#i hope this is a somewhat readable format at least

[forestkniight]

Quitting I.M.P.

So... this is my first post on Tumblr! I'm not sure if I formatted everything correctly, but I hope it's somewhat readable! I decided I would go a bit tame on my first post since it's also been a long while since I've written anything for fun, but I hope y'all enjoy!!

Pairing: Blitz x Reader

Warning: Swearing

Word Count: 1.8K

You felt the anger boiling over as you and the other I.M.P. crew crossed into Hell from where you were on Earth. 

It was supposed to be a simple mission. Kill some cheating husband or something of the sort. It should have been a quick in and out, and to be fair, it was. That’s not what bothered you. 

For the past couple of missions, Blitz had taken away your chance to kill anyone. Every time you set up to kill the target, he would swipe in and kill them first, or he would have Millie or Moxxie take care of it. You knew you were one of the more recent additions to this business, but you had done more than prove yourself working with them in the first few weeks. It pissed you off, and this time around wasn’t any different. 

You were packing away your lunch quickly as you tried your best to mask your frustration and anger. 

“Are you good? You look like you want to bite off someone’s head,” Loona said as she took notice of how hard you were clutching your bag. 

“Just peachy,” you muttered as you began heading out. 

Luck, however, was not on your side as you remembered that the entire crew was supposed to go out for drinks that night. 

“Took you long enough, (Y/N)! The fuck were you doing anyways,” Blitz asked as you stepped back into the main lobby. 

You had to fight off a snarl that threatened to come out. Both Millie and Moxxie noticed something was wrong since your sweet demeanor was nowhere to be found. You took a breath before responding.

“I was packing up my stuff for the night,” you calmly responded, ensuring your emotions weren’t showing. You knew leaving it all pent up would end up bubbling over, but it hadn’t happened yet.

“You could just leave it here! Drinks are on me tonight!” 

You clutched your bag tighter and saw Moxxie looking back and forth between you and Blitz. 

Moxxie was the only one who knew about your crush on your boss because he happened to find you drunk at a bar one time and wanted to make sure you got home safe. Boy had you spilled a lot of information about your feelings that night. Luckily for you, Moxxie wasn’t the meddling type, though he did encourage you to tell Blitz how you felt. 

“Respectfully, sir, I’m really tired, and I just want to go home,” you said with a bit more hostility than you meant to.

The crew looked at you, confused. 

“Maybe we can do this another-“ Moxxie tried to interject, but Blitz interrupted him.

“The fucks got your panties in a twist?” 

You felt your eye twitch as Moxxie cringed. 

“I don’t know SIR. How about the fact that these past few clients we’ve had, you’ve managed to take the opportunity from me to kill them,” you spit out in exasperation. 

“Are you fucking serious right now,” Blitz moved closer to you, “You’re getting paid regardless. Why the fuck does it matter?” 

You clenched your fist tighter but stayed firm where you stood.

“I didn’t join this fucking business just to stand around and look pretty asshole!” 

You saw Blitz’s eye widen at the curse word since he wasn’t used to hearing it come from your mouth. 

“If you think I’m shit at my job, then fucking fire me or tell me what I’m doing wrong,” you yelled at him.

He remained speechless before you saw his expression change.

“Maybe I fucking should! At least someone who is actually pretty to look at, just in case, you bitch!” Blitz yelled in your face.

The silence that followed was extremely tense, as you and Blitz were suddenly very much in each other’s space. You felt your heart completely break, and Moxxie saw the quick, pained expression you couldn’t hide before becoming stoic. 

“Sir, that was uncalled for. They are highly skilled at their job. It would be a mistake-“ 

“No, you know what Moxxie? You heard it from the boss himself,” you laughed mirthlessly, cutting Moxxie off.  

You backed away from Blitz and picked up the bag you had dropped at some point during the screaming match. You began walking towards the door. Moxxie tried to stop you, but one stare showed that you weren’t fucking around. You heard Blitz sigh behind you.

“(Y/N), wait-“ Blitz started as you turned around quickly with your hand on the door handle.

“No, Blitz. I’ll make this easier for you. I fucking quit. Find someone better than me in all aspects,” you say harshly. 

You couldn’t help the tears that were pooling. Blitz’s eyes softened when he noticed, but you didn’t see it. You were ready to go, so you pushed open the door.

“You can’t just quit like that! On such short fucking notice! I can’t find someone that fucking quick,” Blitz yelled.

You couldn’t hear the desperation in his voice, only that he was yelling at you. 

“Don’t fucking yell at me! This business is no longer my fucking problem! God, I can’t believe I ever had feelings for you,” you scream at him as you walk out the door and slam it behind you. 

You were unaware of the chaos you left behind when that door closed.

~~

It had been a week since you quit I.M.P.

Luckily, you were wiser with your paychecks than Blitz, so you had enough to tide you over while you searched for a new job. 

Everyone except Blitz had come to visit you separately. The first and shortest visit was Loona. You had forgotten your favorite necklace in the office and begged her to drop it off. 

When she arrived, she was surprised to see you in disarray. Your hair was slightly messy, your eyes puffy, and you hadn’t changed out of your PJs. It was the day after, and you were utterly heartbroken. 

“Thanks, Loona,” you whispered as you took your favorite necklace back.

“No problem. Blitz saw me leaving with it, though. Moxxie managed to step in before he could reach me. Not like I would have handed it to him anyway.” 

There wasn’t much conversation before she decided to return to the office.

The following person to visit was Millie. Luckily, she saw you in a better state than Loona did, but your eyes hadn’t lost their puffiness. 

“Me and Mox miss you, (Y/N). It’s not the same without you,” Millie said as she passed you a pint of ice cream. 

“Right…”

“I’m serious! We know you’re good at killing, but you were also fun on the field!” Millie looked at you, and you knew she was being genuine. You thanked her, and she stayed with you that night, watching many movies. 

The last person to visit was Moxxie, who had much more to say.

“I’m sorry (Y/N), but what made you think that was the best way to confess?” Mox said as he stood right next to you in your bed. 

“It just came out, Mox. I didn’t mean to,” you sighed as you tried to fight off the tears again, “I wanted my words to hurt him as much as he did.”

After speaking those words out loud, you curled into yourself and silently cried. You heard Moxxie sigh.

“(Y/N), I really think you should talk to him,” Moxxie said, something in his tone. 

Still, you didn’t respond.

“I know he can be- “

“Moxxie….I need you to leave,” you said with a tear-filled voice. 

“(Y/N),” Moxxie tried to start again. 

“Please,” you begged. 

“Fine…I’ll be back, though,” he said, sighing. 

You felt a kiss on your head, and a few seconds later, you heard the door close. You let yourself cry and spend the rest of the day in bed.

~~

That was two days ago. You finally had enough and knew the money wasn’t never-ending. You began your job searching, but you weren’t having any luck.

You sighed as you dropped face-first on your couch, trying to forget all the horrible interviews you had been on today. You weren’t a perfect fit for any of the jobs, and you were beginning to wonder if it was worth it to return and get your job back.

You looked at the time and realized that you had been out all day. You decided to change into your comfy pajama shorts and tank top, deciding you weren’t going out anymore. If you were still working at I.M.P., you would have much more to do on a Friday night. 

You turned on the TV, letting it lull you to sleep as you spent another night alone.

~~

You were awoken at 1 AM by knocking on the door. You groaned as you wondered who could be waking you up at this hour. Moxxie did say he would be back, but you didn’t think it’d be in the dead of night. You yanked the door open, speaking before processing who stood before you.

“Damn it, Mox, I was slee-“ You cut off your words when you realized it wasn’t Moxxie in front of you, but Blitz.

You moved to shut your door again, but he shoved his foot in the door frame before pushing the door open and inviting himself in.

“That’s fucking rude,” Blitz said harshly as he took a look around your apartment.

“Says the asshole who’s inside an apartment that he wasn’t invited into,” you spat back at him. 

You saw Blitz roll his eyes and turn back to face you fully. You avoided his eye contact as you walked to your kitchen to get a drink of water. You heard the clicks of Blitz’s boots as he followed you.

As you filled your cup, you tried to think of what to say, but luckily, you wouldn’t have to.

“Can we talk?” 

“There’s nothing to talk about, Blitz,” you said as you moved past him to walk to your bedroom, “I don’t work for you anymore.”

“Christ on a stick (Y/N), can you stop being a bitch for 5 seconds,” Blitz told you as you set your water down on your nightstand.

“Get the fuck out of my room! No, out of my house,” you yelled, walking towards him, having half a mind to toss him out. 

“No, not until we fucking talk,” Blitz said as he closed your bedroom door and walked towards you.

“I’ve already said there’s nothing to talk about,” you yelled in exasperation.

“Fucking fine,” Blitz yelled back. 

You watched him turn to your door, hand on the handle. You were confused as to why he wasn’t leaving.

“Are you waiting for an invitation, Blitz!? Get the fuck out,” you began walking towards him again. 

“Fuck this shit,” you heard him mutter before he abruptly turned around.

You had no time to react before Blitz pulled you into him and kissed you hard. You let out a squeak of surprise, and Blitz used this to deepen the kiss. After the initial surprise, you began kissing back. The kiss was desperate, your teeth clashing and your pulse rising significantly.

You had no idea this was where the night would take you.

I hope that was fine! Please bear with me as I try to get used to Tumblr (and forgive any formatting errors)!

Also, please always let me know if I forgot to tag a warning!

[gen-is-gone]

Where can I read the eighth doctor adventures?

So the Internet Archive has a bunch of them in just about as readable a format as you're likely to get reading digitally, but they're missing a number of early books as well as City of the Dead and Grimm Reality.

I have a massive zip file of every Target, VNA, VMA, EDA, PDA, and NSA (up through to the end of Ten's run at least)

...but the xdrive I have them all saved on is in uh. Poor shape, and needs to be professionally recovered which is giving me no end of anxiety and I've been putting it off for months fuck me so I currently don't have access to a better source of all these files because I really need to back up my shit better :|

That being said, this fandom is old hat at passing bootleg books around, so I open the floor to anyone else who'd like to come in for the assist.

Also if you prefer reading physical books, despite much fandom moaning about how expensive a hobby collecting is, most of the books individually won't break the bank, and you can find them in places such as ebay and abebooks and the like with a little dedicated hunting. Unfortunately, some of them are truly exorbitantly priced and there isn't really a way around that beyond being diligent and getting lucky. Some books are also available on the official BBC website, and I believe if you buy from there, the respective authors still get some royalties, so that's also a consideration.

[ Here ] is a (somewhat spoilery) breakdown of the books and their arcs.

@johannesviii also has a [ pretty good rec list ] of essential books up to Anachrophobia if you want to dip your toes in the water with some guaranteed good books first. They also have a very fun ongoing book by book liveblog [ here ].

There are also fanmade audiobooks of the first few EDAs, which I reblogged a link to [ here ].

Happy reading! I hope you like them!

ETA: @scarlet-moon has provided a link to every book in various formats:

[stillness-in-green]

On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XXI-B + Conclusion, Final War-B: The Hospital Attack)

To preface before I start documenting these final four chapters, there’s been a lot said (not least by me) about how wildly out of touch the resolution to this plotline is.  While I didn't set out to rehash all of that again, it turns out I can't actually talk about how the series portrays heteromorphobia without talking about how it resolves it—if I'd wanted to do that, the place to stop would have been with the last post. This whole piece is also destined for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be readable for those who don't follow me on tumblr. Therefore, if you've been following my #heteromorph discrimination plot posts for a while, there are portions of this post that will be pretty familiar territory!

If you're new and want my full breakdowns, you can find them in my Chapter Thoughts posts or in this pair of posts rounding up the asks I’d gotten on the topic.  Here, I will simply say that I don’t think Horikoshi’s fumbling of the plot can be read to mean that all the stuff I’ve documented thus far was just me reaching too hard, reading stuff into the manga where nothing was intended.  While I’m sure some of it is—I definitely went out on a few limbs!—I think the main answer to, “How can heteromorphobia be such a well-thought-out depiction of a logically foreseeable form of discrimination while also having such a terrible resolution?” is, “Because the mainstream opinion about how best to handle discrimination is wildly different in Japan than it is in progressive American circles.”

That doesn’t mean I’m willing to wave the wand of Cultural Differences over this resolution and forgive everything—there were plenty of Japanese fans critiquing it as well![1]—but it does somewhat modulate my feelings about it.  In any case, let’s get to it.

1: Most of what I saw was on Twitter, but there’s a Japanese site called bookmeter that’s kinda goodreads-esque, and which had several critical reviews posted for the volume, including one that felt like every point laid out was something I’d complained about as well.  Super validating, but a shame it was necessary!

(I'll be changing up my formatting just a bit in hopes that I can find a way to present sub-sub-bullet points that tumblr won't choke on in this 13K post. Pray for me.)

Chapter 370: 

O We open with a scene which we’re led to believe is about Spinner but which the end of the chapter will reveal to be about Shouji.  It’s shockingly open about the extent of the discrimination Shouji faced, and there’s worse yet to come, but here we find people throwing stones at him, telling him to die, saying he has dirty blood that will defile the land, that he should stay inside the house, and that no matter how much time passes,[2] they will never accept “his kind.”

2: Viz renders this as “no matter how much society progresses,” but the word jidai means something more like “the times”/”the age,” and the progression term used can mean improvement, but in the circumstances, probably just means forward movement.  I think the intention is more like, “No matter how much the times march on,” if only because it would be very odd for the people yelling this vitriol to frame it as themselves resisting progression.  After all, bigots don’t typically think of themselves as “regressive” compared to everyone else’s progressiveness; they think of themselves as normal or valuing tradition compared to everyone else’s moral laxity/perversity.

So, remember how I talked about the spiritual/religious charge to the language the CRC used to talk about their “sanctuary” and the League/Spinner’s presence in it?  Here’s the full scope of that.  It’s about kegare, a Shinto concept of uncleanliness associated particularly with blood and death, and while that’s normally something that can be purified simply by undergoing the proper ritual cleansings, when something is, in itself, intrinsically unclean, no amount of purification will fix it; you can only keep it sealed away.  Hence the yelling at Shouji not to leave the house.

The spirituality-based discrimination calls to mind the burakumin, originally an outcaste group of people who made their living working with all the aspects of life Shinto considered kegare—butchers, tanners, executioners and the like.   They were made to dress and cut their hair in ways that identified them on sight, barred from entering temples or schools, and lived in their own villages.  The laws mandating much of this were abolished in 1871[3] and urban sprawl gradually rolled over burakumin villages, turning them into slum areas.  While today it’s not uncommon for people to not even know they’re descended from burakumin lineage unless they’re specifically told,[4] more subtle discrimination does endure.  While it’s clearly not the only inspiration, there’s a lot about anti-burakumin bias that’s reflected in heteromorphobia.

3: Albeit not without considerable and violent protests against the liberation of the burakumin/the idea that they were henceforth to be allowed to hold other occupations and become ordinary citizens.  Arson, destruction of villages, attacks and deaths—all things considered, the anti-Kaihourei riots are probably a decent place to look for inspiration on the historical massacres Spinner’s #2 will be talking about shortly.

4: Or find out because someone who knows the significance of those old neighborhoods finds out first and they’re suddenly on the bad end of some discriminatory act or another.

O We find out that the group Spinner’s leading consists of fifteen thousand people, that number split between PLF remnants and ordinary civilians who support the PLF’s cause.  It’s unknown exactly how that split breaks down, but based on how the rest of the attack goes, I think it’s probable that the group is mostly civilians—if it were more PLF, it probably wouldn’t be so wholly defanged by Shouji’s big plea for peace.  So that’s what we might call a “bad look,” that fifteen thousand ordinary civilians feel so incredibly hard done-by that they not only flock to join a known terrorist, but that they do so for the purpose of attacking a hospital.

O They’re opposed by about two hundred police and heroes, the relevant of whom for our purposes are Present Mic, Rock Lock, Officer Gori, Shouji, and Koda.  With the exception of Present Mic, who will in any case be heading inside very shortly, they’re all minorities of some sort, with Rock Lock being very visibly, obviously Black, and the others being heteromorphs.  None of them are immediately thinking about the composition of the crowd, but rather about how difficult the crowd is being to handle.

O Rock Lock yells out that the rioters are too organized to be some random mob, a dismissiveness that gets him shouted at by the Spinner fanboys—tragically their only appearance in all of this!—that, “Folks with human faces just don’t get it!”  I have to assume that putting Rock Lock in this scene is no accident, but rather is there to make the rioters come off as short-sighted, so deep in their own pain that they lash out at someone who, if HeroAca!Japan is anything like present day Japan, almost certainly understands better than they think!

The phrasing, in any case, points towards the dehumanization that heteromorphs, especially animal-associated ones, are subject to.  After all, as Re-Destro might point out, in the post-Advent world, isn’t it the case that any given heteromorphic human’s face, no matter how strange it may be, is de facto a “human face”?  Yet the vitriol from the Spinner fans clearly reflects how internalized it’s become for them, that they don’t look “human,” despite the fact that “looking human” means nothing at all in the time of quirks.

O Koda gets called a traitor by an elderly beaked heteromorph from, apparently, a rural area, underscoring what’s been alluded to a few times prior to this, and which will be laid out explicitly in a few pages, that heteromorphobia is far, far worse in the countryside than it is in the cities.  Mr. Beak assumes—correctly, it seems[5]—that Koda’s a city kid, because why else other than ignorance would a fellow heteromorph stand against them?

5: Koda’s from Iwate Prefecture, which is only above Hokkaido in terms of population density; a bit of research suggests that its largest city, Morioka, is considered to be a mid-sized city.  So that’s definitely the hard upper limit on exactly how “big city” Koda could reasonably be.  That said, Shouji also identifies Koda as someone who grew up in a city, for which I assume he must have at least some basis.

O Spinner’s #2 fulfills the promise of his early shorthanded characterization of being a fiery, well-spoken zealot by standing on top of a building over the mob and exhorting them onward with revolutionary, inflammatory rhetoric.  And boy, does he bring up a lot to talk about!    

Demagoguery for Fun & Profit

O Quirk counselling and quirk education?  Phony nonsense, he says.  That’s a fairly confusing grievance to bring up in this context, so let’s consider what he might have in mind.

• For quirk education, I would contend that BNHA has shown very little of it, in spite of having Academia right there in the title.  The academics in question are about Heroics, after all, not quirks in and of themselves.  Here’s the complete list of what I would say the reader has seen that could be qualified as actual education about quirks:

Aizawa telling the kids(/low tier villains at USJ) some broad generalities, things like a very basic explanation of how quirks work on the genetic level or how they’re classified.  Most of this is delivered in the context of how his quirk works; the only outlier that immediately comes to mind for me is his explanation of how quirks are like muscles, and can be strengthened via training.    

Mirio and Tamaki’s middle school class doing “quirk training,” which is framed as a P.E. class and is specifically aimed at finding ways for each kid to be “useful to society,” not about them learning anything about quirks in a broader sense.    

Endeavor’s recent reference to Nedzu’s alleged “quirk morality education,” about which I have already registered my skepticism.    

The bit in Re-Destro’s monologue to Shigaraki where he mentions he was taught not to judge others by their quirks.  It’s hard to judge how applicable this is to normal society because Re-Destro was raised in a cult, and the book shown during this sequence was released by Curious’s publisher.

So of those options, what is #2 talking about?  I’d say the last one is probably closest to what he means: don’t judge others by their quirks.  But of course, people judge others by their quirks all the time.  Family, classmates, teachers, people in the same neighborhood, heroes and police—we see examples from literally the first page of characters who are being judged by their quirks or lack thereof.  While that judgement doesn’t apply only to heteromorphs, they are, by dint of their visibility, going to face it everywhere they go, regardless of whether any given situation—say, going to the grocery store or on a date—involves quirks or not.  So, whatever lessons people in this society are getting about quirks and judgement, they clearly aren’t absorbing them.

It also bears pointing out, of course, that #2’s personal affiliation is with the Metahuman Liberation Army, and he definitely shows signs—as I’ll get to in a bit—of the quirk supremacism that group is so unanimously painted with in the endgame.  So while the supremacy he’s preaching is about heteromorphs rather than quirks more generally, he could well be saying quirk education is phony because he’s all for judging people on their quirks!  However, his criteria for that judgement differs from both forms of judgement taught by the society he’s railing against—what they practice and what they preach.

• Then there’s quirk counseling, a practice the story most prominently associates with Toga, who’s barely a twitch of the needle away from baseline (though her abuse is not wholly without reference to her appearance, in that her natural smile is repeatedly branded as scary or deviant).  So why bring it up in association with heteromorphs?  My suspicion is that a heteromorph—especially a heteromorph with an animal-associated quirk!—being visibly “different” in some way makes the people around them hyper-sensitive to behavioral “deviations.”

For a start, you see that hyper-sensitivity brought to bear against Toga.  Curious contends that Toga’s sense of “admiration” was a perfectly normal thing, but it was the tie to blood that made it wholly unacceptable.  It’s notable that, before she snapped, Toga was never shown to actually want to hurt people: the bird was already injured when she found it, her friend got a scrape the way any child might, Saito was involved in a fight Toga had no hand in.  She hurts people now because a lifetime of rejection and dehumanization, but Toga’s admiration of blood was not intrinsically indicative that she’d grow up to be violent; people treated it that way because of cultural attitudes towards blood and blood-attraction.

So, might the same sort of thing be true of e.g. animal-associated heteromorphs?  That they might exhibit behaviors which would, in different circumstances, be totally fine, but which they’re judged for unduly harshly because of cultural beliefs about the animal they resemble?  Let me just spitball a few possibilities:

A cat heteromorph who, as a child, showed affection by nuzzling.  That’s fine when a literal kitten is doing it, and funny and cute when a baseline child sees a cat doing it and imitates it for fun, but when the cat heteromorph does it, he makes people uncomfortable, makes them wonder if he lacks self-control, comes off as weird and too-forward.  So his parents rebuke him and bring him to a quirk counsellor to break him of the habit, leading him to feel ashamed and alienated from a harmless natural impulse.    

A snake-headed girl is the first heteromorph in her family line and the way she stares at people so fixedly, never blinking, creeps them out, makes them feel like she’s dangerous.  She isn’t and has no intention of being so, but she’s sent to quirk counselling anyway and the lesson she learns is to just never look people in the eye at all.    

