#every response i see to an ace person relating to a character is someone going

[ezra-fell-and-co]

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[blues824]

Hellooo I SERIOUSLY LOVE your work!!! and saw that your request were open and I wanna rq twisted wonderland boys (of your choice!) to a teruhashi!reader from saiki k ty!

Aw, thanks! Y’all making me blush. Here, reader is described as ‘beautiful’.

I chose the characters that somewhat resemble Saiki. None of them are quite like him, but I tried :/ Also, I just threw in Idia and Vil.

Trey Clover

He had to admit that you were rather beautiful. However, he’s not stupid. He knows your kindness is a pure facade. How does he know? Well, the few times where you lose your temper and try to act normal right after.

He’s not used to being sought after, but he is very flattered. He always thought that he was too plain, but apparently not if someone as beautiful as you is so down bad for a baker like himself. 

After a while in Twisted Wonderland, you finally let yourself go. Trey was very glad to hear that you weren’t putting up any charade anymore. You weren’t a part of the spotlight, so you felt no need to act anymore. And it turned out for the better, you told yourself, as Trey wrapped his arms around your torso from behind while you were kneading the dough for a batch of cookies you both were making.

Deuce Spade

He is a full-blown simp for you. You were beautiful and kind to everyone around you, and it’s not something he’s used to at NRC. Sure, you had your moments of anger, but that was to be expected. Especially since you hung around Ace and himself.

When he learns that you liked him back, he is over the moon. He becomes your new protector as well as your lover. He follows you around like a puppy in love, and you can’t help but coo at him a lot.

Deuce is glad to see that you are finally letting loose. Everyone had their quirks, and he helped you in your journey to embrace them. As you’re helping him with his homework, you can’t help but be grateful for someone as great as him to waltz into your life and sweep you off your feet.

Jack Howl

Physical appearances don’t stick out to Jack. So what did stick out to him was how you always desired to help everyone around you. But he’s not stupid either. He knew that it was a facade. I mean, who would want to be so kind towards someone like Ace? IT’S NOT LIKE HE’S JEALOUS OR ANYTHING-

You always show up to his practices and it encourages him to work even harder. You act as his personal cheerleader, and after every practice you give him a hug and he melts like ice cream in July. 

When you finally start letting your actual personality out, Jack is proud of you. Your scent is less distressed. He’s glad he can see this side of you. You can’t help but giggle whenever you think about how Jack became your cheerleader during this time.

Jade Leech

Are you sure you weren’t a mermaid? Your beauty is something akin to beautiful golden treasure that one would find in a shipwreck, if he’s being honest. His compliments always leave you so flustered.

When you start pursuing him, he waits for you with open arms. He knows that your kindness comes from something dark, but his does as well. It just means that you both relate to each other on much deeper levels.

He does feel delighted when you let your true personality shine. It tells him that you trust him enough to let loose around him. He is glad to have the opportunity to stick by your side as you’re getting used to not putting on a mask to hide your true self. For example, he stares at you with hearts in his eyes as you go on an angry rant about how Ace got you in trouble once again.

Jamil Viper

He’s so jealous of Kalim. The three of you were great friends, but since Jamil had a lot of responsibilities to take care of, he was left with only a little bit of time with you. Of course, he kept it to himself.

When he hears that you like him back, he is shocked. Didn’t you like Kalim? He just stands there with his eyes wide. Did that mean he got to call you his own? He would be the one to hold you in his arms? It sounded too good to be true.

He makes more time for you now. He sees you growing comfortable around everyone and he can’t help but be proud of you. He could tell that it was a huge weight off of your shoulders. But now it was your turn to help him relax because we all know this guy can’t catch a break.

Vil Schoenheit

You both are a very beautiful couple, able to outshine any who stand in your way. Surprisingly, you didn’t try to compete against each other. Instead, you both had one common enemy: Neige Leblanche.

Obviously, in your unspoken war, you had grown close and eventually grew to love each other. Neither of you could ignore the butterflies you felt in your stomachs as you looked into each other’s eyes as you were posing for a magazine. 

He actually follows your example when you start letting your personality hang loose. Instead of acting happy and graceful, you can truly feel these emotions along with all the others. You saw each other through the good, bad, and the ugly, and you love each other more because of it.

Idia Shroud

You reminded him of that character from the anime ‘I have psychic powers but I just want to live my life!’ That aside, he thinks you look absolutely breathtaking. He always gets so flustered around you, and he often has trouble talking to you in-person.

When Ortho tells him that you like him back, he flat-out doesn’t believe it. He would need a handwritten note and video footage to prove it, and when he gets it he blushes so hard while shrieking. He has never run so fast towards someone, and that someone was you.

He actually lets his personality shine, but he’s just shy. It became his ‘online persona’. So when he sees your actual self, he can’t help but relate to it. He’s proud of you, and sees you as an inspiration. Ortho thanks you because it’s been a long time since he’s seen this side of Idia.

Sebek Zigvolt

You stole his attention by defeating the overblots single handedly. Maybe you weren’t a stupid human if you were able to defeat magic users without magic. You have earned his respect, but he won’t reprimand you if you even come close to Malleus.

Now, he never said that you weren’t beautiful. When he first saw you, he finally understood why his mother chose a human rather than a fae. You moved with such grace and you were so kind that he couldn’t help but fall for you.

When your true personality begins to show, he’s shocked. He is one of the ones who weren’t able to tell that you were faking it until you made it. However, he doesn’t mind it… as long as you’re not disrespectful towards Waka-sama.

[neondiamond]

2023 Writing Self Evaluation ✨

Thank you to @disgruntledkittenface for tagging me! 💕

1. List of works published this year:

I’m just going to link the masterpost I made a few days ago because I published 26 works this year and I don’t feel like listing them all again here lol

2. Work you are most proud of (and why):

Inner Crisis, for sure. I had written fics with ace characters before, but this one just took it to the next level for me in terms of how personal and vulnerable it is, and I’m very proud of the way it turned out, and of myself for putting it out there. 🥰

3. Work you are least proud of (and why):

I’m going to take the easy way out here and say none. I can honestly say I’m proud of every single fic I have put out into the world this year. <3

4. A favorite excerpt of your writing:

I always find this question hard, but the one that comes to mind first is this bit from You’re Family:

“Anyone want tea?” Anne asks.

Louis lets the others answer first as he allows his eyes to scan the room around him.

A tall tree is tucked away in one corner of the room, decorated beautifully with a mixture of whites, reds and golds, along with a few handmade decorations sprinkled throughout, most likely some of Gemma’s and Harry’s creations from back when they were kids. 

Underneath it, a dozen or so meticulously wrapped gifts await the moment they’ll be unwrapped.

To his left, an imposing fireplace anchors the room, the fire lit within bathing the room in warmth along with a soft amber glow. 

Five traditional red and white stockings are hung along the mantle, and Louis smiles as he reads the names embroidered on each of them, fondly thinking of a time his Mum used to do this for him and his multiple siblings too.

Anne. Gemma. Michal. Harry. Louis.

Wait. 

Louis?

That’s him.

“Louis?” Anne asks, and Louis whips his head around to look at her in disbelief. “How do you take your tea, darling?”

“You got me a stocking?” Louis asks instead of answering her question.

Anne smiles softly at him. “Of course, you’re family.”

Louis tries really hard not to tear up. He mostly succeeds, save for maybe a tear or two he fails to conceal.

Beside him, Harry squeezes his knee and pulls him closer.

“So, your tea?” Anne asks again with a knowing smile.

“Oh, hm,” Louis clears his throat. “Just a splash of milk, please.”

“You got it, darling,” she says before disappearing in the direction of the kitchen.

Louis finds his gaze going back to the stockings again, still shocked to find his name on the last one.

“See,” Harry whispers in his ear. “I told you they’d love you.”

5. Share or describe a favorite review you received:

I don’t think I can pick only one, but I have to say the response to Inner Crisis as a whole. The number of comments and messages I’ve received from people telling me they relate to Louis’ story has just blown my mind and each one of them has made me cry

6. A time when writing was really, really hard:

I’ve found it quite difficult to find time to write this whole year, to be honest. 2023 turned out to be pretty busy for me personally, and it’s resulted in many periods of not writing at all, and then I always find it hard to get back into it.

7. A scene or character you wrote that surprised you:

All of I See You. This is the second year in a row that I wrote horror for the 1D Trick or Treat fest, and I am still baffled that I, someone who usually writes mostly fluff, am somehow able to do that lol.

8. How did you grow as a writer this year:

Most of what I wrote has been very self indulgent. I had so little time to write that when I did, I just wrote what I wanted to write, rather than what I thought other people would enjoy, which is quite freeing actually.

9. How do you hope to grow next year:

I’d like to step out of my comfort zone a little and attempt working on a longer fic.

10. Who was your greatest positive influence this year as a writer (could be another writer or beta or cheerleader or muse etc etc):

Anyone that has left a comment on any of my fics this year. Here are a few people in particular whose support has really made a difference over the past year ❤️: @disgruntledkittenface @bigxrig @parmahamlarrie

11. Anything from your real life show up in your writing this year:

A lot of Inner Crisis is inspired by my own experiences with asexuality.

Oh and A Special Bond literally has links to pictures I took while travelling for visuals!

12. Any new wisdom you can share with other writers:

I’m pretty sure this is what I say every year, so not new wisdom, but, just write what YOU want to write. Have fun with it, and the rest will work itself out!

13. Any projects you’re looking forward to starting (or finishing) in the new year:

I haven’t written in over a month at this point, so I don’t have any active WIPs that I’m bringing into 2024, but there are definitely a lot of ideas I’m excited to get to explore next year, including a fake relationship fic idea I meant to write this year but ran out of time to.

14. Tag three writers whose answers you’d like to read. ;)

@cyantific @so-why-let-your-voice-be-tamed @hellolovers13

[remyfire]

i haven't watched enough to get to Charles yet but i think from ur screenshots he's a very devious person isnt he ( also i saw tags about him being ace on AO3 and i absolutely love that for him and i want him to be both kinky and ace because same, i think he'd rly b into power play maybe but i am asking bc i trust ur input)

OH MY GOD. Charles my beloved. I'm so excited for you to get to him. He hits so fucking brutally in the beginning and the way he evolves is just. Chefs kiss. Augh. He can be devious because he's a clever little bastard who thinks he knows better than everyone on the planet, and I adore when I get to see him be an ass.

As a kinky sex-neutral ace myself, I'll be honest, I love letting him be a kinky ace. Obviously I cheer loudly everyone who chooses for him to be sex-averse, very severe in the boundaries of what he allows sexually, or not actually ace at all, but! I think letting him have the experience of kink is fascinating just as a character development and relational device for a man who is so so so the way he is.

I love making him so fascinated by edging. I love letting him be powerfully unswayed by his partner's begging. To him, I think sex is a science, and he is an exquisite doctor, and he is absolutely fascinated by the bodily responses, the emotional highs and lows, and exactly how out of their mind his partner could be driven until they're someone he scarcely might even recognize at all.

And honestly, you hit the nail on the head for me. I LOVE giving him a power play kink. I love letting him be in control, because that's where he's most comfortable in every area in his life, and I love taking it away from him and overwhelming him with vulnerability with a very trusted individual. I could go on for hours. I am going to rein myself in now. Bless you for setting me off, and I hope you have so so much fun when you meet him!!

[thewhitefluffyhat]

Thoughts on Harrow the Ninth

Similar to my post on Gideon the Ninth, this is a questionably organized collection of impressions, opinions, and a recounting of my experience in reading this book!

Note: This post also includes marked sections where I compare certain Harrow the Ninth plot elements with first the When They Cry series and then Madoka Magica: Rebellion, because that’s just the way my brain works. Those sections do contain spoilers for the other stories, so feel free to skip or read them accordingly!

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After finishing GtN, a few months passed. For various reasons, I found I had to go on a long family roadtrip and needed something to do in the car… and I thought “hm. why not.” and bought HtN.

(So yes, there was Poster Child For A Liberal City Girl aka Me casually wandering around some deep red rural parts of the country with “the necromancers are back, and they’re gayer than ever” emblazoned on the book I refused to put down. Probably made for an amusing picture!)

