#these characters will never have an actual fully developed world around them because of this!!

[toonfinatic]

The reason it takes 200 years for me to get my characters fully defined is because i get caught on irrelevant details.

I decided that one of my characters has a pet dog. Big mistake, i'm a dog nerd. Now, because this world the characters belong to doesn't have real life dog breeds, i'm MAKING UP NEW ONES and thinking which real breeds the fictional pet dog would most resemble. This has no actual input in the story itself.

[cornedbread]

Principal got the Homestuck treatment.

[habken]

Izuku and Katsuki Hospital Comic - Thoughts and Process

I wanted to talk about the process and my thoughts while making this comic! Cause it was A Lot of planning and I feel like talking about how I went about it could maybe be helpful for other people who wanna make comics too ?

Also I just like talking and I've had So Many thoughts about it over the last few months, I just need to get them all out lol

everything is under the cut (it's Very Long) ↓↓↓

Initial Thoughts

I started planning the comic in January, around the time the chapter with the second user's plan to transfer ofa to shigaraki came out. I remember feeling so anxious and sad seeing how devastated Deku was to lose the 'gift' that All Might had passed to him :'((

It made me start thinking about what it would be like to not only go from having all this insane power at your fingertips back to nothing, but also how it would feel to lose the vestiges, which had been his advisers, yapping in his ear and keeping him company for months. How it would feel to go from constantly having people looking over your shoulder back to silence.

Then I thought about what that would mean for his and Bakugou's relationship, which has developed so much over the series. How Bakugou would feel about Deku no longer having ofa, how the two of them would wrestle with old feelings now that Deku would be quirkless again. Bakugou having to face the kid he bullied and Deku going back to a state where the world saw him as "useless" with dreams too big for somebody without a quirk.

I feel like sometimes it's not really taken into account how Deku's past affects him in the present, and that goes for in the actual series as well. Considering he's the main character, it's funny that we never really get too much of a peak inside his mind lol, especially not recently, which is most likely intentional, but I digress.

What I really wanted to do for this comic was circle back to Deku's question to All Might at the start of the series, "can I become a hero without a quirk" because while yes, deku can be a hero, he had to get a quirk to do so. So what happens now that he no longer has it? After all of Bakugou and Deku's development, would Bakugou's opinion on deku pursuing his dreams while quirkless change?

I really didn't want that answer to be no. I didn't want to believe that Deku would have to give up and "be realistic" again, it just didn't feel right for that to be the answer after 400 chapters.

So I wanted to make something that would encapsulate those thoughts! And I felt like the best way to fully get that out was through a scene in the aftermath of the battle, the two of them in the hospital with nothing to do but talk about their feelings.

It was important to me that the doubts they both felt about the future were stomped out, and for there to be reassurance that things between them wouldn't snap back to how it was before UA. That Deku could still reach his dreams even if they did become harder to obtain.

I also felt like narratively it would be a good parallel if Bakugou were to lose something tied to his power too, and with his arm being so bad off in canon, I thought it made sense that there was a chance he could lose it forever.

So it's like they're both coming out of the final battle worse off with huge losses, but no matter what, they're going to fight to achieve their dreams, and they're going to do it side by side :')

At its core, it’s very self indulgent lmao, I didn’t think that we’d get something that sappy and gross in canon (😳) so I wanted to make something for myself :')

Planning

So then I made a first draft!

When I’m making bigger comics, thumbnails are super helpful! They help me see the full picture of what it could look like, and let me change things without putting in too much commitment. So most of the drawings are loose, but occasionally I’ll put in a little extra detail into things that I want to make sure are included in the final work.

There’s three main things I consider when thumbnailing for comics; expression, composition, and dialogue. Each of these things have a huge influence on each other, so keeping them all in mind when roughing out your drawings is important!

How it usually works is I play out the scene in my head like a movie and roughly come up with dialogue, then I draw characters and expressions based on that dialogue and the visions I had. Simultaneously I plan out approximately where those drawings will go/how much space they'll take up and finally, I add in the dialogue and move things around as needed so everything fits nice together.

Having the dialogue there in the draft lets me know around how big the speech bubbles are gonna be which is a massive help when figuring out paneling. It lets me plan around the bubbles and make sure nothing is too squished!

General tips:

Something I learnt from storyboarding is that establishing a setting for your scene at the start is really important! Most of my comics will start with a long shot or include one early on for this reason. It’s good for making sure readers aren’t confused on where everything is taking place!

Having a variety of shots is good for keeping your story engaging! This comic has a lot of closeups, but I tried to add variety where I could and used a lot of different angles to keep things entertaining even if there isn't that much going on

Final thoughts on this draft:

At this stage, the ending was really different from the final version I ended up with. It was a lot more focused on Bakugou's losses too and the vibe was kinda "well we're both nerfed now but that's chill we can still be heroes." I axed most of that cause I thought it was dumb and wasn’t really the conclusion I wanted lol

After the rough draft, I started sketching everything out and adding in panels based on the composition from the og thumbnails. I also changed the dialogue as I went, focusing on making it sound more natural and easy to read.

This is where the nuances in movement and expression became a bit more refined and speech bubbles where better planned out.

At this stage, establishing clarity and imagining how readers are going to move their eye along the page is really important. Comics are generally read left to right, but you can’t just assume people are going to automatically read it in the order you want, which is why panels and speech bubble locations are so important.

Tips:

A general rule is that along with going from left to right, speech bubbles should be in descending order. This can be broken a bit, but it’s important to remember that the rule is there in the first place for clarity's sake. So if you do plan on breaking it, make sure it's not at the sacrifice of legibility. The human eye is lazy and will jump to whatever seems most logical, so planning things out in a confusing manner is going to make your comic hard to read!

This is another thing I picked up from storyboarding, but keeping in mind the 180° rule is good for clarity as well! In the simplest of terms, if you have two characters in a scene, it’s good to keep character A on one side and character B on the other, and not switch those sides willy-nilly, otherwise it can get confusing. This isn't as important in comics as it is in film/television, but I still like keeping it in mind.

Final thoughts:

I hated the original ending but I couldn't exactly figure out how I wanted it to go, and I was too busy at that point to dedicate the time I needed towards it, so it stayed as these four panels for while :’)

During the period I stopped working on it, Deku lost his arms which had me panicking lmao, so much of the comic was devoted to his emotions and body language, specifically in his hands. I just went "am I gonna have to redo everything? Do I give him prosthetics?" and I was fully ready to rework the entire thing but Eri came in clutch for Deku (and me) <3

After Deku started getting hurt, I didn't really like the idea of him being discharged and sitting with a still injured Katsuki, and wanted it to be clear that they were both still in the hospital, so I had to axe poor Deku's "hospital gown" shirt for actual hospital garb </3

At some point during april-ish, I finally added in a new beginning and end, which took the comic from four pages to seven. I felt like the new parts added a lot more levity and humour which were needed, and I think it helped make Izuku and Katsuki feel closer than before.

For these pages, I skipped the thumbnail stage and jumped straight into full page stuff, which felt easier because they were kind of just add-ons.

Something I specifically liked were the first two panels in the last page. Fun fact, but a few days after I sketched those out, horikoshi released that art of to two of them smiling together and I went !! That's the vibe I wanted !! Me and Horikoshi are on the same wavelength! That was a good day lmao.

At this point, though, while new parts added a lot more to the story and brought it closer to the vibe I wanted, they also messed with the tone and overall pacing and it ended up feeling really off. Deku was now doing this weird 180 from being super sad and upset to then immediately joking around and goofing off with no acknowledgement of anything Katsuki was saying, which had been fine enough when it was just 4 panels, but very off-putting once I made the comic longer

...So I decided to add even more panels :')

I went back to my original ideas, and part of what I wanted to get across originally was the doubts about Izuku's future from here on out, and the worry that things would go back to how they were before he got ofa. I realized those initial things which had fueled the comic were no longer really part of it, and I wanted to change that.

When I thought up the idea of visuals surrounding their middle school selves, I felt so smart LMAO. I think it ended up being the thing that brought the entire comic together.

Izuku reverting back to that anxious, unconfident state, spiralling into himself, and mumbling out all his insecurities, including his fears about losing Katsuki's friendship (and yet still somehow more worried about Katsuki's feelings than his own). And in turn, Katsuki remembering and seeing Izuku as that kid again, and his own fears of becoming a bully once more.

It better explored what I wanted to originally get across and delved more into their feelings, so that the jokes and levity at the end felt like they were earned, rather than being a rapid shift in tone.

(The only other thing that changed was the some of the panels in the first page. I changed up the speech bubbles and got rid of a panel so it would be less cramped and easier to read.)

At this point, I was still having trouble figuring out how to tie everything in and segway pages 6-7 into the ending organically, so it sat like this for around a month.

Then chapter 423 released and the battle was over and I realized how little time I actually had to get the comic out. I knew that the next chapter could possibly make my entire comic obsolete, so I hauled ass :D

These were the final plans before I cleaned everything up! I changed around some of the panels to make the story flow better, I figured out how to tie everything in, and I finalized the dialogue!

At this point all the panelling was redone because I wanted more space in between them. Before, it felt really cramped and I think adding in more breathing room made it feel slightly less overwhelming for readers.

The biggest changes from the previous draft:

First, obviously, I finished the middle school stuff and figured out how to get from one part to the next. This was the hardest part of the planning, but I ended up deciding that Deku would spiral, Bakugou would kind of bring him out of that, they'd hug and then Bakugou would reassure him. I also included motifs relating to their childhood to be reminiscent of The Apology, and Katsuki's thoughts going back to them sharing the special All Might cards, them at the lake, etc. As if this was another healing moment for each part of them; their current selves, their MS selves, and their childhood selves too

I then changed some of the panels in the first page. I switched the direction of the diagonal line in the first few panels because I thought it made it more clear which way to start reading and made the comic flow better.

In the fourth page, I added a panel after Deku starts crying, because I felt like it worked better with the dialogue, and brought in more of Katsuki's POV into the story

The sixth page doesn't really look different, but there was a lot of resizing going on panel-wise. The bottom panel doesn't take up as much space and the panels up top are a little bigger

The final big change was the eighth page. I added in an extra panel and changed up a lot of expressions/dialogue so there was more of a natural transition between the heartfelt moments and the two goofing off

I then made some final changes and drawover notes before I started a week of cleanup and colouring!

Cleanup/Colouring Stage

Cleaning up my sketches usually just means duplicating the layer, putting the original layer at 5% opacity and.. cleaning it until it looks nice lol. It's the easiest way for me to work because I hate doing lineart.

This is what my sketch vs final usually looks like. The biggest change was adding in bandages into all the drawings lol.

For speech bubbles, I drew them all by hand, created a flat colour layer underneath in white, duplicated that and filled it in with black and shifted it with the transformation tool to make a drop shadow effect.

It took me two days to colour the whole thing :')

Usually when I colour, I work in a pretty painterly way, but I thought flats/cell shading would be a lot faster for this. I was right but it still took Very Long.

The smartest thing I did was put colour swatches of each colour I was using on a separate layer above everything else so I could easily use the eyedropper and get the right colour without having to reference them from another page. It was a big time saver!

I colour all on a single layer so I don't have progress photos to show, but for each drawing, I roughly added in all the colours in the approximate locations they'd be, and once I did that for every single panel, I went back and cleaned them up one by one.

And that's that! After colouring was done, I added my signature, posted it, and took the nap of the century.

