#including one man who read off the whole beginning of the wiki page

[sleepanonymous]

After Red Rocks, when I got out of my post-concert shower I laid in bed and made this list so I wouldn't forget some important details of the ritual. I was gonna turn this into a cohesive post but I'm home and I'm lazy so you get screenshots instead 😅

[sineala]

Tony Stark and Arthuriana

Coming to you by special request, a very long post about 616 Tony's interest in Arthuriana, with a focus on all of Tony's run-ins with Morgan le Fay!

I feel like I should disclaim the extent of my knowledge here, which is that I still haven't managed to read anywhere near every issue of Iron Man -- at least, not yet, anyway -- so I'm just going by the things I know I've read, and Morgan le Fay's Marvel wiki entry is frustratingly under-cited, so it's very possible I've missed something relevant, but I'm pretty sure I've got the big stuff down. My other disclaimer here is that I'm not as big an Arthurian nerd as Tony is, which is to say that most of my familiarity comes from modern retellings -- T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave, Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset -- and not so much the usual classic sources on the Matter of Britain, though I've read bits and pieces of them.

(This is because I wanted to read versions of them that were as close to the original as possible but so far have not ended up finishing any of them because, well, that's hard. So I've never read the Mabinogion because I do not know Welsh. I've got the Norton Critical Edition of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which is probably the best student edition if you're looking for something without modernized spellings, as I was. I've also got -- well, okay, it's my wife's but I'm borrowing it -- a relatively recent Boydell & Brewer edition (ed. Reeve, tr. Wright) of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), which is, you guessed it, in Latin with a facing English translation. I haven't gotten very far in it because, in case you didn't know this about Latin texts, the beginning is pretty much always the hardest, so I gave up and read some Plautus adaptations instead. Anyway, if for some reason you too want to read Geoffrey of Monmouth in the original Latin I'd recommend that one, but I can't recommend any particular English translations because I've never read one by itself. I bet you didn't think you'd be getting Latin prose recommendations in this post. I mean, maybe you did; it is me, after all.)

Okay. Right. King Arthur. Here we go.

We've got:

Flashbacks to Tony's childhood in late Iron Man volume 1

A brief discussion of Morgan's origin story and Avengers #187

Iron Man vol 1 #149-150: Doomquest

What If vol 1 #33: What if Iron Man was trapped in the time of King Arthur?

Iron Man vol 1 #249-250: Recurring Knightmare

Iron Man: Legacy of Doom #1-4

Avengers vol 3 #1-4: The Morgan Conquest

Civil War: The Confession

Mighty Avengers vol 1 #9-11: Time Is On No One's Side

In terms of universe-internal chronology, we know from Iron Man #287, from 1992, that Tony has been a fan of King Arthur since childhood. This is an issue of a fandom-favorite arc which features Tony having a lot of childhood flashbacks, including the famous "Stark men are made of iron" line (in #286) that for some reason MCU fandom decided it loved; I mean, seriously, I've seen that quoted in way more MCU fic than 616 fic. But slightly later, in #287, we get an entire page devoted to Tony's love of King Arthur.

The narration reads: "Over the next few years, I learned as my father intended. Discipline of body. Strength of character. But in what free time I was allowed, I worked my way through the school's library. At thirteen, I discovered Mallory [sic], who showed me a whole new world. A world of dedication to a cause greater than oneself. Of chivalry and honor. And the fantastic deeds -- of armored heroes."

The art shows Tony as a child sitting under a tree, reading a book labeled Mort D'Arthur by Mallory [sic] -- no, don't ask me why nobody at Marvel checked how to spell either the name of the book or its author -- and daydreaming of King Arthur, the Sword in the Stone, knights, et cetera. Just in case you somehow missed the extremely blatant hint that we are meant to understand that Tony's knight obsession heavily influenced him becoming Iron Man as an adult, we see one of his armors mixed in with all the drawings of knights. So, yes, canonically Tony is Iron Man at least partly because he's a giant King Arthur nerd, which I think is so very sweet. I love him. He's such a dork!

(This issue is currently in print in the Iron Man Epic Collection War Machine, should you need your own copy.)

This isn't actually the only reference to Tony as a King Arthur fanboy in this era of canon, either; a little later, in IM #298, we see that one of Tony's passwords is actually "Mallory." (Yeah, no, they still couldn't spell. But it's cute.)

But in terms of actual publication order, this is definitely not the first time we have seen in canon that Tony is into Arthuriana, as I'm sure you all know. I would assume, in fact, that giving Tony a childhood interest in Arthuriana is because Doomquest is one of the most beloved Iron Man story arcs of all time, and that all started at least a decade before IM #287 here was published.

The villain of Doomquest -- the one who isn't Doctor Doom, at least -- is Morgan le Fay. Yes, that Morgan le Fay. Yes, Arthur's evil half-sister Morgan le Fay. Yes, all of this King Arthur stuff is canonically real history on Earth-616. Morgan's first appearance in Marvel, per the wiki, was in Black Knight #1 (1955), which I have not read, and judging by the summary I feel like this is probably just supposed to be a straight-up comic retelling of Arthurian legends for kids; I don't think Marvel really had the whole Marvel Universe in mind as a concept in 1955, so I'm not sure this was meant to connect to anything else. I feel like this is another one of those instances of Marvel discovering that they can write comics about characters in the public domain for free -- like, I'm pretty sure that's how we also ended up with, like, Norse, Greek, and Roman mythology wedged into 616.

As far as I can tell from the wiki, the first time Morgan tangled with the Avengers (or indeed the larger 616 universe) in any way actually predated Doomquest -- it was in an early arc in Spider-Woman (#2-6) and then Avengers #187, which came out in 1979, actually right when Demon in a Bottle was happening over in Iron Man comics. If you read #187, Iron Man is not in it because he's off the team due to his drinking problem and also his accidentally murdering the Carnelian ambassador problem. So Wonder Man's filling in instead. This issue is part of Michelinie's rather sporadic Avengers run, which makes sense, I guess, considering where we see Morgan next.

Anyway, Avengers #187 is the classic issue where Wanda is possessed by Chthon, but what you may not remember from Chthon's backstory (I sure didn't!) is that he was summoned by Morgan le Fay because she was the first person who tried to wield the Darkhold to summon him. As you can imagine, this did not work out especially well for her and her followers and they had to seal Chthon away in Wundagore Mountain, which was where Wanda found him. (The Spider-Woman stuff is only slightly earlier and also appears to be about Morgan and the Darkhold; the Darkhold is not one of the areas of 616 canon I am especially conversant with, alas. It's on my to-read list.)

Doomquest, as you probably know, was a classic Iron Man two-parter in Layton & Michelinie's first Iron Man run that set up Tony and Doom as rivals; Doomquest itself was IM #149-150, in 1981, and then in their second IM run they came back and did a sequel in 1989, Recurring Knightmare (IM #249-250), and then the much later four-part sequel to that was the 2008 miniseries Iron Man: Legacy of Doom, which was also by Layton & Michelinie but generally does not seem to be as popular as the first two parts. They've all been reprinted, if you're looking for copies; I have a Doomquest hardcover that collects the first four issues and then a separate Legacy of Doom hardcover. Currently in the Iron Man Epic Collection line there's a volume called Doom, which confusingly only collects the 249-250 part of the storyline (as well as surrounding issues), because for some reason the first Layton & Michelinie run isn't in Epics yet but the second one is. So the beginning of Doomquest isn't currently in print, as far as I can tell. I'm sure you can find it anyway.

So what's Doomquest about? Okay, so you remember how Doctor Doom's mother's soul is stuck in hell for all eternity? Well, Doom's obviously interested in getting her back, and the strategy he has embarked on is to try to team up with other powerful magicians who can help him out, and he thinks Morgan le Fay would be a good choice, for, uh, his quest. Doom's quest. A Doomquest, if you will. (If you've ever read Doctor Strange & Doctor Doom: Triumph & Torment, you're familiar with the part where he later ends up waylaying Strange for this and they go to hell together. And if you haven't read Triumph & Torment, you really should, because it's amazing.)

So Doom is off to his time machine to go team up with Morgan le Fay and Tony thinks Doom is up to something -- Doom has been stealing components for his time machine from a lot of people, including Tony -- and he follows him and it turns out one of Doom's lackeys has a grudge and wants to trap Doom in the past forever, and Tony gets caught up in it. Now they're both in Camelot. Surprise! #149 is actually all setup; they don't get to Camelot until #150.

IM #150 begins with Doom and Tony thrown back into the past; there's a fandom-famous splash page of them locked in combat, only to realize that they have found themselves in Camelot.

They are then discovered by knights; Doom would very much like to attack them, but Tony, who naturally would be happy to LARP Camelot forever, persuades him to play nice. Also Doom thinks Iron Man is only Tony's bodyguard so he keeps referring to him as "lackey," much to Tony's annoyance. Somehow everyone thinks they're sorcerers. Can't imagine why. The knights take them to meet King Arthur himself, and Tony has clearly had his introduction all ready to go, as he introduces himself in a timeline-appropriate manner, says he's here to apprehend Doom, and demonstrates his "magic" by levitating Arthur's throne. Doom's response is essentially "I'm the king of Latveria," which is, y'know, also valid. So they're guests at Camelot for the night while Arthur figures out what to do with them.

We then have a page devoted to Tony alone in his room, musing sadly about how alien he feels, how he doesn't know if he'll ever get home, how he could never fit in here without his beloved technology. Then a Sexy Lady shows up to keep him company for the night, and he decides maybe it's not all bad. Thanks, Marvel. I guess they can't all be winners.

Doom is using his evening much more productively; he compels one of the servants to tell him where Morgan's castle is, because he's still interested in having that team-up. Then he jets off. Literally. He has a jetpack.

The next morning Arthur's like "one of you is still here and one of you has punched a hole through the castle wall and flown off to join Morgan so I guess I know which of you is more trustworthy." He then explains to Tony who Morgan is, because Tony professes ignorance, because clearly we had not yet retconned in Tony's love of Arthuriana. Tony offers to go fight Doom and Morgan with Arthur; meanwhile, Morgan and Doom have teamed up and Morgan has offered to help get Doom's mother out of hell if he commands her undead armies against Arthur because for Reasons she can't command them herself anymore. So that's a thing that happens.

So, yes, it's Tony and Arthur versus Doom and Morgan. Fight fight fight!

Tony tries Doom first but then decides to hunt Morgan down, and in the ensuing fight we get what I think is Tony's first ever "I hate magic," a complaint that we all know he still makes even to this day.

Anyway, Tony freezes a dragon with Freon (mmm, technology) and Morgan gets upset and disappears, so the battle comes to an end, and of course Doom is extremely mad at Tony because he blames Tony for Morgan not sticking around to save Doom's mom, because I guess Doom trusted her to keep her word? Weird. (Like I said, for the next chapter of Doom saving his mother, go read Triumph & Torment.)

Doom says if he and Tony work together, the components in both of their armors can send them both home. So Tony has to trust Doom. Which he does, because he really has no other choice. They build a time machine and Tony makes Doom agree to a 24-hour truce when they get back, so they can both get home. So it all works out okay, and they end up in the present, and Doom tells him, ominously, that they will meet again. Okay, then. That concludes the original Doomquest. It's fun! You can see why fandom likes it.

So that's all well and good, but you might have noticed that Tony's ability to get home hinged on Doom actually being trustworthy. And Doom was. But what if Doom hadn't been? What if he'd just stranded Tony in Camelot forever As you may have surmised from the form of that question, that is in fact a question Marvel asked themselves, because, yes, there's a What If about this! What If v1 #33 is "What if Iron Man was trapped in the time of King Arthur?"

The divergence point from canon, as you can probably guess, is the very end of Doomquest. Instead of Doom bringing Tony home, he deceives him and leaves him in Camelot. And since Tony cannibalized a lot of the tech from his armor to make the time machine, he doesn't have a way to go home.

This is not a story where Tony comes up with a way to go home after all. He really doesn't get to go home. But instead of drowning his sorrows in mead -- because, remember, Demon in a Bottle has already happened and Tony is sober now -- he decides he might as well just play the hand he's dealt. So with what's left of his armor, he defeats some enemies that Morgan rounds up to send against Camelot. And for his services, he's knighted. He is now Sir Anthony.

Tony acknowledges that he is both living the dream and would also like very, very much to go home.

He does end up having some fun in Camelot; it's not all miserable. But he obviously doesn't want to be there.

So if you're at all familiar with King Arthur, you know how this goes, right? Arthur fights Mordred and Mordred kills him. And that does happen in this version. Except Tony is right there, and with his dying words, Arthur asks Tony to rule Camelot... and Tony agrees.

So, yes, Tony Stark becomes king of the Britons after Arthur's death and he never goes home again. The end. Man, I love What Ifs.

Heading back to main 616 continuity, there is still more of this arc to go. The original Doomquest was only two issues, yes, but it was popular enough that Layton & Michelinie did a sequel a hundred issues later, in their second run of Iron Man, and that's Iron Man #249-250, Recurring Knightmare. (In the intervening issues were Denny O'Neil's IM run, specifically the second drinking arc (#160-200), and then Layton & Michelinie came back and most famously gave us Armor Wars (#225-232). I would have to say that Armor Wars is definitely the standout fandom-favorite arc of their second IM run; for their first one, I think a lot of people would have a hard time choosing between Doomquest and Demon.) But anyway, yes. Recurring Knightmare.

Recurring Knightmare is... well, the best way I can describe it is "a trip." It is definitely a sequel to Doomquest, and it is also definitely not a sequel you  would ever have expected to see for Doomquest.

Much like #149, #249 is pretty much just setup. Fun setup, but the big action is in the next issue. We open with Doom in Latveria, on his throne, pondering which of his servants he should have disintegrated. Anyway, he's just hanging out there when a mysterious object appears. In California, Tony is suited up and entertaining the crowd at a mall opening when the same object also appears! He takes it to his lab. Please note that this is after the Kathy Dare incident, so Tony is still recovering and is walking with a cane. Doom sees on the news that Iron Man has found the same object, which cannot be carbon-dated, and he shows up at Tony's house. He criticizes Tony's taste in art.

Anyway, Doom basically orders Tony to work with him. Tony refuses, and then Doom sends some robots to attempt to steal Tony's version of the object because he thinks if he has them both he will be powerful. Doom manages to steal it, and when he puts the pieces together, both he and Tony disappear.

So where do they go, you might ask? Camelot?

Not exactly. The future! There is a great callback to the Doomquest splash page.

It turns out they are in London in 2093. Merlin brought them there. Tony still hates magic. And in the future, King Arthur is still there, except he is now a child, because he has been reborn. But he does remember Tony from Doomquest, at which point Tony kneels. Doom, of course, is not impressed. He asks why they have been brought to the future.

The answer is that things are going wrong in the future. If you do not personally remember United States politics in the 1980s, I need you to google the words "Strategic Defense Initiative" right now. I'll wait.

Back with me? Okay, so this is a future where Reagan's Star Wars program actually happened the way he wanted it to, and the satellites are still hanging around the Earth in the future and messing everything up, and Arthur and Merlin need Tony and Doom's help to stop them. Doom once again flies away with his jetpack, of course.

Tony is game to help, but he's not in an armor that can stay in space for long. This is when Merlin takes him and Arthur to the mall and Tony manages to get everything to upgrade his armor at Radio Shack. You see what I meant about this issue being weird.

Tony is out in space trying to disarm the SDI platform, which is where he runs into his future descendant, Andros Stark, who is in armor you will probably recognize from Iron Man 2020. He is referred to as "the resurrected spawn of Iron Man 2020" so I assume he's actually directly related to Arno rather than a direct descendant of Tony; Wiki confirms that Arno is his grandfather. This is all from way before Arno was contemporaneous with Tony in canon. Anyway, he's fighting Tony.

Oh, by the way, Future Doom exists. Future Doom would like to rule this future Earth and for some reason Andros would like to help him. Meanwhile, Present Doom finds out from Merlin that he can't leave except by magic and he can't leave without Tony, so he is reluctantly on Tony's side.

They need help from the Lady of the Lake, except the lake has been paved over and is now a parking lot. Merlin makes the lake come back and then of course they get Excalibur. Arthur is a kid, so he can't wield a longsword; Doom assumes he's going to take it because he is basically a king, and he's pretty grumpy when the sword picks Tony. Tony then uses Excalibur to destroy the space lasers, and I bet that is a sentence you never thought you would read. It's pretty cool. Tony concludes that magic has its good points. Tony stops Andros and Doom stops, uh, himself, and the world is saved and they get to go home. Also, Doom finds out Tony is Iron Man, but when Merlin sends them back he conveniently erases their memories, so neither of them remember anything about this and Tony's secret is still safe. And that's the sequel to Doomquest.

And if you think that's weird, wait until you see Legacy of Doom.

Iron Man: Legacy of Doom is a four-issue miniseries from 2008, also by Layton and Michelinie. Even though it's from 2008, it's set during a much more classic time in Iron Man, continuing on from where we left off in this Doomquest saga. We start with a framing story in 2008. Tony, who has Extremis now, is busy scrapping some of his older armors and reviewing his logs when he suddenly remembers that there was a whole thing with Doom that happened that he seems to have forgotten about until right now. So the whole thing is narrated by Tony in flashback.

Tony's in space fixing a satellite when a hologram of Doom shows up and summons him to Latveria. It's not really clear why Doom needs Tony's help in particular here, but Doom tells Tony that he's discovered that Mephisto would like to bring about the end of the world, which Doom finds, and I quote, "presumptive." So Doom has his Time Cube, and with it he takes Tony to hell.

(Yes, I promise this is relevant to Doomquest. There will be some Arthuriana shortly.)

Doom brings Tony to Mephisto, and it turns out it's a setup! Doom trades Tony for an item he wants from Mephisto, leaves, and Tony's going to be trapped in hell forever! Oh no! (I mean, he's not. But it's quite a cliffhanger.)

At the beginning of issue #2, we find out what the Arthurian connection is, which is that we learned that after the events of Doomquest, Morgan had been granted sanctuary by Mephisto in exchange for a shard of Excalibur that she had somehow stolen. Doom still wants Morgan's help with some magic -- he doesn't mention what it is here, but he says he needs someone of Pendragon blood, and that'd be her -- so he traded Tony to Mephisto in exchange for, I'm guessing, Morgan and the Excalibur shard.

I have probably mentioned this elsewhere, but Legacy of Doom #2 is one of my favorite issues of Iron Man ever, solely because of the next scene. We return to Tony in hell. Howard Stark is also in hell, and he is now a demon, and Tony has to fight him. Mephisto brings popcorn and watches. This is the one time in canon when Tony actually confronts his father, and okay, yes, it's a fistfight in hell and Howard is a demon, but that's comics for you. Howard spends several pages insulting Tony -- specifically insulting his masculinity, but that's a whole other essay -- until he finally insults Maria too, and that's when Tony fights back, because his mother taught him to be good. Honestly if you're a Tony fan I'd recommend this issue just for that scene.

Anyway, we go back to the Doom and Morgan plot, and Morgan casts the spell Doom wanted, which was fusing the Excalibur shard with Doom's armor. Then Doom sends her back to Camelot rather than hell, because he's still mad that she never helped him get his mom out of hell like she said she would.

Tony freezes Howard with Freon -- yes, the same trick he pulled on the dragon back in Doomquest -- and tells him, "You're no father of mine." It is immensely satisfying.

(I had been going to mention that I thought it was a shame that neither canon nor fandom seems to have really engaged with this confrontation, and I know canon never believes in narrative closure but fandom sure does -- and then, anyway, it occurred to me that since the framing story of Tony remembering this is set when Tony has Extremis, there's a very good chance that he no longer remembers remembering it. Goddammit, Marvel.)

(If I got to retcon one canon thing about Tony, I think "the entirety of World's Most Wanted" is up there. I mean, okay, a lot of things are up there, but WMW is definitely on the shortlist.)

Okay. Tony has now engineered his way out of hell, and he's back with Doom in Latveria. Doom has Excalibur. Doom would very much like to fight him. While wielding Excalibur. You get the sense that this is going to be bad. Another cliffhanger!

Legacy of Doom #3 opens with Tony destroying Doom's lab to buy time and running away from Doom and Excalibur. I should probably mention that Doom still doesn't know Tony is Iron Man (anymore), so he thinks he is dealing only with Iron Man, Tony Stark's lackey. Meanwhile, some scientists at SI think there's something weird going on with space. Meanwhile meanwhile, Tony is in a forest taking a breather when a mysterious old man walks up to him.

It's Merlin! Surprise! Merlin wants Tony's help to stop Doom from doing whatever he's doing with Excalibur. The sword makes you invincible and the scabbard makes you invulnerable, so Merlin sends Tony to Scotland on a fetch quest for the scabbard. Doom has now magically sent the sword in search of the scabbard, so the sword flies away to meet it and Doom follows. Turns out the thing that's wrong with space is a thing that's going to hit Earth at the exact place Tony and Doom are. What a coincidence! So Tony and Doom get trapped in a stone circle and fight some stone warriors and then Tony ends up with the scabbard. And by "ends up with," I mean it fuses to his armor. Next issue!

Legacy of Doom #4 is when things really, really get weird. A giant demon made of eyes (???) appears, and this demon is apparently what Doom had been preparing to fight (because it's mad that Doom stole one of its spellbooks), and now he can't, because the sword and the scabbard aren't together. Thanks, Shellhead.

That's when Merlin shows up and says all is not lost. They can defeat the demon... if they put the sword into the scabbard.

"But I'm the scabbard now!" Tony says, uncomprehending.

"Yes," Merlin says. "You are."

Then Tony gets it.

So, yes, Doom has to, um, penetrate Tony. With Excalibur. I love comics. I love comics so much.

So that's a thing that happens.

And then Tony flies off and, I guess, resolves to never, ever think about any of this again.

We head back to the framing story, in which Tony, now having remembered all of this, flies to Britain, buys the land the lake is on, and paves it over, presumably so it will be there for Merlin to bring back in Iron Man #250. The end.

Whew.

