#Nishiya Shinji

[delawaredetroit]

I do appreciate that the story continues to come back to the chapter one fail heroes whenever Horikoshi needs to highlight generic structural problems with career heroism.

This whole "these kids need to be taught how to make it in this tough, cruel world" sentiment is particularly funny coming from Death Arms. Because we know he's one of the first named characters to abandon ship when things actually started to fall apart and there was more on the line than his own career

[thingsoverheardatua]

Kamui Woods: Request for you not to be a bitch?

Mt. Lady: Request denied.

[quill-n]

I got a new kitty so in honor of it may i request a lil tabby woods making basics on or with mt coon 👁👁🫵🌳🐱⛰️🐱

Said kitty ^

You absolutely may

[ID] An animated gif of Kamui Woods and Mt. Lady from BNHA as cats. Kamui is kneading his paws on the fluff of Lady's back while she is contently loafed. [end ID]

CONGRATS ON THE KITTY!!! sooo cute <33

[villxinmiixx]

Can I please get some Kamui woods x reader cuddle Drabble like after a tough mission they both go on they cuddle? pls make my wish come true I’m a simp for this man but no one writes for him 🙏

nights like these

kamui woods ( nishiya shinji ) x reader 

♡ reader doesn’t have specified gender

♡ reader is in an established relationship w/ kamui, here’s what kamui looks like w/o a mask or something ( fanart ) so you have an idea what he looks like.

♡ genre; pure fluff, comfort

♡ word count; 371 

♡ notes; ily anon this is cute asf i love my little tree wannabe.

ㅤit was late at night, you were waiting for shinji to come back home so you could both go to sleep at the same time. times like these, it was hard waiting for him since he barely took the night shift. you weren’t sure when he’s gonna come back home. it was already 11. where is he? you were getting antsy, a bit impatient although your lover taught you to be more patient so you’re trying. keyword; trying. 

ㅤthen there it was, the door creaking open slowly. you could tell shinji was trying his best to not make so much noise in case you were asleep or trying to focus on doing something. you sat up from your lying position in bed and looked at the bedroom door opening as well, a light creeping in. shinji realized you were still awake. he took off his hero costume and put on more comfortable clothing.

ㅤhe never showed his bare self in public, he was always in his hero costume and never came out of his home without his whole body covered up. only you got to see that side of him. and you never complained about it. you loved him.

ㅤ”how was work, darling?” you asked your lover. “it was draining.” he stretched his neck as he answered. “but i’m fine now that i’m with you again, my love.” shinji smiled at you, placing a kiss on your forehead before getting in bed with you. his wooden arms wrap around your body while you do so as well. moments like these made your heart swell with joy. you treasured them, making them a core memory.

ㅤso while he’s here, while you still can, you’ll make every moment with him memorable and will be treasured forever in your mind and heart. the war’s gonna come soon. and you don’t have control on what’s gonna happen.

ㅤlost in thought, shinji kissed your nose “i love you, my dear. goodnight, sweet dreams” “i love you too, nishiya shinji.” you replied to him lovingly as he slowly drifted to sleep. a tear running down your eye rolling to his shirt. oh how you loved nishiya shinji hoping one day you’ll take his last name. 

ㅤ©𝘃𝗶𝗹𝗹𝘅𝗶𝗻𝗺𝗶𝗶𝘅𝘅 - 𝗔𝗹𝗹 𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁𝘀 𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗲𝗱. 𝗡𝗼 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝘀𝗵𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗯𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗲𝗱, 𝗺𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗳𝗶𝗲𝗱, 𝘁𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘀𝗹𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝘄𝗶𝘁𝗵𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗱𝗶𝘁; 𝗿𝗲𝗯𝗹𝗼𝗴𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗶𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗲𝗰𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱.

[magicianenthusiast]

jeanist, edgeshot, kamui and mt lady from the genshin au

(genshin spoilers below the cut)

Best Jeanist

born in port ormos and grew up admiring the fabrics imported from across the world

entered the akademiya and joined the kshahrewar darshan, focusing on textile production and machinery

he rose to become one of the youngest sages in the history of the darshan and is well known in sumeru city

despite all of this he's sometimes mocked thanks to his area of study being seen as 'boring' and the darshan remaining the most underfunded in the akedimiya

as a student, he met shinya when the two of them were paired up for a study trip to the desert

both had different areas of study that they considered more important, and bickered their way across the Hypostyle Desert

they eventually reached an understanding after getting lost in the tunnels below the desert

the two developed feelings for one another, but it wasn't until shinya returned from inazuma that they started dating

he has a hydro vision and uses moves a lot like yelan's

probably a bow user too? unsure.

