#not saying this is something i accidentally explored in my character study but it might show up who knows!

[alrightbuckaroo]

Do you think it would be out of pocket for me to bring up the fact that Carlos cried for two reasons in the two part season finale, one due to losing his father and one due to marrying the love of his life?

Do you think it's out of pocket for me to say that the grief he has for his father is only matched to the love he has for TK?

[teddybasmanov]

Since we all already know that I make lists in my sleep, baby I decided to make this too.

Alien ASMR roleplay recommendations

made by people who are to my knowledge not cancelled at the time of recording

Those are unfortunately far and few between and alien is the key word here - not just sci-fi, but necessarily containing an alien as at least one of the main characters. You know, the whole "never have I ever kissed a human" vibe.

These are all for gender neutral listeners and almost no yanderes.

Starline seasons one and two by the one and only Gav VA - two big series with a lot of lore and both plot heavy, first is a classical accidental abduction strangers to lovers, second is not less classical forced to work together enemies/rivals to lovers. Very lovely characters, adore both of them.

The Abduction series by Mage Bunkshelf - the last human alive abduction, a lot of confusion and cultural differences, yet again - the sweetest character, really want it continued.

The Specimen by The Storyteller - this is a legal abduction, everything is alright, you're being studied by a very excitable and flusterable researcher.

Alien Stranger part one and part two by Lyra VA - you're a badass and you're being rescued by the hottest and handsomest scientist with a V-neck going to his naval. He's really nice and lets you play with his hair.

Alien videos by Hollow_VA - unfortunately an unfinished series, loosely based on the "Alien" franchise about adventures with a caring alien on a space station where something very scary has happened.

Sadodere Pilot by Liu's Audio - you're semi-rescued by an alien pilot, who waxes philosophy and threatens to throw you out.

Alien Biomechanoid by Stygian Murmur - helping a big threatening looking guy after he had a crash landing and some negative experiences with humans.

Space Orc Series by Nightwatch ASMR - they're more afraid of you than you are of them - you're being studied by aliens, who treat you with caution.

Alien boy by Angels&Bread ASMR - a very cute alien saves you while struggling with the language barrier.

Center of the Universe and Alien Speed Dating and Abducted by a Kind Alien script fills by NaughtPlusZero - both are script fills, so you can find other versions of them. The first is sort of an isekai story, in which you're yet again being studied, the second is exactly what it says - speed dating a bunch of very different and interesting aliens, the third is a classical "abduction for your own good, let's be friends".

Encountering an Earthling (one, two, three) and The human touch script fill by Jupiter VA - in the series you're an alien, who tries to communicate with a human (and it's more difficult than you think); the script fill (yet again you can find other versions) is pretty sweet and explores the concept of an alien who has never experienced physical touch.

Intergalactic Dating Service by CardlinAduio - Cardlin has more alien audios, but not all of them are M4A and this one I just like more - a self-conscious alien thinks you're his soulmate.

Alien Interview and Alien Zookeeper by TheMusicalBoy'93 - the first one is the classical - abduction by a polite alien who wants you to tell them about humans and Earth and the second one... is why I put "almost" no yanderes up the - you're one of the last humans alive and you're being kept at a zoo by an alien who just has to be your sole owner. (I'm a sick bastard and I love it.)

The Space Pirates Saga one and two by Good Boy Audios - an extremely complicated series, very plot heavy, angsty, character dense and what not. It's difficult to say at this point who's the alien here.

Area 51 Cranial Nerve Exam by Jim ち ASMR - it might sound like a classical ASMR - even banal at this point - but it's not, it has a lot of details and a plot. Anyway, you're an alien who crush-landed in Nevada in the fifties and you're being tested by an Area 51 employee who's a little lost but has good intentions.

Feel free to add more!

[forabeatofadrum]

Hello and happy Sunday to you all. Thank you @confused-bi-queer, @cutestkilla, @you-remind-me-of-the-babe for the tags, and a tag back to @aroace-genderfluid-sheep.

My Klaine fic is still being written. Toffee the hamster has been found, but it's taking a while to finish it. An anon did give me a title idea, namely The Class Menagerie, and anon, I love you for it,

In other fic related news, I started posting Dancin' on that bamboo ceiling, the fic series that explores Asian identity and racism through Glee, while also trying to find a way to place glee's own racism towards its Asian characters. I was quite nervous to post it and a bit stressed. So stressed that I straight up confused Mike and Wes in one of my summaries and in the series' summary I accidentally wrote that Mike moved to China, not from China. Oops. It's been fixed. Five fics are posted and I am not at all surprised that the Klaine-centric one has the most hits, since people still prefer shippy fics over gen fics. I just hope these Klainers (hi!!) are encouraged to also read the others.

I am also nervous because I don't want to come off as if I am speaking for everyone yada yada. I did add the disclaimer that I am one sole person writing this and I am also alway open for more feedback, but it feels so nerve wracking. I usually write for me and me alone, but not this time, I guess. And even so, I am one Chinese person and damnit China is big. Catch me frantically googling whether people in Hubei speak Mandarin or something else etc. (Which I knew the answer to, cause my sister is from Hubei, but I'm just so nervous!!!) (This is also why I remember that Mike's family is from Hubei.)

Also some things in Glee are so fucking stupid. I am already thinking about changing something in Blaine's chapter so it lines up with canon, but I am still trying to explain why Tina's last name is Cohen-Chang.

Writing this fic is uhhhh A Lot, since I am delving deep into the racism that I have experienced and also the stories of other Asian people who I have spoken to about this. (JY, Todd, I haven't seen y'all in literal years, but you're in this fic.) (I do still talk to Cilla regularly.) (And a shout-out to my sister who constantly has to deal with people saying "she is too pretty to be Chinese"!). I am excited to explore this and I keep thinking about things I can add, but it is heavy, as you might expect. I do try to keep some humour and joy in it, because unlike Glee, I also want to show that being Asian can be fun and can lead to connection. I am looking forward to Mike, Tina, Wes, Blaine and Yu-Jin being friends! Here's a more upbeat part of the sad shit that I shared recently:

"Yes, yes, yes!" Yu-Jin cheers when Mike and Wes step inside the bedroom, both wearing a tangzhuang. "God, if only my grandparents could see me now," Wes says as he studies himself in the mirror. "Tina's making photo's," Blaine says. Tina's new phone has the best camera of them all and she'll send the photos to the others later. She definitely wants to save the mirror selfies that she made with Yu-Jin. Tina's hanbok has become to small and it's straining her in places, but she loves the way she looks and that's what matters.

And now, the weather: @quizasvivamos @blurglesmurfklaine @coffeegleek @esperantoauthor @otherworldsivelivedin @caramelcoffeeaddict @sillyunicorn @bazzybelle @dragoneggos @raenestee @tectonicduck @nightimedreamersworld @urban-sith @thnxforknowingme @captain-aralias @justgleekout @cerriddwenluna @tea-brigade @ivelovedhimthroughworse @moodandmist @whogaveyoupermission @bookish-bogwitch @ionlydrinkhotwater @1908jmd @special-bc-ur-part-of-it @larkral @chen-chen-chen-again-chen ​ @artsyunderstudy ​ @martsonmars ​ @facewithoutheart ​ @shrekgogurt @boyinjeans @rockitmans @bitbybitwrites @blackberrysummerblog @whatevertheweather

[mangatxt]

For the wip ask, if you don't mind, I'd love to hear more about any of these(you don't have to answer all of them if you don't want!):

"your hand on the hot stove" "Serizawa Broccoli" "Matsuo Pokedex" ?! "Too many beds Serirei" this sounds hilarious, and the title instantly has me humming the 'too many cooks' song "Emi Writes a Novel" "Health Inspector / Blair Witch" ?!?! "Mob and Serizawa Lunch Gossip" this sounds Adorable!!

again you don't have to answer all of them, please forgive my inability to narrow my curiosity

Hope you're doing well!

Best wishes!

"forgive me for my inability to narrow my curiosity" you say, meanwhile i'm over here like

AHHH thank you so much for asking about all of these. i get excited about ideas and end up outlining a story or writing a particular scene i think would be fun. i hope to go back and finish off a lot of these ideas eventually -- or repurpose them into other things i'm working on.

i'll give a summary of these wips under the cut:

your hand on the hot stove

This is a backstory fic for screwball that I've been working on and off for the past year. The summary is: "Serizawa Katsuya will never touch a baseball again. The man who knocks on the front door every day says otherwise." More specifically, Suzuki Touichirou is determined to put together the best supporting team possible despite salary cap regulations, and thus, resorts to recruiting a handful of powerful and impressionable misfits. Among them is Serizawa, a major-league dropout after he accidentally struck a pitcher in the face and put him in a coma. The fic follows Suzuki convincing Serizawa to come out of retirement and get involved in the baseball scene once again -- and explores the twists and turns of Serizawa's simultaneous rehabilitation and indoctrination into the Claw org. Basically, it's a baseball-ified version of the Serizawa backstory and some thoughts about how professional sports recruiting takes advantage of people or invests them in the idea of winning at all costs (e.g. feuds, steroid use, etc). As for the title, the “hot stove” refers to the winter during the major league baseball off-season when free-agent signing and trades are most prevalent. This is one of the more complete fics I have in my WIP folder, but I find I can only work on one angst-y thing at a time, and android au has held that attention for a while.

serizawa broccoli

This was short, angst-y attempt to fill in Serizawa's missing scenes during the Divine Tree arc. In it he reacts to the strange vibes at work and school and eventually receives the candy from Reigen and encounters the brainwashing himself, which mirrors his entry into Claw so thoroughly that he panics and loses control of his powers enough to snap him out of it. In the manga, Serizawa is the first character to identify the roots having weird properties during the Yokai Hunt mini-arc. I think it would be interesting to explore how his Claw deprogramming experience interacts with the city-wide rise of Psycho Helmet -- the indoctrination patterns he might recognize or the tactics he would remain susceptible to.

matsuo pokedex

This is a character study of Matsuo from early life and through major plot points (7D, Mogami, World Dom). It was based on the idea that Matsuo internalized his own powers as a kid by comparing them to Pokemon games. As such, each snippet of his life has Matsuo's version of a PokeDex entry for a relevant spirit. Much of the fic follows Matsuo's journey from treating spirits like tools to something more compassionate and the grief he goes through every time he loses his pets.

too many beds serirei

(nsfw-ish) After an awkward one-night stand with Reigen, Serizawa -- in cahoots with wingman!Dimple -- attempts to spur on another hook-up by engineering a "there was only one bed" situation. He's foiled by "too many beds" at every turn.

emi writes a novel

This a 5+1 "5 times emi's writing was rejected and one time it wasn't" that goes over Emi's progress at her first novel before and after her encounter with Mob and how her writing follows her changes as a person.

health inspector / blair witch

The premise is based on this post. I think it's actually going to be separate from TPC, but still post-Reigen spinoff S&S. A resentful Roshuuto calls the Seasoning City equivalent of OSHA on Reigen and Serizawa, which forces them to cancel out-of-office case plans with Tome. Annoyed, Tome recruits Hoshida and Dimple into a "witch-hunting" trip of her own. The fic swaps back and forth between the comedy-of-errors inspector debacle and the increasingly-troubling Blair Witch situation (which seems to affect Hoshida exclusively) on Tome's livestream. The two situations finally intersect when Tome and Dimple (carrying an unconscious Hoshida) run into Reigen and Serizawa (carrying an unconscious health inspector) at the office stairwell and they're both like, "don't ask." It's only an outline right now, but I fully intend to write this.

mob and serizawa lunch gossip

Mob and Serizawa go out for lunch during Serizawa's first week on the job (sometime between 3x02 and 3x03). Serizawa has a lot of questions about the job and Reigen and society in general, and they talk about some of Mob's more troubling memories. Missing scene friendship stuff with minor references to upcoming Divine Tree arc.

pheeeew that's a lot. it was fun to write this out. thanks again for asking!!!

[princess-of-the-corner]

See that thing you just did where you assumed that Adrien would handle it in the worst possible way? That’s the condescension that I’m identifying in Felix. He doesn’t know that. Just like Ladybug doesn’t know that he won’t be able to emotionally handle the reveals. She has evidence for it, yes. It’s possible yes. But like Felix, she doesn’t know. They’re doing something very similar. I think it’s funny that you defend Felix for it but when Ladybug does it, it’s a problem.

