: “I’m a doctor. Would you mind if I took a closer look?”

Permission granted, I carefully palpated the boy under the jaw and peered as best I could without an otoscope into the offending ear canal. Confident in my diagnosis, I recommended treatment with a warm compress, an over-the-counter analgesic ear drop, and children’s paracetamol to control his fever. If, after twenty-four hours the symptoms had not improved, they could consider seeing his pediatrician for antibiotics, but these were only truly necessary for a persistent infection.

“Och, ye ‘ave no idea what a relief it is tae hear ye say so, lass. He’s my first bairn, ye ken, an’ I can ne’er tell if I’m over-reacting or being negligent. Can ye say thank ye tae the nice doctor, Wee Jamie?”

My stomach jumped. “Wee Jamie? Is he related by chance to Jamie Fraser?”

“Aye, tis his nephew. I’m Jamie’s sister, Jenny. Ye ken my brother, then?”

The pieces fell into place, and my insides settled.

“We’ve spoken before,” I explained. “I’m Claire Beauchamp. You and your brother helped me with a dinner party emergency last Tuesday. I came to return your market bags, and to thank you again for coming to my aid during my hour of need.”

Jenny and I spoke for another ten minutes, sharing the superficial narratives of two strangers brought together by circumstance. She was warm and thistly by turns, and I felt a longing for the honesty of female friendship that I’d given up when we left Boston. Eventually a matronly woman arrived to collect Wee Jamie. I carefully wrote down the exact names and dosages of my prescribed remedy.

After Mrs. Fitz and Wee Jamie had left, it occurred to me that Jenny needed to get back to work. I’d accomplished what I’d set out to do, even if I hadn’t thanked Jamie himself. As I began to make my goodbyes, however, Jenny interjected. “If ye’re no’ in a rush, why dinna ye join our afternoon cooking class? My brother will be demonstrating how tae make quiche. Tis the least we can do, after ye helped Wee Jamie.”

Which was how I found myself standing behind one of six cooking stations arranged across the fire station’s main area, a bright red apron covering my black slacks and saffron turtleneck. My impetuous curls were slowly breaking ranks from where I’d slicked them into a bun that morning. I worried I looked like a human Pez dispenser.

I glanced at the workstation immediately to my left. A slight woman who I guessed to be roughly my own age was engrossed in her phone, a cheeky smirk playing on her berried lips. Her strawberry blond hair was swept into an effortless chignon that made me twitch with envy. She looked up from her screen and caught me looking her way.

“Geillis Duncan,” she said, offering a well-manicured hand.

“Claire Beauchamp. Pleased to meet you.”

“Is it yer first time taking a class, Claire?” At my nod, she leaned in and whispered conspiratorially: “Ye’re in for a treat.”

Before I could enquire what she meant, a murmur amongst the other students (all women, save one) was accompanied by the heavy tread of work boots on polished concrete and a familiar Scottish burr.

“Good afternoon, everyone. Thank ye fer joining me on this dreich Scottish day. I ken a few of ye are new, so let’s start with a brief overview of yer stations and some basic safety reminders, before we tackle the quiche.”

Today Jamie was wearing a pair of olive pants that tapered down his endless legs and a technical shirt that clung valiantly to his upper body. He looked like he’d just stepped off the nearest rock climbing pitch. I wondered if he owned anything that answered to the name of a professional wardrobe, but I couldn’t deny that he looked impressive, in an athleisure sort of way.

“See what I mean?” Geillis hissed at me as Jamie made his way to the front of the hall, speaking now about optimal burner temperatures. “That man is a dozen kinds of yes.”

I concentrated on each step of the ostensibly simple recipe. Pie crust had been the previous week’s assignment, so I had only to blind bake the prepared dough already at my workstation. Once I had the crust centered exactly in the pie pan, pierced with a fork in orderly rows and placed in the oven, I rushed to catch up with the others. I’d missed Jamie’s instructions regarding pan frying the bacon, so I increased the flame, thinking I could make up a little time. The fatty meat crackled pleasingly as I set it in the lightly greased pan. I was inordinately proud of myself.

Things went very badly, very fast. First, my eyes wouldn’t stop watering as I meticulously peeled then dissected the onion into near-transparent crescents. Tears obscured my vision and I tried to wipe them away without contaminating my hands. To my left I could make out Geillis skillfully cracking eggs into a glass bowl, her pie crust already elegantly filled with crispy morsels of bacon and caramelized onion bits.

A vague sense of having forgotten something important tickled my mind. My pie crust! Grabbing a silicone glove (I wasn’t making that mistake twice) I rushed to the wall oven and extracted the pan. Giddy with relief, I saw the dough was only a little dark around the edges.

Before I could return victorious to my station, Jamie uttered a Scottish noise of alarm from his vantage at the front of the class. We both rushed across the room to where my rashers of bacon now resembled blackened shoe laces obscured by a heavy veil of smoke. With practiced ease, Jamie lifted the entire skillet into the adjacent sink and turned on the cold water. A cloud of steam enveloped his head, highlighting his auburn curls. I bit my lip as he looked my way in amusement.

“I hope ye werena planning on serving quiche to yer faculty guests t’night, Ms. Beauchamp?”

I stood meekly next to Geillis for the remainder of the class, no longer trusted around open flame without adult supervision. She graciously allowed me to extract her quiche when it was done baking. It looked like a magazine cover. Meanwhile, my workstation looked like the scene of an industrial accident.

While we were waiting for her quiche to cook, Geillis and I got to know each other a little better. She was a Highland lass from up near Inverness. Married to a wealthy older man, her life sounded like an endless quest for diversion. Despite this, or because of it, she had a sharp-witted frankness that I appreciated. She was also a hard-core gossip.

“Wee besom,” she remarked with a nod towards a blond girl who was currently monopolizing Jamie’s attention with endless questions punctuated by manufactured giggles and flicks of her pin-straight hair. “Tha’s Laoghaire Mackenzie of the Mackenzie brewing dynasty. They’ve a live-in cook, so there’s only one reason she attends these classes, and it isna for the quiche.”

I watched Jamie laugh over something the girl said, mineral eyes alight and his perfect white teeth on display. I suppose I couldn’t blame her. I wasn’t here for the quiche either.

The interminable ninety minute lesson finally ended. I thanked Geillis profusely and we exchanged numbers before she rushed off for her reiki treatment. Gathering my trench coat and purse, I tried to slink away without calling any further attention to myself.

“Ms. Beauchamp!”

I cursed under my breath, then turned to face him.

“Please, call me Claire. After I nearly burned down your place of business, we should probably be on a first name basis.”

Jamie chuckled. It sounded more natural and lived-in than his earlier response to Laoghaire, but I was likely fooling myself.

“Och, wha’s a cooking demonstration wi’out a wee bit of drama. Will ye be joining us next week? We’ll be making ceviche, sae I willna need tae put the fire brigade on stand-by.”

“Bastard,” I replied to his cheeky smirk. “Alas, I don’t think I’m cut out to be a cook. It appears to be the one science I can’t master.”

“Cooking isna a science, Claire,” he explained with sincere intensity. “Tis an art. Perhaps tha’s the root of yer struggle.”

“Perhaps it is. But in that case, I may as well give up now. I haven’t an artistic bone in my body.”

His languorous perusal of said body lit a different kind of flame in my belly. Geillis was right; he really was a dozen kinds of yes.

“I canna say as I agree. Come back any time if ye’d like tae try again.”

I blushed, thoroughly discomfited by his blatant flirting. He knew about Frank. He’d fled from him onto my fire escape, for Christ’s sake! Maybe when you looked like James Fraser, every interaction with a woman was merely a chance to hone your craft. Or maybe he was truly ignorant of his effect.

“I’ll take that under advisement. Thank you again, Jamie.”

“Until the next time, Arsonist.”

