#// just got an ask but it was someone just spamming a bunch of stuff about a show they liked. I searched up the user and they’ve posted the

[gluttonyedits]

Spam :/

[jihyoruri]

I feel like nobody has asked this but can we get some wow!yn and aeri moments I know for sure they have questionable but cute friendship moments on camera

✮GISELLE AND YN BEST MOMENTS — aeri x wow!yn

warnings: idol au, wow!yn, you can also find more wow!yn stuff in my masterlist <;33

➩ CLIP #1 PLAYING… 📼

“I’m meeting a friend.” aeri said to the camera as she walks, “most of the time we see each other like everyday but we’ve been so busy lately so I’m excited to see her.” she continue trying not to say the persons name for suspense but everyone knew who she was talking about.

“we always meet at this hangout place that we discovered there’s just a bunch of seating and music and they sell records as well, it’s pretty cool.” the girl rambles as she walks up to the place opening the door the indie music playing loud enough for aeri to wince at the camera.

she scans the area and her eyes lights up when she spots the certain someone sitting in the corner with her face in her phone, her managers sitting a couple seats away from her.

aeri quickly gives the camera to her manager and speed walks over to the girl her manager walking closer behind.

“ynnnn.” aeri sings walking over to the girl with a wide smile on her face, she stands above yn as the girl looks up from her phone and adjusts the backwards cap on her head looking at aeri with a small smile.

yn takes aeri’s hand in hers swinging it slightly, “aeriiii.” she mocks before taking a quick glance at the camera in the mangers hand and sends aeri a teasing look, “using me for veiws?”

aeri rolls her eyes before sitting on yn's lap muttering a “shut up”

yn wraps her arms around the older girl and looks up at the camera singing the lyrics to the song playing in the background, aeri also joining in.

➩ CLIP #2 PLAYING… 📼

both yn and aeri laughed their heart out at the most dumbest things that came out of each other’s mouths, both girls were on live after aeri spammed yn to join her live.

fans enjoy watching the two girls cause it’s like watching two best friends on a facetime, “wait wait I can’t breathe.” yn said taking her face out of the camera and tilting her phone to said causing aeri to laugh harder but the girl took notice of the lump under a blanket beside yn the only thing being shown was hair.

“um, what’s that?” aeri asked trying her best to be serious but the way she asked it had the girls laughing again.

yn tilted the camera back to her, “oh, that’s wonyoung.” she said nonchalantly after another giggling fit.

aeri raised an exaggerated brow at yn causing the younger girl to do one back sending them back into another laughing fit.

➩ CLIP #3 PLAYING… 📼

somi turned the camera so it showed yn, aeri and her all there girls decked out in chrome hearts in an alley way, “the trio is back.” she said to the camera with a serious face, yn making a serious face as well but aeri ruined it by bursting out in laughter, leaning into the girls shoulder as the taller girl looked down at her unamused.

“you ruined it.” she groans as somi explains that the girls have been trying to do with intro for like 15 minutes but it constantly got ruined by the aespa member laughing.

“don’t talk to your elder like that.” aeri said pointing up at yn’s face with faux seriousness.

“I’ll talk to you however I want.” the ive member says with attitude.

“guys she’s so disrespectful to me.” aeri says to the camera as somi turned it towards the two girls.

aeri shoves yn and tries to run away but is stoped by the younger girl grabbing into her hood and pulling the older girl into her, she lets out a scream as yn laughs, somi’s laughs also being heard in the background.

“she thought she could get away.” yn says into the camera wrapped an arm around aeri’s neck pulling the girl closer to her.

➩ CLIP #4 PLAYING… 📼

both girls sat beside each other on the floor their legs crossed as they answered fans questions on the live.

“have you guys ever dated someone?” aeri reads before laughing and turns to the younger girl who unbottens her flannel a little acting like she didn’t hear the a question.

“yn I know you heard me.”

“huh?” the girl asks only to be met with a teasing face from aeri.

she sighs and innocently looks at the camera, “I’ve never dated anyone, I’m too innocent for that.” she says causing aeri to let out the most biggest laugh ever heard.

yn tries her best to be serious and not laugh as aeri laughs her heart out.

“I only belong to my fans.” she says scratching the back of her neck.

“starship training.” aeri says between laughs finally causing yn to burst out in laughter.

➩ CLIP #5 PLAYING… 📼

aeri stands on the stage alongside many other idols waving fans with her members.

she lets out a startled sound when she feels someone wrap both of their hands around her from behind.

she turns around and slaps yn’s shoulder, scolding the younger girl for scaring her.

yn laughs and interlocks her hand with aeri before both girls walk together on the stage, waving at fans and talking to each other.

[secretgamergirl]

It is absolutely ridiculous that I have no way to contact people I care about in 2023.

So I got up today, and saw a big announcement about a certain particularly large company in the games industry did an absolutely massive round of layoffs despite an amazingly good year. You know, as they do. As it so happens, this is a company that, last I checked, employs several people I consider to be pretty good friends, and I feel compelled to toss them a quick message asking if that affected them, ask if poke around on their behalf for freelance work or slap a project of my own real quick they can collaborate on, or whatever.

And it's suddenly sinking in to me that I can't actually do that.

Tabletop game work is writing work, and that means 90% of the networking for most of the past decade or so happened over Twitter. Someone announces they're working on a thing, you message them, e-mails get traded to formally send stuff around. I was on there until I wasn't, so normally, that'd be where I'd be doing my checking in. But that of course is off the table. And like, I don't even have read-access to the site to check if anyone's announcing anything there.

Well, we've traded e-mails, right? We absolutely have. Back when everyone I'm worried about was at this other company, which let this same pile of people I care about and then some go several years ago now. So... those e-mails are no longer valid.

Well, what else is there? Oh right, the one friend has a discord server. It's been super dead for years now since he stopped doing the big weekly social thing it was there for, but it's still - oh, no. It's actually closed out. Same with the one for this freelance artist in that same general orbit... and oh Discord redid usernames and forced everyone to pick new ones. Damn.

Well, there's tumblr here, maybe? Like, there isn't really practically any direct messaging on here but... no, no wait, none of them have posted anything on here since bad policies drove a bunch of people out years back.

There's Facebook? But no, I don't have an account, they're all real legal name focused, and for personal security reasons, I never actually use my legal name anywhere even if I could make one (see, they also insist my name "sounds fake" over at Facebook). Well surely I can just find people's personal websites and send an e-mail but... no, people just don't have personal e-mails anymore, and spam got so bad decades ago now that I can't remember the last time I saw ANYONE post a personal e-mail address anywhere visible. Used to be phonebooks, but I don't think they really adapted to everyone just having a cellphone, and even if they did, they're a local thing.

So yeah. I've got nothing here. Uh... on the off chance anyone's reading this who I'm concerned about, hey, I hope you're OK? I'm still at least periodically checking the e-mails you last used to send things to me? Feel free to reach out and let me know how things are going?

But yeah this just sucks.

[alllgator-blood]

MY BAD FOR LIKE SPAMMING I DIDNT CHECK YOUR BLOG IN LIKE A WEEK AND I ATE ALL OF YOUR RAMBLINGS AND ART

I HOPE YOU KNOW THAT YOU LITERALLY KILLED ME WITH THE ANGST THINGYS

FLIGHT GOT DELAYED, I HAVE CHOSEN THIS ASK TO BE THE FINAL ONE FOR NOW BEFORE I SHUT MY PC OFF. I just wanted to say there's absolutely no issue with spamming me because number go up = more dopamine so I'd be insane to complain. If anything I think it's neat when I see familiar names in my notifs/inbox, it's been forever since I've had an online presence so I love going "oh look who's online!" when I see someone liked a bunch of my posts sdfkjhsdfkjs

ABOUT THE ANGST STUFF. I AM SORRY I KILLED YOU WITH MY ANGST COMICS, BUT AM GLAD TO HEAR THEY ACTUALLY LIKE AFFECT PEOPLE?? I bum myself out when I do sad comics but in like a good way. I haven't been invested in anything in sooo long, so I like feeling every possible emotion towards this stupid game. I HAVE...MORE ANGST......SO MUCH MORE. I work on it when I'm sad about irl stuff cause being sad about fictional stuff is more fun.

I'm gonna put a sketch comic under the cut, it's the one where shamura is accidentally gaslit into having a freakout and killing one of their followers. AVERT THINE EYES IF THAT'S TOO HEAVY, THERE IS ALSO SLIGHT SKETCHY GORE WHERE I COULDN'T REALLY CROP IT OUT

I cropped out the part where they explode their follower from the inside out. I was formerly a warrior cats kid so I like drawing edgy violent shit, but I understand not everyone wants to see that SDJFHSDFKJ- it'll be in the final comic if I ever come back to this one (tagged appropriately)

I wonder if it's obvious that I'm projecting hardcore in this comic but also, I feel like if I HAVE to have the health issues I do, I might as well make lobotomy spider comics based on my personal frustration?? I have a few more like this but one of them is...idk if I'll ever post it cause it's more soul crushing the other ones I've posted.

What a way to leave my blog for the next week. ENJOY THE ANGST, SEE Y'ALL WHEN I'M BACK FROM THE BEACH B)

[himbofan]

haikyuu!! boys finding out you're a big 'ol nerd

hello i once again return with some headcanons no one asked for B)

what if some nerdy boys found out that you were also a nerd?? I feel like when I tell people I like manga or video games it somehow changes their perspective of me so I tried writing it :)

cw: fluff, mention of bugs, gn reader

characters: kenma, tendou, tsukishima

wc: 700+

kozume kenma

when he hears you’re a gamer, he lights up so fast; like a cat when you open a can of food

if you’re talking to someone else, he’ll pretend he didn’t overhear, but really he’s hanging on to every word you say

if you’re talking to him, he’ll begin asking you your favorite games with a sparkle in his eye

if you ask to swap friend codes he’ll gladly oblige

once you accept his friend request he’s immediately scanning through your library to see what you’ve played

if he sees that you play a lot of games that he plays as well, he’ll get butterflies 💕

in the future he’ll definitely be more open and trusting towards you, since you’re a fellow nerd

will send you video game news and announcements through text, asking if you’re going to get the new game or whatever

he definitely loves it when you send memes or geek out about a game, no matter how much you may spam him he’s reading all of it!!

if you ask him to put his minecraft bed next to yours (even as a joke) he might malfunction for a bit

congrats you now have a high level friend that can carry you on all the hard bosses 

he’s also the type to give you a bunch of high level items and money when you play an online game together (because he's absolutely enamored 😳)

kuroo points it out and is totally dramatic about it

“damn, you’ve never given me that much stuff when I play. I almost feel hurt, do you like them more than me now?”

