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linkspooky · 4 months

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Art credit: @/charscounterattack reposted with permission.

INVINCIBLE VS. MY HERO ACADEMIA: WHEN HEROES KILL

Whether or not heroes should kill people is a hotly debated topic in comics.

There are people who think heroes should never kill, and others who think heroes should kill more. One of the most famous comic book storylines "Under the Red Hood" has Red Hood / Jason Todd debate whether or not it was ethical for Bruce to keep letting the joker live even after the Joker killed Jaso, especially after the Joker killed Jason. If killing the Joker earlier to prevent all future deaths would have been justified. There are like a hundred DC Aus that are like "What if Batman and Superman just started killing people?"

In order to explore this question I'm going to explore two situations in different comics, Invincible and My Hero Academia when the hero, a very idealistic young hero kills someone for the first time.

LET HORI COOK

Storytelling, especially for serialized storytelling which comes out week by week instead of all at once works on the premise of drawing people in by promising that certain future developments and plot points are going to happen. Stories are all about creating expectations, building them, and then paying them off.

Here's an example: The Dabi is a Todoroki theory has existed pretty much since the training camp arc. Horikoshi wasn't in your face about the hints about Toya, but there was just enough hints to make the theory seem more and more plausible. Toya having the same fire quirk as Shoto / Endeavor. Toya mentioning both of them by name. Shoto's two other siblings getting revealed but not Toya. Toya saying that Hawks should have paid attention to him most of all. All of these little pieces came together until Toya finally revealed his identity on live TV in front of both Shoto and Endeavor.

This worked because not only did it give the audience just enough clues that they felt smart for figuring it out, and get invested in the idea of Toya as a Todoroki, it also was well-paced so it didn't seem like Horikoshi forgot about it unlike the traitor plot which went hundreds of chapters without being mentioned. If Toya was revealed to be a Todoroki at the training camp arc with no buildup, it wouldn't be as effective bcause we didn't have years of waiting and theorizing. If Todoroki was revealed to be some guy named Steve after all the hints, it also wouldn't be an effective reveal because there were hints dropped for Toya Todoroki, but there were no Steve hints so it'd feel like the author lied to us.

Themes are like this too. I tend to explain story themes by oversimplifying it as "Question, and answer." The story asks a question, it provides us an answer, and we can come up with our own answer as well. However, there's a middle part I'm skipping out on which is deliberation. Before you can come up with an answer, you obviously need to deliberate it, either by presenting arguments for or against, hearing outside opinions or just thinking things through.

In other words, you need to "Let things cook."

If Toya calling Shoto by his full name at the Training Camp Arc is when we're first asked "Is Toya a Todoroki?" or when the theories first started, then the long middle period between Training Camp Arc and the First War Arc is the deliberation. This is when the story not only added more hints to the idea that Toya was a Todoroki, but also set up why that reveal mattered. Endeavor wanted to atone for his past sins, but one of his victims was no longer alive. Endeavor begins to move on anyway and think he's finally made himself a good hero, but now Toya appears to flip up the reverse Uno Card.

So let's follow this basic formula, for how ideas get developed in My Hero Academia and just any good story.

Question / Introduction

Deliberation

Answer / Conclusion

My Hero Academia and Invincible explore similar themes in regards to heroism, generational trauma and how to be better than the previous generation in both Mark and Deku. I'm going to streamline their arcs down to one basic question for the sake of time. For both the question is:

Can I be a better hero than my Dad?

Deku and Mark might be two characters who cannot possibly seem to be more different, but you can actually list off a lot of similarities between them right away. Deku and Mark are both people who in a world oversaturated with superheroes spent most of their childhoods with no superpowers at all. Also, they were genetically supposed to inherit a quirk / viltrumite powers, but Deku was born quirkless, and Mark was an extremely late bloomer. They are also people who while being powerless civilians for most of their lives worship heroes. Deku collects so much All Might Merch he even stole some from Nighteye after he died, Mark attends comic conventions even after he becomes a superhero.

They also grew up worshipping one hero in particular who was essentially earth's strongest hero, for Mark it was his dad Omni-Man, for Deku it was All Might. They also both get the opportunity to train directly under their favorite hero immediately after they get their powers. At first this makes it seem like they've been given everything they've ever wanted. All Mark has ever wanted was to be a hero like his dad and make his father proud. Not only did Deku just want one person to tell him he could be a hero too even without a quirk, but his very idea of heroism is built around seeing All Might always save people with a smile.

However, both of them suddenly hit complication just when it seems like they've been given everything they've ever wanted. They are both confronted with the fact that their heroes are not who they expected them to be. They are overly idealistic heroes who have been dreaming of being heroes since childhood only to be hit with a much greyer reality. To the point where there innocence becomes a flaw in and of itself. The way they've been coddled and protected all of their lives leaves them completely unaware and unable to spot the grey areas in the world, or the people around them.

For Deku the moral greys exist in the villains around them. In MHA Society, villains are basically just bad guys in suits for the heroes to punch on television. They're seen as a faceless enemy, and there's very little in way of rehabilitation for villains once they're captured. Deku lived in a very black and white world before this point, and he's suddenly presented with the idea that his villains could be morally grey.

Deku's image of All Might is a hero who saves everyone with a smile, so he could never imagine that there are people who All Might has failed to save. He's never stopped to consider where villains came from, or if any of them might have legitimate reasons for their grievances.

This becomes a pretty central theme in MHA. It's first brought up here when Shigaraki talks about All Might acting as if there's no one he can't save. Twice brings it up again in his first backstory chapter, that the heroes only save the virtuous ones.

This is further enforced in the same overhaul arc with members who are loyal to Overhaul because they are society's trash who would have been thrown out otherwise. There is a group of people fiercley loyal to Overhaul who is a terrible boss, because he is the only person who would accept them.

edits belong to @stillness-in-green from bring it all back a tone poem on returning to staus quo located here on ao3.

In the War Arc this long running theme basically reaches a climax with the Hawks and Twice confrontation, where Hawks decides to try to offer Jin a chance to restart because he's deemed him "good" but he won't extend the same helping hand to the league who Hawks has determined as "bad." He then asks Jin to betray his friends in order to be saved, something that Jin rightfully calls out.

That Hawks only wants to save Jin because he's one of the good ones, and he's written off the rest of the league and left them for dead. Hawks choosing to divide between good and bad victims ad only save the one he personally thought was worthy of redemption, makes it impossible for him to save Twice who would never under any circumstances give up on the rest of the league.

Twice's death is a tragedy, but it also presents us a clear example of the failures of the previous generation. Even a hero who sincerely sympathized with a villain and wanted to help them start over wasn't able to help them because of this attitude of selectively picking and choosing who to save. If the heroes only save the innocent the I guess the lives of the guilty are worth less.

This is the questio Toga poses to Ochako, if the heroes killed Twice then are you going to kill me in order to stop me. This is the central subject of Shigaraki's speech to the heroes. That heroes and villains will never uderstand each other, because the entire hero system perpetuates itself on ignoring the needs of societal outcasts and rejects in form of the "innocent people" and those outcasts who aren't having their needs met eventually turn into villains who get systematically put down by heroes. Heroes and villains are incapable of understanding each other and breaking the cycle, because the entire system isn't built on helping people, but merely maintaining the idea that heroes are perfect, faultless saviors so normal people will feel secure, while the people the heroes have failed get swept under the rug so society can keep "functioning."

"You heroes hurt your own families just to help strangers. You heroes pretend to be society's guardians. For generations, you pretended not to see those you couldn't protect. That means your system's all rotten from the inside with maggots crawling out. It all builds up, little by little, over time. You've got the common trash, all too dependent on being protected, and the brave guardians who created the trash that needed coddling. It's a corrupt, vicious, cycle. Everythig I've witnessed, the whole system you've built has always rejected me. Now I'm ready to reject it. That's why I destroy. That's why I took power for myself. Simple enough, Yeah? I don't care if you don't understand. That's what makes us heroes and villains."

So if the starting question is: Can I be a better hero than my dad?

Then everything I've detailed above is deliberation. Here we have, ever since the training camp arc, this slowly built up idea of why All Might was a flawed hero in the end.

Mark has to face the fact that his father is a more morally grey person than he could ever imagine, whereas Deku has to face the fact that the villains are more morally grey in his world, and that makes the heroes look more flawed in comparison as well. The deliberation is all slowly bringing Deku to think over what Shigaraki asked him all the way in the beginning in there first meeting.

Were there ever people that the heroes couldn't save? If so then what are you supposed to do with the victims you can't save after they grow up? This is when Deku begins to start forming his own answer.

Deku hears the advice of both the other OFA users, and The Stinky Old Man (Gran Torino) that killing Shigaraki is the best option, but wants to explore other options.

Scenes like this clearly telegraph what the answer / conclusion Hori is leading us to to be. The same way that Toya is a Todoroki is foreshadowed long in advance, statements like "All for one is a power meant for saving, not killing" clearly set up Deku's Endgame. Deku's end goal is to find a way use his power to save Shigaraki rather than killing him. Everything else is just a matter of deliberation, Deku knows what his edgoal is but the chapters between then and the end of the manga is Deku having to figure out how exactly to save Shigaraki without killing him.

You Heroes Hurt Your Own Families Just to Help Strangers

Invincible is the story of Mark Grayson, the son of Omni Man / Nolan Grayson. He's been told all of his life that his father is a viltrumite, a race of benevolent aliens who send out people like Nolan to alien civilizations in order to uplift their entire civilization. Which is what led Nolan to come to earth and become Earth's greatest heroes.

This turns out to be a big fat lie when within 12 chapters Nolan not only slaughters the guardian's of the globe, but also has a confrontation with his son.

Mark has wanted to be just like his dad his entire life. Only to be slapped in the face with the realization he's known nothing about his dad his entire life, shown rather brilliantly by these panels where Nolan tries to have a normal father / son conversation with Mark while covered in blood.

Nolan isn't from a futuristic utopia but from a brutal, fascist space empire. He didn't come to earth to help bring it up, but to weaken its defenses and make it prime for conquering. He didn't have Mark out of love, but to produce another soldier for the viltrumite empire.

Mark's entire schtick is that he's invincible, but he's so inexperienced as a hero that he gets beat up constantly despite the fact he has the strongest power set in the series b/c he has viltrumite powers. However, not only does the series introduce moral greys by continually showing how Mark even with the best power set in the series constantly gets his ass kicked, it also challenges Mark's black and white thinking and hero worship of his father by showing him the kind of man his father really is.

Mark has wanted to be exactly like his father his entire life, but now that's suddenly a bad thing. His father is a morally reprehensible person and Mark is now a descendant of an alien race meant to conquer worlds. Not only is Mark confronted by who his father really is, but now everyone in Mark's life judges him by comparing him with his father.

Mark has to work with Cecil and be his on-call Superhero, both to be able to pay for college, and also to prove that he's not his dad. The unspoken part of the agreement is that Cecil gets to keep a leash on Mark and Mark has to prove that he'll never turn out like his father to earn Cecil's trust.

Cecil is automatically suspicious of him because if Mark were to turn evil, the planet would have no defenses against him just like it didn't have any for Omni Man. Mark's mother starts to drink and blames Mark for Omni-Man leaving in a drunken moment of weakness because of how much the information that Omni Man only regarded her as a pet affected her.

The comic even shows us that in most alternate universes, mark actually did make the decision to join his father's conquest, and this universe is one of the few exceptions. This is also where we're introduced to a major reoccuring antagonist in the comics, and also the main antagonist / final antagonist of season 2 of the cartoon Angstrom Levy.

Levy is someone who can jump between dimensions and has traveled to almost all of them collecting his alternate selves. He has witnessed for a fact that in most universes Mark sides with his father instead of fighting against him.

Levy enlists the clone bros to build a device that would combine the knowledge of his alternate selves into one individual. This device ends up breaking tragically (partially mark's fault, but levy himself made the decision to stop the machine in order to stop the clone bros from killing Mark). Levy's memories become confused as a result of the machine malfunctioning, and he can't tell the difference between himself and his alternate universe counterparts. This means that Levy now remembers several alternate universes where Mark did turn evil, and remembers them as if they happened to him.

It's better elaborated upon in this post:

The process by which Invincible has had to condense and consolidate the plot beats of the original comic, coupled with the opportunity it's granted the writers to tighten up and emphasize its themes on a second pass, has resulted in a newfound appreciation for how unbelievably fucking good Angstrom Levy's whole character concept is. What's that, Mark? Your main emotional crisis this season is your fear of turning out like your father? Here, have an archnemesis who's out to kill you because his memories were inadvertently overwritten with the lived experiences of hundreds of alternate versions of himself whose friends and families were slaughtered in worlds where you did, in fact, turn out exactly like your father. Because it turns out that that is in fact the multiversal norm. That you turn out like your father. And now you're left to wonder what set of arbitrary coinflips pulled you back from that abyss in this dimension, and whether your luck is going to continue to hold into the future.

Mark is not only hit with the revelation that his father isn't as good as he thought he was, but also while he's in a crisis about about whether or not he will turn out like his father, he learns the answer is yes, in several dimensions he turns out exactly like his father.

In My Hero Academia there are families like the Todoroki's who balance the difference between a hero's obligations to society, and a hero's obligation to society. However, that's a side plot where I'd argue that the main plot for Invincible and it's main focus is what Mark owes to the world as a hero, and what Mark owes to his family.

It's not just that Omniman is trying to invade earth for the Viltrumite empire. It's not just that he failed as a hero, but that he failed as a father. What makes Mark snap, is hearing Omniman call Debbie a pet. Until that point Mark was in denial and still trying to reason with his father.

Invincible is about two intersecting themes: Is Mark obligated to use his incredible powers to help make the world better? Can Mark be a good hero and a good family man?

While MHA has more far reaching societal implications in its themes and questions, Invincible is more specifically about the Grayson Family. It's generational trauma on a society level, vs generational trauma on an individual level. The way Nolan was raised on Viltrumite effects how he raised Mark causing their conflict, and Mark's conflict with his father effects most of his young adulthood when he's trying to figure out what person he wants to be (read: not his dad), but also the way he parents his daughter with Atom Eve.

Omni-man failed Mark as both a hero, and a father. Mark feels the need to overcompensate for what his father did the world and all those innocent people by acting as Cecil's lapdog and doing whatever Cecil tells him.

However, Mark is much more hurt by the personal betrayal than he lets on. It's not just that his father killed a bunch of innocent people, it's also that Mark's father failed as a father, abandoning both him and mom and choosing to be a viltrumite rather than being Mark's father. Mark's stated reason for wanting to be a hero post the omni-man reveal is to prove he's not like his dad to the world, and also make up for the innocent lives he failed to save. However, his unstated underlying reason is Mark is hurt and betrayed his father didn't put his family first, and this causes Mark to always put his family first.

This leads to two insecurities / narrative flaws. One, Mark is insecure about becoming like his father so he tries to prove he's nothing like him by being the most selfless, perfect hero possible. Two, Mark is hurt by being abandoned by his father and doesn't want to become a deadbeat like Nolan so he gets extremely overprotective of his own family.

These two things are obvious in conflict with one another: A hero has an obligation to the common good which sometimes means sacrificing time with your loved ones. However, being a good family man requires a level of selfishness that directly contradicts the selfless hero that Mark is pushing himself to be. In the comic the way Mark prioritizes his family and loved ones over the common good and justice is made even more obvious. His first instinct on seeing Omni-Man again isn't to call him out for being an awful father, but to hug him and ask him to come home. Mark is a distraught son first, and a hero second.