#my writing #outlander #ginger snap

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bananaofswifts · 4 years ago

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Taylor Swift appears to be waging war over the serial resale of her old master recordings on two fronts. She recently confirmed that she is already underway in the process of re-recording the six albums she made for the Big Machine label, in order to steer her fans (and sync licensing execs) toward the coming alternate versions she’ll control. But now that she’s followed the surprise release of “Folklore” with the very, very surprise release of “Evermore” less than five months later, the thought may occur: If she keeps up this pace, she may have more new albums out on the Republic label than she ever did on Big Machine in a quarter of the time. Flooding the zone to further crowd out the oldies is unlikely to be Swift’s real motivation for giving the world a full-blown “Folklore” sequel this instantaneously: As motivations for prolific activity go, relieving and sublimating quarantine pressure is probably even better than revenge. Anyway, this is not a gift horse to be looked in the mouth. “Evermore,” like its mid-pandemic predecessor, feels like something that’s been labored over — in the best possible way — for years, not something that was written and recorded beginning in August, with the bow said to be put on it only about a week ago. Albums don’t get graded on a curve for how hastily they came together, or shouldn’t be, but this one doesn’t need the handicap. It’d be a jewel even if it’d been in progress forevermore and a day.The closest analog for the relation the new album bears to its predecessor might be one that’d seem ancient to much of Swift��s audience: U2 following “Achtung Baby” with “Zooropa” while still touring behind the previous album. It’s hard to remember now that a whole year and a half separated those two related projects; In that very different era, it seemed like a ridiculously fast follow-up. But the real comparison lies in how U2, having been rewarded for making a pretty gutsy change of pace with “Achtung,” seemed to say: You’re okay with a little experimentation? Let’s see how you like it when we really boil things down to our least commercial impulses, then — while we’ve still got you in the mood.Swift isn’t going avant-garde with “Evermore.” If anything, she’s just stripping things down to even more of an acoustic core, so that the new album often sounds like the folk record that the title of the previous one promised — albeit with nearly subliminal layers of Mellotrons, flutes, French horns and cellos that are so well embedded beneath the profuse finger-picking, you probably won’t notice them till you scour the credits. But it’s taking the risk of “Folklore” one step further by not even offering such an obvious banger (irony intended) as “Cardigan.” Aaron Dessner of the National produced or co-produced about two-thirds of the last record, but he’s on 14 out of 15 tracks here (Jack Antonoff gets the remaining spot), and so the new album is even more all of a piece with his arpeggiated chamber-pop impulses, Warmth amid iciness is a recurring lyrical motif here, and kind of a musical one, too, as Swift’s still increasingly agile vocal acting breathes heat into arrangements that might otherwise seem pretty controlled. At one point Swift sings, “Hey, December, I’m feeling unmoored,” like a woman who might even know she’s going to put her album out a couple of weeks before Christmas. It’s a wintry record — suitable for double-cardigan wearing! — and if you’re among the 99% who have been feeling unmoored, too, then perhaps you are Ready For It. Swift said in announcing the album that she was moving further into fiction songwriting after finding out it was a good fit on much of “Folklore,” a probably inevitable move for someone who’s turning 31 in a few days and appears to have a fairly settled personal life. Which is not to say that there aren’t scores to settle, and a few intriguing tracks whose real-life associations will be speculated upon. But just as the “Betty”/”August” love triangle of mid-year established that modern pop’s most celebrated confessional writer can just make shit up, too, so, here, do we get the narrator of “Dorothea,” a honey in Tupelo who is telling a childhood friend who moved away and became famous that she’s always welcome back in her hometown. (Swift may be doing a bit of empathic wondering in a couple of tracks here how it feels to be at the other end of the telescope.) One time the album takes a turn away from rumination into a pure spirit of fun — while getting dark anyway — is “No Body, No Crime,” a spirited double-murder ballad that may have more than a little inspiration in “Goodbye, Earl.” Since Swift already used the Dixie Chicks for background vocals two albums ago, for this one she brings in two of the sisters from Haim, Danielle and Este, and even uses the latter’s name for one of the characters. Yes, the rock band Haim’s featured appearance is on the only really country-sounding song on the record… there’s one you didn’t see coming, in the 16 hours you had to wonder about it. Yet there are also a handful of songs that clearly represent a Swiftian state of mind. At least, it’s easy to suppose that the love songs that opens the album, “Willow,” is a cousin to the previous record’s “Invisible String” and “Peace,” even if it doesn’t offer quite as many clearly corroborating details about her current relationship as those did. On the sadder side, Swift is apparently determined to run through her entire family tree for heartrending material. On “Lover,” she sang for her stricken mother; on “Folklore,” for her grandfather in wartime. In that tradition the new album offers “Marjorie,” about the beloved grandmother she lost in 2003, when she was 13. (The lyric videos that are being offered online mostly offer static visual loops, but the one for “Marjorie” is an exception, reviving a wealth of stills and home-movie footage of Grandma, who was quite a looker in a miniskirt in her day.) Rue is not something Swift is afraid of here anymore than anywhere else, as she sings, “I should’ve asked you questions / I should’ve asked you how to be / Asked you to write it down for me / Should’ve kept every grocery store receipt / ‘Cause every scrap of you would be taken from me,” lines that will leave a dry eye only in houses that have never known death. The piece de resistance in its poignance is Swift actually resurrecting faint audio clips of Marjorie, who was an opera singer back in the day. It’s almost like ELO’s “Rockaria,” played for weeping instead of a laugh. Swift has not given up, thank God, on the medium that brought her to the dance — the breakup song — but most of them here have more to do with dimming memories and the search for forgiveness, however slowly and incompletely achieved, than feist. But doesn’t Swift know that we like her when she’s angry? She does, and so she delves deep into something like venom just once, but it’s a good one. The ire in “Closure,” a pulsating song about an unwelcome “we can still be friends, right?” letter from an ex, seems so fresh and close to the surface that it would be reasonable to speculate that it is not about a romantic relationship at all, but a professional one she has no intention of ever recalling in a sweet light. Or maybe she does harbor that a disdain for an actual former love with that machinelike a level of intensity. What “Evermore” is full of is narratives that, like the music that accompanies them, really come into focus on second or third listen, usually because of a detail or two that turns her sometimes impressionistic modes completely vivid. “Champagne Problems” is a superb example of her abilities as a storyteller who doesn’t always tell all: She’s playing the role of a woman who quickly ruins a relationship by balking at a marriage proposal the guy had assumed was an easy enough yes that he’d tipped off his nearby family. “Sometimes you just don’t know the answer ‘ Til someone’s on their knees and asks you / ‘She would’ve made such a lovely bride / What a shame she’s fucked in the head’ / They said / But you’ll find the real thing instead / She’ll patch up your tapestry that I shred.” (Swift has doubled the F-bomb quotient this time around, among other expletives, for anyone who may be wondering whether there’s rough wordplay amid Dessner’s delicacy — that would an effing yes.) “‘Tis the Damn Season,” representing a gentler expletive, gives us a character who is willing to settle, or at least share a Christmas-time bed with an ex back in the hometown, till something better comes along. The pleasures here are shared, though not many more fellow artists have broken into her quarantine bubble this time around. Besides Haim’s cameo, Marcus Mumford offers a lovely harmony vocal on “Cowboy Like Me,” which might count as the other country song on the album, and even throws in something Swift never much favored in her Nashville days, a bit of lap steel. Its tale of male and female grifters meeting and maybe — maybe — falling in love is really more determinedly Western than C&W, per se, though. The National itself, as a group, finally gets featured billing on “Coney Island,” with Matt Berninger taking a duet vocal on a track that recalls the previous album’s celebrated Bon Iver collaboration “Exile,” with ex-lovers taking quiet turns deciding who was to blame. (Swift saves the rare laugh line for herself: “We were like the mall before the internet / It was the one place to be.) Don’t worry, legions of new Bon Iver fans: Dessner has not kicked Justin Vernon out of his inner circle just to make room for Berninger. The Bon Iver frontman whose appearance on “Folklore” came as a bit of a shock to some of his fan base actually makes several appearances on this album, and the one that gets him elevated to featured status again, as a duet, the closing “Evermore,” is different from “Exile” in two key ways. Vernon gets to sing in his high register… and he gets the girl. As it turned out, the year 2020 did not involve any such waiting for Swift fans; it’s an embarrassment of stunning albums-ending-in-“ore” that she’s mined out of a locked-down muse.

#taylor swift #evermore #review

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animebw · 2 years ago

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And that’s a wrap on Thunderbolt Fantasy! Post-season 1, there are two more seasons, as well as two movies that are meant to be watched in the gaps between seasons. That’s a grand total of 39 episodes and 2 movies of content for this incredibly obscure franchise; you don’t stick with something like that for so long unless you’re really dedicated to it. And if nothing else, it was great to see so many passionate creators just having fun doing the things they loved. But how did the future seasons and movies turn out? Read on, gentle audience, and you shall know...

The first movie, meant to be watched between seasons 1 and 2, is less a movie and more two OVA episodes awkwardly stapled together. The first episode details the backstory of the villainous Setsu Mu Shou and how he developed the grudge against Rin Setsu A that drove his actions in season 1. The second episode, meanwhile, is a classic “some dumbass pretends to be the protagonist to piggyback off their fame“ storyline, which also serves as an Ember Island Players-style cracked recap of the first season as Shou Fu Kan listens to the fictionalized version of his exploits spouted by the faker he comes across. Neither of these episodes have much to do with each other, but they’re both good on their own; I particularly love how nasty the battles in Mu Shou’s backstory get, and there’s a very smart, thematically rich twist in the second part that elevates the story a lot. 6/10.