“no comment.”

tendou satori

if you tell him you read shounen jump he’ll probably fall in love on the spot

ok maybe not that fast, but he’s definitely excited to finally have someone to talk to about weekly chapters

he’ll ask to swap numbers too so you can send each other memes and theories about the mangas being serialized

sends a “good morning!” and “goodnight!” everyday to you with a meme or cool fanart related to the manga you’ve been discussing

he absolutely loves it when you ramble about characters, storytelling techniques, how the good the anime adaption is, and other extremely niche nerdy details

if you cry when your favorite character dies, he’ll think it’s so cute and endearing

he’ll tease you at first, but will comfort you nonetheless without being condescending or judging you

he will subtly try to act like characters that you simp for

tendou worries that your reputation might take a hit if you’re seen hanging out with him all the time, so he asks you if it’s okay

“of course it’s fine, talking to you makes my day more fun! plus, who else would I cry to about fictional characters?” 

he’s frozen for a moment before bursting out into laughter with heated cheeks

if he hadn’t fallen for you already, he definitely knew this was the final nail in the coffin 💘

tsukishima kei

ok i’m imagining a gecko or bug that accidentally got into the classroom and no one wants to touch it because they think it’s gross

tsukishima would, but he doesn’t want to attract any unnecessary attention so he just sits back and watches his classmates scramble about

until you show up and gracefully scoop up the lil guy with tenderness and adoration, carefully heading towards the door to release it outside 

he probably already thought you were cute, but now he has a reason to talk to you that doesn’t seem forced

he stops you before you get out the door, asking to see the creature in your hands 

you ask if he wants to hold it, he’s a little surprised but will say yes

when your hand brushes his, adrenaline explodes in his body but he makes no outward indication about how nervous he really is 

you excitedly ask if he likes creatures too, which leads to a wonderful conversation about how bugs and stuff are actually really cool

until you both remember that he still has a bug in his hands that needs to be outside 

you continue chatting while heading towards the door and it might seem like he’s not listening; responding with one word answers and nods, but he’s just trying to keep his cool

if you exchange numbers, he’ll send you pictures of bugs or reptiles he finds outside that he thinks you might like 

if you have any pets that require tanks (fish, bugs, reptiles, amphibians etc) he’ll subtly ask to come over so he can check them out

“hey, we should study at your place sometime.”

“you know you can just ask me if you wanna see my pets lol”

"...hmpf"

[snail-studios]

OK I'm gonna send several asks about Orca OC because I've been thinking about several different ideas and I wanna separate them.

First, just some ideas to bounce names off you and see if you like any of then. Zora names are usually two syllables (sometimes three), and carry something of a heavier vowel focus. Here are a few of the ideas that I think sort of capture a "Zora" vibe and I hoped maybe one of them would get you going in the direction you want for the character.

Fura-- sounds like fury, just thought it was neat

Larunda-- straight up stole this name from a water nymph but it sounds extremely Zora-like. You could also go with its variant "Laru". Does come with the risk of sounding too much like the already existent "Laruta" though.

Sera/Sela-- tweaked version of French word for "salt" because she's from the sea

Saumi/u/a-- brackish

Nevi-- tweaked version of Italian word for "snow"

Padot-- just threw together a bunch of Zora names for this one.

Hope these help to some extent.

ahh these are great! (I'm just going to put all of your asks in one post so not to spam anyone)

long answers below ⤵

Would she mop the floor with Link in a spear on spear sparring match?

It really depends. I would say she would beat him out of brute strength but Link can parry lynels, so he’s definitely monstrously strong. But she’s been training with the spear her whole life and can probably outwit him by making him angry, as long as she doesn’t lose her temper herself. I think in a no holds-barred fight she could kill him though, and post-Calamity Link when he’s just woken up wouldn’t stand a chance even if all the odds are with him.

Do you reckon she's on par with Mipha and the other Champions in terms of martial skill, or perhaps just exemplary among the Zora (but not close to a Champion), or was her appointment more of a formality like Urbosa's guards would have been?

Give her another century or 50 years of training and she absolutely would be, but pre-Calamity she’s more of a formal knight there for when Mipha’s unarmed or in a vulnerable position (resting, in unfamiliar environments, stuff like that.) I don’t think she’s like Link with Zelda and trailing her 99% of the time because that’s not even necessary for a warrior as skilled as Mipha. (Mipha’s probably an even better fighter than her knight but it’s always good to have extra support)

What are her chances against a Lynel?

She could kill it! She’s pretty big and strong so she has a higher chance of living than Mipha and Link fighting one together.

A Guardian Scout?

She’s mortal, so a beam could probably take her out, but if she got it onto the ground she could probably dismantle it fairly efficiently.

How many Moblins could she take on at once?

Realistically, probably three or four, given she’s a big target and fairly slow compared to Mipha, who I can imagine being able to take on around five or six. Together they could probably kill at least 15 tho. Teamwork makes the dream work! <3

You've already given a snapshot of what her relationship with Dorephan, Link, Mipha, and Muzu would look like, but what about her reputation/relationship with Zora's Domain as a whole? We know Link finds her intimidating, and strangers likely do too, but would the citizens of Zora's Domain feel that same intimidation or something else? 

I think it depends on the Zora! The little kids would love her, since she’s friendly to them, but one of Mipha’s suitors? Or just a scab in general (or a rude tourist)? Yeah they would be terrified. She’s not someone to be immediately unfriendly but she doesn’t like rude people.

Do they perhaps look up to her, or think she's some really cool lone wolf type?

Some people would absolutely think of her as a lone wolf, but the people who actually know and spend time with her just think she’s a nice and respectful person. Little Zora and other knights look up to her. The little Zora think she’s cool, the other knights hope they can rise to a rank like hers one day.

 Do they gossip about her and Mipha? 

Oh absolutely xD Being a public figure like that, there’s no way they’re not getting gossiped about.

Does she have a Sidon style fan club? 

I WANT HER TO OMG

Is this emotional toughness a Link-specific problem due to jealousy? 

Yeah, I think so. She also worries that people don’t believe she’s fit for the job, so acts exceptionally tough and professional around people she’s insecure around.

I get that she has something of an aura of scariness, but I guess I'm curious about the particulars. Is she scary because she's the quiet, reserved, unreadable watchdog kind of person? 

She’s very much like a watchdog at times and can be quite unreadable, but most people fear her because of her stature and battle prowess. 

Is she easily nettled and perhaps overly forceful and aggressive like Buliara is?

No, not at all. She used to be when she was younger, but learnt that’s not helpful to anyone and just makes her charges uncomfortable.

 Is she one of those people you can clearly see planning how she would dismantle you on your very first meeting? 

If you’re a threat, yes. If you’re just a mildly annoying person or are acting normal and like you have no tricks up your sleeve, probably not.

She'd probably bite her tongue .3.

[apupp3tw0-strings]

Dream Dairy

Date: October 15th, 2131

I'm writing this on the bus to school, but still felt I needed to write this down because well... it felt important.

Its been a couple of days since Spamton started living with us, and he is... even weirder than I initially thought. Not it a particularly bad way just... weird. There's been a bunch of things I've observed, from random glitches to the way its lens static or its weird vocal tics or how it like just, forgets stuff randomly. Papa and Dadaton have noticed even more stuff as they've been staying home with him while I've had to go to school the past few days (Fall Break starts tomorrow so at least there's that.) I've heard them whispering to each other about how it's probably best Spamton's not left alone after Dadaton found him rummaging around the attic on Thursday. (I've noticed it tends to get pretty lonely but have no clue what Spam could've been doing in the attic) Papa's also been planning for CK, Kris, and Jevil to hopefully come over soon so progress can be started sorting through their issues or something. I'm mostly excited for CK to come up here hopefully tomorrow.

Gyeh! But wait, that's not the important thing I was gonna talk about! (Though updating on the Spamton situation is like half of why I've been keeping this blog.) No, I... this is about the strange dreams I keep having. Which I now wonder are tied into the whole Dark World thing. I've mentioned before how I'm no stranger to weird dreams or nightmares, but now it seems my dreams are veering less towards the usual puppet performance stages and strange, blob like audiences and deep, dark waves that drag me under, and more towards the Dark World.

On Friday, I had a dream where I was in my Dark World outfit in a very dark, dark place. I don't remember much, just walking around a lot in the darkness, until I heard... ringing. It seemed to be getting louder and louder and I couldn't tell where it was coming from until I saw a phone. But when I got closer and reached for the phone to make the ringing stop... I woke up. Turns out the ringing was just my phone's alarm and I was late for school. Had to rush to get ready as soon as I could and ask Dadaton to drive me.

And then last night, Sunday started out like my usual nightmares do. On a stage and with a grey crowd. I was Pinocchio and was being held up by strings (likely came from Blane and Blaze teasing me for my nose earlier that day. If only I could have them meet Spamton, my nose seems tiny in comparison.) "I've Got No Strings" seemed to be playing on loop as the strings made me move against my will until it felt like someone or some... thing, picked me up. Suddenly I was in my Dark World outfit again as I laid limp in their hands. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I couldn't do anything until something cut my strings and I fell deeper and deeper, darker and darker before waking up. When I woke up in the middle of the night, I found Spamton sitting on my chest, staring at me. (Also I think he was... purring?)

I don't know what any of these dreams mean, if they mean anything at all, but if I have any more ill be sure to record them here for... mostly myself but also I guess whoever else is reading these posts? For now, we're at the stop for school and Taffy's trying to ask me something so I should pay attention and put my phone away.

[blaze-vibes-here]

Notes: this is an rp between me and Sunny that was originally on quotev, that's why this first post is like this. I'm fine with others reading this (not sure about Sunny) but please don't rb this as it'll get confusing trying to figure out if it's a response or not. Cheers! ^^

Also, colour coded this to make it easier to know who responded with what. Does not need to be upheld throughout rest of RP!! ^^

Lucia looked around the kitchen, doing one last check that everything was in order before hitting start stream on the phone that she had set up. "Hi chat!" She exclaimed, waving as people began to join the livestream. "As you all can clearly see, this isn't our usual set up, buuuut, I'm doing a cooking stream!"

Her cat, Cookie, jumped up onto the counter, she she walked over to get her off the counter, while chat began spamming variations of "cat<3" and "cookie<3". "Bad Cookie, you know I'm gonna be cooking." Lucia mumbled, gently dropping said cat onto the ground, before turning back to her stream.

"Have you picked something to cook yet?" Popped up, a message from a donation. Lucia hummed to herself for a moment before shaking her head. "Thanks for the money, and no I have no picked something yet. I was thinking we could pick that all together." She said, smiling before adding, "so! Best look for a recipe now!"

Lelan just finished up his shift at a fancy ish restaurant and was headed to a coffee shop. When he got there he got a chai and sat down to watch his favorite streamer. He logged on to the stream and popped into the chat. He typed out …Hi Chat, a cooking stream! How fun!… and watched as Lucia was searching for a recipe.

Lucia scrolled through her phone, having put on a screen share that let the viewers see what recipes she was looking at. There was a couple recipes that seemed good, and that she had the ingredients for, but chat ended up telling her to find something else instead each time, be it that the dish took too long, didn't taste good or was too difficult to make.

