#imagine just existing and you save someone's entire career that's just. wow.

[breannastewart]

SUE BIRD & BREANNA STEWART

“you have all of these conversations. You spend hours and days and weeks and months thinking things over, and then, suddenly, out of nowhere, something just happens to render all of that….. I mean, almost meaningless [...] We won the lottery. We got Breanna. We won, so I stayed.” - Sue.

“Words can’t describe how much you have meant to me. Thank you for letting me share the court with you for many, many years. I wish there were many more years coming. I love you, you’re a great person, great teammate. Thank you for everything you’ve done.” - Stewie.

[darkcircles4lyfe]

Death to All Might, Rebirth to Yagi Toshinori

So about All Might. I’ve been extremely wary of talking about what could happen to him because straight up saying “I don’t think he’s gonna die” is asking the universe to spite me. Plus it also feels like a room full of people turning to stare at me as if I said the Sun isn’t a star. Man has death flags everywhere, I know. 

But, okay, *Bill Nye voice* consider the following:

Mr. Yagi here, if he overheard everything, just received the final nail in the coffin on his career. His time as the symbol of peace is not only over, it was in fact partially responsible for the current state of things, since he once did so much on his own that his absence now makes heroes and civilians alike ill-prepared to cope. I think it was very apt for that one guy to be wearing an All Might shirt--he was acting as a mouthpiece for the latent societal problems embedded in All Might’s legacy. 

We know already that he’s been feeling useless. I love this scene and although I’m not gonna talk about it right this second, remember what Aizawa says about just “being here” being enough:

And we know from conversations with Inko that Toshinori is also reframed his purpose around looking after Izuku. But in the end, Izuku rejected his help, and it was his classmates instead who were able to save him. Now the very progress of humanity is rejecting him too. You may me wondering how on Earth I don’t see the logical conclusion of all this being his death. Hold on. It actually has a lot to do with the fact that we’re all expecting it. Nighteye himself saw it, and despite any contrary convictions anyone might have, the plot doesn’t seem to be veering away from that end. All Might Is Gonna Die, says absolutely everything. 

It’s occurring to me that I have previous experience with this kind of plotline that probably little to no one else in this fandom shares, being that I’ve read a certain book series in which the main character is told in no uncertain terms that he will die (no, I’m not talking about hp). The series in question is T*e Und*rland Chronicl*s (censoring so it doesn’t get put in their side of tumblr) and I’m sorry but I’m about to go on a shameless tangent about it and spoil the ending for you.

So in this series there is a prophecy in every book, each one having something to do with war and conflict, and so far all of them have been right. In the last book [mc] finds out that it’s prophesied that he will be killed. Lots of the things in the prophecies are convoluted and metaphorical, but no, this one literally says “when the [mc’s title] has been killed.” He spends the whole book coming to terms with this, and he gives into it, only to find himself waking up in the hospital instead. “Wow, plot twist. /s” you may be thinking, and yeah sure, the mc in a kids book survived, big shocker. But it doesn't end there. After the war, there are peace talks, but they escalate until the two sides are on the verge of declaring war again. And [mc], bless him, has just been caught in the middle of all of this the entire time. He’s sick as shit of fighting, of watching the suffering and death of people he cares about. He draws his sword against both of them angrily, gives a speech saying he won’t take a side, and then promptly breaks his sword across his knee: “There. [mc’s title in the prophecies] is dead. I killed him.” He’s giving a huge middle finger to everyone there, to the man who wrote the prophecies, to the entire fucked up culture of it all. And so something that was taken literally turns out to be metaphorical. That is, if you still believe in the prophecies at all.

Hopefully you’re catching my drift here. What I’m saying is, even though this other series has nothing to do with bnha, it goes to show sometimes it’s the most absolute certainties that are red herrings, and a “death” can consequently be a symbolic one. In All Might’s case, it could be the death of hero society and a rejection of his own past. In other words, character development for Toshinori himself that reflects on the way the world is changing, too. Also there’s the fact that the mc from that other series I’m trying not to name has an honorary title, and I’m imagining that role he occupied “dying” could correspond to something that amounts to, “All Might is dead. I (Yagi Toshinori) killed him.” 

And here’s another thing: we also have to ask ourselves what good a dead Toshinori is to Izuku, narratively speaking. Yes, Izuku has spent his whole life idolizing even the more toxic parts of All Might, and his idealized vision of his hero does need to “die.” But how about Toshinori as a father figure?  Izuku regretting that his last interaction with Toshinori was to reject his help may drive home the fact that he shouldn’t go off on his own, but at this point it’s kinda redundant. If anything it would negate some of the progress that was just made because it’d make him extra paranoid about losing other people too. To be honest, the whole “Uncle Ben” trope, the mentor/father figure who dies and gives the mc a reason to do better, is so tired. Experiencing the death of a loved one really doesn’t deserve to be romanticized like that. I might as well admit that I’m speaking from experience, and let me tell you, losing someone you love suddenly, when you weren’t around, and with unfinished business--it makes you paranoid as hell that it will happen again. It literally gives me nightmares. Y’all, I cannot stress enough that trauma does not equal character development. Granted, just because I know this doesn’t mean Horikoshi does, but in general he does seem to lead his characters toward healing.

Okay, back to the present. Toshinori is turning away from UA. He likely feels useless and rejected. We can infer that what happens next will involve Stain, and we have a couple of extra clues to go with it: Stain considers All Might a true hero, and has stated that he would let All Might kill him. And since Horikoshi loves his parallels, we also have this fight between Endeavor and this random villain who admires him so much that he wants to die by Endeavor’s hand:

This suggests a confrontation in which Stain challenges All Might to live up to himself as he once was, so that as a hero he can vanquish Stain and symbolically overcome society's perversion of that role. But based on what All Might has learned about the system he upheld, Stain is wrong. All Might is not a “true hero” in the sense that the societal issues Stain witnessed exist not in spite of All Might, but (in part) because of him, because he took too much of the responsibility for himself.

Stain probably had no idea about the personal cost of All Might’s lonely burden until after the fact. Maybe he’s seeing it now. So then perhaps the confrontation would be more about Stain claiming he’s just as fake as the rest. Either way, Toshinori has the opportunity to denounce himself and be rid of “All Might,”  to stop living in his own shadow. Nighteye’s vision has been defied before, and I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the combination of society shifting + Toshinori’s own conviction is enough to do it again and work fate in his favor.

He is not All Might. He is Yagi Toshinori: quirkless, worn down, and directionless except for his dedication to Izuku. If he survives his interaction with Stain, he can resolve his imperfect mentorship by confessing about his shortcomings and simply supporting Izuku as a part of his family, not as his teacher (as Aizawa said, just “being there”). And that’s how you really get character development, for both of them. I mean, shit, imagine Toshinori straight up telling Izuku to stop calling him All Might.

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 299: No Chains Left

Previously on BnHA: Horikoshi was all “and then AFO broke out all of the inmates from six other prisons and took a nap. well anyways, here’s the hospital angst.” Kacchan woke up two days later and was all, “WAIT BUT HOW ARE DEKU AND TODOROKI AND ALL OF THE OTHER CHARACTERS EXCEPT IIDA DOING” and then we cut to Shouto’s room where the other U.A. kids were sitting around being Mutually Traumatized and giving each other moral support and such. Everyone was alll, “...”, and then the rest of the Todofam showed up, INCLUDING POSSIBLY REI?! which, omg. The chapter ended with Kacchan STOMPING THROUGH THE HALLS all “WHADDYA MEAN DEKU HASN’T WOKEN UP YET”, dragging along Satou and Mineta behind him, fueled by the power of ALL OF THE FUCKS HE NOW GIVES. He gives so many fucks now you guys. This boy cares so much he can probably deduct it on his taxes.

Today on BnHA: SPEAKING OF PEOPLE WHO GIVE A LOT OF FUCKS, the story cuts abruptly to Hawks, freshly recovering from his near-death experience, and pondering the threads that have weaved the tapestry of his life and led him to this moment. Basically he grew up in poverty with his Jerk Dad and Jerk Mom until his dad got arrested one day and his mom sent him off to go Find Money Or Something, and so he rescued a busload of people and found himself a new career. Back in the present day, Hawks and Jeanist ride around town in Jeanist’s Jamborghini having awkward encounters with civilians in a country on the brink of social collapse, and visiting Hawks’s mother’s home. Hawks is all “I know from an outsider’s perspective it must look like my life currently sucks, but now that the HPSC is gone, my public image is shot, and my parents are finally out of my life, I’m actually feeling SURPRISINGLY GOOD.” Anyway so he’s gonna go meet up with Endeavor now, and p.s. this chapter was fucking fantastic though, damn.

oh my god?? is this Hawks narration?? something about him growing up watching the heroes on TV and thinking of them as fictional characters

okay I scrolled down a little bit more to see the rest of that “Keigo” panel, and wow

this is basically a shed. poor boy definitely grew up rough. let me tell you guys, I came in here ready for some BakuDeku shenanigans; I was not prepared for Hawks Flashback Angst. I AM HERE FOR IT, but also wow I gotta brace myself now lol

HELLO MISTER HAWKS’S JERK DAD, SIR

BnHA sure does have an array of Jerk Dads, doesn’t it. makes me appreciate characters like Masaru and JirouDad all the more for bucking the trend

anyway. so Horikoshi, you really thought that one itty bitty chapter of hospital catharsis would be enough to calm us all before you went right back to showing us child abuse huh. my god man can we rest

BABY HAWKS

swear to god this kid can’t be more than five or six, and yet he has this completely blank look on his face even with his dad looming over him being all threatening and shit. like he’s shut down his emotions to protect himself. imagine what has to happen to a child for him to have learned this at such a young age. fuck

AND MEANWHILE THIS GUY

don’t mingle with humans?? not “other” humans, just humans?? what is this implying here?? and also holy shit Hawks definitely didn’t inherit his looks from his dad orz

then again he doesn’t really bear much of a resemblance to his strung-out mom here either

omg omg omg. and this child is basically trapped here in this environment with these two people. this explains a SHITLOAD about Hawks’s personality though you guys. his ability to completely separate his real thoughts from the face he presents to the outside world. his pragmatic approach to analyzing and solving problems. his layers of emotional walls. turns out almost none of that came from the HPSC training -- that was all learned hands-on in his own personal do-or-die survival nightmare childhood!! oh, boy

and small wonder then that he latched on to Endeavor so strongly if he really is the one who brought down his dad and inadvertently saved him from this. also, just putting this out there, I know people are always talking about him and Dabi being foils, and I think it’s very interesting how Touya grew up in a household where he saw firsthand the dark side of hero society, and so ended up becoming a villain in order to bring it down. whereas young Keigo had almost the exact opposite experience, growing up experiencing the dark side of villain society and becoming a hero in order to bring about a world where no one else has to experience that. just. both of them are so determined not to become their fathers. some interesting parallels there

so Hawks was sort of an accident after his parents had “thanks for helping me not get caught after I killed that guy” sex, and now this little boy is growing up in squalor and being beaten by his father for things like Sitting In The Wrong Out-Of-The-Way Corner Trying Not To Be A Bother To Anybody. holy fuck. this is so rough to read through you guys

wait so does Jerk Dad have a an eyeball manipulation quirk?? because he doesn’t have the wings like his son, but wth are these things??

this presumably also means that Keigo has never been to school or anything either. he basically doesn’t exist. he thinks heroes are fictional characters, he doesn’t realize that they’re real people. these are people who could help him if he could escape and find them, but he doesn’t know, and they don’t know about him

OH MY GOD HE’S JUST SITTING IN HIS CORNER HUGGLING HIS ENDEAVOR PLUSH OH MY GOD

how could this child possibly have an anti-fandom when he’s done NOTHING WRONG HIS ENTIRE LIFE. huh. just explain that to me. lol I mean I’m not looking to pick a fight with anyone, but also, MAYBE I AM, idk?? this kid has gotten me all riled up lmao

anyways, Protect Keigo 2021, and thank you Horikoshi for these three very terrible pages. I am pleased to inform you that you’ve effectively gotten your point across and you may now commence saving this kid already

YAY

oh no, Keigo’s dumbass jerk dad tried to steal a car and the popo nabbed his ass and now his mom can’t just sit around neglecting her VERY YOUNG SON all day long, oh horrors. sorry lady my tiny violin is on backorder. just imagine that I’m playing a very sarcastic song on it for you

anyway so what are you gonna do now, abandon him? I can hardly imagine he’d be worse off, if anything it might be a near-instant improvement

LMAO HE’S ALL “WAIT WHAT ENDEAVOR’S A REAL FUCKING DUDE?!”

AND THEY SAY THAT A HERO CAN SAVE US~~~~ I’M NOT GONNA STAND HERE AND WAAAAAIT~~~~~ I’LL HOLD ONTO THE WINGS OF THE EAGLES, WATCH AS WE ALL FLY AWAAAAAAY~~~~

lol what a randomly pivotal moment in his young life. TIME TO GO MAKE THESE MEMES INTO DREAMS YOUNG ONE

anyway so his mom freaked out and grabbed him and they wound up at a train station with her TELLING HIM TO GO GET HER SOME MONEY, oh my god. SURE MOM LEMME JUST WALTZ RIGHT ON DOWN TO THE “JOBS FOR FIVE-YEAR-OLDS” STORE AND TELL THEM I NEED SOME CASH. ffff manifesting someone to come help him in 3... 2...

...

SIGH, JUST GO RESCUE THE PEOPLE FROM THE BUS, KEIGO. is this the outfit he was wearing when that happened?? it must be, right?? I can’t imagine them surviving more than a couple days out here unless this starts getting REALLY dark in a way I know that even Horikoshi won’t explore, so yeah. cut to the HPSC now please. never thought we’d be glad to see them. I mean sure, it may be an “out of the frying pan...” case, but good god

THANK YOU!!

and I guess it was his mom’s eyeball quirk then. anyway, whatever, see you again never, hopefully. lol oh man. thaaaat, was upsetting. need to center myself here for a sec. NAMASTE

OH YAY THE PRESENT

so we cut from Baby Hawks Angst straight to Present Day Hawks Angst, huh. not that this exhausted and traumatized lil lad isn’t still a baby to me too, I’ll have you know

BEST JEANIST, ALWAYS WITH THE JOKES

“WHEW, THOUGHT YOU DIED ON ME FOR A SEC THERE KID.” lmao. Caleb will no doubt ruin this by making his word choice all stiffly formal as usual, so I’m just going to treasure this “WOULD YOU LOOK AT THAT, I’M FRESH OUT OF FUCKS” version of Jeanist while I can

look at him, driving his Jeanistmobile

again, is it any wonder Kacchan was bitching about Endeavor’s dinky little car when he was used to riding around town in style like this. anyone else staring at this panel trying to figure out how this car is somehow secretly made of jeans

NOOOOO

FUCK YOU DABI LMAO. PUTTING THESE VOICE ACTORS OUT OF A JOB ONE BY ONE

anyway so Jeanist is all “GOOD THING IT’S THE FUTURE AND WE’RE SO GOOD AT MEDICAL SCIENCE” to handwave how Hawks went from one step shy of being a very handsome corpse, to sitting around texting Jeanist in a car all of two days later

OH MY GOD, AND FINALLY AN EXPLANATION FOR THIS

wait a minute. I’m so confused lmfao. soooo, was Hawks all “anyway, here’s Jeanist’s dead body, you can examine it but please don’t look at him too closely and also I’m gonna need that back unharmed.” how tf did you pull that off lmao

(ETA: also isn’t this technically confirmation of the ol’ Noumu Jeanist theory lol. I’m gonna go ahead and say it is.)

