#this is a very shitty comic btw but. something about them living long enough to be old men together...

[martyrbat]

"a few more white hairs since the last time we saw each other!" | superman & batman: generations #4

[ID: Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne against a solid, light blue background. They're both visibly older and are in their costumes with Bruce having his cowl off. Clark has his arm around Bruce's shoulders as they smile at each other. Clark's hair is down to his shoulders and is entirely silver while Bruce's hair is mostly black with grey streaks in it. END ID]

[pass-the-bechdel]

Marvel Cinematic Universe: Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)

Does it pass the Bechdel Test?

Yes, once.

How many female characters (with names and lines) are there?

Seven (30.43% of cast).

How many male characters (with names and lines) are there?

Sixteen.

Positive Content Rating:

Three.

General Film Quality:

Significantly flawed, and well-known in fandom for it. Unpopular opinion? I still think it’s better than the first Avengers film.

MORE INFO (and potential spoilers) UNDER THE CUT:

Passing the Bechdel:

Natasha and Laura pass in a single-line trade. It’s sooo close to not counting.

Female characters:

Natasha Romanoff.

Wanda Maximoff.

Maria Hill.

Helen Cho.

Peggy Carter.

Laura Barton.

FRIDAY.

Male characters:

Tony Stark.

Steve Rogers.

JARVIS.

Thor.

Clint Barton.

Strucker.

Pietro Maximoff.

Bruce Banner.

Ultron.

Sam Wilson.

James Rhodes.

Ulysses Klaue.

Heimdall.

Nick Fury.

Erik Selvig.

Vision.

OTHER NOTES:

Everyone talking about Strucker like we already know who he is...

The “Shit!”/”Language!” gag was funnier before they hung a lantern on it. Not least because it takes almost a full minute before Tony harks back to it (fifty seconds, actually. I checked). If you’re gonna make a Thing out of it, you gotta follow up immediately, not after fifty seconds of cutting around to different character intros and action shots and a whole lot of other dialogue. 

Urrgghh, ok, I’m going to break my standing rule about not discussing source material, because we gotta acknowledge the colossal wrongness of re-writing the Maximoff twins - canonically Jewish Romani - as willing volunteers in a Nazi science experiment. It gets worse the more you think about it. There are a few things about this movie which generated significant negative outcry, and this incredibly offensive decision is one of them.

Tony and Thor fighting over who has a better girlfriend does have a certain charm to it. If you’re gonna have a testosterone-off, it might as well be about how great your partner is.

I got a zero out of ten on this out-of-nowhere forced romance crap with Natasha and Bruce. We’ll come back to this later.

“I will be reinstituting Prima Nocta,” Tony declares, as he prepares to lift Thor’s hammer and thereby theoretically take charge of the Nine Realms. Primae noctis (believed to in fact be a myth) refers to a supposed Dark-Ages law that granted lords the ‘right’ to take the virginity of any newlywed peasant woman who lived on their land. So, this is a wonderful little rape joke from Tony (or, y’know, not so little, since primae noctis in reality would make Tony a serial rapist). Ha ha ha ha. Hilarious. Good one.

I’m really mad about the parts here that are total garbage, because mostly, the revels sequence has a nice low-key quality to it, good solid team dynamics. 

I can’t fucking believe that they played the ‘and then Bruce falls with his face in Natasha’s cleavage!’ gag. I cannot believe it. Is this a disgusting frat-boy comedy from the nineties?

Honestly, Tony, just shut up and admit that you KNEW from the get-go that it was wrong to try and make Ultron happen (that is why you kept it secret from everyone else to begin with); don’t try to defend the decision now that you’ve got a ‘murderbot’ on your hands. Take responsibility for a bad choice instead of talking shit about how you had to and everyone else is just too short-sighted, damn it! 

Andy Serkis is delightful.

