#also that one reddit dude can finally rest easy

[dopehologramfury]

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[raposarealm]

AIMI UNCAP AIMI UNCAP AIMI UNCAPPPPPPPPPPPP!

WE’VE WON, FOLKS!!!

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 315: I Didn’t Expect This to Blow Up

Previously on BnHA: Horikoshi was all “guess which plot that you thought was dead is actually not dead and is making a comeback!” and we were all “EVIL HPSC??” and he was all “girl you know it,” and that’s the story of how we got a sexy Lady Nagant flashback with lots of guns and murder. Flashback!Lady was all “gotta murder peeps to preserve the people’s trust,” but then a little while later she was like “actually wait that makes no sense,” and so she shot her evil boss and they sent her to jail. Back in the present, Deku was all “okay fair, the hero system might in fact be a little fucked up, but hear me out... have you considered not helping AFO take over the world so he can murder like a bazillion more innocent people??” The chapter ended with the not-all-there Overhaul finally revealing himself to Deku, and I honestly have no idea where this is gonna go.

Today on BnHA: In what is unfortunately the single worst plan ever concocted by anyone in BnHA, Nagant is all “I’m going to try and get this Deku kid to panic and freeze up by putting someone in mortal danger.” Deku is all, “[doesn’t panic and freeze up at the sight of someone in mortal danger].” Nagant is all “omg no way.” Deku, who is now all of a sudden being so OP that even I have to acknowledge that it’s OP lol, is all “[smashes Nagant’s gun arm to bits]”, which sucks but is also really cool, and which also apparently makes Nagant decide that she actually likes this kid after all. Deku is all “NAGANT I REALLY LIKE YOU AND THINK YOU’RE GREAT SO PLEASE JOIN UP WITH ME AND STOP BEING EVIL.” Nagant is all “aw shucks (✿ •͈ᴗ•͈) well okay then” and everyone is all “( ･◡･) ✰ ( ˆᴗˆ ) ( ᵘ ᵕ ᵘ ⁎)” and then Nagant FUCKING EXPLODES LIKE AN EGG IN THE MICROWAVE AND FALLS TO HER DEATH!!!! except not really because Hawks saves her??? In conclusion, (a) THE FUCK, and (b) AFO TURN ON YOUR LOCATION I JUST WANT TO TALK.

so I have to tell you guys something, which is that barely ten minutes after I made that “please don’t send me spoilers” post the other day, someone replied to the comments in a stunning fit of “tell me that you’re twelve without actually telling me you’re twelve” energy and posted what seemed to be the copy-pasted spoiler summary from reddit or twitter or whatever lol. so here is my good news/bad news rundown of all that

good news: I have very well-conditioned ABORT!! reflexes and have trained myself to immediately look away from the screen (usually in dramatic fashion) as soon as I realize that whatever I’m reading is a spoiler

bad news: unfortunately as I was subsequently deleting said comments, I accidentally read the very last one

good news??: said spoiler was so unbelievably, absurdly over-the-top that I’m almost positive this person was just trolling. like, there’s just no way lmao

bad news: but in the unlikely event that it is true I will absolutely lose my shit I swear to god

(ETA: “NAGANT DIES.” that was the spoiler I read lol. like, literally all I read from the person’s comments was “My Hero Academia Chapter 315 Title: “Beautiful Words.” Chapter starts with...” and then I noped out of there, and then of all the comments to read as I was deleting, it had to be that one lol. I seriously was just like “SURE, JAN.” all “just how gullible do you think I am” sob. but I was wrong. a troll, but an honest troll they remain.

but anyways like I’m pretty sure Nagant isn’t even actually dead lol, so in the end this whole little adventure doesn’t even have a point to it, but for me it was a journey!)

anyway, so there are apparently two versions of the chapter today?? no idea what the difference is, but I’m going to go with the Bean version, because it’s the one at the top and I don’t feel like making decisions today

huh, so Overhaul is actually more coherent than Horikoshi was letting on

look at him having a whole back and forth conversation with her. side note, how is he still this jacked when he’s been sitting in a cell doing absolutely nothing for the past six months

anyway so he says he’ll go with her on one condition. I wonder what that condition could possibly be. do you think it could be the thing he literally hasn’t shut up about ever since he reappeared lol

yep! and damn -- maybe this guy will surprise me after all

still would be nice if you also felt a bit sorry for the little girl you tortured and traumatized, but this is something at least. maybe Deku will yell at him for that other stuff lol

(ETA: also can’t help but wonder if he wants to make amends because he put him in a coma, or because his plan was a failure and ended up destroying the family. just hoping you’ve finally had that “hurting other people is bad” epiphany dude.)

anyways so now Nagant’s arm is transforming again, and this particular transformation happens to be the only truly unsexy thing that Nagant has done thus far so I’m just gonna skip right on ahead lol

aaaaand we’re back to the delirious ranting

buddy. just. read the fucking room, guy

wow she really is aiming at Overhaul, then. those theories were spot-on

damn she’s really out here all “it really fucks with kids’ heads when you kill people right in front of them and make them blame themselves” like yo

I’m picturing her saying all this in a very loud stage-whispery tone while making very significant eye contact with Deku lol

uh oh but wait

um. okay. who’s gonna tell her. Nagant I might have some bad news for you about the kid you’re trying to capture here. specifically about the way he tends to do the opposite of what you’re thinking that he’s about to do

holy shit

so it’s basically just “tap x repeatedly to charge up your attack” lol

and okay, so that’s cool and all, but is anyone else wincing at the thought of what that must be like on his knees. oh to be young

anyway, but so to the surprise of basically no one, Deku did not, in fact, freeze. I am very sorry, Nagant. he’s just like this

LMAO

someone wanna tell me how getting yoloed in the fucking ribs by this fucking slingshot kid moving at literal sniper bullet speed is in any way even remotely better than getting hit by the bullet itself lol

(ETA: this is 10x funnier now that we know the bullet wasn’t even gonna hit him lmao.)

anyway so now Nagant is having an extended “!?!?!?” reaction about how Deku just moved with no hesitation, and I’m starting to get an inkling of fear that the rest of this fight isn’t going to go very well for her and maybe that’s what all the “hoo boy” is about

oh my god Deku are you about to Gomu Gomu no Rocket yourself at her you insane little man

now Three is popping up again and he’s all “I see you’ve learned your lesson and are now only using three quirks at once instead of five” like with all this effusive praise about how great and badass Deku is and sob, okay, yeah. this chapter is basically one of those machines that shoots tennis balls at people, except instead of tennis balls it shoots hot piping discourse

OH MY GOD

YOOOOOOOOOO but also, NOOOOOOOOOOO

lol oh my god it’s literally two opposing reactions at once wtf. do I love this or hate this. like just for once can Horikoshi actually let a badass lady character win their fucking fight without getting their arm ripped off, BUT ALSO fucking look at that absurdly cool “SMASH” onomatopoeia though. it looks like it’s about to float right off the page holy shit that’s some seriously good art

anyway so is this really the end?? do I need to break out my ಠ_ಠ faces

lmao okay yeah I can definitely see how this would piss a lot of people off

he basically one-shotted her and she’s all “damn this kid is so amazing that I’m about to do a complete 180 turn on all of my previous angst” lmao. Horikoshi is really shounening it up today

on the plus side though, maybe this means there’s still a chance for her to join up with him after all? unless that spoiler was true lmao, then all hell is gonna break loose

YESSSSSSS

OH MY GOD AND HE SAYS THE BULLET WOULDN’T HAVE DONE MORE THAN GRAZE OVERHAUL ANYWAY, wow, I’m actually more relieved by that than I would have expected. I mean I would have forgiven her either way, but it means that there was still more hero in her than she was letting on

YES!!! FUCKING YES, THANK YOU

lol but I mean, it’s also like, “oh so today they get to have brain cells”, thank you so much lol. sometimes it’s really hard to tell which times we’re supposed to question these character decisions that seem dumb, and which times we’re just supposed to full on embrace them and switch off our critical thinking

but okay, so in this case it really was Nagant going easy on him on purpose, and not just her fucking up for no good reason even though she used to do this for a living and was the best in the game. and I know in this case it’s probably just Horikoshi giving us some consolation headpats to soften the blow of her losing so abruptly, but you know what, shit. I’ll take it

also you guys the light is coming back into Deku’s eyes again for just a moment here and I’m having feels about it?? the way it still comes back when he’s reaching out to save someone, and following his own hero path instead of the much darker and lonelier Christopher Nolan path that’s been laid out for him instead that he never wanted?? it’s both reassuring and also very sad

YESSSSSSSSSSS

DO IT LADY OMG PLEASE?? PLEASE COME BE HIS NEW IRRESPONSIBLE ADULT SUPERVISION YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO

AHHHHHHH SHE’S GONNA DO IT AHHHH

p.s. I am now absolutely scared shitless that that spoiler was actually true sob. swear to god, I will throw this manga into a fucking volcano. but we’re almost at the end of the chapter and this seems just WAY TOO GOOD to be true fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck f

UCK

NOPE NAH SEND IT BACK, NOPE, NUH UH, DIDN’T ORDER THIS. “GULLIBLE” OKAY FUCK YOU?? “COUNTERMEASURES” NOPE, DON’T NEED ‘EM, WE’RE ALL FINE HERE. WE’RE ACTUALLY GOOD SO YOU CAN JUST GO, OKAY. PLEASE

fuck, lol, I don’t wanna do it. I don’t wanna scroll down what have I ever done to deserve this oh my god

WHAT THE HONEY-ROASTED FUCK

WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT FUCKING VOLCANO IN ICELAND THAT I KEEP SEEING ALL THESE PICTURES OF. WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT SHIT. LET’S GO

ARE YOU SERIOUS RIGHT NOW

can someone please give AFO a really good, sharpish kick in the balls. just really let him have it. I’m so tired, what the fuck

-- ARE YOU KIDDING ME LOL WHAT

bro. I was literally going through my Excel folders to find the spreadsheet about female characters in BnHA that I made back when Midnight died. was gearing myself up for a wholeass rant. and honestly I might just let all of that continue simmering on low to keep it warm just in case lol, because to tell you the truth I have absolutely no idea what’s happening right now

my girl straight up does not have a face. she used to have a face. people usually need those, idk. like, even if she’s alive, her gorgeous eyebrows are definitely not making it out of this and I’m gonna throw a funeral just for them

how the fuck did AFO just blow her up?? how did he know what was going on?? and if he had a quirk that could explode people at will, why is this the first we’re hearing of it?? you’d think that might have come in handy at Kamino or Jakku, like what

(ETA: present!me, who’s had more than three hours of sleep and can now actually remember facts about the series, would like to remind past!me that AFO gave Nagant a quirk, and so this is probably just more Vestige shenanigans now on his part. that’s also probably why Air Walk suddenly stopped working out of nowhere. still doesn’t explain why he doesn’t go around blowing people up more often though but maybe he thinks it’s gauche.)

Hawks just straight up out of nowhere. just Mirioed his way straight into the chapter just in time to be too late sob. here I was looking forward to seeing your face when Deku showed up with his new best friend. can’t believe Horikoshi deprived us of that moment

on the plus side, WELCOME BACK, HAWKS’S FEATHERS. I have no doubt that in this chapter of Deku being an almighty threequirk-mastering god, and Nagant losing anticlimactically only to be immediately blown up because girl characters in BnHA can only be cool for one fight and one fight only, there are still some people who are focusing solely on the “how dare Hawks get his wings back when he is a MURDERER this is an outrage what about CONSEQUENCES” discourse, and to hell with all the other discourses lmao

anyway, so yeah. wow. and now it’s just occurring to me that maybe the real reason why Overhaul is there is so he can get a head start on that amend-making by actually doing a good thing for once in his life, and using his quirk to heal Nagant. assuming he can still do that

and so now Horikoshi has got me out here actually rooting for Overhaul. you know what, on that note I think I’m just gonna go ahead and call it a day sob

[chimtaera]

imagine model namjoon.

ok let’s not kid ourselves

boy’s already a model

he’s got the body.

got the looks.

what can i say, he’s no super model (too clumsy), but he get’s around with the more diverse castings yanno

probably got started on instagram,

with his #kimdaily outfits

which are sometimes just chill, pretty, sporty, casual, cool

and other times completely wacky and just ??? how did you even think to wear those ??? at the same time?? together ???

he always looks good tho

but some looks will give you whiplash. ur warned.

but that’s part of his appeal tbh

hhhh probably gains a lot of popularity when one of those more ‘out there’ outfits circulates on twitter or reddit and people are like “hOW does he make that work??? why does it look good??? is he just that hot??”

the answer is yes.

from there he builds a solid following.

for his great looks, great fashion sense, and his 4am instagram stories that are just a black pic with like a three paragraph text about how rain might feel if it had feelings.

also, solid music recommendations omg 

you probably make ur own spotify playlist with just his recommendations.

ok ok so you best bELIEVE when this boy finally gets cast for a show he’s gonna fall on his ass and go viral

claim to fame baby

probably becomes a meme and rolls with it tbh

like he’ll share the memes in his story, so as not to ruin the ・ﾟ:*aesthetic*:・ﾟand react to them and shit

but then also get on live and talk at length about how faceplanting on the catwalk impacts your self-esteem, how he’s habit he could benefit positively from such an embarrassing moment, and how there’s a lesson for everyone here, and that he hopes all our embarrassing moments may in some way benefit us one day.

he’s such a sweetheart im-

so you might be a stylist?

a hair stylist?

makeup artist?

fellow model?

whatever you’re comfortable with.

you definitely see him on instagram first tho

you came for the memes but are super impressed with his profile and end up staying for the music.

