#until they never went away

[maximura]

Mingi at Coachella 2024 Part II, April 12th

[numberonetacostan]

Obliviously fruity vs excellent gaydar

[boygirlctommy]

hate getting attached to characters. like okay what if there was a 16 year old kid whos abrasive and loud and kindof rude. what if he hates being told what to do but would follow two people to the ends of the earth. what if he raised himself what if every day was a fight to stay alive what if he just wants to hold onto the people he has left. what if hes childish and emotional, because hes a kid for fucks sake.

[inkskinned]

so one time i got bit by a brown recluse which is one of the only types of spider in my area that's actually dangerous and at first i didn't know what had happened to me, only that it was nasty. the swelling wasn't going down and the wound started to get ugly. i don't want to like get into the details because that's gross but it got to the point 2 weeks later that i was worried enough to go to the doctor, which i hate doing.

i am not afraid of spiders but other people are so i'd been covering it with this big ole square bandage (i needed more landscape coverage than a simple bandaid) and sat in the university medical waiting room, kicking my heels and playing BOTW. the nurse who admitted me was like, oh, we have got to get Tom to cover this one. she wrote spider bite under my ticket.

i waited in the near-empty building for like an hour and then nurse tom shows up in spiderman scrubs, out of breath. "sorry," he says, "i saw - your slip - and I had," he heaves in a breath, "to run home and. get. these scrubs. i literally. ran. felt like a job. for. spiderman."

i laugh. he puts his hands on his knees, thumbs-ups at me. fishes a pamphlet out from under his clipboard that basically says spiders can be scary but you don't need to be scared, there's very few dangerous spiders in new england. "honestly," he wheezes, "we probably don't need to get you into an exam room. just..." he waves his hand at the pamphlet, "read that."

i look down at my arm. then back at him in his scrubs. and then down at my arm. i like that he made an effort to make a joke, but now it does not feel like a good joke, because they are mistaking my calm for a lack of injury. "can i. like. at least show you the bite?"

he gives me kind of a weird look, which is fair, but then says. "if. i mean, if you have to."

i peel the bandage off. his face goes green.

"oh," he says.

"yeah, man."

"a... spider bit you?" his voice is high and tight and trembling. he backs up a few steps.

"i think a brown recluse," i offer. "i know it's nasty, sorry."

"excuse me for a moment." he looks over to the administering nurse on the other side of the small room. "i need to find someone else to take care of you."

the administering nurse smiles over to us with a degree of pleasure that is almost salivating. for a moment, like a window opening, i am briefly aware of what must be a psychic message floating amongst the in-between. her jaguar teeth all say this is like a party for me and i know exactly what i'm doing.

"oh no, tom," she says, grinning. "i gave her to you specifically."

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

pez dispenser debris for the fic ask thing? 👀

As much as this is my “kill no darlings you will get EVERY flashback” fic, there’s overarching sociopolitical backstory explaining why Izuku and the rest of class 3A exploded in the public eye that I don’t think I’ll ever fully fit in.

It’s a combination of it being more of a meta analysis than anything and also requiring information from a perspective that I know will never appear in the fic. Like, the fic still gets the different moments that make up this analysis, but there’s no explicit connecting thread to show how they all locked together to create this sort of global cult following of class 3-A. I almost put in a little fake news article opinion piece that was meant to sort of walk the reader through why society is Like This, but I decided it was too heavy handed and deleted it.

Everything that I’m going to reference has already appeared in pez dispenser debris to some degree, and none of it will ever actually materially impact the plot. They may receive a little more detail down the line if they’re mentioned in passing in the fic, so out of an abundance of caution, I’ll stick it below the cut so people can avoid this, but I don’t personally consider any of this spoilers.

Izuku and the rest of the class are famous in pez dispenser debris in a way that’s pretty much unprecedented for students. Canonically, not even all might had a name for himself until after his graduation. Pretty much everyone from class 3A are public figures, with Izuku specifically being considered a major global figure.

In my mind, there was this perfect storm right during their second year that catapulted them into fame. The class personally has varying levels of awareness of why they got so popular, but there was this perfect cross winds of societal unrest and fear that made them household names.

There was an approximately one month span in their second year where they were just hit one after another with a major firestorms of events: The UA Sports Festival, the Sidekick Strike, and the Tartarus Prison Break/Desertion of Yokohama.

The UA Sports Festival is the one that the kids attribute this most to, because so many of the news articles that followed referenced their performance in it. But it probably gave them less mileage than what the other two events did.