Eventually, after a good fifteen minutes of debating with chat, someone posted a link to what looked to be a nice dish, using spices and veg that she liked. Though that wasn't the only thing that caught her eye."Oh! Hey! It's an L name!" She declared, as was a mini tradition that she had started, every time that she found a name that started with the name letters as hers, she'd point it out.

Lelan just smiled and watched. He took a sip of his coffee. He watched everything unfold and he started laughing at the cat walking along the counter.

Lucia scrolled through the recipe, already thinking that this one would be a good one to make. "So chat, what's the verdict? We make this one?" She asked, looking over at where she had set up a screen to show the chat, seeing that the majority of them agreed with her, saying that the recipe would be good.

"Alright then! Majority vote wins! I'll be right back, don't do anything illegal." She told chat, before moving out of frame. The opening of cupboards and stuff being grabbed could be heard, before she got back into frame, carrying a whole bunch of cooking utensils. She quickly set them down onto the counter, before shooing her cat off it again. "Damn it Cookie."

Lelan laughed again, he noticed it’s his recipe that she’s about to make. He took at sip of his coffee, and started typing out a reply to go with a small donation. chefLelan: That’s a hard one, I should know I made it 😂

Lucia took one last look at the chat, planning on just glancing at it before heading off to being cooking, but immediately made a double take when she saw Lelan's donation, doing the human equivalent of a computer blue screening.

"What?! No way!" She shouted, slightly louder than usual, before composing herself once more. "No way the actual chef is watching this stream." She said, with almost disbelief in her voice, though she was still smiling."Well, let's hope this goes as well as it can, and i hope you enjoy watching!" Lucia finished with a wave, before moving back over to her counter. "Aight, time to do this." She mumbled to herself.

Lelan shook his head with a small smile. He loved watching Lucia’s streams. He typed out in the chat : Do you have any questions that I can answer?

Lucia read the notification, before shaking her head. "None at the moment, but if I get any, well you'll probably know." She replied with a grin to the camera. "Okay! What's the first step again?" She said aloud to herself, looking back at the recipe, and beginning to follow it, carefully measuring the needed ingredients as best as she could.

Lelan sat back and watched as she tried to make this recipe. It started off fine then it slowly went down hill. “Good lord.” He mumbled to himself. He began typing again. chefLelan: The heat is too high on the stove,the milk mixture is about to burn. Take it off the heat now!

Yeah, it went down hill quicker than she thought it would. Lucia had thought that she'd at least manage to get to the fifth step before something went wrong, but here they all were.

"Thanks for that." Lucia said aloud, having noticed the message before rushing over to the stove and pulling the pot off the heat, though not before the fire alarm went off, causing a high pitched sound to go through all of the ears within fifty meters. "Lovely!" She grumbled, throwing her arms up into the air as she went to go turn of the noise before someone came knocking, either concerned or annoyed by the sound.

“Jesus Christ.” Lelan mumbled as he watched the chaos unfold before his eyes. At least she took the mixture off the stove, but it’s still burnt. He decided to send her a whisper with his instagram just in case she wanted any cooking tips or lessons.

Finally, after a minute of struggling against the screaming fire alarm, Lucia finally managed to get it to stop, and luckily nobody had come knocking to ask about it. She slowly moved back into the frame of the video, a somber looking expression on her face, looking at the burnt food. "Should have stayed playing videogames." She complained, just loud enough for the microphone to pick up on.

With a reluctant sign, she went to go clean up the mess that had been made, which she was luckily much better at than cooking, so it wasn't long before everything was spick and span once more. "I think that's enough chaos for one day," Lucia said, turning back to the livestream. "Probably just gonna order out today. Bye bye guys!" She waved before ending the stream.

After a moment of debating, she picked up her phone, and noticed the notification from Instagram. Clicking on it, she read the message from Lelan. She faintly smiled before responding.

ItsaLucia: omg, hi!! Thank you for the offer! Yeah, I'd love either of those if you're up to doing it!! You can probably tell just how bad I am, so anything could help!

Lelan watched as the stream ended and he shut his laptop and stowed it away. “Good lord Lucia.” He mumbled. His phone vibrated and he picked it up the see a notification from Lucia.

cheflelanrossiofficial: Np! I can give you tips but I think it would be easier to teach you. :) Lmk how a lessons could work and we can figure out details :)

ItsaLucia: oooo!! Yeah lessons can maybe work! I'm free most days after 2pm so any time after should be good!! :)

As she waited for a response, Lucia pulled up the app that she had for a local takeout restaurant chain to see what she could order for the day. She is definitely not going to be trying to cook anymore today.

[glorified-red]

how do you find beta readers for fics?

Ahh, you mean friends I force my hyperfixations on.

A lot of it boils down to reaching out and hoping something sticks. I used to be in a discord with a bunch of other popular batfam writers and there were so many channels purely so we could get our fics proofread. We'd all be each others' proofreaders, some would put untintelligable thoughts, screaming, and motivation, while others (me lmao) would offer advice and grammar.

I left that discord like, a hot minute ago, but I did miss that kind of collaboration. After I got comfortable writing for myself, I started reaching out to other content creators simply because like, why not?

Worst case scenario they're not interested or say no to talking. Best case? You get a cool online friend to bug all the time. People forget all content creators on here are just humans screaming about their hyper fixations to a crowd, sometimes they could enjoy a new friend.

How do you think I scored a friendship with @birdy-bat-writes?? I made a dumb joke in their tags and I blink and we're meeting up for coffee. @unmotivatedwrit3r?? They reached out to me about a fic they were writing and guess what, they can't get rid of me even if they tried. They've heard my voice, they're in too deep now. @quillsareswords????? honestly I spammed their page until they let me be their friend. I am like an annoying koala hugging their leg.

Are they soley my beta readers? Not at all, they're friends first, but they're also fanfic writers and if I talk about a fic I'm writing, most often they enjoy reading it. And I like reading their work too! But I wouldn't have gotten to meet any of them without someone starting that connection.

I've scrolled through my dash and see people asking to be beta readers. I can't speak for many content creators but whenever I have any of you guys enter my inbox or dms asking me to beta read something, I literally kick and scream and squeal like a child. I love that shit. I will always offer to beta read stuff and the idea that people find my writing good enough to want to listen to what I say?? Insane.

So yea, reach out to people, branch out. Find discords with other fic writers! Those are always a great way to find other content creators to bond with and most times those creators become friends.

[stillness-in-green]

Some targeted follow-up on 383, courtesy of a disgruntled Mina Stan

(Or, Why the chapter post for 384 is late.)

Ooo-kay, @randomvongenerico, I’ll dance this time because you’re just barely on the right side of “politely asking questions” for someone who, judging by their own page, is probably pretty new here.  But please know that I came very close to hitting the block button the moment I saw, “Why do you even care about heroes?  Aren’t you a villain stan?” at the very top of a notification chain of twenty-seven comments on my chapter post.  The next time you have as much to say about someone’s post, I strongly urge you to just reblog it and add your thoughts rather than indignantly spamming the comment section and then sending a bunch of the same stuff word-for-word via ask when you don’t get a reply in less than 48 hours.  Some of us do have lives and commitments outside of Tumblr.

That said, as with last time I got a detailed reply that seemed to genuinely want to hear my reasoning but also edged over into belligerent/condescending territory, I’ll have to ask you to forgive me for being somewhat blunt at times.  Digs like, “Or are we going to say Mina is being rude and impolite for having trauma now?” have not earned you the most patient reply I’ve ever put down in writing.

I’ll take your questions and points roughly in order you sent them, though I may omit points I have nothing much to say about, or rearrange them.  Anyone who wants to see rvg’s full set of replies in the original order and context is invited to check the comments here, at least until such time as I deem it less of a headache to hit that block button after all.

For everyone else, for the purposes of gauging your interest, this post contains discussion of the following topics:

Mina as she's affected by BNHA's tendency to shortchange the interiority and development of its women. I hit this one from a few different angles.

How the series treats physical damage and how that impacts what I call out as problematic or don't (e.g. why Shinsou's brainwashing got compared to a war crime but Mina's acid did not).

The Sludge Villain, why he shouldn't have been involved in the second war at all, and how his return fails to address the flaws in Hero Society he was originally used to establish.

The circumstances of Midnight's death and the impact of the narrative's ongoing refusal to allow people panel time to grieve for her.

Saving villains, who that maxim applies to, what it means for the heroes' responsibilities, and what it means when they fail to live up to said responsibilities. Specifically addresses Hose Face and Gigantomachia.

Replying to wild presumptions re: which characters I should or should not care about, as well what situations I ought or ought not overthink.

A fair number of intersections between the above topics and other less substantial diversions, including a retraction on my part for a mistake I made in the chapter post that rvg brought to my attention.

Hit the jump.

I think the “pure psychological scarring” thing is just referencing Mina’s trauma from her first encounter with Machia. It’s just there to remind the readers about Mina’s trauma, since it’s been a while since the last time it was brought up. Shonen does this sort of exposition all the time. I wouldn’t think too deeply on it.  Like, I mean, it’s technically not an incorrect statement. Mina was mentally and emotionally scarred by Gigantomachia. Or are we going to say Mina is being rude and impolite for having trauma now?

It’s true that the specific line about Machia embodying psychological scarring overlays Mina in a way that’s doubtlessly intended to remind the reader of her trauma.  However, if that’s the only function Horikoshi intended the line to serve, he’d have done much better to put it in a text box, delivered to the reader via omniscient narrator.  Instead, Mount Lady is the one delivering it, and she is explicitly thinking about Machia in relation to “ordinary people,” flashing back to the scene of carnage left in Machia’s wake, as countless civilians scream and cry for help.  She’s not even slightly thinking about Mina in that moment, for all that the same sentiment applies.

When I criticize Mount Lady’s mode of thinking, therefore, my point is not that people are wrong to have trauma,[1] but that it is wrong to dehumanize the source of that trauma.  Machia has feelings and thoughts just like any other human—treating him like a symbol of pain rather than a human being, something to be stamped out like a disease or a curse, is the same sentiment as Gran Torino blaming All Might’s pain and the smearing of Nana’s memory on Shigaraki’s very existence.  As with Shigaraki, there are reasons that Machia turned out the way he did, and talking like he’s some kind of free-roaming trauma elemental obfuscates the chain of failures and wrongdoings that produced him to begin with.

Incidentally, I wrote a twenty-thousand-word essay on the mass arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front, so I promise you are not going to get anywhere with advising me not to overthink this manga.  If Horikoshi didn’t want his readers to take his societal issues seriously, he shouldn’t have presented them as the root cause of so many problems; if you didn’t want to read a detailed meta dive tackling the chapter’s philosophical shortcomings, you probably should have abandoned ship somewhere around the time I started waxing verbose about the ethics authors sign up to engage with when they make the decision to put their protagonists in skintight catsuits and call them Heroes.

On which note:

I have some questions about your logic about the morality of the methods and tactics here, if you don’t mind. So brainwashing and calling Machia mean things is crossing the line, but throwing acid at him is okay?  You criticize Shinso using his Quirk on Gigantomachia, yet you don’t take any issue with Mina melting his claws(…).  Why?  I guess brainwashing is just too much of a villain Quirk, so it just can’t be used heroically?

