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corviiids · 1 month

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sparknotes for chapter 9 of as you like it because a very kind commenter asked for a breakdown and if theres one thing im good at it's breaking down

(spoilers for the fic obviously)

tihs chapter gave me so much trouble. i sat on it for so long i literally hated it by the time i posted it but im starting to forgive it now. it was, as ive said, originally way longer, and the next part of the fic was supposed to be the second half of this one... but it was starting to get absurd and i realised that neither part would have the weight i needed them to have if they were lumped in together. (with some relief, honestly, because i kind of had wanted them to be separate initially but didn't think they'd be long enough. i dont know myself very well.) anyway, the next chapter should be a bit of a doozy now although hopefully not SO absurdly long.

this chapter picks up where the previous cliff hung off, which is to say, after the 'shadow' akechi reveals that he's actually just the real ass guy. akechi in the palace what will he do. the chapter doesn't immediately kick off with ren's reaction though and that is because ren is the most repressed man alive and does not know how he feels about it.

so, akechi disguised himself to enter his palace, which is significant for a few reasons:

1. he's disguised as himself

which i think is ironic in a fun way, but it's also just a very basic nod to the fact that akechi pivots between which of his personae is his default. this isn't necessarily super meaningful, but he does later refer to the black mask suit as

a costume, instead of an outfit. i mean, don't read into it too much, he's just talking, but i did think that probably points to how he feels about his appearance generally.

2. more importantly, his disguise involves taking off his mask.

so he's disguised, yes, and he's disguised as himself, yes, but that disguise is a literal unmasking, which is also kind of ironic. in presenting himself this way he has literally and figuratively made himself vulnerable. they're inside his heart, and the entire time he's in the palace, he is exposed... again both literally and figuratively because he also starts sharing more with ren than he ever has. look, i just think it's fun to have a character who has so many layers that he has to lie so hard that he becomes himself again.

i only want to point this out because (this is also part of larger meta about mona lol) akechi knew about the metaverse, but there is no way to intuit the method of stealing hearts without guidance. it's such a specific and involved process. thje most akechi could work out on his own was that if you killed a shadow, that person would have a mental breakdown. no way to guess that if you send a calling card and then go in within the next 24 hours and take a physical manifestation of a thing that you didn't know existed (process) would lead to that person ahving a change of heart (result). so even if akechi had a palace and knew about it, even if he wanted to do something about it, he would have assumed there was nothing he could do about it - i also have no idea what the process would be for sending yourself a calling card, even if he DID know about the process. so basically in this fic akechi found his palace and just assumed that was it. he was like, fucked up lol. anyway

this just straight up isn't true HAHA so i put in the silly little dichotomy of akechi gently taking ren's arm to protect him from slipping on the ice while telling him that he lied about caring about him. i think in this chapter as akechi begins to openly explain more and more of his thought process, this is probably the first truly clear glimpse you get of exactly what akechi's distortion is and how deep it runs.

the things akechi says with total conviction in this chapter are just... not true, not a fair or founded way to view the world (or the art of performance haha), but he says them with total conviction, and hopefully it should show off how unreliable he is as a source of exposition. one commenter asked about this moment of akc's eyes going yellow and if it was somehting that happened in canon - not really, i was just thinking about those little moments in the game after you send a calling card where the game cuts from the person to their shadow to do a little oneliner about their distortion.

akechi's IN his own palace, so i thought it would be fun to kind of make it a physical thing that can happen to him where he sort of merges with his shadow for a brief second in the moments when the distortion is strongest.

OKAY this is one of my favourite bits of the chapter HAHA the deep soda lore. i dont expect anyone to remember all the way back to chapter 3 but:

literally nobody asked about this but i love the phantom thieves!!! i dream of all the little silly moments of being a team that they must have that we don't get to see in gameplay, for obvious reasons of it wouldn't really work in a game, but i can imagine them in my brain. i can imagine their trickshot contests that get their asses kicked. i can imagine them chanting at each other to chug while joker and oracle compete to down an entire bottle of brand neutral mountain dew baja blast. i can dream.

soda lore is gay.

i dont honestly think it's inherently a bad thing necessarily but this part does kind of set up like... you can see akechi very early on in life forming this worldview that the truth isn't always what you want, you know? this was a 'lie' he and his mother both bought into, they both knew what the truth actually was, so it wasn't real dishonesty, but they just had this little fantasy. i just thought it would be fun for akechi to have a way to bond with his mother and feel closer to her, and that way is by buying into this white lie. idk

akechi's mother isn't really a character and i don't want to form her into too much of one because i think it's very much the point that, like... he made this point in an earlier chapter but having lost her at a pretty young age i think it's quite crucial that akechi doesn't really have a fully formed image of who his mother is outside of what she was to him as a child. so i actively don't want her to feel too real or defined. im not interested in making an oc out of her because i think it defeats the purpose. that said, this line exists to maybe gesture very vaguely at the notion that akechi's mother was a very bright person who similarly was stuck in circumstances that didn't serve to foster her real potential. just the image in my mind of a person who's clever enough to get across algebraic notation in chess by flipping through a book in a few minutes, but was never exposed to the opportunity to learn chess until this moment in someone else's house, and also the particular situation of learning this skill WHILE at someone's place as a call girl, i dunno . i hope im treating this with the grace it deserves but i wanted to build just this particular image in vivid colour while also keeping the reality quite blurry and vague, just to give the reader a sense of where akechi came from while still preserving his limited pov.