Mark has two flaws, his fear of being like his father makes him try too hard to be a perfect hero, and his trauma over losing his father makes him prioritize his family over being a hero. It's very much a having your cake and eating it too situation, oftentimes heroes make huge sacrifices for their personal lives in order to be heroes, that's basically a theme discussed in the comic with Nolan being absent for a lot of Mark's childhood, and why Mark's relationship with Amber fails.

The show also introduces us to the idea that Mark is so afraid of becoming like his father that he deliberately holds back his punches. Which is good when he's fighting earth villains, but bad when he's facing viltrumites who can only survive being disemboweled, but will also come to wipe out all life on earth if they're allowed to live. In the show it's directly mentioned that Mark is holding back, in the comic it's implied when we see how helpless Mark is in the fight against other viltrumites. Mark lacks the resolve to kill someone and when fighting a viltrumite, failing to put them down can have consequences because they are galactic conquerors who will not show you any mercy.

This all comes to a head in the Angstrom Levy fight where Mark makes his first kill on-screen when beforehand he'd never fought to kill before, and even held back against galaxy conquering aliens who were out to murder him and his dad.

However. before we begin that.

Should superheroes kill?

People often act like whether or not super heroes should kill their villains is a black and white topic, where it actually depends highly on context.

Batman’s an entire character is written around how he wants to redeem Gotham and save the city, most of his villains aren’t even sent to prison they’re sent to Arkham a facility that’s supposed to rehabilitee the mentally ill so they can rejoin society. Batman has decided it’s his place to stop crime, not his place to decide whether or not people have the right to live or redeem themselves.

Batman is also at risk for being just like his villains, that’s why he’s foils with Harvey Dent, someone who tried to prosecute people under the law who then snapped and went full violent mobster vigilante. Batman actually is at risk for walking the same path as Harvey if he decides murder is an option.

In X-Men 97, there was a character known as Rogue who dropped Simon Bolivar Trask off of a building in an act of vigilante justice. This action makes sense in context for several reasons. One Rogue was raised by Mystique and Destiny, is a former member of the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, and began as a terrorist in the comics. She's not really a "moral highground" character like Batman. Two, Boliver Trask built a giant killer robot that resulted in the deaths of millions in Genosha which Rogue is a survivor of. Number three, Trask had no sympathetic reasons for building the genocide robot, he built the sentinels out of bigotry to wipe out mutants. He's not a victim in any way, he's an oppressor facing consequences for his actions.

Batman shooting Harvey Dent, his former best friend, a victim of severe mental illness and trauma that still has hope for recovery, and Rogue dropping the guy who made a genocide robot off of a building are both wildly different situations.

So in the context of MHA we have Shigaraki Tomura, a terrorist who's goal is to destroy japan enough that it will dismantle the hero system for good. Shigaraki Tomura is a ten year old child who lost control of his quirk and killed his family for mistake, he wandered for days in crowded city streets but not a single hero stopped to help him, then he was found by the main villain of the story and groomed for ten years into becoming his successor. Shigaraki is also surrounded by a group of societal outcasts who were failed by society in similiar ways, so Shigaraki knows he wasn't the only one failed by hero society and he starts to wage his war for their sake as much as his own.

In Invincible we have Angstrom Levy. Angstrom is not plotting mass murder the way that Shigaraki is. He is specifically only targetting Mark Grayson's family for revenge (at least the first time he showed up, the second time during the invincible war arc was different). Angstrom's revenge against Mark Grayson is misplaced, but to be fair the accident messed with his brain hardcore and he doesn't remember clearly what happened. He doesn't remember that he's the one who decided to stop the machine in order to help Mark. It's tragic. Angstrom also has the memories of like hundreds of different universes of evil Marks. Even though he's the victim of a tragic accident, he's also a victimizer in that he doesn't choose to just go after Mark, he deliberately picks Mark's family, his mother, and his infant little brother as a way of hurting Mark.

So both of these characters blur the line between villain and victim, but neither of them are like Trask in that they have no sympathetic motivation whatsoever. Shigaraki's actions don't come from bigotry, and he's not an oppressor. Trask was actually trying to do something good before his machine broke and his brains got scrambled, and now he wants personal revenge and to blame all his problems on Mark which is petty yes, but not on Trask's level of heartlessness.

So, there's a case that can be made here for both of them that there's room to save them. After all Mark and Deku aren't killers to begin with. Mark especially has an incredibly vested interest in not becoming a killer. Even if they don't explicitly go out of their way to save and redeem these two people, we're still at this point expecting the heroes to at least take down these two sympathetic figures non-lethally. Mark doesn't want to be like his dad and Deku has said explicitly he wants to save Shigaraki, and that OFA is a power for saving and not killing.

Also to sidestep this argument before people comment on my post with it.

What do you expect the heroes to just let a mass murderer live?

YES!

It happens in comics literally all the time.

Magneto, Wolverine, Jean Grey / Phoenix, Emma Scott, heck, OMNIMAN himself, all characters who have killed lots of people and all characters who get to live and even be on the heroes side. Of these three Jean Grey of all people has the highest body count.

Shonen Jump also has Vegeta. Have you ever heard of Vegeta? Most popular Shonen Rival of all time? Omni-man and Viltrumites are basically just Saiyans.

In real life they wouldn't let a mass murderer walk away but comics are not the same as real life. That's why characters are always punching dinosaurs all the time. Fun fact, if you were to try to punch a dinosaur in real life it would probably hurt your hand. I would advise against it. Dinosaurs are for the most part much stronger than human beings.

As I outlined above Shigaraki and Angstrom are different characters than Trask. They might all be murderers, but the first two have sympathetic elements and are humanized, they are victims of oppression (Angstrom's been killed by viltrumites in a whole bunch of worlds) whereas Trask is an oppressor.

So for both of these stories we are not expecting to see Deku and Mark kill their final villains (for the series and for this season). Deku because he's spent the final third of the series trying to work out a way to save the villains, and Mark because he doesn't want to turn out to be a violent murderer like his father so he's trying to be the most selfless, most perfect hero ever.

I THOUGHT YOU WERE STRONGER

So we finally reach the scenes in question and I thought I'd compare them without much commentary, just highlighting what happens without adding much spin.

So the final episode of Invincible Season 2 and Issue #33 of the comic is where Angstrom and Mark have it out. Angstrom appears in Mark's home and threatens his family. he brings up the comparison between Mark and his father right away. This is also something Angstrom has seen first hand by traveling to multiple universes where Mark has sided with his father.

In the cartoon he's a lot more confused because he's constantly remembering other universe's memories as if he were his own so he genuinely thinks he's taking down an evil viltrumite, in the comic he's being more petty and blaming Mark for his deformity (I think he doesn't remember that he was the one to take the helmet off by choice). In both versions he uses Mark's family as hostages to keep him from fighting back as he tries to send Markk to his death in several different realities.

Angstrom then ups the threat of violence from holding them hostage to threatening to kill them. In both the show and comic he brutally breaks Debbie's arm. Mark is sent through several more realities, only to discover that Debbie's arm is broken and lose his temper.

Mark and Angstrom's fist fight comes to an end, and while Mark has him on the ground he keeps hitting and hitting and hitting long after Angstrom stopped fighting back. Which is what prompts the famous "I thought you were stronger..."

Now, in this situation it looks pretty justifiable that Mark attacked Angstrom so aggressively,. it was self defense for one against a man trying to kill him and he only got truly aggressive after he saw his mother's arm get broken. Not only that he didn't intentionally kill Angstrom, you can argue he went too far in a case of clear self defense. Other people even tell Mark that this one isn't on him, including Cecil who compares Mark to his father the most.

Then, why is Mark so disturbed?

It's because this....

Is a deliberate parallel to this...

It's not just that Mark killed a man, it's that he killed a man by pounding on him relentlessly long after he'd stopped fighting back the exact same way his father did to him during their fight.

There's a difference between Mark say, fighting against a viltrumite and making a deliberate decision to kill them because of the danger that viltrumites represent to other people considering they are planet conquerors, and Mark killing this man because he lost his temper and couldn't control his own strength.

Mark spends the entire season trying to not be like his father, only to see first hand that he's capable of the exact same violence that his father is. The last episode of Season 2 summarizes this moment pretty perfectly in a montage of season 1 moments while Mark screams and breaks the sound barrier trying to push his viltrumite powers to their limits.

Mark: I'm strong enough and I can do this. It's all I've ever wanted for as long as I can remember. I want to do what you do. I want to be just like you. Omni-Man: You will be, son. You will. Mark screaming. Omni-Man: You'll outlast every single fragile being on this planet. You'll live to see this world crumble to dust and blow away. Everyone and everything you know will be gone. Mark screaming. Cecil: You know who else said that to me? Mark: I'm not my dad. Mark screaming some more. KRegg: Your father will be execute and you can return to earth. You will assume the mission to prepare earth for our rule.

So not only is Mark hit with the realization that he's just as capable of being violent and angry as his father is. He also is being forced by the situation to become more violent out of pragmatism, because if he doesn't get strong enough to fight viltrumites then they're going to come to his planet and take everything.

Not only has Mark lost some of his innocence, he's also being forced to throw the rest of it away. It's why Mark drops out of college at the end of the season because any pretense of balancing between his human life and his duty as a hero is gone. He is basically forced to be a viltrumite full time now and will abandon any semblance of trying to live his own life for a very, very long time until his relationship with Eve starts to get serious.

Which is why a pretty justifiable murder in this context is presented as so bloody, gruesome and traumatizing an event for both the audience and Mark himself. We both know there's no coming back from this.

As for the death of main series villain Shigaraki Tomura, Deku ends up being forced to kill Shigaraki in a situation similiar to Mark. Though I will highlight one difference right away. Mark was trying to reason with Angstrom, but he was at no point like "I want to save Angstrom, he's a victim I want to find some other way of ending this bloody conflict between us." Mark just didn't intend to go so far as killing him.

Deku entered the fight with the explicit stated desire to save Shigaraki rather than killing him, which would make him different from the previous generation of heroes because he wouldn't turn a blind eye to society's faults and victims like Shigaraki accused him of.

Deku makes a journey into Shigaraki's mental landscape to find Tenko in a recreation of the memory of the day of his worst trauma. As Tenko's quirk activates, Deku attempts to grab the little boy's hands to comfort him.

Deku's "Why I am here" is markedly different from All Might's. Deku says the reason he wants to save others is to take their hands, comfort them and give them peace, whereas All Might as the strongest hero tried to keep peace by beating all the villains down. Deku's way to become the greatest hero once again, focuses heavily on saving others, and offering his hand to everyone without hesitation instead of picking and choosing who to save like previous generations.

Deku even says that he has to extend a helping hand to everyone because he's learning that the world is more complicated than he thought, he was ignorant to a lot of people's suffering, and he can't sweep their pain under the rug anymore.

For a moment Deku unconditionally extending a hand to Shimura Tenko even as his mental body begins to decay away wins over Shimura Tenko. Though Shigaraki also resists because much like Twice he doesn't want to abandon the rest of his friends even if it means he personally will be saved.

However, any attempts to save Shigaraki are interrupted by AFO suddenly appearing out of nowhere and taking control of Shigaraki's body yet again.

At this point Deku does exactly what Mark does, which is relentlessly punch Shigaraki's body to death in order to kill AFO along with Shigaraki. In some small defese Shigaraki was also there too punching AFO in his mental landscape so he was assisting Deku in defeating AFO he wasn't helpless the entire time.

But, basically we see the same scene happen with Mark.

A hero who does not wish to kill is forced by circumstance to kill a villain. In Deku's case it should be even more devastating because they explicitly went into the fight wanting to save Shigaraki and they believed their power was for saving and not killing.

Yet, we don't get nearly as horrified a response from Deku.

However, instead Deku's final words are just about how he couldn't forgive Shigaraki and had to put a stop to him no matter what.

Even the way the scenes are presented to us are entirely different. Mark punches Angstrom in a wasteland a dry, dead place, until he's soaked in Angstrom's blood, and painted everything around him red. Once again, it's a visual callback to Mark's father beating him half to death, which was Mark's own lowest point.

Whereas, when Deku punches Shigaraki until he disintegrates not only is the violence or horror of Shigaraki's death not acknowledged, but it's played as a triumphant moment where the clouds clear from the sky and the stun starts shining.

In the cartoon Mark killing Angstrom leads to a total screaming breakdown where he has traumatic flashbacks of his dad beating him and pushes himself to break the sound barrier multiple times. It also leads him to making big life changes like dropping out of college to become a hero full time and giving up any pretense of having a normal life. As seen in a scene where he watches Amber from the sky, and is tempted to go down and greet her and just flies off, because Amber represents his connection to his humanity.

Also, Angstrom doesn't even die. He comes back way worse and that's how invinicble war arc starts.

In the aftermath of killing Shigaraki, Deku gets melancholy about not being able to save Shigaraki only to be reassured he did save him in the end. Only to be told by All Might that it's okay because he still saved Shigaraki's heart even if he killed him.

DEKU: "I couldn't save Tenko's life." "I reached out to his heart, and even though his hatred was crushed," "to the very end, Tenko" "was the leader of the League of Villains." ALL MIGHT: "Let me tell you this as someone who has had a near-death experience," "I think it's in the expression on his face at the end." "If there wasn't a crying boy there," "I think his heart was saved after all,"

People also try to convince mark that he did nothing wrong and that there was no helping what he did in a situation like that, but he doesn't let himself believe them.

The ending lines about the last episode of Season 2, are this:

Eve: I'm sorry Mark. It's not fair. You don't deserve this. Eve: You don't deserve this.

Which has a double meaning. Eve is just trying to comfort Mark, because arguably he shouldn't have to feel guilty for fighting in self defense. On the other hand what Mark hears is You don't deserve this in the context of Eve's feelings for him. An alternate timeline version of Eve confessed her love for Mark. Mark was about to bring it up but decided not to. At that moment as Eve embraces and comforts him, what Mark hears because of his own self loathing is that he doesn't deserve Eve comforting him, or her love for him.

Just to clarify I don't think that Mark is crying over Angstrom Levy specifically. In fact over time he's painted to be pathetic in his obsession with revenge, and what he amounts to is just wanting to blame everything on invincible when it was partially caused by his own actions.

However, it's inarguable that killing (or rather seemingly killing Angstrom) deeply impacted Mark and how he saw himself as a hero. It's less about Angstrom, and more about the loss of control, and the realization of how powerful his anger and hatred can get and what that means for him personally.

It also shows us where Mark's priorities lie. Mark wants to be a perfect hero and a perfect family man, and Invincible shows us he can't be both, his desire to protect his family leads him to staining his blood when he was trying so hard to be a good, selfless hero. This is all a part of a deliberate arc where Mark chooses more and more to value his family over being a hero. I'm not going to say whether or not it's the right choice, but it's a choice he makes, as a part of his character development where as he grows up and becomes a father his priorities change.

My point is that this moment has an impactful change on Mark, for arguably the rest of the comic.

Now my question is, with My Hero Academia will the death of Shigaraki Tomura, the series greatest villain and it's greatest victim have an equal impact on Deku's character that Levy's death did on Mark's?

#bnha 424 #bnha spoilers #invincible #mark grayson #deku #izuku midoriya #mha 424 #mha spoilers #omni man #bnha meta #mha meta

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novlr · 6 months

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Hi, how do you write a healthy sibling relationship?