Okay, yeah, I know I didn't have to summarize the whole thing, but Legacy of Doom here really is one of my favorite Iron Man miniseries. And I just want to share the love. Please read it. It's great.

But the Arthuriana fun doesn't end there! In fact, now we get an Arthurian-themed arc that actually isn't in Iron Man comics. It's in Avengers! Iron Man is involved, though.

(There is also apparently a Morgan arc in Avengers #240. I actually haven't read it. It seems to be yet another Spider-Woman arc. I get the impression that this isn't really Arthuriana other than having Morgan in it fighting Jess, though, so it doesn't seem quite as relevant. Morgan also apparently has some appearances in FF, Journey into Mystery, and Marvel Team-Up, but those seem like more of just basic villainy. Also, probably not involving Tony.)

Kurt Busiek's 1998 Avengers run, volume 3, is in large part the kind of Avengers run that is a nostalgic love letter to older comics. Heroes are heroes and villains are villains and good triumphs over evil. The Avengers all live in the mansion and are BFFs. I love it. It does assume that you are already a fan of the Avengers, because it starts out by summoning pretty much everyone who has ever been an Avenger and is available to the mansion, and that is... a lot of people. Thirty-nine, by my count. Also, when the entire team is magically whisked away, we are treated to the following narration, as Steve disappears: "And Captain America's last thought, as the world goes white around him, and he with it -- is that Iron Man would hate this."

The narration doesn't tell you why Iron Man would hate this, or how Captain America would know that Iron Man hates this. This is not explained later on. But if you have read comics -- or if you have read the above summary of Doomquest -- you know that Tony is absolutely, one hundred percent, thinking, "I hate magic." And Steve knows it.

The reference is not relevant to the plot; if you don't get it, you'll be fine. But that's what I mean when I say this is a nostalgia run. There are definitely Easter eggs for people who have read a bunch of comics. Busiek does this a whole lot in his work -- there's a reason you can buy an annotated edition of Marvels -- and, yeah, it happens here too. Just know that there will be references you're not getting, if you're new to comics.

Anyway. So Busiek's run actually starts out with an Arthurian arc, #1-4, "The Morgan Conquest." The name is a dead giveaway. Yes, Morgan le Fay is back. Again. For once, Doom is not involved.

The Avengers are all back from their sojourn on Counter-Earth after fighting Onslaught -- don't worry about it -- and mysterious things are happening. There are a lot of monster attacks. So pretty much everyone who has ever been an Avenger is summoned to the mansion, at which point we learn from Thor about some mystical artifacts that are being stolen. (They are the Norn Stones and also the Twilight Sword. That sounds like something from a Zelda game, doesn't it?) The Avengers go to try to stop this, end up in Tintagel, and then they run into Mordred. He wants to capture Wanda, presumably for Magic Reasons. Morgan le Fay casts a spell on all of them, reshaping reality. Yes, all of them. Surprise!

So now all the Avengers are living in a medieval castle and/or town; Morgan is their queen, and thanks to the power of mind-control they are all basically living in Ye Olden Times. The Avengers are all some variety of knight, except for Wanda, who is chained up in the dungeon so Morgan can steal her magic and use it to fuel all this reality-warping.

Wanda calls for help, and that snaps Steve (Yeoman America!) out of the mind control (or altered reality or whatever you want to call it) pretty fast, because Steve's always been very good at resisting mind control, and then Steve promptly goes and snaps Clint out of it, because I guess Steve is also good at inspiring people to snap out of mind control. "Oh, man!" Clint says. "Not another alternate reality! Not again!" (I assume he's referring to Counter-Earth? Maybe?)

So Steve and Clint go around reassembling the Avengers and orienting them as to reality. They get Jan and Monica easily, but then Steve insists on trying to get Tony because, I guess, he likes Tony and would really like to hang around Tony, who is half-naked and asleep in his bedroom, and certainly I am reading nothing whatsoever into this. Clint tells Steve it's not going to work. Tony has historically been fairly susceptible to mind control; it was only pretty recently at this point that he'd been doing Kang's bidding in The Crossing. But the more serious impediment is that this is Tony Stark and he would obviously like to LARP being a knight forever and ever. Tony, therefore, does not believe Steve, and throws him and Clint out of his bedroom and into the barracks.

"Iron Man's a good guy, normally," Clint says. "But he's waaay too into his whole nobleman/lord of the manor trip. That spell musta hit him right where he lives!"

Clint speaks the truth, clearly.

Anyway, they go around and manage to make pretty much every Avenger in the room other than Tony snap out, and attempt to rebel against Morgan while Tony is stil fighting them because he is Still A Knight. There's a lot of punching, because some of the Avengers still aren't free; they weren't ones Steve found.

The day is saved when Wanda manages to channel Wonder Man and break free. This gives the Avengers a fighting chance against Morgan and the Avengers are all lending Wanda their power when Tony finally snaps out of it and is on the side of good. 

Then they take Morgan down, go home, and attempt to figure out which of these thirty-nine people should be on the active Avengers team. Hooray.

But that's not the end of Morgan le Fay showing up to screw around with Tony's life! There's more to come! Not much, but there is one that I know of, and at least one more memorable reference. 

(I haven't read all her appearances or anything, but one of them definitely involves Tony; I can't swear that he doesn't appear in any of the other books Morgan shows up in, but it'd be a cameo for him, because I only know of one more arc that she's in in a book that Tony stars in.)

In a few more years, we have now entered the part of Marvel Comics history where Brian Michael Bendis writes all the Avengers books at the same time for, like, seven years running. It was sure A Time. There were a lot of word bubbles.

And the thing about Bendis is, Bendis looooooves Doomquest. If you're familiar with the very end of his tenure at Marvel where he made Doom be Iron Man after Tony got knocked into a coma in Civil War II, you have probably figured out already that he likes Doom. But he also likes Doomquest, specifically.

I mean, if nothing else, the giant splash page in The Confession where Maleev redrew the climactic Doomquest fight while Bendis had Tony talk about how deeply meaningful to his understanding of the world this all was -- and how it allowed him to predict Civil War -- was probably a big clue, right?

As far as I am aware, Morgan le Fay makes exactly one more appearance in Tony's life. And that's in Mighty Avengers vol 1 #9-11. Only one of those issues is named, so I'm going to assume the arc is named after it: Time Is On No One's Side.

You remember Mighty Avengers, right? The deal with the Avengers books at the time was that after Bendis exploded the mansion and made the team disband in Avengers Disassembled, the main Avengers book was no longer called just Avengers. Instead, the main Avengers book was New Avengers, and that was the only Avengers book. Then Civil War happened, Steve got killed, and New Avengers became the book about what was left of the SHRA resistance (i.e., Steve's side) after the war. So about halfway through New Avengers, Mighty Avengers starts up, and Mighty Avengers is about an extremely fucked-up and grief-stricken Tony Stark trying to run the official government-sanctioned Avengers team, with Carol's help. This is the comic with the arc where Tony turned into naked girl Ultron. You remember.

So, anyway, there's this Mighty Avengers arc where Doom is Up To Something (there are symbiotes and a satellite involved) and somehow Tony and the Avengers end up in Latveria, punching Doom. Also, by the way, Doom is visiting Morgan in the past because he likes her. The Avengers attacking his castle made him have to come back to the present, so he's kind of cranky. And he fights Tony, and in the course of the fight, his time platform explodes and sends Doom and Tony and also the Sentry to... the past.

This is one of those times where you should definitely look up the comics if possible because the way the past is visually indicated here is that it's colored with halftone dots the way you would expect old comics to be colored, although they have modern shading and color palettes. It's very charmingly retro.

So the three of them are stuck in New York in the past, and naturally they would like to leave. There's one person in this time who has a time machine and it is, of course, Reed Richards. Doom and Tony have a lot of banter in this arc; I think it's entertaining.

Sentry has to be the one to break them all into the Baxter Building because of that power he has where no one will remember him. So they do that, travel forward in time, and end up in Latveria in the present again except Doom is gone and also things are currently exploding where they are.

Doom, of course, has made a side trip to visit Morgan again and he asks her to help him build an army, because I guess this is what their relationship is like. So the rest of the Avengers are captured by what look to me like Mindless Ones and are in a cave in magic bondage, because comics. Jess comments that at least they aren't naked, because she too is remembering that memorable New Avengers trip to the Savage Land. Doom threatens Carol in some creepy sexist ways and eventually it turns out that Tony and the Sentry are fine and everyone kicks Doom's ass. Business as usual.

And the last page of the arc is Morgan alone, wondering where Doom is. So technically Morgan and Tony don't come face to face here, but I think she counts as being at least partially responsible for ruining Tony's day here. And then Secret Invasion happens and Tony has a very, very bad day.

There are a few more Morgan appearances after this, but, as I said, I don't think any of them involve Tony. She shows up in Dark Avengers, apparently, which was one of the post-Civil War Avengers titles I didn't read, and I know that recently, on the X-Men side of things, she's been in Tini Howard's Excalibur one, which I have only read a little of. No Tony there. Just a lot of Morgan and Betsy Braddock and Brian Braddock and the Otherworld.

If you are interested in Morgan's other appearances, you might like this Marvel listicle that is Morgan le Fay's six most malicious acts. I pulled some of the Darkhold backstory from their discussion, but it's not really focused on Morgan and Tony.

So there you have it! That's everything I know about Tony's love for King Arthur and every run-in I know about that he's had with Morgan le Fay! One of two terrible people in Tony's life named Morgan! Actually, I don't think we've seen Morgan Stark in a while. I wonder if he's alive. There should be a Morgan & Morgan team-up. I should probably stop typing and post this.

The tl;dr point is that you should all read Doomquest and its sequels, especially Legacy of Doom. They're great!

[gendercensus]

I saw that you removed third gender because of the anthropological definition- that's not the definition most people use for it. Third gender relates mainly to the western binary and means a gender that's neither a man nor a woman but something else. It's now known as maverique, which has a flag and is more popular, but people who had the gender identity before the word was established used third gender instead because it was the easiest to explain. I just wanted to clarify this because seeing someone call one of my genders a scientific term was super weird and kind of offensive. As much as I care about the safety and comfort of poc in the nb community, we already replaced the term while acknowledging that none of us meant the one that is incredibly transphobic and racist to begin with they just co-evolved separately and with nothing to do with one another. If possible, a note that the history of third gender as a nb identity and as a term within anthropology would be really appreciated. Our community is very small and I'd hate for young nbs to feel as though the term they relate to isn't a gender they can identify with without being bigoted, especially when we've done the work necessary to establish community elsewhere where there are less problems for everyone.

For context, this ask is a reference to this part of the 2020 worldwide report:

Last year I decided that I would remove terms from the checkbox list that were chosen by under 3% of participants in both the over-30s and under-30s group and that didn’t correspond with other more popular terms on the list. This year one term met the criteria: third gender. I looked into the phrase a little more last year, and found that it’s essentially a term used by white anthropologists to describe non-straight-non-cis people in non-Western societies. That could include LGB people and binary trans people, in addition to people whose genders are not described by the M/F binary. On the basis of racism alone I am very happy to finally remove this term from the checkbox list next year.

There is a lot going on in my head in response to your ask, so I’m putting it into bullet points to tidy it up!

I would really love to see some sources to back up the claim that maverique has the exact same meaning as third gender and that one has replaced the other. Something about this claim feels very off to me and I can’t quite articulate why.

I can definitely see how third gender as an identity term could have evolved separately alongside the use of third gender in an anthropological context. “So if you’re not a man or a woman but you still have a gender, what are you?” “Oh you know, some third gender, I guess?” It’s very intuitive, and the definition is right there in the term itself.

I agree that the way I talked about the term third gender in the 2020 report doesn’t take into account the people who started claiming and using it independently of the anthropology context. My tone was pretty insensitive, so I’d like to go back and edit the report to correct that.

My understanding is there are several words that mean “a specific and whole gender identity entirely distinct from female/woman/feminine and male/man/masculine”. To claim that one particular word has entirely replaced another with the exact same meaning, with the implication that this was an intentional community decision by consensus, seems very bold to me - there is certainly no mention of it on the Nonbinary Wiki pages for third gender or maverique - so if that truly has happened I would like to read more about it.

~

Edit: Also, just spotted this:

I saw that you removed third gender because of the anthropological definition

That isn’t true. I removed it because it was chosen as a checkbox option by under 3% of respondents in both the over-30 and under-30 age groups. With some exceptions, anything that is chosen or typed in often enough will be on the checkbox list, regardless of whether or not I personally like it.

[scrawnytreedemon]

Shit I’ve Been Winding Up For A Long Time Now But Am Very Aware Will Probably Hold No Relevance Should I Actually Go Into This More--

This is about Bhunivelze.

I.

You know, when I was chilling out, on my bed, that evening on that half term in early June, deciding to check up on ClementJ64′s FF retrospective because-- Hey! It’s been awhile, I wonder if he’s got around to doing the final bit of the FFXIII saga --You know, I was there, chilling, just for a laff. Just a laff.

The rest of that week was spent spiralling into a hyperfixation I absolutely did not anticipate in any way, shape, or form, because the way they introduced that character was “wwhdhfjjhHJDFJKHKJHW H A T??”

That retrospective and a good amount of wiki-scrounging is all I have as a basis for this. This is not a coherent character analysis-- Though I might tag it as that for ease of access. This is not, by any means, the thoughts of someone deeply familiar with FFXIII on the whole beyond plot synopses and overarching themes.

I don’t think I’m brave enough for that.

Reading the vast yet surface-deep lore on those wiki pages on my birthday while in a delirious state of mind was enough to make me somewhat nauseous.

Do you think I’m going to go through all of that in real time?

(Someday, someday.)

Ugh, I don’t know how to begin, but let us, I guess. I’d recommend you read this church-mime-demiurge’s FF Wiki page if you want the same level of base-knowledge I had, and maybe the aformentioned retrospective if you want the experience, because I don’t think I have the wherewithal to get into all of that from the bottom-up.

I am also, so, so fucking sorry for any remaining FFXIII fans in advance. There is like, a good chance I may be butchering the characterisation completely, so bear with me here.

With that... we begin?

Where do we even start with this guy?

How on earth to you begin to explain the absolute monolith you’ve constructed from crumbs of a Guy, some material no doubt spliced in from the Pale King, Sephiroth, y o u r  o w n  G o d  O C and other characters, and the mountains of religious trauma you carry around at all times that is probably the only reason you’ve been able to latch on as hard as you did?

I’m going to try.

What gets me, in summary, about Bhunivelze is how he’s a prime example of how love and concern can become deadly forces if in the wrong hands. His first acquainting with human emotion was by deceiving and possessing Hope, reverting his body to a teenage state, and planning to live among humanity through him. He sees human sorrow and suffering, and decides that, to End This(because it must be ended, you see) he’s going to destroy all the souls of the deceased that make up the Chaos that’s been eating this world for the past five-hundred years so they all forget and Are Happy. :).

Capital G God here hasn’t been present for the vast part of human history because he’s hidden himself away from Everything due to paranoia from killing his own mother and throwing her body into the Cosmic Basement, THEN creating the beings that would come to create humanity and OTHER beings because he didn’t have the keys to the cosmic basement. And also he believes death is a thing because she’d’ve somehow cursed all things to pass(including him) out of Spite.

Which explains why he’s so fucking averse to it and anything to do with it.

Bhunivelze, to put it lightly, is Shit at stepping into others’ shoes and Getting their experiences-- All the FalCie in FFXIII are, but him especially. It’s clear(again, in the f u c k i n g JP--) that he makes attempts to sympathise with them and does what he can to help, but it’s with such a loftiness and a complete inability to Understand why anyone would want grief, The Worst Fucking Experience In Existence, and even less why they’d be willing to Go Up Against Him And HisThe New Perfect World just for it-- And what would it matter, anyway, forgetting their loved ones. It’s not like you can grieve lost memories, right?

Right.

It reminds me of when at the end of the story of Job in the Bible, where, after putting this man through hell on earth, God rewards Job by giving him ten new children to make up for the ones that he lost. I. And that’s fucked! Nothing can replace the sheer uniqueness of each individual person you loved so dearly! But if you were a nigh-omnipotent deity high and mighty, with a cursory, almost mechanical knowledge on the functionings of the human psyche, that would seem adequete; enough.

Bhunivelze is doing that on a cosmic level.

I now want to get onto the romance: that being, his affections for Lightning. I don’t know how much I’m going to say, but it’ll probably be alot. It’s something that hits very close to home.

There is this... thing, within certain branches of Christianity, perhaps even in those of various Abrahamic faiths, where God’s love is posited to be the love-- The ultimate, most-fulfilling, all-encompassing love you could ever imagine --Because, well, he is love, so the story goes, and so often the best way to convey that is through the imagery of...

Marriage.

Giving up yourself so completely, to serve, to be the Bride; to be bound by him for all eternity; and for there to be no higher bliss than this.

This angle is pushed on young girls and women the most; from the mere parallels to the woman’s role in marriage, all the way down to downright-horrifying ultra-Evangelical purity pacts. With men, God is your dad, your best bud and confidant, your boss, your king, your this, your that, and the ‘marriage‘ as it were is relegated to a sort of half-thought; a metaphor.

For me, God was an attempt at all that, and my arranged groom.

(It was almost incestuous; was incestuous, that my own Divine Father would reach for my hand in marriage.)

Bhunivelze experiences Emotions™ for the first time through Hope, experiences Hope’s sheer overwhelming admiration for Lighting(whether there were any baby-crush feelings mixed in, I can’t say), and promptly falls into a nigh-romantic obsession with Lightning, deciding that she will be Etro(his all-but daughter)’s replacement, will be his Goddess of Death to-be-- He even calls her as such, before the final boss-battle--

...In the JP.

What happened in localisation, probably due to a number of factors, all the way back in early 2014, was that everything emotionally challenging about Bhunivelze was scraped off, like it was extra fat, and tossed aside, leaving us with the bland, clichéd shell of a foe-god we’ve seen time and time again. And I mean everything. I mean his very love for humanity; the fact his ploy was, in his eyes, to save them. Because if they’d left that all on, then it would raise the question of even if there was such a seemingly pure, all-knowing, loving being hell-bent on setting things “straight,“ would they truly be unquestionable? Would we have the right to fight for our humanity in the face of the Creator of the Universe?

To reject a love so personal?

That’s what gets me about FFXIII’s tackling of God, no matter how hackneyed and poorly-executed. It’s personal.

It’s from a feminine experience.

I know that terming is... vague, and problematic, but the way Christianity and much of the video game industry handle femininity itself is weird and problematic, so as it stands, I’ll have to simplify it. Apologies.

What sets FFXIII’s Let’s Kill God™ plot aside from most JRPG Let’s Kill God™ plots is that with our protagonist being a woman, and one who is very in touch with her femininity alongside her sheer strength; often, in these stories, God is reduced to Yet Another Foe, expected or unexpected, and you are tasked with taking him down unquestioningly for the Good of Mankind-- You will fight God, because you are right to, and you will go man-to-man-to-however-many-men you decide to bring along for the bloodbath.

And that just, doesn’t speak to me.

Even as an Extian.

Especially as an Extian. And an AFAB one with a deeply complicated experience with my gender, at that.

Leaving Christianity was painful. Questioning God was painful. Coming to terms with the fact that I had been mentally, emotionally, and spiritually traumatised under the guise of All-Encompassing Love was so, so fucking painful. I had been taught since I was five years old to devote myself to him, spent my life desperate to feel something, anything, to stay connected because I just, I never could Feel It on a deeper level, never could Give Up Myself, all I was, couldn’t Die A Spiritual Death And Be Reborn As His Eager Vessel, thus deeming myself to be worthless and a broken vessel for years and years on end... And for all that to have been... Nothing.

Lightning is hollowed out, the shards of her dead sister ripped from her in-stasis, leaving her emotionally numb for the majority of the game, Bhunivelze sweeps it under the rug, pretends he’ll perform a miracle and return Serah to life in exchange for her compliance, then sends her on her way to do his work, all the while knowing he’s going to pull said-rug from under her and elevate her such dizzying heights in the aftermath--

That he’ll deny her humanity.

Sand down all the rough edges that make her her, and polish her up afterwards, gild her as he is gilded, make her a Goddess.

And he’ll do it all because he loves her.

You can’t fight God like you can everything else. To fight It is the fight Existence Itself; FFXIII even conveys that by making Bhunivelze’s model part of the arena; it’s baked into the fabric of the game, no matter how minute.

While Lightning Returns is far from perfect in its execution of this concept, and that in itself makes me wince, not even taking into account the horribly botched excuse for a localisation Bhunivelze endured, it speaks to me more than anything else I’ve seen so far.

And it’s helped uncover some things within me. Helped me untangle them, just a little more.

So, yeah. I have alot of Thoughts on Bhunivelze, I want to share them, and I’m kinda really sad I have no one but my currently-absent friend Vee to share them with. I could get into alot more, like his very Fucked relationship with familial bonds, and how Lightning’s role as saviour so deeply parallels the overwhelming panic and never-ending guilt of Evangelical proselytisation, but I think I’ll leave those for another time.

In short, Bhunivelze is the epitome of Divine Love gone deeply wrong; on all fronts.

And if all of that isn’t enough to intrigue you, then, in Vee’s words, Lightning and Velze are literally canon endgame Sefikura lmaOOOOOOOOOOOOOO--

[bokunoheroanalysisforthefuture]

Horikoshi: This will probably not be super popular, but it’ll be fun!

Us: Oh, well that sounds nice!

Us, 290 chapters later: This Isn’t Fun Anymore Horikoshi

Horikoshi: :)

Anyways, welcome to the beginning of - hopefully - a long term and engaging project. I am basically aware of all of canon, and am up to date with the manga, but I haven’t actually read from the beginning of the series, and I’ve only watched the series up to the Deku v Todo fight in the sports festival. However, I’ve been curious as to how the manga portrays stuff that I’ve seen in anime gif form, and so I figured, hey, make this a project!

If you have questions or anything, the ask box is open for now. Meanwhile, I am going to head into the first chapter proper!

