#he doesn’t even want to be a hero

[emsleyanbluejay]

none of you are ever going to read this fic, so i can spoil the first big twist because i’m looking forward to the utter betrayal:

the first viewpoint character, who you’re introduced to as the protagonist, is a fake-it-til-he-makes-it nervous wreck who doesn’t even want to be here but has no other way to get his search and rescue license, after finally starting to gain some confidence and feel that he measures up to his classmates, dies brutally saving a fellow student’s life, and rather than let him rest, the villains desecrate his corpse and turn it into a weapon for no other reason than to torment his friends

[tanglepelt]

Dc x dp idea 127

After the events of the nasty burger. Clockwork doesn’t rewind the explosion, but rather then fully trust Danny not to allow Dan to happen. He took matters into his own hands.

He deages Danny and in order to ensure he had no contact with Vlad ever again. Unleashes a grieving and peeved super powered toddler on the dc universe.

Jack is a hero’s alternate. Like say Clark or Bruce. Even any of the batkids or super kids. So if a dna test were to occur. Well. It would register Danny as their child.

[bitemarx]

her and duck newton.. chosen ones who stare down fate like a barrel to the head and chose to walk away. literally so interesting 2 me

anyway. hero oak #1 mami tomoe defender.

[swordmaid]

i am wide awake thinking about that post canon jb au again when I should be sleeping …!!! such is the nature of the jbrainrot…

[fujii-draws]

OKAY! Chatot rant in tags below! Read at your own discretion.

[little-pondhead]

Does villain Danny have custom made accessories? Does he have swirly glasses? Very long ragged lab coat with carefully placed stains? Does he don a fake, tastefully swirly mustache when he hijacks every screen on the town to give rambling villain monologues?

Does he put comically big red selfdestruct buttons on his machines?

I need to now

Concept: He does wear all of that, but switches it up every time he’s committing a major crime and refuses to acknowledge what he’s doing. He never wears the same prop twice. October is his favorite month :)

And I feel like Danny would put those oversized buttons on everything, but they either don’t work at all, or something stupid happens like making confetti and glitter blow up in the face of whomever pressed the button. (He probably doesn’t want anyone to get into a horrible accident like he did. After all, Danny died because of a few loose wires and one big button. So he pulls a Death Star and puts one vital flaw in all his designs for the heroes to discover.)

[ilovereading5252]

DpxDc promt

Danny knows he can get a bit hyper focused. Especially if it concerns him personally. So maybe he didn’t notice that other places also had ghost problems. So what? He fixed it didn’t he. He even said sorry, all right. He will pay more attention from now on.

The Justice League, probably: It’s alright, we forgive you, but what did you do with them?

[daylighteclipsed]

actually it’s kinda funny how KH1 ends with Riku telling Sora to take care of Kairi and then Sora completely does not do that and searches for Riku refusing to go home at all without him

[lucksbucks]

“rick riordan should have his stan lee moment and have a cameo in the percy jackson show!” - old, tired

“haley riordan, whom rick created percy jackson for, and in many ways IS the original percy jackson, should have a cameo in the show” - fresh, exciting

[zeb-z]

missa, after his self resentment and lamenting about how he doesn’t feel worthy or like he should be accepted, after telling himself and the capybaras that he doesn’t have a home, not really - after all is said and done, he returns to phil & missa, leaving his mini mi in the house on the wall. as if he’d consider anywhere other than the house he shared with phil safe enough. seeking out safety and home brought him right back where he started.

something about how despite his internal conflicts and issues about what he thinks he deserves, he’ll still come back. and for all he worries that he is not enough to be loved in return, his name is still on the warp stone.

[sorryiwasasleep]

No no no, because I understand that it’s a camp to train demigods and everything, but why the FUCK did Jason at TWO YEARS OLD have to start training, to the point where he’s there to get an SPQR brand as a toddler! It’s not like Camp Half Blood where Annabeth arrived at 7 (also absurd but MUCH more understandable considering she was already being attacked by monsters AND that Chiron is the only real adult) Whereas New Rome HAS ADULTS!!! Married couples! Families!

I don’t care that he’s the son of Jupiter. You’re telling me NONE OF THEM took a look at a literal CHILD walking into camp and didn’t go ‘I will simply take him, this is my son now, you can have him back to train in a few years you crazies.’

