Danny has been doing the hero thing for a while now. He’s had a big reveal; everyone has accepted him (including his parents), the GIW disbanded, the Anti-Ecto acts repealed, and generally, everything is going great. Some of the A-Listers are even training as junior ghost hunters to help give him a break from his rogues! (Being Ghost King makes things hectic sometimes, and he just needs the extra help. Sue him!)
The point is, literally nothing is wrong with Danny Phantom’s afterlife.
And then Valerie Gray, the Red Huntress, disappears in front of his eyes.
Danny is baffled! She’s just…gone! Valerie just popped out of existence, like she was never there. But no matter how hard he searches in the Ghost Zone, he can’t find her soul anywhere. His core isn't broken in grief. So she’s not dead. Which is good. So then, where is she?
Some of the others come forward with ideas on how to find her. A few ghosts volunteer to go out into the mortal realm, an area Danny had declared off-limits, to see if she was out there. Danny approves it. He rounds up some of the friendlier (i.e., discreet) ghosts and Amity Parkers and demolishes the outside travel ban.
So everyone spreads out, looking for their dear frenemy and teammate. But it becomes apparent very quickly that something is wrong with the rest of the world.
There are no more heroes.
Every single living superhero on the face of the Earth has just…vanished. Villains are running amok; the countries are in chaos! Some aliens are invading Earth, mythical deities are trying to take over, and society is crumbling to the ground. Everything is on the brink of collapse.
Well, Danny was still there. And so were his people. They were pretty spread out, so could they just…take up the mantles? He also knew where to find the souls of dead heroes in the Zone; surely they wouldn't mind coming out of retirement for a little bit, especially if they couldn't die again. Oh! And that skeleton army leftover from Pariah Dark's reign might be useful in repelling those invading forces.
Honestly, there were more than enough hands to go around! And with the heroes gone, Danny didn't mind letting everyone out for a little break, as long as they followed his rules. They wouldn't stop the search for the other heroes, but hopefully, when they found them, the heroes wouldn't mind Danny's intervention too much. :)
In other words:
Someone fucks up, and all of Earth's living heroes are either wished out of existence or are whisked away to some far-off realm where Danny hasn't checked yet. In the attempt to figure out what's going on, Danny lets the dead run amok over the Earth as they search for clues. The skeleton army repels the invading armies, the souls of dead heroes deal with the world leaders, and his rogues and other Amity Parkers set up shop in place of famous heroes, trying to get the cities under control again.
Basically, they just do their best to keep everything from imploding until the Justice League and others are back.
(And why is it that Danny hasn't disappeared? Well, whatever caused everyone to go poof! only affected living heroes. Anyone heroes that were dead in the first place, or even just half-dead, stayed behind.)
okay unironically I love so much that porter is like this world SUCKS its BAD here and it HURTS you why do you care abt it!!! and literally every single bad kid is like ngl we just hate ur ass it does not matter what ur philosophy is
Scum Villain fic where Shen Yuan wakes up out of a coma and realizes that he just had a very, very vibrant dream about his boy and that web novel he hatereads.
When he gets back home after observation it's so... surreal. He feels so much older now. He's practically lived a lifetime in that dream, even if only a few months have passed.
His room is so... cringe is the word he wants to use, but he can't help but find his past self endearing about it all. Except that line of thought makes... no sense at all. His past self is just him from a couple months ago.
He decides to check up on the story he'd been dreaming about and finds out that, though there were a dozen more chapters, they had stopped updating completely without warning just a few weeks after his own coma.
(The comments after his coma, a few mention him, calling him out or cheering for him finally giving up on the story. Some people even speculate he might have died.)
His old comments were so embarrassing to read, but there's a part of him that... sees his love for Luo Binghe even in these.
Wait, why is he suddenly okay being gay for this protag??
He thinks he probably shouldn't be quite so chill about it.
He wonders what happened to Airplane. He stops himself from thinking too hard on the possibility it could all have been real. That was ridiculous!!
Meanwhile in the world of the system....
Luo Binghe is flipping OUT. His husband his shizun his beloved just up and went POOF. No trace of him, no clue left behind.
(Or is it worse if he dies? The original goods died that night he qi deviated and was replaced by Shen Yuan, so there's no soul there to replace him. Luo Binghe has had to deal with dead Shizun before but this time it's... different.)
Either way, after a whole lot of everyone flipping out, Shang Qinghua seems to know a little too much about... something.
