#but it won’t matter if i end up spending $300 on random

[qazastra]

i gotta stop going to random concerts man how have i already been to 5 this year COME ONNNNN

[tamakissimp]

headcanon- secretly rich s/o

request: @rayanicaraynbow​ Hi! This might be a little weird, but could I get headcanons for Todoroki, YaoMomo, Shinsou, and Jiro with a s/o that is the child of a pro hero/someone who's just generally rich, but they have a different last name than their rich parent, so nobody knows their rich. I'm not sure if this is *too* specific or not specific *enough*. If not, that's fine, it was just a random 1 AM thought, and I couldn't find a rules list if there was one. I love your blog btw! :)

a/n: I wrote Shouto’s differently because this boy 100% has a rich people radar. idc it’s true.

TODOROKI:

He'll probably know that you're rich before you tell him. He most likely saw you at a 'rich people' party when he was younger.

He knows how much it sucks to be judge by your parents' name so he'll ignore the topic of your family all together.

Shouto thinks it's cute and sad at the same time how much you try to hide your wealth.

He loves how nonrich you act. Going to thrift shops as dates, always sharing bills, checking price tags, not always getting name-brand stuff.

He loves how normal he feels around you. No pressure to go out to fancy restaurants. You tow can just make a nice homecooked meal.

Absolutely adores the low maintenance dates. You two can go for a walk in the park and call it a date.

You've already gone through your 'allowance' (while you have a couple hundred thousand in your bank account) and still need a sweater. He'll use this as an excuse to gift you his clothing. Seeing you in his shirts makes his heart do summersaults.

"Shouto.". The half-and-half boy turns around at the sound of your voice. His hearts warm up at the sight of you, a big smile plastered on your cheeks while you hold a shirt in front of you. "Look how cute this is! And it's only 300 yen.".

Shouta walks over to you and presses the shirt against you slightly. He tries to imagine how it would look on you. "It's pretty," he says. "But it'll look even prettier on you.". You give his chest a playful swat as you hide your face behind the shirt. "What, it's true.".

"You are a flirt, mister," you say before twirling around and walking to the changing rooms in the thrift shop. Shouta doesn't know what he's feeling. Maybe it's love, maybe it's happiness, maybe it's longing. He doesn't know. All he knows is that he's hooked on how domestic things like going shopping together feel. How normal everything feels. He isn't Shouto Todoroki, son of Endeavor. You aren't Y/n Y/L/n, child of one of the richest family in Japan.

No, you're just Shouta and Y/n. Just a young couple wanting to spend their afternoon together.

MOMO:

She is very rich herself. Even though she should be able to recognize a fellow rich person, she doesn't.

She always pays when you go out to eat, she buys you the most extravagant gifts while yours are just average.

You even got a job, not wanting to solely rely on your parents' money.

Every time she offered to pay for something or gift you something, you had to stifle your laughter. Her intent is kind and sweet but at the same time useless. You could easily buy all the stuff she gifts you yourself.

You like to DIY stuff with her. Upcycling old clothing, tailoring thrift shop clothing, mixing broken items. You make it a bonding experience for both of you.

If she thinks that you're on the poorer side than she'll spoil you to death. Either with basic things like your favourite snacks or with that shirt she's seen you eyeing in the store.

She had no clue about your wealth so when she found out, she was perplexed.

It isn't weird for Aizawa to take attendance, though he forgot to do so most of the times. "Bakugou," he says. Bakugou grunts in response. You and Momo are too caught up in your own hushed conversation to pay attention to what the teacher is saying.

"Tanaka," Aizawa says. Fuck. Your attention is suddenly turned to the teacher. Students look around themself for the said Tanaka. "Oh, sorry. Y/l/n.". You raise your hand and drop it back down the second Aizawa acknowledges your presence.

You turn back to Momo. Her jaw has dropped and she's looking at you with wide eyes. "You're a Tanaka?". You nod at her question. Everyone knew the Tanaka's. They're the richest family in Japan, owning multiple renown hero agency.

"Yeah," you say as you awkwardly scratch at the back of your neck. "But I go by my father's name.". Momo nods. She understands the pressure of being seen as the 'rich kid'. The assumptions people make about you just because of your financial status.

"Don't worry," she says. "You're still Y/n to me.". You smile at her before continuing your conversation. God, how did you get lucky enough to end up with someone like Momo?

SHINSO:

Shinso never cared about how much money you had or how little. All he cared about is that you're with him. That you don't judge him for his quirk.

So he never noticed the few designer pieces of clothing you had mixed between your wardrobe. Or the fact that you always had the newest model phone on the market.

He thought that you were just being kind and wanted to treat him when you offered to pay the bill whenever you went out to eat.

When you were younger, you tried to hide who your mother was more but as you went older and went to the U.A, you started to accept it more.

So, when Shinsou found out you're the child of a pro-hero, saying he's shocked is an understatement.

Guest speakers come every often. At least once a week, the school arrange a pro-hero to come and give the class a pep talk or give them tips. Due to this, you knew that it was only a matter of time before your mother would be standing before your class.

"I'll pick you up at your dorm.". You read over your mother's text a hundred times. Even though you weren't the one who's going to be standing in front of a class full of hyperactive, overly excited students you're still nervous. You tap your foot against the floor as you bit your nails.

"Y/n!". You turn to your left. You see your mother standing in the elevator, waving at your happily before mentioning you to come over. You take quick steps towards her. The moment you're within arms-reach she pulls you in for a hug. "I missed you. Have you gotten taller?".

You swat her hand away as she tries to ruffle through your hair. "A little. And I missed you too.". The elevator doors close and you two start to move downwards. You tell your mother all about your class but your conversation is interrupted when the elevator stops and another person enters.

"Baby?". You look up as you see your boyfriend standing before you. His eyes wander from you to the pro-hero, your mother, standing beside you. He bows slightly to her before standing beside you.

"Is this the boy you've been telling me about?" your mother asks as she nudges your side. Your cheeks heat up as you nod your head. "He's handsome!". You look over at Shinso, who's eyes are wide. He tilts his head as you can almost see the gears in his hand turning.

You smile at him. "Shinso, this is my mom," you say. With that his jaw drops. Sure, he saw how much you two looked alike but he didn't think much of it. His mouth opens and closes a couple of times as he tries to think of what to say.

"You didn't tell him about me?". You shake your head at your mother's question. The elevator doors open against and your mother quickly slips out of the it, leaving you and a barely functioning Shinsou behind.

You lace your fingers through Shinsu's and pull him out of the elevator. "You're.....She's your mom?" he asks. You nod while keeping your eyes fixed on the ground. Will he judge you? Will he be mad that you didn't tell him? "Huh, never would have guessed.". You're taken aback by his cheery tone but your confusion doesn't last long as Shinso drags you along with him to your classroom. Well, that went smoother than you imagined.

JIRO:

Much like Shinsou, she doesn't care about your wealth. She doesn't care about your money. All she cares about is that you love her.

She'll start to grow suspicious when you buy concert tickets and new instruments for her like it's nothing but she won't bring it up.

Jiro will probably try to 'compensate' with your gifts and goes out of her way with cute dates and romantic gestures.

She doesn't say a thing about your wealth until you gift her a new guitar for the third time.

And when she accidentally sees your true last name on a letter your parents send you, she's surprised. You, her Y/n who's she's been with for so long, is filthy rich.

"Surprise," you say as you push the beautifully wrapped box towards her. Jiro quirks up her brow as she carefully rips the patterned paper of the box. She opens it to reveal a new guitar.

She recognizes the model. You've seen her eying it for a week now. Your heart warms up as you see a smile spread across her lips. "Again?" she asks. You nod.

"I couldn't help myself," you explain. "I wanted to hear you play on it.". Jiro just shakes her head with a smile as she continues to unbox the instrument.

You watch her intensively as she places the now fully unwrapped guitar next to her older ones. It stands out. It's shinier than the others. "How do you afford this?" she says. "A guitar is like 60,000 yen.". You just shrug as you pull her towards you.

"Oh, it's...inheritance.". You feel bad for lying straight through your teeth but you don't know who she'll react if she finds out about your family. You plaster on a smile.

"I saw the letter," she says. Your blood runs cold. Maybe she saw a different letter. Yeah, it must have been. "I don't care about your family.". Oh crap. She definitely read the letter.

Your smile falters a bit. Jiro notices and cups your cheeks. "Is something wrong?" she asks. Her voice calms you down a bit. You just shake your head.

"No, I just..." you say. "I just thought you might...act differently when you found out.". She shakes her head and plants a kiss on your forehead.

"God no, you're still my Y/n," Jiro says.

[justananxiousauthor]

DestructiveDeath Oneshot

Soooooo, I made this a few months ago.... and never posted it... then shared with my friend... now I gotta post it.... soooo here ya go. @nozapuns Here ya go....

I found myself trembling as Reaper disappeared, my voice still caught in my throat, my throat dry. He didn’t understand, he didn’t understand a thing I’d been through. I’d watched everyone I loved die by the hands of some kid. No, not some kid, Chara. The name made me grit my teeth, I hated that small child with every fiber in my being, and every drop of magic in my soul. They’d taken everything I cared about, everything but Reaper, I guess I took them away from myself. He didn’t understand how much I loathed myself for what had happened, and it wasn’t like I could talk to anyone else in my plain white hell. I’d spend days, months, years maybe, waiting for him to return so we could spend a short time together before he vanished again. I was done living like this, I’d rather return to my timeline and be dusted than spend another moment here, and reaper hated that. I sat on the ground in my lonely silence as time passed by. He’d say he’d be back soon, but here?

Soon could be never.

And never could be soon.

Time passed…….

I don’t even know how long

I could only judge by the exhaustion I felt, so I counted the days by my sleep. 

10 cycles passed and I was still alone.

20 passed and nothing…..

30

40

50…

100… 

Invisible aches filled me, and I don’t even know what happened next. Anger filled me, rage that I couldn’t even understand. I just didn’t understand…..

150…

200…

300…

500…….

5,000………………….

Everything blurred together, the loneliness crushing. Tears burned my skull like fire branding my bones. Then something changed, a new power coursed through my soul as the tears dried to once porcelain white face of mine leaving streaks of light blue. I gasped as I felt the void pulling at my body, glitching it even more than the day I had come here. What was once white turned black, my sockets red eyes yellow, and fingers red and yellow. What was happening?!

I woke up somewhere new, or maybe it was the same place as before, but it felt…..

Different.

I could feel the energy that was hidden in the white space, and it was almost like I could... 

Open it. 

Out stretching my hand I took in a sharp breath, a window opening for me to look out into the world.

Not a window, a door for me to finally escape my endless prison.

Freedom….

5,001…...

Day 11,397 without Reaper.

A day well done as the Destroyer of AU’s, a title I held dear, bringing all other abominations to their knees. I enjoyed my work, which made it easy to keep others from suffering like how I did. However, I found it impossible to destroy a classic timeline, something I was from, maybe it just pained me too much to see my brother cry… but if a single Sans attempted to become Geno and stray from their code, they would be annihilated. I found myself in a void, not one of my own, one created by a new Geno. The new code felt sickly to me, this idiot had no idea what he was doing, but I could fix that. By the end of the fight, if you could even call it that, his dust laid at my feet, a hollow pain echoing in my soul, but before I could destroy the timeline….

A voice from the past came echoing back.

“Geno, I’m here to visit!” Reaper’s voice echoed through the void. My body stiffened at the sound, so this is what he had been doing? Got in a fight with me so he just found a replacement? A new geno, someone with the same face, personality, a clean slate…

I couldn’t help but laugh. 

“What- Error!” Reaper growled, and by the time I turned to see him, he had his scythe ready to fight. So quick to jump to attack the one he claimed to love, not that I was that person anymore, Geno died a long long time ago.

“Long time no see Reaper,” I said, I doubt he remembered, I probably wasn’t even the first Geno he played with. I pressed my fingers to my face for a moment before pulling the brightly colored yarn away from my blackened cheekbones, “Do you wanna play too?” I asked, the pain numbing.

“You killed him,” He began staring at the dust that greyed my feet. He charged, probably mad I broke his new toy, so I dodged.

“What? Miss him already? Oh please Reaper, I know this isn’t the first Geno you’ve played with. Just another toy broken in your miserable toy box right?” 

“You know NOTHING!!” He yelled while swinging his scythe at me, his rage would be his downfall in this fight. 

I was right, the fight ended quickly as Reaper made a mistake and ended up caught in my lines, hands tangled above his head.

“I know nothing?” I asked leaning in, holding the ends of the yarn that tangled him up oh so beautifully. “Is that true? Do I really know nothing? I mean you’ve been Geno hopping for as long as I can remember, their sad faces crying out for you, yet you never come. You never save them, you never saved him.”

“Him?” He asked, he looked so deliciously defeated, like I had destroyed something he actually cared for.

“Geno? All of them, everyone I have ever destroyed.” 

“Did you?” He began.

“Of course I did, they all became dust at my feet. Which is really a shame, dust is so hard to wash out.” 

“Did you kill a Geno, 11,000 days ago?” He asked, wow, color me impressed, he remembered.

“What’s so important about that Geno in particular? He’s just another abomination snuffed out.” 

“He was my Geno, now tell me, did you kill him, 11,000 days ago?” He asked again, his Geno? Me? He was lying, trying to get under my skin. If I had any.

“Yes, I killed Geno, and I watched him scream, I watched him slowly become insane, from loneliness, from guilt, from pain. 11,000 days alone, and I watched, and then, when I became bored with watching his insanity, I killed him.” I said expressionlessly. Reaper’s eyes went dark. “I mean, did you really care about him, you left him alone for so long!” I couldn’t help but laugh.

“I cared,” He whispered.

“Excuse me?” I said dryly.

“I cared more than I have ever cared about anyone.” Reaper continued.

“You cared about some random Geno that you ran away from?” I couldn’t help but ask as I leaned forwards to look into his deep dead eyes. “You left him alone, to go insane.” I said simply, “you two get in a fight over something that was killing him inside and you left him.” 

“I didn’t mean to!” Reaper snapped looking up at me, “I couldn’t get back in! I couldn’t open a portal or anything to his void! I tried to go back to apologize but I couldn’t!” He said now tears began to fall.

“You tried?” I said dryly, “you tried?” I began to laugh, “well obviously Reaper, you didn’t try hard enough!” Now I was yelling, the same painful rage as the day I left filled me. “You left me there alone to suffer for years on end! 15 years of isolation 15 YEARS of being alone and you…. YOU…!” I yanked on the yarn to pull him upright into, what looked like, a rather uncomfortable position. “You tried,” I growled, my anger, my frustration….

“You?” The light returned to his eye as he looked at me.

“Me?” I asked, “What about me? You left Geno alone!” I snapped.

“No, you said I left you alone, Error…” he paused.

“Hah! No, I didn’t,” The anger was quickly replaced with stomach-turning anxiety. 

“Error where did you come from?” Reaper asked while looking my body over. “How were you made?” I wanted to hide, remove his wandering eye lights from me.

“That’s a little personal don’t you think?” I asked, feeling sick.

“You’re the one that started monologuing and slipped up. Now tell me, Error, where did you come from.” The look he gave me made me feel like I hadn’t felt in over 30 years. I grabbed my chest with my free hand and looked down. 

“It really isn’t any of your business,” I stated.

“I really think it is Geno,” his words made the yarn slip from my hands, releasing him and dropping the other skeleton to the ground. It took him a moment to recover but he stood. “Now, tell me what happened.” He could see right through me, see right through the lies, through this character I had made.

“Don’t call me that,” I said simply, arms dropping to my sides.

“Alright, Error,” He got up and came to me, hands sliding down my arms before taking my hands in his. His touch, though it did make me flinch, it also made me feel like that love-struck puppy I once was. It wasn’t as scary. “Tell me what happened.” I found myself unable to stop once I started, telling him my new life story, the pain, the tears, everything. Damp dark yarn ran down from his empty socks, sticking to my cheeks as he listened to me, one hand gently brushing over my cheekbone as he hushed me, I pushed him back.

“Reaper,” I said my voice cracking from the pain, “I can’t.” my voice broke my own tears falling. “I couldn’t do it anymore,” he hushed me more silently as he pulled me into his arms, one hand cradling the back of my head, the other rubbing circles into my shoulder. I could more glitches coat me but… he was okay... “The loneliness was crushing.”

“It's okay, I am so sorry I left you like that, I tried to go back and apologize, I promise, I’ll be right next to you the whole way, I promise I won’t leave you again,” I swore into my ear. 

“But Reaper,” I started with voice trembling, “What am I going to do?” I asked, “I’m no longer the person you love.” 

“Error no,” He said pulling back and resting a hand on my cheek, “No no my love, it doesn’t matter who you are, Sans, Geno, Error, I don’t care. I know who I love, and that’s you.” His words made me melt into him, returning into his arms as the tears fell heavier. I just wanted to stay there, in his grip as he protected me from the pain I had felt for all these years without him. He hushed me as I sobbed, the crushing loneliness finally lifting off my shoulders as I just melted into the man I loved’s arms. His hands gently ran over me as he tried to comfort me, trying to hide his own tears. “I am so sorry my love, I love you more than the worlds themselves.” 

Day 1 with Reaper again.

[thoughtfullyyoungduck]

superhero’s

Summary: Could you do one where Freddy Freeman (Shazam) is Eddie's son and is about to meet Richie?

A/N: sorry it took me so long to post! 

Eddie is nervous. He rarely lets himself admit to it, and the instances where he does have been few and far between after Freddy was born and he became a dad, but today Eddie can say it without thinking of how to hide it. Freddy can discern it, just like he always can when it comes to his father, but he either can’t conjure up the words to reassure him, or he knows tonight is not going to go well and wants to prepare his father for it.

