The most embarrassing series of posts about Lawlu you will ever read: edition Punk Hazard (part 2)
We're still not done with the Punk Hazard! There's way too many interactions with them there and posts have apparently a restriction of 30 images, geez. Anyway, let's follow the tale further!
Law: Hey, I can hear that.
It's hilarious, because it turned out to be true in the end. Law wouldn't betray Luffy (as in backstab him), but he would finish the alliance early if that means keeping Luffy safe. But would it count as betrayal actually?
And then Luffy brags again. Wait, or doesn't he? It sounds kinda correct to me though lol. Also of course there's nothing to worry about, after all it will be Law's job from now on!
Law (thinking): Those people... how did they survive so long on their own?! They have no sense of danger!
Probably a moment later: Wait, so it will be my job to worry for them all the time?!
Law (thinking): It's nice of them to have brought the kids here, but they're pirates, I can't really expect Strawhats to actually want to help them, right? Damn, if I have to choose between keeping Mugiwara-ya safe and keeping the children safe, I guess the choice is only one to make...
Law (thinking): They actually want to help the children?... but why? They're not friends with them like with that fishman and mermaid on Sabaody... are they saying this just on a whim? Anyway, I can't lose the main goal from sight, keeping Mugiwara-ya safe is the priority.
To understand Law's odd reaction here we need to go back to his flashback:
Because when he told the nun and the children that he doesn't want to leave without Lammy, they just told him they will leave him behind on his own (but will return for him later on). That's why he expects that Nami wants to stay behind by herself. But Luffy's isn't having any of that, Luffy's like "no one is getting left behind on my watch". And no wonder really, because Luffy also knows how it's like. After all didn't Garp and Dragon leave him behind on his own as well, choosing to pursue their jobs instead? But Luffy does not want others to feel the same way he did.
Law's shocked "?!" there really says volumes. He probably didn't expect that option of "not leaving anyone behind" as even possible. We will see him struggling to accept it later on as well in this arc.
Law (thinking): Wait a second... How did that turn out this way?!
Because let's rewind a bit. Law's just reached his inner peace with the dificult decision that he's gonna sacrifice the children's fate in favour of keeping Strawhats safe. But here Luffy makes a 180 turn on him and tells him "Actually, we're saving the kids and there is this funny samurai as well, we also want to reassemble him". And Law is like TrafalgarLaw.exe stopped functioning, please reboot. He thought he made it clear this is not the time to be altruistic and has a difficult time to process this illogical conclusion. You were too lost in your own thoughts, that's why you missed it, Law.
Law (thinking): Friends?! What?! Whatever, put that thought aside for now, more importantly... those conditions for the alliance are ridiculous! Also it would totally be something I would want to do and make it a condition, if not for the fact I think it's impossible to pull that all off.
Usopp (thinking, surprised): Luffy was right, he's actually a good guy!
Luffy (thinking): I knew you would help us!
Law (thinking): You must be kidding me, what kind of pirates are so altruistic. Great, now I have even more troubles to deal with. And yet I can't refuse them.
Law (thinking): No, anything but this...!
I'm so sorry for him in this one, tbh. Can't make it look funny anymore, I'm sorry! (but if you really want to, then the classic "Am I a joke to you?" commentary is usually spot-on) At least it was Chopper and I think Law is okay with touching animals and minks.
Luffy (thinking): Torao, you come up with the best ideas! This sounds so fun!
Law (thinking): I'm actually not gonna allow you to rethink. You need to stick with me so I can keep you safe.
(my god Torao)
Luffy: No chance! Good luck getting rid of me now after you offered friendship to me!
(those two, I swear...)
Fun fact: he didn't, lol. Law trusted him with this, but Luffy told them all only after they boarded the Sunny lol. Ouch, Luffy!
Luffy's safety is constantly on his mind, isn't it... and he's taking the most work on himself as well. Also can you try to think of anything else for a change, Trafalgar Law?! I know you're super duper worried but, come on...
Yeah, I know Law, right? You try so hard to keep him safe, and he goes and does some ridiculous shit again. And so the neverending spiral of worrying and suffering because of it continues for Law, lol.
Luffy (thinking): I will make you proud, Torao! Just watch me kidnap that guy in a few secs!!
Robin (thinking): Luffy is so excited, not sure if it's because of the plan or that Trafalgar. Probably the latter, actually, he just ignored the plan after all...
He's adorable but omg, they miss the marks all the time when it comes to each other, don't they. It's pure romantic comedy!
The end result is to be expected haha. Law's eyes are like constantly on Luffy lol. At least Law's not so anxious and worried anymore, because fake cuffs are part of his backup plan, so things are going okay for now.