A condor heteromorph develops a morbid interest in corpses in middle school.  He doesn’t want to eat them, he’s not some kind of cannibalistic animal—at least that’s what he told himself before quirk counselling, where his counsellor, like his teachers, assumed that his interest had to be tied to animal instincts.  He wanted to be a mortician, or join the police and get into crime scene investigation, but when he told people that they just looked at him like he was already holding a fork and knife.  (He ends up getting into photography, and just has to live with the fact that now people have two excuses to call him a vulture.)    

Two children—one with a plant-based emitter quirk, the other an eight-eyed spider heteromorph—are caught in the act of killing some insects by a local police officer.  It’s the sort of innocent childhood cruelty you might find anywhere, and, indeed, when the officer calls their school about it, that’s what gets decided about the emitter—he was just a child who didn’t know any better.  But the heteromorph gets recommended for quirk counselling instead—after all, spiders kill insects.  What if this is an early warning sign for instincts towards predatory behavior?  It’s important to nip these things in the bud.

That’s all off the top of my head or taken from some conversation with friends on the topic, and maybe it’s a reach, but it’s also a very plausible explanation for why a heteromorphic idealogue might bring up quirk counselling as a specific grievance—because, like the Villain-designation for criminals, it’s unevenly and unfairly applied.

O The next point #2 makes, and definitely the one that made the biggest splash in fandom at the time, is his invocation of a pair of historical incidents, possibly both but at least one of which was a mass murder targeting heteromorphs, carried out by a bunch of baseline types.  He names them as the 6/6 Incident and the Great Jeda Purge.  These are both stealth Star Wars references, though the former is disguised a bit better by being in the same format that Japan sometimes uses for naming events like attempted coups.[6]  Given the image we see, it’s fair to assume the event in BNHA was similar.

6: See for example the May 15 Incident or the February 26 Incident, called the 5・15 Incident and the 2・26 Incident respectively in Japan. You see this in China as well, with the Tiananmen Square massacre being referred to there as the 6/4 Incident.

Notice that the perpetrators here are mostly holding weapons.  Were they quirkless themselves, or were they avoiding using quirks such that they couldn’t be branded as Villains?  Knowing the answer to that would give us a timeframe for this.

He goes on to declaim, on the basis of these events, that the history of the paranormal is one of persecution and oppression of those with “differing forms.”[7] The term in Japanese there is kotonaru katachi, 異なる形, which uses a different reading of the kanji in igyou (異形) and muscles in a verb conjugation, which has the effect of softening the harshness of 異 somewhat.[8]  This would be a great catch-all term for those with heteromorphic bodies who might or might not have heteromorphic quirks[9] if it weren’t for the fact that literally the only person we ever hear using it is an anti-social zealot.  No one on Team Hero ever makes this kind of distinguishment.

In any case, #2 is obviously over-simplifying to play to his audience—recall the baseline woman we saw back in that shot of Persecuted Early Quirk-Havers back in Chapter 59—but, as I’ve discussed extensively, being more visible does make one a more ready target.  Also, of course, the presence of the CRC in the story lays the groundwork for this sort of historical horror story even long after the worst days of the Advent.

7: I provide my own translation here because the Viz one, “those who don’t fit the mold,” is vague to the point of uselessness.

8: The koto reading, as best I can tell, seems to be pretty rare, often tagged as archaic in words including it.  The i reading is far more common, in words that denote wrongness, divergence, abnormality, and so on.  But it may be less about the reading and more about the fact that adding the verb conjugation makes the term more of a descriptive phrase than a direct noun.  As ever, take my talk about Japanese language minutiae with a grain of salt.

9: “Differing forms” is broad enough, however, that it could also be read as covering, say, people with amputations, congenital anomalies, or other sorts of non-quirk-related disfigurements from accidents or disease.  As in real life, navigating the linguistic space between specificity and Othering can be tricky.

O Next, #2 rhetorically demands what excuse was given by those who perpetrated these slaughters?  He answers his own question with the quote, “They give me the creeps.” Note how this ties in with my earlier suppositions about the likelihood of discrimination worsening the farther one is from baseline, as well as those about the necessity of putting up a good, positive, appealing front.  It’s a perfectly intuitive leap, that more extreme variants of heteromorphy, or those who evoke negative associations—animals tied to rot or bad luck, people made wholly out of green ooze—are going to be more likely to be found “creepy” than those who look like e.g. sexy bunny girls or straight-laced guys who just happen to have pipes jutting out of their calves.  Of course, that’s on something of a sliding scale; the more biased an area is against heteromorphs in general, the easier it will be to find oneself on the wrong side of that line.

O #2 presents the idea that society has reflected on their actions and made amends, or at least that’s how society’s narrative goes.  Illustrating this, we see two of the three heteromorphs in the police force, as well as Nedzu.  Interestingly, the panel does not include any heteromorphic heroes!  I might guess that this is because heroes are meant to use their quirks to serve others; they’re really just enforcement tools, lacking any particular authority beyond a quirk-use license and some admittedly broad soft power courtesy of the social contract.[10] Conversely, a school principal and a police chief (Gori remaining the outlier here) have actual authority, such that the average heteromorphobia-denier can point to them as evidence that heteromorphobia doesn’t exist anymore.

10: Which is to say, I don’t get the impression civilians are required to take orders from heroes, such that they would actually get in legal trouble for disobeying.  The fact that people do typically follow those orders speaks more to the power heroes wield via their association with the police force, as well as the general tendency of people to assume that someone in a uniform giving orders during an emergency is probably a professional whose orders it would be safe and wise to follow.

In the same panel, we also see a baseline guy palling around with a vaguely murine heteromorph dude (he looks more like a mascot suit mouse than an actual mouse, but he’s certainly nowhere close to baseline!), illustrating another way society wants to pretend it’s moved past heteromorphic discrimination.  I can’t help but note, in regards to this specific pair, that the manga uses faces the readers know to illustrate the point about heteromorphs in positions of authority, whereas to make the point about baseline/heteromorph friendships, it has to make up a new pair to show us because the series hasn’t made the time to actually build any (heroic) relationships that actually look like that!

Now, one could argue that using familiar faces to underscore #2’s speech would imply that he’s aware of those faces, and while that’s fine for figures of authority, there’s no reason for him to be aware of e.g. Natsuo and his mousey girlfriend.  However, the same would apply to anyone placed to demonstrate a random urban friendship crossing the “differing forms” line, including those two strangers.  Who are those two, after all, that #2 is any more familiar with them than he would be of Natsuo and mouse gal?

Honestly, I think the best relationship candidate we have—a pair who would both communicate what the panel needs to communicate to the reader and who would feasibly be enough in the public eye to get pointed at for rhetorical purposes by an in-universe speaker—would be Kamui Woods and Mount Lady.  Unfortunately, they don’t work because Horikoshi has never seen fit to actually reveal Kamui Woods’ real face, so they’re much less visibly “a baseline person being emotionally close with a heteromorph” than the random two Horikoshi made up.

O The oratory continues into discussing the divide between city versus rural views on heteromorphs, and this is, to me, the first clear sign that the series is beginning to lose the thread of this plot.  Taking #2 at his word asks us to concede the heteromorphobia has been completely wiped out in cities, eradicated with that wonderful antidote called “education.”  But discrimination very much does exist in cities!  It may be less violent, less extreme, less vocal, but in the form of things like law enforcement bias, housing discrimination, microaggressions, the quirk counselling #2 himself brought up, it’s very much still there!  Now, it could be that he’s just downplaying that discrimination to focus on the really ugly stuff you don’t see in cities, but I don’t know what his reasons for doing so would be?  Not when there’s so much else he could say that would be equally inflammatory without alienating urban heteromorphs by dismissing their still very much present, modern suffering.

O He then brings up the talk of “light”—echoing Skeptic’s earlier rhetoric—and it not reaching those gathered at the hospital, so they must make their own, for people who’ve never once regretted the quirks they were born with can never be their heroes.  What this primarily puts me in mind of is Hawks’s background with heroes prior to his father’s arrest—that heroes were only on TV, not present to save him in his actual life.  Keep that in mind for Shouji’s response later on.

O Towards the end, #2’s speech finally tips over the line from what could plausibly be read as protesting unequal treatment to an outright call for supremacy.  Notably, he doesn’t call for quirk supremacy, but rather for heteromorph supremacy—for the tables to be turned, the cards reversed, for them to not merely be equal, but rather to be superior.

It’s unclear how much of this he’s sincere about and how much is just convenient rhetoric disguising views that are more quirk supremacist in actuality.  For many reasons, I want to read him in good faith: because the MLA originally struck me as being written in good faith throughout MVA and the first war arc; because #2 never once uses his quirk in this mini-arc, casting doubt on him having such an amazing quirk that he’d benefit overmuch from quirk supremacy anyway; and especially because it would be incredibly bad faith on Horikoshi’s part to make a character delivering a speech like this a total bad faith, manipulative outsider.  Unfortunately, #2’s inner monologue in later chapters will make a good faith read all but impossible to sustain.    

O Halfway through his speech, #2 unmasks himself, revealing both his face—dominated by four pairs of pedipalp-esque mouthparts, though the markings on his head are pretty eye-catching, too—and his scar.  We’re never told how he got it, but the implication is certainly that he was attacked for his appearance.  That may just be a conclusion it serves him to let people make, given his bad faith elsewhere, but thankfully the manga doesn’t go so far as to say that explicitly.  In any case, his deliberate reveal turns his wound into a form of performance art, drawing attention to it, forcing it to be a part of the conversation—the polar opposite of Shouji covering his scars because he doesn’t want them to be a part of the conversation about him, and those scars being revealed because his mask is torn off against his will.[11]

11: This also fits a larger pattern of villains, by and large, choosing their expressions of vulnerability, making deliberate shows of agency in how their weakness is perceived by the broader world—Shigaraki taking his hand off for the first time, Dabi’s video, Toga approaching heroes with genuine questions, and so on.  There are certainly exceptions, but generally if a villain shows his “true face,” it’s because they’re making a conscious decision to do so, and may be actively manipulating how that reveal is going to land.  Conversely, heroes want to present a powerful, confident, untarnished image to the public, so their shows of vulnerability all have to be forced out of them after pitched battles or acts of violence.  Heroes don’t make themselves vulnerable to the public on purpose, which feeds into the way the public then treats them when they are forced into vulnerable positions.

O Spinner’s a mess at this point, and the reason he’s a mess is all tied up in his faith in/desire to help Shigaraki.  It’s not explicitly about heteromorphobia, but on the other hand, given that the thing that drove Spinner to be here at all was his horrifically low self-esteem caused by heteromorphobia, maybe it’s not so irrelevant after all.  It may have taken Spinner longer than the Tenkos, Touyas, and Chisaki Kais of the world to reach the “fall victim to a dark influence due to the neglect and abuse you faced at the hands of Hero Society” plot, but he certainly got there in the end![12]

12: I call this The Sekoto Peak Problem, and it’s a big criticism of mine about how the final arc is framing all these conflicts as being solely brought about because Bad Faith Villain Men like AFO are scooping up vulnerable people and driving them towards violence, without acknowledging the much worse circumstances those vulnerable people might be in if they were just left to their fates.  Touya, for example, if not for AFO’s timely rescue, would likely have simply died on the mountain long before Endeavor was able to find him.

O Shouji takes the mob to task for attacking a hospital without ensuring the safety of the uninvolved innocents within, a laughable bit of sophistry[13] that accurately foreshadows how disastrous his reasoning will be throughout the rest of these chapters.

13: It’s laughable sophistry firstly because the heroes knew this mob was coming but chose to leave Kurogiri at a hospital anyway; one can mount a very reasonable argument that Kurogiri’s teleportation power qualifies him as a military objective, which would make stashing him at a hospital an actual war crime in an international conflict, as well as negating the hospital’s protected status as a civilian object.  It’s laughable sophistry secondly because it criticizes a Villain-led mob for failing to evacuate the building, as if said mob had exactly the same social cachet possessed by heroes, that they could freely walk in the front door of a hospital and start shouting evacuation orders with reasonable confidence that they’d be obeyed.  Finally, it’s laughable sophistry because Shouji is quite simply wrong about the order of the actions he’s describing—the heroes’ evacuation of Ujiko’s hospital was concurrent with their invasion of said hospital, not precedent to it.

   

Chapter 371: 

O Shouji accuses Spinner of taking actions that will set them back thirty years, which is just a really egregiously victim blamey sort of thing to say, placing the responsibility on heteromorphs for the crimes of those who hate them.

O Koda’s perspective gives us a flashback to Shouji telling his classmates about his history—his town and his scars and his reason for wanting to be a hero.  It’s all material that works in the context of all the set-up we’ve gotten—the CRC and the religious inflection of their specific brand of hatred, the rural heteromorphobia, the hints about Shouji’s own discrimination, the attack on the Ordinary Woman, and so on—but that would have been far better served to have been integrated into the story more naturally.  Koda has no specifically established relationship with Shouji (seriously, there is absolutely nothing; it’s shocking how out of nowhere his sudden deep dedication to Shouji is), nor does the scene he remembers have any specific flags for when it might take place,[14] leaving the memory feeling less like a natural extension of their arc than it is a graceless sequence muscled in to attempt to rouse some emotion in the audience when Koda has a quirk awakening he is not otherwise remotely in dire enough straits to have rightfully earned.[15]

14: Shouto and Bakugou being missing might suggest that they’re off at their remedial license course, which would put the scene somewhere in late September up through December (stretching from the aftermath of Overhaul to the introduction of the MLA), save that there are several other students missing as well—Sero, Iida, Sato, and Aoyama, none of whom where in the remedial course.

15: Nearly every other inarguable quirk awakening[※] we know of in the series has as a chief component serious physical injury: Bakugou, Ochaco, Toga.  Geten’s is the only exception, and his is tied to the strength of his feelings for Re-Destro, which are clearly and overridingly his most significant character trait!  Shouji is not anywhere near that central to Koda’s life, and he sure as hell isn’t injured enough to have gotten it that way.

※: By which measure I exclude stuff like the change in Shigaraki’s Decay or Mina’s acid attack against Gigantomachia.  Shigaraki was explicitly just breaking through a mental block to access power he already had.  Meanwhile, if Mina’s Plus Ultra moment had been a sudden quirk evolution, she wouldn’t already have an attack name picked out for it, nor would her horns have gone back to normal after it.  Acidman: ALMA is an Ultimate Move, not Mina having a quirk awakening.

O The flashback itself calls for another subsection.    

Ignoring the Difference Between the Personal and the Systemic for Fun & Profit

O The big thing here the description of the whole town coming out for a “blood cleansing” whenever Shouji touched someone.  This is depicted as Shouji, probably a preteen in this sequence,[16] being savagely attacked with farming tools, the most visible of which is a pitchfork.  This visual, as well as #2’s invocation of historical slaughters, is the darkest heart of heteromorphobia: a child being ritualistically assaulted in the open street as a matter of course, as a consequence for touching someone.  This is the image you should hold in your mind as The Problem through all of the potential answers and responses that get trotted out through the rest of these chapters.

16: Visibly older/bigger than, say, Kouta, but also visibly younger/smaller than middle school Deku.

Before moving on, I do want to examine this image in just a bit more depth.

This is, firstly, the moment that Shouji got those scars, and it’s very important to note that what we’re being shown is likely not a random, representative sample of what the town “coming out in force for a blood cleansing” looks like.  The strong implication is that this is in the immediate aftermath of the sequence we’ll see shortly of Shouji saving the girl from the river: he’s wearing the same clothes and shoes,[17] he’s the same size, and there’s a spray of blood from where he’s being struck across the mouth where he didn’t have his distinctive scars when he saved the girl.  Does that mean the blood cleansings were typically not this violent?  That’s hard to say.  On the one hand, we don’t see any other scars on Shouji, and he wears his arms pretty bare!  On the other hand, we never see any part of his body bare except his neck and arms, and since he can regrow his arms,[18] they’re not exactly conclusive evidence that he’s never been scarred there.  Also, he does say talk about his situation—the scars he bears—as something other children in the country have to bear, suggesting that the norm is rather worse than a little symbolic gash across the palm or something!     17: In fairness, he may not own very much different, as I’ll discuss shortly.     18: The duplicated ones, at least.  I seem to recall reading once that he could regrow the base set as well, but I’m still working on tracking down a citation on that.    

Secondly, as was the case with the image of the historical massacres, the adults here are using tools/weapons in the assault, not quirks.  As I mentioned in a footnote last time, them not using quirks to carry out this attack makes them merely criminals, not Villains, and therefore not nominally a Hero’s job to deal with.  While I can’t imagine any Hero in the manga these days would stand back and let this go on, the absence still stands out—no Hero is participating in this, nor observing from the sidelines, nor trying to intervene.  Heroes simply don’t figure into this picture at all.    

Thirdly, we can see a few children in the background, both there with adults, I assume their parents.  The child on the right is a passive observer, clinging close to their mother and simply watching; their father has one hand supportively on their shoulder.  Neither parent seems distressed, insomuch as we can tell from their somewhat indistinct features and rather clearer body language.  The child on the left is being actively held back by their mother, who’s standing with her back to the violence, her body interposed between it and her child.  The kid is reaching out towards the scene, but it’s unclear what the intent is.  Are they trying to intervene or do they want to join in?     Neither child appears to be the little girl Shouji saved—the one on the right is dark-haired, and the one on the left—the more likely prospect just going by the body language!—is wearing a long, dark T-shirt instead of the little girl’s overalls.  I suppose the left one could be the little girl if we assume she was hustled out of what she’d been wearing by her parents, eager to get her out of now-tainted (and also soaking wet) clothes and into something dry and warm and, in more ways than one, clean.  However, that seems like the sort of thing that would take longer than what looks to have been a pretty impromptu, disorganized bloodletting, unless everyone just held off on assaulting Shouji right out on the street until the “victim” could be present.    

Finally, there’s the pair of adults right at the center of the background.  If anyone in this picture is actually related to Shouji, I’d put money on them being here, watching but not attempting to intercede.  I don’t think it’s conclusive, though; the woman is thin and hunched, making her look older—I’d guess Shouji’s grandmother before Shouji’s mother.  That hunched posture and her hands being raised to her mouth do give her the most obviously distressed appearance of any of the adult, though, to the extent that the person with her is focused on supporting her rather than watching what’s going on in the foreground—and forward attention is what I’d expect if the dark-haired figure is related to Shouji.

So that’s the image we have of the crowd—actively taking part or observing with varying degrees of reaction running from distress to indifference to, potentially, enthusiasm.

O Next, let’s talk about Shouji’s parents.  He implies they were baseline—at the least they were significantly more baseline than Shouji himself, as they lacked arms “like his.”  That makes it quite telling that Shouji’s parents are nowhere to be seen in his story beyond the simple mention of how they were different than him.

Now, I don’t want to suggest here that Shouji’s parents are completely irredeemable people.  While I would imagine that—at least initially—they shared their town’s bigotry, having a heteromorphic child themselves would have exponentially increased the hardship of their own lives.  In a town like that, I’m sure that many if not all of their neighbors must have come to regard them with suspicion of wrongdoing or transgression—recall the first page of the last chapter, where Shouji is accused of tricking the town in his having brought dirty blood to it.  Hie parents almost certainly lost friends and likely became ostracized themselves, and ostracization in a small Japanese town can be a horrifying thing to deal with.

And yet, even with all that being the case, they didn’t abandon Shouji or give him up; they didn’t commit family suicide with him.[19]  Assuming he wasn’t removed from their custody after the incident, they’re presumably paying his school and living costs;[20] likewise, unless he just ran away from home or is carrying out an incredibly elaborate deception about what school he’s attending, they almost had to support his desire to attend a hero school to begin with.  In his situation, parents who support his desire to be a Hero is a big fucking deal.  After all, between the winning and the saving, heroes will de facto be touching people all the time!  If Shouji’s parents still live in his hometown, how do you think those people will take it when someone first realizes the Shouji family sent their kegare-riddled monster off to be a Hero?

19: The history of honorable suicide in Japan casts a very long shadow, and when it’s combined with the meiwaku culture, you get an underreported epidemic of things like parents who can’t see their way out of a bad situation taking their lives and their children’s as well, so as not to leave messy loose ends that others will have to bear the burden of dealing with.

20: I won’t get into whether or not the U.A. students’ parents are paying for any given thing on the following list, but here are some potential costs to consider, assuming that Shouji, like Uraraka, was commuting from an apartment prior to the dorms being implemented: tuition, school uniforms, textbooks, school supplies, school meal plan, food not served at school (e.g. breakfast and dinner or meals when the school is on break), non-uniform attire, personal care and hygiene, housing and transportation costs, a measure of spending money for unanticipated expenses or culturally expected gift-giving, etc.

All that being said, it’s obviously not a glowingly loving relationship, either.  Think back to Shouji’s absolutely barren room in Chapter 99 and consider it in the context of the information we get in this chapter.  Is he really so ascetic by inclination, or is he just used to making do with as little as possible?  After all, it goes without saying that if him coming into contact with someone called for blood purification, anything he himself was in regular contact with was also to be considered incredibly impure.  That includes his clothes, personal belongings and living space; even setting aside his parents’ view on it, who in his hometown would even want to provide or sell things to the family that they think will go to the child with the dirty blood that’s defiling their land?

Shouji’s parents’ absence is also glaring in other ways.  For example:

They’re either not in the beating scene image above at all or they’re that central background couple hanging back and just watching; whichever is the case, what they’re assuredly not doing while their son is being beaten so badly he will still have glaringly visible scars years later is “trying to stop the violence or take the blows themselves.”    

Shouji says he has one single good memory about his body, but his parents are nowhere to be found in that memory.  Ergo, his parents have not given him a single moment of positivity about his heteromorphic form.    

Parents of U.A. students were evacuated to U.A.—not just the ones near it, but even ones like Uraraka’s parents, who live at least a two hour drive away, in a wholly different prefecture with a third prefecture in between them and U.A.  Every student we see in the departure scene in Chapter 342 is shown with their parents except Shouji.

To sum all that up, Shouji’s family situation is not maximally bad, but it’s certainly proximally bad.