NO BUT PLEASE, CONTINUE. I unironically love reading Horikoshi’s overly convoluted “SEE IT’S NOT A PLOT HOLE” explanations

lkldslfk so wait, you’re telling me Hawks convinced Dabi and the League to put Jeanist’s body in storage, and basically just hoped they wouldn’t use him for any experiments until he could put his plan into action and have the HPSC’s people break in and find and revive him?? WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG. A FOOLPROOF PLAN IF I’VE EVER HEARD ONE

fff this man really asked Jeanist to risk it all to prop up his little cover story, and Jeanist was all “sure why not” omfg. anyways, thanks for recapping all of this out loud for no particular reason in your car conversation you two

LMAO NOW WHAT

TROUBLE YOU SAY? GOOD THING THE NEW NUMBER ONE HERO IS ON THE JOB THEN

okay no it’s just some random thugs strolling around terrorizing the downtown. fuck ‘em. so Jeanist is making short work of them now

uh oh

won’t come? not can’t, but won’t?? what???

WOW

well I guess that makes the local heroes A BUNCH OF SHITHEADS now doesn’t it?? jesus

and okay, serious question, if the cops are spread too thin and the heroes have literally walked out on the job, what exactly is stopping everyone from deciding to use their quirks to defend themselves, legal or not? nothing, as far as I can tell. society just got a hell of a lot more chaotic

anyway so this is an interesting panel here

man, Dabi really did pull it off, didn’t he. well anyway so here’s that better world all of the villains were wanting, you guys! isn’t it so great?? everyone’s terrified and angry and losing hope and society is inches away from collapsing into total anarchy! but hey, at least we exposed the number one hero as a hypocrite

anyway so what are these guys up to

fucking hell, he’s visiting his mom. I really wasn’t prepared to commit this much emotional energy towards reading this chapter today. BUT VERY WELL, WE PRESS ON

?? wait she’s not there?

is this supposed to explain how Dabi knew who Hawks really was? except that there’s the little matter of how he even know where to find his mother in the first place. feels like we’re still missing something there, but oh well

OH MY GOD

RHA I TAKE BACK EVERY WORD I EVER SPOKE AGAINST YOU. YOU ARE A SCANLATION GROUP FILLED WITH ANGELS LMAO. I WILL TAKE THIS PANEL IN MY HANDS, AND TREASURE IT AND KEEP IT SAFE

ANYWAY, BECAUSE MY TIRED BIRD SON’S LIFE SUCKED SO MUCH ALREADY, IT TURNS OUT HE’S ACTUALLY PLEASED WITH THIS NEW TURN OF EVENTS LOL HOW ABOUT THAT

GOOD FOR YOU BBY. YOU GO OUT THERE AND BE YOUR OWN PERSON

and in all seriousness, I love that identity he chooses -- chooses, because it actually is him making a choice now, possibly for the very first time in his life -- is “guy who helps people”, though. it really is nothing short of miraculous that he held on to that kind of optimism and desire to do good even with everything he’s been through. there were so many times he could have chosen to turn his back on the world in retaliation for the way it treated him. but he didn’t!! and here he is now, finally free, and what he wants to do with the rest of his life now is simply to help others. anyway please excuse me for a moment, I need to go find some sort of basket or a big vase to put all of my fresh new Hawks Feels in, pardonne-moi

YEAH BOIIIIII

“FIRST ORDER OF BUSINESS, MISTER JEANIST, WHERE DID YOU FIND YOUSELF THAT SWEETASS CAR.” hey, all I’m saying is if this boy’s wings really aren’t growing back, he’s gonna need to find himself a new means of transportation y’know?

oh my god you guys it’s a flashback to his mom buying him the Endeavor plushie when he was like two because, and I quote, ALL MIGHT WAS TOO EXPENSIVE

oh my god oh my god. my boy out here with a new lease on life finding hope in the darkest of times

wasn’t your throat supposed to be all fucked up lmao. Horikoshi was suddenly all “oh shit the VAs are gonna be pissed at me if I keep this up huh”

“that’s why Bubaigawara was such a great guy” motherfucker IT IS A TERRIBLE DAY FOR RAIN. FORECAST SAID NOTHING ABOUT THIS

:’)

yes ma’am. yes indeed. confirmed, I really will straight up fight some motherfuckers for this child. well not really, but YOU KEEP YOUR DISCOURSE OFF MY LAWN AND OUT OF MY BLOG YOU HEAR. THIS IS A HAWKS-FRIENDLY SPACE. WE RESPECT TAKAMI KEIGO IN THESE STREETS

and he’s saying (or is he thinking?? what a weirdly shaped speech bubble this is) that even if what Dabi said about the Todoroki household is true, “I’m not sure it’s the same now.” which happens to be ABSOLUTELY CORRECT. man this whole chapter really is all about saying “fuck the past” and moving forward and I am living for it

SON!!!!

“the first step is at my beginning” fklkjlk. what an iconic fucking line??

AND HIS WINGS!!!! THEY ACTUALLY ARE GROWING BACK AHHHHHHH. “PUT A RAINCHECK ON THAT CAR, JEANIST-SAN.” THE HAWKSMOBILE CAN WAIT, RIGHT NOW HE HAS TO GO INSERT HIMSELF BACK INTO THE TODODRAMA WHETHER THEY LIKE IT OR NOT

you guys. I came here ready for some BAKUDEKU HOSPITAL ANGST, and I got DIDDLY SHIT of that, and none of my other kids were even in this chapter, but!!! ASK ME IF I CARE LMAO omg. because bird son is hanging with his new best friend, and he’s out here Finding Himself and picking up the pieces and putting them back together stronger than ever because RESILIENCE HAS A NAME, AND IT’S SPELLED H-A-W-K-S, and you guys. profound, my love for this child. holy shit. hey google, play Silence by Marshmello

[prongsmydeer]

Ayesha Liveblogs Class Action Park

“Gene was effectively kicked off of Wall street. So he did what anybody in this situation would do... buy up two ski resorts in Vernon, New Jersey.” That’s how I deal with all my career-related angst 

“Gene turned to his old buddy Bob Brennan, always there to find cash or investors any time Gene had a wild new idea” bdjdjjfkdbf find u a friend like Bob, I guess?

“Who we got? How about these teenage employees” oh NOOO

If your employer makes you call him Uncle maybe that’s a warning sign 

Gene giving his teen employees $100 every time he puts their lives in unparalleled danger has a similar energy as my dad giving me $5 when I was sad but 150 million times worse 

You know, if they had advertised the slide as a slide that could bite you like a shark, they might’ve been able to play off the teeth thing in their stride (in any case Slidey McBitey did not slow them down?)

“You couldn’t go down the canonball loop if you were too small, you couldn’t go down if you were too big” the Goldilocks of Dangerous Water Park Features

The way that everyone in this documentary says ‘water’ as ‘worder’ is very Jersey

I mean it absolutely doesn’t surprise me that there were no engineers involved in this but wow that’s a choice

The animations in this documentary in place of stock footage are truly on another level:

The accompanying dialogue to these images: People who Six Flags or Disney wanted nothing to do with; these guys would literally track Gene down at amusement industry conventions. You can tell these guys went and did bumps of coke and went just [unintelligentible] fuckin’ let’s just drill a slide right in the fuckin’ middle of the mountain and it’ll shoot ‘em 20 feet in the fuckin’ air--

“It was not fit for a safe ride by the average person in public” you don’t say, Bob Krauhlik, Head Lifeguard

I mean those like... bubbles for people to roll around in exist? Why couldn’t Gene have invested money in developing those in the seventies and just had people go down a very slight hill? Must EVERYTHING in this park be a deathtrap

The fact the Ball Man (presumably) survived the ride collapse, the freeway, and falling into a swamp,,, invincible

“We started sending employees off of [the airborne slide]” These guys really needed a union

“He’s gone on to lead a normal life” jhfkjhkjf the disclaimer

Honestly a built-in bidet/lota situation in a water slide doesn’t sound bad

Gene fulfilling my lifelong dream to get to lay on the baggage rollers at an airport

“The Aqua Skoot was also home to a thriving bee nest” I hope the bees were okay!!

“You’re probably concussed, and you have like a hundred and fifty people from New Jersey just being like ‘Pussy! You fuckin’ bitch!” this sounds in line with everything I know about New Jersey

“No lifeguard every blew a whistle and was like, ‘Hey stop chanting the word ‘pussy’ at this injured, bleeding person’“ I would pay money to see any lifeguard I know say that

Bob Krauhlik said: The first rule of Action Park is we don’t talk about our suppressed traumatic memories of Action Park

“Just literally imagine teenagers you know right now opening an amusement park” As someone who knows MANY teenagers this scenario sounds terrifying

“I was a good girl, so I wasn’t really involved in much of the shenanigans that took place” if u say so Faith

“I may have attended one [party]” HA I knew it 

This cattleprod story reminds me in a horrible way of a Paris Metro authority memory but long story short people will try to attack you physically if they think u cheated a $3 ticket; capitalism warps the brain

“But if we’re so bad, why don’t they just make a new town?” I’ve never heard a whiter sentence in my life

“He was a cool dude” [cut to] “I think he was a piece of shit” POETIC CINEMA

Gene annoying the state of New Jersey into relinquishing their land... incredible 

“Gene was free from the pesky state of New Jersey” is that what it says on the sign when you cross state lines into Pennsylvania 

“It might’ve attracted a more, say, working class clientele” ah the water park class divide

I don’t know what kind of mindset for just bodily-functioning all over the pool but I hope I never reach that point 

You really should need a sobriety test to operate anything motorized I think they could’ve made thousands on a Go-Kart breathalyzer

“It had a top speed of over 60 miles an hour, it was worth it” said Ed the Park Operations Manager, about driving a go-kart on the highway

“Action Park had full-on, Miami Vice-grade speed boats, where riders regularly tempted fate by treating them like bumper boats, a common action, that would send many a guest tumbling into a pond murky from leaked gas and oil, and known by employees to be infested with snakes” Somehow that sentence got worse and worse with time

The guy who literally crushed another person with his boat and then moved to the next ride: I pretend I did not do it

“He wound up getting getting ejected from the park” they said, about a person literally attempting to set other patrons on fire:

Bob the Lifeguard really speaks with way too much fondness in his voice of trying to throw carts on top of people sliding down a fibreglass and concrete slide

“On an an average day, you would have 50 to 100 people injured” the 80s were a lawless time 

“Gene Mulvihill had a vision of a place where there were no rules - something between Ayn Rand and Lord of the Flies” strike that this is the whitest sentence I’ve ever heard

HAHAHAHA I can’t believe the lawyer is now explaining Action Park with the argument that the 80s were a lawless time

“[D*nald Tr*mp] realized it was too wild, too nuts even for him” kjghkgjhkg this comment aged poorly 

The audacity of this man to blatantly exhaust everyone into submission

Kayaks did nothing to deserve being associated with electrocuting water park attendees 

Every time I think this documentary can’t get worse they introduce a new concept like The Death Zone at the Grave Pool 

“They expected to drown at the Action Park Wave Pool“ DID THEY, BOB? DID THEY REALLY?

“Nobody should ever be the second person to die in a wave pool, you know why? ‘Cause after the first person dies in a wave pool, close the fuckin’ wave pool!” Chris the Comedian has summed up this entire documentary in two sentences 

This documentary has intentionally saved the worst for last this whole interview with the family of the (first) deceased is deeply upsetting 

The Wave Pool death happened a week before the Kayak death??? THEY DIDN’T EVEN CLOSE FOR A WEEK???????

“Its time came and went” IS THERE EVER A TIME FOR A WATERPARK WHICH KILLS MULTIPLE PEOPLE 

Weird that the woman whom Gene got fired from her job and who deposed him became his friend

“Was he a villain or a victor” I think that’s a false dichotomy you can be victorious at villainy 

“The spirit of Action Park lives on today in the Fyre Festival” Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t remember Fyre Fest killing anyone

“Fyre Festival’s bullshit, man. Gene gave you everything he fuckin’ promised you” grievous injury???

There’s also something weirdly poetic about the name of the park going back and forth from Mountain Creek to Action Park and vice versa every few years 

I’m gonna leave off with this not: Not a single visible minority was interviewed for this documentary as a park attendee or employee and while that’s probably more a product of selection bias and New Jersey it’s also all the argument you need for diversity in any field. Diversity of thought and culture does not a loop-de-loop-death trap make 

[fictionalboys-arebetter]

Lovestruck - Bucky Barnes

“You’re staring again.”

 The soft, smug voice came from your left, and you rolled you eyes as you turned to face it’s owner. Loki had been released into the custody of Thor for a small probationary period, to repay his debt to Earth. Lucky for you, the decision had been made that he would be best kept under many a pair of watchful eyes at the Avengers compound. Ever since he got here, he’d had a confidence that should have been impossible for a man who’d had his ass kicked by the majority of the population of this building. Then again, arrogance had never been in short supply where he was concerned.

 “No, I wasn’t.”

 You were, of course. His sly comment was the only latest addition to his narrative of your crippling infatuation with one James Buchanan Barnes. An infatuation that only the man himself seemed oblivious to. Your pining had been an endless source of entertainment for the God of Mischief since his arrival, much to your displeasure.

 It began shortly after he’d been returned into his own mind following his forced career as The Winter Soldier. You were sort of the dedicated Avengers medic, someone the team kept close and trusted with their well being, and their secrets. Bucky had been distant at first, understandably. He was hesitant to let you be near him, touch him, afraid he would hurt you without meaning to. Over countless missions and regular check-ins, for both his physical and mental health, you had gently coaxed him out of shell. Now, he would make idle chatter while you healed him, making jokes and expressing his amazement at all the advances the world had seen since he was last himself.

 He was currently sat across the far side of the living room, visible through the doorway from your position in the kitchen, trading stories and jokes with Steve and Nat. He’d been laughing at something Nat said when your eyes landed on him, and he was utterly beautiful. It was an odd description, you supposed, for this mountain of a man but it fit him so well. The moments where he was truly in the present, where he seemed to forget about the existence of The Winter Soldier, were the most spectacular thing to behold. He seemed younger by decades, the carefree lovable imp that he’d been all those years ago lived on in those moments.

 Loki’s deep chuckle pulled you back into yourself, and you realised you’d been staring. Again.

 “I haven’t said it out loud before, because I have manners but I just want you know, I wish you were still locked in that bloody cell on Asgard! ” You hissed at the God, not that he took any notice. If he didn’t shut up, you were certain you were going to kill him.  

Across the room, Bucky was acutely aware of a pair of eyes burning hotly into the side of his face. He was always aware of you. He supposed it was a combination of his soldier’s instincts and the fact that he’d fallen entirely under your spell weeks ago. He always knew when you entered the room, because his heart rate spiked and heat flooded through his veins. He wasn’t really sure how it had happened, because it had been slow and languid, and suddenly one day he realised he couldn’t imagine his life without you in it.