Also what? Lol Felix will apologize and own up to his mistake but Marinette won’t? Where are you getting this from? What makes you think Felix would tell him In the first place? Why would it become a priority? He’s never cared about Adrien being In the know before and it’s never seemed to bother him. Why start now? What makes you think Felix would admit that he is wrong so easily compared to Ladybug? And what makes you think Ladybug would be immovable on owning up to her mistakes compared to Felix? There’s a lot of unfounded bias in your statements. Felix hasn’t proven himself to be particularly self reproaching. It took him snapping everyone out of existence and then believing he’d killed his cousins girlfriend to stop genociding. Marinette, on the other hand, has been self reproaching and changed her tune for much less. There is no evidence to suggest that Felix would suddenly have a higher EQ than Marinette and suddenly become reasonable with his cousin. Just a lot of projecting onto Felix what you might want him to be. Also your quotes for them are esstentially saying the same thing. “I did what I did and I don’t regret it.” The only difference is Felix is dropping an unfounded and ultimately meaningless “sorry”.

You really have no idea what you’re talking about, do you? You just saw my posts in a tag, out of context for the whole AU I was crafting where certain things happen and character exploration and character development goes on and assumed I was trying to predict Canon rather than taking an idea and running with it.

I could go on about how Felix isn’t a character so much as a plot device. The writers want something to happen, so they have him do it. His motivations and goals being contradictory and making no sense when put together because the writing is a hot mess. So fanfic writers either have to use him like Canon, or pick one of his motivations and stick to the bit.

I could point out that fanfic is for taking a scenario and running with it. Sometimes in a way that may eventually go against Canon.

I could point out that yes there is a huge fucking difference between the idea of “I had my reasons but you got hurt and for that I’m sorry” and “sorry you got hurt but I was doing it for Good so it’s fine!”, and go into a character study on why I think each does what they do, even accidentally because Felix isn’t trying to be a saint and Mari isn’t trying to be an asshole.

But you’re clearly not here for that.

Like. Fuck off my dude. This isn’t a place for picking fights over nonsense. If you want to bait someone into it, go somewhere else

[ramblingdruid]

The Viper's Magic

If you missed, I recently wrote about a concept for magic. In this universe, magic can be drawn from art. From beauty. And that can look like pretty much anything. The way people channel the magic of the universe can end up warping their body, if they use it too much at a time.

If I were to put my bladesinger character Visarella into this world, she'd have to get her magic somewhere, so I want to explore some ideas of what that might look like.

So, in Visarella's backstory, she was once a bounty hunter and assassin, focusing on stealth and trickery spells along with her sword and her venom.

Bladesinging has an inherent art to it already. It's a sort of dance of elvish origin in the Forgotten Realms, so there's a clear path forward here; I'm not going to take it.

I want something a little more unique for Visarella. Yes, her martial style is rather dance-like and has deep roots in elvish culture. The struggle is that the magic she uses in D&D is drawn from knowledge. As a wizard, she has a spellbook, and she had to learn how to cast these spells through study.

I definitely want to utilize the dance aspect in some way, and I think the study aspect of her character is very important, because she wields a spellbook in one hand and her sword in the other.

So, we have a mage who uses dance and study to wield magic, somehow. What does that look like? I want to explore something a bit off to the side of what we have so far.

Bladesinging itself is an art form, developed by a certain culture and spread to other people. There are so many examples of this in the real world, so why don't we look at some of those for inspiration?

The first example that comes to mind is Flamenco, a Spanish dance and musical style. Salsa, a Latin American dance and musical style. The Waltz, a triple-time dance originating in Germany and Austria.

There are so many more that I just don't have the time to mention, but it's really interesting, so I highly recommend you go check it out yourself.

Flamenco is the most appealing to me for Visarella at the moment. It's such a beautiful dance and a the music is just so good. Now, I'm not going to copy, rebrand, or just make her a Flamenco dancer; I don't think that's a good way to take inspiration from culture, and is very risky in accidental (or intentional, depending on the author) harmful stereotypes of these cultures.

That said, Flamenco will be a somewhat big inspiration for Visarella.

Visarella is fast. She is graceful, lithe, and precise with her movements. She dances with the grace of a trained assassin, the streak of silver slicing the air around her. She strikes like a snake with the venom of one. The heels of her boots click lightly against the ground as she steps, not missing a beat.

I like to imagine that her feet are constantly moving while she's in combat. Changing direction in an instant, keeping her opponent unsure of her next move, before she strikes.

There's beauty in the way her dress flows around her as the beat of her footsteps relax her opponent. The way her sword streaks through the air, never failing to land on its target. A constant flow of motion and sound, and the universe responds. The energy of the universe wells up inside her as she dances across the battlefield, her forked tail swirling behind her, the magic of the universe flowing through her body, ready to strike with her.

I think that's good enough of an explanation, at least for now. I do not have the expertise to create an entire dance style for one character, but I would love to if I could. I think saying less about the exact way she dances leaves more to the imagination, and that's magic in itself.

Thanks for reading!

[blorbosexterminator]

BERLIN TEASER looks like Emily in Paris but male version.

It's just fucked up you know. The whole new cast of characters and the plot. Nobody can argue with me on that one. Unless they magically changes the whole theme and vibe.

I mean... I want it DARK.

First. I would like to see the history of hermanos. Andres-Sergio. There's so much to this stories. How they reunited. How angry Andres when he found out about the whole thing. Showing us some father/brother-son bond between them. Show us some soft domestic Andres. Show us some Angsty, touching, fluffy story between the hermanos that worth crying all night.

It'd be told in Andres POV. (Doesn't need narration, depends on the directing style). And

I think (from my study, research, and deep analyzing) Sergio's illness might have been mentally too, there are some deep dark secrets that are kept between Andres and Sergio, that somehow only few people knew about it. (Martin DEFINITELY knew). You can definitely feel THAT (mysterious secretive tale) vibe around those two. There's so many hints that lead to that mystery back in lcdp.

Second. I would like to see how good and SMART Andres is at education and his profession (a thief)... Since they kept on hinting that part in lcdp. This include MARTIN also. Martin's genius mind is a mystery and I like to explore it.

Third. I would like to see how ANDRES rises to be the KING of thieving. And thrives in the criminal world... Because Andres is a proud criminal. I wanna see SOME BADASS GANGSTA MURDERING EVIL DEMON ANDRES. BRING IT TO ME!!!!

THE SATANIC SILENT KILLER but loving (not abusive towards his loved ones; friends, brother, wife). I would love to see a criminal who is EVIL but kind to his loved ones ONLY. GIVE ME THAT. Give me ANDRES who killed a holy man. Give me ANDRES who killed a man with a pen. Give me ANDRES who killed people just by looking at them. This will explain the tilte BERLIN. He is a sweet Devil in disguised.

Fourth. THE ROMANCE. Give me Andres who married woman. Give me Andres who questions himself. Give me the dark side of him. Give me the EVIL BASTARD AND THE LOVING HUSBAND. Give me confused Andres. Give me sad Andres. Give me BERLERMO.

I'm not talking about cheesy romance like fucking, sucking, and done. I'm talking about...

The NOIR, HIGH CLASS romance.

Staring, longing, yearning, accidental/intentional touching, tension, awkwardness, rival of domination.

Give me the angst, the horror, the suspense, give me the comedy, the happy, the satisfying scenes of these two.

Give me the LONGING of making love and feel it. Give me the break up of a friendship (which will kill us all), give me the regrets, the frustration, and the forgiveness, and the reunions.

Give me all the feels and i'm gonna make a milkshake out of these emotions.

Give me a love story that tested by time and death.

This also include the bromance of the trio. SAD that the most potential friendship between Martin and Sergio is not explored enough. I wanna see THEM. UGH

Fifth. Give me the GOOD STORIES about the characters and the robberies..with all the genres. Enough said.

Sixth. The closing of the series. Give me a GREAT BREATHAKING ENDING (doesn't need to be Angsty, or happy. Just floating like... The ending was in the middle and yet almost the end of the friendship which we already knew what will happend, and yet the scene were them dancing or singing, or eating together) and then the end.

I hope that Pina realized the potential of this story and characters. Because this kind of story is rare, unique, authentic, one of a kind.

I just wish at least we will or can see something like this. Because its never made into movies or tv shows that tell stories like them. 🥲

I hope Pina is not stupid and blind.

I'm sorry if I rant this too long. I must explain im diagnosed with BPD and ADHD, that's why I took it personally and intensely on another level. 🙏🏻🙏🏻 i'm afraid if you'd get offended by my ranting here. Even when I still have so much to say.

I still have hope despite everything. 🥲🥲 they're all great actors.

You're right anon, haha. Berlín is just the male version of Emily in Paris. You unlocked the mystery. We'll have four seasons of Andrés getting in love triangles and trying different outfits, in Paris.

Can't say I disagree with you! But unfortunately, Pina decided that we want to see a Romantic Comedy in Paris, so that's what we're kidding. BUT Pina has always shifted easily between genres, so we could still get some darker elements, don't lose hope!

[kouros-herc]

For the second day of Christmas your true love gave to you, A re-imagining of disney songs for your characters @kenneth-carson

Character Study/Discussion below

Benjamin Drakken - Go The Distance

Like a lot of these, at first glance it seems mad BUT hear me out. One of the things that makes Drakken compelling as a character and a baddie is his persistence and drive and intensity. All qualities we might praise him for if his goal wasn't ... you know, global domination. I think this song can be re-imagined to that sort of intense passion and dedication to his goal.

Ken Carson (ft. Hercules) - Love Is An Open Door

While I don't mean this as a sort of romantic thing, Ken is a character who is discovering his life outside his family and the metaphorical enclosure of that! Herc is likewise looking for people in his life he can let in and share it with and embrace and this song as so much of that naive but endearing warmth about it. Also "we finish each others-" "Sandwiches!" "Thats what I was going to say!" is canonical Kerc dumbassery.

Gabriella Marino (ft. Eric (SOB)) - Love Will Find A Way

First off I am so sorry. But tragic lovers doomed by their opposition in the narratives of their lives who despite that are able to get to know each other as people and ... mean a lot to each other ... I'm not wrong.

Qin Su - What Else Can I Do?

Su is a badass! A witch finding her feet and grappling with what she wants her specialty to be and how to embrace her gifts towards the area of plants and wood witchery? I think this song captures some of that excitement and energy and intrigue. What else can Su do? I can't wait to see.

David Hatter - When Will My Life Begin?

It's on account of Keanue's long luscious locks. Joking! But it's actually because I see Hatter as a man who accidentally hit pause on his life a long time ago - he had to, he had his little siblings to look after and his personal dreams had to take a back seat. So he's been going through life being brilliant at what he does but is he really living. Hopefully Marlin can help him explore that a bit more!

Cruz Ramirez - I'll Make A Man Magic Grand Prix Champion Out Of You

Who wouldn't want to see a Cruz training montage of her being awesome and whipping her new recruits into shape! Cruz is a teacher and a leader and dedicates herself to helping people bring the very best out of themselves, and she deserves a main character moment musical number to celebrate that.

James Jones Sr (ft. James Jones Jr) - Mine, Mine, Mine

Sorry to assign Hook a rampant capitalist villain song but I like the way this song also has that element of disdain for other people in it that we've seen with Hook's hatred of Magicks. We also see some of the chip on the shoulder of the rejection from high society with the stuff about how he'll be able to gain favour with everyone at court by his exploits. I also just think that the John Smith half of the song sort of fits into how young James is this idealistic adventurer who things all of this will be some grand adventure! Which is maybe not exactly the reality of life as a pirate and magick hunter.

Toby Determined - Almost There

I know how much you've spoken about Toby having this desire to be great and brilliant and how that constantly motivates him to push boundaries and maybe push through some of them sometimes. So I thought that sentiment of reaching out for something that is just out of reach but you can almost feel would fit him in an interesting way.

[ladywaffles]

hello fellow enjoyer of things >:)

😈 Has there been a point in a story where you did something just to be playfully mean to your readers?

🛒 What are some common things you incorporate in your fics? Themes, feels, scenes, imagery, etc.

🛠What tools/programs/apps do you use to write?

💖 What made you start writing?

👀 Tell me about an up and coming wip please!

💞 Who's your comfort character?

✅ What's something that appears in your fics over and over and over again, even if you don't mean to?

😈: i am so bad at writing smut scenes so i always fade to black, even when it feels like there should be a scene there and i've built up to it, and it just feels cruel. i would say like 60% of the time there was a sex scene there but i just couldn't get it right so i always end up cutting them out before posting. also i wrote a story once where the entire thesis was "what if the villain deliberately broke the rules on bioethics, as a character study and worldbuilding exercise" and well. readers did not seem to like that. conversely, i also have not updated either of my big WIPs in over a year, so like, that too.

