#Time to be afraid in case they mean harm ops

[pktearsoftazmily]

🌻

Seeing their smiles made Lucas smile more, chuckling as he continued using his PSI to create the soft snow from his hands. Thankfully, it wasn't deep snow, but enough for them to enjoy. They were so adorable, he wasn't sure who's parents they were, but he hoped they didn't mind--

Oh. Oh no. Frozen on the spot, Lucas' snow stopped immediately, slowly looking over to see who had spotted him. Oh Gods, what if they hadn't wanted him to approach?

"Ah! I-I, urm, y-you see--!"

As quickly as the snow stopped, the boy closed his hands, stepping backwards.

"I-I swear I brought no h-harm to them! I-I was just-- Th-they looked-- I-I'm so sorry!"

[itsabouttimex2]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAA I LOVE YOUR AU!!!!! IT'S SO GOOD!!! op, your ideas are fantastic, you're really creative and an awesome writer!! 💫🌟

The monkiefam dynamic is so fun to read about — and pretty sad in MK's case, the poor guy.

Hopefully it's not too dark of a question, but how brutal does MK get during the primal moon? If he gets too violent with reader, does Wukong or Mac try stopping him or would they just let the natural pecking order happen?

I feel so bad for him, he's is gonna have a hell of a time acknowleding all the stuff he did during the primal moon week :/

Thank you so much, that means a lot to me! I’m glad people like my silly little things! (UPDATED to add a few extra characters!)

Thankfully for Y/N, MK isn’t too brutal- I don’t think they’ll come out with anything worse than a sprained wrist or ankle. The trauma will persist far beyond their injuries, however. When the last green moon of the week fades, he’s positively distraught.

Lining his hand curiously up to a slap mark on Y/N’s cheek to check it, tears brimming in his eyes when it lines up too perfectly to be a coincidence.

I don’t know whether he heartbrokenly distances himself or tries to make up for it with extreme smothering. The poor kid just wanted to spend what was supposed to “just another green moon” with one of his best friends.

And as for Macaque, though he’d really like to help Y/N… he just doesn’t have the ranking. MK is above him in the hierarchy, so he genuinely can’t do anything to upset or piss him off. This only that accomplishes is him getting smacked around right beside Y/N. All he can really do for them is apply herbal balm and bandages after the fact. If he hasn’t had a seal applied to his powers yet, Macaque might think about trying his shadow portals, but… it’s probably better not to risk having two angry monkeys on his tail, demanding to know where he’s hidden their beloved cub/rookie.

Sun Wukong is crazy delusional under the moon’s influence- to him, Y/N getting thrown and tosses all around is just “playfighting”, so he won’t interfere until after things get genuinely harmful. The moment he hears his little “cub” scream and start to cry, Old Sun is there in a second, bringing them into his arms and cooing softly. If they come to him begging for protection and use a “Bàba” to sweeten the deal, they’ll have his shelter for a number of hours, so it’s not impossible to get away from MK… just very hard.

And even after learning that something as severe as a broken wrist has occurred, Wukong coddles MK and forgives him on your behalf, writing the whole thing off as an accident. Not that you get any less smothering then him- you’re now stuck in bed with stiff bandages and surrounded by young mountain monkeys and sweet fruit. In a way, it saves you from any further rough play.

All three of them are dangerous in their own ways, of course. None are outright above “disciplining” you, with slaps or bites or shoves. There’s no (intentional) bone-shattering or flesh-tearing, but they make you afraid that there will be.

———————————————————————

After the Primal Moon ends, there’s a lot of patching-up to do afterwards. For example…

Pigsy has to come down from the constant self-drugging, taking more than a few hours to compose himself and make the rounds with his friends, calling them all up in short order. Once he’s gotten through everyone- Tang, Sandy, Mei, even her parents… then he spends a few minutes making sure he hasn’t gored any holes into his restaurant. Unlocks the windows and doors, but doesn’t flip the open sign.

He’s not up to deal with customers right now. All he wants is to check on his kids.

He’ll take MK and you out to eat today, he thinks. You’ve both earned it, after a week of isolation up in your shared room, under strict instructions to stay inside and come down for no one and nothing.

Red Son is always horribly humiliated when everything is said and done, a groaning and red-faced mess of shame. Another week of essentially devolving into a child, desperate for love and attention. Another, slow, grudging week of constant begging for skinship and words of praise. Needless to say, he’s pissed off and looking for an outlet, and beating on the numerous Bull Clones just doesn’t seem all too enticing… when he’s got a much squishier target who’ll actually squirm and yelp?

Sure, he’s not going to outright mangle you. No permanent burns. No shattered spine. And he’ll take pity on you eventually and stop with the torment. After a few months, he might even start to like you.

Let’s hope you get there mostly unscathed.

[olderthannetfic]

The "reblog, don't like. Liking hurts creators" stuff has always gotten on my nerves, who are you to tell me what to put on my blog? But I jsut saw this post, which put it in a different light. https://mayahawkse.tumblr.com/post/691239174316097536/heres-a-little-comparison-for-people-who-say

I' got on Tumblr in 2013, quit around the porn ban, and only came back pretty recently. I didn't realise that people had actually stopped reblogging things from each other.

I guess the "likes hurt creators" thing might have some validity after all. I still really don't like the tone of entitlement or the idea that expressing your appreciation to OP with a like is an insult instead of an expression of appreciation.

The comment section probably cuts into the reblog counts; people have conversations there instead of in reblog chains, and don't have to reblog an entire post just to point out one quick thing or make the same joke as everyone else, but I don't think that comments account for the ratios in that post, especially since the screenshots don't show posts with hefty comments.

So yeah, guys, likes don't hurt creators, but Tumblr is for passing posts around. If you see something you like, you can just reblog it to be all "look at this cool thing I found". You don't have to worry about adding anything meaningful in a reblog, and if you and all your mutuals reblog the same post twelve times in a row, well, that's just how Tumblr works; if someone gets anoyed they can block the post through xkit.

--

Eh. I'd beware of anecdata like that.

I used to get like 2 notes a post and no asks ever. On the rare occasions that I reblogged heavily in a hot fandom of the moment for a month or two, I got a lot of engagement once people realized I was a place to go for that fandom, and I particularly got a lot of reblogs because people wanted that content on their own tumblrs.

Currently, I get a decent number of reblogs, but I get a lot more other interaction because things here tend to be discussions and debates and people don't necessarily want them on their own tumblrs.

--

In my case, I don't like the framing that it hurts creators because that's assuming that a person would have reblogged if they hadn't liked. In reality, they probably just wouldn't have interacted.

People pass posts around all kinds of ways, including pasting links to mine into various discord channels for fandom drama or sending me links to others' posts via chat messages here.

I also don't like the framing that it hurts creators because this only makes sense if you mean that it hurts the ability of visual artists to earn money.

Am I not a creator of a kind? Do I not write copious meta even if a lot of the content here comes from others? My ~engagement numbers~ are not harmed by failing to reblog. My engagement numbers don't matter full stop.

Or maybe, maybe, it's not about money, but it's about clout-chasing nonsense. Boo hoo, my gifset doesn't do numbers because it's not 2012 and I'm not in superwholock fandom now. Oh well. Chase the crowds to another site or chase the megafandoms. That's the only way to get those numbers back.

--

I do think that some time after 2012, people became increasingly afraid of harassment and may have pulled back on interactions, particularly contentful ones, because of that.

But mostly, tumblr has cleared out. Fewer people are using it, and fewer of the ones remaining are using it actively in a way where it makes sense to fill their own blog with content.

Maybe part of the change is that you can't become a BNF of tasteful curation so easily now, so there's no point in reblogging unless it's for yourself?

Maybe it's gifsets that are out of fashion? I don't know.

--

I never had much interest in "look at this cool thing" sans commentary back then, and I have little now. I have my activity page set to hide all that.

The changing phases of a site can be interesting, but we need a bit more than one person's top couple of posts to reach any conclusions.

[darkkitty1208]

hi!! since you don't tag much have you ever considered just making like sideblogs for each fandom or something? i know you're multifandom but i followed for the ironstrange content, just a suggestion i don't mean to criticize or something ;;

There's quite a load to unpack here, but I know you mean no harm, anon. So let me just clear this up: first, I'm gonna assume you're new here. Not on my blog, but like, the entirety of tumblr. Because there are countless of blogs out there (multifandom ones) that tend not to tag their posts and post from different fandoms. And I'm not sure if you know, but you can easily filter out tags from fandoms you don't wanna see; I don't need to tag my reblogs for that, if OP already has those tags in the post it'll filter itself out. (There should be an option for tag filters in your settings.) In this case, here's some fandoms I've recently been fixating on that you may want to filter out if you only wanna see the ironstrange stuff: - BBC Sherlock (long-term hyperfixation) - Good Omens - Spiderverse (although this one's still marvel, but thought I'd include it anyway) - Dead Poets Society - Baldur's Gate 3

And I haven't finished watching Heartstopper, and courtesy of a friend I'm going to start watching the live action One Piece soon, so I may or may not go on a reblog spree soon for those two. Consider filtering those out as well.

Second, as you know, I've mentioned very clearly in my blog desc and intro post that I'm a multifandom blog and I tend to jump between one fixation to another. I even said I go on reblog sprees a lot of times. So you should already be warned before following me.

Third, this is my blog. I get to do whatever the hell I want with it. If I wanna make it my dumpster, I'll make it my dumpster. If I wanna make it neat and organised, I'll make it neat and organised. If I wanna spam shitposts in it, I'll spam shitposts in it. Followers are not entitled to think that me or my blog is a content peddler--like accounts in, say, TikTok--and if you think my *personal* blog that I made for *myself* and *my enjoyment* should be catered to your liking, then I'm afraid you're wrong. And besides, I like the way I'm running my blog right now. It's not neat in any way, or convenient for any other person, but I like the way it is.

Anyway, if you still feel like I'm running my blog wrong, the unfollow button is right there. :)

[bloody-wonder]

heyyy okay so I just saw a post where people basically called the fandom out for ignoring the fact that Andrew is “abusive as fuck” to the other monsters while still bashing seth and aaron for their homophobia and I just uhhh- I would really like to hear your thoughts on this pls? Cus while I can definitely see how andrews relationship with them is not at all normal or healthy in many ways, I don’t really feel like abusive is the right word for it, is that just me?

firstly, while we’re on this topic i’d like to say a couple of words about the aaron discourse that seems to be back in fashion.

in fandoms we have this interesting desire to rank *problematic* behaviors in order of their graveness and then act as if this ranking is objective for all people everywhere. this is where the “you hate aaron bc he’s homophobic? well your fave actually killed a person so“ argument comes from. while there’s logic to the idea that being murdered is worse than being called a slur, for people who experience homophobia irl on a daily basis a fictional murder will never be as upsetting as fictional homophobia. conversely, other fans who don’t fall into this category but might relate to aaron for different reasons (bc he happens to be a well-rounded character) are confused by how he’s branded as the worst while the other foxes (especially the monsters) are right there and feel the need to make the fandom appreciate him more by writing that kind of posts comparing his flaws and shortcomings to those of the other foxes according to the questionable but binding ranking of all sins. and round and round the discourse goes bc the latter party can’t imagine how for many people homophobia can take the highest rank of Problématique despite being “not as bad as murder” or whatever.

if you’re able-bodied and able-minded it’s likely that all the ableism in aftg went over your head. if you’re not queer and haven’t experienced homophobia it might be easier for you to look past it in aaron’s case and be able to appreciate him as a character despite it. if “asexual spectrum” and “amatonormativity” are terms you don’t give much thought to in your day-to-day life, you probably see nicky in a completely different light than i do. all of these things are objectively wrong but if one is worse than the other is completely subjective for each individual. there will always be people who like aaron and those who dislike him and i’m afraid no amount of discourse will drastically change their opinions.

returning to your question, a lot can be said about andrew and all the bad things he does. a lot has been said. if you’re after some good andrew bashing i feel like there are quite a few blogs out there who can provide. even in our corner of the fandom where we worship and idolize andrew joseph minyard we still discuss his flaws from time to time. the only reason we haven’t done that recently is bc according to our latest decree “andrew hasn’t done anything wrong ever and we love him and in fact he deserves more opportunities to stab people”. so the argument that andrew’s problematic behaviors don’t get discussed enough doesn’t seem true to me. but it’s not really about that, is it? it’s about not enough people liking aaron and seth and too many people liking andrew - according to op. whereas his crimes are higher (or at least as high) in the ranking of crimes - according to op. but here’s the thing - like i said all of this is very subjective, some people just like andrew despite everything and will never like aaron no matter how strong your argument in his favor is. they’re not politicians in an election campaign, they’re imaginary people who we get attached to bc they make us feel better about ourselves. but if they were politicians and the election was held on tumblr andrew would win in a landslide just bc the voters are mostly queer and andrew’s gay and aaron’s homophobic. that’s how it works.

and finally as for the word “abusive”, before i used to get mad at how people use it all too often and dilute its meaning but nowadays i’m just wondering if this is just simple etymological evolution: at first “abusive” was used to designate only the gravest kinds of mistreatment, but then people became aware of its rhetorical effect and now this word seems to mean “acts i personally find unacceptable” - which can range from more to less harmful. for the sake of intelligible discussions it would be helpful to use different words for different acts in that range, but you can’t really generate enough engagement with words like “annoying”, “offensive” or “harmful” and many users don’t really pursue intelligible discussion anyway. i personally like the word “problematic” which suits me well bc it requires futher explanation of why you perceive something as a problem and it doesn’t have the indicator of its graveness built in. however, i can also see how bc it’s been overused in the past to the point where it itself became a meme, some people can’t take it seriously anymore. “problematic” sounds like a joke so people have to call things “abusive” to be taken seriously. “abusive” is the new “problematic”. this is something i perceive as well so i often try to distance myself from the word by writing it in funny ways but i still use it bc i know no better umbrella term for things that i consider “not good” but wouldn’t go as far as to call them “abusive”.

that being said, what exactly you designate as *problematic* matters as well. for example, i would call some of andrew’s behaviors problematic bc, you know, they are a problem, but i wouldn’t call his relationship with the monsters problematic. strained, difficult, lacking communication, even “not a friendship” if you wish, but no, not problematic and certainly not abusive.

