#not gonna tag the character just in case somebody sees it as a spoiler

[macabresymphonies]

His inherent bitchiness and autistic swag is coming through even in Javascript, I'm crying

[iliveforyouilongforyouvesuvia]

ok its me again hi AAAHHHH this is so nice i feel so warm im lying on my bed kickin my lil legs i cant believe this thank you for being nice omgggg now im on a roll im gonna say things about julian hkdhjgdgjf

only one song really that i scanned the whole tag looking for to see if anyone said it before and i was so surprised that i didnt find it and i went to check the official playlists on spotify cause maybe its on there already and thERE ISNT ONE WHAT???? i had the muriel one liked on here and id never checked any other ones out lmao but like i swear there had to be one?? like maybe they made it first and its somewhere separately??? julian is like the most popular one how the hell does he not get a spotify list is that how this tag was created?? *gasp* am i discovering the ~fandom lore~

(just gonna say you dont actually need to answer any of that in detail dont waste your time gksgkydgjf im just screaming into the void cause i was so flabbergasted after those 3 whole minutes of research i put into this)

ANYWAY the actual song would be House of Wolves by our lord and saviour MCR! its so good for him with his whole Woe is Me drama king vibe lol and the plaguey thematicssss mmmm delicious TELL ME im a BAD BAD BAD BAAD MAAAAN aight you lil masochist i see u and the "you better run like the devil cause they never gonna leave you alone" you get it caUSE HES A FUGITIVE DO YOU GET THE DEEP UNRAVELABLE METAPHORS DO YOU GET IT DO YOU G aight shut up hkhfjtdy anyway

ok i lied jystfhte heres another one i just remembered i really wanted to put here its not new but just in case somebody hasnt seen it yet lmao its such a masterpiece ill do anything to give it its due here ya go

https://youtu.be/61HltPN_k3g

and the other thing im really glad to have seen people mention here is musical songs cause thats one of the things i love about him the most like yass we love a thespian king slay grl so then anytime im binging a musical there always come the intrusive thoughts of "aw hed love this one" and "oh hed be great for this role" like i went to see f-ing swan lake with my f-ing grandpa and one of the major takeaways i got from the experience was (UH IM GONNA PUT A SPOILER WARNING HERE? I GUESS? IN CASE ANYONE CARES HELLO JULIAN BAD ENDING SPOILERS AHEAD DO MOVE ALONG NOW IF YOU DONT LIKE THAT AVERT YOUR GAZE CITIZENS LMAO LIKE YOU HAVENT SEEN FANARTS N ADS ALREADY ALRIGHT ALRIGHT) "omg jules would be so perfect as that bird guy villain IN HIS BIRD GUY SHAPE TOO OMG WITH THE WINGS ON STAGE THIS IS AWESOME WHY CANT I DRAW GOOD GODDA-"

anyway hed love hadestown (hed at least try to cast muriel as hades cause hes perfectly intimidating for it but theres way too many lines which okay Maybe but AND he has to sing???? nah hes out bkgdhkdt) i dont know what hed think of pierre natasha & the great comet cause its maybe a little eccentric i suppose but i think hed appreciate the cultural roots of the vibe with him being fantasy ruso-slav-ukrainian-whatnot heritage i reckon and hed definitely have a blast at a live performance and hed ABsolutely join in with the actors in between the rows at some point and theyd ABSOlutely let him cause hes that good and game recognize game cmon hes gonna show you amateurs what a real kazotski looks like

i can also see him enjoying sweeney todd, for its delightful edgyness, maybe even some themes relatable for him, and his sappy ass would SO memorise Pretty women to whip it out at an opportune serenading moment khgdturshc im so cringe and loving it

well i cant think of any more shows to throw him together with so thus ends my soliloquy wow i cant believe thats how you spell that anyway i hope anybody who knew what the hell im talking about enjoyed all that jgfztits see you in another 20 minutes when i come back like "AND ANOTHER thing-

Yay, it's the character song essays anon!! :D

I'm glad to see you back, and I will once again be re-linking the song you shared below and adding your suggestions to the tag ^.^

And frankly, I'm 76% certain that one of Julian's love languages is theatre, especially musical theatre. That could be tickets, that could memorizing the lines from one of this favorite scenes and reciting it back to him, it could be showing up to every single performance he's involved in :)

I'm glad to see you back in my inbox, friend, feel free to message me if you ever want to obsess over the characters together! Cheers -

brainrot

[morganas-pendragons]

I posted 1,394 times in 2022

That's 366 more posts than 2021!

179 posts created (13%)

1,215 posts reblogged (87%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@morganas-pendragons

@authortobenamedlater

@embarrassedauthornerd

@thelvadams

@mcbride

I tagged 1,184 of my posts in 2022

Only 15% of my posts had no tags

#show: hotd - 69 posts

#halo spoilers - 63 posts

#twd spoilers - 58 posts

#show: kenobi - 53 posts

#show: halo - 49 posts

#c: obi wan kenobi - 45 posts

#show: moon knight - 44 posts

#batfam - 42 posts

#moon knight spoilers - 41 posts

#kenobi spoilers - 39 posts

Longest Tag: 139 characters

#kix getting adopted by obi-wan bc he's force sensitive and obi-wan found out he was gonna get decommissioned so he said screw the kaminoans

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

Nobility | Elijah Mikaelson

as I am writing this I am currently on 4x17 of the vampire diaries and I had a whole dream about this man last night that prompted me to write this fic. and he's hot. okay. I love the complexity of his character.

anyway, this isn't too long but I had to get this out. possible part 2 if you guys like it. enjoy!

***

He's not somebody worthy of being loved. He knows that. Someone who has committed the atrocities he did, someone who had lived a long enough life to be sure that he was at peace when death came for him.

Pushing people away is better. Mikaelsons are artists at that. When you have lived long enough to see the same eyes in different generations of people, it becomes difficult to allow yourself to feel things like what Elijah believes himself to be feeling right now.

Love, if memory serves him correctly.

You were just a simple person. Someone who didn't ask for a lot, someone who took joy in the little things rather than the things that often drew people to him and his brothers. Money. Extravagance. You were not interested in that.

You were just interested in him. The man across the cobblestone street who would simply stand by and watch you play violin from dawn until dusk. The way he would always smile when he thought you weren't looking and the way his eyes looked when the sunlight reflected off of them just the right way.

You found beauty in the every day. Him? He was ethereal, and that drew your attention.

He almost never approached you for the first several weeks that you took your street corner, but every time you came back from your breaks you found two hundred dollars in your violin case.

Generous and curious. Interesting.

The days that handsome stranger was there the most was when you played older music. It seemed to ring familiar to him. Like it reminded him of something better. When you recognized what his favorites were, you made an effort to play only those whenever he came around.

It's a shame he was drawn to you so easily.

"Excuse me?" That wonderful, brilliant accent rang clearly behind you as you turned away from the coffee stand parallel to your corner. "I thought I would formally introduce myself to you. My name is Elijah."

Of course you knew who he was. The Mikaelsons had only helped established New Orleans. "It's nice to meet you, Mr. Mikaelson." You replied. "Can I get you a cup of coffee?"

He was handsome, dressed in that deep navy suit with the crisp white tie. Dressed immaculately and finely groomed. Someone definitely had an appearance to maintain.

"I'd rather you give me your name."

You smile around the plastic rim of your cup as you reply with your name. His eyes crinkle around the edges when he smiles as he hears it. It's just as lovely as you are.

"And yours?" You ask.

"Elijah. Elijah Mikaelson."

***

Christmas came easily enough. Tips were always better around this time of year, and you were meant to be one of the featured violinists in the Christmas festivities on the square. People came and people went. You were always smiling. Always joyful.

The world had spared you from pain.

Or that was at least what Elijah thought.

"Where is this girl that you haven't stopped yammering on about?" Klaus remarked as the two of them moved down the cobblestone street in the direction of the Christmas lights and the smell of hot cocoa. "Because I have heard many a violinists in my day but with the way you talk about her-"

Elijah jabbed his brother in the side and pointed to the stage. There you were in all your glory, dressed in one of those typical Santa suits for women that was just a little bit too short and had that ridiculous hat. He'd never understood the purpose behind that story that catered to children's dreams.

"Her. That's her."

"Ah, I can see why you're drawn to her." Klaus murmured. "Innocence is not something we're accustomed to, brother."

Maybe that's why he was so drawn to you. You in all your innocent beauty, a simple human, someone he was so desperate to know to see if this one person... this one girl.... could help him believe the one thing about himself he's been trying so hard to deny.

See the full post

155 notes - Posted February 21, 2022

#4

fragments | the master chief

This is entirely @embarrassedauthornerd fault. She sent me the idea when I said that I wanted to write John fic for the show, and this happened. It will be multiple parts. Please tell me what you think. Likes tell me nothing. Reblogs, comments, anything is appreciated!

and if you'd like to be tagged, please let me know! this contains spoilers for the first two episodes of Halo. Female!Reader. Enjoy!

***

Things are coming back to him in fragments. Memories. Soft, monochromatic pictures and faces of people he was not supposed to forget. John knows deep in his heart - something that is never supposed to lead his actions, but here he is anyway on the run from the UNSC - that what he keeps seeing every time he touches the object is something Halsey took from him.

He wants to hate her, but how can he? She raised him. Morphed him into who he is. Catherine Halsey was the sculpter of everything The Master Chief is known for.

What John fails to understand is why you are in them. There are two adults, rolling hills and a white dog, and a girl who smiles at him like he is the reason for her happiness.

The imagery always shifts though. Your face is the only one that does. The rest is pure, untainted, hidden away in the corners of his mind, and only triggered by the object that cannot be named.

When you are not smiling, you are screaming.

And that petrifies him. The infamous Master Chief Petty Officer, the pride of the military and humanity, is afraid of and for you.

You should be looking harder for me, John. Look deeper.

He's only just finished his conversation with Halsey in his cell when he dares to broach the topic. She's been regarding him with such a soft look, such a look of concern but he knows it's just masking the intrigue for whatever he endured when he touched the object the second time. Data. Catherine Halsey lives and breathes discoveries.

117 has to learn autonomy: He is not hers, he is not a tool. That's right, John. You're human. Blood and flesh and bone with a heart that is only yours. No one can take that from you.

John swallows the knot in his throat and carefully considers his words.

"I've been seeing something else. Another person I don't remember. There are people. Multiple."

"Oh? And who might this be?"

He pauses and closes his eyes again to picture you. Shimmering hair that's a color he can't quite discern, eyes that seem to stare right through and into him, hands that cradle his face and run thumbs against his jawline just gentle enough that the touch is almost imperceptible.

The image flickers. You're smiling, then screaming, and then there is simply darkness. No other memories remain. He is so desperate to know you. Who are you? Why do you make him feel safe? What are these memories that are just out of his grasp?

"A girl." His expression is grave as he meets Halsey's gaze. "Not just a normal girl either. I knew her. Well. And I can't-I need to remember her."

Halsey flashes one of those smiles - that condescending, wicked smile - before she gently squeezes his hand and stands to her feet. "No, John." She replies cooly. The way she so easily brushes off his pleas speaks volumes. "You don't need to remember. That's not the mission here. The mission is to understand the effects of the artifact and what it contains inside."

The mission is to understand the weapon, John. You are not a priority. Your desires are secondary to that of the UNSC. You are a tool. A weapon. And weapons do not get to plead to remember fragments of memories that may not even be real.

John gives a curt nod as she slips out the door and disappears. He is alone with his thoughts. His dreams.

He dreams of dancing. Something he'd never seen himself doing, but someone had coaxed him into doing it after a lengthy lesson. He'd stumbled over his feet at first and had blushed through his embarrassment, but you had simply brushed it off with a shy smile and encouraged him to try again.

So he did. That night, John dreams of dancing.

As John sleeps, Halsey paces. She knows exactly what he is talking about. That girl had been the other candidate to be conscripted into the Spartan 2 program at the beginning of her work. She had failed the preliminary checklist and had been removed, effective immediately.

Or they'd tried to until John had become attached to her. And well, attachments for Spartans are forbidden. The UNSC cannot allow their prized Spartan to be attached.

So they'd done what they saw fit. They had broken that girl down to the very fabric of what makes a human human, wiped it clean, and reprogrammed her to be their best.

Their best headhunter.

The one with fragmented memories of a boy.

****

See the full post

185 notes - Posted April 5, 2022

#3

succumb | the master chief

summary: john dreams of the one thing he’s desperate to have. You. 

Sometimes in the quiet hours of the morning, John dreams. They’re fairly simple dreams when he’s younger. Dreams of desire to be able to live the childhood he knows deep down he will never have. Dreams to be back home on Eridanus II, surrounded by the love of his mother and father, and running with reckless abandon through the forest he calls home. 

They change as he gets older. His dreams shift from home to horror. There’s no longer dreams of light and happiness and freedom. It’s just war. 

That is.. until he meets you. John meets you, a fragment of a memory from his past, and he’s suddenly dreaming of something he hasn’t dreamt of since he was a child: Home. Waking up beside you, brushing hair from your face and admiring your beauty even in sleep, being able to feel you and call you his... 

It’s a dream. 

A dream he welcomes openly. It prompts him to want to sleep more. 

The ones that make desire pool in his stomach are the ones where Silver isn’t around. Where he’s alone in the bunk room and dressed only in his fatigues, battle weariness settling on his shoulders so much that his body cannot carry weight anymore and he leans forward to hide his head in his hands. 

That’s when he feels the ghost of lips against his arm. He already knows what it’s from. A side effect of the augmentation, the scar is thick and ridged and stands out so starkly against his skin that it’s practically impossible to hide. John had never been fazed by them before. He wasn’t one for insecurities.. but he had been so nervous once he started thinking about what you might think about his scars. 

That was why he’d hidden them.

Until now. 

John’s entire body shudders at the sensation of your lips burning his skin, fingertips trailing across his hipbones and upward until they settle just over where his heart is pounding. 

  “I wish you knew how loved you were, John.” Your voice is so soft he nearly doesn’t hear it even in the quietness of the room. 

He doesn’t reply. John’s head slowly tips to the side, and he slowly breathes through his chest constricting and the dizziness that settles upon him whenever you begin to kiss your way upward to the column of his neck. 

  “I don’t deserve to be loved this way.” The words are out before he can stop them, and The Master Chief whines when your touch disappears just briefly before he’s then being pinned to the bed, his wrists trapped by your hands above his head. 

What a view. He’s grown so used to sorched battlefields and the echoes of screams, but the view of the person he loves poised above him with that fixed, intense stare that screams adoration is something he can get used to. 

He craves that. Wants that. 

Is desire human? 

  “You listen to me, John-117.” Your voice is firm but gentle as you lean in closer, closer closer close enough that he can feel your breath fan his face as your eyes flicker from his eyes to his lips. “I don’t care how much blood is on your hands. I don’t care what sins you’ve had to commit. I am yours...” 

Your lips hover just over his. 

  “And you are mine.” 

And he always wakes up before he can kiss you. 

*** 

One day, I will kiss you. 

He seeks you out like a man on a mission the follow day. You’re alone in the gym set aside for the Spartans, back turned to him as you continue to aim your wrapped hands at the punching bag. 

Heat pools in your stomach at the thought of John standing across from you, bare chested and poised to fight, and there’s something deep in you that says you want him to. You want him to pin you down with his body and kiss you until your lungs scream for air and your lips are swollen. 

Is desire a human need? 

Might as well be. It’s all you’re capable of feeling when you’re in proximity of the Master Chief. 

You stop mid-stride to peer over your shoulder as the door shuts behind you. John moves in with all the grace of a battle hardened warrior, and you barely have enough time to react before his gaze is fixed on you. 

Hungry. 

See the full post

216 notes - Posted May 18, 2022

#2

There’s Only Legacies Burning | O.K.

[not my gif!]

Guys, truthfully, I am not okay after watching that episode. It sucked for me. I'm not someone who usually reacts to TV and what tv shows bring because I'm aware it's not real, but this episode felt so real it made me physically nauseous despite how excellent it was.

spoilers for Kenobi 1x03. let me know if I should write for him again!

tagging my name twin @penfullofwordsaheadfullofstories​

He can't breathe. Everything is encompassed by fire, and he can't breathe.

Part of him knew that this day was going to be coming. Even if he hadn't been entirely aware that Darth Vader was walking around in the body of his former Padawan, Obi-Wan knew that he would have to face the main who had essentially brought the galaxy to ruin.

It didn't mean he couldn't try to run from it.

Leia and Tala and yourself were safe. He was more then okay with being the diversion if it meant you and Leia got back to Alderaan. He had accepted Death as a gift a long time ago. This would be okay. He would be okay.

Because wasn't he always? People knew him as Obi-Wan Kenobi, the Master of Soresu and a Jedi so steeped in the Light Side that he practically embodied it.

The war he wasn't even supposed to be fighting in just kept taking and taking and taking. Jedi were not soldiers. They were never meant to be soldiers, and yet the Dark Lord of the Sith had orchestrated an entire war that had inevitably led to their downfall. He had lost, time and time again. Lost Qui-Gon, lost to Maul, lost Satine, lost Ahsoka and Anakin... he was so used to losing things, losing people, that he seemed to have forgotten what it was like to succeed. To win.