🛒: music and sound are a very big part of my life, so they come up in my stories pretty often! i really enjoy writing to set the place of a scene/story, so i do a lot of touch/smell/hearing similes and metaphors. in terms of feelings, there's a lot of contemplating of loneliness, but not the kind that is, "i am alone in my room," rather the, "i am the only one who has this set of experiences and circumstances, and i cannot explain myself to this person who i care about so they can understand my actions/affections/choices fully, and that makes me feel isolated."

🛠: i primarily use scrivener to write fic, although if you catch me without my laptop, i'll sometimes use google docs or just a plain old fashioned pen and paper. if i'm plotting something out for a longer story, i might use a handwritten timeline on a blank sheet of paper and then just cover it in highlighter and sticky notes as i tack on addendums, if i'm not just screaming about it in a friend's DMs. thesaurus dot com is my best friend.

💖: i started writing fic when i was maybe 11 or 12, right around the time that i first learned that fic existed when i was looking up pictures to make my nook wallpaper, and you could do self-inserts and change the story around to suit your desires, like play-pretend but better. there were just so many permutations to explore, and i really liked that idea! i didn't start publishing fic until i was about 15. that first fic is still out there on ao3 somewhere, but i've since anonymized it so i don't have to look at it on my profile anymore lol. (not because i think the fandom is cringe, but rather because i've grown a lot as an author and it's not necessarily representative of my ability anymore!)

👀: so i know the answer you want me to tell you about is the comphet iceman accidental lovechild aaron tveit AU but sadly i have no more words on paper than that which i have already told you (iceman, very gay and upset over breakup # 3 with maverick, comphet rebounds with a woman who is also very gay and rebounding comphet style and whoops there's a baby now and here comes a bouncing baby aaron tveit). i'm still working on the timelines, because the top gun timeline in relation to the actual universe timeline of when everyone got married/how old aaron is versus when CMIYC was on broadway/aaron's nearly 10-year long absence from broadway is a hot mess and i'm trying to piece things together in the way that is the most true to form/makes the most sense.

💞: donald scripps from the history boys ("I have never particularly liked myself but the boy I was, kneeling in that cold and empty chapel that winter morning, fills me now with longing and pity," spoke wonders to my eighteen-year-old self who was also off to university and questioning reality) and obi-wan kenobi from star wars ("until this very moment, he had never realized he’d always expected, for no discernible reason—that when he died, anakin would be with him." his place in the series as a man who fights for good because it is the right thing to do, because he believes in goodwill, even as the world crumbles around him because it is inevitable that he fail in his mission and ultimately lose everything and everyone he loves, and we all know that he must fail so that others will succeed where he did not... i eat that shit RIGHT up.)

✅: there are at least three separate instances where i have used the righteous brothers' unchained melody in my writing, and two of them are because the song plays on a jukebox in a greasy spoon diner. it was completely unintentional, that's just a song that keeps popping up lol.

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[ninlilwinds]

Hi! May I request a platonic Scaramouche, Venti, Zhongli and Ei with isekai’d best friend reader? The reader tries to keep it a secret from them for their safety but eventually, the characters find out, and they keep asking what their world is like and how other people view them in their world etc. I hope this isn’t too much, thank you!

So I wasn't sure if you meant that you came from a world where genshin was a game or just from another world so I just did the one where genshin was a game since I think that's what you meant. If it isn't please let me know and I'll rewrite it with pleasure! P.S. Sorry it took so long time to write!

Plot: isekai'd reader can't keep the seceret much longer! How will the genshin characters react?

Characters: Venti, Scaramouche, Zhongli, Ei

Warning: Not proofread. Also posted on my phone so format might be weird. If you spot any major mistakes let me know and I'll fix them!!

Venti

• Venti found you one day while u were looking at the statue of the anemo god near windrise. You looked like you weren't from around the area and he sensed a strange presence coming from you, but despite that, he still took you back to Monstadt • After that Venti was your personal guide! He introduced you to the Monstadt culture and made sure you were well accommodated • During those times you two became quite close, although he noticed you seemed a bit strange whenever you interacted with the people. • He noticed you knew many many facts about this world, even ones he didn't think anyone else knew. • Like the day you accidentally let it slip that you knew he was a god.......

You listened to Venti play a song on his lyre while telling you the story of a tyrant king who took control of a kingdom and trapped the people. As you listened to the story you sighed. Ah, you remembered this. It made your heartache. "I'm so sorry Barba-...I mean Venti! I mean not sorry! Haha, I meant that's a great story." You struggled to recover from the slip.

Venti raised his eyebrows and frowned, "(Y/N) I know we haven't been friends for long, but I consider you one of my closest friends! Is there something you would like to tell me about, my dear companion?"

You sighed. There was no way you could play this off. So you explained everything about where you came from and how everyone knew them there because they were....famous. you spared him the fact that he was a character from a game in fear he'd be upset.

Venti's eyes slowly widened as you continued to say your story, "So your like the traveller's from another world? And people from your world know me?"

You nodded, "Yeah. You've become popular lately. "

"In a good or bad way?" He wondered if they knew him for his mistakes or for something else.

"Depends on who you ask. Many like you and some don't."

• You spent the rest of the afternoon explaining to Venti about your world and how things worked. • He was really curious and hoped one day maybe he could explore your world with you.

Scaramouche

• The day you appeared you'd acted very different. When you saw him you began to look around and then say how you wished this wasn't a dream • He had to reassure you that you were in fact very much awake • After that, you seemed very happy about it all and immediately asked if you could join him • He was shocked, to say the least, but agreed because he wanted to study you further. Where did you come from and what were you doing there? • During the coming months, Scara found himself actually becoming very close with you. He liked how helpful you were during missions and how you seemed to know where everything was. Yes, he's selfish at times, but deep down we all know that was just an excuse. He'd never admit he actually enjoyed your company

"It's that way." You said pointing in the direction of the chest at the end, "and there's going to be a few monsters you have to fight to get it first." Scaramouche nodded and sent his men away so he could get rid of the monsters by himself without any holdbacks. As he walked down a question continued to play through his head. One he'd had for a long time now. How did you know all of this?

"Have you been here before?" He asked.

You shrugged, "In a way."

"Is that so." He frowned and reached the end. Sure enough, there were a few hoards of monsters he had to take care of. Before he opened the chest he turned towards you weapon still in hand, "How do you know so much? Are you a threat? An archon?"

You looked at him nervously, "Sc-Scara...no need for the sword. I'm just...I just know things ok." "Where did you get this knowledge?" He asked, adjusting his grip on the weapon.

You sighed and explained your situation, making sure to not make any sudden movements that would cause him to attack. He stared at you for a long time, the information you had told him still registering.

"Is that so?" He said crossing his arms You nodded and he gave in, putting his swords away

• He wouldn't ask you many questions at once but he would ask them spread out. Here and there sometimes two at a time sometimes only one • And he'd still keep you around despite how uneasy it makes him that you know so much about him. But he trusts you enough

Zhongli

• He found you wandering the street of Liyue. You bumped into him and your eyes widened, your mouth falling open in shock. • He found your reaction quite amusing and when you invited him for tea he accepted. Similar to Venti he felt something different and off about you • Whenever he would sit down with you in the coming weeks you would have very deep conversations about the past • He found it a bit shocking and interesting how well you knew the history of not only Liyue, but seemingly the whole of Teyvet • One day he decided to ask you about it.

After a deep conversation about the landscape of Liyue and Rex Lapis, Zhongli decided to ask you the question that had been pressing him for a while now, "(Y/N), your not from around here are you?" You looked up at him in a bit of surprise at the question, "What do you...mean?"

" Well, you don't seem like you're from this world in general. But perhaps I'm mistaken and you're simply from another nation."

You knew Zhongli could keep a secret, so you decided it'd be best to tell him. The secret was weighing on you too so you wanted someone to help you with it.

"Actually you're right. I'm not from this world." You said and looked at Zhongli. He nodded and looked at you as if to say you has his full attention. You explained everything about your life before and your world and how you actually knew much about him because of where you came from.

• Zhongli found all of this very interesting and he would sit down with you for some tea just for the purpose of listening to you explain more about your world • He asked how he was known in your world and you explained the concept of video games and such • At first, he was confused but eventually he got the idea and asked about that game in particular. You two would have many conversations about this topic but if you ever seemed uncomfortable about it he would immediately stop and change the subject

Ei

• I don't really see her bumping into you, but maybe I'd Kujo Sara one day found you being suspicious and she brought you in for judgment, she would notice something different about you • The way you dressed and talked was very different from any of the nations • She would tell Kujo Sara to let you go and she would sit down with you that evening for dinner and talk to you • She knew you had secrets but she wouldn't push them out of you out of respect. She knew what it was like to have a bad past and didn't want to make you uncomfortable • And so the days went by and you two grew fairly close considering how she treated most.

"Would you like to try this? It's a delicious dessert that is perfect for a sunny day." She asked you.

You nodded and tasted it, "Mm it tastes like something I'd have back at home."

This seemed like the perfect opportunity for her, "Your home? What is that like?"

You described where you lived in some detail and she listening intently. 

"How interesting. That doesn't sound like any place I've heard of." She noted.

You shifted uncomfortably, "Ah it's....a pretty unknown area around here."

"Is there a reason for that?" She asked. When you nodded she asked, "Why?"

You considered your options in that moment and decided it was best if you simply told her what actually was your situation.

"Well its bc its not here in Inazuma...or Teyvat. I came from another world. Much like the traveller that you met a few months ago. But unlike them, I know a lot of this world because where I came from this place is part of it but in a different way."

Ei hummed quietly as she tried to understand what you had just told her and then she nodded, "I had already assumed as much. Why don't you tell me more?"

• Many conversations about your world but as soon as she notices your uncomfortable about a topic, she stops and tells you a little bit about herself in change • And so your relationship grows in this back and forth storytelling

[brawltogethernow]

@mirrorfalls​ submitted: Came across this while searching for James Bond’s scrambled-eggs recipe (long story). Your thoughts?

~~

But did you find James Bond’s scrambled eggs recipe?

In this article, Scocca laments his inability to find accessible, lighthearted superhero comics suitable to read with his young son, while also demonstrating a mysterious aversion to looking at DC and Marvel’s lines of comics for children, which is where the accessible, lighthearted superhero comics suitable for reading with young children are. He wants his elementary schooler to be able to safely have the run of all superhero media so he doesn’t have to touch the yucky baby books.

This is not an industry-wide crisis. This is just one dude who got paid to write an article where he accidentally exposed one of his personal hangups.

The child headed toward the trade paperbacks of Marvel and D.C. superhero titles on the side wall […] a few steps in front of me. […] Is he with you? a clerk asked me. I said he was. You know, the clerk said, we have a kids’ section. The clerk gestured backward, at a few shelves near the entrance. I said, Thanks, we know and tried throwing in a little shrug, as the kid kept going.

You can’t just turn a seven-year-old child loose in a comic-book store to look at the superhero comic books. […] My seven-year-old really wanted to see that last Avengers movie […] that is, he wished it were a movie he could see, but he understood that it was, instead, a movie designed to scare and sadden him—a movie actively hostile to people like him.

They have a children’s section. Because comics are a medium suitable for stories for everybody, and they are sold in comic book shops, which have sections, like bookstores. You can use this organization to find books that you know in advance are suitable for children. What goes in that category is determined by industry professionals. This area will be bigger the bigger the shop is. These comics are not lower quality that titles from the main lines. They are actually slightly better-written on average.

Your local comic book shop has considerately wrapped Empowered in a plastic bag, so your child will not be drawn in by a colorful superhero and accidentally read a graphic scene. If you think your kid might find a memoir about internment camps upsetting, it is your job to notice them picking up They Called Us Enemy and read the blurb on the back before you let them have it. This comic adults are meant to read is in a comic book shop because that is where comics are sold. Not every public place is supposed to be Disneyland.

Movies have ratings systems. If you do not want your child to watch a PG-13 movie, you will find that most superhero cartoons are for children. They are about the same characters. Some are quite good! I really enjoyed Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Your child may like Avengers Assemble. At least I think that’s right. I’m always mixing those titles around.

This is a deeply weird bias for Scocca to casually demonstrate, because he identifies in the article that real childishness is striving for empty maturity.