[No. 1 - Izuku Midoriya: Origin]

Wow, you’d almost think this kid would grow up to be a villain or something, with that kind of attitude, huh? No way that this kind of attitude would ever come to bite him in the ass and force him to reevaluate his entire character and kickstart his character development.

(Before you say anything, I like Katsuki as a character, but DAMN did he have to do a lot of growing up. I suppose when one is at the bottom, the only way to go is up… unless you have a pickaxe.)

One thing I actually noticed right away, and I dunno how much it’s used in other manga (seeing as I currently am not reading any other manga and the last ones I read were… a long while ago…) is the shape of the text boxes in order to convey emotion! It’s actually hella neat and a little detail I wouldn’t think about adding if I were in his position (not that I can draw all that well, but that’s not my point). You can practically hear the warbling in Izuku’s tone and the rougher edges in Katsuki’s!

(Also, question for the English sub while we’re at it, why the fuck does Katsuki sound like he’s a goddamned adult when he’s fourteen. What the fuck.)

Interesting little thing here, Katsuki not actually using his quirk here against Izuku; his hand is trailing smoke from his explosion, but it’s not a direct burn wound. Not that he should be doing this at all, but with the number of fics I see where Katsuki literally gives Izuku second or third degree burns, I think this is a reminder that canon Katsuki has some modicum of restraint, even this early.

Before I forget, hello winged kid who definitely has no plot significance whatsoever. No siree.

(If you are new to the manga/show and are reading this as among your first introductions to the fandom, first off, I am so sorry. Secondly, expect me to be… definitely making a lot of sarcastic quips to things in the future.)

Onto the second/third page, which is supposed to be a full spread, but is split up into two pages on the online reading site. RIP, but I will not complain about free access to the whole manga. 

Lookit this green bean. I love him so much. I can’t wait for him to suffer.

Izuku: wait, what?

Anyways, a few things to note:

Who the fuck is this guy? I looked into the wiki but he apparently doesn’t warrant a page or even a mention as one of the background faces of the series, but look at that fucking claw, man! And those boots and jets! He’s very obviously themed after a baseball catcher, so I’m going to guess that he has some kind of quirk that deals with either drawing projectiles to him, or perhaps in throwing projectiles… in either case, it’d be something like Snipe’s quirk, so maybe this is his less howdy-happy sibling.

Oh right, the chapter. The other heroes we see on the scene in this two-page spread are Death Arms, Air Jet, and Kamui Woods. 

Also, something I want to point out that I’m sure others have but just struck me while looking at this spread - multiple people are recording / taking pictures of this. I wonder if part of the reason for the villain industry to be as strong as it is is because the villains, even if they know they’ll lose, still get their own sort of fame in being in the news? That… might explain a lot about how there can be enough villains to even run an entire damn industry.

(Well, that and a lot of sociopolitical commentary on BNHA society, but we don’t need to get into that now. Maybe wait two hundred or so chapters first.)

Not gonna lie, I had to double take because I was like ‘wait, what is Ochako doing here?’ but then I realized it was just a random civilian; she doesn’t have those side bangs Ochako does. But now I almost wonder what sort of world we could have had, if they’d met a bit earlier.

Onto the fifth page (fourth is just a filler page, nothing on it), and we get treated to this gem:

Tag yourself I’m the guy who’s slackjawed because his kid is fucking glowing.

The first four examples of quirks shown in this flashback are the luminescence, telekinesis, ice, and that flame-headed(?) mutation. Of them, we actually see hints to the fact that quirks have drawbacks, as the girl with ice is drawn with the same frostbite backlash as Shouto, while the flame-headed kid is… well, I have no idea, but they do not look to be happy.

Also, I love the nod Hori does to the heroes of our era as silhouettes! This is just more evidence to me, along with the fact that the first quirked kid is born and presented in a modern hospital, that this series takes place sometime in the future. I… even calculated the years it could technically be, based on information we get in a few chapters, but I’ll save that for then.

Onto the sixth page! A nice shot of Kamui Woods getting into position, and man is that giant quirk unnerving.

What the fuck is with those feet, Hori. Those aren’t feet.

Next we see how the crowds are reacting, basically with no panic or concern. One guy is just casually letting his boss know he’ll be getting in late. And Backdraft! That is some serious water manipulation, but it seems like it has to be the water they’re in contact with? Also, is it just me or is that a portable pressure hose on their back?

And of course, Izuku being excited over hero stuff, as one does. He’s so babey faced, going back to current chapters after this is gonna be fucking wild.

Onto the seventh page, and here we are with the ‘you’re pure evil’ speech to someone who’s… just a robber. Seriously, dude? I get that you’re still fairly new to the scene (I think he might not be from a hero high school, but a late join program, but that’s another post), but like. You can’t just call random people ‘pure evil’ and correlate petty crime with like, actual mass murderers, or else people might start to see things in black and white and, you know, create the idea of ‘villainous people’ and so push even more innocents down the path of desperation and criminality.

Wait, sociopolitics later. Izuku being a hero fanboy now. Even able to utter Kamui’s attack call as he’s calling it out, with some seriously cool visual effects-

And on the eighth page, we have Mt. Lady crash the scene. Literally. She just fucking shows up outta nowhere and fucking leaps up and delivers a kick right to the villain’s chin, throwing him back through the train bridge wall and sending debris down to the ground below. Sure hope there weren’t civilians there!

Also, hello to that random guy on the roof watching this. I think in Smash they made that guy her manager or something.

I love how Izuku and the other guy are like ‘what the fuck’ while the press just shows up out of nowhere and is like. Hyperfocused on her. (I’ve heard some issues with the portrayal of media/reporters in the series, but since I have no experience with that sort of thing, I can’t say much on it.)

The last panel of this page shows that, fortunately, there were no civilians on that part of the street (even though it being rush hour and the huge crowds on the other side of the bridge should have suggested otherwise… but what do I know?)

With page nine, we get to see our first case of villain apprehension, which to note does not include any sort of quirk suppressors. Because those don’t exist. Otherwise Aizawa and the Eight Precepts’ erasure bullets would not be such huge deals to everyone. I mean yikes, though, the guy is fucking muzzled. And you can see the damage done by Mt. Lady in the background, both physical and emotional. Not to mention…

What the fuck is that face.

But yeah, this notes that performance in heroics determines not only what they’re paid by the government, but also how much fame they get. No way a system like this could backfire in any capacity, right? Right? (cough).

I love how Hori uses Izuku’s muttering habit as the border for the text bubble when the kid zones into his little world. Also, gigantification is noted to be a common and strong quirk, so we really should see more OCs with size altering quirks in fics in the future, you hear me? Honestly, with it being common, I would almost expect there to be entire buildings, or maybe even neighborhoods / blocks dedicated to catering to size shifters… wonder what those places look like.

Also aww, the guy saying good luck on the heroics dream to Izuku and Izuku just sparkling. What a cutie. Can’t wait for him to suffer. :D

Izuku: No seriously, what-

Anyways, I’m cutting off here since we then transition into the next ‘scene’ and this is a long chapter - 55 pages! Besides, this has already surpassed 1700 words, I don’t need to ramble on too long in one post. 

Lemme know what you think, and I’ll be back with more soon!

[steve0discusses]

The Fullmetal Alchemist Live Action Movie Part 9: Ctrl-Z

Well guys, we did it, this is the last installment of the FMA movie. Probably forever because this movie hella bombed and I am 99% positive they will not bring it back (and if they do, it will be a complete reboot because this is a mess) We are left with one burning question--how the hell can you resolve any of this?

Especially this alley of human corpses that you have to keep secret from the public:

PS, I did not skip really anything other than some closeups of them shooting stuff. We just have to trust that Hawkeye can just shoot 60,000 dudes with that tiny gun that probably only holds 6 bullets. (12 bullets? I know nothing about guns.)

But we’ll just have to assume that the corpses are dealt with in their own special way, because the movie will never address these again. So, meanwhile, back at the stone, Ed is dealing with how his MacGuffin is a mix of dead people.

Like this is an aside but dude--the drama that’s still boiling off of whatever is left of the hot turd that became Bon Appetit, like HOT DAMN. People always say everything you like will be problematic in 10 years but MAN. Fully expected for Scott Adams to get problematic. But Bon Appetit? The seemingly innocent cooking show?

Yo, I’m not over it.

Yo, I’m not over how much Bon Appetit lied directly to my face: that freakin smokescreen illusion of a perfect working environment. Cannot wait for the Netflix documentary that will inevitably come out.

So glad I was too lazy to make any fanart of that show. Or that I was not good enough at art to make fanart of Dilbert.

(I say knowing full well that the original English voice actor of Ed Elric had a huge ass harassment coverup that spans 15+ years and the legal followup and trial has been a huge mess.)

Anyway, Ed doesn’t even know how problematic that rock is. He doesn’t even know that the dead people in that stone are his distant relatives and that he’s one of the only living Xerxes’ians (Xerxicans? What do you call people from Xerxes anyway?) that are left on the planet, but it still carries weight. Not as much, but it still carries weight.

What follows is what the movie decided was the most important character development of Fullmetal Alchemist, mostly because it’s the only thing in FMA left after they did this massive edit.

(read more under the cut)

(If the rock were still active then Lust would not be dead, she’d just reform, we’ve been over this. And youknow it’s been a minute for me, maybe this was also a thing in the anime where you can still use stones that are from leftover dead homunculi...it just doesn’t make sense to me. They would reform. But I will let this go.)

And if you were like “Hey back in the anime, it felt like it was a lot harder to get into Truth Hut--didn’t you have to kill a guy most of the time?” and you would be correct! I guess the idea is that Ed doesn’t want to kill the souls already in that rock in order to do the exchange--but this idea is never said out loud in the movie, although it was clearly indicated in the anime. Kind of...something they should have mentioned.

But anyway, now we’re back in truth hut but this time Ed can wear pants.

Over in the corner we have Al’s body, confirmation that he is still a real boy.

I guess they had to put this in, since Al’s only character angst in this movie is whether or not he’s real. They can now at least give us some closure about that.

And as the spectral deity decides to make a bargain, Ed realizes that profiting off of war crimes is a bad look.

PS I really don’t know if I should cover the ass on Al’s body over there. It’s kind of got feet in front of it.

We know that’s a dude in a speedo, right? I don’t have to cover that up? Cuz I’m not.

And while we have closure for Al as being a real boy, we really don’t have a lot of closure for Ed. I’m proud of him for not doing a war crime, but it’s not like he freed any of the souls in that stone and it’s not like he got to the bottom of the conspiracy, and it’s not like we got any payback for Hughes.

Ed is still in emotional limbo at the end of this movie, which is pretty disappointing. But again, I think they were REALLY gunning for a second movie, because most of the stuff at the end of this is them hinting that they’re going to continue the story another time...

but like...they knew they weren’t gonna get a second one. There’s just no way they couldn’t have known after how poorly it did in box offices.

Gotta love anime and their refusal to let the not even real people kiss.

They’re not real. They’re characters in a movie. Let them kiss. It’s fine. No one will get arrested.

But whatever.

This hurts my eyes.

But don’t worry, even though that looks like the end, with that sort of crazy ass flare that allows us to hide any of the background we didn’t feel like drawing, it’s not the very, very end.

It just can’t be, not without out one of these:

That’s right it’s trains!

And also, look at this movie segueing right back into Yugioh. Look at that. We got a cursed demon child and Some Basic Girl playing cards on a moving vehicle? Just the way it should be.

So, that’s over--and honestly--this was a hard movie to make. I think they made a lot of good choices, being honest--but I also think they made a lot of bad ones that overshadow the good stuff by a whole lot.

And since this isn’t really a critique but just a deep dive, lets talk about what we would have done differently. Because honestly? There’s no right answer. You have 130 minutes to tell the whole story. What would you do? See I asked bro what he would have done and his answer was “I would make the only villain Shou and that first villain” who’s name I didn’t remember either, so I decided to look it up on the FMA wiki and I saw a big surprise!

That Adolf Hitler is listed as one of the villains of Fullmetal Alchemist??? Guys did I...am I reading that right on this Wikipedia page?

Is this is not the only Fullmetal Alchemist movie???????

OMG, guys there’s another Fullmetal Alchemist movie and I kid you not, it has Hitler in it.

I mean I’m not going to cap it because I got a list of other things to cap (as I know several of you are patiently waiting for) but like..........why have I never heard of this?

Anyway, bro would just condense everything to just the first 4 episodes and include scar and all the rest. Me? I would do the opposite and start at the very end right when Ed and Al meet up with their Dad, and only talk about Xerxes and the Homunculi and their family relationship and no one else.

I dunno if either of our ideas would work because obvi writing a movie is a lot more than just having an idea. You gotta get that through marketing, through people in suits who don’t know how stories work, through actors who’s hair will not hold a braid, etc etc. I mean one person just decided to put Hitler in it, and that movie got way better reviews so...hell do I know about writing anything?

But overall, the movie served it’s purpose by distracting me from the real world for a little while. So, thanks all for sitting on on this nice little excursion from our typical programming, been a weird year, so I was grateful for this buffer. We will go back to our Yugioh routine in the next update which will go up-----at some point. No idea when, I don’t have a schedule anymore for obvious reasons. But we made it to the start of the last season! Bakura’s in it? We see Pharaoh in actual Egyptian wear? I’m looking forward to a lot of really botched and questionable history, so I’ll see you there.

If you just got here and want to read the beginning of this Fullmetal Alchemist Movie journey with me you can here:

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/fma/chrono

[tfw-no-tennis]

mtmte liveblog issue 28

catch me completely ignoring dark cybertron lmao

yeahhhh so I'm just gonna skip dark cybertron bc no thanks. I did read the tf wiki articles for the issues tho, which is more than I did in the past, so at least now I kinda know what happened, though I had to suffer thru reading about dark cybertron to learn stuff about it. yikes. reading ABOUT dark cybertron further enforced my decision to not actually read thru it

anyways. the best part of dark cybertron was when chromedome threw prowl off that cliff. that was baller lmfao

a 1 page recap of dark cybertron is about all I can handle. thank you

ooh, the 6 months later smash-cut, I fucking love itttt

nautica’s here!!!!!!!!!!! I'm so happy I love her. also brainstorm, and I love their friendship sm

hvbjdkhfbshdfj god I love them. they have such a fun dynamic 

everyone eavesdropping on a therapy session vhbhdjkhafbhkjsdf. hipaa laws mean nothing as usual 

the casual reveal of captain megatron, oh god 

the title fucking slaps, as usual. this is one of my favorites - ‘world, shut your mouth.’ great stuff, and a song title/reference to boot! and this being part 1: towards peace...chefs kiss

and then we flash back to 6 months earlier...yknow now that I'm rereading this, mtmte has a LOT of framing devices used - there's story-within-a-story, flashback/flash-forwards, storytelling with narration, etc...I love it

god hbvhjakdfbshjkdf rodimus saying ‘magic’ and then the little *magic = science rodimus doesn't understand HBGKJHSDBFKHJSDF my idiot boy ily

rodimus roasting prowl is my fav hbfjdkafshsbjkf ‘maybe the knights can help us find a cure for your personality’ ily sm

and then prowl agreeing w/rodimus a few panels later about megatron’s guilt...

optimus...don't you think that making yourself chief of justice is...maybe a bad idea...like, maybe there's a conflict of interests here...just a little bit of bias...a bit too much history, perhaps...

the fact that all the big roles in the trial were given to high-ranking autobots who were heavily involved in the war...I see that cybertrons justice system is as much of a farce as their medical ethics and patient confidentiality laws 

the ‘you BROKE the MATRIX’ panel is so good bjhkdhfbajskhdf

rodimus: LISTEN dad I just wanna resume my space cruise with my frat bro ship I have no interest in politics

psychiatrists HATE him! local former warlord refuses to recognize the validity of psychological analyzation of people’s actions

ravage casually breaking hipaa laws and chilling in megatron’s therapy session like >:3

I love rung...he’s so good at like, passive-aggressively cutting right to the heart of someone’s issues, and he’s so generally mild that you can’t even really get mad at him 

the sudden inclusion of megatron as a major character in mtmte is kinda jarring at first - mostly, for me at least, due in part because I didn't read dark cybertron so this is like, megatron’s introduction as a relevant character in general - but I feel like jro does a great job laying a lot of intrigue down from the very beginning w/his character - like, I already want to know more about what his whole deal is, even though we have, ostensibly, seen pretty much all of his story play out already 

rung name-dropping froid...i remember that made me lose my shit bc cmon. FROID....jesus christ

rung and megatron: holy shit! we’re suddenly being drawn in a 90s-esque sci-fi tron-looking retro-futuristic style!

interesting that megatron sought rung out, and not the other way around

RIPTIDE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! my favorite sharkboy is HERE

CREWDITIONS...YES....

‘we’re not allowed to take anyone who might remind rodimus of prowl’ vhbhjdkshfbhaskfd brutal

I love nautica so so much. a perfect autistic scientist after my own heart

I adore that nautica brought chromia along for moral support

hgvbjdakhfbhsj and then swerve saying that rodimus hates ‘trisyllabic names’ and nautica is like....but....‘rodimus’.....

and then nightbeat busts in to get all bbc sherlock on they asses hgbfhjadkfbjaskdf

WHY was perceptor at the crewditions if he was already part of the crew lmao

ooof, and then we have megatron flipping out when chromedome, a mnemosurgeon, shows up

also damn the autobots were rlly like okay so we wanna speed this trial up so lets just like, probe megatrons brain, that seems completely ethical, especially when you consider the history of shadowplay and stuff that our previous government had

I know important stuff is happening but megatron is holding a CUBE and I love CUBES so I'm distracted by that. C U B E

and then right after a scene where we see chromedome willing to perform mnemosurgery again - despite rewind’s like, dying wish for him not to - we hear that he’s been locked up in his room rewatching rewinds goodbye message over and over again :( I'm fucking depressed

I love nightbeat, he’s so funny and kind of an asshole

and then you see more missing letters behind them next panel...clearly nightbeat is right and there’s a mystery afoot...OR somebody is fucking with the ship’s lettering as a prank, which is a plot point I would absolutely buy

yeahhhh skids is right, chromedome is clearly Not dealing 

the dramatic graffiti on megatrons door...I wanna know who spray-painted ‘die’ everywhere like they're reaper overwatch

oh god. whirl vs megatron

really cool red lighting tho

GOD its so brutal, all the stuff megatron said about how he told the cons not to kill whirl...and doesn't that end up being false anyways? so he was just saying it to dig at whirl, which is awful

also I'm never over the fact that literally everyone - including megatron and whirl - blames whirl for ‘turning megatron violent,’ as if the entire Point isn't that whirl was a tool for a corrupt system, and if it wasn't whirl it would've just been someone else, and megatron turning away from pacifism was inevitable given the circumstances, AND also a choice on his part, so he really only has himself to blame for his OWN ACTIONS

bye bye whirls right arm, see you in lost light 

‘people never stop changing’ that IS something I say all the time...damn you warlord grandpa! how can you steal my philosophies?!

ohhh man and then rewind’s goodbye message being different....oooh

AUGH the fact that whirl was basically trying to goad megatron into killing him, just like he did in issue 1 w/cyclonus...It Hurts Man

also I do love the hint at who he’s talking to w/whirl shooting megatron with the bow and arrow earlier, and we know that atomizer is a fan of those

ok, but here’s where my philosophy diverges - megatron talks about throwing away his past and starting new, but I think that you have to learn from and build on your past...either way, megatron’s arc is one that I enjoy greatly from a character writing standpoint, and I'm excited to get it underway, especially w/how controversial it is lmao

big ole double-page spread...I like how you can pick out individual characters in the background crowd, which is crazy cause that's a LOT of people. also how come cosmos is so HUGE

phewwww 4.6 billion cybertronians died in the war, that’s INSANE. that's like, an incomprehensibly huge number. is there an estimate for their current population? I bet its not a lot. no wonder jro leaned into reproductive themes so much in mtmte/ll - of course the continuation of your species would be a concern for many if your numbers have been that greatly reduced

optimus w/his fancy tyrest-lookin crown

oughdajbfsbdf and the fact that megatron ALSO murdered 100 BILLION non-cybertronians...bruh. I feel like they maybe should've dialed those numbers back a little to allow his ‘redemption arc’ to run a little smoother lmao. but also I admire the commitment either way

and then we end w/megatron doing captain stuff, and seeing The Coffin...and we never did see rodimus in any of the flash-forward parts of this issue, did we???? I love how concerning that is. where's my BOY

also of course we gotta remember the warning from way back at the beginning of mtmte: ‘don't open the coffin’....

and so begins mtmte s2! man I love s2. I love mtmte in general lmao. s2 takes on the impossible w/the whole ‘megatron redemption arc’ thing, and I know that’s like, a divisive plot point and stuff, but from a writing standpoint I enjoyed it a lot...I think it was pretty much as well done as it could've been given the enormity of the task, and I thought it was a really interesting direction for the story to go in 

also espec if it’s true that hasbro was like ‘hey jro put megatron in your story and give him a redemption arc’ rather than jro like, planning/asking to do it 

anyways. I doubt ill talk much abt the disc horse(tm) here bc this is just for fun and also my own personal opinions and whatever, but I for one am excited to reexperience this stuff 

so yeah s2 off to a strong start with some wild shit already happening! cant wait to read more!

[az3422]

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PeppersGhost's Proposal, I guess.

K/O Failure Scenario Hub » SPC-001 » PeppersGhost's Proposal, I guess.

rating: +263+–X

You are now connected.

[13:04] Topic is "Fuck credentials, fuck passwords, fuck secrecy, fuck everything. Just, fuck in general. Fuck like it's the end of the world, because it is. Fuck me, please oh lord im so alone | Welcome! If you're still alive to read this, good luck finding someone to talk to."

[13:04] DrTsega: Hello? Anyone here?

[19:32] DrTsega: I'll take that as a no, then.

[22:48] DrTsega: I can't be the only one left.

[22:49] DrTsega: Hey Queg, are you still running?

[22:49] Queg: Hello, DrTsega. What can I do for you?