The truth comes out. Luo Binghe admits he's suspected something like that for a while now, but thats not important. He needs his shizun back, so how..?
🎵 did you learn to dream in the morning?
abandon dreams in the afternoon?
wait without a hope in the evening?
did you stand there in the traces and let them feed you lies?
did you trail along behind them wearing blinkers on your eyes?
did you kiss the foot that kicked you? did you thank them for their scorn?
did you ask for their forgiveness for the act of being born? 🎵
Gotta say people that throw a fit every time someone mentions the possibility of seeing some solavellan in datv are quickly becoming my least favorite people in a fandom filled with unpleasant people. Yes Solas is one of the main characters in datv, there should be more mentions of the romance thanks to that, maybe a 20 minutes romance will become a 25 minutes one should we call the police or can you shut the fuck up
can't stop thinking about how o'dog said mitch was auston's superpower and whipped out the technical fact that mitch is a right handed shot, which just makes it extra easy for him to pass right into auston's wheelhouse when he has the puck.... their play styles and strengths complement each others... it's so clear when both of them are out there they're always looking for each other and making themselves open for each other, and it's so funny to me that people have tried to say that they don't work well together longterm bc they're predictable and the league will catch on... meanwhile they're pulling off the same sorts of goals they were the second they were allowed to play together back in 19-20....... just.............. it never gets old.
more characters who are technically from T$$ (lore under the cut)
So Lis/Lisbet (more commonly known as "Lu", her codename) was one of Vic's first victims when he started working on his own. At the time, Lu was a secretary at a law firm. Unbeknownst to her, her bosses owed money to a local mob boss, and Vic was hired to "apply pressure". By pure coincidence, Lu was the unlucky target. Her torture was recorded and sent to the firm, and it was roughly three weeks before the money was coughed up and she was released.
Her captivity resulted in the loss of her right hand and most of her left leg, and a pregnancy. With Lu not being in a healthy emotional or mental place, the baby was raised by Lu's sister and her husband. Meanwhile, Lu decided she was sick of feeling like a victim and began devoting her time to training, getting physically stronger, and hunting down Victor Shepard.
While her family was very supportive for the first few years of her recovery, most of them were horrified by her desire for revenge. Despite being raised in a close-knit Catholic family and being religious herself, Lu quickly became disgusted at her family's urging to forgive Vic and move on. The only relative who didn't shy away was her cousin Adrien (also known by his codename, "Uriel")
The two were close as children, and Adrien wanted revenge for Lu as much as she did. He not only listened to Lu's violent fantasies, but encouraged them, offering ideas of his own. As a former Marine, he had training to back him up, and helped Lu on her own journey, swiftly becoming her second in command and the most trusted person in her life.
Through the years, Lu tried to maintain routine visitation with her child, but the visits always felt strained, and gradually her goal took over and she came over less and less.
Years later, Lu's son (then going by Leo) sought her out. His aunt had warned him that Lu was going down a dark path, but he was desperate to form some kind of connection with her. He knew the basics of what had happened to his mother, but at her own request, he'd always been told that his father had passed away before his birth. Lu welcomed him aboard, finding it easier to foster a connection when he could be viewed as a soldier and not her son. When he came of age, she welcomed him into her group officially, granting him the codename Gabriel.
Though Vic is her target, Lu and her angels also chase after people like him, capturing and killing them in the name of avenging those who have been lost or had their lives destroyed.
In canon, Lu briefly captures Vic, but he escapes before she can do any real damage. However, in this AU, she manages to contain him, and gets the revenge she's sought for so long.
I wanna know ur Fontaine msq criticisms 👁️👁️👂I’m all ears
I'm not sure if you wanted me to talk about this secretly or publicly but! Here I go!
The TLDR: Fontaine MSQ aestheticised prison, poverty, child abuse, the justice system/court and didn't properly address any of it.
More:
Focalors/Furina has way too much of a sympathetic angle for a dictator who's lets people drown with her inaction.
Neuvillette feels Bad for sentencing some people to death/prison, but that's it. He's one of the most powerful people in Fontaine. If he felt like there are systemic injustices, I.E sending an abused Child to prison, he should be the first person to DO something about it, not just cry and be sad so the audience can be like aw, that's complex character writing isn't it? No it's not! And guilt doesn't absolve you!!!!!!! (These are stuff we deal with in OTCOJ read my fic now /j)
Meropide has children in it, both Sentenced there (Wriothesley) and BORN THERE (Lanoire), and this is just a quirk of the place. Not only that, Meropide accepts prisoners of all genders and crimes. There are abusers and abuse victims in one place. Do you know how bad that is? How much potential for crimes to happen in a place like that— oh wait, Meropide isn't under Fontaine's jurisdiction. If you are assaulted as an inmate it literally means nothing to the court.
