#but honestly the problem is that i need plausible conflict but i can’t use the stuff that’s in the show

[agathabridgerton]

me last month: i guess i’m writing a west wing fic now, i’ll make sure i actually get it done

me now: oopsie, i started a dragon age fic

[torasame]

BSD Beast Theory:

“This is the only world where he lives and writes novels.”

Why exactly is this the case? Of course, mathematically speaking, this statement would be improbable. Maybe the narrative is just overlooking the sequence of possibilities present in alternate realities - but that may not be the case. There’s an importance in the emphasis Dazai puts on the fact that it’s the only world where Oda lives and writes novels. There are multiple realities where Oda is alive - but not ones where he can pursue his dream.

How can this be? Of course, I obviously can’t detail every possible reality in a Dr Strange-esque fashion, but I might not have to considering that the confines of the available possibilities remain in the parameters of Dazai’s own reality. Remember, the Novel only works if the narrative written in it makes cohesive storyline (something pointedly contradictory to life itself. Then again, it is a Novel, after all). This limitation means we’re (thankfully) limited to the world and circumstances Dazai is aware of. Think of it like a deck of cards, in a sense. You can’t change the values in the deck but you can shuffle them around to turn the cards in your favour. Simply put, Dazai cannot rewrite the past or touch things nor can he just overwrite Mimic’s existence, for example. As the manga puts it “you can’t just write ‘all of humanity dies’” because you need to be able to construct a comprehensive-enough plot to reach that sort of conclusion. Even then, it’d be close to impossible because you’d have to account for details out of your control.

In this case, Dazai can’t just say “Mimic does not exist.” Think about it, if you took the 4 of spades out of the deck, you wouldn’t only lack a set of 4s, but you would also lack a 4 in a set of ace to king. You’d ultimately be lacking a card and of course, reality isn’t a game of “go-fish.” This means the only option Dazai has is to counter the events of canon.

Mori’s overarching plan of pressuring the government with Mimic is what ultimately leads to Oda’s death alongside Gide’s insistence on Oda being the only person who could kill him. There’s no doubt Mori is aware of Gide’s ability and he may understand Gide’s sentiments to a slight degree. This is evident in how Mori seems to know that Oda doesn’t want to be rescued, despite initially agreeing to Dazai’s request. Mori understands that Mimic has probably done something to shift Oda’s resolve and sees this as an opportune way to irradiate the organization. You can see that the PM does send gunmen to aid Oda, but in the end, he and Gide are the last ones standing. In Mori’s eyes and in regard to the state the PM was in at the time, there may have been no other way to eliminate Gide. 

But what other measures are present to prevent this whole ordeal? A number of possibilities can be considered of course - but we know of the only plausible one that held out: Dazai’s rise to power as the PM boss. Think about it, anyone could have tried to overthrow Mori but the question lies in their competence and willingness to. With this criteria, we can understand how Beast managed to act as the only effective countermeasure in the aspect of saving Oda.

So we’ve managed to replace Mori. Woo hoo Dazai is the mafia boss and can probably cut Oda some slack and yet, that reality wouldn’t suffice.

Whatever. Maybe we can overlook certain aspects of canon and say that Oda and Dazai manage to leave the PM together with the help of Ango. We can say Dazai becomes the boss and deserts soon after coming into power. But of course, that still wouldn’t be plausible since it comes into conflict with Soseki’s three-fold plan. Dazai couldn’t just leave the mafia unattended and there isn’t anyone else fit to run in the position other than him or Mori. 

Even if there is a world where both Oda and Dazai could live together - one major hindrance remains in the form of Dazai himself.

The truth of the matter is something Oda points out himself: “There is nothing in this world that can fill the emptiness inside you.”

In other words: There is no world where Dazai does not wish to die.

Something important to remember is that Oda is not Dazai’s ultimate means of salvation - Oda is not Dazai’s reason to live. I’ll apologize to fellow odazai enjoyers because of that - but if you look at it realistically and in the context of the story, you’ll find that the statement isn’t too far off.

In any reality they have a relationship together, Dazai puts Oda’s dream at risk with the inevitably of his suicide. His death would traumatize Oda to a degree we’ve already witnessed with the death of the kids. The inevitability of his death, in turn, would mean that Oda may be able to live in that world but will never be able to pursue his dream.

Through Beast, Dazai positions himself in the seat that prevents Oda’s death by external means and preserves Oda’s dream by their lack of affiliation. Dazai puts himself in a position where Oda thinks nothing of him - a position where Oda can go on with life even in the event of his death. He pulls an Itachi, to put it simply.

In short, Beast is Dazai’s meticulously crafted design created to safeguard both Oda’s life and his dream, seeing as they are both inexplicably intertwined.

In this fixed deck of cards, they’re both destined to be dealt bad hands. At least in this way, Dazai manages to ensure that this doesn't have to be the case for Oda. 

Honestly, I came to this epiphany while brainstorming for a fic. I’m just humbled by how intricately woven the plot is and at the same time, I’m sitting here realizing Asagiri-sensei had laid out a  statement that I have (hopefully) managed to prove as though it were a math problem.

Is this meant to hinder anyone (including myself) from imagining a reality where odazai can both live in relative harmony? Of course not. It probably wouldn’t have even with that intention in mind. I’m pretty sure this may already be common knowledge but it probably wouldn’t hurt to compile my thoughts. It’s just some random shot in the dark, by no means comprehensive, and the aftermath of exploring the “universe conspires against us” concept. Overall, not much to it and of course it’s “just a theory, a film theory” or well, anime theory in this case.

And that’s about it. Good on you for making it through the ramble. There’s no cool ending to this amalgamation but you can imagine a pat on the back or whatever helps. Anyway, thanks for making it through this TedTalk. 

[eleanorbloom]

Moonlight: Part Two

Disclaimer: Open Heart and most of the characters are owned by Pixelberry. Matilde is a creation of mine.

Book/Pairing: Open Heart / Bryce Lahela x F! MC (Matilde Luna)

Word Count: 2.5k Warnings/Rating: Angst, curse words/Teen.

Author’s Note: I'm so sorry for disappearing, adult life has been harder than expectected and only this week I had some spare time to edit this :(

Thank you so much to all the people that read the first part, I'm glad you enjoyed it. Hope you like this as well 😊

A bug hug to you, beauties! ❤

Moonlight taglist: @dalishessence @curiousconch @chocopeppermintcake @utterlyinevitable @secretaryunpaid @kachrisberry @romereadingshop @thegreentwin @blackcatkita @choicesficwriterscreations @openheartfanfics

Let me know if you wanna me added to the taglist!

----

Part Two. Orbiting the Moon.

First days are always challenging.

They demand a lot of things. Bravery to explore the unknown (whether it be a place, a person, a job, even food); strength to meet new people when you weren’t blessed in the people skills department; patience to stand the new people who turn out to be shitty people; adaptability to adjust your ways of life to other people’s, etcetera.

It’s a lot.

So, it wouldn’t be a lie if I say that Bryce Lahela didn’t cross my mind after we parted ways at the Atrium that morning, even if his appearance can be categorized as ‘unforgettable’.

Between dealing with Aurora Damn Emery and her insufferable attitude and the fact that I almost killed my first patient on my very first day, I had no space for more.

All I could do was cursing internally (at Aurora and also me) and rethink every fucking decision I made that day. Wondering what would've happened if I hadn't been there the moment Annie had the anaphylactic shock, if Varma hadn't shown up to snap out of me when I froze... Endless questions.

All my dreams about being a doctor crumbled at that moment, wondering if I was doing the right thing, if I was made for this.

“You need to have a long, hard think about whether or not you're ready to be here.”

The face of Annie, unconscious, and Dr. Ramsey's words was all I could hear and see throughout the afternoon, intensifying the guilt with every passing second.

First day and I could've killed someone.

I couldn't even shut up the voice inside my head stating the facts.

First day and I am already a failure.

Because they were nothing but the truth.

Do I deserve to be here?

And there was no point in denying such hard evidence.

Right in the middle of a hallway, surrounded by immaculate white walls and shining lights, I felt exposed. Like everyone around me was going to find out the imposter I was.

I wanted to run away. Disappear.

Without thinking too much, I ran to the nearest supply closet I found before anyone could notice me and the state I was in.

Once under the darkness of the room, I leaned against the wall feeling my stomach trembling, my heartbeats resounding in my temples in slow motion.

“No puedo hacerlo,” I sighed, releasing a shaky breath as I was rubbing my hands on my face, “No… Mamá, no sé si puedo… Casi la mato.” (“I can’t do this,”//“I... Mamá, I don’t know if I can… I almost killed her”)

Fighting the tears back, I closed my eyes trying to evoke the face of my mama in my mind: her black and grey long hair, always in a perfect French braid, her dark and wrinkled eyes full of wisdom and warmth, and her thin lips curling in the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen in my life.

“Creo que, no estoy hecha para esto,” I stated, helpless. (“I think I’m not cut out for this.”)

Just as I was trying to imagine what she would tell me in a case like this, what words she would use to calm me down and reassure me, I heard the door creaking.

A tall silhouette was standing at the entry, looking directly at me.

“Hey, Luna.”

Friendly voice. Sparkly eyes. Expensive, seductive perfume.

Lahela.

I stared speechless as he walked towards me, his brows knitted in worry, “Are you okay?”

I froze at his question. The sole fact he was there froze me, actually.

There was no way I’d tell him the truth, but I had so many things bottled up from that day; so many emotions, fears, anger, all that demanding to come out, that for a moment I thought I would spill all out.

And the way he was looking at me, evidently worried, waiting for an answer, made it even more plausible. Maybe I could tell him and maybe he would say something that could make me feel good. Just as good as he made me feel that morning on our short trip to the Atrium.

I opened my mouth to respond...

But I couldn’t.

I couldn’t let myself do that. That was not me.

The risk was too big and I was a fucking coward.

So I gulped. I gulped as if I was swallowing all my feelings about to come out of my mouth, sour as bile, to let them deep buried inside of me, where they have always belonged.

I cleared my throat and I said instead, “Yeah, I'm okay…”

He arched an eyebrow, dubious, “You don't look like it. If you need to talk…”

I shook my head, nonchalantly.

He seemed earnestly worried, but I couldn't say anything. I didn't know him, and I don't talk to people I barely know, much less about the mess I was on my first day. And much, much less to another resident who could doubt my potential and right to be there. A fucking surgical resident that thinks is above anyone else.

He was the worst option in all Edenbrook.

Well, after Aurora Emery, of course.

“Don’t worry, it’s all good,” I insisted with a humorless smile, “What are you doing here, by the way? Need some syringes? Don't let me stop you.”

He shook his head this time, “No. I saw you in the hallway, I needed to check if you were okay.”

“I’m…”

I was ready to reply automatically as before, without even considering my answer. It didn't matter how bad I was, I was used to saying everything was okay even if my world was falling apart in a million pieces inside, because it was just pleasantries, force-of-habit questions, and people honestly never gave a shit about it, and it was okay. But this felt different. I couldn’t lie to him, but I also couldn’t tell him the truth.

Bryce probably realized my intern conflict, despite the darkness of the room -only dimly illuminated by some blindings mildly open behind the racks of medical supplies-, because he took a step closer to me, pensive, “Are you sure, Mat-”

The moment I saw him getting closer, I felt dread. Dread because I realized that I was an insistence away from speaking. From letting my resolve crumble and tell him the truth. Just a simple and insignificant truth that meant hell to me.

Before he could reach me, I slid away from him, and sprinted towards the exit, leaving him in the room without looking back.

What the fuck is happening to me?

I couldn't understand it. I’d always kept my shit inside and dealt with it on my own, and when I shared something, it was with someone I deeply trusted, a trust that could take months to get. But why suddenly I wanted to open up to someone I had met that day? Like a chatty drunk, the words wanted to slip out of my mouth, recklessly.

Maybe it was the fact that he had given me attention. Just a bit of attention and my stupid mind gets intoxicated with it. Drunk.

But I had to know better. I knew better. I knew that nothing good could come out of that so I ran away like the coward I am.

_____

If I was already confused before he showed up, after that encounter I was a total mess. And the only way I had to calm down that kind of a mess, to overcome such a shitty, stressful day, was with alcohol. Something that could give me a fucking break from my own mind for a few hours. So once my shift ended, I joined Sienna, another intern, to go together to the bar near Edenbrook.

I could've gone alone, or bought something at a liquor store to drink it alone in my room, but I had promised Sienna I would join her as payback for saving my skin from Dr. Ramsey that afternoon. And I liked her. She seemed genuinely nice among a hospital full of fake and selfish people. Besides, you cannot not trust a person who calls themselves a dolphin, right?

When we got to the bar, packed to the brim with people from the hospital, she led me to a booth where there were other fellow interns she had congregated during the day: Jackie Varma, Landry Olsen, and Elijah Greene. A very diverse group of people.

Elijah was a nerd who couldn’t stop throwing Harry Potter jokes at me since he found out I was renting a room under the stairs of a building, and he was really, really nice, so I couldn't even get mad at him for that.

Jackie was… tough. Competitive to a fault, but she was funny and always had some witty remarks to everyone who talked to her, so that helped me swallow her the rest of the night.

And Landry… Ooof, Landry was… Unreadable. There was something about him that I didn't like. And not precisely his lack of people skills, because, who am I to judge, but he had this air of sufficiency I couldn't stand. Something treacherous. I'd always had this sense with people, and I could sense from the start that I'd never liked him, so I just tried to hang out the less I could with him, and focused on getting to know Sienna and Elijah, the people I found more things in common with.

A couple hours later, tipsy and with all my problems momentarily suspended in midair, I reached the bar for the next round of tequilas for the group.

I had just made my order when I felt a bump in my arm, startling me.

“Hey.”

I turned around and a pair of honey eyes were looking curiously at me.

Holy fuck, not you again.

“Hey, ” I replied, looking at him for a millisecond before fixing my eyes on the dozens of bottles of alcohol in front of me, begging he would just go and leave me alone.

“Are you doing better?”

My eyes widened.

Oh no, is he really? No, please no. Don’t.

But the alcohol had made its effect by now. I could lie blatantly at him without feeling that stupid necessity of telling him the truth. Although it wouldn't be a lie because I was doing better thanks to the tequilas.

“I..., Yeah. I’m… I’m doing better now.”

Hearing my own words, I realized I had just snitched myself.

Stupid, stupid idiot. I should’ve just ignored him.

Saying I was doing better implied I wasn't good before, and I didn't want to recognize that in front of him. I didn't want to give him any permission to pry, more than he had already done.

Too late.

“That’s great, Luna, I’m glad,” he said, heartily.

Sincerely.

Why the fuck everything he says seem so sincere to me?

I turned to him to look for some kind of smirk or smugness, something that could tell me that he was amused by what had happened that afternoon, or a hint of "I gotcha" in his gaze, but he was just looking at me earnestly. With a soft, warm smile and eyes beaming with candor.

It was kind of intriguing that someone like him could look like that. Or maybe he was just a good actor.

Feeling bold because of the alcohol I had in my bloodstream, I dared to turn to him and scan him carefully, realizing details I wasn't able to get when I first met him that morning.

It was like I had only been able to get brushstrokes of him or just certain sensations about him: his warm smile, his vivid golden eyes, his imposing yet stunning beauty, but not so much about details.

Details such as the shape of his eyes -delicate monolid traces around amber and honey hues-, crowned with meticulously groomed eyebrows. His lips, generous and soft; his caramel skin, tanned, his face with sculpted cheekbones and jaw, and impossibly smooth skin. His nose, straight but slightly crooked at the bridge.

After a few moments, he arched an eyebrow, “Yes?”

And his hair -with soft golden streaks- styled in a perfect mess to one side, falling casually over his temple when he leaned one arm onto the bar, breaking the height distance between the both of us. Because he was tall. Or maybe not that tall, but everyone in this damn country was too tall to me. With my 5’2 I was a dwarf to anyone and everyone was a giant to me, so that pose let me inspect him even more carefully.

After seeing all that, there's no wonder why he was so damn handsome.

Just then I realized he was looking expectantly at me, as if I was looking at him to say something.

Oh, no, not again. Eres una vergüenza, Matilde. (You’re an embarrassment, Matilde).

“I…”

What does this human being have that always leaves me speechless?

He chuckled, his eyes wrinkling in amusement, “You’re something else, Luna.”

I blushed. Maybe even more than I already was.

What's that supposed to mean?

Without expecting any reply from me, maybe because he knew I couldn't come up with anything, he added, “Wanna go play darts with me?”

My stomach churned instantly, anxiety metabolizing to the speed of light as I imagined what that entailed.

“N-No, thanks. I don’t play darts. I suck and I don’t pretend to humiliate myself in front of the whole Edenbrook on my first night here.”

Bryce clicked his tongue, “Doesn't matter, I can teach you if you want.”

I wanted to say yes, I really did. Like always in other things. I wanna say yes, but a part of me stops me. The fear of embarrassing myself in front of everybody, of being so dumb people will realize I have no fix, or of feel so nervous that I will ruin everything.

And his sincere smile was telling me he really wanted to teach me and he was hoping I'd say yes, like a puppy waiting for his human to take him for a walk. But, ah, once again. I couldn't.

“I appreciate the offer, but this time I pass.”

“Just this time,” he stressed, pointing a finger to me playfully.

I shook my head, giggling, “We’ll see.”

“We’ll see,” he defied, wiggling his eyebrows.

“Five tequilas ready!” a deep masculine voice announced at the other side of the bar.

I turned around, startled, and I found a tray with five shots of tequilas in front of me, “Thanks!” I looked back at Bryce, “Well, I… I have to go.”

“Need any help?”

“Nah, don’t worry,” I shrugged and took the tray with naturality.

“Ah, you know your stuff,” he pointed with an approving smirk.

I arched an eyebrow, kind of baffled by his implicit skepticism, “Do you?”

“I know a cowboy when I see one,” he winked at me.

It took me a moment to catch his drift.

“Oh.”

I nodded, kind of shocked by that revelation. I had imagined he aced Med School with no worries, using daddy’s credit card and all the commodities frat boys like him have. I would’ve never guessed he had to work his way here, just like me.

“Have a good night, Luna.”

“You too, Lahela. See ya.”

He smiled confidently, knowingly, “See ya.”

----

Thank you so much for reading!!!

[xiyao-feels]

I'm so confused. can jgy reincarnate or be resurrected? I know fanfic can take liberties but I've read conflicting things. plus the untamed didn't show his body or explain anything and I believe the novel says something else entirely? 😔🥺😕

So "can JGY reincarnate or be resurrected" is not a question I can really properly answer. My understanding is that the answer is yes if he's not stuck in the coffin (and a friend of mine has read a bunch of Chinese fic, albeit through Google translate, where stuff like that does in fact happen), but I'm not confident I'd know it if the answer were no! So I'm afraid I can't really help you there, I'm sorry. This is normally where I'd link you stuff from people who know more than I do but while I know I've seen stuff on the subject apparently I didn't save it, and I couldn't find anything relevant searching, either. That'll teach me not to save my links...

But I can show you what happened to JGY in MDZS, and then contrast with CQL! Let's go.

So, end of ch. 108, JGY pushes LXC away from the coffin and NMJ (not, note, out of the temple, which isn't crumbling!) and then NMJ immediately drags him into the coffin and kills him:

Yet, just as the hand was an instant from grasping Lan XiChen’s neck, Jin GuangYao used the only hand he had left to strike Lan XiChen’s chest, pushing Lan XiChen away.