Edgeshot

born in Konda Village to a long line of samurai serving the pyro archon

he trained as a swordsman from an early age, but bucked the trend by entering the akedimiya instead, causing a rift between himself and his family

he joined the Spantamad Darshan, studying ley lines

after their misadventures in the hypostyle desert he and tsunagu become close friends, even living together

six years before the present day, the pyro archon (enji) enacts the sakoku decree and recalls all inazuma-born researchers from the akademiya

the akademiya wanted to remain trading partners with inazuma so they order their inazuman researchers to return, by force if necessary

shinya goes willingly, thinking it's just a misunderstanding

upon return to sumeru he's ordered to either give up his vision, or swear loyalty to the shogunate and hunt down other vision holders

shinya refuses, and is sentenced to jail

after a year of continual refusal, he's sentenced to face the musou no hitotachi but escapes at the last minute and manages to stow away back to sumeru

unable to return to the akademiya, he now works as a mercenary

Kamui Woods

the current dendro archon, reborn after the fall of Greater Lord Rukkhadevata during the Cataclysm

for almost five hundred years he remained in the Sanctuary of Surasthana, sleeping thanks to the Akedimiya siphoning his power for the akasha terminal

he never physically left during this time, but would 'dream' by seeing things through the akasha

after one of the inazuman researchers sent home was executed, her grieving widow set shinji free in a fit of spite

not knowing what to do with himself, shinji found the city too loud and confusing, and fled into the countryside

he lives alone, wandering the forests and helping where he can

he's quite shy, and hides his status of a god, not wanting to be caught again by the akedimiya

Mt. Lady

yu is a researcher in the spantamad darshan, and previously a student of shinji's

she grew up in an orphanage in the grand bazaar, and learnt to dance at the zubayr theatre

although a talented dancer, she stuck out from an early age due to her height compared to the other kids

one day she left the grand bazaar to explore the city and got into a fight after mouthing off to some mercenaries

she was saved by shinji and after this became a fixture in his and tsunagu's lives, eventually moving in with them and joining the spantamad darshan

during shinya's time in inazuma and his supposed 'death' she and tsunagu remained very close

after shinji's return she began to take trips out of sumeru city fairly often - whilst she didn't want to be banished to the desert, she didn't trust the akedimiya

her work with the elements and ley lines brought her to shinji

she realised instantly who he was, but shinji seemed so keen to keep his identity hidden that she pretends not to

she accompanies him in his work in the forests

[mhabirthdays]

Happy Birthday

Shinji Nishiya (Kamui Woods) – May 20th

[randombook4idk]

ah yes, my ship

attention hog x guy who just wants be appreciated

[bisexual-queenie]

I think this is the second post featuring the Lurkers in a row but whi cares I love these 3 so much,

Anyways, imagine when Kaminari comes in for his internship for the Lurkers for the first time in his hero costume and while hes not in the room that just turn to each other and:

Mount Lady: Edgeshot… the boy has a CHOKER

Edgeshot: I knew I attracted queer kids but damn its like I was staring at the face of bisexuality itself.

LMAO bonus points if Kamui is super confused and the other two are just like:

Edgeshot: …Takeyama are you aware that your boyfriend is painfully straight

Mount Lady: Ugh I know

Kamui: ???

(I do headcannon that Kamui is straight with a bi girlfriend (Mount Lady) and a pan co worker (Edgeshot) but he can never understand jokes the other two make about him, but its after Sero becomes his intern then he understands everything)

[missgreenkitty]

Tending bonsai

[bnhaobservation]

Ramblings about BNHA chap 376

So, let’s tackle the short chap 376.

We’ve a spread color page…

...which is just to celebrate the characters that ended in the top 10 of most voted ones. It’s nice with its fantasy theme but that’s it.

We resume with the story and with Ochako and Tsuyu following Himiko. The line ‘We still haven’t had our chat about romance!’ seems more a memory than something that gets said. Still Himiko, transformed in a Twice among the countless Twice clones, notices she’s being followed, protest the girls can’t take a hint and that she’s no more a blushing schoolgirl in love… which is really one of the saddest things she said because it implies she has… given up.

