#i’m not joking with that last part tho.. it’s important and vital to the beginning of bonding

[achilleslyre]

@aquataines ohhh absolutely i am soo happy to talk about food as an amalgamation of the uchihas love and the way it haunts them after the massacre. i'm really passionate about this so you don’t even understand the can of beans you have opened. i am going to be talking about both canon and filler in this though, because there is lots of supporting canon however filler continues to support and fuel this thought.

growing up with his family, sasuke is very commonly shown at the dinner table with his family eating together, and it’s where a lot of conversations with his family take place. now to start this off, i’m going to point out the obvious that the uchiha canonically are a clan that holds too much love inside of them, which is what develops their sharingan. carrying so much love within you of course needs an outlet to come out. we don’t really see the uchiha showing much verbal affection towards each other but sasukes family very obviously loves each other. fugaku even tells itachi that he doesn’t wish for words of flattery, but nonetheless to show his thanks and return the love back to itachi for what he said fugaku immediately offers to get him his favourite snack, dango. so we would infer that they communicate their love to each other in a different way. food.

sasuke and his family really share their most intimate moments together when they are in the kitchen at the table. here is where sasuke asks fugaku why itachi doesn’t give him much attention while at the dinner table, and fugaku explains that itachi is just not very social, sasuke later admits to mikoto that he thinks he’s unfavoured between him and itachi by fugaku, to which mikoto explains the differences between him and itachi and reassures him that he’s not. it’s where they’re seen talking most commonly just in general as well, about the sharingan, about training, exciting moments, ect.. the dinner table is where their love is shown when they gather together and eat the food that mikoto has made with the love for her family. it’s where they feel most comfortable to show their love and be honest because in the kitchen is where their love grows.

why is the food their centre of love though? just in general making food for someone is something very special, intimate and ultimately caring. you are turning basic ingredients and foods into something for others to not only to take nutrients from, grow and gain strength from, but also to spend time with them and enjoy the taste of the food you made with care together. you pour the love you have into the food you make for the people you love because you want to see them be happy and healthy. for people like mikoto and itachi who’re shown to enjoy cooking, it’s something special that they put everything into because not only do they want to see their family eat to keep them alive, but they want to see them enjoy the taste and feel the care and love for them that they’ve stored within the food as they make it. they want to place their love inside their family and have them carry their love around wherever they go and what better way to store their love inside them other than to put it in the food your make for them? mikoto is obviously the main cook of the uchiha household and she makes sure that her family stores the love she puts into the meals she cooks inside of them. she is frequently seen ensuring that her kids are fed, making sure they’re filled up, making them lunches, giving them snacks and making sure they are eating good food.

itachi as well, in filler, spends the episode finally getting to be around sasuke and bond with him. the day was spent making sasuke happy and sharing the love that he does have for sasuke with his brother, and at the end of the day makes a huge feast for sasuke. he made him so much food to show sasuke that he cares about him and loves him, he wants to see him eat and he wants to see him eat well. he intends to pack him full of his love. not to get into the fact that clearly mikoto would have had to teach itachi how to cook, sharing the ‘secret’ of spreading love. now this isn’t canon however i personally would like to think (considering how young itachi is here and how much he can make already on his own) that mikoto also had started teaching sasuke how to cook a little as well. this will come back later, which is why i mention it.

the common theme within all of these meals— all of mikoto’s dinners, her bento boxes, fugaku and itachi’s dango, and his feast for sasuke— they are all good, yummy food. they’re something you want to eat and hold inside you and cherish. they’re all made and/or given with care, thought, intention and love.

sasuke grew up eating a variety of good tasting and well made food.

after the massacre, though, he changes. sasuke has lost the love from his family, he doesn’t have it anymore. sasuke grew up with food being the indicator of love, and grew up with the dinner table being the centre of family and bonding. as a reaction to the loss of his family he couldn’t bare to keep storing that love inside him, food as a love language died with them. his family was now gone, and the thought of storing love (read: well made food) inside him after his family was killed was not in the question. after the loss of their love, the only thing he needed to focus on was catching up to itachi to kill him.

here we can see what foods sasuke favours post massacre. “sasuke’s every move is designed to make him stronger, he approaches his diet with equal intensity.” his diet has changed drastically. from being fed a large variety of yummy, well made food filled with love and care for him to enjoy eating, he goes to eating raw and bland food, anything just to get stronger quicker. you could argue that he just didn’t know how to cook, which i can’t say he didn’t, but as i stated before it seems very likely that mikoto started teaching the boys to cook from a very young age, added to the fact that sasuke intentionally only starts eating food for its nutrients and health benefit, it’s fair enough to infer that he can cook at least some meals that he used to eat, he just can’t bare to anymore.

“he never selects his meals based on what he actually likes.” we look to his favourite foods to eat and they’re broken down into their health factors. this kid, reportedly, is known to be eating raw tomatoes simply because he wants to get stronger as fast as possible. he does not like the taste of what he is eating. he does not eat food with the intention of enjoying it’s creation. with the loss of his family he lost the will to store himself with love (this is not to say he does not still have love, he has been stored with love all his life, he is an uchiha, he will always be motivated by love), he couldn’t bare to continue consuming love filled food so he ate food solely to get stronger. food made with no care, thought, intention, or love. the love of his family haunts him. this is beside the point but i can’t even begin to express how heart breaking that is. the uchiha show their love with food and sasuke stops eating food created with love once he loses his family, all the love he had.

sasuke, isolated, left all alone in this village with no friends spent his time from 7 to 12 years old avoiding the love of food. but when he finally finds someone to create a bond with, what does he do?

he offers naruto food. despite what he says, this an olive branch to start forming a bond with naruto. this is him extending care with the intention of filling naruto so that he doesn’t go hungry. whether the food was made with love or care doesn’t matter because at that moment sasuke put the intention into the food. it’s how he creates bonds, it’s how he shows care and how he shows love because that was how he was raised, he was raised to bond over food, to show care and to love with food.

the uchiha’s love has always revolved around food and it’s woven so into the text that at this point it’s not even a head canon to me, but fact.

