#team E-Scope being a thing

[dramaticallytotal]

The Not-So Cinderfella

An idea that does not take place in the competition???? Whaaaaat????

It's more likely than you think!

Basically, Noah accidentally seducing a prince from the neighboring kingdom who was visiting for this year's drama festival/ week long ball. He works as a court scholar amongst other things, and despite King Chris having a whole ass council to help him plan and delegate things to, somehow it always falls on Noah to do the actual planning and delegating.

He absolutely does not want to go to the ball, but he was planning on going to the festival with his friends, Izzy, who worked as a jester, but Noah was like 73% convinced she was actually the king's assassin or was an assassin sent after the king who decided she dug his vibes and just stayed. Then there was Eva, who was the first woman commander of the knights. There was also Owen, an apprentice chef under King Chris's husband and personal chef, Chef. Yes, it got confusing when he first started working at the palace. Lastly, there was Lady Lindsay and Sir Tyler. Lady Lindsay was a noble woman who had a passion for acrobatics and was lucky her family was so understanding of her passion. Her betrothed, Sir Tyler was training to become a knight under Commander Eva but currently worked part time with his father, who set up and managed the festival games.

They were crazy in their own ways, and he loved them.

So they had all set up a time to enjoy the festival before the ball began at night. The festival would last seven days, and each night would be a different themed ball, but no matter the theme, each ball would be a masquerade. Apparently, it added a certain air of mystery and suspense to the evening. How King Chris thought people could afford seven different outfits for seven different themes was beyond him, and he was willing to bet some would just show up in a basic outfit each night, considering the king had invited everyone in the kingdom to the ball. Usually, the whole kingdom just got the festival, but this year, he opened the ball to them, too.

Noah doesn't know why, but he found it incredibly kind of the king. (What Noah doesn't now is that the king did it for him because Noah had complained about when he would have to go into town and be harassed by the common people about the king barring them entry to the party. He could handle it fine he just liked to complain. He didn't know the king would take it seriously.)

He had a theory that it was because the king had gotten so close to his family, and his grandma had somehow charmed him. Because a little after that and a little after he got the internship to be a palace scholar, the king made his family nobility. They were new nobility, so they didn't always get respect, but for the most part, the other nobles were nice or polite. But something weird came out of the whole thing. He got nicknamed Prince Noah, and he hated it. He was close to the king, yeah, but that didn't warrant the nickname. Everyone knew Chris's eldest nephew was basically next in line for the throne because King Chris and Prince Consort Chef didn't have children. Therefore, no heir. So, for people to call him, the prince was weird and could lead to trouble between their families if they caught word of it or could end with Noah being mistakenly kidnapped as some stupid person could believe the nickname. (Noah doesn't know that the royal family already knows about the nickname and is okay with it. In fact, they find it amusing. )

On the first day of the festival, many visiting royals arrived, and Noah was thankful he wasn't required to greet them or be around them unless he ran into them down in the festival square, or festival street, or festival market. Of course, he wouldn't run into them at the ball since he was not planning on attending despite the fact his whole family was. Okay, he would go the first night, but that was it. (He promised his Pāṭṭi (grandma) he would dance with her, and you don't break a promise to Pāṭṭi.

Chris knew he only planned to go the first night and only had an outfit for the first theme anyways which was Creatures of the Forest. His Pāṭṭi had made him a fox themed Dhoti Kurta and his sister Nadia had made the whole family their masks. So imagine his utter surprise when he and his family were gifted six other sets of clothing for the remaining themes. There was no way his mom wouldn't make him go now!!! To refuse a gift like that would be incredibly rude! Damn Chris!

So Noah reluctantly got ready for the first night after a fun day with his friends. He fully expected he would only talk to them or stick to the walls until it was socially acceptable for him to leave the party. He hadn't anticipated being approached by a tall man dressed as a coyote.

"Ah, it seems I have met another trickster spirit." The man had basically purred and no it had no effect on Noah. None at all.

"Lucky you." He deadpanned sarcastically.

His sarcasm seemed to have thrown the guy off, which Noah hoped meant he would be left alone once more, but unfortunately, he was not that lucky. The man laughed and leaned closer. "I should not be surprised this little zorro is clever and witty too."

"Little!" He took offense to that. He was not that short!

"Si. I thought that was obvious, mi amigo. Do you perhaps wear glasses normally and can't see the truth because we are required to wear masks?"

This guy approached him and now has the audacity to insult him! (Noah was a little sensitive about his height).

"My eyes work just fine, you eel!"

"I'm not so sure they do. I'm a coyote not an eel. You poor soul."

Noah was beginning to fume. "Do you make a habit of insulting people you approach, or am I just cursed?" He hissed.

"I believe the saying is blessed. But I wouldn't call my simple observation of a fact an insult."

"Well, here's a simple observation for you. You're not as suave as you think you are, and obviously desperate for everyone to like you given you approached someone who didn't want to be approached because you thought you could charm them into liking you." Noah was smug with his response. Reading people had always been a talent of his, and if he was correct, his words would infuriate the man and make him leave him alone or fight him. But the guy didn't seem like the type to cause a scene without a reason.

"Dance with me." What?

"What?"

"Dance with me. Now that we have both been insulted by the other, I think it best we make it up to each other by sharing a dance." The man held out his hand to Noah, who just stared incredulously at him.

"You're insane."

"And you're refreshingly resistant."

"Oh joy. You also have a big ego. Who could have guessed."

"Perhaps you can humble me during our dance."

This guy was stupidly persistent, and Noah was getting tired of arguing. Maybe if he gave the guy one dance, he would leave him alone.

It did not.

During their dance, Noah did take up the invitation to try and humble the overconfident eel, but somehow, they ended up talking about books and recent essays that had been released by some very famous scholars. Then they debated on those essays and books. Before Noah knew it, they had danced the whole night together. He was more than a little embarrassed since he saw some of his sisters smirking at him. Oh, man. He was not looking forward to that interrogation.

"This is where we part mi zorro. I will see you tomorrow evening. Hopefully, we can reach an agreement about symbolism in the last short story in the collection." His conversation partner declared while still holding into one of Noah's hands.

He scoffed in reply, "You don't even know if I'll be here tomorrow. And we can end the conversation here and now if you just agreed with me."

"I have a feeling you will be here, mi amigo."

"Okay... maybe I will be, but that doesn't mean you'll find me again. There are hundreds of people here."

"That sounds like a challenge, mi zorro."

"Maybe it is Eel." Okay, maybe he found the guy interesting.

The guy he had dubbed, Eel, merely huffed out a laugh. "Again with the eel. I have a name you know."

"I think Eel suits you."

"I think my name suits me, but I must admit I am intrigued if I can figure out who you are behind the mask. I am here for the whole festival and I think it is rather obvious you will be as well."

They ended up agreeing to try to figure out who each other was because it added a sense of mystery and fun to an event Noah hadn't even been interested in. Plus, he couldn't deny he was curious how it would go, and he had a love of mysteries.

____________

They find each other each night and flirt like it was their jobs to do so.

Noah's sisters are ecstatic and watching like it's their favorite drama play. Carlos is excited and happy for his baby brother. Do Carlos and all of Noah's sisters find each other and find out the two's identities before they do? Yes. Do they plot on how to get the two to figure it out and get together? Also, yes.

[henke-penke]

Fuck it,

World Tour but with Eva instead of Duncan !!!

Some plot points I conjured up while procrastinating my illustration

Eva ends up on Team Chris Is Really Really Really Really Hot.

She's almost immediately wary of Alejandro, but will write it off since she's not good with people, so it's likely just her reading into things wrong.

However, this changes in Germany, when Noah makes note of his own suspicions.

Owen is the one medically evacuated in Jamaica.

Team E-scope wins the challenge in London, and because there is no Duncan to capture, Team Amazon loses. And realistically, Heather would be voted out, sad but true

This means that Alejandro is in a bit of a situation, because Noah and Eva are both onto him and they along with Izzy have the majority vote on their team. (Which, they've technically had since day one, but Alejandro wasn't aware of their suspicions of him prior, he didn't see it as a threat)

His best strategy is then to take away that advantage. Because of his interaction with Izzy in the Paris episode, I'm going to say that Alejandro manages to convince her to vote herself, and Izzy leaves in Area 51.

Because of this Team Chris now has to stay on a winning streak where Eva and Noah will try their damn hardest to get Tyler to vote with them. Which will be a fucking task because he and Alejandro are friends.

And quickly for the Amazons. Because there's no Duncan, Courtney and Gwen can properly establish a friendship. Absolutely not without a handful of hiccups along the ride, but it'll be much more stable without him being there and they can actually talk out any issues they may have.

If we're rolling with the canon of Team Victory being eliminated in the first half of the season, then the players making the merge will be; Alejandro, Eva, Noah, Tyler, Courtney, Gwen, and Sierra (Cody is eliminated in Australia I have my reasons trust). Which means that with the addition of Blaineley, we get an f/f couple in the wedding challenge hell yeah !!

Oh and Eva makes final four because she's awesome like that

[artickroyale]

Can we just get Noah as a boyfriend general head canons where Noah and Gn reader met on TD set? (Btw I love your work, your literally the only person who frequently writes for Noah and I love u for that ❤)

DISINFECT

noah tdi x gn reader

'' i've been watching you for quite a while now ''

ISLAND

you two were on the same team

had to share a bunk with you

when the cameras weren't rolling, you two spent some time together

not a lot

just talking about random stuff

you asked him what book he was reading once

turns out you loved it

so you bonded over that

teased him nonstop for the ear kissing thing

when he got eliminated you were sad, but oh well

got eliminated in place of katie

in playa de losers it was even better

i mean, not having to live in that crappy summer camp anymore? awesome

noah just made it a whole lot better

you were on team e-scope

ACTION

you were in the peanut gallery with him

didn't really do anything

when the aftermath show wasn't being aired, thats when your relationship started

noah told cody and then cody started hyping him up

the last episode was when he confessed

you said yes, of course

during when he was chris' assistant he didnt want you getting wrapped up in anything

definitely told you about all the crazy shit

WORLD TOUR

competed with him AGAIN

but you two were a couple nowww

no one knew except cody

hung around you most often

you both agreed to NOT trust alejandro

alejandro probably tried to woo you or something

noah got all defensive but in his cool calm collected way

alejandro found out after that

toooootally didnt use it against you

totally DID

when noah got eliminated you were pissed

had a very not nice conversation with alejandro after that

you got booted next

cheered noah on when he was doing that disco laser thing

now you two never competed on td again, got a cozy little apartment somewhere and go on cafe dates regularly ❤

[tiffanys-aus-and-headcanons]

Appendix D: Some Pig/One More Final

The first three posts in this series are here.

Undertale was a slightly postmodern children's fantasy movie produced by Jim Henson's Creature Shop in the '80s. Noah Hathaway played the protagonist, Frisk, who went on a long quest to escape from a magical prison inside Mt. Ebott; Frisk's father had thrown them into the mountain, known to be full of monsters, in an attempt to kill them. However, it's suggested that as a human, Frisk is inherently more of a protagonist than a monster can be, and has a vague sort of magical power over them. Toriel's death, which Frisk accidentally causes early in the movie, is commonly listed as a Peak Sad Childhood Moment.

George Orwell wrote The Writing In The Web, a political fable about a cult started by a well-meaning spider. E. B. White wrote Snowball's Farm, a whimsical children's tale about a farm whose animals decide to take over.

Infamously, Emmanuel Goldstein's monologue fills dozens of pages, takes at least three hours to read aloud, and brings the plot of Ayn Rand's 1984 to a screeching halt.

Short story collections and anthologies often keep the same title, author, and spirit, it's just the stories that are swapped out. For example, classic episodes of Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone include A Wonderful Life, The Secret Life Of Walter Mitty, Miracle On 34th Street, and The Sixth Sense. 1983's The Twilight Zone Movie includes segments based on classic episodes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (directed by John Landis and given anti-war themes), Cocoon, The Poltergeist, and In Search of the Twelve Monkeys (the original starred a young William Shatner). Candle Cove is an episode of Black Mirror.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was a 1999 Ben Stiller comedy about a team of low-rent superheroes who theme themselves after public domain characters because they cannot afford licensing fees. The film was well-reviewed, but a box office bomb. It was actually the first film to use Smash Mouth's One Week - the One Week music video is actually cross promotion with League of Extraordinary Gentlemen - and it would remain the film most associated with the song until Dreamworks' Happily N'Ever After hit theaters two years later.

The Amazing Digital Circus was a virtual pet game and toy line that struck when the iron was hot on that niche, before being bought out by Hasbro and rebooted a few times in different forms and mediums. Lauren Faust created a long-running television cartoon of it that was a huge smash hit with fandom culture despite the show's clearly very young target audience. The property's canon is all very light kiddie fare; the scariest thing about The Amazing Digital Circus is that for a brief and touchy stretch of time in the early 2000s, it was owned by the Peoples Temple, which was seriously considering turning it into a recruiting platform.