The people she loved, Ochako and Midoriya, who’re both heroes, won’t accept her or try to see things from her perspective. They don’t get her struggle, they acted like everyone else, telling her to just drop being different. We go back to what Jin said, they’re not ‘heroes’ to her.

This is not the moment to discuss Midoriya and Ochako’s (completely understandable) reasons for failing to understand Himiko, it’s just the moment to watch the resulting wreckage of this miscommunication.

Himiko has given up on the people she loved (her own way) and this has caused her to unleash her power over the heroes. For want of a nail, the tide of the battle was completely overturned.

Because no hero managed to connect with Spinner, Himiko or Touya, Kurogiri was freed, Himiko was taken away from the island and now she’s unleashing her sad man’s parade and Touya is setting the place afire.

It’s meaningful Himiko doesn’t say Ochako-chan, but just calls her ‘hero’. Himiko wanted to connect with her, wanted to see her as a person, but now she sees her as just ‘her job’, a hero.

We’re reminded heroes are still the good guys when one of them claims they’ve to move away the villains they tied up so as not to have them die burned by Touya’s flames.

I’ve mixed feelings about this. I mean, the story wants to address the corruption of the hero system but then tends to show, more often than not, heroes being good (or implying they’ll get redeemed like Enji) and mostly failing out of mistakes more than due to genuine ill will.

Heroes who’re all but heroic and with no hope of redemption are just mentioned in passing (as victims of Nagant for example) or small sidecharacters (like Tokoname Tatsuyuki/Slidin' Go) who aren’t really shown doing anything too terrible.

So yeah, good that the heroes want to stop the Villains from ending up roasted but... some bad heroes were needed to be seen in a more substantial way.

Tsuyu worries, hoping Shouto and Shoji are okay before the girls regroup with Kyouka and Tokoyami and they states how they’re now in serious troubles. Ochako again thinks they’ve to stop Himiko or all Japan will be buried. It’s meaningful she said so, because this is the task she set upon herself. I wish for her to wonder something else instead.

Ochako is noteworthy for wondering who protects heroes when they’re hurting, but I wish she could also wonders who protects villains when they hurt, and when I say ‘when they hurt’ I mean not in the physical sense, we just saw in this chapters heroes moving tied villains away so they won’t be burned, but in the psychological one, when they are emotionally hurting who protects the villains? Because things are escalating because the more the villains are hurt, the more ferociously they attack. Same as how AFO pointed out physically wounded heroes get more dangerous, emotionally wounded villains gets more dangerous as well (note how the more desperate Tomura, Himiko, Touya and even Jin and Mr. Compress and Spinner get, the more they get dangerous and capable of crazy stuffs).

Still, I find hugely ironic that now that they’re outnumbered heroes complain this is not a proper battle anymore because their divide and conquer strategy has failed (and Himiko’s Sad Man’s Parade is gonna outnumber them while Dabi’s fire makes impossible for them to keep fighting).

Now, it had been discussed endlessly if Endeavor’s reaction to seeing Touya (worrying for Shouto’s survival completely ignoring how Touya’s body is barely holding together due to how burned he is) is… acceptable.

Normally, an instinctual loving parent’s first reaction in seeing him in such a shape, would be being shocked and worrying for him, then connecting the dots, realizing he might have been reduced like that by his other son and that said other son, who’s conspicuously absent, might have been reduced to ashes in return. Or not. As his elder might have just managed to escape with his life thanks to Kurogiri and Shouto’s move from a battle that, up to minutes ago, he was declared to have lost.

Todoroki Enji is still in a place in which he prioritizes Shouto. Even in chap 355, when he thought at both his sons and he had already heard about how Shouto took Touya down and how AFO was the one to find Touya after he burned at Setoko Peak (which implies the mental state in which Touya is could be the result of AFO’s manipulation as well as Enji’s failure at, at least, finding him first or keeping searching for him), he first worries for Shouto (the supposed winner of the battle) and then for Touya (the supposed loser).

Even in chap 357, when he think at the future, the path he wants to protect is the one of Shouto AND OF THE OTHER KIDS HEROES, without being shown worrying about Fuyumi and Natsuo (I don’t mean to say he doesn’t worry about them just that the manga shows his first concern was for Shouto, for his path as a hero toward the future).

And then adds he’ll pay his penance, he’ll win today AND THEN he’ll keep his eyes on Touya, postponing his duty as a father to his duty as a hero.

