#it makes me really sad to see a lot of young kids able to communicate with strangers Even if its safe! Theres always a risk

[cephalonheadquarters]

internet safety is a wonderful thing and so important and i love being safe online soooooo much

[yourclumsyguardianangel]

the seven + a few others future headcanons

percy:

becomes a high school teacher

teaches high school marine biology (idk how it is in other schools but when we hit sophomore year we got to choose different bio classes ie: marine bio, ag bio, med bio + regular bio)

also teaches the mythology elective and is the swim team coach

annabeth:

we already know this queen is an architect with obvious inspiration from greek architecture

learns how to make blue food for percy and their kids from sally

has traveled all over the world looking at different architecture

learns the basics of many languages so shes able to communicate with the locals

her and leo team up to build a small school near camp half-blood for year rounders so everyone can learn consistently but dw they get summers off

piper:

love her but shes a nepo baby

she doesnt act like it tho

”are you tristan mcleans daughter?” “who?”

loves her dad to bits but does not like being seen out in public by the paparazzi

marries shel, they dont have kids tho, neither of them want to bring any into the world especially with america’s downfall and the government erasing women and poc rights

is basically leos big sister atp

leo:

him and calypso dont last, maybe a year and a half in they split bc calypso wants to explore the world and leo is very emotionally unstable and calypso has a hard time understanding

they end on good terms but dont ever talk unless its with a group of friends

he goes into a trade to become a mechanic and owns his own shop

starts smoking cigarettes/vaping

his friends dont really approve but they understand he cant quit just yet as hes not in a mental space to do so

goes to therapy with a psychologist whos a demigod that specializes in grieving and war trauma

they all go to therapy but hes the last one to do it

he’s still the ‘happy go lucky’ guy hes always been but as he gets closer w the others they start to see the true sadness in him

piper and him grow a lot closer after jason died and have a big sister little brother relationship

hazel:

my girl stays at camp jupiter

takes nicos place at camp

horse trainer

her and frank also dont work out as a romantic relationship, they felt that the age gap was too much after frank turned 18 and hazel was 15 theyre still friends tho

hazel often visits leo in his shop

as much as leo reminds her of sammy, through therapy she has recognized that theyre separate people and to not push all her past feelings for sammy onto leo

not only does she train horses but she also teaches little kids basic math, science, and history to the younger kids

they all call her ms. hazel

she prefers to teach the really young kids (age 4-7)

wears her hair in different braid styles after BOO

frank:

my friggin HOMIE

i relate to frank a lot personality wise

therefore i think hed be a 4/20 fanatic after BOO

hes not stoned during training or during important camp duties

but otherwise you try talkin to him and you dont really notice until you look and see the far off look and red eyes and he just goes “huh?”

other than that hes a great leader

after he gets his cool new look from mars he takes really good care of his body including consistent exercise and eating really healthily (maybe he has a soft spot for fast food when hes hi)

him joining the military does not make sense to me

he lost his mom to war, and he was in one himself, idk about you but i would not wanna join the military after being the main character in a war

he studies to be a veterinarian for exotic animals

when no one is around he shifts into the animal to find out whats wrong

”dr. zhang prefers to work by himself” “why” “idk but hes always right, if it aint broke dont fix it”

jason:

rip home-slice

nico:

my other homie

my guy does not get taller than 5’8

stays at camp during the summer to train the new and old kids

him and will get a house together

teaches history at the camp school

cat dad (5 cats and counting)

will:

takes nicos last name when they marry bc its cooler

him being a doctor doesnt click w me i more picture him being an EMT

EMTs are hotter anyways

does med training with new apollo kids whenever he gets time

if he’s not busy during working hours he drops by nicos classroom w his fav drink from dutch bros (starbucks is MID) and hangs out with him and his students

[localapparently]

i love kimcom so much.. i love them so much..

theyre so..!! honestly if i think about them too much i'll cry.. and I'm rereading a few bits of dark castle to compare the novel and the webtoon and gosh, sleepyc and team's art really allows kimcoms interactions to feel more alive and goofy, silly even,,

epilogue spoilers ahead near the end

and novel's narration are like the gaps to fill in, both sides elevate the story,, i sound like a food critic but like. oh my goodness you read the part where kdj reunites with sys in dark castle after his revival and youre so taken by how sweet and cute it is. and then you read novel and..!!

I wouldn't have been able to run straight here if it wasn't for this feeling. I saw Shin Yoosung crying and thought that parents probably felt like this.

GOODBYEEEE I AM SO DEADDDD LIKE OH MY GOD YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME???

and webtoon chooses to let kdj maintain the same composure he had when he talked to jihye after saving her just moments prior,, and it works because now i read his inner thoughts in novel and I FEEL SO INSANE?!?!?! YOU BITCHHH SAY IT SAY YOU MISS HER?? no wait .. im getting off topic. this is becoming a kdj sys ramble

Honestly even though i call them found family I don't really classify them as a family either, they feel more like a home? at least at the first half of the story.. In an apocalypse where everything feels uncertain and you've lost all your close friends, you'd end up wandering aimlessly, so sticking to a group is moreso a temporary means of survival than friendship of any sort. It's also why kdj is so essential to kimcom as their glue, as the person who gathered them together, he provided them with that temporary party. and having that 'constant' you can return and realign to in that setting is so.. augh...

not to mention that three of the kimcom members are kids and kdj is their form of stability. lgy and sys hug him whenever they see him because he's the first adult that had ever shown them care. jihye is probably shaken from the first scenario but while she clings to yjh and admires him as her master, he probably doesnt do enough to reciprocate her respect or communicate as enthusiastically. now that i think about it, jihye feels kind of lonely, not young enough to get along with the kids particularly closely and not old enough to be buddies with the adults. does she make up for it by being talkative?)

And at this point in the story its evident that theyre not even that close !! singshong's writing style isnt one that elaborates on emotions and descriptive fluff to begin with, but sys is stated to not be so fond of jihye in ch162 because jihye was rude to kdj, they still feel like theyre in their own cliques. sys and lgy stick together as kids of similar ages, jhw and lhs get along normally, hsy is. hsy. lhs for one narrates kimcom as his 'companions' quite early on, but i'm unsure whether that choice is becuase thats just a suitable word for people closer than 'allies' but not close enough to be 'friends'. ultimately its just a buncha people who are trying to survive, and care about the guy that brought them tgt. it doesnt really feel like anything more than that.

and then as you're caught up in kdj's shenanigans, small snippets pass by and they feel a bit warmer yk. like sys and lgy having a coin flip whenever they're uneasy. (sys states that lgy has "done this before", like he's the one that has suggested the past coin flip(s). it feels like its implying that hes initiated this game system just to cheer up sys because shes a lot more transparent about feeling sad that kdj isnt there.) sooyoung of all people, willing to get an outer god contract to save sangah. jihye, hyunsung and seolhwa chilling in the room during proof of stars, and hyunsung was picking his nose like are you fr they are so unserious,.

in jttw arc ch 433, yoosung growing close enough to joonghyuk to not get intimidated by him and (forcefully (forcefully is a strong word but she straight up just puts it on his cheek unprompted and that is so funny of her)) apply seolhwa's ointment, even giggling when he allows her to do it after she brings up doctors orders.

after proof of stars, theres a portion that goes

The party members supported each other. (...) I saw the white lines connecting the empty universe. The stars, that seemed like they would never meet each other, were facing each other.

please know this: i wanted to cry and scream so bad. ive started to spell out kimcoms names rather than address them in their shortforms, that writing inconsistency is how emotional i am right now.

I can't do the justice of listing down every instance where they've grown a little closer, but i'm hoping to remember more on my second reread.

because orv is such a long novel, the way they gradually grow closer also feels realistic.. and by the time you're in the ch400s, its so clear that they wouldn't go anywhere else without each other.. if i start talking about vacation arc i'll just start sitting and staring at a wall again.

"you're explaining how an average found family trope is realised" Youre right!!! youre right!!,, me when the found family is actually found family.. don't shame me like this.. i'm just an emotional person..

Ah and then you get moments where their unity really shines, and they become god pummeling probability festering forces of nature... and its when one guy's life is in jeopardy. even when they weren't all that close yet, its when they save kdj where they feel most strong. and its a bit obvious because its like, common goal makes people group together yknow, but god the adrenaline and relief when they appeared in demon king selection.. the way their names pop up one after another when they vote for jung heewon's skill..

and 1865 !! 1865 was really the epitome of it all!! oh my god they were all so reluctant to return to the hell of the scenarios but they dragged themselves back because of one fucking guy that they loved too much. and i'm rereading 1865 a bit as i write this but the way they all yelled at their sponsors to pick them is so so funny and the whole speedrunning thing really shows their desperation to quickly find him but also feels a bit fun and even exhilirating with how theyd already beaten the game once, and they were going to storm through the whole thing again to reach kim dokja. like a fuckin earthquake. the lines in ch 536

They had to be insane. (...) These people who lost their minds were clearing the scenarios with insane methods.

YEAHHH THATS MY FUCKING KIMCOM WOOOH OH MY GODD THEYRE SO INSANE!!!!

kimcom's bond was strengthened because of their love for kim dokja, kimcom drifted so close because of how much they wanted to save kim dokja. whenever i think about the 'found family' trope between kimcom, it exists because they love kim dokja, and once again i'm reminded of how much that bastard is loved and how he denies that he is anything else but a reader outside the covers of the story.

It's not to say that all of kimcom's bonds were because of him, but it's clear that had it not been for him, they would have dissipated so much quicker.

agh. what was i talking about again..

genuinely i dont know if ive proven anything through this. i just had to talk about it. i havent even talked about the relationship between kdj and each kimcom member but then the post wouldnt end. sys's section would be thousands of words and i would even have a portion for gong pildu and jang hayoung..

i love kimcom. thats it thats the post.

[muzzlemouths]

OK time to discuss some thoughts concerning the DLC/Eclipse. Obviously, spoilers ahoy

. So first and foremost, I really appreciate their voice mannerisms (prior to being rebooted) being about what we expected out of Eclipse. One talking and then the other talking, despite the body itself not changing. And then after being rebooted, that voice becoming soft and careful. There are many implications to what the change means, but I'll return to that thought later.

. Getting confirmation that the light isn't just a pesky nuisance but does, in fact, genuinely hurt Moon. More than that — the confirmation that the animatronics can feel pain at all! I've been writing my fics with this headcanon in mind the whole time, but it's nice to have it confirmed.

. THE TABLE W/ PLUSHES. I know a lot of the fandom has already decided that Sun was playing by himself (a hc that is incredibly sad on its own) but I've been thinking... wouldn't it be neat if this was a showcase of them playing with each other? If they're both stuck in this state of back-and-forth and communication is limited if available at all, wouldn't it make sense for one of them to set-up a scene and the other to finish it? Is it not even sadder that this might be the only way they can have any sort of real conversation?

. Their mouth moves. Their mouth moves??? Their mouth moves! I'm not for sure the exact reason for why it's hidden behind their mask, but I'm assuming it was put in place after they were reworked as daycare attendants. It makes sense that they would be able to move and talk like the glamrocks, especially while working theater, so my only guess is that they placed the mask over their face after reworking them to prevent young children from sticking their fingers between the moving teeth. As a former daycare volunteer (and a teacher of the 1st-4th grade), let me tell you, kids that age will put their fingers anywhere.

. Happy Birthday! I don't think this being their first line after having been rebooted has anything to do with the rebooting itself. Like, I doubt there's any real correlation beyond them recognizing that it's Cassie's birthday. Then again, Kellen Goff's tweet makes me think I could be wrong about this one. Who knows!

. OK OK OK so the way they switch between Sun/Moon when we're wearing the mask is really fun (as mentioned by twinanimatronics, Moon rocks while Sun twitches!) but I want to talk about how wearing the mask inside their bedroom makes it look clean, and the implications behind that if we see Sun while the mask is on but Moon while it's off. Does it mean Moon sees things how they are while Sun sees things how he wants to? (Sidebar, this will definitely be influencing how I write Sun's denial in DMD)

. On a similar note, the mask being on in their bedroom also shows Eclipse's face over their ceiling, but more than that, it shows their ceiling decorations (the painted on clouds, now almost entirely gone) moving, with trees swaying at the very corners. Is this a trick of the mask, or is this how they really saw the room? Was it built that way or did it just happen after years of being cooped up inside? ARGHGH there's just so much to think about with this one!!

