#none of this is canon btw

[ask-thesparedau]

Can I ask with the Macaque is spared AU, why do you make him so childish and adorable every single time?!

My heart can’t take it!

Glad you asked! I do have a reason for it

With his true form revealed, the six eared macaque becomes timid and withdrawn. He prefers to only speak when addressed, and does so quietly. A stark contrast to his near-perfect imitation of the witty and abrasive monkey king!

This is because he finds comfort in playing the part of someone more confident than himself. He has a knack for theatrics, and really knows how to get into the mind of the ‘characters’ he plays.

Sun Wukong is an especially entertaining muse. Macaque had to perfect more than his personality to properly imitate him.

[lyn-ne]

honestly to me ena and akito are the epitome of closeted bisexual and open bisexual

let me elaborate. Akito is extremely closeted. He does not want to admit that he’s bi or at least queer. ena, however, does. She came out to the rest of n25 soon after meeting them and the shinonome parents know she’s bi. Unlike their son.

[lucabyte]

Happy PMD Red is on NSO day. Sadly I don't think King the Skitty and Muse the Cyndaquil will be returning to finish up their adventure regardless.

[hopeswriting]

was thinking about takeshi and how he's my favorite brand of unconditional devotion btw. the utter and absolute and all-consuming kind that runs so deep to the very core and is so intrinsic and fundamental to it, it can only express itself in the most casual and natural and certain way. without second thoughts, without any room for doubts or for any moral dilemma to be had over it, because of course he ought to always be breathing and living for his chosen person first and foremost. of course he ought to hang on their every word and make them true no matter what, no matter what he has to do to make it happen, no matter what he has to do to other people to make it happen, and no matter what it might turn him into in the process. because it's obviously the way the world should be for his chosen person. at their feet, ready to bend over backwards and break and build itself again to better answer to all their needs even if they don't ask it for it. it's the only right way it should be for them, and of course takeshi's going to do his utmost at all times to make it a reality as much as possible.

and his devotion comes out as naturally as breathing, comes out lighthearted and nonchalant like he might as well be talking about the weather, but it's not unaware of itself. it's not that takeshi doesn't know it's unhealthy and wrong and that he's willing to go entirely too far in its name for anyone's good. it's not that he wouldn't hear you out if you were to sit him down and explain to him just why he needs to tone it down a little (a lot). logically, he'd agree with you and know you're right. and then he'd tell you he's still not going to do anything whatsoever about it. that he's not bothered by it and doesn't feel the need to change anything to his attitude. makes it a point to never let anyone or anything sway him even an inch in the stand he took when it comes to that, no matter how many thousand of times you might go over the subject with him.

because the morality of his devotion isn't the point at all. is entirely irrelevant to it and doesn't affect the way he expresses it all. it's not the metric with which he draws a line in the sand to hold it accountable to. because the thing is, takeshi's entire world revolves around tsuna--tsuna is his entire world altogether, and it's just a matter of fact, that simple. to him it's a truth as unchanging as the sky being blue, and so being the way he is according to that truth is the only way he can imagine being that'd feel right to him. and so the actual and only metric that matters here is "would tsuna be happier if i were to do this?" and/or "is this something tsuna needs me to do?"

and like. i don't think takeshi ever stops being a kind person capable of compassion and understanding and mercy and forgiveness even ten years later once they became mafia through and through. and i don't think either he grows up to be feared and called a monster per se despite the things they inevitably had to do during those ten years (and the things they'll inevitably keep having to do as long as they keep being mafia), at least not in the way, for example, they'll never stop fearing and calling mukuro one. but i do think that among the tenth gen, he ends up being the one with the most ruthless, merciless and horrific blood on his hands of that particular and distinct loving kind. you know the one i mean, right? he comes to be the one most expected and the one first expected to be willing and to take it upon himself to go through with it when the need arises. and to think little of it after, if anything at all. all in the name of making tsuna's reign as easy on him as possible.