For all that Enji claims he wants to atone to his family, he still isn’t shown prioritizing it. Even prioritizing Shouto over Touya isn’t quite as prioritizing his family, because he views Shouto as a future hero, not just as his kid. In that moment he doesn’t think at his dream of his family eating happily together, he thinks at Shouto walking to reach the other kid heroes.

Enji knows it’s his fault if Touya turned out the way he did, that’s why he says he wants to pay penance, that he wants to atone. But he still presented as approaching the thing as a hero, not as a father. He defines it as his duty, not as something he feels he has to do out of love, something he wants to do because he has caused pain to his child and seeing him in pain, hurt him back. If there’s love inside him (and there’s probably some, partly because Horikoshi tried to imply it but MOSTLY because it’s hard for him to get a redemption if he doesn’t care about his kids on an emotional level), he’s buried under layer upon layer of hero duty and he doesn’t seem at all aware of how to tackle it. And even if he views what happened to Touya as his responsibility, his approach to the whole thing is the one of someone who let a rock fall from a cliff and it created a landslide, not of someone who has pushed a person off a cliff causing such person to react violently.

Now… this is how it looks like from a Watsonian point of view.

But authors show things in their story for a reason so I’m actually going to wonder WHY, despite implying Enji should go on a redemption path, Horikoshi is still waiting so long to give us glimpses of him thinking as a father and not as a hero.

So… theories ahead.

1) Well, for start the whole redemption thing can be a red herring. Enji might never manage to get it, because he’s really not putting much efforts in acting as a father.

2) Or it can be the surprise/drama factor. Horikoshi is withholding Enji finally acting like a father would for either surprise factor or drama factor. We’re still meant to wait a little longer because Horikoshi hadn’t had Enji realize yet that what his family wants from him isn’t playing his role as Endeavor, the hero but his role as Todoroki Enji, the father. And so he’s working up a surprising or highly emotional scene in which it finally dawn on him or something like that and then finally, FINALLY, his redemption arc will start with him righting the first wrong he did, ignoring his son (after all at the end of the chapter he said he wanted to see him… it’s only a matter to see if he’s capable to do so or his own are just pretty words and he’s merely seeing what he wants to see and still needs more time before being capable to truly see Touya).

3) The short amount of pages of this chapter can also be to blame, if Enji was actually meant to spend a decent amount of thoughts toward Touya Horikoshi might have decided to move the whole thing in the next chapter due to lack of pages. It’s still not great to see Enji worry about Shouto FIRST, but this can easily be switched once the story is released in the volume.

4) Or this is just Horikoshi failing to notice Enji isn’t acting as a father because this is a story about heroes and so he subconsciously prioritizes heroes and heroic behavior even if actually his story seems to imply Enji should just act as a father, because Horikoshi wants him to act as both but can’t quite find a way to balance the two well.

5) Or on the whole it’s a warning to readers we shouldn’t care about Touya. Garaki implied Touya might not have long to live, Touya himself is on a suicide mission and his body is in a sad state. Enji is not going to redeem himself by saving his son, he’s meant to fail Touya again (the only villain getting saved being Shigaraki and, maybe Himiko) and let him die and this will be the trigger to push him to save at least Shouto. In this case it’s convenient Shouto isn’t currently around because, if Touya dies, his death will be on Enji and not on Shouto also. Enji can die heroically to save Shouto and so that Shouto can continue the path to the future. Mind you, I hate this idea of killing characters, but it’s a really convenient way for authors to deal with morally questionable characters. If Touya dies (doing something good or not) it spares Horikoshi from having to deal with how people would feel if Touya, who had killed people, were to survive, and the same goes for Enji who abused his kids.All those pesky questions about how to punish them for what they did would be out of picture because you can’t really punish who’s dead. It’s the cheapest solution ever but, for authors it’s oh so simple and so often deployed… and it doesn’t really help how Touya (same as Enji) in a way, parallel Darth Vader, because Vader is the one that gets redeemed in the eyes of his son by saving him and then dying short after (which results in him also saving the galaxy in the process).

I honestly don’t know which is the right answer, if the fact that Enji prioritizes asking about Shouto is due to a Doylist reason (lack of pages for exploring his mind or simply not the right moment in the story to show he cares) or due to a Watsonian reason (he’s prioritizing Shouto and heroes and hasn’t changed at all/yet from how he was before).

We’ll see.