The Iron Man/Hulk fight absolutely KILLS the momentum of this film. It goes for way the fuck too long (eight minutes) and has no narrative significance at all. Pro tip for action scenes: they should always be driving the story somewhere. You can pull off eighty minutes of action so long as your plot is advancing alongside/within it.

Also, Iron Man causes a huge amount of additional damage during this fight, in the service of the aforementioned pointless action. His efforts to minimise Hulk’s effects are extremely poor, and calling in his relief organisation to clean up after the fact does not negate that. 

Gotta love that throwing a wife and kids at Hawkeye at the same time as we suddenly start pushing this Natasha/Bruce thing. That’s not transparent at all. I also understand this to be a major deviation from Clint’s identity in the comics, and very unpopular with fans for that reason, but regardless; reinventing him as a family man to reset the romantic blather after baiting fans with the possibility of Clint/Natasha in the first Avengers movie is such a shitty move. I was not invested in the ship myself and would have loved to have them reinforce the just-friends relationship between Hawkeye and Black Widow, because there are not enough platonic friendships between compatible men and women in fiction, but 'they’re not interested in each other because they’re busy with someone else!’ is a weak reinforcement indeed. Less forced romances, and definitely less token wifey who exists for no other Goddamn reason at all. This comes out of nowhere, and not in a clever-surprise kind of way.

“You still think you’re the only monster on the team?” Natasha says, after telling Bruce about her sterilisation. This earned a HUGE backlash, and for good reason - despite all arguments about how what Natasha meant was that her being raised to be an assassin makes her a monster, the direct implication of her words as they are phrased and as the discussion is structured is that her inability to have children makes her monstrous, and that’s deeply offensive. It’s also completely in keeping with a narrative which is often played out against women, in which their value as people is attributed directly to their ability to produce offspring, so it’s not even like this outrageous implication of monstrosity - the corruption of what it means to be female! - is that unusual. It’s awful, but not unusual. Add on the fact that 1) Natasha’s nightmare-flashes specifically foregrounded her sterilisation over all other details of her training, supporting the idea that she believes that it’s what makes her irredeemable (instead of, y’know, all the murdering and stuff), and 2) this is Joss Whedon’s work and he is OBSESSED with highlighting the womanhood of his female characters and treating it like their defining trait while also variously punishing them for it, and you’ve got every reason to interpret this terrible fucking line as exactly the heinous thing it (presumably, unwittingly) seems to be. 

Steve ripping a log in half with his bare hands is the funniest thing in this whole movie.

Thor’s brief side-adventure with Erik Selvig is pretty out-of-place. He just...goes for a swim in a convenient magic pond that Selvig chances to know about. Seems normal.

Ultron is full of such boring, empty rhetoric. Reminds me of Loki in The Avengers, with all that sound-and-fury. 

I love Paul Bettany.

Man, they sure do find Natasha instantly. It’s almost like making a damsel-in-distress of her who needs to be rescued by the team was completely meaningless...

Breaking my no-BTS rule (since I already have done for this movie at this point) because it’s well-known how Joss Whedon ordered Elizabeth Olsen not to show exertion or ‘ugly emotion’ on her face in this film, because God forbid she compromise her attractiveness by being human. Joss Whedon is not human; he’s fucking trash. 

The final fight sure does just, y’know, get to a point where it ends. They really did not ratchet up the tension over the course of the Sokovia conflict, it just goes along until it stops (also, they say Sokovia is a country, but then they never call the city anything else, it’s just Sokovia. Is the city conveniently named after the country (very confusing), or is it a city-country, like The Vatican? I kinda assume it’s option three, which is that no one bothered to care because it’s just some fake European placeholder anyway and we’re not supposed to notice such a dumb oversight).

“I was born yesterday.” This is the best quip in this whole thinks-it-is-way-wittier-than-it-is movie.

Helen Cho deserved better than to be a prop rapidly dismissed and then just trotted past at the end for an ‘oh, she survived, btw’. 

