#at least they interact which is like way more than some of my ships lmfao

[beanghostprincess]

Hi, do you now the feeling of confusion when you see a rare ship and you think: "Nope, not my thing." And than you try to just ignore it, but you just can´t shake of the question of WHY? What did they see in this ship. Not even in a bad way, just confused, because thats a ship you would have never thought of. The ship that I saw was Buggy x Luffy. This ship just screams chaos for me. (I don´t even know anymore where I saw this ship.)

I don't know? When I see ships that don't resonate with me I just ignore them? And I think that no matter how rare the ship is and even if the characters are shipped only because "they're hot" or just because "they can ship them" every ship has some kind of reason/dynamic behind that could make sense.

I don't ship that. Not even close to shipping that. I understand why people would ship it but it's not for me. But I think I've seen weirder stuff around here. I mean, at least Buggy and Luffy have a good dynamic in canon and I understand the reasoning behind the ship. I mean, I do talk about these two a lot too, just not in that way. So I can see why somebody would do it but,,,, Not for me. At all.

[kayetra-spade-queen]

Because @drawnfamiliarfaces got me into their AU rabbit hole of a variant version of the Teen Heroes™, I hope they don't mind of me making my own variant (I'm self-conscious, please excuse me-).

First and foremost, I can't draw, at least not to the extent of completely fleshing out a sketch out of my ass (ok- I can, but only a single eye, and even then it looks like shit to me-). I can draw clothing better than making a full body to make a whole ass scene. Comics are out the window cuz I will suffer.

Second, it'll probably be more on writing than making fanarts.

Third, I didn't watch the majority of the other characters' respective shows. I watched Danny Phantom a bit because of Nicktoons, and Ben 10 because of the same person who got me into starting this whole thing. I'll probably get my own snips and bits of necessary info from the wiki, but don't expect any accuracy, and I'd appreciate if anyone could dump some info that could prove to be very necessary for me.

Fourth, this is an entire AU itself, so I'm mostly not gonna follow canon at most. There will be stories I will try to twist to my liking.

Fifth, ships. Yes, but bear with me here; thanks to my overconsumption of media, I will be putting just a few ships that I think are neat, but if anyone disagrees with me or didn't like how I didn't mention a ship they like (cuz I barely knew shit about the characters), then please just either move away from my blog, or block me entirely to avoid unwanted conflict. We all have our interests that make us happy, the least you could do is to respect and/or completely don't interact.

Sixth, the clothing are gonna filled with my own personal headcanons, mostly their clothing when they battle (the characters themselves too, but I'm gonna focus more on the clothes because I'm a fashion illustrator). Danny, Ben, and Randy are gonna wear heels because yes.

The ships involved;

Tigerghost (Manny Rivera from El Tigre x Danny Fenton from Danny Phantom) (I completely blame izbubbles for this one)

Benrex (Rex Salazar from Generator Rex x Ben Tennyson from Ben 10) (surprised? Probably not lmfao-)

Jimmytimmy (Timmy Turner x Jimmy Neutron) (first and foremost; no, none of the Nicktoons (Jimmy, Timmy, SpongeBob, and Manny) except Danny and Jenny are part of this team. Danny and Jenny still go on missions with the NU team because duh. And second; they're only here as some sort of filler and cuz I really love Nicktoons since most of them I have watched)

Headcanons involved (will get expanded in due time I swear-);

Trans Danny

Anodite Ben (still wields the Omnitrix. His anodite powers are pink too)

Dani and Dan are Danny's kids (under a different name because they have to go through a re-birth process that I'll touch upon later)

Ben's necrofriggian children now comes to earth to live with their mom (like I said, I'm not following canon)

Randy is still ninja, but because this AU involves a 3rd power/skill, I'll have to twist a bit of the canon my way, especially when it comes to the Ultimate Lesson and memory wipe

There will be some Genshin Impact references here and there, because I do play them, and I love it-

Ghost King Danny (by extent, Ghost Princess Dani and Ghost Prince Dan)

Fashion designer Ben (his sassy and confident nature could be more of a use tbh)

Primal Iudex Randy (he and Furina would get along nicely-)

Pearl Keeper Jake

Side gig magician Rex (leave me be, I think it's neat-)

Engaged Rex and Ben (all of the members are adults over 20, so don't be surprised)

Sandra Tennyson is French, so that makes Ben half-French by heritage

Ben and Randy are pen pals turned close friends by the time Ben moved to France (yes, I made Randy somewhat French here for this reason, but I'll have to put in more details later)

Rex won't lose his memories, but he'll get short-term amnesia often, which just need something to trigger the old memories back

Everyone is under the same universe

Danny's ghost team are Sam-Tucker-Valerie-Jazz and his parents (Valerie deserves better than what was given to her by canon)

Yes, Maddie and Jack knew Danny became a ghost from the very start, but they didn't treat him any differently than he was before; if anything, they felt guilty that their son had paid the price for their ignorance and neglect

Phantom Planet do not exist, and it shouldn't have been to begin with, but whatever

Valerie had always been part of Danny's gang. In terms of Shades of Gray, I'll have to change a lot of things, that includes her father's job (he didn't get fired), so I have other things in mind regarding Cujo

Cujo became Danny's pet dog later on, cuz you can't tell me these two aren't made for each other

Members from oldest to youngest, I do hope @drawnfamiliarfaces wouldn't mind me using their headcanon as well (eldest Kim, youngest Randy). I think they're really neat.

Please keep in mind that none of this follow canon whatsoever, they follow my headcanons and versions. Character backstories are written purely by my own personal headcanons too. I'll probably add actual canon when I didn't have anything good to offer, but this is what I could put for now.

[spiderlingh]

obx s3 thoughts (obviously contains spoilers!)

this is just my opinion, please don’t come for me if u disagree :)

i was a bit disappointed with this season ngl, definitely my least favorite season of the series so far

action sequences were really good but i felt like a few episodes were just straight meaningless action scenes and that definitely felt unnecessary to me

cleo pope jj owners of the season <3

drew starkey can certainly pull off a buzzcut but man do i miss his sexy haircut from season 2 😭😭

WAY TOO MANY BIG JOHN SCENES oh my god look i get it, it’s a miracle the guy turned up alive and shit but i am not john b i do not give two shits about this rather mean looking man and i felt like he was on my screen more than the main cast

shoutout to his actor tho. he did a great job portraying him

i thought i would be a jiara shipper but i don’t like them together at all… i lowkey hate that the writers now literally paired kie with every guy of the pogues when that seems so out of character for her

saw a post about kie being lesbian and you know what? y e s. even though i think a love interest wouldn’t be necessary for her to begin with

i’m a jjpope girlie sorry their chemistry is just chef’s kiss but it’s never gonna happen bc according to the writers there’s not a single gay on that silly lil island

(it’s completely fine if you do ship them bc they did have chemistry in the previous seasons)

not the sarah x topper drama getting reused from last season… i love sarah but girl what the hell

speaking of topper i thought it was fun how they included him in the train heist

but the way sarah manipulated him and used him… i’m no fan of his at all but i did feel for him bc he pulled so much for her and she went straight back to john b 😭

my boy really said i’m gonna light this place up like a damn bonfire lmfao

anyway back to it

the main villains (ward and rafe) of the past two seasons became pretty much irrelevant this season?? huh???

rafe did a near complete 180 out of nowhere… which was strange

like this man’s whole trauma was solely fixed on getting love and respect from his father and the whole donating the cross situation really sucked if you look at it from rafe’s perspective but i do not believe that THAT was all it took to suddenly become so hostile towards ward. even if he still ended up saving him.

this guy was so stuck in the cycle of violence from the pilot up to the final episode of season 2 and his character development was so interesting to see (that scene in s2 when he says he’s not okay and needs help and ward tells him to man up still stuck with me) and it feels like they threw it out of the window and pretty much sidelined his character for no reason at all.

new boring villain is introduced and gets killed in the same season

worst parent award goes to mike and anna

I WANT TO SEE MORE OF JJ AND SARAH WORKING TOGETHER OR JUST INTERACTING PLEASE

they’re such a fun dynamic like give me that please i’ve been asking for this before s2 even came out

the pogues had pretty much 2 scenes together and that’s it… i had hoped to see more of them and their dynamics and just more of them on that deserted island??? wasted potential oh my god

is it just me or was the filming style a lil different this season…

wasn’t rafe’s love interest supposed to be a bigger thing? because the few scenes he shared with her were completely irrelevant and so was her entire character tbh 😭

rafe and kie teaming up… was awesome i loved it

jj and kie running into pope and cleo when they were just about to get off the bus and immediately had to run from people with big ass guns is peak obx energy and i thought it was hilarious

i audibly gasped at the time jump!! such a weird way to end the season, it almost seemed like a series finale but knowing that season 4 is already confirmed i’m genuinely wondering what direction they’re gonna take this. the root of it all was that they were looking for the treasures because some of them were connected to it in their own ways (john b and the royal merchant bc of his dad, pope and the cross/denmark tanny bc family) and rafe and ward were perfect villains up until this season.

if there’s something i want to see in the next season, it’s just more pogue scenes, strengthening their own characters and developments and their dynamics with the other pogues. we really do not need the same romance drama every season. it’s boring and frankly annoying. honestly in this show there’s so much going on that i don’t feel like each one of the pogues needs to end up with someone. i would love to have jarah and jjpope as endgame and have kie and cleo end up solo or maybe have other love interests (but not really).

just give me the pogues doing what they do best — bickering while they’re off chasing some mystery and putting their lives at risk and miraculously getting out of it alive and well.

because season 3 was just weird. really weird. idk this is all for now but i might add more later!

[gontagokuhara]

Just went on Instagram to look at more DR art (because tumblr won't let me see a lot of DR art for some reason) and saw hinanami discourse out in the wild which made me say, out loud, "oh, are we still doing this 💀"

Like idk if I've just aged out of the fandom (on Instagram) but just seeing that hinanami rant made me realize I've been spoiled by the DR community on Tumblr bc I'll scroll on here for 2 minutes and see a text post that will literally SHIFT my entire view of a character/ship and CHANGE my LIFE in just a small analysis that was probably written by op while they were on the toilet💀

Anyway it made me think of the post about Maki and Chappel Roan that I actually recited by memory out loud to my friend last night [gooning over wlw content together after watching Muriel's Wedding], And also that one post abt Monomi and Monokuma being Junko's satire of her own rivalry with Mukuro, and Junko not liking that her friends don't appreciate her fursona doing stand-up 💀💀 and like compare that to Instagram discourse and it's like "Komahina is stupid bc hinata isn't straight" like 💀

Anyway maybe it was the same on tumblr before [it probably definitely was] but now that I'm older I'm really appreciating mature convos/takes about danganronpa because good fanfiction/fanart/fan interpretations are truly adapting the story+characters in much better ways than the creators could ever imagine circa 2010 [pointy objects] [peaches and cream] [anything w/autistic nagito] [anything w/transmasc hajime]

number one rule of modern fandom experience (at the very least with media that has a propensity to draw Certain Crowds [looking especially hard at danganronpa and p5]) is CURATE YOUR OWN SPACE AND STRAY NO FARTHER ‼️‼️‼️ i personally escaped the early era dr fandom (pre v3 localization/the 2019 Danganronpa Renaissance) but time capsule posts tell me i dodged something of a bullet there ❤️ in that vein 2019/2020/covid era discourse was still crazy insane (<- was a part of it for sure LMFAO) but it had a much different Flavor than it did way back when. and the same is true of present-day: still a little kooky if you search hard enough (insta/tiktok/twitter/tumblr all have their own demons). but at least This go around i have largely avoided that by picking my people that i trust not to be Weird and just living in my own bubble wrt the dr fandom at large. and thats served me very well the past year+ since i got back into dr <3 and i have also seen MANY of those perspective-altering posts in that little curation circle that has deepened and made better my experience THE GOOD IS OUT THERE ‼️‼️‼️

THE JUNKO FURSONA POST ALSO LIVES IN MY BRAIN its so real and just one of many takes i’ve seen fly by in a post and been like This is so real and it’s mine now. many such cases <3 i follow people like that and simply block people expending energy on discourse i DOOOOOONT care about. like simply enjoy kmha (I SURE DO ‼️‼️‼️) if you like it and ignore hnmi/kmnmi if you dont (cant relate I LOVE YOU TOO HINANAMI + KOMANAMI ‼️‼️‼️) and live your life happy not angry ❤️

like re: maki lesbianism (which was written on the toilet no lie) she is The most lesbian of all time i could write 10,000 scholarly articles on her comphet + traumatic past of being made to hurt people keeping her from fully coming to terms with herself as a lesbian and as someone who wants to Protect the people she loves (an integral pillar of butchness!!!!!!!!) and it is so important to me. and MANY people disagree! and i simply just dont worry about it <3 but i DO think about the people that agree (and the people who i Influence to agree…..that makes me so happy to hear you talking about it with people :D) and that makes fandom FUN!!!!! not arguing over word of god or whatever that isn’t going to change anyone’s opinions anyway 😭

there is a LOOOOOT of good discussion and character/scene analysis and genuinely fun unique takes on tumblr (+ im sure other places but i rly only interact with dr on her & Occasionally by liking a twt post on my main) and that’s where i’ve made my niche <3 people having fun with the media they enjoy and trying to salvage its shortcomings and missteps because they love it!!

and putting little old Me up amongst the dr goats (transmasc hajime) (autistic nagito)………..framing this ask tbh the HIGHEST honor 4 me……..thank you my beloved cider as always KISS MWAH MWAH

[voxofthevoid]

Hello, I just want to say, that your goyuu fics are exquisite. I don't know what sort of insight you have for them, but the way you write their interactions in your works feels so canonnicaly accurate to me personally. It's like you're chilling with Gege but in NSFW area, so you're have a deeper understanding of what's going on with characters in different scenarios. I'm joking and don't want to belittle your talents on characterisation of JJK characters, but it's just THAT accurate in my opinion. Also, I've never read that good of a sex/intimacy descriptions which on top of that are various and not repetitive, and trust me on that, I READ A LOT.

I'm also interested if you're considering to write and discover some other pairings, like Sukuita, some rare pairs maybe or you're Goyuu for life? With such skills you have I think you'll do wonderfully and, personally, I would hype your every upcoming work lmfao, because at this point, no matter what you post it qualifies as 💯 out of 💯.

I wish you all the best and great inspiration for your future endeavors with goyuu and other men 😌

It's like you're chilling with Gege but in NSFW area, so you're have a deeper understanding of what's going on with characters in different scenarios.