[gisellelx]

I've got to object HEARTILY to Esme being Jewish. Domestic abuse is anathema in Jewish culture (with the exception of *maybe* some very very fundamentalist sects), and it's canonical that her parents knew Charles was physically hurting her. I don't care what time period we're talking about, Esme's parents would have taken her home and she would have recourse to a divorce. That headcanon is not awesome, it's extremely culturally tone-deaf.

Oh you have decided to come into my inbox to talk about someone else's headcanon. Well, strap in, anon, this is going to be a semi-long post because there are four separate things this ask makes me want to talk about. tl;dr--this is interesting and useful, so why not direct this comment in a thoughtful manner at the OP? First, let's talk about headcanons. Headcanons are what in the trade are called backstory. They're the stuff that you, as the author, know about your character which may or may not end up on the page, but which should influence what does end up on the page. When you're talking to the writer of a source, there is a "right" and a "wrong" headcanon because the author actually does know what they had in mind (or at least, they should; I happen to think that is often not the case for Stephenie Meyer). But when it comes to fans reading between the lines, making up their own headcanons to guide their own engagement with characters? There's no such right and wrong. There're some things that are better supported or less supported, either by canon itself or by history/circumstance, of course. We can agree or disagree on them, or argue about why one makes more sense than another, but when it comes to it, we aren't the originators of the canon so unless they're running contradictory to the canon, they're not "wrong" per se. Second. Esme as Jewish. This is a piece of Twi Renaissance fanon with which I happen also to HEARTILY disagree. While I happen not to be Jewish and don't know this particular piece of information you've offered, anon, there are two big reasons why I think her being Jewish is a nonstarter: one, the Jewish population in Ohio was very small in 1911 and mostly in Cincinnati, which was the largest city at the time, not Columbus. It was also very insular--a Jewish family was not particularly likely to horse-and-buggy it to the city to see a doctor. I agree, the way Esme's parents behaved is much more consistent with Protestant, Calvinist Christianity, which would make a ton of sense for the middle of Ohio at the turn of the 20th century. I've never fully fleshed this one out in my head, but I'd be leaning toward Methodist. The second reason I disagree with it is that it strikes me as very unlikely that Carlisle would be open to marrying a Jewish woman. This is a rant suited for another day, but please never mistake my curiosity for Carlisle's character as a blanket condoning of everything he is and stands for. He's quite racist, which we see in canon, he's pretty misogynistic, and he doesn't experience much contrition for the ways his actions harm others. The religion he was raised in would've taught him to be derisive of Jewish people, and the circles he moved in thereafter would not have offered very many opportunities for him to change his mind. So I am starting from a base of assuming that Carlisle is pretty anti-Semitic. I think he probably woke up on this front around the Holocaust. These things are actually why I find him so compelling--he's pretty deeply prejudiced about a lot of things and it means he has great blind spots I can exploit as a writer. Okay, onto thing three. So why would I reblog something and tag it with my "awesome headcanons" tag when I don't agree with every single word? Because it's interesting and fun and sharing fan content makes the world go 'round. And consistent tags make it easier to navigate old content. But shouldn't I be really clear that I don't agree with that one part just be sure that no one mistakes it for my idea? Well, imagine if every headcanon or meta someone shared was followed by a bunch of reblogs of people going, "Well, actually I don't like this part even though I agree with most of these..." this place would stop being fun real quick. I lived through a time in this fandom when fic authors told their readers to go fuck themselves in their author's notes, when people created whole blogs and livejournal communities just to anonymously make fun of anyone whose fic was remotely popular, where it was seen as totally acceptable to drag people's

personal lives out in the open and mock them for whatever personal thing they mentioned having done in service of you know, just being human and talking about their lives.

That sort of constant fighting makes you not want to engage with other people. Most of us just took our balls and went home. So I'm not going to do that to another fan because I enjoy being a fan with other fans. This is also the same reason I don't spend a lot of time going "I know you all love calling Esme Jewish but I disagree because this this and this other this"...like, that's just not fun for anybody, even if I can support my position well. I will quietly hold my own headcanon over here and I'm going to not jump on somebody else about theirs.

But what if the thing somebody said actually could be unintentionally harmful? Am I telling you to just shut up about that? Part four: your very odd decision to anon into my inbox about headcanons from someone else. What you've offered here is really useful information, because as you point out, it suggests something negative about Jewish people (an already marginalized group) that isn't true and therefore is harmful. So here's a much more useful way to address that. Rather than going anon into the asks of a person who reblogged it, which doesn't get you anywhere, you could choose to either thoughtfully engage the OP, or you could reblog it yourself and say, "You know, this particular headcanon is actually problematic. You may not know this, but domestic violence is actually very frowned on in Jewish culture and it's very unlikely her parents would not have taken her back in. That they didn't suggests she's not Jewish. To suggest that she is Jewish would ascribe this untrue awful behavior to Jewish people which, given the extent to which Jewish people were and are still persecuted across the globe, is a thing you don't want to do, even unintentionally in good fun. So I just want to make you aware." The latter is probably the better option, in part because then you'll ascribe your own blog to the comment, and people can know it was your well-supported point. You'll then allow yourself room to let the OP rebut directly about why they followed that particular headcanon in the first place and what they think of your critique of it. But since it's not actually my headcanon, and one I don't actually hold, I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place. Thanks for the soapbox, though.

[thevoidable]

Why did Dabi let Hawks into the League? (major manga spoilers ahead)

This is a question that’s been plaguing my head ever since Dabi proudly announced to Hawks that he’d known all along that he was lying.

If that was the case, what was the point of bringing him in? Surely Dabi must have seen this coming by enabling Hawks to continue his infiltration? What exactly was Dabi’s end-goal here???

It’s unclear whether or not if this will get explained eventually, but after giving it a lot of thought, I think I have a pretty good answer to the question regardless. Essay under the cut.

What is Dabi fighting for?

First, we have to address Dabi’s motivations. They run deeper than just making Stain’s will a reality - he’s taking steps that Stain never even considered to make, because even he was blinded by something that Dabi despises more than anything: hero idolization. Stain saw All Might as a true hero, someone worthy of the title, but in Dabi’s eyes, All Might is one of the biggest contributing factors to why there is such a huge problem with the hero system, and aside from All Might allowing other heroes to become complacent, it’s all because of Endeavour.

Hawks and Dabi are two sides of the same coin when it comes to the new no. 1; Hawks grew up seeing Endeavour’s ambition to surpass All Might as impressive and heroic, mostly due to the fact that Hawks himself lacks the drive to become so great, because all he wants is to live life comfortably. But for Dabi, Endeavour’s need to surpass All Might was nothing but a blinded greed for power, the need to be the best of the best for his own selfish desires rather than to actually save people. It was a path that led him to horrifically abuse his own family in order to achieve it, because he saw Quirk breeding as the only way to fix his own flaws. As such, Dabi, AKA Toya, suffered greatly at the hands of it. He knows firsthand just how much the hero system is unjust, allowing for people with unhealthy mindsets like Endeavour to gain positions of power. He knows that people admire Endeavour for his heroism, but are unaware of the monster that lurks behind closed doors, even when his temper comes out during public patrols. This is a man who is the very definition of a false hero, a man who let his eldest son die and traumatized his entire family.

Dabi goes on to claim in chapter 267 that there are no true heroes - this, however, does not mean that true heroes cannot exist. All he means is that there are simply no heroes currently present and he plans to change that, because in the system that society has right now, it’s near-impossible. Hero idolization forces heroes to become perfect images that people can admire, and it also enforces the mindset that only the greatest heroes can come from schools like UA and Shiketsu. This results in a flood of people longing to become heroes for reasons other than saving people. Uraraka, for example, while she is gentle and kind-hearted, is still only becoming a hero so she can support her family. It’s a well-paying job, and that kind of promise will most certainly lure anyone in who is desperate enough. Yes, she has good intentions in mind, and she does want to save people, but saving people is not her ultimate goal. So, by Dabi’s definition, she is not a true hero.

Becoming a hero should also not be as easy as it is, and becoming a hero certainly should not start at such a young age. UA and the other hero schools are putting teenagers between the ages of 15 - 19 at severe risk, and we’ve seen worst-case scenario results of this twice over the course of the series, and it’s terrifying to think that there are most likely more that we haven’t heard of.

First you have Shirakumo who died before he had even graduated, an incident that led him to becoming a nomu working for the League, who would then go on to cause the second result.

By placing children in such a dangerous training course, it automatically places targets on their backs for villains before they even get their licenses. The League proved just how incapable the staff are at protecting their students by not only successfully attacking a location within the school, but also kidnapping one of said students later on, even after UA’s attempt at keeping the location of the training camp hidden and Dabi himself had revealed their basic plan to Aizawa.

This is all fuel for Dabi’s fire in his journey to rip hero society apart at the seams, and while he is absolutely planning to kill every false hero he comes across, he also has a secondary plan in mind, and that is for the students.

In One’s Justice 2, Dabi has this particular voice line to Hawks: “We’re working for the glorious future where those UA kids are hollowed, and brought down to earth. We’ll have to see what you’re working for.”

Dabi knows that while they are all still young, there is still time to prevent them from falling into every hero’s brainwashed mindset: villains bad, heroes good, no matter what either of them do. 

Something extremely important that the MVA and the current war arcs do is flip the black and white narratives on their heads, showing us just how human and empathetic the villains can be, while the heroes are doing nothing but making unheroic choices and opting for making the violent move first. We’ve seen all of the heroes do nothing but dehumanize Shigaraki, calling him “it” and “thing” like he’s just some monster that they have to kill. We’ve had to watch Hawks murder Twice in the name of “justice” simply because Twice refused to come quietly and be forced back into a life he felt miserable in. Even X-less chose to focus on the machinery next to him rather than getting a near-dead Shigaraki medical attention, and we all know how karma decided to treat that.

And this is where I would like to bring your attention to Tokoyami.

We’ve seen multiple times before how Dabi seems to have no interest in actually harming the students - initially, anyway. He leaves Aoyama alone even though he saw him; he taunts Shoto but doesn’t attack him to get him away; and lastly, Tokoyami first showing up to rescue Hawks actually calms Dabi down. Dabi shows no intent of hurting them because they’re still just kids, not heroes.

Calling back to how the heroes are currently being depicted as the ones making all the disturbing decisions, Dabi doesn’t hesitate to be the first to call out their decision to bring the students into what is essentially a covert-ops assassination mission that has turned into an all-out war. He first recognises that the boy in front of him is just that: a boy, and instead of attacking, Dabi gives Tokoyami a chance.

But what chance, exactly? To escape? Absolutely not.

The first thing Dabi does is make Tokoyami aware of the crime his so-called mentor just committed, and carefully wording it so that the stakes were made clear.

Twice was trying to run away to protect his friends.

But Hawks still killed him.

Dabi is giving Tokoyami a chance to recognise that the hero system he admires hides many skeletons in its closet, and is something that is severely corrupt. He’s giving Tokoyami a chance to rethink his working relationship with Hawks and everything Hawks has taught him.

But Tokoyami doesn’t take it.

As soon as Hawks speaks up again, Tokoyami returns to being obedient, ignoring everything Dabi just said and focusing only on the task at hand regardless of the moral dilemma presented before him, and that’s when Dabi’s intention for Tokoyami changes, because as Dabi put it, “You’ve stopped thinking for yourself.”

And indeed, Tokoyami has. Tokoyami is now cemented in the brainwashed mindset, blindly putting his faith in that Hawks’s decision to kill Twice was right, simply because Twice is the villain and Hawks is the hero, and Dabi realises this.

Tokoyami is now a false hero, and thus on Dabi’s kill list.

So, we have established that Dabi fully intends to wipe-out existing false heroes, while simultaneously trying to save those who have the chance to recover/escape from the brainwashing before it’s too late.

“Keigo Takami!!”

It’s no secret that Dabi clearly knows exactly what kind of situation Hawks is in. The fact that he knows Hawks’s real name alone tells Hawks that Dabi knows far more than he is comfortable with. So, seeing as Dabi was able to see through Hawks’s lies so easily, let’s assume that Dabi knows most, if not all, of what we the readers know about Hawks and how the HPSC groomed him.

Considering that Dabi came from the no. 1 hero’s household, there’s a high chance that he knows quite a bit about the HPSC and just how shady they actually are, especially if the theories are true that they had a hand in covering up his own death. Dabi is well-aware then that the HPSC is responsible for the hero system being so broken, and the reason they do nothing to fix it is so they can stay in power. They are not afraid to make questionable decisions which they know is only making the villain situation worse, because villains are what’s keeping them in business. And what’s sad about this is that even when the decisions they present are clearly morally wrong, the heroes are in no position to argue, because the HPSC is in complete control of their jobs. The HPSC governs the hero system, so whatever they do must be just, right?

Well, Dabi definitely knows the answer to that.

The HPSC deliberately manipulated the heroes to believe that the UA students were needed on the front lines for this mission, and so far, we’ve seen that they really weren’t, actually. The evac team remains the best place for the students to be, because while the pros with all the combat experience can focus on the villains, the heroes-in-training can focus on the smaller task of getting people to safety. Sure, Kaminari, Tokoyami, and the other front-liners helped, but the pros absolutely overwhelmed the PLF on their own. All the front-liners did was just kind of...pave the way, make things easier, and then they were sent back to rejoin their classmates. And the heroes didn’t question the decision at all.

What’s even more disturbing is that the students weren’t even aware of what they were getting into, and most of the pros weren’t aware that the students weren’t aware.

But, as mentioned before, Dabi doesn’t hesitate to call this out.

It’s highly likely that he’s able to connect that the HPSC were the ones who organised this attack and sent the kids out onto the battlefield, which also means that he’s unfortunately no stranger to the HPSC reducing talented children to nothing but weapons, a concept he is also personally familiar with.

Toya was bred with the intent of creating a Quirk superior to Endeavour’s, and then put under extremely harmful training that abused both his mind and his body. We already know that Dabi is heavily against valuing a person’s Quirk over their individual worth, thanks to his fight with Geten.