Back when I reviewed the first Avengers movie, I said that I considered that film to be heavily overrated, so maybe it’s not such a surprise that I actually like this one better. The two primary problems I had with that first film were the overly simplistic plot, and the fact that most of the characters were OOC compared to previous films, and this movie does do better on both scores, so I feel more engaged by it, and less annoyed. That said...this movie has still got a lot of problems, and those include iffy characterisation and a plot with various holes, nonsensical complications, and conveniently ignored or smoothed-down dynamics. When I say I like this movie better than the first one, I mean just that: I like this better. That does not mean I am here to sing its praises. 

The tacked-on romance is part of the problem - for Clint as well as Natasha (but especially for Natasha). After Hawkeye was so heavily under-used in the first film (and his slightly-ambiguous relationship with Black Widow was the only human element that made him a character instead of a prop), Age of Ultron attempts to compensate by giving Clint a personal life, in the form of a magically-appearing heavily-pregnant wife and a pair of nameless children. The function of this family appears to be 1) to give Clint a reason to not be interested in Natasha, and 2) to ‘humanise’ him by giving him something to fight for and get home to, because we all know nothing legitimises a character quite like some otherwise-irrelevant dependents. Want a man to seem lovable and important? Give him a pregnant wife. That’s what women are for, anyway, right? To enhance a man’s story? In this case, to provide a man whose purpose in the story has been contested with insta-personality, because ‘he’s secretly a family man, ooh, twist!’ is way better than having to spend time on giving him something to do in the plot that is actually meaningful in some way. Great logic. Makes Hawkeye super dynamic, right? 

Natasha, unsurprisingly, is hit much, much harder. As the only female avenger and one of only two prominent female characters in a cast which has seven-to-nine male characters of equal or greater importance/screen time (YMMV on whether or not you think Fury and Vision count for that list), the pressure is already on for Natasha to be served up a quality narrative, because if she doesn’t get one, well...she doesn’t have six-to-eight alternative characters to pull the weight for her gender. The best solve for this problem would be to avoid the ‘Token Woman’ cliche in the first place, but since we missed that boat...not having the personal story of your only primary female character revolve completely around her womanhood and her catering to heteronormative expectations of a love interest would have been a good choice. This weird, forced, chemistry-free thing with Bruce Banner? Was the worst thing they could have used to define Natasha’s presence in the film. It sticks out like a sore thumb every time they have an awkward interaction, and it leads in to that atrocious ‘monstrous infertility’ element (though that particular egregious mistake could have been included with or without a romantic blunder, it...probably wouldn’t be, and we’d all be the better off). Even the Hulk-whisperer part of the relationship - while not awful on its own with all the unnecessary romance and Unresolved Sexual Not-Tension removed - serves to highlight Natasha’s female-ness by making her the soft maternal figure for the team, because God forbid one of the other male members of the team be asked to ASMR-speak to the Hulk while delicately caressing his hand. If Natasha’s presence in the first Avengers film leaned too heavily on her gender identity as a defining trait (and it did), this movie doesn’t fix that problem at all: it doubles down on it. 

The good news for most of the excess of male characters is, they by-and-large don’t feel as OOC as they did in the first film. The boorish romantic entanglement aside, Bruce Banner is still a naturalistic character highlight (all credit to Mark Ruffalo, who probably doesn’t know how to turn in a bad performance in the first place), and Thor’s dialogue is way less ridiculous this time ‘round, so he lands a lot closer to his personality from previous films simply by virtue of sounding like the same guy (unfortunately, the plot does not have the faintest idea what it wants to do with him as a character). Steve Rogers is still being written as if being Captain America is his character, which is a fundamental misunderstanding of his identity, albeit one which conveniently allows him to behave in a stereotypical self-righteously bland manner, thus avoiding the need for any nuance in his perspective or actions. This borderline fanfic-flamer ‘Captain America is my least favourite character so I’m going to write him as a boring stick-in-the-mud and then hopefully no one else will like him either!’ approach doesn’t grate quite as badly as it did in the first Avengers, and it can’t cancel out the innate level-headed charm of Chris Evans, so as disappointing as the bias is, it’s still a better balance here than it was last time. The one character who is not so flatteringly handled, however? Also happens to be the one who was arguably handled best last time, and unfortunately, he’s the one who is essentially treated as the ‘lead’. 