I have a really bad one and I want my characters to get along, but still fight sometimes

Any help would be great

Sibling relationships are the first and often the most enduring bonds we form in life. They shape our identities, define our roles in the family, and teach us how to love, fight, forgive, and grow alongside another person.

For writers, capturing the intricacies of sibling dynamics can infuse stories with authenticity, depth, and emotional resonance that keeps readers turning pages. Here are some tips for how to write healthy sibling relationships:

Make them unique characters

Establish each sibling’s unique personality and role.

Give each sibling their own distinct personality, interests, strengths, and flaws.

Show how their personalities complement and contrast with each other.

Establish the roles and dynamics between the siblings (leader, peacemaker, rebel, etc.).

Avoid stereotypes and allow the siblings’ personalities to evolve over time.

Develop each sibling’s unique voice and communication style.

Give them contrasting but complementary skills and strengths.

Develop their relationship over time

Show how the siblings’ relationship strengthens as they grow up and go through life changes. Maybe they grow apart for a while but then reconnect later in life.

Give their relationship a story arc, showing how their bond matures and changes over the course of the story.

Explore how the siblings navigate major life events together, like the birth of a new sibling, a family move, losing a loved one, or a parent’s divorce.

Depict milestones and rites of passage where the siblings support or challenge each other, like learning to drive, graduating high school, starting college or a career.

Show how the siblings’ communication and conflict resolution skills improve (or deteriorate) over time. Perhaps they learn to express their feelings more openly, fight more fairly, or establish healthier boundaries as they mature.

Give them shared history and inside jokes

Build strong backstories into their characters with shared childhood experiences.

Show them laughing over inside jokes and funny memories only they understand.

Use shared history to show their bond, even when they’re fighting.

Have the siblings reference shared childhood possessions or special objects like a beloved stuffed animal they both cherished or a secret hideout only they knew about.

Show the siblings using a private language, code words, or shared vocabulary that only they understand.

Have them reminisce about funny or embarrassing childhood stories.

Let them learn from each other

Show the siblings teaching each other important life lessons.

Have them learn from each other’s mistakes and successes.

Show how the siblings challenge each other to step outside their comfort zones and try new things.

Depict moments where the siblings offer each other wise advice or a fresh perspective on a problem, demonstrating how well they understand and support one another.

Show how the siblings inspire each other to pursue their passions and dreams.

Depict the siblings’ learning to appreciate their differences and see them as strengths

Show unwavering loyalty and love

Depict the siblings standing up for each other in the face of adversity or conflict. They have each other’s backs, no matter what.

Portray the siblings making sacrifices for each other’s happiness or well-being.

Show the siblings being there for each other during tough times, like heartbreak, illness, or failure. Highlight how they offer comfort, encouragement, and unconditional support.

Illustrate the siblings’ fierce protectiveness of each other. Show them defending each other against bullies, naysayers, or anyone who threatens their bond.

Depict the siblings forgiving each other after arguments or misunderstandings. Show how their love helps them overcome hurt feelings and find understanding.

Portray the siblings expressing their love and appreciation for each other through both big gestures and small, everyday acts of kindness.

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hadesisqueer · 1 month

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I appreciate The Dragon Prince because it gave me tragic antagonists or villains that I love (Claudia), villains that while I don't really like them I understand how they came to be and can feel a bit of sympathy for (Aaravos or Viren), villains I straight up fucking hate (Sol Regem) and villains that I don't really hate because when they appear on-screen I just sigh wondering how they can be so fucking stupid (Karim). They really give you everything.

No but for real, Karim's entire character arc consists of 'The risk I took was calculated but I am bad at math' because. He's so dumb. He keeps saying he wants to restore the Sunfire Empire to its former glory, but like-- how? What plans do you have for the future? Are you going to try to retake Lux Aurea? Because you can't. Oh, you want humans out? Okay-- how would that help to restore the former glory, though? You're just being a bigot?

The thing is that all Karim ever did was talk about his birthright —that's not even his birthright, actually, because he's the youngest sibling— and keep babbling about history demanding blah blah blah of people and how his sister wasn't a competent queen when actually it is the opposite. Janai proves, by allowing the architect to live while still giving her an according punishment, that she is a fair queen who chooses mercy and allows people to grow while still choosing justice; also, that she's more practical, because what good is a talented architect dead —who did something awful but still was sorta right about fire being dangerous around the camp— when you can just make her build a shrine so this kind of incident never happens again. Janai also had the Sunseed and plans to nurture it and help it grow, help her own people grow. She actually had plans for the future, and she had the patience necessary. She understands that you must learn from history but that it also doesn't define you, that you must not let it define you.

Karim doesn't get that. He was obsessed with history and the old ways. He didn't have any patience. And he didn't have any long term plans. Or even backup plans for when his plans inevitably failed, either! He was so convinced Janai would refuse his duel he was shocked when she actually fought him, and resorted to fighting-- with fire magic-- against someone who's fireproof-- again, no actual plan. He tried using an assassin to kill his sister, the actual person the assassin had a life debt to. He wants to steal the Sunseed, actively fucking over his people. When Ezran tells him to take his followers and start somewhere else, Karim refuses because he says he doesn't want crumbs off his sister's plate, but at the same time it's like-- that's exactly what you were gonna get, buddy. You wanna use Sol Regem to torch your sister's army. The only thing you're gonna rule over is the followers you have now plus what remains of Janai's, if they even accept you. So, yeah. Literally crumbs.

Also, again, he's so fucking entitled. 'What's rightfully mine' he's the youngest sibling, nothing is rightfully his, he's an usurper. Part of his demands being that humans leave and go back to 'their side of the border, where they belong', buddy, you'd be the king of the Sunfire Elves, not the King of all of Xadia. As king you could make humans leave your territory, but not Xadia. If a bunch of humans, hypothetically, befriended Moonshadow or Skywing elves and lived at the Silvergrove, or wherever the Skywing elves live, with them-- what, now you're gonna try to wage war against the the other elves, too, because they're not following your ways? You can threaten them with Sol Regem, sure, but also consider, because you didn't even consider it when you went to him-- he's an Archdragon, yeah, but the weakest of the Archdragons right now. Let's say Ezran and Janai follow through and give up and leave. They could go with Zym and head straight up to the Mushroom Mage and come back with Zubeia, the current Queen of the Dragons, right after she's done with her treatment. They arrive. Who's gonna win? A healthy Archdragon on her prime or an old, blind Archdragon that hasn't flown or fought in centuries? Also, once you give him the Sunseed he actually has no reason to be on your side, he already got what he wanted. Even if the Katolis thing didn't happen, he could've turned against you very easily. He likely would've done so.

He's an awful leader who doesn't actually care about his people. He disrespects other world leaders like Ezran immediately. He's an entitled, bigoted idiot who doesn't actually think things through and that actually makes him both incredibly annoying and very realistic, which actually makes me like him as an antagonist but still makes me let out a exasperated sigh every time he talks. Best part of him is that he's obsessed with going down in history as someone great when, with his actions, he's only going to pass down as the prince who tried to usurp his sister three times and failed the three times, each failure worse than the previous one. Lmao.

#the dragon prince #tpd #karim tdp #janai tdp

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whinlatter · 10 months

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sirius and ginny: a meta (part 1)

“Excuse me, but I care what happens to Sirius as much as you do!” said Ginny, her jaw set so that her resemblance to Fred and George was suddenly striking.’

are you a very brave, very reckless, very hot self-destructive rebel with a treacherous sibling and a flair for christmas decoration, harbouring complex feelings about your mother, close ties to crookshanks the cat and spend your days plagued by the memory of your worst mistakes and dark past? do you find yourself constantly being begged to stay in a state of protective confinement to save your life by a young man with a lightning scar, bad hair and crippling abandonment issues? if so, congratulations! you might be one of harry potter's chosen family members, sirius black and ginevra molly weasley!

basically - i want to talk about sirius and ginny. these are two characters who don’t share a lot of scenes in canon but who, i think, have some clear (if overlooked) parallels: stubborn, fiercely protective of harry, self-sacrificing, admired, principled, haunted (in different ways) by traumatic pasts and betrayals, with complicated relationships with their families and entirely uncomplicated devoted relationships with someone else’s cat. their narrative arcs are successive, with ginny ascending in significance in the series during sirius’ period of decline and ultimate death. and ultimately, they’re also the two people who become, over the course of the canon series, family to a protagonist desperately seeking to build one. sirius and ginny are the two people harry in canon most worries about, wants to protect, and thinks of as someone who embodies the promise of family and home.

sirius and ginny aren’t mirror images of each other. ofc, ginny also has parallels with the only other family members harry claims in the series, lily and james (i mean, especially james - she’s literally a cocky funny flirtatious chaser with a years-long debilitating mega crush who can also catch a snitch like a champ. come on now). it’s also clear in canon that sirius means more to ginny as a hero/role model/ally against her mother than ginny ever means to sirius. nevertheless, the text puts in work to let the reader know we should think about these characters together as somehow aligned. from the beginning of ootp, there are clues and signals in the text that foreshadow ginny’s emergence as someone important to harry, and that subtly let the reader know that the baton of being harry’s ‘person’ is about to be passed from sirius to ginny, two kindred spirits, after sirius’ death. so that's what this meta is about! (consider this my 700th attempt to show that, as the popular fandom complaint/all of reddit still insist, ginny as a character, and especially the harry/ginny romance, did not ‘come out of nowhere’.)

the following meta is part one of two (and yet it's still too long! sorry about it). o in this part, i look at the period from the end of goblet of fire thru the start of half blood prince, exploring how the text sets up the sirius and ginny parallels as a way of foreshadowing ginny’s emergence as harry’s main love interest and place as a family substitute. the second part (tbc) will be what the memory of sirius does for harry’s view of his relationship with ginny, and the kind of positive - and negative - ways this shapes harry’s ideas about love and what family do for each other. i wrote this meta as a way of thinking through some characterisation choices for my current WIP, beasts. if you're following along with that fic, this meta can be seen as a companion piece especially to my thinking behind chapters ten and eleven, so hope proves helpful for some of my thinking behind the sirius and ginny friendship that appears in that project. it's also dedicated to @ashesandhackles, queen of metas, who has reminded me to post this meta precisely 9 million times because she is a long-suffering saint.

ok - sirius and ginny. let’s goooooo!

sirius and ginny before ootp

before OotP, ginny is absent from any plot connected to sirius. ginny doesn’t know the truth about sirius’ innocence, nor does she know that harry, her brother and her friend are in regular contact with sirius and that harry now as a surrogate father/big brother figure to confide in and seek comfort in. in fact, in one of ginny’s few appearances in GoF, the narration is unusually insistent that the reader knows how little ginny knows about sirius:

“And have you heard from — ?” Ron began, but at a look from Hermione he fell silent. Harry knew Ron had been about to ask about Sirius. Ron and Hermione had been so deeply involved in helping Sirius escape from the Ministry of Magic that they were almost as concerned about Harry’s godfather as he was. However, discussing him in front of Ginny was a bad idea. Nobody but themselves and Professor Dumbledore knew about how Sirius had escaped, or believed in his innocence. “I think they’ve stopped arguing,” said Hermione, to cover the awkward moment, because Ginny was looking curiously from Ron to Harry. “Shall we go down and help your mum with dinner?”

the only other tiny crumb of sirius and ginny we get is the news that the owl sirius bought in PoA and gifted to ron as a replacement pet for scabbers has been embraced and named by ginny. sirius gifting a tiny little spitfire of an owl that annoys ron? it's giving foreshadowing, your honour.

the reader, though, knows who sirius is to harry by GoF. throughout this book, for the first time in the series, harry has a person he can claim as something like a family: someone to worry about, someone who cares about him,who can advise, guide and mentor him, as well as offer him support and consolation in difficult times (‘someone like a parent…’) although sirius has not been able to offer harry a stable alternative home to the dursleys due to his status as a wanted man, he’s still filling a role that previously had been vacant in the series: he’s harry’s person, the surrogate parent chosen for him by james and lily. he’s close by, either by the floo or eventually living (at great personal cost) as padfoot in hogsmeade, and he’s present emotionally for harry in ways that prove incredibly meaningful to his young godson. in times of great of distress, sirius is there for harry to meet emotional needs that ron and hermione (understandably, no shade to them) can’t always meet. the floo scene early on in GoF, during harry’s row with ron, is a particularly good example of this:

“Never mind me, how are you?” said Sirius seriously. “I’m —” For a second, Harry tried to say “fine” — but he couldn’t do it. …Before he could stop himself, he was talking more than he’d talked in days — about how no one believed he hadn’t entered the tournament of his own free will, how Rita Skeeter had lied about him in the Daily Prophet, how he couldn’t walk down a corridor without being sneered at — and about Ron, Ron not believing him, Ron’s jealousy . . . Sirius looked at him, eyes full of concern… He had let Harry talk himself into silence without interruption’.

harry derives enormous comfort from sirius’ presence in his life during GoF. he writes to sirius, he repeatedly turns to him for advice, he worries for him more than he does any other person. sirius fulfils harry’s desire to be kept abreast of important information about voldemort and death eaters, doesn’t sugarcoat news for harry, and makes him feel important, cared for and understood. (harry even shows off to sirius telling him about how much of a slay the first task was. ugh). by the time of the third task, sirius is sending harry daily owls, a constant flow of reassurance and concern (‘He reminded Harry in every letter that whatever might be going on outside the walls of Hogwarts was not Harry’s responsibility, nor was it within his power to influence it. If Voldemort is really getting stronger again, he wrote, my priority is to ensure your safety.’) when harry returns from the graveyard at the novel’s end, it’s sirius who races to his side to advocate for him and offer him both words of comfort and physical affection as he processes the traumatic series of events that constitute the climax of the book’s plot. (my personal favourite part is where harry says ‘wormtail cut me with a knife’ and the text says sirius made a ‘vehement exclamation’, which i can only assume is children’s book speak for ‘fucking hell’.) harry goes to bed: sirius stays with him, a literal guard dog as he recuperates. after the most traumatic events of the series to date, the reader is at least consoled that harry potter has a person now, someone he loves for him to worry about and to worry for him, who catches him on the other side of traumatic events and makes them that bit much more bearable.

sirius and ginny during ootp

with sirius' role in harry's life established in GoF, OotP begins with harry, cooped up and restless at privet drive, angry with ron, hermione, sirius, and dumbledore for abandoning him at privet drive and keeping him in the dark. harry arrives at grimmauld place to find an anxious ron and hermione, with whom harry is angry and frustrated for having left him out of their summer hangs and having neglected him, by his assessment, in surrey. it’s the most conflict we’ve seen in the trio in terms of harry vs ron and hermione, and sets up one of the important themes of the book, which is harry no longer being solely emotionally fulfilled by the people he is closest to, including his two surrogate parents best mates but also his godfather. when he encounters sirius for the first time after the order meeting, he finds him surly, bitter, and depressed, furious that he is confined to his childhood home, and (understandably) much less able or willing to offer harry much in the way of comfort, apology or cheering words (‘Harry, who had expected a better welcome, noted how hard and bitter Sirius’s voice sounded.’) in this sense, the book opens with harry disappointed and/or more distant from all the people on whom he most depends and is usually closest to, and that there therefore is already an absence of a certain kind of emotional support in harry’s life that the plot demands be filled.

