#(I say having put other figures in other polls without having a good case)

[lohstandfound]

Polls for my Greek myth x art idea ended so I can start working!

michael - odysseus

jeremy - theseus

rich - icarus

chloe - medusa

jake - achilles

brooke - echo

jenna - cassandra

christine- calliope

Although, I still like some of the other ideas that came up so maybe I'll do something with those too

[nerdlingmerchling]

CROWS AND LOVE LANGUAGES

Physical touch. 

Am I surprised this one came on top for Jesper? Not at all.  

In the show, Kit plays Jesper as someone who's VERY TACTILE and sensual at his core;  experiencing the world primarily through bodily sensations. 

His signature move?  The pat on the shoulder. He does that to people he doesn't know that well (Arken). He also has no misgivings hugging strangers (Markus the circus guy). 

He pats Wylan on the shoulder several times as they get to know each other, even holds his hand for the whole “Jesper Fahey, are you worried about me” conversation. 

And when he and Wylan are figuring out their relationship, whenever Wylan's within touching distance, Jesper has an arm around his shoulders. When they first arrive in Shu Han, and Wylan is upset about Jesper finding out he can't read, you can tell how much the physical distance between them pains Jesper. Physical touch is a big part of how he seeks and gives reassurance and comfort, and not being able to do that makes him anxious. At the same time, he’s able to respect boundaries, and as much as I’m sure it must be difficult for him, he's able to refrain from touching Kaz. 

His friendship with Inej also involves a lot of physical affection : hugging, face touching, forehead kissing. It’s also true in the books. I remember a scene, much like the one in the series, where Kaz wishes he could be like Jesper and spin Inej around in his arms. Jesper is about as tactile as Kaz isn't. 

I’d argue that physical touch is also a big part of who BookJesper is. Let’s remember that in trying to figure out romantic chemistry between him and Wylan, a lot of it was riding on how it would feel to kiss Wylan (“it’s the kiss he’s been waiting for. It was prairie fire…”) 

Words of affirmation

I marked that this one would come in third ; the poll put it in second place. 

A love language is how you show love, and also how you want others to show you love. And I think Jesper craves words of affirmation. What makes me say that? His bragging and his cockiness.

He says : “I'm so handsome” because he wants to hear “you're handsome, Jesper.” 

He says: “I’m fantastic” cause he wants to be told he's indeed fantastic and a good friend. 

He says: “you're going to tell me you can't do this without me” because he wants Kaz to tell him “I can't do this without you because I value your skills and I love you like a brother”. 

I'm not saying Jesper has low self-esteem, or confidence issues as such. He just wants to feel loved and appreciated through words. He's known to be a flirt, and seemingly good at it, so that means he has some talent when it comes to complimenting people. I persist to think, however, that in Jesper's case, his actions tend to speak louder than his words.

Acts of service

I thought acts of service would come in second place. As it turns out, it comes in third.

I think acts of service are a big part of Jesper's personality. He's very loyal, and he'd do anything for the people he cares about. 

In the show, it transpires in his friendship with Inej. He offers to follow her to the Menagerie to watch her back. He agrees to kill someone for her, because she asks him to. Sure, he whines about it, but you know he's gonna show up when you need him to. 

In the hallucination sequence, his mother tells Jesper “you risk your life for your friends all the time” and he replies “but they never ask me to”. And that's the definition of an act of service : giving something without the other having to ask, and not expecting anything in return. 

I also think that giving Wylan a key to his room was much more about an act of service (providing a space where he'd feel at home) than about the key as a physical gift in itself. 

Vote for Inej's love language HERE

[michanvalentine]

Notes: I went with the flow (and the poll result! xD) and wrote this fanfiction. It is the retelling of the events we already know, from the point of view of the most lovable scientist in the world. <3 (x°°°D) With the addition of various and possible missing moments, of course. I particularly focused on the psychological aspect of Hojo, on how a person like him can experience falling in love. With everything that entails. In this case, naturally, it is the poor Vincent (and not only) who pays the price. There are no explicit scenes of violence and a lot is left to the reader's imagination, but I think the result is still quite disturbing. Normally I dabble in the comedy genre, but when I decide to change I don't have too many scruples. And Hojo remains a disturbing character in his own right. Below I leave a preview of the fanfiction, until I finish translating it and my account on Archive of Our Own is up and running. Be patient with me, I'm an old woman! xD

You look at the Turk sideways, his tall, slender figure silhouetted against the bright glass window. The image - or the light - hurts your eyes and you turn back to the steaming coffee in your hands. It was that silly hen who prepared the drink - for everyone, including you. Your mouth distorts into a grimace of impatience: you didn't need a break. But Faremis found it a splendid idea. To you it's just a useless waste of time, however, and you tremble leaning against the wall, when you could instead be concentrating on the lenses of your microscope. “…I took them home, their parents didn't know where they had ended up,” the dude sent by Shinra is saying.

“Luckily they didn't get hurt,” observes the female, the hen to whom you owe that annoying interruption.

“Good job, Valentine,” Faremis adds, and takes another sip of coffee.

A sound of annoyance comes out of your mouth, and you haven't even touched your coffee yet. Good fucking job, you think. He is paid to protect you, to repel and eliminate threats, not to babysit. It doesn't matter that it was a bunch of curious kids who attempted the break-in.

“Excellent indeed, now the villagers of Nibelheim will think that crossing the borders of the Shinra mansion and putting our jobs at risk is a simple joke,” you observe.

Everyone's eyes fall on you, as if they had only noticed you at that moment. Crescent even puts a hand to her mouth in surprise. But you barely notice, because you're focused on the Turk. On the still look, on the regular features of the face, on the crimson eyes that convey no hesitation. It irritates you, but you can't exactly say why. Meanwhile, from the photo on his CV you hadn't understood how tall he was. And to look him straight in the face you are forced to raise your head. He looks like Grimoire Valentine, you notice again - even if that charlatan has been dead for a while and you don't remember him well. But Vincent Valentine also inherited from his mother. Genetic traits don't lie, no matter how pleasantly mixed they are. He may wear an elegant dark suit, enjoy an excellent education and all the training necessary to stand out among the Turks, but he remains a dirty half-breed. A bastard from Wutai.

“I didn't think it was appropriate to do otherwise,” he says - he contradict you, in fact, and without hesitation in his voice, “Scaring the children more than necessary would have alarmed the entire village. I imagine that to work you need quiet and concentration, not eyes on you.”

“I understand the concern, Hojo, but everything is under control. Our security guard knows what to do,” adds Faremis, unsolicited.

You let your gaze go from one to the other and grit your teeth. Valentine's insolence, Faremis's condescension. You feel outraged deep inside and a little voice suggests to you that they both think they are superior to you, that they can silence you. Clench your fists as well and keep quiet. Take the insult - for now. At least the hen saw fit to stay out of it and keep quiet.

“Well,” you state dryly, “I hope so. In the meantime I believe that this," waste of time, useless theater crosses your mind. “Pause,” you say finally, “it lasted long enough. This is a very important project, Faremis, you should know. Or would you rather our diligent bodyguard also invite the Nibelheim brats here for a coffee?”

You don't wait for an answer, you have paid far too much attention to the issue and to those present, when there are many other things to do. Data to analyze, results to achieve. You throw the still full paper cup into the dustbin and walk away towards the lower floors of the mansion, towards your laboratory. There you will no longer have to listen to useless chatter, nor stumble upon Valentine's profile silhouetted against the window. Or in his steady red eyes that pass through you. Despite yourself, irritation follows you into the basement and you can't say why. He is nothing. Yet everyone in there seems to appreciate him. He is nothing, repeat in your mind; yet even you cannot ignore his simple existence. And you can't stand this.

[greatlyblessed]

@ilovebeingaturtle @tmnt-crossover-polls @iamheretemporarly

Poll shenanigans with For Future Reference '12 Mikey and Team 2 of A Mixed Bag! Featuring minor cameo of the Sunset Linings crew!

Donnie finally admitted to himself that this was useless. They’d been all over the theater, and no sign of any other mixed-up group of turtles like them.

“Figures,” he grumbled bitterly, shoulders slumping. “We get a solid lead from that… space cat knight lady and it doesn’t pan out.”

“We’ll find them again,” Michelangelo said determinedly. “Maybe not here, but we will. Eventually.”

Wordlessly-- thank goodness-- the Leo draped his arm over the little guy’s shoulders. 

Uselessly optimistic. For a second, Donnie wanted to snap at him. But, he was just trying to help. And he could hear an echo of his own Mikey in the words. So he simply nodded. “Yeah. Sure. Eventually.”

The peace is broken by a passionate shriek.

“HOLY CHALUPA-DEE?!”

Donnie’s head snapped up and around. Where was-- there! Staring at him was an extremely familiar face. “MIKEY!?” he shrieked back.

Not even a second after he yells, Mikey barrels him over with a hug more akin to a football tackle.

“DUDE I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S YOU! THERE WERE ALL THESE OTHER TURTLES, AND I COULDN’T EVEN PROCESS WHAT WAS GOING ON BUT IT’S-IT’S-“

“It’s you!” Donnie laughed-- cried-- some mix of the two, wrapping his arms around his brother. “Oh thank pizza supreme in the sky I found you.”

Mikey sniffles, enthusiasm crashing the second he has the case to hide his face into Dee’s neck, “I-we’ve been falling apart man, I can’t-I was trying to hold us together but no one was listening to me, and we-I-“

The rest of his voice cuts offs, and he squeezes Donnie tighter, “I missed you…”

“Me too,” Donnie said quietly, returning the squeeze.

He could have stayed like that for a while, but the other Michelangelo he was currently stuck with decided to interrupt by crouching down and tapping Mikey’s shoulder. “Hey, sorry to interrupt the moment-- and good to see you again, other me, but, you wouldn’t happen to know where any of the guys from my universe are?”

Mikey blinks.

“Say what.”

Huh. So, were Donnie and the others the only ones that had been turtle-napped then?

“Hey, can we see your sticker real quick?” Leo asked, and without waiting for an answer picked Mikey up.

“Hey!” Donnie snapped, scrambling to his feet. He grabbed Mikey’s arm and jerked it, pulling his brother away from Leo. “That’s my brother!”

Mikey, meanwhile, gawks at Leo, “Dude…are you another version of Leo?!”

Attention entirely redirected, he turns back to Michelangelo and enthusiastically points, “So you must be another version of me! Dee, you didn’t tell me you’ve been making friends!”

“...Not sure I’d put it that way,” Donnie grumbled. “But yeah this is a version of Leo, Raph, and-- you,” he said, gesturing at each in turn.

“Okay but are you sure this is actually your brother--” Leo started to say.

Mikey waves eagerly at the other versions-pausing to stare at Raph-before jabbing a finger at Donnie’s chest, “Heyyyyy-so you’re not trying to replace us then, are you?”

“Wh-- what?!” Donnie sputtered. “No!! This whole incident has been extremely stressful and--” his voice cracked for a second, “and I haven’t even had you guys around.”

Mikey’s frown drops into a more serious form of upset, “Aw, Dee…” 

“But you’re here now!” Donnie said grinning and throwing his arms out. “Where’s everybody else?!” he asked, looking around. “Did April and Casey make it too?”

“Nah dude, she’s out looking for you!” Mikey beams, “But I found you! Not a moment too soon too, Leo was starting to flip his lid! What with you vanishing, and then Raph being captured by the Krang on top of it, and-“

“KRAANG?!” Donnie-- and Leo-- shouted at the same time.

“The Kraang are involved?!” Donnie continued. “Okay the evil versions of us were one thing but--”

Mikey sounds dazed as Donnie rambles, “I am so lost right now…”

Donnie’s mind kept whirling with possibilities. “Then again it is our evil counterparts-- could they be working with the Kraang?” he said, beginning to pace. “It might explain the level of technology we’re seeing in our prison.”

“Or that’s not actually your brother?” Leo said. “Look, his sticker says--”

Raph shook him. Just a little bit, but enough the threat was there. “That’s enough outta you,” he snapped.

“Evil counterparts?! There can be evil counterparts?!” Mikey grabs the side of his head, “But then that could be any of us! There’s so many here! It could be you, or you, or-oh my god it could be me! Have I been the villain this whole time?!”

“HEY!” Michelangelo yelled glaring up at Raph. “Leave him alone!” He grabbed at Leo’s arm, pulling. Raph let go, and Michelangelo shoved himself between the two. “You and Donatello need to chill out and leave Leonardo alone! He’s on our side!”

“And the Kraang are able to travel to other dimensions,” Donnie continued to ramble. “They’d have a vested interest in finding out what we’re capable of. Maybe our evil counterparts made a deal to help in exchange for their dimension being left alone?”

“I always knew I couldn’t trust myself!” Mikey flails his arms at seemingly no one, “I’ve got like an evil double! I knew it! One time, I got something to eat-and I blinked?! And someone else had already eaten it!! Or, wait. No. Yeah that was still me-“

“Leave it, Michelangelo,” Raph said, warning heavy in his tone.

“No way, dude!” Michelangelo yelled. “You’ve had it out for Leonardo since the beginning, and I’m getting sick of--”

A loud whistle cut through the air. Donnie’s head snapped around to the source-- Leo.

“-BUT ANOTHER TIME, I LOOKED INTO A MIRROR? AND I SWEAR THE OTHER MIKEY IN IT LOOKED RIGHT BACK AT ME MAN-“

“Mikey,” Leo grabbed ahold of his shoulders, staring right into his eyes. “You’re not the evil counterpart.”

Mikey blinks again.

“Oh, okay!”

Leo grinned, rubbing Mikey’s head and then turning, arm now draped over Mikey’s shoulders. “Hey, Shrieky-D--”

“I do not shriek--!”

Mikey wraps his other arm around Leo, now also grinning, “You kinda do Dee.”

“Mikey--!”

“Anyway!” Leo interrupts loudly. “Have you noticed his sticker,” he said, patting Mikey’s plastron, right over the sticker.

Donnie glanced at it and felt the anger fizzle and fade. The sticker on Leo’s chest said “Mixed Bag”. The sticker on Mikey’s… didn’t.

“Oh snap, we got free accessories?” Mikey promptly begins straining his neck to see his own sticker, “Sweeeeet!”

“There could be other reasons for that,” Donnie said. “We were in different dimensions before we came here-- the stickers could reflect that.”

Leo shot him a look and then turned back to Mikey. “Hey, Miguel, you ever meet alternates of you and your bros before?”

