#the world isn’t just and fair and some people are soulless

[homosandhomies]

i don’t understand how some people think a ceasefire is possible when hamas has broken ceasefires MULTIPLE times. 10/7 was literally their response to a ceasefire to begin with.

they don’t want peace. they’re terrorists.

[soullessjack]

i don’t think there’s anything new I can add to the performative-jack studies because it’s like..very cut and dry, guy who’s constantly perceived as a threat does his best to seem innocuous and friendly..but there is an underlying layer of exactly how jack tries to present himself to others (that I’ve definitely already posted about but whatever).

soo like. take this outline for example:

Jack: “He still has to be killed.” Cas: “Doing that might kill Dean as well, so [I] doubt any of [us] would be willing to do that.” Jack: “I would.”

‘Cas is a little shocked by how calmly Jack says this, and Jack says he knows what Cas is thinking; that this is Lucifer’s gene pool talking. It’s not. “I’m not my father. I’m not my mother. I’m me.”

“You’re all so focused on saving Dean, but Dean is Michael’s vessel. There’s a good chance Dean isn’t even alive. Is Jimmy Novak still alive?* Could anyone save him? It’s Michael. And Michael has to die.” ‘Cas stares at Jack, who looks coldly collected.

post-war jack is straight up traumatized and jaded by everything he’s seen and experienced in apocalypse world, still making efforts to be kind and sympathetic of course, but with a bit more edge to him now. for six months he’s been fixated on killing Michael, and he’s way more willing to do the Hard Thing (kill Dean) than he might’ve been before to do so (which actually reminds me a LOT of the chicken/snake story from ouroboros but we won’t get off subject).

obviously he still cares about/loves Dean, we’ve seen that in the rest of S14, but he’s also seen what Michael did to another world and wouldn’t put anything before preventing that. *he’s also very willing to hit Cas where it hurts with the Jimmy comment

but the thing that sticks out is Castiel immediately assuming that Jack’s calm, cold collectedness in the way he talks about killing Dean/Michael is somehow evidence of Lucifer’s influence or heritage; that Jack couldn’t possibly feel this way by himself. even Jack refutes it, stating that he’s neither of his parents (ie, it’s his own decision to kill Dean if it’s necessary). I think it’s also interesting he mentioned not being his mother, because I think that’s why Cas is so surprised by his demeanor and jumps to attribute it to Lucifer.

from day one Kelly’s heritage was the only argument Sam and Cas had against the idea that Jack would be evil. to be fair, Jack does take after Kelly a lot; he even looks like her to some extent. but treating Kelly’s heritage as the It-factor that makes Jack good, treating him as basically an extension of Kelly who must be good and kind because she was good and kind (literally an inverse of how Lucifer’s heritage is treated) is still just dehumanizing.

the distrust he faces is understandable coming from AU Bobby and people who are being actually displaced and exterminated by Michael, but the fact that Jack is subject to the same scrutiny from his own chosen father as well adds to why he represses these parts of himself so much, why he puts on that naive nuclear-son personality and basically butters everyone up all the time.

I think the only times when Jack has actually unmasked himself were at points of extreme low empathy, because most of the time his facade is put on for the sake of other people and the fear they feel towards him. he obviously wouldn’t have to worry about that while he’s human, but like I said, he’s literally a war veteran/criminal by this point. he’s gonna have a little more edge to him than before, and a little less empathy for the small things.

the second and probbaly more obvious one is his behavior while soulless, completely lacking the empathy required to care about keeping up his facade—so much so that he just bluntly tells Mary that he’s annoyed by everyone eggshell-walking around him like he’s a time bomb again. then, *checks script* like a flip switched, he goes back to that facade and reassures Mary that he knows they’re doing it out of love. He’s blatantly performing his emotional responses now.

jack is still soulless for like…three (?) episodes in S15, and still incapable of really feeling any emotion despite being able to logically process them. like he is literally so empty inside that he resorts to binge eating to feel some kind of sensation. but he’s consistently playing up the happy-go-lucky shtick when he isn’t just depressed and withdrawn (especially the church basement scene where he immediately gets the dumb Bambi look when he sees Cas after his failed cannibalism attempt).

got a headache while writing this so I’ll just leave it here but like. A Lot of the reason why Jack performs so much is because specific traits he shows are not only taken as threats, but are also associated with Lucifer and treated as signs of his “true nature” <- click that link it’s important for context

Mk that’s all byeeee (*´ -`)

[mrpenguinpants]

Spider’s Thread [Reverse AU]

Possessive Red Xiao x Reader

Word Count: 2.5k

Commissioned for: @profoundwitchsalad

Art Credit: @ruoyeahs

Warning: Unhealthy relationships.

Prompt:

“You’ve ruined my life because I have a warped idea of what love is and I can’t live without you. But now you’re trying to leave me and I won’t allow that. You left me alive. You have a duty to live for me and by me. I’m not letting you go.”

---

Xiao Semi Series

[ Friendship ] [ Falling in Love ] [ Cuddles ] [ Protective ] [ Affection ] [ Jealously ] [ Opposites Attract ] [ String Of Fate (Soulmate) ] [ Fainting ]

Link to original posts:  [Red! Xiao.] [Reverse AU]

[Masterlist]

Alatus was once told a story by his Master. A sinner who falls into hell is rewarded for his only good deed, choosing not to kill a spider. As his reward, a thread is lowered down for him to climb out of Hell. In the end, the sinner remains in Hell because he kicks aside others and the thread breaks. Alatus doesn't remember why his Master told him this story but he still empathizes with the sinner. He would have done the same or asked for this 'saviour' to extend their hand down instead. That way he could pull them down.

"Xiao? Are you okay?"

He slowly opens his jade eyes to see you hunch over, peering down above him, eyebrows furrowed together in concern as you reach down and softly tap his temple. He allows you to take a moment to do whatever you want with his face before he reaches up to grasp at your wrist gently, holding back on his want to rub circles into your skin. His reminiscing can wait for now.

"What is it?" he asks curtly, sitting up and resting his elbow on his raised knee. You pout at his curt tone but shrug it off as you take a seat next to him and lean your shoulder against his. You dig into your bag and pull out slips of commission papers and hand it over to him to read through what needed to be done today. A few Hilichurl camps needed to be taken care of, sabotaging a slime balloon, all tasks that seem mundane to someone who fought in a war. As he's preoccupied, you take a moment to look at Xiao's face. He's just the slightest bit unnerved whenever you do this because you always seem to know what's bothering someone.

"Were you dreaming of her again?" you ask quietly. The silence is a good enough answer but you nod understandingly. You never knew his Master personally but you did fight a long strenuous battle against her. From one look you could tell she was a manipulative and cruel woman. While it may not be very kind to say, you were glad that with her passing, Xiao would be free from her physically. But mentally...there were still some things to work out. But Xiao was a very reclusive person, especially with his emotions, so pushing him any further would only make him irritated and closed off.

"Venti and Zhongli are joining our party for a bit if that’s alright. They'll help out a lot with our commissions and travelling. I like Liyue a lot but climbing mountains stresses my shoulders out," you laugh as you change the subject to something less depressing. Standing up as you dust your clothes off before turning to Xiao and holding your hand out for him to take. He stares at it hard for a few moments before huffing and reaching over to clasp your hands together.

It has been so frustratingly peaceful since the war ended. He's not used to it and he can still feel the lick of cutting winds and the heavy pressure of rocks against his body when he sees the bard and funeral parlor consultant just on the horizon. If it were up to him, he wouldn't play nice with these two Archons but they're important to you so he bites his tongue until he tastes blood. He knows the Archons do the same. As soon as the two of them spot you both, Venti is already rushing and tackling you to the ground in his excitement.

"Traveler! I haven't seen you in ages. You need to come and visit Mondstadt more," Venti cried into your shoulder as you awkwardly patted him on his back. Always with the dramatics but you cared about Venti all the same. Xiao scoffed before flicking his jade eyes to meet gold as Zhongli stared down at him cautiously. Since the war ended, everyone seemed to have this warped idea that Alatus had some vendetta against the Gods and Celestia but he was fighting because he was told to.

"Xiao. It's good to see you again," Zhongli said to him. Xiao just nodded in acknowledgement. Even with this new mortal form, Morax never bothered to change his eyes. His gaze alone held the weight of the mountains he had thrown. If Xiao hadn’t been under one of them before, he might have crumbled under the pressure.

"Alright alright, Venti. I promise I'll drop by sometime this month but we still have commissions to do!" you laugh as you haul the bard onto his feet and swat his cape down from the speckles of dirt. He grins cheekily at you, linking pinkies with you to seal your promise, before suddenly lighting up as if he just remembered something.

"Actually! Before we start anything, I need to speak to Mr. Zhongli and Xiao. Super important archon things, you know?" Venti nodded to himself as the two mentioned people stared at him with varying levels of confusion. But Venti just waved their worries off and linked his arms with both men as he dragged them off to a more secluded corner with a surprising amount of strength, “We’ll be right back!”

"Do what you need to do but don't take too long," you called after the trio as you trailed off to the side, messing with your bag of commission papers and gear. Xiao hated that. He knows that these two Archons are your...friends.. but shouldn't you be a bit more cautious? Just because they have mortal forms doesn’t make them human, it doesn’t make him human either.

"Hey, there's no need to look so scary. There really is something important I wanted to talk to the two of you about," Venti speaks up as soon as you're out of earshot. It still gives Xiao whiplash whenever he drops the persona and switches back to Barbatos. "Since Morax is the only Archon I trust with this information and, while I don't trust you one bit, you're the one that's with her all the time you should also know. She's ascending to Celestia."

Barbatos gauges both of their reactions. Morax seems visibly surprised, his eyes slightly widened a fraction, while Xiao has no idea what that means. His Master didn’t exactly give him a history lesson on Celestia or Archons, just pointed to who was his enemy and dealt punishments when he failed.

"And what the hell does that mean?" Xiao asks as he crosses his arms. Venti appears for a second as the bard pouts before continuing.

"It's like I said. A mortal who performs great, heroic feats can ascend to Celestia and achieve godhood. Where they will watch over their people from above. I've only seen this once before so it took me a while to recognize the signs. But 1000 years ago, I helped a woman named Vennessa with her ascension and with the traveler's recent actions with winning the war. Well, you don't need me to explain the rest," Barbatos finishes. Zhongli simply hums as he cups his chin and absorbs what's just been heard. He doesn’t seem troubled by the news at all.

"Have you told her about this?" Zhongli questions as he looks towards the direction that you left. Venti shakes his head. “That would mean that she would vanish from this world."

“I know she loves this world. Whether she wishes to ascend or not isn’t my choice but I want her to continue her travels with that beloved smile on her face. But if she does choose to ascend, she will need our help," Venti stares at the two of them in a mix of pride, sadness, and determination. "Can I count on you two for your help?"

It's a complete white noise in Xiao's ears as his surroundings fade out. He thinks he can see Zhongli nod to Venti wishes, the ever calm smile on his face to match the cheery grin on Venti’s. What, now you want to become a God? Leave this world behind? That’s not funny. You made him give up everything. While in your eyes, your blinded hero syndrome, you think you've liberated him from a soulless conquest but he still has nothing. You still took everything away from him and your only compensation was to have him by your side until he left himself. But now you want to leave without a warning? That’s not fair. You don’t get to take back what you owe. He won't allow you to leave him behind.

“Did something happen? Did Venti say something unnecessary again?” you ask out of the blue. Zhongli and Venti had returned to their respective regions once your commissions were all finished. Since the three of them disappeared to talk Archon business, Xiao had seemed even more tense and aloof than usual. As if he was out of it? You knew that everyone was still suspicious of Xiao and they were angsty to leave you alone with him, but you knew Xiao would never do anything to hurt you. When he doesn't answer, you slowly reach over and you subtly nudge his head up onto your lap and look at him curiously. Before reaching down and cupping his cheek. He leans into your touch before turning his face into your palm and leaving a soft kiss. It makes you giggle at the ticklish feeling as you look at him so softly. It annoys him.

"You were never connected to the war and yet you fought against us anyways. Even when I killed so many people, why did you choose to spare me?" he asked as you blinked at him before giving it some serious thought. He went on a rampage and almost destroyed the world. It was fun. He doesn't have any regrets at all because he hated humanity. His own Master was human after all. But then you appeared and stopped him. A random outsider that wanted to play the hero. He thought it was cute. Perhaps he had underestimated the lengths someone would go to to save the world they loved but when he fell defeated at your feet. He said that this wouldn't change a single thing. He would still scorn humanity and what they did to him. He was so sure he would die there but you chose to extend your hand down to him instead despite what your companions felt. Even when the war ended and he had nowhere else to go, you offered him to travel with you. Nothing changed about his mentality, every person that chose to talk to him was quickly scared away with piercing eyes. Every conversation started would end in silence. Every touch would be met by the tip of his spear. But you would link your hands together with his and smile brightly, and he would always end up forgetting his trauma for a moment. You’ve... become precious to him.

"I love this world and everyone in it. You are a part of that world even if you tried to destroy it. It...didn't seem fair to leave you behind when you've suffered just as much," you finish but it only seemed to spark a wave of deep anger inside of Xiao. He quickly lurched up, almost knocking your forehead with his, before grabbing the scruff of your shirt collar and yanking you forward.

"Cut it out with that "love of everything" crap. It's revolting. So you're saying the people I killed weren't worth avenging? Do you think I'm so weak that I need protection? It's one thing to try and please everyone but at least have some awareness would you?" he snarled as he pushed you to the ground. He knew he was being harsh on you and you had every right to walk out and abandon him but you didn't. Of course, you wouldn't. You needed him as much as he needed you. You just reached over and tenderly reached your hand and placed it next to his. Damn it, why is he always the one stuck worrying about you.

"Then you want to protect me, right? Then don't break your promise. You left me alive which means you have a duty to live for me," he takes your hand in his and squeezes hard. Digging his nails into your own until crescents appear and tiny specks of blood appear so you know he's serious. He doesn't care how you interpret his words, just so long as you never leave him.

"Don't die on me, Hero."

It's been a few hours since the conversation so it's pitch black outside but Xiao was never one to sleep. Even if he could, his mind is too loud to fall asleep too. He's startled when you melt against him fully asleep. Honey smooth as you curl up to his warmth and cling to him like moss to a rock. He can feel his cheeks start to flush as his heart begins to pound against his chest. He can't breathe as his world is filtered through each beat that drums against his ears. He's not sure if there's actually something wrong with him or if it's just been a while since someone got so close and his instincts haven't left.

He's just realized it. He's feeling pain. The feeling in his chest is black but he can't claw it away. It's strange in a way that he can't explain it, that he's never felt before, that he's never felt the need to experience. His life had been warped by battle and a constant push to submit to his Master. They are all things he knows but the gentle words that come from your mouth, the bright eyes that hold the world, the horrible ice-hot feeling inside of him is so foreign yet too easy. He doesn't like it.

It makes him feel...clean in a way. Enlightened perhaps? His Master is long gone and it's like you said. He's free now. Free to make his own decisions and live his life how he wants to. He carefully turns over so as to not startle you away as he really looks at you. You look so peaceful in his arms, eyelids shut without worry, face slack without nightmares, breathing so softly against him. If you weren't so close to him that he couldn't feel the rise of your chest, he wonders if he would think you were dead. He stares at the lock of hair swaying back and forth with each breath like a starved man. The strange feeling doesn't stop. He hates it. It's everything that goes against him and what he knows and everything he should want. He's supposed to be the villain in your story, he should kill you right now-

"Xiao..." he hears you mumble beside him as you lean further into his arm. Damn it. How low is he going to go?

“What are you thinking about now? You just need to think about me. Don’t think about anything else...but me” Xiao sighs before he wraps his arms around you and pulls you into him until you're snug against his chest. Close to him, where he can touch you, where you belong. Not with Morax or Barbatos. Not with humans but beside him. He closes his eyes and nuzzles his head into your hair and he stares off into the distance. The feeling never leaves him for the remainder of the night.

"Ah! There you are. I was running around crazy looking for you," he turns his hair to see your flushed form pulling yourself up onto the mountain cliff, "When I woke up I couldn’t find you anywhere! You gave me a scare there."

He hates you. He hates you.

Words of his previous master ring in his ears, almost as if her very soul is wrapping around him as she whispers in his ear how weak he is. Ones with power that refuse to take what they want because they rather live in the comfort of nothing. Be greedier, take what belongs to you.

