#...oh yeah and there's one more reason

[emmajh97-mumaji]

"Why do you Takuto Maruki fans think he's a genuinely good person?!" (Invincible meme) "That's the neat part, we don't!"

Jokes aside, I do acknowledge that there is a non-zero number of Maruki fans who genuinely fall into the "Maruki did nothing wrong!" camp. I am not one of those, but I have theories.

I think some people are just blinded by how appealing the hypothetical of Maruki's reality is. Life is hard, so people sympathize with Maruki's escapism and try to logic out why it is justified for his reality to exist. They figure, "Who cares if a few kids get emotionally manipulated if it results in an entire world where people in wheelchairs can walk, people who lost their life savings aren't destitute, and corrupt government officials are actually held accountable for their actions? Plus- If Maruki can make it so that nobody remembers the terrible things he did to create this perfect reality, then those terrible things might as well have never happened. So all-in-all it was worth it, in the end." They are Cypher going "ignorance is bliss" and eating the steak, so to speak.

(This argument could also apply to extremely pragmatic people who agree with the philosophy that systematic change on a greater scale is more effective than the type of localized change the Phantom Thieves promote. People who are critical of P5's writing/themes overall.)

Other people may just relate to Maruki personally insofar as they have also experienced an inability to express extreme emotional pain. They try to justify Maruki's actions because they don't want to face the idea that doing a bad thing for the right reasons is still bad. Overall painting Maruki as 'just confused/misguided, NOT bad at all'.

Arguments I've heard from this camp include stuff like, "Maruki is just an extreme empath who was triggered.", "He only did that to Sumire because she asked for it.", "He wasn't intending to manipulate Sumire, he just did what made logical sense to him at the time.", "Akechi dying along with the false reality would have happened whether or not Maruki brought it up, he was just being honest and letting Joker know what was at stake", "Maruki puts Joker to sleep in the bad ending because he only intends to give people what they desire, and he couldn't figure out what Joker wanted so he compromised.", and "Maruki knew that in his ideal reality he could fix any problems that he caused; it was all for the greater good-- not just for the Phantom Thieves but for everyone."

(Funnily enough, I think these people sort of miss the point of Maruki? The reason Maruki quits being a doctor and becomes a taxi cab driver in the end is because even he realizes what he did was wrong. That's what stealing his treasure and having him go through a Change of Heart is supposed to represent, after all.)

So yeah, TL,DR: Maruki apologists usually think either A) his ends justified his means or B) a bad person is only bad if they intend to hurt someone and Maruki never intended to hurt anyone. That's my theory, anyway.

My opinion on Maruki, spoilers, obviously

So, finally got my hands on a copy of persona five royal like a month ago, finished it yesterday, because I work five days a week and have two days to play it. Amazing game, amazing characters.

But after going through the third semester...HOW DOES ANYONE THINK MARUKI IS A GENUINELY GOOD PERSON??? Like, I get the whole "he just wants to help people escape their pain" thing, but like...he himself admits before the third semester that it's not exactly the right way to go about things. There's also the way he goes about trying to prove his reality is better by...effectively retraumatising Sumire, someone he already screwed over mentally by making her think she was her dead sister Kasumi. Like, of course she's gonna react terribly to being shown the exact moment of her sisters death again, YOU STOPPED HER FROM ACTUALLY MOURNING IT AND HEALING FROM IT. There's also how unnerving everyone looks in his reality. Ignoring the main cast, I mean the general public, the people you walk past who fade out to keep the screen from getting cluttered, as you get closer to the deadline for Marukis palace they all end up with these horrific smiles I can only compare to the Puppets smile from fnaf, smiles that look like a threat display rather then any form of happiness. There's also the fact he dangles Akechis life in front of Joker and Akechi to try and get them to accept his reality by implying that destroying it will kill Akechi, GOOD PEOPLE DON'T THREATEN ANOTHER PERSONS LIFE TO WIN AN ARGUMENT, and if you fail to secure a path to the treasure he sticks Joker in a permanent coma for all of eternity to "spare him the pain of making a decision".

Maruki fans, please, I am dying to know how you all think he's a good person rather then just one with good intentions, because those two things are VERY different.

[turtleblogatlast]

One of my favorite headcanons is that Leo grew up watching telenovelas with Splinter.

It just works so well - his bits of Spanish that he spouts randomly, his showy way of apologizing, and, of course, his love for dramatic betrayals all point to this being a very real possibility.

Plus, it’s very cute to imagine a tiny Leo at his father’s side as they both gasp in shock when the show’s eighth plot twist in just as many episodes happens.

