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shoichee · 4 years

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Hello! Can I perhaps ask for no. 28. “Make me” from your prompt list for my beloved Imayoshi? It's so nice seeing him here on your theme and avatar and that pERFECT url, it feels like I finally found my people.

HELLO HELLO, and YES I WAS SO SURPRISED THAT NO ONE TOOK THIS URL... considering that it was just an alternative spelling of shoichi and its a rlly short handle too mwehe // im sort of a particular person when it comes to how something looks, whether itd be outfits, drawings, coloring, and the UI of a blog, u name it.... i may have spent hours trying to have the perfect colors for this theme PLEASEEEE, but without further ado here is our man, our little shit, Imayoshi

@knb-kreations howdy! another new work posted here!

Imayoshi x Reader

28. “Make me”

Word Count: 2331

prompt list here

»»—————　☼　—————««

Imayoshi doesn’t exactly know how he feels about you.

Scratch that, he does know. He’s quite amused at the shenanigans you pull on others around you, and a lot of times, you actually elicit a few dry laughs out of the guy. Other times though, he’d wish that you would just shut the fuck up, especially when all he hears amidst his studying was your loud “whispering” and “hushed” jokes. How you were always nearby no matter where he is was still a mystery that he casually ponders about from time to time. Perhaps your natural tendency to project your voice creates the illusion that you were near when you really weren’t?

No matter, such trivial thoughts can’t occupy his mind when college entrance exams loom closer. Then again, they weren’t particularly difficult; they were simply a hassle to secure near-perfect scores, especially when his chances of admittance rely critically on how well he does.

“That’s an awful drawing of a samurai,” Susa comments, snapping Imayoshi out of idle thought.

“Ho? Is it really terrible if you were able to tell what it is?” Imayoshi chuckles. “The point of a drawing is to convey the right idea or emotion. It seems that my drawing skills hit a bulls-eye with this sketch, no?” He playfully spins his pencil around, patiently waiting for his reply to goad him.

All Susa does in response is to roll his eyes before he turns his full attention back to his notes. He knows better than to try a comeback against Imayoshi, who can easily make it backfire against the person with a pleasant close-eyed smile. Imayoshi, seeing Susa’s nonverbal resign from engaging further banter, also looks down back to his book of scribbled notes and chicken-scratch drawings before he exhales an inaudible sigh.

School just doesn’t cut out to be mentally stimulating for him. It’s a little too repetitive and mundane for his taste.

“Argh!! Oh no!” your voice rang out, despite your poor attempt to be reasonably quiet. “I forgot applications for the Coca-Cola scholarship are due today!”

Coca-Cola… what?

Everyone looks up to warily eye you, and your few friends, who are currently rushing to pull you down and slap their hands over your mouth to mute you, were panicking at the new attention you managed to garner. Even still, your mind seems more fixated on whatever was on the laptop’s screen, rather than what they were doing to you.

Imayoshi can’t help but stifle his audible mirth from how you manage to change the mood of the entire library within seconds.

“How do you even forget something as important as a huge scholarship like that?” Susa says in dismay. “Makes me kind of wonder how (l/n) would handle life after graduation, to be honest.”

“Well,” Imayoshi begins. “I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s best not to underestimate (l/n)-san. Surely we’ve learned our lesson with Seirin?” He toys with the pencil grip before he sporadically draws some lines loosely resembling another sketch.

“Drawing again?” Susa raises a brow. “Have you even been studying?”

“Well,” he replies. “There’s still plenty of time before exams—months to be exact. Could you even study with the current distractions in here?” At his own words, he nudges his chin in your direction.

“It’s not just any exams though, it’s—”

“Whether they have more importance or not doesn’t really concern me. After all, standardized testing isn’t worth stressing out for when we’ve taken essentially the same thing all our lives.”

“What most are worried about is the content inside the exams, Imayoshi,” he said, carefully treading into dangerous waters with Imayoshi’s tendency to take all replies as mind-game challenges for his own amusement.

“‘If you have been paying attention consistently throughout the year, you wouldn’t be having much trouble…’ that’s what you once oh-so-wisely said to Wakamatsu yesterday, hmm?” His mimicking tone drips a hint of arrogance. “Unless you mean to tell me my ears do not work? But by all means, please feel free to correct me.”

“That’s different,” he sighed, his face clearly evident that he was done with Imayoshi’s shit. “That exam only tested content for the past year, not your entire academic repertoire over the courses of middle and high school.”

“I’d like to think that the logic still applies the same way.”

“Well,” Susa heaves with a languid stretch. “You generally score better on the exams than me, so you’re probably right. Still, don’t neglect your studying.”

“Right, right, Susa-senpai~”

“... Please don’t call me that again.”

“... If you say so,” he said, but his smile blatantly showed his real intentions of never stopping his irritable quips. Susa gets ready to pack up his book bag before he heads out the door with a friendly wave. Imayoshi half-heartedly returns the gesture with a casual wave of his own. He immediately notices you also packed up and about to leave with a worried frown, and of course, while audibly mumbling your concerns and makeshift schedules to accommodate time for last-minute essay writing. By now, all of your friends have left for home.

“Ah, biology lab due next week, kanji worksheets due tomorrow, hmm, um, how would I finish this on time… ah, calculus test is tomorrow too, ah shit… should I ask someone to tutor?—ah, but it’s super last minute, and there’s still that scholarship… argh, fuck!” Your voice peaked in volume at the end, and the librarian immediately shot daggers at you.

“Shhhhh!”

“A-Ah! S-Sorry, sorry!”

Imayoshi was watching you with his chin on his arm propped up on the desk, unable to control the smile that escaped his lips. You really were entertaining to watch, and you never cease to bore him.

He turns away to crack his neck and roll it around before methodically packing up his writing utensils and notebooks. Soft shuffling filled the air as he rearranged the items inside his bag. As he turns to pack the last thing on the table, which happened to be the notebook filled with his idle doodling, his face slightly softens at the drawing he did after the samurai. Yes, the one Susa chastised him for when he could’ve been studying. Yes, perhaps he was right when he was terrible at drawing after all; your panicked face and wild hand gestures didn’t really translate well into paper, and it looked a little too much like a horror comic and less than a sketch of you. Still, he’s oddly proud of it.

Imayoshi promptly pushes the chair in and leaves the library, but when he rounds the corner of the adjacent hallway, he bumps into you.

“Er—hi! I mean, please, uhhh… if it isn’t too much to ask—canyoupleasetutormeforthecalculustesttomorrowbecausemyfinalgradedependsonthat?”

Imayoshi winces at the sheer volume of your voice and plugs his ears in out of habit to block out some of the decibels. Wakamatsu was eerily similar to you in that regard. Only difference between the two of you was that you were deceptively intelligent. Extremely so.

“My, my, if it isn’t (l/n)-senpai!” He fakes a surprised look, earning him an eye roll on your end. “You need someone like me to teach you the works?”

“I—what? We’re literally in the same calc class, Imayoshi,” you retort. “Besides, drop the ‘senpai’ honorific. It feels so slimy when you say it so disingenuously… Aren’t we both 3rd years too?”

“I’m so hurt,” he mocks. “What if I was really genuine with you?”

“Look, right now, no remarks from you, Evil Glasses,” you say. “It’s really, really urgent and I don’t know how to grasp the material for the class lately, plus my essay, ugh…” You rub your fingers against your temples in an attempt to make the stressful headaches disappear while Imayoshi simply watches with his eyes slightly open.

“... You usually do well on all your exams, no? Unless my eyes and memory fail me.” It was true; even though you were as loud-mouthed as Wakamatsu, you would often shock a lot of people when your name always appeared in the higher percentiles of exam results. Apparently most students and teachers associate your rowdy personality with an expected subpar academic performance. He has you to thank for when your score reports always cause reactions of utter disbelief from the teachers. You really do liven up the school and make it a lot more unorthodox.

“I guess…” you mumble. “But I really wanna do especially well for this one because math is my weakest subject, and you always score the highest for these types of exams, so…”

“It may be my best subject,” he says, leaning slightly closer to your face. “But I’m not the one with the highest scores in any math subjects throughout these years, and we both know that quite well, don’t we, (l/n)? Why don’t you come clean about the real reason why you’re here?”

“Oh my literal fuck—Imayoshi, you’re one of the best students in calc right now regardless of exam results,” you petulantly huffed, not backing down from his intimidation. Imayoshi notes your cheeks reddening, and he figured it was either because of the close proximity between your faces or the fact you were frustrated… perhaps both. “And you’re the only one around here on campus who I could ask!”

“Really now,” he chimes, moving closer to whisper in your ear. “Are you sure?” With incoherent stammers, you backed away from him, slapping your hands against both of your ears to protect them.

“W-W-What the fuck are you doing?!”

“Looks like I won this one, (l/n)-san,” he purrs, relishing the fact that only he could render you this quiet. “Ho? What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?”

“I—Shut up!” you lamely shoot back. “You can just say no if you really don’t wanna do this—urgh, I’m leaving, I’m not gonna waste any more time—”

“How hurtful,” he dryly remarks, standing up straight again after leaning for a quite a while. “It’s almost as if you’re rejecting me~” He knew you would always take his bait and quip back (unlike Susa), regardless of whether or not you tell him that you weren’t going to engage further.

“As if,” you snorted, making another exaggerated eye roll. “You’re the last person who would ever be hurt from this.”

“Dear me!” he exclaims. “Have you ever considered that perhaps I don’t help out people for free? Did you think I would be a gracious, selfless person who would help you like a saint?”

“Okay, fine! Perhaps I didn’t think that far ahead, okay? You just were the first person that came to mind, and I thought asking you wouldn’t hurt.” His smirk widens almost maliciously at your words, lips already opening to deliver another irritating quip before you immediately spoke again to stop him. “Okay, Imayoshi, you little shit, just shut up—I don’t wanna hear anything from your mouth right now.”

“I don’t see any reason why I should listen to you at all,” he muses. “Why don’t you make me?” He has a shit-eating grin plastered across his face, eagerly eyeing your next move, and as he expected, you let out a frustrated noise that prompted passerby students to shoot pointed looks towards the both of you.

What he didn’t expect was for you to take a huge step towards him, unceremoniously pull him down to your level, and press a reverberating smack on his lips. His eyes are immediately blown wide open to look at your embarrassed, but determined face. His fingers unconsciously move to touch his warmed lips.

“... That was quite romantic, wasn’t it, (l/n)?” he dryly says, recovering almost immediately from the shock. All the other students fled from the blatantly bold scene to save face. Not that Imayoshi really cared.

“Okay, you know what? Bye, I’m not gonna play anymore mind games with you,” you grumble. “Essays and studying aren’t gonna be done by themselves—wah!”

Imayoshi gently tugs you back to reciprocate back a kiss, meticulously slipping his hands behind your head and on your waist to accommodate you. Your eyes are completely open from the shock that the Imayoshi Shoichi was actually kissing you. You don’t close your eyes from the sensation, completely entranced when you make eye contact with his half-lidded eyes watching your every reaction closely. The kiss ended all too soon, and Imayoshi separates himself from you, secretly admiring your dazed look.

“That was quite a strong reaction to just a simple kiss.”

“I—that was not just a ‘simple kiss!’”

“Now would you like to tell me the true reason why you approached me?”

“You’re… insinuating that you know something.”

“Well we wouldn’t know unless you come clean,” Imayoshi purrs. “I can sometimes be wrong too.”