Anyway, it was a good thing I wasn’t called on to help drive during that trip, because I started the book in the morning and was only barely able to put it down for meals and checking into the hotel. Oh, we had to get up early to drive the next day? I didn’t care, I just waited for everyone else in the room to fall asleep and then stayed up until 2am curled up on the tiny bathroom counter to finish it.

Like a Smart Person, I’d also neglected to take my copy of Gideon the Ninth with me on the trip, and I didn’t have internet access either. And as mentioned, I’d marathoned GtN over the course of a single night several months prior. In other words: my memory of the events in that book was extremely unreliable, which, I have to say, only enhanced the surreal atmosphere of HtN. I was just as confused and uncertain as Harrow, and it was delightful.

And after finishing, I continued my tradition and proceeded to gush incoherently about it to my younger brother the next sleep-deprived morning. (I do wonder what his secondhand impression of these books is, haha.)

Luckily I had brought other books with me to read; I don’t know how I would have staved off my cravings to dive into fandom analysis otherwise. But first things first: my thoughts on the book!

I Swear This Book Was Made To Appeal Directly To Me??

-Yeah, so remember that “I’m a sex-averse-ish ace” thing I mentioned in the previous post? And how I really wanted Less Swords More Bones Please And Thank You? Needless to say, Harrow won me over as a protagonist instantaneously. And that’s without getting into a whole bunch of other really weird, really specific things about her/HtN that were precisely my thing.

-For example, I am neither neurodivergent nor mentally ill (afaik), but I still related so hard to Harrow’s food sensitivities, her touch-shyness, her obsessions, her completely broken sleep schedule… I mean, oh gosh, the thing with John’s tea and biscuits? I have never before read something that so perfectly captures the feeling of someone giving you food and you would like to eat it to please them but you just. Cannot. And the sheer uncomfortableness and background radiation of polite disappointment that entails. Especially when they keep trying! Gah!

-Another random, tiny moment that stood out to me: Gideon’s response to waking up in Harrow’s body. See, even relatively tame and mainstream anime (Shinkai’s “Your Name” springs to mind) still feel the need to kick off their body switching plots by having one character immediately and nonconsensually grope their love interest’s body when the switch happens.

But instead of doing that, Gideon keeps apologizing, desperately trying to protect Harrow’s body, and even declaring she’ll take showers fully clothed. Is it over-the-top and did I laugh? Absolutely. But the point is also that she’s determined to be considerate of Harrow’s privacy, even to an absurd degree. It’s a strong way to show that Gideon genuinely cares about Harrow, serving as a welcome contrast after an entire book of every other character ignoring and often actively trying to erode Harrow’s boundaries.

-Last but the opposite of least: I actually really love Second Person POV! If anything, that’s often the most natural POV for me to write fanfic in, for whatever reason. But it’s specifically second person where the “you” is a defined, in-universe character. Second person where “you” is meant to be You The Reader, You The Self-Insert makes me instinctively roll my eyes. (A bias that is definitely not related to my thoughts on Frisk vs Chara vs The Player in Undertale, what are you talking about, ahaha.)

So reading a whole book in that POV? YASSSS. And then the reveal of Gideon as the first person narrator on top of it? Incredible. Genius. Honestly I would recommend this book just for the utter brilliance of that twist.

I’m admitting my own ignorance here, but this is definitely the first long-form genre work I’ve read in First Person Direct Address POV. Heck, this is the first time I’ve ever run across that term! *narrows eyes at my creative writing teachers* And oooh boy I am dying to give it a spin myself in fanfic, it’s so good.

Harrow the “Unreliable” Narrator

Backing up a bit, though, I think I can pinpoint the exact scene when I knew I would love this book: the conversation between Harrow and Ortus, with the wham line of “You see, I am insane.”

Because my first thought on reading that was: oh hell yes this is going to be a RIDE

Quickly followed by the second thought: hang on, was this… was this true for Harrow during GtN as well? She was potentially dealing with hallucinations and unreality this whole time and we (Gideon, the audience) had no idea? oh, Harrow… TT_TT

And indeed, the rest of the book lived up to the dual promises of that moment - of the free-fall into the depths of horror and paranoia that comes with a narrator who’s not just unreliable, but knows they can’t even trust themselves. And of Harrow being a wonderfully compelling protagonist, equal parts heartbreaking meow meow balanced out by raw, unrelenting determination.

Then there was the final payoff to all the narrative shenanigans: the dawning reveal that actually, Harrow was right all along. And oh, I loved it when I read it and I still love the concept now! The idea of presenting the reader with the hoary old trope of an "insane," unreliable narrator, and then having the twist be that they were perfectly reliable where it counted? Beautiful. Amazing. I couldn’t be completely certain until I read the note from the author at the end, but threading throughout the fantasy trappings, this read like a book that came from a very personal place, and had some very sharp things to say about people who get dismissed as “insane.”

(On that note - are there any moments where Harrow outright hallucinates? I certainly took the “a few out-of-order bumps in the temporal gyrus that might have been there already” line as leaving open the interpretation that she’s genuinely schizophrenic in addition to the wacky supernatural nonsense she has to deal with…)

Harrow Would Make a Great When They Cry Character, Prove Me Wrong

An unreliable narrator? A fantasy-infused murder mystery in that lovely mindscrew “is it magic? Is it mundane? Is it a hallucination?” mode? There’s a surprising amount of Harrow the Ninth that reminds me of the best parts of When They Cry novels.

(Look, just because I’m not actively participating in the fandom doesn’t mean my WTC brainworms have gone away. :P)

To the first point, I would absolutely argue that Harrow gives Rena and Shion and other WTC characters a run for their money at Best Unreliable Narrator. In particular, if you enjoyed moments like Rena trying to logic through her paranoia in Tsumihoroboshi and only digging herself deeper, or Rika dissociating and wishing to erase part of herself in Saikoroshi - this book is for you.

Meanwhile, Harrow’s internal conflict - that “Is somebody trying to kill her? And if they succeeded, would the universe be better off?” from the summary blurb still haunts me! - evokes some of my favorite When They Cry character beats. “Why was I born?”/“I’m sorry for being born.” are lines that keep recurring throughout the WTC series, and for good reason. The regret and tragedy of a monstrous existence sure makes for some excellent character drama!

After Higurashi Sotsu left me hanging with its poorly-written antagonist, I was desperately craving something that did a complex, Beatrice-like character well, and I found that in Harrow. Though it’s perhaps less surprising of a jump than you might think; both Umineko and The Locked Tomb series are heavily influenced by gothic literature. Something something kids messed up by the crime of their conception, something something continuing the cycle of violence by taking it out on the only other person who might have helped them instead.

If only, I were… Never born to begin with at all; More smiles may have blossomed, But we'll never know now

If only, I were… Able to cease my own breath, Maybe some could have lived on?

Surely, even these feelings Will soon lose their form— But can we walk on ahead As if nothing ever happened?

(Umineko’s “hope” is too soft and peaceful of a song to truly fit Harrow’s gremlin energy, and yet… hm.)

Finally, here’s some mood whiplash: in other WTC news, Ianthe has managed to steal the title of Best Worst Girl from Furudo Erika. Which is no mean feat! I love her. I can’t wait to see her get worse. I especially love that the fandom is entirely on board with her being The Absolute Worst. <3

Dream Bubble AUs, Unburying Your Gays, and PMMM: Rebellion

The Madoka Magica: Rebellion parallels are much much more tenuous, but boy oh boy do I have Feels about them. Homura dreamt of a world where she and Madoka could both live cheerful lives as magical girls - not one where she stole and sealed away Madoka’s powers. Harrow dreamt of worlds where Gideon had comparatively more freedom and power - not ones where she was the shackle binding Gideon to the Ninth. In both cases, idyllic fanfic-influenced dream AUs are used as a clever means of portraying the more equal dynamic a character actually wants from a relationship vs the deeply broken and possessive dynamic they had with that person in reality.

It’s just such a fascinating storytelling device that accomplishes so many things at once!

-By contrasting these happier universes with the characters’ reality, it deftly underlines how strongly the characters have been warped by their traumas into their current selves, without the result feeling maudlin or unearned. -Because the setting is a character’s mindscape, any setting details are also implicitly characterization details. So it’s a rich opportunity to explore the dreamer’s unfiltered and most heartfelt desires - and a whole lot of other amusing quirks besides. (Was Homura a fan of magical girl shows? Was Harrow thinking of Pal’s ridiculous novel when she came up with that Ball AU? Why are both of them so fond of coffee??) -By specifically invoking fanfiction tropes, it also becomes a sweet and positive way to acknowledge the power of transformative fandom, and the value of sharing and reimagining stories to grapple with our own identities. -And finally, by giving the audience a taste of “what could have been,” it makes a fraught relationship that much easier to root for - an implied preview of “what might yet be.”

I also have even MORE Feels about disaster lesbians spectacularly rejecting the idea of a Bury Your Gays so hard they shatter their own minds and even reality itself in the process. Because, look. In both HtN and Rebellion, the main character arc seems to be heading toward a conclusion where the protagonist finally faces reality, regains their memories, and bittersweetly accepts their love interest’s heroic sacrifice. But in a last minute twist, the protagonist says “screw that” to the obvious ending and doubles down on rejecting their love interest’s death as the world collapses around them.

After so, so many stories where lesbians are killed off for tragedy, it’s an incredibly striking and resonant choice! To have a character put their foot down, tell the rest of the universe to go to hell, and say No. To look at a neat and perfect heroic sacrifice and refuse it in favor of a messier, more imperfect conclusion - but one in which their love interest has a chance to live. That was the powerful moment of catharsis that made me love Rebellion despite its problems, and it’s executed just as, if not more beautifully, in HtN.

(“There’s a difference between keeping a shred of a dance card,” said Harrow Nonagesimus, and saving the last dance.” - MY HEART. “It’s love!” all over again!)

Now, I’d like to say that the difference that puts HtN ahead is that Rebellion portrays this reversal of expectations in a negative light while HtN is more triumphant. But if I’m being honest… they’re both extremely ambiguous and nigh-incomprehensibly symbolic in their cliffhanger endings! (And in both cases the love interest is not a fan of having their own choices overwritten…) But I made peace years ago with the ambiguity in the last act of Rebellion, so it’s not like I minded it much in HtN either.

Still, it does make me wonder: will Nona+Alecto pan out better than the upcoming Rebellion sequel? My money is currently on the former, but with neither out yet, who can say?

Speaking of which…

Concerns for the Sequels?

As much as I’m invested in Griddlehark (and I am VERY invested), I could just as easily see it not happening. Of course, Muir’s writing has been strong enough that I’d like to think that whatever happens instead will at least be interesting. Plus, it’s not like Gideon and Harrow need to be in a romantic relationship with each other to be lesbians! Though whether the books will stay the course in not shoving them at male love interests at the last minute is something I sincerely hope but just cannot bring myself to trust after so many bad experiences with other authors.

However, it’s not shipping that’s my main concern.

No, the aspect that actually gives me pause is the Christian slant of the books. And I’m not talking about the Spoopy Space Catholicism worldbuilding or Bible allusions. Those are cool! Rather, it’s in the subtle little things, like how Muir describes Gideon forgiving Harrow so quickly as the moment Gideon “achieves grace.” When I read it, I personally found Gideon’s trauma being resolved so neatly and easily to be odd and underwritten. And if major plot and characterization beats are going to be resting on a religious rather than character-driven base, then, well… I’m worried that the final result may resonate with Christian audiences but I’ll simply find it alienating and unsatisfying.

Of course, it’s not that there’s anything wrong with writing books shaped by one’s religion. But that would be a signal that these books are fundamentally not for me, and I should find another fandom.

It’s also why I’m perhaps less on board with “flowers will die on necromancy’s grave” (although that certainly is a nicely poetic turn of phrase!) than it appears most of the fandom is. I’m very wary of themes of restoring the world/society/people back to some inherently “natural'' or “divine” order. One of the few things that could still completely ruin the series for me would be a swerve where now that False Idol John has been killed and the River is Fixed™, everyone abandons their witchcraft to go back to worshiping Real Christian Jesus as they were intended to. Or a conclusion where everyone dies and that’s portrayed as a happy end, because they’re With God so it’s all good, right?

I have no particular love for Christianity, so to me, an ending along those lines would read as though the series abandoned its anti-imperialist themes and replaced one empire with a return to another, even crueler one. No thank you!

(Not that I think those things are especially likely to happen. Like with the queerness, I've just been burned from some very weird prior experiences, haha.)