[zuzuslastbraincell]

For the salty ask game: 6, 10 and 16? <3

6: Has fandom ever made you enjoy a pairing you previously hated?

I never used to like kataang or maiko much, but I’m good with the former and really like the latter now.

while I’m still not a big fan of the kataang (without wanting to write an essay: ember island players ruins it for me), I’ve softened on it a lot largely just from seeing the content for it on here. they’re just honestly very sweet? I don’t know if it’ll last for practical reasons, but the idea of aang & katara offering each other hope from the beginning and until the end is just lovely. 

as for maiko, I absolutely love the strength of mai & zuko’s dynamic (platonic or romantic) just from their boiling rock interactions alone. I feel like a lot of early s3 maiko very much demonstrates that they have some communication difficulties to work through together (thinking about the beach in particular here, but also the ‘are you cold?’ scene, as well as the break-up via letter interaction, that’s the big one) and in a sense mai represents part of zuko’s ‘ideal’ life as a perfect prince that he realises that he has to break from in the first half of s3, but I’ve come around to the idea that if they spent some time working through their communication issues they could really have something lovely? I do also think mai deserves a short break from the stifling culture of nobility/time to explore herself first, but after that? totally could work. like, i’m personally really attached to the gay zuko headcanon and always have been but a lot recent mutuals are maiko shippers and i’ve become very attached to maiko as well because of them (in parallel universes of course).

16: If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?

so many things....

1. less racist, more sensitive worldbuilding. crucially better south asian rep, clear south asian rep. this also means including removing the caricature of guru pathik and changing the design of combustion man (and p’li) not to include a reference to shiva. the show’s philosophies and vocabulary owes so much to south asian culture and the lack of representation in that aspect alone is shocking.

2. references to the fact that there are some air nomad survivors / descendents in hiding in various and that being a late s2 / s3 subplot. (maybe aang is still the last airbender tho? but certainly his culture won’t die with him). the culture isn’t perfectly preserved / has changed with time and enduring hardships, some things have been lost, but there are still survivors clinging on, proud. maybe it’s this community that helps with him the avatar state, not a random guru? or they could help him with his s3e1 dilemma about ‘blending in’, as many of them have discarded certain aspects of appearance in order to hide? i feel like this could add so much to aang’s arc in the latter half of the show.

3. better writing of the white lotus, with the white lotus as a international resistance org that operates in all nations, that uses old man’s pai sho club as a front. they’re introduced as opposing the dai li in ba sing se, as trying to organise resistance in secret, have ties to some local revolutionary/radical factions as they have a long standing rivalry with the dai li (& part of the reason the dai li side with azula is to crush the white lotus and resistance to their reign). iroh is not grand lotus but merely gets recruited in s2, as part of a redemption arc.

4. a subtle iroh redemption arc where iroh realises he cannot simply be passive and perhaps let the treasonous thought ”hm, maybe it would have been better if the avatar fought sozin” cross his mind - he needs to take a more active role in opposing the fire nation, and he joins the white lotus. i think he also needs to reckon quite specifically with the cost of the siege of ba sing se, he needs to make amends to those hurt from it on both sides - be confronted by fire nation defectors who left after the siege because why were their deaths less important that his son’s? as well as encounter how the siege left scars on the lower ring, in a less visible way (untrained lower ring residents formed resistance militia and generally died in huge numbers; plague and starvation greatly affected the lower ring, etc.). no iroh as a moral authority here - he’s morally grey trying to become good. also he doesn’t stick around in ba sing se, he realises the jasmine dragon, as lovely as it is, isn’t true redemption either, and at the end of the series he stays in the fire nation.

5. leading into point 3 (and 4): in s3 the gaang encounters and works with grassroots underground resistance in the fire nation. i think this is a better message than ‘oh the fire nation is a soceity ridden by class division that exploits its poorer / less privileged people and its own environment as long as it doesn’t affect the elite, and turns even its most privileged children into traumatised child soldiers and is indirectly hurt by its own colonialism and imperialistic culture, and that’s deeply sad’ - i think a better message is ‘the fire nation is a society with all those problems and you can do something about it. you can stand up. even though that’s scary.’ this resistance group is around for day of black sun (in fact they’re vital to it) and then you see a key member in boiling rock too.

6. no combustion man. honestly? weak writing. would much prefer zuko attempting to ‘stealthily’ track the gaang on the false premise of a ‘welcome home tour’ where he slips out under night to try and chase them down - this would mostly be alluded to in a few scenes. i also think this would get zuko to realise how much the fire nation itself has been hurt from war. i think the main early s3 plot points e.g. the beach episode still happens, as does the war meeting. i feel like zuko would need extra firepower to be a decent s3 threat - maybe he takes mai and ty lee with him? zuko ultimate lesbian ally takes bored lesbians from the palace for a knife throwing chi blocking field trip kjfshdj i’m joking. but seriously we could also have a combustion bender on board as well as a potential new character (i’m imagining someone like a younger p’li if i’m honest, same age range as zuko), as long as they have a character beyond being a scary assassin. maybe they defect early to the resistance group before the day of black sun, tell zuko they should too (but zuko doesn’t listen)? that’d be rad.

7. the existence of grassroots resistance would basically allow for the series to end with zuko being offerred the crown, but deciding to give it up / end the royal line. rather than a power vacuum, or iroh, the existance of resistance means there are clearly people (i.e. adults) who can fill that space. maybe this is a bit optimistic of me but i would just love to set up a scenario where zuko doesn’t become a boy-king of an imperialist nation and where absolute monarchy doesn’t continue, where there’s a clear shift in system. i understand the narrative power of zuko acknowledges he has inherited wealth and power that has been gained through exploitation and imperialism, and dedicating his whole life to undoing the damage his family has done, but i think he can do this without being the fire lord? in fact not being the fire lord is a good first step. zuko finds another way of doing exactly this.

8. talked about this a lot recently but better toph s3 representation & greater ties to the earth kingdom. also, i’d just appreciate a lot more flavour from the earth kingdom as a whole, and more prominent characters from there?