and it's to the point where it's the kind of blood that makes even mukuro pause at times. or, when takeshi is the one coming up with solutions himself during meetings, makes even reborn blink. not because it's unjustified or wouldn't be safe or efficient or anything of the sort, but because it is unwarrantedly thorough in its retaliation. and sometimes, at times like this, he's the one tsuna needs to step in for the most, because he's the only one who can reason with him that "yes, this would work in getting rid of our problem" but "no, please, don't do that takeshi". because if tsuna is the only thing that infers on just how much and in what ways he'll let himself be devoted to him, then of course, he's also the only one takeshi's willing to reign himself in for without second thoughts. because he'd hate to ever do something tsuna would disapprove of or wouldn't want him to do. or do something that'd make tsuna see him differently or love him back less even in the slightest.

and it's also like. his devotion isn't an undisciplined one. it's not one he doesn't have control over, the very opposite. it's a very purposeful and conscious choice he chooses to keep making over and over again every step of the way, and he taught himself to have control over it, to know when it's needed and/or wanted, and how much and in which ways it is when it happens, and to keep it down otherwise. and, yes, to also reign it back in at tsuna's request at times when it still slips past his control. because it's all about making tsuna's happiness easier and secure and long-lasting, and never about burdening him with just how committed he is to do that.

so it comes down to this: takeshi willing to go above and beyond and more for tsuna unless tsuna explicitly asks him not to. and to tsuna needing to ask him not to every now and then. and to other people pointing out to him how too many times tsuna's already needed to stop him, and that maybe there's a hint for him to take there. and to takeshi seeing the hint, looking it straight in the eye and recognizing it for what it is and just. deciding it doesn't apply to him because it's all perfectly normal behavior to him. because it's the only kind of behavior that makes sense to him and feels right.

and so—to circle back to my first point—he can only express his devotion as naturally as breathing, so casually, almost like it's something inconsequential and not worth talking about despite how unmistakably it couldn't be further away from being the truth. it's the only way he could have always known how to express it, because, after all, who has ever taken time to ponder about the details and the hows of the way they breathe?

and i, for one, absolutely eat that shit up every time, thanks for coming to my ted talk <3

[voidbeans]

i'm obsessed with the idea of miss holloway having given up what she cherished most (being remembered) in her deal with the lords in black but now it's just hitting me so hard that oh my GOD what if she made the deal asking for immortality purely because she didn't want to fall into obscurity and be forgotten but THEN in order to get that she had to give up the thing she cherished most WHICH WAS THE WHOLE REASON SHE WAS MAKING THE DEAL IN THE FIRST PLACE so she technically gets what she wanted but it's cruel and unhappy because those manipulative BASTARDS that's so FUCKED UP now i need to go watch nightmare time again so i can get more miss holloway because if i don't eventually learn all her lore i am going to CRY

[heartthumpnovel]

It's just a prank bro!

[its-no-biggie]

they should get to call each other pet names post-canon i think

you may be asking "why is he only freaking out about the pet name? what about the kiss?" well you see. it's part of their routine and he's deluded himself into thinking it doesn't mean anything <3 [ kim dok ja is an idi ot ]

this is inspired by an art challenge i saw for valentines - to show a character calling another one sweetheart. i'm extremely late for valentine's so i'm not officially participating or anything but. them calling each other sweetheart is sooooo good as a concept i had to see it through. so happy late valentine's day and, more importantly, happy late birthday kdj <3 get kissied idiot!!!!!

also i know this is mostly joongdok but i promise hsy wasn't an afterthought - i just couldn't put together more than one of these and i liked this one best. here are all the ideas i wrote down

anyway i'm really happy with this ^_^ i'm not sure if it's in character but it makes me smile :3 especially kdj's hair getting all ruffled..... hsy laughing at him like a hypocrite..... they're soooo silly. i do wish i could've included yjh's titty belt though </3

[salad-storm]

I love sashisu because they all very much love each other and are best friends but the shoko erasure is so blatant that it makes for a very interesting dynamic. Like yeah obviously she was part of everything that happened. Not that any of them would realise if you asked them though.