What the UA Sports Festival did was showcase their skills to the world in a venue designed to show them off. The public was already on edge. All Might had retired, crime rates kept going up, and people were rapidly losing confidence in existing heroes. Class 2A made such an insane showing of skill in the second Sports Festival that it made the public rave about them for weeks after. It was extremely reassuring to Japan that they had such powerful heroes in the barrel and would soon be on the streets. But that attention probably would have died down had it not been for the Sidekick Strike and Yokohama.

The Sidekick Strike actually had nothing to do with them. But it undermined the public’s faith in heroes at just the right time.

The Sidekick Strike is just one of those things that I have no POV that would even tangentially be involved in it so we’ll get a few passing references in media clips and it’ll never be discussed in depth. Which is a shame because it’s such an interesting conflict to me.

The Sidekick Strike was heavily inspired by the 1919 Boston Police Strike. Effectively, it was the height of the labor rights movement, and police officers got together and went on strike to get the police union recognized. They had tried to negotiate and negotiations failed, and so they all walked off the job. The city descended into lawlessness, the national guard was deployed, it was a whole thing. Famously, Calvin Coolidge fired the entire police force over it on the grounds that there was no striking from public safety.

I thought it would be really interesting if there was something similar that happened with the sidekicks. The thing is that the heroics structure as it stands really incentivizes abuse towards sidekicks. We have a society where there’s a decent amount of heroes who are only in it for the fame. A not insignificant amount of money must come from marketing deals. And it’s a ranked system, so they’re all in competition with each other.

Heroes wouldn’t be incentivized to showcase their sidekicks—they’d be incentivized to take advantage of them and take credit for their work.

Like, think about the work-study experiences. Momo didn’t even officially work for the hero she studied with. She wasn’t getting paid. An adult woman used her for a shampoo ad. Who wants to bet whether Momo saw a dime from it? It’s probably very predatory because the nature of the system incentivizes predation.

I thought the underlying legal issues would be interesting and complex. Who owns a sidekick’s image—the agency or the individual? Who gets the proceeds of their brand deals? This all would be governed by their employment contracts, and sidekicks just starting out have very little leverage compared to big name heroes. And those heroes would want to keep their sidekicks names small and theirs big. The rankings are competitive, after all.

It’s a situation where I do think that like. The sidekicks would have a point in unionizing. The use of their image, appropriate compensation, and proper credit for their busts would all be like, very legitimate concerns in a normal employment context.

I see agencies like Idaten settling immediately with the union and having their sidekicks back on the street before the day is out. In my mind, idaten is considered the gold standard for sidekick jobs already, and their employees mostly did it out of solidarity with the people they worked alongside of. Like, Idaten was already doing most of the union’s demands and signed off very quickly on the remaining ones. If it was just about the Idaten sidekicks, none of them would have gone on strike, but they had a lot of colleagues who they depended on in the field who were in terrible situations. What were they gonna say, sorry, sucks to be you, I got a great gig though so condolences? These were the people keeping them alive. They went on strike because they knew Idaten would publicly settle before the day was out and set an example for the rest of the agencies. Hopefully it would help other agencies follow their lead.

But that didn’t happen. Some agencies, like Endeavor’s, fired everyone immediately. And I think a lot of agencies spent a long time picking over every line item in prolonged negotiations. It dragged out.

And that went over fucking terribly.

All Might just retired. Crime is up. And their sworn defenders are bickering over who gets what cut of the action figure line. Like I think the public would have fucking hated this in a post-All Might world. It would have seemed like the only real hero just medically and irreversibly retired and the rest of them are squabbling about whose turn it is in the spotlight.

I also think that the villains would have taken advantage of it.

The Tartarus Prison Break in pez isn’t the one that happened in canon. Here, the League of Villains attacked Tartarus and set everyone loose. In the process, they made a very clear stance: they are going to leave with All for One, and they are not going to attack any civilians. They won’t fight at all unless attacked first.

All of the horrible and sadistic villains they just let go have not made the same promise.

They chose to do this now because of the Sidekick Strike. All their heroes don’t give a fuck about protecting them, so they’re strapped for staffing. So they’re taking back their leader and going back to ground, and the heroes are free to immediately go after and contain all those bad bad villains who just escaped. And those guys are headed to the heavily populated mainland, so better be quick.

The whole world knew that was their explicit reasoning and promise. Because Himiko fucking lived tweeted the escape.