Eddie adores Freddy to bits, unsurprisingly. His son looks like a mirror image of himself when he was a kid, and it’s sometimes eerie for Eddie to come downstairs and see his son. It’s like feeling he’s been send back into the past to watch himself from the third person view. Though their physical appearances are similar, their personalities have a few major discrepancies.

For one, Freddy is a lot more brave then Eddie was at age, a lot more brave than Eddie is today. He’s obsessed with superheroes and convinced that they’re real, and he’s been know to dive headfirst into danger out of idolatry of these heroes.

He has a leg problem that he never lets other or himself acknowledges, but that’s no setback for the power of his mind. Once Freddy is convinced of something, it’s very difficult – impossible even- to throw him of his game. That Eddie likes a whole lot, that he can stand up for himself and is able to secure boundaries no matter who they’re aimed at, he likes the impulsivity a lot less.  

It’s because their way of handling things is so fundamentally different, that Eddie is afraid how he’s going to react to Richie. He’s not sure if Freddy will appreciate any of the jabs Richie makes, if he will accept a new man moving in with them, or what he will do if he deems Richie unworthy.

Freddy on the other hand is a lot more collected, to no one’s surprise. He’s been playing videogames for most of the day, and an abandoned comic book is carelessly thrown over the entry way table. He hasn’t said anything about the impending meeting, and acts indifferent, but Eddie thinks it’s just an act.

He watches from the corner of the room as Freddy concentrates on his game, fingers pressing the console so hard Eddie fears he’ll need to buy him a new x-box if he keeps it up. Under his breath, he mutters along with his actions, some words a lot more explicit then Eddie would normally allow.

His presence looming behind Freddy is unnoticed, because if Freddy knew Eddie was standing there, he would have stopped his stream of curse words and smiled cheekily his direction, the way he always does when he’s trying to get his dad to break the house rules and escape repercussions.

Eddie coughs once, but willingly waits for his son’s video game to end so he won’t have to start over. He’s not always blessed with the patience to wait, his road rage is a clear example of that, but Eddie fight hard against the instincts that his child has to drop everything for him. Myra accuses him of trying to be the favorite parent over it, but Eddie has no such intentions. After growing up with a mother like his, he’s all too aware of how fast the lines between requesting respect and demanding it get crossed. He doesn’t over want to be an overbearing presence in his son’s life that Freddy dreads coming home too.

His tactic pays off in the end, to Myra’s irritation. Where Freddy will roll his eyes whenever Myra asks him to do something, he now gets his game - Eddie doesn’t know which game he’s playing, he’s pretty much clueless about videogames in general- to a safe point, pauses it and looks acceptingly in Eddie’s direction.

‘What’s up dad?’

‘Is that your favorite game you’re playing?’ Eddie fumbles, having no idea what video game he was actually playing or what his son’s best-beloved even is. ‘The one with – spiderman?’ He guesses, judging by the eye roll that Freddy gives him he’s gravely mistaken.

‘Spiderman? Dad my favorite video game is batman arkham underworld. About batman, not Spiderman’, Freddy voice trails off and he draws out the last few words, clearly pulling Eddie’s leg about not differentiating the two superheroes. ‘I should be offended that you don’t know that. Don’t you ever listen to what I have to say?’

Eddie laughs, but it’s strained and shaky from the nerves jumping over on his vocal cords. He came up to Freddy’s room because Richie should be arriving in less than five minutes, and he get a word on how open to the conversation Freddy really was. Now that he’s up here though, Eddie can’t conjure up a worse thing but to ask.

‘Dad, I’m sure you didn’t come here to talk about a videogame you’re not interested in. Spit out what you want to say.’

‘I- I need you to give Richie a chance. He’s brazen and sometimes a whole lot of weird, and he’s fucking stupid too sometimes’, Freddy doesn’t comment on the way Eddie smiles with full dimples out at the mere thought of Richie, ‘but I love him and if you could keep an open mind that would be great.’

Eddie walks deeper into Freddy’s room, on the verge of pacing around, feeling stupid for begging to his son about Richie. He can’t help it, he loves Richie almost as much as he loves Freddy, and it would kill him in the two most important people in his life didn’t get along.

‘Dad-‘

‘If you don’t like him then we can talk later. I love you and if you don’t like Richie that’s not going to change anything, but I’m aware Richie might not give the best first impression – the first time I ever met him he poured sand over me and I intended on killing him - so if you could stick it out for the entire evening then you can decide for yourself if you like him or not.’

‘Dad, it’s fine. I’m not going to judge the guy from doing different.’ Freddy chuckles, but it lacks all the normal energy and joy it normally contains.

At once, Eddie feels stupid. All he had considered was how nervous Richie was to meet Freddy, but he hadn’t contemplated how on edge Freddy was to be introduced to Richie. ‘Bud.’

‘No, it’s fine. I mean my own mom didn’t even accept me with my disability but some random stranger sure will.’

‘Freddy..’, Eddie trails off, he inches himself closer to sit beside Freddy on the floor, despite his kneecaps creaking. He’s all to aware that this is a delicate situations. Despite his resentment towards Myra for dragging him back into he’s old mindset that he was sick, she’s Freddy’s mom, and he would never do anything to harm their relationship.

‘Your mom loves you. Every part of you.’

‘No she didn’t, she liked that she could take care of me and get sympathy for it, but as soon as I tried to create some independence she hated it.’

It’s quiet in the room for a long time. It lays heavy on Eddie’s stomach, but he’s at a loss for words. The only thing he can do is to comfort his son, by hugging him close and trying with all his might to take over his sadness. Freddy asks him often what super power he would like to have if he had the change, and Eddie always responds with time travel, to have a redo of his childhood, but now he knows the actual answer is that he would like to absorb other people’s sadness and take it upon himself. Anything to get his son to stop suffering.

He can’t condone Myra’s actions, her cold behavior when Freddy managed to jump over small hurdles and she refused to see it and instead tried her best to sink his confidence by convincing him he did it wrong, no matter how much he had hoped his son would have a better relationship with his mom.

‘Richie’s not like that’, Eddie eventually settles on saying, because he knows that with all his heart. ‘And if he was I would kick his ass. If he would make fun of you’, he ruffles Freddy’s hair and is delighted to hear him laugh. ‘Then I’ll never allow him to set one foot back in this door.’

‘Okay dad, you don’t have to oversell it.’

‘Do you not think I would do it? I spend more than 300 dollars on comic books for you.’

‘Yeah cause buying comic books and beating him up are comparable.’

Freddy is back to his old chipper self, for now at least, and he reaches for his cane to help him walk.

‘Well, if what you’re saying is true, I better go check him out and see if he’s good enough for my old man. Race you down the stairs?’

Freddy doesn’t wait for Eddie’s answer before he’s off, fully ready to throw himself off the stairs if it means being the first one down. Eddie slows down tremendously, praying that he’s son won’t actually do that, but enjoying their little game anyway.

‘Flight or Invisibility?’ Freddy asks later at the dinner table, looking at Richie specifically as he asks.

Richie’s looking a little bit pale, and he glances at Eddie not understanding. Alas, he gets no help from him, Richie’s on his own on this one.

‘Euh, invisibility?’ The answer is said with uncertainty, but Freddy dismisses it as he jumps on the opportunity to talk about more superhero stuff.

‘Really? You picked invisibility? Okay wow, that’s surprising cause they once did this test where it showed that-‘ Freddy continues to ramble, but all Eddie can do is stare dreamily at his own little family. 

[random-mha-thoughts]

Stranger (Todoroki x Reader)

Pairing: Todoroki x Reader

Genre: Fluff, College!AU

Summary: While at a party you were forced to attend, you meet a mysterious stranger having fun by himself in the corner.

Inspo: A Tiktok by Designer_eyebags that has suddenly disappeared, it was too cute for me not to write honestly.

Word count: 2,476

Tags:  @yuki-osaki​ @liviitehe​ @iamsoftsodonttoucheume-blog​ @bunnythepipsqueak​

a/n:  When I tell you I'm a sucker for casual Todo esp Todo in a beanie?? Ded 

College!AU for Todoroki finally!  It was honestly about time!  Though, I feel like I could’ve done better with it, I wasn’t really sure where I wanted to take it so I just let it take me I guess?  But I think it's still pretty cute, so that's gotta count for something, right?

I've got another Baku scenario planned, and then a Midoriya one right after that (or I might reverse the order since I have the beginning of the Midoriya one written already).  Also thanks again for 300 followers!  Yall might be getting a surprise at 400, depends on when I finish these next few scenarios.

Buy me a coffee?

I don't want to be here at this party, but Ochaco told me I need to loosen up.  And she's tired of me whining about how single I am.  "Then do something about it!" she exclaimed, "Get out there and find someone!  You won't meet anyone if you stay in the same rut!"  She's lucky, she already has a boyfriend.  At first glance, he's a complete pushover, but he seems to be a social person.  At least, social enough to have friends who host dorm parties, apparently.  So here I am, in a stranger's dorm with colored lights and obnoxiously loud music.

The funniest thing about this entire party, though, is this random person I've been watching.   The music in the room is bumping to some EDM tracks, but this guy's having a blast in the corner of the room.  He's off in his own world, headphones on, swaying and mouthing the lyrics to whatever's playing, which might be more melodious judging by how much slower his head nods are.

Honestly, relatable.

I would've thought he was just drunk or on some really good drugs, but his movements are structured enough to show he still has coordination.  I'll admit, the way he's dancing around like no one's watching is pretty endearing.  He seems like a pretty fun guy to be around, I should go talk to him.   Ochaco abandoned me for her boyfriend, and this is my way of finding someone else, I guess.

I approach him slowly.  It would be a stupid idea to tap on his shoulder and interrupt him, I don't really want to break his flow.  I settle for standing by quietly, close enough for him to notice I'm staring right at him, but far enough so I don't break up his single-man party.

It takes him a while to notice me.  The music bleeding from his white headphones even in this loud environment tells me he's really trying to drown everyone else out.  His eyes are closed as his had bobs around, silently mouthing the lyrics to a familiar Top 40's song I've heard on the radio.  His casual outfit consists of black jeans, a half-white-half-black hoodie over a black T-shirt, gray Converse, and a matching beanie.  His hair on the side facing me is scarlet red, but from his movements, I can see the other side is snow white.

My lips quirk into a small smile as I continue to watch him entertain himself.  I probably look like a creep, just watching some other weirdo doing their thing in the corner.  I can't help it, he looks absolutely adorable, not to mention just a smidge familiar.

His eyes open for a brief moment just so he can blink and he double takes at me, freezing up and jolting backward.  He slides the headphones down around his neck and looks around before scratching his head.  "Hi... " he offers a slight wave.  "Was I bothering you?"

Now that he fully faces me, I notice he has two different colored eyes, and his features are sharply handsome, contrasting the staple casual soft-boy aesthetic of his outfit and his awkward speech.  "Not at all," I shrug, collecting my thoughts, "You seem like you're having the time of your life, so I thought I'd join you."

A slight blush coats his cheeks as he buries his hands in his jeans pockets.  "I apologize.  Perhaps what I was doing was distracting and inappropriate."

He's so prim and proper, it's adorable.  "No worries, no one was staring other than me," I assure him, leaning against the wall.  "So, why are you jamming all alone over here instead of being with your friends?"

"Ah, my roommate is spending time with his girlfriend right now, I don't really want to pry into their business."  He scratches the back of his neck nervously.

I sigh.  "Yeah, same here.  Your roommate wouldn't happen to be a Midoriya, would it?"

He blinks.  "As a matter of fact, he is."

"Wow, small world."  That really is a coincidence.  Can't say I was expecting to meet the roommate of my best friend's boyfriend, let alone find him alluring in some way.

The boy is silent for a moment.  "Honestly, I'm sleepy, but I lost the key to my room, so I have to wait for Midoriya.  I don't even have my wallet, unfortunately."  He fingers one side of the headphones.  "This is the only way to keep myself awake and occupied until he's ready to leave."

"I'd say you have guts to be listening to your own music at a party.  You must have a pretty great playlist."

He tilts his head to the side.  "I'm just not fond of this sort of music, it nauseates me."

"I feel that.  This, in general," I motion to all the happenings around us, "Isn't really my scene.  I'd rather be in my dorm alone."

He nods in agreement.  "Me too.  If it wasn't for me losing my dorm key, I would have already gone back."

Now that I've called attention to it, we really have drowned out the world around us, as if there was a bubble and I just popped it to return us to the present.  There's this magnetism between us to keep to ourselves, despite the awkwardness of this being our first encounter.

I kick off from the wall and face him.  "If you wanna hurry out of here, we can go somewhere else to talk.   Or if you wanna go eat, I can pay for you, it's no big deal."

For the first time in our conversation, he turned to look at me head-on.  "Really?" he cocks an eyebrow, "We've only just met, do trust me that much?"

I offer an amiable smile.  "You seem like someone I'd like to get to know."

We walk into the darkness of campus at night, talking about nothing in particular.  Whatever random question that popped into my mind was whatever I asked him.  He's a quiet one, very hesitant about opening up and answering my questions more than what I've asked.  I guess I like how mysteriously awkward he is, it's cute.  Normally, I'm not one to talk either, but when it comes to someone who's even less of a talker than me, I take the lead just to make them comfortable.

His name is Shouto Todoroki, he's in the same year as me, a business major because his father wants him to take over the family company.  He's the youngest of his siblings, his parents are separated, and he's a cat person.

Finally reaching a diner just a block off campus, I instinctively stroll up to the counter.  At first he stands behind me, unsure what to do as he stares at the seat next to me.  I eye him with another smile.  "I guess you've never sat at the counter before?"  At the shake of his head, I pat the stool to my right.  "Come on up, it's not that different from sitting in a booth."

Slowly, he hoists himself up onto the seat and rotates over to face me.  "Do you come here often?"

"Sort of, I'm alone most of the time.  I don't usually come this late though.  After my classes, I would come here because I love their burgers.  I like sitting here to just do some homework."

The waitress gives us the menu and takes our drink orders.  The diner is empty this time of night, save for a group of probably drunk students from our college and a truck driver at the other end of the counter across the room.

"What do you feel like eating?" I ask.

Todoroki's staring at the menu in great thought, holding his chin with one hand.  "Maybe a sandwich.  Or a pasta dish, I'm not sure yet."

"I think..."  I scan over the menu.  I'm not that hungry per se, I just wanted to get out of that party with this adorable stranger.  "I'm gonna have a bowl of soup.  It'll warm me up after being in the cold outside."  I rub my cold hands together and tuck them inside the sleeves of my sweater.

The boy glances down at my hands before his cheeks blush slightly.  He tries to hide it by rubbing the back of his neck.  "Would you like me to...hold them for you?  I've been told I have pretty warm hands..."

It's my turn to blush now.  "Sure, thanks."

He stretches out his left hand onto the table, tentatively covering my clasped hands.  Surprisingly, I find his hand is large, able to surround both of mine entirely.  And they're pretty muscular, I'd say.  "Your hands are pretty warm," I comment, almost dumbly.

He nods wordlessly in response.

Our shoulders almost brush because of how close I'm leaning to him.  I'm close enough to smell his fresh scent coming off his jacket.

The waitress returns with our drinks and startles us into ripping our hands away from each other, bumping shoulders in the process.  She takes our orders on her pad before smiling at us.  "Aw, you two look so cute together," she coos and walks away before we can correct her.

Suddenly I don't know what I should say now.

"What made you come here one day?" Todoroki asks, his cheeks brushed pink.  I appreciate his attempt at making things less awkward.

"I like having comfort food, I guess."  I stir the straw in my water.  "I get easily overwhelmed and homesick, so I like eating my feelings in a way."

His hands cup his warm mug of tea.  "I can't say I agree with that.  I wanted to get away from home.  It was suffocating there."

"That must be difficult."  Out of reflex, I raise my hand to pat his shoulder, stopping myself right before I can touch him.  "I'm sorry-"

"I don't mind it," he blurts out quickly.  "But only if you're comfortable."

I chuckle at his eagerness and rest my hand there.  "We've become somewhat awkward again, huh?"

"Should I ask some questions, then?  Since you were doing that earlier."

"Sure, go ahead."

Todoroki's questions were difficult to get out.  He didn't ask as many as me since he thought very carefully before asking them.  They weren't typical small talk questions you would ask someone you just met; they were thought-provoking, which I admit is something I appreciate way more.  His last question was to discuss what would be the most important items to have you were stranded on a space mission with a group of people.

"Why wouldn't you want a flare gun?  It could help the home base locate you from the light."

"Yes, normally, but it wouldn't work the same in anti-gravity space," Todoroki explains monotonously.  "Though, the force of the shot would at least allow you to propel you in a certain direction if you're floating around aimlessly."

"You have a point.  But we agree that rope, oxygen tank, and water are definitely essential for survival."

The waitress sets our food in front of us.  Todoroki ended up getting a vegetarian panini just because he didn't really want any meat tonight.

"Will you be satisfied with just that soup?" he eyes my bowl carefully.

I start ripping at the toasted bread on the side and dip one into my tomato soup.  "Yeah, I'm not terribly hungry, and I haven't had this soup in a long time."

We eat in a somewhat comfortable silence.  I feel like we've gotten to know each other pretty well, but there's still the awkwardness surrounding us.  Nothing really told me why he was so familiar to me at the party either.  I don't really remember him at any of the previous outings I was forced to attend.

Todoroki puts down his mostly eaten sandwich.  "I must...confess something.  I-"

"Are you a creepy stalker?" I casually joke, dipping my spoon into the soup.

His face turns blank and the life drains from his eyes.  "N-No!  Not at-!"