I'm adding this to the list of comments/reactions that I want to print out and put in my mouthput on my wall. Thank you so much, anon! This entire ask makes me incredibly happy 💗

It feels especially good to hear this for JJK (Gojou and Yuuji in particular) because I've put more deliberate, sustained effort into the characterization than I have for any of my prior fandoms. Full disclosure, my initial method of "figuring out" a character is to sit down and write them, so serpent tongue and little lamb were how I developed my initial grasp on Gojou and Yuuji, respectively, but since then, it's been a near-constant state of analysis and discussion. I've got a doc devoted just to noting down things and sorting headcanons. It's not my usual style, but something about this narrative and these two make me kinda feral.

The porn style is my usual fare these days, but it's never any less of a delight to know it's being enjoyed!

To answer your question about other ships—I am! JJK has turned me into more of a multishipper than I ever was, at least when it comes to Yuuji. Might be a problem, actually, how much I ship Yuuji. Gojou/Yuuji is my main ship, and everything I write has that in it, but I've also dabbled in Chōsō/Yuuji, Nanami/Yuuji, and Sukuna/Yuuji, with plans for a few more. Most of my goyuu+ ideas are for nanaita and sukuita, but a bunch of others also feature.

If you want details, I've posted them under the read more here: https://voxofthevoid.tumblr.com/post/741705299793149952/youre-well-known-to-be-a-fantastic-goyuu-author

Thanks so much again!

[neo-neos]

Getting to know your BL mutuals - 2022 Edition

Simple, answer the questions. @ some people. Include the tag 'g2ky BL mutuals 2022' on your post so we can find everyone's answers!

tagged by the lovely @chimerasinourskyline - and @aleng-neng and @dont---just-dont Thank you so much for this <3 It's my first time really interacting with the community in this way and I feel legit honored <3

DISCLAIMER -> I started watching BL literally last month, I am fully 110% new and have been literally binging everything I can get my hands on to get on everyones level of knowledge and passion. If I fuck up a date (aka: came out last year or something) pls do not lynch me it is hard to keep up. I also have not seen everything yet, I am trying to keep up but I can only watch so much in a day. Okay thank you &lt;;3

What has been the BL that took you by surprise this year?

To be fair, ChocoMilkShake -> (I am aware it is still airing but I am pretty sure it will finish airing before the year is over) When I heard the concept I was kinda like ???? Dog??? Cat??? BL???? But I was so happily surprised omg.

Roommates of Poongduck 304 -> I HAVE NO IDEA WHY I DOUBTED THIS IN THE BEGINNING BUT OH MY GOD I LOVE THEM SO MUCH NOW

What has been the BL that you felt a bit disappointed with this year?

To be very very honest... And hear me out here... Big Dragon -> The first episode I was like: OH SHIT LET'S GO??? The spice, the drama the bdsm... but then I was like... Where...Where did that go? I LOVE the couple, like MosBank are hawt... But I feel like MosBank has more chemistry than MangkornYai does and... Idk? Season 2 redemption????? Idk

Cutie Pie -> was a little hard to get through for me at times... Sorry? The couple is great, the story wasn't my fav

The rest of the slightly more disappointing shows are from before 2022 so I won't go on a rant lmfao

What has been your favourite BL this year?

KINNPORSCHE -> Oh my god, this show changed me... Like, I can't even explain in words how... But I literally consume every piece of content I can about the cast because I cannot get enough. I'm gonna rewatch it another 10 times probably?

Love in the Air -> I don't even know how to explain this one tbh, I just love the cast, the characters, the storyline didn't even matter that much to me as long as I got to see them doing their thing.. It had some deeper messages here and there too which I loved.

Blueming -> Do I need to explain this one?

Semantic error -> My first BL, again do I need to explain this one?

(I know it's not done airing but...) Between Us -> as long as it does not take some really hectic turns... It's def a fav for this year at least!

Favourite BL couples (not just of 2022)?

MileApo, Payurain, Prapaisky, WinTeam... I am not really big on remembering ship names yet.. I am trying but I legit forget names in daily life too, and then having to remember IN SHOW ship names and then they also come up with REAL NAME ship names and I have 2 working braincells pls do not do this to me lmfao

If you had to suggest a BL for someone what would it be?

(This didn't have to be 2022 right??? I'm just going to go with no)

Kinnporsche -> this one is mainly a little selfish because I just want more people to see it so I can make more friends lmfao

Not me -> I mean come on... That shit was a masterpiece

Blueming -> Good story fr fr fr

Life - Love on the Line -> Look I loved this so much and I kinda related a lot to this show and that shit HURT but also brought so much comfort????

My beautiful man -> Same as above really lmao

Bad buddy -> I mean it's just good

What's your non-BL favourite for this year?

WEAK HERO CLASS 1

OH MY GOD this show has me in a fucking chokehold and I want to consume everything that has even a VAGUE mention to this show

It is so insanely good

It has some bromance going on so not fully "non-bl" but still.

AnYWAY any questions about this feel free to hit up my askbox or the comments to this thing. Again excuse the noob mistakes if there are any, feel free to point them out kindly to teach me because I love to learn but pls don't come for my throat lmao &lt;;3

I would like to tag: @sunf10wer8 @irishtwinmags @keithblguy

(If ^^^^ any of you already did this and I missed it, I am very sorry, feel free to @ me on the post so I can see it! <3)

[treeba-rk]

Yh i agree about people s obsession with new duos. And don t get me wrong, sometimes new and unexpected duos are great, i m talking to the treebark burner account! Ranchers were also great, and totally out of nowhere. But i think people are a bit too obsessed with 1 creating new duos and names in order to portray new narratives and theories and 2 making every close relationship romantic or familiar, as if close friendships, qprs or just good ol' rivalries did not exist 3 ignoring female ccs, even more so when it gets in the middle of a ship (this happens with women in every single piece of media btw).

Male-female friendships (or ships) are often ignored bc i feel a lot of fans feel as if these fanon relationships are somehow more "real" and not roleplay bc they are a "straight couple" (c'mon people, most of us are queer what are you doing with this mentality?), and are more likely to assume you ship the creators and not the characters, or worst, to actually assume the ccs are together irl (which was the reason some female ccs were against shipping in the 1st place). Re: this point, I will give an special mention to bee duo though, the fans really assumed they liked each other irl, which was very creepy considering they were underage at the time.

F/F ships are also often snubbed, although lately i ve seen them become a lot more popular, such as nature wives and more recently Gem & Pearl (ik the ship has a name, but i ve decided to ignore it bc we are better than that), which has been satisfactory to see. Still a long way to go though.

Hope i have explained myself correctly 👉👈 english s not my 1st language so i m kind of nervous about dping such a long post about such a complex issue. Feel free to correct me

no you're all good! thanks for the ask 🫶

also sorry to anyone who's here for tree bark only bc this acc is basically my alt now lmaoo (due to me keeping anon off on main)

you're right that ppl want to create new duos and narratives but sometimes... those ppl aren't that close. or had three interactions in a series. that isn't to say they're not friends or friends can't become close in a short amount of time. but the fandomisation and trying to come up with an incomprehensible name instead of saying their names is kinda ?? to me personally. not that's bad, it's just... i don't really get why you won't use their names. especially when it's not a long established group that frequently collabs.

you're so right about male-female friendships and especially in this fandom. i feel like m/f shipping in this sphere (outside of the obvious lizzie/joel) is seen as taboo bc it could leak into m/f irl shipping. at least that's why i was squicked out for like two years. esp bc m/f irl shipping was / is a problem (for example, i still see ppl asking in their public yt comments if stress and iskall are together. during hc2 people thought mumbo and false were dating when he was like 17 and she was in her early twenties and it's just fucking weird to truth in people's comments).

(unrelated to this discussion but i will always be salty that the antihcshippers never bring up the point of REAL AND ANNOYING M/F IRL SHIPPING IN COMMENTS and instead bully scar/grian shippers on twitter or whatever. really shows that they never cared about cc's "boundaries" or feelings and just want that fandom moral superiority. quick have you been to comment sections of eps posted by the women in like 2017. have you seen the random twitch chatters.)

the fanon side of m-f friendships/ships in hc is interesting bc pre gem and pearl, the three women had their "designated guy bestie that they always collab with" and it's quite obvious who: stress-iskall, cleo-joe, false-ren (to a lesser extent cub). former two are basically the only prominent m/f ships (iskall in particular plays into it). i had talked to ppl in dms about why false/ren isn't prominent and my main theory is what i call the yaoi shield bc ren is shipped with a lot of men LMFAO (also something something about ren/iskall and false/stress being complements to avoid the "boring" m/f shipping).

but i still wish m-f friendships get more recognition 😔 like if you're not shipping them in the character sense, there's no risk of being seen as irl shipping, so technically it's no different from same gender friendships, right? 🤡 and i do not like the instant "siblingification" to create a fanon familiar bond to avoid shipping. like sometimes it works. a lot of the time it doesn't. people can just be friends. and they all are actually friends.

ok, more of a tangent here, but dug up an old ass convo from 2021 in which there was a point like "sometimes romantic relationships can happen between ccs and it is definitely more feasible than ccs becoming family via marriage/adoption" and i said "so technically 'shipping hcs' are less weird than 'same family hcs'. hm". soooo 🤡🤡🤡 it's totally fine if you don't wanna ship, but it is also TOTALLY fine to keep them as friends instead of siblings / family hcs. i think this fandom has enough awareness now to know you mean friends when you portray them as friends.

i'm happy to see more yuri bc yuri is almost always the least popular in fandoms. but i think m/m and f/f also has the vibes of "less likely to be perceived as irl shipping so we can go wild" while m/f character shipping is still treated with caution? and people really don't want ccs to misinterpret it as irl shipping? tbh i feel like the modern day fandom has gone into "god forbid a man and a woman are friends" that m/f is seen as the "boring" "cop-out" and it goes all the way around. like yeah sometimes it's boring. but not the point of it being nonexistent lmfao like m/f could be funnnnn!!!!!! and they can be queer too!! bi4bi, t4t!!!! or they can just be hetero idk!!

anyways. as a m&f / m/f main i have Thoughts. but yeah 👍

[flowerslut]

random/general/personal fanfic rambling + whining beneath the cut ♡

sometimes I think to myself: "lmfao I have such a tiny audience!!" but not in a self-deprecating 'oh woe is me no one reads my stuff' way. more like a "hell yeah I can do and say whatever the fuck I want because no one is looking in this direction anyways" which is just.... so nice???? and not entirely true but true enough that twilight has been my most peaceful fandom experience in a long time (despite still being Hated by certain fandom niches lmfaoo 😘)

like I often forget that the twilight fic I write has the least amount of interaction overall in comparison to literally Every Other Fandom i've ever been in. which is SO funny. even my unfinished dbz fic from forever ago has more hits than most of my twilight fic combined (the curse of being a jalice girlie 💔) which is also lowkey nice as hell because I don't have bratty teenagers and weird middle aged men in my comments/reviews/ask box bitching that "SaSuke wOULD NEVER—" and I can live in relative peace now 😌

but then that post saying "post the difference in hits between your most and least viewed fics" gets put on my dash again and I spend at least 20 minutes each time looking for someone with a comparable difference (SOMEONE TO RELATE TO YOU KNOW?) and out of the 5 or 6 times I've done this I've found ONE person. ONE!!! which just reminds me of how often I forget that although I can be a rando who flies under the radar here in twilight I will Not Be Afforded that luxury when I eventually go back to n*ruto. just look at how comical it is to look at my goddamn ff stats page. and yes, these two are listed right next to each other bc it's an alphabetized list, which just further emphasizes the absurdity in my different fandom 'audiences':

(it goes 'Word Count' -> 'Chapters' -> 'Reviews' -> 'Hits')

so its a weird feeling to be in a more niche, smaller fandom (largely by choice) and then seeing people constantly bitch and fucking moan about how their content doesn't get the hits it used to. or how they wish their numbers were higher. and instead of being like "these are personal, internal issues I must work on" they're like "ITS NOT ABOUT NUMBERS ITS ABOUT RESPECT" while they're BITCHING about wanting their numbers higher????? like bitch make it make sense! just say you're vain and want more hits/kudos! this is the worst part of being a part of the larger tumblr fic writer community because it's so insufferable to see

like yknow those popular posts that go around saying "Ummmm it's an UNSPOKEN RULE and always HAS been to ALWAYS leave a kudos and ALWAYS leave a comment even if you didn't enjoy the fic 😌💅" it makes me want to laugh in their faces. because I don't know what delusional circles you run in to think you're entitled to what you deem is 'adequate attention'?

"but fic writers spend hundreds, sometimes thousands of hours on—" and no one is making them do that. fic writing is a hobby.

"it's discouraging to get no engagement on fic—" then reexamine why you're writing and maybe take a break from the internet

"some fic writers are trying to establish an audience so when they switch to ofic or traditional publishing it'll be easier—" if this is a strategic business choice then either get into a bigger ship or fandom (hp/marvel/etc) or change your strategy dude because this is not going to work the way you think it will

"seeing so few kudos/hits makes me want to delete everything some days—" again: reexamine why you write fic. if you're doing it for external validation then there's a bigger issue at play here. if no engagement affects your mental health you really need to take a step back

and I will always understand wanting acknowledgement for the hard work content creators do. it feels really nice to get a kind comment or a bunch of favorites/kudos/whatever. but the tumblr-popularized mindset of "your readers OWE you for what you've provided for them" has skewed so far off from the original "fandom is a community" and into a weird "fandom has a hierarchy that we are attempting to enforce" mindset and I can't fucking stand it dude!!!!!

I wouldn't consider myself a fandom veteran because there are so many people who have been around far longer than I and who have seen some worse shit than I have, but over the past ~17 years that I've spent in online fandom spaces (and ~15 as a fanfic writer) the worst part of creating in fandom isn't that "kids these days are soooo entitled" or "noBoDy kNowS HOw tO CoMmEnT ANYmoRE" its that capitalism has warped everyones fucking mindsets!! now that content creation can be monetized people are viewing the content they create as things they can charge this weird 'social currency' for if they can't exchange it for actual currency (which you can't with most fan content).

you don't get to demand that people owe you interaction for you providing a service that you were not required to provide anyways. this banker ass capitalistic republican ass energy makes me wanna scream. and like, if you DO do this (we've all read a fic on FF.net where an authors note says "no more chapters until I get at least 5 reviews!!") then stop trying to moralize it and pretend that people who DONT comment are not doing what is required of them. which, is nothing. nothing is required of them.

tldr; anyways I always feel weird about my experience in fandom and as a fanfic writer bc I don't know where my peers are who can relate to my strange experience but who also don't subscribe to this bullshit "readers OWE the writers" mindset that's becoming aggressively popularized. either encourage friendly engagement with people's content or shut up. no more of this bs "fic writers Deserve More because I'm mad my highly-niche 7k pwp only got 18 kudos" bullshit

okay love u all happy friday bye bye can't wait to work on prompts for u guys this weekend ♡♡♡♡♡

[firelxdykatara]

Katara x Aang :3c

are you trying to get me in trouble

-cough-

no but in all honesty, my genuine feelings about kataang boil down to three major points: 1. it's boring, and does not jive thematically with either of their character arcs, to the point of, 2. actively hampering character development on both sides, and 3. katara deserved better.

points expanded under the cut. (please, if you're a kataang shipper and you see this, just keep scrolling. i've tagged it appropriately and put the bulk under a cut and at this point that's literally all i can do lmfao.)

send me a ship and get my (brutally) honest opinion!

