#the true villain reform story

[kumikocchi]

meruem’s simp arc is too cute

[darkonekrisrewrite]

This can't be the final "End", for both the heroes and the villains

(Spoiler warning, long post)

Deku and Ochako's stories didn't end well, and not just for the shipping or not keeping One For All.

The narrative endings they got, either don't make sense or flat out don't work at all.

The end of Ochako's arc doesn't work because it conflicts with what we've been shown to be true.

She does try to help others after hearing PARTS of Toga's backstory, a natural progression of her character.

But the problem is that it leads to this:

"Uravity to expand access to Quirk Counseling"

EXPANDING Quirk Counseling...

Not REFORMING and then expanding Quirk Counseling.

Remember that this is Quirk Counseling:

"Where they attempt to hammer out any bumps in your understanding of the world and program you to fit neatly into society's little boxes.

It's a far from perfect process, the counseling ends up emphasizing the inherent differences among us all, and that's one bug they've yet to work out of the programming."

Stated by Curious during the MVA Arc, then confirmed later in a flashback featuring a counselor talking to Toga and her parents:

"Let's straighten you out so you can be "Normal".

Deviance is common in children with strong Quirks.

We'll fix it. It'll be like it never existed."

Focusing only on repression and the appearance of being normal, not actually helping the child at all.

So yeah, knowing that this is how Quirk Counseling really is, how exactly does expanding this help??

THIS WAS WHY TOGA STAYING CLOSE TO OCHAKO WAS SO IMPORTANT

(Not being with her in the shipping sense but working, talking with her and just being together.)

Anything good about this project that Ochako is creating is only implied not shown, and it doesn't mesh well at all with what we already know.

And even if Ochako did do things right, it still wouldn't be a satisfying payoff.

Ochako wasn't fighting so hard and struggling so much to help random, unnamed, unseen people from the villain life.

She was fighting to help Toga Himiko.

Her failing to save Toga and only (implying) saving others we don't even know, will never carry the same weight.

It won't feel right in a story that's supposed to be "Hopeful", because there's no solid connection left for that sentiment to be attached.

And there was no saving going on between Deku/shigaraki and Ochako/Toga after their battles were over.

This is the sentiment put forth by Nana Shimura (and at the time agreed upon by All-might and Deku), on what a true hero saving someone means:

"When you have to save someone, they're usually in a scary situation. A true hero saves not only their lives, but also their hearts... That's what I believe."

"Saving" is supposed to be both the life and the heart.

Not just one or the other.

And even if Gran Torino was supposed to be the one in the right -

(The narrative sure as hell made it look like he was supposed to be in the wrong and Deku was going to be the one to prove that.)

- in that killing can be a form of saving.

Deku and Ochako didn't even save the villain's hearts.

Not fully.

Shigaraki tells Deku that he still needs to be a hero to the villains and that he fought to destroy until the very end.

Only giving a snide encouragement to Deku at the end of the fight because he's literally crumbling into dust and got his world view rocked by the "It was AFO all along~" reveal.

Toga tells ochako that she didn't make "the bad stuff", the pain in her heart go away.

Only telling ochako that her efforts and words made Toga feel happy, but that's it.

They couldn't save their lives, only partially saved their hearts, leading to the results:

100% - 50% - 25% = 25 % (final grade)

FAIL

The rest of Deku's conclusion doesn't fair any better.

Deku's heroic finale ends the exact same way it ended in every filler bnha movie, only with even less payoff.

He didn't succeed in his goal, with who he wanted to save and he just goes back to doing what he always did at the start, being a hero.

He doesn't develop in any noticable way until the OFA embers run out off screen.

Even the symbolic saving of the scissors boy, Deku doesn't get.

It would have been a world of difference if deku had seen tenko's full backstory, then told it to the world.

Telling the civilians that they needed to do their part to help those in trouble.

(Knowing that there's no AFO left to potentially get in the way.)

Resulting in many civilians coming together to help the scissor boy.

That would have delivered on everyone's narrative payoff.

But instead the theme doesn't work here because the single old lady who does step up to help, does so out of guilt (Not helping tenko) rather than because it is the right thing to do.

Nobody among the civilians besides the old lady stepped up to help on top of that.

So it looks less like a societal shift and more like the redemption of one single person.

The narrative makes a half-hearted attempt to tie this back to Deku but it doesn't work there either.

Because how exactly does Deku punching shigaraki into powder inspire the old lady to extend a helping hand to someone who represents that same villain??

It doesn't.

Even if the sentiment is: that everyone must do their part to help, there is a giant disconnect between:

Everyone seeing the heroes helping each other, fighting and succeeding in destroying the scary villain.

and

Realizing that someone has to help the person who looks like a scary villain.

It doesn't add up together.

Doesn't flow narratively at all.

The 8 year time skip makes more problems with Deku.

The line of: "You too can become a Hero."

Is meant to be the payoff callback to All-might giving those same words to Deku in bnha's beginning, so now Deku says the same thing to another kid that has doubts about his ability to become a hero.

It is kind of sweet but thinking about it for more than 5 seconds should give pause because:

Deku was about to receive the most powerful quirk in the world from All-might.

And the kid Deku was giving those same inspirational words to could throw plates from his head.

It's not even confirmed whether or not the kid could control their size, telepathically manipulate them or something like that.

So if what that other loudmouth kid in the final chapter said is true, about how only the most capable can become heroes in the current time.

The entire conversation, just like many other things in this ending, reads like false hope from the heroes.

Not like Deku has to deal with any of that or the kid himself anymore because he gets a tech suit, allowing him to be a hero again.

We don't know if he keeps his teaching job or not, maybe he did, maybe he didn't.

But still, once again Deku avoids any difficult questions that the story puts in front of him.

And all of this doesn't even cover the other issues that the story brought up:

The popularity poll expanding instead of ending, as if that would prevent the Endeavor/Dabi situation from happening again.

Lack of social/government help for anyone who gets dealt more than a couple of bad hands in life, those caught up in hero/villain conflicts or other disasters (quirk based or not).

Remember how twice became a villain?

THE QUIRK SINGULARITY DOOMSDAY

Now that AFO, shigaraki and the doctor (all of his research and technology) are gone, what's going to happen when children start wiping out whole city blocks?

(The doctor may be alive and imprisoned but with AFO dead, the doctor likely won't help anymore because AFO was so important to him.)

With the power and complexity of the quirks inevitably increasing, think Eri unintentionally killing her dad X10.

Then the next round of kids, make it X50 then X100.

And finally, in the last chapter it's stated that there's a: "Decline in the villain emergence rate."

Why exactly that is isn't said, but it's implied that it's due to the efforts of Ochako and Shoji.

Let's put aside the suspension of disbelief and assume that it's true, that what they did worked in stopping villains from being made enough to have a real impact.

What happens to the people that are already villains??

The ones currently on the run or in jail.

If the hero kids made that big of a difference in the demographic of villains just by expanding counseling and nonviolent resolution, then that only reinforces the truth that the villains are easily preventable victims.

The implications of that aren't doing the heroes or hero society any favors.

We don't know what happens after because Rehabilitation was never offered to anyone who wasn't a small time criminal (Gentle Criminal) or a former assassin of the state (Lady Nagant).

Are the other villains still currently stuck in their circumstances just out of luck, help came too late for them too just like the Lov?

We don't know.

You can assume, imply and head-canon the solutions to all these issues, with what the hero kids might do, as much as you want to.

But if you have to do that with the big questions and plot points, then the story hasn't delivered on what it said it was going to.

Maybe horikoshi isn't that good of a writer but it's hard to believe that.

Horikoshi put so much into this series and all the characters in it, the central villains and the hero kids being the most important ones.

That he'd just fumble everything and pull a Falcon and the Winter Soldier: "You need to do better" and then they did'-Type ending.

This can't be it.

Maybe the "Ending" endpoint of this narrative but not the end of the overall story.

For the villains just as much as the heroes.

Toga dying to a blood transfusion, despite everything other characters survived (Gran Torino donut, edgeshot worm, Dabi charcoal skeleton) and things that she herself survived already.

Having curious bombs go off inside her body leading to internal damage and severe blood loss, yet she still survived until she received help and recovered just fine.

They got Dabi to medical and kept him alive.

Other villains like overhaul, muscular, compress and spinner survived.

It's not like she either had to die or go to jail, she could have just escaped.

Leading to her meeting up with Ochako again in secret or something, to finally fulfill both of their arcs and iron everything out for what would have happened in the future.

Then the Quirk Counseling ending could have worked.

Shigaraki dying after finding out his life was entirely manipulated by AFO.

Strung along like a puppet, mentally and physically manipulated to believe he is a force of destruction, so much that by the time the series starts, it's all shigaraki can believe himself to be.

Twice and Kurogiri fight and die trying to save Toga and Shigaraki, so they can live and be reunited with their friends.

This all just meant nothing in the end??

Ochako, Deku, Toga and Shigaraki's stories can't be over yet because they are important characters and there's too much left unresolved.

Ochako's resolution is incomplete and undefined.

Deku's hero ending feels disappointing and tone-deaf.

Toga completely disappeared before Ochako was taken by the helicopter, nowhere to be seen where she should have been if she had died.

And how is shigaraki a force ghost still walking around in the world if there's no quirks left tethering him as a vestige?

ALSO this recent interview with Horikoshi himself:

(Warning: Spoilers for the most recent BNHA movie)

"Horikoshi says one thing to pay attention to from the My Hero Academia "You're Next" movie is the relationship between Giulio and Anna and how it connects with Deku and the others' goals.

He writes:

"The relationship between Giulio and Anna is a part of the goal point where Deku and the others will eventually reach.

The movie as a standalone in itself is interesting, but if you watch the movie then return to the actual story, then you might feel 'oh so this is where the story leads to.' As such, please pay attention to Giulio and Anna in the movie!"

To give context, by the end of the movie, Giulio is able to cancel out Anna's quirk using his own, allowing her to live a life without being sheltered in fear of her quirk or used as a weapon. So Horikoshi's comment is probably referring to how they help each other accept their quirks or lack thereof and still be able to live in harmony.

In regards to their relationship, Giulio tells Anna he will always be by her side no matter what, they hug and then walk off into the sunset together at the end of the movie."

And another heavily lampshaded moment in the movie novelization when Giulio inner narrates this:

'He knew that killing her wouldn't be a true form of salvation.'