I shove him lightly.  "I'm just joking!  You look like you've seen a ghost.  What is it?"

Color returns to his face as he looks down at his unfinished burger and fries.  "I've...been to a couple parties with Midoriya before, and I admit I've seen you already.  To say you never caught my attention is a lie.  Actually, I...hoped to see you every time he offered me to join him."

I'm frozen in place, my cheeks heating up at the implication.  "Does that mean you've taken an interest in me?"

He inhales carefully.  "Yes, I have."

"So...you'd like to see me outside of parties then?"

"Yes."  He rubs his hands together.  "We could even come back here, if you'd like."

"I wouldn't mind that."  I avert my eyes away from him, ashamed to be shy like this.  "But next time, you're trying a burger here."

His chuckle reminds me of the tinkle of wind chimes, except deeper.  "It's a date."

I can't stop myself from smiling, my heart skipping a beat at the word.  Wow, I actually found someone decent at a stupid college party.

We finish the rest of our meal in silence again, and I paid as I promised.  It felt like we were holding back a secret from everyone else in the diner.  We just started dating in the middle of our first meal together, how cute is that?

We leave and start heading back to the dorms, keeping a distance between us.  Neither of us really know what to say after a sudden change in relationship status like that.

Todoroki coughs awkwardly.  "If you don't mind, I'd like to warm your hands up again.  Only if you're okay with it."

That's such a cute way of asking to hold hands, I gush inwardly.  I close the distance between us, allowing him to gently grip one of my hands in his.  He tucks our joined hands inside his hoodie pocket, pulling me closer to him.  It feels like I'm walking on clouds.

He walks me to the front of my building.  He'd gotten a text from Midoriya that he's back at their room and will open the door for him when he returns.  "Thank you for the meal."  His eyes express his gratitude clearly as he stands in front of me.  "It was more enjoyable with your company."

"Don't mention it.  It was great having someone to talk to."  I realize I've unnaturally used my left hand to brush my hair behind my ear because my right hand is still in his pocket.  Standing so close to him makes me nervous.

Todoroki lifts our joined hands to place a feather-light kiss on my knuckles.  "I look forward to next time," his low voice resonates smooth as butter, eyes boring into mine.

I can't meet them for very long after, breaking eye contact with him sheepishly.  "M-Me too."

[stoopsbookstore]

Camboy!San Kink Alphabet

A = Aftercare (What they’re like after sex)

When that camera shuts off, he's out like a light, so he's not the best when it comes to aftercare. The most he does is wipe you down with a shirt and that's about it. Not even a wet shirt, just a shirt he picked up off the floor.

B = Body part (Their favourite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

His hands! He fucking loves showing off his hands to the audience, seeing all of the comments from the chat about how they wish it was their mouth or holes they were going in. Same goes for his occasional stream partner, Wooyoung, his hands are San's favorite part.

As for you, your ass. Simple and basic, but he loves molding and biting the flesh and teasing your puckered hole in front of the camera turns him so much.

C = Cum (Anything to do with cum basically)

You best believe your chest is getting coated in cum at least twice during every stream. He loves seeing you on your back, hair all messed up, face with a fucked out expression, covered in his cum.

He also is a huge fan of watching cum leak out of any hole, so much so that when he's offline and needs to jack off, he'll watch some past streams where he came in every hole.

D = Dirty Secret (Pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

He cams, that would have to be his dirty secret. He's not ashamed, but how would someone say they show their dick off for a living to their strict parents who got emotional having the "talk" with him? His mom would be ashamed and his father would pretty much disown him, so he would just rather say he does some stuff online and listen to his dad bitch about "those damn influencers and their poopy tea."

E = Experience (How experienced are they? Do they know what they’re doing?)

San knows what he's doing, but he is a bit cocky with his experience. There's a reason why his solo streams are messier and less organized compared to streams with Wooyoung, even though the chat considers him to be a bottom, he's a power bottom, he like what he likes, or you.

F = Favourite Position (This goes without saying. Will probably include a visual)

According to BadGirlsBible, it's called the Sandwich Position.

It's basically missionary, San's on top, you're on bottom, he's spreading your legs open, but he'll have you hold the camera and give the audience a sort of P.O.V. shot, because let's be honest, who doesn't want to fuck San?

G = Goofy (Are they more serious in the moment, or are they humorous, etc)

Wooyoung dubbed him Silly San and the chat has not forgotten about it since.

San is goofy, camming can be tense sometimes, so he will sometimes pinch your butt, nip your ear, throw in a few puns here and there just to make you laugh. The chat is split fifty-fifty on it, some love it, some hate it, but as long as you're okay with it, he'll always add a little bit of humor into the streams.

H = Hair (How well groomed are they, does the carpet match the drapes, etc.)

Honestly, it depends on what the chat wants. If the chat wants him shaved, he'll shave. If the chat wants him hairy, he'll grow it out. He grows it out between streams and then will post a poll about an hour and a half before the stream starts for what the chat wants.

San is a people pleaser, he tries his best to cater to the audience and if that means a lot of hair or none at all, he'll do it. But if he had to choose, he'd let it grow out and no, the curtains do not match the drapes.

I = Intimacy (How are they during the moment, romantic aspect…)

On the stream, he tries to make it intimate and romantic, but it often comes off as too try-hard, so he often just keeps it light-hearted instead of sensual.

When he's just with you, he is able to be romantic and it not come off as cringy or like he's forcing himself and no matter how many times you tell him to just be himself when it comes to sensuality, he is still stiff and awkward about it.

J = Jack Off (Masturbation headcanon)

San uses a cockring just because he feels it produces more cum for the audience to lose their shit over. As mentioned before, he's a people-pleaser and he will make a show of masturbation if it means more tips and coins.

If jacking off in front of a camera can make him 300 dollars a day, fuck yeah, he'll do it.

K = Kink (One or more of their kinks)

Honestly, it would be easier to list the few things he won't do, but his top kinks are

Toys

Odaxelagnia (Biting/Be bitten)

Mixophilia (Watching yourself having sex)

Roleplay

L = Location (Favourite places to do the do)

His room at the cam clubhouse, Utopia. It has all of his toys, it has the most perfect bed, there's a bunch of surfaces, and he just likes the vibe the room gives off.

Also, if his parents saw him with you in his bed, they would freak the fuck out.

M = Motivation (What turns them on, gets them going)

Seeing all of the coins and tips on his profile. Sounds bad because "greed bad," but this is his job, he makes money from having sex with you or Wooyoung or fucking himself on camera.

Another thing is seeing you already undressed, ready for him to fuck you and for Wooyoung to have already start the stream and teasing himself for later.

N = NO (Something they wouldn’t do, turn offs) -Trigger Warning- Mentions of non-consensual sex

Someone once requested him to do a non-consensual scenario with you and it was an immediate shut-down of the livestream, the person was banned from his stream, he told everyone else in Utopia to ban the person and San refunded all of the tips he was given.

There's a line and this person crossed it. He'll do a robber/houseowner scenario, he'll do a demon/human scenario, helpless kinks are fine, but as soon as he saw a comment about not stopping, San said "fuck that shit, fuck your 1,000 coins and get off my stream."

O = Oral (Preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc)

He loves giving and loves receiving. It's like Christmas all around! Give and take is his motto when it comes to oral.

That being said, he's very sloppy with oral, he's not bad at all, it's just very wet and spitty and slobbery. Which is fine if you're into that, but holy fuck, is it a pain to clean up.

P = Pace (Are they fast and rough? Slow and sensual? etc.)

San is like a jackrabbit when he's on stream, his hips will pistol in and out of you or Wooyoung and he actually has a counter with how many orgasms per stream happens.

The record is 6, 4 from you and two from him.

Q = Quickie (Their opinions on quickies rather than proper sex, how often, etc.)

It seems counterintuitive for him to love fucking you and Wooyoung fast and hard, bu not be able to stand quickies, they're just not his thing. He likes to be able to take his time getting you riled up and tease you and he can't do that in a 10 minute quickie.

Also, he cums a lot and that takes a while to clean up.

R = Risk (Are they game to experiment, do they take risks, etc.)

Experiment as long as he's inside the comfort of his second room, but he can't run the risk of his parents finding out, so anything he buys comes to Utopia from Amazon, Adam and Eve, Spencer's and if he needs to go out in public to buy supplies, he goes with Seonghwa, Hongjoong and Wooyoung, his facemask is spirit gummed to his face, his sunglasses are superglued to his ears and his hoodie is sewed to his scalp.

He wants to take risks, but he's still being held back by the thoughts of what his parents would think.

S = Stamina (How many rounds can they go for, how long do they last…)

As mentioned before, he is able to go for at least 2 hours, his longest stream was 4 hours, it was a lot of teasing, ruined orgasms and a ruined bedding set.

Seonghwa was not happy when he found out a 70 dollar bedding set was ruined with sweat, cum and squirt.

T = Toy (Do they own toys? Do they use them? On a partner or themselves?)

Cockring. That's his favorite toy and will always be his favorite toy.

For you, he has the nipple clamp that's attached to a choker with his username on it and it gets him so fucking hard when you wear it. When it's him and Wooyoung, it's a paddle that they had specially made, one side is a cushion while the other is just hard wood.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

He could spend an entire stream just teasing you, it's his favorite thing to do. He loves watching you squirm when he has a vibrator near you or you're blindfolded and he's trailing a feather along your body.

Don't even try to tease him though, it will end horribly for you.

V = Volume (How loud they are, what sounds they make)

Mingi has made jokes about not streaming at the same time with San because you will hear his groans and moans through the door. This fucker is loud.

W = Wild Card (Get a random headcanon for the character of your choice)

He wants to do a three-way simultaneously stream with you and Wooyoung, but the schedules never work out. You either have class or your own stream, Wooyoung has his own stream or is planning for the next month.

Just let him fuck both of you on stream already, dammit!

X = X-Ray (Let’s see what’s going on in those pants, picture or words)

5 and a half inches, nothing too big, nothing too small, just enough for the audience to flip their shit everytime he whips it out.

Y = Yearning (How high is their sex drive?)

This boy is so horny, there's a reason his streams are on the longer end, about 2 hours. He can cum at least 3 times in one stream, and to be honest, it's probably because he only fucks on stream days unless it's a special occasion like a birthday or your anniversary.

Z = ZZZ (… how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

Almost instantly.

The second that "This Broadcast Has Ended" textbox comes up, he is out like a light for a good 2 or 3 hours. There was one time when he ended the stream while he was still inside of you from behind and you both just plopped, San on top of you, his chest attached to your back from the sweat and Seonghwa had to wake you two up after 30 or so minutes because San let the vibrator on and it fell to the floor.

Vibrator on wood is very annoying to Seonghwa, don't drop your vibrator on his clean floors.

[tjkiahgb]

Listen, I got so caught up in Tyrus Week, spending hours and hours going through tags and liking posts and queuing reblogs, that I pretty much pushed everything else to the side. (Plus I’ve also been working on the next thing I’ll tell you guys about in the next few days.)

All that is to say, I got a lot of stuff in my inbox this last week, so I’m just going to tackle a bunch of them in... A LIGHTNING ROUND.

Let’s go.

And before you ask, yes, I made a graphic for it.

Looks like this Andi Mack finale party has turned into... a death party.

Would’ve been a strange choice for Terri Minsky to turn the finale of Andi Mack into a murder mystery, but if that’s what she wanted, I’d trust her.

I don’t watch that show but I know some people who do and they’ve told me it’s just light and airy and pleasant, so, yeah, sounds right up Cyrus’s alley.

You guys are shouting Lightning Round! every time the graphic comes up, right?

I, like TJ, am just some guy. I tell everyone who asks to call me Jay. Jay is long for “J”, which is short for another name that I, also like TJ, only let people related to me by blood or my soulmate know about. I will say it’s not Jagger, though. I wish.

That wasn’t my intention while writing TJ and the Gals, but as with all art, or whatever TJ and the Gals was, once it’s out of the creator’s hands, it belongs to the people.

No.

Thelonious Jagger Kippen Is A Hashtag Good Boi.

Shoutout to my FAQ page, where you can find information like this and more. Not blaming you, anon, I’ve gotten this a lot and the FAQ page is hard to find. I mostly just delete the question and let the anon live in mystery because I’m chaotic something. I’m only answering this now because it’s the

You know the shook_bitch? Thank them from me for getting Disney Channel to respond to them, and congratulate them on being the subject of the best comment the Disney Channel Instagram account ever made.

Yeah, I went back and checked and Jonah only says in 3x12 that his dad made a bad investment, not lost a job or anything.

It really seems like he’s been managing the Judy Bartholomew fortune all these years. We don’t know anything else of him other than he was once a background workout video guy and he has at least enough knowledge about baseball to coach little league.

Hopefully the new job is providing him with a solid salary, but if not, I think the world is ready for a Judy Bartholomew comeback.

Judy Bartholomew: Still Trottin’ After All These Years

I’m not entirely sure exactly which girl we’re talking about here. I think this one:

I will say, she does seem into it. She’s like, oh, things are about to get gay in here.

Honestly, there were so many background actors killing it in this scene.

You’ve got this guy...

...who hears the beginning of “Born This Way” and reacts like it’s ruined his evening. I mean, I was a little tired of it, too, when it was being played on the radio over and over and over, but it’s been some years. It’s not overplayed as much anymore and it definitely wouldn’t make me this upset. (He pops up later in the song and is happily dancing, so maybe he thought it was the beginning of a different song?)

Then there’s this girl...

...who is feeling it. She’s like, hell yeah, this is my jam!

And there’s this girl in the goggles...

...who, after TJ and Cyrus sing the “be myself, respect my youth” part, is like, okayyyy. I see you.

Here’s a fun(?) behind-the-scenes thing for this blog. A few months back, I was thinking about ways to replace “Moments” if we had, by some miracle, gotten a season four, since I would’ve run out of moments weeks after the finale. What I came up with was “The Random Andi Mack Extra of the Day.” It would’ve just been screenshots of random extras throughout the show’s run. Upon some reflection, this was a bad idea.

The first problem here is that I get the feeling those posts would’ve gotten, at most, 20-30 notes each, because no one really cares about random, out of context extras and it doesn’t seem like a thing people would want to reblog.

The second problem is, knowing myself, I probably would’ve spent hundreds of hours during the hiatus between s3 and s4 making 1000 of them in the first place, just so I could have them ready to go. I would’ve absolutely done this without testing the waters first to see if there was any interest. (Just like with the “Moments.” I made like 300 of them before I made the first post about them.)

So, the most likely scenario was going to be me, two weeks into “The RAMEotD,” looking at flopping posts, then looking at my folder of 800 screenshots of Andi Mack extras and going, “Well, what am I going to do, not post them? I already did all the work!” And I would keeping queuing them up, and they would keep appearing on this blog every day, and they would taunt me with their 22 notes. You remember the work you did? IT WAS FOR BUT A PITTANCE!

So I guess what I’m saying is maybe it’s for the best. The cancellation saves me from myself.

Hey, though, heads up. If and when you go back and watch the series again, pay attention to the extras -- the unsung heroes of the entertainment industry. There are some extras reallllly putting in work on this show. It absolutely adds to the delightful quality of Andi Mack. Every time I would spot someone in the background being goofy or really overselling whatever they were supposed to be experiencing, it filled me with joy.

It’s a fun show. Everything about it is fun, including the little details.

Ooh, a serious one. This is going to be my first ever hybrid Discussion/Analysis post.

Okay, so I think we’re talking about two different things here.

I won’t argue that I think Tyrus could have absolutely happened sooner and been explored more.

I obviously can’t say with certainty, but I assume that was at least somewhat the plan leading out of season two. The setup for their relationship was all already there by the end of it. They’d met, they had bumps, they grew really close, and they capped the whole season off with TJ looking back at Cyrus. All the elements were in place that you could jump right into this storyline in TJ’s next appearance. (Not necessarily them canoning, but at least the exploration of TJ’s feelings or some movement towards canoning.)

When Cyrus’s lookback happened, it was addressed in the very next episode (granted following a break in seasons). I don’t know that TJ’s would’ve been as immediate, but I don’t think you have him look back in the season two finale if you don’t intend on truly paying it off for 21 episodes. (Or, at least 13, if you want to say 3x13 was the real start of a storyline involving TJ’s homosexuality.)

So, yeah, look, I’m speculating wildly, but I would imagine the original creative idea was to address TJ’s lookback early in season three and start getting into it, and that, yes, that idea was likely kiboshed from above.

What I will argue is that the bench scene is subtle but not ambiguous. We’ve made the semi-joke constantly around here that there’s “No heterosexual explanation for this!” but, truly, there is no heterosexual explanation for the bench scene: two boys, one of whom has already explicitly stated he’s gay, slowly reaching for and holding each other’s hands, intertwining their fingers while they sit by the fire and stare into each other’s eyes, nervously smiling. This is something that has been built towards for multiple seasons. If you’ve been watching the show, if you’ve been paying attention to it, if you care about the characters, especially TJ and Cyrus, it’s very clear what’s happening here.

This feels like talking about people who weren’t sure Cyrus was gay after the first two times he came out because he didn’t use the word. Or people who thought Cyrus wasn’t gay anymore after he said his crush on Jonah was gone. I sympathize with some of the younger set who maybe don’t have the world sense to follow along with this, but, come on, at some point, we’re three seasons in and you have to keep up with the level of the storytelling. I don’t mean this in an insulting way, but if someone can’t get what’s happening here, then maybe this whole thing isn’t for them. Maybe if all they know right now is that Cyrus is gay and accepted and happy, then that’s good enough, and they can hold onto that idea and grow with that and catch the next train, whenever it comes along. Maybe this moment is for all the people who get it.