Mikey tilts his head, with a distinct lack of recognition for the concept in his eyes, “Uh, only in my dreams dude! I have this good one, right- where me and all the other Mikeys of the multiverse team up together to create the greatest superhero team ever! I’m the leader, obviously, and-“

Donnie’s stomach sank. His Mikey had been too excited by meeting Michelangelo and his brothers to forget. His Mikey would have gone off on an excited ramble about their team-ups with that crew.

“Mikey,” he interrupted. “I. I don’t think-- I don’t think I am your brother.”

Something akin to terror flashes in the other Mikey’s eyes, before he goes right back to beaming.

“Aw c’mon man, who else could you be? You look just like him!”

Donnie silently gestured behind them. A group of five were walking by. Four looked just like Donnie and Mikey and their brothers-- the fifth a much older turtle that Donnie didn’t recognize. A Slash, maybe?

“We’re not the only ones that look like… us around here, Mikey.”

Mikey’s grins gets wider from the force of upholding it, and his voice picks up, “No-no-it, it’s gotta be you dude! We can’t-we need you back home, you disappeared! We-we don’t know where you are, and-we’re all fighting worse than ever and-and we were going to search with Master Splinter but now we’re-he-it just-it has to be you!”

Master Splinter. Donnie’s heart clenched. He must still be alive in Mikey’s dimension. This really wasn’t his Mikey.

“Oh hey it’s okay, it’s okay,,” Leo said, pulling Mikey around to face him. “Breathe, Mikey.” 

Mikey squeezes his eyes shut and clenches his fists in response, breathing practically rattling his whole body, “It’s not-fair, it’s gotta be-it-I-“

“Oh hey whoa, dude,” Michelangelo said, patting Mikey on the shell. “I’m sure your Donatello is just fine! We all got kidnapped by evil alternate versions of us and stuck with these shock bands that are like, mondo painful, and could also kill us so that’s a major bummer. But I’m sure yours isn’t in nearly as bad of a situation!”

“…WHAAAAT?!?!”

“What the shell are you guys doing?!” Raph said. He huffed and shouldered by Donnie, pulling Mikey away from Leo and crouching to be more at his level. “Hey. Breathe with me,” he said, and pulled in a long, slow breath in.

Mikey looks anguished, but he forces in a harsh shuddering breath at the larger turtle's request. Slowly, Raph keeps helping him until it’s no longer a struggle to keep his breathing steady.

“You all right?” Raph asked quietly, with a surprising amount of gentleness.

Mikey sniffles, and glares at the ground, but his hoarse voice is finally steady, “yeah…”

“Good,” Raph said, getting up and patting Mikey on the shoulder.

“Soooooo,” Leo drawled. That tone meant nothing good was about to come out of his mouth. “Remember when I suggested that maybe you guys weren’t brothers, and you shook me,” he said, crossing his arms and glaring at Raph.

“Oh my god, dude,” Mikey’s voice is simultaneously brittle and biting, “shut up.”

Something very hurt flashes in Leo’s eyes as his jaw clicks shut.

“But hey!” Donnie said, “You could keep hanging out with us till you find your brothers? If you want?”

Mikey barely responds, seemingly now lost in his own thoughts. His mood seems drastically soured, “Yeah. Sure. Whatever…”

So, Donnie needed to give him something to get out of his head. “Have you seen the costume area yet?” he asked. “We only poked our heads in for a second but you might be able to whip up something like Turflytle--”

It’s like a switch gets flicked, and Mikey’s eyes fill up with sparkles.

“You mean like…maybe even for…all, of us?”

Donnie’s stomach dropped. He started to deny it but--

“Yeah!” Leo interrupted with a smirk. “Especially Donnie, right?”

…Donnie was going to kill him.

[ultimatepokemontournament]

I’m sorry to bother you with a question like this, but may I ask how you went about putting this bracket together? I’m trying to figure out my own addition to this showdown bandwagon and am also working with a large roster of characters. Jumping in blind would be a disaster, so I thought it best to seek guidance from someone who’s got a solid approach going.

I can definitely summarize what I did! Though without knowing what you're working with, I'm not sure how much this will map onto anything else!

1) Organizing Matches by the Numbers

So I split up the 1000+ Pokemon into more manageable groups by doing them by Generation, which technically means that I'm just running 9 100+ competitor brackets.

Then, for each generation, I targeted ~high 20s, low 30s for my number of matches with 3-5 Pokemon in each match. I wouldn't exceed 5 in a match, and lower is ideal, when you're trying to figure out how this works for your numbers.

Now, I targeted that number of matches because I wanted to use the next round to force-fit it into better tournament numbers— A nice proper 1v1 tournament has power of 2 competitors, so 2, 4, 8, 16, etc... It simplifies the math and makes it easier, and that's something that I chose for my tournament to avoid Pokemon "skipping" rounds, but you don't have to follow that.

So I will be targeting 8 Pokemon going to round 3 out of round 2, so if we take the number of round 1 winners from Gen 1 for example, there are 31 of them. 31/8=3.875 which means 7 4-Pokemoj matches and 1 3-Pokemon match. Perfect. Run those matches, get your 8 winners, pit your 8 winners against each other in the typical 1v1 tournament style (4 matches), get your 4 winners, etc.

2) Organizing Competitors into Matches

This part is super messy and the actual proper way to do seeding is probably via pre-tournament polling and also by having 1v1 matches, so what I did was the nearest reasonable approximation, given time and effort requirements.

The process: Put all your competitors in a spreadsheet column. Go through the list and bold all the fan favorites, all of the ones you expect to win, etc. Shuffle the column. If the top n(*) competitors look okay for a matchup (ideally, only one bolded name), mark it as (probably) acceptable (I changed the cell colors), and move to the next match. If not, shuffle again. (You'll probably have to do this a lot. However, if just a few of of them are messing up the match, you can move them to the bottom of the match stack and just shuffle them into the remaining competitors.) By the time you get to the bottom, you will very likely have to move things around or break up previously acceptable matches to get the last ones fitting.

(*) n is the target number of competitors in a match.

Note I chose this method specifically because I wanted my own biases to impact the match sorting as little as possible. It's worked out most of the time, sometimes there were fan favorites I completely didn't anticipate. Again, not a perfect system, but it prevents stuff like having Bulbasaur and Eevee in the same round 1 match.

(And sometimes you can't avoid having more than one fan favorite in the same match. In those cases, you want to try your best to pair most-fan-favorites with considerably less fan favorites, but this is also where smaller match sizes do come in handy. 1 5-competitor match allows for 1 fan favorite in 5 competitors, while 2 3-competitor matches allow for 2 fan favorites in 6 competitors... But again it's messy and you can't anticipate everything and sometimes there are a lot of fan favorites.)

(One more thing, Google Sheets does let you randomize a selected range if you right click on it, which can save you time running back and forth between random.org.)

3) Rematches

Personally I think if you want good data in a 3+ competitor winner-take-all kind of situation, you have to run rematches. Say 40% of people like competitor A, 30% of people like competitor B, and the remaining 30% are spread out among competitors C, D, and E. competitor A would win without rematches, but it could very much be the case that of the latter 30% of voters, if their picks were eliminated, only 5% would vote for competitor A, and the remaining 25% would vote for competitor B. That would leave us with 45/55 in B's favor.

Anyway, you can do whatever suits you because running rematches is a little tricky and it requires keeping track of all these extra scattered little polls, but the rules I have for rematches are as follows:

If the winner wins by 50% or more, no rematch.

If the winner is in the lead by 20%, no rematch.

If there are two leading competitor, single rematch.

If there's one leading competitor and two close runner ups, double rematch.

If it looks like it could be a double rematch, but the 2nd place competitor is closer to the first place competitor, it should be a single rematch (and vice versa).

If it looks like it could be a double rematch, the 3rd + 4th + etc place competitors results must be greater than or equal to the 1st place competitor for a double rematch to be held.

4) Scheduling

This one is rather unique to my situation, so I can't really offer too much advice here. Really depending on your voter-base and your access to them, you need to determine if you want to do this long term (slowly releasing the polls) or short term (release them more or less all at once) and if you want to do 1 week polls (requires some extra coordination, especially so that you don't have 1 week gaps between poll drops as you wait for previous round's data to come in) or 1 day polls (easier, but requires your voter base to be more readily available to you).

My very long term approach is based mostly on the fact that the Pokemon community here is very very large and scattered and, starting off, I effectively had 0 way to spread news about the tournament to anyone other than via Blaze. I think if you search scheduling on this blog, you can find the posts that were made when I decided to change the poll schedule, and I did so fairly publicly, so it should be pretty easy to see the structure of this tournament from that.

5) Tournament Summaries/Brackets

Wasn't sure what to call this one but it's basically a, oh no this thing is huge and constantly shifting but people want to kind of get an idea of where we've been and what's coming next, but because it's not a typical 1v1 tournament and also there are hundreds of these guys, I have no idea how to do that.

Which doesn't fit so well in a title lol.

Anyway there are probably a lot better ways of doing this than I did, but I basically just set up a free Neocities site to help keep track of anything. It took me a very long evening to do it, especially since my web dev is super rusty, but it's working out great because it also helps me keep track of everything, because the way I had it set up in my spreadsheet was not super intuitive or easy to see. I doubt anyone wants it, but I am totally willing to share the code behind the site if you all don't know how to get it from just inspecting the page and all. It's pretty clunky though so I'm not advertising it lol.

If I was really smart I'd have all the data in a JSON file and have a JS script just make all the cards that I have in there for me instead of using a separate C++ script (yes, sorry, I use C++ for things like this but that's because I know it better than like Python which would actually probably be the better choice) to generate the cards in HTML which I then paste into the HTML file, but also that would take a lot of time to figure out how to do, and time is not on my side. So.

Anyway. That's most of what I've got organization-wise. I typed this all up on my phone away from my computer so hopefully it's not too messy. I'm not sure if I've provided the info you're looking for or if I've included too much of the information you're not looking for, but I've rarely been accused of not being thorough at least 😭

If you have more questions, feel free to drop me an ask off anon and I'll send you a DM from my main! Otherwise, best of luck!!

[narhinafan]

If Sakura was so popular why is she one of the most universally hated female characters of all of anime and manga? I mean seriously you ask a fan of other series who are a fan of Naruto and you will likely hear them say Sakura is one if not their least favorite characters. This was the case long before the fandom lost their shit with Sakura not ending up with Naruto I've heard nothing but non-stop Sakura bashing anybody can go to forms before 2014 on any website and you will see soccer bashing almost Non-Stop these fans completely revise history and count on people being ignorant of the state of the Naruto fandom before the end of the manga.

I'm just being more and more convinced that most Sakura fans just hate the Naruto franchise in general and only like Sakura out of spite they're sad and pathetic people who can't move on that their shitty ship was never Canon and their stupid shit ruined what could have been a good Naruto movie I'm referring road to ninja that could have been great had it not forced a shitty ship that was never going to be Canon. I'm sorry if I'm come off as an angry Hinata fan who's sick and tired of dealing with a bunch of bullies who had done nothing productive with their lives except harass other fans and creators and act like complete children I can't name a signal fandom in any anime that's worse than Sakura if anyone can name one worse I Will Wait cuz I can't find any.

I know what you mean they are in denial, like Sakura had her moments, but 99% of the fandom are aware of how bad she is and notice all the bad things about her and her character and what she does.

Sakura fans try to convince themselves that Sakura is popular, but that was never the case, even in the official polls Sakura only gets votes cause she is shown so much since she is on the main characters teams. Every time Sakura is show you can easily pick out so many negative things about what is happening, what she does or how she acts. Sakura fans are the minority in that they refuse to see how bad Sakura is and basically hate the rest of the fandom and Naruto franchise out of spite.

Road to Ninja would have been really good without it forcing the NaruSaku parts. Like really it could focused more on how Naruto takes RTN Hinata loving him. Even if it wasn't canon would have been nice to see Naruto getting flustered over Hinata and for her to give some heartfelt words for why she looks him. Plus Menma clearly wasn't interested in RTN Sakura so likely he would have gotten with Hinata sooner. They could have made a contrast since Menma seems to have given in to hatred and how people mistreated him after he became a Jinchūriki and how while his life was nice it wasn't all good as Menma wouldn't have gone through the big events that lead to Naruto finally earning acceptance from the village.

And RTN Hinata's personality could have been somthing she developed cause she wanted to defend Menma from the public criticism he got after he became a Jinchūriki. You know how normal Hinata couldn't approach Naruto due to her family crushing her confidence it could have been the opposite with RTN not having her confidence crush and instead becoming protective of Naruto. However because of Sakura he mistakes Hinata for a fangirl. Also having RTN Naruto be the only one to figure out that Naruto wasn't Menma on her own but still notice how similar they are.

They could have played around with the movie in a lot of ways if they didn't force the NaruSaku parts. It's really annoying as it was made after Pain, but also after Hinata and Naruto had that Zetsu scene during the war. Basically feels like the team had NaruSaku fans who weren't happy about NaruHina gaining momentum and tried to force the end ship to get changed by putting NaruSaku as the movie focuses in hopes it would gain traction.

[sapphire-heart-tippy]

I'm not even done with the original Sapphire Heartverse fanfic (written anyway, but I know how I want it to end), and I already have ideas for the sequel, starring mine and Vanilla's son, Ramon

Okay so here's some quick info!

In case you don't know, here's the fic of how we found him

The reason the main story is called The Sapphire Heartverse is because that's my stand's name!

I think this ahem... "brief summary" covers everything

Alright, now that we have everything situated, let's go right into it!!

The original Sapphire Heartverse has two alternate endings, the good ending and the bad ending. The good ending is the canonical ending, the bad ending is what could plausibly happen if the couple didn't make it out of there alive.

I'm still debating on what to call the sequel. Something having to do with Ramon's stand Sugar Crash maybe? I'll figure it out, I might do a poll with all the different names I came up with!

Anyway, the sequel takes place 15/16 years after Vanilla and Tippy got married and found Ramon. So they're a little older, but still have the same ol' style (different designs, however).

Ramon is now a teenager, and got his stand Sugar Crash when he was about 10 years old. He's a typical edgy teenager, wearing dark eyeliner, painting his nails black, giving the finger to society. His teachers are in for a surprise when they find out that his fathers are exactly like that too. Unfortunately, Ramon gets in trouble a lot at school and might face expulsion. Vanilla and Tippy have a serious heart to heart conversation with their son. It's difficult being a teenager, but also being a teenager who has a stand and going to an all stand user school. They try to tell him that you can still defend yourself without breaking the rules and using your stand.

