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souurcitrus · 7 months ago

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I want to talk about Kallark, Gladiator, because I like him a lot. Not as person, but more as a cool character.

He's present in the new ep of X-Men 97, don't have many lines and just standing there and being cool most of time. But, seeing Charles discussing with the Shi'ar about their government made me think about Gladiator's role in all of this, specially after he agreed with Charles about 'idealism being a sign of insanity', and because of his past.

I'm gonna try to put it into words as best I can. It's too long and i just want to ramble about one of my favorite underrated character(s).

Gladiator is the praetor, he's known for being extremely loyal to the Empire, to the person that sits on the throne, no matter who it is. Yet, hes known for being honorable and having respect for those who beat him up or have high morals, that includes Lilandra, for her kindness, Rachel, Charles and Cyclops (though we know he would not hesitate to fight them if it meant protecting the empire)

Right, he's too prideful, but that's because his powers comes from his confidence on himself. And what bugs about me in his character is that he's too loyal to this government, and they're the solely reason he's the last one of his species and he knows that what they do is wrong.

In War of Kings: Warriors we see Kallark thinking about his past while under the rule of Vulcan.

The Shi'ar are a imperialist and colonizing government. They invade other planets and force these civilizations to kneel under their ruler, and depending of the planet, these can people will end slaves for the Shi'ar without rights. This happened to Kallark's people.

The strontians are/were a very powerful species that even the Shi'ar were scared of their power, but they're mostly gone now, with Kallark, his son Kubark and his cousin Xenith being the last living ones.

Kallark was born to be a soldier and trained to serve the Shi'ar Empire, together with his peers, other strontians of his age, his close friends. And all of them were loyal to the Shi'ar, wanting to prove themselves worthy of being part of the Imperial Guard.

Of course, Kallark was chosen because he was the most dedicated. The only thing the Shi'ar didn't liked about him is that he would often leave the missions to save his peers.

So they test his loyalty by making him attack his own people and kill them to see which one he would choose, his family or his duty. In the end he ends dooming his people by doing exactly what the Shi'ar asked, and it's fucked up.

The elders even say that they knew that Kallark could never turn his back to his duty, because "he's a good soldier". His family dies knowing he had chosen the Shi'ar and not them, his friends die disappointed on him.

The flashback ends with Kallark wodering if he would still follow Vulcan if it meant the fall of the empire, and Kallark decides that he would, because Vulcan is the Emperor and Kallark is loyal to the throne.

And that's what makes me hate him! He's too loyal. To the wrong cause. He's so loyal to the empire he ends up forgetting things he actually cares about, like Lilandra's love for him and his own son.

He loves them deeply, he cares for his people, his friends from his home planet, his friends from the Imperial Guards, his soldiers, his son. However, he can't let go of being a soldier.

We don't know much about his past or what the Shi'ar Empire did to Strotia, but it's clear they forced and pushed their ideals and rules on the young strontians to turn them into loyal weapons. And after years and years of serving the crown, Kallark can't change.

He's fully aware of the atrocities the royal family, the elders, the people in the power do to other civilizations, yet he stays by their side.

That's why when he agreed with Charles in X-Men 97, and Charles started explaining to them how their system was harmful, I was wondering if Kallark feels guilty. If it even crosses his mind what he had done to his own people.

In the comics, when Lilandra is desposed from the throne and the elders try to kill her, Kallark, who has been working for Vulcan until now, despite hating doing so, stays on Lilandra's side.

He loves her, it's obvious, he respects her and knows she only has the best interests in her heart. He even refers to her as 'Majestrix Lilandra'. He mourns her death later, he goes in a blind rage massacre, he kills everyone in sight and Black Cloak even says 'it would be painful for him to live without her'.

Later in Watxm Annual, an issue that focus on Kubark, his son, he shows how much he cares for him, how much he loves and is proud of Kubark's strength and grow.

When Kubark shows he's unhappy in his situation, being the only strontian in a school where every student must stay with their own species, Kallark doesn't listen to him. Kubark says he wants to be unique and choose his own path, Kallark denies, because it's 'not the way of the empire'.

It reminds me that Kallark, who grew up brainwashed to obey the Shi'ar, to believe that being a soldier is his only choice, expects his son to do the same.

In the beginning, Kubark did want to be a soldier like him, he hated being on Earth because he believed his destiny was to be a warrior. Then he learned he would be lonely if he did and he decided he wanted to be a hero. To be himself. And to choose.

Kubark choose to be loyal to his friends and make his own choices. Kallark did not.

So, if he's willing to change his mind and leave his job as praetor aside to protect someone he loves like he did to Lilandra, why he can't do the same for Kubark?

In the end he allows Kubark to go back to Earth. Later Kubark is back on Shi'ar, so we don't know if he was allowed to stay on earth just until he graduated. But he allows Kubark to go back and be himself, because be loves him.

But he stays the same. He never changes. He keeps making had decisions and committing mistakes and doing bad things for the empire.

Kallark is a Shi'ar by citizenship, but he's a Strontian, he's not considerate a Shi'ar, and he might not even have the same rights the Aerie Shi'ar have. He might be the most loyal and powerful soldier of the Empire, but he's nothing more than a strotian, and nothing more than a soldier. He's a soldier first, then majestor, a father, a friend.

Later when I discovered about his past and started to read about him I just made the same questions all the time: Why he never tried to change the way the Empire works? Why he never changed the bad things that the Empire did?

It would be interesting if the writers acknowledged that (that would be expecting much from Marvel). Kubark shows that he cares for Earth and his friends, that he's genuinely good and wants to do goods things. It would be interesting to see him trying to fight his father's ideals and the Empire.

It will never happen. Both these characters are underrated and were already forgotten by the writers, but I wanted to see it.

#i just want to ramble #too many thoughts #kallark #kubark #gladiator #kid gladiator #praetor gladiator #Shi'ar empire #lilandra neramani #marvel #x men #watxm #x men 97

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azsazz · 9 months ago

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MM Feedback Contd.

Anon Feedback: for the midnight muse feedback: what was missing: for me most of the plot was missing, besides their bickering phase and then them getting together i think we didn't really get much else. also a backstory for the reader character but i understand why we didnt get it here since it's a x reader fic

Yes, backstories will be flushed out for sure, a bit difficult to do like you said because x reader, but i will for sure work on this!

what you didn't like: honestly most of the relationships between them, the talk between the bat boys and az was good but it felt like they just apologized and moved on and that was it. but feyre was a terrible friend with the whole rhys situation and in her talk with reader she basically admitted she was prioritizing rhys over her and reader was just like "it's fine, we're best friends" it made me not like feyre for the rest of the story. cass going to befriend the girls immediately also feels a little weird, like i get the vibes that he didn't really think about it but i think if i was azriel i would be sad about it, of all the people in the world my bestfriend went to befriend the people i don't like? that's low. and then their relationship because it felt like it dragged on where they hated each other to then have them get together after one nice talk and then the story ends after a couple of chapters. there was some tension between them but just sexual so when they got together that's the only thing i felt. the little fight they had was unnecessary, it literally served no purpose and made no sense.

Working on friendship relationships, noted! Will also work on Cass becoming a more gradual friend instead of jumping in headfirst with them behind az's back, good feedback for sure. I will also work on reader x feyre's relationship because they're supposed to be better friends than that, so good thing to point out, thank you!

what you adored: i like the characters. reader is cool but if it gets turned into a book like i said i wish we got more story for her. i like az and even when he was being an asshole it's clear it's mostly because he has a lot on his mind and probably needs a therapist. cassian is funny sometimes but he gives too much frat boy at other times and it's a bit icky because it gives me war flashbacks, i also don't love the himbo characters usually so i think it's really personal preference. feyre was a terrible friend but other than that she was just there i guess. rhys was also giving me the ick too much in the beginning but then towards the end it got better, i like how he went and talked to reader about feyre (almost better than feyre herself did) and he was really good with azriel especially during their talk. lucien ended up not really serving much of a purpose in my opinion but his character is cool

there were def some times where i was writing cass where i was like this is probably way too much, so i'll probably rework some of his liners and such. i didn't really have a backstory for feyre x rhys but i think i do now so that will help give the story and their actions some meat/will be reworking thier characters a bit so that makes more sense as well. yeah i need to figure out what i'm doing with lu. i was trying to allude that at the coffeehouse he was there to show off reader to make one of the barista's jealous, so they were kind of using each other a little bit, reader didn't know her feelings for az at the time so she wasn't hanging out with him to make az jealous but luc kept suggesting coffee because his love interest works there.

what I should remove completely: the fight after they got together and i think how they end up being friends. i don't know cassian just going up to them and suddenly they were all besties was a little weird to me also i get what you were doing with the elevator scene because at that point they only talked if they were locked together but it's just so cliché and it's another one to add to the others like the talk was nice but it being in the elevator was predictable

I did get a lot of feedback about the fight, so this has been added to my feedback notes a lot. i mean, i don't mind the elevator cliche, or a cliche at all, as long as the entire book didn't feel like one...i'll consider it for sure during the rewrite and see how i feel about it, so thank you for the feedback on that!

things that felt off or you felt were unresolved: their relationship because like i said we got them hating each other and then they got together and it just ended. and i think at that point they really didn't know anything about each other so there was even more of a whiplash when they actually start dating immediately because you only see sexual tension before that and then suddenly they're super nice to each other and act like they always liked each other. i think people go into it already liking azriel and knowing they'll end up together so they're just waiting on it and never take it as not being a possibility because its azriel and they're reading fanfics about him because they already like him but if it's a nameless character you need to make people like the characters and like them together and feel the tension between them and like they'd be good together which i dont really get from this fic. most of the plot felt unresolved too because the dad thing never really went anywhere which i guess was the plot besides the romance, also lucien was there and then just wasn't (it also didn't really feel like he liked her much)

will definitely be working on their chemistry and them getting to know each other/building a relationship. i agree with what you're saying that they just got together and didn't know anything about each other so i'll edit that too. az's dad will have more presence in the rewrite as well, as i was writing i kept thinking of ideas (as we can tell) so that's why they weren't predated in the story etc, so i will def fill those holes in as well!

also this might just be my opinion but the idea for her tattoo is so bad im sorry, i had to stop when i read it and it's her first tattoo as well. just the thought of it looks ugly to me but even the meaning is off for me... maybe if you want to keep the hand idea let him get it because he's already so heavily tattooed that the big two detailed hands piece might kind of blend in but for her first tattoo let him get her something else, either something meaningless and pretty (i mean she's in art school i know she has to have better ideas) or something important for her but not necessarily a relationship tattoo not even a year into their relationship.

i'm not going to lie, i struggled so hard with what to give her a tattoo of and i think that's also why i didn't actually add it into the story is because i had no idea what to do. i do agree that she shouldn't have gotten that when they've only been together for not that long, and it is cringey but i felt like it made sense at the time. i will work on her tattoo ideas tho

also (and i might be talking out of my ass) but if his injury only happened a year ago i'm not sure he'd be even drawing already even if shaky, you'd have to do some research there but i think it wouldn't be bad if you pushed it back a little further in the past

this is also a fair point, i'm also not sure, but if i ever go to publish it will be a different injury so i will for sure do some research about that when i go to describe it! and yeah, i can totally move it a bit further into the past like you said :)

Thank you for the feedback this is a lot to work with here, so thank you for reading and taking the time to send all of this back to me!! 💙