What was all this about??

There has to be more left.

[antianakin]

I really do feel a lot of sympathy for the people who still have the softer anti-Jedi interpretation of Star Wars. You know the one, where the Jedi were good people individually and definitely didn't deserve to be genocided, but that their culture is repressive and isolating, and if they'd reformed it more then maybe Anakin wouldn't have gone dark, etc etc.

Because I believe that they love the Jedi. I do! You can often tell in some of the things they write about them, in meta or in fic, that they do genuinely LIKE the Jedi. And this interpretation very much does feel like it spawned as a way to fight back against the interpretation that "the Jedi were corrupt and that's the point of the Prequels" that was so popular right after the films were released and remains relatively popular today. It stands in a middle ground between "the Jedi are the heroes of the story who did nothing wrong" and "the Jedi are the true villains of the story who deserved to die" that allows for the Jedi to have been GOOD, just misguided.

This interpretation allows for these fans to find ways to SAVE the Jedi by having them reform themselves to, often, philosophies and practices that the canon Jedi actually already have. They often end up deciding that they CAN have relationships actually, so long as the don't let their relationships be prioritized over their duty or cause them to harm others. They often end up recognizing that balance means letting go of anger and fear rather than pretending it doesn't exist. They often end up realizing that mental health and therapy are good and important things.

These fans are SO CLOSE to getting it! All they need a little nudge to realize that the Jedi ALREADY HAVE ALL OF THAT. It's not a BETTER interpretation to see the Jedi as having caused their own destruction, intentionally or not. It doesn't necessarily make the story better to see it as true. It's not even necessarily more nuanced to view it that way.

As Jean-Luc Picard and Beyonce have taught us, sometimes you can do everything right, make no mistakes, and still lose. That's not failure, that's just life. The Jedi lost. They did everything right, as well as they could have under the circumstances, and lost due to things that were completely out of their control to change.

[luna-rainbow]

Thoughts about this quote from AM about how Sam doesn't trust Bucky and will probably never completely forgive him for being the Winter Soldier?

Here's the link to the tweet I saw (I don't know how to include screenshots sorry 😭😭):

https://twitter.com/DianneR_99/status/1785867853238833641?t=NUhkilfwG2guZQx31-b82g&s=19

It's apparently from the official Marvel Studios' collector special TFATWS book.

Why is it so hard for people at Marvel to acknowledge that Bucky is a victim not some reformed villain?

(Also please feel free to ignore this ask, I know people have been dogpiled in the past for being slightly critical of AM and the last thing I want is for you to get hate because of me.)

It’s okay I think I’ve blocked most of them, or they’ve gotten tired of dogpiling me and blocked me. If I’ve missed anyone feel free to announce yourselves to get a block 😌

Thanks for bringing this to my attention!

I’ve said in other asks about AM’s comments on Bucky, I never blame an actor for not understanding the nuances of another character. That’s not his job. Understanding Bucky is the job of Sebastian Stan and the writers.

However, I know it’s tempting to compare him to CEvans, who had always spoken so affectionately of Bucky. Remember that Bucky’s story in the movies was complementary to Steve’s, meaning that CEvans had to understand Bucky's tragedy in order to understand Steve’s pain and guilt. To CEvans/Steve, it was important that Bucky was a wronged hero, because it rationalises why Steve would go such lengths to help him. For the entire trilogy, Bucky, and particularly Bucky's suffering, was very much impetus for Steve’s personal journey and growth. I've talked about the narrative motifs in other meta and I want to emphasise I don't mean this from a shipping lens - I mean that thematically, events that happen to Bucky have always been a major driver for Steve to make important narrative choices, and it is true even if you see their relationship as platonic.

Which…I guess brings us to the crux of the disk horse that brought about this tweet. No, Bucky is in no way important personally or narratively to Sam. Sam doesn’t grow or change because he cares about Bucky, although fortunately at least Bucky’s TFATWS arc involves him growing because he cares about Sam. We know Bucky is not personally or narratively important to Sam because of what AM has just said — Sam will always see Bucky as the guy who tore off his wings and kicked him off a helicarrier. Not a WW2 war hero, not a prisoner of war tortured into blank amnesia, not a survivor who had to rebuild most of his identity ground up, not a veteran living with PTSD without any social supports. These same views are echoed by his fans, who will scoff at everything I’ve said above and say we’re trying to “woobify a white fave” without knowing what woobify means. Sam does not care about what Bucky has been through, we know because the writing of the story has told AM that it is not important to understand who Bucky is or what Bucky has been through. All AM needs to do is to banter with this guy like he’s still annoyed at him over an incident 10 years ago when he had amnesia.

Again, I don't blame AM for this, because he can only work with what the writers have told him about the intended relationship between Sam and Bucky. And to be fair, he plays it like it is. At no point does it feel like Sam values or trusts Bucky beyond "annoying guy I put up with for work". I know some fans like to point to the Louisiana scene as proof that Sam trusts Bucky and has him as part of the family -- which would be great fanon if 1) AM didn't just contradict that and b) Sam spends most of the deleted scenes calling Bucky "the Winter Soldier" like the guy had any say in the moniker. And no, Bucky confessing his deeds to Yori is not Bucky reclaiming his identity as the Winter Soldier.

This is not an indictment on the ship, by the way, because you can wrangle canon to make it work, and shipping has been built on far less. I've got nearly 50k words on AO3 proving I've tried. But TFATWS canon is full of things happening off camera and the truth is...we never saw mutual trust and affection on camera between the two men. We saw two guys perpetually annoyed at and annoying to each other, and AM just gave the reason why.

[the-lyctor-prince]

see lots of people complaining about the rat grinders dying and not getting redeemed, and rightfully so, as they were a bunch of kids who got taken advantage of

although I think the bad kids have justifiable reasons to dislike the group (Ruben not falling for Wanda, Ivy being horrible to Maezy, Oisin tricking Adaine, all of them watching Kipperlily kill Buddy), and they are literally in a kill or be killed situation-

my theory is that if when Ankarna raises and survives the attempt to kill her she will revert to her true self and revive all the rat grinders to pre-corrupted state. Or at least I believe that will be an option given to the players. Although the bad kids have personal vendettas against the group I doubt any of them actually want them to stay dead. And I doubt Brennan’s(known villain reformer) story amounts to nothing but “and we kill the bad guys”

[whetstonefires]

“The Justice League and the Avengers are very different teams”

In what respect? Like, how would you say both teams differ in terms of overall function, how they respond to threats, how they’re viewed by their respective publics, etc?

😂 who even are you?

anyway, these two teams have been reformed and rebooted so many times and are the flagships of the two juggernauts of their industry, so their natures have evolved and influenced one another heavily over the decades as you see armies tend to do in prolonged warfare, so there is probably not one single statement you could make about either one that's always true.

it would be crazy to try to explain the difference in diegetic terms, because those aren't goalposts they're hockey pucks. the difference in kind exists at a publishing level.

fundamentally, the Avengers was designed to rest, in narrative terms, on everyone's personal relationships and neuroses, and develop soap opera subplots and office drama around how these intersected with each other and various villains. because in the 60s Marvel was launching the Big New Thing which was heightened naturalism and relatability in comics.

(spiderman and the whole genre of underdog superhero who can't catch a break rather than slyly winking at the audience as the world looks down on his secret identity, not knowing how impressive he really is, dates to this pivot of Marvel's. both Superman and Captain America did the latter in their early days, which is highly dissonant from Cap and Bucky looking at them today, but Cap was retired from print for like 20 years and got heavily rebooted for the new age.)

they had an actual mansion they could all live in, and many of them did, for a solid chunk of time early on. there's a reason people swung so hard for the 'everyone lives in stark tower' scenario foreshadowed at the end of Avengers (2012)--that's how the Avengers are! you bang the action figures together and give them angst and bonding about it!

they fractured repeatedly under the weight of all that drama (because psychology and because stories that don't end are unable to make any narrative sense, and breaking up a team is honestly a half-decent substitute in the Eternal Now of big comics) and at this point the current avengers is much more impersonal and even pays salaries, like basically the commune-underwritten-by-rich-buddy has reincorporated as an NGO.

but it still runs on the same types of narrative tensions mostly--huge epic stuff will be happening, but the Avengers tension comes down to whether everyone really hates T'Challa this month for that thing he did. and what this is doing to group cohesion.

the Justice League on the other hand was not built for character-driven story.

they've done plenty of them, after it became the done thing, and even imitated the Avengers and did the diegetic collapsing and reforming arcs and so on. but it's not fundamental to how a Justice League runs; you could do a super long run where the interpersonal tensions never rose above B-plot status and it wouldn't be tonally dissonant.

it would be weird for many of the Justice League to live together--when a character is shown living in Justice League facilities it is usually to signify that they are isolated and don't have a life and this is Bad. the Martian Manhunter and Maxwell Lord dominated era was deliberately aping the Avengers imo and came out weird as a result, and Lord turning out to be a mind-controlling supervillain was not unrelated to how weird most people felt it was.

the Justice League is like. joining a club rather than a frat. like being on the board of an NGO, rather than taking a full-time job there.

you know? the type of commitment is different. the level of intimacy is different.

cap and iron man's relationship has generally played out primarily in the context of their positions within the Avengers, even though it spills into their own titles, while superman and batman have had entire joint books just for them, and their friendship has not usually been allowed to take up much page time in Justice League issues. because that would be indecorous.

commercially speaking, Justice League is first and foremost an easy-buy showcase for high-profile hero characters and anyone you want to burnish up by displaying adjacent to them.

They've totally gotten messy with it over the years but like. I think the seminal Justice League internal dramas were 1) that time Barry Allen killed the guy who'd killed his first wife and was about to kill his second one and they put him on trial 2) that time Wonder Woman killed a dude who told her under truth compulsion that the only way to stop him from mind-controlling Superman to murder people was to kill him and they put her on trial 3) blah blah Batman paranoia exploited by eeeeevil (barely counts imo) and 4) that extremely oogy time it turned out the Justice League had been using magic to forcible reform criminals and erased Batman's memories of this being a thing when he found out and objected because ethics wtf.

That last one was sufficiently story-breaking they started pretending it hadn't happened as quickly as possible. Which was amazingly quickly considering Identity Crisis was the basis for things like killing off the presiding Robin's remaining parent. They actually soft-reset the whole world fairly soon after by timeskipping over most of a year and being like ahem anyway the past is in the past. And then the universe just kept serially ending for over a decade, so it's been weird.