Your cringe unpublished works that you gave up on were almost certainly swapped around with other people's cringe unpublished works that they gave up on. There's lots of upwards and downwards mobility to the scramble, but not usually that much. Exceptions are very rare - like a beggar suddenly being made king, or a god being reincarnated into an ant - but they do occasionally happen. For example, what you know as the land of Oz exists only in the head of a young Milwaukee stoner, who suddenly came up with the idea for an epic graphic novel one day in the 2010s while sitting on the bus, and spent a couple of years absolutely convinced she would eventually make it. (She cannot draw.) Conversely, L. Frank Baum's children's fantasy series, Enormia, which has been adapted and reimagined many times, most notably as audiences' introduction to color film, exists in your world only as a different Milwaukee stoner's overly elaborate backstory for his jerkoff sessions. This kind of thing is much more the exception than the rule, and even such exceptions are almost always much smaller in scope - an obscure stillborn project getting swapped around with an obscure out-of-print novel, or an obscure direct-to-video z-movie.

The True Detectives forum and its many schismatic spinoffs, all of which are devoted to discussing mystery fiction, host literally thousands of Wind fanfics. Many of the writers - perhaps most of them - have never actually read Wind, just other fanfiction of it; next to none of the fics are worth reading. Most Wind fics reuse the original protagonist, Rorschach, but treat him as a generically relatable blank slate. The most common fic format by far is the "altdunnit", a form of what-if scenario in which the mystery that sets off Wind's plot is different in some way.

Rorschach is held by a substantial portion of the fandom to be an egg (a trans woman who has not realized it yet). Wildbow has never endorsed this interpretation, and it doesn't seem to be much on his radar. In recent years, the trans Rorschach portion of the fandom has grown; they don't tend to look especially kindly on Warn, much of which Wildbow wrote as a response to fans (like those on the True Detectives forum) he felt had been too inclined to take Rorschach's side in Wind. Flame wars over Warn's content were constant throughout its serial publication, and made it easily the rockiest experience of Wildbow's writing career.

Some noteworthy and relevant podcasts include Jonathan Sims' The Dresden Files, the Ranged Touch Network's Scott Pilgrim Made The World, Doof Media's Winding Down (later Warning Down), and the McElroy family's The Adventure Zone (an actual play podcast which has currently had three major campaigns, two anthology series, and various one-shots). Film Reroll is still an actual play podcast that runs the basic setups of movies (and occasionally other media) as short tabletop campaigns; occasionally, their version of a movie will be much closer to ours than it is to the version of the movie in their own universe.

Xenobuddy was an early childhood public access show, originally created for the BBC in the late 1990s but later aired internationally. The title character is a small alien puppet who lives on a futuristic spaceship staffed by children (who speak a vague conlang akin to a dollar store Esperanto). At the end of every episode, it gets lost and is found, usually by (harmlessly) bursting out of one of the children. It was very popular with its target audience and much loathed by parents. Edgy ironic fanart depicting the titular Xenobuddy as some kind of dangerous parasite abounds.

Static is a supernatural slasher franchise created by Wes Craven, with the first film, also simply titled Static, released in 1984. The movies concern a group of gibbering neotenous ogre-fae who wake up in the modern day after a long sleep, incorporate televisions into their bodies, and start eating people by sucking them into hellish pocket dimensions. The Screen-Guts collectively are probably in the top five antagonists most people think of when they think of slasher horror.

Toby Fox's ROSEQUARTZ is especially known for its meta take on video game morality systems. The game has a mission-based structure; throughout it, the player is encouraged to take on a pacifist playstyle, championed by the player character's late mother, the title character. However, the Crystal Gems give the player enough autonomy that you are entirely able to take a much more violent tack; doing so has a rippling effect on the game's writing in countless immersively-integrated ways. If the player goes out of their way to be as murderous as possible - the so-called "genocide route" - the differences from the main route grow much more extreme, and rather than gaining allies, you start to lose them, as the Crystal Gems realize what you're doing and one by one turn against you. If you manage to shatter Garnet - it's the hardest and most iconic fight in the game, Megalovania is playing, her Future Vision gets used for all it's worth - then you use your knife to slash at the cosmos, erasing Earth, Homeworld, and everything else. This, Toby Fox is saying, is apparently all you want out of a video game - another toy to break.

Warner Bros still did Space Jam with Michael Jordan and the Looney Tunes, it's just that the Looney Tunes in question were Mickey Mouse and friends. They also still did a second one with LeBron James, which was, by God, somehow worse. They put Ms. Frizzle in it.

Walt Disney made his squeaky clean reputation on the back of adaptations of things like Rudyard Kipling's adventure novel The Call of Cthulhu, P. L. Travers' Thomas the Tank Engine, and Erich Kästner's feel-good coming-of-age kidnapping tale about the power of perseverance, Lolita, originally done with Hayley Mills and later remade with Lindsay Lohan.

Nabokov's extremely controversial literary classic that has defined the idea of the unreliable narrator is Father's Trap, from the perspective of a man who plots to obtain custody of both of his daughters for nefarious purposes. Most publishers ignored Nabokov's instructions not to depict the twins, Lisa and Lottie, on the cover. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne have directed mediocre film adaptations, and songwriting team Lerner and Loewe did a musical that was a legendary flop.

The Japanese fashion movement is Gothic Pollyanna, after an otherwise-forgotten series of penny dreadfuls about a cute, cheery, rules-minded young girl who is, despite appearances, an insane criminal. Minor character Bonesaw in Alan Moore's Worm Turns also clearly hearkens back to the Pollyanna stock character.

The DEA was a prime-time soap opera about the ongoing "war on drugs"; it ran for eleven seasons from 1982 to 1993. Its plot focused on federal agents working at the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and especially partners Hank Schrader and Steve Gomez and their families. It is mostly remembered today for its downer ending (in which the treachery of late-show villain Walter White, or "Heisenberg", gets the leads killed, and he escapes from justice), and for its far-more-acclaimed spinoff series Better Call Saul, which also ran for eleven seasons from 1993 to 2004, functioning as a prequel, midquel, and sequel to The DEA.

Between The DEA and Better Call Saul, Kelsey Grammer played crooked lawyer Saul Goodman for twenty consecutive years of primetime TV, first as featured comic relief and later as a leading man. (He also guest-starred on the mostly-forgotten Mall Cop, establishing that it, too, was set in the world of The DEA and Better Call Saul.) Better Call Saul won more than a dozen Primetime Emmys. Peri Gilpin received several of these for her performance as Kim Wexler.

St. Elsewhere was a film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan in the late 1990s; it was highly acclaimed and successful, and established Shyamalan in the public eye as a skilled auteur with an affinity for twist endings. The film's final scene reveals that its main setting, St. Eligius Hospital, exists entirely within the imagination of an autistic boy, Tommy Westphall, as he gazes into a snowglobe. The so-called "Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis", which posits that this same twist applies to most of fiction due to a network of crossovers, was invented by a Saturday Night Live sketch shortly postdating the film's release, in which an amnesiac Charles McGill (from Better Call Saul) wakes up in St. Eligius, attended to by a cast of characters who are more concerned with their own nonexistence.

After rising to prominence as a writer, storyboarder, and composer for Pendleton Ward's Science Time (where she established the Summer/Jessica relationship that would come to define later seasons), Rebecca Sugar got to make her own cartoon, Henry Ichor. Set in a recently post-apocalyptic but strangely cheerful world, Henry Ichor concerns a young teenage boy who is conscripted as a mech pilot due to his rare and innate ability to link to the powerful Evangelion mecha. (His preferred Evangelion is eventually revealed to be a form of his late mother, the reason he can do this in the first place.) Henry turns out to be a vital asset in protecting humanity from the monstrous "Angels" that frequently threaten it, and is surprisingly emotionally mature for his age. However, the adults around him (especially his father, Gennady) frequently push him too far, especially considering his generally noncombative and pacifistic nature. There is much interpersonal drama and much singing about it, with a very vocally trained cast. After several seasons of slow buildup, the show was forced to suddenly rush to its ending in only a few (infamous) episodes after an arc where Henry had a romance with an Angel in male human form. Henry Ichor The Movie and an ensuing miniseries, End Of Henry Ichor, helped bring the show to a more thematically satisfying conclusion.

Although he has played a creative or consultant role in many animated projects, Alex Hirsch is best known for the one he was actually the showrunner for, Disney Channel's smash hit Sunnydale. Focusing on a small California town constantly plagued by supernatural threats, Sunnydale generally followed a simple monster-of-the-week format, but kept audiences on the hook with teases at a deeper underlying mystery. The show almost didn't get a season two, as Hirsch found working with Disney very tiring, but he was eventually persuaded; season two ran through the rest of Hirsch's ideas at a faster pace, and concluded the show with the leads graduating from Sunnydale High.

For a brief historical moment, Daron Nefcy's show, Ender vs. the Space Bug Army, looked like it would become the successor to Sunnydale, keeping Disney Television Animation prestigious after Sunnydale ended. However, though Ender drew in a big crowd, and lasted almost twice as long as Sunnydale, it was not ultimately as well-received. EvtSBA is a children's space opera, wearing its Starship Troopers (Joss Whedon) inspiration on its sleeve, but also clearly copying some (superficial) notes from Philip Pullman. Set in a future where mankind has come into violent conflict with bug-like aliens, the show follows unbearably smug boy supergenius Ender as he is sent to military school to prepare for interstellar warfare. The show has an extremely cutesy and hyperactive tone; typical filler episodes include the one (generally taken as meta about fandom drama) in which Ender's siblings' futuristic internet arguments prove instrumental to the survival of the human race. Later seasons get a bit more serious, but focus heavily on shipping. The show is infamous for its ending, in which Ender, for his final exam, destroys the Formics' home planet and releases a psychic signal that eradicates the Formic race. Although the show explicitly notes that this includes many individual Formics who we have previously known as sympathetic characters, it is nonetheless played as a happy ending in which a hostile colonial power is defeated. Ender has ended the war; he has beaten the Space Bug Army.

"Meugh-Neigh. 'Meugh' like the cat, 'neigh' like the horse." "Does it mean something?" "No answer; none at all."

Orson Scott Card is an extremely prolific author of speculative fiction. Although it isn't as close to his heart as the Steel Gear series, in which he got to flex his military sci-fi muscles and allegorically retell stories from his faith, he is undoubtedly best known for Ishtar's Curse. Initially a short story and later expanded into a full novel, the plot concerns young Princess Ishtar, or Star, heir to the heathen fairy kingdom of Meugh-Neigh. (In later novels, she changes her name to Bethlehem Diaz, or Beth.) Spoiled and destructive but magically talented, Star is sent to twentieth century Earth so she can develop the wits and the strength of character to be a viable wartime leader for her people - or at least so she can be kept out of the way. After several years of personal growth and magical misadventures with companions she met on Earth, a more grounded Star devises a spell to erase the magic that makes up the bodies of most of her throne's enemies. This plan works, and merges Meugh-Neigh into the Earth as a small and ordinary European country. However, though her subjects are eager to celebrate her for this, Star is devastated when she realizes that she has killed trillions of innocent spirits, and, seeking to atone, she takes on the title of Speaker for the Dead (also the title of the book's first sequel). Although it's frequently ranked highly in lists of fantasy novels of the twentieth century, Ishtar's Curse has received some harsh criticism, with the standard line being that Star is an idealized fantasy of a repentant Hitler figure, and that the text presents excessive justifications for her actions. The story has also been called a reactionary response to Wilde's The Little Mermaid. After more than twenty years, a film adaptation of Ishtar's Curse was released in 2009, starring Dakota Fanning, to mixed reviews. The box office took a further hit due to a boycott campaign, after Card's views on homosexuality (and, relatedly, his membership in the LDS Church) became widely known. In the end, it lost the studio a lot of money.

Hideaki Anno is best known for the classic smash hit anime he made for Studio Gainax, Einstein Goliath Nestorian, a psychologically intense deconstruction of martial arts shonen like Yoshiyuki Tomino's Dragon Ball. Einstein Goliath Nestorian concerns a mystery man known only as Saitama, who finds that he has become dissatisfied with life and alienated from the world after only three years of training have enabled him to easily surpass any physical challenge. The original series is known for its sudden, surreal, and clearly budget-driven ending, although this was quickly alleviated with a similarly surreal but more definitive finale movie. Although many Western anime fans often think of Einstein Goliath Nestorian as pretentious and ultra niche, it was actually a huge mainstream hit in Japan, with a colossal franchise of adaptations, merch, and spinoffs (notably including a series of Retrain films, which began as extremely close shot-for-shot remakes of the original series but wound up spiraling into a very different updated timeline).