#midnight muse #midnight muse feedback

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solar-halos · 10 months ago

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sorry i’m gonna talk some more about annie/johanna

first of all, i just think finnick and johanna would be so different as partners. finnick and annie give me the vibe as that one tweet that’s like “i don’t have any morals or opinions if a woman says something is right then it is” “um well maybe you should have morals and opinions” “you’re right i should”

in all seriousness, i think that even when they do fight finnick doesn’t even yell and he’s insanely good at communicating / compromising, which would be good skills for the capitol but also i think he’s just not a very intense person in the first place and that he HATES conflict. and then this is also based on my hcs of annie, but i imagine that she cannot handle conflict well and she struggles to compromise on something even she agrees with the compromise just bc she’s so pissed off, and that johanna is the exact same way. so when she and johanna fight, they fight. like we already know that johanna will say anything even if it upsets everyone (and she canonically did upset annie into having a flashback of some sort) so i think whenever they argue it’s a days long affair and that they only rlly try to figure out how to be more healthy about it when odesta’s son is like “ma where’s johanna i wanna see her” and since annie’s not gonna fill him in on all the tea she’s like “hm. we’re gonna have to work something out”

also it’s really interesting to think about johanna being more sensitive. i think there’s a fine line between censoring her thoughts (“it’s part of my therapy!” she ate) and just being more careful about saying things that are going to trigger annie, and that’s a balance johanna is going to try so hard to figure out. and it’s probably gonna be rlly hard bc when was the last time she had to figure something out for someone she cares abt, and when was the last time she had the luxury to care about someone, and will annie leave her if she messes up but it’s genuinely just a mistake and she’s consistently trying?

i do think that’s all gonna be resolved before they’re an actual couple, which is also something i wanted to talk abt. pre-canon i imagine they met at johanna’s victory tour and johanna lowkey had a small crush on her but also johanna has had a small crush on everybody at one point in time (in a “to cure the boredom” way lmao) so she doesn’t rlly think too much of it. just that when annie laughs it makes her wanna laugh too. and that when annie makes jokes johanna is like “why isn’t anyone laughing she’s literally a comedic genius.” i personally don’t understand this concept but sometimes when my friends enter relationships they’re like “omg i had a crush on them all throughout hs.” and they obviously don’t mean a full on consistent crush, just something that came and went in varying degrees, and i can totally see that with johanna. but also being a mentor + the quell + her morphling addiction + finnick’s death probably wouldn’t have given her much time to rlly think about it, so she doesn’t rlly realize how bad she has it until the war is over and they’re raising odesta’s kid

speaking of odesta’s kid! as soon as he’s born she immediately loves + wants to protect him + gets sick at the thought of never seeing him again and she’s just like “it’s just bc he’s a baby everyone feels that way abt babies.” which true but she also co-parents without any hesitation and when annie is like “i don’t want u to feel pressured to take care of him just bc we’re living together” johanna is like what the fuck are you talking about

oh and also i think annie is fully capable of being insensitive to johanna’s needs too, so it’s a two way street. like with her morphling addiction in particular, annie would probably continually ask her why she can’t just stop and johanna is so fed up with having to explain that it doesn’t work that way but they work thru it obviously

i think this is it. tbh this was more like an outline of how their relationship would work than actual hcs but i think there’s something beautiful about johanna learning how to be more loving and gentle without losing her bite. like she’ll still bully annie but she’d do it so lovingly and without actually hurting any feelings

oh i guess one more thing that’s not rlly a hc or anything just something silly i’ve been fretting abt: what if johanna and annie get together and they love each other soso much and then finnick shows up like “actually i lived and i’ve been finding my way to u all this time!!” like omg what would happen? my knee jerk reaction is odesta pt 2 but if i think abt it for more than a second it’s like. wow. annie and johanna went thru all these trials and tribulations and have grown into each other and made each other their home so it would be so fucked up if annie just fuckin left 😭😭 also annie and finnick wouldn’t be on the same pg anymore so if they even had a chance of getting back together they’d have to refamiliarize themselves w each other

but again that’s a silly worry bc if finnick hasnt returned in years he’s obviously not gonna show up when annie and johanna are happy and healthy and in love. that would be terrible timing and also this hinges on the fact that he most definitely didn’t get blown the fuck up when he obviously did. anyway i’m actually done now

#long post #very long #annie cresta #johanna mason

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polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 1 year ago

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don't wait for tumblr to give u more tags. go off about tony and steve and zola pls i am humbly requesting

As a part of my ongoing war on my ask box this is a very old post regarding a tumblr tag essay i made forever ago. i half answered this ask when it came in and then forgot to finish. without further ado:

Anon is talking about this post about Steve and Tony’s relationship. I HIGHLY recommend the original post it's great but i copied the original tags essay below since it's been so long since the ask arrived.

#I feel like anyone who writes Tony stark for marvel should have to go watch bojack horseman first as like a mandatory assignment#because that show understood the premise of Tony stark better than any MCU writer ever has and it wasn’t even writing for tony stark#in sum bojack horseman follows the titular bojack who is a washed up 90s sitcom television star#bojack himself is extremely self destructive and the show follows him as his selfish and egotistical tendencies erode at his relationships#However bojack himself is an extremely sympathetic character. his harmful acts are all tied very directly to the trauma of his life#he’s a survivor of generational abuse whose own substance abuse problems stem from the fact that he was in such a neglectful environment#that he had started drinking at an INCREDIBLY young age got himself sober only to relapse due to a spiked drink after fame

#this sympathic is increased by the fact that he does geninuinely love and care for his friends and often goes to extreme lengths to show it#but what the show understands that MCU writers dont is that his tragic past doesn’t excuse the harm or pain he causes and the show goes to#LABORIOUS extents to emphasize the consequences and suffering his actions cause in his attempt towards making amends#it is FASINCATING to me that MCU just fails to grasp this because it’s really the core of Tony’s character. his story is one of redemption#and regret. but what it never seemed to get is that requires recognition of wrongs and change and his relationship with steve is a prime ex.#when they meet tony is 40+ and Steve is 23-25. steve has been awake from world war 2 for less than 2 weeks everyone he loves is dead and hes#visibly haunted by his time in the ice. his ptsd flashbacks to crashing the plane is how his character is introduced. Tony spends the time

#calling him ‘capsicle’ and talking about how much he can’t stand steve. the narrative plays it off as a gaff of little consequence but#practically speaking that’s INSANE. like can you imagine you’re a traumatized war vet who got out of a coma 2 months ago and woke up to#discover everyone you ever loved is dead and this stranger twice your age at your new work nicknames you coma boy and hates your guts bc of#his daddy issues? like Tony in avengers is borderline cruel but the narrative and the fandom never acknowledge it. it’s like removing the#laugh track on a scene from one of those old sitcoms and realizing how mean it is. and while we can fully acknowledge that Howard hurt Tony#that doesn’t make it Steve’s fault and doesn’t give Tony the license to take it out on him. like at the end of the day your healing is your#responsibility and the MCU fails to grasp that with Tony. honestly it does a disservice to the depth of his character b/c Tony should have#already grown past this by the time of Avengers. he had already gone through iron man 2 and grappled somewhat with his relationship w howard#while that doesn’t mean he’s healed yet it does mean that his character needs to learn to grow past it or he risks stagnation. mcu just#happily embraced stagnation and it made the character worse for it. Theres a scene in the comics where Tony is the first to reach out to#Steve post ice. he takes him to the air&space museum and welcomes him to the future. THATS the growth we want. Bc fundamentally even if we

#sympathize for Tony’s abuse by Howard lashing out at someone who was functionally dead at the time of ur dads mistakes is a very juvenile#mindset. /growth/ is deciding to be better than the person who hurt you and the MCUs obsession with blaming Steve for howard cut that off#CW would have been SO MUCH MORE COMPELLING if Tony had formed a relationship with Steve bc Steve would be torn between past and present but#instead Tony is saying how much he hated Steve during the fucking movie and Steve’s taking it with grace. like you’re 50 man you gotta work#past this at some point. out of tags but I have Opinions about Tony and actually zola too but we won’t get there give me more tags tumblr

Fundamentally, my issue with Tony and how he's written for the MCU is that he has the potential for one of greatest redemption arcs ever and the writers are fucking allergic to giving it to him, and his dynamic with Steve is a a prime example of it. How poorly Steve's relationship with Tony was mishandled is a pretty perfect case study as to how Tony as a character was mishandled as a whole.

As stated in the Tumblr Tags Essay above, by the time Steve came on the scene, Tony should have already grown past his hate for Steve. To be clear, that is not saying he should have gotten over Howard or any harm that he suffered as a result of his. Howard was his parent who was, to some degree, at least emotionally neglectful, if not abusive. Healing and learning helping coping mechanisms does not demand you forgive your abuser.

But Steve was never his abuser. He's a 20-something year old guy who has been trapped in a block of ice for Tony's entire life and who woke up two weeks ago to find out that everyone he ever loved is dead or suffering from alzheimer's and that his sacrifice was for nothing because he was just told the thing he drove a fucking plane into the fucking arctic over is Back Again Because We Learned Nothing.

And the thing is that the realization that "This man can hold literally no complicity in my abuser because he was frozen in the Arctic Circle the entire time" requires a level of emotional maturity you generally achieve at the age of thirteen or so. Tony is fucking fifty. Mentally, he's over twice Steve's age. At absolute best, the way Tony treats Steve from the outset is immature and more accurately it's downright cruel. Voluntarily killing himself by driving a plane into ice only to wake up and discover that he has lost everyone he ever loved is undoubtedly one of the most traumatic things that has ever happened to steve, and he just woke up from it. He is two weeks out from this. He's actively having flashbacks of what happened right before Tony starts cracking jokes about it. It'd be like if Steve walked up to Tony right after he got back from Afghanistan and called him Waterboarding Boy and everyone treated it like it was a cutesy character trait.

That's one of the most egregious parts of how Tony's character is written--things that are objectively things that need to be addressed in his character arc area treated like acceptable and borderline justified quirks in his personality. Tony's relationship with his father is one of the cornerstones of his backstory and who he became. While he doesn't have to forgive his father on the road to recovery, he does have to realize when he's using it as an excuse to hurt others and stop it.

That's also something he never does, and one of the reasons why i think that the writers for him need to watch Bojack horseman. In the same movie he's claiming to that he was Steve's friend, he's still saying to his face how much he fucking hated him over things that happened when Steve was supposed to have martyred himself to save the world.

There's multiple parts of Tony's character that could have formed the basis of an amazing character arc if he grew and improved from them, but the narrative refused to even recognize them as problems, let alone have him overcome them, and his relationship with Steve is a perfect example of it. The writer's refusal to recognize that brings down the quality of his entire arc and cheapens him as a character.

If Tony had been allowed to recognize that Steve was not to blame for his father, accepted it, and given a man half his age who just lost everything a lifeline, that would have shown an amazing amount of growth. Instead, they left him as immature and cruel. It's a shame and an insult to the potential of his character, and it's a mistake that they repeat again and again. Tony was supposed to be completely against developing weapons for others, but he canonically helped build a major part of Project Insight. Tony's entire stance in Civil War was meant to show that he had accepted that he made mistakes and that he needed to be held accountable for his actions, but then he went and unilaterally built EDITH, whose existence violates multiple international treaties including the Accords and had so few safety precautions that a teenaged boy was able to accidentally call out a missile strike on his teenaged classmate. He's in a movie where he's driven by his guilt for causing the death of someone's college-aged son, and in that same movie he blackmails a high-school-aged boy to join in on a fight he knows nothing about, that goes directly against his interests, and could get him killed even if he was certain that Team Cap wouldn't use lethal force. Rhodey got paralyzed from the waist down from friendly fire. Tony had a moment in the same fight where he had reason to fear that Peter had been injured if not killed.

Ultimately, Tony's entire character is built on a foundation of repentance and growth. That's why he has so much potential and why he's so compelling. The fact that his writers were unable to recognize when he even needed to repent, let alone allow him to grow, was honestly insulting to what he could have been.

Zola:

The reference to Zola is actually more of a response to fandom’s response to Zola as a whole than the actual specific person who made the comment.

Overall, the majority of fandom response that I've seen just seemed to be sort of besides the point? The thing about Armin Zola working for SHIELD is that I personally have only seen discussion about this in context of talking about how Peggy and Howard are Bad or talking about how steve would feel betrayed when he discovered it. To be honest most of the discourse I’ve seen has just been about hating Peggy Carter and using this as a sledgehammer in that discussion.

It’s not that I disagree with that reading of it—like, I do think Steve felt betrayed by the realization that Zola was recruited in the end, and I think it’s bad to have recruited literal Nazis—but I do think that fandom elevated the most tangential point of it to the detriment of its entire narrative purpose. I've only ever personally seen it used in character discourse and shipping wars--which like, anyone can draw on any plot point they so choose while participating in fandom. But Zola's recruitment was the thematic core of Winter Soldier, and it always seemed kinda weird to me that it was treated as a personal defect in Howard and Peggy when it was the entire argument of the movie and one of the best social commentaries that the MCU ever made.