my thoughts on the phantom thieves' methods (and how they compare to maruki) are definitely too long and involved to put into a post about this fic chapter specifically, but maybe one day. i also wanna stress im not like... strictly anti-phantom thief or anti-heartstealing lol but i do have thoughts about the philsophy of it and the thieves' hypocrisy WHATEVER that's not for this post. i bring this up only to crow about finding a way to bring up the experience machine (ie maruki's reality) in this fic without it being royal compliant and have it be... hoepfully... sufficiently relevant to the plot. wa hoo! the experience machine came up for the first time back in chapter 4 and im just delighted that i finally got to close that loop. by the way, that experiment is also called the lotus eater machine after the lotus eaters in the odyssey! i dunno that it's actively my favourite thought experiment but it's definitely up there and i think about it a lot.

TITLE DROP

i think i spoke once about what 'as you like it' means. it's obviously the name of the shakespeare play from where 'all the world's a stage' comes, but it has a couple more layers to it as well - akechi's palace is a place where he performs to what he believes other people want or need to see from him - so his appearance is as you like it. and his accusation of the thieves' heartstealing methods is that they twist a person's internal reality to suit their vision - that's the meaning he's taking here, claiming that joker is turning akechi into an unfamiliar new thing, as [joker] like[s] it. you get it.

this running joke of ren really hating vents wasn't something i planned but im attached to it now. prayer circle for his knees

ive basically given up on making sense of samerecarm, which is par for the course for any rpg or video game really where reduction to 0hp/revival are mechanics. like, im inclined to think 0hp is more equivalent to unconsciousness, because... well... otherwise it's pretty cold that they left akechi dead in the engine room without even looking for a way around the wall. lol. but one of mona's revival lines is 'being dead isnt easy!' or something like that, so i kind of just give up and assume it's video game logic you'r enot meant to look at too hard lol. the way i reconcile it for my purposes is to say it's a sort of metaverse-exclusive state of being which is not quite dead but sort of in a limbo state wher eyou can be brought back with specific revival magic, which i refer to as being down. that's uhhh, that's different from the battle status of down... which you get after being hit with a crit/technical/weak skill... look, don't think about it. joker in crow's arms.

this is literally meaningless i just wanted to include a cameo of my very favourite persona q2 battle theme.

#rookfic #thank you sunlitpearl on ao3 for asking. all my love forever to everyone who enables me to yap non fucking stop #rookposting #i need to actually have a tag for this fic specifically because i talk about it so much #AYLI #< there #long post #eta i forgot to mention but goro figuring out the stamp thing but continuing to play along anyway #was very very very loosely based on my experience as a kiddo with santa HAHAHA #i was 3 y/o and clocked that 'santa' used the same wrapping paper as my parents. and i thought that was sus.#then i asked mother if santa was real and she went 'do you want the truth' and i was like well never mind. i know NOW.#idiot smartass toddler!! i was so pleased about figuring it out i didnt think about cutting off the present supply.#kept playing along for the fun of it tho although 'santa' started receiving carefully price matched lists from me instead of letters #anyway #tangent from my childhood tales

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dw-flagler · 2 months

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In this post, I will attempt to calmly, reasonably, and in-a-good-faith-manner argue all the points raised by tumblr user @library-bat-girl in the following posts. I am starting a new thread so as not to further destroy the original poster, @skitterenjoyer's, tumblr notifications. Worm (+MHA) spoilers ahead. This will be a long post.

Firstly, I would like to apologize on the worm fandom's behalf. We will not engage in ableism of any kind. I sincerely hope that this was a singular incident and @skittersdrippygirlcock will be better about this in the future.

"MHA has better characters,"

My Hero Academia's primary achievement, I think, is managing to make many decently well rounded characters in a fairly short time-span. It certainly has very good visual character design, with easily memorable character designs, like Mina Ashido or Tsuyu Asui. Most of Class 1A is shown to be more than single-note gimmick characters. For a story with such a tight schedule, and only so much page real-estate, that's impressive! For instance, a character decidedly outside of the main cast, Fumikage Tokoyami, is shown to have more to his personality than "is an edgelord," showing a humility and friendliness that is highly against-type. This is very different than a lot of its peers, especially in Shonen manga, where side characters (and sometimes even main characters) are never more than their tropes (see Fairy Tale, One Punch Man*, The Seven Deadly Sins, or Black Clover). My Hero Academia does clear that bar, by making side characters little more than their tropes. This is to say nothing of the primary cast, who, again, is largely defined by tropes and easily slotted into standardized interchangeable Shonen roles. Rival, Love Interest, Rival but Nice About It. Additionally, MHA has an uncomfortably sexualized main cast, for one composed primarily of minors.

This is compared to Worm, in which many characters are fully realized and could have been the protagonist (and often were in older drafts of the story, due to Worm's 10-year development hell). Every character that gets an interlude, and most that don't, all have fully realized interiority, traumas, and wants. In fact, this is one of the major themes of Worm. Every character, from the protagonist Taylor, to characters so minor they're seen only once (see Damsel of Distress, Dauntless), to major antagonists and monsters (see Jack Slash, Bonesaw) all have their own story, even if this is never shown on-screen. There are no "side characters" in the same manner as in My Hero Academia, because every character is a protagonist of their own story, and not in a trite "life is so beautiful" way.