The Sidekick Strike took the hit for a lot of the blame, but I do see all the sidekicks breaking strike lines to go respond to the crisis. But response times were severely handicapped by the fact that most if not all of them were cut off from their agencies. It was just a complete systemic breakdown.

And then there became the question of what crisis do you respond to: All for One’s escape, or everyone else’s?

I mentioned in one of the little fake tumblr posts that the Tartarus Prison Break was seen as Endeavor’s greatest failure. And part of that is because he chose to sacrifice the nearby area, Yokohama, to contain All for One.

I am one of the biggest haters of Endeavor’s later arc, specifically because it required going back on the nature of the abuse he had subjected his family to that was already established in canon, but that’s a different rant. This is not canon endeavor. I hate what they did with canon endeavor.

That being said, I do think that the self doubt weighed on him once he became number one. And this was the moment of his career where it really crushed him.

All for One had escaped. So had every other villain from Tartarus. He should go after the most immediate threats. He knew this. It was basic triage.

But they would never have a better chance to stop All for One.

Prisoners in Tartarus aren’t exactly hitting all their macros and micros or training daily. They are not adherents to the Bakugou Katsuki Fitness Lifestyle. All for One was coming off spending the last few months drugged up to his eyeballs and strapped to a chair in a straitjacket with at least fifty guns pointed at him at all times. The man has not scratched his own nose in weeks. He’s weaker now than he’ll ever be again.

It was their best chance.

If he escaped, and he went back to ground, he’d have the time and space to get as strong as he wanted, and then he’d come back for real. And he’d be coming back for everything.

Stopping him the first time had cost them All Might.

And Endeavor simply was not All Might. And he still wouldn’t be All Might when the next fight came.

It really was the hardest decision of Endeavor’s life. He had to admit to himself that his own inadequacy was going to cost them countless lives. But he thought it was a hard decision he had to make. He was losing the battle for the barest chance at winning the war.

So he made the call that all heroes were to respond to All for One. They had to hit the league of villains now with their full force if they were to stand a chance. They could not afford to divide their already sparse forces. They’d respond to Yokohama when AfO was contained.

He was also the one who made the call to broadcast the warning message that we hear in the Twitter post. He thought it would give civilians their best chance. He didn’t want them to act with the expectation of the heroes being en route.

Of course, that meant that the entire city got fucking sirens going off and a message telling them that the heroes were not going to save them. Which, as you can expect, did not do a lot for public morale.

In my head, Tartarus is like, the equivalent to Gotham’s Arkham. It’s borderline an institute for the criminally insane. You don’t end up there unless you did something super fucked, are super dangerous, and have extreme violent tendencies. It’s exclusively for the most dangerous and indiscriminately violent criminals in the country.

The entire world was watching in real time while the tragedy unfolded. A lot of people were livestreaming after the emergency broadcast dropped, because they didn’t want the government to be able to handwave away how terrible their death was, or because they didn’t know what else to do, or because they just didn’t want to be alone. The full expectation was that it’d be a massacre.

But it wasn’t. Because Class 2-A responded instead.

The Class 2-A defensive efforts were discussed in one of the silly little fake tumblr posts and in the fake twitter post. In those, we find out that 1) Class 2-A, along with Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire responded to the scene; 2) the entire class rolled out of Mirio’s fucking mom van and tamaki and nejire’s cars like they were fucking clown cars; 3) the HPSC claimed it was a legitimate operation blessed and coordinated by them; and 4) a lot of people think this was a lie, in part because videos leaked of Aizawa bitching them all out in the street afterwards. We also see Izuku’s green lightning at the end of the twitter video, showing him responding to the scene just as the first villains hit the mainland.

This fight has a lot of names in the backstory that lives in my head. It’s called the Tartarus Prison Break for obvious reasons. It’s also been called in some circles the Desertion of Yokohama, because of the call Endeavor made.

But it’s also called the Battle of Yokohoma. And it’s ranked alongside the Battle of Kamino as one of the finest acts of modern day heroics. And that’s because of Class 2-A. If it hadn’t been for them showing up, it would have gone down in history as the Massacre of Yokohama.

Like. It kills me that I can’t include the full details of what happened, but there’s just too much to make in a flashback. It’s a fic in and of itself. But it really was the fight that made Class 2-A.

It was the first fight where they were really the only heroes that could be counted on. Granted, they’d had to fight for their lives alone, but this wasn’t just their lives. These were thousands of terrified civilians who all thought they were going to die.