fresh off the back of harry’s row with ron and hermione is ginny’s reintroduction to the reader. after years of being so shy in harry’s presence she was often nearly mute, the reader finds that ginny is not only now speaking, but that her presence turns out to be remarkably refreshing. from her opening scene where ginny enters harry’s bedroom at grimmauld place, the reader discovers the new ginny is confident, up to no good, in cahoots with her most troublemaking brothers trying to intercept the order meeting, enterprising in her mischief (and very happy to lie to her mother’s face about it). she’s thoroughly unfazed by harry’s great display of rage that has just startled and upset ron and hermione. (side note: in both ootp and hbp, ginny’s opening scene is her entering harry’s bedroom, which is the kind of foreshadowing i personally find delicious). everyone else is behaving pretty much as they have been up to this point, but it’s ginny who is showcasing behaviours new to the reader, a signal that she might be about to play a different role in the series than she has done up to this point.

cut to the dinner scene. sirius and ginny are in the room together for the first time. sirius is moody: though he’s still able to laugh, enjoying displays of mischief and humour (the twins and the knife), he’s more bitter than harry and the reader have seen him since PoA. it’s an important scene for lots of reasons (not least the sirius v molly beef), but it’s also one where sirius and ginny are repeatedly drawn into mental association in the reader’s mind. it’s also a great scene because the behaviour of crookshanks the cat literally serves to foreshadow the behaviour of harry james potter in ways that are frankly extremely fun.

so! the sirius and ginny hints start small. from the start of the scene, ginny is amused by mundungus the crook (a man, we will learn, so disdained by her mother):

“Some’n say m’ name?” Mundungus mumbled sleepily. “I ’gree with Sirius. . . .” He raised a very grubby hand in the air as though voting, his droopy, bloodshot eyes unfocused. Ginny giggled. “The meeting’s over, Dung,” said Sirius, as they all sat down around him at the table. “Harry’s arrived.”

sirius and harry, sat at the end of the table, are both greeted by crookshanks, sirius’ old accomplice from PoA:

'Harry felt something brush against his knees and started, but it was only Crookshanks, Hermione’s bandy-legged ginger cat, who wound himself once around Harry’s legs, purring, then jumped onto Sirius’s lap and curled up. Sirius scratched him absentmindedly behind the ears as he turned, still grim-faced, to Harry…

when fred and george’s levitation goes awry, flinging a knife at sirius (now that’s how you foreshadow a death), crookshanks bolts:

‘Harry and Sirius were both laughing… Crookshanks had given an angry hiss and shot off under the dresser, from whence his large yellow eyes glowed in the darkness…’

during the meal, ginny’s with hermione, having a laugh with tonks, a character harry has just met but whom he has already decided to both admire and like. after the meal, when harry’s cheered up a bit and had his crumble (the man loves dessert), crookshanks finally emerges from his hiding place, having been coaxed out from his sulk by - you guessed it - one g. m. weasley:

‘…Ginny, who had lured Crookshanks out from under the dresser, was sitting cross-legged on the floor, rolling butterbeer corks for him to chase.’

a grouchy character, initially drawn to sirius, but prone to lashing out and locking himself away, only to be lured back out into comfort and safety by ginny weasley? wow………. radical

after dinner, the argument between sirius and molly kicks off. sirius is arguing hard for harry’s right to know, though he makes no attempt to advocate for any of the other weasleys or for hermione. ginny’s noticeably singled out in her reaction to this scene, the text highlighting that she is particularly struck by this conflict as if it is of particular personal resonance, including someone standing up to her famously overprotective mother for once:

‘Ron, Hermione, Fred, and George’s heads turned from Sirius to Mrs. Weasley as though following a tennis rally. Ginny was kneeling amid a pile of abandoned butterbeer corks, watching the conversation with her mouth slightly open. Lupin’s eyes were fixed on Sirius.’

of course, molly loses the argument: harry gets to stay for juicy order deets (‘Sirius was right, he was not a child.’) after the row, ginny is the only person forbidden from hearing information about the order’s activities. suddenly, the roles are switched: it’s ginny who’s now furious and bitter to be kept out of the action:

‘“Fine!” shouted Mrs. Weasley. “Fine! Ginny — BED!” Ginny did not go quietly. They could hear her raging and storming at her mother all the way up the stairs, and when she reached the hall Mrs. Black’s earsplitting shrieks were added to the din. Lupin hurried off to the portrait to restore calm. It was only after he had returned, closing the kitchen door behind him and taking his seat at the table again, that Sirius spoke. “Okay, Harry . . . what do you want to know?”’

it’s not just the parallels of confinement between harry, sirius and ginny that are so revealing, it’s also the dual maternal conflicts. ginny loud raging at her own mother sets off the howling relic of sirius’, serving to underline two characters who continue to grapple with maternal relationships that are complex and full of conflict, though by no means solely negative (sirius i see you sleeping in your mother’s bedroom babe. don’t think i think your relationship with walburga is just one of straight hate ok). when ginny later gets knocked down the stairs by fred and george, there’s more direct mrs weasley/walburga parallels, with the two of them literally shouting over each other during the ordeal lol. as such, the readers see that the conflicts being set up for sirius’ character in this book - frustration at confinement, conflict with a mother figure, drawn to more reckless and arguably irresponsible characters (mundungus, the twins) and courses of action - are also conflicts subtly playing out with the new ginny we’re meeting, too.

as the rest of the summer at grimmauld wears on, there are more examples of sirius and ginny foreshadowing. the scenes where the two characters interact serve to place ginny and sirius firmly in the same camp of people harry admires and has fun with, the troublemakers and the rebels. over the prefects issue, ginny not only is sat chatting with the troublemaking adults harry likes most, but actively draws sirius into conversation on the issue, likely knowing the answer will comfort harry, but also showing a curiosity and interest in sirius that suggests she admires him:

“I was never a prefect myself,” said Tonks brightly from behind Harry as everybody moved toward the table to help themselves to food. Her hair was tomato-red and waist length today; she looked like Ginny’s older sister. “My Head of House said I lacked certain necessary qualities.” “Like what?” said Ginny, who was choosing a baked potato. “Like the ability to behave myself,” said Tonks. Ginny laughed; Hermione looked as though she did not know whether to smile or not and compromised by taking an extra large gulp of butterbeer and choking on it. “What about you, Sirius?” Ginny asked, thumping Hermione on the back. Sirius, who was right beside Harry, let out his usual barklike laugh…’

ginny’s choice to try and draw sirius into the conversation bears fruit: sirius confirms james was never a prefect, and harry’s sour mood is suddenly lifted. (‘All at once the party seemed much more enjoyable; he loaded up his plate, feeling unusually fond of everyone in the room.’) ginny is thus beginning to provide harry with subtle comfort and reassurance, especially as sirius, struggling with his own confinement, is taking a less active role in trying to cheer harry up. what i also like is that we have evidence of how ginny views sirius - she’s curious about him and his past, she clearly thinks he and the other new rebellious adults are cool as shit, and she’s drawn increasingly away from her mother’s cautious overprotective approach towards these resistance fighters who prioritise the fight over safety. (it is noticeable to me that ginny does not become a prefect in HBP, suggesting sirius' example proved instructive).

we see more small parallels between sirius and ginny during the cleaning scenes. the battle against grimmauld place is an important symbol of one of the important themes of OotP as a book: a battle over past traumas and their persistent and unwieldy symptoms that are seemingly never-ending. while it’s harry’s experiences that, of course, take centre stage, sirius’, too, loom omnipresent throughout the text. it’s significant, then, that ginny’s own past gets brought up for the first time in three books here, albeit briefly:

'They found an unpleasant-looking silver instrument, something like a many-legged pair of tweezers, which scuttled up Harry’s arm like a spider when he picked it up, and attempted to puncture his skin; Sirius seized it and smashed it with a heavy book entitled Nature’s Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy. There was a musical box that emitted a faintly sinister, tinkling tune when wound, and they all found themselves becoming curiously weak and sleepy until Ginny had the sense to slam the lid shut…'

in this moment, we see sirius and ginny singled in the larger group as quick-thinking, shrewd characters, with a good instincts and common sense (if a bit of a tendency to get scrappy). their respective dark pasts are subtly alluded to. sirius whacks a spider trying to attack harry with a book that might as well be entitled my big book of family trauma. ginny, meanwhile, steps in when everybody present starts to be enchanted by a mysterious object luring them into danger by whacking it shut (gee i wonder why!) given this is the book that will see ginny mention the events of CoS for the first time in errrrr three years, it’s significant that the text is careful to draw ginny into this broader theme that unites sirius and harry, the constant reminders of traumatic pasts at every turn. we also see here the revelation that regulus black was a death eater. coming after news of percy weasley’s betrayal, sirius’ bitter dismissal of his younger brother deliberately mirrors ginny and the other weasleys’ attitude towards percy, this sense of pureblood families split over wizarding politics, often fatally.

while harry fears his expulsion from hogwarts prior his hearing, he continues to fantasise about coming to live with sirius at grimmauld, and about being with a family member and finding an alternative home to hogwarts. sirius, as hermione astutely observes, tries to manage harry’s expectations and not to get his own hopes up: still, when harry is exonerated, sirius is visibly depressed, showing the beginnings of an emotional dependency on harry that harry feels great guilt over.when leaving grimmauld for the start of the school year, sirius, as padfoot, accompanies harry to king’s cross: unlike in GoF, though, he is spotted, and harry begins to worry much more actively about sirius’ vulnerability to capture, about his recklessness and about his judgement. concerned for sirius, and absent ron and hermione, who are in the prefects carriage, the person who stays with harry and offers him company is ginny. she sacrifices her own train journey (presumably with her own boyfriend) to find a carriage with harry and make sure he’s not lonely, bringing him to neville and luna and sorting him out after his embarassing cho run-in. it’s not a coincidence that once again we see ginny here taking care of harry crookshanks:

'“Where’s Crookshanks?” “Ginny’s got him,” said Harry. “There she is. . . .” Ginny had just emerged from the crowd, clutching a squirming Crookshanks. “Thanks,” said Hermione, relieving Ginny of the cat. “Come on, let’s get a carriage together before they all fill up. . . '

once harry’s back at school, having left sirius behind to languish miserably in london, we see he's more isolated and alone than ever. he’s tormented by umbridge, endlessly (though often unfairly) frustrated with ron and hermione, ghosted by dumbledore, yet absent the more stable, reassuring sirius he came to know in GoF, unable to write candidly to him and faced with a much less well sirius in the opportunities they do have to speak face-to-face. as sirius’ mental health declines as he is shut up at grimmauld, his ability to support harry and comfort him starts to falter, and he becomes a much more uneven source of advice and support, particularly during his car crash floo appearance, where he’s much ruder than he has previously been (cutting off, ignoring their pleas for him to be more cautious, the infamous ‘the risk would have made it fun for james’ moment). this new sirius, clearly struggling, is much more happy to do up guilt trip to his godson than we have seen him to up this point (‘I’ll write to tell you a time I can make it back into the fire, then, shall I? If you can stand to risk it?’ - you petty little shit, padfoot). all of this serves to increase harry’s anxiety about sirius’ wellbeing and reinforce harry’s sense of emotional isolation. even sirius’ encouragement on the DA is, as hermione points out, partly bound up in more selfish motivations (‘I think he’s really frustrated at how little he can do where he is… so I think he’s keen to kind of… egg us on.’)

ginny’s largely absent in this section of the novel. in the brief moments she does appear, it’s to inject humour (eg. her impressions at the DA meeting) and in little reminders that she now has a boyfriend, no longer harbours romantic feelings for harry, making sure the reader continues to hold her mentally apart from harry. harry, meanwhile, misguidedly tries to seek out a relationship with cho chang, who is showing clear signs of her own emotional distress and inability to meet harry’s emotional needs given her own grief. still, among this, there’s still room for some small subtle sirius/ginny parallels. once the DA plot picks up, we have another little sign that ginny weasley and sirius black think somewhat alike:

“Yeah, the D.A.’s good,” said Ginny. “Only let’s make it stand for Dumbledore’s Army because that’s the Ministry’s worst fear, isn’t it?”

“Trained in combat?” repeated Harry incredulously. “What does he think we’re doing here, forming some sort of wizard army? “That’s exactly what he thinks you’re doing,” said Sirius, “or rather, that’s exactly what he’s afraid Dumbledore’s doing — forming his own private army, with which he will be able to take on the Ministry of Magic.”

with harry's isolation and need for more emotional support established in this first term, christmas at grimmauld offers more opportunity to subtly develop the sirius and ginny parallels, as well as to highlight ginny’s ability to fill the gaps left by sirius’ decline. after the attack on arthur weasley, the group arrive back at grimmauld:

‘Sirius was hurrying toward them all, looking anxious. He was unshaven and still in his day clothes; there was also a slightly Mundungus-like whiff of stale drink about him. “What’s going on?” he said, stretching out a hand to help Ginny up. “Phineas Nigellus said Arthur’s been badly injured —”

could this be sirius literally lifting ginny up into plot significance? why yes it could

ofc the weasleys then argue with sirius about their right to go see their father. despite his own frustrations at being trapped at grimmauld, sirius proves the voice of reason and rational decision making against both ginny and the twins’ hotheadedness (ginny asks to borrow cloaks to go to the hospital: sirius: ‘Hang on, you can’t go tearing off to St. Mungo’s!’) crucially, though, when sirius points out that there are bigger things at stake - the work of the order and the resistance movement - it’s ginny who listens:

“Your father knew what he was getting into, and he won’t thank you for messing things up for the Order!” said Sirius angrily in his turn. “This is how it is — this is why you’re not in the Order — you don’t understand — there are things worth dying for!” “Easy for you to say, stuck here!” bellowed Fred. “I don’t see you risking your neck!” The little colour remaining in Sirius’s face drained from it. He looked for a moment as though he would quite like to hit Fred, but when he spoke, it was in a voice of determined calm. “I know it’s hard, but we’ve all got to act as though we don’t know anything yet. We’ve got to stay put, at least until we hear from your mother, all right?” Fred and George still looked mutinous. Ginny, however, took a few steps over to the nearest chair and sank into it. Harry looked at Ron, who made a funny movement somewhere between a nod and shrug, and they sat down too. The twins glared at Sirius for another minute, then took seats on either side of Ginny. “That’s right,” said Sirius encouragingly, “come on, let’s all . . . let’s all have a drink while we’re waiting…’

there’s a lot going on here: ginny’s willingness to follow sirius’ orders, but also her willingness to accept an argument based on some idea of the greater good before any of her brothers. she and sirius are aligned here, and it’s her decision to accept sirius’ reasoning that proves the catalyst for her brothers to follow. we see here how ginny has come to see sirius: someone she looks up to and admires, an adult whose judgement she trusts and whose worldview she subscribes to. (as a character prone to hero worship - see her view of her big brother bill - i think this is noteworthy, and is behind a lot of my characterisation choices for ginny towards sirius in beasts). but we also see that ginny agrees with sirius' worldview. there are some things worth dying for, and self-sacrifice is part of that.