Season 2, sadly, is the start of will become this franchise’s biggest Achilles Heel: overly long, draggy pacing with too many long-winded conversations. Season 1 was pretty talky as well, but it balanced that talkiness with interesting characterization and a plot that moved forward at a constant clip. Season 2, on the other hand, spends way too much time on characters just talking about the plot in between all the (still incredible) action. As a result, it drags on for a long while, and it’s not until the final few episodes that it really kicks into high gear. On the bright side, it also has a new deuteragonist who literally has the power to unleash epic Sawano Drops upon his foes and Aoi Yuuki voicing an evil ASMR demon sword, so there’s still plenty to like here, even if it’s spaced between way too much padding for its own good. 5.5/10.

The second movie, which you should watch between seasons 2 and 3 and details the backstory of said Sawano-Dropping badass Rou Fu You, is the peak of Thunderbolt Fantasy. Since it’s a proper movie rather than a TV series or two OVAs shoved together, it’s able to craft a compelling story from beginning to end, with no time wasted on long-winded conversations and enough space to build a rich character arc for Fu You to undergo. Every little moment is meaningful, and the way it ties back to the present of TF’s ongoing narrative (including future developments in season 3) makes for a deeply satisfying addition to the story. Also, like, it’s an entire movie centered on a guy who’s special ability is to literally weaponize the power of one of anime’s most fist-pumping composers, and you better believe it takes full advantage of that fact. The fights in this thing kick fucking ass, y’all. 7/10.

Unfortunately, season 3 ricochets right back around to being the weakest entry so far. That issue season 2 had with too much boring talking is even more pronounced here; I swear like 50% of this season just bad guys standing around and monologuing about their plans. And if that wasn’t bad enough, the action- you know, the highlight of this series, what makes it worth sitting through the slower parts to get to- is just so much weaker than usual. Not only are there fewer fights overall- most of them jammed into an action-heavy opening stretch, which makes the pacing even more lopsided- but it feels like those fights have been neutered. I can barely remember a single dismembered limb or bisected body being tossed through the air in an explosion of blood that paints the dirt a deep crimson. And that’s, like, 80% of what makes Thunderbolt Fantasy great in the first place! That’s where the craft of this series comes through and shows why it was worth watching in the first place! I didn’t come here to see puppets standing around rambling about plot stuff, I came here to see them rip each other to fucking shreds. But overall, this season just felt like the worst of Urobuchi’s Fate/Zero writing instincts came back with a vengeance, and the many delightfully weird directions this season ends up going in aren’t enough to salvage a score above 5/10.

When will we get more Thunderbolt Fantasy? I don’t know; Anilist has a fourth season listen, but only time will tell when it finally sees the light of day. Until then, I’m content to leave this franchise behind and return to it when it’s ready for another go, hopefully back in its best dancing shoes once more. In the meantime, I have adorable post-apocalypse girls to check out. See you then!

#anime #the anime binge-watcher #tabw #thunderbolt fantasy #gen urobuchi #2016 aniwatch

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yel-it · 4 years ago

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Alright I've finished Fate so here are my thoughts:

•They never should have attached Winx to it, keeping only 5 names and 2 powers the same while changing everyone's personality does not an adaptation make.

•However, they chose to do that so the whitewashing is inexcusable. The actors weren't so amazing and I'm sure they could have found Latine/Asian actors on par with Eliot's and Elisha's acting skills if not better.

•Even if you divorce Fate from OG Winx, it is still a badly written, poorly developed, bigoted, and barely cohesive show and here's why:

1) the dialogue is some of the weirdest nonsensical shit I have ever seen. The writer throws in random buzzwords and pop culture references to try and hide his clear misogyny and homophobia. I'm not sure why they hired a guy who professionally goes by Speed Weed to write the script but it was a mistake.

2) the pacing is bad, really bad. People's personalities change with no explanation or development, plot points are brought up and then dropped (Stella becomes nice all of a sudden and Dane likes Beatrix now when they've had barely any interaction and Bloom's mom becomes nice and caring, Aisha's struggles with her powers and Stella being "broken" by her mom's teaching methods are dropped and now they are totally fine.) and the show drags until you hit episode 4 and then everything happens.

3) the only developed relationship is Silva and Sky's and it is very clear that the writer's favorite is Sky since he's the only likeable character.

4) the girls didn't need to be friends at the beginning but the way they acted was weirdly catty and rude and not how anyone acts when first meeting people. Aisha and Bloom have some weird animosity throughout the entire series and the rest of the girls are... cliquey? Musa and Terra and Stella stick more together and have more interaction. There is no friend group dynamic at all and it's out of the blue when all of a sudden they're all buddy buddy and Bloom is laughing with them at her parent's house.

5) The climax was a let down with barely any loose ends tied up and I understand that there's going to be a second season but it was just kinda meh. I don't care what happens in the second season because the end is so confusing and not exciting at all.

6) The list of bigotry is long with this one.

- Racism- Black main characters are sidekicks at best with zero personality, overall even the background characters are overwhelmingly white.

-Homophobia- Riven is extremely homophobic and although Beatrix calls him out on it she still hangs out with him. I'm not even sure if Riven is bi because the "flirting" he does with Dane just seems like weird bullying. He actively mocks Dane for being bi and yet Dane still hangs around him. The optics for having your two bi characters be villains is not good though.

-Misogyny- writing girls as catty brats who aren’t nice to each other for no reason and fight over boys is a dumb misogynistic trope. Riven also constantly objectifies women and is never called out.

-Fatphobia- bringing in a fat person for “body diversity” who is constantly belittled, barely fights back, and has no self-love arc is not as woke as you think it is Fate.

-Ableism- the concept of changelings is well known to be how autistic children were perceived way back when. Bringing this tale back and applying it to the main character, with the narrative of her being a troubled child but not autistic is... troubling? offensive? neglectful? All of the above.

In conclusion, Fate sucks as a show and was a nostalgia baiting cash grab wrapped in bigotry. If you must watch it please pirate it, but honestly it’s not worth your time.

#fate the winx saga #netwinx #not fanfic #yelhatesfate

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thathopelessromantic · 3 years ago

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Reckless Good (1/?)

Fandom: Boku no Hero Academia/My Hero Academia

Fic Rating: Explicit

Chapter Rating: Teen+

Pairing: Todoroki Shouto/Midoriya Izuku

Note: Part of the @tododekubigbang for 2021! I'm super excited to share this AU with everyone. And please check out the awesome compaion art from @cryptidcatgod for chapter six!

Todoroki Shouto had accepted his fate as a public figure when he became a pro-hero, but there are some parts of his private life he would like to stay private. When he gets invited to be a speaker in a college lecture series, he goes to the meeting with one goal: to give the coordinator a piece of his mind and finally put an end to people hounding him for information about his family.

The last thing he expects is the curious, and quirkless, hero- and quirk-study professor, Midoriya Izuku, who has no interest in his family's history, and, somehow, even more ties to the hero industry than Shouto. Intrigued by the professor, Shouto tentatively agrees to the lecture series, unknowingly intertwining their futures.

But the more Todoroki sees of Midoriya, the more questions he has. When a villain attack leaves them living together until the culprits are apprehended, maybe he'll finally get some answers.

AO3: (x)

Dear Pro-Hero Entropy,

On behalf of Musutafu University, I would like to cordially invite you to be a speaker in our first annual Hero Talks series. We anticipate university students, as well as members of the public from all walks of life, will be interested in hearing from 10 different pro-heroes, over the course of ten-weeks between September and November, as they discuss their experience in the hero industry, the details of their jobs, and the unique quirks they’ve encountered or that helped them in becoming the heroes of today.

I would be extremely grateful if you were willing to share your expertise and be a part of the series. You would be an excellent addition to our program, and our line-up of great heroes that already includes current number one, Pro-Hero Lemillion, the Permeation Hero, and the well-respected, Youthful Heroine Recovery Girl.

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I look forward to hearing from you!

“I think you should do it.”

Shouto pauses with his cup half-way to his mouth as the silence that had fallen over them is finally broken. Momo primly takes a sip of her tea, pointedly avoiding his astonished look.

“…What?”

Momo clears her throat, placing her teacup back on the table and sitting up, somehow, straighter in her chair. Despite the fact that they are in her home, she looks decidedly more uncomfortable than he feels, even by the bizarre direction of their conversation. “I think you should do it. I think it would be a good opportunity for you, Shouto.”

“Have you met me?” he asks incredulously. “There’s nothing ‘good’ about anything that includes me and talking.”

His phone, with the offending email still pulled up on the darkening screen, sits on the table between them. He doesn’t realize he is glaring at it until Momo plucks it up and away from his line of sight. Waking up the screen, she reads over the email again. He doesn’t know why she bothers – they must have poured over it together at least three or four times when he first arrived, dumbfounded by yet another invitation and nearly laughing over the ridiculous concept of him giving a talk on a college campus.

“It’s not like you would have to wing it, it’s still only April now, so the series won’t be taking place until the second term. You would have time to come up with a topic, write a speech, prepare.”

“No one wants to listen to me read from a piece of paper for an hour,” he replies drolly. “And I don’t have anything to talk about that long, anyways.”