Zola gives what I think is one of the better MCU villain speeches in the bunker about how Hydra recovered after the war. He states that they realized that taking the freedom of the world by force only galvanised people against them. It led to their own downfall. But he explains that Hydra realized that the people of the world would freely give away their own rights and freedoms if you made them comfortable. If you say you’re doing it for their own safety and comfort, then they’ll effectively look the other way while Hydra seizes control of the world. And that entire monologue is bolstered by the fact that that is exactly what happened in Zola’s case.

Zola was brought into SHIELD as a part of operation paperclip. Operation Paperclip was a post-war initiative by the United States government to recruit key Nazi scientists into United States scientific development. This entire initiative was brought about in response to the Cold War arm’s race and it was justified on the basis of dire national security need. Both America and the Soviet Union were EXTREMELY CONCERNED about losing the cold war. As a result, they were willing to take pretty much any strategic advantage they could, including After, President Truman, who gave the final go-ahead for the initiative, said that "this had to be done and was done."

Even after it became public knowledge, it was defended as more of a necessary evil and the cost of the practicalities of governance than a world power welcoming war criminals with open arms. Multiple participants have been linked to human experimentation, slave labor factories, etc, though none were ever formally found guilty of anything--which may be because the US aggressively whitewashed their pasts and then went so far as to help relocate one of the members of the initiative to Argentina.

This was, again, all a part of the Cold War arms race with the USSR--who had an identical program going at the same time, Operation Osoaviakhim.

En arguendo, let's just assume that all of this was done with the best possible intentions and execution. The nominal rationale was the Cold War. While analyzing the Red Scare and the entire Cold War period would take way too long, I think a solid premise we can agree on is that nuclear war is bad. It would have been disastrous for anyone alive if the Cold War had escalated, and recruiting top scientists from the Nazi regime 1) kept the USSR from doing it instead, which they were actively doing, and 2) helped prevent strategic advantage in one country or another that may have led to an escalation. Now, I'm not a historian, and all of these premises can naturally be debated, but these were the like, best faith premises that world leaders had at the time. If you want a nuclear deterrent, you need the biggest stick.

The thing is that, if you assume these premises as genuine for the sake of the argument, the absolute best this leaves you with is doing a very bad thing for a very important government purpose. You're supposedly preventing nuclear war, but you're doing so at the cost of justice for all the people who suffered at the hands of these people, and the risk of future harm that they may cause.

Which, thematically, is the core of the Winter Soldier.

I've usually seen Zola's recruitment discussed in terms of Peggy or Howard making the decision to let him in, when in reality, they probably didn't make the call themselves so much as become complicit in it later. Zola was captured and recruited right at the end of CA:FA (he later clocks this at 1945) but Peggy and Howard didn't even have an organization at that point, let alone the power to recruit a head Nazi scientist. This was two decades before SHIELD was ever founded, and if we take the Agent Carter series as binding canon, at the time of Zola's transition into American government would, Peggy had so little sway that she couldn't even get anyone to listen to her, let alone recruit a nazi scientist, and Howard was potentially on the run and definitely not involved in any formal governmental decision making. Even if you assume that they were somehow in charge of a government agency at the time of Zola's recruitment, the actual recruitment and function of Operation Paperclip was conducted by independent agencies (Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency and the Counterintelligence Corps) that Peggy and Howard weren't a part of, and the person who made the call for Operation Paperclip itself was The Literal President Of The United States. Whatever way you cut it, Peggy and Howard probably had nothing to do with Zola's initial recruitment--what most likely happened was that two decades passed (the time between Zola's recruitment and SHIELD's founding) and when resources were being allocated some big-shot in the overseeing body was like Yeah You Do Weird Stuff? We Got A Guy Who's Been Doing Weird Stuff For Us For Like Twenty Years and then when Peggy and Howard saw him they were like Oh Its This Motherfucker.

To be clear, this is not at all to absolve howard and peggy for working with a guy they knew did literal human experimentation because he did it on one of their best friends. But this is to more clearly reframe it from Decision They Personally Made to The Ways Being At A Certain Level Of Government Makes You Complicit With Horrible Things, which perfectly encapsulates the heart of the movie.

At the open of the movie, Steve is visibly on a fucking ledge with SHIELD. Fuck, Fury and Nat spend most of the opening trying to keep him from flying the coop. And it's because Steve for the very first time has to grapple with the consequences of being an active participant in a governmental body.

Straight up--Steve spent the entire war going AWOL. His entire military career was spent doing what he wanted and flipping his superior officers the bird. The man was a terrible fucking soldier but by the time anyone figured it out they had already given him a comic book and the Medal of Honor and the man could bench press a tank it was simply too late. Then, he got encased in ice for 70 years, woke up, had two weeks of fun future integration activities like Not Getting Therapy For His Problems and Looking At Pictures Of His Dead Friends, got tapped in because they fucked up with the exact thing he lost everything to stop, immediately went AWOL again, almost died again, went on a roadtrip of self discovery, and at some point between then and CAWS started working as one of the main STRIKE members of SHIELD. This is likely his first time having to ever deal with the realities of being a hand of the government.

One of the most insidious things about high-level government work is there's rarely some Main Guy sitting behind a desk signing Evil Decrees and responsible for everything. Power is allocated and things get messy very quickly.

Take Ghost for example. One of SHIELD'S Main Guys falls out with another Guy, smears his name, which makes the Ex-Guy so desperate that he takes unnecessary risks in his experiments that predictably blow up in his face and leads to his young daughter having a debilitating power that results in her uncontrollably phasing through objects. Another Guy tries to do the right thing and help her, but Other Main Guys think "This kid would make a GREAT assassin" and leverage a cure for her debilitating health condition into turning her into a forced operative. This health condition starts to kill her, but the Main Guys were so happy with their new forced assassin that they never looked for a cure to begin with and was going to use her until she died. She goes rather reasonably goes AWOL, and in her attempts to cure herself, she's willing to do just about anything to get cured, and including contemplating kidnapping Scott's daughter as an option.

Steve obviously wasn't called in to help with that (he was AWOL himself at that point) but assume he was--he would only get pulled into this mess at the very end when all the damage is done and there's a highly unstable assassin kidnapping little girls. SHIELD was at fault for every horrible thing that happened to this person. He has a strong sense of justice, and he'd likely to be furious to find out that SHIELD took an orphanged child and abused their incredibly painful and terminal medical condition, which was indirectly caused by them, in order to force them into becoming a highly skilled operative.

But there isn't just one person that he'd be able to find and blame for what happened with this--culpability was stretched out over Multiple Main Guys who made bad decisions, a lot of Lower Guys who built the suit, trained her, handled her in the field, and experimented on her to learn her limits, many of whom likely didn't even work for the organization any more.

Who do you go after for that? The Main Guy who smeared her dad? But he didn't have anything to do with the assassin business or the actual accident. The Main Guys who made the calls for the assassination thing? Better candidates, but is it that simple? What about the guys who just get orders every day and have no decision making authority, who were handed a little girl who was vulnerable and in pain and told to train her to kill? What about the ones making a child-sized tactical suit with no details about what was going on but who had reason enough to suspect it wasn't all good? They were just following orders, but so were Nazis working the camps.

How do you go after people for that? Fire them? It's been decades. Most are probably retired. And that's a pretty lame punishment for what they did. He doesn't make the calls for legal action, they definitely have qualified immunity for their decisions, and there's a whole host of problems with proving anything.

But, on the flip side, what does he do about Ghost? what happened to her is terrible, but if she had kidnapped Cassie Lang, he couldn't exactly sit on his hands and let it happen no matter the justification. There's a very good chance he has to stop her and become another link in a chain of what's been a lifetime of abuse. Things get messy when you're just a cog in the machine of a sprawling agency that has a lot of power to abuse.

While we don't know what Steve's been doing while he worked for SHIELD, we do know that it pissed him off to high heavens. The very first thing we see him doing for SHIELD is recapturing the off-course Lemurian Star from pirates, and he is the exact opposite of a dutiful soldier during it. He doesn't just salute and follow his orders without question--one of the first lines of his mouth is calling them out for lying about the ship being in those waters because it was off-course. He's like "Oh, so it's not off course, it's trespassing" to which Nat says "I'm sure they had a good reason" and Steve replies "I'm getting a little tired of being Fury's janitor."

He's saving the hostages, and then all of a sudden he finds Natasha in the control room downloading the drive and realizes that this was about SHIELD's data to begin with but no one clued him in on that fact. He's pissed because the hostages could have died, which is a fact he immediately goes after Fury about.

There is so much character jammed into those few minutes of screen time. This is visibly an old argument--at one point, Fury says to him "It's damn near getting past time for you to get with the program, Cap" to which Steve tells him not to hold his breath. Steve doesn't like or approve of a lot of SHIELD's actions, but he's called in after all the bad things they did went to shit. Like, what's he going to do--say, sorry, the Lemurian Star was obviously Up To Some Shit that I don't want to be a part of, RIP to the hostages but I'm just going to let them get shot in the head? He's the janitor and he's sick of getting called into SHIELD fucking something up through their own immoral actions and calling him to pull their ass out of the fire. He spends the entire first half of the movie on the verge of flying the coop entirely, and Nat and Fury visibly know it and are trying to get him off the ledge in every interaction they have on screen with him--which directly contributes to the fact that Steve doesn't trust either of them for the first half of the movie.

It also is likely the motivator behind why he does ultimately trust Sam. Steve spends the first half of the movie getting Managed. He's increasingly pissed and distrustful of SHIELD and its agents, and he's got good reason to be--Nat and Fury hide things from him and keep trying to persuade him to stick with the program (to be clear Nat's (and to a somewhat lesser extent Fury's) own actions and whether any culpability for things like project insight could possibly be imputed to her has to be analyzed under an entirely different lens due to the difference in her personal history and character type, but this is already way too long to tackle that here. this isn't actually meant to assign blame to her, but more to analyze the likely results on steve). Fury takes him for a tour of his Fascist Death Machine and tells him that's what the world needs. The neighbor he was growing increasingly intimate with was a SHIELD agent who lied to him about her name and the fact that she was spying on him. At the end of the day, the majority of the of the early movie is spent with his desires and principles are treated as secondary and unwanted complications to the fact that they really need him to keep throwing that shield on SHIELD's behalf (whether this is actually what nat and fury specifically are trying to do is, again, a separate analysis we don't have time for, this is just to go to how it likely affects and appears to Steve).

Sam, meanwhile, is beautiful and charming is the only one who openly expresses a genuine concern for Steve as a person and not steve as a solider. Sam spends the entire first half of the movie reaching out to someone in a position he's been in himself and trying to get him help. his entire first meeting with Steve is defined by him trying to help a fellow Vet recover from war. he tries to gauge where Steve's at with the future, invites him to the VA, and packages it in a easily-seen-through excuse that gives them both plausible deniability--Steve can come by and get the help he needs not as Captain America The Man The Myth The Legend Who Is Really Fucking Struggling, but as Steve the guy helping Sam impress the girl at the front desk.

When he comes to the VA, Sam has the direct opposite response that everyone else in the movie has to Steve questioning his place in SHIELD and in government work--he's like "Quit. Quit now. Be free and beautiful like me. become an ultimate fighter or whatever the fuck you want." He doesn't give two shits about what the world will do without Captain America keeping it safe--he just cares about what Steve needs.

This all goes to a greater analysis about how Sam is beautiful and charming the perfect parallel to Steve, the only one who could possibly have taken up his shield, and actually wrong in that line he says about how he does what Steve does but slower because he consistently decides to do the right thing before Steve is another analysis that would go too far off the point to get into. The point being is that Sam exists in the narrative as the direct opposite and alternative to the reality fury and nat offers Steve. Steve spends the beginning of the movie with Nat and Fury seemingly sacrificing the means for the end, but there's Sam, beautiful and charming someone who made the same decision he's now faced with, being like "fuck it. sometimes you have to walk."

