#you don’t have to hate a character if they’re not perfectly justified 100% of the time!

[eiloveir]

Distinguish your thoughts about naruto shippings and who do you ship?

i’ve finally found the motivation to respond to the anonymous messages in my notifications—apologies for the delay. i’ll begin with you. i’ll just list my ships in the series numerically.

ships that i fw:

sasunaru, of course, is my on-top shit. i care about it a lot, and if it didn’t have any shippers, i'd be dead. the chemistry between them is undeniable, and they have many tropes that enhance their connection. i won’t lie—though i love the canon ships like naruhina and sasusaku (which i also enjoy), sasunaru has that special standard for me. it aligns perfectly with the romantic tropes in books and movies that i fw.

shikatema—for real, dude, who doesn’t like these two? they’re the straightest couple that makes more sense than the others who ended up together. malewife and girlboss wifey, for real.

sasusaku. i know some don’t like this, but honestly? nobody wants to hear an opinion (kidding)—i find their reasons justifiable. like, if i were sakura, i’d definitely let sasuke go off on his own. i wouldn’t chase him or cry for him—especially after he tried to kill her. i understand why he did so, and i totally get his character (i relate to him a lot). but moving on, i ship them—fucking hell. I DO.

choji and karui, 100% yes. i don’t know why they ended up together, to be honest, but yay. it’d be wholesome if we got to see a scene with them, you know? i feel like i would like their tropes a lot.

i guess the rest of the canon ships are fine, like naruhina and sai/ino. i don’t have much to say about them, but they’re okay for me.

itadei. WHY DOESN’T THIS SHIP GET ENOUGH LOVE? seriously, i’m here for it. dei’s like, “i fucking hate you, man,” but secretly he’s like, “fucking hell, why is he so damn good?” i fw with whatever trope is this. you’ve got dei throwing bombs, and itachi just calmly deflects them like, “nice try, buddy.” & in that moment, he almost reveres itachi as a god of artistry.

tobidei (at first, no, but...) honestly!!!!! I love their dynamic too, bro. their relationship is so funny and entertaining. the only thing that bothers me is their age gap

sakuino, the lacey of each other. they’re so lacy-coded, bruh—similar to Itadei, i guess? they claim to hate each other, but the difference is, sakuino don’t actually hate each other; they just make each other jealous with whatever they think the other has

[web-novel-polls]

Just saw your MDZS thing and I half agree and half not. Like, on the one hand, I think it's absolutely justified (though I don't generally support any torture, but this is fiction and...it's Wen Chao...), but on the other hand, it's not supposed to be black and white??? MXTX clearly wanted her readers to understand the cruelty of this moment. Wei Wuxian was so traumatized he became kind of twisted, at least with the people who massacred the Jiangs. But even though we all know WWX is NOT the evil overlord that the cultivation world thinks him to be, he is not meant to be seen as someone who can do no wrong. He makes mistakes! Some of the fault does, in fact, lie with him! He's not 100% sunshine boy! And THAT'S OKAY. In fact, him being complex is WHY he's such a good character! And it boggles my mind how people will go to any lengths to make him perfectly innocent and pure in everything (rather than being traumatized and human) while also vilifying Jiang Cheng and Jin Guangyao and Xue Yang and whoever else. Like, the latter two obviously did really bad things, worse than WWX, but they are very obvious mirrors to WWX. Xue Yang grew up an orphan on the streets. If WWX hadn't been rescued by Jiang Fengmian, he might've turned out the same way. Jin Guangyao was consistently denigrated for being the son of a prostitute. WWX also faced classism (to a lesser extent) for being the son of a servant (which Yu Ziyuan and Jin Zixun used against him). And don't even get me started on JC. People will go to any extent to vilify him when all of his actions make sense as someone who is also human and flawed and traumatized. Does this absolve any of them of their actions? No. But it does explain them. And just because someone does make mistakes doesn't mean they deserve to be hated and condemned (unless they're Wen Chao, who didn't make mistakes but who instead had an entire personality dedicated to being horrible. Pretty sure he's the only one who MXTX wanted to be a straight up bad guy, though if you can give me evidence to the contrary, feel free). Readers thinking in black and white and condemning other characters for xyz actions without trying to understand them while holding up WWX as a shining beacon who can do no wrong miss the entire point of the novel and do disrespect to WWX himself. Anyway... There's my rant over. Feel free to ignore this if you want, haha.

I’m not completely sure what you mean in regards to “half agreeing and half not” tbh. It seems to me like your disagreement lies with vilifying other characters when the main character is a morally complex character, which was my point? The morality policing was specifically what I was criticizing in my original post? Because, like, I agree with the broad strokes about Wei Wuxian and other characters’ moral complexities and grayness. 

My point was that, even if justified or understandable, the torture of Wen Chao was horrific and brutal, and I don’t completely understand how anyone who DID read the novel (which I understand not everyone has and/or has a different interpretation) is willing to harass actual, flesh-and-blood people over liking a character when the main character has literally tortured someone. That’s it.

I actually made my original post after a bunch of Jiang Cheng antis (who I do actually like talking to and seeing their opinions when they’re not harassing others) found an Aroace-spec Character Tournament poll with Jiang Cheng and were incredibly condescending about it. Which is honestly better than the death threats and threats of violence and doxxing, but it did hurt more than it probably should have to have people so unwilling to even TRY and see why I, and others, connected to Jiang Cheng, even after reading the same book that made them hate him. 

Seeing a character say, “Hey, what you did was not okay. I know why you did it, but it doesn’t change the damage you caused. I do not forgive you." to the main character was something that I needed to hear and see. It was something real, even if it might not be justifiable or “correct.” I like Jiang Cheng not because I think he’s always in the right or a perfect person, but because he’s not. And it’s fine if people don’t like him or think he’s the scum of the Earth or whatever, but I also think that prioritizing the debate about a character that doesn’t exist over actual people is cruel and unjustifiable. Ultimately, I do not care about any fictional character as much as I care about how willing people are to be so unbelievably inhumane for just disagreeing with them. 

And, somehow, this also ties into my opinions about the torture and killing of Wen Chao. I don’t think Wei Wuxian was unjustified, per se, for punishing Wen Chao, but I do think it was wrong in the sense that the action itself is wrong. It’s not a “WHOOO! WE KILLED THE BAD GUY” moment to me but a moment showing the brutality of war and a literary mark of descent to the “single plank bridge.” As someone else said (and so many more have probably said), it was fucked up, and acknowledging it was fucked up doesn’t mean Wei Wuxian is a “bad person” or a character you CAN’T like (paraphasing). It just means acknowledging that the act of torture itself is fucked up, no matter who does it or who it’s done to. Comparatively, sending death threats and threats of violence and doxxing is also fucked up, no matter who the other person is and what they’ve said. Putting a fictional story and character - no matter how much they may mean to you - over actual people for often no reason is fucked up. 

But yeah, I think “just because someone does make mistakes doesn’t mean they deserve to be hated and condemned” is one of my favorite aspects in a lot of web novels. I like that characters have “bad aspects” that while I may not condone IRL, including them make the characters… characters. That the “person” (character) is more important than whatever “bad aspect” they may have or mistake they might have made.

Anyway, I hope this clears up what I was trying to say lol. Not everything I wrote was meant specifically because I think you don’t agree or to argue with you, but to get my opinion across properly. I feel like we’re broadly saying the same thing, even if I’m not sure if I agree or disagree with the finer points like “Wei Wuxian might have become like Xue Yang.” Sorry if any of this comes off as aggressive, btw; it's not meant to be, but I lose my fight with tone everyday.

[kirain]

Hazbin Hotel and VivziePop Drama

I've been hearing/seeing a lot of drama concerning Hazbin Hotel and it's creator VivziePop, and while I don't know her personally or really care what people think, I do hate slander and the spread of misinformation. Truly nothing in this world upsets me more than when people believe rumours while making no effort to fact check, and that's exactly what's happening right now. That said, I wanted to try and clear up some of the rumours going around about Vivzie and the show, because I think some of them are absolutely outrageous and need to be addressed.

1. Vivzie hired an abuser onto the show.

Now, I’m not here to burn anyone at the stake, especially since I don’t know anything about Chris Niosi (the alleged abuser), who I believe openly admitted to the allegations? Regardless, this is a moot point. He’s not credited anywhere at the end of the episode. So either he was booted before production wrapped up or he had nothing to do with the show in the first place.

2. Vivzie supports bestiality.

Admittedly I thought this one might be true, since she draws so many anthropomorphic animals. In the very least, I figured she was probably a furry, but I haven't seen any evidence supporting this accusation either. Near as I can tell, this rumour started for two reasons. One, because of her famous Zoophobia comic, which revolves around a therapist named Cameron who gets assigned to work with human-like animals. Ironically, poor Cameron suffers from crippling zoophobia, which makes for some pretty decent comedy. I didn't read the whole comic because, quite frankly, it’s not my cup of tea and I just don’t have the time. But from what I saw there are no examples of bestiality anywhere in its contents.

Two, this message, which blew up all over social media:

To me, this just proves that people are more interested in virtue signalling than checking to see if their claims are actually true. Everything about this message is 100% false, which I’ll touch on in my next point.

3. Vivzie is a pedophile and she’s drawn child porn.

This is hands down the worst allegation and holy shit, I really wish people would stop using it to defame someone when they don't have any proof. This is a life-ruining accusation and you're disgusting if you believe it based solely on hearsay. This rumour began to spread when Vivzie allegedly shipped the two underage characters in the above photo and drew them NSFW-style. At the time, one character was 19 while the other was 14, and the relationship was a very illegal student-teacher relationship.

This is WRONG! The characters were not 14 and 19, they were actually 18 and 19, the legal age of consent! Additionally, the relationship wasn't student-teacher. One character is a student and the other is Alumni (a student teacher). This one pisses me off the most because it’s obvious the person who sent that message didn’t even bother to conduct any research. They said, “He’s a teacher, she’s a child.” Both characters are MALE!

Since then, Vivzie has apologised for any NSFW art she drew in the past and stated that it's not a reflection of her art today, and I'm inclined to believe her. Almost every artist has drawn NSFW content at some point in their career, and hers wasn't even distasteful. Other than this one example, there is no evidence anywhere that suggests she’s drawn “child porn”. In fact, she’s never even drawn explicit NSFW.

Please stop spreading this rumour. It’s dangerous and completely incorrect.

4. Vivzie said the "N" word!

No, she didn’t. It was a fabricated tweet. That is all.

5. Vivzie is copyright striking every video that criticises her!

No she isn't. YouTube’s DMCA is automatically striking people who are using full clips without permission. Vivzie has gone public several times, telling people exactly how to avoid getting a copy strike from the algorithm, which is something she absolutely does not have to do. At this point, she doesn't owe you anything. In my opinion, she should just sit back and watch these channels burn.

6. Vivzie copies and traces other artists’ work.

This is another one I’ve seen going around, but I looked into it as thoroughly as I could and failed to find any concrete evidence to support the allegations. As of right now, there are only two examples of Vivzie “copying” or “tracing” other artists’ work, and both of them can be explained. The first is a gif she made with a character from her Zoophobia comic, which looked a lot like the girl from ME!ME!ME!:

Damn, that’s pretty incriminating. She obviously stole-- oh, wait. This gif was part of a ME!ME!ME! MEP (multi editor’s project) and Vivzie didn’t take full credit, despite the fact that it’s not even a direct trace. It’s supposed to look like the original, which she fully cited. The second example comes from a short dance sequence from her Timber video, which seems to have been inspired by several Disney movies. As Vivzie herself stated, that was an homage to the original animations. Lots of artists and shows do this, including the beloved Stephen Universe series.

Regardless, this doesn’t count as stealing character designs or plagiarising someone’s work. It’s meant to be respectful, an admiration of other projects. Other than these two instances, however, there is no evidence of her tracing or stealing other people’s art. From what I’ve discovered, all other designs she’s been accused of “stealing” are characters she bought and paid for. They’re quite literally HER characters.

7. Vivzie supports problematic creators.

I’m getting really tired of guilt by association. Vivzie follows and enjoys some controversial figures, but who cares? We can argue all day about whether or not the accusations against them are true, but it ultimately has nothing to do with the show or Vivzie as a person. I do the exact same thing, to be honest-- follow and listen to people on all sides so I can learn, understand, and form my own opinions. The fact that some people think this is bad, to me, is absolutely mesmerising. Vivzie doesn’t control what the people she follows post, and if they do something overly questionable she publicly criticises and denounces it.

From Vivzie:

Now that that’s been dealt with, I’d like to address some complaints/claims about the actual show.

8. Vaggie is an angry Latina stereotype and a lesbian stereotype. Vivzie is appropriating Hispanic culture and misrepresenting the gay for profit.

First off, I see a lot of people passing around yet more misinformation regarding Vivzie's race. So many people seem to think she's white? Well, I'm here to tell you they're wrong. Very incorrect. Vivzie is in fact Latina, and Vaggie is meant to mirror some of her own personality traits.

Second, who is Vaggie mad at? Context matters, and if we take a look at the episode, we see that Vaggie is literally only mad at two specific people: Angel Dust and Alastor. Why? Well, for starters, it's her girlfriend's dream to run a rehab hotel for sinners, and Angel Dust nearly demolishes that dream single-handedly. Vaggie has every right to be over-the-top vitriolic. Then there's Alastor, a known sadist, narcissist, and murderer who loves trapping people in his nefarious schemes. He invites himself in, effectively takes over the hotel, and pushes both her and Charlie aside. At one point he even sexually assaults her by slapping her butt during his musical number. So yeah, I think her seething ire is totally justified. Keep in mind, however, that when she's around Charlie she's calm, collected, and happy. I wouldn't call that a stereotype.

Thirdly, the lesbian stereotypes. I keep hearing this argument but I really don't see it. Both Vaggie and Charlie have so much personality and trust for each other. Maybe I'm wrong, but the stereotype I know always totes a more butch, tomboyish woman with a ditsy, innocent, naive woman. Charlie is optimistic, but she isn't stupid. She refuses to shake Alastor’s hand because she knows he’s likely trying to screw her over. She’s also not entirely innocent herself and uses words like “fuck” and “shit”. I also wouldn’t call Vaggie butch or tomboyish. She has a cute, girly presentation, complete with a pink ribbon in her hair, lace stockings, and a dress. She's protective of her girlfriend, as I think we all are with our partners, and there's nothing wrong with that. They're flawed characters, as every character is meant to be. This isn't a problem.

9. The show is racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, blah, blah, blah.

I’m amazed this is even an argument. The show is supposed to be a dark comedy that takes place in HELL. You know, the place the worst of the worst end up after they die? What were you expecting? Everyone gets a shot or two fired at them, but that doesn't make them bad characters nor does it make the show itself horrible. Take, for example, Katie Killjoy, the news reporter so many people are up in arms about. She says she doesn’t “touch the gays” because she has “standards”. Well, here’s a newsflash of my own: we’re not supposed to like her! She’s an antagonist. Not to mention ten seconds later Charlie insults her and isn’t the least bit slighted by her pretentious attitude. The characters are strong and don’t take shit from anyone, because to some degree they’re all terrible people who can throw down when it’s called for.

Obviously if you don’t like the show or think it’s offensive, I’m probably not going to change your mind. That’s perfectly fine. You’re entitled to your opinions and you don’t have to watch the show. Just stop lying and stop trying to take it away from everybody else. Stop attacking Vivzie and spreading misinformation without checking the facts. I realise a lot of people probably aren’t trying to be vindictive and only want to do something good, but just remember this: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[vidalinav]

Be forewarned this is a rant.