It is her turn to stare at him incredulously from across the table. He resists the urge to squirm under the disbelieving look. Finally, Momo sighs, returning his phone to the table.

“I think you underestimate what people would be willing to listen to,” she clears her throat. “You have a unique perspective on the hero industry that very few have, or get to hear about-”

“Because my dad was a dick?”

“Due to being raised by a hero," she continues on, as if he hadn't spoken. "And not just any hero, but someone who was the number two hero for a very long time, and even briefly the number one hero. Very few heroes nowadays have children, and even fewer have children who go on to follow in their footsteps. You’re a legacy.”

“I’m the only one of any of Endeavor’s kids to become a hero. If they wanted to hear about hero family legacies, they should have contacted Iida.”

Momo sighs, rubbing her temples. He’s noticed her doing that around him with increasing frequency these days. “Well I believe they did, actually. And he agreed.”

Shouto leans back in his seat. “Then he can talk all about being a legacy. What would they need to hear from me for?”

Momo is quiet for a very long time. “…Well-”

“No.”

“You brought it up.”

“Not seriously. I’m not going to talk about that.”

“It was just a suggestion. You, your family, have kept things remarkably quiet after it all went down, and I understand wanting to protect your privacy, considering it really is none of their business, but people are always going to have questions. It’s been years since the trial and the media still asks you every year. At least this way, if you talked about it, you could control the narrative.”

Shouto looks away. The setting sun is just out of sight from the dining room window, but it paints the neighbor’s house and the trees along the road a warm orange. The anniversary of the trial, of his father’s fall from grace in the public eye was just a few weeks away, still looming over him, even years after the fact. He has no interest in ‘controlling the narrative.’ He’d rather not think about it at all, actually. But just like every year before, as the date grew closer, the media got more frantic, more invasive.

You would think after more than ten years of radio silence from the Todoroki family they would finally get discouraged, and yet…

Sensing he wasn’t interested in pursuing this topic of conversation any longer, Momo changes tactics, carefully pulling his thoughts from a dangerous spiral. “Or you could have a meeting with the person who invited you. See what topic they had in mind for you.”

Shouto glances at her. “What are you talking about?”

“Well they didn’t just mass invite heroes, the invitations have only gone out to a select few. I’m assuming the coordinator had some idea of what they thought those particular heroes would talk about.” There is a quiet click of her nails against the glass table top as she picks up his phone once more. “You could set up a meeting with him and see what he had in mind. If the topic is something you’re comfortable talking about, wonderful. If not, you can decline the invitation, and all you’ve wasted is an afternoon.”

Something clicks in his head and Shouto sits up again, an idea brewing. He turns his attention back to her. “I still don’t want to give a talk,”

“Shouto-”

“But you have a point. It wouldn’t hurt to ask.”

Momo smiles, but her brows shoot up, a clear indication of her surprise at – and her suspicion over – his quick surrender. “I’m…a little shocked you agree.”

“Well you’d just keep bothering me about it if I didn’t at least talk to him, wouldn’t you?” She glares at him but doesn’t refute the accusation. “But isn’t it just the dean of the school that sent the emails? He’s probably not the sole coordinator.”

“No,” She shakes her head, handing his phone back over. “It says here he’s a professor.”

Midoriya Izuku, Ph.D.

Professor of Hero and Quirk Studies

Musutafu University

[email protected]

It takes two days after his talk with Momo for Shouto to get around to even opening the professor’s response to his request for a meeting.

Kyouka watches him suspiciously from where she’s draped over his office chair as he paces in front of his desk. “What’s wrong with you?”

She takes an obnoxious sip of her coffee. The smell has permeated the entire room and it makes something in his stomach curl with longing, but his doctor made it explicitly clear that he was to take an extended break from the drink after letting it serve as breakfast, lunch, and dinner a few too many days in a row. Something more painful than longing – perhaps an ulcer he may or may not have given himself from his liquid diet – twists his stomach.

“Why are you even here?”

Kyouka sighs at his question, her head lolling back as she sinks deeper into the chair. He’s not totally sure what she’s doing. He knows for a fact those chairs aren’t comfortable. His best attempt to keep people from staying in his office longer than absolutely necessary.

“Kyouka?”

She takes another sip of her coffee. He has absolutely no idea how she doesn’t spill it all over herself in that position.

“Momo asked me to talk to you.”

He stops pacing long enough to determine that she’s telling the truth. “…Why?”

“Because she doesn’t think you’ve emailed the professor back about that hero series yet.”

He glances at his computer. At the unread email blinking at the top of his inbox, taunting him. “I’m not saying she’s right…but why does she want you to talk to me about it?”

She swings her legs off the arm of the chair to sit up right and glare at him. “I resent the insinuation that I am not a great candidate for making you get your shit together. But,” she stands up, dropping her cup onto his desk and crossing her arms. Her expression is fierce, but he recognizes the barely-there flush high on her cheeks and the nervous twitch of her earphone jacks. “I was also invited to be a part of the series.”

Shouto stops, sinking into his desk chair. Invitations like this were usually a pain for him. For one, he hated public speaking – or even extended conversations. As one of the top students at U.A., however, and as the son of a well-known hero, he had been getting requests for talks and interviews and special features for years. Most of which he usually ignored, knowing what it was they wanted him to talk about. But he knows an invitation like this can be special. Especially for someone like Kyouka, who doesn’t have particularly strong connections with the hero industry, even after graduating U.A. Her parents’ reputation and her internship with Present Mic made her more of a celebrity in the music industry than a well-known hero, despite all the great work she did.

“Kyouka,” he says quietly, earnestly, so that she pays attention to him. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” she replies with a small smile, before her expression changes again. “But shut up, Todoroki. That’s not the point. Momo thinks you’ll be dragging your feet over getting back to the professor. But when she told me about how quickly you agreed, I got a feeling there was something else going on.” She braces her hands on his desk and leans into his personal space, jacks floating threateningly close to his throat. “You were gonna set up that meeting, and then just give him a hard time, weren’t you?”

Shouto freezes, caught. “Uh…”

It’s not exactly an admission, but Kyouka throws her head back and laughs, anyways. “I knew it. We’ve all been waiting for when you finally got fed up and picked a victim. I’m honestly surprised it’s taken this long.”

Shouto doesn’t mean for the quiet, astonished chuckle to slip out, but he supposes if it’s Kyouka, it’s alright. There’s a devilish glint in her eyes as she drops back into her chair.

“So,” she asks. “What are you waiting for?”

“You’re really not going to stop me?”

“We’re public figures, the media has never been interested in respecting our privacy, but we’ve all spent years watching you get hounded over your parents’ divorce and your father’s trial. If this is just another asshole trying to get a scoop, or recognition for finally getting you to spill, he deserves it. Everyone would agree. Well…Tenya and Momo might frown at your approach, but I still think they’d support the general idea. And well,” she shrugs. “If he is just an asshole, all the better for the rest of us to know now so we don’t support what he’s trying to do.”

He hesitates, mouse hovering over the professor’s email. “Are you sure?”

She scowls, though there isn’t any heat behind it. “If I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t say it.” She comes around the desk to stand behind him. “Now hurry up, I have a patrol to get to.”

Reaching down, she opens the email before he can react.

Thank you so much for your interest! Of course we can meet to discuss the details of the series more. Below are my office hours when I will be on the Musutafu University campus. If you are not available for any of those times, please let me know when would work best for you and we can plan a meeting then.

Kyouka leans over his shoulder to read the email.

“Tuesday’s your day off next week, right?”

Shouto rolls his eyes but opens a new draft to reply.

Kyouka grins. “Good boy. I will report your excellent behavior to Momo.” She ruffles his hair before heading for the door, grabbing her coffee cup off his desk as she goes.

“Fuck off.”

She tosses her head back and laughs again. “Give ‘em hell.”

They make plans to meet in a few days, when Shouto has some time off, and the professor forwards his office room number and three different maps of campus “just in case.” Which Shouto found ridiculous….at the time.

Now he’s here, and has been wandering around for God knows how long. It takes approximately ten minutes for Shouto to admit he’s lost, and another five minutes for him to get frustrated over still being lost. He wasn’t sure what to expect of the university campus, but, clearly, he did not prepare enough in advance. The large, sprawling buildings remind him of U.A.’s campus, but rather than extra training grounds, the spaces between are grassy plots filled with students relaxing under the shade of trees or soaking up the sun on blankets. Instead of practicing hand-to-hand, the students sit in clusters pouring over textbooks or typing away on laptops. And they, of course, all appear perfectly at home amongst the labyrinth of lecture halls.

The paved plaza in the middle of all the activity hosts a large fountain and a statue of a man with large, curling horns coming from his temples that Shouto assumes has some kind of importance to the school, but that he doesn’t recognize.