9. okay i’m not sure there is quite honestly space in the narrative for an azula redemption clearly on screen in as much depth as zuko’s but 1. i’d like iroh not to treat her horribly, thanks, and maybe even try to reach out to her at appropriate moments, maybe we see him (comically) say a lovely warm hello during her s2 appearances, maybe we see her play pai sho with him in s3 while he’s in prison in return for some secret info he’s not actually giving her while he’s not-so-subtly suggesting she should defy her father (but it’s too little too late, he already *chose* zuko in her eyes, and perhaps he did and is only just beginning to realise that) 2. i would like some hope and optimism at the end for azula. her breakdown is truly tragic but it feels like pain for pain’s sake in a sense - i would have loved for the finale scene with zuko & ozai replaced with a scene where someone visits azula and tells them they’ll be there for her and/or they love her. perhaps iroh, perhaps zuko (though i think that one would be more complicated obviously). i would love a post-finale scene where iroh sets up a tea shop somewhere in the fire nation where we see azula out the back, finishing up wiping down/mopping the patio, and before aang goes inside to say hi to his friends, we see them bump into each other - azula bows deeply, a clear apology, and aang accepts it. then we see azula runs off to go hang out with some friends before we follow aang inside as he encounters his own friends.

basically i’d rewrite a lot of s3. i’m dearly, dearly attached to s3, especially the second half, which has some of my favourite episodes of the entire season, but i think it’s flawed.

[derangedhyena-zoids]

I guess now that I featured The Kids in something I can elaborate on them and everything related slightly without seeming completely insane.  BIG HEADCANON BLATHER TIME: Raven and Ryss had 2 kids, both boys. 

Ryss wasn’t a terribly good mother. She loved her kids but was a little panicked about them at all times, and didn’t really like the distraction they were. Specula was a good mother and did the majority of keeping them out of trouble. 

They were also psychic as fuck, but that didn’t show up until they were hitting puberty. I’m sure that was an entire Time.  

Ryss literally didn’t think she could get pregnant by Raven. She based this off of both what she’d been taught by Hiltz (humans=/=Zoidians) and the fact that Fiona had never been pregnant despite sleeping with Van for years*.  So, once Ryss figured out she was pregnant**, telling Raven was a bit of an event because Raven was under the impression that such a thing wasn’t possible. He also had little interest in being a parent. Ryss also had no idea what pregnancy even entailed for a Zoidian, and neither did Fiona. Again, all she knew was what she’d learned from Hiltz, and it wasn’t as if he went out of his way to teach her the finer points of anything. (Knowledge is power after all, and he wanted wanted to hold as much power over her as possible. What she didn’t know to begin with, she couldn’t know was being withheld. All she knew from Hiltz on the topic was Zoidian pregnancies are of a greater duration than human pregnancies - mainly because he’d irritably snapped about how ‘the vermin’ reproduce faster.)  Raven’s main reluctance about parenting had to do with... you know, his massive unresolved parental trauma. Which after some extreme stress he and Ryss managed to work through, largely because they had a lot in common in this department. Afterwards Raven warmed up to the idea of being a father, and was... well, Okay.jpg at it. Let’s just say he had Shadow helping Specula with the kids a lot. ...the kids were raised by Organoids. SO.

An attempt was made to keep track of Ryss and her offspring, especially after Raven’s death and she began to make herself scarce. But nobody expected the kids to be psychic af, and they quickly sussed out that something was up and followed their mom’s lead, making themselves and their families impossible to find.  ....

The Guardian Force pretty quickly lost tabs on them, but did know what to “look for”, so to speak. 

However, this attempt was never linked up with the information the Empire had on Ryss, mainly because too much time had passed and no one knew to bridge the info.

Anyways. All three Zoidians were aware there were differences between themselves and humans, Hiltz more than most. Hiltz was the only one of them that had an adult level of knowledge from Zoidian times. Fiona and Ryss were literal children and were only ever, at best, taught the very basics about things. Part and parcel of subscribing wholesale to the we’re-the-best group’s newsletter, Hiltz also a keen interest in biology/related, obviously interested in scholars of that group’s discussion on what amounted to Zoidian eugenics. ‘we’re the best, and here’s why.’ Hiltz didn’t even remotely consider that humans and Zoidians could hybridize, nor was he interested in finding out. (though he had well-established to Prozen and the Imperial scientists his “ownership” of Ryss and the fact she was not to be messed with, I’m sure he had to mindfuck and/or sic Ambient on a swath of folks to get them to stop bothering him about jizzing in a cup.)***

Joke’s on him because he fathered *at least* these three: 

while living in the small colony with the scholar. 

because he, Hiltz, the weird guy, was hot, amazing in bed, and quite DTF.   scholar: ...   Hiltz:  (ツ) scholar: ... Hiltz:  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯  scholar: ...sure, whatever, what could it hurt anyways ^^^THESE FOLKS HAD A TIME. Unlike with Ryss’s kids, who at least had a slight understanding they were different and some guidance on the situation, any and all of Hiltz’s offspring HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON. And not that any of the fertility restrictions were enacted at this point in time (there’s wars, you live in the wild west, please have kids), but the addition of Zoidian into the mix fucks the inbuilt population-control-genetic-engineering-bullshit straight up, which resulted later in a lot of confusing surprises for people annnnnd is part of why miscarriages became common later down the line. 

Nobody expected the spanish inquisition weird side-species fuckery. Nobody even knows to look! By NC0 times there’s just starting to be coherent, unified inquiry into the various vanilla-human mutations running around.

