#the art in this run is so pretty too. like not only does the narration and dialogue and story kill me but i could look at it forever. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

soulerflaire · 4 months

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Long post of me rating various animes I've been keeping up with the past few weeks. A note: I watch these shows with original language audio and English subtitles, so I can't rate the English voice acting, which I know can make or break a show for a lot of people.

Tearmoon Empire Synopsis: 20-year-old Princess Mia (basically anime Marie Antionette) is executed at the guillotine after a rebellion overthrows her empire. But then she wakes up 8 years in the past, with all her memories leading up to her execution written down in a blood-stained diary. She makes it her goal to do everything she can to avoid her terrible fate. Rating: 7/10 This is the first "character wakes up in the past with all their memories" show I've watched, so I can't comment on how original it is in that regard, but I think it's pretty good! The show is very tongue-in-cheek in the beginning, with Mia still being a fairly self-centered spoiled princess, but all her attempts to avoid her past mistakes get misinterpreted as her being wise and kind. She quickly ends up with a large following of loyal friends and gains a reputation as "the Wisdom of the Empire". It does eventually start leaning into more heavy story as it goes on, though, so it's not all lighthearted silliness. But what really brings this show up to a 7 for me is the narrator. His deadpan disappointment every time someone misinterprets Mia's intentions kills me. I think the story has some holes here and there, and Mia can get kinda grating at times, but I'm definitely enjoying it regardless.

Shangri-La Frontier Synopsis: Rakuro Hizutome prides himself on his ability to beat really shitty VR games (advanced anime VR, think Sword Art Online). But one day, he decides to try the most popular VR MMO in the world, Shangri-La Frontier. Rating: 10/10 That's it, that's the synopsis. It's such a simple plot, but it's so good. The writer clearly understands video games, and so everything about the game and Rakuro's strats while playing makes sense. Imagine your favorite speedrunner or challenge runner taking a stab at a brand new anime VR MMO; that's basically this show. Rakuro uses all the skill and strategy he's built up over the years playing awful, awful games, and while this does make him really good at the game, he doesn't feel OP out of nowhere. Everything he does in the game is something anyone else could do, he's not breaking the game at all. Also, so far there's been zero fanservice-y nonsense. In fact, it feels like they're making a point of avoiding typical fanservice tropes. The (possible) love interest always wears a suit of heavy full plate armor in the game. There's a bunny girl NPC in Rakuro's party, but she's literally a small bunny. She can take on a human form, but it rapidly drains her mana so she can only do it for like a minute at a time, and her human form just looks like a normal person. Heck, the person showing the most skin in the show is Rakuro himself, because (in typical souls-like speedrunner fashion) he runs around in shorts and a mask, and people call him out on it frequently. The show is very low-stakes, lighthearted fun, I highly recommend it!

The Apothecary Diaries Synopsis: Maomao, the daughter of a smalltown apothecary, is kidnapped and sold as a servant in the harem of the emperor's palace. Her plan is to keep her head down until her servitude is up, then go home. But when the newborn imperial heirs fall ill, she steps in to provide a cure, drawing the eye of Jinshi, the head official of the harem. Rating: 8/10 This set up sounds ripe for skeezy creepy fanservice crap, but it couldn't be further from that. It's more along the lines of a mystery of the week show, where Maomao is tasked by Jinshi to unravel a medical mystery, or perform detective work, or give her take on the goings on in the palace. Maomao is bright, sarcastic, and genre-savvy, and has no shortage of scathing remarks for Jinshi any time he tries to get too friendly. She is probably my favorite character out of all the shows I've watched recently. What brings the show down a bit for me is that I'm not particularly attached to any of the other characters. I can't tell most of the attendants apart, I don't really care about the top four consorts, and Jinshi himself is a total creep (the show does treat him like a creep, it does not condone his behavior, but I still don't like him). This is really the Maomao show, and that's enough for me to give it an 8, but not really anything higher. Side note: the show does not confirm it, but I headcanon Maomao as ace. Edit: Forgot to mention I've also been listening to Hana ni Natte on repeat most of today. The opening theme of Apothecary Diaries didn't need to go that hard, but it does anyway.

Frieren: Beyond Journey's End Synopsis: A party of heroes have defeated the Demon King and restored peace to the land. Frieren, a long-lived elf who was the mage in that party, returns to her life of solitude. 50 years later, she visits Himmel, the leader of the party, to fulfill a promise she made, and finds him to be a wizened old man. He passes shortly thereafter, and Frieren is forced to face the reality of human mortality. Rating: 9/10 This is a heavy, heavy show. Frieren is an elf, a race that lives for thousands of years. To her, the 10-year journey to defeat the Demon King was the blink of an eye, and the following 50 years were almost as brief. But at Himmel's funeral, she realizes that was almost his entire life, and she never really knew him. Despite Frieren seeing their journey together as brief, Himmel had a huge impact on her, and she deeply regrets not getting to know him. This show focuses a lot on Frieren's personal struggle to comes to terms with the short lifespans of everyone around her, but it doesn't generally do so directly. We don't hear Frieren's thoughts on this; instead, we have to interpret her thoughts and feelings through her actions and what little she says. She's extremely reserved and her expression and tone rarely change; you have to pay attention to her words themselves, and think about her motivations for what she's doing, and connect the dots. Frieren eventually takes on an apprentice, Fern, and later they recruit a fighter, Stark, and those two serve as helpers for discerning Frieren's thoughts. Stark will often express confusion about something Frieren is doing, and Fern will provide as good an explanation as she can. The show also touches on "what comes after" as the world recovers from the threat of the Demon King. In some places, the party of heroes are remembered with statues and parades, while in others, the party is all but forgotten. There are remnants of the Demon King's forces scattered about. The world is moving on, but still bears the scars of the Demon King's tyranny. What brings the show down from a 10 for me is a couple things. 1, there's some fairly immature humor sprinkled in that feels tonally dissonant to me. Nothing too awful, but it's a little jarring when compared to the super heavy first few episodes. 2, the show has recently been focusing more and more on Fern and Stark's developing relationship. I don't know if there's a goal in mind with it, or if it's just a desire to include romance in the story. Either way, I don't really care if they get together or not, I just don't want it to be such a focus. It's not really what I'm here to see. Side note: Unlike with Apothecary Diaries, I don't have to headcanon Frieren as ace; in the show, all elves are canonically ace, which is why there are so few of them.

My New Boss is Goofy Synopsis: Momose quit his previous job because his boss was extremely abusive and cruel. He finds a new job at a new company, and is overwhelmed with anxiety, but it turns out his new boss Shirosake is a lovable goof with his head in the clouds. Rating: 7/10 This show is adorable; Momose is frequently scared and anxious because of memories of his old boss, but Shirosake's goofiness always puts him at ease and makes his stress disappear. It's just episode after episode of Shirosake being an amazing boss and a great friend to Momose while also being adorably goofy. The show at first kind of waggles its eyebrows about whether it's meant to be taken as queer or not, then winks knowingly while elbowing you, then starts jumping up and down and pointing at a pride flag, then eventually yells "HEY REPLACE 'BOSS' WITH 'BOYFRIEND' DO YOU GET IT NOW DO YOU GET IT?" There is a lot of blushing. It's very cute. But a warning: when you replace 'boss' with 'boyfriend', Momose's ex-boss suddenly becomes a lot darker, and it can get pretty heavy at times. His ex-boss is clearly a metaphor for a controlling, abusive ex-boyfriend (even going so far as to take Momose's phone and block all his contacts), and I know that can hit close to home for people. So just a heads up that the show is 90% gay fluff and cuteness and 10% main character trying to recover from the severe trauma of an abusive relationship. I give it a 7/10 because I doubt Momose and Shirosake are ever going to actually get together; shows like this tend to do the "will they won't they" forever, and I know I'll lose patience with it long before it's done. But for now, it's a lot of fun. I also identify with Shirosake's forgetfulness and social awkwardness : p

#I heartily recommend all of these shows tbh #I think it just depends on what you're interested in

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relax-and-read-on · 2 years

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i like to think that if Rogal Dorn created a youtube channel about buildings just to espread his knowledge Perturabo would on the same day create his and turn it into a full blown competition, not only on the construction aspect but also on the youtuber aspect and would be constantly frustrated on why Rogal have more subscribers than him, also if the other primarchs made youtube channels, what kind of channel they would make?

Yes

Y E S

I WAS THINKING OF MAKING THIS ONE!!!

The primarch, if youtube had been around.

Leman: You know those tiktok of fedex guys being bff with dogs? This, but it's leman across the galaxy. Just a ton of youtube short of him going "oooHHHH WHO'S A GOOD BOY!!!!" At every single dog he encounter in the imperium.

Jaghatai: travel vlog. Very little narration, mostly just insanely cool vibe and him going "so if you take this road only accessible for 3 months of the year every year you too can go visit this hidden valley with the BEST hot spring on the planet-"

Magnus: video essay channel that make 8 hours narrative docs on shitty random media that you have never even heard of before. Goes way too hard on the overanalyzing. Millions of view.

Horus: a fucking vlogger. One of THOSE youtube influencer. He does a bit of everything and no one can really remember why he's popular now, but he sure is. Is always in some youtube drama or another. Get cancelled at least once a year.

Sanguinius: Arts and craft channel, with super easy and nice tutorial. Very active with the commenters and the community, and seem to be good at everything.

Angron: How to Basic channel. Except it was angron ACTUALLY trying to do the thing and everything else is natural and unscripted.

Alpharius Omegon: prank channel, but they are actually funny. They pull on some SHIT on one another.

Ferrus: "Hello everyone today we are going to create a functioning lightsaber because we aren't pussy and we want to cut things." His things are always pretty functional.

Fulgrim: "Artist react" video and it's him watching like, fucking 5 minutes craft and starting to scream. Has also timelapse of his art, and run a super popular series of video where he try to make his brothers do art. The one where he try to teach Konrad to knit has become viral.

Lion: He walk into the forest. The camera move slowly, in unexplainable pattern. Sometime, it follow sound and end up hiding in the bush filming unsuspecting hiker or just starring at random animals. Lion see ot as his hiking journal. People think this might be a serial killer diary.

Corvus: might be a creepy pasta chanel, might be an ARG, or just an analog horror thing. No one is sure. There's creepy sad original music in each videos. It's actually just the video clip for her musics and she did not realise she might be creating a cult.

Konrad: a urban exploring channel. No narrations, just more or less shaky video with innocent title like "the home on 3rd street". The fact the he straight up break and enter and do parkour give it a very mirror's edges feel to it, and it's actually a youtube challenge to watch his scary af videos without screaming.

Mortarion: very nice niche lil science and biology channel. Does voice over of lil clipart and fix pictures and semi shitty lil doodles to explain hos concepts. It's actually a really fun and easy to understand channel, highly underated.

Roboute: let's play channel but it's only cosy game like Stardew valley or animal crossing or minecraft. Actually mostly talk about his life on top of it, just little vlog that explain stress and ptsd and his anxiety. He has a very loyal following and a lot of vets really relate to what he talk about.

Rogal: an architecture channel, except he like to explain a lot of his concept using Lego. Has become a meme for some of the accidentally saying hilarious shit like "Off colored bricks may work the same, but they deserve the Shame Bucket". Absolutely feral fanbase, and he understand none of it.

Lorgar: religious study channel... And legit helpful. Like yeah ofc he totally believe in what he's talking about, but he also will happily explain the texts, the historical context, translations, interpretations throu history and relevance to other excerpt, etc. If you are going through a religious study class he 100% will help you pass.

Vulkan: a very nice and sweet channel where he explain the basic of how to forge things. All the tutorial and super nicely labeled. Also explain the basic of how to be a farrier for horses and donkey, even if half of those videos is just him petting a blissed out animal and calling them the cutest thing in the galaxy.

Perturabo: tried making a channel similar to Rogal. Failed. Posted one video of him reacting to a shitty reality tv. Instant overnight superstar. Content outrage to the max. Reality tv are BEGGING him to review them and call them trash, they get millions of extra viewer because of him.

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comicbookhyperfixationtime · 6 months

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Uncanny X-Men #195- It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Last Issue Recap: A routine stakeout on Juggernaut turned nasty when Nimrod showed up and started blasting. He was barely driven off thanks to a clutch move by Rogue, but the X-men's decision to let Juggey go without a fight has landed them in even hotter water with the public. Meanwhile, Ruskies are scheming and Storm's off in Africa.

This cover is so amazingly dumb and beautiful and I love it. Like, its literally Wolverine about to murder a child. Everyone's expression is gold. Of course its a fakeout, Wolverine isn't going to murder a child this issue, but I'll be damned if its not effective at grabbing my attention. I vaguely recognize these kids from a Thor comic from the same era they should up in but I'll be damned if I remember a thing about them. I guess Marvel was pushing them really hard at the time. Edit: after doing some research I have discovered the Power Pack was actually created by one of the Marvel comics editors, which explains a lot about their seeming omnipresence.

The opening narration gives a brief summation of who these little rascals are (they are called Power Pack, a quartet of siblings who were given powers by a dying alien Green Lantern style) which explains them I guess but also doesn't explain them at all.

We see the Power Pack in bed with their parents, awoken by the sound of thunder. Because, its a Dark and Stormy Night, get it? What a waste of a good title, why would you name an X-men story "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night" when Storm isn't even there?! A great pun, flushed down the drain.

I think the following dialogue is a good example of Claremont's limits as I writer. Even though I can tell he's trying to simplify his style for kids, this dialogue is still quite longwinded and a bit too verbose. Of course, struggling to write convincing child dialogue isn't a Claremont specific problem, I don't recall Power Pack sounding any more natural in the Thor comic they showed up in. But in the Thor comic, the characters I actually cared about showed up pretty quickly. We spend the first third of this comic with these kids as the only focus, so the awkward dialogue starts to really grate. Doesn't help that the art on the kids is not so hot, their bodies are sometimes weirdly proportioned, and their faces misshapen. Kids are clearly not John Romita Jr's wheelhouse, although he's a great artist.

The Power Pack realizes their parents and neighbors have forgotten who they are, and what's more, all their possessions have been cleared out like they never existed in the first place! This is an excellent setup that will quickly become an extremely stupid plot hole.

The phonetic accent is... certainly a choice. It's Claremont in the 80s, could be worse I guess. But more importantly, these children call themselves the Power Pack... and their their last name is "Powers"... and they don't even wear masks! Wikipedia tells me they had secret identities, how the heck did they keep that up?!

The kid's parents are about to call the police, so they make a run for it, using their powers to blast a hole through their apartment building and causing massive property damage rather than leaving like normal people, I guess because we needed to establish their powers. This doesn't really help me understand their power sets at all, though. Also their personalities are pretty much interchangeable, except for perhaps the youngest, so no matter how many times they repeat each other's names I'm not going to remember them. Best I can gather, the youngest girl absorbs (matter? energy?) to make things explode, the brown haired boy turns into mist, the older girl has Canonball powers but with the pansexual flag, and the oldest boy does gravity manipulation?

The children decide that this series of unfortunate events must be the doing of Annalee, a Morlock who'd previously attempted to forcefully adopted them, with the help of another Morlock with memory manipulation powers. You might say to yourself, "but Fix, this makes no sense because if the Morlocks could access the Powers' house and steal all their stuff why wouldn't they have just kidnapped the kids as well?" You would be right! Unfortunately, so are the kids.

The kids decide to confront the Morlock's themselves, rather than try to find help in the city where literally every other person is either a superhero or related to them, which does seem like the sort of idiotic action a child would take.

The X-men, Spiderman, Cloak and Dagger and Thor?! Jesus, these kids must know everyone in the MC(omics)U! Hell, give them a few more issues and they may meet Jesus too!

The kids enter the sewers, quipping the whole time. Actually, they've been quipping throughout the entire issue; never let it be said that a mood-killing sarcastic comment in a Marvel Movie is not comics accurate. They're confronted by the Morlocks who (unsurprisingly) overpower them quickly. Only the youngest, Katie, escapes, but not before being disfigured by one of Morlocks, Masque, who has plastic surgery powers. The damage to her face is hidden from us and from the way Masque's fingers stick to Katie's flesh in a previous panel like it's hot play-dough, it must be pretty nasty. I kind of enjoyed the brief body horror here, its definitely an interesting idea, I want to see Masque again used to her full potential.

Exactly my reaction if some stranger approached me talking like that.