...... and him.

he’s hot, come on.

also 90% of networking is done on instagram these days let us be real.

okay so oNE DAY, or like late evening, who cares

he post a music recommendation and you’re like !!!!!!!!

it’s that low key indie band with like only one EP out that you found on some obscure spotify playlist and you’ve been jamming to since october

and apparently namjoon has too because they’ve released a new single and you didn’t even know ????

and you’re so excited your fingers slip and oopsie you’ve sent a short but rambling message explaining exactly that into his DM’s

instant regret.

then the anxiety bubbles up in you.

and then you calm yourself and convince yourself that he gets a LOT of messages he probably won’t even see yours, so it’s fine it’s fine it’s-

next morning you have a reply

a new follow

and a mcfUCKING LIKE ON A PICTURE OF YOU FROM TWO WEEKS AGO

yikes, you didn’t even have time to give your feed a spring cleaning

you just like his short “ikr!!!!”, too mortified to reply.

alas, the regrets!

but also

the butterflies.

then you see him at an event one time.

it’s fashion week, you’re hecking busy and about to leave because it’s like midnight and you’ve got places to be tomorrow

but it’s always so strange to see people from insta irl like ??? all those dimensions??? you really be lookign like that ??? damn.

once you’ve stared long enough to be certain that’s actually what he looks like (so handome!!! so tall!!!! wtf!!!! who allowed this??) you turn to leave just as he glances up and cetches your eye for like the tiniest fraction of a second

and you hightail it outta there and hope to heaven he doesn’t know you were staring.

but he likes your pic from the party the next morning and you almost choke on your coffee and the lump in your throat stays there all day

and you’re like, am i?? catching feelings ??? for the catwalk faceplant guy??? you’ve never even talked to the man smh

he’s fucking hot tho.

so, fashion week ends and with it comes another party

you can finally relax, celebrate, wind down from the long week.

yA THOUGHT lmao

you’re talking to some designer about their next project and they’re going on about this instagram dude who’s already on board when they start waving someone over like “hey hey, there he is, y/n have you met kim namjoon yet?”

you turn around you’re like !!!!! fuck. he’s so much taller up close.

“hey, no, yeah, no, but i’ve seen you on, uh, on instagram. i think.” smooth, y/n.

after introductions, the designer gets pulled along into some other conversation and you and namjoon are kinda awkward for a minute.

you just sip your drink like ‘fuck fuck fuckfuck fuck aaaaaaa’

but then he asks you easy questions about what you do and what you’ve been working on this week and it’s the same thing you’ve been talking about with everyone you’ve met this week so it goes pretty smoothly

he makes it easy for you, like he’s very attentive, nods along enthusiastically asking follow-up questions and seems genuinely interested in your work it’s so nice! he’s so nice!

and you ask him the same things you’ve asked everyone else this week like you haven’t seen everything on his instagram already.

actually you’ve missed a few things since you’ve been so busy and your interest is genuine, before you know it the two of you are at a table and getting along like a house on fire, showing each other pics from the week.

he asks you send him a pic from one of the shows he didn’t get to see and when he do he’s sees your old messages and is like ?? oh !!

i mean, he totally knew it was you, but he had forgotten the part about that obscure indie band and the new single, so he shows you!

you’ve been following them even closer since then so you know they’re playing a gig in like two weeks and you tell him.

turns out he’s missed this info because of fashion week and he’s super excited!! you guys have to go together!!!¨

“i mean, we don’t have to- it’s just, i don’t know anyone else who listens to them, i could probably go alone, but, you know, it would be cool-”

and of course you’ll go with him, so you two exchange numbers and end up texting the next two weeks.

at first you’re just making tentative plans to meet and go to to the gig, but then there’s a gallery opening the same day, and you know this realy good thrift shop nearby that he should check out, and you guys should get dinner before because namjoon knows this really cool place and-

and it’s a date.

namjoon has every intention to kiss you that night after the gig, but he wants to ask you first and he’s not sure exactly how so he’s just like “um ??? can i ??? uhhh ?? do you ??? uh”

and ur like, “hey, namjoon, i really want u to kiss me, please?”

the rest is history.

you two are too cute, with your instagram aesthetic and lowkey couple outfits, and highkey couple pics, i’d follow.

you two would be gOALS, and it does wonders for both your careers tbh

omg imagine all the cool collaborations you two could do.

and eventually namjoon would go viral again when the paparazzi captures him spilling his coffee and your cute reaction.

but the best thing about dating model namjoon is he makes you your very own playlist.

and you get your very own story highlight with all the aesthetic pics he snaps of you just like buying milk and stealing his fries, and exploring the city on sundays afternoons, going vintage shopping and reading in the park, titled: “bae.” with every colour heart.

hyping each other in the comments always.

and the thirst omg

anyway, nsfw under the cut.

so you take it kinda slow at first because turns out namjoon has a huge crush on you and he lowkey can’t keep his hands off you but also wants to “date you properly”, whatever that means.

props to you if you get impatient with him and tease him a little, a thirst trap here, a netflix and chill there, sending a sexy song his way, or even better post it on your story for him to see.

if it doesn’t provoke him to action it’ll at least get him hard flustered, which is cute.

in the end joon is a soft boy and you can sit up all night talking, so you end up talking about sex long before having it.

and that just makes it all the more special tbh

and when it does happen, it’s like everything else the two of you do, a little awkward at first, a little clumsy, fumbly, but a lot of fun, and it’s namjoon, and you love namjoon. so, so much.

like it doesn’t matter if he accidentally bumps your nose, because he’ll apologise and the two of you will just giggle and continue. 

and he might pull your hair on accident, but that way you can admit to him that it’s.. kinda hot.

and when your teeth collide when you kiss it’s only because any amount of distance between you quickly becomes unbearable, and you both need each other so, so much.

imagine slow, lazy sunday morning snuggle fuck with namjoon.

and then later when you’re on a blanket in the park reading both your books he’ll get distracted, thinking about it, lean in close and tell you something ridiculous like he wishes you would wake him up by sitting on his face.

and imagine backstage heavy petting after a show, leaving the afterparty early, because you’re both buzzing with unrelieved tension and namjoon is very hard in his pants, pressing himself against you as you try to have a polite conversation with some influencer.

love, love, loooooves, watching you ride.

and he’ll go down on you for hours if you let him, honestly.

anytime, anywhere tbh

how did you get so lucky?

[just-a-url-doing-url-things]

ALTERNATE UNIVERSE THEORY

FLCL Alternative has just ended, and I’m pretty sure everyone is in a state of confusion as to what EXACTLY happened near the end of FLCL, so here’s my little theory that many people are calling the “Alternate universe theory”

I made a similar post on the reddit discussions, so I will also post the same thing here with a few modifications

So Alternative takes place in a different universe than Classic and Progressive, this might be now obvious. In the final moments of Kana's "i love you" speech, tsukata kanda (aka the dude in the suit 24/7) mentions that "space and time will collapse" while being shown this giant wormhole (this is more or less important cuz this random fact was kinda put for "no apparent reason other than sounding sciencey" so this was a small hint to what’s happening). When you see everyone being sort of dissipated into nothingness, we see haruko NOT doing that, instead she gets thrown into the sky and we get shown the famous "haruko and vespa + clips from FLCL season 1" scene. Everyone else who was transported to god knows where (some say mars, some say another universe) was given that specific animation, but haruko. So we can assume she’s in a different area than kana and the rest. After the FLCL season 1 clip scene Haruko then gets thrown into what people are speculating would be Naota's universe. This would essentially make Alternative the prequel to FLCLassic. This would explain Haruko in Alternative being more mature, she (and I quote from ep 6) "doesn't want a bad ending" meaning she actually cares about Earth unlike how (in season 1 ep 6) she states that she doesn't care about earth only atomsk, and why she doesn't have her atomsk tracking chain bracelet in alternative.

Another possible speculation is that Kana transported her and everyone else into a different dimension while leaving haruko to be transported back in time. Which would support how Medical Machina in all three seasons are still doing the same thing: flatten planets. yet we don’t see any Irons in the end credits to FLCL Alternative ep 6, where Kana and her friends are. Also it explains why NO is still a thing where Haruko is around. The problem with this possible outcome is the flattened earth in Alternative’s ending credits and that we would be essentially be making Haruko time travel so FLCL 1 and 2′s setting makes sense because it’s on Earth (they mentioned America in FLCLassic so I’m assuming they are on Earth). And if Haruko time traveled, why was everyone in alternative so surprised about the irons if they’ve already known about them in Classic and Progressive which would be before Alternative. Our main theory has it where Kana and them just transported to Mars leaving Earth to flatten and Haruko is sent into Naota’s universe where Earth hasn’t been flattened. We can simply assume that MM and NO was either transported with Haruko or that Naota’s universe is very VERY similar to Kana’s so Medical Mechanica and NO still exists(I mean...Naota’s universe has way more wacky characters than Kana’s somewhat realistic universe, if that’s to add to anything).

So let's now. tie all 3 seasons into what would be a coherent story line of FLCL. Haruko originally came from Kana's universe where she was part of the Brotherhood, Galactic Police. She worked as a space investigator and her job was probably to get rid of the irons that were about to flatten earth. At the same time she's also searching for the N.O. She knows it exists, but from what we and what haruko knows of as of alternative, the only things that comes out of people's heads are small robots, small weapons, and the occasional guitar and the fact that NO strengthens with emotional intensity. As Alternative ep 5 comes to a close, we and haruko experience the strong power of NO and how it can make gigantic MM robots disappear in mere seconds. This was probably what began haruko's spiraling obsession with strong NO and not just anyone who has it. Then ending ep 6, Haruko is thrown into what would be now Naota's universe. There is a bit of a gap between ep 6 of alternative and ep 1 of classic. Within this gap, Haruko has fallen in love with Atomsk and his massive NO capabilities, she makes her vespa fly, she gains her rickenbacker, and she drops her tied up hair style. Then ep 1 of flcl begins. I am pretty sure Haruko targeted Naota because either 1)her atomsk bracelet helped her, 2) naota greatly resembles kana, or 3)she just guessed. Regardless, Haruko now meets Naota and Haruko becomes Naota's family maid. By the end of ep 1 of Classic it's been subtly implied that Canti was seen as an enemy in Haruko's eyes because he looked like the MM robot she fought in ep 6 of Alternative. Haruko also now has found the general location of Atomsk. As the episodes go on, we fight more robots and we reach the end of ep 6 where Naota takes atomsk's power for a short time and then sends the bird into space once again. Before Haruko leaves she gives Naota her Rickenbacker. Then we timeskip over to Progressive, but before ep 1 begins let's talk about what happens in between the two seasons. Haruko gains Atomsk's power temporarily and she splits into Haruko and Jinyu, the original cast got older seen in cameos, and in the end credits scene we see...all of the main cast of FLCL, but in the peculiar order...Alternative shows up first, then Classic, then Progressive. The order might be "random", but the order of which the cast appears matches up with the Alternate dimension theory we have going. Anyways, continuing onto Progressive. Haruko shows back up again after a decades of being out in space and she's back because she wants to find atomsk again while also terrorizing the lives of Hidomi and Ide to start up that strong NO that she needs to get to atomsk. The story is relatively easy to follow after just watching the episodes to Progressive so there isn't much to say other than Hidomi maturing episode after episode, Haruko and Jinyu's bickering about what they want regarding Atomsk, and how Atomsk escapes again after hugging Haruko in ep 6. Then Haruko leaves the planet once more.