Vanilla and Tippy had to follow a similar rule while working at Dio's mansion. They teach him how to fight without using his stand.

Unfortunately, this doesn't end well either. Ramon defends his friend from a bully using his own fists. This doesn't sit well with the counselor. She suspends both Ramon and the bully from the school. Vanilla and Tippy go up there and end up making things worse. Now they have a reputation for being a family of delinquents.

To make things even worse, Vanilla and Tippy end up arguing a lot more because their bakery isn't making enough money to pay bills. Ramon has never seen them upset with each other before. Ramon overhears one of their arguments and they say something about how they should ask "him" for help again... Vanilla is especially nervous about this. Everything goes silent. Vanilla explains that "he" has helped them out before but he doesn't want to face "him" again.

They have no choice.... Ramon knows something is up. Over the next few days, things are more calm, but... his fathers are acting a little strange. Happier and more upbeat than usual, in a very bizarre way. Ramon goes to school and tells his friends about everything. One suggests they might be drug dealers and they're high on something. Ramon goes back home and sees his fathers cleaning up the house. They give him tickets to a concert he really wanted to go to and tell him that he can stay out as late as he wants that night.

This isn't exactly new, but... something is very off about this interaction. Ramon goes to the concert with his friends and heads home around 2am. Why would his fathers want him to stay out as late as possible? Don't they care about him anymore?

Ramon decides to sneak back in the house to see if they really are selling drugs or something... it's something even weirder.

Ramon hears 3 men laughing. One is Vanilla. One is Tippy.... and one.... is a man who sounds eerily familiar. Ramon can't quite put his finger on it, but he feels like he's heard that voice before. Ramon uses Sugar Crash to glitch into a wall and listen in on the conversation.

The mysterious man is very poised and feminine, yet super masculine and strong looking. He sips wine from a glass daintily and tells Ramon's fathers that he has been waiting for their return to Egypt for years. The man says that trouble has stricken the mansion and he would rather have it taken care of by the people he knows will fix it. Plus, the mysterious man has found somebody who might be important to Vanilla.

Vanilla is very confused by this, considering the fact nobody has ever really been important to him besides all of those who are in the house right now. The mystery man reveals that he knows somebody who is a blood relative of Vanilla. How he knows this? ... His blood tasted the same as Vanilla's....

Ramon's eyes widen and he is frozen in place with shock and fear. The man flips his blonde hair over his shoulder while speaking casually. Ramon is trembling at how equally casual his fathers are at the mention of blood drinking from this man. The man stands up and looks Ramon in the eyes... it seems.

Ramon is in between the wall, not visible to anyone, but Ramon feels like this man with piercing amber eyes, golden blonde hair, and flawless porcelain skin is staring deep into his soul. The man smiles, revealing two razor sharp canine teeth. A sudden flashback enters Ramon's mind. He has seen this man before... he just can't pinpoint when he has seen him. But the grin that man has made was the exact face he remembered. The man turns around to continue speaking to Ramon's fathers about the plan. He has recruited others for this task, including one of Vanilla's supposed relatives. They come up with a plan, but they can't just leave Ramon here by himself.

"Bring the little one with you! Where is he? I would like to see how much he's grown.... it's been what? 14 years? How old is he now? 16? My god, it's been so long since I've seen the little darling." Said the man... that's when Ramon realizes... that's him. That's the man. He hasn't aged a single day since Ramon had seen him. They tell him that he should be out at a concert with his friends. The man looks slightly disappointed. As he pours another glass of wine silently... he asks with a bit more seriousness in his tone,

"The child is a stand user... isn't he?" He swirls the wine around in his glass, "Why else would you allow him, a teenage boy, to go out and about at this unholy hour? Unless he has something to protect himself with? Hm?"

Vanilla and Tippy sullenly nods their heads and confirm.

"I told you so." The man take a drink and sets the glass down, "You know what needs to be done. Bring the boy to Egypt with you. Ice," the man gazes deep into Vanilla's eyes.

"Yes, sire?"

Sire? Ramon thinks to himself, is this guy royalty or something?

"Do what you did with your beloved. You will train him. You will work him to the bone until I find out just what his stand is capable of. Considering the fact you both are," the man uses finger quotes, " 'void dwellers', the boy might be one himself. Watch him closely."

"Yes, sire... very good, sire." Vanilla nods his head, feeling ill. The man smirks,

"You three will be my most powerful allies. Hmhmhm... Oh my my my my my..." He shakes his head, grinning and showing his full pearly white teeth, "You are not to tell him why you're there until I give you the right, do I make myself clear?"

The two men nod. The blonde man walks around, softly touching the counter. He leans in on Vanilla's ear and whispers,

"You're my favorite servant... I put my full faith in you once again."

Ice has his eyes closed, his cheeks are flushed but he resists feelings buried deep inside of him. The man touches Vanilla's right bang,

"Hm... you never decided to let it grow out, hm, Ice?" He chuckles and releases Ice. "Oh and.... Jonathan says hi... hmhmhm." After a while, the mystery man leaves.

Ramon is terrified. He's going to Egypt but his fathers are hiding some sort of dark secret from him...

What the hell is going on?!

(to be actually written one day!!)

[darsynia]

hello darsy! happy valentine's day!, first i wanted to remind you of what an amazing person you are i really mean it and that i love the posts you share and the polls, absolutely make my days, also want to ask you if you had a tag list? and in that case if i could be added, please? i would like to start reading your published writings here but i don't know where to first start and i would like to just pop up from nothing after getting the notification you updated, beforehand, thank you, i wish you the best of weeks and some good rest! send you my love<3

Oh goodness, thank you so much! I'm twirling :D And that pic is just the most preciously applicable to your kind words! I've been super shy about sending messages and stuff, this really makes my day 💚

I'd love to add you! I have a couple of different things going, but am happy to tag and then if you aren't in the mood for that thing or it's not your typical fare it's fine. However, if you'd like to specify, cause I have about 3 'kinds' of stories I'm currently posting, that's also good!

So, I have the Stephen series Animate Objects, and that starts with a 2-part story, Day Eight, where aid worker Amista Cairn runs into Stephen Strange and feels oddly compelled to show up at the sanctum to figure him out. That's followed by Diminished Seventh, a seven part sequel where Stephen and Amy work through his suspicion and her confusion as an ancient Babylonian relic imprinted on her the second she set foot in the sanctum. The next in the series will be Sixth Sense, which I haven't started yet, but it'll delve more deeply into what is up with the relic, and whether Stephen and Amy can get over their mutual mistrust, since they can't keep their hands off of each other...

The other series I'm posting is Trust Fall, which is a Tony/OC MCU re-write that will include more women in the Avengers, a team-oriented take earlier on in the chronology, and features Tony Stark and Emory Autumn. Emory is a PA to a pop star whose career needed a boost, so she went to Afghanistan to sing for the troops, putting Emory in the position to be kidnapped along with Tony, in the cave. Emory's smart and capable, but she's let her friend walk all over her for far too long. Tony and Emory both realize they need to change for the better as they fall for each other. A complication arises as Yinsen offers Emory a serum injection he'd spent his life savings on for his own family, who are now gone. Emory's new powers help them escape the cave-- but they put her in SHIELD's sights. ((EDIT: oh I forgot. There is so much sexy kissing in this story. SO MUCH. Gosh! Eventually smut in this one))

Along with Trust Fall I have a couple of other Tony Stark smut or ask stories (including a Tony/Steve I'm writing right now)

The third thing I've been writing is Steve/Reader fics, I have a oneshot set early on after Thanos's snap, and my series is called Just Right. Post-Ultron, Reader works as the 'armorer' for the Avengers, and she's loved Steve from afar for a year without being brave enough to say anything. Another version of Steve Rogers shows up, and this version looks at her like a precious gift-- but what's going on? What's happened to this Steve, and will it happen to their universe? Reader wants her Steve, but if this other version goes home, will she lose her chance to be with Steve Rogers? I also have a Sam Wilson/Reader argument kiss ask that's coming up, too!

I would be delighted to tag you in any or all of them, and again, no pressure-- I know I'm tagged in a few things that I look forward to getting to, but haven't yet!

Thanks again! I'm writing this at the DMV and I think the person beside me thinks it's a love letter, bahahaha. Honestly I love writing and getting to share it, so it kind of is? 💚

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Monopolists are winning the repair wars

In 2018, dozens of states introduced Right to Repair bills. These bills are wildly popular among voters, but wildly unpopular among monopolists ranging from Apple to Microsoft to Google to GM to John Deere to Wahl. Every one of these bills was defeated.

Repair advocates regrouped for 2021. 27 R2R bills have been introduced at the state level. Every single one that came up for a vote was defeated, thanks to aggressive lobbying by an unholy alliance of the country’s largest, most profitable, least taxpaying corporations.

In 2014, a pair of American political scientists published a groundbreaking peer-reviewed paper analyzing 30 years’ worth of US policy-making that compared policy outcomes to public polling results.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B#authors-details

They concluded that general public sentiment had almost no impact on US policy making — but the political preferences of wealthy people and large corporations were hugely predictive of what laws and regulations we’d get.

Or, in poli-sci jargon, “Economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.”

The Right to Repair fight is a hell of a proof of this principle. It’s really hard to overstate the popularity of the idea that you should be able to fix your own stuff, or choose where you get your stuff fixed.

Take auto-repair. As auto-manufacturing has grown more concentrated, car makers have squeezed independent mechanics — as close to a folk-hero as the American imagination can produce! — to the margins.

After all, forcing car owners to use official service depots has huge advantages: manufacturers can gouge on service prices, they can force drivers to buy expensive original parts, and they get to unilaterally decide when a car is beyond repair and force you to buy a new one.

Drivers have a good intuitive sense that this is going on. That’s why, when Bay Staters voted on Massachusetts Question 1 (an automotive R2R ballot initiative) in 2012, it passed with an 86% majority!

Mass Question 1 is a really good example of how monopolists can arm-twist politicians into frustrating the will of the people. Immediately after the 2012 initiative, auto-makers set about retooling their cars to escape the new right to repair rule.

The 2012 rule forced automakers to give mechanics access to diagnostic info from cars’ wired internal networks, so Big Car moved all the useful diagnostic data to their cars’ wireless networks. Hence the 2020 Massachusetts R2R ballot initiative, which closed this loophole.

The 2020 fight over the Mass. R2R ballot initiative was fuckin’ wild. The car-makers ran some seriously freaky scare-ads, in which the ability of auto mechanics to read wireless diagnostic data led directly to women being stalked and murdered.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

I’m not making this up. The underlying premise was, “We turned your car into a hyper-aggressive mobile surveillance platform that incidentally gets you places. If we let other people see the data we’re nonconsensually extracting from you, it will put you in terrible danger.”

Thankfully, Bay Staters saw through this bullshit and passed 2020’s Question 1 with a 75% majority.

The thing is, people completely understand that they should be in charge of deciding who fixes their stuff.

They understand that the risk of poor repairs should be addressed through consumer protection laws (which also bind monopolists’ own authorized repair depots), not by having the repair market privately regulated by monopolists who have vast conflicts of interest.

This understanding has only deepened through the pandemic year, as authorized repair depots shuttered and vital equipment languished thanks to anti-repair laws and technological countermeasures.

For example, Medtronic’s workhorse PB840 ventilators couldn’t be refurbed without using a grey-market activation dongle that a single Polish med-tech homebrewed, encasing them in cases harvested from busted clock-radios and guitar pedals.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#medtronic-again

Medtronic — a med-tech monopolist that effected the largest corporate inversion in history to escape US taxes — argues that letting independent med-techs fix its products puts patients at risk, but this argument is every bit as flimsy as the auto-makers’ Mass. scare-ads.

It ignores three important facts:

I. Med-techs have always done this kind of repair. The change isn’t that med-techs are demanding the right to do something new — it’s that Medtronic leveraged its monopoly to foreclose on the industry-standard practice

II. Medtronic’s own security track-record is comically terrible. This is the company that makes pacemakers that can be wirelessly hacked from across a room to kill its user, whose software update system doesn’t even use cryptographic signatures.

If Medtronic is an expert on any aspect of patient safety, that expertise is certainly hard-won, derived from its long history of lethal patient endangerment.

III. If there is a problem with indie technicians struggling to fix Medtronic products, the obvious answer is to provide service manuals, parts and diagnostic codes.

The case for Right to Repair is incredibly strong. Not only does R2R protect consumers from ripoffs, it also provides local jobs — 1–4% of US GDP comes from the independent repair sector, almost entirely in independent small/medium businesses.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#r2r

Repair is an important environmental, labor and human rights story. As leaked internal memos demonstrate, Apple’s aggressively landfilling of devices (so customers buy more) is environmentally devastating and creates demand for conflict minerals.

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/31/hall-of-famer/#e-waste-apple

The average American family loses $330/year because of the lack of access to independent repair, a $40b annual drag on the economy thanks to monopoly rents collected by monopoly firms.

To say nothing of the impact on jobs: landfilling a kiloton of ewaste creates <1 job; recycling that waste creates 15 jobs, while repairing it creates 200 good, local jobs that can’t be offshored (you don’t send a phone overseas for repair).

https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Jobs-Revolution

Then there’s the food security story: John Deere is an agribusiness monopolist that outraged farmers by claiming that they didn’t own the tractors they paid six figures for, merely “licensed” them on terms that forbade them from fixing their own machines.

Deere leads Big Ag’s anti-repair, forcing farmers to use official parts, preventing modifications that would allow third-party attachments, and collecting outrageous service call fees for a technician whose job is to unlock the tractor after the farmer replaces a part.

This policy means that farmers who fix  their own tractors still can’t use them even if there’s a hail-storm coming and they need to bring in the crop. Farmers — who’ve been fixing their own gear since the first farmer built a forge next to their farmhouse — are desperate.

Some farmers download anonymously maintained Ukrainian firmware and overwrite the Deere software, creating unknowable risk of remote attack. Others have to maintain “backup tractors” they use for weeks while waiting for Deere to fix their equipment.

https://www.npr.org/2021/05/26/1000400896/standoff-between-farmers-and-tractor-makers-intensifies-over-repair-issues

Just like Medtronic and GM, Deere claims that allowing independent service creates infosec risk — but just like its anti-repair comrades, Deere’s own infosec is a dumpster-fire, with tractors across America at risk of mass-scale cyber-attacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john

The common thread joining these firms is monopoly: a lack of competition that allows them to extract billions from the public, and a cozy cohort of business leaders who can mobilize that loot to ensure that politicians and regulators don’t give the public what it demands.