I get really upset sometimes when I read ACOSF because I don’t know how you read it without it sounding like Nesta needing to change her whole person to be loved, when the problem itself was her drinking and sleeping around due to the trauma of the war and the death of her father, which needed the intervention. Not her personality. 

But it was her personality that was insulted. Belonging to Hewn City, by Mor. Mor not even being warm to her at all, to a point where it is very noticable that she acts differently. Waste of life, by Amren. Her deep distrust of Nesta for no reason other than that Nesta doesn’t train with her. Rhys having a deep disdain for her. Elain wanting Nesta to change, saying she hopes that her attitude could be channeled into something else. All of her scenes accusing Nesta of something, either not understanding Elain’s pain or not being healed already or of ruining something when she’s trying. Feyre not painting a picture of her until Nesta has irrevocably proved that she loves her, but offering the intervention on the premise that they love her. 

And then you have that compared to her “found family” who both had seen Nesta snarky or rude. Their initial reactions are not exactly pleasant, but not off-extremely. It was very normal Nesta, and still they wanted to be friends with her or dismissed it because they too understand. 

We have Cassian who starts off exactly like the IC, and then eventually, because they form a deeper connection, starts understanding her to some extent and then starts sticking up for her more. But still... you have an essence of ignorance. Which at some point is just played as dumb jock syndrome, because he has foot in the mouth disease, because he lacks emotional intelligence, because he doesn’t connect dots where Nesta doesn’t want to train in front of the Illyrians, the fires... the mating bond vs marriage debacle, Nesta hating herself. 

And through the entire thing, the IC is correct, because Nesta, the narrator, hates herself so much that everything they do is justified, and everything they do is accurate. Even in regards to her father, because he “loves” her and she was the one who didn’t show love to him. She was the one who was awful to him. She was the one awful to Cassian, even if blow by blow, they’re equal in terms of horrible things, if not more so Cassian because his words tend to be way worse. 

Her personality wasn’t even a major problem pre-ACOFAS. It was an annoyance to some characters, it goaded at some characters, it was understood by some characters, accepted by some characters. But all around it wasn’t really that big of an issue. It directly becomes an issue when she starts drinking and she starts sleeping around and when she pushes them away, all signs that she has PTSD. But the “healing” arc is not about the PTSD. It’s about her personality. Her not being friendly enough, her not helping enough, her not being nice enough, her not loving Cassian enough, her not loving Feyre enough, her not treating Elain the way she wants, not healing fast enough. 

So I will 100% believe that this is not a healing arc. It’s very much a redemption arc and I will 100% believe that that logically no one should be friends or close with Nesta in the next book (except for Cassian). They should still have all of these problems. Unfortunately I don’t know what SJM is going to do. It would be fantastic if all these problems are still there, and the only person who has changed or received growth is Nesta, because that’s essentially what happened, sort of. Cassian doesn’t have very much growth in this book either. Nesta even doesn’t have enough growth. Because she trades one unrealistic idea for another. 

So... that being said, I’m really having a hard time with this book. Because I loved Nesta because she was imperfect and she was allowed to be that way, which many characters are not and she was struggling like so many people are. And she was not given a narrative that validates her feelings. Which would be perfectly fine because she’s fake and made up, if there wasn’t this insistence that this is a healing arc. That Nesta healed from a real life trauma, many that people go through. Alcoholism. PTSD. Anxiety. Death of a family member. Childhood trauma. The deep innate hatred that people sometimes feel and are ashamed of. And Nesta did not “heal” from that. She was made to be ashamed. Her own bad opinions of herself were validated by the actions and opinions of the other characters. 

It makes me feel extremely sad. I can’t. I take mental health and the topic of mental health very seriously. Especially when it’s made to be a serious issue in the narrative. And I feel bad for all readers who have related to Nesta in some way on an emotional level and had to read that book. I promise your feelings are valid. 

[bigskydreaming]

Couldn't the thing with Jason thinking Dick is infallible from Truth and Justice story come from how he is compared to his brother from Bruce. Even when he was Robin with Dick and Bruce fighting, he was told that Dick was better by Bruce. Then he comes back and is a cautionary tale of what not to and how not to be while Dick and Bruce are now getting along.

I mean yeah, you could go with that take, but I’m always gonna argue that even that is more fanon based than anything else, at least before this issue. We’ve seen a lot of that take in the past already, but truth is, there really isn’t that much basis in older stories for Bruce comparing Jason to Dick. And like I’ve expanded on in the past, younger Jason looked UP to Dick, he certainly didn’t resent him. 

With this being true even when he first came back - Dick was the only one he didn’t target at ALL during Under the Red Hood, and when he did finally meet up with Dick a year later, during the Brothers in Blood arc, it was more to fuck with him than any attempt to take things out on him. Like, that arc gets a lot of shit and deservedly so, but I really do wish more people would at least takeaway from it the fact that in it, JASON referenced still thinking of Dick as family. Which just doesn’t mesh up with all the ‘they barely knew each other/they resented each other’ takes.

Pretty much all the times I can think of when Jason was compared to Dick pre ADITF, it was actually not at all what its usually represented as by most fandom takes, such as the time Jason teamed up with the Titans. For pretty much Jason’s entire tenure as Robin up until the Felipe Garzonas arc, Jason was actually portrayed as perfectly secure in his position of Robin and wasn’t threatened by anyone else’s perception of him at all. Even the arc where he loses it on Two-Face has been kinda amplified to make more of it than it was, like.....Bruce was worried about the anger he expressed there, but that was more out of concern FOR Jason and it wasn’t the “Jason was on the verge of getting fired as Robin all along” kinda narrative we tend to see referenced. 

Jason was only made out to be the angry Robin or the less competent Robin or whatever AFTER his death, which is all kinds of shitty, but like......there’s no real basis for any kind of extended history where Jason resentfully suffered under his big brother’s shadow while Robin. The angry/less competent Robin stuff was all DC retroactively railroading him after the fact to justify their choice to kill him off (which was still their choice no matter the existence of a poll), and its the narrative most people have run with because it amplifies Jason’s existence as the misunderstood and unfairly judged underdog of the family.

Now to be 100% clear, as I’ve said in the past.....there is absolutely no reason you CAN’T go with this take if you don’t want to. Nobody has to abide by canon, or a particular canon and I’ll never argue otherwise. My main point has always just been that the thing about fanfic is that its a transformative process, it enables fans to take canon and transform it into something else.....but here’s the thing....those transformations ALWAYS happen with INTENT. People are deliberate in how and in what ways they transform canon, even if they’re not always CONSCIOUS of that deliberation.....it still exists. None of these transformations just happen, they happen for a reason. Because fans want an end result that’s different from what we saw in canon.

So my thing is always just.....yes, transform canon as you like, for whatever reason. But don’t pretend that those reasons don’t exist, and understand that when people look at a canon to fanon transformation that really only results in one major difference.......they’re gonna assume that this difference, achieving this difference, was for whatever reason, the POINT of the transformation.

And here’s where I also want to express something else: my take has never been that most of fandom just hates Dick Grayson. That they’re consciously, deliberately out to smear him or make him look bad. I think there’s a lot of elements in play with how I perceive fandom’s interactions with him compared to other characters, but more often than not, I think one of the bigger issues with how his character is TRANSFORMED from canon to fanon, is just.......he’s collateral damage. I don’t think in most cases the point is even to make actual transformations of his character or characterization......its to apply these things to people he’s in scene WITH......and he just ends up transformed as well, by proximity.

Take a look at some examples:

1) Dick firing Tim

Except as we’ve gone over multiple times, Dick didn’t actually FIRE Tim. He didn’t neglect him, he didn’t turn his back on him, he could have handled that situation differently, sure, but he had none of the ill intent people assign to him when they typically ramp up how bad this period was for Tim. Dick actually called him his equal, begged him to stay, said he was too GOOD to be Dick’s junior partner........but this is not at all how this moment in canon is generally viewed by a lot of fandom. He comes off looking a TON worse, like he just chose Damian over Tim and discarded Tim first chance he got, he didn’t care how Tim was affected, he kicked Tim out of the manor and out of Gotham.

But the thing is.....I’d argue that none of this TRANSFORMATION from canon really had anything to do with Dick. I don’t actually think that tons of fans were just waiting in the wings for the perfect opportunity to make a villain out of Dick and just seized upon this moment as the perfect opportunity. I think it was just all about Tim. It was about accentuating his misery, his aloneness, heightening the whump factor of his character and amplifying the feelings of insecurity, rejection and alienation he was feeling and that people related to.

What happened to Dick’s character in most peoples’ eyes as a result of this transformation, was the symptom, not the point. It was the collateral damage, not the aim.

2) Bruce firing Dick

In contrast, we have more than one canon interpretation of Bruce firing Dick as Robin, with this leading directly into Dick leaving the manor at a fairly young age, keeping his distance from Bruce until he finds out about Jason, Bruce giving Robin to Jason without acknowledging or apologizing for the fact that he was giving away the identity that someone else had crafted and poured their heart and soul into, not him.......but this isn’t how a lot of fandom outside of Dick stans and people who are specifically predisposed towards Bad Dad Bruce like to treat that part of canon.

Here, the transformation is the reverse from what happened with Tim and Dick. Here, the feelings of rejection and alienation and insecurity Dick realistically would have felt during that time are overlooked and even outright invalidated by TRANSFORMING the canon so that actually, this period of extended estrangement is completely disconnected from any version of events where Bruce fired Dick, which he did not do here. And in fact, Dick gave up Robin, he and Bruce had a falling out, and this was mutual and two-sided and thus Dick’s refusal to come home earlier and reconcile with Bruce was not actually him standing up for himself and refusing to settle for being taken for granted and dismissed when convenient but rather just Dick being immature, stubborn and a little spoiled.

But again.....I don’t think that’s the aim so much as a byproduct of the intended end result. Once more, I think that had very little to do with Dick himself, wasn’t about making him look bad specifically....but rather, it was about making Bruce look better. It was transforming the thing he had done in canon which was so hard to defend, ie ignore all of Dick’s feelings on the matter much in the way people accuse Dick of ignoring Tim’s later, and passively rejecting him and refusing to be the first to reach out unlike Dick who actively sought after Tim when he left. Those moments in canon definitively make Bruce look pretty bad, and are hard to reconcile with Good Parent Bruce Wayne, so that is what people are trying to transform. Once again, the way it makes Dick look in contrast is just a symptom.

The further examples are honestly pretty endless.

The aftermath of Forever Evil and Spyral is ignored, transforming Dick into the true villain of that period not because people just want an excuse to hate him, but because they don’t want to or can’t reconcile what Bruce actually did in order to get Dick to act so out of character, or they want to justify Jason and Tim and others’ anger at Dick later rather than have them appear to be inconsiderate assholes just piling on a guy who just had the worst year of his life to date.

The instances of Bruce outright abusing Dick after Jason’s death and at other times like Night of the Owls are ignored, transforming Dick into an impetuous, overly aggressive asshole who isn’t reacting to Bruce’s initial aggression, but rather just popping off the handle because he isn’t being received or treated just the way he likes.

Dick reaching out to Jason and making an offer to be there for him as Robin and later times they interact in Titans as well as any actual bond they build, even if mostly just hinted at off the page....all ignored in favor of transforming Dick into this bitter, jealous jerk who can’t see past his own feelings long enough to realize he’s taking things out on an innocent kid who doesn’t deserve this, even though that’s exactly what he realized and motivated his actual actions towards Jason in canon. And again, its not so much about making Dick worse, its about overlooking the WHYS of Dick’s hurt, turning the focus from what was done to him that justifies him being upset in the first place, to some greater mistreatment he enacts on Jason and thus drowns out any sympathy that people might otherwise have for Dick.

Dick’s periods of brainwashing like under the Church of Blood being overwritten or ignored in order to transform his deliberately out of character attitudes towards his friends and teammates there into just normal outbursts that were part of his characterization rather than signs that something was abnormally wrong with him. Thus turning everyone else’s treatment of him during that time period into again just their part of a two-way street and nothing they had to feel bad about rather than acknowledge that he’d literally not been in full control of himself while they had no such excuse for their behavior.

To be clear.....this kind of thing is NOT limited to just Dick. It tends to happen any time people want to transform a canon event into something more one-sided, to accentuate a particular character’s position as the victim or the misunderstood or neglected party.....or to turn a one-way street into a mutual antagonism, to lessen a particular character’s culpability in some argument or feud. You can absolutely find examples of this same effect applying to every other character in the Batfam as well.

But the reason it happens so often with Dick, and thus every instance of it happening tends to be amplified by the sheer volume of similar situations......is because of convenience. Because ironically, the reason Dick so often looks so bad in fanon’s eyes when it comes to his treatment of his family....is BECAUSE of how Dick is so much more integrated into every one of his family’s lives (and his friends’) than pretty much any other character. He’s the collateral damage to other characters being deliberately transformed in some way purely because he’s the one who almost always is THERE to some degree. Because there’s no one else in the scene that’s being transformed.

And so to bring it all back to your question......I think you absolutely can go with that take. There’s an argument to be made for it, especially now given that this canon issue has actually established a precedent for Jason feeling that way rather than fanon just running with the idea because it makes Jason more maligned. Its still not something that’s ever going to interest me though, even if I can see the reasoning for it, because its not just the fact that this particular dynamic between Dick and Jason has played out thousands of times before in fic, as I said yesterday. Its also because like I laid out here......my bigger issue is that take has absolutely NOTHING to do with Dick himself, says nothing about his character, but his character is inevitably the one who will suffer fallout from that particular take. That dynamic, as you described it, makes sense.....but its entirely, 100% on Bruce or others for raising those comparisons, not because of anything Dick did to Jason himself.....and thus it makes Jason’s dynamic towards Dick MORE a product of other peoples’ reactions and attitudes towards him and his brother respectively.

And that dynamic IS perfectly understandable and valid. But even if its slightly different this time because of more of a canon basis, it still for me falls into the same pattern of Dick being collateral damage to something that’s largely focused on another character entirely, with him and how he’s impacted by extension being kinda an afterthought. 

*Shrugs* And that’s just......a story I’ve read so many many times before, I’m just never gonna be all that engaged by it. 

[thefloatingstone]

I’m not joking about the JV thing btw.

I’ve been in the Invader Zim fandom since 2005. And even back then JV was vocally unimpressed by his fanbase. Heck while the show was AIRING he would take things the fanbase wanted to see and actually do them but like in a monkey’s paw kind of way.

“Zim should have a love interest!” JV introduces a female Irken who Zim tries to woo when he thinks she’s a human girl just to make his disguise more believable. She ends up being someone whose life Zim ruined and her entire goal is to murder Zim. They end up hating each other’s guts.

“Zim should have a human friend!” JV introduces Keef. probably one of the most terrifying characters in the show as he obsessively follows Zim around and becomes stalkerish and possessive in a way that starts bordering on being too real to be funny.

“Zim should find out his mission is fake” Enter the Florpus happens

JV is not only against the ideas and tropes his fandom has asked for but literally gives the fandom the exact opposite in some cases. Or when he doesn’t give the exact opposite he makes fun of common tropes in the fandom. Zim and Dib being friends a big one.

And although there are fans who come and go or who many years later will still be annoyed that JV doesn’t give them what they want, it’s been going on so long now that the long time fans have reached a point of

“LOL That’s our Vasquez!”

