#at least the comics explained how it happened. he lost control of his powers

[isleofdarkness]

Who is legion and what is their story? Also what are they from?

Legion, AKA David Haller and at least one thousand other alters, is the son of Charles Xavier and one of the few beings more powerful than Charles Xavier- he's barely less powerful than the Phoenix. It would win, but it would be a brutal fight because this system does not go down easy and killing them is dang near impossible. There are so many alters with so many different abilities that there's really no way to rank the system on a power scale, but Jack alone is more powerful than David's father and I'm willing to bet that Styx is, too. That would put those two at a heavier level five, maybe even a light level six. David is confirmed to be a heavy level five, some sources put him at as much as a moderate-to-heavy level six. That would put him at the same level as Jean Grey, possibly even more powerful.

There was never any reason given for David having DID so I'm headcanoning he had a lot of traumatic experiences as a telepath when he was little, made worse by his mother having no powers and his father, who would have understood, not knowing he existed. By the time Charles learned he existed (I'm using the X Men Evolution story for David,) he couldn't control his powers and had lost control in some very dangerous ways. Jack (he's supposed to be an "evil" alter but, because there's no such thing, I have him as a persecutor-protector and a nineteen-year-old punk with a lot of anger) had "kidnapped" David and that's when Charles was called. Jack tricked Charles into making David go dormant for a while because he thought the system needed protecting and that David couldn't protect them like Jack. Jack was eventually captured by the MRD, who used a few extremely dirty tricks, and kept as a mutant test subject for years, until David came back and managed to help them all escape. Jack did need to kill many people to get them out of there, but they needed to. Because the system blamed Xavier for what happened, Jack went after Xavier and would have won if Xavier hadn't acknowledged his anger as valid and explained "but not excused" his absence in David's life. The system joined Xavier for protection because the MRD was still after them, and eventually Xavier got through to them and started helping all of them.

The system is from X Men comics and I'm using the version of their story from both X Men Evolution (up to the MRD part) and from the movies (after the MRD part up to them trying to kill Xavier.)

Currently David is twenty-nine (he was sixteen when Charles learned of his existence) and doing very well. Jack has found an outlet for his anger as the leader of a punk band and Styx has taken a lot off of his shoulders by taking over as the main protector of the system. Most of the nameless ones (alters who hadn't revealed their names and instead used numbers) feel secure enough that they've let the others know their names and what they are (118 is a girl named Charlotte, she's five and she loves the colour magenta and is very artistic.) Forge made them special inhibitor wristbands and headbands (collars are a massive trigger for them) so that they don't feel like they're still with the MRD, and they're all getting training on how to work together to control their powers.

They are all very happy and healthy and they all feel safe.

[m1st1x]

RUIN Theory! - Escape Plans

Spoilers for all of the RUIN dlc. Buckle up, I’m about to make a controversial theory that no one here will be happy about. …yay. You might’ve heard someone else mention the idea, but I am ready to try and sell it to you.

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Ok, I want you to hear me out. What if Security Breach never happened? The idea was first planted into my head by Matpat during on of the GTLive play throughs of RUIN, and since then, a few connections have been made. I just want to share what I think could make this theory make sense.

So first, I decided to look at the Glamrock’s shattered and ruined designs to compare, and I noticed a few little details. One is that Freddy still has the present. Now this could be because he’s the prototype, but I’m not going to immediately write it off because of that. Another thing that everyone noticed is Roxy’s face—it’s completely different, and it has those ports which I assumed are how the eyes attach (but even then, how would they rotate properly? It doesn’t really make sense). Thirdly, Monty didn’t have a sternum piece before RUIN. In Security Breach, there’s just a hole there. And, his tail wires are longer in RUIN, not to mention the fact that they’re bound with cable ties. Given how he acts, I don’t think he would have the insight to install one himself. He also wouldn’t be able to reach back there to tie all of those messy wires up, especially not with how good it looks. So unless someone came down there to fix some of them, I can’t see how they would end up like that. Chica doesn’t seem to have any discrepancies though—there’s nothing that was lost that she now has from what I can see. (Side note: I noticed Monty has a gold tooth, which reminded me of Foxy, specifically the Golden AR plush whose description was “I guess he replaced more than his teeth.” It just struck me as odd.)

Then I looked at and thought about the comic pages. They’re all in fairly random places, but the page with the Burntrap ending is down in one of the rooms with the burners. That’s odd, right? How would Gregory have gotten down there to drop it off? How would he have known about both Burntrap and the Blob? And why is that ending not shown as comic pages in Security Breach? (Who collected those pages and put them together?)

Then I had an idea. People pretty much agree that Vanessa is Vanny, and the theory that Gregory is GGY, or Dr. Rabbit, is out there even if we don’t have too much information to back it. This would mean both are under Glitchtrap’s control, or are at least on his side. What if Gregory (or the Crying Child, if you’ll accept that theory) drew those while being stuck in the Pizzaplex? Like the kind parts of him broke through, whether that be because of a spirit or not, and he sort of fantasized. I know it sounds like a stretch, but hold on. Kids fantasize, especially kids that are being abused. They make up scenarios where they do things that they aren’t able to do, and sometimes the ideas are put onto paper. I mean Gregory has got to have seen all the animatronics while he’s there, and he’s probably got the processing power to figure out how the animatronics would break when faced with certain factors, even if he wasn’t completely right or knowing of how they all looked underneath their suit. He’d also probably be pretty angry at the whole place, except maybe that one character that he really liked for whatever reason—Freddy. He would even know about the animatronic in the basement, which explains why he said that it was trapped down there for a long time and why he knew about the MXES security program. He could’ve even been partially behind it. He’s also probably seen the Blob and Burntrap during his time there, and I’d imagine he hates Burntrap more than most. He knows what he’s done, who he was made by, and/or what he was made for. He’d probably have some beef, so it would make sense why that ending would look better than the others. It’s the one he wants to happen the most. All the animatronics are shattered, the building collapses, and Burntrap dies.

I can hear the questions—but what about the bad endings? Why would Gregory fantasize about those? You have to remember, he’s not stupid (and is he’s a robot, he would be more logical anyways). He would know that Vanny would be sent to find him if he just ran, maybe it even happened once or twice already, and he would know the map of the building, so he’d know the best door to leave from. The Burntrap ending is the only one where we don’t see them actually leave, so they might’ve not even made it in that scenario. It is only that—a scenario. A stupid idea, but it could happen. And even if that isn’t the case, our minds go down bad paths all the time, even if we don’t want them to.

Maybe one of those comics was a plan to try and escape, but something else ultimately ended up happening. Vanessa is with him in the cutout/Brazil ending, so they could’ve escaped together. Maybe with the help of Helpy. It would probably be the most similar to the Princess Quest ending then, with Gregory helping Vanessa snap out of it. This theory would even make sense for why he dropped the elevator (you know, if he was the one who dropped it). “We can’t risk being followed,” he says. That could be talking about him, Vanessa, and/or Charlie/Elizabeth if they’re in the same body, and I understand why he would do anything—even sacrifice a friend—to not go back. To not be found again. The missing posters could’ve been put up by the one controlling (or trying to control) them, which would force them to stay in hiding, leaving Cassie wondering where he went. I’m not sure how they became friends in the first place, but my best guess is that Cassie visited the Plex often, Roxy says that he came for her birthday twice, and they met at some point.

For the Glamrock Freddy backpack near the MXES machine, I believe it’s Gregory’s. He might’ve dropped it on his haste to get out of there, or couldn’t come back to get it when the plan was in motion. And something I did find odd during the normal ending is that the speaker seems to cut out. It has a ringing sound to cut in, and that same noise occurs before Gregory says “it’s not your fault,” and drops the elevator. A popular theory is that it was that animatronic in the basement the whole time, which although I’m not completely with, I feel like it could have some plausibility.

EDIT: there’s “He was our superstar” in yellow graffiti in the beginning, which I feel could either be referencing Gregory, Glamrock Freddy, or even Glamrock Bonnie.

EDIT II: when you’re in the daycare attendant’s room in AR, you can see Roxy, Chica, and Monty in a playhouse, with Roxy being front and center. Sun and Moon sit on a table on opposite sides, kind of overlooking the scene. Moon looks a bit ostracized though, and Freddy is absent from what I’ve seen. The glitch Eclipse/Sun is on the ceiling. Could this be a notion to Freddy being not very liked by the other animatronics, or him not being under the glitch’s hold? It might explain why the prototype doesn’t even show up in AR mode.

EDIT III: I forgot to even mention Gregory’s attitude in the games. He HATES the animatronics, and I feel there’s less fear than there should be. He’s definitely scared for his life, but that isn’t really shown in his actions. He shatters all three without remorse, only caring about Freddy. Meanwhile, Cassie is nice and sympathetic towards them.

EDIT IV: I just realized that the backpack is next to a hole in the wall that Gregory could’ve definitely fit in.

EDIT V: Monty’s endo coloring. In the shattered design, his endo is all this dark grey color, but in the RUIN design, parts of it—namely his jaw and chest—are tan colored. It isn’t the right color for rust, and there aren’t any parts that color in the other animatronics. (You can see the jaw hinge in shattered Monty. It’s definitely that grey, not bronze.)

[spongebobafettywap]

Hhh I don't like the new origin story personally. It's supposed to explain everything, make complete sense and be all in the feels but... It doesn't ? At all ?? At least not for me.

The timeline is now more broken from all the continuity errors : Nightcrawler's still officially 30-35 years old while Destiny is stated to be born in the 1850's-1860's cuz the writers really hammered in on the "Irene Adler from Sherlock Holmes" shtick. We got to see her in Immortal X-Men post WWII looking her age, as in old with white hair and wrinkles, cuz she doesn't slowly age like Mystique at all (it's one of the most pivotal part about their dynamic and relationship of Immortal vs Mortal), so ? Was Nightcrawler born before both WW ?? When Margali herself wasn't even around yet since her father was a young soldier still during the wars (who am I kidding the writer for this comic hates Margali judging by how he straight up killed her in his last one shot) ??? Destiny shouldn't look or be younger than 90 years old by the time Kurt was born (he was 21 in the 1980 annual) so why is the comic acting like she's still in her 20's-40's when she supposedly had him ??

Nightcrawler is supposed to be made from like what ? 50% of Destiny's DNA (unaltered and full on hers) + 30% of Mystique's + 10% of Baron Wagner's (an old infertile human...) + 10% of Azazel's ? Okay so why the H did he end up looking like a (+)70% Azazel baby when none of his other children ended up like that with the usual 50% ratio ??? From all his powers coming from him (because they retconned the way Mystique's were and always worked meaning Kurt doesn't actually have anything from her on that aspect), his appearance both as a mutant and when depowered (Some of Azazel's kids are just blue and depowered Nightcrawler is the human disguise Azazel uses without a beard...), his daughter TJ having a retractable tail like Azazel to Sinister's chimera experiments (splicing different mutants's DNA together to make a new one) which had Kurt's DNA mixed with two other mutants (Rachael and Ajax) resulting in Cardinal, who just looks like Azazel with red hair and red eyes, there's a fundamental lack of any "Destiny" in him. It doesn't help that Sinister (guy who makes entire genealogical trees of everyone as a flex) now has a longtime history of going against Destiny so you bet your ass he would have ran his DNA bank computer looking for any descendants of hers, saw a good 50% on Kurt and exploited that ratio to the ground for his splicing experiments. (Kurt is now the og spliced baby too)

And like we really lost something important here in the tone. Because no matter how you looked at the one from Lobdell or the one from Austen (a continuation of and addition to Lobdell's technically), there was a deep layer of tragedy to Nightcrawler's origins and you couldn't help asking yourself if things couldn't have been different for both Mystique and him if she wasn't in such a precarious situation to begin with when she had him (knew this would have happened at all) or if she just tried harder to keep him. That's why the Age of Apocalypse version of them is interesting, this is why the What-if where she raised him from birth with Destiny and Rogue was good addition. It showed that there WAS an alternative... But it wasn't in the cards he got. It was beyond either his or Mystique's control and it was just the usual uncertainty of life being at play. You felt bad for Kurt and even sympathetic for Mystique because she was somewhat a victim of circumstances. It was a tragedy because life back then was unpredictable for both of them

Not here. Mystique and Destiny planned everything, worked years for it to go exactly as intended, went to very specific terrible people for it, picked exactly what they wanted for Nightcrawler (the "child they always wanted") to look like... And on the first notice/freak ass future vision, just unceremoniously abandoned him. After all of that. Did Destiny just never check for the immediate future of them both raising the baby during the entire pregnancy ? Or noticed how her diaries never mentioned him once but did for Rogue many many times ? Then, they felt SO guilty about it that, instead of trying to make the life they forced upon him be slightly better in any way shape or form, they chose to FORGET about it to live their current lives with this adoptive daughter of theirs in peace of mind. Mystique, for some wtf reason, decided to keep the knowledge of her biological ties to Nightcrawler and has since then used it against him whenever. Destiny, the one who wanted this kid in the first place and was the reason he was suddenly abandoned because they just "could never ever possibly raise him due to VISION" (*points to the What-if story where they did raise him and she was pretty much the reason why Kurt died because she did jack and didn't even care that he died*), chose to erase everything. Gg to the one who started it all.

Nightcrawler's origins isn't a tragic story anymore. It's a comedy : the set up ? payoff ? All there. The punchline? The writer wants us to sympathize with Mystique and Destiny in these new origins like the other ones did for Mystique. They want us to sympathize with selfish lazy cowards, who've lived consequence free of the child abandonment they committed and even abandoned said child again in that weird event with Sinister this year, all in a heartbeat. Because Mystique suddenly remembered that she "cared" since that kid was related to her lover... Instead of caring because he was HER KID even with the memory erasure (that factor never stopped her from raising and loving him in those other realities)

So Kurt now : 1) is the closest thing to an IVF baby genetically profiled to be a certain way by the same parents who abandoned him at birth in a place where he was eventually found... Near death. 2) has not one, not two, but 3 irredeemable deadbeat parents (+ one straight up dead) and we now have to like two of them every time they'll get shoved into any stories that includes him (yes from the way this one-shot ended, he's an inclusion, not a main character) and 3) has no actual free will of his own. His argument with Azazel about how much fate/destiny was at play in Kurt's life when they had their fight in Heaven? Azazel was right. It's just that Nightcrawler's life was under someone else's thumb than his, Mystique and Destiny from the very start sure but also Charles since he apparently knew everything ALL ALONG being the one who erased their memories when they asked him to... The very guy that rescued Kurt from a mob, got him in the X-Men, had him face these two ladies time and time again, was there when he wanted to investigate Mystique after she name dropped Margali (never got answered still) and was his confident after the whole Azazel debacle. That guy

I just can't, man

Well yeah but to be fair Kurt's age has always been a problem given that he was originally written to be born just a few years after WWII. Best resolution I have for this problem with his age that I am amazed isn't official canon yet is just make him one of the many ageless mutants, I don't see WHY that's out of the question given Azazel and Mystique's nature.

lol wow gotta love how much contempt X-men writers have for Margali, its not enough to make her a Supervillain they also have to kill her off whenever they get the chance, she's only the only remotely healthy parental relationship Kurt has had with a person who is still alive why even try to write her properly?