American industry is experiencing a wave of monopolism not seen since the Gilded Age, and it affects every sector. Take hair-clippers — a category that exploded during the lockdown thanks to the newly created need for home haircuts.

The clipper market is monopolized by a single firm, Wahl. As I discovered — the hard way — Wahl has designed its newest clippers so they disintegrate if you try to take them apart to sharpen them.

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1380554358824136706

Instead of sharpening these devices, you’re expected to buy a new $40 blade (for a shaver that costs $60 all in!), and throw out the old one — or, less realistically, you can mail them your razor for factory sharpening.

You won’t be surprised to learn that Wahl is part of the war on repair, sending letters to state legislators warning that letting people sharpen their own clipper blades could lead to fatal housefires.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4446374-Wahl-Opposition-Illinois.html

Two years ago, the FTC convened an inquiry on independent repair called “Nixing the Fix.” The Nixing the Fix report was released earlier this month, and it affirms everything that repair advocates have said all along.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/07/pro-act-class-war/#we-fixit

The FTC calls bullshit on manufacturers’ claims about cyber-risk, housefires, and whether getting your car fixed by your family’s beloved mechanic will lead to your murder. It broadly and firmly endorses Right to Repair.

Which brings me back to 2021, were every one of the 27 R2R bills that has been brought before a state legislature for a vote has been defeated, thanks to heavy corporate lobbying by monopolists.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-20/microsoft-and-apple-wage-war-on-gadget-right-to-repair-laws

These bills were voted down after heartbreaking testimony from ed-tech repair specialists who described the devastating impact that a broken laptop has on poor families whose kids are doing remote learning.

They were voted down despite the record, the public support, the climate questions, the food security issue, the human rights issues — voted down to preserve the monopoly profits of a tiny number of firms whose claim to being “American” is tenuous at best.

These tax-dodging, offshoring companies view the American public as an all-you-can-eat buffet, and disclaim any responsibility to the country — while still expecting its lawmakers to defend their interests, at the expense of the voters.

Image: Jcaravanos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:E-waste_workers.jpg

CC BY-SA: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[starsfic]

Family Dinner

Summary: Xiaotian is invited to be a buffer at Red’s family dinner.

Notes: So Family Dinner won the Art School poll so...enjoy!

-_-

“I need your help.”

The tone, barely audible over his music, was enough to make Xiaotian stop his music and look up from his tablet. Red looked nervous, bouncing from foot to foot, and it didn’t help that his hair was down in a poofy mess and he looked like he hadn’t slept for three days. “Sure.” he said, hoping that would help that look fade. “What do you need?”

The look didn’t ease. “Just so we’re clear, you can say no, but my family dinner is coming up and I don’t want to be alone with them but-” Realization came to life. He hadn’t heard much about Red’s parents, but enough had been heard that Xiaotian could get a picture.

“Sure.”

Red came to a stop, eyes widening. “Really?”

Xiaotian nodded, saving his work and then turning off his tablet. “Yeah! If you don’t want to be alone with them, I get it. This hasn’t been the first time I’ve been a buffer.” The other blinked, opened his mouth, and then closed it, clearly confused. “Xiaojiao’s parents love me.” he said, shrugging.

Red blinked again. “...okay.” he finally managed out, clearly moving past it. “Dress up nice and I’ll pick you up on Friday. Thanks.” And just like that, he was walking away.

“You’re welcome!” he called after him, unsure of what else to do.

-_-

Thankfully, Xiaotian had two nice outfits. Unfortunately, he also had a complete unawareness if they were nice enough. A quick text to Red, asking where they were going, fixed that. Thankfully, the outfits he had looked nice enough for the place which meant he didn’t need to go shopping.

Thirty minutes before he was supposed to be picked up, Xiaotian smoothed down his shirt. He had decided to go with the dress shirt and black slacks inside of the pretty orange dress, which still left him the question of what to do with his hair. He considered his reflection, humming in thought. He could leave it like it was, with his red headband making it spike up, but that felt too casual. Maybe down? He tried it, considering it. Xiaojiao was at a race in the next town over and was probably asleep at this hour, so he couldn’t call her for her opinion.

A knock on the door made him pull his eyes away. “It’s open!”

The door creaked open, revealing Red. He was dressed similarly, what looked like a fancy jacket slung over his arm, golden earrings in, and eye bags still visible. “I was wondering if you were-” He paused, staring at Xiaotian. It might’ve been the light, but for a moment, he had thought Red had been looking him over in a... boyfriend way, for lack of a better word. “You… have your hair down.” He sounded flustered, at least.

“Yeah, I wasn’t sure if it was nice enough or I should put it into a ponytail…”

“Keep it down.” Red said, scanning him over again with a much more technical look. “But it is missing something.” He looked around before landing on Xiaotian and Xiaojiao’s shared jewelry box. “Mind if I-?” Xiaotian nodded his approval, so Red hurried over. After a moment of rustling around, he pulled something out. “Here we go.”

He had pulled out a pair of golden monkey earrings, a gift from Tripitaka when he returned from visiting New York one time. Xiaotian took it with a word of thanks and slid them in. “You ready?” he asked when he finished, stopping to grab the flowers he had ordered just in case. Red shook his head but gestured to him to go first, closing the door behind them.

Outside, the night was cool. Red led Xiaotian to a small red car and once, they were buckled in, drove silently away from the dorms. 

After a few minutes of tense silence, Xiaotian glanced over at his… he wasn’t sure what they were. In any case, Red was as tense as a board, glaring straight ahead, and looking ready to pass out. “Hey,” he finally said. The other blinked. “It’s gonna be okay.”

“It’s just… it’s the first time I’ve brought a guest to these dinners and my mother wasn’t exactly pleased when I told her you were coming after I asked you.” His knuckles went white on the wheel. “And I’m just freaked out you’re going to hate me after this is done.”

He reached out, holding Red’s shoulder. “Hey. Nothing your parents can do will make me hate you.” Xiaotian tried his best to pour every inch of sincerity into his voice. “You’re great. And there is nothing- RED LIGHT!” At his cry, Red slammed on the brakes, an inch from crossing the red light.

The car once again went silent, except for their frantic breaths and furiously pumping hearts. Ahead of them, traffic furiously drove and drove, busy, busy, busy. The two finally managed to catch their breaths, glancing at each other. When they met eyes, they lost their breath again- this time to relieved laughter. Finally, their light turned green and Red started again.

The brush with life and death had seemed to calm him a bit. He started smiling when Xiaotian turned on the radio and started to bop his head to the music.

But, soon enough, they were pulling into a parking lot. Red went stiff again the minute they had parked. Following his gaze, Xiaotian watched as a black limo dropped off two people at the front. When it passed, he finally got a good glance at Red’s parents.

The small woman in the front must’ve been Iron Fan. She was dressed in an elegant red and gold dress. Her long dark hair was pulled away in a complex hairstyle to reveal a beautiful face with red-painted lips and sharp eyeliner. Behind her was DBK. Sharing his son’s liking of colored hair, his purple hair was pulled back into a short bun. He was dressed in a dark suit that failed to hide the fact that he was built like a tank, amber eyes scanning the parking lot. Looking for them.

Red took a deep breath before pulling on his coat. “Okay.” he breathed out, readjudting his ponytail one last time. “Let’s do this.”

“Are you ready?”

“Nope. Let’s go.”

The two bundled out of the car, Xiaotian gripping his bouquet tight. Together they headed towards Red’s parents. In a walk that both felt too long and too short, they were at the sidewalk. The two elders turned and he felt a shiver run down his spine. DBK looked… not pleased. But Iron Fan had the same look on Xiaojiao’s face whenever she was mentally planning to gut someone. Red came to a stop and Xiaotian mirrored him.

“Mother. Father. My apologies for being late.” Red’s tone was formal, apologetic.

His mother stepped forward, the gutting look replaced by some kind of look that was too cold to be maternal. “We were wondering where you were,” Iron Fan said, cupping Red’s face. And then she was squishing his cheeks. “My sweet useless boy.” Before Xiaotian could say something, she was turning to him. The look was back. “And this must be Qi Xiaotian.”

“Yes!” Xiaotian said, trying to not be cowed. He held out his hand. “Red’s told me so much about you.” A lie, but one he hoped worked. Iron Fan considered his hand before shaking it. Her red-nailed grip was ridiculously strong. “I… hope you like flowers?” he managed out, holding out the bouquet.

Iron Fan took it, considering the flowers. “How sweet.” she said. Without another word, she turned. “Come on, let’s go before our table is given away.” The boys followed, not sure what else to do.

When their backs were turned, Xiaotian slid his hand into Red’s hand and squeezed it in a hopeful attempt at comfort.

Red squeezed it back.

Inside, the decor was elegant- one of the fanciest places Xiaotian had ever been in. Their hostess led them up a grand staircase, overlooking the rest of the restaurant, and to a round table with a lazy Susan tray in the center. “We hope you enjoy it.” she said, promising their waiter would be by soon. Xiaotian thanked her before looking down to realize Red had pulled out his chair. Across the table, DBK had done the same to Iron Fan, pushing her in.

Together, they opened their menus. “I think we will get our usual,” DBK said, his voice rough. Xiaotian nearly jumped at it, since the man hadn’t said a word. “Do you have any thoughts, Xiaotian?”

He glanced at the menu, trying to figure out what would be best to say. The menu had been online and he had given it a quick scan ahead, but Red’s parents were leaving him floundering. “Do you have any recommendations?” he finally managed out.

Iron Fan’s grin, cold and cruel, showed he had mistepped.

In the end, it felt like they had ordered the spiciest things on the menu for their main courses. Xiaotian resisted a scream and the waiter had a pitying look on his face. So did DBK, much to his surprise. Now, all that was left to do was wait for the first course.

“So, Xiaotian,” Iron Fan said, all her attention on him. “What do you study?”

School. He could do school. “I’m doing a painting and graphic design major.” Xiaotian said, trying to sound confident. “I’m working on a webcomic idea. But if that doesn’t work out, I’m planning to go into museum work.” He had worked with his dads to figure out this backup plan, just in case.

“Oh, really.” The waiter returned to pour dark red wine into their wine glasses. Iron Fan took a sip. “What is your webcomic about?” Next to him, Red stiffened. Xiaotian stiffened as well.

“It’s… about my dad.” he finally squeaked out.

Iron Fan stiffened but this time DBK leaned forward in interest. “How is Wukong?” he said. “I haven’t heard much since my… return.” And there was another fact- they used to be friends. If things had been different, Xiaotian probably would’ve grown up with Red. “I only heard he adopted a son.”

“He’s married.” Xiaotian squeaked.

The dinner did not get better from there. 

When the food arrived, there was a glass of water that came with it for Xiaotian (which seemed to be the only mercy), and Iron Fan and DBK seemed to laser-focus on Red. It didn’t seem to matter that he was there, their words were cold, casual, and cruel as they picked at things here and there, no matter how trivial.

Finally, the dessert course was done, the check arrived, and DBK paid. “Remember your grades.” Iron Fan said when DBK’s credit card was returned. Without another word or an actual goodbye, she was standing and she and her husband were leaving. Red shuddered the minute they were out of view.

“That went well.” he finally managed out.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t much help.” Xiaotian said, not sure what else to say. At least Xiaojiao’s parents tried, or at least didn’t have their issues in front of him. “I didn’t expect…”

“Nobody expects my parents, Noodle Boy. Let’s go home.”

The ride back was in exhausted silence. “I have mochi.” Xiaotian mumbled out when they parked. “Want some?” He needed something to eat after trying to not burn his tongue off and he really didn’t want to leave Red alone.

“...yeah.”

[kaizokuou-ni-naru]

Some Reasons I Love One Piece

So I set up a poll to ask what I should do for my 4000 follower milestone, and something like 85% of the responses to my poll said you wanted me to do a compilation of stuff I love about One Piece! So hell yeah, get ready for me to talk about pirates for way too long (a sentence that could also serve as an accurate blog description).

Before that though, lemme just say- thank you all! Seriously! When I started this blog I figured I’d be extremely lucky to end up with like a thousand followers, and now I have four times that and it just keeps growing, which just constantly baffles and amazes me. I adore every one of you, and you’re providing me something fun and productive to do in quarantine, and I love you for that.

Anyways! Let’s talk good shit.

Let’s start with Luffy. The whole story starts with him, after all.

I love Luffy, just as a character. He’s one of my favorite protagonists in anything, ever, when ordinarily protagonist characters don’t really appeal to me all that much. I genuinely think he might be my favorite character in One Piece now that I sit down and really think about it. I love how unconventional of a main character he is- he actively shuns the idea of being a hero and is in fact the most chaotic neutral motherfucker on the planet, and yet he’s so friendly and loyal and fun that you straight up can’t not love him both in-universe and out. 

I also love the Strawhats just in general, both as a group and individually. Found family is one of my all-time favorite story tropes, and they do it better than like, the vast majority of stories out there. They’re all so completely unique from each other and play off each other so well and they really do feel like a family. I love how often Oda just shows them fucking around and hanging out. (One of my only gripes with post-timeskip is how much time they spend split apart.) I think it says a lot about them that I struggled so much when someone asked me to rank the Strawhats a few months back and had to rearrange the list like four times. I just!! Love them all!!

One of my favorite things about One Piece is that it’s the story of Luffy’s rise, and that it occurs in a world that’s so solidly scaled and well-developed that all progress he makes actually feels tangible and impactful. Some of my favorite moments in One Piece are the ones where we can see how far he and the crew have come and see other people’s reactions. His reappearance at Sabaody after the timeskip is my favorite scene in the manga, full stop. His entrance at Marineford and all of the Decks of the World cover stories delight me for the same reason.

Speaking of the worldbuilding, god it’s so good? I think one of the greatest potential strengths of a long manga is that its just got so much time to establish and build on so much information, and sometimes that leads to mangaka kind of tying themselves in knots with too much lore and explanation, but Oda just fucking nails it. 

I recently read a conversation during Zou where the Strawhats are talking to Inuarashi, Nekomamushi and the Wano folks about all their mutual acquaintances on the Roger Pirates- Brook asks about Crocus, Franky mentions Tom, etc- and I had a moment where I realized how in pretty much any other series all those connections might seem contrived, but in One Piece it works so well. So much time has been dedicated to establishing all these facts and characters and connections over years and hundreds of chapters that when they do come together, it just feels so satisfying. 