He forwent his hero-suit for jeans, a button-up, and a leather jacket – in addition to sunglasses, a mask, and a baseball cap. The clothing seemed to blend in well enough with the other students, if not a tad understated, but his distinct hair and scar are not so easily hidden and soon enough he notices students staring, following his movements back and forth across campus or whispering amongst themselves.

Eventually, a few brave students manage to catch him as he is trying to reorient himself. Again.

“Um, excuse me, are you pro-hero Entropy?” a girl asks. Two friends flank her, staring with wide eyes.

Caught, he pulls down his mask. “Ah, yes. Hello.”

“Oh my gosh! Hi-Hello, I’m wow…I’m sorry to bother you, but it’s really great to meet you!”

“Are you here about the Hero Talks series!?” one of her friends asks suddenly, quickly slapping a hand over her mouth after the loud outburst.

Well…they aren’t wrong, and maybe they can help him. “It’s…something like that.” He agrees carefully.

The three light up with smiles, two of them jumping up and down in excitement.

“Dr. Midoriya is going to be so excited, oh my gosh!”

“You know the professor?”

All three nod excitedly. “We’re all in his Intro to Combat Analysis lecture! He’s been gushing about this series since he got permission last semester!” the third student finally chimes in.

Perfect. “Do you know where I could find his office? I’m supposed to be meeting with him, but I’ve gotten a little turned around.”

The three jump to help direct him to the right building, gushing all the while over the professor and his classes. By the time they finally part ways, Shouto feels a little guilty about his plan to give the professor a piece of his mind over the whole thing and misleading them about his intention to join the series. They were nice girls after all.

Someone bumps into him before he reaches the building, sending him stumbling off the sidewalk.

“I’m so sorry,” a bright voice calls, gently pulling Shouto back onto the pavement. “I wasn’t watching where I was going. Are you alright?”

Large, bright green eyes behind thin, wire-framed glasses give him a quick once-over, as if looking for injuries. The man meets his gaze through his sunglasses for a moment before glancing down at his wrist watch again. Somehow, he feels even more dazed meeting the man’s eyes than simply being booted off the sidewalk.

“…yes I’m fine, thank you.”

The man gives him a dazzling smile, flashing one dimple and further accentuating the smattering of freckles over his cheeks. “Good, good. Sorry again.” With a quick bow, the man is on his way again and headed into the building before them. The same building Shouto was headed.

Shaking off the strange feeling left behind, he waits a few moments, so as not to appear as if he was following the bright-eyed man, and goes inside. Along the wall there are signs directing visitors to particular room numbers or restrooms, and a bulletin board nearly as long as the wall is tall, full of posters advertising events happening around campus, and Musutafu, as well as ads looking for roommates or a reminder about signing up for a study abroad program. Right in the corner, as if attached as an after-thought, or a secret, there’s a small, handwritten flyer declaring the First Annual Hero Talks series could be counted as credits for Quirk or Hero Study students looking for an independent study if they met with Dr. Mirdoriya before the end of the term. Shouto almost takes the flyer before he realizes, realistically, that the students who might be interested in such a thing would probably benefit from it more than his brief curiosity needed to be sated.

Turning from the wall, he sets out for the stairs. The students instructed him to take the staircase on the far end of the east hall (the closest to the professor’s office, supposedly), to the third floor, where the professor’s office would be the third door on the left.

Midoriya Izuku is written clearly on a small sign hanging outside of the office. A small box sits under it, stuffed full of papers and folders that Shouto assumes are from students. The professor’s half-open door is covered in colorful posters and stickers – including, Shouto realizes, another copy of the flyer about the series and a poster of him, Pro-Hero Entropy, from his debut year. He looks away from his younger self and knocks on the door.

“Dr. Midoriya?” he calls, poking his head into the office.

The first thing he notices is that the hero-memorabilia on the door has absolutely nothing on what’s inside the office. More posters cover the entire front of the professor’s desk, and from the looks of it the top of his computer. Mixed between dozens of books on the shelves and filing cabinets filling two of the four walls are hero-figurines and framed pictures of heroes or preserved comic books. Even more posters and framed pictures cover the rest of the walls.

The second thing he notices, is that the broad-shouldered man dropping a beat-up, leather satchel to the ground besides the desk, is the same man who ran into him outside.

Dr. Midoriya whirls around, greeting him with another 100-watt smile. “Ah yes! Hello- oh! It’s you.”

“Ah, yes.” Shouto shuffles a little further into the office, he pulls his mask down under his chin and takes his sunglasses off, tucking them into the collar of his shirt. After a second's thought, he pulls off his cap as well, shoving the bill into his back pocket.

Dr. Midoriya’s jaw drops, his eyes comically wide, for approximately three seconds, before he comes back into himself, steeling his expression. His hands flutter nervously around his head for a moment and then he smiles again.

“Entropy! Welcome! I’m so sorry I did not recognize you before. Please, come in. Take a seat. Did you find your way through campus alright?”

Shouto gives a small bow, mumbling a thank you, as he comes further into the office to sit in one of the two small chairs before the desk. A poster of some of his old classmates is hung at knee-level, and even on paper, Momo's serious expression is judging him. Kyouka is egging him on.

Dr. Midoriya still stands behind his desk, staring at Shouto like he’s not sure what to make of him sitting in his office.

“Uh…Dr. Midoriya?”

The professor snaps back to life. “Yes! Sorry, sorry,” he sits down finally, pulling off his glasses and putting them to the side. “Welcome, again, to Musutafu University. And thank you for taking some time out of your busy schedule to consider our series! I really can’t tell you how thrilled I was to get your email.”

Shouto shifts in his seat. The professor talks with his hands, and every movement seems to pull the beige-colored cardigan he’s wearing even tighter around his biceps. Shouto isn’t usually one to speculate about others’ quirks unless in a fight, but he wonders now if the professor has some kind of strength-augmenting quirk – and if he does, how adept is he at using it if Shouto pisses him off? The potential of getting his ass kicked has never stopped Shouto before, but he can already hear the lecture he’d get from Momo, and probably Fuyumi, if he made the news for destroying a college building in a fight with a civilian professor.

Honestly, the property damage would probably be the least of their worries if he starts fighting with civilians.

“I know you don’t normally work with the media or make non-heroic work public appearances so I figured it was a long shot for you to even consider being a part of the series, but I really think you would make an amazing feature.”

Shouto shifts in his seat. Here it comes, he thinks. He really should have prepared what exactly he was going to say more, but he figured it would just come to him in the moment. Now, for some reason, he’s nervous. As if he would accidentally agree or something else equally absurd.

How this sweater had contained the man’s arms so far was a miracle, honestly.

“…but quirks are mutating, or rather evolving, at an astonishing rate. Every generation we see quirks getting stronger than those of previous generations but more and more we are now seeing children with quirks that have little to no relation to their parent’s quirks, or a manifestation of some kind of combination of quirks. You gained attention early on for being one of the first heroes, or even hero-in-training, to have multiple quirks.

“Now that it’s becoming more common, hearing first hand from someone who has had to learn how to control and gain mastery over two separate quirks would be invaluable information, especially for many quirk-study students who will be working with parents and children who are going through this for the first time, and for those who may have some form of a combination quirk but did not have the benefit of a hero-course education that could teach them proper control.”

Wait…what?

“What?”

Dr. Midoriya startles, glancing between Shouto and something unseen in the air around him. “Oh…” he winces. “I’m sorry. Was I mumbling again? I apologize, sometimes my brain works faster than my mouth and I get carried away, where did I…never mind, I’ll start again…slower. So, when quirks first appeared-”

Shouto holds up a hand to stop the professor and his jaw snaps shut with an audible click. “You want me to talk about my quirk?”

“…Yes?”

“Not…my family?”

Dr. Midoriya lowers his arms to the top of his desk, folding his hands together. Shouto thinks it might be the first time he has seen him completely still since they first ran into each other outside.

Now that they’re closer, and his hands aren’t moving, Shouto can also see surprisingly large scars running over the professor’s fingers and onto the backs of his hands. Those definitely don’t look like something you would get as a teacher. At least not as a normal, non-hero course teacher.

“Do you want to talk about your family?”

He shifts awkwardly in his seat. The professor’s serious attention directed all at him is suddenly unnerving somehow. “Well, no, I don’t.”

Dr. Midoriya nods, once. “Okay.” A pause. “Honestly, I was surprised to even hear you ask, I hadn’t considered broaching the topic for something like this.”

“You didn’t?” he asks incredulously.

Dr. Midoriya pins him with an expression he can’t interpret but inexplicably reminds him of Aizawa back in high school when he was frustrated with students or a lesson or even a fellow teacher. Especially All Might.