The retcon with how he's made is so messy, its like okay they want to make it so Mystique and Destiny are his parents but then they realised they can't exactly just remove Azazel from the picture so now they had to make a version of having their cake and eating it too. So Mystique and Azazel had a baby together but then Mystique put that baby into Destiny. That's how I understand it, I know apparently they tried to factor Baron Wagner into it when its just like wow damn who was even asking for that irrelevant character to be involved? The actual origin makes little sense given that Kurt as you said inherited nothing from Destiny (almost as if her being his mother was a stupid idea or something!)

But you are right now instead of it being a love affair between Azazel and Mystique that ended up exposing her as a mutant due to a mutant child and having her run out of town. Now its some really convoluted origin to Nightcrawler, him being a child of like 3 parental figures and apparently of the 3 only Azazel even remotely cared about him. Which is just you know really amazing writing for all the people who demanded Mystique and Destiny be both his parents lol great job now they both look like even worse parents given they had a kid together and they opted to abandon him for no real reason.

See when it was Mystique on the run it at least made some kind of sense she abandoned him in a Moses basket as her life was too dangerous to involve a baby in and she had no one else with her at the time, now its just like "oh yeah you know me and my partner already had an adopted child but we also had a biological one that we gave up for no reason". It's also funny how Destiny wanted this child but then she doesn't have like any interaction with him or concern over his well being at all in all her years of existing as a character.

I don't like this origin much either as it really does play more like a comedic parody of comic origins than anything actually serious, but the one good thing about it is the hardcore Destiny fans didn't get it their way either.

[soul-dwelling]

But yeah reading fire force weakly would kinda suck, not just because of the standard problems of weekly shows but also because for how often it has fake outs that get revealed as nothint, status quo shake ups that go nowhere or people just doing nothing and jumping from one arc to the next. Like whats the point of Shinras 3month time skip, or Inca linking with him and riding to the past or teasing that Shinra hurt Iris very much but nah nothing just a segway for a power reveal

I can’t act like reading Fire Force weekly was the worst experience I had weekly…but the anxiety of it each week, inching closer to closer to that stupid prequel reveal, was miserable.

But I also was reading that final arc in a months-long time period where I lost a job and was mourning a parent dying. So, yeah, Fire Force weekly sucked, but so did losing a job and so much more did losing a parent. 

(And yes, Shinra’s “I’ll just make death mean less!” hit in the wrong way when I was losing a parent, so, no, that idiotic message was so not fucking needed when I was and am still mourning that loss. I should acknowledge all of this in case it has been influencing my response to Fire Force--but goddamn it, it’s not like that wouldn’t be the feeling for other people who have, will, or are mourning a loss while reading that comic.) 

Time skips and the status quo shifts: yeah, it was a lot of nothing. 

But, forgive my oversimplification, I struggle to think of any time skip that worked. Most time skips exist to set up a mystery--then to work backwards to slowly answer answers that you might as well have just revealed in chronological order instead of skipping forward. That’s why the most that we tend to get in time skips is that characters get more powerful, alliances change for the sake of it, and the creator gets to end a story quicker. 

About the only good time skip is in One Piece. You give the characters a believable reason to be more powerful. The amount of time skipped is the exact same as the amount of months in publishing since we last saw these characters. Any alliance changes are logical or explained as soon as they happen so that you have little need to back-fill the story. And, because Oda is going to Oda, it didn’t shave off any time for him to finish this freaking story already, he’s still not done!

At least we saw the world itself despise Shinra after his three-month time skip--but that was mostly after he put down Doppel!Raffles III. And there is so much more that should have happened to show how bad it got for Shinra. Show us what his doppel was up to in public. If he did hit Iris, really show Maki and others just flat-out hating Shinra before they realize he was not himself. Actually show that the character dynamics changed, don’t just excuse it with a (weirdly toxic masculine) remark by Akitaru that they all just thought Shinra was going through a teen rebellious phase. 

Inca linking with him: it’s even worse when I still have no idea where Inca went. She went with Shinra to the past…and then what? Was someone auto-piloting her body? Did her doppel control her body? How did the Clads manage her while she was out of it? Or, what changed for her that then changed the Clads? Did she come back with info that helped the Clads speed up their work to destroy the Earth? Was she just zapped to where Sumire was so that they and the Evangelist could finish the last steps to destroy the world? 

(My friend and I already have a plan for how to re-write what Inca was up to after she and Shinra saw the world 250 years ago.)

[isfjmel-phleg]

Random comic issues from the local antique store: an overview, part 5/5

Superman: The Man of Steel #102 (July 2000). This is part three of a four-parter, so nothing is going to make much sense. I've skimmed a digital version of this one (and others in this storyline) before while researching that post about Kon and Clark's relationship that I am Totally Going To Get To Someday, but I was concentrating more on interactions and characters than plot. So let's figure this out.

This storyline is called "Critical Condition." Like most Superman plots, it's split across multiple titles released around the same time, which allows for whole stories to be told more quickly, rather than having to wait from month to month for the next installment.

Apparently the gist is that Superman is dying (...again, occupational hazard, I guess) due to something inside of him attacking his body. The treatment is to have The Atom shrink down Steel, Supergirl, and Superboy and send them inside the body to put a stop to whatever this thing is. Very Magic School Bus, but with Fighting.

They have been battling weird creatures, and it has just been revealed to the audience that this Steel is not actually John Henry Irons, who has just shown up at the lab where all this is happening. Or something like that. So Part 3 begins...

John Henry Irons explains how someone knocked him out and stole his Steel suit. Using another suit, he gets shrunk and sets out to find his unsuspecting team and the imposter before it's too late. No one has heard from Supergirl and Superboy, and everything is very up in the air and dangerous.

Meanwhile, Supergirl (Linda Danvers) is weakened after a fight and separated from the others, and Kon and not!Steel are nearing the stomach, which has "an atomic fire" in it and are arguing about what to do before it absorbs them when some weird glowing organs pull them away goodness knows where.

The body starts to convulse, which breaks the pull of the glowing things and sends not!Steel and Kon into free fall toward an unidentified other area.

Irons meanwhile has reached the heart (which has at least eight chambers because Kryptonian biology). He spots the glowing organs heading toward the brain. The body convulses again, and Superman's heat vision involuntarily goes off. The team in the lab has no idea how to control it, but it eventually stops.

Kon and not!Steel are in the lungs now, and Kon owns up to something he's been hiding: he has lost his powers.

(This comes after the Sins of Youth storyline from Young Justice 1998, in which Kon is temporarily aged up, only to lose his powers when he's restored to his proper age. He's been having to learn workarounds to compensate for this...disability of sorts? while trying to process grief and possibly some depression after the death of his former girlfriend Tana. It's been rough.)

Not!Steel seems pleased to learn this? And that's when Kon figures it out.

(...wait, where's his earring? it's completely absent for the whole issue)

Not!Steel announces his intentions to kill Superman, the real Steel, Supergirl, and Superboy: "Fate ordained that you get canceled first, kid."

On that note, we cut to Lois Lane "in a distant place seldom visited by human beings," and Deathstroke??? is there too for some reason, with a woman that he's yelling at for teleporting them there. I'm not sure what's going on here. Lois suggests to the woman that she use her power (whatever it is) to zap Deathstroke away from them. It works. Apparently the woman previously contacted Lois and needs her for something and claims she has information that can save Superman.

Not!Steel is trying to kill Kon, who is doing his darnedest to put up a fight, when Irons finally catches up to them. He starts to attack not!Steel. Linda then shows up, blazing heat vision and assuming that Irons is some unidentified enemy beating up on her teammate. Kon sets her straight, but in the meantime, not!Steel escapes.

The newly reunited team compare notes.

But Irons has a plan.

I would like you to appreciate Kon's reaction to being handed a laser cannon.

Back at the lab, Lois arrives, toting the woman (now looking rather sheepish) with her. The stranger's name is Encantadora, and she knows what's killing Superman. She apparently was hired to transfer a nanobot to him with a kiss. No wonder Lois is ticked. The nanobot contains a tiny amount of kryptonite intended to spread disease through the whole body while moving constantly to avoid detection. And Linda and Kon seem to have located it, or maybe are getting close.

Encantadora tries to defend herself by saying it was just a job that she needed and she never intended it to come to this. Lois isn't having any of it. And that's when Deathstroke shows up, ready to attack Encantadora and ensure that their "mutual employer," whoever that is, gets "to see Superman dead."

TO BE CONTINUED!!!

Wow, that was a weird plot. But what little we get of Kon puts him in an interesting light. He's not doing his typical showboating much or exhibiting his usual immaturity. Instead, he's being open about his vulnerability and determined not to let Clark down. Issues of Kon's solo and Young Justice and Superman released pretty recently to this issue showed a growing closeness between Kon and Clark, so this character development is a natural progression of that. Kon's had to grow up a lot lately, both literally and figuratively, and that's evident here. The final part of this storyline will have him be ready to die to save Clark. And of course it all works out, but...yikes.

[boom-fanfic-a-latta]

Aight Permakuma AU Bits:

*Inspired by the thing about the ladybug comic by Nathanael (am I spelling his name right?) and Marc. I remember something about them writing that Evillustrator and Reverser in their comic joined the good guys after being deakumatized or something? If I'm remembering correctly. Though in this AU they probably act a bit too... unstable so Ladybug tells them to stop djdjdjdnd (since in this AU they also still act like how they did as an akuma for the most part. a bit more self-control but... yeah)

*probably takes a while for some of them (especially the kids) to really adapt to the changes so expect Ladybug to have to show up at the school every once in a while in order to get things under control and reverse damage.

*the miraculous transformations still look the same and that's about the most normal the kids who got akumatized will probably ever get to look ever again sndndndndnmd (poor things)

*Horrificator and Stoneheart. Big monster couple <3

*Chloe has probably utilized Sabrina's powers as Vanisher for stuff

*Idk how the Antibug powers would work since iirc her powers also operated on a timer in the episode but she didn't have like an akuma kwami so idk how that'd work.

*the akumatized version of the miraculous transformations (Rena Rage, Shell Shock, Queen Wasp, I guess Cat Blanc too but he only appears in the future and it gets prevented-) stick but only while they are using the miraculous (so for example: Lady WiFi still becomes Rena Rouge but post-Heroes' Day is stuck being Rena Rage when she transforms)

*idk how I'll handle Chloe but I feel like she'd be too pissed at Hawk Moth for turning Paris into an eyesore to want to work with him fnfnfnfnnfnfnfnfnfn especially if he still turns her parents into Heart Hunter because now her parents are a giant floating two-faced head forever and it's all his fault-

*Gamer and Robustus are the most epic duo of all time we stan them <3

*Natalie has to come up with an excuse for Catalyst having happened to explain why the heck she looks Like That now djdndndndndnnddn

*Gorizilla probably just carries Adrien to school every day like that. Adrien gets used to it.

*Reflekta and Princess Fragrance are the swag evil couple we all needed

*The same rules do not apply to sentimonsters so Feast is still gone after that and sadly Senti-bug still dies

*Marinette's poor uncle having to explain to his customers (he had a restaurant right?-) why he's turned into a Creature-

*pretty much any character who gets akumatized and doesn't live in Paris tbh. At least for a while until people just go "Aw man you went to france didn't you?"

*Manon has lost her doll privileges :(

👀

[sonicboomseason3]

Ok so ik that rol isn't canon to the show, and that the ds games are mostly canon, BUT. Do you have a preference for their lore/stories? Basically, shattered crystal vs rol: which is ur preferred take as a prequel? I love the chaos crystals from rol and I don't like the lost crystal of power from shattered crystal, so I prefer rol for that reason. I think shadow was handled much better in shattered crystal tho, but the japanese dub of rol is virtually identically to shattered crystal wrt shadow's characterization (in the jpn dub, shadow was under lyric's control a la shattered crystal, and that's why he shows up to fight sonic & tails; sorry for mansplaining if u know this already), soooo like yea the jpn dub of rol is prolly my overall fave take on the lyric/prequel debacle. Curious 2 hear ur thoughts. Bc I've got a billion of them.

haha yes im aware that the japanese dub of rol added mind control to shadows situation! (though you said it was shattered crystal in your ask, which im assuming was a typo) digressing a bit here but i hear that overall the jpn version of all sonic media is much better at portraying its characters even with the tonal shift that happened between the 00s and 10s so afaik theres also a lot less discourse about the characters being written "incorrectly" over on the jpn side of the fanbase, and by extension theres a difference between how jp fans and eng fans see the charas but anyway back to boom. keep in mind that i own neither a wiiu nor a 3ds so i wouldnt be able to play either game even if i wanted to, and therefore im strictly going off of the cutscenes that ive watched and hoping that there isnt anything in the levels themselves that i may have missed.

my overall thoughts concerning rise of lyric and shattered crystal can be summed up as this: shattered crystal is the better game, but rol is by far more ambitious. i didnt... really catch any significant lore details in shattered crystal at all tbh? at least, not in the game itself - the prequel comic explains a little bit on what amys doing at the beginning of the game and what lyrics plans are, but at the same time... not really? the comic kind of just hops around from the ancients to shadow to amy to fill in the gaps that the game itself doesnt answer. and i wouldnt really call much of it very interesting, like lyric is looking for the crystal shards because he wants ultimate power? sorry not sorry but thats incredibly boring. also what was he doing during the time between the shattering of the lost crystal and the present day? how is he even still alive? shattered crystal just doesnt go very deep lore-wise. this isnt to say i dont like it because i do and im slightly bitter that its position as the followup to rol made it so hard for people to give it a chance. im not saying its the best game ever or anything, but the gameplay looks very fun and shadows role makes me smile

as for rol....... oh GOD. even without experiencing the infamous glitches in the gameplay, the cutscenes are so awkward and the script is executed so poorly that its hard to care much about whats actually happening BUT i do see. i see the vision. the vision of its lore, i mean. i dont care much about the difference between the chaos crystals and the lost crystal of power (imo the crystals themselves are the least interesting thing about their universe lol) but like i said at the beginning rol seemed to be going for something while shattered crystal wasnt. for one, i think lyrics motivations in rol are better, since we have that one scene that goes into his backstory and why he hates organic life so much. unfortunately, however, i dont think they did the concept justice, because there was so much more they couldve done with that - he couldve been an amazing narrative foil to sonic (someone who was slowly warming up to people throughout the course of the game, as opposed to someone who felt wronged by others and wanted to exterminate everyone) and his view that technology was the only thing to be trusted couldve been challenged when MAIA betrayed him. that just one example of how i consider rol to be a giant sack of wasted potential but if i were to go into every single thought i had watching the cutscenes, id crash everyones dashes, so ill save that for another time. oh and obligatory mention of shadow here, the way they included him in this game sucks, you could take him out and nothing would change, i hate it as much as the next guy but also its genuinely kinda funny that hes just there. did anyone else notice that how important he is in the boom games is sorta the inverse of metal sonics own role? when one has an effect on the plot, the other is there just to be there and fucks off immediately afterwards. there can only ever be one active hedgehog nemesis at any given time which is the real reason the s2 finale went down the way it did

so to finally answer your question, i like shattered crystals story better but my favorite version of boom lore is what rol COULD HAVE been if it hadnt been so poorly made. but to tell you the truth i dont think that hard about how to connect the games to the show? im not saying id never include mentions of lyric in my continuation but the show feels so disconnected from the games (naturally, since they were completely separate projects) that its hard for me to consider either one of them as an official prequel. much love to everyone who puts in the effort to connect them though

[staroflightning]

TV Shade 🤝 Comics Shade

Accidentally sending a loved one to the Shadowlands and feeling guilty about it

[cloudraker]

Somehow, the reader ends up getting mind controlled/brain washed by somebody, and now, they’ve been sent out to attack, and possibly kill, the bots. Headcanons for how Cyberverse Ratchet, G1 Mirage, G1 Red Alert, MTMTE Tailgate, and MTMTE Swerve would react to this/what would they do to try and get the reader out of the control.