Seeing JV make fun of his own fanbase and troll them without outright being viscous or hateful towards them is just what being in the fandom is. And it works because of the nature of IZ in the first place. It’s a cynical, dystopian dark comedy that parodies modern American culture. Every character gets the short end of the stick at some point and the humour comes from how stupid everything is, often due to the character’s own faults. So having a fanbase where the most favourite tropes are what gets turned onto its head and made fun of? That’s perfectly on brand with the entire tone of the canon itself.

And honestly? I really adore this. A fandom of “Don’t ask JV what the canon for this one idea is because he’s gonna tell you the most anti-climactic answer on the planet. Just make up your own headcanon.” or “Zim and Dib are friends in this comic/fanfic and I don’t give a fuck I just wanna write it lol. It’s not canon at all but honestly who cares.”

There’s very little argument about “how canon” something is because it’s either canon or its completely not and not even pretending to be.

Also compare this to how several shows have suffered in the age where Twitter is a thing and you can directly communicate with show creators.

You get My Little Pony. a show that started out being about friendship and lessons about inter personal relationships told through funny humour and likeable characters. It attracted an adult audience by accident, especially a young adult male audience, who then as time went by more and more and more wanted focus on the LORE. On background characters. On the MYTHOLOGY of the world. And as time went on the show devolved into a mess of memes, pandering to the fans, references to other pop culture until it just became a mess of trying to solve world shattering events and wars with “we should all be friends” type logic.

You have Steven Universe which has a lot of writing problems, and when fans point out the problems have the writers try and EXPLAIN why the problems weren’t actually problems because see there’s actually this behind the scenes thing that happened and we’re showing it in a NEW episode that completely justifies the original problem! Which as a result ends up creating a community of “Theory crafters” so obsessed with what they’re NOT getting told because what is being given to them doesn’t explain things properly. With then theories getting taken as canon and so when the actual show doesn’t MATCH the theories those who liked those theories end up pissed.

You have shows like Star Versus the Forces of Evil which actively tried to bait its audience with different ships across its seasons and actively putting shippers against each other, while yoyo-ing the characters back and forth between potential love interests just to keep a certain aspect of its own audience invested in the romance side of things until it inevitably crashed and burned in its finale.

And then you have JV. Who doesn’t give a single fuck about what his fandom wants or thinks and if you try and bother him about it he will actively do the opposite of what you want just to spite you. Resulting in a relationship of very clear distinction between what is canon, and what is not. And not being bothered if your Zim and Dib Friendship fic could happen in canon or not. Because it can’t and it won’t. And you don’t care you writing it anyway.

This is why the Invader Zim canon has managed to remain recogniseable as itself despite the internet and social media becoming what it is. Because JV has no interest in placating fans. And at this point, the fans have no expectation for him to do so.

And although there is still discourse and bullshit and arguing and antis and fights... at least Invader Zim as a cartoon, movie and comic, is still 100% Invader Zim.

And that’s why JV being such a troll to his fanbase is something I honestly love.

[it-sy-bit-sy]

The ending of Attack on Titan: a shallow analysis

(I don't think I should have to put a spoilers alert on a blog about the ENDING OF AOT, but in general if you mind being spoiled on a series, I advise you to refrain from attending discussions about the body of work until you've finished it in its entirety/come up to speed on the current chapter/episode. Screw hype dude, do you like being hurt? Also for the TLDR, it’s that Attack on Titan explores the cycle of hatred (Eren’s journey) AND love which is why Mikasa and Ymir become relevant at the end of the story.)

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PREFACE

Since the newly added panels of AOT’s ending have been likened by some to the ending of Naruto, I'd like to say that Naruto's end truly hurt me; the way it flows into Boruto is so contrived it burns. A story that's always centered around powerful ninja bloodlines fighting political wars suddenly introduced aliens that harvest planets for energy as the super antagonist, and additionally they're the source of all our characters' powers as well as the jinchuriki and tailed beasts themselves. Then when you look at the plot of Boruto which heavily relies on the Otsutsuki clan as an antagonistic force, their whole existence feels like the transition from Dragon Ball straight into the first DBZ arc with Goku learning he’s really part of an alien race that was meant to destroy Earth.

I didn't detect so forced a role in the ending of AOT, but it's absolutely plausible to speculate that the alternate ending was influenced for this reason, as we know Attack on Titan wasn't produced through Isayama's involvement alone. Certain compromises are made when operating as a team, though it would be wonderful if the original intent of authors were more absolute in the world of production than they are known to be.

And as much as I don't enjoy half-hearted continuations of series for a royalty check, I ALMOST can't blame them for doing it...it creates (many) happy fans, more jobs, and Isayama gets his royalty check. The rest of us suffer but hey, artists need money I guess... 🥀 Moving on. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#1. Eren's development as a character

I never saw Eren's goal steered in the direction of breaking the cycle of revenge or hatred. He was acting wholly in his own interests. He's intensely selfish, doesn't want to change his views, and exists in the story to further the cycle itself. According to me, Chapters 129 and 131 perfectly explain his motivations for the rumbling.

Now before I go on, I'd like to bring a particular scene to mind. I do remember him saying this once (to Historia who had just told him killing the rest of the world is unjustifiable and wrong):

Yes, he said that, but I don't think that is what he ever intended the rumbling to be used for.

After he stated that 80% of humanity was wiped out so Paradis will be safe for the time being, he neglected to answer Armin's questions in 139: "Did you really need to go that far? Are you sure you did all of this for our sakes?" We may also consider the thoughts he chose NOT to share in chapter 131:

That combined with this excerpt from 129 is pretty much all there is to Eren's convictions.

Those are the same words he said in Chapter 2 after his mother died.

So despite his brief period of self-loathing when considering 1) the countless lives in survey corps sacrificed for his sake, 2) being confronted with his and his father's involvement in the Reiss family, 3) everything he learned about his enemy--that all titans are formerly human, that the titan shifters were just children deceived by their world--he even admits to Reiner during Tyburn's speech (Chapter 100) that they are indeed in the same boat--and on top of that, admitting that the rumbling will do nothing to fix the course of history, he settled with the same conviction he held the moment he decided to do something to change the world.

Again, here's his words from 139 showing us just how angry a boi Eren was.

This was Eren Jaeger...he didn't even really know what he was doing.

As a human being, Eren was very much in the cycle of revenge as much as everyone else was. His course of action never deviated too far from that path. He knew better, but he lashed out at the world to protect the few people he cared about anyway. He took freedom away from the ones who threatened him. He was a mass murderer, and so were the other soldiers in this series fighting for their own reasons, since titans were people. Survey corps were always slaughtering these people whom they saw as monsters. Marley viewed Eldians as monstrously and with as much hatred as Eldians viewed the titans. Eren did not try to justify his actions to everyone. He simply stopped seeing the value of life in others not important to him, as humans often do.

So what did he sacrifice 80% of humanity for? From 129 again:

Them meaning his immediate friends.

No, he didn't care about their children's children and beyond because there's no way to control what happens when you're gone from this world. It wasn't his problem. Eren had 4 years at most left to live, and he wanted to do what he could to ensure his friends were happy before he left.

And as jarring as it was to see Eren become undone in the last chapter, I didn't find it completely out of character, because for one he was talking to his closest friend moments before his own death, and secondly, Eren was just a stupid human like the rest of the people in this series. Obviously, most people just want a normal life that they can spend with people whom they love. Eren was the same way, but was denied that future (and happened to be able to do something about it). Very selfish goals, but those chosen few were his world. Along with a general distaste for humanity, that's how I understand his character motivations.

*Which is to say in relation to the extra pages, Ymir's curse returning a generation or two after the events of AOT doesn't entirely void his actions. I’m assuming the power of Ymir apparently exists as a force of nature on this version of Earth period, so I suppose this points us to an endless cycle of humans eventually finding the power and using it as they see fit *

#2 Why is Romance Relevant to Attack on Titan?

I wasn't expecting a romance factor to be relevant at the end of the story, however considering that Mikasa's affection for Eren WAS her most prominent personality trait as a character, then the events that followed, I was forced to look back to a few moments in the series that could lend light to why, in the end, a romantic subplot ended the curse of Ymir. My conclusions are as follows:

1. Quite literally, the cycle of hatred never ends. Humans will always have a reason to be unkind to one another. We are animals after all; this trait cannot be reasoned through with logic, bred out, or defeated. We are a self-aware species (Eren's even aware of his own hypocrisy in Chapter 131). There will always arise those who take what they want for themselves because they decide in the end they don't care about others as much as they care about their own interests.

2. To make this second point, I'm stealing these words out of a certain machine lifeform's mouth, but bear with me here:

"But the humans...? Now THEY are interesting. Because they are an enigma! They killed uncountable numbers of their own kind, yet loved in equal measure! It's fascinating, don't you think? What could possibly drive such behavior? We have dedicated ourselves to unraveling this riddle of humanity..."

--Adam from NieR:Automata

AOT uses Eren and Mikasa as a case study of humanity. Humans hate and love in equal measure.

In Ch. 129, Zeke's piece here foreshadows the significance of those two for the story, I guess?

Now everyone reading this series as well as the characters in it had noticed how much fondness Mikasa always had for Eren, and how aloof he always was towards her in return...that's something for them to work out.

Despite never really reciprocating Mikasa's feelings, Eren told Armin at the end of the series that yes, he enjoyed receiving her attention; he would have liked to live a happy life with her. So, Mikasa just liked Eren, Eren liked her... And similar to Mikasa, Ymir just liked King Fritz. It doesn't matter whether we think these feelings were sound or not; they did what they wanted with themselves. I suppose that explains the reason she was a mega simp for Eren in the whole story. Yes, this turn in the story reads like a different plot now, not one about war and killing monsters, but I'm pleasantly surprised that this trait taken as a flaw of Mikasa’s actually served as a necessary condition to end the conflict of the titans.

Eren wouldn't let go of his hatred of the world for his own satisfaction, Ymir wouldn't let go of her love of King Fritz for her own satisfaction, and Mikasa is the only one who decided to let go of her convictions in the interest of someone other than herself. That's what moved the curse.

I think Isayama used the characters of Ymir and Mikasa to demonstrate that while there is a cycle of hatred and revenge running rampant in humanity, the cycle of love doesn't stop either.

In closing, and I truly apologize for such a lengthy post; I hope I didn’t reiterate my point too often here...I didn't think about any of this until I heard so many readers upset with the way AOT ended. I'm not personally left with any disappointment in where the story went. I didn't know where it was going to go in the first place, and I think it could have been much worse for us in different hands. 

*shrugs*

AOT is a story about the nature of humanity.

*And in regards to Jean, if that is supposed to be him with Mikasa in the new panels, all I can say is dude likes his girl. He was a simp for her and she was a simp for Eren, but the fact that they shared their lives together means a lot even if Eren was never completely buried in her heart. He meant a lot to her man, idk...

[gamebunny-advance]

The Thrilling Continuation~

@kujo-supernova​

As to not clog the dashes with increasingly long posts of anyone who has to put up with this, I started a new post~

[Original response here]

K, I agree with 95% of what you said, so I don't feel the need to go over it point by point. Even the stuff I don't agree with I’m not going to really address  because it's irrelevant to the argument I’m trying to make. This isn't even an argument about each other's opinions anymore so much as I'm just commenting on the fandom at large now. So basically everything I'm about to say is not really directed at you (except for the last part), and is more directed at this fictional straw man of the fandom that probably doesn't exist, but I'm gonna attack anyway because it helps illustrate my thought process.

But thanks for reading anyway if you do~

I don't take issue with the fandom because I'm trying to defend Kliff or say that anyone else is 100% in the wrong here. This is a story about flawed individuals that make bad decisions. It's multi-layered and complex, and that's why I love this game so much.

My issue is largely with how the fandom in general is hypocritical in the way they treat Kliff because they see him as *more* "wrong" than he actually is, but my goal is not to prove that he was in the “right”.

Yeah, B2J (mostly Mayday) did get to learn from the experience that they were wrong because they're the protagonists: the purpose of their story is to learn that lesson. Kliff exists to be Mayday's "shadow". He represents an extreme that Mayday could have become had she not realized that taking over NSR isn't the solution to her problem. But as the true antagonist, Kliff literally *can't* come to that same realization: it would be redundant. And that's fine. For the purposes of the story that it wanted to tell, Kliff getting a resolution was not necessary, even if it leaves him in a bad spot with the other characters.

But that story is done and now fandom gets to write new ones. He still has a lot of character that can be explored: Now that rock is back in the city, what will he do? Why is rock specifically so important to him? Why does he know so much about every artist in the city? Why does he look so much younger than he actually is? *cough*becausehe'savampire*cough*

But largely the fandom doesn't seem interested in exploring any of that and more than just a handful of people seem to outwardly reject the idea of writing him as even *capable* of the kind of growth that B2J went through.

I brought up DJSS specifically as a counterargument to Kliff because he is THE scummiest person in the cast for all the reasons you said and more, but he is still one of the most popular characters because he has a cool design and a sexy voice, and maybe some people see him as a "sad boi" and want to coddle him. I am also one of those people for all 3 1/2 of those reasons, but I don't believe that you need to think that a character is a good person to justify liking them. There's a lot of reasons to like a morally gray or even morally black character, and agreeing with their actions/opinions doesn't need to be one of them.

I just think it's hypocritical to excuse one character for their flaws and not another with similar ones. Like there's some nuance to it that can change what makes something okay in one context and not okay in another, but I think the comparison between DJSS and Kliff is apt.

In my opinion their shared flaw is being egocentric. They are both willing to sacrifice the health and happiness of others for their own agendas. They express it in different ways, but it all comes from the same place: They think that what they're trying to achieve is more important than the feelings/condition of others.

DJSS seriously does not give a damn about anyone other than himself and he doesn't even have the courtesy to try and hide it. Even after his district is restored, he's still the same asshole he always was. He STILL calls B2J "Plutonians" (and I don't count him saying that "they aren't so bad after all" as "change", because even as a professor he was capable of expressing backhanded gratitude) and his reason for playing music is STILL "self-importance". He is in the same place that he started and will probably continue to abuse his district over his sense of ego unless Tatiana or someone else finally forces him not to. And everyone either accepts that or disregards it because that's just who he is. And again, that's fine, but I find it hypocritical.

Like I feel like many people's problems with Kliff is that they're not interested in exploring his character beyond what has been presented in the text. And that's fine too. It is perfectly valid to enjoy the game as it is and not want to explore it beyond that, but if having such a small scope of a game's themes and characters causes you to get "bugged" when someone presents a different interpretation, then it might be beneficial to look at another reading.

For example, let's go back to the satellite argument. My point about the satellite being "symbolic" was to disprove "murderous intent". His motivations for dropping it are totally separate. You say that you still think his motivation is being fueled by bitterness over Tatiana leaving rock. Your exact words: "I still think part of it was done out of spiteness for Tatiana leaving rock", but I feel like that's a very surface level reading.

In my opinion, rock is just the window dressing to the core of his actual problem: he feels like he's not getting back what he gave. He drops the satellite after her response to this question: "Did my loyalty mean nothing to you?" Which was, "I don't give a damn about you. I owe you nothing." which I think is far from a trivial response.

In any relationship, even a non-romantic one like this, it hurts knowing that the other person isn't as invested in it as you are. Even more so if they were to flat out say, "I don't give a damn about you." Like, can you imagine being told by your favorite content creator that they hated you to your face after you've done everything you could do to support them as a fan? Would most people react calmly to that in the heat of the moment?