I'm also surprised by how universally the fandom assumes John will be the endgame villain. I'm a cynic, and I could quite easily see the series doing a disappointing swerve in the opposite direction, valorizing and "redeeming" God and his empire once we have more insight into his motives. A similarly universally-reviled character got that treatment in my last fandom, and hoo boy did it ever set the discourse (and the story in general) on fire! Another development I'm not keen to experience a repeat of!

Fandom and Future Things

Well that was dire, let’s go back to talking about fun things instead!

So, new obsessions tend to sneak up on me slowly. I don’t just finish something and immediately know it will consume the next few years of my life. The true story is, when I got internet access again, I read through the #tlt tags on some blogs that I remembered had occasionally posted about it, and then I went about my business.

And that could have been the end of it.

But the beginning signs were already there. In between assembling IKEA furniture, I spent the rest of the trip daydreaming the threads of what would become only the first of many, many fic ideas.

Since then, I’ve read a lot more analysis, and even more fanfic. So much fanfic. This is also the first time I’ve felt comfortable going through a fandom tag with the blanket policy that yes, I will be reading explicit fics too. (Honestly: the porn has been less weird than I expected.)

Of course, I’m quite late to the party on this fandom. And I’m not sure how much I’ll both be able and want to contribute. I probably won’t be writing weekly analysis posts and committing myself to a long fanfic like I did for Higurashi, at the very least. That was exhausting.

However, I now have 25 pages of saved fanfic links to convert into bookmarks, oodles of tumblr posts to reblog, and some 150-odd pages of post ideas and fanfic plot bunnies of my own. I doubt much of the latter will ever see the light of day, but the point is: I’ve been having fun.

So yes, I think it’s safe to say I liked HtN. I actually liked it even more than GtN, following the exact same pattern as my feelings for Higurashi/Umineko and PMMM/Rebellion. The first work interested me, but the follow up stole my heart and then ate my brain.

In conclusion: GtN intrigued me, but HtN inspired me. And oh. It feels so nice to be excited and hopeful and creative again.

[roleshirked]

what you are missing is probably some (many?) of those lesbians are bi (closeted or in denial) but dont want to identify as such, or maybe they have something like autoandrophilia, where they get horny for the idea of being those men bc its still homo in their mind but either they dont have that kind of ref for lesb stuff & its the closest they have to a rugged butchxbutch thing they crave tha softie gnc and pixiecut F/F doesnt properly fulfill or internal shame& lesbophobia ruins F/F stuff

is this in response to my vent from the other day? because you're probably right on all fronts.

semi-related, i sometimes think of one of the most insane roommates i've ever had. she was married to another woman (well, an nb lol) and so played the lesbian card at every possible opportunity, but i also routinely had to listen to her describe how she wanted to get railed by X male character of the week. bonus, she'd refer to that male character as a lesbian. as if that makes a difference. i see this so often online too. she was high femme to the point of it being satire (eg. she and her QuEeR eNbY wife went to ridiculous lengths to perform Femme and Butch in front of people when we had company or on social media, but both were at each other's throats constantly and lived like slobs behind closed doors, both reasons i hightailed it out of there) so i don't think it was AAP. just bi in denial.

"a rugged butchxbutch thing" - i could maybe believe this to a point, this is one of the reasons i think there are a good number of (actual) lesbians who still ship slash stuff, but look at the difference between like. this:

and this:

and i ask you, dear anon. is the latter butchxbutch, or just unapologetically malexmale? i specifically tried to cherry pick tender moments from both fanartists so the comparison could be clearly 1:1. i don't think there's any world where you can look at a pair like the latter and mindbend it to be butchxbutch. bonus points, the latter fanartist IDs as an "ace lesbian" but it took me 5 media posts of the tattooed dude sucking the other dude's cock before i found a sfw image. so.

maybe to your point someone like the artist that draws the second one probably has AAP, or something else going on. or maybe...

here's one: how do you (or anyone else reading this) reckon with lesbians who prioritize the character interaction over their own personal feelings? eg. "i read/create the fic/the doujin/the erotic fancomic because i'm invested in the character's sexuality, but it doesn't turn me on". i feel this is probably more common? but even then, no amount of me wanting to see two characters having a go at each other would make me want to draw them sucking each others' cocks from slightly different angles for 5 media posts in a row...

[makeste]

I saw this take on twitter about Hana & Kacchan having “reverse parallels” and since they both have apologised to Tenko/Deku (but one was more or less sincere and the other was absolutely sincere) and they said that, while Hana moved away from Tenko, Kacchan ran to catch Deku. There was also more to the thread abt Kacchan & Hana’s differences. They were sorta trying to argue that this is a clue that Hori intends for Bkdk to be sibling-like/brotherly. As a bkdk shipped, I’ve accepted that it makes sense.. cause it’s an established fact that Tenko & Deku parallel each other. Tenko having his own “Kacchan” makes sense. Tho yes I am a little sad since I’ve held a little bit of hope for romantic bkdk becoming canon. I just wanted to ask your opinion if Hana was really meant to foil Kacchan or was it just a reach?

okay so I have a couple responses to this.

1. while it's true that Horikoshi has woven a lot of deliberate parallels between Deku and Tenko's characters, that doesn't mean every single thing about their lives and every single person they interact with is a part of those parallels. which is to say that no, I don't really think Hana and Kacchan are meant to mirror each other in any kind of significant way. Hana's apology to Tenko was under completely different circumstances than Kacchan's apology to Deku; I really don't see any connection between the two situations. you might as well be trying to compare Hana to Endeavor, or Deku, or Hawks, or Aizawa, or any other character who's apologized to anyone over the course of the story.

2. please pardon the forthcoming rant, anon -- and I hope you know that none of this is aimed at you in particular -- but for me personally, this whole obsession with ships becoming canon is one of the most exasperating types of discourse there is. like, don't get me wrong, I totally understand people wanting to see their favorite ships validated by the author, and not to mention there's also the issue of having more LGBTQ+ representation. but speaking as someone whose own orientation (aromantic) has almost no representation in fiction whatsoever, it gets frustrating to see so many people dismiss non-romantic relationships as being an inferior type of ship, to the extent that calling a relationship "sibling-like" is now a commonly-used attack in ship wars. so many people view romance as this completely transformative element, to the point where two characters can literally tick every other box on the intimate personal relationship checklist, and none of it will matter to some people unless they actually confess their love and kiss.

and again, I'm not saying I don't understand it, especially since queerbating is a thing. it's one thing if a writer is genuinely just trying to portray a close friendship, especially in series where romance isn't really a focus. but it's another thing entirely if a writer is deliberately hinting at a romance in a blatant bid to attract a larger queer audience, while all the while having no intention whatsoever of having those hints lead anywhere. the issue, I guess, is that it's not always easy to tell which scenarios are the former, and which are the latter. and of course, you also have people who think that the former is a type of cop-out as well, because the thing is that romance is always viewed as the default. so for a lot of people, allosexual and alloromantic relationships are the only ones that get considered as far as representation goes.

but you know what, I'm just gonna say it; even knowing where people are coming from, it's still discouraging to know that so many people are so dismissive of aro and ace relationships that the thought of a favorite ship not becoming romantic in canon is considered a profound disappointment. and it's even more discouraging that the thought of a rival ship becoming canon is considered such an existential threat to some that they will literally use "oh, they're just like siblings" as an argument against the ship, rather than a point in favor of. because siblings are a downgrade. friendship is a downgrade. any kind of close relationship that isn't inherently romantic or sexual in nature is less important, and that's just how it is.

so yeah, that's kind of a pet peeve, ngl. especially since the truth is I actually do think Bakugou and Deku's relationship is very akin to siblings. and so I do sometimes get weary of not being able to just outright say that without having to first pepper the statement with all kinds of disclaimers so that people don't think I'm invalidating the ship. I feel like I have to walk on eggshells if I ever want to talk about their relationship in terms that I can personally relate to.

but I mean, here's how I look at it. they've known each other since they were small children. they call each other exclusively (or almost exclusively) by childhood nicknames. they have an openness and an unspoken, almost taken-for-granted trust in each other to the point where they'll share closely guarded secrets ("I got my quirk from someone else") and personal vulnerabilities ("why was I the one who ended All Might?") with barely a second's hesitation which they would never share with anyone else. they have a comfortable little bickering type of rapport ("I'm getting stronger"; "well I'll just have to get even stronger then"; "you'll never surpass me"; "we'll see about that") which they can fall into with ease and which looks weird af to outsiders, but is "normal" to them and something they're both grateful to have.

they're so intimately familiar with each other's personality and behaviors that they can predict them with perfect accuracy. they're so in tune with each other that they can whip up elaborate coordinated attacks right on the spot in perfect sync. their admiration for each other is so strong that they each think of the other as being the epitome of winning and saving, respectively. their mental images of each other are so vivid that they subconsciously mimic each other's speech patterns whenever they start falling into a particularly strong Win or Save mindset themselves. they take no small amount of pride in showing off for each other. they go apeshit any time the other is in danger or hurt. and each of them would literally die for the other if it ever came to that.

all of that is already canon. on just about every metric imaginable except for "now kiss", the two of them already have a canon intimacy that rivals just about every other great relationship out there. and so to say that none of it actually counts unless there's an actual love confession involved frankly just boggles me. again, maybe it's because I have no personal vested interest in romance myself, though. I'm literally just not wired that way, and so I'm really not the best person to vent to when it comes to these kinds of concerns.

but look, no matter what happens from here on out, these two care about each other on a very deep and personal level. they're going to continue to be a part of each other's lives no matter what. and each of them, no matter what, will continue to occupy a space in each other's lives that no other person can fill, regardless of how we or Horikoshi or anyone else choose to label and define that space. and so in my book, that's already a win.

anyways, apologies again for the impromptu rant. again, this wasn't particularly directed at you in any way; if anything it's mostly just a generic response to the constant shipping discourse in this and every other fandom, and a more detailed explanation for why I personally don't like to get involved in it. this is just one of the myriad reasons why I try my best to stay very far away from BnHA twitter lol.

[ganymedesclock]

These are questions I've had for some while and it's hard to find someone who'll answer with grace. This mostly relates to disabilities (mental or physical) in fiction.

1) What makes a portrayal of a disability that's harming the character in question ableist?

2) Is there a way to write a disabled villain in a way that isn't ableist?

In the circles I've been in, the common conceptions are you can't use a character's disability as a plot point or showcase it being a hindrance in some manner. heaven forbid you make your villain disabled in some capacity, that's a freaking death sentence to a creative's image. I understand historically villains were the only characters given disabilities, but (and this is my personal experience) I've not seen as many disabled villains nowadays, heck, I see more disabled heroes in media nowadays.

Sorry if this comes off as abrasive, I'd really like to be informed for future media consumption and my own creative endeavors.

Okay so the first thing I'm going to say is that while it IS a good idea to talk to disabled people and get their feedback, disabled people are not a monolith and they aren't going to all have the same take on how this goes.

My personal take is biased in favor that I'm a neurodivergent person (ADHD and autism) who has no real experience with physical disabilities, so I won't speak for physically disabled people- heck, I won't even speak for every neurotype. Like I say, people aren't a monolith.

For myself and my own writing of disabled characters, here's a couple of concepts I stick by:

Research is your friend

Think about broad conventions of ableism

Be mindful of cast composition

1. Research is your friend

Yeah this is the thing everybody says, so here's the main bases I try to cover:

What's the story on this character's disability?

Less in terms of 'tragic angst' and more, what kind of condition this is- because a congenital amputee (that is to say, someone who was born without a limb) will have a different relationship to said limb absence than someone who lost their limb years ago to someone who lost their limb yesterday. How did people in their life respond to it, and how did they respond to it? These responses are not "natural" and will not be the same to every person with every worldview. This can also be a great environment to do worldbuilding in! Think about the movie (and the tv series) How To Train Your Dragon. The vikings in that setting don't have access to modern medicine, and they're, well, literally fighting dragons and other vikings. The instance of disability is high, and the medical terminology to talk about said disabilities is fairly lackluster- but in a context where you need every man you possibly can to avoid the winter, the mindset is going to be not necessarily very correct, but egalitarian. You live in a village of twenty people and know a guy who took a nasty blow to the head and hasn't quite been the same ever since? "Traumatic Brain Injury" is probably not going to be on your lips, but you're also probably going to just make whatever peace you need to and figure out how to accommodate Old Byron for his occasional inability to find the right word, stammers and trembles. In this example, there are several relevant pieces of information- what the character's disability is (aphasia), how they got it (brain injury), and the culture and climate around it (every man has to work, and we can't make more men or throw them away very easily, so, how can we make sure this person can work even if we don't know what's wrong with them)

And that dovetails into:

What's the real history, and modern understandings, of this?