“Entropy, you have made it very clear in the past that you have no interest in talking about what happened to your family publicly. And that is your right. No one is owed anything about your personal life. If you suddenly decided you wanted to talk about what happened, and you wanted to use the Hero Talks series as your platform, you would be more than welcome to do so. Honestly, the publicity from that one lecture alone would probably be enough to guarantee the university allowing this series again in the future. But that is not why I asked you to be a part of it. You want to keep your private affairs private, and I respect that. I picked heroes who I knew the public would be interested in hearing from, but also who would have the most helpful information to offer to the students who are studying these topics, and, frankly, they would learn far more hearing about your quirk than your…homelife.”

“I…I wouldn’t know what to talk about.” Shouto admits awkwardly.

Dr. Midoriya smiles softly. “That’s okay. I can give you some general topics to consider, or more specific questions to think about as main points if that would be more helpful. Let me see…” he turns around in his chair, shifting to the side, and Shouto can see the shelves just under the view of the desk are stuffed full of identical notebooks, each with a carefully penned number on the binding. The professor pulls one out and flips through it. Almost every page is crammed with scrawling handwriting, some written sideways or upside down, squeezed into every blank space he could find. The slightly-less busy pages have drawings of heroes or costumes or diagrams Shouto can’t interpret from the quick, upside-down glance he gets of them.

From his seat Shouto could see there were, at least, two shelves of these notebooks. Were they all like that?

Finally, the professor finds what he’s looking for with a satisfied hum. He sets the notebook on the desk, turning it so Shouto can see. The page is marginally less chaotic than others he saw. At the top, in surprisingly neat handwriting and underlined three times, it reads: Questions for Multiple-Quirk Usage (Entropy).

The rest of the page is made up of dozens of questions about his quirk. Some, Shouto imagines, are just general questions for anyone with multiple quirks to consider (Do you activate both quirks the same way? Can you use them both simultaneously?) and get progressively tailored to questions about his quirk, like if there are places he can’t use one quirk or the other and the temperature ranges of his fire and ice, if particular environmental factors affect his ability to use either of them.

“Uh…”

Dr. Midoriya scratches the back of his head sheepishly. He hides a nervous laugh with a cough before taking the notebook back and closing it. The light isn’t strong in the office, but Shouto is positive the professor is blushing.

“Of course, if a list of topics or questions is something you would be interested in, I can provide you with a neater – and shorter – list. This was just a-a demonstration that there is a lot to consider when it comes to multiple quirks. Of course, not all of that would be relevant for a lecture, and admittedly some are just personal curiosities, but…anyways,” he clears his throat. “I’m assuming if you came here thinking I was going to ask about your family…you don’t actually want to be a part of the series.”

Shouto crosses his arms over his chest, sitting back in his chair. Does he want to be a part of a public lecture series? No. But now he is undeniably curious about this professor and how the hell his brain works.

“Do you have a notebook page like that for every hero?”

“Every hero? That would be impossible…well maybe not impossible-” Shouto raises a brow and the professor bites his tongue. “Maybe…most Japanese heroes since…early Silver Age and well-known international heroes? And any American heroes who would have overlapped with All Might’s time either learning or working in America.”

“How long have you been making those?”

He looks down a little wistfully at the question, thumbing gently at the corner of the page. “I was probably four or five when I started my first one,” he admits with a quiet laugh. “None that are here are quite that old, though.”

Shouto has…so many questions.

There’s a quiet buzz of the professor’s phone going off. He excuses himself for a moment and pulls the cell out of his pocket. His case has the design of All Might’s Golden Age costume.

“I’m sorry, Entropy, I have another meeting and I teach a class after so I can’t talk much longer today.”

“I should be getting going anyways.” Shouto says, standing up and Dr. Midoriya shoots out of his chair.

“Right, yes, of course. I’m sorry we probably took up more of your time than you meant to. Thank you for coming in, it was an honor to speak with you.”

Shouto feels like “honor” is a bit much, he didn’t really even say much at all, and he came here with rather rude intentions but, he doesn’t really know how to argue with the professor’s enthusiasm.

His brain and his good sense, and the small bit of self-preservation he has left, all tell him to keep going, to accept the professor’s gracious dismissal and move on, but he finds himself hesitating in the doorway anyways.

“Uh…Entropy? Is everything alright?” Dr. Midoriya asks, looking at him curiously.

Oh hell.

“If you send me the list, of topics…I’ll think about it.”

Dr. Midoriya’s entire being lights up. “Really?”

Oh, he was really going to regret this.

“…Yes.”

“Thank you! I will forward it to you right away!” He drops into a bow so deep, so quickly, he slams his head into the top of the desk.

Both of them freeze at the resounding crack that echoes in the small room. Shouto takes a step back into the office, already reaching for the professor.

“Are you alright?”

Dr. Midoriya straightens, looking a little dazed but mostly just embarrassed. There’s a bright red mark on his forehead. “Oh my God.” He whispers.

Shouto is surprised, and a little ashamed, by how hard it is to keep himself from laughing at the horrified expression. “Dr. Midoriya, are you-”

The desk gives a sudden, heaving creak and tips sideways. The two watch helplessly as the desk collapses, sending the clutter on top flying across the floor.

Dr. Midoriya makes a strangled noise, covering his face with his hands. “Not again.”

Again?

There are rushed footsteps outside and a young woman with six eyes and lavender hair piled in a high bun peeks her head in through the half-open door. “Dr. Midoriya, did you break something again?”

“I’m sorry Kobayashi.” He bows his head again, though not nearly as low this time, and keeps his face covered.

Kobayashi tuts disapprovingly. “I’ll call for another,” she says, already turning on her heel to leave.

“Thank you, Kobayashi.”

Shouto bends down to gather some of the papers that scattered around his feet. Dr. Midoriya lowers his hands, immediately stumbling over the mess when he sees Shouto cleaning.

“Please Entropy, thank you, but that’s not necessary.”

“It’s fine,” he waves off the worries. “Where would you like these things?”

“Uh,” Dr. Midoriya looks around the office for a moment. “Here, thank you.” Taking the papers from him he makes a neat pile on his un-damaged desk chair.

It’s quick work for the two of them to straighten up the rest of the room, though the professor takes a moment to mourn his cracked eyeglasses, and then again when he realizes some of the posters were damaged by the desk’s fall.

“Thank you again, Entropy. I’m so sorry about all the trouble.”

“It’s…fine.” Shouto says dumbly. “Well I should…go, now.”

“Yes, of course! I’m sorry about taking up even more of your time. Thank you for coming in.”

Before Shouto can reply, two new people arrive, knocking once before they shuffle into the office. Shouto moves further into the room, out of the way, as they collect the broken desk and carry it out of the room.

For a moment, they stand in silence, Shouto coming up with about a hundred more questions about the professor, while Dr. Midoriya stands nearby, twisting his hands together in embarrassment. Finally, his common-sense kicks in enough that after another short good-bye, Shouto manages to walk himself out of the office and down the stairs without doing anything else stupid or impulsive.

He passes someone on his way to the doors, so focused on getting out of the building that he doesn’t notice until they call his name.

He recognizes the wild purple hair and slouched stance of the man approaching him, but nearly dismisses the similarities on principle.

“Shinso? Since when do you come out while the sun’s still up?” He asks.

Ignoring the jab, Shinso pulls off a pair of sunglasses and looks him up and down. Despite also being a part of U.A.’s hero course in high school, Shinso promptly went underground after graduation and has been working in the shadows long enough that only some other pros and hardcore hero-fans are able to recognize him out of costume. “What are you doing here?”

“I was…I had a meeting with a professor,” he admits.

Shouto doesn’t know Shinso well, but he swears he looks surprised by the admission.

And then he laughs. “I can’t believe he actually did it. Good for him.”

Shouto isn’t totally sure he heard him correctly, but when he asks, Shinso makes an expression he can’t figure out and changes the subject.

“I’ll see you later, Todoroki.” He says with a wave.

Shouto waves back, unsure of what to make of the interaction, and watches as Shinso disappears up the same stairs he just descended.

Shoving the strange interaction out of his head, he pushes open the doors and steps outside.

Then he calls Kyouka.

She picks up after two rings. “Did you make him cry?”

He can hear Momo scold her from the background.

“No, but I think I fucked up.”

Kyouka is quiet for a moment but based on the noise he hears in the background, he thinks she’s moving further away from Momo. When she speaks again, her voice is quieter. “Fucked up how? Like news crews are coming to report the damage and you might be going to jail for beating up an old, civilian professor-fucked up?”

Faintly, Shouto wonders what it says about him that both he and Kyouka assumed the worst-case scenario for this meeting was him fighting with a civilian.

“No, fucked up like…I didn’t tell him ‘no’?”

#bnha #mha #tddk #tododeku #tododeku big bang 2021 #midoriya izuku #todoroki shouto #fic #rita writes #6.17.21 #fic: reckless good

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theweaverofworlds-official · 4 years ago

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I cannot stop thinking about this deleted scene from IT Chapter 2 as described by Andy Muschietti in an interview.