when harry goes to sirius for reassurance about witnessing arthur’s attack, he finds sirius unable to properly console him and convince him that he was not to blame for arthur’s attack. the reader gets the impression of sirius withholding information from harry (‘He could only see a sliver of Sirius’s face; the rest was in darkness’), and the scene ends with sirius clapping harry on the shoulder and leaving him ‘standing alone in the dark’. while sirius throws himself into christmas preparations, obviously delighted to have company, harry shrinks from the cheer and isolates himself. in the end, ofc, the only person that manages to pull harry out of his dark, brooding thoughts is ginny. the text is careful to note she’s sitting beside him on the tube back from st mungo’s, when he looks very unwell. then, in the ‘lucky you’ scene, she showcases some of the same skills harry first came to appreciate in sirius in GoF. she tells it to him straight: she’s sympathetic, but not overly gushing, and she reminds him of her own intensely frightening experience which she endured alone, something harry can relate to, even if the experience of possession is not. it’s an important scene for lots of reasons, but it’s also, crucially, the intervention that causes harry’s mood to lift, and he gets to enjoy a christmas with his godfather, the thing he had most wanted in the run-up to christmas, and which becomes the only holiday period harry and sirius ever spend together:

‘I’m not the weapon after all, thought Harry. His heart swelled with happiness and relief, and he felt like joining in as they heard Sirius tramping past their door toward Buckbeak’s room, singing “God Rest Ye Merry, Hippogriffs” at the top of his voice.’

of course, once christmas is over, sirius slips back into a depressed, gloomy state. harry wants a better goodbye than he gives him, merely giving him a quick one armed hug (there’s a real theme throughout harry and sirius’ relationship of very sparing physical contact on sirius’ part, which is obviously a hole in harry's life ginny will fill in - er - a big way). back at school, harry returns to umbridge’s increasingly draconian rule, maks a disastrous attempt at forging a relationship with cho, and continues to feel lonely, paranoid, and angry. unable to speak to sirius properly via letter or floo - and unwilling to open the present sirius has given him to communicate directly with him, the two-way mirror - harry is increasingly sullen, a mood that only worsens after seeing snape's worst memory.

the easter egg scene is obviously important for hinny for lots of different reasons. but here i just want to highlight how the scene serves to show ginny as both the conduit to sirius for harry, and someone whose behaviour echoes that of sirius in GoF when harry first began to open up to and seek comfort in him. harry is distressed by his now complicated feelings both towards the father he previously revered and towards sirius, who seemed to encourage james’ bullying behaviour. ginny hands harry a chocolate easter egg covered in snitches: chocolate, a canonical source of comfort against dark thoughts, and an egg that reminds him of the love of parent. the act makes him suddenly emotional, though he at first denies he’s upset. ginny presses carefully and sensitively, asking the right questions to get him to confess the source of his worry, waiting for harry to take his time to speak - all behaviours that echo sirius’ own effective listening techniques. ginny’s acquaintance with sirius, and knowledge of how significant he is to harry, is important here, too, and a subtle sign to the reader that he trusts ginny with knowledge about sirius after a long time of having her in the dark about his godfather. the reader leaves the scene having seen ginny breakthrough to harry emotionally in a way for the second time in the novel, in a way no other character has done (‘he felt a bit more hopeful…’)

of course, the course of action ginny has set in motion is itself risky and reckless (‘anything is possible if you’ve got enough nerve’ is very marauders as a philosophy). the decision to go ahead with the plan the twins come up with is one harry sees as a decision on whether to be more like james and sirius - a risk taker - or to abandon the hero worship for the marauders he has lived with for so long. in the end, of course, it’s a win for the reckless troublemakers: he chooses to go ahead with the plan the twins have crafted and that ginny has set in motion, and to speak to sirius.

and yet. sirius is still alive - there is not need for ginny yet. for the remainder of the book, ginny has to beg to be included in the trio's plans and to be allowed to be a part of the plot to rescue sirius. she’s is often in conflict with harry, showing a lot of sirius’ bitterness at attempts at containment and to keep her out of the fighting. she grates against harry’s insistence that she is too young and inexperienced, and having to remind the trio that she, too, has come to care about sirius and wants to see him safe:

“I’ve got a broom!” said Ginny. “Yeah, but you’re not coming,” said Ron angrily. “Excuse me, but I care what happens to Sirius as much as you do!” said Ginny, her jaw set so that her resemblance to Fred and George was suddenly striking.

of course, it all ends in tragedy: sirius, desperate to go to harry’s aid and absolutely gunning for a fight after months of confinement, is killed, leaving harry alone. there a subtle clues that something has shifted in ginny’s relationship to harry and the trio in the scenes after sirius’ death, including ginny positioned as the mirror image to harry in the hospital:

‘Harry was sitting on the end of Ron’s bed and they were both listening to Hermione read the front page of the Sunday Prophet. Ginny, whose ankle had been mended in a trice by Madam Pomfrey, was curled up at the foot of Hermione’s bed…’

despite this, in the immediate aftermath of sirius’ death, harry is extremely alone. he is unable to work out what he needs (‘Whenever he was in company he wanted to get away, and whenever he was alone he wanted company.’) he tries to go to hagrid’s, but regrets it (‘He was starting to wish he was alone again’), leaving after hagrid reminds him of sirius’ core traits, an inability to stay out of the fight when he believes in the cause:

“But still, Harry . . . he was never one ter sit around at home an’ let other people do the fightin’. He couldn’ have lived with himself if he hadn’ gone ter help —”

unlike at the end of GoF, harry is isolated by his grief and the revelation of the prophecy's contents by the end of this book. he goes alone to a secluded corner of the lakeshore, ‘sheltered from the gaze of passersby behind a tangle of shrubs’, and ‘[stares] out over the gleaming water’, and cries alone. there is no sirius or other person to catch him and console him in his grief. his person has died, and there’s a gap in his life again, just waiting to be filled:

‘Wanting to impress Cho seemed to belong to a past that was no longer quite connected with him. So much of what he had wanted before Sirius’s death felt that way these days. . . . The week that had elapsed since he had last seen Sirius seemed to have lasted much, much longer: It stretched across two universes, the one with Sirius in it, and the one without.’

ginny and sirius parallels in HBP and DH

after sirius’ death, the parallels between sirius and ginny become more important as ginny moves into the centre frame as a character. at the start of HBP, harry arrives at the burrow and discusses his grief over sirius’ death with dumbledore in the burrow broom shed, acknowledging how profoundly the loss of a family member who cares singularly about him is affecting him. ('He felt stupid for admitting it, but the fact that he had had someone outside Hogwarts who cared what happened to him, almost like a parent, had been one of the best things about discovering his godfather . . . and now the post owls would never bring him that comfort again. . . .' beasts readers: there's a reason harry clings to letters!) of course, having reminded the reader of the gap in harry’s life that now needs to be filled, harry goes to sleep, the active reflection on his grief for sirius put to one side so the novel's plot can get underway. he'll go to bed mourning sirius and wake up in a sunlit bedroom. of course, ginny will walk into this bedroom too, only now things will be different: harry potter is back to the search for a loved one, for a family, and he's about to realise ginny is the one he wants to fill it. thus the start of the plot of ginny stepping into the role vacated by sirius beginneth.

so much of who ginny is in HBP is reminiscent of sirius. she frequently leaps into battle as harry’s protector (‘You’re taking orders from something someone wrote in a book?’, ‘Give it a rest, Hermione’), she’s scrappy (RIP zacharias smith), she’s funny and laughs easily in a way that less recalls sirius in the time harry knew him than sirius as harry sees him as a young man, in photographs or memories. she's the one who commits to the insane christmas decorations, determined to cheer everyone up over the festive period as sirius did the year before. she even enjoys the widespread admiration and lust of her peers, a trait that directly recalls sirius being eyed up by his peers in snape's memory. by the novel’s end, after dumbledore’s death, it will be ginny who goes to harry’s side after the climax of the plot and catch him in his grief just as sirius did in GoF, this time over dumbledore’s death:

‘He did not want to leave Dumbledore’s side, he did not want to move anywhere. Hagrid’s hand on his shoulder was trembling. Then another voice said, “Harry, come on.’ A much smaller and warmer hand had enclosed his and was pulling him upward. He obeyed its pressure without really thinking about it.’

their breakup has sirius all over it. taking place at the lakeshore, the place where harry wept alone over sirius a year prior, harry draws on the circumstances of sirius’ demise as a reason he must break up with ginny (‘Voldemort uses people his enemies are close to.’) the breakup does little to shift what ginny has become in harry’s mind, though, and he spends all of DH thinking of her as he once thought of sirius: the person whose safety he most craves, the person he misses, someone he claims as his, and whom he associates with (now banished) hopes of a home and a family:

“It’s not a problem,” said Harry, sickened by the pain in his head. “It’s your family, ’course you’re worried. I’d feel the same way.” He thought of Ginny. “I do feel the same way.”

of course, echoes of sirius will also come into play during open war. it’s now ginny, not sirius, who is the one left behind for her own protection: in the run-up to the battle, harry finds himself once again faced with the prospect of confining his loved one for their safety, despite their desperation to fight and do the right thing. but these are thoughts for part 2…….

#meta #sirius black #ginny weasley #it's not NOT an aged up sinevra ship agenda #hp meta #hp analysis #hinny #marauders #black family #beasts

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nyababymao · 2 years

Text

Anyone else feel like neteyam should've had a hinted romance between him and aonung like lo'ak and tsireya did?

Cause i feel like because he was destined to be death fodder, neteyam doesn't really get a character arc and instead just has like character points in regards to other characters to help *their* character developments. Like he's a good soldier son to contrast against lo'ak and further define the conflict between lo'ak and jake and a good older brother so as to be the mediator when his siblings get into conflicts and fights and that's all still good character points but unlike lo'ak, who has an implied love interest, bond with a special animal, and explored internal conflict; kiri who has her oddly intricate and well-controlled connection to the sealife, her deeper friendship with spider, and her own internal conflicts regarding her mother; and spider, who has his frustrating love-hate bond with his recom father, his strained relationship with neytiri, and the gap that comes from him being human biologically but na'vi in everything else; neteyam really doesn't have any personal character points or conflicts that gets explored.

Him being the good soldier son is only ever discussed in comparison to lo'ak as the rebellious son and not really a conflict that he also has with his father that later gets resolved like lo'ak's, him used to being the future leader of his clan is just never explored even though I feel like that would have been a huge part of his character, his relationship to jake and neytiri ends up being more build up for their reaction to and effects of him dying rather then any development for neteyam himself, and even the idea of him feeling pressured by being the oldest son is in a way given to lo'ak when he says he and aonung are the same because both they feel pressure. I mean I'm sure they do but I get the feeling if neteyam wasn't originally planned to be death fodder, he would've been involved during that moment.

The entire movie, neteyam just feels overly sidelined in comparison to rhe other characters and is only ever brought up to be further compared to lo'ak or to play 'the good son'. He doesn't really get any personal goals or drive or anything that is his arc and his alone. And it's a shame because I feel like they could've added in an aonung/neteyam background romance and gave him that tiny bit of personal character development.

I mean, aonung and neteyam were already interacting quite a bit(for how minor their contribution to the plot is, I’m not saying they had many interactions overall) between that glance they gave each other when they first met to when they fought each other and they could've built upon that to quietly imply a romance happening in the background. Maybe one big scene where they make up and aonung apologizes for endangering lo'ak and that leads into a small moment of "i get it, being the eldest and future leader is tough" kinda thing. Then some little moments of them exchanging words like 'goodnight's or netting fish together in the background, etc....and then having aonung uncharacteristically wail in agony and anger when neteyam's body is brought back. He was already crying at neteyam's funeral gathering so it really would not have been too hard to give neteyam this little piece of character development. Not to mention it would've then been a great way to lead into aonung getting a bigger role in a third movie.

I just think it would've been cool if neteyam was explored more then what we got and this is one way they could've done it. And it’s like, if lo’ak and tsireya gets to be love interests, why can’t neteyam and aonung be too? You can’t say it’s because lo’ak and tsireya has more chemistry or is more well written/developed because they literally start liking each other and their relationship is hinted at literally the second they first laid eyes on each other 😐

#avatar #avatar way of water #neteyam #aonung #neteyam x aonung #aonung x neteyam

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arc-misadventures · 10 months

Note

A funny little idea that popped into my head with the bunny knight posts.

Rabbit faunus Jaune introducing his 'daughter' Juniper(small faunus version of the jackalope) to Velvet and her family

Little BunBun

Jaune was in the midst of a mission in a small village that had recently been attacked by, Grimm. Jaune, and his team had managed to defeat the, Grimm with minimal damage to the town. But, they were combing through the town checking the destroyed, buildings for any survivors, or if there may still be some, Grimm lurking about.

Jaune: Guys? How’s everything going; Any survivors?

Ren: None so far.

Nora: Found one! Pyrrha, give me a hand!

Pyrrha: On it!

Jaune: Need help?

Pyrrha: Don’t worry, I got him!

Jaune: Okay.

Jaune continued to walk through the town when he stopped abruptly, he heard some rustling in nearby bush. He raised his shield, and pointed his sword towards the sound. He slowly creeped forward, hearing the bush rustling more until it stopped when he came close. He bent down to look at the underbrush. And, saw something he didn’t expect.

Jaune: Oh… Well, hello there.

~~~

Jaune: So, yeah. That’s how all of this happened.

Velvet: Oh, that so sad…

Lulu: I can’t believe this could possibly even happen.

Ilaria: It’s more common than you may think… The same thing happened to me when we were younger.

Rumi: I have the scars to prove it.

Silk: And, it happened to this innocent child as well?

Lily: So… W-What’s her name?

Jaune: Oh yes, say hello to my adopted daughter, Juniper Arc. Say ‘hi,’ Juniper.

A small faunas girl slowly peaked out from behind, Jaune’s leg, before darting back behind his leg.

Jaune: It’s okay, Juni, they’re alright. Just like gramma, grampa, and all your crazy aunts.

The girl slowly appeared from behind, Jaune’s leg, and nervously waved at the, Scarlatina family.

Juniper: H-Hi…

Ilaria: Well, hello there sweetie, my name is, Iliara, it’s nice to meet you~!

Juniper: Hi…

Lulu: She’s so cute~!

Lily: Oh~! I want one~!

Silk: She’s already got eight aunts… What’s wrong with one more…?

Velvet: How about another sibling instead~?

Rumi: This is… giving me ideas…

Iliara: You look hungry, do you want something to eat dear?

Juniper looked at them before darting back behind her adopted fathers leg. Jaune could feel her shaking nervously against him.

Jaune: Sorry, she’s scared around other people because of… Because of stuff.

Silk: What stuff?

Jaune: Stuff.

Lily: Best leave it at that.

Jaune: Give her some time, and some space, and she’ll warm up to you all eventually. So long as you don’t do what my mother did…

Velvet: What happened?

Jaune: Well…

~~~

Juniper: SHE’S. SO. PRECIOUS!!!

Juniper, Jaune’s mother squealed in delight as she hugged her first grandchild. She didn’t care if she was adopted, all that she cared was that she finally had her first grandchild, and that she was absolutely adorable.