The big problem for Tony Stark is that this movie is not interested in digging in to the pathos of any character, it’s all-flash-no-substance on that front, and Tony really, really needed a less heavy-handed slathering of ‘afraid of what might come (feat. messiah complex)’ to motivate his actions and reactions in this film, because without any exploration he’s basically just a billionaire kid playing with matches. If this were an Iron Man film (either the first or third one, anyway), we’d get into some tasty deconstruction of Tony’s mental state and confront his hubris, etc, and - crucially, most crucial of all, it’s a mainstay of all his past stories in the MCU - Tony would own up to his mistakes, listen to the advice of those around him, and take contrite steps toward fixing the problem not just in the direct sense of ‘beating the bad guy’, but also in the personal and emotional sense of working on his own flaws and making amends with the people he hurt along the way. This movie offers none of that. To begin with, Tony’s ‘I know best and I will not be taking any questions’ approach to creating Ultron feels like a significant step backwards in his character development so far (Iron Man 3 was specifically about addressing his PTSD and associated tumultuous emotions surrounding the fear of imminent alien invasion, so his reactionary and secretive behaviour in this film feels particularly out-of-touch with a mental reality Tony has been explicitly working on for the past couple of years); Tony is actively aware that it’s a bad call and thus hides it from the other Avengers until it’s too late, and then he’s bizarrely unrepentant about his mistake. Worst of all, he actually attempts to repeat that mistake, only worse, late in the film (the fact that his idiotic ‘mad scientist’ pep talk actually convinces Bruce to help him again is the weakest character moment for Bruce outside of the aforementioned romance crap). The plot rewards Tony’s second, far worse mistake, in the creation of Vision, who turns out to be ‘worthy of wielding Thor’s Hammer’ and whatnot and conveniently provides every necessary skill to defeat Ultron in a deus ex machina so overt you could use it as a textbook example, so even though Tony had absolutely no way of knowing that he’d get a good result this time and almost every reason to believe he’d just compound the existing problem, his reckless disregard for the literal safety of the planet is treated like a good thing because it happens to work out this time, and they just kinda sweep under the rug the fact that Tony is playing God (and being uncharacteristically stupid and selfish about it - in other films, Tony is normally only reckless with his own safety, and it’s when his actions spill out into unintended consequences for others that he realises the error of his ways and cues up a positive learning curve; it’s what makes him palatable). At the end of the film, once Ultron is gone and Tony has thrown some dispassionate wads of cash into ‘relief efforts’, he strolls and quips and eventually drives off into the sunset in his expensive car, with nary a mention of, I dunno, maybe a little guilty conscience? Maybe a hint of having learned a valuable lesson? The closest he gets is just suggesting that it might be time he retires from Avenging, but neither he nor anyone else lets on that there’s a need for serious self-reflection. The Tony Stark in this movie is the nightmarish male-fantasy version of the character, the playboy with the cool tech and no limits who does whatever he wants and then...literally rides off into the sunset in the end, no muss, no fuss. He’s kinda like a complete reversion to his original self, pre-Iron Man, frittering money around and designing weapons of mass destruction while convincing himself he’s bringing peace to the world one explosion at a time, but that Tony has no business here, seven years of character development down the track.

