#power of teamwork!

[suguruuuuu-chan]

I dreamt the entire Wano arc with the Shirohige pirates btw. Ace lived, and the focus was on their crew instead. I was recovering from fever and I'll never recreate the masterpiece again but I'm so glad 😭😭

[zoetheneko]

How that one group of homies look like on presentation day when they procrastinated and didn't finish their PowerPoint on time.

[opbackgrounds]

More than any other story I've experienced, One Piece lets character traits simply be traits without pigeonholing them as being positive or negative. You see it most with Usopp and Sanji, but much like Sanji's chivalry, Usopp's negativity is presented as part of who he is. It's not something that must be overcome in order to become a better, more complete person. While it gets him into trouble during Water 7, without it the Straw Hats would have lost here at Thriller Bark.

It feels very much like a role reversal from when Sanji saved Usopp from Jabra back on Enies Lobby. Usopp's particular brand of negativity is something only he can do, and for once the rest of the crew has to depend on him to save the day. While there is character development for Usopp during this fight, the core of who he is as a person doesn't change, and that's a really interesting way to handle character development.

And just like the others can depend on Usopp to beat Perona because of his specific ability, Usopp has to depend on the others to defeat the "weaker" zombies surrounding the room, because he's not strong enough to fight them on his own. Even when Usopp gets his hero moment, he has to rely on others to cover his weaknesses.

[baconmoop]

I did this in the TAZ fandom a while ago but with the quangle still on my mind i gotta ask here too:

(If you think it's unfair that Ally and Lou are down a character, feel free to add Lord Squak from ACOFAF for Lou and Lars from mice amd murder for Ally)

[solarpunkwarlock]

Folks, imagine what our lives would look like if we valued redundancy for the sake of safety and quality of life when it came to jobs. How much could we benefit if most single person positions were occupied by 2 folks instead?

2 pairs of eyes on every task instead of one. A single person taking their well-earned vacation or maybe tragically dying doesn't cause an entire department or business to come to a screeching halt.

On top of that, think of how many positions become that much less demanding and straining when you have someone to share the load with. Why should one person break their back for eight hours a day when 2 folks can labor moderately for 4 hours a day?

We need to start demanding a little redundancy. If a job can be accomolished by a team of 4, it should be accomplished by a team of 8. I'm sure this thought won't apply universally to every kind of job out there, but I think it still has some value.

[spopbang]

And that, my friends, is a wrap on the 4th Anniversary SPOP Big Bang! 

We had just under forty brand new fanfics and fanart go up over the last week (with a few latecomers still to come), so many beautiful works of art and amazing stories!

In many cases, people went above and beyond with multiple works of art and multi-chapter fanfics much higher than the word count minimum and we can't thank our wonderful participating artists and writers enough for not just being wonderful to work with, but also sharing your beautiful creations and love of SPOP with everyone!

A big thank you also to the mods of the SPOP Creative Flex discord for letting us use their space to run this event and helping with the influx of new people who joined for the event. And of course a big thanks to everyone who has shared and interacted with the stuff made for the Big Bang to encourage our fandom creators! 

If you missed anything posted this week, you can find everything in the Big Bang Collection on AO3 as linked below.

Many of the stories are still on going so make sure you subscribe and enjoy the new content as it trickles out.

Happy finale-versary everyone!  

<3 your Big Bang mod, @tippenfunkaport

[trianglesimpfordpines]

broke: ford has "the face of the man destined to destroy bill" because that man was actually stan the whole time

woke: that prophecy was referring to both stan twins. destroying bill was a team effort. stan dealt the final blow, but that doesn't erase ford's thirty-one-year struggle against bill. the only reason why stan was able to do that is because he and ford could impersonate each other. neither stan nor ford could have defeated bill alone and survived. and this works better with their shared character arc; defeating the big bad by putting aside their conflict and working together to take him down. the point isn't that ford "was never really the hero" or whatever, the point is that he had to learn he can't do everything by himself (and that he had to reconcile with his brother). ford is the hero. and so is stan. they're twins; they both have the face of the man destined to destroy bill.

[soninandknucklesuniverse]

Tag me in.

[chelshiart]

i'd like to think that bill got unstoppable and stacked up all those cars with the power of love :)

[fightwing]

bruce immediately asking if he hurt dick after days spent infected yeah okay dc i see this and i raise you: 😭😭😭

[sparring-spirals]

I just really appreciate the Bell's Hells Patented Problem Solving Brand, which is like a spiritual evolution of "when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail" except they all have hammers of varying size, effectiveness, and potential-to-explode-on-impact. Their solution is always just Whatever We Think Of First + Fixing The Repercussions Of Whatever We Thought Of First. It's not even a two step plan. The backfiring is part of the plan. The backfiring could even BE the plan. This could probably be a meta but I also just think its really funny. in this case its the "yeah we can cast turn undead! i'll just grab laudna :) nice." but tell me this isnt the vibe in general.