[tanglepelt]

Dc x dp idea 34

Danny gets sent back in time often to fix disasters. This causes problems.

Danny is a member of the teen titans in this. Amity has been handled portal shut down by the league. The minute the anti ecto acts were suggested they acted and nipped it in the bud. As Danny is a teen in this that’s we’re he goes.

Now Danny never really stated his status as a halfa. Just indirectly said his parents caused him to have the second form.

One day there is a huge threat. Now there are rumors the ghost king is kind and protective of earth. In the past there are records of him helping. At the same time warnings he will bring destruction. Two very distinct personalities.

Danny tries to stop them but it’s too late. As he is the one who sealed pariah not the ancients. The summoning worked as it had no magic backing it.

Cue pariah instantly attacking Danny raving about how he took away his victory. Now they have two threats at once. Danny takes down pariah and becomes king.

Now the split personalities makes sense especially when Danny actually discloses some information. Like the fact he had time traveled and clockwork likes to make him fix things.

[theknittingshadow]

Tang is a Damsel in Distress

So, we know in the original Journey to the West, Tripitaka gets kidnapped almost every chapter. Usually either to be eaten or married. Lego Monkie Kid seems to imply this happens to Tang too.

In the episode “Amnesia Rules,” Tang is kidnapped by the Scorpion Queen. Coincidentally, a character who shows up in JTTW too though they changed her and her story TREMENDOUSLY for the cartoon.

He tells her that he’s been kidnapped by “a lot of lesser yaogui” before soooooo

This is interesting. As far as the show goes, the only time Tang has been kidnapped was when the Spider Queen was going to eat Pigsy and him. That’s only one, not a lot.

Add onto this:

“She kept giving you noodles so you wouldn’t leave.” (Pigsy speaking)

Pigsy says this with exasperation, as if this has happened dozens of times before. My guess is that Tang HAS dealt with semi-regular kidnappings similar to his predecessor Tang Sanzang. And based off of Pigy’s reaction, he was there for a LOT of these, most likely having to save him.

This also explains how Pigsy carries around Tang is to such ease and how Tang doesn’t so much as bat an eye or flounder about.

Probably had to carry him off to safety a lot in their youth. I would LOVE to see an episode where they show Pigsy, Tang, and Sandy when they were younger and play it almost like a classic episode of JTTW. Tang gets kidnapped and Pigsy and Sandy go rescue him!

[justaz]

percy loves to play card games with estelle but especially go fish (it’s a simple game that most kids learn really early on and the whole go fish son of poseidon thing, yeah u get it). he usually wins bc it’s simple but he does give her a few wins (teaching her to win and lose with grace). annabeth swoops in and (secretly) teaches estelle the strategic part of a card game like that (keeping track of ur opponents cards, what they ask for, etc). the next time percy and estelle play go fish, estelle absolutely decimates percy and he’s just sitting there wondering how the absolute fuck he lost so badly at go fish to a goddamn five year old.

[kingkatsuki]

Imagine Bakugou picking you up from a night out with friends at the end of his patrol, so he comes in still in his hero costume not bothering to shower or change🥺

[compacflt]

I just wanted to say as someone who has stumbled across your blog and has read your Wednesday wips and posts about anything topgun related that your thought process and consideration of mav and ice, specifically their political beliefs and relationships with their own identities, is honestly so impressive and cool. You have brought such realism and life to these characters which is just so refreshing to see. idk i just wanted to express how cool and awesome i think that is

Because of the thought into these characters does it make it difficult to like them or understand them if you have differing opinions from them? for me personally i feel like if i were to ever actually have a convo with ice or mav regarding identity politics i would actually start to lose my mind (like how one feels when your dad or fun uncle talks for too long at thanksgiving dinner). If it does make them difficult to like, does that make it difficult for you to write them sometimes?

oh yeah! i think, my ice i really empathize with & really love & really could get along with, once he grows out of the sexism of his teens & twenties, but my maverick drives me crazy. someone sent in an ask a while ago that was like “WHY is cyclone simpson your one true love??” And it’s because i too would absolutely hate maverick & hate working with him lol. people who are overly cocky & un-self-aware & a bit self-centered make me CRAZY. (narrator voice: compacflt is a hypocrite as all these things also apply to compacflt.)