Like we don't know the extent that Kliff was involved in Tatiana's life, but Tatiana never implies that he's lying about supporting her after the Goolings disbanded. Their relationship couldn't have been completely parasocial because she immediately recognizes him and addresses him by name when she sees him, and her being Kul Fyra isn't common or easy to obtain knowledge, so he must have been close to her to even know that. We know what he may have been willing to do for her given how much he helps B2J, and had Tatiana been upfront about her feelings with Kliff in the past, then I don't think he would have even bothered to give his sob story because he would have known that she wouldn't be receptive to it.

What I'm getting at is that "abandoning rock" isn't the actual reason he felt hurt enough to want to retaliate. It was likely more about "abandoning him" than it is a loyalty to any particular genre.

Even with this reading of his motivation, I don't think he was justified in doing what he did. Tatiana was totally right in calling him out, even if she was harsh about it, because in the end it doesn't matter how much he might have done for her if she didn't want it to begin with. He should have just walked away and accepted that she wasn't the person he thought she was, but people don't always do the right or rational thing, especially if they're caught up in the heat of their emotions and I think that's a relatable emotion worthy of discussion and dissection, even if it's not positive.

Will reading any of that change your mind? Probably not, but it's another perspective, and that's really all I want to offer.

Saying you're okay with someone liking something that you don't, isn't the same as understanding it, and that's what I want to change. I don't need anyone to agree with me, I wouldn’t start these discussions with strangers if I did. My end goal is to get you to understand where I'm coming from, and I think you're just *barely* missing my point. Hopefully I’m understanding your points too, but maybe I’m wrong about you’re getting at as well. UoU

[the-lightning-strikes-again]

Yeah I never understood why people say Allura is racist she's perfectly fine with Keith AND Krolia who is in fact FULL Galra

Hi, anon! Thanks for your note. Yeah, that’s a good point! Honestly, I think some people pick up on the show’s implicit narrative biases, which are largely unsympathetic to genocide survivors while sweeping under the rug the visceral level of brutality that a significant number of Galra enacted point-blank against so many civilizations. The narrative and visual “lens,” if you will, even in s3 flashbacks, focuses more on the instigators and their motives than it does the victims and their traumatic experiences. And the narrative lens throughout the show continuously demands that genocide victims unquestionably forgive and accept oppressors into their lives without said oppressors/groups vocalizing empathy. But we see Allura going above and beyond with accepting Galra!

Regarding specifically season 2′s initial plot twist with Keith—I suppose it helps to look at Allura’s sudden suspicion from the lens of season 3. Galrans and Alteans had a great relationship between them—the official VLD book “Allura’s Story” even calls Zarkon Alfor’s “best friend.” So in this past, you have a strong Galtean alliance, you have Alfor saving the entire Galra people after Zarkon destabilized their planet and endangered the entire solar system with a widening rift, thus forcing Alfor to blow Daibazaal up to save every other civilization too. You have Alfor hosting the Galran people/Zonerva’s allies while giving Zarkon and Honerva an honorable state funeral. But the instant Zarkon wakes up and demands his people massacre the entire solar system (not just Altea—in s3, the Galra extinguished their entire galaxy planet by planet until only Altea was left)….the Galra people at large accept that order? Without question? Despite all the deep friendship and bonds that came before? Literally, a single order from an undead emperor of their own kind overturned this solid interracial alliance and launched an unstoppable, galaxy-level bloodbath?

But of course, we don’t get this history until another season later, so Allura’s initial reactions to even Keith for example, feel left-field to some who hadn’t already emotionally connected to the trauma of genocide/omnicide. Specifically, Allura’s trauma was triggered with Keith because she’s 100% experienced having mass allies and treasured friends suddenly betray you in the name of pure loyalty to someone of their own race. But we don’t get that additional history until later.

So while clearly the racism accusation is not justified and Keith and Allura reconcile anyway in season 2, I think the seeds of “Allura is racist” were planted at large during this time, while waiting for season 3.

And notice as well that in the show, it’s Allura who comes to Keith and apologizes. There is zero narrative attempt to understand the “why” behind Allura’s reaction during this plot twist, and no other character (including Keith) makes an attempt to reach out to her either. They all turn into a bunch of passive aggressives. So narratively, the show champions an imbalance—you feel sympathy for Keith and are asked to join the paladins in demonizing Allura (or seeing her as the “other” for suddenly having suspicions, per her experiences). And the show champions the paladins for such riveting high school diplomacy while Allura takes full responsibility on herself to open up the conversation, make herself vulnerable by explaining her own trauma, and then begging for Keith’s forgiveness and even hugging him. She does all of this, by the way, upon seeing that—unlike the s3 Galra in the past—Keith’s revelation didn’t mean he felt an automatic loyalty-tie to the Galra, and that he was just as true and good as he always had been. And kudos to Keith, he confirms his nature again by accepting her apology and the both of them moving on together, with Allura even ultimately accepting Keith’s authority over her as Black Paladin.

So for all the trauma Allura has from actively experiencing the Galra wipe out her entire galaxy and planet, we see Keith and Allura reconcile—and we see her move onto accepting the Blade of Marmora and Krolia. She admonishes Lotor for not protecting his own Galran subjects from attack. And despite the romance and alliance with Lotor going south over his activities with an Altean colony, she still pursues alliances with other Galrans and even tries to emotionally connect with them. She’s the one who first offers an alliance with Zarkon himself into s8, ultimately resurrecting Daibazaal as equal to her own resurrected Altea. And she does all of this while fighting against an Altean who is the ultimate big bad of the series. So even if someone wanted to totally ignore Allura’s past as an omnicide victim and just wanted to crucify her point-blank for her season 2 actions, we see her acting in incredibly dynamic ways to preserve and obtain peace for the Galran people.

I think, in looking at Allura’s development arc from season 1 to season 8, it becomes clear to me that people holding onto the “Allura is racist” card are doing so for one or several of the following reasons:

They haven’t watched the show entirely to see her interactions with a wide myriad of other Galrans, so they’re cherry-picking based on a few uncontextualized scenes.  

They view Allura as an antagonist to their favored character, so they hate her anyway and are looking for any reason possible to hate her.

They view her as romantic competition for their favored ship (that old fandom internalized misogynism where gosh darn if a female character dare exist to unsettle their own personal romantic headcanons or self-ship needs, which means we gotta find a way to get rid of her and her fans).

And thanks to purity police corruption of fandom, militant antis using the “racism” card recognize that they can inappropriately hijack a social buzz word to manipulate fandom interests and obtain supremacy over other fans by de-legitimizing their voice. Because no one wants to stan a racist, right???

Either way, “Allura is racist” is definitely an inaccurate use of the word, yeah. If people want to hate on Allura, which is their right to do if they so desperately want, they just really need to find other reasons to do it.

Thank you for your note, anon! Sorry, I guess I rambled after I got to thinking about “why,” haha.

[dusk-writes]

hoooo boy. I’m probably gonna get hate for this (bc i’ve heard the stans of this fic are Like That) but here goes anyway!! & I’m also…. really hoping you asked me this in good faith, @parttwoelectricboogaloo, because I’m Not Here to Start Shit (ie, important disclaimer that this post is NOT an attack against the author or anyone who likes the fic, & i won’t tolerate stans being rude/shitty in the replies).

anyway, tl;dr: the author took a CANONICALLY strong & independent character (Remus) & reduced him to someone who literally cannot function without a romantic love interest (either Sirius or the OC) by the end of the fic– his arc is essentially a downward spiral over the course of which he loses any shred of agency & becomes unhealthily clingy/needy instead.

Remus in Actual Book Canon is clever, competent, intelligent, and incredibly self-sufficient– while That Fic characterises Remus as the sort of person who literally whines & begs his lover not to break up with him (and I’m entirely unable to understand where OP got this characterisation from, bc it doesn’t remotely resemble Canon Remus from the books).

…like, Remus’s character in the final chapters of a/t/y/d is strongly reminiscent of Bella from Twilight– and I shouldn’t need to explain why this is Not A Good Thing. you know that one super icky section where Edward buggers off & there are several completely blank chapters with only the names of months at the top, to show how she literally Cannot Exist without her hot boyfriend & nothing else going on in her life is even worth mentioning…? This fic, similarly, has Remus fall into a deep depressive state after Halloween 1981 (including problems with addiction & substance abuse) from which he needs to be ‘saved’ by a Man, which would justifiably have everyone up in arms if he were a woman (except in some ways it’s even worse to shove Remus into this role, bc he’s a grown ass man and not an immature hormonal teenager). I definitely don’t dispute that Remus was very messed up after the war, and of course it would take time for him to recover from that trauma, but this is something he Can & Should be able to work through on his own!! Having another character (especially a love interest) swoop in to pick up the pieces for him strips Remus of his agency, & I’m really not about that.

Point 1: if a trope is gross & misogynistic when applied to a female character, it really should not be applied to a gay man, either. And, on that note, portraying one half of a gay ship as the ‘soft emotional vulnerable one’ (especially when this is not a canon trait of the character) is in fact super problematic; it’s literally a homophobic stereotype.

Point 2: Romance is not a cure for mental illness!!! And any romantic relationship where one partner contributes all of the emotional labour is Not Healthy.

Canon Wolfstar is beautiful because Remus & Sirius are equals who perfectly balance each other out, whose lives are both improved by the other’s presence while each still existing as his own independent person. they’re so close and vibe so well together that even after 12 years apart they barely need to speak out loud to understand each other. The author of a/t/y/d, meanwhile, is on the record as saying that Sirius & Remus ‘don’t really understand each other’, and injected their own OC into this role instead (which… Big Oof).

And for the record, I want to be 100% crystal clear that I’m NOT saying no one should ever read this fic, or that enjoying it makes you a bad person!! (we’re all still fans of HP & wolfstar in spite of JKR being a terrible racist terf, after all). But please, if you enjoy this work, do so while being conscious & critical of its flaws, and stop holding it up as the Pinnacle Of All Literature, or even the Best Fanfic Ever (remember that Perfect Flawless Media Does Not Exist!! flaws are normal, & they don’t mean you can’t/shouldn’t enjoy things, but it’s important to be aware & respectful). Because yeah, as a mentally ill queer dude, there are a Lot of unfortunate implications in this fic that make me very deeply uncomfortable (and friends who are POC have voiced discomfort regarding that aspect as well, though I’ll leave it to them to elaborate if they choose to). Again, you’re absolutely free to enjoy this fic & rec it to others, & it’s not my intention to stop you– but it is Not good rep of mental illness & disability, or of queer men (another side note: writing a character who explicitly & consistently IDs as a Gay Man throughout his adult life, only to have him marry a woman as the ultimate endgame ship, is also Very Squicky). I’m just. Really Tired.

in closing: It’s 2020 & We Are Past The Need For Gay Men Cast As Sexist Female Character Tropes & Presenting Toxic Unhealthy Relationships As Romantic. thank you for coming to my ted talk, and have a lovely day, friends ♡

[tysukis]

Hi, first(?) AU anon here. I will absolutely dive down this rabbit hole with you. I went a little overboard (sorry?). I absolutely agree with you on your Zuko take. I think we all kind of land there naturally. But I also think that Zuko would latch onto stability the moment he realized he had it. So this is kind of how I see it going down:

I think the band Sokka is part of would be solid. Just a local hit, right? But Sokka is the plans guy, and the aspirations guy, and they can do *so much better*. I 100% do not know how real life musicians work so add a pinch of salt here, but he would absolutely land them a gig as openers to a mediocre niche headliner just by sheer power of phone calls and charm. (He scripted it as much as possible, we all remember how that canon speech went when he winged it, but he knows how to put words together when he has time).

And yeah I love the idea of Zuko being an academic. I'm assuming Ozai is out of the picture for this, and the boy gets to pursue his passions instead of an expectation. Unfortunately, you mix in passion and the general anxiety of a kid who lived under intense scrutiny and you get an adult who gets tunnel vision during spring finals/prep for a conference/etc. So he doesn't quite rise to the occasion when his boyfriend drops this life changing news, he's proud but distracted, and he's already so bad at words in comparison to Sokka that it's just. Lackluster. And he probably meant to meet them at the bar/house party to celebrate after he got home but he's sleep deprived and his phone is dead because he's a disaster sometimes.

So now you've got Sokka stewing on immediate events, and being a little heartbroken because he went all out every time Zuko accomplished *anything*, even if it wasn't super impressive to Zuko himself. And maybe there's a bit of Zuko assuming Sokka doesn't need that reciprocated. He just doesn't vocalize his important needs, so Zuko assumes they're being met, you know? I like the drama of a blown up confrontation but also the idea that Sokka just confronts him sounding hurt and so damn tired of being the emotional one for that long.

But on the other side you have Zuko with his internalized plan that this is his forever person, and he does go to almost every performance even if they don't play his preferred music. And he assumes Sokka is satisfied with this. Maybe because Zuko can't imagine being happier than near his family - the good ones anyway - or because he genuinely thinks Sokka and the band are happy with being local celebrities and leaving it at that. So he plans for permanence. Because he is still a disaster, Zuko probably never vocalized this beyond doing window shopping for apartments or something. Vague jokes about a wedding that Sokka laughs at/agrees with and Zuko interprets as, "Yes I am also thinking about being here with you forever." He's not the wordsmith, he's the pragmatist and love means house shopping and snuggling over takeout and planning trips to visit their distant family together, right? Sokka's confrontation blindsided him, because he thought they were on the same page, and Sokka didn't have to leave to keep playing music, why is that even a thing??

They're both justified in being jaded because they're dumb as hell (affectionate). This isn't an AU for two grown ass men who have put in therapy time, they're both young and full of their own understanding with poor communication skills.

musician au anon!!! hello welcome back thank you so much for this incredible ask, let’s GO

(I’m gonna pop this one under a read more because otherwise this post will be eight miles long lmao)

Honestly I’m wracking my brain with what I can possibly add to this because you’ve got like. A fully fledged outline here my dude and it’s a good one. Do you write? Because you should, if you don’t. I still love the alternative take of Sokka being the one to leave and honestly this pretty much cements how much potential it has. I absolutely adore how you’ve thought about just how the communication would break down between them - and you’re completely bang on the money with it as well. Zuko is fully a hot disaster and would completely just assume Sokka’s needs are being met if he isn’t vocalising them, and we know Sokka, he’s a complainer but when it really comes down to those he loves - he’s known for being pretty selfless and for putting up brave faces. I can totally see Sokka perhaps almost feeling a bit self conscious about how hurt he is by Zuko’s lack of enthusiasm. Because Zuko loves him, right? And it’s just one show, right? So maybe he’s just overreacting, right? Or maybe he’s actually not even that good. Oh no, maybe Zuko hates his music and is just waiting for the right time to break it to him gently. Oh no, oh no, oh no. I think I might have already said it at some point tonight but Sokka would absolutely spiral until he convinces himself that him leaving would be nothing more than simply just leaving before he gets left. And like you said: Zuko  is out here planning a whole future assuming that they’re on the same page, meanwhile he has no idea.

I totally buy Sokka winging his way into a supporting act spot using his charm and charisma, and yeah his speech in canon didn’t go too well but this could likely be over the phone to only one person which would probably make it easier. I was thinking about how Sokka performing would work in conjuncture with his canon almost stage fright/fear of public speaking - and I’m leaning towards the hc that he embodies a sort of persona in front of large crowds and he’s able to let that take over and act casually and confidently no matter the audience.  (source: I am someone who studied acting and excelled in public speaking most of her life despite having a chronic anxiety disorder - playing parts and speaking on stage didn’t feel like ‘me’ because I was always channeling a character either fictional or an alternative version of myself. It works, folks.)