There's definitely more but these are the ones rattling around in my brain the hardest. Let me know your thoughts!

[deliciousdefendorinternet]

comparing Brother Bear with TBT since their Both movies about Brotherhood and also Brother Bear just Randomly popped into my head again today.

I've loved Brother Bear for years I think its a very underrated Disney movie with nice songs cute characters and a cute story.

and I randomly started thinking about it earlier and then started comparing it to TBT since their both strongly focused on Brotherhood.

and I realised that for some reason Brother Bear doesn't bother me as much as TBT does even tho it technically has many of the same faults.

it Rushes over the interesting character Drama and it Rushes a conclusion to said Drama between the Brothers at the end.

like the scene in the main film of Kenai confessing to Koda is still fairly sad but its massively undercut by having the song play over it.

the deleted version of that scene where the song doesn't play and we get to hear the full version of Kenai's confession and Koda's reaction is available on youtube and its way more heart-breaking imo.

which I guess is why they didn't go with that version since it would have maybe been a bit too much for young kids.

but the movie also employs the gimmick of having the brothers come back together in the end to fight off a life threatening enemy and all is seemingly forgiven between them straight away afterwards.

I guess one reason why BB doesn't bother me as much as TBT is that Kenai actually grows throughout the film despite wronging Koda in a massive way.

and Koda forgiving him too quickly in the ending is not as bothersome because we didn't see Kenai mistreat him the entire film up until the point he found out.

and he didn't then proceed to hurt him again in arguably just as bad a way as he did before like Bro zone did.

instead Kenai did grow in the film and he and Koda already had a healthy relationship prior to the reveal and later confession.

plus what they had throughout the film was genuine sibling banter it wasn't one sided like Bro zone's interactions were with Branch where it was basically just them treating him like a kid and not taking his Valid feelings seriously.

and when Kenai confesses to Koda he's a lot more openly remorseful and tries to go after him to make things right Bro zone just get a brief 4 second shot of them feeling bad and then the movie moves on.

not to mention the climax of BB involves Kenai making a sacrifice for Koda first off he puts his own life in danger in order to save him from his Brother Denahi. and at the very end he makes a big sacrifice ( staying as a Bear so he can stay with him even tho it means leaving behind his human life and not being able to openly communicate with his family )

which somewhat works as an act of love and redemption whereas the climax of TBT involves Bro zone being forced to work together in order to save their own lives as well as the life of the Bro who none of them wronged all that much tbh.

it doesn't really work as a first step towards them redeeming themselves and fixing their family because its kinda selfish and it didn't involve them really making any sort of personal sacrifice or even that much effort.

ya know its funny I just thought I'd make this post as a Random little thought since that's all this was I didn't actually expect to talk in depth and compare the movies stories this much lol.

I just started typing and got carried away 😂😂😂😂😂😂

anyway in short I love Brother Bear its a very adorable film and while its far from perfect in how it handles its story its flaws don't stop me from enjoying it.

since it still handled the more important parts of the story well enough.

unlike with Trolls 3 best thing I can say about it is that the movie version of "" Better Place "" is a legit great little song and frankly its too good for this film.

the story didn't earn such an emotional music piece in my opinion.

[my-decade]

my thoughts on Netflix's ATLA live action

As an adult who watched this show growing up and was there for the countdown to the comet (iykyk!!) I have thoughts!

Best: Zuko. angsty, teenage boy depression, father issues, determined to a self-destructive degree. The actor is great at capturing all these facets of Zuko's conflicting, complex character. Really great with the choreography/martial arts too. Its not easy to pull off Zuko's mostly shaven but with a ponytail haircut, but this actor manages it. And yes, the opening scene with him seeing the beam of light from the iceberg and saying, "Finally." did give me some chills. Honestly the actor just captures Zuko really well. Great casting.

Worst: Katara. has the personality of an elegant yet unassuming well watered house plant. Its more because of the writing than the actress… she's doing her best with this depressing egg whites version of Katara she's had thrusted upon her. It's not going to be convincing when Toph comes along next season and calls her sugar queen.

Aang: never has any fun. spends every episode staring into the distance being sorrowful and melancholic. *teardrop rolls down cheek* he is a depressed 40 year old in the body of a 12 year old. He has no fun side to him anymore- an important side for a 12 year old kid to have! Also spends the entirety of season one (you know, titled "water"!) and doesn't learn a lick of waterbending, not even from Katara, who spends a lot of it learning from the waterbending scroll!! Why??? However the actor is doing a great job and I think he captures Aang's essence really well. He is young and I think next season he will improve a lot.

Sokka: I almost forgot to write thoughts down for him, which I think says more than anything else. He's essentially been boiled down to the same old overprotective big brother, but now he comes complete with daddy issues. It's a little hilarious that Katara's worst memory is watching her mom get burned alive by a firebender soldier while Sokka's is hearing his dad say he's disappointed with him. Kind of ruins the moment tbh. They really took all the fun aspects of the main Gaang and dulled them down completely, its sad. At least he's cute though- and imo, the chemistry with Suki's actress was there.

The previous avatars: every single one meets Aang just to berate & yell at him and tell him he shouldn't have friends and where has he been for the past 100 years without giving him a second to speak. What?? Sadly it seems any dignity, grace, or wisdom the previous avatars had in the original, has been completely wiped out in this live action. Also, this idea of them telling Aang about things that are going to happen makes no sense. Did no previous avatar tell Roku his friend was going to betray him, let him die on the island, and start a 100 year long war? Also the idea of Aang being able to communicate ONLY if he's in one of their temples is stupid. What is the point of the avatar state, then? Will Roku be able to teach him anything at all?

Princess Yue: yes I wrote an entire paragraph about her lol. She is one of my favorite minor characters. I think they wanted her to look so accurate to her original counterpart that she just looks too much like a cosplayer, with such a stiff and lifeless looking wig. This is the one and only time I will concede I prefer M. Night's version of Yue as far as costuming goes, though both funnily enough forget her eyebrows shouldn't be dark. The actress was fine. But this version of Yue is quite a different person from og Yue, I can't really compare. Plus, it feels like we see her for a good 10 minutes before she dies for the moon spirit. I couldn't buy into her and Sokka having feelings for each other because it felt like they knew each other for a good 2 hours at most. Ideally, I think these two versions kind of fused together would be perfect.

Azula/Mai/Ty Lee: Grouping them together because. Azula is the most unconvincing out of the characters for me. I don't buy that this girl is supposed to be the princess Azula for a second. I'm neither intrigued nor intimidated, and that's pretty bad as Azula was one of my top favorite characters from the original. The costume is fine, the wig feels cheap, her dialogue is horrendous, the actress can't convince me. Azula isn't smart or cunning, sharp, or collected, and her "working with Zhao" just made her look dumb when the entire plan flopped. She is a whiny, petulant little girl stamping her feet in every other scene. It's not for me. Also, the way her relationship with Ozai is depicted here makes Ozai look like a loser, too. It's like they want us to not be afraid of either of them.

As for Mai and Ty Lee. Ty Lee is fine. She looks okay, the actress is fine for how little we see her. On Mai, the wig is just so bad I don't get what happened. It's like they're struggling on the line of being realistic with the styling, or leaning completely in cartoon-character-came-to-life. I don't think the actress for Mai here was a good choice.

Dialogue: the worst part of this show. When they're not completely quoting word for word from the original, it's.. just bad. Everything is always exposition and thats not good. The few moments that aren't are just... idk.

CGI: not bad. I was expecting worse. Fire, earth, and air all look great. Water feels a little slow, mostly when its just water and not ice but that can be improved I assume. Koh was pretty cool, as was Wan Shi Tong.

Settings: Beautiful!! Omashu looked great. South and North water tribes looked great. Ozai's throne room looked incredible and I was annoyed every time we see it, he is just standing around and not sitting on his throne. It just reminded me how amazing the buildup to Ozai and Azula's reveals were in og season 1.

Costume: Its either a hit or a miss. There's strangley not much in between. Aang, Katara, Sokka, Zuko, Iroh, June, Ozai, Jet, Suki, the Kyoshi warriors, all look pretty great. Then you have characters like Azula, Mai, or Yue, who just look like half decent cosplayers. It kind of takes you out of the moment when it looks like the person is a cartoon character, rather than just a normal person. For example, compare how Katara looks compared to Azula.

Music: of course it was fantastic. A lot of it (I think most) was from the original show, which has one of the greatest soundtracks an animated show has ever had imo.

Final thoughts: Ultimately, it was kind of what I was expecting. You can't condense 20+ episodes worth of development into 8 and expect it all to flow perfectly. However, there are also a lot of changes that really don't make sense to me. I am very curious to know how on earth they will do seasons 2 and 3, as season 1 is the slowest in pace compared to the next two seasons. The original's finale was split into four episodes! Unless they add more episodes for next season, it's going to be a big jumbled mess of lore being shoved into our faces. I am also concerned about Toph. The Gaang so far has been stripped of their fun/unique personality traits. Is Toph going to be the same?

[littleequinn]

Chapter 5

After talking with Bruce I decided I wanted to go try and find everyone else. Hopefully we would still get along even though I wasn't feeling young. Eventually I found them in the kitchen making breakfeast. Tim was flipping eggs, Dick was getting drinks for everyone and Barb was setting the table. 'Alfred must not be feeling well' I thought.

"There she is! Good morning sunshine" Tim waved at me

I waved and smiled a bit averting my gaze

"Not that talkative when you're not in little space huh?" Barbara laughed.

"I was threatened with my life if I spoke what do you expect"

That must have came off rude because they seemed suprised that I said that. I mean it was the truth i'm not gonna sugar coat it. Being little was so much more easier than being big. At least I didn't really have to communicate.

"Anyways, Bruce said that you guys need to help me with my powers and stuff so when can we start?"

"After breakfast, do you like eggs? If not I can make something else"

"I like eggs just fine thanks Tim"

"No problem kiddo"

When Tim gave me my eggs I started eating really fast, afraid that this was the last meal I was ever gonna have.

"Its not going anywhere kid slow down" Dick laughed

After I finished I was a bit embarrassed. Its just that they didn't feed me a lot in that cell. I'm just scared that any minute now they'll bust through that door and take me away. To the dark place. He left me in pitch darkness until he came down to play with me some more. So when the light came on I knew things were gonna get bad.

"Sweetie are you okay? You're spacing out" Barbara asked and reached her hand out to touch me. I flinched and my eyes must have turned blue because everyone looked a bit scared.

"I'm okay"

Nobody looked convinced but they let it go.

They took me outside where there was a hug pool. It even had a waterfall which I thought was really cool. Geesh this guy was rich rich. Barb wanted to review what I could do with my powers. So I walked on the water, breathed underwater, and moved the water with my mind.

"Nice job, but now lets try to do some attacks. Do you think yoy can do that"

My mind went back to slicing those guys in half and suffocating the madman. What if I accidently hurt them?

"I don't wanna hurt you guys. Last time I used my powers I killed people" I shuttered and started crying. Those little feelings were coming back. But I need to be big. When I figure out my powers then I can regress. Have to be stronger.

"Kid we promise you wont hurt us now just show us what you can do" Tim encouraged

First thing I tried to do was the water strikes again. Tim and Dick dodged it easily. Suprisingly when it made impact with the manor it didn't damage it just left wet marks.

We all trained for a couple more hours so I could figure out new attacks and how to use them. Still wasn't able to hit them at all so that sucked but I'm a little grateful just incase I accidently hurt them.

More attacks I could do was

1. Slam the ground and make water come out

2. Launch a water ball that trapped them in a water bubble for 10 seconds. (I missed the attack on Dick and hit a nearby chair

3. Control the water and make it attack for me

I'm so tired from all of this. All I wanna do is find papa and have him hold me. Barb must see me getting sad because she comes over to me and takes a pacifier out of her bag and gives it to me.