If only The Great Negotiator of Yesterday could see him now...

He had lost. They had lost. What was the point of fighting, of trying to be someone of a long-dead era, when there was nothing left to fight for? What was the point of trying to stay loyal to the Light when the whole galaxy was encased in darkness and death?

He looks at Leia's face and sees it then, just moments before they part. The reason why he's decided to do this. Hope. Joy. The promise of a future.

But when he looks at you? There is all of the love he feels as if he has been deprived of. Loving you, being with you, is like replenishing the air that has been snatched from his lungs and granting him the ability to remember what it's like to properly breathe again.

When he looks at you, the embers of the man who compose Obi-Wan Kenobi begin to grow stronger, and the pieces are slowly put back together by the capable hands of someone who has always held his heart.

It's a shame that he will now die without it.

"Now you will suffer, Obi-Wan. Your pain has only just begun.” 

It’s fitting, now that he thinks about it. Even if Anakin always did have a flare for the dramatic. Obi-Wan had left him in the prime of his suffering and his rage when he’d departed from his brother’s burning body on the banks of Mustafar. Those fires had burnt away what little remained of Anakin Skywalker and had birthed Darth Vader. 

These fires will burn away the last of Obi-Wan and birth Ben. 

The fire goes out for a miraculous reprieve, but Obi-Wan finds himself unable to move very well knowing that he’s failed his mission. Again. He failed you, and he failed Anakin, and he failed Ahsoka and Luke and Leia and Cody-

  “Bring him to me.” 

Somewhere in the distance he hears a cry from a stormtrooper - a failed attempt to recreate the soldiers that the clones had once been to the republic - as a teal lightsaber flies out of the darkness in a wide arc around Vader that seemingly takes out every single trooper who had been looking to kill him. 

Vader tilts his head. He clearly wasn’t counting on you, emerging from the dark right in between himself and Obi-Wan. 

Your saber flies back into your hand to be gripped by white knuckles. 

  “I believe you’re trying to take something that doesn’t belong to you, chaak’ar. You don’t get to have Obi-Wan.” You tilt your head to the side in a manner that just screams threatening. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?” 

Vader is not amused. “Your devotion to the Light is futile. Your anger and your bitterness would have made you a fantastic Sith apprentice. If only you had seen it sooner, then you would not have suffered the fate of falling in love with the man who made me this.” Vader replied.

You rolled your eyes. Even if this.. thing... had taken over Anakin’s body, he still had the ability to somehow make everything seem much more dramatic by making it about himself. 

  “I’ve heard enough of your lies. You were the one who failed. Failed me, failed him,” You point behind you at the ground where Obi-Wan lays. “I came into Anakin’s life too late. I know that. Despite that, when we loved him time and time again, loving him then and loving him now only made us weak.” You loosen the grip on the hilt of your blade and eye the machine in the corner, in which you most definitely intend to use the opportunity of an explosion to slip away into the night. “Goodbye, Lord Vader.” 

Your saber flies toward the panel, and Tala watches as you and NED bend down to scoop Obi-Wan up while fleeing under the cover of night fall, leaving Lord Vader to watch the flames dissipate before him. 

See the full post

336 notes - Posted June 2, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Accurate representations of my mood after moon knight episode 5:

See the full post

419 notes - Posted April 27, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

[elyvorg]

I received an ask about The Great Ace Attorney, which I’m putting under a cut in order to reply to instead of doing it normally, because it involves spoilers and I’m not taking any chances. To people following my blog, consider this another warning: I really meant it when I recommended blocking the tag #tgaa spoilers if you’re interested in AA but haven’t played this one yet. I know I haven’t actually been posting much TGAA content other than my liveblog just yet, but I still very much intend to sometime in future, and some of it will unavoidably involve spoilers. I do not want to be the reason anybody else is spoiled like I was. Please.

Anyway. The ask, from an anon:

So, about GAA, apparently Kazuma was supposed to die for real in the first game, but he was so popular they decided to bring him back. The amnesia thing is probably a rather awkward attempt to re-integrate him to the story.

My very initial kneejerk reaction to seeing this was, “what no, what do you mean Kazuma was supposed to be dead for real when they released the first game, there’s no way that’s true.”

Here’s the thing: “The amnesia is awkwardly there because his return wasn’t planned as of the first game” doesn’t actually explain anything about the amnesia. Kazuma wasn’t in London until after the end of the first game, so the question of “why didn’t he contact Ryunosuke in the first game to let him know he was alive” does not actually need “because he had amnesia” as an awkwardly retconned explanation. He just literally wasn’t even there yet, explanation sorted.

And, see, despite the way I felt about it on my first playthrough, the amnesia has a decent amount of narrative purpose even as part of a return that was planned! Evidently the point of the it was to allow the reveal of Kazuma’s return to be spread out over a whole case with a gradual build-up. That’d be a thing they’d do whether or not they had it planned from game 1. It’s quite a bit more interesting to do it that way than just have Kazuma suddenly show up like “hey guys I’m alive actually”. Take this from me, someone who spent half the game constantly trying to imagine how his return would actually play out and how a hypothetical writer would do it well in order to give it the impact it deserved. I kept thinking, “Is he gonna just? show up??? that’d be weirdly abrupt, right? but then, how else would you do it?” The way they did it, with the amnesia and the mask, was not an unreasonable way to go about it!

In the end, I really latched way too hard on the idea of Kazuma faking the amnesia for reasons very specific to me. I’d spent so long – basically the entire game from the end of 1-2 – imagining that he was alive and in London and deliberately not contacting Ryunosuke the whole time, which I therefore assumed had to be a Secret Mission thing, so that was my initial thought when I saw him in van Zieks’s office not reacting to Ryunosuke’s presence. And then I liked that idea enough that I didn’t want to let go of it even when I learned he had amnesia, which is why I kept clinging to the possibility of it being fake.

(Still like that idea a lot, still writing a fic about it like I mentioned at the end of my liveblog. That’ll happen. Watch this space.)

But anyway, amnesia aside, I have thoughts about the idea that Kazuma’s return wasn’t planned in general. When I got this ask, I consulted seatherny from my liveblog thread to see if she’d heard about this, because she knows more about this fandom than I do. It seems that this notion originates from an ambiguous implication in a translated interview with Shu Takumi that fandom opinion is torn on how to interpret.

It’s possible that what the interview meant instead was that Kazuma wasn’t meant to be the masked apprentice, and that character was going to be somebody new, until they came up against scope creep and had to streamline things. This might explain the amnesia thing being arguably a little bit awkward, if they had to merge these two characters and make Kazuma be the masked apprentice with relatively little prior intent to do that! It does make sense to me that, though they’d planned the fact that Kazuma would return in some manner, they hadn’t fully decided how to do it until they were writing the second game.

So, I’m sure the fandom has already debated this plenty, and I’m not trying to actually get into a debate over this with anyone, but since I like saying words about this game, here are some of my thoughts on this topic.

I am, if you couldn’t already tell, very firmly in the camp of Kazuma’s return being planned as of the first game. There’s so many parts I love that seemed to be hinting at and foreshadowing it that would just become massive ridiculous coincidences if it wasn’t planned. The TGAA writers instantly become significantly less good writers if they never intended for Kazuma to return in the second game while writing the first. I don’t want that to be true about them.

It would be such a ridiculous coincidence that the one dead character the fandom loves and wants back also happens to be the one character whose death was ambiguous and weird and unconfirmed enough that it’s actually possible to bring him back at all. Most victims are a lot more definitely unambiguously confirmed dead than Kazuma would have just had to happen to be!

On that front, there’s also everything regarding Sholmes’s role in things, too: the List giving him a reason to fake Kazuma’s death; him persuading Ryunosuke to take Kazuma’s place; him generally being even more inexplicable and obfuscating in 1-2 in particular than he usually is. All of that just happens to create a situation in which Sholmes faking Kazuma’s death is plausible. It’s all so weird if the writers never planned for him to turn out to be alive! 1-2 has so much more fun intrigue in hindsight when you know Kazuma’s not really dead. I refuse to believe that’s all a gigantic accident.

There’s this bit in 1-4 where Roly is feeling all guilty that he thought Olive was dead, and he laments that if only he’d noticed she was alive and got her medical help sooner then she might not have been in a coma for so long. They put a weirdly large amount of emphasis on that for something that ultimately doesn’t matter, because Olive wakes up fine. That seems to me like it exists to foreshadow/parallel Kazuma’s situation, like maybe if Sholmes hadn’t dicked around faking his death and there’d been more priority on getting him medical help then he wouldn’t have been in a coma for so long and may not have woken up with amnesia.

Then there’s a bit in Seven Days of Sin Part 1 Adjudication (a bonus content thing you can find in the videos section of the bonus menu) where Sholmes basically goes, “here is an example of a very bad spoiler: ‘Hey, didn’t Herlock Sholmes die by falling off a cliff? Oh, but then later it turned out he wasn’t actually dead!’” This was pre-release material that came out shortly before the release of the first game. It would sure be another huge coincidence for that to match so perfectly to Kazuma’s fate if his survival wasn’t planned at that point. That really feels to me like something the team did on purpose, the scamps, I cannot believe the absolute brazen cheek of it.

Even aside from all those hints at his survival in particular, there’s the fact that the details with Kazuma’s missions – both of them, the assassin one and the father one – were very clearly planned from the first game. And they’re both such big, complicated deals such that it wouldn’t be nearly as impactful to only learn about all this posthumously with Kazuma long dead. All of it is character fuel, especially the whole thing with his father. Kazuma as a character is and always was so much more than just the mentor figure who dies to inspire the main character to step into the spotlight. The rest of his character potential would have been almost entirely squandered if he’d actually been dead. I trust the writers better than that. They very clearly had a lot of the second game’s general direction – with regards to the Professor and the assassin exchange – planned as of the first; it’s too interconnected for them not to have.

I can believe that maybe somewhere in the original very early planning of the game they might have intended for Kazuma to die for real, playing that Mia role and not much else. But then they came up with enough of his backstory and the details of his missions, to the point that they realised how much character potential it had and were like, “wait a minute, we should really keep him alive for all this, actually”, and so they changed their plans – during the production of the first game. That’s a possibility I can accept.

However, it doesn’t make any sense to me that they would only catch on to the fact that Kazuma is a character worth keeping alive and exploring more after seeing him be popular with people who played the first game. Those people didn’t even know the half of why Kazuma is so fascinating at the time – but the game’s writers definitely did, long before the first game came out! And also, like, if the reason they brought Kazuma back was supposedly purely fan demand from people who loved him in the first game, it’s bit of a weird flex to bring him back and then have him act really pointedly different from the character everyone loved and was sad to see die.

[darth-does-stuff]

ok so i need to place this information somewhere and i just decided id post it here 

 idk if im even gonna post the actual superhero au fic but im posting it here anyways

 this superhero au is gonna fit all the angst in here because there is little angst in the chaos crew au lmao

but here are the separate arcs each is gonna face in this au under the cut

(there is gonna be some graphic stuff so be warned)

(it is also going to be very long)

heed the tags guys

Logan

A very important factor for his entire character in this au is that he has cybernetics. His right eye, his left arm, and the lower half of his left leg. This happened due to an explosion, his arm and lower left leg essentially blown off, and shrapnel piercing his eye. 

His arc centers around his cybernetics, thinking they are a burden, and feeling like he doesn’t fit in, along with feeling inadequate. 

Logan struggles with thinking that his cybernetics aren’t truly a part of him, just something he has to deal with. A burden. He resents it, there’s no sugarcoating it. He wishes he had his human limbs back.

 In his arc, he’ll deal with the fact he has them, and that no amount of wishing will ever change it. He accepts them as a part of himself, an imperfect part, for sure, but every human is imperfect. Hell, even human parts of himself are imperfect, so it fits right in. 

Before he accepts it as a part of himself, though, he deals with feelings of inadequacy. People often pitied him (keep in mind they thought he had prosthetics), trying to ‘lighten the load’ for him. He appreciated the thought, but they never let him do anything. He felt like they were belittling him. Logan tried to brush it off, but deep down, he worried that he truly was inadequate. Was he weak? Should he even be doing these things? Was he good enough? Sometimes...Logan felt he wasn’t.

But, once he hits the arc with accepting his cybernetics, he faces this feeling of inadequacy and proves it wrong. He’s been doing things normal humans couldn’t dream of and the city’s still thriving. He’s faced countless robbers, countless villains, and found a home with the team. He was good enough. He was okay. He’d be fine. Of course, sometimes he’d still have those feelings of not being good enough, but he could deal with it now. It wasn’t something that haunted his nightmares.

But, even after the whole cybernetic arc, he still faces the problem of not fitting in. Even before having superpowers and cybernetics, he wasn’t like other children. He was the eldest child, so his parents were basically helicopter parents, afraid he was going to get hurt in some way. As he got older and he had more siblings, they got a bit more lax, but he still hadn’t done things normal children had done. He didn’t explore, didn’t interact much with other children (though that was more of his doing), barely went outside, and had his every move basically monitored. Logan preferred reading a book to playing at the park, drawing a picture instead of hanging out with friends, etc., etc. So, he always felt a bit like an outsider. It only got worse once he had the incident. 

Now, he had fucking powers and literal robotics attached to his body, and he was scared. He was angry. He was...confused. How would his life change? What would happen to him? Then, all of a sudden, he got roped into being a fucking vigilante and just had to deal with it.

Then, he joins this team, all of them so much more normal than him, and he still doesn’t know what to do. He’s scared they are going to judge him, belittle him, like so many before them had done.

But...they don’t. They accept him, they joke with him, they are happy with him. And, he slowly starts to relax. He comes out of his shell and he feels...complete. It’s okay he isn’t normal. It’s okay he doesn’t exactly fit in. Everything is okay. 

He doesn’t blame his parents for being helicopter parents, he still loves them and his siblings. He knows they were worried about him. Sure, they did mess up, but he’s made countless mistakes in his life too. He doesn’t blame them or his siblings. They helped him become who he is and he is eternally grateful for that.

Patton

Patton faces the problem of his public image and his own self-image. In public and when he is Typhoon, he puts on this bright and chipper personality. And it’s grueling to keep up because that is not who he truly is. He’s much more mischievous, much more sarcastic, much more brash, much more himself. 

He tries to keep up this optimistic persona because he doesn’t want backlash. He’s afraid of what people would say if they saw the real thing. So, he puts up an image. Smile, all the time. Wave enthusiastically. Don’t let them see through you. Act like you’re fine. You always have to be fine, right? That’s what Patton thinks, at least.

With his arc, he slowly learns to just accept himself. It helps when Virgil joins the team, because he sees him not putting up a facade. He acts himself, dark and broody, sarcastic and sardonic. And nobody really questioned it or gave him backlash. Patton has this moment of ‘Oh’ because he realizes that he can show what he truly is. He no longer has to hide.

When he first starts showing himself as he actually is, he’s scared. It’s only natural, no matter how much you prepared for it, you will still be scared. Some people notice. There are a few news articles as some just want drama. But, his team, his friends, his family backs him up and it strengthens his resolve. He learns to ignore those types of people, knowing they only want drama. He can finally be...himself.

Roman

Oh boy, this is going to be a doozy.

Roman’s angst is that his entire world view changes, his beliefs (not religious) crumble. Everything just seems to flip for him.

Roman had always thought that everyone could be redeemed. No matter the deed. Everyone deserves a second chance. He’s faced criminals and villains with this belief at the forefront of his mind. 

When everything else seemed to be crumbling around him, this belief sustained him. It kept him going. It was a constant when nothing else stayed the same.

But now? Now everything is foreign. Everything is changing with nothing being that constant that he so desperately needed. This situation he is facing hits even closer to home because--well, I’m afraid I can’t say because of spoilers, but let’s just say it may involve a certain mustached villain ;)

But, anyways, in his arc, he realizes that everything can’t just be sunshine and daisies. He’s known this before, but it hits full force now. He has to accept that some people can’t be redeemed, that some are just...evil. He hates to admit it, but he knows it’s true.

His friends--no, family backed him up. They helped him with this realization, helped to make sure he doesn’t break. And he is so, so, so, so grateful and thankful for them.

He knows that some people can’t change. He’s...well, he’s not fine with it, but he accepts it at the very least. And when he looks around at his family, seeing how genuine and kind they are, he knows that, no matter what, all he needs is his family to survive.

Virgil

He faces problems with his self-esteem, his own anxiety, and his fear of lack of self-control.

He has little self-esteem. He always has, really. Since he was a kid, he always overthought everything he did, criticized himself severely, always tried to push himself harder, in unhealthy amounts. It all left him feeling so tired.

He kept doing this even into adulthood, checking himself, always wondering if he could do better, barely feeling good about things he did. Things he wanted to be proud of, but just couldn’t.