O Next, we get Shouji alleging ignorance on the part of heteromorphs raised in cities, that there are still parts of the country in the modern day where stories like his happen.[21]  It’s a milder version of the same assertions made by #2 and the beaky heteromorph last chapter, in that Shouji doesn’t suggest heteromorphobia doesn’t exist at all in cities, simply that there are extremes of violence that can only be found in the country.  It still feels off, however, to suggest that absolutely no one else in Shouji’s class might ever have heard of this through any channel at all: being from similarly small towns, reading about an attack in the news, reading about factors that impact the public approval ratings for Heroes, going through a morbid phase in middle school and researching it, being talked to about it by their parents, etc.

21: The suggestion of the Viz translation of this suggests that city-raised heteromorphs do know this, but only because they’re read about it in textbooks.  My sister-in-law, who does professional translation, tells me this was a subtle mistranslation of the original text, however; the textbook framing is supposed to imply a remove of time, not merely of distance.

It’s not as unrealistic a story beat here as it would be in an American comic, as Japan does tend more towards using silence as a weapon against bigotry—children won’t learn what they aren’t taught, and similar reasoning.  Still, to portray the class as so unanimously ignorant reflects a deep incuriosity, be that in the kids themselves about the world around them or in their author about how the knowledge/perpetuation of discrimination spreads.

This is particularly the case when you consider the story’s handling of the Ordinary Woman—attacked in her own town because people were suspicious of a heteromorph out after dark, turned away from multiple shelters because of her heteromorph status.  It’s certainly true that things got worse for heteromorphs after the first war arc, but for discrimination in that specific form to emerge, there needed to be something for it to draw on.  The fear of villains and the association of villains with heteromorphs are the foundation for the upswelling in anti-heteromorph sentiments in cities.

O Mina’s reaction to all this is one of rather theatrical anger.  That is, no one around her takes her broad declarations—that the world would be better off without the people who hurt Shouji—as anything more serious than hyperbole.  This is, it would seem, the only sort of anger that’s acceptable to show in response to hearing a story like Shouji’s—empathy to the wronged, sure, but no real intent to confront the wrongdoers.

O Mineta stares into space for a second before emphatically apologizing for calling Shouji an octopus once—a call all the way back to his microaggression in Chapter 6!—and asserting that it wasn’t his intention to say Shouji was gross or anything.  Shouji responds gracefully, saying it’s “only natural” that his arms would make people think of octopus.

He doesn’t go on to say, “But that doesn’t mean people have to say it out loud,” but it’s possible that Mineta’s apology is meant to suggest that regardless.  At least, one certainly hopes this isn’t the author’s way of quietly absolving his more popular characters of all the times they’ve done the same thing!  It’s notable, however, that none of the other Class 1-A kids that have done this are in the scene.  Shouto and Bakugou, who have both used that kind of language in anger (and in the latter’s case, also just with no provocation whatsoever) are the missing elephants in the room, and even Sero, who was the actual person to call Shouji an octopus, is, in his absence, Sir Letting The Gag Character Handle This Apology So I A More Serious Character Don’t Have To.

O Shouji brings up the Heroes Who Look Like Villains rankings.  We know the Number 1 on that list is actually Endeavor, per a movie bonus booklet, but bringing it up in this context does implicitly confirm that said rankings have an unseemly slant towards heteromorphs, and what did Skeptic say about Villains and heteromorphs again…?

O Shouji says he wears the mask because he knows that if people see his scars, they’ll wonder about them, and fear he’s out for revenge.  He doesn’t want people to think that, so he covers them up.  He’s praised for this by Tokoyami, and the narrative pretty clearly also thinks it’s admirable and cool.  I have serious issues with this—chiefly that it’s prioritizing the oblivious comfort of the baseline citizens over the fellow feeling and affirmation of other persecuted heteromorphs—but I’m also curious to see if the mask will come back now that its meta-narrative purpose of hiding Shouji’s scars from the reader has been fulfilled.  I note, for example, that Shouji is not wearing the mask in the color spread for Chapter 394, and the color art does have some precedent for being an early predictor of stuff in the body of the manga.[22]

Incidentally, while I’m talking about Shouji’s mask, I do wonder how effective it would even be for him to cover his scars up?  I have my doubts for two reasons.  First and most obviously, heroes are such celebrities, all over the news all the time, such that if Shouji really does get as popular as he intends to, there will be people who want to know what he looks like.[23]

22: The big one is Aizawa’s eyepatch.  It showed up in two pieces of color art (the popularity poll results spread for Chapter 293 and the new art announcing the BNHA Drawing Smash Exhibition) before it was revealed in the manga.  Both pieces released within days of each other in early December, 2020, three months after Shigaraki raked his hand down Aizawa’s face during the war and almost two months before the latter showed up in bandages in the hospital, with another two months to go beyond that before the eyepatch itself made it to the manga in late March.  In a more stealth spoiler, the same popularity spread revealed Shigaraki’s blackened, burned face-hand two chapters prior to Spinner digging it out of Shigaraki’s pants.  The 394 spread is also my basis for asserting that Mina’s horns have gone back to normal after her attack against Gigantomachia, compared to Shouji lacking his mask and Koda having his new horn in the same spread.

23: Edgeshot’s character profile page notes that his fans are split into two factions: those who’re mad to see his real face and those who think the mask is what makes him cool.

O More importantly, though, heroes have to be licensed, and Hero Licenses are photo IDs.  Photo IDs don’t typically allow face coverage because not being able to provide a visual reference to what the bearer looks like defeats the whole purpose.  While we don’t know what full-fledged hero licenses look like to say if they’re taken in or out of costume, we do know the provisional licenses the students carry showed them in their school uniforms, despite the fact that they definitely had working costumes by then:

Pardon the sudden screenshot. The manga has this shot, too, but the anime fills in the details of the text a bit more.

It seems probable to me that the photo on a Hero License must show the bearer’s face, so that if they’re tooling around a crime scene and a cop who hasn’t seen them around before asks for their license, it can reliably be used as a form of identification.  (I wonder how Hagakure manages?)

Also, think back to the press conferences we’ve seen in the story, most recently the one post-war: at every one, the heroes are in serious, solemn black suits, not their costumes.  So at any press conferences Shouji ever has to speak at in the future, he’ll have to show his face there, as well.

O We see a direct flashback to Shouji saving a little girl from drowning in a choppy, swift-flowing river as he says in voiceover that he’d rather cling to the single good memory related to his body than dwell on the bad memories.  He very much uses his quirk to do it, with his right set of limbs used to hold onto the bank while his left ones reach out to the girl, extending out another few “nodes” of arm-length when he at first can’t keep hold of her fingers.  As they sit and catch their breath afterward, the girl clings to one of his tentacles and cries.  This is not quite what his entry in the Ultra Analysis databook was hinting at[24] when it said he wears the mask due to his scary face making a little girl cry; that’ll be next chapter.

24: My apologies for not bringing this up before; it’ll be covered on AO3.  The gist is as detailed above; the databook came out circa the Endeavor Agency arc, so this was a known factoid about Shouji by the time this chapter came out three years later.

O Wrapping up the flashback, we’re left with Koda’s memory of Shouji saying that he knows it’ll take longer than a generation to tear down a wall that’s stood for over a century, so, just as previous generations have done, he’ll keep paying it forward, being the coolest hero the world’s ever seen, “to give good memories to generations to come.”  Which sounds really nice when he says it that way, as opposed to the broader implication that people whose children have been or are in danger of being maimed by bigots should just keep their heads down and “keep paying it forward.”

The whole “be a cool hero and give good memories” bit is particularly egregious to my eye, for a few reasons.

How much good did cool heroes do for Takami Keigo when they were just on TV?  Which is where Shouji will be, because in order to be “the coolest hero the world’s ever seen,” he’s going to have to be at the top of the rankings, and being at the top of the rankings means prioritizing cities, which means all those heteromorphs out in rural areas are never going to see him in person.  And anyway, what’s stopping all those bigots from just changing the channel or going on a rant about Woke Mutie Agendas every time a heteromorphic hero crops up on TV?    

How much did the visibility of previous generations’ cool heroes do for Spinner?  Does Shouji think Spinner was super inspired and uplifted by seeing e.g. Gang Orca on TV using the emitter-like hypersonic waves his quirk gives him to beat up Villains, an undue percentage of whom are also heteromorphs?

It’s certainly nice that Shouji was inspired enough by heroes on TV to want to emulate them, but he is demonstrably not the norm when it comes to wildly disadvantaged and victimized heteromorphs.  Also, I have to wonder how much his admiration of TV heroes would have done him if he’d gotten to the girl just a little later—say, in time to get her out of the river, but too late to be able to save her life without knowing CPR.  As bad as it was for him when he saved a little girl but had to touch her to do it, can you imagine how much worse it would have been if he’d touched her and then failed to save her, being found or having to walk back into town with her body?

I realize that's incredibly dark, but it's the kind of question that presents itself when the story is so insistent on Shouji's exemplary behavior being the model for heteromorphs to follow in their own lives.

   

O Exiting the flashback, when Shouji calls out to the heteromorphs, we finally get a straight-out look at how disastrous this conclusion is going to be in the way he shouts that no, the people who hurt them weren’t justified, but that there has to be a better way, that they should think about how to use their rage—but offers exactly zero suggestions himself for what that better way might be, or what they should be using their rage to do instead.[25]

25: I have seen the argument put forth that Shouji is one (1) teenager, and one (1) teenager cannot fairly be asked to Solve Bigotry.  To this, I would counter that if Shouji doesn’t have even one (1) single idea to offer, why is the camera lens holding him up as the hero who quelled a fifteen-thousand-strong mob with only words?  He doesn’t have to Solve Bigotry, but if he’s going to be used as a counter for other peoples’ misguided but at least active attempts to address the problem, he needed to be better than a mere white knight for the status quo.

Spinner’s #2 calls Shouji out on this directly, saying that if the situation were that easy to resolve, it wouldn’t have come down to this, and accusing Shouji of having no feasible solution to offer, just childish and naïve egotism.  And call me a hopeless MLA Stan and you’d be right, but truly, where’s the lie?

His efforts in this regard, however, wind up pushing Koda to what certainly has all the markings of a quirk awakening because it upsets Koda to see Shouji being “mocked.”  Man, sure is a good thing quirk awakenings are just a dime a dozen and definitely don’t require life-threatening injuries and/or incredibly severe emotional distress over someone who means more to you than your own life, right?

O In a last little stroke of ugliness for the chapter, Spinner calls Shouji gross.  Just to, you know, make it really obvious that the villains are all totally bad faith representation for this cause and thus can be safely dismissed.  (Christ, I hate these chapters.)

   

Chapter 372: 

O We get the flashback of Shouji and Koda asking All Might to assign them to the hospital defense group.  Points of note:

Neither Shouji nor All Might can be bothered to use the Ordinary Woman’s real name, instead just referring to her by her size.  Seriously, I get the intent behind insisting that she’s just an ordinary woman, that there’s nothing in particular stand-out about her in the current age; it’s pretty much the same deal as Shinomori saying that OFA can no longer be wielded by an “ordinary” person, with that phrasing being used to ironically emphasize that quirks are now seen as ordinary, while those without quirks are the unusual ones.  However, it obviously wouldn’t work in-universe for characters trying to specify who they’re talking about to say, “That ordinary woman,” with the end result being that they have to grab for what stands out about her if they want to be understood—in this case, her obviously unusual height.  In trying to emphasize that she’s normal, Horikoshi forces his characters to define her by what makes her stand out.    

Koda says that if Shouji’s going, he is too, a moment that would really land much better if they’d had literally any interactions of note at literally any point prior to this exact moment.  Frankly, even last chapter’s flashback is pretty thin on that front, since Koda is not one of the students who gets speaking lines when cuddling up to Shouji to comfort him.  (I’m not even convinced it’s very in character for Koda to be one of the kids diving in for cuddles—he’s usually pretty shy!)    

Shouji says that he could never call himself a hero if he were to stand back while the hospital attack plays out, implicitly emphasizing the role his reaction to his own oppression plays in his heroic motivation.

O Another flashback[26] gives us Koda’s mother discussing the possibility that he might get horns like hers someday, and what those horns can do, as well as mentioning that she used to have to put up with considerable mistreatment herself, and, lastly, telling her son to grow up into a man who gets angry when people mock those dear to him.

26: The sheer number of them crammed into this mini-arc really says a lot for how rushed it is, but complaining about the structural problems of the last few arcs would be a different essay.

Breaking those down, we’ve got:

The fact that Koda’s mom says he might grow in horns like hers suggests to me pretty strongly that her own horns are a quirk evolution she just doesn’t have the language to name as such.  If it were just a matter of maturation, something that came in with puberty, there’d be no “maybe” about it.  Given what we know about the context of quirk evolutions elsewhere, this in turn suggests that she did not exactly get her horns under peaceful, wholesome, uplifting circumstances!    

This is backed up by her mention of the “real cruelty” she faced.  Interestingly, this kind of raises some questions in relation to Shouji’s assertion last chapter that people like Koda who grew up in cities lack an understanding of the extremes of heteromorphobic violence that endure elsewhere.  Did Koda’s parents move to the city from the country at some point when Koda was young/before he was born, and the “real cruelty” was out in the country?  That might track with the overalls she was wearing.  And of course, Koda’s mother was a younger woman then, so maybe it’s just the fact that heteromorphic discrimination was worse at the time.  Either way, Koda’s mother is clearly open with him about the fact that she was mistreated because of her appearance, though she may have downplayed the severity of it.    

The idea of Shouji being “dear to Koda” is immensely frustrating for how utterly groundless it is, based on absolutely no prior grounding within the story other than the general bond among the 1-A students.  That’s just me complaining, though—more pertinent for this essay is the problem with how this moment frames anger.  Like, the whole mini-arc has the same problem, but this chapter is particularly rotten with it.  To preview: Koda’s anger is portrayed as righteous, as was his father’s, because their anger is about protection, about defensive reaction, about intervening with harm currently in progress—basically all the stuff Heroes are supposed to do.  It is notably not about action based on past harm or proactive attempts to prevent future harm.

O Koda’s bird attack knocks Spinner’s #2 off the roof in one of the most egregious examples of, “I can’t come up with an actual counterpoint for his arguments, so I’ll just shut him up through force,” I’ve ever seen.  Sure, there’s something to be said for not engaging bad faith parties in good faith arguments, but like…  That guy already had a platform of his arguments—he was standing on the roof of a tall building!  The author gave him several pages to make his pitch; the argument’s already out there in the readers’ minds!  The only thing getting rid of him does is guarantee that the person the taciturn Shouji actually has to argue with is…Spinner.  Who is not exactly a born orator at the best of times, and he’s very far from even that level here.

Now, #2 will get a few more lines next chapter, but they’re against one of the people on his own side.  No heroic character has to argue #2 down; instead, they get to match wits with the literally drooling Spin-zilla.  Which is a bit like stepping into the wrestling ring with someone who’s had a bag thrown over his head and his hands zip-tied behind his back.

This confrontation is, woefully, not the only place in the endgame where a heroic character gets all the time and freedom in the world to make their big pronunciations while their opponent gets shut down by some outside factor—interference from other villains, psychological decay, literal possession—but it’s in particularly stark relief here.

O Shouji contends that the crowd is letting their pain be exploited, which is a fair cop, but will become difficult to square with his praise of them next chapter.

O He says that these peoples’ children might be the next targets, presumably because of their actions here today.  This is particularly maddening because it’s coming from someone who was, himself, already targeted as a child!  Not because of anything his parents did, and certainly not because of anything bad he did, but simply because of the bigoted, backwards views of his town.  Children already and still are being targeted!  Shouji’s backstory is all wrong for this stand, and there’ll be another angle on that next chapter as well.

O Here we finally fulfill the promise of Shouji’s databook entry and see the Little Girl Crying Because His Face Was Scary.  She wasn’t crying because she was just scared of his face in isolation, but rather because she sees his face being scary as her fault, directly correlating his wounds to her rescue.[27] Those wounds stand in marked contrast to what happens when other people save small helpless children from danger, and underlines the biggest problem with this whole resolution: the idea that simply Being An Hero will create change.

27: My big question is, “Given that him being in contact with her was so bad it got him scarred for life, how did she even sneak out to see him again to give him this tearful apology?  Did young Shouji even want this apology, or would he have preferred she not risk the two of them being seen together again for both their sakes?

Now, it’s certainly likely in Horikoshi’s world that this little girl will, herself, grow up to be different from the people around her, that she won’t think heteromorphs are tainted.  And like, that’s at least one less person being awful, right?  And doesn’t every one count?

Sure, of course—but what happens when she runs up against that prejudice herself?  Will she try to intervene the next time she sees a blood cleansing?  Will she simply abstain from such action and teach equality in her own household without trying to change the village around her?  Will she simply move away and leave her hometown worse for her absence?  If she does stay in that town, will she herself become an outcast for her views—a form of silent, passive harassment that can be absolutely life-wrecking in those small Japanese villages?  If she gets married and has children, will her husband have her back in trying to raise those kids free of hatred?

For that matter, isn’t there a chance that, being surrounded in people who think heteromorphs are tainted, that she’ll just internalize something like, “It was my carelessness that got that poor heteromorph boy beaten so badly.  He was trying to help, and it only got us both hurt—him for the beatings, me for being in contact with his filth.”  Like, she’s so young in that scene; she’s got a whole lotta years of having the anti-heteromorph narrative reaffirmed at her before she’s old enough to do anything different herself.  It feels to me like the kind of thing that she could easily fall back into as she grows up, only to have a huge spiritual crisis about it once she hits her late teens to early twenties.

In any case, it's just a lot to put on a single child—on her and Shouji both!

O Spinner rallies enough to yell out a message of his own, but it’s just a quote of what he told his followers when he first sent out the call, not anything new to rally them, nor tailored to respond to what Shouji’s saying.  This has been the danger of the plotline all along, and here it comes to fruition: in putting bad faith villains with ulterior motives[28] up against an underdeveloped character who’s hidden the evidence of his mistreatment from Day 1, someone with no apparent intention to ever speak up for others like himself, no one comes out looking good.  Truly, heteromorphs deserve better rep.

28: #2 is the obvious one, but Spinner’s here in bad faith, too.  While I’m sure he’s not totally indifferent to the matter of heteromorph rights, it’s self-admittedly not his current priority.

O That said, if what Spinner says is old hat to the crowd, it is new to the audience, and it serves to sharply up the ante on from what we knew previously about the persecution he faced in his hometown!

But it would have gotten better if he’d just put on a mask and dealt with it, amirite?

Recall that Spinner has previously only said that people in his town called him names—this is self-evidently many steps worse.  Note, though, that it’s another example of the violence heteromorphs face not involving anyone using quirks—that is to say, nothing that’s a hero’s jurisdiction to deal with.  That being the case, how much could Spinner get away with fighting back or running before the “it’s okay to use quirks in self-defense” stops holding?  After all, is it still self-defense if biased cops[29] can accuse him of “escalating” the conflict?  How far away can he get by climbing on walls before it becomes, to some small-town local Hero, unlicensed public quirk use?

29: If policing in HeroAca Japan still works basically the same as it does in IRL Japan, then in truly backwater areas, ones too small to afford the upkeep of a police department, an officer would be sent in from another area to live in a home attached to the police box.  That being the case, it’s not a given that the officer would share the locals’ bigotry.  That’s where we come back to the whole “what percentage of Villain-designated criminals are heteromorphs” statement and what it implies about bias in the law enforcement system.  Also too, building a strong relationship with the community is absolutely essential to rural policing, and there are, oh, so many stories about what happens when someone new in a small Japanese town gets between the inhabitants and their “traditional spiritual practices.”

O Pig Nose Guy starts making an impression by noticing the doctors—most prominently Dr. Yoshi, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with a baseline nurse—forming a human chain in front of the hallway leading to the Inpatient Ward.  This drama is undercut on both fronts by the fact that Spinner is not looking for the Inpatient Ward, and in fact barrels right on past that hallway without even glancing in its direction.  So, the mob stops because they’re struck to hesitation by a group of people protecting a part of the hospital that the mob was not even intending to assault in the first place.

O As part of stopping, Pig Nose Guy seems to have some sort of flashback to a time he saw Dr. Toad caring for an elderly baseline man.  This raises a lot of questions to my by-this-time hyper-critical eyes.

What past circumstance brought Pig Nose Guy—presumably fairly rural, as most of this crowd is implied to be—to Central Hospital, the most technologically advanced hospital in the entire country?    •  If Pig Nose Guy is not rural, but was still so fired up about heteromorphobia that he joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital, wouldn’t that suggest that a lot of people in the story have been misleading us about the extent of anti-heteromorph sentiment in cities?    

If the person in the bed is someone related to Pig Nose Guy—perhaps someone with a rare illness that requires specialized treatment?—why is the guy entirely baseline?  If it’s just a friend, then they must be very close, given that PNG was willing to take a trip to the Tokyo metropolitan area to visit him.  But if PNG is that close to a baseline guy, why did he ever believe that baseline folks are such a lost cause that he, again, joined a terrorist-led mob to attack a hospital?    

Why is this important, impactful memory one of a heteromorph in a caretaker role instead of being taken care of?  To elaborate on why that question matters, a common issue you’ll see minority groups raise when talking about representation in media is the role any given minority character performs in their narrative—the gay best friend there to give the straight female lead advice, the Black person there to help a white person self-actualize, that sort of thing.  This is not so much a critique of any given, specific character as it is criticizing the restrictions on of what demographics are allowed to be portrayed as full, rounded individuals in popular media versus which are relegated to stock stereotypes or supporting cast.     This isn’t something BNHA addresses explicitly, but I do think we have some precedent for suspecting heteromorphs in this world have similar problems—think of the image for Class B’s play in Chapter 173, Gang Orca playing the Villain at the license exam, and, most egregiously, the Hug Me Corporation and its all-baseline-all-the-time image of bystanders and victims.  That being the case, it really gets to me that Pig Nose Guy’s memory here has the man in the hospital bed being baseline while it’s the doctor who’s the heteromorph.     Like, what does that communicate about his mindset, exactly?  “Oh, I remember this time I saw a heteromorph who’d managed to actually kind of Make It in society and he was nice to the baseline guy in his care.  But the spider guy leading us, he didn’t sound like he wanted us to be very nice at all.  Is that what I am?  Not nice?”  On the other hand, if the whole point of this memory is to remind PNG that there can be peace and support between heteromorphs and “people with human faces,” why in heaven’s name isn’t this a memory of a heteromorph being cared for and supported by a baseline person?  Why does the person doing the labor in this picture have to be of the oppressed class?