"You've had a long day haven't you little bat. How about we go find Bruce and he can take a nap with you"

I tiredly nodded my head and held my arms out for Dick to carry me. He took me in his arms quickly and started teasing me

"Why are you so tired baby? You didn't even hit us" He laughed

I babbled in annoyance and hit his back obviously not hurting him with how weak I was. By the time we made it to my nursery I was already half asleep. Bruce thanked them all for training me while he put me on the large changing table taking off my clothes. For some reason Perse didn't care about Bruce seeing her in her underwear and bra. She knew he wasn't going to judge her body or do anything to her. He just wanted to get her comfortable. Bruce put Perse in her crib and covered her up in the soft pink blanket. Perse started to cry reaching up at her caregiver not wanting him to leave her alone

"Baby I'm right here I'm not going anywhere"

Perse still continued to cry out wanting to cuddle with him while she fell asleep.

"Do you want me to hold you? Is that it pumpkin?"

She nodded and stopped crying. Bruce chuckled and took her out of the crib and went into his own room where he layed Perse down and layed next to her where she quickly fell asleep.

(Meanwhile)

Jason has been getting tortured for 6 months by that sick clown. He didn't lose hope that Batman was gonna save him not knowing that he wasn't coming. Nobody was coming. Joker was going on about how they should team up and wreak havick on the innocent. Jason was tuning him out until Joker said something that made his whole body run cold.

"Just like Bats and his new kids"

"No he wouldn't!" Jason protested

"You think! So this isn't Batman then? Weird. The pointy ears are usually a dead giveaway" Joker said showing him a picture of batman and Tim.

"No..."

Joker laughs as he takes out the next picture

"You thought that one was bad? Look at this!"

Joker showed Jason pictures of the sliced up dead bodies that Perse killed and then showed a picture of her wrapped in Batmans cape.

"So Batman will save a murderer but won't even come save you? How disappointing is that?" Joker laughed.

"Im sure he took her to arkham right after"

"No no no no no Jason my boy! He took her in as his own! Shes now a member of the batfam. Isn't that just sweet" Joker took out another picture that was taken that day of Batman sitting with you on a building. Both your legs hanging over the edge with Perse leaner into him smiling softly.

"I didn't want to show you those photos really I didn't. But it was the only way for you to get closure. Now I know it hurts but sometimes you gotta be cruel to be kind"

Joker then proceeds to beat Jason with his cane. 'After everything we went through he can just replace me like that? I'll destroy him I swear on everything'

[breesays]

When everyone believes you - what’s that like?

Hello, and happy Pride! I'm asexual. Hetero romantic asexual I think, but without alcohol maybe aromantic. It remains to be seen. I hadn't even heard the term aromantic before this year. But this is my first official Pride - and although I'm not exactly parading around waving my purple/black/white/grey flag (as my pride is still another's pain point), I DO want to knock out some FAQs. 

The first one I see a lot, and have a very personal investment in: Why would an asexual need to come out? I see this from allos (GOOGLE IT) and aces alike. Some aces say "it's my business, it's private" and I respect that. Some allos consider it a non-event - annoying, even, that we feel the need for a label. But I do. I want to make it perfectly clear that my experiences - from just before puberty and beyond - have been very different from the NORM. 

If you don't know what asexuality is, I will direct you to the following: AVEN, Ace Dad, TAAAP. I don't want to give that TED talk today. In fact, here is that TED talk. 

So, why be loud about it? First of all, I actually don't feel great talking or writing about it. I'm a sex-averse ace, and will go to great lengths to avoid it in conversation, TV, movies, music, etc. I don't even like SAYING the WORD asexual (ace is great) But LISTEN - there are people who don't know asexuality EXISTS. As an orientation, it needs visibility. People - kids - teens - couples who've been married for decades - need to know of it as part of a wide spectrum. It's like someone found the uncropped, full size photo and it is incredible. 

From a very young age, we're taught that sexuality is compulsory. An inevitability. Not now, but always "someday." Late bloomers. Innocents. Prudes. "Nothing serious." We're taught about consent, and boundaries (now) but at no point did anyone say - "and you may choose to never consent." Just... never presented as an option. And that sort of narrative needs a forking fork in it.

It's so great to see Gen Z coming out at 13, 14,15 - and yes, sexuality is fluid so maybe they change their mind - but God it must feel amazing to KNOW. To have had that a-ha moment. To be able to wave that little flag and just... Opt out. Say no thank you, and be believed.

We learned how painfully white-centric spaces and media were (are) and underrepresented Black people felt during the Black Lives Matter movement because we finally shut up and listened to their stories and perspectives. I'm not suggesting it's the same level of oppression, but I'm saying it was a great chance for us all to stop centering ourselves and our experiences. And to consider the value in representation. And I’m asking you to do that again.

  I basically tried to drink myself into being allo for 15+ years. So what I'm trying to do is put my story out there in case some other questioning ace need to see it. I'm trying to save your liver, your dignity, your mornings. I want to tell you that I believe you and you have nothing to prove. YOU DON'T HAVE TO TRY IT. You CAN JUST KNOW. Trust yourself. Are you looking for permission? Then I grant you it.

I am not completely at peace with this identity. I'm angry. I'm sad. I re-evaluating a huge portion of my life - what things did I want and what things did I just think I should want? Which parts of me are damaged because I've spent so long trying to cram myself into a mold that wasn't made for me? I don't think it could've happened any other way. When I tried to come out in 2005 it was pre-Twitter, pre-Tumblr, pre-podcasts There was no flag, and there was only ONE activist (David Jay). AVEN was there, but it didn't feel like a community. I couldn't get anyone to take it seriously. Now we have like 3 books, two podcasts and Yasmin Benoit! Hey, it's something.

I guess that wasn’t really an FAQ. It was one why, my why. 

[violentivy]

REEL FEELS: DAYS 9 AND 10

Yoshi lives at my Mom's, and has since the last time my sons were there in early 2014. Even though it's a different house, this Yosh made the move. My family has never given up on seeing my kids again.

Even when I've thought I would never see them again, there are all these little reminders. A vinyl Mario toy, a bathtub toy, and the sad doting my step father does with just a little less pep in his step.

My step dad is a man of few words. He has some hearing troubles and it's generally kind of hard to communicate with him. He's taking very good care of my Mom and Brother.

But since the boys haven't been around, you can just see him move a bit slower and sadder.

He still keeps the cookie jar stocked with Dan's favorite cookies" even though Dan has Celiac's disease and couldn't possibly eat them anymore.

It hurts sometimes just to go over there. My Mom has lost 2 sets of grandkids. My sister moved to Ireland when my niece and nephew were still quite young. Of course, my various situations and my brother's relationship with his baby mama dissolving soon after his youngest was born...

They at least only live around the corner, and during the school year my brother's kids go to Moms after school a few days a week.

But, my Mom has all these grand kids and only really ever sees 2 of them. Sometimes 3. My step kids like going to see her but seldom make the time, my daughter lives more than halfway across the state and...

It must be like a nightmare that keeps replaying in her head.

This is why, I think, she told me that I never did anything to raise my own kids.

She wanted to hurt me for allowing my children to go to my ex in laws when she was right there.

But she doesn't remember choking me, or hitting me. She only remembers threatening to kill me before I was 5.

(she mentioned this last night.)

I spent the night last night explaining what autism and ADHD look like in adults and how every last one of us has symptoms.

Poor emotional regulation that looks like BPD? Check.

I have been staying away because menopause is making my emotions a bit more roller coastery than usual.

Luckily, I'm able to stay calm most of the time at home now. The worst I do is occasionally yell at or throw inanimate objects.

This was not always the case. I am a product of my conditioning. I wish I could go back for a lot of reasons. I wish I had known these things when I was younger. But I can only act on what I know now.

I know I am not good at regulating my emotions and mess. I know I have severe abandonment issues due to the way my parents treated me as a kid, only reinforced by sending my ex to prison and having my kids taken away. It isn't anyones fault but my own and I own that.

I really thought I was doing the right thing at the time. And yes, having harmful people in one's life is less pleasent than their absence. However, my life is a bit different and I haven't quite figured out how to navigate these feels yet.

I will. I know I will. In the meantime I try really hard not to drive people nuts with my poor regulation.

My ex father in law, on one of the last occasions we spoke, said something that angered me, and I walked away from him.

He said "Why do you do that, Dee? You get angry then you walk away! Stay and talk with me."

I didn't want to have to find a shovel, old man.

That's the answer. I'm a loose fucking cannon with a horrible temper that I'm usually pretty good at directing into things that aren't people.

But I swear if any harm comes to any of my kids, I will direct every bit of righteous rage at whomever has committed the atrocity. So, he best not upset any of my kids enough for me to get involved.

He will have unwittingly opened a firehose of rage, and my capacity to make someone's life an absolute living hell.

Like dude, I get it, your son is in jail because I made a judgement call. Remains to be seen whether or not it was the right one. I stand by it though because I literally can't legally do anything else. Nor can you.

It is a fool's errand.

In this next photo, Emma reminds me that when folding laundry, getting kissy breaks is an important and nessesary measure to keep one productive and sane.

This. Fucking. Doggo.

Emma crash landed into our life about 5 years ago, right around my birthday. As you can no doubt tell from the picture, Em is a dog of a certain pedigree, the kind that many apartment complexes prohibit.

Luckily, her paperwork just says she's a lab mix. We told our original apartment when we got her that she was part vizsla, and she's the right color and shape for that, so they accepted without question.

And being the kind of dog she is, she must be very close to a human at all times, she wakes herself up snoring. She is afraid of her own farts. She is also incredibly friendly.

She can identify someone crying in any room of the house and will determinedly try to get to whomever it is to dry their tears with her tongue until they are giggling again. If I am the Queen and my partner is the "Princess", (his/their choice of designation) then Emma is the court jester.

She loves kids and young adults more than she loves anything else in her life. A close second is her Daddy.

I am a distant third. I am the preferred play parent though, so I'll take it.

She broke my finger once! It really hurt and Nyxie has as a result taken on the majority of the walks. She's just a big strong dog and I am... Well I'm unaware that I'm 5'0" and over 40. Sorry fam, didn't get that memo. I know you were trying to tell me something important, too. Darn.

Emma has witnessed Nyx falling several times in the winter and usually isn't much help. She panics well.

But we love her silly pibble butt, and we're glad she lives here with us.

She's a lot, but so is my Princess.

😂

[wallflowerimagines]

oh hello!! i found your blog and i’m so amazed at what you write! i’m unsure if i’ve asked here before, or if this is my first time. how would the lords react to a young F!reader who has liquid mercury wings, and also doesn’t know how to smile (yet)? lil ‘kuudere’ mercury angel lmao. i hope this isn’t too much to ask ^^ tysm and stay safe!! 💛

Thank you! 💛 This is my first time getting this ask. I've interpreted it as more of a child/young teen reader, let me know if you envisioned it differently!

Alcina Dimitrescu

Congratulations! You've just been adopted! 🎉🎉🎉

All of Alcina's mom instincts just clicked on the minute she saw you. You're so small. So cute. She felt the same instant connection to you as she did to her three daughters.

Without even being able to really process it, you're given a room, an entire new wardrobe, and three older sisters who adore you just as much as their mom does. Honestly, it's a little disorienting.

Alcina is a little worried about the fact that you seem to have no real emotions, but she's a patient lady who believes firmly in communication. If you like something and tell her, she believes you. Some people just don't emote that well, after all. She gets used to it very quickly.

(And if anyone even so much as makes a snippy comment about your face or tone, they're straight up dead.)

She is the kind of mom who wants ALL the pictures of her darling children, and makes you sit for many, many formal portraits--some of which she even paints herself.

She likes incorporating Angelic imagery in all of your portraits, too. Your wings are beautiful, and she wants to make sure that you never have insecurities about your appearance or your abilities. If she can show even 1/10th of how perfect she finds you, she calls it a mission accomplished.

Alcina never expected you to smile for her, honestly. You had limits, and she respected them. But when she unveiled the newest family portrait--with all of her children featured prominently--to her surprise she spots a small, trembling smile on your lips.