“’When you see McAvoy confronting his fear in the flooded basement,’ Muschietti paints the picture, ‘and he kills the notion of guilt by killing himself as a kid, he jumps back in the water. He’s lost, there is no way out, and suddenly, the eyes of Pennywise — Pennywise Bill, the kid — come out of the dark. But it’s not Pennywise, it’s the turtle that is swimming by him. And he views the turtle and he’s sort of fascinated, like, ‘What is this thing?’, and very soon after, the kids are swimming after it. So, McAvoy follows them toward the light, and he emerges back in the cavern.’

‘It’s a scene that’s connected to Chapter One,’ he continues, ‘when you see the kids in the quarry, and they’re splashing around, and one of them says, ‘There’s something in the water.’ ‘What is it?’ ‘A turtle!’ And they all go into the water. So, this is a continuation of that scene. It’s a beautiful scene, but I had to leave it out over pacing reasons. It was very emotional, but it was not in the right moment, where things had to move faster.’”

Like I’m sorry how did this not make it into the film at all?

The power of childhood friendships is so strong here like wtf. That’s why so many people loved and related to the first film, it wasn’t just a horror movie, it was a coming of age film. This scene ties into that.

The way it connects the films together shows an understanding and planning of the narrative structure that frankly other parts of Chapter Two lack. (Even if you love the film you know it’s true.)

The fact that it’s Bill’s childhood friends that help him find his way back is beautiful. The entire first movie showed that Bill needed his friends’ support in order to accept the death of his brother. And when he finally is able to face that guilt as an adult he has this sort of loss of purpose. Like he’s been holding onto his guilt for so long, and now that he is free of it he isn’t sure what that means for him, and it’s his friends -- as he remembers them when they held him in the cistern after finding Georgie’s jacket -- who lead him out. It touches on the themes of memory, childhood and growing up, as well as loss and guilt.

I understand that pacing-wise it didn’t feel right at this point in the film, but I will forever feel robbed that we never got to see it. And I’ll probably keep thinking about it until I die

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secret-engima · 4 years ago

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*kicks down door* WHO WANTS TO READ ME RAMBLE/RANT ABOUT THE GRALEA LEVEL IN FFXV AND WHY IT ACTUALLY WAS A GOOD LEVEL AND EVERYONE SHOULD PLAY THE NOCTIS ROUTE AT LEAST ONCE RATHER THAN THE GLADIO ROUTE EVEN THOUGH IT’S TERRIFYING AND FRUSTRATING.

No one?

WELL TOO BAD.

(Unless you haven’t played or watched the game yet and don’t want spoilers in which case TURN AWAY NOW).

...Ahem. *deep breath* Okay so I will forever stand by my opinion that chapter 13 of the game (the one that takes place on the train and then in Gralea) is Good™ and does exactly what it's supposed to in the narrative. That is not to say I don't hate it with a passion and didn't cheer when they added the Gladiolus route for those of us (like me) who didn't want to replay the Noctis route again, but I will stubbornly insist to anyone that wants to listen that the chapter's difficulty and wildly different tone and pacing was THE POINT of the darn thing and deserves some respect for it.

See, the game up to that point is, if not always lighthearted (because it's not), has still been something of an Adventure Story™. Yes there's horrible tragic things like Insomnia falling and Regis dying, but for the most part the gameplay is exploration and cool combat mechanics and the relationship between the four brothers. It's ... happy for a good chunk of it. There's this light at the end of the tunnel, this comfy assurance that there can be a happy ending, that this can all be fixed and tied up in a neat little bow somehow.

Then Altissia happens. Luna dies, Ignis is blinded, and the game puts you on literal rails, forcing you to go hurtling toward A Different Tone. Everyone is stressed, everyone is scared or angry. You’d THINK that this is the lowest point of the story and that surely there’s going to be an emotional reconciliation between Noctis and Gladio and then we’ll get back to exploring and saving the world and all that jazz.

Except we don’t.

The train scene with Ardyn and Shiva happens, and the entire heartbreak with Prompto happens, and that’s when things start to seriously crack. You lose all access to your magic while stuck in this narrow train, then you lose the Regalia, your symbol of freedom, your main way to travel through the game (even when you fast travel, the animation of arrival shows you getting out of the Regalia). You are now trapped in Gralea. In dark, hostile territory with one of your party missing, one of them blind, the other angry at you, and still no magic. Then a few minutes later you are forcibly separated from the rest of your party, the characters you’ve spent all game getting attached to, and leaning on, and laughing with. They are��your last anchor points to the brother dynamic that has kept the whole game on a lighter note and now they are GONE. You have none of your weapons or skills, you have no idea where the others are (first time playing the game without spoilers anyway), you have NOTHING. No hope. No backup. No distractions from the fact that, oh yeah, this is a story where the Bad. Guys. Win. Are winning, have won, and all Noctis (all you) can do is take out the Ring that slowly killed Regis, that Luna died for, the thing that represents everything going wrong and all NOCTIS must do to fix it even when he is painfully, woefully unprepared ... and finally put it on.

Noctis (and by extension you, the player) MUST shoulder the responsibility of being the king of a lost kingdom, of acknowledging that he IS the king, his dad was MURDERED, and Luna was killed for the thing you are now wearing and everything it means. It’s your only option until you eventually find the dead Ravus and take back Regis’s sword toward the middle/end of the level, which you can’t use recklessly because every swing drains your very life-force, forcing the Ring to still be your “best” option in many cases.

Most of that level is spent running, and hiding, and praying that the MT Units on the floor don’t leap up and try to murder you, or that the daemons don’t notice you, or that the teleporting daemon doesn’t find you, or that Ardyn will just SHUT UP because his taunts are really unhelpful right now.

The only hope you have left in this level is to grit your teeth and get through it with the Ring until you can reunite with your brothers and get magic back and go get the Crystal, the mcguffin of this whole game, and put the game back on the normal track of brotherly dynamics and fun quests. Just get to the Crystal, and everything will somehow start going back to normal.

And then that turns out to be a trap too.

Welcome to the final act of a tragedy, and your character is the one living through it. There will be no restoration of the norm until you’ve seen this to its final conclusion. There will be no light save for the one Noctis dies for.

Even when I first played that level (vanilla, not even a day one patch version btw because I was an idiot like that) and hated it because it was terrifying, I never thought it didn't belong in the story like ... quite a few comments I saw on the internet later insisted it didn’t. This is Noctis's story. This is Noctis's tragedy. THIS is the level that strips every last distraction and security blanket and shelter away from him and makes him put on the Ring and thus shoulder everything it represents. There is- terror here, there is trauma, there is GRIEF. This is practically Noctis's headspace without his brothers, because let's not forget that while we the players are having fun fishing and catching frogs for a silly scientist lady, Noctis is a refugee from an empire that MURDERED HIS FATHER and the FATHER OF HIS SHIELD-BROTHER, destroyed his HOME and then, right before Gralea, murdered Luna, the girl who he's known and talked to and confided in via letter for twelve years. This is a world falling into literal darkness (and if the player hadn’t noticed how the daytime cycle in the game kept getting shorter and shorter before this point YOU CERTAINLY NOTICE NOW) and it's up to Noctis- JUST Noctis, ONLY NOCTIS thanks to a Prophecy made long before he was ever born, to somehow Fix It™.

One person. Just one.

And he has to fix ... all of this.

How?

He doesn’t know. During the Gralea level he DOESN’T KNOW. All he (all we) know is that the Crystal is the key, but since the Crystal only answers to Lucis Caelums, that means Noctis is the key, and Noctis (and you the player) is painfully aware of how Not Ready he is.

And the weight of that is enough to render you helpless in the face of it. The fear of that is a maze. The terror of it is a monster following you down the halls that you cannot escape from and cannot kill while it laughs at your misery.

All of that is GRALEA. The capital city of the people who overthrew his home, killed his father, killed his fiancé, and isolated him from the last safety nets he had.

The entirety of chapter 13 isn’t meant to be enjoyed. It’s meant to make you scared. It’s meant to frustrate you and make you feel helpless. It’s meant to make you feel sick when you learn what the daemons and MTs you’ve been killing really are. It’s meant to make you RAGE against Ardyn, and the Empire, and this entire situation because you’re one person and you’re not prepared for this and it’s NOT FAIR and you just want things to go BACK TO THE WAY IT WAS AND ALL OF THIS SUCKS.

Yeah. It does.

And who else do you think feels like that?

Noctis.

Chapter 13 isn’t meant to be fun. It’s meant to make you feel like Noctis does.

And what emotions would you expect from someone who has just lost everything and is expected to fix everything for everyone else, and now has no distractions or shields between him and his grief?

I remember reading an article about “why this chapter failed” and it was basically to the order of “this game is about a fun road trip with your bros and reuniting with your fiancé and chapter 13 breaks away from that too hard” and I respectfully have to disagree.