Said all this no, it’s not wrong Enji asks about Shouto, that he worries about him, Shouto is his son too… but humans are normally simple creatures. They worry first about what’s under their eyes and then connects the dots and worry about the implications of what’s under their eyes.

Touya’s body is in such poor conditions even Shouto and Enji’s helpers had no idea how he could still move so it would stand to reason than, seeing him in such a state, if Enji cared about him or cared about him as much as he cared about Shouto, his first reaction would be worrying ABOUT HIM, and then connect the dots and realize if Touya is still standing and Shouto didn’t follow him, it might be because Touya managed to turn tables and worry for Shouto.

So yes, Enji’s apparent lack of concern for Touya’s state doesn’t really speak in favor of Enji’s feelings of care as a father.

Credits when it’s due, not even Himiko was shown to care this time (while in the past she cared because his arm was burning), which might be because either she knows Touya went in the battle planning to die so she has already given up on him or because she’s just that focused on killing Hawks (but still she managed to react to Ochako and Tsuyu so it doesn’t work so well) or again, because there just wasn’t time for this in the chapter.

We’ll see.

Honestly I really hope we’ll finally see Enji acting as a father because this whole redemption arc thing has been going along for way too long. I think we’re to a point where the story either addresses it or just gives up on it.

Anyway, while Enji worries about Shouto, we’ve Touya commenting on how his grand dream will never come true…

...and I wonder if he gave up on his dream of carrying out Stain’s will.

In hindsight his focus on Stain’s will was probably a way to distance himself from the emotional aspect of the whole thing, as it did for Spinner, carrying out Stain’s will gave him a sense of purpose that was… better structured than just… returning the pain that he received from his father. His personal vendetta and his ideal might have seemed to overlap but he’ll be likely asked to chose one or the other, because allowing AFO to prevail would also go against Stain’s will as AFO presents himself as a hero in a way but he’s just using people even worse than heroes. AFO won’t bring forward the world Stain wished for, Stain’s world was one in which heroes would reform, not where AFO would rule.

Interesting enough Touya admits he didn’t manage to kill Shouto (when it would have probably hurt Enji more if he had said he killed him, especially if he were to manage to end the battle BEFORE Shouto could reach them) but insists he wants to steal from him what he holds dear, what he’s trying to protect.

The easiest choice would be to go for Hawks (which Touya knows is close to his father) or, at the very last, for the kid heroes (Ochako, Tsuyu, Kyoka and Tokoyami). I would chose Hawks because, as said before, he knew Hawks and his father were close and because Hawks killed Jin so it ironically kills two birds with one stone. But whatever, again we’ll see.

AFO decides now he’s in advantage since Touya and Himiko are taking care of his opponents.

He mourns the fact he didn’t take for himself Kurogiri’s warp (yeah, he should have had Garaki make a copy of it for himself, it’s weird he didn’t but I guess  for this plot reasons are to blame since we aren’t given an official in story explanation) but decides to go to Shigaraki.

Hawks gets in the way because, although he called for killing immediately that guy, which we all assumed was Twice, he’s apparently of the idea he should kill AFO first. I really wish that sentence had specified who Hawks wanted to kill first but whatever.

Haws gets pushed back, AFO mockingly tells him to go face Jin but Hawks points out  AFO is on a timer due to the rewind effect he used and asks him if he has doubts on Shigaraki’s ‘perfect’ body.

For reasons that I can blame solely to either overconfidence or plot AFO confesses Shigaraki’s body isn’t complete yet so this version of him is essential… and really, I don’t think it’s a bright idea to tell Hawks all this even if he believes he had the upper hand, but whatever.

Hawks, who’s evidently the strategist beyond this whole thing (it was implied in the past it was also due to Hawks’ plan that it was Shouto who was sent to fight Touya) makes the point of the situation and tells Enji the only way out of that pinch is for him to ‘put a stop to Touya’.

Well, at least he hadn’t said to murder him.

So far no one of the kids has reacted to him saying they had to murder ‘someone’. It’s kind of disappointing but whatever.

AFO points out his request is cruel because… Enji isn’t in the best physical shape and this would mean he’s abandoning his duty. Not because Enji is Touya’s father and fighting his son might pain him. Despite all his previous teasing it seems AFO too believes Enji doesn’t give a damn about Touya.

Hawks, as a good Endeavor’s fanboy, points out Endeavor beat AFO once so Endeavor isn’t abandoning his duty. AFO isn’t impressed, apparently he finds it very much an excuse.