 You’d been immensely patient with him, his attitude towards you all had been awful when he first came here. Thinking back on it now, he was actually a little ashamed of himself, not that he’d ever tell you that. He’d been short and sharp with you, unsure whether he could trust you all, whether he could trust himself. You’d warned him at the beginning that you were stubborn, and you’d take care of him whether he liked it or not but he hadn’t quite believed you. Time after time, you’d persevered with soft words and anecdotes about your life. He’d never been so happy to be wrong in all his life.

 You complemented every part of him that he saw as flawed. Where he was jaded, you tried to see the good in people. Where he was cold and unyielding, you were warm and kind. Steve had saved him from The Winter Soldier, you had saved him from himself.

 “Are you even listening to me, Bucky?”

 His eyes focused on Steve, and he must have looked as confused as he felt because Steve just shook his head with a knowing smile. Next to him, Natasha rolled her eyes, she knew exactly what his mind had been on.    

 “For heavens sake man, strap on a pair and tell her that you love her. You’re a soldier, not a teenager!”

 Bucky had to laugh along with her as he realised the truth in her words, it was ridiculous that after all he’d been through, he couldn’t muster up the courage to ask you on a single date.

 “That might be the most useful thing anyone’s ever said to me,” Bucky address Nat with a chuckle as he rose from his chair to cross the room into the kitchen.

 He was rather startled when he found you hissing insults at an amused Loki, but brushed it off. Loki was no threat to him when it came to you, he knew that much at least.  

 “Sorry to interrupt, might I have a word with Y/N?”

 You turned at Bucky’s question, and his heart damn near stopped at the smile you beamed his way.

 “You’re not interrupting anything, James. In fact, you may just have saved our guest from a less than desirable fate,” You shot another glare in Loki’s direction, as he turned and left the room.

 Bucky almost missed it because he was so focused on how much he loved it when you called him James. He would never get used to the way it made him feel. You’d called him that once during one of your talks when he seemed to be drifting back to times gone by, and the way he’d looked at you afterwards had been enough for you to silently swear you’d never call him anything else.

 “So, the thing is,” Bucky started, feeling nervous, “I realised I’ve never really said thank you for all the time you’ve taken to help me get back to, well, me. And that’s extremely rude of me really, because you didn’t have to do that.”

 “You don’t have to say thank you, really. I told you I was going to help you, whether you liked it or not, I meant it!” You laughed. Bucky did too.

 “I have to admit, I kind of doubted you there for a second. Anyway, that wasn’t really why I came over. Not all of it anyway.” He drew in a breath. “I’d really love if you’d let me take you out to dinner tomorrow night?”

 “Like on a date?”

 “Exactly like that. What do you say?”

 “What do I say? Are you insane? I’m like 99% sure that I’m in love with you so obviously I would love that!” You paused, taking in Bucky’s shocked look and realising the words that just spewed out of you in your excitement. “Wow. I guess there’s no way you’ll just like, pretend I didn’t throw that out there?”

 “None at all,” Bucky moved to take your hand in his metal one, his flesh hand snaking up to the back of your neck as he continued, “because I’m 100% sure I’m in love with you.”

 You’d never really bought into romantic clichés, until Bucky kissed you. When he did, you thought that all the stories you’d heard or read about the perfect kiss hadn’t done it justice. Whatever breath you might have had left in you when he pulled away was robbed from your lungs when you saw his smile. It wasn’t his cocky smirk or the cheeky grin he had on when he cracked jokes. It was soft, almost tentative. A genuine smile. You hoped you’d never have to live without that smile.

[renardtrickster]

ThePedanticRomantic Rebuttal: If You Like Goblin Slayer, You’re Probably A Hypocrite Edgelord

OH BOY I SURE DO LOVE ME SOME goblin slayer discourse cute people ALL OF THOSE THINGS. And you’re only going to get two of those.

First of all, ThePedanticRomantic, in a super-brave move that nobody could have possibly predicted, accuses Goblin Slayer of being an allegory for racism/muh borders/antisemitism/buzzword halfway through the video. Congratulations, nobody has even spewed up that hairball. In a previous draft, I went over how it’s very unlikely that a Japanese work would use largely european imagery when nine times out of ten, “vaguely european” is all that settings like this get. But let’s go over how that innately doesn’t make sense for propaganda.

Let’s say the Redhats make a propaganda piece against the Bluejackets. The piece would most likely, despite being for Redhats, focus entirely on Bluejackets. How depraved they are, how they’re evil, what they do, what they believe in, with the Redhats being relegated to “wow we killed them and are heroic”. Or at least that’s what I would do if I made propaganda that’s a phrase I shouldn’t say. Either way, Goblin Slayer does not operate like this. The depravity of goblins is either stated in passing dialogue, or shown for a few minutes, making up 10% of the anime. The other 30% focuses on killing them, and the other 60% focuses on Goblin Slayer as a character and his relationships. That seems rather odd for a propaganda piece, to focus on interpersonal matters.

Furthermore, why it’s focusing on Goblin Slayer. This isn’t just “Wow, Kill The Rapists: the Anime”. It’s focusing on Goblin Slayer and his dynamic with his party. What a lifestyle of encountering brutal sadists on a daily basis does to a person. What treating them with the same hatred they show to everyone does to a person. How he’s so socially stunted and probably mentally unwell from this career, how all his friends are vaguely scared of him, scared for him, and how this is shaping his whole life and how it will end probably poorly. A propaganda piece does not do something like that, they would focus on how noble and rewarding it is, not show how grim, dirty, and devoid of reward of even a promise of accomplishment it is. The Goblins are not a plot element to show how “imagine this is a race and we should kill them”, they’re a Necessary Weasel for a character like Goblin Slayer to come into being, and how it develops him.

Additionally, the thought-provocation was NEVER “is it okay to genocide the Goblins?”, it was “is it okay for one man to try undertaking that quest?”. Priestess wasn’t shell-shocked over “wow he killed babies that could have been good”, she was horrified by the fact that, after watching her friends be slaughtered, violated, or BOTH by the Goblins, Goblin Slayer waltzed in and did something equally horrific, even though it was necessary. Think of it this way, the concept of killing babies is horrific, but it was entirely justified in this situation. Doesn’t stop it from being horrifying. That’s like a kid learning that superheroes should capture bad guys and put them in jail, being put into a hostage situation, and being saved by shooting the criminal. That was morally justified because the criminal put a child in danger, but fucked up because the child witnessed death, and learned that nonlethality isn’t always the go-to option.

The bigger issue I have with this video is the point Pedantic is making largely. That Goblin Slayer is JUST AS BAD as Sword Art Online when it comes to handling rape. The problem isn’t just “oh they both use rape to show Bad Guy, they’re exactly the same”, it’s HOW they use it. Let’s construct an example using everyone’s favourite punching bag: Nazis.

Film A is about Nazis in Nazi Germany. It is grim, it shows the evils of the Nazis in full colour, even though you already hated Nazis, you get re-affirmed because the film uses itself to convince you that these are the bad guys instead of “audience, you know what to feel”, and the evil of Nazism is treated for all it’s worth.

Film B is entirely suburban. It’s mostly lighthearted, focusing on the protagonist’s journey and their clashes with Dickhead. Dickhead is a dickhead, and is mostly a jerk, petty, or has motivations kind of like the protagonist, but for some negative end or one that clashes with the protagonist’s. Halfway through, or near the end of the film, Dickhead is revealed to be a full-on Nazis, with armbands, regalia, and all that implies. This wasn either foreshadowed very poorly, or not at all. The reveal that Dickhead is a Nazi is treated as more of “wow, that’s another thing I dislike about you” than anything very serious. The protagonist beats them up and goes on to finish their journey. In case you weren’t fully intimidated by Dickhead, there’s one scene of him saying or doing very generic Nazi stuff that gets the point across without actually doing anything. Heavy metal plays over this scene.

DO YOU SEE THE PROBLEM?!?!?! Goblin Slayer treats goblins with fear and loathing. Anytime a Goblin enters someone’s life, they are fucked up irreparably. Shield Maiden still has PTSD, Fighter quit adventuring outright. People die gruesomely and slowly! In Sword Art Online, it’s almost a joke! Death Gun reveals that he has a rape penchant for no reason other than to raise the stakes. Sugou tied Asuna up and fondled her and she not only barely reacted to it, but didn’t show any signs of that as soon as he stopped touching her! It’s superflous, provides nothing to the characterization, and is incredibly lazy. The author of Sword Art even admitted that it was unnecessary and he did it because he read light novels that had those exact plot elements tacked on. They are not comparable in this respect. That’s edgy.

Semi-Finally, PedanticRomantic has OBVIOUSLY only seen the first episode, maybe watched some reviews who also only saw the first episode, and wrote this entire dissertation. The Goblins don’t need to be deep, they’re a necessary weasel for Goblin Slayer as a character to exist. There aren’t moral quandaries, just notations that even though Goblin Slayer is doing an okay thing, it’s self-destructive. And while the premise is “guy kills goblins”, it actually focuses more on the characters and interpersonal relationships more! Of course it sounds edgy and hollow when you say that, you’re cutting out an entire 60% of the show! Berserk sounds edgy as fuck when you just relay “man with big sword fights demons and his rapist demon-king ex-friend” and completely omit that focus on Guts’ character, strong development, entire party of friends, and themes of inevitability, fate, and perseverance.

Also thank you for smugly ending off with “i thought it was cool but but then i STOPPED BEING AN IDIOT, if you still think it’s good, then okay”. I covered this in a different post, but it’s a humongous reflection on yourself.

I said “semi-final” up above, because Pedantic made an “apology video”.

Don’t bother clicking on that video. She doesn’t actually listen to any criticism or comments on her video which she disabled lmao, but blames it on the fact that the video was poorly scheduled, rushed, fans didn’t get the point she intended to make, and something something youtube algorithm. Where I come from, we call this clickbait. Get fucked.

Another video like this I would recommend is the one made by NECRO XIII. It takes a more MST3K take on the video, but gets across a lot of the points I made/liked.

[thelittlestcheshire]

Hello! I’m Katie, and this is my muse Ches. There’s like death/murder tws in this but honestly? I just did this in a quick fact kinda way so... nothing is really detailed.

Is that HAILEY CHESHIRE “CHES” ELSWOOD? Wow, they do look a lot like KATHERINE MCNAMARA. I hear SHE is a EIGHTEEN year old SENIOR who originally attended CARNIFEX Academy. Word is they are an ARISTOCRAT student. You should watch out because they can be IMPULSIVE and STUBBORN, but on the bright side they can also be LOYAL and CREATIVE. Ultimately, you’ll get to see it all for yourself.

♥ basics; Full Name: Hailey Cheshire “Ches” Elswood Age: 18 Birthday: July 19th Sexual Orientation: Biromantic bisexual Relationship Status: Single Occupation: Student Nationality: American [with French dual citizenship] Ches’s Car

♥ classes;

Anthropology

Shakespearean Studies

Linguistics

Latin

Music

Advanced Sociology

Advanced Psychology

Russian

World History

♥ extracurriculars;

National Honor Society

Theater Club (Actor)

Concert Band (Piano)

♥ background; Place of Birth: Paris, France Hometown: New York, New York Health Issues: Borderline Personality Disorder and PTSD Traumas: Watching her mother die (mugging gone wrong/shot to death)

♥ physical; Face Claim: Katherine McNamara Eye Color: Green Hair Color: Red Height: 5′3 ½” Weight: 115 lbs Tattoos, Birthmarks, Scars, etc: Mole above her belly button, a few moles on her thighs, freckles and face moles. (Face Ref 1, Face Ref 2,  Body Ref 1, Body Ref 2)

♥ relatives;

Father’s Full Name: Edward Valentine Elswood Father’s Status: Alive Father’s Occupation: CEO/Owner of a multi-billion dollar luxury goods conglomerate  (net worth of 50+ Billion in fact - in turn Elswood kids do NOT bat an eyelash at prices) Mother’s Full Name: Julia Andrieux Elswood Mother’s Status: Deceased [shot by a mugger on the twin’s 8th birthday] Siblings: 6 brothers and sisters (family page here) Elswood Children Oldest to Youngest:

Logan (23)

Jamie (21)

Emmett (19)

Jonah / Ches (TWINS)

Effie (13)

Ella (10)

♥ relationships; Ex-Significant Other(s): Probably a handful of people tbh, hit me up if you want this as a WC Reason for Separation: Stuff not working out, Ches getting bored before she got attached, so on - she’s a flirt tbh, it takes her wanting to get invested for her to stay Current Significant Other: N/A because she’s too busy sabotaging shit with Thomas

♥ misc;

Hobbies: playing piano, archery, singing, reading, and acting

Pinterest Board // Musings Tag // Playlist

Ches speaks English and French fluently, her mother was born and raised in Paris so she learnt them both at the same time

DO NOT CALL HER HAILEY unless you really want to end up on her shit list.

She’s the mom friend if your mom friend also goes “I HAVE THE BEST IDEA” and drags you into trouble. Literally, the one who frets over you and proceeds to get you into trouble.

This muse does what she wants, I just write it down I apologize always for her

Doesn’t really... seriously date too much because of past situations (Her older brother slept with the first person she truly loved) and she tries to avoid falling in love

That being said platonic I love yous are her shit, she loves her friends a LOT

Ches is very serious about her studying (and wanting to be among the best of the best because - this girl has Ivy league college dreams and she has no intents on fucking those up)

That being said if you get her away from her books she’s actually a lot of fun, she’s just like work first play later

She’s a bit of a closet nerd - if you look under her bed she has a chest of comic books, she’ll just lie if you ask her about them

Honestly, bios are my least favorite thing so if anyone has questions about Chessie just... toss them my way I’ll eagerly answer them.

♥ bio;

TWs: Gun Violence, Murder, Death, Blood, Abuse (Relationship), Cheating, Mental Illnesses

Growing up as an Elswood means two things, you have a lot of a sibling and a lot of money. Her parents had decided to raise their children in Manhattan, New York, where they could keep a close eye on their multi-billion dollar conglomerate. Her mother, Julia, would take them on trips constantly too - when she wanted to get the children away from the hustle and bustle of the city they’d go to their vacation home upstate, or their private island, or even to visit their family in Paris. At that point in life, Ches was happy. She had a solid group of friends, she had the best friend she could ever imagine having in the form of her twin brother, she had a loving and warm family, and she had a parent who would tell her no. 

When she thinks back to her life before the incident, it feels like a completely different story. A fairytale even, perfect and happy in every way compared to her life now. However, it wouldn’t last, after all, fairy tales didn’t exist and reality was a much crueler mistress. One could say Lin-Manuel Miranda described it best; “life doesn't discriminate between the sinners and the saints. It takes and it takes and it takes.”

Everything changed on her eighth birthday when her mother took her out shopping to get a present for twin brother Jonah at Palisades Mall. A man came up with a gun while they were in the parking lot and asked for all of their money. Julia Elswood compiled but she made one mistake, the simple utterance of “Cours, Ches” as she gave the man her purse.

Ches might have gotten out of the event alive, but not she was not unscathed. Julia Elswood was pronounced dead when medical finally arrived on the scene, her blood coating her daughter’s hands and clothing from Ches’s attempts to stop the bleeding. She might have survived the event without physical harm but she was never the same child she was before after that.