Justice League has reliably gotten a shiny coat of polish with every reboot tho lol.

(Still not over the way they were like, okay we're wiping Green Lantern back to Hal but now we don't have the token black guy everyone who saw the cartoon expects, let's promote Cyborg people know him because of that other cartoon, ah shit he doesn't work without a partner to do bits with. well we can't put garfield logan in the justice league it's too prestigious, he's from the doom patrol for a reason, yeah i know we've had folks like plastic man shut up this is a Cool Sexy new reboot where Superman and Wonder Woman are fucking, we're not using friggin beast boy. how about Captain Marvel? yeah ok shazam is An Silly Joker now and besties with this 20 year old who may or may not know about his elaborate cognitive situation. i don't actually think they put even this much effort into it but otoh maybe they debated really hard and this was the compromise.

........actually vic could probably work up a decent oppositional patter with eel o'brien ik they were never gonna use plastic man but i don't hate it.)

Right. There was a point.

Obviously I'm probably missing a few big dramas here, but the point is DC was trying to keep up with the fantastic dysfunction of the Avengers because if it bleeds it leads, but even in the Dark Age they could not dive in groin first without tarnishing valued brands. The Justice League is simply not built to tell the same types of stories that the Avengers are.

In Justice League stories the narrative will typically be split in focus to a varying degree between the problems created by the villain and the personal emotional situations--the problems--of the heroes. Usually the villain leads and provides the emotional stakes. Only occasionally, overall, do problems between the heroes rise to the same level. Even when they're having them canonically in some other book Justice League tends to be ruled not the right place for that.

Secret identities are traditionally kept to a minimum in the League and League stories, though what this means in practice has gone through some shifts.

This is not just the difference between DC and Marvel house styles, though of course that's part of it, nor is it the League being older, because it isn't by any significant amount. It replaced the Justice Society of America in 1960. Other teams, even the Titans to an extent which was just the junior wing of the League at first, were allowed to get more into the grit sooner, and have the experimental story of Speedy's career-ending heroin problem happen and intra-team dating drama take the foreground, and all that. Doom Patrol was all about the dysfunction, god.

But the Justice League is simply not designed to be that kind of a team book, and when it's occasionally written that way the seams usually creak.

[iloveyanderes]

Yandere hunting dogs analysis, I'm doin it. Doing it for my fellow hunting dogs lovers.

This will not include the captain and the fifth member because one there names are two hard and I hate the captain (don't tell teruko) also teruko will be platonic.

First analyzations:

Tecchou: he's a rather odd guy, very questionable food tastes, but he seems like a very kind and loyal dude, he also drinks respect woman juice, be like him. He has complete and utter respect for justice and those that show respect to others. He's good-natured to the bone and an absolute idiot, he seems attached to jouno in some way despite how jouno tells him he wishes he were dead like every other five minutes, in the manga he lost jouno for like 15 minutes and then threw away justice and beat up a 14 year old child. I think he was kinda having a panic attack. This actions prove that he would put his love ones above justice, his usual number one thing, we don't know much about his backstory so I can't analyze that too.

Jouno:I haven't seen his backstory in the manga so what I'm about to analyze might not be true so talk it with a grain of salt, I heard from third party information that he was originally a criminal who got reformed and joined the hunting dogs. He's also a sadist with exceptional senses other then his sight, because you know he's blind. Despite the fact that he's a sadist he loves saving people and in the end will put people over his own pleasures.

Teruko: personally I believe she is a lot older then she appears, she is a bit more sadistic then jouno but a lot better at hiding it, with her relationship with the commander if she truly loves an admires someone she just end up doing whatever they want, but I did see a theory that she's being brainwashed of some sort and I have to admit I believe it so that character point is debunked for me but I'll still use it because there's a probable chance the theory is not true, her most scary side is when she goes along with what others say with a smile, shown in the manga when she fights sigma, absolutely loves getting piggy back rides from litterly anyone, not to mention she cried when she finally got this one evil guy whose name I don't remember to confess. So very fun character.

Type of yandere:

Tecchou: harmless, protective, out of the three I'd probably want him as a yandere, he's so weird in general that you probably wouldn't even notice that he's a yandere at all, very protective, like I said earlier he's willing to put his loved ones above justice and your on the top, he doesn't care if the person that hurt you was a normal civilian or even a hero like him, he will make them pay. If you were a normal civilian he probably would be like that one guy you have complete trust in, visits your home and buys you a bunch of food, if you were a hunting dog he would be right next to you like glue, never leaving you alone, think tecchou and jouno but 3×, might take a lot of your missions to protect you so just bonk him on the head and he'll back down. If you were a villain it be a very very different story, a lot more rough but would definitely believe he could reform you.

Jouno:manipulative and sadistic, at first glance he'd look like he would be an easy yandere to escape because of his blindness but it's the complete opposite, his heightened senses and the fact he's in a worldwide military unit makes him a very hard yandere to escape, if you were a civilian he absolutely will kidnap you and keep you in some bunker, if you were apart of the hunting dogs he would volunteer to be your partner all the time and then nitpick you for every little mistake you make, his sadistic tendencies would go through the roof if you were a villain, physically torturing you simply because he can. Don't get him wrong, he genuinely cares for you but has a very hard time expressing it.

Teruko(platonic): clingy and sadistic, she is sometimes super nice and sometimes super mean, is not protective but would not hesitate to beat the shit out of someone and torture them for giving you the slightest of bad looks, regardless of what you are she will demand you carry her over her shoulders. if you were a civilian she's gonna be more of a stalker type of yandere, most of the time you don't even know she's in your house until you wake up at three a.m. to your tv going off and she's right next to you on your bed, smiling at you as if you'd invited her to have a sleepover at your house, if you were a hunting dog think how she is with the captain but a lot worse never leaving you alone kinda like tecchou but through physical contact, if your a villain I'd suggest pulling a Xie lian and staying in a coffin for a 100 years, because damn this girl is terrifying, the type to enjoy terrorizing the terrorists and she thinks of you as the toy she can never break, the longer you last through her torture the more she likes you, so I'd suggest dying quickly.

Bonus: tecchou and jouno: having tecchou and jouno as a yandere would be better then having them as separate yandere's, mainly because there too busy talking to each other to talk to you, bickering ×10 jouno can't be sadistic with you because tecchou will stab him in the butt and tecchou can't let you be free because jouno absolutely refuses to let you go. To be honest you might end up laughing a bunch of the time because of there bickering and it being ridiculous, though you do have to be nice to jouno or else he'll like tecchou feed you his weird food combinations, overall this wouldn't really be that bad of a duo.

Bonus bonus: same as before but add teruko to the mix, this is absolutely wild jouno and teruko's sadistic nature combining with each other and more of suegiku bickering= wildness, imagine just you and teruko sitting in the corner and suegiku argue about the move random things, teruko really likes to tease you and depending on your reactions it'll either turn sadistic or gentle.

I don't have ideas for individual but I do have one for the three of them together.

1. I've been trying to write this on Wattpad but I haven't gone far or posted it, imagine previously being really close friends with the hunting dogs, like they visit you every opportunity they get at this point in time their not yandere but then you get kidnapped by some random evil man and get experimented on until you become some half human half bird thing, were you can turn into a bird but you forget everything, then get rescued by the arm detective agency and then you begin to work for them. When they get framed by the decay of angels your to busy trying to get atsushis foot out of the ground and don't appear on tv, but later when your helping your groupies out you get ambushed by tecchou and jouno who recognize you immediately but you have no idea who they are, immediately they jump to the conclusion that the ada brainwashed you and that your doing this against you will and meanwhile your like "who tf are you!?" Escaping with the help of chuuya they go to tell teruko and she is super pissed. "Not only are these guys terrorists but they freaking brainwashed my bestie!" Is what she thinks, oh boy, angry teruko is terrifying. Eventually they end up kidnapping you and keep you restrained for "your own safety" not to mention you keep fighting back simply because you have no idea who these weird people are and your more focused on helping the people that helped you.

2.your someone who joined the military at 12 years old, your entire life was dedicated to it, everything you are is to serve in the military, so anyone can imagine your happiness when you were told by your Superior that you were getting promoted. Becoming an assistant for the hunting dogs, or at least you were happy about it until you learned this meant all paperwork and no saving citizens whatsoever, that was there job. Regardless of that you still went to the job openheartingly, the moment you step into the place your immediately bombarded by the sight of a little girl crying, giving the girl a piece of candy you had she immediately stops, smiling you ask what's wrong and her answer confuses you to the max, she whined about finally getting a confession from some evil dude, complaining about how she thought she could torture him forever and he'd never break but he did, 'wtf?' You had thought, your confusion was answered when two very different looking males came into the room, one having dark spiky hair and the other white. You soon find out that these are the people your working for, quickly getting to know them you discover each of there personalities, let's just say they have really really strong personalities, tecchou is a dumbass with a strong sense of justice, jouno is very sadistic but you can still talk to him, teruko... Well she follows you everywhere but is the most scary human being you've ever met. Doing paperwork is the most boring job you've ever had, as much as you hate to admit it but the front lines are where you thrive, your duty is to die on the battlefield not be holded up in this place. The hunting dogs fought more then actual hunting dogs, a lot more powerful then you'll ever be, you felt awe watching them but also fear, hearing teruko and jouno torture people in the middle of the night when your trying to get paperwork done is not helping, tecchou really isn't that much of a help either his weird food choices in the middle of the night may or may not have made you throw up in the middle of the night. Eventually it becomes too much and you hand in a resignation letter thinking you can just join another military in Canada or the u.s. when the hunting dogs were told of this they were not happy, it wasn't until you heard someone breaking and entering into your house that you realized how much they were attached to you.

This is all I've got for you guys, hope you enjoyed and please give me your ideas.

Have a good day.

[miraculousdeservesbetter2024]

MAJOR Revelation & Collusion salt/vent incoming:

Look, I’m sorry if I’m misunderstanding something here, but I really dislike these episodes.

Why? To me, it seems like that guy is using Gabriel (the main villain and known terrorist of Miraculous) as the main "mouthpiece" for the fans who have the gall to take up for Chloe or call out her bad character portrayal (“You have a wonderful life, power, wife and a daughter”).