That’s about the kids in the casual audience. Now, if we’re talking about an adult homophobe -- one who would express the kind of outrage that we believe Disney fears -- it’s a different story. If an adult homophobe is really watching that scene and thinking, “Seems pretty straight to me” then it feels like it doesn’t matter what they would’ve done in the finale. They could’ve said “gay,” they could’ve said “boyfriend,” Cyrus and TJ could’ve lead a pride parade down the street outside Celia’s house while blasting -- well, I was going to pick a gay song here for the joke, but probably “Born This Way” would be the most appropriate one, so -- “Born This Way” from loud speakers, and that homophobe would’ve been like, “Nice parade.” As ignorant as homophobes are, even they are not that dense. An adult pretending Tyrus isn’t a couple after the bench scene requires a level of impenetrably willful ignorance.

Anyway, the truth is that angry homophobes aren’t watching the show. They never do. They like to read headlines and get mad, but they’re cowardly and, most of all, lazy, and they don’t like to put in the actual footwork. They like to leave comments on articles they haven’t read, about shows they haven’t watched. They like to post reactions to stuff they see in their Facebook feed or send one sentence responses like, “There goes Disney Channel!!!” or “What is happening to our country?!?!” And then they like to scroll on to the next thing that will feed their sad rage about how the world is changing around them.

If you want to think about Disney censorship as a way of preventing those homophobes from being outraged, it’s not the textuality of the scene itself, it’s the placement at the end. Delaying them canoning until the finale just makes for less work. Show’s over. There’s nothing to defend. No one’s signing a petition to get a show off the air that’s just aired its last episode. Most of the articles written will be about everything happening in the finale, and Tyrus would just be a part of it.

And that is more or less what’s happened. Just about every major article I’ve seen about the finale has discussed Tyrus, and discussed them as textually getting together -- again, there’s no ambiguity there -- but has also brought them up in conjunction with what happened with Andi and Jonah, with Muffy getting together, and with Andi getting into SAVA. And the articles themselves tend to largely be about the show ending as a whole and its impact. (No one needs to send me articles trying to prove or disprove this. I’ve been over a lot of them. Some are more Tyrus focused -- the ones in the gay media for sure -- and some just mention it -- more traditional media sources. This is the general gist of most of them.)

So the article headlines mostly read “Andi Mack Finale” or “Andi Mack Ends Run” or something like that. The homophobes -- who, again, aren’t watching the show and are getting all their information about it via article headlines -- see those headlines and don’t even remember Andi Mack was the show they hated from two years ago because their rage is mostly performative and short-lived. They get mad in the minute but forget about the specifics of the stuff within a day.

Like I said in the recap, I won’t argue that there’s a scene with more that wouldn’t work, but I personally don’t see the bench scene as not having accomplished everything it needed to.

Oh, that went longer than I thought it was going to be. Not very lightning round of me.

This actually got sent a while back but it was still in my inbox and I figured I’d throw it in here in case the anon saw it. Lightning round!

Sorry, anon, I wasn’t ignoring you and I appreciate you reading my old recaps, but you were the second anon to piece together that I am actually blessed with psychic powers.

I don’t really have any plans to, sorry.

I had only planned to do one set before and after the finale for Tyrus Week, but I will point you and anyone else interested in making their own TJ and Cyrus texts to this post I made that should give you the basic tools needed for the job. (Use them! You wouldn’t believe what a pain in the butt it was to get that background clean like that!)

Thank you, honestly. That’s so, so sweet. But I have no plans to do that.

Like I mentioned at the start of this post, I’m working on something now that I’ll tell you guys about shortly that’s look-backy and will hit on some stuff from those seasons. (Though not in the same vein as the recaps.)

The recaps take a long time to produce, and as much as I’ve loved this show and this fandom, I will be honest and tell you guys I am sort of planning my exit.

This blog has become something of a part-time job for me. Not in the work sense because I have truly enjoyed all this, but just in the time sense. I’ve put a lot of time in and I would like to rededicate that time back toward other things I’ve put on hold for the last year and a half.

It’s starting to feel like making you shout Lightning Round! each time was a mistake now that I’m answering stuff seriously or sadly.

I was getting emotional multiple times while writing it, because of the show, because of the fandom, because of this whole journey we’ve all been on together.

I appreciate you saying this so much because that’s what I’ve always hoped has come through in the things I’ve written about this show. That I’ll make jokes or point out holes or goofy details or whatever, but that I couldn’t do this -- I couldn’t commit myself to this as much as I have -- if I truly didn’t love the show. That everything I’m doing here comes from a place of love and celebrating the show and embracing it for its good stuff and its silly stuff.

It wasn’t a perfect show, but that was always what made it kind of perfect.

Thanks for the asks. Thus ends the lightning round.

[pandemicthestory]

1: introduced

The love story of a teenage girl trapped inside during the end of the world. Daily chapters during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Neon orange nails tap at a laptop, chatting with someone across the internet. This manicure is fresh, except no one has left their house in weeks, so we know she did it herself. 

ADMIN_E: just sent your essay back. Gonna be 300 bc of the works cited 

GUEST48: oh come on 

ADMIN_E: i need the money, and you have more money than you need

GUEST48: ugh pls just tell me this is gonna get me an A in AP US history, i need this grade to get into duke 

ADMIN_E: lol, you’re actually worried about getting into college?

GUEST48: uh yeah, aren’t u?

ADMIN_E: Sweetie the world is ending. Who the fuck cares

*buzz* 

She looks away from the computer and down at her cracked iPhone 7. Another thing she’d like the cash to upgrade. The bigger issue: it’s basically impossible to scam in peace with her group chat constantly blowing up. But what are your best friends for, if not to provide human contact during an infinite quarantine? 

Madison is a self-proclaimed burnout, who used to be the carefree athletic type until a soccer injury sent her spiraling into an emo-grunge moment. Zoe is probably going to run for president and also be a doctor at the same time, unless her weird senior boyfriend convinces her to leave on a weed farm (which he would totally do, wow Gabriel sucks). And Olivia is sort of the one who keeps everyone together, obsessed with being a friend. She’s the one who religiously decorates your locker on your birthday even if you insist that it’s not necessary and that actually you’d prefer if she didn’t because it’s embarrassing. That’s Olivia.

MADISON: holy shit did u hear 

OLIVIA: I was just about to text you guys. My mom just told me. R u ok?? 

ZOE: wait what’s going on?? wtf tell me rn !! 

*knock knock*

The bedroom door opens without waiting for an answer.

“Emma?”

Emma Bradford, a skinny 16-year-old wearing an oversized hoodie and boxers, slams her laptop shut with way too much force. Hopefully it isn’t broken, she’d have to find a different way to cheat the school system for money. 

“Mom, what happened to our deal? If we’re going to be stuck at home together, you have to pretend I’m AT school. As in don’t speak to me before 3:25 PM.”

“You can’t say I didn’t knock. I knocked.” 

“It’s not about knocking, it’s about--wait why are we even having a conversation? See you at dinner. Or not. Just go please.” 

Emma jams in her air pods and pulls up her hoodie over her head so you can’t see the top of her face. She’s used to hiding her identity, and even in quarantine, old habits die hard or whatever.

Mom sighs, she doesn’t want to be here either. Out of all her kids, Emma is the truly difficult one. The smart one who uses her brain for all the wrong reasons. And wow those nails are intense. Traffic cones. Kids these days. 

“I just came to tell you that...well we just got a phone call from the school district. It looks like classes are going to be canceled for the rest of the year. Zoom classes too. Everything. I’m sorry.”

Emma’s stomach drops. Canceled? Like, wait, canceled? Canceled. But...how will she earn hundreds of dollars doing writing assignments for her fellow dumbasses?

“Seriously? How is that possible?! Don’t I need like, an education and shit?”

“Government spending is affecting everyone in strange ways right now. And wait a second, I thought you’d be happy. You always tell me how much you hate high school.”

Mom raises an eyebrow. Emma hates that. If her mom starts digging around in her personal life again, she’s going to find some weird shit. Not just forged essays, but, well, let’s just leave that all buried for now. 

“I do hate school. And I don’t care if I never go back. But I do need some boundaries, so please get out.”

Her Mom closes the door. We can’t see, but that eyebrow is definitely still raised. Something’s up with Emma. Her mom just has no idea of what it is, or how big it’s about to get.

Emma examines the group chat, having missed over 80 texts since she last checked it five minutes ago. 

EMMA: i don’t have time to read all that but, school, right?

ZOE: How can this happen? I already have a prom dress and it was final sale!!

MADISON: u don’t HAVE to go to prom this year zo- when gabriel goes to school next year u guys will prob break up anyway and then you’ll be free to go to like 10 more proms w guys who haven’t been arrested

ZOE: He was not actually arrested and we are doing long distance we already discussed it! 

MADISON: you don’t think they’ll cancel prom do you? if i have to do prom over zoom i’m legit done 

EMMA: So, prom is what you’re all worried about?

A brief pause. 

OLIVIA: Well what are you worried about Em? Or aren’t you

EMMA: Oh well idk. I mean i’m not that worried

EMMA: I just mean like it could be worse

As soon as Emma sends this, she doesn’t know if she actually believes it. She doesn’t know what’s coming. 

ZOE: Sure, I guess...

MADISON: UR BEING RLY WEIRD EM 

EMMA: Ah you’re right sorry, it’s just a weird time. I love u guys btw 

Everyone sends their signature heart emoji. Zoe: pink with sparkles. Olivia: yellow. Madison: small red with red dot underneath. And Emma sends the black heart, because she really needs to start acting like her normal self as people are getting suspicious. Her best friends know almost everything about her. Almost. They don’t know about what she’s doing on the side, or what she plans to do with the money. 

Emma takes a deep breath and reopens the laptop. No school is going to be a problem. No school, no assignments, no college applications, which means: no income. And no income means no leaving...no running off with...him. 

Him, the eternal problem. Him who won’t get out of her head no matter how much she curses the day he was born. Him from that other school that’s annoyingly far yet still too close for her own good. Him who knows her favorite candle scent. Him who rests his hand in the space between her hip bone and her belly button. Him who lied. Him who was forgiven. 

Him. 

She stares at the interface of her ghostwriter page on the screen. This was good while it lasted. She’ll just need a new plan to get to Him. 

Emma is about to shut the computer when: 

*Ping* 

New Assignment.

What? Every student at Harrison Ford High School got the same announcement today that she did. School’s canceled. No more class, no more losing sleep over getting into Duke. What a random life goal. 

Seriously, what the hell could this be?

Emma clicks the link to open the new assignment, to learn that it isn’t a new assignment at all. It’s a drawing?  

Circular lines, deflated shapes encircling each other. Like oil in water. The picture could almost be, well it looks somewhat like...a map. Holy shit, this is a map.

The lines of the map are messy and hand drawn. As if someone made this in a rush. Or maybe they were confused about where the path leads. But underneath the twists and turns, there’s a note: 

before you run away, come find me

[benichi]

Money Jar and Illusion of Choice

aka Story Jar by NTT Solmare and Love Choice by Otome Romance (former Voltage Inc.) Since I haven’t been around much the last few weeks and because I got an ask about it I decided to look at these new ways to “enjoy” Otome games. I already vented about Money-... I mean Love Jar yesterday, and while Voltage isn’t quite as hardcode (yet) it still should be talked about.

I’ll start with Masquerade Kiss, Otome Romance (former Voltage Inc.)’s new game which introduces Love Choice as a way to read Main Stories. Apparently the only way for future releases. Though it doesn’t matter much where I start since both of these new “systems” have a lot in common. This is how the Love 365 app greets you currently.

FOR FREE OMG. However as you know nothing in life is free, if you look closely you’ll see “Use hearts to read without wait times ♪”. So literally in the same breath they tell you that this new system is shit. We’ll take a more in-depth look at those wait times later because they play a big role for this entire new system, including the situation in Story Jar. To put the second part into words that aren’t sugar coated “Use money to deepen your affection! If you want to see CG’s and get a satisfactory ending you had better open that wallet of yours cause those are behind a paywall♪“. Otome Romance (former Voltage Inc.) is trying to be charming about this but the bottom line is: without money you get the short end of the stick. Which isn’t all bad or uncommon. They are a company so obviously they have to make money. But they’ve come up with quite a cunning way to do just that.

CELEBRATION! NOW OR NEVER! READ THE WHOLE STORY WITHOUT WAITING!!! WHAT A NEW AND REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPT?! HAS THIS EVER HAPPENED BEFORE? Yes. That’s the old system we’ve had until now. Where you pay 4€ once and own the entire thing to read at your own pace and revisit as often as you’d like. I honestly couldn’t help but scoff when this screen showed up as I was playing. 

Which brought me to my first question. Why don’t they simply let us consumers choose between buying the entire thing and this “f2p” version? It’s the same simple answer for all questions related to this topic:  💰 💰 💰

The elaborate explanation is that obviously no one would touch this “f2p” version unless they’re forced to. As stated above stories used to be 4€. However Love Choice is much more expensive.

This part made me especially sick. They know exactly that for a lot of us Otoge is something we use to treat ourselves. These sugar coated words “special” “exciting outcomes” “spicy ending” aim exactly for that. You’re already here, surely you don’t want to miss this super special spicy scintillating sexy breathtaking ending.

However that’s not even the worst part yet. One choice costs 5 hearts which is not too bad right? Too good to be true almost, which is exactly what’s happening here. As you progress the amount of hearts needed steadily increases. The biggest amount one choice costs is 26 hearts.

That singular choice plus CG costs almost as much as an entire route with all CG’s etc. used to cost (400 Coins).

Granted as you can see above you “only” need 12 points to get the super special spicy scintillating sexy breathtaking ending. Which means you don’t always have to select the ~special choice~. However the amount of points you get per special choice is different each time (ranging from 1pt to 3pts), there’s no other way to earn them. So unless you use a Walkthrough you’re grasping at straws. Like here, you’ll get a CG sure but only 1pt. In theory a choice with 3pts is more lucrative but who knows when one of those might show up.

Ultimately guessing whether the money you’ve invested so far will be enough to get you that desired ending might be more thrilling than Eisuke 2.0 trying to shove his tongue into your mouth.

Let’s get back to our numbers though. In order to get all the CG’s + that super special ending you’ll need at least 85 hearts. Which basically translates to 900 Coins.

11€. Only possible if you play it smart by using a Walkthrough, which means someone else took the plunge and paid the whooping 22€ instead. Because that’s what you’ll have to pay if you go for every single special choice. Granted you don’t have to spend the entire 2000 Coins, there are 300 left over because Otome Romance (former Voltage Inc.) simply never offers the exact amount of 1700 Coins you’d need. But what do these leftover 300 coins even do for you? Nothing much anymore as we’ve seen.

Plus there’s the wait times we haven’t experienced yet. I mean how much does it cost if I don’t want to wait for 5 hours? Will those “leftover” 300 coins even cover that? A part of me honestly doesn’t even want to know.

Moving on to the illusion of having a choice. As stated above the only way to raise points is by using money. Only these paid choices change the Love Meter. Every other ~choice~ might as well not be there because it doesn’t make a difference. Let’s look at this one scene in particular. For context my dude Kazuomi Shido wants to get rid of a woman because she “knows too much”.

As stated before you could skip this special choice and still get that ~Super Happy Ending~. I mean ppffft what’s she to me amirite? Random Woman Nr.1 is definitely not worth my 50 coins.

But how is this enjoyable? How am I supposed to be pleased knowing that the only way to get a different ending is paying up. That my choices don’t matter except for the ones where I make it rain money for Otome Romance (former Voltage Inc.). They might as well just remove the “choices” and sell the entire story for 11€ or 22€ if they’re feeling bold. 

But again, if the amount you spend was displayed in such a blunt way no one would ever go near these stories. I mean just look at Wand of Fortune (Story Jar). A single route consists of 27 Chapters (the 1st one being free). One Chapter costs 20 diamonds. So to read everything you’ll need 520 diamonds, which translates to 44€. How is this real life? Who thought this was a good idea?

Which brought me to my next question: What’s up with this sudden increase we see for the amount of Chapters? Could we be... getting more for our money? Again, no. It’s still all about them getting more  💰 💰 💰

Because each Chapter is incredibly short. And while the Chapters in Masquerade Kiss at least make sense despite their shortness the same can’t even be said for Wand of Fortune.

I think this sudden rise serves a few different purposes. Obviously more Chapters means more money. In WoF you just straight up have to pay and in Love Choice it gives them the option to put in even more “””special choices”””. Plus when there’s no CELEBRATION NOW OR NEVER PLAY WITHOUT WAIT TIMES event that’s another point where you could possibly pay to progress more quickly. I mean 5 hours wait time means you’ll only get to play 4 Chapters per day. If that’s even an option for you. I certainly can’t whip out my phone at work to get raunchy with Eisuke 2.0 simply because 5 hours have passed. But that’s an entirely different matter.

But what else is happening here? Honestly these Chapter splits are nothing but sneaky practices to pick the money right out of our pockets. By splitting the costs into different Chapters people will be less aware of how much they’re actually paying. If they straight up tried to sell one story for 44€ or 22€ who in their right mind would buy that? Unless you sit down and do the math first you’ll just kind of pay slowly as you progress the story. Plus on Love Choice you don’t even necessarily have the option to figure out how much it’ll cost in the end unless you go through the thing for yourself once or find someone that wrote everything down. At this point we can’t even say if the requirements for Kazuomi’s route are the norm. Are 85 hearts always the minimum requirement? 169 the most? There’s no telling at this point.

What I do know at this point however is that these companies are taking advantage of us. It’s true, we are currently in a dire situation. Our niche market is slowly running cold with the Vita being officially dead and no announcements for the Switch overseas. Currently mobile games are the only thing that’s going strong in the Otome Market here. But this? This can’t be it!