Taylor isn't the center of the universe, there's an entire world outside of her 3-block bubble. The mechanism by which all characters get their superpowers means that the mere fact of having powers implies this about them. Even the seeming exceptions, aren't (see Alexandria, Garotte). Taylor is a good character. I don't even know how to elaborate on that. She just is. Worm does not have the character Minoru Mineta.

"a better plot,"

What... what is the plot of My Hero Academia? For the life of me, I can't seem to recall. I can tell you the general formula of most of the arcs for the first ~2/3rds of the story. Class 1A goes to do a hero high school thing, like do rescue training, or on-the-job training, or on-the-job-training, or on-the-job-training (they do it like 4 times for some reason), the League Of Villains shows up (even when it's seemingly not the league of villains it actually is the league of villains) they fight about it, the class beats all the villains, and Deku beats up strongest bad guy and also breaks his bones. Repeat step 1. But like. What's... the plot? The League of Villains is evil and wants to kill people and do bad stuff. They explicitly do not have greater motivations. There's generally themes of passing-on-to-the-new-generation, so there's Tomura Shigaraki as the arch nemesis to Izuku Midoriya, just as All Might's Nemesis is All For One. Eventually they fight a big fight about it and I stop reading because I find out about Worm. From what I understand (I have not read the conclusion) the series ends without addressing any long-running questions, wrapping up any character arcs, or concluding anything in a narratively satisfying manner. As if severely rushed.

Worm, there are maybe 15 main stories going on simultaneously, which are all tied into the final confrontation with Scion. The most obvious is Taylor's and the Undersiders' story, about taking over Brockton Bay and defeating Coil, which is a smaller part of Coil's story about taking over the bay, until their confrontation with him in arc 17, when it supersedes Coil's story, and then intersects with Cauldron's story, the Traveler's story, the Case 53s' stories, the Wards' story, all of it, in arcs 18-19. This is one example. A great deal of attention is spent making sure the reader knows that Taylor, the Undersiders, Coil, all of them, are bit players in a very large game. Despite this, it's never hard to follow, because Wildbow, while lacking some of the more flowery prose, manages extremely well at making his stories easy to understand.

"I feel like even people who like Worm can agree that Worm is not the most consistent piece of fiction ever written. The disjointed way it was written meant that emphasis was primarily put on 'What Wildbow thought was cool in the moment', [sic] and the story RADICALLY shifts gears every time a new arc starts."

What? Huh? Worm is extremely consistent. Like. 1.1 to E.x. It's, like. Not disjointed? Oh my god, are you talking about interludes? Is that what you mean? The interludes shift gears? Because that makes sense. It's one of the hardest things about worm, yeah. It's gripping! The interludes are a great idea to expand the world of worm, but the problem is that taylor's story is so intriguing that stepping away from it to focus on something else is hard, no matter how individually interesting. I want to read about taylor's escalation spiral, not the travelers! (As opposed to My Hero Academia having random escalation and de-escalation between arcs with no real explanation. We're reading about lives-on-the-line battles with child-slavers and then move to playing on a playground with little kids? Best I can think of is that this whiplash is intentional, but this is never communicated to the reader. Worm does not do this. Any de-escalation is met with the explicit understanding that this is merely a period of calm before things get even worse). Taylor's story wraps up in an extremely narratively satisfying fashion, following her story to its logical conclusion. There were so many ways it could have been avoided, but there was really only one way that it could have ended.

"better worldbuilding,"

This actually offends me. MHA could have had great world-building. It doesn't. Every potentially interesting bit of world-building is backpedaled out of or stopped before it could get anywhere. Or it's just never elaborated or expanded upon. Everyone having a superpower could have been cool, but the implications of this are nonexistent. The reasons for this having no real implications, that being the banning of quirks, also has implications that are also immediately backpedaled out of. It's been hundreds of years since our time, yet life is exactly the same. Nothing ever happens. Endeavor is a cool concept. I like Endeavor. his existence implies such interesting things about the world, how important hero ranking is to these people's lives, that he would create this horrific system of domestic abuse to try and get to the #1 spot. What does this say about this system of heroes that operates like a popularity contest? It could have said a lot. It says nothing. What does the League of Villains, a league of people who call themselves out-and-out villains, who base their ideology in opposing this system of heroes, say about society? Nothing. On purpose. Worm does something with this. One Punch Man does something with this. My Hero Academia puts it in the story, and lets it sit, unused, for a decade.

Worm has... unique world-building. Because it's both good and bad at the same time. Worm's #1 feature is its world. It's brilliant, full stop. Triggers, The Birdcage, the PRT, Exclusion Zones! Why does the status quo exist? what does it say about that society? What does it say about our society? Why hasn't society radically changed from how it is in our world? This is explained. This plays into the themes. The story wants to say something about this world, and so it does. There are characters whose stories explicitly delve into these themes that are set up in the worldbuilding, like Armsmaster, or Battery, or Bonesaw, or Coil, or Piggot or Alexandria or Taylor herself or Brian or Lisa or ANY OF THEM THEY ALL DO THIS. Sorry.