There are many little moments that can tie each season to one another like how kana looked like atomsk in human form (based off of Amarao's depiction of him). The many irons in Progessive matching the many iron locations in Alternative. The bridge where Canti was born on still exists in Progressive. And many more little clues and hints. 

Overall, I personally loved each season for different reasons and even if Progressive and Alternative can't match up to what we like about FLClassic, I think it's safe to assume that the 2 seasons did a pretty alright job giving us a story about adolescence, because that's what FLCL is all about.

Scores:

FLCL- FLCL/10, furi kuri~

Progressive- 9/10, the massive amounts of Sakuga in some episodes raised this score by 3 (I’m a bitch for sweet SWEET animations shut up). I wished Progressive had more wackier scenes and more info condensed within the episodes instead of spending 20 seconds of shots of Hidomi walking or looking at something, but this sequel has a LOT of FLCL vibes to it. I like this sequel (good thing to note that I DID rewatch this season the same amount of times I watched FLCLassic’s season)

Alternative- 8/10, loved the character arcs and how it loops back to FLCL, still wished we could’ve had a more clues to figure out what EXACTLY happened near the end (I think showing Mabase (Naota’s town) in the distance rather than the landscape with a small city in the distance woud’ve solidified this theory a whole lot). The show was consistent which was good, but I hated how safe they played it this season with each episode’s animations (i’m just glad there’s plenty of sakuga scenes at all). Also it’s replay value is somewhat low since everything is easy to remember within the story. I wouldn’t enjoy Alternative if I would rewatch it again and again. still loved it tho.

[sending-the-message]

I've been wandering through Aokigahara Forest, where bodies hang all year long by Ra1n_Walker

Hi guys. This is going to be long, because I'll just be as thorough as possible. I don't think leaving out details will contribute to the story, so bear with me. Or don't… I was wondering how many of you are aware of the existence of this forest. The Sea of Trees, as they like to call it, or, on a less brighter note; Suicide Forest.

I have a mildly unhealthy obsession for the obscure and unsolved mysteries, which often leads me to venture to lost and forgotten places. Abandoned asylums, hotels, evil looking buildings. I love to scour the internet for strange occurences and events that seem to involve anything going from ghosts to murderers or aliens. People will believe anything to feel excitement.

I wouldn't call myself a believer. In fact, I think it's funny how people can get all serious and worked up about some weird theory that sounds creepy, but has not the slightest proof or link to a plausible explanation. What I do believe in is that people have a tendency to do some really fucked up things. Guess everyone knows to what extent, but the real atrocities are preferably kept a bit further in our daily lives and rather not thought of.

It litterally turns me on. I can get goosebumps hearing about gruesome scenes, imagining someone's pain or finding truly disturbing things. The 'this-song-makes-me-wanna-cry' type of goosebumps. I can't ever get enough. So I heard of this forest and read about it on the web. Reddit also has some accounts on this and there's even a few movies based on its reputation and stories (which I haven't seen yet as I don't want to ruin the experience) so it really isn't hard getting a bit educated about it. I had to fricking go there.

So that was that, and I was off to Japan only about a month later. I always thought Mount Fuji might be worth seeing and I definitely had a strong passion for the Japanese culture. And their anime and manga, obviously. Being on a plane towards my long awaited destination, I had enough time to go through the available information and read up on the forest. I probably read it all already, being the special person that I am, but it amused me. 

It definitely was a cool mystery anyway. The 'facts' were often disturbing and the assumptions made around the place were even more so. There's a few of those that really stuck with me that I think are thought provoking or at the very least interesting. I read about a lot of aspects. Locals would believe they could pin point the exact type of visitor to the woods.

There were the ones trying to snap pictures of Mount Fuji and its impressive base and flora around it. Some would go in there and hope to find something dark or scary. Thrillseekers if you will. And then there's the obvious type, the type that make the forest famous; the suicidals that don't plan on coming back out. What the fuck

The thing that struck me when I first heard about it is that it would have to be littered with corpses, seeing as over 75 people were found every year. Most of them hanged. They even reached over a hundred victims a few years back and decided to stop reveiling numbers to avoid making it more popular, thus resulting in more suicides. So yeah, there's a fricking cleanup crew. Every year locals search the forest for bodies or what's left of them.

According to what I'd read, they would drag decomposed bodies or parts of them, skeletons and personal belongings scattered around the sea of trees back to some kind of room where they'd store them. There's accounts of people staying in a room with the bodies, because according to local folklore, it would mean bad luck to leave those  alone.

I landed after a long flight and needed a good night's rest. I always admired people who were able to sleep on a plane, I was too nervous to achieve that. I'd never been too keen on flying and this time was no different. It felt good to get out of that bird. I called a cab and made my way to my hotel, about an hour drive from Shizuoka airport. I would've loved to chat with the driver and learn more than I already knew, but guess what. The dude didn't speak one word of English. 

"Yessir."

Good talk...

I dozed off in the car, face against the window and coat over my head to block out the light of the evening that still shone bright. When I woke up, the cab had stopped and I was in... Shimizu? My Japanese was about as good as the cab driver's English, so I didn't bother even trying to ask. I got out, stepped inside the hotel and was pointed to my room. I stayed there the whole evening to fall asleep quickly. Next day; alarm at 6am, breakfast with some documents and brochures to re-check my way to Aokigahara and what to look out for.

After speaking with the hotel clerk, whose English was good enough to be able to make out key words. It only took me half an hour before being on a train towards Mount Fuji. Shizuoka airport was about 80 miles from Aokigahara  and I was about half way going from where I was right then. An hour drive before getting there and I had to walk quite a bit before arriving at the area I was trying to get to, after even taking an extra bus.

And that's when I finally got to the place I had been looking forward to for the last weeks. I had Mount Fuji looking over me from the distance, like a titan contemplating the world beneath, and the forest of Aokigahara in front of me. The Sea of Trees. Suicide Forest... I was standing at the beginning of a path that lead into the woods. The path seemed to be an easy one to follow, it was clearly maintained regularly and countless footsteps were printed in the slightly muddy trail. Heart racing and adrenaline pumping, I took off hoping for adventure.

The path continued for much further than I had imagined and started twisting and turning the more I got into the forest. I knew it stretched about 13 miles and I wasn't helpless at all when it comes to navigating. I know how to use a compass and I have a good sense of awareness, so I never worried once. I just thought it was a bit weird that people tried to maintain this, as if they were trying to shake the woods' reputation and attract more tourists and less suicidals.

I have to say, after an hour or so, my surroundings felt a bit darker, a bit scarier if you will. One of the reasons for this is that there were multiple ways to go from the main trail. Dozens of paths leading deeper through the trees that were everywhere. I mean it's a forest, but goddamn this forest was dense. A lot of those paths were marked with a sign or a carving in a tree. Messages saying things I couldn't read, others in English saying life is precious and I shouldn't give in, a plea to return to the town and talk to someone... They really tried hard to stop you from killing yourself. Those signs were well intended, but I couldn't help thinking this shit was spooky and so out of place.

Honestly, it was creepy, but nothing I couldn't handle and definitely not enough to satisfy my need for excitement and adventure. I noticed more turns and twists in the trail I was following and I looked behind me on a few occasions just to make sure I kept my bearings. Plus, I was slowly getting a bit paranoid. The forest got darker the more I ventured in and I thought I heard footsteps every so often. Don't get me wrong, I love this. But yeah, shit gets scary when you go looking for it.

At one point, I decided I'd take a break and drink some water while checking the compass, just to be sure. And of course, my compass was acting up and desperately looking for north, while I looked at it and sighed. No biggie, I just have to turn around and follow the trail back, should I want to leave. Problem is, I turned around to find myself standing on an intersection. I had three possible directions to go and I doubted a little when wondering which one I came from. I couldn't remember seeing any paths starting from the one I was walking until then and I felt a lot less confident all of a sudden.

Shit

I was used to the feeling of panic rising and that was also part of the thrill I wanted to find every time I went looking for it. So I took some time to take in my surroundings and thought about what to do now. I hadn't seen anything really exciting so far and I was slowly doubting to go back. But the day wasn't over and I was dedicated to my trip. So I looked up to see if I could see the sun's position and nearly screamed like a girl. The foliage was way too dense to see through, only a small amount of light pierced through the canopy. But hanging practically right above me was a little girl, eyes missing and legs bitten off to the knees. Her head was hanging down rested on her chest and I gagged.

I jumped back and fell down, tripping over and hurting my wrist in the process. I cursed at myself while looking at the grim scene before me, but I can't say I wasn't excited. THIS was the thrill I liked and I was proud of myself for getting where I was trying to get, the small border between adrenaline and madness or insanity. But when you're looking at a dead body of a hanged little girl, there's some things you don't expect/want to happen, because you might just get a heart attack like I almost did.

"Hoshi."

Guys. No shit. I sharted then and there and I'm not even ashamed to admit it. It was the voice of a little girl that sounded like she was playing with her dolls or having an imaginary tea-party. Except she was having it in the middle of a dark forest all alone with a dead girl as a view... It came from right behind me and I turned around with eyes wide open and a scream ready to escape my mouth. There was no one there and I started to feel watched and incredibly nervous. I could hear rustling from behind me and I prayed. I wasn't superstitious, but I think I knew what was coming. I turned around and felt myself turn pale.

"We are the doo doo doO dOO DOOO you help me sir sir please sir for the I want to down down me or you"

The girl was still hanging in the trees when she said it and her empty eye sockets seemed to be shimmering in the dim light. Her mouth didn't move, but her head was straight up and looking forward, completely immobile. It was the most unsettling thing I'd ever experienced and I honestly stood there nailed to the ground, unable to think or move. I didn't understand the first word I heard coming from behind me, but what she was repeating now was so chaotic and abnormal that it scared the living shit out of me.

I stepped back even more and rubbed my eyes, hoping I was dreaming (which I definitely wasn't) and I tried to set my mind straight.

""We are the doo doo doO dOO DOOO you help me sir sir please sir for the I want to down down me or you"

This time it was MUCH louder and coming from much closer and I felt my heart pumping in my head, scared to open my eyes. When I did, I could've cried. The girl was now standing a few feet in front of me, pieces of flesh dragging behind her while her legs, or what was left of them, carried her lifeless body towards me. Saying the same thing over and over again with the rope still tied around her neck, tight.

I stood there watching her, never blinking. She was really frightening with her deep empty eye sockets, her mutilated body and the fact that she was so little. Despite all of that, the sensation of fear and the desire to run became less urgent. I started feeling more sad than scared. A girl that age committing suicide was just above me, it blew my mind and I couldn't shake the feeling this was wrong. Well, of course it was, but isn't it more than just weird to see such a young child here? I looked up and saw the rope going from her neck towards the canopy and realized what was bothering me that much. How the fucking fuck does that rope even get there.

Not kidding, the trees were high. Like, really high. You'd have to use machinery to get all the way up or be a damn good climber and I couldn't for the life of me picture this kid doing that. It was so high up I couldn't even exactly see where it was attached and when I looked back at her, she was holding out her hand as to motion me to grab it. I reluctently took a step forward and held out my hand, watching her getting closer.

Before I continue; what would you do?

Seriously. I'm nearly 30 years old, I'm the biggest horror fan I can think of and I have a tendency to question everything that doesn't have a reasonable explanation. So, what would you do?

I stood there watching her as she stopped in place and looked right back at me with those black, hollow eyes. Despite the obvious fucked-upness of the whole situation, I just couldn't shake the feeling I was having. Unable to explain it, I'd have to go with sheer empathy… This girl had to be, what? Six? Seven years old? I'm not a pro, so ten probably would've done it as well, but you get it. No kid this young should be thinking about suicide, nor should a girl this young be here in a forest so dark and dense you can't hear any birds or other animals. I only heard the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves as I looked at the first person I encountered in these woods; a girl that was so young and looked so innocent that I got sick thinking about the undeniable fact she was here. In these woods that carried its name so clearly and casually, forgotten forever.

"Hoshi."

That word snapped me back to my senses instantly and made me feel like I lost something that I never had. Who the fuck leaves a kid in here, or who the fucking fuck makes a kid feel so bad that it makes her ending up here with a rope around its neck in the Aokigahara forest? Or where the fuck ever. So I don't know what you would do, but tears were almost running down my face when I practically lunged forward and grabbed her hand as firmly as I could.

I guess the world stopped

I was somewhere else, feeling like someone else and thinking like someone else. I was afraid.

If only…

I was scared as I had never been before. The world around me was pitch black and I couldn't hear anything but my frantic screams and the drumming of my blood pumping in my brain, making me feel like I was going to explode. The feeling I had persisted until a loud bang made me jump up and nearly gave me a heart attack.