He, himself, on the other hand, was dragged into the coffin by Nie MingJue, then held up like holding a puppet. The scene was beyond frightening. Jin GuangYao used his one hand to peel away at Nie MingJue’s steel-like palm. He struggled ceaselessly from the pain, hair tangled, as heavy malice shot from his eyes. He cursed with all the energy he had left, “Fuck you, Nie MingJue! You think I’m really scared of you?! I…”

With much difficulty, he coughed up some blood. Everyone present heard a crack that was abnormally clear and brutal.

A whimper of a last breath left Jin GuangYao’s throat.

There's a last short couple of sentences about JL's reaction, and then at the beginning of 109 you immediately have:

Lan XiChen staggered a few steps back from the push. He hadn’t realized what happened yet. Meanwhile, Lan WangJi struck the back of the fair-featured Guanyin statue at the center of the temple. The statue vibrated as it flew towards the coffin. Nie MingJue was still inspecting the corpse in his hand, the head had already dipped. As the heavy statue hit him, he fell right back where he’d been.

Wei WuXian leaped over and stepped onto the Guanyin’s chest. The coffin lid had broken already. They could only use the Guanyin statue as a lid to seal away Nie MingJue and his rampage. Down below, Nie MingJue struck the statue again and again in attempt to break free, while Wei WuXian also shook again and again, reeling so much he was almost thrown off.

And then LWJ lifts the coffin up, seals it with seven quqin strings and lets it fall again to the ground.

Then for the rest of chapter 109 and the beginning of 110, LXC and then WWX ask NHS some questions, after which:

After a while of silence, Wei WuXian spoke, “Let’s stop standing around for nothing. Get a few people to go find assistance. Save a few to stand by here and watch the thing. The coffin and the guqin strings won’t be able to seal ChiFeng-Zun for long.”

As though to verify his judgement, loud noises echoed within the coffin again, along with a nameless fury. Nie HuaiSang shivered. Wei WuXian glanced at him, “You see? You have to switch to a firmer coffin right now, dig a deep ditch, and bury it once more. You won’t be able to open it in at least a hundred years. If you do, it’s guaranteed it’ll continue to haunt, resulting in endless consequences…”

Right after this, the crowd comes pouring in. Some of them do indeed work on strengthening the seal; we're also told that it requires careful handling (which is why it's a few of the sect leaders who volunteer to handle it), and WWX anticipates the near future of the coffin:

Soon, this coffin would be sealed within a larger, firmer coffin. It’d be secured with seventy-two mahogany nails and buried deep underground, sealed under some mountain with stone tablets of warning.

Then we see some sect leaders carrying it outside the temple, and later LQR watches it be hauled onto a cart.

The next we hear of it is in overheard rumour in ch 113, three months later:

Someone switched the subject, “Enough, enough. Why talk about these things? Eat up, eat up No matter how powerful that Jin GuangYao used to be, right now he could be stuck in a coffin brawling with Nie MingJue.”

“I don’t think so. They loathe each other to the core, after all. I bet his bones have already been torn apart by Nie MingJue.”

“Indeed! I went to the sealing ceremony. The resentful energy in that coffin was so strong that no life grew within five hundred feet of it. I’m doubting it, really—could the coffin really seal them for a hundred years?”

Overheard rumour is not the most reliable of things, especially in MDZS—for example, I would not be surprised if it wasn't really five hundred feet. But it gives any sense, and certainly—as WWX indicated above—the coffin is /meant/ to seal them for a hundred years. (Though I have my doubts on this actually working; see here.)

Now let's look at CQL:

After JGY breaks the seal on the coffin, the blood drops onto the Tiger Seal, and resentful energy emerges and the temple starts to crumple; pretty much everyone but wangxian and xiyao flee the temple. LXC lifts his hand to push JGY away, but can't bring himself to do it; JGY asks him to stay and die with him, and he agrees. JGY then pushed him away to save his life, and wangxian catch him and LWJ brings him out of the temple to make sure he actually leaves insead of e.g. running right back in to die with JGY. WWX stays and watches a little; we see JGY turn and confront the resentful energy: "Nie Mingjue. Do you think I will be afraid of you?" The temple continues to collapse, WWX flees, and JGY runs towards the coffin.

(I'm having a hard time with the blocking on this one, I watched it a few times and it looks like they are a) immediately over the coffin when JGY bleeds on it and then immediately after they're...not? Despite not moving??? But the above is what I think is supposed to be going on.)

They're then sitting around in the courtyard outside. They seem to have been sitting around for a while even before WWX's wound heals (not a feature in MDZS, because in MDZS MXY's revenge didn't include JGY); it seems likely that JGY died before that, I think, but that's at least an end point. After this the cultivators rush into the courtyard. Now we finally get people going into the temple again, but there doesn't seem to be any sign or mention of sealing. I thought I remembered mention if a ceremony of some sort, but I can't find it in the rest of the episode and a friend doesn't remember it at all so I think it's pretty likely I was just misremembering/crossing it with MDZS.

But basically: in MDZS, they seal them together /immediately/ after JGY dies, and they proceed very quickly to a stronger, more permanent seal. In CQL, there's no sign of any of this at all! It seems quite plausible that they're not buried together, never mind sealed together. And regardless, it couldn't have happened nearly as immediately; JGY's spirit could have time to flee the coop.

It's also worth remembering that in MDZS when they seal the coffin at the end, it's to immediately deal with /fierce corpse NMJ/, who otherwise would be an extremely powerful, extraordinarily dangerous fierce corpse, made even worse—as WWX notes in ch 107—by having killed JGY.* In CQL it looks like the problem is more the Tiger Seal, I think? And it's not like they need to immediately seal it into the coffin which JGY is also in? It's not even clear that JGY's body actually ends up in the coffin, from what I can see. As far as I can tell there's not really any reason to believe they're buried together. If I had to guess (though I didn't rewatch all relevant scenes, or even all the temple scenes, and I could easily be missing something) I'd say NMJ might be going back to Honourable Burial Nie Land, and JGY's corpse....

Hmmm. That's kind of interesting, come to think of it. If it hasn't mysteriously vanished I'm not sure what would happen to it; I'm inclined to say it wouldn't be treated well except LXC is right there and he might like. Stab someone, honestly. If it /has/ mysteriously vanished—I just might change my mind about CQL LXC killing himself.** In Which a Twin Jade obsessively searches the world for their loved one because there's the possibility they might not be dead, huh.

*"After he killed Jin GuangYao, his killing intent would definitely become stronger, and he’d be more difficult to subdue!"

**I don't think this is the impression CQL as a whole is trying to give us, to be clear, it's just what I think happened.

[cryingcow]

Character Story - Daigo [RGGO]

This might be the longest Character Story I’ve done and man do my fingers feel it, but here’s Daigo! Now with GIFs, because I finally figured out how to use screencapture on my phone and I want to show how extra Majima’s sprite is XD (Thank you @onadacora​ and @blurred-voices​ for the request!)

Story: Kiryu leaves Daigo in charge of the Tojo Clan, but the people really don’t like nepotism, surprisingly. Majima returns to the clan but doesn’t listen to Daigo because he doesn’t have the required gym badge to tame him yet.

Bodhisattva Majima: “The Tojo Clan is pathetic! This is all Kiryu-chan’s fault for leaving!!”

Bonbon Boy Daigo: “Majima-san, I know you’re upset about your breakup, but please stop taking it out on our men D: ”

Note: “Bodhisattva” according to google means “a person who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings” (so yeah Majima’s definitely full of shit). “Bonbon” refers to whiskey bonbon. EDIT: Apparently it’s slang for “rich spoiled brat”. (Yay new Daigo nickname!)

.

CHAPTER 1

.

|A few months after Kiryu Kazuma settled the score with Goda Ryuji and the Go-Ryu Clan, Dojima Daigo is recommended by Kiryu to be appointed as the Sixth Chairman of the Tojo Clan.|

Kiryu: “Then, I trust you to handle the rest . . .  Daigo.”

Daigo: “Yeah, please leave it to me.  . . . But . . . why me?”

Kiryu: “What do you mean?”

Daigo: “I think there are others more suitable than me. Such as Kashiwagi-san and Kiryu-san . . .”

Kiryu: “No, there’s no one else more suitable to be the Sixth Chairman than you. That’s what I think.”

Daigo: “More . . . than anyone?”

Kiryu: “Daigo, you are strong. You have the strength not to give in to violence or power. Now, with the Tojo Clan exhausted by the conflict against the Omi, we need a strong leader like you.”

Daigo: “A strong leader . . .”

Kiryu: “You will surely unite the Tojo Clan. I believe so.”

Daigo: “Kiryu-san . . .”

----

|After several months . . .|

Kodama: “That bastard Sasaki, invading our territory, what is the meaning of this?! Sixth Chairman!!”

Daigo: “. . . I don’t mean to leave it alone. I have repeatedly advised Sasaki to be careful.”

Kijima: “It’s not just Kodama, I’m affected too. Are you just going to let them do what they want?!”

Daigo: “. . . I’ll have a lot of words for Sasaki.”

Kodama: “Honestly, I don’t want to hear what you’re going to say. I’m sick of the Sixth Chairman.”

Daigo: “. . .”

Kijima: “You think this is all right? Sixth Chairman, do you even know what you’re saying? ‘The Sixth Chairman is a half-assed yakuza who lets the direct patriarchs do what they want’. That’s your reputation in the clan, right?”

Daigo: “What?”

Kashiwagi: “Kijima, watch your mouth.”

Kodama: “Kashiwagi-san. These are just facts. Even if you look away, it won’t solve the problem. Moreover, Kanda, who recently became the head of the Nishikiyama Family, is rumored to be planning something big.”

Kijima: “Haa~. None of this would be happening if the Fourth Chairman was still holding the seat.”

Daigo: “. . .”

---

Daigo: “Damn it! Nobody listens to what I have to say . . .”

Kashiwagi: “I’m here. The resistance is strong . . . even so, there is no courtesy to the Sixth Chairman.”

Daigo: “. . . but . . . what they are saying is also plausible.”

Kashiwagi: “Sixth Chairman, this isn’t solely your responsibility. There was also that incident with the Omi, and the clan is still in turmoil. The police are also keeping their distance from the Tojo, and the battle for territory is accelerating.”

Daigo: “Yeah. I can’t leave it as it is.”

Kashiwagi: “Jeez . . . that Kiryu left such a heavy role on you.”

Daigo: “Kashiwagi-san. For now, let’s talk to Sasaki again.”

----

Sasaki: “Sixth Chairman, even if you say that. I’m not doing anything wrong, am I? You just pay the money properly, make a contract, and buy the land, right?”

Daigo: “However, the land is Kodama Family territory. It doesn’t make sense to buy territory from your own relatives.”

Sasaki: “What reason. I’m not doing anything illegal, right? I even consulted with a lawyer.”

Daigo: “Even if you didn’t violate the law, you violated the code. I can’t forgive you for that.”

Sasaki: “Good grief, the person who was just a mere gangster the other day is now acting like he knows anything about being a yakuza. Didn’t the deceased Patriarch Dojima . . . no, didn’t your daddy give you a special education?”

Daigo: “What?”

Sasaki: “At this point in time, let me tell you . . . no one accepts you as the Sixth Chairman. Doesn’t have any experience or track record. Doesn’t have his own family. Aren’t you just recommended by the Fourth Chairman? On the contrary, until recently you were just a thug who drank a lot. Being fucked over by the Omi, getting captured, and after being released you play around with your parents’ money like a good-for-nothing boy?”

Daigo: “What was that?!”

Sasaki: “Is that who’s supposed to be the Sixth Chairman? How funny. You think anyone would agree to that? Hey, you . . . how much did you bribe the Fourth Chairman?”

Daigo: “Bastard!!”

Sasaki: “. . . That’s right. What are you going to do?!”

Daigo: “. . . if people don’t understand what you say, you need to change the way you say it.”

Sasaki: “Sixth Chairman. You think if you hit me in a fight, I’ll answer to you?!”

Daigo: “Yeah. If I can do it, then I’ll try it!”

{Daigo beats up Sasaki.}

Daigo: “Who are you calling a boy? Huh?!”

Sasaki: “Gyaah!!”

{Sasaki collapses.}

Daigo: “Haa . . . haa . . . haa . . .”

Kashiwagi: “Daigo! What happened?”

Daigo: “. . .”

Kashiwagi: “Is this . . . Sasaki? Daigo, you . . . no way . . .”

Daigo: “If people don’t understand what you say, you need to change the way you say it.  . . . Kashiwagi-san.”

Kashiwagi: “. . . Sixth Chairman. Is this what Kiryu expected of you?”

Daigo: “Eh?”

Kashiwagi: “Anyone can rule by force if they’re strong enough. But is this what Kiryu wanted you to do?”

Daigo: “That is . . .”

Kashiwagi: “I know suddenly being thrust into this role is confusing. But still . . . don’t lose sight of what you have to do as chairman.”

Daigo: “. . . Yeah. I already know that.”

Daigo: “. . .”

---

|After a few weeks . . .|

Kashiwagi: “. . . Sixth Chairman. There’s been talk.”

Daigo: “Talk? Of what?”

Kashiwagi: “Yeah it’s . . . should I call it good news, or should I call it bad news. Actually . . .”

Majima: “. . . I’m tired of waiting! How long I’ve waited!”

Daigo: “Ma-Majima-san?!”

Majima: “Daigo-chaa~n! Great to see ya!”

Daigo: “Kashiwagi-san, is this what you were saying earlier?”

Kashiwagi: “Yeah. the Majima Family will return to the Tojo Clan. It seems that Kiryu persuaded him. He wants him to support you.”

Daigo: “Kiryu-san? For me?”

Majima: “So, I’ll be taking care of ya from now on.”

Kashiwagi: “. . . Majima. I ask that you moderate your behavior.”

Majima: “Oh, leave it to me. With a bodhisattva-like heart, I support Daigo-chan.”

Daigo: Yes! If Majima-san returns, that would be reassuring! With this, the Tojo Clan . . . I think it will finally come together.”

Majima: “. . .”

Daigo: (Alright. From now on, let’s brace ourselves!)

.

-END-

.

CHAPTER 2

 .

Yakuza: “B-Bastard . . . What’re you doing?”

Majima: “You . . . I heard it. You’re dissatisfied with Daigo-chan’s manner of doing things. It sounds like something is being planned behind the scenes. Are you staging a coup d’état?”

Yakuza: “Wh-What the hell are you talking about?! Guh!!”

Majima: “Get up. I’m not through with ya yet.”

Yakuza: Hiii! No more!!”

Majima: “The Tojo Clan has become weak. If Kiryu-chan was still here . . . It wouldn’t be such a mess!!”

Yakuza: “Gyaaa!!”

----

Daigo: “What was that?! Majima-san again?!”

Kashiwagi: “Yeah. This is the 19th incident this month.”

Daigo: “Damn it. Why is he doing this?”

Kashiwagi: “It seems he is rampaging as much as he likes against those under suspicion of rebellion against you. With or without evidence, if he has judged you to have the will of rebellion against the Sixth Chairman, he will give you no mercy . . . Thanks to that, the number of voices dissatisfied with the Sixth Chairman is only increasing.”

Daigo: “. . . Majima-san, this is counterproductive . . .”

Kashiwagi: "That man is the kind of guy whose leash you couldn’t even hold in the first place. That Kiryu, bringing back such an outrageous problem child . . .”

Daigo: “It can’t be helped. I’ll have a word with him . . .”

----

Majima: “Daigo-chan, what’re ya talking about?”

Daigo: “Majima-san, I heard you’ve been rampaging around Kamurocho.”

Majima: “Kiryu-chan told me to. Hit the guy who opposes Daigo-chan from one end. That was what Kiryu-chan endorsed.”

Daigo: “Kiryu-san said that?”

Majima: “That’s the truth. I don’t know what to tell ya: if an idiot strikes, the owner will bite back to discipline him. With a dog.”

Daigo: “Th-that may be so . . . but what you’re doing is overkill.”

Majima: “. . . Haa. Daigo-chan, you’re an amateur.”

Daigo: “. . . Majima-san. Thank you for doing this for me and the clan. However, because of your rampaging, the Tojo Clan is plunged into more and more chaos. That is . . .”

Majima: “Daigo-chan! There seems to be a misunderstanding, so let me clear it up.”

Majima: “I don’t want to do this for the Tojo Clan and Daigo-chan.”

Daigo: “Then . . . are you doing this because of Kiryu-san?”

Majima: That ain’t it.  . . . It’s because . . . I want to rampage.”

Daigo: “Eh?”

Majima: “Kiryu-chan asked me to do it for Daigo-chan, it’s just for the cause!”

Daigo: “Wha-”

Majima: “Besides, the only one who can order me around is someone who is stronger than me! But Daigo-chan . . . you’re weak. I met ya the other day and it was easy to see at first glance.”

Daigo: “W-Weak?”

Majima: “Hopeless. I won’t listen to someone that weak. Y’know, that kind of thing!”

Daigo: (What . . . such an absurd person . . .)

----

Kashiwagi: “Really. Majima did that . . .”

Daigo: “Yeah. I’m in trouble.”

Kashiwagi: “. . . But, Sixth Chairman. Are you in a position to criticize Majima?”

Daigo: “Eh?”

Kashiwagi: “The other day, you too tried to make Sasaki obey with violence.”

Daigo: “!”

Kashiwagi: “What Majima is doing and what you did are essentially the same. The result is the current turmoil.”

Daigo: “. . .”

Daigo: “. . . Kashiwagi-san. How would Kiryu-san deal with this?”

Kashiwagi: “If it was Kiryu? No . . . I think the problem here is, ‘What would you do?’”

Daigo: “Me?”

Kashiwagi: “Yeah. There must be a reason why Kiryu is willing to entrust the Tojo Clan to you. In that case, it shouldn’t be about what Majima or Kiryu will do . . . but rather what will you do?”

Daigo: “. . . so it should be by my method?”

Kashiwagi: “Yeah. Just think it over.”

Daigo: “Okay . . .”

----

Daigo: (My method . . . In terms of achievements and popularity in the Tojo Clan, I can’t hope to match Kiryu-san. Majima-san’s way of domination through violence, that’s not my way . . . Then Kiryu-san, what were you expecting from me?)

Driver: “Uooooo!”

{The driver swerves wildly.}

Daigo: “Oi! What?!”

{A hail of bullets rings out.}

Daigo: “What?! A shootout?!”

Thug: “Dojima Daigo!! Come out!”

Daigo’s Bodyguard: “What the hell are you doing?!”

Thug: “You guys, do it!!”

Daigo’s Bodyguard: “Kuh . . . this many people . . .”

Thug: “You’re annoying!! Now die!!”

{the thugs beat up the bodyguard.}

Daigo’s Bodyguard: “Damn. . .”

Thug: “Hahahahahahaha!! Die!!”

Daigo: “Oi!! Stop it!! Aren’t I the one you want?!”

Daigo’s Bodyguard: “Sixth Chairman . . . please run away . . .”

Daigo: “No. I can’t. If I run away, you guys . . .”

Daigo’s Bodyguard: “B-But . . .”

Thug: “Hehehe. Don’t count on it. There are 30 people here. The load is too heavy for the Bonbon Boy!!”

{Daigo defeats all 30 men.}

Thug: “S-So strong . . .they didn’t say . . .”

Daigo: “You thought a chairman who sits at his desk all day and only does clerical work couldn’t fight? You guys . . . who hired you?”