One day she had an intact family, the next day the Elswoods were in ruin. Her father completely shut himself out from the family, only coming out for birthdays and holidays. Her oldest brother stepped up as their parental figure, first starting out with homeschooling before he eventually dropped out to ensure his siblings was getting as much of his time as they possibly could. He tried his hardest to make the loss of their mother easier on the younger girls especially, given how young they were at the time. She helped him with the girls as much as she could (and over time she slowly started filling the role as their second parent). Because of how busy the younger Elswood children kept him, sometimes Logan didn’t have the time to comfort Ches when she woke up in the middle of the night, haunted by their mother.

That was when Emmett stepped in. It wasn’t uncommon for him to sleep on her floor so he’d be there when she woke up terrified out of her mind, and he was there when she just eventually stopped sleeping like people tended to. Over time she realized that Jonah and her weren’t truly two peas in a pod the way they used to be, that Emmett was the only Elswood who truly got her. He wasn’t perfectly normal either, his thoughts and feelings were flawed like hers. 

In a family that made her feel so broken at times, Emmett was a saving grace - a reminder she wasn’t alone.

He wasn’t the only reminder however, another one entered her life in the form of Asher Churchill when she was 11. He was on vacation in Paris while she was visiting her family when their paths crossed, they were fast friends and there was a point where she wished he would stay longer, a wish she felt guilty for after his family went through their own trauma. The experience only solidified her friendship with him, however - she likes to think that no matter what happens, she’ll always have Asher. He’s her ride or die, one of the few people who’s willing to put up with her all of her shit and want to keep her in their life. They even tried dating at one point, although that was fairly short-lived. She simply doesn’t love him like that.

It didn’t take her long to find someone she did love like that, however. Ches had thought she was fucked up before she met James, that she was at the worst point she ever could be. He showed her how mistaken she had been, even now she doesn’t like thinking about everything he had done to her. She doesn’t discuss everything he had put her through nor does she have any intentions on truly discussing the worst of the abuse she endured while dating him. Her past with James does have an effect on her, it made her terrified of truly falling in love with somebody again. 

James is also a massive reason why she doesn't get along with her brother Jamie, the two Elswood siblings never recovered from Jamie sleeping with Ches’s boyfriend. It causes a good deal of tension in the Elswood home but Ches can’t just forgive him, her brother never even apologized for his actions, she wasn’t going to pretend he didn’t hurt her because her father wanted them to get along for his own sake. They were on the rocks before this and afterward the tension just got a whole lot worse.

Perhaps the increasing tension was a factor in Ches deciding she wanted to attend Carnifex, the fact she knew Asher would be in attendance was another factor. (Although she plays dumb to the fact she actually knows he’s a Churchill, if he wanted to lie to everyone, she was going to play along - no matter how adorable she thinks the fact he actually believes she doesn’t know is.) It’s certainly a factor in why she stays, she gets very homesick at times - even after attending boarding school for her entire high school career. She misses her younger sisters, she missed Emmett and Camellia, and she misses her friends in the city. She also dislikes just how restricted she truly is when it comes to Instagram and trying to grow her influence while she attends Carnifex. Networking had to wait until she was home and sometimes she questions why she decided boarding school was a good idea.

And then Ches looks at her friends, at the education she’s receiving, and all the fond memories she’s developing. Carnifex, and now Luxor, was well worth the fear of missing out she feels. She’s happy in Lake George, and she has no intention of leaving the area before she graduates.

Please note, Asher is mentioned a lot. He belonged to an ex-member who is no longer here. I may write him out later but for now, keep that in mind.

TLDR / quick important notes recap for rereads:

Ches’s mother was murdered on her 8th birthday in front of her

She was raised by her oldest brother, Logan, and is NOT close to her father really. She also helped raise her younger sisters and is very protective of them.

The Elswood she is closest to is Emmett, Jonah and her grew apart after her mother’s death.

Ches’s first real love was James, they dated (entire)Freshman-(mid)Sophomore years, it was abusive (much more than Ches will ever discuss unless she gets majorly close to someone and they HAVE to know (cough still hasn’t happened though cough)) and Ches is now terrified of falling in love again. Her messy as fuck relationships & exes all start after this point.

[pluckyredhead]

Daredevil 101: Foggy Finds Out, Part 2 (Ghost Stick Boogaloo)

[Content Warning: Severe mental health issues portrayed rather sloppily, suicide attempt, discussion of violence against sex workers.]

Last time on Daredevil 101, Matt was found in basically a catatonic state by Karen and Foggy - both of whom thought he was dead, and only one of whom knew he was Daredevil. By the next issue, Matt’s still out of it, and Foggy’s not particularly happy with anyone:

IDK why Foggy’s a redhead here but WAY TO GO, KAREN. Yes, she kept Matt’s secret from Foggy - but it was Matt’s secret to tell. Just because Matt’s not in a position to be yelled at right now doesn’t mean Foggy gets to take it out on Karen.

And Matt’s really, really not in a position to be yelled at:

Hooboy. I don’t believe anyone in Matt’s entire 53-year history has ever suggested therapy but, like...he should probably go? Right away? Honey.

Eventually, as he is wont to do, Matt decides to escape from the expectations of his two favorite people by climbing out the window and running away. It’s fairly distressing to his loved ones:

THESE TWO. HOW I LOVE THEM.

So where is Matt? Well - possibly predicting DD Season 3 - he’s gone to see his mommy:

Maggie tries to comfort him, but if confession could make Matt feel absolved of this he’d probably have gotten it over with a long time ago, repressed memory or no. (Though to be fair, I can only think of one example of 616!Matt taking confession, and that was this year.)

Leaving Maggie, Matt briefly flirts with the idea of just ending it all:

Having decided not to kill himself, Matt returns to Jack Batlin’s hovel, only to be confronted by a surprising figure from his past:

I mean, technically neither of you saw anything, and also shut up, Stick.

I’m not really sure how to take his presence here, because on the one hand, if it’s all in Matt’s head, that means that Matt’s way of coping with his mental health issues is to imagine his former mentor hitting him in the face with a cane until he feels better, which is appalling.

But if Stick’s really there, it means there’s a possibility for him to come back in DD Season 3, which is also appalling.

Anyway, Stick or Matt’s hallucination thereof goes away long enough for Matt to greet Karen. He attempts to do so with a kiss, because he is a moron:

Matt takes a beat and apologizes - for yelling at Karen just now, and for, um, faking his death at her. I like this moment because it acknowledges simultaneously that Matt is having - and has been having - a really hard time, and yet he also treated his loved ones in an unacceptably cruel way, and though his illness is a reason, it’s not an excuse.

Meanwhile, there’s one person who never really gets an apology:

Foggy looks so young and sweet in that first panel, MY HEART.

Anyway, I’ll come back to this later, but please note that Foggy’s betrayal here centers entirely on being lied to and he has no problems with the basic existence of Daredevil.

He’ll have to wait to get proper closure on this, but meanwhile Stick is still beating Matt up, this time almost definitely inside Matt’s head - and he’s brought help:

Is this the first time Matt’s been beaten up by hallucinations of his various selves? It’s definitely not the last. Oh, Matt.

Seeking some kind of closure, he goes to the brothel where he accidentally knocked the prostitute out the window, all those years ago:

Matt sort of vaguely explains his purpose, and the last woman explains that the girl in question, Lyla, was a runaway fleeing an unhappy home, and in a way maybe it’s better that she died and got out of this life young. I realize we have a little bit of an unreliable narrator situation here but I’d be okay with 100% fewer “better dead than a sex worker” opinions out there, fictional or not!

(This won’t be revealed for a couple more years, but "Lyla” turns out to not be dead, in a particularly dumb retcon. Not that her not dying is dumb, but the reveal is...well, you’ll see.)

Anyway, I guess putting a name to the accident makes Matt feel better, because he declares himself ready to put it behind him. At which point Stick drops a fairly hilarious bombshell:

Yeah, Matt’s just been killing people pretty much his whole career, it turns out. Here are the most damning phrases to me: “some beaten an inch past their lives,” “you saw them as worthless maggots who deserved what they got,” and “faceless thug.” Matt habitually beats people to death, apparently, and then forgets about it because they deserve it???

(Stick telling him that taking even one life is too many is an interesting contrast to MCU Stick, who is constantly urging Matt to kill. But 616!Stick only kills Hand ninjas, who aren’t really alive to begin with.)

Anyway I think this is a real YMMV piece of canon. Personally I feel like it’s a pretty lukewarm approach to the ethics of killing, especially since DeMatteis would leave right after this arc. It just sort of throws down the idea that Matt kills people all the time, wags a finger at him, and leaves. Either dig into what this means, for Matt and for superheroes as a whole, or leave us with the polite fiction that superheroes (and head trauma) never ever kill. Don’t half-ass it like this.

And speaking of half-assing it:

Matt just needs to accept all the parts of himself! That makes it okay to commit habitual manslaughter! Phew, what a relief. Time to eat a Pop-Tart and dance around Karen’s kitchen!

HOORAY!

(No, seriously, I’m glad Matt’s feeling better and that he and Karen are okay, but see what I mean about half-assing it? You can’t be like “Matt, you kill people all the time” and then have him immediately get over it, especially in a story about how he developed a split personality disorder due to repressed guilt over accidentally killing someone ten years ago.)

With that, DeMatteis is off the book. Our next long-running writer will be Karl Kesel, but before he takes over there’s a brief fill-in by Ben Raab and Shawn McManus, which touches on the state of Matt and Foggy’s relationship. It’s...not good, and Matt doesn’t make it better by snooping - specifically, on Foggy at work with a client named Martinique:

"Something’s not kosher here...” Please note that Matt, as always, is very upset by Foggy being attracted to someone else. Please also note Matt creeping on Foggy’s “pleasure centers.”

Matt announces his presence. Foggy’s not happy to see him:

“Things may never be as good as they once were, but they can at least be good...” That’s practically up there with “Was anything ever real with us,” my goodness.

Please note that nowhere on this page does Matt use the word “sorry.” And yes, this is the first time he’s spoken to Foggy since before his “death.” Wow, Murdock. (Also, get a haircut.)

Matt does not trust any woman who flirts with his Foggy, so he tails Foggy to his meeting place with Martinique and finds a horrifyingly trippy carnival full of monstrous puppet versions of his enemies. And at the very center:

It’s the classic superhero dilemma: Matt can only save one of his loved ones! And this time, he chooses Foggy.

All the trappings of the carnival fade away to reveal...Martinique, of course, a.k.a. Lady Mastermind:

Right, so this makes no actual sense, because it’s not public knowledge that the “old” Daredevil is back. Martinique should be operating under the impression that the “current” Daredevil would show up in a black costume and not give two shits about either Foggy or Elektra. Also how would she know how Bullseye killed Elektra, anyway?

She takes off, and Matt and Foggy are left together:

Again, this doesn’t make a lot of sense, given that Elektra’s not dead anymore, and Matt knows it. He doesn’t say that he knows Elektra wasn’t really there (in which case his choosing Foggy over her would mean very little), so is the implication supposed to be that once you die once Matt doesn’t care if you die again? This is all very silly.

Anyway, that’s...kind of it? No “Nelson v. Murdock”-style fight here, just Matt saying that he wants to be friends again with no actual apology at any point, and Foggy very slowly thawing over the next few issues. There’s no yelling, no catharsis, nothing. Feh, I say!

(I will reiterate what I noted above - Foggy’s only upset about being lied to. He has no ethical problems with Daredevil’s existence or vigilantism in general, and isn’t particularly troubled by Matt’s propensities towards lawbreaking, violence, or nearly getting himself killed. Because, of course, in the comics Matt is just one of many superheroes and is practically legally sanctioned, or at least not an outlaw - and Foggy has been friends with Daredevil for many years. Whereas in the MCU, Matt’s the first real vigilante and the first with a secret identity - the Avengers are (or have been) all government sanctioned and public, and Matt predates Spider-Man and the other Defenders. MCU Foggy doesn’t really have a framework to accept Matt���s extracurricular activities in the way 616 Foggy does.)

Next up: Brighter days for Daredevil and company as we head into the Kesel run...and finally meet Rosalind Sharpe!

[ikonislife]

Soulmate 1

- OT7 x Reader

- It’s not all honey and sunshine in the world where soulmates are something of God given will. Will the boys be strong enough to get through the day with their better half or will the relationship will tarnish with the tick of the clock.

-Fluff, slight angst, soulmate au, soulmate!iKon

-Disclamer: Yes, that first sentence is borrowed from Jane Austin’s Pride and Prejudice, one of my favorite romance book to read. I was rereading the book for the umpteenth time when this popped up in my head. I don’t know why but hopefully it’ll be a good series.

-Chapter 1: Chanwoo

-Chapter 2: Hanbin

-Chapter 3: Yunhyeong 

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man (or woman) in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a mate. Just in this universe, this time and space, that truth is a bit more complicated than most. It seems as though everyone around you were raised on the rigid schedule of school, career, marriage. People stumbling and bumbling around like fools waiting for that special someone to drop on their laps and be merry as if their sole purpose in life is to find a mate. Sure lots of time it works out for the better but more often than not, it entails a string of heartbreak and tears that perhaps is nobody’s fault but the outdated belief that your soulmate gets assigned to you for a reason so just accept it and let it be. The ridiculous belief that the meaning of life is to get a fortune, or as close to one as you could in the modern days meaning a good career, then getting hitched off to some stranger for the rest of your life and be merry for all eternity.

That’s right. This is one of those world that soulmate comes to you neatly wrap in a bow by some sort of higher divine, cosmic bullshit. You had always wonder had it been any other way, in some other universe where soulmate is what you decided or the idea of soulmate is altogether preposterous, would it be any better. The idea of stumbling through life searching for the connection to the person you’re suppose to spend your life with is curious yet intriguing. How many times, trials and errors would you have to go through before ending up with that person. Whatever it is, seems better than having someone popping up out of nowhere like a flower in spring and just “Tah dah, I’m your soulmate, love me.” Where’s the romance, where’s the passion. Sure this was efficient when the human race was on the brink of extinction but now with it thriving like a horde of unstoppable cockroach taking over Earth and moving onto outer space, why was looking for your own love so radical. 

You had heard the story thousand, no, millions of times of course. When you meet the one that was meant for you, your heart will just know. How could it be any more cryptic than that. Come on, couldn’t the ancestors had asked the Gods for something more obvious like a sign,their names appearing on your skin as a tattoo, the sound of their voice, the world bursting out with colors, anything. Nope! All you got to go on is heart palpitation or something like that. You scoffed at the girls huddling together excitingly sharing the tale on the playground at age 6, cafeteria at age 11, again at the gym locker at age 16. Some girls are so hellbent on “saving themselves heart and soul” for their soulmate that they would turn down completely good men and happiness times again. You sigh as the fleeting giggle as a group of girls murmur amongst each other, something about the girl named Hani finally felt that heart clenching moment. 

Maybe you’ll never feel it, maybe it’ll be tomorrow but who knows… Whatever it may be, you’re in no rush to find out.

Chapter 1: The Boy with the Baseball Glove.