This is where "knowing the story" helps a lot. To keep positing our hypothetical viking with a brain injury, I can look into brain injuries, what affects their extent and prognosis, and maybe even beliefs about this from the time period and setting I'm thinking of (because people have had brains, and brain injuries, the entire time!) Sure, if the setting is fantastical, I have wiggle room, but looking at inspirations might give me a guide post.

Having a name for your disorder also lets you look for posts made by specific people who live with the condition talking about their lives. This is super, super important for conditions stereotyped as really scary, like schizophrenia or narcissistic personality disorder. Even if you already know "schizophrenic people are real and normal" it's still a good thing to wake yourself up and connect with others.

2. Think about broad conventions of ableism

It CAN seem very daunting or intimidating to stay ahead of every single possible condition that could affect someone's body and mind and the specific stereotypes to avoid- there's a lot under the vast umbrella of human experience and we're learning more all the time! A good hallmark is, ableism has a few broad tendencies, and when you see those tendencies rear their head, in your own thinking or in accounts you read by others, it's good to put your skeptical glasses on and look closer. Here's a few that I tend to watch out for:

Failing the “heartwarming dog” test

This was a piece of sage wisdom that passed my eyeballs, became accepted as sage wisdom, and my brain magnificently failed to recall where I saw it. Basically, if you could replace your disabled character with a lovable pet who might need a procedure to save them, and it wouldn’t change the plot, that’s something to look into.

Disability activists speak often about infantilization, and this is a big thing of what they mean- a lot of casual ableism considers disabled people as basically belonging to, or being a burden onto, the able-bodied and neurotypical. This doesn’t necessarily even need to have an able neurotypical in the picture- a personal experience I had that was extremely hurtful was at a point in high school, I decided to do some research on autism for a school project. As an autistic teenager looking up resources online, I was very upset to realize that every single resource I accessed at the time presumed it was talking to a neurotypical parent about their helpless autistic child. I was looking for resources to myself, yet made to feel like I was the subject in a conversation.

Likewise, many wheelchair users have relayed the experience of, when they, in their chair, are in an environment accompanied by someone else who isn’t using a chair, strangers would speak to the standing person exclusively, avoiding addressing the chair user. 

It’s important to always remind yourself that at no point do disabled people stop being people. Yes, even people who have facial deformities; yes, even people who need help using the bathroom; yes, even people who drool; yes, even people whose conditions impact their ability to communicate, yes, even people with cognitive disabilities. They are people, they deserve dignity, and they are not “a child trapped in a 27-year-old body”- a disabled adult is still an adult. All of the “trying to learn the right rules” in the world won’t save you if you keep an underlying fear of non-normative bodies and minds.

This also has a modest overlap between disability and sexuality in particular. I am an autistic grayromantic ace. Absolutely none of my choices or inclinations about sex are because I’m too naive or innocent or childlike to comprehend the notion- disabled people have as diverse a relationship with sexuality as any other. That underlying fear- as mentioned before- can prevent many people from imagining that, say, a wheelchair user might enjoy sex and have experience with it. Make sure all of your disabled characters have full internal worlds.

Poor sickly little Tiffany and the Red Right Hand

A big part of fictional ableism is that it separates the disabled into two categories. Anybody who’s used TVTropes would recognize the latter term I used here. But to keep it brief:

Poor, sickly little Tiffany is cute. Vulnerable. How her disability affects her life is that it constantly creates a pall of suffering that she lives beneath. After all, having a non-normative mind or body must be an endless cavalcade of suffering and tragedy, right? People who are disabled clearly spend their every waking moment affected by, and upset, that they aren’t normal!

The answer is... No, actually. Cut the sad violin; even people who have chronic pain who are literally experiencing pain a lot more than the rest of us are still fully capable of living complex lives and being happy. If nothing else, it would be literally boring to feel nothing but awful, and people with major depression or other problems still, also, have complicated experiences. And yes, some of it’s not great. You don’t have to present every disability as disingenuously a joy to have. But make a point that they own these things. It is a very different feeling to have a concerned father looking through the window at his angel-faced daughter rocking sadly in her wheelchair while she stares longingly out the window, compared to a character waking up at midnight because they have to go do something and frustratedly hauling their body out of their bed into their chair to get going.

Poor Sickly Little Tiffany (PSLT, if you will) virtually always are young, and they virtually always are bound to the problems listed under ‘failing the heartwarming dog’ test. Yes, disabled kids exist, but the point I’m making here is that in the duality of the most widely accepted disabled characters, PSLT embodies the nadir of the Victim, who is so pure, so saintly, so gracious, that it can only be a cruel quirk of fate that she’s suffering. After all, it’s not as if disabled people have the same dignity that any neurotypical and able-bodied person has, where they can be an asshole and still expect other people to not seriously attack their quality of life- it’s a “service” for the neurotypical and able-bodied to “humor” them.

(this is a bad way to think. Either human lives matter or they don’t. There is no “wretched half-experience” here- if you wouldn’t bodily grab and yank around a person standing on their own feet, you have no business grabbing another person’s wheelchair)

On the opposite end- and relevant to your question- is the Red Right Hand. The Red Right Hand does not have PSLT’s innocence or “purity”- is the opposite extreme. The Red Right Hand is virtually always visually deformed, and framed as threatening for their visual deformity. To pick on a movie I like a fair amount, think about how in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the title character is described- “Strong. Fast. Had a metal arm.” That’s a subtle example, but, think about how that metal arm is menacing. Sure, it’s a high tech weapon in a superhero genre- but who has the metal arm? The Winter Soldier, who is, while a tormented figure that ultimately becomes more heroic- scary. Aggressive. Out for blood.

The man who walks at midnight with a Red Right Hand is a signal to us that his character is foul because of the twisting of his body. A good person, we are led to believe, would not be so- or a good person would be ashamed of their deformity and work to hide it. The Red Right Hand is not merely “an evil disabled person”- they are a disabled person whose disability is depicted as symptomatic of their evil, twisted nature, and when you pair this trope with PSLT, it sends a message: “stay in your place, disabled people. Be sad, be consumable, and let us push you around and decide what to do with you. If you get uppity, if you have ideas, if you stand up to us, then the thing that made you a helpless little victim will suddenly make you a horrible monster, and justify us handling you with inhumanity.”

As someone who is a BIG fan of eldritch horror and many forms of unsettling “wrongness” it is extremely important to watch out for the Red Right Hand. Be careful how you talk about Villainous Disability- there is no connection between disability and morality. People will be good, bad, or simply just people entirely separate from their status of ability or disability. It’s just as ableist to depict every disabled person as an innocent good soul as it is to exclusively deal in grim and ghastly monsters.

Don’t justify disabilities and don’t destroy them.

Superpowers are cool. Characters can and IMO should have superpowers, as long as you’re writing a genre when they’re there.

BUT.

It’s important to remember that there is no justification for disabilities, because they don’t need one. Disability is simply a feature characters have. You do not need to go “they’re blind, BUT they can see the future”

This is admittedly shaky, and people can argue either way; the Blind Seer is a very pronounced mythological figure and an interesting philosophical point about what truly matters in the world. There’s a reason it exists as a conceit. But if every blind character is blind in a way that completely negates that disability or makes it meaningless- this sucks. People have been blind since the dawn of time. And people will always accommodate their disabilities in different ways. Even if the technology exists to fix some forms of blindness, there are people who will have “fixable” blindness and refuse to treat it. There will be individuals born blind who have no meaningful desire to modify this. And there are some people whose condition will be inoperable even if it “shouldn’t” be.

You don’t need to make your disabled characters excessively cool, or give them a means by which the audience can totally forget they’re disabled. Again, this is a place where strong worldbuilding is your buddy- a handwave of “x technology fixed all disabilities”, in my opinion, will never come off good. If, instead, however, you throw out a careless detail that the cool girl the main character is chatting up in a cyberpunk bar has an obvious spinal modification, and feature other characters with prosthetics and without- I will like your work a lot, actually. Even if you’re handing out a fictional “cure”- show the seams. Make it have drawbacks and pros and cons. A great example of this is in the series Full Metal Alchemist- the main character has two prosthetic limbs, and not only do these limbs come with problems, some mundane (he has phantom limb pains, and has to deal with outgrowing his prostheses or damaging them in combat) some more fantastical (these artificial limbs are connected to his nerves to function fluidly- which means that they get surgically installed with no anesthesia and hurt like fuck plugging in- and they require master engineering to stay in shape). We explicitly see a scene of the experts responsible for said limbs talking to a man who uses an ordinary prosthetic leg, despite the advantages of an automail limb, because these drawbacks are daunting to him and he is happier with a simple prosthetic leg.

Even in mundane accommodations you didn’t make up- no two wheelchair users use their chair the exact same way, and there’s a huge diversity of chairs. Someone might be legally blind but still navigate confidently on their own; they might use a guide dog, or they might use a cane. They might even change their needs from situation to situation!

Disability accommodations are part of life

This ties in heavily to the previous point, but seriously! Don’t just look up one model of cane and superimpose it with no modifications onto your character- think about what their lifestyle is, and what kind of person they are!

Also medication is not the devil. Yes, medical abuse is real and tragic and the medication is not magic fairy dust that solves all problems either. But also, it’s straight ableism to act like anybody needing pills for any reason is a scary edgy plot twist. 

(and addiction is a disease. Please be careful, and moreover be compassionate, if you’re writing a character who’s an addict)

3. Be mindful of cast composition

This, to me, is a big tip about disability writing and it’s also super easy to implement!

Just make sure your cast has a lot of meaningful disabled characters in it!

Have you done all the work you can to try and dodge the Red Right Hand but you’re still worried your disabled villain is a bad look? They sure won’t look like a commentary on disability if three other people in the cast are disabled and don’t have the same outlook or role! Worried that you’re PSLT-ing your main character’s disabled child? Maybe the disability is hereditary and they got it from the main character!

The more disabled characters you have, the more it will challenge you to think about what their individual relationship is with the world and the less you’ll rely on hackneyed tropes. At least, ideally.

-

Ultimately, there’s no perfect silver bullet of diversity writing that will prevent a work from EVER being ableist, but I hope this helped, at least!