And when you say 'Thank you, Mother'? Alcina gets really emotional, and even a little teary eyed.

She Immediately drops to her knees and pulls you into the BIGGEST hug. You are always welcome.

Donna Beneviento

But if you're baby, and I'm baby, then who's driving the bus?

Donna does not know how to interact with you. She's already quite inexperienced with social interaction, and without the feedback that she normally gets from people's facial expressions, she's left floundering.

She's really trying her best, too! It's just, your voice doesn't even have the slightest bit of inflection. Are you happy? Sad? Give her a hint she is suffering.

Your deadpan tone just CRACKS Angie up, though.

Angie bridges the gap in your relationship. She is talkative and wacky, which fills the awkward silences between you and Donna very easily.

Similar to Donna, you find it very easy to talk to Angie! She doesn't force you to smile, or talk, or do anything you might be uncomfortable with. She's playful and loud, so you don't have to try very hard around her.

Eventually you two reach a peaceful, relaxing medium. Donna slowly accepts that your words are meant to be taken at face value, and with that realization a lot of the stress between you two melts away.

Also, if you let her make you clothes? She👏is👏 LIVING👏

She loooves to make things for you, and the wings only offer a welcome challenge. She's never worked with anything like that before, and she's so excited!!!!

Angie also wants you to fly around with her in the yard! The three of you actually have a lot of fond memories of outdoor tea parties where Donna primly sits in a chair, watching with a small, happy smile on her face as you flutter through the air with a SCREECHING Angie in your arms. She's having a BLAST!!

It's the first time she sees you smile, too, and it just makes her own smile grow. She never thought she'd have another sibling, but life really is full of surprises, isn't it?

Salvatore Moreau

Salvatore is SO concerned...

You're really young, left alone, with an obvious physical difference that can be spotted a mile away. Someone could target you very easily, and despite your wings he doesn't know if you could safely defend yourself. He really wants to help you out, but uh...

Kids are consistently terrified of him? He doesn't know if you would accept his help or run away screaming.

...but your clothes are so ratty, and it's so cold outside...

Moreau decides to sneakily leave you some cheese and a spare scarf on a rock in plain view. When he sees you put the scarf on and absolutely DEVOUR the piece of cheese, it steals his resolve.

He winds up leaving you a small trail of cheese pieces that lead to his home, and sets up a small separate nest like area for you. It's entirely enclosed, warm and far enough away from his room that he hopes it won't spook you. This will work great!

Little does he know, that you were only a few paces behind him the entire time, and when he finally finished with the setup, he turned around to find you hovering in the doorway, expression blank as always, and mouth full of cheese.

Moreau screamed

You seem happy enough with the new setup, though, and begin to follow Moreau around like a baby duck.

Dr. Moreau Time: He does give you the occasional exam to test your reflexes. He's worried a little bit about the composition of your wings--Mercury is a chemical that is known to cause madness and nerve damage with extended exposure, especially in young children.

He wants to ensure that you're safe from harm, both physical and mental!

One night, many weeks later, when you two are seated side by side watching a movie, you flop into his side with a small smile on your face, and fall asleep. Moreau tries not to wake you up with his overwhelmed sobbing.

Karl Heisenberg

Hello?? Child?? Why are you here???

Karl doesn't quite know what to do with you, at first. He's not bad with kids, per se, but it's suspicious for him that you just so happen to have a variant of his metal powers and were found wandering around outside the Factory.

He suspects Mother Miranda immediately--are you a spy? Another one of her victims? He doesn't know, and until he does you will be fed, clothed, and kept at arm's length.

Once he confirms your lack of involvement in her schemes, he engages with you a lot more.

Initially, just kind of baffled by the fact you don't emote, but upon further thought he totally gets it. Emotions suck, man. You don't gotta express more than you have to around him, he's cool with it.

He's more used to being a Fun Uncle rather than a dad (he's totally helped Alcina's daughters sneak out and cause mischief before this), so he only vaguely knows that you should probably have a bedtime, regular meals, and a social circle? He'll halfheartedly try to enforce stuff, but if you push back at all he just let's it go.

He, uh, will also let you help him mess around with corpses for the soldats? Definitely not age appropriate, but still, he wants to share his passion with you and teach you a little bit about metalwork.

One day, he does a little metal bending trick in front of you and makes you a flower, just to show off. Your eyes just LIGHT UP and the tiniest little smile shows up on your face, and when you reach your hands out to grab it--

Something deep in his chest just seized up all of a sudden. Shit, that's cute.

Shit, does that mean he's attached??? FUCK, WHEN DID HE GET ATTACHED??

[miaclemeverett]

ok so I'll admit I haven't watched the full Tommy alt vod yet. Mostly because I watched just a bit earlier (right before/when Wilbur joined) and it was making me so uncomfortable and sad haha but here's my take sorry it got long lmao

0. context for those unaware

everything kind of came to a boiling point yesterday (?) when Tommy made a joke on Twitter about Schlatt:

so people have been upset because it sounds like Tommy is poking fun at people who dislike Schlatt (for various reasons, but the majority of people who dislike him cite his his past use of slurs and jokes that he's made [most infamous being the Jackbox video])

1. Schlatt

I have a lot of feelings about just the dude alone lmao. I admit that I do watch a lot of his content even though that Jackbox video really was just a big wake-up call for me in feeling upset at that genre of his jokes. It sucked to see him and others make a joke out of people who are rightfully outraged at racism, when he has shown so much capacity to be funny without relying on lazy shock humor (literally the Fragrance Man stream and the Minecraft but videos with Wilbur are some of my favorite videos/streams of all time). But I think since that video Schlatt has taken that to heart and hasn't done that shit anymore, though I wish he'd actually vocalize that, so I've felt more comfortable still watching him I guess? Idk it's just hard for me, same when I think back on Soothouse and think about some of the jokes that were made during that era which make me a bit upset.

2. Wilbur's advice to Tommy

Tommy appeared on Wilbur's stream today and briefly mentioned how he's thinking of taking a break from Twitter (timestamp: 1:36:52, you can also see a transcript of likely the most important bit here). I have so many thoughts about what Wilbur said to Tommy here!!

I'm really glad to hear that Wilbur wants Tommy (and presumably other people with platforms) to be politically active. Overall, I don't think we should be lifting up & expecting content creators (especially young Minecrafters lmao) to be pinnacles of political activism. ABSOLUTELY NOT. But I think if you have a platform of millions of people, not using that platform to help & uplift others is a huge waste of potential & opportunity for even a bit of change.

As an adult, in an ideal world I wish NO KID OR TEENAGER felt the pressure to learn about politics or to be an activist. But as a person of color & a member of the LGBTQ community, I felt essentially forced into that role based on pure survival like... you think about the "extreme" cases of people like Malala Yousafzai and I can't even name how many teens I saw in the frontlines of BLM protests & the awful border camps. So many parents have to have the talk with their kids that the police and EVERY INSTITUTION are going to treat them differently just because of shit they can't control. It is very much a privilege to be able to be a 'normal teenager' and I wish it wasn't.

3. Tommy's response

Nonetheless, I think it's important to recognize that Tommy himself has many pressures on him that I can never begin to understand. The biggest being that he has hundreds of thousands of eyes on him during streams, millions of people follow him on Twitter and Youtube and TikTok.

I can already tell from what I saw of the alt stream (which has been taken down now) that Tommy was really really anxious about what's been happening on Twitter. I genuinely think this isn't completely routed in fear of being 'cancelled', I genuinely think he wants to make his community inclusive and he likely saw fans of his upset and alienated by his jokes.

I definitely don't expect Tommy to be as seemingly educated as Wilbur is on various issues. Wilbur himself is educated but doesn't really talk in depth about politics (which I think is a good thing; when it matters he will speak out, but the best voices to uplift aren't creators lmao that leads to a lot of idolizing and placing them on pedestals or tearing them down if they get something even slightly wrong even if their intentions were good). Wilbur is 24 years old and IN THE STREAM ITSELF told Tommy about how he used to say homophobic slurs when he was older than Tommy currently is, and he's talked a lot about how he hated the person he was up until like 21 years old.

I think people really need to keep in mind how fucking clueless and susceptible to bad influences white boys are. Remember how many white boys got caught up in the alt-right pipeline during that Pewdiepie era (up to the Christchurch shooting where I feel like he finally vocalized his complete disavowal of that). Of all people to essentially be the next Pewdiepie, I'm glad it's Tommy, but he's only 17 and he's not ever going to be perfect. I want to give him as much time to learn how he wants to use his platform, but in the end I just hope he uses it for good and that he takes care of himself.

[ganymedesclock]

These are questions I've had for some while and it's hard to find someone who'll answer with grace. This mostly relates to disabilities (mental or physical) in fiction.

1) What makes a portrayal of a disability that's harming the character in question ableist?

2) Is there a way to write a disabled villain in a way that isn't ableist?

In the circles I've been in, the common conceptions are you can't use a character's disability as a plot point or showcase it being a hindrance in some manner. heaven forbid you make your villain disabled in some capacity, that's a freaking death sentence to a creative's image. I understand historically villains were the only characters given disabilities, but (and this is my personal experience) I've not seen as many disabled villains nowadays, heck, I see more disabled heroes in media nowadays.

Sorry if this comes off as abrasive, I'd really like to be informed for future media consumption and my own creative endeavors.

Okay so the first thing I'm going to say is that while it IS a good idea to talk to disabled people and get their feedback, disabled people are not a monolith and they aren't going to all have the same take on how this goes.

My personal take is biased in favor that I'm a neurodivergent person (ADHD and autism) who has no real experience with physical disabilities, so I won't speak for physically disabled people- heck, I won't even speak for every neurotype. Like I say, people aren't a monolith.

For myself and my own writing of disabled characters, here's a couple of concepts I stick by:

Research is your friend

Think about broad conventions of ableism

Be mindful of cast composition

1. Research is your friend

Yeah this is the thing everybody says, so here's the main bases I try to cover:

What's the story on this character's disability?

Less in terms of 'tragic angst' and more, what kind of condition this is- because a congenital amputee (that is to say, someone who was born without a limb) will have a different relationship to said limb absence than someone who lost their limb years ago to someone who lost their limb yesterday. How did people in their life respond to it, and how did they respond to it? These responses are not "natural" and will not be the same to every person with every worldview. This can also be a great environment to do worldbuilding in! Think about the movie (and the tv series) How To Train Your Dragon. The vikings in that setting don't have access to modern medicine, and they're, well, literally fighting dragons and other vikings. The instance of disability is high, and the medical terminology to talk about said disabilities is fairly lackluster- but in a context where you need every man you possibly can to avoid the winter, the mindset is going to be not necessarily very correct, but egalitarian. You live in a village of twenty people and know a guy who took a nasty blow to the head and hasn't quite been the same ever since? "Traumatic Brain Injury" is probably not going to be on your lips, but you're also probably going to just make whatever peace you need to and figure out how to accommodate Old Byron for his occasional inability to find the right word, stammers and trembles. In this example, there are several relevant pieces of information- what the character's disability is (aphasia), how they got it (brain injury), and the culture and climate around it (every man has to work, and we can't make more men or throw them away very easily, so, how can we make sure this person can work even if we don't know what's wrong with them)

And that dovetails into:

What's the real history, and modern understandings, of this?

This is where "knowing the story" helps a lot. To keep positing our hypothetical viking with a brain injury, I can look into brain injuries, what affects their extent and prognosis, and maybe even beliefs about this from the time period and setting I'm thinking of (because people have had brains, and brain injuries, the entire time!) Sure, if the setting is fantastical, I have wiggle room, but looking at inspirations might give me a guide post.

Having a name for your disorder also lets you look for posts made by specific people who live with the condition talking about their lives. This is super, super important for conditions stereotyped as really scary, like schizophrenia or narcissistic personality disorder. Even if you already know "schizophrenic people are real and normal" it's still a good thing to wake yourself up and connect with others.