I won’t pay for a game that’s so completely butchered from it’s original release that it's barely functional and makes no sense. With core mechanics and voice acting removed. I won’t pay to be stripped from the right to make my own choices in a visual novel and to be played like a fiddle with all these sugar coated words that hide shrewed tricks.

Only if you give him 13 hearts first though. I gotta admit the image of Kazuomi standing there with his palm stretched out like 

“I could stick my tongue into your mouth BUT that’ll be 2,29€ first. We don’t take checks, by the way” is a little funny but ultimately too expensive for my taste.

I honestly understand that these are not easy times to be a fan of Otome Games. However, if we let these companies play us like this then we’ve already lost. Why would Aksys or any other company bother translating major titles that take so much more effort to localize if mobile Otoge with considerably less work can be sold for almost the same amount? I mean if someone pays 44€ per route that’s 264 € for the entire “game”. You could probably buy half of the Vita games Aksys has released so far with that amount. Maybe all of them if you wait for sales, this is insanity.

And 22€ is in no way better either. Just think of all the things you can buy for that amount of money, I mean not even games. Plus Otome Romance (former Voltage Inc.) is becoming worse and worse as time goes on. I’ve defended them for a long time because in a way I’m grateful. I still remember when Pirates in Love was practically the only thing we had. But I’ve reached my limit. Love Choice is just as bad as Story Jar. 

This post has become long enough, but I’ll add this later or make a seperate post of how f2p can work. I don’t want to be misunderstood, I know some people prefer f2p instead of just buying the entire stories which is perfectly fine. But these two companies have missed the mark completely and we have to be vocal about it.

PS: If you want to experience good f2p games please check out Cybird games, they’re our only hope in these unholy times.

[misha-moose-dean-burger-lover]

The Supernatural Series

Someone buzzed the door to the Bunker. The footsteps inside the bunker drained it out, familiar voices all muffled. They sighed, with perhaps the hint of a smile, and put the parcel at the gate. Hefty cartons of books. But not of the peculiar lore that the boys read most often. They were story books. Yet far from fiction.

They walked away, noiselessly.

The Supernatural Series, all the books to 300, securely packaged, would wait until another case was tracked and the boys were off, to be found.

***

A grey evening, Dean found Cas with his nose in one of those Chuck-Shurley books they'd found on their doorstep, almost a month ago. Cas was seated at the library table, reading in the dim, but without the necessary crease in his forehead which would have been, were he reading about monsters, following a victim's death.

Cas had gotten ahead of all of them. Sam had been reading extensively too, but Cas had the advantage of night-time reading too, and when the bunker fell silent and was enveloped in sleep, he would spend hours, reading through the works of his father - reading about his friends and family, and sometimes himself.

Sam, Dean remembered, was just finishing the Dean's demon arc, and Dean - who'd not really been a part of the reading tournament, nor was interested to be - had been reading random works that piqued his interest, or Sam and Cas recommended.

When Dean walked into the library, and assumed the seat in front of Cas, he made the angel look up at him.

"This," Cas spoke, almost reverently. "This one's a good one, Dean. 'The Future'."

Dean crinkled his eyes into a smile. "God and cliched titles, am I right?"

"It's quite aptly titled." Cas replied simply, putting the book on the table, with his finger patiently on the page where he'd stopped reading, to give his attention to Dean. "Are you finished with Baby, Dean?"

He nodded.

"Why don't you start 'Regarding Dean'?" Cas smiled.

Dean rolled his eyes at the title. "I feel so special."

"Read with me, please." Cas passed the book to him - he'd kept it by him, waiting for Dean to return and their routine to begin. "It was an amusing read. I know you'll enjoy it."

***

Dean couldn't look up from the book. 'Stuck in the middle'. Had he lived all of this? It seemed like the first time, somehow.

It was difficult to imagine, he'd skipped all of these books the first time he skimmed through the series - as Cas recommended books to him - but now as Sam followed Cas's reading along, he forced Dean to read at least seven books, a week.

"They're splendid! You have to read these, Dean! I do not get why Cas passed over these!" Sam had said, handing Dean 'Goodbye Stranger', a long time back now. That day, Dean had sat reading next to Castiel, closer than usual.

He'd come to know of a lot of things.

A lot of things.

***

"You almost killed yourself, Dean!" Cas barged into Dean's room, the source of his anger in his hand, a neat and new copy of 'Lost and Found' clutched in his hand. He's furious, and it's visible in the uncharacteristic glare he throws in Dean's direction. But his anger melts in a fraction of a second.

Dean looks up at him, miserable and heartbroken, and names what has made him this pathetic, "I'm no Angel."

Cas recognizes the book instantly, and gulps as he remembers all that happened in it.

"You needed me!" Dean's voice cracked, as he got to his feet and began to heave himself towards the angel. "You've given up so much for me, and I couldn't help you the one time you needed me! I chucked you out, and I didn't even leave you money, or give you any help! I could've done something to make it better - you were homeless, you were - you didn't even have food! And I fucking made you leave the very evening you helped save our asses again! I am such a -"

He collapsed in Cas's arms, as the latter held him up resiliently, hugging him back for support. "I know it wasn't you, it was Gadreel - I don't blame you -"

As if Cas's pleas fell on deaf ears, Dean continued to berate himself, his face buried in his best friend's chest. "I am so sorry, for everything! I don't deserve you, Cas. You're too good to me, and I'm, I'm such a shitty friend - I'm sorry!"

"Its okay," Cas muttered, meaning it a million times more than he said it, until Dean stopped trembling in his arms, and crying about what a terrible friend he was. "Its okay." He repeated when Dean apologized for his breakdown, mere moments after he'd recomposed himself. "Its okay," He smiled, when Dean apologized for asking him if he could spend the night in his room so that Dean could sleep and not read anymore. He added a, "Of course, Dean."

***

Dean and Cas realized, a day and a half later, that they together have a wondrous total of things to apologize to Sam for.

The youngest hunter never held a single thing against them, never brought up any of the injustices they did to him, never even batted an eye before laying his life on the line for them all. He, at the very least, deserved an apology

"...for being a whining bitch about Purgatory, and Amelia, when you let me live with - er - Lisa and Ben, and away from the hunting life, for a year. And for beating the shit outta you when you were soulless, because I was a dumbass. For ever doubting that you had anything else in mind, but good. For killing your werewolf friend, while you let Benny live." Dean practised in front of the bathroom mirror. "For that one time, when I said that we weren't brothers if you walked out - because I'm not Dad, Sam! And I'm sorry for all the times I behaved like him..."

It was kind of a long monologue.

But when push came to shove, it ended up being cut short by Sam marching forward, and hugging his brother fiercely, when he was not even halfway through. He let Dean drag him to his height, as happened whenever they hugged, and he forbade Dean from going on about it anymore.

"Its okay." Sam swore. "You don't need to count them off your fingers. I get it. I don't think about those times, Dean. Why should you, anymore?"

And when Dean opened his mouth to protest, Sam swatted the air to quieten him. "I know I didn't make a list on an Old Yellow Legal Pad or anything, but Dean, I'm sorry too."

"Your list would be way shorter than mine." Dean muttered. "This way or that, Sammy, you ought to have reminded me, someday, if I went on about being a good brother - that I wasn't one."

"Listen here, you jerk," Sam was full-on defensive, and ready to fight. "We both had some crappy moments in the past. But that doesn't change the fact, that you're a great brother." He paused, and grinned, looking a lot younger. "True, you were a far better brother when we were kids than you've been, these last 10-12 years? But you know what? I'll take it. You're kind of the best brother I could ever have asked for." He muttered the last line, and it would've been lost, if Dean hadn't been standing right up next to him, and Cas hadn't had angel-hearing.

Sam turned to Cas, with his eyebrows raised. "What, you were here for emotional support, Cas?" He grinned.

"No, I too have actions to apologize for." Cas admitted. Sam shook his head, dismissively.

"Same goes for you, Cas," He insisted. "You're both my family. And I don't need to hear a checklist of things you've done wrong, to feel better."

Dean clicked his tongue, landing a hand on his brother's shoulder, proud and pleased.

"Nonetheless," Cas went on, a hint of a smile on his face. "I feel like I particularly need to address and apologize for my tendency to not respond to you, Sam. It was wrong, and I should've helped you more in those years."

"Huh," Sam mused. "That's something you did, ignore my prayers, didn't you?"

Cas nodded, embarrassedly. "Please believe, I'm very sorry -"

"Nah, it's cool," Sam shrugged. "The whole 'profound bond' thing you had with Dean, right? I get it."

Dean stifled a grin, while Cas hemmed and hawed for too long, earning a chuckle from Sam.

***

"What are you thinking about?" Dean nudged Cas with his elbow, because he'd caught Cas looking into the distance instead of into his book, 'Lebanon'.

"So much," Cas answered, softly. When he turned his head and continued speaking, he was only inches away from Dean. "Who gave these to us?"

Dean blinked. "I think about that all the time too."

"And," Cas went on. "Who wrote it? I mean, wasn't father - God writing the Winchester Gospel? But, he's not with us anymore. He left, with Amara, we all remember." Cas's eyes softened. "Then, who wrote it, Dean?"

"Isn't it possible that Chuck does god-stuff and cat-blogging during the day, and dishes out crap novellas with godspeed, at night?" Dean grinned, and Cas mirrored it, at such proximity.

"Not crap novellas." Cas held up his book, looking at the cover page, which had the Winchester family on it. "You know I'm old, Dean, and I've read extensively in all of my millions of years. This is one of the best stories I've ever read." He paused, as Dean sucked in a breath. "I won't say it's greatly written, for in literary style, it is dedicatedly average. But moderate prose doesn't defile the story, and the tale of you and Sam, is a spectacular one to behold."

Dean bit his lip. He didn't know what to say.

"I was also thinking of another thing," Cas kept speaking, as if his turn hadn't ended with that breathy last dialogue. "Does it happen because he writes it? Do all our lives entangle and entwined because he so wishes it? Or, does he merely write what he knows will happen?" Cas's eyes twinkled, with awe.

"Does it matter?" Dean whispered, his eyes straining not to look at Cas's lips too, even as they stare unblinking into his Angel's sky blue eyes.

"It could." Cas replied, a wise intonation in his voice. "You see, Dean, no one knows what will actually happen. Back when we angels were new on Earth and to you, we often claimed to know what would happen, didn't we? But that's the thing. It hardly ever did. Do you know why, Dean? Because its impossible to look into that which hasn't happened yet. For anyone. All we can do is know how the life of a particular individual shall unfold - but this too is entrapped in millions of probabilities and no certainty, because it's ever changing. And the fates of billions of humans like that one, need to be taken into measure, to get a glimpse of the future - and that's neither simple, nor accurate."

"So, Zachariah, or Lucifer or Michael were bullshitting us all that while?" Dean frowned.

"They were lying, in a way," Cas confessed. "Angels can predict the future, but its difficult. Humans can change it, and that's simple. Fate, in actuality, is an amalgamation of a million different futures, all strung together and changing each moment. What, at all, do we know - a man as you are, and an angel as I am - of fate, and the future? But a speck, Dean. And if," His speech held an even deeper note of poetry, even as he explained in a monotonous voice, the workings of the Universe, to a patient and keen listener. "God truly can see the future, don't you think Amara would've been dealt with better? Father was dying at the hands of his sister - wouldn't that be an event he'd have prevented if he foresaw it?"

Dean nodded, enraptured. Not just by Cas's words, or his manner of speaking - but the developing emotions on his face as he did.

Suddenly, the wave of seriousness seemed to pass, and Cas smiled - almost pleased that he'd gotten to talk to Dean about this, if nothing else. "And you, Dean? You weren't reading either. What were you thinking about?"

"Cas, I'm no you," Dean hesitated. "And I wasn't thinking of anything as grand as that."

"It won't be trivial to me, if it is of importance to you," Cas promised.

"Well," Dean shied, almost. Their eyes were still locked on each other's. "In the books, we often - uh - stare. At each other. A lot. I was just wondering if it was an exaggeration, or if we really look at each other, like that, that much?"

Cas stares back at him, and the gravity of his gaze renders Dean incapable of looking away, even if he wanted to. The warmth of the blue of Cas's eyes, had never ceased to amaze him. He could feel the feeling of Cas radiate through him, through an interlocking of mere visions. It was happy, reassuring, safe and homely. It was exciting, and cherishing, and one of sheer wonder. It was tingling, but it was familiar -

It struck Dean. "Did we just do it aga -"

Cas moved towards him at the exact same moment that Dean leaned in. They met in the middle, perfectly at ease, for all the throbbing in their chests - comfortably sliding into a kiss, with their lips fitting over the other's in a smooth harmony.

It may be their first kiss, but it feels like the most natural thing ever.

*

"Not to ruin the mood, Cas," Dean mumbled to Cas's ribs, as the angel ran his hand through Dean's hair as they lay on the bed together, Dean's head resting on Cas's chest. "But, Chuck - slash - your fucking Dad better not write about this. That'd be a whole 'nother level of crazy."

Cas smiled, and Dean could hear it in his breaths. "I don't really know what to say, Dean, because he did write in ample detail about your inte -uh, your time with Anna, in the Impala."

Dean lifted his head to frown at Cas pointedly. "You had to go there, didn't you?" Cas, still frowning, refused to react. Dean egged him on. "Though, Cas, ample details, huh? You've been paying extra attention or..?"

Cas hummed, and lifted his head from the pillow to plant a chaste kiss on Dean's smirking lips, probably as a means of not replying. But Dean couldn't mind less, and he enthusiastically replied.

*

The Author sipped from their cup of coffee, and rang for the delivery boy, with a smile. The story was on its way to the end, and a happy ending had begun to form.

*

HAPPY MISHAPOCALYPSE, CROUTONS!

[mittensmorgul]

Any thoughts on the differences between ghosts and demons, since Hell has been busted open but it's pretty much just ghosts topside (except Belphie). It can't just be time in Hell as the deciding factor - unless Jack the Ripper's been haunting people for awhile and just recently got his soul sent to Hell. Crowley's the only demon we really have a timeline for... I wonder if souls "choose", like Dean's "choice" to get off the rack and take up the knife when he was in Hell...

So... I don’t honestly have more than random guesses to go on here, but this is one of those cosmological things I tend to obsess over at 3 am, so I decided to take this directly to grey’s chattybubbles, and we had an interesting chat about it. I’ll just put it here because our rambling entertained me, and heck, maybe someone else has something to add...

Warnings for incredibly dubious math below the cut :’D

mittensmorgulI gotta say, your ask message is something I've been thinking about since last week, but jack the ripper's ghost has made it 100000x worse >.>I'm just gonna... ramble a bit in your general direction and see if we can come up with an answer either of us finds reasonable >.>Maybe it's a frogs and toads situation. All toads are frogs, but not all frogs are toads?i.e. all demons once were human souls, but not all human souls can or will become demons

mittensmorgulI don't know if it's their choice as to whether they become demons or not, or some other unrelated metaphysical process. But I've wondered this for a while about how crossroads demons develop red eyes while "regular demons" don't. So what makes a crossroads demon vs a run of the mill demon?

grey2510right

mittensmorgulI know it's not the same question, but it's in the same family of questions :'D

grey2510one of the things I was considering was what made them go to Hell in the first placelike someone who made a deal - for whatever reason - is someone who knows to look for loopholes and ways out of a shit situationand if your options are "be tortured" or "not be tortured"...

grey2510could also explain how crossroads demons are made... maybe the crossroads demons all made deals as humansit's a self perpetuating systemwhereas some psychopath serial killer would get sent to hell, but might not have the deal-making acumenif that makes any kind of sense

mittensmorgulI always had assumed that the torture was part of the process, and that happening in Hell was what turned a soul into a demon, you know? But if Hell is mostly just ghosts being tortured for their sins for eternity, rather than being tortured into demons within a relatively short span of time (one would think 140 earth years should do it...) maybe only some souls are even able to become demonsor there may be a specific process involved to turn them-- like witches who pledge themselves to a demon like RubyAnd Crowley, who made a deal and then ended up a crossroads demon

grey2510yeah

mittensmorgullike maybe there had to be a bit of something supernatural already staining the soul to make them eligible :'D

grey2510because we know it must have been a relatively short turn around for Crowley - in earth years, he died 300 years ago, but he was turned demon in enough time to know Naomi and refer to Mesopotamia (which doesn't sound modern) and to establish himself as King of the Crossroads

mittensmorgulBecause if it was just a matter of a choice, I don't think very many people would choose "torture" over "do this and you can become a demon which is bad but heck it's not torture"

grey2510yeahunless they truly believed they were guilty (but that's more of Lucifer the show's version of Hell)I don't have an answer but I thought Spiders George might have a few thoughtslol*georg

mittensmorgulyeah, and Crowley has STUDIED STUFF. I mean, he knows Enochian, knows all the major players, knows tons of unrelated lore and weapons and all sorts of stuff (including magic he presumably learned as a human)So he's been a demon (or at least not just some poor tortured soul in Hell) for a very, very long time to have been "King of the Crossroads" in a leadership position even at the beginning of the serieshe didn't spend 140 of those years languishing as a soul in Hell

grey2510yeahand he had it in with Lilith

mittensmorgulyeah, this is all just random thoughts, but I don't know if canon will ever make a statement on it one way or another.