Thug: “Damn . . .”

Daigo: “Answer me!!”

Thug: “. . . To-Tojo Clan.”

Daigo: “What? Oi!! Which family was it?”

Thug: “Come on! I don’t know! He seemed to be from a family at the lower end, but he didn’t give a name!! We were just given money by him and were told to kill you!!”

Daigo: (Shit. Who the hell could it be?)

---

|A few days later . . .|

Daigo: (The other day’s attack. The assailants didn’t seem to know anything . . . The person who hired them. If I think about it . . . it must be someone who has a deep grudge against me. Sasaki . . . he was still complaining about me after that, but could it really be him?)

Kashiwagi: “Daigo! It’s terrible! There’s an attack! Sasaki’s office is being attacked!”

Daigo: “Attacked?! By who?”

Kashiwagi: “. . . Majima. It seems he called up his family and headed to Sasaki’s office.”

Daigo: “What was that?!”

Kashiwagi: “Majima thinks Sasaki is the culprit who had you ambushed, said he was going to execute him.”

Daigo: “E-Execute?”

Kashiwagi: “Sixth Chairman. We can’t forgive Majima’s violence anymore. Isn’t that right?”

Daigo: “Y-Yes!! Let’s head to Majima-san right away!”

Kashiwagi: “. . .Yeah!”

.

-END-

.

CHAPTER 3

 .

Daigo: “Majima-san!!”

Sasaki: “U-Ugh . . .”

Majima: “Oh, Daigo-chan. Yeah, I came here too. This guy spilled everything. He said he had Daigo-chan attacked.”

Daigo: “You?”

Majima: “Rebellion against the chairman won’t be forgiven. You’ll be executed.”

Daigo: “Majima-san, stop it!!”

Majima: “Stop? Why? Didn’t this guy try to kill Daigo-chan?”

Sasaki: “D-Don’t kill me . . .”

Daigo: (Th-This method . . .)

Daigo: “. . . Majima-san! This method of making a mark is wrong!”

Majima: “. . . Haa. Don’t say something so boring. Besides, didn’t I say so the other day? The only ones who can order me around are those stronger than me. Is Daigo-chan stronger than me?”

Daigo: “. . . Th-that is . . .”

Majima: “Or . . . can ya prove it? That Daigo-chan is stronger than me.”

Daigo: “Eh?”

Majima: “Since you’re silent, I guess that means I don’t have to do what you say . . .”

Daigo: “Prove . . .”

Majima: “If ya can’t do it, then don’t do it. Let me do things my own way!!”

Daigo: “W-Wait!!”

Kashiwagi: “Daigo. Majima is provoking you. If you hop on . . .”

Daigo: “I know that. But . . . if I pull back now . . .”

Majima: “What are you going to do? To stop this guy from getting killed, are ya gonna prove you’re stronger than me?”

Daigo: “. . . . . . . . . Understood. Let’s fight, to bargain for his life.”

Majima: “Oh! So you’ll do it?!”

Daigo: “Yeah. And . . . if I beat you, please swear your loyalty to me.”

Majima: “What? That’s a hefty condition. Well, in that case . . . If I win, I get the Tojo Clan. I’ll be the next chairman.”

Daigo: “What!”

Kashiwagi: “O-Oi! That’s . . .”

Majima: “If ya can’t meet those conditions, then this discussion is over. Let Sasaki die.”

Sasaki: “H-Hiii~~!!”

Daigo: “. . . Alright. Let’s drink to your conditions.”

Majima: “Kukuku. Yeah. We’ll have to do that, Daigo-chan.”

Kashiwagi: “Daigo . . . ! This method . . .”

Daigo: “Pardon me, Kashiwagi-san. But this is the only way . . .”

Majima: “. . . Really. I should change the location. The best stage for the best event is . . . I’ll contact ya in a moment, so please wait. The pickup will come soon.”

Daigo: “. . .”

----

Daigo: “Here?”

Audience: “Wow!!”

Ring Announcer: “L a d i e s   a n d   G e n t l e m e n ! ! We suddenly have a special match tonight! Tojo Clan’s Sixth Chairman, Dojima Daigo VS  the patriarch of the Majima Family directly under the Tojo Clan and the Mad Dog of Shimano, Majima Goro! The battle for the chairmanship is about to begin!!”

Audience: “Oh~~~~~~!”

Daigo: “Wh-What is this . . .?”

Majima: “A special match. Isn’t it more exciting to do it this way?”

Daigo: “Heh. How like you . . .”

Majima: “Time to say goodbye, Daigo-chan!!”

{Daigo and Majima fight in the ring, presumably shirts off. Daigo . . . very much does not win.}

Daigo: (Damn . . . of course . . . he’s incredibly . . . strong . . .)

Majima: “After all that, Daigo-chan, it wasn’t enough. this is how it turns out.”

Daigo: “No, not yet!”

Majima: “Hmph. Let go.”

{Majima kicks Daigo.}

Daigo: “Guh!! Damn it!”

Majima: “Can’t be. I shouldn’t hit ya that way. It’s too full of holes!!”

{Majima kicks Daigo again.}

Daigo: “Gah! Guwaaaaaa!!”

Ring Announcer: “Oops, Dojima Daigo is  d o w n !”

Majima: “This is the end!! Uoryaaaaaaaaa!!”

{Majima kneedrops Daigo in the head.}

Daigo: “~~Gah!!!!”

Ring Announcer: “The Mad Dog of Shimano’s ruthless kneedrop downed Dojima Daigo with a direct hit to the skull!!”

Daigo: (No . . . I can’t beat . . . this person . . .)

Majima: “It’s over, Daigo-chan. The Tojo Clan is mine.”

Daigo: “. . .”

Kiryu: “Daigo, you are strong. You have the strength not to give in to violence or power. Now, with the Tojo Clan exhausted by the conflict against the Omi, we need a strong leader like you.”

Daigo: “A strong leader . . .”

Kiryu: “You will surely unite the Tojo Clan. I believe so.”

 Daigo: (. . . I see. So that’s what you meant, Kiryu-san.  . . . Strength is not just about power. The strength of Kiryu-san that I admired . . . is so much more than that!!)

Majima: “Wh-What?!”

Daigo: “. . . Haa . . . Haa . . . Majima-san, it’s still . . . it’s still not over yet!!”

Majima: “Hn. Ya talk big. Uooryaaaaaaaaa!!”

Daigo: “Guh!!”

Majima: “Good . . . now stay down, Daigo-chan!!”

Daigo: “No, I can’t lose. I can’t afford to lose!”

Majima: “Wh-What are you doing? Are you really going this far for the Tojo Clan and Sasaki?!”

Daigo: “. . . Majima-san, I finally understand now. What Kiryu-san expected from me and entrusted to me.”

Majima: “Wh-What?”

Daigo: “I will not give in to violence, because there is something to protect. But. If I succumb to you here, I would be recognizing that violence rules. I can’t admit that . . . so I can’t back down!!”

Majima: “!! . . . Hopeless. Daigo-chan, you . . . Being great . . . it’s hard. Meeting Kiryu-chan’s expectations.”

Daigo: “?”

{Majima falls to the ground.}

Ring Announcer: “Wh-What the hell is this?! Majima has fallen?!”

Daigo: “!”

Majima: “I lost. I’ve been completely defeated. Daigo-chan has crushed me.”

Ring Announcer: “Th-This is . . . the Mad Dog of Shimano has been torn downnnnn!! A miraculous reversal by Dojima Daigoooo!!”

{The crowd cheers.}

Daigo: “Majima-san, you promised. From now on, follow me. Okay?”

Majima: “. . . Yeah. Do whatever ya want with me. I entrust my life to Daigo-chan. Really, you’re a great man, Daigo-chan. It’s your win.”

{The crowd goes wild.}

----

|A few weeks later. . .|

Tojo Clan Member A: “Hey, have you heard the rumor? It’s said that the chairman disciplined a rampaging Majima with an iron fist.”

Tojo Clan Member B: “Ah, really? I can’t believe it.”

Tojo Clan Member A: “But lately, the Majima Family patriarch has been listening to the Sixth Chairman, and quietly does as he is told.”

Tojo Clan Member B: “No way, the Mad Dog of Shimano deferring to that boy?”

Majima’s voice: “Who is this ‘boy’?”

Tojo Clan Member B: “P-Patriarch Majima . . .”

Majima: “As long as my eyes are black, rebellion against the Sixth Chairman won’t be forgiven!!”

Tojo Clan Member B: “Hiii. I’ll be careful!”

Majima: “Hmph. Just rumors, at most.”

----

Sasaki: “I’m really sorry!! For me . . . to do such a thing . . .”

Daigo: “It wasn’t for you. I did what I should as the chairman.”

Sasaki: “But my betrayal this time can’t be forgiven! I will atone here as a yakuza!!”

Daigo: “Can you even use your fingers? I don’t need you to do such a thing.”

Sasaki: “But . . . !!”

Daigo: “With the Tojo Clan exhausted after the conflict with the Omi, we need as many people as possible. We do not allow acts that will impair it. Work frantically if you want the chance to remove your finger.”

Sasaki: “S-Sixth Chairman . . .”

Kashiwagi: “Everything worked out as you expected.  . . . Majima.”

Majima: “Whatcha mean?”

Kashiwagi: “The Mad Dog of Shimano that rampages as he likes, obeys when the Sixth Chairman punishes him . . . For the newly appointed Daigo who has no backing yet, that legend will become his strongest backing in leading the Tojo Clan. In preparation of that, didn’t you rampage around just so you can challenge Daigo to a one-on-one battle?”

Majima: “. . . You’re overthinking it. I just do what I want to do and I did it.”

Kashiwagi: “Hmph. So you did.”

Majima: “I was convinced and have accepted him as the Sixth Chairman. That guy is worthy to lead the Tojo Clan.  . . . Daigo-chan is real. More of a worthy man than I thought.”

Kashiwagi: “. . . Yeah. Maybe Kiryu had seen Daigo’s worth . . .”

Daigo: (The rebuilding of the Tojo Clan is just getting started.  . . . Kiryu-san, please watch. The future of the Tojo Clan that you protected, I will take over and show you.)

.

-END-

Masterlist

[livlepretre]

Okay, for the ask I just sent in, on the topic of Elena’s friends not really loving her unconditionally or caring about her for her, Damon and Stefan both started caring about Elena simply because she looks like Katherine (also, how much danger do you think Elena was in the night she technically met Damon, being human and wearing Katherine’s face? It must have been terrifying in retrospect for her, knowing he didn’t love her then and she looked exactly like the woman he’d been obsessed with for over 100 years, but was human and compellable). Maybe they grew to care for Elena later, but it was always about Katherine at the start. When Damon forced Elena to shut off her humanity, Elena straight up didn’t give a fuck about any of them (love that for her) and actually demonstrated her anger at her friends, that she’d never shown them before. She tried to kill Caroline and Bonnie, and while she loved them with her humanity on, there was no denying that there had been some deep underlying issues there. She lost her brother, whom she loved more than anybody or anything else, and was pretty much her last tether to the girl she’d been at the start of everything. It’s Jeremy’s death that shatters her completely, because he’s the only person that would always be there for her. Jeremy wanted the cure for Elena, since he thought she wanted it and also because it probably would’ve been nice for him to not worry about killing her after he became a hunter (didn’t he become a hunter because Elena was suffering from the hunter’s curse and he wanted to save her from that?) Everyone else wanted the cure because they didn’t like vampire Elena and wanted her human and fragile again, or because they wanted her blood useful again. At the beginning of season 4, everyone’s telling Elena how to be a vampire, giving conflicting pieces of advice, and telling her that she’s doing it wrong, without really telling her how to do it right. She gets in from all sides then, and then she can’t really be around her brother, since he keeps trying to kill her (those two love each other so much, I could ramble forever, but their relationship slowly grows warped through out the show (~vampirism is a curse~). Elena has Damon compel him to get out of the city in an attempt to keep Jeremy safe from the vampires and hybrids surrounding her (her mere existence brought them to town. How much must she blame herself for what happens throughout the show?), Jeremy helped trap her in the house in season 2 when she wanted to surrender to Klaus, Jeremy drugs her in an attempt to get her out of Mystic Falls, they both fight against what they are to be around each other safely again. They love each other, but holy shit, do they do terrible things to each other. They know their love is so ingrained and reciprocated that the only way they’d leave the other is through outside forces, like drugging or compulsion). Then, Rebekah, who’s tried to kill her multiple times and then really did kill her, is the only person who accepts her without her humanity. Everyone else, who accepted Damon despite the shitty things he did without his humanity and the numerous murders he committed, decided they didn’t like her that way and wouldn’t be there for her until she got hers back (and yeah, everyone was going through shit in season 4, but the Salvatores really decided that even though they forced her to turn it off, they hated that she no longer cared about them, and wouldn’t accept her that way (does anyone honestly think they would’ve accepted if Elena decided she didn’t want either of them? Stefan might have, but Damon would’ve flipped his shit). They both did horrific things without their humanity, but Elena’s a bitch to her friends and kills one cheerleader, and she’s off the rails and needs to be stopped (this arc in TVD is otherwise called the hypocrisy arc)). The Salvatores legitimately torture Elena and murder one of her oldest friends to get her to turn her humanity on again. Elena should’ve never forgiven that, and should’ve just left Mystic Falls entirely

Not sure I agree with your general premise. Like, yeah, the Salvatores are initially interested in Elena because of her face... but does anyone really care about any particular stranger until they get to know them? They go pretty quickly from interest piqued to really caring about her in a genuine way (it's fucked up, but honestly I would not have watched the show if it weren't. they're vampires. it should be fucked up). I would have a bigger problem with the show's premise if she were just some random teenager who grabbed their interest, because then it would be a question of why. What could possibly make Elena special enough to avoid getting casually eaten and forgotten about like every other random teenager on the show? The doppelganger thing at least gives us a plausible explanation for how they could get so entangled.

As for Jeremy, I agree with you that they do love each other and look out for each other in an entirely different way from the others, but it's also overlooking the fact that they're brother and sister. Of course they do. Anyone who is lucky enough to be really close with a brother or sister knows that there is literally no other bond like it. That's the kind of love you burn the world down for, that you would die for. One of the things that tvd does best is convey the depth of that particular bond, and the fact that it has the power to supersede every other kind of bond. It would be preposterous to imagine that Jeremy isn't ultimately the person Elena loves the very most. No friendship, no matter how deep, can touch that.

As for the vampire thing, I don't really have a problem with everyone being selfish about not wanting Elena to be a monster. The Salvatores are selfish. It's what I love about them. And it is disturbing when Elena kills that waitress. What are her friends supposed to do... let her go on a killing spree? The show was definitely going for some sort of storyline about going off the rails with depression and grief and anger, they just did it kind of poorly. I would have loved for Elena to go completely dark as a vampire, then to have the cure thrust upon her, the clarity of her humanity restored, and for her to have to live with what she did as a vampire. That would have been a great way to build on and maybe even conclude the arc of Elena's moral decay which we see developed throughout the early seasons.

[rachelbethhines]

Tangled Salt Marathon - Painter’s Block

Once again, we have a decent episode that winds up falling apart in context of the wider story arc. 

Summary:  Traumatized after the previous events, Rapunzel is feeling out of sorts, even having trouble painting again, and starts taking a class with a mysterious new art instructor. The other members of the class disappear one by one to a mysterious location by the sea, apparently painting an old, withered tree. The instructor is revealed to actually be an old witch serving Zhan Tiri (the monster who released the blizzard), released after the use of the weather machine and wishing to release her master as well. It’s up to Eugene and Cassandra to rescue Rapunzel. 

Tonal Dissonance Is a Problem

We start this episode with a recap of Queen for a Day and then we jump straight into yet another festival. 

Ok, ignoring that clearly a lot of time has past and no one hasn’t done anything to help Varian nor even mentions helping him; it’s just aggravating to switch from a serious storyline back to a supposedly low stakes situation without resolving the first arc properly. Yes, levity is needed to break up tension, but not in a way that distracts entirely from the narrative. 

Rapunzel Doesn’t Even Bother To Think About Varian When She’s Having Her PTSD Flashback  

Its a minor thing, but throughout the episode Rapunzel keeps having dissociative moments as she constantly hears voices in her head as she remembers the storm. Now I actually do appreciate what the writers are trying to do here. As some who also struggles with Complex-PTSD and dissociation, it's nice to see it represented here in some way. However, the fact that they leave out the key part of her trauma, letting down Varian, undermines these moments. Especially when they had no problem using Varian’s voice clip of “You promised!” earlier in the recap. It’s one of those things you may not notice it at first, but once you do it winds up distracting from the scene. 

What an Odd Place to Make This Reference 

Sugarby is quoting Ursula here, but I honestly don't know why. Ursula’s actual VA, Pat Carroll, does appear in this episode but she plays Old Lady Crowley instead. Sugarby’s VA is Ellen Greene, of Little Shop of Horrors fame. (and Rock-A-Doodle) You’d think a quote from that movie would be more apt. Also Rapunzel was admiring everyone elses work right before this, not talking about tough choices. 

Yet Again Cassandra Gains What She Wants, But the Narrative Refuses To Remember It

Cassandra’s beef in seasons two and three is apparently no one notices her or gives her credit for what she does, yet in season one she gets tons of recognition. Like here for instance, when her dad gives her a detective assignment on a missing persons case. To her specifically. He doesn’t ask anybody else first and isn’t running low on troops. 

You can’t have one of the main characters achieve their goal on screen several times and then act like they had never achieved it in later seasons. The audience isn’t dumb. We’re going to remember what happened and it’s insulting to the viewers for the narrative to pretend like what we’ve seen just didn’t happen. 

Friedborg is Wasted Here

I’ve talked about it before, but Friedborg is an unnecessary addition to the cast. However I bring it up again because this episode could have been the perfect set up for making her plot relevant. There’s tons of unintentional moments within the episode that could have easily served as foreshadowing that could have connected her to Zan Tiri, more so than any of the other characters. 

Trauma is an Explanation, Not an Excuse

This episode presents the idea that Rapunzel is procrastinating helping Varian because she’s reluctant to face her trauma. Which isn’t excusable. It gives reasons for her actions but those reasons are still ultimately selfish. 

Now, had the show owned up to this mistake, I would have no problem with using it as a point of conflict, yet the show constantly excuses Rapunzel’s behavior here. In fact the show excuses the behavior of several characters with the idea that so long that they had a traumatic backstory, they’re justified in their horrible actions. All but Varian, which a big double standard. 

However, and I can’t stress this enough, trauma is never an excuse for harming others. Especially people who've never done you wrong. 

Rapunzel spends several episodes ignoring Varian’s problem, long past the point of acceptability. And if viewed in the intended production order, the amount of episodes doubles. Varian is left alone for months, given the timeline of the show, and yet Rapunzel, the supposed adult in this situation, is never held accountable for neglecting a child.  

Xavier isn’t Tied Into the Plot Properly 

Xavier just so happens to have a convenient spell book that also just so happens to have all the exposition on the big bad that’s needed. It’s never explained how he got this book, why he has it, nor is it ever used outside of the first season. 

Xavier is plot important as the exposition fairy but the show never explorers him further than that and doesn’t tie him into the narrative properly, even though there’s plenty of reasons to do so. In fact Xavier will become just as useless as Monty by the time season three rolls around, even though he previously had the most connection to the ultimate villain. 