I'm actually so stoked for this one omg?? Thank you for sending it in!! I didn’t do Cyberverse Ratchet as I’m not super familiar with him, sorry about that ^^’

G1 Mirage and Red Alert and MTMTE Tailgate and Swerve with brainwashed S/o

CW - brainwashing + minor violence mentions

Under the cut for length :)

Mirage

Angry, to say the least

As part of Spec Ops, he's seen things beyond description and done things he's not proud of. But this? This takes the cake for the worst thing that could have happened

Despite his feelings towards the situation, he's a professional first and he's got a job to do. He's going to do everything in his power to get you back. He knows that chances are it's gonna be a messy process, but he's willing to do what it takes

When actually faced with you, he hesitates for a moment. Yes, he's a professional and this is his job and it needs to get done but it's you

But he does his job with a grimace and manages to secure you. With you safely in Autobot hands, he devotes whatever time he can to finding a way to snap you out of it. It hurts him more than he can say to see you swipe at him whenever he gets close enough, but he keeps telling himself it's only temporary

Luckily, he was right. The effects eventually wear off, after too many nights if you in a cell and him pacing outside

After you're given the all clear that no, you aren't being controlled anymore, and no, you aren't fit to go back to duty, he takes it upon himself to help you get better the best you can

Takes you out to participate in what activities he can put together that the two of you would do before the war. Sure, they aren't perfect, and as a former noble that isn't something he's entirely proud of, but the way your face relaxes and the look of familiarity forms in your eyes makes it worth while to him

Red Alert

As paranoid a bot as he is, you being mind controlled was something he always thought might happen. Well, you and everybody he’d ever known ever

He notices you acting strange after coming back from a solo patrol (something he was always against. Anything can happen to somebody on their own, patrols really should be done in pairs), and is quick to voice his concerns

He expected to be told he was overreacting, paranoid even. What he wasn’t expecting was for you to lunge at him like a bot possessed

He makes a comically quick escape, with you hot on his heels, and manages to sound the alarm

He flees the scene relatively quick, leaving the actual heavy work to those more suited to it

With you restrained and the medics working on a way to bring you back, Red Alert is on a quest of improved security

Thanks to both him and the events that transpired, patrols are no longer solo, and each shift needs at least two bots on board. He tries to push for tighter security, but gets told that they need to focus on “one thing at a time”

Even after all is said and done, it’s going to take a long time for your relationship to go back to normal, if it ever does. Yes he loves you and yes he wants to be there with you, but his fear of you still being not fully in control or it maybe happening again keeps him at bay

He somewhat blames himself for the whole incident. Maybe if he had pushed harder against solo patrols, maybe if he had been more tight on security none of this wouldn’t have happened

It might take a while, but work with him and things will start to straighten themselves out

Tailgate

He doesn't understand at first. What do you mean there's something wrong, they're right there???

After it's properly explained, he passes right through shock to panic and horror and into a panic attack the likes of which the Lost Light has never seen

He wants to help in any way he can, he really does! He's just not,,, sure what to do

It takes Cyclonus holding him back and the promise that they're going to fix you for him to calm down enough to be properly reasoned with

When faced with a mind controlled you, his first instinct is to try to talk you down. Unsurprisingly, it doesn't really work at first, but the little flicker in your eye that started up when he reminded you of how you first met urged him to continue

And so he talks and he talks and he talks and he starts to get through to you and as soon as he sees it’s starting to work, he’s rushing forward and grabbing your hands in his

He’s with you through the entire recovery process, bringing you updates on the happenings of the ship, and just generally keeping you company and in the loop while you get better

Swerve

He’s just trying to run his bar why is there yet another emergency alert

Holes up with some patrons who decided to stay in the bar (everybody still has to pay for their drinks though, he isn’t running a charity!)

When you, in all your mind controlled grace and glory, burst into the bar and start throwing punches, he’s quick to dive behind the bar and call for backup

Swerve is quick to figure out what’s going on thanks to the copious amounts of media he’s consume, and, like Tailgate, decides the power of conversation is the best way to deal with the situation

Except, unlike Tailgate, his attempts at communication are a rapid fire wave of words that are almost impossible to fully make out

It,,, works somehow. Maybe you’re just used to his ramblings and it’s easier for you, or it’s the familiarity of the rambling itself, but slowly but surely he’s bringing you out of it

While most probably have little to no clue what Swerve is saying, you know it’s something heartfelt and true and it’s something for what remains of your self to grab on to and wrestle back control

Recovery is probably the best with Swerve. He gets all the good gossip as a bartender, and he shares it with you when he gets the chance. While he doesn’t see himself as somebody who often gossips, he’s happy to do it to see you smile after such an event

Sends Ten to check on you when he can’t do it himself

If somebody talks bad about you regarding the incident, they’re banned from the bar, no questions asked

[kim-hao-han]

A Leap Of Faith // Five Hargreeves X Reader (Pt.2)

Some info:  Just an inspo from Demon Slayer (totally irrelevant), “Below the Surface” FNAF(also irrelevant) and of course “The Umbrella Academy” show and comics. Reader and Five are 20 for the sake of being mature content (no smut but violence, alcohol and such). I kinda follow the real plot but also not???? There may be multiple endings so be warned. I’m not new to fanfiction but its been a few years so excuse any mistake or not well written parts. Also, English is not my first language so bare with me for any grammar mistakes. Please enjoy the story!! <3

Words: 2.1k

 /Part 1/

Explaining to the guys what happened and who the girl was, was a mess Five had nor the patient or the mood to do. So y/n tried her best to explain as calmly as she could. “We’ve been working in an organization kind of company doing missions for the past 30 something years.” y/n said as she took a sip of water that Vanya offered her. She looked at Five who was making a peanut butter sandwich. Luther was getting even more confused. After hearing Five’s explanation of time travelling, the Commission and the apocalypse coming he felt like he had lost every connection with reality. “So…you guys are actually 58?” Diego asked piecing the newly acquired information together. “Our consciousness is 58. Currently, we are stuck int the bodies of our 20 year old selfs.” Five explained cutting the sandwich and passing half to y/n. Y/n smiled at him, mouthing a thank you and turned to face the confused family. “We basically had to transfer out consciousness to the last existing body that existed in this timeline” she added which from their expressions she could understand they were beyond confused. “Are you two fucking?” Klaus asked which made both Y/n and Five choke on their sandwiches. “Far from it, we worked together. Partners” Five said and patted Y/n’s shoulder. “I’m gonna go get some decent coffee” he told her and blinked away. She was a bit worried about him since they may be chased by the Commission but she had to hide how she felt. It wasn’t new for y/n to do so. After working with Five she had learnt to hide her one side love feelings for him quite well. That along with her worry about his well being.

Allison was watching them standing besides Luther and cleared her throat. “Care to explain to us what happened? Like from the start?” she asked y/n and smiling she nodded. “I would have many questions if I were you as well. I can’t really tell you much about how Five survived the apocalypse before the Handler found him. But I can certainly fill you in about some of our adventures together.” Y/n said and stood up. Walking up and down she started telling them about how together they passed the last 30 years. The family looking at her as if nothing was more interesting in the room. After all, they ere all worried about Five being gone all these years

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“Y/n we have a new recruit working on desk 35. You will be his partner. Lila works better alone and you are not ready to work alone. His name is Five. I’m sure you’ll be able to warm him up.” The handler said as she guided Y/n through the office. “Yeah, yeah…Lila is so good and strong I get it.” She replied rolling her eyes. Don’t get her wrong. She loved Lila like a sister but this discrimination their “mother” had against her was making her sick. Y/n was not weak or less capable than Lila. Her powers just requested someone to guide her body while she possessed the enemy.

Y/n left the Handler behind walking to the desk she was told she would meet the young man. “33…34.. 35!” she counted and looked at the chair only for her to stop breathing. She had seen many hot guys during her life but literally no one had taken her breath away. She felt like for the first time she was the one losing control of her mind. “Can I help you?” an irritated voice snapped her out of her thoughts and she shook her head. “Y-You are Five right?” The young man rolled his eyes. “Am I that famous? If so you could at least bring me some good coffee. The machine on this floor is broken and most employees here drink tea.” He said and went back to typing away at his typewriter. Y/n blinked a few times. “I can totally get some coffee. I’m Y/n. I am…actually your appointed partner for the ‘missions’.” She added and smiled at him. Five turned to face her and her smiled instantly warmed his heart. He felt like he could at least talk to her. She seemed smart and could actually reply to him, unlike Delores. No No…let’s not ahead of himself. He was loyal to Delores. She was the one by his side when he had no one…But then again some company wouldn’t trouble him. “I would really appreciate it. Black please” he said in his monotone voice and went back to typing. Y/n nodded and walked out to go get the both some coffee.

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Present Day

“It was hilarious seeing him spit out the coffee I got him. Turned out he didn’t like the offices coffee so going out for some coffee became a routine for us. Y/n said and laughed remembering how they first met. Vanya smiled as well. “Sounds like you two are good friends” she said and y/n looked at her. “That’s one way to describe our relationship. We are not actually friends but not simple coworkers either.” She added and sat back down. “Our time with the Commission wasn’t all happiness and jokes. If it was he wouldn’t want to leave so badly…Actually, I think he would leave the Commission even if it was paradise. He may not look like it but he missed you guys. He talked to me about you guys and you could see his eyes being happy.” She said and looked at them. She could see that they were all touched by knowing that little detail about how Five felt. Klaus touched his cheek tilting his head to the side” Aww lil brother Five actually loves us”. Y/n and the guys laughed at this except Diego. He stayed still as a rock thinking. “What did you mean with the Commission not being a happy place? It sounds normal.” Diego asked. Signing Y/n nodded and sat back down at the chair fiddling with her fingers. “Our job was not an office job. We were assasins. The Handler promised that if Five did her dirty work, she would allow him to come back. Of course, that never happened. After each mission, she would tell him he had to do more.”

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“Y/N! Did you see what we are asked to do? How can we go there? It’s a suicide mission” Five whispered full of anger as they were sneaking into the warehouse. “I’ll take care of the guard and you sneak inside okay?” y/n only said to him. She closed her eyes and to five it looked like she just took her last breath. Next thing he heard was the guard walking to the wall and smashing his head against it until he was dead for good. Y/n took back a deep breath and Five immediately held her. “What just happened…how did you do that?” he asked her. “I moved my consciousness to his body and killed him. Simple.” She said as if it was not a big deal.

Five couldn’t recognize her at that moment. Her eyes had lost their usual glow, her soft smile was erased from her sweet face. She looked different. Thinking about what she told him his eyes widened. “You..you committed suicide to kill the guard?!” He asked shocked  and y/n stood up walking inside. “After a few years death and suicide don’t have the same meaning.” She said quickly. The rest of the mission was a shock for Five but also Y/n. She felt awful. Every time she moved to another body, killed them and went back to her own was like she was having multiple heart attacks. Watching Five blink around and kill was amusing to her. She felt the rush of adrenaline hit her hard. It was like doing her job and amusing Five was her new goal. She wanted him to see her as a strong woman and not as a weak child. “Y/N!” Five’s scream snaped her out of her mind just in time before she was shot. Five blinked to her grabbed her and blinked them behind the last guy killing him. “Are you stupid? What were you thinking? I can see why The Handler didn’t trust you alone” He said frustrated as he pushed his hair back. He wasn’t actually mad at her but what if she got hurt? He was worried. No…No he wasn’t worried. He didn’t care at all. He only did this for his family…right?

Y/n was shocked and hurt by his words. She was grateful he saved her but her plan to awe him backfired “You are right…I’m sorry..” was the only thing she said dropping her head down. As anyone would expect the drive home was quite and awkward. Five wanted to apologize but he found himself being a coward and selfish.

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“I want to come with you” Y/n said looking at Fives wall which was full of equations and graphics. “No! It’s dangerous, not safe and I don’t want to risk you. Your family is here. You have your life here. Mine is not here.” Five told her as he was fixing his suit. Now both of them being 58, their relation was not only as coworkers for sure. They had build a certain level of skinship between them and trust. “Five, let’s be honest, just time travelling won’t work. Let me try to transfer our consciousness to our bodies in that time line” y/n said sitting on his bed. Her intelligence and grasp of things never seized to amaze him. She had a point. His teleportation and her mind transferring could accomplish the plan better. “Are you sure you are willing to leave everything you know behind for me?” He asked her walking closer. Y/n stood up and connected her forehead with his, cupping his face. “This is a leap of faith I am willing to make.”

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The brothers and sisters were shocked at what Y/n had just explained to them. “I am also one of the kid born on October 1st 1989…as is my sister Lila. She is a strong bitch if you ever get on her bad side.” She said jokingly. “I am more interested in your powers though Y/n…We have similar powers yet so different. I can’t imagine having to “kill” myself in order to defeat an enemy. Allison commented and Klaus jumped in. ”I can! I totally relate with you my friend. Death is so weird. Like being high” he said and laughed. Y/n looked at the time and stood up. “Five, has been gone for a while. Is there a place-“ she was cut off by the front door opening and closing. Five walked past them and Y/n rushed to the staircase meeting a bloody Five, a not so unfamiliar sight. “They found us” Five told her and she swallowed hard. “The chip right..” He nodded and walked to her. “We have to take yours out too.” He said and carefully held her hand, rubbing just above her wrist which was scared and with dried blood. “You took yours out?” He asked and looked at her. “When?” she took his hand and smiled. “I had to before I came to your room this morning” Y/n said and looked at his siblings. “They will most likely find us soon. And the apocalypse is 8 days away” Five nodded. “I guess we go back to work then”

[raineydays411]

So warm and tender

Tony Stark x Daughter!reader

A/n: Hello! finally the last part of Ember. I hope you guys like it and sorry for making y’all wait so long for the confrontation lol)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Y/n’s POV

“Aunt Pam?!” you say in shock as you stop struggling against the vine wrapped around your body.