Final, Final Thoughts

I worked... Very Hard to get the comic out before leaks night and even if it was just a few hours, I'm so glad I was able to do it cause when I saw the actual chapter I lost my mindddd

I feel like as the comic progressed, Katsuki's feelings took a backseat and if I was to redo it, I'd probably put a bit more emphasis on that than I did in the final version. I feel like his ~inner turmoil~ didn't fully come through the way I wanted it to. I didn't want it to be an immediate acceptance — I wanted the fact that he was struggling with his past to be evident too — but with the focus being so heavily on Izuku, Katsuki's inner thoughts get a bit lost which is too bad </3 Good thing is Horikoshi had the exact opposite idea as me, so it all worked out :D

I'm really proud of how the comic turned out, and I'm so happy to have gotten such a positive response to it! Thank you for reading if you got this far and thank you for reading my silly self-indulgent hospital comic :)

[vechter]

👀 please elaborate on ur Cass and Damian thoughts, I’m also always thinking about what their dynamic could’ve been

omg i have so many!!!

okay, so initially, in batgirl 2009 #5 (iffy about character portrayals in this comic but that's a whole other thing), we see damian kind of anticipatory and even excited to meet cass:

it's super interesting to me because at that point, damian is still grappling with being a product of the league, still very much figuring out his role in this group of people his father chose.

and cass is one of them. cass, who's respected and considered formidable even by the loa. cass, who has also killed! i think in damian's eyes, they've had similar upbringings and he probably expects a certain degree of kinship with her.

because yes, dick, steph and alfred are coming to accept him, have purposely and actively showed that they care for him but they don't understand him! they don't know what growing up in that kind of isolation, with that demand for perfection is like.

damian's primary arc being dick's robin is about acceptance, from others but also, from himself! some heartbreaking panels below from red robin 2009 #14:

for damian, who is still actively fighting against his own instincts, who wasn't someone his father- a near mythical figure- chose, cass is someone who can, maybe, not only understand him but is also incontrovertible proof that people can change, that their childhoods don't define them. so, he already has somewhat high expectations for when they eventually meet, as we see in their first real interaction in gates of gotham 2011 #2:

gates of gotham is actually a great comic but unfortunately cannot consider the editorial nuance of cass being pushed aside by dc and removed from gotham entirely. but if you consider the implications, tim and steph definitely talk about her- probably dick and alfred, too. at this point, all of them respect and consider cass one of their own- she's accepted, she's even loved.

and that's probably something that damian is plagued and intrigued by. here's this girl who was brought up by someone the bats deem morally bankrupt, who changed her life around and went from being a would-be assassin to a hero (just like him!). she meets even his father's impossible standards, who has assigned her a whole city with batman inc. he lashes out at her when he thinks she hasn't accepted him (at this point, cass hasn't even done anything except come back to gotham lol so you can see how much damian struggles with acceptance, especially from someone he considers his peer!):

it's a deeply skewed view bc we know how much cass struggles with her own redemption but damian is still just a kid, lacking the emotional maturity to fully understand her.

i won't go into all the events of gates of gotham because it starts off with friction between them and they eventually end up working as a team and everything's sort of hunky-dory. but i think if flashpoint hadn't happened and we had actually gotten a deeply exploratory continuation of the nuances of the complicated bat-dynamics after bruce's return- we would definitely see more friction between cass and damian.

for cass, who sees everything- damian would be painful to witness. her own fears, her own guilt staring back at her. and i absolutely adore cass but she isn't going to be capable of tact or the kind of support that damian is passively seeking from everyone, but especially from her! cass is incredibly compassionate but her world-view is also so deeply jaded by her feelings about the life she took.

damian's initial robin tenure would be about developing his own moral code + coming to grips with what kind culpability he has in his own childhood- and cass would probably not see that bone-crippling regret and remorse and guilt she has, or even the one she often sees in bruce, and it would not sit right with her! sure, damian is a kid but she was a kid, too. and she can never get over what she did so for her to see damian coming to terms with his childhood would be like looking at a distorted reflection. i think it's also possible there would be something like- i don't want to say jealousy- but a complicated kind of resentment, not just from cass's end but also from damian's.

(also, a begrudging sort of respect from damian for cass's abilities expressed in somewhat snide comments)

this is not to say that they couldn't or wouldn't have a good dynamic! i think if they continued to spend time together, they would eventually come to an understanding (just like gates of gotham lol except a much more nuanced and complicated route to getting there) and while it would not be the kind of understanding either of them were expecting- it would be good! and there would be a very strong foundation of kindness in it.

[cupcakeslushie]

Hi there, I love your stuff, I hope you don't mind but I wanted to do an ask the artist

Where are you from?

What's your favorite color?

How long have you been creating art for?

What drives you to make art?

What is your favorite piece of artwork of yours?

What is your favorite fan artwork that was done for you?

What character of yours is your favorite?

If you could go to any fictional world which one would it be?

Do you consider what will please your audience or do you just do your own thing?

What made you want to start your AU?

1. American! Southern girl, specifically.

2. You’d think it would be green with how it’s been my hair color for three years, and I’ve made it my signature on here, but it’s actually yellow! Like the really saturated, sunny kind! 💛

3. Oh lord. Um, since like 1st or 2nd grade.

4. I never really thought about it. I think I’m just a visual person. So if I have an idea, I need to get it on paper to really see it. I’m the same with movies, especially adaptations. I could never picture characters by reading them in books very well, but seeing them in movies I’m like, “oh okay, now I see what they were going for!” It’s also just fun. It’s my own story-telling method.

5. Fav piece of anything I’ve ever made would be one of my stained glass pieces, like my lemon one, that took me three weeks, and was one of my first bigger pieces. Digitally it would probably be my most recent dtiys cause I just don’t like looking at my older stuff.

6. Noooo!! I have so many, especially recently, that I’ve been gifted! I can’t choose just one!!! Seriously! I love everything I’ve ever been sent! I will say, I’ve been gifted a few fan fictions by now, that have had me like, mind blown—just because writing is such a thing that I’ve always admired and never really been able to fully grasp. If you’ve sent me art, it’s more than likely been my phone or iPad wallpaper, and if you’ve sent me fanfiction, I’ve probably read it no less than five times, and will continue to go back to it.

7. I mean, it’s Donnie. It’s pretty clearly Donnie. I try and be fair and love all the boys equally, but I’m not gonna lie, you all know it. It’s obvious. Just know, I’ll never ignore the others story wise 😜. But Donnie gets the most of my attention and my evil creative plots 😈.

8. Any world ever? Probably Fullmetal Alchemist—if I could actually be an alchemist. I mean, like come on—how cool is that? And like, yeah, you’ve got Father and the homucuous running around, but for the most part, the world is pretty chill and has the coolest rules.

9. The main chunks of my stories are really just what I want to see, but sometimes I can hear a suggestion and think about changing the trajectory of things. I’m always open to ideas, especially if I’m stumped on how it should go. I even change my opinions on the things I’ve established myself, I’m very open to changing a story if a better idea comes to me. I don’t think I’ve ever been like, scared to tell something because I think someone wouldn’t like it. If they don’t, that’s fine, not everything is for everyone, and some things only click with a few people. If I really want to tell a story, then I’m going to tell it.

10. It’s really so funny, because at the time, I was working on this short, post-movie aftermath comic about Leo learning to find a healthy middle ground between being the silly guy and a serious leader. But I was having trouble with the next part, so I decided to watch Arcane and doodle. I posted that little concept sheet, and it feels like…within days my inbox was full with people wanting to know more, and the more I answered, the more I was like, wait I wanna actually explore this. Tbh pretty much all my AUs have started this way. With just an idea jotted down, and then turning into something I couldn’t stop developing.

[smytherines]

I often wonder if I would feel differently about The Staircase Scene if I had seen SAF when it first came out in 2016. The first time I saw it was probably around October or November of 2023, and like... the context is different now.

Whatever we want to say about the personal story arcs of these characters (and I know I'm in a tiny minority because, for me, killing Owen does not constitute a satisfying close to Curt's arc, that's totally fine), there is the very real issue of the sociopolitical context that this scene takes place within- both in their time (1961) and in ours.

One very cool thing about SAF is that, in order to understand these characters better, a lot of younger queer folks end up learning about the Lavender Scare, about Executive Order 10450- which officially prohibited gay people from working for the US government- for the first time. That's an incredible, precious thing to me. Yay queer history! It's important!

The show itself never addresses the fact that both the US and UK governments had very public, very brutal campaigns equating homosexuality with communism with being a traitor to your country. But if you want to understand these characters, and especially write fanfiction, you're really incentivized to teach yourself some fundamentally important aspects of queer history.

In the 54 Below concert, before singing Not So Bad, Brian Rosenthal talks about how when they were developing the show they thought N@zis were more or less a thing of the past, that they're fully aware of how differently that song might be taken now after an escalation into a more open embrace of fascism in the US. And they're absolutely right about that.

But I think that's also perhaps an issue with the staircase scene, or at least it is for me. Obviously homophobia and transphobia were not "fixed" in 2016, they were still massive problems resulting in violence and discrimination and brutality. But institutionally, at least, you could look at the situation and point to some things that were gradually getting better.

In 2016 trans youth in my state were legally allowed to receive gender affirming care. In 2024, they are not. It's not that homophobia and transphobia went away and then came back, but there was a very real resurgence of the use of the media and of governmental power to inflict pain on queer & trans people and chase them out of public life- bathroom bans, gender affirming care bans, Don't Say Gay laws, trying to make drag illegal, equating queer and trans people with pedophilia. There has been a big cultural shift back towards the same kind of violent governmental moral panic that our beloved Curt & Owen would have lived under.

Whatever we want to say about these characters and this story (and there's tons of fascinating debate there), there is still the base of a gay man killing his ex-lover ostensibly to protect US foreign policy objectives. Killing the man he loves- or loved, at least- to protect the secret that he is gay. And that hits different for me now.

I watch that scene and it is heartbreaking on a personal level, but its also heartbreaking as a queer person who just wants to scream "your government will destroy you for being gay, you don't owe them shit!"

Owen tries to explain that the surveillance network is happening, that the future won't wait for Curt to catch up. Barb has been saying she's working on the same thing for the US government the entire show, but Curt just kept ignoring her. And I just want to say "Curt, honey, what do you think your government is going to do to you with that surveillance system? Do you think you're useful enough to keep around even though you have sex with men? Because I promise you they will not care."

It feels tragic to me because on some level it seems like Curt would actually be safer with another gay man having control of all the world's secrets than he will be if the government he has dedicated his life to gets their hands on that same technology.

And the thing is, having a tragic ending doesn't make the show bad. This show is great. This scene is spectacular. It makes you think, it makes you feel things, it does all the stuff that great art is supposed to do. Absolutely none of what I'm saying here is meant to denigrate the show as a musical or a story or even a queer story. I hope it doesn't come off as me saying "actually this show is bad," because I don't feel that way at all.

Clearly I live and breathe this show. That's why I spend all my time on here analyzing every scene, every frame, every facial expression. I love this show so much that I can't help but deconstruct it and look at all its component parts- including the sociopolitical context both now and in 1961. Because that context, despite never being explicitly mentioned, is important to our understanding of these characters.

I love these characters so much that it's actually pretty difficult for me to watch A2P7 anymore, because the staircase scene is so emotionally devastating to me that it's hard to try to swing back into that more comedic tone (even though Spy Dance is a certified bop).

I'm not even sure what my point is with all of this, other than to say that Spies Are Forever is a show that is great and fun and funny as written/performed, and becomes gradually more emotionally devastating when you rewatch it or when you understand the subtext of it. When you can engage with the themes of gender and sexuality, surveillance and technology, trauma and trust, and tease out even more satisfying theories around this show.

So yeah. It's a musical. It's about spies.

[lttleghost]

The Thematic Relevance of Jesse Pinkman as an Egg 🏳️‍⚧️

(I wrote this analysis awhile back and wanted to make a fresh post to update it!)

While not intentional, there is a lot in Breaking Bad that supports reading Jesse as an egg. This reading of Jesse has a lot of thematic and narrative relevance and also doesn't create any conflicts with the canon material. Jesse being someone who hasn’t realized he’s not actually a man yet could quite literally be canon.

This analysis is heavily based around parallels between Jesse’s character development and what Breaking Bad thematically associates with gender. It’s also heavily interconnected with the show's overarching theme of change, and also, at least for our two main characters of Walt and Jesse, the revealing of true self. There’s plenty of evidence that each of them already had the traits we see them with at the end of Breaking Bad. Jesse being this very kind and compassionate young adult and Walt being this egotistical monster.

But I would consider Walt's self-deception to be more shallow than Jesse’s self deception. While Walt did end up in a lifestyle that was opposed to who he truly was, he consciously knew what he wanted to some extent, whereas Jesse fully convinced himself that he was a different person than the one he truly is because he never really got the chance to actually figure out much about himself. 