We finally cut to the X-Mansion and Kitty having her morning breakfast/midnight snack, where its revealed she apparently does some work for the Power Pack's father. Not sure if she's a student assistant or an intern or what have you, especially since she's supposed to be a highschooler, but it doesn't matter because this will never come up again!

She living my life fr fr. Love the little detail of the milk missing the bowl.

We finally get a reveal for what Masque did to Katie's face and I'm going to be honest it really doesn't look that bad. Nowhere near as horrifying as Kitty's mullet.

Kitty and some of the other of the X-men rescue Katie. Not Nightcrawler, though "he's on another mission." Boooooo. I might as well just stop reading. Unfortunately, my completionist tendencies urge me onward, although I expect the next issue to be a totally Nightcrawler-centric or I'm going to write a letter to the editor.

Rachel recaps the first half of the issue via telepathy for the X-men, who vow to help the little tyke.

No she's fucking not, she was literally introduced kidnapping torturing and attempting to rape Angel! I seriously don't get how the X-men manage to gloss over that in all of her subsequent appearances, or why she's ever written as remotely sympathetic (aside from the fact Claremont wants to get stepped on). I'd put her on par with Mastermind for deplorable levels.

Kitty is unanimously elected Team Leader. You got to love a team of people so dysfunctional that the teenager is their current most competent member. This does explain why the best boy has been so unceremoniously left out this week, as Nightcrawler probably wouldn't enact a plan as boneheaded as "rush head-on into Morlock territory with one of the children you're trying to rescue. I can't blame her, though, she is literally a child.

We get a cute little character moment where Wolverine comforts and bonds with a scared Katie that I kind of mentally glossed over because I don't care. It's not that it's poorly written or anything (although it is longwinded), its just I'm really not invested in these kids we never met and their emotional struggles I've been introduced to five minutes ago. I just want to get to the part where people punch each other already.

And get to the punching we shall! The X-men find the room where Annalee is keeping the children, and their stuff.

Average College Dorm Experience.

To the X-men's shock and horror, the Morlocks have mutated the other Powers' children to be slightly uglier as well! They've also brainwashed them to think Annalee is their real mother. Again, why this couldn't have been done when they snuck into their house to steal all their furniture, I don't know.

The X-men start brawling with the brainwashed kids, plus a menagerie of Morlocks. Rogue is kicking ass but gets whammied by Leech, who whammies himself in the process. I'm really enjoying the creative scenarios that Rogues' powerset can create. She's definitely the highlight of this issue.

Leech temporarily strips Rogue of her powers, meaning she'll have to take out the Morlocks the old fashioned way, which she does no problem because Rogue is a badass.

Damn, Aang really let himself go.

Meanwhile, for the rest of the team (sans Rachel who just disappears for a couple pages?) the mooks start coming and they don't stop coming, so Kitty Pryde slips off to rescue the kids herself while Wolvie performs gratuitous offscreen violence. She gets Annalee to surrender with a quick "what would your dead children think?" speech, at which point peak femcel Callisto shows up, just in time to be useless.

The plot is resolved, and Annalee finally processes her trauma from her children's death and makes peace with the Power Pack. And then Rachel and her rattail show back up to let the team know they're being summoned to the X-Mansion... by Magneto, for Secret Wars II!

Wait didn't we just have Secret Wars?!

Oh god, we're entering the Age of the Event Comic, aren't we?! There's going to be a new one every year (at least every 12 issues!) and its going to be convoluted and my completionist ass is going to read every single one of them. But not here because I don't want to.

Anyway, this was a waste of an issue. Usually I'm chill with a breather episode, but I don't care about Power Pack and this wasn't really that fun. The X-men weren't given a lot of time to shine, especially Rachel and poor, poor Kurt. Especially since now I'm going to have to speedrun through Secret Wars II real quick just to make sure I'm all caught up on the drama (expect a brief, unhinged review coming soon).

#comic books #marvel comics #uncanny xmen #rogue #kitty pryde #wolverine #power pack #morlocks #rachel summers for like five seconds #way too long #way too many tags

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a-lukewarm-take · 11 months

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buddy, i understand why youre so confused. cause i am too.

i understand the whole things yeah, the 'harassing people is bad', 'mind your business', etc etc. but other than that im lost on whatever the hell this 'pro' and 'anti' stuff is. ive just been not interacting with that, i think those pro anti people call it being 'neutral' im pretty sure. anyway i think the whole concept is pretty dumb, but its the internet. i wouldnt be surprised if someone doxed someone else over ice cream flavors

what ive for the whole thing is this: pro in proship stands for 'pro' as in 'for' for shipping/ship and let ship, anti is the opposite of that. antis believe that fiction can influence people, pros dont. pros believe what you like in fiction does not dictate your morals, antis dont. etc etc

my tip is this: keep far far away and ignore everything about those two things. if you dont wanna do that, well, try not to get too lost in the sauce while listening to both sides and keep your mind open

sorry if you already knew half of this and this is just kinda null, have a nice day

I'm not big on lables. I think theres a pretty reasonable middle ground to be had but I doubt either side is going to actually listen for long enough to figure this out. It would be nice if they did but, this is the internet.

"Pedophilia is bad"

can coexist with

"Fictional characters aren't real and doing reprehensible things to them has no real life victims"

aswell as

"Fiction and the way objectionable content in fiction is framed has historically been used as propaganda to enable or encourage harmful behavior irl."

They're not contradictory unless deliberately misinterpreted and exaggerated via a bad faith rube-goldberg of causality.

Books like Lolita play with framing in a way that a lot of mainstream readers miss the point of, especially readers that expect Lolita to spoon feed them the morals as many other books would have. Whether or not a reader is aroused or horrified by Lolita has nothing to do with their own morals and everything to do with whether or not they picked up on the fact that the narrator is an unreliable monster justifying and lying to himself when it comes to the girl in the novel.

Art is complicated and some audiences, no matter how hard the author tries, are going to interpret that art in a way the author did not intend or even pervert the meaning to support whatever worldview they had before encountering the work.

Sometimes stories show you an oversexualized and glorified depiction of a repugnant act, explicitly because they trust that this framing would make the audience uncomfortable. The titillation is intended only as a gateway to vomiting or a profound sense of horror as it highlights that not all bad things are prevented and that this world will not punish the unjust inherently. It's asking you to wallow in the tragedy.

There are surely stories that have no such deeper meaning and are quite simply porn. The line is thin and blurry. When you censor one you run the risk of censoring them all because someone unprepared to think critically about what the media they consume is trying to say, is going to miss the point.

Censorship is a difficult thing to manage and everyone has a right to distrust the powers enforcing it.

You can believe strongly that there is media that does more harm than good whilst also understanding that very rarely is this the direct or intentional fault of the creator or consumers of the work on an individual level. But rather cogs in a larger system to which individuals can participate much in the same way we don't blame the butterfly for the hurricane. You can fight for censorship without shaming or harassing the people who don't want it.

I'm sure someone else could explain this better than I could and I'm open to being wrong about this. I certainly don't have all the answers, that's a part of being human.

-Luke

#proship #antiship #ask #discourse

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isfjmel-phleg · 2 years

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I've read the first dozen issues of Impulse and more or less the entirety of Thad's appearances later on, and that's about it (...for now), but it's still a pretty good overview of the characters and world. For additional context, I also read the various Flash issues that introduce Bart, and it was like reading about a completely different character. Not that anything essentially changes about him between each series (they're even written by the same author, Mark Waid), but the use of differing POV manipulates the reader's perception.

Impulse has a third-person narrator (a fitting choice: first-person commentary throughout would be too introspective for this protagonist) who is affectionately snarky toward Bart. Sure, this kid has some pretty significant flaws, which we have no illusions about, but we love him for it. Even without first-person narration, we still get to access his thoughts (relayed in characteristic pictograms), which builds sympathy. He's also permitted to tell his own backstory in #1 through the means of a school essay. This establishes how he sees himself, how he feels about what has happened to him, what he wants, and what his main relationships are like. His narrative and the accompanying graphics show an affectionate bond between him and his grandmother ("the only one who ever really" cared about him? understood him?) and his resentment of Wally West ("some teacher" who "played [Bart] like a--a--like whatever you guys play in this era..."), who is consistently pictured as angry and aggressive toward Bart. A very subjective account, clearly, but it and the other narrative elements combine to allow the reader to understand where Bart's coming from and sympathize with him as a protagonist.

The Flash tells a different story. This comic is narrated in first person by Wally himself, so almost everything is filtered through his perception. He introduces people and situations and how he feels about them and keeps up a snarky running commentary (...poor choice of words but how else could I phrase that). There are plenty of scenes that he does not appear in and therefore cannot narrate, but his POV sets the tone and understanding of the story. And from Wally's POV, Bart is a jerk. He's "the Fastest Attitude Alive," belligerent, mouthy, arrogant, and refuses to listen, and Wally spends a lot of time being annoyed with him. He acknowledges that they're too much alike, and his constantly berating Bart might be a way of taking out frustrations with himself on someone whom he sees as the embodiment of his worst traits. And he's...not wrong about Bart. All of those traits are still present in his characterization in Impulse. But from Wally's POV, that's all we get to see of Bart. There's no access to his thoughts. Most of his appearances are angry confrontations with Wally, so there's not much sense of who he is when not interacting with someone he dislikes. His more sympathetic traits, like his bond with his grandmother, are only implied through body language, and there's no mention of his preference for staying with her (which he mentions in his essay). We don't really know what he wants next, aside from his admitting to Jesse that he might want to return to his own time "when this is all over." And why should we know? It's not important to Wally's narrative. We see only his limited understanding, just as Bart lacks insight into where Wally was coming from.

The art styles even underline the difference in perception! In The Flash, Bart looks more like a shortish adult, which is at odds with his juvenile behavior. This is how Wally sees him: someone who is too old to be acting like this (...mentally, if not actually chronologically) and needs to shape up and take responsibility. But in Impulse (which was aimed at a younger readership), Bart is very clearly a young teenager, his face less chiseled and more childlike, his proportions more wiry. This visually establishes that he's just a kid. He's going to behave like one. The reader should have sympathy for him as such.

And of course neither characterization is more or less correct than the other. Just different facets being emphasized according to the narrative's POV. This is something I would expect from traditional literature, and it's exciting to see how it plays out in comics/graphic novels and how much thought and complexity evidently went into these portrayals.

#comicsposting again #with my English major hat on #multiple POV in literature is something that fascinates me #and here it is in a nontraditional literary format!

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stillness-in-green · 2 years

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So is it just me or is the setup to save the 3 main villains looking kind of forced? Deku seeing Shigaraki’s child form, Dabi’s whole family feeling guilty and wanting to save him, and Toga crying. Dabi is the most believable but I wish there was more nuance about his family’s feelings.

I'll get to my thoughts on your actual ask beneath the cut down below, anon, but I feel obliged to point out first that I haven't really put a lot of stock in the “““villain trio”””(1) conceptually since My Villain Academia, and particularly Spinner’s closing narration in Chapter 239. Not to say that there's no reason to talk about Shigaraki, Toga and Dabi as a group, but the way some people talk about them and what their stories require of the larger narrative has always struck me as banking way too much on the prominence of that trio in anime merchandise art and not enough on what's actually going on with the League in the manga.

In that sense, my biggest fear about the set-up on saving just the "villain trio" is the way that the current scenario leaves other villains–and particularly non-League villains–out in the cold. For all that it seems obvious that the manga is maneuvering the kids towards the idea that saving villains is the right thing to do–that it's in bridging the divide between hero and villain that they will collectively become "the greatest heroes"–it's still glaringly obvious that this salvation doesn’t apply to villains as a group.

Why does that matter? Well, first let's go ahead and look at the gonna-get-saved-by-the-kids trio, because all three of them point in the direction of the answer to that question, and while two of them are, in my opinion, set up pretty well to do so, the third is a goddamn mess.

Which is a problem, seeing as it's the one with the most crucial parts of the narrative riding on it.

Beneath the cut: thoughts on the individual set-ups for saving Toga, Dabi, and Shigaraki–including lengthy diversions onto Uraraka’s money concerns and why we should have kept them, how the Todoroki Plot reflects on the larger plot of BNHA+the demands said mirroring puts on it as a narrative of intimate family abuse, and especially the myriad ways the narrative lets down Midoriya Izuku in trying to portray him as a young man “possessed by a drive to save others that eclipses all common understanding”–before coming back around to a discussion of why it isn't enough for just those three to be saved.

TOGA:

So, to start with, I personally feel like Toga’s is the most believable set-up. After all, the only thing that set-up requires is Toga's tears and Uraraka witnessing them, and that’s quite easy to arrange, given that Toga’s tears come when she essentially gets turned down by her crush–except in this case the rejection is also tantamount to a death threat. Of course that’s upsetting!

Ochaco would never, of course, but Toga’s fear of heroes being tied to fear for her life didn’t start with Jin’s murder; it goes all the way back to the training camp attack, which means it probably goes back to her time on the run. Villains being dehumanized to the point of them not counting as “people” fits right into the narrative she already has about heroes, but she clearly hoped for better from Uraraka, so I’m perfectly accepting of her being upset when she instead just gets told that she will be “stopped.”

I like that the matter of Toga feels so much in limbo right now, too. Like, Shigaraki and Dabi may need help, may even want help on some subconscious level, but Shigaraki certainly doesn’t think he’s going to get it, and I suspect Dabi is going to try to murder the first person who offers; he may or may not be laughing hysterically as he does so. Toga is the only one of the three who sought out her opposite number specifically to ask for advice and clarification, functionally a cry for help, only to have her hand very personally slapped away. Her leaving the way she did felt ominous, like a window of opportunity closing before Uraraka even realized it was there. I’m sure things will work out in the end, but there’s a good tension there that I’m rather enjoying.

If anything about the Toga/Uraraka situation feels forced, I think it’s on Uraraka’s end, and it isn’t really about Toga per se, so much as it is Uraraka’s larger arc and what’s driving it. A lot of people rightfully complain about how the character arc Uraraka seemed initially set up for–the one about her family’s financial struggles and how they influence her motivations re: heroism–got binned in favor of making her entire character revolve around Deku, possibly to make her a better parallel to Toga and her struggles with the nature of her “love.” While I’m inclined to agree that Uraraka’s money problems were 10,000x more interesting than her “heroes who protect other heroes” shtick, what annoys me about it is that her money motivations didn’t need to change to tie her to Toga.

Uraraka’s practicality stemming from her financial worries is not mutually exclusive to her crush on Deku and the way it attracts Toga’s attention. A harmless schoolgirl crush did not need to reroute her entire character arc; she could have kept all the financial worries while also being obliged to wrestle with this apparently maniacal serial killer being interested in her, and she would have been affected by Toga’s tears either way, because ultimately, Uraraka’s a nice kid with ample natural empathy, compassion, and desire to help people in need.

This is particularly egregious when you consider that the reasons Toga sought out Uraraka to begin with are a) her grief over Jin’s death and b) her fear of what that death presages for herself, neither of which is in the slightest romantic. Hell, Jin’s own situation is one he found himself in in part because of his poverty. I wish I had any faith that we could one day see Uraraka having to ask herself some uncomfortable questions about her original motivations for getting into heroism and what she might have done if heroism was either not an option at all or not a helpful option because something that makes you wait three years before you’re eligible to start getting paid for it doesn’t pay the rent or put food on the table today.

So, yeah. I don’t know; maybe Uraraka was always going to get derailed by the romance plot because Horikoshi couldn’t figure out a better way to approach her, or because his editor thought the female lead should have more of a focus on romance–Shonen Jump’s editorial staff is famously antiquated about that sort of thing.

But even if something like the above is the case, I ultimately find it hard to lay the blame for any resulting artificiality at the feet of the Saving Villains plot. Uraraka’s arc is awkward because of the ways it pivoted to revolve around her feelings for Deku, not because there’s anything inherently strained or bad about her pull to heroism being about helping people, or her gradually expanding her understanding of who she wants to help and what that help needs to look like in order to be effective via her parents, Deku, Nighteye, the civilians hurt in Gigantomachia’s passage, and eventually Toga. At worst, Uraraka deciding to pursue a career as a rescue hero is a bit Tiresomely Traditionally Feminine and Nurturing, but it would have been a lot more tolerably so without her every scene having to involve Deku somehow or another.