And in the world of heroics, this unhealthy mindset is unfortunately in abundance, especially in Hawks’s case.

What makes Hawks an especially tragic character is that he started out with the same longing to be a great hero that every child has. He wanted to be a comforting sight to those in need, and his innocent mind thought that the HPSC would help him make that reality.

Instead, the HPSC presented him with a life-changing decision that a child his age has absolutely zero mental capacity to consent to, and it’s heartbreaking that Hawks’s grooming began right from the second they met. The HPSC forced a child into intensive training at an age even younger than students training at proper hero schools, and they ever-so-gradually began chipping away at Keigo’s hopeful dream, starting with the erasure of his own name, the first step in disconnecting him from who he once was.

Over the years of the hero Hawks growing up under the HPSC’s wing, he had been stripped of his childhood and moulded into the perfect image of a hero, one that is loveable to the public, obedient to his handlers, talented in his work, and completely self-sacrificing to his missions.

The HPSC has successfully groomed Hawks so that his selflessness is now their trump card that they hold over him - instead of using his selflessness to save others no matter who they are, he’s been manipulated to believe that he has to give up everything in his life to be a great hero, that he’s not suited for being a “shining light”, thus bringing about his new goal of creating a world where heroes have free time, a goal that he is unfortunately pursuing in the wrong way. He’s been brainwashed to not think about villains too much, to not sympathize with them and dig into where they came from and why they became villains, which is why he’s targeting the wrong problem when it comes to making his dream a reality. He believes that he has to solve every case as fast as possible, and eventually there will be virtually no more villains left to hunt down, but the League has already shown us that the roots of villainy stretch much further down than that.

We catch a glimpse of how Hawks even acknowledges that he’s being held down by hero society, caged, and yet he does nothing to change it.

The result of his grooming has left him stuck in a thoughtless state, where it’s easier to believe that everything he is doing is right, and the villains are wrong.

And this is unfortunately something that he has spread to Tokoyami, as evidenced earlier.

Hawks is a hero who was groomed and manipulated from a young age, being thrown into training just so he could become a tool for those in power to use.

Sounds awfully familiar, doesn’t it?

Dabi can read Hawks like a book

It’s wonderfully ironic how Hawks prides himself in being capable of fooling anyone and everyone, making himself the hardest person in the room to read while simultaneously being able to read everyone else, and yet the one person that he couldn’t predict ends up being the only one who knows him better than anyone else.

Throughout all of their interactions, Dabi has always been two steps ahead of Hawks, able to catch him off-guard and ruffle his feathers. Keeping in mind that Dabi had known all along that Hawks was faking his desire to join the League, it’s interesting just how long Dabi kept stringing him along. Was he simply doing it for his own enjoyment?

Maybe a small part of him was, but in the long run, Dabi was absolutely still testing Hawks’s worthiness. What makes this great, however, is that Hawks was unaware that Dabi wasn’t testing him for what he originally thought.

Loyalty was absolutely out of the question for Dabi, since he knew from the start Hawks wasn’t planning on being as such. So, what exactly was Dabi looking for?

Looking through the tests that we know Dabi put Hawks through (the battle with Hood, and taking out a hero of Hawks’s choice), we can analyse what Dabi was impressed with, and what he wasn’t.

First off, there’s not a lot that Dabi didn’t like about what Hawks did. The most he complained about was Hawks simply bringing along Endeavour to the Hood fight instead of someone else.

It appears that he also complains about Hawks not letting anyone die, but Dabi is always quick to point out when heroes are prioritising lives, and this will become important later.

Then, we have Dabi asking Hawks to take someone out who isn’t the no. 1. When Hawks brought him Jeanist’s body, Dabi was genuinely surprised, but pleasantly-so. 

Now, Jeanist’s death here serves multiple narrative purposes:

It shows us that Hawks won’t hesitate to kill for a mission (RIP Twice),

It shows Dabi that Hawks is capable of killing anyone, not just villains,

And lastly, it serves as blackmail for Dabi in his pursuit of bringing down false heroes.

(There’s also Bakugo’s whole thing with his hero name, but this isn’t about him.)

That last point is what granted Hawks access into the League, contrary to Hawks believing that the only reason he got in is because the merging of the League and the MLA suddenly made it easy to do so. 

Dabi wasn’t going to let Hawks in without making sure he had a backup in mind in case Hawks tripped up.

But, blackmail wasn’t the only thing that Dabi was looking for. If anything, it was just a bonus.

What the Hood battle and Jeanist’s death showed to Dabi were the two sides that Hawks possessed: a bird of prey that isn’t afraid to kill for a cause, and the innocent child who just wanted to help people. Dabi was searching for both of those qualities within Hawks, because they’re both qualities that Dabi himself has.

Dabi relates to Hawks

As previously mentioned, there’s no doubt that Dabi is aware of how Hawks was trained and forced into a life he didn’t want. He’s very aware of how much Hawks longs for freedom but still wants to help those in need, but what separates them from each other is that Dabi has achieved the freedom that Hawks wants and is pursuing his dream in a way that works.

Dabi kills for his cause, but that cause is ultimately to prevent the future suffering of innocent lives at the hands of false heroes. In his own twisted way, he too wants to save lives. He wants to stop the possibility of another him from being created. He is choosing to be the unfriendly reminder that something is very wrong with the current system, and it needs fixing ASAP.

And that is exactly why Dabi can see through Hawks’s lies, because he recognises that Hawks too is a victim of the same system.

Dabi’s plan for Hawks

With Hawks presenting himself in front of Dabi, it offered up a multitude of opportunities for him. Dabi not only had a new connection to Endeavour through Hawks, but here was a hero who was prepared to get his hands extremely dirty just for a way to bring down the League. 

Dabi’s prior knowledge of Hawks and his past allowed him to constantly have the upper hand, but not in case Hawks attacked.

Through testing Hawks to see what qualities he possessed, Dabi was able to see if Hawks was worthy not for joining the League, but for undoing the brainwashing he’d been subjected to.

Dabi let Hawks into the League because he was giving him a chance, the same chance he gave to Tokoyami, to see hero society for what it really was and decide to do something about it. Dabi saw the potential in Hawks to be a true hero, to return to the boy he once was and save people for the sake of saving them. He saw Hawks’s potential to kill false heroes and that he wasn’t afraid to do it, and the idea of someone thinking the same way as Dabi, of understanding him and his goals wholly, would have absolutely been enticing to him.

Dabi claims to not care about the League, but even if that were true, Dabi recognises that the other League members are important to each other, especially when it comes to Twice and how eager he is to make friends. Dabi introducing Hawks to the League was his chance to show Hawks that they’re all human, and gain sympathy for them and what they stand for. It would have been the ultimate power move on Dabi’s part for Hawks to turn on the heroes and go villain, undoing what hero society did to him, providing him the freedom he always wanted and ultimately proving Dabi and his ideals right.

But, unfortunately, that wasn’t how things went.

How Dabi’s plan backfired

When Hawks first joined the PLF, it was obvious that Dabi was sticking close to him, both to keep an eye on him and to be genuinely friendly and accepting.

It’s rare to see a smile like this on Dabi when he’s around heroes, and he never smiles around the League, but for Hawks specifically, Dabi is always smiling. I think it’s safe to say that Dabi did genuinely enjoy Hawks’s company and that he was the only one Dabi actually liked, which is probably what led to him being comfortable with leaving Hawks to his own devices for the next few months, especially when he started a budding friendship with Twice.

Dabi must have been confident that Twice would be the one to break through the last of Hawks’s walls, because if we were seeing genuine smiles from Hawks, then Dabi must have seen them too.

However, it’s clear that Dabi severely underestimated Hawks’s capability to kill anyone. 

Hawks leaked the information to the heroes, an attack was launched, and Dabi immediately knew why.

And he was, understandably, incredibly pissed.

Upon confronting Hawks and hearing how he was about to kill Twice, Dabi used what he’d learned about Hawks during the Hood fight to his advantage and triggered Hawks’s rescue response, prompting him to subconsciously save Twice from Dabi’s flames, because Dabi knows deep down that a hero is who Hawks really is. What he was most likely hoping was for Hawks to maintain that response, but he instead made a mistake and directly caused Hawks to go back into mission-mode.

And it’s just a downward spiral from there, with all of Dabi’s last-ditch efforts falling flat. In one last desperate attempt to reach through to Hawks, he called out his name. His real name.

Dabi’s final chance to bring Hawks to his senses was to try and reconnect him with his past self of whom the HPSC had carefully erased, and it almost worked. Dabi let Hawks know that he knew everything about him, everything that he once was, but just like with Tokoyami, Dabi learnt the hard way that Hawks was beyond saving.

With Twice’s death, Dabi completely lost it, scolded Hawks for not focusing on him, and dropped one last bomb on Hawks before ending yet another false hero.

Until, yet again, that too backfired due to Dabi’s hope that he could save an innocent mind from the hero system’s brainwashing, and Hawks escaped with his life.

We get a glimpse of Dabi’s defeated expression, the knowledge that he can’t cry, and that he just lost two friends within the span of just a few minutes.

What next?

Honestly, if there’s one thing that is going to break Hawks, it’s knowing the truth about Endeavour. My hope is that Dabi is going to have a chance to make his reveal public to the entire nation, and exposing Enji Todoroki for the abuser he is will really shake things up.

At the moment, it’s still not clear exactly what Dabi told Hawks in his redacted bubble, but it was obviously something relating to his identity. Only time will tell what Hawks knows once he regains consciousness.

[firelxdykatara]

P1: The rwby fandom is being really weird about that scene with ironwood shooting slate huh? Cause it’s like you said: he doesn’t have a history of reacting violently to situations up until the very end of v7. Actually i remember ironwood being the one to stop winter from killing? (idk if she actually had the intent to kill but her blade was at his neck) Qrow in a fit of rage. And now you’re telling me Winter is terrified and shocked by ironwood killing slate. Idk i guess you could argue that

P2: that what ironwood did was a cold-blooded execution but still WHY? That still isn’t in-character for him from what we’ve seen so far. Maybe crwby realized that being afraid of salem doesn’t make james paranoid bc she’s a real threat so they decided to make james see threats everywhere. Threats that he desperately and “robotically”  tries to eliminate. This would solve some problems with the writing while creating a whole lot of other problems that i don’t even want to get into

Honestly, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head.

For whatever reason, the writers/showrunners (is there a meaningful difference for a show like RWBY? genuine question, I’m not sure how the production is structured) decided they needed another villain. I’m not sure why, since they have a whole slew of villains and more than enough obstacles to throw at the heroes by keeping Ironwood as a morally grey ally with an opposing viewpoint, meaning he could very well have become an antagonist without getting yeeted over the moral event horizon on a rocketship. But whatever the reason (his heart or his shoes wait wrong show), they wanted to add to their cast of card-carrying evil villains, and picked Ironwood, and by extension anyone following him.

Rather than setting this up volumes in advance, though--for instance, by showing him reacting irrationally, with unnecessary violence, and these reactions getting more extreme despite not having concrete evidence that Salem was acting--what they did was have Ironwood act as a rational, reasonable man, who had to make some very tough choices. He never reacted with unwarranted aggression to any situation before volume 7--again, his ‘I’d have you shot’ comment was delivered with sarcasm in a moment of irritation, but there was no heat behind it, and he certainly wasn’t threatening to actually shoot Qrow--and he had very concrete reasons to set up the embargo and close Atlas’ borders.

He knew about Salem--he knew everything the heroes know, except the fact that she is immortal and can’t be destroyed, a secret which Ruby chose to keep and which, in the long run, did more harm than good (and yet none of them reflected on why Ozpin might have been keeping that secret in the first place, but I digress)--and he knew that her agents were acting in Remnant. He knew they were behind the Fall of Beacon, and he knew they all remained at large. Not a single one of the instigators of Beacon’s fall was captured in the aftermath. For all he knew, Atlas, the greatest remaining bastion of military strength and the only kingdom that might have a chance at defending against her if she chose to make her move (which he had every reason to believe she soon would, since this was the first time in centuries that she had acted directly to anyone’s knowledge), was going to be their next target. While global communications were down, he had no way of getting fast and reliable information from the other kingdoms. He could not risk spreading his forces too thin in an attempt to protect them without that knowledge--which is why his focus was on Amity Arena.

Get global comms back up and running, talk to the other kingdoms, warn them about Salem, and then they might have a chance. This was a plan, by the way, that team RWBY was all for, even though it meant that he would be setting up the entire world to fail because they knew Salem couldn’t be defeated. Ruby encouraged him to keep diverting resources from Mantle to finish the tower as quickly as he could. No one so much as mentioned the fact that if he did, and he told the world about Salem, they would be gearing up for a fight team RWBY&Co knew they would not be able to win.

Not until after James told the people of Atlas about Salem--again, without the crucial knowledge that she was immortal and they could not fight her.

So, notably, the entirety of volume 7 we see James Ironwood reacting reasonably, and rationally, to very real threats. We know Salem is a threat, we know the world is in danger--shit, we know Atlas is in danger, because Watts and Tyrian are there causing chaos. We see him take in the news that Salem is immortal much more calmly than I think the situation warranted--I would not have blamed him for exploding then, because the fact is that they didn’t give him this critical information until after it was nearly too late to act on it. And now he had an entire kingdom of people who likewise are laboring under the false belief that they have a chance against Salem, that she can be defeated, if they stick together. Which the protagonists know to be false, because if that were the case, then Jinn would have said as much to Oz when he asked how she could be destroyed.

(Which doesn’t mean that RWBY won’t pull some sort of ‘actually she only said Oz couldn’t, because he didn’t have the ability to unite the world [even though that’s bs], so team RWBY can kill her with the power of friendship actually’ ending out of a hat, but still, when it comes to characterization, we have to go by what the characters know and what they might reasonably believe based on the information they have--not meta knowledge we have as an audience because we’re genre savvy and can see the writing on the wall.)