I hate this panel so much.

   

Chapter 373: 

O The last conversation plays out between Pig Nose Guy, #2, and Shouji, revealing #2 to be a bad faith idealogue who thinks of Shouji with microaggressions and his followers as meatshield patsies.  It’s real bad.

O Shouji says that the feelings that led the mob to come today are neither useless nor wrong, and that their willingness to keep thinking about everything makes them look like a bright and shining light to his eyes.  However, he carefully does not engage with the fact that those feelings, which were previously aimless and directionless, were only stirred up and stoked to the point of “coming today” by the villains.  It’s the same sort of thing the villains always get told, really—you may have a point, you have suffered, but when you act on that point, that suffering, then you’ve gone too far.  All you’re really supposed to do with that pain is—what, exactly?  Thinka bout it and choose to Nobly Endure?

O The last little bit of insult to this chapter, to my eye, is #2 getting an apology from some anonymous hero we’ve never seen in our lives, who says, “We’ve heard your voices loud and clear today.  Sorry for not realizing sooner.”

Remember the bit where the person who apologizes to Shouji for the octopus comment is Mineta, the gag character, instead of Sero, the serious character who brought it up in the first place?  Remember the conspicuous absence of Bakugou and Todoroki, who have actually used that language with conscious demeaning intent?  This apology is the systemic version of that absolute unwillingness on Horikoshi’s part to let his sympathetic/popular/important characters look bad.  It’s the same thing that led to none of the heroes who retired after the war being heroes the readers know and care about, the same thing behind the total collapse of the series’ critique of All Might.  Heroes are allowed to be ignorant, but they are not allowed to be complicit.

Notice, too, what this random hero does not say, what Shouji does not offer, the absence that damns this resolution: any promises of concrete change.  We’ve finally gotten to the crux of Horikoshi’s point, as delivered by Shouji, and it really does all boil down to this:

And I can’t overstate enough what a terrible resolution this is, especially given how Shouji’s own experience puts the lie to it.  Remember, Shouji saved a child from drowning, one of the absolute most prototypical actions someone can do and get called a Hero by the bystanders/victims/evening news.  The only thing he could have done that would have been more stereotyped would have been saving her from a burning building!  He saved that little girl from drowning and the townsfolk attacked him with farming tools for it.

How much more heroic would he have needed to be?  How much more of a shining light could he possibly have been?  In what universe could someone with that backstory possibly think that the answer to systemic bigotry—violence that goes wholly accepted by the community and wholly unpunished by the broader society—could be this Model Minority bullshit?

Ultimately, for Shouji’s backstory to realistically have given him the motivation he professes, his actions needed to have changed the people in his village for the better.  If the reader is meant to believe that Shouji’s “answer”—the premise that selfless heroism can change the hearts of bigots—then we have to see it.  And, you know, even if that had been what we got, there would still be grounds to criticize it!  It would still be a perhaps-too-idealistic depiction of fighting oppression; it would still put too much responsibility on the victims!  But at least it would justify Shouji’s own stance.

As it is, we have Shouji choosing to believe in the changeability of people who specifically shouted while throwing rocks at him that, no matter how much the times advanced, they would never accept him.  His answer does not entail a single non-heteromorph working to bring heteromorphs living in the darkness a light; it entails them kindling their own.  As with Pig Nose Guy shutting down in the face of a memory of a heteromorph doctor, this resolution asserts the life-changing power of…being told that heteromorphs have to do all the work to make baseline people feel better.

   

Conclusion

Do I think that this terrible resolution means heteromorphobia was poorly set up or retconned?  No, I don’t.  I just think it means that Horikoshi is a Japanese man writing a Japanese story from a position of demographic privilege in Japanese society.  I think he’s fully capable of setting up a detailed, intelligent, thoughtful discrimination allegory, a logical, internally consistent extension of the discrimination in the world around him to the alternate future he’s created—and then coming to a completely different resolution than I would because his context led him to different answers than I wanted or found acceptable.  Compared to the U.S., Japan as a culture is more communal, more collectivist; they have less history with successful protest movements, more history with protest movements turning violently extremist or just being ignored by those in power.  The idea of “not making trouble for others” is an incredibly deeply engrained value.

I have a decent idea why this resolution is what it is.  I can try to make myself view it through the more generous, forgiving lens of Cultural Differences; I can fail to do so and instead conclude that this is portrayal is much less about Cultural Differences than it is yet another in a long chain of Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Author Writes Discrimination Allegory, Fucks It All Up Because of His Well-Meaning Majority-Culture Centrism.  That doesn’t mean I believe heteromorphobia came out of nowhere, and I hope this essay has at least demonstrated that much, whatever you might think of its resolution.

——————————

Thank you so much for taking this journey with me, all! At 42,000 words and 93 pages in Word, there's definitely more I'd like to do with this, chiefly taking a spin through the Vigilantes spinoff, which I've always found to be very good at grappling with practical questions and concerns BNHA Core largely ignores. The character of Kamayan is particularly relevant to this topic.

However, for now, I'm going to take a break on this subject and turn my attention to something else. I'm not sure what it'll be quite yet, but meta projects that have moved towards the top of my list concern the ridiculous series of nerfs Toga has been subjected to in this endgame, arc thoughts on everything I hate about the stupid, stupid All Mech fight, and an organized argument for the endgame being chock-full of retcons that are obvious if you look at them for more than the five minutes it takes to read a chapter each week.

You may notice that all of those are pretty negative-sounding, and you would be right. Given that the whole reason I stopped doing my chapter posts is that I was weary of the constant negativity, the actual next thing I do will probably be to get back to one of my neglected MLA fanfic projects.

'Til next time, all!

[asbestieos]

we used to be friends, way before, and like, wow, youve gone so far, proud of you

🥹🥹🥹 oh my goodness!! anon if youre who i think you are (i am somewhat confident in my silly hunch), im so happy to know youre still out there even if we dont talk anymore!!! admittedly i have the most terrible memory ever so i barely remember much of our time together (i wish i remembered more!! but as is, i cant even remember the last time i showered lmfao) but since its been such a long time, i hope its ok if i give you a Riley Life Update of the past.. two, three years? <- it feels like it has been longer than that 😭😭

2020!! i graduated!! i enrolled in school! i girlslayed hard! however due to World Events, i cant go to school in person and am relegated to online classes in my room </3 unfortunately im also in the deepest depths of my genshin phase and ran both my own And denver’s acc. sometimes i paid for her acc’s battlepass too it was bad DBDKBFJ

2021! girlslaying starting to fail from burnout and severe depression from being shut in! i passed my first semester exams with flying colors! i failed all but one of my second semester exams. also come january im both afflicted with covid and experiencing a bad bed bug infestation. #girlsuffering. i dropped out in the summer ^_^ this is when the terrible moodswings hit (i thought they were moodswings but as it turns out, i was incredibly emotionally unstable!! more on this later)

2022!! last year oh my gosh! denver and jasper/moth and i started talking about moving in together, which requires me to have money of course. so aprilish i get a job! i work at starbucks! i girlslay REALLY hard. i also start playing ensemble stars (the beginning of my curse……..). come july i had a massive breakdown and almost broke up with denver and our mutual friend group 👍 it was Bad bad.. but things worked out? <- this experience has led me to believe im probably a bpd haver becos of how wildly unstable i am. fun! crasy asf!

moving plans fall through as summer goes by, im still employed at my job, still havent gotten my license yet but it is ok i will get it soon, and come 2023, moving plans are back on!! hopefully will be seen-through ny the time summer comes…

tldr i have bpd, i dropped out and got a job, im gay a shit over idol bot gacha game, and by summer, ill hopefully be moved in with denver!! yeha those are the important updates! for me at least. randys in college now btw!!! in her sophomore year!! shes incredible truly! she lives on campus so i usually only see her once a month or so but shes literally awesome ^_^

very long update post and i made it all about me 💔 theres history between us that ive unfortunately forgotten and im sad that ive forgotten (then again i could always read back, but every time ive tried, ive only cringed at myself like OOGH is that me?? sickening) but im really glad to have gotten this anon!! if youre not the person i think you are thats okay and also i am sorry i assumed UEGEJVFDJF i needed this i think to try and reflect back on. the crazy ass time my newrly three years of adult life has been.. im 21 in july!!! crazy as hell!

i also hope the formatting is ok, i try to break up big paragraphs w/o starting a brand new one for the sake of readability <:] i think i mightbe learned that from you? i dont remember though guwbddjjd.. but i think about you on the occasion as i do with everyone ive ever met ever and im glad to know youre still kicking it like i am.. life is rough a hell 💔

theres not enough words i can say that can make up for not remembering us too well and also for saying and doing hurtful things to you if theres one thing ive not forgotten, its that i was not a very nice person way back when. but i hope now youre in a better place and you have friends who love you just as much as i did and still do!!

i have to go to work but uuwheuehehhehehrhfht thank you for reaching out anon i hope this post was nice to read and feel free to live in my inbox for forever, even if you wanna stay anonymous forever i dont mind! if youre not the person i was thinking of, rest well with the joy that youve given me a moment to reflect on myself euwhhwrh but if you ARE the person i was thinking of. im sorry i hurt you. and thank you!! i love you!! im glad you were a part of my life. i hope your day is good and your tomorrow is better!! live in my inbox if it pleases you!!

EDIT: FROGOR TO SAY IM PROUD OF YOU TOO 👍

[presumenothing]

FMAB: Daughter of the Dusk – Chapter 8: A Gunshot Through Hope

(A little late, but here’s my non-fic contribution to the fandom in honour of FMA day! The game is quite long overall, so this covers just the first part, which I figured people might be curious about since it ties up the cliffhanger from Prince of the Dawn. Not sure if I’ll do the rest of the game yet, but in the meantime – enjoy this chapter!)

-

Daughter of the Dusk is the sequel to Prince of the Dawn, which covers Chapters 1-7 of the story, and has a English-subbed playthrough by EnvyPlays (which you should watch first before reading on, obviously). I don’t have either game, so this summary is based on this playthrough by チキンオレ, starting from video 9 in the playlist.

The game is set before the Briggs arc, and picks up directly from where the previous one ended: at the Amestris-Aerugo peace treaty signing ceremony in Central City, with Bradley and Prince Claudio shaking hands onstage. Ed spots Scar in the audience, but he vanishes before Ed can give pursuit. 

Meanwhile, up on the radio tower, Hawkeye prepares to snipe Claudio (on Bradley’s orders) with Black Hayate by her side. She takes out her pocketbook to check the ceremony map, and a photo of the team falls out, leading to this moment as she looks at the photo…

HAWKEYE: [silently] I pull this trigger of my own will. [aloud, at Hayate’s worried expression] It’s alright. [aims the rifle at Claudio as he begins his speech] The Hawk’s Eye does not miss. Goodbye, Colonel.

[sound of gunshot, cut to black]

[flashback to before the signing ceremony]

CHAPTER 8: A GUNSHOT THROUGH HOPE

NARRATOR: Central City gladly welcomed “Envoy of Peace” Prince Claudio, whose arrival marked the end of a long war. But the gunshot that rang out at the climax of the festivities – the peace treaty signing ceremony – abruptly turned the celebratory cheers to screams. The beginning can be traced back to several hours before the fated time……

FUHRER’S OFFICE: Envy leaves to bring Hawkeye to the sniper spot. Greed arrives. Bradley assigns him to bring Hawkeye’s rifle from the armoury (G: “How could a sniper forget her rifle?” B: “She couldn’t carry it and get past security.”), and gives him an ID for a weapons dealer so he can get in.

[player character: Greed]

CENTRAL COMMAND - RECEPTION: Greed bluffs his way past (G: Lying is against my creed, but I did promise to do this…), mainly because it turns out Bradley informed them beforehand of his arrival.

CENTRAL COMMAND - ARMOURY 2: Greed notices something odd about a large box, but dismisses it as his imagination, and takes the rifle. Bradley appears, having “coincidentally” passed by. Greed realises this was a test. (B: “This is a tactic that will shake the nation. Who knew if ‘the prince’ would make a racket.”) Bradley then reveals Greed’s next task – blowing up the sniper spot after the deed is done, to erase the evidence and silence Hawkeye.

[PC: Mustang, who is implied to have been hiding in the box Greed noticed]

Mustang thinks about what he overheard – the assassination and silencing of Hawkeye afterwards. (M: “My instinct was spot on, to have picked this as the meeting place! [beat] Time is running out. ……I’ll have to cancel my date. Hang in there.”) He heads out to search for the sniper spot.

CENTRAL COMMAND - LOBBY: A soldier tells Mustang that Hawkeye has gone out, and someone at the entrance might know where she was headed.

At the entrance, best boy™️ Black Hayate barks and proceeds to tug Mustang’s uniform. (M: “What’re you doing! I don’t have time to play with you now…" BH: [growls] M: “Ow ow ow! Let go! [beat] Fine, I’ll follow you! Lead me to where your master is……")

Mustang spots Envy in the city, and deduces that Hawkeye is somewhere nearby. He arrives at the train depot, followed swiftly by Ed looking for Hayate (this scene was seen from Ed’s POV in the previous game, at 13:20 of Part 18). Mustang decides to return Hayate and make Ed leave so they won’t get caught up in this. He reflects on how Hawkeye has been given nothing but tasks opposite to him ever since Claudio arrived, likely because the higher-ups wanted to separate them so he wouldn’t find out about the assassination plan… which didn’t work out, clearly. Hawkeye then arrives (their confrontation was also previously seen from Hawkeye’s POV, at 7:08 of Part 19).

[PC: Fuery]

Fuery wrings his hands over having lost sight of Mustang, Ed, and Hayate. He decides to track down Mustang since something about him had looked off, by asking around if anyone’s seen him.

ENTERTAINMENT DISTRICT: Fuery runs into Vanessa, who is Peak Angry at Mustang for passing by without noticing her at all. She says that he’d headed towards the abandoned factory.

[PC: Mustang]

ABANDONED FACTORY: Fuery finally finds Mustang, who asks what he’s doing here. (F: “Please stop saying such stand-offish things. Something happened, right, Colonel?” M: “You’re no longer under my command. Whatever I do has nothing to do with you.” F: “It does! I’m worried of my own accord!” M: “One after another… I really did get some strong-willed subordinates, huh.”) Scar then appears out of… seemingly nowhere, causing Mustang to dimiss Fuery over his protests, telling him to contact Breda and Falman. Scar and Mustang both declare they don’t have time for this. Scar activates his disintegration alchemy, but Mustang makes a smokescreen with flame alchemy and runs off.

[Time left until the fated moment – 00:59:59]

Having explained the situation to Falman, Breda, and Fuery, Mustang tells them it’s not too late to return to their posts, but of course they reject this offhand. Mustang then says that he’s going to meet Claudio and try to stop the signing ceremony somehow.

[Time left until the fated moment – 00:51:28]

Mustang asks Claudio to not appear at the ceremony, as he is being targeted. Claudio says he was prepared for the danger all along, and a mini-game follows where you have to choose dialogue that will convince him. Mustang says that it’s a plot by rebels within the military (another option says it’s by mysterious aliens, lol) with a sniper known to be a crack shot, though he claims their identity is still under investigation. Claudio then asks the real reason why he’s so determined to stop this, since it might even endanger his standing in the military, and Mustang answers that it’s out of his personal wish of peace. In the end, Claudio declares that he still won’t stop the ceremony just to protect his own life, but he will bear Mustang’s words in mind. Mustang acknowledges this determination, and says that he will do everything he can to foil the plot.

[Time left until the fated moment – 00:32:23]

[PC: Fuery]

Fuery sneaks into the communication room to eavesdrop on transmissions from Bradley’s allies to Hawkeye. After some false alarms (including a report of a woman being detained for carrying a rifle-shaped object and blunt weapon, who turns out to be Winry with automail case and spanner), he catches an exchange between Envy and Hawkeye, and finds out the sniper spot is outside the ceremony area and informs the rest. An emergency report then comes in about an intruder at the back door – it’s Scar.

[PC: Scar]

Scar barges in and destroys things while… monologuing darkly about various things, including his comrades and “that man”. (I’ll be honest, I do not like this Ishvalan terrorist subplot at all so I paid about zero attention to it.) He leaves. Falman and Breda arrive under the pretext of providing backup.

[Time left until the fated moment – 00:24:45]

[PC: Falman]

Falman and Breda head towards the watchtower to look for Hawkeye’s sniper spot. Just to be on the safe side, Falman memorises a guard assignment map of the ceremony area, which turns out useful when a suspicious soldier gives them a literal pop quiz to prove they’re really here as backup. Falman aces it, and Breda sneaks off while he proceeds to distract the soldier… with a long, long, long monologue on the founding of Amestris. Which continues even as the screen fades to black. Who ever said history wasn’t useful?

[Time left until the fated moment – 00:15:22]

[PC: Breda]

Breda sneaks up to the watchtower, and spots Hawkeye through a telescope, at her sniper spot atop the radio tower. He’s then discovered, but manages to send word to Mustang before he’s knocked out.

[Time left until the fated moment – 00:04:48]

[PC: Mustang]

Mustang hears Breda’s message but can’t get any further response from him, and rushes off. Fuery also radios in to warn that Bradley has ordered Mustang’s arrest, saying not to reply before he’s seemingly arrested too. Mustang is then surrounded, but spots a certain gremlin.

[Time left until the fated moment – 00:03:11]

[PC: Ed]

Unsurprisingly, Ed is furious, and proceeds to furiously kick ass via alchemy. Mustang warns him about the plot before leaving. (M: “The Hawk’s Eye is aiming for the stage. She’s being used by them. I don’t want to ask anything of you, but–” E: “Leave it to me.” M: “You’re not surprised? ……so you already noticed.” E: “No. I didn’t know until now.” M: [shrugs with excessive sass])

Other soldiers try to stop Ed, on account of him being Mustang’s ally, leading to an entertaining obstacle course as he dashes towards the stage. (E: “Hah, as if they could keep up with me! [beat] …wait, this isn’t the time for that!”)

We’re now back to the start, at the moment where Claudio begins his speech. From offstage, Ed spots a flash from the radio tower. He rushes forward to tackle Claudio down and gets shot……… on his automail, so it’s all fine!

It gets much less fine a moment later, when the radio tower blows up. Hawkeye pulls Hayate into a hug, trying to shield him as the tower falls onto them, but the entire thing goes up in flames just in time, metal and all. Stunned, Hawkeye turns around amidst the drifting ashes to see none other than…

MUSTANG: Sorry I kept you waiting. You ended up bearing all this alone. HAWKEYE: I chose this myself. MUSTANG: You were trying to protect us, weren’t you? Leave the rest to me. [Hawkeye inhales sharply] Protection is my job. HAWKEYE: Understood.

Meanwhile, back at the ceremony:

AL: Brother! ELENA: Brother! WINRY: Ed! AL: [silently] “Brother”!? Elena definitely said that just now……!

ED: That was close. CLAUDIO: …time to change plans. We’ll retreat for now. [leaves] ED: What was that about……?

There’s a bit more aftermath: Scar talks with another Ishvalan, Envy chews Greed out for letting Hawkeye escape (until Father bitches them out for sibling quarrels), and Bradley says he’ll release Mustang’s team.

We cut to Mustang and Breda right outside the ceremony area:

ED: Is everyone okay!? BREDA: Everyone was let off without censure. Sergeant Fuery, Officer Falman, and Lieutenant Hawkeye are fine too. MUSTANG: “In recognition of heroic actions to save the prince’s life”, apparently. ED: And what about the ceasefire treaty? MUSTANG: It’s taking everything we have just to handle the fallout. About the treaty, or the prince… none of it has been decided. ED: That prince……

AL: [narrating] The prince’s life was saved with Brother’s involvement. It seems that the Fuhrer and his allies had planned from the start to worsen the war by killing the prince. Unaware of all this, Prince Claudio remains in this country, and is said to be hoping to start over on the treaty. But there’s something I’m far more bothered by–

[flashback to Elena shouting “Brother!”]

AL: The word Elena shouted while looking at Prince Claudio… and yet, I wasn’t able to ask her anything. Because it felt like Elena would vanish somewhere, if I did ask……

To be continued.

-

And last but not least… the trailer for the next chapter!

WINRY: Oh no, it’s terrible! There’s been a case! A locked-room murder! The name of the case is “The Murder of Colonel Roy Mustang”! ED: So you died without achieving your goal… go to your sleep in peace, Colonel. ROY: Hold it right there! I’m still alive! WINRY: I’ll solve this case for sure! I definitely will! Next time, on FMAB: Daughter of the Dusk, Chapter 9 – Automail Mechanic Winry Rockbell’s Splendid Casebook! ROY: Like I said, stop progressing the story however you like! [gets elbowed(??) by Winry] WINRY: Well then, who’s the culprit!?

[gammija]

The final Web!Martin evidence list

Now that canon is done, and we’ve got word of god confirmation that Web!Martin wasn’t complete nonsense, I decided to go back to my lil chronological evidence list and actually clean it up a bit, delete parts that in hindsight weren't all that indicative, and put everything in a slightly more readable format. (Obligatory disclaimer that i don’t and never did believe or advocate for some kind of evil web!martin, and that I'm not intending to connect a moral judgement to martin (or anyone else for that matter) having some of these traits)

So here: The (hopefully, please) final list with Web!Martin Evidence! Presented in order of importance, according to. me

The final (hopefully) Web!Martin evidence list

(In order from most to least obvious)

Spiders

I mean, it’s called the Web. TMA reiterates quite a few times that Martin liked spiders. Sometimes it IS that easy.

MAG022: Martin: "I like spiders. Big ones, at least. Y’know, y’know the ones you can see some fur on; I actually think they’re sort of cute -"

MAG038: | Sasha: "A spider?" Jon: "Yeah. I tried to kill it…" [...] Sasha: [Chuckles] "Well, I won’t tell Martin." Jon: "Oh, god. I don’t think I could stand another lecture on their importance to the ecosystem."