You were about done with the world, what is it about Friday afternoon and the throngs of customers flooding the small cafe you’re currently employed at. By all mean you weren’t one of those “I hate my job, kill me now” type of employee. You like the job and it pays well enough to keep your motivation up but some days, some days are just worse than others. Just as the door to the quaint place creaked open, a group of what you could only described as annoying “frat boys” with nothing better to do but belittling everyone else around them stormed through the threshold. What’s with the quotation around “frat boys”? Well you have friends in frat and you know just because a boy is in a frat doesn’t mean they’re good for nothing, obnoxious, making pass at anything that move. They wore their letters proud and make maximum effort at showing off their muscles as they passed you by. Just as the boys’ attempts at putting about absolutely every greasy remarks in the book to get you into one of their beds finished, a horde of teenagers that bought between the 5 of them 2 cups of hot chocolate, 8 glasses of free water and taking up half the place for almost 4 hours had your manager ticking with anxiety. Then a man returned his drink that was ¾ finished complaining it wasn’t to his liking. Normally your sassy manager would’ve made a new one, dump off ¾ then return the “new” drink just for the sheer rudeness given to you by the dude. However, with the crowd fighting for seats, line out the door, he just simply pat your back as a thank you for not losing it. 

The rest of the shift went by in a blur and soon enough, the golden hue blending away with the rose tone of leftover daylight signaling your shift had ended. You smile at your replacement, wishing her luck before shedding the sticky sweet stained black apron. Slumping onto the wooden bench, your fingers sluggishly pull the oversized flannel over your weary shoulders before slamming the old metal locker shut with a bang.  

It’s such a beautiful sunset, calm and graceful, unlike the rowdy suffocating atmosphere at work. Your feet begin pattering against the pavement once again leaving the bus stop you had been sitting at for the past 10 minutes. Evening like this shouldn’t be waste on watching the streams of taillights from your usual window seat. Hand clutching a snow ice milk shake bag, you watches as young couples emerge from random corner of life for a long awaited date night after a torturous week of work. 

“When will I meet that person…”

Even as anti-soulmate as you were, the thought of having someone the share all you secrets, all your worries, even just a simple meal, or a midnight snack with tingles your heart a bit. A soft smile unknowingly blooms on your lips as you watch the awkward interaction of a young couple, no doubt barely meeting each other not too many times before. How her cheeks flushes in a rosy hue whenever he smiles her way. How his smile wavers just a bit whenever she brushes her hand over his. How-

Your thought blanks out just as your vision. Suddenly all you could see was white then it was dark before you feel the radiating pain on your forehead just above your left brow. 

Shit.

You stand still, your bag of ice cream laid on the ground, its content sprawls messily across the border of the sidewalk and the grass. Hand holding your non existent bump on your head tightly, your face scrunches up in anger and before you know it, a scream lets out from your throat.

“YAH!”

Then there it was. You could feel cold sweat breaking all over and your throat clamps up. Thump. A single heartbeat so loud it wipes out every other noise in the entire block. Thump. A second heartbeat though not as loud, just as powerful as the first and there it was again. It feels like someone had reached their hand through your ribcage, grasping your heart then squeeze it with all their might. You could feel all the air getting forced out of your lungs from the sheer pain alone yet it felt so magnificent. Your eyes widen, hand moving from your forehead to your heart to feel not one beat but two, two for a brief moment before they both join together in a harmonious almost overexcited beat. Before you could start to wrap your still aching head around the situation, a soft voice speaks up that has your body tense. 

“You felt it too, didn’t you? Don’t lie, I can see it on your face.” A boy, well his face was childlike and playful despite a worry scowl prominent on his features, his stature however shame most men. He totters over, a hand shove in his pocket, the other mirroring the one you have over your heart. 

 “Are you the idiot that threw…” You glances around the ground, wondering just what it was that has your head aching. “This stupid glove at my head?” You groan as you bend over, reaching for the glove before… 

Goddamn it, not again. 

Your heart clenched again but that wasn’t the part that has you grumbling in frustration. 

 “Oh my God. I’m so sorry. I’m sooo sorry. Shit. I swear I’m not this clumsy all the time.” He speaks up again and your heart couldn’t help but elates. Your right hand still clutching the dirtied glove , the left on your forehead once more as the boy had knocked you on your ass quite literally with his forehead slammed roughly against yours as you both dove for the weapon of your heart destruction. 

“Are you okay, miss…” 

“It’s Y/n.” His voice trails off and you replace it with an almost annoyed grunt. 

“Y/n… wow…” You peer up to catch him repeating your name with almost a sense of admiration filling his twinkling eyes. 

“Ahem. I-I’m Chanwoo. Jung Chanwoo.” The boy snaps out of it the second he feels your eyes on him, straightening himself out but still stuttering a bit from nervousness. Honestly, you can’t help but giggle from how cute he is. His face handsome and physique top notch. He dressed simple in a grey pair of sweat and a giant white t-shirt that’s dirtied probably from dirt and sweat. His eyes train on you so intently it’s borderline rudeness but he couldn’t stop staring. You were just a foot away from him, hand still fidgeting with your forehead, face cringing slightly from the pain yet you look so lovely, better than any of the figment of his imagination he thought up pondering of what his other half would look like. 

“I’m really sorry about, you know… your head. That’s not how I imagine meeting my-” Near simultaneous, the wheels of both your brains begin churning vigorously at the realization of who the person sitting across the way was. 

“YOU’RE MY SOULMATE!!” 

You both yelp out loudly, earning a few strange stares from nearby park goers. He laughs in delight watching the way your cheeks turn a soft shade of pink matching the sky above, your hair glows in the last few drop of sunlight of the day, happy that on your lips too was a smile. He whispers a soft “wait for me” before running off to a group of boys that had been watching from afar this entire time. A minute later he returns, backpack slings over his shoulders as he shyly reaches out for your hand. You tilt your head in confusion before realizing your fingers wrapping tightly still around the brown worn out glove. You hand it back and he gladly accept until his brows furrow with worry. Glove hastily shove into his bag, his svelte fingers travel toward your face leaving you backing away out of instinct yet not even a second later, to his joy, you move forward into his touch. 

“Does it hurt a lot? I’m sorry, my hyung are idiots. They were messing around and threw my gloves. I told them not to...” His eyes glue to your forehead as his finger delicately pressing warmth to the redden area. 

 “I’m okay. It just sting a little bit.” You chuckle nervously, eyes hook onto his gorgeous brown ones scrunching up while he wincing at your barely there wound.

 “Can I take you to dinner? You know… make up for scratching up your beautif-“ Chanwoo feels his face bursting out with steam, throat closing quick. 

"What was that? Can I hear the rest of that sentence?” Smirk teasing on your lips as chanwoo pats his heated skin in embarrassment. 

 “Your, your… uh… your very beautiful face.” He stutter out, averting your gaze at all cost. “I can’t believe this. So embarrassing. I’m suppose to be all cool and stuff when I meet my soulmate but instead i hurt her then make a fool of myself.” He groans perhaps a bit louder than he wanted to, feeling another burst of steam puffing off from saying such ridiculous things. 

“You’re funny, Jung Chanwoo. Not to mention cute.” At your timid praise, his face perks up with excitement, leaving you drunk with his smile and the cute little dimple. “Just so happen I am free tonight. I guess I’ll take you up on that offer.” 

 Chanwoo waves to the group of boys that had been looking on from the far side of the green grass field of the park and you bow before heading off toward the darkening horizon with your fated man. In the short 15 minutes walk to the nearest cafe, you found out he was some sort of child actor and model. He worked random jobs before hitting the big break with the boys you had seen earlier. You felt bad, a young boy thrown into this crazy business of practicing till early morning only to get rush straight into voice lesson right after. Guilt ran through your veins watching his wide eyes then that slight awkward shuffle as you both stood there waiting for the crosswalk to turn green when you had confessed you didn't know who he was. You hastily explained you're not one to keep up with entertainment but that only turned from bad to worse, as if you’re just making up excuses. You’re sure he’s some big star, it’s just your lame ass could never bother enough with keeping up with insert-celebrity-name-here. 

“So you’re telling me you’ve never heard of iKon? WIN? Mix and Match?” Chanwoo muses as he pulls you away from the edge of the sidewalk, moving you inside while he ever so gentlemanly walks on the outside closer to the street. Man, this boy will be the death of you. Up to an hour ago, you thought the whole soulmate idea was stupid but this, if this isn’t romantic you don’t know what is.  You found yourself grinning like an idiot before snapping out of your dream world to answer his pestering. 

“Yea, I’m so sorry.” You hesitate for a second, watching how he’d react but he just keeps smiling, walking close to you. “But if you’re free, maybe you can show me? I’d love to spend more time with you, that is if you want... I know you’re an idol, super busy and all that... I’m just some averag-” 

“Don’t finish that sentence. I just met you and I may not know much but you are not average and I would love to get to know you more.” He stood there cheesing at you with the most innocent glint sparkling in his eyes. You might not know who he is but you feel a strange sense of comfort knowing he wants to get to know you just as much as you do him. There was no hidden intention behind those kind, playful eyes, just pure curiosity of who you might be.

By the time both your hands were heavy with food and drinks, the sky is already darken, dotting with a few barely visible stars and more than a few manmade ones. The thought of a sit down dinner cross his and your mind but ultimately both of you decided against it opting for a more “intimate” dinner at the nearby park. Settling down in the brightly lit picnic area, you watch as Chanwoo slowly pull the contents of your many bags out one by one, smiling as a couple kids run pass by in a tag game. 

“Before we eat, let me see that.” Chanwoo coos as he reaches forward once again, this time reaching for your cheek. You could feel the steam puffing out of your ears from the close proximity alone but now, his large hand cupping your cheek as he inches closer, lips mere centimeters away from yours... You could die this moment and still be the happiest woman in the world. His index quick to rub something wet over the small cut above your brow complete with a small bump you had acquired from the impact during the hour spent wandering under the street lamps with your new friend. 

“Keep still. It’s just antibiotic ointment. This will keep your skin from scarring.” He quips when you wince from the warmth of his finger contrasting to the cold of the ointment. With a firm press to the bandaid, he smiles contently before moving away admiring his neat job.

“You seem like a pro.”

“I hurt myself a lot playing sport... Gotta keep the money making face pristine, you know.” He jests leaving you shaking your head in disbelief.

“Alright, pretty boy. Thank you, my beautiful face appreciate your beautiful patch up job.” Lord knows what went through your mind but a sudden gush of bravery strike the match in your heart giving you the courage to do what you had been wanting too all night... You reach out to grasp his hand in yours. Chanwoo finches at your touch at first but then melting straight into it. For a split second, you feel your chest tighten when he pulls his hand away only to feel like cloud nine when he intertwines his fingers with yours. A strange sense of serenity washes over the both of you despite the screaming of kids and loud thuds of basketball hitting the hard paved courts. For a moment it was just you and him, hand in hand, barely know a thing about each other but you trust him and he does you. Suddenly the future doesn’t seem so bleak and distant anymore but bursting out with roses and sunshine. How could a stranger makes your heart flutter so. He raises all the hair on your body just with his voice. Your heart races just by glancing at those large eyes that seems to hold the universe. His lips so pillowy soft despite the way he constantly has it gnawed in between his perfect teeth leaving you mirroring the action, wondering what they’d taste like. His skin tan and smooth, exulting every trait of an athlete. Not only so but he seems to be such a wonderful man, someone you’d love to know more about. He’s so cheeky yet at the same time, a certain shyness is about in the way he speaks whenever you’d retort with something out of his prediction. Yet it also left you wondering, would he likes you if he really knows who you are. The life of an idol, must be exciting flying to Japan one day then America the next. You’re just a cafe worker...

“What’s wrong, Y/n? You got kinda quiet... Is it me? Did you not want to hold hand...” His voice laces with a touch of sadness, eyes fallen onto your joint hands, hoping you won’t pull away.

“NO, no.. it’s definitely not that. It’s... You know up to an hour ago, I though soulmate was bullshit. I thought soulmate is someone you have to work for to meet, not just some chance encounter and instantaneous intertwining of hearts.” You sigh dejectedly, confessing your worries.

“Oh... So you don’t want me then?” His voice sounds almost monotone, robotic for lacks of a better term. You didn’t want him to think that way, no you definitely would love for nothing more to be with him despite going against everything you believed in.

“Chanwoo, you’re perfect... maybe too perfect for me. I’m just a normal girl. i’m not even one of those girl that buys into the idea of a God given man just for me. You could do so much better. I’m sure you’ve meet tons of better girls in your line of work” You chuckle awkwardly, eyeing him for any reaction. When non given, you rest your head on his broad shoulder, hand squeezing tighter as if it’s the last night you’d get to be with him. “I’d understand if-”

You have never shut up faster before in your life. One moment you felt his hand leaving yours, no doubt making up his mind about leaving you. The next you were seeing stars and no longer did you wonder about how his lips taste. Chanwoo has both his hands around your cheeks holding you in place, thumbs caressing your redden skin gently before they move onto pulling you closer. He presses his lips onto yours hastily, doing his best to yank you away from your strange thoughts because he had never seen a more perfect girl, and all for him. You’re his soulmate and no force in this world was going to take you away from him, not even you. Sure there were cases of one sided soulmate, soulmates that ended in divorce, but this wasn’t one of those. He saw heaven when you appeared and he knew you felt it too. He’d be a fool to let you walk away because you somehow think he needs better. His hands trail away from your cheeks and tightening around your back, happy when your little hands travels to his waist holding him close. You let him work you into a stupor with the way his lips moulding against yours tasting like peppermint and sweat. He pulls away for a second but his hold on you remains strong as ever.

“You’re my soulmate and I don’t care what you think of this whole thing. I wholeheartedly believe soulmates are soulmates for a reason, call me old fashion. You, I don’t know why or how, I don’t even know that much about you yet but I can tell you this, I only need you. Even if you don’t buy into this whole thing, at least give me one chance. Yea? If you don’t believe in love at first sight then give me one chance to prove to you I am your soulmate. At least let me earn your love.” 

He presses another kiss onto your lips and feel the relief of the weight of the world being lift off his shoulder when you nod, lips still flush tight against his, matching smiles bloom on both your lips.

“What about me? What should I do to earn your love.” You mumble against his lips, still desperately pressing against yours as if he could live off of kissing you alone. You pull away slightly to just really look at the man sitting in front of you as you await his answer. It had been such a whirlwind of an evening that you hadn’t really just look at him and every with every second pass you could feel yourself getting further in him. Your finger tracing out the edges of his face, to those soft lips that had been drugging you, to those chubby soft cheeks of his. You place a lingering kiss on his left cheek and feel him giggle under your caring touches.

“Nothing. You already have mine.”

Chapter 2: The Boy in the Red Flannel.