When he joins the team, it’s a slow process. He was immensely afraid of being judged, of being insulted, of them. They were all these heroes the city recognized and praised and he was left feeling like shit, in his mind at least. He felt like he couldn’t keep up. Virgil kept trying to push himself harder to at least try and be on the same level as them, but ended up pushing much too hard, passing out from exhaustion and stress.

They realized his mindset, having had once had this mindset themselves, and help him deal with it, help him try to minimize it because it’s not something you can be fully rid of. They know this themselves because sometimes they still get those moments, where they feel they aren’t doing enough and push harder, too harder. But, the best they can do is to deal with it. And that’s exactly what Virgil does. 

His anxiety is also a doozy. 

It holds him back so much. Especially with fear of failing. He doesn’t want to fail anybody. He wants to do the best he can and do it perfectly. But, the problem is that he can’t. He knows he can’t and it terrifies him. His anxiety and fear of failing prevent him from doing so many things just because of what could go wrong. 

The team also helps with this. They provide somebody he can rant to and offer solutions and different types of perspective. They help him to realize that if you only worry about what could go wrong, then you wouldn’t be able to do anything, you wouldn’t be able to live. Because with that mindset, you aren’t living, you are only surviving. 

And they help Virgil see this point. Help him to not let his anxiety hold him back from things he really wants to do. And it provides him with so many opportunities. 

They all know that sometimes, it’s going to happen. Sometimes, Virgil just can’t be able to do something because the fear practically paralyzes him. It’s like with his self-esteem issues. It’s not something you can be rid of, just something you have to deal with. They help him when this happens, help bring him back to reality and help to calm him down.

Lastly, his fear of no self-control. You have to remember that their powers can be heavily influenced by emotions. Strong bursts of emotions can work it into overdrive. Too much use of their powers can also use all of their energy. In very extreme cases, it can lead to death.

But, while Virgil is also afraid of the side effects, he’s mostly afraid of what his powers can do to other people, innocent people. And, to him, it’s a found fear. It’s happened before. He’s hurt others without meaning to and he vowed to never do it again. This is partly why he became a vigilante, to protect others instead of hurting them. But he is so afraid of still harming them and he has nightmares about it. It practically haunts him. He fears turning into those killers and villains he’s fought.

Once again, the team is very helpful in debunking this. They’ve explained their own experiences, explained how they themselves have hurt innocents without meaning to, and it’s something you have to just...deal with, like all other problems. It doesn’t make you a bad person. Him worrying about being a bad person just proves furthermore that he isn’t. After all, a bad person wouldn’t care about it. But, he does. And that is what provides the difference. 

Janus

spoilers spoilers spoilers

Remus

spoilers spoilers spoilers-

[themonkeycabal]

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Episode 1 SPOILERS

If you need to blacklist, I will be tagging all things as #tfatws and/or #tfatws spoilers

My roommate keeps calling this The Falcon and the Snowman. I'm not entirely sure it's accidental.

I was going to watch at midnight and then fell asleep. Betrayal. I will not forgive this, brain.

Bucky Barnes character development. Sam Wilson character development. Six full episodes of Bucky Barnes and Sam Wilson. When we watched Civil War, did we think we'd actually be lucky enough to get a buddy idiot cop movie? Let alone six hours of it? #blessed

What are we expecting here? I have no idea, honestly. I think all the clips we've been seeing are from the first couple episodes, so they've hidden any sort of plot from us. We know Baron Zemo's around with his stupid purple ski mask and burning hatred for superheroes and probably specifically for Bucky who he tried (and honestly kind of succeeded, before then ultimately failing dramatically) to set up. And Sharon Carter will turn up at some point. OMG guys, Sharon Carter character development!

I'm just here for the buddy bickering and badassery.

SPOILERS BELOW

New World Order: Sam Wilson and Bucky Barnes realize that their futures are anything but normal. *Realize*? lol

Also, it's tagged as "science fiction, action-adventure, buddy" Awww.

Aww, Sam looks sad as he gazes at The Shield.

"How's it feel?" "Like it's someone else's." "It isn't."

That's right, Sam! Listen to that voice. That's yours now, baby.

We're just going to roll right into a mission. Rescuing a Captain Vassant, whose plane fell out of contact shortly after take off, from the ridiculously named group LAF, somewhere over Tunisia. Sam's got to keep LAF from doing bad things and the US Military can't be seen doing anything blah blah blah, violation of treaties, yada yada. And Sam's all "blah blah got it". We're on the same page, Sam and me. Nobody wants to hear it, Briefing Exposition Guy.

We will have a Lt. Torres on the ground following along and offering helpful commentary as they go.

Sam is warned to be subtle as he falls backwards out of the cargo plane in very dramatic fashion and then swoops off on his brightly colored wings. lol

Sam gets to the captain's plane but the pilot is dead and a shady LAF guy is piloting. Oh no. Hey, it's Batroc. Last seen getting his ass kicked by Captain America in "CA: The Winter Soldier". He makes some jokes about their prisoner - presumably Captain Vassant. Awful cocky for a guy with a history of getting stomped on, you know.

Anyway, he's about to get his ass kicked by a Captain America again as Sam breaks into the plane. You might just be using wing shields now, Sam, but you're Captain America in my heart. Also, hey, dumb bad guys, don't open fire with an automatic weapon inside a plane or the ricochets might kill your pilot. And his body will slump forward and put the plane into a steep dive.

Batroc distracts Sam while the bad guys gather up Vassant and jump out of the plane with him. They have wingsuits, but Sam has, you know, wings. And like a jet pack. Don't hit the canyon walls, Sam!

Somehow the bad guys have waiting gunships. Did they expect to jump out of the plane over this canyon? I can only assume. Red Wing takes care of one of the helicopters. Man these guys are a pain in the ass. They wing suit into one of the many many helicopters that just happen to be right in the right spot. They're racing for the Libyan border. Then Sam shows up, they throw Vassant out the copter again — this guy is having the worst day — and glide into another chopper.

Man ANOTHER gunship? The hell? They're causing serious ecological damage to this canyon, what with all the zillionty missiles they're firing at Sam. How strapped is this thing?

LT Torres is trying to keep up, and you know, trying to get Sam to not fly into Libyan territory and cause an international incident or some such. Sam is struck by inspiration and not by a missile. But, the missiles are following Sam and Sam is following Batroc's chopper. Sam zooms through the open doors of the chopper, knocks poor Vassant out of the chopper AGAIN (but then catches him), and LAF blows up their own helicopter. Alas, Batroc escaped.

Sam saves the day and LT Torres is like super excited. Don't break your humvee, Torres.

Torres and Sam stop by a tea shop in Tunis, or somewhere. Sam's trying to fix his tech that got a little shot up and Torres buys the tea. A man comes up and thanks Sam for saving his wife. It's sweet. And then Torres gets up and wanders about a bit with his phone as he exposits about LAF. Is Torres about to become a pin cushion? Only instead of pins it'll be bullets? I'm not feeling good about his continued health. He's too cute and earnest.

Oh, he's looking for some sort of hidden, augmented reality tag on the walls. A red handprint, id'ing some group that calls themselves the Flag Smashers. Bad guys are really scraping the bottom of the evil name barrel. Anyway, they think the world was better during the blip. Nothing says better like mass failure of infrastructure and probably world wide famine. They want a unified world without borders. I have big doubts the world would be a borderless utopia during a blip-like event. Power vacuums invite trouble, seldom unity.

Anyhoo. Sam kind of agrees with me, "every time something gets better for one group, it gets worse for another".

Torres will track the 'online chatter'. But he's also heard some wacky things about Steve Rogers, conspiracy theory stuff, "they think that he's in a secret base on the moon, looking down over us". LOL. What? Is Steve a moon angel now? or Santa Claus? "You didn't like fly him to the moon?" Sam assures him that's all very much silly foolishness. Steve's in Boca working on his tan.

Sam's back in D.C. giving a talk about Steve at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space museum. "And he mastered posing stoically". Hey, I have that picture. Also, RHODEY! Hi Rhodey!

"A few months ago, billions of people reappeared after 5 years away. Sending the world into turmoil." Again. I know this was meant to come out before WandaVision, but timeline-wise this works better.

"We need new heroes. Ones suited for the times we're in. Symbols are nothing without the women and men that give them meaning." Sam holds up The Shield. "I don't know if there's been a greater symbol." Aww, he's retiring the shield. He hands it off to museum people and they put it in a display case. I think Rhodey has some thoughts about this. I suspect Rhodey maybe doesn't agree.

Sam and Rhodey wander through the Cap exhibit and Sam's talking about how when he left (or got snapped, it's not like you had a choice about that, Sam), his nephews were babies and now they're little men. Awww. Rhodey says Sam should bring them to D.C., he'll teach them how to fly, "the right way". lol.

Rhodey says it's crazy to think nobody will be carrying the shield. Sam points out they went 70 years without, so like …

Rhodey wants to know why Sam didn't take up the mantle. BTW, this is a cool exhibit, marvel peeps. Sam says it feels like it belongs to someone else … Steve. Rhodey says everything's broken. Allies are enemies, things are torn apart. People are looking for somebody to make it better. Having made his pitch, Rhodey leaves Sam to stare mournfully at the shield. I think you're afraid to pick up the shield, Sam. Afraid you won't measure up. But, you can do it. I have faith. Also, Steve was kind of a disaster in his own way. He wasn't perfect, which was the point of Steve as a hero. Pick up the shield, Sam.

A fancy hotel, chatting people in the lobby, up to a mezzanine, a group of very Russian oligarch looking dudes and their security. And lo! A metal arm punches through a wall and the Winter Soldier, looking very Winter Soldiery appears and stabs some dudes in the neck. This has a sepia, dream/nightmareness to it. Oh yeah, it's his old shiny silver arm. Totally a nightmare/very bad memory. "Hail Hydra" and he kills the head Russian guy. The poor dude who was just chatting in the lobby is caught trying to get into his door. He swears he didn't see anything, begs for his life and the Winter Soldier shoots him. Bucky wakes up, breathing heavily. Poor Bucky.

Glad he's in therapy. I'm sure goat herding in Wakanda was good and peaceful and all, but, goats will only get you so far. Also glad we've skipped the "wanted terrorist" part and gone on to traumatized hero.

I get the feeling he's not the best patient. He lies to his therapist straight off. Twice. lol. "You're a civilian now. With your history the government needs to know, you're not gonna … [therapist makes stabby motion]." lol (I love this actress by the way. She's been in everything for ages. She's great). "It's a condition of your pardon. So tell me about your most recent nightmare." "I didn't have a nightmare." She starts writing, Bucky objects and tells her she's being passive-aggressive, but he gives in.  

He has a list of amends to make and three rules to follow. He crossed a name off. There's a Hydra pawn who's a senator, he helped her get into office. "After Hydra disbanded, she continued to use the power I gave her." Hmm. He tracks her car and listens in on her plotting to have a congressman killed.

* Rule number one: Can't do anything illegal.

He's hijacked the Senator's car and is remote controlling it, making it drive all out of control and freaking her out. He says he was collecting intel to give to an aide to convict her. Absolutely only did that. Not one illegal thing about that at all, no ma'am.

"Rule number two?" "Hmm. What was rule number two?" "Nobody gets hurt. It's a big one." "Then why isn't it rule number one?" Oh, Bucky, you're a jackass.

* Rule number two: Nobody gets hurt.

"I didn't hurt anybody. Promise." He totally broke a dude's hand and then punched him in the face, knocking him out. I mean, there's levels of 'hurt' I suppose.

"The whole point of making amends is to fulfill rule number three." "Of course I completed rule number three."

* Rule number three: "I am no longer the Winter Soldier. I am James 'Bucky' Barnes. And you're part of my efforts to make amends." He says to the corrupt senator he's just been terrifying. And then he walks away as a tac team pulls up. lol.

What I'm getting from this therapy session is that Bucky is a big fat fibber.

Also he's got a little black book full of names. Including, I see, H. Zemo. That's not going to go as smoothly as taking down a shady government fatcat, I think.

"So you did it all right, but it didn't help with the nightmares?" "Well, like I said, I didn't have any." Fibber.

People wanna help you Bucky and you can trust them. "I trust people," he mutters grumpily. She asks for his phone and he hands it over. Look, lady! Trust! Probably government mandated trust, but still!

"You don't have ten phone numbers on this thing." … I don't have ten phone numbers on my phone. :( "Oh, and you've been ignoring texts from Sam." Well …

"I am the only person you have called all week. That is so sad." lol. Tough love from the therapist. I'm feeling a little judged myself, though. "You're alone." ALRIGHT DON'T RUB IT IN!

"You're a hundred years old. You have no history. No family—" "Are you lashing out at me, doc? Because that's really unprofessional." I love you Bucky, but you are a disaster patient.

Bucky relents. "I'm trying. This is new for me. I didn't have a moment to deal with anything. I had a little calm in Wakanda. And other than that, I just went from one fight to another for 90 years." Get this man a goat farm!

"So now that you've stopped fighting, what do you want?" "Peace." A goat farm. "That is utter bullshit." lol "You're a terrible shrink." "I was an excellent soldier, so I saw a lot of dead bodies and I know how that can shut you down. And if you are alone, that is the quietest, most personal hell." Get some friends, Bucky. "I know you've been through a lot. But, you've got your mind back. You're being pardoned. These are good things. You're free." "To do what?"

On the streets of Brooklyn. Bucky breaks up an argument between neighbors about trashcans. Hey, Bucky has a friend! Yori Nakajima who's probably like 80+. Did you babysit him back in the day, Buck? har har. They were going to meet for lunch, but some punk named Unique was putting his trash into Mr. Nakajima's trash can and just derailed the whole day. The horror. No joke, though, people get so nutted up about that. It's weird to me. Of course, I did also have a neighbor who never put out his trash for pickup and just snuck out at night before trash day and distributed his garbage into in other people's bins. Cheapass.

"Hey man, I'm Unique. Like Monique but it's got a 'u' in there for uniqueness." Yeah, you should have let Yori smack him, Buck.

Well now Yori is just not in the mood for lunch. Bucky tries to persuade him, but one grumpy old man out grumps the other. "But Izzy. We always go to Izzy on Wednesday. What if I buy?" "Fine. But no talking." lol. BFFs!

Yori is looking at the obituaries. "Look, nobody made it past 90 this week." Bucky tsks "So young, such a shame."

Bucky kind of smiles at the girl behind the counter at the sushi joint, Yori tells him he should ask her out. Bucky makes a "are you nuts, shut up" face. That doesn't stop Yori. "He would like to take you out on a date. Maybe to bingo or a night of pinochle." You're a wild man, Yori!

She's down by it, though, and she and Yori hammer out the details while Bucky's like uh, okay, so wow, that's happening. "There's a dance to these things. You can't … you gotta warm up and I haven't danced since 1943."

Yori sees something and suddenly gets sad. His son loves red bean mochi. His son was a consultant, working abroad and he was killed. Oh. Oh Bucky, why you gotta … Yori's son was the innocent witness he killed at the hotel in his nightmare/memory. "I will never know what really happened to him." Brutal.

Delacroix, Louisana

Sam's on his way home. Wilson Family Seafood. Aww. His nephews are helping mom with the catch. "Blue for the snapper, orange for the white fish," Sam calls out. The boys run over to him. They do look like fine gentlemen. It's weird, Sam, I get it. I recently realized my oldest nephew will be 13 in May and it's like "no, he's only in kindergarten, what are you talking about?"

His sister greets him then tells him he's looking all sneaky. Sam deflects. Their boat has seen better days. The Paul & Darlene. Aww. Is that his parents names? "Baby being held together by duct tape and prayers." Just needs to float long enough for his sister to sell it. But Sam's all, uh I thought we were going to *discuss* that. Uh oh, family drama. "We did, and then you were off fighting Dr Space Cape or whatever (lol), while I was holding it together for five long years." Ouch.

Sam is not down by this selling the boat thing. His sister doesn't seem to think they're in a position to hold on to it. Also, she'd really like to not hash this out on the pier with like twenty other people around, Sam.

They get into more of an argument on the boat. The family biz is not doing well financially. Sarah won't let Sam help for some reason, and he makes some comment about the house and loans and she punches him in the chest. lol "I forgot how hard you hit."

Sam insists they can turn it around, consolidate loans. And she's all, been there done that, I've come to terms with this. He's a persistent little jerk. This is such a perfectly sibling argument. Notably he has moved himself out of punching range.

Aww, she wants to believe he can save the boat, but she has DOUBTS.

Back in Brooklyn. Bucky attempts his date. He turns up at the end of the sushi girl's shift and gives her flowers. "Well, if that's not the most adorably old-fashioned thing anyone's ever done."

They chat while she tidies. He tried online dating oh lol. It didn't take. She tells him "You sound like my dad. Wait how old are you?" "Hundred and six." Oh yeah, what a funny joke. Next she wants to know why he's wearing gloves. "I have … um … poor circulation." He grimaces at himself and glances out the window. Smooth as silk, Bucky. Smoooooth.

"Let's play a game." Now, I'm thinking like some weird dating word/get-to-know-each-other game or something. I don't know. But, nope, she means Battleship. lol. I like her.