It was the first true test of them as heroes in the world. And they actually rose to the occasion. They didn’t just fight the villains—they realized that they needed to get emergency services working throughout the city if everyone was going to make it. Momo and Tsuyu conducted a mildly hostile take over of the emergency call center so they could coordinate relief. They had fucking Tokoyami and Dark Shadow single-handedly holding the line on the hospital while Kaminari, Shoji, Jiro, and Sato all learned to drive for the Very First Time while commandeering the city’s fucking ambulances. They were fighting and containing villains, performing emergency aid, putting out literal fires, everything. It was the hardest fight of their lives.

There was a hot second where Class 2-A was The Moment. Like. The entire world was watching them during this fight, and they had no fucking idea until it was over. People lost their minds when the first footage made it out of Yokohama of a bunch of teenagers showing up and immediately throwing hands with S-Class villains.

It was global news. Think of the kind of media attention that was received by the search for the Titan, the Tham Luang Cave Rescue, the Suez Canal getting blocked by the Ever Given (rip queen you will always be famous to me), that kind of thing. Class 2-A was fighting for their fucking lives and then found out three days later while they were all still in the hospital that there was a prayer vigil going on in Portugal for them during the battle and CNN had 24 hours live coverage of the fight that had so many viewers it outnumbered the population of Finland. Like what do you even do with that information.

The world expected a massacre. They didn’t expect a bunch of footage of high schoolers kicking the shit out of superpowered murders and personally ferrying the injured to the hospitals they were also defending.

The other part about this fight that really made them permanently part of the public consciousness is that it was not lost on everyone that every single person who responded to that fight did so at the risk of their license.

All of them had provisional licenses, save Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire, all of whom went AWOL from the explicit directives ordering them to respond to the fight against All for One. The operation could not have been less authorized. They had to steal their gear and jimmy the UA fence to even get out. The explicit plan was to steal one of the UA buses and have Bakugou fucking drive them to the fight (he also did not know how to drive but he seemed the most likely of them to break literally every single motor vehicle code to get them there but still be naturally talented at it enough to not kill them) but Izuku told Mirio what bullshit they were up to and Mirio, who was with Tamaki and Nejire when the news broke, immediately decided he would be on that bullshit too and pulled up in his mom van.

In my mind, there were strict rules around provisional licenses and how they could be used, and they broke pretty much all of them to respond to Yokohama. It would have been grounds to revoke their provisionals and permanently bar them from heroics. Lemillion, Suneater, and Nejire could have all lost their licenses for helping them and for going AWOL.

The HPSC fucking fell over themselves to legitimatize the entire operation. They knew they were utterly fucked if they didn’t. These kids already had murals being painted of their faces in other fucking countries. There was a little old lady in Kyoto livestreaming herself working overtime to embroider Iida’s face onto a cushion because that lovely young man saved her darling granddaughter from *checks notes* horrible and painful death directly caused by the failings of the current HPSC administration. There were multiple trending posts online agreeing to fucking riot if those kids got in trouble for this.

Every single actual hero in the immediate vicinity of this disaster had responded to fight a villain who wasn’t actually attacking anyone. And then they fucking lost. They publicly broadcast a message saying Good Luck Champs Because We’re Not Going To Save You. It was an actual PR nightmare that they had a bare chance of salvaging if they just latched onto these kids like an aggressive parasite and that is exactly what they did.

They totally knew. Actually, it was a joint operation coordinated by and between UA and and the HPSC. Why would the kids be in trouble?? They had responded because the HPSC told them to.

UA gave it a week of dead silence and then issued a short statement praising the bravery of their students in a recent HPSC approved mission, and then they never said another word about it. They didn’t have any choice but to go along with the HPSC’s story. If they contradicted them, all of class 2-a would find their licenses pulled by the end of the day, and lord knows they wouldn’t wait for the court of public opinion to work its magic and would just all go out and become fucking vigilantes, because why not. Aizawa has aged 100 years since he got this class. Every single day he thinks of how it was a 50/50 shot between him and Vlad.

No one in the class is fully aware of just how famous they were in the immediate aftermath, because the school bent over backwards to try and shield them from it as much as possible. Like, they have an idea, but none of them saw the full explosion firsthand because of just how hard the school worked to keep it from them. Aizawa confiscated the internet router and told them it was punishment for whatever the fuck they did to the buses (thank god Mirio was just as crazy as them because they were NOT GOOD at hotwiring cars) but really it was to try and insulate them from it a little bit. Like. Japan’s Imperial Family wanted to do an official visit. The White House offered to host them. They received interview requests from every major talk show on the planet. Buzzfeed wanted to do a puppy interview with them.