MAG059: Jon: "I have done my best to prevent Martin reading this statement in too much detail. I have no interest in having another argument about spiders."

MAG079: Jon: "Apparently, biologically, his account of the spiders doesn’t make any sense according to Martin."

MAG197: Martin: “What? Because I like spiders? Well, used to.”

Lies and subterfuge

Martin is able to use lying and subterfuge to achieve his goals, and is called manipulative a few times.

Lies:

MAG022: Martin: "[He] became slightly more co-operative after I lied to him and told him that one of the upstairs residents had buzzed me in."

MAG056: Martin: "I lied on my CV."

MAG158: Peter: “But you said –” Martin: “Honestly, I mostly just said what I thought you wanted to hear.”

MAG164: Jon: "You – I actually believed you!"

MAG189: Martin: “Sorry. Sorry, John. Not sure how much everything up there actually understood what was going on. But, y’know, I didn’t want to take any chances so it made sense to… um…” Jon: “Put on a show?” Martin: “Yeah, basically, more or less.”

MAG191: Martin: "That's not true." Arun: "Liar!"

Subterfuge:

The plan in 118, which revolved around convincing Elias that Martin was only “acting out”, to create a distraction for Melanie. (Also compare the way he evades giving a straight answer here with the way Annabelle talks in 196.)

Working with Peter in s4 under false pretenses, to distract him from Jon and eventually try to learn what Peter wanted.

Manipulation accusations:

These, I know, are somewhat contentious, since it’s mostly villains saying this to him. I’m still including them, since

1): From a media analysis standpoint, being mentioned 3 times is a sign to pay attention, even when it may not be the full truth.

2): I only see it as describing Martin’s behaviour in the previous points, not as a moral judgement; Especially since he almost always ‘manipulates’ people in positions of power over him.

Still, if it bothers anyone, feel free to ignore these.

MAG138: Martin: "That’s it? No, no monologue, no mind games? You love manipulating people!" Elias: "That makes two of us."

MAG186: Martin: “I can be a real manipulative prick, you know that?” Also Martin: “Oh yeah.”

MAG196: Annabelle: “Because you always managed to get what you wanted through smiles and shrugs and stammerings that weren’t nearly as awkward as they seemed.” [SMALL SOUND OF MARTIN’S CONCESSION TO THE POINT] Martin: “Point taken.”

The Lonely/the Web

The Lonely and the Web sometimes affect Martin to similar degrees.

In season 3, when Martin is getting used to reading statements for the first time, most of them leave him emotionally affected: MAG084, MAG088, MAG090,

MAG095: Martin: “S-S-Statement… done.” [HEAVY BREATHING & TREMBLING AS MARTIN STEADIES HIMSELF] “I don’t like recording these. There. I-I said it.”,

MAG098: Martin: [Panting] “End of statement.” [Deep breath] “I, um, I think I might need to sit down. Oh. Yeah, I am. Right. I don’t, uh, I’m not really sure if these are actually getting easier or harder. I mean I don’t feel –”

Only the last two statements he reads are remarkably easier. This might be a hint that Martin is just getting used to reading them, but the quote from MAG098 seems to contradict that. Either way, it’s likely not a coincidence that those last two happen to be the Lonely and the Web:

MAG108: Martin: “Statement ends.” (exhale) “That wasn’t so bad…”

MAG110: Martin: “Statement ends.” [...] “I mean, I think it sounds like a Jurgen Leitner book. About spiders. Hm. Good John didn’t have to read this one, anyway. I know he’s not a fan. Although, this one wasn’t too bad, actually! I – yeah. Anyway.”

In season 5, there are two powers’ Domains that actually affected Martin mentally, as opposed to only physically: the Lonely’s, in 170 (and arguably 186), and, depending on your interpretation, in 172, when Martin went exploring without knowing why he did so.

Proximity

Martin investigates a lot of the Web statements during season 1 to 3 (in other words, when the archive team still researches statements). The only ones he isn’t mentioned in during this period are MAG019 and MAG020, when he’s being harrassed by worms, and MAG081, which Jon records by himself outside of the institute.

Most notably, he’s the one who discovered the statement in MAG114, ‘Cracked Foundations’, which is the one statement in the entire show that sets up the interdimensional properties of HTR.

The Web!Lighter passed through Martin's hands first, before he gave it to Jon.

Similarly, Annabelle mostly spoke to Martin in season 5, despite most other Avatars usually focusing on Jon.

Aesthetics

Apart from the above obviously Web related areas, there are some other aesthetics which are mentioned in connection to both the Web and Martin, throughout canon.

These are describing the Web;

These are describing Martin.

Tapes:

Martin is the only character to treat the tape recorders as friends - any other character is either indifferent, or treats them as enemies.

MAG039: Martin: "I think the tapes have a sort of… low-fi charm."

MAG154 Martin: “Oh. Hi. Hello again.” … (small laugh) “Sorry pal, false alarm this time.”

MAG156 Martin: “Mm? Oh.” [HE LAUGHS, GENTLY.] “Yeah. (rustling paper) I was going to read one. Hate for you to miss it!” [SHORT, FORCED LAUGH, AS HE FLAPS THE STATEMENT AROUND.]

MAG170 Martin: “Oh. Oh, hello. What’s this? Wow, retro! What are you up to, little buddy; just – listening? That’s okay. It’s nice to have someone to talk to.”

MAG190 Jon: "[The tapes] seem to like [Martin]."

Retro:

MAG069: Statement: “I only saw Annabelle Cane once during this period. She wasn’t hard to pick out. She dressed like a vintage clothing store exploded on her, and her short bleach-blonde hair stood out sharply against dark skin.”

MAG160: Jon: “Anyways, don’t tell me the phonebox down there doesn’t appeal to your retro aesthetic.” Martin: “It – might. Maybe.”

MAG163: Annabelle/the Web callying Martin via an old payphone: [ A PHONE RINGS. IT’S NOT THE TINNY, ELECTRONIC SOUND OF A CELLPHONE – NO, THIS IS A TRUE, HEAVY, CLASSIC RING.] Martin: “Uh. John? Uh, J, John – the, uh, payphone that’s – here, for some reason – it’s ringing?”

Hatred of burns:

MAG067: Jack Barnabas’ statement: “I looked up and noticed within the corner of the room, where there had been a spider’s web this morning, there was just a faint wisp of smoke.” “Another held a bag that seemed to be full of candles, while a third had a clear plastic container filled with hundreds of tiny spiders.”

MAG139: Statement by member of Cult of the Lightless Flame: “The Mother of Puppets has always suffered at our hand; all the manipulation and subtle venom in the world means nothing against a pure and unrestrained force of destruction and ruin.” Agnes burned down Hilltop Road.

MAG145: The Web ties Gertrude to Agnes, stopping the Desolation’s ritual (the only Power whose ritual the Web is known to have prevented).

MAG167: Gertrude enlists Agnes’/the Desolation’s help in order to burn her assistant Emma, who was Web aligned.

MAG169: Martin: "Look, I just – don’t want to get burned, all right? It’s, it’s like my least favorite pain ever. [...] I, I legitimately hate burns, alright? They’re, they’re awful, and they scar horribly, and they just – it – it just makes me sick; I, I hate it. Hate it!"

Phrasing:

MAG039: Martin: "I’m trapped here. It’s like I can’t… move on and the more I struggle, the more I’m stuck. [...] It's just that whatever web these statements have caught you in, well, I’m there too. We all are, I think."

MAG079: Martin's poem: "The threads of people walking, living, lovi–"

MAG117: Martin: "This last couple of years, I’ve always been running, always hiding, caught in someone else’s trap, but, but now it’s my trap, and, well, I think it’ll work. I know, I know it’s not exactly intricate, but it felt good leaving my own little web. Oh, oh, Christ, I hope John doesn’t actually listen to these. “Good lord, is Martin becoming some sort of spider person?” No, John, it’s an expression, chill out! Besides, spiders are fine. I mean, yes, people are scared of them, obviously, but actual spiders, they just want to help you out with flies."

MAG167: Jon: “Methinks the Spider dost protest too much.” Martin: “Jon –” Jon: “Joking! Just joking.”

Personality:

How applicable these are depends heavily on how you interpret Martin's own personality, so your mileage may vary.

MAG008: Statement: “Nobody ever said a word against Raymond himself, though, who was by all accounts a kind and gentle soul [...]”

MAG123: Jon: "The Web does seem to have a preference for those who prefer not to assert themselves."

MAG147: Annabelles statement: "I discovered a deep and enduring talent inside myself for lying. [...] My manipulations were not intricate, but they were far beyond what was expected of a child my age, and I have always believed that the key to manipulating people is to ensure that they always under- or overestimate you. Never reveal your true abilities or plans."

Word of God and Annabelle

I kinda wanted to ‘prove’ that Web!Martin had quite a bit of evidence to back it up, hence this header being last. But of course, in this post-canon world, there are a few lines that most obviously confirm the theory:

MAG197: Martin is Web enough to be able to read the 'vibrations', like Annabelle, and see Jon and Basira (the latter being especially notable, as he hadn't known she was there beforehand): [CHITTERING, BUZZING AND HIGH-PITCHED SQUEALS CHANGE CADENCE] Martin: "Wait… Wait, hang on, is that him?" Annabelle: "Yes. I guess you’re better with the Web than we thought." Martin: "And – Wait, ha– No, uh… is that… Basira? He – He’s got Basira with him!" Annabelle: "Yes."

Season 5 Q&A part 2: Jonny: “Essentially, it was fascinating looking at the fandom and, like, the Web!Martin believers, because what they were doing was correctly picking up on hints dropped in the early seasons that were later, like, not exactly abandoned, but it was much more like, ‘Well, no, he does have like aspects of The Web to him, but he is moreover The Lonely.’ And that came about very… very organically, really. Because throughout Season 3 and going into Season 4, we had this conversation and we were like, ‘No, actually he's like-” Alex: “‘It can't be, it cannot be, it must be the other way round’ Yeah.”

(Note that they say “throughout season 3 and going into season 4,” which likely means that season 1, season 2, and at least part of season 3, aka half of the entire show, were written with Web!Martin as an intentional possibility.)

If you read all that, thanks so much! Obviously, Web!Martin never really came to fruition, so it's fine if you still don't like it. This is just a post explaining where it was coming from, at least for me and the other theorists I've spoken to.

[itsthemysteryofthedroods]

I appreciate this blog so much for always making me smile when I see MOTD content, I got really into the game a little while back unfortunately it crashes Everytime I try to give Chris the bone BUT I was really happy when I saw a blog for fandom stuff I wasn't expecting to see, thnk u for the content it is what I am living on for this smol fandom ((tell me more about the druids?))

Thank you, anon, really. :,) It means a lot to me to know that, seriously. I mean, I love doing this either way but...It's really wonderful when people reach out and let me know they're actually enjoying it.

I just wanted to say that you're the reason I posted those things about Droods bug fixes. Because I can't believe I never thought to share them on here? They'll probably solve the problem you had, anon.

This fandom's just so wonderful, I always feel so safe and happy sharing stuff about my (usually incredibly obscure or at least somewhat unpopular) interests.

Honestly, jokes aside, I'm not the best person to ask about the Druids, there are some people in the fandom who are just so rad at doing research, but I just wanted to say that in case you didn't know, the mistletoe thing is actually true-to-life somewhat and a popular fact compared to everything else. It was basically their de-facto sacred plant...Even though, like all information about the Druids in real life, this fact is very hard to know for sure, let alone prove. I believe, though, that druids might have actually used it, as in real life, ordinarily toxic (when consumed) plants like mistletoe have medicinal purposes, much like the infamous "deadly nightshade". Their medicinal uses are plenty. You can even make mistletoe tea, ah, barring the obvious problems. Anyway, the whole mistletoe thing makes a lot of sense, seeing as druids were (hope I'm saying this right) scholars, and just generally knowledgeable people who would have probably found a use for that plant on a deep level, and maybe even have come to revere it.

The only thing that's quite weird is how mistletoe grows in the game, growing straight out of the ground, but you probably knew this already. Mistletoe (which is actually can refer to several kinds of species, much like violets or almost any other plant really) is a parasitic plant (note that I did not say parasite, it actually doesn't derive all of its nutrients from another plant, so it's only semi parasitic or hemiparasitc if you want to use the proper term), however it does need some kind of host to attach to, it cannot survive otherwise.

Anyway, Tobias himself (the guy with the idea for Druids in the first place) did say he was pretty proud of his level of research regarding the Druids (artistic liberties aside) and I believe him, especially considering that new information about the Druids probably wasn't even available when the game was conceived. I don't know how many people know about this, but the game was indeed supposed to have a sequel centering on Melanie and Halligan (He said so in an interview), so I would've very much liked to know how that turned out, because he did seem at least passionate about the subject and would've probably been able to do more with it as time went on :(

...A somewhat odd fact about the game itself that I bet you is completely useless and probably only has any relevance to me is that there are around 63+ still-frames of animation for Lowry's fan alone (something I learned while painstakingly trying to convert each image into a more readable format), which are all placed on top of Lowry's office, which is another 3D still-image, which is how the in-game animations (not the characters) work. Door opening and closing animations are only 4 frames each, so you can definitely tell what was important to the developers...A significant portion of the game's early frames are dedicated entirely to the "american water-dispenser" in the chief's office.

I don't know why I find that so funny. I'm just really, really into learning about every nook and cranny of the stuff I love on a technical level, so I guess if you want to know about that...You can...Well, you can count on me for that.

Wow, this got long! I don't even know what I'm saying anymore, anon, but thank you again, hope you have a good time :,)

[nomazee]

Slow

ushijima wakatoshi x reader

word count: 3400+

content: soulmate au (matching soulmarks), developing relationship, mild angst, ushijima is just Very Clueless sometimes, weird pacing (i can never get the pacing of my writing right :/ )

(hi hi hi!! here’s the ushijima oneshot i mentioned a few days ago. this was something i started working on a while ago but dropped it momentarily to focus on some other stuff. i ended up rewriting it completely and renewing the concept a bit.

this is sort of a different writing style? but that’s mainly because i wanted to adjust the way i wrote to the way the reader’s thoughts came through. i hope that makes sense? and i hope this is still readable!!

i really hope you guys like this one. while soulmate aus aren’t my most favorite trope, i definitely like the way you can twist it to fit your story and make up new concepts branching from the main idea of soulmates.

i think this is the longest work i’ve made?? i’m definitely pretty proud of it!! i hope my hard work paid off and you all enjoy it :)

ALSO: a very quick note. i use the word “furoshiki” a few times in one part of the story to refer to the cloth that people use to wrap bento boxes. if i misused that term please let me know!! i looked it up to make sure i was using the right word but there’s definitely still a chance that i could be wrong. feel free to correct me on that!!

by the way: i’m posting this from my phone right now so the formatting might not all be there. i’m very sorry about that!! once i get the chance to go back on my laptop i’ll make sure to fix everything :)

happy reading !!)

☾.:°∗★.:☆:.★∗°:.☽

It was common knowledge among those in the Shiratorizawa Volleyball Club that their captain, Ushijima Wakatoshi, prioritized volleyball over nearly everything else.

Even relationships. Even soulmates.

His friend Tendou had laughed mirthlessly when Ushijima first met you, his soulmate. He was there to witness the whole thing, your eyes flitting between the ace’s soulmark trailed beautifully against his wrist and the same mark mirrored on your forearm. You looked enthused to meet him--not overly, hopping-off-the-walls ecstatic, but certainly hopeful enough to elicit a wide smile from you.

“I’m [Last] [First],” you introduced yourself politely, with light hesitance and an extended hand.

Ushijima blinked, looked down at your hand (soft, a red and scabbed cut on your first knuckle, a birthmark on the bony part of your wrist) and then back up at your eyes. He returned the gesture, shaking your hand, giving a polite bow--

--and walking right away.

You blinked in shock. Tendou’s mouth parted in disbelief. His head swung back and he called after Ushijima to no avail. Turning back to you, he gave a short apology and ran after his friend to scold (and tease) him.

Your mind went a bit hazy and in a natural defense mechanism, you tried to convince yourself that you were just dreaming.

You went home. Fell into your bed. Realized you were not dreaming. Cried into your pillow and fell asleep, begrudgingly waking up the next morning and getting ready for school.

---

During lunch, you stayed in your classroom to eat lunch alone when someone at the door told you a boy was looking for you. (You felt a bit pathetic for hoping that it was your soulmate and being disappointed when you realized it was not him.)

You recognized the boy as the redhead that accompanied your soulmate yesterday. Flinching at the memory, you asked him why he was here.

“I just wanted to say sorry, for the way my friend acted yesterday.” His expression was lighthearted and playful, if anything, but you recognized the sincerity of his words. “He tends to be a little… aloof, sometimes. But I promise you it’s not that he hates you or anything, just isn’t used to this. But he’s willing to talk to you again.”

You tried not to get your hopes up too much, and instead look at the reasonable outcomes of this whole soulmate thing. It’s not like you were really expecting love at first sight--lots of soulmates didn’t end up in a romantic relationship. Hell, your parents weren’t even soulmates but they were still very in love with each other. But at the very least, you thought your soulmate wouldn’t just walk away after meeting you.

You took the redhead’s offer, packed up your half-eaten bento, and followed him to his own classroom a few doors down.

Your soulmate was there--you still didn’t know his name--and his head perked up at the sound of the sliding door opening. His expression was stagnant, which dampered your spirits the slightest bit and made you consider spinning on your heel and locking yourself in the bathroom for the rest of the school day.

You sat with the two of them, knees clenched together and gaze focused solely on the bento box resting on your lap. None of you spoke. Tendou’s eyes flitted between the both of you in expectance.

“So,” he spoke up, thankfully breaking the bout of stifling silence. “[Name], you wanna tell us a little about yourself? We don't really know much about you outside of… the very little we learned yesterday, so…?”

Your mouth gaped and closed rapidly, trying to find a good way to describe yourself without either seeming like an interviewee or a self-absorbed rando.

“I’m… [Name]. I’m seventeen… in class one. I’m in the photography club.” There wasn’t much else to say, you thought. You were a very normal person. Maybe too normal to really be worthy of having a close bond with your soulmate, but a small part of you still sort of hoped.

“Wakatoshi, your turn.”

The taller boy blinked into his bento (hayashi rice, you noted. Something you were able to cook, if you tried hard enough) before speaking. His voice was deep and embarrassingly, you flushed at the way it rumbled within his throat.

“I’m the captain of the volleyball team.”

Okay. So. No age. No name (except for ‘Wakatoshi,’ which you only pulled from what Tendou said). Just his club.

With a lump in your throat and a prickly feeling behind your eyes, you excused yourself politely, bowing, and clutching tightly to your star-wrapped bento before leaving the classroom.

You went home. Punched your pillow before realizing you were definitely not one for using aggression as a coping mechanism and instead crying while making a cup of tea. Went to bed and woke up the next morning trying to forget all of the events of the past two days.

---

A week passed. Somewhere within that time, Tendou had exchanged numbers with you as a polite formality, a deeper meaning ingrained in his offer (one that you read as, “hey, I know it must be really disappointing to realize that your soulmate has absolutely no clue what romance is and no ambition for anything but hitting a volleyball, but if you ever wanna talk about it then hit me up!” You couldn’t deny that you still appreciated it).

You took the week to avoid interacting with Wa-ka-to-shi, never texting Tendou and asking to eat lunch with them or even showing up at his practice like some of their fans did (you were a bit surprised to learn that the volleyball team had fans). But you had a breaking point, as you often did whenever it came to your faux-shunning.

You texted Tendou, hoping that you weren’t that unlucky that he was still at volleyball practice and had his phone out for the captain to view.

does he like hayashi rice?

“Read” appeared under your text. You waited for the three dots to appear, which took an unnervingly long time to happen.

yup! how’d u know??

he was eating it when i had lunch with you guys.

ur observant!!

i guess. do you guys have morning practice tomorrow?

yup! starts at 7. fourth gym :) see you there!!

You paused. Tendou was nice. Also very observant. Scarily observant, enough to catch onto what you were trying to do. It made you a bit wary, but to be fair, you weren’t really being discreet in the first place.

Your mother asked you multiple times why you were cooking beef stew at nine PM, far past dinnertime. You were scared to admit that it was for a soulmate, so you instead settled for “friend” and she (very suspiciously) let you be in the kitchen.

You packed the food into four bento boxes. One for your mom, your dad, Wa-ka-to-shi, and you. (You couldn’t help the annunciation of each syllable of his name. It was just so fun to say, so fun to click against the back of your tongue repeatedly. You blamed the affinity for his name on your soulmate bond.)

You went to bed. Woke up extra early. Disregarded the concerned look your parents gave you when you left the house half an hour early with two bentos in hand.

Just as Tendou said, there was the squeaking of the volleyball team from within Gym Number Four. You hovered outside, a text sent to Tendou asking if you were allowed to come in as you awkwardly shifted the weight on your feet.

yup!! we’re taking a break right now. just come right in, i’ll be waiting for u at the door

He was waiting for you at the door, but so was Wakatoshi (you figured you should drop the somewhat-annoying pronunciation of each letter), which threw you into a stammering loop as you blinked between the both of them.

“Good morning.” Wakatoshi greeted you politely, nodding his head at you. You repeated the gesture before extending a bento box to him, with your favorite star cloth wrapping it in the neatest way you could manage.

“It’s for you. For lunch. Or dinner. Or whenever. It’s hay-- um, hayashi rice.”

Wakatoshi didn’t take it. You cringed at the lack of action and a familiar lump manifested in your throat. The stoic boy blinked down at the childish wrap and you found yourself wishing you took a solid colored furoshiki instead of this one.

In a moment of boldness, you shoved the box into his chest where he instinctively reached for it and held it.

“I hope you like it!” You said it louder than intended and flinched at the sudden gazes on you from the other members of the team further into the gym. “Have a good day.”

A polite bow, and you were on your way, cursing yourself for taking the effort to make a decent-quality meal for a soulmate, a boy who barely even glanced at you without his friend giving him the hint to do so.

During lunch, you didn’t feel hungry, and the bento sat untouched on your desk for the whole break. You ended up letting your parents have the leftovers when you got home. Your appetite was gone for the rest of the day.