Previously most noteworthy for his 2003 visual novel Oreimo, Gen Urobuchi was tapped by Shaft for their extremely successful and acclaimed anime Ohayou Hana!, hailed as a deceptively dark deconstruction of the teen idol genre. The plot concerns a girl, Saionji Mayuri, who leads a double life, being of little note at school, out of costume, but spending much of her time as #1 idol Hana. Her mental stability begins to deteriorate as she realizes that the adults in her life - especially her father, himself a former idol - have groomed her to serve as a drugged and hypnotized propaganda mouthpiece for a shadowy conspiracy. She winds up in the worst of both worlds as her ensuing breakdown, and her handlers' response to it, destroys both of her lives and brings ruin to those she cares about. In addition to the popularity of the actual anime, many of its songs became decontextualized J-Pop hits. The idol anime genre would then receive a glut of edgy lesser imitators, like Love Live: School Idol Project, Cheetah Girls, and magical girl fusion Symphogear. Although the original Ohayou Hana! was a self-contained twelve-episode story, it received a sequel movie shortly thereafter, Ohayou Hana! Rebel!, which ended on a cliffhanger that has still not been resolved over a decade later. The upcoming Ohayou Hana! MK Ultra! is expected to get things back on track. An abridged series originating on 4chan, focusing on cropped screencaps from Ohayou Hana!, called the title character "Miss Ohio", producing the memetic tagline "being Ohio is suffering".

Zack Snyder first came up with the idea for Madoka around 2000, a long time before he'd actually get to make it; he put the project on hold in 2006 to make his adaptation of Worm Turns. He developed the idea with his wife Deborah and a cowriter, Steve Shibuya. Inspired by the Disney Princess phenomenon, as well as Naoko Takeuchi's Pretty Cure (one of the few anime that had already become a hit in the States), Snyder wanted to tell a coherent story about fights between magical girls who could make anything happen, who could make any fantastical world or visual appear. In Snyder's film, we follow Madoka Kaname, a teenager attending a Catholic school in Los Angeles. Madoka and her friends are approached by a strange young woman who goes only by "Mommy", and her animal companion (a CGI-ed up squirrel-cat thing), QB. They offer to make the teens into "magical girls", granting them one wish each in exchange for a life devoted to spiritual warfare. (Another mysterious new girl, Lilly, urges them not to take the deal in the strongest possible terms.) This turns out to be a scam; QB is pitting the magical girls against one another for his own reasons, and in the end, every magical girl and her wish gets corrupted. Despite much of the film's plot being a horrific bloodbath - the MPAA demanded a lot of cuts to get it down to a PG-13 rating - there is a happy ending; Madoka finally makes her own wish and uses it to topple QB's whole system. Madoka isn't often discussed nowadays but it was a major discourse bomb when it came out in 2010, alternately being called misogynistic Orientalist trash and a subversive feminist masterpiece. Snyder, for his part, often notes that QB is intended as an allegory for exploitative forces within the entertainment industry that treat young women as disposable resources with an expiration date; this is already clear to anyone who's watched the film, which is not exactly subtle in its symbolism. He also explains that the film sexualizes the girls in an effort to shame the audience, to get people to understand that they are objectifying the characters in the same way that QB does. The soundtrack's got a really cool ethereal cover of Nine Inch Nails' King Nothing on it, which is probably the most remembered part of the film today.

Selena Gomez became a star by playing Violet Parr on Disney Channel's superhero sitcom The Incredibles. While the show was initially a very throwaway villain-of-the-week affair whose leads had to keep their powers hidden from the public and their caped escapades secret from the government for self-explanatory comes-with-the-genre reasons, it would eventually unfold that the show was set in something of an X-Men-style dystopia where superheroism had been outlawed and supers oppressed by the government as a potential societal fifth column.

Brad Bird directed one of Pixar's most celebrated films, Wizards of Waverly Place; it was Pixar's first film with a predominantly human cast. Disney was hungry for a fantasy property after losing a bidding war for the Luz Noceda rights. It had strong populist anti-eugenic themes, with an elaborate wizarding hierarchy of antagonists who seek to remove the Russo family's magic as part of an effort to curb wizard overpopulation. The sequel came more than a decade later, and wasn't nearly as good.

In addition to Worm Turns, Alan Moore is notable for the heavily metafictional comic Pagemaster, about a boy, Richard, who finds a magical library that contains all stories that have ever been or could ever be told; he becomes lost and imperiled in assorted pieces of historically noteworthy literature (initially ones in the public domain, though later volumes would start using legally safe serial-numbers-filed-off versions of modern stories). The 2003 film, in which Sean Connery played the librarian in one of his last film roles, is widely regarded as a terrible, deeply-toned-down adaptation that didn't grasp the tone or themes of the original story at all; it only covered the first half of the first volume, in which Richard meets "genre spirits" who wish to sort all stories into rigid categories. In a later volume, Pagemaster Millennium, an aged Richard Tyler, who has since taken on the mantle of librarian himself, meets a teenage girl, heavily implied to be Luz Noceda, who has also become lost in the library. She has become corrupted by an eldritch book, or "Necronomicon", written by "the Wrong Author", heavily implied to be the devil (and/or Hugo Astley, an Aleister Crowley caricature from W. Somerset Maugham's The Winged Bull). Flushed with demonic power and enraged by what she's become, a monstrous Luz tears through the library in a blaze of hellfire, seeking to destroy all of literature and the world. It is only through the intervention of the Fat Controller - heavily implied to be God - that Luz is defeated; he mercifully erases her by hitting her with a train, and laments what she became.

[perpetualexistence]

Team E-scope plays 'What If?', becomes unstoppable

During their morning jogs, Izzy starts making a habit of playing 'What if?' Neither Eva nor Noah take it seriously at first since they think she's just spouting off random questions. So she decides to turn it into a more involved 'What would you do?'

It starts off simple enough for Izzy.

She asks Eva "What would you do if I bit you?"

"I'd throw you into a tree."

"Cool!" says Izzy, as she immediately bites Eva. Eva commits to her promise. Noah's not quite sure what either of them expected.

It goes from things Izzy can quickly do to hypothetical scenarios. She refuses to leave the subject alone until at least one of them engages her. They also start going from 'what would you do' to 'what would we do'. It's more fun because it makes it more likely that Eva and/or Noah will start playing along. These hypothetical scenarios include:

What do we do if a zombie apocalypse hits?

What do we do if one of us might be an imposter?

What do we do if one of us is forced into villainy?

What do we do if one of us wants to go into villainy?

What do we do if we wake up with no idea where we are?

What do we do if we all turn into worms?

The next thing any of them know, they're coming up with actionable plans for these scenarios. Izzy comes up with out of the box plans, Noah comes up with clever plans, and Eva makes the plans simple so they're actually doable.

Zombie apocalypse? Izzy's the Scout, Noah's the Medic, Eva's the Heavy Hitter. Imposter? They each start developing two different code phrases to confirm who they are depending on who's asking. Villainy? Start a riot if it's forced, and start a different kind of riot if it's not. Transported? Go to high ground, kick ass as needed. Worms? Vibe.

They even start coming up with legitimate plans for how to take each other down if need be. Izzy and Eva have a plan for how to take down Noah. Noah and Izzy have a plan to take down Eva. Eva and Noah have a plan to take down Izzy. And each of them has a plan for how to take the other two out individually and together. They extend this courtesy to their other friends. Not out of maliciousness. Except for Justin and Alejandro, those ones have a good amount of maliciousness. It's mainly just because it's fun, and you never know if you might need it. Izzy even finds a safe house for some of their plans.

They develop so many plans that Eva's having a hard time keeping track of them. She's no Izzy or Noah who can just memorize things quickly. One thing that does help her concentrate is her music. So she starts associating plans with songs.

She won't admit to it at first because she's a bit self conscious about the intelligence gap. And that frustrates her. And that never goes well.

It's not until she accidentally hums a song under her breath during the creation of a plan that one of the others notices, and she confesses it while doing her calming exercises so she's not yelling at them for being know it alls treating her like an idiot.

Noah and Izzy just look at her because holy shit, that's a great idea, and they're rolling with this now. Having songs for each plan means that if they ever need to actually use them, they can say something like 'Track 34'. They'll immediately know what to do, and no one else will be able to catch on. If they need to be more subtle, then they can just hum the song or play it out loud.

They need to know how Eva's playlist works now, and they might end up suggesting some of their own songs for newer plans. They won't mess with her current playlist. It'd be a dick move to force her to unlearn her own associations when she came up with the idea in the first place.

Eva's definitely not tearing up for having supportive friends. Shut up. She's punching a tree now.

And that's how Team E-scope solidifies themselves as an unstoppable force of nature when provoked. Through the power of actually making plans, and unbreakable friendship.

[jazminetoad]

In Between Seasons (Total Drama Pop Culture)

So, after the Total Drama World Tour, the contestants have a two-year wait before the next season is aired, allowing them to recover from injuries (Alejandro) and focus on graduating High School. So here's a bit of slice-of-life from now and then, plus some highlights of their motivations for coming back on the show.

Chris has been cashing in on his status as Total Drama host, making guest star appearances on shows and even movies

Noah has returned to working as his personal assistant since Chris can’t find anyone more organized and amusing than him, kinda grown a soft spot for the boy and asks him to take care of himself. When he doesn’t seem to be acknowledging his health, Chris calls up Eva, Izzy, and Owen to do it for him, even paying them a little side cash to do it. With the paychecks Chris gives them, they are all able to go to secondary school after they graduate.

Thanks to Chris looking out for Noah, Team E-scope is back in action with Owen hanging out with them (Izzy jokes Owen’s like their loveable mascot). They regularly hang out when Noah goes for his lunch break (and they go to a cafe/fast food joint) or when Izzy isn’t on set for filming. They catch movies together, go to open parks to be able to freely mess around, and even go to the library (Eva tricks Noah into getting stronger by making him carry all these big books she’s gonna “check out” from the library)

Yes, Owen and Izzy are a couple (Only after Noah lectured Izzy about being a good girlfriend to Owen, he knows that she is sane and only undermined her in front of Alejandro so he wouldn’t see her as a threat or a pawn for the eel [but Izzy ended up leaving the game early again] and because he didn’t like Owen being treated poorly (even if it was for the sake of her game strategy), he’s all for her messing with all non-Team E-scope)

Also, they get Owen unhypnotized so the word “Revenge” doesn’t affect him anymore

Heather, Sierra, and Cody hang out together after the show much to everyone’s surprise. With Heather’s help, Sierra calms down on her fangirl over the cast saying she’s part of them now and friends with them like her friends from school which helps Sierra see them as normal people at least enough that she is like them. Heather also hangs out with them more than her “friends” she made when she was in school (since Sierra and Cody are genuine people). 

Cody does hangout with the Drama Brothers, making songs with them still, but takes more hands off the fan interactions as he doesn’t want another crazed fan, and he doesn’t show his face anymore, opting to edit music videos with Sierra

Heather is a little bit distraught that Alejandro never contacted her after the show, not knowing that he was unable to due to being hospitalized

Sierra left her fan blog on hiatus since she’s now enjoying living the moment with her friends from the show, and while she still keeps up to date with them, she keeps it to herself, going on to have new hyperfixations on things like Doctor Who and musical theatre (You know she gets Heather into the musical Heathers)

Duncan is back in juvie and Gwen writes him letters about home, how school’s going, and how she misses him. She also writes in the details of how she crashed her prom, Duncan writes back he wishes he could’ve crashed it with her. He also brings up in his letter about this new runner of juvie, Mal, who has given him some ideas of how to mess with the other contestants once they go back on the show. Gwen just admits she hopes she’s able to win so she can go to art school without having to worry about Student loans

It’s a long-distance relationship, and they think it’s working but once they see each other again they both expect different things of the other only for it to fall apart (which sets up the fuel for the fire when Courtney drama happens)

Leshawna is grasping for straws for fame, feeling like fans are forgetting about her, going as far as making her own rap videos with her gal pals back home who are doing it with her to get famous themselves, however, it kinda goes nowhere once her pals get noticed and they leave her behind for pursuit of their upcoming career. She calls up Harold when she’s down (they are also long distance), and he brings her back up, she thanks him, saying she appreciates him and how she can always count on him. She asks Harold to be her date to her prom which he happily agrees to, and even if she doesn’t have anyone there who supports her, Harold is all she needs that night

Harold is doing alright, the Drama Brothers are kinda divided, Trent and Cody are taking a faceless approach to their name while Harold and Justin stay on the covers and music videos. He’s the one who helps Trent compose the music files together and then sends them to Cody. He’s a little burnt out from all the work being the middle man (and Justin’s not helping) and he misses seeing Leshawna since she’s the only girl who liked him while he was nerdy, so he’s ready to get on the next season since he’ll get to see her again and not have to worry about working on a computer all day, also he wants to stick it to Alejandro

Ezekiel made such a stellar performance for acting like a feral creature on the show that he’s been scouted for other various feral roles. Giving great performances for each, but he is beginning to get tired of constantly getting the same archetype and wants something else so he thinks the next season will be his chance to showcase what else he can do

Tyler and Lindsay are a celebrity couple now, both appearing in magazines and modelling for big fashion designers. They go on double dates with Beth and her boyfriend. They talk about old times (TDI) and how they miss being on the show together, Beth mentions she would like to spend time with some of the cast members again as she doesn’t get to interact with them as much as she’d want to on the Aftermath. Once they find out it’s gonna be about Pop Culture, they all double down on wanting to be on the next show

Geoff and Bridgette are doing great, Bridgette has sorta moved on from the show busi, focusing on school (and she gets that scholarship) and having a great time doing sports. Geoff on the other hand is cashing it in on his time for hosting the Aftermath, taking up gigs for hosting other shows or guest star appearances, at least until he messes up big time and blows up a set, costing a studio big money and gets fired, hence fueling his desire to be a contestant on the next season

DJ is not having the best time, he still believes he got the animal curse, but thanks to Geoff, he got a few gigs to at least have some money to make sure he and his mama are living in an apartment (unfortunately a lot of those minor roles for horror movies where he gets no memo it is a horror movie until the horror is playing out in the scene and he screams bloody murder, money’s too good to deny it tho) He just hopes he actually makes it this season though, and he trains a bit since the only reason he ever gets out is because of the challenges and not the voting

Courtney is a complete social mess. She’s graduated and moving on to Law school, but oh is she isolated. She trusts no one but herself to get where she wants to be, earning her scholarship through hard work and determination, her once school friends are all concerned and have tried to reach out to her but she pushes them away not trusting anyone. She finds herself dreaming about Alejandro since her lack of socializing with people and his sweet interactions with her cause these little fantasies to be created. She also has bad dreams about Duncan and Gwen from time to time. She regularly visits her therapist and it helps her keep level-headed enough to work and study just fine, but when she is advised to sit the next season out she storms out of the office, fuming that her therapist would even suggest the idea. She still has so much to prove and she’s not quitting until the million is hers!