Steve's entire struggle about his position with SHIELD reaches its climax when he first finds out the truth of Project Insight.

For the avoidance of any doubt, SHIELD secretly being infiltrated by HYDRA has no effect on how wrong Project Insight was from the start--it just emphasized how horrifically wrong it could go. But "Space Super Death Weapon That Can Immediately Kill Dangers To National Security" is a bad idea no matter who is in charge of it. First off, Steve is right--punishment follows the crime. No government has a crystal fucking ball and anyone who justifies things on the basis of "taking out threats ahead of time" is talking out their ass. to be clear, i'm not saying you need to wait for someone to be on a plane and flying at the twin towers to stop a terrorist attack--in law, we have a designated level of "closeness" that lets us say "yeah you were totally actually doing what we don't want you doing" at which point you can charge them with attempt, and often a lot of the earlier steps leading up to the Big Harmful Thing are actual crimes you can intervene with.

Project Insight was the flagship of of a "quantum surge in threat analysis." It did exactly what it was designed to do: it took out threats before they became threats. The only difference between SHIELD being at the helm and HYDRA is who gets defined as a threat. HYDRA would have defined that as anyone from a high school valedictorian in Iowa to Stephen Strange, but it's not any better if SHIELD's defining that as some random kid in Afghanistan who shows whatever traits show a risk for one day becoming a combatant.

And yet, steve's the only one in the movie who says this. We don't actually know how much Nat knows about Project insight itself, but Fury is fully aware and a participant in it, and Tony Stark apparently took one look at the thing and said "your engines are shit. i'll improve them." Steve takes one look at them and calls it fascist bullshit.

At the end of the day, you can never justify shit like this under the assumption that the people controlling it will use it for the best, because you cannot trust the people controlling it. Yeah, Project Insight was probably pitched with being used against the worst threats. Dangers to public safety, terrorists, that kind of thing. Do you want to know who else was considered a danger to public safety? MLK, who the FBI fucking murdered. The people who define threats to national security are the ones who have the same incentive to maintain the status quo in an unjust world. Even if we assume Project Insight was made to stop the next 9/11, we also have to assume that at least some of the strikes it would have carried out under not-HYDRA control would have been for the wrong reasons.

What the fuck does all of this this have to do with Zola?

Operation Paperclip and Peggy and Howard's decisions within it directly mirrors Project Insight and Fury's decisions within it, directly mirrors Steve's journey and central conflict over the course of the film, and directly contrasts with the alternative Sam poses within it.

CA:WS at its thematic core, says that initiatives that sacrifice justice for claims of national security and public safety are exactly what robs us of our rights and freedoms and ultimately endangers us all. It's not even subtle--Zola says it out loud in his evil villain speech. but operating at a high level in a government agency puts you in a position where you're meant to make that decision again and again, even if we assume you have the best of intentions.

Peggy and Howard were people who believed that they had to make the hard decisions to save the world. They were handed a decision where perception of culpability was obscured by how distributed out the blame was, and the direct public benefit to national security was posed to be overwhelmingly good. It leads to SHIELD's infiltration. Project Insight went through on the exact same reasoning. Fury, Maria Hill, possibly Nat, and Tony (off-screen) all do the exact same thing and justify the means by the end, and it leads to the helicarriers being made.

Steve spends the movie being told, explicitly, to "get with the program" and start making the same decisions. His central conflict is being someone on the inside of this club, being told that he needs to start understand what keeping the world safe demands, and his journey leads to him refusing to do it. The climax of the movie is a character so minor that we never learn his name refusing to launch the helicarriers with a gun pointed at his head, even though the complicity he carried in it would have been just as attenuated as Steve's was as SHIELD's janitor. And all throughout it, there's Sam, someone who left the military explicitly because he couldn't follow the rules he was being given anymore.

Peggy and Howard's decision to go along with Zola in Operation Paperclip is a direct parallel of the decisions Fury made with Project Insight and the decisions Steve ultimately refuses to make himself. Making Peggy and Howard complicit in what let in Arnim Zola encapsulates the entire core argument of CA:WS and it's so weird to me that I've only ever seen it discussed in shipping wars and discourse as to whether a Character Is Bad.

Peggy and Howard, ultimately, were members of a governmental task force who made the Hard Decisions for The Public Good. As an inherent part of that role, they did bad things. Unjust things. They undoubtedly saved the world multiple times over as a part of their tenure as the head of SHIELD, but it would be absolute naivety to assume that anyone in that position didn't become complicit in terrible fucking things. It's the direct product of their positions in the government, and it's exactly what leads to Steve's position in Civil War. it is absolutely bonkers to me how people watched Winter Solider and then reacted to Steve's opposition to the Accords like Local Imperialist Military Boy Refuses To Listen To Anyone Else. Steve just had a masterclass in how people in the government make decisions that sacrifice justice up to and including people he once trusted with his life. Of course he didn't fucking trust General Human Experimentation And I Consider Bruce Banner The Property Of The United States Military with his every action as Captain America. He had just learned that he couldn't even trust Peggy and Howard with it.

#this became very long #and you know what #if i want to say the same thing in the tags of some unsuspecting person's post then that's my right #more tags when #more tags NOW

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tazzertopia · 1 year ago

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my thoughts on the hxh phantom rouge movie

pls do not take this too seriously i just wanna talk about things i noticed when watching it while sleep deprived last night 😊👍😊👍

🚨YAPPER ALERT🚨

-ik kurapika defo would’ve mentioned him at some point to gon and killua but how the fuck did they recognise (puppet) uvogin… like no hesitation….. did kurapika show them a picture or what

-why was kurapika so badly dumbed down and ooc in the movie it actually pissed me off (not really) like one of the main plot points is that the puppet guy (insufferable prick who I’ll get to later) used dead pairo to steal kurapika’s eyes but the issue is that he used pairo’s child self to lure him in like…. 🤨 based on the flashbacks i’m assuming kurapika was around 11-12 when the kurta clan massacre happened and pairo was probably either the same age or a year or two younger (i am not looking this up due to i can’t be bothered) so how the fuck did kurapika not question why his supposedly alive friend hadn’t aged a day in about five years

-especially as kurapika is mostly pretty level headed and logical so how would he not figure that out

-the timeline was confusing as hell to me bc based on uvo and pakunoda being dead in the movie and killua still having illumi’s manipulation needle i’d assume it’s anywhere between the end of the york new arc to the end of the greed island arc but thanks to the power scaling it’s really hard to tell ????????? like somehow gon and killua were basically unscathed after getting directly hit by uvo (the physically strongest member of the troupe) but basically just attacked by combining their nen and overall didn’t seem that strong like how strong are they meant to be by this point

-the townspeople in this movie are coming out on top in the idgaf war because the way none of them reacted to uvo demolishing a hospital… like no commotion. NADA. they just minded their business the entire movie (inspirational tbh)

-but also why was the hospital so desolate and why was kurapika the only one there

-the way only gon, killua and the blonde girl reacted to uvo fucking up the hospital while kurapika remained unbothered

-finally gonna talk about that ugly mf omokage

-he looks like a toxic love interest from an early 2000s dark fantasy harem anime

-like why was he in a completely different art style

-his ability soul doll or whatever it’s called is stupid op bc you’re telling me he can just create puppets of anyone he wants with their exact strength just like that ???????

-also what is the criteria for creating the puppets bc i swear they never explain how he’s able to create them

-like does he need their hair or what

-still confused on how kurapika used chain jail on him considering he isn’t a spider anymore (no clue how the limitations to his power were so flexible) #plotconvenience

-illumi looked uglier than usual in this movie especially at the beginning when he killed those kids

-hisoka’s hair being more orange than red also pissed me off

-we got one shalnark line in the movie tho 😍😍😍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍 crumbs

-speaking of crumbs for a movie about the phantom troupe they had barely any screen time

-like barely even five minutes 💔

-lastly just wanna say how fuxking ugly the blonde girl’s puppet was i hate it so much

-lastly lastly ik i posted this already but the cgi fish made me giggle bc they look so out of place (ik i couldn’t do any better i just found them funny tee hee)

that’s it hope you enjoyed reading my complaints about a cash-grab anime movie 💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕😜😜😜😜 can’t wait to watch the last mission tonight so i can complain about it tomorrow 💙 that’s what you get when you’re desperate for hxh content lols but like i said pls don’t take this too seriously okay mwah xoxoxo

#hunter x hunter #hxh #phantom rouge #phantom troupe #gon freecss #killua zoldyck #kurapika #leorio #this movie sucked ass but it’s fine #i know i’m a loser for writing a whole complaint post about it #basically just brain dumping so this won’t make sense #really don’t want to be known as the one who complains about hxh movies #but it’s fine #at least nobunaga looked good

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pinkprimrose05 · 2 years ago

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Pink's ARC-V Highlights - Volume 2: Beware The Blue

Warning: Very Long Post, Contains Spoilers

Okay, uh, I lied. I'm not only here to talk about theories and potential foreshadowing. This series also serves as a quick recap of all ARC-V episodes and the cool moments in them -regardless of relevance to the plot- sprinkled with a generous drizzle of ramblings from yours truly.

If all goes well, you can expect fairly consistent updates, where I cover a few episodes every time. This one, for example, will go over Episodes 3 to 7, since those are the ones I managed to watch this week.

(I. hate. midyear finals.)

If that still piques your interest, then I hope you enjoy the read!

(And yes, I know Yuuto is purple, but purple is technically a shade of blue so the rhyme still works-)

__________________________________

1) Episodes 3 & 4, OR: The obligatory "No card is useless!" Duel.

We pick up where we left off with the You Show crew, and the mishaps of Learning How To Pendulum At The Unholy Hour of 3 A.M. I must applaud the sheer lack of braincells between Gongenzaka and Yuuya, because wow, I can't believe they both forgot that Duel Replays are a thing.

(This is why only Yuzu has a 60%+ winrate.)

Fast forward through school-flavored pain, and we now introduce everyone's favorite banana peel...

... whom I highkey want to punt off a cliff.

Look, I love Sawatari. I really do. But good Lord, I forgot just how insufferable he was this far back in the show. I had to refrain from punching my screen several times through the back half of Episode 3, because Shingo, you idiot, who the fuck told you it was fine to put 8-year-old children in mortal danger for a bunch of shiny new cards??

Suffice to say, it took me a good while to actually like him after this atrocious first impression... but hey, at least he gets humbled with style!

As far as early-game Duels go, this one is actually not half bad. The "weak card wins you the game" trope is a bit cliché, but Yuuya gets props for turning it into a pretty light show with Kaleidoscorp and Block Spider, and then using said pretty light show to win the game in one turn.

Another thing is that this Duel introduces Action Traps! Gosh, I would have loved to see more of those later down the line. The concept is pretty neat, and the negative effects create an interesting risk, where a Duelist has to stop and think if they really need to grab an Action card, regardless of the potential ramifications of it being a Trap.

Oh, and did I mention that Sawatari gets roasted to oblivion before the final direct attack? Because he does. Yuuya went above and beyond to make this as entertaining as possible to his friends, and as humiliating as possible for Shingo... for which I ultimately have to thank him, because that's the spark that eventually turned Sawatari into the flashy dork we all know and love.

... And because he deserved an asskicking at the time. Sora did well knocking him out, actually.

Speaking of which—

__________________________________

2) Episodes 5 & 6, OR: That one time we adopted a war criminal.

I actually kinda like these two episodes. They're nothing particularly special if you look back (well, unless you're subscribed to the theory that the stadium in the first minute or so is the same one from Leo's flashback in Episode 126), but hey, at least we get to "properly" know our beloved sugar gremlin!

God, I love Sora. He's actually pretty terrible at disguising his position as a spy- like wow, he keeps outing himself as suspicious every time he makes a snide comment, even without the context of who he actually is. I think he could only afford to slip up so much because no one could ever guess that he came from a world-invading organization in a reality parallel to their own.

... And also because everyone thought of him as a mere child with a bit of a quirky, mischievous streak. I mean, who can ever think ill of such a sweet little guy?