"Xiao?" you say as his piercing eyes stare directly through you. His Master always told him that she loved him. Even if he hated her he still clung to that false love. Of being wanted. Isn't love for a single person vile? Would feeling such emotions for one person instead of "everyone" bring you down to reality? It's not fair that you've crawled your way into his heart while you walk along in bliss. Now that he thinks about it. It was so simple. He just needs to monopolize your thoughts and love. This time it won't be as friends.

"I love you."

He'll pull you down to where he is. You extended your hand down to hell so it's your fault. He'll drag you down kicking and screaming if he has to. You left him alive. You have to live for him and by him. He's not letting go.

Reblogged for extra notes

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[five-rivers]

Pep Talks 12

I think this might be the longest chapter of Pep Talks so far...

(AO3)

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When Clockwork first took Danny on as an apprentice, he’d laid out some ground rules for when he unexpectedly found himself in an unknown timeline. As Apprentice of Time, Danny was more likely to attract anomalies like natural portals and the like, and when that was combined with his innate bad luck regarding portals, well… winding up in weird places wasn’t quite a weekly occurrence, but saying it was wouldn’t have been a huge exaggeration.

That’s all to say, Danny appreciated the rules. He didn’t want to wind up never having been born again, or, worse, making it so that one of his friends had never been born. Or causing an apocalypse. Or wrecking the future. Or—

There were just a lot of problems that he could, and had, caused.

If Clockwork were able to pick Danny up right away every time, most of the rules probably would have been unnecessary. But he wasn’t. Mostly because of physics-shaped problems involving paradoxes and how too many time portals in the same general area could screw things up, but also because of Observant- and politics-shaped problems. And, Clockwork had admitted to Danny, sometime Clockwork left him somewhere because he was supposed to be there.

The first rule was to lay low. Avoid people when possible, except to acquire basic necessities. Avoid major events, crowds, protests, and cameras. Avoid important-looking buildings.

Do not offer help unless asked first, or unless the person is a ghost. There was, evidently, a loophole that made it okay for Danny to interact with ghosts even in places where it wasn’t okay for him to do the same to humans. Clockwork had said ghosts fell under Danny’s ‘jurisdiction,’ a term that seemed just a bit too weighty with meaning for Danny. As for being allowed to help when asked… Well, Clockwork knew that Danny was incapable of not helping. Although he did ask that Danny be subtle and indirect about it.

He was also not supposed to fight anyone unless he himself was directly attacked, for similar reasons.

The fourth rule was to stay within the accepted rules of the world he found himself in, where possible. In other words, if people generally didn’t believe in ghosts or the supernatural, don’t challenge that belief by using his powers in public, but if superpowers were common, it was okay to use them.

The fifth was that, if he found himself in the past, leave civilized areas. With the threat of unpersoning himself hanging over his head, Danny took that one very seriously.

The sixth, the one that made Danny feel like a little kid despite his real age, was, if the previous rule didn’t apply, try to stay in the same general area he first found himself in.

There were others, of course, and special ones for special circumstances. For example, if he was captured by law enforcement, or injured, or actively in danger, or if he didn’t know what time period he was in. Different sets of rules prevailed if he was actually on a mission.

Clockwork had also told him that the rules no loner applied if it took him more than two weeks to find Danny. That, if he’d been waiting for that long, something had gone wrong, or Clockwork was unable to find him or pull him out.

It had been just under half that time, and Danny was starting to get worried. More worried.

He pulled his legs up, closer to himself. He didn’t need to conserve warmth, being what he was, but the action was comforting and the abandoned warehouse he was in was weird and creepy.

This whole timeline was weird and creepy. Also, semi-apocalyptic. They were going through some serious societal upheaval. Danny wasn’t entirely sure why, having only been here for six days, but he was pretty sure it had to do with the nascent ghosts partially overshadowing people and giving them power.

At least, that’s what it felt like. Danny wasn’t sure. The next nearest thing to this he’d ever encountered was a warlock, and that had been just one person. Ghosts were under his jurisdiction, but, like the warlock, the people with powers here didn’t quite feel like ghosts, and he wasn’t sure how trustworthy news sources saying that metahumans were all soulless degenerates were…

Hopefully, he wouldn’t have to find out. Hopefully, Clockwork would pick him up before another week went by.

He didn’t think the government here could actually catch him, but some of the things they apparently did to metahumans made his core ache. It was a very X-Men-like situation. Except, well, set in Japan.

Why Japan?

But! Eight more days. Tops. Clockwork would get him.

Before he’d finished the thought, something blew the door of the warehouse in and a ropelike appendage hurtled towards Danny’s corner.

He reacted. Rules were, if someone attacked him, he could respond in kind, and if superpowers were common knowledge, he could use his.

There were at least a dozen of them, all of them displaying an eclectic array of superpowers, some reminiscent of Danny’s ghostly enemies, others entirely novel to him. A fair few also had guns. One man even used multiple powers. Needless to say, the battle was incredibly one sided.

In Danny’s favor.

Hey, he’d been doing this for years, and he was very comfortable with his abilities. Most of these guys weren’t. Most. The multiple-power guy had been challenging.

Danny examined his captives. He should probably just knock them out, then go find a new hideout somewhere else, but he wanted to know why he was attacked, first.

“So,” he said, deciding that the curly-haired man with multiple powers was probably the leader, given the way the battle had been structured, “why did you and your goons attack me?”

“I heard you were like me,” growled the man, attempting to escape Danny’s telekinetic hold. “I’m looking for a power that can help my brother.”

Danny twitched slightly at the word help. “What do you mean, like you?”

“You can take powers, too,” said the man, staring up at Danny with desperate, hungry, red eyes.

Danny blinked, frowned. “You thought I could help you, or your brother, so you attacked me?” His frown became deeper. “Or did you attack me to, what, steal my powers?”

The man squirmed.

It was. That was such a ridiculous villain cliché, although the brother thing was a twist. People could get desperate about their families and do terrible things.

Including Danny. As had been proven many, many times.

His heart and stance both softened. This counted as a request for help, right? And the guy was sort of ghostly. On the other hand… Transplanting whatever it was giving these people powers willy-nilly couldn’t be healthy, especially if it was related to ghosts.

(Multiple ghosts in one body… It reminded him of his dark future self, which was never good.)

“Okay,” he said, dragging a hand down his face. “Alright. What exactly does your brother need help with?”

The man clearly hadn’t expected Danny to ask this question. “He’s sick,” he said. His eyes gleamed at the edge of tears. “His body is tearing itself apart, DNA molecule by DNA molecule. If I could just find the right ability, I could save him,” the man’s voice broke, “I knowit.”

Molecule by molecule, huh?

Actually… that was something Danny could help with. Crud. People had powers here, right? He was being asked for help, wasn’t he? He was staying within the rules. Especially seeing as these guys were like warlocks. He was only doing warlock stuff.

“If I help you with this—if,” he stressed when the man perked up. “If I help you with this, I need two things from you. Well, three, really. Actually, no, four.”

“Name them,” declared the man.

“Yeah, I was about to,” said Danny. “Anyway, first, you need to ask your brother if he wants this. If he doesn’t, you have to come back here and return it. Asap. As in, tomorrow.” He was pretty sure he could get Clockwork to give him a day, even if he came to pick Danny up right now.

“Those are your first two conditions, then?”

Danny nodded. “Yeah. Third one is, you have to stop taking powers from people who don’t give you permission. The end of that road isn’t pretty.” At least, he was pretty sure it wasn’t. All those little maybe-ghosts, slammed together… Even if it didn’t have any immediate effect on this guy’s personality, the resulting ghost could wind up possessing him. If the ghost vaguely wanted to go with him, that might change things. Maybe. At least, it’d slow things down.

If this worked the way he thought it did.

The man scowled. “And you know this, how?”

Danny rolled his eyes. “Look, you’rethe one who said I was like you, not me. Too much of these powers can mess you up.”

“If the number is the problem, it shouldn’t matter how I take them.”

“Do you ever get bad dreams?”

The man stilled completely. “What do you know about that?”

Danny shrugged. “Enough,” he said. “Do you want to be overwhelmed by your powers? Do you want to explode? It could happen.” Actually, Danny had no idea if it could happen or not. But it sounded good. “More importantly, do you want to help your brother or not?”

“Of course I do!”

“Great!” said Danny, clapping his hands together. “Let’s finish this up somewhere privately, okay?” He grabbed the man’s shoulder and phased them through the floor into the basement, which he lit with a ball of ectoplasm. “Okay,” he said. “Fourth thing.”

The man was staring at the ectoplasm with undisguised curiosity. “What is it? Money? A new identity? Passage out of the country?”

“Uh, no,” said Danny. What would he do with any of that, after all? “I need to know the full story behind you and your brother.”

“What? Why? Don’t you know enough?”

“So that I can be sure that I can help, first off. Also, the way I’d be doing it involved me giving you something rather personal, so…” He trailed off with a gesture that indicated he expected the man to talk.

He sighed. “My name is Shigaraki Hisashi. My brother’s name is Kazuki, and he’s been sick since we were children…”

Danny let him give a summary of his life up until this point. He had the vague feeling that he wasn’t being told everything of importance, but, then, not everything about a person’s life could be condensed into an hour or so of storytelling.

Apparently Hisashi had basically raised Kazuki, and once Hisashi’s meta power had come in as a young adult, they’d been completely abandoned by their parents. Hisashi had put together a group of freedom fighters (Danny skeptically recalled the guns, but also forced himself to remember the hints that there might be something like concentration camps for power users) to defend himself, his brother, and others with power. But Kazuki’s illness made him incredibly vulnerable, and as he was Hisashi’s one major weakness…

The feeling that he was living through an ‘X-Men Japan’ comic intensified. He felt so sorry for this guy. Danny knew what this kind of life was like.

“Alright,” he said, softly, finally, “I can help. And, this probably doesn’t mean anything coming from me, but that better world you were talking about? Where people with powers and people without can coexist? I think you’ll be able to make it happen. Just don’t let anyone stop you.”

“I don’t intend to.”

Danny nodded. “I can give you something to help your brother. A power,” he clarified. “But I need you to know, it could change him.”

“Change him?”

“His personality.”

“You were saying something about that before. Forgive me if I don’t agree with you. These powers are tools.”

“Okay, sure, but even just having more options can influence how a person behaves. Just warn him before you give it to him, okay?”

“Of course. I’m a man of my word, after all.”

“Right,” said Danny. “Give me your hand.”

“A handshake?” asked Hisashi.

“Not exactly.”

Danny let a minuscule, almost microscopic, piece of his core break free from the whole. It hurt like a knife to the chest, and some of his physical and mental abilities would be impaired for a while, but he had done it before, and it would heal before long. A fragment this size would give a power on par with those he’d seen so far in this world. It would also grow, of course, but it was unlikely for any human to live long enough for that to become a problem.

He let it pass into Hisashi, and the man shivered.

“That should strengthen his body without being too much of a burden on him,” said Danny.

“What kind of power is it?” asked Hisashi, reclaiming his hand and flexing his fingers.

“Uh,” said Danny, casting about for something vague that would fit. “A gradual stockpile of power. That enhances the user’s body.” That should be close enough. “Remember, ask first.”

“I will, I will,” assured Hisashi one more time. “And you can be sure I’ll be returning regardless, to thank you.”

“Uh huh.”

It took a while for Hisashi and his men to clear out. Longer still for Danny to find a new place to sleep. But he did.

He woke to a time medallion around his neck and Clockwork’s exasperated expression. “Daniel,” he said, “what did you do?”

.

Toshinori and Izuku stared at Danny with open mouths.

“You’re the original stockpile user?” yelled Izuku, pointing.

Danny smiled sheepishly. “Surprise?”

[magnusmysteries]

Part 4: The Sixteenth Fear

The Magnus Archives was a horror podcast. It is now completed. Many of the show’s mysteries were never explained on the show. I intend to explain them. Spoilers for the show, but also spoilers if you wanna solve these mysteries yourself.

In part 3 I said every fear has an opposite. But the Flesh didn’t exist before the industrial revolution. So there would have been 13 fears then, an uneven number, and not every fear could balance against an opposite. So how could that be?

The answer is, there were only 12 fears before the Flesh. The Corruption and the Desolation used to be the same fear. 

Diego Molina of the Lightless Flame cult worships Asag. A Sumerian god of disease that could make fish boil. So Asag seems to be of both the Corruption and the Desolation.

In Infectious Doubts Arthur Nolan complains about it: “Not like I can vent to the others about what a prat Diego is. Got a lot of funny ideas. Still calls the Lightless Flame Asag, like he was when he was first researching it. I just really wanna tell him to get over it; I mean Asag was traditionally a force of destruction, sure, but as a church we very much settled on burning in terms of the – face we worship, and some fish-boiling Sumerian demon doesn’t really match up, does it? Plus there’s a lot of disease imagery with Asag that I’ll reckon is way too close to Filth for my taste, but no, he read it in some ancient tome, so that’s that –“

Ancient is the key word. The tome predates the industrial revolution and the Flesh. Asag probably isn’t a thing anymore and Diego is indeed a prat for worshipping it.

In The Architecture of Fear Smirke writes “I know you say the Flesh was perhaps always there, shriveled and nascent until its recent growth, but to grant the existence of such a lesser power would throw everything into confusion. Would you have me separate the Corruption into insects, dirt, and disease? To divide the fungal bloom from the maggot?”

It is not random that Smirke uses the Corruption as an example here. The Corruption is the opposite of the Flesh, so the Corruption is the fear that Smirke believed had no opposite for hundreds or thousands of years.

In part 3 I said vampires where Corruption/Desolation/Hunt. This is a little far-fetched, but I wonder if the vampire’s we’ve seen have been old ones that predate the Flesh. And that’s why they are part Corruption, since Corruption and Hunt used to be next to each other. Maybe there are more modern vampires without the long sucking tongue. Maybe instead of sucking blood, when they bite you begin to burn or boil. Since the Hunt is now next to the Desolation instead of the Corruption-Desolation combo.

In Vampire Killer Trevor says “I have killed five people that I know for sure as vampires, and there are two more that may or may not have been.” There is a missing middle part of Trevor’s statement. Maybe there he talks about killing two vampires that are modern and therefore different so he’s not sure if they’re actually vampires.

Speaking of fears splitting up, why is the Darkness the opposite fear of the Slaughter? In Last Words we hear of the first fear “A fear of blood and pounding feet, a fear of that sudden burst of pain and then nothing.” 

And of the second fear “The fear of their own end, of the things that lived in the darkness, became a fear of the darkness itself.”

I think the first was a general fear of violence. It includes what became the Hunt “Blood and pounding Feet...” and the Slaughter “...Sudden burst of pain and then nothing”, and the End “The fear of their own end…” And the second fear was the Darkness. They were the opposite by default, simply for being the two first fears.

When the Buried became a fear, the Hunt split up from the Violence to oppose it. When the Vast became a fear, the End split up from the Violence to oppose it. All that was left of the Violence was Slaughter, still opposing the Dark. When humans began warfare, fear of war fit nicely with the Slaughter.

The Eye might have been part of the Dark at first. Still from Last Words: “...because they knew the dark held flashing talons and shining eyes…” 

When the Lonely became a fear, the Eye split up from the Dark to oppose it.

So what about the Extinction? Does it have an opposite? Yes! There is a sixteenth fear. And what can be the opposite of the fear of the end of the world? The fear that the world isn’t real. That we’re all just living in a computer simulation. If you think the world isn’t even real, you’re not gonna be so worried about it ending. I’ll call it the Simulation.

Here is how the fears are arranged on the wheel, with the two latest fears added:

Description of image: A circle with 16 spots similar to a clock. On each spot is a number and the name of a power: 1. Corruption. 2 Extinction. 3. Desolation. 4. Hunt. 5. Slaughter. 6. End. 7. Lonely. 8. Stranger. 9. Flesh. 10. Simulation 11. Spiral. 12. Buried. 13. Dark. 14. Vast. 15. Eye. 16. Web.

The Extinction is next to the Corruption. Disease and garbage are both gross. Possessive is an Extinction episode, even if not acknowledged as such by any of the characters. It’s about garbage. And Maggie is creating people out of garbage. She is making the inheritors mentioned in Time of Revelation. There are also creatures made of garbage in Concrete Jungle. And Maggie was full of moving insect legs, showing Corruption influence.

Quote from Adelard Dekker from Rotten Core: “I’ve spoken before about how keenly I’ve watched news of possible pandemics, which is where I suspect the Extinction may pull away from the Corruption during its emergence.” Adelard knows the Extinction is next to Corruption.