[soosoosoup]

Do you have more headcanons about your critter trolls?

There's not much to it really, I just give them animal habits that I find cute lol.

Well first off they do make animal-like sounds. Purrs when content, in love, sometimes when a they're in pain. Growl when angry. Trollings make really high pitched squeaking sounds to voice a want/need.

They're more fluffy!!! Have a more condensed tuft on fur on their chests bc why not. When frightened, hair and fur puff out to appear bigger. Give baps on the head when upset (not serious) like a cat lol.

Scruffing I feel like is done more by older siblings or relatives that aren't the parents. Parents still predominatly use their hair. But they can scruff if their hands and hair are full. It's seen as a little childish (not in negative way), since it's big sibs that usually scruff (bc it's fun)!

Nests, love to sleep in a pile of blankets and pillows. Naps are a great way to bond w/ loved ones. A pretty special step for a new couple to take. Grooming too is important, reserved for parent & child, or between partners.

That’s all I can think of :)

[whetstonefires]

I think a part of the reason I feel so connected to JGY and XY is that I, too, think everyone is lying about what a good person they are. Sure, there may be a few genuinely good people, but those are in the minority and never claim the title.

I don't know about never; some people are pretty straightforward.

And in some ways the whole point of the concept of 'a good person' is that the feeling of losing the right to consider yourself one can impose instinctive recoil from doing wrong, in situations where you don't have the leisure of working your way through an ethics diagram and choosing the logically moral path before reacting to a situation. It has practical utility.

But that system can backfire pretty horribly too, in a lot of ways. It can be hijacked by definitions of 'good' that actually make you recoil from ethical acts because they're deviant. It can lead to disappearing up your own ass lmao.

And definitely the threshold for 'talking about how you're a good person' enough that it makes you suspect as either a) a liar or b) someone who values that self-image over objective reality and other people's wellbeing is. Not very high.

Jin Guangyao, ironically, is one of those people who's so performatively A Good Person in his public life that in retrospect it looks like a red flag. Which knowing this about himself in an ongoing fashion ofc just reinforces his own cynicism about everyone else lmao.

Even Lan Xichen, who I think he may see as a genuinely good person, he also sees as an easy mark who will reliably choose what is comfortable over what is 'right,' if you just structure the scenario to make that an easy choice that's easy for him to justify.

Xue Yang's bitterness is in many ways more exciting than Jin Guangyao's because he has a way more unusual relationship to reality, but it does share a lot of notes.

The role of deception in his psychology fascinates me because as far as I can tell he's as instinctively straightforward a person as Lan Wangji, albeit along quite different lines involving a total lack of impulse control, but has adopted 'deceit' as a weapon against the wicked world in the same way he has adopted 'murder.'

But when he feels someone is not merely lying but papering over bad behavior with principles they are not living up to he is livid.

People claiming to be better than him because they're 'good' when 'good' is a construct of privilege, is the underlying idea he's not equipped to articulate. Except he takes that and applies it to 'hitting me to interrupt my random murder of some guy who happened to be within arm's reach when I wanted to hurt someone.'

Which isn't like philosophically perfect, but the underlying problem he's actually reacting to is that he understands the social contract as a lie that has never protected him but seeks to control him, while protecting rich men it has no power to control.

Which it is fair to be mad about, but then his feeling is that since that's the nature of the world and all people, he is entitled to amass for himself the power to inflict hurt without consequences as much as he possibly can, and to use it against the vulnerable for fun, and no one is entitled to interfere.

Which brings him to a place where he is violently angry at anyone talking about trying to treat other people well as a value, because either they're a hypocrite and a liar or they threaten his entire system of rationalization for why he can be The Worst and still In The Right.