Politically… It’s difficult to say. no one really wants to hear the intricacies of one person’s political journey, which is why i won’t give you mine, but suffice to say—since the start of the russian invasion of Ukraine, and my semi-concerted effort to learn more about the political landscape of modern warfare, my own personal beliefs have shifted a whole bunch. definitely aided in that shift by my top gun fic project that specifically aims to understand the conservative straight-passing male mindset as it relates to military matters… there are many end goals to a project like mine, but one end product is a filter you can take away and hold up in front of your eyes and see the world through it. When writing from the eyes of a conservative straight (passing) white man, your priorities totally shift. I had to write from the perspective of someone who doesn’t care about identity politics. Because they don’t! A core tenet of conservatism is very proudly not caring about that stuff, and being very annoyed when people (usually left-of-centers) make that stuff very visible and want you to care about it! “Don’t shove it in my face,” etc., etc. Don’t force me to care about this taboo, private thing I really don’t care about. It violates my freedoms, or whatever, to be forced to care—or even bear witness to—stuff that i don’t care about. Etc. And then, to be nominally a part of that community that you really, really don’t care about, and then to be told that you have to care about it because of your publicity… people asking you to be proud of something that has had a negative connotation for much of your entire life… that’s not a transformation that happens easily.

Jesus, I could write an essay about this. I have, several times by now in responses to asks over my blog. But there is so much that I could talk about. I think… I really worry that some of my writing falls into the first of the below categories:

I really try not to romanticize conservatism in my writing—I tried to show that ice and mav’s happiness is the price they pay for their conservatism. They’re actively choosing to be unhappy—but because they prioritize their honor over everything, due to EXTERNAL PRESSURES they cannot control, and which I think are often ignored in the fandom space for one reason or another. The fact of the matter is, in 99% of IPs, characters prioritize something other than their sexualities. It’s never Maverick’s personal identity that is at stake in either Top Gun or Top Gun: Maverick, because he has built himself so impermeably masculine that there are no grounds upon which to question his personal identity. He just isn’t thinking about it. He’s thinking about how to get into Charlie’s pants, how to win the Top Gun trophy, how to uphold his promise to Goose, et cetera. If he’s fucking guys on the side, it’s because he wants to and because hes maverick and he does what he wants without thinking about it—that’s the whole point of his character, from a story-construction standpoint. That’s his archetype. He’s a renegade maverick superstar who is both thoughtlessly brilliant and thoughtlessly dangerous. He’s thoughtless. His priorities are to survive and to look cool doing it, and that’s it. He is a savant in the Naval Air Force, where honor is your lifeblood, who feels he has been dishonored by his own family name, and who willingly joined the conservative post-Vietnam Navy right when/after Ronald Reagan was elected President, and who wears cowboy boots and who disrespects women to their faces, and who is eager to get into altercations with Soviet-Chinese-DPRK-X-second-world-country-coded-but-EXPLICITLY-Soviet-manufactured-Mikoyan-Gurevich-MiG-28s(-F-5s-painted-black)… I’m sorry. In my opinion, the conservatism is baked into him as a character. I find it extremely difficult to separate him from his conservatism, because in some ways his patriotic conservatism is his raison d’etre. IMO if you take that away from him, he ceases to exist.

Same thing with Ice and his unwillingness to openly rebel or go against the grain. That is his whole reason to exist in the story at all. I know that I’m saying this in a fandom space where the whole point is to change characters & put them in different situations (fanfic) but… in kind of a perverse self aware way, as in I know I sound ridiculous and pretentious, i guess i don’t really understand an impulse to change the core tenets of a character irreparably in fanworks. We are shown that ice always goes by the books in TG. Then we are shown that he achieves the fruits of that labor (four stars) in TGM. So he is rewarded for never rebelling, whereas Maverick, who always rebels (but NEVER in a way that challenges his personal identity), has stagnated in the ranks at full-bird O-6. And that’s Ice’s character. That’s what he’s there for in the story—he’s a tool to show us the value system of rank and prestige you earn by following the rules of the Navy. Why take that away from him? That’s his priority! Canonically, that’s his priority and reason for existence! And historically the way to achieve that priority is through conservatism.