Are we thinking he broke away from the band and went on to succeed in a solo career? As in, he felt being local heroes was a limited pathway? Or did they all go together? Who else would be in it I wonder.

I LOVE your interpretation of Zuko and how the factors under which he was raised would shape him, especially in a modern setting. He would absolutely go into tunnel vision and that perfectionist mindset he was essentially forced into as a kid would probably be alive and well into adulthood. (And yeah, these aren’t men who have been to therapy - yet! - so we’re probably gonna assume that Zuko views this as a Perfectly Normal And Healthy Way To Live And Not At All A Trauma/Survival Response.)

I’m assuming this confrontation is what leads to their break up and then Sokka going off to pursue music further? I wonder, even all their other issues aside, what Zuko thinks about him travelling so far? As you said, we’re operating under the assumption that he doesn’t understand why Sokka couldn’t continue music and stay local. Even if things were perfect between the two, I imagine they still might not see eye to eye on that, which of course would just be another breaking point for them to tack onto the list.

As for their eventual reconciliation, Kaleigh @zukkau with her gigantic brain, said earlier that Sokka being the one to leave could also tie into a whole ‘I couldn’t ask you to uproot your whole life for me’ anxiety (especially if we’re painting zuko as a bit of a homebody here; hates change, likes routine) and that sets up perfectly for a “I would go anywhere for/with you” moment. All this to say that I think that would slot into this (^) narrative nicely.

If you have (or anyone has) anything more to add or touch on I would absolutely love to hear it, I am now fully in love with this AU and all messages and mentions of it are permanently welcome in my inbox and DMs <3 

[murasaki-murasame]

Since everyone got a free T3 ticket to try and compensate for how much of a shit-show this entire event was, I decided to just go ahead and use it on Grand Narmaya, and while I was at it I got Vane from the new suptix.

So I guess I may as well take the opportunity to give my own two cents on this whole debacle, lol.

Firstly, just to go over why I chose those two units from the free ticket and the suptix, I chose Narmaya over Belial because wind GW is relatively soon, and I currently have over 120 gold moons, so it won’t be that long before I can just get a sierotix normally and use it for Belial, so I just decided that Narmaya was the better option. I’m also just the sort of person who’s always going to be more interested in getting a new character in a game like this compared to a piece of equipment that just boosts my damage.

I was actually genuinely tempted to get Grand Jeanne instead, since I at least thought that it was much more rare for that gala pool to line up with big free summon events and stuff, so it’d be more annoying to try and spark her later, but after going through the records of past banners, I remembered that at the end of each year we get a flash gala at the end of December during roulette season, right before the new years premium gala. I was already planning to try and save a spark for around then anyway, so I figured at that point I may as well get Narmaya now, and just commit to sparking Jeanne at the end of the year. If I get lucky I might also have a full spark saved by the time the regular December flash gala with new Christmas characters comes out, so I could maybe spark her then and get some new Christmas units along the way.

As for the suptix, I’ve been wanting Vane for ages just because I like him, so even though there’s definitely better options, even within the water element alone, it was a pretty easy choice. I was kinda tempted to pick Shion instead to make fire GW easier, but that’s the only place I’d ever use her, and since I’ve already started switching over to my Ixaba Agni grid, I should be able to OTK there pretty easily without her, and I don’t think I have the overall grid strength needed to achieve a one-button OTK with her, so there wouldn’t even be a huge difference between what I could accomplish with her now and what I can already do with the characters I have.

Anyway, all that aside, the lottery sure was completely awful in every way, lol. I guess there’s no point going into much detail about it since there’s already been so much discourse about it, but I’m 100% in the camp of hating how it was handled, and I empathize with everyone who decided to quit over it. I’m not as upset with how they handled the compensation as a lot of people are, but I get where they’re coming from, and I don’t think it’s entitlement to complain about how everyone got given a free T3 ticket as compensation, when the whole point was that there was a big disparity between the people who got nothing, and the people who got a T3 or higher prize. I think it would have been fine if everyone got the free T3 ticket when the results got announced, but the fact that this only happened because of the backlash does a lot to change the situation.

I don’t really think there’s much they could reasonably do to fix the situation after this, though. If they try and provide even more compensation, it might just get out of hand. The bottom line is just that the whole set-up of the event was fucked up from the start, and everyone should have been guaranteed this ticket right from the start so we didn’t end up in this mess.

But really I just think that the whole issue of ‘you can’t just expect a free high-tier ticket, since that’d be like everyone getting a free Belial/free spark/free Sierotix!’ just goes to show how badly the event was set up. Usually in events like this there’s a fairly linear progression in value between reward tiers as they get rarer, but I honestly think that all three of the higher tiers ended up being effectively the same value because of just how insane the sierotix, the 100k crystals, and Belial were. If they had even just moved the unticketable summons up to T2, it would have been a lot easier to justify giving everyone a free T3 ticket, since everything else on that tier is a lot less valuable. But they decided to include at least one insanely high-value reward in each tier, which completely fucked the balance of the tiers.

There’s also the fact that, with how the lottery worked and how they rigged people’s first 10 cards, it made the actual probabilities of winning different tiers a lot more unbalanced and weird than you’d expect. Like, it basically meant that your chances of getting at least one T1 or T3 prize were basically the same, and that you had a surprisingly high chance of getting at least one T2 prize. Which just feels like a weird way to design a lottery in the first place, and it also set up this situation where a much higher amount of people than you’d expect got high-tier rewards. I think it basically ended up being a coin flip as to whether you only got T4 prizes, or if you got at least one ticket higher than that, which is completely different to how any normal lottery works, and it meant that basically everyone who ‘lost’ was surrounded by people who got super massive prizes.

If I was in charge of it, I would have adjusted the event by taking the current T4 reward tier and demoting it to a consolation prize assigned to all of the ‘losing’ tickets, while replacing it with a tier of rewards that includes stuff like non-limited SSR characters, ticketable summons, a sunlight stone, a damascus ingot, or a medium amount of crystals. And then everyone should have gotten the guaranteed T3 ticket when they announced the results. Even if they still decided not to give everyone a T3 ticket, making the T4 pool better would have at least made the rewards closer to the guaranteed rewards we got last year. Like, if they added 10k crystals to the T4 pool, then the combo of the guaranteed two T4 tickets plus the random 10k crystals they gave out on that day would have amounted to at least 30k crystals, which is what everyone got last year from treasure rush.

I also think it was a mistake to let people get multiple of the same high-tier reward if they got super lucky, since it’s just kinda absurd to think that you could get *multiple* free sparks or sierotixes from this. But that’s relatively minor compared to everything else.

Also, the negative attitude people have towards the players that chose to quit the game and burn their accounts is genuinely really weird and gross. As far as I’m concerned, it’s perfectly fine to cut ties with something that was becoming a negative part of your life, and deleting everything in your account means you’ll be less tempted to go back to it later. It’s not like they’re hurting anyone except themselves, at the very least. And all the people I’ve seen complain about how this is going to give crews a worse time in GW if lots of their members quit are just highlighting the fact that yet another part of the problem is that the endgame in GBF is inherently designed around scoring and racing content that’s decided by who has the most advanced account.

Anyway this got longer than I wanted it to, but I just have a lot of thoughts about this, lol.

[fencesandfrogs]

cloudtail’s daughter au

so i decided to do a full write-up of this au instead of doing a second post to cover books 4-6 and then everything will be self-contained.

the essence of this au is pretty simple: dovewing does not, imo, fulfill the prophecy by being the granddaughter of firestar’s nephew, because that’s at least 3 “kin” away from him. so while i think she’d actually have to be princess’ daughter to fit, i’ll let her be firestar’s grandniece and call that “close enough” because it’s better.

anyway, there’s no real reason for this to change anything, but i think given who cloudtail and brightheart are, and how close dovewing and ivypool are to whitewing, it would probably change quite a few things.

[4k words. 15 minute read. proper section headers.]

this is a big summary so i’m sure i’ll forget things, i’ve already had to add in the events caused by the dovewing/tigerheart romance/conflict that carries through the first three books, and that cloudtail being an atheist has a major effect on ivypaw. i know i wrote a detailed summary of the first arc, where i didn’t forget any of that, but nothing exists for the second arc. anyway this au is tagged cloudtail’s daughter and apparently i have a lot to say about it so i’m sure if you click on the tag you can find info about it. assuming this isn’t the first thing i post. which it might be.

section one: things that don’t happen

so i don’t want this to be a po3 rewrite, which means i’m going to take a moment to explicitly discuss what doesn’t change.

first, po3 stays pretty much exactly the same. i want jayfeather to be a warrior too. i also want him to be dovewing’s brother. but the au where brightheart gives birth to dovekit, anxiety child, and jaykit, blind, and feels like a failure despite the fact that its not like her half-blindness is genetic, is not this au. that is another au.

anyway, hollyleaf does keep herself more together, because she needs to be alive for some family drama. she’s in background character hell (BGCH) for a while, though, especially the first book.

she still goes to the tunnels, mind, she just comes out sooner.

but otherwise, despite my personal tastes, i’m not changing po3 very much.

section two: brightheart’s litters

okay so cloudtail and brightheart have four children, i believe, and my choice is either to replace whitewing, or to replace the others. now, i don’t particularly care for either of these options, but i’d rather they have their second litter younger, so we’re replacing amber/dew/snow. this still lets you have old queen drama, but not so much that you’re like “brightheart how on god’s green earth did you have 3 children with no issues”

instead, she’ll have dovekit and ivykit at about the same time whitewing had them.

now, for complicated cat genetic reasons, cloudtail could have been a black cat. now, here me out: what i mean is, if he wasn’t white, he could be black. basically, white is a masking color in cats, it goes on top of whatever pattern they would have displayed. both he and brightheart would have to inherit one dilute gene (princess was not dilute, so she had to carry it), and then either dovewing or brightheart are tortie, and that’s the best i can do for keeping dovewing grey.

i, personally, lean towards tortie brightheart, because i always pictured her that way, but i have seen some pretty cute tortie dovewing.

ivykit inherits red from her mother, and is tortie either way, because tortie ivypool is cute.

in fact, i’ve been tinkering with the idea that ivykit and dovekit have kind of mirrored grey and cream spots. not, like, perfectly mirrored, because that’s not how tortoiseshell/calico (they would technically be calico, since they have white) works, but close enough to be cute.

section three: arc one (summary)

these books are going to have six protagonists (dovekit, lionblaze, cinderheart, hollyleaf, jayfeather, ivypool, in that order) with a secondary character who gets less chapters but the most important b-plot (ivykit, hollyleaf, lionblaze, jayfeather, cinderheart, dovewing).

arc one focuses on “two braincells” i.e., dovewing, lionblaze, and cinderheart (sorry bb, ur not like the other two, but i’m putting you somewhere) and the main theme is dovepaw learning to manage her power. it’s a tug and pull between dovewing: glass canon, and dovewing: can’t do shit.

cinderheart and lionblaze also have a romance going on, which irritates ivypaw, who has a bit of a catalyst with the dark forest in the middle/end of the arc (like in the original). we only get this through external perspecives, though, because when this happens, lionblaze is in the secondary position.

one of the ways to fix this book series is to decouple it from ivy and dove, much as i love them. both the beavers and the dark forest make up a b-plot in this arc, while the quest for the third prophecy cat, as well as growing tensions between clans, take center stage, and lionblaze and cinderheart work in the second and third book to give us the adult perspective of the tension that dovekit and ivykit can’t in the first book.

mostly, this is fairly low stakes. part of that is because characters are having stakes appropriate for them, rather than smeared around in a book. (looking @ u, flametail buddy). so dovekit/paw spends her first book worried about apprentice things and doesn’t get to narrate again until the end of the series.

section four: book one — growing shadows

i think the fourth apprentice is a stupid name, okay?

so book one is dovekit and ivykit, for pretty obvious reasons.

although actually i’m pushing off the beavers in this to book two or three. i’m not 100% sure where i want that, yet.

so anyway, dovekit is born and wow is she anxiety child. (i call dovewing anxiety child a lot, because, well, she is? i feel like it’s sort of implicit in the books and i’m making it explicity.) anyway, she’s in sensory overload like 100% of the time. see, she was born late, and so she didn’t have her powers kick in over time like lionblaze and jayfeather. nope. she got the adult version right away.

so she spends a lot of time hiding with cloudtail because he’s big and fluffy and not complicated to look at. cloudtail and brightheart are understandibly pretty worried about her, because no one really knows what to do about it. she’s skittish and distractable and extremely sensitive. she hates going out in the rain, hates bright sun, etc.

(side note: dovekit’s powers extend to pretty much all her senses. she can see, hear, and smell much farther than she should, and she can taste and feel much more strongly than an other cat.)

ivykit doesn’t feel unloved, but she does know her sister is getting more attention, and that always kind of hurts, even if you’re understanding.

cloudtail and brightheart work to try to help dovekit get on her feet, but they’re not super successful. she learns to cope enough to be able to function as a kit, but she’s always kind of a strange, quiet kit. she doesn’t know how to talk about seeing too much because she doesn’t realize its too much.

dove is given to cinderheart, because lionblaze is a terrible mentor for small anxiety child, and ivy is given to lionblaze. this will also create drama later, just wait.

so the main plot of this book is keyed into dovepaw learning to hunt. the stakes are pretty low, honestly. they’re mounting around dovepaw and ivypaw, but the girls are too young to properly understand everything.

dovepaw is initially successful hunting due to some luck and being good at spotting prey, but she can’t replicate it. ivypaw only trains with her a bit at first, and she sees this success, and feels like her parents’ attention on dovepaw made dovepaw better than her.

this gets ivypaw into the dark forest. this is the b-plot: ivypaw training, realizing she made a mistake, and not knowing how to get out. plus, she doesn’t have to mind her sister. (ivypaw is raised by an atheist, so while she’s smart enough to eventually work out that these cats are evil, she doesn’t have a sunshine and rainbows view of starclan. that’s the only way i can justify her not being smart enough to nope the fuck out of there, even if she is really young and really angry.)

in clan life, ivypaw knows she needs to look out for dovepaw. she doesn’t mind, but she gets to experience a life without that in the dark forest.

dovepaw does mind how everyone treats her like she’s made of glass. she sees cinderheart talking to brightheart and jayfeather and firestar and feels like everyone thinks she’s useless. so she decides to go out on her own and prove she can function.

dovepaw starts sneaking out at night and she finds the tunnels. her senses dampened, she panicks, running deeper and deeper, getting lost. fallen leaves will find her, and help get her strength up and then get her out. kind of like with hollyleaf, who is out of the caves by now.

ivypaw sees everyone searching for dovepaw and starts to feel guilty about wanting more attention, and the fact that part of why she wants dovepaw back is so people pay attention to ivypaw again. she also feels responsible for this.

cinderheart is distraught, because she really did care about dovepaw, and it’s been three days, her scent tracked to the tunnels but it was raining and no one has seen her since, so she’s probably dead.

ivypaw, grieving, refuses to accept that dovepaw is dead and she hunts outside the tunnel mouth until she thinks she hears something.

dove and ivy reunite and return to the clan. ivypaw’s convictions that dovepaw needs to be protected are strengthened, and dovepaw knows she failed in her goal. everyone is happy to see them.

we get some fretting about how washed out everything is, how the rain didn’t even stick because the soil is so dry. that’s a cue to the drought, which will be a bigger deal next book.

section five: book two — fading echoes

honestly i’m not attached to book titles, but this works here too.

