#he didnt know how to hold her and like

[molloyism]

constantly thinking abt the implications of the yowzah kiss at end of day of the moon.

[bigmoon-is-bigwife]

You know sometimes I forget just how much bloodlust TR!Ros has and I think she does too until she gets lost in it. Ros saw weakness in Alien Pili and immediately went on the offensive and started chasing him. She took a lot of joy in seeing him cower and cry and was intentionally trying to break his armor to make him defenseless. This isn't even new behavior either, Ros has done similar things with people like Harry and other weaker Red Faction members. She likes when people cower from her and gets lost in the adrenaline of it. It's why she keeps killing low level players and it's part of why she ended up killing Alien Pili. She gets caught up in the rush of being the attacker and the power that comes with it that she forgets to hold back. Stronger players often fight back and/or don't humor her so it's not as fun for her so she backs off but weaker players panic in a way that gives her a thrill and she forgets to stop. It's like a prey drive in a way and she doesn't know how to control it and that's why she's so dangerous to weaker players. She was wanting to attack Eloise the other day for the fun of it and everyone around her told her not to because Eloise was much weaker. Ros said she wouldn't kill her but given her reputation for accidentally going too far, they were right to step in. Ros has earned her reputation for a reason and I think it's because she's so used to feeling like the victim that she forgets she is just as capable of being dangerous.

[polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup]

Everything about the battle at yokohama was Amazing, I love all of your thoughts and world building in pez dispenser. If you have time (and feel like it), could you explain ‘this entire sub-analysis on Idaten’s internal culture and how it intersects with broader heroics standards’. (i was ENRAPTURED by your hero economic analysis)

ps. when i saw in the tags about how the class just. broke down. and asked for their parents, it was like sucker punch to the face, i couldn’t imagine how the actual heroes felt when they saw them. if the public saw that side of class 2a, would they lay off? probably not, but damn. your world building and ideas are just. so good

So my decision about Idaten and its subculture actually hinges on one question about canon: Why did Stain go after Tensei?

Stain was all about attacking people who had committed some kind of perceived failing of heroics. But Tensei seems to be legitimately above the board. He didn’t seem to engage too heavily in the consumerist culture around heroics. He did good work. He was a good hero. So what about him made Stain decide to go after him?

I didn’t want it to be an “IDK he thinks all heroes but all might is fake” thing because 1) that cheapens the character and 2) it doesn’t match what canon shows. Don’t get me wrong, he was a lunatic who thought he needed to kill a fucking kid over his extremist ideals, but he let Izuku go the second Izuku established he conformed to his moral system.

Stain kills when he perceives a reason to. That doesn’t mean he’s always right. But he needs an excuse first.

I decided that there was one detail about Idaten that would be his most likely motive: the number of sidekicks he had.

Tensei is canonically taking up his parents’ mantle. This is a family business he’s heavily suited to and excels at. He has working beneath him a much higher than average number of sidekicks. And we know from canon that he’s not the type to take advantage of his team. Fuck, he seems to emphasize taking care of his team and working together above all else.

But we know that from canon. Stain doesn’t. What he sees, from the outside, is a young hero who took over his parents’ agency and is bolstering his own career on the backs of his sidekicks, which is what so many heroes were doing at that time.

Because stain is an extremist. He doesn’t once consider that maybe Tensei is the exception to the rule. He didn’t think to ask the sidekicks who he was, in a way, taking action on behalf of what they thought of Tensei.

Which is consistent with his character. It took him less than five minutes to decide “yeah I need to put down this grief stricken fifteen year old boy” do you????

Iida becomes the kind of hero that meets his ideals. Stain would have killed him the first time Iida gave him a reason. He’s shown to not always be right or do due diligence to determine if someone is even consistent with his crazy fucking moral system. He was just wrong when he went after Tensei.

And a big reason why he was wrong is because Idaten, as a culture, is far from the typical agency experience. It’s just that no one knows this, because Idaten is shown to be all about maintain a strong and confident facade. It’s not releasing its fucking employment contracts. The public only gets the calm, in control demeanor of the team. It doesn’t see how the sausage is made.

Do you know that millionaire ceo who realized his employees lives sucked and voluntarily took a huge pay cut so that way he could raise all of their salaries to a huge degree and the company as a whole got much, much better because the workers cared about it now and they made more profits and his salary eventually increased too as the company improved and all of his employees loved him? And he published the results thinking maybe other ceos would follow them after it was proven to make their companies more successful? And literally not one single one of them did?

Yeah that’s Idaten.

We talked in the earlier post about how heroics culture, for the most part, is abusive and built on the backs of sidekicks who are being widely taken advantage of. Idaten just… isn’t. Their compensation is incredibly fair and above board. People get credited for busts based on who was in charge of that particular bust or went above and beyond. They genuinely take care of their team, which is consistent with how Tensei seems to treat his team in canon.