He compares an old comic,

[…]a 1966 Spider-Man comic in which Spider-Man meets, fights, and defeats the Rhino; participates in a running argument between John Jameson and J. Jonah Jameson about his heroism; buys a motorcycle; breaks up with his first girlfriend, Betty Brant; flirts with Gwen Stacy; and reluctantly agrees to let Aunt May take him to meet her friend Mrs. Watson’s niece, Mary Jane.

and a new comic,

[…]a 21st century comic book in which Thor, brooding in a Katrina-destroyed New Orleans, beats up Iron Man. He also yells at Iron Man a lot about some incomprehensibly convoluted set of grievances, including involuntary cloning, that he believes Iron Man perpetrated against him while he was dead(?), and then summons some other Norse god from the beyond somehow for reasons having something to do with real estate. I think. Where the 1966 comic is zippy and fun and complete, the whole contemporary one is muddled and lugubrious and seems to constitute a tiny piece of a seemingly endless plot arc—simultaneously apocalyptic and inert.

and concludes that the edgier comic is actually less mature. This is true. (This is not news about mediocre comics.)

It also has nothing to do with either comic being child-friendly, the article’s nominal thesis, except in the sense that ASM #41 (yes, I eyeballed that from that summary, yes I am just showing off now) is better written, making it more everyone-friendly. It also has practically more space dedicated to word balloons than art and is about a college student juggling girl problems and a part-time job with a tyrannical boss. But the immature one, as Scocca points out, is dour.

These are both teenagery issues, separated only by quality. It’s true that lots of new comics published by the big 2 are bad in the specific way Scocca describes here, taking themselves too seriously and hauled down by associated stories instead of buoyed by them. Some are not! Some titles from these companies’ main continuities are zippy, contained, and child friendly. Give your child The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl! Or if you like vintage comics so much better, why don’t you…buy some?

The books on the kid’s rack are good and fun and totally suitable for parents to read with their children without wanting to scoop their eyeballs out. Scocca cites the Batman ‘66 comics as the brightly colored, tightly written all ages solution to his problem about sharing superhero stories with his son. My local comic shop stores this title in the kid’s section. I am glad that Scocca’s does not, as he seems to have a peculiar aversion to looking for comics to read with his son there.

Scocca cites Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as a superhero movie he could watch with his kids. (I was surprised when this line made it sound like he has several. I don’t want to assume the other one isn’t in this article because they’re a girl, but I very much am assuming that.) Great! Go to the kid’s section and look for Marvel Adventures: Spider-Man. It’s a fun, zippy title directly inspired by ITSV where Miles, Gwen, and Peter superhero together. It’s much more tightly written than most of the various Spider-Verse comics, which are ambitiously messy ubercrossovers. You may not want to give those to children because they include murder and so on, but also you just have the choice between the two as an adult reader deciding how much continuity you want to deal with. Adventures is one of the only titles I would buy on sight before corona. The kid comic rack is a reliable place to take a break from How Comics Get Sometimes regardless of how old you are.

This article makes me feel quarrelsome. Maybe it’s that it doesn’t seem like exploration of a single idea so much as a loosely grouped bundle of things to kvetch about. Maybe it’s that the experience of getting into superheroes that Scocca describes experiencing, projects his seven-year-old son will experience, and from which he extrapolates a metaphorical microcosm of the history of the genre is completely alien to me.

Comic books [and] comic-book movies—are […] trapped in their imagined audience’s own awful passage from childhood to adolescence. A seven-year-old has a clean […] appreciation of superheroes. They like hero comics because the comics have heroes: bold, strong, vividly colored good guys to fight off the bad guys and make the world safe.

But seven-year-olds stop being seven. […] They become 13-year-olds, defensively trying to learn how to develop tastes about tastes.

The 13-year-old wants many things from comics, but the overarching one is that they want to prove that they’re not some seven-year-old baby anymore. They want gloomy heroes, miserable heroes, heroes who would make a seven-year-old feel bad. (Also boobs. They want boobs.)

Not because of the boobs line, although that does illicit an eyeroll that this gloomy thinkpiece is fretting over preserving the superhero experience of little boys who resemble the little boy the writer was while casually dismissing everyone else. I was one of those unlikable little seven-year-olds with a college reading level and the impression that maintaining it was the crux of my worth. I only read Books - distinguished media you could club someone with. I have a formative memory of pausing, enraptured, in front of a poster for Spider-Man 3, preparing to say that it looked pretty cool, and being beaten to the punch by my mother making a disparaging comment about how the movie was trash. It wasn’t out yet, but it was a superhero movie. That meant it was for loud, brainless children.

That was the total of my childhood experience with superheroes, excluding being the unwilling audience to incessant renditions of “Jingle Bells, Batman Smells” that left me wondering why in god’s name Batman’s sidekick was named Robin. I certainly never visited a comic book shop. I got into TvTropes, which got me into webcomics, which got me following David Willis, who got me into Ask Chris at ComicsAlliance, which led to me rewarding myself for studying like a demon for the AP tests with three volumes of Waid’s Daredevil, pitched as a return to the character being colorful and swashbuckling. I was seven…teen.

This is of the same thread as Scocca’s point that immaturity is running from childish things. It leaves me baffled that he doesn’t follow that maturity is embracing them.

I will disclose here that while I think it was dumb I had to overcome my upbringing’s deeply embedded shame associated with enjoying arbitrarily defined lowbrow media and children being childish, I think it’s fine that I was allowed largely unchecked access to technically age-inappropriate content. In my limited experience, content small children are too young for is also content they’re too young to understand, so it kind of just bounces off of them, and what actually ends up terrorizing them is unpredictable collages of impressions that strike out at them from content deemed perfectly child-friendly. I would not forbid a seven-year-old I was in charge of from seeing an MCU movie unless I had a reason to believe that specific child would not take it well. These are emotionally low-stakes bubblegum films. It will probably be easier to socialize with other kids if they have seen them.

But then, when I picture being in charge of a hypothetical child, I usually imagine this being the case because they are related to me, and the pupal stage in my family strongly resembles Wednesday Addams. ALL children love death and violence, though, right?? This isn’t a joke point. I know it looks like a joke point.

The MCU thing seems especially weird in light of the article’s particular focus on Spider-Man, which is the kiddie line of the MCU, even if they refused to waver from their usual formula enough to get a lower rating. Though I am more inclined to describe it as “preying on the young” than “child-friendly”.

(MCU movies are increasingly dubious propaganda, but I would not judge them in front of a child who wanted to watch them for that reason, just in case this led to them partaking of them without me the second they were old enough to and then they grew up to run a blog about them while our relationship suffered because they didn’t feel like it was safe to talk to me about their interests…Mom.)

I tried to overcome the philosophy of letting anyone read anything while compiling this handful of mostly-newish superhero recs for the road that anyone can read. (Handily, I have been in spitting distance of being hired as a comic shop clerk enough to have thought about it before):

For actual children:

Marvel Adventures Spider-Man (the new one is reminiscent of ITSV, the old one is more like 616) any DC/Archie crossover, Archie’s Superteens The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (for bookish children who think they’re too good for comics and adults afraid of the kid’s section) Teen Titans Go (even if you hate the show) Superman Smashes the Klan

For teens:

Ms. Marvel Young Avengers (volume 2) Unbelievable Gwenpool Batman: Gotham Adventures Teen Titans Go (the tie-in comic based off the old show was also called this)

Here are a bunch of relevant C. S. Lewis quotes.

[maxwell-grant]

Jumping off from my previous question/suggestion, might I please ask if there are any superheroes you think would make fine Pulp Villains and any Supervillains you think would make convincing Pulp Heroes?

I'm gonna go ahead and remark that I'd personally suggest to anyone who's trying to create pulp characters inspired by superheroes (which would be probably about 90% of you who may want to do that sort of thing) to flip the script around a little. As in, don't try to create pulp analogues to the Justice League/Avengers upfront, but play around with some of the lesser-known icons and filter those through your idea of what “pulp” means (which is gonna be quite different than my own or anyone else’s). 

I’m not gonna really mention characters I’ve already talked about before like Vandal Savage or Namor, instead I’ll pick new ones and see what can be highlighted about them.

Regarding “Superheroes who could make fine/convincing Pulp Villains”, even though he’s a character I've read basically nothing on, Martian Manhunter definitely leaped out to me as an obvious option. He’s a Sci-Fi Superman who takes the first half of the name to an extreme that borders on comical, except he’s not a square-jawed white man, he’s a 1.000 year old green alien from Mars with shapeshifting powers who can look as monstrous as the artist desires. He’s the product of an advanced civilization and genetic modification, and on top of the Flying Brick powerset and shapeshifting, he also has incredibly powerful and extensive telepathic abilities, he can become invisible, phaze through matter, use telekinesis and other weird abilities. A lot of pulp stories closer to sci-fi were based around the idea of taking one of these abilities and extrapolating horrific consequences for them, and J’onn has those by the dozens. He also has an extremely mundane weakness that would allow him to be beaten by Macready with a blowtorch if that’s where the story ended.

He was also a law enforcement officer from Mars who became a police detective and it’s even right there in his name, and again, I have never read anything he’s in (I should probably pick the Orlando mini), I know he’s for all intents and purposes a generally nice man who tends to job a lot in crossovers and cartoons, but the idea of taking all those great vast and horrifying alien powers, combining all of them into a single character who also happens to be the last survivor of a doomed planet (and one who actually lived through it’s collapse), and then making that character a former cop trying to resume his work on Earth? 

That is a Pulp Supervillain begging to happen, and a particularly horrifying one at that. And hey, speaking of The Thing-

Now, Plastic Man’s potential for horror has already been explored quite a bit in some of the darker DC continuities like Injustice and DCeased, and it’s quite funny seeing a lot of these turn Plastic Man into The Thing because there were quite a handful of Wold Newton pages that ran with the idea that Macready from the original story was Doc Savage, and that the secret chemicals that Eel O’Brian was hit by that gave him his powers were actually samples of The Thing contained in one of Savage’s labs. Regardless, the idea of a former street crook suddenly gaining bizarre shapeshifting abilities that allow him to reign terror on his gangster associates could make for a great premise as a pulp crime story that veers into horror as the gangsters gradually figure out what is Eel O’Brian’s deal, and then the story can take a more tragic turn.

The thing about Jack Cole’s Plastic Man that modern takes on the character neglect is that, while Plas was a lively roguish anti-hero (arguably the first of it’s kind in comics), he’s still for intents and purposes “the straight man” (HA, right, Plastic Man being “straight”). He’s the relatively sane hero who plays off Woozy’s wackier misadventures and the imaginative madness that Jack Cole paints his adventures with, and it makes for an interesting contrast considering Plastic Man is already a weird character, having to ramp up the strangeness of the world around him so that he still remains the sane man. There are ways to twist this into something quite horrifying, even tragic for Plastic Man as he either struggles to maintain coherency, or embraces the shifting chaos the world’s spiraling into for better or worse (and definitely for the worse towards those on the receiving end of his vengeance, or even his humor).

Now, onto the flipside, regarding Supervillains that could become Pulp Heroes -

Normally I’d not mention the Batman villains here, because I already have a lot to talk about in regards to them as is, they comprise some of my favorite comic characters, but I pretty much have to make an exception for Two-Face in this topic, as not only a pretty obvious option but one with even case studies to prove it, as not only do we have The Black Bat, a 1930s costumed pulp hero with an identical origin story and several other conceptual overlaps with Batman, as well as The Whisperer, a young hotshot police commissioner who dresses up as a disfigured vigilante to kill criminals without consequence (and who’s somehow less of a maniacal asshole in his secret identity than in his regular one), but it turns out that there actually was a 1910s pulp hero called The Two-Faced Man:

Crewe was created by “Varick Vanardy,” the pseudonym of Frederic van Rensselaer Dey (Nick Carter, Doctor Quartz), and appeared in three short stories and two novels and short story collections from 1914 to 1919, beginning with “That Man Crew” (The Cavalier, Jan. 24, 1914). 

Crewe is “The Two-Faced Man.” 

He is in his forties and has gray hair and a “sharply cut and handsome profile—until one caught a view of the other side of his face and saw the almost hideous blemish that nearly covered it, and which graduated in corrugated irregularity from a delicate pink to repulsive purple.” 

Crewe is two-faced in another way. Crewe is a saloon owner in below Washington Square. But he has another identity: Birge Moreau, portraitist and socialite hanger-on. Crewe uses both his identities to solve crimes as an amateur detective.