It also feels like the exact same thing when it came to Lila in Revelation, using the whole “Chloe is capable of change” speech for her own advantage, similar to what she tried to do with Marinette in Chameleon with the whole "friendship and not fighting over a boy" speech. It’s like he’s using them both as mouthpieces to represent the fans who still think Chloe can change or has potential.

So basically he's saying "Only psychopaths think that. You should listen to Marinette when she says Chloe is incapable of change because she’s the protagonist, and you shouldn’t listen to Lila and Gabriel when they say that Chloe can change because they’re the antagonists!”.

It’s really frustrating because any other time, we are made to feel sorry for Gabriel despite everything that he’s done, now we shouldn’t listen to him??? This is really disappointing to think about because he’s ruining Marinette's character this way. I still like Marinette and I really do think she deserves better, but I’m starting to see why people are starting to dislike her. She's becoming ANOTHER Thomas self-insert (on top of the MANY he already has in the series). The guy loves himself TOO much, don't you think?

I'm going to be completely honest here. As a Marinette fan, I still think the way SOME critics go about describing/criticizing/disliking Marinette and her character isn’t necessarily correct, but I must say that it’s still understandable. This guy is basically making her into his own personal mouthpiece, making S5 Marinette’s portrayal the worst as it has ever been 😓

Which is really a letdown because I love Marinette. It’s Chloe’s “Darnation arc” all over again. He’s ruining characters and development just to push his own morals and fill his own ego to the brim and it’s a shame.

And before anyone says:

“Geez! I swear to god people act like they know Chloe more than her own creator!” 🙄

Maybe your right, but MAYBE it wouldn’t of turned out that way if the show wasn’t so inconsistent and contradicting all the time! This is another reason why I think people have so much animosity towards characters like Andre, because the story portrays him as the victim “this entire time” who only got into politics to please his father and Audrey, pretending that he was never a corrupt politician on his own free will. It’s questionable because…he made his own bed. He choose the life that he has now, to have a child with a despicable woman, choose to spoil Chloe rotten, not to discipline her when she was being rotten to other people, and choose to not be there for her for emotional support.

I’m not saying that Chloe bares no blame at all, but it’s not ENTIRELY her fault just because “she’s her own person”. There is such things as bad parents & bad role models 🙄 You don’t have the right to give up on your daughter, saying things like “you have a terrible/cruel daughter” or “you tried everything in your power to help” when all you really did from the beginning was enable her, let her make everyone’s lives miserable and not be there for her like your should have. Yeah, she’s horrible, but at least she has the excuse that she’s a child. Your not only a grown man, but her father.

This goes for other figures in her life also (Audrey, Bustier, her butler, heck, even Ladybug to a degree). People are right, not everybody is responsible for holding her hand through redemption/reformation (and I agree) and to coddle her every time she does something wrong, but to say that “they’ve tried everything/their best”…just isn’t true. It’s more of an excuse to give up on her. Then JUST SAY THAT instead of trying to convince everybody that you did everything that you could.

Enabling =/= Helping.

[firstagent]

Spoilers! Digimon Adventure 02 The Beginning [Dub]

Here's my full System Restore write-up of Digimon 02 The Beginning. Spoilers below!

In this movie, an adorable, sympathizing Digimon gives a poor, desperate kid the chance to make his humble wishes come true. Clearly they’re the villains of the piece.

Depending on whether you approach The Beginning from the perspective of Lui or the Zero Two cast, you’re going to find it to be a story about one of two things. Looking solely at Lui and Ukkomon, there’s a lesson in how wishes are fulfilled. You’re only going to get what you want out of a relationship if you express your needs clearly and understand the motivations of those trying to provide them. That applies double if they can magically grant wishes, as any good Monkey’s Paw derivative would illustrate. The Zero Two kids face a tale about the nature of fate. Not the dread over an inevitable tragedy as the last parts of tri. and Kizuna explored. Instead, the dread of learning that something wonderful originated from something awkward and manufactured, and how an origin point can be more uncomfortable than a fixed destination.

It’s a bombshell to both us and the established cast: the digidestined were created not to help a digital entity maintain order, but to help a abused four year old feel less alone. There are some staggering questions that arise from all this. Did Ukkomon empower Homeostasis to choose digidestined? Would the Digital World have been defenseless against its evils if Lui hadn’t made the wish? Why couldn’t Ukkomon get anyone together for Lui’s eighth birthday? Even if everything that came before this remains in continuity (and it’s supposed to), it twists the initial contact between child and Digimon into something forced rather than a divine destiny. That’s what the kids have to grapple with, and grapple they do.

What they come to realize is that even if their fated partnership had such shallow origins, they themselves made it genuine. They’re the ones who put the work into creating and maintaining these bonds, the same as any other relationship. The preservation of past canon reinforces that, allowing them to look back to Willis and Ken and even Lui himself to understand that such partnerships, well-intentioned as they may be, have the capacity to go wrong. Theirs didn’t (or at least they got better), and that’s still something to cherish. In this way, it’s still a struggle to accept fate the same way Tai had to in tri. and Kizuna, but coping with the past rather than the future.

Meanwhile, contrast that to Lui and you can understand his cynicism towards the concept of digidestined. Grateful to have his life turned around and unwilling to question the implications of Ukkomon’s actions, he doesn’t put the effort into maintaining a partnership because he never had the impetus to. Without the stakes the other digidestined faced, he’s allowed to continue living his fantasy, only realizing the implications when he sees other kids and Digimon risking their lives because of the wish. Feel to mark that as a possible clue to some of the above questions. Either way he goes to the other extreme, rejecting the wish entirely, inflicting some gruesome body horror, and making Ukkomon very sad.

In this regard, and our astonishment that Kari calls this out so bluntly, Lui and Ukkomon are simultaneously the story’s protagonists and antagonists. Lui’s wish and his initial refusal to rein in his partner are as responsible for this mess as Ukkomon was, while both seek to work together to find a more organic solution to make young Lui’s life better and not realize the wish’s final apex. The Beginning is very naive about the power of communication. Sympathetic as it tries to be towards Lui’s mother, a random stranger grabbing her out of nowhere is unlikely to suddenly reform an abusive parent. And it’s hard to envision a way Lui could have successfully articulated his wish better after it was already set in motion. But this movie follows a series where Davis reforms a former villain just by talking to him enough, so don’t act so shocked.

The movie certainly communicates its feelings about this world’s continuity. Its way of honoring everything that came before it while simultaneously being cavalier about how it’s incorporated is either incredibly frustrating or the most zen thing we’ve ever seen. Kari and TK know of Homeostasis and mention it by name, so they must know of the original five digidestined. But using that to question Lui’s claim of being the first would be distracting and fruitless, so we don’t see it. The epilogue is more intact than ever, with Davis consumed by ramen, Kari helping with a daycare, and Yolei hitting on Ken. But it also treats the notion of giving everyone a Digimon partner as a nightmare scenario with little elaboration. Not that it needs any after Savers and Ghost Game, but Zero Two’s ending relies on the idea of making Digimon accessible to everyone. And despite its close links to Kizuna, when the kids wonder if killing Ukkomon will end everyone’s partnerships, it never weighs on their minds that they may already have a shelf life. In fact, the destruction of the D3s suggest that the bonds are again limitless, possibly reversing mechanics we just learned about.

So why is it all right? Both the elimination of the digivices and the final narration suggest that even if the Digimon Adventure timeline is unbreakable, it is malleable. Events can swerve in different directions, new revelations can upset what we used to believe, contradictions can co-exist, and the rules and logic of the world can be made and broken on a whim. We have to allow ourselves to put our assumptions and expectations aside for the sake of a good story. We still seem headed towards the epilogue, but the surprises Kizuna and The Beginning throw at us suggest we should stay on our toes as we await whatever comes next. Remembering how dull it once seemed to be stuck traveling a narrow path to 2027, isn’t that what we should be wishing for?

My Grade: A

Loose Data:

Suppose we should start out with thoughts on the dub, which is mostly faithful and generally solid. Davis, Ken, Veemon, and Hawkmon are back in peak form, and Yolei sounds more natural and expressive than she did in Kizuna. TK, Patamon, and Cody are fine, while our substitute Wormmon does his best. Kari and Gatomon have the same voices from tri. and Kizuna but sound a little shakier this go-round. Armadillomon’s the same actor, but an shockingly stark downgrade in his direction. As the leads, both of Lui’s actors and Ukkomon absolutely deliver standout performances. Good luck getting that birthday song out of your nightmares.

As far as the script goes, some things like Hikarigaoka and a couple attacks don’t get adapted to dub equivalents, but everything’s pretty understandable. The conversation about switching to D3s is the only one that seems unfocused.

That “Journey 1, Route 1” bit at the start makes it feel like there’s some bigger plan in motion for more Digimon Adventure stories. But it also feels like whatever that’s supposed to be about should have started with Kizuna.

Even if the story is not really about the Zero Two kids, Davis, Ken, and Yolei certainly make their presences felt. Davis Davises his way into getting everyone on board working with Lui and with Veemon offers the motivational speeches. Ken keeps him in check and tries to inject reason to his madness, even if Davis’s introspective side shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise to him. Yolei is back to offering pure personality in her dealings with Davis, even calling out him and Ken’s “flirting” (which Davis blushes at!). Kari and TK occasionally bring up interesting points. Cody… he got them into a computer room?

It doesn’t matter for purposes of this movie and nobody is in a position to deliver answers, but they bring up Ukkomon’s connection to a higher power a lot. A connection to Homeostasis makes the most sense, but there were an uncomfortable number of helixes flying around when Lui dove into Ukkomon at the end there. That’s not usually good.

The effects of Ukkomon melting and later dying track well enough if you realize Lui isn’t actually changing the past. But his mother dropping dead is alarming since she wasn’t physically unwell when Lui made the wish. Her death suggests that Ukkomon taking control of her means it actually killed her years ago. Hope those classmates are all right.

We get the sudden canonization of the ol’ “digidestined count doubles every year” thing that was only a rough guide that even Zero Two proper didn’t actually follow. It still can only be seen as a loose estimate given its inevitable march to the “everyone on Earth is a digidestined” scenario the kids fought so hard to avert, and there are so many surprise digidestined cropping up before the Zero Two kids (Menoa and Meiko are just the recent ones) that it’s a disservice to steer the audience to any hard numbers. So it’s a strange choice to mention out loud, especially when Miyako or Ken just dropping the raw estimate would have sufficed for that scene.