'Everyone is equally bad, actually' is like, an understandable take for anyone who's had cause to become embittered. Everyone is free to make whatever philosophical peace they can with the world and by and large there's no ethical weight to any such opinion, in itself.

But it's an ideological crutch people tend to wind up leaning on very heavily when they can't or don't want to take responsibility for their own behavior.

Which is an approach that Xue Yang, Jin Guangyao, and Su She all share, and which not only is shitty of them, it...traps them in a wheel of doubling down on their own worst impulses because rather than going 'that was bad and I shouldn't do it again' they've repeatedly invested all this energy into making what they did actually the correct thing, according to their interpretation of the context. Which means they're more likely to do it again.

(I think this is how Jin Guangyao became a serial killer, for example. He followed a doing-a-murder-impulse and then internally doubled down on how he had nothing to be ashamed of, so he was more likely to do it again, every time.

Wei Wuxian's strain of self-righteousness about his revenge was less...thorough than Jin Guangyao's, because he had the benefit of going after people on the opposite side of a war from him while Meng Yao's first known murder plot was against a shitty boss. But it probably didn't help him not try to solve army-shaped problems with mass murder, even after that stopped being allowed.)

If any of them had just like, zero moral sensibilities they would have created very different problems, and very possibly fewer of them. It's making a central goal of your operations 'self-vindication in your own internal narrative, created retroactively via reframing' rather than 'figuring out what I think I should do and trying to do that' that traps them in the self-reinforcing murder pissbaby vortex.

So if you look at it one way, these three villains are themselves perfect examples of how pursuit of the 'feeling of being good' (or at least 'not the bad guy') can make you worse.

Notably Wei Wuxian was also extremely sensitive to hypocrisy in his youth; it was the only part of Madam Yu's behavior he was ever shown objecting to. But he's sufficiently mellow and cynical from regret and burnout by the 'present' timespan after his resurrection to just get disgusted and alienated about it, rather than outraged.

He wasn't even all that mad at Xue Yang, though honestly that may be partly because he stopped entirely characterizing him as a person at some point during their interaction. Like, there's no point being angry at someone whose moral sensibilities operate exclusively on the plane of 'is this unfair to me' for manipulating and destroying people who were good to him, and then getting obsessed with his own self-pity about it. This is not a person who understands how not to be, metaphorically speaking, a cannibal.

And Wei Wuxian did know better and still got roughly the same result, so what business does he have getting angry?

Anyway yeah those two villains are both delightfully relatable if you sit down and put their perspectives together; they are clearly operating with the same basic suite of human needs and emotions as everybody else, without that being in itself particularly exculpatory, which is honestly refreshing. They've just got the most fantastically toxic interpersonal habits that knowing them counts as some level of Suffering A Curse.

Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang do both stand as scathing rebukes of the society that created them. But within the narrative, wherein they're people, the fact is that each of them had agency and one of the things they chose to do with it was develop rationales for why they were the most special little guy and everything was someone else's fault.

And their moral nihilisms, while also grounded in serious trauma, ping me as emotional masturbation of this variety.

[starcurtain]

respectfully the reason people mischaracterize aventurine in the specific way you mentioned in the tags of "canonically not caring about wealth or power" at least is a lot more simple than you'd think; because the devs said otherwise. in the livestream where acheron and aventurine were revealed (so right before we actually got that tb quest where we learned everything) the ceo and the writer outright state that he seems to have an obsession with amassing wealth.

now obviously we can now look back on this with hindsight, they said a lot of things in there that make more sense with context (example; mentioning that his original kit being focused around dodging left him the only party member alive was scrapped even though they joked about it being fitting might have made him look like a jackass, but now recontextualized as being about his luck only saving him) but i would argue that when the writer of the story and the ceo of the company look into the camera while revealing behind the scenes details and say he has an obsession with wealth (even if there are now multiple interpretations of that, from thinking he intentionally plays into that facade to thinking that's how he coped after losing his reason for going on) and that is the first impression a lot of people had of his real character if they didn't follow leaks, it's kind of no wonder that it's so common of an interpretation.

