#or don't nobody's gonna see it anyway

[baxieblur-turnip]

kinda angsty art warning - tw very minor blood, religious (ish) imagery? idk dude

yeah. baby's first proper art I guess. rare that i draw something original that ain't schoolwork or just a headshot haha

idk why i did this but eh. kinda like how it turned out. maybe will clean it up later, make it neater, but for now i am fine with this the way it is :)

[helielune]

and stalling only goes so far when you've got a head start

[moe-broey]

My homunculus

Hashtag my homunculus

[soulfullives]

i think that we often do forget that the black brothers were not inherently good people; they were more or less morally grey, more or less leaning towards the good/bad side. it's hard to fully unlearn beliefs of your family (and i think that many people resonate with this statement, whether we are talking about fictional characters or real, fully-fledged people), and i think that morally grey characters are far more interesting than people who are inherently good or evil.

sirius black

many people (including myself) would say that sirius is leaning more towards the lighter end of the spectrum, given the fact that he actively tried to unlearn his family's beliefs, he ran away from home at the age of sixteen and decided to move in with people who were recognized in the wizarding society as good people, he joined the order as soon as he finished hogwarts, and, even after the unfortunate ending of the first war, he decided to join the order again and stay inside a house that was never a home for him, to ensure the safety of himself, the order, and harry, too. his last act was the attack at the ministry where he found himself, despite the fact that he was supposed to stay inside grimmauld place, and where he died.

however, we cannot deny that sirius, too, had slip-ups. one of them was the prank (to review what happened, essentially, he told snape how to get past the whomping willow, therefore revealing remus' secret to him). in this situation, sirius shows recklessness and a lack of thought towards the consequences that his actions could have towards not only himself, but severus snape and remus, too. his behavior showed a lack of altruism, and a lack of consideration for the people around him, being willing to put them in danger for whatever may have been the reason.

another one would be swm (snape's worst memory), where james is a part of the action too, but the tormenting of snape was unjustified (j&s started the fight, and snape responded) and ended badly. now, i am in no way a defender of severus snape's, but both j&s and him were acting based on either boredom (the aforementioned) and a need for revenge caused by the actions that had happened against him (the latter).

in canon, we are also shown that he does not exactly think the words he says, and the effect they have on people. (“You're less like your father than I thought.” — GoF). i think that sirius had no right to say this to harry, who was just trying to make sure that sirius would be safe. what we need to remember is that, by the time of the action of GoF took place, sirius was still on the run, and the ministry was still looking for him; it would have been dangerous for both him and harry (and whoever might have joined them) to go out of hiding and go meet up somewhere near hogwarts (hogsmeade). harry's response to sirius' request was logical, and sirius' response was reckless and not well-thought.

regulus black

we do not have enough information on regulus to fully state on which side of the spectrum he finds himself on. however, he was known to have held the same beliefs that his parents did and to be an open voldemort supporter (The Slytherin colours of emerald and silver were everywhere, draping the bed, the walls and the windows. The Black Family crest was painstakingly painted over the bed, along with its motto Toujours Pur. Beneath this was a collection of yellow newspaper cuttings (of voldemort), all stuck together to make a ragged collage.)

therefore, to some extent, we can safely assume that he held the same beliefs as him (and, implicitly, his parents). the voldemort collage might have been on the wall for either research purposes or an act of devotion (this interesting perspective has been added by @/werewolfenthusiast) we cannot be sure; however, i am inclined to think that it might have been a mixture of both.

furthermore, i think the fact that regulus only started actively betraying and going against voldemort only after voldemort's actions had direct consequences on him and the ones he loved — kreacher, and this is shown in two acts; (wording taken off the hp wiki)

After becoming a Death Eater, Regulus began to consider abandoning Lord Voldemort, partly because his master mistreated and intended to kill the Black family's loyal house-elf Kreacher whilst setting up the security measures for one of his Horcruxes.

One day, Voldemort asked Regulus for the use of his house-elf, Kreacher and Regulus eagerly accepted as he wanted to please his master. Voldemort used Kreacher to test the defences around his locket Horcrux, leaving him to die afterwards. Kreacher was able to escape using house-elf magic and told Regulus of what had happened. Regulus worked out that the locket was a Horcrux and was the reason behind Voldemort's immortality. This was the deciding factor in Regulus's defection.

therefore, regulus has been shown to feel remorse and to start to realize the lenghts lord voldemort would go through only when his family (implicitly, his house-elf) were targeted. however, by researching horcruxes and trying to destroy one of them, regulus (un)willingly helped the wizarding world towards voldemort's fall.

all in all, the black brothers are two complex characters who, to some extent, held their family's beliefs and values. whether they had actively tried to unlearn them (sirius) or their betrayal was slow and silent (regulus), and neither of them can be fit in the category of inherently good or bad people.