The drinking game version of battleship. Bucky sucks at it. "You sure can drink." "Yeah, well." Super assassin, unfair advantage.

We're just going to rub in this whole The Winter Soldier killed Yori's son thing, as she says it's nice that he's spending time with the old man. Since he was all messed up after his son was murdered and how it was extra hard because he didn't know what happened. I'm not sure this is healthy, Bucky.

"There's no word for someone whose kids die." Okay, ouch, lady, jeez. Bucky looks like he wants to puke. Or crawl into a deep dark hole. Or something. "Because it's the worst thing that can happen." Bucky nopes right out the front door. So, maybe they should have played pinochle instead.

Bucky goes to Yori. Are you really going to tell this man you murdered his son when you were a brain-washed Hydra assassin? Yori asks how the date was, and Bucky sees a shrine to the man's son in the apartment. Poor Bucky. He makes some excuse about owing Yori for lunch and leaves. Yori's name is in his book of amends. :(

Back in Louisiana. Sam and the kids are packing up meals. His sister maybe wants to sell meals in addition to fish. Sam says they've got to get going to their appointment at the bank. She's says it's in an hour. Sam must be just the worst brother to live with "There's no such thing as on time. You're either early or late. Pick one." Man, no wonder he gets punched.

Switzerland

Lt Torres is walking down a street with an unusually large number of people just sort of milling around in the middle of the street looking at their phones. He's got his kind of hidden, recording. He stops a guy and asks if he knows what they're supposed to be doing. Oh it's the flag munchers, or whatever. There's a weird phony bird whistle and then people gather around a person handing out masks with red handprints on them. His decoy bad guy phone chirps and gives the order to run. A guy jumps out of a nearby building with two huge duffle bags (of money it seems) and walks off while the previously milling people become a seemingly panicked mob, distracting police and whatnot.

Torres tries to arrest the jumper guy, who appears to have some super strength as he kicks a policeman halfway across the street. Torres, you're cute, but not super bright. Torres gets body slammed and then stomped. He survives again, however, defying the odds.

At the bank. The account manager keeps giving Sam the side-eye as he goes through their paperwork. "Do I know you from somewhere." Sam's all modest, "I don't know. Do you?" And then he makes a little wing flappy move with his hands. lol. What a nerd. "Falcon!" Then he takes a selfie with Sam. Sarah is very done with all this. She tries to get them back on track. Account guy wants to know how Avengers make a living. Probably not looking good for your loan, Sam.

"Is there some kind of fund for heroes? Or did Stark pay you when he was around? My condolences, by the way."

Yeah, financially this is looking bad, my dude. "You have no income over the last five years." Well, but, he was blipped. I mean …

Alas, shot down for the loan.

Sam and Sarah argue on the street. Ah, Sam ran off to the Air Force and didn't deal with what was going on at home. Oh my, this is getting ugly. Speaking as someone who got disowned on account of a family business, let me just say, they're not easy. Nuh-uh.

"Half the boat's mine and so is the house. We're not selling our family's legacy." "You gonna do me like what when you know I'm right?"

I get it might be awkward to ask, but I bet you could have asked Pepper for a loan, Sam, and she would have given it to you gladly. Come on, man.

Later. Sam's working on the boat's engine, and it's not cooperating. In the cabin he looks at the family pictures on all the walls. He's having a rough day. About as rough as Torres who texts him to find a secure line and call him along with a selfie of his bruised and battered face. #important (lol, really?)

Sam watches the footage Torres caught and they chat about how Torres was supposed to be doing that stuff online and not getting his face kicked in in Switzerland.

Sarah interrupts and turns on the TV. Some guy is giving a speech about how everybody needs a hero. "We need someone who can inspire us again. Someone who can be a symbol for all of us. So on behalf of the Department of Defense and our Commander-in-Chief, it is with great honor that we announce here today that the United States of America has a new hero." hmm, no comment. Except, you should have taken up the shield, Sam. Now it's Sam's turn to look like he's going to puke. What did I say about power vacuums? Somebody will fill them, whether you want them to or not. 

This new guy looks like a goober. There, I said it.

credits

So … lots of setup. And very clear on the two guys trying to figure out where they fit in this world post blip and big wars. Both of them trying to fix broken families.

Plus a goober in a Cap suit.

So far so good. 

[laceymorganwrites]

somebody wanted my thoughts on Rei so here they are hehehe

I already ranted to my friend abt this but I´ll keep it more neutral and organized here haha

um I´m tagging u just in case, hope that´s alright! 

@star-doll-universe

uuuuh since this is bnha: pls no hate, those are just my opinions, k thanks bye (I mean ur still very allowed to voice ur opinon and have a different one than me, I won´t hate u cause u like her so pls don´t hate me cause I hate her)

putting this under a  cut cause spoilers

okay so let´s do this chronologically and work our way up to the point where I aboslutely started hating her (Aka the chapter 2 weeks ago)

Her portrayal:

Rei used to be portrayed as rather weak and quiet, not rlly doing much

and I never had a problem with that since I didn´t think she´d have that much of a role

I mean what I thought would happen was this: Rei is back with her family, Enji is no longer living with them, they all still hate him

um I will also quickly state my thoughts on him later when I´m done with this so yeah

now the problem I have with her ´character development´ is that it´s super sudden and feels really out of place

I mean she just suddenly barges in to Enji´s room and is being ´badass´ after not doing anything at all for her family??? aight

yeah she had her children visit her (minus Touya ofc, we´re gonna get into that in the next part)

it just really rubs me the wrong way how she´s suddenly acting like the savior and commanding people (going into depth in the third part)

she´s highly manipulative and even worse than Enji in my opinion

let´s get to why that is

What happened and why I´m a Shoto fan now:

let´s start with Touya´s childhood

Rei completely neglected him because Shoto was just her little angel and the wonder child Touya never could be

she did tell Enji to give him more attention so I´ll give her that

however it was also her fault that Touya and her had a falling out since he wouldn´t have been this angry if she was there for him

she was supposed to watch him on that particular day and she didn´t

of course she didn´t since she watched Shoto

she also isn´t shown to have cared much about the others

oh also, sorry to break the chronological stuff but it´s said that she was super cold and cunning when she met Enji and fully aware of the reasoning for the marriage obviously

so she never showed any love to him (they did go on dates and stuff and Enji still leaves her flowers, but we´ll get into their relationship in the next part)

so. she didn´t watch Touya and didn´t rlly care what happened to him (yeah she cried but only cause Enji got mad and she knew he would cause she fucking failed as a mother)

now. let´s skip to the hospital scene

she goes in like she owns everything

blames Enji for everything which just isn´t fair (again we´ll get to that)

and then she has the audacity to tell everyone what their next move should be???

excuse me maam but who the fuck do you think you are?

´our family only has one hero left. Shoto´

fuck you

that was the sentence that did it for me, guys

first of all: again, who the fuck are you to deny Enji´s hero status? who the fuck are you to paint Touya as a villain that, YOU MADE IN THE FIRST PLACE

yeah I´m biased af since Touya´s my fave but honestly...I always thought she´d be nicer to him and understand him since they went through the same thing

but no

and now why am I a Shoto fan because of this?

because I feel so incredibly sorry for him

he already has the weight of the world on his shoulders from his dad and now this???

I don´t understand how he forgave her honestly cause this guilt tripping and manipulation is worse than Enji´s ambition gone wrong

Shoto already has enough to do and she can´t tell him and command him to fight his brother

she cannot just pressure him into being the hero he never wanted to be, the perfect hero that Enji wanted him to be

I mean just imagine ur own mother sculpting u just like ur dad did when she´s the one who always told u that what he did was wrong and that she felt for you 

yes she apologized for scarring him but honestly she´d do it again

and now she´s acting as the victim again and being like: oh you all have to fight Touya (mostly Shoto tho cause he´s the only hero they have left apparently)

I don´t think Shoto even wants to fight Touya honestly

I mean he´s his brother still and if anyone can understand him it´s him

also now it makes sense why Touya wants revenge on Shoto cause he lived the life Touya wanted to have

anyway

I also don´t think Touya wants to fight Shoto since he´s already achieved everything he wanted to. he won

okay now for the final part:

Enji´s redemption:

I am outing myself now; I really like Enji´s development

he actually is aware of and sorry for the things he did and I believe him

he regrets everything he did

and still he´s being blamed by Rei

he´s already hurt enough and Rei just puts salt into his wound more than necessary

he´s just tired, man, let the man live pls

yes, Enji did fuck up in a lot of ways and he shouldn´t be forgiven for that

but everyone deserves a second chance and he´s trying so hard

he doesn´t deserve to be shut out like this

he doesn´t deserve the way Rei treats him

she doesn´t love him, I don´t buy it

if she did he´d tell him he´s a hero cause he is

she´s also kind of putting their children against him tbh

she just says Enji is at fault for everything that happened

and if we compare what they both did wrong we can see something very clearly

Rei is the victim and Enji is the bad guy

why is that?

why is Rei forgiven for neglecting Touya and burning Shoto and Enji is burned at stake for anger issues and his inferiority complex? 

they were both abusing their children

and only one of them gets completely forgiven

it´s so unfair to me

[lavenderek]

i have a thought to express, feel free to scroll past.

i’m gonna discuss rape and sexual abuse in this post. it’s also long because i don’t really have a conclusion, it’s just some thoughts. 

so i was looking into that reality show that facilitated shane dawson’s horrible movie “not cool” and i stumbled across a reddit thread posted by someone who was a fan of his as a preteen. the OP alleged that shane’s content contributed to them developing some serious issues including body dysmorphia and the normalization of sexual behavior involving children. 

some of the comments were in support and agreement, but a large amount of them were like, “where were your parents? it’s not shane’s job to police what you see online. it’s not his fault you were too young for his content.” 

now, shane was well aware from the jump that his fans were mostly kids and teens - he talked about it multiple times - but that’s not what this post is about. this post is about that particular argument, which does not sit well with me.

it reminded me of a couple years ago when i made a very critical post about c*ptive prince. 

pause: i want to make it crystal clear that i am not drawing a comparison between people who like cp and shane dawson. i’m not mad anymore, so i am not making this post making a value judgment on cp or fans of it, positive or negative. 

specifically, i was really bothered by the way cp content was posted and shared with no mention of or reference to the actual material. people were calling it a queer romance. it was a little-known series by a little-known author, so there were no synopses anywhere online, only the summary you’d see on the back of the book. so people would seek out cp thinking it was a romance and be blindsided by the fact that, spoilers, the story is set in a fantasy world where child rape is a major tenet of society. the scenes are explicit, detailed, and many. it’s not a thing that happens once or twice and is a major plot point, it’s a thing that happens multiple times in every chapter and is just kind of a thing that’s going on. if you’ve ever read twilight, i would compare the presence of rape in cp to the presence of rain in twilight.

like, that’s how often it happened, that’s how it was treated. sometimes with indifference, sometimes with a negative opinion, sometimes it caused problems, bella talks about it every two pages. it is a very rapey series. 

and people like, did not want to discuss this. they were like, “the characters decide the rape is bad in the end. and that’s not even what the story is about, it just happens in the story. i don’t know what to tell you.” like... people were not receptive to any kind of conversation about this topic lmfao, it was very touchy. they wanted to acknowledge that rape itself is bad, and then they wanted the subject closed. 

now, why is this a problem? i read the books. there were parts i enjoyed, and there were parts i didn’t enjoy. i’m not gonna reread them, but i’m still game to talk about it. ultimately i wanted to be able to talk about books with a friend of mine, and while i was like, “yikes, this is a lot of rape, was not expecting the volume of rape,” it didn’t occur to me this would be a pervasive issue at all until a different friend of mine happened upon it. this other friend was a rape survivor, and i happened to know she would find this content very upsetting. when she said she was thinking of buying the book, i was like, “halt, you know what happens in it, right?” 

nope! she didn’t. she saw cute fanart and a ficlet on her dash, somebody told her it was a queer romance. nowhere was there any indicator in summaries online or the posts she was seeing that the book would describe a person being drugged and sexually abused. she was pretty relieved that i’d warned her and shaken that that’s what happens in the books lmao. she would never have guessed. the cp fandom was made up of people who loved the main pairing, and they’d talk about them being in love and draw them being in love, and it felt like everybody was just acting like the rape wasn’t even present in the books lmao. 

pause: i didn’t go in the tags. this is not representative of the fandom as a whole. this is just my and my friend’s experience of it as passive internetgoers.

people got uncomfortable and a little defensive if i brought it up. they’d agree to tag for cp, but if you don’t know what cp is about, that isn’t helpful information. like that post that’s like, “waterboarding at guantanamo bay sounds like a lot of fun if you don’t know what either of those things are” lmao. if you don’t know what cp is about, tagging for it just tells you what it’s called. and it very clearly ruined everyone’s fun if i talked about this. 

so that’s what i was mad about, i was mad that i felt as though there was no recourse here, and i was mad because i felt like the cp fandom was the emperor’s new clothes. nobody was acting like it even existed and everybody got uncomfortable if i brought it up, like, i legitimately wondered at some point if i had somehow accidentally read a kinky rewrite of it, that the real version did not have rape in it and nobody knew what i was talking about. i felt like i was going crazy and i got shitty in the middle of the night one time, and wrote that post. 

i ultimately deleted it, so i do not remember how it was worded; but i do recall that it was a venting post, it was not intended to reach a wider audience. i was not trying to convince anyone in that moment, i was just talking shit. so i can bet that it probably came across as very judgmental and unkind. 

i made a bunch of people very angry with that post. somebody got thousands of notes by reblogging with an impassioned smackdown saying basically what those redditors were saying about shane - it’s not their job to police what people see online. it’s not their fault you were unprepared for cp. 

i do not think this is a nuanced enough argument because i do not think it acknowledges that not all content is created equal. 

i even got an anon ask in good faith saying, well, a huge trigger for me is body horror, and people will draw or reblog stuff with body horror in it, and i can’t hold that against them. 

and like, no, you can’t, but body horror is not the same as rape or child sexual abuse. body horror isn’t the same as sex trafficking. right? like those things aren’t comparable in the way that i think the anon was wanting them to be. they were saying that both of these are common triggers that people would want tagged and be unable to move past in media, you know? and i get that, i got what they were saying. 

kind of like that cartoonist who wrote a spooky horror comic a while ago and somebody sent them an ask being like, “that was really scary, you usually post fun comics, this was damaging, unfollowed :/” like obviously a stranger’s fear of spooky things is not something he should be expected to take on on his own blog lmao. i am deeply afraid of ghosts, by the way. 

but according to rainn.org, 1 in 5 women experience rape in their lifetime. 1 in 5 women are not frightened by literal ghosts in their lifetime. 1 in 3 girls and 1 in 7 boys aren’t body horrored. body horror and ghosts aren’t used on a global scale as tools to control and abuse people and they do not have the same connotations of shame, degradation, and control. the things are not the same. 

i don’t have an easy answer. i can’t wave my magic wand and make people not enjoy the rape erotica, nor was that my goal in the first place. i wasn’t clutching my pearls like, “how dare you! do not draw this art! think of the children!” and i don’t know how else i would have solved the problem, aside from having a weird disclaimer under your art of two dudes cuddling that says “warning, these dudes are from a book that’s got several thousand words of explicit rape in it, and i know that, you’re not the only one seeing that,” like that’s a lot and i get it. 

i don’t have an easy answer because there isn’t one. i felt like “well, that’s not my problem” was an easy answer. 

as i get older, the more responsibility i have as an adult online to maintain boundaries between me and minors, for example. i am not responsible for their internet experience and they can’t get mad at me for cussing or writing about gay werewolves on my blog, but i do have to be mindful of that context if i’m interacting with someone online. that’s where the complexity comes in. you can’t wash your hands of the context of the things you say and do online. 

just how to solve these problems, i did not know then and i do not know now. i guess we take it on a case by case basis. 

if you’re curious about shane dawson and his horrible movie, by the way, this guy did a few funny videos about the horrible movie and this guy did a not funny but comprehensive breakdown of shane and his career. 

and i tried to tint my eyebrows for the first time the other day, i have red hair and my eyebrows are darker than my hair for some reason, so i tried to use an eyebrow tint to lift my brows just like, a shade, so be closer to my hair? but in doing this i discovered that my eyebrows are a mixture of red and brown? 

so the red hairs lifted to a sunny orange, and the brown hairs stayed brown. so my eyebrows are fully like, calico right now. boom, orange juice, that’s life

[postmodernmulticoloredcloak]

So! It’s time for me to finally watch Avatar: The Last Airbender. I’m only a decade late or so, which I suppose could be worse. 

Actually, I just checked, and it apparently came out in 2005-2008, so it’s technically as old as Supernatural. The more you know.

(Wait, what.)

In case you are interested in stupid ramblings, or just love the show so much you’re willing to consume the stupidest content about it, I am planning on making a commentary of my watching, although I promise nothing interesting or funny. I’ll use the tag “marghe watches atla”.