Judging by one of your later comments, you did some archive-diving to find out if I’d ever talked about Mina before the Chapter 283 post.  Judging by this question, that archive-diving did not include the Chapter 282 post.  Please see it for a lengthy explanation about what specifically I object to in Shinsou’s use of his quirk on Machia, and a much briefer aside about what kinds of uses I’d have been completely fine with.

As to the difference between hurling acid at someone and brainwashing them to attack their own allies, while it’s certainly true that doing the former would be a horrific crime in real life,[2] that’s down as one of the places where I’m spotting the series its premise.  To wit, physical attacks like Mina’s acid are only ever going to be as impactful as the plot needs them to be, and the plot has a history of being wildly erratic about that impact.[3]

You can call accuse me of having a double standard if you like—picking and choosing what I hold to realistic standards—but in essence, I view Mina melting Machia’s claws with acid as Shounen Battle Action Damage.  There’s definitely a point at which it would stop being that—if she’d used it on his face instead of the tips of claws he could potentially just retract and grow in fresh—but if I were inclined to complain about every hero who uses a power that would cause ghastly mutilation if used against criminals in real life (acid, fire, concussive blasts, etc), we’d be here all week.  Shinsou’s brainwashing doesn’t get that handwave because it’s fully and completely effective.

Btw, Kirishima hearing about Midoriya and the sludge Villain was already established. We have known this since we got Kirishima’s backstory in the Yakuza arc. So this didn’t come out of nowhere.

This is a 100% fair point.  I very clearly remembered Kirishima shaking his funk because he saw the clip of the interview with Crimson Riot; I’d completely forgotten that the Sludge Villain attack was one of the things contributing to his funk.  Having looked back over it, it still seems weird that Kirishima doesn’t show any sign of recognition in this chapter, but it’s certainly possible that that’s just a consequence of the breakneck storytelling.  Regardless, consider that complaint retracted, and thanks for the refresher.

What do you mean we don’t get anything of Mina against Machia and overcoming her fears and previous failure? That’s literally what the chapter is all about. She doesn’t freeze under fear this time and instead jumps into action to save her friends and come in clutch to guarantee the win for her team. She’s the actual MVP here. The actual problem here is that the whole thing gets sped up and abbreviated. What should’ve been 3 or 4 chapters of this battlefield, gets presented and resolved in one chapter.

One of my longstanding issues with BNHA is the difference between the levels of interiority that are permitted to the male characters as opposed to the female ones—how much they’re allowed to dictate their own internal narratives via having their thoughts shown on-panel, and how much room the story affords that exploration.  Following are some examples:

Mirko has no thoughts we’re permitted to access about her traumatic double limb loss.  While Endeavor’s story of wrestling with his sins and trying to better himself as a person is a prominent, recurring storyline, carried out in the foreground to such an extent that some people complain it’s actually sublimating Shouto’s arc, Mount Lady grows from a money-hungry fame-chaser to a responsible and determined hero completely off-screen.[4]  Tamaki and Mirio get dedicated multi-chapter solo battles peppered with emotive childhood flashbacks; Nejire gets a beauty pageant that takes up a grand total of four pages, exactly one (1) of which is dedicated to Nejire’s actual participation.

And so on and so forth.  The only two gals we’re really allowed to get into the heads of in a consistent, sustained way are Toga and Uraraka, with perhaps Jirou or Momo as distant runners-up, though Jirou's interiority is mostly concentrated in the Cultural Festival arc and Momo's is virtually all rooted in her bouts with paralytic self-doubt.  That's pretty pitiful compared to the number of dudes who get sustained attention paid to their internal landscape.

That issue is largely what I’m getting at when I kvetch about not being shown Mina overcoming her fears.  When Kirishima first gets overwhelmed by Rappa, the reason he gets back up is given a backstory flashback that takes up almost two full chapters.[5]  Those chapters are the one and only reason we have any context at all for Mina’s PTSD flashback against Machia in MVA.  She’s not allowed to “tell” that trauma to the audience herself; we know about it because we got it filtered through Kirishima.

Likewise, when she comes through against Machia in 383, she just—does it.  There’re no extended scenes of her wrestling with her fear, drawing on her experience to overcome it; we don’t get a flashback to her training with Bakugou or Shouto.[6]  She just tells us about it in a single sentence, then gets a third of a page dedicated to a collage of old scenes.  And then, again, she pulls through in a moment of crisis in such a way that her moment of awesome is in service of giving a dude an opening to solve the problem instead of doing it herself.

The coming-through-so-a-dude-can-pull-off-the-finisher pattern is a significant problem with the general power balance in the class: the girls do support while all the heavy-hitters are boys.  And doing support is fine!  There are a healthy share of boys doing support, too!  Kirishima’s own big moment in the Hassaikai arc is playing support so Fat Gum can get in the finishing blow, for example.  The problem is not girls having support roles at all; the problem is that while there are boy support students, there are no heavy-hitter, A-list offense-oriented girl students (at least not in Class A).  And actually, Mina has always been both interesting and frustrating for me in that regard because she feels like she should be a heavy hitter, but up until this exact chapter, she’s never really treated like one.

It’s never been clear to me why fire and explosions are so much more A-list material than acid, save that Mina doesn’t have Shouto or Bakugou’s intense determination to pull her up to their level from the beginning.  Acid is also the kind of thing that could so, so easily have been called a villain quirk, especially in combination with Mina’s mild heteromorphic appearance.  She doesn’t ever seem to attract that accusation, however, possibly because she’s so chipper—indeed, in a narrative that had more time for her, I wonder if we’d find that her chipperness is, at least in part, a defense mechanism she maintains for exactly that reason.  As it is, though, her personality keeps her as a fun presence in class without ever letting her seize a larger piece of the narrative for herself.  But I’ll always wonder what she would have looked like if she were hiding negativity for the same reasons Shouji hides his scars, or if she’d had Bakugou’s burning desire to be #1.

Instead, her most significant backstory moment gets relegated to a flashback intended to advance a male character, while her big moment in the story is freeing Shinsou and saving Mount Lady more or less on the backswing.  Admirable in its own right, certainly, but part of a larger pattern when it comes to the roles the Class 1-A girls play on the battlefield.

(I know Machia literally has a Quirk that makes him feel no pain, so that attack did nothing to him.  Which in retrospect, makes the poor handling of Mina’s spoltight worse, because it sorta makes it seem like the biggest feat and most powerful move she has ever performed in the series was inconsequential. Yes, I know she literally saves Mt. Lady by using it, but still). + The Sludge Villain being faced by a character that has had an encounter with him before like Midoriya or Bakugo would be too obvious and on the nose. Horikoshi can be pretty basic at times, but he’s not that basic. + Mina saving Shinso from the Sludge Villain isn’t the important part, the important part is her saving Kirishima from the Sludge Villain.

I’m unclear on why that would be more basic than e.g. Muscular showing back up for no reason save to get clowned on by Deku, or the incredibly twee return of the woman All Might saved at Kamino, but to each their own basic bar, I suppose.  On the matter of Mina’s biggest and most powerful move being arguably inconsequential, I agree completely.  As I said before, it’s entirely possible that Machia could just regrow the claws—he clearly doesn’t have them in his “base” form, so it’s entirely down to an arbitrary call on Horikoshi’s part whether the damage to them would stick if he retracted them entirely and then regrew them.  We haven’t gotten a good look at his right hand yet to see one way or the other, so the jury’s still out.

As to the Sludge Villain and who gets to face him, two things:

1)  He didn’t have to come back at all.  I can’t help but feel like the only real reason he does is that Horikoshi’s enjoying throwing in callbacks to bit characters from early chapters, rather than because there was any real groundwork laid for their return: the Sludge Villain, the baby in the cloud-pattern onesie, the star-head guy Deku talked to in the first chapter, Jin’s boss from his MVA flashback, etc.  At least the returnees from USJ have a modicum of prior association with the League of Villains and thus, indirectly, AFO.  The Sludge Villain doesn’t have that, and, honestly?  Given his characterization in 383, I’m confused about why he joined up with AFO’s group at all.

It was a specific point of note that when AFO freed the prisoners from Tartarus, the only task he gave them was to rampage, to go wild.  When Muscular shows up to bust open the prison Gentle’s in, he tells them they’re free, to do with their lives as they will.  We even know from Kashi Kashiko (the guy in 334 who ShigAFO tries to unload New Order onto) that more than one person was freed and immediately headed to the boonies.  Given that all the Sludge Villain wants is to sneak away from this fight without getting hurt, why wasn’t he one of those?

It’s always possible AFO called in favors for the jailbreaks, of course—the Warp quirk makes him an enormous danger to anyone he wants to have in his presence when he decides to call in a chip—but there’s been no indication of it if that is the case, I assume because the story doesn’t care about its shallower convict characters.

2)  Another reason you might consider critiquing this as a meaningful victory for Mina is that her defeat of the Sludge Villain has literally nothing to do with who she is as a character and the work she’s done.  She defeats the Sludge Villain because she just so happens to have a liquid-based quirk that can effectively be used to harm him.  She only used the souped-up damage quotient to get through Machia; presumably, a much less corrosive version would have been perfectly sufficient against the liquid-based Sludge Villain.

And that’s particularly annoying because one of the key points the Sludge Villain was originally used to establish was the way that heroes just stood around not even trying to fight him because they didn’t have the right quirks, and why that was a failing of the current system.  So when he returns—at the climax of the series! Almost four hundred chapters later!—it would seem the perfect time to explore how the heroes have improved.  We should watch them determine that they have to fight him even though they don’t have the ideal quirks for it.  We should see them use ingenuity and their surroundings to come up with a work-around, assuming we don’t see them apply the Save Villains maxim to convince him to back off.

But we don’t get any of that.  Instead, Team Hero just so happens to have Mina on hand, who just so happens to have the right quirk.  It’s a damn waste, is what it is.  Not only does the Sludge Villain have no personal relevance to Mina whatsoever, only twice-displaced relevance via Kirishima, she doesn’t even get to defeat him via determination or wits, skill or training—she could have sneezed on him and won.  I can’t imagine finding that rewarding for a character you really like.

Finally, I disagree that the important part of this scene is Mina saving Kirishima from the Sludge Villain rather than her defeat of the Sludge Villain in and of itself. She doesn’t save Kirishima from the Sludge Villain; Kirishima is in no danger from the Sludge Villain.  He’s Class A’s premier defensive tank character!  The only way Sludgey could pose the slightest threat to him is by trying to hijack his body, but Sludgey already has a body he seems perfectly satisfied with and is trying to use to escape.  The worst he can do is smack Kirishima around a bit, which, again, is going to be wildly ineffective.  He could possibly also attempt using Shinsou’s quirk, but Kirishima is entirely aware of Brainwashing’s operating conditions—note that he doesn’t say a single word to Shinsou the moment he becomes aware Shinsou’s compromised.