[cowboylikeghost]

Here are 73 fact about me that nobody ask for but i need validation

1- I love Reading, drawing and plants even if i always kill them

2- I'm a whore for Jane Austen

3- I love when people prove that a conspiracy theory is false

4- I have a weird passion for geology and paleontology

4- I probably have undiagnosed ADHD because of my mother

5- I'm bad at frienship, every of them have to be special

6- My love language is talking about my passion and learning everything about the person, people think it's weird, i have nobody

7- I'm hopeless romantic even if i act like i'm not

8- I hate being touch and i hate hug, they feel weird to me

9- I hate when someone is next to me and their arm or knee touch me, it's make me feel anxious

10- I'm an introvert with diagnosed social anxiety, i'm also an infp and a sagittarius

11- I'm bi and disgusted about the idea of having s*x with someone, i think i'm ace, nobody will ever love me like i do

12- Autumn is the best season and i basically live for rainy day, if it could rain forever i will be the happiest

13- I love academic validation but i suck at school, my only way to work is to pretend i'm Chilton Rory Gilmore

14- I read non stop for 6 month and after i go on a reading slump for the rest of the year

15- I don't have a stable personality

16- I write sad poetry

17- I'm sad and this is my main personality trait

18- My family said that i'm basically sadness from this Disney movie

19- I want to move in a cottage in England with a lot of mountains so i can found cool rocks

20- I have a no self control and a big problem with my emotions

21- I get angry very easily

22- I only have 3 friends and one of them is my sister

23- I have commitment issues

24- I broke up two times in two years with two different girls that lives at more than 8h from me

25- I hate what the french language became even if i can't write a sentence without any fault

26- English is my fav subject at school

27- I hate eyes contact, it's make me uncomfy and i feel like people judge me

28- I feel like i'm better than everyone

29- I feel like everyone hate me

30- I feel sorry for every teacher

31- I love being in my bed, scrolling on my phone or reading but i hate sleeping because i feel like i'm wasting my time

32- Sometimes i wake up in the middle of the night because i feel like i forgot something for school, even if i'm in vacation

33- I hate people at school because i get bullied

34- People don't like me but i would kill to have someone like me in my life so i don't understand

35- I don't understand every jokes, i just know it's suppose to be funny so i laught, i just understand that

36- Taylor Swift is my only religion

37- I Iove more Harry styles songs than Harry styles himself, i found him arrogant and he always date problematic women, Stan Niall

38- I would do anything for Ben Barnes and Tom Hiddleston or any british men in their 40 who have a degree in literature

39- I relate to Spencer Reid in a way that nobody could ever understand

40- I love true crime, my favorite stories are about cult

41- My love for my cat is not healthy, if he died, i have to follow him

42- I alway stop watching Gilmore girls when Rory finish Chilton because i hear that she became annoying but she's one of my confort character so i don't want to see it

43- I prefer the marauders over the golden trio

44- I'm a Remus Lupin kinnie and a James Potter Simp

45- I hate Dumbledore with my whole heart i could talk about it for hours

46- I started all the young dudes, i like it but i cry at every chapter so i stoped

47- I hate my brother but if he died i would be destroyed

48- When i was little i have an obsession with panda and now i have panda everywhere in my room

49- I don't know if i want to live alone forever because i like the idea or because of any other reason

50- I alway need adults validation

51- When i was a kid i was sleeping with my socks on because i liked it but i learned that some people think it's weird so i stoped

52- I eat my cereal with no milk and i don't understand the debate, for me it always taste the same: disgusting

53- I hate touching food that isn't mine ( like when someone ask if you want to taste their meal, or if you have to clean something that someone else eat in, it's just make me want to threw up)

54- I have to sleep with no sound, if you breath a little to loud i will not be able to sleep, i'll be angry and probably hit you, one time my sister breathed too loud and i cryed

55- When i was a kid i hated turtle neck, it maked me feel like i was chocking but i learned how to support it even if it's still uncomfy

56- I hate when a shirt, a dress or a blouse show too mutch of my skin, i don't like it

57- I always wear a tank top with my t-shirt and if i don't i feel naked

58- My first panick attack was because i had a fight with my brother and my dad was yelling at me and didn't see it (i'm not mad at him)

59- When i was little i acted like i couldn't read because i was scared my mom will not read story to me anymore

60- I had my first phone at 13 but i wish i didn't

61- When i was 11 i started reading sm*t on my DS and it became an addiction, i wish everyday i forget what i read

62- I realise i was bi because of Millie Bobby Brown in Stranger things

63- I didn't realise my feminisme wasn't good until a 12yrs old insulted me in a comment section, i said thanks to her after

64- I love kids, i think they're cute and i'm jealous of their innocence so i act like i hate them

65- I want to raise a kid alone in the forest

66- I'm sure that my grandma in my dad side is a lesbian and that my mom is bisexual but have internalised homophobia

67- I hate when boomer joke about hating their husband/wife, just divorce

68- I still have my babies plush even if they're disgusting and look possessed

69- I sleep with my fairy lights on because three month ago i had a sleep paralysis

70- My parents are responsible of 80% of my insecurities and don't even know it

71- I love when it's get dark earlier in autumn/winter

72- I'm an Amy March simp

73- I just made a liste of 73 fact about me

[cloverthirteen]

Was Ace Attorney made as a satire on Japan’s legal system? -- An analysis

I wouldn’t really call myself an Ace Attorney fan--I’ve never played any of the games, the closest I’ve come being watching other people’s let’s plays. I do like reading about the series on wikis and interacting with fan content for it, though, so I do know a fair amount about it.

One thing I see being said pretty often by fans is that the series was intended as a satire/parody of the Japanese legal system, which is why the courts are ridiculously biased towards the prosecution, prosecutors often care more about perfect win records more than putting actual guilty people behind bars, etc. If you’re familiar with this, you’ve probably heard of Japan’s 99% conviction rate. This interpretation of the games and the way they work definitely makes sense.

But after hearing this many times I eventually noticed something. There isn’t a single actual source (creator statement, interview, etc.) that backs up this claim. Every time I see someone online say “the series creator made Ace Attorney to parody Japan’s actual legal system” there is never a link to an interview or anything that proves their statement correct. If someone has an actual, verified source from Shu Takumi or someone else who had significant involvement with the series, please prove me wrong and show it to me. But according to all of the creator’s statement’s I’ve read, there’s no evidence of the series being an intentional parody.

So, what do we know about the creation of the Ace Attorney series? Well, it was created by Shu Takumi, who wrote and directed the first three games. After working on the dinosaur survival horror game Dino Crisis for Capcom, he was given the opportunity to make any kind of game he wanted. He really wanted to make mystery and adventure games, and from that came Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney.

MC: Before developing Ace Attorney you worked on Dino Crisis. How does one go from dinosaur survival horror to virtual courtrooms?

ST: Dino Crisis was the brainchild of my then boss, Resident Evil creator, Shinji Mikami. Working on his projects taught me not only how to make games, but also how to think about them. After Dino Crisis 2 wrapped, Mr Mikami gave me six months in which to create any kind of game I wanted.

I was still pretty wet behind the ears, but as I'd originally joined Capcom with a desire to create mystery and adventure games, this was a huge chance for me to make my mark as a creator. In the end it took a team of seven 10 months to produce the first GBA Ace Attorney title. Having the freedom to create exactly the kind of game I wanted was amazing and it was a real pleasure to work on that project.

MC: Can you remember when the idea of Ace Attorney first came to you? How did your bosses respond to the idea of a lawyer-based adventure game when you first described it to them?

ST: It was in 2000 when Mr Mikami said I could make my own game and my original idea was a fairly typical adventure with a detective as the main character. Most mystery adventures have the player choose from a number of different dialogue options for their character in order to progress the story, but I wanted a new gameplay style that enabled players to deduce for themselves what was happening, rather than just selecting canned responses. I developed this into the concept of facing off against the suspect in a crime and exposing the contradictions in their statements.

I was sure my new idea would be a fun and original take on the genre, so I started to revise the main character, since a detective would be too traditional for such an original concept. I asked myself, "What kind of professional would face off against a suspect and expose their contradictory statements?" The answer, of course, was a lawyer and so the Ace Attorney concept was born.

(source, from an interview on the making of the series)

Takumi’s original concept for the game involved Phoenix as not a defense lawyer, but as a detective. The gameplay was to consist of “facing off against the suspect of a crime and finding the contradictions in their statements.” However, Takumi eventually realized that taking apart contradictions wasn’t really a detective’s job, and decided to change the protagonist to a lawyer and the setting to a courtroom instead. And thus, the game’s concept was finalized.

Janet: As you know, “Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy” is coming out world-wide this winter, and as I was brainstorming what to write about for this week’s blog, I remembered your tweets from 2010.

Takumi: Tweets from 2010?

Janet: …Well, it was a long time ago…

Takumi: ???

Janet: I-It’s OK if you don’t remember…

Takumi: …Oh, THOSE! Yes!

Janet: I remember reading them and being shocked by how different the original draft of the game’s story was – how Phoenix wasn’t even a lawyer, but a private eye!

Takumi: Yes, AA was originally supposed to be a detective game, so naturally, Phoenix was to be a private eye. But then, one day, I made a startling realization: the gameplay concept I was going for was for players to enjoy finding and taking contradictions apart, but that was hardly related to investigating or detective work at all. In that moment, I had it – I realized that the main setting for the game should be the courtroom.

Janet: That’s quite the jump, but you know, I can’t imagine this series being anything else at this point. 

(source, from an interview by Janet Hsu about the game’s early development)

During the development for the game, Takumi actually knew very little about the intricacies of the legal system--and in fact, he’s been very transparent about that fact in interviews. There’s even a story he talks about in a blog post where he was asked “shouldn’t we do some research on law before we make this game?” and agonized over it for a bit before deciding that being accurate about courtroom processes wasn’t important--what was important was that the game made the trials exciting and fun.

November, 2000. The characters were coming together, and I was working desperately on my first scenario (the current Turnabout Sisters). One day, I was asked about the one thing I didn’t want to be asked about.

“Mr. Takumi. Don’t we need to do some research on law?”

The knowledge I have about the law, pretty amounts to the one fact that in Japan we have the Roppō Zensho ('Complete Book of The Six Major Legal Codes').

“Don’t bother with that. This is a detective game. “

It should have been over with this one line, but…

“But this isn’t a detective game, it’s a lawyer game!”

“If it’s not going to be realistic, I don’t see why this should be about trials.”

“People who play this might get wrong knowledge from the game!”

“We might get sued by the Bar Association!”

“They’ll start complaining!”

…Gyakuten Saiban (Ace Attorney GBA) is simply a “mystery game.”　“Being realistic” is not what is important. What’s important is emphasizing, and recreating the unique “atmosphere” and “tension” of the courtroom. That is why the judge uses a gavel, even though no judge uses that, and why Naruhodō shouts "Objection!" even though nobody does that either.　This game does not need a “realistic courtroom”!

Chasing the true murderer down to the end, and then getting applauded for that in the courtroom. That feeling of thrill and excitement. It was only by February of the following year when we finally manage to recreate that in the game. The couple of months after this had happened, we looked around, got lost and troubled our minds in search for the answer of the big question of “How do we make a trial into a game?”.  Fall was passing by, and the cold winter was close upon us.

(source, from an archived blog post by Takumi)

So, realism and knowledge of law wasn’t important to Takumi during the development of the series. But there’s also the fact that Takumi has actually personally denied that the Ace Attorney series was an intentional satire or criticism of the court system at any point. In fact, according to a blog post (done as if Phoenix and Maya were reading the column and commenting on it), he actually dislikes people seeing his work this way, as he never intended the games to have any big political statements.

A major prerequisite for Gyakuten Saiban is it’s so simple “even my mother could play it”.  So there is only one point at the core of the game: “Seeing through lies”.

Naruhodō: It wasn’t even supposed to be a game about the trials at first. Mayoi: Eh! Really?! Naruhodō: “Simple” is basically all this game is about, according to TakuShū. Mayoi: What do you mean? Naruhodō: He didn’t want to add all kinds of elements for the player to think about, like alibis, tricks or about the culprit. It’d just confuse them. Mayoi: Really. Naruhodō: Basically, you can proceed in the game if you just think about where the contradiction is. He figured that with that, the controls of the game could also stay simple. Mayoi: But, but, why the trials then? Naruhodō: “A story about a detective seeing through lies” wouldn’t be any different from the other games out there. So that’s why he decided to have someone whose job is seeing through lies as the protagonist. Mayoi: So a defense attorney. Naruhodō: Occasionally  TakuShū sees magazines introducing the game as “a work that dared to take on the theme of trials”, and that actually hurts him. Mayoi: He never meant to be something as big as that…. 

(source, from the mentioned blog post)

Ultimately I see how easy it is, if you know a good amount about both Ace Attorney and Japan’s legal system, to come to the conclusion that the games were made as a dig against the latter. However, somewhere along the line, people apparently stopped seeing this as merely a theory and instead as a definite fact. Now, that doesn’t mean that the theory is entirely unfounded--given that Takumi focused only on making trials interesting and fun in the games, you could say that the games work as an light, comedic parody, not meant to make any political statements. And hey, maybe there’s something I missed--maybe there were other people working on the series who did have significant knowledge of law and wrote some parts of the games as intentional satire of the system. Again, if anyone has evidence of this, don’t hesitate to provide it. But with what I know, I don’t think going “well actually” to people who point out the ridiculousness and unfairness of Ace Attorney’s court system is necessary. It’s simply that way to make the games more fun.

[punk-rock-prince]

//ok I’m gonna talk abt this bc I see it everywhere. Leon’s relation to his talent. In my version of Leon, it’s personal to me.

I have experienced this. I am apparently a good singer, and my father is a choir director. I was forced to be a part of music everyday for my entire childhood. I liked singing. It was fun and stimulating. But not the way I was being forced to do it. I decided that I hated singing, and that I wouldn’t do it again. I told everyone I hated singing. I committed to the bit. But the thing was, I didn’t actually hate it, I hated the way it was forced on me. I didn’t want to sing as a career/life choice. I liked doing it as a hobby, or even in front of people every now and then, but doing it all the time sucked the soul of it out of me. I say all of this to convey, that I know what it feels like to be boxed in like that. And it has influenced my feelings on this character.

