#that aside ... thanks for the ask!!!

[bitsybunbun]

Time to check your diaper!

What diaper? Look, I wear grown-up panties 😇

[grey-viridian]

Hi! Hope you are ok.

It's not a question, just a little fanart of your Possessed AU. Because I love them and your concept and what you do.

Have a nice day!!

Oh. My. God.

THIS IS SO BEAUTIFUL!! I LOVE IT I LOVE IT I LOVE IT!!! The art is amazing!! AAAA so pretty!

I truly have no words. I've been looking at this art for hours and smiling so hard my face hurts now.

Thank you so so so much! You made my week.

[merverelli]

"you just feel yourself let go."

still thinking about this episode. man. 💪💥

[stealingpotatoes]

cilantro or coriander. there’s only one right answer.

(it’s cilantro)

....

[sweeneydino]

Hi!! Love all the stuff you have on this blog!! I was wondering about your wrong parent AU, how would this change how the boys grow up, like with more of a motherly presence than their rat dad (though maybe she is just as a “sensei” as splinter…who knows XD) or is this like a time travel situation? AAA sorry im excited about this awesome AU!!!

Anywho, sorry for my ramblings I don’t write asks very often and there is no pressure to answer! Thanks so much for all the cool things you do! Lol I love seeing your stuff on my dash :D

It'd be a lot different! I guess I can list a few I thought of,,,

So, Rat!Mom.

She’s still a bit paranoid (how can you not be with the Shredder actively trying to find out what happened to you, where you are, and if you're actually dead), but shes more focused on trying to give her kids as normal of a life as she can and definitely not hiding all her stress underneath endless piles of work.

Mikey plays alot of games and is more adept at cooking, Raph's painting more often and always trying to help his mom with cleaning(yes, hes a mama's boy), Donnie is creating and creating and always wanting to go bigger, and Leo and Karai(yes, Karai :]) play fight alot(so many wars...) when they aren’t watching Space Heroes 24/7 or trying to explore outside the home.

Then, maybe during one of her dumpster dives, she finds some convenient "Chris Bradford" training tapes that they start to gain an interest in ninjutsu. She's not too pleased with it, but since they enjoy it, she tries to be more open to it(she conflicted)

They do go out and about earlier than Canon(with a curfew), meet April earlier too(her and her dad are a little different), and Karai and April become BFFS. (Unless...)

The kids still call her sensei or variations of mom, which ones? Probably all depending on what they did.

Now, fighting bad guys? She did not raise them for that /hj

In reality, when she sees her kids scratched up from fights topside, they are usually pretty quick to inform her what happened(except for two). They get carefully patched up, and scolded before being told to rest for a while(grounded). Which is definitely not so she can keep an eye on them.

And she is certainly not stressed whatsoever👍

Also…

“She was as beautiful as she was kind, and as kind as she was intelligent”

- Splinter

…probably meaning emotional intelligence, or somethin but i think itd be fun if she was just…. Fred.

As in Traps galore, I mean imagine it-

You're Chris Bradford, greatest actor (and martial artist ig) of all time, and your chasing what you presume to be your bosses stubborn former lover,(who you kind of hate ngl) and then you think you have her cornered, just for the ground to cave in beneath you cause whoops, she boobytrapped the whole place.

She can still be emotionally intelligent too, but the traps are staying.

Other than the traps, I do think Rat! Shen will have some other types of self-defense training during the time she was in hiding. Girl is not risking shit.

When it comes to VS. Shredder bits, she'd definitely use everything she can to her advantage, especially her rat abilities. Climbing, gnawing, scratching, hissing; just get the fuck away from her and her kids.