Mina saves Shinsou from the Sludge Villain, not Kirishima.

On regards on her developing her new technique due to training with Bakugo and Todoroki, I don’t see the problem. All of the students learn from other adults and eachother, as well as inspire one another. The only problem I have with the Bakugo and Todoroki thing is that we never got to see those interactions. There’s so much stuff we should’ve gotten to see from class 1-A during the aftermath of the first war and we never got.

You are welcome to not see it as a problem.  I would probably see it as much less of one if the story cared enough about Mina to actually show us any scenes of her fretting about her strength, wanting to improve herself, and psyching herself up to whatever degree she might have needed to in order to approach Bakugou about private training.

Hell, it wouldn’t even need to be a full scene—BNHA gets plenty of mileage out of 1–4 panels of characters interacting in ways that aren’t immediately explained and then dropping the explanation thirty chapters later.  Shinsou’s training with Aizawa was like that, for example.  Why not make the time for Mina?  Other than, as you bring up, the unseemly abbreviation of the aftermath of the first war.  The story at that stage has zero time for any of the students other than Deku—Mina’s hardly the only character whose arc suffers because we don’t get to see her reactions to such a sea change in the society she’s lived in all her life, or the trauma of what she experienced the day of the raid.  I’m not going to refrain from critiquing the writing just because it’s not any given character’s fault that their arc is missing huge chunks that are being papered over with flashbacks and retroactive explanations for the scenes we didn’t get.

To be fair about the Midnight thing, no one really had any actual established connection to her.  With Momo, Midnight just was her hype woman like two times, and then she entrusted her with the plan to sedate Machia.  With Mineta it’s kinda hard to take it seriously because their one meaningful interaction is full of the usual pervy jokes that are synonym to Mineta.  I guess Horikoshi tied Mina to the plotline of Midnight’s murder because Mina is a more emotional character, so there’s more he can do with that (and then he barely did anything, but what little he did, did show some great shots from her).

All of the things you cite are things that give both Momo and Mineta more established connections to Midnight, which is exactly why I brought them up as people who should have been involved in the confrontation with her killer.  I also brought up that those connections are themselves fairly thin and that Midnight doesn’t really have any strong connections with any of the students.  This is in large part why I continue to believe that Midnight being the most emotionally significant hero death during the war[7] is pure cowardice on Horikoshi’s part.  Mina getting the final say on that death is just the latest way the story is writing off dealing with it.

Midnight gets no funeral.  Aizawa, one of her closest friends, immediately shuts down Mic when he tries to bring her up in the hospital, and neither of them ever bring her up again—for heaven’s sake, Mic doesn’t even think about her in Chapter 372 when bringing up what Aizawa has lost!  And when someone finally does want to actually talk openly about Midnight’s death, who is it?  Not Momo, who Midnight trusted and praised, or Mineta, an openly admitted fan of Midnight, one perv to another.  It’s—Mina, who liked her classes, who is emotional about the death because she’s a good person who’d be emotional about the death of anyone in her social circle, not because Midnight was in any way special to her.  For heaven’s sake, she registers her first opinion ever on Midnight the chapter after the deathblow is struck.

And then, to top it all off, there’s that tossed-off, perfunctory line about vengeance, which no one Mina is facing that chapter even brought up, and which she herself immediately shuts down.  So not only do I not feel any impact from Mina rejecting revenge because she’s never been shown struggling with a desire for it, but it just feels like another case of Midnight being brought up only to get immediately dropped again. To wit:

Aizawa, who won’t or can’t think about her, chooses instead to focus on his students.  Mic brings her up the once and then drops the subject at Aizawa’s request, apparently never to think about her again, despite being given an excellent opening to do so in his confrontation with Kurogiri.  And Mina makes three, bringing up how much she liked Midnight Midnight’s classes only in the context of how stewing on the desire for revenge is bad.

And so the narrative just moves on.  And it sucks, and Midnight deserved better, even if only in her memory.

…Also, just for the record, Mineta is an incredibly emotional character.  He cries as much Deku does!  He openly, habitually worries about classmates when he knows they’re in danger somewhere he can’t reach; he worries about Midnight during the war.  Yes, he’s a primarily a joke character (and the jokes are outmoded and sexist), but so what if his scene with Midnight is full of the pervy jokes that define him as a character?  Midnight is also a perv!  She was contributing a perfectly adequate amount of pervy jokes to that scene all on her own!  Indeed, that was part of the humor of it—Mineta the lech running afoul of Midnight’s theatrical sadism and being incredibly in love with it even as he runs around screaming about how he’s ever supposed to beat her.

Mineta has been a much-improved character from the war onward so I, for one, would not have any problems at all with taking him seriously if he were allowed to seriously mourn.

In regards to the Mina and vengeance part. Remember again that Mina is a very emotional character. Also remember that when she heard about Shoji’s backstory, she angrily stated that the kind of people who hurt Shoji “should be removed from existence” (I think you said Mina was 100% right in saying that, if I’m not mistaken).  So while yes, Mina is a very cheerful, kind and friendly girl, we know the war and her inability to help deeply affected her. The problem is that we never got to explore that or see her go through it. Her inner struggle got resolved off screen in the background before her shinning moment.

You know, I thought about bringing up the Shouji bit in the post.  I didn’t end up doing it because that moment doesn’t break the pattern I otherwise described: “Mina doesn’t hold onto anger; she doesn’t brood; she’s extremely well-adjusted in that she cries when she needs to, to get it out of her system, and then she bounces back.”

That all still applies!  Indeed, as I said in the post you reference, her comment in Koda’s flashback is clearly presented as hyperbole.  She says it in the heat of the moment and no one even blinks because they understand that she’s not seriously suggesting that e.g. all bigots should be murdered in their beds.  No one takes her aside afterward to have a gentle talk with her about appropriate levels of bloodthirst or tentatively ask her if there’s anything she needs to get off her chest.  After she says it, Shouji gently acknowledges that she might be right[8] and then moves the conversation along; within the next few exchanges, she’s joined the group encouraging Shouji about making new, happier memories for him going forward.

I’m sure the war and her inability to help did deeply affect her.  Those things affected everyone.  But we didn’t get to see it, so I’m simply not going to accept the story insisting on how noble she is for eschewing the vengeance she was never shown to be contemplating to begin with.[9]  You’re welcome to fill in those blanks yourself; god knows I have characters myself in this series for whom I’m willing to make those reaches.  But then, my blank-filled characters are mostly in prison right now rather than active in the plot and trying to do emotional heavy-lifting for which the author has woefully ill-equipped them.

Regarding Midnight’s killer. I just didn’t like that part in general.  Idk about you, but I don’t like that Horikoshi wrote Mina trying to find common ground with the guy who went out of his way to mercilessly kill a severely injured woman when she was on the ground, too weak to defend herself, and posed no active threat to him.  Like, couldn’t you have just let Mina kick his ass? Like, I know the story is setting up the kids reaching out a hand to “save” the villains. But seriously? If there’s one villain who should get his ass kicked, it’s that guy.

This is another clue that you definitely haven’t poked around my backlog in any depth.  No.  Just no.  Trying to save the villains means trying to save all the villains.  No exceptions.  Anything less means the heroes are just picking and choosing based on personal bias.  That means this guy and the rest of the PLF.  It means the Tartarus escapees.  It even means All For One himself, if anyone can manage it.  The heroes are not arbiters of justice.  It is not their job to play favorites based on who they’ve seen crying and who they haven’t; it is their job—or so Deku and the general direction of the narrative would have us believe—to save people in crisis.

Should it be their jobs to do all the emotional labor and hand-holding that’s required to talk down someone whose crisis has led them to endanger others?  Maybe, maybe not, but the story has been exceptionally clear that they’re the only ones in a position to do it; God knows their justice system isn’t.  But given that the climax of the series is revolving around saving villains, if that isn’t the heroes’ responsibility, then whose responsibility is it, and why aren’t we reading the story about them?

I’m sure some people would point that, in-universe, saving people is only half of a hero's job description, and the other half is defeating villains.  That’s true enough in the world as it now stands.  However, Deku—in what’s clearly meant to be a big inspiring moment—tells the OFA tribunal in Chapter 305 that One For All is a power meant for saving, not killing, and that he learned this from All Might.  In 326, in a scene that I have some issues with but that is also obviously meant to be taken sincerely, Stain alludes to the influence of All Might on the next generation, to the embers he left behind being nurtured by the ones who don’t give up.

Thus, if All Might is meant to be the ideal because of his tireless efforts at saving people, and Class 1-A—key members of whom are moving towards saving villains—are being modelled as the collective successors of All Might, it only makes sense to assume that, yes, the series wants us to accept that villains are people who also need to be saved.  That means all of them, not just the ones who look easy.  What kind of successors will the kids be, if they can’t go even farther than All Might did?  If they just turn their backs on anyone who they don’t have the exact right quirk inspiring monologue to save, aren’t we basically just back where we started?

Incidentally, let’s talk about this characterization of Hose Face, which allegedly makes him a villain who doesn’t need to be saved, but just needs his ass kicked: he “went out of his way to mercilessly kill a severely injured woman when she was on the ground, too weak to defend herself, and posed no active threat(…).”

Twice was too weak to defend himself from Hawks when Hawks tried to put a feather sword through his forehead.  He posed no active threat to Hawks when Hawks stabbed him in the back.  Shigaraki floating in tube stasis posed no active threat to anyone, certainly not Mirko or Mic, both of whom did their level best to kill him by destroying the tube and all its systems that were keeping Shigaraki alive.  The PLF had their guard completely down the day of the raids, which certainly didn’t stop Cementoss from ripping the building in half with no warning—how many people do you think might have been in rooms five or six stories up when the floor ripped out from under them and sent them plummeting 50+ feet towards the shattered concrete and broken wood below?

They’re villains, sure.  They were going to hurt a lot of people, sure.  But aren’t heroes supposed to be better than villains?

Further, I have to contest your assertion that Midnight even was “severely wounded” or “posed no active threat.”  Yes, she’d taken a few hunks of concrete to the face and fallen through the canopy, which would severely injure any normally fragile human, but again, this is BNHA, where physical damage is only as severe as the plot demands.[10]  Midnight went from splayed on the ground to starting to push herself back up in a single panel, had gotten to her hands and knees two panels later, and was just getting a foot on the ground, preparing to push herself back upright, when Hose Face hit her from behind two pages later.

I can remember being unsure how that fight would go back when the chapter dropped, because, just as the scene cut away, Midnight managed to whip her head around and shoot that fierce glare at the oncoming enemy.  Midnight had an AOE attack that was extra effective against dudes, and all of the people coming at her that we could see were men.  It was entirely plausible to me at the time that she would win, that she just stopped answering her comm line because she had to focus on the fight.

All in all, she had recently immobilized dozens of people on Hose Face’s side and was clearly still a threat.  What would you expect him to do, detour the whole group the long way around just so no one would hurt her?  Let Machia get even farther ahead of them by standing back and waiting for her to finish getting up so they could have an honorable fight?  Come on; she was part of an army of heroes who'd just attacked their base.  Of course he didn’t stand back and hand her the opening to knock them all out with sleeping gas.  And no, he didn’t go out of his way to kill her—he and his group were following Machia and just happened to run across Midnight in the path Machia had taken.