“Y/n, is it really you?” your aunt said as the vine loosened its grip and gently lowered you on the ground. “ Where have you been? Everyone has been going crazy looking for you”

You don’t answer as you look at your aunt. You didn’t realise you missed her as much as you did but now all you want to do is throw yourself in her arms. So you did.Pam, sensing you needed comfort rather than an interrogation, wrapped her arms around you. “I missed so much my Petal.” 

With those five words, all the hurt and pain you bottled up came out. and you cried.

As you cried, your aunt looked at the girl she hasn’t seen in eight years, and wondered what she’s been going through and if she did the right thing by giving you to your father all those years ago.

“Petal, I think you need to explain what’s going on”

You look up and sniff, “ Yeah, i think an explanation is well in order.” and you tell her everything. From the years of being ignored by your father, your last argument, the two weeks you spent in captivity, and your new powers. 

“ And that’s when I found you.” You finish looking at the grim faces of Pam and the other woman, who now that you think about it looks really familiar. 

“Oh, you poor puddin’!” you found your face being squished between two ands and then you were comically pressed against a body in a tight hug. 

“Don’tcha worry bout a thing, me and Pammy will take care of everything, you just sit here and---”  This seems familiar...

“ Harley, I don’t think she can breathe.” “Oh right, now you remember, it the blonde woman who used to sneak into the apartment”. You think to yourself as you struggle to get loose from her grip. You hear someone snicker and see Danny looking at the commotion. 

“ Shut up Danny, where have you been?” You say, forgetting that you’re the only one who can see him. 

“Exploring, do you thing she could hug me like that too?” 

“ If you weren’t already dead, I’m sure they would kill you for that comment”

Pam and Harley look at each other in concern as it seems like you’re talking to yourself. 

“ Hey kid, if you’re gonna talk to yourself, try an’ do it when other people can’t see you, like me.”  The blonde says as if someone talking to themselves was a daily occurrence for her.  You explain that with your powers, you were basically dead and can speak and see other dead people. Hearing that, Pam’s expression darkened

“He let you die?” she said in a grim tone. All the vines and plants in the room started whipping around angrily as if they were looking for the person who wronged you. It was then when you realized it wasn’t your Auntie Pam who taught you how to plant petunias you were looking at, this was Poison Ivy. 

“ Men, you can never trust em’. Well, whadda say little flower, ya up for a little premeditated murder?” and that was the infamous Harley Quinn. 

“ It would’ve been nice to know that you’re related to scary criminals y/n....” Danny said in a fearful voice. And if you were being honest you just found out that your aunt Pam was also the Poison Ivy but to be fair you haven’t seen her since you were like eight. 

“I don’t want to kill him” you finally say. “ I don’t want anything to do with him. Nor his precious Spiderling.” The plants calm down as Ivy calmed down and was your aunt Pam again. “ What do you want to do?” she asks.

You think to yourself and say,” I want him to know how he made me feel, and then I want to stay with you.”  Your aunt and Harley froze when you said that. 

“Petal, there is nothing I want more than for you to stay with me again,” She started, “ But it isn’t safe for you to stay.” Your eyes started to water

“But I-I have powers now, I can defend myself! I won’t be any trouble, it’ll be like I’m not even here” At this point, anything was better than going back to being invisible. “Please...I don’t want to go back...” 

Hearing the desperation in your voice broke Pams, Harleys, and Danny's heart. Pam because this was the daughter of her closest friend. She vowed to protect you from anything the day you came to her after losing your mother. Seeing you like this just reminded her how she, in her mind, has failed you. Seeing you so desperate to get away from the man who broke your heart reminded Harley of herself. The nights she would sneak into the tiny apartment you shared with Pammy, in hopes of escape only to get drawn back with empty promises. So yeah, she had a small soft spot for you. And Danny, you were the only person who saw him after months of being invisible. He felt like he needed to help you in your mission to get your father regret ignoring you.

“Hey Pammy...maybe we should call him...” Harley started to suggest. 

“NO, I’d rather drink weed killer than go to that...orphan collector for help.” the red head spat. “ No. We’ll figure it out but she can stay here for now.”

Hearing that you had a place to call home now, gave you the motivation to go and confront your father. Not only for ignoring you, but for leaving you in that..cell for two weeks. He didn’t even attempt to look for you as far as you knew. You’d have thought at least one of the other Avengers would have came to save you. But no one came. After all those years, no one came.

“Y/n.. your eyes” Danny whispered, his cold hand touching your arm snapped you out of your mind. The neon glow of your eyes faded to your normal e/c. 

“ Aunt Pam, Harley is there any way you guys can get me to New York and back?” You ask, finally ready to confront your father. 