WHOOPS THO: Backdraft & Co have been at this shit for a while and already know a lot about this. Because they have a hard-on for the Empire and a lot of OG Backdraft are basically really rich, bitter offspring from Imperial families who think they’re better in just about every way. Including genetically. When Backdraft became predominantly a moneymaking, black-market, illegal-battling underground enterprise, a rift began and never stopped growing. Backdraft has a strong preference for recruiting folks of Guylos descent (hi, Bit), but in recent memory had stopped turning people away for not being so. Because money.  It did kinda...  go in peoples’ file though.  In the game of historical telephone, Ryss (and Raven’s) bloodline were more or less demoted to the same: ‘from Guylos.’  Alteil was in range of figuring a few important things out. Unfortunately, HE DED. His successor with this information is Layon.  Surely nothing can go wrong there. ANYWAYS. A massive and valid concern Ryss had was what would happen with hybrid offspring, since to her knowledge her kid would be the first. Hiltz’s were already adults, they were fine. They were better than fine, they just needed a lot more water and salt than everyone else. So, as we all know, Hiltz uh, actually succeeded in removing a sizable chunk of the human population on Zi. Once everyone had scraped semi-functional society back together, the powers that-were-to-be basically prioritized secure settlements and making everyone feel safe so... you know, they’d have kids. Important for the whole rebuilding society thing.   The Zoidian offspring became slightly more statistically relevant during this time, because them and potentially even their kids had all been scared shitless and fled into the hills from the Death Stinger bullshit long before anyone else had. Once there they were good at Not Dying In General, because they had a variety of inexplicable abilities and were just WELL I’M A FREAK BUT I’M ALIVE SO, YOU KNOW, WE’RE COOL. 

Greater than zero chance that someone started a cult. Very, very obviously: these folks knew to keep to themselves. Though the original offspring and their mother had NO idea what was going on, over time any kids at least had fair warning, and knew to keep oddity to themselves. When the most blatant expressions of things were bred out, only the subtle but strongly expressed items remained, discussion of familial strangeness subsided.  Then you’re left with people like Brad who can basically see in the dark, but thinks everyone can see in the dark, it’s no big deal right?    RELATED, BUT NOT: This is technically a spoiler, but not really, because I’m not sure this actually “plays into the plot” so much as it is just “a fact of the plot” annnnnd I sort of want/need to explain this a little because it’s related to all of this.  In this hc, the Zoid Eve is a metaphorical hyper-simplification of ‘resources.’

Back in Zoidian times, some scholars - namely those aligned with the group(s) Hiltz was eventually born into - theorized that the Zoid Eve’s power was not an infinite resource as many believed, but actually an incredibly finite one. Not in the sense of it being used up, but the sense of “there are only ‘100′ of these, there will only ever be ‘100′ of these, we cannot add to or take away from this”  (sidenote: I subscribe to the idea that the Zoid Eve was some kind of supernaturally-occurring power source that the Zoidians shaped into what everyone now calls the Zoid Eve. They did this so long ago that its origins became unclear; beliefs from various groups ran the gamut from “LITERALLY GOD” to “it was built by us”)   The power of it gave life and longevity not only to all Zoids but them too. And it seemed that the more individuals there were, the smaller the “slice of the pie” they received. They began to project apocalyptic futures in which the “slices” were so small that death ran rampant, and Big War would be inevitable. Obviously, nobody wanted this. But unfortunately the group who theorized this also started a huge, lengthy campaign to reduce the population, which - after many years, a lot of societal sabotage and and many smaller conflicts between groups - eventually culminated in ongoing, wholesale slaughter, which led to the big Zoidian-apocalypse nonsense that we’re all familiar with. Cool story bro, right? Well, y’see, those ancient scholars weren’t wrong, though. To an extent that’s actually what led to the hyper-concentration of strength in the DSaurer/DScorpion battle, and why Zero and One are functionally god-tier Organoids. But what this means in modern times, is that the remaining Zoidians - and to a proportionately-relevant extent, the hybrid offspring - are the only remaining folks (besides the Organoids and Zoids) benefiting from the pie anymore. Ryss is the last Zoidian; she’s basically non-aging at this point. 

First-gen hybrids? Aging at a complete snail’s pace.  Second gen? Still having a very strange time. So on and so forth... Can they die? Absolutely, but it’s pretty hard to kill them.  Basically only complete destruction of vital parts works. Does this also apply to Organoids and Zoids? Absolutely. “then why’s Fiona dead” Because the double-bond with Zeke seriously fucked her up. Van dragged her down, hard. “but-”  Zeke could’ve pulled away from her at any time and she would’ve lived. Been a nutcase probably, but lived. She suspected it, Zeke was outright in denial; she never called him on it because she cared about him too much and didn’t want him blaming himself for whatever happened. This is what Ryss suspected/understood as well, and likewise didn’t want to break Zeke. “wait, what about zeke?” HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM IN CLOSING: I don’t have names for any of the offspring discussed here, but I have thought about the appearances/other stuff. Obviously. I’ve never specified how many original offspring(s) were running around. But it couldn’t have been too many. So anyone in NC0 times related to either Ryss or Hiltz can trace back to ^^^the folks pictured above, most likely.  I actually have no idea how to properly calculate the amount of population vs how much impact a handful of reproducing individuals would have over x generations. So please excuse vagueness there, as I’m both open to adjusting that number when/if it becomes feasible to do so, and also don’t think it’s terribly necessary to have this information nailed down because let’s be real nobody cares and that’s a lot of work. Also as I’ve mentioned before, there’s several serious confounding factors here: -these people can LIVE A LONG TIME. The original hybrids and their kids ARE POTENTIALLY STILL ALIVE. They mature relatively rapidly, but then coast into a very slow aging process. That means that - especially the males - could still technically be producing offspring.  -that makes my head hurt and makes figuring out lineages stupid nightmare mode. so don’t expect me to actually do that because I’m not sure how to. The main Facts(tm) you need are:  Sara is 4th gen. Vega is 5th gen x2. Brad is 5th gen. Stoller is 7th gen.

that’s the important part, okay.  (*’s from earlier: )  *tl;dr the bizarre situation they’d inadvertently created with Zeke wreaked havoc on Fiona’s ability to reproduce. Conversely, Raven and Ryss *almost* had a ‘proper’ setup, so Ryss was fine. Nobody knew this. **Ryss figured this out with Fiona’s help - and who did they both go to, to ask in confidence?