There’s no planned ships atm (other than Shen x Yoshi, but that's the point- hes ded anyway)

Lastly, Im thinking of probably at least three separate versions or “alternate timelines” for the WP au, or two divergents of the wp au canon lol. One where the original turts find Shen and her turts pre-adventure, one post-adventure and/or during the shredder kidnap arc(i will not elaborate) and the least timefuckery timeline where Rat mom and her babies gotta march on without future “assistance” 🤷 im sure they’ll be fine(they willllll)

Thank you all for being interested in this ^ ^ "

I actually don't have much planned for this since it was just another random idea(you can probably tell hdgdhdg), but I'm always happy to see everyone's ideas! It helps a lot with my scattered-brain--

And one FINAL, final thing

Im not sorry.

[boredth]

hello. I love your work and how you convey characters. I'm in tears when I see your art, it's too gorgeous <3 and I've been very interested in learning some facts about your v or the universe in general for a long time, it seems very interesting to me. Can you tell me something about it and the interactions of the characters (the characters themselves) please :3 (I use a translator, so there may be mistakes) <33

They can't stand each other (affectionate)

[kiyomitakada]

what draws you to misa amane?

oh this is such a good question let me see if i can do it justice.

two of my favorite themes in anything are

characters who are performances

what if love was not good

and misa is basically like if you took these two and smashed them together in a way perfectly calculated to obliterate me

like she's so! our first introduction to her is her pretending to be someone else (the first kira) so well that she even fools the audience. our second introduction to her is rem telling her that she is only alive because someone loved her, someone was killed by their love for her, and misa looks down for a second — looks almost sad — and then smiles and immediately starts scheming to kill her too.

who the fuck does that? what is wrong with her?

i think what misa understands fundamentally is that love is a weapon. if you asked her she'd laugh and say that's silly, she's a romantic after all! but she knows how attraction works and she uses it like a physical object with rem and higuchi and her jailor (when she thinks she's being tied up by a stalker and she starts offering bits of herself in order to get them to give her more freedom. mr stalker, the video won't be interesting if i can't move. oh, i'll give you an autograph, i'll shake your hand…)

and like, sure, that's how any femme fatale works, but crucial to the entire act is that misa doesn't admit it. she acts stupid on purpose! she's a cute little girl, she's misa-misa! all of this is literally in the text but she is just so good at acting that people forget about it! she isn't your usual scheming seductress character (also a character archetype i'm obsessed with, incidentally) because she knows better than to let anyone see her scheming.

look at this bit where she's specifically trying to get sidelined and successfully gets light to sideline her

+ i literally just posted about it but this scene where she decides to go behind everyone's back to uncover higuchi as kira drives me up a wall. the way she immediately covers it up with asking light to come to bed to her. i've seen so many people just screenshot that last part out of context because it really does look like a normal misa thing to do, haha misa and her conviction that light is in love with her, so funny! and that is the exact thing she is relying on to make sure they don't catch onto her. she pulls the same trick on the reader that she does on the characters. isn't that! insane! and it works every time!!!!

and of course talking about misa is never really complete without talking about her and light. it is my personal belief that she has a bpd favorite-person fixation on light that she convinces herself is actually romantic, but mental illness headcanons aside i am obsessed with the way she conceives of their relationship? on their first meeting she says out loud that she doesn't care if light just plays the part of her boyfriend ("i'll work hard to make you love me") but she doesn't want him to date other girls in public. she doesn't actually mind that he doesn't have feelings for her (yet!) but she cares about the appearance of their relationship. about the facade. she keeps putting both of them in danger by showing up to see him when he's told her not to. she gives up her actual memory of light but is relieved that she doesn't have to give up her feelings for him, specifically. she is over the moon when L and rem say she's in love with him (not the other way around!). and this

this fucking scene added a decade to my lifespan

rem: you tried to kill yourself over this boy misa: (sincere) that's awesome!

like she isn't actually enamored with him. she's enamored with how in love with him she is

oh that reminds me. addition to my favorite themes in anything list:

3. SUICIDALITY

misa halves her lifespan twice. risks her life to catch kira multiple times in yotsuba arc. as aforementioned goes to meet light even though it threatens both of them. literally says aloud i'd rather die while i'm still young and pretty

her parents are dead. she is nineteen years old and incredibly traumatized. the conclusion here is very straightforward.