It’s worth pointing out that Lui convincing his mother to stop abusing her kid is happening inside Ukkomon, so the improbable effectiveness of that act could well be one last bit of wish fulfillment before they hash things out. Wonder what would have happened if Davis actually had intervened in the first leap.

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[flightfoot]

Underrated Miraculous Fic writers

So I read a crapton of miraculous fanfics, and I often end up gravitating towards particular fic writers over and over. Most of the time a lot of other people have clearly noticed the same thing, as their stories tend to get tons of kudos - but not always. Some of the fic writers I read most reliably get very little attention, for one reason or another. Usually because they tend to write for a particular niche that I like but isn't overwhelmingly popular throughout the fandom, but other times I have no idea why their stories aren't more popular.

Anyway, I wanted to spotlight a few of those authors here!

---

Generalluxun (@generalluxun)

If you're a fan of fics that really explore Chloe's character, look into her mindset and try to redeem her without relying on shortcuts or making other characters look worse in comparison, then you've probably at least dabbled in his fics before. I'm especially partial to his newest fic "In Direct Opposition", as Alya's the main POV character and is looking to reform Chloe while navigating this whole akuma situation, and Control, a Senti!Chloe fic where Marinette accidentally stumbles across Chloe's Amok and has to decide what to do with it.

---

linerle (@liiinerle)

Linerle specializes in Marigami fics, with a more general bend towards queer romance. If you like those, then you're in for a real treat! Accidents Are Also Miracles is particularly noteworthy, as it's the single longest completed Marigami-centric fic in the fandom. It's a fantastic story that I highly recommend checking out!

---

BecomingButterflies (@bbutterflies)

They specialize in Adrino fics, so if you want to read some Adrino goodness, their author page is a great place to stop by! I've especially enjoyed "I'll give myself a name (something stupid and pretentious)", where Adrien leaves town after finding out Monarch was Gabriel, and only returns years later, to find that Nino has missed him quite a lot...

---

TrishaCollins (@consistent-chaos-corporation)

Trisha often writes Felix-focused fics, delving into his trauma with being raised by Colt, and him trying to be a better person. Not that it's just introspective pieces, a lot of their fics are pretty action-based with serious stakes and villains who are only too willing to hurt the heroes and innocent bystanders, and even kill them. I'm especially partial to their Madness series, which is a sprawling AU, touching on Felix's and Adrien's childhood, but soon fast-forwarding to the present-day, with Chat Noir and Ladybug confronting Felix about Monarch's Miraculous theft, and him seeing the errors of his ways and helping them. I particularly appreciate how viscerally Felix comes to understand how his actions hurt others, particularly the Kwamis, who he put in a similar position to what he himself had been in with Colt.

---

TheChatatonicOne (@rosie-b)

I love a lot of their fics dearly, they're well-written and scratch just the right itch! They mostly write Lovesquare fics, often with a more angsty bent.

I especially adore their enemies au fics:

Stealing Freedom, where Adrien's long been puppeted about using his ring by his father as Cat Walker, who, thankfully, Ladybug and Co. know is a Senti who has no choice in the matter - with Marinette then discovering that her fiance, Adrien, IS Cat Walker.

home is where the fight is, A short glimpse into a Ladrien enemies au, where Adrien's being controlled by his father into fighting her, but is dating Ladybug as a civilian - and Ladybug's secret identity has just been revealed to the world.

True Blue, Chatatonic's ongoing enemies au which I have recced numerous times, which takes the more unusual (and difficult) approach of having MARINETTE side with Gabriel instead of Adrien, and doing so while keeping her in-character by having Gabriel lean into his manipulation skills, telling her half-truths about how Adrien will be happier once his mother's back, and that ultimately the heroes are the ones being greedy and reticent in all this, and that the akumas all agree to help him, even if they don't remember afterwards. It's among the best Miraculous fics I've read this year so far!

Not that she only writes enemies au of course, she's written many other Lovesquare fics. I particularly enjoyed The Mer-Human Race, in which sailors and merfolk would have friendly competitions on who was faster in the water, with the winner being able to ask for some sort of prize. Marinette had been looking for a merman to race for awhile so that she could be granted a vessel of her own at a younger age than was normally permitted. Luckily, a Merman named Chat Noir showed up suddenly and offered to race her. Pity that her friend Adrien wasn't there to watch it...

[emperor-kumquat]

When you say 'Failed' routes is that the new version of dark+ (or whatever was the term previously I can't remember) where they are fundamentally similar to World Domination, Discovery, and Monstrous Heart routes but diverge to be vastly different stories as opposed to the Let Go version of Space Adventure in contrast to it's original Threaten version, or do those paths lead to doom without any good or happy endings but not a dead end like the RiD15 ending?

And side question, how much influence does your early choices have in relation to the alternate pathways to routes under the same name? Would it be just a simple edit to the credits near the end or do we get a slightly different Predaking going through the same version of the story who reacts slightly differently?

The failed routes mean that the consequence of killing Starscream catches up with you (his ghost working with an assassin Slipstream). It's what I was always thinking would happen in those Dark paths. Predaking will die before a story gets too far.

Predaking will also die in satisfying ways at the end of the storylines where he is pure evil. Basically, if you mess with Starscream, he will always get his revenge on you except in one story. In Reformed Predator, the threat of Starscream and Slipstream is stopped by Nightbeat and Rung.

The X's mean you die very quickly, in Part 1 or 2, so they don't really lead anywhere.

The variations of a storyline mean that the starts are different, but eventually the stories merge together. For example, how you treated Starscream at the start won't really matter once Space Adventure starts. All Space Adventure stories combine by the end of Part 2. The two variations of Discovery merge in Part 4. The stories are the same except Starscream has scratches present on his wings. When Starscream heals, the stories will become one. Starscream has forgiven you. As long as you let Starscream go before killing him at the start, he'll forgive you and just feel relieved that he survived

For these new changes to work, it means Starscream can't get the Phase Shifter anymore for the original Heart path (following the first Let Go option).

The terms "Dark", "One Attack", "Neutral", and "Heart" still help me organize everything especially when things get similar. "Dark" is any time Predaking continues the torture of Starscream past scratching and biting his wings (but now, Starscream will always die when the torture continues. I cut out all "Maul Recovery" options). "One Attack", is when only one attack is chosen before Starscream is let go. "Neutral" is the threaten Starscream option. "Heart" is the no violence at the start option, but I toned down how goody Predaking was to be more in character. Now he doesn't really pity Starscream, but just feels like tearing him apart would be dishonourable. Monstrous Heart has become available to One Attack and Neutral as well (wherever Predaking isn't evil). Whenever Predaking works as a police officer, he will encounter Kremzeek and get dragged into all kinds of trouble. Monstrous Heart explores the themes of manipulation and what makes a true villain!

I hope this was enough information for your curiosity :)

[missvelvetsstuff]

Just A Number

Bucky Barnes x Older Reader

Summary: Reader meets Bucky at a party and the attraction is more than either one of them wants to resist.

Notes: Since most stories are younger readers I felt like having a more mature reader could be a nice change of pace. Especially since I'm creeping up on senior discounts and want to believe Bucky could fall in love with someone like me.

I try to keep my readers description vague but, as always, she's female, tall and this one is obviously 40+

Previous chapter.....

The woman sighed "I'm Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine but you can call me Val. I'm told your entire family is here tonight and I need a word."

Chapter 14

Notes at the end of this chapter.

Warnings: swearing and fluff, talk about sex

Dawn let Val in and led her to the dining room where everyone was having dessert and coffee, they all stopped talking to check out the newcomer. Val sat and accepted the coffee that Dawn offered while everyone else waited for her to speak.

Val looked up from her coffee and winked "I'm sure you're all wondering why I gathered you here today" and chuckled at herself "Sorry, I've always wanted to say that but it's also probably true."

John nodded "We're all listening."

Val nodded " Right. So most of you know I'm working with General Ross on his campaign and his plans to make a team of, ahem, reformed villains. This team would work around the law to help fight our enemies." She paused to take a bite of her dessert "Mmmm, this is very good." And washed it down with a sip of coffee "I'm working on the line up but in addition to you I'm hoping to recruit one of Natasha Romanoffs red room sisters, Yelena Belova, the Red Guardian and the Taskmaster. A couple others are in my sights as well. Some people think that someone like that shouldn't have any close family or attachments but I think having loved ones to fight for is a good thing. A sister or girlfriend who works for Pepper Potts could also be helpful."

Y/N shook her head "I'll support James if he's going to be part of your team but Pepper has done quite a bit for me and I won't betray her or give away any of her or the companies secrets." Bucky squeezed her hand so she knew he supported her.

Val nodded "Fair enough, I'll speak to Mrs Potts-Stark about making you a liaison. Her company has some of the best tech out there." She looked between Bucky and Y/N "You 2 are a good pair, top of the charts in our internal polling. Keep up the good work."

Bucky and Y/N looked at each other, confused but Val had already moved on to John and Olivia "John, you need to stop the womanizing and work on your marriage. It's hard to convince people that you're reformed if you're blatantly cheating on your wife."

She handed Olivia her business card "Call me if he gives you any trouble." She stopped to take a sip of her coffee.

"Bucky and John, you both just need to stay out of trouble until Ross is inaugurated, you'll all be invited and the team will be introduced sometime around then. You may be called on if anything comes up but until then, take an extended vacation, on a grateful government."

Val sat back and took another bite of her tart before John spoke up "But Sharon said-"

Val cleared her throat "Nope, don't even finish that thought. I have Agent Carter working on some other concerns that don't involve you. Your association is done, end of discussion."

She finished her coffee "This tart is delish, I haven't had fresh strawberries in years. So, I'll speak to Pepper and Ross to set that up. Maybe you should take some time too Y/N, see some of the world with the Sargent."

She stood and headed for the front door before anyone else could stand.

"I'll be in touch."

Dawn and Y/N looked at each other and shrugged. Olivia spoke up "Well, she's an odd one. I thought that when John and I met her."

She looked at John "I might be willing to reconcile but you'll have to prove yourself and regain my trust. Maybe some counseling would be a good idea."

John looked around to see everyone glaring at him and shrugged defeated "Yeah, I guess we can try that."

After the kitchen was cleaned up Bucky and Y/N went back to her room. They spent the rest of the day cuddling and watching TV until Bucky spoke up.