Everyone was adoring watching, Juniper embrace her new grandchild, except for two people; Jaune who knew, Juniper, his daughter, had anxiety issues when it came to other people, and Juniper, the child, who was in the midst of said anxiety issues as she frantically tried to get out of her overbearing grip on her.

~~~

Jaune: Yeah, she started to hide behind something whenever mom got too close for comfort.

Ilaria: Oh my.

Jaune: So yeah, please give her some space, and time.

Lulu: Can do!

Rumi: I’ll make sure the others give her some space.

Silk: I gotta take a photo of this!

Lily: Awwww~! The way she clings on to him is so precious!

Velvet: She’s just a scared little bunny rabbit.

Ilaria: She reminds me of you girls when you were her age. A whole litter of scared little bunnies. Ahh, you were so adorable.

Jaune: Yeah, she is a… Hmm? What is it, Juni?

Jaune bent down to look into the eyes of his daughter after she pulled at his pants leggings. Looking into her beautiful golden eyes as she cutely stared at her adopted father.

Juniper: Dad, i’m hungry.

Jaune: Alright, lets get something to eat dear.

Jaune picked up his daughter, and held her in his arms, and turned to address the, Scarlatina family.

Jaune: Sorry, ladies. The little lady is hungry. We’re going to grab something to eat. We’ll catch you all later. Say, ‘goodbye,’ Juni.

Juniper: Bye.

IRVLLS: Awww~!

They waved back at the little girl as they watched the father, and daughter duo leave.

Velvet: That is the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.

Silk: I always had a feeling, Jaune would be a great father. And, he took to it like an eagle flying in the sky.

Lulu: Hey… Uhh…? D-Did any of you feel a sort of… throbbing feeling in your gut?

Lily: Now that you mention it, I kinda did.

Rumi: So did I.

Silk: Are we sick?

Velvet: I knew there was something off with that casserole we had yesterday!

Ilaria: Oh don’t worry, I know what this feeling is, I’ve had it before myself.

Silk: You have?

Ilaria: Oh yes, numerous times in fact.

Velvet: Then what is it?

Ilaria: A desire to do some baby making~!

Lily: WHAT?!

Lulu: That was my womb throbbing then?

Velvet: Did seeing, Jaune with, Juniper really do that to us?

Rumi: Dips.

Silk: Di…?! Fuck!

Lulu: Wait, are yoy two going to… with the aim of having his kids?!

Silk: I want to be a mom, and, Jaune has already proven he will be one hell of a daddy~! So why not?

Rumi: I’m at that age where I want to settle down, and have a family. Who better to do that with than, Jaune?

Ilaria: Care to make that a threesome sister? Maybe we can give our hips a break of we tag team him.

Rumi: Ha! That’s not gonna happen…

Ilaria: I know…

///

What do you think of the art? I couldn’t find any good art of a jackalope anime girl. So I found a cute bunny girl, and tweaked it so she looked like a faunas version of, Juniper.

Which was a nightmare to do that on my phone. Couldn’t get anything looking right…

Art isn’t mine.

#rwby #jaune arc #pyrrha nikos #lie ren #nora valkyrie #velvet scarlatina #juniper arc #rumi usagiyama

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pholla-jm · 4 months

Text

Stronger Now

lol, I found this deep in my WIP's. IMAGINE: STRONGER NOW ~ SANJI X SIBLING!READER GENRE: ANGST/FLUFF cw: during sabaody archipelago arc. also touches sanji's past. talk of slavery and child abuse. not proof read. first person p.o.v **************

"Everything will be okay... everything will be okay." Is what I say every single time I'm put onto that stage. However, I knew that nothing would be okay. Whenever I'm put onto the stage, I worry for who is going to buy me next. How the next person is going to treat me... which would be shit.

I don't regret what I did to receive this type of life. If I had a choice to redo anything it would be to help my younger brother sooner. I haven't seen him almost eleven years, and I hope wherever he is at he is alive and well.

My younger brother Sanji, one of the sweetest people I know, did not deserve the torment he went through. Especially from our father or any of our siblings.

The sound of my shoes hitting the ground is the only thing I could hear throughout the stone walls of the castle I currently resided in. I was currently searching for Sanji, wondering what he was doing since I haven't seen him in awhile.

I suddenly hear a loud crash followed by some crying. I could hear some other voices, four voices to be exact. I didn't need to hear anything more to know what was going on. I quickly followed the voices and soon I was greeted with the sight of Yonji beating Sanji up.

"Hey!" I shout walking over to the three males and picking all of them up by the back of the collar, "what do you think you're doing?!" "We caught Sanji cooking again-" Ichiji starts but I cut him off. "So you beat him up for it? I told you many times-" "I don't care what you say! Sanji is weak!"

I raise my eyebrow at his response, irritation and anger filling my veins. No matter how much I want to hit them, I won't. I refuse to hit a kid, no matter how much they deserve it. Instead, I drop all three of them on the ground. Each one landing on their bum with a 'oof'.

"Go on, get out of here. Next time I catch you hurting Sanji, there will be dire consequences."

All three of them got up and started to leave, each of them mumbling how one day they would be stronger than me and beat me up. Hah, like that day would ever come.

"What's going on here?" I hear Judge, or rather father, say. I look over to see him glowering down at me, and right next to him was my younger sister, Reiju.

I immediately feel Sanji go behind my legs, gripping onto them. I place my hand on the back of his head, comforting him.

"None of your business."

One would think that a father wouldn't support his kids hurting each other, but he was the opposite. I hated the fact he didn't claim Sanji on his own just because he considered him weak.

"It is my business girl." "It will be your business when you actually start caring for you children." "I do care for them, not for that one though."

I scowl at him, disgusted with him. I can't believe half of his DNA is in me.

"Then it's none of your business. Let's go Sanji." I say turning around and grabbing his hand. "You won't be able to protect him forever. Once you're married off, you're never allowed in this building."

I grimace at his words. That's right, he set up a marriage for me. I don't even know the guy, this marriage is just for Judge's convenience. I ignore him and continue to walk with Sanji to my room where I have some medical stuff for him.

I look down at Sanji, his face set in a frown. Now I could see all the bruises and bumps on him caused from his brothers. "What's the matter Sanji?" I ask him. He looks up at me, with tears in his eyes, "you're going to leave me one day."

"Actually," I say before sitting him down on my counter so I could grab some bandages, "I think you're going to leave before me. But I'll always be with you. Even if I'm physically not here, I'll be here." I say pointing to his heart.

I start to clean his cuts and put ointments on his bruises.

He looks at me confused, "how will you be in my heart?" I laugh at him, "no silly. I won't be in there physically. Metaphorically. No matter where you're at, I'll always love you and I'll be in your memory." "But I want you to stay with me forever." I give him a sad smile, knowing that things won't turn out that way, "I know... I know."

Honestly where I'm at right now is a lot better than being married off to some guy I don't know. If I was married right now, I would probably be tied down with children and never allowed to leave the house. Huh, now actually that I'm thinking about it, both situations are the same. Either way, I ended up a slave.

I close my eyes, letting the darkness overtake me. I was definitely going to need rest for what was going to happen next. Auctions were so tiring and it drained a lot of energy out of me.

"Why do you protect him? He's so weak." Reiju asks me while I continue to write in my journal. Besides Sanji, I can tolerate Reiju sometimes. I place down my pencil at her question and close the journal. "One day he won't be weak. But just because someone is weak, doesn't give someone the right to pick on them. If you are strong, then it is your duty to protect the weak." Reiju tilts her head, "why?" "Well wouldn't you want someone to help you if you were weak?" Reiju hums in thought. "If we help someone out while they are weak, they in turn will become stronger later. They will help aid other people. That person will never forget the kindness and will return the favor later if needed."

"Ah," Reiju smiles up at me, "you're so smart (y/n)." I smile back at her and ruffle her hair, "where's Sanji anyway?" Her smile immediately goes into a frown making me worry. "Father put him in the dungeons."

"What?!" I immediately get up and start to rush around the room, gathering some things. "What are you doing?" She asks. "It doesn't matter. It's pass your bedtime though. You should get going to bed." "But-" "Now."

Reiju sighs and leave my room. I continue to stuff things in a bag, including the journal I was previously writing in. Once I leave my room, I go out to grab a lantern knowing that Sanji was scared of the dark.

I quickly make my way towards where the dungeons at, careful not to be seen by the guards. Once I pass them I can immediately hear the cries of my younger brother. The sounds causing my heart to clench.

"Father please, I'm sorry. It's so dark down here. Please let me out." I bite my lip to suppress any tears from escaping. I hate this so much. Once I calm down my emotions, I pull out a match and light up the lantern.

"It is pretty dark down here, huh Sanji?" I ask once I'm able to see him.

There he was placed behind the bars with a metal helmet on him so I could only see his eyes. He had tears flowing down his face, but once he saw me his tears immediately dried up.

"(y/n)!" "Shh!" I say placing a finger on my lips and he nods his head. Once I'm in front of him, I kneel down in front of him. "I'm so sorry Sanji..." I whisper grabbing onto his hand. "It's not your fault..." He whispers back clenching onto my hand. "I'm going to help you, okay? But you have to listen to everything I say."

He immediately nods his head. I let go of his hand and bring both of my hands up to the helmet that was stuck on him. "Relax." I tell him as I put my fingers in the helmet, facing away from him. I applied pressure the metal bending in the opposite direction until it broke. The broken pieces clunked on the floor and I could now see Sanji's full face. His eyes were wide as he looked at me.

"There's that handsome face." I say pinching his cheek causing him to blush and swat my hand away. I laugh at his reaction before standing up, "did I hurt you?" I ask a little worried. He shook his head, "no... you're so strong." He says with wonder.

"I bet one day, you'll be stronger than me though. Stand back." I tell him and he listens to my orders.

I grab two of the metal bars and push against them so there was enough space for Sanji to get through. "You really think so?" He asks and I nod my head, "I know so."

"Come here." I say waving him over and he doesn't waste another second to wrap his arms around my waist. His head resting right on my stomach. I place my hands on his back. I really wish I could stay like this forever. I just want to protect my little brother as long as I could, which is why I have to do this.

"Let's go Sanji." "Where are we going?" He asks, but I don't answer him.

I walk over to one of the walls, punching the cobble wall. The stones fall easily to the ground causing a sliver of daylight to sneak into the room. The sun was rising, which meant the ship should be here soon.

"(y/n), where are we going?" He asks as I drag him across the ship. There was already an island that I could see. A island that father was attacking. There was bound to be another ship nearby where I could get him to safety. "Stop asking questions."

I didn't hear anything else from him.

It took a while for the fighting to stop, but neither of us were spotted which was good. I saw a ship from a far.

"There," I say pointing to the ship, "go on there okay? There are wonderful people on there that will take care of you." "Huh?" Sanji looks at me confused, "what's going on?" "I know you want to be a cook Sanji. You have a gift and if you stay here, you won't be able to fulfill your dreams." "B-but" "You want to find the All Blue, don't you?" His eyes widen at my words and tears start to well up in his eyes. "Come with me." He says but I shake my head. "I can't. Just go, Sanji!"

Tears now fell down his face and loud sobs escaped his lips. I put my bag over his shoulder and turn him back around the ship, "the sea is a big place. You're going to meet some people that love you more than your family ever did. So stop crying and just go!" I push him towards the ship trying to stop the tears running down my face.

Sanji must of realized that I was right and continued to run towards the ship while crying. Hearing his cries only made my cries worse.

"Stay safe, Sanji."

After that, the rest was history. Once Judge found out what I did and the damage I caused, he immediately disowned me. He realized that he couldn't marry me off since I wasn't technically a Vinsmoke anymore. That combined with the fact he couldn't look at me any more, he sold me off to be a slave. I don't regret what happened though. I would happily do it again. The look of anger on his face was very pleasing to me.

"Hey, get up. You're up next." Someone shook me and pushed me towards the stage.

Well here we go.

I was pushed onto the stage where the announcer immediately started bidding for a price for me. It didn't take long with a bid of 3,000,000 bellis. I was so used to this that I didn't hear the small commotion that was going on in the crowd.

Right after me was a mermaid, which I knew she was going to be placed for a high amount. I was right, of course, with 500,000,000 bellis. She was about to be pushed off the stage until there was a loud crash. Two men burst into the building, one of them punching a celestial dragon and punching another person. Soon a commotion erupted throughout the room causing everyone to run and destruction to follow.

What the hell is going on?

"(y/n)!" I heard someone shout my name and I was soon grabbed. I let out a small scream from shock and closed my eyes. I didn't know who was grabbing me, but I didn't fight back just in case it was one of the buyers. "(Y/n)?! Is that you? Please look at me!"

The voice was familiar causing me to slowly open my eyes and look up at the person who was holding my arm. I squint my eyes at the guy. The blonde hair covering one eye, and a swirly eyebrow. It couldn't be....

"Sanji?"

A large smile is now placed on his face and his arms wrap around me, spinning me around. "What are you doing here? How did you end up like this?" He asks me as soon as he places me down. "That doesn't matter. What matters is that you're safe! I'm so happy to know that you didn't die out there." I smile at him.

I was a bit confused to why he was frowning at me.

"(y/n)," He says. "What is it?" "I'm not a little kid anymore. I'm a lot stronger now. You don't have to hide things from me."

The smile falters from my face, "oh."

That's right. He is grown now. Sanji sighs, "just because I'm older and stronger now doesn't mean I still don't need you."

"Once my crewmates find the keys, I'll get you out of this." He says pointing at the collar around my neck. "Thanks." I say pulling wrists outwards so the chains could break. I do the same thing with the chains wrapped around my ankles.

"So, you're on a crew now?" "Yeah... we have a lot of catching up to do." He says patting my head, just like I used to do when he was a kid.

"From now on, I'll protect you."

#one piece #oneshot #one piece x reader #op x reader #sanji fluff #vinsmoke sanji x reader #sanji angst #one piece fluff #one piece angst

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captain-hen · 4 months

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I have been telling my friends that season 7 is a bridge. Also, that Tim had a plan and as he wasn’t in the last 2, the story isn’t as he planned so he spent the whole season taking the characters there. Meaning healing from last trauma to add new traumas and building the foundations for the next season, foundations he thought were going to be build.

For example:

- Chim and Maddie fostering Mara is the bridge to Maddie and Chim having another child, maybe adopting this time.

- Hen and Karen will adopt Mara, and I’m not quite sure about the next step because I’m thinking about Captain Hen but I don’t think it’ll happen in the next season.

- Bi Buck we know what bridge that is even if some people don’t want to accept it.

- Eddie, being bad written, is the bridge to prioritising and putting himself first for them establishing boundaries with his parents. (Kind of Buck did). Also, to discover himself and what he really wants. Healing.

- Bobby to realise he’s a hero and that his works wasn’t over, especially now that Gerrard is back.

- Athena hasn’t been a proper cop this season and both times (Harry incident and whatever the fuck was the Amir thing) she has used her power so I think something will happen there that’ll make her stop and think.

The reason why the wasn’t room for development is because for some stories, it was the end (Chim being traumatised in his wedding by Doug) and for other stories it was the beginning (the whole episode 7x10)

i'm sorry, i don't want to sound like i'm being dismissive of your opinion because you're entitled to it, but i don't agree with any of this. to start with, it's too bad that tim couldn't tell the story he wanted to after s4, but that's not an excuse for him to come back two seasons later, throw a temper tantrum and ignore everything that's happened since that isn't convenient for him. lol. as for the rest, let's break it down:

this sets up for maddie and chim having another child...except we don't actually KNOW how THEY feel about it. they've never talked about having more kids, let alone fostering. we never saw any of this from their POV, we were just up and told that they wanted to do it for henren. which is a beautiful thing for them to do, but we don't know what they feel about it, if they've considered the logistics of having a second child, about jee having a sibling—none of it!