grey2510I'd be surprised if they did

mittensmorguland Jack the Ripper was I believe Eugenie's pet Evil Thing in this episode, so I don't know that this wasn't just a random "I'm gonna use this because it sounds cool! Screw canon!" moment for her or what

grey2510especially since we have BL canon acrobatics

mittensmorgulyeah

grey2510yeah - I could really care less about Jack the Ripper but if that's her current chew toy, have fun

mittensmorgulI think Ketch is her current chew toy

grey2510well him too

mittensmorgulwhich I'll take over Lucifer or Nick any day:P

grey2510haha I was just about to say that

mittensmorgulbut yeah, as far as understanding the cosmology and metaphysics, if it's just BL canon I tend to ignore it as much as possible unless we get secondary confirmation of a thing from another writer

grey2510yeah - although we do have a little bit of outside of BL since it was introduced in 15x01but that could have just been the other writers tossing a shiny object to her

mittensmorgulwell the oldest of those other souls from hell that we saw was 15 earth years, the Woman in White.Which... I could buy she wouldn't have been "demonized" yet.

grey2510yeahalso - Lizzie Borden we don't know for sure because our Lizzie ep wasn't actually Lizzie right?

mittensmorgulShe was a deeply traumatized ghost for decades before being sent to Hell in 1.01yeah, it was a fake haunting, and Amara eating people's souls

grey2510rightbeen awhile since I've seen that season

mittensmorgulBut nothing in canon clarified if it was lizzie borden with the ax anyway, we just assume it was

grey2510truebut yeah - Constance still being a soul and not a demon makes sense

mittensmorgulAnd if it was, we don't know if that was scripted, or something someone thought would look cool and costumed that way

grey2510yeah

mittensmorgulBUT! I do think it's likely that most souls don't become demons, otherwise there would've been a heck of a lot more of them. And like we've been running out of angels, Hell was running low on demons by s13even by s11, after amara ate her way through a lot of them

grey2510trueit still does make you wonder what it is that makes some souls "special" enough to become demons

mittensmorgulI've always found it weird we don't really see a lot of "brand new demons"

grey2510....still waiting for Bela to show up and be like fuck all y'all

mittensmorgulBela should be queen of the crossroads. She made a deal, dealt with the supernatural, and deserved better.

grey2510seriouslyshe'd be the natural successor - she was pretty much the human equivalent before she got dragged away

mittensmorgulyep

grey2510i know this is also just early season weirdness, but there was never anything else about different types of demons like the shadowy things that Meg called

mittensmorgulthough I'm 99% sure the show can't afford Lauren Cohan, and I'm not sure they'd bring back Bela without her. Though as a demon she would by necessity be wearing a different meatsuit...

grey2510yeah - they could put her in anyone

mittensmorgulYeah, the Daevasand the Acheri demon we saw exactly once in 2.21 >..

grey2510or why wispy the pilot was doing his thingoh yeah that was the girl looking thing right?

mittensmorguland good old Specky from 1.04 with his airplane fetishyeah

grey2510i'm just going to assume that they were things that other hunters/lore called "demons" because they didn't have another name for them

mittensmorgulyeah

grey2510anyway, it would be fascinating to know what exactly the soul to demon process is all about

mittensmorgulbut human souls, twisted into demons, seems to happen by a very specific process. Like it must be done TO the soulit's probably all on the demon tablet >.>

grey2510haha probably

mittensmorgulbut they mentioned there were several BILLION souls in Hell, which seems... rather a lot... I just looked it up... about 55 million people die every year.

grey2510that's a lot of big numbers

mittensmorgulso about 20 years for a billion people to die

grey2510so not my area lol

mittensmorguland I assume the vast majority of them do not go to Hell

grey2510lol ok - i'm glad you did the math (i've been grading freshman papers all day so my brain is kinda fried)do you watch the Good Place?

mittensmorgulI mean if even Ken Lay gets into Heaven, then we have to assume the VAST majority of people who die won't go to Hell

grey2510yeah

mittensmorgulno I haven't seen it, but I've watched through tumblr :'D

grey2510the rules seem pretty laxah gotchai was going to make a reference to something that happened last season but didn't want to ruin it for you

mittensmorgulso if even 1/10 people who die end up in Hell, it would still take like 200 years for a billion souls to accumulate. Or 2000 years if only 1 /100 people go to Hell

grey2510so assume a few centuries to get a billion

mittensmorgul(and the death rate has not always been as high as it is now, with 8 billion people on the planet, compared to 2000 years ago, you know? so that's more math than I'm actually willing to do :P)

grey2510lolyeah spn's hell rules seem to be "made a deal" and "totally evil person"murders, rapists, etc.not much in the middle

mittensmorgulyeahbut the population of the earth even 200 years ago was less than 1/10 what it is today, so the death rate would've also dropped by that much, making it take that much longer for hell souls to accumulate.Point being, if there are that many SOULS in Hell, and not just demons, then apparently not every soul DOES become a demonand I REALLY NEED TO KNOW WHY NOW

grey2510haha

mittensmorgulGAH

grey2510it's been bugging me too, so i guess we can suffer together

mittensmorgulokay, I really wanna copy/paste this as the reply to your message, because I feel like my non-answer is a good answer

grey2510fine by me

mittensmorguland maybe we can have other people pitch in ideas :PI'm pretty sure this is the sort of thing Canon will never explain in detail, but it's exactly the sort of thing I personally wonder about the most.

grey2510so where did we land? something done specifically to the soul that turns them, but then also the question of whether there's something about the soul that makes them a viable candidate for the transformation?

mittensmorgulyeah, that's succinct. :'D

grey2510and then if crossroads demons are former deal makers

mittensmorgulalso if they've made a deal either with a crossroads demon, or as a "borrower witch," as they've been called by other witches in canon

grey2510or something else about them that determines what kind of demon they'll be come*become

mittensmorgulyeah

[sturlsons]

french in 1.5 years anon

Kinda random but I just found out that I’ll be required to be intermediate/advanced in French by the next 1.5 years; ALL I KNOW IS THAT MEIRDE IS A BAD BAD WORD! Idk if you’re a native speaker but I was wondering if you could provide me of any good French language resources (or language in general since I’ll be needing to learn Arabic soon as well), and like tips for language learning and how to go about it? Sorry to bother you haha this is MY stress but I appreciate any help! Have a great day!

HEY. so i really fucking dropped the ball on this one, i’m sorry. 2019 has been one health fiasco after another (or more like the same fiasco again and again) and i kept telling myself i want to sit down and make a proper post for this, until i realised that that’s just never going to happen given the way things are rn. and i’d rather give you a quickly-written post which is actually helpful than never write that perfect bullet-pointed one. 

first of all, i’ve been in your EXACT position (so no, i’m not a native speaker) except i had about...six months to go from je m’appelle teesta to voyez-vous, le problème qui se cache derrière tout ça n’est pas le manque de respect mais la personne dont il s’agit or whatever. i was like, i can so do this. (spoiler: i didn’t, because i was 18 and overconfident and stupid and didn’t actually know how to learn a language.) GOOD NEWS: having learned 3 more foreign languages since then, i am now REALLY GOOD at learning languages REALLY FAST. 1.5 years is a good amount of time, so don’t stress.

i’m going to go generic on this, with some extra tips about french since i speak it, unlike arabic. 

first thing, that typical thing everyone hates to hear but knows is coming from the mouth of an accomplished person (pat on my back) in any field whatsoever: you’re going to have to work really hard and practice like fuck. 

there’s just nothing else that can replace it. i’ve filled up notebooks and notebooks with japanese verb conjugations, once i did like 1800 of them in one sitting. but you better believe that a bitch will never forget those now. resign yourself to putting in at least three hours of your day to this until you get to the level you need. (and three hours is...kind. at my peak i was literally reading through french dictionaries at the library, 10 AM - 8 PM. i treated it like a workday.)

now, what you need to establish is: are you a hands-on learner or a digital one. 

i don’t really care for all the auditory learner and visual learner stuff, i don’t know about anyone else but i personally used those as excuses to avoid certain exercises. unless you have actual disabilities preventing you from accessing certain methods of learning, you can train yourself into anything. it’s a matter of practice. i could barely understand a new song without reading its lyrics first, now i eat up podcasts. 

SO. the question here is different. a hands-on learner, like i used to be more or less throughout my bachelor’s, is someone who absolutely cannot retain information unless they’ve written it down BY HAND at least once. pen and paper. (i’m still like this but i’ve learned to combine it with digital methods to go faster.) if this isn’t a hurdle for you, congratulations. your process is going to go that much faster, at least for french. (you’ll have to spend hours practicing your written arabic however, if you’re not familiar with the script.) 

now, if you’re a hands-on learner, you need to add an extra hour to your daily time. no matter how fast you write, you will take that time. and you cannot shorthand your way into languages. you need to understand how french is spelt, what accents it uses, that they put a space before exclamation points, question marks, and semicolons. (side tip: learn the IPA. it will be useful to you forever in language learning, at least for the romance languages.) i’m not gonna teach you how to make notes since i’ve never benefitted from copying someone else’s style, so if you don’t have a set method start establishing that. you need regularity and rhythm when you learn a language. my grammar notes look the same regardless of the language. i don’t have my french ones since it’s been years and i didn’t take good ones then anyway, but here’s my japanese and russian stuff. 

JAPANESE NOTES // RUSSIAN NOTES

now, it bears mentioning that these notes are NOT the notes i take when i don’t know shit. these are final level notes. they’re brief, idiosyncratic, and only reminders. something to refer to when i’m revising and suddenly forget a rule. the first notes i make are much more elaborate, whether they’re pretty or not. i’ve gradually lost the fucks i had about really going ham on academics so my russian notes are very messy, but my japanese ones from back in the day are magnificent. here’s a look. during lesson one i realised that japanese and my mother tongue, gujarati, are syntaxically similar as shit, and i started taking notes with references in gujarati. it sped up my learning process 2x while my french classmates were still going “BUT WHY IS IT LIKE THAT”. 

PRACTICAL GRAMMAR // THEORETICAL GRAMMAR

if you plan to learn more languages in the future, this will be so valuable. sometimes a phrase i learn in russian doesn’t make sense in its french explanation, but a phrase in english might use the same logic. bam, put down the translation in english then. you get what i’m saying? the more languages you learn, the easier it gets to learn languages. 

now if you’re a digital learner, i’ve got great news for you. duolingo and anki are your best friends. duolingo’s memed to hell and has a system that might not work for everyone, but they’ll do the brunt work of compiling grammar notes for you in the beginnings/ends of their lessons. note those down and transform them into anki flashcards, and you can learn grammar concepts without doing 20 exercises. (do those exercises if you can, though, nothing beats mindless practice.) now anki is an intimidating-looking but actually super intuitive app that basically builds digital flashcards for you and shows them to you in a rhythm based on your own learning speed. it’ll show you the front of a card, let’s say merde. you say the english translation out loud, shit, and hit enter. correct! was that easy? anki’ll show it to you in 10 minutes. hard? it’ll show you in 1 minute. super easy? merde won’t come up again until tomorrow. eventually you get so good at it that you can bury a card for 2 months. anki will also show you the same cards reversed, which is harder but trains you better. you’ll see shit and have to remember what it’s called in french, which is more difficult than you’d think it is. 

you can use anki for more than just vocab, like i mentioned. it’s a little tricky learning to convert grammar concepts into front/back flashcards, but you can do it. for example, here’s a sample of one of my russian grammar cards: 

front ^^

back once i hit enter^^

see? not that difficult. now don’t be an idiot like me who manually entered every single flashcard into anki. you can find pre-made packages online (but you can’t guarantee they’ll be correct) or you can make your own without killing your fingers. what you wanna do is open up a spreadsheet and make two columns, A for front of the card and B for back. it’ll look like this:

then you’re gonna save that spreadsheet as a .CVS (comma separated values) and import that into anki. bam, your flashcards are made for you with half the effort. there’s also a script floating around somewhere to make excel translate words automatically for you, but i don’t recommend that unless they’re really easy words. google translate can fuck up. reverso is your friend. 

you need to review your anki cards every day. it’ll take less and less time as you go along. i can review 300 russian cards in 15 minutes now. but you need to keep the rhythm going. download ankiapp and sync your cards, review them on commutes or in the hallway or whatever. trust me, it’s magic. 

apart from this, if a traditional textbook helps, go for that. i’ve always used textbooks and workbooks, more as supports than as principal methods, but it does help. it’s structured and organised and these people know how to train you. bescherelle is a good go-to for french. 

media is always a great way of immersion too, until you get to the country itself. it’ll show you how french people speak french. when i first came to france i didn’t have that experience and even though i spoke an arguably decent amount of french when i got here, it was like, if this is french then what the fuck was i learning in high school. if you like watching movies this is your chance. watch the classics first so that you can get an idea of french pop culture. amélie (though the pop culture aspect here is about shitting on it) and les intouchables, for starters. watch your favourite films, first subbed, then subbed and dubbed, then just dubbed. i watched all ten seasons of friends with french subs, it was wild. with music you want to start off with some indie-ish singers since they will universally sing softer and slower, making things easier to understand than idk, la tribu de dana. (if you’re into bts there’s a hilarious video of their baepsae choreo set to la tribu de dana.) anyway - angèle, cœur de pirate, céline dion, fréro delavega, uhhh that fucking french sufjan stevens. what’s his name. VIANNEY. don’t fucking listen to biglo and oli or like, fatal bazooka right away. you will not understand shit. i barely understand it. white people are wild. ooh listen to stromae. orelsan too, he’s a rapper but he has a relatively clean diction imo. he also sang the french opening for OPM. they call him orelsan-san in japan.

last but not the least: if you have the opportunity to interact in french with people, DO IT. native speakers will do their best to help you and be kind about it. people who learned french might sometimes be assholes from experience. it’s a whole superiority complex thing, and very hypocritical. anyway - online or IRL, wherever you can practice your french, do it. it’ll be immensely helpful. there’s nothing like the frustration of not being able to express simple things to get you motivated to get better. do your best to immerse yourself - changing the language on your devices can make a difference too. 

i think that’s all i have and again, i’m sorry for taking this long to finally deliver, thanks for your patience! if you have any specific questions don’t hesitate to hit me up, on anon or not. 

good luck - it’s not going to be the easiest but nothing is as gratifying as beginning to understand the workings of a language. you’re gonna love it!

[abybweisse]

LONG VENT POST: Family issues, part 1 of ?

So, a bit ago I said I’m not as active right now, due to family issues. I didn’t want to fill the thread of that post with all the long, sordid details.

Right now I’m trying to get my mother into an “assisted living and memory care” community (nursing home, basically) and doing everything I can to stop her credit union accounts from hemorrhaging from all her incompetence (she’s been scammed a bunch and generally taken advantage of).

Yesterday’s biggest takeaway was the discovery of numerous scams she fell for over the past few years... plus three months worth of fraudulent Uber and Uber Eats charges... and the fact that she pays about $550/mo on car insurance but the last couple times (at least, maybe more) she got collision repairs done? She didn’t file claims and pay a $500 deductible. No, she paid in full, out of pocket. Out $7k instead of $1k for two repairs in just a few months’ time. How can you pay huge insurance premiums and never notify them when you need collision repairs?!

Found out just recently that about a couple years ago, someone scammed her for an easy $5k. Found out she never deposits the full amount on car payments I send her. She never makes full deposits on the rent a tenant pays her. Instead, she cashes much of them out, and I have no idea what she does with the cash.

She buys stuff in bulk but cannot use most of it before it goes bad, but she refuses to toss out expired foods. Her hoarding tendencies have gotten worse. Even though she tells my sister and I not to send her gifts that would add to the clutter in the house, I found out yesterday she’s been dropping $200-$300 on random stuff from places like TJ Maxx and Tuesday Morning just because they made her “happy”. She hasn’t even unpackaged the hanging glass butterflies or other things. I told her she can take them to the “home”....

She’s wrecked two brand new Priuses (about $30k each, each paid up front/in full with inheritance money from my dad, who died five years ago) within about two years’ time. The first was “totaled”, but I have yet to verify whether she ever opened a claim to get money for it. This one hasn’t been officially declared totaled or repairable. I had to file the claim on it on her behalf. For all I know, the $550/mo premium might be on both cars. I’ll know for sure soon. If she’s been paying insurance on a car that was “totaled” two years ago instead of getting market value of about $22k, I will definitely break down and cry. For at least the 50th time in the past few days. Seriously, if she just found out the previous one couldn’t be fixed and walked away from it without filing a claim and getting the huge payout... and is therefore also still paying for insurance on it? I’ll probably scream, too.

The latest (and last ever) car wreck was last Wednesday. We’ve been telling her for over a year she shouldn’t be driving. Her doctors have told her the same for at least 6mo. My sister and I were planning to visit her and take away her keys, but the wreck happened before we could even finalize our travel plans.

This time, she was trying to get to dialysis (she goes three days a week), and she couldn’t use Uber anymore, so she was determined to drive herself. Just before 5 am, she was driving down her own residential street and blacked out (apparently) and hit three parked (and unoccupied) vehicles. Police showed up and she got out of her car and told them she needed a ride to dialysis. One of the officers took her. She can’t recall hitting three cars. Told me she hit a curb and one car. Later told someone else she only hit a curb. I don’t know anything about the curb, but probably. However, I definitely believe the police report that three parked cars were hit badly and had to be towed away, too. After the police spoke to her tenant, they said they’d make things easier for us and revoke her license. Phew.