[thevioletcaptain]

if you as a fic reader ever become possessed by the urge to do a popularity bracket with the fics other people wrote and shared for fun and for free, consider:

don't ❤️ 

[skrunksthatwunk]

idk if i've discussed it before (i have certainly THOUGHT about it) but someone on my kuwa suffering ep 89 comp mentioned it and i just had to go off about it like. ok. sensui tells yusuke something along the lines of "you heard itsuki" when itsuki's inside the uraotoko, implying that not only can sensui hear those inside the uraotoko, but that he expects yusuke to be able to as well. which means that yusuke Almost Certainly Heard And Kind Of Ignored kuwabara's prolonged mental breakdown and wailing about how much he needs yusuke to live etc. which. guHHH i hate him yusuke you ass but also listen.

the only acknowledgement yusuke gives to this (if any) is when he says something like "sensui you're sooo fucking cooked this plan's going perfectly (my friends are going to get strong and kill you when i die)." he's trash talking to sensui, ignoring the others because, i think, he doesn't want to acknowledge what he's doing to them.

yusuke is explicitly recreating the experience he had with kuwabara's "death" at the hands of toguro, complete with the announcement of intent (and power) to kill, the inability to impede the threat in any way (barring a power-breakthrough), and the target in some way racing towards/volunteering for their death. yusuke learns through doing, and through tough love-style approaches. it's only effective if it hurts. watching kuwabara die like that was devastating to yusuke, but it sure as hell fucking worked. he beat toguro because of that maneuver. so even if he has to (re-)traumatize his friends in the process, this method will make his friends stronger, and he feels confident in that. but he never had to live with the consequences of kuwabara's death, not really. that's something hiei makes clear before they enter the cave as well, that there are no fake-outs ready to make him or anyone else stronger. the only deaths here will be real. the only power gained will come at a high, permanent cost. hiei's warning is an attempt to keep everyone alive, to keep yusuke from being stupid. and then yusuke decides to take that fatality into his own hands, but it's kind of his friends who would pay the price. he's going to make them live through the days, months, years without him, the actual permanency of loss (assuming they survive for that long), something he never experienced with kuwabara (a new facet of that traumatic scenario), AND he's escaping the emotional fallout of this choice through death. he doesn't have to see them mourn, won't get yelled at, won't watch them fail to move on. he's tapping out and choosing to believe they'll be fine.

but i think he feels guilty. just a little. i mean, yusuke couldn't even believe that people cared about him enough to want him alive in episode one. he's staked everything on his friends, which means he still kind of... doesn't value his own life, at least not compared to theirs. but he believes his friends love him and want him around, and we know that because he has to, or else he wouldn't make a plan that depends entirely on that love. he is actively leveraging the care he doesn't think he deserves, trying to hurt them in a way he is intimately familiar with (only worse), for.... what, exactly?

this is kind of my sticking point tbh. i don't think the answer is... super clear, but let's start with what it's not.

yusuke is not doing this because it is the most practical way to save all of humanity; that would be the mafukan, which he stopped. it could be a gamble to save all of his friends? the mafukan strategy would guarantee koenma's death/eternal imprisonment, whereas this strategy gambles all of humanity on the chance that his friends come out of the Easy Break Oven strong enough to avert the end of the world. if the sacrifice of even one friend is completely intolerable, perhaps he'd accept those slim odds and their steep consequences. yusuke tends to take risks like that, especially when he's got fight-induced tunnel vision. he doesn't think things through too much; his schemes are usually dependent on surprising his enemy enough to oneshot them. truthfully, i think this is the closest we'll get to an answer, and it's a more conventional one for this kind of story. but there is another layer i haven't been able to get from my mind.

i think yusuke is gifting each of his friends an honorable warrior's death.

so, in case it needs saying, yusuke, kuwabara, kurama, and hiei all (at least once, if not several times) exhibit a desire to die in combat in a way they deem noble to give their lives purpose (usually by self-sacrifice, but sometimes by another metric of honor, like hiei's duel with shigure and his desire to die in mutual defeat against an evenly matched opponent; or even kurama's decision to fight shigure in his human form, displaying a sort of passive suicidality via placing being true to himself in this (somewhat symbolic/inconsequential) way over survival). they need to make their lives count for something, because they feel guilty for being alive (kurama and hiei feel guilty for their past actions (hiei's is most evident in his distance from yukina, though that's not its primary reason), hiei, kuwabara, and yusuke have all been ostracized and made to feel like burdens on/unwanted by their caregivers and general society; all four of them have felt profound isolation even from their loved ones (yusuke and hiei are rather obvious; kurama can never tell his mother about the majority of his life nor what she truly means to him in the context of it; and kuwabara is separated from his peers for his spiritual awareness and his "stupidity" (plus his parents aren't around? and he is Desperate to define manhood/manliness through a broader pop cultural one which includes the warrior sacrifice thing bc he has no male role models BUT that's for another post) (i will admit kuwa's the most tenuous one here irt isolation)). they want to die for a cause so badly it's actually physically painful to me. it is passive suicidality, and they define their lives and identities by their relation to, engagement with, and skill at doing violence, etc. they live to die by the sword. anyway. nobody talks about it but i think it's very important to understanding what yusuke's doing here.