Alejandro gets regular visits from his family (specifically his mama and Jose). His mother really helps him relax and eases him about all his worries, he feels like he’s healing faster when his mother is there. Jose, however, is nothing but a nuisance. His brother visits him to gloat at how he lost a million to a volcano, bringing up his most embarrassing moments on TV, and saying “Maybe I should’ve been on the show, I would’ve done so much better than you, Al.” all the while drinking in Alejandro’s rage. Alejandro is determined to win more than anything now to spite his brother.

Once it’s announced that Noah is on the next season (and Eva), the fandom blows up with those outside his fanbase betting when he’ll get eliminated, many pointing out how he is always the first to be voted out on his team (and they’re betting Eva will be an early boot too). So out of spite, goes up to Izzy, with Eva, and tells her they’re getting serious and making a game plan to get to the top 3. Izzy trains them with mini-challenges, making sure they’re good at it but making sure to scold them to not show off (Izzy tells Eva that even though she can’t hide her strength, she can hide other things aka taking team orders and not taking leadership since the “smart” players are gonna want to keep pawns to use). She tells them to look for loopholes and exploit them, bringing up how she exploited her Escope elimination. She also brings up a chart of alliances they’ll need to make, enemies to stay close (Heather and Alejandro are highlighted), and enemies they need to take out immediately (Leshawna, Beth, Duncan, Gwen, and Courtney are highlighted), she even lists each players’ strengths and weaknesses. Noah and Eva are surprised and impressed, they know she is smarter than she lets on and the crazy persona is nothing but an act, this just takes the cake with how much she strategizes and takes the game seriously, and they feel confident with their leader.

Also, Izzy is her real self around them (not crazy) since they’re not around the other contestants and away from the cameras. Izzy is aware that her biggest setback in her previous seasons was that she kept her smart strategy to herself and working solo hasn’t gotten her the million, hence why she is showing her genuine intellect self to Team E-scope, two heads are better than one and you always need brawn to go with the brain. With all three working together, she believes the million is guaranteed to be theirs, and they all agreed to split the money anyway

Chris notices Noah is fitter and him testing out small manipulations on his co-workers (who don’t realize), and knows something is up

To throw off everyone and their strategies, Chris introduces new contestants to the show

[total-drama-brainrot]

Total Drama AU/Headcanon: Where everything is the same, except Noah is just as crazy/insane as Izzy and Eva, but he's much better at hiding it (with a sarcastic calm personality) ... Only Izzy, Eva and Owen know his true unhinged colors (and that's why they get along with him so well) .../// Duncan briefly saw it during the Total Drama Island Special Finale, when Duncan grabbed Noah's leg, but Noah escaped, and we didn't see HOW Noah escaped... In this AU, Noah bit Duncan's hand then gave Duncan a silent psychotic grin, which shocked Duncan and gave Noah time to escape (Noah basically pretending the bite and grin never happened) ... In TDWT, imagine if Alejandro ever found out that the sanest one on his Team is only PRETENDING to be sane! 😅

I've seen that one Scary!Noah AU floating about in the main tag lately, and I love the concept. There's so much that could be done with having someone like Noah (scarily smart, mostly motivated by either spite or The Bit, nerfed by his own laziness/apathy/hubris) have the added bonus of Going Apeshit sometimes. Either as a treat to himself, or as the natural consequence of his hidden nature.

It's like that "Izzy Isn't Crazy" theory, but in reverse. "Noah Is Crazy, He's Just Good At Masking".

In this AU, he and Izzy would get on like a house on fire.

Like recognises like, after all; Izzy would clock him as just as unhinged as herself at their first meeting, and probably confront him about his 'game plan' at the first chance she could (maybe that's why she was so quick to swap with Katie? A bid to get herself on the same team as Noah?). Noah would try to deny it at first, because he's supposed to be the 'lazy genius'- slipping from his allotted persona this soon into the competition would jeopardise his strategy!- but Izzy would reassure him that she can practically smell the crazy on him.

He'd live up to his title as 'The Schemer', by means of plotting pranks and other such events with Izzy. She'd use her status as the overt crazy girl to pull them off, and Noah would either help behind the scenes to abate his hunger for chaos, or live vicariously through Izzy's blatant mania whilst revelling in the fact that their plan(s) play out perfectly every time. Imagine how much better Izzy's bear suit prank would've been with a man on the inside- and now imagine how much better it would've been if Noah pretended to get eaten/mauled by bear!Izzy (using smuggled ketchup packets and A Lot Of Screaming to convince the Gophers of his demise)! (He'd play off the incident by blaming the whole thing on Izzy- saying she was the one who used the ketchup, and his screaming was just him being Rightfully Terrified of being eaten. Gotta keep up the charade!)

No one would suspect him either! Who would ever assume that slothful, apathetic Noah who complains about the trials and tribulations of 'hard work', 'effort' and 'physical activity' could be a friend and an accomplice to the unstoppable force of nature that is Izzy? He's always too busy shoving his nose into his book to ever consider befriending the crazy girl, there's no way Noah would even tolerate her! (/s)

I think he'd eventually reveal his true colours to Team E-scope plus Owen once their friendship is cemented off-screen. Noah isn't the trusting type (I'd clarify, but I'd end up writing a whole unrelated essay- maybe another time) and he's habitually secretive- his non-answers in the WT Character Interview and his Sierra-given title of "The Man of Mystery" attest to this- so he'd need to know that his friends are really his friends before letting himself be vulnerable/transparent with them, since any 'friendships' made on Total Drama always run the risk of being a ploy/fake. It is a social game, after all.

As for the Duncan Incident. Having Noah bite people is going to turn into a running gag for me at this point, because it's so fucking hilarious to imagine him in a scenario where he's forced/pressured into violence and immediately starts chomping down on someone. This weasel boy wasn't built for punches and kicks but On God can he use those pearly whites to cause some damage. (The human jaw has a surprisingly strong bite force. Noah absolutely knows this.)

I'd also like to suggest that Noah rips himself out of his cargo shorts after biting Duncan, leaving the punk with a bleeding handful of nerd shorts and an open wound for his troubles. He'd already let go of Noah by that point too; it's hard to maintain your grip on anything when you've got a manic bookworm tearing away at the tendons in your hands. So he's just sat there, terrified and concerned, nursing the throbbing, sluggishly bleeding bitemark on his hand and wondering how Noah managed to contort his usually stoic facial features into a grin so wild and feral.

And Noah races back to Izzy and Eva, face and teeth splattered in Duncan's blood, sans cargo shorts. Neither of them question it; Izzy has an idea of what he's done, since Noah's smugness levels have risen at least three tiers and he's smiling almost contentedly to himself, and Eva has learned how to Mind Her Own Business when it comes to Izzy and Noah's eccentricities (though she often shoots inquisitive looks towards Noah's red-painted face).

Then in World Tour? Alejandro is suffering. Noah's the only person on his team who isn't lacking braincells and/or completely unhinged (or so he thinks), and as such he's the latino's only lifeline to sanity on the forsaken jet. So when Duncan returns in London and seems scared of the harmless bookworm? That's concerning.

Assuming that Noah's a wee bit more savvy in this AU thanks to his subterfuge experience in Island, he probably wouldn't be as outwardly apparent in his distrust of Alejandro during the challenge- either that, or he'd be enjoying torturing Tyler too much to think about how much of an eel Alejandro is. So Alejandro wouldn't have any reason to want to eliminate him, if anything he'd be motivated to keep him around, if only to act as a buffer between himself and the idiocy of Team Chris.

Duncan's re-introduction and allocation to the team would be Alejandro's first inkling into the fact that Noah is more than he seems. When the delinquent is ushered to stand next to Alejandro and Noah, his pupils contract into pinpricks or terror, and his attention flickers between the aloof cynic to his side and an oval-shaped scar on his hand. The cynic shoots Duncan a friendly smile (Alejandro ignores how the smile doesn't quite reach Noah's eyes) and the punk turns sheet white.

Alejandro doesn't know what to make of it.

[courtney-deserved-better]

o what about Izzy? Or Sammy. whichever one you want

i'll do both!

izzy

How I feel about this character

she's fun! i don't find her annoying, but i don't find her particularly interesting either. a good garnish to any td group dynamic.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

eva is the only one i can think of, but respect goes out to the courtizzy shippers

My non-romantic OTP for this character

team e-scope!!! would also love to know more about her friendship with sierra in between action and world tour

My unpopular opinion about this character

idk if this is necessarily unpopular, but i've found it hard to flesh out izzy in fic writing due to her one dimensionality* in canon

*technically not a word but i think it's fun

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

i would've loved to understand her thought process more in canon! like, why does she do the things she does beyond to be chaotic?

sammy

How I feel about this character

i like her! her story felt half baked but there were definitely glimmers of potential there.

All the people I ship romantically with this character

jasmine! i love jasammy. i don't usually poly ship but i can see jasmine dating sammy and shawn at the same time and sammy and shawn being buddies

My non-romantic OTP for this character

i can also see sammy being friends with jashawn! i liked the trio dynamic they had going on briefly

My unpopular opinion about this character

sammy is not as "soft uwu smol bean" as the fandom often makes her out to be. like, yes, she absolutely has self esteem issues and struggles to stand up against her sister's bullying, but let's also not forget she's devious. girl got her sister eliminated by manipulating her into eating a dangerous fruit, claimed her identity while her sister's throat swelled up, and then pretended to be her. and when amy showed up again, sammy got into a physical fight with her. like, it may take a push to get sammy to finally fight back, but she fights back!

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon.

i wish she'd gotten more screentime getting to be herself, but also with amy out of the picture. we only really see sammy when she's getting bullied by amy or pretending to be amy

[noahvember]

Hello, hello! With about two weeks out to Noahvember, we're breaking down our day 3 prompt: Teamwork Tuesday!

Read below for more information. And to find our breakdown of day 6, London Calling, click here!

Team E-Scope

Team E-Scope consists of Eva, Izzy, and Noah! This unlikely friendship is formed in the special "Total Drama Drama Drama Drama Island" as teams race to hunt down the cash prize of a million dollars. While Eva and Noah don't make the cut for Total Drama Action, Izzy certainly does. This friendship has gained popularity within the fandom, and there are tons of fanart and fics about this trio!

Team Chris is Really (x4) Hot

Team Chris is Really Really Really Really Hot consists of Alejandro, Tyler, Izzy, Owen, and Noah (and fanworks sometimes include early/late additions of Sierra and Duncan!). The team is formed during Total Drama: World Tour, with their name being made by Sierra. The team was arguably the strongest during World Tour, with Alejandro being responsible for picking off Team Victory one by one. Despite their differences, this team manages to make things work!

Reality TV. Bros

The Reality TV. Bros - Noah and Owen! This two-person team competes together in Ridonculous Race. Longtime friends, this team has actually been known to compete on various reality shows with each other. This is one of the furthest seasons that Noah has made it. With how long their friendship is and how strong their bond is, there's nothing this team can't do!

And that's our breakdown of day 3! If there are any days you want to see broken down, let us know. Also, feel free to hit up our inbox with any questions! We're so excited for Noahvember! Only two weeks left to go!

[starryluminary]

hi, sorry, love your au! its really. really good, and i admire the fact that you have drawn a whole comic, especially one so good, thats incredible!

don't know if this has been asked before or if you have answered this already, but how does the afterparty (I don't remember the name exactly, but the eliminated contestants plus the contestants that didn't get in) feel about this whole situation between cody, noah and sierra, are they being being stupid like duncan or mean and malicious like alejandro, are they on noahs and codys side or sierras? how do the rest of team e-scope feel about it (eva and izzy), are they ready to fight sierra for hurting noah and cody?

also, how do their families? specifically noahs, since codys mother and father are implied to be neglectful and likely wouldn't care to watch a show their son was on and I don't know if its the same in your au, sierras we don't know (I can't remember if we ever met her family members), and noah we know to have 8 sisters and a mom and since noahs like. the baby - I think their reactions are going to be very interesting if they are even established at all

sorry, that's a lot. thank you for making your comic. it's kind of fascinating seeing how things progress over time in this new narrative and how different things are from canon. you're doing a great job. - 🍓 anon

Oooooo this is a long one! Uuuhhh let's go one block of text at a time

Thank you so much!! I'm really glad you like my au!! It always wows me that this impulsive decision I made turned into something people really like and even anticipate. That's so cool

This ask actually made me pause and seriously think about the Peanut Gallery. So I made a bullet list of all the contestants in the Peanut Gallery and their (mostly) individual opinions on the situation. I'll let you decide if they're stupid or not

Katie and Sadie: Sympathize with Sierra. All she is is a girl in love, who's Noah to ruin that?! Like, soooo not cool!