For the most part, the sidekicks don’t want to even leave Idaten and become big name heroes themselves. They are all so genuinely happy and fulfilled that most of them happily spend their whole career as a sidekick.

But that’s the exception, and not the rule. And from the outside, Stain saw another sidekick farm propping up a pretend hero.

Which is one of the reasons why all of the Idaten sidekicks got together to hunt him down like a sick dog when he escaped. Tensei was babygirl to them and Stain hurt babygirl. He besmirched babygirl’s name over something he didn’t even do. Tensei didn’t even coordinate that mission the sidekicks made a group chat without him and went out to kick that fucking guy’s ass.

Idaten is a model of what heroics could be if it wasn’t focused on self profit and promotion. It made sacrifices to be this way. But it resulted in a team of excellent heroes who are all able to focus on protecting society without going home and feeling like they got fucked.

Stain has this mental image of heroes who should be helpful and good and save everyone without any personal incentive. But when you’re breaking your fucking back and going home to a shit apartment while your boss does 3 hours of work per day and has five houses, you start to ask yourself why you have to fucked for society to be safe. The sidekicks’ “greed” took the blame for the meltdown with Tartarus, but really, people should have been pointing fingers at every single agency head who refused to treat them fairly.

Idaten is this sparkling model of a business that is incredibly successful because the company heads are actually fair and good. They are the exception. And they are operating within a system where many of the other agencies are treating their talent like disposable cogs in a machine. The system needs to be regulated to force everyone else to act like Idaten—Idaten’s independent success is not a sign that the system works on its own.

As to your second question—no. The world saw little snapshots of Class 2A melting down in the aftermath and it got traded around like every other moment. Someone took a picture of the moment I talked about with Iida just sitting on the curb and crying when his brother’s men came to relieve him of command, and it was just another famous picture of many on the internet do that incident.

It was just—a horrifically public event. All of the kids had to be hospitalized in the aftermath. The world knew that. Izuku took a hit during his big fight with Mirio against the major villain team. He got stabbed, and it was poisoned. He knew from the villain’s history that the poison they produced was slow acting, though, so he quietly took Todoroki aside, had him cauterize the wound, and kept fighting until more heroes came. There’s a fuck ton of photos of him lying down on the sidewalk with his head in Todoroki’s lap in terrible shape waiting for the ambulance to come get him. And the world took that as a “Look At How Strong He Is, All Might Reborn, He Fought All Night With That Terrible Wound And He Still Prevailed” not “wow, that actual child had to fight for hours through the night not knowing if he’d live long enough to make it to a hospital.” Which is like. What happened. Izuku didn’t tell anyone but Todoroki that he took the hit. They both knew that if he didn’t get the antidote in time, he was dead. And they also both knew that there was no way he was going to be able to have even a shot at a hospital until morning, so they just had to keep going.

The world also took that as fuel for the ongoing ship war around Izuku and Todoroki, that they are only marginally aware of. Which like. Would not be comforting, that that’s what they took from a picture where both of them were legitimately afraid that Izuku was going to die.

The world knew they were young. They knew they were a bunch of amazing kids who had done something spectacular. To a lesser extent, they knew that those kids struggled in the aftermath. But that was never going to save them from the media machine. The fact that this fell to kids who visibly struggled in the aftermath was picked apart and used as a bat to hit opponents with in the debates that followed.

The picture of Iida crying on the curb with his brother’s sidekicks around him is considered one of the seminal photos documenting modern Japan’s heroics. It is the kind of thing that is probably going to end up in a textbook down the line.

Iida hates that photo. He hates that he had one moment of vulnerability in the aftermath when he managed to keep it together the entire rest of the event, and people still pass it around like a trading card. He had worked so, so hard not to lose it, and right when he thought it was safe to, it got posted on the internet.

When Iida sat on the curb and started crying, he was barely standing. He was injured himself. Momo had a tremendous fight that left her in terrible shape, and everyone was afraid that she was not going to make it. Izuku had just revealed, by the way, guys, This Happened, and now everyone was afraid he wasn’t going to make it. Bakugou was like two days out of the medically induced coma Uraraka put him in when this happened and apparently the doctor’s warnings that he could only be on light work was a hard requirement because he was completely non responsive for the since the fighting stopped and now everyone was afraid he wasn’t going to make it. The entire class was concussed, exhausted, and wanted their parents.

And he just really, really wanted his brother. He wanted his big brother to come in as the hero he had always admired, sit down with him, and tell him it was over. That he did good, and he could rest now. His brother’s sidekicks were the closest second available to him.

That picture made Iida feel like he had failed. He hadn’t held it together, and he hadn’t had the same strong facade as his brother always did. His anguish became another thing for the world to chew on. And that was true for all of those kids at that fight.