The Extinction is next to Desolation. That fits, nuclear weapons cause fire. Quote from Times of Revelation, describing corpses: “They were stiff, and desiccated, mummified by some process Bernadette could not begin to guess at, but that rendered their flesh like tightly packed ash” Ash as if they were burned.

The Simulation is next to the Flesh. The Flesh makes you think humans aren’t people, they are just meat. The Simulation makes you think humans aren’t people, they are just NPCs.

The Simulation is the next to the Spiral. Both make you question what is real. The Spiral makes you doubt your mind, the Simulation makes you doubt your world.

There are four episodes about the Simulation: Binary, Zombie, Cul-de-sac and Reflection.

In Binary Sergey Ushanka uploads his mind into a computer. He becomes a simulation and it hurts. There is influence by the Spiral, the statement giver isn’t sure if she’s going crazy. And there is influence by the Flesh. Ushanka uploads himself into a computer and then he eats the computer. So that’s cannibalism.

In Zombie the statement giver thinks other people aren’t real, they’re philosophical zombies, In other words they like simulations or NPCs. The man that follows her repeats the phrase “Just fine, thank you for asking” and says nothing else. Just like some NPCs in video games will say the same phrase over and over. The man is identical the three times they meet, except for his t-shirt changes color. Sometimes in video games some NPCs will be identical, except for some colors are changed. (Because it’s less work to recollar a character than to draw one from scratch.)

John thinks Cul-De-Sac is about the Lonely. And yes, the statement giver was lonely. But the people affected by the Lonely choose to be lonely, and the statement giver didn’t. His boyfriend broke up with him because of cheating and then he lost his friends because they sided with his boyfriend. 

I think the theme of the statement is unreality, not loneliness. In the Magnus Archives, when someone gets marked by a power it is because they made some wrong choice. The choice the statement giver makes is to return to the place he found dead and soulless. He drives back to his ex-boyfriend to deliver the moose, rather than send it by mail. He specifically wants to meet his ex. Not an act of loneliness, quite the opposite. Also he is returning a moose that is angular and creepy, in other words it is unreal.

When the statement escapes from the nightmare it’s because he got a phone call from his ex. And he says “I love you.” and that fits neatly with the Lonely. But it also fits with escape from the unreal. He escapes because he communicates with a real person.

The road signs says “Road” and “Street”. Generic and unreal. All the houses look the same. Like in a computer game. The statement giver wonders if they are the same house. Like in a computer game where one might reuse the code for a house many times.

The house he enters has stock photos. Unreal.

The people on TV have something wrong with their eyes, similar to the eyes of the zombies in Zombie. And it's a fake cooking show, and a fake infomercial.

The dead woman upstairs was someone who had social media profiles, and that nobody notices had died. Meaning she lived her life online. That sounds like she was lonely. But living online also makes her a good victim for the Simulation. Everyone she talked to was on a computer, she couldn’t know for sure if they were real.

The woman had killed herself with a mirror. I think what happened was she had looked into the mirror and seen that her eyes were wrong, like the eyes of the people on TV. And she had thought she was just a simulation, like everything around her. And therefore she killed herself. Or perhaps she wasn’t reflected in the mirror at all? Like in…

Reflection. Adelard speculated that this statement was about the Extinction, but I don’t think so. The protagonist was in a world that seemed unreal. A fun fair is artificial so that fits the theme. The people were playing games, which fits the theme via computer games maybe.

Adelard says “I can’t quite get past the detail that there was no reflection at all in the mirror he used to return.” It is almost at the end of Adelard’s letter, it’s clearly meant to be significant. The no reflection might be symbolic for the statement giver starting to think he isn’t real, which might be what happened to him after he gave the statement.

Reflection has influence by the Spiral, with the maze of mirrors. There is influence by the Flesh, with the cannibalism.

[gloryofluv]

Order Up! (Coffee Shop AU) Chapter 5

Well, I guess Alex is going through the motions. I am really starting to love how well-rounded this is getting. Flirty fics are fun, but they always need heart and perseverance!

Chapter

1 - 2- 3 - 4

Fuck. Why did she do that? Alex wanted to toss her phone but knew she couldn’t afford a new one yet. Memories. Social media keeps track even if you don’t. She was bundled on the ground of the bathroom she just cleaned and sobbed.

All she wanted to do was look at this real estate agent that Lucifer texted her. She glanced down at the picture of her and her mother while she was getting dressed for prom. Would she be upset that she was thinking of selling their home? Would she be proud? She felt so fucking alone.

There was a knock at the bathroom door, and she stuttered on a breath. Fucking get it together, girl. She wiped her face and nodded. “I’ll be out momentarily,” she said in a cheery tone.

Breathe. Stand up. Bitch, buck the fuck up, you’re at work. Alex listened to her inner dialog, turned on the water to the sink, cleaned her hands and face, and fixed her makeup. After she was satisfied, she picked up her tool tote and walked to the door with a plastered smile.

Solomon was on the other side of the door. “Hey, Alex,” he said with a curl to his lips.

“Hey, Sol, how are you doing?” she asked.

“Not horribly. I’m a bit stuck on this formula, but it’s bound to come to me,” he voiced while walking in step with her.

She rocked her head and shifted at the entrance to the counter. “Let me just go put this away and clock out. We can chat a minute after I’m off the clock.”

He rocked his head and leaned on the wall nearby. “Want to take a walk with me?”

She tilted her head and hummed. “Maybe.”

“Good, I’ll order, and we’ll head to the park.”

“Oh, good, we’re taking a walk to the park?”

Alex glanced over to see Satan wander over with his tea and pastry bag. “Oh, hey, Satan. I didn’t see you there.”

He tilted his head and gestured to his messenger bag. “I was grading pages.”

Solomon crossed his arms before touching his chin with his fingers. “You want to join us?”

Satan rocked his head. “A little fresh air would be great.”

“Okay, let me just go finish up,” Alex smiled and walked to the back of the shop. Well, it was quite the variation, but after how interesting her Sunday had been, it wouldn’t be a bad thing. She turned to the computer after putting the tote away and clocked out. Shaking out her body and taking off her apron and hat, she rolled her neck.

There was something to be said about the smears on her uniform. Alex stripped off her overshirt and straightened her purple tank top, and pulled out her ponytail. After checking her face in the mirror and reapplying a few touches on her eyeliner and lip gloss, she was ready.

Better. Alex smiled and collected her bag before marching to the front again. Solomon and Satan seemed to be in a discussion about the book in Satan’s hand. Their hand gestures only confirmed the estimation as Alex walked over to collect her drink.

“Hey, babes,” Jess hummed. “Do you think you could do me a favor and take my Friday shift, and I’ll take your Saturday one. It's closing, and I have a date.”

Alex rocked her head. “Yeah, I can. You never ask me to trade, so they must be pretty hot,” she teased.

Jess smirked and rocked her head. “Yeah, Mr. Macchiato, who comes in the evenings.”

“Nice, well, I hope you have tons of fun. Text Jordan and let him know, alright?”

Jess beamed and blew a kiss. “You’re a lifesaver for my social life, hun.”

Alex waved and met up with the two intellectuals holding their beverages. “I’m just saying that Dickens wasn’t as extraordinary as we make him out to be,” Solomon huffed.

“Oh, no, we’re on about Charles again?”

Satan laughed and shook his head as they walked out the door. “Just Solomon’s primary dagger.”

“Solomon, do you just enjoy debating?” Alex asked.

Solomon smiled and shifted his head from side to side. “Occasionally, but so does Satan, so we have a mutual understanding never to take it to blows.”

“I think the Brontë sisters are probably a staple for every woman,” Alex added to the conversation.

“And men,” Satan nodded.

“Very true, but we need to selectively decide what mannerisms are dated in order to value the interpretation,” Solomon voiced.

Alex smirked and raised her hand to her chest. “'Do you think I am an automaton? — a machine without feelings? And can bear to have my morsel of bread snatched from my lips and my drop of living water dashed from my cup? Do you think, because I am poor, obscure, plain, and little, I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong! — I have as much soul as you — and full as much heart!'” She paused after the quote and laughed. “Imagine declaring equality to a man who was higher in rank and stature than you in that time. The dated behavior is only setting.”

Satan let out a stream of hearty laughter. “Oh, Alex, I would have loved to have you in my class today. There was a sexist animal who was definitely in need of a strong female to set him straight.”

“My little Jane isn’t very plain,” Solomon chuckled and waved his hand.

“No, she isn’t,” Alex laughed before sipping her iced tea.

“I was referring to you,” Solomon hummed.

Alex smirked at him and shrugged. “I do pretty well, I suppose.”

Satan cleared his throat, drawing Alex’s attention to her left. “So, you realized that half your customers are my brothers.”

Alex rocked her head. “Yes, I was informed of that by Belphegor in a rather creative way.”

“I heard,” Satan laughed. “We all live together.”

“So I’ve heard,” she smiled.

“Interesting dynamic,” Solomon voiced. “All seven of them together.”

“They also throw some ridiculous parties,” Alex said and then waved her free hand in a circle. “From what I’ve heard.”

“Oh, don’t worry. I know you live across the street,” Satan snorted with a smug smile. “I’ve known longer than Lucifer.”

Alex gasped as they walked on the sideway in the park. “What?”

Satan chuckled and rocked his head. “Yes, I knew from Jordan. I was the one to buy his motorcycle.”

She shrieked and gasped. “Oh! That’s why I’ve seen it around the cafe.”

Satan wagged his eyebrows. “So yes, I’ve known for about four months. He pulled it out of your garage and brought it over. When I asked why he moved, he told me about your circumstance and why he was torn, but family comes first.”

“It does,” Alex smiled. “His mother was great to me when my parents died. She practically lived with me for the first six months. Then Jordan moved in, and he got me a job at the cafe. He’s always been like my big brother. So when his dad got injured at work and couldn’t work, I told him to move home to help.”

“How did you both meet?” Solomon questioned.

“Oh, that’s a funny story, actually. So, in middle school, he was a grade above me, and I was super shy. He saw me being harassed by some asshole. He stepped in and smoothed the situation. I was so shocked he was able to do so without violence. Jordan took me to the bathroom, cleaned me up, and told me that the only bitches in our life are the beautiful bitches we can be, so I needed to learn to walk like it. From then on, he just started pulling me into his antics,” she explained and laughed while shaking her head.

“You were shy?” Satan questioned.

Alex stopped drinking her tea and nodded. “I actually am in general. I took his advice to heart. I’m friendly and enjoy people, but I don’t have very many people I consider close with.”

“Is this why you aren’t dating anyone?” Solomon questioned.

Alex narrowed her eyes at him and smirked. “Yes.”

“Liar,” Solomon smiled.

“Wait, I really find this fascinating. You aren’t close to any family?” Satan asked.

Alex shrugged and hummed. “My aunts and uncles all live in different parts of the country. I was an only child, and now that my parents aren’t here, the only people I see are Jordan and his parents. Jordan’s sister left for a university across the country two years ago. I see them probably once a month.”

“You live alone? Like no one ever comes to knock on your door or calls your phone?” Satan questioned with a scowl.

“Well, I won’t be living there much longer,” Alex sighed. “I have to sell the place, so I’ll have to clear it out in the next couple of weeks. The financial officer, my parents, left in charge, said that the funds wouldn’t cover the expenses this next year, so it would be a good idea for me to sell.”

“Hm,” Solomon murmured. “I could help.”

“No,” Alex shook her head. “It’s time. I don’t need handouts, Sol. I appreciate it, but no.”

“Why do you feel like you have to do everything alone?” Satan asked as they rounded the outside of the park.

Alex breathed and shook her head. “It’s such a long story.”

“Your parents?” Solomon voiced.

This analysis was cathartic in a way, and Alex felt this heavyweight being pulled from her shoulders. “Well, yes and no. I was telling my mother before she passed that I was thinking of taking a year off to go with my boyfriend at the time to travel the world. She was so supportive, even though it would put my education in jeopardy. When they died, he bailed with some other girl, so I kind of just stopped relying on others.”

Satan tutted and exhaled. “To be an idiot teenager who couldn’t handle grief. I’m sorry you had to go through that, especially at such a young age.”

Alex smiled and shrugged as they made their way back to the cafe. “I’m pretty good. I have a degree. I’ll have a decent nest egg to pay for my schooling for an even better education and my best friend. I’m doing pretty well.”

“I have an intrigue before we conclude our adventure into your life,” Solomon hummed.

Alex tilted her head as she grinned at him. “What’s that?”

“You are strong without someone, but it makes it so much richer to share your heart with others,” Solomon declared.

“Says the man who has done his fair share of that,” Satan snorted.

Solomon rolled his eyes. “Satan, don’t cast stones in glass houses.”

“You have been married three times now,” Satan snorted.

News. Alex raised her eyebrows. “Three times? Aren’t you like barely forty?”

“I resent that,” Solomon scowled. “No, I am not. However, marriage and love are difficult measurements in a formula very few understand. I’m difficult.”

“I actually like that about you,” Alex laughed.

Satan scowled as they stopped at the sidewalk near the cafe. “You enjoy that he’s difficult, but you won’t text me?” he questioned with a sly smile.

She puffed and pulled his phone from his bag’s pocket. It was sticking out and available. Alex then went to his keypad, dialed her number, and pressed the call. Her phone soon rang, and she hung up.

“Now, you have my number. Stop trying to make me do all the work, you pushy professor,” she snorted and handed his phone back.

Satan was grinning as he pocketed his phone. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Solomon handed her his phone, and she groaned but did the same exact thing. “If you both call me all the time, I will block your number,” she teased.

“If you need any help with your house, please tell me,” Solomon nodded. “I am quite organized.”

“I will,” Alex smiled.

Solomon tossed his cup in the trash and smiled before walking to his car. Alex watched him wave and climb inside before driving off in the silver vehicle. Satan shifted and tilted his head when she turned back to him.

“Did you want to have dinner with me tonight? I’ll cook,” Satan offered.

“Just because we’re temporarily neighbors does not mean I’m a booty call, understood?” Alex questioned.

Satan snorted and straightened his shirt. “You’re far too interesting to blow on a booty call, Alex.”

“Just had to make it clear. I would take your offer for dinner, but I’m actually exhausted. Diavolo came in for a coffee tasting, and I hosted it. Since then, I’ve just been drained.”

Satan rocked his head. “Well, I’ll ask tomorrow then,” he smiled and shrugged. “You’ll eventually say yes,” he chuckled and walked over to the motorcycle.

Alex smiled and observed as he slid on his helmet, waved, and climbed on the bike. Bad boy, professor. Pretty sexy. That tickled her to no end. He pulled out with a roaring shift of gears and headed in the same direction she needed to go. Home. Even if it was just for now.

@rsmrymnt-tea @otome-scribbles

[nexyra]

Okay so This is just a way to let out some frustration so I can put it out there and stop mulling on it bc I'm bad at this sort of stuff - Feel free to ignore it

I'm putting this under Read More; if your fav past-time is to call anyone who likes Ironwood's character or was disappointed by his V8 turn to villainy a stupid bootlicker who "should have seen the signs he was always a tyrant !!" please don't interact with this post. You're ultimately free to think what you want but honestly I see enough of that in the main tag when left alone, I don't need it on my blog it doesn't make me feel good.

Anyone else... well you can read if you're interested but you don't have to either. Feel free to respectfully disagree though, I'm not that bullheaded that I can't partake in a friendly argument =) I'll just be listing some things about Ironwood's reading by the FNDM who get old or draining as someone who doesn't like the V8-characterization they went with

Can people please stop just... copy/pasting real world issues on a world/characters that have nothing to do with them or a completely different context ?

Like,, I genuinely try to educate myself on real-world issues. I know I'm rather privileged so I try to listen and hear out people who speak out about the issues they live through day by day. I know why the "ACAB" moniker exists. I understand the problem that lies within the american police system (and likely other countries as well). I see why the army, on our blue planet, is criticized & its many failings. Etc, the list can go on...

But I'm sorry to say, Remnant isn't OUR Earth. Their Army's primary job is to fight actual evil soulless monsters, not people. The Ace Opps or Huntsmen are not an organization directly inherited from slave-hunting groups. James Ironwood isn't the US army general bombing Middle East. Clover Ebi isn't the racist cop you want in prison. So WHY are they treated as such by so many people ? Stories are not a 1-1 where you can take everything you know and just apply it to a completely different world.

Has Atlas been presented as a country that suffers from racism & classism ? Certainly. Has it be shown this way ? That's already more debatable since the only racist arguments we got were in Mantle (which is the city we're supposed to be rooting for so that's a weird choice but eh it's whatever). Are the characters, as persons, shown to evoke these issues in a way that deserve our scorn ? Not really.