DJ: Doesn't sympathize with Sierra, but doesn't agree with how noco kissed without setting her straight. Isn't really on anyone's side.

Leshawna: Does not like Sierra's persistence. Completely understands Noah and Cody doing what they do behind her back.

Harold: Compelled to agree with Leshawna. Also likes Cody, therefore feels bad he has to deal with Sierra. He's happy Noah makes him happy.

Beth: Thinks Noco's "forbidden love" situation is super sweet and sappy. She's on their side.

Justin: Cannot fathom why Cody would want to be with Noah when Sierra is so much prettier and treats him like a God. Also doesn't like Noah in general.

Trent: Is happy Cody's happy with Noah, but feels bad Sierra's heartbroken, regardless of what she's done. Mostly neutral.

Izzy: Noticed Noah had a crush during her time on the game, but only found out it was on Cody when she watched the London episode. She's proud he went after who he wanted. Got a pit in her stomach when Sierra attacked Noah in Greece.

Eva: Finds the whole situation incredibly stupid. Cannot understand how love makes Sierra so obsessed. Would maim her if she had the chance. Someone put them in the ring, actually.

Lindsay: Is not paying attention. Sees Tyler is friends with Noah (more on that later) so she likes Noah too!

Gwen: Made friends with Cody in the first half of the season and helped him out with his feelings for Noah where she could. Understands Sierra's insane and feels bad for Cody.

Owen: Feels awful about ever doubting Noah after watching Alejandro try to manipulate Cody by flirting with Noah. Plans to apologize to Noah as soon as he sees him again.

Now about their families (which I also had not thought too much about before this ask). They're on a scale to me. Cody's parents are on the "Not watching the show at all" extreme of the scale, Sierra's mom (cause I don't think she has a dad?) is on the "Obsessively watching the show" extreme of the scale, and Noah's family is somewhere in the middle, tuning in and out. Cody will come home, have his parents ask "How was the trip?", he'll answer an empty "fine" and they'll move on. Sierra's mom is loudly cheering her daughter on, cause she knows if she was there instead of her daughter, she'd be doing the same thing to Chris. She's proud of her for going after Cody and has an unhealthy hatred for Noah for getting in the way. For the first half of the season, Noah's family would watch the episodes as they aired if they could catch them. Most of them were there for London though. After that they started putting in more effort to catch the episodes. His parents are mostly worried for his well being, but his siblings are mostly cheering for him and Cody with every episode. They're gonna jump him (with affection) when he gets home.

You don't have to apologize Strawberry. (Can I call you Strawberry?) I'm always happy to receive asks about this au! And I'm glad you're having your fun with it. It's what I strive for. The fun

[kijosakka]

Thoughts. okay so the total drama drama drama drama island special is interesting mainly bc of team e-scope but im going to take a moment here to ramble about his dynamic with other people here,,

(oh and i didn't have anywhere really to slot it into the other post or segue into it here but dodgebrawl as a Moment demonstrates how [this AU] noah can play the social game, just in a very very different way than how it's normally seen.

he knows what he's doing is going to bother his team and incentivize them to vote, i'd say in this au he even plays up the cockiness and makes veiled personal slights against specific people

(mainly those who would be annoyed enough to vote him off, see: heather, justin, leshawna, cody/trent to some extent if he said smth about gwen? < and gwen herself in that scenario. and to another extent beth, since hes playing up his outright mean traits, which would make lindsay vote with her. i dont think he would do anything specific to/with owen or izzy, since he may see izzy as too volatile and owen too genuine)

in the opposite way of whats expected, sure, but it is a social play. he can pick apart what these people are and what they show and push at it to achieve his own ends (and maybe its even some sort of way for him to regain control in this fundamentally uncontrollable situation he's found himself in; he can be the punishment in foucalt's imagining, to a much smaller degree))

so his teammates,,, do not like him tbh. his flagrant display during dodgeball and everyone being pissed at him after the fact is true in this AU, just coming with different motivations. even after the fact when the frustration of everyone fizzles out, hes still majorly offputting because of his detachedness, and deliberately makes his shown traits very unpalatable to experience in person combined with that.

the only two exceptions are izzy and owen respectively: owens mostly coming from a place of genuineness and im going to say while he wouldnt be able to verbalize it, in some manner owen would clock noahs behavior as a defense mechanism. maybe in the sense of 'hes just scared to open up to people!!' or something similar, but he definitely has a lot more faith that noah really isnt that cold and flat.

[*]izzy feels much the same -- except maybe it comes off more to her as strategic. izzy can act, and might recognize that in noah. if you wanted to you could write this in as to why she was eager to swap teams in the first episode, but it wouldnt change that he does get eliminated and thats all she sees of him until the special -- which, her intrigue in his lacking and the fact that it apparently wasnt strategic to get him further in the game, could help explain why she picks him in the team-up.

[*i have soooo much to say about izzy in this au actually. but ill save it for a diff post]

and speaking of the team-up: team e-scope!!!! :0

my au my rules eva and izzy became really good friends on the playa; izzy isn't afraid of eva (and curbing her anger before it reaches a boiling point) and eva is physically adept enough to restrain izzy from Shenanigans that might be a little Much. but eva doesnt really?? know anything about noah?? but izzy insists on teaming with him for the special (and unbeknownst to her noah wasnt even planning to participate initially) so he must be some level of Not Too Bad if izzy wants anything to do with him that doesnt seem to be related to tormenting the guy

and she thinks hes Fine. apathetic and detached and unpalatable (but then again, everyone in their little trio really is to some degree), but can kind of understand izzys intrigue: hes still A Guy, hes just hidden behind 20 layers of non-substance that are so offputting from the first meeting it makes people steer clear of him.

now with tddddi comes two other pertinent details: the justin line, and the Thing With Duncan.

i personally thing noahs 'he's the anti-me' line is really funny in the context of canon but if you squint it kinda works here? wherein justin is non-speaking yet flaunts himself to be the center of attention and clearly shows intent and capacity to scheme (underdeveloped or no, see: awakeathon), whereas noah speaks a lot yet lets himself fade into the background, showing vague hints of the capacity to scheme but no intention or palpable ambition behind it.

^ am i reaching? maybe. the other option here is noah somehow has seen him in-person before on a modeling or red carpet kind of gig and dislikes him on principle because of it/its a jab at it (smth smth they are both opposite ends of the same industry? justin is the face of it in a manner where noah stays behind the scenes and out of sight)

and the thing with duncan,, hear me out here okay noah does his whole song and dance, goes up to him and patronizes him, and duncan retaliates. however, he curses like a sailor and in noah's head has ruined the footage, therefore instead of further retaliating and potentially invoking actual physical harm he just. doesnt react. at all. duncan looks up at him and hes just dead-eyed staring down at him -- and then he leaves.

^ the scene has been ruined, and everyone else is doing so much that theres no reason to play it up any more. duncan and him arent plot important like how heather and lindsay were, theres no reason for the crew to painstakingly edit his swearing out. they just wont let it reach the final cut. duncan is understandably very confused by this, but at that point noah was already gone to find eva and izzy again (< this is when the cast having a running bet that noahs and android becomes Not a Joke)

but life goes on!!! and in the worlds worst comedy of errors (for noah), izzy ends up dragging him along into the lake, thereby leaving him as a confirmed member of the next season.

^ noah is so angry at this. popping blood vessels. he argues with chris endlessly, straight frothing at the mouth at only having two days of real reprieve before he has to deal with the Same Shit again. and chris gets this, to some degree, but also knows that if theres no explanation for noahs non-appearance to hand the producers, theyll be pissed (since all things considered, noahs pretty damn popular among the fans)

luckily for him, courtney just filed a lawsuit against the show!! and since chris is busy running said show, the producers do not want to deal with it and are willing to hand off the case to anyone else -- hence, chris officially signs noah on as his PA, and noah takes over the court settlements and whatnot.

< though i do imagine the producers would see it as a 'get out of the show' scheme, and thereby push way harder for his involvement in WT as a result

but noah does get a break!!! for now, at least.

[dramaticallytotal]

For Your Entertainment

Oh my god, another TDWT au???? Whaaaaaat?

Yep.

I will not apologize UwU

This au will feature Chaos Gremlin Noah. We've seen in canon he genuinely enjoys chaos and drama as long as it's not involving him, and I wanted to focus a whole fic around that. In this one, he is way more apathetic than in my other aus, and he is really only friends with Team E-Scope and Owen. So he really doesn't care what happens to anyone besides his friends in the competition.

Him being a little Chaos Gremlin is why he has managed to be Chris McLean's longest standing employee ever. They get on like a house on fire. Chris is arguably a king of chaos, so I just love the idea of him emotionally adopting little chaos gremlin Noah and bonding with him. In this au, Chris does tell Noah about having to fire him, and of course, they plan to stage it while Noah helps budget and take inventory of everything they will need for the new season. He is also publicly helping with the fake show, so it looks like he has no idea about the new season. There are some interns and crew who would love to snitch to the producers on him and Chris if they caught wind of their plans.

Noah is the one who selected and approved Alejandro, being the newest competitor as well as one of the fake stars of Dirtbags. If anything else, the guy will stir things up and make things entertaining for Noah while he pretends to be lazy and useless. But Noah and Chris agreed that he would embrace his original marketed title as Schemer. And he's all for it, as long as it keeps him entertained.

A bored Noah is a dangerous Noah. Chris found this out the hard way. (He never thought he would have to talk a teen out of actively blackmailing a very successful producer in the company, but well, life is full of surprises).

Noah knows all the challenges because he helped plan some! He was very proud of himself. Oh, he made sure things were safe but just barely, I mean, he doesn't want to end up hurt or dead in these challenges, so he had to make some safety features and everything. It's weird, but Noah actually feels...excited about the new season. Oh, and he left Chris some of his blackmail material in case they producers want to change anything or are being assholes. They had been planning on buying out the company, and Noah thinks this is the perfect chance. Chris will run the show how he wants, and when he gets complaints, some anonymous "interns" will leak the messages, emails, or calls and show the viewers just how fucked up and corrupt the producers are. This plan has been a year in the making.

Which is a long time for one of Noah's plans to take off, but they want to do this right and come out the winners/heroes.

The day of the plan dawns, and Noah is practically trembling in excitement, but he's had a lot of practice pushing down his real emotions (thanks, Mason). He played his role perfectly all up to the bus rescue. He thankfully was able to get Eva to stay by pretending to fall asleep, but he knew she knew he wasn't sleeping. The trust she has for him has him feeling all warm and fuzzy. He loves Eva. She's basically his ninth sister. Beth ended up staying, too, because Lindsay wanted to paint her best friends nails, and that absolutely could not wait.

The rescue happened, and finally, they were on the bus to the plane. Eva wanted the window seat, and Noah would give it to her since she stayed. Plus, the aisle seat was perfect for observing everyone and seeing what was going on. It looks like Harold and Leshawna were off again, which was not surprising, which would mean a small amount of entertainment for Noah. Then there was the whole Gwen, Courtney, Duncan thing that had Noah holding back a smile. That whole train wreck would bring him so much entertainment.

But who really had his attention was Mr. New Guy. Oh, he knew his name, Alejandro, but he had to pretend he didn't. He could already hear the giggles from the girls who thought he was attractive, and he could already hear the boys grumbling. Noah made sure to give a comment or two about he hoped Mr. New Guy wouldn't just be another Justin, which made some laugh, and Courtney glared at him. Oh yeah, he forgot those two were friends. He also caught the slight smirk from Alejandro before the boy suppressed it.

The competition began, and Noah was surprised that Ezekiel made it, but with Duncan up and quitting (goodbye love triangle drama), it made sense that they had to even out the teams. So, the first challenge became a reward. Boring.

He saw the way Alejandro had flirted with the girls, specifically Bridgette and Leshawna. Which probably meant they were his first targets. Oh, that was fun~!

And he could help move things along! And if, by doing so, he got rid of Harold, even better! So he made sure to make comments about Leshawna falling for Alejandro when he was close to Harold. Or he would make sure to act disgusted at the cultural insensitivity (yes. Noah will always be responsible for Harold's elimination XD). It got the ginger right where he wanted.

Then Harold was gone, and Noah knew it wasn’t all him given he had witnessed Alejandro talking to Harold a lot, and he caught on to the subtle manipulations. That guy was good!