Cripes, you make it sound like he spotted her unconscious on the ground eighty feet away in another clearing and decided to run over and cut her throat before rejoining the group.  No.  Remember, he’s a member of the MLA, the only group in the series that explicitly styles themselves as an army.  His attack on Midnight should be read as a soldier fighting an enemy soldier—it’s quick, it’s brutal, it’s merciless.  Because, as far as he’s concerned, he’s at war.  Both letting a hero go because she was injured (but not so injured that she wasn’t trying to get up again) or wasting time going out of his way to murder someone who’s already dealt with (because he gets his jollies from murder) would have been acting counter to the mission.

I’m not going to tell you he was morally correct—he’s a villain, a cultist, an unabashed quirk supremacist, someone who would have been on the front lines of any terrorist attacks the PLF were planning by virtue of the regiment he was associated with—but just in terms of tactics, he didn’t do anything the heroes haven’t done or sought to do repeatedly over the course of both war arcs.  If you feel it’s okay for them to cross those lines but not him because they’re heroes who want to help people while he’s a villain who wants to hurt people, then it’s his allegiance that’s the real problem, not his tactics. 

(And, just to be clear, the reason I’m okay with him killing Midnight but not Hawks killing Twice is because of their respective allegiances.  Hose Face is a villain.  I don’t hold him to a hero’s moral code because he never claimed it to begin with, so he’s not being a massive hypocrite by not adhering to it.)

Any comment on the Mina and Kirishima interaction? What are your thoughts on the “you’ve always been my hero” line?

If I had a comment on it, you can generally assume it would have been in my chapter post.  I don’t have much interest in the lens on Mina that, because it frames her as Kirishima’s hero, means we see her heroism almost entirely through his eyes.  Again: he gets the two chapter flashback lovingly detailing his personal history, doubts, and motivations; she gets to be a figure inside his flashback rather than ever being able to frame her own.  Ochaco may not ever get two chapters dedicated to her backstory, but at least what flashbacks she does get come to us filtered through her.  Though, I will say that I find Ochaco’s romance plot largely tiresome, so I do hugely appreciate about Mina and Kirishima that they legitimately are just friends and I don’t have to watch Mina’s arc get devoured by blushing and fumbling crush behavior.

Since you asked, I can think of a scenario in which Kirishima telling Mina that she’s always been his hero would have worked much better, at least for me.  It’d fit right into all the post-war material we didn’t get because the story was so laser-focused on Deku.

Start by showing the readers Mina approaching Shouto and Bakugou about training with them.  Don’t have them ask why (because Bakugou wouldn’t care why and Shouto would just take the request at face value, especially if she explained that they both have techniques she thinks she could benefit from learning; Shouto would understand that), but have Kirishima notice or otherwise find out about it, and have him bring it up to her later on.

Then, because Kirishima and Mina are friends and should be able to have these conversations with each other, especially in the particularly vulnerable states they’d be in after the war, have Mina actually confide in Kirishima that she’s feeling shitty about freezing up when facing Machia.

Have him remind her of the time he did the same, and expand on what she already knows. I checked back over his Hassaikai arc flashback, and I notice that, while he apologized to the other two girls that were there for freezing up and being unable to help, and while he tells Mina later that he’s saying goodbye to his old pathetic self, he never actually tells her that he admired her courage (unless it’s in some other scene of theirs I’m forgetting about, which is entirely possible; feel free to give me a cite if so).  The closest they get to openly acknowledging the way Mina inspired him is her observing that his new styled hair spikes resemble her horns.  Have him say it out loud to her after the war, then, when she’s in an emotionally raw place and needs to hear it.

Thus, when he calls her his hero again after the Sludge Villain encounter (if we must indeed keep the Sludge Villain encounter), it becomes a reiteration and callback to that bonding moment, and implicitly him congratulating her on overcoming her fear—like he always knew she would, because she’s his hero.

Why do you care about Mina, btw? You’re a villain stan, correct? So why do you care about Mina’s moment to shine being handled poorly and not receiving the proper care and attention it deserved, if you don’t mind me asking?

Good lord, rvg, just because I’m a villain stan doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to care about bad writing affecting the heroes.  If the heroes’ writing were better, it would improve everyone’s treatment, including the villains!  If the students’ writing were better, I might actually care about the kids more than I do!  If the girls’ writing were better, I would have infinitely less to complain about re: the disparity in how fleshed out they are compared to their male counterparts!

Anyway, I like plenty of heroes.  I have observably positive feelings for about a third of Class 1-A[11] and only particularly negative feelings about Deku and Kaminari.  I love Monoma and Tamaki.  On the pro side, I adore Nighteye, am a thoroughly unapologetic Best Jeanist appreciator, and want to watch way more of Rock Lock mouthing off at more people higher ranked than him.  I think Haimawari Koichi is everything Horikoshi desperately wants Deku to be and is failing to write him as being.  There are plenty of others I at least think are good company when they’re around (Fat Gum and the Wild Wild Pussycats, for example), and some I would be happy to embrace if the series could stop being so incredibly indecisive about how it wants us to read them (Hawks and All Might are big offenders here).

I realize this is a hyper-divided fandom—we might as well start asking all those manufacturers who made the team affiliation T-shirts for the Twilight or MCU fandoms to make us some Team Hero and Team Villain shirts—but I promise you it’s possible to like characters from both sides of the divide.  You don’t have to lock yourself into one position or another.

Frankly, I think most of these characters deserve a final arc better than the one they’re in.  I’m just louder about it for the villains because they’re the ones who are going to be left to suffer or be forgotten if the actual ending isn’t up to snuff, whereas I fully expect the heroes to get a lavish epilogue chapter that crams cameos and last second answers into every nook and cranny of the panel layout.

-

All that said, rvg, I'm not sure you'll see this at all, as I don't seem able to tag you, which I'm unsure if means you blocked me at some point after spamming my comments and also my ask box or just that tumblr is being tumblr. If you do, feel free to respond if you like, though I'd prefer a reblog and less vibrating indignation if you do. I hope I've made it clear that I really and truly have nothing against your pink blorbo. Indeed, so far as I can tell, we both think her scene was pretty poorly handled; you're just more willing to do the mental legwork on fleshing out her characterization than I am.

Which is fine, but maybe ratchet back on lashing out at people who don't make it a priority to read depth the author is not providing onto characters that aren't their blorbos. Cheers!

------------------ FOOTNOTES ------------------

[1] And way to be, like, super unnecessarily confrontational with those words you put in my mouth, by the way. 

[2] And, yes, also a war crime—even more of one, actually.  Forcing captured enemy soldiers to fight their own is only officially a war crime in international conflicts, but Japan is a signatory to an amendment to the Rome Statute that classifies the use of chemical agents in armed conflicts as a war crime in internal disputes as well as international ones.  Give or take whether the clashes between heroes and villains meet the criteria of “protracted armed conflict between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups” anyway.

          I’m inclined to say the use of licensed and regulated abilities like quirks makes the combatants “armed,” but as much research as I’m willing to give this footnote doesn’t immediately clarify how long hostilities need to drag out to count as “protracted.”  Certainly the presence of the PLF makes the villain side an “organized armed group,” though.

[3] Dabi’s blue fire is my go-to example: it reduces back-alley thugs to twisted blackened husks but barely even singes Hawks’s forearms; it melts carbon fiber cables but leaves his outfit completely unscathed.  Given that Horikoshi can’t even keep Dabi’s damage output consistent with itself across all of his appearances, I damn sure don’t expect consistent damage output between characters.

[4] Sure, Endeavor’s connected to one of the lead students while Mount Lady is not, but that’s all on the writing.  There’s no reason that Mount Lady couldn’t have been connected to a student via a meaningful internship or a past acquaintanceship save that Horikoshi chose not to write her such a connection.

[5] That come, I might note, after he already has gotten back up.  Perhaps Horikoshi had been doing this “spoiling the outcome before we see the process” thing for longer than I thought…

[6] Recall that the story managed to make time for a flashback of Deku getting training from Ochaco, Tsuyu and Sero as a lead-in to the conversation between Bakugou and All Might about the latter hiding something.

[7] Or, more cynically, the only one, given how tertiary the characters start becoming immediately after her.

[8] And for what it’s worth, when I said that she was right, I was saying that the world would, in fact, be a better place without bigotry.  Obviously the answer is not, “Kill all bigots in their beds,” but I wish the group had talked more about what Mina said because it would have been a more frank, more honest discussion about how to fight bigotry than the provided answer of, “Put a bag over your head and hope it goes away on its own if you and everyone like you just act with inhuman levels of patience and calm at all times for the next hundred years.”

[9] Give or take her dramatically shaded angry face in Chapter 338—a face she is making along with the entire rest of her class sans Aoyama, so, again, really not impressing upon me that Mina particularly is a character struggling to avoid losing herself to revenge.

[10] So, you know, all those people who fell from upper floors of the Villa were probably also fine.  But it’s one or the other, isn’t it?  Either that kind of fall is enough to severely injure people so Cementoss knowingly enacted  an opening gambit that stood a high chance of maiming or killing an unknown number of people, or people in BNHA would walk it off with nothing worse than a few abrasions, in which case Midnight was in no significant danger.

[11] In seating order, I like: Aoyama, Tsuyu, Iida, Uraraka, Ojiro, Tokoyami, and, from the war arc on, Mineta.

[roo-bastmoon]

Exploring ARMY Cancel Culture

Let's start with agreeing there's always a good time to block and report accounts and it is when they:

--use hate speech and slurs

--denigrate members and fans

--share personal or harmful content

--outright spread lies and misinformation

By all means, block and report those kinds of assholes. I do this at least once a day over on Twitter.

But today I witnessed something really disturbing.

I woke up to my notifications going off. I was being tagged and asked to unfollow a Twitter account because they posted photos of Jimin at Paris' fashion week, but they either trimmed Hobi out of the shots or just didn't mention Hobi if he were in the photos.

This was considered "diet-solo" behavior and folks were calling for massive blocks and reports.

So I asked: May I have some context please? What's problematic about this Jimin-focused account focusing on Jimin?

And of course got called a mootie and had some private quote retweets for my troubles. But basically, people felt it was super shady not to mention Hobi if he was in the shot.

Okay. That's a perspective that could have some legitimacy.

So here's what deeply concerns me.

This could have been an opportunity to have a discussion, to learn and grow, and actually affect some change.

Folks could have politely commented something like: "It appears that you keep cutting Hobi out of photos. You state you are a Jimin image archive, but many folks feel it is very disrespectful to ignore another BTS member. Would you consider mentioning Hobi or not cropping him out of your images?"

That is an example of non-violent communication, which illustrates a concept and a boundary, without insulting anyone or insisting the other person act in a way you deem fit.