because i think he knows that about himself and his friends. they're kindred spirits. at the very least he knows this about kuwabara, who literally made a speech about this before diving into toguro's fingers In The Event That He Is Recreating Explicitly. he is dying nobly like they all want to on the chance that they'll get to break out and fight sensui rather than dying without even getting to take a swing. it's about his pride and theirs. but i don't think yusuke necessarily believes they'll win. he knows better than anyone how strong sensui is, and how wide the gap is between sensui and team urameshi. his stated position that humanity is doomed and that he doesn't care about its fate is, i think, not completely genuine, but if we take it at face value, he's not killing himself so that his friends can survive the end of the world. something's going to come around and kill them eventually. he's doing it so they can survive long enough to fight sensui. he needs them (specifically kuwabara) to be strong enough to free themselves to begin round two. but he's given up on their side winning, on humanity surviving, on his own victory---why should he think his friends are capable of winning? this could be another case of yusuke's fight-blinders. it could be another gamble, more blind faith put in his friends. but honestly it reads more to me that yusuke's giving them a chance to die together on the battlefield. them winning would be great, but it's not his goal. it's a pipe dream.

he knows he's going to be killed. they're probably going to be killed, too. but to make it so they last a little longer against sensui, to make the odds a little more even, so they are killed not like livestock, but like worthy fighters, he'd die a little faster. it's the best kind of death someone like them can have; and he'll deprive himself of it just to make their ends a little sweeter. even if the road to that is far more bitter.

but it's not like yusuke's friends know what he's thinking or agree to it, and he can't exactly make his case for it in the moment. he's making that choice for them. whatever his intentions, whatever odds he thinks they have of beating sensui, he's kind of sealing all of their fates. so how the hell is he supposed to acknowledge kuwabara screaming at him not to die, trying desperately to express what yusuke means to him in what could be their final moments together? this plan is going to hurt his friends terribly. it is already doing so, and he can hear it. his choices to stop koenma from using the mafukan and to die for his friends' strength are both selfish in some way, no matter how you read the scene. if yusuke comforts kuwabara, he might not get strong enough. if he twists the knife, well... how could he forgive himself? and either way by responding he would have to face them all and say yes, i'm doing this regardless of your feelings (with the intention of hurting you). so i think he does what he often does. he avoids it. he lets that emotion glance off him and his bravado and his one-liners so he doesn't have to deal with the fact that he's hurting people, that he's scared and guilty and unsure of himself. that he's about to die again, about to put kuwabara through the grief he saw at his wake again, only worse; about to put his quieter friends through something similar.

yusuke is confronted with the responsibility one has to the people who care for them, and he runs from it in an attempt to give them some small peace. just like when he died before and thought hey, at least my mom and keiko won't be burdened by me anymore. because the only thing he can really do for them is die.

[elibean]

ooof ok senpai otoko no ko wins the award for getting me to read ahead in the manga, not a lot of anime can say they've made me do that

[strawberry-cowmilk]

oh no somebody I do not want to know about my online presence might have found this account luckily I didn't find anything suspicious in my follower list but oh my god

[catkin-morgs-kookaburralover]

one odd thing about going deeper is that I'm no longer satisfied with shallower. and that's, weirdly enough, a net positive. I've self harmed - eh, twice? in the last month. both were well into the criteria that should have got sutures and ignored it; suspect I hit a vein once and was extremely close to muscle, which feels kind of odd. yeah, it's ramped up; yeah, there's a lot of blood and all that kind of stuff. very high risk of infection, potential nerve damage and all that kind of stuff (though I have not got either of them; I scared off an infection that wanted to hang round by chucking quantities of alcohol on it). but at the same time. that's only twice. that's a lot better than previously.

[keeps-ache]

buttered noodles 💫💛🍜

[lab-gr0wn-lambs]

[nervocat]

I want to delete my account.... disappear for a bit........ but I WON'T I WON'T I WON'T I PROMISE

[swiftstrange]

i'm drunk i want a girlfriend

[whysamwhy123]

Hmmm. What if I attempted to write a piece of Trash and posted it anonymously?

[skrunksthatwunk]

FINISHED GAIDEN

[vt-scribbles]

Something seriously lacking in my art is the ability to tell a story in a single illustration.

I've gotten so used to drawing my characters standing around doing random things that I've never practiced telling a full tale/putting implications into my pieces that require more thinking/looking.

It also comes from a lower amount of details in my works by default [since I like to get pieces done fast], but I'm tired of using that as an excuse.