Right now, Aizawa’s terrified for Midoriya’s graduation, but in the aftermath of that, he was breathing into a paper bag about all of them. Society had sort of latched onto them like they were the last life raft on the titanic. All for One was back, and All Might wasn’t, and the heroes had publicly broadcast a message saying they were useless, but don’t fucking worry, fifteen year old Iida Tenya is on the case. Society will be upheld by Kaminari Denki, currently viral for driving a real life city ambulance one hundred miles per hour down the street while screaming “WEE WOO BITCH.” And don’t forget the pillar that will be Mina Ashido, who rushed over to him earlier that day to show him her extra sparkly pink nails. And if you have a major fight that needs to be won? Don’t fucking worry, just send out bone-breaking boy wonder Midoriya Izuku and his equally reckless brother Toogata Mirio, because their dumbasses managed to take down an S-Class villain team that only All Might could defeat the first time around. Don’t worry about the multi week hospitalization they needed after, because that’s an acceptable burden to put on children.

When Aizawa started this job, he promised himself he would never send a student out to die. Some of them would die. But it would be tragedy, not damnation. He’d have given them their best chance. Part of the reason why he made that promise was because he sort of felt like his teacher sent him out set up to die, and it’s only luck that he made it through his first couple of years.

He has gone to the funeral of every single student he has ever had who did not make it. He goes back to their graves every year.

He was fucking petrified after Yokohama that society would push these kids too far too soon. Every single one of his classes before them had gotten the benefit of being practically unknown their first few years. They didn’t have the world talking about them like they were already the top heroes. He was terrified they wouldn’t have the space to learn and grow when they started.

A lot of teachers would have tried to mine the notoriety of Yokohama to hard launch their students’ careers. Aizawa told Nedzu point blank that he would quit tomorrow if he did not help him quash this thing as much as possible, and nedzu agreed.

This world killed its real heroes. It sucked them dry and left them like All Might, and he just needed fucking time. He needed fucking time to let them be kids and maybe they’d survive.

Izuku ended up being the one who escaped the aftermath of everything the least. His Quirk was too much like All Might’s for the world to let go of him easily.

And then Stain got fucking dogpiled by idaten in the aftermath of the Tartarus prison break and implied he considered Izuku the only true hero in the absence of all might and everyone started asking super inconvenient questions like “how does stain even know you exist” and “no really he called you by your actual legal name how does he even know that” and it just. It didn’t help things. Izuku’s suffering.

So yeah. There was just this absolute collision of a total lack of faith in current heroes combined with a huge swell of public trust in class 2-a that led us to being in the landscape we are now. All of the currently licensed heroes said that they wouldn’t be there to save the public, and then Class 2-A immediately hit back that they would be there. Actually, they’ll risk everything to be there. They’ll die to protect the public and they’ll risk the entire future they had been trying to build and they will fucking be there to save them.

There’s a lot of people that never forgave the heroes for deserting Yokohama. And there’s even more people who have absolute faith in Izuku and his classmates because they didn’t. That’s why the world is watching them so aggressively. These kids are the most trusted heroes in Japan right now.

I wish I could fit in more about what happened, because I love this backstory so much, but 1) some of it absolutely requires POVs like Endeavors, which we won’t get in pez dispenser debris, 2) there’s no one POV that could tell the full story via flashback and 3) it’d just be too long of a divergence. Like. It really is a whole fic of its own. I’d love to write it one day but I probably won’t have the time

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

When Superboy Prime accidentally resurrected Jason Todd, it was described something like the universe righting itself. And, from a purely physical point of view, Jason never died. It brought his body back to it's state before his death, his injuries there but with just enough he could still survive

So, now I'm imagining like. What if there was an au where it was more than Jason just physically "never dying," but it affected memories of those around as well

Joker not remembering killing him, Dick not remembering hearing the news, Batman and Gotham not remembering the 6 months between Jason's death and resurrection, but not thinking much if it

Its all as if Jason never died

[fourswords]

fsa is placed at the end of the four swords subseries timeline and as such ganon canonically never breaks out of the seal of the four sword despite him being able to break out of seals in multiple other games. i like to think that the reason for this is because the four sword just straight up ate him over a long period of time. like from inside the seal