DABI:

As to Dabi, I too wish there was a bit more nuance to the Todoroki family’s feelings, but mainly that’s because my second-highest hope for that plot(2) was that we’d see the two older siblings invert: that Natsuo would be forgiving and want a reconciliation, while Fuyumi–who worked so tirelessly and for so long on salvaging what she could of her family, and who was finally beginning to see those efforts pay off–would be the one who found herself not wanting to forgive.

I never really expected to get that, though, so I’m generally pretty okay with what we’re getting on the Todoroki front. I know a lot of the Western villain fandom/the Endeavor hatedom really loathes the idea that the whole family was “taking responsibility” when Dabi is Endeavor’s monster to the bone, but I prefer to look at it as shrinking the societal down to the personal. It's all about connecting the family's personal troubles with the themes of the series at large, and one of those themes–indeed, possibly the theme as far as the sympathetic villain angle goes–is that society has a responsibility to the victims it creates.

No one single person is responsible for Shigaraki Tomura,(3) and yet, one single person could have made all the difference in the world to him. Whose fault is it, that not one person did? No one’s, obviously, because you can’t pin (to use a different show’s marvelously apt phrasing) a complex network of interrelated forces beyond anyone's control on a single person. Yet still, that crowd of people is indicted by the manga. Them averting their eyes and saying, “It’s not my job; someone else will come along soon; I can’t right now; I’m not the right one.”–their inaction is the systemic fault that the manga has set out to critique from its very first chapter. It is the “normal” that Midoriya Izuku is intended(4) to be marked apart from.

So, if the story is saying that it is everyone's responsibility to try to help someone in need, regardless of whether the situation is their fault or their responsibility, then the story has to bear that out on a personal level as much as it does a societal one. It would ring totally false if the manga were to say that perfect strangers have an obligation to step in and help when help is needed, but somehow not have that hold true for when the need is within one’s own family.(5)

Returning, then, to the Todoroki plot: if we can’t permit family members to even say, “Maybe if I had spoken up back then, I could have stopped it from getting as bad as it did,” in a conversation about the circumstances that led to Dabi without accusing Horikoshi of victim-blaming or abuse apologia, then how on earth can we expect to navigate the conversation about the collective failures that piled up and piled up until they became the lethal hatred Shigaraki bears for the common bystander? If we can indict that crowd of people whose worst crime was to avert their eyes from something uncomfortable they saw one time, telling themselves they’d let a professional handle it, then why can’t the Todoroki family have a frank discussion about a problem they all (with the exception of Shouto) spent years watching get worse and worse and yet still proved unable to avert?

And look, lest anyone think I’m blaming them, of course it wasn’t Fuyumi or Natsuo’s responsibility to fix that whole situation; they were just kids, and, no, I don't seriously think there's anything they could have done that would have changed it. But the two of them looking back on The Problem of Touya with the benefit of hindsight and wondering if there was anything they could have done seems like a perfectly normal, human response to me, and that's even without the themes around the saving of villains being what they are.

Incidentally, the same sentiment cropped up–and received similar complaints from the Western fandom–when Iida said that Class 1-A shared some responsibility for Aoyama’s crimes because they failed to “perceive what was in his heart.” Of course what he did isn’t their fault, but still, the narrative says, he was there and he needed help, and he even tried to ask for it in subtle ways, and yet, no one helped him; everyone just chalked his weirdness up to him being a weirdo and didn’t try to look any deeper. And so, when they look back on those moments, they think, “He needed us then and he needs us now, even if he's given up asking. We owe it to him to try to help because we didn’t back then.”

Yes, there's certainly a conversation to be had about Consequences For Endeavor, but playing blame games in Enji's hospital room when he's out of his mind on grief and painkillers doesn't actually bring Touya back in from the mountain. Touya has to come first.

Class 1-A's conclusion of collective responsibility is the same one the Todorokis reach in the hospital room: We all have to try, because we owe him the help we couldn’t give him when he needed it back then. The conclusion is the same because it's the same conclusion the arc of the Heros vs. Villains story is bending towards.

And on that note…

SHIGARAKI:

As much as I wish it were otherwise, I do, in fact, agree 100% that the set-up on Deku wanting to save Shigaraki is forced, insincere, thematically shakey, underrealized bullshit, and almost all of it goes back to the woeful gap between what the story tells us about Deku and what the story shows us about Deku.

Chiefly, the complaint I have is that I just don’t buy–have never bought–the idea that Deku’s “drive to save” is unique and rare beyond all others.

I'm about to spend a lot of time talking about this, so let me lay out at the outset why it's important to the matter at hand: because Shigaraki is both Hero Society's ultimate villain, the hardest one to defeat, and its ultimate victim, the hardest one to save. Deku's drive to save has to be as extreme as we're told it is because he's going to have to risk everything fighting the villain in Shigaraki (possibly the AFO influence, if ShigAFO is the Final Boss) while also still looking for the remnants of the victim no one else could reach, the one everyone else has written off as unsavable. If the audience has the impression that just anybody could reach the victim in Shigaraki, it will be that much less impactful when Deku does, and that much less convincing when the story is shouting into a megaphone about how impressive it is that he's able to.

If Deku's drive to save falls flat, then the huge deal the story is making about him wanting to save Shigaraki falls flat, and it becomes–in anon's words–"forced."

So.

Deku goes to extreme lengths to save, sure, but has he really gone that much farther than any–than every–other character? What exactly has he done that’s so unique? Risked his arms? Arms which he got healed constantly, and that narrative handwaving has now ensured he can and does still use? That doesn’t impress me like Mirio’s snap decision to knowingly sacrifice his quirk–and with it, all his past efforts and future dreams–to save Eri.

Maybe him sacrificing his connections, like when he left school? But how can I count that when All Might left with him and, within a month, Deku’s entire class turned up to drag him out of his ass and back into their midst? How can one month possibly compare to All Might’s willingness to spend thirty years burning himself out with virtually no close friends or loved ones to show for it?

Deku risked his life? All those heroes who planted themselves in front of Gigantomachia mid-rampage risked their lives. So did every single member of the MLA who escaped the wave of Shigaraki’s Decay in Deika and then, knowing that that deadly attack could still be on the table, pressed into the cloud of dust and ruin out of a desire to help their leader. Hell, Mr. Compress even explicitly called out the idea that only heroes can give their lives for a cause when he consciously chose to maim himself in a way that both he and Best Jeanist clearly assumed would prove fatal.

How am I supposed to be impressed by Deku risking his life after watching Twice give his? No. Nothing Deku has done or sacrificed strikes me as indicative of a drive to save that warrants Nighteye’s description as a sort of madness.

There are only two things I can think of that might argue otherwise, and both of them are compromised by other factors.

First, there’s the idea that Deku risks his life not only for friends (like any number of other characters) or complete strangers (like any hero worth a damn), but also for people who have hurt him and people he cares about–people like middle school Bakugou and Shigaraki. But Bakugou told All Might (and thereby the audience) that Deku’s drive to save is one that doesn’t consider himself; Deku’s fanbase has been arguing for years that his self-sacrificial tendencies are a symptom of a lack of self-worth resulting from the bullying and judgment he faced for being quirkless.

Deku helping people who have hurt him doesn’t make his drive to save impressive; it just means he doesn’t get angry for his own sake. If that’s the case, why should I find that trait admirable? If it’s secretly a character flaw, shouldn’t I want him to change it? But that’s clearly not what the story’s trying to tell me–not unless it’s saving up for a serious endgame pivot on its saintly portrayal of Shigaraki Yoichi.(6)

The other possibility–and this one is much bigger–goes back to anon’s question, and the story's larger thematic thrust: the idea of saving villains.

And like, okay, this would be huge. It should be huge. All those people I listed above, who have risked and given as much or more than Deku ever has? They all undertook those risks, paid those prices, for people on their own side. For innocents, for allies, for friends.

Deku reaching out for villains would represent reaching across the aisle–reaching out for people who his cultural upbringing tacitly trained him to believe were less than human, people who could never possibly need to be saved themselves because they were who heroes saved people from. If Deku had, this whole time, wanted to save villains, now that would be a drive to save that I could believe was so rare as to be called insanity. Hell, even if he didn't start out thinking of saving villains but was the first to try and bridge the gap, that would be something.

But even here, the series undermines him in countless ways.

You know who the first person to reach across the aisle to save someone was?

It was Stain, when he acted to stop Deku being carried off by a Noumu. A villain was the first person to try to save someone ideologically opposed to themselves. Hell, a villain was the second person, too: Spinner, in acting to stop Magne from attacking Deku.(7)

Now, in fairness, the story does portray Stain as a madman, and Spinner was consciously emulating him, not acting on his own inherent beliefs. And, yes, Deku was the first hero to try to save a villain–except that the Todorokis and Uraraka are all right on his heels, and nobody in the story is calling them crazy!

The Todorokis haven’t said the words yet, but anyone who thinks people like Rei or Natsuo are going to be down with murdering Touya for the greater good are fools beyond belief; likewise, there is no damn way Shouto’s position as “hero of the family” ends in him killing his oldest brother and twisted reflection of who he himself knows he could have become.

Meanwhile, though Uraraka has probably not even fully articulated the quandary to herself yet, she’s also running on a lot less knowledge than either the Todorokis–who spent over a decade with Touya and intimately know what every bit of his damage is–or Deku, who literally got to experience a psychic impression of Shigaraki as a weeping five-year-old child clutching his dog while seeing current!Shigaraki being gruesomely consumed by All For One in a flesh-twisting vision out of Cronenberg. So, you know, by comparison,(8) I think Uraraka already feeling the pangs of conscience from catching a brief glimpse of tears from a girl she already knew to be emotionally out of whack is doing pretty well.

And, of course, let’s not forget the way that every single member of Class 1-A was 100% ready to let bygones be bygones mere hours after finding out that their classmate Aoyama is a traitor who set them up for attack after lethal attack that led to injuries, kidnapping, and could easily have gotten any number of them killed.

This goes even further: the problem isn’t just that Deku was neither the first nor the only person to think about saving his enemies; it’s that he has never even faced significant pushback for his allegedly mad, rare, uncommon, nonsensical way of thinking. All Might didn’t fight him on wanting to save Shigaraki. Gran Torino gave him a gentle rebuke that consisted of nothing stronger than asking him to keep murder in mind as an option for “saving.”(9) The One For All vestiges questioned him some but quickly acceded. The Second and Third vestiges repudiated him more strongly, but Deku didn’t even have to win them over by his own efforts; Yoichi did it for him. Tsukauchi and Mic tried to protest holding that hand out to Aoyama, but both of them folded like wet paper the instant Aizawa backed Deku and the other kids’ resolve.

How am I supposed to buy that Deku’s resolve is so shockingly unprecedented when he’s never had to so much as raise his voice about it? For heaven’s sake, the sharpest anyone ever was with him was Nighteye, and even Nighteye’s harsh words were less about wanting to save someone–Eri, as picture-perfect an innocent victim as could possibly be imagined–as about not getting so arrogant as to assume he could just swoop in and carry that rescue out without even thinking about the consequences if something went wrong.

There is one final way the narrative lets Deku down in portraying his singular drive to save: how he treats villains he isn’t primed to be sympathetic towards. I mentioned already that it took that psychic vision to get him thinking about saving Shigaraki, and that’s a lot to require of a character who’s supposed to have this remarkable, unprecedented Saving Instinct. But required it apparently is, because, lacking open weeping (Vision!Shigaraki, La Brava, Aoyama) or an outright explanation of their damage (Gentle Criminal, Lady Nagant), other villains get screwed by Deku without remorse.

Muscular? Well, he didn't want to answer questions about his motives coming from some holier-than-thou teenager, meaning he must be irredeemable, so no need for anyone other than Deku to try to help him. Overhaul? Well, Deku held a grudge about him for Eri’s sake, so while Deku did the bare minimum of saving him from getting shot,(10) don’t expect him to take any steps to save Overhaul from what’s actually tormenting him.(11) The PLF? Hah hah, Deku’s never even met anyone from that group; why would he waste a moment’s thought on their problems?

By the time Deku got around to Dictator, his goal of understanding and saving villains, which he defended so idealistically to the vestiges, had crumbled into thoughts about how he had to “put a stop” to Shigaraki and the League; the only thing he wanted to talk to Dictator about was where he could find All For One. He offered the man not even one question about e.g. why he felt he needed “security.”

And look, Dictator is obviously a caricature who we are not meant to even consider the notion of a sympathetic backstory for. But fans are all too willing to invent abusive parents for Shinsou wholecloth based on his peers’ reactions to his mind-control quirk, we saw directly how Toga was treated for her inborn biological urges, and both of them have entirely normal, conventionally attractive features. Compare them to a dude with a Thanos chin, a bad case of kyphosis (in the vernacular, hunchback), and a quirk that manifests as cables coming out of his back like something out of The Cell, and tell me you can’t imagine the kinds of issues Dictator might easily have been dealing with since he was three years old.

Where was Deku's drive to save all of those people? If his desire to save is really so profound, why is it contingent on knowing someone's sob story first?

Before seeing Shigaraki in the mindscape, the only villain Deku made a real attempt to soften a landing for was Gentle Criminal, and even there, Gentle was the one to take the first step; he gave Deku an easy lie and all Deku had to do is back him up on it. Deku did, and that’s not nothing, but Gentle Criminal and La Brava were the easiest, “Are villains human?” test on their side of the traitor reveal–it's not some miracle that Deku passed.

Oh, by the way. One more little aside here before we move on. Kirishima was the first hero to openly show sympathy to a villain, back when he was fighting that extremely low tier gang dude in the alley–the one who would shortly shoot himself up with Trigger, becoming, briefly, Moonfish 2.0. He still scolded the man, sure, but he managed to attempt some conversation and openly expressed sympathy for the dude's motivations–about the same tack Deku would take with Gentle, except Kirishima beat him to the punch by forty chapters, largely because Kirishima is a side character and was therefore allowed to have street-level fights with low-stakes threats long before Deku was.

THAT ALL SAID, there’s one other huge, huge problem with the way the manga is currently approaching “saving Shigaraki,” and it’s a problem that’s on Shigaraki’s side, rather than Deku’s. The problem with the Shigaraki side of the equation is that if Shigaraki rolls over and stops being a villain just because Deku saved him from All For One–and with the series set to end within the year, we are rapidly running out of time to get much else(12)–it is going to be the most shameful squandering of everything a character represents that I have ever seen in my life.

Here’s the thing: despite All For One being the man most singly responsible for the existence that is Shigaraki Tomura, Shigaraki’s grievances aren’t about All For One. They never have been. Shigaraki may hate All For One, especially now, but that hatred doesn’t hold a candle to his hate for All Might and his broken promises, for bystanders that snivel about needing to be saved while being too cowardly to try and save others themselves, for heroes that perpetuate that weakness, for an entire system that relentlessly and ruthlessly ignores and villainizes everyone that it couldn’t or wouldn’t save. That is the challenge he poses; that is what has to be overcome for him to be mollified.

All For One has got shit-all to do with Shigaraki’s real accusations against the protagonists. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t need to be saved from All For One; it just means that saving him from All For One cannot be sufficient to resolve his grievances–not the ones he carries for himself, and especially not the ones he represents for others.

Saving Shigaraki has to mean saving everyone Shigaraki speaks for, and thematically, Shigaraki speaks for damn near every villain in the series except All For One. If the kids don’t address those villains' pain, they don’t address his. If they don’t address his pain, they haven’t saved him.

As it stands, individual villains have to earn their rescues by not only having sad backstories or sympathetic personalities, but by having those things where a hero can see them. Re-Destro was groomed from the time he was in schoolboy shorts to take on the burdens of his ancestor? Overhaul was raised by a yakuza boss who clearly never got him the help he needed to deal with his issues about disease and uncleanliness? Mustard is a disaffected middle-schooler with clear hangups about class? Well, they weren’t Sad where a hero character could see it, so fuck ‘em, apparently.

I’m very here for seeing the humanity in villains and wanting to save them, because the current state of affairs in-universe is a goddamn carnival of human rights abuses, but if it never goes any farther than the kids trying to reach people that have pre-demonstrated sympathetic qualities, then it doesn’t amount to shit in my eyes.