so this book is split between lionblaze and hollyleaf. i’m pretty sure hollyleaf is out of the caves by now, but i haven’t decided if she’s rejoined the clans. she feels strongly for fallen leaves: they’re listed as mates on the warrior cats wiki, and if hollyleaf and jayfeather are both going to have ancient dead ghost mates, she’s at least going to visit hers. her end goal is to get him to starclan so they can be together after her death.

anyway, this is beavers book. i don’t have a ton to say about it because it’s pretty much the same, except hollyleaf goes with dovepaw and cinderheart and she’s our pov as dovepaw falls for tigerheart because (and this is my understanding of her logic in the books to begin with): “big fluffy tom is safe fluffy tom.”

lionblaze feels the disconnect between him and ivypaw, but he can’t help that cinderheart is away. ivypaw is clearly preoccupied, but he can’t tell with what. his larger conflict is in finding the third cat.

this isn’t a filler book, per say. the tree falls and that happens, and lionblaze gets thrown into rebuilding camp. ivypaw feels doubly abandoned. lionblaze tries to win her affection, but he doesn’t know how.

beaver crew gets back. dovepaw has stars in her eyes. ivypaw is close to passing her warrior assessment, but lionblaze can tell she’s holding back because she doesn’t want to leave dovepaw. dovepaw can hunt by now, but she can’t really split her attention.

she’s scared of going into battle.

after a border skirmish where dovepaw just freezes, ideas of her being a medicine cat are raised.

ivypaw sees tigerheart in the dark forest, and she goes all bluefur being like “snowfur ur bf has rabies” on dovepaw, who is not happy with this. ivypaw pushes dovepaw to be a medicine cat because of this. the sisters are squabbling and barely talking.

book ends.

section six: book three — distant whispers

again not 100% sold on the names.

so this is cinderheart’s book, and she’s going to figure this out, because dovepaw and ivypaw are falling apart, and dovepaw deserves to be a warrior. so she convinces firestar to let her and lionblaze take ivypaw and dovepaw to the mountains. she believes, well, i’m not sure i haven’t worked that part out.

anyway, they go.

the tribe is like “yeah the world sure is a big place with a lot to look at. that’s why only half of us look.” (i know that’s not exactly how cave guard’s work but close enough.)

cinderheart is like “hm. what if, dovepaw, just a thought, what if you just, you know, avoid battles? i know it’s part of clan life but judging by the two souls crammed into my body, i’d say there’s been very few major conflicts over this and, reasonably, you should be able to avoid being chosen for battle control.”

dovepaw says, “but cinderheart, i’m a main character! unless i’m being punished or taught a lesson about duty, i’ll be automatically registered for every battle patrol until i die!”

cindheart says, “you’re right, i’m so sorry. hey ivypaw, [whoops yeah ivy and lion are here too sorry i forgot to mention that] what if you two learn to work as a team.”

dovepaw says, “i don’t want to work with her.”

ivypaw says, “that’s a great idea.”

because dovepaw talks very quietly (she forgets not everyone can hear as well as her), ivypaw wins.

they spend at least a month in the tribe, maybe longer, i’m not sure. eventually, they decide to go back. dovepaw is never happy in the tribe, it’s way too loud all the time, but she does manage to sort out her hunting issues, and so fighting is left.

so there’s still a big push for dovepaw to consider maybe being a medicine cat.

but that is not this au. this is the jaywing/dovefeather au where they basically switch roles. there’s a really good fic where dovepaw goes to riverclan for a while that i love and anyway this au is a as-close-as-possible to canon au for me to rectify my issues with dovewing in canon (nominally, i don’t have any, but i think her character was displayed…curiously, and i’m mad about the prophecy.)

ivypaw is team medicine cat. cinderheart and lionblaze are struggling. cinderheart eventually teaches dovepaw an extension of the techniques of the tribe, and they work out that dovepaw can kind of, track the cats she’s with to anchor herself in battle. this means dovepaw no longer is tied to ivypaw for her success, and so they both become warriors.

while they’re still in the tribe, ivypaw has time away from the dark forest and lionblaze finally puts two and two together, and that basically makes up the b-plot for the back half of the book, lionblaze trying to get ivypaw to admit what’s going on and then trying to help her.

dovewing’s senses begin to return but since they come back slowly she’s able to manage them. so she quickly excels in hunting.

ivypool cottons on to the dark forest breeding loyalty between its members, not to their original clans, and realizes that this is going to threaten all four of the clans.

end book with a bang, end first arc. we will now turn to the actually-have-more-than-two-braincells crew (sorry cinderheart, you don’t deserve to be in this group, but your prefix doesn’t end in -y, so you can’t be with jay/holly/ivy in the brainy crew.)

section seven: arc 2 (summary)

so this arc is when the main conflict (dark forest battle) becomes obvious. dovewing’s problems have been sorted out, so she’s pushed into BGCH for a little bit while the smart adults sort things out.

book three ends with ivypool realizing the dark forest isn’t a personal problem, but a clan-group (like, all of the clans together? not sure how to call it) sized problem. ivypool, jayfeather, and hollyleaf together manage to sort out a lot of the dark forest’s eventual plan, and they try to sort out a way to solve it. then the battle happens. that’s basically the summary?

in here, the clans start working together way sooner and the prophecy comes out way faster.

section eight: book 4 — the forgotten character

alright, hollyleaf is liberated from BGCH. actual title is still the forgotten warrior.

hollyleaf and ivypool start to bond, and hollyleaf is convinced all the clans need to know about what’s up.

ivypool disagrees, and they talk about it like rational people.

hollyleaf and fallen leaves are still cute.

jayfeather has his timetravel thing in this book so he can do flametail’s job in the next book. he gets to talk to hollyleaf and fallen leaves about it.

i don’t think i’d mess with jayfeather and briarlight’s relationship in this au, because i think it’s sweet in canon as is, but you know i have thoughts about half moon and briarlight. anyway, jayfeather gets his book next, this is about hollyleaf.

fallen leaves helps hollyleaf learn to control, idk, spirit dream travel? jayfeather helps with this too. hollyleaf has to share extra hard with jayfeather because she took up a disproportionate amount of time in lionblaze’s book.

so anyway, hollyleaf is learning to travel into the dark forest. similar to the way dark forest cats leave it? but in reverse. this is the main plot.

like the second book, it’s not really filler, so much as lower stakes, and like the second book, i don’t have a ton to say about it because the plot is self evident. unfortunately, hollyleaf has the two “chill” books. sorry bb.

anyway, this is building into jayfeather going all angry old man yells at sky at starclan next book, so the biggest conflict in this book is hollyleaf realizing she can just, leave. she can go back in time the way jayfeather did, but on purpose, save fallen leaves, and they can be alive.

i mean, that wouldn’t actually work, not the least because i’m not keen on hollyleaf being a reincarnation, espcially in the reincarnation-lite universe, but also because she can’t save fallen leaves, then he wouldn’t be a sharpclaw, not really, and like a whole host of other issues but anyway

at the end of power of three, hollyleaf runs away from her problems. this book is about her standing up to defend them.

i don’t know if she explicitly breaks up with fallen leaves, but they have a falling out that won’t get resolved until after the great battle. this is a mutual/not mutual thing where they both know that fallen leaves is stopping hollyleaf from fully committing to helping her clans now, but they love each other.

relationship conflict that isn’t forbidden romance.

speaking of, ivypool getting close to hollyleaf means that the two of them start to reconnect with their siblings. hollyleaf’s actions alienated her from jayfeather and lionblaze and she kind of just was sad and apologetic but they didn’t want to forgive her.

(sorry hollybush, says jayfeather,

that’s not my name, says hollyleaf,

oh, says jayfeather, guess i forget. well anyway, i have a new sister now. her name is dovewing.

dovewing?, says hollyleaf. but you don’t like her.

it’s okay, says jayfeather, she never tore my family to shreds and then abandoned me to deal with the fallout.)

(jayfeather and hollyleaf always seemed closer to me than lionblaze and either of them, until hollyleaf’s whole event. anyway he remains petty about everything and lionblaze stands by him because, well, he’s not wrong, also dovewing is important to cinderheart so he feels like he should be on her side on this which means jayfeather’s side. even though cinderheart is friends with hollyleaf look i said lionblaze is a loveable dumbass already, didn’t i?)

so anyway hollyleaf is sad and ivypool sees that and is like “hm maybe i shouldn’t be a petty bitch for no reason” and this is fine until after this series is over when dovewing and tigerheart are like “bitch we gon b together”

dovewing’s emotions get jayfeather to, well, not go back on his actions, but recognize hollyleaf is the most effective person to work with. because lionblaze and dovewing are just. so dumb.

and yeah this book ends with things feeling almost hopeful.

section nine: book 5 — sign of the moon

i cannot overstate how little i care about the titles of these books.

anyway, jayfeather and cinderheart.

i don’t have a ton of thoughts about this one. jayfeather reunites starclan, cinderheart helps convince ivypool and dovewing to work together. this is the book where clans find out about the propechy but not the dark forest that is for next book

they know something is coming, but everyone agrees not to give ivypool away yet. they like her, you know, alive.

anyway, i don’t have much to say because it’s pretty obvious what happens, because this is just a bunch of events from other books crammed into this book, now, and they’ve been written and i don’t see the need to make many changes.

cinderheart and lionblaze have kit drama, maybe? cinderheart counsels dovewing about tigerheart, maybe? my point is it’s not super important.

the book ends with the two warriors to every camp. and dovewing, jayfeather, and lionblaze, are going to get split up.

this is my biggest change so far imo because it’s the most plot relevant.

dovewing is going to shadowclan with ivypool. jayfeather is going to windclan with…i’m not sure yet? i don’t want him going to riverclan because leafpool has ties to riverclan and, well, i want jayfeather to get a chance to stand on his own. and lionblaze goes to riverclan, with either cinderheart or hollyleaf.

jayfeather is super grumbly about this, but admits that it’s important as a show of unity, and also, he’s pretty functional in wind clan? like they’re all playing to their strengths.

jayfeather learns to navigate pretty quickly, dovewing appreciates quiet and also not being that-strange-cat who everyone is super careful around, and lionblaze is big and gregarious and enjoys riverclan being chill and friendly. so yeah, people get a chance to chill and be happy.

ivypool is in position to be angsty next book.

end book.

section ten: book 6 — the last hope

despite my claim that the biggest change is sending the three to different clans, i don’t have a lot to say about it.

basically, well, okay

first, we see ivypool and dovewing again. reminder that last time we were in one of their heads, they were apprentices. in book one.

dovewing couldn’t even hunt last time we had her pov.

so there’s a few chapters to some characterization that happens. dovewing is no longer anxiety child. she’s somewhat shy, she’s soft spoken, but she’s not skittish. you can’t surprise her. and she’s intense. she’ll just stare at you with wide eyes if you come talk to her until you say something she wants to respond to.

ivypool sees why dovewing and tigerheart are good together. she’s still not supportive, but, like, he understands her. he doesn’t treat her like she’s fragile, but he also is kind and forgiving and soft to her.

plus he’s a total simp for dovewing. that helps.

anyway, ivypool gets along fairly well in shadowclan. i don’t have ton of thoughts about this.

ivypool, hollyleaf/cinderheart, and jayfeather’s companion, as well as half of the other cats away on missions, are acting as messengers between their host clans and their home clans. that’s how ivypool gets to find out about info. they meet on the island every morning. or something.

anyway, this bit is where i most hate the set up of this with two pov per book hard cap because it’d be cool to see into everyone else’s head but that’s for novellas and side stories.

the battle happens.

everything sucks. dovewing has basically committed to tigerheart, but bramblestar’s storm messes with the timeline.

and that’s pretty much it.

section eleven: what’s next?

so i swore i wasn’t starting new fic and then i thought of this and now i do want to write it so, maybe?

the most important thing is:

tl/dr: the reason dovewing shouldn’t have been a prophecy cat is because she’s not the kin of firestar’s kin.

[wcamino-confessions]

hi I’ve been waiting for species to come up in here, and now that it has, hold on to your asses boys we’re going for a ride

it’s another long one, sorry, but I’m very passionate about the species debate and whether or not you agree with me, you can’t say I’m wrong with some of these points

firstly, species are various ‘hybrids’ or evolutionized/mutated subversions of cats that are commonly found around amino. sometimes they’re simply cats with odd traits that serve no real purpose and were mainly created for aesthetic. some more popular species include delicats, mermyxns, and slimetails. each species has traits that are specific to their genes, although MOST (not all) have the same base traits (horns, wings, steam, fish tails, spikes, random inanimate objects as tails, socks, bandaids, unnatural whiskers, antennae, glass body parts, liquidated body parts, etc).

species really got big upon the first notable creation of warriors species called slimetails back in late 2018/early 2019. the cats featured various colored, themed, textured and substanced tails made from slime after radioactivity consumed the clans homes and resulted in the genetic mutation. they grew very popular very quickly as they were, and are, an open original species. from there, species quickly took off with the members of WA, and with no regulations about who could make them and how you went about doing so, they were quickly overwhelming. well, maybe overwhelming isn’t the right term. the community absolutely ate up the prospect of unnatural, oftentimes irrelevant, cats with pretty features and levels of trait rarity. they’re still a very popular aspect of WA today.

and in today’s standards, they are oftentimes associated with a users level of “popularity.” although this is definitely not the case with all species owners and affiliates, no one can deny that the only reason some members are popular is because of their status as creators, GA’s, or fervent members of that species communities. now, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does tend to rile small bouts of drama in some cases. luckily, they usually remain off of WA, or at least out of the BIG drama category of WA. but there is plenty of drama associated with species nonetheless.

firstly, there is the matter of relevancy that needs to be addressed within species. although the LT did reform their guidelines to ensure that all species do have some form of relation to the warriors books in their lore, we haven’t seen much of a change. in order to “abide” by this new guidelines, many species creators simply said that the cats in their species could be found living in clans either in the wild, on their own accord, or as a whole. WITHOUT altering their lore as required. that’s all fine and dandy. but how does it derive species from the books? well. it doesn’t. because in order for a species to be truly relevant to the warriors fandom, they must have descended DIRECTLY from one of the five clans in the books, or a tribe. rogues and loners, while apart of the series, have never been found to go off and create their own clan(s) for the fun of it. and we have no reason to believe that would change in the series. even the Skyclan cats didn’t reform Skyclan for shits and giggles. they were influenced by clan cats and received prophetic dreams from Starclan cats that basically guilt tripped them into doing this really random thing that they otherwise wouldn’t have even known of.

so, in all technicality, rogue/loner species derivatives do not pertain to the books. in order for a species to be genuinely, unquestionably relevant to warriors they need to either be mutated/evolved counterparts to the clans/tribe, or they need to, by direct lineage, be related to the original clan cats. of course no one expects you to go draw up a family tree on how your flying monkey cats have someone come from Firestar the Greats bloodline. but simply saying so isn’t enough. if they’re truly relevant to the books, then species owners need to add it. to. the lore. yeah, that guideline has already been passed. but it was not followed efficiently. your quirky cats with a clan/tribe hierarchy or something similar to such does not make them relevant. fix the damn lore like the guidelines originally stated. oh, and sorry to break it to you, but this means that your mythical god-like cats, your robo-cats, and your human object cats are immediately out of the running for relevancy. I can see how wings might have some semblance of realistism, but your sparkly candle tailed cats or cats who grow moss in cute little bubbles serve no evolutionary purpose and wouldn’t have any possibility of existing within the warriors universe.