[angeart]

Howwwww did you angst the world tour?? 🎀

this question made me giggle so much oh i'm glad you asked :3c there was so much yummy grian angst in the hc world tour!

it's all about grian and his penchant for destruction. he doesn't even mean to! he's not trying to be pesky; quite the opposite. he's curious but restrained, trying to be good, trying to follow instructions. he's not malicious at all! he's just there to see what people were up to, open and friendly and curious, eager to look and learn and praise. not a bad intention in sight... and yet things seem to break wherever he goes. everything he touches goes wrong.

the guilt churns, acidic and overwhelming, and grian's miserable. why is he like this? he's trying so hard, why is this the only way he can ever be? why can't it stop?

spoilers for grian's world tour video below <3

plantie pointed out to me how, during the tour of scar's train, when grian got rid of scar's arrows—the glitched ones that doc put there—he was so desperate to point it out after scar just glossed over it. as if he wanted to show that he can do something good. he can be helpful, he can fix things instead of just breaking everything.

but then we have all the other things, right? grian can't escape it.

when he was with etho and the mushroom farm exploded, he sums it up in a wretched if confused apology: "i'm so sorry. the two times i tried to use it, i broke it :( and created a water source floating— which i don't know how it happened— and flung the TNT, which i really don't understand—"

they move on, but it's so clear it lingers.

etho isn't blaming him. he's amused and brushes it off and moves along, unbothered, but grian himself can't wrap his head around it. about that propensity to breaking things, even unintentionally. the way nothing is safe around him.

he tells etho: "i can't stop thinking about your mushroom farm. why does everything i touch break, in new and unexpected ways?"

(not to mention when etho's showing him frogger and grian plays, almost instantly etho goes: "uh-oh, the game's broken", with a little huff of laugh. it wasn't exactly tied to anything grian did, but still something i wanted to point out, since grian was there for it <3)

and then grian goes to zedaph, right?

the very first game zedaph shows him. the very first. grian plays the way he was told to, the way he was meant to, and— he breaks it.

zedaph just laughs and moves them on.

(just sprinkling in a side note that zedaph's furnace minigame also didn't seem to work the way it should've—)

by the time grian gets to pearl's, it's starting to be a pattern that's so clearly eating away at him, making him anxious. he doesn't want it to happen again!

and yet.

pearl invites him to play her wordle game, and grian mindlessly goes and pushes the wrong button trying to start it... instantly stepping away with a quiet groan of a dread-filled "...oh-" followed by: "i just— ruined it already."

there's something about the mood switch. the way he seems more restrained and tame, silently upset with himself, trying so hard not to mess things up further. questioning why this is happening again. why he can't stop making it happen.

he walks over to the reset game button and asks, carefully: "can i press reset? is it gonna hurt? 🥺👉👈"

pearl reassures him he can, with a sigh noting that it'll just take a while.

there's an almost hysteric laugh from grian, followed by an exasperated, upset scream. "everything i touch breaks! when i went to e— i broke etho's thing when i went to— not frogger, his— his mushroom farm i— it blew up."

"you blew up his mushroom farm?? how? what did you do?!"

"yeah, i— i broke zed's game, instantly, pretty much, it's—"

"oh my gosh :("

"sorry 🥺"

pearl is quick to reassure him, though. "well, luckily for you, this is— you doing that (pushing the wrong button) does not break the game. it's just, you now have to wait for it to reset."

she makes sure grian knows that he didn't mess up anything terribly here. he didn't break pearl's game. it's okay! it's fine!

and then grian right clicks to open the book, and instead makes bonemeal pop out of a composter.

i think at this point pearl is a little bit taken aback by how wrong everything really seems to be going around grian. she makes sure to say, "it's fine," again, just so grian won't start worrying about it all again. "you're clicking on everything that people do not usually click on today. but it's okay. it's still not broken! it's not broken, it's alright, it's okay— i've got failsaves for people like you."

it's so sweet how she really tries to soothe him— and yet she can't help but let out that last remark.

people like you.

those few words surely lodge in more than all the reassurances. they're like splinter, proving grian right.

eventually, he gets to skizz.

during the tour of skizz's base, skizz shows him a horse statue and starts talking about how he lost his first horse at an event that grian was also a part of. and grian's stomach instantly sinks.

he asks hushedly, a bit confused, trying to remember: "was i there?"

skizz laughs. "you were absolutely there, dude."