Like, at Twin Cape Crocus mentions he was a ship’s doctor and then mentions Roger as the Strawhats leave, at Thriller Bark we find out he’s Brook’s friend, at Sabaody in conversation with Rayleigh we find out for sure which ship he was a doctor on and that he joined them to look for Brook’s crew- and it all just falls together so nicely. One Piece is maybe the strongest series I’ve ever read in terms of how it establishes its characters and concepts and how they all fit into the world and cross over and connect with each other. The world of One Piece is huge, but it also feels so alive and interconnected, and that’s just wonderful. 

I love how hopeful One Piece is. I was talking to a friend a couple months ago who doesn’t watch it, and she kind of dismissed it as ‘a show where nobody dies.’ Which- setting aside the fact that that’s just not fucking true- my first response to that was, “So?” I think it’s nice that we can all know for pretty much certain that the Strawhats will achieve their dreams in the end. There’ll be a happy ending, and Luffy’s going to be Pirate King, we’ve known that from the start. The fun is in seeing how they get there. 

Aside from a few specific cases, I also really like how Oda does his character writing just in general. The female characters in One Piece generally get a bad rap, largely from people who haven’t watched the show and judge it on the (admittedly exaggerated) artstyle, but fuck if I haven’t seen such a widely varied and developed and flawed female cast writing-wise since- I don’t even know. Oda does a really good job of giving his characters, both male and female, unique and memorable personalities, which is super fucking impressive considering just how many there are. Similarly, I’m impressed by how new characters are introduced without getting repetitive or annoying, and very often those characters are really fantastic. I could talk about all the different One Piece characters I love and why, but we would legitimately be here all day. 

I also love how unlike a lot of long-running series like this, characters don’t just go away when their time in the spotlight is done. In just about any other series, characters like Buggy and Coby and Crocodile would just be gone and never to be heard from again after they’ve served their purpose. Instead you have the stupid clown villain from the second arc becoming a fucking shichibukai several hundred chapters later, and it makes sense in the context of the story! The whole concept of the cover stories works really well towards this aspect of One Piece, letting us see what all these other characters are up to without taking attention off the main story. This fits in with the interconnectedness I mentioned earlier, too. 

And I like how (and I know there are people who will argue this, I have had them in my inbox, but I do not care) One Piece has stayed so strong for so long. I’ve mentioned before that both of my favorite big arcs are pre-timeskip- Alabasta, for the civil war storyline and great supporting cast and villains, and W7/Enies Lobby, for the epic emotional highs and lowers + ANOTHER great supporting cast. But like, I’ve been enjoying the more recent arcs just as much! Honestly, now that I’ve finished Dressrosa, I think it definitely ranks up there among my favorites as well, for how chaotic and fun and high-stakes the whole thing felt when I was binging through it. I’m only a few chapters into Whole Cake Island so far but it seems very promising, and I’m really excited to get to Wano from what I’ve seen of it.

I haven’t even really touched on the art yet, either. I know the artstyle turns some people off of the series, for how kind of cartoony it is sometimes and how different it is from most other series, but honestly I just love it. I wasn’t sure about it at the start but it grew on me very fast. Hell, I have a whole tag (which I should use more) dedicated just to appreciation of pretty panels.

And the action scenes in One Piece are so fun and expressive and creative and almost always at least a little silly just by the nature of Luffy’s powers. I don’t think I’ve ever been bored during a One Piece fight. And the splash pages are frequently just breathtaking. I’m a writing person, not an art person, so I’m bad at putting this kind of thing into words nearly as well, but- yeah. One Piece Art Good. (My friend Narramin also has a really, really good series of posts about how great the visual storytelling in OP is starting here that I highly recommend, if you’re interested.)

Finally, I think my favorite thing about One Piece is that it’s all one story, start to end. I kind of touched on this above with the worldbuilding thing, but you can see what a ridiculous degree of thought and planning Oda has put into his story, and how well everything comes together. It’s the main aspect that got me to give One Piece a try in the first place- I heard how good and thought-out the long term storytelling is, and I just eat that shit up. I don’t think I’ve ever had the level of trust in a creator to handle and end their story satisfyingly that I have in Oda. It’s a good feeling. 

[lionheartkrbkzine]

Lionheart’s Interactive KiriBaku Twitter Thread

Pro Heroes, Bed-Sharing, Fake Dating, Quirk Accident

Rating: T (for swearing & canon-typical violence)

At the end of each Twitter update was an overnight poll where our followers got to decide the direction of the plot or details about story elements!

Feel free to reply with your thoughts, predictions, or desires, and Head Mod ET and Social Media Mod Belle will do our best to incorporate your ideas! This is a thank you and a way for us all to collaborate together until application responses are sent out on April 5th.

🧡❤️💥⚙️💥❤️🧡

Three buildings were on fire, and it wasn’t Bakugou’s fault.

Blackened smokestacks billowed above the Tokyo cityscape as he and Kirishima raced toward the scene. Bakugou took to the skies while his partner swerved between sedans and work trucks parked bumper-to-bumper on the roadway. Bakugou’s boots skid on the rough gravel of rooftops as he blasted from one to the next, his scorching propellant warping the air behind him, leaving trails of Schlieren lines in his wake.

He crouched on the edge of a four-story building above the battle, glimpses of a hero battle raging beneath the haze of ash and concrete dust. Heroes with water-based quirks tried and failed to mitigate the damage of six gangly beams of red-hot light.

“Riot, you got eyes?” he asked into his earpiece.

“Not directly on the prize, but I’m getting intel now! Are you seeing how the beams flicker in and out?”

“Yeah. Probably low level of quirk control or erratic mentality. Or both.”

“The team leader on the ground says the villain’s in a donut hole of concrete. Rubble’s piled up on all sides, so no one can get to him.”

Bakugou rolled his eyes. “Amateurs.” The villain probably got himself cornered in a pit of fallen debris and figured he could wait it out or cause enough damage to try to make a run for it. “Shock Diamond, then.”

“Now?! Finally?! Hell yeah, let's go!"

Bakugou felt the heat of the lasers as one shaved the side of his building. He sneered at the heroes doing a piss-poor job of containment and checked behind him for the extent of the damage. A singed line gouged into the wall of a parking garage, but it stopped with a blunted tip before it speared the next building. The lasers didn’t seem to work like Aoyama’s — they could only extend so far.

Not made out of light, then. Kiri will be fine.

Not that he was worried about his partner. Kirishima could handle himself.

Even if Bakugou did pack the idiot a lunch every day and nudge him to go to bed when he fell asleep on the couch. And bought him cold medicine when he stayed out late walking Mirko’s seventy-eight-year-old receptionist home on dark, rainy nights. And bleached and dyed his roots when they started growing out.

But he wasn’t worried. The fact that the beams must be a form of slow-moving energy just gave them a tactical advantage. It had nothing to do with the fact that Kirishima’s hardening was more sensitive to concentrated light attacks yet the hero would bulldoze his way in front of them anyway.

The idiot’s voice rang through Bakugou’s earpiece. “Greenlight, Dynamight!”

“No matter how many times you say it, the rhyme doesn’t get any catchier.” Like a swimmer, he gripped the edge of the roof, rose halfway from his crouch, and dove into the pool of ash and smoke head-first. 

Catching the current mid-air, he soared closer to where Kirishima was probably charging into the fray. Bakugou used the familiar shock of red hair as his signal and dropped feet-first, sending down a counterblast to stick the landing. 

As Dynamight set himself up directly behind Red Riot, they charged the villain in a single-file line. 

Without missing a beat, Kirishima extended his arms behind him at the same time Bakugou pushed his chest into the other man’s back. Kirishima’s arms locked onto Bakugou’s sides.

Bakugou tucked his chin, extended his hands behind him, and sent out a blinding explosion.

They rocketed forward — an unbreakable wall and a ballistic force. The perfect offense and defense. Explosion and Hardening. 

Dynamight and Red Riot: Shock Diamond.

As they smashed through the rubble, the devastating strength of Red Riot’s quirk wracked through Bakugou’s body, but Kirishima held him tightly against his back. The shock waves cleared from Bakugou’s spine, and he jumped into the rapidly-clearing fog of smoke and dust.

His eyes widened. He whipped his head from side to side. He stopped, listened.

The pit was empty.

Meeting his partner’s eyes, Bakugou could only think of one thing to say. “What the fuck?!”

But Red Riot was similarly dumbfounded, his brows furrowed and jaw hanging slack, glancing around the center of the crater.

Bakugou kicked at a fallen pebble, its mere presence offensive in the heat of his frustration. 

“Dynamight! Red Riot!” An aged hero with a sky blue costume ran toward them, waving his arms in ridiculous circles and spraying arcs of water through the air. “Good work out there!”

“We didn’t do shit! We just busted through a wall!”

"What Bakugou means to say is 'thank you', sir!”

“Well, the guy’s a problem for tomorrow’s heroes now. I’ve sent a team to scout the perimeter, and the police have his mugshot and quirk info. Another group is putting out the last of the fires. We’re lucky it’s a weekend — no one in those office buildings meant no casualties.” The older hero jiggled and sloshed as he rested his hands on his service belt, the edges of his existence just barely see-through as his costume molded to his mutation quirk. “For now, we need you two to handle some of the media coverage while we start to get a section of road opened back up.”

“No problem! Leave it to us!”

Flubber strode off, his boots leaving wet footprints on the asphalt.

Bakugou turned to his partner. “No.”

"Hey— where are you going?! You can't just leave the press to me all the time!"

Huffing, Bakugou slipped through an unblocked alleyway, brushing concrete crumbs off his shoulders as he took deep breaths. Normally he would feel some semblance of guilt about leaving a crime scene or abandoning Kirishima to fend off the harpies on his own, but the villain did escape. Bakugou might as well join the search of the perimeter.

A sharp scream had his feet slapping the pavement before his brain caught up.

Rounding the corner of an office park, the street opened up to allow for a municipal park one block long and one wide. Amidst swing sets and jungle gyms stood a proud maple tree. In one of its branches clung a girl no more than six years old.

Below her, a group of parents huddled in a crescent moon around the trunk, some gawking, some enjoying the entertainment, and others consoling one woman in the center of it all. Bakugou made a beeline for her.

She jumped at the hulking form of a grenade-adorned hero. He never tried very hard to work on his public image.

“Oh, Dynamight.” The whites of the woman’s eyes gaped in surprise, and she looked back and forth between the imposing hero and the girl high up in the tree. “She just— She feels more secure when she’s up high, and she got scared by all the noise and the lights, so she climbed into the tree, but now she can’t get back down and she’s too high for me to reach her, and I can’t climb up—”

“Stop.” The woman snapped her teeth closed with a click. “I’ll get her down.”

She didn’t look especially reassured. Shit. What would Kirishima do? Probably flash a smile and bang his fists together or some other cute-ass Kirishima-ism. Bakugou gave her a closed-mouth smile and a stiff pat on the shoulder instead. That’ll do.

Grasping a branch with one hand and placing the flat of his boot on the trunk, he hoisted himself into the tree. He climbed higher and higher, wary of the thinning branches. When he couldn’t fit on the remaining limbs, he lifted his arms out for the girl.

“C’mon, I’ll take you back to your mom.” His voice was soft, low, and practiced. The girl eyed him warily, but after catching a glimpse of her mom below, shuffled into Bakugou’s hold. “Good job. Just hold on to me like you did to the branch, okay?”

She nodded against his shoulder, and he began his climb back down.

“What’s your name?”

“Matatabi,” she mumbled.

“What were you doin’ that high up?”

“Wanted to catch it.”

He frowned, wondering what it was, but they had reached the bottom and he had reached his patience quota for the day. Especially when the girl threw a fit in his arms, hissing and wiggling, and pushing and scratching at him. “Oi!” He dropped her, and she scurried to her mom, leaving him with whiplash and three welts on his bicep.

“Oh. Oh, dear.” The mother looked like she was about to confess to murder. Great. “Did she scratch you?”

No shit. “Yes, but it’s completely understandable.”

“Ah, awe, thank you—” at least he got a smile out of that one “—but, um, there may be a bit of an issue?” Of course there is. “She seems to activate her quirk when she scratches or bites.” She grimaced, floundering for her next words.

He took a deep breath. It wasn’t the kid’s fault. “It’s fine. What should I expect with the effects?”

“Um. Cat?”

He blinked. “Cat?”

She nodded. “Cat.”

“Dynamight!”

They both looked up then to Red Riot’s jogging figure, dust and cement billowing behind his ass cape. 

“Everything alri-oh.” Kirishima was staring somewhere above Bakugou’s forehead, his mouth formed in the perfect ‘O’ shape.

“What are you looking at?!”

“Ears.”

Bakugou’s stomach fell into his butt. “What?”

“Bro… ears. You have… ears.”

“No.”

“Dude they look so soft.” Slow hands lifted higher and higher, above Bakugou’s face up to the top of his head. “Can I just—”

Bakugou slapped his hands away. “Don’t you dare,” he hissed.

Kirishima chortled— chortled! — and turned to the mother of the tree climbing, cat nabbing daughter.

Bakugou watched the exchange with clenched fists.

“I’m so sorry!” She bowed low, almost tipping her kid onto the ground. “Is she in trouble?”

“No, no!” Kirishima smiled at them. They seeped into it like a warm blanket on a cold day. “We’ll just get your contact information in case we have any further questions about the quirk—”

A sharp pain stung both of Bakugou’s palms. He hissed and checked his hands, tuning out the rest of Kirishima’s mediation.

Claws. He had ears and claws.

Well, at least he had another weapon now — that was pretty cool, actually. As soon as the thought passed through his head, the claws retracted into his nail beds, leaving behind his normal, blunt nails.

He felt his ears droop to the side of his head.

“So… do you want to head back to the agency?”

He looked up at his partner, giving him his best baleful glare with the ears and all. Kirishima just snorted. “There’s no way in Hell I’m going back there like this.”

“Awe, but you could be our new office mascot.” He reached forward to pet Bakugou’s ear again. He was unsuccessful. “Alright, alright,” he laughed, pulling out his phone, “let’s call Mirko and get our next orders, then.” The ringer blasted loud and clear, Kirishima holding his phone in selfie-mode.

“You little shit! She doesn’t need to see!”

They played a game of impromptu tag until their boss picked up. She, of course, immediately burst into guffaws of laughter. 

Bakugou was so ready for today to be over.

“Hey, boss! What, uh— What do you suggest we do here with uh, Cat...kugou?”

“I’ll kill you,” he whispered.

“Hell if I know, I’ve never needed flea prevention.” Bakugou balked. “Take him to the vet, I guess!”