The Disciples Plot Goes Nowhere 

Ok, first off we get no real explanation as who these guys are, nor why they follow Zan Tiri to begin with. Why do they want Zan Tiri freed? What’s in it for them precisely? 

Second, what meminal backstory we get on these guys, contradicts what we’re told about them here. Xavier calls them evil spirits, but later we find out that they were actual real people who onced lived. You could call them ghosts if you want to, but that begs the original question of why they followed Zhan Tiri in the first place and why they continue to do so even in the afterlife. Simply being ‘evil’ no longer cuts it because real people aren’t just purely ‘evil’. They have goals and motivations. 

Finally, they accomplish nothing. They never wind up freeing their master. That happens through other means. They never connect back to Zhan Tiri’s own goals and motivations. They don’t add backstory to any of the other characters nor expand the mythos of the series. They’re just there to be a baddie of the week, and it’s is such a let down given what other hints we got for them. 

Sugarby Misgenders Her Master

So it’s clear that the writers did not fully figure out Zhan Tiri’s plot before they started making episodes. Given how animation works and how much pre-production time you’re given before you ever even start animating (which is several years btw), that’s a sign of mismanagement right there. 

Zhan Tiri is revealed to be a girl, but is referred to using male pronouns until that reveal, even by people who very well should know better, like her disciples. 

Also all these tree metaphors and hints come to nothing either, as Zhan Tiri is ultimately both freed and imprisoned without them. So what was the point here? 

Rapunzel Doesn’t Learn Her Lesson

This episode is suppose to be about Rapunzel learning to accept responsibility and owning up to her decisions even if it's hard. This should, sensibly, end with her taking upon her responsibility for Varian and following up with him. But no, we get a painting party instead. 

This isn’t Proper Foreshadowing 

So everyone acts like this painting of Cassandra in front of the moon is foreshadowing for her taking the moonstone, but it’s not. Not good foreshadowing, anyways. 

For starters, it’s not focused upon. Everyone is also painting stuff and crowding out what she’s doing so your eye isn’t lead to her

Nothing anybody else paints is a hint to anything later on, so why should the viewer pick up on this? It’s just a thing anybody could paint. If anything, Freidborg painting the void over there could have been some real foreshadowing cause that’s different and stands out, but it isn’t. 

It’s not on screen long enough to register for the audience. If you’re only going to notice something after the fact then it’s not a meaningful clue. Real foreshadowing has to be detectable and the audience needs to be able to plausibly figure out a twist before it happens or you’ve got a bad twist that’s not integrated into the story.   

There’s no other evidence to backup the twist. All we get is one framing shot of a mirror and that brief talk with Eugene in in the cell in Cassandra vs. Eugene. That’s not enough. And no, Chris claiming her ‘dress is blue’ as a hint is utter bullshit, cause there’s Freidborg right there wearing the exact same dress. 

If MoonCass was always a thing that the writers intended to happen, which we do have evidence for given released production artwork and Chris’s own discussions about the show’s development, then they needed to put more effort into establishing the character and setting up her arc. 

The very fact that viewers can easily pick out supposedly non-existent ‘hints’ with other characters like Freidborg and Varian, but not pick up on the actual twist, means that the writers failed to communicate clearly with their audience. That is on them and not the viewers, no matter what Chris says. 

Conclusion

This episode is frustrating. Much like the pilot, it offers up good ideas but then never properly follows up on them. To make matters worse, it winds up distracting from the plot that viewers actually care about rather than furthering. 

[ravel-puzzlewell]

i’m making a separate post bc I didn’t want to clutter this post even more, but I think keeping Nihlus on the team would solve a lot of me1 problems with both clunky first act structure and Saren’s lackluster characterization. 

like, the game clearly tries to present Saren as this far-end Renegade who started with good intentions and similar attitudes to Renegade\Ruthless Shepard, they use a lot of similar “getting things done no matter the cost” rhetoric, but we only see\hear about him after his fall from grace, we never get examples\stories of him doing legit heroic shit. So his quick, 1-minute redemption falls pretty flat in my opinion, bc there’s practically no build up or emotional investment in seeing Saren as more than just an asshole. The most we get is this abominably awkward dialogue with Liara about “mb he’s misunderstood and had noble intentions??” that makes no fucking sense bc first, Liara had to kill her own mother bc of Saren, second, it’s shoehorned right after Virmire where one of your teammates dies bc of him, third, she has no arguments except for “hmmmm, but what if??”. But if we had Nihlus, Saren’s old friend, partner (and mb ex lover?), it would very naturally give us a perspective of someone who knew Saren at his best and would be willing to try and find some excuses. 

also, as I’ve said, me1′s first act is v clunky, bc they just straight up tell you that Saren is a bad guy in a cutscene that Shepard can’t even see, but then they make you run around getting proof, but there’s no suspense, basically no dramatic stakes, you can’t even pretend you’re investigating, you just feel like you’re wasting your time. But what if instead we didn’t have any obvious proof that Saren did it? Like, first of all, we start with including Nihlus on the team, bc he’s supposed to be evaluating Shepard’s performance, for fuck’s sake, why would he want move faster on his own, bioware. He still gets shot by Saren, BUT it happens almost at the end of the mission, so he and Shepard get to work together, and second, it’s done by the sniper rifle and we don’t see who the shooter was (in-game a headshot from a Spectre-gear sniper rifles can plausibly take off both shields and most, if not all, of the enemy health, so it’s not dumb as Nihlus going down from a one pistol shot), and third, he’s taken out of commission for the rest of the mission so we can still recruit Ash, but he survives. After that, when Shepard accuses Saren of working with geth, the Council appoints Nihlus to investigate, bc honestly, internal affairs investigation by Garrus makes no sense. Garrus is a regular cop, it’s like sending airport security to investigate James Bond. (don’t worry, shakarians, when I’m hired to write me1-remake, we can still fit your boy in there, bc he’s gonna have a very different characterization and dynamic from Nihlus) So now instead of the Council just being idiotically obtuse we have to convince Nihlus that Saren did it, and it’d make sense that he’s resistant to this idea bc they are friends and he can’t believe Saren would try to kill him. We can restructure this part of the game to resemble an actual investigation more and make it a bit longer, not by a lot, just frex integrating Telos, bc rn Telos serves no narrative purpose, you could easily cut it out and just recruit Liara on the Citadel like everyone else, and second bc rn “ undeniable proof” is stupid, as if you couldn’t just fake an audio file?? Instead we can have Tali have leads to Telos, and there we find an actual evidence.

After that we can have an actual dramatic scene with the Council, where Nihlus has to confront Saren about his betrayal, instead of the Council just being clowns like we have right now. The rest of the game is structured pretty much the same, Nihlus stick with Shepard to bring down Saren and his arc is coming in terms with Saren’s downfall, but learning to trust Shepard despite the recent betrayal. I think it’d be cool and thematically relevant to have someone represent Paragon end of Spectre scale, bc right now we have only Renegade in Saren. Nihlus could play this role, being no-nonsense, but responsible, but also having to confront the reality of how the Council treats Shepard vs how he’s treated himself and realize that even tho he himself is not prejudiced and judges people by their actions (he canonically is the one who nominates Shepard to become a Spectre despite turian-human conflicts), the system in whole is stacked against non-Council races. I’m seeing his dynamic with Shepard with Legolas\Gimli vibe of mutual respect, but playful competitiveness. Also, I know it’s controversial, but I’m not married to Nihlus being turian, he needs to be one of the Council races, and we already have asari and turian on the team, so he can be our salarian representation that me1 lacks. but tbh i don’t feel strongly either way. 

[taziidcvil]

My Thoughts on RWBY’s new intro and chapter 1

This is going to be long so is there’s someone or something specific you want to read, I’d suggest using ctrl+f

WHITLEY

ngl i just want to start with my boy bc I’m so glad to see him back. Half of this is speculation and theorizing with no real merit ngl, but it’s something I’ve been thinking of for awhile

First of all this is a,,, very uncertain and conflicted look on his face here. He has his arm wrapped around his stomach and he looks very pensive. imo, Whitley’s going to be faced with a choice, one with no easy answer for him. And an answer that

might not bode well for the schnee family

Those clouds are, of course, Salem’s. Which makes me fear that Whitley may fuck up badly, and end up siding himself with the wrong people and it is likely going to be up to Weiss to bring him back.

Whitley isn’t a fighter. and if Whitley does cause the downfall of the Schnee family, he wont be at use for long. And once Whitley outlives his usefulness, there is no reason for her to keep him around.

But there’s a line that has been in my head for the last couple days. Namely Whitley’s line of ‘what could one huntsman do that an army cannot?’

Again, Whitley is no huntsman, but what it boils down to is ‘what can one person do?’ And I think Whitley is going to have to answer that question himself. 

I do think that Whitley is going to have to act at some point. Do something that puts him out for the greater good. I don’t expect him to suddenly join the fight, but I do think he will have his Pacifica moment. Where there’s something that he is physically capable of doing, but emotionally and psychologically it’s a mountain to him. Something only he can do, and Whitley will have to be the one person who changes the outcome of something dreadful. And most likely, i do believe it will involve Weiss

NORA & REN & RENORA (but mostly Nora)

ngl i am STOKED for this divide here

I love renora. it is one of my favourite ships. probably my third favourite i have to admit. 

what I don’t like is how its been going lately. while i do have the initial shipper reaction of ‘YES’ to the kiss, nora forcing it on ren sits wrong with me. Even more so their song last volume. It’s a bop of a song, true, but so much of it is nora telling ren to tell the truth only for her to tell him to love her. and while i’m sure he does love her, nora’s forcing it out of him and assuming is not healthy for either of them. Ren needs to come to terms with his own feelings, and these two need a wedge between them for a moment to develop separate from one another. 

and while i think ren will come to understand and accept how he feels

i think nora might give up on the pursuit and will put their mission above her feelings

But I do absolutely love the focus on Nora and I hope that’s a sign we are getting her backstory this volume. Nora is going to be a major piece in all of this and I personally cannot WAIT

I will say tho that I think her siding with Ruby’s plan is a little,,, strange to me. She was all gungho for protecting mantle last volume and i find it odd that she’s not on team ‘protect mantle first’. i get that she needs to be in that group because of what is shown in the trailer, but personally i would prefer her reluctantly forced into that group because of her usefulness. to keep the devive, that would mean ren would need to side with the ‘protect everyone’ but I don’t think it would have been that hard to spin his mindset that way

I’ve seen some talk about winter maiden nora and, while i personally would have preferred it, giving the power to penny only to give it to nora next volume is a little,,, cheap to me. ignoring the fact that it would likely mean penny would have to die and i am not about that life

i still think penny shooting lightning bolts at nora to power her up would be OP as FUCK tho

CLOVER

NO I AM NOT USING THE ONE SCREENCAP OF CLOVER THIS VOLUME YOU CAN’T MAKE ME

WARNING: Talk about dead bodies. Both fictional and real.

now i won’t lie, i am avoiding that shot like the fucking plague so I’m working mostly from memory here

I have seen bodies hours after someone has passed. Unless the body has something what effects the colour, here’s a greyness to the skin. Yes, this includes all skin colours. there’s also a distinct blue colour to the lips though clover doesn’t,,, exactly have distinctive lips. 

But seeing his body gave me the same nauseous and horrified sensation as seeing a long dead body. Of course not nearly as strong as he’s fictional and it’s animated, but it was the same. that sick greyness I’d expect from a body. ngl that shit,,, i wont say it triggered me, but it got damn close. it brought back memories and left me feeling very sick. It’s obvious he is very dead.

but even with that feeling, that didn’t stop me from being very fucking confused when I realised where the body was.

Now there’s a number of reasons that clover’s body would be there

They could have tried to save him and failed. They’re in a state of emergency and all the doctors are brought to one collective spot to deal with the potential rise of people needing medical attention. Maybe Atlas just works this way who the fuck knows. Most likely, they just wanted the Ace Ops to witness James and having Clover there just makes it easier to do that. but jfc if you’re going to have bodies in the medical area can you not install curtains??

ngl if i was at the hospital and they had a dead body uncovered and in full view of my room i would be 

I didn’t want to go back and see that image again, so i poked around the clover tag to see what people were saying in case i’m dumb and missed something. but i think if they were trying to bring clover back, they’d make it more obvious. and they sure as hell wouldn’t have coloured him that way. but I don’t blame people for being confused about if he’s dead or not when they literally put him in with people getting medical treatment and give him a patient number

but talking about Clover fuck i miss you so much brings me to

THE STAFF OF CREATION (with mentions of ‘that’ theory)

Ozpin: [mentions that using the staff will make Atlas fall]

Joanna: [talks about plans to move mantle citizens into atlas’ crater]

While it is debatable what the staff will be used on, I think we can all agree this bitch is coming down. Personally I think it’s how the volume will end. with the staff used, and atlas dropping. It’s a fantastic cliffhanger but fuck imma be so mad if that’s really where it ends. 

let me,,, get to that theory first. we all know which one i mean.

I’m not going to lie, i haven’t read much into it. mainly because i’d rather not get my hopes up and be pleasantly surprised than get my hopes up and be disappointed. Do i think it’s plausible? Well... after steven universe i think anything is possible. If it has even the slightest merit behind it I wont rule it out.

Do i think it will happen? debatable. i don’t think it was their plan but i also wouldn’t be surprised if they added it after the reaction to clover last year. but i’m not holding my breath. i’m leaning far closer to ‘no’ but i’m open to being wrong Do i want it to happen? god yes i fucking miss him okay i’m sorry i’m selfish i love my dumb fisherman himbo

the problem though is, if it can be done, there needs to be some form of payment. I know there’s been talk about a life for a life, and these are the options that come to mind: James: Don’t like this. James is a character rooted deep in the story and I think trading his life for Clover’s is,,, questionable. idk something about this doesn’t sit right. Especially when he has far more history with qrow than clover did. Tyrian: this feels cheap. trading a villain for a hero? that’s not even a payment, that’s hitting two birds with one stone. I do believe Tyrian wont survive the series, but this way is,,,, very cheap Qrow: pppppppppffffffttttt honestly this would just be a dick move that’s some monkey paw shit right there

either way, reviving clover would drop atlas and put both the people on atlas and under in danger. so the question is, is reviving clover worth it.

ethically, no. it’s not. one life will never outweigh thousands.  but would my selfish ass rather risk thousands of lives for one comfort character? you bet your sweet ass i would. it’s fiction, see if i care. storywise tho, we probably shouldn’t

But there’s nothing in the OP to suggest that Qrow is after the staff. and while it could be left for volume 9, i don’t see this volume lasting without dropping atlas after this volume started with the reminder that’s what would happen.

but ruby is shown reaching for it. (also is it just me or do those look like nuckelavee arms?) which makes me wonder just what she could want it for. Sure, she could be reaching to protect it, and that’s highly possible. but if we’re already talking about bringing characters back, i would not be too surprised if ruby considers the same idea. Namely with summer (though pyrrha is also an option). If she does consider that though, I don’t think she’ll succeed. and I doubt she’d really try if she knows atlas would fall. 

though if she wants to use it to save the world, if there’s something she can make with it that will stop salem, then i might believe she’d risk it. but even then i have a hard time believing she’d risk peoples lives.

but who else could and can get her hands on the staff?

PENNY

our sweet and dear penny, who has already suggested giving herself over to salem. and who is shown divided and framed opposing the team

While her being hacked is an option, and one i think james would consider letting watts do, from a story point I believe it’s far more interesting if penny is the one to decide this for herself.

Penny is a protector. And she wants to protect everyone. And one way she could possibly do that is by cooperating with salem. And with that gd whale having docking stations and a whole damn room inside it, penny going to salem fits with the whole ‘being eaten by a whale’. 

and if penny is the cause of atlas dropping, that girl is going to be dealing with even more guilt than she already has.

JAMES

me: okay, i know james shooting oscar was a big dick move, but james has done so many good things too. imo it’s questionable writing, but james’ stance is understandable. he’s still a good person-

listen. listen. listen. I... i don’t know what the fuck the writers are doing with this one. it would have been just as easy to arrest him but we just... gun happy i see. but james being gun happy makes me very nervous for qrow and that ‘if you were one of my men, i’d have you shot’. qrow’s out for james’ blood, but I don’t think qrow could ever actually kill him. and normally i don’t think james could try and kill qrow, but these are,,, not normal circumstances, and james has a semblance that will absolutely help him pull the trigger

i still love james. and i still understand both sides of the fight. and i still believe james is a good person. there’s so many good things james has done, but fuck if the writers aren’t trying their hardest to make the fandom hate him. and for the most part, it’s working. my gf already hates him lol

when all is said and done, there’s a lot that james is going to feel guilt for, but it’s guilt he’s willing to bare

while i understand the reason behind making james the bad guy, i will admit that i’m bitter about it. namely because in volumes 2 and 3 there were so many people expecting james to be bad, only for him to prove himself as a good person. and now the story is doing its best to take that back

THE ACE OPS

Again, one of the main reasons i think they put clover there and confused the fuck out of people. I think there’s going to be a divide in the ace ops, and i think we see which side people fall on here

harriet and vine are going to be harder to turn, but i think this moment just planted some uncertainty in elm and marrow. I dont think it’ll be an instant thing, but this isn’t something they’re going to forget. this is going to bother them for a good long while. yeah, the writers are trying to turn the fandom on james, but storywise it’s planting the seeds of betrayal and giving the ace ops a reason to switch sides. but i don’t think they’ll come into fruition until the end of the volume

And while we’re talking on betrayal, Winter is edging herself closer too. but while i think she’ll turn faster than the ops, i also think she’ll be the most understanding and caring of james of them all. 