While we’re talking iffy characterisation, we should also segue into plot, and that’s something we can do easily enough by looking at our villain, Ultron. Calling Ultron an actual character feels...ambitious. He’s a CGI robot full of empty rhetoric and, you guessed it, more of those quips that this movie has in place of any meaningful dialogue. I’d call him self-fellating, but he ain’t got nothing to fellate, so instead he just blathers a lot in a manner that sounds vaguely poetically intelligent but is, upon a moment’s consideration, just vapid nonsense (much like Loki in the first Avengers, as noted above, but at least Loki had the benefit of a flesh-and-blood actor delivering his lines with conviction; James Spader does solid work as the voice of Ultron, but trying to make a CGI robot who spouts a school-kid’s attempt at edgy philosophy sound like a genuine menace is an uphill battle). Speaking of genuine menace, I assume the reason the film is called Age of Ultron is because A Couple of Days of Ultron Causing Disturbances in a Handful of Specific Locations was too much. For all the big talk (and there is..so much), Ultron doesn’t get up to all that much trouble, most notably in the sense that he apparently has his code all over the internet and yet he doesn’t bother stirring up a single ounce of chaos with that ungodly power. Why bother including this as an element of the character if it achieves zero story? Is it purely to make Ultron seem ~unstoppable~ because he keeps downloading into new robots? Because it didn’t really land, y’all. They try to play it like a big victory for the good guys when Vision burns Ultron out of the ‘net, but in context it’s meaningless because he didn’t do anything while he was there. Pretty much everything about Ultron was all talk, little to no action - even a whole bunch of the trouble he did cause happened off-screen, with Maria Hill just popping in to let us know that ‘there are reports of metal men stealing shit’. Cheers, cool. And you know, Ultron makes a song and dance about how he’s going to save the world by ‘ending the Avengers’, but then he...does not pursue that at all. He tries to make himself a pretty body, the Avengers thwart him, and then he enacts a doomsday machine to destroy all life on Earth. Like every other aspect of the character, the whole ‘end the Avengers’ schtick is just white noise, there’s no meaning in it. Ultron is just a same-old-same ‘What if Artificial Intelligence wants to WIPE US OUT?!’ cliche, and maybe that’s what he was in the comics too, I don’t know, but it’s the job of the film to tell that story in a dynamic way, and they had two and a half hours to do it. And yet.

There should be more to this than a nondescript placeholder villain concept and a series of action set pieces that just kinda happen until they stop. At least the first Avengers had some variety in each of its action sequences, using the location and the different skills and weapons of its antagonists, whereas this one is just ‘there are robots and the good guys punched and shot them until they were all broken, the end’. Even making the city fly in the end doesn’t actually make it interesting, not least because the characters spend most of their time running around the (weirdly, perfectly stable) streets not having to deal with any consequences of being up in the air anyway, and the doomsday device is too nebulous to ratchet up any real tension about figuring out how to deal with it. The conflicts with the Maximoff twins have at least some spark of life in them, but the characters themselves are treated to an over-simplified and very contrived narrative arc that uses what they do and what they know more as plot devices than as details of actual people’s lives, leading to a cheap death for Pietro so that Wanda will be distracted enough to abandon the big ol’ doomsday button, and it’s just all so convenient. There’s no heart in any of it, and it makes the moments that try to have heart all the more embarrassing and out-of-place (don’t even get me started on what a prescribed attempt at tugging the heart-strings it is to have Hawkeye name his magnificently well-timed newborn after Pietro, because DAMN). When I said I liked this movie better than the first Avengers, I meant just that: I like this better. That’s not to suggest that it is significantly better in any sense, because it isn’t, and I can’t even argue that this one has a better story, because honestly, it doesn’t. The first film made more sense, it was just less interesting to watch, and the things about it that were contrived were contrived in different ways. The first film was weaker and more irritating on character, and character is always the most important part of a story for me, so as annoyed as I am by the major character blunders in Age of Ultron, I’m still not as annoyed as I was after The Avengers. That is damning with the faintest of praise; this is just not a particularly good movie, it makes a poor use of its cast at the best of times, delivers a sub-par action extravaganza, and the script is not half as witty as it gleefully convinces itself that it is. It comes as no surprise, I’m sure, that I am very glad a certain writer/director departed the franchise after disappointing everyone with this outing. I say I like this better than the first Avengers, but gee, it’s a close call.