misa calls kira her savior even though she knows kira isn't the one who actually saved her life with gelus. kira doesn't even save her parents, just avenges them by murdering their killer. so why is he her savior? because kira gives her a reason to live again. her goal now is to meet him, and then after she meets him, get him to fall in love with her. this is impossible because of the way light is and in some ways i think that is ideal for misa: there's always something to keep going after, some reason for her to not die yet. but she keeps throwing herself at death anyway in the meantime because if she's going to die then she wants it to be for love. i did all that for light? that makes me so happy!

the two times i think misa is completely entirely honest with the audience are when she's in confinement and when she's in the forest alone, right after getting her memories back:

christ.

this is imo why she sides with light over kira in the yotsuba arc. because what she actually wants is to not be alone, to have a reason to live, and kira helpfully provided that for a while but now that she's under constant surveillance to make sure she's not siding with kira and now that her boyfriend is also trying to catch him, she's going to side with the boyfriend so that she can keep light by her side.

what i really like about this is that it's so… amoral? misa does think kira is doing good for the world but she personally doesn't care, she just wants to be loved. she will twist her morals into whatever necessary to make sure that she is loved. she really doesn't care about anything else. she frames her good friend for the kira tapes. she places zero value on her own life and by extension zero value on anyone else's — even light's, to be honest, see above about how she's willing to put them both at risk to see him — and it's the most entertaining thing in the whole world! it's so awesome! she's so awesome!

and the best thing is that this comes back to bite her so hard in the second arc because now that she's lost her memories she can't remember why she's with light in the first place but just like in yotsuba arc she understands that this person is the only reason she is still alive, that she has to be in love with him, that he has to be in love with her, and it doesn't matter how either of them actually feel because that is How The Story Goes for a cute little girl. it doesn't matter that she's canonically developing alcohol dependence issues (see her dinner with kiyomi) or that she never sees her fiance anymore. she's still misa-misa. she's still everything.

her trick folds in on itself. she's been pretending to be a good non-murderous girlfriend for so long that when she loses her memories and her internality she has to believe herself. she becomes the shell she was putting on for light

where's the post. here. [light, about misa]

like isn't that the coolest thing in the world! she's been acting for the audience both in- and out-of-universe for so long that she has nothing else to believe in! becoming the mask is a form of ego death! isn't that the most meta thing ever! i love her so much im going to die

oh god this is getting long. umm. conclusion

there's this framework i like to think about characters with that i call zoom-in and zoom-out, where the zoom-in focuses on their internal life and conflicts and feelings etc. and the zoom-out focuses on their role in the narrative, outsider-pov style. the best characters are the ones that are compelling both zoom-in and zoom-out style.

zoom-in: misa amane is a deeply lonely and deeply suicidal teenager who latches onto the first reason she finds for living and clings onto it (him) for the entire rest of the series while constantly putting on a moe act for the sake of survival and then just because she has nothing else

zoom-out: misa amane is the second kira, stalks a high school boy to his house, kills over a hundred thousand people at his command with the same bright smile, and is such a good liar that people still come away from this show calling her stupid.

[purplepixel]

You asked and shall receive

(Regarding the screenshot request post)

You think my life is a joke? Youre really coming into my house like this and sending this montrosity. As if I would ever draw—

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

I need you to know that every time I see your personal cat in cowboy boots I am driven once more to embroider it onto a denim jacket. I still have one pair of your cats saved as a reaction image because they convey such an emotion.

Whether or not you go through with it, the mental image has enriched me more than you can imagine.