Its like. all of them trying to cross a river with completely separate tactics, and 50% of the energy is doing their own thing and 50% of the energy is countering or aiding what other people are doing. And then someone falls into the river anyway. And they fish them out. BUT THEY END UP OVER THE RIVER. and look we have a fish :)

[blueskittlesart]

any thoughts on how once again zelda was robbed of her agency because her "father figure" didn't listen to her? even if rauru was kinder to her than her father. and that she had sonia who was patient and loving for a little while before she died (just like her mother). i know rauru apologizes for his hubris but still, i wish we saw zelda be upset about it. and even if zelda was such a big part of the quest she still literally sacrificed her humanity once again because of someone else's mistake- because rauru literally didn't listen to the girl from the future that warned you that shit was going to go down. o know nintendo just loves putting zelda inside crystals and stones but i wish we got something better. even if it was her decision to become a dragon... did she have any other choice? it really just feels like they robbed her of agency again just like botw and the games before

i've been trying to figure out how to answer this one. because there are two ways i could analyze this plot point, either from a writer's perspective or an in-story perspective, but neither of those lead to me fully agreeing with your interpretation? I think there's definitely something to be said about zelda consistently being pushed aside in these games, but. well. ok let's get into it ig

from a writer's perspective, I do honestly have quite a bit of sympathy for the zelda devs as they attempt to navigate the modern political landscape with these games. The cyclical lore, though canonized relatively recently, holds them to a standard of consistency in their games in terms of certain key elements. one of those key elements is that there has to be a princess, and that princess must somehow be the main macguffin of the game. The player must chase her, and the end goal of the game must be to reunite the player and the princess. In 1986 this was an incredibly easy sell. women didn't need to be characters. players were content with saving a 2-dimensional princess whose only purpose was to tell them "good job!" at the end. but as society advances, that princess becomes a much more difficult character to write while adhering to the established overarching canon. (as a side note: i don't necessarily believe that the writers SHOULD be held to the standards of that canon. I think deviating from it in certain areas would be a good change of pace. but i also recognize that deviations from the formula are widely hated by the loz playerbase and that they're trying to make money off these games, so we're working under the established rule that the formula must be at least loosely adhered to.) Modern fans want a princess who is a person, who has agency and makes decisions and struggles in the same way the hero does. but modern fans ALSO want a game that follows the established rules of the canon. so we need a princess who is a real character but who can ALSO serve as a macguffin within the narrative, something that is inherently somewhat objectifying.

the two games that i think do the best job writing a princess with agency are skyward sword and botw (based on your ask, our opinions differ there lol. hear me out) in both games, we have a framing event which seperates zelda and link, but in both games, that separation was ZELDA'S CHOICE. skyward sword zelda runs away from link out of fear of hurting him. botw zelda chooses to return to the castle alone to allow link the time he needs to heal. sksw kinda fumbled later on by having ghirahim kidnap her anyway, but. i said BEST not PERFECT. botw zelda I think is the better example because, with the context of the memories, she's arguably MORE of a character than link is. we see her struggles, her breakdowns, her imperfection, specifically we see her struggle with her lack of agency within the context of the game itself. when she steps in front of link in the final memory, and when she chooses to return to the castle, those are some of the first choices we see her make almost completely free of outside influence; a RECLAMATION of her agency (within the narrative) after years of having it stripped from her. from an objective viewer's standpoint, this writing decision still means she is absent from 90% of the game and that she has little control over her actions for the duration of the player's journey. however I think this is just about the best they could have done to create a princess with agency and a real character arc while still keeping the macguffin formula intact--you're not really SAVING zelda in botw. SHE is the one that is saving YOU; when you wake up on the plateau with no memories, too weak to fight bokoblins, let alone calamity ganon. the reason you are allowed to train and heal in early-game botw is because SHE is in the castle holding ganon back, protecting YOU. When you enter the final fight, you're not rescuing zelda, you're relieving her of her duty. taking over the work she's been doing for the past hundred years. in the final hour, you both work in tandem to defeat ganon. while this isn't a PERFECT example of a female character with agency and narrative weight, i think it's a pretty good one, especially in the context of save-the-princess games like loz.