my issue with henren this season was that they recycled the plot of them having trouble with expanding their family for, what, the...third time? it's so tired and feels like misery porn at this point (and let's not even get into the uncomfortable racial elements around the way mara was written in 7x05).

something as monumental as the bi!buck arc should have been explored better. sorry. aside from his conversation with maddie, we barely got to see buck do any kind of serious self-reflection about this major part of his identity and his relationship with tommy, has, well. it's just been written in a very strange and off-putting way post 7x05. sorry to say.

whatever happened with eddie is really not the way to get him to prioritize himself! think about it. for the first time he prioritized his own grief in trying to get catharsis with kim. and it backfired on him spectacularly. he hurt his kid. he lost christopher. i don't think he's ever gonna recover from this guilt. if anything, what's happened will only reinforce his belief that he should never prioritize himself, ever. the thing with kim didn't lead to any kind of healing, it made everything a million times worse. he was quite literally punished by the narrative for his grief and it's quite sickening. and given how things were handled this season i highly doubt it will be treated with any kind of nuance or care in the next.

this has not been the first time athena has abused her power—only the most egregious instance of it—and it won't be the last. if abusing her power in s1 and harassing a teenage girl then didn't get her to stop and think, i don't think this will. sorry.

my entire point, is that most of the things you've mentioned here was incredibly last minute. madney fostering mara. the eddie/kim plotline. eddie's conflict with chris. the bobby and amir plotline. everything in 7x10 felt like an afterthought. why is it that bobby's life was in serious danger and yet we barely saw anything of him? why didn't we get to see more the firefam being worried over him and holding vigil? how is it that eddie and chris didn't even have a single conversation before chris went away to a different state?

you don't use all ten episodes of a season just to set up new plot points for the rest without developing or concluding the stuff already going on in a meaningful manner that makes sense. sorry.

#neethu answers #anon #negativity

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yourminecraftboyfriend · 25 days

Text

some facts about gotham (2014)

jeremiah valeska was the engineer behind wayne plaza and was personally visited by thomas wayne before its construction

he confirms this in late season 4 which takes place roughly 6 years after the start of the show

we know this because bruce is 12 years when his parents are murdered but celebrated his 18th birthday roughly around the same time that jeremiah is introduced

jeremiah says that after he left the circus he was enrolled at st ignatius for some amount of time then went to college for four years

he also says that he started construction on the maze 4 years after graduation and it's been finished for 6 years prior to his meeting bruce. this timeline doesn't actually make any sense because--

in s2 during the maniax arc, when jim is putting the bolo on jerome he says that he's 18 years old (so jeremiah would be too)

at the time bruce is about 14 years old so there's a four year age difference between them

that makes jeremiah about 22 when he's introduced

so at the start of the show at the time of the wayne killings, both valeska siblings would've been 16 years old

therefore

(factoring in the minimal amount of time for construction) jeremiah would've been 15 at the oldest when thomas wayne came to see him

thomas wayne hired a 15 year old to make one of his buildings

lmao

#gotham fox #gotham 2014 #jeremiah valeska #ooooooh gotham timeline ur soooo inconsistent <33 i wouldn't have her any other way

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wangxianficfinder · 8 months

Text

Fic Finder

Jan 19th

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1. Hello, I have lost a fic! It was an arranged-marriage au where WWX marries into the Lan sect. During the wedding all the Lans refuse to look towards WWX which hurts him deeply. Later on LWJ explains it is Lan tradition for no one to look upon the bride until the husband has removed her veil. This was just one of many cultural differences between the Lan and Jiang that the fic explored. Overall I think the fic was kind of somber and angsty? Probably had a happy ending though. Any ideas?

FOUND? Concord by Deastar (T, 41k, WangXian, Arranged Marriage, Gūsū Lán Sect Rules, Depression, Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending)

FOUND? In Love and War by Cataclysmic_Calamity (E, 68k, wangxian, A/B/O, Canon Divergence, Alpha LWJ, Omega WWX, Arranged Marriage, Kind of a slow burn, enemies to lovers ish, rampant sexual tension, WWX is a Menace to society and LWJ is doing his best, Miscommunication, past emotional abuse, Dubious Consent, Consensual Non-Consent, Semi-Public Sex, Anal Fingering, Dom/sub, Anal Sex)

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2. Hello, I need help finding a fic. I'm pretty sure I found this fic through your blog.

It's from Lan Wangji's perspective and takes place during the early sunshot campaign before Wei Wuxian's return. Wen outposts are attacked by some unknown entity and Lan Wangji goes to investigate. The culprit is a human shaped being covered in resentful energy. After a few confrontations Lan Wangji discovers that the being is an unconscious Wei Wuxian and finds a way to free him from the resentful energy. @bluekittenfire

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3. (First part added to an itmf) I cannot remember what it is called but there was one fic where WWX loses his foot/leg and the Wen build him a wooden prosthetic that I really enjoyed and am looking for more fics like this. Where characters are dealt a difficult hand but they work through it and yeah, any recs would be much appreciated thank you!

FOUND? we’re starting at the end by Miss_Enthusiasimal (M, 92k, WangXian, JC & WWX, Time Travel, Canon Divergence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Golden Core Reveal, Burial Mounds, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Starvation, emaciation, Cannibalism, Self-Harm, Amputation, Suicidal Thoughts, Sunshot Campaign, let JZX and WWX be friends club)

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4. Hi! I’m sorry to bother you, but maybe you can help me? I’m looking for a fic where Wei Wuxian is fighting at what I remember to be Qiongqi Path. I think Jiang Cheng makes a smart remark (something like “Are you just gonna play your flute or you going to help us?!”) and Wei Wuxian stops playing his dizi long enough to give JC the finger… only for them to realise what it means that he’s stopped playing and a flute can still be heard. Not long after LWJ pulls Su She out of the foliage with the other flute.

Vaguely I remember it being a fix it fic where less people die than in canon.

If you can help with this I would appreciate it since it’s haunted me for days now! And even if not I hope you have a pleasant day. ^^ @jestingknights

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5. hi!! i’m been looking for a fic for days. i read it forever ago but it’s during the cloud recess study arc and in it lan xichen realizes how awful the jiangs are treating wwx and tries to subtly convince him to leave tywng and stay in gusu bc he knows how much lwj likes him and he sees how talented wwx is and knows he would be a good asset for any sect to have. a specific scene i remember is that lxc would pretend to accidentally bump into wwx to talk to him. and they would go on walks and lwj saw it and got jealous. i think lxc was lowkey manipulative but in a way where he was doing it to make wwx care enough about himself to leave the jiangs. it was not jiang clan friendly at all. i kno this is so vague sorry about that. but it’s driving me crazy how i can’t find it when i know ive read it more then once. thanks for any help u can give

FOUND? If 5 isn't 🔒💖 Hoards and treasures by apathyinreverie (T, 21k, WangXian, Siblings, Family, not particularly Jiang friendly, YZY Bashing, slightly darker Gusu Lans, LXC being the best brother, Some manipulation, But with the best of intentions, and not between wangxian, Dragon LWJ, Fox WWX, Smitten LWJ, Fluff, perfect happiness, adorable WWX, Romance, Some worldbuilding, courting), it's very similar so here's hoping!

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6. Hello! I’m looking for a modern AU where WWX lives in and runs a theater, I believe LWJ is hosting his orchestra there for practice and for an event??? And it’s important that it’s successful to keep the theater open. I believe at some point, someone throws a rock or a brick through the front doors, and I believe the jiangs show up in the end and WWX confronts that. Im having such a hard time finding it or remembering more about it, and I’ve been looking for it for so long 🥲 @takemitchyleaps

FOUND? Talisman by Witch_Nova221 (M, 192k, WangXian, Modern AU, Eventual Romance, Theatre, Rock Band, Childhood Friends, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Spousal Abuse, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff, Stalking, Minor Character Death, Friends to Lovers, Mutual Pining)

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7. Hi! I hope doing this right, can tou help me find a fic ? I remember that the sects start making alliances because they notice how the Wens are acting. The Jiangs and the Lans are going to ally through marriage, the choice is up to LXC, but because he is jealous of LZ, thinking he never had it difficult, when WY is offered to the Lans, LXC decides to marry him to make LZ suffer, knowing LZ and WY like each other. LXC is the one whose core is melted and LSZ is LXC and WY's biological son. @old-rose-peonies

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8. There's a fic I vaguely remember reading, and I don't know what it's called. There's a scene where Lan Zhan is trying to help Wei Ying eat again (residual starvation stuff), and there's an NSFW scene with honey where Lan Zhan is trying to help Wei Ying associate eating with Good Things. That's the extent of my memory. If you could please help me find it, I'd greatly appreciate it! Thank you! @amynchan

Oh oh! I know exactly which fic this is because it was written based on a post of mine! It's actually WWX helping LWJ and was written by the wonderful InTheGreySpaces (thank you again for writing this beautiful fic~) 😊 Though I could be wrong so please let me know if this isn't it 😅 - Mod C

FOUND! 🧡 Sustenance of the Soul OR Five Times Lan Wangji Refused to Eat and One Time Wei Wuxian Convinced Him To by InTheGreySpaces (E, 9k, WangXian, Grief/Mourning, Angst, Pining, Eating Disorders, LWJ Has an Eating Disorder, and WWX is going to help him get past it, Inedia, Inedia used in the wrong way, LWJ's 33 Lashes Punishment, referenced as the cause of his eating problems, Submissive LWJ, Sort of?)

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9. Hello! I'm looking for a specific fic that I'm afraid might've been deleted. It's a modern au set in the 90s in California (possibly). The Spotify playlist "LWJ DJs your life 1999" goes with it. What I remember is that LWJ is both a goth club DJ and a cello player, WWX drives a terrible car, and the gang is looking to buy the perfect huge house to collectively live in. It might've been part of a series, there's a Halloween party bit where LWJ dresses up at a classic style gothic vampire and curates an extensive party playlist. Thanks for the help! @aceaviatrix

FOUND? The Quiet Room by trickybonmot (M, 39k, WangXian, Modern AU, 1990s, Goth LWJ, Cellist LWJ, College Student WWX, House Hunting, Dating, Clubbing, San Francisco, Implied/Referenced Past Child Abuse, Mental Health Issues, Academic Disaster Aftermath, Getting Together, Repressed Teen Crushes to Strangers to Lovers, Homelessness, in the form of couch surfing, background NieLan)

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10. For the next fic finder: I'm looking for a longer fic where the wens find shelter at the nie sect. It was part of a way bigger plot and some wangxian shenanigans, but wen qing and nie mingjue end up sleeping together, mainly because wen qing is cold and is like "might as well". I do remember that nie mingjue was trans, also. Anyone have any idea what fic that was?

FOUND? 💖 Uninvited by WithBroomBefore (M, 13k, wangxian, canon divergence, fix-it, hurt/comfort, sect leader jyl, sick fic, happy ending) specifically chapter 3

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11. Hi! I need help in looking for a fic where Nie Huaisang was the one who sacrificed his body and soul to summon Wei Wuxian back to life. Thank you @etutb

FOUND? Crowded by nirejseki (G, 1k, NHS & WWX, WangXian, WangXianSang, Canon Divergence, Different Body Offering Ritual, Atypical Relationship Dynamics, sentient sabers) this is a nhs sacrifice summon (gone sideways) fic

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12. Hello. I am looking for a fic where there was a finger trap? You know, the “thing that traps the victim's fingers (often the index fingers) in both ends of a small cylinder”? Anyway i cant remember if it was a tweetfic or a fic on ao3 but wangxian had their fingers in this 🥲🙏

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13. Hi, I don't normally lose fics but I lost this one: Post-Canon, Jiang Cheng basically goes round all the clans and tells them what was wrong with their defences during Sunshot and what they could do better. He also has some unkind words to say about Lotus Pier's organisation. It sounds like he's making enemies but he's really not. Any ideas, please? @solo----

FOUND? 🔒 The Cold Wind of Harsh Truth (or How We Nearly Lost the Sunshot Campaign): A Treatise by Icarus (T, 13k, wangxian, Post-Canon, Humor, Angst, JC digs and keeps digging, Zidian lore, Fun with talismans, JC-centric, Competence Kink, Strategy & Tactics, Cultivation Sect Politics, Arranged Marriage, Trauma, Logic, POV JC)

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14. Hi, I am looking for a fic set post-canon (I think). I remember Wei Wuxian maybe living in the jingshi, possibly teaching classes, but definitely going into Caiyi with Lan Wangji and during a festival Wangji wins a game and the prize is this ugly turtle statue that Wei Wuxian adores. They go on to prank Lan Qiren with the turtle statue. I loved this scene but I can’t remember what fic it came from, please help!

FOUND! I think 14for the fic finder is from the actual book. It sounds like the last extra chapter. / Not saying there isn't a fic involving it, but #14 sounds a lot like the Yunmeng extra in book five, as well. Ring toss, ugly turtle statue, and Wei Wuxian considering pranking Lan Qiren included. The only difference is the location. Your searcher may have mistaken it for fic, especially if they read translations online. / #14 is one of the extra chapters from the actual novel (Extra 7 in the official English translation)

I found a few similar fics with a turtle statue if you want to check them out ^^ - Mod C

The Turtle in the Lanshi by Brierilee (G, 1k, WangXian, Post Canon, POV LJY)

Jin Ling and the No Good Very Bad Terrible Year of Cloud Recesses Bullshit by cringewerewolf (T, 2k, WangXian, Juniors)

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15. hi!! looking for this funny fic based on a silly story. Lwj rejects wwx on a dating app accidently right in front of him, i think they're on an airport? they end up talking obvs and it's cute and funny @ilyweiwuxian

FOUND? Ticket to Ride by mistresscurvy (E, 18k, wangxian, Modern, Online Dating, Road Trips, Service Top, Phone Sex, Dick Pics, Wedding Banquet)

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16. Hey was hoping you guys may be able to help, I've been look for a fic I read awhile back idk if it got deleted or something but. It is a modern time wangxian fic with tattoo artist wei ying, his parents are alive too. But he ends up renting a boyfriend/ Lan wangji off a boyfriend renting site. They have misunderstandings but get through it, he even gives lan Zhan a lotus tattoo like his own and they get together officially in the end. @yilingpatriarchsimp

FOUND! Rent a Gege by wayward_wing (E, 12k, WangXian, Fluff and Angst, Smut, Bottom LWJ/Top WWX, Bottom LWJ, Top WWX, Getting Together, Older WWX, Younger LWJ, Mention of wangxian with others, WWX’s parents are alive, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Happy Ending, Blow Jobs, Riding, Skinny Dipping, eating ass, Anal Fingering, Anal Sex)

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17. I have lost a fic where Wei Wuxian is a catfish for sale and he helps jilted lovers get back at their exes. Su She hires him to target Lan Wangji but Wei Wuxian falls for him instead. Please help me find this fic!

FOUND! I'm pretty sure this one is we'll get him falling for a stranger (or a catfish) by sweetlolixo (T, 38k, wangxian, modern, College AU, Catfish AU, Eventual Happy Ending, Crossdressing WWX, Rich heir LWJ gets catfished by pretty Weiying online that's it that's the fic, LWJ learns how to text with kaomojis, Gossipy aunties NHS and WWX: canon, sometimes LWJ gives you secondhand embarrassment, this fic is on crack, Pining LWJ, Fluff, Humor, lwj is a grade A+ SIMP, Identity Porn)

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18. lan xichen is driving after drinking at night and hits Jiang yanli and she dies. Plot twist ended up she committed suicide, but they didn’t know that before. The lans and jiangs had a fight and somehow lan wangji ended up getting married to Wei wuxian. Wwx is significantly older then lan zhan in this fic.

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19. Hello! I was wondering if I could get help looking for a fic. It’s a doctor AU where LZ and WY are both surgeons. It starts with WY being late to a presentation and showing up right in the middle of LZ’s presentation time. Then WY eventually ends up working on a research project or something like that with LZ? Wen Ning gets hurt at some point in it too and WY and LZ save him against LQR’s orders. I’ve been looking for this for forever and can’t seem to find it. Thank you so much!