[teamsasukes]

Was Itachi's forehead poke to Sasuke a sign of distancing himself and not wanting Sasuke to get involved, rather than just a mere sign of affection? I saw a few people talk about that and how it's weird that Sasuke does that to his family considering the original meaning.

yes, you've got an accurate handle on the original meaning of the Forehead Poke. fundamentally it is an expression of distance that itachi wields at times when he cannot be with sasuke. and it seems to be a throughline of his childhood: sasuke asks itachi to do something as mundane as train together but itachi continually refuses on account of his duties as a shinobi.

it is not a gesture devoid of love -- it's not as though itachi ever delights in dismissing sasuke (on the contrary, he is always regretful). but there's a cruelty in the uncertainty of it all: the most direct translation is "maybe next time", so itachi fails to provide even an assurance that they can, like, hang out next week or something. this chasm between them is then widened by itachi promising, on the night of the massacre, that he might allow a final battle between them if sasuke ever proves competent enough to bother fighting, leaving sasuke in protracted pursuit of the looming specter of his older brother.

this distance is really only bridged (barely) in their final scene when itachi lays bare the truth of his motives, his regrets (which are lacking, to put it mildly, but for sasuke this is nonetheless momentous), and his unconditional pride in and love for his little brother. the Forehead Poke is notably absent here because textually, the enforced distance wrt sasuke is framed as itachi's greatest wrong. (seriously, itachi says something to the effect of: i shouldn't have done All That because maybe you, my 7-year-old brother, could have brought change to our clan... thereby reducing inconvenience for konoha, of course. the paucity of virtue in massacring the uchiha doesn't really register for him even during this reconciliation, and it's deliberate... because the author doesn't see it as much of an issue either!)

anyway, it might seem odd for sasuke to repeat this gesture with sakura in chapter 699, then, particularly because it seems to be invoked in a manner identical to itachi in his neglect. kind of an odd way to signify a happy ending for these characters, right...?

well, it works for me solely because it is not identical! and naruto's english dub is my worst enemy. i would grab a couple of manga panel screenshots in the original japanese to prove it, but it's easier for me to just plug these scenes from the anime. here is an itachi Forehead Poke (0:51) and here is sakura seeing sasuke off at the konoha gate (0:33). there's a subtle but meaningful distinction in the phrasing: "mata kondo da" vs. "mata kondo na". which, in effect, alter the meaning from "maybe next time" to:

(there's an excellent tumblr post from years ago which performs a substantive analysis of the japanese in both contexts, but eludes me now. pls send if any of you have a link to it!)

so personally i adore its inclusion in chapter 699 specifically. it obviously carries a great deal of weight for sasuke and it's meaningful he chooses to express it to sakura specifically despite leaving the entire team behind -- in lots of ways, and more than any other character, i think for sasuke, sakura is the anti-itachi. (that would require another post to elucidate.) so not only is it an expression of regret at unintended distance, but, more crucially, it's a promise of return. i think it's incredibly sweet that sasuke can repurpose the gesture from something soul-rending to something hopeful.

(also deserving of another post lol but this scene also achieves a neat and, crucially, subversive callback to sakura's foundational insecurities... it's like poetry it rhymes)

all that said, i understand why it reads as something different once we are then given the context of chapter 700 and gaiden... i dislike both of these installments, primarily for the implication that distance becomes a love language, so to speak, between sasuke and sakura/sarada. these relationships are ruled by distance and sasuke accepts it. it's disappointing! his journey to learn about more of the world in chapter 699 jibed with the character's arc until that point. this does not.

my unpopular take is i think this has just about nothing to do with sakura or the sasusaku relationship and everything to do with authorial outlook on sasuke's actions in part 2. and for the record, i maintain that these crimes ultimately amount to very little -- violence and death are occupational hazards if one is a shinobi. konoha is also foregrounded by a cold calculus on the worth of human lives; i'm sure sasuke's indispensable role in saving the world outweighs the killing of a few samurai. i just think kishimoto needs sasuke to atone, somehow, forever, via endless service to the village. and he also cannot sensibly write a kakashi- or naruto-headed government that would impose any meaningful punishment, so sasuke is relegated to a state of permanent rootlessness in some dumbass quest. it's a sacrifice on his part, but contrived for a number of reasons, chief among them being that the sasuke we came to know in the original series would literally never internalize konoha's ideals in this manner. so even though the Forehead Poke in gaiden and boruto retains the elements of promise and anticipation of eventual reconciliation, it feels kind of... lame and weightless. there is a superficial signal at growth but materially, for the parties on the receiving end of the Forehead Poke, very little seems to change.