As Touya moves closer Enji thinks at his duty and decides this time he’ll really see Touya.

‘Shimei... Kondo ore ga miru’

使命... 今度俺が見る

As I said before, I’m not really seeing it as a good thing that he connects the whole thing to his duty, his mission (‘Shimei’ 使命 can also mean “mission”) and I’m not sure he can really ‘SEE’ Touya. He might be a better fighter, after all he created all the moves Touya uses (we still have to see Touya coming up with an attack of his own, so far he was always using other people’s moves), has more experience and, despite not being in a great physical state… well, Touya looks worse physically. Touya’s fire is stronger, yes, but he tends to get overemotional when his father is around, which damages his ability to think with a cold head so, although Touya isn’t bad at strategizing and at noticing things, he might fail this time. Or burn himself even more than he manages to burn Enji because he loses even more control of his flames. It’s hard to tell.

On a positive note ‘miru’ (見る) can mean “to see” but also “to look after", “to keep an eye on”, “to take care of”, so maybe it’s not meant to be just seeing him but also taking care of him (even though the whole theme of the Todoroki is that Enji and Shouto are bad at seeing things, opposite to Touya, so it makes sense it’s just ‘to see’)... we’ll see.

Anyway, for being so short, it was an interesting chapter but not one that had the heroes acting as saviors. They seem to be here just to beat their enemies, not to do some saving or some serious introspection on how to stop this situation without using punches. But well, the chapter was short so there’s hope.

We’ll see.

[stillness-in-green]

MLA May AUs (Parts 3+4/31?)

Intro Post

5/3: you’re lost in the labyrinth

+

5/4: no sweat, no tears, no guilt

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Content Warning: Accidental death, harassment.

you’re lost in the labyrinth

It starts with blood on your hands, a sticky wetness you can smell but can’t see.

No.  Maybe it ends there.  Backtrack, turn the corner.

It starts with a power outage, a lit bedroom plunged into black, as if you’d blinked and gone blind.

Still not quite right.  Try again.

Maybe it starts with the fact that Dark Shadow was never like other quirks.  Usually, quirks start small.  Nearly harmless, no matter what their potential may be.  A quirk is like a muscle, after all, and children’s muscles are so weak.

But then there are quirks that don’t play by the rules.  Unique quirks, mysteries assembled from odds and ends of the genetic cloth.  Quirks that draw on resources beyond just a six-year-old’s tiny body.  Quirks unchained from the normal linear path of improvement or regression.

Quirks like Dark Shadow.

It starts with Dark Shadow, perhaps, and all the ways people misjudge him.

Your parents are out that night, enjoying dinner and an avant-garde play for their wedding anniversary.  If they were home, things might have ended differently.  They would know where to find the flashlights, would know to grab the flood lantern.

They told the sitter where to find these things before they left.  But the sitter is fifteen, her mind on other things, expecting no trouble, because really, how much trouble could one little shadow, teary-eyed and hiding beneath your elbow from the foyer’s overhead light, possibly cause?

Ah, and here’s this ending again, blood in the dark.

But it’s not the ending it seems—a great deal comes afterward.  Screaming and flashing lights, a violent whirl of people in costumes trying and failing to subdue Dark Shadow, until finally comes a hero wreathed in flames bright enough to burn the night away.

Everything is exposed.

Everything except your path, which twists awry, leading you into a labyrinth of court rooms, social workers, your mother grimly sending you back inside when you ask her what she’s scrubbing off the walls of your house.

Your father, from whom you inherited the shape of your face if not the color of your plumage, goes missing.  The police suggest in a back-handed way that he left (and who could blame him); your mother will believe otherwise (monster, said the writing on your walls, and carrion crow) until her dying breath.

You can’t talk to Dark Shadow anymore: the connection is still there, but to the best efforts of court orders and back-up generators, the darkness is exiled, and all Dark Shadow’s strength with it.  You aren’t allowed outside past sunset; you sleep with the lights on, a blindfold the only concession granted by your now-eternal day.

You change schools.  It doesn’t matter.

You change neighborhoods.  It doesn’t help.

No matter what, it always seems to go back to that night—to the blood in the dark.  And what you don’t dare tell anyone is, I wish I could go back.  I miss him.  I miss him so much.

But this, too, is not the ending, just time lost squinting against the unforgiving scrutiny of the light.