Is Ironwood depicted as particularly racist for example ? I wouldn't say so seeing as one (or more considering Tortuga) of his Ace-Opps are Faunus & it seems perfectly accepted; and he hates Jacques Schnee's guts. So why does he get to shoulder all of our real-world issues as if he was responsible for them, in a context where (pre V8) his army had most likely never killed anything else than Grimm and was shown to elicit very positive reactions from most of the population (V3) ? (In direct contrast to the polarization that the US army might evoke for example.)

You can totally hate Ironwood because of the feelings he evoke, the trope he stems from or the parallels to be made. That doesn't mean however, that he IS truly guilty of every one of OUR world issues (pre-V8)

Just because classism is prevalent in Atlas society does not make Ironwood the figurehead & leader of this issue.

Is classism an issue in Atlas ? Yes. That's been made clear because of Mantle's state as well as Jacques Schnee entire existence & even Cinder's backstory. Does that mean every single one of Ironwood's decisions reeks of classism ? NO

Trust me, as someone who found Ironwood's V8 characterization not... well-executed & too much; there's nothing more annoying than being assaulted by posts about his fall going "it was so obvious !! look at -" only for them to then list reasons in a really biased way or even headcannons based on (again) irl problems. An exemple...

Reasons his turn was good that I see thrown around : "Ironwood left Mantle behind because he only wanted to save the rich. He's a selfish coward & an asshole !"

What we were actually given : "Ironwood suffers from PTSD, and faced with Salem's imminent arrival, he tried to save what he was CERTAIN to be able to protect aka the flying city and all the people on it including Mantle evacuees. There is absolutely no text backing the idea that he wanted to leave with Atlas because it's rich. We could even suppose that he would have left with the 'poor' Mantle if it was the flying city and rich people were hanging safely on the ground. There is indeed an issue with Atlas & Mantle disparity, but Ironwood isn't directly responsible for it."

Does that make his decision to leave Mantle behind a morally right one ? That's of course NOT what I'm saying. The situation is still very ambiguous. But the classism theme has NO place here.

"Ironwood leads Atlas & Mantle. As such, he inherently holds responsability for the issues plaguing it." THIS is an acceptable reading according to me. I would probably argue that even if Ironwood's the only Atlas leader we're shown; he actually only oversees the military & academy (where we haven't ever seen classism issues), so putting Atlas' classism issues on him still doesn't sound fair to me. However the idea & argument is sound.

Acknowledging only how his actions look/the tyrannical surface reading and not the reasonnable justifications or glimpses we were given (pre-V7) of Ironwood being more than his trope

I'll probably stop after this one, but the last thing that is both tiring & annoying after too much of it; is seeing people boil down all of Ironwood's character to the most basic summary, inherently written to paint him in a bad line. And then saying that everything led up to his downfall by using these watered-down versions of the show's events to justify it. Or worse (imo), saying that people who are not satisfied with his V8 characterization that THEY don't understand how good a character he is and don't really appreciate him.... All the while only ever highlighting his characters flaws. Please stop this.

"Ironwood brought an army to the peace Olympics why are you surprised he turned out this way ?" ==> Ironwood brought an army to a country where the civilians visibly have no issue with said-army, to protect a peaceful event that he KNOWS to be targeted by foes. It's definitely overzealous & his conviction that threats should be dealt with by blunt force IS one of his flaws; but pretending that he did it for fun or because he's a tyran is just as misplaced.

"Ironwood said he'd shoot Qrow if he were one of his men why are you surprised he shot Oscar ?" ==> Do I really need to flip through every joke in this show and consider it as absolute truth & proof that the character would enact these words if given the occasion; even when we're shown with certainty that they actually don't mean it ? (IW hugging Qrow to welcome him, refusing to attack Qrow when he's certain Qrow IS attacking him...)

"Ironwood has his military all over Mantle, there's a curfew, all of this is tyrannical why are you surprised he's also down for genocide" ==> Damn, it sure is criminal to have Mantle defended from the litteral monsters roaming inside & out, and to make sure with a curfew that the people are not at risk during the night. I wonder if any recent events could make us reconsider our stance on how evil a enforced curfew is. Mhmmm maybe a pandemic ? Nah I must be imagining things. For real though, at what point did Tyrian's framing/lies (IW has his soldiers all over Mantle because of politics/he's a tyran who refuses opposition) became the truth of the situation for the FDNM too ? Again Mantle's situations SUCK, and that's a problem in itself. Making up problematic reasoning for the situation is dishonest though.

To end this, I'll just make clear. I do not condone any of Ironwood's actions post-V7. I don't think he had to be the big hero of the Atlas arc. Nor that he was without faults. I merely think that he'd have been a better antagonist than villain. And that it'd have been nice to keep the ambiguity/morally greyness that surrounds him; the knowledge that he's TRYING hard to do what's best for everyone; that he has good intentions. That he cares about individuals too to a lesser degree, and that he had people who cared about him as a person.

For short... Ironwood as an antagonist with understandable issues, flaws & failures; making questionable choices but with good intentions ? Hell yeah. Ironwood as a villain, more irredeemable than Hazel, willing to kill people for NO reason or even wipe out a city ? I'm not convinced.

[wisteria-lodge]

Character Analysis: Sorting Castiel

courtesy of the @sortinghatchats​ system.

LION PRIMARY - Sense of morality and ethics comes from inside. Things just feel right or they feel wrong.

First things first. I completely get why people are saying that Cas has to be a Snake primary with his morality and motivations bound up in the well-being of Dean Winchester. His whole love confession was very Snake-flavored - “I cared about the whole world because of you” - such a Snake thing to say. And we know (from a couple alternate-universe Castiels) that Dean is the reason he tore up his entire life and rebelled against Heaven. So far so Snake.

But I want to talk about one of those other Castiels for a second. Apocalypse!Cas (with the Slavic accent) is loyal to Heaven, sure. But he’s also... not doing great. This Cas is twitchy, stuttering, he’s got about 15 facial tics. He looks like he’s gone half mad. He is not the cold, detached, selfish and hyper-capable Burnt Snake I would expect in that situation (*cough* Soulless!Sam). That’s a Cas who on some deep level knows he’s doing wrong, and cares.

The way I see it, sure Dean may have pushed him over the edge, but Cas was already doubting. Even back in Season 4 he’s telling us, “I’m not a hammer. I have doubts,” and making cynical little asides like, “they don’t tell me much.” Heaven has a very strict Badger primary culture, and “crack in his chassis” Cas knows he doesn’t really fit.

Dean quickly becomes the most important thing Cas’ life because he represents a way out: another group to join, another set of values. Dean is a Badger (like the angels) but a softer Badger, one Cas has an easier time agreeing with. Dean’s even the prophesied “Righteous Man” which means his morality comes pre-approved by God. He becomes Cas’ replacement Heaven, his commanding officer. Dean’s coping mechanisms and mission statements become Cas’ coping mechanisms and mission statements. Castiel tries to be part of the world though him.

But it doesn’t work. Because Cas is not a Badger, no matter how hard he tries to be. The first time we see him truly angry is also the first time he sees Dean as morally flawed. Cas beats him up, yelling, “I rebelled for this?! So that you could surrender to them? I gave everything for you. And this this what you give to me?”  

He’s doing what a lot of Burned Lions do, looking for an external conscience that gels perfectly with their own felt morals. And then getting angry when that person turns out to be fallible. Cas goes on a quest to find God (ie morality/goodness/meaning) using Dean’s necklace as a guide. Then when he fails to find God, he acts like it’s Dean who has betrayed him.

So Castiel starts down the Path of the Unhealthy Lion Primary. He declares himself the new God (the most extreme version of Exploded Lion possible.) And when that doesn’t work, goes insane for a while. He gets amnesia, hears Leviathan voices in his head, actually spends time in a mental hospital. It’s a dramatic way of talking about a Lion primary who has no idea what their internal voice is saying anymore. The whole Naomi arc just underlines this one more time: Cas doesn’t know what he’s doing, because he is controlled by Heaven. So he needs to to break though his brainwashing and find his internal sense of rightness.

I’m also thinking Lion primary because in order to heal, Cas has to go off by himself, get internal, and just sit with his thoughts. That’s what he does alone in Purgatory and through a lot of his “becoming human” and “hiding the tablets” arcs. The most dramatic example is when he dies for the fifth time and is stuck talking to the Empty’s Personification (who happens to sound a whole lot like Apocalypse!Cas...) 

"I'm already saved. You can prance and you can preen and you can scream and yell and remind me of my failings but somehow, I'm awake. And I will stay awake and I will keep you awake until we both go insane. I will fight you. And fight you and fight you forever. For eternity."

This is the moment when he plants his feet, stares down impossible odds and goes No. You move. Cas has gone deep, found his meaning, found that inner voice that will keep him going - and keep him stable - and he will never let it be taken from him again. He’s become the heroic Lion primary.

And that’s the context a lot of metas are missing when they talk about Cas ending up in the Empty during Season 15. The Empty is a place of great strength for Cas. So during his confession when he says, “happiness isn't in the having. It's in just being. It's in just saying it,” what he’s saying that he’s complete in himself, without Dean. In that moment, Cas becomes somebody who doesn’t need to follow anyone anymore. And if Cas wanted to have a relationship with Dean after that, well, he’d be in a good enough headspace to do it.

BADGER SECONDARY - fair, hardworking, shows up. Good at getting people to trust them, good at getting people to help them. If they see a locked door, they knock. 

This is definitely how Cas problem-solves. He makes himself part of groups, and once he’s there he takes on support roles and caretakes. Sometimes he lays on the tough love a little harsh, and can seem kind of direct-Lion-secondary flavored. But I don’t think Cas even has a Lion secondary model. It’s just his loud primary shining through. There is a cleanness and straightforwardness to Cas’ methods that is important to him as a character, and makes him a nice contrast to the Winchesters, who model everything.

In the later seasons, after he gets a little healthier, Cas starts to build his own family (Kelly and Jack to start.) But even when he goes dark, he goes dark like a Badger – Cas the blackmailer, Cas the interrogator.

He builds things a little bit at a time. That’s how we saw him learn to be human. He’s inspirational and effortlessly attracts allies. Dean responds well to those Badger secondary you’re safe with me vibes. And even Cas’ idea of how to deal with Empty on his his dark night of the soul is so, so Badger: I will sit here, and keep at it, and argue with you forever.

tl;dr

LION PRIMARY that is first burnt, then exploded, then burnt again, then healed / BADGER SECONDARY

[13eyond13]

The way I see it, Light was your typical intelligent asexual atheist on his way to live a successful like as a somewhat soulless but ultimately well-meaning if selfish government official, who was literally handed the power over life and death by an actual (apparent idiot of a) god, and told there was a heaven and hell. What would you do?

Mm, what's especially interesting about this in the manga to me is that it's actually revealed that during Light's first meeting with Ryuk he learned there is no heaven and hell, and that everyone will go to MU (nonexistence) after they die regardless of how morally they behaved here on earth.

This is all we saw of their conversation when Ryuk and Light were initially discussing the subject in chapter one:

But then at the end in chapter 107 we saw that there was another half to the conversation where Light told Ryuk he assumed that there was no afterlife for humans at all, and Ryuk confirmed it:

To me that makes everything more interesting, because Light could've easily thought that it was pointless to try to change the world once he learned from Ryuk that everyone goes to MU. He could've been relieved or disappointed in different ways to know that humans are mostly just seen as food by the lazy gods that be, and that there isn't any objective standard of morality governing things or consequences for anyone's actions after death. But Light still felt that guilty about initially taking life, and that rigidly about categorizing everyone on earth as either good or evil people, and that determined to transform the world anyway. And I think that his naïve ideals and his ambition and his guilt and his ego were tangled together so thoroughly that it's basically impossible to discount any one of them when determining his motives for doing what he does. To me Light's immaturity and lack of actual life experience comes into it a lot, and the other characters conjuring up a profile of Kira make a point of mentioning that quite often too. He has the arrogant confidence of a booksmart and popular and sheltered-yet-cynical young prodigy raised by the highly respected and overworked chief of police. He also has the strong fear of failure and shame, and of acknowledging himself to have fallen into the category of people he's grown up viewing as the worst.

So yes, I think it's reasonable to say that his actions make total sense considering who he was at the exact moment in his life that he picked up the notebook, and I admire the writing of his character immensely for that. I don't at all think his version of a perfect world would have been the fair and peaceful utopia that he dreamed though, nor that his cruel methods were a good way of achieving it, regardless of Light knowing he existed within an overall nihilistic universe where everyone goes to MU after death. And I don't think we are meant to look at the story as a whole and see it as an admirable blueprint for how to behave if we were in the same shoes, even if we can look at his character and easily understand how he got to be like that, or admire him for being so clever and idealistic and entertaining and resourceful. 😅 Near had some good things to say about this in the warehouse when he rebuked Light for thinking he has the ultimate authority to decide upon some objective standard of morality for all of mankind, and he also brought up the importance of respecting others' autonomy and rights to different points of view. And I wish it had been included in the anime, because I think it's so important to the story as a whole!

[katsidhe]

Ranking Every SPN Midseason Finale

15) 10.09 The Things We Left Behind. Claire’s reintroduction isn’t as bad as some of her later appearances, mostly because she’s still hostile towards Cas and the Winchesters, but it’s still not great. There’s Rowena and Crowley drama I don’t care about, and Dean kills a bunch of people, which is kinda fun, but would be more interesting if it had any consequences.

14) 14.09 The Spear. Michael’s monsters plan is pretty dumb. I’m still not clear on why Michael stopped possessing Dean at any point. Michael and Jack have a good conversation, and I suppose an assassination is the only viable plan for the Winchesters to go for, but most of this episode is just a series of “why” moments one after another.

13) 1.10 Asylum. This is a perfectly acceptable MOTW episode, and a ghost-addled Sam yelling at and punching Dean is fun, but it’s simply not up to snuff with the kind of plot or character development that the other midseason finales put on the table.

12) 13.09 The Bad Place. I really like Kaia and Jack here. The moment with the angels pounding on the ground to break the wards is genuinely pretty cool.  The stakes get upped with the reveal that Mary’s being tortured in Apocaland, and Dean reacts by threatening Kaia at gunpoint, nice. It’s not a bad episode, and it’s not incredible either.

11) 12.08 LOTUS. Is this episode silly? Oh yes. Am I thoroughly entertained when watching it? Resoundingly yes. Every dumb terrible campy detail--like Lucifer turning crosses upside down—combined with the sheer balls-to-the-wall wtf-ery of the President being possessed, and the interspersed moments of genuine drama—as when Sam banishes Lucifer—creates a combination that I can’t help but enjoy. I also like the likely somewhat unintentional implications as to how the political landscape of the SPN world was changed by the sheer volume of apocalyptic events it’s experienced. Seems fair to conclude that God is angry.

10) 8.09 Citizen Fang. Dean sends Sam after Amelia with a fake text, as their s8 conflict comes to a head. This is far from the shadiest thing Dean’s ever done, but it’s so fascinatingly, unapologetically a Relationship Red Flag that I really enjoy it. Plus, I find Sam’s conflict with Benny pretty interesting here.  

9) 6.11 Appointment in Samara. Dean’s deal with Death is a cool concept, and it’s set up well, but it falls a bit flat. Dean fails the test in a way that’s very predictable, and that has no consequences, because Death likes Sam enough to retrieve him anyway. The better part of this episode is Soulless’ desperate, last ditch attempt to save his life at the cost of Bobby’s—he screams and begs as his soul is returned, and I love the moral dilemma here.

8) 9.09 Holy Terror. Kevin!! His death was viscerally shocking and heartbreaking. This episode is consigned to mid B tier because of the angel drama I don’t care about, and because I am still torn on if I really like Kevin’s death thematically speaking. For one thing, I miss him to this day—I miss having a cynical, informed perspective on the Winchesters in the room. For another, it muddies the waters of Dean’s crime in having Gadreel possess Sam, in ways that are sometimes interesting but sometimes miss the point.

7) 15.08 Our Father, Who Aren’t in Heaven. *chanting* New Cage canon! New Cage canon! Jake Abel steals the show with his insane chemistry with himself, and makes the s15 conflict much more interesting just by existing. I love how goddamn uncomfortable Sam is this entire episode, I love Adam and Michael’s weird compelling dynamic, I love Dean’s awkwardness, and I love the four of them all together. I just want them to sit in a room and talk foreeeever.

6) 7.10 Death’s Door. I don’t even like Bobby that much, but even I have to admit that this is a great emotional episode. Sam and Dean deal with their grief, and it’s done well enough to make me grieve for Bobby too.