frankly, i think we are meant to view sasuke's love as noble (and sasuke himself as penitent, suggested by the ascetic quality of his life). sasuke is still doing things differently than itachi, insufficient though it may be: he is honest about the reason for his travels, he does not rush to dismiss sarada when she needs emotional support, his motives are selfless rather than selfish (sasuke guards against the threat of the otsutsuki; itachi... wanted sasuke to kill him, in no small part as a desperate ploy to end his own suffering, notwithstanding the subsequent damage that would be inflicted on his thoroughly traumatized little brother). gaiden is surprisingly candid about the distance as a source of distress for sarada, sakura, and even sasuke, but by the end everyone understands why it must be as it is. the state above all! (you'll notice even itachi's apology to sasuke held this precept intact... there is a reason the series closes with sasuke accepting his old hitai-ate.) it is admittedly vexing, considering the totality of evidence here, to see sasuke's nomadic status in boruto pinned on how much he hates his dumb bitch wife and not, you know. the shockingly bad politics underpinning the narrative.

i appreciate the attempts of sasuke enjoyers to explain his distance as natural aversion to konoha, but this isn't canonically backed by any interiority (which seems to be absent in boruto-era team 7 at large) and moreover it requires miscommunication between sasuke and sakura (or even naruto) so great as to be unbelievable. i've accepted that post-pt2 sasuke is an unfortunate victim of kishomoto's nationalist views. his weird takes on how a man like sasuke would behave in a loving relationship and likely desire for a continued revenue stream don't help either. yes i will weep forever...

TLDR: i think the Forehead Poke fits in chapter 699 precisely because it diverges from itachi's. i resent its recurrence suggesting distance from loved ones is an inevitable condition of sasuke's life to which he's stoically acquiescent.

[carpetbug]

I'm sure you're not full around to this yet and I'm not gonna to be upset if you don't answer but what do the other heros outfits look like in your au?

hi anon! I have been HELLA busy with school that I honestly haven’t done anything with fbau in a while 😔 that being said, I do have a few rough ideas for hero outfits from throughout the past year or so (also. fbau almost one year old what the hell) and since you asked so nicely I’ll say fuck it and share em

SO! feast your eyes on some fairly rough design ideas for kim, sabrina, ivan, mylene, marc, nathaniel, kagami, nino, felix, and alix! None of these ideas are 100% decided on, hence why they’re mostly labeled as idea #1. p.s ignore most text it’s not relevant i was just too lazy to take it out <3

you can also find lukas (future) hero design here! he’s yet to have a younger/present day design though

anyways long live feline blue au go read chapter three if you haven’t already and feel free to scream at me about it

[sonicchaoscontrol]

Loving your depictions of all the characters so far. Cool composed auntie Rouge, cold unsentimental professional Shadow, Omega.

They're coping.

(Omega? Omega never changes. That one just is.)

[meltypen]

btw ur my fav artist and i really look forward to ur posts can i nibble on ur cheek /p

that's scary... don't do that to my cheek bro

[thistransient]

do you take photo requests? there's a cemetery path in ruifang in new taipei i think i got cursed on late at night and i'd love to see what it looks like in the day, but i don't live there anymore

If it's accessible by public transport (or reasonable bicycling) I can give it a go, just send the coordinates~ However if you were in the cemetery on account of fleeing feral dog packs, please let me know so I can prepare appropriately. Did you ever manage to get un-cursed?

[thistleraven]

Is your writing edible? Just reading it isn't enough anymore, I have to absorb every word into my bloodstream.

Lmfaaao nonny ♥️♥️♥️

I guess if you printed out?? Oh!! Screenprint it onto a cake?? Then you could...

...

TAKE A BITE????

[whatsthebird]

Not a submission but wanted to give appreciation to the people who submit birds regularly (I see you Minnesota and west Michigan) From a Michigander

We thank our Midwest overlords for this wonderful bounty.