There are a lot of examples of Jesse’s disconnected sense of self throughout the show, but the first one that comes to mind has to do with his superhero OCs-

EDIT: YO! if you find video essays more engaging than reading a bunch of text, this analysis now also comes in video form [link]

I think that Jane’s observation that all of them looked like Jesse was, in fact, correct. I wouldn’t consider him doing this as a conscious decision but I feel that he almost admits it. After initially denying that his OCs looked like him and after Jane affectionately teases him he ends up saying to her “like you never wanted a superpower.” And while you could interpret this as just a response to her teasing, I’m convinced that there’s an additional layer to it. Especially because when Jane leaves to check the door, there's a moment where Jesse looks at the sketchbook with his drawings and it seems like he’s considering something, and I’d bet you anything that what he’s thinking about is whether or not he had actually drawn himself and this is REALLY interesting since-

Jesse is a criminal right? And while superheroes themselves are technically criminals as well, as vigilante justice isn’t actually legal, they’re still typically known to be ‘crime fighters’, and Jesse describes his characters as being such. So with his OCs subconsciously being depictions of himself and them being superheroes (crime fighters) and his current life as a criminal, you get the image of someone who doesn’t know who he is or what he wants deep down. 

There’s no way that Jesse’s current delinquent lifestyle was his truly… preferred path. It’s much more likely it was the only thing he thought he could do successfully. It’s evidently been the one thing he’s made a decent living off of. He has no support from his parents, and doesn’t seem like he has had it since he was a highschooler. Jesse is shown to have no support outside of the drug trade. Most of his personal skills and interests are artistic or honestly domestic in a world that assigns more value to academics and he’s a highschool graduate who doesn’t have any job experience. 

I also believe Jesse is very aggressively ADHD coded, and the combination of having virtually no support, struggling with addiction, and having undiagnosed and improperly self medicated ADHD would make slogging through any “respectable” job that he has access to, or any job that his parents might encourage him to do, unbearable.

So the drug trade was his best bet, Jesse even views cooking meth as a form of art, something that he’s passionate about.

I can’t in good faith ignore that doing something that is... generally frowned upon, didn’t factor into what Jesse chose to do on some level, as society and the structures that it’s built on failed him and there’s an inherent sense of rebellion that often forms in a person when they’re failed like that. Granted, superheroes also tend to often contain some commentary on societies failings as well. Jesse just couldn’t actually be a real-life superhero. So with the few benefits it had in practice compared to any other job, Jesse played into the rest of the role of a criminal, and convinced himself that the aspects of it that conflicted with his personality... didn’t, probably without even noticing.

Even more to this disconnect; When Jane asks “and that’s a superpower?” in response to Jesse explaining Backwardo’s powers Jesse responds with “come on, I was a kid when I drew these, it was like four years ago.” And Jesse is 24 years old in that scene, meaning that he would’ve been 20 when he drew these characters, and when I first wrote this analysis I was wondering whether or not Jesse had gotten involved with the drug trade other than buying drugs by that time, but there wasn’t really anything I could confirm any theories with. 

But now I've got the Better Call Saul episode “Waterworks” where Jesse has his second cameo, where he is in fact, 20, and in that cameo Jesse accompanying Emilio, a person we know is his partner in cooking meth, to Saul’s office makes me certain he’s in it by that point. And I just have to wonder if Jesse’s superheroes were almost a… subconscious vent, a manifestation of how being a criminal in the specific way Jesse is, is not what he wants. Something that suggests that Jesse’s actual identity and his current view of his identity don’t line up.

Another thing to point out about the cameo that could be seen as additional evidence of Jesse’s discomfort with being more than just a customer of the drug trade is that he was hanging out outside of Saul’s office, and until Kim gave him one he didn't have a cigarette, so he wasn’t out there to smoke. And while there could be other explanations to why he was outside on his own, I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say, other than just his general skepticism of Saul, he was just not particularly jazzed to be where he was at that moment and not comfortable going inside.

So relating all of this to gender; that narrative of convincing yourself that you are the person that you’re supposed to be for your best chance of survival instead of being able to truly be yourself already works pretty strongly as an allegory for being trans. But to add onto that even more, thematically Breaking Bad associates “manhood” with the drug trade in one way or another, and paralleling how Jesse realizes he doesn’t fit into the drug trade like he thought he did with how he might not be a cis man like he thought he was makes for a really solid queer reading.

The whole show is pretty explicitly about toxic masculinity. Obviously in real life masculinity and manhood do not have to be toxic, and in Breaking Bad’s original intended story Jesse is a cis man who ends up not fitting into those toxic ideas of manhood. 

Things that the rest of the male cast don’t blink at or at least have more mild reactions to, just tear Jesse apart. He’s also targeted at least a couple of times for having emotional vulnerability that is considered to be “not manly”. It’s much easier to point out the differences between him and the male cast than it is to point out similarities between them and this just gets more pronounced the longer the show goes on. He doesn’t really have any positive ties to being a man and I don’t think we can say we ever see Jesse actually reclaim his own sense of manhood. And I think that lack of reclamation gives even more legitimacy to the reading that, along with leaving the drug trade and all of its toxic masculinity bullshit behind, maybe Jesse just leaves behind being a man altogether, and maybe it was something that wasn’t really ever a true part of him, just like his life as a criminal.

Even at the start of the series Jesse’s attempts at hyper-masculinity come off as really goofy and performative. In episode one  Krazy-8 mentions that Emilio thinks that Jesse might’ve ratted on him Jesse first has a much more genuine response of “that’s bullshit” which makes sense with his strong character trait of being loyal, but then he goes to say “I should kick his punk ass for even thinking that.” and it just sounds like fake bravado to me. There’s no way Jesse actually thinks he stands a chance against Emilio since Jesse has a body type that resembles a small bird and there's no way he has that little self awareness. He's just playing out a script that wasnt even well thought through, and while some of his other performances of masculinity don’t come across as that fake, there aren’t many that feel like they actually come from Jesse himself, they just feel like something that he just thinks he should do.

And while not every experience with men Jesse has is negative, there always seems to be some distance between him and the men he does have good relationships with. Jesse forms a parent-child type relationship with Mike that is healthier than any other he’s had up to that point other than probably his aunt, but there’s a part of Jesse that Mike never seems to fully get. When Jesse doesn’t want Lydia to be killed Mike says that 'this woman deserves to die as much as any man' and I think he misses that Jesse just still isn’t that keen on killing people even with everything he’s gotten involved with. Even if there are some acts of violence and even some people’s deaths he is fine with and thinks are justified, Jesse never fully adapts to “the job” the way Mike does, and Mike is just not quite able to understand that, or at least not why.

Jesse and his friends have a distance between them as well. Though they’re arguably not as entrenched in toxic masculinity as any of the other prominent men in the show are, and aren’t nearly as involved in the violence of dealing drugs despite being in the trade. Yet still Jesse’s interactions with them most of the time feel different and more withdrawn than their interactions with each other. Like Jesse really wants their presence and company and wants to fit in but there ends up being something that he can’t connect with alongside them, and this also gets more prominent as the show progresses. There’s parts where Jesse seems to be withholding how badly his “high rank” in the drug trade is affecting him when Pete and Badger seem to sort of idolize him for it and want in on it. I think Jesse sort of considers saying something to them about it, but he hesitates and doesn’t. He repeatedly doesn’t confide in them even though, while his friends do perform some facets of hyper-masculinity, they don’t really seem to target or reject vulnerability in the way most of the other men in Breaking Bad do. And Jesse’s distance from even the more harmless side of the male cast makes it feel like it’s not just the toxic masculinity that he’s disconnected from.

Jesse’s relationships with women even further separate him from the men of the show. His romantic relationships with Jane and Andrea read much more as relationships between equals, compared to Walt and Skyler or Hank and Marie. While Jesse does throw the “nice job wearing the pants in the family” insult at Walt in episode two of the first season, after Skyler almost caught him moving Emilio’s body, in Jesse’s own relationships he never actually tries to take control and doesn’t have any problem with Jane honestly being the person making more active choices for the both of them in their relationship, which Walt comments on by throwing that same “nice job wearing the pants” insult back at Jesse.

Another interesting thing found within Jesse’s relationship with Jane that ties them to specific gender roles happens after Jane doesn’t really introduce him to her father. Jesse asks about it and after a bit this Jane ends up saying “What am I supposed to say? Hey dad, meet the stoner guy who lives next door and by the way I’m sleeping with him?” and Jesse replies “Is that all you think you’re doing?”

It’s been pretty common for “the guy” to be considered as the one who sees a relationship as just being sex and “the girl” to see it as being romantic, and this is a very very dumb aspect of traditional western gender roles that this scene even has to subvert, but I think in the context of Breaking Bad’s dealings with gender roles the fact that Jesse is put in the role much more typically associated with women could be viewed as significant. And this significance can be extended to the show’s most prominent dynamic, dealing with the relationship between abusive men and women, Jesse is a victim. I’m not implying men can’t be victims of other men's abuse, but it does make Jesse easier to associate with women in the story, and while the narrative association comes from a negative place, the negativity is directed towards men. But the connection it forms between Jesse and women is a sense of camaraderie and even comfort, at least on Jesse’s side.

and with those connections with women I’d say the most accurate egg interpretation of Jesse is that she’s specifically transfeminine in some way.

I think in this analysis its important to specifically examine Jesse's journey with gender questioning as I think it follows the rest of the ups and downs in her learning more about herself in the resr of her character arc. My personal interpretation of Jesse is that she is a non medically transitioning nonbinary transfem person. The not medically transitioning bit is largely because I enjoy bringing attention to the existence of no-med no-op trans people and to push the point that not seeking medical transition doesnt make a person any less trans, though I do feel that since Jesse's relationship with gender is focused on the societal side of gender roles that don't really relate to physical form that it's a reasonable interpretation that she may not medically transition. I think she uses he/him and she/her pronouns, and is maybe a futch lesbian. I’m saying all of this because it'll be the lens through which I’ll be talking about Jesse’s journey with questioning his gender and how that progresses during the timeline of Breaking Bad. However I don’t claim this to be the only version of transfem Jesse that works with my analysis, or that it's necessarily better than any others that do work. I’ll also be mentioning concepts of “offscreen” additional scenes. That being said, if you’re someone who likes to stick 100% to the text given to us, the “offscreen” scenes aren’t exactly necessary for this interpretation to work as a part of the existing story as the general emotions behind them still stand.

I don’t picture Jesse as having any definable Gender (™) experiences when he was younger other than just a general sense of not belonging, though gender wouldn’t be the only thing playing into that. But as Jesse got older and struggled more, he started to purposefully play the part of what he saw as “a man” to survive in the only role that he thought he could. I see the thought “I wish I didn’t have to be a man” crossing his mind every so often though. I think he just deals with his place in the world for awhile, but after Walt enters the scene and Jesse experiences shit he really didn’t bargain for because of his old teacher, someone who is settling into a personification of toxic masculinity, Jesse’s frustration with being a man becomes more prominent and harder to ignore internally. 

In my opinion Jane is the person that helped him start to solidify what exactly those thoughts were indicating. Her approach to relationships would be considered not traditionally cishet, and so is the way she presents herself in general, so I think Jane has some sort of knowledge about the complexities of gender, if she isn't actually queer herself in some way.

And she’s one of the only people we see Jesse truly, truly open up to and so I think at some point later in their relationship Jesse might actually say something about wishing she wasn’t a man around Jane, and I can see Jane saying that Jesse doesn't have to be a man if she doesn't want to be.

But then Jane dies, and I think as a result of that and the lesson Jesse learned from rehab “I’m the bad guy” he goes into just total repression mode. Embodying this new belief Jesse very much dips into the hyper-masculine behavior of the drug trade, he is much more concerned with money beyond paying bills and having nice things, and he plans to do the one thing in the entire show that makes me truly angry at him because of this whole thing, attempting to sell drugs to the rehab group. I don’t think he would’ve ever thought of doing something like that before. He’s trying very hard to be something that’s even further from his actual nature than we’ve seen up until this point.

Part of Jesse’s grief over losing Jane, a person who he confided in probably more than anyone else at that point, was to just completely close up, even to himself. Forget all of those parts of himself that resisted the rougher aspects of the drug trade he was getting dragged into and definitely forget about wondering if he really is a man or not.

At least until meeting Andrea and Brock, which snaps him out of that “I’m the bad guy” mindset, but by that time I think just, too much starts to happen for Jesse to have much time to question her gender. I wouldn’t consider her to be as actively repressing any sort of “I wish I wasn’t a man” thoughts but the amount of turmoil and danger that she’s in, just really really doesn’t lend itself to that sort of gender introspection as much. 