The only person to know about both of Crewe’s identities is a police inspector who is also Crewe’s friend and who Crewe helps in pressing cases - The Encyclopedia of Pulp Heores by Jess Nevins

And speaking of obvious picks for Supervillains turned Pulp Heroes,

Assuming I even need to make a case for Kraven the Hunter other than just presenting this cropped panel from Squirrel Girl and in particular the art painted on the Kra-Van, or even just telling you to read Squirrel Girl and it’s take on “The Unhuntable Sergei” (I had no idea most of the people saying “Kraven’s arc in Squirrel Girl is as good if not better than Kraven’s Last Hunt” weren’t actually joking in the slightest and I speak as someone who has Kraven among their absolute favorite Marvel characters, it had no right being that good), I’m going to quote the brilliant Rogue’s Review from The Mindless Ones that lays down in painstaking detail why Kraven could make a killer protagonist in that horrifically over-the-top pulp fashion

One thing that strikes me writing this, is how well Kraven could hold his own comic. There’s always room for a book spotlighting a ruthless, hardcore, gentleman bastard, and Kraven’s raison d’etre makes him supremely versatile, so well suited to any genre, any environment. It’s odd that more writers haven’t jumped on the fact that in a universe where off-world travel is possible – indeed, common – a hunter like Kraven would have a field day. 

I can just imagine the opening scene – herds of weird cthuloid bat creatures grazing in the gloomy green nitrogen fields, bathed in lethal, bone splintering fog, when, suddenly, LIGHT! from above and an unholy bellowing: “CTHGRGN fthgrgnARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHGN!”

They look up in fear and then they start to run – ploughing into and over each other, tentacles flailing, as from the space-ship’s docking bay Kraven silently plummets, barely dressed for the cold, a glowing knife smothered in elder signs jammed between his teeth. 

You should have seen him one night previous, sipping alien tokay around the Captain’s table with the other guests, discussing the morning’s hunt; and the way he insulted the Skrull dignitary by forgetting himself and accidentally sporting his favourite piece of formal wear: his boiling unstable dinner-jacket of many colours, fashioned from the hide of one of the Ambassador’s super kinsmen.

Whoops!

Midway through Kraven explaining how the best way to irreparably damage a symbiote is to wait until its bonded with you and then seriously maim yourself, the Skrull decided it might be a good idea to simmer down, while his beautiful Inhuman lover hung on every word.

The deeper I get into this the more convinced I am that the MU’s hunter-killer extraordinaire wouldn’t limit himself to bloody planet Earth. And neither would he limit himself to this dimension, or universe or timeline. The guy’d be just as at home leaping, sword raised, onto the back of a T-Rex in the Savage Land, as he would be ploughing through werewolves in the graveyards of Arkham or tracking a howling Demon across Mephistopheles’ realm. 

He’d work perfectly in all these environments because he has a damn good reason to be casting a bloody swathe through them: wherever there’s big game, you’ll find Kraven.

The next choice I guess is an oddball, but not that much of an oddball if you know already what is my main frame of reference towards Marvel

I don’t think people appreciate enough that the main reason Shuma-Gorath has anything resembling a fanbase has nothing whatsoever to do with the comics he was in, but entirely because, when Capcom designers had a list of Marvel characters to pick from to work on Marvel Super Heroes, they took a look at the diet Cthulhu and went “gimme THAT one”, and then went all-in in giving the alien squid monster a funky personality along with a great stage and music and animations and all that great fighting game character stuff, and now he’s maybe the most popular Dr Strange villain along with Dormammu and Mordo, despite having ZERO film appearences or major showings in comic sagas.

Capcom's designers redefined Shuma-Gorath from a nebulous cosmic evil into a comically smug cartoon bastard who can rant about devouring all dimensions and souls horrifically while also cracking poses and zingers like “How do you expect to win a fight with only two arms?” and having dinners with Dhalsim or hosting Japanese game shows in his endings, and it kills me that none of this ever made it’s way into any depictions of the character outside of MvC. 

So that’s kinda what I’d go with. I’d take Capcom’s Shuma-Gorath, depower him a bit obviously from his canonical power, and run with the premise of his MvC3 ending where he decides that, well, if he's the unlikely savior of this pathetic planet and these wretched human dogs like him so much, and he’s clearly having a much better time here among them than he ever had drifting among the stars cealessly consuming life, then maybe he can take a break from all that eldritch business and keep up hosting the Super Monster Awesome Hour and maybe fight whatever PITIFUL villains think can take HIS planet. I mean, he’ll probably still end up destroying the planet by the end, but why not give this hero business a try?

Just until he gets his full powers back of course. 

I mean you can’t deny he DOES look pretty good in that bowtie, surely The Great Shuma-Gorath wouldn’t be so unmerciful as to deny these vile wastes of flesh something good to look at in their brief and miserable lives.

[djhedy]

what is canon and should we respect it (a not-essay on aftg fandom)

i want to write an *entire* essay on this but i am between meds right now so exhausted and suffering a HEAT WAVE (uk?? why! we are normally so temperate) and also there's always a risk of sounding patronising when trying to put your opinions/experience across, so i'll try to write briefly and wotnot

what is canon:

"the material accepted as officially part of the story in an individual universe of that story" or, as we'd probably all put it "wot the author wrote"

why this matters, and why the author matters - our characters wouldn't exist without them

beyond a basic respect for the author, which i would define as like not being a bitch to them (because every human being has feelings, and this is something easily forgotten on the internet), we land on the question "should we respect canon"

well... maybe?

it sort of depends why you're here. the experience of literature/art can be defined a few ways: what the author intended, what the reader experiences, the impact on society.

what nora intended: if you care, she's written a lot of extra content on tumblr. but given that the majority of people who read the books probably won't care enough to find the extra content, this isn't canon. it isn't canon because it isn't in the books of the story. calling it canon is gatekeeping. but it's SUPER FUN and i enjoy seeing what nora's interpretation of her own characters are. thanks nora we luv u.

the impact on society: people get SO UPSET about this question. and it's a reasonable question for sure. art does impact society and vice versa. i just kind of don't think this is the big deal you think it is. people are always hunting for signs of homophobia, sexism, transphobia etc in fandom works. and like... sure, you can do that if you'll enjoy it. this essay isn't really about this, and i don't want to ramble. but aftg is an indie publication. its impact is so insubstantial. maybe chill out. the people who are like AARON IS HOMOPHOBIC BUT ANDREW THE MURDERER IS UWU or, opposite, SETH DESERVED REDEMPTION AND MATT IS ABLEIST - my guys it's a book. these characters are flawed. literature isn't meant to be a pinnacle of morals (unless... it is) and we're supposed to love these characters because they work through their flaws and settle into who they are. are they still dicks at the end? sure! it's fun. not everything has to be light and perfect. and you'll have more fun with art if you stop hunting for homophobes in the fandom of an independent publication with a few thousand readers. that's not how to succeed at the gay agenda. we're on it, i promise.

WHAT THE READER EXPERIENCES: this is the big one! you know when you read a book or watch a film and say "oh wow so it was about THIS, THIS was the important bit!" and someone disagrees? well, they're not wrong and you're not wrong. experience is a whole thing. what someone has experienced in life before they come to the art, what they experience during the art itself. art is a communication from the creator to the audience and that communication is subtle and will be different for *every* single person.

this will upset a lot of people, but it isn't canon that neil is demisexual. the label isn't mentioned once in the books. can it be inferred? ABSOLUTELY. he's demi in all of my fanfics because i personally love it. but nora mentioning it in extra content does not make it canon, in the same way that jkr telling everyone she saw dumbledore as gay after the books, does not make it canon. #theauthorisdead (but let's still be nice to them. ...unless you're jkr. fuck jkr.)

my point is just that canon doesn’t always matter. collectively most of us have decided neil is demi, which is important rep to a lot of people without rep. how sexy of us.

and experience matters. there will be people to whom it's important to write neil as not-very-demi. there will be people to whom it's important to write neil as super ace. be kind to each other.

i've decided i need to add another heading.

WHAT'S THE POINT OF FANFICTION?

to preserve canon? no, because... nora already did that. there's a huge amount of fun to be had trying to write neil and andrew as *accurately* as possible - but this *accuracy* will be different from person to person. because a work of literature is complicated and writing is hard and - individual experience. we've already gone through that. but like, have you ever tried to write andrew's dialogue accurately, the way he speaks like he's half-high half-shakespearean?? it's DIFFICULT. i have tried.

you know what's also fun? experimenting. what would their relationship be like if neil was an alcoholic. what if andrew liked wearing dresses. what if one of them cheated. what if matt died of a drug overdose.

in my head the point of fanfiction is EXPLORATION.

sometimes you're exploring the characters as accurately to your experience of them as possible, sometimes you're adding a new element in to see how they would react. let's be honest, that new element is usually something you're obsessed with in your own life. gender presentation? why people cheat? why people relapse? why relationships break down?

anyway, back to the list.

WHAT'S THE POINT OF FANFICTION?

to dick around and have a nice time? yes.

to work through your own identities/traumas/what have you? probably if you're anything like me and basically everyone i know in the fandom lol.

i think this is everything i want to say.

no wait i lied! final point.

if you've ever studied literature or philosophy the first things they teach you is to question *everything*. for example: what is fanfiction, what is canon, "we have to respect canon" do we??

if you've heard someone using the word "feminisation" to mean "make neil soft uwu", rather than repeating the word, question why it's being used here. what does feminise mean, what does soft mean. maybe you love the dark side to neil, maybe other people like the side of him that can heal.

there's nothing wrong with playing with sexual dynamics and relationship dynamics. sometimes you might be writing something cliched, homophobic, sexist - if you work out you are doing that, maybe stop it. on the other hand lots of couples *do* play out the dynamics of - trousers on in the bedroom, trousers on in the relationship. it's not homophobic to depict a homosexual relationship where one is subby and one is dommy. it exists. so like, chill a little.

and remember you are not always right and everyone is different?

man did i accidentally make this patronising?

woops.

lots of love hedy x

[captain-yeet]

A Beautiful Way To Die

Pairing: Heidi x Fem!Reader

Summary; When you thought of death or the possibility of you dying, you never seriously considered the possibility of dying at the hands of a gorgeous vampire.

Word count: 1.7k

Warnings: swearing, Heidi accidentally being creepy give her a break she's new to interacting with mortals and NOT eating them

Author's note: I've been wanting to write about Heidi for a while now because her character, even though we got so very little of it is fascinating (again thanks smeyer for making your side characters more interesting than the main ones). Also, am a simple gay.

Arising from your jet-lagged slumber, you'd hoped the beautiful blue, sunny skies you enjoyed yesterday would still be there. Sadly, your luck was out the window along with the welcoming warm weather.

You'd travelled to Italy with the intention of finally getting out into the world and having the freedom to explore and go your own path. Looking online for travel destinations was both a struggle and exciting! "Where should I go?" you wondered while scrolling through all your proposed options. None caught your eye until you landed on one listing;

Enjoy an enriching, quaint experience in the city of Volterra!

Nestled in the country hillsides of Italy, Volterra has a host of activities for you to enjoy, from historical site tours and many shopping locales, bars and more. From the Palazzo di Priori to the Volterra Cathedral... Come, and lose yourself in a city who's architecture is frozen in time.

You wandered the town, taking in the sites of all the old buildings around you. Even with the clouded sky above your head, Volterra was still a breathtaking place.

After an hour of wandering you came to a stop in the Palazzo, plopping down to sit by the large fountain. Hands resting under your chin, you entered a blissful, happy daydream.

Sighing dreamily, you let your eyes close.

You didn't notice the woman watching you attentively.

Heidi had been tasked with finding more humans to feed the guards and the masters themselves, her own hunger growing more ravenous by the day. She'd managed to lure in a few stray helpless tourists, but she still needed just a few more.

Striding through the streets with confidence, she halted as a sudden alluring scent hit her like wave. Mouth pooling with venomous saliva, she held in an instinctive growl. Where is that scent coming from? More so... who?

Following the mouthwatering aroma, she let herself be guided through the cobblestone streets of Volterra, the beast within her growling with glee as she got closer and closer to the human. Heidi had had many victims, many catches that she's reeled in from her "fishing" that have satisfied her, but none that made her yearn for blood more so than whoever it was that smelt like this.

She found herself in the Palazzo, her eyes desperately scanning every face, every scent of anyone who was nearby. She needed to know which it was.

Taking in another deep breath through her nose, the scent hit her again, and she found the poor helpless human.