Yep. ”isn’t he-” YEP. ***The Empire knows next to nothing about Hiltz. The Republic, however has AN OBSCENE AMOUNT of information about him. Difficulty level? The data was both classified, and never really tied back to him. Because Hiltz murdered the scholar and burned down his house/lab, the connecting information was all lost. The scholar had moved the material to his house in secret, due to fears of an Imperial spy in their research facility - he was telling Hiltz the truth.   The most that the Empire ever learned at that time was that the Republic had “captured” a Zoidian (Hiltz), and that was about it. This drove the fervor which led to them grabbing at the Republic’s continued excavations - eg what happened with Shadow, and presumably them attacking (and IMO, overpowering) the Republic group that’d also seized Ryss.   Before Hiltz became involved, Imperial scientists gleaned a lot about Ryss, but as I’ve mentioned before, she wasn’t treated anywhere nearly as poorly as Hiltz had been. She also had Specula, which helped a lot.  So, the Empire knew nothing of Hiltz, but a lot about Ryss.  Thanks to Alteil and his predecessor’s longstanding obsession with the Imperial military, Backdraft has almost all of the Imperial military’s data from the past few centuries.  Ergo...

[thechocobros]

My little (not so little) Kingdom Hearts III’s review :)

(possible spoilers under the cut)

Somebody asked for my personal opinion about the game, so, here I am! I’ll try to be as objective as possible, even if you probably know already my deep affection for this saga and for its creators XD

Let’s start with the positive things, the things that really impressed me the most about KH3, which are: the graphic (even the in-game one), the gameplay, the huge amount of enjoyable exploration. And then I’ll start voting the rest, by giving my opinion. 

 - Graphic: 10/10. I was able to see the pores on Sora’s face and on Terra’s hands. I was able to zoom on the smallest details with my Gummiphone and still find some amazing details in the landscape. Literally EVERYTHING was so well done i had to stop more than once to admire what i was playing. It was stunning. Let’s not even talk about the Disney cutscenes, because those were a masterpiece and i have no words to describe them. 

- Gameplay: 10/10. Listen, i never played a game where there were so MANY options for the gameplay. I beated the 13 darknesses by using attractions, limits, different forms, combined moves, special abilities, combos, different keyblades ... There were so many minigames, ideas, i fought on Baymax, i fought as a captain of a ship, i cooked, I did treasure hunts, took pictures, the gummiship style too ... every fricking world offered so many different gameplays options i even freaked out because i wasn’t able to learn them all. It was so FUN!

- Exploration; 10/10. Let’s be real, every world (except Twilight Town lol) was as huge as all the Disney worlds of the previous KH games together. Really, i was lost. It was even too much. It will take me a lifetime to explore all the worlds in all its beautiful details xD for ex in the POTC’s world we are able to access to at least 6 different islands + Port Royal + underwater + the battles setting + we command an entire sailing ship. Also, have you try to collect all the lucky emblems? Because I think they all are in some areas i still don’t know they exist. It was AMAZING. 

- Music: 8/10. I love “Face my fears” so much, i like “Don’t think twice” a lot, Utada is always a queen. As for Yoko, she never dissapoints me either, even though this time she didn’t came out with “new” brilliant melodies like she did in the other games. She mostly arranged differently songs and themes we already were familiar with, which is nostalgic and happily welcomed anyway. + Bonus Points to Somnus song mixed together with Hikari. Wow. 

- Plot twists/Surprise/content/plot elements: 8.5/10. Every Kingdom Hearts game needs a huge amount of “WHAt-THE-moments” and KH3 makes no exception. The final battles and the endings were a concentrated of twists and turns, starting from Yen Sid, to Ephemer, from Sora dying (like twice, during this game? the last one almost got me tho), to Kairi dying, from Xigbar’s real identity to Yozora officially inserted in KH’s main plot etc etc. It was a rollercoaster. And I loved it. Funny enough, the only “secret” that didn’t feel like a “secret” was the “secret” that Nomura defined the “biggest secret” XD ... aka Roxas xD I mean, they talked about making a replica for Roxas all the game long, so when Roxas actually appeared and claimed that Vexen made a replica for him, i was like ... yeah, thanks, that’s not a brand new information xD Talking about Vexen, him and the rest of the Organization had some really nice surprising elements, their story was worthy. 

- The narrative/structure/pace: 6.5/10. Ok, here’s the thing. Even if the actual story content was interesting and pretty good, there were problems in the pace and we all hardcore fans noticed it. Why was that? Because they changed some things they shouldn’t have changed in order to give more space to Disney worlds. 

For ex, I’m talking about the fact that we started our adventure in ... the Olympus world. I have nothing against that world of course. But in KH1 we started in Destiny Islands/Traverse Town. In KH2 we started in Twilight Town. In KHBBS we started in the Land of the Departure. In KH3 we should have respected traditions and start from an original world. Why? Because original worlds are strictly connected to the original characters’ development + main plot. By making Sora starting in a Disney world, they cut out an extremely important part in the KH3 story’s development, aka the very own basis. And  no, Twilight Town arrived 3 hours later, and was half as big as the other Disney worlds, so it doesn’t really stand the competion. 

  So, by putting so many Disney worlds and cutting out the original worlds, they confused the storyline’s pace. The actual story’s progression was reduced to some cutscenes between a world and another which is ... not a really good idea. We needed at least one or two more playable original worlds somewhere there in between, like KH2 had Radiant Garden and KH1 had Traverse Town, so that the story could have been developed  and the characters would have been able to meet and interact properly.

  In fact, the biggest problem is that the entire main plot is rushed in the last hours of the game. 35 hours of funny happy Disney gameplay. 5 hours of actual plot. It’s not balanced. The player didn’t feel the rising pressure for the final battle of light against darkness. No matter how epic the Keyblade War actually was, of course it felt a bit rushed, because it popped out all of a sudden and wasn’t smoothly inserted from the beginning of the game. 

  I can actually justify this choice though: KH3′s purpose was to give a conclusion to Xehanort’s saga. Which means they didn’t plan to develop the story or the characters more than what they already had in the previous games. They just wanted to show a proper “conclusion”. Not “development”. 

  It’s not the choice i would have taken in terms of storytelling, but it’s an option so i’m not really angry about it. It worked anyway because almost all the characters really had a solid background plot. .... almost. Which sadly leads to the sore point of the game. Here we go.