Yang vs Ruby

pitting them together is honestly a good thing for yang’s character. they still love each other. they’d still fight for each other.

they may see things differently, and they may go their own paths, but there’s no animosity. they can work together and have each others backs, even when they don’t agree. 

and that’s something team rwby/ornj and friends and james/aceOPs need to work towards

Yang was never happy with Ruby keeping secrets, and personally i think it’s good for her to voice it and go a path she sees as right

Tyrian (and nuts and volts)

we’ve seen a lot of tyrian’s smiles. he is a very animated person who broadcasts his emotions. in fact, the only time he ever quiets down is in front of salem

this smile is the most ‘you bitch you’re lucky mum is here’ smile ive ever fucking seen on this man grhueiorfubgnjfroe

look, i don’t think tyrian and arthur are romantically involved. but i do think tyrian is fond of arthur. whether that’s romantic or platonic is up for debate, but tyrian has always spoken foldly of arthur. tyrian obviously does not like cinder or her crew, though he does love picking on them while i dont think he has that level of dislike for hazel, hazel is the sort of person to not like unnecessary killing, so i don’t see them getting close. Arthur crafted him his tail, and he organized a plan where tyrian got to murder often. out of the bunch, i think it’s rather obvious arthur is the person closest to him, and I also think he’s absolutely looking forward to seeing arthur again

Emerald/Mercury/Neo

first of all, FUCKING FINALLY! MY KIDS HAVE NEW OUTFITS! now there’s things i like and don’t like about mercury’s. personally, i like his old outfit better, but he NEEDED new clothes so i don’t miss it! Emerald is looking GOOD!! i don’t give a fuck what anyone says, she looking fine as hell

hazel tho, what the FUCK did they do to your hair?? who the fuck did this?? how DARE YOU

that’s all i have to say about hazel bc boy is quiet but WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE?? while we talking about new looks, winter is looking FIIIIINE too

Neo is, very obviously, finding this whole situation fucked up. i know a vast majority of us thought Neo would turn on Cinder, but at this point i believe she was content with finding a new reason to live. but the more cinder brushes her aside, and the more she gets to know salem, she’s looking more and more disturbed and annoyed with it all. 

emerald is an obvious turn. with her whole Aladdin tale, i wont be surprised if she takes the lamp from salem and uses the last question. (i’ll admit though that i’m curious what salem’s question(s) is). now i still think neo will want to kill ruby, but i don’t see her staying sided with salem and cinder.  i will say tho that I find it fucking HILARIOUS that salem has no fucking idea who she is. how much of cinder’s plan did salem even know? did she know about roman? did she know about mercury and emerald before they went to pick up her silver eye’d ass? Salem cut Cinder down for ‘acting without salem’s say so’ but how much of that has cinder already been doing before now pffffttt

but mercury’s the only one that isn’t showing that much hint to turning. and personally, that makes sense. Mercury’s been shown plenty of times being disturbed by it all. he’s always stood beside emerald, equally frightened or distrusting. but if salem is calm and mercury’s in no real immediate danger, mercury has always tried to play with the big boys. he has a better poker face than emerald and neo, but he doesn’t belong there nearly as much as he pretends to.

but mr pokerface isn’t perfect. the moment he notices cinder, his attention goes back to emerald, and he watches her. he’s told her before that cinder doesn’t care for them. he’s tried to break that to her, and when they come to face cinder he’s not happy. less so when emerald instantly runs back to her. he knows emerald’s goiing to get hurt, and while he’d like to think he’d be the type to say ‘i told you so’, he’s not going to take pleasure in seeing her hurt

but one think about emerald is that she reminds me a lot of nora. they were both starved and homeless, and were ‘saved’ by someone else. but cinder is no lie ren, and emerald’s gone a very different path. not to mention her ‘saviour’ came much later in her life, and nora is on equal footing with ren and has saved him right back. but nora has been shown to empathise with mantle and its condition. which makes me wonder if emerald will too. she described the attack on vale as ‘sad’. So emerald, how will you feel when you take in the situation in mantle?

CINDER

i’ll be honest, i don’t like cinder. I’m sorry ;n; she just never interested me. she has a nice design, but other than that i just,,, never clicked with her. but i am happy we’re getting a backstory for her. mostly because it’s damn well due, and for her fans. y’all enjoy your food

that is,,, where i’m going to leave it. it’s late and i need to sleep. there’s probably things i missed, and if there is i’ll add to it in the morning. but these are the immediate thoughts that come to mind.

please feel free to discuss. and remember these are just personal opinions and thoughts, many of which probably will lead to nothing. 

[generallypo]

“I heard your voice, so I came... Aoba-san.”

Hooo-boy, if that doesn’t get me emotional every single time. Call it my bias for eccentric bundles of sunshine and softness, or my crippling weakness for the secretly-handsome-and-devastatingly-earnest type, but you can’t change my mind: Clear is, hands down, DMMD’s best love interest. Character development-wise, thematically, romantically, he nails every trial thrown at him, gets his man,  and proceeds to break your heart in the tenderest, sincerest way possible. I am hopping with Huge Fan Energy, so this post is gonna be unapologetically long and self-indulgent and grossly enthusiastic. Yeeeee.

———— 

Look, DMMD meta analysis has been done to death, I get it. This game is old. But I think it stands as testament to its excellent production that it’s still a game worth revisiting years later — especially during these times when social contact is so hard pressed to come by and we all rabidly devour digital media like a horde of screeching feral gremlins. (Have you seen Netflix’s stock value now? The exploding MMO server populations? Astonishing.) It’s pure, simple human nature to want to connect, to cling to members of our network out of biological imperative and our psychological dependency on each other. As cold and primitive at that sounds, social contact also fulfills us on a higher level: the community is always stronger than the individual; genuine trust begets a mutually supportive relationship of exchange and evolution. People learn from each other, and grow into stronger, wiser, better versions of themselves.

Yeah, I’m being deliberately obtuse about this. Of course I’m talking about Clear. Clear, who is a robot. Clear, who is nearly childlike in his insatiable curiosity regarding the human condition.

And it’s a classic literary tactic, using non-human entities to question the intangible constructs of a concept like ‘humanity’ — think Frankenstein, or Tokyo Ghoul, or Detroit: Become Human, among so, so many works in various media — all tackling that question from countless angles, all with varying measures of success. What does it mean to be human? To be good? Who are we, and where do we stand in the grand scheme of things? Is there even a scheme to follow? … Wait, what?

Jokes aside, there are so many ways that the whole approaching-human-yet-not-quite-there schtick can be abused into edgy, joyless existential griping. Nothing wrong with that if it’s what you’re looking for, except that we’re talking about a boys’ love game here. But DMMD neatly, sweetly side steps that particular wrinkle, giving us a wonderfully grounded character to work with as a result. 

Character Design — a see-through secret

Let’s start small: Clear’s design and premise. Unlike so many other lost, clueless robo-lambs across media, Clear does have a small guiding presence early on in his life. It takes the form of his grandfather, who teaches Clear about the world while also sheltering him from his origins. It means he learns enough to blend sufficiently into society; it also means that Clear has even more questions that sprout from his limited understanding of the world.

Told that he must never remove his mask lest he expose his identity as a non-human, Clear’s perpetual fear of rejection for what he is drives much of his eccentricity and challenges him throughout much of his route. As for the player, the mystery of what lies underneath his mask is a carrot that the writers get to dangle until the peak moment of emotional payoff. Even if it’s not hard to guess that there’s probably a hottie of legendary proportions stuck under there, there’s still significance in waiting for that good moment to happen. And when it does, it feels great.

His upbringing contextualizes and affirms his odd choice of fashion: deliberately generic, bashfully covered from the public eye, and colored nearly in pure white - the quintessential signal of a blank slate, of innocence. Contrasted with the rest of DMMD’s flashy, colorful crew, Clear is probably the most difficult to read on a superficial scale, not falling into the fiery, bare-chest sex appeal of a womanizer, or the techno-nerd rebel aesthetic that Noiz somehow rocks. Goofy weirdo? Possibly a serial killer? Honestly, both seem plausible at the start.

And that’s the funny thing, because as damn hard as he tries to physically cover himself up from society, Clear is irrepressibly true to his name: transparent to a fault. He’s a walking, talking contradiction, and it’s not hard to realize that this mysterious, masked stranger… is really just an open book. By far the most effusive and straightforward of the entire cast, his actions are wildly unconventional and sometimes wholly inexplicable. But given time to explain himself, he is always, always sincere in his intentions — and unlike the rest of the love interests, naturally inclined to offer bits of himself to Aoba. It doesn’t take the entire character arc to figure out his big, bad secret — our main character gets an inkling about halfway through his route — and what’s even better is that he embraces it, understanding that his abilities also allow him to protect what he cherishes: Aoba. 

So what if he doesn’t fit into an easily recognizable box of daydream boyfriend material? He’s contradictory, and contradiction is interesting. Dons a gas mask, but isn’t an edgelord. Blandly dressed, but ridiculously charming. Unreadable and modestly intimidating — until he opens his mouth. Even without the benefit of traversing his route, there’s already so much good stuff to work with, and sure as hell, you’re kept guessing all the way to the end.

Character Development — from reckless devotion into complaisant subservience, complaisant subservience into mutual understanding. And then, of course: free will, and true love. 

At its core, DMMD is about a dude with magic mind-melding powers and his merry band of attractive men with — surprise! — crippling emotional baggage. Each route follows the same pattern, simply remixing the individual character interactions and the pace of the program: Aoba finds himself isolated with the love interest, faces various communication issues varying on the scale of frustrating to downright dangerous, wanders into a sketchy section of Platinum Jail, bonds with the love interest over shared duress, breaks into the Oval Tower, faces mental assault by the big bad — and finally, finally, destroys those internal demons plaguing the love interest, releasing the couple onto the path of a real heart-to-heart conversation. And then, you know, the lovey-dovey stuff. 

Here’s the thing: as far as romantic progression goes, it’s really not a bad structure. There’s room to bump heads, but also to bond. The Scrap scene is a thematically cohesive and clever way to squeeze in the full breadth of character backstory while simultaneously advancing the plot. In this part, Aoba must become the hero to each of his love interests and save them from themselves. Having become privy to each other’s deepest thoughts and reaching a mutual understanding of each other, their feelings afterwards slide much more naturally into romantic territory. They break free of Oval Tower, make their way home, and have hot, emotionally fulfilling sex or otherwise some variation on the last few steps. The end. 

That is, except for Clear. 

Clear’s route is refreshing in that he needs none of these things — the climax of his emotional arc actually comes a little after the halfway point of his route. When Clear’s true origins are revealed, he comes entirely clean to Aoba, fighting against his fear of rejection but also trusting that Aoba will listen. It’s a quiet, vulnerable moment, rather than the action-packed tension we normally experience during a Scrap scene. 

That doesn’t mean it’s prematurely written in — it simply means that he reaches his potential faster than the other characters. Because of that, he’s free to pursue the next level of his route’s development much, much sooner in the timeline: he overcomes his fears of his appearance, he confesses his love to Aoba, he leaves the confines of a largely dubious master-servant relationship and allows himself to be Aoba’s equal. Clear’s sprite art mirrors his emotional transformation all the way through, exposing him to the literal bone — and Aoba’s affection for him doesn’t change a single bit. Beautiful.

The whammy of incredible moments doesn’t just stop there, though. I don’t exactly recall the order the routes DMMD is ideally meant to be played in, but I believe Clear’s is meant to be last. And if you do, I can guarantee that it becomes a hugely delightful gameplay experience — in order to achieve his good ending, you must do absolutely nothing with Scrap. It doesn’t just subvert our player expectations of proactively clicking and interacting with our love interests; it grabs the story by its thematic reins and yanks it all back to the forefront of our scene. 

In every route besides Clear’s, Scrap is a tool used to insert Aoba’s influence into and interfere with his target’s mind. Using his powers of destruction, Aoba is able to prune whatever maligned thoughts are harming his target; in any conventional situation, using Scrap is the right choice. 

But one of the central problems in Clear’s route is his conflict between the impulses of his conditioning and his desire to live freely as a human would. Breaking free of Toue’s programming is what initially made him unique; growing beyond the rules imposed by his grandfather is what makes him human. In the final conflict scene, Clear’s decision to destroy his key-lock is an action of true autonomy, made with perfect understanding of the consequences and a sincere, selflessly selfish desire to protect someone he loves. In order to receive his good end, you have to respect his decision. It doesn’t matter which option you pick — by using Scrap, Aoba turns his back on every positive choice he made with Clear and attempts to exert his authority over him. This is Aoba becoming Toue; this is Aoba trying to reinstate himself as ‘Master’ right as he approved Clear as his equal. That’s blatant hypocrisy, and it doesn’t matter if Aoba is trying to do it for Clear’s ‘own good’ — that’s not Aoba’s call to make. If you truly wish to respect Clear’s free will, you will stand by. This is the truth of the moment: Clear has no emotional blockages that Aoba needs to fix. Believe in him, just as he believed in you.

The path to his heart is, and always has been, clear. Scrap was never needed from the start.

While Aoba might be the main character, Clear is undeniably a hero in his own route just as much. Tirelessly earnest and always curious, he leaps headlong into the unknown and emerges with his newfound enlightenment. He’s unafraid of weathering trials, even to the point of accepting death, and returns anew from oblivion to a sweet, cathartic ending. That’s about as textbook hero’s journey as it gets — if that doesn’t make him unquestionably, certifiably, unconditionally human, then I will scream.

And only finally… there is the free end. The final CG is like a throwback to our first impression of him: indistinct, purposefully obscured from proper view. But this time, we know better — and so does Aoba. Looks were never what mattered in Clear’s route. If you were patient, and you were open-minded, and you listened… well, what we realize now is that Clear was doing the exact same thing for you, too.

From a carefree, aimless robot-man with only the gimmick of “eccentric ditz” to carry him forward, we get a supremely more interesting character by the end: a man who has graduated from the well-intentioned but claustrophobic conditioning of his childhood; a weapon who has defied the imperatives placed on him by his creator’s programming; a wanderer who has, through unconditional patience and empathy, discovered love, and striven to become a better person for it. Who was it that ever doubted Clear’s character? He’s the goddamn goodest boy that ever wanted to be a real boy. Of course Clear is human. And in fact, he does it better than every single one of the actually human love interests. You can’t change my mind.

The Romance — kindness is really fucking attractive, okay.

Like I’ve said earlier, I have my Big Fan Blinds stuck on pretty tight. I might be conjuring sparks from thin air. But I think every choice was a deliberate creative decision on the writers’ part, and they deserve all the kudos for it — I’m just the lucky player who gets to enjoy it. But aside from Noiz (who I also think is a perfect darling as well — I could go on and on about him), Clear’s route is a model example for consent and healthy relationships in VN storytelling. This is reciprocated on both sides: never does Aoba infringe on Clear’s boundaries, and neither does Clear. They’re sensitive to each other’s needs and concerns; they ask for permission and stop when it isn’t granted (and when it is, boy do they get frisky — I’m not complaining!) I don’t need to say much more, because I think that consent is both fantastic and yes, incredibly hot (the scene in DMMD is tons more sad, go play Re:connect!). Good writing shows off the massive erotic potential enthusiastic consent puts into intimacy, and Aoba’s and Clear’s relationship is honestly a dream playground. The point is, I think Aoba and Clear genuinely do find equal balance in their relationship by the end of his route (and certainly through Re:connect). If you follow through Re:connect’s storyline, there’s even more thematic richness that comes through in the form of Clear’s greatest asset: communication. The couple get to discuss the long-term implications of them being together; they both offer concerns, points, and assurances to the other, and it’s just a soft, honest moment not so unlike the worries of a real relationship. Hearing is kind of Clear’s motif sense, but it’s really great to see that Aoba also subtly picks it up, really flexes his own communication skills to better engage with Clear. 

Point is, Clear’s route spoke to me on a lot of little levels. Design-wise, he’s already got a ton going for him, and his story builds upon it rather than against it, enriching his development and grounding him a little more solidly in the DMMD universe (and in my heart). His route, aside from being emotionally ruinous, carries a pretty solid chunk of world-building (only beaten out by Mink’s and Ren’s, probably), and the romance feels organic, healthy, and realistic. He’s not the only one with an excellent route, but he’s my favorite. If you read through all of this, you’re a real trooper and I’m extremely impressed. Thanks for tuning in. Peace.

[quickspinner]

⭐️star⭐️ Oooooorrr Hey gorgeous. Honestly one of my favorite lukanette stories of all time. Whichever you prefer 😊

Ask for director’s commentary

All right I’ve got another star in my inbox so we’ll go with Hey Gorgeous since that’s probably my most popular piece to date. So, how about a little bit of background, a couple of the issues I had writing it, and a deleted scene? I’m gonna go ahead and put a cut here because, as we all know: I’m wordy.

HG was totally an accident; I had no idea how it was going to blow up either in size or popularity. It’s also a fic that wouldn’t have happened, or at least wouldn’t have been nearly as big, if I hadn’t gotten such a great reaction to the beginning, so just know: Your feedback matters. If you like something, tell the author, because you never know what might happen (but it’s almost always more fic in some way or another).

I wrote the original 8 or 9 pieces mostly in one go; I did a little filling out and polishing before I posted each piece, and then when the feedback was so positive I started thinking about how I could continue and expand it, and I just jotted down the scenes as they came to me. That was really the fun thing about HG, aside from all the flirting which was fun to write--I didn’t worry about the things that usually stall me a bit. Because of the way I was writing it I didn’t worry about connecting scenes or flow. Usually, when I write a story, I have a bunch of really vivid scenes in my mind that I write first, and then I have to go back and connect them and smooth everything into a flow, but I didn’t bother with that with HG and that gave the story a really unique energy. Since it didn’t have a serious, plot-heavy narrative arc, I could just hit the high points of the relationship and that made it a lot of fun. 

I struggled a lot sometimes with whether Luka was really in character; HG Luka had a little less reserve and a little more sass than canon Luka. I tried to keep the things I see really essential to his character; his music (obviously), his empathy and sensitivity, his relationship with Juleka, his tendency to be a helper/caretaker and a problem solver. I admit I get salty with people who think there’s nothing to Luka; I think that the show gives us a lot of implied information and it’s not hard to extrapolate from there (if you actually care enough to think about it for five minutes instead of just dismissing his entire character because you don’t like the competition), but there’s also kind of a lot of wiggle room with him, because he gets so little screen time, and since I was working with an older Luka, I tried to sort of run with a direction I felt was plausible, even if it was a little more extreme than what we’d seen from him so far. That’s another reason why the feedback was so important in making this story continue; when I started to question what I was doing, I would look at the reactions and think, well, I must be doing something right, so here goes.

With that said, there were times where I started second guessing and got a little bit stuck. One of those spots was the moment where Luka sat down and talked to Marinette about the future. I didn’t want it to turn into a spontaneous proposal (because I already had the proposal scene planned) but I did feel like it was an important discussion to have. I also felt like I should show some conflict in their relationship, and that seemed like kind of a good point, but in the end...I just didn’t want to write it. I didn’t want to write them fighting! Because I didn’t want to it was next to impossible to actually do it, so finally I said the hell with it, I don’t care if it makes them look too perfect, I’m not dealing with that. But in the process of thinking through all of that I wrote this version of the scene, thinking maybe I could handle the argument in flashback, but ultimately, I decided it didn’t fit the tone of the story, and resigned myself to the fact that they would just stay too perfect. I can’t say I regret it, honestly. (Also I don’t know why there was so much cursing in this version of the scene, but it might have to do with the way I was winding myself up over getting it right, lol.)

***

Toni’s words weighed on his mind, but he couldn’t quite find the courage, or the words, or the right opening. 

Luka was overthinking it, he knew. Blunt, raw honesty had gotten him this far. They’d done the meet the parents thing, they lived together, and he was honestly being fucking ridiculous. It wasn’t as if he was asking her for any kind of commitment. 

So why was he so fucking terrified that asking her about the future was crossing a line? That it would somehow make her really look at the idea of a life with him and cause her to freak the fuck out.

He’d seen her freak out, a few months ago when she’d had deadlines stacked up and it was clearly physically impossible for her to meet them all. It wasn’t pretty. It was messy and tearful and honestly a little bit traumatizing, giving him flashbacks to Juleka’s darkest days. Seeing Marinette like that scared him literally sick, and the fight they’d had afterwards gave him chills to think about.

He’d been quietly furious that she had let things get so bad, but he had held it in until her deadlines were past and he’d thought she had recovered enough to talk about it...but she hadn’t, and it turned out neither had he. She’d fled livid and crying to Alya and he’d sobbed in Juleka’s lap, and in the end, after they’d both been talked down enough to deal with each other again, they’d agreed that Marinette had overextended herself to the point of endangering her health and sanity, and that Luka could find ways to confront her about it that didn’t involve projecting all the emotional trauma of his childhood into a situation that, while bad, wasn’t nearly dire enough to warrant his level of reaction. 

Luka hated himself for weeks afterward, even more so because Juleka felt guilty that her past problems had been a contributing factor. He probably owed her therapist a gift basket.

He jumped as he felt Marinette’s hands on his shoulders. “Hey, Gorgeous.” 

“Y-you’re t-tense t-today,” she said, leaning over the back of the couch. “Are y-you r-r-r—” She closed her eyes, and Luka reached up to squeeze her hand and sighed. He’d freaked her out, and now she was nervous. Her stutter was hardly ever that bad at home unless she was stressed out. “Sssorry,” she sighed. 