A woman, who smelt better than anything she'd ever had before. Heidi sunk into the shadows of a nearby alley and studied you. You were plain, simple clothes and your eyes were currently closed as you enjoyed some blissful daydream. Her throat burned with thirst by this point, and as she watched you... something else began to grow.

Curiosity, was it? Heidi couldn't put her finger on it. Letting out an unnecessary huff, she decided to approach. I'll make sure to let Felix and Demetri know that this snack is strictly mine alone. Heidi put on her best smile and sauntered over to the human.

 “Pardon me, Miss?” a smooth voice called your attention away from your daydreaming. 

You jump in surprise as you turn your attention to the source of the voice that startled you. The owner of the voice was equally startling; her beauty blinded you, as she stood directly in front of the faint rays of sunlight you swore she was literally shining. The red dress she wore clung nicely to her body, an off the shoulder piece that only highlighted her best assets. Violet eyes gazed at you curiously, flicking from the art book open in your lap to your face. 

If angels were real, you’d believe this woman was one.

Unbeknownst to you, but the shock went both ways. Now that she was face-to-face with you, Heidi’s painted red lips had parted, an inaudible gasp to your ears escaping them.

A pull she had never experienced before took hold of the vampire. She needed to be near you - not just in the hunger sense, but more of a “If I am separated from this woman for any reason I will rip someone’s arm off” kind of way. At least, that is how Heidi would describe it.

Trying to shake herself out of her jumbled train of thought, she flashed you a quick smile, savouring the way it made your heart stutter. “I couldn’t help but notice you sitting here, are you new to Volterra?”

You nodded, gently smiling at the pretty woman. “I am, just passing through on my way to Venice.”

Heidi giggled. "Venice? That's quite the destination. And what brings you to Volterra?"

"I'm going on a tour here before I leave for Venice," you explained, none the wiser to the sudden shift in Heidi's demeanor. "I needed a place to stay since it was such a long trip, and..."

"What tour, if you don't mind my asking?"

You blinked. The woman was now very serious, the playful almost-flirtatious air about her gone. "In there, actually," you reply, pointing to the castle-like cathedral just behind her.

"I see."

Shit. Shit, shit, fuck! A string of curse words swam in Heidi's head in multiple languages. She can't go in there! But she's booked already, they'll be expecting her and we don't often get cancellations and if we do -

"I'm sorry, is there a problem?" You ask, growing more confused by the pretty lady as the seconds went by.

"Ah, hello Heidi."

You both turn your head to the rather tall man who had appeared at Heidi's side. He was quite the looker - very tall, heavy build and looked like he could break you in half with one hand.

"Felix, what are you doing here?" The woman - Heidi - says to her companion with an airy smile.

You didn't fail to notice the sharp look she had in her eyes.

"Just roaming about the city is all," the man replied coolly, a grin on his face that faltered into a curious smile when his gaze shifted to you. “And who might this lovely lady be? Perhaps a tour guest of the castle?”

With a laugh, Heidi linked her arm into Felix’s bicep, her fingernails digging deep into his arm. Under his breath Felix hissed and looked at Heidi with wide, confused eyes but she kept her airy exterior up perfectly.

 “Our tour bookings are full, Felix,” she said pointedly.

You looked on at the exchange feeling lost. There seemed to be some animosity between the two but why? You didn’t know. Maybe they were exes.

 “I see.” A thin, curt smile replaced his cocky grin from just moments ago. “Well then, I’ll meet up with you later. We’ll talk more then.” 

As the man left, Heidi left out a small huff and then turned back toward you, her brilliant smile bewitching you again. "Forgive him, he's always prowling during the tours for pretty young women to bore to death with his rants about his hobbies."

You giggled, grinning back at her. "I'll be sure to try and stay off his radar when tomorrow's tour begins."

Tomorrow's tour, Heidi's thoughts echoed your words. So she's coming in on that tour. Keeping her composure cool, she tilted her head down and gazed at you from beneath her eyelashes. Seduction tactics, only this time she was trying to steer her prey away. "Please beautiful, I want you to listen to me very closely."

Frowning at her sudden serious nature, you began to stand up from where you were perched, listening intently.

"Volterra has a lot to offer tourists, many fascinating sites to see. Our cathedral however... don't come. Please," she pleaded, her voice low and silky, "find somewhere else to go sight seeing."

You froze mid-way through putting away your art book. Her serious tone and the look in her eyes... something about the look in her eyes sent a chill down your spine. "I - I'll consider it."

The corner of Heidi's mouth twitched. She then straightened herself up and the deadly serious disposition left as quickly as it had appeared, the friendly seductress returning once more. "Well, I suppose all I can do is steer you away," she chuckled, more to herself.

You smiled politely back, your eyes flickering to your surroundings briefly. As you took in how the sky had gone much darker than it was before, you gasped. "Oh damn, it looks like its going to rain!"

Sure enough, as soon as the word "rain" left your lips, Heidi felt a droplet from the sky land on her cheek.

"I had better get going, it was really nice meeting you!" You began saying your farewells to the beautiful lady, pulling your backpack hastily up onto your back. You didn't want to get potentially drenched in the downpour.

"Wait!"

Ice gripped your wrist abruptly, sending a shock up your arm and making a surprised gasp escape your lips. The fuck?

Oh.

Heidi had grabbed your wrist. She must have some bad circulation, you vaguely thought to yourself.

"I never got your name." The word were desperate, to Heidi pitiful even.

"It's Y/N," you breathed, taken back by Heidi's behavior.

She let go of your wrist, a half smile appearing. "Y/N," she repeated, your name leaving her mouth - in your mind anyway - almost reverently. "Beautiful name, cara mia... anyway, we should head our separate ways! The rain is sure to stat pouring any moment now."

You hummed in agreement, internally trying to shake yourself out of the stupor you now found yourself in. God damn, this woman... help. She's pretty. So pretty. I am very gay.

"It was nice meeting you, Heidi. Maybe I'll see you around?" You offered with a hopeful smile, trying to shut out your internal screaming.

As you quickly walked away, Heidi carefully breathed in after holding her breath. The air stung her throat, your scent, your blood, making her moan wantonly.

She only hoped for two things; one, that she would get the pleasure of seeing your exquisite face again, and secondly and most importantly, that you would heed her warning not to come to the Volterra Cathedral tour tomorrow.

[hanijunk]

Alright boys, girls, and nonbinary folks of the world. It’s 5:36am (1/30 when I first started) as I decide to give up on my attempt to continue to focus on learning statistics, avoid studying for my two upcoming midterms, and put off my two actual essays for two different classes.

Instead we’re going into a dive about ✨ KazuFuuma ✨ . Is this me telling you you gotta ship it? No of course not, you’re entitled to your own ships! You don’t really gotta care about it as a ship. But I do want people to recognize it’s THERE canonically, and how disregarding it is extremely unfair to Kazuki as a character particularly. Also, I’m working on the assumption anyone clicking this at least knows the bare bones about what KazuFuuma (ex. You know they are a ship of Kazuki/Fuuma from Dolce, you know they are childhood friends, you know who Dolce is, you know about Honeyworks, etc.) I’ll be making references to specific things, but I won’t always go into heavy detail. Might just hope you know it or take my word for what it is, and go into analyzing it. Some I’ll put direct references to find, but some I’ll trust you can find it yourself. If you somehow read this MAMMOTH and want reference to a specific thing mentioned, hmu I can help you find it!!

Also I hate tumblr formatting sm if you legit wanna read this 7 page essay but hate tumblr format lmk I'll add it as a google doc link instead too. anYWHO

Before actually getting into the meat of things lemme preface some stuff.

Again it’s like almost 6am so this will be disorganized and very train of thought (and likely long due to the fact when I fly by the seat of my pants I’m known to get unnecessarily extensive). It’s definitely gonna be in large part why it’s important to recognize as a romantic relationship foundation and what about it shapes Kazuki’s character in particular. Maybe a bit of how it’s been built up and its general focus and implications. Dunno yet. We’ll see LMAOO

I say f*ck. Not a lot, just a handful of times. This ain’t something scholarly this is for my own enjoyment so if you don’t like that might not wanna read. And it’s not like spitefully I just curse a lot if you haven’t...read my tags before lol

Again this is through the lens of a Kazuki stan. Of COURSE I’m going to have some level of bias, but if anything that bias may help more than hurt because that means I become FIXATED and think a lot about Kazuki. Which plays into establishing just how important it is that Kazufuuma’s relationship is recognized, especially in a romantic light at this point. Lmfao. 

I’ll have a few more prefaces about the actual content below but to keep this from getting too long if you wanna read come below the cut owo

I have extremely limited knowledge of Japanese just taking a few classes in highschool (so like 3 yrs ago) and live in America. This means a lot of my knowledge is gathered through the english translations of the super duper incredible and lovely people in the Honeyworks fandom who provide translations (delaix and takanenene esp have provided so much for me being able to understand Dolce) and my own limited Japanese paired with Google Translate for things that remain untranslated.

This only will be drawing on information I have come in contact with and have access to and making assumptions based on that, most (if not all) of which is in the public domain. So things like the Dolce Manga Volumes released via Animate, exclusive 4komas, and Light Novels are out of my area for the most part (apart from again snippets of translations thanks to this fandom’s godlike and generous translators).

I will not be drawing on anything from the first Dolce album with the exception of Nade Nade. From a meta standpoint, I consider those songs as songs made as performance media as opposed to character explorations. Nade Nade is the exception because (1) it was released a whole year before the album and (2) you can tell it’s explicitly an exploration of Fuuma and Kazuki’s interpersonal relationship even if it’s in a slightly more performance based context than the songs that came out with the Dolce LNs. Easiest parallel I can make to show this is if you held Non-Fantasy, Yume Fanfare, and Samishigariya up against each other, you could tell the difference in intended audience and intended purpose the same way the Dolce 1st album, Nade Nade, and the songs of the LNs do respectively. Even if there is some basis to ground Kazufuuma, for the purposes of this essay I’ll be acting under the assumption the 1st album falls under the Non-Fantasy equivalent category.

THAT WAS A LOT OF PREFACING CONSIDERING LIKE 2 PPL WILL PROBABLY READ IT I just have a tendency to anytime I do anything analytical lay down ground acknowledgements for myself to work on just...cuz it makes me feel less guilty for any accidental misinformation even if I’m writing towards my future self to read lolll IM SORRY WITHOUT FURTHER TO DO HERE’S THE BRAIN DUMP

First let’s go ahead and establish why it needs to be recognized as an important relationship. Again, I’m a Kazuki stan. He’s my favorite character not only of Dolce but also of the entire Honeyworks series, and as much as I love him for reasons outside the ship, whether you like it or not Kazufuuma is an essential aspect of his character and narrative. Of course there’s the fact that him and Fuuma are childhood friends, so that’s going to in part define their characters and interactions with each other and those around them. They’re both going to be relevant to one another and important to one another’s stories to an even greater extent than the rest of the members of Dolce. But on Kazuki’s side at least, it’s an EXTREME amount. A running plotpoint in Dolce Diary is the sheer amount of dedication Kazuki has to Fuuma and how much his thoughts and decisions are influenced by Fuuma, whether it be how he feels happiest spending time with Fuuma, how he decided to get his piercing to represent he wanted to protect Fuuma, how he doesn’t want to dislike food so he can eat what Fuuma dislikes, etc. Not to mention running jokes about his borderline overprotectiveness and downright possessiveness of Fuuma, how proud he is when Fuuma gets praised, or that one 4koma that literally explicitly states he can read Fuuma’s mind when he thinks motherfucking ‘dirty thoughts’ about his childhood friend (Fuuma). I still don’t know what the fuck to make of that last bit. Genuinely. Or the fact it’s a fucking running joke. As in it’s not a one off. It’s been brought up multiple times. Kazuki what the fuck. 

That’s not to say that he doesn’t have character outside of Fuuma or he doesn’t interact with people other than Fuuma. He’s great friends with Sara, Girisha, and Kippei and is shown time and time again to have fun interactions with all of them, generally acting as the best support friend for every member of the group, not Fuuma alone. For instance how he helps Kippei with his self confidence issues or stays over at Sara’s to protect him from a cockroach (which he fails at lol). Nor is that to say all his interactions involving Fuuma focus solely on his devotion to Fuuma, especially in instances where the manga focuses on Dolce as a group dynamic (though even in that setting there are times where jokes about his devotion are thrown in). He’s kind, he’s stupid, he’s friendly, he’s an amazing character in his own right, and I love him for all those reasons. But that doesn’t change the fact a major part of his character and his character interactions are rooted in Fuuma, and arguably some of his most interesting, eccentric, and notable behaviors and traits revolve around Fuuma (again the mind reading for example).