Wriothesley had no qualifications when he took over. Depending on how long he lived on the streets, how old he was when he killed his parents, how old he was when he was first taken in by the orphanage, etc, the man might never have more than 4–5 years of formal education. Sigewinne probably had to teach him how to write reports. And do Meropide's spreadsheets. Edit because I forgot to elaborate on this one: This isn't a point brought up anywhere, which is bad, because when poverty and incarceration robs you of a proper education (and the rights to vote in many places too, too, by the way), it reduces your prospects for jobs, reduces many people's ability to get a home etc etc. Wriothesley was just, narratively, Given his position.
Meropide is an industrialized prison, and they portray this as a good thing. Prisoners are paid in coupons for their labour, and this is also portrayed as a good thing.
The One-Meal-A-Day reform was something Paimon gushed about being so great of a perk, that people might want to go to jail for food (could be interesting and reflective of systemic poverty if MHY had brains, but they don't, so I was just Pissed because essentially all Paimon wanted to say was "Prison isn't so bad, but still don't go to prison guys! Prison labour is really hard!"). By the way, in most real-world prisons they are obligated to feed you three meals a day. Because that's how much food a human needs. MHY went with one meal just so they can say "if you want to eat more, you have to work." And then the welfare meal is a goddamn gacha. So imagine you're a starving child who's too weak to work in the fucking robot assembly line, and you wander up for your first meal in 24 hours, only to luck in with a shit one. I'd kill myself.
They wrote Wriothesley, who's a victim of the system, into a guy who's say shit like "I'm the Duke I can do whatever I want" for a cool moment where he choke-slams an inmate (I know he was a bad guy. But also, in copaganda when cops are violent/disregarding protocols, they are always only portrayed to do that against bad guys, so what does our critical thinking tells us about this one?) They wrote Wriothesley, who was an inmate of a prison so bad, so notorious that it is the literal boogeyman of Fontaine, that has a legal (???) fighting pit, with an administrator who abuses his position to be unreasonable, to willingly stay in the place and become an Administrator who would choke-slam an inmate while saying a cool line about how he has the power to do whatever he wants. They wrote him, the guy who had to be fed on the streets by melusines, to think one-meal-a-day was a good enough reform (while he spends god-knows how much on his boat). This wasn't a victim-turns-into-abuser narrative either, they want all this to be seen as positive character growth.
And then, the final kicker is, they gloss over his entire abuse. You can only read about these shit in his profile, which most people don't because they don't Have Him or doesn't care to unlock it/read it online, and they jammed his entire backstory into a flaccid info-dump at the end of his character story quest. This man isn't Allowed to feel abused and neglected and show any reaction to it within the narrative of Fontaine itself, because if they actually Gave Weight to what happened to him, they'd have to confront THE FUCKING JUSTICE SYSTEM they had NO PLANS on criticising. I don't think they ever explicitly said the fucking Crime-Theatre nonsense was Bad either.
I could go on, but this is already so long. But yeah, I hope this gave you an idea.
Remember how I was like "Yeah I'm 41 and I've never done jury duty"? Well I got a summons today. And it's ON MY GODDAMN BIRTHDAY. LIKE HELLO.
It's also Rosh Hashanah though so I'm gonna see if I can get out for religious reasons. Because I do not want to start out the new year/spend my birthday doing fucking jury duty, that's absolute bullshit.
very weird to frame your abuse apologia as being aware that the writers intended to illustrate a mutually harmful dynamic and not an abusive one. when the writers in question also wrote the line 'once you put it out there, they [the audience] decide what it is' because nothing you ever create has any innate definition. when the writers in question decided to racebend major characters and then showcase them being harmed by white or nonblack characters in a repeatedly racialized pattern when they Did Not Have To Do That and then genuinely or disingenuously decide to dialogue about their directly or indirectly illustrated racialized dynamic of intimate partner violence within and outside the narrative. like to be quite honest it does not matter what they intended because this is what they made and this is how it Looks to a notably large amount of people. who just happen to be interpreting it wrong? according to what metric? the very metric they say Doesn't Work in their own fictional creation? ok