I only have fifteen years’ worth of spoilers, but simultaneously know very little about what actually happens in it. Or, better, I know a lot of things that happen in it but I have no idea how they relate to each other. Okay. Time to figure it out.

Fun fact: I made a “and then the fire nation attacked” meme once for a mini online Gishwhes Misha organized on tumblr once. I found it! I think the item called for something about shipping wars...?

It’s not actually funny, alright, but it’s sort of accurate in regards of Amazon’s company policies, I guess.

Alright, the actual show now.

Water is associated to goodness, earth to strength, fire to violence and air to harmony. Still a better classification than brave-smart-racist-and-soft.

For some reason I never realized the opening monologue was narrated by Katara. I imagined it to be some outside-narrating voice. Admittedly it doesn’t change anything. Unless it’s relevant that she is the narrator of the story.

I also pronounced Katara with the accent on the first a in my head. Now it sounds like they’re saying it wrong. Oops.

It’s interesting that he calls her waterbending powers weird, I assumed that those kinds of powers were pretty common or at least normal in the ATLA universe. But I guess that he’s probably just jealous he doesn’t have them and acts like they’re weird but no one else actually thinks that. Or maybe they do and waterbenders are considered freaks. I suppose I can just shut up and watch the show and see what follows.

If she can control water why is he paddling the boat? That’s how you get your boat smashed. No offense.

He also asks the same question. Then makes a sexist comment, which isn’t cool and sets the basis for Character Development(TM). She calls him out on it, gets rightfully pissed for being placed in the position of the Mom Of The Family When The Mom Is Dead, and accidentally breaks an iceberg. Don’t you hate when that happens.

From the 0.1 seconds of screentime I’ve watched so far, what I can tell is that basically she’s Dean Winchester if Dean Winchester was the one with magical powers. But also he’s Dean Winchester if Dean Winchester wasn’t the parentified one. *Oprah voice* You’re Dean Winchester! You’re Dean Winchester! Everyone is Dean Winchester! Admittedly, Dean Winchester contains multitudes.

Katara’s first instinct when seeing a weird glowing boy sitting inside an iceberg is to smash the iceberg down immediately to get the glowing boy out. I mean, understandable, but also not really. A Winchester-style thing, admittedly.

The design of those weird canid-feline seal-walruses is great.

The Fire Nation has steam ships which is super funny to me. Enters Dean Winchester Number 3. We’ve had 3 speaking characters so far. Mmm. Maybe it’s me.

I’m sorry, I’ve seen too many memes, I can’t take any of the Zuko scenes seriously.

Appa is adorable. Now imagine Supernatural but instead of the Impala they travel via weird flying six-legged platypus-bison or whatever it is. And now I’ve automatically made Aang into Dean Winchester Number 4 because he loves the car. It’s definitely me.

The village is adorable. Everyone is adorable actually.

I LOVE THE PENGUINS somebody give whoever designed the animals in this thing an award.

Aww you can ride the penguins like a sled. Amazing. Galaxy brain.

“I haven’t done this since I was a kid” “You still are a kid” paired with Sokka trying to train children as soldiers is a little moment but I suppose we’re gonna get our heart broken by how they had to grow up too fast...

Now imagine Aang finds out he spent a hundred years trapped in ice but it’s Nick Fury that breaks the news to him.

Whoops. They serve Aang’s location to Zuko on a silver platter aaand episode over.

Anyway. So the answer to my previous questions is that Katara is the only waterbender in the south pole and no one can teach her how to actually use her powers, so she’s not really good at it. Contrast to Zuko who has a proper teacher and soldiers he can spar with. I also like how the episode opens with the siblings’ little boat that crashes in the ice, and closes on a war ship crashed in the ice; both lead to the Avatar, but in very different ways.

Well, this was super cute and I want to see more. Great design.

[ashesarrows]

The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two by Catherynne M. Valente- FULL REVIEW

This review is the complete version of its counterpart on GoodReads.

This book really disappointed me. The roughest thing is that it’s right in the middle of the series, so you have to read it if you want to continue. There are bright spots (Ell! Saturday!), and I can sense the incredible book Valente was trying to write, but overall, this was a flop. Would’ve been a DNF if I hadn’t promised myself I’d finish the series. 

So, firstly: I’m a longtime fan of Fairyland, and I commonly list the first book and Valente herself as my favorite book and author. I had no negative preconceptions about the book going in. In fact, I know I have an irrational fear of series, and at first I thought my struggles with this book could be chalked up to that. 

But I loved the second book. It was entertaining, a good follow-up, and a unique new story to explore. When I picked up the third book and only got a chapter in before forgetting about it, I had a lot of excuses—I was burned out. I didn’t like the Blue Wind, and I didn’t want to read about her. I was busy with school.

As it turns out, having picked the book up three years later and finished it this time, none of that was true. This time, I was yearning for more of Fairyland, I quite liked the Blue Wind, and I had ample time to read in. 

It just wasn’t a good book.

I talk about planning/pantsing a lot, and that’s once again relevant. I’ll excerpt from my review of another book:

There are two types of NaNoWriMo writers: the planners, & the pantsers. Planners have an outline ready before they write, and pantsers go "by the seat of their pants"—very few, or even no, plans. Both have pros/cons; here I'll focus on a common pitfall for pantsers.

Almost every Western narrative… follows something akin to the 3-act structure. There is a main conflict which builds to a climax and is then resolved (think Star Wars’s Death Star.) For any good narrative, you need MOTIVATION-GOAL-CONFLICT—and occasionally stakes[.]

This book does not have a conflict.

So where do you find 300+ pages of writing? Just have something happen & see what comes next as a response!

The problem is that this makes an unworkable first draft. Things Happening =/= Satisfying Plot Arc. In editing, you have to take everything you've written and organize it into a plot shape, often cutting things that don't fit. (Planning is the opposite; tons of work upfront/you usually end up UNDERwriting.)

...The most common method of writing on Wattpad is pantsing. 99% of the time, writers write & then post chapters on a set schedule. Can't edit plot structure when you upload one chapter a week.

Now, I knew that Valente was a pantser before I read this book, and that she originally uploaded Fairyland one chapter a week. I was very impressed when I first found out; I don’t recall sensing any of these pitfalls in the two previous books. It is hard to write a book with no editing—it is damn well near impossible. Whether I liked this book or not, the first two are a triumph just for that. Valente has been writing this entire series with both hands tied behind her back and her eyes taped shut, and I have to commend her. Even my feelings of frustration are almost overshadowed by how impressed I am that it took three books for her to fail.

Valente herself acknowledged editing concerns in multiple / interviews. From the latter link:

I remember being at a convention right after it really hit, and somebody in the audience asked, “Well, you realize you can’t go back and change anything, because you’ve already posted it online.” And I said, “Oh, shit.” It had never occurred to me that that was gonna be a problem. I kept a couple weeks ahead of the posting schedule, but again, much like writing The Labyrinth in ten days instead of thirty, I just ran ahead with something without knowing that I couldn’t do it and it worked out incredibly well.

Did it? I feel differently, and this review aims to explain why.

This book lacks plot. Valente is attempting a 3-act structure, which relies heavily on a central conflict. There has to be some big mission; some big goal. First book example: September has to beat the Marquess (goal and conflict) OR ELSE everyone in Fairyland suffers (stakes/motivation). Every moment of the book ties back to this larger goal.

The central conflict of this book appears about halfway through. You know the moon, and the yeti, and splitting things? This comes up over a hundred pages in. September, and the audience, has no idea about any of that for a hundred or so pages, and so for that amount of time, the book is unconscionably boring. 

The beginning of the book sees September afraid she’s too old to go back to Fairyland, which is a great central conflict idea for the one chapter in which it exists. Aha! A book about growing up and the associated trials and tribulations. That’s a fantastic theme, and yet I forgot about it entirely until the end, where it briefly awakens again, after an entire book of Not That At All. More on this later.

For now, the book takes September back to Fairyland, which should be wonderful, but Fairyland seems to have become all exposition and no action. A whole chapter of The Blue Wind lecturing September, for example. This is a character we don’t know, have no reason to be attached to, and are being actively hindered by as she relentlessly slows the plot down. And then September gets talked at by an alligator or something, and then another something something… I don’t remember any of this, because it was not relevant.

This isn’t like Fairyland #1, where September might need to befriend someone to gain access to magic which would help her on her quest. In fact, for this first half of the book, September doesn’t even have agency! Someone hands her a MacGuffin (I refuse to recall its name) in the form of a box, and she Must carry it to some city or other on the moon. Why? Who knows. She just must. And she does. And you’re thinking to yourself, why isn’t September making her own ship and leading revels? We know, as an audience, that she’s more than capable. What on Earth has got her seeming so meek? She even sasses characters, but somehow always ends up doing as they ask.

The book also takes all this time to reach any characters we know and love. The readers want Ell and Saturday! We do not care about a horde of lecturing adults with no connection to a central plot or September! Looking back, I can see how Valente may have been hoping to pull off something similar to Alice in Wonderland, but in Alice nobody speaks for a full page. This is just one example:

direct link

I’m hard pressed to even call this exposition, because it tells us nothing about the world we’re in. It’s just a sermon Valente wants us to hear. And worse, because I’ve read the last two books, I know she can pull this off. It doesn’t have to be this way. Many people said many things in Fairyland #1, and it worked because there was a plot that the speeches were part of. 

(If you just look at the quotes page for this book, you can see how many there are—and how repetitive they get. X is a Y, okay, alright…)

But this sort of thing reached its peak when it almost ruined Saturday. Don’t worry, he’s generally well-written, but when September meets him and he starts lecturing? It’s just awful to read. Suddenly it’s not Saturday talking but Valente speaking through his mouth, giving those sermons again, and it just makes you want to scream.

This made me recall an old writing rule—“never remind me of the author’s existence.” I want to feel as though real people are really saying these things, and when all of them speak identically, it’s really difficult to believe that. I won’t deny Saturday his right to say poignant things, obviously, but in this case due to the volume of lectures, and the proximity of his to the others, and the obvious preachiness of all of them, it really got in the way of my even enjoying the scenes with Saturday. And come on; that is unforgivable.

But there is a plot. There is an, ahem… other MacGuffin. A paw? A yeti’s paw. Something about time. Look, at this point I just wanted to finish the book. The original MacGuffin had become a new one, which would lead them to the third, and all this because at 100 pages in someone said “hey there’s this yeti we really hate around here,” and September went “sounds awful I’ll go hunt him right now.” And of course she can, because she has been DOING NOTHING FOR THE LAST HUNDRED PAGES. What is she going to do, something else? There IS nothing else to do in Fairyland apparently. Again, what this book does to the world & inhabitants of Fairyland is near criminal.

So the plot starts here, and it’s not great—September takes it up because there’s nothing else to do, and of course her friends come along, but (at least to me) it seems obvious that Valente invented the moon’s political situation and the Yeti just to come up with SOMETHING for this book. It never felt convincing that this had really been happening behind the scenes in the other books. On top of that, since we get very little context (despite the lectures!), it feels less like a vital quest and more like September (again) doing something because someone else told her to. We really don’t get any other perspective on the issue until the very end.

But talking about the end will require a spoiler tag, so I’ll avoid it for now. Let’s take a break to talk about how confusing the book was overall. I often didn’t know where the characters were heading or why, or what role a new character played, or even if they were there or not.

After seeing a GR query about this particular issue, I went back and researched it. The character Candlestick allegedly leaves the party on page 189:

Candlestick had not come with them after all, turning up her peacock tail and refusing to speak further with any of the lot of them.

But then shows up in not one but two lines in the next chapter anyway:

The Tyguerrotype, the thirteen bouncing Glasshobs, the quivering houses—and September and Saturday, A-Through-L and Candlestick—had a little thickness, but no more than a thick sheet of paper. (201)

“Did we see what?” called Candlestick. (204)

I understand why Valente wouldn’t want to make major plot edits to the books after posting them, but why didn’t an editor read through this even once? It would have been easy to fix—delete one line, or even just a word. It seems clear through surrounding context, looking back, that Valente intended to leave Candlestick out of these chapters, so why didn’t anyone confirm that for readers?

It’s just not fair to your audience to leave things like this in. It’s not professional. It makes me look down on the publisher, to be quite honest, because they apparently couldn’t take the few months necessary to re-read the draft and offer Valente edits on these bare minimum issues.

So you can understand why I wasn’t sure what was going on most of the time. Especially in the beginning, when multiple characters existed just to lecture, it was hard to get attached to any one addition to the party because I could expect them to be gone without incident or importance within two chapters. 

For example, the Periwig (whose name I refuse to look up) who works with Ell in the library says she has cursed him to stop him from flaming around the books. Yes, Ell is having uncontrollable flaming issues now. As a reader pummeled by random lectures, watching September ferry around MacGuffins, this just felt like an “oh shit we have to come up with a NEW conflict for these characters” ploy, without much thought or logic. And I had no idea what the curse was for over fifty pages, until on page 173 there’s a specific reference to Ell getting smaller after he shoots flame. I’m sure there were more earlier on, but I missed them, and who can blame me after a hundred pages of content that was not relevant to the story.

This plot point is never satisfyingly wrapped up, either. Why did the Periwig think this was a good idea? Could she have undone it? Why did nobody address her about it? And why was it solved the way it was? Nothing made sense.

What’s really frustrating is what could have been. Near the end of the book, I turned to the back cover just to avoid continuing to read, and I looked once again in total bafflement at the two starred reviews of the book pictured there. Booklist’s back cover quote reads as follows:

As usual, Valente enlightens readers with pearly gleams of wisdom about honesty, identity, free will, and growing up. September often worries who she should be and what path she should follow, but the lovely truth, tenderly told, is that it's all up to her.

And, despite having read roughly two hundred pages of this book, it was only once I saw this quote that I understood what Valente was trying to do.

This is a great idea. And there are ELEMENTS of it here, and even elements I quite like. Occasionally, the lectures September hears do in fact correspond to some aspect of this theme (“you become what you are called” is one example of a line I could tell meant something, but needed to be expanded to accomplish anything.) It’s hard, as a reader, to differentiate between lectures addressing a vital theme in the story and lectures that are just talking.

Returning to Ell’s curse, it turns out that [SPOILER] Ell was just flaming for what is essentially dragon puberty, which is a GREAT opportunity to build on this theme! Somehow, though, we don’t get that.. I would have loved to see Ell have to deal with, essentially, a sexual awakening, and that did not happen, and it feels like the cure scene is random and therefore wasted. [END SPOILER]

It doesn’t help that Valente also wastes a scene with FANTASTIC potential where September literally destroys her fate by giving it no prior context, no weight in the plot, no relevance to the conflict, and fifteen tons worth of expositional lecturing to drown in. I want to love these scenes; some of these scenes utilize my favorite tropes! I just can’t get around all the ways Valente is leaving her story out to dry.

Then there’s the clothing September wears, her new designation, Aroostook the car, the attempted blossoming romance between September and Saturday: so many elements which could have made that theme great. It’s like a broken puzzle.

This brings us to the Yeti. I’m just going to go full spoiler, because I’m mad.

[SPOILER]

The Yeti is a reverse twist villain?? Can we stop with this? It’s not interesting & not an engaging surprise & also feels like going “ha ha I fooled you.”

From the moment September set off to beat him, I was wondering—are we really doing this? Based on one random person’s complaint? September has made it very clear that she doesn’t understand the politics of the world she’s inhabiting, and yet: this. Unlike in the first book, where the Marquess’s evil is confirmed by every person she comes across and September ends up fighting her out of personal connection, this just seems like meddling. September has no skin in the game; it’s almost a white savior trope—especially when the history of the Moon parallels colonization!

And then The Gang sees future-Saturday helping the yeti, and instead of thinking “maybe we got this wrong based on one person’s lecture” they think “ah FUCK maybe Saturday is going to be evil” and manufacture totally unnecessary conflict.

But it’s not even that they misunderstood, or that their source was biased; the end result is that the Yeti was seen as evil because he DIDN’T CARE THAT HE WAS. He gives this “none of their business” answer that is fundamentally unsatisfying (and makes no sense—had he explained, THEY WOULD NOT HAVE BOTHERED HIM) because at the end of the day, it means none of September’s actions in Fairyland were necessary. She just showed up and left. Nobody, not even the story, needed her. I guess September and Saturday have now kissed (twice!) which is great for them but not something that makes the whole book worthwhile.

[END SPOILER]

And on top of this, there are typos. I already covered the issue with Candlestick, so here are the others quickly:

 “All of us,” September said gently, and held out her hands. “I know what you said, Miss Candlestick, but however you count it, our fates are stuck together and stitched up good.” She paused for a moment, looking down at her flowing black silks and her own small hands. “Closer than shadows, she finished.” (170)

“If you’re not to tired after your cannonades.” (179)

The full moon rose passed the high barn windows, spilling in like milk. (248)

(First sentence ought to have put the end quotation mark after the word “shadows,” but accidentally places it after September’s dialogue tag. The second sentence should use “too” instead of “to”. The final sentence needs to either say that the moon “rose past the high barn windows” or “passed the high barn windows”, likely the former.)