Hell let’s take it one step further. If you look at the character bios of the Dolce members, you get everyone’s motives for being an idol and interests. Of them, Kazuki is the only one to have another character mentioned directly, not to mention that supporting Fuuma is explicitly stated to be his primary motive as to why he became an idol. Not even Fuuma’s sister is mentioned, though two arguments can be made for this. The first would be that Fuuma’s backstory about wanting to fulfill his dream for himself and his sister was decided later to explain Fuuma’s choice to crossdress though it can be argued it was intentionally done to leave it as a reveal at a later date, to which I would argue I don’t think this backstory was a choice in post. While Fuuma’s dedicated Dolce Diary extra exploring that backstory was released a little less than a year after Dolce was revealed, the preview to set up Fuuma’s backstory was actually the first thing released after the character bios on the Dolce Official Twitter page if you exclude a drawing of Dolce from Yamako. The second argument could be that information about his sister was intentionally withheld to set up the reveal when Fuuma’s extra released to explore it. However, going by that logic (which I do agree with), that would also mean that Fuuma’s inclusion and importance in Kazuki’s character bio also set up his dedicated extra, which I don’t think would be incorrect to assume considering what his actual extra turned out being.

Which brings me to the thing that makes it inexplicable to write off the romantic implications behind Kazufuuma: Kazuki’s dedicated Dolce Diary extra, Suki. I shipped Kazufuuma before even knowing of Suki, sure. But the fact that Suki even exists is a shock to me and drove into me the fact that Kazufuuma wasn’t just my own projection. Again, it’s not a surprise that Fuuma shapes Kazuki’s life. They’re childhood friends, of course they’re going to be important to each other. But this extra explicitly brought Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma under a direct spotlight. At first I was thinking oh, this extra was just to acknowledge the fact that Kazuki and Fuuma’s relationship can have romantic implications, but the end of it the conclusion that we got was that it didn’t matter what type of “like” he felt for Fuuma. Originally, I thought it wasn’t anything more than saying there are all types of like, and it doesn’t always need to be explicitly defined, but I appreciated the fact they were aware that they were writing Kazuki in a way that conveyed romantic implications. 

Then I thought about it because, again, I love Kazuki of course I’m going to think about his character extra, and realized...that’s not how these character extras have worked. There are only three character extras out as far as I know and have read: Fuuma, Kippei, and Kazuki. If we look at Fuuma and Kippei’s, each extra had a conclusion, sure, but they didn’t have a resolution. Rather, they were simply setting up explicitly what each character’s primary character arc and conflict were. Fuuma’s extra brought attention to the fact that he’s particularly a crossdressing idol by exploring the motives behind it. His choice to be a crossdressing idol is constantly under fire both by himself and the world around him. He’s not immune to those who consider his crossdressing strange, and a part of his story is both finding people who accept his decision to crossdress and to succeed for himself as a crossdressing idol. It’s an essential part of how we understand and define him as a character and it’s a central part of how he interacts with the world around him. For Kippei, it lays the severity of his insecurity under the spotlight and his journey and motives for improving himself. Again, this isn’t something isolated and resolved in the extra; his extreme insecurity and negativity is constantly affecting how he interacts with practically everyone from his fellow Dolce members to his fans despite the fact in all honesty? He’s fucking insanely talented in his own right, his own brother mentioning how smart he is and how he has amazing reflexes. For Kippei, his negativity is an essential part of how we understand and define him and central to how he interacts with the world as much as Fuuma’s decision to crossdress is to him.

Which brings us back to Kazuki, of course. In his dedicated extra, in the chapter that’s supposed to explore and establish and bring attention to an essential part of his character, the aspect of himself under investigation is how he feels about Fuuma. It’s not just how he behaves around Fuuma, it’s explicitly an exploration of his feelings, on top of the fact it’s explicitly an exploration about whether or not he likes Fuuma r o m a n t i c a l l y. Literally the conflict is spurred on by someone outright asking “Do you like him?” and having to clarify “I mean romantically.” What they decided to focus on for Kazuki’s character and emphasize and establish is that Kazuki’s like towards Fuuma toes the line between friendship and romance. His ambiguous feelings towards Fuuma (if we leave them inconclusive as Suki did) are just like Fuuma’s crossdressing and Kippei’s insecurity in the sense the weight of whatever those feelings may be are seen in how he interacts with the world around him and influences his behaviors. It would be another story if they introduced the potential and shut it down all within the extra, because then his central conflict would to me be less directly open to romantic potential and more simply about how his arc was meant to explore the dynamic of the behavior of an extremely dedicated best friend. The fact that he may be romantically attracted to Fuuma or may be only platonically dedicated to Fuuma is instead something that looms over Kazuki in the same way Fuuma’s decision to crossdress constantly looms over him. It’s what Dolce wanted to point to and say this is Kazuki’s central character conflict and central arc: exploring what type of feelings he has towards Fuuma. 

Sure, it can be argued that there’s only three Dolce Diary character extras, there’s not enough to be sure about that being the purpose of the extras unless we get the other two’s extras. First, at this point I honestly don’t know if or when they’re going to release an extra revolving around Sara and Girisha just because not only has it been over a year and a half since the latest Dolce Diary Character Extra (Kazuki’s) was released despite the gap between the first and latest Dolce Diary Character Extra (Fuuma’s and Kazuki’s) were within a year of release but also because the Dolce 4komas and comics they’ve been posting to Twitter have decreased (last one being over half a year ago) potentially due to them deciding to focus on releasing Dolce manga content through the purchasable volumes instead. (This is not particularly related to the Kazufuuma argument, just wanted to put out there my two cents on what Sara and Girisha’s extra/focal arc would be. Based on a large part of the Dolce Diary in conjuncture with Can’t an Idol Fall in Love, I’d argue Sara’s would be his journey to regain his passion for performing, and if it’s not that I’d say it’d be coming out of his self-imposed isolation and opening up to people again. As for Girisha, I have less of a concrete idea but I’m assuming it’d be something pertaining to how people often misconceive him whether it be in tandem with his determination, his optimism and sociability, or his stupidity/ability to ignore those misconceptions and work past them. But Girisha is treated like the comedic relief 90% of the time so I’m not entirely sure, but his primary conflict is definitely rooted in misconceptions of him being his roadblock imo. #MoreGirishaContentPlz) That being said, I personally feel like the three are already enough evidence, especially considering it would be honestly even more cruel for Kazuki’s character-centric extra to be focusing on something that wasn’t essential to his character and character arc, anyway. And though it’s not explicitly stated that these chapters are extras exploring a central character, you can kind of tell based on how they are (to my knowledge) the only Dolce Diary updates with cover/title cards each which include their focal character front and center. So working off that fact, the Kazuki-centric chapter established that a pillar to his narrative was his feelings towards Fuuma and that those feelings are still open to romantic potential. 

But if you follow me, this is why up until Can’t an Idol Fall in Love With Another Idol’s release, I was terrified of them writing that off. I would have been ok if it was just an arc that was given attention then continued to actively work in the background, as all the character arcs have been over all of Dolce’s content. The fact that they might be giving Fuuma a love interest and giving Fuuma a love arc while Kazuki’s feelings were still up in the air and were still the primary highlighted narrative for him would have been fucking scuffed. To me, it would be like… why would they make him so Fuuma-centric to the point that even his dedicated chapter was not just focused on Fuuma but focused on the ambiguity and potential of him having romantic feelings for Fuuma, yet reduce him to being Fuuma's designated right-hand man. Don’t get me wrong, friendships are just as important as romantic relationships. But again, rather than conclude Kazuki’s answer in Suki to be that his feelings were of friendship, they left it open ended and allow audience members to be actively aware that Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma still had potential to be romantically coded. It would just be so weird to quickly close off that narrative by giving Fuuma a love interest as opposed to letting Kazuki conclude it himself. It would be fucking beyond frustrating for me, at least Eventually, I kept trying to drive my hopes that they would explore Kazuki’s narrative at all down to the ground because it was a Fuuma-centric novel; maybe if anything they’d explore those feelings in his own novel after the fact. But then they kept having little drops here and there of Kazuki being even the slightest bit relevant and I’d go back to questioning “Are??? They??? Is this on purpose??? Do they know what they’re doing or are they just doing this because Kazuki’s just so important to Fuuma as his best friend that he’s there as his right-hand I genuinely can’t tell???” And um. Welp.

Safe to say Can’t An Idol Fall in Love sold me on the fact that they know what they’re doing LOL. And to anyone who thinks that Kazuki’s feelings can still be read as ambiguous in CAIFILWAI as opposed to explicitly romantic - whether it be due to a fear they may pull the “I like him as a friend” card or due to the disbelief that they have an explicit mlm main character in the Honeyworks series - I’d like to cover any bases that may make you think this way. If you think it’s just Kazuki acting like a protective friend, why do you think he calls Yui a rival? If you’ve only seen the MV and think it’s ambiguous or can be taken as the "likfe" for friend, then does that mean you think Yui’s feelings toward Fuuma are also ambiguous or as a friend? With the way Yui responds, she is trying to rival Kazuki’s feelings towards Fuuma. She and Kazuki recognize whatever feeling it is that they hold towards Fuuma, both of their feelings are the same type. I don’t think most people would argue that Yui’s confession about Fuuma was one of pure respect and friendship. Plus, if anything I’d argue of the three characters in the MV, Fuuma is the one whose feelings are left the most ambiguous despite him being the central character. It’s heavily implied that he may be forming feelings for Yui, but nowhere is it established either in the song or in the MV, especially if you compare it to Kazuki and Yui’s declarations or if you compare it to Sara’s feelings for Uru in Can’t An Idol Fall in Love. Fuuma’s romantic narrative here is trying to figure out how he feels for Yui, while for Kazuki and Yui they’ve established a rivalry because they both have mutually established they like Fuuma romantically.

If the MV isn’t enough for you and Suki isn’t enough for you for...some reason…??? You can check out the snippets of the light novel which the wonderful takanenene translated: one which revisits the conflict set up in Suki and one that covers the confession scene in the MV in more detail. If the fact that the conflict set up in Suki (aka the lurking feeling of not knowing if all he felt for Fuuma was only platonic or more than platonic) was specifically reestablished in the LN for anyone who didn’t keep up with Dolce Diary didn’t tip you off that it was something important, his behavior in the confession scene as depicted by the LN definitely should have. He’s possessive about his spot by Fuuma’s side. He doesn’t want that spot to be taken by anyone else. Even if he knows that they can help Fuuma, he wants it to be him. And this line: “Kazuki then trails off his words, quietly saying ‘That’s why…’ and then gave Yui a slightly painful smile, his cheeks turning red,” before he declares Yui a rival and states he likes Fuuma. If you can tell me you read that line and are still on the fence about Kazuki’s “like” towards Fuuma being romantic, please message me and I will see how I can get through to you. Like it wasn’t even just a romantically coded confession. It’s just a romantic confession. That “like” is romantic. And I’m so proud that he’s not only come to understand for himself how he feels, but that he’s confident enough to ask the person he sees as a romantic rival to speak in private and not only clarify her feelings for Fuuma but before she can even do that firmly establishes that he loves Fuuma with conviction. Kazuki my boy I’m so proud of you. *sniffs*

And that’s it for establishing Kazufuuma as at least canonically one-sidedly canon and why there’s not only no reason to deny it but also why denying it is a fucking disrespectful move towards Kazuki. He’s a character, sure, but that doesn’t change the fact you shouldn’t write off his struggle to come to be convicted enough to say it out loud. This has been something weighing on him at least a year, if not more (all I know is it started when both he and Fuuma were in some year in middle school). And as a character in a piece of media, I’ve been saying this the entire time, but brushing it off as non-romantic is literally chucking a fucking pillar of his character’s story into the gutter. And to those who may be saying Kazuki’s confession came out of nowhere and is pandering reread this entire fucking essay again I dare you to do it and tell me to my face it’s pandering. Again. Writing off the buildup as pandering is disrespectful to him, disrespectful to his character and narrative, and disrespectful to the wonderful people who have been creating Dolce so diligently and have crafted this narrative for us. Saying his “supposed feelings” and “ambiguous confession” is pandering is like saying Fuuma’s crossdressing is pandering which. If you say either of those I will find you and I will shank you in the fucking gut. Even if you’re not fully into Dolce, recognize these characters are actually very well developed and executed amazingly, as per every Honeyworks character that has come to exist. I don’t blame you if you weren’t aware of the weight of Kazufuuma, but now that you read this I hope you are. That’s mainly what I needed to get out there, but as follows will be me more exploring how Kazufuuma has been built up and generally waving my hand off at where it may be going. If you want you can dip, thanks for reading up to here because I know I repeated a lot because it’s just. So important to drill into your head and has been something I’ve been hung up about constantly. LOL

As for where exactly they’re taking it from this point on, I honestly don’t know. In all honesty, I didn’t even expect them to take it the direction they did. But honestly, I think the direction they went with it is really interesting and better than I could have imagined, in my opinion at least. Honeyworks never ceases to amaze me with their storytelling and narrative choices, and I don’t think there’s any that stand out to me as being severely questionable that they haven’t reapproached at some point down the line. And, again, I think they’re treating this with a lot of care and deserved respect. So I’m just gonna be gushing about how smart they set it up and how smart they’ve been executing it and maybe my own hopes on the direction it could go.