Anyway, the bad part is that the actual world is not well built (and is kind of racist). What's going on in Europe? There's a 3 blasphemies! a 3 what? never explained. What's going on in Asia, aside from Japan? China is a monarchy for some reason. Why? It's never elaborated on. India gets a little bit of elaboration, we're told its different but not how it's different. Wildbow uses machine translation wrong and names some guy caliph of dogs. This is like worm's #2 problem honestly (#1 is Amy). Wildbow tries to make the implication of a well thought out globe without actually making a well thought out globe.

"stronger themes,"

It really doesn't. As I said in the worldbuilding section, MHA makes a point out of not saying or doing anything. I don't know if editors made Horikoshi walk back the more ambitious story beats or what, but there are multiple points in the story where the author pretty much looks you directly in the eye and goes "This Story Isn't Saying Anything At All Even Though It Looked Like It Would. Lmao."

Worm has lots of themes. I think Armsmaster/Defiant's story is my favorite. His entire character arc (which is fully realized despite him being a background character for nearly the entire story) has a point to it. It says something. It's misanthropic and uplifting simultaneously, and manages to feel like it earns both. It's a shared theme with Bonesaw/Riley's story, explored in two different ways.

"Meanwhile MHA establishes an actual overall theme/message right from the start that expands and develops throughout the story. The worldbuilding is informed by the message, which informs the characters arcs and the people they become by the end of the story."

I notice that you never actually say what that message is. What is it? Like, for real. I'm not being confrontational or anything, like what is the message? Cuz' I can't think of one. My Hero Academia, at its very core, is a defense of the status quo. Much like its world-building, but much less forgivable, because it does do something new and unique with its world-building. MHA could have done some extremely interesting stuff with its early implicit critique of heroic society as shown with characters like Bakugo, or Shigaraki, or Endeavor, or Overhaul, or Midoriya himself! It just doesn't! It doesn't do stuff that Worm does do!

Worm does have a message. It has a lot of messages, actually, some that the author disagrees with somehow. Prison abolition, for one. We know Wildbow loves prison. Anyway, the big one is in the subtitle: doing the wrong things for the right reasons. Taylor's constant spiral of escalation, her dwindling attachments to her friends and greater focus on treating herself like a soldier is prevalent, and it is to be avoided. Taylor isn't a sin-eater. They don't exist. From what I remember, this is sort of explored in Deku's character arc for a short period of time, but much like everything else in MHA, it is backpedaled out of.

The funniest is "don't text and drive" though.

"Just on a basic level the way that the audience is meant to feel about Taylor oscillates wildly between being directed to think of her as a misunderstood victim of circumstance, or history's greatest monster."

That's kind of the point. Like. the audience isn't meant to look at Taylor the same way throughout the entire story. It's meant to change as she changes. Taylor's opinion of Taylor changes. The mistake here is saying it "oscillates wildly." it doesn't. It's a slow and steady change for the worse, as Taylor gets more violent and starts throwing away greater and greater parts of herself to become more like a robot and less like a person.

"But a bigger issue in general is tone. It's very focused on being dark and gritty and edgy, and it makes the mistake a lot of consciously edgy media does. IE: it thinks that all it has to do to be smart is be bleak and/or graphic. It doesn't really try to say anything, in fact it contradicts itself throughout the book as I mentioned before, it just throws in extremely graphic scenes and content periodically to remind the audience how fucked everything is."

Did you read the boys and think it was worm? What? It's not being smart when it's bleak or graphic? I actually personally like the endbringers or the slaughterhouse 9, and not because I like watching people suffer. These things exist for a reason. It's not being dark for the sake of being dark. The heroes could stop the slaughterhouse 9. We see that, when they almost stop the slaughterhouse 9 (it's explicitly shown that they are stopped from destroying the slaughterhouse 9). The question then becomes why don't they? It's a grim, brutal calculus, and one that wasn't worth it. That's the point. The Endbringers are different. It's not until arc 27 that they're really explained. You could either read them as a criticism of Eidolon or of ableism, honestly. I mean, it wasn't intentional, he didn't create them on purpose, he needed something to fight, because without that he's nothing. His powers are all he has.

"Worm spends so much time trying to be edgy that as with a lot of edgy media the edginess loses all impact quite quickly and becomes sort of cringe."

I don't really think so, but like. Okay. I don't think this is a reconcilable viewpoint (none of this is really but this especially), so like we're probably gonna have to agree to disagree. The only thing I can really think of as edgy for the sake of edginess is Amy's arc. But even that's not really true. It's meant to be an utterly avoidable tragedy that could never have been stopped because of the people involved. Much like Taylor, actually. Amy could have stepped back from the brink, but she didn't, because Amy could never have done that, and nobody else was willing/able to help. It's supposed to be a thing where you sit back and think of all the tiny ways this could have easily been avoided, but wasn't.

"When body horror happens it still has impact because it's not happening constantly."

I mean, I guess. But like. I never got desensitized to the body horror in Worm. It hit pretty consistently for me throughout. As opposed to MHA, where it was usually walked back by the end of every arc. I never felt much tension or suspense because it felt as if there weren't actual consequences. In Worm, when Brian was strung up on his nerves, it felt disgusting because I was fully aware Worm would explore the ripple effects of this. It felt entirely possible he would die there, or never recover, because Worm didn't pull its punches. MHA did. This is a matter of opinion. We'll just have to agree to disagree about it.