5) 2.09 Croatoan. Good episode is good. It’s a zombie episode with a real sense of fear and isolation—and then Sam gets infected. Dean’s violent refusal to kill Sam, the subsequent reveal that Sam is somehow immune, and then a demon revealing that this town died just for an experiment on Sam? Creepy and emotional and intriguing!

4) 4.10 Heaven and Hell. Demon and angel battle! Some very fun additions to what we know about the angels and their motivations: Anna’s commitment to fleeing and defying Heaven, coupled with what appears to be Ruby doing the same with Hell, is cool. I also love how Sam ends up successfully playing both sides off each other. Plus, it ends with Dean’s emotional reveal about his time in Hell.

3) 3.08 A Very Supernatural Christmas. Iconic. Three separate things to love: fantastic pre-series content, including amulet backstory and the reveal of little Sam finding out about monsters; a truly wonderful MOTW that involves Christmas tree stabbing and fingernail pulling; and the looming emotional juggernaut of  a final celebration before Dean’s deal comes due.  

2) 5.10 Abandon All Hope. Crowley’s delightful introduction as a smarmy survivalist, Ellen and Jo’s tearjerking deaths, Cas captive and mouthing off to both Lucifer and Meg, Dean’s unsuccessful shot, and of course Sam and Lucifer’s first meeting in person. Action packed and spooky and thrilling and simply beautifully executed.

1) 11.09 O Brother Where Art Thou? In Hell, is where, and I couldn’t be happier!! Lucifer’s reintroduction coupled with Sam’s distress and brittle scared determination is atmospheric and terrifying. Rowena’s betrayal and Amara’s pitch to Dean are compelling. Most importantly, though, I had to wait a MONTH for 11.10 with Sam’s CRYING FACE in my head: best worst cliffhanger of the series by miles and miles. Bury me in this episode.

[twitchyglitchy]

Goodbye Hand, Goodbye Gordon.

An AU I thought about a couple months back, but had forgotten to post about. I was originally going to make an animatic out of this. I might still do it, I don’t know yet. Depends on how much people want it.

Bear with me, this is copy and pasted from a Discord chat and I only looked over it like once or twice. This was more or less half explaining the AU half fanfiction.

Content Warnings: Major character death, bl//d, amputation, unsanitary, funerals, and a whole lotta angst.

So the AU basically starts at the betrayal scene, that's when things get different.

Gordon does his thing: Be skeptical about Bubby and Benrey but goes into the room anyways. 

Lights go out, Gordon is ambushed and loses his hand, etc. Everyone scatters in fear, especially Bubby and Benrey for what they did. Bubby still ends up being taken to his tube. 

Gordon is losing a lot of blood as you would when you get your hand severed. Getting chemicals, dirt and grime in the wound isn't doing much to help either. He wakes up in the trash compactor and narrowly escapes it, stumbling his way through the sewer drains outside until he gets to where Tommy is. 

Being attacked by headcrabs along the way that were scurrying around outside, and the HEV suit's morphine isn't doing him any good, nor is the suit charged at this point so it’s lack of support is like an extra set of twenty pounds on his shoulders and back.

Tommy finds him when he falls from the sewer grate into the room, horrified to see his friend in such a horrid state. Despite how heavy Gordon is with the suit and his deadweight, Tommy helps carry him around through the facility until he finds the Coomer clones. Gordon is protected by Tommy to the best of his ability but is still greatly injured by the clones' attacks.

Soon all the clones are gone, bodies everywhere. Tommy celebrates their victory, but is quickly cut short when he turns to see Gordon lying on the floor, breathing shallowly. He rushes to his friend and tries to cover the wound where his hand was so it could clot, but it's so infected and lost so much blood at this point that his lab coat he tried to use to hold it is drenched. Gordon shakes his head and reaches out to Tommy with his good hand, holding his forearm since he couldn't reach his shoulder. "It's okay, Tommy... I should've seen this coming." Gordon lowers his hand, but Tommy drops what he's doing and holds it close to his heart. The 36 year old is panicked and distraught.

He can't- he can't go. He was the leader of their Science Team. He said he'd help them get out despite the circumstances, and he promised. Tommy feels Gordon's hand get colder, losing body warmth. Gordon set down his crowbar and smiled the best he could. It was small, weak, but warm all the same. The most genuine smile Tommy's seen from him since this whole mess started in the first place.

Tommy begs him to stay awake, saying that if the clones were nearby then maybe their Coomer was there. It was all too late by the time Coomer arrived though. He greeted Tommy who had his back turned on him, grieving over a body. His friend has never seen him so upset over a dead person this entire time with all the bodies they saw and caused. Coomer comes around Tommy to see what he's crying over. His heart stops for a few beats and his breath is caught in his throat. The world felt colder, and crept up his spine like a snake bite.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. This wasn’t meant to happen.

Gordon Freeman, he didn't make it.. 

Coomer stands there for only a few minutes or so in silence, both of them staring over the soulless body in the HEV suit. This can't be. The room with metal from wall to wall echoed and bounced with the sound of Tommy's loud cries. It was gross sobbing, but the young scientist didn't care. He didn't care about anything else right now. Not even escaping Black Mesa. He only cared about his friend. A friend who actually understood him and cared for him back. A friend who's. . Well, now gone.

It was a long while, what felt like hours, until Tommy's cries died down and had the time to actually catch his breath. Coomer had a hand on his shoulder and soon picked up Gordon's crowbar. He held it out to Tommy and set it in his lap.

"I think he'd like for you to have this." He spoke softly. Not like his cryptic whispering or his boisterous voice. It dripped with misfortune and despair that overcame the physicist. 

Tommy hesitated, but took the cold piece of metal into his hands and hugged it close to him for dear life.

Tommy didn't want to leave Gordon behind, but they couldn't just carry a dead body through the facility. He doesn't even know how much further they have to go. Coomer could carry him, but only for so long, and he needs his fists to fight. Tommy leaned down and cupped Gordon's cheek, carefully sliding off his glasses with his other hand and tucking it into his lab coat pocket.

"We- We'll come.. We'll come b-back for you.. We'll come get you once we get out of here, Gordon." He stammered, lowering his hand from his face and staggering to his feet. Coomer adjusted Gordon's body to look more comfortable and presentable. Despite his bloodied state, it's only fair to do something nice for his body out of respect.

The two said their goodbyes to Gordon and soon left, taking his glasses and crowbar with him. 

Later on, they meet up with Bubby, who's in his tube complaining. Tommy ends up going nonverbal for a bit, to which Coomer quickly takes note of and tries to lead the conversation. Bubby and Coomer go back and forth for a bit, Coomer showing sympathy, and decides to let Bubby out. It wouldn't be fair anyways, Bubby didn't know this would happen. It’d be best to break the news.

Bubby steps out of the broken containment tube and looks around. 

"Where's Gordon? I thought he was with you."

Tommy's words are caught in his throat, tears threatening to fall again. Coomer's expression falters and soon does his own words. The silence was enough evidence for Bubby to catch on to what's going on. "Oh. . .He's not, with you, is he?" Tommy gripped the crowbar until his knuckles turned white. It hurt too much to talk, to think, to breathe. His head felt like it was pounding but a headache never came. His hands felt clammy but never broke a sweat. His eyes burned but tears never came. 

Coomer nodded and told them that they should keep going, and that he'll explain later. Bubby for once had no quip or even a scoff to their words, he held his own tongue and decided to keep quiet.

They never did find Benrey. Wherever he went, he was long gone now. The journey was long and uneventful too. Silence wasn't ever awkward since everyone was trapped inside their own heads, thinking about their friend. They do meet Darnold though on the way to the Lambda Lab and take him with them, and he actually comes along with them until they escape. The military finally ceased their fire, and surrendered offhandedly. The US government soon came forth to offer them a full removal of their bounty and move on with their lives if they swore to never speak of the events. After some- or a lot of paperwork, The Science Team was free to just go back to their normal lives. It's not normal anymore though. Every single one of them had trauma and. .Oh god, breaking the news was horrible.

They had to tell Joshua, but telling a kid was enough to make all of them cry. He was too young to understand, but knew that he'd never see his dad again, and that was enough to break the poor child. 

The funeral was private, and rather small, since no one could tell anyone how Gordon died under the agreement of their contracts. The government was kind enough to go retrieve Gordon's body from Black Mesa once all the aliens were dead and mostly gone. At least, to their knowledge. They probably just contained what remained of them.

The Nihilanth never came, and somewhere within Xen, you could find it's body gone, dead.

He looked so nice when they held the service, and was made sure they hid his cleaned and wrapped nub of a hand under the sheet he lied with. The casket was closed after everyone's goodbyes and was lowered. The whole thing hurt every ounce of their bodies, and not much could be said once everything was over. Everyone who attended said their condolences, their sorrows, their goodbyes, and dispersed.

Within a week, his tombstone was set, it was small but it was sweet. The all too familiar lambda was engraved below his name. Flowers decorated the barren space around the grave, and his crowbar was set right in front of it all.

Joshua ends up being taken care of by Tommy and his dad, who he sees as a older brother and Bubby and Coomer as his grandparents. Whenever they're busy, Darnold is around to take care of him, who is actually great with kids. At least Joshua is beginning to be happy again. After everything that’s happened that is. He still misses his dad a lot.

Slightly off canon Epilogue (as requested by previous readers)

Sometime later, someone approaches the grave, standing over it with a rose in their hand. These are good enough, right?

Benrey was there, in his still bloodied and dirty uniform, holding a rose and staring down at the grave. He kneeled down and rested the rose next to the crowbar and all the other flowers. Looked good enough. Hope he liked it. 

"Uhh.. Hey, Gordon. I know you hate me, and- and all.. I just wanted to say my condol- con- I'm sorry. I didn't know, man. I just wanted them to eruh, toughen you up. I didn't think they'd go that far. You can't really forgive me now, can you? You're not here. I bet you're sooo mad at me right now. Yeah, I guess I deserve it. You can come haunt my ass or whatever if you want, at least we can talk then. I didn't mean half the stuff I said either. I was just coming up with an excuse to follow you around. I knew the cascade thing was going to happen, so I tried to get you to stop it. I guess I can't change that from happening either. So uhh.. I didn't actually write anything- I should've- should've done that.. I saw everything from the outer walls too, I should've used the... The heal beam thing. I don't think it would've worked though. Too big of aaa.. Hurt. Anyway, I'm sorry. I'll go now. Bye Gordon." 

Benrey hears a gust of wind sing past his ears under the helmet, and leaves pass by his head. He turns around and sees someone there, wearing the same nice and fancy suit they wore earlier. They looked calm and even smiled a little. Benrey stopped in his tracks and just stared at them as they stood there with their hands held with fingers intertwined. 

"Hey Benrey."

[ironwoodprotectionsquad]

Do you think police state is right description of General Ironwood action in volume 2/3/7?

Let me start off by saying thanks for not asking about volume 8. Volume 8 whose she? I appreciate that. 

Now to start off I can pretty confidently say no I don’t think so at all for volumes 2/3. Did James technically probably overreact to Qrows report and his panic/anxiety kick in and bring a bigger army then really needed? Technically yes but he was also proven right so the argument could be made he just had a gut feeling from experience and though he didn’t know how to properly explain it he just had a feeling they would need more soldiers then Vale had available so he brought more. But regardless of how one feels about what exactly fueled his decision to bring an army we can all agree his intent for the army was to try and keep people calm and keep people safe from what James believed was an inevitable attack on the festival. Also something to keep in mind, his soldiers where not going around patrolling the streets, they remained strictly within the festival grounds acting as security as was asked of James. Anyone who has ever been to a state fair or convention or anything with a lot of people knows that general their is a lot of security and/or police presence at these events (at least any legit event) and generally people are nervous when they don’t think theirs enough of some form of security for a big event. And that is because their are laws about how much security is needed for large events because when you bring a lot of people together into a relatively small space, emotions are bound to run high and people are well people and can be absolute dicks and start fights or stampedes at the drop of a hat and security can help keep things from escalating. Now throw people into a world where their are man eating soulless monsters who are attracted to negative emotions and I’m letting sitting here wondering why having a shit ton of security at an international event is even a debate.

At first I wanted to say Volume 7 is technically could be argued either way but the more I think about it the more I find myself struggling with that one. Because while yes their is a very high level of security and their are soldiers patrolling the streets. BUT even when the people of Mantel where starting to riot in the streets and started fires and started actively attacking the robotic soldiers, no shots where fired at civilians, no attempt to arrest them or anything. We get a shot of one of the soldiers frantically asking for advice on what to do but their is NO violence acted against civilians. None. Zero. They just keep trying to ask people to disperse and go back to their homes for their safety. In a police state, the police (or army in this case) would certainly start arresting people for doing rioting like that. Hell the arresting would have started when people started bad mouthing James because in a police state he would not let people go around bad mouthing him. And their is the whole issue of yes their are soldiers patrolling the streets, but people are still complaining their isn’t enough protection for the people from the Grimm, the soulless man eating monsters hell bent on killing all humans. So having such a military presence makes a lot of sense in reality. 

So....through most of volume 7 I struggle to say yes just because of the grimm being a thing in Remnant that we SEE regularly attacks cities and how scared people are of them and want protection from them. 

[uboat53]

The Greatest Movie Scene

This is a spiel about the greatest scene I have ever seen in a movie.  It is not about the greatest scene that's ever been in a movie, I haven't seen every movie so that's not a fair statement, nor is it about someone else's greatest movie scene.  This is about the greatest scene I have ever seen in a movie, which includes all of the personal background and baggage that I bring to the movie plus the particular circumstances in which I saw it.  Clear?  Great.

The greatest scene is from the movie Batman: The Dark Knight, the one with Christian Bale.  If you haven't seen it yet, stop reading this and go watch it.  It is a movie that really benefits from being seen fresh without spoilers, so don't do that to yourself.  If you read past this, accept that you will be spoiled on key plot details of the movie.

Now, with a movie like this one, with a cast that includes Morgan Freeman, Michael Kaine, Gary Oldman, Aaron Eckhardt, Heath Ledger, and where Christian Bale himself, the star of the movie, can essentially be an afterthought, one might imagine that I'd be talking about one of their fantastic performances.  And one would be wrong.

So let's set the scene.  We come near the end of the movie, the third act.  The Joker, who has spent nearly two hours of movie time tormenting the heroes and tearing the city apart with incredibly innovative and terrifying schemes, has set three terrible plans in motion, all of which are occurring simultaneously.  First, he and his gang have taken a lot of doctors and nurses hostage in a skyscraper that's still under construction.  Second, he's placed explosives in two huge ferries that are being used to evacuate people from the city and is threatening to blow up both ferries unless someone on one ferry presses the detonator to blow up the other.  Finally, he's driven the city's white knight prosecutor insane and has encouraged him to exact his revenge on the police officers who led to his disfigurement, and that prosecutor has taken the family of the city's top policeman hostage.

For our scene we're going to focus on the second plan, the one with the ferries.

Now our two ferries couldn't be more different.  One of them is full of families, lots of women, children, and men who are no longer young.  The other one is full of the most hardened criminals from the city's prison.  Each is full of explosives and each one has a detonator on board that will destroy the other ferry if activated.  Both have been told that they have until midnight to blow up the other ferry (fifteen minutes away!) or both ferries will be blown up.

Now many movies would focus on the execution of the other two plans, they're far more action oriented.  Batman has a ton of great fight scenes in the partially completed skyscraper, tangling with disguised thugs and the police in turn, and the prosecutor (Two-Face!) is threatening the policeman's family with a loaded gun to their faces, but the real heart of this sequences is the scene on the ferries.

On the prison ferry, the warden has the detonator and is protected by two prison guards armed with shotguns.  The guards are young and frightened, both of the prisoners who are increasingly insistent that the warden should activate the detonator and of the ticking clock which is slowly approaching midnight.

On the family ferry, frightened people debate with the captain of the ferry and national guardsmen on board who eventually decide to put it to a vote.  Amidst a sinking feeling of dread, the people on board the ferry write their vote on pieces of paper which are slowly, all too slowly, collected by the guardsmen in their helmets.

Seconds tick by and the tension builds.  Frightened faces flash in front of the screen, sometimes reacting to the arguments for or against using their detonators and sometimes simply blank with dread.  Tension builds and builds.  The family ferry finishes their vote, it's a landslide in favor of using the detonator.  The captain takes it out, his hand on the key that will explode the other ferry.  There are only three minutes left.  He pauses for a moment.  "What are you waiting for?" an old woman demands, "Do it."  "We're still here," he says nervously, "That means they haven't killed us either."