When I played the game, I instantly recognized what Leon was saying/doing by telling everyone he hated baseball. He hates the responsibility, the way he’s forced into it, the way his feelings weren’t taken into consideration. But he does like it, objectively. But I don’t think he wants it to be his life. And that’s what everyone, especially Hope’s Peak, expects of him. They want him to focus on it the way all the other Ultimates focus on their talents. They sort of treat him as a tool, an ace in the hole, rather than person with wants and needs. And he definitely noticed that. I think it’s INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT to not erase Leon’s refusal to “play his part”, bc it’s a direct deconstruction of the trips every single other Ultimate falls into: dedicating their entire life to the one thing they’re good at. But what if you’re like me, and what you’re good at isn’t what you want? What if someone is like Leon, and their passion lies with something they’re not necessarily skilled at? I think it’s incredibly cruel to force someone to be something they don’t wish to be, just because you think they ought to be it.

The fandom largely treats Leon’s preference the same way the school does. “It’s just a phase”, “He doesn’t actually mean it, so ignore him”, etc. They completely ignore the lengths he went to in order to change his image. He says it was initially for a girl, and that’s true. But if he only meant it as far as that, why would he still be doing it? Why would he have stuck with such a drastic change even when she wasn’t even around anymore? And it wasn’t just an outward change—Leon demonstrates knowledge of his chosen genre, and music in general. And in the official DR:Reload art book, even Junko is impressed by the amount of music he has, organized by genre, band, and time. Knowing Leon, I don’t think he’d put that amount of effort into something he didn’t actually care about. He actually does love music. He is just also using it to try and tell people to just listen to him for once. He feels like the real him is neglected in favor of his talent, and it is. He just wants people to work with him, and he decide to act out in order to get their attention. I’m not saying Leon’s thought process and decisions are correct, or mature. But they make sense for his emotionally-driven character. I just feel like dismissing his problems with his talent, and the issues surrounding it, it cutting off a huge chunk of what makes Leon interesting. And having it end by him accepting what everyone was forcing into him, whether he secretly liked his talent or not, isn’t what I’d call a happy ending, because it ends with the legitimate concerns he had with locking himself into a box of his own abilities being thrown away. A true happy ending is with the people that truly love and care for him acknowledging his fears and concerns, and helping him in an uncertain period of his life he isn’t sure what he wants to do or where he wants to go. And when Leon, with the support he should have had from the beginning, decides to pursue his dream, with his talent or without it.

Idk, it’s late and I might not be making sense lol.

EDIT: sorry I didn’t say before jfgjfjj you can reblog this

[ezrasarm]

Coming Out As Asexual/Aspec

Pairings: Javier Pena x reader, Marcus Pike x reader, Din Djarin x reader, Ezra x reader, Frankie Morales x reader

Word count: 2.3K (oops)

Warnings: discussions of sexuality, depictions of main characters as Aspec

A/n: I apologize these were meant to be head canons and a few of them wound up turning into mini fics. I would like to thank @dishonouringmycow for supplying many ideas and helping me concoct these for you and @kiss-evans for her insight as well. These were a lot of fun to write! We’ve written these HCs in hopes that they will be inclusive and relatable to most ace/demi-/greysexual folks and anyone in between. We hope you like them!

[masterlist]

Javier Peña

Telling Javi is a little tricky.

Given the time period, and the fact that asexuality was hardly a word let alone a widely accepted concept, Javier didn’t stand a chance when you went about explaining to him your “unconventional” relationship with sexual attraction.

You didn’t even fully understand it yourself at that point which is why you were terrified when you felt you owed him an explanation for turning him down.

You and Javi had been dancing around each other since pretty much the moment you landed in Bogata.

You knew you cared about him more than the average coworker and Steve didn’t hesitate to tease either of you mercilessly for it with every chance he got.

But there was a reason you had been avoiding acting on those feelings you harboured for him and a reason you were so terrified when he reciprocated them.

Silence overwhelms the small stakeout vehicle when you tell him.

He doesn’t get it.

“Oh.”

The disappointment that pours off of him is palpable.

This really wasn’t the reaction he was expecting to the heartfelt confession he had mustered up the courage for only moments ago.

“Javi,” You sigh, “It’s not like that. It’s not personal. I don’t feel attracted to anyone that way.” You reiterate but he still seems convinced that this is just an elaborate attempt to spare his feelings.

“You don’t have to do that, you know? You don’t have to let me down easy.”

“That’s not what this is. I really just don’t operate that way.”

You had seen the girls coming and going from his apartment across the hall. You knew how he chose to blow off steam after stressful days at work and you knew you couldn’t keep up with that.

“I don’t think I can be there for you like you want me to.”

It takes a moment for it to dawn on him what you mean and you think he finally takes the hint when another ‘oh’ escapes him.

“I don’t need-“ He starts up but cuts himself off when you give him a pointed look.

“I really, really wanted this to work.” He says after what feels like hours of you discussing all the reasons you would wind up resenting each other if you went down that path. All the fears you had of starting something up with him.

“Me too.” You hum solemnly when you deflate to lean into his side and rest your head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

He’s quick to shake his head and whisper a quiet “Don’t apologize.” When he wraps an arm around you and places a kiss to the top of your head.

You both walk away from that stakeout with heavy hearts but lighter shoulders and although it takes some time to heal you learn to show how much you care about each other in different ways.

Now he slings an arm around your shoulders when you’re getting unwanted attention on a night out.

You stay up drinking with him so he doesn’t have to brood alone after a particularly tiring day.

Soft touches and reassuring words come easier between you two.

Most importantly you’re both happy and you haven’t lost each other.

Marcus Pike

Marcus is a little less clueless.

He knows Asexuality exists and has a vague sense of what it is, he just doesn’t know a whole lot about it.

There’s not much pressure when you tell him.

It comes as a bit of a disclaimer early in your relationship and you try not to make a big deal of it. You just want to make sure that he’s aware as your relationship progresses.

Marcus, ever the sweet and compassionate boyfriend is attentive and understanding as you speak.

The words that seem to stick out in his mind come at the only point when the slightest bit of doubt weens it’s way into your voice, “I just wanted to make sure that that’s- that I’m enough for you.”

His heart stops and he’s overcome by a feeling of both shock and sorrow that you could ever think such a thing of yourself.

“Of course. Of course, you’re enough.”

“You’re more than enough. You’re… you’re everything.”

What you don’t see is the way that after this conversation he finds himself wracking up more and more questions that he’s too scared to ask you. Not because he’s afraid of the answer but because he doesn’t want to overstep or make you uncomfortable.

So naturally, he turns to the next best thing.

The internet.

What he fails to realize is how broad a spectrum of asexuality there is and all he gets is more and more confused.

Marcus accidentally develops a following on Aspec Reddit forums for trying to ask people questions and them all just going “aww, Hun” at this poor clueless bean and swooning over how much he cares about you.

Despite the enthusiasm and volume of their responses, they don’t really add much clarity beyond “Hey, maybe you should ask your SO”

Instead, he runs around treating you like glass while he tries to buck up the courage to actually talk to you about it until on a movie night as he awkwardly tries to contort himself around you so he’s cuddling you… without touching you, you finally snap.

“Marcus! What is going on?”

That’s when he finally and rather sheepishly admits that he wants you to tell him more about your sexuality.

“Oh.”

You pause the movie and give him your full attention as you try and talk him through as much as you’re able to explain until suddenly you’re stuck for an answer and you look up at him with rather watery eyes as you admit you have no idea and suddenly you’re the one having the existential crisis.

“Oh, oh no. It’s alright, we can figure it out together! Shhh, it’s all fine. Please don’t cry! Reddit didn’t tell me this would happen!”

“Who-ddit?”

Din Djarin

Coming out to Din is rather anticlimactic.

He doesn’t have much to say beyond “Okay.”

You’re a little confused at first.

That went… too well.

It’s a while later when he brings it up again that you begin to realize why.

There’s no hesitation or taboo, he’s quite straight forward when he asks why you were so nervous.

At first, you’re not so sure what to say. Wasn’t that kind of obvious?

“Not everyone takes it so well.” You shrug thinking back to past relationships where your partners seemed to expect you to give them more than you were willing to.

You could practically see the gears turning behind his visor and it’s only now that you connect the dots and his reaction from before seems to add up.

To him, that was the norm.

It makes sense the more you think about it.

In all the time you had spent travelling with him, all the objectively beautiful women, men and everyone else in between that had crossed your paths, all the slurs that had been thrown at him by drunkards in cantinas about how he fucks with all that armour on, all the rather compromising situations you had found yourself in with him before and you had never caught his gaze wander or heard him express any indication of interest in yourself or anyone in that way.

You had always put it down to his creed. As far as you were aware such things were forbidden for people of his faith but you’re left with an odd sense of comfort as you realized that wasn’t the case.

Perhaps this was his strange little way of letting you know you weren’t alone.

Ezra

When you met Ezra you were prepared for the worst.

A guy as cocky and loquacious as him and you just trying to keep your head down in the busy bar and enjoy your drink in peace after a rough day.

You didn’t have high hopes when he swung into the booth across from you and started down whatever elaborate story he had decided would impress you enough to get you into bed.

“It’s my missing appendage, isn’t it?” he asks when you quite clearly don’t bite.

He’s already moving to leave you be when your eyebrows knit together in confusion and your eyes blow wide as you’re hit with a sudden wave of guilt.

You had grown used to deflecting advances like this but something about the way he said it, the bold, charismatic man suddenly looking like a kicked puppy made your guts churn.

You didn’t normally give an explanation, you didn’t feel you owed anyone that, especially not a stranger and yet here you were.

“What? No! No, I actually think you’re very good looking and charming and all those things people look for in a partner, I’m just not particularly one for casual hookups.” You say looking around the room where you now felt wildly out of place with just about all of its inhabitants presumably looking to get laid or trying to forget someone they couldn’t do so with.

“...Or any hookups really.” You correct yourself and watch as the disappointed look on his face morphs into a glint of curiosity.

“You a uh- a spade?” He asks resettling into the booth, an oblivious smile settling on his cheeks when you laugh at him.

You spend until last-call deeply enthralled in conversation and comforted by one another’s company.

That’s all either of you were here for in the first place, to feel a little less lonely.

You’re only pried apart by the closing of the bar, the nag of sleep hot on your heels and the promise that this wouldn’t be the last you saw of each other.

Frankie Morales

Frankie knew you were asexual.

You had told him before, he just didn’t entirely understand what that meant until much later on.

He seemed familiar with the term but his knowledge of the concept didn’t seem to extend beyond a basic definition.

Frankie’s first wife was his first for a lot of things. First girlfriend, first kiss, first love, first lover, first breakup.

He took the divorce pretty hard, as anyone would.

They’d gotten married so young, before he was deployed, that the guys had never seen him single before and neither had he really.

It took a long time for him to recover and by then he was content. ‘not in a particularly big rush to start down the relationship path and get hurt again’ is how he had phrased it to you once in confidence.

But another factor that he failed to recognize fully at the time was that he just hadn’t found anyone he was interested in in that way.

He’d tried going on a couple of dates but none of them clicked and it just left him feeling more alone.

It was after Tom died, almost five years after his divorce that the guys finally called him on it.

At first they just assumed the way he had been acting was about Tom and in a sense it was, Tom was the only one who had been through a divorce before, he was the only one who really understood and talked him through it when the going got tough.

Will was the one to put the pieces together and realize that the issue wasn’t Tom so much as Frankie getting more and more tired of being on his own.

His intentions were well meaning. They were just trying to help.

All they wanted was to see him happy but the more the boys seemed to try and set him up, the more resistance they were met with and even Frankie couldn’t figure out why until he was sat, venting to you about it one night.

“How did you know you were ace?” He blurts out suddenly and you’re a little lost for words, you weren’t really expecting this conversation to go this way but it was obviously something he had been considering for a while.