2. Think about broad conventions of ableism

It CAN seem very daunting or intimidating to stay ahead of every single possible condition that could affect someone's body and mind and the specific stereotypes to avoid- there's a lot under the vast umbrella of human experience and we're learning more all the time! A good hallmark is, ableism has a few broad tendencies, and when you see those tendencies rear their head, in your own thinking or in accounts you read by others, it's good to put your skeptical glasses on and look closer. Here's a few that I tend to watch out for:

Failing the “heartwarming dog” test

This was a piece of sage wisdom that passed my eyeballs, became accepted as sage wisdom, and my brain magnificently failed to recall where I saw it. Basically, if you could replace your disabled character with a lovable pet who might need a procedure to save them, and it wouldn’t change the plot, that’s something to look into.

Disability activists speak often about infantilization, and this is a big thing of what they mean- a lot of casual ableism considers disabled people as basically belonging to, or being a burden onto, the able-bodied and neurotypical. This doesn’t necessarily even need to have an able neurotypical in the picture- a personal experience I had that was extremely hurtful was at a point in high school, I decided to do some research on autism for a school project. As an autistic teenager looking up resources online, I was very upset to realize that every single resource I accessed at the time presumed it was talking to a neurotypical parent about their helpless autistic child. I was looking for resources to myself, yet made to feel like I was the subject in a conversation.

Likewise, many wheelchair users have relayed the experience of, when they, in their chair, are in an environment accompanied by someone else who isn’t using a chair, strangers would speak to the standing person exclusively, avoiding addressing the chair user. 

It’s important to always remind yourself that at no point do disabled people stop being people. Yes, even people who have facial deformities; yes, even people who need help using the bathroom; yes, even people who drool; yes, even people whose conditions impact their ability to communicate, yes, even people with cognitive disabilities. They are people, they deserve dignity, and they are not “a child trapped in a 27-year-old body”- a disabled adult is still an adult. All of the “trying to learn the right rules” in the world won’t save you if you keep an underlying fear of non-normative bodies and minds.

This also has a modest overlap between disability and sexuality in particular. I am an autistic grayromantic ace. Absolutely none of my choices or inclinations about sex are because I’m too naive or innocent or childlike to comprehend the notion- disabled people have as diverse a relationship with sexuality as any other. That underlying fear- as mentioned before- can prevent many people from imagining that, say, a wheelchair user might enjoy sex and have experience with it. Make sure all of your disabled characters have full internal worlds.

Poor sickly little Tiffany and the Red Right Hand

A big part of fictional ableism is that it separates the disabled into two categories. Anybody who’s used TVTropes would recognize the latter term I used here. But to keep it brief:

Poor, sickly little Tiffany is cute. Vulnerable. How her disability affects her life is that it constantly creates a pall of suffering that she lives beneath. After all, having a non-normative mind or body must be an endless cavalcade of suffering and tragedy, right? People who are disabled clearly spend their every waking moment affected by, and upset, that they aren’t normal!

The answer is... No, actually. Cut the sad violin; even people who have chronic pain who are literally experiencing pain a lot more than the rest of us are still fully capable of living complex lives and being happy. If nothing else, it would be literally boring to feel nothing but awful, and people with major depression or other problems still, also, have complicated experiences. And yes, some of it’s not great. You don’t have to present every disability as disingenuously a joy to have. But make a point that they own these things. It is a very different feeling to have a concerned father looking through the window at his angel-faced daughter rocking sadly in her wheelchair while she stares longingly out the window, compared to a character waking up at midnight because they have to go do something and frustratedly hauling their body out of their bed into their chair to get going.

Poor Sickly Little Tiffany (PSLT, if you will) virtually always are young, and they virtually always are bound to the problems listed under ‘failing the heartwarming dog’ test. Yes, disabled kids exist, but the point I’m making here is that in the duality of the most widely accepted disabled characters, PSLT embodies the nadir of the Victim, who is so pure, so saintly, so gracious, that it can only be a cruel quirk of fate that she’s suffering. After all, it’s not as if disabled people have the same dignity that any neurotypical and able-bodied person has, where they can be an asshole and still expect other people to not seriously attack their quality of life- it’s a “service” for the neurotypical and able-bodied to “humor” them.

(this is a bad way to think. Either human lives matter or they don’t. There is no “wretched half-experience” here- if you wouldn’t bodily grab and yank around a person standing on their own feet, you have no business grabbing another person’s wheelchair)

On the opposite end- and relevant to your question- is the Red Right Hand. The Red Right Hand does not have PSLT’s innocence or “purity”- is the opposite extreme. The Red Right Hand is virtually always visually deformed, and framed as threatening for their visual deformity. To pick on a movie I like a fair amount, think about how in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, the title character is described- “Strong. Fast. Had a metal arm.” That’s a subtle example, but, think about how that metal arm is menacing. Sure, it’s a high tech weapon in a superhero genre- but who has the metal arm? The Winter Soldier, who is, while a tormented figure that ultimately becomes more heroic- scary. Aggressive. Out for blood.

The man who walks at midnight with a Red Right Hand is a signal to us that his character is foul because of the twisting of his body. A good person, we are led to believe, would not be so- or a good person would be ashamed of their deformity and work to hide it. The Red Right Hand is not merely “an evil disabled person”- they are a disabled person whose disability is depicted as symptomatic of their evil, twisted nature, and when you pair this trope with PSLT, it sends a message: “stay in your place, disabled people. Be sad, be consumable, and let us push you around and decide what to do with you. If you get uppity, if you have ideas, if you stand up to us, then the thing that made you a helpless little victim will suddenly make you a horrible monster, and justify us handling you with inhumanity.”

As someone who is a BIG fan of eldritch horror and many forms of unsettling “wrongness” it is extremely important to watch out for the Red Right Hand. Be careful how you talk about Villainous Disability- there is no connection between disability and morality. People will be good, bad, or simply just people entirely separate from their status of ability or disability. It’s just as ableist to depict every disabled person as an innocent good soul as it is to exclusively deal in grim and ghastly monsters.

Don’t justify disabilities and don’t destroy them.

Superpowers are cool. Characters can and IMO should have superpowers, as long as you’re writing a genre when they’re there.

BUT.

It’s important to remember that there is no justification for disabilities, because they don’t need one. Disability is simply a feature characters have. You do not need to go “they’re blind, BUT they can see the future”

This is admittedly shaky, and people can argue either way; the Blind Seer is a very pronounced mythological figure and an interesting philosophical point about what truly matters in the world. There’s a reason it exists as a conceit. But if every blind character is blind in a way that completely negates that disability or makes it meaningless- this sucks. People have been blind since the dawn of time. And people will always accommodate their disabilities in different ways. Even if the technology exists to fix some forms of blindness, there are people who will have “fixable” blindness and refuse to treat it. There will be individuals born blind who have no meaningful desire to modify this. And there are some people whose condition will be inoperable even if it “shouldn’t” be.

You don’t need to make your disabled characters excessively cool, or give them a means by which the audience can totally forget they’re disabled. Again, this is a place where strong worldbuilding is your buddy- a handwave of “x technology fixed all disabilities”, in my opinion, will never come off good. If, instead, however, you throw out a careless detail that the cool girl the main character is chatting up in a cyberpunk bar has an obvious spinal modification, and feature other characters with prosthetics and without- I will like your work a lot, actually. Even if you’re handing out a fictional “cure”- show the seams. Make it have drawbacks and pros and cons. A great example of this is in the series Full Metal Alchemist- the main character has two prosthetic limbs, and not only do these limbs come with problems, some mundane (he has phantom limb pains, and has to deal with outgrowing his prostheses or damaging them in combat) some more fantastical (these artificial limbs are connected to his nerves to function fluidly- which means that they get surgically installed with no anesthesia and hurt like fuck plugging in- and they require master engineering to stay in shape). We explicitly see a scene of the experts responsible for said limbs talking to a man who uses an ordinary prosthetic leg, despite the advantages of an automail limb, because these drawbacks are daunting to him and he is happier with a simple prosthetic leg.

Even in mundane accommodations you didn’t make up- no two wheelchair users use their chair the exact same way, and there’s a huge diversity of chairs. Someone might be legally blind but still navigate confidently on their own; they might use a guide dog, or they might use a cane. They might even change their needs from situation to situation!

Disability accommodations are part of life

This ties in heavily to the previous point, but seriously! Don’t just look up one model of cane and superimpose it with no modifications onto your character- think about what their lifestyle is, and what kind of person they are!

Also medication is not the devil. Yes, medical abuse is real and tragic and the medication is not magic fairy dust that solves all problems either. But also, it’s straight ableism to act like anybody needing pills for any reason is a scary edgy plot twist. 

(and addiction is a disease. Please be careful, and moreover be compassionate, if you’re writing a character who’s an addict)

3. Be mindful of cast composition

This, to me, is a big tip about disability writing and it’s also super easy to implement!

Just make sure your cast has a lot of meaningful disabled characters in it!

Have you done all the work you can to try and dodge the Red Right Hand but you’re still worried your disabled villain is a bad look? They sure won’t look like a commentary on disability if three other people in the cast are disabled and don’t have the same outlook or role! Worried that you’re PSLT-ing your main character’s disabled child? Maybe the disability is hereditary and they got it from the main character!

The more disabled characters you have, the more it will challenge you to think about what their individual relationship is with the world and the less you’ll rely on hackneyed tropes. At least, ideally.

-

Ultimately, there’s no perfect silver bullet of diversity writing that will prevent a work from EVER being ableist, but I hope this helped, at least!

[rainparadefromhell]

tw// LOL a think piece by me about daxton and s3 expectations (it is long bc i am bored and extremely opinionated)

(if you are a daxton fan please try reading with an open mind as i am making commentary on tv romance and ship dynamics on a broader scale than just why i dislike your ship. at the end of the day we are all here to have fun and it is perfectly fine to like whatever you like!)

Putting all of my anti daxton jokes aside, I would actually love to see Mindy handle their storyline with respect and their, in my opinion unavoidable break up, with some cleverness. I don't hate Paxton and I don't wish him any harm, just to clarify!

I know nhie is a comedy show and its point isn't to make some big commentary on romantic high school relationships but i think it is a great opportunity to show young impressionable people that you shouldn't hide the parts of yourself to win over someone's affection. You shouldn't change for them or just want to be with them because of societal pressures. I am team benvi but I do realize that Devi isn't ready for a relationship and her ending up single would be fine with me. What I do not stand for is this horrible notion in teen rom coms and rom coms in general that portrays girls and women like some desperate for love, would do anything to get it creatures. I will say this description does suit Devi for now - she is a (young!) nerdy, insecure and traumatized girlie that just wants a boyfriend. Ain't nothing wrong with that! And ain't nothing wrong with having a kind of superficial relationship when you are that young. I do understand that. But if we are taking the longevity of the show into account, I want to see Devi mature and learn.

And maturing means understanding that you ARE deserving of love AND respect! This is not to shame Paxton, he is a kid as well but why aren't we teaching young women what it means to love and be loved? And not even love, just how to feel respected in a relationship, even a silly high school one. How much time it takes and sacrifice, yes, but not at the expense of losing yourself in that person. Why aren't we teaching young men how not to feel pressured by your friends to obtain an image? I see that a lot among boys. The feeling like you can't share your feelings and that masculinity means pretending like you don't care about anything and that nothing fazes you.

Imagine if the show went in deeper into THOSE topics and not just have Paxton have one panic attack and 3 days later he is magically okay. This is where I fail to connect to his character and I would argue that that is not his fault. I just don't understand how the same writers that wrote these three amazing characters with the most depth in the show (Devi, Ben and Nalini) won't do that for the rest of them (there is probably not enough time but c'mon Paxton is a pretty big character).

I also see a lot of discourse about daxton and the idealization of their relationship from young people (not all of them are young of course but I am talking about influencing young people here) and it makes me sad sometimes. Not because I look down on them (bc i ship benvi) but because this trope, if you will, is all over media. We've seen it a million times. I'm tired of it. I'm tired of the message that it's "cute" to pine over someone that isn't really that interested. That the crumbs that this person gives you sometimes are acts of love or romance (like climbing through your window to make out or saying "Damn Devi are you really gonna make me say it" when asked if you are committed, or showing up with your tail between your legs at a dance). I'm sorry but that isn't romantic and shouldn't be viewed as such! It is teaching young girls to settle and conform if they want love. And that is absolute bullshit! You are deserving and perfectly able to find someone that is going to communicate with you in a healthy way and treat you the way you want to be treated. And this goes both ways! Devi should communicate all the issues and things that bother her to Paxton!