“Ugh, what the hell—fine, I am quite enamored by you, and uh, I… find it infuriating to be with you, but it also gives me butterflies… so I thought I could be with you more… if I asked you—don’t get it twisted, though! I still need your help to study!...” He covers his mouth to suppress a laugh at your honesty.

“Was it really so hard to say that in the beginning, (l/n)-san?”

“Okay, that’s it! I’m really, really leaving! Fuck off, Imayoshi, I swear to—”

“Ho? Just a minute, darling~” he tuts, reaching to hold your hand. “Perhaps if you offer more kisses as an incentive, I’d be more inclined to offer my expertise.”

“How quaint,” you dryly reply. “It’s almost as if we’re in a relationship.”

Imayoshi can’t help but bark out a genuine laugh. You even managed to pick up some of his mannerisms so quickly.

“That’s an interesting proposal, (l/n),” he murmurs. “Should we try that?” You tut at him irritatedly as you tug your interlocked hands while speed-walking ahead.

“Hurry up, or I’ll consider breaking up with you right now.”

“Ah ha!~” he chuckles at your attitude. “How mean, (l/n)-san! Too bad that we both know that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

#ask #narnvaeron #knb #knb scenarios #kuroko no basket #imayoshi shouichi #imayoshi shoichi #imayoshi x reader #imayoshi #knb fic #knb fluff #100 followers #100 follower milestone

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bigskydreaming · 3 years

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I’m writing this scene between Lilith and Bruce right now, and I just cut a whole segue their conversation took because it derailed it too far from where I meant to take it and was more of a meta thought anyway.

So I’m just gonna verbalize it here so as not to waste that thought. You’re welcome!

But purely on a pet peeve note (and this seriously isn’t a response to something I read lately, I feel like people always think that’s what prompts everything I say but honestly, sometimes shit just pops into my head and this is one such instance lol) - anyway like, lemme just express real quick how much I LOATHE the term ‘mindrape.’

Like. Please stop forever with that, sci-fi and fantasy themed media and entertainment. That’s not a thing. Stop trying to make it a thing.

To be perfectly clear, like, the idea of a telepath or someone via some technology or magic being able to go into your head and view or pluck out your most private, carefully guarded thoughts? Abso-fucking-lutely something that can and should be viewed as a violation, in universe.

Its just....not rape. Its literally not.

I honestly do think that the rise of this particular term was because people thought about it and just HOW intimate and personal one’s thoughts can be, especially someone who is used to being closed-off and emotionally guarded, and when trying to come up with a way to describe this that captured the INTENSITY of the violation people were picturing when they imagined this.....that’s how people ended up linking it to rape as a way of conveying just how awful a violation it was?

But like.....rape is a very specific act, is the thing. It has specific context, it has specific catalysts, framing, fallout. Rape has its own name rather than just being described as a violating assault or an act of violation, because rape is a SPECIFIC act that carries its own connotations in our society. And those connotations aren’t something that entertainment should feel comfortable borrowing just to use as like, a benchmark for how awful a completely fictitious concept might be.

Because that dilutes the very purpose of giving rape its own name in the first place. The more its likened to an abstract sense of violation that feasibly encompasses pretty much anything that falls under the umbrella of personal violation.....the less it stands out as notably different from other forms of violation and calls to mind the things that MAKE it different, and thus warrant it being treated differently or approached in a specific way.

And here’s the thing about WHY rape has its own terminology:

First....there’s the fact that whether we like it or not, the simple reality is our society is obsessed with sex. We live in a very heavily sexualized world, where its often difficult to completely separate ANYTHING from sexual connotations. Its easier to make just about anything ABOUT sex than it is to make anything that’s remotely sex-adjacent about something OTHER than sex.

Now combine that with the fact that while rape is about power, and taking it from a victim or exerting it over a victim.....rape is INTRINSICALLY connected to sex. True, rape is not sex, its an act of aggression, not a sexual act. There is no way to engage in rape without simultaneously engaging in violence. There is no way for someone to consent to what is inherently by definition a stripping away of consent.

Rape is not sex. But sex is the VEHICLE by which a rapist takes or exerts power SPECIFICALLY. While at the exact same time, a HUGE part of why survivors struggle so much with getting the support they need in recovery.....is because due to how SEXUALIZED rape is in our society, in our media and just our very conversations of it, most rape survivors face the stumbling block of their assault and violation being viewed as more about sex than it was power.

Essentially, even though on the surface even most people ‘know’ that rape isn’t sex and rape is about power.....lots of people fall into the trap of looking at rape and thinking of it as sex gone wrong, or sex someone regrets, or tons of other thoughts that have more to do with sex than rape. Because from a pretty early age, anyone who doesn’t ALREADY have their own view and awareness of rape....has their view of rape then informed pretty much just by how its depicted and presented in media and entertainment. Where its of course heavily filtered through a very sexual lens.

So even while consciously KNOWING that rape isn’t an act of sex but one strictly of violence, entitlement and power....lots of people still have to contend with and push back against a foundation of it being more closely associated with sex in their minds, as the easily visualized IMAGE of what rape LOOKS like on the surface.....than other things it has more in common with once you look at anything OTHER than the visual of it, such as focusing on the motivating factors for rape and WHY rapists do what they do.

Theft, coercion, other crimes and concepts that more accurately reflect a rapist’s desire to TAKE what they were told was not theirs to take or to just degrade or humiliate someone in the most intimate way possible, or to turn a person’s very body into a weapon against them or to injure someone in a way that is meant to be more lasting or permanent in its effect on a person than just inflicting a physical wound.....any and all of these things have far more to do with why rapists rape than a simple desire for sex.

Rapists don’t rape because its the only way for them to have sex, even. Because even when rape is very much attraction based....its STILL not about just wanting to have sex with the person of their focus....its about wanting to have sex with them even despite being told no, or without giving them even the chance to say no. Even when a rapist ONLY targets a person because of their specific physical attraction to that person and their desires/fantasy to have sex with that specific person and not someone else.....the crime itself is still ABOUT stripping that person of their personhood in order to simply act upon them as the OBJECT of their focus/attraction...rather than any kind of a partner in a mutually beneficial or engaged-in act.

But despite all of that.....ask any non-survivor what springs to mind first when they hear the word ‘rape’....and chances are the resulting thoughts are more instinctively geared towards sex than power.

All of this is directly linked to our tendency as a society to view and treat and even talk about rape in terms of it most commonly being sex that got out of control. Despite the fact that no act of rape was EVER going to be an act of sexual partnership......because the very thing that turns something FROM sex INTO rape....is the MOMENT a rapist determines or feels that sex with a person is off the table or simply not what they’re interested in.....because they either don’t have or don’t WANT their victim’s partnership in what happens. They simply want to take. To steal. To use. To abuse.

Without exception.

Honestly, this got a lot more indepth than I was intending to go when I was just riffing off of a thought that popped into my mind about how I just really don’t like the term mindrape.....but a big part of the problem I have with the term is how indepth you basically HAVE to go in order to fully convey just why the term is so.....not a valid comparison to make to rape, with anyone who doesn’t already have an instinctive or reactive understanding of rape that’s more based on what rape TAKES than with how its usually depicted or talked about, where its in terms of what rape LOOKS like.

Because alllll of the above connotations and how important and central they are to any actual examination or discussion of rape....they simply do not carry over into a concept like someone reading your mind without permission.

Again, its not that such a thing wouldn’t be extremely violating IMO. It absolutely would be.

My point is simply that rape is always a violation, but violations are not always rape. SEXUAL violations are rape. But there’s a ton of ways a person or even something like a law or concept or even a freaking BUSINESS contract can be violated. And these aren’t interchangeable.

Are a person’s most intimate thoughts something incredibly personal, something no one should be allowed to take without permission? Sure. Absolutely. But imagine how else such a scenario could take place even in our real world, without needing a concept such as telepathy to make it feasible. Think about anything from someone reading a person’s carefully guarded or hidden diary or journal where they record thoughts they NEVER expect or want someone else to be privy to. Think about someone being tortured to give up information they’d be willing to give up their life to keep secret. Think about a burglar breaking into someone’s home when they’re not there and going through all their most personal belongings, leaving evidence that some stranger has been there and seen and touched all of that and you now don’t feel like you have the ability to keep anything safe and hidden from others, even in the safety and security of your own home.

Are all of these things different kinds of violation, most of which carry a great degree of intensity and personal betrayal or harm?

Absolutely.

But are any of them interchangeable with RAPE?

Or are they a bit easier to separate from from that concept once laid out to this degree, to see as completely separate and distinct things that may have some overlap but not necessarily even in the same ways or places they’re usually viewed as overlapping with rape as a concept?

Since I began this as a fandom related concept, lemme bring that back for a final thought.

Instead of likening other things TO rape, imagine if we did the same thing in reverse, and likened rape TO other things instead.

In terms of even just Batcharacters.....think about how often its been raised as an actual STORY point, that many Bat characters have shown a willingness or even tendency to cross all kinds of ethical boundaries and illegally surveil someone or intrude upon boundaries in the name of ‘the greater good’ or because they feel the ends justify the means.

Now imagine if all of those instances, no matter how large or small a violation....from a simple breaking and entering job to get inside a Rogue’s secret hideout in order to steal the location of their next crime....to putting bugs and cameras into someone’s home without their knowledge or permission and even just being able to spy on them naked or when revealing extremely personal information while thinking there’s no one else around to hear it, regardless of whether or not that’s what the character intends those to be used for or never actually uses them in that way.....

Imagine if all of THOSE violations were considered, viewed and talked about as not just breaches of privacy but as RAPE, specifically....with any relevant Bat-characters thus by extension specifically being rapists for having engaged in such violations.

And then, let’s flip the script back AGAIN, and now look at those instances where characters intrude, surveil, cross boundaries or invade privacies in the name of trying to save people or prevent tragedies or in the name of that always handy alleged ‘greater good.’

Try using that ‘in the name of [...]’ clause in regards to when and why a rapist rapes, and see how......not good that is. Has any of the above EVER been an ACTUAL justification for why someone rapes someone else? COULD it ever be? I know there’s the fuck or die trope and there’s more than a few variations of it in which one hero is forced to essentially rape another one or someone innocent or else the villain will kill them both, or kill the other person, or something like that....but even then, the actual RAPE is still on the villain or person exerting coercion, so no, not even then is rape being done in the name of saving/protecting someone or some supposed greater good. Its still the villain that’s doing the actual violating, that’s making the CHOICE to set up this scenario and limit the hero’s options to either ‘participating’ or signing someone’s death warrant....and just like sex is the vehicle by which rape occurs, the ‘raping’ hero is in this kind of scenario STILL just being used as a proxy by the actual person with the actual intent and desire to violate and assault the other person, and in being used in such a way, and in an inherently sexualized way themself.....it simply makes the ‘raping’ hero still not an actual rapist, but an additional rape victim of the ultimate villain as well.

See how complicated and messy this all gets, and how quickly?

And especially given that it doesn’t ever NEED to get there, in either direction, since there’s plenty of ways to describe varying types and degrees of violation with specificity, without resorting to ‘rounding up’ to refer to them as rape as a shorthand for expressing it was a particularly intimate or sensitive violation - and without losing sight of the fact that violations that result even in the THEFT of sensitive, personal information or secrets.....still only result in things like pieces of INFORMATION being what’s stolen, rather than someone’s entire bodily autonomy and personal agency.