"But most importantly - you root for the heroes because the world actually seems like it's worth saving."

that's just, um. sorry. I'm really trying here. That's just. Uh. Dumb. Do you root for Batman cause Gotham is a nice city? Everything's worth saving, that's, like, at its most basic what the concept of a superhero is about.

"Not only that but MHA simply does villain protagonists objectively better than Worm."

um. No? There straight up aren't villain protagonists in MHA. The villains are the POV characters for, like, one arc? You know what, here's a good spot for it. It's stated throughout the story that Shigaraki and the League of Villains have a goal, beyond just death and destruction. They're here to stop the corrupt society of heroes (that MHA hints at the existence of before backpedaling away from), and bring about a fairer society. But then, and this part pissed me off, one of the characters, I think Bakugo, says: "you're just using that as cover! you just want to kill people, you have no noble goal!" and shigaraki's like "dang you caught me." and then it happens again with Deku! Because My Hero Academia is allergic to saying something. Nope! They're villains! No moral depth here! They're Villains, We're Heroes, Go Put Them In Jail.

This is opposed to Worm, where- "The characters of the villains and their origins are used to highlight the flaws in the Superhuman society"

"Most of the villains are only villains because society failed them in some way, and the specific ways in which that happened become big plot points that then play into the future arc of our heroic characters."

I had to walk away from my computer for this one. It's hard to be civil. It's really hard. Polite and reasonable.

So Worm is about this. To even say this without a shred of irony makes me thing you've never once read a single word of Worm and are doing this purely as bait. Or you've read all of Worm and are doing this purely as bait.

"They're actually extremely complex in a way that ends up being fundamentally important to the overall story - where in Worm the villains are either based heroes fighting a corrupt system or they're histories [sic] greatest monsters... until they're presented as heroes again."

I think I get it now. I really think I do. You're not supposed to agree with all the characters. Like. Worm is inconsistent, in that it follows the perspectives of inconsistent people. Of course Triumph and Armsmaster don't agree on what is right! They're different people, they have different perspectives!

"See. Worm fans keep saying "This is Bait." It's not Bait, you all are simply ridiculous and obsessed with this series to such a degree that you feel compelled to say "This is Bait" instead of just... ignoring it, because you have no actual counterargument."

Perhaps worm fans are inclined to believe you posted rage bait because you brazenly walked into another fandom's post and wholeheartedly proclaimed that the thing they liked was Stupid Idiot Bullshit For Fucking Morons, and refused to elaborate until prompted, at which point you said several things that are demonstrably false about Worm.

"Your only response to anything I've said is pedantry, bigotry, and deflection. If it was obviously just bait why are you engaging?"

Well, I'm engaging because I've been in a foul mood since I woke up this morning. Also because you, again, said some very rude and patently false statements about a story that I really enjoy and find narratively rich, even in its faults.

"MHA's characters do fall into archetypal shounen character roles - but they are all given a solid amount of focus explaining why they are like that and developing them into something bigger."

Again, as I said, it's a genuinely impressive feat to have an ensemble cast like what My Hero Academia has, and give so many of the characters a degree of depth, with such little manga to work with. I think worm does it better, but worm doesn't have to be economical about it. MHA does. The problem I have with this statement is that it becomes a question of scale. How much bigger? They're no longer defined by their tropes, instead defined by their opposition to their tropes. It's still a one-note character, you've merely changed the note from C to C sharp.

"so almost every member of the cast has an arc that either develops them past the person they initially seemed to be or explains why they're like that."

This is probably my favorite part about MHA. They do have arcs! I love ensemble casts! it does a much better job in this than all of its contemporaries, even One Piece. However, they are comparatively simplistic arcs that all follow a similar formula.

"I've heard people say MHA is neocon or pro-establishment but the story literally concludes by showing that society HAS TO FUNDAMENTALLY CHANGE or the same problems that created the villains in the first place will keep happening. The entire time skip specifically focuses on the fact that for eight years the main characters have been forcing change in the world and addressing the issues the villains brought up."

Now, I'm going to be clear. I stopped reading My Hero Academia around chapter 275. I don't know the exact number, but it was the latest chapter in ~mid 2020. I would occasionally attempt to reread, in an attempt to catch up, but give up around chapter 200 out of boredom. I don't know exactly how the story ends, but I have read ~2/3rds of the story. I feel this gives me a pretty good understanding of the general tone of the story, unless it wildly changes tone at the 3/4ths mark, which you have explicitly said it does not, as it is extremely coherent and consistent. Therefore, I believe I can state with some degree of confidence that MHA does not do that.

I would certainly believe that it tries (and fails) to SFP it, but SFP does not promote a fundamental societal change. That's the problem. Strong Female Protagonist was willing to come up and say that Alison lived in a fundamentally unjust world, even if it was never willing or able to offer real change. And hey. You do what you can. I sincerely doubt My Hero Academia is even willing to call its world fundamentally unjust, from the 200+ chapters that I did read.

"In the case of the actual main characters, they have extremely comprehensive character arcs."

Adding this behind the last point just so that I don't have to reiterate I haven't finished the book. I am, however, very much not inclined to believe the actual main characters had extremely comprehensive character arcs.

Which plays back into the initial theory that ANYONE CAN BE A HERO.

man, spider-man did that better (not a real argument, but like, spider-man totally did that better). Not least because midoriya specifically could not become a hero were it not for all might giving him a power.