I’ve got some additional thoughts on Jesse’s journey with gender that are more headcanons than actual analysis of the show so I didn’t include them in the text above. But I still really wanted to share because I like them and think that they really add to the analysis, so here they are;

I mentioned that I don’t think that Jesse had any particularly notable moments that might’ve suggested that she was trans when she was younger other than feeling out of place, but maybe he did have some interest in playing with “girls stuff” and her parents discouraged it because as we know they’re the shitty type of people who value their child being “normal” at the price of that child’s happiness, but I can also see her being one of those kids who just didn’t even grasp the differences between boys and girls stuff for a longer time than others, or I can even see Jesse’s last connection to the "male" side of gender being from when she was a little boy, before he was aware of the concept of what being a man was, and that it would be expected of her.

But later, in his adulthood, after the idea and pressures of "manhood" became very present in his life, one of the more certain instances of gender questioning I picture Jesse having is at some point while hanging out with Badger, Pete and Combo, Jesse screws around and puts on a dress. And he's like “haha I look like such a queer don’t I?” but is internally thinking something more along the lines of “ I will die before I tell anyone how this makes me feel” (that being that it makes him feel happy). 

And then, as we enter into the timeline of the show itself; when Jane first tells Jesse that he doesn’t have to be a man if he doesn’t want to, I don’t actually think that Jesse would be receptive of it at first. I think it’s more likely that he’d decide he suddenly doesn’t want to have this discussion anymore and change the subject. Jesse would still have the misconception that you need to medically transition or at least be required to fit some sort of ‘criteria’ to be trans, instead of just identifying as a different gender than your assigned sex, and I think that would play some role in his not wanting to talk about possibly being trans. And even more because, while he could opt out of telling anyone that he’s trans, Jesse’s in a world in general that isn’t trans-friendly, but the drug trade he’s in specifically is very lgbtq-phobic. Jesse himself is definitely gonna have some internalized transphobia, we’ve seen his homophobia, and I definitely read that as a result of his environment rather than actual hatred considering at Jesse’s true core he’s a pretty caring person. But there are definitely people in the drug trade who would be violently homophobic and transphobic, and Jesse would know that, and would probably perceive even realizing that he is trans to be a threat to his safety. But, later on, further into her relationship with Jane I think she’d open up, even if only to Jane.

And that’s what I like to focus on the most with this analysis, all of the happiness and freedom and healing that Jesse gets to feel detaching himself from manhood, something that honestly contributed so much to every part of his suffering. And god does this girl deserve some happiness.

Then when for the most part too much is going on for Jesse to consider whether or not he’s trans, I still sometimes think of a situation where Jesse might’ve suggested? Her gender questioning to Mike, and while I don’t think Mike’s personal reaction would be technically negative, I think he’d tell Jesse to ‘please not share that with anyone else kid’. Which would be discouraging to Jesse, and she’d quickly backtrack, some because of the reaction on its own but also because he really already knows that it’d be stupid to say anything to anyone else, but it’s not until Jesse’s really free from the drug trade that she can finally crack that egg. I really like to think about the comfort and relief Jesse would get to feel no longer having to try and be a man, cause she finally realizes that she isn’t one.

[morallysuperiorlips]

6 Tips That Are GUARANTEED to Help Make Your Villain More Unsettling!

There's cunty villians, there's over the top villains...but what about a good old villain that just makes your skin crawl? Here are some ways to help you achieve such a character in your own writing (with personal examples of my own :>)

1.) Juxtaposition is Your Friend: I like to say that a nuanced villain is a good villain, but it really works well on the "unsettling" factor when you're finding ways to pit their more amicable side against the side that makes them as deplorable as they might be. Nothing is more disquieting than a villain who gushes about something innocuous, then turns around and summons a wall of quantum dark matter to swallow up a children's nursery in the same breath.

EXAMPLE: The villain in my WIP, Chaos, is a #GirlDad who really does try to make attempts to be a decent father. But, not only is he the founder and head of the world's most prominent blood cult and genocidal terrorist organization, but he perpetually feeds his lackies who disobey him to his blood magic eldritch beast pet, and keeps the heads of his most hated enemies on spikes in his office for "tasteful decoration" and because "the look of terror in their eyes keeps him going through the day."

2.) Radicalize the Things They Love: Hear me out. Everyone, even our baddies, have things they enjoy or might positively be in love with (whether it's tangible or intangible). Another surefire way to ensure your villain ruffles your readers is to take that thing they love, and find a way to blow it up to the most extreme degree.

EXAMPLE: Using Chaos as an example to illustrate what I mean--I mentioned in the previous point that he is a #GirlDad and a relatively devoted one at that despite being a genocidal cult leader. However, he's taken this devotion to his daughter up about 800,000 notches by 1.) Attempting to kidnap her from her mother multiple times over the course of her childhood, 2.) Convincing his entire cult congregation to worship her as a religious "prodigal daughter" figure as he has, and 3.) Setting up the HQ of his cult in the country his daughter was born in (after realizing he can't kidnap her) so he could "be closer to her."

3.) Make a Show of Their Humanity: This all somehow ends up looping back into how nuanced your villain should be, but I think focusing on just how humane you can make a villain at certain points will pile on to their disturbing factor. And I don't just mean little acts of kindness here and there; I mean things that might make you pause and wonder if they're actually a villain. I'll never forget that part of Beastars where the lion yakuza boss was asking Haru how much she liked school and telling her how he held her in "high regard" knowing damn well he was going to kill and eat her within the hour. Things like THAT. Find ways where your villain can be in a position of "they're not so bad" before they turn around and make you realize "oh wait. Yes they are."

EXAMPLE: Chaos is a genocidal maniac with a steel-clad cruelty streak, but one of the key conflicts in my WIP is the relationship he soon develops with his daughter, the protagonist. My protag knows he's deplorable, and knows he's all-powerful and fully capable of committing these atrocious acts against the world she inhabits, yet the pedestal he puts her on leaves her deeply questioning and fighting herself about how she actually feels about him. He goes out of his way to protect her, love her, attempt to be her father (despite some clear obstacles), and just show her such a deep humanity that she struggles to comprehend how he can turn around and be a murderous blood cult leader.

4.) Be Sure Their Presence is Always Felt: Your villain might not always be "on stage" in your story. But, even so, to ensure maximum unsettling factor, you should attempt to find ways to make it seem like they might as well be. They're not physically occupying space on the page, they don't have any direct dialogue, but something is happening that makes it clear that their presence is still being felt. Do they have spies out and about? Are there any residual effects of their previous scheme? Do your characters keep replaying something they said over and over in their heads, and it constantly weighs them down through the story?

EXAMPLE: Before Chaos is even fully introduced as the primary threat of my WIP, his presence is known by all even if they aren't quite aware of it just yet. His cult is the rumored cause of a deadly drug epidemic that has the country of France, and other scattered places across the world, in a chokehold. Nobody really knows if this cult is actually real, and nobody has any leads on how to locate them, just that this drug is causing a lot of issues. Only when shit hits the fan does the protag group actually know what they're dealing with.

5.) Show Your Reader the Absolute Grit of the Fight: By this, I mean, try to find ways to showcase how deep both Team Hero and Team Villain have to go to get at each other. I believe an unsettling villain usually has some form of a methodical approach to their schemes, so with that in mind, show readers the absolute mind games and 4D chess your heroes have to play to even have a chance at coming face to face with your baddie, or even be noticed by them, and how your villain responds in return. Bonus points if your villain immediately catches their drift and pivots, thus wrecking whatever semblance of plans your heroes might have had.

EXAMPLE: It's not quite known until later in the story that Chaos is the big bad, but even before that point, there is a secret organization set in place to hunt him down and knock him out. My protag eventually comes into contact with this org, and discovers the tactical, 4D-chess-esque measures they've had to take to even scratch the surface of figuring out where Chaos is and what his actual motivations are.

6.) Take Your Time in Unveiling the Chokehold They Have on Your World: This might feel like an obvious one if you've read my acting examples, but it's pretty straightforward--don't lay down all your villain's cards from the get go. Give your protagonists time to really dissect and unearth just how powerful your villain might actually be. What might start as a small, maybe almost innocuous little case might slowly but surely evolve into a realization that your protags bit off way more than they could chew, and they're up shit's creek without a paddle. There's a sinking, disquieting "oh my god" moment that might come to your readers as they also realize, along with your protags, that they were only scratching the surface of what your villain was capable of, and now that they've found it, there's no going back.

EXAMPLE: The pure reach that Chaos' little cult actually has isn't felt until my protagonist meets him face to face. Only then does it really dawn on her that the man had so much more power than she, or her team, ever imagined.

As always, happy writing <3

[pluckyredhead]

Did I just read your Super Sons primer from 2020 at 3 am on a Monday morning because I'm having a real normal one? Maybe?! I'm wondering how you feel about how they and their relationship has developed since then. IMO it's... Pretty bleak. 😩

I HAVE A LOT OF FEELINGS ABOUT IT. (Also here's the primer for anyone who missed it.)

So I will say that 95% of everything Jon has been in since he got aged up has been hot garbage, but I do think the exception is when Damian is around. But let's take it from the top!

First of all, I don't necessarily think they should de-age him again. Generally speaking I think it's better storytelling to focus on fixing things moving forward, rather than undoing things moving back. Sure, if DC came up with some big cosmic event that reset Jon to 11, I certainly wouldn't complain, but I'd rather see them, uh...do literally anything with Teen Jon that doesn't suck.

But yeah, aging Jon up to begin with still makes me livid because:

I want my baby to have had a childhood.

It's fully character assassination for Lois and Clark. They would NEVER let their 11-year-old go to outer space with a supervillain. Lois would NEVER just abandon him out there, and Clark would NEVER respond with "Well, I'm sure he's fine, wanna have marathon sex?" I honestly have no idea what Bendis or his editor were thinking.

They have not done a single interesting with him since!!!

Putting this behind a cut because it got LONG. Also spoilers for Beast World in there.

I've said this before, but I have to assume that Bendis wanted to age Jon up because he wanted to write a Legion book. But he also in his wisdom decided to bring Kon back into continuity at exactly the same time, which means we have two nearly identical Superboys that DC didn't and still doesn't know what to do with. Kon clearly couldn't have joined the LOSH because he already had a team, but you know what Super teen was available, and not 11, and who has a history with the Legion that goes back almost as long as Clark's? KARA. But I will save that rant for another day.

And honestly, Kara dodged a bullet, because that Legion book was unreadable. Bendis at his most Bendis-y wall of text interrupt-y conversations and no plot. If I give Tom Taylor any credit it's that the second he got his hands on Jon, he torpedoed Jon/Imra as a ship. GOOD.

And when the LOSH book finally went out with a whimper (that JLA/LOSH miniseries! what was that!!!), we entered the Taylor Era. Taylor's quirks are less stylistic and more narrative than Bendis's. You can spot Bendisian dialogue at twenty paces, but a Taylor comic tips its hand when it sets up a really interesting premise or a really high stakes threat and then immediately undercuts it with a little wet fart noise of nothing. To wit:

Jon's starting college! This will be an interesting challenge for him to readjust to normal life after six years in a torture-volcano and an indeterminate amount of time in the future, and also considering he never graduated from sixth grade. I wonder what will - oh no he dropped out after three pages. (He has done NOTHING in his civilian identity since, btw. I guess he's too busy hovering just behind Dick at all times to work on his GED or whatever.)

Jon is going to confront Ultraman! Finally the comics will have to engage with all the trauma he must have - oh no Ultraman's dead.

Jon is trapped in the Injustice Universe! This is a really dangerous universe that might make him question everything he knows about - oh he just lectured everyone and flounced off home.

Beast World is a perfect example. Taylor seems to think that having a hero effortlessly solve a problem makes them look badass, but it's actually the effort that makes them look badass. So like, we spent five months keeping the Kryptonians and other A-class heroes away from the spores because the spores are attracted to power and if a Super got spore'd everyone would be in big trouble...but then in the last issue, they just have Jon fly up to everyone with a spore in them, wait for the spore to jump at him, and catch it? That doesn't make the Titans look smart or Jon look tough. It makes all of them look like idiots because it it was that easy, why didn't they do that in the first place?