(Tendou ended up bringing you back your box and cloth the next day, wordlessly apologizing for having to be the messenger of your belongings rather than the person you actually gifted it to in the first place. You took it back with a resigned sigh and a thankful smile.)

---

The morning you stopped by, Tendou rolled his eyes after your departure and he gave his friend a firm, but friendly pat on the back.

“Why are you so awkward, Wakatoshi? That’s your soulmate, you know. You could at least be a little courteous towards her?”

Said man stayed silent, still leering at the patterned furoshiki covering the lunch you made for him--specifically him; the concept sent an unfamiliar fluttering through his chest that he didn’t dare to look into.

“Why would she make this for me?”

Tendou rolled his eyes again, letting out an audible groan.

“I just explained it to you, ‘Toshi! She likes you. You’re her soulmate. You could at least tell her thank you.”

“I will, next time.”

Tendou’s eyes narrowed at that. You seemed like a spontaneous person, from the few interactions you’d had with each other. (That, and the fact that after a week of ghosting your own soulmate you suddenly decided to make an entirely specialized lunch for him.) He wanted to half-joke and say ‘I don’t really know when the next time will be, exactly,’ but figured that may lead into another Q & A With Ushijima Wakatoshi, and instead let the captain simmer in his own contemplation for now.

---

You didn’t know Semi Eita very well. He was in your class, and you chatted a fairly reasonable amount with him, even going as far as to sit and eat with him in the classroom whenever he claimed he was “too tired to deal with his friends in the cafeteria.” As much of a “friend” of his you could be considered, you didn’t know much of him past what he was on the surface.

Nevertheless, you still knew him better than your soulmate. And that petty realization may have contributed to why you accepted his offer for a cafe date.

Semi approached you during lunch one day, not embarrassed in the slightest when he asked you if you wanted to go to a new cafe with him on Friday. “It can be a date, if you want,” he’d told you, eyes flitting to the side momentarily before meeting yours again. “But it doesn't have to be. We can just hang out.”

A bit flustered, you still accepted his offer, figuring a day out wouldn’t do much harm. He smiled at your response, asking you to meet him at his gym after his volleyball practice ended.

You didn’t think much of it. He certainly didn’t pressure you into assuming it was a date, and if you didn’t like it then you could just turn him down for a second date and move on with your single life.

On Friday afternoon, at five PM like he specified over text, you walked into the doorway of the gym, hovering and watching some of the boys clean up any spare equipment left in the gym. You couldn’t spot Semi anywhere, and moved to back away from the door when a familiar voice stopped you.

“[Name].” The sound of your first name coming from the rumble of your voice unwillingly sent shivers through your spine and you chastised yourself for the reaction.

You looked at him, and there he was--sweaty, all dark-hair and olive-eyes and you hated how flustered you got.

You gave him a polite nod and forced your lips into a smile. Despite you not responding verbally, he (uncharacteristically) led the conversation.

“It’s nice to see you here.” The words felt forced, almost rehearsed on his lips, and you couldn’t help the cock of your head in curiosity at that. “The food you made me last time was very good.” A pause, and his eyes turned to the polish wood floor. “Are you here to bring another gift?”

Wakatoshi was straightforward with his question, and at the unfamiliar aloofness you found your ears turning warm and fingers grasping at each other in habit.

“No, um-- I’m actually here to see… someone.”

“...someone?”

“Yeah. Someone.” You didn’t feel like elaborating, and by some sheer luck that you mentally praised the gods for, Semi jogged to your side, changed into his school uniform and a kind smile crossing his face.

“Hey.” He greeted you, turning up to his captain in confusion before focusing on you again. “Ready to go?”

Your eyes were forced off of Wakatoshi’s, and you returned Semi’s expression with a nod. You refused to look the captain in his eyes again, and instead focused on making sure you didn’t trip on the sidewalk while walking with Semi.

---

The date-- hang out-- outing-- whatever you wanted to call it went nicely. You both had pleasant, lighthearted, not-forced conversation over very good coffee and you found it enjoyable.

By the end of the night, while Semi walked you back home, you figured you had to address what you were a bit nervous to address in the first place. After explaining your hesitancy towards calling your hang-outs “dates,” Semi ultimately brushed it off, a smile on his face as he told you he really didn’t care too much and would enjoy just being a friend to you.

You were relieved. A quiet voice deep inside your head told you to not let this poor boy get hopeful when you were still trying to settle things with (read: get over) your soulmate. Regardless of secondhand reasoning, you were thankful he was understanding and also thankful he was willing to be a friend.

---

You found yourself eating lunch with Semi a bit more often than before. It was nice to have someone else’s presence near you while you ate rather than having to sit alone and people-watch through the window of the classroom.

You were startled when Wakatoshi appeared in the doorway of your classroom while in the midst of a conversation with Semi. Noticing your mildly dumbfounded expression, Semi turned around to see where you were looking and looked confusedly at the form of his fellow teammate.

Wakatoshi nodded at him, turned to you, and gave a wave and a very, very subtle upturn of his lips. (Despite the subtlety of the gesture, you had to suppress a gasp that threatened to break past the back of your throat.)

He didn’t make a move to approach you, so you took the opportunity to walk up to him and meet him at the door, unintentionally avoiding the questions Semi shot at you in confusion.

“Hi,” you greeted stiffly. “Do you need something?”

“No. Yes.” Wakatoshi paused, collecting his thoughts. “I was wondering if you wanted to eat lunch with me.”

It was an unexpected offer, one you deemed uncharacteristic coming from the aloof boy. You let your mind overprocess it before cutting off your overthinking and giving him a proper response.

“I’m eating lunch with Semi today. But maybe tomorrow, if you still want to.”

A foreign look of confusion appeared on his face, his brows furrowed together and head tilting slightly to the side. “Are you dating Semi?”

Wow. Okay. Very straightforward. Very sudden. You certainly were not dating Semi, and you didn’t know how he managed to draw that conclusion after seeing you and Semi interact a total of two times in his presence.

“I’m not…? Why are you so worried about that?”

“Because we’re soulmates.”

Your stomach churned in a mix of emotions. You didn’t know how to describe your feelings--it was an ugly mesh of annoyed, angry, confused, and on-the-verge-of-tears. You found it a bit funny that only now he was acknowledging your soulmate bond. It made the prickling sensation behind your eyes only increase in intensity.

“Right. Um, you… you didn’t really do much about that before.” You tried not to call out word-for-word what he did, but figured a jab at it wouldn’t send you into guiltily reflecting on your past actions while in the shower at midnight.

He was silent, avoiding your gaze and finding interest in the cracked wood of the door. Before your subconscious forced you to apologize, you gave a polite farewell and slid the door halfway shut before returning to your seat.

Semi stared at you incredulously. “Are you…?”

“I don’t know, man.” Despite the sudden lack of appetite (yet again! You really were not good at any form of confrontation), you forced yourself to nibble on your food and pushed down the uncomfortable feeling in your stomach.

---

Wakatoshi made a point to run into at any time he saw fit, which was very often. He’d find ways to catch you in the morning and say hi, and always invited you to eat lunch with him in his classroom. Out of courtesy, you often accepted his offer, feeling a bit surprised (and wary) when Tendou didn’t appear to accompany the both of you. Those lunch periods were spent in jarring silence, Wakatoshi slowly eating his food (cutely, you noted before burning that thought into the fiery recesses of hell in your mind) and you eating yours while sweating and hoping that you didn’t look weird when you chewed.

This routine kept going on for a solid week. You didn’t know what to expect anymore. Other than the lunch invitations and morning small talk, he didn’t make any outstanding gestures towards you to try to get closer. You didn’t know if that was good or bad.

One day, during lunch when you’d hesitantly accepted yet another offer to eat with him (ignoring Semi’s teasing look when you left the classroom), he made another strange offer, diverting from the usual discussions of weather, clubs, and schoolwork.

“I have a game soon.” He started off. “I’d like you to come watch.”

You paused, staring into your rice in an empty hope that it’d give you a clue on how to respond.

“It’s on Saturday. At twelve. The gymnasium isn’t too far from here. I’d like to take you to dinner afterwards.”

Oh. Oh. That was unexpected. And you were expecting the unexpected. Then again, maybe you should’ve figured that eventually he may have made some sort of move after waiting a week with bated breath.

Your lips parted, but no noise escaped. You wanted to accept, definitely, but you also wanted to be a little aware of his intentions.

“Um…” You floundered a little bit, “I’ll see if I can make it. But… um, dinner?”

“Yes.” Though his voice was steady and deep as always, you sensed hesitance in the way his eyes shifted away from yours and into his lunch. “A date.”

It was a relief to hear him just say it rather than beating around the bush. You cleared your throat in habit and scratched the skin of your thumb.

“Oh. Okay. That would… be nice.”

He smiled. It wasn’t the occasional tilt of his lips, it was a smile. Stretched lips, crinkled eyes and all. You lost your breath at the sight and a soundless laugh escaped your lips.

“Yes. I think so too.”

It was a slow start. It would take some getting used to. But you were both willing to guide each other, slow and steady.

[chrysalispen]

upon pale dawns, prologue II: ardent for some desperate glory

AO3 Link HERE

=====

Castrum Abania, 9th Sun, Third Umbral Moon, Year 5 of the Seventh Umbral Era

The room was cold and its silence sterile, broken only by the sounds of a dry ticking from the digital wall chronometer and the soft and regular sighs of a sleeping man.

Silence in itself was hardly anything to be remarked upon, let alone a surprise. The research and development floors were always kept clear of unnecessary chatter in favor of the sound and rhythm of industry, small gears turning amidst the well-oiled machine of imperial conquest. Standard procedure, that. Especially when the work that took place away from prying eyes was exacting and often hazardous.

But for several hours, the relative darkness and the ambient cycling of the console's processor had been interspersed only with the low rumble of the central air unit and the rhythmic rattle of footsteps without the corridors, and Nero tol Scaeva had been awake for most of the past thirty hours. He had finally fallen asleep waiting for one of his processes to run and lay half-sprawled over the metal surface of the table: limbs immobile and lashes fluttering against his cheekbones as he drowsed at the empty work station he’d appropriated upon his arrival in the lower levels.

When the chiming began, it went unheeded at first. The timer had been set in this instance to ring without cessation, however, and after a few minutes had lapsed the sound began to send him drifting wide from his dreaming state by ilms. The transition from sleeping to wakefulness felt reluctant: heavy and sluggish, a pearl diver kicking against deep currents, breaking the surface tension of consciousness through brute force.

He blinked slowly, once, then twice, attempting to reorient himself.

The noise was also aggravating an incipient headache. Nero righted his posture with a tired grumble and smacked the damned thing until blessed silence reigned once more, before reaching for the mug he had left on a borrowed coaster (long since gone cold. His own fault, he owned). Sipping at its contents with a distasteful grimace - whoever had brewed the coffee, they had added too much water and the result was something weak and listless and far too bitter - he turned his attention towards the old Allagan testing module and its compiling readout.

It appeared to be reaching the end of its cycle. So he thought, until the activity scrolling across the screen flickered in place and pulsed once, twice, an arrythmia within the steady heartbeat of the machine. Nero swore under his breath when on its heels, a brief error message superimposed itself over the readout in black-bordered white. One he’d seen with far too many of these devices recently.

[Unable to read file. The current application will be terminated.]

An annoyed sigh escaped in a hiss between his teeth.

Brow wrinkled in thought, he stared at the screen for a few beats. This was but one of many datalog volumes his team had salvaged at the original site. The initial discovery had excited him - it had excited everyone, in fact, including the legatus - as it well should have done, but getting the godsdamned things to yield the fruit he sought was quickly proving to be an exercise in tedium.

Although Ultima’s original hardware was in surprisingly reasonable working order, several of the tomestones they had found in the same space had not proven to be nearly as resistant to the vagaries of time. Thus far, only a handful had relinquished their secrets without issue or delay. Not entirely unexpected, given their age and the conditions in which they’d been found, but unfortunate all the same.

The tribunus laticlavius of the XIVth Imperial Legion was not a patient man by nature, given to rather more direct methods of approach, but as a man of thirty-four winters with a good fifteen of them spent in the legions, he had very much learned the value of that particular skill. It was one he had developed through years of trial and error and the innate understanding of those traits his chosen craft required.

Magitek was not ineffable. It was parts and pieces that fit together neatly like a puzzle in the absence of human error. To guide and to create with these tools required a methodical mind and observant eye, as well as a certain degree of acceptance that on occasion one simply could not rush the desired results.

This was one such occasion. The end result, of course, would be worth the means. Or so one might fondly hope.  

Nero leaned forward and compressed the small button until the module had powered down and all that was left was the rumbling rattle of the castrum's central air unit (always running this time of year). A gentle tug freed the small tomestone from its moorings and he held it aloft to study the detailing, periwinkle-blue eyes squinting and straining against the red-tinged light from the fluorescents.

The small grooves caught the ambient lighting from the walls with each idle spin between his fingers. They seemed to mock him with each little shimmer: ancient secrets so painfully close to discovery that they lay mere ilms from his grasp. Secrets which promised a long and tedious process if he wished to claim them.

...Well. He’d do it, of course he would. Aught he deemed necessary - good, bad, or ugly - in order to see Project Ultima to completion. Even were it not his primary directive, he had always had every intention of plundering their contents at his leisure for the challenge of it and the knowledge to be had. This was but the least method at his disposal. There were some few other options he might employ, which might serve to successfully extract the data into some readable format that he could put to use.

While the old datalogs were fascinating, he wasn't spending his time reading them for a history lesson. No, what he sought was preliminary information, something upon which to safely extrapolate. Ideally he'd end up with a dossier of sorts which he could use to catalogue the Weapon’s original abilities, and enough code to piece together an operating system more or less analogous to that of Allag, albeit one powered by ceruleum instead of aether. If he could simply-

A much lower-pitched sound than his armor’s onboard timer - not an alarum but a harsh, flat buzz - cut through the quiet of the lab. Nero’s first inclination was to ignore it in favor of his study, but a second followed quickly on its heels, and a third. 

That, unfortunately, meant someone was expecting him to answer.

With a barely suppressed yawn he toggled the small red switch next to the wall’s built-in communications device. “Scaeva. Engineering," he said, keeping his tone clipped and curt- the voice of a man who would brook no disturbances. "State your business.”

The response he received was a very audible swallow followed with a hoarsely uttered, “Lord Scaeva?”

“Speaking."

"My lord?"

Nero sighed. "Speaking. As in 'with whom do I have the pleasure.' Name and rank."

“Oh. Terribly sorry, my lord. I, erm, Quintus pyr Blasio. Lord, uh. Tribunus. Sir.”

Seven hells. Not a name Nero recalled, though he rarely had reason to trouble himself over memorizing the personnel that manned every garrison between Ala Mhigo and the Velodyna fringes. Some poor bastard who was likely the first man flagged down for runner duty by his direct report, no doubt. Some poor bastard who was also either too dazzled or too shit-scared of speaking to the legion's top brass to string three coherent words together. Just what he needed.  

“...Go on,” he prompted when the man said nothing further.

“Lord Sc-”

“I daresay we’ve both established our identities at this juncture," impatience and lingering drowsiness rendered his response a sardonic drawl, for all its erstwhile civility. "The message, if you please.”

“Message, my lord?”

“Yes. The message. That is why you’ve called to interrupt my current litany of scheduled tasks, or so I assume?”

“Ah... y-yes. Yes, my lord.” The speaker at the other end of the connection paused, and on its heels came the sound of a clearing throat. “Ah, Lord van Baelsar asked that I, er, that is, he requests your presence to discuss-”

“He wants me to attend a meeting,” Nero cut in. “When and where?”

“Half four, my lord. Ah- in Sector VI. The administrative complex south of the new hangar.”

Half four- it was five minutes past now. With the identification checks and elevators taken into account, that gave him about ten minutes' leeway. The timing would be somewhat tight to work in, perhaps, but it was perfectly feasible.

The man’s nervous, ragged breathing crackled across the link; the only other sound was the flat drumming of Nero’s fingertips upon the metal surface as he mentally rearranged the next hour he’d dedicated to other tasks. It was an inconvenience to be certain. He was going to have to run the process once more after some adjustments were made, and clearly, it would need closer supervision. Meaning the sleep he knew he needed was not going to be an option.

But this summons still amounted to an order, and hardly one he could disregard or countermand. Heavily classified weapon project or no.

“Understood," he said at last. "Inform the legatus that I will be along presently."

"I will, Lord tol Scaeva. I-"

"In future, do make some bare attempt at brevity when delivering messages, tessarius- for your own sake.”

Another gulp. “Of course, my lord. I’ll pass alo--”

Before the hapless soldier could waste more of his time stammering out another response, the tribunus laticlavius flipped the switch and cut the connection. The line went dead with a static click.

Nero was a practical man, one rarely wont to let trivial annoyances linger. As he set the artifact aside to reach for the fountain pen at his elbow and drew a small leather-bound planner from the desk drawer, a habit he’d kept since his Academy days, he could already feel his focus shifting, moving onwards.

He rolled the pen thoughtfully betwixt index and middle fingers, eyes flickering away from the planner to linger briefly upon the blank console screen. No doubt there was also more useful information to be ascertained from the old Meteor Project dossier; he’d request another copy of the relevant files through the proper channels once the meeting concluded.

In the meantime, it seemed a progress report was likely to be expected upon his timely - and fully conscious - arrival. Strict self-imposed schedule notwithstanding, it wouldn’t do for him to be the only one empty-handed.

He flipped the notebook open to a fresh and empty page, tilted the ink nub, and began to write.

[resourceanime]

RESOURCEANIME’S: MAGAZINE GRAPHIC TUTORIAL

Hi guys! I’ve had a lot of fun making these magazine covers (and inside features) so I thought it would be cool to do a lil tutorial on the whole process. I will be going into detail for all the steps to create both the covers and the inside features, as well as giving helpful tips and ideas such as font suggestions. 

Difficulty: Easy/Medium (depends on complexity) 

Likes/Reblogs appreciated if you found this helpful!

First let’s do the main magazine cover. I will go over the inside features afterward. 

I will be using this edit as an example for this tutorial. 

Step 1: Creating the Base Cover

Going by Tumblr sizes, I’ve done all my covers at 540px x 750px (or 800px - this is the maximum length you can do). Select File >> New and create your canvas at the sizes suggested. Go ahead and fill it with a background colour of your choice. 

💡Tip: I used colour palettes to help me create my covers so that they all have some variation of colours that will look good together in text while also complimenting the cover itself. Try to choose at least one light colour and one dark colour for contrast. This will help you later on when you write headliners on the cover. 

For the Iwaizumi cover, I simply used the box tool to create a box and filled it in with the light purple colour that you see. This allows a white border around the edges of the cover. 

Step 2: Name the Magazine

Generally, you see the title on the top more often than not, but please feel free to put that title wherever you see fit. The thing with these covers is that you have a lot of freedom on how you place things, the main thing to be cautious about is readability and style. 

I believe that the magazine title is one of the focal points of the cover itself. Graphic viewers should be able to decipher that this is a magazine cover edit immediately when they see it - that’s kind of the whole point. So, font choice for the title is pretty important. 

💡Tip: use fonts that are easy to read - doesn’t need to be plain, but it does have to be simple in my opinion. 

💡Tip: Avoid using Script fonts as they are harder to read. As mentioned before, the title is a focal point. 

💡Tip: Be wary of Decorative types of fonts. If you can find one that is not hard to read, then by all means use it!

👍Font Recommendations for Magazine Titles:

Croco

Ginebra

Muara

Groce

Almonte

Salvalyn

Aliens & Cows

Bohem Press (used for the Reigen cover shown above)

Ranger (not free, used for the Iwaizumi cover shown above) 

Now I have something small that is written as a subtitle below the actual title like “monthly” or “magazine”. This is totally optional! If you do end up using it:

💡Tip: I recommend you use a different font just to add some variation. For example, if you used a thick, bolded font, try contrasting it with a thin font. Script fonts would definitely work here if you so choose to use one. 

💡Tip: If you’d rather use the same font - which is totally ok - try changing the colour of the subtitle or play around with italicizing/underlining it, etc.

💡Tip: As for what the subtitle should be....maybe showing what kind of magazine it is. I was being simple and used just “magazine” for the Reigen one, but I used “monthly” for the Iwaizumi. You could try weekly, daily, or even point out the city which the character is from (i.e. Vogue: India)

Step 3: Add Render of Character 

I will not be showing how to render a character for this tutorial, but please feel free to refer to Step 1 of this Graphic Tutorial to see! Essentially, please be sure to have a render that is somewhat large in size. You want the character to take up as much of the space on the cover as possible. You don’t have to feel like they gotta be in the middle, arrange them however you please! But, they are the focal point of the cover itself, so be sure to have them cover the space as much as possible.

And at this stage I will be adding a psd colouring to Iwaizumi. 

Step 4: Add a Background (optional)

I like being Extra with my edits so I usually add something in the background, whether it be a png or a pattern. This is totally optional, if you’re not into filling up spaces as much then by all means skip the step! 

For the example cover, I put some floral pngs behind Iwaizumi to add more to the empty space in the background. 

I also added a psd colouring to it so that the flowers adhere to the kind of colours I was using.

Step 5: Headliners and Features

This is the part where you will showcase exactly who is being featured and what are some of the contents you will be reading about inside the magazine. This is also the part where you get to play with fonts a lot! Again, readability is key, but you have lots of ways you can work around it. 

Here is what I came up with at the end: 

This anime was about volleyball so I centered a lot of content around working out and training. At this stage I can only really give tips as this is something you will have to experiment with, but I hope these help!

For Headliners & Subheadings:

💡Tip: I used about 4-5 fonts for the headlines/subheading. I recommend that you do the same thing, but just vary the format/arrangement. For example, I used the same font for “Trying to Get Scouted?” headline and “by Iwaizumi Hajime” subheading. They’re both the same font, but they’re in different sizes, different colours, one is a title while the other is subheading. 

💡Tip: Use smaller/thinner font for the descriptions as they are not as important as the headlines. For headlines, use eye-catching stuff - bold, contrasting, even use script if you have to. 

💡Tip: As shown in my example, I think varying the colours also helps.

💡Tip: As for the actual content, as I mentioned before, go with a theme like I did since my character plays volleyball. But don’t feel like you can only have lines that need to hook! You can always make like a little sticker that says “poster inside!” or write a quote from the character.  