“Sorry that wasn’t a fair question,” He says when he notices you’re struggling, “I just- they keep trying to set me up with, who I’m sure are some really great people, but it’s all on this little tiny screen and all you see are a couple photos and maybe a blurb if you’re lucky and there’s just no…”

“Connection?” You suggest. Those big puppy eyes shoot up to you from where they were fixed on the counter in front of him and he gives you a slight nod.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” He sighs and your heart breaks a little looking at him like that before you round the counter and pull him into a hug. “I’ve felt attraction before but I look at the guys and it feels like it takes so much more for me to get to that point than them.”

“There’s nothing wrong with you.” You assure him gently, brushing your fingers through his hair when you pull away to give him a reassuring smile. “Sounds like you could be on the asexuality spectrum.”

“There’s a spectrum?”

[masterlist]

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[despairing-disaster]

ask game for veronika? :] and/or arturo HEH

YES!!! Gonna do em both so dw

Veronika

Favorite thing about them

Veronika does the same thing I have a habit of doing and that's just completely infodumping everything she knows about her interests, regardless of how socially inappropriate it may be, the second she is given an opportunity to. Honestly, she's just really relatable in that regard and considering this is something I'm extremely self-conscious about, it's really comforting to see characters who are kinda like me in that regard.

Least favorite thing about them

Honestly, I got nothing so far. She's one of my faves, what else can I say.

Favorite line

"Watching someone lose their sanity as they desperately claw towards an ever-dwindling hope for survival... It's so much better than any story I could've ever read."

I think it is a quote that's pretty telling, but also made so much better by the voice acting in that moment

brOTP

This might be a weird thing to say, but I actually think her and Ace could make a good duo. He's obviously scared shitless of... most things, but I could see Veronika trying to ease him out of his comfort zone and him getting a little less jumpy over time because of that

OTP

I get the impression you already know the answer to this, lol.

Man, idk what it was, but I feel like I and every other verturo shipper collectively saw her interaction with Arturo in episode 4 and was like "omg... what if they went on movie dates together" and ran with it. I do really feel like they have a nice dynamic though, what with her being so unrelenting in her high energy and Arturo having big tsundere potential.

nOTP

I feel like I've been saying this a lot, but I don't really have any.

Random headcanon

People joke about celebrating holidays too soon, but Veronika literally never puts away her Halloween decorations. You can go to her house in January and there will be giant fuzzy spider animatronics in her front yard wearing scarves and mittens (on all 8 legs, might I add). HOA doesn't find this nearly as entertaining as she does.

Unpopular opinion

I'm pretty sure I got an ask about this previously and I explained it before, but you can't convince me that she's going to kill someone. Or that she's the mastermind. Maybe if she lives past chapter 3, then we can start talking mastermind theories, but outside of that, I seriously don't think she's gonna kill anybody.

Song I associate with them

Living Dead Girl- Rob Zombie

It's literally just a fun Halloween song that kinda gives off Veronika vibes (although I probably could've chosen almost any Rob Zombie song for that)

Favorite picture of them

I honestly just think her expression in this sprite is really cute

Arturo

Favorite thing about them

Arturo is incredibly entertaining just because his ideals are so out-there to me. He was kind of hard to like at first, but honestly, he’s the kind of person I look at and think “I want to study you.”

Least favorite thing about them

His world view honestly makes him difficult to like and impossible to write. Have you tried writing fanfic from his POV? I did and I got about two paragraphs in before I realized what I was working with.

Favorite line

(in response to MonoTV) “On the contrary, I believe that there is a lot wrong with you”

Idk. Arturo really didn’t have a lot of lines that particularly stood out to me other than one particular rant about beautiful people that I’m too lazy to write out.

brOTP

Maybe this is a weird one, but after thinking about it a bit, I could kinda see him being friends with Whit. It’d certainly be amusing to see Whit pestering him, at the very least.

OTP

See response for Veronika.

nOTP

To contrast with Veronika, outside of her, I can’t really see myself shipping him with anyone, so I suppose most Arturo ships would fall into this category for me.

Random headcanon

Outside of work, the way he normally dresses is very extra. He’s not necessarily an expert in haute couture, but his wardrobe is probably worth more than my liver on the black market.

Unpopular opinion

I’d let him do my top surgery. There’s no way he’d do it, but I’d let him.

Song I associate with them

Around the Fur- Deftones

A bit of an odd choice in a way, but I guess the best thing to say is that this song is sort of the inverse of Arturo, being a critique of beauty standards and celebrity culture. I’m still counting it as an association, though.

Favorite picture of them

This is literally my discord pfp right now.

[ceoofanticatradora]

We need more anti C//A who are Adora stans (like you seem to be) so that people can understand that C///A is bad for Adora. Heck C//A is bad for Catra too, but the shippers don't seem to realize it. If Catra had been able to let Adora go maybe she could have healed instead of her festering and the abuse may have ended instead of escalated.

Hello Dear, welcome on my Blog and a big thank you for your message! Firstly I wanna apologize that this response is reaching you more than three full days, almost four later. Just real life getting into the way of my online presence (at least I got my A-Levels admission!) but I assure you that replying to you was on my To Do List the entire time. And while I could've typed something quick, I thought you deserved a full length response just as much as the person before you received. That goes for anyone really to ask/write me anything in the future.

Adora is a character that has flaws, her own interests, things she struggles with/is insecure about etc. but she also still works on being better (up to Season 5). This makes her relatable, fleshed out and overall three dimensional. Overall for me that makes Adora very likeable. Which is funny because when I first watched the show I thought of her as too goofy and felt like she as a character was overall just flat. Her character design did not speak to me either, the ponytail with the weird hair poof and these pointy shoulders of her jacket just really were not my taste. Isn't it amazing how perceptions can change?

As you can guess from that description I did not always stan Adora and she's probably still not my favorite character but over the almost two years I've been in this fandom I've grown rather fond of her. Other important characters to me are Kyle (a very relatable comfort character of mine, he learned to stand up for himself and others and I support that, f*ck Season 5 for barely acknowledging his existence), Lonnie (apart from treating Kyle badly (which I really do NOT support or excuse) I really love her, man, some women just do me like that, I mean she really stood up to Catra like that), Entrapta (I'm autistic too! It's great to have some representation, seeing the ableism/treatment she experiences in the show is not so much though), Seahawk (I don't even know why, I have some issues with his behavior towards Mermista at times but overall I love this dork), Scorpia (she reminds me of myself so much and I really wanna give her hugs, I'm so glad she chose to no longer let Catra treat her like that even though I will be forever salty she just immediately forgave her), Peekablue (I can explain this even less than Seahawk, especially since it was not even really him in the end but his existence somehow helped me cope with Season 5, without him I probably would've left this fandom ... and also my favorite color is blue) and Double Trouble (now there's enough people already critcizing how they're not exactly great Non-binary representation but this dramatic lizard will forever be in my heart, that reality check they gave Catra, basically slapping her in the face with facts was satisfying as h*ck, also I like lizards overall).

Now there's plenty of characters I like, dislike (or even hate) or am simply indifferent about but after all this is not a tier list but me talking about Adora, Catra and Catradora. Adora started off as this girl that was so sure what she was doing is right but once she was taught differently she was willing to leave everything she knew (except Catra, because she valued her despite everything) behind. And not only that, she broke out of the abuse cycle that Catra tried so hard to keep upright. And that is exactly what makes Adora such a good role model. She teaches children (or people) that:

Your past doesn't define what/who you are or what/who you can become

-> Adora used to be a Horde soldier and did not know where she came from, but nonetheless she found herself a family and became a hero that saved thousands of people

You can always change your mind and start a new life if you feel disappointed in what you are doing/who you are as a person

-> Basically the exact same point, Adora started a new life as she saw what the Horde really was and changed her mind about who to fight for

You deserve love too, be it platonic or romantic (or se*ual???) (If you're aro and/or ace just ignore the part that does not work for you)

-> While Adora for various reasons thought her only use was to please others and meet their needs and expectations (mostly due to Shadow Weaver and Catra) she learned to accept that she too deserves love and validation (if the love aspect would not have been focused on it being romantic love so she could smooch Catra in the finale this would've been a billion times better because she got love from her friends that showed her her real value)

You can walk away from something/someone, that does not make you egoistic/selfish

-> Adora walked away from the Horde, after Catra stubbornly refused to come with her despite many offers (basically Catra broke the promise, not Adora) from her too and that did not make her a "traitor" or "selfish", h*ck, Adora in the end did this for a bigger purpose too, even if part of it was her not wanting to live with such wrong morals

Your opinions, feelings etc. about a person/something can change and that is perfectly fine and valid, being able to change is part of what makes someone human

-> Adora's views on many things changed throughout the show: The Horde and the Rebellion, the First Ones, Catra, being She-Ra, herself, her priorities and so on ... she actually makes use of her brain, which is why Catra saying "Don't you ge it?" or calling her an idiot and dumb never sat right with me, she's a realistic character for shifting with her thoughts, feelings etc. and sometimes just does not fully think things through

You don't have to let other people treat you like sh*t (just because they have some issues they never worked through does not give them any right to let it out on you)

-> This point is obviously centered mostly around Catra and her abusing Adora almost every chance she gets, which is why Adora standing up for herself and not letting Catra blame her for her own decisions and mistakes is so important, "You made your choice, now live with it" is one of the most powerful lines throughout all the five Seasons

Now I'm sure there is still more to Adora's character than what I just listed and unfortunately almost all the points basically got pushed aside, well, Adora as a character got pushed aside in Season 5. All her growth, the things that made me love her, see her as great role model for so many people robbed of their value for the sake of making everything revolve around Catra. That brings me to her and how you are absolutely right that Catradora is harmful to both characters. Of course Adora is affected most by it in the end but Catra too is obviously suffering under the fandoms obsession and just the overall idea of them being romantically involved.

Just like with Adora the stans make almost everything about Catra over her relationship with Adora. She too can barely exist outside of it and if she wasn't the fan favorite she'd most likely would too be mostly in Fanarts that include Adora and not just her (if you google "Catra Fanart" most content is still Catra and Catra only but here and there Catradora still peaks through). But for whatever reason the fandom still views her more as her own person as the other ones? Catrouble and Scorptra Shippers might actually still get less hate than Glimmadora Shippers (I'm not denying they don't get any, they most certaintly do) which is just plain hypocricy and favorism. Kinda like the: A woman needs to be loyal to her husband and her husband only but if the husband wants to be active with other women that is perfectly fine because "that is just how men are" or how i like to call it ... sexism. Now in this case they are both women so it's not sexism but yo do get my point.

But much more importantly, Catra has an unhealthy obsession with Adora. Signs of that are for example:

Constantly talking about Adora, even when said person is not around (to Shadow Weaver, Scorpia etc.)

Obsessing over having control over Adora like in that one Episode "Are you kidding? I finally got control over Adora, I'm not giving that up!"

Building her entire character and her actions around Adora "We need to take Adora down", "Adora left me", "I'd rather see the whole world end than see you win!", also shown in Season 5 where she states she does save Glimmer only for Adora and not for Glimmer or to do the right thing

Getting aggressive or very emotional over Adora like clawing the wall, having nightmares etc. (destructive behavior towards herself and others)

Having no or barely any characteristics outside of her relationship with Adora like, we don't know her interests or likes and dislikes outside of being evil, obsessed with Adora, being abused by Shadow Weaver ...

Trying to force Adora to meet her needs and expectations regardless of Adora's owns

Sacrificing her oppurtunity to be happy in the Crimson Waste for the sake of her Adora obsession and being better than her at all costs

So yes, you were very right with saying that not putting Catra in a relationship with Adora would've benefited both characters. Catra could've learned to exist on her own, develop interests and a life outside of Adora. Learn to accept herself and eventually come to terms with her childhood abuse. She could've been free and not "the abusive cat girl that ended up with the person she unhealthily obsessed over to the point of no return" she kinda is now. Even if we ignore the whole "dating your long term abuser" part from Adora's side and "being rewarded" for horrible behavior, Catra alone is not giving a good example to people watching. As much as I dislike Catra, disdain her even, an ending where she is dependent on Adora, unable to stand on her own two legs after she led armies in war is not what I would wish for her, even with a decent redemption arc (that she did not get).

[dropintomanga]

The Evergreen Shonen Story

A short while ago, there were some online conversations about the popularity of shonen stories. Almost all of them are based around the experiences of youth and some adult fans wanted action-oriented stories based around their life experiences as adults. Reading stories centered on teens and kids as the main characters isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, I’ll admit that. But sometimes, I think shonen stories are somewhat of a reflection on what adults have been telling kids for years and how some/most of their advice has failed youth.