On top of that, Taylor doesn't ever really earn relationships. Jon and Jay is the obvious one. Jay has no personality. There's no chemistry between the two characters. Jon might as well be dating a cardboard cutout labeled "Proof of Queerness." (Or "Bernard." Ahem.) But we're supposed to be like, yes, give Tom Taylor a GLAAD award for using queer characters as props, when he's going to turn around and kiss Chuck Dixon's ass on social for being homophobic about Jon? UGH.

Honestly worse for me though is the Jon and Dick relationship. Because Taylor is writing both characters, we're supposed to believe that there's this close mentor-mentee bond there? I don't think they EVER interacted before the Taylor era. (And don't even look at me with that retconned-in scene of Dick finding lost baby Jon. You're telling me that Superman, with his X-ray and telescopic vision, needs to call Bruce and Dick for help finding his own son? Fuck off.)

Anyway it all combines to make basically every Jon appearance for the past three years profoundly unsatisfying. Even the stuff that isn't by Taylor never goes anywhere. Remember when he was jealous of the Super Twins for two panels? And then everyone forgot about it forever? SIGH.

HOWEVER.

However.

If there is one thing that Bendis and Taylor and every other writer got right, it's that Jon is crazy bonkers in love with Damian always and forever. Jon has been written like shit since 2019, but he has also not wavered in his devotion for even one single solitary second.

THE EVIDENCE:

This is the first thing Jon does when he gets back to Earth:

He then tells Damian he's contemplating not joining the Legion because he'll have to leave Damian behind. Damian tells him to go and then come get him if it's cool.

Turns out the Legion is cool. Jon comes and gets Damian. The Legion isn't happy about it and Jon threatens to leave if Damian can't stay, while gazing adoringly at Damian's unconscious body cradled in his arms:

Eventually LOSH is canceled and Jon comes home and starts following Damian around by listening for his heartbeat. LIKE PALS DO!

Then Damian gives him a pep talk!

Then there's this ABSOLUTE CUDDLE:

The way Damian nuzzles into Jon's shoulder! Can you even stand it!

And then there's this:

The climax of Son of Kal-El, btw, is one of the several times Jon is saved by Damian and confides in Damian and turns to Damian for comfort or advice...and Jay is just sort of standing there off to the side. I am fully aware I have ship goggles on but the degree of emotional investment Jon has in these relationships is not the same.

Then they had a special issue teamup:

Then we got Dark Crisis, and I actually love this interaction between them, because they are very different people with very different upbringings and this feels extremely in character to me for how they would both handle the loss of their fathers:

But even when they disagree, they still instantly support each other. Jon comes back with information? Damian makes a plan:

Also, we got the 2022 Pride issue where Jon, Jay, and Damian go to Pride together. I know that story is...contentious...but leave me here with Damian sulking while Jon and Jay kiss, okay?

Then we get Adventures of Superman, which is objectively awful, but Jon does spend his whole time in the Injustice universe thinking about Damian like the seagulls in Finding Nemo saying "Mine? Mine? Mine?"

This whole arc is truly hilarious. Jon finds out that Damian accidentally killed Dick and his response is to a) go find Batman and yell at him for not supporting Damian enough for accidentally killing Dick, and then b) go find Damian to be like "Wow, that must have been really hard for you (accidentally killing Dick)." There's being ride or die for your BFF, and then there's whatever the fuck Jon has going on.

(Meanwhile there's an incredibly uncomfortable scene with him and Injustice Jay where Jay "tests" him by trying to get Jon to cheat on regular Jay. So. That happens.)

And then just this past month we got Nightwing #110, where we learn that Jon is still listening to Damian's heart:

He completely freaks out watching Damian in danger, and immediately intervenes when it looks like Damian is about to kill someone because he knows what matters the most to Damian. Also, this happens:

YOU WIN THIS ONE, TAYLOR.

AND THEN THEY BICKER I LOVE IT WHEN THEY BICKER:

AND THEN DAMIAN LETS HIMSELF BE VULNERABLE BY ASKING JON IF HE HURT ANYONE WHILE HE WAS A KITTY, AND JON GIVES YET ANOTHER SPEECH ABOUT HOW DAMIAN HAS NEVER DONE ANYTHING WRONG EVER, IN HIS LIFE, AND DAMIAN STAGGERS OFF, LEANING ON JON.

This isn't even getting into the Trinity backup stories in Wonder Woman, which, like...Tom King is not valid but Jon and Damian are such an old married couple in them? It's truly incredible?

It took me like 45 minutes to parse Jon's line here as the general 'you" and not specifically Jon saying Damian wasn't straight. But like..."That's for straight people, which has nothing to do with us" is a hell of a thing to say, Jonathan.

I ALSO haven't even talked about DCeased because it's a different universe, but! Jon sitting with Damian while he dies??? MY HEART.

IN CONCLUSION:

Yes, they should never have aged up Jon.

Yes, most of his appearances since have been terrible and bland.

But OH BOY, do he and Damian remain in love.

[monstersinthecosmos]

Hi, completely agree with what you said here but it makes me very sad to think about it. As someone who imprinted on Armand at 12, Marius/Armand was my first ship in VC but I find it hard to ship them post Venice era, even though Blood Communion seems to suggest some positive developments in their relationship (Marius standing behind Armand during his argument with Benedict supporting Armand being his own person iirc?). Idk I want them to work their shit out but it’s still hard to imagine them putting their differences aside sans an apocalyptic scenario like in QotD.

And sometimes idk if Marius loves Armand enough to work on it. I know that the corner of tumblr that loves Marius (And I certainly understand the appeal of a complicated and polarizing character like him. Kudos to Anne for creating Marius!) likes to push the idea that the turning of Benji and Sybelle was mostly out of love (and to a varying extent depending on the person’s pov, due to Marius’ mental health issues) but how much was that love and how much was it ‘my pet needs to have pets so that he stays alive for ME’. Not saying these 2 motivations are mutually exclusive but I’m genuinely curious about your views.

I’m rambling but guess what I’m trying to say is, how much do you think Marius’ love for Armand is unselfish, whether in Venice, at the end of TVA or after Blood Communion?

Asdghjakl yeah I have really similar feelings about them as a ship! Like the Venice era is my favorite time period in the VC but modern/present-day Marius/Armand doesn’t really hit the same way for me because it’s just such a motherfuckin mess lol.

What I do want to say, though, is that we’re kind of dancing around a topic here that involves the inhumanity and inherent monstrosity of Marius, and while I tend to think “THEY’RE VAMPIRES” is a lazy approach to analysis, there’s a deeper version of it that’s relevant here.

What I mean is that Marius can love Armand truthfully, sincerely, unselfishly and STILL cause harm, and still love him imperfectly, and still cause problems. I think when we really wanna start dissecting Marius/Armand as a ship, and the Venice era as a whole, and whatever trauma it left on Armand vs Marius’s motivations/intentions/character morals, it’s important to remember that Marius was not human. 

I think a lot about like, when we say that Armand is a “pet”, or that Denis, Daniel, Benji, and Sybelle are Armand’s pets, there’s sort of a connotation or shorthand to TLDR that it’s their cute little human. But I think about like, for example!, my fucking cats! Like, when I think about ACTUAL pets IRL, um, I would fuckin die for my cats? They’re my lil babies? I love them so fully and with my entire fucking soul but they’re dumb little animals that live in my house and I take care of them and I don’t think they have a single thought in their fucking skulls. 

So when you think about like, a 1500 year old immortal night creature adopting a little human, he can love Armand with his ENTIRE being, and I believe he really really did, and it’s still “aww the cute lil human that I feed”. And Marius is unique amongst the vampires for how hard he tries to stay connected to the human world, and it’s still never enough, he’s still never quite there, so I have always believed he had the right intentions even if he fumbled it or did things that could cause harm. It’s not like, he’s a ~MONSTER~ in a scary way, but literally, he’s so removed from humanity that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. 

(Don’t let me get into a side essay here but it reminds me so much of like, imperfect boomer parenting, like looking at different generations’ parenting styles and realizing how much harm they caused, but most people aren’t intending to harm their children and just don’t know any better. Every generation will likely experience a form of this as we learn and grow and try to be better, but I find this really interesting for Marius specifically because of the age of the author!)

He was fifteen hundred years old when he met Armand. I think in a lot of ways he acted with good intentions that wound up causing a lot of harm. But it does a disservice to the story and to him as a character to only look at the outcome, without considering the universe he’s operating in. 

And idk like, where is the line between selfish and selfless love? Like, Marius is clearly a fucking mess at the beginning of TVA and didn’t take the news of Armand’s suicide very well. Is it selfish to do something drastic because he’s worried that Armand is still suicidal? Where does one end and the other begin? Especially with immortals like, is your own death a gift? Is it an act of kindness to save someone’s life instead of allowing them to check out? Idk idk! Grief is fucking messy, it can be both, but I don’t think it’s fair to characterize it as purely for himself. He even immediately fucks off to Norway in shame afterwards. I think I prefer to think he just wanted Armand to be happy and safe. By the end of the book they're still struggling to communicate with each other about religion, and in some ways I think Marius doesn't think Armand truly wanted to die, vs seeing a religious fit for what it is. So I'm not sure he sees Armand's suicide attempt as sincere, either, and maybe doesn't feel the need to respect his wish for death.  

I think a lot about the conversation Marius has with Armand after he turns Benji & Sybelle and realizes how bad he fucked up. 

"You loved them selflessly," he whispered. "For all their strange faults, and wild evil, they were not compromised for you. You loved them perhaps more respectfully than I... than I ever loved you." He seemed so amazed. I could only nod. I wasn't so sure he was right. My need for them had never been tested, but I didn't want to tell him so.

Even at 500 years old, Marius still doesn’t entirely understand Armand as a complete person. He doesn’t completely understand Armand’s needs, or the person he wants to be, or what his human companions were to him. I think it even starts when Armand is still alive, how Marius treats him like a silly little pet, like, Armand’s piety is a cute little quirk that Marius humors without ever truly respecting. It doesn’t occur to him that Benji & Sybelle aren’t just pets. And I think Marius being stuck in his trauma means he’s just perpetually trying to believe in himself and control everything around him, while Armand stuck in trauma means he’s constantly trying on different roles and figuring out who he is. 

(But FUCK ME, christ, “I wasn't so sure he was right. My need for them had never been tested, but I didn't want to tell him so.” this really fucks me up so bad, we have to keep talking about this another time because like, these two can NOT communicate with each other! They are useless with the barrier between them maybe they need to drink from each other more often and iron this out.)

Someone can do their best, and mean well, and still cause harm. Humans do this, too. I’m sure we’ve all been there. And Marius is a great example of vampires being stuck in the trauma of their turning—it doesn’t matter how wise he tries to be, he always comes back to the same trauma, over and over. Even the way he treats Armand in Venice is a direct result of Marius trying to fix his own trauma. And like, would therapy even work on a vampire, or are their brains stuck forever where they were? How much of their “changing” is just learning behavior, and learning to mask?

Because I think Marius 100% could do that for Armand. He loves Armand. Armand is his child. He was the first fledgling Marius ever made of his own will, after 1500 years! But I think canon left us off in a place where neither of them are quite there yet. Marius is in decent shape at the end of the series, I think—it feels like he’s made some huge strides in accepting himself and his nature, so I think there’s some potential! Armand also has to learn how to use his fuckin words a little bit better, which he’s never been good at, but I think the way he goes off on Lestat after keeping that inside for 200 years is a really great sign! 

I go back and forth about “does therapy even work on vampires” all the time, like, do they have neuroplasticity, are they capable of change, have we uncovered something in the PL Trilogy that could be a key to them functioning better and learning to change. I don’t really have an answer because canon doesn’t, it’s just a fun thing to think about, but it’s the best way that I can reconcile Marius’s intentions vs his actions, and how he somehow continues to make the same mistakes and never learns! 

Basically, I think it’s not helpful to ask if Marius loves him enough. He does! But loving someone doesn’t mean we magically know how to behave, and the qualities in Marius that cause him to behave selfishly are so deeply tied to his trauma, his control issues, his use of ego as a defense mechanism. And even in real life we can have boundaries and hold people accountable when they hurt us, even if it’s because of mental illness. We can have empathy and still have boundaries, and we can be hurt and still know when something wasn't personal. That feels kinda IRL and serious to frame vampire meta but like, Marius can love people and still fuck up, because he can’t help it, and I don’t think it’s a fair reading of the text to insist he’s a diabolical abuser because it just doesn’t really match his characterization otherwise. 

I hope he gets better! 