This story isn’t about a “fun road trip” and it isn’t just about “reuniting with your fiancé”. From the very first cutscene we are told that it’s not in Regis’s desperate (and soon revealed as last) words to his son about setting forth on a journey and not being able to go back. We are told it’s not in the first hour or so when Insomnia burns and Noctis cries and Cor tells us that “in his last moments together he didn’t want to be your king, he wanted to be your father”. How is that a “fun story about a road trip?”. Yes the road trip IS fun for us, and it IS about the brother relationship, but in a large, LARGE part-

Final Fantasy XV is about a young man setting out into the world and facing the hardships of it. It’s about loss. It’s about regrets. It’s about how no matter how much you want them to, some things can never go back to the way they were yet you must keep going anyway. It’s about how the darkness of the world will just keep taking-taking-taking until someone is willing to pay the price to make it stop, and that sometimes a happy ending for the people you love most means giving up your own personal happy ending on their behalf.

Final Fantasy XV never really hid the fact that it was a tragic, bittersweet story.

But it’s in chapter 13 that the story refuses to let you mistake it for anything else any longer.

Could the chapter have been structured a little better so that the gameplay itself wasn’t so frustrating? Probably. I know almost nothing about game design so that’s not really my call. But does the chapter, for all its frustration and anger-inducing inversion of pacing and tone, brutally get the point across?

Maybe it’s just my opinion, but I’d say yes. Yes it does. Because this video game was the one that fully 100% convinced me, in a way that no other video game had before, that the platform could tell heart wrenching stories, could give me characters I would care for, cry over, rage on the behalf of.

And a big part of that clicked for me at the ending, but it likely wouldn’t have if I hadn’t first struggled my way through chapter 13 and all the emotions it causes and represents just like Noctis did.

...

There. I’m done. Thanks for reading my long-suppressed rant on the most hated chapter of FFXV.

#Secret Engima Rambles #SE rants #ffxv #storytelling things #writer things #I will die on this hill

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ljf613 · 4 years ago

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So could you please explain Sessrin to me? I'm not in the fandom nor have I watched the show but from what little I've been told the antis (as usual) have completely mischaracterized the whole thing.

P. S. Can we please ban grooming from the fandom lexicon? It lacks semantic meaning other than age gap bad.

Well, it’s been a while since I last saw/read Inuyasha, and I’m super-behind on Yashahime, but I do love SessRin and am pretty bummed about the amount of hate this ship has been getting lately, so I’m going to do my best to share why I love these two so much.

First off, anyone who uses the word ‘grooming’ either doesn’t know what that word means, or was not seeing the same story I was. The definition of grooming is “befriending and establishing an emotional connection with a child, and sometimes the family, to lower the child's inhibitions with the objective of sexual abuse.” This never happened. Sesshomaru did not look at this traumatiized child and go “hmm, how I can I best get her to trust me so that I can convince her to sleep with me” or whatever-- in fact, a large part of their dynamic is Rin choosing, over and over, to stand by him even as he is actively trying to push her away. (And considering that I suspect many of these antis are also Sesshomaru fans, the fact that they’re so quick to launch such a serious and out-of-character accusation at him is rather strange.)

Here’s their story in a nutshell (and, again, I may be slightly misremembering details, it’s been a while): Rin, whose entire family was slaughtered by human bandits, comes across Sesshomaru in the woods and is initially terrified because, you know, demon. However, despite her fear, she realizes that he’s been injured and incapacitated, and does her best to try and help him (cleaning his wounds, getting him food and water, etc). Sesshomaru, who, up until this point, has been a fairly typical demonic antagonist with your standard mindset of, “humans are stupid, selfish, and weak,” is understandably bewildered by this, and tries to scare her off. It doesn’t really work. This goes on for some time. (Several days? Weeks? IDEK.) One day, after Rin returns to her village, a tribe of demons arrives and kills everyone. Rin tries to run back to the woods and escape, but the demons eventually catch and kill her. Sesshomaru finds her body, and, for some reason even he doesn’t understand, decides to use his magic sword that brings people back from the dead (yes he has one of those) to revive her. (This is significant because up until this point he has never even used the sword, as he hated the fact that he’d gotten the stupid healing sword while his little brother got the cool, killing sword.) And Rin, who has no one left and no home to go back to, decides to travel with him. (One of the interesting things here is that, despite the fact that she was killed by demons, Rin is actually more afraid of humans, because they’re the ones who murdered her family.)

Their relationship throughout the course of the story is fascinating. At first glance, it might seem like Sesshomaru is always the one saving her, but she saves him too. Rin forced him to acknowledge that the world wasn’t black-and-white, that humans were complex, that just because he didn’t like someone or something didn’t mean it didn’t have a right to exist. Sesshomaru’s arc is subtle, but by the end of the story, he’s fighting side by side with the heroes-- something that would never have happened if he hadn’t met Rin.

Now, the thing here is that, for most of the story Rin is eight years old. Their relationship is never, ever shown as sexual, but there’s clearly love there, and the implication the story ends with is that they will likely get together once Rin is older. I’ve heard antis say that they read the relationship as being more along the lines of “Sesshomaru ‘adopts’ Rin,” which explains a lot. However, I personally never saw it that way. They were partners-- just because Rin didn’t take out a sword and fight off anyone who tried to hurt Sesshomaru doesn’t mean she she was primarily on the receiving end of the relationship. (In a story about battling evil, where nearly all of the characters are these awesome fighters, it’s pretty cool to see a character who is not a warrior, who just gives and loves and trusts and cares, and is never treated as lesser by either the characters or the narrative because of this. I really love Rin.) I think it’s a cultural thing-- people are used to the narrative of ‘coldhearted bachelor meets and adopts lovable scamp who reminds him how to love again’ and are primed to see it even in a story from an entirely different culture set five hundred years in the past.

(Part of it is also about shipping wars-- many of the antis ship Sesshomaru with other characters, particularly Kagura, and would rather make the argument about morality versus just saying that they would prefer something a little different.)

Here’s where I admit it gets a little bit sticky: How much of this is Rin just imprinting on Sesshomaru and using him as an excuse to avoid her trauma surrounding other humans? And the narrative did a great job of resolving this dilemma. Near the end of the story, Rin leaves Sesshomaru. She goes to live among humans, to learn how to be human again, so that once she’s an adult, she has the agency to make an informed decision about what she really wants.

There happens to be an audio-drama CD that was released in Japan sometime after the show ended, which is set just after the original story ends (when Rin is eleven). In it, Sesshomaru says something to Rin which is referred to by one of the other characters as a ‘proposal.’ Now, I don’t follow anti discourse, so I’m not sure if they know about it, but I can imagine they’d have a field day with that one. “Omigoodness, he proposed to an eleven year old, that’s so creepy.” However, there’s some context involved. The word ‘proposal’ is used by one of the other characters-- who happens to have time-travelled from five hundred years later (that is, the present day). The whole plot of the CD starts when she complains to her husband/lover/whatever-their-relationship-status-is-supposed-to-be that he never actually proposed to her, and since he doesn’t know what a proposal is (because, again, culture gap), he thinks it’s some sort of monster she wants him to go fight for her before they can actually be married, and hilaraity ensues. She calls Sesshomaru’s words to Rin a proposal as in “see, that’s what a proposal is supposed to look like.” It has very little to do with SessRin in and of themselves.

For reference, here’s what Sesshomaru actually said in this so-called ‘proposal’ (thanks to @inu-drama for the translation):

“Rin, have you grown accustomed to life in the village? No one is bullying you or anything? Did you make a kimono out of the cloth I gave you the other day? When you are troubled, or anxious, or sad, or any other time, feel free to call on me. I will come to you immediately. Even if we are far apart, if you call my name I will absolutely come flying to you. If you cannot speak, you can whistle. Whistle through your fingers, if you like. Distance is no object. Our hearts are tied together. With the power of trust, there is nothing to fear. Simply having that feeling should be enough to fill your heart. That is why it is fine for things to remain as they are for now. We have plenty of time. You can examine your heart at your own pace. Until then, take care of yourself.”

(Is there something inherently creepy or predatory about that?)

To me, SessRin is about love, in its purest form. It’s about believing in someone when the rest of the world is against them. It’s about choosing the person who chooses you. It’s about learning and growing and changing together.

What’s that quote-- I think it was from Dawson’s Creek or something? “What's a soulmate?” “It's uh... Well, it's like a best friend but more. It's the one person in the world that knows you better than anyone else. It's someone who makes you a better person. Actually, they don't make you a better person, you do that yourself - because they inspire you. A soulmate is someone who you carry with you forever. It's the one person who knew you and accepted you and believed in you before anyone else did, or when no one else would. And no matter what happens, you will always love them. Nothing can ever change that.” Yeah, that one. That’s what SessRin is about.

#inuyasha #thoughts #sessxrin #sesshomaru #rin #anti anti #love is a choice #otp: nothing was worth losing her

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