No, the Villains don't get happy endings,

Why not? Why do they go to jail, even the ones who changed and wanted to redeem themselves? Endeavor never goes to jail. He did some horrible stuff. He's redeemed himself in the eyes of the story, right? Anyone can be a hero, right? So why not them? Why haven't they redeemed themselves in the eyes of the story?

You may wish to turn this back on me and ask why doesn't Armsmaster go to prison? Because he's similar in some respects. But worm never calls prison justice. (for some reason, even though wildbow totally loves prison). Prison is punitive, a tool for those in charge to control those it manages to capture. Maybe some deserve life in the birdcage. Many don't. It doesn't matter. Because the birdcage isn't a tool of justice. It's not meant to be. it's a box to put the uncontrollable capes in, until they can be used as meat shields. So Armsmaster doesn't go to prison because the story says explicitly there is no point to it. But MHA? MHA says there is a point to it. Endeavor needs to go to prison if he wants to atone. He's escaping justice every second he's outside.

I have actually read Worm, and for the first half to two thirds I loved it.

Weird. That's exactly how long I really enjoyed MHA. Not, like relevant, to anything. Just odd. I mean, I don't actually dislike MHA. I think it's fine, actually. It feels like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade to me. Funny (when Mineta isn't around), bombastic, and a good time, even if I don't think it's super thematically rich.

I'm not coming at this from the perspective of someone who has never seen any of the merits of Worm, I'm coming at it from the perspective of someone who really liked it, gave it a fair shot, and was eventually disappointed when it ended up not tying together right.

See, this makes me more inclined to think it's bait, actually. since you said "Oh yeah. MHA is published. MHA's been an ongoing publication with a large following for ten years, in a notoriously competitive industry. Now this might seem kind of unimpressive, it's a very low bar to clear I know. But it's one Worm hasn't, so. I dunno, I'd say that's fairly objective. Now you may think "Yeah, but Trash fiction gets published all the time." And that's true but again - Worm hasn't. The worst piece of fiction you can think of got published and Worm didn't. You wanna be an asshole about this? The thing you love is so mid that it was self published in 2013, couldn't get picked up for professional publishing until 2019 and as far as I can see has stayed in development hell since then." in your previous post. Sure, perhaps we can say you were pissed at the time, but "the thing you love is worse than trash fiction, an altogether nothing piece of literature that isn't even worth the paper it would hypothetically be printed on" does not strike me as the words of someone who "really liked it, gave it a fair shot, and was eventually disappointed when it ended up not tying together right." In fact, going back through your other statements on the story, you seem to have genuinely disliked it from the very beginning, on grounds of being too edgy (which I can fully understand the logic of): "IE: it thinks that all it has to do to be smart is be bleak and/or graphic," thematically incoherent: "It doesn't really try to say anything, in fact it contradicts itself throughout the book as I mentioned before, it just throws in extremely graphic scenes and content periodically to remind the audience how fucked everything is," and utterly devoid of purpose or meaning. "When it does introduce new lore that new lore is almost always overly convoluted and acts as a catalyst for things happening, but not really things happening that play into a wider theme or message. It's just "Oh and here's this team of god-level serial killers who are gonna string a dude up by his nervous system." Like yeah, cool visual, but what is any of this actually saying?" This does not sound like a ringing endorsement of the first half of Worm to me. In fact, this sounds like you hated every second of it.

"And frankly given the number of comments that are just people saying "Bait" - I don't think any of y'all have engaged with this in a fair or honest way"

I'm going to reiterate on my previous statement. I like my hero academia. Capeshit is my favorite genre, it probably always will be. They're my favorite genre of story. While I find the themes—or lack thereof—extremely frustrating, I still think of it as fun. I gave it a fair shake. I would probably really enjoy the ending if I didn't have a reading list that was 300 books long.

#worm spoilers #MHA spoilers #*One Punch Man is partially an exception as characters are “never more than their tropes” for the sake of parody.#i don't dislike my hero academia by the way. in fact i rather like it. at least the first three quarters or so #L style contessa should have hit eidolon with a car and been like “look at that the endbringers stopped crazy.”#well it would have actually been crazy considering she had no way to know he was causing them #sorry n0brainjustvibes i never finished that MHA fanfic you recced me #quote text is colored to stop your eyes glazing over at the wall of text #armsmaster is what endeavor could/should have been #like they have a very similar arc. but they differ in that armsmaster's redemption is earned and endeavor's isn't #how so? there's like a reason armsmaster has an epiphany about his previous behavior #endeavor's like “oh the narrative is focusing on me as a protagonist i better be a good guy now!”#the fixing society thing is what ward should have been about but wasn't. but we're not talking about ward #by the way i wish they just killed teacher instead of birdcaging him. ward would have been so much better #^that was a joke #sorry about making the quotes smaller i'm trying to save some space in this tumor of a post somewhere #please don't say “god-level serial killers” by the way. for my sake if nothing else #you know i made the comparison to gotham being a shithole somehow without any thought that the person i am disagreeing with is a batman fan #or at least a batgirl fan

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contagious-watermelon · 2 months

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if i hear one more person unironically identifying themself as afab or amab I'm gonna start biting