[teh-nos]

okay, so the thing with wishing we could kudos every chapter of a fic.

i get it, we all want to hit the little like button more than once, it's the easiest way to express our approval/enjoyment/gratitude. i am going to address this to a generic 'you' (hello Y/N!) and assume that 'you' has either never posted fic to ao3 or hasn't posted both oneshots and multichapter works.

hits, kudos, comments, bookmarks. every marker of popularity (which many will interpret as quality) on ao3 is inadvertantly weighted in favour of works with more chapters. no, not longer necessarily, but with more chapters. go and sort a few fandoms by any of those stats and you'll probably be able to spot this trend in action right away.

oneshots are only at the top of a tag (by the default date sorting) once, and even if you re-read it you can only leave one kudos on it.

a multichapter can stay near the top of the update-sorted results for months if you time your chapter drops right, and of course every time someone comes back for the next chapter that's another hit, and being seen more it is more likely to end up with more kudos. you can still only leave one per work, though, which limits the effects to some extent. multichapter works still tend to overall outperform oneshots on stats, and the longer they are the more likely that becomes, but you'll still usually see a couple of oneshots on the first page if you sort that list by kudos.

and a lot of people (percentage unknown) do sort by kudos (or some other stat) and works at the top of 'by kudos' will thus attract more readers and more kudos. so there's an incentive to get as many kudos as you can on your fic, and if cutting it up into 250 chapters will help... well it already does, and that's had an effect whether writers will admit to dragging fics out a bit on purpose or not, but imagine if that effect were to become orders of magnitude more intense.

even if you personally prefer longer fics cut into fairly short chapters, you probably don't want to get your 150k epic in chapters of only a 100-300 words, do you? you don't want the oneshot writers to just give up when every page, no matter how they're sorted, is full of 5000-chapter works to the point that readers now riot when asked to read a whole 2000 words in one go. your fave author is now feeling insecure because chapter 12 didn't get as many kudos as the last one did.

and this is why ao3 will never let you leave kudos on every chapter. they're aware that the site already incentivises chaptering works and doing that more than you otherwise might. so you're just going to have to learn to put an emoji heart in the comment box.

[lightnersdream-archive]

i've been thinking about exactly why people portraying one of the other crew members successfully killing Jimmy as a "for what you did to Anya" kind of thing rubs me the wrong way a bit and it's because like..... this is just another form of taking agency away from Anya, in a way. it's kind of framing her as some meek, shivery woman-thing who's entirely at the mercy of the men around her, either to hurt her or save her.

(i understand these are mostly for wish fulfillment on the audience's behalf because everyone would like to see Jimmy pay for his crimes. whether or not this is the intention of the person writing it isn't really relevant, characterization happens with or without intent. i feel like it misses the point by portraying it as an 'ideal ending'.)

because... Anya is a capable person. she takes things into her own hands when she can. it was partially(?) her idea to get into the cargo,

(before he interrupts her.. remember when she interrupted Curly in the dead pixel segment?)

it was her idea to get the code scanner from the cockpit,

it was her idea to get the medication from behind the foam.

(the chance to do these things herself is not given to her.)

she'd been keeping Curly alive for months in a critical state somehow, her psych evaluations at the start are only so useless because Jimmy refuses to take it/her seriously and Curly is obviously biased when he puts it into his own hands. he's known him a long time, like he said. "I'll just put good for that one."

there's not a lot of material to work with because of how the game is framed, but it's there. we are working with two very biased perspectives and neither one lends Anya what she deserves

there's significant changes in how she speaks post- and pre- crash, and depending on who she happens to be talking to. i recommend re-reading her dialogue, because the difference is drastic

she acts the way she does around Jimmy because he has tangibly done horrible things to her, is actively hostile, and physically could not escape him by any means. she can't take away Curly's agency herself, in my eyes. you have to remember that Especially in the post-crash segments of the game, it's entirely from Jimmy's POV, and he obviously does not (and has never) thought very highly of her or treated her with a shred of respect

i've seen a general idea that she can't bear to hurt other people for any reason, but that doesn't really track to me. this is the real point of the post by the way

it seems based on the parts where she says she struggles to give Curly medication. "It just hurts him so much, I can't stand the noise." "It makes me nauseous."

it's not really the same thing as, say, hurting someone in self defense

this sounds like she did want the gun itself. this never felt worded like someone who would refuse to, at very least, threaten Jimmy with a gun, with violence. if she had been given the agency to make that decision on her own. she wasn't though

she still tries to reclaim some of it even as she's denied it

by the end she's still trying to keep that gun out of his hands

i think some people overly soften her, for similar reasons the game itself is trying to comment on. she's not a tender victim who couldn't cause pain to another out of the softness of her soul, she's a person who's had every last bit of agency ripped from her repeatedly until she couldn't take it anymore. that's the point. that's why framing her that way, "needing" someone to save her, is odd to me

she didn't need Curly to save her, she needed him to take responsibility

she didn't want to escalate things, but she's not an idiot. self defense was absolutely on her mind

but who knows im just saying shit *smiles serenely*

[blueskittlesart]