My blindfold was taken away and the light that attacked my face stung like a thousand wasps. The smack on my jaw made sure I wasn't distracted by the stinging of the air in my nostrils and also made me open my burning blue eyes to watch what was causing me to feel like this.

The guy I was watching looked far too happy to be sane.

I was sitting down in a corner of a room, hands tied behind my back to a chain that was attached to a radiator, the only thing in the room besides me. My wrists were on fire and I saw my little feet twisting in front of me as I cowarded backwards against the wall, trying to escape his filthy hands. The knife in his right hand was all the more threatening when he grabbed my neck with his left and started applying pressure.

Panic, fear, anger, loss, despair. Those are but a fraction of the emotions flooding me at that time and I wouldn't even know how to begin to describe the rest of them. As if the lack of oxygen wasn't enough, the pressure on my neck felt like it was going to make it snap and the fact that my legs were everywhere and arms flailing made sure to make me lose all hope. The world went dark with the last image of a lunatic smiling at me as I drew my last breath.

Then I woke up

I was in the middle of the forest at an intersection and it didn't take me more than a few seconds to realize I was right where I was before I started dreaming. Panicked, I turned to look around me and above me, only to see I was alone in the woods. But the fucking rope was there. Right in front of me, where the girl had been standing, there was a rope on the ground heading deeper into the woods.

Safe to say everything was already fucked up and I didn't even think straight when I bent over to grab it and started following it into the forest.

Stay. The fuck. Out of there.

Guys, I followed it and walked for an hour (approximately) and from the very first minute I was surrounded by a sea. Not of trees, but bodies. Kids hanging from trees, some mutilated, some unharmed as if they were sleeping. Others decomposed to almost nothing but bones, fallen down as their ropes were still ominously hanging from the invisible canopy… it kept going for as long as I was. When I got to the end of the rope and thought I'd shed every tear and consumed all the fear that was hidden inside me, I was standing in the middle of a clearing and looking at a guy.

An asian guy standing by some kind of enormous plastic bag and hoisting something up in the trees with a rope. I started shivering and I felt like all power was taken away from me when I saw an arm sticking out if the bag. The boy he was hanging couldn't have been older than five and the fact I was watching this as if I'd be watching a street musician suddenly put me in a mood I hadn't yet been in.

Tears running down my face and legs unable to take a step in whatever direction, I felt a hand grabbing a hold of mine. The little girl, the one I could watch now without being scared, the one that showed me and asked for help was standing next to me. Although they were blue, she didn't have eyes, but her smile was worth a thousand words.

What happened next took five minutes at the most.

I anonymously notified the police when I found my way back out of the forest almost a full day later and I went back home immediately. I know that nobody there likes to talk about the reputation of the forest and I know that other things have been covered up, so I have no way of knowing what happened or if anything got done.

Don't fucking touch children, because I might be the last thing you see. I looked up what she said -hoshi- and I guess she meant hoshii… I'm not Japanese so I might be wrong, but I believe she wanted/needed someone to help her

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 238: Shigaraki Tomura: Tattered Goth Remix

Previously on BnHA: Young Shimura Tenko killed his whole family, as angsty young misguided antagonist characters sometimes do, and then proceeded to wander the streets feeling all sad about it until All for One just happened!! to come across him and was all “oh you poor thing it looks like you killed your whole family by accident, let me just adopt you and raise you to be my own personal killing machine.” We got some more flashbacks showing just how this transformation took place, plus some answers about the hands that kind of just raised more questions though tbh, and watched as little Tenko made his first premeditated kill after a number of effed up AFO pep talks. AFO then rechristened him “Shigaraki Tomura”, and we learned that Shigaraki is actually AFO’s own last name. The chapter ended back in the present day, with Tomura reflecting on how his family’s death wasn’t really a tragedy after all and ended up setting him free. We’ll have to agree to disagree, kid, but in the meantime have fun fucking up Re-Destro and dealing with Gigantomachia’s rampage!

Today on BnHA: Re-Destro tries to smash Tomura at 100% and absolutely nothing happens. So then he summons a bunch of robot armor bits like fucking Iron Man, and levels up to 150%! Tomura could not care less, because he’s leveled up to be one of those “yawn, is that all you got?” bad guys now, and while RD desperately tries to intimidate him, we briefly check in with the rest of the League. Everyone is freaking out at how quickly Machia is destroying the Liberation Army, and Compress calls Ujiko and frantically begs him to warp them all to safety. But Ujiko is all “nah” and says he wants to drive Tomura into a corner. Meanwhile Gigantomachia finally takes out Dairy Queen, since Dabi was doing fuckall, and the chapter ends with Tomura possibly killing Re-Destro?? To be honest it’s really unclear. For all I know the dude just dropped dead of a heart attack from all that stress. In fact, now that I’ve typed that, I kind of think that’s what did happen. Anyway! The point is I’m pretty sure the battle is finally over.

(All comments are my unspoiled reactions from my initial readthrough of the chapter. I did a quick edit for grammar and clarity immediately afterward, and added one or two ETAs in the process, but aside from that there are no changes.) 

so I mentioned this in an ask post a couple days ago, but this recap is a day late because I was out of town this week. consequently I’m behind on my asks and other things as well (I know, what else is new), so I’m sorry about that!

also! @temperatezone informed me that there’s yet another BnHA spinoff coming out, and that the preview chapter debuted last week! so I went to check it out, and holy shit, it’s a manga all about the U.A. kids teaming up with various pro heroes!!!!??!! between this and the new anime season coming up in just two months (it’ll fly by) and BakuDeku: Heroes Rising coming out in December, I feel like I’m being fucking spoiled with BnHA content. and I didn’t even mention the 2nd light novel which just had its official English translation released last month! so all in all it’s a lot of good stuff, and I desperately want to recap chapter 0 of the new spinoff as soon as possible, but it’ll probably be a few days unfortunately, unless I decide to be very irresponsible and do that instead of the piles of work I should actually be doing. we’ll see which impulses actually win out sob

fortunately Jump is on a break next week if I recall, so that’ll give me some time to catch up. anyway let’s start this thing before I manage to procrastinate anymore! so the new chapter is called “Liberation”, probably after a certain army

and the chapter is picking up where we left off before, with Tomura taking his Father Hand out of his pocket and saying he doesn’t need it or any of his other hands

ooooooh

maybe the title isn’t referring to the Liberation Army after all! or just one of those cool double meaning things

oooh man

god but that is satisfying. is there anything more satisfying than seeing a character you’ve been rooting for finally reach out and take control of their own destiny? ahhhh yessss that’s the good shounen shit right there

lol Re-Destro

he finally scared you into using your ~full power~, huh? punk

don’t mind me I’m just appreciating how much of a total badass my boy here is

your move, RD. personally if it were me, I wouldn’t want to fuck with him anymore! but hey your funeral bud

hmmm

the last few chapters have been so well-drawn that I’m starting to think I was maybe getting spoiled. I wonder if Horikoshi will re-do these later for the volume release

anyway so it seems like what’s happening is that RD is trying to hit Tomura with another Almighty Bitchslap and Tomura is not having any of it, basically

oh wow

and this isn’t even the Gigantomachia damage. will there be any pieces of this town left larger than a toothpick once all is said and done here?? stay tuned! but the answer is no

so the rest of this two page spread is just more panels showing vague high-contrast images of the destruction. we’re also briefly cutting to Gigantomachia! and to Dabi, who is still fighting Pinkberry, and like, dude, come on. finish him off already

and now the dust is clearing after that latest clash, and would you guys fucking look at this dramatic bitch though omfg

Shigaraki Tomura: Tattered Goth Remix. you look like the cover of a Bauhaus album. thank god this arc isn’t set somewhere stupidly dark, like, say, a basement

lmao Re-Destro is so mad

once again I would like to point out that you invited him here, you overconfident dishrag

so now Tomura is casually conversing with him

Tomura did you burn one right before this battle. you’re so fucking chill all of a sudden. gotta say that if someone had asked me “what do you think it would take to get Shigaraki Tomura to mellow out” before this arc, I probably would not have answered, “hmm, well maybe flashbacks to his horrific childhood and the violent deaths of all of his loved ones”

well at any rate, watching Re-Destro progressively freak out while Tomura makes more (ﾟ⊿ﾟ) faces is my new form of sustenance, guys

“you seem a bit rattled. a bit ill at ease. perturbed. something’s got you in a tizzy, huh.” ⊂( ・ ̫・)⊃

(ETA: okay but rereading this here, he keeps talking about his heart pounding, and then he goes and summons a fucking robot suit that actually raises his stress on purpose. so like, I don’t know? but I vaguely recall reading a theory on reddit a few weeks ago that RD was going to have a heart attack and it looks like it could really be the case. or not! that last page is really inconclusive.)

and now the Re-Destro flashbacks that absolutely no one asked for! of course!!

-- OH MY GOD

I’M DYING I CAN’T. SEND HELP

Iida I’m so sorry. all this time I have been teasing you and calling you a 40-year-old man, when this whole time it was actually Re-Destro who Benjamin Buttoned his way from his mother’s womb

is he related to the Alpha Kid from the adventures of the Babysitter’s Club? he can’t not be, right? what else could it be? two characters just happening to vaguely resemble one another in a purely coincidental manner?? are you even hearing yourself?! get out!!

um hey, so what the actual fuck is happening

...Krestro??

lol what. Horikoshi Muriel Kouhei, did you seriously just give this fucker Hulkbuster armor. do you just have a list of Marvel comics tribute shit that you check off as you go

so apparently this suit jacks his power up to one hundred and fifty percent! wowwwwwwww

but meanwhile Tomura is all just

what would it take to faze new Toked Goth Remix Tomura, I wonder

sob omg

goddammit now he’s going to want one. Ujiko you’d better get on it

oh my god you guys

I’m starting to feel really bad about all of these nice Twice clones who are being so helpful and are just going to end up dying in the end omg

also, if someone ever asks you, “should I read BnHA,” you can say, “well that depends, how much do you like scenes of characters with two broken arms getting piggyback rides from other characters?” and they’ll be like, “that’s really specific, does that... happen often,” and you can be like, “well it’s officially happened more than once, so”

like, it’s a whole thing now I guess. also, ouch

anyway so Real!Twice is concerned that Machia is having far too easy of a time kicking names and taking ass, and he’s trying to regroup with the rest of the League

oh my god Compress, seriously?

League of Ungrateful Sods, is what you guys are. he’s trying to help you guys out!!

lol Dabi you fucking liar

no you fucking weren’t, you were going to keep fighting him for a million more years. your fight was going to make Goku VS Frieza look like a 15-second Youtube ad. once again, you guys should really be more grateful here

(ETA: why did they even invite Dabi lol. all he did was fight offscreen and have zero (0) flashbacks. fucking tease.)

so now Compress is calling Ujiko and asking him to warp them out of there

what...?

he’s absolutely 100% making this up, right?

lol yeah now even Compress is calling him on it

right, Compress??

okay now Ujiko is straight up telling him no

oh, this is good you guys

Ujiko, I don’t know how to tell you this but while you weren’t looking, the dude hopped on a fucking golf cart and drove his own damn self. and now appears to have made himself pretty damn comfortable in that corner too

oh is Halo Top finally about to fucking die??

the cornerstone?? really?? holy shit, it really is remarkable how thoroughly unprepared these guys actually were in the end

anyway so now more action panels are happening

did Machia kill him? it looks like he survived but just went flying

and what the hell does Hanabata think he’s actually going to be able to do. drive his van at him? give him encouragement??

anyway I guess we’re wrapping this up now, and we’re cutting back to Tomura who’s saying something extremely cool

it is kind of like that. except that it’s bullshit

anyway so it looks like he’s touching the ground and using his decay again and holy shit is this it???

!!!!!

YOU GUYS DID HE JUST DISINTEGRATE RE-DESTRO OH MY GOD. JUST LIKE THAT!!??!