Yeah, I think I take this with a strong does of skepticism though, because:

A) Everyone knows the devs lie in previews in order to keep secrets about characters, and, as you note, what they say about characters tends to be wildly out of context. We all remember those comments about Gallagher not being plot relevant at all lol. Should we still believe that just because it was said by the devs once?

B) At this point, why would you be engaging in the fandom for a character if you skipped or put off doing any of his content in the actual game? Playing through 2.0 alone, let alone 2.1, would reveal to anyone paying attention that Aventurine is a very duplicitous character who puts on a specific persona as a mask to hide the fact that he thinks of himself very differently on the inside.

I feel like we can use the "the devs said this" as an excuse for a little while, but once the character's content has been out for months and provides a completely different picture of the character, if you're not willing to update your "first impression" of the character to an more accurate portrayal of them based on what's actually in the game... then like... why be in that character's fandom at all?

That's just my opinion anyway. This might not be the nicest thing for me to say, but I do feel like if people refuse to move on from an impression they formed of the character before the character was even released... then what they've created is an OC, not a portrayal of the actual canon character anymore.

[thatswhatsushesaid]

emotions i expected to experience upon finishing the blackwater arc: ohhhh the tragedy of beefleaf

emotions i am currently experiencing upon finishing the blackwater arc: WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE TALK TO ME ABOUT SHI WUDU. SOMEONE. ANYONE.

[s0ap-bubbles]

Hyperfixation so bad you start unironically shipping the canon straight ship

I’d put more but it looks nice with the 4 so I ain’t changing it lmao

Honourable mentions: Liu kang and kitana, Jonathan Joestar and Erina, Yasuho and Josuke, Dick and Kori/Nightwing and Starfire, Ada Wong and Leon S. Kennedy depending on my mood, and Nero and Kyrie

[wish-upon-the-universe]

Hc that islanders are particularly susceptible to body craft

I mean. Looks at the king. Looks at act 5 sif. Looks au euphrasie. Looks at the person who wished for someone to understand them.

Something about the universe being big and following as it molds you

[eff-plays]

"Durge and Astarion are canon your honor!"

Well canon Durge is a white male dragonborn sorcerer and yet y'all are making cute little drow girlies and sexy little tiefling twinks to get at that extra content so what's the truth?

Oh that your personal preferences are somehow more canon than someone else's because the devs didn't have enough time to write extra content for every companion, leaving an unfair and imbalanced emphasis on the one character that did get extra content? That you feel your choices are validated because they're reinforced by poor planning/game design? Hmm. Hmm. Hmmmm 🤔

[donnatroyyyy]

Dick and Jason fighting:

Dick: you’re nothing but a scummy, worthless piece of shit! I hope you die again! You should’ve never come back in the first place!

Jason: oh yeah?! Well you’re nothing than a big fake who doesn’t deserve to be here with the family or with superheroes in general! There’s a reason why you’re the one Bruce took the longest to adopt! It’s because you’re not worth it! You’re worthless and nobody loves you!

Dick: well at least I can get my own juice box from the grocery shop! But oh no I’m Jason Todd, the favorite child because I fucking died and I need to do everything criminally because I’m rebelling! Get over yourself you ass no one thinks you’re cool!

Jason: and people think you’re cool?! With your fucking mullet phase and need to over sexualize yourself?! Yeah fucking sure, stop blowing this out of proportion it’s a fucking juicebox!

Dick: and you’re just a fucking failure but oh look at that— Bruce still loves you for some reason!

Jason: what you’re sad cuz he doesn’t love you?!

Dick: and you’re sad because you never had a real mother?

*five minutes later*

Dick, in Jason’s doorway, has done this a million times before with all his siblings: I’m going to bat burger

Jason, was contemplating burning down Dick’s apartment, and also wanted to go ask Dick his opinion on some cargos but didn’t want to be the first to cave: I’m coming with