as for totk, you put a lot of emphasis on rauru not believing zelda and taking action immediately, which, again, from an objective standpoint, i understand. but even when we're writing characters with social implications in mind, those character's actions still need to... make sense. Rauru was a king ruling over what he believed to be a perfectly peaceful kingdom. zelda literally fell out of the sky, landed in front of him, claimed to be his long-lost granddaughter, and then told him that some random ruler of a fringe faction in the desert was going to murder him and he had to get the jump on it by killing him first. the ruler which this girl is trying to convince rauru to wage an unprompted war on has the power to disguise himself as other people. no one in their right mind would immediately take the girl at her word. war is not something any leader should jump into without proper research and consideration, and to rauru's credit, he DIDN'T ever outright dismiss zelda. he believed her when she said she was from the future, he allowed her to work with him and he took her warnings as seriously as he could without any further proof. but he could not wage an unprompted war on ganondorf. that's just genuinely not practical, especially for a king who values peace among his people as much as rauru seems to. as soon as ganondorf DID attack, giving rauru confirmation that zelda's accounts of the future were real, he began making preparations to confront him. remember that zelda didn't KNOW that rauru and sonia were going to be casualties of the war--she didn't make the connection between rauru's arm in the future and rauru the king until AFTER sonia's death, when rauru made the decision to attack ganondorf directly. I think the imprisoning war and the casualties of it were less an issue of zelda being denied agency and more an issue of no one, including zelda, having full context for the events as they were unfolding. if zelda had KNOWN that sonia and rauru were going to die from the beginning and was still unable to prevent it that would be a different issue, but she didn't. none of them did.

I think another thing worth pointing out with rauru and his death irt zelda is that rauru is clearly written specifically as a foil to rhoam. this is evident in how he treats both zelda and link, with a constant kindness and understanding which is clearly opposite to rhoam's dismissiveness and disappointment. consider rhoam's death and the circumstances surrounding it. He died because, in zelda's eyes, she was unable to do her duty; the one thing he constantly berated her for. Rhoam's death solidified zelda's belief that she was a failure, a belief which she KNEW rhoam held as well. his death was doubly traumatic to her because she knew he died believing it was her fault. Now contrast that to the circumstances surrounding rauru's death. Rauru CHOSE to die despite zelda's warnings, because he wanted zelda and his kingdom to live. rauru's death was not agency-stripping for zelda; in fact, it functioned almost as an admission that he believed her capable of continuing to live in his place. With him gone, the fate of the kingdom fell to her and the sages. he KNEW that he would die and still went into that battle confidently, trusting zelda to make the right decisions once he was gone. where rhoam believed zelda incapable of doing ANYTHING without link, rauru trusted zelda COMPLETELY with the fate of his kingdom. several details in totk confirm that when rauru died there was no plan for zelda to draconify, that all happened after rauru was gone. it was HER plan, the plan which rauru trusted her to come up with once he was gone. and I think it's also worth noting that zelda's sacrifice with the draconification parallels rauru's!! Rauru gives up his life trusting the sages and his people to be able to continue his work in his place. Zelda gives up her physical form trusting link and the sages in the future to be able to figure out what to do and find her. these games in general have this recurring theme but totk specifically is all about love and trust and reliance on others. zelda relies on link, link relies on zelda, they both rely on the champions and the sages and rauru and sonia and they all rely each other. reliance on others isn't lack of agency, it's a constant choice they make, and that choice is the thing which allows them to triumph.

The draconification itself is something i view similarly to zelda's sacrifice in botw--a choice she makes which, symbolically & within the confines of the narrative, is a demonstration of her reclaimed agency and places her at the center of the narrative, but which ALSO removes her from much of the player's experience and robs her of any overt presence or decisionmaking within the gameplay. again, I think this is a solution to the macguffin-with-agency dilemma, and it's probably one of the better solutions they could have come up with. Would I have liked to see a game where zelda is more present within the actual gameplay? yes, but I also understand that at this point the writers aren't quite willing to deviate that much from their formula. the alternative within the confines of this story would be to let zelda DIE in the past, removing her from gameplay ENTIRELY, which is an infinitely worse option in my opinion. draconification allowed her to be present, centered the narrative around her, and allowed the writers to reiterate the game's theme of trust and teamwork when she assists the player in the final battle, which i think was a REALLY great choice, narratively speaking.

In any case, I don't think it's right to say that zelda was completely robbed of her agency in botw and totk. Agency doesn't always mean that she's unburdened and constantly present, it means she's given the freedom to make her own choices and that her choices are realistically written with HER in mind, not just the male characters around her, and I think botw/totk do a pretty good job of writing her and her choices realistically and with nuance.

[cloudsoffire]

made a version of this not long after the shadow one, but took it down and redid it because it didn't look great. this is the result.

[hayakawashousewife]

[sayhowdycountrycritters]

Out in the garage workshop, helping my husband, @sayhelloanimalfriends cut some boards for a project.

[kyouka-supremacy]

People seriously be thinking Akutagawa is the brain in sskk like?????? Uh??????? Dude was born with half a brain cell and was probably tricked into donating it to Dazai when he was 16?????????????