Whether they make Kazufuuma reciprocated I have no real clue or bearings, but to me my gut reaction is they will. Of course, I’m biased, but again if you trace things all the way back to 2018 and step through Dolce’s content and growth from there, I’d say even if they didn’t know if they could execute it like this and see it to fruition, I’d argue that Kazufuuma has been at least heavily implied since the beginning as a relationship they wanted to explore from both sides of the relationship. Obviously I brought up Kazuki’s character bio already, but if you look at the *goes to count* 5th Dolce Diary update already has a joke jabbing at the fact that Kazuki is technically Fuuma’s type (and the way Kippei and Kazuki excitedly react is so cute). The fifth update. And as stated before there are tons of Kazufuuma moments in Dolce Diary, whether it’s played for comedic effect or played straight (and this is post Suki but oh my god I’ve said it before I’ll say it again get yourself someone who looks at you the way Kazuki looks at Fuuma oh my jesus). But song-wise, I mentioned the one Dolce album song I would bring up is Nade Nade and this is where it comes! 

Not only is Nade Nade specifically focused on Kazuki and Fuuma’s relationship as opposed to the whole of Dolce despite being the first song, it included the setup/preview of the Fuuma-centric extra prior to the full release of the Fuuma-centric extra itself and was released early as fuck. Literally between the 6th and 7th update to Dolce Diary. Sure, it could be to isolate them as a duo for marketing purposes (they’re very often the two promoted idols together if the whole of the group aren’t included), but the way it’s established as a perspective song as opposed to a general idol duet is what fascinates me. Anyone who didn’t know about Dolce prior and only followed Honeyworks for music would be first introduced to these characters through this song alone, and maybe this is where my Kazufuuma bias comes from but I was one of those people LOL. I thought it was just a cute one-off relationship that they had set up for the purpose of a song and that it was an implied friends-to-lovers story that would never get a conclusion. Also I mistakenly thought Fuuma was a girl oop-. In the full context of Dolce, this song in part helped establish Fuuma and Kazuki more solidly as a unique duo out of all of Dolce, but it also specifically explored through Fuuma’s eyes just how much Fuuma recognizes and appreciates the unwavering support Kazuki gives him to follow his dreams as he wishes. For Fuuma, he loves Kazuki too, though whether it holds any romantic potential in the same way Kazuki loves him has never been explored to nearly the same extent. But Fuuma appreciates how Kazuki’s remained by his side and does everything he can to support him, so Nade Nade explores how his way of expressing his love and thankfulness to Kazuki is by never saying that he needs Kazuki by his side. He’s glad Kazuki’s always been there for him, and his reciprocation takes on the form of being ready to unwaveringly support Kazuki and not ask for more than he already has, even if it meant Kazuki would be leaving his side, despite the fact that he really does wish they could remain together forever just as Kazuki does. The one point he lets himself say something vaguely close to always wanting to stay together, he gets a surprised expression out of Kazuki and says an ambiguous “suki dayo.” Of course, this it much less romantically coded than what we get from Kazuki in Suki and CAIFILWAI, but there is an interesting emphasis put on it nonetheless. Keep in mind, this is all established through the song, which released long before not only Fuuma’s character-centric extra released but also Kazuki’s character-centric extra released, so there is at least a substantial setup for Fuuma’s feelings towards Kazuki’s being strong as well and possibly grow to be reciprocated one day.

I think for me the most fascinating part about Nade Nade is how they tied it back around to Can’t An Idol Fall In Love with Another Idol. Again, without remembering Nade Nade, I still thought CAIFILWAI was brilliantly explored and executed, even if some people would have preferred no love triangle. But honestly, revisiting Nade Nade makes me trust even more the direction they’re taking with this. Whether or not they make Kazufuuma canon mutually (which. Even if they for some inexplicable reason didn’t I’m going down with this ship.), I’m sure they’re putting a lot of thought into the story, because the last bit of Nade Nade directly parallels the misunderstanding that arose from Fuuma mishearing the Kazuki and Yui. Fuuma is resolved to support Kazuki in any area he’s given the chance, and that explicitly includes if Kazuki had some girl he liked, which is what he assumes is going on. The fact that they tied this back around in the form of a misunderstanding was really really smart and Honeyworks is always so good at parallels and references back to their older songs, but for some reason I didn’t expect this. I don’t know how to say why, but the fact that the song that started it all, kicked off both Dolce and Kazufuuma, was directly referenced both visually in the MV with a cameo at the start and narratively despite the central dynamic being predominantly explored in this story in particular was that of Fuuma and another potential love interest and involves said potential love interest for some reason makes me think that (sorry Yui) this is all planned out for Kazufuuma in the grand scheme of things. That being said, I don’t know if me thinking it was planned all along is just me with shipper goggles, but the idea it’s come full circle nearly 3 years later is not shipper goggles and a very very well done parallel in my opinion, whether this trajectory was their plan for Kazufuuma from the beginning or not. Just wanted to gush about that some more. 

There’s more I could go into especially if I went into specific details about interactions or specific implications established in Honeyworks' Dolce content about different characters that would be fascinating to explore in relation to and under the lens of Kazufuuma, but I think this is uh...plenty long enough. Plus, I doubt you'll stop seeing Kazufuuma posts from me so those ideas will probably just be miniposts or somethin.

Back to the overarching point of this segment, idk what they’ll do with this story in the end, but do I think Kazufuuma will canon? I’m used to looking at ships that aren’t explicitly apparent with a sliver of skepticism, but all things considered (as I stated before) yeah. I don’t see reason why they wouldn’t now that they’ve explicitly identified there is a romantic dimension to it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Like to me, the setup isn’t something that would be written off as unrequited? And this doesn’t have to play into why I don’t think it will canon, my personal opinion on the Fuuyui relationship (again albeit through the lens of a hard Kazufuuma shipper lmao) has it’s own merits and is really cute, I find it cute in the way I found Koyuhina cute. I personally never really shipped Koyuhina, and especially since they slipped Kotarou into Ima Suki Ni Naru I was more curious about who this kid was and how he played into things I didn’t really see Koyuhina as something that would come to fruition. Similarly, there’s more importance in the overall sense on Kazuki than there is Yui (considering he’s one of the 5 original and focal members of this generation of idols, this would be natural), as well as the fact there’s just way more foundation and exploration in Fuuma and Kazuki’s relationship than there is Fuuma and Yui. As for how much of a balance there is inside the LN itself, the fact that they seem to have spent a substantial amount relaying the foundation of Fuuma and Kazuki’s relationship and re-exploring it (at least in Kazuki’s perspective) at all on top of how much content there is covering their relationship prior to the LN ever since Dolce’s origin just feels like that relationship holds more weight. Pretty much Kazufuuma feels more established as a priority in general. The way I personally hope Fuuyui plays out is whether they wind up holding mutual feelings or not or whether Fuuma doesn’t feel that way towards Yui is they get a relationship akin to Kotarou and Arisa. Albeit, Kotarou and Arisa never viewed each other in a romantic light, but they had mutual respect and solidarity. That’s the type of friendship I hope comes out of Fuyui. And considering there hasn’t been a break-up in any Honeyworks’ canon relationships (nor do I expect there to be… they’re all perfect for each other LMAO) it would actually be interesting if Fuuyui get together but don’t endgame and Kazufuuma is established as the inseparable endgame after some realization or another, though I don’t expect them to go that route nor do I know if that’d be the best way to go about it anyway. Also final point, Honeyworks seems to have a thing for childhood friends trope anyway soooooo owo All in all, don’t know where they’re taking it, just excited to see where it goes. 

TL;DR of this *counts* 7 page essay, stan Kazufuuma. Not gonna proof this. Maybe I’ll edit and repost but yall are getting a confusing clusterfuck of ramblings over 2-3 hr periods of me writing across 3 different days at around 5am each day. Uh. If you got this far like and subscribe and-- jk plz reply to this mammoth anywhere you see fit or tell me if you have stuffs to add or counter or whatnot I like hearing people talk about Kazufuuma ;w; I am Kazuki and Kazufuuma brainrot can you tell after reading this? No? Lemme just remind you I’m K--

[nextstopparis]

fic tag game - thnk u for thinking of me @southfarthing 🥺❤️❤️

how many works do you have on ao3?

29..... its rlly bothering me i need to get one more up gbjjhbhb

what's your total ao3 word count?

130,758 (???? WHAT???? I DONT THINK IVE EVEN SAID THIS MANY WORDS IN THE LAST TWO YRS WTF)

how many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

ive only written for merlin:)

what are your top five fics by kudos?

1. all the things we did not become, 2.08 fix it fic for glompfest

2. he won't tell you that he loves you (but he loves you), a lil fluff for merthur week 2020

3. frozen deep blue (you painted me golden), angsty arthur returns fic bc i sort of got annoyed by the idea that the only issues they would encounter would be arthur adjusting to the modern world.

4. how it was supposed to be, like pre s4 fic (except uthers already dead lol) based on a tsoa scene that i sob over every time.

5. build a house in paradise, modern au slice of life fic full of domesticity.

do you respond to comments? why or why not?

yes i do! it might take a WHILE though bc im just. bad at things. idk i get stressed over saying thank you to strangers online ok leave me alone. but yes id o eventually. (at least i have thus far)

what's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

omg. OMG WAIT LOL i was gonna say none bc i dont tend to do angsty endings BUT I DO HAVE ONE!!! (well two, but thisis the angstier one i think): tell me why this has to end is pretty angsty although it does. like. end as the show did lol. well anyway. omg i completely forgot abt that fic:/

do you write crossovers? if so, what is the craziest one you've written?

i dont write crossovers

have you ever received hate on a fic?

errr not that ive been made aware of lol.

do you write smut? if so, what kind?

i do not write smut.. the closest ive gotten is alluding to it skdjncjsnc

have you ever had a fic stolen?

lol why would anyone want to steal my fic skjdncskjncs but no

have you ever had a fic translated?

nah

have you ever co-written a fic before?

NO BUT ID LIKE TO ONE DAY i think itd be really cool:(

what's your all time favourite ship?

well hm. *looks at entire blog dedicated to merthur and like 600 bookmarked fics also about them* ummm,,,, thats a really hard question aha...

whats a WIP that you want to finish but dont think you ever will?

is it a wip if its still just an idea that i havent actually written anything for??? its based on gold rush by taylor swift (ohmygod im so annoying) and i REALLY like the idea but i think im just too scared to start it bc like. it deserves better than me u know sjdcnksdjnksnc ugh.

what are your writing strengths?

my english teacher in hs once told me that im good with voice which is great for writing crack i think

what are your writing weaknesses?

dialogue, plotting, tenses really kick my ass too bc i can never decide if i want to do it in the present or the past. like wtf

what are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

errrr.... i dont really have that much of an opinion on it? it would be nice to understand what im reading though,,

what was the first fandom you wrote for?

m...merlin..

whats your favourite fic you've written?

invent the future. its the longest thing ive written which already makes it something im really proud of, but i also just like the ideas i explored in it about forgiveness and justice and the nature of destiny and stuff (wowzers im sort of so-fist-o-kate-id huh). it started out as a single sentence and then accidentally became a pendragon siblings relationship repair fic which. i mean. whatever lol. also its the first merwenthur fic ive written which im pleased abt bc i LOVE THEM. and OKAY. so maybe its also just 60k words of an arthur character study. GOSH leave me alone...

tagging: @shana-rosee , @witchmd13 , and @queerofthedagger (if you want ofc!!)