“It’s fine, I know I’ve been weird. Come on over here, I’ve been trying to figure out how to bring this up and I guess I might as well just blurt it out. It’s not bad stuff, just...well, I don’t know how you’re going to feel about it.”

Marinette came around the side of the couch and sat down next to him. Luka gave into the impulse to pull her into his lap. She wriggled around until she was snuggled against him but could still see his face. “You know I met with my agent the other day,” he said, figuring that was the best place to start. “She’s not happy about some of the choices I’ve been making, about the work I’ll take. She thinks I’m not thinking long term enough, and I…” He paused, and bit his lip, squeezing her thigh nervously. “I guess...I don’t know how to think long term without talking to you first. And I would never, ever want to pressure you into anything and I’m not asking you for any kind of commitment or—” Marinette put her fingers over his lips lightly to stop him. 

“J-just t-tell mmme what you w-want,” she said softly. 

Luka smiled. “I just wanna stay with you, babe, that’s all. I can do what I do anywhere. Toni thinks I should be willing to travel more, make more contacts now with people that will be big later. It all makes sense, I guess, except…” he shrugged. “I just don’t care. I’m not out to get famous or rich, I just want to be comfortable, and happy, and right now I’m all of those here with you.”

Marinette’s lips thinned slightly, and one finger tapped lightly on his arm in a nervous tic that meant she was thinking hard. Luka waited as patiently as he could, though his whole body felt tense and nervous. Marinette’s mind was a thing of wonder, and it was probably racing along paths of possibility he hadn’t even considered. 

When her focus returned to him, she didn’t speak immediately, and suddenly Luka found himself asking, “Does it bother you, that I don’t care about all that stuff? Is it...is it too much for me to want to always be here? Am I too much?”

“No,” she said clearly. “I don’t think you c-could b-be as...as you if that w-was what you wwwanted. And y-you’re n-not t-too mmmuch.” She turned pink. “Y-you’re mmy s-safe p-place, L-luka. Y-you always b-back off when I n-need ssspace, usually even b-before I h-have to ask. I w-want you to b-be here.” 

His shoulders must’ve lowered two inches in relief. Marinette giggled, patting his cheek. “I w-want you t-to be h-happy. I’m h-happy y-you asked mme, b-but I t-trust you to manage your c-career your own w-way.”

[mariisseething]

Top 5: Who Could Beat Bakugou?

I’m kind of obsessed with over-analyzing My Hero Academia, so here you go. Prime insanity.

Note: I am only using STUDENTS in this list! (From any school we’ve seen).

Technically speaking, Bakugou has never been beaten in a fight. During the training exercise in Season 1, he and Iida were outsmarted by Midoriya and Uraraka, but I’ve decided not to count that as a victory won in a fight. So yeah, he’s a strong little gremlin! But who could/can beat him under the correct circumstances.......

#5. Yaoyorozu Momo

It’s rather difficult to gauge whether or not Bakugou would be a tough match-up for her, as we’ve never seen them engaged in a conflict. But due to the vast range of her quirk, I firmly believe Momo has the capability to beat Bakugou in a one-on-one battle. The only set back being her confidence issues. As we saw in her and Todoroki’s fight against Aizawa in the second half of Season 2, Momo tends to lose confidence at the worst possible moment. I think Aizawa summed it up pretty well by saying, “She’s decided that he’s (Todoroki) better than her, and has begun to doubt herself.” And since most problems in life don’t just vanish, I’d say she still struggles with that.

Nevertheless, Momo has the ability to focus primarily on defense while Bakugou tires himself out on the offense. We don’t know exactly where she placed in the recommendation exam (since we only saw a glimpse of the boy’s exam during Inasa and Todoroki’s fight in the second half of Season 3), but it’s safe to say she scored within the top three spots. Especially since the exam looked like something right up her alley!

#4. Shinsou Hitoshi

(Now this is a match-up I would LOVE to see)!

It’s no secret that Bakugou Katsuki is easily provoked, and provoking people is a prime aspect of Shinsou’s quirk. When a person knows what his quirk is, his only choice is to get under their skin. (Which we saw him do during his fight with Midoriya at the sports festival). And he seems to be rather good at it too. Ojiro hammered Midoriya on NOT answering any of Shinsou’s questions, which he did almost immediately. Imagine if that’d been Bakugou instead of Midoriya, the reaction would have been 10x faster.

The only issue I can foresee with this match-up is Bakugou going all in at the beginning. Since Shinsou’s quirk is not showy, Bakugou could decimate him in like thirty seconds flat. That’s why, if Shinsou wanted to beat him, he would need to work on hitting him where it hurts, and dodging attacks. Which would most likely prove difficult, considering Bakugou’s quirk covers much more ground than Midoriya’s, for instance.

These two are a great match-up in my opinion, because they test each other’s biggest weakness. Shinsou’s being physical attacks, and Bakugou’s being anger management. In one of the last episodes of Season 3, we are informed that Shinsou has “bulked up”, meaning he has been working on physical training.

#3. Kirishima Eijirou

Kirishima is is one of the only people who I believe Bakugou would tolerate being beaten by. As we know, Katsuki considers Eijirou to be his equal, and wouldn’t be too hurt if he lost in a fight with him.

During the sports festival, Bakugou beats Kirishima in their bracket fight. He seems satisfied with his win, because he feels like Kirishima put his best foot forward. And he really did use all of his power during that battle, but since then, he has significantly improved.

In either volume 15 or 16 of the manga, (I’m not sure), Kirishima develops a new ultimate move during a street fight with a villain hyped up on “quirk steroids”. This move is called his “Unbreakable” form. (Note that this move was only made possible by Bakugou’s encouraging, supportive words). If Kirishima had had his Unbreakable form during the sports festival arc, he would have beaten Bakugou fair and square.

Not to say that Bakugou hasn’t also gotten stronger, but unlike Kiri he doesn’t have the ability to “power-up” even further. Which is simply due to the different nature of their quirks.

In addition, during Kirishima’s backstory retelling in the manga, we find out that he actually placed second in the U.A. entrance exams! Though he did not beat Bakugou, his score was much more well rounded than the latter. Meaning he had nearly an equal amount of rescue and defeat points, whereas Bakugou did not have ANY rescue points.

This match-up has very promising results.

#2. Midoriya Izuku

In Deku vs. Kacchan Part 2, Bakugou declares himself the victor of a match that I would personally define as a draw. I’m going to be quite blunt and just say it, Midoriya is stronger than Bakugou. It’s not too shocking, especially when you consider that Deku is the protagonist. The only reason he didn’t beat Bakugou in their most recent animated fight is because he had to repress his full power, i.e. “One For All, 5%”!

With Izuku’s handicap in mind, consider the main reason Bakugou struggles to beat the prior. Midoriya makes him angry. Depending on the exact nature of his emotions, Bakugou’s performance varies from an irrefutable victory to a slippery, emotion-heavy defeat. Battles with Deku tend to lean towards the slippery, emotion-heavy defeat outcome.

Deku is rather empathetic, thus he feels bad when Bakugou can’t fight like his normal self due to emotional turmoil. Or, in simpler terms, he has a soft spot for his rival. Though Izuku is not immune to the same type of emotional turmoil, he is much better at working through it. Bakugou gave Midoriya one of his greatest strengths, emotional intelligence and control. His relentless bullying of Deku as a child and pre-teen resulted in the latter retaining a strong grasp on his feelings. In parallel, Bakugou did not prepare for these struggles since he was coddled and praised for everything he did.

Midoriya can absolutely beat Bakugou, he just needs to work on not literally killing him in order to do it.

Honorable Mentions:

~Monoma Neito~

During the sports festival, Monoma seriously misjudged Bakugou by picking a fight with him. Due to his lack of knowledge on his opponent, Neito lost. Had he known what buttons to push, he could have beaten Katsuki with his own quirk.

(Which would have been pretty badass, let’s be honest).

~Tetsutetsu Tetsutetsu~

Based on what we know about Tetsutetsu, which is not much, he might be able to defeat Bakugou. Though his and Kirishima’s quirks are ridiculously similar, Kiri has something that Tetsu doesn’t. His special move.

I couldn’t omit him from the list entirely since he Kirishima are on just about the same level. And besides, Tetsutetsu placed in the Top 10 during the entrance exam.

~Inasa Yoarashi~

Since he placed first in the recommendation exam, I had to include him. Theoretically he could beat Bakugou, but scientifically he would fail miserably. As we all know, heat makes air rise. But more importantly, air makes nitroglycerin EVEN MORE explosive. Inasa would most likely end up fueling Bakugou’s quirk and scoring on himself.

(I honestly just put him in the honorable mentions so I could talk about science, because science is cool).

~Mirio Togata~

Considering Mirio is in the running for #1 Hero, he could probably beat Bakugou instantly. It’s unfortunate we didn’t get to see Katsuki test his skills against Togata. His skill is truly unparalleled by any other student, but sadly this match-up is no longer plausible. Maybe in another timeline :(

#1. Todoroki Shoto

This kind of goes without saying, honestly. Yes, Bakugou beat Todoroki in the sports festival, but that was due to Shoto not putting in his best effort. Had he fought the way he did with Midoriya, I have no doubt that he would have beaten Bakugou. And Katsuki knew this too.

Since the sports festival arc, Todoroki has worked hard at overcoming his childhood trauma, and even though I’m sure this will become a problem again in the future, for the time being he’s free from emotional distress. Also, placing second in the recommendation exam is nothing to scoff at.

Bakugou is beginning to view Todoroki as an equal, like he does with Kirishima, so someday being defeated by Shoto might not seem as painful as it is now.

Unlike with Midoriya, I believe that Todoroki and Bakugou are equal in terms of power. So I could imagine their victories against each other flip-flopping all over the place.

Shoto earned the #1 spot because currently, in the manga, he is the most likely to beat Katsuki.

[panharmonium]

stranger things 3, a visual summary:

more coherent thoughts under the cut, because wow.

......okay.  that was a Trainwreck.  an absolute mess.

i remember when my coworkers were watching S3 (and still urging me to start season 1) and they were saying how amazing the latest season was, and honestly i think there must just be a difference in people who watch tv just to be entertained and people who watch tv and automatically evaluate the story (aka fandom veterans and English majors, lol - cue Me twice), because WHO could watch this critically and praise it that way?

it's honestly hard to know where to even begin; i've been sending frustrated notes to @brambleberrycottage ever since episode three and now that i'm done with episode 8 there's just......so much more to say

first, good things:

erica is a great character.  she's what max should have been (aka, uh.......interesting!)  i liked the realization moment where dustin was like "you're a NERD!"

that entire sequence where will is so upset with lucas and mike for not being engaged with the dnd game was very well done, especially the conversation he has with mike out in the rain.  i loved that moment where mike asked him "did you think we were just going to hang out in my basement playing games forever?" and will said, "yeah.  yeah, i guess i did."  i really felt that.  [edit, now that i've finished: this was never resolved.  will giving away his dnd books at the end was not an actual resolution to this conflict.]

steve is still a good dude, and robin was pretty cool.  i'm down for them being super friends.  but i'm still mourning the steve+nancy+jonathan trio that was a thing for like 5 seconds and then never returned.

i loved how genuinely excited steve was to see dustin when dustin came back from camp.  that was adorable.  "HENDERSON!!!!"  "how many children are you friends with?"

and uh. yeah.  i had more problems with this season than praise-bestowing moments, so.  here goes that bit.

OVERARCHING PROBLEMS:

1. keep it simple, stupid

remember in the office when dwight quoted the above advice to ryan as michael's rule for making a sale?  the same advice applies to storytelling.

season 1 of stranger things is so simple.  there is One Monster.  that is the danger.  and somehow, that single monster manages to be a thousand times more terrifying than all of these new "bigger, scarier, more epic" threats crammed into the second two seasons.

how goofy is the stranger things season 3 plot, seriously?  russians are blackmailing a small-town mayor so they can buy up land to steal power from the town while operating a secret lab under the mall to open a gate to the Upside Down (WHY?), while simultaneously a remnant of the malevolent force that was "defeated" last season has reanimated itself and is making people scarf chemicals (WHY?), and then it possesses one of them and uses that person to possess a bunch of other people in order to build itself a body made out of melted people, in order to kill el, whose only story this season is breaking up with her boyfriend, and we have to infiltrate this russian base in order to close the gate (same endgame as last season - BIG NO-NO) to kill the goo monster, except last time the "mindflayer” survived the gate being closed, so why would this even WORK, and -

the fact that there are so many "round-up/info dump" scenes where characters summarize what's going on and make implausibly accurate connections/guesses about what it all must mean is a red flag.  the characters shouldn’t have to tell your story to the audience.  if it's too complicated for us to keep straight on our own, it's too complicated.  

the amount of energy that goes into trying to lash together a Chaos Plot with too many shaky legs leaves nothing left over for nuanced character development or mood establishment.  you're constantly running to catch up to your own flimsy story before it collapses on top of itself.

2. the horror!

S1 of stranger things was the scariest thing i'd ever seen.

granted, i don't watch a lot of horror, because i don't like it.  i get scared too easily and then i legitimately can't sleep.  i watched a horror movie five years ago that i still think about every time the lights are off in my house.  but still, ST1 was something i had never experienced before.

it wasn't creature horror, and it wasn't just suspense.  it was the UNSETTLINGNESS of it all.  it wasn't really about the monster.  it was about the Upside Down.

the reason ST1 is so successful is because of how much we don’t know.  it's the horror of not understanding what is happening, and the terror of knowing that nobody thinks it’s real.  feeling like you're going crazy and being cut off from all assistance.  the conspiracy and the cover-up.  and the sheer unsettlingness of the whole parallel worlds things just tipped me over the edge - the idea that you can take one wrong step and then be suddenly and without warning completely off the map, simultaneously right next to the people you want to get to and also utterly beyond their reach.  that was fucking scary!!!!  

and they do it all with so little.  i have literally never been more scared in my life than when i would see those christmas lights start flickering.  and they're just LIGHTS!  yes, we see the monster later, but it's the uncertainty that's most frightening.  we don't understand how it arrives in our world, and we don’t know where it will show up next.  it could be right next to you - on the other side.  you could be standing on top of it.  you just don't know.  it’s like what jonathan says to nancy in her bedroom - “it can’t get us in here.”  and she says, “we don’t know that.”

the later seasons of stranger things, by comparison, did not scare me at all.  season two was like a zombie movie - hordes of weak enemies that you can just shoot with a gun.  and season 3 was even less frightening - upping the ante and making things gorier, more explosive, and bigger just isn't the vibe they set in S1.  i'm not scared of that giant goop monster.  it's like godzilla.  it's not horror; it's just a lot of noise.

the unsettling, "creep" factor that made season 1 so effective was gone.  it just turned into a regular old monster movie, and i didn't find that particularly interesting.

3. illogical, captain

a while ago there was a wave of pushback against people complaining about plot holes, but you know what?  there is, in fact, an appropriate place for us to talk about plausibility, as well as the point at which our suspension of disbelief collapses.

ST3 is a bona fide plausibility disaster.  i did not believe half of the story, because it was not unfolding in a believable way.

half of the plot points in this season would not have happened if the characters had been behaving with any kind of sense.  it is absolutely impossible for me to believe that none of these children IMMEDIATELY went to joyce or hopper the minute they knew something weird was going on.  it makes no sense.  after the shit they've seen?  it makes sense in season 1, because the kids are still so young that they have that kind of magical thinking that makes all of this seem kind of like an adventure.  but they're teenagers now, and developmentally, they’re past that stage.  they know the evil creature is back and they're pretty sure it's possessing billy?  for some unfathomable reason, they don't go to an adult, but try to trap billy in the sauna and just see what happens.  the other group has actual proof that russian soldiers are up to something shady in the mall?  they don't tell an adult; they send a TEN YEAR-OLD in through the AIR DUCTS to investigate the secret room guarded by MEN WITH GUNS.

this is ridiculous.  none of this should have happened.  none of this WOULD have happened.  it breaks the boundaries of disbelief.  it completely sabotages the audience’s engagement with the story - joyce and hopper's whole detour with alexei and murray is so dull, because its entire purpose is to bring hop and joyce up to speed on something that we, the audience, already know.  the other characters already found out this stuff, but did not communicate it - the gate is being opened again in a russian lab underground.  there's no suspense for us.  nothing new is revealed.  we're just waiting for them to hurry up and finish finding out so we can move on to the next thing.

moreover: there are so many other problems besides just "these characters would have talked to each other."  why on earth would murray, whose sole characteristic is extreme paranoia, take alexei wandering around the festival for hot dogs and carnival games.  why would hopper be so virulently against the possibility that weird shit might be happening again?  does he remember the past year or what?  how on earth would the kids be able to fight off that massive monster with an ax and a hunting rifle?  it's made out of dead guts and bones; why does it care if they shoot it?!  how in the WORLD is this russian facility so penetrable?  i'm sorry, it's just - beyond believable.  it doesn't have cameras?  the russians guards really can't tell that murray isn't a native speaker?  they don't check his id when they don't recognize him?  joyce and hopper really just got that lucky, to be asked a question and have “smile and nod” be the right answer?  nobody ever got shot?  it's silly.  it's just silly.  so many things - erica uses the "Open" button to open the elevator door in order to let steve and robin and dustin inside, but once the elevator is at the bottom of the shaft, robin explains the door's inexplicable non-opening because......you apparently need a keycard to use the buttons????  THAT MAKES NO SENSE; ERICA JUST USED THE BUTTONS A SECOND AGO.

even the entire endgame of this season is a contradiction!  if the mind-flayer survived el closing the gate last time, it doesn't make sense that closing the gate this time would kill it.  literally the entire plot of last season was "we need to get this thing out of will, because the creature will die once the gate is closed, and we want to make sure will doesn't die with it."  but apparently the creature didn't die upon closing the gate; it just got trapped in our dimension.  but now apparently it WILL die upon closing the gate.  for whatever fucking reason.

i'm sorry, but that’s a mess.  that’s a bona fide mess.

4. watch your tone

i honestly think the tonal change is the thing that made me the most frustrated about this season.  it's possible to have a terrible plot and still stay relatively true to your characters - you'll still have a bad season, but at least you didn't bastardize your characters in the process.

i had issues with S2 and i definitely was not as impressed with it as i was with S1, but at least in S2 joyce and hopper were recognizable.  in S3, i felt like i was watching strangers.  the tonal shift was bizarre and off-putting, more so with hopper than joyce, but it affected both of them.  

even as early as the very beginning of this season, i was feeling weird about how often hopper was being used for comedy.  and as the season progressed, this trend only became more pronounced.  almost every scene we had of him felt silly - and not like there was just something funny in the scene for me to laugh at, but like the audience was almost being asked to laugh AT him.  like he was constantly the butt of the joke.  

this really bothered me.  from that incredibly sincere and heart-wrenching portrayal of him in season 1, when they kept him rooted in the trauma of losing his daughter and the breakdown of his marriage, and then how that same trauma made him so driven to save will and protect the kids - what a change.  even in season 2 i was frustrated how the throughline of his daughter wasn’t touched again until the very last episode, and now in season 3 we’ve left that part of him so far behind that he's just there for us to laugh at.  we're supposed to laugh at scenes of him being drunk and a mess.  every scene he's in is either him arguing with joyce for comedic relief or being way over the top with alexei or the mayor.  he was like a caricature of himself, and i didn't recognize him.  

joyce suffered from the same thing, just by virtue of proximity.  she spent almost all of her time in this season with hopper, and virtually all of that time was taken up with silly shenanigans or comically overblown arguing.  what a departure from the desperate mother of season 1, who was maligned by everyone in town and only taken seriously by the audience.  now it’s the audience who are supposed to be chuckling at her.  

i dunno.  the tone shift was very dramatic, very obvious, and it impacted the entire season.  are we supposed to be taking this seriously or is it supposed to be a joke?  a little bit of humor to break tension can be a good thing, but when it's constant, it confuses the mood.  

and i personally don't think it was appropriate or respectful to either of these characters, in this case.