#theres times where it's useful to delineate (e.g. talking about the ways nb people are treated depending on which sex they're assumed to be #born with)#(tho i would argue that it's not agab per se but rather assumed current sex)#but PLEASE can i stop seeing people earnestly calling themselves ''afab nonbinary''#OR ALSO implying that they have some innate understanding of womanhood based on how they were raised #I've come across a bunch of nonbinary spaces online #where it's maybe 90% self-identified afab people #and they always have this undertone of ''well‚ we're not women‚ but we Understand™️ by virtue of our assigned sex''#which‚ maybe it's just me‚ but it always implies that trans women & transfems somehow are barred from understanding misogyny #bc of the fact that they were raised as boys & don't have the right body parts #(the ''''right'''' body parts lemme be clear)#um yeah basically my whole issue with it (other than that it's basically recreating the gender binary‚ including the ''inexorably tied to #biological sex'' part)#is that it misgenders transmascs & trans men (me lol thats why i get angy abt it) by implying we have some sort of inherent connection to #womanhood by virtue of our sex at birth #and also feeds into the exact thing that terfs like to say; that trans women will never really understand sexism & that they're interlopers #bc they ''are amab'' / ''are male fakers''#anyway.#o.#trans #transsexual #transgender #afab #amab #agab #transphobia #transmisogyny #<- these guys mostly for the stuff in the tags in case people have those blocked & don't wanna hear me talking abt it #transmasc #transfem

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narugen · 4 months

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i seriously need more narumi and mina moments because just imagine the relief mina felt when narumi joined, similar age to her and was also considered a prodigy in the force.

to have someone to share the burden of the defence force’s future with must’ve felt so freeing. because before he joined it was just her, age 18, being told that she was going to change kaiju extermination with her exceptional synergy with firearms. and she was so, so scared.

narumi doesn’t have the kind of skills or talent for long range combat like she does, but he’s also a top candidate (despite his behavioural issues- which aren’t much of a hinderance anyway) and mina doesn’t have to carry the burden of the future alone anymore

(although she’d never admit, given she probably views narumi as someone completely shocking i just think it’s so funny how she stood there like O_O when she first saw him)

like i LOVE seeing the contrast. mina who was sent onto the battlefield for the first time and was deathly afraid vs narumi who was sent out and immediately took action because that’s how he always lived (fighting)

and now they’re the top two strongest captains in the force and they will be the ones to lead the new generation..

#egg boils #IM SOOO BONKERS SORRY THEYRE MY FAVES I WANT THME TO HAVE AN IMPACT ON ESCH ORHEF SO FUCKING BAD.#consider this: narumi teaches mina to be less serious. to stop holding onto the burden of others and her team mates and Fight because she #wants to. hold onto ur weapon clench ur teeth because you WANT to be here and protect lives and not because You feel like you have to ashir #and mina teaches him abt team work and yes you can work along but And maybe having to consider ur team members IS burdensome for u but isnt #it nice to have someone watch ur back? for someone to Help you narumi #please please show me how they’ve influenced each other I KNOW DAMN WELL THEY HAVE. I INOW IT. matsumoto please.#i will never be over mina and how genuinely AFRAID she was #ashiro mina my absolute beloved #narumi tells mina to stop being so freaked out all the damn time because you have your team mates don’t you?! always talking my ear off abo #about team work but you can’t even trust your own comrades?!#mina tells narumi that HE keeps acting recklessly because he doesn’t trust his team mates either!!! they’re perfectly capable too #ohhhhh i’m sick im sick i want mina to knock some sense into narumi and vice versa i want them to be the reason they trust their units to #SUCH a degree now. i want them to be the reason why they stand for their men so strongly (narumi immediately pouncing on no.9 when he showe #kikoru isao’s face. mina’s anger and appreciation when her unit stood their ground against no10.#mina #narumi #kaiju no.8 #they’re my top two of course i’m making this shit up. i need it so bad bside please please please #i know she grit her teeth and got used to be alone when she subjugates from the roof top but CONSIDER narumi the delinquent but extremely #capable recruit being the one to show her how to live less in fear #i need a tag for them #don’t be stupid #okay that’s it that’s my tag #kn8 spoilers #sorry again. tagging for myself #narumina

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polysyndetonaddictsupportgroup · 2 months

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Just want to say: a, I admire very much that you've figured out a healthy way to work on your fics that allows you to have fun with it. And also b, am very excited to hear that you are getting there with pez! It has fully given me brain rot ever since I read it last year, there is just such a lack of content for the highly specific trope of using time travel as a device to explore extremely unhealthy levels of self loathing.

I just adore everything you're doing in it. Neither midoriya is anywhere approaching okay for any portion of the fic and I love rereading and mining into all the subtle characterization pointing to that. It's a bit like nhtycth in that some really goofy funny stuff is often hiding some really fucking worrying things, but the fact that characters DO do that stuff—that todoroki uses his teaspoon's worth of extremely stunted social skills to bludgeon his friend's door open and help him, that a rpf shipping war is an actual source of drama despite how goofy the sentiment seems on the surface, that about half of what jon says is deeply worrying and the other half is extremely funny and there's a lot of overlap between the two—really lifts the tension and brightens the universe. It's sort of similar to what you did with gerry, in that endless misery isn't nearly as painful as the ups and downs of a life that, when you step back and zoom out, has something deeply and horribly wrong with it.