YOU GUYS I HONESTLY CAN’T TELL, ALL I KNOW IS TOMURA TAPPED THE GROUND, AND RE-DESTRO HAD A WEIRD PANEL WHERE YOU COULDN’T SEE WHAT WAS HAPPENING, AND HE HAD A THOUGHT AND IT WAS SUDDENLY CUT OFF, AND THEN WE CUT TO GIGANTOMACHIA WATCHING AND WE COULDN’T REALLY SEE ANYTHING OMG

but can you imagine, though?? “one single strike”?! like oh my god, there wasn’t even any fanfare? if he really did just kill him that is pretty much exactly how I would have wanted it to go down tbh

at any rate, it’s safe to say life just got a hell of a lot more dangerous for our Actual Protagonist with this new power-up. shit. oh my god

well I guess that’s it! does that mean this arc is gonna wrap up next chapter. because I’m also going to be away the 16th, so I’ll be a day late in doing that chapter too. I s2g Horikoshi, if you finally cut back to U.A. on a day that I’m not able to read the chapter right away, I will... well actually I’ll be pretty happy regardless, but secretly I will also believe it’s some sort of conspiracy against me. so just know that

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Soon I Will Be Invincible - Review

by Wardog

Saturday, 08 September 2007Wardog dusts off her cape and puts her pants on outside the rest of her clothing.~Soon I will Be Invincible is a book written by a loser for losers. Perhaps I'm being slightly unfair but the guy on the back is aggressively bald, over-educated, a computer game designer and has written an over-angsty, over-affectionate novel about superheroes and supervillains. I'm not saying he's not somebody I would love to hang out with but then I'm not saying I'm anything other than a loser too.

I'm a fair-to-moderate reader of superhero comics but I'm no authority on the genre so what I'm about to posit could be either a) so obvious it's not worth stating or b) completely wrong but I do think there's been a bit of a change of focus. Back in the day, it seems to me that superheroes were deliberately presented as everyman figures, community-spirited boys-next-door who just so happened to get gifted with exceptional powers. They seemed to be saying: "This Peter Parker fellow, he could be you, you could be the superhero."

But, of course, moral values have shifted with time. We're no longer all about the wholesome friendly neighbourhood superhero, we want the dark and the driven and morally ambiguous. The people who read comics are, for the most part, people like me (weird, unpopular kids) and, here on either side of the millennium, superheroes - those gifted by pure chance or cruel circumstance to be more attractive, more powerful and more popular than, say, me - are beginning to look rather like the kids who laughed at me at school. Thus you start to pay more attention to the villains, initially just larger than life foils to set against the unyielding virtue of the superhero. But, unlike the hero, villains tends to be self-made men who have progressed down the long road to world domination by dint being more intelligent and more determined than everyone else around them. A familiar motif for weird unpopular kids, I'm sure. The superhero belongs to the realm of the blessed and the accepted. The villain is the perennial scorned and derided outsider. I could take over the world, you know. If I wanted to.

SIWBI takes place on an alternative earth that, although rife with aliens, fairies, superheroes and supervillains, future tech and magic, is recognisably our own. The first person narrative alternates between the point of view of Dr Impossible, brilliant scientist turned supervillain and Fatale, a newly created cyborg who has just been invited into The Champions, a famous group of superheroes, previously led by Dr Impossible's arch nemesis. The plot, such as it is, is typical superhero fare: Dr Impossible escapes from prison and hatches the usual supervillain scheme to knock the planet out of orbit and herald in a new ice-age. Meanwhile CoreFire, the leader of The Champions, has disappeared and the group must to struggle to re-form into an effective unit and deal with the events of their past. As is practically de rigueur these days in anything dealing with people with super powers, the self-consciously trite plotline and the comic book archetypes are there primarily to illuminate the recognisable human dimension to it all. Thus The Champions battle not only Dr Impossible but their own very human failings and, even as he flounces around in scarlet cape and helmet, Dr Impossible angsts over the whether "the smartest man in the world has done the smartest possible thing with his life." It's not exactly ground-breaking but it seems to work well enough and adds pathos to Dr Impossible's obsession with invincibility, not so much to protect him from those with superpowers but to protect him from the very ordinary world that has always excluded and derided him and never loses its power to hurt him.

There's a lot to like here, if you're into that kind of thing. The chapter titles are all stock phrases ("Foiled Again" etc.) and most of the secondary characters are nods to various comic book characters. In fact the whole style and approach of SIWBI is incredibly affectionate and genial, although I do have to wonder what it's doing presenting itself as literary fiction because I can't imagine you'll get it, or indeed see the point of it, unless you're also fond of and familiar with the genre to which it offers itself as an homage. And I know that Grossman wanted specifically to write a book but it seems a peculiar choice to me. His writing style is brisk and punchy, favouring a lot of dramatic statements that would look absolutely perfect floating above a character's head in a speech bubble ("It was time for me to stop punishing myself and start punishing everyone else") but when they're just a just a line on a page they occasionally fall somewhat flat. It's kind of the equivalent of writing POW just like that. In fact, the blatant attempt to "literary-ise" the book, and through association the genre, is one of the more irritating features SIWBI. You like comics, dude, just accept it. Some people will laugh at you, some people will agree, and some people will start to talk about Maus. Regardless, Watchman will never be Ulysses.

As well as occasional stylistic difficulties the narrative jumps between the present and the past in a rather jarring manner. Although it's interesting to get (some of) the backstory, it does completely ruin the pace to the extent that what ought to be an adrenaline-saturated rush towards the final stages of Dr Impossible's plan bog down in a lot of superhero dithering and bickering. For the most part, Grossman is at his best in his supervillain's head. The attempt to give Dr Impossible a reasonably credible psychology for behaving as supervillains behave within the genre (always explaining his plans to the good guys, shrieking I AM A GENIUS at every slight provocation and so forth) does not entirely work because if you were actually capable of such self-awareness one would hope you would also be capable of behaving in a moderately sensible fashion. Nevertheless, Dr Impossible's seemingly unflinching commitment to a role he knows must always be the losing one does generate a certain emotional resonance and bizarrely, as the novel stutters to his inevitable defeat, a certain tragic force.

Dr Impossible, painted with all the narrative garishness a supervillain deserves, is not a subtle character:

For a second I stand at the fulcrum point of creation. God, I'm so unhappy.

But he is complex. Grossman writes him with genuine flair and appreciation. And, one loser to another, it's impossible not to empathise with his broken and lonely desperation:

If you're different you always know it and you can't fix it even if you want. What do you do when you find out your heart is the wrong kind? You take what you're given and be the hero you can be. Hero to your own cold, inverted heart.

Villain he may be but he's probably the arrogant, articulate poster boy for every geeky comic lover out there.

Sadly, the other characters can in no way live up to him, so much so they seem almost like afterthoughts. The Champions bitch and moan like a bunch of sulky teenagers and, even if that was partly the point, it didn't make them easy or pleasant to read about. As for Fatale, new superhero on the block, who narrates with Dr Impossible, she's tedious beyond expression. I had a feeling that, as a woman, she was probably meant to be saying profound things to me but her narrative voice is pedestrian at best and offers none of the exuberance or emotional engagement of Dr Impossible's. I skimmed most of the superhero sections.

Even so, Dr Impossible is worth the price of admission alone. If you're even remotely interested in the superhero genre or have ever contemplated world domination while sitting by yourself in maths, you'll probably find something to enjoy here.

PS - Please note the views expressed within the article are solely those of the author. Ferretbrain as a whole does not believe Mr Grossman is a loser.

Themes:

Books

,

Sci-fi / Fantasy

~

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Arthur B

at 18:32 on 2007-09-08I'm sorry, but there's only room for one "arrogant, articulate poster boy for every geeky comic lover out there" and it's

this guy

. :)

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Wardog

at 16:05 on 2007-09-10Oh come on, geeks need all the help we can get :)

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Jamie Johnston

at 12:59 on 2007-10-01Aside from the merits and demerits peculiar to this book (which I haven't read), I wonder whether it was a good idea to try to do superheroes in a novel at all. They grew up in comics, which are basically a dramatic form like plays, films, or television. They seem to get on fairly well on film and television (never seem them on stage), but throwing them into continuous prose narrative strikes me as probably unwise and possibly self-defeating.

If Grossman has, as you guess, done it in the hope of giving the genre literary credibility, then he's rather missed the point, hasn't he? Putting superheroes into a novel doesn't make them into literature any more than doing 'Richard III' as a comic would make it into childish pulp.

'Heroes' is a pretty good example of an intelligent transfer of superheroes from one literary form to another because it recognizes and deals with the differences between the two forms. The scale of television (both the size of the screen and the length of episodes and series) means it can't cover the whole range of dramatic action that comics do, so it concentrates on what television does well, which is the drama of personal relationships; but it also remembers that saving the world is the point of superhero stories, so it uses the flash-back / flash-forward structure to suggest a larger drama going on without having to indulge in the big colourful battles which do the same thing in a comic. It also recognizes that on television, with live actors and real-time action, superhero costumes simply aren't going to be credible, so it simply ditches them.

I'd say a superhero novel should probably ditch costumes too, for different reasons. In comics, costumes solve three problems: first, how do we easily distinguish different characters when the simplified style of the artwork makes all faces and bodies look very similar? second, how do we make every page look exciting even when nothing much is happening? and third, how do we make it easy to work out what's going on when up to a dozen different actions need to be depicted on a single page smaller than A4?

The advantage of solving those problems outweighs the disadvantage of a slight loss of credibility. But in a novel none of those problems arises in the first place, so costumes have none of the advantages but retain the disadvantage of implausibility (which is in no way reduced by the traditional internal narrative explanation: "I must protect my secret identity by wearing a costume which incorporates a mask... and bright yellow tights and a billowy green cloak").

Gosh, if I look behind me through a telescope I can see the point where this comment stopped being relevant to the article... Oh yes, that's right. Well, I think that's probably why I'm very dubious about doing superheroes in a novel at all. The whole point of the superhero genre is that it externalizes the drama and symbolism of the story. The way the identity of each character is made explicitly visual through his costume and is expressed in action through his superpower is a prime example of that. The whole point of the novel, on the other hand, is that it internalizes the drama by taking the reader into the minds of at least some of the principal characters. Action in a novel is secondary - it affects the characters and triggers internal change. If there was ever a narrative form which was unsuitable for superheroes, it's got to be the novel, surely?

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Wardog

at 10:49 on 2007-10-04I think I read in the introduction or the acknowledgements or somewhere that presenting the story as a novel rather than a comic was a carefully thought through decision, and one the author felt strongly about. On the other hand, I do think the interactions of various literary (or artistic) forms is interesting and, for that alone, perhaps I feel more supportive of it than perhaps it deserves. I was possibly being quite unfair when I suggested it was a doomed attempt to confer a literary validity on a popular form. As you point out, books / comics hop easily to the big and small screen and back again and books do, in fact, turn readily into comics (I've even seen a comic version of Proust for God's sake) and it seems peculiar that it's always been an unspoken one-way street i.e. that things can be turned into comics and comics can be turned into movies but never the other way round.

For what I've read about Heroes, I think it was always designed primarily as a drama rather than a slightly more high brow than average contribution to the superhero-genre. Tim Kring claims explicitely that his inspiration was Lost, he has no geeky nostalgia for the days of X-men or whatever ... essentially he started with television and incorporated superheroes rather than starting with superheroes and incorporating television. If that makes sense.

And there are some quite amusing sequences about costumes in SIWBI in fact! I think the point is that the novel - regardless of whether you think it's an appropriate experiment or not - deliberately attempts to offer a plausible psychological landscape to the external superhero world. Thus, Dr Impossible has an outrageous costume to allow him to put aside the vulnerabilities (or attempt to) of the man behind the mask and become a supervillain capable of delivering the usual array of hysterical villain lines. And one of the themes of the book is the clash between the external and the internal, the visual and the psychological. It doesn't *quite* work because you can't actually offer up a credible explanation of supervillainous compulsions i.e. why do they always pour our the details of their dastardly plans at the slighest provocation.

But it was fun.

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Jamie Johnston

at 16:37 on 2007-10-07Perhaps my reaction comes partly from my continual annoyance at the use of the novel form in general. I feel that a lot of storytellers write novels not because that's the best narrative form for the story they want to tell but because either they prioritize being a novelist over telling the story to its best advantage or, worse, it simply never occurs to them that there are any other narrative forms at all.

But certainly I don't want to say that a story can't be transferred from a comic to a novel just as well as the other way round. In principle any story can be told in any form, it's just that some forms are going to be better suited to the nature of some stories. But genre is a horse of a different colour. Still, I mustn't be too categorical since I haven't actually read the thing! If he's trying to explore the inside of the characters minds then the novel is certainly the form to do it with, but I would tend to think that all that would really achieve is to expose the psychological implausibility of many central elements of the superhero genre. Which, from your comments, sounds more or less like what happened. But it's interesting to find the edges of a genre.

As for 'Heroes', I'm interested that you say that Kring (not a bad supervillain name, that) wasn't particularly interested in superheroes. I hadn't heard that, and judging solely from the content of the series so far I'd have guessed the exact opposite. I can count on one finger the concepts, super-powers, characters, and plot developments in 'Heroes' which aren't almost identical to things I read in the X-Men comics when I was 15. And I notice that the producer of 'Heroes' (and the script-writer of a couple of episodes) is Jeph Loeb, who was a writer on X-Men for a long time, if I recall correctly.