I convinced dialysis staff (actually, they completely agreed without question) to send her to hospital afterwards instead of letting yet another friend take her home. Good thing, too, because before dialysis was even up that morning, she was in a lot of pain; she had told them earlier she didn’t need to be looked at. Well... no broken bones, no major injuries, and her labs were ok except slightly low potassium. However, a brain scan showed something I already knew just by dealing with her: it showed ischemic changes associated with dementia. Monday of that week, I had called her renal doctor to tell him I worried about her mental health and wondered if it had anything to do with the renal failure. He said he didn’t think so; it’s got to be something else causing the mental decline we are seeing. When I told him she’s still driving sometimes, he became furious and said he’d refer her to get a full dementia evaluation. Well, before he could even get the referral to her, she’d wrecked again. He’s seen her now, but I haven’t heard any updates from him. Mom says she hasn’t done the evaluation (that she knows of), and she heard someone at the hospital mention “dementia”, but she doesn’t recall what they said about it. 😔

I didn’t take photos when I finally saw her car, but I’m going back up to Dallas tomorrow and staying in a Motel 6 overnight (with my dog) to take care of as much financial matters for her as I can in these next two days. I’ll get another chance to see the car (to clean out items), so I’ll take pics then. I might not get back to Austin until sometime Wednesday. Not sure about Wednesday yet, but I already requested Monday and Tuesday off from work by email and left a vm with coworkers. I’m about to run out of annual leave because of this. I know I’ll be making many weekend trips coming up until my sister and I have gotten her moved into the nursing facility. And for a while afterwards, too, since we have to clean out the house, put some of her stuff into a storage unit, and sell the house ASAP. Plus, we need to visit often, at least at first, to make sure she’s settled in, isn’t hating it too much, and is being taken care of properly.

It’s a good thing my sister is paying for my hotel charges and has also offered gas money (though I haven’t asked for gas money... yet). This is still way cheaper for her than booking herself flights back and forth between Olympia, WA and Dallas, TX. The more leg work I do on this, the happier my sister is to help with my travel costs. Honestly, she really doesn’t want to come down here until it’s time to move our mom, clean the house, and put it up for sale.

And, since we have so little time to get her affairs in order, we are placing her in the only community my mom and I have toured, so far. I told her if it turns out to not be a good place (at all) once she moves in, we can keep looking at others (while she still lives at that one) and move her again. But, honestly, this place does seem nice enough, and none of these places are perfect. Plus, it’s right next to the hospital where she always goes... the one where her doctors are associates. I joked that if they needed to send her to the hospital, they could put her on a gurney and wheel her down the street. She laughed at that and said the location is perfect.

Sigh. She’s being compliant and has even said thanks for us (her two daughters) stepping up to help her and get things taken care of. We were afraid she would refuse to leave her house of almost 40years. She’s not even batting an eye at us deciding to sell the house to make sure she can afford the rent and services (the suites at the community are rented out like apartments, but with three meals a day and unlimited snacks, weekly cleaning service, weekly laundry service, landline phone, cable, and internet included. We will have to pay more for “memory care” and probably for medical transport they provide (unless that’s included, too), plus whatever else. She might take her cat with her, or she might leave him with a friend of the family. But it’s a one-time, non-refundable fee of $500 if she keeps him. I kind of hope she gives him up, and they just bring him along on visits to her. She would have trouble taking care of him.

She’s never shown me her finances before. We had no idea how bad (completely uncontrolled) her spending was. It was probably bad enough before our dad died, but afterwards, she started going downhill fast. Now she’s in renal failure and requires dialysis three days a week. She’s recently lost an unhealthy amount of weight in a very short time, apparently because she can’t remember to eat and sometimes she’s too disoriented to get up. She can’t cook anymore, and she’s hardly done cleaning chores since she had kids (that’s what us kids were for: housework). So she’s a money-wasting hoarder in a house full of dirty dishes, dirty clothes, clutter everywhere, and $100’s — maybe $1000 worth — of groceries she can’t get through but won’t throw out when they go bad. And she won’t let anyone else touch them while she’s still living there.

I have so much to do the next couple days, I had to write a list of each thing I need to look into and take care of before I return home. I still have some stuff to get ready for the trip, so this is the end of the first vent post.

I hope I get more sleep tonight than I have the past week....

[racke7]

Disgaea’s Item World

So, today I started thinking about Disgaea's Item World, and why I dislike it.

After all, I'm honestly really fond of the idea of the Item World, where you battle endless enemies for the sake of improving your equipment so that you can continue battle even more endless enemies.

The problem is that I... really dislike Disgaea's combat-system. Like, it gets better later on in the series, with a lot of minor quality-of-life improvements (like the button that lets you immediately toggle through enemies and friendlies).

But the camera is often really awkward, and the map (not even mentioning the “random map generation”) can be frustrating to navigate.

There's never any real “you will do x amount of damage” way to predict if you've set it up right, until you've tried it (and even then, it can randomly decide that it wasn't enough this time around). And I don't mean that in the “RNG is shit”-way, but rather in the “I'd like to know if I'll do 300 damage, or a total of 5”-way, but even later titles basically refuse to give accurate “attack-predictions” (watched someone fight Carnage Baal in Disgaea 5 a few days ago, and those attack-predictions said that he'd take half of Baal's health, only for him to kill him outright instead).

And this isn't even mentioning the geo-panels where enemies will suddenly be boosted or immortal or your characters might end up silenced or damaged, forcing you to keep a lookout for those as well.

So it's clunky to navigate the characters around the map, it's awkward to set them up with the camera being what it is, and it's extremely unpredictable because you don't know if you'll kill the enemy outright until you've already tried it.

Basically, the combat of Disgaea is... not fun. It's not dreadful, mind you, but it isn't exactly a glowing review by any stretch of the word.

And the Item World is based around the idea that you love the combat of the game in question. That the very act of battling an endless amount of enemies is nearly a reward in and of itself, that you then also receive a bonus super-powered item from by the end of it.

So I was thinking about how Divinity 2 would be glorious with an Item World, because the combat of that game is (in my eyes, as someone who isn't using it for socializing with friends, which it's no doubt excellent for) all that really keeps it afloat. So Divinity 2's combat must be amazing, right? And actually? No, it kind of really isn't.

Divinity 2 is sort of based around the idea that either you completely decimate your enemy, or your enemy completely decimates you. There's very little space in between those two scenarios, and sometimes it'll require you to cheese it by bending the physics of the game-mechanics until they start to cry, or you'll go away and level-up somewhere else until you decimate them instead of the other way around.

Basically, if the enemy gets their turn before you, odds are pretty good that you'll be dead by the time your turn comes around. And if you don't manage to finish off the enemies in your turn, they'll probably manage to kill you in theirs.

So, you know, it's not the most excitedly dynamic kind of combat-systems. The reason combat is looked forward to so much in the game, is because it offers you the chance to earn a bit of extra experience. And since there's a limited amount of encounters in the entire game, every little bit of experience helps.

Basically, Divinity 2 is a game that sets up an entire wonderful world for you to explore, and then proceeds to railroad you into following the path that won't insta-kill you by forcing you into encounters you don't have enough levels to win. So, you know, lots of fun to play with friends, but kind of repetitive to play by yourself.

By now, I was getting curious. Was there any game with a combat-system where the Item World would be exciting to play through in and of itself?

And I came up with one.

Bloodborne.

Bloodborne basically stacks all of its value into having absolutely phenomenal combat-mechanics. It's the kind of game where your character or story doesn't matter all that much, because you only care about all of the cool fights that you can get yourself involved in.

I mean, sure, there are bosses whom I'd kick in front of a train if I could get away with it, but Bloodborne is at its heart a game where you're kind of delighted by having found a new boss to fight.

The only real thing that Bloodborne falters at (in my eyes) is the lack of available equipment until the player reaches New Game Plus.

Some builds just aren't viable until you have certain weapons or items, and those will only be found on certain end-game bosses. Meaning that you'll have to beat the game before you can try to play with that kind of build, which gets really annoying if you don't want to actually play New Game Plus.

But see, that's the moment where the Item World really begins to shine as an idea. What if you could spend enough time in the Item World that you could make some weapons viable for any kind of build, even without going into New Game Plus? A way to change what a weapon scales with, or how much damage it does, or the chance for causing stagger?

Suddenly, what was before a limiting kind of thing, has become a novelty. If you want a weapon with that particular move-set, then you'll have to deal with the bosses, but any other weapon could serve as a replacement of sorts to that weapon.

And, perhaps, hidden deep within that Item World, a certain Pthumerian Queen waits to be revealed. (Thus replacing the Chalice Dungeons with the Item World, and turning them into something that's actively rewarding the player as they go along, rather than an eternal grind that will lead to a kind of interesting boss-fight some day down the line.)

[cosmofantasy]

Crusade: the (in)complete guide

(NOT REALLY COMPLETE YET. RELEASED EARLY AND INCOMPLETE JUST TO HELP PEOPLE WITH THE BASICS AND SOME OF THE ADVANCE FACTS FOR THE 12/5/2018 CRUSADE) (WILL COMPLETE SOON)

Index: (Coming Soon)

What is Crusade?

Crusade is a mode in which Guilds fight other Guilds. Victory or defeat will determine the rewards earned and the ranking of each Guild. Every Crusade Season lasts 3 days. Your Guild will fight one Guild each of the three days. 

When do Crusades happen?

Crusades are seasonal. Meaning that they aren’t always on. Crusade Seasons are usually announced with some days ahead in the Notice/News of the game.  Average, there is a Crusade every 2-3 weeks or so. 

What are the rewards for participating in Crusades?

The main reason to play and win in Crusades, is to obtain Crusade Coins. Crusade Coins can be used in the Crusade Shop where players can buy Cosmo of the Three Gods (Athena, Poseidon and Hades).  Playing enough Crusades will allow any player to unlock these three powerful characters without spending any money in the game (F2P/Free To Play). 

What do I need to participate in Crusade?

First of all, you need to belong to a Guild. If you don’t have one, check the Domestic and Global Chats in the game and look for people posting request for Guild Members.  Secondly, the Guild Master needs to set up a time in which the Guild wants to play Crusade. 

And note that the times given are in UTC, so Google what each of those times are for your geographical timezone. 

(3:00 UTC is 7pm for me here in Pacific Time)

How Crusades work?

BASICS

- Introduction

Two Guilds will fight for 60 minutes. The goal is to score more than the enemy Guild at the end of the 60 minutes countdown.

Every member of a Guild will have a Defense Formation and an Attack pool. 

The DEF Formation is made of 3 teams, and up to 15 characters.

The ATK pool can (and should) have 15 characters.

The total number of DEF Formations of a Guild will determine the number of DEFENSES the Guild has. Max 50.  (If a Guild has ideally all of its 50 members set up for Crusade, the Guild will have a total of 50 Defenses)

You as a player will use characters from your Attack Pool to attack and defeat the enemy Guild Defenses. That means you will fight against the Defense Teams that the players in the enemy guild have set up.  You will need to defeat the 3 teams of that player DEF Formation in order to take down that Defense. Failing to do so will not count as a Defense taken, although if you killed a character or a whole team during your try, they will remain dead the next time you or another team member tries it. Their HP will also remain exactly the same as they had it the second your battle finished and you lost. (if one of their characters was almost dead, they will still be with low HP when you go to fight them again).

To attack an enemy Defense, you need to click in the Battle button

This will select a RANDOM enemy Defense from the ones that haven’t been taken down already. 

If you feel you can’t beat it or prefer to see if you can fight someone else, you can click on the back button and click on Battle again. However, the game can be sometimes very broken and only show you the same enemy over and over, so be aware of that. 

- Scoring

Once you have defeated a Defense, you will score for your Guild and add to the total Guild Combo.

The total score of your Guild and the enemy Guild’s will be shown in the main screen of Crusade. Your Guild always in blue, the enemy always in red.

(Always try to keep the blue crossing the middle line!!)

- Big Bang Attack (BBA)

When your Guild, or the enemy Guild takes down all of the Defenses, a big Bang Attack will happen.

A Big Bang Attack lasts for 3 minutes and allows the Guild who took all the enemy defenses down to score a MASSIVE amount of points during that time. Ideally players use the Cost: 15 BBA to score 3 times as much in the same time that it takes to use the Cost: 5. The idea of the BBA is to score as much as you can.

When you attack on a Big Bang Attack, a random character from your ATK Pool will appear on screen (what character appears has no effect or makes any difference in the score)

And then your BBA score will appear

(We will go more in detail later about how to optimize BBA scores, Battle Scores and Combo Scores)

When the BBA ends, the Defenses of the defending Guild are restored, and the other Guild will have to take all of them down again to reach another BBA.

- Blocking

When the enemy Guild wipes out all of your Guild’s Defenses, they will get their BBA Chance. 

For the duration of their BBA, all the participating members of the Guild can choose to BLOCK.

Blocking will decrease the score that the enemy Guild is earning during their BBA by a percentage. Each blocking member blocks for 1%, no matter the level of the player. 

However, blocking will keep you unable to do anything until the enemy BBA is over and your Defenses are revived. 

You cannot cancel the block once you started it.

- Starting times.

All the guild members will see a BLUE countdown above the Guild Button in the Main Menu THE PREVIOUS DAY to the beginning of Crusade Season.

NOTE: It does not mark the beginning of the actual Crusade that you can play. It just marks the beginning of that Crusade Season and will reach zero exactly at Date Reset. 

After the Date is reset, Crusade Season will be on and you will see a new RED countdown above the Guild Button in the Main menu. 

Clicking on the Guild Button and the Crusade Mode once in the Guild Menu, you will see that same red countdown. 

When this countdown reaches zero, the actual Crusade of your Guild will start 

- Crusade Skills

Every character has a Crusade Skill (some powerful characters have two). There are different ones and each one has a different effect during a Crusade. There are ATK and DEF skills.

ATTACK CRUSADE SKILLS

Score Plus BBA

Increases the Score gained when you are attacking during a BBA if this character is in your Attack Pool.

Score Plus Battle

Increases the Score earned if the character with this skill is in the Attack team (NOTE: the character needs to be in the attacking team, it doesn’t count if the character is simply in the Attack Pool of 15 characters.)

Combo Plus

Increases the Combo earned if the character with this skill is in the Attack team (NOTE: same as with BT, the character needs to be in the team of 5 that is attacking, it doesn’t count just by being in the pool)

DEFENSIVE CRUSADE SKILLS

Recovery

When a Defense team wins against an attack attempt and they have a character with this skill in the team, the team will heal for a set amount. (usually their HP remains as low or high as it was at the end of the fight)

Damage Cut

A Defense Team with a character with this skill in it will receive a set % less damage. However, the character with this skill will only be able to perform charge skills and nothing else (unless there is an exception that specifically states in the description of the Crusade Skill that allows the character to cast a skill other than the charge skill). The character will stand static and only able to perform charge skills (or any allowed skill if any)

If you are attacking a team and any of the defending characters has a Defensive Crusade Skill, it will show in a dialogue at the beginning of the fight 

(in the case shown above, three characters have Defensive Crusade Skills: one Damage Cut, and two Recovery)

There are also 2 different types that all Crusade Skills can be:

Quality: the quality of the Crusade Skill will be determined by the roman number in front of the skill, and goes from 1 to 3 (I, II, III). The higher the number, the higher the effect of the Crusade Skill will be.

Type: Crusade Skills can be intensive, standard, or delayed. (Exception: all Damage Cut and Combo Plus skills are Standard and won’t have any indication in the name).  Intensive Crusade Skills are stronger than Delayed and Standard ones at lower levels, while Delayed is stronger than Intensive and Standard at higher to MAX levels.  Standard are never the worst, and never the strongest.

Additionally, there are special types like “LG Exclusive”, or “Specter Exclusive”. They are usually stronger than all the other ones, so nurture those first!

- Combo

Combo is an essential part of Crusade and a vital factor to win. The main function of the Combo is to increase by a % the score earned by all the Guild members when attacking a Defense or attacking during a BBA.

Every time an enemy Defense is taken down, a player will not only score points for the Guild, but will also increase the Combo of the Guild.  The Combo stacks up and increases with every Guild member that is attacking. The higher the combo, the higher the % score bonus for the Guild will be. 

However, the Combo needs to be maintained or it will DIE.  A countdown with the words “until combo ends” will mark when the Combo needs to be maintained.  Every time one of your guild members joins a fight, that timer will reset back to 1:59

Specifically, the moment they click on the “Start battle” button, that timer will reset.

This means that there can’t be 2 full minutes since someone clicked that button and until someone in your guild clicks it again to join another fight.  If the Guild fails at starting a battle in those 2 minutes, the Combo will die and it will go back to zero. All Score bonus will be gone and the combo will need to be build up again.  This will surely mean defeat in an even match because you lost a big advantage and your enemy will keep their combo going higher and higher, scoring more and more than you.

- Stamina

Crusade Stamina is a different kind of stamina that is determined by the player’s PREMIUM RANK. It refills one per minute.

During a Crusade, every player has 2 free Stamina refills. After that, any refill needs to be done using Energy Fruits that can be purchased in the Shop, Rare Shop and Premium Shop for 300 Holy Stones each.

They can also be earned as reward for Guild Missions and at the end of a Crusade Season.

There is also a limit of times that a player can refill Stamina, no matter how many Energy Fruits they own. 

ADVANCED

Optimizing your Attack Pool

So you know now that you need 15 characters in your ATK Formation and that they have Crusade Skills that will increase Battle Score, Combo or BBA Score. So what to put there now?

There are several things to consider:

BBA Score is determined by the Total Power of your ATK Formation. This means that the sum of the Power stat of all your 15 Saints in the ATK Formation will determine how good your BBA score will be. So consider including characters with high Power in the ATK Pool.

BBA Score Crusade Skills will further improve your BBA Score, so you might also want to consider adding characters with the best BBA Skills (III, Exclusive, etc)

You will need characters that can defeat enemies in actual fights, so don’t forget to include those characters you trust the most in battle.

If those 5 characters that you would include in your attacking team have powerful BT Score or Combo Crusade Skills, that would be optimal. Not always possible, but worth considering.