"What do you think about what Val said? About taking some time off to see the world?" He looked at her hopefully.

Y/N ran her fingers through his hair "I would love to. Having Michael at 17 kept us from doing much traveling outside of some family road trips. I've always wanted to see more of the world but I don't know if Pepper will be ok with it, I haven't worked for her long enough to have accrued many vacation days. And I definitely don't have a lot of money to toss around."

Bucky nuzzled her neck "Didn't you hear her say an extended vacation on the government? Maybe Olivia could fill in for you with Pepper."

He nibbled on her ear and down her neck "I'd love to get you on a warm, private beach. Maybe Pepper has one we could use, I know Tony had places all over the world."

He kissed her shoulder "we could stay in bed until noon and then go lay on the beach, maybe play in the water. I bet you're a real dish in a swim suit."

He growled as he turned her onto her back, mumbling as he kissed down her body "so beautiful, tastes so sweet." He looked up into her eyes for the ok to go further.

Y/N rolled her eyes at him, exasperated "You're insatiable!"

Bucky nipped the top of one of her breasts "For you doll? Always. You feel and taste so good, I don't think I'll ever get enough."

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

Five days later they were sitting together on the Stark corporate jet, that Pepper insisted they use, but Bucky still hadn't told her where they were headed except that it was someplace warm.

Y/N felt dizzy at the events of the last few days. One day she's having Sunday dinner with her family, then after a few words from Val, a discussion with Pepper, a day of shopping and a day of packing, then she's here sipping expensive champagne while a dark haired, centenarian super soldier is cuddling her in his lap.

She pulled back to look at him "Does all this feel a bit, surreal to you? Life has taken some crazy turns in the last year and I went from mourning to falling for an enhanced hundred year old dreamboat who's taking me on a fancy vacation in a private jet."

Bucky looked at her with a lopsided grip and a twinkle in his blue eyes "Dreamboat, huh? I don't know that someone my age could be considered a dreamboat but my life has felt surreal since Steve saved me the first time. Right now definitely seems like a high point, flying on that private jet with the prettiest doll I've ever met."

Y/N felt her face heat up before fidgeting in his lap until he grabbed her hips to hold her still. "So, how much time until we land?"

Bucky chuckled "It'll be awhile. You want to take a nap or something? Might help us adjust to the time difference."

Y/N looked at him and fluttered her lashes "Have you ever heard of the mile high club?"

He shook his head "No, do we have to reach a certain altitude? Did you tell Happy?"

She giggled "No, that's not it." She leaned to whisper in his ear, explaining what she wanted.

Bucky pulled back, surprised "Right here?"

She shook her head "I mean, we could but there is a bed in back. Most people are on commercial flights so have to do it in the bathroom and hope they don't get caught."

He shook his head "I don't think it would be possible in the bathroom but-" he quickly stood, holding on to the back of her thighs and making her yelp.

Bucky carried her to the back of the plane where he gently dropped her on the bed before quickly removing his clothes. He then focused all his attention on her until she was tired, shaking and slightly dazed from his efforts. He grabbed a towel to clean her up and lay down next to her, chuckling at her soft snores.

They woke shortly before landing and once dressed and fixed up, Y/N looked out a window eyes growing wide at the White sand, coconut trees and blue water.

Bucky helped her off the jet and they walked to a limo.

Happy opened the door for them, smiled and told them "Welcome to Bora Bora, Sargent, Miss.

It's a short ride to the house, please make yourself comfortable."

Y/N looked at Bucky "Bora Bora!?"

He chuckled and nodded "Yep. Pepper has a house here with a private beach. I figure we can relax here for a few days, then decide where else you want to go."

They were both suitably impressed at the huge, beautiful house which included every luxury possible. The largest of the 7 suites opened to the beach with a Jacuzzi on the deck.

Since they had rested on the plane, they changed into cooler clothes, Y/N in a pastel blue gauze dress and Bucky in a t-shirt and shorts, and went for a walk on the beach before lunch.

They walked slowly, holding hands and taking in the beauty before they stopped to watch the water as a pod of dolphins swam past. Once they were out of sight, Bucky pulled her close to kiss her before dropping to one knee.

Y/N looked at him, confused for a minute before she realized what what happening. She felt her heart speed up "Bucky?"

Bucky looked at her with eyes full of love "Y/N, doll, I'm not great with words and I'm horribly broken but I hope I've given you even a fraction of the happiness you've given me and I promise I will do my very best and spend the rest of our lives trying to make you as happy as you make me." He cleared his throat and held out an old fashioned sapphire ring "Marry me?"

Y/N was shocked and speechless with tears streaming down her face as she nodded energetically "Yes! Yes, of course."

Bucky's hands shook as he tried to put the ring on her shaking hand and once that was accomplished he picked her up as he stood and spun them both around. He let her down and kissed her with everything he had.

He pulled back to look in her eyes "I never imagined I'd meet someone like you, especially after.....everything." Took her left hand and kissed the ring "You know, I don't know if I want to wait any longer. How would you feel about a very short engagement that ends at sunset? Or would you rather have a huge, expensive thing?"

Y/N shook her head "I'm sure you know me well enough that I don't want some big, flashy event but I don't know if I could do it without my family. I mean at least Dawn and the kids."

She choked up a little "Besides, Dawn would hurt you so maybe a little planning and a small thing back home?"

Bucky nodded "I think I can work with some of that but before we discuss this anymore, I have a surprise for you."

Y/N giggled "More than proposing?"

"Yeah, it's at the house. C'mon, I'll show you."

He pulled her up the beach impatiently until he got frustrated and threw her over his shoulder.

As they got closer to the house she heard music and voices in the air, Y/N tried to look around and see who was there but couldn't. As soon as Bucky sat her down she turned around and heard people yelling "Surprise!".

The shock almost knocked her over but Bucky was quick to catch her.

Dawn, Michael, Jessie, Olivia, John, Sam and Pepper were standing by the table on the deck that they appeared to be decorating.

Y/N didn't know what to think so hugged all her friends and family that she had seen on the other side of the world less than a day ago.

"I don't understand. What's going on?"

Dawn chuckled "Isn't it obvious, dear sister? We're here for the wedding?"

Y/N turned to Bucky "You planned all this before you even proposed? How did you? What if? That's awfully presumptuous of you, Sargent."

He chuckled "I never had a doubt"

Dawn cackled "Don't let him fool you, Sissy. He's been making me crazy for 2 weeks. Then Val showed up and sent you on vacation so we had to start over."

She winked at Bucky "You two better make this last because I'm not dealing with another wedding. Now, come eat lunch so we can get you ready."

After lunch Dawn took Y/N to one of the bedrooms to fix a wreath in her hair, apply light make up and change her into an ivory, lacy, off the shoulder dress and sandals. She quickly kicked the sandals off.

As the sun began to set the ukulele cover version of "Over the Rainbow" came through speakers on the deck while Michael and Jessie walked their mom to stand beside Bucky who was dressed simply in black slacks and a short sleeved white dress shirt, no shoes.

Everyone stood on the beach for the brief ceremony, officiated by Happy Hogan, cheering loudly and taking pictures when the newly married couple kissed as the sun set behind them.

Notes: this is the end of the story that was in my head but I'll probably be writing more on the newlyweds honeymoon adventures.

I also reserve the right to check in on this couple when Thunderbolts is released.

@supraveng @cjand10 @440mxs-wife @kandis-mom @dtba-grey81 @calwitch @ozwriterchick

[linkspooky]

To add to my previous post, I think a lot of the current debates raging in the My Hero Academia fandom on whether My Hero Academia has failed because at the end of the story there probably won’t be major changes to the society it takes place in are kind of silly. You see to remove any political message MHA is trying to send out of the equation. I think the big problem with MHA  is much simpler than anyone wants to admit. 

The biggest problem is that... it’s boring. 

It’s boring the same way Marvel Movies are boring. It’s swapped out what are potentially interesting and layered hero characters, for what are essentially characters with costumes and superhero powers and not much else going on for them. Enji and Hawks are the only heroes that have character flaws, and they are largely stagnant characters, Aizawa is introduced to us as a ruthless pragmatist and trickster mentor and he’s now just a generic “I love all my kids” mentor and the only thing he really has done in a hundred chapters is use his power. I don’t think this is a controversial opinion either, a lot of people didn’t like the deku alone arc, a lot of people think the current war arc is less satisfying to read than the previous one and it’s not well paced and it drags. 

You could say the kid heroes are interesting characters with potential for growth, but have you noticed the kid heroes have been consistently sidelined for the adult heroes who are shallower, just because they have stronger more flashy powers. Heck, Enji gets more screentime in the Todoroki family arc than Shoto does and Shoto is supposed to be a main character. I think the hero kids just not getting plot importance they used to get and being sidelined because they’re not as powerful as the adults is not even an MHA exclusive problem, it’s the reason I don’t like the Young Justie Cartoon, it’s a pretty common flaw in adolescent superhero stories. Because why focus on the kids when the adults get all the cool fights against the bigger bads? 

I think the reason people sympathize with the villains so much is not because they find them to have better politics, that’s probably a ex-posto facto applied reasoning (though I think that’s part of it). (Also if people are invested in the story in MHA because of the political issues it expressed, and they are disappointed because we’re not focusing on that, that’s a valid response too because Horikoshi is the one who set these ideas up as themes and then failed t follow through). (Or even if someone wants to critcize the way Hori dragged race as a metaphor into the story, they’re free to be displeased with how HOri handled it but also can still be invested in the story as a whole.) I don’t think the villains are sympathetic because they’re societal reformers, I think they’re just interesting because they have severe personality flaws and character arcs. Enji is the same character from the pro-hero work onward, the exact same character, he even does the exact same action his only true action to atone is to just defeat a big bad in AFO the same way he roasted the Noumu alive. You can’t say Shigaraki is the same character he was at the beginning of his arc, nor Himiko Toga, nor Dabi, nor Spinner, not even Twice and he has a tragic arc. Negative character development is still development, a stagnant character is dull a dynamic character is interesting. Maybe everyone is excited that Toga, and Dabi are at extreme low points in their character arcs, because it’s a change, and it’s compelling to see the extreme emotions they represent. Like, there’s so much discourse today on whether or not the League of Villains is a healthy friend group for one another, and like they’re not, they’re codependent and heavily flawed but that’s what makes them interesting dude. 