As of right now, there is precious little setting apart All Might’s and Deku’s attitudes on Shigaraki: both of them were 100% ready to beat him as savagely as necessary to make him stop, right up until the instant they learned something humanizing and personal about him, and only then did they think about saving him, despite both of them having had ample evidence to think critically about how Shigaraki wound up the way he did way long before they learned his real name/the fact that he used to be a sad kid with a dog. The only difference is that when people tried to talk them out of it, All Might let himself be, while Deku acknowledged the difficulty but claimed to still want to try.(12)

Like, guys, Shigaraki’s sad backstory is not Schrödinger's cat; it exists whether or not a hero bears witness to it. The same goes for every other villain–it has to, because the personal opinion of a sixteen-year-old should not and cannot be the deciding factor in how a society treats its criminals. Obviously, that’s not to say, “Whee, no consequences for anyone because everyone has justification for being the way they are!” but the re-humanization of villains has to go farther than “the three villains that these three high school kids have any reason to care about.”

Look how far having a sympathetic backstory but no high schoolers who cared about him got Jin, after all.

Changing all of this will be a massive, massive feat–but that is, after all, why Shigaraki, who symbolically carries something from every other villain he's faced, is Hero Society’s greatest challenge. He's the greatest villain and greatest victim all in one, because the two categories are, from a practical standpoint, inseparably tangled. Whether you see someone as one or the other is all in how much you know and where you’re looking from.

Now, the story is, of course, ongoing. It is perfectly plausible to me that all this business with setting some of the kids up to see the humanity in these villains is just the first step in them realizing that all the people they’ve been taught to see as inhuman villains have reasons for being the way they are, and those reasons–poverty, abuse, discrimination, generational grudges, urges they were born with and never given a healthy way to channel–are the real enemy. That maps perfectly well to the experience of many real-life people raised on discriminatory rhetoric against The Other who never think to question it until they meet someone who puts a face on the issue, and then have to unlearn an entire lifetime’s worth of messaging.

It’s a slow, difficult, painful process in real life, so if what it takes for the heroes to get there is a smiling girl’s tears, a lost brother’s rage, and the vision of an inconsolable boy and his dog–well, maybe it’s a bit hamfisted, but as long as it doesn’t end with the girl, the brother, and the boy, I can live with that.

But we're awfully late in the game now to only just be starting on that arc.

Thanks for the ask, and I hope I managed to hit on anything you were actually wanting to know somewhere in All Of That. Sorry it took so long!

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FOOTNOTES

(1) I would have thought the way I use scare quotes every time I talk about the ““”““villain trio”””“”””“””“”” would make that clear, but perhaps more are in order. Time to start ordering in bulk, I guess.

(2) My highest hope was Dabi being treated less like the Secretly Sweet Good Big Brother the fandom always liked and more like the vengeful D&D-style revenant of Todoroki Touya, which I’m thrilled to say is exactly what the canon is giving me.

(3) The obvious talking point here is All For One, and he certainly comes the closest to bearing singular blame, but even he might never have had what he had to work with if any of Kotarou, Nana, or Gran Torino had made different choices. This is especially the case if Decay proves to be Tenko’s own quirk, a mutation like Eri’s, and not one given to him by AFO.

(4) How successfully Midoriya Izuku really stands apart from that norm is a different matter, about which I will have a great deal more to say shortly.

(5) As, indeed, we also see within the Shimura family. The “one person” to change everything could have been any adult in that household willing to stand up to Kotarou and tell him he was letting his abandonment trauma poison his entire family.

(6) By all means, I would welcome this, but I'm long past the point of expecting it.

(7) And people say he has no connection to the students. Fools, Spinner’s connection to the students is Deku, and not just because of the training camp.

(8) My specific point of comparison would probably be Uraraka taking about four weeks and thirty-five chapters to get to the same question of, “What happens to people that don’t get saved?” that Deku ignores for well over two hundred chapters and the better part of a year. It’s not like Deku didn’t pick up on the implications when Shigaraki laid the crux of his damage bare at Deku’s feet during their mall encounter; Deku asked All Might in the very next chapter if there was ever–as Shigaraki implied–someone that All Might was unable to save. He listened to All Might acknowledge, sure, that’s happened lots of times, and then he apparently just never let himself think about it again, right up until he had his face shoved in the consequences. By comparison, Uraraka got there all on her own, no psychic visions required, just her own insight and ability to push a statement of intent to its logical conclusion.

(9) And despite this bit of ludicrous advice going against everything he just got done facing down a psychic tribunal over, Deku doesn’t even think twice about wearing this man’s mantle.

(10) And both Dabi (the eldest son of a top hero who for years aspired to the career himself, so he presumably has some idea about what the job requirements entail) and Lady Nagant (a hero herself, personally trained by the regulatory bureau in charge of heroes, so you know she's got a pretty good idea of what the party line is) say that heroes are trained to never let people die, no matter who they are. So no, Deku saving Overhaul from getting shot even though he's a villain does not impress me; it's literally and explicitly a matter of basic hero education to not let villains get killed through one's own inaction. This, incidentally, is also why I didn't credit Hawks saving Twice from Dabi's fire as being the first hero to try to save a villain; note that if I did count Deku saving Overhaul from Nagant's bullet, Hawks' earlier save would have been one more way the series undercut him.

(11) Bullshit moral grandstanding that doesn’t materially improve things for anyone, least of all Overhaul’s actual victims, decidedly does not count.

(12) Especially if we're due for any more nonsensical wheel-turning like pissing away ten chapters on sleight-of-hand tricks about how long it will be before Shigaraki is "complete."

(13) Of course, right out of the gate, he tripped and fell on his face so badly that it's probably more apt to compare his performance with Muscular to Hawks' performance with Twice. Both of them go through the same motions of making a perfunctory attempt to persuade a villain to back down from a fight before writing that villain off as a lost cause. The difference is that Hawks was more extreme on both ends–more emotionally invested in getting his villain to surrender, and resorting to more extreme measures when his villain refused. Deku clearly never believed in the questions he was asking Muscular from the start, but he did at least manage to refrain from murdering the man.

#boku no academia #my hero academia #bnha #my writing #stillness answers #stillness has salt #bnha meta #toga himiko #uraraka ochaco #dabi #the todoroki drama #shigaraki tomura #midoriya izuku #deku critical #-ish #he's okay but his concept deserves better than the writing is giving him #which is on the writing more than on him #hero society #this one is just a lot you guys

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sineala · 3 years

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Tony Stark and Arthuriana

Coming to you by special request, a very long post about 616 Tony's interest in Arthuriana, with a focus on all of Tony's run-ins with Morgan le Fay!

I feel like I should disclaim the extent of my knowledge here, which is that I still haven't managed to read anywhere near every issue of Iron Man -- at least, not yet, anyway -- so I'm just going by the things I know I've read, and Morgan le Fay's Marvel wiki entry is frustratingly under-cited, so it's very possible I've missed something relevant, but I'm pretty sure I've got the big stuff down. My other disclaimer here is that I'm not as big an Arthurian nerd as Tony is, which is to say that most of my familiarity comes from modern retellings -- T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, Mary Stewart's The Crystal Cave, Rosemary Sutcliff's Sword at Sunset -- and not so much the usual classic sources on the Matter of Britain, though I've read bits and pieces of them.

(This is because I wanted to read versions of them that were as close to the original as possible but so far have not ended up finishing any of them because, well, that's hard. So I've never read the Mabinogion because I do not know Welsh. I've got the Norton Critical Edition of Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, which is probably the best student edition if you're looking for something without modernized spellings, as I was. I've also got -- well, okay, it's my wife's but I'm borrowing it -- a relatively recent Boydell & Brewer edition (ed. Reeve, tr. Wright) of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), which is, you guessed it, in Latin with a facing English translation. I haven't gotten very far in it because, in case you didn't know this about Latin texts, the beginning is pretty much always the hardest, so I gave up and read some Plautus adaptations instead. Anyway, if for some reason you too want to read Geoffrey of Monmouth in the original Latin I'd recommend that one, but I can't recommend any particular English translations because I've never read one by itself. I bet you didn't think you'd be getting Latin prose recommendations in this post. I mean, maybe you did; it is me, after all.)

Okay. Right. King Arthur. Here we go.

We've got:

Flashbacks to Tony's childhood in late Iron Man volume 1

A brief discussion of Morgan's origin story and Avengers #187

Iron Man vol 1 #149-150: Doomquest

What If vol 1 #33: What if Iron Man was trapped in the time of King Arthur?

Iron Man vol 1 #249-250: Recurring Knightmare

Iron Man: Legacy of Doom #1-4

Avengers vol 3 #1-4: The Morgan Conquest

Civil War: The Confession

Mighty Avengers vol 1 #9-11: Time Is On No One's Side

In terms of universe-internal chronology, we know from Iron Man #287, from 1992, that Tony has been a fan of King Arthur since childhood. This is an issue of a fandom-favorite arc which features Tony having a lot of childhood flashbacks, including the famous "Stark men are made of iron" line (in #286) that for some reason MCU fandom decided it loved; I mean, seriously, I've seen that quoted in way more MCU fic than 616 fic. But slightly later, in #287, we get an entire page devoted to Tony's love of King Arthur.

The narration reads: "Over the next few years, I learned as my father intended. Discipline of body. Strength of character. But in what free time I was allowed, I worked my way through the school's library. At thirteen, I discovered Mallory [sic], who showed me a whole new world. A world of dedication to a cause greater than oneself. Of chivalry and honor. And the fantastic deeds -- of armored heroes."

The art shows Tony as a child sitting under a tree, reading a book labeled Mort D'Arthur by Mallory [sic] -- no, don't ask me why nobody at Marvel checked how to spell either the name of the book or its author -- and daydreaming of King Arthur, the Sword in the Stone, knights, et cetera. Just in case you somehow missed the extremely blatant hint that we are meant to understand that Tony's knight obsession heavily influenced him becoming Iron Man as an adult, we see one of his armors mixed in with all the drawings of knights. So, yes, canonically Tony is Iron Man at least partly because he's a giant King Arthur nerd, which I think is so very sweet. I love him. He's such a dork!

(This issue is currently in print in the Iron Man Epic Collection War Machine, should you need your own copy.)

This isn't actually the only reference to Tony as a King Arthur fanboy in this era of canon, either; a little later, in IM #298, we see that one of Tony's passwords is actually "Mallory." (Yeah, no, they still couldn't spell. But it's cute.)

But in terms of actual publication order, this is definitely not the first time we have seen in canon that Tony is into Arthuriana, as I'm sure you all know. I would assume, in fact, that giving Tony a childhood interest in Arthuriana is because Doomquest is one of the most beloved Iron Man story arcs of all time, and that all started at least a decade before IM #287 here was published.

The villain of Doomquest -- the one who isn't Doctor Doom, at least -- is Morgan le Fay. Yes, that Morgan le Fay. Yes, Arthur's evil half-sister Morgan le Fay. Yes, all of this King Arthur stuff is canonically real history on Earth-616. Morgan's first appearance in Marvel, per the wiki, was in Black Knight #1 (1955), which I have not read, and judging by the summary I feel like this is probably just supposed to be a straight-up comic retelling of Arthurian legends for kids; I don't think Marvel really had the whole Marvel Universe in mind as a concept in 1955, so I'm not sure this was meant to connect to anything else. I feel like this is another one of those instances of Marvel discovering that they can write comics about characters in the public domain for free -- like, I'm pretty sure that's how we also ended up with, like, Norse, Greek, and Roman mythology wedged into 616.

As far as I can tell from the wiki, the first time Morgan tangled with the Avengers (or indeed the larger 616 universe) in any way actually predated Doomquest -- it was in an early arc in Spider-Woman (#2-6) and then Avengers #187, which came out in 1979, actually right when Demon in a Bottle was happening over in Iron Man comics. If you read #187, Iron Man is not in it because he's off the team due to his drinking problem and also his accidentally murdering the Carnelian ambassador problem. So Wonder Man's filling in instead. This issue is part of Michelinie's rather sporadic Avengers run, which makes sense, I guess, considering where we see Morgan next.

Anyway, Avengers #187 is the classic issue where Wanda is possessed by Chthon, but what you may not remember from Chthon's backstory (I sure didn't!) is that he was summoned by Morgan le Fay because she was the first person who tried to wield the Darkhold to summon him. As you can imagine, this did not work out especially well for her and her followers and they had to seal Chthon away in Wundagore Mountain, which was where Wanda found him. (The Spider-Woman stuff is only slightly earlier and also appears to be about Morgan and the Darkhold; the Darkhold is not one of the areas of 616 canon I am especially conversant with, alas. It's on my to-read list.)

Doomquest, as you probably know, was a classic Iron Man two-parter in Layton & Michelinie's first Iron Man run that set up Tony and Doom as rivals; Doomquest itself was IM #149-150, in 1981, and then in their second IM run they came back and did a sequel in 1989, Recurring Knightmare (IM #249-250), and then the much later four-part sequel to that was the 2008 miniseries Iron Man: Legacy of Doom, which was also by Layton & Michelinie but generally does not seem to be as popular as the first two parts. They've all been reprinted, if you're looking for copies; I have a Doomquest hardcover that collects the first four issues and then a separate Legacy of Doom hardcover. Currently in the Iron Man Epic Collection line there's a volume called Doom, which confusingly only collects the 249-250 part of the storyline (as well as surrounding issues), because for some reason the first Layton & Michelinie run isn't in Epics yet but the second one is. So the beginning of Doomquest isn't currently in print, as far as I can tell. I'm sure you can find it anyway.

So what's Doomquest about? Okay, so you remember how Doctor Doom's mother's soul is stuck in hell for all eternity? Well, Doom's obviously interested in getting her back, and the strategy he has embarked on is to try to team up with other powerful magicians who can help him out, and he thinks Morgan le Fay would be a good choice, for, uh, his quest. Doom's quest. A Doomquest, if you will. (If you've ever read Doctor Strange & Doctor Doom: Triumph & Torment, you're familiar with the part where he later ends up waylaying Strange for this and they go to hell together. And if you haven't read Triumph & Torment, you really should, because it's amazing.)

So Doom is off to his time machine to go team up with Morgan le Fay and Tony thinks Doom is up to something -- Doom has been stealing components for his time machine from a lot of people, including Tony -- and he follows him and it turns out one of Doom's lackeys has a grudge and wants to trap Doom in the past forever, and Tony gets caught up in it. Now they're both in Camelot. Surprise! #149 is actually all setup; they don't get to Camelot until #150.

IM #150 begins with Doom and Tony thrown back into the past; there's a fandom-famous splash page of them locked in combat, only to realize that they have found themselves in Camelot.

They are then discovered by knights; Doom would very much like to attack them, but Tony, who naturally would be happy to LARP Camelot forever, persuades him to play nice. Also Doom thinks Iron Man is only Tony's bodyguard so he keeps referring to him as "lackey," much to Tony's annoyance. Somehow everyone thinks they're sorcerers. Can't imagine why. The knights take them to meet King Arthur himself, and Tony has clearly had his introduction all ready to go, as he introduces himself in a timeline-appropriate manner, says he's here to apprehend Doom, and demonstrates his "magic" by levitating Arthur's throne. Doom's response is essentially "I'm the king of Latveria," which is, y'know, also valid. So they're guests at Camelot for the night while Arthur figures out what to do with them.

We then have a page devoted to Tony alone in his room, musing sadly about how alien he feels, how he doesn't know if he'll ever get home, how he could never fit in here without his beloved technology. Then a Sexy Lady shows up to keep him company for the night, and he decides maybe it's not all bad. Thanks, Marvel. I guess they can't all be winners.

Doom is using his evening much more productively; he compels one of the servants to tell him where Morgan's castle is, because he's still interested in having that team-up. Then he jets off. Literally. He has a jetpack.

The next morning Arthur's like "one of you is still here and one of you has punched a hole through the castle wall and flown off to join Morgan so I guess I know which of you is more trustworthy." He then explains to Tony who Morgan is, because Tony professes ignorance, because clearly we had not yet retconned in Tony's love of Arthuriana. Tony offers to go fight Doom and Morgan with Arthur; meanwhile, Morgan and Doom have teamed up and Morgan has offered to help get Doom's mother out of hell if he commands her undead armies against Arthur because for Reasons she can't command them herself anymore. So that's a thing that happens.

So, yes, it's Tony and Arthur versus Doom and Morgan. Fight fight fight!

Tony tries Doom first but then decides to hunt Morgan down, and in the ensuing fight we get what I think is Tony's first ever "I hate magic," a complaint that we all know he still makes even to this day.