- Characters development: 7/10. Kingdom Hearts has a large quantity of very developed characters. Kingdom Hearts’ original characters are the ones who entered in out hearts years ago and we love them for a reason. They’re all well characterized, with specific strengths and weaknesses. Which means that no matter how weird the pace of KH3 could have been, the characters have been so well written in the previous games that they were able to tollerate everything in terms or story telling. Sora, Riku, Aqua, Roxas, Axel, Ventus, Xion, Terra, Naminè .... they all had a major role in KH’s plot on their shoulders and unique facets. But one character was strongly penalized by this the rhythm of KH3: Kairi. 

  Unlike most of the other characters that belong to the famous trios, Kairi could never count on a strong background, nor a good characterization. 

  Even though i liked her in KH1 (where she at least interacted with both Sora and Riku multiple times and had a part in the main plot, even if she was comatose for 80% of the time), it’s not a secret that she got benched immediately after that. KH2 didn’t make her justice with all that being kidnapped, and in the next games she completely dissapeared even. She was never involved in the story ever again. What am i referring to?

  In Birth By Sleep, only Sora and Riku met all the members of the wayfinder trio and played an actual part in their lives. Kairi barely meet Aqua once, and never played an active part in her life anyway. I mean, Aqua never needed Kairi for anything, never. On the contrary, both Sora and Riku were vital for all the members of the wayfinder trio, back then and later on.

  In Chain of Memories, Coded, 358/2 days ... Kairi was replaced with two other girls that quickly became more interesting than Kairi herself, aka Naminé and Xion. In those stories Kairi is barely mentioned and almost never appears. But Sora and Riku ... oh, Sora and Riku! They’re the PROTAGONISTS. They always interact, they always appear, they always do stuff. 

  Let’s not even talk about Dream Drop Distance, where it’s JUST Sora and RIku. 

  What’s my point? The Destiny trio isn’t a trio, it’s a duo. Kairi is ALWAYS put in a corner, she never has a part in the story. 

  I’m not talking about ships, i don’t care about ships, I don’t ship Soriku nor Sokai, it’s not about this. The problem is Kairi’s character development, which did not exist. Not only a development, but even a purpose was missing. 

  So, since i kinda liked her in KH1 and the potential was there, i thought that KH3 would have set things right for her. I had high hopes especially because of Axel, I was like, “WOW here it is a great potential for a good, healthy, platonic relationship, finally Kairi found someone to be paired with and do stuff. We will finally see her being weak, finding her power again, maybe she will be a playable character, maybe she will interact with BOTH Sora and RIku too, making jokes, express her preferences etc etc” yeah and what we got? Kairi is reduced to a mere man pain object again. She almost forgot about Axel once that Sora appeared. She got kidnapped here and there all along. Again. She kinda forced Sora to eat that fruit and never asked for his opinion, while Riku was having an existential drama going on just some steps away. But i don’t think she cares for Riku anyway since she never had any kind of bond time with him and isn’t interested in his problems. She fought once (badly), revealing that her training was somehow useless (she had to be saved by Sora and the others). She gets killed (pretty stupidly too) and Sora had to sacrifice to bring her back. And what made me angry the most: Sora’s heart gets lost in the process of saving her but it’s NOT Kairi the one going after him in the secret ending. IT’S RIKU. LIKE WHAAAT?? Riku?? She can’t even take her girly keyblade and go after the boy she is supposed to love and that died for her?? Riku has to do it? Really? It’s ridiculous. ... 

  Furthermore, she wasn’t a playable character. The only characters that we were able to play were Sora, Riku and .... Aqua! Pretty funny. (I think they are Nomura’s favorites, i don’t know.)

  Kairi’s only part in KH3 was changing outfit and “being Sora’s light” somehow but ... that was so much out of the blue and most likely an isolated moment. It could have been a nice coronation for a developed love story but the problem is that no development was there before.

  So, going back to my point.

  Even if i would have chosen another way to tell the story, the rushed pace of KH3 worked for everyone anyway, except for Kairi. Kairi needed a different treatment.

  But at this point i don’t think she will ever get it, probably Nomura doesn’t like her too much since he decided to make another DreamDropDistance game settled in Insommia next time xD so i give up on her. I’ll focus on the other beautiful female characters of this game.

  Anyway, even if i talked a lot about why Kairi was another flop, i want to point out how interesting some characters got instead. I’m talking about Xigbar (great plot twist), Saix, Demyx, Vexen (Vexen had so much importance, i mean, i didn’t expect him to be the one moving kh3’s plot), Luxord, Marluxia, Larxene and Repliriku! They used to be marginal characters and now they turned out to be protagonists, it’s amazing.

- FF characters: 7/10. I really loved Verum Rex’s surprise, it’s a clever idea to recycle the Versus characters and concepts Nomura couldn’t bring to life. Now that Nomura turned them into original characters, he has the copyright over them again thanks to Disney and he can use them as much as he wants, bringing the “ff characters cameos in kh��� on a brand new level. Starting from the next game, we will have semi-FFcharacters included in the main plot, not just having a cameo here and there, which is amazing!

  But. This doesn’t mean i didn’t miss actual FF characters in Kh3. Cloud, Leon&Co left a hole in kh’s tradition.

Let’s sum it up my notes: 

Graphic: 10/10 +

Gameplay: 10/10 +

Exploration: 10/10 +

Music: 8/10 +

Plot twists/Surprise/Content/Plot elements: 8.5/10. +

The narrative/structure/pace: 6.5/10. +

Characters development: 7/10. +

FF characters: 7/10. +

Total = 8,3

AND ... THAT’S IT FOR NOW I GUESS? xD

[possibilistfanfiction]

these are what they call hard feelings (of love)

[carm/elle, grey’s anatomy au (no one dies tho). they’re disaster kids who are also surgeons. yknow the deal.]

//

these are what they call hard feelings (of love)

guess this is the winter/ our bodies are young & blue/ i still remember everything, how we’d drift buying groceries, how you’d dance for me/ i wish i believed you when you told me this was my home —lorde, ‘hard feelings/loveless’

//

it starts like this: you get to work before the sun even rises, change into your scrubs, go on your rounds, perform an eight-hour operation, kiss another pretty girl, walk home after your twelve hour shift; you have a normal day, really, all things considered for a resident who works somewhere that has a winter for eight months.

it starts like this: it snows before the sun even rises, and that day you lose a child on the table, and her heart stops beating in your hands, and you tug elle to you in the on-call room because you can’t stop feeling the exact moment, and you kiss her roughly while you cry, and after you put on your beanie and light a cigarette and walk home in the snow, the ash burning in the dark, your delicate, extraordinary hands going numb.