(Yuuya can, but that's because Sora was annoying him on purpose lmao. It's good that he wasn't fooled by the cutesy act, though; that means he could read Sora better than most, despite his deflection and the constant switching between cutie pie and smug bastard.)

As for the Duel, it isn't much to talk about. The first few Duels are usually for exposition and showing mechanics, and in this case, we just see what happens when a Pendulum monster gets destroyed.

Short answer: It goes to the Extra Deck instead of the GY.

Long asnwer: Yuuya goes through a minor existential crisis, because his mishmash of a strategy comes crashing down the moment Odd-Eyes is out of the equation. How does he deal with that, you ask? Hysterical laughter, that's how.

(Goddammit ARC-V, isn't it far too early to make me question the protagonist's sanity?

... actually, don't answer that.)

Aaaaaaaaanyway, we also get to see the reintroduction of Fusion summoning!

(Look at this cool animation. So clean. So awesome.)

Fluffals are actually a very good Deck to showcase the different levels of complexity of the mechanic, and they get bonus points for the contrast between the cutesy plushies and... whatever animatronic shit the Frightfurs have going on. I am now reminded of how glad I was to see the older summoning methods getting a neat glow-up, especially after ZEXAL booted them out of existence in favor of focusing on Xyz.

(And on that note, I feel the need to stress that it's Xyz, not XYZ. Please. It's been twelve years. Stop confusing the game mechanic with the Union cards, people.)

__________________________________

3) Episode 7, OR: The one I actually wanted to talk about all along.

Oh this. This. This is where the plot finally starts to move forward. Nothing against the previous episodes, but I did say before they're mostly there for exposition, and that, by nature, is bound to be a little boring.

Unlike here.

I'd like to start by talking about Yuzu, because we have to admit: this is the first time she's relevant to the story as herself, not as Yuuya's friend or as a student at You Show. And boy, does she make it count.

She busts Sawatari on her own, and literally calls him a hundredth-rate Duelist. To his face. In front of his lackeys. Yuzu was ready to take him on, even when she was alone and locked in the warehouse (again, Shingo, what the fuck??), and I'm fairly certain she could've backed up her words given the chance...

Except, well, she wasn't given the chance.

I'm actually willing to let this one slide, because Yoot's interference doesn't invalidate Yuzu's ability to handle this by herself. I see it more as a precaution on his part, and also a chance to learn more about LDS and Academia that he simply couldn't pass up.

There's also the likely possibility that he genuinely didn't know how Duels worked here, and couldn't risk Yuzu getting hurt if he could help it. It's clear that Yuuto was aware she wasn't Ruri at this point (wow, good job man, you're not as colorblind as everyone else), but still didn't wish to involve an innocent bystander in conflict... which actually makes sense, considering his moral code.

And besides, the Duel was still pretty cool! There's something inherently awesome about setting a full backrow board on Turn 1, and the first time I saw it, I was absolutely shooketh.

(Also, there was a copy of Mystical Space Typhoon among the set cards. Something tells me that Yuuto knows it doesn't negate, and that is definitely praiseworthy, because it means that he actually reads the damn cards.)

Even Sawatari gets kudos for Monarch representation. And also for showing us that Prismatic foil and different rarities do exist in-universe, just like in GX. It makes me wonder why most Duelists don't use them, buuut I guess that was just a throwaway detail that they used to highlight Shingo's spoiled rich brat disposition.

ANYWAYS, moving on to more important matters!

Like dark matter. Which exists in space. Which is the theme of many Xyz cards. Among which there is one Dark Rebellion Xyz Dragon.

(HAIL THE T-POSE ALTERNATE ARTWORK!!)

Don't let the lesser requirement of 1 Overlay Unit fool you; the anime version is still worse than the one we got in the game... though it does, at least, have better OTK abilities against non-Xyz bosses.

I still laugh at the fact that it left Sawatari with exactly 100 LP. Poor guy probably thought he could pull a protagonist comeback, but alas, he forgot that he is not the protagonist...

Well, at least he gets a shot at the role in Episode 139, but we're a few ways away from that right now.

And speaking of stuff that we're a few ways away from...

*shakes Yuuto* Did you just- DID YOU JUST FUCKING NAMEDROP ACADEMIA???

I don't remember this at all. I thought he just asked about the significance of the LDS pin and left. What the hell? Why does none of the characters talk about it then? Not Sawatari, not his goons, not even Yuzu? What??

This is really, really weird. I may have to look into it a little more later on, but for now, we return to a bewildered Yuzu... and her absolute party pooper of a plot device.

Yes. You know the one.

(FuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufuckyoufUCKYOU)

This stupid bracelet and the subsequent events following its activation bring us to a point of great frustration that I would like to touch upon, that being the cast's crippling inability to tell the counterparts apart from each other. Brace yourselves, Duelists; this might be a bit of a long tangent.

*inhales*

Okay, look, there are two sides to this issue; one that can be excused in more than one instance, and one that makes zero sense, no matter how you spin it.

The excusable side is the visual confusion. I understand Yuzu's shock at the situation as a whole, not helped at all by this odd fellow who strongly resembles her best friend.

(And before you say Yuuto doesn't resemble Yuuya for shit, yes he does, if only because the goggles' band is holding his bangs down.)

One must also remember they were locked in a now-wrecked warehouse, so the lighting conditions are bound to be rather bad, and it might be difficult to see clearly as a result. With all that in mind, I can forgive Yuzu for confusing their looks.

The inexcusable side, however, is the auditory confusion. The counterparts -every single one of them- don't sound the least bit similar to each other, even in the English dub.

They could look straight up identical for all it matters, but their voices are so wildly distinct I cannot begin to fathom how anyone can ever confuse them. You could technically make a case for excluding Yuuri and Yuuya since the sole difference between them is voice tone (at least in the sub), but the former is not a subject of comparison right now, and Yuuto's voice is far cry from the latter.

In conclusion of these two factors, I only have one thing to say:

... This is stupid.

This is so, so stupid.

It's so fucking stupid it's not even funny, but it is what it is, and as with every single time anyone talks about this issue, we'll just have to roll with it and be glad when a character doesn't take the bait.

*sigh*

__________________________________

Well, this should be everything for now, and *checks post length*.... holy shit I didn't think it'd slip from me this much. If you somehow managed to reach the end without dozing off midway through, then you deserve a cookie.

Thanks for reading, and see you soon, Duelists!

#pink's arc v highlights #yugioh #yugioh arc v #arc v #yuya sakaki #yuzu hiragi #yuzu hiiragi #shingo sawatari #sora shiunin #yuto (arc v)#long post #episode analysis #also uhh #just noticed i keep switching between sawatari and shingo every time i mention him #i hope its not disconcerting #im still talking about the same guy

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thewanderingace · 11 months ago

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So I saw Wish back on December like 14th and it was.....okay.

I really did enjoy it! Asha was so great as a character, Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine were amazing, and I did enjoy most of the songs a lot, The plot had great potential but there was just enough that didn't quite go right that I can't say I loved it.

The song Asha and Magnifico sing together at the beginning, "At All Costs", as a whole is a beautiful song. I teared up listening to it. It was stunning and they sounded so good together. But it did not fit with what the scene was showing. It felt so weird and out of place. That's a song to sing to a person, a loved one, and not about a bunch of random people wishes trapped in orbs. It was weird and confused me.

The song "I'm a Star" was not good. The rhymes were so forced and badly done and it also felt like it didn't fit. "Here's a little fun allegory That gets me excitatory" Why. And "I'm a star! Watch out world here I are!" I hate that so much.

I also kept waiting for a song with the like the villagers all singing about their wishes and such. Like, even a few lines in "Welcome to Rosas" with some of villagers talking about their wishes/giving up their wishes/wanting their wish to be granted would have been good.

The many, many, Disney movie references was just plain annoying after a while. They really made all her friends the 7 Dwarves? Really? I understand this was for the 100th anniversary but they went a little too far with them. It was really annoying after a while and I just kept thinking about how weird it'll be to rewatch this years from now when no one remembers this movie was supposed to be a 100th anniversary love letter type of movie. It'll just be stranger than it already is to have 1000 blatant references to other disney movies.

What happened to the kings home exactly? Cause all we got was that burned up tapestry and his vague "my home was destroyed" and nothing else about it. Who destroyed it? It killed his parents? I want to know more. There should have been some kind of flashback scene showing what happened. It held no weight with me cause I didn't know any of it.

I fully expected Magnifico to have some sort or redemption moment at the end since the book really took over his mind basically. Yeah he was a narcissistic, selfish asshole beforehand but not evil until the book took over. I thought Star was going to like break him from the curse/influence of the book and he'd hear the town singing "so I make this wish!" realize what he'd done and maybe he'd finish the next line. And it would have been interesting if at the end he'd be teaching Asha magic.

It was way too fast for Asha to find out the truth about Magnifico. I mean it happened so darn fast. I thought that'd be an act 2 type of reveal. Not after the second song.

I also kinda expected Magnifico to be using the wishes some how? Like for more magic or something but the dude was literally just holding them for safekeeping? To make sure bad ones to come true? Was that it? Okay that's not bad exactly. Maybe he saw people wish for war or for someone to die or something.

Also Asha's only reason for wanting to become Magnifico's apprentice was to get her saba's wish granted yes? Or did I miss something. Did she even want to be his apprentice? Was his apprentice going to learn magic?

The goat. Look he was cute and I love Alan Tudyk but Valentino did nothing but make quips the whole movie. At least heihei and pascale and other animal companions have a role in the film. Valentino did nothing.

I also thought Asha was gonna like get powers and start granting wishes or giving them to people or something but nope the star did it all.

Magifico ending up trapped in the mirror was...idk annoying? And is Asha now the fairy godmother or something?

#wish #wish disney #just my opinion #mod post #stephs stuff

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0aurelion-sol0 · 4 years ago

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SNK keeps on being amazing. ( A rant that is not really one. )

133.

Just this panel alone is able to confirm everything that I wanted from this manga.

Eren's condition has always been what I suspected.

Ever since he sided with his brother Zeke, who manipulated Marley in attacking Eldia to retrieve the founder and other titans. Something THEY DIDN'T WANT TO DO, because they were being pressured by many other countries and were not as powerful as before due to their lack of powerful weapons like the ones in the Middle Eastern Alliance which were able to PIERCE through the fucking Armored Titan.

THIS resulted in the fucking festival and we know what happened then. Dozens of people died including children continuing the cycle of hate that has been started for god knows how long. And Eren WILLINGLY took a part in it because he wanted his actions to be a little easier while he was going to genocide the whole fucking world.

INCLUDING his own island because let's be honest when Eren is done with the Rumbling, destroying every ecosystems. EVERYTHING that keeps a planet alive, his little island won't live for long.

"The ground... It's crying." CHAPTER 131 said by one of the goddamn kids he fucking killed.

Marley is now sure, let's fucking kill all Eldians.

He did his attack on Liberio, he betrayed everyone. Crushing Hange's every possibilities of finding a peaceful way of settling things down after having been hidden MANY useful informations by Eren, Zeke and his group but also the Azumabitos.

Sparking a civil war inside Eldia, leading to an Eldian supremacist group cause let's be honest when Floch killed that Marleyan and than gave his little first king Fritz speech, it was like seeing Hitler all over again and the Klux Klux Klan.

I MEAN... FLOCH OF ALL PEOPLE! A guy who has PTSD after seing dozens of his comrades died, their faces exploded by fucking thrown rocks. He bastardized Erwin's ideologies and no matter how good willing he was, he was just a dead man walking acting like a fool.

He also betrays his own party now, the Jeagerist by allowing the very people they tried to stop the power to stop him. By activating the Rumbling, he also caused the death of Eldians inside the walls as we've been shown with Hitch.

AND THE WORST... destroy every connection he has with his friends. Hurting them, putting them in danger by the very group he created and the Titans.

Oh but that's not all...

He uses the titan the same way Marley did it, with oppression and violence. He is not stopping the cycle of hate, he is continuing it. And it will have repercussions inside the very group of people he tried to defend.

People killed each other inside the walls and they will kill each other without it. Mikasa as shown us that when her parents got murdered and she almost became a slave.