Anyway, Tony freezes a dragon with Freon (mmm, technology) and Morgan gets upset and disappears, so the battle comes to an end, and of course Doom is extremely mad at Tony because he blames Tony for Morgan not sticking around to save Doom's mom, because I guess Doom trusted her to keep her word? Weird. (Like I said, for the next chapter of Doom saving his mother, go read Triumph & Torment.)

Doom says if he and Tony work together, the components in both of their armors can send them both home. So Tony has to trust Doom. Which he does, because he really has no other choice. They build a time machine and Tony makes Doom agree to a 24-hour truce when they get back, so they can both get home. So it all works out okay, and they end up in the present, and Doom tells him, ominously, that they will meet again. Okay, then. That concludes the original Doomquest. It's fun! You can see why fandom likes it.

So that's all well and good, but you might have noticed that Tony's ability to get home hinged on Doom actually being trustworthy. And Doom was. But what if Doom hadn't been? What if he'd just stranded Tony in Camelot forever As you may have surmised from the form of that question, that is in fact a question Marvel asked themselves, because, yes, there's a What If about this! What If v1 #33 is "What if Iron Man was trapped in the time of King Arthur?"

The divergence point from canon, as you can probably guess, is the very end of Doomquest. Instead of Doom bringing Tony home, he deceives him and leaves him in Camelot. And since Tony cannibalized a lot of the tech from his armor to make the time machine, he doesn't have a way to go home.

This is not a story where Tony comes up with a way to go home after all. He really doesn't get to go home. But instead of drowning his sorrows in mead -- because, remember, Demon in a Bottle has already happened and Tony is sober now -- he decides he might as well just play the hand he's dealt. So with what's left of his armor, he defeats some enemies that Morgan rounds up to send against Camelot. And for his services, he's knighted. He is now Sir Anthony.

Tony acknowledges that he is both living the dream and would also like very, very much to go home.

He does end up having some fun in Camelot; it's not all miserable. But he obviously doesn't want to be there.

So if you're at all familiar with King Arthur, you know how this goes, right? Arthur fights Mordred and Mordred kills him. And that does happen in this version. Except Tony is right there, and with his dying words, Arthur asks Tony to rule Camelot... and Tony agrees.

So, yes, Tony Stark becomes king of the Britons after Arthur's death and he never goes home again. The end. Man, I love What Ifs.

Heading back to main 616 continuity, there is still more of this arc to go. The original Doomquest was only two issues, yes, but it was popular enough that Layton & Michelinie did a sequel a hundred issues later, in their second run of Iron Man, and that's Iron Man #249-250, Recurring Knightmare. (In the intervening issues were Denny O'Neil's IM run, specifically the second drinking arc (#160-200), and then Layton & Michelinie came back and most famously gave us Armor Wars (#225-232). I would have to say that Armor Wars is definitely the standout fandom-favorite arc of their second IM run; for their first one, I think a lot of people would have a hard time choosing between Doomquest and Demon.) But anyway, yes. Recurring Knightmare.

Recurring Knightmare is... well, the best way I can describe it is "a trip." It is definitely a sequel to Doomquest, and it is also definitely not a sequel you would ever have expected to see for Doomquest.

Much like #149, #249 is pretty much just setup. Fun setup, but the big action is in the next issue. We open with Doom in Latveria, on his throne, pondering which of his servants he should have disintegrated. Anyway, he's just hanging out there when a mysterious object appears. In California, Tony is suited up and entertaining the crowd at a mall opening when the same object also appears! He takes it to his lab. Please note that this is after the Kathy Dare incident, so Tony is still recovering and is walking with a cane. Doom sees on the news that Iron Man has found the same object, which cannot be carbon-dated, and he shows up at Tony's house. He criticizes Tony's taste in art.

Anyway, Doom basically orders Tony to work with him. Tony refuses, and then Doom sends some robots to attempt to steal Tony's version of the object because he thinks if he has them both he will be powerful. Doom manages to steal it, and when he puts the pieces together, both he and Tony disappear.

So where do they go, you might ask? Camelot?

Not exactly. The future! There is a great callback to the Doomquest splash page.

It turns out they are in London in 2093. Merlin brought them there. Tony still hates magic. And in the future, King Arthur is still there, except he is now a child, because he has been reborn. But he does remember Tony from Doomquest, at which point Tony kneels. Doom, of course, is not impressed. He asks why they have been brought to the future.

The answer is that things are going wrong in the future. If you do not personally remember United States politics in the 1980s, I need you to google the words "Strategic Defense Initiative" right now. I'll wait.

Back with me? Okay, so this is a future where Reagan's Star Wars program actually happened the way he wanted it to, and the satellites are still hanging around the Earth in the future and messing everything up, and Arthur and Merlin need Tony and Doom's help to stop them. Doom once again flies away with his jetpack, of course.

Tony is game to help, but he's not in an armor that can stay in space for long. This is when Merlin takes him and Arthur to the mall and Tony manages to get everything to upgrade his armor at Radio Shack. You see what I meant about this issue being weird.

Tony is out in space trying to disarm the SDI platform, which is where he runs into his future descendant, Andros Stark, who is in armor you will probably recognize from Iron Man 2020. He is referred to as "the resurrected spawn of Iron Man 2020" so I assume he's actually directly related to Arno rather than a direct descendant of Tony; Wiki confirms that Arno is his grandfather. This is all from way before Arno was contemporaneous with Tony in canon. Anyway, he's fighting Tony.

Oh, by the way, Future Doom exists. Future Doom would like to rule this future Earth and for some reason Andros would like to help him. Meanwhile, Present Doom finds out from Merlin that he can't leave except by magic and he can't leave without Tony, so he is reluctantly on Tony's side.

They need help from the Lady of the Lake, except the lake has been paved over and is now a parking lot. Merlin makes the lake come back and then of course they get Excalibur. Arthur is a kid, so he can't wield a longsword; Doom assumes he's going to take it because he is basically a king, and he's pretty grumpy when the sword picks Tony. Tony then uses Excalibur to destroy the space lasers, and I bet that is a sentence you never thought you would read. It's pretty cool. Tony concludes that magic has its good points. Tony stops Andros and Doom stops, uh, himself, and the world is saved and they get to go home. Also, Doom finds out Tony is Iron Man, but when Merlin sends them back he conveniently erases their memories, so neither of them remember anything about this and Tony's secret is still safe. And that's the sequel to Doomquest.

And if you think that's weird, wait until you see Legacy of Doom.

Iron Man: Legacy of Doom is a four-issue miniseries from 2008, also by Layton and Michelinie. Even though it's from 2008, it's set during a much more classic time in Iron Man, continuing on from where we left off in this Doomquest saga. We start with a framing story in 2008. Tony, who has Extremis now, is busy scrapping some of his older armors and reviewing his logs when he suddenly remembers that there was a whole thing with Doom that happened that he seems to have forgotten about until right now. So the whole thing is narrated by Tony in flashback.

Tony's in space fixing a satellite when a hologram of Doom shows up and summons him to Latveria. It's not really clear why Doom needs Tony's help in particular here, but Doom tells Tony that he's discovered that Mephisto would like to bring about the end of the world, which Doom finds, and I quote, "presumptive." So Doom has his Time Cube, and with it he takes Tony to hell.

(Yes, I promise this is relevant to Doomquest. There will be some Arthuriana shortly.)

Doom brings Tony to Mephisto, and it turns out it's a setup! Doom trades Tony for an item he wants from Mephisto, leaves, and Tony's going to be trapped in hell forever! Oh no! (I mean, he's not. But it's quite a cliffhanger.)

At the beginning of issue #2, we find out what the Arthurian connection is, which is that we learned that after the events of Doomquest, Morgan had been granted sanctuary by Mephisto in exchange for a shard of Excalibur that she had somehow stolen. Doom still wants Morgan's help with some magic -- he doesn't mention what it is here, but he says he needs someone of Pendragon blood, and that'd be her -- so he traded Tony to Mephisto in exchange for, I'm guessing, Morgan and the Excalibur shard.

I have probably mentioned this elsewhere, but Legacy of Doom #2 is one of my favorite issues of Iron Man ever, solely because of the next scene. We return to Tony in hell. Howard Stark is also in hell, and he is now a demon, and Tony has to fight him. Mephisto brings popcorn and watches. This is the one time in canon when Tony actually confronts his father, and okay, yes, it's a fistfight in hell and Howard is a demon, but that's comics for you. Howard spends several pages insulting Tony -- specifically insulting his masculinity, but that's a whole other essay -- until he finally insults Maria too, and that's when Tony fights back, because his mother taught him to be good. Honestly if you're a Tony fan I'd recommend this issue just for that scene.

Anyway, we go back to the Doom and Morgan plot, and Morgan casts the spell Doom wanted, which was fusing the Excalibur shard with Doom's armor. Then Doom sends her back to Camelot rather than hell, because he's still mad that she never helped him get his mom out of hell like she said she would.

Tony freezes Howard with Freon -- yes, the same trick he pulled on the dragon back in Doomquest -- and tells him, "You're no father of mine." It is immensely satisfying.

(I had been going to mention that I thought it was a shame that neither canon nor fandom seems to have really engaged with this confrontation, and I know canon never believes in narrative closure but fandom sure does -- and then, anyway, it occurred to me that since the framing story of Tony remembering this is set when Tony has Extremis, there's a very good chance that he no longer remembers remembering it. Goddammit, Marvel.)

(If I got to retcon one canon thing about Tony, I think "the entirety of World's Most Wanted" is up there. I mean, okay, a lot of things are up there, but WMW is definitely on the shortlist.)

Okay. Tony has now engineered his way out of hell, and he's back with Doom in Latveria. Doom has Excalibur. Doom would very much like to fight him. While wielding Excalibur. You get the sense that this is going to be bad. Another cliffhanger!

Legacy of Doom #3 opens with Tony destroying Doom's lab to buy time and running away from Doom and Excalibur. I should probably mention that Doom still doesn't know Tony is Iron Man (anymore), so he thinks he is dealing only with Iron Man, Tony Stark's lackey. Meanwhile, some scientists at SI think there's something weird going on with space. Meanwhile meanwhile, Tony is in a forest taking a breather when a mysterious old man walks up to him.

It's Merlin! Surprise! Merlin wants Tony's help to stop Doom from doing whatever he's doing with Excalibur. The sword makes you invincible and the scabbard makes you invulnerable, so Merlin sends Tony to Scotland on a fetch quest for the scabbard. Doom has now magically sent the sword in search of the scabbard, so the sword flies away to meet it and Doom follows. Turns out the thing that's wrong with space is a thing that's going to hit Earth at the exact place Tony and Doom are. What a coincidence! So Tony and Doom get trapped in a stone circle and fight some stone warriors and then Tony ends up with the scabbard. And by "ends up with," I mean it fuses to his armor. Next issue!

Legacy of Doom #4 is when things really, really get weird. A giant demon made of eyes (???) appears, and this demon is apparently what Doom had been preparing to fight (because it's mad that Doom stole one of its spellbooks), and now he can't, because the sword and the scabbard aren't together. Thanks, Shellhead.

That's when Merlin shows up and says all is not lost. They can defeat the demon... if they put the sword into the scabbard.

"But I'm the scabbard now!" Tony says, uncomprehending.

"Yes," Merlin says. "You are."

Then Tony gets it.

So, yes, Doom has to, um, penetrate Tony. With Excalibur. I love comics. I love comics so much.

So that's a thing that happens.

And then Tony flies off and, I guess, resolves to never, ever think about any of this again.

We head back to the framing story, in which Tony, now having remembered all of this, flies to Britain, buys the land the lake is on, and paves it over, presumably so it will be there for Merlin to bring back in Iron Man #250. The end.

Whew.

Okay, yeah, I know I didn't have to summarize the whole thing, but Legacy of Doom here really is one of my favorite Iron Man miniseries. And I just want to share the love. Please read it. It's great.

But the Arthuriana fun doesn't end there! In fact, now we get an Arthurian-themed arc that actually isn't in Iron Man comics. It's in Avengers! Iron Man is involved, though.

(There is also apparently a Morgan arc in Avengers #240. I actually haven't read it. It seems to be yet another Spider-Woman arc. I get the impression that this isn't really Arthuriana other than having Morgan in it fighting Jess, though, so it doesn't seem quite as relevant. Morgan also apparently has some appearances in FF, Journey into Mystery, and Marvel Team-Up, but those seem like more of just basic villainy. Also, probably not involving Tony.)

Kurt Busiek's 1998 Avengers run, volume 3, is in large part the kind of Avengers run that is a nostalgic love letter to older comics. Heroes are heroes and villains are villains and good triumphs over evil. The Avengers all live in the mansion and are BFFs. I love it. It does assume that you are already a fan of the Avengers, because it starts out by summoning pretty much everyone who has ever been an Avenger and is available to the mansion, and that is... a lot of people. Thirty-nine, by my count. Also, when the entire team is magically whisked away, we are treated to the following narration, as Steve disappears: "And Captain America's last thought, as the world goes white around him, and he with it -- is that Iron Man would hate this."

The narration doesn't tell you why Iron Man would hate this, or how Captain America would know that Iron Man hates this. This is not explained later on. But if you have read comics -- or if you have read the above summary of Doomquest -- you know that Tony is absolutely, one hundred percent, thinking, "I hate magic." And Steve knows it.

The reference is not relevant to the plot; if you don't get it, you'll be fine. But that's what I mean when I say this is a nostalgia run. There are definitely Easter eggs for people who have read a bunch of comics. Busiek does this a whole lot in his work -- there's a reason you can buy an annotated edition of Marvels -- and, yeah, it happens here too. Just know that there will be references you're not getting, if you're new to comics.

Anyway. So Busiek's run actually starts out with an Arthurian arc, #1-4, "The Morgan Conquest." The name is a dead giveaway. Yes, Morgan le Fay is back. Again. For once, Doom is not involved.

The Avengers are all back from their sojourn on Counter-Earth after fighting Onslaught -- don't worry about it -- and mysterious things are happening. There are a lot of monster attacks. So pretty much everyone who has ever been an Avenger is summoned to the mansion, at which point we learn from Thor about some mystical artifacts that are being stolen. (They are the Norn Stones and also the Twilight Sword. That sounds like something from a Zelda game, doesn't it?) The Avengers go to try to stop this, end up in Tintagel, and then they run into Mordred. He wants to capture Wanda, presumably for Magic Reasons. Morgan le Fay casts a spell on all of them, reshaping reality. Yes, all of them. Surprise!

So now all the Avengers are living in a medieval castle and/or town; Morgan is their queen, and thanks to the power of mind-control they are all basically living in Ye Olden Times. The Avengers are all some variety of knight, except for Wanda, who is chained up in the dungeon so Morgan can steal her magic and use it to fuel all this reality-warping.

Wanda calls for help, and that snaps Steve (Yeoman America!) out of the mind control (or altered reality or whatever you want to call it) pretty fast, because Steve's always been very good at resisting mind control, and then Steve promptly goes and snaps Clint out of it, because I guess Steve is also good at inspiring people to snap out of mind control. "Oh, man!" Clint says. "Not another alternate reality! Not again!" (I assume he's referring to Counter-Earth? Maybe?)

So Steve and Clint go around reassembling the Avengers and orienting them as to reality. They get Jan and Monica easily, but then Steve insists on trying to get Tony because, I guess, he likes Tony and would really like to hang around Tony, who is half-naked and asleep in his bedroom, and certainly I am reading nothing whatsoever into this. Clint tells Steve it's not going to work. Tony has historically been fairly susceptible to mind control; it was only pretty recently at this point that he'd been doing Kang's bidding in The Crossing. But the more serious impediment is that this is Tony Stark and he would obviously like to LARP being a knight forever and ever. Tony, therefore, does not believe Steve, and throws him and Clint out of his bedroom and into the barracks.

"Iron Man's a good guy, normally," Clint says. "But he's waaay too into his whole nobleman/lord of the manor trip. That spell musta hit him right where he lives!"

Clint speaks the truth, clearly.

Anyway, they go around and manage to make pretty much every Avenger in the room other than Tony snap out, and attempt to rebel against Morgan while Tony is stil fighting them because he is Still A Knight. There's a lot of punching, because some of the Avengers still aren't free; they weren't ones Steve found.