[savedpeople]

Words cannot describe how much I hate Negan’s wife system and wish it wasn’t a thing but some people blow it so out of proportion and get the facts so wrong and assume so much that it almost makes me want to defend it like y’all that’s how you know it’s bad.

Of course by “defend” I mean getting the facts straight, not literally defend it. I still can’t watch the parlor scene without feeling uncomfortable tbh. Anyway below the cut is a very long breakdown of a post I saw and wowee, here’s the subject I’ve been too afraid to really talk about on this blog for the entire year and a half I’ve had it for.

Based entirely on the show btw.

1. No one was forced to become a wife in order to live at the Sanctuary. This was literally never a requirement. No one was threatened with being kicked out or anything like that. Where are they getting this from?

2. There was never any mention of a “rotating schedule” for sex...? We never see him any sexual situation with any of the wives, everything related to sex is completely made up of assumptions based on Negan talking about having sex with them. At the end of the day we don’t know what actually goes on. At all.

3. No one’s family was threatened with harm if they said no. The only one this slightly applies to is Dwight, who was going to be killed for completely unrelated reasons. He was going to be killed for stealing meds and fleeing the Sanctuary (which also led to Tina dying.) For breaking rules. Sherry was going to be too until Dwight begged for her life. Negan never says “marry me or he dies,” it wasn’t even his idea. Sherry brought it up. Now obviously she would have never offered if she didn’t think it could save Dwight’s life, and that makes it problematic as shit, but at no point does Negan dangle someone’s life in front of a woman and say “marry me or I’ll hurt them,” nor has he ever said "marry me or I’ll hurt you.” He’s never suggested marriage in exchange for someone’s life, period. Would he? I don’t know, but in canon he hasn’t.

4. I hate that it’s stated like fact that every wife was forced into it. Frankie literally admits that her and Tanya fully chose it. There are also two other wives there we’re never introduced to and so we have no idea what their stories are. Sherry and Amber are the only ones we know felt pushed into the situation, and two of six (or three of seven if you include Tina) is still too many, but there’s no need to exaggerate it.

5. Negan doesn’t deny Amber meds in order to make her marry him. “He wouldn’t give them any other way” is false. He will give medication to anyone that has the points to purchase it. Every single worker there has to work for points to get anything. The problem was Amber couldn’t earn them fast enough for the rate her mother needed them, so he gave her the option to become a wife to bypass the rules and get them for free. Same thing for Tina. It’s not “I won’t let you have meds if you don’t marry me,” it’s “everyone here has to work for these but if you’re struggling, you can marry me and get whatever you want for free and not have to work for them anymore.” Like Sherry, this is icky because clearly Amber wouldn’t have wanted to become a wife if she didn’t need to, but felt she had to take the offer for her mom’s sake, because the job she had wasn’t earning her enough points fast enough. I’m not going to defend Negan here. The poor girl is miserable. I’m just tired of people claiming he’s withholding meds from women in order to make them marry him. They’re just expected to earn them like everyone else. If there were any male workers struggling to get enough points for medication, they were shit out of luck too. Necessary lifesaving medication or not, If he started giving out free supplies, especially something as valuable and rare as meds, the whole community would start expecting free stuff and the whole system would fall apart. Becoming a wife makes you an exception. 

(I do wish Negan had some sort of system in place for people like Amber’s mom who are physically too sick/weak to work, because I feel like he realistically would have considering his whole deal is “saving people,” and the idea that he’d potentially let any of his own die because they’re literally unable to work doesn’t sound right.)