I’m so sorry how much bullshit HP fans are continuing to putting trans people through, Im so fucking sick of it. I mean its international news that jkr is almost single handedly bankrolling the transphobic movement in Scotland and for the second year in a row Ive had to explain to a ‘well meaning’ friend of mine that her harry potter halloween party isn’t just poor taste and I don’t care if she has trans friends who are cool with it I’m not fucking going and its fucking embarrassing. I just wanna shake people. Fucking stand up for something. Consume other media. Sorry not sorry your comfort characters are trash and so are you until you grow the fuck up

what really gets me is that i WAS a huge harry potter fan back in the day. my best friend mailed me a hogwarts letter on my 11th birthday. I got picked to do the wand-choosing thing at universal, and of course i made my parents buy me that fucking $40 wand afterwards. I dressed up as hermione for halloween like 3 years in a row. I've read every single book. I've watched all the movies. I bought the fucking lego sets. but you know what i did when she lost her shit on twitter? i STOPPED FUCKING BUYING HER SHIT. what is so hard about that. genuinely. idc if you used to love the characters. i did too. they don't stand for what we thought they stood for and that sucks but you are an adult and you have to come to terms with the fact that sometimes things aren't what they say they are. find something else to love. or at the very least SHUT. THE FUCK. UP.

[bull-shit-suji]

actually no i need to talk about the green witch arc. ciel and his band of merry fools go to germany and learn that this forest is haunted by WEREWOLVES and in it is a village full of WITCHES with cursed amulets and potions and whatever

and the immediate vibe is "lol what a bunch of bogus" which is really just batshit coming from the kid with a demon butler

and then woah big reveal! it wasn't werewolves or witches it was a covert military operation REPLETE with radar tracking (not a thing until wwii) and electronic displays (most likely crt screens, which again weren't fully developed until the 1930s) and TANKS. for reference the first "tank" was put together by a guy in 1899 who mounted a machine gun to THIS

absolute paragon of engineering. the panzer (the exact model of tank in the arc) was not a thing until wwi.

and. and ciel and ESPECIALLY the Demon Butler in question are like. ohhhh yeah that makes more sense. the amulets were just transmitting our exact locations through technology that won't exist for another three decades. whew glad we sorted that one out. man wouldn't it have been CRAZY if it really was werewolves.

[om340700]

ha ha ha ha ha ha I need them to add hairstyles in the new game NYOW!!! (please) i cant take this anymore!!1!1!1! (thank you)

[premamelody]

like theyre like siblings part 2 for me

explaination or smth

[my-name-is-apollo]

One thing I like about Apollo in Hades 2 is that he is usually polite, especially respectful towards his elders, but if they provoke him he will get back at them. But in a subtle manner, and only after a few seconds will you realise that he was throwing shade.

I'm paraphrasing here but here are two examples:

Hera: you are just like Zeus (derogatory)

Apollo: did you just compare me to your husband ? How awfully kind of you :)

Poseidon: haha Apollo has finally decided to join the war because he couldn't withstand the pressure from his dear mortals anymore

Apollo: it's because I want to help you, uncle! since I know that you guys cannot handle this situation on your own :)

[compasspyxis]

Stupid headcanon I came up with instead of doing my assignment

Consigliere

- Has a fantastic poker face and can sweet talk almost everyone

- Is overworked, juggling legal messes and paperwork to keep the crew out of prison (often forgets to eat)

- Normally hides his tiredness and stress behind a well practiced smile

- Basically grew up in the mafia

- Also went to law school to become the mafias ''official'' legal protection.

- Met Capo when they were both younger and was happy to finally speak to someone his own age

Caporegime

- His family owns a restaurant (which acted as a mafia front unbeknownst to his parents)

- Found about this and eventually became an official member of the gang (met Consigliere around this time as well.)

- The gangs unofficial cook and makes sure everyones well fed (especially Consi)

- Has a mental note of everyones meal preferences and allergies

- The sensible one and keeps everyone grounded when things get chaotic.

Soldier

- Tallest and strongest (can easily do push ups with the whole crew on his back)

- Big foodie

- Raised by his grandfather (a war vet) who taught him survival and combat basics.

- Worked several jobs to support his grandfather

- Has a strong russian accent

- He becomes very loud when hes drunk

Contractee

- The youngest in the crew

- has a notebook he doodles in during mission briefings (has mini comics he made up)

- Likes to make up his own ''missions'' that he goes on his own (usually ends up in trouble)

- Grew up poor and in more messy area (a lot of the kids there end up killed, taken or sold)

- Survived by pickpocketing and setting traps

[cluescorner]

A Batman who kills people is a bad Batman. Except for Terry because he is my special boy. Terry can drown a man it's ok. He can literally shatter a woman it's fine.