It would be fine and I wouldn't be writing this now if Devi is a type of girl that is fine with being casual and not putting much effort and passion into things. But she is not and that is where Paxton and Devi's love languages will probably never meet in the middle. And that's okay! As long as they realize that in s3 and talk about it and end things with no hard feelings. Devi now understands what she wants in a relationship and even better how to ask for it. This would be my perfect ending for s3.

(i need to take a break from the nhie tag now like i've got actual college papers to do lol-)

[jojikawa]

Mrs. Bucciarati | Bruno Bucciarati x Fem! Reader | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

┊❥ Part 6 - Down Time

MASTERLIST

✧『Fandom』: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

✧『Character』: Bruno Bucciarati

✧『Word Count』: 3,129 words 16,714 characters

✧『Summary』: The group kills time as they wait for Giorno and Mista to reach their destination.

The group quickly made its way back on the road to Venezia. Mista, Fugo, and Giorno were on the surface, driving the car while everyone else stayed inside to protect Trish as a second line of defense.

Inside the turtle, you had been sitting in between Narancia and Abbacchio. You had sat there first because Narancia wanted to show you something in the magazine he was reading but Abbacchio made it awkward by sitting next to you.

You had taken notice because previously, he was trying to avoid you.

Bruno was sitting on the other side of the table, his head tucked into the laptop that was used for communications. You wanted to talk but you felt like that would be distracting since he wanted to focus.

You didn’t know why but often, you would think of the first time the two of you met and the events that followed. You used to cringe at the memory of it but now that you were sure about your feelings towards him, it was wholesome.

One of your favorite memories with him was during a “charity” event your father held a few years ago. It wasn’t actually for anything charity-related.

Just another excuse to greet Italian capos. You hated it. You hated how corrupt your father was. He had a way of keeping investors while still doing dirty work.

Amongst them was Polpo from Passione in Italy and with him was a young Bruno Bucciarati. He was 17 at the time and you had just turned 16. Polpo agreed to take Bruno with him after much begging on his part. The boy just wanted to see you again.

That night, you were completely upset. Your father wanted you to sing since he and much of the staff agreed you had a nice singing voice. You were too nervous and honestly, you couldn’t even see yourself singing well at all. This upset him and he made you stay by him all night.

The ball was boring until Bruno had arrived. He found you quickly and wanted to talk. He figured that you were being held hostage by your father and wanted to help.

When we walked over, he cleared his throat. “Excuse me.” He said, grabbing your father’s attention. Your father had been speaking to a popular district attorney.

“It’s an honor to have been invited here, Mr. (l/n).” Bruno bowed, trying to seem as gentlemanly as possible.

Your father finished up his conversation before nodding the attorney away and taking a sip of his drink. “Oh, Bruno Bucciarati. I didn’t know Polpo was bringing you. I’m sure I only sent out one invitation.” Your father joked, even laughing when no one found it funny.

You just tried to tune him out, fiddling with your dress that was the same color as your father’s tuxedo.

Bruno humored him, laughing as well. “Well, you see, I couldn’t pass up the chance of hearing (y/n) sing so I had Polpo make room for one more.” His eyes lingered over to you. Bruno seemed so friendly and soft but he was tall for his age and it was almost intimidating…

You looked away, blushing after seeing the innocent twinkle in his eyes when he saw you were all dressed up. Normally, you were wearing loungewear since you were always inside. You looked so stunning!

“That’s too bad because little (y/n) over here decided that she didn’t want to help me pull any investors and she’s not singing at all tonight.” Your father lazily waved his hand in your direction, sipping more of his wine.

“I don’t believe I can sing. I’ve never had any lessons.” You spoke up for the first time. Your father narrowed his eyes at you. “Then after tonight, we’re getting you some.”

You sighed, looking away from your father and off to the side. This was so awkward… you wanted to leave.

Bruno saw what was unfolding and intervened before things could escalate.

“There’s nothing to worry about, Mr. (l/n). I’m sure (y/n) has an amazing voice. She’s just shy and there’s nothing wrong with that. Perhaps, I can help her build her confidence.” He offered his hand to you. You just stared at it.

Your father sighed. “I suppose so. I trust you, Bruno.”

Your father then let you spend the night with him and it was a lot better than just standing around.

All night, Bruno had been such a gentleman and even slow danced with you when no one was watching. You weren't very good and neither was he but you still found it enjoyable.

You had been reminiscing about the past when your thoughts were interrupted by Bruno who had been speaking to Abbacchio.

Bruno had gotten a message on the laptop asking Abbacchio to use his stand to reveal a message that was left behind.

Everyone had gathered around and you got up to look too.

Abbacchio decided to go back 15 hours. The person Moody Blues took the shape off was of the older man you had seen when you all first picked up Trish.

He explained more instructions for the team to follow. You felt so out of place. Everything about this was so bizarre. The moment you get to be with Bruno, you get wrapped up in some elaborate plan. You haven’t sat down with him since you arrived.

When you came to, you saw the image of Mr. Pericolo with a gun to his head. You had only zoned out for a moment! What happened?

Pericolo explained that because of his influence, the enemy knows that he’s helping Bruno deliver Trish. He isn’t a stand user so he doesn’t know how he could defend himself.

His only escape was killing himself before they got to him. It was tragic but these are things you sign up for in Passione.

He pulled the trigger and you saw red before Bruno hugged you to his chest and turned around to block the image of what you almost saw.

You tried to resist but he only held you tighter until the image of it was gone.

“Oh my god!!” You heard Narancia yell.

Trish and Abbacchio were speechless. You had wished that Bruno could’ve used his energy to protect the eyes of one of the children, especially Trish, but it was over now.

You wanted to cry but you were in so much shock. You felt like after everything was over, you would need some kind of therapy. It’s only been a few days and you’ve endured so much trauma. You were just a human.

“Bruno…” you tried to loosen his grip. “…let go.”

He squeezed you again when you had said his name but then without a word, he let go of you. He stood up to talk but his eyes were darkened and he was visibly sweating.

“Mr. Pericolo.”

You were dazed for a moment by his behavior but then you looked over at Trish who must have been traumatized.

You walked over and grabbed her hand. “I’m sorry that you had to see that. Are you okay?” You asked, sweetly. Her eyes darted over to you. She was shaking and sweating as well. It hurt you that she had to deal with all of this at such a young age.

“M-mhm.” She nodded and gave your hand a tight squeeze. “It’s going to be okay.” You told her.

You then realize that you would have to comfort Narancia, Fugo, and Giorno, as well. Being a mother figure wasn’t easy. You felt so obligated to be there for all of them but it was impossible.

You didn’t know how helpful Bruno was towards the younger members but you could only hope he took their mental health into account.

Before you could ask everyone about how they felt, Bruno had sent Mista and Giorno to drive while the rest of you stayed inside the turtle.

You couldn’t figure out why Bruno kept sheltering you. He wanted you by his side or inside the turtle at all times. You wanted to be able to help him protect everyone. You were tired of him acting like he could do everything on his own.

It was hard trying to get a good word in since everyone was in such close proximity. To everyone else, the way you and Bruno interacted was similar to parents. All of the kids had prominent parental issues so the two of you served as a support system when they needed it.

You were sitting next to Trish and you were unsure if you should give her space or make yourself available to speak to. You thought that maybe you should use this time to talk to Bruno but Trish had actually spoken first.

“Mrs. Bucciarati, what was your life like before you came here?” Her voice was pretty monotone as always but you could tell she was sad.

“My life? Well, I was pretty much a homebody. I just tended to my garden and practiced Italian.” You answered.

“Practicing Italian? Why?” She looked at you before realizing you weren’t a native Italian. It’s probably why your dialect sounded a bit different than most. You had a more formal way of speaking compared to the others.

“I’m from America and I know Bruno because I’m the daughter of a boss as well.” You explained with a smile. She didn’t reply to you. She just stared at you with her mouth opened a small bit. Maybe she could finally relate to someone.

You then turned your attention to Bruno who had been using the laptop. You were so worried about the boys. It didn’t feel right for you to send Mista and Giorno out on their own.

“Bruno.” You got up from your spot with Trish and went over to Bruno. You didn’t want to create a scene, so just in case things escalated, you spoke in English.

“I know you have faith in the boys, but is it really wise to send them out on their own? I could’ve gone with them.” You said down next to him, not really interested in what he was doing enough to look.

He just hummed before saying. “I don’t want you to be separated from me anymore. The last two times we got separated, you were hurt and every time we’ve been attacked, you were hurt.”

You huffed. “But you told me you were proud of me. You still don’t believe I can handle myself?”

“Cara mia, I know you can handle yourself but I just can’t have you hurt anymore. You were only taught to fight to a certain extent. If either of us makes a mistake then you could be killed.” His voice was firm. He’s never spoken to you in this tone before and it almost embarrassed you.

“But we have made mistakes. We both have. I’ve done my part in helping. I just still haven’t proven myself to you.” You turned away from him, upset that he was babying you and belittling the training you went through just for him.

Bruno look over at you who had been completely facing the other way. He reached over to your shoulder but you lightly jerked it away.

Why couldn’t you just understand that he was trying to protect you? Was it really wise to promise Giorno this ridiculous plan? Your first impression of Italy has just been filled with bloodshed. Although, if he didn’t then he never would have been Capo.

How long would it have taken him to reach the status of Capo normally?

Bruno pushed those thoughts out of his head. Maybe he was smothering you a little. It was just so hard not seeing you as a delicate flower anymore. He wished that he could’ve seen you more.

As an attempt to show affection, he reached out to your hand that has been free and resting on the sofa. The tips of his fingers brushed yours lightly but you had quickly curled them up, hiding them in a fist.

You didn’t seem to want to hold hands either.

Across the room, Fugo and Narancia were pondering on what you two could’ve been talking about. They didn’t know much English either. It was easy for the others to pay so much attention to you because of how new you were to them.

“Hey, Fugo, you know some English right? What do you think they’re talking about?” Narancia asked. “I’ve never seen Bucciarati so soft!” He hoarsely whispered into his ear.

Fugo, who was trying to rest his eyes, was getting annoyed at the boy. “No, Narancia, I don’t know what they’re saying. I’m not going to violate their privacy either. If it were meant for us to hear, then they wouldn’t have changed languages in the first place.” He explained. This made Narancia frown and retract himself.

You figured that maybe you should talk to Abbacchio for advice. You went over to the purple schemed man and Bruno’s eyes followed you curiously.

He watched as you talked to Leone with confidence and not anything at all like he expected. At first, when you first met them in Naples, he could sense your fear for that man but now you didn’t seem like you were at all.

“Leone,” You sighed and his head snapped over to you. You jumped at his reaction. “A-Abbacchio, I mean, sorry.” You raised your hands in defense and began to sweat. His neutral expression didn’t change. Deep down he didn’t mind your voice saying his name.

“As Bruno always called the shots this way? Sending the children out?” You asked softly.

This annoyed Abbacchio but still, his expression didn’t change. Of course, you would want to talk to him about Bruno of all people. Since you’ve been here, it’s just been about you and him and can’t even last 2 minutes apart when you’re just a foot away from him.

He knew that the only reason he felt this way was that he was jealous. He was probably just jealous of Bucciarati the whole time. What would it take for him to get a woman like you?

“Yeah. Always been that way.” He replied. “They know that they’re doing. Nothing new.”

A small gasp left your mouth. Everyone seemed so uncaring of the safety of the boys. But this didn’t have to mean the end.

You just had to be strong enough to protect them yourself. “I see.” That was all you had said. You didn’t care if it didn't seem like Bruno had faith in you or that there were so many children or how nonchalant Leone was about it. You had a stand too and you knew how to use it.