Then the Yukon happened, and he knew he didn't hide his glee at seeing Bridgette stuck to a pole well, given the look Alejandro had given him.

"Good work." He whispered with a snicker to Alejandro.

"I'm not sure what you mean mi amigo." Of course the guy would play dumb but whatever.

"Hmm. Whatever you say." He tried to be blasé but the wide smile then kept growing on his face was probably a dead giveaway of how he felt.

And maybe that's what shot him in the foot because the next day, Alejandro was flirting with him. Noah was pretty confident it was because Alejandro was scared he figured him out (he did) and was going to expose him or something. Like hell! This was the most fun he was having on a season. And if him acting coy or shy or flirting a little back with Alejandro had most of the females mad at him, so be it. It just made everything all the more entertaining to him.

He did hurt his ankle in the Yukon (this will always be canon to me), so pain medication was a must but he had been stubborn in not taking it because it either makes him drowsy or puts him right to sleep and he doesn't want to be voted out (and miss out on all the drama and fun) because he couldn't contribute much to the challenge. But Izzy, Owen, and Alejandro made him take the medication.

So, the next challenge, he was a little out of it, but Izzy or Owen carried him when there was running or walking. He was able to climb the rope at least, and he volunteered to be put in the baby carriage, which was fine by him. He fell asleep, which was not a surprise.

No being swapped with a baby, though, because Alejandro made Izzy guard Noah. Heather had planned on doing something but couldn't because even she was not crazy enough to go against Izzy.

It was a reward challenge, which was great! What was not great was the challenge in Germany! Noah wanted first class! He craved it! And he knew they had it in the bag the moment he saw Alejandro flirting with Leshawna again. He made sure to have discussions with Izzy when Leshawna was around and made it seem like he didn't know she was there.

"I mean, it's honestly pathetic. How obvious Heather's crush on Alejandro is." He drawled.

"Izzy knows!!! Girl has got it bad! I didn't think you'd notice it, though NoNo. You're not usually one to notice these things." Izzy gossiped as she tried to put Noah's hair into pigtails. She knew what he was doing and was all for it. He's her chaos brother!

"Normally, and this kills me to say, but normally you'd be right. But it's so obvious that even Owen has noticed, and that's saying something."

"I don't know, Owen is pretty good at knowing when someone likes someone."

"Agree to disagree."

"Is this about him trying to set you up with that-"

"We are not talking about that!" Well, no acting there was necessary. He did not want to talk about that disaster of a date. Ever.

"Well, it's not like Heather has realized it yet, which makes it all the more entertaining for us." This is why he loved Izzy. She knew when to drop things, she knew how to roll with his plans, and she liked chaos just as much if not more than him.

"True. I'm more worried about what she'd do because of said crush. Even if she doesn't realize it, she's already snapped at her teammates when he's flirted with Leshawna."

"Oh yeah! She definitely seems like one of those people who would do anything to get someone to back off her crush. Izzy knows."

"Mmm. You would seeing as you're the same way. Normally, I don't worry for anyone, but I can't help but feel bad for Leshawna."

"Why?"

"Because it's obvious Alejandro likes her, and we already established that Heather likes him, so it's not out of the realm of possibility that Heather will so or do something to come between the two."

"Oooooh."

He couldn't hold back his smirk when he heard Leshawna storm off, and Izzy immediately matched his with one of her own.

Then the challenge happened, and he played up not knowing what Alejandro was doing up until the guy purposefully lost the challenge. Once they were back in the plane, he immediately dragged the guy down to the cargo hold to confront him. He, of course, tried to deny everything and tried to flirt with Noah in the same breath. Noah was not having it.

With more strength than he thought himself capable of, he shoved the guy into the nearest wall. He had to look up, given he was only to the guy's chest (short king Noah, my beloved), but he poked him in his abs to get his attention.

"I don't care that you got into Harold's head and made him vote himself off. Mainly because I was getting into his head first. And I don't care that you helped and flirted with Bridgette enough to get her to make out with a pole! In fact, I thought it was hilarious." He admitted.

And just to see more of a reaction than just the wide green eyes he was staring into, Noah started walking his fingers up Alejandro's torso oh so slowly. It got the eyes off of him for a second, and he thought maybe he saw a blush forming, but those green eyes held his attention once more.

"And I even decided to be nice and help you get to Leshawna! I had to let Izzy mess with my hair! But it was all for the sake of getting entertainment, and you, sir, make a lot of it happen. So I was content to let you play your game."

His fingers reached Alejandro's bull necklace, which he wound his fingers around and tugged.

He didn't miss the gasp the boy in front of him breathed out, given how close they now were.

"But I'm not so content when your actions mess with my game. I don't like to lose when I know we had every opportunity to win and would have won had you not thrown. You may not think much of me, I mean, I did get out early in the first season. But then again, I manipulated my way into being thrown off. I was not about to spend my summer in that shitty camp. And so far I've been playing in the shadows this season."

Great. He was monologuing like some cheesy villain. But I mean...he was being paid to play a villain this season, so he might as well go all in.

"I'm keeping you around for my entertainment and amusement. Purposefully losing is not something I find amusing, so the next challenge you better give it your all or I'm going to have to really play and you don't want that." He hissed before leaning back and patting Alejandro's cheek and letting go of his necklace.

"Good talk." And with that, he sauntered out. That was fun!

He missed the absolute heart eyes Alejandro had been giving him.

__________

Basically, a villain Noah au, where Alejandro falls for him so hard. The two create an alliance and dominate the game, all the while Alejandro is trying to get Noah to date him. Noah thinks it's just Alejandro being Alejandro, but he does like him, and he thinks it's very funny that the guy can't handle when Noah flirts back with him.

Boy this got long.

Enjoy.

[crowroboros]

the main echo cast and their splatoon mains. GO!

Oh fun, alright! I'll also put an explanation for my reasoning at the end. Really enjoyed thinking about this. This will be Splatoon 3 focused by the way, as it is the most recent game.

Chase Hunter - Octobrush (Suction Bomb/Zipcaster)

Leo Alvarez - Dread Wringer (Suction Bomb/Reefslider)

Jenna Begay - .52 Gal Deco (Curling Bomb/Splattercolor Screen)

Carl Hendricks - Splatana Stamper Nouveau (Toxic Mist/Crab Tank)

TJ Hess - Big Swig Roller Express (Angle Shooter/Ink Storm)

Flynn Moore - Custom E-Liter 4K Scope (Squid Beakon/Kraken Royale)

Bonus! Syndey Bronson - Custom Blaster (Point Sensor/Triple Splashdown)

Explanation time, spoilers will be mentioned.

Chase: Chunter mains Octobrush. The weapon cannot take fights head on due to having shorter range than many other weapons and thus has to rely on off-angles to get kills and take space or by poking with bombs from a distance. Chase rarely if ever wins a fight he's in one-on-one, having to rely on a distraction from people around him to get any sort of advantage. He also tends to avoid confrontation all together, usually running when faced with a danger like Duke or Brian. This works very well with Brushes as they are highly mobile when brushing along the ground which they use to escape situations that they would get splatted in otherwise. Chase is also referred to as having stubby legs that makes running not his strong-suit and that works with Octobrush specifically as it it slower in both its flicks and brushing when compared to the Inkbrush (though it is still faster than the Painbrush but I don't think Chase is that slow so it still works). Octobrushes tend to shark in ink, swimming around and popping up when an opportunity presents itself. So an octobrush user is often in swim form a noticeable portion of a match, which works great with Chotter who is an avid swimmer! Zipcaster may be the odd one out when it comes to this weapon being Chase's main but I do think it plays into all of the aforementioned traits with how Octobrush tends to use the special.

Leo: I might need to defend myself on this one but here me out. Leo is headstrong and very straightforward in how he does things right? He's intelligent but stubborn, rarely considering alternative options which can backfire on him. That is the Reefslider special. It is straightforward; Rush forward on an inflatable shark and explode. But because of that, it can be predicable and ends up getting countered a lot. Beyond that, Leo really does care for his friends and wants to be their protector. Originally I thought that a Big Bubbler weapon could be pretty good for that, but I think that Reefslider fits Leo better but also a main weapon like Dread Wringer also can cover that aspect. Dread Wringer paints an insane amount, which means that the team has a lot of ink to swim through, hide in, recover health, escape through, etc. It also is AMAZING at comboing with weapons like the Range Blaster or Snipewriter so it ends up working a lot with other weapons. Sharing the sub weapon of suction bomb with Octobrush can be representative of his relationship with Chase and how he sticks to the image of Echo, Chase, and the past.

Jenna: .52 Gal Deco and Jenna okay. I had a few ideas for Jenna, initially thinking of her maining a dualie of some kind but I just couldn't figure out which one would work best. Jenna is practical, self-reliant, and resourceful while also having a playful streak about her. She loves pulling pranks and joking around with her friends while still being generally supportive and helpful towards them even if she can come off as harsh at times. Also being a fox, she is rather mobile and fast on her feet. It's that last part that originally made me think of giving her a dualie, but I couldn't find one that I thought matched all of her traits. That's when I decided to approach it from a different angle. I started from her independence and worked from there. I started thinking of weapons that were very self-reliant, able to hold their own in fights, can paint well for themselves, etc. Then I started thinking about weapons that can be a bit playful and sneaky while keeping their mobility. And after a lot of consideration I landed on the .52 Gal Deco. The main weapon, .52 Gal, is a mid-range shooter that is pretty much the definition of a self-reliant and resourceful weapon. It is a very consistent two-shot weapon with a pretty solid fire rate, making it very reliable in fights while minimizing the amount of time it takes to kill so it can splat the opponent before it can get splatted. It can be a bit ink-hungry so the user needs to be resourceful and aware of their surroundings and their own resources to fully utilize the weapon's strengths. Curling bomb as a sub weapon gives this otherwise okay-mobility weapon much better movement, which the user can use to get around the map quickly and distract opponents. This weapon ends up playing rather fast paced and sneaky by using its range, kill-time, and curling bomb to move around the map to take positions that the enemy team might not be expecting. And then the special of Splattercolor Screen works as a smoke-screen of sorts, concealing your team from the enemy sight. That plus curling bomb allows for a bunch of mind games on where the .52 Gal Deco user could be at any given time, especially if they're running Ninja Squid.

Carl: This one was a bit more difficult to figure out than the first three but I think the Splatana Stamper Nouveau is a good fit for him. Carl is more laid-back and chill, so I didn't think a weapon that is very fast-paced, aggressive, and "high energy" would work for him. He also dislikes being the center of attention so in my mind that pushed me towards weapons that work well as an anchor in a team comp rather than a slayer or skirmisher or something. Carl also has a stockier build and for a time worked out, which made me think of Crab Tank. This narrowed my thoughts down to Splatana Stamper Nouveau and the Heavy Edit Splatling Nouveau. Both are strong, slower, sturdier weapons that play at the range that Crab Tank favors. I went with Splatana Stamper Nouveau over Heavy Edit Nouveau because Heavy Edit as a main weapon is much more fast and mobile and really likes fighting. Stamper Nouveau — unlike the vanilla Stamper — isn't as much as a fighter. It can still fight pretty well, it is a Splatana Stamper after all, but it plays more to support it's team by painting for Crab Tank to apply distance pressure and comboing with other weapons by using it's 70dmg charge slash or the aforementioned Crab Tank. Nouveau as a weapon brand also tends to make weapons based around art supplies, and Carl is an artist.

TJ: Okay TJ and Big Swig Express. TJ as a character is very altruistic and kind. He loves and supports his friends and I figured that a more supportive weapon would work very well with that. The Big Swig roller as a main weapon is focused on putting down paint for your team to swim through, heal, etc. And with Ink Storm also expanding upon that I thought that the Big Swig Express fits TJ's caring personality pretty well. It also is a weapon that doesn't fight much due to it's low damage, which I again think fits with TJ's personality. He tends to avoid conflict and often gets very uncomfortable when pressured by Flynn or anyone else. TJ is also very athletic, and the Big Swig is a faster weapon in terms of its flicks and movement.

Flynn: One I think is pretty self-explanatory. Flynn is proficient with a rifle and the charger class of weapons fill the archetype of sniper-rifles in the Splatoon games. I chose the Custom E-Liter 4K Scope specifically as a callback to Flynn's role in Jenna's route where he takes a position far back to aim his rifle on Heather at the dam. Kraken Royale is a transformation special that transforms the user into a large invincible kraken, in which the user can swim around and perform melee attacks to fight before turning back about ~7 seconds later. For Custom E-Liter, this allows it to protect itself up close. The main gun is very long range and has a very slow charge time. It is meant to take vantage points and snipe from a distance and thus it can't fight when rushed down. Kraken helps cover that weakness. Flynn does throw some punches a few times in the vn, though he doesn't always win these fights. I thought that this dynamic between E-Liter and Kraken represents that pretty well. Also spoiler. Flynn transforms into the Socket Man, a seemingly immortal entity that can rush down and kill things kind of like how Kraken functions.