Compare that to Class 1-A which is a much bigger group of kids where they are all unconditionally supportive of each other, and a healthy influence on one another, and because there’s very little conflict in that group bond there’s also little development. The only reason Class 1-A is in fact something people are emotoinally invested in is because of the conflict they had earlier in their arcs, Bakugo and Deku is a long running conflict based on an unhealthy friendship and fixation they have on one another, it takes a long time for Bakugo and Todoroki to interact regularly as friends, Deku had to literally beat up Todoroki to get him to accept help or even admit he needed it, Iida would have straight up killed a man without Todoroki and Deku’s interference, and even early on Uraraka felt inferior and more selfish to her friends, and Iida also drew a line that Deku shouldn’t expect unconditional support and teamwork from Iida during the tournament  because they are compettitors competing for number one. 

Conflict creates depth which creates audience engagement. 

The Teen Titans are my favorite superhero team ever, and they are a heavily dysfunctional found family. In fact Cyborg even jokes at one point that their life is a soap opera. They are constantly breaking up and getting back together, and sometimes the group’s decision to collectively either neglect or enable someone has a bad influence on their personality (the second return of trigon arc comes about because no one was paying attention to Raven, heck, Raven is kidnapped by a cult and just left there for months because Donna was a poor leader). These character conflicts are also what makes them interesting as a group dynamic, I don’t think you should break the group apart because they’re not healthy, because there’s a better story to be told in them working through their dysfunction into a healthier group bond. 

I’ve said this a thousand times but I don’t think the hero kids are bad characters, I don’t even dislike them, I want to see more of them. Literally all I talk about on this blog are the villains, but the only fanfic about MHA I’ve ever written and managed to finish, is about Bakugo, Todoroki, Momo and Uraraka and in particular the great potential I see in those characters to be interesting, 

You could write a story where society does not change as a whole, but still circumstances get better for people because the kids are deciding to help people and be kind. Bleach is all about the fact you can’t really change the whole world or save everyone. Ichigo is just trying to protect his hometown and it’s my favorite shonen manga. I also think those stories matter just as much as like revolutionary fiction, because oftentimes people can’t change the world as an individual, and yet the action of helping people still matters, and I think also for a lot of normal people they tend to be paralyzed into not taking any action to help people at all because they believe that it won’t make a difference in the grand scheme of things. 

At the most basic level we haven’t even gotten that yet. We used to have it! I really liked the Overhaul arc, and that entire arc isn’t about societal reform, it was about several people striving to save a young girl because heroes are supposed to save people. We are thoroughly in shonen battle manga punch em ups and fisticuffs. And as a shonen battle manga it’s not even that interesting because the fights suck, they’re not well choreographed, we don’t know what’s happening most of the time, they’re incredibly crowded, there’s no tension because the heroes despite supposedly being outnumbered way outpower the bad guys. We are given the promise that might happen in the future, there is set up for the fact that these kids are going to as their final act in the story save the villains and sympathize them but all we’ve gotten between then and now is a whole bunch of fighting. And once again it doesn’t come from a hatred of the kids but a genuine desire to see more of them, I want to see Shoto’s thoughts and feelings about his brother, I want to see Uraraka try to be a rescue hero and grapple with the fact villains are suffering, I want to see Deku think about what saving Shigaraki actually means. What I don’t want to see is new super powers, kids trying out their super moves, or kids helping the adults in fight. 

And once again this isn’t to criticize people who enjoy MHA or are still emotoinally invested in it. Like I’m sure I’m going to get replies to this post “Why are you even reading MHA if you’re bored by it?” 

Like... because you can engage critically with something even if you’re not entertained by it? There’s more purpose to literature and media then just whether or not ti’s personally enjoyable? I think there’s still a fascinating conversation to be had, in what works in MHA, and what does not work. I like superhero comics, and MHA is a shonen mangaka’s commentary on how they perceive western comics to be. 

But yeah, I think the biggest most fundamental failing of MHA right now is that it’s a real snooze fest. As a comic book story, it doesn’t work because the heroes aren’t fun, it doesn’t seem to have much to say about the heroes besides very generic statements of heroes good. Heroes help people. Deku good. Deku saves. Deku punches. Deku wins. 

So like can everyone collectively agree to just stop yelling at people who are emotionally invested in the villains, or even want to see them win? And like I think people should be allowed to post salt on their own blogs privately or even try to like comment on why they think certain fandom opinions are wrong, but gosh some of these posts guys they’re just like acting like a vast majority of readers are stupid. PEOPLE AREN”T STUPID! In fact I think most people are actually really good at interpreting stories because we are exposed to stories from a young age, and we think and feel in narrative, it’s just a lot of people don’t have the tools to either analyze stories or express what they find engaging. In fact if you think someone is wrong, or even think they have a vastly different take then you’re own, I think you should ask them why they think that way if you’re really interested in a conversation with them. Heck Thy and I usually agree about a lot of things, but sometimes I’ll make a pretty extreme statement, and they go “Oh, I don’t think that, or that’s wrong.” And then I just walk it back and try to explain my reasoning and then even if they’re not convinced to agree with me we just both move on. 

People root for the villains because they’re underdogs. They’re sympathetic and flawed. They are also not stagnant as characters and we spend more time in their head. People aren’t stupid for being emotionally invested in them or reading the story wrong necessarily, so much as MHA has kind of failed to properly establish stakes and tension and make things difficult for the heroes like it should be, that’s just how engagement in a story works. There’s a reason that everyone hates the Yankees, but Cubs fans can stay fans for like a hundred years without a world series victory. I’m not even trying to directly insult anyone, or say that My Hero Academia is bad fiction, or not worth reading, I just wish people would chill a little bit and stop jumping on villain stans for liking the unhealthier or darker aspects of the characters. 

Everyone’s like “I love my murderous meow meows covered in blood” and then you actually say the reason you like Shigaraki is because he’s heavily flawed, and at times a vengeful, hateful little shit and suddenly it’s a problem. Spinner’s a codependent enabler, yeah it’s called having a personality with flaws. He wouldn’t even have a character arc if he wasn’t those things, he’d just be a lizard. The thing that is deliberately written by a flaw, called out in the plot, and he gets punished for. God has punished him for his sins. Right now he’s just lying on the floor nearly brain dead. Also sometimes characters don’t have like, big, operatic flaws. Like as murderous and nasty as Dabi is there’s like a catharsis and power in the way he calls out his abusers. Sometimes people are annoying and needy. I feel like more ficitonal characters should be annoying and needy! Sometimes the most interesting characters, are characters you like would hate to be friends with in real life because they’d just be too high maintennance and put-upon. 

I mean on top of that there are also stories where characters get worse, and only experience negative character development, and there are people who become engaged in those stories because of the dark turns it takes. 

You could say that the fandom downplays the darker aspects of these characters, but like that’s what every fandom does. Heck, don’t Bakugo and Deku have an extremely unhealthy friendship for a long time, that fandom likes to downplay because they want to see them in a much healthier version of their relationship? 

It’s also pretty much harmless. Beyond being frustrated with seeing an out of character version of a character being popularized, it doesn’t really harm people in any way that matters, you don’t have to yell at people for being wrong or even go out of your way to correct them. In fact, I think people having extremely different takes from the story that you do should be celebrated more. Isn’t it interesting two people can read the exact same events and interpret them in wildly different ways? Isn’t it weird, that we all have this collective agreed upon version of like “in character” and “Out of character” and yet people tend to either deviate or stay inside that framework. People also, tend to enjoy different aspects of the story. I don’t think the heroes are interesting at all, but if someone is a diehard hero stan and they like the heroes I’m glad they are having a fun time. 

Fandom is supposed to be a conversation, and like, you shouldn’t go out of your way to correct the people you’re talking with, because it’s a much more fun conversation to ask why people think the way they do and try to understand that then to just tell them they’re wrong and end the conversation there. The reason I have this blog is not because I think I’m right and other people are wrong, I just like to talk to people about my thoughts on the comic books I’m reading, and then other people ask me why I think the things I do and I try to explain it. 

Oh and by the way I’m not talking about people who disagree with me specifically. Like, Class1akids wrote a response to one of my posts. I think they have every right to disagree with me and they were pretty professional about the way they expressed their opinion, I follow them and like their takes because they’re good at stating the reasons behind what they think. I just didn’t interact with it because I was feeling lazy that day and didn’t want to type up a big response. I’m just in general asking people to chill and be nice and have fun. 

[laiqualaurelote]

Follow up question from your Ted/Trent one: would you elaborate on your S3 disappointment? Thanks for letting me pick your fascinating, insightful, brilliant brain!

You're very kind. My disappointments with S3 are manifold but I will try to sum them up here.

There was a pervasive wrongness to much of this season that had not previously been present, unlike in S1 and much of S2, where radical kindness was a driving force and storylines would seem to be heading towards a predictable trope, then be surprisingly and pleasingly subverted. Several S3 plotlines were handled in a way that left an unpleasant taste in the mouth, without any catharsis attached. The truly baffling Shandy storyline is a prime example of this. I thought at first that this was part of a wider plan (the dark forest, so to speak, from which we would eventually emerge) and defended the show to friends as such, but weeks went by and it became clear that a show that had once been meticulously, lovingly plotted in every detail had devolved into a haphazard mess.

Story arcs came and went with no perceptible purpose. The show promised Important Social Commentary (the attacks on Sam's restaurant, Keeley's sex video leaking) then failed to revisit these issues once the episodes in question were over. Plot points were hinted at, then never brought up again (Higgins broaches the subject of firing Ted to Rebecca; this is never returned to.)

The characterisation was a mass of unfulfilled potential. Why make the reason for Sam not being chosen for the Nigerian national team Edwin Akufo's cartoonish grudge, and not his S2E3 calling out of government corruption, which would have made far more sense narratively and given Toheeb Jimoh far more to work with? Why tell us repeatedly that Keeley is a PR genius, then fail to have her take charge of her own PR crisis? Instead of Shandy proving to be a bad hire, surely a better way to show Keeley learning to be a good leader would have been for her to integrate Shandy and Barbara's diverse skill sets and attitudes into a functional workplace dynamic. Why not show the most key milestones of Nate's reformation, especially his confrontation with Rupert when he quit West Ham? for that matter, why give the moment of a West Ham coach standing up to Rupert for ethical reasons not to Nate, but to George Cartrick? I think we were robbed of a truly meaty Nate villain-and-back arc.