[redhoodinternaldialectical]

Having spent the last few weeks un-fridging Catherine Todd, let me tell you, I NEVER want to see another motherfucker complaining about how Jason was """fridged"""

Like, sorry folks but he just fucking wasn't!!! Even if he had been a female character, that would not have been a fridging. The narrative at all times was deeply concerned with his internal experience of the world, his motives and emotions, and always considered him a human being whose agency and autonomy needed to be considered and highlighted. At least half of Death in the Family is about Jason's wants and needs and his attempts to fulfill them. Jason constantly makes decisions that alter the course of the story.

"Oh but his death was used for the development of the other character and the tone of the narrative as a whole" yeah, no fucking shit, of course it was, that is the entire fucking point of killing a character off! When a character dies, they stop developing through their own story arc, so they can only effect the arcs of other characters. The fact that this is done disproportionately to women is only one part of what the concept of fridging is about and reducing it down to only that ignores the real meat of why fridging matters.

Fridging is about the way that female characters are killed off in ways that disregard their agency, write off any choices, emotions, or motivations they might have had as not worth examining, and pointing out that the reason female characters are so often killed this way is because women are thought of as being less capable of agency and less fully people than men.

A good way to tell if a character has been fridged is to ask yourself "Hmm, if this woman was replaced with a literal bitch, an actual four legged puppy dog, would the narrative meaningfully change?"

Catherine Todd was fridged for Jason. She has no opinions, no meaningful personality traits, no agency in her own story or basically anyone else's for that matter. She is sad. She is addicted. She is dead. That is the whole of her character. Her entire purpose is to be a bullet point of angst in Jason's backstory. If you replaced her with a dead dog, none of Jason's story would be meaningfully changed.

"Oh but she was a parent, all the Robins have dead par-" They why was it Willis Todd that got resurrected in order to turn Jason into the 'Damned Prince of Gotham' and not her? It's because misogyny. If you come to any other conclusion why Scott "Known to Write Misogynistically" Lobdell didn't make Catherine Todd the one to come back, you are fucking kidding yourself. She is a female character and was therefore not given the same consideration as the male characters, it is as simple as that.

We all have every right to rail against the way Jason was killed off, the way the narrative blames him for his own death, the ways that he has been badly mishandled. He's even a character that's suffered due to prejudice! The classism in the way he's handled is really strong! I also think there's a ton of value in an analytical comparison between the ways that Jason's mental health is treated and the origins of mental health stigma that are rooted in misogyny. The Jason Todd Hysteria Essay is a frequent reread for me.

However.

None of this makes him "female coded" and any serious comparison of how female characters are treated and how he is treated must inevitably run into the truth that he does benefit from all the privileges that a male character gets for being male. He is treated in classist and ableist ways, and both classism and ableism intersect with misogyny, but the fact of the matter is that he does not have direct misogyny wielded against him and the female characters around him suffer from misogyny to his benefit.

You can call his death obnoxious, a callow cash grab, poorly thought out, bad for his character, of overall detriment to society, et.c. and be perfectly justified in doing so

But if you claim that he was fridged you are factually incorrect and for the crime of ripping the label off of a feminist theory (and failing to learn what it means beyond the most reductive single sentence 'definition' possible) for the benefit of a male character I sentence you to having all of your socks dipped in musty ass bog water.

[o-hora-o]

What are your thoughts on Tesla and Joey's "mother-son" relationship? Do you think Tesla truly sees and treats Joey as her own son? Or would it be hella awkward because Joey is one of Joyce’s clones? Would Tesla be a strict, overprotective, considerate or pampering ? Joey seems to be a polite and understanding boy, so ig his parents are doing a good job.

In APHO, we can see that both Joey and Tesla care for each other a lot. Also when you choose the “Drunk” option, idk, it’s just kinda depressing… Sound like Tesla control her drinking problems and be happier for Joey.

Joachim and Eins, too, what do you think their relationship with Joey will be like? Maybe the two sometimes just quietly stare at Joey because he reminds them of Joyce?

Now that Joachim has gone to HSR, do you think Tesla will ever “hate” Joachim for leaving her and Joey? I mean she was already really busy before, so busy that Joey could rarely see her, but at least Joachim was there to look after him. Now that he's gone, Tesla will have to raise Joey all by herself, and yk, raising a child is never easy. With Tesla's personality, I don't think she could really handle this.

(Sorry if i was asking too much, i just really love reading your post about them, pls never stop😭💞)

Aw, thank you very much for all these questions and dialogue screenshots! ❤️ 

Oh, Joey, Joey... We have so many questions for this precious boy yet know so little about him. He’s so polite, kind, and remarkably brave for his young age, just like a certain someone. “I’m more Joyce than Joffrey” he once said and, in every sense of these words, he was absolutely right. He's the most Joyce-like clone with the most Joyce-like mind that, in my opinion, doomed him to think, to act and to perceive the world around him and people in it the very same way Joyce did (He even developed the same passion for cosmos, pls).    Yes, as Joachim said, “he’ll never become Joyce.” But the resemblance is still there and it's too painful. This is why I was confident that Joey’s existence would be too much for AE to bear. They would have to constantly remind themselves that this is not Joyce nor he will ever be, they can't heal their wounds using this boy and force him to become like Joyce.    And the worst part is that Joey knows it? I thought that perhaps he doesn’t understand fully the reason why everyone looks at him that way, why some things he unconsciously says or does make his mother or father or auntie Ein look at him with a poorly hidden sorrow in their eyes, but it’s the elephant in the room and one day he'll might as well want to become this hero everyone sees in him. 

But... I was wrong? Thanks to that hasty chapter that gave no explanation on who this boy was and where he came from, it seemed as everyone were relatively fine with Joey around. Even Ein appeared to be okay which was...odd to me but never mind. 

On the other hand, it was cute and heartwarming to see Tesla being so mature and caring with Joey. She always could get along with kids and teens pretty easily but with Joey she became surprisingly extra self-restrained and showed this lovely mother-ish side of hers. True, Tesla can be both strict and overprotective, and considerate AND pampering. But that’s how she shows her love and she’ll do everything for those she loves (after grumbling for a while, of course). And! Tesla controlling her swearing and alcoholic habits is just whoa. That's some character development right there. 

On top of everything, Tesla is very good in quickly adapting for even the most fucked up situations. So even though we don’t know the exact story of how they came to this whole situation with Joey and even if it was awkward at first, I think at this point she just treats him as her son. Not as a clone, not as some Joyce’s copy, but as her precious little Joey. And I think Joey’s appearance in her life is actually for the better. She needed someone who’d care for her as immensely as she’s willing to care for others. 

With Joey, Tesla has become more mature, calm, and soft, with a hint of tiredness that comes from the old age. But omg not only she started to drink less and tries to tame her temper but that part where she told Joey that glasses are not cool even though she wore glasses to look cool-    As for Joachim and Ein… *sighs*. As I’ve said long time ago, these two are in the same depression boat when it comes to Joyce topic. And no matter how the story currently unfolds and will unfold in the future, I think these two have it hard with Joey. Let me be a sucker for angst here, please. But even in APHO it really felt like it wasn’t easy for Joachim to talk about Joey. He’s trying his best to see the boy as an independent individual but he can’t help but be reminded of Joyce. 

Joachim’s life, personality, his everything was heavily affected and shaped by Joyce’s legacy, then he went through traumatic era of killing Joyce’s clones and now he takes care of another clone. He can’t be free from Joyce’s shadow looming over his life even after everything he went through. It’s just so ironic that parenting Joey not only reminds him of Joyce but perhaps makes him miss his own father too. Still, Joachim tries his best to be a good father.

(But in my opinion, in his case Joey doesn’t really brightens his life, unlike Tesla’s situation).  And then there’s Ein… *pat pat* your sanity will be missed, doctor (And here I thought her life can’t be even more miserable). Before the ex chapter was released, I believed that Joey’s presence would turn her life into a living nightmare. It’s been hard for her to stop treating Joachim as a shadow of Welt and now the story wants me to believe that she’s not bothered by a boy with Joyce’s hair, eyes, smile and character. Uh-huh...I know that the story loves to make her be controversial from time to time but not to this extent? (Or she’s so fed up with life and reached a point of exhaustion where even something like this can’t disturb her).

How could she accept him so easily? I can’t believe it wouldn’t be overwhelming for her to see this boy every day. Surely it would be too much, the story did a very dirty move. And while she may care for Joey, she can’t draw the line between Joey and Welt the very same way she never drew the line between Joachim and Welt. Perhaps she would feel guilty and terrible for being like this and for her inability to love him properly. That's why Ein keeping her distance from Joey was the most obvious thing for me to expect. Yes, avoiding the boy or giving him the cold shoulder would confuse him, "why does auntie Ein hate me?”, he did nothing wrong after all, but Ein just wouldn’t know how to treat him normally. However, the story says she’s ✨fine✨ with it all.    Will Tesla ever “hate” Joachim for leaving her and Joey...well yes, she can’t bring herself to truly hate him nor she can stay indifferent. Most likely she’ll go through a cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance once again. At least she can take comfort in the fact that Joey is not a problematic child. Perhaps she will have break downs from the constant stress and make mistakes along the way, but I want to believe that she’ll manage just fine as long as no one around her offs themselves for the sake of heroic deeds after all, she’s a strong lady and I hope she’ll become a great mother figure to Joey.

Unfortunately, we still have very little content on this topic and I hope to come back to this ramble one day. Thank you once again for these questions tho

[nudistjayne]

Topless UK Beach

I've not mentioned much about sharing nudism with friends and thats because most of my friends don't know about it. I had a trip last year with some uni friends and was able to give them a small gimpse into my world.

A mixed group of five of us meet up fairly regularly and on this occasion we decided to have a beach trip. One of the friends lives towards the east of the UK, so we decided to visit Cromer beach. It's quite a typical English beach with a pier, fish and chip shops, arcades, cafes, and tourist shops. I decided I wanted to try going topless with them, it felt awkward to ask and I wanted it to appear more natural and spur of the moment. I didn't come up with a game plan and just decided to see how things went at the time. We got there about 11am, it was a really warm day and plenty of people had the same idea. We setup on the beach a couple of hundred meters from the pier and everyone stripped straight to swimwear as it was already getting hot. We settled in, chatted, sun-lotioned and relaxed. I'd been sunbathing lying on my back for a little (quite concerned about developing tanlines) and decided to roll onto my front. This was the perfect opportunity to undo my bikini straps, a fairly common occurance and no suspision so far so I decided to push things a little. I rolled slighty onto my right side and delved into my bag for some water whilst lifting my left breast off my abandonned bikini top and revealing it to everyone nearby. It wasn't a massive or obvious flash but it didn't go unnoticed. I went on to read a little so i could prop myself up on my elbows, this was specifically so i could lift both breasts off my beach towel as much as i wanted whilst appearing to be innocently reading. Again it was nothing dramatic but everyone in the vicinity could probably tell I wasn't very concerned about showing myself. I continued taking drinks and reading like this so the extended flashes of my breasts seemed quite normal - I don't know if this worked, but it made sense to me at the time. My two male friends had definitey noticed.

We'd been there about an hour when someone mentioned food. We'd all bought various picnic foods and some of them started to spread everything out on a sand-free towel. Everyone started tucking in and I appeard to be absorbed in my book. I wasn't actually reading a word but waiting for them to be focused on food and plucking up the courage to make my next move. I took a breath and rolled fully onto my side facing the group (and the food in the middle). I reached over and started helping myself trying to appear as casual as possible. They all noticed as we were in a vague circle, but nobody said anything, just some lingering views. It was quite busy by now and I hadn't even thought about other beach goers but some of them definitely saw. I stayed on my side and whilst I was topless I kept quite a low profile, trying not to attract attention. As everyone finished eating some of them started packing the food away. I sat up and helped out feeling quite bold by now.

It's probably worth pointing out for anyone not from the UK that going topless on beaches over here is never done. Feel free to comment, but I've not really seen others do it on the regular beaches I've been to. Me sitting up like this was quite a big thing, but I continued to act completely unphased by it and as if it were perfectly normal. The only comment from my friends had been to ask if i was particularly warm, and to joke about tanlines. Nothing off-putting anyway, I think they were trying to be respectful, they're quite a liberal bunch on the whole and they know I'm quite a free spirit, so it wasn't terribly out of character.