1. It's Boring: This is the most subjective point on the list (I mean, in fairness, it's all subjective, but I have evidence from the show and post-canonical materials to support my other points; this one is just preference), but there's just... nothing to kataang. It's cute (when it's not actively aggravating), and... that's about it. It's not even that I dislike friends-to-lovers as a shipping trope (though it's not my overall preference), because there are a lot of friends-to-lovers couples that I do ship (kanej comes to mind, also will/elizabeth from potc, karolsen from supergirl, romione and hinny from hp, among others), but one thing that I think all of those couples have that kataang doesn't is that both sides of the pairing are teens or adults when they get together, with teen/adult dynamics and issues and stories to deal with, rather than one half being a teenager and the other being literally prepubescent.

And don't get me wrong, I have no problem with age gap ships in general. And as far as atla goes, Katara, at 14, has the same age difference from Zuko (16) as Aang has from her, and it's never stopped me--because both Katara and Zuko are well into puberty when they meet and I have no problem picturing them being into one another and growing together as they enter adulthood. Aang, on the other hand, is a child. And he acts like it. Which wouldn't be a problem, if the show weren't expecting me to believe he is a) ready for a romantic relationship, and b) ready for one specifically with Katara, who is not only older and far more mature but is specifically cast as his caretaker in a very maternal role for the entire show's run.

This show asks me to believe that a teenage girl well into adolescence is going to be attracted to and develop romantic feelings for a pre-adolescent child--and it asks me to believe this while showing us otherwise that Katara's type is actually older boys with fabulous hair and angsty pasts in all of her other potential romantic dalliances--and then enter into a relationship with him, all while ignoring the elephant in the room that is the fact that she was basically acting like his mother for the entire series to that point. (Something that is heavily lampshaded earlier in the very same season.) That just stretches the bounds of credulity way too far for me, especially when there's no evidence that Katara herself would get anything out of their romantic relationship.

There's nothing there for me to sink my teeth into. No delicious development, no parallels where they help each other grow, no internal conflicts that they have to work through together, nothing. Certainly no reason for me to actually believe Katara feels (or would grow to feel) anything for him other than the platonic affection of a caretaker. I can easily believe she loves him dearly, as a friend and quasi-little-brother, but I just can't see that developing naturally into romantic love--not the way it's presented in the show.

And even if they did manage to at least make the development of Katara's feelings believable, unless they changed something fundamental about the nature of their relationship, it'd still be boring, so.

2. It Actively Hampers Their Character Development--On Both Sides: I've written before (extensively lol im so sorry) about how kataang is actively detrimental to Katara and to Aang. In short (because ye gods this post is already getting long enough), Katara is narratively harmed by being shoved into a relationship that completely ignores her stated feelings--a relationship that had been presented as a one-sided puppylove crush for the vast majority of the series--and it inhibits her growth as a character in ways that become far more obvious in the comics and lok, where the very same creative forces that lead to her beginning a relationship with Aang in the first place reduce her to 'the Avatar's girl' and very little else, all the way through to the end of LoK (where she is a Healer and the Avatar's wife and, again, very little else).

As for Aang:

As to how this relationship is detrimental to Aang (other than the comics and LoK nonsense)? Just take a look at book 2, when he’s trying to learn Earthbending from Toph. Katara constantly coddles him. Much of the time, she’s afraid to be anything other than gentle and understanding with Aang--partly because of her fear that if she pushes him too far, he’ll run away. (Which he does, several times.) But sometimes, what Aang needs to grow is a sharp kick in the slats, which Toph was more than willing to provide--and which worked. Katara was great for teaching Aang to waterbend, but he needed more than that to grow as a person. And he can’t get that while he’s in a relationship with someone who will apologize for getting upset when he was very explicitly neglecting her.

In addition, it is pointed out by Guru Pathik at the end of Book 2 that one of Aang's chakras is blocked by his attachment to Katara. Aang takes this to mean (incorrectly) that he has to stop loving her in order to become fully realized as an Avatar, but this is actually part of the problem--because the issue isn't that he is in love with Katara, it's that he's possessively attached to her. He believes himself entitled to her love in return, rather than selflessly loving someone regardless of whether or not they return that affection. (This is obvious come the EIP episode, where Aang demands to know why he and Katara aren't in a relationship already--because he kissed her without asking [or even checking to see if she'd be ok with kissing him], which he phrases as mutual even though it very much was not, and he gets angry and violates her boundaries when she says that she is confused and doesn't want to think about it right then.)

It is his attachment to Katara--the need for her to return his love, the belief that she will and it is only a matter of time before he gets what he wants--that he was supposed to let go of, not his feelings for her in general. Unfortunately, while he pays lipservice to doing this (far too late for it to be useful--if he'd stayed with the Guru for five more minutes and unlocked his chakra there, that battle would've gone very differently), he almost immediately backtracks on that development come book 3, and there isn't another single whisper of Aang maybe growing up and moving past his one-sided and possessive crush and realizing that even if Katara doesn't feel the same way, it doesn't mean she loves him less or that their friendship is less important.

What really needed to happen, for Aang to grow as a person and become fully realized as an Avatar, was for him to grow up. To realize that his feelings were not of paramount importance, and that even if he was in love with Katara, he was not entitled to her love in return. He should have been able to move past his need for her to love him back, in order to get past that stumbling block, unlock his chakras, and regain the Avatar State in time to face the Firelord. But he didn't. As a result, they had to find some other way to just give him the Avatar State (a well-placed rock) and the means to defeat Ozai without killing him (the deus ex lionturtle) and his entire character arc just fell apart in the third act rather than reaching a satisfying conclusion.

3. Katara Deserved Better: This really ties into how her romantic relationship with Aang hampered her own development, but I'm still bitter enough about it that it gets its own bullet-point. And the biggest single reason I could never ship kataang--the thing that would've turned me off even if there were substance and a halfway decent storyline for them--is the fact that Aang kisses her without her consent (for the second time) in Ember Island Players, Katara gets angry at him and storms off, and then..... she walks out onto the balcony to make out with him.

With nothing to bridge that gap.

It's bad enough that a show aimed at children had a scene where the child protagonist kissed the object of his affections without her consent when she didn't want him to (made explicit by her angry reaction)--and this is absolutely an issue when the show is aimed at children and it may well be the first experience they've had with consent issues portrayed in media--but this moment is never addressed again. Katara just decides--completely off-screen--that she does love him Really and walks out to make out with him in the epilogue. There's no conversation, no apology for violating her boundaries, no discussion of why that was wrong or any indication that Aang understands what he did and why it upset her. They don't have a single one-on-one interaction between that kiss and the epilogue, and the only other time they are on screen together, Aang yells at her and storms off.

So, even leaving the comics and lok aside, Katara deserved much better from her own romantic plotline. In fact, she deserved to have one, rather than simply being the oblivious object of Aang's affections, given a couple moments where she blushes but otherwise remains completely ignorant of his feelings (she looks shocked and upset when he kisses her prior to the invasion, and then she completely forgets that even happened because she's confused as to what Aang is even talking about during EIP until he brings it up; that's not the behavior of a fourteen-year-old girl who was kissed by someone she was developing romantic feelings for), before the epilogue where it becomes clear that she figured all of that out off-screen and had feelings for him after all.

She's a main character, not a side-character written in solely to give one of the mains a love interest. She deserved a romantic plotline of her own. (She could have had one with someone else, with very few changes made to what was actually on-screen prior to the epilogue, but that's another conversation entirely.) She deserved to have her feelings considered at all important by the person she was going to be paired with in the end, rather than having him just assume she felt the same way and then get mad at her for never giving any indication of it when he'd never asked about her feelings to begin with. She deseserved agency in her own romantic narrative, and she just didn't get that with Aang.

So yeah, at the end of the day, my biggest issue with kataang is that it involved doing Katara dirty, and she's my favorite character and she deserved so much better damnit.

[janiedean]

crack prompt inspired by all the tvd talk on your blog: damon, jaime, tony stark all walk into a bar alone and end up drunk oversharing ~~

(if you wanna include ships in it anything with delena/dalaric/bamon; brienne; pepper/bruce/strange/rhodey is okay lmfao so pretty much anything goes, i just want them being each other's therapist because the timeline collapsed for some time and their universes interacted somehow lmfao)

*spins the wheel* AAAND hello anon we can absolutely try that u__u

ten years on tumblr anniversary prompt post | buy me a coffee | commissions open

Well, now I really did bite off more than I could chew, Tony thinks as he shakes his head and hopes that he and Bruce didn't fuck up the entire fabric of reality.

Well.

He's not in New York and he wasn't in the span of five seconds since they got the machine turned on, but - but well. Bruce isn't here, so hopefully he'll figure out where the fuck he ended up. Maybe we should have been sober when trying to work out that whole different timelines and multiverses thing.

Now, damage control. He should probably try to not go anywhere, but in case he actually just... teleported somewhere, maybe he should just ask where he is. He glances at his back. He's in front of a bar named Mystic Grill, which... okay, shitty name, but he could be anywhere in fuck-all-middle-of-nowhere Idaho for all he knows. He takes out his cellphone, and there is zero reception.

Bad news.

He sees a blonde kid with a police badge coming up the road, so he clears his throat and stops him.

"Uh, officer?"

"Hello," the kid says, "I don't remember seeing you around here."

Yeah, because I'm not from this world, most likely. "Eh," Tony lies, "I was driving my car but it broke down outside town and the way I got in, there wasn't a sign. Would you mind telling me where exactly I ended up?"

"Mystic Falls," the guy says, "I didn't know the damned State of Virginia now took us off the maps, too." That was sarcastic, Tony can hear it, but.

He's sure that there is no such place where he comes from.

"Right," Tony says, "I'll, uh, be out to find a mechanic then."

The kid gives him instructions to reach one, Tony thanks him and lets him go. Well, he can't certainly go anywhere now, but at least it seems like they fucked up just his -

"What the fuck," he hears from his left side -

Just in time to see a blonde guy wearing a white armor and a white cloak fall through a portal just the same as his own, that disappears a moment later. The blonde guy has green eyes, Tony notices, is lacking a right hand because he has a rather heavy golden prothesis on it that looks tacky also for his own tastes and looks completely out of his depth as he moves to his feet.

"Uh," Tony says, "I imagine you aren't from... here."

"Certainly not," the guy says, sounding... near hysterical, as he takes the surroundings. "What - what are those things anyway?" Cars. Oh fuck, he's looking at cars. "How are you dressed? What - what are these houses?"

"Er," Tony says, "humor me a moment. What's your name and where do you come from?"

The guy rolls his eyes. "Jaime Lannister, and I come from Westeros, thank you very much, now where the hell am I?"

... Great, Tony thinks, now it's not even someplace where the USA exist. "Er," Tony says, "in another world. Listen, it's my fault, I, uh, sort of caused it, and my colleague will most likely fix it, but it's really better we don't go anywhere so he can locate us more easily. Tell you what, can I buy you a drink while we wait?"

"Another world?" The guy blurts, and then - then he stares at Tony, then at his surroundings, then rolls his eyes again.

"You know what," he says, "I've had a shit long day. What can this be on top of fucking undead Catelyn Stark? Buy me the fucking drink."

I'm not doing drunk science anymore, Tony vows to himself as they walk inside the place, and he really hopes he can spin some story as to why the guy with him is wearing bonafide armor -

"And who the fuck are the two of you now?"

So: Tony had not taken into account that there would be just one person in the bar and that this person would be of course not human because no one human could pin the two of them to the wall in a split second and hold them there with such strength, and that's how he finds out that pretty guy with blue eyes, dark hair, pale skin and homicidal face is a damned vampire.

Except that the moment Tony explains it - Jaime or whoever he is is just keeping his mouth shut, wisely - the guy stares at them, and then more, and then -

"With everything I've seen in the last years," he says, "honestly, that's not even the most fucking stupid. So, you just want to lounge around until your friend shows up to fix whatever the fuck you did?"

"Er, yes?"

"Whatever. I'm Damon. I can cover your drinks and compel the bartender to forget your face. I sorely fucking need some myself."

He lets them go, but then - "Get that armor off," he tells Jaime, "this isn't New York City."

"I can't just leave my armor around!"

"Just leave it in the bathroom and take it back later," Damon shrugs, and then nods towards what's most likely the bathroom.

Jaime shrugs and goes, muttering something about maybe having drank too much milk of the poppy, and Tony doesn't want to know whatever the hell that is.

--

"Listen," Jaime says later, wearing an attire that's still obviously Middle-Ages-like but at least doesn't stand out too much, sipping at the bourbon Damon shoved at them, "I'm choosing to think I'm making this all up, but if I'm not, how long will it be before I can go back where I come from? Because you dragged me away from a rather fucking delicate situation."

"No idea," Tony shrugs, "but he's good at his job. And he was less drunk than me. We might get you back at the point you left."

"And what would that delicate situation be?" Damon asks. "Entertain me."

"And why should I tell you?"

"First, I bought you that alcohol and you're definitely enjoying it. Second, this is my town and I could tear your throat open if I wanted to." Fuck. He just showed fangs at the both of them. What the fuck. "Also, my murderous former girlfriend who is the cause of all my problems just finally fucked off this planet for good after possessing my current girlfriend who looks like her but really is the whole contrary and my best friend just came back to life after being dead for a whole lot of time and it's a complicated situation and I need a distraction or ten."

"That... sounds like something," Tony mutters, sipping at his alcohol. It's good, at least.

"Believe me, it is. So, what's the poison from Middle Ages here?"

"Ah, fuck that," Jaime says, takes a drink, and starts talking.

--

Half an hour later, Tony thinks that he and Damon are equally staring at the guy with the same disbelieving face.

"... Was that the undead woman that got you like this?" Jaime asks, blinking. "Considering that he seems like he's some kind of living dead, that's a tad hypocritical."

"No," Damon says, "that's the least of my problems. How haven't you frenched this Brienne person already?"

"I frenched?"

"Dude, he's from the Middle Ages," Tony takes pity on him. "He means put your tongue in her mouth."

"I - what - she's not - I'm not -"

"Listen," Damon cuts him, "I've been there. I mean, thinking I couldn't live without an arse who didn't give a fuck about me, which you admitted. But you do realize you spent at least five minutes of your charming tale describing us exactly how this Brienne of yours is ripped and has pretty eyes and was about to die for you?"