Consider having some characters with good Combo Crusade Skills. You will eventually encounter Defenses that have very low level units defending them. The score you will obtain against a low level defense is very small, HOWEVER the Combo score you earn is exactly the same, no matter the level of the enemy. Hence you will benefit your Guild a lot more if you attack a low level Defense with a team fully made of characters with Combo Crusade Skills. 

Optimizing your Defense Formation

If you are thinking about putting your best units in Defense so your enemies have a hard time defeating it, consider the points mentioned in the previous “Optimizing your Attack Pool” section, because sometimes our best units have Skills that would benefit the Guild if they were in the Attack Pool. Also consider your player level. If you don’t have a high level, your team will probably be easily defeated even if you put your best units in Defense.

The better your defense and the higher their level, the more points it is going to give to the enemy team if defeated. Some people prefer to 1 level 1 character in every of the 3 teams to give no points to the enemy Guild. However, this strategy can easily backfire if they are defeated by a team with high Combo Plus Crusade Skills. 

If you don’t have a high level, the best you can do with your defenses is trying to make the enemy Guild waste their time. This is vital in Crusade because if you force the enemy Guild to need even just one more second every fight, it will mean minutes later on that they will have wasted and that could mean a whole BBA that they didn’t have time to reach. And so, the difference between victory or defeat.  There are several units that waste time. New Andromeda Shun revives when defeated and needs to be taken down by a number of hits or he will revive again and again. Phoenix Ikki revives once as well. Surplice Camus revives and becomes invulnerable for some seconds once. Virgo Shun and Geki Bear survive beyond their HP when awakened to Seventh Sense... etc.

There are characters that are Crusade Defense Specialists. For example Final Pegasus Seiya whose Damage Cut Crusade Skill will make it harder for the team to die, and his Charge Skill will make the fight start from scratch for the enemy team, making it longer and wasting their time. Other highly defensive characters like Hypnos, Abel or Shaka Spear will extend the fights and make the Defending team hard to kill, or at least waste the enemy time much longer. However, you will have to consider losing some of their powerful Crusade Skills if you put them in your Defense Formation instead of your Attack Pool (like mentioned in Point 1)

There are also characters that are useful for Crusade Defenses when they die. Kanon God Cloth, or Libra Shiryu for example, will deplete the enemy team Cosmo Gauge when they die. You can consider putting them in your defenses barely leveled up (just enough to awaken the needed skill, usually Silver Rank/level 53) just so they die quick and mess the enemy Cosmo gauge, forcing the fight to last longer. Some people put them as the only character in the second team. This way, the enemy team will be forced to start the fight against your third team completely depleted of cosmo gauge, and will lose the advantage of starting the third fight with full Cosmo gauges.

Guild Organization, strategy and communication

(will complete soon)

[paragon-yoshi]

Improvement-Ideas for Splatoon 2 (Opinion Alert!!!)

This game is amazing, just like the first. And it definitely deserves all the praise and love it gets. However, I still believe this game has plenty of problems, that could be improved on. Because as fun as it can be, it can just as well be frustrating and morale crushing... Depending on what people you end up playing with and against... So first up, here is my list of problems I have with the game.

Problems with Regular Mode (Turf War)

Since Turf Wars is described as a casual mode, that anyone can pick up and play, it should also be the easiest to get into. And in a way it is, with an objective that is very easy to grasp. Just paint as much as you can and you win... But unfortunately, it's not as simple as that...

- Turf Wars IMO is the hardest mode of them all! That may sound surprising, but in my experience, I had by far the hardest time with Turf Wars. While I had a much easier and fairer time with Ranked. Why is that? Well the biggest reason is that Ranked Modes focus on one of two areas on the map (Clam Blitz kinda being an exception, with clams being scattered everywhere). But Turf Wars in universal: The entire map is the objective, rather than a few select parts of it. You have to stay vigilant at all times, since the opposition can be literally anywhere. With Ranked you can make a pretty good guess where the opposition is headed. But not in Turf Wars... Secondly, the tides can turn at the last minute, even if your team was ahead the entire time. (And most of the time, that's exactly what happens, at least in my experience) And thirdly, kills are effective. Perhaps even too effective. Giving players with superior skills an undeniable edge over beginners and other not quite as skilled players... And that's why a lot of people go for kills and try to completely lock the other team down. Which is incredibly infuriating when you're at the receiving end of it. And the maps don't really offer much in terms of sneaking around. Which sucks... So if you're up against godlike players and they completely lock you down, you might as well throw the game... It's not fun, believe me... - Matchmaking is random What Nintendo (and a whole lot of other people) sees as a good thing, ends up being a dealbreaker for me and many other people... And it's easily my biggest gripe with this mode. What players you're matched with and against, is all just a roll of the dice. Aka completely luck-based. And as such, winning or even your team just doing well enough, become mostly luck-based as well. And if you're having real bad luck (like yours truly), you lose most of the time and question your life choices... Either because the matchmaking decided to match you with teammates that are far less skilled than you or you are straight thrown into arctic water, by matching you against players that are so far above your skill level, that you stand no chance against... Sometimes even the two combined... It's really aggravating, when the dice roll results are so unbalanced. - Turf Wars is a little too winning-oriented I still remember the days of early Splatoon 1, where you simply had to get as many Turf Points as possible, to do well. Losing didn't matter, since winning only net you 300 extra points back then. The bulk of the points (and thus your money and EXP) came from your Turf Score. And I believe this is how Turf Wars worked best and it truly was a casual mode, where losing really didn't matter all that much. Unfortunately, with the update that added the New Level Up System post level 20 and now with the adoption of the same system in Splatoon 2, that is a thing of the past. You only need to reach 500 Turf Points to get the most points possible from the Turf Score. And you get the most EXP points for winning. And I believe that is why Turf Wars became so frustrating to play. After that update, you could see nothing but E-Liters in Splatoon 1 Turf Wars. And since E-liters were completely broken in that game, Turf Wars became impossible to play and enjoy, if you used any other weapon than that. And even in Splatoon 2, people became really aggressive and focus mostly on kills and base invading. Since that wins the game. And I am pretty sure, if Nintendo wouldn't have changed the Level Up System like that and stuck with the original all the way, people wouldn't be so tryhard in that mode.

Problems with Splatfest

- Toxicity I made a whole Tumblr-Post about it once. Link: https://paragon-yoshi.tumblr.com/post/175961272304/toxicity-in-splatfest-revised But to summarize: I believe Marina and Pearl act way too toxic during Splatfests (at least in the localization, since in the original japanese version they apparently don't act nearly as obnoxious). And it mirrors the toxicity coming from the players, as far as I have seen. Not to mention it makes the Splatfest a much more serious deal, than it needs to be... - Same problems as normal Turf Wars All the same problems from normal Turf Wars can be found here. You may think matchmaking would be the only exception, with the "Splatfest Power" system. Though even with it, it seemed just as random, which is a shame... Because the concept of Splatfest Power definitely goes into the right direction.

Problems with Salmon Run

- Not available at all times.< Okay, this is something nearly everyone complains about. So enough said here... - Being unable to use your normal clothes I HATE the working attire that Salmon Run forces on you. It's UGLY! I'd much rather use my preferred clothes from normal PvP.

Other Problems

- The game doesn't let you play with more or less than 8 players in a match Looking at other online shooters, pretty much all of them let you play with different amounts of players, rather than forcing a set number on you. (Let alone being able to enter and exit mid-game) I get that Nintendo wants to be original and likes to do things their own way. But in this case, I really wish they would've done it the same way other online shooters did. I believe we wouldn't be stuck in "Waiting Room Hell" nearly as much, if the game was more flexible with the number of people that can play at a time... - Abilities being locked to Clothes Clothes should be cosmetics first, period! And I don't believe it was a good idea to lock Abilities behind clothes. And it very often creates a dilemma to me. Since the clothes I really like, often have abilities I have no use for. While clothes with good abilities for me, often look ugly AF. So yeah, enough said here...

How Splatoon 2 could be improved

Let's tackle the small fry first...

Improving Cosmetics and Abilities

- Separate Clothing and Abilities I'd make Clothing completely cosmetic, while Abilities have their own slot-system. It could work the very same way as they work now, just without the clothes. And instead of buying clothes for abilities, you would buy... Let's say, Badges or something like that.

- Add more Clothing categories Like this: - Head (Hats, Caps, Headbands, Bandanas...) - Face (Glasses, Masks, Facepaint...) - Body (Shirts, Coats, Sweaters, Jackets...) - Wrists (Bracelets, Watches, Sweatbands...) - Hands (Gloves) - Legs (Pants, Dresses, Skirts...) - Feet (Shoes, Boots, Sandals...) - Accessories (Necklaces, Rings, Vests, Wigs...) Obviously that would mean, for example, Gloves are seperate from Body Gear now. As well as allowing you to wear Hats and Glasses at the same time. - Adding new customization options for your Inkling/Octoling Adding the following options would really perfect the character creation in my eyes: - Face (not just the eyes) - Voice - Height - Body Type (Skinny, Fat, Muscular, etc.) So people would be able to re-create their Inksona's much more accurately in-game... :3

Improving Salmon Run

- Unlockables: Normal PvP Clothes for Salmon Run and Salmon Run Work Clothes for PvP Unlock the Work Clothes as equippable cosmetics for other modes. And at the same time, from the moment you unlock them, you will always play Salmon Run with the clothes you have equipped. If you want your Work Clothes back, simply equip them to play the old-fashioned way. Both unlock after you reach a certain Rank in Salmon Run! - Make Salmon Run playable online, even when main shifts are closed. The logic behind this is: When Grizzco is closed, Inklings and Octolings can still work on their own and sell the Eggs they collect. This'd be a great way to make Salmon Run playable at all times, even when Grizzco is not available. However, it'd play a little differently... - You'd be able to freely pick your weapon. And it wouldn't change in-between waves. - Difficulty is still dependant on your rank. But it won't change. If you win, it won't increase. If you lose, it won't go down. - Players vote for stages and the game then randomly picks the stage from the voted options (Like Mario Kart 8 online picks tracks) - You only get cash at the end. Nothing else! - Since Mr. Grizz isn't around when you work on your own, there'll be no one to order you around or give you advice! So basicly, when Grizzco is open (which right now is the only time you can play Salmon run) it'd play as usual. But when Grizzco is closed, the above mentioned changes are in effect, until they open again.

Improving PvP Modes

- Make Ranked Mode available from the start Aka, no longer having to unlock Ranked by reaching level 10. You can jump straight into competitive, if you want. This actually goes hand in hand with the more drastic changes I suggest, further down. - Ability to play with more or less than 8 players AT THE VERY LEAST FOR REGULAR MATCHES! Like I said, being able to play with different amounts of players would greatly cut the time we spend waiting for a lobby to fill up. It works well for all other online games of this kind. So why shouldn't it in Splatoon as well? And the ability to enter a match mid-battle, could easily fix uneven teams in a match. Plus, if teams are uneven, I'd like to have some "handicap effect" in place, giving the outnumbered team a boost in some way, until it's even again. The greater the difference in numbers between teams, the higher the boost. - Allow players to create "Custom Lobbies" with their own rules Essentially this would revise the current "Private Battle", give it more options to customize your game, as well as the choice to either make it public or friends only. Obviously you could join any open lobby from a list of available lobbies, if you want to join a custom game, rather than create one. The host of the lobby would set the rules. Like choosing maps and Game Mode. In this regard it'd work exactly like Private Battle does now. But it'd offer far more options for the host to customize their game: - Time Limit (so you can play Turf Wars for longer or less than 3 minutes of you want. Same with Ranked and their 5 minutes) - Maximum Number of Players - Respawn Time - Ink Capacity - Damage/Life - Abilities On/Off - Items On/Off etc. This would allow for some much needed diversity, allowing you to play the familiar modes in very different ways... Lastly, I'd still allow EXP and Money to be obtained from this (at least if it's a public lobby). One possible concern some of you might have, is that if the Time Limit is ridiculously high (like 30 minutes for example), you'd have to sit through the whole thing. Well no, you wouldn't. Since other online games of this nature allow you to enter and exit mid-game. So that very same option would allow you to leave at any time. Of course, the downside is that you won't receive any EXP or Money, if you don't play the match until the end. And now we're getting to the changes for Regular Mode (and Splatfests) As far as I can see, there are two ways to improve it. One very simple way and one drastic way, that changes Regular Mode in some significant ways... The simple way is: - Make "Splatfest Power" a feature for normal Turf Wars This would be the easiest way to fix the issue of unbalanced match-up's in Turf Wars. Since, if it works as intended, there'd at least be some sort of balance between players and their skills. It wouldn't be perfect, but IMO it's better than nothing. But like I said, there is another, more drastic way to go about it. And I am sure some people will lose their mind and want to see me on a chopping block for coming up with these ideas. (If there's anything I learned, it's that people don't like big changes. Especially if it's a game changer!) I'll be blunt: I believe Splatoon would be better, and appeal to much more people, if it were half Party-Game and half Competitive Game! The key to this lies in the "Regular/Ranked Split" Make "Regular" the "Party Side" of Splatoon, for casual players who want to have good old fun. While "Ranked" would be the fully "Competitive Side" of Splatoon, where you need to have superior skills to come out on top. While the, above mentioned, "Custom Lobby" feature would allow players to customize their games, and give their matches the best of both worlds maybe. Or turn their games into something different... If you wonder why I would do it like this... Well, have a look at this informative reddit post, that talks about Party Games and Competitive Games. Link: https://www.reddit.com/r/smashbros/comments/281eja/why_smash_is_a_party_game_and_what_the_melee/ It's about Smash Bros (and quite a lengthy read), but a lot of the points there should apply to any game! And you might understand why I'd vouch for the following changes... - Add items to Regular! Let me stress this one more time: REGULAR MODE ONLY! ITEMS WOULD NOT BE IN ANY RANKED MODES!!! This system isn't even new, since the Battle Dojo from the first game, actually had items! Items from Single Player and Octo Expansion (adjusted for Multiplayer) would appear here. And they would appear all over the stage. It'd have items such as "Battle Armor", along with the ability to stack armors for more durability... "Ink Tanks" that refill your ink, as well as temporarily increase your Ink Capacity... "Canned Subs" to swap out your Sub Weapons, until you get splatted... "Canned Specials" giving you instant access to the depicted Special Weapon... The "Full Power Up" from the first game's Battle Dojo, increasing all of your stats for a short time... On top of that, I could imagine some specials from the previous game returning in item-form. And maybe some original items. Such as temporary upgrades like "Spread Shot", "Rebound Shots" or "Homing Shots". Items would mostly appear randomly. But when a team is at a disadvantage or player imbalances are detected, items would spawn more closely to the players/teams at a disadvantage. Again, I stress: ONLY REGULAR MODES WOULD HAVE ITEMS! Ranked on the other hand wouldn't have them. So if you loathe items and random chance in games, just play Ranked and be happy. Or make your own "Custom Lobby" and turn them off! And since I mentioned the Battle Dojo from the first game so many times... - Revise Battle Dojo from the first game and make it a new Regular mode I really believe "Balloon Battle" from the first game would make a really good new Regular mode. Just like it was in the first game, the objective would be to pop as many balloons as possible and rack up points. You lose points if you get splatted and whoever has the most points, wins! But of course, there'd be some changes: - Obviously, it'd be a team mode now. So now the points of every team member are added up for the Team Score. And the team with the higher Team Score wins. If there's a draw, there'd be overtime, until one team takes the lead. - Add balloons with multiple colors that are worth more points The normal balloons would earn you 1 point for every one you pop. However, this game would also have balloons with multiple colors, which are worth more points. Of course, the more points a balloon is worth, the less often it appears. - Balloons would spawn more frequently and in multiple areas all over the map If you are one of the few people, who ever got to play the Battle Dojo in the first game, I think you might remember how it works. There is an area marked on the map and balloons will spawn there after some time. But in this mode, the balloons would spawn much faster, instead of having to wait for like 10 to 20 seconds for them to spawn. Also, balloons would also now appear in multiple areas all over the map, instead of just one area. And also in different intervals. So it'd be much more chaotic now. Turf Wars is all alone in the Regular mode. It's time to add a new Regular mode for once, instead of giving all the new modes to Ranked only. Of course, since it would be a new Regular mode, it'd also have items. - Splatfest Ranking and Scoring The way you'd rank up and thus earn Sea Snails, I'd do a little differently. Again, I think it is too winning-oriented. Instead, while winning is one way to earn points for your title, I'd add more things that can earn you points. Like helping out a teammate, splatting enemies that fire at your teammate, assisting in a splat, Booyahing together in the first 10 seconds of a match. These things would net you more points towards your title. So ultimately it's not so much about winning during Splatfest, as it is about sticking together and working as a team. Performing teamwork actions would actually reward you more, than just winning the match. And it'd perfectly work with the team-mentality of Splatfest. An "Alternate Way" to handle this would be to ditch the Splatfest leveling altogether and instead collect "Splatfest Tokens". You earn Splatfest Tokens after every match, depending on how much turf you inked, whether or not your team won and by performing various teamwork actions during the game, like the aforementioned examples. Again, you would get the most rewards out of working well as a team and not for winning. You could spend Splatfest Tokens at a vending machine for Sea Snails, Ability Chunks, unique gear or Food/Drink Tickets (which you could freely pick even). You know funfair's in real life, where you can win tokens and exchange them for various rewards? Yep, that was my main inspiration for this alternate idea for Splatfests. And it's very fitting in my eyes. ;) And that's it! That's all the ideas I have that could really make Splatoon 2 better. Or maybe even a possible sequel. If you want a polite discussion, I'm all for it. But I won't be talking with people that obviously want to troll, completely trash me for my ideas or performing any inconsiderate, disrespectful or hostile action against me. That's all. See you.