[22:49] DrTsega: thank god

[22:50] DrTsega: !backscroll 10

[22:50] Queg: [04:33] SgtYitay: I've looked through the entire building

[22:50] Queg: [04:33] SgtYitay: Everyone is dead

[22:50] Queg: [04:33] AgentCaleb: No shit

[22:50] Queg: [04:33] AgentCaleb: I know nobody uses this thing anyway but DAMN it's been EMPTY

[22:50] Queg: [04:34] AgentCaleb: You think it's just the two of us?

[22:50] Queg: [04:37] AgentCaleb: You still there

[22:50] Queg: [04:39] AgentCaleb: Saaarrrrge

[22:50] Queg: [04:50] SgtYitay has been disconnected (Ping timeout)

[22:50] Queg: [18:22] AgentCaleb: oooookay well i think im gonna call it quits then. If anyone sees this tell my husband I love him

[22:50] Queg: [18:22] AgentCaleb: lol jk i'll see that dogfaced whore in hell 👍🕶👍

[22:51] DrTsega: hmm

[22:52] DrTsega: !seen Agent Caleb

[22:52] Queg: AgentCaleb was last seen 8 days ago saying: lol jk i'll see that dogfaced whore in hell 👍🕶👍

[22:52] DrTsega: shit

[22:53] DrTsega: shitballs

[22:53] DrTsega: shitmonkeys

[22:55] DrTsega: shit the nail on the head

[22:55] DrTsega: okay

[11:16] DrTsega: Good morning. If anyone sees this just ping me, I'll stay around as long as I can.

[09:48] DrTsega: I'm still here

[14:26] DrTsega: !quote CaptSumner

[14:26] Queg: CaptSumner: I may be shitting out of my pee parts but FUCK YOU I will WALK IT OFF

[14:26] DrTsega: haha what

[14:27] DrTsega: Good times, good times.

[14:28] DrTsega: I wish Sumner wasn't lying dead in the bathroom

[14:29] DrTsega: or anywhere, for that matter

[14:33] DrTsega: but especially the bathroom

[08:01] DrTsega: I'm still here

[12:55] DrTsega: Man, if anyone sees this later I'm going to look really pitiful

[05:51] DrTsega: okay I can't sleep so I guess I might as well do this

[05:52] DrTsega: !settopic Check the backscroll. Look for "Start here"

[05:52] Topic is "Check the backscroll. Look for "Start here""

[05:52] DrTsega: Start here

[05:53] DrTsega: If you're still alive to read this, congratulations. You survived.

[05:54] DrTsega: You also have access to working internet and enough knowledge about shadow governments to visit a (previously) private communications channel, so, hey, good on you.

[05:55] DrTsega: As a reward for being such a cool and alive person, I'm going to tell you the story of how we ended the world.

[05:55] DrTsega: For context, though, you'll probably want to start by reading a certain document…

[05:56] DrTsega: Actually, you can probably just skim it. A lot of this won't make sense to you anyway, so who cares?

[05:57] DrTsega: Anyway. I'll go find the link. If memory serves, they declassified everything when they realized we were all gonna die.

[06:13] DrTsega: How are these servers even still up? Isn't that just the craziest thing

[08:22] DrTsega: Found it.

NOTICE FROM THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE COORDINATION

AND PROJECTS OPERATION COMMAND OFFICE

There is nothing new to report regarding SPC-001 at this time.

Test subject displaying the results of his exposure to SPC-001.

Project #: SPC-001

Selachian Pugnātorial Capabilities: Individuals enhanced with SPC-001 display a dramatic improvement in pugilistic prowess and have consistently proven capable of easily dispatching 90% of squaloid entities in simulations, even with no prior training. Furthermore, SPC-001 subjects have reported a radical elevation in coastal requiescence position retention, even when under assault from extragranular sedimentary weaponry.

Project Components: SPC-001 is a manmade chemical substance which augments the biological strength and dexterity of human beings. After initial exposure to SPC-001, subjects will undergo a steady increase in muscle mass over the following 72 hours, accompanied by heightened energy levels and adroit perception of their surroundings. Increased lung capacity and resistance to deep-sea hydrostatic pressure are common side effects.

Following the DREAD PORPOISE COMMUNION and the subsequent activation of the ALL HANDS ON DECK PROTOCOL, SPC agents embedded in the food industry began introducing discreet amounts of SPC-001 into numerous products intended for public consumption. Centre researchers have projected a full global saturation of SPC-001 to be achieved by the year ████. In the event that the DREAD PORPOISE COMMUNION ends before global saturation can be achieved, more aggressive means of SPC-001 dispersal may be undertaken to prevent a complete End-of-World K/O Failure Scenario.

Nascency Impetus: On May 16, ████, all observed selachian entities across the globe simultaneously demanifested, including those in SPC captivity. No selachian entities or evidence of the continued presence of selachian entities have been observed since. A Maximum State of Emergency was declared soon after by the Executive Pugilist Assembly and the phenomenon was codified as the DREAD PORPOISE COMMUNION. It is the belief of the Assembly that the selachians are congregating in preparation for the FINAL CONFLICT, an event foretold by Elder Pugilord Azmanititas in the Centre's original constitutional documents in 1451.

[08:23] DrTsega: Did you get all that?

[08:23] DrTsega: No? Okay, I'll break it down for you.

[08:26] DrTsega: I was part of a group known as the Selachian Punching Centre. An organization dedicated to fighting the menace that plagued our oceans. "We punch underwater so you can live on the land." That's what we used to say.

[08:27] DrTsega: I know what you're thinking.

[08:29] DrTsega: Yes. It was us keeping you safe the entire time. The Centre safeguarded mankind for centuries. Civilization as we knew it wouldn't have been possible if we weren't around. Our influence was unparalleled, extending to every level of every government, changing the course of world events, yet remaining a complete secret from everybody, which was really quite tricky.

Then, one day, the selachian menace disappeared. Our immediate reaction was one of disbelief, followed by euphoria, followed by raucous celebration. We danced. We drank ourselves stupid. We sang the songs of our forefathers. The orgies weren't officially sanctioned, of course, but boy howdy-doo were they tremendous.

Sadly, our revelry wasn't meant to last.

"DREAD PORPOISE COMMUNION", the Assembly called it. The prophesied gathering of every selachian, big or small. Every sharp, slimy, putrid horror that haunted our dreams, coming together in one place to bring about the end of all other life on our beautiful, green planet.

"But fear not," said our trusted Assembly. They told us that the human race would fight back. They said that when the selachians returned with their armies and squaloid murder-drones, we would be ready.

And they were right. We were ready. Thanks to SPC-001, we managed to get the entire human race fighting fit. At first people were alarmed when everyone started getting super ripped for no apparent reason, but then they realized it was awesome and the panic died down. Within a few months, every man, woman, and child was a lean, mean, punching machine. Even babies had abs you could wash your clothes on. It seemed like everything was going fine.

And that's how it went for the first couple of years: fine. Sure, boxing had to be outlawed once folks could punch with the same Newtonian force as your average car crash, and there were a few riots now and then over tank top shortages, but for the most part everything felt normal.

Year three, people started getting antsy. We had kept ourselves busy at the Centre by devising new weapons for selachian warfare, but every innovation felt hollow with a lack of anything to use them on. We grew listless. Surely the assault would begin any day, right?

Year four. There was an aura of dread hanging over the whole organization. I remember sitting in the Site-71 cafeteria, eating pickled cabbage and creamed corn salads with my comrades, when I finally heard someone ask aloud what we'd all wondered in the dark corners of our heads.

"What if they don't come back?"

It was Simmons who said that, of course. Of course. I kicked him in the face—a punch would have really hurt him—but the damage was done. It's a scary thought, losing your purpose in life. Faced with that kind of existential ennui, it's no wonder that everyone responded by flipping their shit. Hersberger screamed and started smearing her salad all over her face. Gertzler stabbed his fork tines into his cheek with no visible emotion. Bühler just broke down and cried until his tears turned to blood.

But Schwartzentruber was downright fuming. Started shouting all sorts of obscenities. Said he'd shove his fist down Simmons' throat and rip out his toenails from the inside. And Simmons was all defensive, "you all were thinking it" and that kind of stuff. The two kept going at it. We shouldn't have just sat there and watched, but no one thought fists would ever get involved. How could we have known?

I remember the entire cafeteria going silent. One moment, the two colleagues had been arguing. Next thing we knew, Schwartzentruber was wearing Simmons' face around his arm like a bracelet. Fist went straight through. Nobody knew what to say. Hersberger just picked the brain matter from her hair. There was no finishing our dinner after something like that.

We all tried to write it off as an isolated incident, an unhinged employee who forgot his own strength in a moment of pure emotion. That illusion was shattered when reports started coming in from the other sites. Similar incidents were happening all over the world, and within a few weeks it wasn't just limited to SPC personnel. These arms were made for punching, and that's just what they did.

As time went on, it became harder for us to fight the itch. Punching bags were laughable at that point, so instead we invented punching blocks out of a titanium-concrete composite. Even fashioned them into the shape of selachians to help take the pain away, but it still wasn’t enough. Whenever we came close to a cure, someone would end up atomizing the equipment with a flick of the wrist and we'd have to start over.

Eventually, one day I walked into the cafeteria and found the floor covered in what must have been two inches of blood. I thought maybe a pipe had burst until I saw Bühler sitting on a table in the corner. Guy was slathered in viscera from top to bottom, and he was wearing human heads around his arms like they were snap bracelets. I asked if he wanted to talk, but he didn't answer. He just stared at his fists and trembled. Then, in the blink of an eye, he was dead, hole in his beefy chest so big I coulda driven my Grampy's Volvo through it.

That was what broke me, I think. I had never seen someone self-pugilate before. I didn't know how many people were still alive in Site-71, but I knew that I would not perpetuate the carnage. I gathered some medical supplies from the surgical augmentations lab and tied a tourniquet around my burgeoning, well-defined bicep. Carefully, I injected myself with the nearest substance that resembled an anesthetic and bid my guns goodbye.

Screaming, writhing, I hacked off my arm using only a pair of rusty toenail clippers. Needless to say, I was dizzy from pain, blood loss, and the 5 CCs of green apple daiquiri I'd injected myself with, but somehow I managed to drag myself back to the cafeteria to cauterize my stump in the kitchen's oven. Barely clinging to consciousness, I set the oven to preheat, wrapped my stump in a tent of foil, and stuck it inside, turning regularly to promote an even cauter and applying a light baste to keep it moist.

When the bleeding stopped, I went back and repeated the process with my other arm. The second time was harder, I think. With no free hands remaining, I was forced to grip the toenail clippers with my teeth. I also ran out of baste. It was the most agonizing experience I could ever possibly fathom, but here I am. Alive. My cannonball deltoids still ripple with pugilistic vigor now and then, but the stubs are too short to be lethal.

And that's it. That's my story. That's how I ended up here, barricaded alone in an underground facility, typing on a keyboard with my tongue. I haven't been able to get in touch with any other Centre sites, and I can't leave the building. Every day I lose a little more hope. My personal hygiene has suffered, too—partly because I can't look at a pair of clippers without bursting into tears. My toenails are getting really long now. I'll probably have to use a pair of scissors or something. I could even use that electric carving knife I got for my birthday. Hell, I think there's a chainsaw in the supply closet. No shortage of options, really.

Even if I'm alive now, there's no telling how long that will last. Sometimes I hear people punching on the reinforced doors, desperate to break in and claim another victim to slake their drunken punchlust. Someday they may succeed. There's enough food left around to keep me going a while, though just for a while. I've kept my mind occupied and my spirits up by watching Dr. Cavender's Walking Dead box sets, but I can feel that post-Season-Six quality drop looming just around the corner.

Maybe this was their plan all along. Maybe they just left the planet, knowing full well we'd destroy ourselves. Maybe when the last human has passed their final breath, the selachians will return from wherever they went and feast on our tight, sculpted corpses. Or maybe they're happier where they are now. Maybe they're not coming back. I hope that's not the case. As much as it pains me to say it: I miss them.

I miss sharks.

[23:19] DrTsega: With all the squats I've been doing, I could probably pop their heads between my fucking thighs.

[23:20] DrTsega: pop 'em just like cherries. hell yeah

doomsday2018goi-formatshark-punching-center

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Sadly, two seasons since his introduction we still don’t know all that much about him or his super villain origin story, and with the conclusion of Season 3 we likely never will. The writers put this guy on the back shelf, and this is why I’m writing an essay piecing together all the messy details we have regarding the character of the Mechanic. It turns out there’s quite a lot to talk about, so get comfy.

*Episode spoilers ahead if you haven’t watched Seasons 2 and 3*

The biggest tease about the Mechanic was his hinting that he knows Brains very well or even personally in Earthbreaker, but after that it’s not really brought up again. Massive wasted potential there. He made it sound like he and Brains were old rivals from long ago, but Brains doesn’t show any signs of recognising him. Brains himself never really reacts to the Mechanic’s hints that they might know each other during Earthbreaker or after, and never even tries to guess at who this masked engineer may be, which feels ridiculous.

“Hey Brains, in all your years of being one of the world’s best engineers, did you ever meet anyone in your field of expertise who was capable of making an army of robots completely on his own, looked like he could bench press MAX with one hand, and maybe seemed a little power-hungry and unhinged?”

“Nope, sorry. That sounds like it could have been anyone.”

Surely if they were both brilliant inventors working on similar stuff, they would have mutually run into each other before???

Not only does Brains not keep up his end of the ‘we-may-know-each-other’ plotline to make it believable, but after Earthbreaker the writers seem to drop it from the Mechanic’s character too. He doesn’t show the same ominous bias towards focusing on Brains again whenever he crosses paths with IR, and if anything he seems to reacts with distrust towards Brains when he first offers to help him in Home on the Range. In Brains vs Brawn Brains offers to help him again, but still acts wary of him wanting to get close. If they had known each other before then this could have been a great bonding moment for them to reconnect and win each other’s trust, but instead Brains has to use the promise of “engineer to engineer” which is as far as their personal connection seems to go in the end.

Brains also only ever calls him “the Mechanic” the same as everyone else does, and going into Season 3 this lack of a proper name becomes more of a problem for the Mechanic’s character as a whole. We finally see him without his mask in Chaos Part 2, but a face reveal is all it is. It’s not a grand finale Scooby-Doo moment of “Aha! It was old man Jenkins the janitor all along!”, and this again feels like wasted potential to me. What’s the point of having a masked villain if he’s still exactly the same person without the mask, just a little sadder?

Between being taken into GDF custody in Brains vs. Brawn and then being negotiated for release in Break Out (a 20 episode gap, which is quite a long time span in TAGverse), the GDF don’t seem to have done any background check on him whatsoever. Everyone, including Colonel Casey, still refers to him as “the Mechanic”. If even the in-world authorities couldn’t find this guy’s original identity, then it seems that the entirety of who he was before never existed, and that’s because the writers never properly wrote it. Don’t get me wrong, I adore the TAG writers and have rarely had to fault them on anything in 78 episodes, but fitting their OCs into the series for more than an episode or two is by far their biggest weakness *coughcoughwhydidn’tyouuseEOSmorecough*

His backstory was clearly set up before his introduction, but then scrapped for whatever reason. Perhaps with everything else going on in the show they simply didn’t have time for it? This I can understand, because there’s only so much time in a children’s show and action has to come first in this genre, but it opens up a lot of additional plot holes when you keep trying to build a story on top of a poorly-established character.

What I’m trying to get at here is that without ever having his personal motivations revealed, looking back on the Mechanic’s pervious actions in the story gets a lot more confusing, and makes his character development and the plot development between Season 2 and 3 more difficult to understand.

I’ll split these last points into two parts:

1.    How do we know he built the the T-Drive when he’s unidentifiable?

In Break Out it’s suddenly revealed that the Mechanic was the engineer who designed the first T-Drive engine/Zero-X prototype... But how? How do they now know that??? Surely being the engineer who came up with this fantastic revolutionary warp drive for the spaceship that allegedly killed the great Jeff Tracy would make this guy pretty famous? His former name should probably be common knowledge, and yet he’s still only ever called the Mechanic. It’s been suggested to me on anon that maybe he’s shunned his former name in favour of the Mechanic moniker, which is fine, except that’s no reason for all of the other characters never to speak his true name even when he’s not there to hear it. To us he’s still just the villain we were introduced to, never the man he was before. Without being shown how that past and him today are linked, it’s difficult for us as an audience to attach such important prior information to a character who doesn’t seem to have previously existed.

2.    Was he ever really a true villain, or was it all because of the Hood? And does his change of heart make sense?

We’re never told how the Mechanic came to be. Why did he go from brilliant engineer, to turning over to the dark side and becoming a puppet of the Hood? In Break Out he hints that the Hood manipulated his bitterness over ~something~ in order to get him to work under him, but again it’s frustratingly vague! In the beginning we assumed it was through some personal grudge with Brains, but as I’ve already gone through at length, all that backstory just got washed away. Another anon has suggested to me that his rivalry with Brains was manufactured by the Hood. He didn’t know Brains personally, but developed a grudge against him through being compared. “Brains is brilliant, but you’re a failure”... because of the Zero-X disaster? He’s clearly as good as or even better than Brains when it comes to inventing things, so he had to have had something big happen to him in order to spiral downwards as he did. The Zero-X disaster would certainly fit the bill for that, but it’s a shame to leave all that to speculation. If it were true, then would it have been so hard to fit that into the show?

Anyway, the Hood somehow fostered a hatred for IR in him that served his own motives, and so began their partnership. He’s clearly very strong, so that’s probably why the Hood needed extra control over him via cybernetics. It’s in Brains vs. Brawn that we first learn that the Mechanic is at least partially being controlled by the Hood. Since the Hood spent most of Season 2 in jail, this was maintained through a connection between his bionic eye and some kind of cybernetics that the Mechanic has (forcibly implanted by the Hood or just already there and hacked, we don’t know). Partially coerced and partially forced, but we will never really know how much of each.

The Mechanic is a lot more violent than the Hood ever is on his own. The Hood may not care much for other people or the collateral damage he causes (e.g. in Falling Skies he’s fine with abandoning the Estrella Grand hotel full of people to crash and burn if he decides that he doesn’t want it anymore), but it isn’t really his priority. For the whole of Season 3 he makes the Chaos Crew do the physical dirty work he doesn’t care for (btw I let the Chaos Crew off for not having much background story because their “we’re bad just because we enjoy being that way” motive stays fairly consistent throughout the show. They aren’t that complicated). 

In contrast, the Mechanic has frequently plowed forward with no regard for anyone’s safety. He doesn’t make sneaking around his Plan A like the Hood, and he doesn’t hit and run for fun like the Chaos Crew. He’s brutal. Earthbreaker really sets him up for being a ruthless villain because he’s so focused on getting what he wants that he’s willing to take down anyone who gets in his way. Even when Scott asks for him just to let IR work around him to rescue the civilians below, he attacks! He’s a genuinely scary and thrilling character for how relentlessly destructive he manages to be every time she shows up in Season 2. Seriously, just read his wiki page and you’ll see it’s got ‘perfect villain traits’ written all the way through it.

Then comes the redemption arc.

In Brains vs. Brawn he is subdued and chooses to trust that Brains can redeem him. In Break Out he shows remorse for his actions. He believes that he deserves to be in prison and is beyond redemption for what he’s done. He puts Kayo’s safety before his own and saves her life. He could have disappeared, but instead comes to Tracy Island of his own free will and voluntarily works with his former enemies. That’s a pretty big change from someone who was hellbent on destruction regardless of innocent people begging for their lives! It’s a pretty big ask to believe that all of that relentless anger and complete apathy towards human life was only there because the Hood was in control the whole time.

There’s something else which leads me to believe that “I was being controlled by the Hood” isn’t the watertight excuse it’s presented as. The Mechanic makes it sound like he’s totally stuck and irredeemable without the Hood’s control being removed, but prior to that happening in Buried Treasure he makes choices of his own that the Hood could’ve stopped.

Between being dumped by the Hood in Escape Proof and Brains vs. Brawn, he’s pretty much a villain under his own steam. He’s working independently on continuing Project Sentinel, which has the aim of using to destroy the Hood for having control over him. Sure, he may only be doing bad things because he’s desperate for revenge against his abuser, but he’s still willfully endangering a lot of other people in the process. The Hood may have lost interest in him during that period, but the control system was still in place that whole time - and he was resisting it! If he can manage to hide himself from the Hood and work directly against him despite that, then he still has some free will of his own.

In Chaos - Part 2 Havoc learns the Mechanic is in space prison, which is why the Hood has lost control over him. Arguably the HEX probably had a faraday cage around his prison cell to block the Hood’s influence, and it is stated that it’s harder for the Hood to influence him from space anyway. But after breaking out and coming to Tracy Island of his own free will, shouldn’t being back on earth have put him back under influence again? The only time he had to fight against the Hood’s direct control after that was when Brains disturbed the control software and alerted the Hood, who then suddenly reveals that he has a fail-safe that can wipe the Mechanic’s memories. Wow. If he could really do that, then why didn’t he do so in Escape Proof and not leave the Mechanic as the potential enemy that he turned out to be? Sure, he later says that he still has plans for the Mechanic, but you would think that during Brains vs. Brawn when he’s getting shot at by a giant lazer whilst being thrown around by IR, and the Mechanic is resisting his commands to stop, that then would have been the ideal time to use the secret factory reset ability?  

Afterthoughts aside, I’m still convinced that the Mechanic had a lot of evil in himself that wasn’t just there because of the Hood, and it’s really a wonder that the Tracys let him into heir home after how many times he tried to kill them. i really don’t blame Scott for staying suspicious, even though he was the one most obviously anxious to find a way to get his father back. 

Despite all the questions that the show failed to answer about him, I still think that the Mechanic was a good villain. Whatever his super villain origin story was supposed to be, I think it had a lot more potential to be morally complex than the origin they ended up giving the Hood. It’s a shame that writers across the board these days often don’t have the time to write villains more complex than the trope of “once upon a time somebody made me sad, so I decided to be evil to get revenge”. I know that somebody out there will be looking at this unnecessarily long post and screaming But fab, it’s just a kid’s show! Kids won’t care about tying up offscreen plotlines or any of this crap! And my answer is yes, I know that. That’s why I’m not actually mad about what the writers did with the Mechanic’s character. The writers of TAG did a great job and the show works as it is, but I can’t help but feel that they only had to push a little more or add a line or two somewhere and then all of these questions I have about the Mechanic could have been answered. A little backstory goes a long way in fleshing out a character, and Thunderbirds is a franchise with a lot of history.