“Yessir!” Kirishima hung up before Bakugou could even process the words that just came out of his boss’s mouth.

“I am not—” he huffed “—going—” huff “—to the fucking VET!”

🧡❤️💥⚙️💥❤️🧡

If All Might himself had told Bakugou that hero life would involve sitting on a metal exam table in a veterinarian’s office, he wouldn’t believe a word of it. Not because it was impossible. Just because Bakugou would never get himself into that kind of situation.

He craned his neck back, glaring at his reflection in the operating mirror hanging from the ceiling. Two ash blond ears twitched back at him.

He sighed, crossing his arms and adjusting his seat on the hard metal. If I grow a tail, I’m gonna scream.

After what felt like hours of waiting, twitching, and reading pamphlets about “What to do if you have a fat cat,” the vet finally strode through the door, Kirishima hot on her heels.

She turned, frowning. “Oh, I’m so sorry — I know you’re hero partners, but technically the exam room is family only."

Bakugou’s eyes flicked to Kirishima. His partner met his desperate glare head-on.

[4haechie]

son of apollo!donghyuck

pairing: son of apollo!donghyuck x child of athena!reader genre: fluff, comedy, some adventure/action, pjo au, e2l au words: 3,173 warning: couple of curse words here n there a/n: i reference a bunch of pjo characters in this so if u haven’t read pjo *crowd booing*

so donghyuck’s the son of apollo right

there’s like no arguing when it comes to that

he’s extremely talented at singing and making music, dancing, rapping, songwriting, so he’s no doubt apollo’s offspring

and he’s naturally gifted at archery as well

you can’t spell haechan without ACE teehee

u on the other hand

you’re athena’s child

you love to read and write you’re incredibly smart ofc

you love competing and winning and taking part in strategy making to bring your opponents DOWN 💅🏼

athena’s the goddess of wisdom as well as warcraft so needless to say you’re exceptional in both fields

you’re not just textbook smart, no no, you’re able to apply all the knowledge you learn…well…irl

not to mention you’re good with all kinds of weapons

ur fave weapons include swords and spears :D

you’re okay w knives too!!! and daggers!!! you’re not picky

but you’re better w longer blades just cuz u have more experience w them

fun fact: you’re the head of the athena cabin and donghyuck’s the head of the apollo cabin

you’re both great leaders, always doing your best to make the best strategies to win capture the flag, the chariot races, and other fun activities chiron plans for the campers 😁

but . you guys are Sworn Enemies

actually the better term to use would be “rivals”

you guys r So competitive to the point where you actually developed a rivalry during your first few years at camp half-blood

donghyuck LOVES to win but so do you… so obv he’s gonna go out of his way to make sure he/his cabin wins

that doesn’t mean you’ve ever backed down from his challenges…

if he’s competitive you’re twice as competitive

one day after breakfast during your fifth year at camp when you’re both about 18, chiron decides to host a good old game of capture the flag

u know . for old times’ sake 😼

once he makes the announcement you immediately turn to your cabin mates

“we have to win no matter what”

“y/n, it’s just capture the flag. we’re not fighting gaea”

“bitch are u in or not”

the entire dining hall is buzzing with excitement

nothing makes a demigod’s day like a capture the flag announcement 😌

chiron suddenly grabs the megaphone again and calls out “this time however there’s a little twist,” he chuckles as everybody goes silent

you raise an eyebrow

“you’ll be in teams of course. everybody has to play. there’s twenty cabins, so there will be ten teams of two cabins each. i’ll pair you guys up myself. each pair gets a flag–so there’s ten flags in total. the game will be won by the pair who manages to collect all flags and brings them back to their base before anyone has the chance to steal their own flag.”

the demigods burst into intense chatter and discussion once more

you turn your head back to your siblings and tilt your head in slight confusion

you’ve never played capture the flag in teams before

“anyone but apollo. i’m literally begging. sam, pray to athena right now”

“y/n RELAX”

“i think if we’re partners with apollo’s cabin i’ll actually jump into tartarus”

“…”

“what? percy and annabeth survived” 🙄

chiron pulls out a scroll and calls out the pairings one by one

poseidon and demeter, hades and ares (good luck to them), so on and so forth

your heart keeps racing . athena’s name has not been called out yet

and just like that your worst fear comes true

“athena cabin with apollo cabin. the game will commence in thirty minutes, which is how much time you have to prepare. good luck and stay safe!”

you drop your head into your palm (aka head in hands meme jpg)

“this is the worst day of my entire life”

“y/n, you’re hands down the most dramatic person i’ve ever met”

maybe it’s just you–bc your siblings seem fine with the apollo kids

they have so many apollo cabin friends :(

curse u and donghyuck’s little rivalry that the entire camp and chiron knows about

so him putting yall together definitely was not a coincidence cough cough

can u blame him

🌤🌈 he just wants all of u to get along 🌈🌤

he’s seen w his own two centaur eyes what happens when demigods fight between themselves

it’s not healthy

he needs u guys to get along bc u and donghyuck are some of the best demigods at camp rn

ur quick wits and amazing sword skills

his position as the camp’s best archer

imagine how powerful yall would be if u two worked together

if only you got along from the start.. but nooooo

ur egos r just too high F

but anyway, back to the present

you’re sitting there, head in your hands, dreading this already when some of the apollo kids swagger over to your guys’ table

donghyuck is in front of them as he scoffs after seeing your dreadful state

“why the sad face, y/n?”

you lift your head up to see him hovering over your seat and roll your eyes

you get up and your siblings follow

you’re just gonna have to make do. you don’t have time to complain

the thing is

you’ve only lost capture the flag once 👎🏼

a few summers ago the apollo cabin defeated the entire camp leaving everybody speechless

it’s true they didn’t defeat JUST you but somehow you thought it was personal

you had the PERFECT record 😕

zero losses . only wins

but bc of the apollo kids your cabin’s record was tarnished

which is sorta why you started hating them (esp donghyuck their leader) so much

donghyuck caught on immediately and made it a point to compete just as hard as u

so yea. that’s how you became rivals

he knows how much ur gonna hate working with him but u don’t really have a choice now do u :/

so he knows exactly why u have a sad face

but this is donghyuck we’re talking about

just bc yall r “rivals” doesn’t mean he’s not gonna tease u 😂😂😂

(or maybe he teases u bc he thinks ur cute and he hopes one day u realise him teasing is actually donghyuck for flirting 🤭)

“you know damn well why, lee donghyuck”

“oh c’mon i think it’ll be fun! if we combine our skills, we definitely have a hundred percent chance of winning”

you cross your arms and glance at your siblings who just shrug in agreement

you sigh loudly

“don’t even think about fucking this is up, donghyuck. and just so we’re clear, i’m in charge”

he laughs, “yup! got it”

so you start talking strategy

you only have 30 minutes so you need to make the best of it

you divide the two cabins into pairs so that an athena and an apollo kid will be paired together and in charge of smth diff

you have plenty of people on your team – 5 in athena’s cabin and 5 in apollo’s cabin

some will handle weapons and safety gear, some will handle mapping out the playing area which was basically the entirety of the woods, some will be setting up traps near your team’s flag to prevent others from coming close

30 minutes quickly pass and after dividing the work and planning your strategy with donghyuck and friends you turn your attention back to chiron who has his megaphone in hand

everyone’s told to gather outside the dining hall at the open field before the game commences

you, donghyuck, and your teammates briefly talk strategy once more . just to make sure everybody knows what they’re supposed to do

“let the game begin!” chiron blows a loud whistle and the demigods scramble out of the field, going to their designated flag locations

your spot is near a little creek, but the forest around your flag is quite dense so u figure it’s relatively hard to locate

it’s not that late so the afternoon sun makes your skin glisten with sweat

“damn, can you tell your dad to chill tf out for a while,” you tell donghyuck jokingly

he just rolls his eyes but on the inside he’s kinda glad you’re being casual with him rather than 😡😡😡😡😡 like u normally are

u don’t know what it is about him today but u swear he’s acting different around u

he wasn’t… as annoying while discussing strategy ????

he actually ?????? listened ?????? to what u had to say 🤔🤔🤔🤔

he didn’t argue, he didn’t even throw around witty burns like he usually does w/o hesitation

u were like… is he ok

little do u know!!! he actually l*kes u 🤭🤭🤭

well… it’s not a 100% fact that HE himself knows as well

but his siblings caught on to his weird behaviour n figured smth was up

mark being one of hyuck’s closest friends n siblings in the apollo cabin, realised he was acting weird ever since yall got grouped together

he seemed nervous ⁉️ which he never ever is

he’s like the most confident person mark’s ever known

so mark was like *thinks*

after putting two and two together mark came to the conclusion that he might have a small crush on u

bc hyuck kept glancing over at u, kept talking abt how ur a good leader (he’s never gonna tell YOU that tho. he crossed his heart on that one)

mark was like i didn’t even ask but ok

mark was confused at first tho cuz everybody and their mom knows about your guys’ rivalry so why tf would hyuck have a crush on someone he considers his rival

mark decides not to get ahead of himself bc hey!!! maybe he doesn’t have a crush, maybe he just thinks ur a good leader

like that’s it u know?

LMAO 🤫

so anywayz where was i

ah right

the flag

OK SO ur team’s flag is yellow ! :D

it’s like the colour of sunflowers

you and donghyuck r in charge of guarding the flag while ur team members scout around for the other flags

easy peasy

you and donghyuck are at your base now, weapons drawn just in case

the flag is hung on a poll couple feet taller than you

you’re dressed in ur usual training clothes – a pair of washed out shorts, a very old orange camp half-blood shirt; your sword’s sheath hanging from one of the belt loops of your shorts

donghyuck’s dressed similarly – a pair of blue ripped jeans, the same orange camp shirt tucked into them, but he has a purple flannel on, which he takes off and ties around his waist

“it’s so freaking hot,” he says, mentally agreeing with the comment u made about apollo earlier

“tell me about it”

there’s a silence that follows, the only sound heard is the subtle flow of the creek water

you’re thankful for the silence

it’s easier to keep an ear open for opponents on their way to steal your flag

just as you think about it, an ares and a hades kid approach your base

they’re on the other side of the creek, less than ten to fifteen feet away

“hi y/n,” the hades kid you’re kind of close to says

you shoot him a fake smile before holding your sword in front of you

donghyuck pulls out an arrow from his quiver and nocks it in his bow, aiming for the two demigods in front of you

the creek isn’t that deep, so the two demigods cross it with ease

they have their weapons drawn; they’re now a couple of feet away from you and more importantly the flag

no words are said as donghyuck lets his arrow fly and knock the hades’ kid sword out of his hands

he didn’t use an arrow with a sharp tip, you note

the hades’ kid stumbles backwards, imbalanced after he gets unarmed

you stand your ground as the ares’ kid scrambles forward, attacking you with her sword

your blades clash defiantly

you continue to spar with all your might

from the corner of your eye you see that the hades’ kid, sword back in hand, is battling donghyuck on your left

the flag is right behind you and donghyuck; you can’t let the two demigods get near it

you and the ares kid are still battling each other, putting all your strength into making sure she surrenders

but u should know better

ares and athena kids have many similarities like their love for winning, their confidence in battle, etc.

it’s like looking in a mirror

you don’t have anything against this particular ares kid, though

“c’mon, y/n, give up already”

that REALLY makes your blood boil

you never give up, no matter what

with one final blow of your sword, you knock her sword out of her hands, making her think she distracted you with her words

she goes flying back, half her body landing in the creek water

her sword lies in between you and her, but you doubt she’ll have the courage to fight again

the hades kid sees this and quickly scrambles away from hyuck, picking up the ares kid’s sword and giving her a hand up

“this is why i hate you and your siblings–your huge ego always gets in the way,” you hear the hades kid grumble to his partner as they run away from you, shame written all over their defeat

hyuck laughs and wipes sweat from his forehead

you can’t help but laugh either

you love it here at 🧡 camp half-blood 🧡

a few moments pass as your teammates emerge from the dense woods, each pair with a different colour flag held between them

you smile in victory

you quickly bring down your flag from its pole and give it to hyuck

“me? it was your plan…”

“yeah, but i couldn’t have done it without you, hyuck”

he almost passes out at your choice of nickname

back at the main hall, chiron announces your team as the winner, and that the prize yall being excused from doing chores all week long!!!!

it’s not much, but hey, at least you and hyuck ended up working together and winning the game, right?

later, hyuck pulls you aside from your cabin mates, and walks you to the lakeside

you two sit at the deck, side by side, watching the water doing nothing in particular

you watch as hyuck swings his feet lightly, his toes barely touching the water

“y/n, do you hate me?” donghyuck asks out of the blue

you’re like 😳 what

now that he asks you that . like straight up . it makes u think

do u REALLY hate him

or do u just hate losing to him

“why would i hate you?” you question back

“i don’t know? i guess because of our, um, rivalry thing i thought you can’t stand me”

you play with the beads of your camp necklace

“i don’t hate you, donghyuck. i just hate losing. i guess it’s the athena in me,” you laugh at how lame you sound

“i hate losing too, but i don’t hate you, in case you’re wondering.”

he takes a deep breath

“i know we started going against one another ‘cause of that one time my cabin won capture the flag, but i don’t want things to stay this way,” he pushes his hair back

“i guess what i’m saying is… i like working with you.” he pauses

“yeah,” he says, as if more convinced now, “and i would really like to get to know you better,” he clears his throat, very clearly embarrassed

you laugh at his flustered state

“stop laughing at me,” he stretches the last syllable as he lightly shoves you with his shoulder

you’re trying even harder to not laugh now, but for his sake, you hold it in

“that’s probably the cutest thing you’ve ever said”

he crosses his arms, “i’m always cute”

you’re like. THE NERVE?????? 😒😒😒

“how ‘bout we go slow? i mean, we just became un-enemies, we’re gonna need to be friends first, right?” you poke his shoulder

“you make a good point”

“i’m literally athena’s child, but okay”

“shut up!”

✨ time skip ✨

both u and hyuck stay at camp over the holidays which means more bonding time!!! yay!!!!!

a year has passed and u and hyuck r basically bffs, attached at the hip, and everybody except mark is surprised as fuck

rmb the days when hyuck thought u were “cute”?

welp 🤭 he’s at that point where everything u do makes his heart flutter

yeah… he likes u Like A Lot

u have no clue abt his feelings for u and he has no clue abt ur feelings for him either

exactly a year after the iconic capture the flag game, ur both seated at the deck by the lakeside, side by side, again

“y/n…there’s something you need to know”

“if you’re gonna tell me about the mixtape you’re dropping with mark, i literally don’t want to hear it”

“THAT WAS ONE TIME”

“YOU GOT THE ENTIRE CAMP’S HOPES UP FOR NO REASON”

both of you burst into fits of laughter

after calming down, he shoves your shoulder lightly with his shoulder, like he always does (only to u tho)

“no, seriously, i need to tell you something”

“what’s up?”