And he killed Hange with these same titans. I don't care if they sacrificed themself. He didn't live up to what he preached. They died and Hange was someone close to him and was concerned with his well being. Maybe it was too late but they also had many other priorities as Hange was commander. They also fell into depression because of their position. One of his mentors and friends, one who tried to talk with him while he was in that cell planning to destroy the world...

talking to himself...

At this point, you know where I'm going with this. We've all suspected it, we all know it. Let's not be blind about it.

Eren is influenced by the Attack Titan. Not Ymir (at least I hope so and I think so), not Kruger and certainly not Grisha.

It's pretty clear now.

I mean Eren's change happens off screen, every time we see him he is completely different from what we used to know of him.

He barely cares about his friend and don't give me the bullcrap of (hE dOeS tHiS fOr tHeM.) If he was he would have secured them and put them in a place where they wouldn't interfere, he would have tried to convince them. HE WOULD HAVE COMMANDED FLOCH NOT TO HURT THEM.

He would have not commited genocide after knowing what it led to with Reiner, Annie and Bertholt.

That's not Eren. And the stupid argument of "hE's aLwAyS bEeN vIoLeNt". That's just bullcrap and it just destroy every bit of beautiful empathy we have seen of him. With Mikasa, Armin and Historia. Levi who he respected a lot.

It just isn't coherent. Every action he does is not coherent since the timeskip.

NOW HE'S CHALLENGING HIS FRIEND ? WTF ?

I mean is no one questionning this, doesn't it seem off from what we've seen of him.

Eren is no strategist BUT... he isn't stupid. Every sane person would know that these actions will not benefit anybody.

But... they still happened.

If we look back again, here is Eren being positive trying to put Armin in a good mood.

The outside world... endless possibilities. It's a man who wonders.

Yet, AT THE RIGHT MOMENT... he has a flashback of Faye. And his face just change.

Isn't it just weird ? Like at the right moment where he can have a positive outlook on thing. NOPE.

And this has been going and going and going...

Here:

Chapter 130.

Eren arrives in Liberio what does he see.

A flashback of his mother's death

I mean it's pretty clear now.

_________________________________________

Eren has been influenced and convinced by the Attack Titan that there's no way out. He's been reliving past memories of his and others, past memories that were traumatic. It put him in a state of depression and dread through 5 FUCKING YEARS. On top of that, he is able to see the future and what he saw will happen and has happened hence his reaction to Sasha's death.

A fucking mental breakdown.

Jesus Christ, I don't know if I've ever cursed that much in my life.

It's impossible to stop what is going to happen, because what is going to happen, needs to happen.

But as we know Sasha is in the afterlife with Erwin, Hange and the others. And we have been confirmed that this is the afterlife. So we have time-travelling, afterlife, 13 years curse, people who can turn into titans, parallel dimensions and Eren who can see through birds.

But the fandom said, no, the prospect of him being manipulated by the Attack Titan is impossible even after knowing it has special abilities.

I MEAN...

Umm... This has happened before. And I saw no one complain.

So why this ?

Is impossible ?

Especially when Eren's whole arc is about questionning his perspective of the world and becoming in control of his violence and rage. Having an agency. HELLOOOO!!!????

What better way of having the main threat of that being the very thing that causes all of his problems and his powers.

Doesn't this remind anyone of anything ?

Yep. The Uprising Arc. And who ? Historia, the girl whose all life, she couldn't act as herself or have any real agency.

Yes, you know the girl whose pregnant and decided to live the rest of her life Little House On The Prairie style. ( I mean I don't think it's her but... that's what it's looking right now. )

And who is a descendent of Ymir Fritz. With too much uncanney similarities between the two.

They could have said the Founder, Eren Jeager or something else but no they said... "It's the Attack Titan."

And it's not Ymir, if she was the one to control Eren. Why wouldn't she free herself on her own if she's able to do that ?

And in 131, she was clearly in a position where she was questionning her choice.

And perhaps she probably tried to stop Eren but the Attack Titan took over him and her. Using her powers as she is the founder.

And now just like Eren, she has no eyes. She is still a slave. Why ? I thought Eren freed her. So ? This is the only logical explanation right now.

I mean when is the last time we saw Eren.

He was sleeping inside his titan in 131. Having a dream about seeing his "sight" of freedom as a kid. And also potentially watching things with birds.

It's just weird. If he was fully in control, the characters wouldn't have questionned it and none of this weird shit would be happening.

He clearly doesn't have a free will.

This requires too much energy and Eren is a normal Eldian, not one of Royal Blood. Being both in Paths, watching this " sight ", communicating, watching with birds, moving his titan which is enormous and the thousands of colossal titans is clearly hard and too dangerous for only one person to do.

Isayama has fooled us all and me in the process.

All this time, it was that goddamn thing pulling the strings. And with the help of Isayama since he is the goddamn author of this series

In chapter 88, we learn the true meaning of Shingeki No Kyojin.

The beauty of the japanese language, as confusing as it is, can be translated by Attack On Titan, at least for us american and western audiences.

( yes because as someone pointed out in the comments, it's a mistranslation but since I don't understand how to give credit by linking because I don't understand how it works, i can't credit. So you can find the person in the comments. DO NOT JUDGE ME, tumblr is not the best place to post sometimes. )

But it's not the Attack on Titan anymore.

It's the Attack Titan.

( piece of shit is it's surname. )

#shingeki no kyojin #snk #attack on titan #eren jeager #snk eren #aot spoiler #snk spoilers #aot eren #the attack titan #I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK #THIS IS WHAT I CHOOSE TO BELIEVE #EUREKA #snk 133 #aot 133 #snk chapter 133 #ymir the first #ymir fritz

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iukasylvie · 2 years ago

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@watertribe-enya I can empathize with your feelings on how underappreciated Scar is. I remember talking with a friend of mine on Discord about how literal war criminals like Mustang and Hawkeye are far more popular than him because I saw him lose to Hawkeye one-to-one in a popularity poll by a wide margin. To elaborate on my mother and older sister's opinion, both of them think Scar is an immature idiot. My mother hates his self-righteous and stubborn attitude in particular and thinks I'm a weirdo because she's well aware of my history of taking a fancy to characters like Count Bleck from Super Paper Mario.

Even in Sons of the Desert, Scar's stubbornness shows early on as he refuses an offer from his old master to reclaim priesthood despite accepting a new chuva (a piece of priestly clothing in this case).

You called Scar a "thirty something" in your first reply, but I thought he looked rather young in flashbacks about the war of extermination.

Speaking of Sons of the Desert, why did you think the so-called "Dead Guy Junior" naming syndrome was prevalent in the fic? I thought Scar's sons, Mattas and Turyan, were the only one named in this fashion.

Because of the nature of English - it can't tell characters apart by the way they speak like Japanese - I wish the fanfic had been a Japanese doujinshi adorned with a beautiful cover art and illustrations like the Touhou Project fic Noapte Strigoiului by Hatsu Takashiro with art by Loalo Honda. It's the first doujinshi I've ever bought and I immensely enjoyed the tragic story of Remilia and Flandre Scarlet (named Frandor in the fic) as young daughters of Vlad III in the author's prose.

I have no idea why I could not read Sons of the Desert thoroughly from the start to the end like I did with the Moribito series (in particular Guardian of the Spirit, Guardian of the Darkness, and Guardian of the God), The Beast Player, and Noapte Strigoiului. In fact, I skipped several chapters without Scar. I seized an opportunity to read the fic when I and my family were on a trip for two days to two tourist attractions soon after revisiting Fullmetal Alchemist to heal myself from disappointment at the finale of a certain animated show.

You also noted the fic's portrayal of Scar's brother. While I don't remember much about it or the fic in general, I appreciate his note from Chapter 26 because the ending sentence is one of the few sources of comedy alongside Zulema in the entire fic as far as I know:

I was able to find the right people to help carry out my plan. If not, well, I guess we're all screwed and it doesn't really matter who is reading this. I'm giving my kid brother the most crucial notes in case I don't make it, and I hope he can figure them out. If something does happen to me, I hope Andakar doesn't go and do something stupid. I hope he just gets the job done. He's smart but just a little hot-headed and close-minded. He needs to watch that. He also seriously needs to get laid, but he may not take my word for it. I just hope Ishvala keeps an eye on him if I can't.

The fic goes further and Mattas the Elder's comment takes on a new light in Chapter 38:

When he was a priest, Scar would sometimes be called upon to counsel young people against giving in to desires of the flesh. He found this painfully awkward as well as slightly hypocritical on his part, considering that he had lost his own heart to a young maiden who was beyond his reach. He would tell these despondent, hormone-ridden children to pray for guidance. He figured if they were busy praying, they wouldn't have time for anything else. Even now, when his young maiden was all grown up and well within his reach, he didn't feel much more qualified to counsel anyone on affairs of the heart. Heartache, however, he was well acquainted with, and he knew that Vesya was looking for the way that would hurt less.

What are your thoughts on Scar from Fullmetal Alchemist (manga/Brotherhood)?

I have many thoughts on Scar, because I love him to pieces. Best character in both anime and manga

One thing that bothers me even among people who are staunchly pro "Scar did nothing wrong (except the one time when he was completely out of it due to immense trauma)" and "Scar should have been allowed to kill more people" , is that they completely overlook that Scar just doesn't enjoy killing people. He does it because he feels that those who denied his people the right to live would never face justice for their actions otherwise. And also because he's really, really mad at them of course. Actually the part about justice might be moreso the fandom's view of it, and Scar's desire for vengeance is his primary motivation(when you look at what he said while fleeing through the desert). So Scar feels he's doing what is necessary, but he doesn't usually take enjoyment out of it. The closest he came to show glee during a fight was when Mustang showed up to intervene in chapter 7/ episode 5. And that was more grim satisfaction than anything. He doesn't even show any joy when mangling Envy and Kimblee, who kickstarted the genocide and brutally murdered his family. Every action is trenched in anger, and that anger is born from tremendous pain and loss.

So Scar doesn't want to kill (or at least doesn't want his whole life to be centered arround it). He wants to protect. He wants to do something for his community, his people. But for the longest time he felt that he had lost the chance to do so forever. His immense relief at finding out how many Ishvalans had actually survived was wonderful to behold.

Now you might say "But he's doing the right thing by killing those unrependant war criminals! He shouldn't feel bad about it!" And while that's correct (at least from my perspective) you have to look at Scar's other circumstances too. It's not an enjoyable life if you spent your days solely focused on the people who brutalized you. And Scar is doing it all alone, with no help or support system. With no breaks from the struggle for survival and recurring death battles. It's good that he stopped killing (outside of the necessary battles), not because Edward and the other good guys kept whining at him, but for his own sake. Because he finally feels he's actually doing something for the people he loves again.

Anyhow, how painful is it that Scar who was afraid about his brother creating or turning into a human weapon via alchemy, became exactly that?

"Your brother may discover a way to gain enough power to face those state alchemists, and perhaps even enough to destroy their army. With power that far surpasses theirs, to retalitate against them with alchemy! Make them pay for their sins with blood!'

I'm crying.

Another great thing about Scar is that you can guilt trip this thirty something, hardened warrior with "You'll make your brother sad." And he has no proper reply for that.

To end this with my personal headcanon, Scar outlives all the remaining State Alchemists sans Edward, and dies aged 103 surrounded by his 20 grandchildren.

#Fullmetal Alchemist #Scar #fanfiction #Touhou Project #Remilia Scarlet #Flandre Scarlet

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write-ur-wrongs · 3 years ago

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Facing Your Demons

Jaskier x Reader 1785 words

TW: implied sexual assault, seeing an abuser in public, panic attacks, and references to trauma. I did my best to avoid explicit details but tread carefully.