“ Well....” Harley say as with a smirk

~~~~~~~~~one terrifying ride on a stolen batplane later~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Upon arriving to New York you made Pam and Harley wait a few blocks away from the tower, as you really didn’t want the Avengers to find out your aunt was a wanted criminal. You “went ghost” as Danny like to call it and snuck into the Tower with ease. You then snuck into your room, seeing everything covered in a layer of dust as no one has been in there for over two weeks. You packed a bag and filled it with some clothes, books and a picture of you and your mother. You took that bag and walked to the door, looking around at the room that was both you prison and safe space. It was decorated with multiple trophies, medals, and ribbons all from the multiple sports and clubs you joined to impress your father. Not like that ever happened. Danny wander around looking at the multiple teams photos you had hung up.

“ You’re a volleyball girl?” he said, “ Huh. I’d never have had guessed.” 

You rolled your eyes as you finished packing. “ Hey I have a job for you.” you say turning to him. “ I need you to go to the control room and turn off the power for thirty minutes. Then turn it back on and come find me in the common room.”

“ Yes ma’am” Danny says, saluting and disappearing through the wall before he comes back. “Ummm, wheres the control room?” 

You roll your eyes and explain how to get to the control room and wait. When the lights go out and you’ll make your move. Your father would have to pass through the common room to get to the control room from his lab, which you assume he’ll be. There you’ll be waiting for him. 

The lights go out. It’s showtime.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tony's POV

The team spent three more days searching for you. They followed every lead and half of the team even flew out to the building that collapsed an hour ago. Tony, Steve, and Natasha stood behind to look at more clues. It was a little past midnight, and both Steve and Natasha went to bed leaving Tony to tinker in his lab. Tony was making improvements to a certain spider suit as he thought about what his daughter said to him before she went missing.

“Sir, there seems to be someone in Y/--” FRIDAY started to say when the power cut out.

��FRIDAY??” Tony questioned as he walked out to check the control room, making sure to get his nano bracelet just incase. As he walked down the hallway he thought about waking up Steve and if he was brave enough to wake Natasha when he heard it.

“Hi daddy.”

Tony stopped dead in his tracks as he looked up in disbelief. The lights turned back on to reveal his daughter. Wearing a black halter top, spandex leggings, grey boots with elbow length gloves. She looked skinny, as if she hadn’t had a proper meal in the weeks she was gone. And for some reason the air was cold in the room. But there she stood.

‘Y/n” Tony said breathlessly. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Y/n pov

As you wait for Tony to walk in,you look around the common room and reminisce. You think about the time when you first moved in, and you got lost trying to find the bathroom and accidently walked into Natashas room. YOu thought she was going to kill you but ended up walking you to the restroom and back to your room. Or when you made the volleyball team way back in eighth grade, and you ran home to tell your dad but ended up telling the whole team, who were rarely all together, and they all took you out to get ice cream, minus Tony. You had to admit, even though your dad didn’t pay attention to you, Nat and Steve did. As well as the whole team, but those two really became the parental figures in your life. That’s why it hurt when not even they came for you. Even they had forgotten you.

“Hi daddy” you said in a mocking voice. Your father stopped dead in his tracks, as he looked you over in disbelief.

“Y/n”, he said in a breathless voice. 

“Oh, you remember my name?” You say in an sarcastic tone. “ Didn’t seem like you did when you left me in a hydra cell for two weeks.” 

Hearing that you were a prisoner of Hydra made Tony’s blood freeze. 

“Hydra? Oh Y/N are you okay? What did they do to you?” He asked frantically as he walk towards you with the intent of checking if you were injured. You jerk away from him, avoiding his touch and say

“ Oh, I’m wonderful. Just so fucking fantastic. I was just experimented on and injected with various liquids that caused excruciating pain. No big deal” 

“ Y/n..we spent days trying to look for you. Me and the team--”

“You and the team what Tony? I was there for two weeks. TWO WEEKS I WAS POKED AND PRODDED. I THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO DIE.” You scream, anger filling your heart as you remember the agony you went through. You think about the scratches on the wall of the cells, the taunts from the guards, and screams of the undead.

“ You have no idea what I went through. What I’m going through.” You say, feeling your body grow colder as you lose control and start to shift. “ You don’t care about me. If I were Parker, you would have saved mem within SECONDS.”

“That's not true. Y/N you have no idea how much I love you.” Tony tries to say. He’s filled with the need to tell you everything he didn’t tell you before. “I know I haven’t always been the best father. Trust me I know that now. But if you give me a chance, I want to make everything right. Please.” 

You didn’t think it would go like this. In fact you were not at all prepared for Tony to say this. You expected to walk in on him continuing his life as normal, tinkering in his lab and such. You had always yearned to hear him say those words to you. But now, they just fill you with anger.

“You think you could just tell me what I want to hear and what? I’ll just act like nothing happened?? I know you’re not that stupid.” You spit, the room growing colder as you get angrier. “ It’s too late for all that Tony. I’m not the same girl i was two weeks ago.i won;t take it any longer.” 

“Y/n..your eyes” Tony says as he slowly starts to put his gauntlet bracelet on, realising that you are becoming a threat. 

“ Oh do you like them?”, You ask “ This is what happened when they injected me. I can also do this.” You shift, shades of blue taking over brown skin. Tony stared at you in awe and a bit of fear. 

“ Y/n this isn’t you. I know you’re angry but--” “ Isn’t me?” You interrupt.” You don’t know me. You don’t know what I’m like. And even if you did the old me died in that cell. Literally I died” You and Tony stared at each other. and that's when you heard the doors open. Two sets of footsteps started rushing to the commotion. 

“Y/N some red head and beefy blonde are on their way” You hear Danny say as you realize you had to wrap it up. If anyone can convince you to stay, it’s Steve and Nat.

“ It doesn’t matter anymore Tony.” you say as you start walking to the window. “ I can’t stay here anymore. There’s nothing for me. You win. Peter can be the child you always wanted cause from now on, consider me dead.” and with that, you phase threw the window and let yourself fall, knowing that you won’t actually fall as you can fly. 

Tony freaks out and calls for his suit, only to see a blue blur shoot up and across the sky. Then he just sits there and stares. The footsteps reach the common room and he hears someone ask 

“ Stark..what was all the yelling. What's going on?” 

“she's gone” He says, and that's when he truly realizes his mistake. He became what he never wanted to become. He became his father. And now you were gone.

Taglist: @vxidsti1es @big-galaxy-chaos

[milolunde]

Do you mind expanding on your HC about sonic and chaos energy ? So intrigued to hear , sorry if you’ve already explained this before

👁 I don’t mind at all

This got longer than I though it would so…

TL;DR: Sonic is wary of corruption after the events of Perfect Chaos and Sonic X’s SA2

The entire headcanon stems from the fact that one day I was thinking about Sonic and about the Chaos Emerald in general and tried to think of the times Sonic had actually used the Chaos Emerald’s powers outside of going super.

I couldn’t really think of anything other than his race with Shadow on the ARK in SA2.

Characters still can use Chaos powers; Shadow uses his Chaos spears in X and, for a more recent example, uses Chaos Control in the IDW comics. He seems to have a good relationship to the emeralds and their power. A relationship that we don’t see Sonic have with the emeralds, despite being more experienced in their use.

So, why?

Really, I think it’s just a thing Sonic stopped and really thought about. Something that Shadow has probably though of, but doesn’t seemed phased by as far as his actions go.

That’s corruption by the Chaos emeralds. As cheesy as it is, the emeralds have a balance of positive and negative that helps power them. Either one or both of these can be used, but using the pure negative energy, as we see with Final Chaos, can make you lose yourself. Negative emotions are just like that.

I think those events from SA1 and SA2 (more specifically, SA2 from Sonic X, ahem, Dark Sonic) and even the events of Unleashed (both the comics and the game) is what made Sonic realize, he’s not that above corruption*.

[*for the case of Unleashed, the comics aid it better. In the games Chip tells Sonic that his heart is too good; He’s too genuine to be overtaken by Dark Gaia, and that’s why he didn’t lose himself. In the comics, Sonic lost his shit the first time he transformed, damn-well nearly killing Mighty:

…or at least seriously injuring him since a lot of Sonic characters aren’t allowed to die.]

And the Chaos emeralds are… Chaotic in nature. It’s their namesake,

-Dr. Starline (IDW) about the Warp Topaz in comparison to the Chaos Emeralds

“[The Chaos Emeralds’ power] can change given the situation or their usage.”

We’ve seen this happen twice, as I recall off the top of my head, in Sonic. First, with Perfect Chaos only harnessing the negative powers of the Chaos emeralds,

And with Sonic himself,

Given the situation, given the need for the power, given the headspace Sonic was in, is all why I believe Dark Sonic happened.

After all,

“Chaos is power… Power enriched by the heart,” -Tikal’s prayer, SA1

It’s up to the unifier what happens with the Chaos Emeralds. Sonic doesn’t want that to ever happen again.

He’s no scientist and all of his knowledge, though reliable because how else do you study Chaos, comes from experience, Sonic has the gut feeling that if he were to overuse the Chaos Emeralds or start using their power, as he sees, selfishly, that that could happen again.

So yeah. That’s why I don’t think Sonic uses Chaos Control and that all whilly-nilly after SA2.

I am very bad at closing “essays”. [Closing Thesis]

[testudoaubrei-blog]

Content note for discussions of eternal damnation, and all sorts of other shit that will trigger a lot of folks with religious trauma.

Before I get started I might as well explain where I’m coming from - unlike a lot of She-Ra fans, and a lot of queer people, I don’t have much religious trauma, or any, maybe (okay there were a number of years I was convinced I was going to hell, but that happens to everyone, right?). I was raised a liberal Christian by liberal Christian parents in the Episcopal Church, where most of my memories are overwhelmingly positive. Fuck, growing up in the 90’s, Chuch was probably the only place outside my home I didn’t have homophobia spewed at me. Because it was the 90’s and it was a fucking hellscape of bigotry where 5 year olds knew enough to taunt each other with homophobic slurs and the adults didn’t know enough to realize how fucked up that was. Anyway. This is my experience, but it is an atypical one, and I know it. Quite frankly I know that my experience of Christianity has very little at all to do with what most people experienced, or what people generally mean when they talk about Christianity as a cultural force in America today. So if you were raised Christian and you don’t recognize your theology here, congrats, neither do I, but these ideas and cultural forces are huge and powerful and dominant. And it’s this dominant Christian narrative that I’m referring to in this post. As well as, you know, a children’s cartoon about lesbian rainbow princesses. So here it goes. This is going to get batshit.

"All events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God." - John Calvin

“We’re all just a bunch of wooly guys” - Noelle Stevenson

This is a post triggered by a single scene, and a single line. It’s one of the most fucked-up scenes in She-Ra, toward the end of Save the Cat. Catra, turned into a puppet by Prime, struggles with her chip, desperately trying to gain control of herself, so lost and scared and vulnerable that she flings aside her own death wish and her pride and tearfully begs Adora to rescue her. Adora reaches out , about to grab her, and then Prime takes control back, pronounces ‘disappointing’ and activates the kill switch that pitches Catra off the platform and to her death (and seriously, she dies here, guys - also Adora breaks both her legs in the fall). But before he does, he dismisses Catra with one of his most chilling lines. “Some creatures are meant only for destruction.”

And that’s when everyone watching probably had their heart broken a little bit, but some of the viewers raised in or around Christianity watching the same scene probably whispered ‘holy shit’ to themselves. Because Prime’s line - which works as a chilling and callous dismissal of Catra - is also an allusion to a passage from the Bible. In fact, it’s from one of the most fucked up passages in a book with more than its share of fucked up passages. It’s from Romans 9:22, and I’m going to quote several previous verses to give the context of the passage (if not the entire Epistle, which is more about who needs to abide by Jewish dietary restrictions but was used to construct a systematic theology in the centuries afterwards because people decided it was Eternal Truth).

19 Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will?

20 Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus?

21 Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?

22 What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with much longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction:

The context of the allusion supports the context in the show. Prime is dismissing Catra - serial betrayer, liar, failed conqueror, former bloody-handed warlord - as worthless, as having always been worthless and fit only to be destroyed. He is speaking from a divine and authoritative perspective (because he really does think he’s God, more of this in my TL/DR Horde Prime thing). Prime is echoing not only his own haughty dismissal of Catra, and Shadow Weaver’s view of her, but also perhaps the viewer’s harshest assessment of her, and her own worst fears about herself. Catra was bad from the start, doomed to destroy and to be destroyed. A malformed pot, cracked in firing, destined to be shattered against a wall and have her shards classified by some future archaeologist 2,000 years later. And all that’s bad enough.

But the full historical and theological context of this passage shows the real depth of Noelle Stevenson’s passion and thought and care when writing this show. Noelle was raised in Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christianity. To my knowledge, he has never specified what sect or denomination, but in interviews and her memoir Noelle has shown a particular concern for questions that this passage raises, and a particular loathing for the strains of Protestant theology that take this passage and run with it - that is to say, Calvinism. So while I’m not sure if Noelle was raised as a conservative, Calvinist Presbyterian, his preoccupation with these questions mean that it’s time to talk about Calvinism.

It would be unfair, perhaps, to say that Calvinism is a systematic theology built entirely upon the Epistles of Romans and Galatians, but only -just- (and here my Catholic readers in particular will chuckle to themselves and lovingly stroke their favorite passage of the Epistle of James). The core of Calvinist Doctrine is often expressed by the very Dutch acronym TULIP:

Total Depravity - people are wholly evil, and incapable of good action or even willing good thoughts or deeds

Unconditional Election - God chooses some people to save because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, not because they did anything to deserve, trigger or accept it

Limited Atonement - Jesus died only to save the people God chose to save, not the rest of us bastards

Irresistible Grace - God chooses some people to be saved - if you didn’t want to be saved, too bad, God said so.

Perseverance of the Saints - People often forget this one and assume it’s ‘predestination’ but it’s actually this - basically, once saved by God, always saved, and if it looks like someone falls out of grace, they were never saved to begin with. Well that’s all sealed up tight I guess.

Reading through these, predestination isn’t a single doctrine in Calvinism but the entire theological underpinnings of it together with humanity’s utter powerlessness before sin. Basically God has all agency, humanity has none. Calvinism (and a lot of early modern Protestantism) is obsessed with questions of how God saves people (grace alone, AKA Sola Fides) and who God saves (the people god elects and only the people God elects, and fuck everyone else).

It’s apparent that Noelle was really taken by these questions, and repelled by the answers he heard. He’s alluded to having a tattoo refuting the Gospel passage about Sheep and Goats being sorted at the end times, affirming instead that ‘we’re all just a bunch of wooly guys’ (you can see this goat tattoo in some of his self-portraits in comics, etc). He’s also mentioned that rejecting and subverting destiny is a huge part of everything he writes as a particular rejection of the idea that some individual people are 'chosen' by God or that God has a plan for any of us. You can see that -so clearly- in Adora’s arc, where Adora embraces and then rejects destiny time and again and finally learns to live life for herself.

But for Catra, we’re much more concerned about the most negative aspect of this - the idea that some people are vessels meant for destruction. And that’s something else that Noelle is preoccupied with. In her memoir in the section about leaving the church and becoming a humanistic atheist, there is a drawing of a pot and the question ‘Am I a vessel prepared for destruction?’ Obviously this was on Noelle’s mind (And this is before he came out to himself as queer!).

To look at how this question plays out in Catra’s entire arc, let’s first talk about how ideas of damnation and salvation actually play out in society. And for that I’m going to plug one of my favorite books, Gin Lun’s Damned Nation: Hell in America from the Revolution to Reconstruction (if you can tell by now, I am a fucking blast at parties). Lun tells the long and very interesting story about, how ideas of hell and who went there changed during the Early American Republic. One of the interesting developments that she talks about is how while at first people who were repelled by Calvinism started moving toward a doctrine of universal salvation (no on goes to hell, at least not forever*), eventually they decided that hell was fine as long as only the right kind of people went there. Mostly The Other - non-Christian foreigners, Catholics, Atheists, people who were sinners in ways that were not just bad but weird and violated Victorian ideas of respectability. Really, Hell became a way of othering people, and arguably that’s how it survives today, especially as a way to other queer people (but expanding this is slated for my Montero rant). Now while a lot of people were consciously rejecting Calvinist predestination, they were still drawing the distinction between the Elect (good, saved, worthwhile) and the everyone else (bad, damned, worthless). I would argue that secularized ideas of this survive to this day even among non-Christian spaces in our society - we like to draw lines between those who Elect, and those who aren’t.

And that’s what brings us back to Catra. Because Catra’s entire arc is a refutation of the idea that some people are worthless and irredeemable, either by nature, nurture or their own actions. Catra’s actions strain the conventions of who is sympathetic in a Kid’s cartoon - I’ve half joked that she’s Walter White as a cat girl, and it’s only half a joke. She’s cruel, self-deluded, she spends 4 seasons refusing to take responsibility for anything she does and until Season 5 she just about always chooses the thing that does the most damage to herself and others. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, the show goes out of its way to demonstrate that Catra is morally culpable in every step of her descent into evil (except maybe her break with reality just before she pulls the lever). The way that Catra personally betrays everyone around her, the way she strips herself of all of her better qualities and most of what makes her human, hell even her costume changes would signal in any other show that she’s irredeemable.