None of his behavior throughout volume 7 indicated that he was on the verge of a complete mental break with reality that would lead him to start shooting people, including a child containing the soul of his best friend, in cold blood let and right. But I suspect that the crew was relying on the fandom having decided that James must be a bad guy, because he’s a military leader and military = bad, and the Ace Ops are effectively cops and cops = bad (even though if we’re going to call the Ace Ops cops, then we need to be calling all huntsmen cops, including Weiss, who performed a legal arrest on screen; if huntsmen have the authority to act as law enforcement officials, they are cops, period), and since they are already mostly bad, performing (and condoning, since there were six witnesses, four of them armed with auras, who just stood there and looked at each other after watching Ironwood gun a defenseless man down) cold-blooded murder is just the next logical step. Of course James would just murder a guy standing in between him and power, he’s a military leader, they’re all evil!

Nevermind the fact that Salem is literally right there, and if ever there was a situation that called for martial law to be legally enacted for the continued safety and protection of the kingdom (there’s a reason martial law exists, and there are reasons it can be justifiably enacted and enforced!!!!!) this is it.

Anyway.... yeah. I am unsurprised by the general fandom reaction--nevertheless, I’m disappointed by it. And I hope for the day in some nebulous future where the very idea of nuance and gray morality doesn’t just make a majority of them break out in hives.

[whenwegounnoticed]

My Turn To Talk About VioletVineyard, MVCreates, and the Glaring Problems of Power Imbalances.

Introduction

I have been on the fence about talking about my experiences, on one hand, because one of her mods and I are or maybe were (?) friends, and I valued their friendship but in recent light, I don’t know and because I want my main to be a safe place for other writeblrs and because I am afraid.

I was in VioletVineyard at the beginning of it -- and being in it did not feel good for reasons I could never put my finger on.

Let's talk about me and who I am first without giving myself away:

I have a disorder that makes expressing myself difficult, this is due to childhood trauma and a form of self preservation. My wording will be clunky because only recently, with the help of amazing friends, I'm learning the right verbage.

Now. Some of you will know who I am. Hello. Please keep me anonymous. Some of you might have a guess. Hello. Surprised? Maybe you're wrong. I don't know, I'm not in your head just as you're not in mine.

I have screenshots for some stuff and none for others. These are all personal experiences.

I will not be sharing the screenshots of those who were victims to respect their privacy.

Please bear with me. I know this will be long and rambly, but it’s how I make sense of my thoughts and brain.

VioletVineyard: Questionable Reality

I joined VV at the start of it, although it was already pretty big. I was excited! I admired many writeblrs who were in there and wanted to be friends with many of them. They were all so welcoming. And I felt, for a hot minute, like I belonged.

It was sprint of my freshman semester as a journalism major, and Mina reached out to me in the general chat, saying that if I needed help or wanted an In at some journalism company, to let her know because she knows people.

Great! Cool. A little odd but that was nice of her -- and.

That's how it starts.

A side: my friend has a theory that if people only present how perfect and amazingly nice they are, they likely are rotting on the inside. Nobody is ever perfect and always super nice, do not trust them. I do not subscribe to this but it is a thought in my mind now.

It took a week of me being there for the not right feeling set in.

First:

There was drama.

She would start it. She'd vague in the vent about someone and then outright state who she was talking about. And it would be about someone whose opinions she disagreed with. People would go and send anons or they'd bitch about whoever was the victim in the vent channel.

I don't remember if I participated but if I did, I am truly and genuinely sorry.

I think I got stressed two weeks in. I was already ill from invisible physical problems. The server felt horribly unmoderated.

I remember saying something because Mina was doing it again and being told,

"Then support in here."

Mostly innocent right? You support your friends, right?

It wouldn't have been a problem if:

The victim did something wrong.

Mina and this person weren't in their goddamn 30s or near that. They have a child, by the way.

The person was at least under 20.

From my scattered memory, the issue was OP either slightly vagued abt Mina or she just disgreed with OP.

Lots of red flags, right?

"But OP why did you stay?"

Emotional masochism? Fear? Because she, either knowingly or unknowingly cultivated this sort of atmosphere? I cannot speak for anyone else, but that's the reasoning for me.

There was, also, in the beginning, a hope that maybe things would change. Varying personalities, you know? And a desperate need for validation.

So, so wrong.

MVCreates & OP

So, get to the point OP. What happened to you?

A vague threat.

Mina....had Opinions. And opinions are just that, opinions but for her, they were fact. After all, she has her own reality and own story that helped form hers but some of hers were odd. Maybe not to most people who aren’t paying attention or didn’t notice the red flags ( “through rose colored glasses, all red flags just look like flags”) but they were definitely something.

She, for awhile, talked an awful lot about writeblr positivity. I could never really make sense of it -- she either supported it or was against it, from what I remember. (keep in mind, this was a little over a year ago and visually, I can see the gaudy green - red - yellow colors for pronoun preferences).

And I made a vague post about it and her. A few times. I was in the wrong for vaguing about her instead of just saying something up front.

Her response was, and I will paraphrase,

“Do you ever screenshot people vaguing about you just in case they enter a political career?”

I wish I had taken a screenshot. I’m sorry now that I did not. Maybe someone saw that, maybe they brushed it off. I don’t know.

From then on, I kept quiet about my thoughts and opinions because I did have plans to go into a political career -- but jokes on her, I plan on being a human rights officer for the United Nations lmao

Another incident (we’re almost done, I promise):

I was -- venting about gender dysphoria. I was Peak Suicidal at this point in time, just knowing what I was born with brought me to tears frequently. Mina had jumped into in the conversation and started talking about something vaguely related. She started talking about trans BIPOC experiences, which is great! Their experiences are things that need to be talked about because they are often thrown to the side for trans white people’s experiences and that is not okay.

I forget the middle part, it’s been over a year. It went from BIPOC experiences to something else, a conversation about gender? I don’t know. Maybe there’s someone out there who remembers. I doubt it though.

I remember saying, “I wish I would have been born with testicles and everything else because [I’m in hell?]” and she answered with,

“That would [mean / cause / ???? ] privilege.”

This person who has claimed she is non binary, claimed to be a trans ally and part of the trans community, said that to someone in the height of dysphoria and was suicidal.

You do not say that to someone who is experiencing gender dysphoria. To say that is transphobia. And yes, trans & non binary people can be transphobic. You are not exempt.

Violet Vineyard & Reprehensible Behaviors

Before I start this section, and I promise this is almost done, I just want to thank:

@radley-writes​, @gingerly-writing​, @lilquill​, @sapiencenotes​  @rrrawrf-writes​ & many more who have come forward about their experiences, whether publicly and in private. It’s admirable and brave of you to do something I could not. @nuwuhorizons​ & @time-to-write-and-suffer​ have amazing documentation as well.

There isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said and documented, but I can corroborate the bullying Mina and the mods engaged in -- the stuff Radley spoke about I did not know about -- and that makes me ill. I’m glad they owned up to what they did, and for that, thank you Radley. It shows you are a much bigger and better person.

I will not lie, however -- I was hurt and felt a bit ill when you talked about what the mods did. And it made me question and second guess a friendship I have (had?) with another mod. But I think that helped put some pieces of the puzzle together.

 An incident that stands out to me (and honestly bothers me, so a few people have heard about this often and I’m sorry), very clearly and I have screenshots for but will not share to protect their privacy, was when they dogpiled someone who had been asking about writing a Jewish character. While they were falling into somewhat harmful stereotypes, VV was handling it.

Not well.

The person was a minor, for one -- teenagers make mistakes, they make them more if they’re not exposed to varying cultures and beliefs. And the person who was on the receiving end of this dogpile looked to be coming more and more unstable and all I could do is just. Grab screenshots of what I could.

And if you’re reading this, you know who you are, I am so sorry I didn’t say anything. That wasn’t right, the entire situation wasn’t okay. You shouldn’t have gone through that. I hope you find healing and peace.

A quick disclaimer: Violet Vineyard, as far as I know, didn’t have a lot of Jewish members. I know a mod was converting (but hadn’t yet) and I think I saw one or two people with the Star of David in their name or icon. That said, my paternal grandmother was Jewish and had been one of the few survivors of her family from the Holocaust. I cannot speak for the entire Jewish population, and I do not consider myself Jewish in religion but trust me when I say this:

YHWH would be disappointed in their (VV’s) behavior -- and if the moderator who is working on converting is genuine about converting, then I need them to think long and hard  about what is happening. This isn’t what Judaism teaches. And if you’re reading this, ask yourself, would G-d condone the actions of your fellow ex mods?

Final Words

Oof, this was long, wasn’t it? Must have been hard to sit through because I ramble! So. What’s left for me to say?

Not a whole lot but still, a lot but the stuff I want to say are not my lived experiences. It is not my place to speak on behalf of anyone else involved in all of this. And that is okay.

But to the people who were involved with the recent drama and dogpiled a trans teenager and to those who helped bully many people in this community on behalf of the oh so great Mina,

my question is  why?

What was a thirty year old woman, WHO HAS A CHILD, bullying a nineteen year old? Why was an almost thirty year old person with a toddler and one on the way involved in this as well?

Most or a decent handful of you were adults, some with children, some expecting. 

And Mina,

You used your age and position to manipulate people and for that, I find you the most reprehensible. Castor did not deserve what happened, neither did the victim mentioned above. Nobody did. 

I hope, in the end, you finally find happiness without having to lie about your talent and without having to manipulate people.

Thank you for listening and sticking around if you made it this far and didn’t bounce in the beginning.

I’ve said my part. If anyone wants to engage in constructive discussion or share their experiences, feel free to do so.

[compassionatereminders]

Little steps towards becoming a  more kind person - and feeling better about yourself!

Smile when you accidentally make eye contact with strangers.

If you think something positive about someone, tell them. Even if they’re a stranger. Even if you feel a bit silly. Tell that girl you love her dress. Tell that dude his tattoo is awesome. Tell your friend how funny she is. I promise you that they will appreciate hearing what you admire about them and there’s a good chance that you using those 5 seconds to give them a genuine compliment will make their entire day.

When you’re around new people, make an effort to go say hi. Go introduce yourself and ask them who they are and how they’re doing. Start a conversation if you feel like it. Who knows, maybe that girl your acquaintance brought to that party has the potential to become your new best friend - and you won’t know before you start talking to her.

If you see someone falling behind while walking in a group, stop and wait for them to catch up even if the others don’t.

If you see someone get interrupted in a conversation you’re a part of, wait for the new person to stop speaking and then look at the person who got interrupted and ask them what they were about to say. Let them know that you care to hear it.

If YOU accidentally interrupt someone, stop yourself and say “hey, I didn’t mean to interrupt you, I thought you were done speaking - what were you about to say?”

If you see someone sitting/standing alone, go ask if you can join them - or invite them to come join you and the people you’re hanging out with.

If you’re in a group conversation and someone is trying to say something and no one is really noticing, look at them and let them know that even if everyone else are stuck in their own stuff right now, you’re there and you care to listen to what they’re trying to share.

Remember to tell the people you care about that you care about them. Send a text to that friend you haven’t seen in a while to let them know that you miss them. Tell your partner that you love them. Tell that new person you’re getting to know how cool you think they are. Call your mom to hear how she’s doing. Don’t be afraid to let the important people in your life know that they’re loved and cared about.

When someone is really passionate and knowledgeable about something, take advantage of it! Ask them some questions and make proper use of this opportunity to learn something new. Make sure to show the people in your life that you don’t think their passions are cringy or boring or dumb.

If something reminded you of someone, let them know. Send your friends songs or silly memes which somehow reminded you of them, and tag them in posts you think they’d enjoy. I promise that they’ll be excited to know that you think of them even when they aren’t around.

Remember to check up on people. Ask that friend you haven’t heard from in a while how they’re doing and what they’re up to. Ask the person who’s seeming unusually distant and sad whether they’re okay. Ask the stranger crying on the street whether there’s something you can do. You can’t force them to accept your help, but you can show them that you’re there and that you care and that alone will mean a lot to them.

Stop talking shit about people behind their backs (unless they’re really horrible people/abuses/predators, in which case warning people about them is necessary and valid!) If you have a serious issue with someone, either tell them directly so that you can work on resolving it or stop hanging out with them.

If you enjoy something someone created, make sure to let them know. Especially if they’re a small artist/creator. Leave kudos and a nice comment on that fanfiction you loved. Reblog/share that piece of art or that poem you really liked. And whenever you see something on your social media feed which you really enjoy, make sure to check out the OP and maybe give them a follow.

Every once in a while, take a couple minutes to tell some of the people you enjoy following on social media that you really enjoy their content or their personality or their art and why that is. It could easily make their day. (It’s okay to go on anon if you’re feeling shy!)

Remember to give compliments to people which aren’t about appearance. Tell your friends how much you love their humor or their passion or their honesty or their confidence. I know they’re probably hot too but make sure to remind them that they are much more than a pretty face.

If you notice that someone is struggling, offer your help and support if you can. Take the time to have that deep conversation with them about how they’re feeling and what’s going on in their life - and if they’re struggling with self care, maybe bring them a home cooked meal or offer to help them conquer the mountains of dishes in their kitchen/do their laundry/buy some groceries/clean their apartment a bit.

If you’re sitting with a group of people and you notice that someone is falling out of the conversation, ask them a question to make them feel like someone cares to hear their input.

Make a habit of asking people whether they’re fully comfortable with something before you do it. Some people don’t like hugs or other casual touching and some people don’t always have the energy to help you sort out your dating situation and some people are triggered by talk of certain topics. So make a habit of asking “is it okay if I hug you/vent to you/talk to you about x topic” before you start doing the thing in question.

If people aren’t hurting themselves or someone else, let them be. Even if you think they’re being weird. Even if you don’t get it. Unless they’re doing something which is actively causing harm to someone, don’t comment on, judge or criticize people for doing something unusual. Just let them be. They probably have their reasons.

[deafmatteo]

top surgery — pre-op prep

This is going to be a very long post where I explain how I went about the process of the surgical assessment, the actual meeting with the surgeon, and preparation. 