What gets me is that this last sentence is on the last page. Even if Valente and her editors never flipped through most of the book, surely someone would’ve noticed this? It just drives home how little anyone cared. About Fairyland, of all things!

And then Valente, who DID NOT EDIT THIS BOOK, has the audacity to include lines like these.

September reached inside and took out the red book. It was heavy. A girl’s face graced the cover, finely embossed, but it was turned away, gazing at some unseen thing. Perhaps it was her own face, perhaps not. A miniature version of herself, after all. Was it an answer? Was it everything already written?  “You can’t argue with something that’s written down,” she said, stroking the red locks of hair on the cover. “If the heart of my fate is a book, there’s nothing for it. Once it’s written, it’s done. All those ancient books always say ‘so it is written’ and that means it’s finished and tidied and you can’t say a thing against it.”  Oh, but September, it isn’t so. I ought to know, better than anyone. I have been objective and even-tempered until now, but I cannot let that stand, I simply cannot. Listen, my girl. Just this once I will whisper from far off, like a sigh, like a wind, like a little breeze. So it is written—but so, too, it is crossed out. You can write over it again. You can make notes in the margins. You can cut out the whole page. You can, and you must, edit and rewrite and reshape and pull out the wrong parts like bones and find just the thing and you can forever, forever, write more and more and more, thicker and longer and clearer. Living is a paragraph, constantly rewritten. It is Grown-Up Magic. Children are heartless; their parents hold them still, squirming and shouting, until a heart can get going in their little lawless wilderness. Teenagers crash their hearts into every hard and thrilling thing to see what will give and what will hold. And Grown-Ups, when they are very good, when they are very lucky, and very brave, and their wishes are sharp as scissors, when they are in the fullness of their strength, use their hearts to start their story over again.

(page 184).

Like... all of that, and then she didn’t edit September’s story? I’m appalled.

At this point, you might well say I’m being far too harsh. I understand that. These next five paragraphs are for you.

For the first few months of (re)reading this book, I genuinely felt like I must be a bad reader, or my attention span was gone, or I just didn’t like Valente or her work enough. Looking at all the incredible reviews here, I felt jealous—and frustrated. Why couldn’t I just enjoy this book the way everyone else did? 

Obviously, I never want to dislike a book, but this was one that I almost feel betrayed me. I know there’s a significant amount of entitlement there; Valente doesn’t owe me any stories, let alone good ones. 

At the same time, I made every effort. I owned all the books, was working hard to read a series despite my long-time struggles with them, and, well, I LOVE Valente! I constantly talk about her work! And even someone like me—someone who’s usually a pretty fast reader, loves the series/author in question, and was determined to finish this book—struggled throughout. 

So I’m frustrated that the book made me feel like an idiot. I’m frustrated that, for the apparent crime of being devoted to Valente’s work, I was put through this. This book would be one star if not for the world of Fairyland and the returning cast—if this had not been a Fairyland book, I would not have finished reading it. For that first half, I was bribing myself (with better books) to read one or two pages at a time. Really.

Like I said, it didn’t have to be this way. I know damn well that Valente can do better than this. If Valente had been given the opportunity to edit this draft into a polished book, she could have done it. It’s only because of these restraints that she chose—and she is a grown woman who may choose what she likes—that the book came out this way. It’s genuinely hard to review, because I understand why she wrote the book this way, and I understand why she did not later edit the majority of the text, and I also have the perspective of a disappointed reader. It’s hard to balance all of that.

So two stars it is. I’m a little sad it took so long to review this book, because I was REALLY pumped to review it when I first finished, but I hope that on the contrary letting it sit has allowed me to be more objective and less emotionally upset by it. 

I hope to pick up the fourth book soon, but with the combination of it being unrelated to the main cast and the letdown that this book was, it’ll be a while before I feel up to it. Don’t worry, though, because I will come back to update you as to whether the series overall is worth continuing. I have every hope that it will be.

[sayu-is-a-sass-queen]

Redemption and Identity - Death Note: New Generation

One thing I really appreciated from the third and final episode of “Death Note: New Generation” was Taichi Amazawa’s arc and his main conflict with Yuki Shien. Those themes of redemption and identity really stuck with me!

I’m gonna be sharing some thoughts and personal opinions under the cut below! Spoilers for “Chapter 3: Fanaticism” (Shien’s chapter) of “Death Note: New Generation”! You can find a brief summary of the episode here (I will be diving into a summary myself, though).

My personal arguement: Taichi’s surname (formerly Kunugida, now Amazawa) represents his identity - how he sees himself and how he is seen by others. Consequently, the act of changing one’s name represents the decision of moving on from his [criminal] past and yearning for at least partial redemption. The episode thus expores the question whether one’s identity should be defined by their past actions (Taichi Kunugida) or by who they are working towards becoming in the future (Taichi Amazawa).

Let’s start with a brief elaboration on the two opposing viewpoints presented in this episode!

On one hand, we have Taichi’s girlfriend Hayaka, who sees him as Taichi Amazawa - she judges him based on his current actions and not based on the act of killing a young girl as  Taichi Kunugida. According to her, he is “no longer Kunugida”.

On the other hand, all other major characters in this episode judge him based on the killing that took place. This includes Taichi himself,  who does not feel like he deserves to live a happy life as a possible husband and future father. Of course, this is certainly a valid viewpoint, especially in the case of the older woman related to Taichi’s victim, who simply cannot forgive Taichi for what he has done.

Yet, Shien takes this a step further by planning to write down the names of Taichi and Namaki, his former partner in crime, in his Death Note. As the victim of a similar crime and as a Kira supporter, Shien judges both Taichi and Namaki based on their past actions and does not believe that they should get the chance to redeem themselves.

Now, how does this conflict further explore themes of regret and (partial) redemption?

This is when the episode presents us with a comparison between Taichi and Namaki. Clearly, Namaki is very much the foil to Taichi’s character - they share the same past but, in the present, choose to define themselves differently. While Taichi is living a quiet life and performing hard but honest work, Namaki is planing to commit further crimes and does not regret his past at all. Thus, he threatens Taichi in order to make him join his criminal ways once more.

However, when Namaki dies because of the effects of Death Note, Taichi finally feels like there might be a chance to partly move on from his past. After all, the person mainly tying him to those events is now gone. Additionally, that meeting with Namaki has reminded Taichi of how he is aiming to improve himself and choosing live with the consequences of his actions, instead of taking the “easy” route.

This results in Taichi not having nightmares about his past for once (something he shares with Shien btw - both have frequent nightmares about family killings but from constrasting perspectives). In my interpretation, he realizes that he has the chance to improve himself and thus accepts Hayaka’s wedding proposal.

Now, whether that would redeem his character or not is up to personal debate. I personally think redemption is a matter based on personal relationships and values - you can be redeemed in the eyes some but not be forgiven by others. It would be unrealistic for somebody to be “completely” redeemed, as there will always be someone who won’t be able to forgive you (often for justified reasons). In a way, I do believe that Taichi has become aware of this notion as well. He might never be able to completely move on from his past but, to some people, he can bring positive change. I’d like to think that this is what lead to his change of mind.

Now, how exactly does that moral conflict conclude with Shien writing down Taichi’s name in the Death Note?

Ironically, this one night without any nightmares (and thus to Shien’s eyes, without regrets) is the reason why Shien chooses to write down Taichi’s name after all (although I do personally think that Shien might have written down Taichi’s name anyway and was merely looking for ways to justify his decision).

Interestingly, Shien confronts Taichi upfront about his actions - which is something he did not do before killing Namaki! Shien once more makes his moral standpoint clear by referring to Taichi as “Taichi Kunugida” and states the following: “Even if you change your name, your sin will not go away.”

And Shien is right about that. Taichi will never be able to completely erase his past. However, Shien refuses to even acknowledge Taichi’s new identity, his regret, and how he is aiming to become a better person.

In the end, Shien does write down Taichi’s name at home, observing Taichi through live security footage. (Of course he cannot be seen at the crime scene during the crime itself, but I do find that sudden distance after such a direct confrontation interesting as well.)

Shien writes down Tiachi’s name: Taichi Kunugida - his old surname. It’s the identity that represents his crimes and that Shien sees him through.

And so he waits for Taichi to die - but nothing happens.

Shien stops....and he is forced to acknowledge that Taichi’s birthname is not the name that can be used to kill him. Thus, when Shien now writes down the name “Taichi Amazawa”, he is forced to admit to himself that he was wrong about what Taichi’s real identity truly was.

In the end, the name used to kill Taichi represents the identity that he chose himself - the identity that he is striving towards in the present, not the identity defined by his past.

Once again, whether this prooves that Taichi is a redeemed character is not entirely possible to answer. It goes without saying that this is a tricky subject to discuss. Yet, what this episode does state (in my personal opinion!!) is the following:

While our past actions can not be entirely ignored, they are not the sole thing defining our identity. Rather, our identity also depends on how we react to our past actions and how we are willing to improve ourselves towards a future goal.

Of course this statement is a fairly popular one that’s explored in all sorts of different media - but I simply liked the execution in this particular episode and how (given the nature of the Death Note universe), names were used to drive this point further.

Moreover, I am aware that the universe that this miniseries takes place in is not the canon manga universe. From what I’m aware (pls correct me if I’m wrong!), we don’t know how name changes affect the Death Note in the manga. It was really just fun to explore this idea further (bc I feel like this moral conflict is something the manga did not elaborate on to the same degree) and to give these lesser-known Death Note characters some more attention. New content! We love to see it!

To conclude this spiral of Death Note thoughts, I thought it would be fun to end this with some translations of Taichi’s name(s)! Thank you so much for the translations and your general help regarding this post, @misora-massacre!

To directly quote Blue’s messages:

[02:19, 1.6.2020] Blue: Amazawa is written 雨澤, those are the kanji for "rain" and "swamp" [02:23, 1.6.2020] Blue: Kunugida is 椚田, those are "oak" and "rice field" [02:24, 1.6.2020] Blue: Taichi is written with the kanji for "thick"/"fat" and "one" [02:24, 1.6.2020] Blue: ....... He shares two kanji with [Touta] Matsuda's [02:25, 1.6.2020] Blue: The da at the end of Kunigida "rice field" is also the da at the end of Matsuda [02:25, 1.6.2020] Blue: And the Ta at the beginning of Taichi "fat" is also the Ta at the end of Touta

Some things that stand out in my opinion (but that could very much be coincidental): The common kanji with Matsuda’s name, as well the possible translation of “one” for Taichi’s first name in contrast his two surnames/identities.

Anyways, thank you very much for reading this! If you have anything to add or if you disagree with one of or several of the points that I have made, feel free to reblog this post with your reply or make your own post and (if you want to) tag me in it. Always looking forward to different opinions or corrections in case I accidentally got something wrong!

[suits-of-woe]

I would love to hear more about your DnD character(s)! I'm still such a newbie hehe but I love to hear what others are up to! (Also if you wanna put this on the other blog that's totally cool too) :)

Thanks for asking! I love going off about this stuff. Tagging my fellow DnD players @panhasablog and @illusion-of-death in case you guys are interested. This is very long, I’m sorry.

My current character (like I might have posted before) is vaguely based on Philip the Bastard from King John, but besides name and kind of backstory they don’t actually have that many similarities. My character’s name is Pippa Terrell and she’s a 16-year-old red draconic sorcerer who thought she was born to live a completely normal, down-trodden life as a factory worker (since the campaign setting is vaguely industrial revolution) until the day she got so angry at her supervisor mistreating a young girl that, oops, she set him on fire. Turned out, she had dragon blood, so she set off to try to become an adventurer.

My DM makes fun of me because I play DnD like a total English major and I like to have ~central themes~ around my characters. Pippa’s main theme is an exploration of the idea that power corrupts. What happens when you take a totally unremarkable, genuinely goodhearted but pretty un-heroic girl who’s been powerless all her life and suddenly give her more power than she’s ever dreamed of? Pippa’s magic is mostly fire-based and is volatile and dangerous. She can adapt it a bit to various circumstances, but there’s no question -- killing is what it does best. And being half red dragon (spoilers), her basest instincts tend toward violence and domination, so the few times she has killed someone, she’s been overcome by triumph and ecstasy before realizing what she’d done. But Pippa’s also been the victim of abuses of power all her life, and since she’s down to fight capitalists and eat the rich, she refuses to buy that some people are just meant to have power because they were born with it. Her philosophy is basically “if someone’s gonna have this super dangerous power, better me than somebody else” and she’s determined to prove that she can maintain her humanity and use her magic for good, even she’s terrified that she can’t fully trust herself to keep to that goal.

As for the campaign, the party has gained and lost a few members due to logistics, but her current best friend/awkward father figure is our Tiefling College of Swords Bard. They constantly snark at each other but really care about each other, even if they’ll only say it in emotional circumstances. He was there for her first kill and the trauma that followed, that time she met her red dragon dad and subsequently helped kill him (partially due to a failed insight check that I’m still salty about), and lots more family drama. Currently, the party is trying to defeat four elemental lords scattered across the world using some powerful artifacts they’ve found. Apparently they’re prophesied to be the ones to do this, which Pippa thinks is BS, because again, she’s not down with fate, and really distrusts anyone who wants to enlist her help because of how easily her magic can be used to hurt people. But we’ll see how it goes...

Mechanically, if you’re curious, Pippa is currently Sorcerer 6 (Red Draconic Bloodline)/Paladin 1 (Oath of Redemption) because she recently decided an oath might help her with the whole goal of not turning evil. Her alignment is Neutral Good. She’s a variant human with an Urchin background and I rolled quite high on her stats: STR: 13, DEX: 16, CON: 16, INT: 9, WIS: 13, CHA: 18. Her -1 to arcana checks as an uneducated magic user who doesn’t know SHIT about magic is a constant source of comedy. Between her high CON, Tough feat, and Draconic bloodline feature, she’s the world’s tankiest sorcerer at 74 HP. Her spells are currently: Create Bonfire, Fire Bolt, Message, Prestidigitation, Green Flame Blade, Control Flames (from a magic item), Chromatic Orb, Sleep, Healing Word (from a deal she struck with a god), Scorching Ray, Mirror Image, Dragon’s Breath (which I’m gonna drop soon tbh), Haste, and, of course, FIREBALL. Oh also, she speaks with my bad attempt at a lower class British/vaguely cockney accent :)

And very briefly, I have two other big DnD characters. For my past campaign, I played a changeling Mastermind Rogue named Kez. That was before I was good at RP and character building, so they weren’t super fleshed out, but they were super chaotic neutral, slippery, and non-committal. They also banged a storm giant once. And for my next campaign that my friend is working on setting up, I have big plans for Meriele Tyrvalsa, aka the least Barbarian-like Barbarian I could come up with. She’s a beautiful noble high-elf who smiles constantly, but she got kidnapped by a band of orcs a few years back and proceeded to fall in love and realize, after a century of being repressed as hell, letting loose and raging a bit might not be a bad thing. Until she was forced back to her family and once again became repressed :) as :) hell :) :) :) but that just makes her rage, when it comes out, even more terrifying.

[jawnjendes]

it came back for more | shawn mendes

university au, shawn x goth gf

AN: let me know if i should give the goth gf a name bc like,,,,,,,,,,, idk just let me know,, also does anyone actually like this series lmao

masterlist | series playlist

"You're leaving me?" Shawn asked in mock disbelief.

I knew he was joking, but the fact that he said it as we were walking through campus, in the view of many passing students was a little embarrassing. There was just no getting used to that, like he couldn’t get used to my emotional distance sometimes. I just kept my eyes on the ground and continued walking next to him. No hand holding today. Doesn’t mean I don’t adore him any less.

"I made plans with Stella weeks ago," I told him. "We already bought tickets."

Shawn smiled, letting go of his pretend hurt. "It's cool. I understand, and I hope you have fun."

"Shit, me too. I feel like this movie is going to destroy me."

Yes, this is about the most anticipated movie of the year. Yes, I was more hyped than I have been in months. No, there will not be any spoilers.

"You're welcome to tag along," I added. "I mean, if there's still seats available at the theatre."

He shrugged off the invite, which I knew he would do. Shawn wasn't into this particular franchise, claiming he was tired of this type of movie. Can't say I blame him, plenty of people felt the same way. It was just hard to ramble at him about it because he didn't know jack shit. That was why I was going to the movie with Stella.

"I'll just stay home and watch Grey's without you." He smirked.

"First of all, that's mean and I would never do that to you. Secondly, Grey's comes back next week!"

"Oh yeah."

“Besides,” I added, “I’m gonna spend the night at your place anyway. Just like every Thursday.”

“Yeah, but instead of twenty four uninterrupted hours, we’ll get…” Shawn counted on his fingers. “...Less than that?”

We made it back to my dorm to find Stella lying facedown on the couch. Shawn and I shared a look as we entered the vicinity. Not that this wasn’t unusual, it was just hard to pinpoint her reasoning for this. I mean, I shouldn’t talk. Sometimes I lie on the floor without explanation wherever I please. Stella was used to that, but Shawn would ask if I “wanted to talk” or something.