Luffy is instantly interested in Torao's connection to Joker. He just wants to know more about Law, circumenstances be damned, because who cares they're locked up, right.
Law (thinking): Really? You ask about it now?! Fine, whatever, I will tell you... it's not like I can hide it from you forever.
He's not really that great at lying to Luffy, is he? Unless he just sold him a half-truth, but it doesn't appear to be this way. Alliance is all about trust after all, right? (Law says that in Wano) And Law is a bit uncomfortable sharing his connection to Doflamingo, but he does it anyway.
Luffy is so easily impressed with Torao, and it makes it even funnier that it's for all the wrong things really lol. Though it's understandable because when Ace died he got a big hole in his chest and couldn't survive, so in Luffy's mind anyone who can actually live despite that might be like the strongest person ever in his mind (stronger than Ace even?!). It's ridiculous, cute and actually a bit touching. I doubt Law understood it right lol, he's just lying there in disgrace.
Law (thinking): You will pay for this! Especially for making me look so pathetic in front of Mugiwara-ya!
Also Luffy please stop staring at Law like this all the time and close your mouth. He's so infatuated with him.
Law's face here is kinda hilarious, listening to Robin's and Luffy's talk about Kinemon's legs. Is he thinking something like "Interesting, you like it that much? I could do it for you all the time actually... I can do so much more, in fact"
Please someone shut them up.
Change of tone. As soon as Luffy's so worried and stressed, Law becomes all serious and worried as well. You can't make this shit up.
Showing off in front of Luffy lol. You actually want him to think you're cool, don't you, Law?
Luffy: Omg you're so cool Torao! I thought we're goners fr!
And guess what, it's working like a charm. Oh, Luffy!
Luffy adoring Law again, his eyes are almost sparkling here :D he tries to show off a little as well there heh. It's like "Torao, I'm so impressed with you, so be impressed with me and my crew as well!!"
Law, when not ordering people around: "is there anyone in here who can do x or y?". He's really not used to this "equal alliance" thing either, isn't he? Because that's such an awkward thing to say. Is this first ever alliance for him as well? Perhaps all other arrangements he had was just Law giving people orders.
That would mean this is first alliance both for Luffy AND Law awww. Oda, stop, I'm cringing! There's no way Law did it just for Luffy, right?...
Law making Luffy laugh on purpose will never stop having a special place in my heart <3 because you know he said this just for that. He doesn't yet care much about the others, but he sure af cares for Luffy. Perhaps he joked a bit because he didn't want to see Luffy so anxious like before when worrying about his crew geezas stop.
Someone's showing off again and it works like a charm. Can you stop making it such a show ffs, Law. No you can't, you're just having too much fun seeing Luffy so obviously impressed.
I mean... anyone still doubting Law loves Luffy after this image would have to also doubt Law ever loved his little sister, you know?
Also he's really not very honest, is he. Still not gonna admit it openly, acting cold and keeping his distance, despite the fact Luffy is already holding a dear spot in his heart. I know Law has predisposition for being serious and secretive, like that's just legit part of his personality, but he also clearly doesn't want Luffy to know how he actually feels about him.
Damn, Punk Hazard is long. I wonder if I can finish it with the next post haha. To be continued!
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Back in late 2022, I started working on a long story about Ishin: a tale of two dummies whose weird one-night stand blossoms into a surprisingly caring relationship even as a (mostly) canon-compliant series of tragedies plays out around them. It’s a now-complete series in approximately 125,000 words and three parts, and you can read the whole thing right now on AO3: The Glorious and Bloody Deeds of Okita Soji, Volume 1: Okita Soji Versus the Scoundrel Saito Hajime; The Secret History of Saito Hajime, Volume 2: The Shiraume Incident; and, finally, Brief Notes on the Domestic Life of one Saito Hajime.
Taken as a whole, it's a story about identity and history and the stories that people tell each other and themselves about those things. And it's a story about one guy getting way too into weird Edo-era egg dishes, and another guy finding himself embroiled in an extended detective sequence, and a third guy composing a series of corny haiku that (almost) nobody wants to read. And, of course, it's also a story about people who are shamelessly and sometimes explicitly in love (so you probably shouldn't read it at work).
This whole big, sprawling thing has been a labour of love on my part: it turns out that I adore writing historical fiction and finding excuses to read books and journal articles in order to write it better. In addition to making not one but four little illustrations to celebrate the fic's completion (and please look at them up-close; I hand-inked all those kimono patterns), I've drawn up a list of some of the sources that I consulted for my writing, and you can find those under the cut.