"Yeah, uh," Tony says, "let it come from someone who had the right people in front of him for ages and didn't let himself go for it, you really don't wanna drag it any longer."

"That's - she's a knight, that's not -"

"Oh, sure, all knights are shit where you come from, you said that, but suddenly someone would rather hang than kill you and you're here jittering because you got sucked here while she's dealing with a zombie that wanted you dead but I have to think you don't wanna french her?" Damon rolls his eyes again, pours himself another drink and honestly, Tony has cut down on the alcohol lately but he's gonna just make a damned exception. "Please."

"He's right," Tony says, "and also, let it come from someone whose dad was loaded on money and fairly shitty and still way better than yours, whatever he said about you is wrong."

"How do you know -" Jaime starts, half-blanching.

"Told you," Tony shrugs, "loaded on money, shitty father, at least I missed out on the shit sister. Honestly, man, just fucking drop her like hot coal and follow your gut. And let it come from someone who's fucked around a lot to get distracted, if you wanted to bone her in that bath then you're into her."

"I -" Jaime goes red in the face, finishes the drink, "it's not like it ever happened with anyone else before, it was a mistake, most likely -"

Damon gives him a look that looks halfway worried.

Tony thinks he just matched it, except even more worried.

"My vampire friend," he says, "are you thinking what I am thinking?"

"I'm afraid so," Damon says, and then looks back at Jaime. "Newsflash," he goes on, "if you get hard looking at a naked woman most likely you find her attractive. Also, you can find more than one person attractive in your life. And let it come from someone who's been there in the sense that I thought I could only love fucking Katherine, you really don't want to keep on doing it."

"I didn't say I wasn't done with Cersei," Jaime replies, somewhat weakly.

"Good," the two of them reply at the same time, and Tony has to snort.

"Look at that," he says, "for once I'm the one with the healthiest relationship history sitting at a table. Who'd have thought?"

"Fuck this," Damon says, "I'm getting more bourbon."

"Please," Jaime says, and - well. Seems like when Bruce comes to collect him, Tony won't be sober.

--

"Wait," Jaime says, "wait, wait, wait, she possessed your girlfriend?"

"Yeah, well, as if," Damon shrugs, "honestly, sometimes I think I should have just run away to New York after deserting."

"You deserted what?" Tony asks.

"The fucking confederacy," Damon shrugs. "Well, what are you staring about? I'm a vampire, I've been around ages, I'm from fucking middleofnowhere Virginia, you think I got drafted with the unionists? But I disagreed and I hated it and I never wanted to go, so I fucking deserted. I hope you aren't here judging me, or -"

"Please, I used to build weapons for the army and stopped when I realized it wasn't what I wanted to be, and honestly, that just means you have a conscience, so -"

"Wait, you did what," Jaime says.

"Deserted. An army. Back in the day. Risked my neck for it, and I came back and met Katherine and honestly I should have just gone North, but -"

"Hm," Jaime says, drinking, and then - "you don't regret it?"

"No," Damon says at once, "best decision I ever took. Why, you want to do that, too?"

"Sure he wants to," Tony says when Jaime doesn't immediately reply. "Let me guess, not just your army. You want to desert the whole shebang, don't you?"

"I don't know what a fucking shebang is, but yes. So what?"

"Well, if you want my been there done that advice, do that," Damon shrugs. "From what it sounds like, your entire world is collapsing because of zombies anyway, what do you have to lose? Your sister? You're better fucking off without."

Jaime stares down at the glass, then knocks it down. "Can I have another?"

"Sure," Damon says, and generously tips it.

--

"So what," Tony says, "now that your best friend you had a thing with while your girlfriend was with your brother is back to life you're having trouble adjusting?"

"She also hadn't been possessed by my murderous ex until then," Damon shrugs.

Jaime just looks at them, then drinks some more. "Who am I to judge on that anyway," he says, "but that sounds like a lot of work."

"You wouldn't believe," Damon shrugs, knocking down some more of his bourbon. "Never mind that Stefan won't get over brooding instead of fessing up to the girl he is in love with now, but it's not like I hadn't expected it."

"Tell him to," Jaime says at once. "I let my father fuck things up for my brother once and I hate that I ever did, just - don't."

"This is getting fucking eerie," Damon says.

Tony, who is currently feeling very thankful he doesn't have siblings, takes another sip. Then -

"Man, if it's complicated just date the both of them. If they both like you and aren't the kind of super monogamous people that can't handle a threesome once in a while, they won't have a problem."

"... And what do you know?"

He shrug. "Well," he says, "my steady girlfriend was in front of my eyes for years. Took us a while to get over ourselves. The guy I was doing drunk science with, well. Was an instant hit and I didn't let myself drag it in the centuries and guess what, we have a nice lovely arrangement where I'm with both of them, they commiserate about how much of an idiot I can be and sometimes we all occasionally have sex. It's grand. You should try it."

And I really hope Bruce shows up soon.

"Huh," Damon says, "maybe it has merit. For me. Not for you."

Jaime sputters. "I said nothing!"

"You shouldn't even think about threesomes. I can see it in your face you're not the type. And certainly not including your sister."

"Fuck you," Jaime replies without meaning it, "I was not considering that." Huh. Now he sounds offended Damon implied it. Maybe he really will fess up to the other one when he's back.

"Then it means this enlightening talk has enlightened you," Tony grins. "Mind telling us more about that hand?"

"And why?"

Tony shrugs. It's not like he doesn't have time to waste. "What if I could help you with that thing?" He says, nodding towards Jaime's stump, and then - well. Time to test if he can summon the armor here, too.

--

"God," Damon says a while later, "I'll have to compel that poor bartender so hard, but fuck this is something."

Sure it is, Tony grins. "Hey, I managed to fuck with quantum reality, I'm not the first idiot that passes by."

"Seven Hells," Jaime says, "I have no idea what it is you're putting on me but if it works half as well as that thing you have, I'm going to show back up in King's Landing just to show my sister who has the useless hand now. If she didn't get herself killed."

"Well, now that is one reason I could approve of," Tony laughs, "and don't fucking move."

Sure, building a prothesis from the rests of whatever nonfunctioning electronics the bartender had lying around is... somewhat a challenge, but as stated, he has time to waste and it's not like he's wanted anywhere soon.

"By the way," Damon says as he watches him tinker around with the toolkit he found him in the backroom, "do you need advice in the whole I fucked up and want my brother to forgive me department?"

"What if I do?" Jaime replies through his teeth. "Because now that would distract me from how much this entire thing is fucking hurting."

The more they talk while he tinkers, the more Tony decides he's absolutely glad he was an only child and that his father only fucked one son up.

--

"You're doing this while not even being fucking sober?" Damon knocks back more bourbon. "You sure you don't wanna stay here and turn into an immortal? You'd be useful."

"Thanks but I like my life as it is," Tony snorts. "But if you need tech tinkered with, you can ask while I'm here."

Jaime is just staring at the steel-colored hand coming to life while Tony puts piece after piece together, his throat working up and down.

He drinks some more. "Fuck, if only I had such a thing when I realized what the fuck Aerys had turned into."

"Wait, who's Aerys now?" Damon asks.

--

He hadn't told them that part in detail.

When he's done and Tony is at the fourth finger, he kind of wants to hurl, but mostly -

"Do we really have to stay here," Damon says, "or you think we could sneak him to a VA? I can compel them to just hear that he's talking about Vietnam or something."

"He's not old enough for Vietnam, but you know what, I think we could risk that."

"What in the Seven Hells is a VA?"

"Someone I really could have used in the nineteenth century," Damon sighs, and then just as Tony moves to the last finger -

"Tony, what the hell is this?"

--

Turns out, where Bruce comes from it took him two days to figure this out. He also immediately spots three different improvements Tony could do to that hand, and when he hears the entire shebang he raises his hands and says that he can send Jaime right back when he left at any point and he and Tony, too, but he supposes that if they want to compel the VA before they leave it's not like he's in a hurry, and wait, vampires?

Damon ends up asking him if the threesome thing is really working out as well as Tony says.

While he does, Tony manages the finishing touches on the sort-of-steel-and-iron-hand he cobbled up together, and thank fuck Bruce showed up because he had been the one studying how Barnes's arm worked, back in the day, and gave Tony the pointer he needed to make sure the entire thing was... well, connected to the nervous system without needing to rip Jaime's wrist open.

"Right," he says, "try to move the fingers."

Jaime holds them in a fist.

It works.

"Seven fucking hells -"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm a genius. Just keep it out of too many lines of fire, but if you're from the middle ages it should withstand most stuff. You're welcome. And go french that knight of yours instead of waiting, really."

"I think in between him and you, you've made a case. Uh, thank you, I -"

"Nonsense, I was the reason you're here, I might as well have helped out. Hey," he says, "so, what about a last round before we drag him to the VA and Bruce here settles everything?"

"I'm so down for it," Damon says.

"Do I even have a choice," Bruce groans, but then he does sit down at the same table and lets Tony fill his glass.

"Oh, don't look like that," Tony says, "after all I didn't destroy the universe and made some friends, it could have gone worse."

"Wouldn't know about that, but I could have done worse, too," Damon says, and orders more bourbon.

"I sure as the fucking Seven Hells will never manage to explain this to anyone," Jaime says, "but I guess I'm not too disappointed, either."

"Tony," Bruce groans, "did you manage to somehow end up with two people with - never mind. Of course you did. We're never doing drunk science again, hear me?"

"Maybe so," Tony agrees, though... well.

Maybe he will want to check on them, once in a while.

But he can think about how to convince Bruce to make sure they can later.

For now, he'll enjoy his last round.

[hanijunk]

Alright boys, girls, and nonbinary folks of the world. It’s 5:36am (1/30 when I first started) as I decide to give up on my attempt to continue to focus on learning statistics, avoid studying for my two upcoming midterms, and put off my two actual essays for two different classes.

Instead we’re going into a dive about ✨ KazuFuuma ✨ . Is this me telling you you gotta ship it? No of course not, you’re entitled to your own ships! You don’t really gotta care about it as a ship. But I do want people to recognize it’s THERE canonically, and how disregarding it is extremely unfair to Kazuki as a character particularly. Also, I’m working on the assumption anyone clicking this at least knows the bare bones about what KazuFuuma (ex. You know they are a ship of Kazuki/Fuuma from Dolce, you know they are childhood friends, you know who Dolce is, you know about Honeyworks, etc.) I’ll be making references to specific things, but I won’t always go into heavy detail. Might just hope you know it or take my word for what it is, and go into analyzing it. Some I’ll put direct references to find, but some I’ll trust you can find it yourself. If you somehow read this MAMMOTH and want reference to a specific thing mentioned, hmu I can help you find it!!

Also I hate tumblr formatting sm if you legit wanna read this 7 page essay but hate tumblr format lmk I'll add it as a google doc link instead too. anYWHO

Before actually getting into the meat of things lemme preface some stuff.

Again it’s like almost 6am so this will be disorganized and very train of thought (and likely long due to the fact when I fly by the seat of my pants I’m known to get unnecessarily extensive). It’s definitely gonna be in large part why it’s important to recognize as a romantic relationship foundation and what about it shapes Kazuki’s character in particular. Maybe a bit of how it’s been built up and its general focus and implications. Dunno yet. We’ll see LMAOO

I say f*ck. Not a lot, just a handful of times. This ain’t something scholarly this is for my own enjoyment so if you don’t like that might not wanna read. And it’s not like spitefully I just curse a lot if you haven’t...read my tags before lol

Again this is through the lens of a Kazuki stan. Of COURSE I’m going to have some level of bias, but if anything that bias may help more than hurt because that means I become FIXATED and think a lot about Kazuki. Which plays into establishing just how important it is that Kazufuuma’s relationship is recognized, especially in a romantic light at this point. Lmfao. 

I’ll have a few more prefaces about the actual content below but to keep this from getting too long if you wanna read come below the cut owo

I have extremely limited knowledge of Japanese just taking a few classes in highschool (so like 3 yrs ago) and live in America. This means a lot of my knowledge is gathered through the english translations of the super duper incredible and lovely people in the Honeyworks fandom who provide translations (delaix and takanenene esp have provided so much for me being able to understand Dolce) and my own limited Japanese paired with Google Translate for things that remain untranslated.

This only will be drawing on information I have come in contact with and have access to and making assumptions based on that, most (if not all) of which is in the public domain. So things like the Dolce Manga Volumes released via Animate, exclusive 4komas, and Light Novels are out of my area for the most part (apart from again snippets of translations thanks to this fandom’s godlike and generous translators).

I will not be drawing on anything from the first Dolce album with the exception of Nade Nade. From a meta standpoint, I consider those songs as songs made as performance media as opposed to character explorations. Nade Nade is the exception because (1) it was released a whole year before the album and (2) you can tell it’s explicitly an exploration of Fuuma and Kazuki’s interpersonal relationship even if it’s in a slightly more performance based context than the songs that came out with the Dolce LNs. Easiest parallel I can make to show this is if you held Non-Fantasy, Yume Fanfare, and Samishigariya up against each other, you could tell the difference in intended audience and intended purpose the same way the Dolce 1st album, Nade Nade, and the songs of the LNs do respectively. Even if there is some basis to ground Kazufuuma, for the purposes of this essay I’ll be acting under the assumption the 1st album falls under the Non-Fantasy equivalent category.

THAT WAS A LOT OF PREFACING CONSIDERING LIKE 2 PPL WILL PROBABLY READ IT I just have a tendency to anytime I do anything analytical lay down ground acknowledgements for myself to work on just...cuz it makes me feel less guilty for any accidental misinformation even if I’m writing towards my future self to read lolll IM SORRY WITHOUT FURTHER TO DO HERE’S THE BRAIN DUMP

First let’s go ahead and establish why it needs to be recognized as an important relationship. Again, I’m a Kazuki stan. He’s my favorite character not only of Dolce but also of the entire Honeyworks series, and as much as I love him for reasons outside the ship, whether you like it or not Kazufuuma is an essential aspect of his character and narrative. Of course there’s the fact that him and Fuuma are childhood friends, so that’s going to in part define their characters and interactions with each other and those around them. They’re both going to be relevant to one another and important to one another’s stories to an even greater extent than the rest of the members of Dolce. But on Kazuki’s side at least, it’s an EXTREME amount. A running plotpoint in Dolce Diary is the sheer amount of dedication Kazuki has to Fuuma and how much his thoughts and decisions are influenced by Fuuma, whether it be how he feels happiest spending time with Fuuma, how he decided to get his piercing to represent he wanted to protect Fuuma, how he doesn’t want to dislike food so he can eat what Fuuma dislikes, etc. Not to mention running jokes about his borderline overprotectiveness and downright possessiveness of Fuuma, how proud he is when Fuuma gets praised, or that one 4koma that literally explicitly states he can read Fuuma’s mind when he thinks motherfucking ‘dirty thoughts’ about his childhood friend (Fuuma). I still don’t know what the fuck to make of that last bit. Genuinely. Or the fact it’s a fucking running joke. As in it’s not a one off. It’s been brought up multiple times. Kazuki what the fuck. 