Disclaimer: my experiences will not be universal. I am very fortunate to be Canadian and live in a country where the actual surgery is covered and I only need to pay for the stuff outside of the surgery such as medication and travel. additionally, my experience of pre- and post-surgery time at the surgical center was altered quite heavily due to COVID-19. things may be different for your experiences or for your character but here’s a general outline! if you have any questions, don’t be afraid to dm or send an anon!

content warning for below the cut: suicide mention, weight mention, substance use, crash dieting mention, 

i. Surgery Assessment: 

In order to qualify for an assessment with the surgeon, you need to have one taken by a different doctor. In my case, there was only one who was able to do the assessment and she worked in an office in a town adjacent to mine. The actual assessment took roughly two hours (spaced over multiple appointments) and it was filled with questions asking my relationship with my gender identity, expectations from the surgery, my personal and familial health history, my transition beyond top surgery—if i have socially come out, if i have begun my medical transition, etc—and the stability of my mental health. Because I was in the process of trying to get medication for my mental health, this was a potential red flag that could have caused me to fail my assessment but because I have not, to the assessor’s knowledge, considered suicide or even thought of it, I was cleared. 

Once I passed my assessment, it was then passed onto the waiting list for the surgeons in my province. I had opted for the general waitlist to get the surgeon who had the shortlist but you are given the option to select surgeons but there is a requirement for certain surgeons. Some will not operate on tobacco smokers, some will not operate on fat people with a high BMI(35+), some will not operate on tobacco and marijuana smokers, but there also some who will operate on all of the above. It personally depends on the surgeon and what they’re comfortable with. Within two months of the assessment, I got a call back from the surgeon’s office and from there, I made my surgical appointment where I would discuss things with the surgeon! 

ii. Surgeon Appointment:

this was done at the surgeon’s office which was again, not local to me. it was very quick and i mean. very quick. the surgeon asked about my expectations from top surgery and what i hoped would come from it and things about my dysphoria and my post-operative care plans. you should have your plan all figured out by this point! they need to know that you will be well cared for! he then took off my hospital gown and took a look at my chest before determining what kind of surgery would be best. I was relatively smalle in terms of pre-op chests but do to the way that my chest had formed because of binding unsafely for over half a decade, i was told that Double Incision was the best & safest option. then i got the option of if i want to keep my nipples or not — i opted for yes. 

with that all figured out, i was given an initial date & time for surgery and that was that! (for myself, my date got changed multiple times because of covid-19 but if it wasn’t for the virus, it would have stayed true to the selected day).

iii. Waiting Game:

okay! now you’ve got all your appointments in order and you’re just waiting for them to get snipped off. now what?

one. research post-operative care! i have researched for many, many years on top surgery but i still researched more constantly. this surgery is a big deal and you don’t want to do anything wrong that could cause further harm to yourself! look at different resources, watch different youtube videos, etc. there’s a lot of information out there that could help ease your post-op anxieties. 

two. get prepared with the stuff you need. the surgeon beforehand will give you some things that they will want you to have before surgery but don’t be afraid to purchase additional things! here’s a list of some of the things i purchased beforehand. 

 PILLOWS. my pillows were shit, flat out. they had no proper support & they just hurt to use so they often were just tossed to the sit for my cat to use. i bought two that provide good support and comfort and genuinely never felt better. this is because you cannot lay on your side or stomach for up to 4 weeks after the surgery and i, personally, am versatile and will sleep any which way. the pillows are to help you stay comfortable and propped up whilst laying in bed or sleeping. 

MEDICINE. get the strongest dose of Tylenol & Advil you can because this will be your pain medication afterwards. (the surgeon will provide over-the-counter ones as well but, if they’re like my surgeon, they’ll ask you to avoid it as much as you can). these will be your life-savers, trust me. 

SUPPLEMENTS. this one i haven’t seen around too much but for me, it was a better safe than sorry option. i already have to take iron supplements for my anemia so i purchased some zinc ones as well! zinc supplements help with immunity and scar healing which is always a good thing to take after a major surgery. the iron can help because your body may lose blood during surgery but it’s not one that i’ve seen people recommend. DO NOT GO OVERBOARD! you know your immune system and how well it will handle injuries. i have had a previous surgery done and due to my weakened immune system, it took me a lot longer to recover than initially anticipated. that’s why i’m going for the zinc supplements. most people don’t! personal preference.

SIX-FOOT CHARGER. life-saver. you can’t do that awkward extend-your-arms as you attempt to charge your phone before rolling over and finally getting comfortable. get one of those chargers that you can comfortable sit in your bed and use because even if you’re not in surgery, better comfort. what’s the worst that could happen?

DRY SHAMPOO & WIPES. for the first week, you CANNOT shower. stinky. be courteous to those with you and don’t be a stinky stinker. you can sit in the tub from the waist down but you cannot get your post-operative binder wet which leaves your entire torso, your armpits, neck, and face that do not see the godliness of the bathtub for a week. the wipes will help wipe away any grunginess and the dry shampoo will prevent your hair from becoming disgusting and oily. trust me. you’re doing yourself-and everyone around you-a favour.

there are additional things that other people tend to buy and like i said, it’s all up to personal preference. if you think it would help you, do it! there’s no harm than can be done by buying something you think would help but you end up not using rather than needing something but not having access to it. trust me, you deserve the utmost care and attention that you can give yourself during this time. 

IMPORTANT!!

do not crash diet. this is when you basically attempt to do any of those fasting diets that basically deprives your body of the nutrients it needs. buddy, you’re about to have a massive surgery. you’re doing more harm than good to your body and you deserve better. and trust me, i tried. and as a person in recovery for an E.D., it is the most slippery slope you can take. your body needs the nutrients to help you heal.

exercise! (not excessively). it makes it easier for the surgeons to work around your chest and can also help with its masculinization. for about a month before the surgery, i would go on a run at least every other day as well as some HIIT exercises. i do genuinely believe that it has helped me in some way in regards to healing but it could very well be me trying to justify the exercise.

LISTEN TO THE SURGEON. seriously. no amount of text-posts, no amount of youtube videos will ever overpower the advice your surgeon will give you. please, just listen to them. they’re the ones performing the surgery so they know what is best for you.

[stereostevie]

LaKeith Stanfield Settles Into His Toughest Role Yet: Himself

As he heads towards his thirties, the electrifying actor is laying himself bare — and finding a new sense of balance

by Tirhakah Love Feb 12

For nearly a decade, LaKeith Stanfield has used his screen time reveling in the bizarreness of America’s racial consciousness. Whether Atlanta’s quippy street mystic Darius, or the code-switching sardonics of Cassius in Sorry to Bother You, his characters have always seemed to be in on the joke — and in his latest, Judas and the Black Messiah, Stanfield is closer to the secret than ever before.

Shaka King’s film, which chronicles the final days of Black Panther Party Chairman Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) through the sullen eyes of FBI informant William O’Neal (Stanfield), finds the actor in his darkest, most nuanced rendition of the Black saboteur to date. “It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do,” the 29-year-old said over a Zoom call last week, “I just really wanted to make sure I was getting it right. But then also not getting it too right, if that makes sense.”

Stanfield has built a name on playing conflicted characters, but a figure with as much baggage as O’Neal — who was forced into his own role while still a teenager — demanded what he calls a “necessary nuance,” one that became, at times, overwhelming. The film set became not just a vision of radical Black politics, but a space for Stanfield to process his own upbringing in order to be a more “realized, holistic” person. LEVEL spoke with the actor about how playing O’Neal helped illuminate his path toward a healthier decade that included both therapy and meditation, heading into his thirties.

LEVEL: Judas and the Black Messiah was supposed to drop in August, but 2020 had other plans. How does it feel to know it’s coming out?

LaKeith Stanfield: I’m excited. I want people to learn about Chairman Fred Hampton’s story. It’s something that’s not spoken about enough. Everything has been such a question mark with this pandemic — not knowing how it was going to come out, or whether it would come out, period. So here we are with Black History Month, this story of Chairman Fred Hampton, and everybody gets to experience this in the most honest way we could put it in. I’m really happy. I’m going to host a screening at my house and just invite everybody… who’s been tested. [Laughs]

By my count, this is the second role that Daniel swiped from under your nose. Didn’t he get you for Get Out, too?

That’s right. You know what, for Get Out I auditioned for like every role. I came in and I read with Jordan Peele. And then I read for another — I think it was Rel’s role — and ended up eventually reading for my role. Damn, I forgot all about that.

How can we keep being friends with a dude who just steals roles from you, bro?

Nah, it’s all good. [Laughs] Ultimately, those decisions are made by people who have a better understanding about casting and their relation to the story than I do. If they’d asked me to play a hat in this movie, I would’ve done it.

It doesn’t seem like a Hollywood thing to do at all.

Hollywood is not always behind things like this. It took years to get it to the point where we could actually make it. These are stories people are yearning for. We have to always prove that time and time again, unfortunately, but it is what it is. We show and prove these kinds of stories are human stories. They’re specific to the Black experience, but it’s global. We hope that we can get these studios to understand that more and more.

How did you relate to [William O’Neal’s] isolation and paranoia he lived with? How did you tap into that?

I didn’t see him as someone I could connect to, so we started to design the character from the inside out. The thing is, we don’t have any information about O’Neal outside of his Eyes on the Prize interview, a couple of court transcripts, and other eyewitness accounts. We could create him from scratch and give him different dimensions. I wanted to introduce how he might be a thrill-seeker. He might get fun out of creating imbalance. He steals cars — he wasn’t very afraid to put himself in a line of fire — but he was also a person who eventually felt guilty about what he did. In the full-length version of his Eyes on the Prize interview, he says at one point, “I felt bad about the things I did, but I had to continue to play the role.” He contradicts that later by saying, “I’ll let history speak for me.” Clearly this guy has an internal struggle that we missed.

Wearing all these different masks.

In the scene where I had to poison him, a lot of it didn’t end up making it to the final cut, but we shot [me mixing it in] Kool-Aid, and I had to go through all those motions. With somebody like Daniel, who I just respect as a human and an artist, as Fred Hampton, it felt like I was actually poisoning Chairman Fred Hampton. One thing [co-star] Dominique Fishback mentioned to me is that your body doesn’t always differentiate the experience from your imagination. So sometimes your body thinks that’s real, everything you’re putting it through. It’s no wonder I’ve been feeling so stressed out and having panic attacks. I realized going forward before I step into something like that again, maybe have a therapist. [Laughs]

“There’s a dynamic between celebrity and the common man that Covid-19 has really lifted the veil on. We all gotta wear our masks or we suffer the same fate. You’re not special.”

For Black people playing an op it’s different. There’s real pressure. Especially for a character who’s never been portrayed.

That’s how I felt when I first figured out I found out who he was. But you don’t go into something like this not knowing that’s going to be the case. I hope I was able to portray him in a way that made people see themselves in the character. What decisions would you have made? Were you trying to go to jail for five to 10 years? Would you try to stay out? What does that mean? Those are the more important questions. Let’s say there’s a million people in the world: two of them are Fred Hamptons; the rest are William O’Neal. I want to challenge people to think about the ways they might be O’Neal-esque. And maybe through seeing this, you might distance yourself from some of those things.

If the pandemic has revealed anything, it’s the disconnect between the celebrity class and everyone else. People like Hampton and [Bobby] Seale are trying to do cultural work. We’re seeing that there’s disconnects here. How does a film like this impact your view of celebrity?

These roles are metaphors for so many things. Chairman Fred Hampton as a metaphor for socialism, selflessness, and O’Neal could be argued to be a metaphor for capitalism and selfishness, or perceived celebrity ego. There’s a dynamic between celebrity and the common man that exists, which Covid-19 has really lifted the veil on to a significant degree because we all sit in here on Zoom, right? [Laughs] We all gotta wear our masks or we suffer the same fate. You’re not special. This made everybody have to sit down and confront that idea.

[Laughs] Right.

One could argue that the fact that Fred Hampton died at a young age is justification as to why you shouldn’t try and put things outside yourself for the greater good, because it ends up being helpless and hopeless. I don’t agree with that. I think that Chairman Fred Hampton’s legacy lives on, like he said, “you can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill a revolution.” I remember being in that scene where Daniel was giving a speech, and I’m thinking, the things that Chairman Fred did all those years ago, today we are here experiencing this moment collectively because of him. While I’m doing this, I’m looking into the audience, seeing Afros, seeing Black people, seeing the beauty and the confidence and love, I don’t really even see that these days. So he zapped me back into a time where this is what people were on. We gotta find that in ourselves again and unlock it

You have a great way of playing chaos agents. Whether it’s a muted performance in Atlanta or muted in a different way in Uncut Gems, where your character was always on the fucking edge. Why do those roles as subversive figures speak to you?

I haven’t really thought about it but I know one thing’s for sure: I tend to lean toward characters who have internal dialogue or struggle. I like trying to find some groundedness and truth in the in-between of two extremes. These characters appeal to me on a subconscious level because that’s how I am. I like taking things to crazy extremes and then trying to find some kind of balance in that. I’m also attracted to characters being able to show the mirror to you and have you see something that activates something in you. Those characters that have you see yourself through absurdity.

You mentioned earlier how young these dudes were. Fred Hampton was 21 years old when he was killed. If he made 24, 25, I’m wondering how much more he could have gotten done. Being Black, we make it to 25, it’s a thing. You’re now about to make it to 30. How’s it hitting you? Do you think about age at all like that?

Not really. Not really, but to some extent, this is a landmark moment for me. I feel like I’m just starting to really get my shit together, like personally. And be the better version of myself for myself. I just started therapy just this year.

Yo, congrats.

Thanks man. Going into my thirties, I plan to continue to do it. It’s been helpful for me to unpack a lot of stuff. I’ve been through a lot of stuff, there’s a lot of things I just didn’t confront. Those things mount; you act out in different ways and they can become harmful to you. So I just said this year, I’m going to make the choice to try and be better. Like I was always throwing off therapy. I never wanted to try it. I was like, whatever. It was just something that’s bad in my family. Growing up, everyone’s like, “therapy, what the fuck are talking about?”

So I wanna continue working on that — working on myself and finding a better sense of balance, and by virtue of doing that, unlock more potential in my heart. And I’ll be able to express in a more realized, whole holistic way. Those are my ambitions moving forward.

There’s always a moment where you just know that you need it. That, there are strategies you just don’t have that you need to build to be a person. Was there a moment for you where it’s like, fuck I really gotta go to therapy. I really gotta get some help?