[morfinwen]

For the ask: Drops of Jupiter, King and Lionheart, If My Heart was a House, and No Light, No Light, if you please. (Have I mentioned lately how much I love your ship names? :D )

Thanks, i’m really happy with how that whole using song names for ships has worked out so far!

drops of jupiter (fitz/simmons)

who’s the werewolf and who’s the hunter

Simmons is the scientist who is absolutely fascinated with recent evidence suggesting the existence of werewolves, and doesn’t quite realize her eagerness to find out the truth can be a bit … alarming. Especially for the Scotsman, living on his own in somewhat remote circumstances, whom she keeps dragging along on her fact-finding mission, who is secretly, constantly worried that some full moon he’s going to lose control and hurt someone.

who’s the mermaid and who’s the fisherman

If Fitz had grown up in a bigger village, then maybe he could have done something with his life instead of just fishing like everyone in his family before him, but then this curious mermaid starts visiting him whenever he’s out fishing on his own, asking him all kinds of questions about everything in the human world. No one believes him about her, of course, but maybe it means being a fisherman isn’t terrible? … No, it’s still terrible, but less terrible.

who’s the witch and who’s the familiar

Fitz is Jemma’s familiar. They constantly bicker with each other, disagreeing over the proper way to use magic to handle a conflict, but no matter how many times he refuses to answer her summons or she bans him (temporarily), they are both willing to die for the other.

who’s the barista and who’s the coffee addict

Simmons falls in love with this adorable little coffee shop that is the perfect distance from work to get a cup before going to work. She always chats up barista Fitz, completely oblivious that he barely talks to anyone except for her, and that he’s rapidly developing a massive crush on her.

who’s the professor and who’s the TA

See, this could go either way – Simmons as the eager student who starts off the relationship by stepping on Fitz’s toes, and she didn’t mean it like that, but seriously how is he a professor when he’s only as old as she is? or Fitz as the student who worked so hard to be good enough to be a TA for the brilliant professor Simmons.

who’s the knight and who’s the prince(ss)

Simmons is proud to be one of the first to be breaking all these expectations about female knights, and Fitz isn’t all that embarrassed at being rescued by a woman, but they both grew up on all those stories about princesses being saved by heroic knights and getting married, and frankly it’s a little awkward to be living out those stories flipped.

who’s the teacher and who’s the single parent

Simmons is the teacher who dotes on the tiny Scottish boy in her class, and wonders exactly how long it’s going to take his dad to realize that half the reasons she asks for all these parent-teacher meetings is to see him.

who’s the writer and who’s the editor

Fitz is the writer who wants so badly to put the stuff in his head into words, but the concepts are so intense it’s hard to put them coherently. Simmons is the editor who loves his work, but if she has to use up another whole pack of red pens editing his next manuscript, she’s sending him the bill.

king and lionheart (peter + neal); all platonic, thank you

who’s the werewolf and who’s the hunter

Neal is the werewolf who doesn’t mean any harm, but every full moon winds up stealing chickens and scaring cows. Peter is the beleaguered hunter who wishes that he could go just one month without having to talk down irate villagers, but never lets anyone lay a hand on Neal.

who’s the mermaid and who’s the fisherman

Peter is the fisherman who doesn’t get why this merman has suddenly decided he must be lonely out there, and is always showing up to talk to him. Not that he wants him to stop, but sometimes quiet is nice, Neal.

who’s the witch and who’s the familiar

It would just be Neal’s luck that he gets the grumpy, law-abiding familiar who refuses to help him perform any sneaking, invisible, thief-friendly magic, and is always lecturing him about using his powers for good. 

who’s the barista and who’s the coffee addict

Neal is a barista at the coffee shop Peter always goes to before work. He does his best to get Peter talking about whatever case he’s working on, and secretly imagines they’re actually partners working on cases together.

who’s the professor and who’s the TA

Peter is the professor. Neal is the TA who offers lots of wonderful professional assistance, and lots of totally unnecessary personal advice. Unnecessary in Peter’s mind, at least. Neal isn’t sure how Peter has managed to stay alive all this time, even with his beautiful, attentive wife.

who’s the knight and who’s the prince(ss)

Neal is the prince who grew up following Sir Peter around all the time, because being a knight is so cool and Sir Peter is the best, and Sir Peter pretends to be annoyed but everyone sees right through it.

who’s the teacher and who’s the single parent

Peter is the teacher who lends a hand to an overwhelmed Neal so often he sometimes wonders if he’s doing more for Neal than for Neal’s kid.

who’s the writer and who’s the editor

Neal is the writer who loves needling his grumpy editor. Peter is the editor who constantly talks about dumping Neal but buys like twenty copies of every book he writes and talks him up to anyone who’ll listen.

if my heart was a house (chuck/sarah)

who’s the werewolf and who’s the hunter

Sarah is the hunter who was raised her whole life to believe werewolves were universally dangerous and need to be wiped out, and really doesn’t appreciate having the foundation of her entire belief system shaken by this sweet, adorkable nerd who also happens to be a werewolf.

who’s the mermaid and who’s the fisherman

Sarah is the mermaid who finds herself inexplicably fascinated by this one lanky fisherman, and follows him whenever he goes out, taking care not to be seen. She’s not quite as good at it as she thinks; Chuck isn’t sure if he actually saw that gorgeous mermaid following him, or if maybe he’s losing his mind, but either way suddenly it doesn’t matter so much that every other career plan fell through.

who’s the witch and who’s the familiar

Chuck is the struggling warlock who feels like he’s ruining … whatever kind of future a familiar could have by having Sarah work with him, but she thinks he’s sweet and deserves so much more respect than anyone’s giving him, and determined to see him become accomplished.

who’s the barista and who’s the coffee addict

Sarah is not a morning person, so she’s always three-quarters out of it when she comes into the coffee shop, but after all these weeks, everyone (the other employees, the friends or coworkers who come in with her sometimes, the other coffee shop regulars) is starting to wonder how she hasn’t noticed that that one barista has a major crush on her.

who’s the professor and who’s the TA

Chuck is the professor who, when not lost in thought about the computer sciences, wonders when and how he got the most beautiful woman on campus to be his TA. Sarah is the TA who can’t believe she went and fell in love with the professor she’s working for, what a cliché, oh lord please don’t let him notice …

who’s the knight and who’s the prince(ss)

Sarah is the knight, who wishes the prince would remember that she’s supposed to be the one rescuing him, because if he ever gets hurt trying to help her she is never going to be able to forgive herself.

who’s the teacher and who’s the single parent

Chuck is the single parent who wonders if it’s fate that he’s fallen head-over-heels for his child’s favorite teacher, or just the lead-up to another disappointment.

who’s the writer and who’s the editor

Sarah is the editor who is totally not spending more time with this one author than any of the others, and Chuck is the writer who is totally not fabricating writer’s block or technical difficulties as an excuse to call her for help more often. 

no light, no light (peeta/katniss)

who’s the werewolf and who’s the hunter

Katniss is the hunter who doesn’t realize that the golden wolf that follows her some nights, never interfering but always watching, and the baker who gives her discounts are one and the same. 

who’s the mermaid and who’s the fisherman

Peeta is the merman who doesn’t care that there aren’t any happy stories about merfolk and humans, he’s going to make friends with the beautiful, lonely fisherwoman he’s fallen in love with, no matter how hard she makes it.

who’s the witch and who’s the familiar

Katniss is the witch who wonders if something’s wrong with her that she ended up with a healing familiar, because in what imaginary world does fire magic heal anything?

who’s the barista and who’s the coffee addict

The obvious answer is Katniss is the addict and Peeta is the barista, but i’m gonna mix it up a little. Peeta runs the bakery across the street, and at first his regular visits to the coffee shop are solely for his caffeine fix, but then he starts bringing over various pastries for Katniss to “test”.

who’s the professor and who’s the TA

Katniss is the professor who does not need her TA to take care of her, thank you … but it is nice that he tries.

who’s the knight and who’s the prince(ss)

I’m gonna mix this up too – Katniss is the princess who feels overwhelmed by all the fancy parties and diplomatic meetings she keeps getting called to, and Peeta is the knight who is somehow always at her side, whispering advice when she needs it.

who’s the teacher and who’s the single parent

Peeta is the teacher who wishes he could do more for the clearly overworked single mom Katniss, whose world is so wrapped up in her daughter she can’t see him clearly.

who’s the writer and who’s the editor

Katniss is the editor who wonders why Peeta keeps asking for her when he doesn’t really seem to need one.

…. wow, that was way easier to answer than anticipated. I’m still amazed.

Thanks for asking!

[lauramalchowblog]

The Rebellion of the Buyers

By JOE FLOWER

Did you catch that headline a few weeks back?

An official of a health system in North Carolina sent an email to the entire board of the North Carolina State Health Plan calling them a bunch of “sorry SOBs” who would “burn in hell” after they “bankrupt every hospital in the state.”

Wow. He sounds rather upset. He sounds angry and afraid. He sounds surprised, gobsmacked, face-palming.

Bless his heart. I get it, I really do. Well, I get the fear and pain. Here’s what I don’t get: the surprise, the tone of, “This came out of nowhere! Why didn’t anyone tell us this was coming?”

Brother, we did. We have been. As loudly as we can. For years.

Two things to notice here:

What is he so upset about? Under State Treasurer Dale Folwell’s leadership, the State Health Plan has pegged its payments to hospitals and other medical providers in the state to a range of roughly 200% of Medicare payments (with special help for rural hospitals and other exceptions). In an industry that routinely says that Medicare covers 90% of their costs, this actually sounds rather generous.

What is the State Health Plan? It’s not a payer, that is, an insurer. It’s a buyer. Buyers play under a different set of rules and incentives than an insurer.

Payers are not Buyers

That #2 is key: Insurers are paying for your healthcare with your money, the premiums you pay them. Under the Affordable Care Act their entire administrative cost, executive salaries, and the profit for shareholders comes out of a strictly limited percentage of the total cost. Think about that. The higher the total cost of the healthcare they buy for you, the more money to go around for executive salaries and shareholder profit. The more your healthcare costs, the better their bottom line looks. How’s that for an incentive?

Buyers, on the other hand, are paying for your healthcare with their own money and yours together. Self-funded employers, union health plans, state health plans, pension plans and other buyers pay the actual medical bills through a third-party administrator (TPA). The higher the total cost of your healthcare, the worse their bottom line looks. The lower, the better. If they can help you avoid an expensive unnecessary surgery, or get it done at a provider that charges one fourth as much, or help you get your expensive drugs at half the price or less, you will be happier and so will they.

Buyers’ incentives are closely aligned with their members, employees, and beneficiaries. As large buyers buying for thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people they have the freedom and power to do something about those costs.

This has been the drumbeat of my books, talks, columns, articles, YouTube videos, and tweets, for years: The healthcare economy is hollow, inflated, and flammable, like the Hindenburg approaching Lakehurst in a thunderstorm. What will set it off? A rebellion of the buyers.

Analyze This

Can we analyze this for just a moment? Bear with me for a little systems analysis.

Picture healthcare as a complex adaptive system with multiple interdependent parts (hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, government payers and regulators, insurance companies and so on). Each part is busy taking in energy (mostly money) from the other parts and putting out products and services, or money to fund other parts. The input of each part is someone else’s output. The more one part puts out, the more other parts can take in.

Each part is at a local optimum. Picture this as a 3-D “fitness landscape,” where the height of each part represents its “fitness,” its ability to survive and prosper. In healthcare each part is on a tall mesa, that is, they have optimized their position over time so that they are doing as well as they possibly can in the system that exists. That’s why they operate the way they do and make the choices they make.

Think about the people who run each of these organizations. By definition, they are at the peak of their careers. They got all their training and experience, and climbed the career ladder to the C suite, by being excellent at the existing way of doing things in an industry that has not changed its fundamental structure for 40 years or more.

Not all the mesas are the same height. Some are doing very well, some not so well. But nearly all of them see a wide gulf between where they are and any other higher level of fitness that they might hope to reach, a gulf that is fraught with danger and unknowns.

This complex adaptive system is stuck in a Nash equilibrium. That is, each player, doing as well as possible for themselves in the system as it is, sees no advantage in changing the way they do things. In every direction in this fitness landscape, any change they make will see them and their organization climbing down off their mesa, their “local optimum” into a lower level of fitness, into a valley of uncertainty, into being beginners at this game.

Yet at the same time the system is more and more unbalanced, with some mesas growing ever taller, drawing in more and more energy from the other actors—the vast health insurers, the increasingly consolidated healthcare systems, the world-girdling pharmaceutical companies.

What Breaks the Stuckness?

So what moves a Nash equilibrium off of its equilibrium? Either new sources of energy, new players, or longtime players waking up to new energy and awareness and options. Today we are seeing all three.

Think of yin-yang. The more unbalanced the system becomes, the greater the energy driving any potential instability. Any complex adaptive system in an unbalanced state at a sufficiently high energy level will resolve its potentials into a more-stable lower-energy state. The greater the potential instability, the more likely the resolution will not be incremental but sudden and catastrophic.

What’s that mean? It means that the “burn in hell” guy is losing in this contest.

Why? Because of something else we can learn from systems dynamics, which is this: This disruptive resolution and rebalancing will come from the system actors who:

are the most disadvantaged,

have unified incentives,

and have the greatest freedom of action.

Who am I describing? Where do we find such system actors?

Where?

Not in the political realm. In their nature, like Obamacare, attempts at reform mostly end up being efforts to stabilize the existing system a little longer by taking the edge off some of its inequities and arbitrary cruelties. So for instance the various proposed reforms, even the most radical ones, are mostly just about making sure that everyone is covered in one way or another. No mechanisms for actual cost savings or elimination of rampant waste is contemplated beyond government fiat, which has proven a slender reed on which to depend.

Not from the healthcare providers, nor the insurers, the payers, who actually are mostly doing quite well on their ever-exaggerating mesas in the fitness landscape, drawing in more and more energy from the rest of us, and whose true incentives are to keep the imbalance going and keep costs up.

It’s the buyers, who are professionally, personally, and financially aligned with their members, beneficiaries, and employees. They have traditionally been quiescent, unaware of their power, without the knowledge, the strategies, the tools to take up their power, simply paying the bills without questioning them. All it takes is for them to wake up.

And they are waking up.

Imagine Yourself…

Put yourself in their place. Imagine you are running one of these entities, buying healthcare for tens to hundreds of thousands of people, in charge of trying to keep that budget in line and those costs down. With all the new pricing information coming out in various ways, imagine that you are contemplating the fact that MRIs in your area may vary from $400 to $2200 depending not on quality but just on the site. Or you see hospital bills that ring up a single bag of saline for $91 to $758 for no reason, for a generic item that costs less than $1 to manufacture. Or you see, as we have seen online, a young man with a rare genetic condition sharing his hospital bills on the Internet. He requires an infusion that requires an overnight hospital stay twice a month. His life circumstances have required him to move between states, change insurers, and get treated at different centers. For the exact same procedure with the exact same materials his insurers have paid from $3,319 to $20,736, while he has co-paid from $222 to $4,261.

For no reason. If you have studied quality theory, you know that variation for no reason is always a marker of damage in a system.

If you were a self-funded buyer, paying directly for medical care for your employees or beneficiaries, what would you do when confronted with these random absurd variations in cost for no reason?

You’d say, “I’ll take door number 2.”

You’d say, “Wait, who’s the chump here?”

You’d say, “This is bullshit.”

You’d say, “I will figure out what it takes to pay the lowest price possible for high quality care.”

And that’s what’s happening in 2019, facing 2020. The buyers are not buying the story anymore. They’re saying, “Show us the goods. Show us:

The cost of the whole thing, diagnosis to rehab, whatever the package might be.

The appropriateness. Does this really need to be done? How do we know? Where are the real checks in the system?

The quality. How good are you really? Show us.