Once we finished eating, two of them went for a walk down the beach. I decided to push it further, so I stood up wearing only my bikini bottoms. I took the opportunity to pack away my bikini top so there was no easy option to cover up if I wanted to. I didn't walk around, just stood there stretching and taking in the view. It was a lovey day and there was a great view of the beach and out to sea. I stood there stretching and gently moving about for about 5 minutes maybe, it felt much longer and by now I had noticed a significant amount of attention from those nearby. Whilst I'd noticed it I didn't let it put me off I was just aware of it. The sun and breeze on my body felt amazing, maybe even more than usual as it was somewhere I wouldn't normally get to enjoy.

I've realised this is quite a long post, so I'll stop here for now and pick it up later.

[capricioussun]

I don't know if I or another person have asked but what's your interpretation of Fell Papyrus?

I swear I'm going to try and keep this from becoming a novel but I can't be held accountable for if I fail.

Edit post-typing: I failed. Anyway

So, similarly to the US boys, I started off basically taking the UT boys (as I see them) and going all the way back to the beginning and seeing how the changes would ultimately affect them. This pretty consistently has a bigger impact on Papyrus than Sans because I've always seen Papyrus as very...sort of impressionable? Or reflective. A lot of his behaviors come from those around him and their expectations.

To me, he comes across as the type of character to try to mold himself into a specific shape because he sort of lacks his own sense of self. I've always headcanoned this as coming from my standard lore of being like, partially synthetic and receiving a larger part of Gaster's soul than Sans in their creation, meaning he takes more after someone with low empathy and serious issues with derealization, and only became even more sort of..."detached" from himself after Gaster shattered and it damaged his and Sans' "code" (Papyrus more so, again, because of having a larger percentage of Gaster's soul).

In UF, because of how Gaster was, and because of how much fear he semi-unintentionally instilled in Sans, that Sans then went on to try and teach Papyrus through the lens of, he wound up with a tremendously overzealous responsibility complex. Gaster had impressed on the boys how important they were to his plans to free monsterkind, all the way up until shattering when the boys were still young. And then Sans tried desperately hard to teach Papyrus how to be entirely self sufficient and survive in a world as cruel as theirs because he believed he'd get killed or Fall Down at pretty much any moment (Sans was a very, very stressed out kid/teenager).

So Papyrus essentially learned Anything can be an exploitable weakness, not to show emotions, do anything for the sake of surviving, and above all else, protect those that need protecting, with Sans, and eventually Undyne, at the top of the list. This is also where his deeply secretive nature really settled in, and also why he struggles so much to accept...really anything good that's offered freely. Kindness, friendship, help. He has to remain untouchable, unreachable, the one to provide and not take, because if he messes up, if he lets the wrong person in, he's not just risking his own well being, but by extension, everyone who's depending on him.

It's also a really good way to distract himself from the crushing loneliness. Saw a tumblr post the other day that resonated so hard w/ my ideas of him that said something along the lines of "if I cannot be wanted I will be needed, and if I am not needed then let me be used until there is nothing left". He was never really allowed to develop himself as a person, not fully, so he completely filled himself with what he thought he had to be. When those things are taken away, he has nothing, and he’s too terrified to let that happen.

It's also why I hc he, in some ways, winds up having a really really hard time after surfacing in some of my ideas/aus/stories. He was needed underground, Sans needed him, Undyne needed him, Snowdin needed him, and by extension the whole underground did, to keep the balance. Above ground, everyone calming and becoming happier, Sans and Toriel settling down, Undyne and Alphys settling down, being a replaceable member of the ambassadorial team, he's hit with this just...utter loss of self.

Getting carried away on the specifics. He and UT Papyrus actually align in a lot of ways it's hard to see at first glance. Both have their "roles", both have a specific sort of "bit" they do with their brothers, both let Undyne believe she knows what's best because they believe it's what best for her, both, despite knowing better, desperately want to believe in the greater good. Despite all the aforementioned problems, despite preparing his whole life to kill humans, he's the first to give up and try to help Frisk. They're just a child. A child who wants to help, who's scared, who doesn't even have a brother to look after them.

In reality he’s a nervous wreck. My man is TIRED. He puts himself under tremendous pressure and doesn't know how to express nor understand emotions. His schtick is so well rehearsed anything that goes off script completely blindsides him. The soft, silly, bratty goofiness is really only under a very thin layer of ice. It doesn't take much to crack it, but that only makes him that much more defensive and paranoid. He can't risk anyone knowing how "weak" he truly is, even if most anyone who's been around him any amount of time can see it clear as day, because he’s about as good at hiding it as UT Papyrus would be lol

At least they don't know about the [REDACTED]. That, he’s actually really good at hiding.

I do wish I'd given him a different nickname than Edge looking back, but back when I'd nicknamed my main guys I just went w/ the fandom usuals so now he’s forever cursed to be Edge bc I associate it too strongly lol

[lizzyscribbles]

Tonight's blabber is brought to you by sleep deprivation and my desire to ignore it long enough to try to get my sleep schedule back on track. Drink your electrolytes when you're out in the sun for long periods of time kids, even if you don't feel thirsty, don't be me.

Lizzy's MHA Ramble of the Evening (I need a shorter title for these things): Why I think Toga's death was one of the best in the series.

Now, before I begin, I have to say that as an author, I think that her dying was a good choice since it seems so authentic to her character and I can’t see an end where she’d be happy being captured. Over and over again, she shows us that she's only going to do what she wants. It makes the whole scene so much more impactful, because it shows us how much Ochaco's words really meant to her. We know from over the course of the series that Himiko doesn't do shit she doesn't want to, that's the whole point of her being in the league. So, her sacrificing herself because she wanted to just feels so right and satisfying from an author standpoint, it's the kind of development I die for. Could it have been better? Probably! But that’s a thought for another time.

...But, as a fan, it hurts my heart so much. Toga was another character, much like Bakugo, that I hated so much in the beginning yet grew to love by the end. Her story hits home for me for several reasons, but mostly because it not only shows the importance of finding people who don't ask you to be someone else for their comfort, but also inspires us to be that person for someone else.

You see, love is a funny thing, mostly because it's never the same twice. Be it platonic, romantic, familial or friend, it's never something I think we'll fully understand. However, I do believe this:

Himiko Toga was never truly loved before she ended up in the league.

I don't necessarily mean romantic love here, by the way, I feel like I should say that. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't, but I don't really think that's what matters here anyway.

We see at the end of Toga's fight with Ochaco where she gives the hero her blood that she ponders what she would've done if she'd found love sooner, love that made her want to give and not take. I think that tells us a lot about the love she received before she left. She was under the impression that love was all take, take, take, and I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that's because that was the only kind of "love" she ever received.

That is, until Ochaco came along and offered up herself, even when she didn't have to. Like Himiko tells her, Ochaco could've killed her and she would've been in the right, but she doesn't. Instead of demanding something from Toga like everyone else had done, Ochaco offered a part of herself at no cost. She didn't expect anything back, she didn't ask for anything back, she didn't even tell her to stop, she just offered her wrist and said "please, tell me everything".

She doesn't apologize, she doesn't beg, she levels with Toga as a person and shows her what love actually is. And what does Himiko do with that? She turns around and gives it back. Even though she could've let Ochaco die and moved on, creating an easier world for her to live in, she didn't. I think that's the magic of love, as cheesy as it sounds, the second she got a taste of what it truly was she realized it was worth dying for.

In a lot of ways, love is a sacrifice, a piece of yourself you never expect to get back. But, sometimes, when you find those people who love you as much as you love them, they take your love and give you theirs.

Love is a lot of things. It makes you happy, it makes you sad, it makes you safe, and sometimes it forces you to be a little uncomfortable while you face things you didn't want to face. To love someone is to make them happy yes, but it's also to help them realize that it's okay to not be okay. Love is beautiful, but it hurts sometimes.

No one forced Himiko to give her life for Ochaco's, she didn't do it out of a warped sense of duty or because it's what she was supposed to do, she did it because for once in her life she found someone worth giving to instead of taking from.

Himiko died, but she died how she lived, doing exactly what she wanted to, and I don't think she'd have wanted it any other way.

In a way, Ochaco did save her, just like Izuku saved Tomura, even if it wasn't the way they intended to.

Okay I HAVE to go to bed because I can't keep my eyes open so hopefully that all made sense, farewell all and if anyone has any fix-it fanfics with Himiko please recommend because my heart hurts after writing that.

[alyimoss]

I don’t actually know anything about your underswap I’d love to hear about it!

explodes ok so.

this ended up being the length of the average one-shot so it has to go under the cut

tbf my underverse is not super developed. i mostly just have. sans, papyrus, alphys, and undyne figured out (though not fully) and the rest im still thinking through. but nevertheless i love my swaps and would die for them.

between those four, the swaps are pretty standard (so sans and papyrus swap, and so do alphys and undyne), but they generally have a bit more like?? backstory as to why they are the way that they are?? my underswap is like. base ut but something went sideways and now shit's weird. so these characters, for the most part, started out like their classic counterparts, and this is why my swaps have more of their base ut traits than some other swaps.

like- for example, my swap papyrus started out more or less like classic papyrus. he's energetic and ambitious and he puts his all into the things that he does and he believes in everyone!! but he lets his reality wear him down more than classic: where classic keeps up his "fake it til you make it" kind of attitude towards his own popularity and just keeps trying even if he fails, my swap pap realizes that no matter what he does, he's not the person he wants to be. he wants to be the cool popular guy that everyone wants to be friends with, but… through years of rejection and failure, he eventually resigns himself to just being some fucking guy. not important. forgettable.

so he stops trying. he stops trying to make friends, trying to put himself out there, etc. the thought of joining the royal guard doesnt even cross his mind because he'd preemptively decided that its pointless — he wont get in and hell just make a fool of himself trying. why bother? the funny thing, though, is that, as a papyrus, i guess he can never truly stop trying, because he kind of does a 180 here. instead of being some cool extrovert popular guy, he assumes the persona of just the average guy. he masks his effort levels, trying to make it seem like he's someone who really doesnt try that hard (because he doesnt want to look like a tryhard), so like for example, where classic papyrus speaks in all caps to show his effort (and classic sans, conversely, speaks in all lowercase to show the exact opposite thing), my swap papyrus speaks with proper capitalizations because thats what normal, average people do!! and hes just a perfectly normal, average guy… just your average, completely forgettable rando…

i guess at his core, hes someone influenced wildly by shame and a fear of being his true self, because he doesnt see that self as being worthy enough because it doesnt fit his specific criteria (this is smthn that also applies to classic papyrus, at least to a certain extent, but thats not what im here to yap abt)

and then his spiral into depression is what pushes my swap sans into becoming a proper swap. he, like classic, knows about the timeline and resets and whatnot, and has, too, given up. why bother? nothing matters. except then he looks around and he sees the townspeople notice. his friends at the bar ask if hes okay, and when he blatantly lies to them, he can feel their hopes dwindle. he feels the whole town almost become darker, heavier. he cant fathom himself having this kind of impact on others, but he feels it and even if its not his fault, if its just a byproduct of them all being stuck underground for so damn long, he feels like hes doing something wrong. he feels guilty. and then he sees papyrus. his brother, who had always shined like the brightest star in the sky, giving up and losing hope and hiding away from the world. and sans feels responsible.

so he does the only thing he can think of — he decides to try. of course, that doesnt mean that he actually feels any better. he doesnt think this will do anything in the larger scheme of things. but he cant stand seeing his brother like that. he cant stand the guilt. and so he becomes more like classic papyrus — he enrolls in the guard, he makes rounds around snowdin, he cooks and cleans and drags his brother out of the house with him. and even if he has no energy and he feels like hes drowning but the waves are still crashing on top of him one after the other, he keeps going because anything is better than the feeling of failure.

this is where id go in on his backstory and why he feels this way about failure, but. i kind of. dont have anything. and anyway i keep these two's backstories brief in most aus bc canonically we do not know what the fuck is up w them and i dont know if we ever will. and really im fine with that, the mystery makes them. but yeah anyway, due to circumstances, my swap sans is riddler with guilt and the fear of failure, and he will do anything to prove he is not a failure, that he can at least do something right.