A huge thank you to @bubblegumfanfics for trusting me with this request - I hope I’ve done it justice :”)

Request: Something where the reader was a*saulted in the in the past and has a flashback or she sees her ex that did it and Jaskier ends up comforting the reader, telling her how much she means to him (accidental love confession? Maybe? I love those) while Geralt is dealing with her ex. The reader says she feel the same way but she can't give Jaskier anything sexual because it makes her uncomfortable. But jaskier says he'll be with her regardless and that he loves her and if she ever wanted to try he will oblige and if she doesn't like it he'll stop

It was only one contract, meant to last no more than a fortnight. It should have been an easy in-and-out arrangement; your client got nervous, enlisted a Witcher’s help, and you agreed against your better judgement to stay on and split the earnings. While you’d dealt with this type of apparition before, you were tired, and figured it wouldn’t hurt to work alongside someone tailormade for the trade.

It was only supposed to be for the one job. It should have never gone on like this. You should have never allowed yourself to be charmed by the Geralt’s friend, the bard. You shouldn’t have grown comfortable working alongside Geralt, earning twice the coin by doubling your work. Hell, you should have refused to travel with them while working that first contract. Because maybe if you’d done that, you wouldn’t have found yourself so heavily linked to the pair of them.

Maybe if you’d had kept your distance, you wouldn’t be where you are now.

And you so desperately did not want to be where you were now.

Cowering in the dank, stuffy corner of this horrid tavern, trapped between Geralt’s gargantuan frame and Jaskier’s far-too-close body, you were stuck looking the devil in the eye.

Okay, don’t be dramatic, you thought desperately, clinging to whatever silver lining you could get your trembling hands on to stay afloat, you haven’t actually looked him in the eye.

But still, you’d seen him, and the memories you’d spent so long trying to scrub away were worming their way back into the forefront of your mind, traveling down your body like furious snakes. Each memory burning with venom over everywhere he’d touched you.

“Hey, Y/N, you alright?” Jaskier asked, reaching over to lay a comforting hand on your arm.

At the contact, however, you recoiled so violently away from him that you practically slammed yourself into Geralt. The combined sensation of Jaskier’s warm, calloused fingers on your arm and Geralt’s broad, hard chest against your shoulder sent blaring alarms of panic through you. Everything was too loud; everyone was too close.

You jerked your knees up in an attempt to curl yourself into a ball but ended up slamming both knees, hard, under the table. Surprised by the sudden ruckus, Geralt swore loudly beside you as Jaskier yelped, jumping back as his beer spilt and splashed across the table and onto his lap.

Both knees were now throbbing angrily, your head felt as if it had been filled with cotton, and your mouth watered dangerously as panic-induced nausea crashed over you. I can’t be here, a voice screamed inside your mind, I can’t be here with him.

“Y/N, what the hell-” Geralt started, stopping short when he finally saw the state you were in; the pallor of your skin paired with your wide, vacant eyes were horrifically familiar. It was something he’d seen in the faces of traumatized villagers whose lives were ruined by war, and in soldiers who’d just seen their comrades killed.

Geralt met Jaskier’s eyes over your head and knew that they were thinking the same thing.

Without speaking, Jaskier pushed the table away from you as Geralt scooped you up and began marching steadily towards the exit. Once outside, Geralt gently set you down on a bench as Jaskier materialized by your side with a cup of water.

You’d been so focused on the devil’s face that you’d barely registered the change of scenery, but when your back hit the cool rock wall behind the bench, you were pulled back to reality. Startled, you blinked back unshed tears and let your eyes focus on the two concerned faces before you.

Your breathing slowed, and as you were coming too you heard Jaskier as Geralt whether he should splash the water he’d brought onto your face.

“N-no,” you breathed, feeling more grounded with every passing second, “please don’t.”

Geralt hummed knowingly and smacked the bard upside the head, scolding him for his ridiculous proposal, eliciting another yelp from Jaskier. “It was just an idea!” he hissed defensively, earning only a vacant stare from you and a glare from Geralt.

Frustrated and inexplicably jealous to see Geralt assume the dominant protective role, Jaskier knelt in front of you and scanned your face for a sign. His brows furrowed as he watched your lips mumble something inaudibly. “What is it?” he encouraged you gently, resting a hand next to you on the bench, but decisively not onto you.

“I can’t be here,” you said, barely above a whisper, “I can’t be here with him.”

Jaskier looked back at Geralt inquisitively, as if assuming he’d know you better since he got so defensive earlier. But when Geralt shrugged unperceptively in response, Jaskier felt strangely vindicated and turned back to you confidently.

“Be here with who, love?” he tried, meeting your eyes and doing his best to communicate non-verbally that you could trust him.

“The devil,” you murmured, your eyes finding the man over Jaskier’s head, through the tavern’s window.

The two men turned to follow your gaze. Upon spotting the man they assumed to be devil – a pompous soldier, gesticulating wildly as he held audience in the tavern – their eyes met briefly, eyebrows quirked, before coming back to you.

“You mean, that ridiculous ass?” Jaskier asked, trying to lighten the mood.

“The one in red? you asked.

“That’s the ass,” he replied, eyes sad as a tentative smile played at the corner of his lips, hoping you’d mirror the act.

You nodded silently, eyes meeting his fleetingly. “We, um, I mean he –” you broke off unable to continue, your eyes now closed as memories washed over you like acid.

“You were… together?” he tried, looking back to Geralt for support but getting nothing back but a non-committal shrug.

“I was, I mean he – um,” you swallowed thickly before going on, “we were.”

“And it was bad?” Jaskier was whispering now, meeting you at your energy.

You hesitated before responding, and that brief moment of silence broke Jaskier completely as he imagined the worst.

“It was,” you replied finally, meeting his eyes head-on, “not consensual.”

What happened next happened quickly.

Geralt swore loudly, his hands closing into tight fists as Jaskier swore in a way you’d never imagined him capable.

“Geralt!” Jaskier called over his shoulder, saying his name more like a command, begging his friend to take action.

“Way ahead of you, Jask,” he replied, already stalking his way back into the tavern.

When the tavern door slammed shut behind Geralt, Jaskier sprang to his feet before tentatively sitting by your side. His hand hovered over yours momentarily before he thought better of it and brought his hand back to rest on his own lap. “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked.

“I can’t,” you choked out, putting your own hand over his, surprising both of you.

“That’s alright,” he breathed, placing his other hand over yours lightly, “you don’t ever need to think about it ever again. Geralt is taking care of it.” As he spoke, he swung a leg over the bench and turned so that his body faced yours squarely.

“But Geralt doesn’t get involved in human conflict,” you said, swiping at the tears that had managed to fall as you tucked a leg under yourself to angle yourself in his direction.

Jaskier’s eyes flit momentarily to the tavern’s window before quickly coming back to meet yours. “No, but he does kill monsters,” he assured, “and specializes in demons.”

“Do you think he’ll kill him?” you ask quietly, crossing your arms defensively over your chest.

“Hard to say,” he tried to answer, but was interrupted by loud crash followed by shouting coming from within the tavern, “but, huh, I think it’s fair to say you won’t ever need to worry about him again.”

You nodded lightly, trying and failing to hold Jaskier’s gaze. He was looking at you with such intensity, with a warmth you definitely didn’t think you deserved. “Don’t look at me like that, Jask.”

“I’m sorry,” he breathed, bringing his eyes down to your still-intertwined hands. “I just hate to think of anything bad ever happening to you. I wish I could have known you then… that I could have protected you, that I could have,” he hesitated, considering his next words carefully, “that I could have loved you the way you deserve to be loved.”

“Oh, Jask…”

“No, no, darling, you don’t need to say anything. Please don’t feel obligated,” he blurted out, immediate regret burning at his cheeks, “I’m so incredibly stupid and selfish! I’m so sorry I-I just, seeing you like this it just, argh! I shouldn’t have said it-”

“Jaskier, please,” you interject, placing a feather-light hand over his chest, the pads of your fingers ghosting over the flesh exposed at his collar, “it’s not that. I’m… honestly I’m glad you said it.”

“Yeah?” he asked timidly, looking up at you through his thick lashes.

“Yeah,” you breathed, “I think I feel the same way… about wishing I could, know your love. Be able to love you, freely.”

“Yeah?” he murmured once more; eyes hesitantly alight with hope.

“Yeah,” a teary laugh escaping your lips. “But Jaskier, I’m afraid that I won’t be able to, you know, love you in the way you need.”

“Y/N, hey,” he cooed, your confession bolstering his confidence, “all I need is to know your heart. Knowing you love me is enough.”

“Jask, I don’t think you’re understanding me –”

“My sweet girl, look at me,” he pleaded, bringing his head down to hold your gaze through the curtain of your tear-soaked lashes, “so long as you’ll have me, I’ll be by your side. And I promise you, nothing will happen unless you’re ready and you want it. Nothing.”

“Yeah?” you ask, your eyes scanning his for any hint of mal-intent or deception but finding only earnest adoration.

“Hell yeah,” he whispered, bringing his forehead to rest against yours.

Just then, Geralt immerged from the tavern and wiped his blood-soaked blade against the tall grass as he spoke. “We’re leaving.”

“Way ahead of you,” you parroted in a small voice, letting Jaskier pull you to your feet, before you ran to your horses.

You didn’t feel ready to ride out yourself, so you hopped behind Jaskier as Geralt led your horse behind him on Roach. As you put more distance between you and the tavern behind you, you found yourself growing ever calmer. Until finally, with your arms wrapped tightly around Jaskier’s waist and your face pushed between his shoulder blades, you took your first full breath of the evening and realized, incredulously, that you knew you were going to be okay.

#the witcher #the witcher series #the witcher fanfiction #witcher fanfiction #jaskier x reader #jaskier x y/n #jaskier fanfic #jaskier fanfiction #Jaskier #fic recs #dandelion #geralt of rivia #witcher geralt

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thehaitanis · 3 years ago

Text

𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔱𝔥𝔢𝔦𝔯 𝔠𝔯𝔲𝔰𝔥: 𝔪𝔦𝔱𝔰𝔲𝔶𝔞 𝔱𝔞𝔨𝔞𝔰𝔥𝔦 𝔞𝔫𝔡 𝔯𝔶𝔲𝔤𝔲𝔧𝔦 𝔨𝔢𝔫

❮★❯ summary: how will mitsuya takashi and ryuguji ken (draken) act around their crush?

❮★❯ warnings: none, maybe bad writing.

❮★❯ disclaimer: english is not my first language, so forgive me for any mistakes. yes i did cry with the war flashbacks in the draken one.

as i said before, mitsuya is one if not the most mature guys in toman. he had to grow up really fast so it is expected that he would be hyper aware of everything that happens in his surroundings so yes, he definitely knows he has a crush on you. he knew of his affections for you the moment he caught himself thinking about you outside school, in every moment he spend alone and even in his own club. the thought of hearing your voice calling his name and seeing your cute face smile because of him got mitsuya all soft inside.

unfortunately, his crush is obvious only to him. he doesn’t want to be too forward simply because he’s afraid he’s going to scare you, besides, he’s terrified of the idea of getting to intense with his actions so he prefers to keep a low profile until he feel it’s safe to show you just how much he likes you.

mitsuya would begin to show his interest the moment you give him signals that you might like him too. that would be his queue to act and the little things that he would do for you at the beginning would make you definitely like him for real. he’s a gentleman, so it’s not weird to see him offering to walk you home, give you a ride or even asking you to be his model for the things he’s making. anything is a good excuse to spend time beside you.

with all the effort he puts into making you feel special only around him it’s obvious that you would guess what’s going on. mitsuya is someone who tends to keep a neutral stance on everything, he doesn’t go out of his way to talk to anyone with who he’s not friends with and would of course ignore everything that’s not important and might get him in trouble but, with you he doesn’t care about that. he doesn’t care that he met you a few months ago because you’re already so special to him that he’s willing to fight for you if you need him to, so please be sure that all his actions come from a genuine interest.

if you do show signs of liking him after all the things he does for you, he would totally confess to you. it wouldn’t be anything too extra because he himself hates that kind of thing, it would be something small but very intimate, something that can show you just how much he already likes you.

draken is completely aware of his crush on you but will he act upon it? no, he won’t. however, that doesn’t mean he’s going to ignore it, he knows he likes you and even if he pretends he doesn’t when he’s in front of you, he always ends up worrying about you and your safety whenever the situation gets out of hand. this refusal comes mostly from the fact that he feels like you deserve something better, someone who’s not in a gang and someone who actually cares for a future that won’t be as dangerous as his. he’s loyal to toman and mikey but that might get in the way if he actually decides to listen to his impulses, his more normal impulses.

like mitsuya, his crush is not exactly obvious but this is because he chooses to deal with it in silence. he can’t seem to show you his affections but he’s still there if you need him, always watching over you and protecting you from anything and anyone that might want to harm you. draken is not used to feel that way so he would probably distance himself from you every now and then in hopes for his feelings to go away. they never go, but he likes to pretend as if they do.

when he is around you everything seems to be more fun. he’s always teasing you in some way. he always surprises himself by smiling at whatever you do. it’s impossible to pretend he doesn’t care about you when you look at him with those eyes and, so far, only mikey’s been able to notice his strange behaviour, meaning that he’s lost because there’s little time until his friend connects the dots.

you won’t find out until he finally gets fed up with everything and decides to tell you. he probably realized that you could be gone any moment now and because he doesn’t want to have any regrets in his life he’s willing to risk it all just to let you know how he feels about you. yes, he will be very harsh about it, yelling out of frustration with himself for taking so damn long but please be sure he’s not mad at you, he’s just an idiot who doesn’t know how to handle emotions.

after he confesses it is probable that he distances himself because he’s afraid he might have fucked that up. he wanted to let you know in a more special way but his feelings got the best of him and well, now it’s your turn to reassure him if you do feel the same as him. but be gentle, he’s on edge and well, he’s still a dumb guy after all.