Sydney: I think this one is also pretty self-explanatory, right? Sydney was rambunctious, loves to wrestle, was a big fan of things like ninjas and treasure hunts. Custom Blaster is a short range blaster that plays to its aggression and being able to get up to an opponent and hopefully hit its one-shot direct before the opponent can fire back. Point Sensor marks any enemy that enters its aoe, so the Custom Blaster player will know where that enemy is while the enemy won't know where the Custom Blaster player is. This allows the user to get up flank and get up close to either direct or use Triple Splashdown, which I mean looks like this.

The user rises into the air and summons two massive fists, smashing into the ground and creating three large explosions.

Custom Blaster has a very aggressive, fast-paced, up-close playstyle that rewards both rushing down your opponent and being creative in ways that you approach to compensate for your short range. It also is a weapon that favors gear with Quick Respawn, cause it ends up dying a lot.

[legayfuck]

okay but the way that noah and eva were SUCH GREAT CHARACTERS that NEVER DID ANYTHING is so upsetting. I know we all wanted a team e-scope comeback and wt TOTALLY COULD'VE DONE THAT like

and there's definitely possibility for people to get eliminated fairly late in the game, like sweeden sour, rapa phooey and of course double eliminations

first, I'm going to talk about the relations between the members of team e-scope

there could definitely be an expansion on the team e-scope relations. eva and izzy could have a very dynamic friendship- they're both some of the most threatening competitors while also having contrasting personalities. this friendship could've been used in island when they were both returning contestants. eva would recognize that they're both targets because they both skipped challenges and izzy really just went along with anything. she and eva definitely got along and they would be a killer alliance.

if eva made it even like a couple of challenges I think it would be good. just push trent and bridgette back once and move the no pain, no game challenge to after hide and be sneaky. there's the whole trent and heather plot in search & do not destroy, heather, leshawna, and eva could all have immunity in hide & be sneaky which would lead to bridgette's elimination, and then eva loses in no pain, no game. that would give enough time for at least a little use of eva and her rivalries with other characters. ALSO why was izzy in an alliance with heather? put her in with eva cmon. anyways. in hide & be sneaky, the guys could use eva's hate of bridgette to their advantage. anyways I'm going on a tangent here. NEXT

noah and izzy had at least some sort of thing going on since haute camp-ture. izzy with the 'throwing some shrimp on the barbie, that means you noah!' and the whole 'he kissed a guy!' thing definitely leads you to believe that at least izzy thinks they're friends, even if she just annoys noah. then in world tour, while he spent most the time calling her a nutcase, she carried him around a lot it wasn't like he hated her, he just didn't want owen dating her because she didn't treat him right.

noah and eva are a good team-up. noah's the brains and eva's the brawn, that's alliance material. they know each others strengths and neither really have friends. well, noah has owen but that's basically it. and owen isn't the most strategic person in the game. and both have a lot of enemies.

I'm going to talk about potential of the characters as if eva was in world tour and on team chris because that would make sense with canon

I feel like eva could be used so well. She didn't like being famous, so she was all in it for the money. She was straightforward. She was not playing any games. SHE WANTED THAT MONEY. I think Alejandro would see her as useful and keep her around, but he knows he has to get rid of her before the merge. Plus, she's so great for an antagonist. She has a lot of drive and could have a rivalry with literally anyone. She could have beef with tyler I mean realistically. he was a killer bass. also, I feel like she could have an alliance with alejandro. she doesn't seem like someone exactly all for alliances, but she understands a deal when she sees one- alejandro is a powerful competitor and she knows it. betrayal later could be AMAZING and I'll get to a point with that in a minute

and we all know the noah story, we've heard it a million times but it's true, he's a great character. He has a rivalry with alejandro, was labeled 'the schemer' or whatever even though he did nothing, he's really smart like they could have used that. he also had a lot of rivalries with people that were just not used. he didn't like alejandro, he didn't like sierra, he didn't like duncan, and he definitely had potential for relationships (positive or negative) with other contestants. he could still be eliminated at the same time, but at least let him do something.

okay. so I know we all love blaineley. well I actually don't really but we all love blainerific. HOWEVER. HER ASS DID NOTHING. I would bring back either eva or noah. eva, if having that alliance with alejandro, would be mad as hell. and post-merge, she could interact with members of team amazon. noah also is against alejandro and has a lot of potential for relations with other competitors. then I would have them last a little longer than blaineley did so they ACTUALLY DO SOMETHING anyways that's my little rant about eva and noah

[thespianinthebackcorner]

Coroika posting again. Also Shady posting again. Do y'all think he's like really badly shortsighted???

Like, I know the standing-really-far-away-and-using-a-scope is just a gag, but... it does seem weird in general. Like, it's funny, but the extent to which he goes for it makes me a little sus. Even in conversation, like when he first meets Team Blue, he's weirdly far away. Like, to the point where they're saying he's hard to hear. And taping the thing to his face is more than a bit weird too, although in context it does make a bit of sense considering he's so used to using a scoped charger instead of a nonscoped one.

I don't know, I'm probably overthinking it, but to me it looks like he's really really shortsighted and either 1. Hates wearing glasses or 2. Can't get them or contacts somehow, so he manages by standing really far away and using the scope so that it technically falls within his range of being able to see. It would also explain why he holds it with his hand half of the time, because he's used to carting it around so that he can actually see properly. like he's using them as his fucked up little version of glasses. And he just passes it off as being eccentric, because most everyone else in the Best 8 already are a little eccentric themselves, so he fits right in.

I mean, there's a couple of things wrong with Shady (why the hell are you standing anywhere NEAR the halfway point at hammerhead bridge with an E-Liter 4K Scope wtf what's the point) (the way they use weapons in this manga would anhiliate a meta player on SIGHT) but the weird insistence he has on the whole scope thing is making me suspect he can't actually see what's happening. It would also kinds explain why he constantly has a 0_0 expression on his face, as one of my friends put it so well 😂. It's not just the design of his face, it's the fact that he's not really focusing on anything in particular cause he can't see anything that's not right in front of his face. So he looks unfocused and a little dazed.

Am I cooking or is this going in the trash idk what do you guys think

[perpetualexistence]

I Hunt My Own Way

Here's my submission for Day 4 of Evacember: Fantasy AU! And also some of Day 5 since there's Team E-scope in this too.

It's in the same universe as We Drive Each Other Batty, though obviously Eva-centric. Consider this as a prequel fic to that one.

As per my usual, it's more of a summary fic with a few lines of dialogue thrown in there. But hey it's 4.5K words of Eva, it's what she deserves.

Eva wouldn’t say her time before going to the kingdom of Wawanakwa was that bad.

Sure, there were the harsh winters of the north, struggling for firewood, and occasional Yeti attacks, but that was just life. It hardened you so that you’d be able to handle whatever got thrown at you, and then you just find the little joys in things.

Like traveling bard troupes singing tales of heroes brave and true. Most was drivel, but there were a few that knew how to sing so loud their voices gave out. They enchanted stones to hold their songs. It was a pricey magical trinket, but worth being able to hear it play over and over again. She could only afford the one her parents could get her, but she took it eagerly. 

She didn’t mind that winter being a colder one as a result.

She didn’t get why her parents really wanted to move to where it was warm and all the people were. But she was 12 so she didn’t really get much say in the matter.

Despite having an easier life here, she hated it more. Sure, the warmth was nice, but her parents actually expected her to play with other kids. Do her best to ‘fit in’.

Up north the few kids she did see every now and then were a lot like her. They’d play Slay the Monster and get into tussles. It was fun, and it prepped them for when the real monsters came along.

She loved being the Yeti. Sometimes, when she wasn’t, she’d pick up on attack ideas from the older kids. She hated listening to older kids at first. Her patience was as little as she was back then. But when the ideas worked she began to realize that having someone in charge who knew what they were doing could be really good.

Here, the only kids who were ‘allowed’ to play Slay the Monster were boys. They laughed at her for wanting to play until they very quickly learned why laughing at Eva wasn’t a good idea. 

Eva hadn’t meant to go as far as she did. Once she got started it was just so hard to stop. And they had deserved every bit of it.

It solved the problem of people laughing at her. But it created a new problem of being labelled as a monster herself.

Which of course meant now was when her parents decided she needed more attention than before. Her father stopped asking her to help with hard labor around the house. Her mother tried teaching her things that were more ‘suitable’ for someone her age.

She had no patience for sewing. She always ended up pricking her fingers and swearing at a storm, which just got more looks from everyone around. Cooking she could understand, but didn’t get why you needed to be fancy with it when you could just make sure it tasted good and didn’t kill you. 

Every time she told them that she just wanted something to do with her hands she was given something delicate. Her hands weren’t built for delicate. They were built for strength. Blunt instruments existed for good reason: they got the job done in the most straightforward way possible.

Her parents knew that. They were the ones to teach her. And now they’re turning their backs on it just to make sure their neighbors kept wanting business from them?

She hated it. It filled her broiling with rage, which made people fear her more, which made her even angrier. Taking it out on others meant dealing with the town guard, who knew her well as time went on.

So she took it out into the woods. Danger and beasts be damned, it was the only place she could scream and punch and kick where no one could stop her. The forest went quiet at her rage and Eva cared not for that. She just played her music on her song stone loud to drown out everything else.

If she was a problem then she might as well go all out with it.

She built crude dummies shaped like those she desperately wanted to punch and whaled on them instead. Each time they’d break she put them back together. They were a pile of barely held together sticks but that’s all she needed them to be.

It was only a matter of time that a beast would become bold enough to investigate rather than flee. Just her luck that the beast in question was an owlbear.

A particularly aggressive owlbear.

Not that she would let a stupid owlbear get in the middle of her screaming sessions. If anything, it just gave her a new target.

Raw strength fought against raw strength. Her own roars matched the owlbears. It got some deep gashes in her, but in the end she showed it who was boss. It fled when it realized Eva meant to kill it. 

Eva planned to go hunt it down when an axe buried itself into the owlbear’s skull.

That was enough to stop her roaring rampage of displaced anger. 

The wielder of the axe was a large, tan woman with bleached blonde hair and the first set of muscles beside her own that made Eva feel envy. She introduced herself as Abigail Paine (though she’s better known as Abs) and revealed that she was a mercenary, hunting down that owlbear as it had been nearing civilization and was getting bolder and bolder. Going so far as to maul a few unfortunate victims who traveled the woods.

Abs had assumed that Eva would have become one of them, and would have intervened. Except she saw Eva go toe to toe with the thing without a single bit of magic to be had. She kept watch in case Eva was actually in danger. 

She has to say she’s impressed. Eva’s got a strong future ahead of her with moves like that.

Anyways, Abs is going to go now since she does have a bounty to collect, and just slings the owlbear over her shoulder.

Eva doesn’t let her leave so easily. She’s never had anyone compliment her in a while. Not since she moved into this stuffy town. And she’s never met anyone at her level before.

There’s no way in hell that she’s letting Abs go that easily.

She puts herself in Abs’ path and reminds her that Eva did most of the hard work, so she deserved a cut. It didn’t need to be money though, no.

Eva wanted Abs to teach her how to be a mercenary. 

Abs thought about it for a moment, as she’d never trained anyone before. And said that if Eva could withstand what Abs considered training, then she’d consider it. Abs would come back for her after dropping off the owl bear. 

Eva wasn’t about to risk losing track of Abs. She didn’t really have anything tying her here either. So she let Abs know that as soon as Eva got some stuff, she’d go ahead and join her now.

So she ran away from home. Just like that. It wasn’t that impulsive of a decision for her. She hated this place, her parents were failing her, and here was someone who could offer her better. Seemed pretty simple to Eva.

Abs wasn’t kidding about the training. Whether it was to try to scare Eva off, or if she genuinely thought it was a good idea to start the morning off with bench pressing an owl bear corpse, it was hard to say.

She climbed barehanded up cliffsides. Dragged large hauls of their kills for reward. Endured each sparring match against Abs.

She lost each time. She had raw strength going for her, but so did Abs and Abs had years of experience ahead of her. 

Yet rather than get mad at her losses, Eva relished in them. Abs respected her enough to hold nothing back. Encouraged her to use her rage at losing to push her even harder.

Turn her rage into a weapon she could use to protect herself and others.

Finally, something that made sense to her.

She longed to just use her fists for everything. She was plenty strong on her own. The problem was some of the beasts they’d come across. Creatures like vampires or werewolves couldn’t be hurt with a fist like they could with a silvered weapon. Not to mention the risk of getting turned.

So she agreed to start using an axe. It relied on her strength to use well, and she could also use it to cut down trees for firewood and the like.

She stayed with Abs for a few years. Although her fighting skills improved, her reputation didn’t get much better. Being apprentice by Abs didn’t help with her.

Which Eva didn’t understand why. She’d seen the woman grab an ogre and toss it halfway across town. Landed right in the middle of a ballroom. Fight kept going and it was as much a screaming match as it was a fight.

It was glorious.

Everyone needed to stop complaining about collateral damage.

Still, for as much as she loved learning under Abs, she couldn’t help but feel as if something were missing. She thought she’d be content punching things so long as it was with someone else.

But she always had to follow Abs’ way. Her rules. Her whims of going after jobs that offered the most pay. Eva wanted to go after things that would be a challenge for her. She wanted the exhaustion of a near death battle to ease her into a peaceful sleep. 