It’s tempting to see this as Noelle’s version of being edgy - pushing the boundaries of what a sympathetic character is, throwing out antiheroics in favor of just making the villain a protagonist. Noelle isn’t quite Alex ‘I am in the business of traumatizing children’ Hirsch, who seems to have viewed his job as pushing the bounds of what you could show on the Disney Channel (I saw Gravity Falls as an adult and a bunch of that shit lives rent free in my nightmares forever), but Noelle has his own dark side, mostly thematically. The show’s willingness to deal with abuse, and messed up religious themes, and volatile, passionate, not particularly healthy relationships feels pretty daring. I’m not joking when I gleefully recommend this show to friends as ‘a couple from a Mountain Goats Song fights for four seasons in a cartoon intended for 9 year olds’. Noelle is in his own way pushing the boundaries of what a kids show can do. If you read Noelle’s other works like Nimona, you see an argument for Noelle being at least a bit edgy. Nimona is also angry, gleefully destructive, violent and spiteful - not unlike Catra. Given that it was a 2010s webcomic and not a kids show, Nimona is a good deal worse than Catra in some ways - Catra doesn’t kill people on screen, while Nimona laughs about it (that was just like, a webcomic thing - one of the fan favorite characters in my personal favorite, Narbonic, was a fucking sociopath, and the heroes were all amoral mad scientists, except for the superintelligent gerbil**). But unlike Nimona, whose fate is left open ended, Catra is redeemed.

And that is weird. We’ve had redemption arcs, but generally not of characters with -so- much vile stuff in their history. Going back to the comparison between her and Azula, many other shows, like Avatar, would have made Catra a semi-sympathetic villain who has a sob-story in their origin but who is beyond redemption, and in so doing would articulate a kind of psychologized Calvinism where some people are too traumatized to ever be fully and truly human. I’d argue this is the problem with Azula as a character - she’s a fun villain, but she doesn’t have moral agency, and the ultimate message of her arc - that she’s a broken person destined only to hurt people - is actually pretty fucked up. And that’s the origin story of so many serial killers and psycopaths that populate so many TV shows and movies. Beyond ‘hurt people hurt people’ they have nothing to teach us except perhaps that trauma makes you a monster and that the only possible response to people doing bad things is to cut them out of your life and out of our society (and that’s why we have prisons, right?)

And so Catra’s redemption and the depths from which she claws herself back goes back to Noelle’s desire to prove that no person is a vessel ‘fitted for destruction.’ Catra goes about as far down the path of evil as we’ve ever seen a protagonist in a kids show go, and she still has the capacity for good. Importantly, she is not subject to total depravity - she is capable of a good act, if only one at first. Catra is the one who begins her own redemption (unlike in Calvinism, where grace is unearned and even unwelcomed) - because she wants something better than what she has, even if its too late, because she realizes that she never wanted any of this anyway, because she wants to do one good thing once in her life even if it kills her.

The very extremity of Catra’s descent into villainy serves to underline the point that Noelle is trying to make - that no one can be written off completely, that everyone is capable of change, and that no human being is garbage, no matter how twisted they’ve become. Meanwhile her ability to set her own redemption in motion is a powerful statement of human agency, and healing, and a refutation of Calvinism’s idea that we are powerless before sin or pop cultural tropes about us being powerful before the traumas of our upbringing. Catra’s arc, then, is a kind of anti-Calvinist theological statement - about the nature of people and the nature of goodness.

Now, there is a darker side to this that Noelle has only hinted at, but which is suggested by other characters on the show. Because while Catra’s redemption shows that people are capable of change, even when they’ve done horrible things, been fucked up and fucked themselves up, it also illustrates the things people do to themselves that make change hard. As I mentioned in my Catra rant, two of the most sinister parts of her descent into villainy are her self-dehumanization (crushing her own compassion and desire to do good) and her rewriting of her own history in her speech and memory to make her own actions seem justified (which we see with her insistence that Adora left her, eliding Adora’s offers to have Catra join her, or her even more clearly false insistence that Entrapta had betrayed them). In Catra, these processes keep her going down the path of evil, and allow her to nearly destroy herself and everyone else. But we can see the same processes at work in two much darker figures - Shadow Weaver and Horde Prime. These are both rants for another day, but the completeness of Shadow Weaver’s narcissistic self-justification and cultivated callousness and the even more complete narcissism of Prime’s god complex cut both characters off from everyone around them. Perhaps, in a theoretical sense, they are still redeemable, but for narrative purposes they might as well be damned.

This willingness to show a case where someone -isn’t- redeemed actually serves to make Catra’s redemption more believable, especially since Noelle and the writers draw the distinction between how Catra and SW/Prime can relate to reality and other people, not how broken they are by their trauma (unlike Zuko and Azula, who are differentiated by How Fucked Uolp They Are). Redemption is there, it’s an option, we can always do what is right, but someone people will choose not to, in part because doing the right thing involves opening ourselves to the world and others, and thus being vulnerable. Noelle mentions this offhandedly in an interview after Season 1 with the She-Ra Progressive of Power podcast - “I sometimes think that shades of grey, sympathetic villains are part of the escapist fantasy of shows like this.” Because in the real world, some people are just bastards, a point that was particularly clear in 2017. Prime and Shadow Weaver admit this reality, while Catra makes a philosophical point that even the bastards can change their ways (at least in theory).

*An idea first proposed in the second century by Origen, who’s a trip and a fucking half by himself, and an idea that becomes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory, which protestants vehemently denied!

**Speaking of favorite Noelle tropes

[ectonurites]

idk how to quote tags on mobile where is the conner kent essay i NEED it

ALRIGHT OKAY! here’s 5k+ words plus panels & screenshots of me comparing and contrasting the two drastically different versions of Superboy (comics vs young justice cartoon) and going over what makes them such distinctly separate characters. someday i’ll refine this a bit more its kinda just a word dump that’s been living in my brain that i wanted to actually articulate after i read through Reign of the Supermen but here we go:

--

Pretty frequently I see the question “Why is Superboy so different in the Young Justice cartoon?” float around in DC circles. I think there are two main approaches to answering this:

Why did the writers of the cartoon decide to create a very different version of Superboy?

What factors make this Superboy so different from the comic version?

For the first approach the answer is relatively straight-forward, from the start Young Justice as a cartoon was never meant to be a direct adaptation of the comics. They just used the title and a few elements so they could create their own approach to the DC universe with a focus on younger heroes. For example, Artemis Crock in their show is also COMPLETELY different from her comic counterpart, Zatanna is aged way down to be a member of the teen team, and Kaldur’ahm was created for this show (and integrated into the comics as Jackson Hyde). They were always trying to do different things than the main comics universe, so them making a different version of Conner also makes sense. Their approach to him is also very clearly influenced more by how he appeared in the Teen Titans comic run that was still coming out as Young Justice started airing (his design, and some other elements we’ll discuss along the way), as opposed to his original version from the 90′s/the Young Justice comic.

So the basic “why” is that from the start they wanted to create something unique to their universe, which they definitely did accomplish.

The much more interesting subject to dive into, though, is looking at the differences in Superboy’s story that contribute to him becoming such a different person. 

The drastic changes made to the following factors are what I view as the main source of his differences in personality/outlook/characterization:

The conditions and history of the world at the time he is introduced

The circumstances around him being introduced/leaving Cadmus

The reaction Clark has to him and how their relationship starts

The people he first interacted with & became close to, and how he interacts with the world

The timing of him finding out about his connection to Luthor

The State of the Worlds

In the comics, Superboy is first introduced in Adventures of Superman #500 by iconically saying “Don’t ever call me Superboy!” 

during a 1993 event called “Reign of the Supermen”, a follow up to the 1992 event “The Death of Superman”. Based on the title of the 1992 event, I think you can, uh, guess what one major difference in the setting here was vs. the state of the world at the time he was introduced in the cartoon. Obviously Clark didn’t stay dead forever, but Superboy first comes onto the scene as a young clone of Superman who insists he is the new Superman (one of the four characters trying to do so during the event). This is in the main DC universe in the early 90’s, which means that heroes in general, including teen heroes, aren’t a new thing! Not only has the Justice League been around for a while but so has the Teen Titans. Once Clark is alive again, Superboy goes off on his own to establish himself as an individual teen hero. 

So how is that different in the cartoon?

In the cartoon, Superboy is first introduced in the pilot episodes “Independence Day” and “Fireworks” 

on the 4th of July in (what most people consider to be) 2010. This was supposed to be the day that Robin (Dick Grayson), Speedy (Roy Harper), Kid Flash (Wally West), and Aqualad (Kaldur’ahm) would get to see the true Justice League HQ at the Hall of Justice, which... doesn’t go exactly as planned. 

In this world, superheroes are a newer thing, this is something that the creators have talked about before. At this point, while there is an established Justice League, there are no known teams of teen superheroes. Just the fact that as of season one Dick Grayson is still Robin is a pretty good indicator that this world is early in it’s time with a Batman. Now, the sidekicks aren’t a secret, as they appear very publicly in this first episode, but they are almost always seen acting with their mentors at this point. Again, there is no Teen Titans in this setting, and there never has been. 

So when they do form the first teen hero team? It is kept covert-ops. They do not publicize that they act as a superhero team, and the members who weren’t already publicly known heroes (mainly Miss Martian and Superboy) end up being pretty… unknown to a lot of the world outside the hero/villain community! Again their existence is not strictly kept a secret, but they keep the fact that there’s a team of minors who are heroes going on independent missions VERY under the radar on purpose. Thus, those who aren’t going around doing super public hero activities just don’t have nearly as much of a presence.

So to summarize:

In the comics, Superboy is immediately put in a spotlight (he befriends a reporter and is all over tv and literally trademarks the name Superman) becoming known to the world and establishes himself as a solo acting hero YEARS before joining any teams.

In the cartoon, Superboy is kept relatively out of the spotlight, immediately becomes part of a covert-ops team and doesn’t act solo very often. The well known teen heroes in this setting are sidekicks working under a mentor, and Superboy does not actually act as a sidekick.

What does this mean for Superboy?

Superboy in the comics gets to, right away, act on his own and get a taste of what being Superman is like. In the cartoon, he’s brought into the world at a time where there already is a Superman. I think back to this bit from the therapy episode, where he says:

“See, from the moment I first opened my eyes in that Cadmus pod, there’s been one thing I’ve wanted, and feared. To know what it is to be Superman.”

Comics Superboy started out getting to do that! He immediately got a shot at filling that role, and he then makes the choice to relinquish it back to the original once he’s alive again. He (begrudgingly at first) understood that it wasn’t yet his time to be Superman, and knows he’ll someday fill those shoes for real- but in the meantime being Superboy is gonna be his own thing and he’ll embrace it and make it work.

Cartoon Superboy is left in a shadow, not ever truly knowing what it’s like to fill those shoes (except in a doomsday scenario training exercise gone awry that he then just feels intense guilt over). This leaves him a lot more frustrated and lost, and I think is a major contributor to how angry this version of Superboy is compared to his much more ‘chill go with the flow’ attitude in the comics.

Cadmus

In the comics, in that same issue he’s introduced, we find out that Superboy broke out of his cloning tube prematurely and left Cadmus with the assistance of the second Newsboy Legion, who also gave him his first leather jacket, before the programming that would allow Cadmus to control him was implemented.

He quickly gets up to speed with the situation, that Clark is dead. So he comes on the scene starting to save people and saying he is Superman, or at least the clone of the original one. A major thing that does influence his character here is the fact that… this is the 90’s. He is designed around the idea of what is ‘cool’ back in 1993. (look, even his original character design sheets call him cool)

So right off the bat he’s got a stereotypical ‘cool teen guy in that era’ personality, which is often played for comedy to add a little lightness to some of the dark things happening during this event. 

Anyways, he has left Cadmus, he’s acting on his own, and he starts realizing that his powers aren’t exactly the same as Superman’s over the course of the Reign of the Supermen story.

After the main conflict is settled and Clark is fully alive and acting as Superman again, the two of them end up going back to Cadmus to find out what the exact deal is with him. I’ll go into this more in a later point, but they find out he’s not exactly a clone of Superman (or Lex- him being actually involved as a DNA donor is a retcon that happened a decade later). They agree to let someone from Cadmus (Dubbilex- the grey guy with the horns in this pic) leave Metropolis with him, as he sets out on a press tour to establish himself as Superboy now that he relinquished the trademark on the Superman name back to Clark. 

Let’s pause and look at how this is different in the cartoon.

In the cartoon, when the trio of Robin, Kid Flash, and Aqualad decide to prove themselves to their mentors they run off on their own to attend to a fire at Project Cadmus when the Justice League got called off to do something else. Upon arriving, they accidentally uncover some weird things about Cadmus, like the crazy amount of sublevels, the creatures roaming around, and the fact that it’s not on the main power grids. They eventually find Superboy, still in his cloning tube. They break him out, but then get captured themselves.

When they are then put into tubes by Cadmus personnel, they manage to convince Superboy to help free them by promising him things like getting to meet Superman, and see the moon. The group of four now working together manages to escape from the building and it topples down, where they are then greeted by the Justice League who are Not Happy.

Superman flies away shortly after, and the group of kids explain to their remaining mentors that sure, they disobeyed orders, but they accomplished something good here, and they are going to keep doing it, whether the League likes it or not. The compromise is the formation of The Team, to be covert-ops while the Justice League acts publicly, and the boys are joined by Miss Martian.

So to summarize:

In the comics, Superboy leaves Cadmus pretty independently (with some assistance) to go act on his own as a hero immediately. He returns to Cadmus later for more information, and they reveal truths to him about his existence. After he knows his truth, he goes off to continue establishing himself as a solo hero but lets Cadmus still supervise what he’s doing through Dubbilex.

In the cartoon, Superboy is rescued from Cadmus by Robin, Kid Flash, and Aqualad, without knowing pretty much anything about himself besides the fact that he is a clone of Superman, and is immediately put on the covert ops team. 

What it means for Superboy:

Comic Superboy goes to act on his own, even after he admits he’s not the real Superman anymore. Yes he’s not 100% alone in terms of ‘he’s got people (Rex, Roxy, Dubbilex, Tana) around him’, but as a hero he’s a solo act and ends up taking residence in Hawaii. In the cartoon, by joining a team right away, he’s taking on a very different style of being a hero, especially because the team itself is covert-ops. Rather than regularly saving the day all on his own much like Superman, which can help comic Superboy feel like he’s still living up to the name more, cartoon Superboy is working under the radar in a group setting, while still wanting to desperately fill those Superman shoes. 

He is overconfident in his abilities and wants to be the hero he was created to be, so him being put into this very different type of superhero situation is another major contributor to the frustration/anger. Even later on when comics Superboy is part of forming the Young Justice team, they were never a secret covert-ops team, they were always publicly known. (hell, a reporter is the one who gave them the team name Young Justice because he’d misheard Bart)

Superboy & Superman

In the comics, as we have established, Clark was dead at the time Superboy first came on the hero scene. Clark comes back to life, during a little bit of a lull in the middle of the huge conflict. He immediately accepts that Superboy is one of four who came forward to try to replace him, and one of the only two (Superboy & Steel) who genuinely only had good intentions in doing so. Clark, Steel, Supergirl, Hal Jordan, and Superboy then all work together in the big battle against the Cyborg Superman.

Once things are settled, Clark is curious about him, and where he came from and his origin, so they end up going to Cadmus together with Guardian and learning more about him, as I previously mentioned. Once it is established that Superboy is in fact a metahuman clone who was created to mimic Superman, but is not actually a clone of him, Superman still accepts him and thinks he’s earned his right to continue using the ’S’ shield and have the name of Superboy. 

They part ways so Superboy can go on his press tour, but in general they have pretty positive interactions where they mutually respect each other! Not too much later in the comics even (I forget exaaactly when this happens but it’s definitely before the 1998 Young justice comic), Superman is the first one to give Superboy a real name, “Kon-El”, something he is so happy about he literally cries.

How is this different in the cartoon? 

When the boys first escaped, and Superboy first meets the Justice League, Clark is standoffish. Other members of the league need to nudge him over to go actually talk to Superboy, and it’s not much of a conversation before he flies off and away, leaving Superboy frustrated and alone.

This… turns into the standard for almost the entire first season. Other characters constantly telling Clark that he needs to reach out and be support for the boy (like in this iconic diner scene with Bruce and Clark), but Clark consistently being too freaked out by the fact that someone made a clone of him without his knowledge to properly accept Conner. While this does over time get better, this being the immediate reaction when Superboy is brand new in the world definitely… has an impact! 

He is rejected by the person he idolizes, and feels neglected and abandoned, and definitely kinda overcompensates with ego to try to make up for it. 

So:

In the comics, Superman and Superboy work together from the start, not falling into a hero/sidekick situation but rather acknowledging each other as individual heroes with respect for one another. They grow to see each other as family much faster, and little tension between them. A crucial difference in situations, though, is that at the time these versions first meet Superboy is not actually a clone of Superman.

In the cartoon, Superman at first avoids Superboy, and does not offer guidance or mentorship or anything the boy needs. It is clear that he wants to work with Superman and be like him, since it was what he was created to do. It takes a lot of time for Clark to accept Conner in this setting, and there is a lot of tension for the first several months Conner exists. (they seem to settle this towards the end of season 1/during the gap between season 2, but it still has it’s impact on who Conner is early in his life)

What does this mean?

I feel like this is another major factor that contributes to Conner being so angry all the time in the cartoon, he feels immediately rejected by the person he’s supposed to be someday, rather than accepted by him. Again, very different from how comics Superboy got a chance to be Superman, and a chance to then work with the real deal as equals. 

Friendships, Relationships and Identity

When Superboy is freed by the second Newsboy Legion, it’s primarily out of a ‘we’re clones who are stuck here, but you need to be out there, you’re what Metropolis needs right now!’ kind of idea. The first person he actually becomes close to is a reporter named Tana Moon.