The day is saved when Wanda manages to channel Wonder Man and break free. This gives the Avengers a fighting chance against Morgan and the Avengers are all lending Wanda their power when Tony finally snaps out of it and is on the side of good.

Then they take Morgan down, go home, and attempt to figure out which of these thirty-nine people should be on the active Avengers team. Hooray.

But that's not the end of Morgan le Fay showing up to screw around with Tony's life! There's more to come! Not much, but there is one that I know of, and at least one more memorable reference.

(I haven't read all her appearances or anything, but one of them definitely involves Tony; I can't swear that he doesn't appear in any of the other books Morgan shows up in, but it'd be a cameo for him, because I only know of one more arc that she's in in a book that Tony stars in.)

In a few more years, we have now entered the part of Marvel Comics history where Brian Michael Bendis writes all the Avengers books at the same time for, like, seven years running. It was sure A Time. There were a lot of word bubbles.

And the thing about Bendis is, Bendis looooooves Doomquest. If you're familiar with the very end of his tenure at Marvel where he made Doom be Iron Man after Tony got knocked into a coma in Civil War II, you have probably figured out already that he likes Doom. But he also likes Doomquest, specifically.

I mean, if nothing else, the giant splash page in The Confession where Maleev redrew the climactic Doomquest fight while Bendis had Tony talk about how deeply meaningful to his understanding of the world this all was -- and how it allowed him to predict Civil War -- was probably a big clue, right?

As far as I am aware, Morgan le Fay makes exactly one more appearance in Tony's life. And that's in Mighty Avengers vol 1 #9-11. Only one of those issues is named, so I'm going to assume the arc is named after it: Time Is On No One's Side.

You remember Mighty Avengers, right? The deal with the Avengers books at the time was that after Bendis exploded the mansion and made the team disband in Avengers Disassembled, the main Avengers book was no longer called just Avengers. Instead, the main Avengers book was New Avengers, and that was the only Avengers book. Then Civil War happened, Steve got killed, and New Avengers became the book about what was left of the SHRA resistance (i.e., Steve's side) after the war. So about halfway through New Avengers, Mighty Avengers starts up, and Mighty Avengers is about an extremely fucked-up and grief-stricken Tony Stark trying to run the official government-sanctioned Avengers team, with Carol's help. This is the comic with the arc where Tony turned into naked girl Ultron. You remember.

So, anyway, there's this Mighty Avengers arc where Doom is Up To Something (there are symbiotes and a satellite involved) and somehow Tony and the Avengers end up in Latveria, punching Doom. Also, by the way, Doom is visiting Morgan in the past because he likes her. The Avengers attacking his castle made him have to come back to the present, so he's kind of cranky. And he fights Tony, and in the course of the fight, his time platform explodes and sends Doom and Tony and also the Sentry to... the past.

This is one of those times where you should definitely look up the comics if possible because the way the past is visually indicated here is that it's colored with halftone dots the way you would expect old comics to be colored, although they have modern shading and color palettes. It's very charmingly retro.

So the three of them are stuck in New York in the past, and naturally they would like to leave. There's one person in this time who has a time machine and it is, of course, Reed Richards. Doom and Tony have a lot of banter in this arc; I think it's entertaining.

Sentry has to be the one to break them all into the Baxter Building because of that power he has where no one will remember him. So they do that, travel forward in time, and end up in Latveria in the present again except Doom is gone and also things are currently exploding where they are.

Doom, of course, has made a side trip to visit Morgan again and he asks her to help him build an army, because I guess this is what their relationship is like. So the rest of the Avengers are captured by what look to me like Mindless Ones and are in a cave in magic bondage, because comics. Jess comments that at least they aren't naked, because she too is remembering that memorable New Avengers trip to the Savage Land. Doom threatens Carol in some creepy sexist ways and eventually it turns out that Tony and the Sentry are fine and everyone kicks Doom's ass. Business as usual.

And the last page of the arc is Morgan alone, wondering where Doom is. So technically Morgan and Tony don't come face to face here, but I think she counts as being at least partially responsible for ruining Tony's day here. And then Secret Invasion happens and Tony has a very, very bad day.

There are a few more Morgan appearances after this, but, as I said, I don't think any of them involve Tony. She shows up in Dark Avengers, apparently, which was one of the post-Civil War Avengers titles I didn't read, and I know that recently, on the X-Men side of things, she's been in Tini Howard's Excalibur one, which I have only read a little of. No Tony there. Just a lot of Morgan and Betsy Braddock and Brian Braddock and the Otherworld.

If you are interested in Morgan's other appearances, you might like this Marvel listicle that is Morgan le Fay's six most malicious acts. I pulled some of the Darkhold backstory from their discussion, but it's not really focused on Morgan and Tony.

So there you have it! That's everything I know about Tony's love for King Arthur and every run-in I know about that he's had with Morgan le Fay! One of two terrible people in Tony's life named Morgan! Actually, I don't think we've seen Morgan Stark in a while. I wonder if he's alive. There should be a Morgan & Morgan team-up. I should probably stop typing and post this.

The tl;dr point is that you should all read Doomquest and its sequels, especially Legacy of Doom. They're great!

#posts i actually wrote

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rumblelibrary · 3 years

Text

The Diary of Doctor Laszlo Kreizler

Chapter 1

Synopsis: Alienist’s notes are private, sometimes gruesome, secrets of others and of himself.Those pages belongs to secrecy and decadence, have a glimpse to this world made of drafts, notes, accidents and reflections. Or maybe it is you the only person that should ever reach for it.

While you read this imagine Laszlo mostly at the end of his day, scraping the ideas and the thoughts, adjusting previous notes with additions, closing the day behind himself with a couple of sentences while sitting in his evening robe, a good glass of whiskey and his glasses bridged almost at the tip of his nose. Or maybe imagine yourself, you sneaky thing, reach for it from a far shelf.

Word count: 3k

Warnings: listen, this is the set of ideas and confessions of a man living in the 1890’s. Most of them will be outdated, rough, even deprecating in some analysis of the roles of men, women and social status, religion, etc.So be prepared, my point is to make Laszlo reflect upon those topics, but to be as faithful as I can to his time. Mention of death, mutilation, self harm and a minor depiction of a fight. Psychologically troubled young children ahead! Author’s note: I am a nerd for a good Victorian novel and a sexy Alienist.I have always been charmed by Laszlo’s mind and inner conflicts. So I took the chance and tried to have a run into that rollercoaster. The story is placed between season 1 and season 2.

Diary belonging to Dr. Laszlo Kreizler. This is a professional book of annotations over medical treatments of an alienist toward his patients. Do not disclose and send it back to the address if found: Kreizler’s Institute, xxxxxx, New York City (NY) L.K.

Samuel Griswold Goodrich, Illustrated Natural History of the Animal Kingdom (c1859). Contributed for digitization by University Library, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Schiller in his “Die Weltweisen” wrote: So long as philosophy keeps together the structure of the Universe so long does it maintain the world’s machinery by hunger and love. From the philosopher point of view sexual life takes a subordinate position in human’s life, from recent studies pushed by European philosophers, everything is about sexuality and its development. I like to think of the experience of being an alienist as the process of Queen Penelope that, while waiting for her husband Ulysses return, undoes her craftwork every night. I undo the fabulous constructs of people’s beliefs to go back to the rough sketch that stands at the beginning of their loss, their complex, their pain. Maybe that’s why working with children is so motivating and fascinating. They can be saved and yet, I am well aware, some of those sketches already traced in their young lives equal to scars that not even the most advanced theories could cure. But I can sooth them. I can prevent them the torment, the anguish, the recollection at night of those monsters. I feel like a poet would be a better alienist than a philosopher, but I have got no poetry nor philosophy in my veins, but the cold experience of the razor blade judgment of Life itself.

Today I observed a fight among the children at the Institute. Age range between 10 and 12. Boys. The fight was over the possession of a side of the playground, the territory of a pack of youngsters formed under the name of Steven. Peculiar lad, coming from a military background finds comfort in replicating the schemes he lived in his family. He takes the role of the Father/Captain of the team and subjects children that come from a similar background story, but do not posses his same attitude to the command. All quiet on the front, until the space he declared is own spot got affected by the presence of others. Intruders. I knowingly let the events unfold to see how Steven would react to his challenged authority. His reaction was, at first, worded, a sketch, a stage-play of an action he witnessed over and over, and he knew the part so well that some of the contending kids lowered their stance against him. Among considering to mildly intervene into this pyramid scheme of authority, another boy, Jan, calls himself on the role of the educator and hero of the masses and proceeds to unfold a wild and well assessed punch on the newly declared dictator face. Balance is established again. No need for me to arbitrate, once more the laws of nature seem to apply to children as in a state of nature.

Meet John Moore over lunch. His job at the newspaper is picking up, he is charmed by the spirits and the wits that he finds in his shared office with all the other writers. He mentions many, goes on and on over qualities and troubles, gossips and tendencies, and even little scandals here and there. To be aware of all those details gives me no interest, but to see a dear friend so invested clearly gives me something to pick up. To consider also the amount of details and the way he describes this or that member of the journal, I can do a small exercise of analysis. It is almost too easy because John is painfully genuine, even some of the kids at the institute would beat him hands down in a battle of lies. The more he likes somebody, the more he goes on about all the details and the characteristics, often letting aside the physical appearance. When he doesn’t like somebody he has a couple of adjectives for the wits and around four or five for the physical aspects that usually indulge on some repulsive idiosyncrasies. John is a man that painfully fits in the storyline of The Picture of Dorian Gray: to him physical beauty is spiritual beauty and, of course, the other way around. This part of him surely intrigues me, makes me want to tease more from him. But, as a friend, it concerns me as John is way too prone to purposelessly decide that somebody with good eyes is also a good human being, which is a very romantic and admirably naive way of judging matters. I noticed some names that keep repeating in his narration. I dread that it is synonymous of a soon encounter from my side with the objects of his admiration. Fetiches, I dare to say, that I will have to annihilate before they sediment into his mind, perpetuating a narration that soon sees John being mislead by others.

Reserved: Tickets for the Eroica, Symphony n. 3 by Ludwig van Beethoven. Thursday evening.

Note on the show: the first movement lacked the pathos needed to begin with, I am not sure that the guest orchestra really managed to portray the wider emotional ground needed to withstand the whole representation. As the evening progressed there were some outstanding performances by the cellists. Still not approving the choice of reprising the early quick finale movement against the lengthy set of variations and fugue that we are used to in presence of the Eroica. Underwhelming the performance of the horn and oboe, vital in the comprehension of the genius of Beethoven.

Niki is a new addition of the Institute, quite old for the standards. He is already 16, he will leave when summer ends to some expensive college his family meant him to stay. His parents expect me to make him “normal” in the time we are allowed together. He is Austrian and I let him act it out like I don’t understand German for the first week of hist stay until today. I believe I hit his pride, which is good, in the moment I answered back to one of his sneaky comments. Now he knows. He is not safe from me, he doesn’t like it. The young man has a tendency to danger, risky tasks and edgy situations. In his mother’s own words “Niki is not afraid of anything”. The phrase didn’t raise any excitement in the father, rather some sort of painful acceptance that is role as the alpha male of the house is probably not only being challenged, but already diminished, if not abolished. I have taken in consideration that Niki will break himself a bone or two in the process of the therapy, probably out of the spite of boredom or rebellion. It took him less than few days to turn himself into an outcast among the outcasts, which only drives me closer to analyse the complexity of his narcissistic wall of self defence. I gave him a physical challenge to lift a certain weight, he is a pretty skinny one, he didn’t like the challenge, but I am sure he will take it. He is a brainy guy, he hates to be questioned on unfamiliar ground. He won’t sleep at night thinking about it. A challenge, in this first phase, can only bring me closer to the ease of his pains. To continue the observation.

It is a sad privilege of medicine, in particular the one I practice, to be able to witness the weaknesses of the human nature and the reverse side of life. Nevertheless, I oblige this same privilege of the study as life moves into shades of darkness. To be aware of it gives more solace to my soul than to be victim of patiently waiting for the inevitable unfolding of the events. To be able to understand more about psychology would bring more comfort and elevation to any human being, the times might not be there yet, but eventually something will move into the direction of a more wholesome approach.

Dinner meeting with Sara Howard, at the restaurant Jardin Des Cygnes, 7 pm sharp. Do not expect to reach the dessert. Do not know if John will be participating due to undeniable tension among the two and the fatal despise of John over French cuisine.

The case that Sara unfolded tonight to my ears feels more and more like pulled out from some gothic book or from the mind of a Roman historian that needed to justify the godly origins of an Emperor. One killing, apparently random, a very constructed iconography over the body. Signs and insults, shapes and drawings. Is this a work of art? Does the killer wants his victim to be his Mona Lisa? His David? I am charmed and destabilised. If this was a murder like any other, then why to spend so much time into it? Based on the description the act of killing itself was quick: a sharp cut over the throat, almost like not wanting to ruin too much the surface to use as base for, what? I keep rerunning those symbols over and over as Sara described them to me, my mind is flooded with the designs of greek philosophers that needed to explain themselves why the sky is above our head and never collapses on us. Hilarious how, no matter the science advancement, in the mind of many the sky stands inevitably overt their shoulders, suffocates them, brings them to a death of the soul and not of the body. Is all this graphic charade indeed only a form to scream for attention? To stress the eyes of an unaware viewer? It seems ridiculously elaborate, a scream for attention would be quick, it would be like guided by instinct, not reasoning, craftwork. Any man with a knife can paint in blood red the walls of a room and that’s asking for attention. That is the primal howl: look at me! I am here! But this one. I don’t know yet.

Spent the early morning reading anew my copy of The Metamorphosis by Ovid. Didn’t touch it in a long time and I got bedazzled by the world of terrible sensuality, anger and selfishness of those gods and mortals. I think back at all the deviances and weaknesses of human kind and I try to relate it to all of those humanoid figures. Niki would be a minotaur, the lonesome son left in the labyrinth and his strive for success is his bull’s head. Or maybe a centaur, because of his wits and strategic thinking. I might keep up the process, maybe this is the way to understand my patients better, to understand the killer better. Must remember not to romanticise it. Greek gods were probably the first form of self indulging of a society that needed gods to be forgiving and allowing favours and punishments, but only in exchange of sacrifices. But the sacrifice never comes from the God’s will, but from the will of the man that perpetuates the act of killing. To sacrifice someone or something is the sadistic response to a lack of love deeply inherited in human mind that becomes neurotic. Is the killer giving the God of his own neurosis a body to feast upon?

I talked with Jan this morning. The young boy is about 10, but he acts like a full grown adult. I could easily asses that’s the reason why he could challenge Steven in that fight. Two children mimicking adults situations they know too well. Jan is son of an industrial man, but he is also son of the dialectics of the industrial revolution. He sounds like he swallowed some of those books about working class rights and communism, probably pushed by a resentful surrounding (mother?uncle? the midwife?) over the social role of his father. As much as incredibly smart and lectured, Jan lost most of his early occasions in life by spending a considerable amount of time using his fists. The anger ever present in the young boy always surprises me, he seems to be holding a power, a strength of a full grown man in those tiny arms. Nevertheless, he is already the tallest of the group. He is surely an idealist, which makes him also tragically fragile. His strength mixed with his heart of gold can make him the best of the heroes or the worst of the villains. He apologised for the fight, he specified how he didn’t like the sound of Steven’s voice, more than the sound, the level of pitch. I can’t stand somebody shouting orders, I just don’t listen anymore. He is so mature even about his own feelings, almost a gentleman in his chivalry toward the weaker children, honest with his open heart and resentful against any form of injustice. I am not spared by his ways, he would come at me whenever he feels like I was being partial over some of the kids, his sense of justice blinds him and transform a perfectly balanced boy into a ranging animal.

Ordered book, to be delivered around tomorrow evening: Introduction à la méthode de Léonard de Vinci by Paul Valéry. Suddenly feeling myself as a gross ignorant in art themes. I always regarded myself aware of the artistic personalities and tendencies of present and past, but this new amount of perceptions over the human figure and the human body leads me to document myself more. I could ask John for advice, but he wouldn’t take things at matter that seriously. I can almost hear him say how I can make gruesome a pleasant topic such as art. I should probably wait to see the body to push any further aesthetic study, but I find myself not being able to stop. I reckon, I can allow myself a vice or two.