The account owner could have come back and said something like: "Oh my gosh! I never want to disrespect any BTS members. The whole point of this account is simply to focus on my bias. But if it is upsetting to people, I will try to include other members in mentions, or in some shots, if I can!"

In which case, problem solved.

Or the account owner could have come back and said something like: "No I will not be doing that. This is my twitter page. I wish to focus on Jimin. If you don't like it, please just don't follow me."

In which case, you know this account isn't your cup of tea.

OR they had the option to say something like: "Fuck you. Fuck all the other members. Jimin supremacy is real. I hate every other BTS member."

In which case, THEN you know to report and block.

But instead of calling this person in and discussing the matter, people dogpiled on block threads and sent her a bunch of hate and spam, and as a result, she closed her account.

One less Jimin-positive account in a vast sea of Jimin-negative accounts on the Twitsphere.

Plus, someone's feelings were hurt. She basically said something akin to: "I tried my best but it wasn't enough. Please remember there is a human being behind this account. I have to leave without a backup account just to protect my mental health."

So... because folks didn't LIKE that Hobi didn't share a frame with Jimin in some edits, they grabbed pitchforks and torches and villainized a person as a solo, without any conversation.

Gone are her edits. Her archive will not be updated. People may have ruined BTS for her.

I'd been following that account for a bit. There was never a hint of shade toward any members, never anything negative about BTS in general; they didn't even draw comparisons between Jimin and other people. It literally was just an image archive focused on Jimin, making mood boards and stuff like that.

And they got run out of town on the rails. Straight up cancelled. An absolute perfect example of mob mentality and group-think, with almost no due diligence.

It makes me angry. If I am being honest, it makes me a bit ashamed to be ARMY.

I found BTS a little over a year ago thanks to a Jimin-focused fan cam. I was watching dance sequences on YouTube because I am a giant dance nerd. I saw a Jimin fan cam compilation of some of his performances. They cut out other members of the group in order to focus on his moves and skill.

But BECAUSE of his focused cut, I discovered BTS. From there I became a passionately OT7 ARMY, and very quickly after that a Jikook supporter.

BTS had been around for 9 years and I never paid a smidge of attention to them. It was a focused fan account that recruited me into this fandom.

Imagine if we did away with all bias-focused accounts or ship-focused accounts for being "diet solos"? What sort of fandom culture would we be creating? What would the ARMY microcosm look like, if we wiped out the celebration and focus on people's biases?

It's such a harsh, cruel, fucked up world. Can we not let folks just harmlessly enjoy things?

For my part, in any given situation, I always ask myself: WHAT IS THE KIND THING TO DO? Because I believe that is how BTS would want me to represent them as their fan.

Sometimes, the kindest thing I can do is not engage, just report and block vile little antis riding their hate-trains.

But most times, the kindest thing I can do is invite real, nuanced, complex conversation. I can approach people with the goal of making allies instead of enemies. I can try calling them in, before calling them out.

You might notice that I follow people here on Tumblr who love to ship Jikook. I also follow a few people who don't believe in shipping. And I follow one or two blogs who passionately stopped shipping Jikook. I don't agree with them, but I listen to what they have to say.

Because I am able to entertain a thought without automatically adopting it. And I am able to listen to people without endorsing them. Unless someone has monetized their blog, keeping an eye on them is not, in fact, a vote for everything they have to say.

So as to avoid living in an echo chamber, I will open myself up to a multitude of perspectives UNLESS those people:

--use hate speech and slurs

--denigrate members and fans

--share personal or harmful content

--outright spread lies and misinformation

Each and every person must act according to their conscience. I am not trying to convert anyone to my way of seeing the world. But sometimes I feel like purity politics is at play here, in ARMY. I see people on Twitter move like herds, or schools of fish, reacting before thinking, desperate not to be judged, so eager to feel morally superior.

That's... not self-actualization. That's a performance.

I want you to know it's super okay with me if you judge me. So long as you do your due diligence and get all the facts, please go ahead and make judgement calls about me. If you genuinely don't like my content, my methods of expression, my personality--you are absolutely free to police your own internet experience, and mute or block me. I WANT you to. I want you to protect your energy and do what makes you feel safe and joyful.

But if I'm HARMING you or doing something WRONG, I'd really appreciate if you'd kindly tell me what it is, and why it's bad. Give me the chance to learn and grow--or at least to explain my thinking.

Let me be human.

Let fans be human.

Let the members be human.

Humans learn by making mistakes.

I will say it again: as a human, your job is to make mistakes, gather up the related data, analyze it, and learn to adapt and do better.

If you get cancelled for just being human, then no interaction will be authentic. It'll just be token stanning and filtered content until all of fandom is just vapid, watered-down bullshit.

You should be able to be yourself in your own space, as long as you're not deliberately being toxic to others.

So the next time someone tags you and tells you that you need to unfollow someone who is problematic--consider asking for context and proof, sift through the evidence yourself, maybe try to have a conversation if you have the mental energy to get into it, and THEN react.

ARMY is in serious need of critical thinking skills these days.

Things that make you uncomfortable aren't always bad.

Things that challenge you aren't always toxic.

People are all works in progress.

Shame is a weapon, not a teaching tool.

Please use shame as a last resort.

Thanks for coming to my semi-ranty TED Talk.

Sending you all much love and peace,

Roo

[kyra45]

there's a user (01mariam-saad) that i got an ask from, and i'm hesitant about it. abuse was explained briefly within the ask, because it could be triggering, and it seems that at one point, their donation post had more a detailed explanation that has since been edited down, or the post was remade, because it was triggering. i don't know what it looked like before, but i'm aware that they're tagging a bunch of users, and i'm a pretty small blog, yet they found me and sent me an ask, which is ...i don't know, usually this stuff is blazed by someone, or comes across your dash naturally. it made me skeptical, i guess, that a line of contact was formed. in the main post, when i went to check, there were people saying it was a scam, and i've since gone back, but those comments calling it out all seem to be gone. i don't know if they were deleted or what, but it made me hesitate initially to see scam claims, and then more so to come back and see those comments deleted. i don't know if i am right to doubt, and with the topic being pretty badly abusive, i find myself ...worried to express concern over whether it's real, but then, if it is a scam, i think that's really all the more reason to ask, because it would be truly horrendous to tell people that you had suffered such awful abuse for some hundred bucks.

Unfortunately it isn’t uncommon for scammers to pretend they were abused to get money from other people. It’s something they I’ve seen happen quite often happen, and have at least 2 cases of it documented here (dreamerdollface) and another one I can’t remember the url of but there are several other. Both accounts claimed to be abuse victims but never could provide verification that the pictures they were using was actually their own images and not images stolen off the internet.

The user you listed has been spamming asks on a near daily basis, always changing part of it to fit a holiday or the day of the week it’s sent. They target anyone and everyone and don’t seem to care their ask contains triggering content since it’s never edited to remove the unnecessary information. Their pinned post has most of the same information supplied so by now they should edit out it the ask.

A mutual of mine got the same ask and answered it privately telling the account to please stop sending those kind of asks to users. Despite the blog accepting suggestions, they have ignored the kind request and continue to send it to others.

It is suspicious if their deleting anything that raises concerns because while people can be rude sometimes you wouldn’t want to hide anything if it wasn’t a rude comment. If someone calls you a scam, you can reply to them with proof you aren’t. Deleting the comment, without answering it, generally isn’t advisable. Often scammers just don’t want anyone seeing someone’s legitimate concerns. Though sometimes real people just don’t want to deal with those comments as well:

It is fine to doubt someone’s legitimacy if they find you even though your blog is too small for someone to find easily.

[77angelnumbers77]

more asks!! 4 and 17 >:3c

Sorry for taking so long to reply!! I got busy 😭

4. What was the last straw that made you finally block that annoying person?

I'm really a block first, ask questions later kind of person to just avoid long-term conflict and to curate my space. I guess on my last account, I did end up blocking some of my mutuals just because I needed a fresh start . . . even if I didn't really use the account after that.

Let's see . . . I'm willing to tolerate basically anything in moderation, short of bigotry and weird thirst stuff. I've blocked a lot of people who show up in my for you page just for posting x reader fanfiction. Not my cup of tea. I know that's weird for someone who spends so much time writing in the second person, but when that second person is supposed to be me that's harder -- and on top of that, I don't particularly want to fuck the Spiderverse guy.

Tags, on the other hand? I blocked dozens of them on my old account. I don't watch much of anything, so I typically block shows and movies when they start trending.

Sometimes a mutual will start posting a bunch of characters from a show/book/whatever that I can't see myself getting into. Sometimes it's just thirst for some particular guy, or really weird discourse that I'm getting on my feed for some reason. Into the tag filter!

I know it's not very tumblr-y of me, but I have different accounts for my different interests because I don't want to subject my mutuals to random guy/gal thirst™️from fandoms they're not in.

I have my first account from a good number of years ago that is effectively dead. I just spammed there. Hardly any original content.

I have my rarepair account which I use to exclusively talk about my favorite pairing from another franchise.

I had a more personal account for essays and such that I've since deleted. Frankly, I've always been a pretty private person, so I tend to keep these accounts to their defined subject and not crosspost. They're not even sideblogs 😭if I got into sideblogs we'd be here all day.

17. There should be more of this type of fic/art

VrisRezi meteorstuck

Sburb/Sgrub never happened AU (one of my favorite tropes because of the potential for angst)

I will always be so into well-done AUs. Worldbuilding is my best friend. I once read this fic with this amazing premise. It was more or less middle ages on Alternia with all sorts of details on how everything worked -- from the trolls and their physiology, to the human servants, to affairs around the castle. It's from an orphan account and the fic never went beyond 5(?) chapters. Every day I think about all the beautifully thought out fics that will never be completed. A well done fantasy AU is a real treat.

Bonus controversial take: in my opinion, we need less Humanstuck AU. It just takes a lot of the joy out for me! I used to be an avid Humanstuck writer myself, actually. I just think it's difficult to translate the trolls into understandable human characters without:

Changing them entirely or

Making them completely unsympathetic

Nothing against Humanstuck, I just think it's more fulfilling to flesh out Alternia.

[rivvyelf]

On Therapy

Warning: I'm going to discuss about my 1 minor and 1 major trauma of mine. The minor one involves being deceived and the major one involves death.

This is a bit untimely, as I realized I was shadowbanned 3 days ago and thought nobody would see this post. And yes, I do write for myself but I also believe in sharing wisdom. Because I'm shadowbanned, I can't comment on posts, respond to comments (outside of these posts), or message people, and I don't think my reblogs and likes even show up. I think only people who follow me can see this post, but oh well. Hopefully, it doesn't take months or years like others who've been shadowbanned for this post to be seen outside my circle.

I'm putting a "read more" separator here.

I'm piggybacking @brasideios' post from 3-4 days ago on therapy and the importance of seeking it compared to the massive potential disaster of unresolved trauma and untreated illness. I'm going to share my experience of 1 minor trauma and 1 major trauma of mine and how therapy could've helped both.