Life begins in the womb. We come out to a world of many possibilities. As children, we’re immune to bias until adults decide to tell us about the many differences of various people out there. Some adults may not care and have trouble dealing with their own pain, They may resort to substances like drugs and alcohol to cope. Under the influence of drugs or alcohol, these adults may start to abuse children and/or neglect them entirely.

There’s a term that relates to the overwhelming negative experiences of children growing up. It’s called ACE - “adverse childhood experiences.” Examples of such experiences include physical/sexual abuse, parent separation, physical/emotional neglect, and living with an adult with substance addiction. I look at a bunch of shonen flashback stories and many of the traumatic ones revolve around physical and emotional neglect.

Why is this important to acknowledge? Because some adults do a bad job in raising their children or guiding kids to become responsible individuals. We’ve seen examples of bad parenting in anime and manga. There’s also the fact that adults have been full of dreams themselves when they were kids, but have been fed advice on how the “real world” works. They’ve been told that they can’t make their dreams come true and/or they need to behave a certain way to get by. It’s a vicious cycle. A colleague of mine told me that when she sees young people with vision and a desire to smash the status quo end up being a part of the status quo themselves, she wondered if that’s due to those individuals seeing how hard it is and how long it takes to generate the change they want to see.

One of my favorite shonen characters in recent memory is Satoro Gojo of Jujutsu Kaisen. He was a student of Jujutsu High and ends up becoming a teacher there. Gojo is considered to be a prodigy, but he remains humble. He’s also willing to speak up to authority as he has gotten into disputes with upper school management over the fates of cursed students (particularly Yuji Itadori and Yuta Okkutsu) whose potential have yet to be realized. Gojo has once said that he needs to remind himself not to be a bitter old adult as he ages.

A good number of shonen stories drive the point that adults shouldn’t be bitter old ones. Or maybe more importantly, don’t be dismissive about teen experiences. I listened to a podcast a while back about loneliness and how much it affects mental health. There was a discussion point about adults ignoring teens that feel lonely with regards to dating. Here’s a quote from that discussion.

“The number one way that we do this (being dismissive of loneliness) in America is every single 30-year-old up completely dismisses the loneliness that a teenager feels about not having a significant other. Because once we hit 30, we realize that your 16 year old significant other is nonsense. It’s just nonsense. You’re gonna be in love so much in your life. You’re gonna love everybody. You’re going to date a million people. It’s gonna be fine. You’re going to realize how insignificant this relationship is. 

The key word there is you’re gonna realize it. It’s a future thing for them. So when every 30, 40, 50, 60 year old looks at the 16, 17, 18 year old and says, oh, you just broke up with your boyfriend? Yeah, who cares? That’s a meaningless relationship. I don’t care. That exacerbates the loneliness. It exacerbates the disconnected feeling because it really, really, really, really matters to them.”

I honestly think adults being dismissive towards teens’ current experiences is one reason why shonen stories still resonate with many. We’ve all been through those times where adults just shut us down because ultimately, it doesn’t matter. Yes, there comes a point where we have to move forward. But a good amount of emotional pain stems from adolescence and it lingers. Most mental disorders begin to happen around those years. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know how to give back in ways that stop the cycle. I do think mangaka are trying their best to give back the way they know how. 

Yet I think the biggest reason for the enduring popularity of shonen stories is friendship. We all know the Shonen Jump tropes - friendship, hard work and victory. All three are important, but friends are what really keeps us alive. The harsh truths are that hard work doesn’t always get you where you want to go and victories do come at the cost of important relationships. Over the years, I noticed that in my neck of the woods, friendship is frowned upon. When you’re ranking important relationships in life, first is your mother, then maybe your father, then your romantic partner, followed by your children. Friends are last. There was a nice read I found that listed a good amount of studies on the importance of friends (especially for those who are LGBTQ+ and faced stigma from immediate family). 

We don’t live on an island, contrary to what neoliberalism says. Families aren’t enough. Friends are what keeps us alive and helps build our sense of identity. 

Maybe the fans who want more mature/adult-centered stories with shonen action just want to see more nuanced stories about friendships in adult settings. Friendships are so hard to make and maintain as adults. There’s some glimmers of hope for those kinds of stories - in video games. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is a great example of an adult hero in a genre dominated by young protagonists, the Japanese RPG. The story is about a 42-year old ex-yakuza who gets exiled into a unfamiliar city and manages to make something of himself with the help of new friends he made there. It was refreshing because the whole cast were adults who were unemployed and/or stigmatized due to underworld ties. They managed to save Japan from a vicious political alliance with action elements that felt shonen at heart.

I’m all for more adult-centered mainstream shonen stories because seinen material can be a bit too blunt for some tastes, but there’s a lot of focus on the mindset of youth lately than in decades past since there’s concern on how they will manage in a world that continues to disappoint them.

I love shonen because I honestly don’t feel like I’m an adult due to my depression. My development felt stunted. I feel that I have more in common with 20+-year olds than people my age. I want to be around people who are youthful at heart. I wonder about those who still enjoy shonen past the target demographic - what still draws them to it? Is it due to them embracing their inner child more likely than most people? Or do they just like to follow simple action stories that have a lot of heart (something that some people don’t have)?

Looking at shonen’s enduring mainstream status does make me think about the the feedback loops between adults and teenagers. I’ll end this by talking about an incident that happened a couple years ago where a somewhat prominent Anitwitter figure (I am NOT going to mention their name here, but you may know who I’m referring to), who made a lot of friends with people in the anime/manga industry, was outed be a sexual predator who went after young naive anime fans at fan conventions. One of the reactions from someone that was once close with them was how can older anime fans better connect with younger anime fans when needed. I know from personal experience, I sigh on seeing the behavior of teens at conventions at times. But I learned that by saying things like “Kids are so dramatic,” “Boys will be boys,” “She’s being emotional.” gets harmful in a hurry where proper context is warranted. Maybe they are being so-and-so, but it doesn’t hurt to ask and give validation to their concerns. Teens are the lifeblood of anime conventions right now.

Shonen is a gateway introduction for youth on how to process pain in a way that helps themselves and other people with the help of said people. It’s an escape from the distress and trauma of reality. That reality, which has situations like the incident I mentioned, is controlled by adults who don’t always have it together, can’t admit their flaws, and sadly take it out on the world. That’s why shonen is still so powerful today despite all the criticism the genre gets. And that’s the evergreen truth.

[gear-project]

One Character versus THE ROSTER

This issue has been on my mind of late: the idea that people are so focused on one singular character in fighting games that that single character is what defines whether or not they like the game or not.

I hate to break it to most of you newcomers to fighting games, but... Ryu isn't the only character in Street Fighter.

Just like Sol Badguy isn't the only Guilty Gear character, or Baiken, or Chipp, or Jack-O', or even Elphelt.

I want you to understand something: hating on characters is just as bad as focusing on ONE singular character.

Now I get it, as fans we sometimes obsess over one particular character we relate to... I know there's plenty of people like that, I was like that once too when I was younger. I matured and grew out of it, though.

But nowadays everyone's so quick to be opinionated: I hate this character, that character sucks, this character's broken, I can't fight against this character, etc etc, whining endlessly.

I had an argument recently with someone about why they hated Xrd, and they always go on and on endlessly about why they hated Leo Whitefang as a character.

Let me ask you a VERY IMPORTANT question: unless said character is pure Paywall "Expensive" DLC... is the game preventing you from playing as that character? For any reason?

Even if you don't own the character, that's not necessarily a guarantee that someone might one day gift you some DLC for your Birthday/Christmas, whatever... right?

What's the difference between playing AS a character versus fighting AGAINST that character?

Have you ever really pondered that question?

Even in a mirror match, no two Leo Whitefangs are the same. Unless you're complaining about what color they picked, which is purely for aesthetics (and laughing, apparently).

But, even then, the playing field is more level than it will ever be in other situations.

Even if you have a hard time fighting against someone like Leo... playing AS Leo means you have the same advantages (and disadvantages) THAT HE DOES!

Brilliant!

But hey, I'm not saying it's a braindead counter-pick... you still have to learn how to use him just like any OTHER CHARACTER IN THE ROSTER... YOU STILL HAVE TO TAKE THE TIME TO LEARN THEM.

Even Sol Badguy, for as much time as people spend hating on him... Sol has been hated since the very first Guilty Gear... no one could beat him in Arcade Mode even... I mean c'mon, you guys need to seriously learn the game if you want to win.

But that's just it.

You need to learn the game. To STUDY the ROSTER.

Instead of bellyaching about what a character can do AGAINST you... learn what they can't do. Learn what weaknesses they DO HAVE.

"Why can't I win?" Simple: You don't know how to win. Learn HOW to win.

"Why can't I play the way I want to?" For as much freedom as Guilty Gear has afforded us over the years, Roman Cancels, Dead Angles, Charge Cancels, Instant Kills, Burst Overdrives, Forcebreak Abuse, even something as simple as jump cancels or Instant Airdash in someone's face... it takes a bit of creativity on your part to come up with something substantial.

But, it's your own fault if your Opponent can see right through it. Don't make it too obvious. Keep your Aces close to the chest, put on that Poker face.

If you're fighting someone who is more skilled than you, OF COURSE you're gonna have a hard time.

But that's the best time to ask questions: what CAN you do? What CAN'T you do? What SHOULD you do? How can you get sneaky?

"Why can't I have fun?" That BEGS the QUESTION: what is your definition of fun?

This all boils back in to my main topic: ENJOYING THE ROSTER AS A WHOLE.

Yeah sure, that one character is super strong, or that other character is annoying to deal with...

But they aren't the only characters worth spending your emotions and time on, are they?

How many characters can you say you've put in your pocket and studied? How many characters have you even TRIED?

Mmm, okay, yeah, some are difficult to learn at first... but I'd wager that once you pick up a key nuance of a particular character, all the pieces of how they play will fall in to place.

There is NO CHARACTER that is absolutely IMPOSSIBLE TO LEARN.

I'd actually state, that with GGStrive, most characters are boiled down to their most BASIC OF BASIC ELEMENTS. Some might argue they are TOO BASIC.

But learning the basics is always important. That's why they're called "Fundamentals".

Picking up a random character, pushing buttons, and exploring what they can do isn't hard at all.

The next question you need to ask is... how far do you want to go with this character?

Every character I've fought with always has a tough matchup or two... that goes for ANY character, and even the strongest characters (like Justice, or heck, Leopaldon), have situations they cannot handle.

But rather than dwell on the things they can't do... looking at everything they CAN do and handling the situation when its in your favor to WIN... is the most ideal outcome.

So why focus on the ROSTER instead of ONE CHARACTER?

In my case, I don't dwell on specific situations because that only happens with one or two events/situations. I like to look at the OVERALL SMELL OF THE GAME.

Yes, of course characters have a hard time in some situations... but it's when they SHINE in OTHER situations... situations that you've practiced for, situations you've studied... even situations you found were interesting. Studying the MATCHUP in other words: is where things become less "effort" and more "fun".

How many times have you abused a character who had a hard time against the character you picked? I'm sure it's a guilty pleasure to a lot of people. We can be just as brutal to people on the dishing end as we often complain about being on the receiving end.

But even THAT is a learning process, it's a learning experience for both the abusee, and the abuser.

Even if it looks like I'm "bored" kicking the bejeezus out of some poor loser who can't fight back... that's only what it looks like on the outside:

On the INSIDE, I'm expecting them to find a way to fight back. To turn the tables on my methods. To flip my strategies on their ear. To make my attempts at fighting look like I pushed the wrong button.

That's what META is... looking at the same situations over and over and seeing what different THINGS you can DO in those situations. How will you respond if you somehow manage to block Volcanic Viper? How will you respond if I were to wiff this attack?

But, again, THIS IS WHY THE ROSTER AS A WHOLE IS SO INTERESTING!

Why can't people SEE this????

Each character has their own responses to unique situations... and they can, in turn, create their own unique situations.

But you have to know how to handle those situations if you want to win.

The only other excuse you'd have for hating a character is if you hated their wardrobe and color choices... that's just a fashion opinion at the end of the day.

But, to me... it's not about winning... it's about enjoying each and every situation.

To enjoy the "world" of Guilty Gear, not just one person in it.