[thecorteztwins]

@esteicy-blog “I'm convinced that they didn't even check the wiki page of her comic version when writing her in the mcu because movie Mantis has absolutely nothing to do with what you describe.“ I haven’t see the MCU movie, but I have read a bit about that version of Mantis and they sound NOTHING alike to me either! Comics Mantis is: - Not an alien. She’s a completely human woman with a Vietnamese mother and a German father. She was raised by Kree priests in a temple, but that temple was in Vietnam, not space, and then when she was an adult they wiped her memories so she remembered only growing up in Saigon. She never goes to space until her destiny as the Celestial Madonna is revealed. She MARRIES one of the Cotati aliens, but she isn’t one herself. Which means I think GotG has more POC who are playing aliens than actual POC characters? - Her powers are very different. As I understand it, movie!Mantis is a generic empath. Comics book Mantis had what she described as “empathy with nature” often calling it simply “empathy” for short, but what it actually was was just like...this very vague and generic psychic sensitivity. She wasn’t exactly a real telepath, nor a true empath, nor a precog, but she could feel “vibrations” that gave her clues if something was wrong, get a general sense of a person in a vague sort of way, and just generally gave her really good intuition. For instance, this one time a cop with a split personality had his other personality take over, and Mantis sensed SOMETHING was wrong because his “vibrations” changed, she just couldn’t say WHAT was going on. But more than her psychic sensitivity, was her martial arts prowess. Mantis has such martial skill that she’s able to grapple with Thor and WIN---quickly win, at that! At one point ALL THE AVENGERS try to physically restrain her, and she TOSSES THEM THE FUCK OFF (again, including Thor) She also once kicks Pietro in the face WHEN HE’S RUNNING! Again, this woman is HUMAN, she just has really extreme training by alien priests. - Her personality. Again, I haven’t seen the movie, but she seems kind of...cute and fragile and ditzy and naive from what I understand? Comics Mantis is intelligent, fearless, and very much NOT naive. She’s extremely assertive and serious, she’s not shy or giggly at all. She’s also framed as very intelligent and logical, though that’s more something the writing tries to convince us of than what’s actually on the page. She’s not stupid AT ALL, just we’re told she’s a brilliantly logical deductive mind on par with the Vision, when actually she just mostly makes guesses based on her intuition powers but calls it deduction. She’s definitely clever though, both in a fight and in terms of getting what she wants from people and situations, and how to best utilize her powers. She’s also never unsure in her abilities either; she’s so confident in them that in fact she defends them to others when they think her psychic intuition is wrong, or that she didn’t measure her strike correctly, and BOTH times she’s proven correct. But she’s also not arrogant about her skills either, and in fact demures from compliments. Mantis doesn’t tolerate anyone underestimating her abilities, including allies, and she trusts in herself completely...but she also doesn’t need praise from others either, and doesn’t seem to want it. And the story supports her, there is never a moment where she’s proven wrong in this. Mantis is NOT a character who EVER struggles with control of her powers. Mantis can be great. For instance, when she’s reuniting with the Avengers after having been away in space with the whole Celestial Madonna thing, they’re all super happy to see her. Silverclaw, a new Avenger (who is also indigenous Latina) stands off the side and is left out, because she doesn’t have any connection to Mantis. Mantis notices this, and she immediately reaches out to Silverclaw, putting her arm around her, saying that “Yes, they gather around this one. But this one would rather gather around you.” and explains that she was the new girl once and the Avengers supported her, and she wants to support Silverclaw too. It’s very sweet! Mantis absolutely can be a big jerk. The way she meets The Avengers is that some guys are being creeps to Wanda on the street, and Mantis jumps out to kick their asses and defend Wanda. This is great. But it’s not coincidence. Mantis wasn’t just passing by. She and her boyfriend the Swordsman (a former Avenger) want to join, and had come to the US for the express purpose of joining. So she was probably following Wanda and just jumped out at the moment she knew would make her look best to Wanda, so that Wanda would vouch for her as an Avenger. Mantis shows this capacity to be manipulative other times as well, and in fact in the end she seems to have been just using the Swordsman as a way to get America and be an Avenger, even though she claims to the Avenger that she doesn’t care about being one and just wants to be next to “her man”. She acts like the typical “submissive Asian girl who loves her big strong white boyfriend” at first but the minute she decides that she’d rather have the Vision, who is actively involved with Wanda, she starts pursuing him. She’s a huge jerk to Swordsman and Wanda in the process, insulting the both of them as being weak and not good enough for her or Vision, at first behind their backs, and then to their faces, she and Wanda get pretty catty. Mantis is very adamant that she wants a strong, heroic, INTELLIGENT man, and the Swordsman falls short for her. Which is her choice, but the way she handles it is very shitty to him (not to mention going behind his and Wanda’s backs trying to seduce Vision). He tries more than once to have a discussion with her about it, and she evades him, avoiding giving him any kind of straight answer when he asks her very straightforward questions. It’s not towards the end that she finally coldly dismisses him and tells him he’s not enough for her and that she doesn’t care for him any longer. Even when he’s dying after saving her and she’s begging him to live and apologizing, she’s still frankly kind of a selfish dick about it? She says she used him and that it was wrong and that she sees that now, but she says he needs to live so she can make things up to him. So he needs to live so SHE can feel better, basically, and she’s only feeling remorse in the first place because he sacrificed himself for her. Even after death, he can’t catch a break---she says she prefers the version of him that is actually the Elder Cotati possessing his dead body (I’m still not over that) because its smarter than the original Swordsman was. Ouch. But Mantis isn’t all bad for this! She’s not actually demonized for it at all, to be honest, nor is she punished by the narrative. Her story with the Swordsman is honestly more just a way to get her to the Avengers, then she quickly overtakes him in terms of importance as a character. It’s easy to forget he’s there most of the time compared to her, and he’s got rid of the moment he’s no longer really needed, and the next chapter of her story can begin as she’s revealed to be The Celestial Madonna. It’s the reverse of the typical male and female roles in a story, ESPECIALLY for a white man and an Asian woman. He’s HER prop, he’s the one devoted to her, he’s the one who is cast aside and dies for her as a part of HER story. Mantis also evolves. When she comes back from her journey as the Madonna, she’s straight with the Avengers about why she’s come to them, and she asks directly for their help, there’s no manipulative games. Wanda and her still have a bit of an issue on Wanda’s end, Wanda understandably still doesn’t like seeing her be close with Vision, but BOTH of them work at having a better relationship---Wanda in fact goes out of her way to tell Mantis that she and Vision are separated now, so it’s fine if he hooks up with Mantis (which he does) And Mantis hasn’t said an unkind word about Wanda in a very long time. Being a mother brings a whole new dimension to her. Ben Grimm cracks about how any “red-blooded American kid” would have a hard time calling her “Mom” due to her sex appeal, and Mantis rightly points out that people don’t often think of her as a mother---which is a small but VERY true commentary on how people can’t seem to conceive of motherhood and sexiness in the same woman outside the MILF stereotype---but she is, and she is a very devoted one, and she’s a great mom while also having sex with the Vision even while she also has a “mate” in the Elder Cotati, and she’s not portrayed as wrong for this in any way; she and the Elder Cotati seem poly I guess. And being a mother, being the Celestial Madonna, gave her a bunch of additional new powers, she’s stated to be a GODDESS now, and she ends up being able to TAKE ON THANOS and she WARNS him---”This one is life, Thanos, but hurt her son and she will kill you. That is a promise.” So, she’s a very well-rounded character, she’s very assertive and confident woman with every right to be, while not being arrogant. She’s got some really nasty flaws, she can be cruel and catty when it comes to romance, manipulative when it comes to achieving her goals when there’s not even any need to be, but she also matures and develops. She’s a great mom who also has an active sex life and nothing is shown as wrong about it. She starts out with admittedly very racist trappings---the mysterious seductive martial artists Dragon Lady from the Far East who seems devoted to her white boyfriend--but grows beyond it in spades. I can see why a modern movie might want to shed SOME of that baggage...but making her into a cutesty-poo side character with nearly all her incredible canon powers gone, while ALSO erasing her ethnicity and cultural identity, doesn’t seem at all a step in the right direction to me.

[egdocument]

About the EvaGeeks wiki and why you shouldn't trust it, concerning mainly one user.

On the subject of EvaGeeks: Let’s talk about the manipulation of information on the wiki, and perpetuated “nastiness” on the forums that has persisted for several years now. THIS IS A MIRROR OF THIS GOOGLE DOCS FILE. (My twitter post.) You can share this post or the original document freely, use parts of it, etc. I want this document to simply serve as a warning to new Eva fans and those less familiar with EvaGeeks and their history - as well as an update for people who haven’t seen the current state of it.

NOTE: If you can’t read any of these images, these are Imgur albums containing all of the notable ones: https://imgur.com/a/z2mGvvX https://imgur.com/a/oAgufc3

The intent of this document is not to “take down” the wiki or forum, obviously. The intent is simply to inform people of the dangers of trusting this site with their Eva info. It might be the best we have but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve it. I would actually love to see a more community cultivated version of the site with less biased information, but I fear that will never happen. The anxieties of any one (or many) individual(s), which have prevented consistent change until now are well justified, and it is not within reason to blame the outsiders for never bothering to correct the myriad of issues with the wiki. Please extend kindness to other Eva fans and approach sites like EvaGeeks with the appropriate scrutiny, if you aren’t already. We’re divided enough as it is.

Before I begin, I must state: All of the information presented is publicly available, either through main pages, chat logs or history. And yes, the link to join the Discord server and verify the information given in this is publicly available too. I will not link it myself, as I want to avoid any possible harassment of the users I speak about here. Harassment is NEVER the answer in any kind of conflict. This behaviour I don’t believe can go unchecked, but that doesn’t mean the consequences of it should be any kind of conflict towards any user. I will be naming them here so you are aware, but I really do have to advise you, as a reminder, DO NOT HARASS OR ENGAGE WITH THEM. The rule of thumb is that these issues are more systematic than you might think, and blaming or taking it out on a singular person or even a whole group is never justified. Targeted harassment, even with reason, especially never helps to remedy an issue, because it forces the person to double down on their behaviour and beliefs. Causing unnecessary pain to a person is never okay, and the ‘offences’ committed here aren’t deserving of it in the first place. Please also consider the feelings of the people who use the server and EvaGeeks site; not everyone is your "enemy" or your "target" (and frankly, no-one should be) and despite the feelings echoed in this document, EG is not a monolith of a singular opinion or belief.

The purpose of this document is to inform people of the ways EvaGeeks fails objectivity and has existed to push narratives and exclude outsiders for far too long. With new people coming into the Eva fandom (and there of course being others who have been around for quite a while but just aren't aware) I feel like now is the best time I could write this.

As for what prompted this, an anonymous member of the Discord server contacted me regarding the behaviour of one particular user they were concerned about. Said user had expressed considerable bias in the past and was admitting to making large edits to pages on the wiki very recently, and the person who contacted me felt unequipped to bring the issue to light themselves.

A decent amount of this document will be dedicated to presenting said user's contributions - while I feel someone always had to address the EvaGeeks Problem at large, it doesn't help that this user has essentially incriminated himself here to expose the problem in its entirety. 

There is quite a bit of pretense I must discuss before I get into the subject of the wiki pages themselves. I suggest you read all of it; the start of the wiki section will be in heading text if you’d like to skip to it. I’m sure information on the biased editing of wiki pages is privy to anyone who has used the server or the site itself, but at the server’s current status of 60 entire members, I know not everyone has, or is aware of what the problem actually is. Please note that the person who contacted me has requested anonymity and I will be complying. I will not include screenshots of their conversation with me, and anything I quote from them will be paraphrased so nobody can go full Sherlock and analyse their typing patterns. It sounds silly and it’s probably just paranoia, but they shared my concern here. Any conflict we can prevent is for the best. EvaGeeks, of course, has a culture very much promoting the idea that it’s the “number 1 source for all things Eva”, and for English speaking fans it definitely is - you’d be surprised the amount of people who still, after all these years, think this site is consistently reputable. For the sake of context, I’m going to assume that you are not all that familiar with the site’s history or nature, so I’m going to provide a little bit of information about it for those without any first-hand experience. The forums in particular cultivate a very join-us-or-get-out type community, where those who dare to go against the grain get incentivised to leave the site; they’ll claim this isn’t the case if asked and obviously the site is NOT a hivemind but that doesn’t mean it’s not insular. I can vouch for myself and many others who refuse to go in more than a few threads for fear of discussion turning particularly nasty. Even the server member who came to me about this has stated they feel it “might not be a hivemind but it sure feels that way.” Silencing dissent, even when officially-backed, is part of their culture. You don’t have to personally harass everyone who has an opposing thought to you for it to not feel acceptable, you just need to have a history of mocking those who do. If you want some previous, notable cases of “discussion turning nasty”, here’s some off the top of my head: 1. The AWL Incident - In which ADV VA of Rei and director of EoE dub, Amanda Winn-Lee, joined the forums for discussion and was promptly harassed by a user. Most of these messages have been deleted but you can view what remains of her post history here.  2. Recently brought to my attention: upon beginning translation of the Episode 24 drafts, EG forum user LiLi was subjected to incentive to leave, mostly in the form of homophobic disgust in replies to her thread or others they were mentioned in. Any information that goes against the cultivated narrative, even when it is literally officially licensed content, is only ever considered with a degree of reluctance. The fact these drafts co-exist with other pages concerned with this episode is almost a miracle. You can find plenty of repeat instances of the above if you want to (more to do with homophobia and misogyny than outward hostility, but honestly it’s the same thing.) A look at basically any EvaGeeks thread concerning pairings or the female characters will unearth a variety of awful comments from many other users, not that that would be surprising to anyone who has spent more than two minutes in the fandom. Now, of course, that’s very relevant to the topic at hand even if it doesn’t seem to be. The EG wiki and forum have quite a bit of overlap and circular influence on each other as you’ll see later if you aren’t already aware of it. For a short summary before we jump into things and analyse our subject of the day, this essentially means that anyone with an opinion or information the majority doesn’t like will never get in a position good enough to edit the wiki and keep the edits there. This has resulted in many articles filled with conjecture and fan speculation that serve to shut down other viewpoints, whether it’s intentional or not.

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ON THE TOPIC OF THE EVAGEEKS WIKI

The issue surrounding homophobia and downplaying of references to LGB content in Eva, through proxy of fan-dictated content control and translation is not a new one by any stretch of the imagination. I'm sure you're all very well aware. It’s far from the only issue present in the fandom but it will be our subject of conversation today. Any ‘one instance’ of this persistent behaviour from Eva fans is never going to be enough to summarise how insurmountable it really is, though, so today I instead draw your attention to one user of the wiki who goes by the name of FelipeFritschF and his recent, frequent updates to pages concerning Nagisa Kaworu.

[TOPIC: FELIPEFRITSCHF]

I must reiterate here: although this document is mostly concerned with this user and will contain a number of receipts from various places, it is NOT supposed to function as a hit piece or inspire any kind of mob. Leave this guy the hell alone, just be aware that he’s the one making most of these changes and isn’t a particularly impartial party, to put things lightly.

Now, before we really get into things, it should be stated that the EvaGeeks wiki requires approval to get your edits there, as stated at the bottom of the homepage, here:

This means that anyone making consistent edits to the wiki has in fact been approved, and this isn’t the result of lack of maintenance.  

What you’ll find is that it is consistently Felipe making edits to the pages in question. Kaworu’s bio page, for example, is almost entirely edited by Felipe, which we can see from the “History” tab of the article.

This is barely half of his edits made in the last few days. Take a scroll through it yourself if you’re so inclined. This hilarious bit of waffle was added by Felipe a few days ago and since revised since by him, as shown here. 

(As an added bit of comedy, the man who decided to add in the Japanese in the first place apparently didn’t know the difference between 好意 (kindness, what Kaworu actually says) and 行為 (action). It’s been fixed since but I still think it’s quite funny.) Now, as anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese knows, 好き is not actually a very ambiguous word at all. I think it goes without saying, though, and I’m not here to have an argument about translations with you all (for the record, Kanemitsu’s now scarily infamous translation of this scene is perfectly fine with me in a vacuum, it’s just literally everything else surrounding it that’s the problem. Also, regretfully, I will have to speak about this nonsense later when it becomes relevant.) I’m using this as an example instead, to show how utterly ridiculous this guy’s additions to these pages are. He’s not even making a point here. It keeps going past this excerpt, and I suggest you read the whole thing (Kaworu’s page is linked above.) The point of bringing this up - and when I eventually discuss the Netflix translation when it’s necessary - is not to complain about semantics, although I’d argue that’s what’s happening in these articles, honestly. It’s just helpful when proving the actual point of the editor being incredibly unreliable and biased in how he phrases and omits things.

On the page dedicated solely to Shinji and Kaworu’s relationship (which is basically identical to their section on Kaworu’s page as far as I can tell), we can see that Felipe has also edited this several times, and even credits himself with expanding the version on the Evangelion Fandom Wiki now copy and pasted back to EvaGeeks.

The kind of “discussion” (very much not discussion when added to a wiki page supposedly presented as factual information, is it, frankly?) would be fine if it was happening in the EvaGeeks forum itself (and happen does it ever, but that doesn’t change the inappropriateness of this particular behaviour.) What I find disturbing is that in the past few days, this user has gone out of his way to make some already worrying articles even worse, presumably in an attempt to silence discourse, or add more fuel to the flames, surrounding the new Netflix translation. He has a whole page on that one, too, one which is very up-to-date in some regards and not at all in others, despite only being added a few days before me compiling this information. Frankly, going through this whole page on its own is a huge waste of my time considering how BLATANT it is in its biases, but I’ll do it anyway. It IS only a Theory and Analysis page (which is essentially an EvaGeeks free-for-all), but I think it’s quite bothering that the site even allows Theory and Analysis pages that consider only one viewpoint and are written by one person. The forum, presumably, is connected to the site for a reason. 

I’m just going to link it here, for the sake of brevity. https://wiki.evageeks.org/Theory_and_Analysis:Kaworu%27s_lines_in_Episode_24 I suggest you read this before continuing. For a slight departure, the original theatrical Funimation dub of 3.0 is partially available for viewing online, although the audio is in cam quality so you may want headphones if you have plans to watch what’s there. The home media dub’s major changes are to issues with lore and localisation of jargon. While not directly mentioned in this article, it is implied from the subject that this is what it’s about; it’s been speculated that the very literal translation of Episode 24 in particular has come about due to Khara’s embarrassment with how Funimation’s theatrical dub of 3.0 handled Kaworu and Shinji’s relationship rather loosely. Despite these claims, every instance of the two sharing (honestly pretty awkward and unnecessary) flirtatious back-and-forths are still present in the home media version, barring an instance in the stargazing scene where Kaworu’s dialogue was translated even worse than it is in the final dub. If you don’t believe me, do the comparisons yourself. It may not be conclusive, but I think it puts mostly to death the rumour that “a Khara employee was there and saw how people laughed at the Kaworu and Shinji scenes and demanded it needed to be changed for the final release and now that’s being reflected on the new translation”, which is what it tends to boil down to. 

It also goes without saying that NO ONE PERSON is “the most qualified” (holy shit, is this entry not even bothering to hide how biased it is) to translate an entire TV show, let alone something like Evangelion. Let us not forget that Kanemitsu’s claims that he respects “ambiguity” are not even true to begin with. EvaGeeks itself is a shining example of Eva fans, of which Kanemitsu is one and this is even discussed in the article, not being impartial enough to be tasked with discussing Evangelion! (There is obviously issue with citing the ADV translation as a source of all truth; if you read further into the thread on my tweet [the kitchen scene in EoE], I provide extra context for those interested, which I am aware has been spread around Discord and other places without that context included. Of course, I’m not an unbiased source either as you can probably tell from my tweets nor am I claiming to be, so please feel free to discuss these things in other places if you want. I’ve just got the tweets I have on hand here. Sorry about that.) Next, the repeat claim that this is “Khara’s licensed translation and thus the most accurate version” is pretty obviously nonsense; I’m sure I don’t need to point out to the audience that Japanese companies meddling in localisation has ended poorly in the past, or that Khara uses questionable translations from the dubs of the Rebuild films on licensed merch from time-to-time, or that the translation was fairly obviously not overseen or even QA’d by anyone following Kanemitsu’s translation work judging from the myriad of grammatical errors, missing subtitles and overly literal, poor sounding phrasing present in the final work. (Do I need to source this? Just watch the damn thing.) It’s not even like the ways it was translated have been consistent through different versions on Netflix; some were translated from Kanemitsu’s English to other languages judging from the obvious mistakes being present in multiple tracks, and some were barely even translated at all - the Italian version, the dub of which is mysteriously now missing, was so bad people were commenting that it sounded like Shakespeare or that it was translated word for word from Japanese. I dunno about you, the reader, but something about “Khara only bothered to check very rigorously the English version for their specific requests with the translation” doesn’t sound like what really happened to me. It’s more like they’ve just sent a translator they have worked with before to work on a project of theirs. Apologies for engaging in speculation, but that’s all this whole article is anyway. It’s just something I noticed from skimming through the page, but I find it quite interesting that Felipe makes a blanket statement about the excerpts from Schizo and Prano “being wrongly attributed to Anno” and then the source he provides for that is just someone on the EvaGeeks forums saying the same thing with little proper sourcing, when that was never really the intent of their post anyway. An interview summary exists where Anno has stated he wrote both books himself, and if you haven’t seen it, here it is. It’s obviously flimsy at best, but Tokyo Otaku Mode is an officially licensed Evangelion distributor. If Felipe is going to parade around his love for the Very Official Khara Subtitles Of NGE he can at least extend the same gratitude to other forms of official information; I mean, frankly, this article is about as reputable as anything in the Netflix subtitles are.  Lastly, another thing I found quite interesting is his strange love for the ADV VHS subtitles. I really, really think this is obvious, but subtitles changed in later versions of the ADV release were changed because they were deemed incorrect. I don’t have sources for this so take it with an absolute grain of salt but I believe there’s even a commentary track on the Platinum release where the translator talks in depth about why she translated episode 24 as she did. It’s not exactly a better word than Kanemitsu’s, but if we’re considering translator’s word as law for whatever reason like Felipe is here, we might as well consider hers, too, right? Oh, and actually, have a look at the sources used on that article. Most of the sweeping statements he makes have absolutely no backing beyond what he’s piecing together from old and irrelevant interviews (when discussing the Netflix translation) as well as...linking Kanemitsu’s job history...I mean, sure, the guy is qualified, but do I really need to go over this again?