Tana and Superboy’s relationship is… bad once it actually becomes romantic due to their huge age difference (she’s around 23, he is for all intents and purposes 16), but during the Reign of the Supermen where they’re still just friends for the most part, it’s not as bad. Tana becomes the GBS correspondent who focuses on everything Superboy (at this time still insisting he is the new Superman) is doing as a hero, and they become close friends.

GBS then also brings in Rex Leech (and his daughter Roxy) to be his agent, to promote Superboy and manage things for him. Rex is exploitative as hell, but Roxy does become another really important person to Superboy. These characters along with Dubbilex are his main supporting cast at the start of his solo comic when he’s in Hawaii.

In this whole era, Superboy is pretty much a celebrity. He’s cool, he’s a superhero, and I think it’s very notable he does not have a secret Identity. For a decent chunk of time, he is always just ‘Superboy’ (until, as I mentioned earlier, Clark gives him the name Kon-El. Even so, he doesn’t adopt a regular secret identity [Conner Kent, although he actually used a different one, Carl Grummett, before that!] until he begins living with the Kents in the early 2000s). By the time he joins any teams, Kon is pretty damn confident in who he is as a hero and has a relatively good grasp on who he is in general, if anything he’s a little too confident.

Young Justice was created in the aftermath of World Without Grown Ups when the trio of Superboy, Robin (Tim Drake) and Impulse (Bart Allen) had teamed up. After they saved the day they realized they worked well together and formed their team, utilizing the old Justice League base in Mount Justice. They were eventually joined by more members, especially relevant here is Wonder Girl (Cassie Sandsmark) who Kon later dates for a portion of the Teen Titans run that these four are in after Young Justice ends. 

The four of them become close, and when Kon dies during Infinite Crisis it rips a hole in everything they had established growing up together over the past several years (Cassie joins a cult dedicated to bringing him back, Tim tries to clone a new Kon, Bart got aged up and took on the mantle of the Flash, etc) and Bart’s death that followed similarly shook the remaining Cassie and Tim. This group eventually does get to reunite, with Kon and Bart coming back during Final Crisis, solidifying how even things like death don’t keep them apart for long. It’s hard to look at the comic book versions of these four characters and imagine how they would be without their connections to each other... until you look at the YJ cartoon and see a world where they’re not even all part of the same generation, let alone a friend group.

Now in the cartoon…

The first people Conner primarily interacts with are Dick, Wally, Kaldur, and M’gann, along with the League members who interact with The Team pretty regularly, Red Tornado, Batman, and Black Canary. He’s shown to be friends with the other memebers of the team and get along with them relatively well, but in general he’s not much of a social person. 

Much like in the comics, Superboy is considered very attractive, and immediately upon their meeting, M’gann is interested in him. Very, very interested in him.

At first it definitely does seem more just like an innocent crush, but it’s later revealed to be a little more… concerning than that. As in ‘Megan subtlety influencing Superboy to become her dream boyfriend based on a TV show she likes’ concerning. Like… she literally gives him the name ‘Conner’ after the TV show character that was the boyfriend of the character she bases her human self and entire identity on. The two date and once that becomes a thing, a lot of their plot lines in the following seasons revolve around the ups and downs of their relationship.

In general in this show, Superboy doesn’t really get much of a chance to establish himself on his own terms. Within months of him leaving his cloning pod, he and M’gann start going to high school with secret identities, so he’s already having to hide who he truly is to blend in with other people, before he even knows who he truly is. 

So to compare:

In the comics, Superboy gets to figure out who he is as Superman’s Clone/Superboy very publicly, has multiple love interests and a celebrity status, and over time becomes part of a tight-knit group of friends. He doesn’t use a regular secret identity for the first several years he’s active.

In the cartoon, Superboy has one love interest with a very large impact on him, not nearly as much focus is given to his other friendships, and he immediately adopts a secret identity meaning he needs to hide who he is from the start. 

What it means:

These factors play a big difference in his attitude, particularly highlighting how extroverted his comic version is and how introverted his cartoon version is. Comic Superboy never really needed to hide who he was until years into his career, vs being told to do so early on in his life. When you get used to needing to hide things so early, that can definitely lead to being more private/disconnected from others. Also somewhat related- in the comics, when Kon is given knowledge in his cloning tube, more pop culture got included. He mentions knowing Star Wars without having seen it, and references a ton of TV and Movies, vs the cartoon version of him that seems to have been given a lot of history of the world but not the current fun stuff. It’s the difference between knowing what’s going on in the world and what’s popular, vs only knowing the past and what’s fundamental. Not knowing pop culture like this can also really contribute to feeling alienated and lead to introversion. (I just... I think about how in the comics Kon’s favorite TV show is Wendy The Werewolf Stalker, in the cartoon Conner just... watches white noise static)

Also, having a completely different set of friends with different personalities has a big effect, people are always gonna be influenced by the people they’re close to to some extent. Bumping Conner up to Dick’s generation of heroes instead of Tim’s not only gives him completely different friends, but it also puts him in this position of being one of the ‘Original Team Members’. By this I mean, a member of the first iteration of the only teen team, one of the people that younger heroes coming onto the scene and joining the team in later seasons see as an experienced and older team member to look up to (despite the fact that cartoon Conner is permanently 16- they never fixed that for him like in the comics). That just creates a different dynamic entirely, because in the comics even when the Tim/Kon/Cassie/Bart group are more experienced on their team late in the Teen Titans run, they are still always going to have heroes like Dick Grayson, Donna Troy, Wally West etc as the older generation of ‘original teen heroes’ who came before them.

Also, while I am talking mostly about in-universe reasoning here, I do wanna bring up one slightly more meta reason that might also have contributed to them choosing to go for a more ‘introverted brooding hero’ characterization with him: the fact that their version of Wally already filled the ‘flirty jokey’ archetype original Comics Kon fits into. Having two characters like that in the show from the start would definitely get... overwhelming. And at the time this show was first airing, in the comics, he was relatively devoted to Cassie and not nearly as flirty anymore anyways.

Lex Luthor / Details of Cloning

In the comics, as I have already mentioned and will now actually explain, when Superboy was first introduced he was not the clone of Superman and Lex Luthor as we know him to be today. Kon was a metahuman clone, made with the DNA of Paul Westfield who worked at Cadmus, that they genetically altered to look like Superman, and gave powers based on the energy aura they discovered to exist around Clark’s dead body. This telekinetic field gave Kon the distinct powers he had for his first decade of existence: His Tactile Telekinesis (often referred to by him as TTK)

Lex Luthor was originally not directly involved in his creation, but he was aware that it was going on as is revealed during the Reign of the Supermen arc. Kon’s TTK allowed him to mimic Superman’s flight and strength, but not all of his powers. TTK also gave him powers Superman DOESN’T have, such as his ability to dismantle machinery or mold materials he is touching into different shapes. (The reason this is called Tactile Telekinesis is because there needs to be a tactile element, he needs to be touching the things) 

It is not until 2003, a decade after Superboy was created, that writer Geoff Johns in his Teen Titans run decided to alter Superboy’s origin. He established that Lex Luthor had been the real human DNA donor and that Superman’s Kryptonian DNA was actually used in the cloning process. Around this time, Conner also begins to exhibit more of the typical Kryptonian powers, like Clark did around this age. 

This information is at first only known by Conner and Tim, because the email had actually been sent to Tim directly. The two keep it a secret as Conner was not ready to tell the rest of the team, because he fears the implications it has, and is afraid of becoming evil or being rejected. This revelation about Lex being one of his ‘parents’ DNA-wise coming years into his hero career changes a lot of things for Conner, and makes him begin to question who he is. Unfortunately, Lex does at one point take control of Conner and force him to break Tim’s arm and attack Cassie directly (as well as the rest of the team, but these two specifically are what Conner expresses the most guilt over after the fact). This era of Conner in the comics is where he’s definitely closest to his cartoon counterpart, because he’s very troubled and dealing with a lot of heavy stuff regarding himself as a person. Yet there’s still traces of who he has always been in there. I mean, if you’re only familiar with cartoon Conner, can you really imagine his final words as he’s dying after saving the world being “Isn’t it cool?”

Now, looking at the cartoon…

Conner finds out about his connection to Lex in November, only a few months after having existed outside of a cloning tube. He finds it out on his own, from Lex speaking to him directly, after Conner went back to investigate the remains of Cadmus and ended up having a fight with Match (another clone who is able to pass for Conner’s duplicate who they… their version of Match is another thing they drastically changed from the comic version but as we’ve established that’s something they like to do so I’m not gonna dwell on it).

In the cartoon, Conner’s powerset is, from the start, different from both Superman and comic Superboy. Here he has heightened senses and strength and the ability to leap really far, but he lacks actual flight and some of the other standard Kryptonian powers, and has no TTK. The cartoon explains these gaps in his powers as being due to his half human DNA, and they introduce these patches that are able to suppress his human DNA and give him temporary access to full powers. Lex uses these patches as a way to manipulate him. Much like in the comics, Lex has a code word programmed into Conner that effects him, although it isn’t quite used for the same amount of ‘total mind control’, and he doesn’t get fully brainwashed and turn against the team or anything. Instead, the code word (here “Red Sun” rather than “Aut vincere, aut mori” [Translated as “to conquer or die" / "victory or death”]) just leaves him stuck in a hypnotic trance.

So:

In the comics, Kon finds out after years of believing he was a metahuman clone who was given powers to mimic Superman, that he is actually a clone of Lex Luthor and Superman, which alters his entire perspective on himself! This causes him to become a lot more unsure and anxious about who he is, in stark contrast with how confident he was before. There are still traces of his old self within him, but this is a development in his character that influences him moving forward, making him a bit more serious but still at his core the same person he used to be.

In the cartoon, Conner finds out after months of thinking he was a clone of just Superman, that he has half human DNA and the donor was Lex Luthor. While he always had confidence in his abilities, he was still somewhat lost as a person in knowing who he really was outside of things other people have assigned to him (teammate, boyfriend, superhero, etc), and finding out this information about himself just adds to the uncertainty and frustration.

What it means:

Having this struggle be something Conner has to deal with so early in his existence is one of the most fundamental changes in my opinion. Finding out that Lex Luthor is one of your clone parents is something that will alter your entire perception of yourself and who you are! In the comics, Conner had already been confident in who he was so it shakes his world in a really big way, but in the cartoon he still didn’t know who he really was so it just adds to further confusion. 

I think that even with the more serious characterization Kon starts getting in the 2003 Teen TItans run, his history and past as the fun cool 90′s Metropolis Kid isn’t entirely forgotten, it’s still a part of who he is/was. Sure, maybe he’s sometimes even embarrassed by how he used to be, but it’s not treated as though it didn’t happen. All of his history comes together to create the character and who he is by the time he wears just a T shirt as a costume.

By skipping over the fun era of his life and jumping right into who he was when he started facing these huge changes, it creates such a completely different set of challenges for him and that contributes directly to how he’s characterized. 

Putting it all together

The ultimate point I am trying to reach in all of this is that, beyond just ‘they made a writing choice to make him different’ the environment that Superboy was brought into and the events that took place right when he came into the world greatly influenced the type of character he would become. Every time an adaptation is made of something like comics, there are going to be changes and alterations to fit the world the creators want to make. Sometimes these changes are minor and don’t actually change who a character is (an example for the YJ cartoon’s universe itself: In the tie-in comics [issue 6] it’s established in this universe that the Flying Graysons weren’t just Dick and his parents, but other family members were active parts of it too. One was an uncle also named Richard, who actually survived the fall that killed the rest of his family but was left paralyzed and thus unable to care for him. This uncle already used the nickname ‘Rick’ which is likely why Dick ended up using ‘Dick’ as a name in a modern setting even though it has fallen out of popularity as a nickname because uh, connotations. This is something that is mostly unique to their world and helps to explain some things, but it’s not like tragically losing a few more family members changed their version of Dick and his backstory that drastically. At his core, he still has many similarities to his comic self) but they’re still changes, and that’s okay. Superboy, though, is such an extreme case where they made so many changes that at his core he really does become a completely separate character. Sure he has the name and design, but I was able to write five thousand words about differences here and am struggling to come up with more similarities beyond that.

I think there still could be specks of the original Superboy buried inside cartoon Conner, and that maybe he could have been more like his original version under other circumstances. Looking at these differences and where they come from is, I think, a cool way to begin to understand what elements contribute to who each version of Conner Kent really is. I think it’s clear from how I wrote this that I prefer the comic version, but there are definitely things that are fun to look at and think about with both.

--

if u read all of this UH thanks for listenin to me ramble! sorry if this is incomprehensibe!

[traincat]

I’ve been trying to piece together a few things from your Twitter and Tumblr posts alike and still can’t make heads or tales of things, so would you mind helping out a FF & spideytorch noob? 1) what is currently happening with Johnny in the comics? (I’ve fallen head over heels for this guy, largely all your doing) 2) when’s the last time he and Peter have interacted, canon wise? (And do you think upcoming interactions are likely?) 3) your thoughts on if they’ll have him come out in the near future? (has that ‘biggest change to the fantastic four’ teaser come to pass yet?) Love all your content, thank you!

I'd say no problem but then I started thinking about this current run again and got a headache. But yes, I can do that to save you from reading it, because it is very largely not good.

So I don't think it's unfair to just flat out say the current Fantastic Four run is not very good, largely due to writer Dan Slott's efforts. Slott was previously on Amazing Spider-Man for 10 years, to mixed opinions, but a large portion of Spider-Man fandom, myself included, blames him near singlehandedly for the decline in quality of Spider-Man books over those ten years. I will say, in the interest of fairness, that Slott as a writer has an incredible fondness for the Spider-Man/Human Torch relationship, and that a lot of the recent teamups and interactions between them have been written or co-written by him. So it's all not all negative here. But in general, I personally find Slott's more recent comics (the last seven-ish years especially) to be badly plotted out, messily characterized disasters that feature characters written with all the emotion of a cardboard cutout. That's me putting it nicely.

To explain this fully, you have to understand the position Fantastic Four comics were in from the years 2015 through 2018, both in the fictional 616 universe and in the real publishing world. Following the 2015 Secret Wars event (great if you want some Johnny angst in the background of your plot), the Fantastic Four were disbanded -- Reed, Sue, and their many biological and found family children were presumed dead but in reality were remaking the multiverse, unable, for a reason that was never clearly defined, to reach home. Ben and Johnny were left on Earth. They had an unspecified falling out, likely due to Reed and Sue's absence, and went their separate ways -- Ben joined the Guardians of the Galaxy and went to space. Johnny was featured on both Inhumans and Avengers books. What's notable about this period is that it's the first time since 1961 that there was no Fantastic Four book being published by Marvel. Now the real world reason behind this is both complicated and extremely petty: Marvel really wanted the Fantastic Four film rights. Marvel denied this explanation at the time, stating that the reason was sales motivated, but it was a thoroughly flimsy excuse and Jonathan Hickman, writer of 2015's Secret Wars and overseer of the current X-Men plot, gave an interview saying the decision was film rights motivated. This decision kept the Fantastic Four books off the shelves for three years, up until the Disney-Fox merger, which secured the X-Men and Fantastic Four rights for Disney's Marvel Studios. Marvel then announced that the Fantastic Four book would be returning. So that's a little bit of background as to the precarious place the Fantastic Four currently occupy in the Marvel universe -- it's worth noting that this year is their 60th anniversary, and Marvel has done very little for it. Compare this to the X-Men, whose film rights Marvel also obtained during the Disney-Fox merger, and whose books are currently dominating the publishing lineup. The Fantastic Four definitely occupy an unpopular position, one Marvel themselves is at least partially responsible for forcing them into.

But to move back into the actual content of the book -- the readjustment period Slott wrote reintroducing the Fantastic Four into the Marvel universe can be described as clumsy, at best. It's never fully explained why Reed, Sue, and the kids couldn't return to Earth, something that was explored in Chip Zdarsky's 2017 Marvel Two-in-One, which featured Ben, Johnny, and Doom on a multiversal roadtrip to try and find their family and which I on the whole recommend, despite it having an awkward ending due to being cut short by Slott's announced Fantastic Four main title.

(Marvel Two-in-One 2017 #4)

Instead, the Fantastic Four return to a Marvel universe a little different than how they left it, with the Baxter Building -- formerly the offices of Parker Industries, the company Doc Ock started in Peter's body during Superior Spider-Man that Peter inherited after his defeat and then lost spectacularly when he trashed his own company to fight nazis (good for him) -- occupied by a different fantastic foursome in a plot that goes nowhere and does nothing. This is somewhat emblematic of the early days of Slott's run -- he introduces ideas that fail to go anywhere, including Johnny's rekindled relationship with his other best friend and former college roommate, Wyatt Wingfoot, who he was seen being very cuddly with in the early issues.

(FF 2018 #1) A small group of Fantastic Four fans have argued for a while that if Marvel was to have Johnny come out, a relationship with Wyatt would feel very natural -- they're already close, with Wyatt being an important Fantastic Four supporting character since the '60s. I have some further analysis here on the conspiracy theory that Johnny and Wyatt were supposed to be in relationship at the beginning of this run but that that plot was, for whatever reason, nixed. I don't know that I entirely believe this theory, for the record -- but I do think the pieces line up remarkably well.