This is not an absolutely exhaustive list of sources; I don’t think it’s super useful to catalogue the extremely nitty-gritty stuff, like that time that I felt compelled to find out what the state of strawberry cultivation was in 1860s Japan, or when I needed to picture exactly what it looked like when Haruka was repairing Ryoma’s kimono. That being said, I’ve added a couple of things that are really particular to my stories but that I thought were cool enough to share.
Foster, Michael Dylan. The Book of Yokai: Mysterious Creatures of Japanese Folklore. U of California P, 2015.
(This one was a really fun read – it combines a short history of yokai in folklore with a little catalogue of yokai.)
Jansen, Marius B. Sakamoto Ryoma and the Meiji Restoration. Stanford UP, 1971.
(Super useful as an introduction to the Bakumatsu era and for biographical details about Ryoma and the figures around him.)
“Japanese Wiki Corpus.” https://www.japanesewiki.com/.
(This is a machine-translated collection of articles on the Japanese side of Wikipedia related to Kyoto. As with a lot of things on Wikipedia, the citations on these articles tend to be poor or nonexistent, but it’s a useful starting point for information on figures and events that don’t have an English wiki equivalent. Definitely more useful if you can then head over to the original wiki articles and parse them out yourself.)
“Kabuki21” and “The Noh.” https://www.kabuki21.com/section.php, https://www.the-noh.com/en/plays/index.html.
(I’m lumping these two together because I tended to consult them in tandem. Without getting too much into my personal details I am – among other things – a non-practicing theatre scholar, so whenever I wanted to have characters in my old-timey fics refer to something cultural, my first stop was old plays. These sites have, respectively, summaries of kabuki plays and full texts of Noh plays available for you to browse. If you’ve read my other fics you will probably have seen that I referred to the kabuki play “Fuwa” in 亀が如く.)
Katsu, Kokichi. Musui’s Story: The Autobiography of a Tokugawa Samurai. Translated by Teruko Craig. U of Arizona P, 1988.
(A book that needs to be taken with a grain of salt because it’s an autobiography written by a guy who sounds like a real blowhard, but it’s still a really fascinating look into the daily life of a low-ranking samurai.)
Leupp, Gary P. and Tao, De-min. The Tokugawa World. Routledge, 2022.
(Of particular interest is Kimura Sachihiko’s essay, “The Shinsengumi: Shadows and light in the last days of the Tokugawa shogunate” [1104-1124], which gave me a bunch of incidental details about the Roshigumi that I incorporated into the sections of this series that were told from Inoue and Hijikata’s perspectives.)
“Old Photos of Japan.” https://www.oldphotosjapan.com/.
(Pretty self-explanatory. Very useful as a resource for picturing scenes!)
“Shinsengumi Archives.” https://shinsengumi-archives.tumblr.com/.
(A long-running tumblr dedicated to cataloguing resources about the Shinsengumi. There’s an absolute wealth of information collected here, and best of all, the creator cites their sources and even provides links to the original texts. Although it’s focused on the Shinsengumi, it’s impossible to overstate how useful this site is for prospective Bakumatsu-era fic writers in general. The collection of Hijikata’s poems with links to others’ translations and commentary is here: https://shinsengumi-archives.tumblr.com/post/683071924948058112/hijikata-toshizos-haiku-poems. The creator of the blog also links to a translation of Nagakura’s and Shimada’s diaries, and while the document is machine-translated, it’s still a great source of historical details: https://shinsengumi-archives.tumblr.com/post/678083336614428672/where-can-you-read-the-memoirs.)
Smits, Gregory. “Warding off Calamity in Japan: A Comparison of the 1855 Catfish Prints and the 1862 Measles Prints.” EASTM 30 (2009): 9-31.
(Okay, this one is highly specific to my fic – it comes up in Part 2 when Okita tells his story about Kashima and again a couple of chapters later when his pile of remedies includes a crudely-drawn picture meant to ward off indigestion – but I love little details like this so I did want to make a point of sharing it here.)
“Tamago Hyakuchin” and “Tofu Hyakuchin.” http://codh.rois.ac.jp/edo-cooking/tamago-hyakuchin/recipe/, https://toyama-tofu.jp/tofuhyakutin.html.
(These are collections of Edo-era egg- and tofu-based recipes. They’re two of the sources cited in Cookpad’s collection of modernized Edo-era recipes: https://cookpad.com/recipe/list/14604664.)
Vaporis, Constantine N. “Linking the Realm: The Gokaido Highway Network in Early Modern Japan (1603-1868).” Highways, Byways and Road Systems in the Pre-Modern World. Ed. Susan E. Alcock, John Bodel, and Richard J. A. Talbert. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 90-105.