INTERMISSION: Speaking of sources, you might have noticed from perusing these articles yourself that EvaGeeks has a very low standard for sourcing to begin with, which is likely partially to blame for how things like these articles can even exist in their current forms in the first place. A site that doesn’t have such a lenient policy on sourcing, though, is Wikipedia. Felipe, of course, cannot stay within the confines of the fandom and has decided to have a go at providing some information to Kaworu’s actual Wikipedia page as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kaworu_Nagisa&action=history Felipe is far less to blame for the state of Kaworu’s Wikipedia article, which is honestly pretty bad to begin with. There have been plenty of other people editing this one and the rather homophobic “Relationship with Shinji” part of the article has been present for a while before he started editing it. (The fact this article literally uses someone being explicitly homophobic as a source is not surprising for Eva fandom, but holy shit, am I disgusted every time I reopen this page. I'm not even going to bother figuring out who added that one.) I do wonder if his reasons for not desecrating this page the same way he has on EvaGeeks is because he knows it wouldn’t stay up for particularly long. Reminder that he is also the main editor of the same pages on the Evangelion Fandom Wiki, which is essentially a copy and paste of EvaGeeks. Of note is this little tidbit I found:

This is what Felipe then deleted, as this is apparently not relevant, despite literally being about Kaworu’s relationship with Shinji. I mean, I’m sure this could have been put in somewhere else and perhaps phrased a bit better, but why the hell would you outright delete that kind of information? It’s supposed to be a wiki, not your own personal opinion chamber. BTW, this is the thread post he links as a rebuttal to that person adding it, and it’s probably for the best it’s presented here with context: https://forum.evageeks.org/post/886380/NGE-Ep24-Script-First-and-Second-Drafts/#886380

He clearly thinks he has a point here, but I’m not sure what exactly he’s going for. Basically everything he’s saying is conjecture, and while I can kinda see where he’s coming from it sure does completely fail to address the intent as explained in this interview. “Read the whole interview” is very dismissive, especially when the interview in full doesn’t exactly contradict the initial point. It does say quite a bit, how he will disregard official information when his wiki articles themselves are full of nothing but rambling.

Here’s another relevant and quite funny Discord screenshot:

Felipe is making a pretty hypocritical statement here. I’m sure he does have a point - there’s probably been quite a bit of vandalism happening to these pages which isn’t exactly surprising (again, Eva fans are not often rational people, please be honest with ourselves). That being said, I think there’s a particular irony to the man who has written many very, very long paragraphs on the wiki pages he has control over trying to stop people from thinking there might be anything but “ambiguity” between a pair he doesn’t like.

In the case anyone reading has forgotten: the purpose of a wiki should be to provide unbiased information on the material it discusses. Obviously the repeating of “innocuous” statements about how “ambiguous” it all is, in the vain of EG’s now made fun of ‘we don’t know what he really meant by that’ and ‘why Kaworu is so intent for Shinji alone to have happiness remains a mystery’  are pretty obviously intended to downplay the very, very obvious “subtext” and leagues of official information provided.

It kinda goes without saying that WE CAN INFER THESE THINGS FROM THE ACTUAL INFORMATION ON THE WIKI, you don’t need to add a disclaimer to everything going “well we just don’t know what it means!” (even in instances when we do know what it means, but that’s almost besides the point). You don’t need to add in these statements, unless you’re trying to sway people into ignoring what's presented by the show. If you want people to draw their own conclusions, you are in fact capable of presenting information without commentary - in fact, that's kind of the whole point of a wiki. Yes, Eva is ambiguous at times, but talking down to people like they need this reminded to them constantly is an absolute waste of time and energy. It’s almost as if the editor has been trying to cultivate a narrative and has been getting away with it because you can’t really prove these statements are biased unless you do the research. (I mean, you can from context, but it certainly hasn’t done much to get them removed, has it?)

You can view the editing history of any given EvaGeeks article on their own pages if you want to see just how many times these things have been added in by Felipe. And obviously, no, it isn’t just his fault - there are other users, several, in fact, credited with the editing of these pages, many of the edits serving the same point as Felipe’s paragraphs on “ambiguity”. He’s just the most concrete example of a biased editor. Also, yes, I do recognise this has all happened within the few days post the release of Eva on Netflix and that it was likely prompted by that. But we know at least one of the mods is aware of it given how Felipe talks about it in the EvaGeeks Discord server. It’s also quite funny I’ve seen people linking these pages like they're some kind of "gotcha" in response to tweets discussing the new translation, as if they haven’t been invented out of thin air in the past few days.

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Now, frankly I’m sick of staring at EvaGeeks, and if you want any more information on these articles and others with instances of the same thing happening, you can have a look at it yourself.

Originally, this document contained far more screenshots from Felipe. My desire for this to not turn into a hit piece has lead me to remove a great deal of these messages. I do suggest, if you want to, you join the server and make your own conclusions. Even beyond what the member told me about I found myself agreeing with him fairly frequently when he was being reasonable - this doesn't change my concerns regarding the presentation of information on the wiki, though. The anonymous member was mostly concerned about this user having basically all the control over Kaworu's wiki articles, seeing as he has far too high of a stake in everything. Not all of these messages are inflammatory or even necessarily bad or wrong, but I find that to anyone privy to the “revelations” about the EvaGeeks Wiki here, they paint an interesting story, to say the least.

It’s starting to sound like he perhaps has just had some bad experiences. The following few messages are part of the same conversation.

I find it interesting how he flipflops from not understanding anything about the whole Eva Parallelism Theory Thing to suddenly being all for it when it concerns things not about the gay stuff.

Comments on how ‘manipulative’ Kaworu is

Because Kaworu is very pro instrumentality, and this definitely isn’t just a theory, I mean, it’s even talked about on the wiki, guys! (And I’m not even touching on the yes-men in this server.) Oh.

Oh no.

For the record, this page is clearly still under construction, and to point out any one thing about how bad it is would be essentially just poking a stick at a beehive. At least this one is so absolutely poorly phrased it’s doubtful anyone could mistake it for any kind of proper information. I also find it incredibly funny whenever pages on the wiki use the forum as a source. Relevant: Qmisato’s post on his defending of Shinji sexually assaulting Asuka: https://qmisato.tumblr.com/post/183082754484/yesterday-i-was-invited-to-evageeks-official

In response much later. I really can’t see it as being framed as “fun teenage romance”, also why is the word romance suddenly being used to talk about Asuka and Shinji after the whole debacle with Kaworu? He’s said before he doesn’t see Asuka and Shinji’s relationship as romantic, either (and GOOD! It’s not!)

(Also - it’s not sexual assault when Shinji tries to kiss Asuka in her sleep, but it IS when Kaworu does the exact same thing to Shinji? Make up your mind, dude.) Turning this sort of thing into Shipping Discourse is frankly not the right way to go about it, but it is perhaps notable that despite what Felipe says, he is in fact an Asushin shipper. (I don’t feel the need to post all these images in the document as its cluttered enough as it is.) At this point it’s rather adhom and I feel irrelevant but I do think it’s relevant that through all of Eva fandom, those who have the most issue “understanding” (more like accepting, I suppose) LGB subtext, are those who also are really attached to a fairly morally grey het pairing themselves. Again, seriously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this and assuming the worst of someone because of the pairings they like isn’t my intent here, it’s more that I find this pattern has always been prevalent and it’s bothering me I’m seeing it STILL in 2019. ESPECIALLY from a wiki editor who inserts so much of that into his work on the site. 

  You’re probably sick of reading all of this (and I’m getting sick of writing it), so I’ll wrap up the part on Felipe quickly: Yes, I just dedicated several pages to screenshots of mostly innocuous (when considered out of context) stuff one guy had to say. I feel more obsessive than I’d like to admit, and frankly I have no business with this person. We’ve spoken twice on EvaGeeks threads if you can even call it speaking. This task was given to me by a member of the community who was concerned about his behaviour but didn’t want to publicise it themself and I feel a little out of my depth here. I at least hope we can come to the conclusion I wanted to here, that I fear may have been lost in this whole great mess of language - no one person should have THIS much sway over the state of a wiki that’s supposed to be impartial, especially when they have not been quiet with their biases in the first place, and it is the failure of everyone involved in the maintaining of the wiki itself that this sort of behaviour has been allowed in the first place. 

The guy can have whatever opinions and theories he wants, obviously. I don't give a shit; he's not even that bad compared to the grand majority of Eva fans to begin with. Don't think this document exists to "cancel" him or thoughtpolice, I truly, genuinely, do not care what is said inside this server anymore. It doesn't concern me. I mean, it's a fucking cartoon, for god's sake. This only becomes an issue when opinions are expressed on a wiki, for reasons I have reiterated many times now. EvaGeeks lacks the objectivity required to function as a wiki and I'm trying to make that clear. 

[ON THE TOPIC OF THE EVAGEEKS WIKI AND COMMUNITY IN GENERAL] As for who can edit the wiki and what they’re allowed to say: As you can see from the nature of people’s posts in this thread, you’re given access to do very specific things, and although I haven’t bothered going through the process myself (as I find it would be quite redundant, trying to fix such an inherently broken system), I’m guessing it’s very easy to get your edits reversed if you post anything they don’t like. Take that as conjecture of my own.

I have it in decent faith that the approval process involves whoever of the mod team is there at the time coming to an agreement based on people’s applications. Obviously this is a decent idea for a system, and I’m sure there are legitimate reasons as to why EG has to be locked down as much as it is; judging from the state of other fanon wikis I’ve seen there’s likely to be a decent amount of vandalism, especially in a fandom as passionate as Eva’s is. However, I think it’s fair to say that the complete restriction of updating these pages to those approved by a mod team who, while I’m sure are very reasonable people overall, certain individuals of which have displayed concerning behaviour and biases of their own in the server during my brief look around. I won’t be naming anyone in particular from the mod team as I don’t feel like I need to add any more targets of shame to this already horrifically negative document, but I have gotten the general impression (in case it needed confirmation, following the remaining of these specific changes on the wiki) that some mods, not all, aren’t the most nonpartisan individuals themselves. I do happen to be decent acquaintances with at least one of them so, again, please don’t consider this a personal attack.

My concern here plainly is that I don’t think a group of mods who have routinely failed to prevent events like the ones mentioned earlier, nor seem to have much of an issue with the myriad of examples of people being openly homophobic and misogynistic on their own forum are really in the position to be choosing who of the Privelleged Few get to control the Eva meta-narrative here. As I was writing this, I was alerted to the state of the primary Japanese Evangelion wiki as a source of cross referencing for what these things can look like if done right. If you take a moment to browse it, even if you don’t speak any Japanese and have to use an automatic translator it should be very obvious how something like this differs greatly from EvaGeeks. Kaworu’s page, for a relevant example, doesn’t have present any of the nonsense statements about ambiguity or overwritten descriptions of everything. The wiki respects the reader’s intelligence enough to know that it is, in fact, a wiki, and thus tries its best to be factual. His page is fairly decent in size and states things we know are fact rather than theory. There’s no attempt made to influence or confuse.

Oh, and just in case you think the mods aren’t actually active or present enough to know what Felipe is doing, his particularly awful page on Kaworu in episode 24 got a shoutout from the official Twitter account two days ago.  

If you are going to join the Discord server to verify things yourself* or do further digging, again, please be cautious of other users inside and do your best not to start anything. I am an occasional contributor to the forums and I’d prefer not to get my account flagged or to experience harassment myself, if any EvaGeeks members are still reading this document and disagree with my conclusions. I may not have posted much since I joined earlier this year, but despite everything I find the forums to be valuable for connecting with other fans and have enjoyed the positive feedback to my SIRP translation! Those who have spoken to me there have been very kind (including Felipe himself), and I must reiterate that this is not targeted at the whole site, or even at just Felipe. I simply believe there is more than enough evidence to suggest there have been consistent, systematic failures to recognise and correct the utter lack of objectivity present. I seriously don’t have any personal issues or beef with this guy, either. I wouldn’t have done this if it wasn’t someone else who came to me about it.

*It should be noted that the person who spoke to me has pointed out certain members have been concerned about outsiders joining and screenshotting the chat. They may remove the public link to join if this document were to cause a huge issue. I will leave the server following the publication of this document and I have no plans to join again. I can’t speak for those who may join of their own accord but I do hope people have heeded the disclaimer I made initially.

Thankyou to all the people who have extended their own kindness and support during the creation of this document, to the anonymous person who tipped me off and the lovely Eva analysts I know for offering their own experiences with EvaGeeks and further supplementary information. If this whole document reads like the product of a bad mental health day, I guess it is. Also yes I know how hilarious it is that I’ve spent all this time creating what essentially amounts to an EVAGEEKS CALLOUT POST but I mean. Someone had to say it. Why not make an utter buffoon of myself in the process?

[incarnateirony]

Re: 14.14, Ouroboros

So I said I’d write a post about this on Monday but I got more free time today to at least get started on churning out thoughts because, holy shit am I excited. For those of you who don’t know, I’m a modern day hermeticist, I’ve banged pots and pans about the Men of Letters and “Aquarian Star” before, but seeing the Ouroboros pulled up is just Y E S. I went to go find my mountain of serpent jewelry but realized I just woke up and ain’t nobody got time for that.

Anyway rather than writing like I have a stick up my ass I try to make it modern and fun so hopefully this won’t be too agonizing. 

Let it be said I don’t think everything I could ever talk about will come up in an episode but Yockey has proven great at manifesting really abstract concepts and I can see how he’s been arranging for something like this.

Okay first point people can gloss off of a wiki article: The sign of the ouroboros is a fairly universal emblem. We find it in Egypt, people have drawn relation to Jormungand, there’s a lot of mesoamerican and related cultures that have their own version, there’s mention of it in Vedic texts, so it’s kind of everywhere, but hermetics and alchemy are probably the most recurrent gong-bangers about it, as well as adjacent thoughts like gnosticism.

More babbling than this is gonna have me put it beyond a cut because, holy crap batman.

OKAY: the shorthand version you probably know is that the Ouroboros of alchemy is a cyclic figure, the serpent eating its own tail endlessly, and the symbol of “all is one.” 

“That the first day should make the last, that the tail of the snake should return to its mouth precisely at that time, and they should wind upon the day of their nativity.”

Every beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. *anonface NPC whispers in ear* Wait, that’s a song? *leans into whisper* Oh they used it on the quote board season 13?

Neat.

Anyway, I’m also side-eyeing “The Shadow” now and wondering if they chose that name for Jungian purposes, because Jung also tapped on the ouroboros. Just like alchemists, the thought of consuming yourself was thought to be like

bad gifs aside, in jungian psychology specifically, eating one’s own tail is also consuming the shadow, of which all people have, as a sort of primitive collective subconscious dreaming thing we all bubble up thoughts in and hide away parts of ourselves we don’t want. Or at least don’t want to admit exist or show to the world. (Carl Jung, Collected Works vol 14)

In Jungian thought it’s specifically part of attaining a true Persona, which you may remember me yelling about the psychology of a game series with a similar namesake.

Anyway, we consider this cycle of eating our own tail as somehow bad, but a lot of the symbolism came from, to the common eye, the immortality of serpents. They shed their skin and just kept growing. Obviously we know snakes aren’t truly immortal but that was the symbolism involved in it. The idea that all things cycle, that all things come to a full ring, but that the end of the ring isn’t a bad thing, just a new beginning, powered by the mistakes and advances of the old one.

So on the psychological side of things, the ouroboros is us having parts of ourselves that we don’t want to admit exist, that we take on, master, and start over again on a new journey, reaching the point of our birth to begin with. 

Either way, it doesn’t just end at psychology, as one of the key matters of hermetics is “as above, so below.” Or as Gabriel put it in season five, “As it is in heaven, so it must be on earth.” Gabriel, 5.08

Just... and-or the other way around, it puts it into a standard of sort of... relativity, chicken or the egg.

The Ouroboros is just one of several transitioning forms of the alchemical and hermetic serpent, which includes Nehushtan the brazen serpent,

In close association to the crucified serpent, as well as Asclepius and the Caduceus,

Funny we just saw Dean on a cover wearing an Asclepius pendant but OKAY whatever.

Anyway a quick brush over these attributes is that the brazen or crucified serpent is a snake that has broken its cycle and rather than simply consuming itself to exist and ‘grow’, it climbs the tree it would have been staked on. The image of the small idol there is it climbing the qabbalistic tree of life, which has a whole bunch of associations.

Notice the handy dandy traveler’s guide fnear the bottom-centerish of the image that looks like a zig zag or arguably, a sharp snake. Yeah, that thing. Yes, I keep that around my desk. Yes, it’s relevant to me. Yes, my cat has puked on it and I’ve had to clean it up, sorry about that. But the notes all over the page should probably tell you just about the kind of ideas this tree and climbing it considers. 

But, still likened to the ouroboros, once the serpent reaches the top of the tree, it descends in the form of a white dove from kether to malkuth, and sort of starts its cycle over again. Similarly, when not specifically the brazen serpent but rather the nailed crucified one, it’s a matter of transmuting the self by mastering the dark serpent, the other self, sort of binding it unto itself. The specific readings on this vary, but think of it like removing unnecessary chemicals that are mucking up an experiment, but not necessarily dividing from the shadow, as even the caduceus -- much less Jungian thought -- recognize the need for the shadow and things we consider not-good a lot of the time. It’s all about balance.

And that ascent to the divine also keeps it from being a stagnant cycle, but takes that whole “growth” part to another level, represented as a spiral, often tapping on the Fibonacci sequence, which is why Tool’s Lateralus album written all over with alchemical and hermetic concepts is sequenced to the Fibonacci spiral.

So I’m going to try to avoid getting into a ten billion page exposition about lengthy qabbalistic thought on the many planes, but you’ll notice one part of the image is its relation to the inner man (bottom right) -- part of that As Above So Below.

Also a lot of the time there are two snakes, that are arguably eating each OTHER to “grow” in their cycle. In this case, one has wings to represent volatile substance (”the bird of hermes is my name, eating my wings to keep me tame.”), while the other has no wings, representing fixed substance. But the creature(s) birth each other, metaphorically-marry, and slay each other in this circle of eternity, perpetual motion, but immobile, yet always in motion, recoiling on itself. It’s creation to order, and back to chaos, it’s the background radiation of the universe, it’s just this weird perfection-in-stasis, and yet, with the psychology aspect attuned, still room for improvement. Even the brazen serpent still has a cycle which basically involves passing go, collecting 200 dollars, and going back down as an enlightened dove to work its way back up this infinity ladder again.

Be wise as serpents and harmless as doves.

The path of the serpent, and the balanced polarity of the related caduceus, is all about attaining personal perfection and completion, manifest “so below” into the physical world through ideas like the pursuit of gold in the philosopher’s stone, but there’s so much more to it than Just That. It’s about the self, the Best self, but the journey never being over.

[darling-blurbs]

Why Aren’t You Scared of Me? Prologue

(This will turn into a series. I promise you. Also, This is a BNHA OC Story and won’t go with the right order of events. I am going off of the wiki pages and some fanfics I read. I only watch a bit of the first season recently and forgot things also will not be word for word but I am trying to find all the transcripts I can find. This is episodes 1 + 2. I’ll start 2 + 3 tomorrow. Also my spelling is trash as well as my grammar so if it’s bad in those areas, I know. )

Summary: Esther Osoro is an enigma. She was born to two wealthy pro-heroes who seemed dissatisfied with the female. Her quirk was more of a villain then a hero but again she had so many that they made it into one. This is the beginning of the most powerful person in the world.

Warnings: Swearing, Murder, Death, Gore.

_

Esther was happy. She finally realized what all of those voices were and she was quick to talk about it to her elder brothers, who were all named after famous gods as well as not being related to her ‘mother’ and ‘father’. The Quirk Doctor was surprised that her DNA held so many quirks that he told her parents that they made it into a whole category in of itself called Fear Raiser. 

“You Monster!” Her parents didn’t seem so happy when they got home. Esther heard their conversations of giving her up for adoption for the words she spilled. 

[Background on this young girl’s quirk:

Fear Raiser: A combination of multiple quirks. The most powerful of them all is Fear. Fear as a Quirk makes the user hear others fears and can create them. The user can also make it an illusion and use other people’s fear. Example of this is if the user is fighting someone who is scared of losing someone and the user can’t create them so they create a thunderstorm as someone else that is near or that they previously met is scared of thunder or the lighting. The User can also turn into that fear, but it does have it limitations. If someone’s fear is someone dying or themself dying, she cannot make that person die or the victim die unless she is not IN CONTROL. Ahem. Sorry. Anyways, another Quirk of her’s is Life or Animalia. They are close enough that they were included. Life makes her able to make plants grow or wilt. She can make vines appear if she wishes. Animalia gives her more power to become any animal, fictional or not so fiction. It doesn’t have to be someone’s fear. The next one is Angel. She can make beautiful black angel wings appear from her back. It also is very strong in that sense and is unbreakable. The last one is Black Sand. It is another Fear based quirk where she can make black sand appear. Think of Pitch Black Sand and then the villain in Big Hero 6 hand movements and replace the little robots with black sand and you got her last quirk.]

“We can’t set her up for adoption! That would tarnish our rep!” Her mother would always scream. Her father would whisper something that seemed like a good idea.