So she set off on her own from Abs. Abs wasn’t happy to see her go. Kept telling Eva that this was quitting, though deep down she was sure Abs didn’t want to lose her. They had one last sparring match, at Abs’ insistence to prove if Eva was ready to be on her own.

It was the first time Eva won. First time she saw Abs cry, too. 

She promised to keep in touch.

Like that, she was off on her own. Her reputation did proceed her, which was both good and bad for her. 

Good in that she didn’t have to convince others that she could do a job. Especially the dangerous ones typically reserved for older mercenaries.

Others just assumed she was an adult from her disposition. She didn’t feel a need to correct them if it meant she could go head to head with ents.

The bad news was that her anger issues were still the thing she was known the most for. Nobody wanted to hold a conversation with her any longer than it took to talk about a job.

She hadn’t noticed it much when Abs was around. Abs made for good conversation and would fill the space while Eva silently brooded or worked out.

Now if she wanted to have someone else to actually talk with, she’d have to do that on her own. With small talk. About something other than violence.

She wasn’t the smartest but she knew that wasn’t going to happen. Even when she did try talking about music first, she could tell the other person was just too scared of her to ask her to stop talking. 

She’d prefer it if they just told her to go away.

But it was fine. She could manage. She’d just talk violence with other mercenaries she met along the road.

Most of which were older men who were just as shitty as the people in her village. 

Which meant she got angry at them and showed them why they shouldn’t underestimate her. 

Which meant word spread that she was a rage monster.

God.

Damn.

It.

She could just try to find Abs again. But that’d mean admitting defeat, so it wasn’t really an option.

Instead she just settled for having a bad reputation, and going back to chopping trees in the woods with one swing.

Her music being one of the only things to keep her calm enough to not just say fuck it and go on a killing spree. It was loud and it drowned out her angry screams.

What it didn’t drown out was a scream that came from above.

Before she knew it, she had a cackling ginger-haired girl landing on her and refusing to let go.

The two tussled for a while. As her opponent was on her, there was no room for her to grab her axe. It was a brawl, pure and simple. The ginger went so far as to just bite her in the arm. Not one to back down from a challenge, she returned with a bite in the shoulder.

The fight still kept going until the other girl finally relented and got off. The only reason Eva didn’t start swinging her axe was because the gremlin had actually managed to tire her out.

The best sparring partner she’d had since Abs introduced herself as Izzy. She was an outlander who went where the winds carried her. Though she usually stayed in the woods. She heard the screaming and came to see what was going on.

Izzy’s also decided that they’re friends now. Izzy wants to start a collection, and Eva seems perfect for it.

Which throws Eva for a loop. Because who the hell would want to be friends with someone like Eva?

It’s how she knows Izzy’s got to be crazy. That or she’s lying. Something like this is too good to be true and Eva isn’t buying shit. Besides, she’s doing just fine by herself, and if Izzy’s not a mercenary looking to partner up, there’s not much use of them sticking together anyways.

Izzy keeps trying to prod at her. Insist on it. So Eva throws her axe at Izzy to prove her point. Given what she’d seen of Izzy, she’d probably be fine.

And she was right, as Izzy dodged it rather effortlessly. Seemed like she finally took that as her cue to go.

Leaving Eva alone with an axe now halfway stuck in a tree. Her strength worked against her as it was wedged in there.

While grabbing at it, she mulled over whether scaring Izzy off had been a good idea. That conversation had been the best one she’d had in a while. Not to mention the fight. Izzy’d seen what she was capable of and rather than balking, she’d leaned into it. 

She never would have thought a sack of crazy would have been good company, but here Eva was.

No matter, Izzy was gone now. It was just Eva, the axe she’d wrenched free, and peace and quiet. 

Lots of quiet.

Too quiet.

Eva couldn’t hear her songstone. It’d been playing in the background, but in the fight Eva had just assumed that it had gotten turned off. 

She went to where she’d last seen it and-

Gone. 

It was gone.

Eva started throwing rocks and branches to the side and gone gone gone.

Eva was going to kill Izzy. She was going to slaughter Izzy. Behead her and crush her skull with her bare hands.

She packed up her belongings as quickly as she could manage.

She was going on a warpath.

Humans weren’t that different to hunt than monsters. They left their own trail. Izzy couldn’t have been lying about living in the woods, because her trail was hard to find.

Unless you knew what you were looking for. And were very determined to not lose a trail.

Every time she thought she was getting closer, Izzy always seemed to just escape her grasp. Eva would lose the trail for a day or two, but with enough threats, people would usually help point her in the right direction again.

She followed Izzy’s trail all the way to the capital. She didn’t have a proper permit to get in, but with enough knuckle sandwiches and trudging forward for her goal, she made her way through. 

And finally, finally after three weeks of tracking her down, Eva caught sight of the little nutcase. Izzy even turned around and winked at her before continuing to run away. 

Eva plowed through bystander and guard alike, all the way to the castle. It took longer than she would have liked to muscle her way through palace guards. She just wanted her songstone back. They were acting like her storming her way in meant she was going to go kill somebody.

By the time she was at the palace proper, she’d lost sight of Izzy. She was about to let a roar of frustration before she heard a very familiar song coming from above. She looked up to see Izzy waving the songstone from a window of the highest tower. Had to be at least 80 feet tall. Bitch was sticking her tongue out.

Dead. She was so very dead.

Eva had no idea how the hell Izzy had gotten up there so quickly. Nor did she care. As far as she was concerned, there was no time to waste. Going inside to chase her up would mean dealing with more guards. 

So she went for the more direct approach.

She began to climb up the tower itself.

It was made of stone, like most of the tower. There were uneven rocks that jutted out only slightly. She used those as her handholds. When there were none to be found, she punched her way into making one.

Up and up she climbed. There were rangers trying to shoot her down, but she use a shield stolen from one of the guards to block them.

Finally, she made it to the window. She threw herself inside and took quick stock of the situation.

Izzy was nowhere to be found. Surrounding her were a bunch of books. There was a desk with papers strewn about in a bunch of different languages. Some weird shapes on there too. A cot with a ton of blankets in the corner.

And then, in the middle of the room, her precious songstone, singing its siren song.

In the hands of some guy with dark robes and a giant forehead.

Without thinking twice, she threw herself at the guy.

As she moved towards him, weird shapes appeared on the stones underneath her. They touched her shadow. Black tendrils suddenly erupted from her shadow and wrapped around her. They were trying to pull her to the ground, but she refused to be brought down by anything. 

It was a struggle to stay on her feet, but she was still managing. She could do nothing to free her arms though, try as she might.

She screamed at the dark magic as if that would do anything. It held firm.

The guy in front of her also screamed, whether from her lunge or from her presence she couldn’t tell.

Shadows danced around his arm as he took on a rather pathetic fighting stance. The form was all off. He’d clearly never seen a physical battle in his life. She’d think he wasn’t a threat if not for the fact that he was the one controlling whatever magic kept her still.

As much as rage had carried her up to this point, there wasn’t much it could do when she was stuck. The exhaustion of hunting someone down for days on end was hitting her now that she was forced to take a break.

Her struggles slowed, though her anger still carried through in her voice as she demanded that this guy give her songstone back or she’d find a way to kill him.

She wasn’t expecting him to pause.

“You…want to kill me over the songstone?” he asked. “Yeah. Give it. NOW.”

 “Real convincing argument you’ve got there. Seriously, magic isn’t raising any red flags for you?”

Magic would explain things, now that Eva was actually taking the time to think about it. “You could be a demon for all I care right now. Give me the fucking songstone.”

“Tell me how it got here. How YOU got here. Then we’ll talk.”

“The hell do you mean ‘how it got here’? Izzy stole it from me because she has a death wish. One I’m gonna deliver to her, and to YOU if you’re working with her!”

At this, the other teen groaned and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Of course it was fucking Izzy.”

Turned out that Eva wasn’t the only person that Izzy liked to screw over. She was a professional thief who loved taking things just for the sake of causing havoc.

Noah, as he introduced himself, would often find things stolen despite all of his wards. And then the next day, Izzy would come strolling along offering things to sell. Including his own. 

She’d get away before he could get them back by force. Leaving him with the humiliation of buying his own things back. 

The only thing that made tolerating her worth it was that some of the other things she’d stolen were pretty useful to Noah’s studies. 

He could still do without buying back his own stolen property.

Her anger quenched, towards Noah at least, Eva explained her own situation. After agreeing to not pummel Noah into kingdom come, he released her and handed back her songstone. 

Eva hugged it and kissed it. She had no shame. She silently dared Noah to say anything about it, but he seemed rather unfazed by it.

Although she had her songstone back, she still wanted revenge on Izzy. She could tell Noah was just as pissed at her, though he settled for giving up rather than deal with her.

She had no plans to give up on this. With what Noah had managed to do to Eva, she figured that together they could track Izzy down again and take her down.

Noah looked at her like she’d sprouted a second head when she suggested it. Of course. One decent conversation would change shi-

“You seriously don’t care that I’m a dark mage?” he asked.

That…wasn’t how this conversation was supposed to go.

“Are you gonna use any more of that magic against me?”

“If I have to.”

“Yeah, sure, that’s self defense 101. Whatever. If I don’t hit you first, you’re not gonna attack me?”

“Sure, let me go ahead and sign my own death warrant. Got a quill?”

“Fuck you. Point is, we’re good. Are you in or not?”

Noah agreed, though he still seemed cautious about it. Something about the conversation felt off to Eva.

And then it hit her. For once, it wasn’t her reputation that was the problem here. It was Noah’s.

She didn’t know what he could have done wrong to think that she was going to kill him for the sake of it. 

…Then again, she’d never really done anything to make people not want to talk to her. Her anger issues were a problem, sure, but a lot bigger than other people made it out to be. Yet they still haunted her and everything she did.

Huh. She never thought she’d meet someone else who knew the feeling.

Still, there was revenge to be had, so the two started planning. 

After Noah convinced the guards that eventually made their way up to the tower not to immediately send Eva to the dungeon. Apparently he was the king’s royal wizard. 

Well, made things easier for her. As much as she liked fighting, she was exhausted from it.

It was an ordeal to figure out what to do with Izzy. First to track her down again, though it wasn’t too hard as she was apparently deciding to not leave the castle. How to take her down was the bigger concern.

After some humiliating trial and error, they finally made a plan that worked. Noah enchanted a spear that would release a magic net over whoever was under it when it flew. It was Eva’s job to throw it hard and fast enough to catch Izzy in its path.

They both cackled in joy when it finally worked. All the blood, sweat, and definitely not tears were worth seeing Izzy tangled up.

Working with Noah on this had been rather fun. First fun she’d had since Abs. Different, though. When they weren’t talking about strategy, they didn’t just talk about more fighting. 

Conversation turned to other things. Like making fun of people for being stupid. Complaining about others. Talking about music and having someone who, even though he didn’t get it, would still listen.

It sucked that it would have to end now that Izzy was caught.

Just as she thought that, and the two were congratulating each other for having finally caught her, Izzy decided to say her own piece about how fun this had been. Everyone else were boring to run from because they’d give up too quick or were super serious about it.

These two were much more fun to watch and play around with. She was glad she’d made them her friends.

The two were baffled by the idea that this was what she thought friendship was. It got worse as she slid out of the net that Noah swore by everything unholy was supposed to be impenetrable. 

And she just left. Promised she’d be back and just ran off. They chase and tried to track her down, but this time she was untraceable. 

After some choice words, the two didn’t have much choice but to admit that Izzy had bested them. 

Noah was sure she’d make her way back to them one way or another. There was no telling when, so there was no point in Eva sticking around if she didn’t want to. 

Eva could even keep the spear. Noah definitely wasn’t going to be using it. He had no idea if the enchantment would last or not since he wasn’t used to casting permanent magic on weapons. But hey, if something he made saw a bit more use, he could at least be happy with that.

Even if he made it sound like she was doing him a favor, this was still a gift. Someone else liked her enough to just give her something. Nothing needed in return.

…Fuck it. She didn’t want whatever this was to end. And Noah had just given her an idea for how to keep it going.

She admitted that the magic he’d done on the spear was pretty cool. She’d seen mercenaries who had enchanted weapons, but they were few and far in between. Magic was expensive as hell. 

She’d pay him to put more magic into her axe. Instead of giving her gold, she’d get whatever shit he needed to make his magic happen. She didn’t care what he used the magic for. 

She made sure he knew that she didn’t care about the kind of magic it was used for. Or how fucked up an ingredient he was asking for was. She’d kill any kind of monster she had to for the shit he could make. 

Just let her know what to go hunting for now, and she’d come back with it.

She grinned as he accepted the offer.

Their friendship continued with that excuse for a while. Izzy kept her word in coming back again and again. Eva just accepted that Izzy wasn’t malicious as much as she was just Izzy. She knew better than to go after Eva’s songstone again, at the very least. 

Hanging out with them, whether on the road or in the city, just became routine that broke up her hunting. And it felt fucking amazing to have something like that outside of her hunting.

Yeah, she could get used to a life like this.

She couldn’t wait to tell Abs about it when the two crossed paths again.