I wake up every day and I have the same thought: Fuck, I gotta go to therapy.

[Laughter]

I was kind of raised like a wolf. I didn’t have parents or people who were guiding me or told me anything. So I had to figure out everything on my own — try on masks and faces and hats and wigs — and try to figure out what my place is in the world. For a long time, I didn’t realize I was stunted because of that. Not having that at home, and at an early age being traumatized by things I was seeing. Just now, I’m starting to really find the tools to help me pull that young self out of that abyss. It took me a while to even realize there was a problem because I was like, “Oh, you guys are crazy. I’m not crazy.”

Were you shopping for therapists during the pandemic?

It’s all on Zoom now. I’ve found this really cool therapist. It’s great and perfect for me right now. Hopefully it continues to be the case. It’s helped me a lot. After doing press yesterday, I had another session and it was amazing. It helps you unlock things about yourself. It’s not even necessarily about the person that you’re doing therapy with, but like you said, perspectives and strategies and tools that you didn’t have access to before.

Especially in the work you do, it’s important to extricate yourself — that period of like, okay, I gotta get out of this. How have you come back to yourself in this period of time?

It’s been meditation. The one good thing about this pandemic is being able to sit at home by yourself and deal with yourself and just your inner voice. And even though that’s annoying as hell, beautiful clarity comes out of it. People would be surprised how many answers they can give themselves just by listening to themselves and not distracting yourself with so many things like social media or movies and stuff. Now, it isn’t easy, especially once you become hooked into a pattern, but it’s really worth it.

That’s been beautiful for me just to take those moments. It’s important and it’s taught me a lot about myself. And that’s kinda what pushes you. Now that you understand and recognize some of the issues that you want to make better about yourself, you can plan on ways to do that. Whether it means therapy or yoga, which I also started doing.

There’s a scene in the film that feels like the Last Supper, and it’s just gut-wrenching. That sense of dread is so hard to tap into, but it also feels of a piece with what so many of us have been going through — knowing that people are losing their lives, either from our government or from a virus, and living with that same dread.

It’s a real thing. I went to the hospital recently on some health stuff. When I was in there, there were a bunch of Covid-19 patients being moved about. Being in a hospital is pretty scary right now. People screaming and literally dying around you. There’s an overall energy. Like this feeling of loss permeating in the world today.

Before we started this movie, my best friend who I grew up with got killed by his brother. So I was carrying that with me the whole time. One thing that made those moments real for me is that I know what it feels like to lose somebody abruptly, violently. When we filmed me having to poison Fred Hampton, it was a really tough day — I was thinking about my own brother, just in a whole different place all day. On set crying. That sense of loss, knowing the violence of all of that, really informed everything for me. There was no distinction between reality and what I was experiencing in the moment. Most of the takes in that scene, I was actually bawling. I had to tone it back.

The worlds are just overlapping with one another. That’s fucking wild.

I hope having gone through all that, somebody watching it can be moved or touched. Maybe it helps put emphasis on Fred Hampton and why it’s so valuable to protect people like him.

As someone who lost someone close recently, some days it feels like your worlds are collapsing on one another. I just lost my dad this past summer. It’s weird to even talk about, but the fact that you have to just carry on, with your friend’s death sitting in the back of your head is…wild.

With movies, you never know if we’re doing the right take, or even if it’s ever going to be seen by anyone. Especially with something like this, you never really know. I’m so grateful for everybody putting their best foot forward. I want everybody to see it. I really want Black people to see it, especially Black kids in Chicago. I want them to see someone who really put things outside of themselves and put something first and gave in love. I just hope that somebody sees it and it touches them. It makes them think about something a little differently. That’d be dope.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

[icewitcher]

BNHA/MHA OP 6 by Blue Encount

WE SERIOUSLY NEED TO TALK ABOUT IT

And more especially the covers made by AmaLee and NateWantsToBattle because they will help us to understand better the opening. You may get spoilers from the manga so if you’re not following the manga don’t read that post, stop it here. Also theories in coming for Bakugou and the movie Heroes Rising.

LET’S START THE ANANLYSE OF THESE BEAUTIFUL COVERS. I’m starting with AmaLee cover...

AmaLee’s cover of the opening 6 is focusing mainly on the storyline of season 4 of the anime.

Let's start with the two first line of the song

On that day I swore I would keep you safe, it's a promise I have made in my heart.

The promise is referring to the one that Mirio and Midoriya made, the one to save Eri and protect her from anyone who would like to harm her. And it's still the case in the manga.

If I had to give my world to save a life I would, I'd sacrifice everything and wouldn't even thinking twice.

The heroes participating to Eri's rescue operation know they could lose big and not only their lives. ( Thanks a lot bullets who can destroy the quirk factor of a human being.) However and since it concern the life of a little girl they don't really have a plan they've just went into the yakuzas hideout and planned to take them down by fighting. This line can make a parallel with All Might and his will to save and help everyone and he always done this without a plan, it's probably something Sir Nighteye had reproached him when he was sidekick and it went like this when All Might choose Midoriya as the next wielder of One For All. After all, Nighteye didn't hide his displeasure as the choice made by All Might. The next line amplify the idea of sacrifice...

Every day somebody makes a sacrifice and that's why we're able to continue on fight and live our lives.

Fat Gum, Red Riot and Sun Eater are the first ones to fight the members of the Eight Precepts of Death. They choose to stay behind and fought those villains to permit to Sir Nighteye, Eraserhead and the rest of the team to save Eri from Overhaul. However like we have seen Tamaki and Kirishima are both out and severely injuried and Fat Gum is on a better shape than his interns but it won't be able to join the others so they have to count on the others. But I'm afraid my dear anime watchers only, those three aren't the worst when the fight against Chisaki will be over.

I won't run away and hide in the past, I will become the me that I'm striving to be.

The first time they've met Eri, Lemillion and Deku couldn't save her and they have regrets which haunted them but once they knew what Chisaki was doing to her, we could feel their powerless and possible uselessness but they turned it into a new determination and renew at the same time their interior promise which is to save Eri but also to accomplish their respective goals.

Even if is nothing more than a hopeful wish, I hope I can reach you just a little bit.

Deku is the first one to have touch Eri with his right hand (the scarred one after his fight against Todoroki, this right hand is a 100 % bless by god himself) and he realized she was trembling in his arms. He tried to do anything to sve her but you know how it turns the first time. But Aizawa told Midoriya that his hand has reached the little girl and he is fucking right because a few seconds later we see Eri and her thoughts and it was the first time someone touched her with a warm hand which is different from all the others contact human she had before.

Even if the fading light is all we know let's go.

The problem with this operation is that while the heroes have to fight the obstacles put by Chisaki, Overhaul is escaping with Eri so Deku and the others has to hurry  up before it's too late but they're still hope since Mirio went ahead however it doesn't mean he will hold long against Chisaki... If he catch him...

I've finished with AmaLee's version so that means...

Time to Analyse of the cover made by NateWantsToBattle.

First of all, I wanted to say that I realize something... Polaris can also help us to understand the movie Heroes Rising. Yep you've read this well even if the opening 6 isn't the theme song for Heroes Rising. And like someone said it on a Tumblr post, NateWantsToBattle said BakuDeku rights, well dude you don’t know how much you’re saying the truth. The first part concern Midoriya until the end of the first chorus then the second verse and second chorus talked about Bakugou and maybe his intimate thoughts towards Midoriya and the third verse it’s the two of them or at least I think. (Maybe the movie will be divided in different parts: one centered around Midoriya, an another with Bakugou, the third part will be the class and BakuDeku to finally finish with Katsuki beating the crap out of Nine by using One For All.)

Before I start with this cover, I want to precise that in the second part I will make theories about Bakugou’s behavior towards Midoriya, if you don’t like what I’m gonna to say then there’s no need to show your displeasure in the comments of this post or by reblogging.

I’ve decided I will follow my heart, Promise yours will always be right near me

Midoriya’s actions are always due to the fact he wants to save people, it’s what he always wanted to do since he was 4, he wanted to become a hero. All Might has been the first one to believe in him after he said that the true heroes are always the one who moved their legs before they could think. And Midoriya never forgot who had help him to become what he is (even though it was all thanks to the hard work he did) and he eep those memories everywhere.

What if you could take the chance to save a life but you, you could only save them by losing everything ?

Bakugou and Midoriya has to protect two children (seriously what is the thing with children ? First Kota, then Eri and now those two... What Nine wants from them ? Their quirks ? They must be pretty OP then.) from Nine, the villain of Heroes Rising and we can clearly see in the trailer that Midoriya is the one who will loose everything. At multiple times, it will be One For All but for different reasons, first it will be Nine who will try to steal it:

I doubt it will be the only time would want to steal Deku’s quirk.

Then by giving it temporarily to Bakugou:

Then we can suppose it will Izuku’s life who will be in danger because he will be in a critical situation

Maybe he will “die” because of too much injuries or maybe because he lose One For All. Like @thebroccolidragon​ has said in this post maybe because One For All have reamains of the souls of the previous holders inside the vestiges then maybe by stealing One For All to Midoriya, Nine is forcefully absorbing a part of Midoriya’s soul. And if Izuku is really passing One Fo All to Katsuki then it will explain why we can see Bakugou’s silhoutte inside the One For All in a few pages of the manga. You want a proof ? Go see this post of @half-for-all​ .

If I fall you know I would swim through oceans of my tears to be with you

All his life, Deku admired All Might but also Bakugou because he is Izuku’s image of victory. Even if Bakugou is one of his bully, he still have admiration for him and when One For All was transferred o him, his goal was to catch up his childhood friend, to be on the same level and become his rival. Which he made it. But it doesn’t mean Izuku didn’t suffer during all these years when he was Quirkless which means he had to put eforts to become a hero and be respected by his pairs.

Say Goodbye, I don’t have the strength to let it all end.

Izuku is so persistent he didn’t perceive Katsuki as his bully but as his childhood friend and probably best friend, he even kept the nickname “Kacchan”. And U.A. was a chance to improve their relation which went south when Deku has been diagnosed as Quirkless. His efforts finally pay after the Provisional License exam when they fought and revealed what they have in the heart and now they are rivals.

All I wanted was you to stay and not disappear.

I think Izuku can’t imagine his life without Bakugou being involved somehow whatever it is in a platonic way, as friends or maybe as a couple (everyone have their own preferences) and that’s why he has been so shocked when the League Of Villains managed to capture Bakugou. For him, it was unthinkable that someone captured Katsuki successfully because in Midoriya’s mind, Bakugou wouldn’t allow it without a fight. Hell, I’m sure Bakugou prefers to die than to be a prisoner or an hosage. Somehow Deku needs to be near to Kacchan to be stronger.

It feels like every day I’m fighting for my life

Bakugou sees everything and everyone has a challenge so he push his limits to be stronger. And we don’t forget his quirk which can hurt his arms when his body can’t endure the explosions anymore. However his biggest challenge is Midoriya but maybe not for the reasons we think...

But I, I’m never backing down I’m gonna prove I’m strong for you.

Since they've met, Katsuki and Izuku wanted to become a duo of heroes but a lot of things has change since Bakugou got his quirk: he was praised by his teachers and his comrades, he just has to wait for Izuku to manifest his quirk which never came. And what if Bakugou's reason to become a hero was to protect Midoriya from the villains or from the danger because he knows how much his childhood friend is followed by problems. But because of how the society worked and how they disrespect Quirkless, his thoughts has been twisted and he shown his protective side with violence which has been perceive as bullying by Deku. The only way Katsuki has found to protect his friend was to first train his quirk and become stronger for Izu sake and to show the cinnamon roll how dangerous the world of heroes can be when we are Quirkless. But U.A. changed everything, suddenly his friend developp a quirk, become stronger, seems to have All Might favors and beat him which frustrated Katsuki because he realized Izuku doesn't need to be protected by someone and of course Bakugou felt useless. However he gave him a new reason to become stronger: He has to make sure to be ahead of Izuku if he really wants to protect his friend. But he has to do it too because he saw the damage of Midoriya's quirk on his friend body and he realized something when Izuku kept breaking his bones.

I don't think I'm afraid to lose and fail a fight, I was always so afraid I might be losing you.

He can't live in a world without Midoriya because if Midoriya dies then he doesn't have a reason to become a hero anymore. Personnally, I don't remember Bakugou losing a fight and his victories are always so small if he compared them to Izuku. I mean... He just stop Kurogiri while Izuku literally break his legs in purpose to save All Might at the U.S.J., his fight against Todoroki in the Sports Festival wasn't serious only Deku pushed Shoto to use his fire, during the internships he was just patrolling while Midori fought Stain along with Iida and Todoroki then came my favourite part, the practical exam and the training camp.

Let's start with the practical exam: Bakugou has been paired with Midoriya, we know both of them has been surprised but maybe Bakugou was already forming a plan to make sure the green bean boy was safe but all hope may have been crushed when it was decide their enemy was All Might himself. Katsuki brain went into absolute protective mode and that's why he told he preferred to lose the fight than to ask help from Deku meaning I prefer to lose the fight than to see my only friend being hurt by you or by using his quirk. But it isn't the only moment in the exam. He asked Deku to run until he reached the finish line while he was distracting All Might, Katsuki's job was to make sure Izuku was safe no matter the consequences for him.

And it's exactly what happened in the forest when Dabi grabbed his neck and he saw Deku running towards him to stop the LOV to capture him. He told Izuku to not come and he said it with a worried tone. If that doesn't mean he doesn't care about Izuku then I wonder what it was then.

The same thing seems to happen in Heroes Rising and how many do we bet he will be more angrier than usual when one) Izuku wants to give him One For All two) his friend will fall unconscious or will die if he doesn't hurry up to beat Nine and bring Izuku to doctors. Which explained hos shocked face in the trailer after we see Midoriya finger with blood on it, probably with the purpose to pass on One For All because Midoriya too will think it's over for him, he wouldn't be anymore to save people with a smile just like his idol.

You won't ever see me running away cause this smile, it means more than everything. All I ask stay right next to me and don't disappear.

I'm pretty sure Katsuki wants to protect Midoriya because of this:

In reality, he doesn't want to admit it but Bakugou is a tsundere, only logical explication...