FOUND? Anginal Equivalents by fakeplasticlily (E, 23k, wangxian, Modern, Medical Residents AU, Childhood Friends, Mutual Pining, Oblivious WWX, WangXian.mp3, Sexual Content, Podfic Available)

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20. Hi Peeps! Thank you so much for your dedication to this page, I'm a big fan! I'm looking for a specific fic: there's a cultural show being put on by the whole gang and Wei Ying is specifically doing a dance for it but he needs to have body paint and LZ graciously volunteers for it. He ends up writing characters out of an ancient poem that Huaisang tells him is LZ basically marking him for his own. It's not idiots in love, though that one was great as well. Thank you in advance! @nebuluscharlie

FOUND? Out of the Bin and Into Your Heart by Alaceron (T, 27k, WangXian, Modern AU, Fake/Pretend relationship, Oblivious WWX)

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#wangxian #mdzs #wangxian fic finder #wangxian fic search #the untamed #wangxianficfinder #long post

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chasing-posts · 26 days

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As much as I love Victor, I think some people are right about him dying in the season finale alone, being the right choice.

But more than that, I think it could have been REALLY big and climatic. If I could redo it, I would have Victor feeling guilty because it was he who started the whole timeline thing off because he destroyed the world. In season 2, he almost did so again and Ben's soul had to die/ be destroyed to stop him. Then in season three, he accidentally caused the grandfathers paradox by leaving Harlan with some of his powers. Then later he allows Allison change the world again in the hotel.

Now honestly, there is A LOT about this season that needs to change to make this next idea work. But how I would end it is as such:

- After Victor meets Abrigail, a scene should be added where she wither insists on giving the violin to him as a gift, or she manages to convince him to play together with her, and when he goes away with Reginald, Abigail gifts it to him before they leave.

- After all else fails and the siblings plan to sacrifice themselves and are waiting in the mansion for death, Victor leaves briefly to "go to the bathroom". And while the rest are talking he grabs the violin and starts playing when he walks back in.

- He never got to actually play in front of them before... so he wants them to hear his performance one last time before they're erased. Think of it as his Titanic moment.

- When he hears Ben's giant Footsteps approach...then it's time to put his plan into action and he steals his siblings miracles. Using the same "keep them attatched with strings trick" he used in season one, mixed with miracle sucking ability he got from season two. He doesn't have to physically touch them anymore because his violin amplifies his powers, and it lets him do more now that they had time to build up.

- The fam tries to stop them but he puts a wall between himself and the sibs, as Ben/ Jennifer tears off the roof. Then it's a battle between two giants, Ben and Victor.

-Victor plays the violin as Ben starts to wrap him up, and they have a moment that parallels the last moment with Ben in season 2. Victor talking to Ben one on one. Or maybe Jennifer is there too. But they talk. About the old Ben and now him. about how he regrets being unable to save him or reach him. Maybe Ben talks about never feeling like a part of the family because he had the Sparrows, nd Victor's like "I know how you feel. I never felt like a part of the family either... but we were."

-I dunno something deep

- It ends in one last explosion where Bennifer and Victor take out each other. And create an explosion. Or some sort of white hole. Victor is strong enough to destroy the moon so he should be strong enough to destroy Bennifer if he has a proper build up. Even if he has to take himself out as well.

In the end most of the siblings get to survive... but they are left with regret and have to pick up the pieces. That or the world does reset one last time, but sibs 1-5 (and Lila) survive where 6 and 7 end up erased, but they get to go together.

Its still sad and bittersweet... but some major character beats could at least come out of it and it could create a fitting character arc for Victor in particular.

#victor hargreeves #vanya hargreeves #umbrella academy season 4 #ben hargreeves #the umbrella academy #umbrella academy #five hargreeves #lila hargreeves #jennifer #luther hargreeves #diego hargreeves #allison hargreeves #klaus hargreeves #bennifer #reginald hargreeves #abigail hargreeves

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aphverse-confessions · 29 days

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things i want from ms s7:

- michi returns and crashes the aarmau wedding

- vylad has his main character era where he has to play detective and figure out what's wrong with his family and what exactly went down on starlight because everybody is too traumatized to say what happened (dante & laurance are the watson to his sherlock)

- the shadow knights return for one last slay

- jenny returns and oddly enough becomes besties with aphmau (jennymau toxic yuri ftw. come on, aphmau literally saved the world, she should be allowed to cheat on her fiancee with women as a treat)

- MORE TRAVIS AND AARON INTERACTIONS. the parallels are there! they could bond over being cursed souls and their messy relationships with their (deceased) fathers.

- kimcinda becomes canon. fight me. lucinda and kim are gfs. also emmalyn leaves kim's body and moves onto the afterlife with kenmur and mcd aphmau.

- nana reveals her past and her real name to the rest of the cast. she finally leaves behind her "kawaii~chan" persona, and searches for who she truly is, possibly going on a quest to track down her family with zane.

- make garrance at least implied or give garroth any boyfriend. we deserve one genuine mlm relationship that isn't just played for laughs.

- teony and ivy also return bc i said so.

- zack has a redemption arc and reconnects with aphmau ofc.

- ein's mom shows up as a villain, seeking revenge for her son's death. but when she sees how hurt and sad everybody is, she feels bad and doesn't have the heart to hurt them any further. she also finds out how much pain and suffering her son has caused to everybody, and begins to feel guilty because of how she raised ein.

- ein's ghost haunts the cast and possesses several characters. they eventually have to appease his spirit because it's the only way to get him to leave them alone and put his soul to rest. ein's spirit has very long conversations with all of his enemies — aphmau (they find out they're half-siblings which makes them both feel a mixture of disgust and sadness), aaron (they finally find one thing they can agree on, they both hate their dads, and put their rivalry to rest), blaze, daniel, dottie, rylan, kacey, katelyn, kai, gene, zack and his own mother. [+possibly an ein backstory in flashbacks/animation to finally explain his motivation in detail]. ein finally moves on to the afterlife (HELL ofc).

- elizabeth starts off as the main villain of the season. you think she's gonna do evil stuff and kill people like michael and ein did, and then BAM — halfway through the season she has a reluctant change of heart and semi-redemption arc (with zack's support) and ends up an anti-hero instead. she reunites with her family. katelyn is not happy to see her at all and is still very angry at her. but kacey warms up to her much quicker surprisingly and they spend quality mother-son time together.

- all in all pretty peaceful season with depressing undertones. it's like early, slice-of-life mystreet and late, dark mystreet fused together. there are a lot of red herring villains (michi, ein's mom, elizabeth), but none of them actually do anything evil and all of them have a change of heart. nobody dies.

- the void consumes everything. but the cast ends up creating a new dimension (with the help of the void paradox cast!) and uses the realm breaker to transport themselves into it just before the mystreet dimension is consumed and dies off. the series ends with aphmau and co swearing to build a better world in the new dimension they have created.

#I'm not taking every character here #aphmau confessions #aphmau #aphblr #aphverse #aphmau mystreet #mystreet #but also #can u imagine the outrage if Garroth got a bf who wasn't Laurance #🤭

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subjectnamemissing · 1 year

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The first set of duels all involve seeking a return to a comfortable stagnation or projection. The character has left a state that they wish to return to. The second set all involve seeking to reject the current surrounding world for one that matches their desires. The third set of duels is finally closest to the truth of what 'Revolutionizing the world' is - seeking to prove a change exists in the perception of the duelists - that a level of maturity has been reached and the duelist has grown up - but this change only occurs upon the duelist losing the duel. Without the loss all the third duel accomplishes is the completion of a Rotation on the Revolution. The duelists seek ‘adulthood’ in the belief that doing so will grant them the power to continue to exist unchanged even in new circumstances. Revolution has two meanings within the narrative - a break from stagnant conditions or states, and the completion of a cycle that returns to the start - like a carousel’s spin.

I think that the power to Revolutionize the World that all the characters fight for in Revolutionary Girl Utena is primarily a power to change oneself and break free of the eternal revolution offered by Ohtari and embodied by Akio. Part 1/2 - Mikage & the Black Rose Duelists, Saoinji, Miki, and Juri.

Nanami post link

Black Rose

Mikage in the Black Rose arc keeps trying to kill the Rose Bride and win the power of Dios, but he fails every time since every duelist he chooses is attempting to Reject the world and revolutionize it based upon changing other people. A miracle achieved though sacrificing other people - they pull their swords from others and bear the rose crests of others.

Mikage and the duelists are working on an entirely flawed premise - so each duel ends with another corpse in the crematorium and another chick that failed to break their shell and a return to status quo. Each person dueling is attempting to seek a revolution entirely defined by the perceptions or actions of others - Kaene wants Anthy’s judgement of her (perceived or not) gone. Wakaba wants others to look at her as special (especially Saionji). Kozue wants to protect Miki's innocence, but she also keeps wanting to taint it - her sweet love towards her sibling has turned curdled and she also wants to return to the 'Sunlit Garden'- so everyone who can taint it needs to go. Shiori wants to 'Win' over Juri because she can't believe in Juri's feelings in their clash with her abysmal self-worth and she can't accept her own feelings towards Juri. Tsuwabuki wants to be perceived as an adult and grow up already - though he isn't sure what it entails. Keiko wants to know Touga, and perhaps it is a plain desire common to most of Ohtori, but it’s not one that can be fulfilled while she is the lowest girl on the totem pole and Nanomi is in the way. Mikage himself seeks connection but the person he wants to connect to is terminally ill - so in the ultimate conclusion of this theme of rejecting the world he is seeking Eternity in these memories and reliving the past literally - he is a trapped ghost in a burned down building. The one person rejected is the Onion Prince boy whose basal confession is that he believes the problem is in him - not others.

Saionji

Saionji wants his status symbol back and to have something special that his 'friend' Touga doesn't have and Utena confronts him in revenge for her friend Wakaba first and revenge for Anthy's treatment once she is already committed - later episodes make it clear Wakaba still loves Saionji so it is doubtful that she would have wanted the duel in her honor. As Saoinji scoffingly points out - Utena is the archetypical prince protecting the honor of princesses here. Saionji's 'revolution' is related primarily to his status in the system - without Anthy as his rose bride he is no longer special - just an average upperclassman. His second duel is much the same because despite his belief that he has changed - he utterly fails to articulate 'how' and no other character can even notice how or if he is different. He still seeks to possess the Rose Bride as a status symbol of being 'an Adult' and gaining something that designates him as special - most specifically in regard to Touga. He is the only 2nd time duelist that comes without their own Rose Bride. He's not fighting with his own power/strength of will at all. He's repeating lines said by Touga in the first set of duels, Saioinji is an imitation of an imitation, and it's not very surprising he missed the memo on the change in duel format.

But he seems to have found the route start for the process of growing anyways after being beaten again. Refuting Touga in his desire to be like Akio and accurately pointing out the central premise of Ohtari. He repeats with Touga there is no such thing as True Friendship- but it is still evident that his relationship with Touga only improves again after they fail to complete their revolutions on Akio’s stage.

Miki

Miki wants to recapture his “sunlight garden” through Anthy. He is seeking a return to a state which was simple and joyful for him and believes if he can possess Anthy then he can return to that state. Of course, this simple state in his memory doesn't exist. He loses the duels both times because his illusion of how things were was shattered - first by realizing Anthy was cheering for Utena - she was not an empty vessel for his fantasy, second by realizing that both his sister and Anthy had elements of 'adulthood' - he thinks that he is ready to 'get dirty to get what he wants' in regards to maturing his relationship with Anthy and finally the stability and strength to make his place in the world secure. Both he and Kozue wants to have the strength to return to the Sunlight Garden, but only Kozue seems prepared to grab the power to hold the illusion together - in which case she chose an excellent model. Akio is a professional in the art of maintaining an illusion.

Miki ultimately seeks to return to simpler times because he feels estranged in the present - a chick without a home.

The problem is that his Sunlight Garden is a fragile thing since it is only a facade. Kozue seeks to grant her brother the power of 'Revolution' and take him to the 'world of adulthood' but his sword is still a 'child's sword'. Realizing that he can't return to the past he sought the ability to create a comfortable present - but he can't follow-through with the 'adulthood' embodied by Akio and complete his revolution on the carousel. Perhaps his Revolution requires him to stop trying to fit himself to the dichotomy of either a powerful prince ‘who takes what he want’ or an innocent and pure child ‘who has what’s his taken’ since no such thing as a 'pure prince' who exists without subjecting others or getting subjugated. Perhaps hope exists, he does know a friend or two who also don't fit comfortably into the defined archetypes of princess or prince.

Juri

I understand Juri's issue in regard to her personal coffin - but I'm not actually sure the motivations behind her duels with Utena or what she is hoping to achieve. Juri's issue is that she doesn't believe in miracles (Shiori returning her feelings) but she really wants to believe in miracles (She can't give up her feelings for Shiori anyways). Her issue with miracles is "Believe in miracles and they will know your feelings" In this context, her duel with Utena is triggered by Utena telling how her Rose Crest links her to her 'Prince'. The parallel between miracles is the power to bring about connections - Juri challenges Utena to show her proof that her miracle - she will be led to her prince through her ring - is real while the camera focuses straight on Juri's locket - linking the two symbols. Juri believes there is no hope of her feelings or her being accepted if she communicates them to Shiori.

If she wins, she can continue to deny miracles exist while secretly hoping they exist - being engaged to the Rose Bride who is said to grant miracles - quietly locked into believing her feelings can’t be expressed. Losing - she still refuses to say out loud she believes in miracles - but it is still clear she is less hostile to the idea they can happen.

Juri's second duel starts with coercion - her anguish on seeing Shiori's humiliation and obsession with Ruka/Juri is outweighing her anguish on the uncrossable distance between Juri's feelings and Shiori despite their reciprocity. Ruka seems to love Juri and knows Juri loves Shiori and that Shiori can't and won't reciprocate with her issues, Juri loves Shiori but will neither reach out nor give up, Shiori loves Juri but refuses to believe that she is worthy so she must make Juri hate her. Juri and Ruka seem to share the idea - it's fine if they hate me as long as they are free from this toxic debasement that they are trapped in. Juri's growth hinges on accepting she shouldn't sacrifice herself for the sake of Shiori's miracle - love doesn't justify abuse. It is only by losing Shiori’s locket and letting her feelings (and fears) lay bare that Juri can break away in a new direction from the interruption into her cycle instead of a repeat of her past misfortune with Shiori.

It seems that Ruka succeeds in his goal of letting Juri move on from her obsession with Shiori - though to what degree he intended anything is ambiguous since he goes and dies afterwards. Juri can accept letting Shiori leave her locket and accept it doesn’t need to require her suffering to love Shiori. Unrequited (or believed to be) love can be left to grow wistful - instead of a constant thorn in the heart. Juri has been given a direction to go for when she is ready to Revolutionize her world. She can still love Shiori, but she can't keep letting the rose parasite use its venom.

#revolutionary girl utena #proofread later #feel free to add commentary or evidence #feeling very literary analysis today #rgu #RGU meta #Mikage Souji #utena tenjou #juri arisugawa #saionji kyouichi

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