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Arthur B

at 17:12 on 2007-10-07I think that just shows Kring recognised that he doesn't actually know much about superheroes and was wise enough to hire people who did.

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Wardog

at 10:19 on 2007-10-09On a rather tangential note, it's interesting really that the novel, once the bastard offspring of better literature, is now very much established as, perhaps, the most authentic and recognised of all literary forms - perhaps in a few hundred years the comic will supplant it. I mean, there's not exactly much call for epic nowadays - what sort of narrative forms did you have in mind, Jamie? And I suppose the major point of interest for SIWBI is that it's a novel, not a comic. As a comic it would be sub-standard post-Watchman fare I'm sure. As a novel at least it doesn't get lost among a morass of very similar items.

And with references to Heroes, I think something similar is at work; because he is not a great big superhero geek, Kring is more concerned about providing good television and, therefore, lots of the very obvious superhero tropes and motifs and arcs he uses, he does so with the blissful ignorance of the utterly unitiated. Whereas any superhero fanatic worth their tights would probably be unable to use them as effectively because they'd be preoccupied with what enormous cliches they actually are...

[doedipus]

Let’s Play Dungeons and Dragons: Introduction

So, I think I’m going to go ahead and post the D&D stuff I was talking about earlier. About three months into the campaign, I started keeping notes on each session. I’m thinking of releasing a session or so worth of notes regularly (probably a couple times a week) until I catch up with where we are now, and then just posting updates whenever major story beats wrap up (probably every 1-3 weeks. Sometimes boring things take a long time). Of course, there’s a very obvious problem with that idea: there’s three months of lore between the start of the campaign and when I started taking notes! Thankfully, one of the other players was taking care of that at the time, so I’m going to try to summarize it as best I can.

Let’s get started!

The story began in the town of Valen, a port city located on a peninsula off the southern Sword Coast of Faerun. Three adventurers, Lucas Valeroyant (played by Rich), a recent graduate from the arcane academy of Candlekeep, Ser Graham Broyer (played by Rich’s boyfriend Jake), a trans man who ran away from home and began travelling under his late brother’s name, and Rolen Amastacia (played by Ludovik), a disgraced elven noble and holy man, were summoned from their homelands to a tavern by a mutual friend, Rockseeker. The trio received a mysterious black box from the innkeeper, and were told to deliver it to Rockseeker himself in Waterdeep. The magnificent corvette The Spirit of Fire and her crew awaited them in the harbor, ready to set sail for adventure.

While in town, Lucas met Greg, a dancer at a local bar. Greg robbed him blind and fled. Later that night, some bandits make an attempt on their lives, and were revealed to be assassins. The inn they were staying at was burnt down shortly thereafter, and Graham identified the attackers as the Sisters of the Night, a cult of ne’er do wells bent on causing chaos in Faerun. The party tracks down and captures Greg before fleeing the city on the Spirit.

On the boat, they meet Escrima (Rap), a strange young man from Calimport who was involved with a cult worshipping a lovecraftian creature known only as MOTHER. The party was attacked by some cultists, including villain apparent Sister Elsa. They defeat the attackers handily, though the sister escaped to fight another day. Lucas and Rolen (and Rich and Ludo) began to butt heads frequently, and a rivalry between the two was formed both in and out of character.

In between sessions, Jake posted on /r/transgamers to recruit players, and I joined the gang.

The gang stopped over at Lucas’ alma mater, Candlekeep, to do some research about the Sisters. While there, they ran into Constanza de Catarina (Kim), a tiefling cultist masquerading as a human noblewoman gathering information about the Sisters for her own organization, and Coy (Max), a dragonborn Big Boss expy wandering the world after the dwarven complex he called home was sacked by an angry dragon. The pair quickly hooked up with the party, comparing notes, and running errands for the locals. Along the way, Lucas and Greg formed a close emotional bond. In the countryside, the gang ran into a giant army of drow, orcs, bugbears, gnolls, and Sisters dragging an adult dragon out of its cave and loading it aboard a massive airship. 

The party eventually learned of a secret library below Candlekeep, and set about searching for it. After a dank journey through the partially submerged ruins below the academy, the gang found what they were looking for, and discovered the Sister’s master plan: resurrect their old leader, Overseer Minnia, and summon the demon god Yeenoghu into the material plane. They also found a handful of nifty magic items and a ton of funds, and promptly stole them, because adventurers are bastards.

Among the treasures was a key to a nearby portal to Sigil. Constanza, Graham, Rolen and Escrima accidentally triggered it, and were whisked off to the wild and dangerous city. They met a sapient rat hoard, known as US, and became involved with a murder mystery, meeting Narcovi, a dwarf working for Harmonnium, a guard force in the city, and eventually tracked down and nearly captured Sougad Lawshredder (known within the party as “crazy eyes”), a Believer of the Source who was trying to ascend to godhood by killing lawful folks across the outer planes. Sougad escaped, and Narcovi rewarded the party by helping them locate a portal back home.

Meanwhile, the opening of the portal triggered some sort of alarm in the Candlekeep security, and Coy and Lucas narrowly escaped through the use of a helm of teleportation and some potions of invisibility. They fled Candlekeep, sailing towards the province of Amn, where they believed their missing companions would likely turn up, if they ever did at all. Along the way, the crew encountered a band of slavers and rescued a child slave, Akim. The pair ascended a mountain outside the village of Amswater where a derelict gate was said to stand. Sure enough, the party popped out of the portal shortly after they arrived, and much rejoicing was had.

(Both of those sequences happened in separate sessions due to scheduling snafus. JP, our DM, is a fucking saint for even bothering to set up something like that)

While the gang caught up on the mountain, a company of drow, led by the Sisters sacked Amswater. The party pushed them back, and managed to rescue a couple of villagers from enslavement, though many others were killed in the battle, or carted away to the Underdark. The villagers, having nowhere else to go, boarded the Spirit of Fire with the party. Together, they stopped off at Athkatla, a nearby port city, and Constanza entrusted the refugees to the government there, explaining the situation in the countryside. This earned her the first of several legitimate noble titles that she didn't have to forge.

The adventurers set sail to Waterdeep at last. The sea voyage finally granted them some time to themselves, opportunities to get to know each other, and hone their skills. Graham and Constanza bonded over dragonchess, Escrima attempted to indoctrinate Graham into his cult, and Lucas taught Coy some minor spells in exchange for draconic lessons. Akim bonded with his savior, and essentially became Coy’s adopted child. Constanza established dominance over Escrima by cleaning his filthy ass off. Along the way, the crew captured and sort of tamed a live Wyvern, christened “Lupe,” who the adventurers tried desperately to find some use for besides venom milking.

Eventually, the gang arrived in Waterdeep and met with Rockseeker himself. The man was ostensibly a dwarf, but was quickly discovered to be something more, though the party couldn’t say exactly what. Rockseeker retrieved a parchment from the mysterious box, and explained that contained within it was a magical map that marked the locations of artifacts that could annihilate the Sisters for good... though, the map was encrypted, and the party was going to have to carry the map to Neverwinter, where a talented friend of Rockseeker’s could help them.

While in the city, the gang did much shopping and sleeping around, the latter of which clued them in on a plot to assassinate the Visible Lord of Waterdeep, John Merrow. Supposedly, the ambitious Lord Hier was planning on having him taken care of at an upcoming celebration at his estate. Coincindentally, Rockseeker had some invitations just lying around, so the party had an easy in.

However, the party was still a few days off, and the gang busied themselves with shopping and taking care of small jobs for the locals, as vagrants of their sort are want to do. They uncovered a small vampire infestation, but events conspired such that they never quite got to the bottom of it.

(Scheduling snafus raised their ugly heads again, and Rich ended up doing a solo session)

At this time, Lucas decided to go track down his old mentor from his student days, Gandalf (no relation to the lesser deity from LotR, we swear!) to see if he had any insight on the events that were unfolding, and possibly a way to get Candlekeep to forgive him for his tresspasses against them. He met up with an acquaintance from Candlekeep, Eva (played by Jake), a young lass who had at least one shrine dedicated to Lucas in her home. The two tracked down Gandalf, and, to their horror, discovered that he had become a necromancer, turning most of the town of Proskur into his thralls. The duo narrowly defeated him, though not before Gandalf murdered Eva and blasted a chunk of Lucas’ shoulder off. Eva’s soul found its way into Lucas’ body. Lucas returned to Waterdeep, thoroughly shaken. This is how JP likes to handle multiclassing, by the way.

Since Jake wasn't around to take notes for the session that weekend with the rest of the party, I ended up taking over that day. For whatever reason, Jake basically decided to let me handle the note taking thereafter, so that’s what the rest of this tale is going to look like.

I kind of have a pretty strong emotional connection to this group and campaign. They’re the first group of people I ever met who didn't previously know me as a dude or anything, and because my voice was one of the only things I’d worked on at the time, I was able to just be myself without all the other baggage for a couple hours every week. I didn't really talk about my being trans at all for quite a while, and I’ve been led to believe that I was basically stealth to them for the first couple months of play... though I eventually got more involved with the trans community on reddit, and more open about it in general.

The group was also really my first foray into the LGBT community in general. My impression of LGBT spaces and the people that inhabited them was pretty negative at the time. I just had the idea that everyone was super outgoing and boisterous theater club types, a class of person that I struggle to relate to and get along with. However these folks turned out to be pretty down to earth for the most part, and the realization that there were people like me who I could actually relate to and enjoy being around really opened my eyes.

[thesinglesjukebox]

EMINEM - DARKNESS

[2.20]

We’ve come to talk about Em again...

Alfred Soto: Good lord -- an Eminem single called "Darkness," surprised yet? The Simon and Garfunkel interpolation and sound effects come off as cheap contexualizing for the sake of a bait-and-switch in which Em unmasks himself as Stephen Paddock. With critics paying renewed attention to the complexity of his flow, it's also worth stressing that ability tethered to self-pity deserves scorn. [4]

Brad Shoup: I swear to Christ I saw the title and knew he was gonna interpolate Simon and Garfunkel. But I also knew he and Royce were making their own "Six Feet Deep," and I was way off. Turns out it's a creative-writing assignment designed to keep the grader's pen dangling forever. What do you do with something detailed so painstakingly and painfully? The parallels Em draws are clever enough linguistically. (Has any song ever flattered Genius annotators more?) But the only ones that feel legit involve substance abuse. This is a megalomaniacal idea presented bashfully -- I should be grateful he isn't trying to do voice acting -- and framed thoughtlessly. The gunshots and screams are ghoulish enough without considering how the rest of his catalog uses them as cartoon gags. A fantastically bad idea that I will be thinking about for at least as long as the song's excruciating runtime. [5]

Kylo Nocom: Em forces the audience to endure his balladry, only to reveal that they were, like, empathizing with the Las Vegas shooter the entire time! The set-up is... intriguing (to call it "well-executed" feels like making another lame pun he'd squeeze in) yet it still sucks in many ways that don't even require public moral outcry: the sound effects spoil the twist way too early, his singing burps out remnants of emo rap, the beat samples fucking Simon & Garfunkel, and I still hate the sound of this guy's voice doing anything. To write any more on this feels like losing a game that Eminem will win -- a point he makes annoyingly often and remains true. But it's a shame that something meant to be poignant from the guy comes out as weak shock humor. [3]

Julian Axelrod: In theory, I'm not mad that Eminem is still trying to pivot to Social Commentary Anthems. I guess I'd rather hear him use his platform to wrestle with knotty issues than peddle stale punchlines about killing Honey Boo Boo or whatever. But what's really frustrating is Eminem's refusal to drop his gimmicks when it matters. You can't make a song about real life survivors and reference Saturday Night Fever. You can't condemn gun violence at festivals and condemn festival-goers concerned about gun violence. And regardless of the subject matter, you cannot punctuate a belabored alcohol-as-gun metaphor by muttering "Double entendre" like a sadistic, self-satisfied SparkNotes. That's the worst part: No one outside of Eminem's stanbase will be swayed by this, and very few within it will either. When will his reign of terror end? When no one cares. [0]