6. No one asked for pills to kill themselves. They asked for pills to kill Negan, and it wasn’t about sex, it was about wanting to kill a shitty murderous leader. Saying Amber wanted them to kill herself was a lie to make Eugene agree to making them. He even finds this out and calls them out on it.

7. I don’t know what him cheating has to do with it, except for him harming the men when a wife “cheats” on him which yes, is hypocritical, but it’s also been theorized there’s some self-loathing being projected when he does it, because of how much guilt he’s carrying from cheating on Lucille. It’s also simply punishment for breaking the rule, they know ahead of time what’s going to happen to the guy if they choose to “cheat.” It’s the one rule they have, and they’ve had it since day one. It’s also only a consequence if they decide to stay with him after. It’s implied that if they cheat and decide to leave him, the other man won’t get the iron (though we never see this happen so we don’t know if it’s true.) But they can’t cheat the system and break their only rule and continue getting the benefits without punishment.

8. I really hate that the show made it sound like Negan started cheating on his wife after she was diagnosed, when at least in the comics, her illness is what made him realize how terrible he was being and leave his mistress. Cheating is cheating, but there’s something extra evil about starting to cheat on your spouse after they get sick, so I wish they wouldn’t have worded it like that because that’s not how it happened.

I don’t like the wife system and I’m not trying to make it sound like a great time or like there’s nothing wrong with it, because there is. You guys know I’m here for calling Negan on his shit, but I’m here for accurately calling out his shit. There is already a plethora of bad things he’s done and the whole wife thing is bad enough as is, there’s no need to exaggerate or make up details to make it look even worse.

[franeridart]

Didn't they all take the practical exam at the same time in the manga?? I'm confused....

Yeah, they changed that part orz I’m really unhappy about that for a number of reasons, but I guess their reasoning was that they wanted the anime to end with the Baku Deku vs All Might fight and in the manga that’s, like, the second fight to be done with? And if they had kept the order the anime would have ended with Mineta and Sero, so… I guess I get why they went for this, but still. I can’t say I like it orz

Anon said:I’m sure you’re expecting this ask but kiribaku study date!! :3 I can’t believer Bakugou ACTUALLY tried to beat the learning into kirishima XD

Well, it’s beginning-of-the-story-Bakugou after all, what else could we even expect from him hahaha Kirishima passed the written part tho, so it must have worked!!

Anon said:Wait hold up you’ve got me interested now. So I’m like a little past halfway through soul eater and I haven’t started the manga YET (I totally will now that you’ve suggested it) but… When did tsubaki turn into a boy??

It doesn’t happen in the anime! It’s ch 72 to… 74? 75? They go somewhere where all the girls get turned into boys and vice versa for a while! (That’d be Soul, Maka, Blair, Black Star, Tsubaki, Liz, Patty, Kilik, Thunder and Fire) (Liz and Patty look especially amusing lmao)

Anon said:what do u think abt kats*deku???? If u dont ship them - why?

I’m pretty sure I gave an in depth answer to this question a couple of times already, but do you think I’ve been able to find it? (I haven’t) so to make a fast recap, I only like them as friends, nothing sexual and nothing romantic - I really, really, really want to see them become friends, but I can’t see the necessary chemistry for any other kind of relationship between them, right now

And that’s also why I don’t ship it? I just can’t see it working in a way such that both of them are as happy as they can be, and I only ship if I can see both characters being happy in the relationship - foundamentally Bakugou and Izuku are different on all the wrong things, a big part of the reason why they fight so much is that their ways of living are different, to make a space for each other in their lives big enough that they won’t step on each other’s toes every two steps they take they should change their core personalities a lot. 