"Did you get spoiled?" I asked her.

"No," she replied, her voice muffled by the cushions. "I'm trying to kill time. There's five hours left before the movie!"

I sighed and went to sit on her legs. "I know. I made Shawn take my phone because I don't wanna go online and see something I don't wanna see."

Stella picked her head up. "That's a good idea." She reached for her phone on the table, extending her arm towards my boyfriend. "Can you take mine too?"

Shawn chuckled, back and forth between the two of us. But he took Stella's phone. "You're both crazy."

"And what about it?" I said back. Then I reached for his hand. "Anyway, I need you to keep me busy for at least three hours." I smiled and batted my lashes in an exaggerated manner.

"Only three hours?" he replied with a cheeky grin as he took my hand and got me to my feet again.

"Ugh!" Stella interjected as she rolled off the couch. "I'm going to the library! And I'm leaving my phone so I don't go online! If I'm not back before we have to leave, just assume I killed myself because I got spoiled!"

"That's valid," I told her, "but I like you better alive."

~

Two of the three hours went by before Shawn practically tired himself out. He tapped out and rolled onto his back, leaving me alone with my thoughts. I couldn’t blame him for pulling out (in every aspect) because it was close to finals season. Tensions were rising, he was finally feeling the consequences of missing assignments and poor exam grades. I knew that because I was going through the same thing. The semester was going to be over in a month, then I would be going back to California.

And Shawn was coming with me… for a week.

It got awfully cramped on my single size bed by the time Shawn was out like a light, so I got up and decided to get ready. I got dressed in the appropriate attire for this movie, a black t-shirt with the franchise logo and black leggings. Then I grabbed my makeup bag and sat down on the floor in front of my mirror. Halfway through my routine, Shawn awoke with a start.

"I'm up! Let's go again!" he said, sitting up.

I looked at him through the mirror, still blending concealer under my eyes with a sponge. "You're like, twenty minutes too late, my dear. I'm already getting ready."

He rubbed his eyes and yawned, nodding in response. "Okay…"

As he lied down again, I couldn't help but smile. Shawn was really fucking cute, and he had no right to be. I don't want to sound like that girl, because I’m rarely that girl, but how was I expected to spend three whole hours away from him tonight? Thursdays were usually our night, since neither of us worked or had class after four o'clock. I mean, nothing was going to stop me from going to this movie, let alone a cute guy with curly hair and a charming smile. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t miss him.

"You're still welcome to join us," I told him from where I was sitting.

"You really want me to go, eh?" he replied, shifting to his side so he was looking at me.

"I'm just saying, it's probably the only time you'll see me cry."

Shawn picked his head up, eyes wide. "Seriously?"

Between the two of us, he was the crier. Are we surprised at this point? I had my exceptions, like watching a new movie I was very passionate about, or when my chronic GI issues would flare up and give me a panic attack. However, I haven't gotten sick in a while, so technically only one thing was going to make me weep.

"Well," Shawn spoke after a while, "guess I'm going."

~

I knew I was expecting tear jerkers, but I still sported my inner and outer wings to the movie. Half of it smudged onto my eyelids and half was under my eyes. On top of that, I got a dehydration headache, because I refused to drink water during a three hour long movie. I did eat popcorn, even though it was well after the time I cut off food for the day. That sounds concerning, but it's a thing I go through. If I eat after 8PM I will spend the night barfing.

Shawn, Stella, and I left the theatre practically buzzing. The mood of the film and the other moviegoers kept our spirits high, despite the fact that Stella and I had visible mascara tracks on our faces. I cried at things you wouldn’t normally cry at in a movie, like when your favorite character breathes, or makes a dramatic entrance.

"Okay," Shawn said, "that was actually a really good movie."

"Good enough to convert into a stan?" I asked, holding his hand.

"Mm, probably not."

I quickly let go of his hand. "Fine."

Walking towards the parking lot was when I started to feel something. My abdomen felt a little sore, and it made me slow down my steps a little bit. I placed my hand on my stomach; It wasn’t excruciating, but it was noticeable.

"You okay, honey?" Shawn asked, looking at me.

I nodded quickly and got back into step with him. However, the soreness was persisting by the time we got back to my car. I unlocked the doors to let Stella and Shawn in, but I stood where I was and focused on this pain. Maybe I cried too hard at the movie. Maybe the popcorn I had was giving me a warning.

Either way, there go my late night plans.

"So, I don't think I should stay at your place tonight," I told Shawn when I got in the car.

"Aw, why?" he asked.

"My stomach is, uh, acting up a little. Not feeling too good."

"You're gonna let your stomach stop you?" Stella piped up from the backseat. She wasn't one to normally say things like that. She knew how serious I got when I got sick.

I looked at her through the rear view mirror. "You got plans tonight?"

She picked at her nails and stayed quiet for a minute. "I have a friend visiting."

"Just stay at mine anyway," Shawn said to me. "I have the tea you like, and medicine, and a shit ton of blankets to keep you cozy. I'll be there to take care of you."

"I don't know, I wouldn’t wanna put that on you."

"I really don't mind."

We’ve been together five and a half months. In those months, I have gotten flare ups a handful of times, and all of those times had to do with trying new foods that ended up disagreeing with me. Each time I was with Shawn, and I had to tell him to leave me to deal with my illness. He did so, reluctantly. He really wanted to nurse me back to health, though.

Sickness is just so ugly. I didn't want to burden him with my physically unstable ass sleeping on the bathroom floor. I didn't want him to hear me puking in his bathroom. We just got to a place where things were Love sick, not Sick sick. Everything was so soft and sweet between us. For once nothing was grey, it was soft blend of black and pink. I didn’t want to taint it with my stupid gastrointestinal crap.

On the other hand, Stella is my roommate. She offers to look after me when I get sick, to which I always say no. I know how to handle it. Still, she goes to the extent of cancelling plans and breaking dates just in case I needed help. She was my safe person when went out. She was the extrovert who wanted and deserved to have a good time.

I had to stop by campus to drop Stella off, anyway. She got out of the car, reminding me once again that she'll have somebody over very soon.

Shawn turned to me once we were alone. "Please stay with me tonight."

"I don't need you to deal with my sickness," I said firmly. "It's nothing personal-"

"Okay, stop for a second," he told me. Then he placed his hand on the shoulder of my seat. "I know you know how to handle yourself when you get sick. It's like, a plan you've had to make and adjust over time, and you know it like the back of your hand. I get that, you know how to take care of yourself. I just don't want you to do this plan alone."

"I won't be alone, I have Stella." By that I mean, she's on standby only if things go really wrong... which is never. I’m not that sick.

This time, though… I’ve only felt actual pain one time before this.

Shawn gave me a look. "She's gonna be busy tonight. She wants to be busy tonight."

We stared at each other for a while. My stomach was flipping for reasons unrelated to illness. My boyfriend had stupidly kind, gentle intentions, and stupidly pretty eyes. He also had a very comfy bed.

I sighed. "Fine."

~

After some tea and rest, I felt a little better. I felt good enough to hop into bed with my boyfriend for about twenty minutes. It was fine until he was on top of me...

"Fuck, I'm sorry," Shawn frantically said, moving off of me. "Oh god, I'm so sorry."

My face was scrunched with pain, and I tried to control my breathing. The soreness from earlier turned into a sharp pain in my abdomen that made me push Shawn away from me. It was kind of a mood killer to say the least, since it made him panic.

"Are you okay?" he asked, voice trembling. "How bad is it? What do you need?"

"Shh!" It wasn't intended to sound mean, but I was trying to focus on what my body was doing.

I struggled to sit up, so Shawn held my lower back to support me. He kept asking questions, but I was rapidly tuning him out. The pain didn't get any better or worse, but I was feeling something in my guts. I got up and dashed into the bathroom.

We're going to get just a little TMI. I wanted use the bathroom, but my bowels weren't having it. Then, I wanted to puke but my stomach wasn't having it. I didn't know what to do, so I just stayed on the floor in front of the toilet and let my body try to figure things out for itself.

I shouldn't have had popcorn at the movies. Sure, popcorn is light on the stomach, but Stella wanted extra butter, and I hadn’t eaten for hours. I knew what I was getting myself into, and now I was paying for it. Add popcorn to the list of foods that were now forever tainted with a bad memory.

Shawn came knocking on the door, his voice full of concern. "Honey, are you okay? Can I come in?"

I didn’t say anything but he let himself in anyway. He sat next to me on the floor, next to where I was leaning over the toilet. Delicately, he moved my hair from my face and held it back.

"I don't think I'm gonna puke," I told him, resting my forehead on the seat. My mouth was watering inexplicably, and I felt a tingle in my feet.

"Okay, then let's get you back to bed," he said gently, placing his hands on my waist to help me up.

Then, I actually puked. Yup, no more popcorn for me.

~

It goes without saying that I was up for most of the night. I only threw up that one time, but I felt nauseous until the sun peeked through the window. Not only that, I always got a bout of anxiety whenever things with my stomach got bad, and it intensified knowing that I wasn’t home at my dorm. I wasn’t in the comfort of my squeaky single size bed. I didn’t have my phone charging next to me here because the only other outlet was on the other side of the room. I felt so out of place and I wanted to run, but I knew I couldn’t because traveling would only upset my stomach more.

Shawn fell asleep when I reassured him that I wouldn’t spend anymore time in the bathroom. He was on his side facing me practically the whole night. When I felt okay enough to lay down, I put one of the extra pillows between us and faced away from him. He started stirring by the time I was finally sleepy.

When I woke up in the late afternoon, I was just grateful I didn’t have class on Fridays. I couldn’t get up even if I wanted to.

I rolled onto my back, only to find that I was alone. I rubbed my eyes, then quickly remembered that I fell asleep with smudged eyeliner, and I just made it worse. I sighed and looked out the window from where I lied. It had gotten cloudy throughout the day. Thank god, today was not a sunshine kinda day for me.

If only I had the energy to get off my ass and go back home where I wanted to be.

My eyes blankly stared at the ceiling. Whatever spirit I had left in me was slowly floating away. My incorporeal being was rising out of my physical being, until voices outside the bedroom caused me to come back to earth.

“Oh, let me just see her! Maybe I can help!”

A woman. I slowly moved onto my side, curling up under the blanket and trying to focus on the window. Then, I heard Shawn’s voice.

“No! Ah - I mean…” He was suddenly outside the door. “Let me see if she’s awake.”

Shit.

The door opened, but I didn’t move from my position. Shawn came up in my peripherals, and then he sat down on the empty side of the bed. His eyes met mine, and he smiled.

“Hey, you. How ya feeling?”

I blinked. “Tired… Not sick. Just tired.”

“As long as you’re not sick.” He brought a hand up to my head and stroked my hair. “Listen, my mom is here.”

“Why?” Seemingly innocent question, but it did make me feel some kinda way, and it certainly sounded like it.

“She comes every so often,” Shawn explained. “She’ll clean and do my laundry.”

Must be nice.

“I told her you were here,” he continued. “I told her you were sick, and she just wants to check on you.”

We had talked about me meeting his family. I joked about wearing a high ponytail with a pink scrunchie the way Meredith did in Grey’s Anatomy. Shawn replied by saying I’d be wearing a black scrunchie, duh. Clearly, it wasn’t supposed to be like this, the day after a particularly nasty flare up. I was severely unprepared and it was a couple of months too early. But how the hell am I supposed to turn his mother away when she was already here?

“I’ll go out there,” I told him. “Let me just wash my face first.”

Shawn looked pleasantly surprised. “Okay, great. We’ll be in the living room.” He kissed my forehead and got to his feet.

As I pushed myself out of bed, I noticed the persisting pain in my abdomen yet again. Not as bad as last night, but it was still there. I already knew how to handle this.

[charlicpace]

hello pace! we’re a newly revamped skeleton rp about a group of gifted vigilantes trying to protect their decaying city. could we please trouble you for an opinion? thank you so much!

hi there ! of course you can ! because this is the first opinion posted on this blog, i’m just gonna start with a little disclaimer both so you know, and for anybody who also might want an opinion in the future, but the rest is under the cut !

DISCLAIMER: my opinions/reviews are kind of a two in one, and always going to be worded as kindly as possible. everything i say is only said with the intention of helping to improve an rp so it can reach its full potential and thrive, both as somebody with a personal opinion on most things, someone who’s been an admin before, and someone who knows what the rpc is like and what they’re usually drawn to. i’m always going to be nice and try to focus on the positives before critiquing the negatives, and i fully understand and appreciate the hard work that goes into creating an rp; nothing sucks more than having your hard work ripped apart and i will never do that. everything will be split into sections that i think are important, just so i can keep track of what i have or haven’t said yet, and so it’s easier to read and doesn’t look like an intimidating chunk of Opinion ! and finally and most importantly, my opinion is just that ! an opinion ! in the grand scheme of things, the opinion of one person ( yours truly, in this case ! ) really doesn’t matter if i say something you disagree with and don’t wish to change, as you’re free to run your rp as you wish ! however, if at any point you wish for me to take this post down for any reason, please just ask and i’ll happily oblige. i’ll make the most private, but shoot you an im with the link to the private post so you can still refer back to it if you so wish !

spoiler: y’all are going in my rec tag !

FIRST IMPRESSION. immediately, i’m happy ! your theme is clean & tidy, and everything looks really neat and easy to navigate. all important information is easily accessible, and would definitely make me want to navigate around the main further even if i weren’t about to do so for opinion purposes ! your graphics are bloody lovely, and the first post i see when i load the main is a skeleton specifically for a non-binary character, and with a nb fc as one of the suggestions, so already i’m happy, and would be more inclined to consider applying if that was why i’m looking ! genuinely, i wouldn’t change a thing about the main’s appearance, i love it. 

CHARACTERS & FCs.i actually really love skeleton rps ! i could be wrong, but i feel like that’s actually an unpopular opinion these days ? but i love a good skeleton rp myself ! and i think you’ve found a really great balance between giving enough information to spark muse but leaving enough room for creative freedom, which can be hard ! it’s not often that i’m drawn to more than a couple of skeletons at most, but every single one i looked at is intriguing as heck. they’re such well-written characters that it’d be hard for anybody to create a muse that doesn’t end up being multidimensional and interesting —– at least i hope so. i love that there’s nb rep, skeletons specially made for characters of colour, and encouragement for ‘older’ characters. really, it’s great stuff. and writing the skeletons in second person ? genius !

PLOT.genuinely, i love the plot and the way it’s written. there’s enough information there to get a full grip on the rp and the plotline, but the way you’ve written it makes it easy to read, and you can get all the information required without being faced with a big block of text that a lot of people find intimidating. usually, i’d be put-off by the genre of superheros ( nothing to do with it as a genre, i’m sure it’s great, but it’s just not my thing, y’know ? ) but with the way the main is run and the plot in itself would really make that not matter to me ! i’m just a little bit in love with it. the world you’ve built is so intriguing ! 

GENERAL ADMINNING.again, this seems to be a very well run rp ! asks are answered with kindness and openness, and i’d personally have no problem sending an ask your way if i had any questions or approaching you via the ims if i needed to as a member. your dedication also shows in the fact that you guys have recently revamped, and whether it’s to give the rp a boost or to fine tune some things, it shows that you’re dedicated to your group and the members who’ll be joining, and would make me more inclined to apply, too — i love nothing more than dedicated admins. the only thing i’d say on a tad more negative note is that the gif icons you’re using might be a little small for my taste, but they’re nice and bright so don’t cause too much trouble when it comes to seeing them ! your activity limit being six days is very reasonable and considerate, and very much appreciated, and i also love that your rules state not to write godmoddy starters, as i feel like that’s often neglected when it comes to what people think gomodding is. the banning of any text smaller than , the inclusion of a mandatory triggers to tag list, the lack of specific age-bending rules, the opportunity to add any fcs that make you uncomfortable to the app, the fact that you state that anonymous can be turned off or not enabled in the first place, and the fact that properly using people’s pronouns is in your rules… all brilliant, brilliant things. the rp is obviously a safe, inclusive space, and you make that clear by showing and not telling, and it makes me more inclined to want to join and recommend to friends. i also think your starter rule is very fair, as i feel like a lot of rps take it too far as of recently, and make interactions quite limiting by forcing people to reply to starters that don’t fit their muse, or forcing them to take on more threads than they can handle. i think you’ve got the perfect balance, though, and encourage inclusivity and the lack of bubble rping without taking it too far. however, i’d perhaps say that if you’re allowing minors into the rp, the writing of smut at all might not be the best idea, even though the rules you have in place are appreciated, and to maybe add the banning of autoplay on character blogs.

EXTRAS.including questions about the muse in the app is such a brilliant idea ! both for your sake and helping to decipher who is the best applicant to fill the skeleton, but also for the folks applying, as it’ll lead to them to think about their muse a little deeper and think about things in the long-run. i really think it’ll help weed out the people who aren’t looking to stick around, even more than a full-app rp usually does !