Anyway, in conclusion the point is really just that we come up with the terms we do for specific reasons, and while language and contexts do evolve, grow, and even wholly change over time for a variety of reasons, it is important to take note of when that happens so we can determine if that change SHOULD be happening or if key contexts or connotations are being left out or overlooked in the process or wake of language changing.

And while I kept my point here limited to the example of rape and ‘mind rape,’ it applies to a ton of other stuff and topics as well. This just happened to be the one on my mind at the moment, but this kind of awareness can and should definitely be applied to a lot of other discussions involving sensitive or emotionally charged topics as well.

We come up with specific words and terms with INTENT. The creation of a specific term or phrase almost always involves having seen a NEED for such specificity in the first place, in order to denote key differences between something and other things it might be similar to but not fully described or encompassed by previously existing words or phrases.

Before treating concepts as interchangeable, we should always take care to make sure that they are, in fact, actually interchangeable.

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sasoriapologist · 4 years

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sorry for being mad and starting discourse on Sasori’s birthday but holy shit the Sasori liker side of this fandom is making me fucking insane. As a preface, I’m a huge advocate for letting people have fun and crack shipping. I’m also not a hardcore anti- I find myself thinking a lot of times anymore that antis have a tendency to take things too far and over police without leaving any room for interpretation, unfairly generalizing and often times seeing things too black and white and failing to realize nuance in some situations. That being said, I also think that shipping things that are outright and inarguably pe///dophilic, abu////sive and preda////tory is bad and should be condemned.

The issue I’m noticing is fucking rampant among the Sasori side of this fandom is y’all are doing anything and everything to avoid having ships for him that aren’t inarguably pe//doph/ilic and pred///atory. It’s like y’all will ship him with fucking ANYONE except people where the relationship would be at least to a degree okay.

You want to ship him with a woman? Cool, I think he’s a woman liker bisexual too. But why do y’all flock to the ship between him and a 15 year old girl who he addresses explicitly as a child instead of, I don’t know, Konan? Who is arguably even calls beautiful and worthy of being preserved as art? And is his own age? Something similar applies to the very specific subset of sasodei shippers who portray Deidara as young as possible and Sasori being attracted to Deidara while Deidara is as young as possible beyond what’s realistic for canon- you could easily portray Sasori being attracted to adult Deidara and you choose to make content sexualizing a very very young Deidara with him... why? If not for thinking pe///doph//ilia is cute and sexy? This is coming from an avid sasodei shipper.

And people who want him to be a pretty “smol boy” with a big hunky boyfriend- first of all, I encourage you to examine this, because a lot of the content I see for this is perpetuating harmful fetishized, yaoi-adjacent stereotypes and stereotypes based on appearance such as him being short or and “pretty”, and those are things that are harmful and perpetuating that has negative effects for real life communities, particularly LGBT men. Not only that, but a worrying majority of people in this category seem to want to s3xualize him while making him look as young as possible. Which is concerning for reasons I hope I don’t have to explain. However, if you’re set in this- why do you jump to shipping him with someone he only knew as a child save for the instance of killing him? Why can’t we ship him with Kakuzu or something? Or just have your own headcanons about him and Deidara? And sure, arguments can be made about how Kakuzu and Deidara are also bad to ship with him, but those ships are where I tend to think that there’s more nuance and it’s not necessarily bad to ship even if I understand why someone would personally be uncomfortable.

And for both of these- making OCs is an option. I get he doesn’t interact with a lot of people in canon, but OC x Canon ships aren’t harmful and in my opinion, there’s a lot of unfair bias against them for absolutely no good reason. Make OCs to ship with him. That’s what I did. Or get creative with canon characters to ship with him- nothing wrong with shipping him with someone he has no interaction with but could have a potentially good dynamic with.

It’s literally like you guys will ship him with anyone else to avoid having, for lack of a more civil term, non-freak ships for him. I’m not sure what it is about Sasori specifically that attracts this extreme on both sides, I guess he just has a lot of traits that make him bait for both extremes or something, but this is getting so worrying and I know a lot of people who agree but are too afraid to say it because some of y’all will be so vicious about it. I’m trying to keep this as civil as possible. It’s getting to the point I’m coming across Naruto fans who are instantly weary of people who have Sasori as a favorite because a lot of us either romanticize and s3xualize these really horrible things, perpetuate harmful stereotypes, or are straight up mean and elitist for no reason.

Alright, that’s my Sasori birthday rant. No, I’m not going to turn anon options on for my ask box- if you want to argue about this, do it with your name attached to it if you really stand by what you have to say about it. If you aren’t going to be civil, have the balls to do it with your own name. I doubt this is even going to reach a lot of people in opposition to this though granted I’m pretty sure I have a good majority of the people this is targeted at blocked, but still. This has been bugging me for a while and it’s been bugging a lot of the people I’m friends with for a while and I feel like someone needs to say something about it.

EDIT: adding on to this instead of making a new post so I don’t clog the Sasori tag with discourse, and because it’s related. You guys... know you don’t have to make Sasori as young as possible, right? You don’t have to portray him as physically 15. He can realistically be 18-19 physically, and he can be up into his mid to late twenties physically- his timeline is heavily up to interpretation granted how painfully inconsistent and contradictory Kishimoto was with writing it. Portraying him as a 15 year old in l3wd situations is you choosing to portray him as a 15 year old in l3wd situations when you do not have to. That’s weird and gross to go out of your way to headcanon him at the youngest possible physical age for him and then portray him in n///s//fw situations. If you subscribe to the timeline of him being physically 25 and portray him in those situations- knock yourself out, make him have his dick out and in shit all you want, but if you subscribe to him being 15 physically and do that shit.... please fucking stop it.

#i’m swinging a bat at a hornets nest with this #man i’m just sick of not feeling safe liking my own main comfort character #sasori #dei.txt #akatsuki #naruto #naruto shippuden #sasori of the red sand #akasuna no sasori

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pwnyta · 5 years

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So here are my SUPER rough doodles of some Poke Ocs/

No one asks me to do this.. I just have a lot of ideas and no way to reasonably deal with them... IDK.

These are SUPER messy. Even for me. Dont judge me. I dont wanna be bullied. OMI Might be the only one to understand any of this.. if that. Considering its all a hot mess...

UNDER THE READ MORE.

My shiny Charizard in Lets Go. I named him Cassanova (technically MK18). His mother is a Salazzle that kept him from seeing his Char family for quite awhile. As a Salazzle she didnt like that he evolved the first time but eventually warmed up to it when she saw his coloring was similar to hers. His mother can be very selfish and often uses him to hurt his father, but she does love him and tries to make up for the times shes hurt him (like criticizing his evolution but seeing he was hurt by it so trying to backtrack). Hes very submissive toward women and a little small for his age.

A Char with Gator blood and tough as nails. She is READY TO FIGHT YOU. RIGHT NOW. She aint afraid of water and honestly its a wonder how she has managed to survive this long giving her tendency to push her limits with water. Its what her daddy taught her. Her mom is constantly (offended blinking white guy.gif).

Some Milotic Chars. A little wispy and frail looking but they can pack a punch.... well that Charizard maybe but her sister... good luck getting her to battle. Charizard prefers avoiding physical fights and attacks from a distance... her tail is a bit longer than a usual Char and of course its prime for the grabbing.

The Venusaur parentage in him adds some bulk to him, not a very fast flying but he doesnt need to be. He can tank a hit like nobodies business. A bit of a hooligan despite his seemingly chill nature... tranquil as a forest but on fire within. Once you find your center you are sure to win... he hasnt found his center. Baby bro Char? Just happy to be included honestly.

A pure blood. Shes fun to chill with but always down for a spar too. If theres some mischief happening to some of the elders... she may have something to do with it. Great with kids. (more like ‘great at enabling kids to do stupid shit which makes them like her. Shes the cool adult.’)

Couple of husband Chars. D!Char is a cheeky lad with an ability to backhand compliment like no other but is mostly a sweet caring kinda fella married to a grizzled old man. Old man Char lost his brother and has taken up the duties to teach his niece their traditions. Her mommas not PLEASED but she respects the choice. Its what her husband would have wanted. And with the D!Char there she knows there will be at least someone a bit softer to help take care of her daughter.

SOME BABBIES.

Zippo will stand and allow his fellow Princesses to do as they please.

Kreetan doesnt know what to make of this side of Zippo.

Just a couple of lads enjoying the cool breeze.

Some Team Red shenanigans.

Alex has a pic of Lee with him at all times. He keeps it in his panties.

The answer is no.

MOVE ALONG. THERES NOTHING TO SEE.

Thought about Lees Dojo.

Lee just has a way with people. Luckily he uses his powers for good.

Some trainees. Theyre technically being taught by the Advanced/Assistant class but they still like Lee a lot more.

Will Lee let go of his teaching instinct for a battle?

No. And Sparky hates it.

Blaze Kicked right in the face. You hate to see it. Sparkys been on the end of that foot several times. He understands.

*IM NOT JOKING BITCH.GIF*

Alex is a nice fella... but hes got some extreme buttons.

Or at least a fella as cute as buttons.

Its Lee. Alex’s buttons is all Lee.

Alex fighting with Lee-- as merciful as can be. Saintly even. Alex fighting literally anyone else-- A DEMON.

DO NOT STEAL THE EMPLOYEES.

Dilla doesnt know what to make of his dad and sister being so sleepy at all times. What if they fossilize and remain asleep into the future were theyre resurrected and scared in a spooky hospital?!

Enough of Team Red and Team Red adjacent Pokies...

I also made pirates...

Theyre all part of that Walreins crew and theyre watching their idiot captain try to flirt with a scary swan man.

Also Arceus, the Mews, Type:Null, and some UBs. SPEAKING OF CRIMINALS.

KOP!!! Ive decided his first name is Salvador.

I wanted to draw him without the face coverings.

Kops a pretty joyful fella, doesnt get bothered easily.... but if you dont pay him... OOF. Kops sends his regards to a girlfriend in mourning.

((WHATS IN THE BOX.GIF))

#PKMN fanarts #Pwny Gijinka mon fanarts.

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postmodernmulticoloredcloak · 6 years

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Maybe you need to learn, okay?

Well, it would seem that something interesting came out of Nick’s storyline (making a comment about the fact that it’s in the one episode with a different writers feels a bit like shooting on the Red Cross... but hey *shrugs*) and it’s a lesson long overdue for Sam.

Finally somebody made him realize that using other people as “projects” (nice double sense between the word as in ‘science project’* and as in ‘act of projection’ there) for dealing with his own insecurities about his own worth and goodness is not a foolproof plan, and the fact that he projects himself onto others doesn’t mean that the other person is the same as him -- other people are their own individuals and just because they have some shared experiences with you doesn’t mean they are perfect mirrors, and their paths don’t need to be the same. Other people can just be shitty, and their choices don’t reflect back on you.

*Interesting that Michael in 14x10 used the expression “cool science project” in reference to the mind-entering machine.

Back to Sam -- his conversation with Dean in the car seems to paint Dean in a harsh light, because he’s apparently asking Sam to give up on compassion. But then Nick proves Dean’s point, and I think it’s obvious that the narrative is telling us that Nick is way, way past the point where compassion applies.

Nick is not a project. He’s not a freakin’ puppy. He was Lucifer’s vessel for years. I know that, Dean. I thought -- You thought he’d what? Just walk it off? Come on, man. You’re not that dumb. It’s not about being dumb, Dean. It’s called compassion. Look, what happened to Nick could’ve happened to me. It almost happened to me. You change one little thing in our past, and that was me. Lucifer wearing me to the prom. And besides, since when do we give up on people? Since when do we just cut people loose? Well, maybe you need to learn, okay? ‘Cause when people are past the point of saving, maybe you need to learn to walk away.