Meanwhile, on the prison ferry, there is utter bedlam.  Prisoners are on their feet, screaming and shouting in the faces of the terrified guards, only kept back by bared shotguns.  At the back of the crowd a man stands up and walks forward.  He is huge, a massive African-American man with a shaved head, covered in tattoos and scars.  Calmly, he walks forward, the crowd parting before him and going silent, until he stands face to face with the warden, looming over him.

"You don't want to die, but you don't know how to take a life," he says in a threatening growl, "Give it to me; these men would kill you and take it anyway.  Give it to me. You can tell them I took it by force.  Give it to me and I'll do what you shoulda did ten minutes ago."

Nervously, hands shaking, the warden pushes the detonator into the handcuffed hands of this huge prisoner.  The expression on the warden's face is pained; the prisoner is right, he wants desperately to live but cannot bring himself press the trigger.  He hasn't killed the people on the other ferry directly, but in that moment he has sealed their fate.

The prisoner holds the detonator, looks at it for a moment, and then tosses it out the window into the water.

That is the single greatest momoment of the movie and, for my preferences, the single greatest moment in any movie I've ever seen.  The raw tension of the scene, the conflict between pure morality and a desperate desire for survival, the anticipation of one outcome, and the suddenness by which another is achieved.

That is the pivotal moment of the movie, the moment when the tension is broken.  And not like tension breaks in other movies where there's a gradual drawdown and sense of relief, this tension snapped like a dry twig and left behind only deepening feeling of dread, acceptance, and a certain feeling of pride and accomplishment.  The fear on the people's faces as they chose or were forced to accept that they would die in order not kill was palpable, all the more so as we'd been witness to their struggle.  The decision of the filmmaker to make us spend the entire fifteen minutes with these people, worrying and debating, trying to save both their lives and their souls as Batman fought his way through a vertical construction site, drew us into their struggle and forced us to empathize with their fate.  There was no way to save both their lives and their souls and they had chosen, even the ones who we may have assumed were the most soulless among them, to save their souls.

But it's not just the tension that's the reason why this scene is so great, not by itself.  The reason why that scene, that moment when the detonator flies out the window, is the greatest I've ever seen is that it's the moment when the Joker is defeated.  Batman hasn't punched him in the face yet; in fact, at that moment, he has Batman pinned, forcing him to watch the culmination of his schemes, but in that moment he has lost.

You see, the thing that becomes clear from the rest of the movie is that the Joker isn't trying to kill people or destroy the city.  That's far too simple for him.  He threatens the life of a man not by pointing a gun at him, but by threatening to blow up a hospital if he isn't killed.  He tries to break his enemies not by injuring or killing them, but by setting them up so that they must choose which of two choices they value most, only to discover that they were the reverse of what they thought they were.  The Joker isn't trying to destroy Gotham, he's trying to force Gotham to destroy itself.

In that moment the people of Gotham, some of them at least, decide that they won't do it.  They won't play his game.  He may kill them, he may rampage ans scheme and cause his mayhem, but they won't be a part of it.  Not because they are perfect and not because they are without fear, but because they are human.

And in that moment it is they, the ordinary people, who become the heroes of the movie.  Not the caped crusader or the police, not the extremely talented actors who take lead billing on the marquee, but the regular people who are most often just relegated to the background of superhero movies, forced to simply react to or accept whatever the result of the conflict between the hero and the villain is.

That's why that moment in Batman: The Dark Knight is the greatest scene in any movie I've ever seen.  It has stuck with me since the moment I saw it, at a midnight showing in the summer of 2008 with some of my roommates while we were doing summer work in our college town.  No movie I've seen before or since has stuck in my head the way that one did, coming back to trigger more and more thoughts and contemplations on the many, many topics that it brought up, many of which are still salient to the world we live in today, and no scene to me has better illustrated the greatest potential of human nature.

If you're still with me, thanks for reading.  This has been going through my head for years now and it's good to write it all out.  I hope you enjoyed and, if you haven't seen the movie yet, go see it!

[notebook-13]

…Look, I know nobody really cares about Overhaul’s characterization, but I spent enough time puzzling over wtf is his deal while I was watching the anime that I may as well make a post about it. Especially considering how he’s come up in recent chapters in relation to Twice and Hawks, one thing that strikes me about Overhaul is that he wants to be normal, and to accomplish that, he tries to change the world instead of himself.

On the surface, Overhaul’s goal was to establish himself and the Hassaikai as the rulers of the underworld using the anti-quirk serum, thereby repaying the “debt” he owed the Hassaikai boss for giving him a home, but I think there’s more going on.

Overhaul’s goal was to eradicate the belief that human lives have inherent value. He planned to do this by destroying quirks, since he perceived them as the basis of people’s belief that they matter.

Since Overhaul’s dialogue is confusing, here are two other translations of his lines:

“Because people are endowed with these things called ‘quirks,’ they can dream. Dream that maybe they can be someone that matters…they’re all sick in the head! So wipe that smile off your face! Thanks to the power of that girl you were trying to save, everything you’ve worked so hard to cultivate…has just been reduced to naught!” (Ch152, mangastream)

“The diseased…have been given quirks, and that lets them dream. Thinking you can actually become something is an illness of the mind. It’s funny! With the power of that girl you’ve come to save, everything you’ve worked to cultivate…has now gone to waste!” (Ep74, Funimation subs)

Basically, people want to matter, and they use their quirks (symbolizing individuality, and human deviation more broadly) as proof to say they do. So when Mirio loses his quirk, Overhaul’s reaction isn’t, you’re cured, you’ve been purified, you’re normal now. His reaction is, now you are worth nothing, you are a good-for-nothing deku, the illusion of value your life held is gone, everything you held dear was actually a lie.

I think that’s why Overhaul can use his quirk with impunity without seeing the hypocrisy. He essentially views people as infected mice infatuated with their own disease, but he knows better! He knows everyone is worthless! So he’s the only one who’s immune to this mental disease of ~being special~, he doesn’t get any delusions of grandeur, he’s the only one great enough to change the world—etc. When Shigaraki removes his quirk, Overhaul’s illusions are torn away the way he was expecting from Mirio.

But Mirio stands up to Overhaul and asserts that he still chooses to find value in his life without depending on whether he has a quirk. That’s the underlying reason why Overhaul is repulsed by heroism: it’s built on the ideal that people matter, their suffering is bad, they deserve to be saved, and so forth.

These are concepts Overhaul resoundingly rejects, for reasons never explicitly stated, but I think a fair interpretation is to say Overhaul’s noticed that he’s different from other people, and he’s afraid it means there’s something wrong with him. This fear is on par with an existential terror, so he can’t acknowledge it directly, but it drives him to go above and beyond to prove he is a normal person who does belong in the Hassaikai, specifically, and in society more generally.

First, for context:

^^ Regardless of how the yakuza are in reality, in Japanese pop culture their image is two-faced. They can be chivalrous gangsters (honorable criminals who offer shelter to outcasts and uphold the vestiges of samurai culture) or they can be villains (relentless hypocrites who prey on outcasts and commit staggering violence). Even down to the clothes they wear, the boss and Overhaul embody these two yakuza archetypes, and accordingly, they can’t coexist.

At the core of their power struggle is what it means to be a yakuza, and whether Overhaul belongs as one.

This reaches its climax when Overhaul tells the boss about torturing Eri, and the boss tells him it’s time for him to leave the Hassaikai. Overhaul puts the boss in a coma because he can’t bear to be rejected and branded a deviant for his cruelty (“straying from humanity,” “soulless heresy,” “how little do you think of people?”). The boss pretty much outright tells him there’s something wrong with him.

Overhaul never talks about why he thinks so lowly of people. It could be any tragic event in his life, whatever went down before he met the boss, sure, or even just the simple fact that his quirk enables him to disassemble and reassemble people like objects, but I think the answers are in the material Horikoshi emphasizes: in his relationship with the boss, whom Overhaul fixated on as a kid.

The feature that strikes me most in Overhaul’s relationship with the boss is the (lack of) acceptance between them. Overhaul seeks the unconditional acceptance the boss offered him as a child so intensely that I can’t help but think there’s a deeper motive: validation. The “debt” Overhaul feels is an imprecise label for his discomfort; he feels pressured to earn his place in the yakuza because, on some level, he recognizes that he doesn’t belong here among chivalrous gangsters. He consequently overcompensates, though going to such extremes just underscores he is different, but he wants to win the boss’s validation that badly because, without it, Overhaul feels like a freak. He’s afraid that there’s something wrong with him. This emerges most pointedly in his “germophobia.”

Given that he 1) literally breaks into hives and flies into murderous rage when he’s touched, 2) considers heroism and quirks to be a disease, and 3) breaks into hives multiple times purely from the force of his emotions—I think his phobia shouldn’t be taken at face value.

In some way, Overhaul is “allergic” to society. He doesn’t belong in this world, among these cultural values, which is why he seeks to change society.

“return humanity to normal”

^^ Overhaul wants to change the world to match his version of normal, and, remarkably, the fact that he believes it’s more feasible to change the world than to change himself says leagues about how immutable he believes his differentness is. By destroying quirks, Overhaul wants to make everyone the same: worthless. He resents that other people even want to be different because feeling like there’s something wrong with him is his greatest fear.

Shigaraki is Overhaul’s main foil, but…there’s a reason why Twice introduces him.

Twice (narrating): There’s no place for insane guys like me in society. As for the people who heroes like to save…yeah, they’re always the good, virtuous ones. Anyway, I finally accepted me for me and decided to make myself useful to the League of Villains because I wanna be okay with being me. What I’m searching for now is other people just as crazy as I am. The aimless wackos looking for a place to belong… [Overhaul debuts, complaining that he’s surrounded by sickness] Twice: (staring at Overhaul) But now those nutjobs are starting to carve out a place for themselves in this world. Twice: “Okay… To ask…or not to ask?!” Twice: Whether it’s us or the heroes, everyone’s starting to take on a different look nowadays. Knowing who you are is what really matters. Who you wanna become…what you wanna do… It’s real, real important.

Ch115, viz.

Twice’s narration frames Overhaul as someone who’s just as freakish as he is, and it foreshadows “a place to belong” as a key theme of Overhaul’s arc—a theme that Overhaul’s first flashback (to when he met the boss) cements. Overhaul wants somewhere to be accepted and belong precisely because he’s a “crazy wacko” with no place in society. Usurping the boss is Overhaul’s attempt to carve out a place for himself in the world, to fashion the Hassaikai (and society at large) in his image.

Twice’s narration also highlights how Overhaul doesn’t know who he is or what he wants, and consequently, he turns out to be a humungous hypocrite who can’t uphold even a single of the principles he professes. He double-crosses the boss, he isn’t sure if he wants to commodify quirks or eliminate them, and he can’t accept that he, like everyone, is worthless. He’s so afraid that there’s something wrong with him that he instead insists that everyone else is “sick,” everyone else is wrong, not him, he’s the only normal person. Unlike the LoV, who are more or less okay with being outcasts, Overhaul sets out to correct this difference because he can’t bear it.

…And Twice’s foiling underscores Overhaul’s lack of emotional attachments. It’s ludicrous to think Twice would ever lock Shigaraki away and then release him after Twice’s clones have toppled society. Overhaul’s interest in the boss is as a source of validation to help him repress his fear that he’s abnormal, not in the boss as a human person with feelings.

While fighting Deku and Eri, Overhaul recalls putting the boss in a coma. He follows up his flashback with these lines:

Overhaul: “None of you are looking at the big picture here!! What I’m annihilating is the world itself!! Its very structure!! So a pathetic little would-be hero driven by his emotions…reaching out for whatever petty sense of justice he stumbles across [meaning the status quo]…can’t stop me!!”

Ch158, viz.

The “none of you” is very telling—Overhaul is referring to the boss as well as Deku. He resents the boss, and his resentment of heroes is partly a sublimation of that—both Deku and the boss are driven by compassion Overhaul lacks, which disturbs him, so he needs to lash out and tell himself that his motivator, "logic,” is normal.

But regardless of the underlying reason, his most important motivators are that he doesn’t value human lives, and that he feels alienation because, on some level, he fears there’s something wrong with him for that. (<– the boss basically tells him so, by spurning him for being cruel.)

^^ When Deku delivers his final blow, knocking off Overhaul’s mask and sending him crashing to the ground, Horikoshi reveals Overhaul’s face for the first time. It’s a plain face; the mask hides no quirk-related anomaly; ironically, Overhaul’s "remedy” to his phobia (the plague mask, to stop himself from breathing the same air as others) makes him look like more of a weirdo than if he went without it.

His flashback here gives us a glimpse of what it is that inspires Overhaul. Overhaul remembers walking in the rain in the boss—a memory that prompts him to make a last stand…but also, a memory that causes him to break out into hives. Once you look, it’s clear he has no hives before he remembers it.

This is a positive memory, but it’s also an intensely negative one.

Because, deep down, Overhaul knows the boss will never thank him again. Out of buried resentment for the way the boss withheld his acceptance and made Overhaul feel like a freak, Overhaul made a point to trash everything the boss loved—he turned the Hassaikai into villainous bastards and carelessly offs the boss’s devotees, he followed through on his evil plan to use Eri as the base for his anti-quirk serum, and he, uh, put the boss into a coma. He even rejected the name “Chisaki,” the name of the strange man who tried to be a yakuza but whom the boss discarded anyways, and named himself after his quirk in order to “remake” himself into someone new. Clearly, like everyone else, he’s invested in his quirk as a crucial aspect of his identity –.–

But embracing his “true nature” isn’t enough when Overhaul knows that the boss will never accept him again, when he is still different, which is why Overhaul wants the world to change to match his views on humanity, so that he’s normal.

Another time Overhaul spontaneously breaks out into hives is when Shigaraki leaves him.

No hives when Compress and Shigaraki touch him to remove his arms. Overhaul seems to be in shock. But Shigaraki’s words finally penetrate.

“You should just sit back and watch!! Have a nice life!”

“I just want to repay the debt I owe you. So please, just sit back…and watch.”

It’s these words from Shigaraki that prompt Overhaul to break out into hives, probably because, by sheer luck, Shigaraki quotes Overhaul’s last words to the boss. Before putting the boss in a coma, Overhaul told him to sit back and watch—one problem with that being, obviously, that someone in a coma can’t watch. So (again by sheer luck) Shigaraki actually does Overhaul one better and fulfills his words better than he did.

Similarly, Shigaraki is stealing Overhaul’s life’s work—just like how Overhaul stole the boss’s life’s work, the Hassaikai—and Overhaul’s quirk, just like how Overhaul stole Mirio’s…but Shigaraki steals them better than Overhaul did. It’s Overhaul’s lofty ambition to use the quirk serum change the world, to establish himself as normal and at the center of his new society, that serves as the basis of Overhaul’s self-esteem.…and it’s Overhaul’s quirk that gives Overhaul his name.

By removing his quirk, Shigaraki strips Overhaul of the name he gave himself. He’s no longer Overhaul, and he’s not even the boss’s man “Chisaki” anymore—he’s the nameless child on the streets whom everybody shuns. The outcast, the reject, someone who can only sit on the sidelines and helplessly watch.

Overhaul’s arc ends on the contrast between them. Overhaul is introduced as the mature, more methodical villain who threatens to supplant Shigaraki as AfO’s successor, but the story unmasks him as an irredeemable, reprehensible hypocrite who can’t stand by anything. Shigaraki, however, proves he’ll stand for what little ground he ekes out, and he copes with his resentment over his outsider status by openly acknowledging it and bonding with fellow outcasts to forge their own home. 

Ultimately, I think the core of Overhaul’s character boils down to 1) he doesn’t believe that people matter, 2) he feels intense alienation and isolation, and 3) he’s afraid he’s abnormal. How those three things interrelate, which of them is cause and which is effect, is flexible. I figure his hatred of quirks stems from one of these, probably (1).

Power is another consideration, one that I didn’t look at in my analysis since I think his thirst for power is his attempt to belong/alleviate his sense of abnormality by gaining status. And, though I think Overhaul is framed as a sociopath-like person whose lack of empathy is innate, I think there could be a solid characterization made for his extreme lack of empathy being a consequence of nurture, like he feels like a freak due to a childhood tragedy.

Miscellaneous Overhaul details;

Overhaul doesn’t seem to break out into hives when he touches dirty inanimate objects, like the floor; his phobia of “dirtiness” is focused on people.

His phobia is implied to have escalated or begun during adulthood. He didn’t seem to wear a mask as a kid, nor did he seem to break into hives before the canon timeline (Overhaul has no hives in any of his flashbacks, even when he’s cutting Eri or surrounded by gore).