“Th-That’s all.” You smiled nervously before giving the man his space. You scooted further away, not wanting to move around too much and irritate everyone.

When you looked up, you saw that Bruno was just staring at you, watching. He looked upset but not angry. You wanted to comfort him but you were still upset with him. You’ve worked so hard and it’s like it doesn’t even matter to him.

For some hours, you occupied yourself with a magazine. You tested yourself by reading Italian fashion articles and keeping notes of things you wanted to buy with Bruno’s money. You made sure to bookmark pages with nice shoes and dresses you’d like to try on.

Your actions were interrupted by feeling a portion of the couch next to you sink. You looked to your left to see it was Bruno with the computer resting on his lap. He didn’t say a word and only shifted his weight so that his thigh was touching your exposed one.

This made you blush, so hard that physically acknowledged that he had done this when his goal was to be smooth with it.

“B-Bruno-” You whispered. Bruno ignored you, resting a free hand on the thigh closest to him. He leaned over, so close that the message you got was that he was trying to kiss you.

Really? In front of everyone? What’s gotten into him?

“Are you upset with me?” He whispered into your ear.

Your face heated up. You would feel his breath hitting your ear.

“N-No.” You replied, turning your head to him.

His eyes were narrowed and his face frowned. He leaned in further but he didn’t kiss you. He…licked your face?!

You yelped, breaking contact with him. What the hell was that!?

“To me, it seems like you’re lying.”

“Huh? Is this that lie detection thing you told me about? I thought that was a joke…” You wiped the faint sign of saliva on your face. “Warn me next time, okay?”

He chuckled before kissing you softly. “I thought it would cheer you up.” He said in between breaths.

You kissed back tenderly, your cheeks burning at his actions. Was this a dream?

Your minor make-out session was cut short when Narancia had brought you both back to reality.

Butterflies grew inside of you as you covered your face and turned away. You were always such a shy and delicate flower and now he knew that he could tease you with a public display of affection.

Narancia had been volunteering to be the one to go out to be on the surface so that he could use Aureo Smith to find Mista and Giorno.

You parted from Bruno, enjoying the remaining time just leaning against him. His body was warm and his cologne was faint with a hint of sweat from all the intense fighting.

You were an odd couple but the love was undeniable.

Mista and Giorno were found. Mista had sustained a lot of injuries, which the blonde male healed with his stand.

You played your role and scolded Mista at his lack of awareness to which he replied by calling you “Mom.”

“You should be more careful. You can’t always expect your wounds to be fixed. Giorno can’t help you forever!” You tapped his forehead aggressively.

“Hey, Hey! Yeah, I get it, okay, mom?” He swatted your hand away. This made you giggle.

“Mom? Where’d that come from?” You asked, chuckling to yourself.

“ ‘Cause, you’re annoying like one.” He yelled at you with faint pink dust on his cheeks.

You were the first female figure in his life that worried about him the way you did. It was very easy for them to get attached to you since they were all from broken homes.

It has only been a few days but with Bruno’s tough love and your soft and gentle nature, you two were scaffolding for what having parents was like. Minus the killing of the mafioso members pursuing you, of course.

It was unfortunate that such a cute “family” would come to an end.

[olderthannetfic]

Toaru: How To Research Past Fandoms

Sorry, I’m splitting this off because that reblog chain is so long.

We were talking about RRyaoi, a Ranma 1/2 mailing list that was deleted when Yahoo Groups ended.

@rainydaysandhappydays wrote:

Is this what happened to the Toaru franchise? I’m only 22 so I was only like 5 or so when it came out in the early 2000s. So I’m not sure about what happened during its time on the internet. All I know was that I only recently found out about it and got really excited to engage in this wonderful expansive world, but when I looked it up there was like nothing about it. There were like only a couple of dozen fics I found about the two main male leads that I could have sworn would have been the top ship. (Thoma x Accelerator) And so I got really sad that I assumed it was a long dead fandom. So I stopped trying to get into this world that I was really excited to see bc I knew that I would probably hyperfixate on it and I didn’t want to make myself suffer by not having a community, even dead, to turn to.

It would make a lot more sense if everything was deleted before I found it. And that is absolutely terrible. All of that hard work and love was destroyed years ago and kids(including myself) nowadays will never get to have the pleasure of engaging with the old fandoms. Or the fandoms that got a new update years later bc everything from old was deleted.

At the very least(and to be very frank AO3 does far far more) AO3 will keep the history of the fans. And will allow people to engage in fandoms and worlds that they never knew of before. Even if something is dozens of years old and everyone from a certain age or group seems to know about it, us younger people will always still be able to find it in different ways in different times. And it’s a shame that a lot of younger people can’t have any of the history from before AO3 because it was deleted by people that didn’t like something or another. And there are a lot of young people like me, that either stopped engaging in something I know I would love because I didn’t want to be alone in a fandom that was desolated by any or all purges or just straight up don’t start looking at that because they don’t have the knowledge or context to engage anymore. As most of it is lost and gone.

(Talking about Toaru if there is still a fandom for it I would love to know. I wanna enjoy this series! Please send me in the right direction!)

Short answer: No. Almost certainly not.

Long answer: I’ll walk you through my attempt to find Toaru fandom, explain how I’d go about it, and list anything I find.

I remember seeing this set of names around and being vaguely confused about how the various Toaru... things were related, so I know there was some kind of fandom, but the first thing we want to do for this kind of search is to define very precisely what the canon is, when it made it to English, and what kind of fandom we’re looking for. (Unless, of course, you’re looking for fandom in other languages.)

That previous discussion was about Yahoo Groups. It’s true that Y!G only got deleted a couple of years ago, and parts of it were highly active in the mid-00s, but mailing lists were really this absolute fandom stronghold from like 1998 to like 2003 and then started declining rapidly. So exactly when in the 00s we expect the Toaru franchise to have gotten big matters a lot.

I know if you’re younger, it’s a long, undifferentiated blob of The Past, but the early 00s were a period of very rapid change online. It was more similar to Tumblr right after the porn ban than... like... 2014 where the Tumblry parts of fandom were happily ensconced here, had been here several years, and were staying several more, or the later 00s on LJ, which were another relatively long period of fandom staying put on a website.

The second thing to keep in mind is that almost nothing generates a huge fic fandom. Modest, yes, but it’s very, very rare to have one of those ginormous fandoms. So when we go looking for potentially “lost” fandom, we also want to see if we can make a realistic estimate of how well-known the thing was and what kind of fans it might have attracted. That’s far from foolproof, but it can help when you’re wondering if you just missed something or if it was never big at all.

Step 1A: What and when was canon?

I’m starting on Wikipedia just to give myself a general overview of this media franchise. Toaru [whatever] aka A Certain Scientific/Magical/etc. [whatever] is a series of light novels plus adaptations.

Light Novels:

2004-2010

2011-2019

2020-

Manga:

2007- [Dengeki Daioh magazine]

2013

Anime:

S1: Oct  2008-Mar 2009

S2: Oct 2010-Apr 2011

S3: Oct 2018-Apr 2019

There’s some other media, but those are the basics.

My big observation here is that this is based on light novels (not a prescription for a huge fandom), but it does have an anime. English-language fic fandom tends to form first and primarily around the anime version of things. Also, there is no way this is an early 00s fandom if the light novels only started in 2004 and adaptations started in 2007/8.

Step 1B: English?

The next thing we need to know is if and when they made it to English. In 2021, there are simultaneous releases. The further back you go, the more only anime (and not the manga or the light novel) will ever have been translated and the more translation could lag years or even decades behind when something came out in Japan.

According to Wikipedia, Funimation released an English dub of the first season in 2012. The novel translations are 2014-now. The manga translation is 2015-now.

So it’s fairly available in English, and the English-speaking fandom era it would be from is the mid 2010s, some fifteen years after the type of canon I’d expect to be big on Yahoo Groups.

That doesn’t mean there’s no fandom, but we won’t be searching dead Y!G for it, which is a good thing.

Step 1C: Size Estimate

What generates a huge English-language fic fandom varies, but the prototypical type is Naruto. It starts as a single-author manga in Weekly Shounen Jump specifically. (Maybe other Jump titles or Shounen Sunday. There’s quite a short list of magazines that generate the majority of the really big fandoms.) It gets a massive anime adaptation with a couple hundred episodes, and seasons air each year without long breaks. English translations are swift and plentiful. (Back in ye olden days, fan translations were a bigger factor, but that’s not so true once we get into the 21stC.)

The Toaru franchise is based on light novels (bad). The manga ran in a mag not known for producing this type of fandom (bad). The anime has way fewer episodes and had long breaks (bad). OTOH, English translations are available (good), the franchise is ongoing rather than over (very good), and some translations are very recent. That last factor means a fandom could still grow if it hasn’t already.

I’d estimate this would have a small to medium-size fic fandom rather than a huge one, and that we’d be looking for traces of it on sites popular in the last 5 years.

Step 2A: Where was anime fanfic ~2012-2017?

The English dub of S1 of the anime was 2012. That was just when anime fandoms were switching from predominantly using FFN to AO3 being more popular. My guess would be that we’re looking at a post-switch fandom, but it is anime, so FFN might still be an important player for the het and gen side of things. (I know you care about m/m, but still...)

Basically, we’re looking at an era when AO3, FFN, and Wattpad will have been the big players. Perhaps Quizilla (RIP) or Quotev? We might find some fandom on Reddit, though probably not the part of the fandom you want, and we might find some on Tumblr if we knew where to look.

We’re not looking for a mid-00s anime archive like MediaMiner. (I’d keep that one in mind for porn of series like Inuyasha: things that are older and where the porn lovers got chased off of FFN in 2002 by the porn ban.) We’re also probably not looking for individual hard-coded personal archives or Usenet, which would be more 90s.

This is good news because we’re probably not looking at a situation where everything has been purged. Wattpad is going through some purges currently though, and nobody has a size estimate on those, but I’m not hearing too much screaming. FFN’s last really major purge was 2012.

Step 2B: Let’s go look!

I’ve been doing some google searches, and I’m turning up listings for doujinshi, pinterest pins, etc. I found an Amino post from 2018. Clearly, somebody ships these two.

One thing I’m noticing is that I see a lot of “Touma” and Accelerator, not “Thoma”. I’m also seeing some “To Aru” instead of “Toaru”. Choice of romanization can be a big issue in searching at times, so we’ll keep an eye out for that.

FFN shows Toaru fandoms Toaru Majutsu no Index/とある魔術の禁書目録 and A Certain Scientific Railgun/とある科学の超電磁砲. The first of those shows 1.4K stories, which sounds about right for a minor series from after FFN’s heyday. I wouldn’t expect to find much satisfying m/m, but you can always look.

AO3 is easier. The ship tag appears to be Accelerator/Kamijou Touma. There are 121 works.

Now, Wattpad, my most loathed... The first thing we do is search their names and find at least a couple of works that seem to be the right thing. Then we check those works to see what fans are calling the ship. Those are the tags/descriptions we need to search the hot mess that is Wattpad. I’m finding basically zero, though I suppose that isn’t a shock since most fanfic sites aren’t great for m/m. The extreme m/m-heaviness is an AO3 thing.

The next thing we’re going to do is look at the main AO3 fandom tag this ship is found in, which is Toaru Majutsu no Index | A Certain Magical Index. We’re going to look at the category sidebar:

F/F (180)

F/M (169)

Gen (166)

M/M (143)

Multi (39)

Other (27)

Well... that’s not exactly the typical AO3 distribution! Accelerator/Kamijou Touma is the top ship, but it looks to me like this fandom just isn’t as m/m-centric as some on AO3.

On Reddit, I’m seeing r/railgun/, which has like 8.3k members. For comparison, r/Naruto has 842k and r/Onepiece has 886k. Not that reddit popularity and m/m shipping popularity go together. They don’t. But this helps give a sense of whether there’s a huge fandom of some kind out there.

Step 3: Summing Up

What I think we’re seeing here is a fandom that had some activity around the time the first two seasons of anime came out and maybe another burst in 2019 after the third. It’s not unknown in English, but it was way after the era when we were excited about the few anime we could get and well into an era when it had tons of competition. People are seeing the same ship potential you did, but it’s just not popular enough in English to have gained critical mass for a thriving fic fandom.