Sam doesn’t genuinely seem to realize that things that happen to you are not what you are. Neither Nick or Sam are Lucifer’s possession -- they are different people whom the same thing happened to, but it’s absolutely not a certain fact that by shuffling things a bit, say, increasing Lucifer’s time inside Sam and decreasing Lucifer’s time inside Nick, “that was me”. That was one experience -- as huge and shaping as it was -- that happened to two different people.

Sam has the tendency to project himself onto people who have experiences in common with him, which he calls compassion, but he tends to lose the individuality of the other person under the self-shaped projection he puts on them. Some times, this kind of sympathy can turn into an emotionally useful tool to connect with people, like in Rowena’s case. Some times, it ends up in failure because, like in Nick’s case, the other person is just too different from Sam, and there is no point is trying to save them.

Putting too much investment in saving someone else because he sees themselves in them and he equates them being able to be saved to himself being able to be saved... is a very risky move, because the other person can just be impossible to save for their own personal qualities.

Dean can see that, because he connects to people on a different plane altogether -- like many posts and bloggers have already pointed out, his connections with people is based on empathy, on a less rational (you have gone through this, I have gone through this similar thing, I get you) and more emotional level. If Dean doesn’t empathize with someone, he walks away.

Which leads us to the next point -- Sam’s apparent inability to make a distinction between people and people. “Since when do we give up on people? Since when do we just cut people loose?” he says, obviously leveraging on the fact that Dean does not give up on people or cuts them loose... but the people Dean does not give up on are not... just random people. Not people like Nick. Nick has absolutely no emotional connection with any of them, except for the one-sided projection Sam has operated onto him.

Dean will never give up on you if you matter. Dean will never cut you loose if there is a connection to cut in the first place! Which is not Nick’s case. Nick isn’t a person they have an actual investment in (be it “family” or an innocent person whose welfare they see as their responsibility). Of course, it’s not the Sam can’t tell the difference of a person who matters and a person who doesn’t (again, I’m not saying that Dean only cares about people who mean something to him personally, his ideal quota of people to save is everyone, but if someone consciously and purposely crosses a certain line** - bye) but he has invested Nick of emotional significance that is not reciprocated or based on anything substantial, because it’s based on Sam’s “you are me” mechanism - which doesn’t work.

**I think the scene where Nick steps over the trap symbolizes that line -- of course, not that Nick hasn’t crossed that line already, because he’s done plenty of terrible shit before, but this just symbolizes in general that Nick has passed the line. We could call it the line between human and monster, where the terms don’t exactly match with “biological” humans/monsters. A human, or human-adjacent, is someone who might make mistakes, because life is complicated, but at the end of the day... is still trying. A monster is someone who has stopped trying or has never done it in the first place.

Obviously, Dean’s words at the end echo something dark, because we’re reminded of him considering himself past the point of saving, back during the Mark of Cain arc (the word ‘puppy’, magical boxes trapping dangerous things, the bottom of the ocean are all references to that), and I know we’re supposed to read “you need to walk away from me and let me shut myself in a box on the bottom of the ocean forever” in Dean’s words, but... the scene is textually about Nick, and it’s sort of hard to concentrate on anything else than “fucking yeet Nick out of existence please”. Eventually, Sam will not walk away from Dean, but it is a good thing that he learns that from certain people he needs to.

#my spn thoughts #spn meta #spn 14x11 #sammy #spn spoilers #spn

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tervacious · 2 years

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and another thing, more general but still a vent, Episode 32b

If you know anything about the word “populist”, you’d know it started off in the American midwest as a term for progressive, borderline socialist political organizations who had the temerity to believe the People (ie the Populus, hence, you know, the name) should have a say in how society is run and organized. Populist parties were the first parties in the U.S. to advocate wholeheartedly for complete female sufferage, to regulate business and banks, to break up monopolies, etc.

But then the word got hijacked, and now for some reason “populist” and “populism” have become associated with racists and Donald Trump. How did this happen?

Well, it happened in the same way it’s happening to the word “leftist”. If you are a leftist you are against capitalism and advocate for a redistribution of wealth and generally believe in class solidarity. Everything else is honestly kind of window dressing.

Now, however, the word “leftist” and my favorite, The Left, which is related to The Science and shares the common denominator of factually Not Existing, means “neo liberal asshole who wants my kid to believe there’s fifty genders and white people are bad for being white and cops are bad” or, if you are a neo liberal asshole, it means “fash-adjacent anarchist who thinks cops are bad”. Like, cops are bad, okay, but this is how words end up meaning the opposite of how they started out. I particular love it when people who are, in fact, politically leftists yell about leftists being the cause of all the... Not Leftism?

Radical feminists (fun fact: a genuine Left Wing Movement! Who knew?) have been doing this shit for awhile, we’re always so ahead of the curve on so many things including this dumbfuckery, blaming “the Left”, whatever that is, for things that have nothing to do with Leftism and that leftists strongly disagree about. Not long ago a fairly popular and prominent social media lefty dude ended up getting dogpiled because he quoted Marx’s actual opinion on prostitution, which, spoiler, did not dovetail with the popular neolib Pimp Lobby “sex work” rewriting, and everyone was mad on the internet. But on the other hand I have to watch women who call themselves Radical cooing over Jordan Fucking Peterson because, what, he agrees with you on one thing and has a dick as far as I know? What the hell?

And I guess this does go back to my last venting about living under patriarchy and how female conditioning is, without a doubt, our biggest fucking problem. It really is. You’re only responsible for yourself in the end, not for how some dude behaves, so seriously, what the hell are you doing when you get all giddy over some boy agreeing with you about how inferior you are? That’s what so much of this boils down to. A female swimmer ties a trans male swimmer but let’s just make this all about him and how girls just can’t compete. The boys love that, they got you coming and going, no wonder they’re so into this one.

There was a movie from I think the 1990s, I don’t remember the title or even who was in it though I feel like Bernadette Peters was in there somewhere, and it took place in France in the early to mid 1800s, I think. A character, a woman, was talking about how a woman’s natural tendency was to surrender. She said this very bitterly, but I think the comparison was to a prey animal who feels sharp teeth and instantly submits, and the other female character was not pleased at this remark, but you know what? That’s not nature, that’s conditioning, and watching women in a constant state of surrender is so fucking discouraging. It really is. In fact it’s why the word “feminist” joins the list of things that now mean something completely different from what it actually means, goddamn.

#another vent

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morwensteelsheen · 3 years

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AFTA Chapter 5 Notes

Éowyn is wearing green for a few reasons.

First, as a reference to green being the medieval “middle” colour (please ask me about the middle colour and Dante’s Purgatorio lmao) —

“Medieval scholars inherited the idea from ancient times that there were seven colours: white, yellow, red, green, blue, purple and black. Green was the middle colour, which meant that it sat balanced between the extremes of white and black.” [x]

And also as a reference to Pastoreau’s take on green knights:

“Conversely, a green knight was a young knight, recently dubbed, whose audacious or insolent behaviour was going to cause great disorder; he could be good or bad.” [x]

And lastly as a reference to Dante’s Purgatorio, in which Beatrice, his first and greatest love, appears to him atop the mountain of purgatory described as such (Kirkpatrick translation):

So now, beyond a drifting cloud of flowers (which rose up, arching, from the angels’ hands, then fell within and round the chariot), seen through a veil, pure white, and olive-crowned, a lady now appeared to me. Her robe was green, her dress the colour of a living flame.

Éowyn embroiders as a thistle as a reference to Hugh MacDiarmid’s brilliant poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle:

O fain I’d keep my hert entire, Fain hain the licht o’ my desire, But ech! the shinin’ streams ascend, And leave me empty at the end. For aince it’s toomed my hert and brain, The thistle needs maun fa’ again. —But a’ its growth ’ll never fill The hole it’s turned my life intill!

Her little cultural mix up with food service is loosely inspired by the transition period between when service à la française was popular, and when service à la russe became popular. Adapted for my own purposes.

Éowyn musing that the Gondorrim probably hired people to hold their swords for them is loosely based on the role of actual medieval squires, lol

The basics of Boromir (and Éowyn’s!) education is based on notes given by Tolkien in Appendix F of LOTR.

Specifically: “[S]o that at the time of the War of the Ring the elven-tongue was known only to a small part of the peoples of Gondor, and spoken daily by fewer. These dwelt mainly in Minas Tirith and the townlands adjacent, and in the land of the tributary princes of Dol Amroth.”

Boromir’s discussion on the artistic/political merit of print culture is based on my own private research. For more on that, I suggest James Raven’s chapter, “The Book as Commodity” in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain.

Éowyn’s belief that her people could remember more history than the Gondorrim is based in reality — people raised in oral cultures tend to have better long-term recall. More on that in David Rubin’s Memory in oral traditions: the cognitive psychology of epic, ballads, and counting-out rhymes.

The idea that very few people actually went into the archives/libraries of Minas Tirith is not totally supported by the text, but I’m fudging it based on the following:

“And yet there [in Minas Tirith] lie in his hoards many records that few even of the lore-masters now can read, for their scripts and tongues have become dark to later men.” (This is a reference to Adûnaic iirc But) — The Fellowship of the Ring

"Yet now, if the Rohirrim are grown in some ways more like to us, enhanced in arts and gentleness, we too have become more like to them, and can scarce claim any longer the title High. We are become Middle Men, of the Twilight, but with memory of other things. For as the Rohirrim do, we now love war and valour as things good in themselves, both a sport and an end; and though we still hold that a warrior should have more skills and knowledge than only the craft of weapons and slaying, we esteem a warrior, nonetheless, above men of other crafts.” — The Two Towers

The description of Imrahil’s outfit is based both on this marvellous description in AnnaFan’s Whenas In Silks and on Joffrey Baratheon’s fabulous outfit from fuck knows what episode of GOT. Absolutely brilliant costuming.

Blue is also a colour with a fascinating history (I recommend checking out Pastoreau’s book on the topic if that’s your sort of thing). Blue pigment was pulled from the woad plant, a plant native to the Mediterranean, so it seemed fitting to associate it with Imrahil.

Blue was also the colour of medieval royalty, and given that Imrahil is the only ‘royalty’ (as such, obviously used very, very loosely) remaining in Gondor, it’s another nice fit.

Here’s a cute little Google Arts and Culture ‘exhibit’ on the history of the colour, if you’re bored.

Okay so on Faramir being a bit of a loudmouth as a teenager, I suspect this might be controversial. My take is based on this:

Within minutes of meeting Sam and Frodo, he’s shooting his mouth off about, like, literally everything. Gondor being shit, wars being shit, the Rohirrim being shit, so on and so forth. Obviously he’s serving the narrative function of being Gondor’s Big Exposition Man™ before we get to MT in the next book, but as a character moment it’s pretty intense. This is how he behaves at age 36 and as (effectively) one of the highest ranking military commanders in Gondor.

He’s still pretty mouthy with Big D when he’s getting sent away to Osgiliath. I know there’s a tendency to interpret the line as miserable self-pity, but I think he’s being snippy about it.

The music the musicians play is something Byzantine in my head, it doesn’t have to be that in your head, but that’s just where I was going with it.