SMALLER THINGS THAT BOTHERED ME:

this show has 100% hit maximum character saturation.  by the end of this season there were 13 core characters onscreen at the same time, in the same scene!  it’s too many people!  they cannot reasonably develop that many people in the space allotted.

i still am not interested in max.  i don't feel anything for her.  she doesn't feel real.  i don't hate her, but she's just an empty vessel, and i really do think she's superfluous to this show.  i think you could remove her with very little reworking and the show would be stronger for it.  (they TRIED to do something interesting with billy, and i might have cared if we had been given literally any reason to care about him previously, but there was no investment earned there.  they didn't do the front-end work to make him somebody we were interested in.)

weird relationship sunderings from previous seasons.  i felt very strange about jonathan barely even seeing will this entire season.  i felt very strange about steve having almost zero contact with nancy.  i felt very strange about joyce hardly ever interacting with her kids.  all of these were core relationships - the characters were BUILT on those relationships, and they don't feel real outside of them.  not seeing these characters devote time to these relationships makes it feel like i'm watching a slightly different show.

the VIOLENCE.  apparently this is a beat-em-up now???  i really felt like every other scene somebody was getting beaten to a bloody pulp.  there was SO much smashing and bashing and throwing people into walls and fistfights and head trauma like - first of all, i find that stuff pretty boring, and second of all, all of these people should be in the hospital.  

the GORE.  other people’s mileage may vary, obviously; i just didn't like that.  i looked away at the scene with the rat, and all this...goopy dissolving human shit, and the stabbings, and just...general grossness level - season 1 managed to be bloodcurdlingly terrifying without any of this stuff.

i know this borders on nitpicky, but yet more medical malfeasance - another example of someone receiving an injection via the mysterious 90 degree angle neck route, plus - was anyone else losing it at the fact that steve and robin “puked up” a drug they received……..via injection??????  IT’S NOT IN THEIR STOMACHS, FOLKS!  THEY CAN’T PUKE IT UP!  IT DOESN’T WORK LIKE THAT!

the complete lack of follow-up to last season.  the whole S3 plotline (such as it is) feels like a weird side quest.  last season seemed to be furthering the mythos and setting us up for "there are other children like el/brenner is alive" - but this season, that fact appears to have been forgotten by everyone (even el!!!) and has nothing to do with the story that we're given, which is a goofy and redundant story about russians opening a secret lab under the mall which requires us to solve the exact same problem as last season (closing the gate).

this show's inability to keep certain throughlines in its headlights/keep things visible on the periphery instead of dropping them completely and then bringing them back whenever they feel like they need it again.   i already talked about hopper’s daughter as an example of this (done well in S1 and poorly in S2 and S3).  another example is that scene with nancy and her mom - it’s such a good scene, and yet it misses out on so much resonance, because they completely dropped the plotline of karen feeling locked out of her kids’ lives and desperately wanting to connect with them.  if they had continued to reference that throughout season 2, then this scene would have been so much more powerful.   as a third example, season 3 starts with a clear context/premise, and it’s INTERESTING - the town landscape changing because of the mall, business slow to non-existent, small town discontent over big corporations moving in, hopper pressured to break up the protest against mayor kline when he should have let it proceed - and then the show just drops that entire context.  you expect season 3 to stay rooted in the "our small town is being strangled by this mall" and then to eventually deal with the revitalization of hawkins, but nah.  it's never mentioned again.

LASTLY:

i'm not really gonna get into hopper "dying," because he's, like...clearly not dead.  but the whole situation was stupid and contrived (i was so sick of that arnold schwarzenegger lookalike by the last episode, god that whole thing was so dumb) and it's even cheaper knowing that he'll obviously be back.

what i AM gonna say is that i was livid that they brought back that peter gabriel cover of "heroes" to end this season.  their use of that song in S1 blew my mind - it had me stunned with how GORGEOUS it was and just, the way it worked in that particular scene - absolutely incredible.  floored me.  gave me chills.  to recycle it at the end of such a poorly constructed season made me so mad.  yOU CAN'T MAKE ME FEEL THINGS JUST BY REUSING THIS SONG.  I REFUSE TO HAVE EMOTIONS JUST BECAUSE YOU PULL OUT THIS BEAUTIFUL TRACK THAT YOU ONCE USED TO GREAT EFFECT; YOUR STORY WAS STILL TERRIBLE THIS TIME AROUND; DO NOT TRY TO TRICK FEELINGS OUT OF US THAT HAVEN’T BEEN EARNED.  

and that's it.  i’m sure later i’ll think of other things i neglected to mention here, but...yeah.  i was not impressed.  

[bigskydreaming]

Hi! I'm new to your blog but found a few posts that were about a JayTom ship, and I was wondering who Tom was? And also you've mentioned in a couple of posts the idea of Jason having a lineup of Titans in his age range and you talked about the Ray and Damage in one. Do you have a whole lineup in mind for them and if so, is there a post on that somewhere?

LOL man, I really need to start pulling all my posts about JayTom and Jay’s lineup of Titans together for some kind of a masterlist, so thanks for the reminder haha. Like, I saw this ask and thought of various posts to point you towards but ugh, I don’t know where any of them are.

Anyway, so. The Tom of JayTom. Aka my ideal ship for Robin!Jason in the series of one-shots about an AU where Jason doesn’t go to Ethiopia in ADITF and thus never dies, that’s kinda grown out of that of a one-shot I started as a writing commission a couple months ago, if anyone else remembers that….the one that was like ‘what if Jason called Dick after the Garzonas incident and Dick sided with Jason’…that one. 

Which then snowballed into ‘well, then I could give Jason his own lineup of Titans who are in the same age range as like a younger gen learning from Dick’s generations of Titans but still older than Tim’s generation of YJ and then eventual Titans.’

Sigh. Oh, me. Right! So! Anyway! Tom in JayTom is Thomas Bronson, the son of JSA member Ted Grant, aka Wildcat. 

Tom and Jason have never ever interacted in canon as far as I know, as I don’t think Tom’s ever appeared outside of JSA and Jason never appeared in that book either before or after his death. BUT by the magic of winging it and Canon Has Not Definitively Contradicted Me, I think the two of them are feasibly in the same age range, so I’m going with them both being fifteen when they meet here.

Tom’s a scrappy, street smart, attitude throwing teenager with daddy issues of his own, lol, thanks to Ted’s general non-existence in his life, for most of it….and he’s also tiny, like, 5′6″ and 135 lbs even at the end of his teenage years. LMAO, I honestly don’t remember, but I think that might be the whole basis of this ship for me, or where it originated. Like, I happened across Tom’s stats as listed on one of the DC wiki sites, and was like, lol oh, he and Robin!Jason could be pint-sized punks together! And then from there, I had the inevitable thought “okay but now make them gay” and then from there I fell into my usual trap of “oh no, it was supposed to be a joke but now I’m taking it seriously and seriously pondering how it could seriously work.”

And then from there it consumed my brain and devoured my life. I swear, it was Dick/Kyle all over again. Ugh, my brain is so problematic.

So anyway, this is Tom:

He’s a werepanther, he can shapeshift into a panther form to fight, which brings up an interesting facet of his character and something I think could be really fun to play off Jason and his own issues…because Tom hates fighting. HATES it. Will run from a fight at any given opportunity rather than engage….but its not because he’s a coward, or doesn’t have heroic instincts of his own, and its not even because he’s not GOOD at fighting.

Its that he’s scared of himself, and scared of hurting whoever he’s fighting…at least more than he means to. Because he has trouble controlling his shift when in fights. His panther form just comes out in response to his own amped up levels of aggression. The fight or flight response for him is actually more like “flight or turn into a raging whirlwind of clawed and fanged fury that can’t stop won’t stop until he’s definitively won his fight….which by extension, usually means his opponent is currently bleeding out on the ground from a few dozen deep claw marks because Panther!Tom’s claws and fangs are SHARP.”

Now pair this fear of his own power with Tom’s natural belligerence and problems with authority at certain points in his life, AND his desire to follow in his hero father’s footsteps as well as his resentment and giving himself grief every time he realizes he even has that desire, because he doesn’t owe his deadbeat dad shit and can’t stand that he nevertheless admires him in a lot of ways and still feels a desire to prove himself to him…

Then pair him up with Jason during his Robin years, going through similar issues and emotions as well as a comparable dynamic with Bruce as him not dying in Ethiopia nevertheless changes nothing about the two of them likely clashing more and more over their views on how to deal with criminals and the appropriate levels of aggression when dealing with them….

And that right there, IMO, is super strong potential for a dynamic couple with a lot in common and yet occasional clashes of their own due to different opinions on which direction to go in so as to address those shared issues…but who likely would never hesitate for a second before backing each other up and presenting a united front against anyone else who tried to give one or the other shit for any reason whatsoever.

Also, I have vastly amused myself with the thought (and the occasional post here and there) of Ted and Bruce continually glowering at each other and blaming each other’s son for being a bad influence on their son, who has never done anything wrong in their life ever, CLEARLY (even if Bruce had actually just grounded Jason the day before. Whatever. Ted doesn’t need to know that).

Anyway, so that’s the JayTom I reference now and then. I’ve always maintained that Jason could really benefit from having a stronger support system of friends distinct to him and not sharing similar dynamics with any of his siblings, so then I was like, well if Jay doesn’t die, and I have him and Dick closer in this AU than they’re usually written as being, plausibly Jason would spend a lot of time at the Tower to get away from Bruce and his own fights with him. 

With Dick being more than able to relate to trouble dealing with Bruce and thus happy to lend a sympathetic ear….and eventually maybe express to Bruce that it might do them both some good for Jason to make more friends his own age and have some normal routines that took him out of the house and Gotham enough that he and Bruce don’t constantly feel like they’re breathing down each other’s necks and keeping tension a constant thing between them. A little space now and then could benefit them both, give them chances to cool off after their fights and actually MISS each other before readdressing the issues.

So then I could see the Titans kinda sending out invitations/recruiting various teen heroes around Jason’s age that they’d all maybe had their eyes on for awhile as kids who could benefit from the same kind of team unity/group support that helped them so much when they were that age just a few years ago themselves.

Which leads me to where I am now which is….I still haven’t settled on a solid lineup, because I came up with too many choices, lol. Basically, my parameters were I wanted characters who could feasibly be said to be in the same age range as Jason and Tom, and didn’t have super strong associations with any other characters that would create any kind of conflict with them being on a Titans team at this point in the timeline instead. And because I’m all about my thematics, I wanted them all to have certain root issues in common that they could all bond over and actually, y’know, support each other with and through. 

(The same way I think Dick’s generation of Titans actually has certain distinct themes and issues that almost all of them share and can relate to in varying ways, which I think has a lot to do with how quickly and fully they all bonded and why they created such lasting friendships and teams between them. But that’s a whole other post, lol.)

So the central shared issues I decided to focus on for Jason’s age group of Titans were: teen/young heroes from abusive homes or runaways, ones with issues and fears stemming from and regarding their own powers or tempers, etc, and misfits who were regarded warily by other or older heroes and considered potentially able to end up on either side of the hero/villain line in the sand.

Which Dick’s generation of Titans, which of course includes Raven, Kory, etc, would not be in agreement with that last part, and thus be all the more likely to recruit these specific teen heroes and be like nyah, nyah, watch how with our help and oh yeah, SUPPORT, they all become the best damn heroes that ever did heroically hero. Suck it, JLA-holes!

(And then Donna would be like, not you Diana, you know we’re cool, its just I gotta do the team solidarity thing and Dick, Garth and Roy are still being Displeased with their mentors/dads at the moment, and also we’re all kinda ticked you guys stole Wally. Btw, we’re stealing the new Green Lantern kid, because Revenge and stuff. He’s ours now, you snooze, you lose).

 So, Jason’s lineup of Titans will consist of some of the following, I’m just not 100% sure which yet, because I have to whittle down the list.

1) Jason (nominally mentored by Dick, but the latter just calls it an excuse for brother bonding time and neither of them make much reference ever to having any kind of actual mentor/protégé relationship like I see the rest of Jay’s lineup having. Plus, Jason unique from the rest already has a mentor in Bruce anyway, so his situation and reasons for being part of this team aren’t quite the same from the others, especially as one of my reasons for this AU was always addressing the issues I have with Bruce’s parenting before the canon event point of Jason’s death, and like…..so like, Bruce does get better once Dick calls out some of his shit with Jason based on his own experiences with Bruce and then later Jason returns the favor by calling out Bruce for taking Dick for granted and no longer putting in the same effort connecting with his eldest and being an actual PARENT to him like he used to).

2) Tom Bronson/Tomcat (who else would act as his personal mentor other than Gar aka Beast Boy aka Changeling, the shapeshifter extraordinaire?)

3) Grant Emerson/Damage (recruited by Roy and his personal protégéand likely BFFs with Jason IMO, as I think their temperaments are complete opposites but Grant’s the kind of kid who would roll his eyes and dolefully follow his troublemaking best friend Jay into likely danger, because his power to blow things up really comes in handy with the kind of scrapes Jason gets himself into and this in turn is a really handy thing to point out in the aftermath of pulling Jason’s butt out of a scrape and then gloating but in the totally mature and “I’m much too nice to actually be gloating, you must be mistaken about what’s happening here” manner in which I see that going down. And in terms of the parameters I mentioned, Grant grew up bounced around abusive foster homes, is watched like a hawk by various groups and heroes because of the huge catastrophic potential of his powers, which he has his own fears about, and also he has no idea who his parents are either, and I imagine him and Jason going on a ‘find out who our real parents are roadtrip’ after graduation or something).

4) Ray Terrill/The Ray (potentially recruited by Kory and her personal protégé. He was briefly a member of Tim’s Young Justice team, but part of the reason he was never that close with the other members was he was a little bit older, just a couple years or so, but enough to put him squarely in Jason’s age range. Also comes from an abusive home, and spent the majority of his childhood living in complete darkness because his asshole uncle told him he had the same powers as his father which meant sunlight would be harmful to him and make him dangerous to be around. When in reality, like his dad, Ray’s powers are fueled by sunlight and he’s like a living solar battery, keeping him afraid to leave the dark was just meant to keep him passive and powerless. Even knowing his uncle lied now, Ray still has long had fears about his own powers, unable to totally shake the fears his uncle instilled in him).

5) Todd Rice/Obsidian (potentially recruited by Raven and her personal protégé. He and his twin sister Jenny-Lynn Hayden are probably a bit older than the rest of this team, but their ages aren’t definitively linked to any points in the DC timeline, so there’s no real conflict between handwaving them as aged down to be right around the same ages as the others. Todd and Jenny-Lynn are the twin children of original Green Lantern Alan Scott aka Sentinel, and the DC villainness Thorn. They grew up in separate foster homes though with Alan unaware of their existence for most of their childhoods. Todd’s childhood was notoriously rough, with him having several abusive foster parents. He’s canonically gay and mentally ill/neurodivergent, which several of his foster homes targeted him for. In addition, his shadow powers are tied to a dark dimension that’s said to prey on his mental state and led to occasional times where he’s been a villain briefly, and at all times his powers are regarded fearfully by most people and with him shunned and avoided because of them. All of which I think makes Raven an ideal mentor for him).

6) Jenny-Lynn Hayden/Jade (Todd’s twin sister, even though they didn’t grow up together for the most part. Honestly, she doesn’t share in a lot of the issues the rest of the team prospects do, and had a relatively good childhood before her powers developed and she found her brother and they started operating as heroes together. But upon learning who her brother and dad are, she’s always been committed to growing closer with them, so I think anywhere Todd goes in this AU, she’d definitely follow, and its not like the team can’t benefit from a heavy hitter like her, let alone more girls. Not totally sure who I picture as most mentoring her in specific, probably because I don’t see her as being recruited per se, so much as just going with Todd when recruited….but I’m thinking maybe Garth, actually. Garth has a lot of range and versatility with his powers and magic, which makes him ideal for mentoring someone who not only has the same powers as a Green Lantern, limited only by her imagination…..but who also might benefit from being mentored by someone who ISN’T a Green Lantern because she doesn’t share their traditional weaknesses and thus she’d be best off training with someone whose own techniques and instincts aren’t geared around weaknesses that are literally irrelevant to her powerset).

7) Courtney Mason/Anima (A metahuman runaway who was almost sacrificed by a cult before her powers kicked in….she’s also right in the same age range as Ray, Grant and Jason, and has briefly been a member of a couple Titans lineups but never for long and usually only for big event stories. But she fits the runaway/rough home environment parameter as well as fear of her own powers….she absorbs life energy from people and animals and can potentially kill them by draining too much. She also has a separate power that’s basically a connection to an other-dimensional spirit called the Animus that she can summon forth and unleash on her enemies. I’m thinking she’d make a good recruit/protégé for Jericho actually, for a number of reasons).

8) Cynthia Reynolds/Fantasia (? Maybe? Not sure yet. Not her actual codename, but her actual codename is a slur, so I’m def gonna make up a new one, I just haven’t 100% settled on what it is yet. Suck it, DC. She’s most known for being a member of Justice League Detroit along with Steel, Vibe and the Ray, but she’s the right age range to end up recruited to be a Titan here instead, like Ray. Also is a runaway from an abusive home, and often deals with mistrust and suspicion due to her illusion powers. Perfect recruit/protégé for Lilith, IMO).

9) Cisco Ramone/Vibe (Also created as a teenage hero to be part of the Justice League Detroit lineup, which makes him the right age range and he’s another runaway. The nature of his powers makes him a good fit to be a recruit/protégéof Mal Duncan/Herald).

10) Amy Allen/Bombshell (Totally self-indulgent on my part given that I basically would ignore the vast majority of her storylines and writing, which I think suck. She was in the Titans stories revolving around Tim’s generation of the team, but she was always stated to be a few years older than the rest, like in her late teens when the majority were probably sixteen, so I think she’s a good fit for this age range. Also had a crappy home life and parents, and her powers are hugely destructive in certain applications…she basically has the same powerset as Captain Atom, though she’s never had any kind of official mentor or sidekick relationship with him. Also, I think Captain Atom is an asshat and a dillhole and he sucks, but I do like his powers, so reinterpreting Amy as a character who doesn’t suck and playing around with her powers instead is solid decision making on my part and renders Captain Atom irrelevant now. I think I shall kill him. Because I can do that. Anyway, I think she doesn’t need him as a mentor but could make a good recruit/protégé for Leonid/Red Star).