I would not expect this to be the victim of deletions. I just don’t think it was ever big.

Any fans out there? Thoughts? Have I missed something big?

[thestorycfus]

Behind these two white highway lines

Pairing: Erik Lehnsherr x gn!Reader

Summary: Erik and Reader always kept some distance, but they get a better glimpse of each other when they are tasked with bringing a new mutant to the school. The teen doesn’t like being a mutant, but Erik and Reader help him see the bright side of his identity.

Warnings and notes: This is a very self indulgent and obvious metaphor to how lonely it feels to be ‘the only one different’, and it’s not nearly as well written as it should be. There’s mentions of family discrimination, feelings of isolation, self-doubt and a journey to acceptance. But just... Not well written, for real. Other X-Men (First Class generation) are mentioned. 

Word count: 2,641

Masterlist

Erik Lehnsherr was quite a mystery to you. He was close to Charles and Raven, and he was great at training with the kids, but you had never even had a full conversation with Erik. Even though you had gotten to know everyone else in the Institute after it became your home, the metal bender preferred to keep his distance. He wasn’t rude, just… Private, it seemed. Maybe he had something against you, or maybe he was like that with every new mutant. You wouldn’t be able to tell. The guy made you a little nervous, to be honest. He was serious, powerful, strong-willed and, of course, irritatingly handsome too. If he didn’t want to be bothered, the best you could do was let him be.

For months, that was exactly what you did. You kept teaching your classes and working on your powers, while Erik kept doing whatever Erik does. You rarely talked to each other, despite living in the same house. The Institute was always full and always busy, so there was no need for you two to exchange more than a few words, nothing beyond small talk or work-related communication. You still wondered what Lehnsherr was all about, for a while, the quiet balance worked.

The equilibrium started to crack when Charles gave you a mission. He had detected a new mutant, a teenager with human parents living out of state, and it seemed like the kid was having trouble controlling his abilities. The parents were more than grateful when Professor Xavier called and offered to help their son understand and use his power, but they couldn’t drive him to the institute. With everyone else busy, Charles chose you and Erik to bring the kid to the school.

It sounded like a simple task, but you felt nervous all the same. The road trip was a little awkward, but overall uneventful, with you driving there so Lehnsherr could drive on the way back. As far as you were told, the kid would be ready to go as soon as you arrived. You both got out of the car and Erik rang the doorbell, always keeping a safe distance from you, as if you were about to bite him. You tried not to role your eyes, focusing on your most welcoming smile – very important when meeting a student and their family. The door opened to reveal a fidgety mother, who looked at you and Erik as if you were a miracle.

“I am so glad you are here, we don’t know what else to do. I’m Christine Johnson. Please, come in.”

At the same time, you heard shouting coming from upstairs, with a distinct scream of ‘I am NOT going to that freak show’, followed by the bang of a door closing. You and Erik exchanged a look before introducing yourselves and following Mrs. Johnson to the living room. Nobody had informed the school of it, but you were more than familiar with that sort of conflict. Being a mutant wasn’t always easy, and being a mutant teenager with a bunch of human friends and relatives was a mess, most of the times.

“Please, make yourselves at home. I will go get Jay, we will be ready in just a minute.” Mrs. Johnson said, looking towards the stairs and back to you and Erik. Before she could leave, you took a step forward.

“Maybe we could talk to him first? He might feel more comfortable if he gets to know us a bit before leaving.” You offered, only then remembering to give Erik a glance. He nodded discreetly, ready to follow you. There was a tension on him that you weren’t used to witnessing, but you couldn’t wonder about that now. This kid needed guidance and support, and that was the reason you went to the Institute in the first place. Mutant kids deserved better than what the world usually offered them, and the X mansion was their best opportunity to have that.

“That is very kind of you, Professor, if you don’t mind trying… Come upstairs, he’s in his room.”

You both followed Mrs. Johnson to the hall of the second floor, where her husband was pilling up bags. She called him to help with the something in the kitchen and they practically run downstairs, in an obvious attempt to not be a part of the conversation. You took a deep breath, not wishing to lose your temper, but the way the parents seemed desperate to get rid of the problem made your blood boil. To your surprise, it was Erik who knocked on the bedroom door.

“Hello, Jay. I’m Erik. I am here with my colleague Y/N. We would like to talk to you for a minute, if that is okay.”

There was silence for a moment. Erik beside you in the narrow hall, more serious than you had ever seen him. You watched his expression get lighter when he heard the doorknob click. Jay opened the door and stared at the two strangers with childish curiosity, but quickly looked away and went back inside his room. He sat at the bed, absent mindedly playing with a ring of old keys in his hands.

“It’s nothing personal, but I won’t be going to your school. I already told my parents, if they want me to leave, I’ll just move in with my friend until I get a job. His parents said it’s all good. Sorry you had to drive all the way here for nothing, though.”

His tone broke your heart. You had heard it so many times before, seen so many scared kids who were tired of sticking out, terrified because the people supposed to love them the most just saw them as an issue to fix. You and Erik walked into the room together and you sat down on the floor, leaning against the bedside table. Jay’s eyes scanned you as if you were about to shoot lasers at him – and for all he knew, maybe you were – and even you were surprised when Erik followed you, sitting on the carpet too.

“Let’s start from the beginning. I’m Professor Y/N L/N and I work at the Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters, which, as you might know, is home to many mutants, including myself and…” You gestured to Erik, who took your cue.

“I’m Erik Lehnsherr, also a Professor at Xavier’s and also a mutant. If you do not wish to join us, that is perfectly fine, but you could at least hear us out first. You know, to compensate for the long drive.” He opened his right hand, and Jay’s ring of keys came flying towards him, floating just above his palm.

You smiled at the way Jay stared, looking so lost, but also as if he had just been found. He looked so young, so starved for some understanding… Erik’s approach was a bit on the nose, but it was worth a try.

Since you entered the room, you had spotted the few plants that decorated the room, including a succulent on the table next to you. You reached up and grabbed it, touching the delicate flower that was just beginning to appear on top of it. At your touch, the flower grew, opening up in yellow and orange tones. Jay’s eyes went from you to Erik and back to you.

“What do you even do in there, though? I bet you’re not studying chemistry or something.”

You chuckled at that, and Erik had big grin when he answered.

“You would be surprised. Just because someone is blue, doesn’t mean they aren’t a science genius.”

“Blue as in sad or blue as in… Blue?” Jay probably sounded more invested than he intended to.

“Blue as in blue. Dr McCoy is a biochemistry expert, and he can also take down all three of us in a fight at the same time with very little effort. And he is blue, but he’s not the only one at that.” You explained, amused to see the kid look so curious.

“Actually, Hank couldn’t take me down unless the fight took place in a plastic prison, and even then it would be a close call.” Lehnsherr feigned offense, and you chuckled again. It was nice to see him being so casual and playful.

“No, it wouldn’t, but I won’t insist on that topic.” You turned back to the kid with a soft smile, while making a couple more flowers appear in the plant you were holding. “There’s a lot to discover at the school. You don’t have to stay there forever, but you could meet everyone, take a few classes and see if you like the place.”

“Sounds like all of you have everything figured out, uh?” As Jay spoke, a small flame emerged from his fingers, and he threw it from one hand to the other. “I’m not that good at keeping this under control.” There was a challenge in his eyes, as if he doubted that the school would be able to handle his abilities, even though you were used to students with powers way more complicated.

“Controlling all the metal near you isn’t as simple as it may seem. Most mutants are not in control of their powers when they first appear, but we can develop our abilities to degrees you can’t even dream of, Jay. That’s the reason Charles found the school in the first place – so all mutants can be safe and proud. I used to believe I was alone until he found me, and I was almost lost in my anger. The others allowed me to see that there is more than just one path for us.” Erik answered, making the keys fly back to their owner. Jay extinguished the flame and caught the keys midair. He remained in silence, so you continued Erik’s speech. Everything he had said really resonated with you, making you even more certain of the point you wanted to get across.

“You may make fire, but we have a guy who turns into and produces ice, a lady who can literally control the weather, some laser-shooters and a few telepaths and the list goes on. Even a seemly harmless mutation can be trouble, like when I have a nightmare and break the floor with tree roots growing out of nowhere, and the scariest powers can save all of us very often.” You felt Lehnsherr’s eyes on you, but you focused on Jay. You thought of how tiny you felt before you knew of others like you, remembering the desperation of dealing with a part of yourself that nobody around you could know, because they would never have to handle something similar. Until you were surrounded by other mutants, you were never able to allow yourself to just be.

“We know how hard it is to be the only one that is different. Pardon my language, but it royally sucks, doesn’t it? It gets lonely and terrifying, and it seems like there’s not a single person in your life that can understand. But we do. We have all been through it, one way or the other, and it gets much easier and much more fun when you have a community, if you’re willing to give us a chance.” The honesty in your words was undeniable. Even though no two mutants were the same, and each of the residents of the X Mansion had their own past and their identities, with the x gene being just one aspect of who they were, finding your community had being freeing in ways you didn’t even know you needed. There were still many barriers to face, and a lot of grief for everything that couldn’t be. It wasn’t fair, and it still hurt, but it didn’t hurt after you became more comfortable in yourself. The love you had for every mutant in the institute and the bonds you created made you see yourself in a brand new light, and you had seem the same magic happen to many others. You hoped it would happen to Jay too.

“I’m not just talking of making the burden less heavy. I’m talking of honestly understanding that there isn’t a burden at all. Even if I said I was proud of myself, I wasn’t really happy to be me until I was with the others. Now, when I say I’m a mutant and proud, I mean it. I know how strong, how amazing, how brilliant we are, and I’d never change a thing. I wish the world wasn’t as tough on us, I wish we didn’t have to be strong, but kid, I’m really thankful and proud to say that we can take it, and we’re worth standing up for and celebrating.” You finally stopped talking, feeling a bit self conscious about how much you had said, but opening up was worth it if it gave Jay a better chance of experience those changes. Before you could say more, though, Erik spoke again.

“I had an entire mutant pride speech ready, but I believe Y/N spoke for us both on what really matters here. Give it a try. If the school isn’t for you, you can come back to your friend’s house with some interesting stories.” You smiled at his words, waiting for Jay’s answer.

“Will someone drive me back here if I don’t stay or do I have to find a new ride?” The kid was already getting up and collecting stuff around the room. Erik stood up and offered you his hand. You took it, standing up too and smiling at him.

“Maybe our teleport guy will be back by then. We usually take the road when we’re inviting a new student, but we’ll figure something out.” Erik replied, which gained him an impressed look from Jay.

“Of course there’s a teleport guy. You could have lead with that.” He continued gathering his belongings but, besides the plants, there wasn’t a lot more to pack. Most of the stuff was already in the bags in hall. Jay arranged most of the plants in a metal shelf so they would be easier to carry, but he shook his head when you tried to hand him the succulent in your left hand. “You keep that one. She likes you.”

You nodded, turning around to leave the room and help bring the bags to the car. Only then you noticed that you were still holding Erik’s hand. You let your hand fall, but the two of you didn’t stand so distant to each other now. All three mutants walked out of the room and divided the bags among you, with Lehnsherr showing off and making every metal object float to the front door. Once everything was in the car, Jay went to talk to his parents. There were tears and goodbyes and promises of behaving, but you and Erik stayed outside to give the family some privacy. The Johnsons might not be the best parents a mutant could get, but they were still Jay’s mom and dad, and the process would be important for him.

While you two waited, you decided to break the silence.

“Turns out we can make a good team, Lehnsherr.”

“Wait to see if the kid comes running back home when he sees Alex explode something before you start to boast.”

“Oh, shut up. Alex will be his favorite.”

“Yeah, he will. And we do make a good team.”

The conversation was cut short when the Johnsons came out of the door, with Mrs. Johnson hugging Jay. You and Erik promised to take care of him and finally got in the car. The ride back to the institute was a little less awkward and silent, even though the kid fell asleep in half an hour. You could definitely count that day as a win.