Militarily: we’re in autumn 3016 here, So it’s not as if the war proper is gearing up yet, but we’re definitely starting to see a larger output (if you will) of Orcs, and Sauron putting forth a more concerted effort to strip away Gondor’s military resources.

There is remarkably little in canon about the two or so years leading up to the start of the Ring War. Off the top of my head, all we’re given is the destruction of the bridge at Osgiliath, which happens in the summer of 3018.

I’m not a military historian and I’m not going to pretend to be, so I’m mostly just guessing at what the latter days of a war of attrition/early days of a hot war would look like. Forgive me.

Faramir marking the gravesites of the fallen is lifted directly from Altariel’s The Book of Days

A note on the level of communication between Henneth Annûn and Minas Tirith —

We know very little about the practicalities of it. What we know for certain is that access to Ithilien is limited, and knowledge of the location of Henneth Annûn even more so. Still, in February and March 3019, Faramir’s on record as doing quite a bit of riding around between HA, MT, and Osgiliath. He wasn’t doing that of his own volition, most of what he was doing was coming from higher command, so I think it’s not unreasonable to think that there would have been pretty regular communication with the outside world. Have I inflated that regularity to serve my regency-esque purposes? Absolutely. But I also don’t think I’m shooting too wide of the canon mark with it either.

For reference, the distance between Minas Tirith and Henneth Annûn, via Cair Andros, is about 65 miles, which is an eight or so hour ride by horse. Given that the Rangers, when we meet them in Two Towers, number about two or three hundred strong (per Window on the West), it’s not unreasonable to think they may have had a dedicated messenger or two to make communication with MT easier.

#e writes #this look like shit on mobile I swear to god they were formatted normally on my laptop #tumblr man #what a mess #afta

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eremji · 6 years

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Thoughts on Infinity War, and Thanos' Motivation

Disclaimer: I'm not a Marvel expert. Some of my information on comic plots was collected from wikis and secondary articles, due to a lack of access to a primary source or the simple inaccuracy of my own memory. I also mostly enjoyed Infinity War, and any criticism herein should not be taken as decrying the whole.

Spoilers behind the cut. Please close your eyes and scroll super fast, block tags, duck and cover, etc. if you’re on mobile, because, seriously, spoilers.

An extremely simplified version of movie production:

From a production standpoint, Iron Man was a huge risk for the studios fronting the money for it. After critical and box office flops from 90s Batman films and other various superhero action flicks, studios typically found comic book movies to underperform in comparison to budgetary requirements for good visuals, making them unattractive. Marvel has taken a large step away from making comic book movies, to making comic book adaptations, because what works on the page doesn’t work in a moving picture.

Marvel Studios’ cinematic success has almost nothing to do with how compelling the source material is – because some of Marvel’s library is pretty much slush pile garbage. This was before your average artist or consumer realized you can get pretty literary while still having cool pictures on a page. They’re valuable because they propelled the comic industry to widespread success, but the source is best examined with a critical eye towards tone deaf and anachronistic viewpoints on race, sexuality, gender, and pretty much everything else. Marvel Studios has done a fairly consistent job of divorcing the cinematic canon from the original medium’s baggage, to which I attribute a large portion of the films’ success in comparison to very lukewarm iterations of DC or X-Men.

As media consumers, we’re accustomed to having a finished product to hold and analyze. When considering story, in terms of plotting and pacing, I personally believe it’s most helpful to compare the scope of the MCU production to be similar to that of a television show, rather than a traditional movie or movie series. It may be startling to know that even very successful television shows, like Breaking Bad or Stranger Things, often don’t even have all the episodes completely written out prior to beginning filming of a season.

Marvel Studios’ movies have been in production for ten years, with many, many different hands in the pot, and earlier scripts don’t always set up the best planting and payoff of character or plot elements later in the continuity. (For visual learners, Lindsay Ellis has a very layman-friendly example using clips from Mad Max: Fury Road.)

You can see where this might start to cause some consistency issues.

Crossover event comics and the necessary sacrifice of emotional development:

For anyone walking in to expecting Avengers: Infinity War to have a lot of character development, I’m very sorry for your loss.

There was never going to be a grand emotional reunion for Steve and Bucky, and there was never going to be whole hours dedicated to bonding and witty bickering and new friendships that weren’t absolutely vital to the plot. That we got things like the Steve-and-Bucky hug, the jealous Star-Lord vs. Thor moments, and Steve introducing himself politely to Groot were for the benefit of the audience more than advancing the plot, which is a huge victory in terms of crushing as much as possible into a theatrical cut.

A film production has a finite amount of screen time to allocate before a movie becomes bloated. When people joke about Infinity War being the most ambitious crossover event, I don’t think some of them realize how on the mark that is from a production standpoint. Hard decisions have to be made between what isn’t vital to advancing plot in a compelling way and what was retained to meet audience expectations. Infinity War often felt like it tried to recapture that Joss Whedon-ish sassy-but-kinda-flat comedy from the first Avengers, and that meant punchlines for jokes sometimes land at emotionally inappropriate times because characters just don’t have cinematic space for witty banter between shooting aliens and losing everyone they ever cared about.

There’s a difference in author-audience expectations of what’s important in these team-up movies, and also gaps between fans actively participating in fandom because they love the characters and casual moviegoers looking for a blockbuster. It all comes down to how much each party in the creative transaction is willing to settle for. Traditionally, Marvel has set up the character-driven plots and subplots in individual comics with occasional crossover cameos for a few issues when another character or baddie is relevant to the plot. The large crossover events, like Civil War, Contest of Champions, or Infinity are almost always plot-heavy and character-light.

This is so much easier in comic book format, where multiple series can be coordinated in regular, paced releases, and different comic issues may happen parallel or directly before/after the event crossovers. Movies take a significantly larger amount of time to produce, through pre-production, filming, post-production, marketing, and distribution.

A brief (I’m serious, they’ve been making comics since the 1939) explication of source material:

One of the largest disconnects for me, as a fan of both the comics and the movies, was the change in Thanos’ motivation, but not his mission. For those who aren't aware of the origins of his character, he essentially wants to murder people to impress a girl – Mistress Death, to be specific. He wants to kill half of all life in the universe so that he can be her equal and win her affection.

Dorkly did a pretty solid breakdown of some of Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet story and the innate misogynistic slant of his character, including comic panels from the original source material, that paints comic!Thanos an internet Nice Guy™. (Feel free to skim the article; it's a bit slow to get to the point.) Perusing the comic panels, you can see Thanos is hella into negging and is spiteful when Mistress Death shows interest in another dude (spoilers: it’s Deadpool). He clearly believes love is possession, and if he can’t have what he wants, then, good golly, no one can.

He’s also really off the rails – dubbed the Mad Titan even before his objectification mega crush on a badass corpse with a wicked bod – and is personally responsible for destroying Titan. He’s not a villain that believes he’s the hero, and this shift away from his motivation being dangerous-and-horrible to dangerous-and-misguided casts the first shadow on the premise.

My (very personal) opinion on the execution:

MCU essentially played keep away with some of the more supernatural elements of the source material, at least until introducing Dr. Strange. In doing so they had to construct Thanos’ motivation for a comic-book-inspired task out of whole cloth. There is no Mistress Death. Secondary characters that were discrete entities are often pulling double duty*.

(*Or triple. See also: Bucky Barnes, who is wearing the backstory of Captain America's gay best friend Arnie Roth and now White Wolf. If you were previously unaware of this factoid, please enjoy the irony that Marvel’s biggest pro-American propaganda piece had an openly gay best friend circa early 80s but Civil War ham-fistedly had to work in that awkward-as-fuck smooch between Steve and Peggy Carter’s hot young romantic surrogate niece.)

So, okay, they have to reinvent Thanos, who we've only seen in a handful of post-credit scenes and vicariously learned, through Loki in the first Avengers movie and then Gamora in Guardians, is a conqueror and also really Bad News™.

I buy everything so far. And why not? Black Panther made me love Killmonger and his rage, and the parallels to contemporary issues made him fairly empathetic without highlighting that his perspective was necessarily the ‘correct’ one. Similarly, Spider-Man: Homecoming’s villain, Vulture, was believable in the sort of suffering everyman-turned-desperate way, highlighting the fallout of the Space Invaders vs. Avengers destruction without suggesting the audience should root for Vulture.

In general, I am on board for these movies going straight for the throat on the big baddies of the comic universe because movie production is lengthy, expensive, and time-consuming. Dear Marvel Studios, Give me Avengers vs. Dr. Doom. Love, Me.

A villain can be built up over the course of a single movie (or two). Armed with this optimism, and heartened by recent Marvel Studios successes in characterization, I walked into Infinity War expecting as much gratuitous violence, universe-cleansing genocide, and genuine fear of Thanos as I could possibly expect from something Disney-adjacent.

I knew people were going to die. Let me say – there was no way to spoil this for me. The Infinity Gauntlet comic series starts with half the universe dying. I expected there to be ‘casualties’ and even though the Russo bros said that this wasn’t two parts of the same movie, it’s certainly serial. At minimum, I was expecting Thanos bent on conquering the cosmos, worshiping at the altar of death in the abstract, if not groveling for an inevitable-cosmic-force-turned unattainable woman.

And yet. And yet.

We got the purple version of the Kool-Aid man with some seriously unaddressed parent-child issues (mirrored in Tony Stark’s loss of Peter Parker) and a wholly unimaginative motivation. I won’t go too far much into the movie’s alarming efforts at framing Thanos as a sympathetic character despite his genocidal and horribly abusive tendencies, because I am A) not an expert at identifying film technique and B) the push for Thanos to be an empathetic villain has been analyzed elsewhere.

Phenomenal, limitless cosmic power and all you want to do is break shit? For all the immaturity of it, Thanos’ comic book motivation was more believable.

To those arguing that the his motivations in the movie are predicated off of him being the Mad Titan and therefore not rooted in logic: The film did not explicitly plant the idea – except in the way that we know genocide is bad due to an innate sense of morality – that he was unhinged and power-mad, nor did they really give the audience any payoff.

Instead, we get, ‘I don’t really want to do this, but I must.’

There was a point where I started wondering why the hell he wasn’t just being steadily roasted by the Avengers for not receiving some sort of basic education in the evils of wealth disparity and resource distribution.

As an audience member, was I meant to believe this incredibly powerful entity at the center of a massive fleet, accompanied by a group of talented and sycophantic followers, couldn’t think of a better way to bring ‘balance’ to the universe?

Perhaps Thanos’ justification is simply the conceit of the way the universe operates, required to propel a plot forward. However, this is also poorly explained. There are many unanswered questions: Why is it a given that killing half the universe will create balance? What does balance look like? Is this state permanent or is it a routine, necessary evil in order to stop entropy? Is balance a socioeconomic state, or does it have some greater cosmological significance? We know that Titan fell after rejecting Thanos’ extreme solution, but would the population have actually endured and flourished if his plan had been carried out?

For a movie that did so well at handling a cast so phenomenally large as the one involved in its production, Infinity War really didn’t go in very hard on selling Thanos. I would have been perfectly happy if Marvel Studios had taken the risk to lean in hard on making the movie Thanos-centric, given Thanos even more screen time to develop his character, motives, and the rules of the universe – and then make Avengers 4 about, you know, the actual avenging.

Parting notes:

What are we left with?