oh and also speaking of guilt, papyrus notices this change in his brother. and he recognizes that he has a part in it. and as grateful as he is for his brother's attempts to cheer him up, he also feels immensely guilty because he can see better than anyone else in the whole underground just how much his brother's self-imposed duty weighs on him. he blames himself for letting himself get so bad that now his brother is suffering from it as well, but he also cant get any better. cue the self-loathing cycle. anyway, as a result, he ends up sharing less with sans. its a means of lessening his burden — if he doesnt know the things going wrong in papyrus's life, he wont have to waste time and energy on him and wont have to have more on his already overloaded plate!! its the perfect plan except they drift apart and now their closeness feels so surface-level and papyrus feels guilty about lying and he knows his brother is still worried, perhaps moreso now that he knows less and he's so scared theyll drift further apart but he's committed fully to this so he just keeps digging the hole and he doesnt know how to stop. (theyre still close, but less so than the classic bros, id say)

ok enough abt those two alphyne time.

these two are actually. less developed. and theres one specific part ill talk abt a bit later that im rlly not sure what to do with. but anyway. they, too, had their original roles at first. undyne, the rambunctious, hotheaded kid who kept getting into fights and couldnt sit still long enough to read one paragraph, and alphys, the nerdy kid who practically lived at the dump, collecting comics and anime… and yeah they somehow ended up the royal scientist and head of the royal guard, respectively.

i havent fully thought through why undyne would end up the scientist, but itd probably have something to do with injury. she keeps her eye injury in my swap. but as evidenced by base ut, a simple missing eye cant stop undyne! so she probably had a more. extensive injury, likely coupled with other factors. im not fully sure what happens, but what i am sure of is i want her to have a similar focus on robotics as alphys. she decides that if she cant fulfill the hopes and dreams of monsterkind on the frontlines, she'll become a different kind of hero. i think she mostly makes prosthetics, likely coupling them with weaponry bc thats just cool. she finds the best ways to combine mobility and magic efficiency and is widely respected by monsters for what she does (also, if youre wondering why monsters would need prosthetics when they have op healing and are made of magic, it comes from my personal theory that the longer a wound is left unhealed, the harder it is to heal it perfectly. so like, for example, it's possible to use magic healing to do things like reattach limbs. it will work as long as the recipient of the healing isnt dead. however, this reattachment needs to happen quick. depending on how long you wait, you could lose significant mobility in the limb, or just not be able to attach it at all. also, theres monsters like monster kid who dont have certain limbs. so i guess where some monsters get prosthetics to replace lost body parts, others get them to have entirely new body parts. anyway.)

meanwhile, alphys becomes a guard through a series of events. i think she signs up to be a sentry in hotland or something at first, because positions were open and they didnt exactly have many requirements, and she needed money. she ended up being like- exceptional. she's detail oriented and driven and is good at problem-solving, and her reviews were always stellar, so at some point i think she was approached about a promotion. which i think she took because, again, money. i think the guard has good benefits and pay.

to explain how she becomes the head of the guard, i want to take a moment to talk abt the guard in my swap. because toriel is the queen and is not thrilled at the prospect of killing humans, i think the guard isnt a thing at all until a couple humans in. i think several were less than friendly, killing several monsters. at first, when people brought this up, i think toriel would defend the humans by saying that they were just scared or acting in self-defense etc. but 1) i doubt monsters particularly liked their ruler defending people who killed their loved ones and 2) the human that got the guard established was. probably pretty bad. dont ask me which soul this was, i wont tell you bc i dont know. but they killed a sizeable number of monsters, to the point where not even toriel could defend them. they were probably the only human she killed (ill get to that later). after their death, the guard was established. still not really to kill humans as much as to ensure they got to the queen quickly and safely, as well as to protect monsters in case a particularly violent human fell down.

anyway yeah with this context, alphys was more fitting to be the head of the royal guard than undyne, id say. she's less violent and more mindful than undyne. i think toriel herself talked to her about becoming head of the guard. she said no at first, i think. she still had her ambitions of being a scientist, she was just doing this whole guard thing for the money. i think what pushed her to accepting was undyne getting the position of royal scientist.

this is another part im. not fully sure of. theres something that gets toriel's attention in regard to undyne, but i really dont know what. maybe just her reputation as someone who's making monster lives better day by day. toriel wants to give someone like that more resources and more voice as hope dwindles in the underground (i think its a bot of a more bleak situation in underswap like theyre just. sad. for reason and not. because where in base ut the underground is full of hope because they only need one human soul before theyre freed, interspersed with quiet dread because they dont know when they'll get that final soul, i think its more of the latter in my swap. theres more reason to this but ill touch on that in a bit).

anyway yeah undyne becomes the royal scientist and alphys is like welp. and accepts the position of head of the royal guard on the condition that she is trained to fight (as a member of the guard already, she had some training, but being the head is like. a whole other ballpark, yknow?) and yeah she as a character is. still pretty unsure of herself. she's a bit more confident than classic alphys because of her position and her training, but she's still got a lotta self-loathing and self-esteem issues. she still has her stutter, but she's managed to work through it enough to give speeches and shit without stuttering. catch her off-guard tho and she'll stutter and generally be kinda awkward (her stutter is like one of my fav things abt her as someone who also has a stutter i will never get rid of it ever).

she's very unsure of herself as a leader and constantly wonders if shes worthy of this position. she thinks she got it by pure luck when someone better suited couldve gotten it instead. i think she felt very resentful at the beginning, too. abt someone else getting the job of royal scientist before her. and its interspersed with the self loathing like "of course someone else got it before you, what did you ever do to work towards it? god, why did you accept this job? you shouldve just done fast food or something. or just stuck to science as best you couldve. god, no wonder someone got it before you. youre not worthy of it." i think she held a sort of resentment toward undyne too at first, but after they met and she realized that undynes. kinda chill, actually, she felt incredibly guilty about it. its not like she did this on purpose, she doesnt deserve this hatred…

anyway yeah shes head of the royal guard and she hires sans and trains him and their training is half actual training and half just fucking around and watching anime/movies and whatever. and her training/fighting i think are more. formulaic than classic undyne's. she's more about plan and strategy than raw power. also her section would still be in hotland. mostly because i didnt want to put undyne in hotland bc she hates it. lmao.

anyway undyne!! i think she has some regrets about not being able to become the hero she'd dreamed of being, but she also has come to accept her new role. she's more or less satisfied being who she is. she's one of the few characters who doesnt really feel that pressure of "was i supposed to be something else?" in this au. because at the end of the day, her goal stays the same: help monsterkind and crush humanity!! and she can do that as a nerd, too. i think toriel isnt too thrilled abt her attitude toward humans, but theres not much she can do abt it. i think the underswap underground is generally like. slightly less hostile to humans than undertale? (because the queen doesnt want humans dead, but monsters remember the hurt theyve suffered at the hands of humans) but undyne grew up on stories of the war from gerson and stuff like that, so she feels pretty strongly abt who's right and who's wrong and what should be done about that. i do also think she knows asgore, but this is a part im not fully sure of because i dont fucking know what to do with asgore.

also alphyne are still canon of course they are. this isnt glitchtale. they probably also meet at the dump, as alphys is contemplating things and undyne is searching around for junk to work on. and they talk and share their theories about where that creepy void leads. and they start hanging out and alphys shows undyne anime (and inspires her to go crazier with her prosthetics and other robotics works) and they work on battle strategies as a way of flirting /hj. and theres one problem that they kinda share bc i dont know what to do with it. that being the amalgamates.

so its unclear if the amalgamates would even exist in this au actually, but if they do i have two routes i can go with them i think: 1) undyne is the one responsible for them, but she doesnt lie and hide about it (not that i think she could do that much bc toriel would be expecting reports and stuff). she tells everyone whats going on, letting them see their families and whatnot, but still working on them and trying to figure out how to. fix them. and as a result theres just. amalgamates shambling around the underground sometimes. and the last human runs into them sometimes and gets freaked out and it serves as this foreshadowing moment to who undyne is as a character and serves to paint her as someone absolutely terrifying (which isnt necessarily true but also not necessarily untrue). or 2) alphys is the one responsible.

deciding to do one final science thing because fuck it, shes got nothing to lose (she has everything to lose), she decides to try to make a monster's soul last after death. how would she do this in a position where she cant easily get access to the things she'd need? god fucking knows. the main thing about this route is that it adds even more guilt to alphys's plate, which is pretty fitting for her as a character. and also guilt hi hello another guilt mention. this seemed more thought out in my head moving on.

some minor details abt this swap also are that mtt and mew mew are swapped, and mew mew is a popular streamer (and livestreams herself kicking your ass); bp and catty and bratty are swapped just bc i think its funny; grillby and muffet are in a weird territory of swap. i think theyre swapped but still in the same places as base game (bc grillby likes the cold and muffet will literally die dont do this to her), and maybe grillby gets the miniboss instead of muffet (she just forces you to give her money lolol).

and now the final thing: the dreemurrs. listen. i do not know what the fuck to do with these guys. they kinda fuck with the whole story if swapped in ways that are. not good at all. im including chara and frisk in "the dreemurrs" btw for reasons.

because like- we know what toriel would do if she was queen. she tells us. she would get one soul, cross the barrier, get six more, and then free the underground. and if she did that, there would be no story to tell. so. and asgore couldnt just lock himself in the ruins or smthn like toriel does in base ut, because toriel would break that fucking door down trying to get to him because she knows the humans come from the ruins, and she does not trust asgore in the slightest. and i dont even want to touch on the implications of asriel being alive in underswap. so i do not know what to do with him period. chara and frisk seem like a simple swap, but. theyre still distinct characters, whose personalities and actions do have an effect on the plot of undertale. and swapping them has repercussions. mostly in shit like philosophy which im notoriously bad at. so for now im just not thinking abt them.

ok back to toriel and asgore. i have like. an inkling of an idea as to what to do with them. that idea being that asgore, angry after the deaths of his children, wants to wage war, but toriel gets wind of the idea before he's able to make an official declaration, and grows absolutely disgusted with him. she banishes him and assumes the position of single ruler of the underground. i honestly dont know what to do with asgore past this point, but i do know that at least in the beginning, he is under strict supervision (likely by gerson bc gerson).

so what does toriel do as queen? she waits for a human to fall. she welcomes them as she did the first one. she does not take their soul. she cares for them and gives them the best life she can. as they grow older, she talks to them about using their soul to cross the barrier after they die. and they agree. the first (second) human dies of old age after a good, peaceful life in the underground. toriel absorbs their soul, crosses the barrier… and is nearly killed by the humans, still fearful and angry because it hasn't been that long since the last time they saw a monster. she goes back, deciding to instead wait a little longer. in that time, another human falls, then another… but after the first soul, i think most dont die of old age. several die by accident, several are killed in self defense. as mentioned above, at some point the guard is established due to the violence of one of the humans. toriel doesnt absorb these souls, instead keeping them safe in containment.

we know that when a human's soul is absorbed, they still persist (as evidenced by 1) asriel telling us that chara told him to do things and had control over their body when he absorbed their soul and 2) the photoshop flowey fight), i think toriel kind of feared losing herself and/or hurting the humans somehow by absorbing their souls. and with some of the more violent humans, i think the fears of losing herself grew stronger. so yeah she chooses to wait until the humans no longer fear/want to kill monsters or whatever.

and this has influence on the underground of course because imagine your ruler acquires the necessary means to cross the seal trapping you underground and you think that finally, finally youre free!! and then she comes right back like "yeah uh actually they still want us dead so lets wait a bit longer…"

how crushing is that? knowing that not only was your freedom a lie, you now know for sure that the humans outside want you dead? that chances are that even if you do manage to leave the underground, youll either be killed or forced right back under? this i think is a major reason the underswap underground is lacking in hope compared to the undertale underground. but yeah i. dont know if ill end up going with this, actually. because, again, i do not know what the fuck to do with the dreemurrs and i hate it.

another thing im not sure of is the whole "sans's promise to toriel" thing?? bc i kinda still wanna have that in some form, yknow? and i think it works if he's a guard and shes the queen. he visits her at some point to do a report or smthn (maybe bc alphys is busy who knows) and he notices shes looking kinda gloomy. so he gives her his best knock knock joke and she absolutely loves it. so he keeps going and then she gives him a couple of her own and yeah you get it. i just like sans and toriel they are the besties ever.

anyway yeah i think?? thats it?? for now, anyway. i probably forgot to mention smthn but who cares this is like. wayyyy too fucking long already anyways. thank you for letting me yap, i will continue to do so… forever.