The exit, when you first stumble across it, goes unnoticed.  A reporter, one whose face sticks with you because you like the black sclera of her eyes and the cool blue of her skin.  There were so many reporters at first, and maybe she was even among them, but the news cycle turns ever onward.  What makes her stand out even more than her eyes is her timing: three full years after that night, she contacts your mother with a request for an interview.

“You poor thing,” she says directly to Dark Shadow when you meet, and shock shivers down the bond.  “It’s not your fault you were afraid.  And how short-sighted, to keep your wings clipped like this.”

You don’t know it at the time, when you’re staring at the woman with wide eyes and a stuttering heartbeat (another beginning, albeit a much more embarrassing one), but this statement both instantly endears Kizuki Chitose to your mother, while also striking her to paranoia at the unaccustomed kindness.

Life goes on.  At the time, you fail to recognize her for the exit she is. Everything changes when her article goes to print.

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

no sweat, no tears, no guilt

Content Warning: Gore, Creature Rejection Clan, hate crime violence (past and attempted), referenced child abandonment. This fill guest-stars this delightful fellow, who I've been saying for ages that I'll eventually write something about:

Looking around in the aftermath, Sugar counted bodies: three people in black robes and skull masks, three people whose builds matched the guys who’d spotted him at the convenience store and tailed him to the pit stop.  Two of them lay frozen, dead mid-convulsion.  Their mouths hung open, filled with white spittle and Sugar’s own clumpy secretions, which had eaten right through the hoods.   A low, wet sizzling noise said the dental records were not going to be any help to anyone who happened across the bodies.

The third man was still hanging in there—literally, speared in three places to the trunk of an ancient camphor laurel by the kid’s branches and choking out whimpered breaths as he twitched and writhed.

Idiots.  As if any heteromorph would just not notice he was being followed this far out in the sticks.  Or, having noticed, would bolt for the woods instead of his big, mobile, defensible truck.

Sugar plodded over to the third man and looked over the kid’s work.  One hit through the shoulder, another just barely through the waist—a few centimeters more and it’d've been a clean miss—and the third through the meat of the upper thigh.  That’d be the one that’d kill the guy, and quick, too.

The air reeked of menthol from the oozing tree sap, which made a good cover for all the rest.

“Thought you’d have safety in numbers, huh?” Sugar asked him in a low croak.  “Thought the dumb toad would be too slow and stupid to stand a chance against you fancy emitter metas.  How many of us have you run down in the woods out here?  Tell me where you buried ‘em and maybe in a few months I’ll see to it the cops back in town get a tip-off about where I bury you.”

A hand, covered in blood and still smelling faintly of the ozone of lightning discharge, lifted in a shaking gesture.  One of the kid's branches lifted in warning, ready to strike at the first sign of a stray spark. Sugar didn’t follow the pointing, didn’t look away.  Not until the man groaned and went still, slackening against the laurel.

Sugar’s tongue darted out, snaring the skull mask and the plain hood beneath it, then spitting them out to the side as he stepped close enough to check the man’s eyes—staring and blank, not gone long enough yet to be clouding over, but that was just a matter of time.

He stepped back again and looked the rest of the way up through the leaves.

Shinji laid low against the center boughs, just one arm raised, bulging and branching out into the knotty limbs that curved back, serpentine, into the spears holding one dead bigot in place.  His had a tricky face to try and read—not real human, not real animal, either—but his gaze held steady, even if his eyes looked wider than his usual.

“Not bad,” Sugar said, and watched the tension leak out of the kid’s shoulders.  “You gonna need to throw up or anything?  Lotta people do, their first time.”  Especially when they’re partnered up with me.  (Sugar had it on good authority that watching him plug up someone’s mouth with his inner elbow and choke them with bufotoxin was disgusting even by the standards of people who disposed of bodies.)

“…I’ll be good.  ”  The kid hadn’t grown up learning a spoken language, and that still showed in the time and care he put into stringing his words together.  He rolled his shoulder back, and with a snapping rush, retracted his branches back into a simple, misleadingly arm-shaped limb.  The corpse sagged to a heap on the ground.  “It isn’t—my first time.”

“Right.  Almost forgot.”  It’d been Diopside who found the kid, not Sugar, but that scene probably hadn’t looked much different from this one.  Skull-face activity in Kyushu had been bad for years, and the infant abandonment rate in Kagoshima was still one of the highest in the country.  Plus, Mother Nature herself often wasn’t as pretty as she looked in postcards.