The real outcomes. Not metrics you choose for your marketing. Real metrics.”

Why now?

What’s different this year is that increasingly the tools they need exist, the strategies are there and tested, and there are insurgent vendors ready to show them how to execute on the strategies.

This year and the next are likely to be a tipping point.

The huge cost of healthcare is rooted in the way we pay for healthcare in a line-item, fee-for-service, treat-to-code payment system. Fee-for-service is like taking your car’s bent fender to an auto body shop and being charged for each sheet of sandpaper, each can of Bondo, and each ounce of paint, instead of getting an overall estimate and a single bill.

So I am telegraphing the punchline here: Any serious and widespread attempt to substitute new and different payment systems based on risk and true competition through transparent bundled prices and quality of outcomes will implode today’s healthcare market.

Here Comes Everybody

The North Carolina State Health Plan is not isolated in its efforts. Similar stories are playing out in Montana, Kentucky, and other states. Haven, the amalgamation of JP Morgan Chase, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway, is just such a buyer with just such incentives. Giant retailers like Walmart, Kroeger, and Loews, tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and many other large employers are waking up to their power as wholesale buyers of healthcare. Buyers across the country are using multiple strategies such reference-based pricing, bundled pricing, medical tourism, cost plus caps, even onsite, near-site and direct pay primary care. Consultants and other vendors are proliferating who are eager to help buyers of any size, even small employers, map out these strategies. None of these are yet majority practices across all buyers, but they are trending rapidly and appear to be at a major bend in the curve of adoption.

The more buyers get up on their hind legs and insist on their power as true customers, the faster that change will happen. As more buyers experience and demonstrate that they can get high quality healthcare for 10 percent, 20 percent, even 30 percent less in the system as it exists today, the more other players in the system will have to adjust, accommodate, change their pricing and cost structures, stop wasteful expensive practices and focus on providing what their customers want, need and are willing to pay for: real healthcare and real attention at a reasonable cost.

Change is gonna come.  

Joe Flower has 40 years of experience in the healthcare world and has emerged as a thought leader on the deep forces changing the system in the United States and around the world.

The Rebellion of the Buyers published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com

[kristinsimmons]

The Rebellion of the Buyers

By JOE FLOWER

Did you catch that headline a few weeks back?

An official of a health system in North Carolina sent an email to the entire board of the North Carolina State Health Plan calling them a bunch of “sorry SOBs” who would “burn in hell” after they “bankrupt every hospital in the state.”

Wow. He sounds rather upset. He sounds angry and afraid. He sounds surprised, gobsmacked, face-palming.

Bless his heart. I get it, I really do. Well, I get the fear and pain. Here’s what I don’t get: the surprise, the tone of, “This came out of nowhere! Why didn’t anyone tell us this was coming?”

Brother, we did. We have been. As loudly as we can. For years.

Two things to notice here:

What is he so upset about? Under State Treasurer Dale Folwell’s leadership, the State Health Plan has pegged its payments to hospitals and other medical providers in the state to a range of roughly 200% of Medicare payments (with special help for rural hospitals and other exceptions). In an industry that routinely says that Medicare covers 90% of their costs, this actually sounds rather generous.

What is the State Health Plan? It’s not a payer, that is, an insurer. It’s a buyer. Buyers play under a different set of rules and incentives than an insurer.

Payers are not Buyers

That #2 is key: Insurers are paying for your healthcare with your money, the premiums you pay them. Under the Affordable Care Act their entire administrative cost, executive salaries, and the profit for shareholders comes out of a strictly limited percentage of the total cost. Think about that. The higher the total cost of the healthcare they buy for you, the more money to go around for executive salaries and shareholder profit. The more your healthcare costs, the better their bottom line looks. How’s that for an incentive?

Buyers, on the other hand, are paying for your healthcare with their own money and yours together. Self-funded employers, union health plans, state health plans, pension plans and other buyers pay the actual medical bills through a third-party administrator (TPA). The higher the total cost of your healthcare, the worse their bottom line looks. The lower, the better. If they can help you avoid an expensive unnecessary surgery, or get it done at a provider that charges one fourth as much, or help you get your expensive drugs at half the price or less, you will be happier and so will they.

Buyers’ incentives are closely aligned with their members, employees, and beneficiaries. As large buyers buying for thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people they have the freedom and power to do something about those costs.

This has been the drumbeat of my books, talks, columns, articles, YouTube videos, and tweets, for years: The healthcare economy is hollow, inflated, and flammable, like the Hindenburg approaching Lakehurst in a thunderstorm. What will set it off? A rebellion of the buyers.

Analyze This

Can we analyze this for just a moment? Bear with me for a little systems analysis.

Picture healthcare as a complex adaptive system with multiple interdependent parts (hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, government payers and regulators, insurance companies and so on). Each part is busy taking in energy (mostly money) from the other parts and putting out products and services, or money to fund other parts. The input of each part is someone else’s output. The more one part puts out, the more other parts can take in.

Each part is at a local optimum. Picture this as a 3-D “fitness landscape,” where the height of each part represents its “fitness,” its ability to survive and prosper. In healthcare each part is on a tall mesa, that is, they have optimized their position over time so that they are doing as well as they possibly can in the system that exists. That’s why they operate the way they do and make the choices they make.

Think about the people who run each of these organizations. By definition, they are at the peak of their careers. They got all their training and experience, and climbed the career ladder to the C suite, by being excellent at the existing way of doing things in an industry that has not changed its fundamental structure for 40 years or more.

Not all the mesas are the same height. Some are doing very well, some not so well. But nearly all of them see a wide gulf between where they are and any other higher level of fitness that they might hope to reach, a gulf that is fraught with danger and unknowns.

This complex adaptive system is stuck in a Nash equilibrium. That is, each player, doing as well as possible for themselves in the system as it is, sees no advantage in changing the way they do things. In every direction in this fitness landscape, any change they make will see them and their organization climbing down off their mesa, their “local optimum” into a lower level of fitness, into a valley of uncertainty, into being beginners at this game.

Yet at the same time the system is more and more unbalanced, with some mesas growing ever taller, drawing in more and more energy from the other actors—the vast health insurers, the increasingly consolidated healthcare systems, the world-girdling pharmaceutical companies.

What Breaks the Stuckness?

So what moves a Nash equilibrium off of its equilibrium? Either new sources of energy, new players, or longtime players waking up to new energy and awareness and options. Today we are seeing all three.

Think of yin-yang. The more unbalanced the system becomes, the greater the energy driving any potential instability. Any complex adaptive system in an unbalanced state at a sufficiently high energy level will resolve its potentials into a more-stable lower-energy state. The greater the potential instability, the more likely the resolution will not be incremental but sudden and catastrophic.

What’s that mean? It means that the “burn in hell” guy is losing in this contest.

Why? Because of something else we can learn from systems dynamics, which is this: This disruptive resolution and rebalancing will come from the system actors who:

are the most disadvantaged,

have unified incentives,

and have the greatest freedom of action.

Who am I describing? Where do we find such system actors?

Where?

Not in the political realm. In their nature, like Obamacare, attempts at reform mostly end up being efforts to stabilize the existing system a little longer by taking the edge off some of its inequities and arbitrary cruelties. So for instance the various proposed reforms, even the most radical ones, are mostly just about making sure that everyone is covered in one way or another. No mechanisms for actual cost savings or elimination of rampant waste is contemplated beyond government fiat, which has proven a slender reed on which to depend.

Not from the healthcare providers, nor the insurers, the payers, who actually are mostly doing quite well on their ever-exaggerating mesas in the fitness landscape, drawing in more and more energy from the rest of us, and whose true incentives are to keep the imbalance going and keep costs up.

It’s the buyers, who are professionally, personally, and financially aligned with their members, beneficiaries, and employees. They have traditionally been quiescent, unaware of their power, without the knowledge, the strategies, the tools to take up their power, simply paying the bills without questioning them. All it takes is for them to wake up.

And they are waking up.

Imagine Yourself…

Put yourself in their place. Imagine you are running one of these entities, buying healthcare for tens to hundreds of thousands of people, in charge of trying to keep that budget in line and those costs down. With all the new pricing information coming out in various ways, imagine that you are contemplating the fact that MRIs in your area may vary from $400 to $2200 depending not on quality but just on the site. Or you see hospital bills that ring up a single bag of saline for $91 to $758 for no reason, for a generic item that costs less than $1 to manufacture. Or you see, as we have seen online, a young man with a rare genetic condition sharing his hospital bills on the Internet. He requires an infusion that requires an overnight hospital stay twice a month. His life circumstances have required him to move between states, change insurers, and get treated at different centers. For the exact same procedure with the exact same materials his insurers have paid from $3,319 to $20,736, while he has co-paid from $222 to $4,261.

For no reason. If you have studied quality theory, you know that variation for no reason is always a marker of damage in a system.

If you were a self-funded buyer, paying directly for medical care for your employees or beneficiaries, what would you do when confronted with these random absurd variations in cost for no reason?

You’d say, “I’ll take door number 2.”

You’d say, “Wait, who’s the chump here?”

You’d say, “This is bullshit.”

You’d say, “I will figure out what it takes to pay the lowest price possible for high quality care.”

And that’s what’s happening in 2019, facing 2020. The buyers are not buying the story anymore. They’re saying, “Show us the goods. Show us:

The cost of the whole thing, diagnosis to rehab, whatever the package might be.

The appropriateness. Does this really need to be done? How do we know? Where are the real checks in the system?

The quality. How good are you really? Show us.

The real outcomes. Not metrics you choose for your marketing. Real metrics.”

Why now?

What’s different this year is that increasingly the tools they need exist, the strategies are there and tested, and there are insurgent vendors ready to show them how to execute on the strategies.

This year and the next are likely to be a tipping point.

The huge cost of healthcare is rooted in the way we pay for healthcare in a line-item, fee-for-service, treat-to-code payment system. Fee-for-service is like taking your car’s bent fender to an auto body shop and being charged for each sheet of sandpaper, each can of Bondo, and each ounce of paint, instead of getting an overall estimate and a single bill.

So I am telegraphing the punchline here: Any serious and widespread attempt to substitute new and different payment systems based on risk and true competition through transparent bundled prices and quality of outcomes will implode today’s healthcare market.

Here Comes Everybody

The North Carolina State Health Plan is not isolated in its efforts. Similar stories are playing out in Montana, Kentucky, and other states. Haven, the amalgamation of JP Morgan Chase, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway, is just such a buyer with just such incentives. Giant retailers like Walmart, Kroeger, and Loews, tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and many other large employers are waking up to their power as wholesale buyers of healthcare. Buyers across the country are using multiple strategies such reference-based pricing, bundled pricing, medical tourism, cost plus caps, even onsite, near-site and direct pay primary care. Consultants and other vendors are proliferating who are eager to help buyers of any size, even small employers, map out these strategies. None of these are yet majority practices across all buyers, but they are trending rapidly and appear to be at a major bend in the curve of adoption.

The more buyers get up on their hind legs and insist on their power as true customers, the faster that change will happen. As more buyers experience and demonstrate that they can get high quality healthcare for 10 percent, 20 percent, even 30 percent less in the system as it exists today, the more other players in the system will have to adjust, accommodate, change their pricing and cost structures, stop wasteful expensive practices and focus on providing what their customers want, need and are willing to pay for: real healthcare and real attention at a reasonable cost.

Change is gonna come.  

Joe Flower has 40 years of experience in the healthcare world and has emerged as a thought leader on the deep forces changing the system in the United States and around the world.

The Rebellion of the Buyers published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

[kristinsimmons]

The Rebellion of the Buyers

By JOE FLOWER

Did you catch that headline a few weeks back?

An official of a health system in North Carolina sent an email to the entire board of the North Carolina State Health Plan calling them a bunch of “sorry SOBs” who would “burn in hell” after they “bankrupt every hospital in the state.”

Wow. He sounds rather upset. He sounds angry and afraid. He sounds surprised, gobsmacked, face-palming.

Bless his heart. I get it, I really do. Well, I get the fear and pain. Here’s what I don’t get: the surprise, the tone of, “This came out of nowhere! Why didn’t anyone tell us this was coming?”

Brother, we did. We have been. As loudly as we can. For years.

Two things to notice here:

What is he so upset about? Under State Treasurer Dale Folwell’s leadership, the State Health Plan has pegged its payments to hospitals and other medical providers in the state to a range of roughly 200% of Medicare payments (with special help for rural hospitals and other exceptions). In an industry that routinely says that Medicare covers 90% of their costs, this actually sounds rather generous.

What is the State Health Plan? It’s not a payer, that is, an insurer. It’s a buyer. Buyers play under a different set of rules and incentives than an insurer.

Payers are not Buyers

That #2 is key: Insurers are paying for your healthcare with your money, the premiums you pay them. Under the Affordable Care Act their entire administrative cost, executive salaries, and the profit for shareholders comes out of a strictly limited percentage of the total cost. Think about that. The higher the total cost of the healthcare they buy for you, the more money to go around for executive salaries and shareholder profit. The more your healthcare costs, the better their bottom line looks. How’s that for an incentive?

Buyers, on the other hand, are paying for your healthcare with their own money and yours together. Self-funded employers, union health plans, state health plans, pension plans and other buyers pay the actual medical bills through a third-party administrator (TPA). The higher the total cost of your healthcare, the worse their bottom line looks. The lower, the better. If they can help you avoid an expensive unnecessary surgery, or get it done at a provider that charges one fourth as much, or help you get your expensive drugs at half the price or less, you will be happier and so will they.

Buyers’ incentives are closely aligned with their members, employees, and beneficiaries. As large buyers buying for thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people they have the freedom and power to do something about those costs.

This has been the drumbeat of my books, talks, columns, articles, YouTube videos, and tweets, for years: The healthcare economy is hollow, inflated, and flammable, like the Hindenburg approaching Lakehurst in a thunderstorm. What will set it off? A rebellion of the buyers.

Analyze This

Can we analyze this for just a moment? Bear with me for a little systems analysis.

Picture healthcare as a complex adaptive system with multiple interdependent parts (hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, government payers and regulators, insurance companies and so on). Each part is busy taking in energy (mostly money) from the other parts and putting out products and services, or money to fund other parts. The input of each part is someone else’s output. The more one part puts out, the more other parts can take in.

Each part is at a local optimum. Picture this as a 3-D “fitness landscape,” where the height of each part represents its “fitness,” its ability to survive and prosper. In healthcare each part is on a tall mesa, that is, they have optimized their position over time so that they are doing as well as they possibly can in the system that exists. That��s why they operate the way they do and make the choices they make.

Think about the people who run each of these organizations. By definition, they are at the peak of their careers. They got all their training and experience, and climbed the career ladder to the C suite, by being excellent at the existing way of doing things in an industry that has not changed its fundamental structure for 40 years or more.

Not all the mesas are the same height. Some are doing very well, some not so well. But nearly all of them see a wide gulf between where they are and any other higher level of fitness that they might hope to reach, a gulf that is fraught with danger and unknowns.

This complex adaptive system is stuck in a Nash equilibrium. That is, each player, doing as well as possible for themselves in the system as it is, sees no advantage in changing the way they do things. In every direction in this fitness landscape, any change they make will see them and their organization climbing down off their mesa, their “local optimum” into a lower level of fitness, into a valley of uncertainty, into being beginners at this game.