which leads grian to ask, uneasily: "did i do it?"

skizz waves his hands, quick to easily reassure that no! that's not it, grian didn't do it!

grian lets out an oh with such palpable relief, and goes on to explain about how, "i remember witnessing it, but sometimes it's hard to disentangle whether i did it or not. coz i tell you what, on this tour i've broken everyone's stuff."

nobody was upset with grian when things broke, but here he is, several hermits down, still unable to leave it to rest. because it's him. it's him who did all of that, somehow, and he didn't mean to, but it doesn't matter. it happened anyway.

and now he can't even tell what is and what isn't his fault anymore.

the guilt is deep rooted, leaving anxious assumptions and dark, jagged precipices. how much did he destroy? what else should he be feeling guilty about? how far does this go?

he keeps breaking things, and it's such a blur that he can no longer tell what is and what isn't his fault.

the tour continues, and he delves into skizz's pyramid. and it's just— it's just a tunnel to swim through. nothing to mess up, besides potentially dying to suffocation, right?

and yet you can hear skizz shrilly exclaim: "oh he's going to end up breaking something!!"

and, (plantie's words: ) grian hearing that and just wondering, is that all i'm good for? is that all i'm known for? is that all i am?

there's no room for doubt; not really. that is what grian does, all the time, whether he wants to or not. he breaks stuff. he just— he doesn't mean to. and this tour is one big show of how powerless he is against it. (how everyone expects it from him anyway.)

despite it all, grian perseveres, trying out skizz's game, stubbornly dedicated and trying to win. (to pass; to have something to be proud of, at least—) and he gets to the powdered snow section.

there, he jumps across to a pathway that he was meant to circle to through the snow instead.

it's not breaking anything, not really. not even the rules. it's not cheating! he's just— he just did something skizz did not expect, but that was entirely possible within the game's design, even if not intended. he exploited it to his advantage; a risky, tricky shortcut.

and yet skizz remarks with a laugh: "this is what grian does! he breaks games!"

no matter what grian does... is that all he'll ever be?

is that all they'll see?

he fails getting through skizz's game, is thanked for play-testing, praises it all, they talk it all away, and...

and then grian goes to tour mumbo's base.

and fails to even die properly to his llama—

and then mumbo shows him his archive machine, and instantly panicks when grian gets curious about it, begging him not to touch anything. and grian says: "your stomach just fell through didn't it?" and after mumbo's immediate agreement, he adds: "and rightfully so. coz, almost everything i've touched on this tour has broken."

there's not a sliver of surprise to mumbo's anxious rushed: "yeah, yeah yeah! please stop now." because, of course things have broken. of course what grian touches is bound to go wrong. of course—

and then mumbo very carefully tells grian what to do with the machine.

grian does as he's told.

mumbo looks up and pauses, a frown crossing his face as he takes it in. he notes that grian probably did it too fast—

(something went wrong)

(something broke)

mumbo says: "i can't believe you come along and every single thing in my base starts [going wrong/breaking/malfunctioning]"

and then grian mysteriously ends up with an extra book from mumbo's machine, much to mumbo's dismay. grian's confused, cogs spinning as he tries to figure out what did he mess up this time to result in this.

it's clear mumbo wants grian away from his machine. it's not safe. (grian isn't safe.)

"maybe just give that to me and maybe just step away from the contraption. and then— maybe just leave me to—"

grian's upset and bewildered voice cuts in: "i didn't do anything wrong this time :(("

he's trying so hard.

he's trying so hard to be good and do things right and not mess anything up.

(it isn't working.)

(it's never bound to work, is it?)

mumbo ushers him away, and ends up showing him another cool invention—an elevator. except the second mumbo hits the button, a creeper shows up and explodes it. (it's midday.) (it wasn't even meant to be there.)

this one isn't grian's fault at all, but with everything that's happened— well, it's easy enough to link it to grian's presence. like a bad luck omen.

apprehensively, grian asks if the elevator broke, and mumbo—a bit bewildered by the reality of it—says that no, it seems to still work. "amazingly," he tacks on, disbelieving.

grian's relieved. "ohh, i thought we were in big trouble there!"

besides himself, mumbo anxiously agrees: "augh. i was like, if every single creation that i show breaks in some fashion, i'm just gonna quit."

because this isn't normal. none of this is, least of all everything at once. it simply doesn't happen.