👍Font Recommendations for Headlines & Subheadings:

Krinkes

Coyote

Black Jack

Elephant (see: “workout, not burnout” on Iwaizumi cover)

Alien League (see: all thin subheadings on Iwaizumi cover)

Almyra (see: “Naturally Handsome” on Iwaizumi cover)

Ever After (see: all subheadings on Reigen cover)

For Features & Names:

💡Tip: This is another focal point of the cover, so be sure to make it BIG, make it bold, and make it P O P.

💡Tip: I tend to use script fonts for this because making the size bigger helps with readability so it seems appropriate. Don’t feel obligated to use script here tho! 

👍Font Recommendations for Features & Names:

Bebas 

Lactosa

Balqis

Sant’Elia

Valairya (see: “Iwaizumi Hajime” name)

Roadway (see: “featuring seijou’s ace” on Iwaizumi cover)

Jovanka (see: “Reigen Arataka” name) 

Step 6: Create Base for Inside Cover

For the inside cover, I find that this can literally be anything. I’ve normally just stuck a quote in there but be as creative as you like! Go to File >> New at the same size as your cover. I would honestly just duplicate your background (and border if you had one) from the cover onto this new file. Starting back here again:

Step 7: Add Render of Character

Just like before, try to make sure that the character takes up as much space as possible. Place them where you like and add a psd colouring to them!

Step 8: Add a Background (again, optional)

So again, I like filling up the spaces so I added another floral png in the background with a psd colouring. This is optional! 

Step 9: Adding Content

Now this part is more so dependent on how you want to do things. I like filling up spaces and playing around with typography, so that’s basically what I did here. I used two character quotes and formatted them in such a way that they take up a lot of the space. 

Again, this all depends on the theme and style you’re going for. I can’t really help you at this stage as this is more so about how you would like to go about it, but I am happy to give some tips:

💡Tip: I would recommend trying to fill up the space as much as possible again. Maybe make a section that actually has an “article” or do a photo collage of the character, or even just a quote, whatever works! 

💡Tip: Try using eye-catching headlines and have subheadings just like before on the cover. 

💡Tip: Use varying colours and fonts again! Keep things consistent by using the same 4-5 fonts and colours, but try playing around with the arrangement and formatting of them just like we discussed earlier for the cover. 

Step 10: Save!!

And you’re done! Nice work!!

Final Thoughts

So, I think the main takeaway from this is that you’ve got a lot of room to be creative, but you end up having to play around and experiment a lot in order to make things work. The best tip I can give you is to prioritize readability over aesthetics (even I am guilty of trying to choose aesthetics over readability lol).

Hope you guys found this helpful!! 

{ Iwaizumi Magazine Edit } ~ { Reigen Magazine Edit }  

[tapwrites]

RPG Design Adventures: Gifted

This time, on RPG Design Adventures~~... I’ll be going through the evolution of Gifted, my first “full” RPG. It’s gone through many iterations so far--each with a differently conusing name. At each stage, I’ve posted it to forums online to get feedback from other RPG designers.

I’ve only playtested it a few times in total throughout the process, but each time has yielded a lot of insights regarding what to work on for next time--often prompting entirely new drafts of the game!

Version 1: Structure

Okay, so this name is probably the worst. But at the same time, I didn’t really know what the RPG was at this point. All I had were some half-baked notions of hacking FAE apart (the only RPG I’ve GMed), taking what I liked and growing on those ideas.

From the start, the Motives idea was in there--a simple system of 2 freeform “stats” that brought out the character in the character, rather than what weapon they used and how they best interacted with the environment. At the moment, though, there was no name for these stats; they were just events that positively (for a rolled stat of 4-6) or negatively (1-3) impacted their life. Then they were condensed into a single word for “ease of play.”

It was hard to narrow down what kind of word to use, however. During play, the idea was the player would add detail to the inciting event to explain how it eventually helped them to perform the action in the moment. But again, this is really fiddly in trying to figure out which stat to use. And coming up with more backstory every time--while interesting from a narrative standpoint--made everything slow to a crawl at the table.

Another thing it introduced was the “M.I.C.E. Quotient”--a principle regarding the structure of story. As a GM-less game, this mechanic helped the players come up with new story arcs and scenes to play through next--all the while keeping a satisfying structure to the whole thing as if it were a novel.

I quite liked this aspect of the game. It tapped into my love of writing and made structuring a story more like a game. I even started playing it solo to write a story, using the mechanics to tell me what happens and what kind of scenes to write next.

Version 2: Past is Prologue

Here, the rules were the biggest barrier to entry. I wrote them in a very logical, chronological manner, with one massive list with many levels of nested list therein. It was very hard to understand to people who weren’t me--though they detailed every rule exactly as they worked.

Some of the mechanical ideas developed well, though. Now, you’d roll to select which stats (here called “Words”) would be used for the next scene--as well as what type of scene it would be, just as in version 1.

This worked fine, though the restrictive formatting of one great long list made it difficult to explain how this might work in practise.

The current viewpoint player would roll up what the next scene was about... and just sort of stare at those prompts until something came to mind. They had the freedom to word-associate from those prompts, and use characters’ associated backstory to bring in new elements to the story. But as it was GM-less, and zero-prep, everything was done in the moment and at the table.

This slowed things down considerably. I played this version with a couple of my gaming group. And while I think I did a great job considering it was my first time doing it, and I hadn’t had any time beforehand to prepare... it sucked for the players.

They’d just sit there wondering what to do while I frantically brainstormed in the corner by myself. They felt uncertain about the whole thing. They they wanted to play an actual story rather that something open-ended that just went on forever.

This was interesting feedback, and I didn’t fully understand it for a time. To me, everything the GM does is made up. They just tend to make it up before they get to the table. And most games are open-ended. Most often people play whole campaigns, a story that could go on forever. And there, the GM doesn’t have planned out from the start either!

But from a psychological standpoint, it makes sense. They don’t get the benefit of seeing a “final product” of sorts. They see behind the curtain. And that spoiled the grand illusion for them somewhat.

Character development was randomly generated--though we didn’t really get to that in the play session. You’d basically roll to see if a Word would get higher or lower, with things weighted such that a higher Word would trend downward and a lower Word would trend upward. I still don’t know if this would work for actual play.

I have something similar but a lot more controlled ready for when the time comes in the latest version of Gifted. So we’ll see if it works at all some way down the line.

Version 3: Prompt

The next version actually had a rules document that looked and read more like a rules document. Some mechanics and explanations still confused people, but it was readable at least.

It basically just expanded on everything--giving GM advice and example on how mechanics are used, adding mechanics like “Event” generation with variable countdowns, and some rules about how to create obstacles in the world for the characters.

There was still a lot of structure to the narrative though. And this would still slow down play at the table. And using the mechanic for prep beforehand was a bit awkward.

I actually ran a game with this version. I did roll to select aspects of the “main character” for that session, but I completely ignored the structural side of things. I think it’s still useful for inspiration, but it shouldn’t be a “rule” as such.

The stats were called “Frames”--as in, “frame of mind.” The logic behind what they are, how they are used, and how to come up with the most useful words for them were cleared up a lot in this version.

Version 4: Gifted

Right after that one session of Prompt, I redrafted the game from the ground up.

Now there are no structural rules at all. When you’re working session-to-session, it’s hard to create scenes ahead of time using those structures. If you stick to your plans, the players will feel railroaded. And if you don’t, then what’s the point of those being rules in the first place?

The rules themselves are more understandable, and better formatted for easy demarcation of examples and options and rules. There were a lot fewer questions where entire mechanics were confusing or misunderstood. And the ones that were, were easily fixed.

The character creation was more nuanced, and so the characters are too. In the first draft, stat generation was a bit overly complex, but I’ve simplified it with the help of some of the people giving feedback.

Now, those stats have become “Motives”--still not exactly right for what they represent, but way, way closer, and a lot easier to understand by just calling them “Motives.” There are positive motives, and negative motives (something that causes a character to hold back instead of act).

One of the things the players gave feedback on was the difficulty in selecting which Frame they were in in the moment. Sometimes none of them really fit. They were just jumping over a wall, not acting on their “Saviour” impulse.

So in Gifted, while the Motives are still there and have a big impact on gameplay, there are more regular Ability stats: Mind, Heart (social), Body. These are added to rolls just as Motives are. But to keep things interesting, each character has a “Gift” in each category. So you may have +3 Mind (Calculation). For each Gift that applies, you basically get more D&D advantage on that roll--though the specifics are a little more complicated than that.

That’s one of the things I’ll be interested in finding out, actually. While a roll used to look like: “1d6 + Frame”... now it looks like “1d6 (disadvantage for negative Motives, advantage for Gifts) + Ability stat + positive Motives.” This gives a nice array of aspects that all roll into a single roll, but only playing will answer the question of if it’s just too much work to figure out what to roll each time.

A quick update, as I post this: I’m in the process of tweaking how things work. Abilities are more flexible, and the roll mechanic itself is being shifted to be more intuitive for the players--at least, that’s my hope.

I’ll post again after we play next, and let you know the particulars. Until then, thanks for reading. I hope it was useful, or at least interesting, to see into some of the thought processes behind designing an RPG from the ground up.

[gonefanfic]

(most of my) writing updates beginning May 8 2014 (as found on my Lunaescence profile (afaik no one reads AO3 profiles, so I don’t post on it). I had just started updating after about at least five years iirc. I didn’t start recording these updates until May 8, but they actually began whenever I added chapter 2 to both of these fics (Dec 2013 or Jan 2014), which I had culled down most of the bad original writing (including the entirety of chapters past ch. 1) from in the years before.

Writing Updates: May 8/14- Insanity and BnF both had chapter six added April/24/14, and are now approved (May 4 and 8) May 18/14- Both sevens have rewritten, completed, uploaded, and are awaiting approval. July 28/14- Sevens both approved and posted. Aug 6/14- Working on typing the eights. Taking my time a bit since the queue's closed. Aug 20/14- Now that I note the queue is open, I'm hurrying up again. Insanity 8 is almost done, I'm not sure where I want to put the chapter break. It's over 1000 words but I wanted to cover more plot than I have. Working on BnF 8 now, expect to upload this weekend. Aug 21/14- BNF 8 finished (3220 words) and uploaded, so here's hoping I didn't screw it up and it goes through. Insanity I'm still not sure where to end, but will be uploaded soon. Chapter 9 of BNF is plotted on paper. Aug 28/14- Insanity 8 is very nearly ready for uploading.  Around 2700 words, just needs to be wrapped up, which I'm not doing at 2:30am on a weekday. Plus, giving the mods some spacing what with the rush right now and stuff. Sept 9/14- BNF 8 is up and readable Sept 22/14- I've been sick. I'll try to get updates done for both stories soon. I'm having second thoughts on what's done so far in Insanity 8, which is why it didn't end up just wrapping up and getting posted. Sept 23/14- Insanity 8 is uploaded, awaiting approval. Starting the 9s today. Oct 9/14- Somewhat unexpectedly I am moving, so that will slow down the next uploads. Nov 21/14- Moved in, internet, etc, and not completely buried in stuff, and so BnF 9 is written and has been uploaded. Assuming no grievous errors on my part, it should be approved within a couple weeks. Insanity's 9 has only begun. Nov 26/14- Insanity Ch. 9 is at about 2000/2500 words, so it should be uploaded to await approval within a couple days. Dec 17/14- Validated! Awesome, except that now I'm the only one to blame for slow updates. Dec 22/14- Insanity 9 is finally up, working on both 10s. Feb 12/15- BNF 10 is up Nov 17/15- BNF 11 is uploaded Dec 1/15- BNF 12 is uploaded Dec 2/15- Insanity 10 is framed and started, BNF 13 is framed Dec 3/15- Insanity 10 is uploaded. Insanity 11 is somewhat planned. Dec 17/15- Started a Mushishi one shot. 540 words of probably 2-3k. Dec 29/15- Added further plans for BNF and Insanity's upcoming chapters Dec 30/15 Started a Hellsing one shot, planned an Inuyasha one, and started BNF 13 Dec 31/15- Insanity 11 is started. Jan 4/16- BNF 13 completed and posted, 14 is written. Jan 5/16- BNF 14 edited and posted Jan 7/16- BNF 15 started. Jan 23/16- Insanity 11 is posted Feb 15/16- Insanity 12 is started. 1200 words so far, expect 2.0-3.5k total Apr 18/16- [2am] Insanity 12 is up. BNF 15 will be next up Apr 18/16- [morning] BNF 15 is completed and up. Ins 13 and BNF 16 vaguely planned. Working on Hellsing fic as a refresher. Apr 18/16- [evening] I'm very excited by my Hellsing fic, currently at 3000+ words. Apr 18/16- [late late] Hellsing fic complete [6600ish words] awaiting editing and optional epilogue. This was a very accomplished day. Apr 20/16- Hellsing fic (Wingates Manor) complete and up at 7100 words May 9/16- BNF 16 written and posted. ~1500 words. Insanity 13 started May 12/16- Insanity 13 is 2100/3000ish words. Need to review some material to write Izumi. Starting BNF 17 while I find that. Aug 18/16- Insanity 13 edited and posted Aug 19/16- One shot Gravity Falls drabble written and posted Aug 24/16- BNF Chapter 17 written and posted Jan 27/17- Been on Lunaescence for 10 years! Mar 14/17- Updates for BnF and Insanity written in anticipation of Lunaescence launching. Started Insanity ch. 15 Mar 15/17- Luna is back! Mar 15/17- Various continuity/time corrections for Insanity and BnF. Hoping to upload new chapters, but getting an error. Mar 16/17- Various errors sorted out and both BNF and Insanity are updated Mar 17/17- Realized I've been on Luna for over ten years May 3/17- Worked on Insanity ch. 15 and better tied it together. ~2000 words now, will either be a little longer if I split it, or a lot longer if I fit the next piece into the same chapter. Jan 22/18 - Wrote and uploaded Insanity chapter 16 Nov 18/18 - Wrote short chapter 17 (~800 words) to Ins, uploaded to Ao3 Nov 19/18 - Reformatted and uploaded Ins chapter 17 to Luna Nov 20/18 - Insanity ch. 18 written (~2100 words) and uploaded Dec 2/19 - Insanity ch. 19 written and uploaded to AO3 Dec 4/19 - Insanity ch. 20 started Dec 5/19 - Insanity ch. 19 reformatted and uploaded to Luna Dec 5/19 - Insanity ch. 20 written and uploaded to AO3 and Luna Dec 5/19 - Insanity ch. 21 plotted, first sentences down Feb 13/20 - BNF ch. 19 completed and posted to AO3 Feb 20/20 - Insanity ch. 21 completed and posted to AO3 Apr 24/20 - BNF ch. 20 completed and posted to AO3 Apr 27/20 -  BNF chs. 19 and 20, plus Insanity ch. 21, reformatted and posted to Luna. Worked on Ins ch. 22 Apr 29/20 - Finished and uploaded Insanity ch. 22. Started Insanity 23 Sep 21/20 - Started BNF ch. 21 Sep 22/20 - Finished BNF ch. 21 Sep 23/20 - Proofread and formatted BNF ch. 21, uploaded to Luna and AO3 Sep 24/20 - Completed, edited, uploaded Insanity ch. 23 to Luna and AO3 Sep 25/20 - (will probably remove after next update is added) immediately willing to continue both stories but very very tired and hoping to have the effort on the 17th or 28th (lol watch that not happen) Sep 27/20 - started BNF ch. 22 and Insanity ch. 24, both in the hundreds of words Sep 29/20 - started Fruits Basket fanfic (untitled, transmasc readerxayame), finished and uploaded BNF ch. 22, started BNF ch. 23. finished Insanity ch. 24, but need to edit, especially for repetitious language. Sep 30/20 - realized I spelled 'colonel' wrong almost every time throughout the entirety of Insanity ('colonol') and manually corrected both uploads (here and AO3). Edited and uploaded Insanity Ch. 24 and made notes for Ch. 25. Worked on BNF Ch. 23. Finished ch. 1 of Ayame fic, but waiting to make some buffer before uploading. Oct 1/20 - [2am] finished and uploaded BNF Ch. 23. please note the author's note is not working Oct 2/20 - [~1am] Standardized spellings and italics use for swords 'Jyakotsutō' and 'Banryū' in BNF. Added umlauts to 'führer' throughout Insanity. Started work on chapters 24 and 25, respectively. Oct 3/20 - [~1am] Worked on BNF ch. 25. Started ch.2 of Ayame fic. Oct 4/20 - [am] Wrote much (half? two thirds? one third?) of Insanity ch. 25. super horny chapter, already noting new chapter/story warnings. Also worked on ch. 2 of Ayame fic (still not uploading ch. 1 yet) Oct 4/20 - [late] Worked on BNF ch. 24. Oct 5/20 - [2am] Completed and uploaded Insanity ch. 25. Read the warnings. Oct 5/20 - Completed Ayame fic ch. 2. Still need a title and the will to upload Oct 6/20 - Wrote the first five parts of 31 Day Horror House challenge. Oct 7/20 - Caught up with 31 Day Horror House (days 6 and 7 written) Oct 8/20 - [am] Continued BNF ch. 24, started Insanity ch. 26 and Ayame fic ch. 3. Oct 8/20 - [pm] Continued all active stories, wrote and uploaded day 8 of halloween challenge. Oct 9/20 - [am] completed Ayame fic ch. 3 Oct 9/20 [pm] completed day 9 of Horror House challenge Oct 10/20 - completed day 10 of Horror House challenge Oct 11/20 - completed day 11 of Horror House challenge Oct 12/20 - completed day 12 of Horror House challenge Oct 13/20 - Completed day 13 of Horror House challenge. Made Insanity and Ayame notes Oct 14/20 - finished this day of halloween challenge. Nearly completed BNF ch. 24 and a good amount of Ayame fic (but Aya fic may need a lot of editing) Oct 15/20 - finished and uploaded Horror House 15 and BNF 24. Worked on Ayame fic (no longer really bothering to mark chapters) Oct 16/20 - 31 Day Horror House 16 up, lots of Ayame fic, some of Insanity ch. 26 Oct 17/20 - Horror House 17 up Oct 18/20 - [2am] added about 1000 words to Ayame fic Oct 19/20 - wrote/posted horror house 19. wrote a few hundred words to all fics. Oct 20/20 - wrote/posted horror house 20 Oct 21/20 - wrote/posted horror house 21 and touched on Insanity ch. 26 Oct 22/20 - wrote/posted horror house 22 Oct 23/20 - wrote half of horror house 23 Oct 24/20 - finished and posted horror house 23, wrote/posted horror house 24, and did some work on Insanity ch. 26 Oct 25/20 - wrote and posted 31 day horror house chapter 25. It's short, sorry. Oct 26/20 - wrote and posted 31 day horror house chapter 26 and 27. now episodes will be posted so they can be read on the correct day, instead of at the end of or after that day Oct 28/20 - [2am] wrote and posted 31 day horror house, chapter 28. Oct 29/20 -[1am] write and posted day 29 of horror house, longest chapter yet Oct 30/20 - [2am] wrote and posted chapter 30 of horror house. Oct 31/20 - [2am] wrote and posted ch. 31, completing 31 Day Horror House. Nov 5/20 - some longer progress made on BNF 25, finally. some work on Ayame fic and Insanity 26. Nov 6/20 - worked on BNF ch. 25 and Insanity ch 26. Nov 7/20 - worked on BNF ch. 25 and some Ayame fic Nov 9/20 - worked on BNF ch. 25 Nov 10/20 - worked on BNF ch. 25 and Insanity ch. 26 Nov 17/20 - worked on BNF. Aware I missed noting some of the days this week that I worked on Ins, BNF, and Ayame fic, but don't remember them so can't add notation now. Nov 18/20 - (and Nov 19 early am) worked on Ins, BNF, and Ayame fic. Posted Ins ch. 26. Nov 19/20 - worked on BNF. Nearing 4000 word chapter (ch. 25), but no good places to split it so it is what it is. Nov 21/20 - [2am] completed and uploaded BNF ch. 25

[ucessayexamples196]

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[yi-dashi-a]

The 856th Annual Day of Blades: Part 2

//More pre war drama? I don’t feel inspired for much else, so you get this instead. I better give a blurb for anyone coming into it without headcanon context from my tag. I feel like my weakness as a writer is assuming people have context.

With the Invasion looming over Ionia’s head, having been active for only half a year, all those under Wuju influence had their own reasons to be on edge. Star Practitioner and Teacher Yi Hui, known now as Master Yi, was surely not excluded. Declaring the Wuju celebration Day of Blades to be the last he’d attend, he hoped his young disciples would get one last lesson before the horrors of war consumed both he and them

Fittingly, Day of Blades is a swordsmanship contest where no holds are barred. All one needs to do is draw a single drop of blood from their opponent, or make them step outside of a fighter’s circle whether by force or debate. Even in spite of the Invasion, warriors from all walks arrived to test their blades before they too commit themselves to the defense of the country. So join me over the no doubt months it will take me to write this as I try and condense a 32 person tournament into a readable format.

“Yi Dashi…”

Almost instinctively, Yi put on his festival face when someone called for him. People had been clamoring for his attention ever since he left the proceedings, when all he wanted was some food, the fresh air of his school, and perhaps a secret drink to take the head off his nerves. But the man who approached couldn’t be so easily turned away. He commanded attention, if only because of his gait.

“Oh, do you need something, Master? The festival is back towards the village last time I checked.”

Despite being close to decrepit with his declining health, Master Yi Chao still clung to the agility of his form. His hair was unkempt yet simply bunned, and the grasp about his cane was shaky, but still he ambled up to his son with the remaining tatters of his pride shining through. There was pain behind his expression certainly, but he wore it about as well as he did his stern eyes and subtle wrinkles. Eventually he offered a nod of acknowledgement, and joined Yi in leaning against his hiding spot that was the outer temple walls.

“I’m here to check on you. Your mother’s worried, and last I saw you were storming off to who knew where.”

“I’m fine.” He scoffed, “I’m just waiting for your Master to show up, so that we can have the same conversation as every year.” He put on a voice he hoped his Master would find amusing, “Did you put my name in the draw, Dahui?” His impression mustn’t have been good enough though, “Yes! Yes I… did…” A sigh escaped him, “Do you want to be around when he gets here?”