Yet at the same time the system is more and more unbalanced, with some mesas growing ever taller, drawing in more and more energy from the other actors—the vast health insurers, the increasingly consolidated healthcare systems, the world-girdling pharmaceutical companies.

What Breaks the Stuckness?

So what moves a Nash equilibrium off of its equilibrium? Either new sources of energy, new players, or longtime players waking up to new energy and awareness and options. Today we are seeing all three.

Think of yin-yang. The more unbalanced the system becomes, the greater the energy driving any potential instability. Any complex adaptive system in an unbalanced state at a sufficiently high energy level will resolve its potentials into a more-stable lower-energy state. The greater the potential instability, the more likely the resolution will not be incremental but sudden and catastrophic.

What’s that mean? It means that the “burn in hell” guy is losing in this contest.

Why? Because of something else we can learn from systems dynamics, which is this: This disruptive resolution and rebalancing will come from the system actors who:

are the most disadvantaged,

have unified incentives,

and have the greatest freedom of action.

Who am I describing? Where do we find such system actors?

Where?

Not in the political realm. In their nature, like Obamacare, attempts at reform mostly end up being efforts to stabilize the existing system a little longer by taking the edge off some of its inequities and arbitrary cruelties. So for instance the various proposed reforms, even the most radical ones, are mostly just about making sure that everyone is covered in one way or another. No mechanisms for actual cost savings or elimination of rampant waste is contemplated beyond government fiat, which has proven a slender reed on which to depend.

Not from the healthcare providers, nor the insurers, the payers, who actually are mostly doing quite well on their ever-exaggerating mesas in the fitness landscape, drawing in more and more energy from the rest of us, and whose true incentives are to keep the imbalance going and keep costs up.

It’s the buyers, who are professionally, personally, and financially aligned with their members, beneficiaries, and employees. They have traditionally been quiescent, unaware of their power, without the knowledge, the strategies, the tools to take up their power, simply paying the bills without questioning them. All it takes is for them to wake up.

And they are waking up.

Imagine Yourself…

Put yourself in their place. Imagine you are running one of these entities, buying healthcare for tens to hundreds of thousands of people, in charge of trying to keep that budget in line and those costs down. With all the new pricing information coming out in various ways, imagine that you are contemplating the fact that MRIs in your area may vary from $400 to $2200 depending not on quality but just on the site. Or you see hospital bills that ring up a single bag of saline for $91 to $758 for no reason, for a generic item that costs less than $1 to manufacture. Or you see, as we have seen online, a young man with a rare genetic condition sharing his hospital bills on the Internet. He requires an infusion that requires an overnight hospital stay twice a month. His life circumstances have required him to move between states, change insurers, and get treated at different centers. For the exact same procedure with the exact same materials his insurers have paid from $3,319 to $20,736, while he has co-paid from $222 to $4,261.

For no reason. If you have studied quality theory, you know that variation for no reason is always a marker of damage in a system.

If you were a self-funded buyer, paying directly for medical care for your employees or beneficiaries, what would you do when confronted with these random absurd variations in cost for no reason?

You’d say, “I’ll take door number 2.”

You’d say, “Wait, who’s the chump here?”

You’d say, “This is bullshit.”

You’d say, “I will figure out what it takes to pay the lowest price possible for high quality care.”

And that’s what’s happening in 2019, facing 2020. The buyers are not buying the story anymore. They’re saying, “Show us the goods. Show us:

The cost of the whole thing, diagnosis to rehab, whatever the package might be.

The appropriateness. Does this really need to be done? How do we know? Where are the real checks in the system?

The quality. How good are you really? Show us.

The real outcomes. Not metrics you choose for your marketing. Real metrics.”

Why now?

What’s different this year is that increasingly the tools they need exist, the strategies are there and tested, and there are insurgent vendors ready to show them how to execute on the strategies.

This year and the next are likely to be a tipping point.

The huge cost of healthcare is rooted in the way we pay for healthcare in a line-item, fee-for-service, treat-to-code payment system. Fee-for-service is like taking your car’s bent fender to an auto body shop and being charged for each sheet of sandpaper, each can of Bondo, and each ounce of paint, instead of getting an overall estimate and a single bill.

So I am telegraphing the punchline here: Any serious and widespread attempt to substitute new and different payment systems based on risk and true competition through transparent bundled prices and quality of outcomes will implode today’s healthcare market.

Here Comes Everybody

The North Carolina State Health Plan is not isolated in its efforts. Similar stories are playing out in Montana, Kentucky, and other states. Haven, the amalgamation of JP Morgan Chase, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway, is just such a buyer with just such incentives. Giant retailers like Walmart, Kroeger, and Loews, tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and many other large employers are waking up to their power as wholesale buyers of healthcare. Buyers across the country are using multiple strategies such reference-based pricing, bundled pricing, medical tourism, cost plus caps, even onsite, near-site and direct pay primary care. Consultants and other vendors are proliferating who are eager to help buyers of any size, even small employers, map out these strategies. None of these are yet majority practices across all buyers, but they are trending rapidly and appear to be at a major bend in the curve of adoption.

The more buyers get up on their hind legs and insist on their power as true customers, the faster that change will happen. As more buyers experience and demonstrate that they can get high quality healthcare for 10 percent, 20 percent, even 30 percent less in the system as it exists today, the more other players in the system will have to adjust, accommodate, change their pricing and cost structures, stop wasteful expensive practices and focus on providing what their customers want, need and are willing to pay for: real healthcare and real attention at a reasonable cost.

Change is gonna come.  

Joe Flower has 40 years of experience in the healthcare world and has emerged as a thought leader on the deep forces changing the system in the United States and around the world.

The Rebellion of the Buyers published first on https://wittooth.tumblr.com/

[lauramalchowblog]

The Rebellion of the Buyers

By JOE FLOWER

Did you catch that headline a few weeks back?

An official of a health system in North Carolina sent an email to the entire board of the North Carolina State Health Plan calling them a bunch of “sorry SOBs” who would “burn in hell” after they “bankrupt every hospital in the state.”

Wow. He sounds rather upset. He sounds angry and afraid. He sounds surprised, gobsmacked, face-palming.

Bless his heart. I get it, I really do. Well, I get the fear and pain. Here’s what I don’t get: the surprise, the tone of, “This came out of nowhere! Why didn’t anyone tell us this was coming?”

Brother, we did. We have been. As loudly as we can. For years.

Two things to notice here:

What is he so upset about? Under State Treasurer Dale Folwell’s leadership, the State Health Plan has pegged its payments to hospitals and other medical providers in the state to a range of roughly 200% of Medicare payments (with special help for rural hospitals and other exceptions). In an industry that routinely says that Medicare covers 90% of their costs, this actually sounds rather generous.

What is the State Health Plan? It’s not a payer, that is, an insurer. It’s a buyer. Buyers play under a different set of rules and incentives than an insurer.

Payers are not Buyers

That #2 is key: Insurers are paying for your healthcare with your money, the premiums you pay them. Under the Affordable Care Act their entire administrative cost, executive salaries, and the profit for shareholders comes out of a strictly limited percentage of the total cost. Think about that. The higher the total cost of the healthcare they buy for you, the more money to go around for executive salaries and shareholder profit. The more your healthcare costs, the better their bottom line looks. How’s that for an incentive?

Buyers, on the other hand, are paying for your healthcare with their own money and yours together. Self-funded employers, union health plans, state health plans, pension plans and other buyers pay the actual medical bills through a third-party administrator (TPA). The higher the total cost of your healthcare, the worse their bottom line looks. The lower, the better. If they can help you avoid an expensive unnecessary surgery, or get it done at a provider that charges one fourth as much, or help you get your expensive drugs at half the price or less, you will be happier and so will they.

Buyers’ incentives are closely aligned with their members, employees, and beneficiaries. As large buyers buying for thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of people they have the freedom and power to do something about those costs.

This has been the drumbeat of my books, talks, columns, articles, YouTube videos, and tweets, for years: The healthcare economy is hollow, inflated, and flammable, like the Hindenburg approaching Lakehurst in a thunderstorm. What will set it off? A rebellion of the buyers.

Analyze This

Can we analyze this for just a moment? Bear with me for a little systems analysis.

Picture healthcare as a complex adaptive system with multiple interdependent parts (hospital systems, pharmaceutical companies, device manufacturers, government payers and regulators, insurance companies and so on). Each part is busy taking in energy (mostly money) from the other parts and putting out products and services, or money to fund other parts. The input of each part is someone else’s output. The more one part puts out, the more other parts can take in.

Each part is at a local optimum. Picture this as a 3-D “fitness landscape,” where the height of each part represents its “fitness,” its ability to survive and prosper. In healthcare each part is on a tall mesa, that is, they have optimized their position over time so that they are doing as well as they possibly can in the system that exists. That’s why they operate the way they do and make the choices they make.

Think about the people who run each of these organizations. By definition, they are at the peak of their careers. They got all their training and experience, and climbed the career ladder to the C suite, by being excellent at the existing way of doing things in an industry that has not changed its fundamental structure for 40 years or more.

Not all the mesas are the same height. Some are doing very well, some not so well. But nearly all of them see a wide gulf between where they are and any other higher level of fitness that they might hope to reach, a gulf that is fraught with danger and unknowns.

This complex adaptive system is stuck in a Nash equilibrium. That is, each player, doing as well as possible for themselves in the system as it is, sees no advantage in changing the way they do things. In every direction in this fitness landscape, any change they make will see them and their organization climbing down off their mesa, their “local optimum” into a lower level of fitness, into a valley of uncertainty, into being beginners at this game.

Yet at the same time the system is more and more unbalanced, with some mesas growing ever taller, drawing in more and more energy from the other actors—the vast health insurers, the increasingly consolidated healthcare systems, the world-girdling pharmaceutical companies.

What Breaks the Stuckness?

So what moves a Nash equilibrium off of its equilibrium? Either new sources of energy, new players, or longtime players waking up to new energy and awareness and options. Today we are seeing all three.

Think of yin-yang. The more unbalanced the system becomes, the greater the energy driving any potential instability. Any complex adaptive system in an unbalanced state at a sufficiently high energy level will resolve its potentials into a more-stable lower-energy state. The greater the potential instability, the more likely the resolution will not be incremental but sudden and catastrophic.

What’s that mean? It means that the “burn in hell” guy is losing in this contest.

Why? Because of something else we can learn from systems dynamics, which is this: This disruptive resolution and rebalancing will come from the system actors who:

are the most disadvantaged,

have unified incentives,

and have the greatest freedom of action.

Who am I describing? Where do we find such system actors?

Where?

Not in the political realm. In their nature, like Obamacare, attempts at reform mostly end up being efforts to stabilize the existing system a little longer by taking the edge off some of its inequities and arbitrary cruelties. So for instance the various proposed reforms, even the most radical ones, are mostly just about making sure that everyone is covered in one way or another. No mechanisms for actual cost savings or elimination of rampant waste is contemplated beyond government fiat, which has proven a slender reed on which to depend.

Not from the healthcare providers, nor the insurers, the payers, who actually are mostly doing quite well on their ever-exaggerating mesas in the fitness landscape, drawing in more and more energy from the rest of us, and whose true incentives are to keep the imbalance going and keep costs up.

It’s the buyers, who are professionally, personally, and financially aligned with their members, beneficiaries, and employees. They have traditionally been quiescent, unaware of their power, without the knowledge, the strategies, the tools to take up their power, simply paying the bills without questioning them. All it takes is for them to wake up.

And they are waking up.

Imagine Yourself…

Put yourself in their place. Imagine you are running one of these entities, buying healthcare for tens to hundreds of thousands of people, in charge of trying to keep that budget in line and those costs down. With all the new pricing information coming out in various ways, imagine that you are contemplating the fact that MRIs in your area may vary from $400 to $2200 depending not on quality but just on the site. Or you see hospital bills that ring up a single bag of saline for $91 to $758 for no reason, for a generic item that costs less than $1 to manufacture. Or you see, as we have seen online, a young man with a rare genetic condition sharing his hospital bills on the Internet. He requires an infusion that requires an overnight hospital stay twice a month. His life circumstances have required him to move between states, change insurers, and get treated at different centers. For the exact same procedure with the exact same materials his insurers have paid from $3,319 to $20,736, while he has co-paid from $222 to $4,261.

For no reason. If you have studied quality theory, you know that variation for no reason is always a marker of damage in a system.

If you were a self-funded buyer, paying directly for medical care for your employees or beneficiaries, what would you do when confronted with these random absurd variations in cost for no reason?

You’d say, “I’ll take door number 2.”

You’d say, “Wait, who’s the chump here?”

You’d say, “This is bullshit.”

You’d say, “I will figure out what it takes to pay the lowest price possible for high quality care.”

And that’s what’s happening in 2019, facing 2020. The buyers are not buying the story anymore. They’re saying, “Show us the goods. Show us:

The cost of the whole thing, diagnosis to rehab, whatever the package might be.

The appropriateness. Does this really need to be done? How do we know? Where are the real checks in the system?

The quality. How good are you really? Show us.

The real outcomes. Not metrics you choose for your marketing. Real metrics.”

Why now?

What’s different this year is that increasingly the tools they need exist, the strategies are there and tested, and there are insurgent vendors ready to show them how to execute on the strategies.

This year and the next are likely to be a tipping point.

The huge cost of healthcare is rooted in the way we pay for healthcare in a line-item, fee-for-service, treat-to-code payment system. Fee-for-service is like taking your car’s bent fender to an auto body shop and being charged for each sheet of sandpaper, each can of Bondo, and each ounce of paint, instead of getting an overall estimate and a single bill.

So I am telegraphing the punchline here: Any serious and widespread attempt to substitute new and different payment systems based on risk and true competition through transparent bundled prices and quality of outcomes will implode today’s healthcare market.

Here Comes Everybody

The North Carolina State Health Plan is not isolated in its efforts. Similar stories are playing out in Montana, Kentucky, and other states. Haven, the amalgamation of JP Morgan Chase, Amazon, and Berkshire Hathaway, is just such a buyer with just such incentives. Giant retailers like Walmart, Kroeger, and Loews, tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, and Google, and many other large employers are waking up to their power as wholesale buyers of healthcare. Buyers across the country are using multiple strategies such reference-based pricing, bundled pricing, medical tourism, cost plus caps, even onsite, near-site and direct pay primary care. Consultants and other vendors are proliferating who are eager to help buyers of any size, even small employers, map out these strategies. None of these are yet majority practices across all buyers, but they are trending rapidly and appear to be at a major bend in the curve of adoption.

The more buyers get up on their hind legs and insist on their power as true customers, the faster that change will happen. As more buyers experience and demonstrate that they can get high quality healthcare for 10 percent, 20 percent, even 30 percent less in the system as it exists today, the more other players in the system will have to adjust, accommodate, change their pricing and cost structures, stop wasteful expensive practices and focus on providing what their customers want, need and are willing to pay for: real healthcare and real attention at a reasonable cost.

Change is gonna come.  

Joe Flower has 40 years of experience in the healthcare world and has emerged as a thought leader on the deep forces changing the system in the United States and around the world.

The Rebellion of the Buyers published first on https://venabeahan.tumblr.com