“i,” he pauses, clears his throat, “like you. a lot–i have for a while now.”

you swear your heart stops beating and your brain explodes

HE? LIKES? U?????????

he continues, “i don’t know if you like me back, but i’ve been wanting to tell you this for so long–guess i didn’t have the courage until recently,” he lets out an airy laugh

you’re looking at him in the eyes now; a subtle shimmer of the afternoon sun sparkling in his eyes

“hyuck, i like you too. how could i possibly not?” you chuckle at his shocked expression

he goes :O

he’s genuinely speechless when you lean forward and press your lips ever so softly onto his

you literally feel him freeze, which worries you for a second, but your worry is washed away when he slowly kisses you back

you melt right then and there

he takes your hand in his, interlocking fingers, as you pull away, a faint pink blush painting both your cheeks

“wow”

“really, y/n? that’s all you have to say? what happened to being wisdom’s child, huh?”

“donghyuck, i SWEAR to ALL THE GODS–!”

your sentence is cut off when he presses his lips onto yours again, you smile into the kiss which causes him to smile with you

he kisses you again and again, and then again, until you’re both a giggling mess

“let’s stay like this forever, yeah? what do you say?” he says, bringing his lips to your forehead, lingering there for a moment before pulling back and looking at you

you look at your intertwined hands, and then back up at him, “i’d like that”

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

April 7, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

Last night, commentator Kevin Williamson published a piece in National Review justifying voter suppression by suggesting that “the republic would be better served by having fewer—but better—voters.” Representatives, he says, “are people who act in other people’s interests,” which is different from doing what voters want.

This is the same argument elite slaveholder James Henry Hammond made before the Senate in 1858, when he defended the idea that Congress should recognize the spread of human enslavement into Kansas despite the fact that the people living in that territory wanted to abolish slavery. Our Constitution, Hammond said, did not dictate that people should “be annoyed with the cares of Government,” but rather directed that they should elect leaders who would take those cares upon themselves.

It is the same argument wealthy men made in the 1890s when they illustrated that laws calling for “better” voters meant that white registrars would hand-pick the nation’s voting population. In the South and the North both, legislators wrote new state constitutions to keep Black men, immigrants, and poor workers from the polls. Leading Americans argued that such men “corrupted” the vote by electing lawmakers who provided public infrastructure like schools and hospitals, paid for with the tax dollars of hardworking white men. To keep poor voters and men of color from the ballot, new state laws called for literacy tests, in which white registrars personally judged a man’s ability to read; poll taxes for which one had to keep the receipts; grandfather clauses, in which a man could vote if his grandfather had, and so on.

Williamson’s is the same argument Arizona Senator Barry’s Goldwater’s ghostwriter made in 1960 in The Conscience of a Conservative, when he wrote in frustration about the New Deal government that was wildly popular despite businessmen’s hatred for it. The framers had absolutely not created a democracy, he wrote, but rather had worried about “a tyranny of the masses” who would vote for laws that redistributed tax dollars into projects that would benefit themselves.

The theory of government that lies behind the argument for limiting the vote to “better” voters was also articulated by Senator Hammond in his 1858 speech. He explained that the South had figured out the best government in the world. It had put a few wealthy, educated, well-connected men in power over everyone else: those he called “mudsills,” workers who produced the capital that supported society but had little direction or ambition and had to be controlled by their superiors. In the South, Hammond explained to his northern colleagues, the mudsills were Black, but in the North they were wage workers. It was imperative such men be kept from political power, for “[i]f they knew the tremendous secret, that the ballot-box is stronger than ‘an army with banners,’ and could combine, where would you be? Your society would be reconstructed, your government overthrown, your property divided… by the quiet process of the ballot-box….”

In 1859, Abraham Lincoln rejected this vision of government by wealthy elites and replaced it with one of his own. Government worked best not when it protected the property and thus the power of a few wealthy elites, said this poor man’s son, but when it protected equality of access to resources and equality before the law for everyone. Rather than concentrating wealth upward, society should protect the rights of all men to the fruits of their own labor.

Throughout our history, adherents of these two different visions of what constitutes the best government for the U.S. have struggled. On the one hand are those who say that the country operates best when the government is controlled by a few wealthy, educated, well-connected, and usually white and male leaders. The argument goes that they are the only ones with the skills, the insight, and the experience to make good decisions about national policy, particularly economic policy. And it is important that wealth concentrate in their hands, since they will act as its stewards, using it wisely in lump sums, while if the workers who produce wealth get control of it they will fritter it away.

On the other hand are those like Lincoln, who believe that government should reflect the will of the majority, not simply on principle, but because a wide range of voices means the government has a better chance of getting things right than when only a few people rule.

In today’s world, Americans appear to be siding with the popular measures of the Democrats. A Morning Consult/Politico poll today says that 65% of Americans support higher corporate taxes to pay for infrastructure and that 82% want infrastructure in any case. To make matters worse for the Republicans, counties that voted for Biden provide 70% of the nation’s gross domestic product, the value of goods and services in the nation. The large corporations Republicans used to be able to count on for money and support are now eager to court these young, liberal producers.

So, to combat the nation’s drift toward popular government, it appears the current-day Republican Party has taken up the cause of elite rule.

Williamson is not the only Republican to muse about how getting rid of voters might be good for the nation. Arizona state representative John Kavanagh has said of voting that “[q]uantity is important, but we need to look at the quality of votes as well.”

Today, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) reacted to a story about rising crime rates during the pandemic by tweeting that “[w]e have a major under-incarceration problem in America.” He appears to think that we need more people in jail despite the fact that we already imprison our people at a rate more than 5 times higher than that of the rest of the world. We imprison nearly 2.3 million people, with another 3.6 million on probation and another 840,000 on parole. More important for the current struggle over government, though, his statement is that of an authoritarian rather than a democratic leader, and fits nicely with the idea of a strong-handed elite rule.

In Florida, Republican lawmakers appear ready to silence their opponents with a law that would, according to the Miami Herald, “require public colleges and universities to survey students, faculty and staff about their beliefs and viewpoints.” It would also permit students to record their professors without their consent for a civil or criminal case against their school. A lobbyist for the measure, Barney Bishop, told journalist Ana Ceballos that “the cards are stacked in the education system… toward the left and toward the liberal ideology and also secularism — and those were not the values that our country was founded on…. [T]hose are the values that we need to get our country back to.” “The truth of the matter,” he said, “is that kids are being indoctrinated from an early age.”

Also today, a member of the Boogaloo Bois who attended a “Stop the Steal” rally at the state capitol in Minnesota as part of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election was arrested and charged with illegal possession of a machine gun. He had used a 3D printer to alter a semi-automatic weapon to make it shoot automatically.

The Republican attack on democracy is not playing well at home (although a number of our adversaries like it well enough). A new Gallup poll shows that an average of 49% of Americans consider themselves Democratic or Democratic-leaning Independents while only 40% identify as Republicans or as Republican-leaning Independents. This is the highest split since 2012.

Still, in the end, if Republicans manage to rewrite the voting laws to silence their opponents, how their actions play with the majority of American voters won’t matter in the least.

—-

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[nitewrighter]

Hey :) i kinda miss your prefall Gency fic... Do you think you can write some more ? Take care ♥

I’m still thinking about the canonical existence of Overwatch Propaganda Cartoons that we saw in that preview of Hero of Numbani.

...can you tell I watched old GI Joe opening theme songs specifically for this fic?

Also credit goes to @apocryphist for coming up with “underhand” which really should be the only name for villains in the Overwatch universe.

-----

Genji drummed his fingers on the conference room table as he rested his chin in his other hand. Mercy sat to his left, nonchalantly tapping out some correspondence on her tablet as they waited. On his other side, Tracer was bouncing her knee with her fingers interlaced on the table in front of her, doing her best to at least put forward the semblance of a strike team leader despite her fidgeting. Winston sat stiffly next to her, apparently trying to scroll through lab results on his own tablet but clearly too nervous to stay focused. It was a bright and slightly breezy afternoon in Zurich, and normally Genji would have been gracefully slashing his way through the training grounds at this time, but instead they were all here.

“I can’t stand it when they don’t say what the meetings are about,” mumbled Winston. 

“It’s probably a top secret mission!” said Tracer.

“’Secret?’” said Winston, sounding even more nervous, “I’m... I’m not exactly good at ‘secret.’”

“Is it unrealistic to hope we got more intel from Doomfist?” said Genji, glancing at Mercy.

“I wish,” huffed Mercy, “But from what debriefings I could get my hands on, he hasn’t given us anything useful.”

“How is that possible?” said Genji, “After all the internal damage he did to Talon’s internal power structure, shouldn’t they be scrambling without him? Shouldn’t there be a power vacuum?”

“I don’t know any more than you do...” said Winston, readjusting his glasses. 

“Honestly I thought you’d know more about it, what with the Blackwatch stuff,” said Tracer.

“Still benched,” said Genji, folding his arms.

“Officially,” said Mercy with a slight side-eye.

Genji gave her an amused “Hmph,” before saying, “Either way, Reyes pushed me out of the loop now that I’m on your strike team... not that I paid that much attention to the loop befo---”

The door opened and everyone perked up at the sight of Jack Morrison and Sojourn walking into the room. Jack seemed uneasy, but honestly Mercy couldn’t really recall the last time he seemed at ease.

“Okay, before we start, I want all of you to keep an open mind with this,” he said, looking across all of them.

“...Very encouraging, Strike Commander,” said Sojourn, with slightly sardonic amusement. She put her hands on her hips and turned to face Tracer’s strike team, “As you all know, when you’re recruited into Overwatch, you sign a waiver allowing us to use your image in... all sorts of stuff. Press releases, scientific publications, training videos for new recruits---”

“Posters,” said Mercy, already skeptical.

“Posters, too,” said Sojourn with a smile, “However, back during Omnic Crisis Reconstruction, we were using the images of heroes for a lot more.”

“Heroes?” Genji repeated quietly as Sojourn produced a remote control from the pocket of her jacket and hit a button. The venetian blinds tilted to shut out the sunlight and the lights of the room dimmed as the wallscreen lit up behind Sojourn. The screen lit up in bright colors and red and yellow explosions as a trumpeting fanfare started playing. Tracer’s face lit up as a young cartoon version of Jack Morrison appeared on the screen, pumping his fist in the air. 

“The world needs heroes!” said the cartoon Jack Morrison, “Are you with us?” 

Genji glanced at Jack who was very clearly cringing at his cartoon self.

“Oh yes!” said Tracer, her eyes bright, “It’s been years since I’ve watched this! You guys know the song, right?” she said looking at her teammates, “..No?”

The theme song was already playing, and Tracer was singing along with it eagerly.

There’s no need to fear

Overwatch is here!

Saving all we hold dear!

Mercy made a ‘I really hope this meeting isn’t going the way I think it’s going,’ face at Genji and Genji suppressed a chuckle, but Tracer seemed absolutely thrilled and even Winston was humming along with the theme song. The theme song kept playing and even introduced different members of the old Overwatch Strike team. One of the animators clearly had fun lavishing a lot of attention on Ana Amari’s hair whipping around from the force of an explosion behind her. A still-blonde cartoon Reinhardt brawled fist-to-fist with some kind of black and neon green robot. Cartoon Morrison jumped a motorcycle off of an aircraft carrier with cartoon Reyes wielding a missile launcher in the sidecar. Torbjörn and Liao were working side by side in a lab before the camera panned out to reveal they were in a bright blue tank-like vehicle Genji safely assumed was entirely made up to sell toys, firing off RPG’s with even more explosions. Sojourn chuckled watching her cartoon self fire two submachine guns at black and neon green helicopters while parachuting out of an exploding jet. There was, all in all, a frankly ridiculous amount of explosions. It finally ended with one last massive explosion and fanfare and cartoon versions of Sojourn and the entire original strike team all pumping their fists in the air with Morrison in the center. 

Sojourn hit another button on her remote, the wall screen blipped off, the venetian blinds opened and the lights came on, leaving everyone sitting at the conference table blankly.

“Ahh! Still just as good as when I was a kid!” said Tracer, excitedly.

“Now, I know what you’re going to say--” Morrison started.

“Propaganda,” said Mercy, “You want to put us in propaganda.”

“You’re already in propaganda,” said Sojourn, flatly.

“This is propaganda aimed at children!” said Mercy.

“Do you know how young Talon is recruiting?” said Sojourn.

“That doesn’t mean we should stoop to their level!” said Mercy.

“Wars aren’t just won by strategy and firepower, they’re also won by ideology, by public support,” Winston suggested.

Mercy remembered something Moira said and it sent a shiver down her spine. 

The true struggle is for the superiority of ideas.

“Thank you, Winston,” said Jack, “It’s not necessarily about convincing them to join, it’s about convincing people that we have their best interests in mind. Which...” Jack gestured, “We do.”

“Those bad guys didn’t look like Talon,” said Genji.

“Oh, it wasn’t Talon!” said Tracer excitedly, before dropping into a dramatic narrator voice, “Underhand is a Ruthless Criminal Organization determined to rule the world!”

“Uh--Underhand?” said Winston. Jack said nothing but somehow managed to look more dead inside.

“...Overwatch and Underhand...” Mercy repeated incredulously.

“So--we’re going to be in a cartoon?” said Genji. For some reason, his armor seemed to feel tighter, pinching, constricting around him.

“Well, we did some polling after the Doomfist fight and ran some algorithms through a handful of popular forums and social media,” Sojourn explained, “It turns out you’re all very popular with the younger crowd. Winston and Tracer pull the biggest numbers, but you, Genji, are incredibly popular with boys aged 6 to 14.”

“I...I am?” said Genji.

“Shining armor,” said Mercy, smiling at him, and steam vented from his shoulders.

“And Mercy has a death-grip on the ‘Girls aged 3 to 11′ demographic,” said Sojourn.

“So... more girls are getting into STEM?” said Mercy.

“I’m.. not sure about that, but they seem to really like the fact that you’re pretty and you can fly,” said Sojourn, flipping through the report on her own tablet. 

Mercy’s face dropped and she shook her head. She pursed her lips and thought for a few moments. “I’m not sure about this...”