The season finale was a mess. Ted barely seemed present. I'm not a Tedbecca shipper, but even to me the fakeout at the beginning seemed unnecessarily cruel (and a waste of time in a season where so many things were not adequately explored or given closure). The truly bizarre choices in the final montage, especially Beard's Stonehenge wedding with a conspicuously absent Ted, were the final straw. That Ted needed to return to Henry was, for me, without question, but the way it was handled was deeply questionable.

What bothers me a great deal is the lack of change. Characters either regressed (Roy and Jamie re: Keeley, Ted re: Michelle) or had no agency in major crises inflicted upon them. The opening and closing close-up shots are meant to be of the character that changes most over the course of the season. This holds true for Rebecca in S1, and Nate in S2, but not Ted in S3. What changes for Ted is circumstance: he is in London, leaving his son; then he is in Kansas, back with his son. He himself, however, is not shown to be changed to a degree significant enough to close the show on.

This is not to say it was all bad. There are things I love very much about S3: Roy and Trent's surprise dynamic; Nate/Jade; the Hey Jude scene; the strings exercise; Beard's Jean Valjean backstory; the entirety of Sunflowers, a near-perfect episode that deserved the Emmy writing nomination that was mystifyingly given to So Long, Farewell. It is only that we were asked to believe that the showrunners knew what they were doing in delivering us the final season of a three-season arc, and we did, and that belief was not rewarded. Therein lies my disappointment.

[longitudinalwaveme]

Flash vs Rogues: Who Appears More in a Given Issue

I stumbled upon an old blog post (from 2006!) that tripped one of my OCD triggers. (Don't worry; I'm okay now. My OCD is fairly mild and I am on medication for it.) I'm not going into great detail because the blog appears to still be active and I don't want to get into an Internet debate with the person who does the blog (not least because obviously they didn't intend to trigger the OCD), but part of the article was basically about how Geoff Johns spent too much time focusing on the Rogues instead of Wally, about how giving supervillains sympathetic backstories is a bad idea (because all supervillains must be 100% evil? Because supervillains are/should be inherently unsympathetic?), and about how supervillains are inherently unrealistic and superheroes should just fight random criminals instead (since superheroes and regular criminals are realistic, but supervillains aren't?).

Since I am a person who is a bit of a sucker for sympathetic villains, but am also constantly afraid that this makes me a bad person, my OCD was set off, and I had to talk to my sister about it. Luckily that (and doing some praying) helped. It also helped to realize that the person who wrote the blog post in question hadn't even actually read the comic issue that the blog post was partially based on (Flash vol. 2 #214).

The blog post also mentioned that they thought that the Rogue War storyline in particular was too focused on the Rogues at Wally's expense, and that this was a sign of how modern comic writing has gone downhill since, I can only assume, part of Geoff Johns' run. This made me wonder: do the Rogues actually appear substantially more in Rogue War than they do in older comics?

Here's what I found:

In Rogue War issue #1, the Rogues appear in 10-13 pages (of a 21-page story, and counting all the villains and reformed villains, including Zoom, as a conglomerate). Wally appears (or is narrating) in 6 pages of that same story, Jay Garrick appears in another 2, and there are an additional 4 pages that focus in whole or in part on heroic supporting characters. It's also worth noting that the 10-12 pages of Rogues stuff is being divided between 4 reformed Rogues (James, Hartley, Magenta, and Mick), who probably shouldn't be counted as villains as far as the narrative is concerned, Hunter, and the 5 non-reformed Rogues (Len, Mark, Axel, McCulloch, and Owen). This means, at most, that each villain is getting, on average, roughly 1.8 pages to themselves (and remember that this count is including Hartley as a villain, even though he's 100% reformed through the whole arc). Wally and Linda, who are in most of the 6 pages together, each have roughly 3 pages, or nearly twice as much page time as any individual villain. Furthermore, taking all the good guys together, there are at least 12 pages that focus, in whole or in part, on our protagonists, which is at least equal to the page time that the bad guys are getting. If you take into account the fact that the reformed Rogues should technically count as protagonists, then the good guy page count jumps to 14 and the bad guy page count is 10, which means that the true villains are in less than half of the comic. Granted, some of the good guy panels are them discussing or thinking about the bad guys in some capacity, but since they're trying to stop the bad guys (as heroes do), this doesn't seem like it should count against their totals. Even if you want to get extremely technical and not count any pages where villains physically show up in any capacity, there are at least 10 pages where it's all heroic characters.

Flash vol. 1 #174, published in 1967, is 23 pages long (including the opening teaser page and the half-a-page last page). Of these pages, there are exactly 2 that feature only heroic characters (and one of those two is the half-a-page last page). Conversely, there are 9 pages that feature only villainous characters (or hapless civilians, but if they change the count then the number of pages with just villains drops in the other story too)---which means that over 4 times the pages are focused on just bad guys compared to those focused on the good guys.

(Interesting side note: Sam Scudder, the main villain, appears in or narrates over 61 panels, while Barry only appears in or narrates over 46 panels (though some of these panels do overlap and feature them both). Since there are 110 panels in the story, this means that Barry (the main heroic character) is in 42% of the story, and that Sam alone is in 55% of the story. Even in terms of just page count, Sam has like two entire pages all to himself.)

In terms of the pages that exclusively focus on unambiguous heroes, then, at least 48% of Rogue War is exclusively or near-exclusively focused on the protagonists and their thoughts, while in the story from Flash vol. 1 #174, 8% of the story only shows heroic characters. So while the bad guys get more exclusive page time in Rogue War than they do in Flash #174 (62% of the page time vs 39%), so do the good guys...and the increase in page count for the good guys is much larger than the increase for the bad guys.

Or take Flash vol. 1 #243. Do you want to know how many panels the Flash appears in in this issue that aren't being narrated over by a villain? Three. He appears in three panels, out of 61 in the issue as a whole. That's 5% of the whole issue, and of those panels, only 1 of the 3 isn't technically part of Roscoe's wider narration. Close to 77% of the story is told from Roscoe's POV, and then another 12 to 13 panels (20-21%) is from the other Rogues' perspective. Combined, basically 97 to 98% of the whole issue is arguably just Rogues---and Flash doesn't appear in any capacity for half the story. Granted, this is a bit of an extreme case, but it definitely proves the notion that a story that focuses heavily on the antagonists is not new in Flash comics.

Similarly, Flash #266 is only about Heat Wave (and other villains) for 4 of its 17 pages (roughly 24% of the comic as a whole); Barry only has 2 pages to himself. The rest are split between them. In Flash #306, which has 18 pages, there are 2 pages that only show Mirror Master and 1 page that only shows Barry; the remaining pages are divided between them both. In Flash #307, while the Pied Piper isn't narrating the story as such, a solid 2-3 pages of the story are entirely focused on his background and backstory; this is roughly equivalent to the amount of solo page time Flash gets in the same story.

There are more examples, but I think you get the point. "Story that features the Rogues almost as much as the Flash himself" is not a recent development in Flash comics and definitely predates Geoff Johns.

[ladyloveandjustice]

I just watched Pop Culture Detectives critique as superheroes as reactionary and defending the status quo and villains as disruptors (even when their goals are wrong and authoritarian), and I think it did a fine job summing up the MCU, but I think it would lose something when if you’re doing a conversation outside that specific focus if you don’t acknowledge that there’s very significant times that WASN’T the case in early superhero comics.

For example, several early Superman comics have him actively disrupting society. He wasn’t a friend of the law early on. He destroys an entire “slum” and forces the government to rebuild better housing, and the police come after him for this.

He infiltrates a prison to expose its systemic abuse of prisoners.

He forces war profiteers to experience the terror of war firsthand until they stop.

But as the tweet thread I linked notes, this stops. Modern Superman often states he can’t interfere in wars because humanity has to sort out their own conflicts, that he can’t use his power against systemic issues because what if he becomes the power hungry god imposing his will on humanity? It’s interesting some comics posit that if Superman was more active about social change, he’s become the ‘invader’ Lex Luthor says he is. Especially if you consider Superman’s roots as an immigrant allegory, which makes it come off like he has to avoid being too disruptive or he’ll be labeled a ‘bad immigrant’.

There’s sometimes callbacks to the roots of Superman still, like the issue where he fights that cop probably (I was out of comics by the time that happened) but of course it’s pretty absent from the movies.

It’s also worth noting that Clark Kent is an investigative reporter (often exposing the crimes of billionaire CEO) which is an inherently disruptive job. PCD mentions that heroes do tend to be creative in their civilian identities but says it doesn’t seem to connect much to their superhero selves, but  I don’t think you can separate Clark Kent the reporter from his superhero activity, because they’re often closely tied together, I mean he literally took the job so he could get leads as Superman.

Then there’s Wonder Woman, who was definitely a disruptor in her early incarnation. She was absolute here to spread Marston’s idea of feminism and have others follow her. She wanted to make more Amazons. She wanted a society where women had power. She would literally take her female villains and introduce them to the pleasures of femdom and BDSM  reform them, convert them to her ideology, get them to join her ranks. The comic was CERTAINLY reactionary in other ways, and Marston’s feminism was flawed, but he wrote the comic explicitly because he was hoping for social disruption, that Wonder Woman would be the building block in the utopia he envisioned.

And there was some of that in SOME modern WW comics when I was into them- I was drawn to Greg Rucka’s Wonder Woman because there was a huge emphasis on the fact she’s an ambassador for her culture, and diplomat actively working to change the world, someone who’s seeking social reform and has an ideology. However, it is true that even those comics were mostly about her reacting to threats in her superhero life. (And then in the movie’s that’s entirely absent- feminism isn’t bought up, she goes into hiding rather than mounting a social justice campaign.)

And then on the Marvel side of things. Cap fighting Hitler actually didn’t reflect the status quo of America when it came out. In-universe it did to a degree, because America had entered the war in the universe of the comic, therefore Cap was doing patriotism, but out of universe America HADN’T entered the war yet and it was controversial to take the stance we were definitely going to and sauy Hitler was bad. We all know the story of nazi-sympathizers coming to harass the creators and Jack Kirby declaring he would fight them. So there’s a very interesting dichotomy there!

Anyway, it’s interesting to see this discussion because it’s definitely a very minor theme in my own book about a girl who becomes a supervillain. Look forward to that, I guess!