And you ask me if it’s hard to like my ice and mav. Yes, but that’s not my choice. The movie already did that for me. They are not, I’m sorry, likable people. I am not a straight white conservative male writing about straight white conservative men to validate my own beliefs—I’m a queer AFAB person of color writing about straight white conservative men because I want to understand the limits of their conservatism. What they do and do not care about, and what it takes to make them care. And from what we are shown in TG… ice and mav would not care about ME. At all. And they would not want to be forced to care about me. Ice’s casual careless dismissiveness… “the plaque for the alternates is down in the ladies’ room…” mav following Charlie into the bathroom… turning the key in the ignition and driving away while pretending not to hear her… “what?? i can’t hear you! 🙉” … they do not care. They have no desire to care.

Again. Maybe I subscribe to a very very old-school and labored and pretentious ideology when it comes to writing… I know a lot of people write just to have fun. I do not. I wish i could, but I don’t. And when you’re not writing to have fun, you don’t have to like the characters you’re writing about. They’re nothing more than tools at your disposal to get your point across more effectively. No, I don’t like them! Of course not! My ice is cruel and cowardly and careless and hypocritical and subservient and weak, and my mav is demanding and dangerous and dismissive and oblivious and so, so, so unbelievably bitter.

And that’s what my story needed, to get my point across. So, shrug. My point was my priority. I don’t care too much about the characters themselves.

Re: icemav & identity politics. Part of hopefully selling this story is the attempt at empathy for the conservative male, to bring this discussion back to the top. Why write fiction at all if you’re not going to write about people different from you, and why write about people different from you if you don’t want to understand them? So… part of trying to understand them was to understand and have empathy for this shift in priorities. Conservative guys do not want to care about labels, or sexual orientations, or, God forbid, discussion of their gender identities. I can kind of see Ice tolerating it by the end… but, there are limits. Again, it’s supposed to be private. I think he’d chafe against getting labeled gay—he wouldn’t want to be called the first gay compacflt, or SECNAV, etc. He can’t say, “i slept with like a hundred fifty women before I even MET the ONLY man ive ever slept with,” because that’s like intensely private personal information!! No one deserves that information, but people still want to call him gay, even though in his head he really is not!!!! Again—from the conservative perspective, it’s a public imposition of left-wing, overly sexualized, too-neat labels and politics onto an area of life that has typically been kept private and respectable—I don’t agree with the conservatism, but I can at least empathize with it. Pre-Maverick’s death (pre-coming to terms with it), it would’ve been shameful & embarrassing to him; but even after coming to terms with it, it’s still not something he “takes pride” in. I think he thinks of it like this—most people aren’t proud of being straight. Like, it’s weird if you are. Same thing with being proud of being white, etc. Why be excessively proud of things you have no control over? Why not take pride in your ACTIONS—for instance, his career that he has actively sacrificed so much of his pride for? I can really empathize with that thought. I don’t necessarily agree, but I get it, especially in his professional circumstances, where he has so much to be professionally proud of, and yet people keep wanting him to publicly care about this private part of him he has no control over and can’t change.

Maverick though. I think he’d be actively hostile about talking about it in public. He Does Not Care. he does not want to care. It’s all an insult. They call him the first openly gay Ace cause he’s married to another man— “okay, but, like, I’m not. Stop calling me that. Neither of us are. Oh my god we have slept with so many women. Stop calling us that.” Ok then what do you want us, the press corps, to call you? First openly bisexual Ace? “No that’s worse!! That’s a word some teenager made up and doesn’t mean anything!! I’m sixty years old stop asking me to talk about this stuff im too old.” What do you have to say to LGBT kids who want to go into the navy? “😎👍 there’s a place for you etc etc. Let’s go back to talking about all the planes I shot down.” Maverick does what he wants without thinking about it. That’s the core tenet of his character. Very conservative. Don’t ask him to care too much.

Idk. No I don’t like them. But I understand them, if that makes sense. Like their conservative anti-label logic does make emotional sense to me. So that’s part of what I took away from this project, for better or worse… probably worse: I understand why conservatives don’t like the modern over-publicity of sexuality. They don’t care and they don’t want to care. And because they are small-C conservative, my ice and mav still don’t care lol. So, yeah. It doesn’t make them hard to write, because thats why I wanted to write them in the first place.