Overhaul begins to wear his plague mask after a major argument with the boss over proper conduct for a yakuza.

Despite being Overhaul’s father-figure, the boss called him “Chisaki” instead of “Kai”—he might’ve been too traditional/stuffy to use Overhaul’s given name even when he was just a kid.

Mirio reminds Overhaul of the boss, which is why their fight gets so personal.

Overhaul hates Eri so much because they’re similar—both are “aberrations” who don’t belong. Eri is emphasized as a mutation who was rejected by even her mom, and the boss explicitly links their quirks…except that Eri has what he wants: the boss’s acceptance and a “normal” compassionate disposition, the latter of which he viciously leverages against her in order to punish her for it.

And also like…by virtue of being a young, little, helpless, sweet girl, meaning that she’s the perfect victim heroes always want to save more than anything, her life is disproportionately valuable to people, and that’s the sort of sentimental value Overhaul wants to destroy.

More reading;

If you somehow want to read even more about Overhaul, I only vaguely remember what these analyses are about bc it’s been a while since I last saw them, but each of these should have an interesting perspective on him.

Youtube video “The Beauty of Kai Chisaki” about the Buddhist context of Overhaul and the Shie Hassaikai.

A second youtube video called “Eri’s Quirk Explained with Philosophy” (about Overhaul, Eri, and the return to innocence) are both worth checking out. 

^^ I won’t link them directly because I’ve heard tumblr filters posts with external links out of searches.

Overhaul lost because people cared about his victims.

Linkspooky interprets Overhaul’s phobia as evidence of his repressed guilt, and they’ve also compared him and Shigaraki.

This conversation about Overhaul’s motives.

[xwickedxspiritx]

I have no idea if there’s a subsect of people who both love the Captive Prince novels and the Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV show, but as a person who adores both, I couldn’t get this AU out of my head.

For those who haven’t watched BTVS, it’s a 90s show about a teenage girl who becomes the Slayer -- a young woman who’s gifted extraordinary strength and fighting abilities in order to fend off vampires and other demons.

Let’s say Captive Prince characters exist in this world, in the modern day. I imagine Laurent comes from a long line of Watchers, the (usually male) scholars who are paired with Slayers to guide them. Basically, Slayers are expected to handle the fighting, Watchers usually stand on the sidelines and offer knowledge about demons’ weaknesses or when the next apocalypse will show up.

Aleron and Laurent’s uncle are Watchers, though they’ve never been paired with a Slayer. There’s only one Slayer at a time, and her powers get passed on to the next girl every couple of years (they have short life expectancies, unfortunately.) Auguste is a Watcher-in-training, and he’s totally against the current system. He think it’s unfair for Watchers to expect Slayers to do all the fighting and take on 99 percent of the risks, while Watchers usually sit back, maybe offer some advice, and also make a lot of money while Slayers get nothing.

His opinions don’t really make him popular, even though people are predisposed to love Auguste. They think it’s brave, but other Watchers fear that they’ll actually be expected to share some of their wealth with Slayers, or to take up weapons. But Auguste trains day in and day out, knowing he can’t match up to a Slayer’s superhuman strength but wanting to make himself a partner that could be relied upon.

At 13, Laurent’s dream is that he can follow in his brother’s footsteps to some degree. He hasn’t really started training to fight, since his brother worries he’d get overzealous and try to fight actually fight demons, but he reads as much as he can of demonology lore. Auguste is super proud of him, and they plan that when Auguste gets paired with a Slayer, Laurent will come along and be the brains of the operation.

Slayers fight lots of demons, but killing vampires is their primary fight. Vampires are demons who used to be human but were turned, losing their lives and their souls. They don’t age, but they can be killed with a stake in the heart, decapitation, fire, sunlight or lots of holy water. 

The most infamous vampire of the day is Damianos. He and his brother Kastor were once sons of a prosperous noble family in Greece a few centuries back, but a beautiful blonde vampire named Jokaste turned them both. For 300 years or so, they’ve traveled as a group throughout Europe, wreaking carnage wherever they go. I imagine Jokaste would play them off each other, continuing relationships with both at the same time. Damianos doesn’t really care, but Kastor nurses a bitter jealousy.

As vampires, they’re not capable of remorse. Atrocities are commonplace. Damianos delights in finding strong warriors he can defeat and kill, or beautiful maidens he can feed from. Perhaps he’s even killed one or two Slayers.

When they’re sighted in France present-day, the de Vere family goes on high alert. But Laurent’s uncle is scheming. Maybe he’s after powerful, extremely dangerous magical artifacts that the de Vere family has been entrusted with, but which Aleron and Auguste keep away from him.

So Laurent’s uncle makes his move and kills his brother. But he sets it up to look like it’s Damianos who’s responsible -- Damianos, who’s known as one of the most dangerous demons in the world. Vampires aren’t super high on the demon totem pole, but Damianos fights with a skill no other vampire possesses.

Auguste believes the lie wholeheartedly and makes up his mind to go after Damianos. Let’s say the currently Slayer is also a Frenchwoman, maybe a younger Vannes, and they’re friends, though not officially partnered. They go after Damianos, who doesn’t even know, or care, about the de Vere family.

It goes badly. Damianos might not know what’s incensed Auguste and Vannes, but he likes a good fight in any case. He’s delighted, really, that two strong fighters sought him out instead of the other way around -- and he looks forward to killing them.

They put up a good fight, but Damianos is skilled on a level they didn’t expect. He gets a hit on Vannes that knocks her down hard, and Auguste, who’s been disarmed of a sword he was wielding, sees that she’s about to die. And suddenly, through all the grief and pain, he feels selfish. 

If Vannes dies, the world loses a Slayer who has experience and hardiness, who could still save so many lives. If she dies, her powers get passed on, but they have no idea who’ll get them next, and Auguste has learned what a terrible burden it is to be the Slayer -- to be forced to give up your life to an often thankless duty.

So when Damianos raises the sword to cut Vannes down, Auguste leaps in the way and takes the blow. He tells Vannes to run, because while he dragged her  into this fight for vengeance, Damianos isn’t the biggest fish to fry in terms of saving the world from demons.

Vannes hates herself for it, but she does run. And Auguste resists to the end, but he dies.

Auguste takes his last breath while Laurent struggles to get to him, held back by his uncle. They’ve been in a hidden vantage point. Laurent was so sure Auguste and Vannes would win, and when the tide turns, his uncle holds him back, saying no, Laurent, your brother wouldn’t want you to throw your life away, would he?

So Laurent watches, like the kind of Watcher he and Auguste were so determined to reject. He watches as Damianos looks at Auguste’s corpse without a care in the world. He watches as Damianos licks blood off his fingers and grins with satisfaction. 

Damianos leaves France shortly after, and seven long years begin for Laurent. Years where he learns that his uncle doesn’t have his best interests in mind after all. Where he suffers abuse, and realizes that his uncle could care less about a Watcher’s duty -- he’s taking the de Vere family’s dangerous artifacts and selling them to whoever can pay for them. Maybe he’s been in league with, and is scheming to take over, Wolfram & Hart, an international law firm that specializes in enabling demons’ interests. Evil, but pays well.

By the time Laurent’s twenty, he’s a full-fledged demon hunter all on his own. He knows he’ll never have the power a Slayer would have, but he’s trained himself ruthlessly just like in canon. He’s matched that with an encyclopedic knowledge of demonology and the occult that’s unmatched by any other current Watcher.

Of course, Laurent’s uncle campaigns among the Watcher’s Council to convince them that Laurent is unfit for the position, that he’s dangerously obsessed with the vampire Damianos and would only get a slayer attached to him killed. The Council agrees, and even with all of Laurent’s skill and knowledge, he’s never invited to any Watcher business.

So he goes freelance. Laurent tracks and kills demons across France, maybe venturing into other countries as well. He builds his own network with other demon hunters, and gets a reputation of being ruthless and unbeatable.

With him is Berenger, another Watcher-in-training who was friends with Auguste. Maybe he had to leave the Watchers because of his lover -- Ancel, an incubus. Obviously, the Watchers aren’t big on human/demon couples. Then the rest of the gang -- Jord, Lazar, Orlant, etc. Perhaps Aimeric tags along by Jord’s side as a plant from his uncle.

(I wish Captive Prince had more usable female characters that could also fit in with this. Let’s say Laurent has a lot of female cousins from his mother’s side who are badass demon fighters.)

But his uncle wasn’t wrong that Laurent has an obsession. A hatred and quest for vengeance that kept him going through the worst years -- his desire to kill Damianos, the soulless vampire.

But Damianos hasn’t been seen in years, pretty much since the day he killed Auguste. Unknown to Laurent, Damianos got himself in trouble soon after he left France. He kidnapped and tortured Kashel (sorry!) and then carelessly left her body to be found by her clan of powerful witches. 

Obviously, Halvik and the rest of the clan are enraged. They resolve to curse him with a punishment far worse than death, something that will make him suffer for the rest of his eternal life.

They give him back his human soul.

Without a soul, Damianos could kill, rape and otherwise destroy without any pangs of conscience. While the demon retained the human Damen’s memories and some parts of his personality, as a vampire he was slave to his basest instincts. His lust, both for fighting and sex, and his lack of empathy for what other people feel and experience.

But when his soul is returned, Damen’s better instincts come rushing back -- his sense of honor, his capacity for love, his belief in fair play and doing the right thing. He’s ripped out of the afterlife and forced to confront 300+ years of senseless violence and brutality, and to remember each person whose life he took or ruined.

At first, he’s lost. He goes to Jokaste and Kastor, but they reject him. Jokaste’s not a fan of his return to morality, and Kastor jumps at the chance to ditch Damen for good and have Jokaste to himself.

Let’s say that for a few years, Damen despairs. What does a vampire with a soul do with his life? He can’t live as a human, because he won’t age, he can’t walk in daylight without catching on fire, and he still needs blood to survive (though now he buys pigs’ blood from the butcher.) He wants to make up for what he’s done, but he has no idea how. He returns to his hometown in Greece, seeking some sort of comfort.

There, he meets Nikandros. He’s a fledgling demon hunter who only started hunting demons because his family was killed by them. Most humans have no idea demons exist, so he got thrown into that world headfirst. No superpowers, but he’s athletic and strategic.

He realizes what Damen is pretty quickly, though he knows nothing of his history. He’s ready to kill him without mercy, since no one’s ever heard of a “good vampire.” But Damen wins his trust -- maybe Nikandros gets outnumbered in a fight, and Damen swoops in to help him. Eventually, they team up, and Damen finds a new purpose -- and a means of redemption -- in fighting other demons and keeping innocent people safe.

Meanwhile, Laurent’s pissed that in seven years, there’s been no new sightings of Damianos or any word on his exploits. Damianos was never one to hide, so it’s baffling that he basically disappears. Laurent never considers that he might have been killed -- he saw for himself just how good he was.

As much as he wants to devote himself to hunting Damianos down, there’s the rest of the world to worry about. He also knows that if he confront Damianos too early, he’ll throw away his life for nothing. So he keeps training, keeps killing other demons, and tries not to think about the countless other victims Damianos surely must be racking up.

Suddenly, he gets word that a potential apocalypse might be happening soon in Greece. Vannes died about a year after Auguste (though she lived to save the world a few times in that period), and currently there’s a very new Slayer in Mexico who’s pretty untrained. Still, the Watcher’s Council wants to send her anyway, fairly unconcerned with whether she dies or not, since a new one will just take her place.

The new Slayer’s Watcher just died, and she hasn’t been assigned a new one. Laurent’s uncle volunteers him for the job, saying that since Laurent’s always wanted more of a role, this is perfect. The Council agrees, though of course they all figure Laurent and the Slayer will probably die.

Laurent knows what his uncle is up to, but he wants to go. Even if the risk to his life is greater than ever before, he knows it’s what Auguste would do. The new Slayer is just fifteen years old, and he won’t leave her alone to face the end of the world. He’ll train her to the best of his ability, then fight by her side. His team agrees to go as well, because despite the odds, they believe in Laurent.

So this sets Laurent on a collision course with Damen. I imagine that Laurent sets up camp in Athens, meets the Slayer, grows very attached, and starts training her. They don’t have much time, only three months before a potential apocalypse -- the world falling into hell, etc, etc.

Damen and Nikandros have also heard of the coming apocalypse, and naturally they’re also determined to prevent it. But when they arrive in Athens, they hear that the Slayer’s in town. And she’s not alone -- she’s got a whole team that fights beside her. For a Slayer, that’s pretty unheard of, and Damen is shocked -- he’s known (killed) a few Slayers, and they were always, always alone.

So he’s curious. He’s not stupid enough to make his presence known when the Slayer’s around, but he starts lurking a bit, tries to learn more about her and her team. Eventually, he catches them fighting a group of vampires.

He can tell the Slayer has a lot to learn. Even with superhuman strength and agility, she’s hesitant, doesn’t move confidently in a way that could really harness that power.

But he sees someone who does fight with confidence, even arrogance, who moves like quicksilver even though he has to be a normal human.

He sees Laurent, and a part of him’s already in love.

But he recognizes that scent. He sees the resemblance between the younger brother and the older, who he remembers all too well. Even though Laurent was hidden, Damianos knew he was there that night. Yet even as a vampire, he had no interest in hurting children.

Damen sees Laurent, the Slayer and the rest of the gang kill a dozen vampires like it’s nothing. He’s never seen teamwork like that, except for maybe him and Nikandros. It’s obvious that Laurent’s the leader, and Damen is possessed with the overwhelming, but futile, urge to know him, to understand what’s in the mind behind that golden hair.

But Damen knows he has no right to know anything about Laurent. Even with Kastor’s rejection of him, he still loves his brother. Killing a person’s brother is not something you forgive. Even though Damen and Damianos aren’t truly the same person, Damen still carries a deep guilt for everything Damianos did in his skin.

All the same, he can’t resist lurking a bit more, just to get a few more glimpses of Laurent in battle. He gets a bit stalkerish, finding out where Laurent’s team is camping out, getting an idea of each member and their fighting style, their personality. Of course, he’s also fighting demons with Nikandros. Let’s say that as the apocalypse gears up, more and more demons are drawn to Athens, so it’s a fight just to keep the city from burning down in the meantime.

It’s inevitable that their paths cross for real. Laurent, still a bit solitary at heart, goes on long walks by himself to think and to drink in the local history and art. One night, he’s set upon by several demons eager to rid the town of him. Damen had also been following Laurent at a distance, curious about what he did when not fighting.

Laurent’s armed, but only with a small dagger. Damen watches him fight three or four demons singlehandedly and is impressed yet again by his skill and versatility. But he realizes that it’s not enough -- Laurent’s going to at the very least get badly injured during this fight.

Even knowing it’s a bad idea, that he’s basically signing his death warrant, Damen rushes in to save him. He fights off the demons easily, having enhanced strength that Laurent can’t match with any amount of training.

Laurent, on the ground and bleeding, can’t believe his eyes. Damen, like the sweet idiot he is, offers to help him back to their camp, thereby admitting that he’s been aware of Laurent and his location this whole time.

Laurent lunges at him, overcome with rage, but he passes out from his injuries. So Damen does what he promises and takes him back to camp. Laurent’s team is surprised, horrified and even a little amused at this infamous vampire carrying Laurent in like he’s something precious, setting him down softly and then escaping before they can stop him.

When Laurent wakes up, he thinks it was a dream. But he saw it himself -- Damianos is really back, and Laurent has no idea what he’s playing at. Did he hunt Laurent here, wanting to kill him for some reason? Why didn’t he take the chance he had?

Laurent decides it’s Damianos’s typical MO -- he wants a good fight, and Laurent was too injured to be interesting enough to kill. But he recovers, and now he’s ready. Damianos is in Athens, and so is he, and their battle will come any day now.

But instead, Damen starts jumping into Laurent’s fights whenever it looks like things might take a turn for the worse. He even helps the Slayer once or twice when she’s caught alone by a pack of demons. Nikandros thinks he’s an absolute moron, and he rightly deduces that, despite all common sense, Damen has feelings for Laurent and wants to be close to him any way he can. More than that, he just wants to help Laurent, to make up in some small way for the harm he caused him.

With each friendly save from Damen, Laurent grows more and more incensed. He’s convinced Damen is playing some sort of game with him, although that was never Damianos’s style. Again and again, Damen helps him and his team. Sometimes he’ll even show up with tips about a new demon in town, or something about the swiftly approaching apocalypse.