That’s not to say that he doesn’t have character outside of Fuuma or he doesn’t interact with people other than Fuuma. He’s great friends with Sara, Girisha, and Kippei and is shown time and time again to have fun interactions with all of them, generally acting as the best support friend for every member of the group, not Fuuma alone. For instance how he helps Kippei with his self confidence issues or stays over at Sara’s to protect him from a cockroach (which he fails at lol). Nor is that to say all his interactions involving Fuuma focus solely on his devotion to Fuuma, especially in instances where the manga focuses on Dolce as a group dynamic (though even in that setting there are times where jokes about his devotion are thrown in). He’s kind, he’s stupid, he’s friendly, he’s an amazing character in his own right, and I love him for all those reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact a major part of his character and his character interactions are rooted in Fuuma, and arguably some of his most interesting, eccentric, and notable behaviors and traits revolve around Fuuma (again the mind reading for example).

Hell let’s take it one step further. If you look at the character bios of the Dolce members, you get everyone’s motives for being an idol and interests. Of them, Kazuki is the only one to have another character mentioned directly, not to mention that supporting Fuuma is explicitly stated to be his primary motive as to why he became an idol. Not even Fuuma’s sister is mentioned, though two arguments can be made for this. The first would be that Fuuma’s backstory about wanting to fulfill his dream for himself and his sister was decided later to explain Fuuma’s choice to crossdress though it can be argued it was intentionally done to leave it as a reveal at a later date, to which I would argue I don’t think this backstory was a choice in post. While Fuuma’s dedicated Dolce Diary extra exploring that backstory was released a little less than a year after Dolce was revealed, the preview to set up Fuuma’s backstory was actually the first thing released after the character bios on the Dolce Official Twitter page if you exclude a drawing of Dolce from Yamako. The second argument could be that information about his sister was intentionally withheld to set up the reveal when Fuuma’s extra released to explore it. However, going by that logic (which I do agree with), that would also mean that Fuuma’s inclusion and importance in Kazuki’s character bio also set up his dedicated extra, which I don’t think would be incorrect to assume considering what his actual extra turned out being.

Which brings me to the thing that makes it inexplicable to write off the romantic implications behind Kazufuuma: Kazuki’s dedicated Dolce Diary extra, Suki. I shipped Kazufuuma before even knowing of Suki, sure. But the fact that Suki even exists is a shock to me and drove into me the fact that Kazufuuma wasn’t just my own projection. Again, it’s not a surprise that Fuuma shapes Kazuki’s life. They’re childhood friends, of course they’re going to be important to each other. But this extra explicitly brought Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma under a direct spotlight. At first I was thinking oh, this extra was just to acknowledge the fact that Kazuki and Fuuma’s relationship can have romantic implications, but the end of it the conclusion that we got was that it didn’t matter what type of “like” he felt for Fuuma. Originally, I thought it wasn’t anything more than saying there are all types of like, and it doesn’t always need to be explicitly defined, but I appreciated the fact they were aware that they were writing Kazuki in a way that conveyed romantic implications. 

Then I thought about it because, again, I love Kazuki of course I’m going to think about his character extra, and realized...that’s not how these character extras have worked. There are only three character extras out as far as I know and have read: Fuuma, Kippei, and Kazuki. If we look at Fuuma and Kippei’s, each extra had a conclusion, sure, but they didn’t have a resolution. Rather, they were simply setting up explicitly what each character’s primary character arc and conflict were. Fuuma’s extra brought attention to the fact that he’s particularly a crossdressing idol by exploring the motives behind it. His choice to be a crossdressing idol is constantly under fire both by himself and the world around him. He’s not immune to those who consider his crossdressing strange, and a part of his story is both finding people who accept his decision to crossdress and to succeed for himself as a crossdressing idol. It’s an essential part of how we understand and define him as a character and it’s a central part of how he interacts with the world around him. For Kippei, it lays the severity of his insecurity under the spotlight and his journey and motives for improving himself. Again, this isn’t something isolated and resolved in the extra; his extreme insecurity and negativity is constantly affecting how he interacts with practically everyone from his fellow Dolce members to his fans despite the fact in all honesty? He’s fucking insanely talented in his own right, his own brother mentioning how smart he is and how he has amazing reflexes. For Kippei, his negativity is an essential part of how we understand and define him and central to how he interacts with the world as much as Fuuma’s decision to crossdress is to him.

Which brings us back to Kazuki, of course. In his dedicated extra, in the chapter that’s supposed to explore and establish and bring attention to an essential part of his character, the aspect of himself under investigation is how he feels about Fuuma. It’s not just how he behaves around Fuuma, it’s explicitly an exploration of his feelings, on top of the fact it’s explicitly an exploration about whether or not he likes Fuuma r o m a n t i c a l l y. Literally the conflict is spurred on by someone outright asking “Do you like him?” and having to clarify “I mean romantically.” What they decided to focus on for Kazuki’s character and emphasize and establish is that Kazuki’s like towards Fuuma toes the line between friendship and romance. His ambiguous feelings towards Fuuma (if we leave them inconclusive as Suki did) are just like Fuuma’s crossdressing and Kippei’s insecurity in the sense the weight of whatever those feelings may be are seen in how he interacts with the world around him and influences his behaviors. It would be another story if they introduced the potential and shut it down all within the extra, because then his central conflict would to me be less directly open to romantic potential and more simply about how his arc was meant to explore the dynamic of the behavior of an extremely dedicated best friend. The fact that he may be romantically attracted to Fuuma or may be only platonically dedicated to Fuuma is instead something that looms over Kazuki in the same way Fuuma’s decision to crossdress constantly looms over him. It’s what Dolce wanted to point to and say this is Kazuki’s central character conflict and central arc: exploring what type of feelings he has towards Fuuma. 

Sure, it can be argued that there’s only three Dolce Diary character extras, there’s not enough to be sure about that being the purpose of the extras unless we get the other two’s extras. First, at this point I honestly don’t know if or when they’re going to release an extra revolving around Sara and Girisha just because not only has it been over a year and a half since the latest Dolce Diary Character Extra (Kazuki’s) was released despite the gap between the first and latest Dolce Diary Character Extra (Fuuma’s and Kazuki’s) were within a year of release but also because the Dolce 4komas and comics they’ve been posting to Twitter have decreased (last one being over half a year ago) potentially due to them deciding to focus on releasing Dolce manga content through the purchasable volumes instead. (This is not particularly related to the Kazufuuma argument, just wanted to put out there my two cents on what Sara and Girisha’s extra/focal arc would be. Based on a large part of the Dolce Diary in conjuncture with Can’t an Idol Fall in Love, I’d argue Sara’s would be his journey to regain his passion for performing, and if it’s not that I’d say it’d be coming out of his self-imposed isolation and opening up to people again. As for Girisha, I have less of a concrete idea but I’m assuming it’d be something pertaining to how people often misconceive him whether it be in tandem with his determination, his optimism and sociability, or his stupidity/ability to ignore those misconceptions and work past them. But Girisha is treated like the comedic relief 90% of the time so I’m not entirely sure, but his primary conflict is definitely rooted in misconceptions of him being his roadblock imo. #MoreGirishaContentPlz) That being said, I personally feel like the three are already enough evidence, especially considering it would be honestly even more cruel for Kazuki’s character-centric extra to be focusing on something that wasn’t essential to his character and character arc, anyway. And though it’s not explicitly stated that these chapters are extras exploring a central character, you can kind of tell based on how they are (to my knowledge) the only Dolce Diary updates with cover/title cards each which include their focal character front and center. So working off that fact, the Kazuki-centric chapter established that a pillar to his narrative was his feelings towards Fuuma and that those feelings are still open to romantic potential. 

But if you follow me, this is why up until Can’t an Idol Fall in Love With Another Idol’s release, I was terrified of them writing that off. I would have been ok if it was just an arc that was given attention then continued to actively work in the background, as all the character arcs have been over all of Dolce’s content. The fact that they might be giving Fuuma a love interest and giving Fuuma a love arc while Kazuki’s feelings were still up in the air and were still the primary highlighted narrative for him would have been fucking scuffed. To me, it would be like… why would they make him so Fuuma-centric to the point that even his dedicated chapter was not just focused on Fuuma but focused on the ambiguity and potential of him having romantic feelings for Fuuma, yet reduce him to being Fuuma's designated right-hand man. Don’t get me wrong, friendships are just as important as romantic relationships. But again, rather than conclude Kazuki’s answer in Suki to be that his feelings were of friendship, they left it open ended and allow audience members to be actively aware that Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma still had potential to be romantically coded. It would just be so weird to quickly close off that narrative by giving Fuuma a love interest as opposed to letting Kazuki conclude it himself. It would be fucking beyond frustrating for me, at least Eventually, I kept trying to drive my hopes that they would explore Kazuki’s narrative at all down to the ground because it was a Fuuma-centric novel; maybe if anything they’d explore those feelings in his own novel after the fact. But then they kept having little drops here and there of Kazuki being even the slightest bit relevant and I’d go back to questioning “Are??? They??? Is this on purpose??? Do they know what they’re doing or are they just doing this because Kazuki’s just so important to Fuuma as his best friend that he’s there as his right-hand I genuinely can’t tell???” And um. Welp.

Safe to say Can’t An Idol Fall in Love sold me on the fact that they know what they’re doing LOL. And to anyone who thinks that Kazuki’s feelings can still be read as ambiguous in CAIFILWAI as opposed to explicitly romantic - whether it be due to a fear they may pull the “I like him as a friend” card or due to the disbelief that they have an explicit mlm main character in the Honeyworks series - I’d like to cover any bases that may make you think this way. If you think it’s just Kazuki acting like a protective friend, why do you think he calls Yui a rival? If you’ve only seen the MV and think it’s ambiguous or can be taken as the "likfe" for friend, then does that mean you think Yui’s feelings toward Fuuma are also ambiguous or as a friend? With the way Yui responds, she is trying to rival Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma. She and Kazuki recognize whatever feeling it is that they hold towards Fuuma, both of their feelings are the same type. I don’t think most people would argue that Yui’s confession about Fuuma was one of pure respect and friendship. Plus, if anything I’d argue of the three characters in the MV, Fuuma is the one whose feelings are left the most ambiguous despite him being the central character. It’s heavily implied that he may be forming feelings for Yui, but nowhere is it established either in the song or in the MV, especially if you compare it to Kazuki and Yui’s declarations or if you compare it to Sara’s feelings for Uru in Can’t An Idol Fall in Love. Fuuma’s romantic narrative here is trying to figure out how he feels for Yui, while for Kazuki and Yui they’ve established a rivalry because they both have mutually established they like Fuuma romantically.

If the MV isn’t enough for you and Suki isn’t enough for you for...some reason…??? You can check out the snippets of the light novel which the wonderful takanenene translated: one which revisits the conflict set up in Suki and one that covers the confession scene in the MV in more detail. If the fact that the conflict set up in Suki (aka the lurking feeling of not knowing if all he felt for Fuuma was only platonic or more than platonic) was specifically reestablished in the LN for anyone who didn’t keep up with Dolce Diary didn’t tip you off that it was something important, his behavior in the confession scene as depicted by the LN definitely should have. He’s possessive about his spot by Fuuma’s side. He doesn’t want that spot to be taken by anyone else. Even if he knows that they can help Fuuma, he wants it to be him. And this line: “Kazuki then trails off his words, quietly saying ‘That’s why…’ and then gave Yui a slightly painful smile, his cheeks turning red,” before he declares Yui a rival and states he likes Fuuma. If you can tell me you read that line and are still on the fence about Kazuki’s “like” towards Fuuma being romantic, please message me and I will see how I can get through to you. Like it wasn’t even just a romantically coded confession. It’s just a romantic confession. That “like” is romantic. And I’m so proud that he’s not only come to understand for himself how he feels, but that he’s confident enough to ask the person he sees as a romantic rival to speak in private and not only clarify her feelings for Fuuma but before she can even do that firmly establishes that he loves Fuuma with conviction. Kazuki my boy I’m so proud of you. *sniffs*

And that’s it for establishing Kazufuuma as at least canonically one-sidedly canon and why there’s not only no reason to deny it but also why denying it is a fucking disrespectful move towards Kazuki. He’s a character, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact you shouldn’t write off his struggle to come to be convicted enough to say it out loud. This has been something weighing on him at least a year, if not more (all I know is it started when both he and Fuuma were in some year in middle school). And as a character in a piece of media, I’ve been saying this the entire time, but brushing it off as non-romantic is literally chucking a fucking pillar of his character’s story into the gutter. And to those who may be saying Kazuki’s confession came out of nowhere and is pandering reread this entire fucking essay again I dare you to do it and tell me to my face it’s pandering. Again. Writing off the buildup as pandering is disrespectful to him, disrespectful to his character and narrative, and disrespectful to the wonderful people who have been creating Dolce so diligently and have crafted this narrative for us. Saying his “supposed feelings” and “ambiguous confession” is pandering is like saying Fuuma’s crossdressing is pandering which. If you say either of those I will find you and I will shank you in the fucking gut. Even if you’re not fully into Dolce, recognize these characters are actually very well developed and executed amazingly, as per every Honeyworks character that has come to exist. I don’t blame you if you weren’t aware of the weight of Kazufuuma, but now that you read this I hope you are. That’s mainly what I needed to get out there, but as follows will be me more exploring how Kazufuuma has been built up and generally waving my hand off at where it may be going. If you want you can dip, thanks for reading up to here because I know I repeated a lot because it’s just. So important to drill into your head and has been something I’ve been hung up about constantly. LOL

As for where exactly they’re taking it from this point on, I honestly don’t know. In all honesty, I didn’t even expect them to take it the direction they did. But honestly, I think the direction they went with it is really interesting and better than I could have imagined, in my opinion at least. Honeyworks never ceases to amaze me with their storytelling and narrative choices, and I don’t think there’s any that stand out to me as being severely questionable that they haven’t reapproached at some point down the line. And, again, I think they’re treating this with a lot of care and deserved respect. So I’m just gonna be gushing about how smart they set it up and how smart they’ve been executing it and maybe my own hopes on the direction it could go.