Infinity War gifted us with some badass action clips, a fairly jarring death performance by Tom Holland, Cheerful Goatherd Bucky Barnes, and emotionally traumatizing bubbles. It never really sells the conundrum it sets up via Thanos. You'll never hear me insist a peice of art or entertainment is required to carry some sort of social commentary or moral message, but I feel like this could have been, tonally, a vastly different film had it considered the core of Thanos' motivations the same way it considered Vulture's or Killmonger's.

Also, where the hell is Adam Warlock (set up at the end of GotG: Vol. 2; revisit planting and payoff) to shit talk Thanos’ lack of villainous veracity when we need him?

#infinity war spoilers #infinity war #thanos #spoilers #seriously hella spoilers #mcu #marvel comics #infinity gauntlet #there was whiskey involved in writing this #so many links #thanos' motives #review #explication #meta

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boomtheregoesyourpants · 7 years

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Alpha Tendencies

REQUEST: can you please do an "episode" wherein Katsuki, Todoroki and/or Kirishima got hit by some kind of quirk that gave some wolf features and tendencies and with our little Izuka in the middle. Que: Deku Protecyion Squad plus Dad!Might. Que: Kinky/ hot (borderline lemon...only as a suggestion!) scenarios with either of the three boys mentioned (or possbly a dekubowl) due to Alpha tendencies xD And lastly; que: Fem!Izuku being an oblivious cinnamonroll, chaos ensue.

So I wrote this to the best of my abilities! The characters are slightly aged up - being in their third years when this all occurs. The story basically follows along with the three of them getting hit with a powerful side effect from a villain's quirk, causing them to have some new features and new urges that get them all riled up. It's a lot more peaceful than when I first planned, but I like the tone of it so far.

IT WAS 13 PAGES LONG. I had to stop it somewhere! XD If people would like me to continue it, I would be MORE than happy to - it might honestly become it's own little side story with abo dynamics and Izuka's own little harem ;)

***WARNING: THIS HAS SOME SUGGESTED THEMES IN IT, IF YOU DON’T LIKE THAT PLEASE DON’T READ!***

***

“How the fucking hell did I get stuck with you two fuckers?”

Bakugou sneered as he looked around the large office the three boys were placed in, waiting for the hero known as Hound Dog to appear. He was a counselor at UA and agreed to help with the current assignment the students of 1-A were doing at the moment. Supposedly the class had been split up into teams of students who don't always pair up with each other - hence Bakugou’s current predicament.

“Aw come on Bakubro! You don't really mean that.” Kirishima’s grin irritated the blonde further, his palms flaring up within his gloves. “The three of us as a team is like a dream team! I bet we will ace this assignment no problem!”

“That all depends on if Bakugou can control his temper.” Todoroki’s eyes hardened on Bakugou’s shaking form as he sat patiently on the couch. “I'm afraid I'll never be able to work with someone who is this explosive at times.”

“The fuck you say?!”

“See what I mean?”

Kirishima groaned as he fell against the chair adjacent to the couch. “Come on Bakugou. What has you so riled up anyway?”

“It probably has something to do with where Midoriya was placed.” Todoroki looked up to see Bakugou pacing as if thinking to himself now.

“I almost can say I feel the same. Izuka can handle her own, but the two on her team are a little… frightening.” Kirishima cringed, thinking back to placements and Izuka’s face as her name was called alongside Mineta’s and Aoyama’s.

“If that ball headed purple fucker even touches her I swear to kami I'll blow him up so fucking good no one will be able to recognize him.”

Todoroki nodded his agreement. “That is something I can actually agree with you on Bakugou. If he lays a finger on her…” The flames on his left side suddenly sparked to life and Kirishima yelped as Todoroki slowly cooled himself down. “Sorry.”

“No dude it's okay! Honestly! Just- wow you feel just as strongly about that as Bakubro and I do.”

“Midoriya is a close friend… she means…” Todoroki’s eyes looked up to glance at Bakugou. “She means alot to me.”

Bakugou’s teeth grit as he moved to say something before a large howl filled the room. “Settle down you three! It's time to start the mission!”

---

“Shit fuck damnit! Get the fuck off me you heavy piece of shit!” Bakugou pushed to move Kirishima off of him, the other boy grunting at the pressure put on his tender ribs. “We gotta move! That fucking villain is around and we gotta-” He stopped as his eyes widened at the large imposing figure looming over them. “Shit shit shit! Kirishima fucking move! We gotta move!”

Kirishima groaned, his body aching at the strain put on it after the extensive use of his quirk. He pushed himself up to see the villain they were tasked with trying to detain. Similar to Hound Dog, he had the traits of a large wolf, but this villain’s body was bigger, stronger, and had the traits of a feral who had gone rouge. The large body seemed to be stalking around them like prey, circling the two boys while huffing out pants. Kirishima was shoved to the side and grunted at Bakugou’s rough treatment, the other male standing before Kirishima protectively.

“Bakugou don’t-”

“Shut the fuck up and let me handle this!” Bakugou’s palms let out a few explosions, his gloves long gone from the extensive use and his forearms shaking in overexertion. “Where the fuck is Halfie and that blasted hero anyway!?”

“Hound Dog is out of commission.” Todoroki limped over to the other two boys, his two sides showing both frostbite and burns. “It’s just us now.” His eyes narrowed at the looming villain, his body tensing as the wolf moved slowly, circling them and growling as he stalked closer. “Any ideas on what to do with him?”

“Yeah fucking blowing his face up!” Bakugou moved before a scent hit him full force, his hands flying to cover his mouth and nose as it grew stronger. “Shit what is-?” He grew wheezy and fell to his knees, coughing horribly as a strange fog covered the three boys.

“Bakugou what is-?” Todoroki’s cough followed next, and a loud thud hit the ground, showing Kirishima out cold.

“Shit. Fuck. I can’t…” Bakugou’s eyes grew heavy before he fell forward, his body shaking and he lost consciousness. Todoroki soon followed suit, the large wolf circling them once more before turning and running away, loud sirens filling the deserted street as the fog cleared.

---

“Don’t you think it’s almost cute?”

“Shhh Ochako. We gotta be quiet! Don't you know what Recovery Girl just said?”

Bakugou’s eyes shot open at the sound of Izuka’s voice, his body groaning in protest at his movements before his red eyes met with Izuka’s beautiful green ones. His hands instinctively moved out, grasping for Izuka’s as her eyes widened and softened at Bakugou.

“Kacchan!” She smiled before roughly being jerked into Bakugou’s tight hug. She gasped for breath, feeling the other nuzzle his face into the crook of her neck, seemingly searching for something. “Ka-Kacchan?! What are you doing? Are you okay?” She tried to push away from his body, but it only caused his hold on her to tighten.

“Don't move Deku… I… I need…”

“Kacchan? What do you need?”

A deep growl filled the room as Izuka and Ochako jerked to see Kirishima barring his teeth at Bakugou, his body propped up by a pile of pillows behind him. The two boys sent death glares at each other as an odd scent filled the room.

“Let her go Bakugou.”

“Fuck you hair for brains! I won't-” A loud slap filled the room and Bakugou instantly let go of Izuka, cradling his now pounding head on his hands. “FUCK?! What the shit?!” He growled looking up before seeing Recovery Girl giving him a stern look.

“Hold your tongue young man. Hasn't being at this school for nearly three years taught you anything?”

Bakugou bit back his snarl, his eyes widening at the pathetic noise coming from him. He glanced around the room, finally taking notice that everything seemed to be… brighter. He could also hear and even smell better. Izuka’s natural scent mixed with that perfume she always wore floating in the air around him. He took a confused sniff, before his eyes widened and he covered his nose with his hand, pinching the end. “What the hell is that smell?!”

Kirishima looked around confused as well, his eyes taking in everything within the room twice before looking at Recovery Girl. “What happened to us?”

Recovery Girl sighed before sitting down in a chair, Izuka coming to stand beside her and smiling slightly. “You boys were hit with something fierce in your assignment the yesterday. I'm afraid there were some… side effects.” Recovery Girl fixed them a stare and then nodded over at Todoroki who was just beginning to wake up. “Izuka if you will?”

“Sure Recovery Girl.” She smiled before nodding at Ochako. “Go on ahead of me Ochako. I'm going to help out with Recovery Girl a bit longer.”

“Gotcha! Okay see you back at class Izuka!” Ochako walked out of the room, closing the door tightly behind her as Izuka made her way over to Todoroki and helping him to sit up in his bed as well. Bakugou’s eyes widened at the amount of bandages covering his body but what caught his attention the most was the two fuzzy ears sticking out of his head.

“What in the fuc-” He heard a throat clear and he shut his mouth tightly. “Why does he have ears?”

Todoroki looked confused before he lifted up a hand, gently rubbing about his head and feeling the pair of ears he was sure he didn't have before… This wasn't… how…?

Recovery Girl sighed and looked over to Izuka who smiled at her. “I'll let Izuka explain this all to you. I'm getting too old for this.”

Izuka laughed before facing the three boys. “You see… You three were hit by a transformation quirk from the villain you were after, whose name we've come to know as of now as Hellwolf. Supposedly his quirk is not only able to transform himself into a large wolf, as you three know, but also to transform others into this form as well- forming basically a pack with anyone who is caught within the fog.” She paused to make sure the three third years were still with her before continuing on. “Luckily, you three were taken out of the fog quickly enough that the pack bond wouldn't be permanent and you only have a few side effects from the exposure that should all clear up within a few week.”

The three boys looked from one another and then to the tops of their heads, each supporting a pair of ears that resembled a fluffy dogs. Kirishima’s hands went up to his own ears before a grin broke out over his face. “Izuka! Hey hey! What do they look like?!”

Her eyes followed his hands before a giggle was brought to her lips. She stepped forward to gently rub one of the ears between her fingers. The other two boys in the room narrowing their eyes at the red haired male.

“You have the biggest and pointiest ears Eiji. They are as red as your eyes and have little tuffs of fur that is as dark as your natural hair color.” She smiles at him, ignoring the sound that seemed to be coming from his chest and looking over at Bakugou. “Kacchan has the softest and fluffiest ears of you all. They are the same ashy blonde and the fur sticks up in all different directions.” She giggled at his mortified look, him looking away at the blush that formed on his cheeks. “Shouto probably has the most unique ears, each of them having a different color based on your split hair. They are also the tiniest but in my opinion cutest pair of ears.”

Todoroki’s eyes lit up before a small blush flushed his cheeks, causing him to look away and out the window his bed was against. His eyes widened at the early evening sky before looking over at Recovery Girl. “How long were we out for?”

“It's been nearly a day since you boys were brought in here. I'm surprised you slept for that long but knowing what changes your bodies went through… well…” She stopped and looked at the three of them, her eyes calculating. “Izuka dear, go on back to the classroom and inform Midnight that the boys are awake and you will be their personal nurse for the next few days. I'm signing you off as on a personal assignment as my assistant. Understand?”

“Hai! I'll be right back then!”

Izuka left the room, closing the door swiftly behind her. Recovery Girl’s eyes softened at the young lady, her smile small before turning a cold look at the three boys in front of her. “Now listen up. There are some things you three need to know and I want you to listen well. This is extremely important.”

That seemed to gain their attention and had them sitting up a little straighter. “You three will be spending the next few days resting. Do I make myself clear? We aren't entirely sure how long these effects are going to last, but we need to keep you under a steady watch to make sure nothing seems abnormal.” A few nods were given and she continued on. “You're going to realize that your senses have been heightened. You're going to hear and smell better than before. This means you'll be must more distracted by the tiniest bit of noise and smell so you won't be attending classes due to the high levels of sound and smells from the different people within the room. It'll take you a good while to get used to it, so you're on leave until then. You three will be sharing one of the smaller houses along with Izuka to avoid too much going on within the dormitories. She will not be staying the nights with you all, but will be coming in and out to check in on you three periodically before reporting back to me.”