It comes to a head one day when Damen and Laurent are both captured by a witch who wants to use them for some nefarious ritual. They’re chained in a cellar, out of each other’s reach but forced for once to stay in the same room, able to see and talk to each other.

At first, Laurent wants to ignore Damen. Being in the room with his brother’s killer, and not distracted by an imminent fight to survive, is almost too much for him. But then he takes the chance to pour all the invective he can on Damen, his tongue the only weapon he currently has.

Damen takes it all silently. And when Laurent’s spent, when his grief chokes him, Damen tells Laurent that he knows he can never make up for what he’s done. That he’s been selfish to force his presence on Laurent during those fights. He’s honest, so he tells Laurent how much he admires him. Not for his looks or even just his fighting ability, but for the way he guides and protects the Slayer, the way he looks out for his team.

Because he just can’t stop himself, because some part of him still craves for Laurent to see him in a positive light, he also tells him about the curse. That the Damianos he knew is gone, and that Damen carries his sins but is not that same demon.

Laurent still thinks it’s a trick. He’s forced to rely on Damen to get out of the witch’s cellar, but when they’re free, he challenges Damen to a fight. No holds barred, in which victory means death for the opponent.

Damen agrees, because he feels it’s what Laurent is owed, that chance to take out his rage. And a part of him that sounds too much like Damianos is eager to feel for himself Laurent’s prowess for battle.

So they fight. Laurent gives it everything he’s got, everything he took seven years to build. Like in canon, it isn’t enough. Damen doesn’t hold back, respecting Laurent’s anger and skill too much.

But when it comes time for the final blow Laurent’s expecting, looking up at Damen in hatred, it doesn’t come. The monster Damianos, the soulless vampire, has a look in his eyes that Laurent can’t fathom.

Damen tells Laurent that if he wants to take his life, he’s earned it through the suffering Damianos caused him and so many others. But Damen doesn’t want to see the world end, and he knows that Laurent needs him to stop the apocalypse. The Slayer, though improving in leaps and bounds through Laurent’s tutelage, can’t be expected to take on the end of the world by herself. And she isn’t yet the partner that Laurent needs -- that Damen can be.

Laurent’s tempted to take up his weapon again and cut Damen down from behind, but he’s also realizing that the apocalypse is coming too soon, and he, his team and the Slayer might not be enough. Damen, however, has 300 years of experience with demons, has seen apocalypses from a distance and is surprisingly intelligent behind all that muscle.

He accept Damen’s offer, as painful as it is. He’ll work with Damen (and begrudgingly, Nikandros) to stop the apocalypse with the help of the Slayer. But when it’s over, they’ll fight again, and Laurent will win. He’ll kill Damianos.

In the month left before the end of the world, they’re together constantly. Laurent doesn’t take this gracefully, using his vicious tongue against Damen at every opportunity. But Damen sees how he is with the Slayer, how he’s strict but gentle in teaching her. He falls in love with Laurent even more.

For Laurent, it grows harder and harder to deny how, at least professionally, Damen completes him, makes him a better hunter. His eye for strategy finds what Laurent misses, and his strength and skill in battle still manage to shock Laurent sometimes. Again and again, Damen saves his life, and against his judgment, Laurent saves Damen’s life too. They become the scourge of the Greek underworld.

When the apocalypse comes, they’re ready. It’s not easy, but they stop it, and they all manage to survive. Damen grins at him, and Laurent can’t stop looking at him.

When it’s over, they fight again, one on one. This time, Laurent really does win. Over the past month, he’s watched Damen like a hawk, partly for any hint of betrayal and partly because he just can’t figure him out. He’s starting to believe that Damen really did get his soul back, but if that’s true, what does that mean for Laurent? Damen’s still a vampire, still wears the face of his brother’s killer. 

But Damen’s also the one who fought by his side like no one else ever has, ever could. He talked with Laurent through the night, planning and strategizing, making up for what Laurent overlooked. Damen, a vampire, helped Laurent train the Slayer, his natural enemy.

So with the blade at Damen’s neck, Laurent stops. It’s the most difficult thing he’s ever had to do, but he lets his anger go. As much as he hates Damianos the vampire, he’s seen Damen the man beneath the monster, and he can’t kill him.

The Slayer returns to Mexico, and she asks Laurent to return as her full-time Watcher. The Council isn’t happy about it, but it’s hard to argue after his stunning success.

Laurent’s team is on board to go with him. And Damen says, well, he’s never been to the Americas. (Nikandros, ever-suffering, goes with them, too afraid to leave Damen to Laurent’s mercy. He’s the only family he has left.)

After that, it’s slow but inevitable. Damen and Laurent come together, helpless to do anything else. For the first time in Laurent’s life, and even Damen’s centuries-long existence, they both feel they’ve found a true partner they can trust. A person they love more than they thought possible.

On the night of Laurent’s twenty-first birthday, they consummate that partnership. It’s a moment of true happiness for both of them, for two people who felt unworthy of that kind of happiness, who thought they’d never find it again after all they’ve lost.

But the curse that returned Damen’s soul wasn’t full-proof. He was meant to suffer, to never find a moment’s rest under the burdens of his guilt. Finding happiness with Laurent changes that. It breaks the curse.

He staggers out of the room as Laurent sleeps peacefully. Damen tries to cling to his soul with everything he has, but the pull is too strong.

When Laurent wakes up, he’s alone. At first, he’s irritated, then he’s afraid that Damen’s run off to some fight. A day passes, and he can’t find him everywhere.

But Laurent’s network has started to whisper. The whole underworld beneath Mexico City is buzzing.

And it says, Damianos is back.

Laurent loses his lover, his partner, and is faced again with his brother’s killer. A soulless vampire who remembers the last eight years with disdain. Who’s obsessed with Laurent, which isn’t exactly new, but now sees him as the ideal target -- someone he wants to defeat in every way possible.

To make things worse, Laurent’s uncle shows up. An extraordinarily powerful artifact has been unearthed in Mexico -- Acathla, a demon turned to stone centuries ago, who if reawoken can swallow the world into hell.

Laurent’s facing his uncle on one side and Damianos on the other, who’s joined up again with Jokaste and Kastor. He knows that with Damianos returned, he finally does have a chance at true revenge -- and yet now, when he looks at Damianos, all he sees is Damen.

Laurent takes down his uncle and his whole network of smugglers before he can sell Acathla to the highest bidder. But at the last moment, Damianos sweeps in and steals Acathla right from under him, killing Orlant in the process.

Now, it’s do or die. If Laurent doesn’t fight Damianos and kill him, he could use Acathla to end the world. For months, he’s scoured every possible resource for knowledge on the curse, something that could bring Damen back. 

He thinks he’s finally found something, but it’s badly translated and Laurent doesn’t have the gift for magics that it would require. Ancel pulls out a precocious young witch, Nicaise, that he says he can do it, but Laurent says no. Magic is dangerous, especially a curse on the level of Damen’s, and he doesn’t want a young teenager taking that risk.

So he steels himself and goes to face Damianos. When Jokaste and Kastor stand in his way, Laurent manages to kill Kastor, and Jokaste makes her escape. He’s left with Damianos, who’s enraged at his brother’s death. Damianos, despite himself, also hates Laurent for the emptiness inside him, the hole left by the love Damen felt for the human.

Except that emptiness loses him the edge Damen always seemed to have. Once again, Laurent has his blade against the vampire’s neck, the neck of his enemy and his lover. 

Of course, Ancel and Nicaise didn’t listen to Laurent when he told them not to try the curse. It’s hell on Nicaise, and probably opens some doors he can’t close again, but the power passes through him -- and it works.

Laurent sees a light go back into Damen’s eyes, right as he’s bringing down his sword. He can’t believe it -- he’s too afraid of being wrong -- but Damen gasps, falls to his knees and looks at Laurent like hasn’t seen him in years. The curse hits him like a train, and he doesn’t remember Acathla or losing his soul.

For the first time in months, Damen’s arms are around Laurent. There’s a kiss to his hair, to his forehead, and then to his lips, and Laurent finally allows himself to hope.

But when he opens his eyes again, he sees what Damen can’t -- that Acathla’s eyes are also open. He’s awake and ready to suck the world into hell, unless the one who awakened him is sacrificed into that pit first.

And Laurent finally understands what his brother felt in those last moments. What every Slayer knows. That duty comes before everything, before love and before life.

So he kisses Damen one more time. He tells him, for the first time, that he loves him. And he tells him to close his eyes, knowing he will, because Damen trusts him without reservation.

In a mockery of all the times he could never do it, Laurent’s blade goes so easily through Damen’s heart, pinning him to Acathla. He looks into Damen’s shocked eyes as the vampire is thrown into hell. The portal closes with a snap.

Laurent is alone. 

(If you are a BTVS fan and you’ve seen season three, you know how this goes. Damen will return from hell by some act of god or devil, throwing Laurent into turmoil again -- after everything, what would it mean to forgive Damen for a second time? But unlike with their counterparts Angel and Buffy, I like to think true love conquers all in their case.)

[numinous-shaman]

Secret Space Program Timeline Wars

Not even organic time travelers know what's going to manifest exactly, but I do know this is a timeline war and the forces of chaos and corptocracy are what will lead us into a horrible A.I., future of soullessness and military industrial servitude, if we don't shift the tide in consciousness back to human values soon.

There ARE definately forces ready to resist tyranny all over the country and there are also militarized groups invested in destroying the stamina of defensive forces too, war on our soil is NOT desirable. There used to be only a timeline with five free states in the future, having Constitutional protection, back in 2011, I was aware when that was secured. Then we got an 11 state timeline some years later and I'm pretty sure the last I felt we had a pretty solid 27 state structure for manifesting continued protection of Inalienable human rights, should succession become necessary.

I hope it's more now, it would be wonderful to have the whole country turn back from the Great Reset completely, before the Great Divide manifests. But, consciousness just isn't aware enough to expect that at this point, it's painfully obvious watching the majority of people demand to be experimentation survivors and freely give over their genetic code to hybridization with other species, and new technology, that the level of awareness of the masses has been greatly reduced, along with understanding of their own value, rights and responsibilities. Of course, we KNOW in the future that it was "the fears" that caused them to sell their liberty, not actual harm, just the idea of it and their lack of awareness regarding the methods to manipulate them made it all possible. Watching this play out in real time, is just gut wrenching.

MAYBE, if enough false flags happened to jolt then awake they would help fight their captors instead of beg them in, but the iron curtain of information has become increasingly difficult to penetrate. I don't think Trump is the Messiah, but I think if he's prohuman then he'll use this opportunity he has to rally some people who care about freedom behind him and hit them where it hurts, AT THE INFORMATION LEVEL. We need to get past the frequency fence of distorted information being used to hold humanity hostage and unable to discern the danger.

Of course, the controllers want it that way, they want us dumb and happy when they cut out lives short and all the blame for the genocide resting squarely on our own, failure to rightfully apply free will. I've had more than my fair share of exposure to eugenist, reptilian timelording types of beings and I will tell you what they never will, because I'm not like them although I perceive them. They believe in survival of the fittest, or most cunning, really.

They figure if they are smart enough to fool humans and conquer us, then our benevolence is a weakness and they deserve to rule with an iron rod and treat us like domesticated cattle and resources for their whims. They think of this world as part of a larger ocean and the bigger fish wins, unless the smaller fish gets smart enough to survive. The idea of a loving Creator force is foreign to them, nature is cruel, only children have foolish dreams of things which are obviously not true, that's what they would say to a child who believes good will win out, simply because it's moral.

Now, if the alien Corptocracy gets their way and are able to slice through the federal government and manifest authoritianism quickly, this is probably where the Orwellian vision of two sort of parallel societies might spring up in the same land, some flocking to federally managed economic development, while others reclaim land and resources for sustainability, environmental protection and multicultural preservation, in states leaving the union. Those were basically the legal umbrellas we used to get support from the corptocracy in some timelines in the future and not called fundamentalists, revolutionaries or radicals for simply wanting to remain natural humans and to keep our Bill of Rights.

They didn't care about our rights or our liberty or right to make our own health decisions, because they thought it was important, NO. We had to show that the degradation of our environment was no good for them and the degradation of our genetics was akin to killing a protected animal, because it was an endangered' species. Human interest was protected only under the banner of what today might be equated to Leftist Liberalism or Environmental Activism. So many humans are already under the influence of such heavy programming and so degraded genetically, they already serve the AntiChrist system, the Corptocracy who is attempting to rewrite our souls for capture and control, and just don't know it. Wanting to be human completely and to access nature and make individual choices, was called tragically fundamentalism and seen as radical or mad. Covertly, the secret societies weilding heavy handed influence within the Corptocracy knew the truth and knew the human ascension potential was intentionally being cut off from the masses and tightly controlled. They had their own plans of breeding into the genetics of ascendant humans while enslaving the rest.

The Multidimensional capacity of the human soul was lost by most after being genetically degraded with medicine, environmental toxins and food. Humans literally lost their ability to fully embody and connect with their soul and multidimensional nature, the process happened over a few generations and most didn't notice it occurring or miss it when it was lost, everyone was tuned into their pain and pleasure body only, five senses they couldn't see through with higher ones. In many probable futures a company called Aegis was ultimately responsible for raising awareness and support from the rich to help achieve their goal of protecting, studying and tracking the human potential for Multidimensional communication and influence on the environment. Many human domains for natural living were organized and protected legally and with force by Aegis Corp. and Aegis Shield Corp. Organic and inorganic time travel was experimented with by many factions, warring for control over the timelines and various aspects of our future. Time travel operations were in place before Sept. 11th and that event itself has already been altered by divine intelligence and human operatives, so we are experiencing already, an altered version of the past. The 911 timeline, 911 numerological sequences are an energetic reality that crosses the threshold of the unconscious mind for many of us.

It's so important to understand though, the leaders didn't care about our souls or the afterlife, the government is controlled by soulless corpore entities, not human ideals. They only helped us, in the end at all, because they wanted to replicate what it's REALLY like to be human and receive your Divine nature in artificial systems and experience a replicate reality using technology for virtual extended life spans in artificial worlds of clones or digitized and uploaded into what is akin to a virtual reality cloud. The small percentage of true humans lived parallel lives, but they fought to not be dependent on the Corptocracy, so that separation would remain and the rest of the world saw and treated then like an oddity, some kind of stage show freak for them to project their own fears and insecurity onto. They had no idea they were just dangling participles, evolutionarily speaking, slated for nothing but further degeneration, experimentation and enslavement. I can already feel this separation becoming palpable, the emergency vaccine powers are definately a trigger event

The real humans, eventually were able to live protected, to stay in touch with natural order and live like a natural human, but only in exchange for information and for power the secret societies used for themselves. We still managed to create hubs of Divine Creator energies, cruelty free animal zones and real human existence to assist with keeping balance in the world by helping the Corptocracy understand the importance of universal law and the real purpose of morality at the level of the template of reality manifestation. This helped the populations (we weren't all human) to survive and avert pole shift, we literally have to keep the balance.

The effect of that knowledge on the majority was not natural though, it was tyranical and the populations who destroyed the old America demanding liberation were the ones who ended up with the least liberty in the end. All of these impressions are collected from possible futures and parallel realities, I pray everyday the options improve and more real humans remember who they are and what is really important. They had to shut the inorganic (technologically) induced time travel missions down, the effects were bizarre and became a greater concern than originally imagined. There are rogue groups still experimenting covertly, it is well known in the future and these groups are hunted religiously by the scientific order.

Organic time travel is more mystical in nature, it's the ability of your higher self to project itself back in time to your physical self and effect change which shifts the future. This is just one example of the types of abilities the Multidimensional human is able to do, if their genetics and consciousness aren't interfered with and free will used to serve Love, like Christ taught. The elite know that REAL humanity doesn't need their faulty technology to externalize their powers for interconnectivity and don't need controllers at all. That's why they aim to suppress us, dumb us down and keep the secret about who and what we are far from our awareness.

They need us to control, to feed off, to feel powerful by dominating and to justify their own limited, dimensionalized existence. They are like an interdimensional invader, a parasitic intelligence we are playing host to and giving more power over our entire universal time matrix. The ONLY people who won't be TOTALLY owned and controlled by these corporate boards and warlords in the future, are going to be the ones who dedicate themselves to consciousness expansion and Spiritual Ascension, because they'll need those enhanced abilities and awareness to stay a step ahead of the parasite and their legion of zombie enforcers, demanding submission to intelligence beneath the true Human. They expect us to out smart them if we really deserve our free will, I'm not condoning the belief system, just making it conscious in hopes more people can see through the vaneer of humanity they aim to project.