Whether they make Kazufuuma reciprocated I have no real clue or bearings, but to me my gut reaction is they will. Of course, I’m biased, but again if you trace things all the way back to 2018 and step through Dolce’s content and growth from there, I’d say even if they didn’t know if they could execute it like this and see it to fruition, I’d argue that Kazufuuma has been at least heavily implied since the beginning as a relationship they wanted to explore from both sides of the relationship. Obviously I brought up Kazuki’s character bio already, but if you look at the *goes to count* 5th Dolce Diary update already has a joke jabbing at the fact that Kazuki is technically Fuuma’s type (and the way Kippei and Kazuki excitedly react is so cute). The fifth update. And as stated before there are tons of Kazufuuma moments in Dolce Diary, whether it’s played for comedic effect or played straight (and this is post Suki but oh my god I’ve said it before I’ll say it again get yourself someone who looks at you the way Kazuki looks at Fuuma oh my jesus). But song-wise, I mentioned the one Dolce album song I would bring up is Nade Nade and this is where it comes! 

Not only is Nade Nade specifically focused on Kazuki and Fuuma’s relationship as opposed to the whole of Dolce despite being the first song, it included the setup/preview of the Fuuma-centric extra prior to the full release of the Fuuma-centric extra itself and was released early as fuck. Literally between the 6th and 7th update to Dolce Diary. Sure, it could be to isolate them as a duo for marketing purposes (they’re very often the two promoted idols together if the whole of the group aren’t included), but the way it’s established as a perspective song as opposed to a general idol duet is what fascinates me. Anyone who didn’t know about Dolce prior and only followed Honeyworks for music would be first introduced to these characters through this song alone, and maybe this is where my Kazufuuma bias comes from but I was one of those people LOL. I thought it was just a cute one-off relationship that they had set up for the purpose of a song and that it was an implied friends-to-lovers story that would never get a conclusion. Also I mistakenly thought Fuuma was a girl oop-. In the full context of Dolce, this song in part helped establish Fuuma and Kazuki more solidly as a unique duo out of all of Dolce, but it also specifically explored through Fuuma’s eyes just how much Fuuma recognizes and appreciates the unwavering support Kazuki gives him to follow his dreams as he wishes. For Fuuma, he loves Kazuki too, though whether it holds any romantic potential in the same way Kazuki loves him has never been explored to nearly the same extent. But Fuuma appreciates how Kazuki’s remained by his side and does everything he can to support him, so Nade Nade explores how his way of expressing his love and thankfulness to Kazuki is by never saying that he needs Kazuki by his side. He’s glad Kazuki’s always been there for him, and his reciprocation takes on the form of being ready to unwaveringly support Kazuki and not ask for more than he already has, even if it meant Kazuki would be leaving his side, despite the fact that he really does wish they could remain together forever just as Kazuki does. The one point he lets himself say something vaguely close to always wanting to stay together, he gets a surprised expression out of Kazuki and says an ambiguous “suki dayo.” Of course, this it much less romantically coded than what we get from Kazuki in Suki and CAIFILWAI, but there is an interesting emphasis put on it nonetheless. Keep in mind, this is all established through the song, which released long before not only Fuuma’s character-centric extra released but also Kazuki’s character-centric extra released, so there is at least a substantial setup for Fuuma’s feelings towards Kazuki’s being strong as well and possibly grow to be reciprocated one day.

I think for me the most fascinating part about Nade Nade is how they tied it back around to Can’t An Idol Fall In Love with Another Idol. Again, without remembering Nade Nade, I still thought CAIFILWAI was brilliantly explored and executed, even if some people would have preferred no love triangle. But honestly, revisiting Nade Nade makes me trust even more the direction they’re taking with this. Whether or not they make Kazufuuma canon mutually (which. Even if they for some inexplicable reason didn’t I’m going down with this ship.), I’m sure they’re putting a lot of thought into the story, because the last bit of Nade Nade directly parallels the misunderstanding that arose from Fuuma mishearing the Kazuki and Yui. Fuuma is resolved to support Kazuki in any area he’s given the chance, and that explicitly includes if Kazuki had some girl he liked, which is what he assumes is going on. The fact that they tied this back around in the form of a misunderstanding was really really smart and Honeyworks is always so good at parallels and references back to their older songs, but for some reason I didn’t expect this. I don’t know how to say why, but the fact that the song that started it all, kicked off both Dolce and Kazufuuma, was directly referenced both visually in the MV with a cameo at the start and narratively despite the central dynamic being predominantly explored in this story in particular was that of Fuuma and another potential love interest and involves said potential love interest for some reason makes me think that (sorry Yui) this is all planned out for Kazufuuma in the grand scheme of things. That being said, I don’t know if me thinking it was planned all along is just me with shipper goggles, but the idea it’s come full circle nearly 3 years later is not shipper goggles and a very very well done parallel in my opinion, whether this trajectory was their plan for Kazufuuma from the beginning or not. Just wanted to gush about that some more. 

There’s more I could go into especially if I went into specific details about interactions or specific implications established in Honeyworks' Dolce content about different characters that would be fascinating to explore in relation to and under the lens of Kazufuuma, but I think this is uh...plenty long enough. Plus, I doubt you'll stop seeing Kazufuuma posts from me so those ideas will probably just be miniposts or somethin.

Back to the overarching point of this segment, idk what they’ll do with this story in the end, but do I think Kazufuuma will canon? I’m used to looking at ships that aren’t explicitly apparent with a sliver of skepticism, but all things considered (as I stated before) yeah. I don’t see reason why they wouldn’t now that they’ve explicitly identified there is a romantic dimension to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like to me, the setup isn’t something that would be written off as unrequited? And this doesn’t have to play into why I don’t think it will canon, my personal opinion on the Fuuyui relationship (again albeit through the lens of a hard Kazufuuma shipper lmao) has it’s own merits and is really cute, I find it cute in the way I found Koyuhina cute. I personally never really shipped Koyuhina, and especially since they slipped Kotarou into Ima Suki Ni Naru I was more curious about who this kid was and how he played into things I didn’t really see Koyuhina as something that would come to fruition. Similarly, there’s more importance in the overall sense on Kazuki than there is Yui (considering he’s one of the 5 original and focal members of this generation of idols, this would be natural), as well as the fact there’s just way more foundation and exploration in Fuuma and Kazuki’s relationship than there is Fuuma and Yui. As for how much of a balance there is inside the LN itself, the fact that they seem to have spent a substantial amount relaying the foundation of Fuuma and Kazuki’s relationship and re-exploring it (at least in Kazuki’s perspective) at all on top of how much content there is covering their relationship prior to the LN ever since Dolce’s origin just feels like that relationship holds more weight. Pretty much Kazufuuma feels more established as a priority in general. The way I personally hope Fuuyui plays out is whether they wind up holding mutual feelings or not or whether Fuuma doesn’t feel that way towards Yui is they get a relationship akin to Kotarou and Arisa. Albeit, Kotarou and Arisa never viewed each other in a romantic light, but they had mutual respect and solidarity. That’s the type of friendship I hope comes out of Fuyui. And considering there hasn’t been a break-up in any Honeyworks’ canon relationships (nor do I expect there to be… they’re all perfect for each other LMAO) it would actually be interesting if Fuuyui get together but don’t endgame and Kazufuuma is established as the inseparable endgame after some realization or another, though I don’t expect them to go that route nor do I know if that’d be the best way to go about it anyway. Also final point, Honeyworks seems to have a thing for childhood friends trope anyway soooooo owo All in all, don’t know where they’re taking it, just excited to see where it goes. 

TL;DR of this *counts* 7 page essay, stan Kazufuuma. Not gonna proof this. Maybe I’ll edit and repost but yall are getting a confusing clusterfuck of ramblings over 2-3 hr periods of me writing across 3 different days at around 5am each day. Uh. If you got this far like and subscribe and-- jk plz reply to this mammoth anywhere you see fit or tell me if you have stuffs to add or counter or whatnot I like hearing people talk about Kazufuuma ;w; I am Kazuki and Kazufuuma brainrot can you tell after reading this? No? Lemme just remind you I’m K--

[arcgeminga]

What is the mun's opinion of all the gold saints from TLC?

♚— Oh boi. This is gonna be a mouthful. I know you said "all" , but I can't do saints like Avenir and Sage since I haven't read Shion and the Old Twins' gaiden in English. And I'm not about to act like I know Spanish enough to write a review on those saints.

♚ Aries Shion - Should've been the Hades Arc Shion. Like damn, I really like Shion when he's an angry sheep!! I mean, he yeets the five bronzies in Hades Arc like "Fuck dem kids!". 

I really like Specter/Pope Shion. But TLC Shion I do not hate. In fact, I can understand how and why he becomes Pope. I really like TLC Aries Shion! I just wished he was more angry sheep, but TLC Shion is not bad. I especially loved his Gaiden, at least the part where Avenir was shown. I feel like they should have explained more on his thoughts on becoming pope or exploring him having some sort of survivor's guilt but hey. I don't dislike him!     

♚ Taurus Aldebaran/Hasgard/Rasgado - Honestly, the only thing I can say about Hasgard is that... I don't hate him. I love his English Voice actor (because I'm a really big fan of Jamieson Price since Tales of Vesperia), but for Hasgard himself... I don't really have an opinion or thought on. His teenage years with Sisyphus and Aspros seemed fun, and I'm kinda... hm... sad that their relationship mellowed out? Or at least, we didn't get his and Sisyphus' opinions or reactions to Aspros' death.     

♚ Gemini Defteros & Aspros - OH BOY WHERE DO I START!? ----- Gemini Aspros - I understand why Aspros was the way he was towards everyone and his brother. It's honestly not his fault. I am happy that he doesn't have a "split personality" at all throughout TLC, even though that is something I would never diss Saga for (even if it wasn't really a split personality). He was simply manipulated into behaving cruelly because someone showed him something that he was scared of, and that was akin to his brother not needing him. His Gaiden harks back to that too, during that 'flashback' when he told Defteros that he was going to become pope, Defteros donned the gold cloth and said 'yeah so we can be equals and I won't need you' (paraphrasing). If Aspros is just going to be used and tossed away, might as well harden his own heart before then. And it doesn't help that he saw himself as a Specter and his brother as a Gold Saint when he went to the oracles.

 I feel for Aspros because, in the end, he had no idea that he had been manipulated hard enough that his goodest boy personality changed. And honestly, I can relate to that. I've had my personality take a deep dive some years ago after I had a panic attack. So I don't fault him for his actions. He was just trying to make the best with what he knew, understood, and could do, even if that meant doing terrible things. After all, it is his mindset that the weakest people are the ones that don't do anything.     ----- Gemini Defteros - I also can't fault him for anything. He was dependent on his brother, and there was no way he could understand what was going on in Aspros' tortured mind since Aspros never spoke about his feelings. But I believe that, contrary to what Aspros thinks, Defteros would have been very dependent on him even after Aspros became pope. After all, he didn't have friends, lacked social skills, and couldn't find it in himself to trust anyone aside from his older brother because of how Sanctuary treated him as they were growing up, so he would have been stuck in like a childish headspace of needing a protector and provider, which was Aspros. You can tell that much because he was asking Asmita what should he do when he was possessed by the DEF. 

When Aspros died (or rather, when Defteros killed him [which seriously broke his heart]), it forced Defteros to grow up and look after himself. This isn't a terrible thing--but it was a terrible and such a trauma-inducing way to go about it. But how he died--or rather, the fact that he wanted to sacrifice himself to save his brother... honestly it still makes me cry a lot. You can see in his eyes that he loved his brother even after the very end, and wanted him back. And just IMAGINE how many times Defteros' eyes have shown nothing but the purest love for Aspros, and how Aspros had been manipulated to see those eyes as nothing more than hate. ----- Gemini twins in general - If it wasn't obvious already, I love these two so much. I hate--I ABSOLUTELY HATE--that their brotherhood was RUINED, because these two are so... important to me. I see myself and my sister in the Gemini Twins so much. To the point where it's so personal to me. Even after being manipulated and losing his brother, Aspros still held his little brother very close to his heart and lamented and regretted the fact that he will never get the chance to be the brother he should be. And Defteros... I can't explain why his loyalty and patience for Aspros affect me so much, but it does. It does in a way where it hits me more than just an emotional way. I guess that's because I see my sister in Defteros much more than I should.

I love the twins in such a profound way where I cannot find the right words for it. They obviously still love each other so much, even after all is said and done, and I think that is so important. Having that kind of unconditional love for your sibling is the most important thing in my opinion.

God, look at me, I'm crying over the Gemini twins again for like the 100th time oiwhfowef

     ♚ Cancer Manigoldo - So, Manigoldo... Honestly, I love him, too. But in a different way. When I see Manigoldo, I remember the private threads that a friend and I used to do on Skype, and I am frankly very enamored with him. But also because of that, I do not see him the same way as everyone else too. Besides, he makes up the second half of my OTP, so ofc I'm going to see him differently. Especially since I single ship!

    ♚ Leo Regulus - He's another one that I like a lot! Not only because he's adorable, but I also see him in a different way because I'm a single shipper, and I will never say aloud who I ship Regulus with. I won't say that he's a part of a different OTP (since I only have one OTP in all of Saint Seiya) but I do like Regulus a lot because of a friend's interpretation of him in Private threads a very long time ago. 

Yeah, he might be kinda OP/Gary Sue, but he's not too hateful in my opinion. I wouldn't say he's the best TLC Saint, since my heart is stolen by the twins, but he's a very amiable character when interacting with the characters of the TLC verse, and I wish I can squish his cheeks one day!! He's so adorable! I will say though that he is impressive to replicate a Big Bang(?) by himself... I don't remember if it's the thing that really killed him, but... huh. To be that unafraid of death, I wouldn't be surprised if he has some sort of mental/personality disorder that made him... like that? Something undiagnosed? Hm... thoughts, thoughts.

     ♚ Virgo Asmita - Asmita is one of the gold saints that, I honestly, don't know about. It's different from how I feel about Hasgard. For Hasgard, I don't have an opinion for, but for Asmita, I just don't know. I love how Teshirogi drew his hands. Like damn, bruh, can we switch hands? We're both Virgo, and I think we can make it work out... /kicked

     ♚ Libra Dohko - LOL DOHKOOOO!! My sister's favorite. I feel like he's super impulsive in TLC. I haven't read his gaiden at all, so I can't say much about that, but I do like him! Like with Shion though, I feel like he should have had some sort of heavy Survivor's guilt in the end. I'm also insanely curious about what ability Defteros zonked on him to erase the memory of Athena's blood and cloth. I don't know if it's shown in Dohko's gaiden, but I would love to see how TLC Dohko came across and raised Shiryu.

     ♚ Scorpio Kardia - As a character, I adore him. He's charming, spontaneous, and, like Aspros, wants to live his life to the fullest. And his fullest means just having fun before his short life is ended. Krest might have made him practically immortal, but he's still suffering. However, Kardia also holds a lot of bad memories for me from days before, and his entire character serves as a painful, but a graceful reminder of who I was back then.