He knows Izuku smile a lot and more when he saw All Might on TV when they were children, maybe this image stay in the mind of the explosive blond and make stronger his determination to protect Izuku. He thought maybe if he became a hero and kept safe All Might, it will reassure Izuku.

I'm not strong for the power or the fame or the glory, those don't mean a thing. I just wanted to be stronger so I could hold you closer next to me. Even if I end up losing everything I won't ever forget I had you.

Both Izuku and Bakugou are strong but not for the same goal however their goals completes each other: Izuku wants to be strong and be a hero to save people with a smile on hos face while Bakugou wants to be strong, be a hero to beat villains because he wants to protect Deku while the green haired boy do his part of the job. Which came back to the two famous line of the trailer: Win To Save and Save To Win. But they wants to be stronger because the presence of the other reassured them and make them act not the same as usual. However even if something bad happen to one of them, the other will still remember his friend because they have so much impact on the life that they can't forget, it will be almost a crime.

Even in the darknest night, I feel your heart it lights my way !

Personnally I think it correspond to Bakugou. If Bakugou really have One For All for a moment in the movie, I think he will feel Deku's soul accompany him and guide him during the fight, they will be together to defeat an enemy with the power of All For One and it will make him confiant because maybe he will believe Deku is still alive but not for long.

[writingwithcolor]

I'm a POC who writes mainly white characters but after seeing all the "diversity" posts on this site I'm wondering if I may be subconsciously prejudiced and now I don't know what to do. I feel like I've been doing everything wrong and yet I don't want to change my stories/characters to suit everyone else while not liking them myself.

To Write (or not write) with Diversity

No one can force you to write inclusive stories. Inclusive meaning media that consists of marginalized people, because that is what diversity really is - including people who have always been right there, but have been purposefully left out and erased from the pages of books and scripts. Those who are, when finally represented, are overwhelmingly assigned small, unflattering, and / or stereotypical roles.

Pages like Writing With Color are an offering. Our presence here is for those who choose to write with diversity. We aim to make being inclusive easier because we all believe in the importance of it. But as much as we know how enriching diversity can be, we cannot convince you to do something you don’t necessarily believe in.

Don’t do it because you feel forced

As you mentioned, you’ve read the posts. You know the facts. The decision cannot be forced upon you.  If anything, including diversity out of obligation alone could lead to bad representation. Forcing people to do things without motivation usually means it’ll lack effort, or be done with spite. Trust me when I say marginalized people don’t usually want to see themselves represented by someone who does not want them there. That unwelcome feeling shows. In short: Lack of representation hurts. Bad representation hurts worse.

I only ask that you have accountability.  

Now that you’re aware that your works default to white, you have a choice to make. I think a lot of us grew up reading and writing very white stories - both as PoC and white people - but once you possess the knowledge that things can be different, your next step is a conscious one. You’re not on auto-pilot anymore when you make everyone white (and/or straight, able-bodied, etc). You know better now. Own up to your choices.

So ask yourself: why have I chosen to write without diversity?

I’m afraid to write People of Color. 

Being uncomfortable writing People of Color is a big reason why people stick to writing white people, and only garnish their stories with PoC, if that. White people have long been the default, the everyman. White perspectives are “neutral” to approach. It’s daunting to go from feeling you can portray characters in whatever way you wish to suddenly having the weight of good versus harmful representation on your shoulders.

You don’t want backlash from getting it wrong. You also don’t want to be insensitive to groups. It’s easy to avoid writing them altogether, right? Sure. 

Be aware, though:

You’re making a choice to exclude people out of fear.

Of course, new things are scary. But that’s okay! Courage is the ability to do things that frighten you. Face your fears. Will you shrink away from the challenge, or use it to your advantage?

Let the fear fuel you to do better and to know better. Your concerns about writing PoC can drive you to get the research right in order to best represent people. If your fear is leading to more effort into thoughtful creation, you’re putting it to good use.

Let me tell you right now - you will mess up.

Maybe in small ways, perhaps in a big way. But mistakes will not kick start the apocalypse. Ideally:

Do your research to avoid the most obvious and devastating mistakes from the jump.

Equip yourself with the right beta-reader and sensitivity readers to catch those things. 

Even with errors, your story can be quite enjoyable for people who hardly see themselves represented. Yes, mistakes and all.

As a Black woman bookworm, if you write an exciting story about a Black girl on adventures and falling in love but mention a few questionable things about how she takes care of her hair…I will wince, but it won’t ruin the book for me. I’m willing to overlook some things, for the sake of my enjoyment, and let the author know how I felt about those parts in hopes they can improve.

Say you get something real important wrong. People call you out for it. I suggest you apologize, listen to their critiques, and do better. If possible, pull back the story and re-release when you’ve improved the piece. If that’s not an option, fix it in future works. Getting a finger wagged at you doesn’t mean lock up in fear and never write with diversity again. It means you improve.

Research PoC like you would on any topic:

For comparison’s sake, consider writing People of Color (or any group different from you) like writing other topics you’re unfamiliar with in-depth. 

For example: You may know the basics on Medieval England. The knights, royalty, and so on. But i’m sure there’s a lot of misconceptions mixed in there from television or unreliable sources. 

To write people from this perspective, you would do lots of additional research… right?  

If someone mentioned how you messed up on some of the facts, you would take note and dig into it more for the future…right? 

You might even have more experienced persons check your facts for accuracy beforehand to do the best job possible.

Approach researching PoC in the same way as other topics. There may not be hard facts on how to write an X character, but there are portrayals to avoid with explanations why, and roles people want to see themselves in.

I don’t like to be told what to write.

There’s this misconception that writing with diversity restricts creativity. I get it - there are things you’re being told not to do when writing certain groups. The lists of No’s can get dense. This reflects how poor representation has been for People of Color as there are a number of stereotypical portrayals folks are tired of seeing and has been detrimental to them.

Fiction simply reflects real life: People of Color being viewed through the lens of preconceived notions means being written on with those stereotypes in mind. It is a vicious cycle. Stereotypes are more than an annoyance - they can and do lead to real life consequences.

Being treated like a stereotype lowers our quality of life. Experiencing racism and daily microaggressions has a psychological effect - from insecurity, depression and PTSD - it is serious. (X)

Viewing People of Color by their stereotypes is what makes, say, a Black person who speaks with passion no matter what it’s about (and even if they’ve been wronged) too hostile and “Angry” to take seriously. If anything, they’re now a serious threat. And that’s dangerous for them.

Put yourself in the shoes of the overly typecast.

Think of a time someone misunderstood you. You had a bad day and acted grumpy. Well, being a grump defines who you are now. When asked, people describe you as crabby and humorless. Every new person you meet sees your every action through that lens.

Strangers tiptoe around you, as they can just tell you’re ill-tempered. Peers choose their words carefully, afraid of what might spark your wrath. Your children even inherit the title; teachers discipline them more and take other students’ word over theirs- your kids are snappy, difficult, and known to not play well with others, after all.

Wouldn’t that get old? Wouldn’t you feel it was unfair to be reduced to a label, and that you’re sick of being defined by it? Wouldn’t you have the desire to be seen for who you truly are, and can be? Perhaps you do get grumpy sometimes, which is just being human. You’re so much more than a grouch.

Stereotypes are not creative.

Writing outside of stereotypes open up so many more possibilities. How many times have we seen the Black Best Friend play out in media? You’re not being silenced when readers criticize your sassy sidekick. Your message has been heard, loud and clear - again and again and again. People are upset because it’s not anything new - in fact, it is quite old.  We want multiple portrayals. Why not create something new before you decide to write so closely to how we are always written?

OP said: I don’t want to change my stories/characters to suit everyone else while not liking them myself.

This should not be the case. Avoiding stereotypes has nothing to do with making unlikeable or even perfect characters. Simply make Characters of Color who go beyond stereotypes! Characters who are best friends without being arc-less doormats. Characters who are fierce and emotional and stand for something without being simplified to irrational, hostile, and angry. 

Knowing the difference between stereotype and culture is important, too. Don’t let anyone tell you you’re doing something wrong when their bias means they perceive your character as being stereotypical, or problematic, when they’re not. (See: Stereotyped vs Nuanced Characters and Audience Perception.)  

If anything, writing beyond hard labels leads to complex characters. Writing about new cultures is interesting and can be exciting. 

If you only like your East Asian characters when they’re geniuses or your Black girls when they’re angry without a cause…do some self-reflection. Why do your Characters of Color only seem “right” to you when they are flat, or confined to stereotypes? Why not allow them to be complex humans?

I’m not convinced that representation matters.

Well, representation does matter. A lot. While it has been written on so much, and there being countless studies, statistics, and personal accounts to support this, I would like to mention…

Representation (or lack thereof) lowers self-worth.

Studies show TV boosts the self-esteem of white boys. The confidence of People of Color and girls of all races, on the other hand, decreases when watching TV (X X). 

“If you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves.” -Junot Diaz

The Racial Empathy Gap.

I want to be brief (too late, right?) so let me just mention another point of research for you: the racial empathy gap. Stereotyped depictions and the limited roles for People of Color are internalized by society, leading to lack of empathy towards People of Color and the enforcement of stereotypes in real time. Lack of empathy actively affects how PoC are treated, such as the belief that Black people experience less pain than others and therefore are misdiagnosed (their illnesses and pain are downplayed) and under treated (X X X). 

Fiction Increases Empathy.

In addition to the racial empathy gap, look into the studies on how fiction improves empathy. For example: reading about vampires increases empathy towards vampires. Imagine what non-stereotyped, marginalized depictions in fiction can do for empathy.  (X, X)

The strength in which people are against representation speaks volumes. 

If representation does not matter, then why are some people so angry when it’s there? Let’s take book to movie depictions: 

A Character of Color depicted as white simply means they were the best actor for the job, according to a vocal presence in social media. 

However, even a verified Character of Color being depicted as such leads to boycotting, accusations of being “Politically-correct”, and wide complaints that they can’t relate to the characters and they are poor actors. Never mind that so many Actors of Color attend prestigious schools only to get so far.

The hypocrisy speaks to a need for more representation, and a prevalent lack of empathy. 

The People Want Diversity!

On a positive note: shows that reflect the real world, aka include diversity, continue to get high ratings despite many obstacles: those who don’t want them there, lack of advertising or inconvenient airtime for shows with diverse leads, the ole bait-and-switch method, and hasty cancellations. Not to mention media simply refusing to be inclusive even when they know “diversity sells” (X X). Gee, I wonder why….

Audiences are more drawn to projects that feature a diverse cast, a new study finds, though mirroring the population in the United States remains a problem.

“Less-diverse product underperforms in the marketplace, and yet it still dominates,” said Ana-Christina Ramón, the report’s co-author and assistant director of the Bunche Center. “This makes no financial sense.” 

-Diversity in Hollywood Pays Off in Ratings and Box Office, New Study Finds

Diversity simply reflects the real world accurately. 

There is nothing forced about diversity. People of Color exist in the real world, go out and about, and have lives. Creators including marginalized people only seems strange because media actively scratches them out as much as possible, pulling the marginalized out of focus to zoom in on white characters. That is what’s unrealistic. 

Ultimately, you, the writer, will write what you want. Just ask yourself why you have decided this is what you want to write. Are you okay with that reason? Despite all the progress that is being made, you’ll blend in just fine with all of the other mostly white books and movies out there. And as people become more conscious and bored with the same stories, we can and will choose to ignore whitewashed media.

The good thing is that there’s so much awareness and activism going on with representation; the path has been paved for you and it is not lonely! 

There are resources out there, and WWC continues to be one of them.

More Reading - Diversity:

Braving Diversity: How to Write Yourself (and others) out of your Story  (An early WWC post quite relevant to you, OP)

Diversity exists in the real world 

The Key to Moving Beyond checklisting is not LESS diversity 

Bad Representation vs Tokenism vs Diversity: just existing without justification like in the real world

How to research your racially/ethnically diverse characters 

–Colette

[cheerystarlightwish]

Millionaire Detective Balance: Unlimited Episode 9 Thoughts

Hi guys! Episode 9 got me thinking and though I didn’t want to create theories or analyzations about Fugou Keiji because we are nearing the end already, I simply can’t help myself. To be honest, I wanted to create some earlier and chat with people but my schedule didn’t side with me for the past three months. Nevertheless, here I am better late than never and excited to read other peoples’ reactions, analyzations, and theories as well. Anyways, For those who haven’t watched the recent episodes yet, there are spoilers ahead as I share my thoughts so please be cautioned! Thank you, have a nice day, and stay safe!

(Disclaimer: Any similarities with other posts are purely coincidental. Moreover, if that does happen, I am glad that there are many who think so too because that increases the probability of the statement, thought, analyzation, or theory being somewhat true.)

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Oh.my.goodness.

If I were to summarize my reaction for Ep.9? it would be those. It was nothing short of thrilling and is a perfect stepping point before we get to the climax of the show. Be that as it may, I still can’t wrap my head around the fact that we only have a few episodes left before it ends. Oddly enough, it feels as though we just began due to the pacing of the revelations. Yes, it allowed us to answer some of our previous questions but at the same time, it created new ones as well. 

The first answer we were able to infer is with regards to Shigemaru Kambe. As we have gathered from the previous episodes, he was alive and supposedly went into hiding for the past 19 years after he killed his wife. Throughout that period, he was believed to be dead by both Daisuke and the world. This is with great exception of his mother who had known of this fact for a long time and even kept it secret to the point of trying to dissuade Daisuke from investigating further. Second, Daisuke's parents were both scientists who were researching an "element" called “adolium”. Such a thing was considered to be dangerous by Sayuri and despite her husband's claims that he will not use it, she completely did not trust him. This could only mean that "adolium" is something that people, powerful people, would want to have for their benefit. Unfortunately, this argument of theirs led to Sayuri leaving the house which prompted her husband to kill her because as he said, he has invested too much on the project to let it be for naught.  