Minor trauma: Deception

This was years ago so I didn't realize that I was still affected by me being gaslit years ago. I thought I was friends with someone. I commented a bunch on their FB posts. Later found out those comments were deleted. I asked why. Instead of telling me that they didn't want my comments to be seen by peers outside our circle (social butterfly), they tell me that it was FB's fault. I kept on commenting, and those comments kept on being deleted. Asked FB, FB denied such a glitch. Confronted friend. Things got ugly, but the worst that came was a broken friendship.

It was only recently that I realized that I don't have a trigger, per se, but a fuse that can be lit if I make compliments to people I've interacted with a bunch before, but those compliments get erased without any explanation. It's a fuse because it'll easily turn off if the person gives a reason. If there isn't a reason, the longer time goes the less rational I become. I realize now that it's because I didn't want to relive that memory, the feeling of being lied to, of being deceived, and losing a friendship (if we ever had one, to begin with).

I realized this after the fact because it happened again, except I put all of the blame on myself. I didn't directly ask "Why are you deleting my comments?" I blamed the social media site, believed the best in the person I was communicating to, and so on. I still don't know what happened... and let's be honest here, I probably won't. By the time I realized that the website was working fine, the long fuse was now a short fuse. Things snowballed. Comments kept on getting deleted. In one day, as I chose to unlock my likes and follows (may close those again if I get more spam accounts communicating with me), all of the remaining comments I gave to that person were deleted. I couldn't handle it. Ended up making them uncomfortable. We don't communicate anymore.

I still am beating myself up over this because if I had a therapist at the time, they would've easily identified the memory in the past that I identified a lot quicker. Then the solution could've been: politely ask them why comments are being deleted. Stop commenting on their stuff, wait for a response for like a month. Then prod again. Be patient. People are busy. If there's no response within a reasonable amount of time, just don't make a big deal out of it and do other things. Forget about the person and carry on with what you're doing. Don't let your imagination take over.

All a reasonable therapist would've asked was "Do you remember if a similar event ever happened to you in the past?" and things would've probably been resolved quickly, for good or ill.

Now I know, some of you are saying "Hey! That's a simple question, you should've thought it yourself at the time." To which I respond, "There's a term in history called 'backseat historian' and you're one right now." Unresolved trauma leads to illogical responses. And I'm paying for that right now. So, even for things you thought were buried and done, it could arise again, like it did with me.

Now on to the Major Trauma: Death

My mom passed away in early 2021. It was hell. Lost 1.5 years of my life because I just... we never said goodbye. And a growing part of me believes that once we die, we'll never see each other again.

Now this one would've required a very very special therapist who was an expert in Ruist culture. I didn't want a therapist that was trained in classic Western Psychology because Chinese culture was absolutely almost ruined beyond compare by Imperial Europe and America (Anti-LGBTQIA+, reinforcement of binary gender down to adding gendered pronouns in written Chinese, Stalinism, Short Hair for men [okay that's my personal belief], clothing, spheres of influence, etc.) and psychology played a massive part! I needed an expert in filial piety and annihilationism (I think that's the belief that once we die, there's no afterlife and we disappear forever).

For me, I was in a state of despair that nobody could really understand me. So I didn't seek therapy. 1.5 years down the drain. I regret that decision because, yeah, there's a high likelihood where I just storm off after the first 5 minutes, but referrals exist and I could've done a lot more research.

It wasn't until I started creatively writing that I began to heal. I write stuff that my Mom doesn't agree with (the changing of history, getting certain Chinese culture details wrong, LGBTQIA+ since she was Christian and I didn't hear her say a good thing about homosexuality). Believe it or not, this helped a lot.

But I'm certain a therapist could've dug that out too. Creatively writing about topics that would make a deceased person yell at you isn't exclusive to Ruist/Chinese culture. It probably would've taken a lot of time, swapping around different therapists, but I feel that I could've healed quicker if I went to a therapist.

Yeah, that's my story. Glad you stuck out until the end if you made it this far. Don't be afraid of seeking a therapist.

[hungry-skeleton]

Thanks, appreciate your doc and help a lot!!! I'm pretty dumb so etiquette guides are always helpful.

I realized the questions I have were...quite a load but I'm sending these to you if you wanna continue your doc. Feel free to answer only a few of them or not answer them now!

Dividing content by blogs: I got a few main interests, and some minor interests. When is it a good idea to start a sideblog?

Adding a lot in a reblog: I ended up writing a long essay in my reblog. My contribution adds to the discussion but IDK if it's inconsiderate to post a whole essay to someone's post. Is that OK, or should I instead put it in a new post, put some context and tag the person?

Avoiding the flames: I'm often afraid of posting something for the fear of backlash - whether or not deserved. The options I know so far: a) Don't post it, b) Post it and accept whatever happens, c) Scroll down for 30 minutes in a dashboard or through tags to find out whether my take would be considered problematic or inflammatory. What's your take?

Attention: I heard it was OK to scroll down someone's blog but in one blog I seemed to have interacted with at least 30% of their posts, putting lots of comments along the way. Is that creepy or acceptable?

Anons: There's a few cool people I send a lot of anon asks to. Is it considered considerate or dumb if I eventually let them know that I've sent them a bunch of anons?

Followers, mutuals and the dashboard: I'm considering either visiting blogs individually or curating my dashboard. If I curate my dashboard and unfollow 200 people, that'll go against the "follow back" and "unfollow only if you dislike the person" viewpoints. Do people still have those mindset?

Edit: tumblr is such a functioning website sometimes the numbers on this post get broken lmao 😭😭😭😭

That's all up to you! Some people like to keep their blogs pristine and curated for certain things, others like to put all their stuff in one big pile of you (like me!) it all depends on how you want your blog to operate!

As long as it's relevant to the post it's absolutely okay to add a long addition, especially if you're teaching something! Most people love having some actual substance in their interactions so don't worry about that. But if you'd like to, you can add a "read more" divider so others don't have to scroll through your paragraphs if they don't want to :)

This is true for every place on the internet, it's honestly your call! Do whatever makes you comfortable, not much else I can say

Absolutely fine! We love interaction no matter the age of the post! Make sure you check their bio or pinned posts first though, most people are alright with "like spamming" but some aren't. Unless they say otherwise somewhere interact to your hearts content!

That's the beauty of anon, it's up to you how much you want to be known. Try not to pester people though, let bloggers get to your asks on their own time! If you'd like for them to know all your asks are from one person but without revealing they're from you, you can add an anon signature! It's a simple nickname to give yourself in the ask box to show that you're the same person. This could be as simple as saying "hey! It's me, (blank)anon again!" or a popular way of doing it is assigning your self an emoji to sign off your asks with! Example: "hope you're day is good! -💥anon"

Once again this is a "your call" situation. Curate your experience to your comfort. I will say though I'm following over 800 people and my dash is just fine lol. Tumblr users don't usually believe in the "follow for follow" system so don't feel bad for unfollowing someone for whatever reason

I hope that was helpful :)))

[eemoo1o-animoo]

Went to the Kuro tag for the first time in forever, saw your live blogging of the book of the Atlantic, liked your takes, went to your profile, liked your takes there, followed you

Currently looking for ppl to talk about black butler with so >~>

Your blog says you got opinions about claude and Sebastian, never considered that ship before; wanna tell me about it?

*wheezy fucking WHEEZE*

Aww, got me blushing I see. (It’s also a relief to see my blog back in the tags after the fortnight long shadowban lol definitely not scarred by that).

Relatively new to the fandom (I’d say since mid-July this year but I genuinely can’t tell you for certain, but I’ve known of the anime since the day I added it to my Netflix list after over-hearing someone talk about it and then just never watched it, and so eventually it got removed from Netflix anyway so), but I finally got into it because of an amv of an awesome cover where on the original video (of the cover) people were saying they found it because of a Black Butler amv. Of course, I did the opposite, lmao.

I’m not a manga reader, although I would like to be, and I do/have spoil(ed) myself for most of the lore from the wiki and talk of the manga stuff. Just thought I’d get that out of the way.

It’s interesting how s2 isn’t apart of the manga, because it is an interesting concept (more demons), and I just think that that Sebastian deserves another demon to be petty and to twirl around with, you know?

Lmao, the “live reactions” are relatively spontaneous. I just watch something and I’m like “oh my god oh my god, so like” and on one of my posts I speculated (never reading the manga but knowing of R!Ciel) and someone commented “Yeah, that’s exactly what happened”. And I’m like “haha, well fuck me I am the messiah”.

And thanks for the follow! I really appreciated that! (Again, it’s a baby blog only made in like, early October maybe after I realised I was spamming my main with too much Kuro, so I’m always so glad that someone finds interest in it.)

Feel free to talk/ask anytime, also.

As for Claudebastian… well, for one, I try tagging my posts as concisely as I can, so for the whole “shipping timeline” I suppose you could search for #claudebastian on my profile. (Is that link working? I don’t think it is.) Or #seblaude, because they’re tagged with both.

I also do character playlists for Kuro (an incomplete list, because I couldn’t do anything during the shadowban). Plus, fanfiction. My AO3 is linked in my bio, and the majority of that pseud’s works are Claudebastian.

I suppose the main things to know about me and Claudebastian is:

I first hate-shipped Clannah(?) because I resented them both.

By episode five, Bedewed Butler, (an episode I only remember the name and number of because I had to type it out like a million times when I made a bunch of GIFs for the episode, all under #my gifs and #they’re gay your honour) I started to ship them.

I made a headcanon list regarding them so I could work past the week of writer’s block I had for my second one shot (which I’m still writing and hope to get out later today if I’m so lucky).

My first Claudebastian fic that I made is the one mentioned on top, aka. an unfinished one shot trilogy that I made before even finishing season two and labelled His Mate, Loving (The Claudebastian Collection), because I wholeheartedly expected it to be my one and only Claudebastian work.

I was wrong.

My second published work for Claudebastian (third for Kuro as a whole) is Dear Claude, something which I tried leaving as a fic with an ambiguous relationship/feelings, but it was kinda hard to write that way.

I intend on writing a platonic Grellebastian friendship fic (bit of angst, one sided Grelliam, Grelltaker as the end goal maybe, possibly, who knows) which you can probably find under #grelle fic.

That fic is currently back in action, so to speak, after I’ve watched BoA.

Which is infuriating because I hesitated to watch season three in fear of killing the Claudebastian mood (it did not, probably because of William being there lol), and same goes for Book of Murder, but then I went into Book of Atlantic so I could make GIFs for an up and coming Grelle vs The Undertaker character analysis, but came out with the inspo for Claudebastian slipping away (and after such a good week/maybe two weeks of writing little and often for that one shot).

Kind of re-contemplating the toxic Clauannah marriage (again). Fuck my life.

The theme is kind of a reference to my reactions to season two (and Claudebastian) clogging up my main and resulting in the creation of the blog. Plus I ship them.

Sorry if this doesn’t serve as much of a reply to your questions, but I tried. Feel free to ask again when you’re able!

TL;DR — I’m a rambling idiot.