      ♚ Sagittarius Sisyphus - Honestly, I don't ever think he was qualified to be a candidate for the papal throne. He's so melodramatic. Yeah, he might treat everyone with kindness and all, but I feel like he doesn't have the knowledge part down. Let alone, he's a brawn brain! Bruh!! Shooting an arrow at "hades" is always a bad idea!! What made you-?! 

Lmfao, if possible, I feel like he and Aspros should have dual-pope'd Sanctuary. One has the brains, but lacks compassion while the other has the compassion but is "shoot first, ask questions and think about that later".

      ♚ Capricorn El Cid - I... should love El Cid, but my mind goes blank a lot around him. He's impressive, I give you that, but I don't think I have an opinion on him. And I've read his gaiden in Spanish a LONG time ago, so I'm not going to pretend that I know him enough to talk about him.

      ♚ Aquarius Degel - hm... I think he's cute. Especially in his gaiden, he's really cute.

     ♚ Pieces Agatha -

[woogurl]

WOOSAN FANSERVICE

what is real and what is not real? now, a lot of people think woosan is fanservice because how obvious and in your face the are. while i do think they do give very obvious fanservice, i believe with my whole heart that their relationship is very genuine. 

now let’s discuss fanservice, while i do think every company advises their groups to give fanservice and it’s literally ingrained in their minds(kpop idols) on how to give fanservice. whether it’s sexy dancing, acting cute, or passing along a sheet of paper to a member with your mouth, san constantly exposing his sarms.. these are all clear indications of fanservice. i want to be clear, fanservice in my opinion is always obvious. company’s do not emotionally invest in shipping the way you think they do. because why would they invest on giving obvious hints that their idols are dating? especially in a place like korea? their careers would literally be over. it would literally affect everyone in the group, including them and it would not just ruin the group, but any career path they decide to go in in korea. 

so, i’m gonna show you guys the difference between fanservice and genuine reactions when it comes to woosan. 

let’s talk about fanservice.

let’s talk about this whole ass VCR that KQ put together for woosan, it’s clearly fanservice, but i thought it was interesting the way they filmed it. the way this was filmed was like, they’re each others others other half. which we know they often say this a lot. so my question is the company capitalizing on their relationship or are they supporting? could be both? now, i know it sounds crazy as the most important thing for every company is to make money. even though this does not exclude KQ, i’ve noticed that ateez has a lot more freedom than other kpop artist. they let them eat as much as they want, they spoil them with presents all the time which is proven with their vlogs. they give their idols freedom to speak on things, like hongjoong really says what he wants. especially when he wants to give atiny a reality check. lol. they also give them creative freedom, allowing hongjoong to speak on such a heated topic like race during his black and white cover is really something. but are they still a company whose best interest is to make money? yes. let’s talk about some other moments during the tour.

these moments were all during the tour, the woosan umbrellas, the hand holding the making hearts with each other and even the most obvious one of all which is the one where they had to promote the hats for the tour and KQ picked woosan to do it. ya’know, very cute, but also clearly fanservice. lol. though, there’s an interesting moment, which i don’t think is fanservice, and that moment was during the time woo hugged seonghwa and jongho was like san’s gonna get jealous, and san was like no no, even tho he looked so jelly(you can find a lot of these moments on the yt channel skzo planet, credit to them, they’re great.)  let’s continue. let’s talk about the asmr/lie detector video on yt. which i consider less obvious fanservice because people tend to think these moments are not planned. i know why am i taking the best moments awayyyyyyy. ;c

it’s clear that KQ understands that woosan is the most popular ship, because they have them go on these programs together which highlights their chemistry and interactions together. i think a lot of these moments here are fanservice but i also think they’re genuine. like their moment afterward where they have a deep conversation about their feelings. while i do think the company sets these up to capitalize off their relationship, i don’t think it’s to the point where they give them a script to read and say, “hey, memorize this script” no no. lmfao. if there’s one thing the company’s understand completely is that fans want real human beings. not robots. which is why vlive exist. it’s also one of the reasons kpop is preferred from western pop. they understand that fans love real people and genuine reactions between their fans. so you have to remember that. i think they just seized an opportunity to capitalize off their ship or support, who knows? they seem very grateful towards their company.

here’s the lie detector one, obviously, the company sets these up. which i think is ultimately a fanservicey move. but again, i don’t think the company gives them any script to read these are just their genuine feelings. in which san said woo is his other half and that he would literally give his kidney away for him. the company sets these circumstances up, but they do this to highlight their relationship. the company has them do many things together, but i honestly do not think they force them to pretend to act like bestfriends. i mean that’s just outrageous. lol. 

yup, i have to go there, yes, i’m going to take away everything you’ve ever loved away from you, because this is obvious fanservice. the stares, the sexy sexy dancing tHE STARES. listen, these people are well-trained professionals, never forget that. they know what fans want. while i do think this dance is probably the most common of fanservice for woosan stans i don’t think the reactions are fanservice. there’s just some moments where woo gets really shy and flustered. because i do think san makes him genuinely shy because this boy can be very tense and reek of pure devilish and demonic behavior. woo is someone who has a very commanding presence and demanding personality, and he seems fearless and shameless at times, but there are plenty of moments of san making woo completely flustered and nervous with a simple look. which i think is genuine since discomfort is very noticeable because it’s almost always an immediate reaction to something.

now let’s talk about genuine interactions (a lot of these were probably mentioned in my woosan relationship analysis).

let’s talk about their relationship in general, outside the cameras, that already ultimately prove that their relationship isn’t fanservice. now something that we learned a while back during the christmas vlive with the woosansang drama(i’ve done a post about this). is that woo and san hang out so much with each other that the other members are jealous. obviously, this has nothing to do with the company. they just genuinely hang around each other because they like each other. we know this to be true because the members explicitly say this and have mentioned before. i also did a post where woo mentioned san at least 5-7 times during a vlive with jongho. 

they literally spent the whole day together guys, like you just don’t spend that much time with somebody you don’t like. there’s a bunch of kpop groups with ships who don’t even hang out in real life. they’re literally hanging out with members you least expect them to be. lmfao. it just shows you that the reality is that most kpop ships are not real. because to me, it’s obvious that they aren’t that close irl and that’s the most important factor here. i wanna talk about some other important moments in the woosansang vlive.

there talking about real circumstances here, and yeosangs grievances with woo, ‘cause he feels sad that yeosang doesn’t hang around him anymore. this happened a few months ago. so don’t worry.

mingi said that this was a private conversation that he had with yeosang, so again these are private matters. just in case you don’t know company’s do not like discord in the group, which is why they freaked out during the recent vlive when mingi didn’t have yeosang’s number even though i don’t even have my siblings number. loool.

this is what yunho said when woo wanted him to go to the bathroom with him, and he was sulky ‘cause he only hung out with san. now let’s move onto how clingy they are. 

let’s start with san’s vlog, yes, i said san’s vlog(side eye’s woo). 

this vlog, that was supposed to be san’s, included moments with woo, more so than the other members. they even ate together, and they often do eat together from what i can tell. woo says he goes out to eat with san to relieve stress. he also called him during that time on vlive with yeosang to go out with him. which is why i thought the call was genuine, because they always seem to eat together. i mean the call wasn’t even on speaker and the fact that woo used aegyo with him is also telling to me. do you think the company sets them on dinner dates to please the fandom? lol. no there are other moments of them clinging and you can find them throughout my other posts. but i just wanted to stress that they’re not clingy for fanservice, they’re this way because they’re naturally close and intimate in real life. i have never seen a kpop ship share this type of intimacy.

here’s another moment, where they went out to eat together, mind you they were asking seonghwa if he was happy to join them as if they were an already married couple. i wanna add the moments here with seonghwa wanting to join woosan, and them being like “no” or “we’ll think” about it, but i’ll leave that for my woosanhwa analysis. 

let’s talk about the fact that they created their own ship name, and them being happy about it because i honestly don’t think that if they were not okay with it and the company was forcing it, they wouldn’t milk it for all it was worth.

let’s talk about the ship name and the thousands of other stuff the’ve come up with. could the company have come up with woosan, possibly, but you can’t convince they sat a round table discussing the thousands of handshakes they’ve come up with. you also can’t convince me that the company made woo go online to find a special meanings for a friend that stays with you forever(amicus ad aras). as i said before the company isn’t as invested as you all may think they are. the second one is literally them introducing themselves as woosan to some poor person recording them. like you can’t tell me that they aren’t proud to be woosan. now i know a lot of people get annoyed on twitter because some fans don’t know how not to mention woo without san when he’s doing a solo live (death stare at those fans). but the thing is it just goes to show that they’re comfortable enough with the ship that people can tell that it’s genuine. are there some moments where they’re uncomfortable sure? but is it the company’s fault. i don’t think so, i think it’s the fans(some shippers) that require them not to be their own person. esp woo. 

the stares, to me, the eyes never lie, and most people realize this, even people who’ve only had a gentle bump into the fandom notice the way the look at each other. even in the recent vlive, but you can tell woo tends to avoid san’s stare. even though woo wants to seem comfortable around san to not make it seem obvious, it’s very obvious that he makes an effort not to. i literally had an online friend that ships vkook ask if they were close during the recent vlive because woo never looked at san. xD lol. which is another strong point i want to make. while there are some moments of woo clinging to san on camera. most of the time he does it off camera. i don’t think the company asked to look like they were in love but here we are. one last thing is...

is their trip to jeju, in which seonghwa coicidentally went as well. now this is a family vacation where all the members went with their respective families. now, a lot of you may not know but during a fansign woosan planned a trip to jeju. seonghwa just happened to be there with his family as well. lol. i wanted to mention this because obv the company doesn’t really have any say in the matter. but also because i mean they’re on vacation together. like do you know how many groups are desperate to be on vacation away from each other? lmfao. like nah woosan planned to go on vacation together. while seonghwa talked a lot about it, woo did not and continued brushing it off which makes me wonder....

anyway, that’s it.

oh, here’s a bonus for you greedy ones.

i wanna mention a moment that i thought was interesting. which was a game they played on kbs a few moments ago. they were given a penalty to kiss each other. which is obv fanservice, but i do think reactions matter. as soon as it’s mentioned san’s eyes automatically go to woo? he doesn’t have much time to think about it, his body just reacts, why woo tho hmmm san? 

now, i wanna also mention the moment after, which a lot of people were confused by. like why is he touching himself like that so suddenly? lol. so what i think is happening is that san is “preening”. he’s experiencing nervous excitement and he’s stroking himself. when your attracted to someone your skin becomes sensitive. esp your lips and it feels good to touch. 

woo also whined and hit mingi out of jealousy. lmfao. 

anyway. that’s it.

[laufire]

Supernatural s3

It’s so unfair that the season that has Ruby AND Bela is so short :(((. I was done with it waaaay too quickly, and now I’m speed running through s4 xD (which, like the first time around, is Strong Mixed Feelings territory).

-My girl Ruby!!!! I was so happy to have her back, I kept grinning like a loon every time she was on screen. It’s quite interesting watching the 1.0 and 2.0 versions so close to each other, instead of as they air. I have... Thoughts, on whether Ruby as a double agent was something planned or that they decided as they went, but that’s for the s4 post. s3!Ruby really doesn’t come across as one (“I don’t believe in the devil” oh I wish sometimes xD, I love my nonbelievers), imo, but the beauty of such a device is that you can rationalize anything she does as devious if you want to xD

And it goes without saying that I love her interactions with Sam. THIS SHIP ISTG. I love how immediately ~attuned to her he is lol, his present and instinctive concern for her even if he tries to mask his interest as “practical”. And all the repeated times Sam’s conflicted between her and Dean -like when he deviates Dean shot (wasting one of the Colt’s bullets lmfao) or during the argument about the virgin sacrifice xD. And the “that’s my boy”/ “little fallen angel on your shoulder” quotes!!! Ruby 1.0 deserved to be railed by Sam too, smh.

My favourite episode of hers is “Jus in Bello” (which would be my fave of the season just by virtue of having both Bela and Ruby in the same episode lol. Not interacting, of course, the world as we know it wouldn’t have survived). I just love that she gets that final moment of I TOLD YOU SO to the brothers xD. I really like how she expands on the demonic lore of the show- I love, LOVE the detail about how all demons used to be humans, how they’re souls corrupted in hell. And that in her past life she was a witch (there was this really good fic in Spanish fandom about it... I need to hunt it down).

BTW, though I think her interactions with Dean in that episode are interesting, it really hammers home how much I hate him sometimes xD. Can you stop saying misogynistic slurs for TWO GODDAMN MINUTES, DEAN (and as we know from as early as this season, only HE can have demon/monster friends!! What a fucking hypocrite xD). I freaking love the moment in the finale when she viciously yells him about how she wishes she could see him in hell lmao (and how it foreshadows that when she shows sympathy later, it’s actually Lilith in disguise lmfao). I hate Dean gets the last word in their dynamic, tbqh. Until the s15 cameo, at least xDD

One thing that’s been bothering me xD: the French fries. Demons are vulnerable to salt, like other spirits, right? (and hey, look what a nice piece of foreshadowing that was). How does that translate to food lol. Because Ruby adores French fries, and they obviously contain salt. It’s like spicy food for humans? Or like pineapple? Inquiring minds etc. xD

-I still cannot believe Bela Talbot was only on the show for six episodes lmao. Her presence still lingers in the watchers’ heads so much?? Which is understandable because she’s Lead Girl Material if there was ever any lol. The care with which they styled her even?? You don’t do that for just any character lmao (I mean, just look at most of SPN’s female characters for comparison xD).

Her ship with Dean could’ve really been something, too -even if I hate Dean in it, I can’t deny it packs a punch, narrative-wise. I mean, the Batcat undertones alone!! The fake married undercover shenanigans!! And I think it’s really interesting that she’s such a blind spot for him; Dean’s unusually intuitive about people, but with Bela he takes everything at face value and she can fool him like no other (while, OTOH, is Sam who questions her facade and wants to see more). If he hadn’t been such an idiot (and such an asshole) he could’ve had a really powerful ship. Sucks to be him lol.

Anyway. Man, I love her. So much. I love how Gordon’s threats to kill her don’t work on her, and I love that the show basically said “Bela killing her abusive parents is good, actually” (I’m so tired of forgiveness narratives, you guys. This entire show is founded on revenge, so let me get my revenge fantasies in peace!!) xDD. And I love, LOVE that she withheld that truth from Dean, that she decided he wasn’t worth it. OTOH, you know, fuck the fans that got her written out, definitely; but on the other, I do love how her story ended (and that it was a clear "fuck you" to shitty fans). Doesn’t stop me for wanting to read and re-read (and maybe write!) even more “Bela escapes hell” fix-its, but still.

Also, very important question: what happened to her cat?? It’s the cat alright?? I’m going to headcanon that she left them with that cougar friend of hers lol.