[dewwshi]

he may be the better swordsman but we all know who wins the wrestling matches

(psst i'm on bluesky now i guess?)

[stars-obsession-pit]

A one-sided jazz x Jason or batkid idea

Okay before i get into my own thing, i wanna link this oneshot i found on AO3 which i think is rad

Growing up in Amity Park with mad scientists for parents had not engendered in Jazz a normal sense of danger. She was completely chill in situations that would make most others cower in fear. There’s a reason she was willing to live in as seedy a part of Gotham as she did instead of seeking out more expensive but theoretically safer student housing.

But even so, there were limits. And catching her neighbor climbing up the fire escape at night heavily armed and covered in blood and gore went way beyond them. She is not living next door to a serial killer! Especially considering the way she’d caught him staring at her recently…

Which brought her here, packing her bags as quickly as she could after watching him leave for… whatever it was that he did during the day. She was gonna call the cops on him (not that they were likely to actually do that much in Gotham) and then crash over at her friend’s place until her first chance to transfer colleges to somewhere else.

Then, turning to survey the apartment one last time, a thought struck her. A bit of blood stains and wreckage to make it look like she was kidnapped would hopefully prevent him from realizing she was onto him and coming after her for revenge. Plus, getting to work off some of her own anger by breaking things might be therapeutic.

…And so, when Jason returned to his apartment building later that afternoon, it was to see it surrounded by cop cars. Apparently, someone had kidnapped his neighbor Jazz and ransacked her apartment. And there were no leads except that in her call, she had mentioned seeing a blood-soaked figure enter the building a previous night.

He felt dread and rage boil in his gut. He’d never even noticed anyone watching them. Could they have been after him, and attacked her as collateral? He hadn’t even asked her out yet, but he had mentioned his crush around his minions before. If that was the reason, whoever had snitched would pay.

Or even if it was just a coincidence, he’d still make those responsible regret it.

It was time for Red Hood to start hunting once again.

[synthshenanigans]

for months I've had the idea of mixing/fusing cj's albums & tracks together so im finally gonna try makin them :}

this one being Count Eleven & To Toe Dead Lines making Counting Dead Lines

the outfit is almost entirely off of my Count Eleven design! the very wip sketch of it at least

idk when ill finish that still as i did it like 6-8 months ago but at somepoint. probably .

I plan to make more but no promises at when I can actually finish any of them

[rawliverandgoronspice]

I'm glad totk has no connection to the previous ganon (oot-onwards) because it would totally ruin him as a character.

Honestly I consider totk ganondorf separate even from botw, because I do love the idea of botw ganon being a completely self-dehumanized, seething, eldritch representation of this ageless grudge no one has any context for anymore, so he might as well be understood as a natural disaster or a vicious plague. I find this incredibly juicy!! Buuuut to me it only works within the context of a dozen other games building the ground up for this goopy, demonic, hateful incarnation with too many limbs and far too many angry eyes.

If you decide to connect BotW Ganon to TotK Ganondorf however.... like. I'm sorry, but. Sir, you are not this angry. You have zero reason to be anywhere near this level of rancor. You haven't even been stabbed, ever!!!! You never had your wish ripped out from under you!!!! You have never been forced to rot away in the void while fully aware of every agonizing second for centuries, not even a single time!!!! Rauru merely grounded you so you'd have your little power nap (:>), and then you woke up with renewed energy to topple down the other kid's sand castle just because it's fun to watch him cry. And honestly TotK Ganondorf does kind of feel like a toddler, gleeful to discover his own capacity for destruction for the first time. Which. I guess that could have been, something? I don't know, to me it's still pretty stupid and inconsistent honestly. But either way, that is not Dislocated Screeching Essence of a Mad Pig material.

TotK Ganondorf has no grudge, and as far as we know (which is insane!!!! this guy's core characterization is envy, yet he doesn't have this corrosive toxic energy at all in totk!!! he's far too happy to be here and break stuff just because, and like sir you are a grown man you've been a king for decades what are you so giddy aboutttt), the worse he had to suffer through in totk, as far as the game tells us, was a temporary humiliation. Which could absolutely be motivating for sure, but it feels very human and political and measured. Not "I will shred my own skin and forget my own name and suffer death a thousand times over just to show you all the depths of my hate" levels of fury. Again, to remove our familiarity to the character as players cheapens decades of buildup, and!!!!!!! anyway. Anyway.

anyway.

[defiledtomb]

WE'RE GONNA BE OKAY!!!!