❮★❯ requests are: closed!

#tokyo revengers #tokyo revengers imagines #tokyo revengers x reader #mitsuya takashi #ryuguji ken #draken

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arcadejohn127-9 · 4 years ago

Note

Could you do the Brothers and undatables reacting to MC being poisoned and finding out that Micheal was trying to kill them because he was jealous that MC was close with the brothers. Let me just say your work is great the way you describe the situation before going into the reactions is really interesting. Thank you so much!!!!

I already had this ask half way done but Tumblr decided to delete all my work due to buggy WiFi - I'm currently in pain 😭

I don't know much about poison so bare with me, I just looked at the basic symptoms and went "I'm smart" I've passed out after being ill or just in general quite a few times when younger so I had faith

This also has a bonus Michael part! I've decided to add his response to the boys reactions in its own format or else each one will just have a repeat of the same Michael Response

Warning: angst, implied vomitting, attempted murder, fainting, spoilers of lesson 37 and 16, gore on Michaels part, long

"from Michael...?" You questioned outloud, unsure on how to feel about the parcel you've found.

Your relationship with the angel wasn't a defined one. You didn't hate him but you didn't like him either; there was always something about his presence that made you fearful. You choked it up to be just internalised fear due to hearing the brothers experience of the celestial realm and angels.

You've never met him in person; the first conversation you had of him was when you stabbed yourself with the dagger instead of Lucifer. You saw the light and he spoke to you, surprised and shocked at the love you had for the demons. Even then you never really got to speak to him again, he was a mystery. You've sent a few letters and he's returned some and Simeon is a link between you two. But other than that? You didn't really have a relationship with him.

So why? Why would he send you a gift?

You looked inside to see a packet of apple pieces and herbs inside of a snack shaped teabag. You admired the unique shape and couldn't stop a small smile appearing. It was definitely cute! And you finally got to use the new kettle and cups barbatos got you.

You decided to text Simeon, telling him to thank Michael for your gift. He was surprised by this but agreed, happy you two were connecting.

Whilst your new tea brewed you were trying to figure out a way to repay his kindness. Sure it was simple small gift but he was reaching out - you were giddy! Hopeful this meant he was fully on board to the exchange program.

But you soon would regret drinking that tea. It was so sweet you couldn't stop drinking it; your lips only leaving the cup of a second of breath. It was addicting. The herb covered apples pieces gave it a nice slight bitterness. But it wasn't overbearing but didn't make it taste like sugar in your mouth.

As soon as the last gulp came down; something came up. You hunched over as your stomach churned, a disgusting taste forcing itself up your throat. Your vision growing blurry as you stumbled out of your seat, the light in your room feeling like knives to your eyes. You tried closing them but the effect didn't change. You were barely hunched over on your side releasing everything in your stomach. It stung your throat, your stomach feeling painfully empty.

There was this invisible feeling telling you to go to sleep. You wanted to obey but the light felt too painful. In your dazed state you shakily texted the groupchat a sloppy "help me ASAP, my room" before letting your body go limp, heaving as you just laid there, dragging a nearby jacket over your head and let your vision be consumed by the darkness.

Lucifer:

He's heart broken

How did this happen? You were fine and now you're not moving

Your breathing was faint against his neck as he held you

He saw the parcel and connected the dots, Eden's tea

It was a death sentence for any human, a treat for demons and a punishment for angels

He's started a war once, he can do it again

Whilst he knew he couldn't enter the celestial realm he demanded that Michael show himself

When his demands went unanswered, he was ready to break all rules

"He's gone too far, I don't care for his reasons! I WILL DESTORY THE CELESTIAL REALM IF I HAVE TO! HE WILL ANSWER ME!"

when you received a cure all his angers washed away with relief

Happy to have you awake again even if it was for a few moments

Mammon:

FLASHBACK ARE STRONG

All he can think about his how you looked like in the past; dying in his arms

He immediately went to blame belphie but almost tripped over the parcel

He's an idioit but he knew what this tea was

Becomes feral with rage and overly protective of your unconscious body

He's hunched over by your side at all times just growling at anyone who comes near you

He wanted to hurt Michael but he wanted to stay with you

He'd talk to you and tell you how he was going to get payback

"I should of known he'd do something-! I'll never forgive him- DON'T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT!!! I'M DOING THIS FOR THEM!"

As soon as you get the cure he's hugging you and telling you how much he missed you

Levithan:

When he found you, his heart dropped

It only got worse when he found the parcel and realized what Michael has done

he will remind the celestial realm why he is an admiral of hell's navy

He spends time by the sea communicating with any creature he can get; telling them if things go down he'll need them to flood the gates of heaven

When he isn't planning war he's with you, playing games, trying to ignore how dead you looked

He would remind you what buttons to push when your chatacter didn't move

"YOU THINK I'LL JUST LET THIS SLIDE??!! HE'S KILLED MY BEST FRIEND!"

He broke down sobbing when you woke up after getting a cure

He was convinced you were dead but here you were, alive and awake

Satan:

He's a detective nerd so of course he scoped out the scene

When he found the parcel and Michaels name - oh boy

Never met the man and pities him for letting their first meeting be the angels demise

It wasn't long before he had to be detained

Screaming and tearing up anything he could, yelling at his brother's for falling

He blamed his brothers, he blamed Michael and he blamed himself

Hated being locked away from you, would course more of a fuss when he couldn't see you

"I WILL KILL EVERY ONE OF YOU IF YOU DON'T LET ME GET TO THAT DAMN ANGEL!! I HATE YOU!"

He's only calmed down when you are given a cure and he's told you're alive

Is finally allowed to see you and he holds you tight

Asmodeus:

When he found you he was sobbing

It only grew worse when he found out what happened

In Denial

Not of Michael, he believed that but in denial you were dead or were dying

Kept insisting you were just tired and sleeping

Destroyed an entire room when one of them insisted you weren't sleeping

He'd help you get ready and pamper you, telling you it's okay and you can thank him when you feel better

Would be seen wiping your face often in hopes it'll get rid of that death like appearance you have

"They're fine but Michael won't be, when my precious darling wakes up I'll make sure they know I'll make everything better."

When you bad your cure he started crying and laughing, telling everyone he was right

Clinged to you and let you sleep

Beezlebub:

He found the parcel almost immediately

And went into a rage - we all know how his hunger tantrums are

Would've destroyed the whole house if he wasn't restrained

Guilt

So much guilt, his shoulders are always sagging

Sits by your unconscious body so he feels like he's protecting you

Has tried kissing you awake

Hoping you'll wake up like a fairy tale Character and everything will be fine

"I'm going to kill Michael and I won't let any of you stop me....protect (Y/N) For me."

Was so happy and relieved when you got the cure, sticking to your side at all times even when you were awake

Belphegor:

He was quick to help you into bed and on your side

When he found the parcel he was ready to murder

His rage towards Michael massively outweighed his hatred for humanity - even Lucifer!

Beel couldn't keep control of him mostnofnthe time unless he got forceful, belphegor stuck in a headlock screeching bloody murder

Stress sleeping

Like many of the brothers he develops two modes: calm or PLANNING MASS MURDER

Whenever he gets overwhelmed he just forces body to shut down and sleep besides you

"Michael will face me again, I won't let him kill anyone else that I love! He got Lilith killed and he can't do the same for (Y/N)!"

As soon as the cure was found he was by your side

Letting you rest and watched over you

UNDATEABLES↓

Diavolo:

Found out through the brothers

Sees this as an act of war against the peace he's working for

He was normally sweet and forgiving but it seemed Michael wanted to rip to his last nerve

Demanded for every reliable demon to search for a cure

Even had Solomon try to make one

"Barbatos, what is the possibility of Michael coming down to the devildom or the human realm? I want 'discuss' with him what his actions have caused."

As soon he he found out you were alive and safe

He didn't stop his plans but let himself have time with you

Barbatos:

So much guilt

Like holy shit

Is just constantly questioning how he didn't prevent this

Asked permission from the lord to just change the timelines so this didn't happen but the brothers were against it

They demanded they didn't avoid this situation and let Michael face punishment

That he couldn't refuse, he was angered by the angel's actions

More than he would ever show

"humans are so fragile and their time is so limited - that's why I'm never going to let anyone cut theirs short again."

Was part of the cure search party, he led the group

Once you were cured he stayed with you

Acting as your butler and made to check each of your foods and drinks

Solomon:

It wasn't a wise decision to piss off a wizard with stupid amount of pacts

To think an angel would do such a thing

But whilst Everyone lost their temper and searched for a cure

He was wondering - why did it happen

He was ordered asked to make you a cure

He was able to do it but the real cure was also found - giving you extra cure wasn't going to harm you

But he did plan to harm Michael

"you'd think he was smarter than this, he didn't even hide he was the one who did it but all it does is make my job easier."

nursed you until you woke up

Making sure you had mini cures to completely magic it out of your system

Simeon:

When he found out he was stunned

Betrayal - that's all he felt

How could Michael do such a thing?

But he knew Michael was a cruel angel, many having to drink Eden's tea as punishment

It burned their insides and had any poor soul sobbing for mercy after a gulp

"Michael you fool, you can get away with things in your league but you've involved the three realms into this....I pray you do not make your demise harder for yourself."

Was apart of the cure search party

Soothed you when you finally woke up, telling you it'll be okay

Let you rest as much as you wanted

Luke:

They tried to hide it from him but he kept demanding to see you

He wanted to know why everyone was acting strange

When he finally found out he was broken

His mentor

His idol

His everything

The person who always went for permission and knowledge

He thought so highly of him but he's hurt you

He's done more than that! He's tried to kill you!

He's been sobbing for days and locked himself away, he couldn't bare to see you after his once visit

He believed you were dead and they were just keeping your body

"Michael....why....why would you do this.... I thought you loved your brother's....I thought you were kind..!"

When he found out there was a cure he begged to help but they wouldn't let him

He only got to see you when you woke up and he was hugging you, crying

+ bonus Character↓

Michael:

The angel knew they'd be upset

But 9 demons wanting his blood? One wizard ready to cause mayhem and even his own kind wanting his downfall?

That he didn't expect

In his blind jealousy he didn't expect they'd all care for you this much

Thinking apart of them would be relieved you weren't there

But no

"You were my brother's before you were their partner, I'm simply doing what is right! It was their time to meet him and finally stop controlling all of you! YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO LOVE ME! I'M YOUR FAMILY! WHY ARE THEY MORE IMPORTANT?!"

He got his answer

His wings torn to shreds, chunks of flesh bitten off him and slashes all over his body

He was left in human world bleeding and barely recognisable

They didn't hold back

He dread to think what the rest of them would do when they find him

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