Today I saw the body of the killed man, courtesy of the Isaacson's. To be fair, I had underestimated it. In Sara’s descriptions, probably due to her more analytic mind, all the charm of the representation got lost in favour of a less cryptic and reasonable understanding of the act. Sara got what some alienists will call a masculine mind, which I don’t perfectly agree on. If I apply that same approach John would be a very feminine mind, all wrapped up in romanticising even the ugliest. I guess that dividing the world in “fragile and gentle” and “strong and powerful” is just easier to explain the fluctuation of something that doesn’t need a real name or a category like human inclinations on thoughts. I got a feverish sense of patience by looking at the body. Each symbol traced with sapient slowness, dense of the time that the killer spent with the body. That is a work of hours, he had time and meaning. He had resources and was able to spend not less than the time he needed to reach, a vision? An ideal? A message? Is it the message meant to be understood? Am I supposed to unravel it or it is maybe just the way the killer communicates within himself? And if I do decifrate the code, will that bring me closer to him? Or to his next victim?

Reminder: ask John to replicate all the symbols on the bodies in the correct measure and order. It might be needed some hard convincing. Addition: scheduled meeting, his house, 3 pm.

It wasn’t a day like any other when I met you. Or maybe it was, and that’s why I got so struck by it and now I am here playing it over and over through what my memory clung on so desperately. In my own experience, life was often similar to swimming in a lake. Those rich, dense lakes in the north of (illegible cancelled word) were my father used to bring us during summer. I still feel the pull, the draw down toward the abyss. It ashamed me, in a way, the fear that such a simple feeling aroused in my young mind, unaware nevertheless, that such a feeling would follow me through all my existence. It was a prophecy and, like most of the prophecies, was a riddle. I cradle in my heart the charm of those days, the mindless happiness. The foolish feeling of freedom. Little I knew that freedom would be taken away from me that soon, that the body that used to navigate me over the dense waters, helping me to fight the haul toward the unknown, would become my own cage. That day. Today. The day where I met you, the day I was afloat. The child gasping for air felt the wrench become a gentle push and now he is floating on his back over the scary waters of reality and malice. It gave me relief and it gave me terror, because since that very moment I knew that I would never be able to move on from the sight of you. From the feeling of your eyes lingering on me. From the smile you so easily shone upon me. From the whiff of imported perfume that hit me when you turned on side exploding that swan like neck. And nothing, not even my stern look, could dim that wave of hope that your sole presence washed over me. The abyss roars, calls me to a home of damnation and terror and curses my name and yet you repeated that hell-bound name of mine after me and I felt safe.

John told me so much about you, it feels like I have always known you.

The rope is gone from my neck, the guillotine won’t fall on me, I am spared, I am free.

I have read your latest article, I am thrilled to help with the case.

I am in disbelief.

Your voice.

Dr. Kreizler

How dare you? How dare you to come into my life, to appear, like a vision, mystical, in a way I despised at University when all those theology students talked about the divine. In this very moment I can’t recollect much of what you said, something about the case, about going with John at the obituary. It feels confusing, I feel overstimulated, my memory fails me, I am not sure anymore. I write these few lines and it is passed the hour of the witches and I wish, I demand, to never see you again, because life should never grant hope to a condemned man.

#dr laszlo kreizler #dr laszlo kreizler imagine #dr laszlo kreizler x reader #dr laszlo kreizler x you #laszlo kreizler #laszlo kreizler headcanons #laszlo kreizler x reader #the alienist fanfic #victorian age #v writes #the diary of doctor laszlo kreizler

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allunary · 4 years

Photo

I was planning on waiting to post these after I did proper references of all the characters, but that’s definitely not gonna happen for a while ahaha! This is all art for an AU that me @vicen-non, @boxofwaspss and @sensitive-g roleplayed together!

It’s an apocalypse AU where horrifying eldritch creatures emerge overnight and throw the world into utter chaos. There is also a side-plot of government studies of monsters with supernatural abilities, in which many of the main characters have some special power of interest.

We haven’t continued the RP past the first arc, but there is definitely a second arc hypothetically planned. Big thanks to Vi for being literally the coolest narrator in the world and making this story come to life.

Some basic character descriptions under the cut:

Nightmare’s Group: -Nightmare: The unofficial group leader. Works well under stress, but breaks down after the threat has passed. He was originally under the government study program along with Cross, Ink, Error, Blue, and Blue’s brother Papyrus. Him and Cross were roommates and and good friends. He has abilities not properly documented or disclosed to him. The one he is aware of though is his shared eye with Dream (covered with an eyepatch for convenience) that allows him to see what Dream is seeing. -Cross: He gets stressed very easily and likes to stay out of trouble. Saying that though, he does seem to be involved with something a little less than legal. He drives a beaten up van that, despite all odds, seems to still run. He, too, has abilities not disclosed to him. Though electronics seem to respond well to him, sometimes powering even when there’s no batteries. His brother is part of his city’s police force. -Ink: Eccentric but well meaning, he roomed with Error in the government funded apartment complex. He’s an artist by hobby, and has several sketchbooks full of doodles. His abilities aren’t disclosed to him, however he is aware that when he doesn’t take his medication, he begins to lose feeling and forgets things. -Error: He’s much more of a listener than a talker, but he also has a short temper and becomes very talkative when he’s angry or passionate. Has haphephobia. His medication helps him see better, along with the glasses that he was prescribed (thought never wears). His abilities are not disclosed to him, but he knows that when he doesn’t take his medication, he begins to see strings attaching objects together.

Dream’s Group: -Dream: Takes charge and takes responsibility for others. He was not enrolled in the government research program like his brother, and instead became a pediatric doctor halfway across the country. He has the ability to see what his brother sees, though he wears a purposefully wrong prescription lens on that eye so he doesn’t become disoriented during work. It makes that eyelight fuzzy. He also is aware of his inherent abilities to self-heal, though knows nothing more. He took care of Geno in the hospital before the apocalypse began. Oh, and he carries a gun on him at all times. -Geno: In his late teens. Moody, but isn’t an asshole. He suffered a terrible fate after being trapped in a cave for several years. Surviving off of just bare essentials, he was eventually rescued, but in horrible condition. He has trouble eating as well as processing nutrients, so he is permanently hospitalized. Typically he stays in a wheelchair, but can walk for short periods of time. The right of his skull is permanently damaged and bandaged. -Reaper: Security guard at the hospital. Took the job because he had nothing better to take, and it paid well. He’s chill, a bit too much so at times. He mans the security station with Dust, and they’re pretty close friends despite meeting because of their job. Reaper has no inherent special abilities. -Dust: Security guard at the hospital. His childhood was rough, having been raised in a horrible town that worshipped eldritch beings from another dimension. He was taken under the government research program after police found him, his town massacred with him the only survivor. After lots of therapy and rehabilitation, he was re-introduced to society, in which he now works at the hospital. Has connections to the eldritch monsters they evade, but doesn’t know it yet. He seems to not have any inherent special abilities.

Deceased: -Blue: A practicing nurse at the local hospital (near Nightmare, not Dream). He was friends with practically everyone and wanted the best for his little brother. He was originally going to travel with Nightmare’s group, but found them at the wrong time. -Pap: Blue’s brother. Small but full of energy, and he loved video games. Had been going to elementary school. When Blue tried to meet up with Nightmare’s group, the bright red color of Blue’s car attracted one of the eldritch beasts that had followed Nightmare’s group out of the forest.

#undertale #undertale au #ink sans #error sans #cross sans #nightmare sans #dream sans #reaper sans #dust sans #geno sans #apocalypse au #tw gore #tw character death #shoutout to the shotgun in cross' car that never got used

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dmcvergillament · 3 years

Text

Bedtime Stories [Part 1]

Fem!Reader x Vergil

Summary: Unable to sleep, young Nero requests a bedtime story. You happily oblige and weave a tale that Vergil recognizes. Nero falls asleep to the legend of the dancer and the dragon and Vergil remembers how he fell in love with you.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Tucking little Nero in for the night, Y/N kisses his forehead. "Sweet dreams, my little angel."

Vergil picks up toys off the floor.

Nero catches Y/N's hand to stop them from leaving. "I...can't sleep without a story."

Vergil looks up from studying a blue bird plush he found. It looked oddly familiar...

Y/N smiles and sits back down on the bed to brush aside Nero's bangs. "Alright. What story shall I tell?"

Nero snuggles up to his chin in his comforter, eyes shimmering with curiosity. He waits for his mother to begin.

"Ah! I know: how about the legend of the dancer and the dragon?" suggests Y/N.

Vergil pauses as he sets the bird down alongside a black cat on a shelf. His interest is also piqued. What fantasy is Y/N spinning now?

"In a land far, far away in a time long, long ago..." begins Y/N, twirling her hands.

'There they go again with that dramatic voice,' thinks Vergil. Still, he cannot deny how his lover never fails to spark wonder in their son's eyes. Only a few words in and she has Nero's full attention.

"...there was a dancer who could mesmerize entire palaces with every step. When they moved it was like watching petals on the breeze. The soft colors of their clothes twirling around their long legs. Stories spread across many kingdoms of not only their unrivaled skill but also that of their bewitching beauty. All that bore witness to their dance were charmed. It was like a magic spell only they could use," continues Y/N.

"Were they as pretty as you, Mama?" mews Nero, tilting his head in that way that always melted Y/N's heart.

Y/N reaches over to stroke their son's ivory hair, before opening her mouth to say---

"What a foolish question." Gliding over to the bed, Vergil sits opposite of Y/N. His eyes flicker to Y/N before he continues, "Do not compare a rose to a field of dandelions."

Nero seems satisfied with this answer.

Y/N gestures for Vergil to not interrupt before she adds, "So one day the dancer gets invited to the royal palace to perform. Afterwards, the King becomes so enthralled, he begs them to stay and marry one of his sons. The dancer politely refuses and leaves. This was not the answer the King had hoped for and so he hired a famous knight to find her and bring her back to the palace."

Rubbing his chin, Vergil wonders, 'Why does this sound oddly...familiar?'

"This knight always wore brilliant, scarlet armor, so the people called him the 'Crimson Knight'. Legends spoke of how he could slay any monster and of the sword he carried upon his back. It was a grand sword said to be enchanted with an ancient magic that allowed it to cut through even dragon hide," explained Y/N, waving her hands like she was trying to make the sword appear.

"He was a dragon slayer?" asks Nero curiously.

"No matter how tall or dangerous the monster may be, he was always victorious. While many claimed to have been witness to such a feat, no one knew for certain if he had slain a dragon. After all, dragons were the most powerful of foes. They were cunning, proud, and equipped with immense magic," answered Y/N.

"Could he beat a dragon?" questions Nero.

"He most certainly believed he could. After all, he was the Crimson Knight: the warrior of all the human kingdoms. Whenever a monster appeared, he was called in to defeat it," replied Y/N with a nod.

"Sounds like someone I know," grumbles Vergil.

"Shhhh."

"But here he was faced with a strange request: to hunt not a beast but a woman. A woman armed with only an aptitude for dancing. This was not a job for the Crimson Knight. The King---afraid he'd decline and she'd slip away---lied. He told the knight that the dancer was harboring a curse set upon her by a demon. That if she was not found and brought back to the palace to be purified, she would die. Now this resonated with the Crimson Knight. How could he let such a beauty wither and wilt from such misfortune? So he set off to find her," continued Y/N.

"How could he lie? She's not really cursed, is she?" asks Nero with a frown.

Vergil interrupts, "People lie because..." He clears his throat. "Sometimes they lie to get what they want."

"She's not really going to die, right?" whispers Nero.

Vergil glances at Y/N. "No, she won't."

Y/N nudges him with an elbow. "Shhh, no spoilers."

"So without even knowing she was being followed, the dancer hopped from town to town to perform. Rarely did she stay for more than a few days in the same area. Her heart was set on adventure and she enjoyed the journey even if it was tedious without a horse or carriage. She felt as free as the birds in the sky. With her spirits soaring, she set out for the neighboring city. However, along the well-trodden path, a man appeared. Whipping his cart into a frenzy, he was approaching fast. Spotting her, he jerked on the reins and nearly fell off the bench. 'Young lady! Young lady!' he gasped. 'Turn back now! Only death and hellfire awaits at the end of this road!' Stunned, the dancer asked him to explain. 'A dragon has appeared! He has built his den inside the ruins of the castle and he strikes down all who disturb him! The people are terrified! Protect yourself and run while you still can!' Then with a crack of the reins, his cart was disappearing down the road in a cloud of dust. The dancer stood there flabbergasted. How can there be a dragon of all things? Were they not creatures of myth? Not believing in the danger, she continued onwards despite the warning."

"No! Don't go! You'll get eaten!" gasps Nero, burrowing deeper into his comforter to hide.

Vergil snorts. "Depends on what you mean by 'eat' her."

Y/N shoots him a look. Luckily, she seems to be the only one to catch it. Nero is oblivious as he is too busy trying to blend in with his pillows.

"Anyway..."

"Our heroine reached the city and was hit by a startling revelation: it was quiet. Walking through the marketplace, she found stands of fruit abandoned and carts of goods unprotected. Where was all the hustle and bustle? Where were all the people? Further up the road, shutters rattled and there were hints of movement. The dancer wondered if she'd even be able to perform here if there was no one to be the audience. Then an idea stuck her: what if she could coax the people out with her talents? If not dancing, then maybe a lute or harp would soothe their spirits and rekindle the city's vigor. So she sought out the very reason she had come to this territory specifically: the grand theatre. There all kindred souls of music and art showcased their passions. She had hoped to connect with other performers here who were as dedicated to their craft as she was. Spotting the gold rooftop shimmering in the evening sun, she scurried towards it with a renewed excitement. Throwing the doors open, she gleefully announced her arrival."

"Only to be met with silence."

"How can a place of boisterous joy be silent? On hooks and shelves, all the instruments sat idle. Not a single string was singing. Even the tables were vacant with not even a crumb set out for the mice. 'What is going on?' she wondered. Still, she was even more determined now. Picking up a lute, she played a few notes. Testing its voice, she listened to the hearty tones and wondered how anyone could have put it down. Jumping into an energetic melody, she smiled to herself. This hall echoed the sound perfectly: each note complimented each other rather than drown in a sea of cacophony. Erasing the silence eased the chill that had settled in her chest. That is, until someone snatched the lute from her hands. 'Are you mad?!' hissed a man, 'You'll draw the beast right to us!' Confused, she asked him to explain. 'Music attracts him. If you keep playing, he'll come back!' She asked him if he was speaking of the dragon she heard about. 'Yes. He has settled into the castle on the hill. Both the castle and its lord perished many years ago. The city has never been quite the same since. Now this monster has taken over and the peace in our hearts have been shattered.' The man's words sowed worry in her heart. Yet, something struck her funny: if this dragon was so vicious, then why did it only attack, when he heard music? Did music have some kind of power over him?"

"Did the dragon not like music? Why?" Nero peeked around the edges of his blanket.

Y/N fixed her son's hair behind his ear. He was already nurturing the start of a bird's nest.

"The music made him remember..." Vergil's eyes were glossed over. Y/N could tell he was somewhere else. "Remembering was...painful for him."

Not expecting a co-narrator, Y/N waited to see if he would continue.

"See, the dragon was cursed: his memories stolen from him. Hearing a melody sometimes brought those memories back in bright flashes. Remembering what he had lost pained him more than the sharpest blade. Rather than endure his past, he silenced the melody any way he could. Even if it was...cruel," explained Vergil, his voice dry.

Was that a twinge of guilt Y/N could hear?

[Continued in Part 2...W.I.P.]

#Reader x Vergil #DMC #Devil May Cry #Nero #Vergil #Dante #Nero's mother #bedtime stories #knights #dragons

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autumnsart22 · 3 years

Text

First time in College: Suna x reader

College AU with the Haikyuu boys: Suna Rintarou x fem reader 🤤

Let me know if you want part 2 :)

He is literally so fine I--

Art creds go to agatha123naruto

God, you should never have agreed to do this. Your laptop was calling you, Attack on Titan already pulled up and ready to watch...and yet here you were, shifting uncomfortably in a tight crop top and booty shorts your roommate had provided you with. You crossed your arms over your stomach, trying to hide yourself, but you only succeeded in pushing your tits up.

“Hey, relax, it’s just a party.” Kiyoko smiled softly from her side of the room, applying some chapstick and holding a pair of sneakers.