(jon sort of reminds me of spider-man in that he uses human to deal with trauma and stress, except I don't think he at any point realizes how fucking funny he is. He's just there, in a home depot, gnashing his teeth because he's got so many bodies to dispose of and this cashier sure is taking her time.)

I really, really, really have had trouble finding fics that take everything midoriya has dealt with to task. It's a hell of a thing to live 14 years as a disabled minority, have it heavily shape your existence, and then one day you wake up and you realize you're...not that, or at least, nobody will ever acknowledge you as that again. You've lost all claim to it. Those experiences that shaped who you are? Dust in the wind. 14 years of pain and life might as well be buried in the ground for all the good they do you. Nobody's going to cut you any slack or quarter, you've gotta simply work harder, be better. And now when you do that you get the results you wanted, so that's fine, then. That's good. There was something wrong with the you before, and there's something right with the you now, and if the transition is a little rough, well that doesn't matter, you're the same as everyone else now, so it's your own job to fill in whatever gaps you need to.

I really can't get over how mentally fucked it must be for midoriya to run into quirkless people, run across quirkless issues, and be silently caught between, incapable of speaking his mind and too scared to do so anyway around those he can trust.

Also I should mention, I'm just very excited for bakugou to get back from the gym. He's been there like a year I hope he's getting a good workout in.

Me realizing that it’s been a year since pez dispenser debris:

I feel like there’s just this very specific type of grief that Izuku has to grapple with in the span of pez dispenser debris that I’m just obsessed with. He’s sort of silently mourning who he could have been, when 1) he has to present like there’s nothing lost to maintain his secret and 2) the entire world is constantly inundating him with the message that there was nothing lost.

Like. I don’t want to get too deep into it because it risks spoiling things and I do have major plans to continue it (I’ve loved this story for so many years before I ever even hit publish), but the emotion that Izuku’s feeling right now is so much more complex than “I hate who I used to be and want him to stop existing” or “I just want to keep my secrets.” And I think the way he interacts with Mirio is the biggest evidence of that.

Izuku’s placed himself at the very center of the Quirklessness debate with his support of Mirio. He fights for Quirkless heroes, very publicly, to the point where he’s not even graduated yet but considered to be one of the most prominent voices on the matter. If you took a poll of Quirkless people as to which hero would be most supportive of them pursing their own career in heroics, Izuku would be right at the top of the list. When it comes to Quirklessness itself, he’s nothing but supportive.

But he didn’t tell Mirio the truth of his own Quirklessness.

Out of everyone, Mirio’s the one everyone expects to know, despite him being a relatively newer relationship compared to someone like Iida or Uraraka or Todoroki. And I tried to imply that he’s sort of the one who knows the most about Izuku out of everyone save All Might.

Like, we’ll get into how much exactly Mirio knows soon, so I won’t divulge what, if anything, Izuku has told him. But we know that Mirio knows, weirdly enough, that Izuku is deeply fucking haunted. He knows that boy has many violent ghosts in his bones. He finds it hilarious and will tell their realtor about it. Izuku told him about the discontent spirits who died in a violent passion and live on inside of him before he told him about his Quirklessness.

And I just feel like one of those things is a little bit easier to discuss than the other.

Izuku has decided to keep his own Quirklessness quiet in a way that surpasses secrecy about One for All. If it was just about OfA, he could tell people he didn’t get his quirk until the entrance exam, and it wouldn’t even be a lie. He’s purposefully obscuring his own past as Quirkless even as he takes a forefront of the Quirkless hero debate with his open support of Mirio.

And the fact that he’s at the forefront of this debate in and of itself requires a difficult dichotomy. He is the world’s most vocal proponent for the first Quirkless hero. He is a known figure in the Quirkless community now.

He isn’t considered one of them anymore. He’s an outsider coming in.

It must be such a strange, odd sort of grief to come to the people you were home amongst for most of your life and be greeted as a stranger. To return home, and to be welcomed in for the first time, and to not even be able to tell people that you’ve lived here all your life and don’t need a tour.

It’s a sort of death of self, I think. And I think Izuku never expected to have to grapple with his own ghost.

#there’s just something so haunting to me about the idea of Izuku being considered just a really enthusiastic ally to the Quirkless community #like Izuku canonically did not have friends #he almost definitely was an /incredibly/ avid member of Internet forums #he probably found comfort amongst other Quirkless people for the first time ever online #and then he grew up #got all mights quirk #became a central figure in the Quirklessness debate #and suddenly found himself popping up on those forums that used to be his only solace as a child #that one hero with all the Quirks who supports the Quirkless #I see Izuku as being a semi controversial figure amongst Quirkless #because he obviously supports them #but he’s got quirks to an unprecedented power level and is also used by others against the quirkless community as an example of how far #behind they are in evolution #I feel like he eventually stopped going on those old forums that were his greatest comfort as a child #like I feel like he would feel weird lurking on the forums while they talked about him to him without their knowledge #he would have left to give them privacy away from him #he couldn’t honestly commiserate with them anymore because he was suddenly Quirked anyway #and what must that feel like #that realization that you can never go home again #pez dispenser debris #bnha #update IS incoming im actively working on this fic again #we are so so close people #to this and sgg and nhthcth #god it’s been so close for so long #also if you sent me an ask and I never answered it please know I saw it and loved it and started to answer it #which is why I currently have over 150 asks in a state of partial completeness #we’ll get there one day

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