(not when grian isn't there, anyway.)

mumbo notes that he needs to work on his lighting, and grian nods wisely saying it's a perpetual issue, but the anxiety is digging its talons in now, unrelenting. (what else is going to go bad in grian's presence? what else will he mess up? what else will he break? why is he like this?)

another remark that comes after this is mumbo's nervous: "i've actually just built up the automatic sorter which does this—which you're not gonna touch. we're banned from touching any redstone contraptions!"

and what can grian do but oblige? (but he can at least look, right?)

but does it ever change anything?

does it matter?

-

at the end of the day, the others don't think too much about it.

they all say their part, pass their judgment, wave their hands, dismiss, move on. it doesn't keep them up at night.

... i think it might keep grian up at night.

a cacophonous collection of word snippets, aimed at him or woven around him, digging under his skin until it bleeds. a noose of inescapable fate, a tightening band around his chest that promises he can only ever be one thing:

a vessel for destruction.

it doesn't matter if he wants to be.

shackles and chains and a cosmic inevitability written into his skin, etched into his bones, tangled into his bloodstream. and an ever-rising guilt like stormy sea, far above his head now, drowning him.

(maybe he's not meant to be near other people and their things.)

(maybe he's not meant to touch games that were constructed with so much effort and love and passion poured into them.)

(maybe he shouldn't—)

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bonus screenshots from discord DMs (with extra sprinkles of hmtb mentions):

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bonus hmtb quotes because i kept thinking about it:

He always destroys the things he loves most, after all.

and:

He destroyed everything he touched, and when there was nothing left, he destroyed the only remaining thing: himself.

-

[figureitoutinthemorning]

I would eat this up so hard

WAIT I DIDN’T SEE THIS ASK BEFORE, TUMBLR HID IT FROM ME!!!

But yeah. At some point I will write it!! I have a bunch of little scenes in my head like that.

[justbreakonme]

Most people find listening to the sound of falling rain relaxing.

Most people.

Not him.

He had spent too many nights huddled under awnings and tucked under bridges, unable to avoid the water that soaked him and what little he had to the skin.

Wet shoes and socks meant being barefoot, too numb with cold to notice he was stepping on broken beer bottles along the road. Wet clothes meant that he had only hours to find somewhere, anywhere to get warm or dry before he would get sick, really sick.

He wasn’t there, anymore.

He was safe.

He was home.

But that didn’t mean the sound of falling rain didn’t fill him with a bone deep sense of dread.

She didn’t understand exactly; she knew she’d been lucky enough to never associate the sound of rain with anything other than staying indoors. But she understood enough.

Warm blankets and dry socks found their way into his lap while the whistle of the kettle drowned out at least a little of the noise.

She’d close the curtains and put a movie on, loud enough that he could almost forget until the next crack of thunder would make him jump.

He didn’t hide under storefront umbrellas or overpasses anymore, but he did tuck himself further under her arm, as if out of habit, even now.

They both silently hoped that one day, the rain would be just rain. But until then, they’d wait out the storm together, in dry socks.

[wickershells]

[manygreetingsfriend]

i’m sooooooo normal about the god of war series. so incredibly normal i liked it a normal amount and would be so chill talking about it. don’t worry about the sign

[hickeygender]

me abandoning good taste and relinquishing my critical analysis skills when i return to thinking about fucking star wars whenever i'm experiencing such mental strife that i can only find respite and catharsis in reading about obi-wan experiencing the horrors

[hana-bobo-finch]

i hardly ever mention Glad for some reason. you. you know the one. the cousin. the mouthless one. bellona’s cousin that I have probably only mentioned once but she does actually do stuff in the plot. yknow. i only have concept sketches of her but uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

[skunkes]

[kanene-yaaay]

Random life update let's go!

So, in my house we have an aread w a dinning table outside, next to our yard, and in this place there is ou beloved celling fan that we haven't used in years because it was too weak and the warmth here needed a strong mechanism to dealt with it

Those last months, we notices that a couple of birds we're making a nest on the... idk the name to be honest but its like a small metal bowl right above the fan and we were quite amazed because :D even tho we do have some trees on the yard it's been years since I saw a nest

S o

Recently they hatched.

How did we discovered it?

Because a small baby bird FELL ON THE TABLE OUT OF NOWHERE

Now we're making plans to place a safety nest somewhere below the fan because the ground is very, very hard (pure concrete) and the nest is very small for the two babies (that I've seen until now) and the mother bird. Oh gosh ajvahwvwvsvwjw good morning to all of us I guess