[hauntingblue]

making a collection

making another collection with a threatening aura

[dent-de-leon]

I remember Taliesin saying something to the effect that he wished the Nein had taken more than just the oracle deck when they searched Molly, and the implication that he was carrying some other interesting trinkets that we never got to explore--

Anyway, please consider: Caleb taking one of Molly's earrings or little horn ornaments before he buries him. Something to remember him by, keep him close. Maybe one of his moon charms, or perhaps even a symbol of the Moonweaver Molly hid. Forbidden in the empire, but dear enough to Molly that Caleb would still risk it--

Caleb wearing one of Tealeaf's earrings when he first sees Lucien--

[maerossi]

redditers whove been complaining that the show's taking too long for the helena reveal like hush shhhh im listening to the story

[gayjermamexico]

hummmm i looked around a bit and i guess it just depends on how u interpret their actions…?

[thetimelordbatgirl]

Ngl youtube videos suddenly got me slowly turning into a Justin Russo hater.

[glitchfang]

should i leave it up to the masses if bruno is a closet trans woman at this point cause like i genuinely dont know for myself anymore

[waffultaim]

Well I'm not so dumbfounded on Longtail as a character tbh but I think him being the mentor of Bramblepaw instead of Fireheart could have been a good add to his character development.

.

.

Imagine that when Bluestar is about to speak of who will be Bramblepaw mentor, a voice rises in the crowd interrupting the ceremony, surprised Fireheart looks at the origin of the voice just to find that is Longtail the cause of it and not so far away Goldenflower is also there as well, looking at both leader and deputy...

do you see my vision?

[trainerethan]

In my world oak isn't a malicious abusive bastard. But he is unintentionally greens villain origin story. And I don't think I will write about green being the bigger person and forgiving oak for constantly being obtuse and seeing the worst in green for no good reason. Sometimes people write their conflict as "maybe we were both wrong...you made me miserable during my developing years but....I WAS rude as an 11 year old with no parents and a grandpa who was always scolding me and telling me he's dissapointed in me so...I guess is deserved it..." Especially when oak never actually apologizes or realizes how he hurt green. But it's just like "okay we're good now :)" I refuse. That said I think I am obligated to write them eventually having some sort of heart to heart and good relationship once green is an adult. I don't want him to be miserable forever and in pokemas green gets excited when you bring him up so i don't want to make their relationship seem worse than it actually is. Granted this is also a fanfic where green is an autistic she/him lesbian so canon doesn't matter THAT much but y'know. Still.

[saenora]

recently i have seen too many takes on itoshis having unhealthy parents... or their parents were neglectful of them... or pressurizing and i just wanna take a hot minute BEC WHAT ARE PEOPLE ON?!?

[fellhellion]

This part of the editorial from 2099 (pic sourced from this post) is so interesting to me because i don’t even think the idea of Miguel having these kinds of flaws is uninteresting or impossible, but I just personally would never have come to this conclusion just based on the text.

Like, when I personally look at how Miguel and Dana interact, I don’t see any indication that he emotionally condescends to having a relationship with her, when you’d think this strain of elitism should shine through in some part of their relationship at least initially in his arc.

I don’t look at Xina and Miguel’s interactions and interpret any sense him feeling threatened by her intelligence (even if we're just talking purely pre-spidermanning), when you’d think an element of that would be present, even in a flashback. He was a callous dickhead about the cheating explanation, but that alone without some corresponding behaviour to how he speaks to/treats Dana, even just as a flashback, just doesn’t offer the bridging piece to displaying what the authorial intent apparently was, at least for me.

Also, and by god we always come back to Dana’s writing being so damn lazy, but if Miguel - even if only at first - sought Dana out due to the emotional convenience she provided, what has prompted enough change that he is willing to bear and forgive actions like her seeking out the company of the man who drugged him when she wants to needle Miguel.

ALSO. PETER DAVID I AM SPEAKING DIRECTLY INTO YOUR EAR RN. ITS VERY SILLY TO ME TO POINT OUT THE MISOGYNISTIC STREAK INTENDED IN MIGUEL’S ACTIONS HERE BUT THEN LITERALLY JUST NOT BOTHER TO MAKE THE WOMAN THIS IS ABOUT MAKE LIKE. SENSE WHEN YOU WROTE HER. OFFER NO EXPLORATION INTO WHAT HER ACTIONS SPEAK TO IN HER PERSON AND DELVE INTO WHAT CONTRADICTORY ACTS MIGHT TELL US ABOUT HER.

[shoechoe]

I find it funny people seem to be interpreting the poll as "which one *looks* the best". You can choose based on that but I just meant which one is your favorite generally (though I guess the distinction is otherwise minimal for everyone except for me skfjsjfj)

[coulsons-left-arm]

Having a fic plot you wrote be realized irl is insane actually....

[hauntingblue]

Oh my god why........ why would someone do this omg.... feminism would have saved them all... lesbianism too...