“I’ll… manage.” The father frowned, “I’m going to have to spend the day with him, anyway.”

“It’s your choice.” Yi replied idly, his thoughts focused more on trying to think of idle conversation, “So… how is your back?” Perhaps not the best place to start, he thought. At least not with the way the man winced,

“… I haven’t smoked since the night before now.” He admitted, bracing himself somewhat against the grand school he resided in, “So I’m… as well as I am expected to be.” Though as soon as he said that outwardly, his telepathy bubbled into Yi’s mind, ‘I’m in pain, student… but I’d much rather be lucid for this day than lost to time and free of ills.’

“I see…” Not usually one for sour expressions, the frown on his face almost felt foreign when it hit him, “Well, there’s no shame in forfeiting if you need to. I’ll support you if you do.”

“Thank you…” Chao offered, almost distantly, “… Good luck today, with all of your disciples,” He looked almost ready to ponder something else, but instead watched his words drift away as his gaze traveled past Yi and up the path that wound behind them. With the backdrop of the mountain from which the Highlands gained their name, five men distantly strode towards the Wuju village, “… and good luck with them.”

The Wuju teacher did a double take over his shoulder before digesting the scene properly. As soon as he did, however, he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted,

“Hey, Swordsmen. You are late! By the time you get here the bracket for the fights will already be decided.” But as was expected they took their calculated time, walking almost in lockstep as they made their way along, “By the Stars, I don’t want to have to deal with Grandpapa. Not on top of everything else…”

“Just entertain him and be done with it.” Chao shrugged, “Your mother told me to babysit, so I have to suffer with you.”

“I don’t need a babysitter, Master.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that sometimes.”

But closer and closer the men drew, ordered by height because of course the old Wuju Master would deem it so. The four souls, two pairs, who flanked the shortest man did so with their faces obscured by conical bamboo hats, leaving everyone to focus only on the stern faced powerhouse that was Yi Heng. He always kept his hair loosely tied, with no adornments to his beard either. His robes were unmistakably Wuju however, as was the way his silvery dao hung over his shoulder. He also wasn’t a man for hellos, instead stopping at distance to offer his own form of ‘good to see you.’

“Are our names in the draw?”

“Yes, Grandpapa.” Yi said on a hefty sigh, “Like every year, my mother, you hear that, mother has already placed all your names in the draw before you arrived.” Heng’s brow always creased at that. Yi would have laughed if he thought he could defend himself after, “Though we wouldn’t have to have this discussion if you actually arrived on time, and before the bracket draw was closed, now would we?”

“Wuchao.” Heng’s focus immediately shifted, and Yi slapped a palm to his face and near slid down the wall. The man was as unshifting as the temple that loomed over them, “… Do you intend to fight today?”

“Yes Master.” As if it were a force of habit, Chao dipped his back as much as his damaged spine would allow, “I hope you don’t cause any trouble.”

“I have no intentions of doing anything that isn’t right.”

“Sure…” Yi scoffed, but once more he was ignored. Heng turned his eyes towards all his students in sequence, each bowing their head when they felt the sting of his gaze,

“Kahd, ask about the witchwoman and the draw.”

“Yes Master.”

“Shei?”

“Yes Master?”

“Scope out the competing schools and tell me what you find. Information about the war is also key. Zhy? Izu? Keep following me.”

“Yes Master…” It always quirked Yi’s brow at how eerily in step they could speak. But at the end of all his commands, the grandfather’s attention was back on his son’s,

“I’m going to pay a visit to my other grandchildren… if I am so allowed.”

“If they wish to see you then they will entertain you, Master.” Once Yi might have heard spite there, but Chao’s words were hollow, “I have no way of stopping you.”

“Good…” And just like that the men dispersed, splitting off to perform their assigned tasks. The one known as Kahd, however, seemed to hover about the pair instead of taking leave, stealing even a dangerous looking glace from over the shoulder of his Master.

“Where might I find the witchwoman?” He mumbled in time.

“That’s my mother you’re talking about, you know.” Yi growled back, “And she’s where she always is when she sorts the draw. You get told the same things every year. Are you going senile?”

“Where...” The pause was subtle, but it was long enough to draw attention to the Swordsman and his particular actions. He turned up his conical hat slightly, staring directly eye to eye with Yi’s father. As he continued to speak, he tapped a single finger to his temple, “… is the witchwoman?”

In it all Yi saw antagonistic goading, and he would have begun off on a tirade if his Master hadn’t taken it in a different measure.

“She is in the temple. In the main hall.” He said outwardly, but his expression spoke of something else. The men took a pause seemingly just to stare, but Yi hadn’t been practicing Wuju for nothing. His perception was keen. There was telepathy going on that he wasn’t privy to. All the same, Kahd and his raspy mumbling left swiftly, bowing to the pair before following the wall’s perimeter. But Chao’s stare was still affixed on the air, his forehead creasing all the more over time.

“Master..?” Yi offered outwardly, but to no effect. The man began to walk, but it wasn’t the stride of a confident man. He was intently focused as if analyzing something in fine parchment print, his posture hunching as his reading efforts grew more frenzied, “Master!”

“Let us go back to the festival, Pupil.” He grunted externally, before his words boomed with a lording presence in Yi’s mind, ‘Don’t be stupid. Don’t shout, or I won’t let you be privy to this later.’ With a tug to his long sleeve, Yi was all but dragged along as he still tried to digest any implications of the his Master’s words,

“What is going on?” His voice warned, but his reply was given from an unusual place.

‘Chao… I trust him.’  The distant, warbled voice of his mother sounded out. ‘Of all of them, I trust Kahd. If it was Shei then I’d know him to lie, but Kahd is about as reasonable as any of them can get.’

‘Mama?’ He thought, only to feel the hand about his robes tense.

‘Huan, shush—'

‘ I see the draw in front of me Chao, and I can’t change it without being observed. You have to forfeit.’ As they continued on their way, the festival began to reappear around them. How Yi wished he could get lost in the smells and sights of it all now, ‘You have to! I can’t stand the thought, Chao. Please! You—'

‘--We have appearances we must keep up, Huan. You as well, Pupil.’ He thought his words as if it were nothing but a calm, internal exchange, and he made sure to offer a, “Good day. Thank you for attending.” to a random passer-by for good measure, ‘Just be calm, and if we all need to convene we shall. For now… I’m not panicking. We just wait for the draw and we go from there. Especially you, Hui. Listen, just put on a good face, and when we get the time I’ll tell you what I’ve been told.’

“Master…” His spoken word was barely a whisper. A tense, wary vocalization. His own name seemed to just deflate his whole persona. It was as if the single word signified an end to two-way conversation.

“Yes, Student?” Chao replied, his face still betraying not a single one of his thoughts. Yi took his time, though, to think of something appropriate to speak ‘in character’ that also reflected what he thought within,

“… You’re foolish old man.” He turned on his festival goer’s grin, “Do you know that?”

“Perhaps I am, perhaps I’m not.” The man shrugged, “If you are to prove me one or the other, you must debate me on it later, when we have the time.”

“I’ll make time.” He laughed humorlessly, “Though for now, we have to wait on this draw. I can’t begin to digest more… debate than what has already happened today. It’s… exciting!”

Stressful.

It was stressful, and anyone still listening in on his thoughts knew it.

[lizeng]

6 Components That Shape a Complete Visual System for Digital Products

Photo by Balázs Kétyi on Unsplash

A Visual System conveys the look of a brand and represents how a product feels inside and out. It is very important for any product designers to understand the details of a visual system thus utilize it to help shape a better product. Here let’s go through 6 major elements to consider in a brand visual system.

1. Logo System

Designing a logo for a brand is the first step to establish a brand look and feel. There are many ways to brainstorm a logo and create either a word mark or pictograph. I will write another article specifically focused on logo design. Here let’s summarize some basic good logo rules:

Simple

Original

Balanced

Timeless

Memorable

Versatile and Scalable

Look Good in Black & White

Appropriate

Once a logo idea is set and completed, the rest is to expand that logo into a variety of use cases and formats. A logo should be a unique vector design that only the logo designer has to touch. Once a logo is completed, it should be applied and used in different scenarios and at least lasts for a long period of time. I used to work with a manager (engineering background) who wanted me to come up with a guide of how the logo was designed in case all the original files were lost. That shouldn’t ever be the case. Even with that guide of “how a logo was made”, no one besides the designer can make it. That’s why just simply keeping the original file in multiple secure places; and having a variety of exports that fits every possible need is necessary.

Primary Logo: This is how the logo appears most of the time.

Horizontal & Vertical: This gives the options to choose between two orientations in case the space is restricted.

Logo Mark: This allows a brand to appear in even constrained space, yet still represents the brand and company. The logo mark should be memorable enough for people to know what brand it represents.

Logo with Brand Color: This allows the logo to be applied to a variety of brand colors, which add visual interests in marketing design.

Clearance: This tells marketing designers leaving enough space around the logo so it doesn’t overlap with other elements.

Logo Don’ts: This tells other designers or people who intend to use the logo not to mess up with the original logo. Distortion of logos harms the brand personality and visual experience.

Logo Sizes: A good logo shouldn’t be constrained by its size because it’s vector based and can be expanded or reduced to any size. A standard logo size could be set around 4 inches long; minimum logo size could be set to 1 inch or ¾ inch. Of course, if any websites or social media requires a standard size, the logo should be able to be adjusted to that exact size.

Exports: I usually export all logos (Horizontal, vertical, color, black & white) in ESP, SVG, PNG and PDF format. Not many places needs JEPG and TIFF anymore.  

2. Colors

Color is another thing in a brand that evokes emotional and visual connection between customers and the experience. When considering the color system for a brand, always consider a primary and secondary color. Unless the brand is definitely setting up two colors equally, always suggest one primary color that connects the brand image with it.

Primary Color: It’s important to understand what feelings the brand wants to convey through its primary colors. There are many references online talking about how colors represent different meanings. Just to name a few in the following:

Red: Passion, Love, Anger. Orange: Energy, Happiness, Vitality. Yellow: Happiness, Hope, Deceit. Green: New Beginnings, Abundance, Nature. Blue: Calm, Responsible, Sadness. Purple: Creativity, Royalty, Wealth.

Secondary Color: Secondary color could be one or a set of colors. My preference is to always consider complimentary colors of primary ones to create visual contrast for future usages. Unless harmony or unity is a fairly important message in the brand, otherwise, I would l always prefer complimentary colors over analogous colors.

Color System: Besides the primary and secondary color, it’s important to set up several other colors in the system that covers the rainbow colors. Due to the value, tone and hue of primary or secondary colors, the color system can either enhance the similar tone or complement to add another level of value depending on the need.

Gradient: For many modern digital products, it’s quite important to establish a set of gradients with the brand colors. Different from the considerations on secondary colors which focus on contrast, gradients should create smooth and harmonious transition between colors. That’s why bright and analogous colors (green + blue, or pink + orange) can avoid dirty middle muddy colors.

Grayscale Colors: This is absolutely one of the most important elements in colors designers shouldn’t ignore. Even for typeface alone, different grey levels in font can tell completely different stories in the product and marketing design. Depending on the primary color, the grey tone could be relatively warm or cool.

Transparent Colors: If the system designers want to define the colors  to a next level, having the transparent colors and its value would help tremendously in communicating with engineers and other marketing fellows. This may not be that useful in common cases, but if a design piece involves different layers, gradients can be so useful to make everything clear.

Drop Shadow: You will be surprised by how many designs use drop shadows to create depth and dimensions on a 2D surface. Having used drop shadow in a variety of places, remembering its value could be a painful experience for designers. Thus, defining a drop shadow system that can be applied to any elements while designing would help designers tremendously.

3. Topography

Typography is one of the most important subjects in graphic design and its history. A font designer could focus his whole life and career on just these 26 letters. I personally loved learning, researching and teaching typography in my past experiences. Simply black and white letters alone have so much power to tell everything they want in any media.

Many junior product designers probably won’t consider typography an important thing in a product since it’s such a small piece. However, we have to admit that always every page/flow we design involves text (typography). That’s why it’s important to set a good text display system and make it convenient for any designers to apply and use.

What to consider when setting up a text/typography system?

Contrast: There are so many contrasts worth talking about in typography (Size, weight, form, direction, structure, color and texture etc). Here I mainly meant contrast between forms. It’s important to set a primary font for the brand or product. But there is so much more to play around if there’s a good contrast between displayed font and content font. As a designer for the text system, considering a serif and san serif font. Each set has many sizes and weights, the combination of each one of them can generate ample visual interests.

Sizes: Understanding sizes in font is paramount in print design, I even remember the default text size and minimum sizes I usually apply in graphic design pieces. But for the web, it’s a little different. Not only are the sizes much bigger, since we are working with engineers, we have to build a system that helps them to implement the product too. For sizes, consider: Title and body content sizes. The smallest size on the web I would go is 12pt, then multiple by 4 or 8 and increase all the way up to 48pt or 64pt if necessary.

Weight: The general rule is the bigger the font gets, the more weight it can gain. For body fonts, it’s important to provide a variety of weights: Black, Bold, Medium and Regular. Sometimes for tiny fonts, allowing All Cap letters in some cases can help set a complete font system that’s both visually appealing and flexible.

Leading: Many product designers who do not have the training in typography may not be aware of this concept. There are default settings from the design software or system, but it’s still up to the designer to figure out the exact space between text lines. The rule of thumb is: the bigger the font size, the smaller the leading space can be; and don’t let the leading (white space) jump over the content - meaning always keep the leading space smaller than the font sizes unless there’s special consideration.

Platforms: designing for the web is different than designing on the mobile apps. Believe it or not, fonts on the phone should be set bigger than on the web. Different from how we usually think, since we hold the phone closer, shouldn’t the font size be smaller than on the web? No, since a mobile phone usually moves and its screen size is limited, the regular content size for best readability is around 16-18. At the same time, I wouldn’t go too large on the title font too, anything beyond 32pt can be considered too big for a phone size.

4. Brand Visual Elements

Many products’ branding was done by design agencies, thus many in-house product designers may not realize that visual elements can be generated or used in product or marketing design. I think a good brand system should always consider visual elements that fit the brand personality because it really helps to convey the brand and build beautiful visual connections with customers.

So, how to generate or design visual elements for a brand/product?

Start from the Logo: Many visual elements look consistent or somewhat connected with the brand because it’s originated from the logo elements. Either the logo pieces itself, or the negative space/pieces from the logo. Both could be a good starting point to generate visual elements for the brand.

Start from Scratch: Consider dots, lines, shapes, color and texture; or a combination of them as the basic visual elements. Make some interesting designs to begin with, and start to consider how to apply a system that organizes all elements.

Build Sets: After exploring several designs, define some sets of combinations. These combinations give variety in the design while providing a consistent look and feel from the same elements. It’s always good to have more options when designing.

Create Rules: Similar to considering how a system can be applied to the elements, consider a grid or some sort of rules that pull everything together. The reason why these rules are important is that such systems can be used and applied in other designers’ work across products or departments. That way, the brand and visual elements can stay consistent while creating interesting designs across.

5. Illustrations

As someone who loves illustrations and illustrated my own children’s book, I believe illustrations give personality and emotion to a brand. Many illustrators have a certain style that can provide tremendous visual value to customers. However, as a product designer, we have to consider illustrations from both the brand/ product perspective and stockholders’ perspective. That means we have to figure out the right style that fits the brand/product and is loved by the leadership levels to set examples for future usages.

So, what should we consider when setting up illustration styles?

Line or Shape: This can easily be decided depending on the look of the logo and visual elements. Either to follow the same style, or use a completely different style to contrast the look of the brand. Personally, I like shape based illustrations because it has more details and can contain more colors that also tells part of the story. But for some brand/product that really values simplicity or craft look, line based illustration could be a total great fit.

Mono Color or Multiple Color: This is dependent on the brand personality again. If the brand and product is singular focused and wants to convey a mature, focus and trustworthy meaning, having a mono colored illustration style won’t be a bad idea. But if the brand is very fun, versatile or even energetic, using a variety of color can help reinforce that feeling.

Simple or Sophisticated: Illustrations can be as simple as several lines or gets completed as a whole gigantic system. There are many levels of complexity the illustration can get to. If we can break down the levels and allow our customers or leadership to choose, we can make a good decision that we are also confident about.

Regular or Exaggerated: If the illustration involves a figure for example, one style is to keep it as common as possible, the other style is to exaggerate its size or proportion. I am sure you have seen some of Facebook’s illustrations having a lady with super long arms or feet...That’s what I meant about exaggeration. Depending on the brand personality, exaggerated style can help convey a fun, open minded and futuristic look and feeling.

Smooth or Texture: While a smooth style usually gives people the feeling of professional, digital, trendy or futuristic; a texture based illustration can convey the idea about handson, personalized, crafty and artistic. Depending how the brand can relate to the two different sides, designers or illustrators can help bring textures into the product and make beautiful designs.

6. Photography

After talking about the 5 pieces above, the last piece of photography gets easy. In a brand guide, there is usually a section about image usage and how that reflects the brand personality. In product however, user experience designers have to constantly look for online images in their mocks or design. It’s important to build an image or photo library that conveys the brand and also ease the process of product design.

Avatars: Create a library of 50+ avatars that fits the brand personality; name each one of the avatars with the first and last name in case the mock needs that, organize them into gender, age and personality. Such systems can dramatically help product designers speed up their design process and reduce the stress of looking on the internet.

Default Images: Create a set of default images that can go anywhere as a placeholder. This can simply be a placeholder system for designers, or it can become the default images for real product use cases.

Special images: Buy stock images that fit the brand images, have a variety of them ready to be pulled and used in any design files. Again, this helps the designers and also create a system that circles everything back to the brand from inside the organization to outside.

That’s it! Six components that help shape a complete visual system for any digital products. This is a summary of a visual system on what I learned in 8 years combined experience in both visual design and product design. I hope it’s helpful for other designers who will be helping their companies to build their own visual system.

[wikitopx]

There are Block Format Style Cover Letter Template. This post will help you solve the problem. Read the following.

Updated March 13, 2019

Block format is the most common format for a professional business letter. It’s the easiest format to use and simplest to set up in your word processing program. The block format is perfect for a cover letter created to accompany a resume as part of a job application. Keep reading to learn more about block format cover letters and review examples and templates.

1. What is Block Format?

In block format, everything including your contact information, the date, the employer’s contact information, the body of the letter, and the greeting and closing, is all left-justified. It gives a clean and professional look to your letter.

In block format, the letter is single-spaced, with the exception of a space between each paragraph (as well as a space above and below the date, and above and below the salutation and signature).

2. How to Use a Letter Template

A letter template is a great starting point for your own cover letter. You can use a template to decide the best way to format your letter so that it looks polished and professional. You can also use a template to decide what information to put in each paragraph of your letter.

However, a template is only a jumping-off point. You can, and should, make any changes to the template that you want. Remove anything from the template to fit your personal circumstances. For example, if you don’t know the name of the recipient, you do not have to include a salutation.

You can also change the style and format of the cover letter template. For example, if the letter is in Arial font, and you want your letter to be in Times New Roman, just change the font.

Make sure that your letter includes information specific to you and is organized in a way that highlights your skills and qualifications. Finally, be sure to proofread your letter before submitting it thoroughly.

3. Block Format Cover Letter Template

Block Format Cover Letter Template

Your Name Your Address Your City, State Zip Code Your Phone Number Your Email

Date

Name (If you don't have contact information for the employer, start your letter directly after your contact information) Title Organization Address City, State Zip Code

Dear Mr./Ms. Last Name (or other salutation):

First Paragraph: Why You Are Writing. Remember to include the name of a mutual contact, if you know someone at the organization. Mention the job you are interested in and where you heard about the position. State that you think you’re an ideal candidate for the job. Be clear and concise.

Middle Paragraphs: What You Have to Offer. Convince the reader that he or she should grant the interview or appointment you requested in the first paragraph. Make connections between your abilities and their organization’s needs. Use specific examples from past work experiences to prove your skills and qualifications.

Final Paragraph: How You Will Follow Up. It is your responsibility to follow up if feasible. State that you will do so and provide the professional courtesy of indicating when (one week's time is typical).

Sincerely,

Your Signature (hard copy letter)

Your Typed Name

4. Modified Block Format 

In addition to regular block format, there are similar, but somewhat different options you can also use for resume cover letters, such as modified block and semi-block format. With the modified block format, your name, address, and the date are on the top right, and the closing and your signature are on the bottom right. The employer's contact information (and the remainder of the letter) is left justified.

To get the information such as your name, address, date, closing, and signature on the right side of the page, begin writing at the center of the page. It’s a slightly more informal format for a letter and is a format you can use with someone with whom you are at least somewhat familiar.

5. Semi-Block Format

A third option is a semi-block format. Like the modified block format, your name, contact information, and the date are on the top right, and the sign-off and signature are also on the right. However, there is also an indentation at the start of each paragraph. It’s the most informal letter format.

6. One Additional Alternative

If you are submitting a traditional resume on bond paper to an employer, you can enhance your presentation by using the same header (with your contact information) that you’ve used for your resume – even if this header is centered on the page (which many are). Simply copy-and-paste the header to your new cover document, then use the block format (left-justified) for the rest of your letter.

Make sure that you use the same font for your cover letter as you’ve used for your resume. This should be a conservative, easily readable font such as Times New Roman, Arial, Courier, or Verdana.

This presentation style works well if you are delivering your cover letter and resume through snail mail, in person, or as Word documents attached to an email.

7. How to Send an Email Cover Letter

Applying for a job by way of email means you’ll also send your cover letter via email. Be sure to list your name and the job title in the subject line of the email message. Include your contact information in your email signature, and don't list the employer contact information.

Start your email message with the salutation and follow the block format for the rest of the message. For more tips, review: How to Apply for Jobs via Email.

8. More Cover Letter Examples

Review sample cover letters for a variety of scenarios including a follow-up letter, inquiry letters, job/industry-specific sample cover letters, cold contact, and referral letter samples.

I hope this post can be helpful to you. You will be solved the problem with Wikitopx.com. More ideas for you: Cover Letter and Resume for a Summer Cashier

From : https://wikitopx.com/job/block-format-style-cover-letter-template-712965.html