“If we’re all over the news already, it could help to put stuff out there that gives us more control over our image,” said Winston, he scratched the side of his head, “It... would be nice to show people I’m more than just a gorilla...”

“Genji?” said Mercy, looking over at him. Genji was running his thumb over the knuckles of his prosthetic hand and he seemed to snap out of some particularly stressful train of thought.

“Oh...um... well... it would give you a chance to talk more about Overwatch as a peacekeeping organization?” said Genji, “And if you’re talking about it to children...” 

“They might be less inclined to carry on the conflicts of previous generations!” said Mercy, her eyes brightening.

“Like we said, ideologies,” said Jack.

Mercy inhaled thoughtfully. “If--if we’re going to do this, I want my likeness used responsibly. I don’t want to advocate for violence in any form.”

“...yeah I figured you’d say that,” said Jack.

“And, even if we’re going through fictional conflicts, I don’t want it... glamorized and sensationalized like the old cartoon. We don’t need all those explosions---”

“You did pull Genji out of that explosion a few weeks ago though,” said Tracer.

“Well that’s different--! That’s--!” Mercy huffed, “I think we should push more of Overwatch’s scientific and humanitarian efforts. Show that making the world a better place is more complicated than just.. shooting at bad guys.”

“We could have a science corner!” Winston chimed in, “’Winston’s Science Corner!’”

“Ooh! And maybe I should say something about friendship and teamwork at the end!” said Tracer.

Genji was shrinking a little where he was sitting, unconsciously sliding his wrist plate back and forth.

“What do you think? Edu-tainment?” said Sojourn, glancing back at Jack.

“Could go over easier than a purely fictionalized narrative,” murmured Jack.

“Aw, I wanna fight Underhand, though!” said Tracer.

“Well in any case, you can expect more correspondence from our PR department as we move forward in this project,” said Sojourn. 

“You might not be fighting Talon in some far-flung corner of the world, but make no mistake: this is an important part of the fight,” said Jack.

“And who knows,” said Sojourn as an assistant hurried in with a cardboard box and set it on the conference table, “You could end up some kid’s best friend.”

Tracer and her strike team all stood up from their seats to look into the box.

“Oh commander...!” Tracer looked about to burst with excitement as she reached into the box and pulled out an action figure of herself, “I love it!” She turned over the action figure in her hands and saw a button on the back. She pressed it.

“Cheers love! The Cavalry’s here!” said the Tracer action figure.

“That’s my line!” said Tracer, delighted.

“It’s quite a stunning likeness,” said Winston, taking his own action figure out of the box. He pressed a button on the back of his action figure. 

“Primal Punch!” declared the Winston action figure and Winston chuckled.

Mercy took both the Genji and the Mercy action figures out of the box and chuckled a little. 

“Yours is so pretty, Doc! They even got the wings!” said Tracer as Mercy fiddled around with the action figure’s wings.

“Yes, ‘pretty and flies’ indeed.’ I might be more inclined if she comes with a lab coat accessory,” said Mercy, giving a skeptical glance to her action figure’s bust size. She pressed a button between her action figure��s wings and scoffed a little as the action figure said, “Heroes never die!” 

She held Genji’s action figure out to him and he hesitantly took it. “What do you think?”

Genji turned the action figure over in his hand and looked at the button on the back. He pressed it, but the figure said nothing.

“Oh we um... didn’t really have a ‘catchphrase’ for you yet,” said Sojourn as Genji gingerly ran the finger of his prosthetic hand up the blade of the action figure’s sword clasped in his little plastic hand, “We were hoping you could put in a word for it. These are just mock-ups, really.” 

You’re incredibly popular with boys age 6 to 14...

Genji moved the arm of the action figure up and down, the figure striking downward with its sword, and he thought of young boys playing with this miniature him. Running with the action figure clutched in little hands with white knuckles, playing out battles, having the action figure swing its sword at all those foes, imitating his own swordsmanship, fighting their brothers with sticks, punching each other, kicking each other---

“No,” Genji said on reflex.

“What?” said Sojourn, glancing up from Tracer chattering about her own action figure.

“I--I said no. I shouldn’t have an action figure. I shouldn’t be in the show,” said Genji. His voice was tight.

“Genji...” Mercy started.

“...is it about how you look?” said Sojourn, “Because Genji, I can tell you, seeing people like us on the screen means the world to kids with prosthetics---”

“No--” Genji was stammering, “It’s not about that, it’s--”

“Genji, you’re a part of the team,” Tracer tried to reassure him, “It wouldn’t be the same without you--”

“Children shouldn’t want to be like me!” Genji blurted out, and there was a small plasticky snap. Genji glanced down and saw that he had unthinkingly broken the arm off of his own action figure. The entire room had gone silent, staring at him. He set both the action figure and its broken-off arm on the table and exhaled. “I’m-- I need to think about it,” he said, pushing up from the table and walking briskly out of the room.

“Genji, wait--” said Mercy, standing up. Her eyes flicked to the broken Genji action figure on the table and she picked it up, tucking both the figure and the broken off arm in the pocket of her lab coat. The door slid shut behind Genji but she quickly walked after him, leaving Morrison, Sojourn, Tracer, and Winston alone in the room. A long quiet pause passed between the four of them.

“Maybe just web shorts?” said Winston, “Just.. um... just the science corner?”

“Winston--” Tracer huffed.

“Right--sorry,” said Winston.

“...well, they did keep an open mind,” said Jack, “Mostly.”

“Don’t make me break out your action figure, Jack,” said Sojourn.

----

It was a known fact that if you broke visual contact on Genji, you had a pretty low probability of finding him again unless he wanted to be found. Still Mercy spent more of the remainder of the afternoon looking for him than she was readily willing to admit. The fact that he was able to disappear from the hallway that quickly made her assume he had taken the window (very mature, by the way, Genji, she thought with an eye roll) but she checked all of his usual spots and even went to his room before finally huffing and returning to her lab.

It was about 11 at night when the door slid open.

“Genji, we’re beholden to the UN. I know that was an uncomfortable situation, but... there are still protocols,” said Mercy, not even looking up from her screen.

“I know,” his cybernetically reverberative voice hummed from the other side of the room.

“I don’t know how... informally Reyes maintained his meetings, but we can’t--” Mercy looked up from her screen and read his posture and expression. Her shoulders slumped. She pushed up from her desk and walked across the lab over to him.

“I’m sorry, I know. I just shut down,” said Genji as she closed the distance between them, “I don’t even know where it came from, ever since I joined Tracer’s strike team, I thought I’ve been getting better but--” he cut himself off as she hugged him. He stood there for a few seconds before returning the embrace. A part of him wanted to take his faceplate off, breathe in the smell of her hair and the smell of coffee on her, but he tamped that down. They had embraced before, after Gérard Lacroix’s death, and had broken out of it, both of them muttering about it being inappropriate and messy, but after missions together on Tracer’s strike team, there was no such shame in taking comfort in each other like this. She loosened the hug slightly to look at him.

“What you said... about you and children...”  she trailed off.

“I...” Genji sighed, “I’m an assassin.”

“You’re an agent,” said Mercy.

“Whose skills all come from the fact that he was raised to be an assassin,” said Genji, “What I went through as a child---I don’t want another child to go through it. And I don’t want children to think that’s what they want because it’s not.”

“They won’t have to,” said Mercy, putting her hands on his shoulders, “The Shimada Clan’s practically collapsed! You get to decide who you are, not them! You get to choose what you do with your skills,” one of her hands trailed down his arm and clasped his organic hand, “And you choose good. You’ve been choosing to do good.”

“...kids shouldn’t want to be like me when I don’t even know what the hell I am,” muttered Genji.

Mercy gave a helpless chuckle, “Join the club. ‘Mercy’ is easier to be than Angela. People listen to ‘Mercy,’ except not really, because she’s just pretty and she flies and at the end of the day, she’s just a bloody idea, so no one actually listens to her because she’s not real---”  she caught herself, “God, they’re really going to turn us into cartoon characters, aren’t they?” she said, pushing her bangs back from her face, “As if things weren’t already weird enough.”

“Cyborg ninja. Angel doctor. Time traveler. Gorilla from the moon. It really makes no difference at this point,” said Genji with a shrug, looking over her shoulder, he noticed a small figure on her desk. “Is that---?” he broke out of the embrace and walked over to the desk to see his action figure standing there. The arm had been glued back on, the seam of the break barely visible. He picked up the action figure. “You fixed me? It--It-- I mean it. You fixed it?” he said glancing over his shoulder at her.

“Well I couldn’t just leave you like that,” said Mercy, chuckling a little. 

“’You’ve rescued me again, Doctor Ziegler!’” said Genji, making the action figure bob with his words. They both snickered. “Maybe that can be my catchphrase,” said Genji, a smirk in his voice.

“Absolutely not,” said Mercy, giggling.

[qqueenofhades]

Your political posts recently have been excellent. I was 17 during the 2016 election and watching everything go down while not being able to vote (and watching people choose not to vote) was horrible. I can’t believe how many people on the left seem to have forgotten 2016. I’m worried about the leftist twitter mob and the anti-trump conservatives in swing states who might not vote at all and the voter suppression. I’m so worried about everything right now.

Oof, hon. That is a Big Big Mood.

It’s a hard and surreal feeling when you’re having conversations, as have happened in my family and probably in many of yours, with your parents about what to do if we need to leave the country and flee to Canada (or wherever else) at a moment’s notice. My father is 67 years old and disabled, and he is so worried about all of this (as he damn well should be) because we’re well past the dress-rehearsal stages of fascism and into outright fascism. We are making serious plans to relocate permanently out of America no matter how the election goes, because I honestly cannot take this country at all anymore, and my family feels the same. We have had the conversation about “what if this country collapses and we have to get out.” It’s scary and it’s awful and I hate that we’re having to do this, and I hate even more that people are deliberately rejecting their chance (again, the LAST CHANCE WE HAVE) to reject Trump in a (somewhat) democratic fashion. No wonder we can’t remember history at all when we can’t even remember, as you point out, four years ago.

I just can’t with the renewed kerfuffle that the Harris pick has kicked up, not least because most of us knew or figured for a long time that it was coming. Somehow the twitterati wants us to believe that they would have happily skipped to their polling station to vote for Joe Biden, despite months of screaming about rapist/dementia/corporate ghoul/worse than Trump/senile/won’t follow through on his promises/insert tagline here, if only he hadn’t picked Kamala “Cop” Harris. (She’s a lawyer, not a cop, and her prosecutorial career also specialized in putting away male predators for rape and murder and taking financial giants to town for multibillion-dollar fraud settlements, aka the kind of people we want to see punished, but hey, all nuance is evil.) Because... come on.... seriously???

If Biden had picked Stacey Abrams (and don’t get me wrong, she was my favorite too for a while) the narrative would be about she is inexperienced and has never held any executive office (which she hasn’t), and this is bad because it means he’s senile. If Biden had picked Val Demings, who was ACTUALLY a cop, more cop screaming. If Biden had picked Karen Bass, they would have fixated on her remark praising Castro at his death (which she has subsequently apologized and retracted) and moaned about how this lost Florida. If Biden had picked Susan Rice, who was entangled with the whole Benghazi scandal, BENGHAZI BENGHAZI BENGHAZI HILLARY CLINTON EVIL would have been shouted by both the right and the left. If Biden had picked Elizabeth Warren, oh my god. FAKE PROGRESSIVE CORPORATE SHILL WHITE DEMON WHO DARED TO ATTACK BERNIE!!! would be bellowed from the rooftops. There is literally nobody who would have been Progressive enough for the leftist twitterites, and if they claim there is, they’re lying. Plus, the Vice President does.... not make policy??? He (or she, in this case, and I love that) is there to implement the President’s goals, to advise, consult, take over if necessary, and otherwise serve in a supporting role. So why the fuck on earth is a long-expected VP pick suddenly The Straw That Broke The Camel’s Back?

You wanna know the Upside Down we’re living in right now? Sarah Palin (yes, that Sarah Palin) has been openly more supportive of Kamala Harris than some of the supposed members of her own party for getting the pick. And that’s not because RAH RAH HARRIS’S POLICIES ARE JUST LIKE SARAH PALIN!!! Sarah Palin has offered her advice to Harris without a partisan bent and even said she’s happy to see her picked and that she hopes Harris isn’t attacked in the same way she was (fat chance) and that she should be confident and present herself to the American public as she is. And that is... surprisingly... not terrible advice?? And I’m genuinely happy that the only other female VP pick, as embarrassingly unprepared as she might have been, is doing that, while wondering how on earth we’re living in a world where, again, Sarah Palin is being more supportive than supposed Democratic voters. I don’t get it, chief.

The racist, misogynistic, “nasty woman” attacks on Harris have already eagerly begun from the right, the same stuff they hit Hillary Clinton with, and just as before, the left is eager to pile on rather than to defend their candidate, because they’d rather tear her down for not having policies that perfectly aligned with their own at all times rather than attack her outright fascist opponents. I don’t agree with everything Kamala has done either. But guess what? I DO agree with some things that she HAS done! And I’m going to defend her like crazy, because lord, I am tired of us eating our own. Kamala is experienced, competent, her nomination is historic, and she can clearly do the job. AND SHE IS STILL THE VICE PRESIDENT. NOT THE TOP OF THE TICKET.

The good news is: Biden has leads outside the margin of error in almost all swing states (which don’t matter a damn unless voters actually show up and vote, and we’ve already discussed how hard the GOP is deliberately making that, because they can only win by cheating) and far larger than Clinton’s leads at this time in 2016. Black voters, while being wary of some elements of Harris’s past, are largely very happy with the pick and agree that she can continue to evolve on her policy stances, and that the selection of a Black woman who has been a leader on criminal justice and police reform sends a strong message. Biden’s campaign had its best fundraising hour ever and ultimately raised $26 million in 24 hours after Harris joined the ticket, reflecting a surge of Democratic voter energy and enthusiasm. (That does not count leftists, who aren’t registered Democrats and don’t vote for Democrats and yet still act like their views are mainstream within the party.) So as loud and as obnoxious and maddening as they are, the hard left twitterati still aren’t actually the people that we are counting on as a core constituency. But this election is going to be very hard, and all the people threatening to sit out for some ridiculous moral-ideology reason are only going to make it harder for themselves and us.

I don’t know what to say. I spend a lot of time being scared too. Especially when it can feel like I’m yelling into the void over all this, and the sanctimonious circle-jerking baffles me beyond all reason. But we are not alone, we will do our best, and that is all we can ask for.