now, onto the next topic of relevancy: evolution. some people say that cats developing fish tails or wings defies the laws of evolution. it probably does. but then again, we are dealing with four territorial cult cats who are very religious and, on occasion, will fight ghost cats and lose so. I’m actually defending species on this part, but don’t get used to it. because in all honesty, who are we to defy the lengths that evolution will go to? we didn’t expect fish to grow legs, but here we are. who’s to say that in this hypothetical universes cats can’t evolve to accommodate wings? don’t get me wrong, I hate the idea of it, but it isn’t COMPLETELY unreasonable.

next on the agenda, we have attribute individuality. granted, there are only so many different ways to make your species unique and really genuinely original, seeing the same handful of base traits repeat themselves in multiple different species (that could honestly just be considered one species altogether) does get old. there are not infinite options for creating a species that is going to be genuinely relevant in some remote aspect, and at some point people need to realize its time to stop. new species sprout up on what seems like a monthly basis on several occasions. and, although they don’t always get big, they still hold a place in clogging the latest feed. specifically with their borderline unacceptably irrelevant adopts. species really test the limits in relevancy, and so do adopts, but that’s for another day. and I’m not saying adopts are bad, so don’t single that out from this entire confess.

there’s another thing. species adopts. they’re constantly flooding the latest feed and drowning out actual warriors/oc related content. “it’s not your place to tell people what they should and shouldn’t post!” yeah, no dip. that’s not what I’m doing. I’m simply expressing my grievances with the amount of UNBEARABLY absurd species adopts that are constantly being uploaded and sold. and pricing? yeesh, that’s also for another day. but I am, again, not blatantly telling anyone to “stop posting species adopts!” or “lower your prices!” so that’s not something that needs to be brought up. so, whether or not you continue to post species adopts is your business. I’m positive that plenty of people adore them and are eating them up like candy. but, coming from a rare non-species lover, it does get tiring to trudge through all those horned bases and eye bleed neons to find some actual content.

don’t get me wrong, I’m not against species, per se. but I am against them being on WA. they don’t serve any actual purpose to the fandom in terms of relevancy. in most cases at least. and while I do applaud the creativity, the uniqueness and the overall joy it brings to the table, I just think that they’d be better off elsewhere. this is not a cat amino. this is a warriors amino. meaning we are only inclusive of cats pertaining to the warriors fandom for validated use in the community. validated use consists of realistic role playing, realistic story writing, realistic artistry and/or realistic character development by any means. so, looking outside of species, any unrealistic characters are still fine for the community because they cannot actually be implimented into WA in the ways that species can for their unnatural complexions. the only reason species are justified for their unnatural complexions is because of loopholes that make them seem relevant and viable for validated use, simple because they are completely feline in the genetic sense.

I hope that paragraph made sense, shit got a little complex right there. but, anyways, I’d like to reiterate relevancy. again. because I don’t see anyone giving up their species on WA for the sake of being canonically relevant because they’re going to find some off the wall way to make their quirky cats seem applicable. to be fair, I wouldn’t want to give up by hard earned creation so easily either. but there ARE other places to take them. and it isn’t up to us to figure out where, it’s up to the species owners. so it’s not like the species would be thrown out altogether, it would just be the irrelevant ones. and the relevant ones would be required to ACTUALLY abide by the guidelines instead of finding loopholes or countering valid points as to how their species are not canonically derived with “they lives in clans.” again, sorry if this paragraph was hard to follow. I’m perfectly fine with clearing up any misunderstandings in those last two paragraphs^^

so, to sum up, I believe the guidelines should be fixed and species should be properly mandated to abide by these new guidelines in order to ensure ACTUAL relevancy. I don’t like species. I don’t want anything to do with them. but I like that they bring a new sense of community and likeness to WA. and I don’t give a rats ass if you choose to associate with them. I personally believe that NONE of the species have any place on WA, but that would be unfair of me, wouldn’t it. so, I did my best to accommodate rationality in this entry, and I apologize if I came off as a stuck up bitch at any point. it wasn’t my intention, but I sure it did happen at some point.

oh, and let me derail any “WA would be boring if it were 100% relevant” arguments. because firstly, it WAS 100% relevant when it first started out, and it thrived. secondly, no where did I claim that species need to be 100% relevant. I made it very clear that it was the lore and the traits that needed to match up to accommodate the terms of relevancy. and thirdly, even on the off chance that species were subtracted from the equation, there are still plenty of other aspects that leave WA out of the running for total relevancy. thank you for coming to my ted talk, have a nice day loves <3

[localinferiorgood]

BNHA Modern Gang AU

*I got bored on a car ride and kind of got overexcited imagining and planning out this AU inside my head so uh, yeah. I should also note that I ultimately decided they would not have quirks in this AU*

General Stuff: - I’ll be referring to the gang as Gang X for now - The kids would go to school and everything like normal kids but after school would have gang training (physical and in weapon use (instead of having quirks)  - I want all of the major events of the show to still be incorporated in the AU, in some way - And I want all the kids to have the same personalities and relationships, because its not a BNHA AU if all the characters have different personalities (also I love my babies so) - Everyones “Hero Names” in the show are now their gang names - Instead of striving to become the #1 hero, they’re striving to eventually take over and become the head boss of the gang (at least Bakugo, Deku, and Todoroki are)

School: - So I was imagining the kids would go to a nice private school paid for by the gang - Also a major sports school - It would have mostly normal kids but have 2 classes (in each grade level) filled specifically with the gang kids (like the hero course; the normal kids would be based off the general track in UA) - There are rumors that the school may have gang ties, but no ones ever really been able to prove it - The school nurse (they call her Recovery Girl because it seems like she can take any injury in 15 minutes flat; she even takes care of broken bones and major injuries) and the principal (Nezu; not sure what would be unique about him yet, as he obviously can’t be a mouse in this one) and the gang-class teachers are all aware of the ties to the gang and are in it  - So to properly encompass and justify Class 1-A and Class 1-B’s relationship, I was thinking both classes could also be in sports(maybe volleyball,baseball or basketball(require a lot of  teamwork) but anything would probably work)?(it would be mandatory as physical training and to strengthen their bonds) - I can’t decide whether I would have Class 1-A be varsity and class 1-b be JV of the same sport or both varsity of different sports. 

Support Course/items: - So.... this wouldn’t be an extra class physically in school, but the kids training to work on support items would go to the same private school - Hatsume is still the prodigy - Support tailors weapons and sometimes clothing/other stuff to fit specific people  - Like they can tailor a specific gun to fit your hand, and can lower how much the gun kicks. They can do the same for knives, tailoring them to be the perfect length and weight for the user, as well as fitting perfectly in their hands. This goes for all weapons as well

“Gang Training”: - This is basically training to be able to be a competent gang member (most kids that get into the private school end up being higher ups) - They do basic physical training (I mean in hand-to-hand combat it helps to be strong, but also to handle the kick from any gun) but also with basic weaponry - The guns they use for training look, feel and have the actual kick of the gun they’re using but only actually shoot paintballs (Mr. Aizawa is a tough teacher but it’s not very rational to kill off all of your students lmao) - They train with all kinds of guns and ammunition, to get a feel for what each one is like and what they like. Aizawa requires them to train with all anyway though, as he believes you should be able to pick any random gun off the ground and shoot it with perfect efficiency and aim.  - There’s safety measures for swords and knives too, but I haven’t trained with those so idk what those would be lol 

All Might: - I was imagining he would be the boss, or head of the organization, since he’s #1 hero (at least in the beginning) - Like in the beginning of the show, he is secretly sick from an old injury and can only fight for so long before he starts coughing up blood.  - He’s still revered as not only the best gang leader ever but also one of the most amazing fighters the underworld has ever seen - But, as he gets older he still needs to find a worthy successor, as he’s definitely not immortal - Believes the boss should still be actively involved in the gang, fighting alongside his men and while some people think it’s foolish, everyone respects and likes him more for it 

All Might & Deku: - Obviously, Deku is still his secret chosen successor (or the one he wants to succeed him anyway but it will, in the end, go to the best candidate no matter what) - Deku was (distantly), probably through his father who’s in America, related to Gang X. His grandpa told him about it before he died, and all about All Might, the most impressive man in all the underworld, and has wanted to be just like him ever since - Soooo......I’m not entirely sure about how this part should play out, but I’m thinking maybe Deku was sick? And just couldn’t afford the really expensive procedure? (I’m pretty sure in the show Deku is middle class? So we’d keep it that way) - He by chance meets All Might and asks if he could ever be like him, even with his sickness, and All Might says no - Not sure what would go on to change his mind, but something happens, and All Might decides to pay for Deku’s hospital bills, heal whatever was going on, and personally start physically training him. Probably would make him clean up the whole ass beach still lmao - After the “entrance exam” (the physical part which happens after the standard school written at a secret location), Deku gets in by the skin of his teeth

Endeavor&Todofam: - uhhhhhhhhhhh........ - So he’s always wanted to be gang leader, but has always been behind All Might - He’s even tried duking it out with the boss a couple times but never wins - Not sure if I would make him head of the second most powerful branch of the gang or second in command - Either way he still not-so-secretly hates All Might, although he does grudgingly respect him - Wanted to become better than All Might, not get the top spot from All Might weakening, so he’s still pissed when All Might has to retire and he’s technically the boss now  - So, I haven’t been able to decide what Rei had that Endeavor wanted(since no quirks) but I still want it to be a fucked arranged marriage. Maybe she came from “good bloodlines” (like notoriously strong and smart /or people, whether her family was arranged in gang stuff or not) or maybe she was just very pretty and when she refused him, he literally bought off her parents? - Still raised Touya and Shouto specifically to be All Might’s successor - Touya still wasn’t good enough for some reason and something happened to him (weak bones maybe?) and he’s still dead in this AU (or is Dabi whatever the truth really is) - Rei still had a psychotic break and burned Shouto’s eye with boiling water and is in a hospital

Top 10 Heroes:  - So I want the top 10 heroes to either be the leaders of the 10 branches of the gang, or the top 10 members of the gang (they have a council or something)

Work Studies: - So in my old high school we were allowed to have a work study class, where we left campus for that hour and worked somewhere of our choosing, - Work studies were a big part of character development in the show so I’d like to keep those if possible - To make things less suspicious, work studies are required for all students (I mean let’s face it of entire classes all had work studies and others didn’t it would be weird). Also, since it’s a nice private school, I can totally see where they’d want the kids to go out and have “real world experience” before leaving high school - I would probably keep the fact that first years typically don’t have work studies (our school didn’t let freshman have them) but they’re trying something different this year - Of course the gang classes would be sent to various gang members (I think they’d still get to choose who, but idk maybe it would be more interesting if the teachers chose for them? - The general classes would go to whatever work study of their choosing, probably based on the careers they want to go into

Sports Festival:  - Literal school sports festival  - Limited only to those school students, i think - Gang members interested in work studies would come watch and scout - Would it be as internationally famous as the UA sports festival? i dont know tbh

Summer Camp & The Wild Wild Pussycats: - Not sure if here they would be purely working on physical ability and maybe martial arts or on weapons and stuff too - It would depend whether or not the Pussycats knew about the whole gang thing(or if they were involved in it) or were just regular physical trainers with no connection or idea about the gang thing - Kota......I think I would have his parents die in a gang-related accident and, obviously, hate anything to do with gang activity (which is normal anyway). If the Pussycats were not gang-related I’m not sure how the whole Deku-saving-him thing would go down but oh well - The League of Villains would be attacking still, to kidnap Bakugo (for whatever reason)

League of Villains (Gang Y) & All for One: - In a world where there are no “heroes” and “villians”, they obviously can’t go by that name (I mean I guess they can but I feel like that would be kind of stupid and odd) so we’ll go with Gang Y, for now - All for One can’t be immortal in this one, so maybe the gang name just keeps getting passed on from successor to successor? Or he’s just stupidly old(like 100 years old and still kicking ass)? - So, in the underworld, obviously no one is really “good” so to speak, I assume Gang X would still be involved in basic drug deals and stuff like that, but think Gang Y would be involved in some really fucked up shit. Like slave trade stuff maybe? Blood money? - Gang X and Gang Y have been top rivals since both of them started (around the same time) - Gang startup story would be the same as the beginning of the AFO and OFA rivalry in the show (2 brothers with different ideals) - AFO still ends up in jail after the legendary battle in Kamino Ward  - So......I’m having trouble with Shigaraki’s backstory since quirks aren’t a thing. Like obviously it would still be a horrific accident but.....yeah you get the point (haha it sucks trying not to spill manga spoilers) - Toga’s backstory would pretty much be the same I think - Spinner would have some deformity or something (since he can’t be a lizard) justifying his backstory - Twice is hard for the backstory thing.....but I would still have some traumatic event that caused him to do the contradicting voices thing - Nomu’s would maybe be like, brainless humans? Still look like flesh and blood humans but essentially be brain dead and only do what AFO tells them to do? Not sure but I’d still like them to be the result of human experimentation. - In Kurogiri’s case.........not sure tbh we’ll work on it  - Speaking of Kurogiri, he is like, get away driver/escape artist of the millennia. It’s like him and the rest of Gang Y just disappear into thin air. Even the police have tried to track him but? he’s just....gone? He’s still team mom, by the way, and really the only reason the Gang Y survives tbh (Credit to @tears-of-an-otaku )

Stain:  - Goes after and kills gang members (especially higher-ups) that he deems “corrupt” (ones that sit back and make underlings do all the work; rapers; betrayers; ones that are only really in it for the money; etc) - Puts chemicals on his weapons that immobilize his victims; The blood-type thing is still the same (works longer/better on specific blood-types) - Iida still goes after him for disabling his brother, and Deku finds and follows him, and Todoroki ends up coming as back up. - They still don’t get the credit for defeating him “for safety reasons”

Chisaki & Eri: - From a rivaling gang - Not sure how they find out whats going on but they do - Eri, at the very least, is still severely abused, but it would be cool to be able to incorporate using her blood to make some kind of drug  - Not really sure about much in this story arc tbh it’s so quirk-based it’s kind of hard to incorporate without them :/

The Licensing Exam: - Another sports festival, but this time with other major sports schools - Gang members come to scout as well  - In this one though, the other kids are just competing in a sports festival, but the teachers of the “gang classes” are also watching to determine whether or not their kids are ready to take on more “hardcore”/serious work studies (or even internships), where they would be able to experience what it’s actually like to be in a gang a little more in depth and practice real world fighting (and of course their special skills) - Special thanks to @tears-of-an-otaku for helping me figure this one out!