Anyway, that didn't/hasn't yet happened, obviously. Slott instead for the most part put Johnny on the back burner for the beginning of his run, up until the Spyre arc, which I have reason to believe is the main story he pitched that he credits with securing him the Fantastic Four title. The Spyre arc suggests that the Fantastic Four's failed space exploration during which they got their powers wasn't just to beat the commies to the moon, as Lee and Kirby envisioned (simpler days), but to reach a specific planet outside of our galaxy. When the team sets out to conquer this mission, they arrive at the planet, but are quickly captured. The planet, they find out, operates like a soulmate AU -- everyone has a fated person that they are matched to via a gold armband. Reed and Sue are soulmates (and Ben is confined to an underground subterranean with the other monsters, because this is a Fantastic Four comic) while it's discovered! Shocker! That Johnny is actually the soulmate of the one the planet's inhabitants, a winged woman named Sky, with the suggestion that this is both why Johnny's previous relationships have never worked and why he loves space exploration -- he was just trying to get to his Soulmate TM.

(FF 2018 #15) "What's going on here? Where are my clothes?" As you can see, this didn't start off super great, with Johnny being separated from his family, stripped naked, and put in Sky's bed with a soulmate armband slapped on him. Did I mention they're only removable if your soulmate takes it off for you? And that Sky has consistently refused despite Johnny asking her to? Yeah. It's bad. (I think it's important to note Johnny's long history as a victim of assault plays into this narrative, whether or not Slott is personally holding that in mind while writing, which I don't believe he is. cw in the linked post for discussions of sexual assault.) There's an additional issue here in that Slott has a history of problematic writing regarding women of color, featuring characters he's created to act as love interests being oversexualized, infantilized, villainized, or some mix of all three, with two examples of this phenomena being Cindy Moon and Lian Tang, both of whom he introduced in quick succession in Amazing Spider-Man. Slott certainly didn't have to write Sky as manipulative or controlling towards Johnny, but that's what he chose to do, and that factors into the bigger picture of unfortunate themes in his writing.

Sky returns to Earth with the Fantastic Four despite Johnny appearing unenthused about the idea and initially generally reluctant to interact with her. Apparently they went on a few dates after this and kind of made up. I don't know because I stopped reading for about ten issues in there but I feel confident I missed very little. It's hard to talk about the Sky plot without referencing Johnny's previous interactions with a character named Lyja, a Skrull whose relationship to Johnny I have a long breakdown of here. It's doubly hard, because Lyja actually showed back up in Fantastic Four during this plot. Lyja's modus operandi has remained consistent throughout almost all of her appearances, which I guess makes sense, because she literally has no storylines that do not involve her being obsessed with Johnny, and this recent story isn't any different: Lyja shows up, Lyja disguises herself as another woman in Johnny's life to get close to Johnny, Lyja gets caught and claims it was all fine because she did it for love. This time she disguised herself as Sky.

(FF 2018 #32) Not gonna lie, kind of proud of him for this one. That's one of my problems with Slott -- very occasionally, he busts out good moments, only to undermine them with the rest of his narrative.

In the same issue, Alicia Masters, the first woman Lyja impersonated in order to get close to Johnny, uses her supervillain stepfather's radioactive clay to control Lyja's mind and send her back to space, and I do think she utilized girl power when she did this. Johnny, left reeling after Lyja's latest attempts to trick him into a relationship, ends this issue by sleeping with Victorious, Dr. Doom's right hand woman.

I know she pegged him. I know it. This scene was a little controversial in Johnny fandom, because a lot of people viewed it as Johnny cheating on Sky and thought that that action was out of character for Johnny. I'm personally of a little different opinion, which is that regardless of whether or not you view Johnny and Sky in a committed enough relationship that Johnny's tryst would count as infidelity when all Johnny and Sky are bound by are magic plot soulmate bracelets, I think Lyja's involvement changes things significantly when it comes to Johnny's characterization. All of Johnny's "playboy" periods, if we can call them that, coincide directly with Lyja having been in and then left his life again, which I think makes a certain amount of sense -- it's Johnny trying to wrest control back after a situation where he had none. None of this is explicitly canon, I have to note, but sometimes in comics you have to do the work yourself. So I think this is a case of something being accidentally extremely in character that Slott accidentally stumbled into because he had these love triangles in mind, not because he put a lot of thought into it.

Speaking of love triangles! Johnny sleeping with Victorious gets more complicated when Dr. Doom announces his intent to marry Victorious -- not because he has any romantic interest in her (this engagement caused a lot of uproar in Fantastic Four because Victorious had been previously referred to as being like Doom's adopted daughter) but in order to install her as Latverian regent in his absence. I'm not going to lie, I love a political wedding. Victorious, for some reason, thinks Doom will be deeply upset that she slept with some closeted blond twink and the member of the Fantastic Four he views least as an enemy and more as an annoyance. Johnny, who Sky is currently not talking to because she "felt" him sleeping with Victorious through their magic plot soulmate bracelets, also feels nervous about Doom finding out about this, which I guess is slightly more valid. Anyway, for some completely ridiculous reason, Victorious decides the best time to tell Doom about this little indiscretion is when they're standing at the altar, which coincidentally the Fantastic Four are also standing at, because Doom asked Reed to be his best man in a not at all homoerotic little setup involving midnight swordfighting and Reed slipping Doom's emerald ring onto his own finger. Sorry to sidetrack into DoomReed territory here but it's just like. It's just a lot.

(FF 2018 #33) Also, Ben walked the bride down the aisle. :,) Look at his gigantic hand.

Anyway then Doom decides he's going to kill everyone in a completely reasonable and not at all overblown reaction to Johnny and Zora having what was most likely both disappointing for Zora and weepy for Johnny sex. And that brings us up to where Fantastic Four comics left us yesterday -- in answer to your "big change" question, that's most likely coming up in the next issue, so it hasn't come to pass yet.

Having gotten all that out of the way -- the last time Johnny and Peter interacted canon-wise was in the recent Empyre Fallout Fantastic Four, at the end of the Empyre event:

It was cute! Slott does right good interactions between them. This is possibly the Stockholm Syndrome talking. I don't know if more interactions are likely imminent -- the Empyre event was fairly recent. On the other hand, Slott does like writing interactions between them. So I'd give it about a 50/50 shot. I was skimming the letter page in the latest issue and someone wrote in asking if Peter was likely to appear in the pages of Fantastic Four again any time soon, so there is definitely a demand.

As for Johnny coming out -- I don't know. It's not a call I feel comfortable making at this moment, which I guess means I wouldn't bet money on it. I'd like to say yes, especially because I think Slott set up, whether that was his intention or more likely not, several good places in his run where Johnny could have come out. The beginning, when he's implied to be living with Wyatt again and where he and Wyatt are paralleled against Ben and Alicia. Ben's bachelor party, where Johnny laments not finding the right person -- specifically person and not woman -- and where Ben tells him to "be brave, Johnny Storm." And the soulmate planet plot, where I think could have had a very different and much better ending if Johnny had told Sky that she couldn't be his romantic soulmate, because he knows he wants to be with a man. But those are just places that I think would have made good opportunities for a coming out story. Instead, Johnny's been involved (dubiously) with three different women over the space of the last 10 issues, which is more heterosexuality at one time than he's been confronted with in the last 60 years. So my thoughts are still that it's going to happen eventually, but quite possibly not anytime soon.

Hope that helps! And that my incredibly long answer about what's currently going on with Johnny in comics sheds some light on things!

[stealforreal]

Midoriya Izuku - Future kids I

Midoriya Izuku's day just got turned upside down. MIdoriya is slightly ooc, and I'm dissapointed with the quality of this work. I lost inspiration sorry, but here you go anyways.

Midoriya Izuku x f!reader

Warnings: none, maybe slight cussing

It had been a normal day, so far. Class 1-b and 1-a had a joint training session, and everyone was giving it their all. Iida was using his recipico burst against their team's opponents, giving Midoriya time to think up a new plan now that they had been discovered. They had previously planned to use Aoyama's navel laser to lure their opponents to a specific spot, before using Iida to get him away so Midoriya and Todoroki could apprehend them. The plan had unfortunately backfired, since they had captured Aoyama before Iida could get to him. The solid air user from 1-b had gotten him in his hold, and only after Todoroki had gotten him back did they realise how much the rest of the plan would fail. So now Midoriya was tasked with coming up with a new plan.

Todoroki was occupied with holding the others at bay, and Iida was running out of fuel so they wouldn’t be much help. Aoyama was on the brink of his usual stomach ache that followed with overuse, so he was also pretty useless. Even if he wanted too Midoriya knew he was out matched, a 4 v 1 would not end well for him, besides he had to look out for Monoma and his copy quirk. He was so in his head planning that he didn’t see the Copycat sneaking up on him, not before it was too late. He should have felt an impact, Monoma had pointed one of Bakugou’s explosions towards him. But the impact never came, instead he felt himself float in the air hovering over the remaining smoke from the explosion. “Don’t you dare hurt my daddy” A loud girly voice proclaimed, effectively gaining everybody nearby attention.

Turning his attention towards the girly voice, he felt himself freeze up. In the middle of their training field stood a girl around the age of 10, if he had to take a guess. But that wasn’t what caused him to freeze up, no not the fact that this young girl had somehow managed to bypass UA’s security. Which should have been impossible, considering all the improvements that had been made to it after all the villain attacks that had happened. No, what caused him to freeze up was the fact that before him stood this girl, who looked like a carbon copy of him. It seemed that way from this distance. “Who is responsible for holding Midoriya in the air?” Aizawa’s gruff voice rang out. “Oh right, I forgot about that,” The curly green haired girl exclaimed, catching the attention of the slowly increasing crowd. Slowly Midoriya could feel himself being lowered to the ground again, once his feet hit the cement the quirk that had previously held him in the air deactivated making him feel 10 times heavier.

“Who the fuck disturbed the exercise, I’m gonna kill who ever did it” a familiar angry voice yelled out, making Bakugou’s presence noticeable. Everybody was a little on edge, they had enough experience with villains to not foolishly blindly trust anybody. It didn’t matter that it was a 10 year-old girl, or that she looked like a carbon copy of the resident green haired cinnamon roll. “Man, Uncle Katsu you really were loud back in the day” This statement from the green haired girl left everyone speechless. ‘Does she have a death wish’ was the thought on most of 1-A’s minds, nobody was so casual with Bakugou because it was a serious health hazard.

Well everyone except maybe his two best friends, Kirishima and y/n. It was common knowledge in class A that Bakugou had a soft spot for his two best friends, they had honestly been shocked the first time they met her. She had walked into the classroom, blank faced, walked over to Bakugou’s table, smacked him upside the head with a book before leaving it on his desk, and walked out the door with only a quick “don’t forget it next time, Idiot”. Miraculously she had lived, and Bakugou hadn’t even begun yelling. An impressive feat in itself. Not long after Midoriya had begun noticing you around school, and found out you were a part of the support course. He came to know you a bit, his observation skills made that almost too easy. Slowly but surely he began falling in love with you, the way your hair frames your face, your sharp tongue that never held back. How you would stand up for anybody, it didn’t matter if you knew them well or not if they were in trouble you would help them.

“Hah, what was that you brat?” Bakugou’s loud yelling and heavy footsteps approaching snapped him out of his thoughts, and back to the situation at hand. “ W-wait a minute Kacchan, I’m s-sure that there is a logical explanation” He found himself saying before he could even register what happened. Midoriya was hit with an immense feeling of protectiveness, similar to when they had rescued Eri, but stronger. Without knowing he had subconsciously stepped in front of the girl, pushing her behind his back. “Don’t worry dad I can handle myself, besides it’s only uncle Katsu” she spoke up behind the protective cinnamon roll. “Explain now” Aizawa cut in before they could get side tracked again. It was like the fact she hadn’t introduced herself, only hit her now.

“ Right, allow me to introduce myself” Bowing slightly she continued. “ My name is Midoriya Izumi, I am 10 years old and from the future” Aizawa sent her a raised eyebrow, wanting an elaborated answer. “ My friend was being teased by the others in class about how he was quirkless” Izuku tensed slightly but continued listening to Izumi “ Since my friend’s parents each has a quirk related to time, his mom could speed up herself for only a couple of minutes and his dad could slow down others a bit. This made it really hard for my friend to know if he had a quirk or not, so I helped him research and test different theories. Our last one must have worked, which is time travel by the way, but I have no idea how long his quirk will last” Izumi rambled slightly, reminding them of another curly green haired individual. Difference is Izumi talked loud enough for them to hear, and a bit slower making it understandable.

“Wait, you said your name was Midoriya Izumi. Does this mean that you are Midoriya’s daughter” The ever stoic, conspiracy theory thinking, dual haired boy pointed out. “ Yep, sure am uncle Sho, Don’t tell me you don’t see the resemblance.” She stood next to Izuku hugging his waist with one arm, before continuing” I’m dad's younger copy but female, mom always says there is more wholesomeness in him than there is in her. I remember her asking dad one time why his genes were so damn strong. Luckily for her Haru looks a lot more like her, he’s her younger copy but male” The people present looked between the two Midoriyas, it was true nobody could deny that she was her fathers daughter. The only thing that was different was her eyes, they had specks of y/e/c instead of being fully emerald like Izuku’s were. Also she talks a lot, just like their classmate. They shared the same green hair, both were curly in texture and the classic Midoriya freckles. Though it seemed that she had gotten more of her mothers personality, at least they assumed so. I mean she stood up to Bakugou, without even flinching at his tone.

“Oi, squirt what’s your quirk. And quit rambling like shitty Deku” Bakugou asked, interest evident in his tone. “ Right, my quirk is called Telekinesis, so I can move stuff with my mind. It was also how I was able to keep daddy in the air” Izumi responded, puffing her chest out comically in pride. “Huh so it skipped a generation, and your quirk is stronger than my mom’s. But you also have a different approach so maybe that helps. I wonder why yours is stronger, is it because of your mothers quirk. But then again my quirk is also powerful maybe an aspect of it ties to the genes maybe that’s why your quirk is stronger than moms” The older green haired individual began mumbling on, and he probably would have continued if he hadn’t been cut off by his lowly daughter hitting him in the head. “ Daddy stop mumbling,” Izumi stated sternly.

Bakugou grinned, he liked this kid's spunk and she seemed to have a strong quirk, even if she was shitty Deku’s kid. “Oi squirt fight me” He loudly proclaimed, earning all his classmates attention. Almost everyone began yelling over each other, what the hell dude and she just a kid another one was so not manly bro. Instead of being happy her dad’s old classmates were defending her, stopping her uncle from fighting her she got annoyed. So what if she was a child, this wouldn’t be her first time fighting her dad or her uncles. Before everyone could attack Bakugou even more a voice piqued up “ Sure, if that is alright with you sensei” she directed her attention towards Mr. Aizawa.

It wasn’t rational to challenge a child to a fight, but he couldn’t deny she had a great fighting spirit in her eyes. So he allowed it, he was curious himself to see how it would end. The control she displayed earlier was phenomenal, and she was only 10 but she had a lot of potential in his book. He shooed everuýone a bit away from the hothead and the young Midoriya, and so then created a ring of sorts acting a the line of confinement.

3…..2…...1…...GO!

Bakugou charged straight in with his usual right hook, only to have it swiftly caught by Izumi. She grabbed his right hand, squatted down a bit, then swiftly pushed her shoulder into his rib. The momentum of that allowed her to, even with some difficulty, flip his much larger body over her shoulder and into the ground. There was a small second of silence where Bakugou just laid on the ground in shock, a girl over 5 years younger than him just flipped him over her shoulder like it wasn’t even that hard. However Izumi didn’t give him time to think as she sent metal bars towards him. They had been fried earlier, before her arrival. Bakugou used his explosions to evade the metal projectiles, sending another one straight towards her face. Die squirt die, his colorful vocabulary re-entered the scene. She used her Telekinesis to command the explosion to change course and hit Bakugou square in the face instead. Slightly dazed Bakugou didn’t have time to move before a heel connected to his temple, effectively knocking him out.

Everyone who bore witness to this fight was shell shocked, Bakugou lost. The fight lasted only around 8 minutes before the winner of the 1 years sports festival got knocked out by a 10 year old girl. “Huh, that was easier than expected,” the panting girl exclaimed. Izuku could feel his chest swell with pride, that was his daughter. Strong and smart just like her parents. She walked over to Izuku and slumped against him “ I’m tired daddy, carry me” She looked up at him with those doe green eyes, and how could he say no to his little warrior princess. Blushing, he picked her up, and she let out a sigh of contentment. Using her quirk to command things on a molecular level, like Bakugou’s explosions always took a toll on her.

“Midoriya take Izumi to the dorms to let her rest, the rest of you come with me for our next exercise” Mr. Aizawa commanded the frozen teens and teacher. Izuku then began making his way to the dorms, asking his sleepy daughter a tornado of questions. Do you know about my quirk, how does your quirk work, how old is Haru, am I a good dad, who is your mom? Even in her sleepy state Izumi answered his questions to the best of her abilities, though she refused to reveal who her mother was.

When they arrived at the dorms he put her on the living room couch, and went to leave to grab her some old All Might merch that could fit her. Before he could leave she grabbed his cheeks rather harshly, looking him straight in the eye she said “Don’t worry about who mom is, she loves you for you so it's gonna be fine. Also don’t screw this up so I’ll still be born.” Izuku sweat dropped nervously, before getting out of her hold to go find that old merch of his.

When he returned to the living room after finding what he was looking for, he looked around only to find that it was empty. He walked over to the couch and coffee table where he found a note, picking it up and sitting down on the couch to read it. Dearest daddy, I felt tingly so I think the quirk is gonna wear off now. I just wanted to say that you are awesome and the best daddy out there, I love you so much. I’ll see you again in the future - hugs Izumi Midoriya. Izuku’s heart fell, she had only just arrived an hour or so ago and now she was gone. He didn’t get to know his daughter better like he had hoped, and he didn’t get to see her adorably dressed up in his old All Might merch. He read the note over and over again, trying to satisfy his heart. He would see her again in the future, and then it clicked. his heart swelled, yeah he would see Izumu again some day.

Yeah he would see her again when he was married and happy. Yeah he could wait for that, as long as he has too.

@rainypeachbakerygoth