-So. THE DEAL. Okay. Oof. I love this storyline, a lot. A loooot. I love the conflict it creates between the brothers (as long as there’s still conflict and Sam hasn’t yet started taking everything lying down I can enjoy that part of their narrative lol). I love Dean’s initial forced giddiness about “making the most out of his last year” and I love the moment Dean decides he does want to try to live because it makes the last few episodes all the most desperate and cruel (and hey, I’ve heard he only went to hell because the season was cut short due to a writers’ strike... if that’s true that’s so funny lmao).

My absolutely favourite part however? That you can FEEL Dean’s unvoiced resentment towards Sam. For Dean having to die for him, even if Sam never asked him to. He lashes out to Sam repeatedly through the season, but it really came to ahead in the dreamspace episode, where Dean confronts another version of himself that talks about how Sam was “dotted on” (the revisionism asldfkaf). This show is absolutely ruthless when it comes to showing you its characters’ ugly, unfair reactions to things and it’s my favourite thing evah.

Speaking of the dreamspace episode, OMFG. I loved both brothers there. Dean’s hallucination, seeing himself as a demon? And how he let out his anger about John?? Beautiful, truly (regarding John, I also loved their different reactions when it looked like his spirit had contacted them: Dean jumping on it and Sam detached skepticism). But my favourite part has to be when Sam uses the villain’s abusive father against him. Like. Damn. That was cold-blooded o.0

The second-to-last episode, when Sam tracked down that Frankenstein doctor to try and make Dean immortal was ABSOLUTELY HORRIFYING OMG. I loved that. I love that Sam wanted to use it for both them. It was some scary shit. I also love the scene where the crossroads demon questions whether Sam really wants to break the deal, I’m gathering it’s going to be nice foreshadowing later on in the show lol.

Anyway. I also found Dean’s death scene more impactful than Sam’s. Partially because of the horror of it, but mostly because I think at this type of scenes, Padalecki is better. Sam’s grief felt more real, Dean’s got me out of the scene (it’s the voice, I think. Sometimes Ackles’ voice takes me out of scenes, it sounds... forced).

I also really enjoyed how the time loop episode wrapped around this subplot. It managed to be both heartbreaking and mind-numbly hilarious lmfao. Like?? All the deaths?? Were so pathetic?? I tip my hat to Ackles because I don’t think most actors could carry plots like this half as well lmfao.

Sidenote, it’s always a trip to see The Trickster God knowing that fucker is Gabriel. Archangel “hey Mary do you accept God knocking you up” Gabriel. Which I guess isn’t exactly a thing in this show?? Since according to the wikia SPN Jesus was “just a man” (and let me tell you, I’m tickled pink by the fact that out of ALL mythological figures, specifically all CHRISTIAN mythological figures, the show decided to go “nah” on Jesus Christ. I mean, I guess he’d take away from Dean’s, Sam’s and Castiel’s resurrection narratives, but still. It’s so funny!!).

-Gordon Walker remains a superbly acted and fascinating character with extra racist nonsense alsdkfjasdf. But I can’t deny I loved seeing him as a vampire. He was terrifying. And I’m definitely shipping him with Kubrick, ouch xD

-The Ghostfacers episode is... something. As in, incredibly exploitative and homophobic and with an egregious case of BYG (and the first where I’d say it’s incontestable to claim the trope was used. s1 and s2 are muddy territory given the circumstances, IMO, but this one is 300% BYG), but so successfully manipulative my heart hurt for Corbett and Corbett x Ed still. Fuck them for that ngl. I do still enjoy how anti-Winchesters they all are though xD

-3x01 introduces the one nice marriage of hunters so far, between a black couple. The man dies in a gross, horrifying way within the episode ofc (because he was Mean to the the brothers duh). She makes it out alive, and since she doesn’t reappear in the show she gets to live. So for now black women have a sliiiiiightly better track record in SPN than track guys there: they get to appear in a few more episodes and be more fleshed out (Victor, Gordon), but as long as they’re only in one episode they get to live!! (Cassie, Tamara).

-Rufus and Bobby are exes, right? Right?? Probably still married in some state? You know that post about how when gay marriage was legalized across the USA there were a lot of issues because some couples had split and never bothered to divorce, since it was only legal in one place? That post was made for them. Pity Rufus is a black man, and as such has a limited number of allowed appearances before he’s killed off ¬¬

-I would’ve enjoyed Dean’s moments with Lisa and Ben more (it’s just so RIGHT that in this moment he’d want Ben to be his) if my knowledge of future spoilers didn’t perpetually have me in a state of “pls keep this guy away from kids” lol.

-They had Harmony’s actress (BTVS) and they made her a vampire!! The show’s hard on for the Buffyverse is a bit of a hit and miss but I can’t say I don’t relate xDD.

-I know Jensen Ackles can sing (in fact thanks to youtube I know a few of the actors can... is there a musical episode. Does this show have its own OMWF. I need to know). So why. WHY. Does he sound like that during “Dead or Alive”??? I actually like the scene but he sounds so off-key lmao.

-BTW, I found out that apparently Katie Cassidy and Lauren Cohan originally auditioned for each other’s roles añslkdfjasf. I can’t picture it. Ruby 1.0 is Ruby 1.0 and Bela is Bela xD. Although I’ve seen each playing roles that could meld with the other, just. Nope. Good choice on the casting there lol.

[gingus-doon]

Mishima for the character ask!

thank u for asking about one of my faves 😭😭💕

what i like about him

- THERE'S SO MUCH TO LIKE! first of all, he's very caring and that's just so endearing!! stg he would adopt like at least half of the cast unofficially had they not been in a death game / simulation– and his eccentricity makes him so much more interesting, as well! he's such a down to earth guy who's very sociable and nice but he's also pretty weird sjdbsn. the way he stands, his appearance, the way he throws (apparently) to his weird laugh. then there's also that scene where keiji told him he made the air smell like oil paint (WHICH SOUNDED LIKE SOME KIND OF JOKEY INSULT NGL) and mishima is like SO PLEASED about it??? AND IN REKO'S FONDNESS EVENT (1st i think) WHERE SHE JUST BERATES HIM BUT THEN MISHIMA'S LIKE "ACTUALLY THIS MAKES ME WANT TO BEFRIEND YOU MORE" SKFKSDN

i also just love his humility!! it's so funny sometimes, like when nao gives him that godawful bathing suit aND HE JUST AGREES TO WEAR IT FOR THE SAKE OF HER FEELINGS?? his willingness to work with people, as well, like how he didn't suggest gin take his cape off and how he literally took the time to draw on some shoes just for the sake of alice's safety. and then in that same fondness event, HE PROCEEDS TO BE ASSERTIVE IN THE KINDEST POSSIBLE MANNER LMAO. not to mention the selflessness in his sacrifice for nao?? like he's just too good and considerate and odd, we have to stan

—

what i don't like about him

- OOF there's not much for me to say for this part tbh KDKSDN. ignoring no-smoking signs is pretty bad akdjsj. i could say hypocrisy, as mishima also judged alice by his appearance, but i find that a very human flaw so it makes me like him more actually haha.

perhaps one thing that i actually was Spooked by was the existence in tragedy ending of ytts. it's really jarring and a little disturbing to see mishima so caught up in this own survival that his allies drop from his mind entirely (even nao!) but i can't really fault him for that since it is, again, a very human trait and it gives him depth. it's just spooky to see the juxtaposition of him caring so much to not even having them in mind, esp if you get one of the other endings first.

—

favourite scene

- there are sooo many good ones, it's hard to choose, but one of the ones i always think of is that leaf fondness event with gin!! i love mishima's consideration for gin's feelings (as mentioned before) and really, it's just so stupid and wholesome. like you'd think he'd would be smarter than to go back and forth like that but nope, gin's the one who comes in with the common sense akhsjdnns.

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favourite line

- off the top of my head (as all these answers have been ekfhs) I LOVE HOW HE RESPONDS TO KANNA'S INQUIRY WITH "I'm eternally young, so I wouldn't know." LIKE THAT'S LITERALLY THE SMOOTHEST QUESTION DODGE EVER. WHAT A G LMFAO

—

favourite outfit

- ik he doesn't change outfits in the game but what if his default outfit was a dress shirt and a suit sjfhsjdn. i can't imagine him in casual clothes help 😭 i also considered turtlenecks but actually i think that would be kai's thing

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otp

- of course keishima 😔😔 i could just go on about how perfect they are for each other for hours lmao. keiji is also the only person i ship with mishima?? like kaishima is ok i guess but it just doesn't hit the serotonin like keishima 👊 shunshima is alright too but i think i'd prefer it platonically

—

brotp

- my bias towards the characters is absolutely being exposed because it's not nao, but instead shin and hinako– reko too!!

though it's less of a brotp and more of me thinking that mishima would be a father figure to them AKDHSDJFJ. for an actual brotp in terms of friendship rather than mentorship, i think kai and q-taro would be really good friends with mishima and would b more like peers than pupils to him sjfhdj

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headcannon

- i just think it'd be neat if mishima was one of those kinds of teachers who had an array of colourful and playful ties with a wide variety of dress shirt colours :> also maybe fun socks

—

unpopular opinion

- i'm really not exactly sure! the popular opinion on mishima seems to be that he's awesome, which i agree with lolol. and i haven't seen any content for him which i disagree with in particular (i think) so i don't really have any opinions to go against lol.

if i had to say something, though, i guess it'd be that he's not perfect ? as evidenced by the smoking thing (kazumi mishima is now a morally grey character because he ignores no smoking signs lmao) and the existence in tragedy ending, and any other subtle lapses in a flawless image. though, i don't think mishima is trying to keep up a flawless image so much as a moral one around children! he seems okay to discuss or touch on his deeper feelings in conversation in order to connect with people, and i think that's very neat

and i don't blame people for perceiving him as flawless, i often also struggle to grasp at whatever his more serious character flaws would be! especially since i usually write him with keiji, and keiji is... The Most Flawed so mishima comes off as an even better person in comparison.

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a wish

- i don't think i have any wishes for mishima's character in the main game? like i don't expect him to come back to life or anything ajdhksn. SO, my wish is that nankidai will double up on the fondness events so that we'll see mishima from other people's perspective!! LIKE I AM SERIOUSLY HOPING FOR THIS SO HARD I NEED TO SEE KEIJI AND MISHIMA INTERACT MORE (and other ppl as well SKRHJSNS)

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an oh-god-please-dont-ever-happen

- i know this would like, definitely not happen because there's absolutely no good reason at ALL for this to happen, but it'd break my heart if there was a twist pulled like woaahhh mishima's actually a bad guy wjdhd. that goes against the whole message of "don't judge a book by its cover" that his character conveys 😭😭 honestly i probably wouldn't even think about evil mishima if it wasn't for that ai thing in chap 2. THAT WAS SO FUCKED UP, WHEN I REPLAYED YTTD AFTER PLAYING YTTS I WAS JUST LIKE "HOW DARE YOU DESECRATE THE MEMORY OF KAZUMI MISHIMA LIKE THAT YOU BASTARDS"

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5 words to describe him

- funky uncle with misleading appearance !

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my nickname for him

- i don't really have one haha. i just call him mishima– though sometimes i do like to use full names for the characters so i will just be out here typing "kazumi mishima" in its entirety sjdbns.

i have hc nicknames for what other people would call him though! other people being keiji JSFHS. "kazu" or "mishi"

[feral-creep]

I'm going to need 2,5,9,11, and 12 for save scum please and thank you.

YAY THANKS!

2. which scene was written first

i have no idea lmao i have the *worst* memory. (is that ironic? hm) maybe the chat logs?  i do remember writing chapter “a friend” before i finished chapter 4

5. hardest to write?

all of the scenes where readerchan is UNABLE TO MAKE EYE CONTACT i had to be so cognizant of whomst is wherest in space and time while reiterating not TOO much that she cannot see shit.

like half the time i can't describe any facial expressions b/c she has no way of seeing people's fucking faces. i got so annoyed with it that i wrote in spcial contacts. i wonder how obvious that is b/c i decided to make looking at the world in the eyes a Theme

also the conversation with shig where they chat across from each other and then he flips out about not wanting to change her name, that shit was completely all over the place for like two weeks. it still kind of is

writing tomura and readerchan interacting semi-peacefully is really hard for me actually. i find it so much easier when they’re plotting against each other or have some level of distance

9. alternate versions?

YES actually i scrapped three whole chapters where readerchan willingly drinks quirk suppressant on her first night and shig is all weird and standoffish. idk it just wasn’t working for the dynamic i wanted

there was a plotline i dropped entirely where she gets a job at the bar that they eventually meet at and it was way too convoluted and annoying so i scrapped it entirely.

the first version of the kidnapping scene was super different—i had shiggy threatening her overtly and it just wasn't working. it didn't make sense for him to show his hand that early

the amount of times i have written out scenes where MC thinks about peeing after sex because i'm in Realistic Body Functions Mode and then deleted them because It Doesn't Matter No One Cares It's Fucking Fanfiction is.... over 9000 lmao. i was not joking when i said this is an AU where UTIs do not exist

11. what do you like best about this fic?

i love it when i’m able to write “recursively,” i.e. bringing up a plot thread in chapter 4 that i don't draw a ton of attention to and then using it 10 chapters later to fuck shit up. i am a heavy, heavy outliner and my work suffers if i don’t outline shit. foreshadowing rules esp if the audience doesn’t know it’s foreshadowing

i am really proud of 'a friend' still, the way mc lies to rinko so she doesn't have to have the uncomfortable conversation that "yeah i can erase memories but only in a way that is not in any way helpful to me or you.  you asked me that before, and i tried to help, and it was actually mad traumatic and the second worst thing to happen to me, ever"

i tried to write ‘a friend’ in a way that would have a specific rhythm when spoken and i think i succeeded?

i also love when i get to write in tomura's POV. that scene where he's watching the security cam footage i ended up writing in like 30 minutes and it turned out better than shit i spent HOURS and HOURS on

12. what do you like least about this fic?

occasionally i tend to overexplain shit that genuinely does not. need. explaining. like should i mention kurogiri replacing that table shiggy destroyed in chapter... 15? i don't remember!! i still don't know if i like the idea of tomura wanting to give her a new name or not; it feels convoluted to me still

sometimes i think there isn't enough tomura b/c that's what the audience is Here For

i also think in a certain light, when i reread older chapters, it probably seems like i ship MC and rinko way more than i ship tomura and MC lmfao

the save scumming sessions probably could be written better tbh. i should prob write one from tomura's perspective since lethe can't actually perceive anything about the save scum target until she looks up.

it’s also v unfortunate that the fic doesn’t *seem* like it’s going anywhere until there’s a big payoff in chapter 10. i wrote it that way intentionally, so tomura was circling and circling and circling until BAM but i imagine that a lot of readers are like “wtf is this” before they get to chapter 10