The Kids: - Like I said I want all the kids personalities and relationships to be the same - Jiro is still super into music and can still play (at least a little bit) a bunch of instruments; She has unnaturally good hearing too.  - Bakugo obviously can’t explode things with his hands anymore but has a dangerous interest in explosives (he was actually recommended to join the Support team but he rudely declined); still tells everyone to die on the (way too) regular; also still has the best reflexes in the class - Deku is super strong. Our sweet boy doesn’t look it but is strong af - Koda, still quiet as ever, is super good with animals (but afraid of bugs) - Momo is super good at designing and creating stuff and is very inventive(can always find a solution to a problem); She was also recommended to help in support but she (politely) declined; Still team mom - Iida’s a great runner (probably best at long distance but good at jump about anything)! Back in middle school, he was an absolute track star, but now-a-days with school, his class sports, and gang training, he doesn’t have time for track as well :( ;Still class president and team dad - Kaminari is still our lovable dumbass but is really good with electronics and wiring anything.  - Shinsou obviously can’t actually mind control, but he’s a super smooth talker and can convince almost anybody to do anything for him, so it can kind of seem like he controls people.  - Kirishima is an icon when it comes to defense training, he can block almost anything. He also never seems to get bruises. The rest of the class lowkey hates him for it because while, at the end of the day, they’re covered in bruises, Kirishima’s got maybe one (but usually not even that). He dyed his hair because he thought it made him took tougher and less boring - Aoyama is still into the ridiculously shiny, which is horrible for stealth practice, but he has this trick where he (maybe with a bracelet or something? Or a belt bc of his iconic belt in the show) can blind his opponent with the light reflecting off the metal and go in for an attack in that moment. It’s surprisingly effective.  - Oijiro may not have a tail, but he still excels at martial arts.He even rivals Bakugo (he might be able to win if Bakugo played by the actual martial arts rules that Oijiro was taught but he won’t) - Sugar makes Sato really energetic really quickly! (and for some reason makes him focus better). He’s still a super good cook and baker - Shouji still wears a mask all the time (he has a medical condition with his mouth that’s kind of gross and tends to scare people). He “talks with his hands” using sign language! He’s been teaching the rest of the class, as Aizawa said it was a very useful skill to have, especially in a situation where they need to be quiet but still communicate. - Hagakure, for whatever reason, is amazing a stealth missions! She’s somehow really good at blending into the background and even Jiro can’t hear her when she walks (unless she’s really focusing on it). Top of her class in it, actually.  - Mineta still isn’t that good in actual battle but is really good at simple immobilization (sorry the only thing I could think of for him even a little bit related to his quirk). - Ururaka (while not as strong as Deku), is surprisingly, incredibly strong. She can pick almost anything up and make it seem like the thing’s totally weightless (even when she’s actually struggling, something Deku can’t do) - Sero is the master of Duck tape really good at fixing stuff! It seems like he can fix almost anything; Him and Momo team up a lot when something breaks (which, in Class 1-A, is surprisingly often *cough* Bakugo *cough*); (Sorry, couldn’t really think of anything for him either but tape=fixing things? maybe?) - Mina is really into chemistry, specifically corrosives and hazardous mixtures. Her and Bakugo once teamed up after school and tried to make something - Aizawa said if they ever teamed up to do anything in the chemistry lab again they were going to be banned from it; Mina still has pink hair - Tokoyami has a pet raven that follows him everywhere-literally everywhere. It was a problem at first, but the school eventually decided to let Tokoyami keep it as long as it wasn’t making a mess anywhere and not attacking students (everyone else is lowkey mad about it like why does he get to keep a pet? Nezu tries to pass it off as an “emotional support bird” but everyone knows that’s bullshit); The bird (whom Tokoyami’s emo ass named Dark Shadow for some reason) can actually attack on cue! Actually, he kind of constantly has to be watched otherwise he might attack someone on the random (it’s happened; he seems to pick up on Tokoyami’s emotions somehow and if Tokoyami gets mad well.....; He has in particular had trouble Aoyama and all his sparkly things); The bird can actually send messages too! Tokoyami refuses to say how or why he trained his bird to do this but since no one expects such an old fashioned way of sending a message, it’s extremely useful for high secrecy messages (and packages; actually the actual gang has used it a time or two, a fact Tokoyami is secretly proud of). (Credit to @agaxso) - Todoroki is, not quite an expert, but has a weird amount of knowledge on arson and burning things (not sure why a gang would really need a skill like this except to burn bodies beyond recognition but Endeavor specializes in it so it must be useful somewhere); He also has an extensive knowledge of using  polyoxacyclobutane mixtures(liquid nitrogen definitely and maybe some other things?) to freeze things at whatever temperature (I think he’d probably shoot bullet-like things out of a modified gun; Freezing the target when it hits. Here’s a link explaining basically how polyoxacyclobutane works); He has practice with the modified gun from training with his father, but his mom was the one that originally taught him how to make and use the bullets properly.(Credit to @agaxso) - Monoma can do anything almost perfectly after watching someone else do it once. Unfortunately, he has a really horrible memory so he only retains the information for like an hour then has to watch them do it again. Still an annoying asshole - Kendo is tough as hell! Specifically has really tough hands/knuckles. The One Punch Man of class 1-B, she is literally known for being able to knock people out in only a punch or two. She once smacked Monoma and he had a wicked bruise on his cheek for 2 weeks. She still maintains that she “didn’t even hit him that hard” - Awase is an amazing welder! He was another candidate for the support team, but after some consideration he declined - Tetsutetsu, like Kirishima, has ridiculously tough skin that never bruises, and has amazing defense - I don’t really know enough about class 1-B to finish this unfortunately - Aizawa and Vlad actually put special time aside for the kids to practice and hone their specific skills and learn how to put them to use in battle. After all, you should use everything you have in your arsenal in real battle, and unique/special “skills” can be extremely useful in battle and often pack the element of surprise and can easily but you above whoever your fighting, (especially if they don’t have any special attacks)

Soooo......if anybody would like to write out this AU for me and help fill in the blanks I would love you forever and also probably owe you my life because I have absolutely fallen in love with this AU. Also let me know if I missed anything or you have ideas for the stuff I couldn’t fill in and I’ll put it in (and credit you of course lol) @todorokitops I know you’re a pretty well known Tumblr fanfic writer so......know anybody who might be up for the challenge?

[sparky-is-spiders]

The Hollyleaf Favoritism AU (Again)

This is my last HFAU post for now, although I will absolutely answer any asks I recieve about it. I wanna go over the Dark Forest Plan, talk about what happened to Onestar, and who the fourth cat is.

I’ma start with th fourth cat thing because there isn’’t much to say about it and I’m lazy.

Also: Part 1 Part 2

The Fourth Cat: The truth is, there is no fourth cat. It doesn’t really fit with the AU and it’s not like it was executed brilliantly in the main series books either. I can’t find any cat who could really qualify that way and I don’t wanna add any (more) contradictions to this AU. The Three save the day with the help of all the other cats. Insert some theme about all cats from all clans, no matter who they are or whether or not they’ve been the subject of any prophecies, being important and invaluable. If I ever writes a fic based on this AU, I really want background characters to shine in it. Not all the heroes are gonna be heroes because of powers or a prophecy, which is the point of both Lionblaze and Ivypools arcs.

Onestar: Onestar sucks. If you like Onestar, this is not the AU for you because he does not have a happy ending here. At all.

Onestar hates the way the other clans see WindClan. He thinks that everybody thinks that WindClan is ThunderClan’s pet and it makes him so angry. It is a rage that he feels in his soul, and he severs his friendship with Firestar because of it.

Onestar is, at the very core of his being, arrogant and egotistical. He is also, however, very scared. He never expected to be leader. He never wanted it and when Tallstar dumps leadership on him he kinda panics. He wants to lean on ThunderClan at first, but when he hears how the other clans mock him for it he swings desperately the other way. He tries to seperate WindClan from ThunderClan influence entirely. He is determined to be the best leader of WIndClan ever but he has no idea how to do that. He is desperate and floundering and it is not going well. His fear, his determination, and his pride are a dangerous combination, and they will be his downfall.

Onestar isn’t a great leader. He encourages his warriors to provoke and antagonize ThunderClan cats. During the first few moons of his leadership, he goes on patrols himself just to bother ThunderClan cats. He’s mean to his warriors and unwilling to listen to them.

“No, we don’t need to ask ThunderClan for herbs, we have plenty.”

“But we’re out of-“

“No.”

During a particularly bad winter (several moons before the return of Hollyleaf/storm), illness sweeps through WindClan. Several warriors die, and everybody is furious with Idiotstar. Because sure, he could have asked ThunderClan (the only clan with a large enough herb supply to trade some away) for help, but that might have hurt his precious ego.

Onestar is, in truth, torn over his decision. He does want to help, but he doesn’t want to appear weak. Going to ThunderClan for help, no matter the reason, seems like weakness to him. And weakness is an invitation for the other clans to attack. His warriors keep pushing him to do so, but that only makes it worse. His determination has bred stubborness, and he digs his claws in. He refuses to be bossed around by cats that should follow his orders. Even Ashfoot can’t get him to listen to her. She’s furious that he would put the lives of his clanmates in danger for the sake of his stupid pride. She confronts him aggressivly, and he refuses to listen. Too late, she realizes that aggression, although justified, was the wrong response, and he won’t listen to her even after she tries to be gentler about it. (She hates being gentle about it. It’s like her leader is a stupid kit who throws temper tantrums when he doesn’t get his way.) Several WindClanners end up dead, and this is when the Dark Forest manages gets a firm clawhold in WindClan.

When Hollyleaf shows up moons later, looking for a place in WindClan, Onestar is quick to accept her. Firestar’s granddaughter, his former apprentice. A cat with powers involved in a special prophecy who can spy on the other clans for WindClan, and she’s here. More than that, she wants to stay, to “help WindClan and Onestar” with “whatever problems they may have”. Nobody wants Hollyleaf there, but Onestar is so excited for this excuse to one-up his old friend. He changes her name, too, as if to say “in your face Firestar! She’s a WindClan cat now.”

Hollystorm doesn’t like Onestar, but she’s very good at faking it. It helps that he has a sort of blind faith in her. She’s a chosen one. She’s a good cat, and good cats support Onestar. He doesn’t question her real motives, and he doesn’t notice that her spying on the other clans doesn’t tell him anything big and/or useful.

He feels so betrayed when he hears that Ashfoot has talked to ThunderClan, and is furious when he hears about the Dark Forest cats visiting WindClanners in their dreams. He exiles them all (roughly three quarters of WindClan’s warriors, including Ashfoot, Hollyleaf, and Breezepelt), but they don’t listen. The exiles all turn on him, and they drive him out. The young cats who had been rebelling against Onestar since the Dark Forest first visited them in their dreams win. Breezepelt becomes their new leader, Antpelt becomes their new medicine cat, and anyone who refuses to swear fealty to Breezepelt and the Dark Forest is kicked out.

Onestar leaves with Hollystorm and Ashfoot, but is enraged when he hears that they plan to seek aid from ThunderClan. He has spent so long fighting to get out of Firestar and ThunderClan’s shadow. He refuses to disrupt that, and he abandons them along with about three other WindClan warriors. He leaves to rebuild WindClan on his own.

He mostly mopes on a small hill somewhere outside of clan territories until a patrol comes to collect him many moons later. They planned to ambush WindClan last new moon. They don’t know how it went, but they hope that he can return to lead WindClan again.

They lost, Onestar finds when he returns. He’s furious but there isn’t much he and his three warriors can do about it now. He begrudgingly agrees to stay in ThunderClan camp, but only because everybody else is doing it.

During the final battle, he faces off against Breezestar. For all his faults, Onestar is a good fighter, and he has Breezestar pinned. He’s about to deliver the killing blow, but several of Breezestar’s new rogue WindClan warriors pounce. They drag Onestar off Breezestar and tear him to shreds.

When he reaches StarClan, Tallstar tells Onestar that he is very dissappointed in him.

The Dark Forest PlanTM: The Dark Forest has a much different plan in this AU. They want to take over the clans, sure, but they’re smart, they can wait...

Many of them want to be leaders of their old clans. Some just want revenge. Either way, they are ready to make their move. They plan to divide the clans, weakening them. Eventually, the clan will snap, a civil war will start, and the Dark Forest can move in. They’ll choose a loyal follower to be leader, another to be a medicine cat, and a another to be deputy. These cats will be puppets, of course, but they will think that they are in charge, which is really all that matters.

WindClan is easy. Onestar is crappy, and tensions are already high. Some dark forest cats are deployed to train the older warriors who believe in the Warrior Code too much to want to overthrow a leader. The others visit the dreams of the young and rebellious. They are pleased to witness the fall of WindClan.

RiverClan is a little harder, but they crack the code eventually. RiverClan has a lot of outsiders and half-clan, and some of warriors still hold on to antiquated views on cats who aren’t 100% RiverClan. Some Dark Forest cats plant doubts in the minds of cats that those who aren’t born in RiverClan to a set of RiverClan cats aren’t loyal. They train to defend themselves against these “disloyal” warriors. Mistystar and Mothwing start to expirience mounting hatred and insubordination. Those who want to stand by Mistystar and Mothwing, their noble leader and trusted medicine cat, also get visited by Dark Forest cats too, building tensions even higher. Before civil war can break out, however, the emergency gathering is called. After witnessing what happened to WindClan and hearing about the Dark Forest cats’ scheming, RiverClan tentativly patches itself back together to face a common enemy. It doesn’t go perfectly, and many wounds are still raw, but things do improve.

The Dark Forest cats don’t make much headway in ShadowClan, but the arrival of Sol helps. The cats need somebody to listen to them, to guide them through these tough times. Isn’t it nice that all these Dark Forest are there to help? A few careful digs at Blackstar here, a few warnings about rebellious cats who aren’t happy with Blackstar’s decisions there, and boom! A civil war looms on the horizen. Firestar’s dark forest warning and the aftermath of Breezestar’s coup help ShadowClanner’s realize that they’ve been played against each other like puppets. Fury at this indignity helps them patch things together.

ThunderClan is the hardest. Some of the cats are receptive to dire warnings about how Jayfeaher, Lionblaze, and Hollyleaf/storm are half-clan monsters, but most grew up with Firestar and Graystripe, an outsider and a respected senior warrior who fathered two kits with a RiverClan cat. Feathertail is half-ThunderClan, and she’s a hero. And anyway, the three are still Firestar’s kin. That has to count for something, right? The Dark Forest never manages to get a clawhold in ThunderClan and plans to kill most of them.

When their careful machinations and manipulations are blown, they manage to cobble together a new plan. So what if most of the clans have banded against them? WindClan is on their side and the rogues Breezestar readily welcomes into the clan have made it large and powerful. They’ll send WindClan cats to attack patrols and hunt prey from the other clan’s territories. They’ll slowly pick off cats and lower food supplies until all the clans are weak enough for WindClan to overpower them. When they learn of the planned WindClan ambush, the Dark Forest cats are ecstatic. A force powerful enough to be a threat, but not big enough to be a serious danger, that can be lead straight into a trap. It’s perfect. They warn Antpelt, who warns Breezestar, and WindClan makes their plans. They turn the ambushers into the ambushees.

If it wasn’t for Jayfeather’s frantic warning, the fate of the clans would have been sealed when WindClan attacks the force sent to ambush them. As it is, several cats from the other clans lie dead, and most are seriously injured. It’s a major blow to the clans, and they slink away to lick their wounds.

It’s the perfect time for an attack. The Dark Forest gives WindClan a few days to repair and prepare, and they attack. The final battle happens at night. It is long and harsh and many cats are killed. At the end of it, Firestar and Tigerstar stand against each other. They fight for a long time, until both die of their wounds underneath the rising sun. The Dark Forest has lost, and the clans are victorious.

Some Extra Stuff:

-Breezepelt never gets his nine lives. Witnissing the brutal death of Onestar leaves him feeling awful and shaken. He and Nightcloud return to the clans in time for Crowfeather’s trial.

-As much as I like the idea of Hollystar, her character arc is all about accepting that she can be important and do good as a regular warrior. But I really really want Hollystar. Maybe if Harespring dies...

-Ashfur goes to the Dark Forest. Just as he deserves...

-The three don’t lose their powers, but their powers do get weaker. Jayfeather’s crazy visions ease up, Hollystorm’s senses dull a little, and Dovedream has to really focus to do her dreamwalking thing and her emotion reading becomes weaker and a little less precise.