(Some of the works cited in this article also sound interesting, but I didn’t have a chance to dig any deeper as I just wanted to know a bit about the Tokugawa-era roads. Also interesting in this vein is Jilly Traganou’s book The Tokaido Road: Travelling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan [2004].)
Wert, Michael. Meiji Restoration Losers. Harvard UP, 2013.
(Not directly useful as a source for writing about Ishin – it’s about later events and it mostly tracks the posthumous construction of one specific Tokugawa magistrate’s history – but it was an engaging read and I found it interesting as an exploration of how people continue to look back on the Bakumatsu era and the Meiji Restoration, which is something that the game is, of course, also doing.)
Yamakawa, Kikue. Women of the Mito Domain: Recollections of Samurai Family Life. Translated by Kate Wildman Nakai. U of Tokyo P, 1992.
(Another one of those bits of essential reading on everyday life for low-ranking samurai, this time with a focus on women’s lives and households more generally. I didn’t use a lot of from this book in my fic, but it has everything from translations of songs to records of families’ financial transactions, and it’s fascinating to read about all the turmoil in Mito playing out in the background of these families’ lives.)
“Yokai.com.” https://yokai.com/.
(The creators of this site make a point of not going into detail about their sources, and they’re very careful to state that they don’t intend for the project to be “the final authority” on yokai, but I enjoyed browsing the site to get some ideas for Okita’s stories – and once you know the name of a particular yokai that you’re interested in, it’s easy enough to go look up other sources on them.)
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i spent quite a bit of time thinking, considering my options and wondering if i should even respond to the 'apology' to begin with, but i feel like i've been here before, in this exact same position (i didn't respond to his original 'apology' because it felt off how he omitted the fact that he pretended to be the victim for a whole week, but even then i decided to not say anything and just let the dust settle and give him a chance to learn and do better) and doing nothing eventually just caused more harm. even if i can't reach the other side and find common understanding, i wanted to at least express what's been on my mind for such a long time.
i always try to approach people and situations with understanding and try to assume ignorance instead of malice when someone says or does something i consider questionable or wrong. but i also know we all have our limits. we are all human. and you can't take the heart out of the equation.
one thing in this 'apology' that really stood out to me was this:
how is it not malice to completely disregard another creator, hell, another person and their wishes and feelings when they have made it very clear that your actions are causing them harm?
how is it not malice to outright lie and misrepresent other people and situations in order to portray yourself in a better light?
how is it not malice to disrespect the people you've stolen from and then, after they (by your own words!) rightfully address it and try to bring your actions to light, you then turn around and vilify them to your friends and followers? portray them as bullies and gatekeepers?
all while repeating again and again how the whole experience made you stop creating? as if your actions didn't force people out of this space, this fandom? have you ever sat down to think how the person that made you a 40 minute video tutorial on gif making, the person that taught you so much, no longer makes anything at all because you turned your back on her and copied her sets? kept doing it after she blocked you? after she made text posts expressing how upsetting your behaviour was? you didn't care and kept doing it anyway. even saying things like 'i always credit where credit is due' in response to copying numerous sets from @minthara, down to the caption without ever crediting her.
and if that wasn't enough harm, you then took it a notch further and straight up lied to the people around you, trying to vilify petra and i by saying how the whole thing should've been dealt with in private. how is it not malice to omit the fact that I DID, in fact, reach out to you privately. that i did it in a civil manner. that i tried to explain to you how your actions were wrong and were rightfully upsetting other creators. how you ignored everything i've said and when i expressed that your response (or lack of it) made me uncomfortable and that because of it i couldn't give you permission to 'recreate' (copy) my work, you then insulted me and told me that it didn't matter what i wanted? that you would do as you please and there was nothing i could do about it? how you then immediately blocked me so i couldn't even respond? how is that not malice?
and then this was from your apology back in march:
and you insist that after this 'apology' you've learnt and were never doing anything wrong again and yet you are saying the same thing again in your new 'apology'. how after the march events you went to @galedekarios anyway, asking for permission, didn't wait for her response and posted your copy of her set anyway. which just makes me think that you've never learnt. it just makes it seem that asking people for permission never stemmed from a place of respect and understanding, but from the need to cover your ass in case someone brings the fact that you're still copying up. which someone did, apparently.
at the end of the day, this is my opinion and i might be wrong, but following all of your words and actions, it just seems like you chose notes and attention instead of people. that you kept lying and misrepresenting things and throwing us under the bus for your own gain. and that you only stopped because enough people eventually found out, not because you suddenly felt remorse. and this 'apology' was just another 'ask for permission from a creator', all just for optics. you couldn't even bother to unblock us before posting the 'apology' which just shows how little you were actually thinking about any of us.
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