Her eyes hardened as she fixed them all with a glare. “You three have basically become humans with an alpha complexity. This means you're going to have urges, stronger urges than normal.”

“Recovery Girl, if I may?” Todoroki raised a tired arm and gave her a look. “What kind of urges are you exactly talking about?” He didn't like the knowing glint in her eyes as she pointedly looked at Bakugou.

“Sexual urges.” Kirishima coughed loudly and all three of them had the decency to look embarrassed. “You're going to experience an alpha wolf’s rut, hence why you will be away from the rest of the students for the next few days to a week. I've been monitoring your hormone levels since the moment you were brought in here as I was told of the situation. Izuka has also been informed as she is going to be your caretaker.” Bakugou barked out a loud, “WHAT” before calming back down at the look he received.

“The reason why I'm allowing Izuka to be your caretaker is specifically because of the knowledge that you three all have a certain thing for her, am I right?” Seeing them all give some form of confirmation she sighed, rubbing her temples. “I wouldn't normally allow this to happen, but Izuka personally asked for this and I also know having her scent around you three has had a calming effect on you…” She looked up at the ceiling. “She also told me about your predicament.”

The three of them all had varying forms of shock on their faces as Recovery Girl gave them stern looks. “You will be having the urges to mate. You all must know what that means. You will want to claim, bite and mate with her for the next few days. She is aware of this, and she knows the precautions she must take to avoid letting you three at each other and especially at her. I'm warning you all now, these next few days are going to be hell on you and your body. The main reason why I'm letting Izuka anywhere near you three is because her scent alone will help to calm you down and make it slightly less miserable. Now I suggest going home and resting for the night. Listen to Izuka and prepare to the best of your abilities.”

Recovery Girl stood up and slowly moved to the door, opening it up and seeing a blushing Izuka standing there, fist raised towards the door. “Ah Izuka, you can take these three to the house now. Thanks again deary.”

Izuka smiled before looking up at the three boys, them all pointedly looking away from her as she walked into the room.

“Well, shall we?”

The smaller house was just as spacious as the dorms seemed to be. It fit the four of them easily as Bakugou ran and claimed a room, throwing his stuff in there before plopping onto the bed and groaning. His body still ached from the repeated use of his quirk yesterday. Todoroki sighed, seeing that Bakugou had claimed the one bedroom on the first floor and moved towards the stairs, following behind Kirishima who was heavily leaning against Izuka for help. His eyes narrowed at the red-head, his body instinctively tensing at every touch the two made. He heard more than felt the growl coming from his own chest, and he quickly ducked into the first door that appeared on his right. Noticing it was bedroom, he quickly put his stuff on the bed and moved to close the door, but stopping as he noticed Izuka standing there with her arms crossed.

“Izuka…”

“Shouto.” Her smile widened as he seemed to visibly relax in front of her. Sitting on the bed, she moved to kneel before him, her hands reaching for the gauze still wrapped around his left leg. “May I?”

He nodded, his eyes shifting up to see Bakugou looking into the room. He trailed back down to see Izuka pulling at the gauze, showing the nasty burns on his leg before wrapping her hands around it. He felt the familiar heat in his leg before letting out a loud sigh, the pain slowly ebbing away. His eyes closed as the warm feeling spread. Letting himself relax, he leaned back on the bed, ignoring the presence from the doorway.

“Um… Shouto?” His eyes snapped open and he watched as Izuka gave him a concerned look, but the large blush across her cheeks had him sitting up in interest. “You uh… You were purring.”

Todoroki groaned as he fell back onto the bed at the loud laughing coming from Bakugou. He didn’t think his face could be more red than it was at that moment. Knowing for a fact that he just purred - a sentiment he knew to show that he was beyond content and happy - was mortifying, especially since he had done so in front of Katsuki out of everyone. Izuka… he didn't mind, cause she did bring him that warm feeling and he wouldn't mind purring for her for as long has he had the ability to if it would continuously put that lovely blush on her cheeks.

He peered through his fingers, his hands having come up to cover his face in his embarrassment, to see Katsuki grinning at Izuka while she had her cheeks puffed out in what he called her “frustrated with everything to do with Katsuki” face. He sat up to look once more down at his leg and smiled at the slowly healing burns, the pain almost completely ebbed away at this point. A hand came to rest on his leg and he jerked up to see Izuka smiling softly at him.

“I'm going to go help Kacchan with something and I'll be back up to check on both you and Eiji before I leave, alright?” A silent nod from Shouto had her moving away, and he watched with a bated breath as she moved out of the room and down the stairs to the first floor. His eyes took in Katsuki’s form as he stood there, watching Izuka before his red eyes moved to look at Shouto. His mouth slowly morphed into a smirk and he had the audacity to wink at him before slamming the door shut.

Shouto sat there with wide eyes before falling back onto the bed and nearly whining out in frustration. Of course Katsuki would initiate a challenge, of course he fucking would. This was the most competitive bastard he had ever met before- even bigger than his own father!

“Fucking bastard.”

---

“Kacchan what was it that you needed?” Izuka turned around to look at the room Katsuki had claimed. The large bedroom had a tv and a connected bathroom, like all the other rooms did as Cementoss was instructed to build it specifically to help the three males out during this… less than fortunate time. She noted the bed was a four poster bed, and it seemed he had already placed all of his belongings away. She turned around to look at him, seeing him leaning against the closed door with a smirk on his face.

“Kacchan?”

He stalked closer, having already locked the door, backing Izuka up until she hit the opposite wall of the bedroom, Katsuki’s arms coming to trap her between him as he loomed into her space. His breath fanned over her neck before he leaned down and slowly kissed the exposed skin, a slow sensual kiss compared to his normal rough demeanor.

“I need you Izuka.” His voice growled out and made her body shake, her hands coming up to grip at the front of his shirt. “I fucking need you.” His voice rasped out as his hands moved to grip her hips, pulling her flush against him and grinding down to keep her against the wall and to relieve some of the tension he was feeling.

“Ah- Kacchan we… we shouldn't!” She let out a soft noise as his teeth nibbled lightly against her shoulder, her shirt being moved out of the way for him to nuzzle his face into the crook of her neck. He moaned softly, grinding his body against hers as she gasped at the feeling of his arousal. “Ka-Kacchan pl-please…!”

A hand placed itself over her mouth and her eyes met piercing red as Katsuki sneered at her. “You’re mine Izuka. Not theirs… Not anyone’s. All mine.” His eyes flashed before he removed his hand, replacing it roughly with his lips and groaned as the kiss was instantly returned, her arms winding around his shoulders and pulling him even closer.

The kiss grew heated as their bodies moved together, Izuka moving a hand to his hair and gripping it tightly in that perfect border between painful and pleasurable. Katsuki bucked his hips and Izuka threw her head back, gasping out as her head moved to lean back against the wall. His mouth moved back to the exposed neck, nibbling down the column of her neck before his teeth sunk into the shoulder right above her collarbone.

The noises she was making had Katsuki hard and needy, his fingers digging into her hips as he rolled his against hers, showing her just how much he wanted and needed her. Izuka gently pushed his chest, making him back up and hit the side of the bed, his legs giving out as he plopped down. His eyes took in her shaking form, her chest moving rapidly as she tried to gain her breath, must like his own. Her eyes met his, her kiss swollen lips still glistening from their heated make out and all he wanted to do was reach out to her, pull her back to him, and never let her go.

But he had to.

He grunted as he looked down, fists gripping his pants tightly. He had overstepped a boundary with that bite, knowing that if Recovery Girl or god forbid - All Might saw that bite - he would be in deeper shit than when his mom found his stash of magazines that were not ‘appropriate’ for kids his age.

He willed his erection away, hearing Izuka moving from the wall and coming to stop in front of him. His eyes looked up, his head still down as his ears flicked towards her direction.

“Kacchan…” Her hand wove into his hair before gently scratching at his ears, pulling him closer until she gave a gentle kiss to his lips. He stayed still, letting her kiss him before she pulled away and moved towards the door.

The whine left his throat before he could stop it, his eyes following her as she unlocked the door. “Izuka… I’m sorry.”

She shook her head before a small smile graced her lips. “No, Kacchan. It’s okay. I know it’s the hormones that are affecting you. I just, ah.” She rubbed the back of her head. “I just need to go fix this up before checking on Shouto and Eiji. I’ll be back tomorrow okay?” Her eyes flickered from his eyes to his lips, licking her own in return. “Goodnight Kacchan…”

“Night…”

The door closed behind her and Katsuki threw himself back onto the bed, his body letting out a growl and he groaned as his still semi-hard on dug into his stomach. Only two things came out of this - one, the other bastards now would have to deal with his scent all over her as well as his bite mark. It would drive them both insane. He had initiated the challenge, and he knew the other two wouldn’t back down from it. He had claimed what was his, if they even dared touch her in that way…

His growl sounded deep within his chest, his thoughts stalling to the other consequence to his bite mark…

He was going to be in some deep shit.

A soft knock to his door had Eijirou sitting up in his bed and smiling towards the green haired girl as she moved within the room. His smile instantly dropped as he smelled him on her, his scent rolling off in waves. She was covered in it, that distinctive smell of Katsuki and it had his skin crawling as she moved to sit on his bed.

Before he could stop himself, he was pulling her against his chest, his arms wrapping around her front as she stilled within his grasp. His forehead pressed into the space between her shoulder blades, her body relaxing as Eijirou just opted to hold her, let his own scent mix with the other two that was swirling around her body.

It wasn’t a bad combination, their scents all mixed with one another's. Izuka smelled earthy, like a dew covered field in the first of spring with a covering of spice that was so distinctly her. Whereas Katsuki smelled explosive, like a heavy charcoal campfire with hints of gasoline that shouldn’t by any means go together but fit him so well that it just worked.

Eijirou himself smelled like heavy rainfall over a small creek bed - or at least that’s what he gathered from it. It was sorta like the smell you gather when taking a hike through a rocky area, when the first rain comes to hit over the study rocks on the mountainside and the area smells fresh and new.

His body let out his low groan before he could stop it. His and Izuka’s smells just fit so right together and he couldn’t get enough of it.

Even with Katsuki’s scent intermingling, Eijirou was content to just hold her within his arms like this for the rest of his time with her. He knew she had to make her rounds, before leaving and getting enough rest to deal with the three of them again tomorrow. He lifted his head up to place a kiss on the back of her neck, his lips gently moving before his eyes met with a glaring red bite mark.

The growl that ripped from his throat startled them both, Eijirou’s arms tightening around her before he huffed out a large breath.

“He bit you…?”

Izuka nodded, her body moving to straddle his waist as his arms stayed wrapped around her. “He did.”

His eyes glared at the mark, the teeth indents red and the skin puffing up in irritation. God he wanted to kill him for this…

But did he ever want to leave his own mark on her too…

His eyes met hers before she smiled down at him, her hand moving through his hair and gently playing with his ears as they twitched at the gentle touch.

“You know Eiji… I wouldn’t mind having your mark too…”

His eyes widened at her before he was moving, pinning her beneath him on the bed. His body screamed in protest, it still sore from the grueling battle yesterday but he ignored it all as his lips came to kiss her own. It was a hungry kiss for them both, something raw and fresh and Eijirou shivered with it. He wanted her, his alpha crying out to take her then and there but he held himself back, arms shaking from the strain of holding himself up.