“Ugh,” you rolled your eyes. Yes, it was just a party...but it was also the first college party you were going to be attending. And a frat party at that. Ugh.

The first few months of college had been perfectly well off without them, and you weren’t exactly sure why Kiyoko had been able to convince you to come along this time. Maybe you had felt a little like you were missing out when your roommate would come back giggling and tipsy late into the night every weekend, and maybe you wanted to put a bit more effort into socializing. You had friends, but not a huge group--which was fine. But also, college was a time to try new things...even if that meant frat parties.

“Don’t worry, you’ll probably know some people. And if not, you can just stick with me.” Kiyoko finished putting on her shoes, heading towards the door. “We’ll get drinks as soon as possible.”

You sighed, resigning yourself as you followed her out the door.

The party was just as bad as you expected. It was packed in the house, the lights dimmed, flashing, and confusing as people pushed from all sides. You almost spilled your third drink as you searched for Kiyoko, pretty much impossible in the darkness. You had lost her a little while ago when she had started talking to a guy named Tanaka, and now she seemed to be missing.

“OI!” You looked up to see a clearly wasted, shirtless guy standing on the table, a bottle of beer in his hand. He had blonde hair with a dark undercut, and you were pretty sure you recognized him as one of the frat guys...maybe Atsumu? You didn’t know him well enough to be sure. “We’re putting on a movie, if you fuckheads want to join,” Asumu yelled, practically falling off the table.

Maybe Kiyoko was with them watching a movie.

The crowd swallowed you up again as you headed towards where Atsumu had disappeared, but you managed to push your way into the living room. There were four couches stuffed into the wide space, but every seat was taken, including spots on the floor.

You scanned the room for Kiyoko’s hair, but yet again, no such luck. The projector was set up to play a horror movie, and your stomach clenched unpleasantly as you realized what it was. You really, really hated horror movies--did they seriously have to pick this to watch?

You bit your lip, but the lights were dimming and you had to stop standing awkwardly off to the side. You spotted the arm of one of the couches that was free, but that same couch was also filled with frat guys with girls in their laps. Would I be weird for taking a spot next to them? Would they be ok with that?

Shit, calm down. This isn’t high school, and I’m a bad bitch. Also, I’m sexy as fuck. I got this.

Right. You straightened your shoulders and marched across the room, dodging random girls sprawled across the floor mixed with bongs and beer bottles. You barely even glanced at the occupants of the couch as you settled precariously on the arm, as far from them as possible as the movie began to play.

Almost immediately, your heart was racing and fingers digging into the cushions, and you wanted to run from the room. Why, why, why had you done this to yourself? You could have just turned and left the living room to begin with. Fuck trying new things.

You were considering how you’d make a subtle escape when a drunken kid with bright orange hair slammed into your shoulder as he tried to get past, causing you to lose your balance on the arm of the couch and fall directly into the lap of one of the guys to your right.

For a moment, you were too stunned to move, and you could only stare up at the equally surprised face of one of the frat boys. He had dark brown hair and yellow eyes, the whites tinted red; presumably from the joint in his hand. The smell of weed rolled off him, and you were pretty sure that it wasn’t his first one.

“Oh-Oh my god I’m so sorry,” you gasped, rolling awkwardly off him onto the floor. “I didn’t mean to--I mean--um--”

“Look what you’ve done Suna.” You glanced over to see the same shirtless guy from before, the one you assumed was Atsumu. “You scare off all the girls.”

The lap guy, Suna, just shrugged and took another hit.

“No, that’s not...” you tried, your halfway drunken brain desperately trying to calm down. “I fell on him.”

Atsumu grinned at you. “It’s ok, you don’t have to bother with him. He’s a piece of shit anyway.”

“I didn’t say--”

“What, so you want to sit on his lap?”

“What????” How was this conversation even happening? You wanted to punch Atsumu in the face, and you also wanted to sprint from the building and never show your face to the light of day again.

Unfortunately, now Suna was looking at you, as were the other frat boys sitting on the couch and the girls on their laps. “I mean,” you cleared your throat. “I- I guess.”

Idiot. IDIOT.

“Ah nice. You see Suna, that’s how you get girls--”

“Fuck off, Atsumu. Stop pressuring her.” Suna glared at him, and you let out a breath...until his yellow eyes turned to you, and your lungs hitched yet again. “You can if you want, but we’re holding up the movie.”

He was right; someone had paused the movie since Atsumu was standing right in front of the projector, which meant everyone was waiting on you.

“Are you ok with that?” You asked as you stood up, trying to sound confident and bored.

Suna’s eyes lazily trailed down and up, and he shrugged. “Whatever.”

Ouch. “Uh, right.”

He leaned back on the couch, his legs sprawled wide to give you room between them, and your heart began to pound. Jesus Christ.

You awkwardly sat down, trying to give him space in the very limited area, but his thighs were still pressed tight up against your ass.

The movie started again, and almost immediately every muscle in your body tensed up. At the first jump scare, you flinched so hard that you elbowed Suna’s knee, making him grunt in pain.

“S-sorry,” you whispered, hands shaking a little.

He shifted, leaning forward so you could feel the heat from his chest inches away. “Hey, are you good?”

“Um, yeah. I just really hate horror mov--” The serial killer stepped out from behind the door and you gasped, turning your face away.

Suddenly, you felt Suna’s hands pressing against your ears, blocking out the creepy music and the sound of people getting murdered in front of you. You looked up at him in surprise, and he shrugged, leaning even closer.

“Horror movies are worse with sound,” he said in your ear so you could hear him.

“Thanks,” you murmured, and he smirked.

“You can relax. You’re so tense, it’s freaking me out.”

You let out a breath, forcing your muscles to unclench. It was more comfortable, but it also meant that you were now flat against Suna’s chest, his hands still on your ears.

You tried watching like that for a while, and it was better, but in the end you decided that sound or not--horror movies weren’t your thing. You ended up hiding your face in Suna’s shoulder, until you realized what you were doing and quickly jerked back.

“Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to get in your personal space--”

“It’s fine. Be quiet.” He wrapped his arms around your waist, tucking you against his chest so you could easily bury your face in his shoulder. He smelled nice, mostly of pot, but with undertones of mint and almond or something.

As the movie continued, he turned his head to press his lips against your ear. “Want me to explain what’s going on?”

“Oh...okay.”

“So basically...ugh what is even happening.” You smiled a little at his annoyance. “So this idiot girl just went into the house when clearly she shouldn’t have, aaaand there’s the murderer. Damn she’s dumb. Honestly he’s kind of dumb too, why is he running with a knife? That’s a safety hazard.”

You snorted, feeling a large part of your fear drain out of you at his stupid narration.

“This is literal shit,” he muttered. “How does this scare you?”

You huffed, annoyed at his condescending tone. “I don’t know, just the jump scares, and the creepy lead up, and the music...I just hate it.”

“Do you want to leave? You don’t have to watch, you know”

“I…” I clenched your fists, suddenly determined. “No. I can make it through.”

“Why…? You’re literally not even watching.”

“Just shut up. I’m facing my fears.”

He laughed under his breath, and you felt it in his chest. “How admirable.”

He patted your head, taking another hit of the joint, which was practically gone. “Want some of this?” He gestured to it.

“Oh, sure. That’s fine?”

“I wouldn’t have offered it if it wasn’t.” “Right...” You took the joint from him and took a deep hit, and then another, just needing to relax. It didn’t stop you from almost jumping out of your skin when the murderer suddenly pushed someone down the stairs.

Suna smirked at your terror, and you glared at him. “This isn’t funny!”

“Kind of is.”

It took another twenty minutes, but then finally the film was over, the lights were turned back on, and you were facing Suna again.

“Thanks for doing that,” you said, a blush creeping up your cheeks as you met his pretty eyes.

He shrugged. “Sure.”

“Well, uh. I should probably go. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Wait, hold up--”

You didn’t wait for his response as you rolled off his lap, awkwardly waving, before practically running from the room.

You found Kiyoko sitting on the couch with your friends Suga and Daichi, and you must have looked pretty panicked because she didn’t protest when you dragged her from the frat house.

“So...how was it for you?” She asked imploringly as we made our way back to our dorm.

“Um….” You weren’t sure how to answer.

Part 2

#suna #suna x reader #ive never met this guy but he could high key get it #suna rintaro x y/n #suna rintarō #haikyuu!!#haikyū!!#haikyuu suna #fandom #fanfic #fanfiction #fluff #anime

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bubmyg · 3 years

Text

there was no particular reason i wrote all this down other than reading the translations to my universe made me cry last week because i’m just Like this. this is a mini compilation of yoongi lyrics that i hold gently in my palm and close to my heart in a he’s my artist for life kind of way. these aren’t all my favorite yoongi lyrics, i certainly have more but not ones that fit this general vibe.

this is like extremely disorganized, i kind of just wrote it like a journal (and i’ll probably copy it to my bullet journal at some point actually). interpretations are my own, music is cool in that we can all read and hear the same thing and get different things out of it (which is why yoongi has often said he doesn’t attach specific meaning to things, giving it up to the listener instead)

so yeah. here’s me being fond of yoongi in 4k for no reason other than. idk. i wanted to. all translations are from doyoubangtan and doolsetbangtan.

song request - lee sora ft suga

“I’ll be with you, for your birth and your end; That you’d remember that I’m with you, wherever you are; I’ll be a comfort for your life at any time, and so; please, that you’d lean on me and take a rest, every once in awhile.”

to me, this perfectly encapsulates what creating music is for yoongi in a two-fold kind of way. not only does he want his music to be a source of comfort for those who listen to it (just as the art of music is for himself), he’s also consistent in his assurance that taking a rest is okay. not being okay is okay. simply existing for the time being is okay. it’s a gentle empathy that comes from the experienced heart of someone who’s not going to tell you that it is okay, but will tell you that it won’t always be like this. friendly little moon trying to get you to smile with him on sleepless nights.

so far away - agust d ft suran

dream, will eventually be in full bloom at the end of hardships

this was on my undergrad graduation cap. it’s one of my favorite lyrics of all time. if so far away is my heart song, this is my heart lyric. this is a common motif in yoongi’s lyrics; dormancy is only temporary, you will bloom at the end of the cold winter.

dream, hope it to be there with you at your creation and at the end of your life

creation to end is another common motif n his lyrics. in this specific context, i imagine it to most closely be analogous to holding dreams close to you your entire life. dreams are dreams no matter how they manifest, even if they’re simply something you long for until your “end”.

Hope it to be there with you at your creation and at the end of your life; It will be generous to you wherever you stand; It will eventually be in full bloom at the end of hardships; The beginnings will seem humble, so prosperous will the future be

the entirety of this song reads like a story and this last refrain reads like the conclusion (kind of). the slight wording change from the previous choruses means a lot in that regard, more definite and firm. you will be okay. maybe not now, maybe not next week. but you will be.

suga’s interlude - halsey ft suga

Though the dawn before sunrise is darkest; don’t forget the stars you longed for only rise in the darkness

just a really pretty but heart wrenching lyric in the context of the entire song. he’s also used this metaphor several times. i love me a good string of consistency with minor adaptations to fit the vibe. this song also made me cry the first time i read the translations lmao.

my universe - coldplay ft bts

Because the trial we face now is just for a moment anyway; All you have to do is to just keep shining bright like now; And we will follow you, embroidering this long night

this could mean so many things depending on how you wanted to contextualize it. of course the song is about love, so you could view it in that way. we’re in the midst of a global pandemic where we can’t see each other. or maybe it’s simply existence. continue to exist and one day your bright light will be followed even in the darkest of nights.

also the og title of telepathy being 잠시 (for a moment) is so...min yoongi you are so cool

people - agust d

Did someone say humans are the animals of wisdom?; The way I see it, humans are the animals of regret

Your ordinaries are my extraordinaries; Your extraordinaries are my ordinaries; Your ordinaries are my extraordinaries; Your extraordinaries are my ordinaries

super simple to understand which i think makes it more poignant. especially if you contextualize it with everything he’s said or written regarding the plight of fame and how he himself grapples with it as min yoongi.

28 - agust d ft niihwa

just this whole song. if song request encapsulates yoongi’s musical ethos, this captures a lot of his general musings.

paradise - bts

Just living like this, surviving like this, that’s my small dream; Dreaming dreams, grasping dreams, breathing breaths, it’s often too much

a more blunt take on the simply existing is a good enough dream. yoongi’s 2018 new years message was one of the things that made me go “yes. Him™” so paradise is very <3 for me

interlude: shadow - bts

Flying high scares me; I mean, nobody had told me; how lonely it is here –;how my leap could be my fall

another thing he uses frequently, even as recently as an interview regarding permission to dance. the contemplation of how a fall is far scarier than landing because getting back up is uncertain.

Yeah, I’m you and you’re me, do you finally get that now?; Yeah, you’re me and I’m you, do you finally get that now?

the entirety of this song is haunting particularly paired with the sampling and the music video as a visual but this part is just...the whole idea of competing internal voices throughout the narrative of the song or if you’d rather truly treat the lyrics like a piece of literature, you have quite the unreliable narrator, one that’s trying to grapple with his own sense of self.

140503 at dawn - agust d

Pretending that I’m not lonely, pretending that I’m not suffering; needlessly pretending that I’m okay, and pretending hard that I’m strong; I built a wall in front of me, “Don’t come inside”; I’m an island in this wide ocean, “Don’t abandon me”

the entirety of agust d just makes me ache but i mainly pulled this part because he uses the island metaphor consistently. here, it’s used like i said before; achingly.

this song also gets overlooked a lot in the larger context of agust d but anyway

eight - IU ft suga

Island, yeah this is an island; a small island that we made for each other; Yeah, mm, forever young, the word ‘forever’ is a sandcastle; A farewell is just like an emergency text warning of a disaster; A morning met together with yearning; As each of us pass this eternity, we’re sure to meet again on this island

can i be honest and say i forgot this song came out at the beginning of the pandemic. anyway, if you haven’t heard the various times that jieun has spoke about this song and it’s conveyance, i encourage you to. the music video also gives a beautiful visual.

i wrote a small analysis of this when it came out so i’ll just put it here

burn it - agust d ft max

I hope you don’t forget that giving up decisively also counts as courage

of course this can absolutely be taken at a literal meaning especially considering he said a similar iteration of this to someone on kkul fm BUT i also like looking at it in context of the entire song because maybe this is him trying to convince himself too, especially considering the wording of the last chorus doesn’t change it so it implies in order to get past the fire u need to let it burn first? burn it = giving up on some aspect of pain?

i see why max didn’t shut up for eight months about making this song i wouldn’t either hello

outro: tear - bts

im including this one firstly because i love the song but secondly to say i knew the second u all were surprised by yoongi saying he wrote this as essentially a break up song for bts and they all cried while listening to it that y’all don’t actually read or interact w their lyrics fjdklafjsd

just bc it’s a rap song doesn’t mean it’s a diss or a flex. weirdos.

intro: never mind - bts

I hope you forget about all your mistakes and such; Never mind; It’s not easy, but engrave this in your heart; If you think you’re going to crash, accelerate more, you idiot; Never mind, never mind; Whatever thorny path it may be, go run; Never mind, never mind; There are a lot of things that you can’t control

the entire composition of nevermind is similar to first love and shadow to me where you can just hear the emotion in his voice while performing it

this is also another general idea that he mentions a few different times through different songs which as we’ve seen i am <3 for

intro: the most beautiful moment in life - bts

once again i don’t have a specific lyric to pull i just love this song so much and i feel like it isn’t talked about enough because first of all the use of the basketball throughout the instrumental, the incorporation of the origin of his stage name into an entire song regarding his general existence as a performer and coming into the beginnings of sizeable fame, and just his general way of essentially writing one giant ode to something he loves and analogizing it to something else he loves to talk through internal struggles.

aka im once again saying min yoongi you’re so cool

first love - bts

same line of awe from above this whole song is just a story, a poem, a journal entry, a beautiful confession, i don’t know. this is yoongi’s best bts solo u can argue with a wall about it also if you were able to see this live i hope u have a terrible week (im joking)

every fancam i’ve ever seen of this makes me cry. so. do with that what you will in regards to how i feel about this song.

#i have no reason for posting this so im not gonna tag it with anything other than so i can find it again for myself JFEKWFJS #ffr #my writing #i just realized only one of these is from an ot7 song help #there are so many others. tomorrow. autumn leaves. mikrokosmos. black swan........

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