//

most days aren’t so bad; you like pediatric surgery because sick children are both more honest and far less annoying than sick adults, and the teenagers especially are cool—jaded and clever and funny.

you also have a stellar surgical record, so most days are actually kind of great. when you have time to plan, when you know you’re going to be able to be perfect, it’s amazing. but then an eight year old girl comes in who ran into a tree while sledding in the park, who has broken bones and a small crushed chest and you’re across from elle in the operating room, her steady hands always steady, always lovely, as she tries to stitch up this tiny heart and tiny lungs but it’s not good enough. that day, neither of you are perfect.

//

‘what are we doing?’ elle sighs very quietly. you feel her sigh because you have your head on her chest so you can hear her heartbeat while the wind howls away outside. you’ve started spending more and more time together outside of the hospital; today you’re in her warm bed, fully clothed because you’d both been too tired for anything last night and honestly you didn’t mind. you’re getting less and less used to sleeping alone.

you shrug. ‘i thought we were just having fun.’

‘the past three times we’ve had sex you’ve cried.’

you grunt. ‘false.’

elle tries not to laugh—you can hear it—and you’re glad she can’t see your smile into her soft tshirt. ‘true, carm.’

‘well there’s no need to add insult to injury. first do no harm, right?’

she’s quiet for a moment, so that joke didn’t land. ‘i have feelings for you,’ she says after a while, very quietly, almost like her words are going to shatter something, like the soft, unbearable weight of snow after a night of it.

you swallow and your heart races because you have feelings for elle too—who wouldn’t? she’s smart and kind and beautiful, some kind of perfect version of a kate moss lookalike in a weird world where she ended up being a cardiothoracic surgeon. she makes you laugh and always brings you coffee when you have rounds together and you first started working in a clinical trial together a year ago and then—

‘i can’t,’ you say, even though you don’t want to. but you feel your broken wrists and countless black eyes and ribs that were bruised for years; you feel the kind of love your mother had for you—dark and rough and unforgiving and hateful. it’s confusing and your heart races and you’re scared; elle has never, ever, not once, raised her voice at you, let alone raised a hand. ‘i’m sorry,’ you say, getting out of bed because you feel her chest hitch and you really don’t want to see her cry. ‘i can’t.’

you start to dress and she doesn’t move and you don’t look back, you can’t look at her, because if you do, you’ll stay forever. 

‘i’m sorry,’ you say, again, and when you get outside the snow hasn’t stopped.

//

elle is, frustratingly and predictably, entirely professional and maybe even nicer. she never snipes at you, even when you make some underhanded comment. you think she seems sad, kind of, but elle is happy too—she’s always happy, always amazing with patients. it seems like she has something in common with literally everyone, and she can calm a room within a second.

it’s one of the reasons you liked her to begin with, when you were residents she’d immediately been beyond competent in the OR but also beyond competent interacting with people, which you’d admired even though you hadn’t want to. the first time you kissed was outside clinton’s, across the street at the market near the park, in the fall. you had run into her—you needed cigarettes and she apparently needed vegan sausage and couscous—and you’d never hung out with her outside of work but you were both tired and hungry and you got poutine and beers and then there you were, with your cigarettes and couscous, kissing on the corner under a streetlamp in october.

which was over a year ago, you realize, of kissing her all over the hospital and all over the city and on your orange fire escape on a tuesday evening and in her kitchen while she made you breakfast in the summer light.

you can sleep with lots of people, and you do, after you walk out of her bedroom in the middle of a blizzard—you’re a surgeon and you’re beautiful, you know these things. your hair curls softly and you have eyelashes from god and you have far too many pairs of blundstones and perfectly ripped skinny jeans and when you buy a girl a drink at the gladstone and let her take you home, it’s not hard. it’s not hard because it’s nothing—it’s a few moments of pleasure and then you put your boots back on. 

it’s not hard because you won’t allow that of yourself; you won’t allow yourself to build a life with elle—because that’s what you would be doing, going to work together, saving people together, going home and making dinner and playing with her cat and going to trinity bellwoods on the weekends and probably even letting her convince you to join the hospital’s softball team even though you’re the least athletic person you know.

you work with her, admire her hands and just how fucking smart she is, the way she remembers meilinn’s medical history even though she’d spoken to her for maybe four minutes almost eight months ago; the way she goes through each patient checklist in the OR before surgery like it’s the single most important procedure she’s ever done. you cut your hair in the spring and she smiles genuinely and tells you it looks lovely; you find yourself sitting with her at lunch every now and then. 

taking other girls home is easy; elle—her laugh and the way she chews on the tip of her pen when she’s concentrating; the way she smells like magnolias and the birthmark near her elbow—is hard.

//

your leg fucking hurts, in the kind of way that scares you because it reminds you of when you were small but also because you know that it’s distinctly not good. 

you’re kind of stunned, and it’s probably shock because you were just in a car accident and your uber driver is conscious and seemingly not critically injured when you check on him in the front. you struggle out of the car, but you get the door open. there are plenty of people around and you’re sure someone has called 911, which is good because your leg, when you look down, is sufficiently fucked, which means you only have a few more solid minutes of adrenaline. 

there are two kids in the car that hit you, though, and one isn’t waking up, and she’s bleeding out of her ear and she’s so small. this is, however, what you know best, so you have all of her vitals when the paramedics get there four minutes later. you insist that she’s taken to your hospital, and you try to let them go in the ambulance with her, but they overrule you when they cut your pants open and see part of your femur poking through your skin.

you’re on a significant amount of morphine when you get to the hospital, and after some top-notch scans, you’re relieved that you have some whiplash and bruises and a little gash on your forehead that needs seven stitches and a leg that will require surgery, but nothing else that’s worth caring about. 

elle, however, does not seem to know this news, and she comes rushing into your room in the ER while you’re waiting to go to the OR. 