Though we were able to answer the question regarding the culprit of Sayuri's murder, it raises the question of what is the true purpose of “adolium”? From the last episode, it was hinted that it had something to do with energy. When it was introduced head on, it was used in a way that caused several nearby electronics to malfunction. The weird aspect of that event is that the ship itself was unharmed, and it only specifically targeted those Shigemaru's group considered to be "enemies". This realization is alarming because it basically means that they have advanced in their research, against Sayuri's efforts to prevent them from doing so, and can now utilize the "element" in a destructive method. Now, what exactly will they use it for? I deduced that it would be applied in creating some kind of set of weapons. The reason I thought so is because of that episode with the president of a country from Central America. The one who visited to resign an agreement for further collaboration with the Kambe family. He was apparently affiliated with them when the latter provided resources for that president’s country’s “development”. A “development” that turned out to have caused or will cause harm to a community, as evidenced by an attempted assasination of their lives by someone who belonged to that group of people. One thing to note though is that there are similarities between the machines seen in episode 5 and 9 in that they both interfered with a specific set of electronics. Therefore, I think it is safe to assume that the machine in the earlier episode contained the aforementioned “element” as well. This theory raises new questions in how that person from that community got their hands on those technology, which seemingly belongs to Shigemaru’s group as backed by Daisuke’s discovery of it in Laboratory 3. It makes one wonder, is the family involved in some kind of civil war and profiting from it? No matter what though, we cannot deny the detail that the Kambe family provides resources, technology, and weapons to their “customers”. 

Moving on, another key aspect of the mystery is why the higher ups seem to be bent on not being involved nor further investigating the case of the Kambe family. I first thought that it is mainly because they are afraid for their own lives but looking back, that doesn’t seem to be all there is to it. With all the information we have been given, I have two, maybe three if I combine them both, thoughts or theories on this. The first one is that the superiors themselves have invested on this project and are benefiting from it as a whole. It is possible that they too may have a stake in it and will be used by them to acquire future advantages. The second one is that the ones on top contain Kambes or their puppets and alliances. I pondered on this because of the Kambe family picture and how Shigemaru has been described to be the eldest child.The latter seems a little far fetched because if that were the case, why would Daisuke not know about them? Unless, it is specifically being hidden from him as to continue the image that their corporation or conglomerate is “good”, a high probability. 

The last facet of this mystery so far is what they could want with Daisuke and the identity of the newly introduced characters as well as the location they are currently headed to. With regards to what they want with the former, I’m not quite sure. Daisuke obviously disapproves of whatever this “adolium” business is because of its contribution to his mother’s death and its evident dangerous nature. Shigemaru himself is aware of this, and yet why did he say that he has been waiting for Daisuke for a long time? Why did he instruct Frantz to keep him alive? With these set of questions, I could only gather three possibilities. The first one is that they could be trying to silence him about the matter at hand. They will probably try to kill him too or at least make it so that he would not want to further delve into the issue. Second, they will try to get him in on the business itself by reasoning with him as they might have supposedly did with the higher ups. The last one is that they will let Daisuke take the fall of whatever downhill event is bound to happen next, another high possibility. It cannot be denied that Daisuke is known by the world to be the head of the Kambe Conglomerate. Therefore, it would not be farfetched to think that they might be saving him for future use in taking the fall for the result of whatever they are planning to do. On the matter of the identity of the new characters, we have yet to know more. The only thing episode 9 told us is that Frantz is a multinational weapons merchant on top of being Thomas Matheson’s bodyguard. From that little introduction, it is no doubt difficult to hypothesize the extent of their role in the mystery. Nevertheless, I do have some ideas I would like to share. Frantz’s characteristic of being a weapons merchant aligns with the certainty we had that the Kambe family produces and sells weapons. It would then make sense for them to be related, but what intrigues me is his listed job as a bodyguard which could be some sort of coverup for his true job.  The question is, is he the boss or is he just a representative of his true boss? Additionally, is Thomas aware of Frantz’s involvement with the Kambes? Is he another leader of a country? or better yet, is he himself part of the masterminds or true bosses? We can only know for sure in the next episode. As far as I can conclude though, it would seem that Frantz is an underling, given his actions, of an even bigger persona and that the Kambes are profiting from discords and strife.

With everything they have given us, there are quite a lot of ways it can go. So in consideration of all these notions and ideas, we can only wait for future revelations, confirmations, and validations. To be completely honest, I cannot wait for this mystery to be further unfolded.

Predictions:

Based on a post (link) I saw earlier, it seems that Episode 10 will contain epic scenes. According to the source, the FKBU team apparently called in the director for Shingeki no Kyojin and Kabaneri Fortress to aid in this specific episode. As a result, they themselves are still in awe of how it turned out when they all worked on it together. Now given this information, it fuels my curiosity to the brim and I simply can’t wait for tomorrow. It seems to me that the scene wherein Daisuke and Haru fight side by side in the opening is about to come true. Imagine that sequence and the possibility of the background music being the OP Navigator, and we will get one hell of an iconic scene.  Moreover, I can’t wait to find out who are the other people involved in this scheme and what is “adolium” going to really be used for, because as far as we know, it has something to do with energy and interference. Additionally, we are already aware that the ship is headed for Panama, a famous country that is known for its transit through the Panama Canal. Is it their destination or is it simply a stop over? I guess we'll just see tomorrow! 

[ask-de-writer]

SEA DRAGON’S GIFT : Part 64 of 83 : World of Sea

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to World of Sea

SEA DRAGON’S GIFT

Part 64 of 83

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

140406 words

copyright 2020

written 2007

All rights reserved.

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express consent of the author.

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Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users   of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may   reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information   remains intact.  They may use the characters or original characters in   my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical   compositions.

All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fiction is actively encouraged.

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New to the story?  Read from the beginning.  PART 1 is here

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Kurin watched her unbar the door of the cabin as she thought about it.  She said, “No, I don’t think so.  He used to be my friend.  I just wish that I understood how things went so wrong.”  She looked a mute appeal at Tanlin and added, “How could he hate me so?  I never did anything to him.”

Tanlin paused before opening the door.  She considered before answering, “Nae t’ ‘ear Silor tell t’e tale.  ‘E believes t’at ye were t’e author o’ all o’ ‘is misfortunes.  According t’ ‘im, ye were a Dragon-wicken an’ ‘eld t’e ‘ole Naral fleet in t’e palm o’ yer ‘and.”

Kurin was taken aback.  “You mean it?” she asked.  “What could put him so far onto dry land?”

Tanlin looked at Kurin with pity in her eyes.  “Oi’ve been tryin’ t’ tell ye.  ‘E’s insane w’ere ye are concerned.  ‘E believes ‘imsel’ a tragic ‘ero, persecuted for ridding t’e fleet o’ a deadly an’ unperceived menace.”

“Lady Tanlin,” came a forlorn voice from within the cabin, “I can hear you out there.  Who is with you?  Has the fleet come to their senses yet?”

Tanlin opened the cabin door, leaned in, and said, “Silor, someane ‘as come t’ speak wit’ ye.  She’ll be representin’ t’e Grandalor before a fleet tribunal.  Will ye tell ‘er t’e exact trut’ o’ yer involvement in t’e poisoning?  ‘T may ‘elp our case.”

Silor’s voice answered, calm and assured, “Of course I will talk to her but it is a waste of time.  No case will be needed.  The Witch is dead and in a short time her curses will be gone.  When people are themselves again, they will know themselves freed.”

Kurin spoke from out in the hall where Silor couldn’t see her.  “Silor, you were a good student at learning to navigate by wave and current. Do you know where we are?”

He replied with confidence, “We are in the Dragon Sea.  It was clever of Captain Barad to bring us here.  No fleet owns these waters.  We will be safe here.”

“What of the Great Sea Dragons?  If Mecat taught the witch, perhaps they will not like your having killed her,” Kurin said.

“Dragons live too long to care much about any particular human.  They won’t care one way or the other,” Silor replied airily.

“I’m afraid that you’re wrong about that, Silor,” said Kurin, stepping into his view.

“You’re dead,” he said flatly.  “Nobody can survive Ord poisoning.  Your dying is why the Grandalor had to flee in the first place.”

“No,” Kurin contradicted, “I lived.  The sailor that you duped into poisoning me is the one who died.”

Silor looked at her in dread and leaped at the conclusion that fit his delusion.  “You turned the Ord against the man who poisoned you!” he accused.

“I didn’t have to,” Kurin said quietly.  “The Corliss fleet knows how to heal Ord poisoning.  Sula carried me to her ship and Doctor Worran cured me.  The sailor that you gave the poisoned awl to wasn’t so lucky.  He got the poison through his shirt from carrying the awl in his pocket.  It got to his lungs first.  The doctor tried but she couldn’t save him.”

A wild glint entered Silor’s eyes and he shouted, “Don’t lie!  It was you!  You and that evil Dragon magic!  You killed him just like you did your father!”

Kurin recoiled as if she had been struck.  The very idea that she would have harmed her father was past simply shocking.  It was truly sickening and called to mind her mother’s accusations as she sank into madness.

Silor bunched his legs under him as he paused for breath.  “What does it take to kill you?” he screamed, lunging at Kurin, arms outstretched, hands clawed.

“More’n ye’ve got, Lad!” said Tanlin as she pounced almost into his path and grabbed his arm as he passed, spinning him headfirst into the wall.  Kimson landed on top of him and Tanlin calmly pulled her knife from concealment.  She laid its blade against Silor’s throat and added, “Mister Kimson’s goin’ t’ get off o’ ye, an’ ye’re goin’ t’ get onto yer bunk very slowly.  I’ ye try t’ ‘arm Kurin again, ye die.  Clear?”

Tears of rage and frustration in his eyes, Silor mutely nodded.  Carefully, Kimson released Silor, who slowly got to his feet and sat on his bunk.

Dully, he asked, “I heard whales, who else has she killed?”

As Kurin was about to protest, Tanlin waived her to silence and answered, “Nane.  We lost ane killed outright an’ ane mortal injured.  Yer Longin did t’ose murders an’ some ot’er injuries as well.

“Just gettin’ Kurin ‘ere ‘ad a ‘eavy price.  Macoul t’e steersman died o’ a cut t’roat an’ Lenai Halin died later o’ an abdominal wound.”

That brought a reaction of disgust from Silor.  “So, the witch got to you too?  She made you sacrifice good people just to finish her revenge on me?”

At that, Kurin would not be silent.  “Revenge?  What for?  No witchcraft is needed.  I never lifted a finger against you.  You bring yourself down!”  Bitterly, she added, “If I was a witch, I’d have just changed you so that you wouldn’t care.”

“You knew that I was here on the Grandalor!  How?”

“You were careless.  You were seen at the Gathering,” Kurin retorted angrily.  “Even the sailor that you killed told us it was you before he died.  You are under the same execute on sight order that you got put onto Barad and all the officers of this ship with your murder plot.”

That brought Silor up short.  “Barad?  He tried to stop us.  Why would the Council order him executed?”

Tanlin burst in, icily angry, “M’ too, as an officer o’ t’e Grandalor.  We’re all t’ be executed on sight because o’ ye. Our ‘ope lies in Kurin’s ‘ands an’ t’e jaws o’ t’e Dragons.  T’e Dragons ‘ave let us ‘arbor ‘ere in neutral woters but we cannae go t’rough t’em t’ escape t’e justice o’ a fleet t’at seems t’ ‘ave nane.”

Silor began to whimper and curl up.  “I tried to save you all.  I never wanted to hurt anybody…”  He uncurled an accusing arm, pointing at Kurin.  “If she is your hope, you are as doomed as I am. . .”  He collapsed, eyes rolled back in his head, still breathing but showing no other sign of life.

Shaking and slapping elicited no response.  Silor was gone where none could follow.

Sadly Tanlin said to a thoroughly shocked Kurin, “Oi warned ye.  ‘E wa’ so far ont’ dry land t’at not’ing could bring ‘im bock t’ safe woter.”  She looked grimly down at Silor’s still form and reached a decision.

“Oi’m proof t’at Doctor Corin can care for a person in a coma.  T’he doctor’ll care for ‘im until ‘e recovers or simply dies.” She turned to Kimson.  “Guard ‘im until men come t’ take ‘im t’ sickbay.  See t’at ‘e’s restrained after ‘e’s taken t’ere.”  

She led Kurin back to the Captain’s cabin.  Barad was out and they had the place to themselves.  Tanlin ordered food and drink for Kurin and then said, “T’at wa’ awful.  Oi wad never ‘ave guessed t’at ‘e wad just retreat like t’at.  Wat now?”

Kurin had no answer.  She simply sat and shook, crying inside but not allowing the tears to reach the surface.

Sympathetically, Tanlin sat by her and held her hand.

With a bit of scratching at the window, Thunderhead entered the cabin with a skelt in his beak.  Tanlin looked up at the big Sea Hawk and smiled.

“Ye’re right, T’under’ead.  She does need lookin’ after just now. T’anks for t’e ‘elp.”  She took the small fish and held it out to Kurin.  “‘Ere, youngster.  Take a bite so ‘e’ll know t’at ‘e’s ‘elped.  Friends ‘oo’re ‘urt need food t’ get well.  Tis all t’at ’e knows ‘ow t’ do for ye.”

“It’s raw,” Kurin said, a bit of smile beginning to show around the edges of her shock.

“T’at’s ‘ow tis best for young birds,” said Tanlin tolerantly.  “Go on, ‘e’s really tryin’ t’ ‘elp.”

Kurin took a small bite of the fish and realized that the skelt was good, even raw.  She set to nibbling around the coarse bones until most of the meat was gone, Thunderhead watching critically.  Tanlin absently scratched him under the right wing.

By the time that she was done with the fish, Kurin had a grip on herself.  The distraction provided by the somewhat comic antics of the bird and having to eat as well, helped.

There was a knock at the cabin door and Benj, the cabin-boy entered with a tray.  It had sliced, hard-boiled paddle duck eggs, red-weed bread and dried fillets of skelt for Kurin to eat.  Beside the water bottle were sweet and tart flavors.

By the time that she was done eating the simple fare, Kurin had regained her composure.  She gave Tanlin a measuring look.

“I have all the information that I am likely to get,” Kurin announced, “and I have begun to outline a multi-issue defense.  You said that you could summon the fleet Council and the Longin.  I would like to see how you do that from here.”

TO BE CONTINUED

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