Faster than her 3 year old mind could realize what was happening, Esther was held up by the throat by her father. Her father had the quirk of strength which was not helping the young girl. 

“Once you die, we can have a normal hero life without the worry of your horrid quirks. We will cry to the press saying that we tried to calm you down once you became berserk!” Her mother’s eyes twinkled. Unlike their daughter, the ‘father’ had green eyes and brown hair while his wife was blonde with pink eyes. 

Esther looked nothing like any of her ‘family’. She sported black hair and icy blue eyes. Both her ‘parents’ side looked all the same. Brown hair, green eyes, blonde hair, pink eyes. Their quirks were passed down each gen no flaws until their ‘daughter’ was born. 

Maybe I should be controlling you. Will you let me out Blue? 

The voice was back. Esther knew who it was. It wasn’t Fear Raiser quirk. It was her other catagorized quirk. She nodded as she lost breathe confusing her parents. 

Thanks Blue. Let Red Handle THIS!

Her previously blue eyes changed to red quickly as Red took control. Her ‘father’ faltered in his grip as Red took that as a chance to use her quirk. 

“Hell Raiser.” Red whispered as her hand landed on the husband and erupted in flames. The man screamed and let go. He tried to shake his arm to put out the fire as his wife tried using her water quirk to put the flames out. No luck.

Red chuckled darkly as she lifted her head with her black hair covering one eye. “You can’t put it out old man! It is Hell Fire after all!” All of a sudden her body erupted in flames making the wife scream.

Red stepped out of the flames with devil horns and a devil tail with dragon-like wings. “Maybe you should have double-checked with the doctor before you left you BITCH!” 

The wife ran at the little girl who seemed a little taller. Red chuckled when she was pierced with a water spear through her stomach. Red ripped it out and the hole started to become whole again but not before some black substance dripped out. Red used her hand to get some of the black substance on her entire hand. 

She used it to create a weapon, scythe in fact. It looked like it was dripping but it quickly solidified at it’s master’s command. “Now let’s fight you asshole!” She smiled showing her sharp teeth. 

After a few minutes, Red yawned after she realized this women would not give up. She looked at the blonde female who was bleeding, had a broken right arm that was bent the opposite way, and a clean, chopped off left arm. 

“You know, I’m getting bored and I’m getting tired so I’ll just set this place on fire,” Red pondered this. Red had not a scratch on her, thanks to her multiple quirks. 

The blonde looked straight up at her. “No! Please! We didn’t mean to hurt you!”

Red growled. “You meant to hurt her! She told me how she was scared that you would hurt her and look at what you did! You made me ANGRY!” 

Red erupted in flames again that quickly dispursed around the entire mansion. The screams of the blonde was muffled by the demons that Red summoned. Like how Esther could summon Fears, Red could summon demons and ghosts from the depths of hell.

She walked away from the scene and snapped her fingers making the fire grow stronger in it’s power before going away entirly. The only thing left was ash. No bones as her power was enough to cremate one, no matter how fast. 

--

“Are you sure it’s alright if I stay?” A few days later and a bunch of explaining, Esther was with her brothers. Her real brothers. Apparently those people she called her ‘parents’ were fillers just so the girl could have a life and not be restrained up in heaven, hell, and the afterlife. 

“We said yes a million times Esther,” Loki sighed. Loki, everyone knows him. Norse God of Mischief among other things. 

“Don’t say it that way Loki,” Satan growled. Satan is the devil obviously but not the only one-

“It would be amazing if you stayed little sis!” Lucifer said. Lucifer was the other devil, or really servant of his older brother. He was the ‘next in line’.

God silently nodded as Jesus said Jesus like the meme he tried so hard to be. 

--

“My name is Esther Osoro, but you can call me Esther!” Esther said with confidence to the little boys. One with ash blonde hair while the other had green hair.

Keep these boys. They are adorable.

“I’m Izuku Midoriya and this is Kacchan!” the green haired boy exclaimed. Even though flustered by the sudden appearance of this girl, he always was open to new friends. 

“Can I call you Broccoli?” 

“Huh?” The sudden question broke the boy into a stuttering mess. 

“I call him Deku but Broccoli is a good one,” The ash blonde spoke for once since the girl approached them. “And why are you with us? Don’t girls play with dolls and have cooties?”

Esther giggled making both boys blush, one more than the other since his determination and confidence would not let his do so. “Well, I thought you guys seemed like true heroes and good knights! Maybe you could protect me?” 

Izuku and Katsuki nodded their head and shined with determination. “We will protect you!” They smiled at each other as they ran off. 

--

“Kacchan, w-why are you doing this?” A young Izuku looked up at his former best friend. Katsuki got his quirk recently and became popular quickly. Sometimes fame can get to your head. 

He started bulling Izuku but haven’t been caught by their little angel as she was on a week trip to China. No one asked why but she was coming back that morning.

“Because I can’t be friends with a quirkless person!” Maybe that is what made the angel appear.

Kicking Katsuki to the ground was not something Esther wanted to do, neither was using a bit of her quirk but what Katsuki said sent butterflies of rage to consume her. Did we forget to mention that was part of her quirk. Little butterflies that appeared when she was feeling a very very strong emotion. 

Katsuki looked up at the girl, whose black hair swayyed in the wind. His goons were laying on the ground around them, he never noticed her hurting them. 

“What do you think you are doing to him?”

Red’s demonic voice mixed with Esther’s making it seem distorted. Like a glitched voice that a hacker would use to mask their own. Katsuki was scared. No that was an understatement. He was terrified. The girl’s eyes weren’t their icy blue but a mix of red and blue, swirling pools of pure rage. 

“K-Kacchan didn’t mean it Bunny. H-He was joking around,” Izuku stood up to his little angel who seemed more demonic than angel like. Esther/Red wipped around to see a teary eyed Izuku. Her red/blue eyes widen in realization as the red faded leave the blue eyes that Izuku and Katsuki loved to look at. 

“I-I am sorry I lost my temper then. I hope you can forgive me,” She bowed to Katsuki as she lifted him off the ground. “But that doesn’t mean that I forgive you.” Esther growled before walking away, with Izuku’s hand in her own. 

Katsuki glared at the joined hands before glaring at the floor. “She didn’t even see my quirk...” Katsuki growled. 

--

Ah Middle School... That Esther was currently late for. After the incident when they were younger, Katsuki tried to redeem himself to his former best friend. She let him do that until she finally forgave him. Of course Katsuki still bullied Izuku but not as much. The beating weren’t noticable and Esther was fine as long as Izuku wasn’t in pain. She saw how Katsuki would feel and took it into consideration as she walked with him on a few days, unlike today. 

Esther ran into class with her juice box in mouth. The teacher looked up from the chalkboard to get ready to yell at whoever the person that was late but shut his trap once he realized who it was. Esther’s quirk was not well known, noting that Izuku and Katsuki don’t even know if she even has one/know what it is, but the adults fear it. Funny as her quirk is fear. 

“Sorry I am late my dude. I had to deal with my crusty dusty brothers this morning,” Esther said as she strolled to her desk that was in front of Izuku’s and next to Katsuki’s. 

“It’s fine Osoro. We were just going to talk about everyone’s future,” The teacher said. He blabbed on before saying something about quirks. Katsuki was being quiet when he said something about how everyone wanted to be heroes.

Now that Esther thought about it, both of them were being silent. She was now very very worried at the silence until she was jump scared by everyone using their quirks. 

“Hey Teach, don’t let me in with these bunch of losers. I'm the real deal but these guys will be lucking to be a sidekick to some busted deal lister. Ha!“ Katsuki said with pride as Esther rolled her eyes. The normal, ‘I’ll fight you and be number 1′ was now a normal thing to the young female.

The class screamed at him and he countered. The teacher said something about his test results and the rest of the class said something about him going to UA. Esther was going to UA no matter what she did. Either she would ace the test, or if she didn’t she would be recommended by her best friend and brother from another family.

Then the teacher said something that Esther almost stood up and used her quirk for, “ Oh Yeah, Midoriya, don't you want to go to UA too?” And everyone started laughing and mocking him until they heard a chair slam through the window. They all turned to the source and shrinked away to see Esther glaring at all of them. 

“I think you forgot me Teach. I am going to ace them. As the person in this class with the most intelligence as well as the most powerful, I might as well just Thanos snap you all right here,” the student cowered while Katsuki and Izuku stared at their best friend, thankful they are not the student right now. 

“W-What is your quirk anyways?” A male student asked. Esther whipped around to glare at the student. 

“Well, that ain’t any of your concern you sad excuse of a person? Because you are not going to be a hero,” Esther stated as she snapped her fingers, making a black chair make of ink, appear from stains on the floor to create a regular chair. She moved her hand as the window repaired itself with black ink until it was normal.

“Continue teach,” Esther said with an innocent smile.

--

Of course after her outburst, only Katsuki would yell at Izuku after, as he knows Esther won’t scream at him.

After class ended, Esther turned in her desk. “I heard there is a Sludge Monster somewhere and All Might put a stop to it.” Esther’s face was practically touch Izuku’s but not so much that their breathes mingled. 

Izuku blushed profusely at the closeness of his best friend. “I-I’ll write that down in my notebook Bunny. Be s-sure to wait for me!” Esther giggled as she stood up. 

She ruffled her friend’s hair and waved at him as she left the doorway. She stood outside the school entrance. She knew Izuku made her leave so she wouldn’t have to see Katsuki hurt him again. Esther’s black wings erupted from her back as she flew to the window that was conveniently open. She watched as Katsuki used his explosion quirk on Izuku’s book and threw it out the window.  

Esther dove for the book before it landed in the fountain. She flew back up to the window as Katsuki threatened Izuku about applying.

“I don’t think that is very nice,” Esther crawled in through the window. 

All of the boys in the room watched as the angel wings shrinked back into the female’s back. “Threatening someone for their hard work is a low, even for you Kacchan.” 

Katsuki rolled his eyes. “What do you want bitch?” His mask was faltering the longer she was around and her smirk confirmed she knew it. “I am trying to have a lovely talk with Deku.”

Esther hums and snaps her fingers, making one of his goons flinch while the other one let out a squeak. 

So they know who we are. Why don’t Broccoli and Kacchan know?

Eh. I don’t want anything. I just promised Broccoli I would let him see All Might as I am his best friend. All Might I mean. Oh you didn’t know. Ya I know you love him sweetheart but-

She couldn’t say that so she instead said, “I have a date with him today and we are running late to our reservations.” Katsuki and Izuku choked while the goons said nothing as their boss seemed more angry until he heard her voice in his head. 

‘What I am saying, is just let him fucking go or I will hurt these goons and never talk to you again. I’m not going on a date with Broccoli so don’t worry.’ Katsuki relaxed to that and let Izuku go. He glared at Izuku before turning to Esther. 

“You win this time dipshit. But next time, have a better lie prepared.” Katsuki turned and left the room. 

Izuku turned to his best friend, “Wahhhh! You didn’t need to say that out-”

“I told Kacchan to fuck off in his head so I don’t hurt his popularity. Don’t worry Broccoli. Kacchan wouldn’t do shit and if he heard that we were actually dating, he would murdered them.” Esther giggled at Izuku’s expression which held confusion. 

“What is your quirk?” Esther shrugged. 

“A story for another day... You want to get out of here now?” Izuku nodded as they walked out of the school. Izuku went one way as Esther went the opposite. Katsuki waited in the shadows and lifted himself off the wall as he began to walk with Esther, but far away with his goons. He did this whenever he had his so called ‘friends’. 

Esther heard them talk trash before she heard a gurgling noise and a scream of villain. Esther’s eyes flashed red as she turned to see Katsuki consumed by a villain. 

“It’s a monster!” Someone screamed. Esther’s anger only intestified. 

What the hell are you doing? Let’s roast this popsicle stand!

Esther’s ears picked up another voice saying a kid was there. When Esther saw Izuku, her entire body screamed to help, so she did. Fuck the no power rule, she was going to murder the police if they said it one more time.

She ran onto the scene, using her black sand to use as a way to get there faster. 

Water is scary but strong force is worse

“Gotcha,” She whispered as Izuku’s eyes widen at the sight of his best friend. Going to scream at her to get out of there until she lifted her hand in the middle of the field of flames. Her hand was outstreched towards the sky with her hand done. 

Suddenly, A blur of something passed and grabbed her hand. “All Might!” Izuku exclaimed. 

“Never fear for I am here!” He said, while holding Esther’s hand which she seemed to be doing something with. He turned to Esther “What shall we do Young Esther.” 

Esther lifted her head, “Detroit Smash!” She said in unsion with All Might as he punched the villain, secretly using her hand as a power source so he could keep his form longer. 

--

The heroes were scolding Izuku and praising Katsuki yet seemed to be sympathetic with Esther, asking if her quirk was doing it’s withdrawls again. 

-Flashback-

“This is Esther Osoro. She told us that her parents tried to kill her so she used her other quirk.”

“She has another quirk?” All Might, or Toshinori Yagi, asked the officer. He nodded. 

“She has two quirks that are actually multiple in one. The first one is named Fear Raiser with the quirks Fear, Black Sand, Angel, and Life or Animalia. The Second one was what caught my attention. When the doctor was checking for quirks, they said they saw another form or creature. Apparently, the Second Quirk is someone else entirely-”

“Like another entity?” Shota Aizawa asked suprisingly awake from his nap. 

“Yes. Before they had a chance to check the first time, her parents became odd at the sound of her first quirk and left quickly with her. Now that we have her here and at least alive, the doctors ran it again to find out the quirk is called Hell Raiser.”

“Not a very appealing title,” Midnight stated.

“It isn’t meant to be. Hell Raiser is a very scary and powerful quirk. It consists of four or five quirks. When Hell Raiser, or Red as Osoro calls it, is in control, her eyes turn red. Red isn’t like Osoro and instead is more scary than sweet like her ‘master’.”

“Master? Why do you say master?” Enji Todoroki asked. Now he was interested. A potential quirk user who could make a very powerful quirk with his son? He was already thinking quirk marraige when he said two quirks but realizing they were a front for a bunch of different quirks screamed ‘I will surpass All Might without trying.’

“Red only listens to Osoro. Before Red... Possessed? Esther’s body, she asked permission. Red only appears if either Esther let’s her or if Esther is in a state of weakness. If Esther is scared or weakened phsyically, Red will come out and show hell.”

“What are the quirks in her Hell Raiser Quirk?” Yagi asked. 

“There is Devil’s Sister, I didn’t name these, which means she can summon demons from the depths of hell as well as use something called Hell Fire, which cannot be tamed unless she snaps her fingers or commands it too. She can also make devil horns and a devil type tail appear of her with dragon like wings from her back. The second one is Toxic Kiss where she can kiss someone and control them. The only way to get out of this state is if you are kissed in the spot that she kissed-”

“Kinky-”

“The third one is Fire Dancer, where she may dance and fire is left there. Osoro can also use this quirk but it isn’t hers. Another quirk that Osoro also shares with Red is Black Ink. It has multiple uses but is mostly used to create objects. It mends all types of object except organs, which is the next quirk. Black Blood is not something Osoro shares with Red. Black Black mends Red’s wounds as well as other’s if she smears it on them. It can also be used as a weapon on command. The last one is Death which let’s Red see people’s death dates. If she kills them later in life, she cannot see them. There is always changes in people’s death and how they will perish. What I mean is that she can also see how they die. She can also make darkness consume places but there isn’t much on that.”

“Not so Kinky,” Midnight whined. 

“Well, we need to make her feel comfortable. Her parents almost killed her!” Yagi said as he looked at the said girl who seemed lost in thought.

That day forward, all of the heroes heard of the girl and her abilties as well as feats and promised to protec her at all costs.

-Flashback End-

Esther walked away from the scene and heard running footsteps behind her. She knew it was Kacchan’s from the scent of smoke filling her lungs. She guessed his conversation with Broccoli ended. 

She slowed down as Katsuki caught up to her. She paused when he put himself in front of her. She tilted her head before he wrapped his arms around her waist. She was small but enough to be cuddly. 

She heard his sobs as he broke down in her arms that were quick to wrap around him. He nuzzled his face into the girl’s neck. 

“I-It was so scary... I w-was so scared and I-I didn’t know what to do.” Katsuki poured his emotions out to the small girl. She kissed the side of his neck and whispered how she was there and she helped him.

After a while of standing in the middle of the street, Katsuki pulled away with such hesitance that he almost never let go. Esther stood on her tippy toes to wipe away his tears and give him a peck on the cheek. His outbursts of tears were normal to her. She was the only one he cried in front of other than his mother one day when he was little. 

“You did well Kacchan. You tried your hardest to fight back and it was beautiful,” Esther smiled at the boy who seemed confused at her random praise. 

“But, Fucking Deku came and almost got himself killed and then you were there and-” Katsuki widened his eyes. “And All Might knew you.” He whipped his head to his best friend who look anywhere but his red eyes. “You know All Might! Since when!”

“Since I was like 3. He is like an older brother to me. I was never kidding about autographs.” Esther chuckled as they started walking home with Katsuki chattering about random shit and Esther mindlessly nodding.

Author’s Note: I might remember to write again but this series is what I call ‘Me writing a story with no plot.’ Hope you like it and it will be more exciting later. There is an alteration of a million things such as placement of people in 1A and how the seating will be weird since there will be one extra as everyone in that school is equally important (Even Mineta). There isn’t one set love interest but I am trying to lean towards Bakahoe. I like him, todoroki, hitoshi, and monoma so I rlly don’t know. Maybe this will turn out to be a Esther X 1A, 1B and Villains (Because I will put some villains who are attracted to her second quirk)

[lifes-a-dick]

Determinism vs Free Will and Sherlock’s two falls.

When he jumped from the rooftop, Sherlock was carrying out an action that looked like his own free will but which he actually had no choice in. Determinism in philosophy says that humans cannot act or behave in any other way than they do. Everything that is going to happen is already determined by past events. We have no true freedom, only the illusion of it.

Sherlock couldn’t not fall from Bart’s, because Moriarty ensured through his own suicide that Sherlock would have no choice but to kill himself too. In Causal Determinism, cause-and-effect means that any event is completely determined by prior states. Sherlock knew that Moriarty killing himself gave him no other option, that by that one action (the cause) he must now die (effect). 

Continue under the cut ...

From John’s view Sherlock chose to jump. But the audience knows that he was ‘pushed’. So there are two perspectives - from John’s, Sherlock seemed free to do as he wished, but from the other view we could see every action that lead inevitably to the result.

His fate was inescapable, and you could trace that fate back to the beginning of Moriarty’s “game”. One long chain of cause-and-effect that lead ultimately to Sherlock’s death, no matter what he tried to do to stop it. Sounds like Death in Samarra, doesn’t it?

The opposing philosophical idea to Determinism is Free Will, which says that we do have control over our actions, that they are not already determined, that we are capable of choosing between different outcomes. That we are truly free.

Perhaps this is the point of Sherlock’s second fall, the one from the waterfall in TAB, where he is very clearly making his own decision to jump. It is certainly suggested in his expression as he falls that this is Sherlock re-writing his own story the way he wants. Not the way it was forced to be. He still takes the leap, but this time it was of his own free will. 

If Determinism were true, it would be like being trapped, being forced to play out a part that is already written. However, free will suggests that we truly have some control over the way our lives turn out. This subtext in Sherlock is very much about being trapped into doing what is expected of you versus being free to do what you wish.

The story of Death in Samarra from TST could be another intentional reference to Determinism. It tells a story about the course of the universe being fixed, and that we therefore cannot outrun our fate. What happens, must happen.

Guess what else in TST is about Determinism???! Sherlock’s speech about predicting the future. Because if Determinism is true then the future is theoretically calculable. What Sherlock says in TST is all over the Wiki page on Determinism:

The theory holds that the universe is utterly rational because complete knowledge of any given situation assures that unerring knowledge of its future is also possible. - x (wiki page)

If it were actually possible to have complete knowledge of physical matter and all of the laws governing that matter at any one time, then it would be theoretically possible to compute the time and place of every event that will ever occur. - x (wiki page)

If you could attenuate to every strand of quivering data, the future would be entirely calculable, as inevitable as mathematics. - Sherlock in TST

Sherlock in TST (despite his Free Will fall in TAB), seems dedicated to a Deterministic - completely rational - view of the world.  This is another example of Sherlock fully embodying his facade in S4.

“I’m Sherlock Holmes, I wear the damn hat”

Facade!Sherlock (Hat Man) would be quite happy to exist in a universe where everything were predictable and calculable. It would give him a feeling of control, and it would give him what he craves - the potential to know everything. The potential to deduce anything, including the future. To know everything would be to have nothing to fear.

The determinism vs free will debate is very often focussed on how each effects moral responsibility. If Determinism were true - and Hard Determinism precludes any free will in any of our actions - it would relieve Sherlock of responsibility for his behaviour.  And it would relieve him of the guilt of knowing that he had had the freedom to make other choices. It isn’t his fault that John suffered because of his faked death, or because of his failure to confess his love, because he had no free choice in any of his actions. 

“Jean-Paul Sartre suggested that people sometimes avoid incrimination and responsibility by hiding behind determinism: "...we are always ready to take refuge in a belief in determinism if this freedom weighs upon us or if we need an excuse"” x

Even after Mary made what she thought were random (free) choices in TST, she was unable to get ahead of Sherlock, because in S4, Hard Determinism is real and “no human action is ever truly random”.

Every one of her movements had been determined already, because humans cannot act or behave in any other way than they do. This is how (symbolically) Sherlock found her.

“On one hand, if determinism is true, all our actions are predicted and we are assumed not to be free; on the other hand, if determinism is false, our actions are presumed to be random and as such we do not seem free because we had no part in controlling what happened.” x

Moftiss’s writing on Doctor Who deals with this stuff a lot because stories with time travel in them constantly need to decide whether our actions can alter the future, or whether history is fixed. Moffat’s solution in DW is a combination - there are “fixed points” - certain moments in the universe’s history which must always happen as they do, but then there is flexibility too...

But getting in to the way Moffat handles this in DW is a whole other meta.