Isabel Cole: Oh, fuck you: for being tacky enough to open a limp-pulsing track called "Darkness" with a phrase that's been memed into meaninglessness and then marrying it to our particular American plague so that I feel irrationally bad about dismissing it with a flippant joke. But, fine, Eminem has put on his (boring, ill-fitting) big boy clothes, so let's do this. Being a grown-up, like being an artist, means being accountable for your choices, beginning with not just the choice to rap from the perspective of a mass shooter (although it's hard to imagine a level of artistic merit or political efficacy that would justify that decision), but specifically the choice of this shooter, this tragedy. It's easy to imagine why this particular incident would call to Eminem, from the infamy of the body count to the anxiety he must feel about the possibility of a similar event striking one of his own audiences. In choosing a mass murderer who remains so enigmatic, Eminem gets to dwell in the alleged mystery of violence, emphasizing its senselessness even to those who commit it. But it's more than the scale that makes that massacre unusual (although the scale also bears on the irresponsibility of his selection: come on, dude, how can you profess concern and not see yourself laying the groundwork for some other asshole to think "if I kill enough people someone famous will write a song about me?"); the perpetrator had no known history of domestic violence, but the majority of such men do. You can't talk about American violence without talking about American misogyny, and selecting a narrative that enables you to avoid the connection between the two marks you as someone with nothing to contribute to the conversation; implicitly generalizing this genderless narrative by layering news audio clips of shooting after shooting brings it from stupid to evil, emphasizing the pervasive danger of American culture now that men are dying too. This is of course particularly galling coming from goddamn Eminem, who has profited so handsomely from the commodification of violence against women. Galling partly because it retroactively dims whatever insights on the topic he may have laid claim to: rather than the inscrutable, almost mystical lost soul portrayed here, most of these men are something more like the narrator of "Love the Way You Lie" plus a couple years on the wrong parts of Reddit. He could have chosen to bridge that gap for his long-time listeners, to make the connection between hating the bitch who ruined your life and being self-centered enough to want to watch the world burn, but he didn't. Making me wonder what exactly he thought he was rapping about all those years, if he finds this form of violence so novel. [0]

Will Rivitz: I see Lin-Manuel's done away with his orchestra's string section. [2]

Andy Hutchins: The distance between "Hi, kids! Do you like violence? / Wanna see me stick nine-inch nails through each one of my eyelids?" and a three-verse double entendre that doesn't exactly strain itself to not sympathize with one of history's most nefarious mass murderers is not as far as one should probably walk in 20 years of life. A less clever rapper would not have found as many ways firearms buttress our vernacular; a cleverer one might have made this song about that instead of a five-minute trigger warning. A wiser one wouldn't have attempted this at all: Noble though the aim may be, there is no target audience here. [3]

Will Adams: Eminem stepping into the mind of a mass shooter is not surprising. Punctuating said narrative with in media res sound effects (shower curtains! pill bottles! loading clips! screams!), turning "The Sound of Silence" into a Talkboy sample, and making this shit five and a half minutes long? That takes extra chutzpah. [2]

Katherine St Asaph: I suspect the efforts to prevent copycat shootings were doomed ages ago, if not after Columbine then definitely after Rodger. Even if every mass shooter permanently closed off his chosen inspiration to all future comers, there are still enough sprees strewn throughout history -- hell, just through this millennium -- to produce years of trauma; and even if every media outlet declined to report shooters' names or manifestos, all of that would still circulate on chans and Discords (where they probably originated anyway) that any given proto-shooter is far more likely to read than the Associated Press, and infinitely more likely to trust. It's a failure of imagination: far easier to high-mindedly decline to acknowledge shootings than to reckon with them, to dissect and understand what makes them happen and more importantly what doesn't, and thus learn how to stop them. As a certain folk duo sang, silence like a cancer grows -- which brings us to Eminem's "Sound of Silence"-sampling, presumably cautionary foray into the Vegas shooter's mind. If your average caustic millennial isn't reading the mainstream news, he's definitely not listening to Eminem in 2020, and yet "Darkness" crumples under the burden of needing to not inspire anyone. The rapping is low-energy, the rhymes distractingly stiff or goofy -- trigger/convictions, booze/snooze -- the flow lumbering and often just bad. Where Disturbed heightened "The Sound of Silence" to Game of Thrones grandeur, Em and Royce -- perhaps building on a popular mashup -- desiccates it. The arrangement is the midpoint of Alex da Kid and "Teardrop": a smothering quicksand, meant to drag listeners into inertia and keep them there. (For all the gunshots-and-cussing masculinity of this, the piano loop reminds me most of Sarah Brightman's cover of "Scarborough Fair": delicately hypnotic.) Eminem conveys neither Slim Shady's glee nor "Love the Way You Lie"'s visceral anger, nor much but a morose slog, but give him this: It is mostly impossible to imagine someone hearing "Darkness" and buying a gun. Mostly. Why, if you're aiming not to inspire, would you musically accompany the killing-spree verse by finally moving past line two of "The Sound of Silence," to where the melody gratifyingly blooms upward? The vodka bottles in the video -- the lyrics' metaphorical gun, shown in appealing product-placement close-up -- are thankfully fake prop brands -- but then why do the close-ups at all? Most tellingly, Eminem chooses one of the few shooters with no manifesto to disseminate and few known motivations. Whether that's out of a desire to avoid spreading the truly hateful shit (which would be a recent development), to avoid the issue in general, or just to play the guy with the biggest body count, it means he gets away with lines like "you'll never find a motive, truth is I have no idea" instead of engaging with the specific kind of nihilism shooters are all too happy to tell you about -- a nihilism that is, in some part, his creation. When will this end? When enough people care what "this" is. Begrudging point for the part where, after Eminem says "magazines," the video cuts to actual magazines, like the glossy paper kind: the best trolling he's done in years, specifically of the sort of gunfuckers who were already halfway through a comment about him saying "clips." I suppose it's not the bleakest way he's made people laugh. [3]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: At one point Eminem had the capacity to make jokes. He's way funnier here, his faux-double entendres and sampha-soundalike Simon and Garfunkel interpolation adding up to something so maudlin and obvious that it's almost impossible to listen to as serious political rap. It's not even disgusting. [0]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[lauraramargosian]

Mac Miller: The legacy he left with family, friends, and fans.

Mac Miller: The legacy he left with family, friends, and fans.

There aren’t words that can justify how difficult today will be for Mac Miller’s family, friends and fans.

Miller wasn’t shy about his battles and always talked about his feelings through his music.

He always told people, if they want to know him, to listen to his jams.

In fact, in his song “Come Back to Earth,” he raps “Tell myself to hold on/I can feel my fingers slipping/In a motherfucking instant I’ll be gone.”

Billboard did an interview with Miller in August 2015. The former singer opened up about thoughts he would often face.

“Before I was super-insular all the time, just staying in a room by myself, and it’s so easy to paint this horrible picture of life when you’re not giving yourself a chance to live it. I was too worried about the legacy that I would leave behind — how I would be remembered if I died,” he shared.

However, he shouldn’t have worried. Mac did great things and left behind a legacy that will never be forgotten.

Additionally, fans who truly listend to Macs music, felt just how worried he was about his life. He had always been worried about dying because of “doing a lot of drugs,” which he attempted to dominate.

“That was my whole thing. Like, you never know, man, so I’ve got to make sure I make all this music so when I die there’s albums and albums. But now, I’m going to make sure I do some shit in life, too.” He shared. “It just eats at your mind, doing drugs every single day, every second. It’s rough on your body. That was the plan with Faces’ [closing song]. ‘Grand Finale’ was supposed to be the last song I made on earth. I don’t feel that way as much anymore.”

The rapper was only 23-years-old when he spoke to Billboard, with this in mind, it’s extremely obvious those thoughts continued on, could you imagine how difficult it would be in the limelight facing those battles?

Nevertheless, the former rapper still struggled but constantly attempted to remain “healthier.”

“I was afraid of what my life had become. But once you just breathe and relax, you come to terms with it. This is my life, I enjoy it, and it’s OK that I enjoy it. It’s OK that I’m young and rich. Let’s have fun. You’ve got to look in the mirror and tell yourself to stop being a little bitch: ‘OK, dude, you’re 23 and this is your f**king life. Go out there and do it, stop hiding,’ because that was me before… I’m not 100 percent clean, but I’m not a piece of shit anymore. I can look in the mirror and be like, ‘I look OK.'”

Today is Malcolm James McCormick’s birthday. And sharing the legacy he left is all he could have ever wanted in life, especially, if he passed onto the afterlife.

Man, let’s get real, Mac made it as a successful rapper out of Pittsburgh. That shit takes work, he was devoted and constantly exercised his creativity. Further, his passing has affected people in and out of the industry, very deeply.

Drake dedicated his song “Emotionless,” to Mac Miller during his Boston concert. And G-Eazy opened up to his fans at his Tampa Bay concert. He performed “Everything Will Be Ok,” and an image of Mac was projected onto a screen behind him. G-Eazy gave the crowd a few words of wisdom during this emotional moment.

“Appreciate the moment, be present in it, tell people you love you care about them,” before adding “Mac Miller, you changed my fucking world.” He also took to Instagram and shared his love for his friend with two different images and captions.

“@g_eazy: Performed everything will be ok for you tonight and fuckin broke down on stage. Rest peacefully bro, we miss you.”

Prior to his performance, he shared a picture of the

“@g_eazy: Completely devastated and heart-broken I’m at a loss for words mac you were like a brother to me and were there for me in the hardest of times, especially this summer. I can’t believe this is real. Please tell your friends and the people you care about you love them life is so fucking fragile. You will be missed and your music will live on forever through the millions of people you touched. Thank you for all you gave us, love you bro.”

Frankie Grande also took to Instagram and shared a story, one that truly proves Malcolm’s heart was pure love.

@frankiejgrande: I am beyond heartbroken over Malcolm’s death. He was a good friend and was wonderful to my sister. He was the reason I went to the rehabilitation center where I was detoxed safely from all of the drugs alcohol and medications I was taking when I couldn’t imagine living without them.

It was the place where I found the community of support that showed me that living life without drugs was a possibility and I would never have discovered that if it weren’t for Malcolm. I remember when I would get 30, 60, 90 days clean and Malcolm would be there with a gift and a card and words of encouragement… telling me that he knew how hard getting sober is and how impressed he was that I was succeeding.

Addiction is a TERRIBLE disease… many people are suffering from addiction like I am and many many of them are losing. Those of us who are struggling with addiction must stay strong. We must continue to work HARD on ourselves every single day and help each other.

Our disease is strong but WE ARE STRONGER and I vow to work every moment of my life to keep myself sober so that i may be there for others. This is a difficult road but YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TRUDGE IT ALONE. To anyone who needs help, help is there. you just need to have the courage to ask, which I know can be EXTREMELY difficult… but when you do I GUARANTEE support will be there. do not be ashamed if you are losing the battle against addiction, shame feeds the disease, humility defeats it. please ask for help! you are NOT ALONE! I am here… and I will continue to be here… for you…

Malcolm my friend, you will be dearly missed. and I know you will be looking down on me from heaven, proudAF for every day I live my life clean and sober… 453 days and counting… Thank you from the bottom of my heart

AA: (212) 870-3400 NA: (818) 773-9999 Suicide Prevention Lifeline: :800-273-9255”

Additionally, John Mayer opened up about the former singer.

“@Johnmayer: This was going to be Mac Miller’s year. He made a quantum leap in his music. That’s incredibly hard to do, to evolve and get better and more focused while your career is already underway. You don’t get there without a lot of work, and Mac had put the work in. I didn’t expect to play on his album the day he played some songs for me at his house, but when I heard “Small Worlds,” I gave it a short, chirpy little “yup,” which is the highest praise I can give a track. It means we don’t need to say another word, it’s going down. I grabbed the nearest guitar in the room and within a couple of hours, we had finished a tune that made me so incredibly happy to have a part in, not to mention we established a nice little friendship. He was so funny I just kind of stopped typing “LOL” back in our texts. Mac was, to me, on permanent LOL status. I gave him whatever guidance I thought I had the right to, having been through the press ringer in the past and wanting him to understand that none of that noise could ever really take a bite out of the music he was about to put out.

The last time I saw him, he was playing Hotel Cafe’ in Los Angeles for a crowd of 100 people. He was nervous, and honest about it with the audience. I thought that was so endearing, especially seeing as he would go on to play one of the best sets I’d seen in a very long time. His band was unreal. You gotta know that if you weren’t familiar with Mac Miller, you were about to be, whether you would have seen him at a festival, or a friend was going to catch a show and tell everyone they knew about it (like I did.) Mac put in the work. He made his best album and formed the band that was weeks away from becoming a breakout live sensation. Believe me when I say that. I send my love and support to everyone who knew him better because what relative little I did, I just adored.”

Damn, it hits hard to read all these messages but it just goes to show how much of a positive influence Miller was to all those in and around his life.

One Reddit one user ( yu/morriscode__) shared their personal story about Mac and his influence.