“Will you really—tell police about them?”  The kid pushed himself out of the tree in a fluid motion; the sound he made hitting the ground barefoot was closer to a bulb planter sinking into garden sod than anything you’d peg as someone landing after a jump. He wiped his bloodied hand against the laurel trunk unselfconsciously.

“Hell no,” Sugar answered.  “Their families knew what they were doing in the evening, and if they didn’t, they shoulda been paying more attention.  They can spend the rest of their lives wondering about it, just like the families of their victims.

“Come on.  We got some holes to fill, and I wanna be back on the road soon.”

Shinji nodded, lifting the body with the barest of creaking sounds and no complaints.

—–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–   —   —–

Notes for Tokoyami:

Tokoyami is an edgelord, so he gets second-person POV, the edgiest of all POVs.

It occurred to me, in writing this, that maybe the reason more people don't think Tokoyami is creepy is that ravens in Japanese mythology are less symbols of death than they are of wisdom and guidance. All the same, I think it would take very little to push the life of someone with his specific array of factors into a complete tailspin of harassment and heteromorph/villain quirk discrimination, and so it is here.

Tokoyami's edgy second-person narrator, please, it's called a "sleep mask," not a "blindfold."

Curious at this point would be 29, off the reporter beat and into in-depth magazine exposées.

Notes for Kamui Woods + Sugar:

The most interesting thing about Kamui Woods to me is the over-the-top moral binarism of calling a purse-snatcher "pure evil." If he were more "face," I could pass that off as just being his hero persona's "thing," but he's always presented as so earnest. He also apparently has a documentary-worthy backstory, which to me has "Inspiring True Story" written all over it. Thus, MLA!Shinji is picked up out of his travail-filled childhood by a group that has no interest whatsoever in tempering his moral education with nuances about how to treat their enemies. Probably always going to be a bit more comfortable around heteromorphic types than he is "normal-looking" humans.

"Sugar" as a codename is a roundabout reference to cane toads, which were my primary referent for the character's power set. They're an invasive species in many of the places they're found in the world, one of those cases of a species being introduced to cull the population of one that's causing problems, but then growing into a problem of their own--in this case, cane toads introduced to eat cane beetles that were damaging sugar cane.

Bufotoxin is a caustic secretion that causes red gums, drooling, loss of coordination, convulsions, hallucinations, death of cardiac arrest, and so on. It's a considerably more serious threat to dogs, who will just go around putting anything in their mouths, but it can be a problem for humans who lick or consume toads as well. Seeing as Sugar is human-sized himself, his version is considerably more potent.

This may have been an exercise in vigilante justice against bigots, but Sugar's probably done this to MLA runaways, too. The uglier side of being an illegal underground cult is that, whatever your righteous ideals, you can't risk that anyone will leave and spill your secrets.

[delawaredetroit]

Not sure if this reaction to All Might was meant to show that All Might doesn't work well with/trust other heroes to do their jobs or that "heroism" has been corrupted in that the other heroes on the scene were more concerned about their jobs than the people in front of them who were just saved. It's probably a little of both

[bnha-fashion]

Outfits for Shinji Nishiya “Kamui Woods”

Etro Fall 2015

[quill-n]

I JUST GOT A GREAT IDEA

MT. LADY AS A MANE COON CAT!!!

SHE CAN TAKE BIG STEPPIES

BE A LIL CAT BUS

KAMUI CAN BE A LIL LOAF ON HER BACK AS THEY GO ON ADVENTURES FOR CAT NIP IN THE GARDEN

HEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEHEH

AAAHHHHH ok so I LOVE THIS

Maine coon.... fits her so well........ I'm in love

[ID] Several digital drawings of Mt. Lady and Kamui Woods from BNHA as cats. Lady is a cream-colored maine coon, and Kamui is a small brown tabby. (They are nicknamed Mt. Coon and Tabby Woods respectively). The first image is just Mt. Coon sitting and staring at the viewer. In the second image, she is carrying Tabby Woods—in the first by his scruff, like a kitten, and in the second, he is loafing on her back as she walks. In the third image, she is licking his face. The last image is a simpler doodle of her standing with a paw lifted high in the air in front of her. The words, "BIG steppy" are written above her. [end ID]

[underratedmhapoll]

Rerank the Top Ten Heroes

[the-chikyuu-times]