And I’m not talking about Bakugou, specifically, I’m talking about both of them. I do know that the fandom likes to pick Bakugou and turn his personality inside-out to make him fit with Deku in such a way that Deku will be happy, but realistically that’s only gonna make Bakugou miserable. It’s true that most faults rest on Bakugou’s shoulders as far as their relationship goes, but Deku isn’t the sort of person fit to be with Bakugou either - and I can’t have Bakugou make a 180° on his personality, force himself to be someone he’s not, just to accomodate Deku. I like Bakugou as he is, and I want to see him grow up while growing into himself. And while I do prefer Bakugou as a character, I happen to like Deku as he is very much as well, I don’t want him to turn into another person just to accomodate Bakugou’s personality either

So this turns into “either I change these two characters to make them fit together, or I let them be just friends and actually find characters that do fit with them as they are already”, and personally, I’m always gonna go for the second option. I mean, why would I want to ship them when I can ship bakushima t b h

Of course you’re free to ship it if to you the chemistry is more obvious than it is to me! It’s just not my cup of tea at all ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Anon said:Could I possibly see a comic with Kirishima being tied between Ashido and Bakugo??? I thought it’d be cute since some people *cough cough* me *cough* may or may not be tied between Kirimina and Bakushima. :3

I………….. can’t do that, sorry orz triangles aren’t my thing at all. It’s either the polyship or bakushima, triangles get on my nerves more than any other plot device does to be completely honest with you. Triangles are the bane of my existence

Anon said: Hi there! I just wanted to say I’ve been scrolling through all your Bakushima art for ages and it’s healed me :,) fr tho i lov how you portray them and their dynamic and you have a lovely art style! Thank you for blessing us ahah

AHHHHHHHHHHHH THANK YOU SO MUCH OH MY GOD!!!!! (●´□`)♡

Anon said:hey there! just wanted to drop by and let you know that I find your art super inspiring? like i am IN LOVE with your art style, and I absolutely adore it. i love how the characters you draw have perfect expressions, i love how natural their poses look and i love how you portray characters friendships + relationships in comics it feels completely natural. even if im not into the stuff you draw, i love looking at it because its so great?? keep being wonderful because you deserve good things ^u^

Holy shit thank you??? I honest to god don’t know how to answer this??? means a lot??? fuck thank you I might go and cry for a bit ( •̥̥̥ω•̥̥̥ )

Anon said:Hey your art of sero carry bakugou give me life honestly good posts all around

Thank you!!!! :O Sero carrying Bakugou is something I myself need more of in my life tbh hahaha what a good concept I should draw more

Anon said:your latest bakugou I’m crying… he’s gorgeous and Buff and strong and could highkey bench press me I’m swooning

GLAD YOU LIKED HIM!!!!! :O you guys actually liked that one WAY more than I thought anyone would holy smokes!!

Anon said:Umm… I hope you don’t mind, but I showed a friend so e of your work, and I think it got you a new follower lol they really liked what I showed, and when I told them you do Kaminari, too, that was that. Can’t talk fave artists, without you 💜✌

:O !!!!!!!!!!!! why would I mind omfg, thank you so much!!!!!

Anon said:Okay, now I’ve been through your account since 2 hours ago, i can say I’m officially Bakushimanari trash. Omg i had never seen something as good as what you did to these three. (Btw sorry if my english’s not very good, but i had to say this)

!!!! Happy you liked them!!!!! They’re a good group, those three (灬ºωº灬)♡

Anon said: Yesterday was a shitty day, but today I woke up and saw your art, and stalked your blog, so I feel today will be a much better day. Happy boys are good. Never stop making happy boys happy.

I hope your day was actually a great one, anon!! And I hope today was great for you as well!!! And thank you so much for liking my stuff, happy boys are indeed my greatest weakness and favorite subject to draw haha happy boys and girls and nb and anything else too, really, happy people are good for my soul~

Anon said:Someone doesn’t know Soul Eater?! Now I feel old (・・;)

Haha, well it’s not really about being old/young as much as it’s about how long one’s been into anime/how far back they go when they decide to watch something new~ Soul Eater hasn’t had an active fandom for ages now, after all!