“Mac Miller is the reason why I am swimming today. I have mentioned that in a previous comment before. 2019 is the year of self care which was inspired because of Mac. He wants all of us to be happy and wants all of us to face our demons. This year I want to be positive, happy, organized and ready to face whatever faces me. Thank you Mac. For everything.”

As for me?

Mac Miller is a legend, he was open, he was honest and he tried his hardest not to let the media get him down. It’s not easy in the limelight and somehow he still managed to touch all of our lives.

There’s a song that leads to memories for each of us. Honestly, we each have some kind of deep connection as a family (fans included).

Mac Miller is the most dope as are his fans.

We miss you dude, Rest in paradise, we love you and thank you for the legacy you left behind…

I know he’s lookin’ down on us right now, smiling. Proud of the legacy he spent so much time working hard to achieve.

He’s saved lives and he is still saving lives.

Blessed be.

Mac Miller – Best Day Ever

Positive Celebrity Magazine

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Hey /r/Entrepreneur, I am Rich Clominson, from Failory, where we weekly interview failed startup owners.Today we are releasing a new section in which we will interview successful entrepreneurs, and talk about their mistakes, disadvantages and obstacles. Here is our first interview, with Eric Bandholz, founder of Beardbrand, an e-commerce dedicated to the urban beardsman which is grossing over $100K/month.Pat from Starter Story interviewed him a few weeks ago, so be sure you also check out that interview! Hope you enjoy it :)Hi Eric! What's your background, and what are you currently working on?I’ve got a fairly diverse background before starting my current business, Beardbrand. My career started off in sales and I worked for a few companies doing inside and outside sales. The one that helped me the most with my career was my job as an outside salesman for a small commercial printing company. This is where I was able to hone my knowledge and experience in the creative field.During the economic crash of 2008, I lost my job and started my journey as an entrepreneur. My first business was less of a business and more of self-employment. I joined my dad’s company and tried my hand at being an executive recruiter. Placing jobs during a recession wasn’t an easy thing to accomplish, and I hung up my cleats with no success. As I faced challenges as a recruiter I started another business on the side called Wakomo.Wakomo was my first attempt into the e-commerce space and I designed and produced vinyl wall graphics (my inspiration was Blik). I built the website, produced the graphics, and had one or two sales, but I lost confidence in myself and eventually gave that up.After a string of failures, I decided it was time to start making money again and worked as a financial advisor for about 18 months. I had success here, but I found the job unfulfilling. I had the taste of freedom and working for the ‘man’ wasn’t for me. So I quit that job to start up another business, Sovrnty.Sovrnty was to be a marketing consulting business but ended up essentially being a freelance graphic design company. I gained a few clients who helped sustain me, but I never felt like it was a proper business - I was essentially self-employed and I didn’t want to be a professional graphic designer.During this time (2010 - 2011) I started growing my beard out while still being integrated into the business community. I would get lots of comments about my beard looking like Grizzly Adams, ZZ Top, or Duck Dynasty. While these guys are cool in their own way, I didn’t feel connected to those stereotypes.I attended a beard-related event and realized there were a lot of other guys like me, guys who I called Urban Beardsmen. I wanted to unite these groups of guys and show the world that you can be stylish, professional, be a normal dude, and have a beard. At the time that was a very foreign concept, so I established Beardbrand as a way to unite Urban Beardsmen and give them the tools they needed to feel confident about their beards.Beardbrand started off through content - we had a YouTube channel, Tumblr page, and a blog. We built a small community and then leveraged some lucky press with the NY Times to launch an e-commerce business selling grooming products. The rest, as they say, is history.Currently, Beardbrand is a 7 figure business with just under 20 employees in Austin, TX. We formulate and manufacture men’s grooming products that focus on beard care, hair care, and body care. We ship out of both USA & UK to serve our customers across the world. How did you build Beardbrand initial product?Beardbrand is a bootstrapped business so keeping our costs down has always been a top priority. To do that, we started off as a retailer and tested the market with other brand’s products. If they were successful we’d develop our own and phase out the other brands.Our initial product was beard oil and I found a lot of the products on the market were a little heavy, shiny, and too fragrant. Since the product goes right under your nose, we wanted the fragrance to be subtler and from a performance standpoint it needed to be lightweight and absorb quickly into the beard. A healthy satin shine is the finish that we desired.After many formulations and versions, we settled on a formula that we believed to be class leading. The market agreed and saw great success with our beard oils.All the profits we made went directly back into the business. In the early days, we tried many different things and I always wanted for Beardbrand to be a lifestyle company, so we tried shirts, suspenders, leather products, and accessories. As much as I tried to force those products, they never got the same traction as our grooming product launches.Finally, I relented and focused on becoming a men’s grooming brand rather than an apparel company. It probably took me way longer than it should have.Beardbrand grew rapidly in the first year as we were telling a unique story at the time and reaching men who have never had a tribe before. We were one of the first companies to make a beard oil and invested heavily into educating the market. This helped us stand out and grow organically. With our unique product, brand, and sales trajectory we were able to get onto Shark Tank.Shark Tank helped give us exposure to a large audience and accelerated our growth path. I think we would have been able to get to where we are now without that experience, but I’m very grateful and lucky to have appeared on the show. We still get minor bumps from the reruns on CNBC. Which are your marketing strategies to grow your business?At each stage of our business, we employed different marketing tactics based on the market and our cash flows. Early in the business, when we were cash poor, we spent a lot of time in the world of content. That meant tons of time on social media, YouTube, Tumblr, and Reddit. We tried to provide as much value to the community as possible and deliver world-class customer experience.As we generated more cash, we started dipping our toes into paid marketing channels. Our early investments were primarily focused on remarketing tools as well as PR. We also did a bit of influencer marketing, but never paid to have our products endorsed. We only want authentic connections with our brand and products.We continued to grow and have invested more into paid marketing through Facebook and Google. We’ve seen some success there, but we still aren’t at the level that I think our brand should be at. So, with the moderate success in paid, we’ve decided to focus on what we do best - content.Our top focus has been cranking out quality videos on YouTube daily, in-depth and thorough blog articles, and well-organized email marketing campaigns. Pair that with unique social media posts, and we feel we have something that stands out in a crowded market. What were the biggest challenges you faced and obstacles you overcame?I’ve been passionate about our business, our products, and the community from day #1, however when building the business I never anticipated what it meant to be a leader of an organization. For the longest time, I put off managing duties with the hope that our hires would just get it.Of course, they didn’t (no fault to them), and it lead to several headaches. After about 3 years we finally understood that for the business to grow we needed to become better managers.We implemented the techniques from Traction which helped us set KPIs, improve our hiring process, and maintain our vision. Which are your greatest disadvantages?I’m an entrepreneur in the purest sense. A lot of people will always joke about the “ideas guy” and that person is me. It’s very valuable in the sense that it allows us to overcome challenges creatively, but it’s also a pretty big hindrance.I frequently get bored and move on to the next idea. This has led to (and will probably continue to) confuse the team with the direction. Having quarterly strategy sessions has helped take away my shiny ball syndrome, but it’s still something I struggle with every single day. During the process of building & growing Beardbrand, which were the worst mistakes you committed?In the early days, we gave our team a lot of freedom without many guidelines, accountability, or metrics. Subsequently, it was challenging for them to know if they were being successful in their role and they didn’t have all the information they needed to make appropriate decisions.One season we made investments into inventory that would take 24 months to clear through. Fortunately for us, the product isn’t perishable and we’re able to work through it, but it’s not fun having that much capital in inventory that won’t move for a long time.Other challenges came in the form of our proofing process (or lack of one). We’ve had several products that needed to be destroyed, recalled, or re-produced because labels were wrong. After about 5 years and tens of thousands of dollars of loss, we’ve finally made it a top priority to resolve and mistakes have dropped dramatically. If you had the chance of doing only one thing differently, what would it be?I think we should have given more consideration to our product launch strategy and the number of fragrances we carry. The variety we provide is nice, but operationally it slows down our ability to scale and keep things in stock. It’s a double-edged sword that gives us a competitive advantage in some sense so it makes sense to keep it. It would also erode some of the trust we’ve built up with our customers if we decided to kill a large part of our offerings. At the time we made those decisions it seemed to be a smart idea. Apart from mistakes, what are other sources of learning you would recommend for entrepreneurs who are just starting?I’m a big fan of networking events and connecting with other entrepreneurs. That’s how I learn the best. I just got back from E-commerce Fuel Live and have plans to attend several other conferences of various focuses. Everything from YouTube to e-commerce, to small mastermind style events. Where can we go to learn more?Be sure you check out Beardbrand website. You can also follow us on our social media:YouTubeInstagramMy TwitterMy Instagram Original interview published at http://failory.com/mistakes/beardbrand

[heir-conditioning]

a kind anon asked me about my yung venuz sadstuck headcanons so guess what kids that’s what you’re getting today

SO. yv. during gun godz, you’re playing as yv (to my knowledge this has been confirmed) and moving up through the current gun god’s mansion place thing, and the end of the game, you kill the current gun god and assume his position as the true OG king of Venus. but this begs the question, what was yv doing before he was ruling Venus? it couldn’t be as simple as fuckin bitches and gettin moni, as in character as that is for him.

now. its been a pretty consistent headcanon throughout the NT fandom as far as I can tell (thanks to the critical chair mod) that every planet has its own gun god, so this begged the question to me, why doesn’t earth have one? I forget exactly how I came to this headcanon, but based on earth having all sort of symbolic imagery based on basic shapes that earth was more or less sort of a burial ground for gun gods, a place where they could leave their bodies and have their powers sort of bleed out naturally without causing any significant damage to the universe. because gun gods are pretty fuckin powerful my dude. but back on point, gun gods of all planets use earth as their final resting place, and their influence on the planet shows through in human society and how we interpret/create specific symbolism for things. its just how the balance works, and the previous god of Venus understood that very well.

for clarification’s sake, the previous god of Venus was NOT the triangle you fight at the end of Gun Godz.

someone (i think on reddit??) pointed out that it’d be weird if the final boss of Gun Godz was YV, because he’s, well. a gun god! he shouldn’t have been that easy to beat or let alone kill. so the natural conclusion to take from this is that it wasn’t YV, and was instead an usurper to the Venusian throne--the throne that was rightfully YV’s when he became of age--as well as the title of Gun God. but since the usurper didn’t have the bloodright, he couldn’t really become a gun god, and could only sap what power he could from the previous Gun God and use it as his own after he imprisoned her on earth.

yes, her. the previous Gun God and queen of Venus was YV’s mother--we know her through the Gun Godz soundtrack by her rap name “Moist Mother”.

Moist Mother, or Super Bass Bayonetta as I call her, was a character that sure didn’t need to get fleshed out but heck if I didn’t do it anyway. she is a very powerful Gun God, being one of the few to be able to create the Platinum Weapons (her signature being the Platinum Crossbow) and she had a power over Venus’ water system, alluding to her rap name. before the coup, venus used to be a lot more lush, but after her imprisonment on earth all of Venus’ water went underground, creating the desert on it’s surface. venus’ population had to turn subterranean after the fact, save for YV’s mansion, because no one other than a gun god could live on the surface.

now, the usurper knew he couldn’t kill Moist Mother, because she was just too powerful. imprisoning her on earth and then sending her son to jail was about the best he could do. and he did! even got the IDPD in on it to make it look legit. YV, at this point not able to create golden weapons was incarcerated, and Moist Mother was imprisoned on earth in its past (they’re interdimensional police guys this isnt that much of a stretch) what was basically a life sentence. however, this made a lasting after effect on earth from that point on; Moist Mother being still very much alive and also with an affinity over water created a dangerous psuedo-wormhole in the area of the ocean she was imprisoned in. we know this area as the Bermuda Triangle, and she’s still trapped in there by the time the nuclear apocalypse happens because TIME TRAVEL’S FUCKIN WEIRD

but. yv. yv already didn’t trust cops because no gun god trusts the cops and he does what his mam says like a Good Boy(TM) but after his time in jail he’s been hardened and ready to fight. and we know the story of gun godz at this point, yv breaks out of venus jail, fights his way to the top, and kills the bitch what nearly ruined his life. to add insult to injury, YV doesn’t let the usurper die out on earth, but instead throws him into space where he turns into the asteroid belt. YV takes up the throne of Venus and picks up where his mama left off, and the IDPD can’t do much about this or else they out themselves as the ones who left this whole coup happen in the first place

SO YEAH THATS. about the gist of it i think!! YV is a big momma’s boy and pushed into adulthood given an unfortunate set of time travel circumstances that gotta get fixed