Her hand moving to the back of his neck brought him out of his thoughts and he pulled away to peer into her eyes. She gave him a breathless smile, before leading his head to her stomach, his eyes questioning her before she nodded, a blush heavy across her cheeks.

He lifted her shirt up just enough to expose her wide hips and stomach line, his mouth leaving kisses all across the area before resting on the right side. He sucked gently on the skin there, his teeth aching as he gently opened up before sinking his teeth into the taunt skin.

His fingers gripped the bedsheets on both sides of her, her gasp doing things to him he never imagined would happen from just a simple, but beautiful sound. He pulled away, licking the coppery taste from his mouth before licking the fresh bite wound. The bite was a nasty red, but he felt proud of it, his grin taking over his face as he looked up into Izuka’s shining eyes.

He felt guilty all of a sudden, pulling her against him as he cradled her against his chest. He kissed her all over. Her forehead, the crown of her head, her ears, cute little nose, each freckle and cheek and then slowly her lips. Just a gentle press of them together before she moved towards the door. She gave him a smile, one that pulled at his heart as she left the room, bidding him goodnight.

At least he wasn’t like Katsuki who wanted the whole world to see his glaring bite.

---

Shouto sat on the edge of his bed, his hair wet from his recent shower. He shook the towel through his hair, careful to not rub too hard against his new ears, the damned things getting in the way of his normal routines.

He sighed before looking up, his door opening and closing with a soft click as Izuka made her way into the room. The blush that covered her cheeks was beautiful, and Shouto returned the smile she gave him as her eyes moved away from his shirtless body.

He hoped she liked what she saw.

His eyes moved across her own body, resting on the angry bite mark on her neck, and the way her hand held her right hip tenderly. He could smell the other two alphas all across her skin. It made his own crawl, but it was also deeply satisfying smelling them all mixed as one. His heart swelled as she moved over to sit beside him on the bed, her body angled towards him as her focus was solely on him. He had her attention now, and she was all his for this moment of time.

He moved so their thighs were touching, before wrapping an arm around her shoulders and pulling her in, scenting at the spot where the angry red mark wasn’t glaring back at him. He smelled his own scent wafting through the air, his chilly morning fresh snowfall mixed with Izuka and Eijirou’s scent magically; his molten fire raw and powerful mixed with Katsuki’s to make the scent unbearably strong but in a good way. Oh how he wished Izuka could smell all this, how they smelled together, all of them. It was startling to know he didn’t mind it, the way they all worked together seemingly coming into one.

His lips pressed into her neck, before pulling away and pulling her hand up towards his lips. He kissed her gently on the back of her head, before kissing each knuckle and moving to the pads of her fingertips. He nibbled on her thumb before kissing the palm of her hand, and moving to the inside of her wrist where he stopped and looked up at her.

Her beautiful face was flushed perfectly, her eyes shining from the light treatment he always tried to shower her with. She deserved it. She deserved it all, and he was determined to be the one to give it to her.

With a tilt of his head, he asked his question, knowing she knew exactly what he meant. He was met with a shining smile, and a gasp of breath as his lips made contain once more with her pulse point. His canines seemed to stretch before he sunk them into her wrist, her bit back groan music to his ears as he pulled away to gentle kiss and lick the fresh wound.

He moved forward then, making sure to keep her wrist gently within the grasp of his hand before he kissed her fully on the lips. Her tongue coming out to swipe at his lips, the coppery taste of her blood not startling him like he originally thought it would. They kissed for awhile, their bodies slowly molding together at the swap of tongue before Shouto pulled away.

He gave one last kiss to her wrist before leaning in to kiss her forehead. He smiled at her tired smile, before she moved to get off the bed and towards the door. Watching her go left an ache in his heart, but he would be seeing her first thing in the morning.

“Goodnight Izuka.”

“Night Shouto.” She smiled before closing the door gently behind her.

Izuka walked down the stairs, past Katsuki’s room before slouching against the couch in the living room. Her body ached, her shoulder, hip and wrist screaming at her in dull pain as she looked the two she could see over. Both were dangerously red, but Eijirou’s was a nasty bite with how sharp his teeth were, digging deep into her flesh. She wouldn’t be surprised if they would all scar if she didn’t have her healing quirk already moving to ease the pain.

She sighed before slumping onto the soft cushions of the couch, her body too weak to really give much thought at moving. She turned to her side, avoiding the bite mark to her right hip and glanced at the bite on her wrist.

“How the hell am I supposed to hide all these…?”

***

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obiternihili · 7 years

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I want to like ssc, but every time I go to the site to read stuff there's... something in the air that really rubs me the wrong way. And I'm not really confident in my ability to articulate it and definitely not in a way that would make ~respectable discourse~ or whatever it'd be called. Of course I'm gonna try because, ???, I'm a prick???

But it's like, not really that major anyways. Just maybe hopefully some insight to be had about people who don't like his writing style? I hope?

But like, if I tried to articulate it at all, he's too Sam Harris-y. That's something bad about EY, that's something bad about rationalists as a whole. That's something bad about para-rationalists as well, including fucking me so maybe I'm throwing stones. If you finish this, do please keep in mind that my opening paragraph is admitting that I don't really read him in a habitual aspect. Anyone can rub anyone else the wrong way and first impressions count for a disproportionate lot, even if it's multiple first impressions over a period of a few years. You can feed even a rational inference machine unrepresentative data, like the point of that post of mine that went viralish a little while ago But some Sam Harris-y traits:

We like to be married to our strawmen, even after it's been repeatedly explained to us that the strawman is (shockingly) not a good model of the inner motivations of the people we're criticizing. But unfortunately when you throw out strawmen, the most likely people to respond seem to be the most like the strawmen for some reason, which I feel is happening with the lazy garbage commies who go on hate campaigns against him (the serious ones ignore him actually). And I supposed that almost certainly what happens with me and ancap-types, but I don't really have evidence to support that like I feel I have with Scott's situation.

We have a tendency to talk about new studies like they're objectively correct while ignoring the consensus. That's... not how science works. It's especially common when the conclusion is convenient to our biases, which in Scott's case really seems to mean "is interesting" more than any particular ideology. But like for Harris types it's one thing to think pomo's influence on the sciences has issues, it's another to think that while also using the same philosophical tools to critique sciences that aren't achieving concordance. Like you're going too meta there and throwing the baby out with the bathwater instead of really doing the work to get out the good data in your own framework. It's probably my own biases in assessing my writing but I don't feel like I'm as guilty of this as I used to be, with my being worst at it ironically around the time I started reading rationalist-adjacent stuff; maybe it's because I came into this with a strong allergy to that kind of pattern from my own experiences in the atheism wars and alt-medicine.

Scott mostly just ignores trolls (and ineffectual critics) which is really good behavior, but Sam Harris types also have this tendency to mistake "trying to talk in a neuter tone" with "talking in a neuter tone" (and with Scott he doesn't seem to take a lot of blogging very formally to begin with, which, that's fine, it's incredibly fine, but it affects the synthesis of a wannabe neutral tone and laid back assumptions) and feel offense when someone else doesn't understand them or gets mind-killed early on. Instead of looking over their own work for their own weaknesses as a "neutral writer" they (we) instead have the unfortunate habit of talking about mind-killing like it's the other party's fault. Scott kind of gives off this vibe (I probably do too).

But this comes off as incredibly snide and condescending and is almost a pan-rationalist vice. Like I'd name names but this is already me being an ass as it is. Most of the people I follow do this to some degree, actually. And this might be a bad opinion, but, some topics are not neutral no matter how much you want them to be and your bias is gonna get the better of you if you don't mindfully wrestle with it. Maybe I over-anthropomorphize as well but ideas aren't to be trusted, because they want to take advantage of you so they get passed along; so do expect that they have ways of breaking into and fucking around with your cold, distant, neutral demeanor even if you think it's a game or at least you have no stake in the game.

To be honest - and maybe this is a terrible thing that negatively effects the strength of what I try to say - this is why I try to wear my biases on my sleeve. Because when I don't the impact tends to be heavier than I'm usually prepared to deal with. And when I see my thinking in plain english instead of trying to cover it up I generally feel like I'm handicapping myself when the discussion eventually devolves to tone. Because on there should be my own mistakes so I can avoid trying to be a hypocrite, instead of the shadows of my mistakes obscured even from me such that I defend myself as if I don't cast a shadow.

(Which - casting a shadow, as opposed to deity-like glowing radiance (and which I'm quick to point out radiant bodies also cast shadows, such that not even the gods are perfect even if it's not obvious) - is a metaphor I've used for imperfection and probably isn't an obvious metaphor, sorry if explaining this feels condescending)

There's also probably something to be said about ~revealed preferences~ but I don't really like that piece at all. It seems true to me that people that like certain models of the mind tend to think that way themselves, though, but in general I think the revealed preferences assumes people are more rational than they really are and that people's actions don't really correlate to their inner worlds. There might be *something* to the argument that if you give off the impression of being a reactionary (or tankie, or psycho, or narcissist, or pedo-lover or gay-hater or brown-people-genocider or [positive and neutral things I can't juxtapose against the previous because it would imply they're a natural set] or whatever) through the actions you take such as who you fight or policies you support or mistakes you're willing to make, it might be because you have reactionary (etc) pattern-matching biases in your writings creeping in from your own world, but like if inner worlds really correlated with actions I'd be dead so it'd probably come across as incredibly hypocritical to try to point out that it seems like model held to be true has negative implications and bullets you're willing to bite about yourself. Don't even know if Scott buys into that piece anyways, maybe barking up a wrong tree.

At least this shit is why places like r/badphilosophy have anti-Harris memes. Their applicability to rationalists and para-rationalists and really anyone is probably more of a subjective impressionistic thing than an absolute fact. Harris fans like to say he's taken out of context, for example. My own experiences with the guy are like he's like Marx - taken out of context, but the context gets taken out of context because he's kinda low key a pompous windbag and actually at the next level of context above the context looks like the smallest layer of context again. Like Marx's opiate of the masses quote.

Like I said I don't (habitually) read ssc tho. I'm particularly quick to confuse disagreement with moral failing probably, half this shit's probably not even characteristic of his writing and is just an incorrect set of impressions I've gotten over years of only reading his weakest pieces or second-and-triple hand exposure to him. I really like the anonymized-esque quasi-professional advice he's given on things like depression and he's had a number of jokes I've laughed at or points about non-psychiatric topics I've thought were well articulated. I don't have anything against him and he's a worker who does something I could never do with less free time than I could manage with blogging mostly casually in that free time, so like having lofty expectations that he caters to my preferred writing styles is dickish anyways.

I just tried reading stuff of his again yesterday while running errands because a reactionary-feeling blog was shitting on him, was put off by something I couldn't actually put my finger on while wanting to like him, and tried to describe nebulous gut feelings 12 hours later in a moment of lucidity while being woken up from medication side effects augmented by stupidly poorly managed time on my part, so take me with a boulder of salt

EDIT I also wanted to add a point about how people have this habit of talking about things like everyone else assumes the same points. I'm particularly atrocious at this and basically it can come off as really snide and patronizing if you don't and feels like going A > C because A > B without establishing or referencing why B > C but I forgot to add the point. Rationalist jargon is basically all about shorthanding A > C and Harris is particularly atrocious about it as well, and between it and the other Harris-y stuff is why everyone hates rationalists

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