ENDING NOTES.my friend, you’ve created something really special here. i genuinely, truly wish you the best of luck, and hope you thrive as it’s really well-deserved ! i know i tend to end up giving the lovechild of a standard review and your average opinion, but my opinion is that this rp is fucking glorious. i’m gonna finish each of these on this blog by asking myself would i consider joining this rp if i were looking for one, and the answer this time is a very firm and enthusiastic yes ! congratulations on your revamp, and for sticking to your rp and the ideas for nearly two years, and good luck !

[gems-of-lirema]

GEMS-OF-LIREMA’S RP PLOTTING CHEAT-SHEET Want new-and-exciting plots for your character? Long to reach out to more of your followers, but don’t know where to start? Fear not! Fill out this form and give your RP partners both present and future all the of juicy jumping off points they need to help you get your characters acquainted. Be sure to tag the players whose characters YOU want more cues to interact with, and repost, don’t reblog! Feel free to add or remove sections as you see fit. Template here.

(Putting it under a read more because this is fricking long holy cow. Ah, that’s the price I have to pay for 7 muses...I’m coding everything in case anyone wants to focus on a specific muse)

Mun name: Sean

OOC Contact: IMs on tumblr work best for me, I have a Discord (ask me for the link) & a Discord Pokemon server as well if that’s more convenient

Who the heck is my muse anyway: 💜 The Fool (Eusine): Has no idea what he’s doing, but he’ll be damned if he does anything w/o his Rulebook. 💛 The Rulebook (Morty): Just trying to make it through the month to provide for his 3 roommates. 💎 The Stoic (Steven Stone): Just your average rich vagabond who has a boyfriend & refrains from speaking. 💙 The Wolf (Wolf Grunt): Trusted psychic bodyguard of Team Skull. Always itching for a battle, whether through Pokemon or through their paws. 💚 The Smart Aleck (N Harmonia): The Stoic’s somewhat narcissistic boyfriend. ❤️ The Grump (AZ): Just your average gentle giant going through the motions. Always sassy and never happy. 🖤 The Rebel (Guzma): It’s ya boi. If he’s not careful, his need for destruction will be his own downfall…

Points of interest: Everybody’s got issues! :D Some more noticeable than others…

💜💙💚🖤 Most of my muses (specifically Eusine, Wolf Grunt, N, and Guzma) typically act on a whim if no one keeps them in check. 💜💚 In Eusine and N’s case, they don’t actively want to hurt anyone, but they trust their own judgement better than anyone else's (even if their own judgement is terrible). Of course, Eusine will only do something stupid if Morty’s not around. 💙🖤 In Wolf Grunt & Guzma’s case, they’re not afraid to cross boundaries in order to get what they want. They are a part of Team Skull, after all. 🖤 Guzma swears like a sailor. (Mun disapproves of this & tries not to do this in real life.) 💎 Steven doesn’t talk much, and is very quiet compared to all my other muses. He may avoid you if he knows you’re psychic, or if he knows you know about his curse. 💚 As mentioned above, N is self-centered and typically only speaks for himself. ❤️ Besides his ridiculous height, AZ seems pretty normal, even if he rarely smiles. 💛 Morty’s pretty normal too, but he’s as stubborn as a mule when it comes to personal opinions.

What they’ve been up to recently: Uuuuuuuh my main verse could use some work so all the interactions I’ve made so far don’t pertain to it at all ._.; (I suppose I’ll just call it “The Verse that Never Was” since the Reincarnation AU & Spirits of Chaos AU is basically the aftermath of it. Technically, it involves all my AUs, but that’s a story for another day .-.)

💜 Eusine has no direction or plans, he’s a NEET. He does have a major crush for Morty, but he’s always turned down... 💛 Morty really misses his old job as a Gym Leader, but hasn’t done anything to get it back. Secretly, he does have a thing for Eusine, but he’s too afraid to admit it. 💙 Wolf Grunt was kicked out of the house by their adopted father, Morty, and both know they don’t belong in Team Skull. Despite this, Morty refuses to take them back until they earn his respect. Wolf Grunt couldn’t care less, as they’ve been living in Team Skull for almost two years now. Even if they do miss him every now and then… 💎 Steven is still learning to control his curse, and will not trust anyone to talk about it or help him control it. 💚 N doesn’t trust anyone with Steven’s powers either, and may seem overprotective of him at times. He believes he can help Steven by himself. (Spoiler alert: he can’t.) 💎💚 Steven & N have been dating for 5 years, and plan on engagement. That is, if either one of them are confident enough to propose to the other. Which they’re not. 💚 Like Eusine with Morty, N can’t go anywhere without Steven, and is lost without him. ❤️ Although AZ has finally reunited with his Floette, he is still fighting the old ghosts of his past, feeling great remorse & missing his brother greatly. 🖤 Although Lusamine is dead in my main verse, Guzma is plotting his revenge for what she did to him, starting with the destruction of Aether Paradise. He doesn’t really have a set plan (besides shooting everything), and if he carries his plans out now, he’ll be losing a lot more than Team Skull… (i.e. Ya boi’s gonna die, somebody stop him.)

Where to find them: All my muses currently live in Alola. 💛💚💜❤️ Morty, N, Eusine, and AZ all share a house on Route 1. 🖤💙 Guzma & Wolf Grunt, of course, live in Skull Mansion/Shady House/Po Town. 💎 Steven’s a vagabond and may switch between living in these two houses. Otherwise, it’s difficult to find Steven in one spot. In fact, he may fly to a different region on a good day.

Current plans: None of the stuff I plot with other people pertains to my main verse, as I still wish to develop it further. (Even though I’m torn between keeping it or letting it go c’: ) Since this is getting fricking long already I’m just gonna tag the people I have active threads for/want to plot with more. I apologize to all of you c’:

@dragonfly-grunt @heartbxnd @lushjunglesrecipes @steelwingchampion @thebella-matthews-666 @trainer-riz

Desired interactions: - Duplicates! Some of the best interactions I’ve had so far have been with duplicates, so if we share the same muse, I’d love to plot things between them ^_^ (or just have them be so confused as to why there’s two of them xD) - I’m a sucker for crossovers, as one of my AUs (Spirit of Chaos) is a crossover in and of itself. Here’s a list of all the fandoms I’m willing to interact with ^_^ - Feel free to interact with my AUs too! I love them all c: (you can find them in Rule 8 of the rule’s page.)

💜 For Eusine: He needs to learn that he can’t always depend on Morty to decide everything for him. This could be done by virtually anyone, though he does have a crush for Gym Leader Jasmine in my main verse. Oh yeah, and he needs a job. Or money. Or possibly both. 💛 For Morty: Any Sabrina muses or other Pokemon League muses with psychic powers? Sabrina may give Mortimer the motivation he needs to get his Gym Leader job back...if only because he hates her guts ._. (This could also be true in any other psychic’s case) 💎 For Steven: Steven may be the best option for any crossover interactions, only because his curse allows him to travel between different realities, and even merge realities if he’s not careful… (not to say that he’s the only muse I’ll use for crossovers: all my muses are open for that ^_^) 💙 For Wolf Grunt: They’re a lone wolf when it comes to Team Skull (pun intended), and actually have a hard time opening up to any other grunt. Deep down, they're homesick...not entirely for Morty’s home, but for Sinnoh. If there are any muses from Sinnoh, Wolf Grunt may latch onto you like a leech ._. 💚 For N Harmonia: Somebody help the poor tree boy learn that self-gratification is not the same as self-confidence c’: Yes, N actually has a really low self-esteem (as he’s still trying to find himself & his purpose), and only acts narcissistic as a facade to hide his true emotions. 💚 Also, since N talks to Pokemon, I’d love for him to interact with some Pokemon muses (again, not to say that I’ll only use N for interacting with Pokemon muses ^_^) ❤️ For AZ: Lysandre muses! AZ needs to learn that it’s ok to love his family. Even if he’ll act pretty hostile to Lysandre at first, deep down he wants nothing but the best for him. He sees his brother in Lysandre, and if he’s not true to his feelings, he may end up ignoring Lysandre like he did to his brother (which is the last thing he wants). ❤️ Otherwise, somebody. Hug the gentle giant. Please. Just. Go into my inbox right now and hug him. I’m a sucker for AZ hugs c’: 🖤 For Guzma: Er...I already get enough interaction with Guzma as is...But he does have a secret power that no one, not even himself, knows about. That’s all I’ll say...

Offered interactions: 💜 Eusine’s a musician: in fact, it’s his passion! If your band needs a drummer, he’s your guy. He’s also great for livening up parties, as he loves to do water tricks for anyone. 💛 Morty has his own Psychic reading business! Worried about the future? Old ghosts of the past keep haunting you? Or are you just curious about your lucky numbers? Morty can do it all. (interactions will need to be plotted first of course...unless you don’t mind any infomodding ._.; ) 💎 Steven doesn’t really have anything to offer...unless you’re itching for some reality-warping shenanigans. This can range from turning water into wine or turning the moon into a blood-red moon (again, must be plotted first, considering how reluctant he is with using his powers &  dark his powers can become…) 💙 Wolf Grunt can, and will, beat you up. In fact, they’re looking for someone to fight with everyday. 💚 N doesn’t have much to offer either...Unless you’re a Pokemon. He loves speaking to wild Pokemon. ❤️ AZ can do pretty much anything: cooking, playing musical instruments, designing clothes. The only person holding him back from doing it all is himself. 🖤 Like Wolf, Guzma can and will beat you up. He’s always armed.

Current open post/s: Check the #open rp tag & the #prompts tag, those are always open ^_^

Anything else?: - I live in US Central Time if that helps - All links to my muse’s pages & their relationship to each other can be found in the rules page (Rule 8 specifically) - Please for the love of AZ someone critique me on my main verse it sucks

Tagging: No. You can do this if you want & say I tagged you.

[geek-gem]

OK KO A Hero's Fate & Let's Have A Stakeout

Well I've watched the two episodes 3:56 pm

Spoilers just in case

Including first time I'm not putting Let's Be Heroes in the title because it would seem too long yeah short term screw it the site might not allow it and people might be bothered by it.

Gonna say I was surprised seeing on TV their was two episodes but it's very nice. Including I enjoyed the 2nd episode a lot more.

So I'm gonna talk about these be warned this gonna be long. Along with after the episodes it showed a commercial of next week's episode.

I've seen a screenshot and haven't talked about it. It's the crossover with Captain Planet.

To be honest I don't like Captain Planet much including not the biggest fan of the choice of him being in Cartoon Network Punch Time Explosion XL.

Yet it could be an enjoyable episode. But I'm also being a hypocrite because I'm not the biggest fan of the Steven Universe and Uncle Grandpa crossover... honestly my thoughts on that show has lowered despite I still like the show. Now let's get started.

So the first episode is, "A Hero's Fate" where KO really wants to level up to level 1 even when after him, Enid, and Rad destroyed a bunch of Jethro's. Then some new hero comes by, destroys a limited edition cowboy Darrell and he just wants to level up. Including before this Enid and Rad want to take a break but KO wants to level up despite being tempted to take a break he goes with the hero.

Including as it turns out no offense I wouldn't be surprised it's not all fun. Basically it's KO learning that he doesn't need to keep working so much and that he needs to take a break at times and have fun.

Honestly it was a silly episode at times. But not my favorite. Seriously for some reason I had this stupid thought that this and the new character his name is legit hero. But I for some reason was expecting this outcome where you see his pow card and turns out he's still at level 1 and that when KO takes a break he becomes level 2. Honestly just lol okay to smile just weird...

But it was a nice episode. Yet just it's one of those episodes and the ending. Honestly it reminds me of episodes forgot the one but lol okay to smile but the one with furries and, "We Got Pests" and...I liked those episodes. Really I shouldn't be bothered by episodes where I feel they take after the series or even could affect the series. Seriously the pests one I think of a joke somehow the pests minds are being seen and they are just crying about their future and KO says to Enid I think you broke them.

Sorry that's off topic yet it was a nice episode but not my favorite.

Including I should mention about last weeks episode I did like that. Including I feel the moment I did reblog a post and seems like everyone is okay talking about the episode did talk about the themes of racism and how you shouldn't stereotype a entire species.

Also the part where I went oh shit at the volcano but then the part goes on and with KO and Dendy talking about you can still enjoy something you like and admit theirs problems. I don't know just sorry I forget Ian of he's Rebecca's husband or boyfriend I think husband. Maybe just...him and the crews thoughts on that whole shit I don't know somebody needs to ask them about that part. Including that part makes a reference to the closing star the series ends with on episodes.

Now the next episode, "Let's Have A Stakeout" and I enjoyed this a lot more. Including yeah silly funny, yet also some more lore well story basically.

Including what's nice it's basically a sequel to, "TKO" while, the episode after that, "Stop Attacking The Plaza" luckly my phone remembered stop attacking the just there. While that takes place after well quickly after that. Yet it focuses on Lord Boxman and we see a bit more in depth with him and others.

Now this episode I liked and it's more of a sequel and focuses on the relationship between KO and Mr. Gar and that's nice because their isn't a lot of interaction between. Their has been some but not much.

Including the Shadowy Figure who just his chin and mouth the bottom part of his face. I'm agreeing with that seems to be Professor Venomous. Including his voice which is amazing sorry off topic.

But by talking about him yeah he returns.

So the episode is about Mr. Gar see's on cameras that Shadowy Figure has sneaking into a sewer pipe and just sneaking around the plaza. Because of this he also informs all three KO, Enid, and Rad to be on the lookout while Mr. Gar does a stakeout.

He says no to KO yet when KO asks his mom who's to the left of Mr. Gar, he just can't refuse that.

Honestly the episode is very nice. Including continuing and I suppose expanding some more but little. Basically it's not to see more of that story from the TKO special and Shadowy Figure returning.

Also seriously I wanna say Steven Ogg's voice just that's very lovely hearing that I love that voice.

Including the episode was quite funny too. Mainly the interaction between KO and Mr. Gar including saw this on a promo weeks ago or whenever about Mr. Gar going KO THIS IS A STAKEOUT NOT A CAMPOUT part and then KO showing a steak because I was thinking of the word stake and thought Mr. Gar might say that.

Seriously just because so okay that flashback that Carol and Mr. Gar have mentioned. I laughed or some what because when KO gets to ask him one question. So okay we have some what of an answer but it's still a mystery it's like a joke now but they aren't revealing it yet.

Decided to put the sentence spoilers just in case. But also just I felt weird so I put in case. I don't know if theirs a tag known as OK KO spoilers but just the show isn't known well enough fine I'll just...was gonna say search for it but fuck it.

Also gonna say just at times honestly and this isn't really important but just seriously KO is cute. Including the parts with Mr. Gar and him being so excited and some what of a fanboy to be around him.

So the episode ends and we see Shadowy Figure again and well almost TKO but this one time KO was just showing what he looked like in the start of the episode but he almost became TKO in this.

Sorry yet in the episode he goes into this locked room which was seen in seriously title is long and can't remember but KO, Enid, Rad got lost in the basement of the plaza and one of the rooms they ended up was some room with water, these glowy things and a tree. I think the the glowy things there I'm imagining them it's been a while. Also it's the part where Enid calls Rad out on his bullshit because he got them lost and she takes charge.

But back to the episode Shadowy Figure is in there, and tries to collect these glowy things in a jar. Including KO fights him yet Shadowy Figure tells him about Mr. Gar wouldn't want him there and that well Shadowy Figure got KO to break the door and he basically tricked KO. So basically telling him it's his fault.

Sorry I want to call him Shadowy Figure just to be consistent I think that's the word. So Shadowy Figure mainly kicks KO's ass and with all this talking to KO he almost becomes TKO but manages to control himself which pisses off Shadowy Figure. Yet also KO puts a well okay fight and cuts a bit of Shadowy Figure's scarf or two of them.

Including KO kind of wins when Shadowy Figure misses him and falls down a waterfall but escapes yet is impressed and I think thanks KO. Then Mr. Gar arrives mad, yet KO while sad explains and Mr. Gar understands and even tells because of KO they now know what Shadowy Figure was doing.

Including the end they seal the door back up and a funny scene of Mr. Gar littertly using his elbows to warm up some marshmallows KO was warming up above a fire.

Sorry I wanted to explain that last part quick. Seriously that last part was silly. Yet the rest of the episode was quite good I liked quite a lot. It was silly yet also some development with KO and Mr. Gar they interacted a lot more now. Including some more story related stuff.

To be honest was expecting Mr. Gar to appear out of nowhere and punch and just kick Shadowy Figure's ass. Seriously I just expect that shit. Yet it's alright and helps the episode with it's development of characters.

But honestly I need to see Professor Venomous's pow card and see if it's the same level as Shadowy Figure's pow card. Sorry kept stalling and typing figure.

Also the reason why I just... seriously to be sure of the whole Professor Venomous is Shadowy Figure I can't believe I okay smiled of me saying Boxman or Lord Boxman in my head when they are two completely different characters. Including if we go by this timeline of, "We're Captured", "TKO", and, "Let's Have A Stakeout" and Venomous being Shadowy Figure it's interesting.

Got the tags down and turns out their is a tag for spoilers and that's very nice just Ridiculousness is on 4:44 pm