[I genuinely came across this entire idea from reading an example of determinism versus free will which used a freaking DIVING BOARD as an example of the distinction between the two concepts. The example said that Determinism is like someone being pushed from the diving board, and Free Will is like someone making their own decision to jump off it (Sherlock’s fancy gay little diving move before he jumps in TAB???!). It made me wonder whether the diving board analogy is like a common philosophy textbook example or something, and if Moftiss have referenced it?? I was unable to re-find where I read this diving board analogy (damn it!).]

Now flash forward from TAB to TFP, where the theme of the episode is I Want To Break Free.

In TFP we get an odd mixture of determinism AND free will represented in the scenes where Eurus forces Sherlock and John and Mycroft to make choices.

Being forced and being allowed to choose should be opposite ideas according to our Determinism vs Free Will subtext. So what’s happening in TFP in Eurus’s game is that we are tricked into believing our characters are being given choices, when they are really trapped in a psychopath’s game! These are NOT choices they are being given. They are prisoners - they have no free will.

I think this is telling a story once again, about the illusion of free will, JUST like Sherlock’s fall from Bart’s did. (SO did the Cabbie’s pill game in ASiP, btw! The cabbie gave his victims a choice, but it wasn’t a very good choice. Choose the gun, or a 50/50 chance at death. The cabbie’s victims were doomed to die though. The existence of any choice in the matter was an illusion.)

The determinism vs free will subtext is not so much simply Moftiss’s opinion on an ongoing philosophical debate, but rather they are using it as a commentary on the way we are made to believe that we are free, when we are not.

“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

John is “not free” either (but at least he knows it now). These texts are always about Sherlock, remember. It was just texting, but I wanted more!

I’ve only seen this text message interpreted in terms of John being “not free” because in his heart he is with Sherlock (and as a reference to TPLoSH’s “I am not a free man”). 

But reading it in terms of Free Will frames this text message as being more about our freedom to choose our future, and that John here knows that he can’t outrun his own Death in Samarra which is his heteronormative/no-homo ending that he gets in S4. “Things won’t end well”. Nope. No they did not. “It was nice to get to know you a little”. Because friends are as close as John and Sherlock are going to get (for the time being).

Back to TFP, in the room with only the gun, Sherlock is forced to choose between John and Mycroft, but chooses not to choose, which @tendergingergirl explained here is an example of Buridan’s paradox, another little piece of philosophy referenced here.

On a surface level, clearly Sherlock could simply not bring himself to murder his brother, and so turned the gun on himself.

But the subtext of it - in terms of determinism vs free will - is that killing himself was the only free choice left available to Sherlock. It was what Eurus didn’t want him to do, and she was probably hoping it wouldn’t occur to him. Because it was the one choice left open to Sherlock which would represent a genuine act of Free Will, as it was neither of the two “choices” that were given to him. Neither of those were truly choices. But killing himself was. 

(And with the Cabbie in ASiP, Sherlock did the very same thing. He chose the gun instead of one of the two bottles of pills. But the gun was a fake, in a similar way to how a tranquilizer gun is fake. In ASiP Sherlock ended the Cabbie’s game by essentially getting up and walking away. In TFP he’s managed to escape Eurus’s game the same way - by finding a loophole. He didn’t kill Mycroft, he was able to make a different choice. Of course it didn’t seem like a good choice, but it was a loophole and it allowed him to symbolically escape, proving that perhaps he is indeed Freer than he thought.)

So while Sherlock shows this obsession with Determinism in TST, it seems he is rediscovering his desire for freedom in TFP.

Instead of playing Eurus’s game, Sherlock flipped the chess board. He knew, or had just figured out, that Eurus didn’t want him to die yet, and so Sherlock realised that he held the power over her. There’s a bit of a hint in one of Moffat’s Doctor Who episodes....

“The first rule of being interrogated is that you are the only irreplaceable person in the torture chamber. The room is yours, so work it. If they're going to threaten you with death, show them who's boss. Die faster.” - Heaven Sent (2015), written by Steven Moffat.

So the direction here is good - we’re moving from Sherlock in TRF doing as he is forced, to in TAB and TFP doing what he chooses. From things carrying on as they always have been (determinism), to rewriting history (free will)...

“You wrote your own version, as I remember. Appointment in Sumatra. The merchant goes to a different city and is perfectly fine.” - TST

@justanotherone16 tagging you because philosophy! 

More meta: A Leap of Faith by @raggedyblue and our musings on Reduction ad absurdum here and here and also Mind the Gap again by @raggedyblue. I’m betting there’s more metas out there about this stuff but these are the ones I found. Thanks for reading! :-D

[This is a bit like my Murder, not Suicide meta, but that was in the context of the suicides of gay men that were “murders” perpetrated by homophobic society]

[spotifypremiumapks]

Who is Sam Johnson? Wiki, Biography, Age, Family, CEO Accused of Harassing Teen Boy, Video

Sam Johnson Wiki - Sam Johnson Biography

Sam Johnson is the CEO of VisuWell who is accused of harassing a teen boy who wore a dress to his prom in Tennessee in April 2021. Video of the incident involving the 46-year-old business leader went viral on TikTok, Twitter, and Reddit. The video was recorded by the boy’s boyfriend at a hotel before the Franklin High School prom on Saturday, April 24. Johnson has denied any wrongdoing. The boyfriend, Jacob Geittmann, originally posted the video on TikTok and then on Twitter. He said his boyfriend, Dalton Stevens, wore the dress “for his senior prom to kind of break the stigma around men wearing dresses. He looked gorgeous, everybody loved it and nobody had a problem with it.” Geitmann added, “We went to this hotel close to where we live and we got a lot of good photos and we were there for about an hour and right as we were about to leave we standing outside in this little middle area with a bunch of buildings surrounding us. This man comes up and he’s about an inch away from my boyfriend and he says, ‘What are you wearing?’ And he’s like, ‘A dress, why?’ And he’s like, ‘Why are you wearing that? You shouldn’t be wearing that.’” Geitmann said his boyfriend responded, “because I can and I want to.” According to Geitmann, Johnson then started “going on and on” and was “throwing insults at him … ‘You look disgusting, you look ridiculous, you look like an idiot. Men shouldn’t be wearing this.’ All this homophobic banter.” Johnson told Newsweek the accusations are “entirely false,” saying it “wasn’t anything personal or involving a dress.” He told the news site it was “about obnoxious, loud behavior by this group of teens.” Johnson added he had asked the teens to “tone down the vulgarities around the families and children who were present.” He told Newsweek, “We had just sat down for dinner at this restaurant that we frequent, and I was returning from the restroom when I was presented with their loud cursing. Making it about the dress was their idea and they edited out most of the exchange. I have no ill will towards anyone or their personal choices, so long as it does not harm me or my family.”

Sam Johnson Age

Sam Johnson is 46 years old.

Background

Johnson lives in Franklin, Tennessee, which is about 20 miles south of Nashville. The video has also gone viral on Reddit, in a /r/publicfreakout thread titled, “Man harasses LGBTQ+ teen in dress, leers and tries to follow him.” Johnson and VisuWell did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Heavy. Johnson deleted his Twitter and Facebook accounts and VisuWell appears to have removed a “Meet Our CEO” page about Johnson from its website. Johnson has been the CEO of ValuWell since 2017, according to his now-deleted LinkedIn profile. He is also on the board of directors. According to a press release from VisuWell, the company, formerly known as WeCounsel, has a mission “to provide elegant platforms that allow healthcare organizations of all types to deliver continuity of care and improved access to health services by equipping practitioners and their patients with a convenient and effective platform for virtual care delivery.” A cached page on the VisuWell website includes a “Meet Our CEO: Sam Johnson” section that reads: Sam is a career-long healthcare technology innovator and problem solver with beginnings in the early days of electronic claims and scheduling systems. He was involved throughout the transformation of paper medical records to electronic (EHR), contributed innovations in the Patient Engagement and Population Health movements, and is now engaged in and challenging areas of virtual access, known as telemedicine. He is the founder of multiple healthcare tech startups and currently serves on the board of directors for several healthcare organizations as a growth and technology strategist. On LinkedIn, Johnson wrote about himself, “I’m a brand creator, a growth catalyst, and source of encouragement and problem solving for startup and early stage companies struggling to differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. If you’re into making a difference in healthcare and people’s lives, let’s be in touch.” Johnson was previously the founder and CEO of “patient outreach and messaging platform” from 2012 to 2017. He was a board member of a Nashville healthcare startup from 2010 to 2016, and was sales director at a Franklin-based healthcare company from 2005 to 2012. He previously worked as a regional sales manager at a healthcare systems company in North Carolina from 2002 to 2005 and has other healthcare-related sales jobs dating back to 1996. Johnson was quoted in an April 6, 2021, press release about the University Hospitals system in Cleveland, Ohio, choosing VisuWell as its telehealth provider. Johnson and his company said the pandemic has increased the need for hospitals to have telehealth systems. He said in a statement, “At Visuwell, we partner with organizations to develop tailored virtual care strategies including telemedicine solutions to address healthcare’s biggest challenges, while providing them with a robust feature set and configurable options to help them successfully deliver virtual care for their patients. We are excited to work with an innovative organization like UH to expand their virtual care footprint and transform the telemedicine experience for providers and patients.”

Johnson Can Be Seen in the Video

https://twitter.com/davenewworld_2/status/1386529380529225730?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1386529380529225730%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fheavy.com%2Fnews%2Fsam-johnson-visuwell-ceo%2F The viral video begins with Johnson laughing as Stevens, wearing a red dress and a black mask, tells him to “f*** off.” Geittmann, who is recording with his cell phone, can be heard asking Johnson, “You think he looks gross?” and Johnson responds, “He does.” Stevens then begins to walk away and Johnson can be seen in the video following him. Johnson starts to say, “You look like…” and the teen boy cuts him off and says, “I look like what? F*** off.” Johnson then says, “You look like an idiot,” and continues to walk toward Stevens, who tells him to, “Get the f*** away from me.” The video then shows Johnson swinging his arm toward Geittmann and hitting his phone. He also hits Stevens with his arm as Stevens tries to walk away. Johnson then tries to tell Geittmann to stop recording. Geittmann then smirks and shrugs his shoulders as other people can be heard in the background telling him to stop and leave teens alone. A woman can be heard saying, “stop, stop, stop, please.” A man says to Geittmann, “It’s prom night. It’s a bunch of kids,” and the woman adds, “It’s a special night.” The video ends with Stevens telling Johnson, “I’m sorry, I’m gorgeous.” He replies, “Are you?” with a smirk. Read Also: Who is Alex Koo? Wiki, Biography, Age, Alber Elbaz’s Boyfriend, Cause of Death, Instagram

Geittmann Statement

In a follow-up video posted on TikTok, Geittmann described what can be seen in the video when Johnson swung at him. “He hits my phone out of my hand and it goes flying on the concrete. I go to grab it to start recording him again and he tries to swing at me again, which you can see in the original video when the camera goes out for a second, you can see him swinging, he tries to hit my phone out of my hand again but he misses and hits my boyfriend in the back,” Geittmann said. “So that’s when all of the moms that were there they’re getting really involved now, telling Johnson, ‘You need to calm down, this is absolutely ridiculous, you are out of your mind,’” Geitmann said on TikTok. “And at this point the hotel staff had gotten word from inside about what was going on, so two of their ladies come out and they’re like, ‘OK guys what’s going on out here?’ He pretends like he has absolutely no clue what’s going on and he’s standing there like, ‘I’ve just been standing here the whole time, I don’t know what’s going on, I didn’t try to talk to them, I didn’t hit them, I didn’t try to smack his phone out of his hand.'” Geittmann said, “I’m like, ‘Dude I have a minute-long video of you harassing us you can’t just blatantly deny it like that.'” https://twitter.com/jacobgeittmann2/status/1386402224524316676?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1386580446562107396%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es2_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fheavy.com%2Fnews%2Fsam-johnson-visuwell-ceo%2F Geittmann added, “The staff was really great about everything, they sent him back to the bar, because he was pretty obviously drunk, just cause they were calling the police and they didn’t want him to freak out anymore than he was. And as we were leaving, they told us that they were kicking him out and calling the police. So, I guess it’s a win.” Geittmann did not say in the video what hotel they were at when the incident took place. It was also not immediately clear if police actually responded to the hotel and if an investigation into the incident took place or is ongoing. Geittmann wrote on TikTok, “We left before the police got there so we could make our dinner reservations but he was removed from the hotel.” Geittmann said Johnson was at the hotel for the bar/restaurant on the property and was not part of the prom group. Johnson told Newsweek he not kicked out of the hotel and he and his family left on their own.

VisuWell Is Facing Calls on Social Media

VisuWell is facing calls on social media for the company to speak out about Johnson and to cut ties with their CEO. Geittmann tweeted the video at VisuWell and wrote, “you gonna address this publicly? not a good look!” Former Big Brother houseguest Rachel Swindler was one of the first to call out Johnson and the company, tweeting the video and adding, “Hey @VisuWell, do you know you employ a homophobic named @SJohnsonTN? That doesn’t look too good for your company in 2021. Boost this twitter. He harassed and threw homophobic slurs at a young teenage boy wearing a dress.” The Tennessee Holler, a progressive-leaning local news website, tweeted, “Looks like @sjohnsontn of @VisuWell (who has hopped in our mentions many times to be homophobic but has now deleted his account) appears to have now done some real-life homophobia to some young men at a prom in Nashville.” Political scientist and American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein tweeted, “Hey, clients of @VisuWell, are you cool getting services from a company with a CEO like this?” Screenwriter, director, and TV producer Steven DeKnight tweeted, “Hey, @VisuWell. Is this your CEO Sam Johnson? He either needs to be ejected immediately or you need to make a statement saying you condone this kind of hateful, homophobic behavior. What’s it going to be?” FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK Read the full article

[argetcross]

Boku No Hero Adventure [1/?]

After a Decade, UA Games Announces New Sequel to Popular Fantasy RPG Smash Hit, Hero Adventure: Symbol of Peace.

(the wiki and social media fic about a game that doesn't exist)  

Read it here on AO3.

June 15th, 2016 - Game Announcement

Hero Adventure posted:

6/15/15, 4:02 pm

--

After a Decade, UA Games Announces New Sequel to Popular Fantasy RPG Smash Hit, Hero Adventure: Symbol of Peace

By Maya Lurelin

June 15, 2015, 3:42 pm

Boku no Hero Adventure is the upcoming new installment to the popular fantasy RPG franchise, Hero Adventure. Known for its memorable characters, engaging mix of simulation and RPG combat, and an engaging fantasy world, Hero Adventure defined the early 90s as one of the most beloved RPG games. The story of All Might and Shimura Nana’s struggle against the villainous All for One inspired spin off light novels, 4-koma, and even one questionable live action movie.

However, after a decade, fans had begun to lose hope that UA release a sequel to continue All Might’s adventures. So imagine the collective shock at the UA panel’s presentation when those familiar chords of “You Say Run” began to swell. At the panel, UA debuted their a 30-second long teaser trailer, mainly showcasing nostalgic environments like the Ingenium Manor and the Pussycat Woods now rendered beautifully in 3d. The trailer ended with a stunning cut of the One for All blade emerging from molten lava and a white gloved hand grabbing its hilt. The title card revealed that the sequel is to be called Boku no Hero Adventure and UA Games is expecting a release date next year in June 2016.

Already fans are clamoring for more details, but at the moment, information seems to be sparse. Little is known about the content of the game or its characters. Many speculate that All Might will no longer be the protagonist, comparing the hand in the trailer to All Might’s, and the game will naturally follow the eighth wielder of the One For All blade. At the panel, lead developer Horikoshi Kohei said:

“It’s been a decade since the original Hero Adventure game was released and so we want to deliver something that will both satisfy fans of the original as well as bring in new fans to the series. In every way, Boku no Hero Adventure is meant to be the next step in the Hero Adventure legacy.”

Likely trailers and other promotional material will begin to be released as 2016 rolls around. So far, Boku no Hero Adventure has been confirmed for the PS4and PC.

Boku no Hero Adventure is set to be coming out Summer 2016 in Japan, English localization not yet confirmed.

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(via kotaku.com) | [Reply | Read Comments]

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AllMightiest

IT’S BEEN 84 YEARSSSSSSSS

*champagne emoji* *clapping emoji* *crying emoji* *champagne emoji*

nyoomenginenyoom

BUT WHAT ABOUT ENGLISH LOCALIZATION, UA DON’T DO THIS TO ME

ghoulparty

I think my heart stopped when I heard those first few notes. My mom came in and asked me why I was crying. THE TREES TILES, MOM, THE TREES TILES. 

X9

im so hype but also if u play as the 9th one for all user, doesn’t this mean all might is dead????

       Sniperforlife > X9

       Spoilers!!!! Also maybe not? Nana giving All Might her powers only made her weak, it didn’t kill her.

       crimsonparty > Sniperforlife

       lol this game has been out for 10 years

       edgelord ruth > Sniperforlife

       but it does mean all might might (heh) be weak and old! I’M NOT READY TO SEE OLD ALL MIGHT. OTL

       Sniperforlife > edgelord ruth

       GRAN TORINO IS GOING TO BE GRANPA TORINO

boombaby

hallelujah i praise the gods of one for all and PLUS ULTRAAAAAAAAAA

now please UA just confirm localization *prayer hands emoji*

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Hero Adventure posted:

12/22/15, 5:49 pm

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BNHA in Famitsu scans, First Look at Midoriya Izuku, the 8 th wielder of One For All, and Exclusive Interview with Neda Hirofumi, Art Director

By Kevin Lee

December 22nd, 2015, 2:28 pm

This week, Famitsu released the first artworks of the protagonist for Boku no Hero Adventure, the highly anticipated sequel of Hero Adventure: Symbol of Peace, coming out June 2016. The issue confirms long held fan suspicions that the game does not feature All Might, the protagonist of HA: SoP, as its main character. Instead, fans can look forward to playing as Midoriya Izuku, the purported student and eight inheritor of the legendary blade, One for All. The game setting is said to take some twenty years after the original Hero Adventure.

[image]

(thank you to Tanaka-san for the scans!)

This magazine issue also included a rare interview with the game’s Art Director, Neda Hirofumi, who talks about the difficulties in moving designs from 2D into 3D. Here are some excerpts below:

Neda: When I was brought on to do the design work for Boku no Hero Adventure I was very nervous! I had actually played the original Hero Adventure when I was in college, on the PS1. So the series was very nostalgic for me. My friends all asked me when I got the job, isn’t it fun to design for the characters and environments you grew up drawing? But I ended up being the unhappiest when the design wasn’t working. *laughs*

Neda: You see, the original Hero Adventure was 2D and it was the era of beautiful sprite work. Your impression of the landscapes and those American comic book battle scenes were really strong. So we had a long debate of whether Boku no Hero Adventure should try to look like that. But Horikoshi-san [the lead developer] really wanted to push our boundaries and not just create something easy. But the effort to really translate the feelings in a 2D world into an original 3D world isn’t easy. *laughs*

Neda: Horikoshi-san knew from the start that we wanted to make a game that was the reverse of a sequel. That became a bit of a catchphrase around the office. How to make a sequel that wasn’t a sequel. And so I let those feelings express themselves in the art and that’s why in 3D, we went with a richer, more stylized design and a kind of visual charm, to really try and make our players go, “oh, this is the world I saved ten years ago, but it’s completely new and I want to explore it”.

Boku no Hero Adventure is set to be coming out July 2016 in Japan, US, and EU for the PS4, WiiU, and PC.

(via kotaku.com) | [Reply | Read Comments]

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[video]

Boku no Hero Adventure - Official Story Trailer - UA Games 2016

UA Games | Subscribe 1.7 m

Published January 12, 2016

Boku no Hero Adventure - coming soon to PS4, WiiU, and PC. Preorder here!

The long awaited sequel to Hero Adventure: Symbol of Peace, is coming soon! Step into a fantasy RPG rife with a rich history and complex stories as the aspiring young hero, Midoriya Izuku, must battle the hidden evils that have begun to move again. At the end of the All Might era, who can hold back the twilight of villainy that threatens to engulf the world? Gather rivals and comrades from the corners of the land and fight for your right to be the successor of One for All!

Show More

Comments 37,843 | Top Comments

nchauz13

[Audio Translation]

In a world that has flourished under the peaceful light of All Might,

The roots of evil have begun to worm their way to the surface.

One young man must be ready to risk everything.

For his greatest dream.

Midoriya (VO): I want to save everyone with a smile!

Midoriya (VO): I might not have any special powers, but if I use my mind and work hard-

Bakugo (VO): Move out of the way you backwater peasant! I’ll be the one to claim the legacy of All Might.

Uraraka (VO): For the sake of my family, I have to do my best! I’m not going to let anyone die on my watch!

Iida (VO): It is the duty of a knight of Ingenium to conduct himself with poise and dignity at all times. I cannot tolerate such abhorrent prices for these radishes!

Find friends and rivals alike and unravel the truth about the festering evil. Choose wisely, for your decisions will affect your friends, their stories, and even the fate of the whole world.

Villain (Name?) (VO): You’re a fool if you think the world needs a hero like you! You can’t save everyone!

Nana (VO): Just remember, Toshinori, a hero’s smile can save their hearts!

Midoriya (VO): GO BEYOND! PLUS ULTRA!

              View 173 replies +

              Supersonicfan

              nchauz13 thank u!!!!

              boomboombaby

              nchauz13 omg the voice acting is so good, is the whole game going to be voice acted?

              ghoulparty

              THE RADISHES RETURN xD

              nchauz13

              boomboombaby no confirmation yet for voice acting. my guess is it’ll just be for cutscenes, knowing UA

              Im still shook over branching paths, i can’t imagine them having the resources for full va

              boomboombaby

              nchauz13 yeah holy shit no wonder they’re releasing on pc

              deathfingers

              nchauz13 hand villain’s voice is sexy af you go ukiyama koki #dontkinkshameme

AkatsukiRed

DID I SEE THAT RIGHT? BRANCHING PATHS IN HERO ADVENTURE?????

              View 53 replies +

              pearable

              AkatsukiRed fuck this changes everything