‘whoa,’ you say, and she’s even prettier and softer and lovelier when you’re high. ‘calm down there, hurricane. i’m fine.’

she rolls her eyes and pulls up what you’re pretty sure is your chart on her ipad, scans through everything quickly, then sits with a very relieved sigh in a chair at your side. 

‘you scared me,’ she admits, and it’s the kind of thing that’s so tender and sincere you want to cry. 

‘just a few scratches.’ you wave your hand vaguely in front of you. ‘nothing to worry about.’

‘i had very little information when an intern told me a few minutes ago.’

you snort a laugh and you’re too loopy to even care. ‘interns.’

elle takes your hand, very unceremoniously, and it’s the first time you’ve touched in months. 

‘elle—’ you start, but she squeezes your hand and shakes her head.

‘just—don’t say anything now,’ she tells you, quietly. ‘i’m just glad you’re okay.’

‘yeah,’ you say. ‘okay.’

you doze off and then you have surgery to fix your leg and elle isn’t there when you wake up—you don’t blame her, because she was in scrubs and her labcoat when she’d been to see you earlier and she usually has big surgeries scheduled for tuesdays—but there is a huge bouquet of magnolias by your bedside and you don’t even need to reach for the card to know they’re from her.

//

you take time off of work to heal—you have to, and you’re bored out of your mind. you crutch around your apartment and order in a lot of food and amazon prime pretty much all of your toiletries for two weeks, and you’re legitimately about to go crazy when there’s a knock at your door.

it takes you a frustratingly long time to get there, but then you open it and elle is smiling, holding a huge bag of groceries.

‘when is the last time,’ she says, ‘you had a decent home-cooked meal.’

‘you could’ve called,’ you say, even though you’re smiling and you scoot back to let her in.

she looks guilty for a second, putting some really fancy-looking wine in your fridge. ‘i deleted your number.’

‘ouch,’ you say.

‘i wanted to drunk dial you,’ she explains. ‘like, a lot.’

‘who wouldn’t?’ you say, gesturing kind of in general to your admittedly sloppy and dark apartment and your unkempt hair and the same sweatpants you’d had on for three days now, and elle laughs, then goes to open your blinds. 

you go over to the kitchen island and get yourself situated on a stool before taking her phone and trying out her old passcode (562533, which really just spells LOCKED, which always made you laugh) and when it opens you smile. you put your number back in.

she gets back from your bedroom with a pile of laundry and you say, ‘let’s open the wine.’

‘trying to get me drunk?’

you gesture to her phone. ‘well i did put my number back in your contacts.’

she huffs a laugh. ‘i’m going to start this laundry while you shower, and then i’m going to make dinner, and then we can open the wine.’

‘buzzkill,’ you say, even though you’re already hobbling to your bathroom and you feel more alive than you have in months.

you have wine and the best friend chicken on this earth that night, and you want to kiss her, but elle makes you laugh with her awful impressions of everyone in 9 to 5 before you fall asleep. she’s just—she’s elle—because she sleeps on your couch and leaves you croissants and a cortado from ezra’s pound the next morning, the blankets folded neatly and wine glasses washed.

//

you start to text again, just little messages here and there, a lot about work and some about her cat and a thrilling few when she’s clearly drunk that she misses you. 

but you don’t see her until weeks later, when you get your cast off. you’re limping terribly, but it’s finally a little warmer, and you’d gotten a haircut and some new sneakers you desperately needed. you’re up to maybe sitting at the park and reading, but you want cigarettes and you can’t help but laugh when you spot long blonde hair and what you’re sure are perfectly tailored all saints jeans. 

‘hey stranger,’ you say, walking up behind her.

elle turns with a smile. ‘carm!’ she says excitedly. ‘you got your cast off.’

‘that i did,’ you say, paying for your cigarettes while she frowns. 

‘i hoped your brush with death might’ve stopped that habit.’

‘never,’ you say, winking before you follow her out after she rolls her eyes.

she sighs on the street corner and looks at her watch, then looks at you hopefully, even though you can tell she’s trying not to. ‘do you want dinner?’

‘only if we order like seven kinds of poutine and you buy me drinks.’

‘i’m so glad patients don’t run into you outside of the hospital,’ she says, and you elbow her with a fake glare before she laughs.

you eat and drink and she tells you about the new intern class and you’re set to get back to work in a week or so, so you actually try to pay attention to the tips she gives you. someone is singing terrible karaoke and really boring jays spring training news is on the tv and elle is the most beautiful thing you have ever seen.

'i was, like, really abused when i was little.’ you say it aloud and you’ve said it before, to a few therapists, but you don’t talk about it and you certainly haven’t talked about it to elle, who looks at you so softly you have to turn away. ‘that’s why i—you know, why i—couldn’t.’

she nods. ‘you broke my heart, you know.’

‘i’m good at that,’ you say. ‘broke mine too.’

‘fortunately for you,’ she says, leaning toward you a little but your chest still tightens, ‘i’m a world renowned cardio-thoracic surgeon.’

you laugh, really laugh, because otherwise you’re pretty sure you’d both start crying.

‘also,’ she starts, very solemnly, ‘i can’t promise everything, but i can promise that—i’m good, carm. i’m good and i won’t hurt you.’

you nod down at the remnants of your poutine. 

‘if you want,’ she adds softly.

‘okay,’ you say, and when you look up she looks a little surprised but really, really happy. 

‘yeah?’

‘yeah,’ you say. ‘yeah.’

she laughs this little delighted thing and raises the last sip of her beer in a little toast and then puts down far too much cash and gets up, then helps you.

you feel jittery when you walk outside, even though you’ve both certainly done this before. 

you’re underneath the streetlamp and you both slow and elle laughs. ‘we’re really going to kiss here again?’

‘first kiss 2.0,’ you say. ‘seems fitting.’

she shakes her head and then leans down, and it is. it is.

//

it starts like this: you walk to work, slowly but surely, on a warm morning that’s sunny but not too hot, and a child’s heart is in your hands but it keeps going, beating away, and you watch elle place stitch after careful, lightning-fast stitch, and you wait for her at the front doors, and you kiss a very, very pretty girl, and you hold her hand on the way back to her apartment, anything but numb.