11) Carla Moretti/Cinder (Odd choice, given that she’s only ever really been used as a villainous member of Deathstroke’s anti-Titans team and was easily in her twenties at the time. Pyrokinetic who happily makes bonfires out of her enemies but written with zero attempts at nuance, like a total one note villain framed as having long since abandoned her own humanity….which bugged the crap out of me, as she was given a super angsty backstory of childhood sexual abuse and that’s just ‘why she’s like this’ and I have a deep seeded loathing for asshole writers writing survivors as villains and just blaming their casual homicidal ways on their abuse while serving up said villains to just be punching bags or dominoes for the heroes to knock down on their way to the Boss Fight. So I do have inclinations towards making an actual Titan out of her, like with Amy, because surprise surprise, both these characters being written shittily and one note was the work of the same writer, shocking. So I’d just handwave her down to the right age range and have her recruited/mentored by Donna, probably…more due to me thinking Donna would be the best person to help her deal with stuff because she’s mastered the art of avoiding avoidance via having Dick Grayson as a BFF. So with them its not really because Carla needs mentoring with her powers specifically. Idk, Carla anyway you slice it I think has a lot of rage, and Donna knows what to do with that. Written right, Donna’s not a character who judges or shames a victim or survivor for being angry…she gets angry with them, and helps them find options for what to do with that now.) 

12) Hero Cruz (Lesser known Titan, has a device called the Dial H device that lets him turn into a different hero with different powers depending on the setting he puts it on. Basically Ben 10, but Hero came first. Doesn’t really fit most of the parameters, other than being around the right age range, and not even sure who would make a good mentor for him though I wanna say Vic, but not totally decided yet. Mostly I just like him and think he’s underused, so whatever).

There’s also a few other candidates that I have mostly ruled out but not totally. I thought about using the aged up version of Chris Kent, and just introduce him earlier than he showed up in canon. And then Kara/Supergirl could be his mentor because I kinda handwave her into Dick’s generation of Titans anyway, even though it was the alien Matrix version of Linda Danvers that was the only Supergirl ever on the team. Whatever. She should have been a Titan all along anyway. But also Chris would fit the team well as he had an abusive childhood as well, at his dad General Zod’s hands, and again, I just like the character. 

Thought of including Virgil Hawkins/Static too, even though I think he’s closer to Tim’s age range. And again, just another character I’m a fan of and think is underused, but he would definitely be an odd man out in this group because like….he comes from a happy, healthy, loving home and family, and he loves his powers. So he would constantly be just like nodding his head along while his teammates talk and like ugh that sucks, but 10/10 absolutely can not relate, my parents are awesome.  Same with Natasha Irons/Steel, who really would have to be handwaved to even be in the right age range, and again has a happy loving home environment and a superhero uncle of her own so its not like she needs a Titan mentor…..but I kinda wanna see Karen Beecher/Bumblebee take her under her wing anyway, and have them be science nerds together.

Also pretty much the only reason I ruled out Connor Hawke too, as he doesn’t really match the rest of the team in any of the parameters except for feasibly being right at the upper edge of the same age range. But again, I just love the character. 

So I’m probably gonna end up throwing at least one of these other characters in there anyway, lol. I do know myself).

Anyway. So that’s Jason’s lineup of Titans, or at least the candidates as they exist bouncing around in my head now. Also, they’re pretty much Team “Everyone is Gay Except For When They’re Bi.” Which, granted, is basically how I view Dick’s generation of Titans, but with them I have to be like Make It So, in my brain, whereas with this group like….canon’s actually done the work for me for the most part lol. Ray is gay, Todd Rice is gay, Courtney is bi, Hero is gay. And I can’t actually find anything confirmed Tom was stated to be gay somewhere in canon, but I SWEAR he was, like, ugh this is bugging me.

But anyway. That’s that about all of that.

[diguerra-moved]

I wanted to write about Tyrande but I don’t know how to go about it honestly so uh this is a rant more than a headcanon or meta or whatever I’m just trying to make sense of things before blizzard comes and messes up all of my reasoning in 8.3 

way back when darkshore stuff happened, I did this one post defending that while I disagreed with her initial approach being as it was, it was very in character for tyrande to request help and then act on her own when anduin denied it. 

I think she’s right in not wanting to help the alliance too. I think it makes sense with her, as a character, and what was happening to her that she wouldn’t (and I personally agree with her reasoning tbh). My problem with the lack of tyrande content since darkshore isn’t that I think she should work with the horde --- I don’t think she should tbh. I understand that narratively this is why she wasn’t in nazjatar, even though it is absolutely frustrating that characters like tyrande and malfurion, who were directly tied to azshara, never got to face her, or the ruins of their civilization, or the ghosts of people they knew. while on horde side I found it super satisfying to have thalyssra there (precisely because she has that connection to, albeit less directly to azshara herself) on alliance side to have it be shandris instead was... frustrating. I love shandris, and I definitely support that she should be set up as the next leader of the night elves (it is what tyrande would want, too), but she was a child during the war of the ancients, and while she was a victim like most other night elves, she wasn’t as directly involved in the conflict as tyrande and malfurion were. 

that said, the most upsetting thing about it is that while shandris is being an active part of the story, apparently her ties to tyrande and general contact with her, or malfurion, or maiev, were all completely cut off. I could let it go that tyrande was warned about azshara and nazjatar and actively chose not to participate in it because retaking their lands and having justice for teldrassil was more important --- and I could even excuse it precisely using shandris’ presence there, because she has been tyrande’s second-in-command since forever, and tyrande would trust her to deal with something like that without attending to it personally. I don’t think that would be how she’d go about it, honestly, because I think she’d be more likely to turn her attention to azshara and leave someone else dealing with the horde for a moment (someone like maiev, who is there working with her already anyways). she absolutely wouldn’t make any truce with them if she went to nazjatar, and would be very much against it if/when jaina was willing to accept it/suggest it (maybe even be angered by genn’s acceptance too, even though in his case it isn’t something he seeks as actively, and they have closer ties so not as much as she’d be by jaina). 

anyways, I can reason that as ‘she did indeed know about what was going, shandris did let her know, and she entrusted her with dealing with it bc she was too busy killing horde’ asndjfkasdnf it is not ideal but it is okay. I can accept it, and it excuses why she wouldn’t be there, and why shandris would, and it doesn’t imply they apparently are not talking anymore because the plot demands it or blizzard doesn’t know what to do with tyrande before she goes full evil vengeance murder is all she knows now she’ll kill us all

this I plan on expanding on in an actual proper meta/headcanon thing but, I think tyrande not replying to anduin anymore is reply enough in itself, but that she would be aware it also serves to isolate her and her people from the rest of the alliance... and I don’t think she would unless she has decided the nelves won’t be a part of it anymore, or that she has decided to move against anduin’s leadership and isn’t in fact isolating the nelves from the rest, but ignoring the high king and stormwind alone in an attempt to isolate him, eventually. anyways, I don’t think she cut off communication with everyone, and she definitely wouldn’t with shandris. 

I think her problem is with him specifically (and those who might try to speak for him, like jaina), not that she’s so focused on vengeance she set everything aside because this isn’t like her, even in her current state. and rightfully so tbh: yes, stormwind received the refugees, anduin helped her with helping take as many people from teldrassil as they could, but later when she sought him to retake what of their land they had left (and as I mentioned in the previously linked post, I don’t think that was purely vengeance; it makes sense to get darkshore back from the point of view of someone concerned with the survival of her kind --- just like it was one of the sin’dorei’s priorities too, after the fall) he said they didn’t have the resources to help and refused to. even after she did go to darkshore, (already splitting alliance forces, as much of the night elves went with her and they had the aid of genn and the gilneans too), the alliance didn’t try to help in any way, not even by sending a token force.

the high king said they didn’t have the forces to spare to help her people when they are at their most critical, yet he freed an enemy and used his forces to lend the horde aid with a problem they themselves created --- and that’s even without saying killing sylvanas alone (or sylvanas and nathanos, or sylvanas and the forsaken, what you will) is not enough for tyrande. the rest of the horde isn’t excused in her eyes, and it shouldn’t be because while teldrassil was an unspeakable act, they were all very much on board with marching on a virtually undefended darnassus before the world tree burned, in a plan of saurfang’s own making. to tyrande, the horde as a whole is the problem, not sylvanas --- to tyrande, anduin is deluding himself in believing that sylvanas is the problem because he is a child and not fit to lead, and it is easier to point at her alone and think everything will be fine when she’s gone even though it won’t. 

he didn’t aid her when she needed most, but he can turn all of the alliance’s efforts to help the horde? of course she’s not talking to him. of course she won’t answer. of course she won’t be there. you don’t need to have been corrupted by vengeance for this to be acceptable on her part, honestly. 

the entire thing with lor’themar and jaina has a throwback to mists and their learning that it ends when they both walk away ---- but people like tyrande cannot (don’t want to) walk away. her people was slaughtered, their sacred places and forests destroyed or defiled, and not by sylvanas alone. she won’t walk away, and why should she? it’s not fair to those who lost their lives fighting for their land, fighting for survival, that she’ll forget them and forgive their attackers. she won’t. there can be no peace with the horde, never again, not for tyrande --- and if anduin can’t see this, if he can’t understand this, if he chooses to help the enemies who harmed her people so but cannot move a finger to help her and the night elves, who have been loyal to the alliance for a long time, then he’s not worth more to her than the horde tbh.

I don’t think it’s necessarily wrong that tyrande would be walking away from the alliance or unwilling to fight with them --- my issue is with the overall lack of content, with the implied lack of communication between her and other people (like shandris) which doesn’t make sense, and last but not least, with the nelves standing there without her anyways.

shandris has never demonstrated greater openness towards the horde than tyrande herself. excusing it with something like ‘she and some of the sentinels are there because they haven’t fallen to vengeance like tyrande and the black moon army’ would be complete bullshit. that’s without saying that shandris and the rest of the night elves have always been loyal to tyrande as their leader --- and that they never had reason not to be tbh. on top of that, you still have the fact that kaldorei society predominantly worships elune, and that turning their backs to her former high priestess and current literal embodiment of vengeance and anger wouldn’t make sense either, not with it first being developed that she has indeed gone too far. we might have that in 8.3 but as is? shandris and the sentinels should not be working with the horde. blatantly disobeying tyrande doesn’t make sense and tyrande wouldn’t have even sent someone in her stead. there should be no nelf support to the campaign against sylvanas UNLESS it was made explicit that they’re there to see sylvanas dead but they couldn’t care less for the horde and will resume killing them right afterwards

which is like, the most plausible excuse I’ve found for it. if their stance on it was similar to genn’s who state that he was there to have sylvanas killed and doesn’t give a damn who leads the horde or if they tear each other apart, then it makes sense that some of the night elves, the ones who agree with that standing would be there, while others would be with tyrande and maiev and malfurion vengeancing bc even breathing the same air as the horde is too much afnkjands and if that was the reasoning, then I think tyrande would have begrudgingly accepted that they went --- she wouldn’t have told them to go, but having it requested from shandris for example, she might unwillingly say yes. 

anyways thanks for coming to my ted talk everything is a mess and it’s all over the place but I’m trying to make sense of tyrande with all of this

[your-friendly-neighborhood-sc00t]

Star vs. The Forces of Evil: Thoughts on the Series Finale

SvtFoE just concluded a few days ago, and to be perfectly honest, Im incredibly conflicted.

I've been putting this off for a little while now, since I've needed to time to gather all my thoughts and criticisms of everything that happened in the finale.

Firstly, I don't think they needed a full hour or so to properly wrap things up, like other people have stated.

Instead, more time should have been devoted to the plot and Star in general.

The very strange thing is, despite how much of a threat Mina is, and clearly was in the past few episodes, the writers decided to severely downplay her in favor of revolving mostly around Star and Marco's relationship.

I'm sorry, but in a show as engaging as SvtFoE, romance shouldn't really be the priority in the FINALE, the SERIES finale mind you.

Alot of time gets wasted on the two obsessing over being with each other and it's honestly sickening.

Like, I never cared for Starco, but I really feel like they shouldn't have wasted time with Marco/Jackie Tom/Star, if these two were obviously gonna be endgame.

Had they gotten together waaaay earlier, as they should've, let's say, Season 2, I probably would've felt more about them supposedly being forcibly separated after just getting together.

Another thing that really bothered me was that Star literally just broke up with Tom a few episodes ago, so basically, the relationship was entirely one-sided, and Star was forcing herself to cry during the breakup, and forcing herself to simply be in the relationship with Tom, since she was absolutely, head-over-heels for Marco at that point.

Just feels so rushed and forced, but whatever.

Something that really urked me, was the fact that there was no final battle between Star and Mina, y'know, one last confrontation between Star and the primary antagonist of the season.

No, she just, convienetly is out of the picture thanks to one of the stupid corrupted milhorses, and that's it. She can't even postpone the destruction of Magic or anything.

In my opinion, two, actually cool situations could have played out here.

So, y'know being in the Realm of Magic and all, this should've powered up Mina even further, and Star as well, they're surrounded by pure Magic, so, why shouldn't it empower them?

And then there's some epic final battle between them, maybe Moon and Eclipsa fight alongside Star, Hell, maybe even Tom and Marco get in on the action, and maybe Mina's so powerful here, that they just barely stop her, and while she's temporarily incapacitated, bam, they destroy magic, y'know? Something cool like that.

The other scenario that could play out, is the one that would've been FIRE.

So, the show established a Multiverse exists within the show's universe.

This is seen in Mathmagic, where we get a glimpse of various versions of Star in different universes and timelines.

Now, IMAGINE, if in the Realm of Magic when Mina shows up, Star tries to fight her, but she's too strong or whatever, so she opens up several portals to enlist the help of herselves to help her battle Mina, that would've been so cool, and would have killed two birds with one stone.

1. A proper final confrontation that is epic and different from all the other battles in the show.

2. The show has it's first and only "Multiverse Episode"

Just feels like a missed opportunity to me.

But what do we get?

Oh boy! More Starco drama!

Well, not before they successfully destroy Magic.

I did think it was really nice to see Solaria's spirit, or whatever it was, finally accept Meteora, she just kind of touches her cheek and smiles, it's a pretty sweet moment.

And Glossaryck's last (actual) line is kind of sad to be honest.

Something that really freaking bothered me was the fact that both Star and Marco chose each other over their friends, FAMILY, and HOMES.

Sorry, but I'm just not buying into this whole

"uwu we belong together forever uwu" crap

Like, they should've been together ALOT longer than a few episodes if dialogue like that was to be warranted and for non-Starco viewers to even care about them being separated.

Wait, there was one thing I forgot to mention that happens during this RoM part.

Marco literally is impaled around his stomach by Tom's corrupted Milhorse, and the crazy thing is, he just WALKS it off.

Like, I understand that after Magic is destroyed, the wound disappears, since that's obviously a magical wound, but, he walked around for a good long while BEFORE Star successfully destroyed Magic, so... He just, walks it off???

There's no logical reason for Marco to be able to endure a wound like this, he's fifteen, he's a CHILD for crying out loud.

So, that was shown in the trailer specifically to clickbait everyone, but there's actual pay-off at all.

Marco is able to literally flip one of these horses by the freaking horn, AFTER HE IS WOUNDED.

I feel like, obviously Marco shouldn't just fall over and die after being impaled, but I feel like he should've had to lean on Tom for the rest of the time here, like, there's no plausible explanation as to why he is able to walk this off like nothing happened.

But that isn't the only thing that has no logical explanation.

I know I'm covering most of the negatives so far, but just so you know, I actually was digging this episode for the most part, up until the last two minutes.

Moon and Eclipsa helping Star destroy the Magic was nice and dandy, and finally seeing Eclipsa's and even Meteora's Butterfly forms was pretty sweet.

Finally discovering why Glossaryck loves pudding was actually kinda funny, and served for the plot.

I've hated Ponyhead for a really long time, but she actually made me smile for the first time when she was comforting Star, telling all these stories to assure her, her friends were all well.

And Janna had a similar moment with Marco, where the two, for what seems like the first time, genuinely acknowledge eachother as friends, which was actually really nice.

But then, something has to happen to ruin EVERYTHING.

For a literally entirely unexplained reason, a portal opens between Mewni and Earth, then it explodes, and then Mewni and Earth have merged...?

Oh HEY, Star and Marco can be together at last!

Oh wait, none of this makes any fucking sense.

Is this show honestly trying to tell me, that a MAGICAL PORTAL opened up, despite the fact that Magic was literally destroyed five minutes ago???

There's no logical, rationale, reasonable REASON for this to have happened.

It's all just deus ex machina bullshit Daron came up with just so Star and Marco could be together, great.

Aside from that, there's some very concerning implications as a result of Star's actions that doesn't seem to be acknowledged at all by the characters.

The first thing being, the destruction of Magic means that all magically-based entities will be wiped from existence.

Meaning that entire species have just been wiped off the face of the Multiverse.

Meaning that Star has committed mass-genocide on a Multiversal scale.

And yet no one in the show seems to acknowledge that.

What they should have done, in my opinion, was simply depower all magically-based entities, leaving them to learn how to live without utilizing Magic on a day-to-day basis, that would have been interesting, and far-less scary.

The only one who would justifiably be gone is Glossaryck, who clearly has strong ties to Magic.

I'm surprised a show that is marketed towards children includes a protagonist who commits mass-genocide, and still gets smoochies from her boyfriend.

Woooow.

Another thing is, the Cleaving of Earth and Mewni, isn't exactly beneficial to ANYONE except Star and Marco.

Are humans, mewmans, and monsters, etc going to be able to live together in harmony?

I mean, I highly doubt everything is gonna be all peaches and cream, especially at first.

This probably is going to result in a whole slew of problems, but remember, it was worth it, so Star and Marco could be uwu'ing.

Props to a friend of mine for bringing this to my attention, but Star destroying Magic should've technically erased Meteora as well.

Think about it, Meteora was pretty much reborn through Magic, which would probably make her fall under that magically-based area.

Same thing with Star to be perfectly honest, her original body was destroyed during The Battle for Mewni, and her new body was entirely reconstructed from Magic, meaning that she should've been erased as well.

Which would have made for a hell of an interesting conflict in the finale, but oh well.

Seems like the rules are being ignored if you ask me.

The show unfortunately follows in the footsteps of the Legend of Korra, in which it's final shot and lines are dedicated to shipping, and not the series as a whole.

Which is incredibly disappointing, but oh well.

And then Mina, man oh man...

So Mina is depowered, and Moon offers to rehabilitate her, truly pitying her, and apologizing for using her, (although technically Mina was using her but, whatever)

And instead of Mina finally regaining a bit of her sanity, instead of finally showing some kind of development, instead of finally ending her conquest against monsters, instead of accepting that offer.

Mina just, basically says her racist ideas will always linger in the minds of others, and she walks off into the woods.

Her dialogue and the way she does this is just an absolute joke, like, the writers just downplay her at every possible moment.

The dialogue is clearly supposed to be funny, despite how mentally fractured this woman is, and it just feels disrespectful to the character in general.

Do you want her to be a psychotic, deranged soldier, stuck in her ways, who knows nothing but war and bigotry?

Or do you want her to be a clown, which is it, Daron?

I can't really say I'm satisfied with this ending.

There's too scary and/or concerning implications, unsatisfying resolutions, and questions for this to be a truly good finale.

I think more time should've been dedicated Mina, considering she's the main antagonist of the season, and it's the series finale, and the merging of Mewni and Earth should have never have been a thing.

Star and Marco should've went on with their lives.

The last we see of Marco should have been him going back to school.

And the last we see of Star should have been her giving a speech to the people of Mewni.

I don't know, I was just hoping for alot more, but the end result was just kind of rushed and unfulfilling.

However, when all is set and done,

Star vs. The Forces of Evil was a hell of a four-year ride, I had a blast watching it for all it's 4 seasons, and I'm really gonna miss it.