#I’ll reblog this with the original panel in a few
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Orange Town panel redraw that I’ve been using as a warmup :)
#one piece#one piece fanart#I’ll reblog this with the original panel in a few#cat burglar nami#nami#nami one piece#straw hat luffy#monkey d. luffy#luffy one piece#op nami#op luffy#panel redraw#art tag
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We'll Make It Out
Summary: As the new Jedi Commander of the Bad Batch you aren’t exactly well liked by your new team, who view you as a babysitter. Except for Echo, who understands better then most what it’s like to be on the outside. When a mission goes sideways you start to lose faith in yourself, in your squad, in everyone but Echo, who won’t let you give up.
Character: Echo and F!Jedireader (no use of Y/N)
Word Count: 2,782
Warnings: Canon typical violence and peril, minor injury, mention of blood.... I think that's it.
A/N: This is my second entry for the incredible secret gift exchange hosted by @cloneficgiftexchange you are so incredible and thank you so much for doing these amazing events, and giving me a reason to finally write again! I have never gotten to write for any of the Bad Batch boys and I was super excited to do this prompt especially as I got to explore the Batch's earlier days and work in a little about the way they may have originally viewed Echo and a new leader of the squad. It definitely took me out of my comfort zone, but I took a risk and tried something new for the wonderful @orbital-mirror. I hope you enjoy this fun little piece as much as I enjoyed writing it!! As always, any comments or reblogs with your thoughts are appreciated.
“Echo, look out!” You shouted to be heard about the blaster fire as you raced towards the former arc trooper currently being surrounded and cornered by a legion of Droids.
He spun towards your voice and managed to blast the three shots needed to dismantle the droids that had snuck up behind him, while you ignited your lightsabers and flipped in front of him to slice through the remaining ones there.
“I’ll handle the rest of these you get that door open and try not to trip the alarm this time,” you ordered. Echo grumbled something but it was hard to hear through his helmet modulator as he jogged toward the metal door built against the mountainside you were currently cornered on. Inserting his scop into the lock and beginning to twist as he typed hurriedly on the pad.
You took a stance in front of him and spun your two lightsabers back and forth as you guarded him and yourself from the relentless blaster fire. Your eyes scanned back and forth as you reached out and connected with the force around you. Feeling the reverberations in the ground and the change in the air pressure as you blocked each blast by near instinct alone.
“I don’t mean to rush you, but there’s more coming,” you said breathlessly. A sheen of sweat coated your forehead as you tossed one of your sabers up high in the air, reaching your hand out and using the force to shove the first few rows of the advancing battalion back into each other. The clock of metal and their high-pitched voices adding to the chaos as you spun and caught your saber again before it hit the ground.
“I’m doing the best I—got it! Go get inside I’ll cover you,” Echo said loudly. You didn’t even hesitate as you felt him stand and move towards you. You blocked one more shot before you took off into the dark maw of the now open tunnel, turning and calling out for Echo as he walked backwards into the tunnel after you.
One press of your fingers has your lightsabers disengaged and back on your belt before you flick your wrist to close the door and spin the lock. Echo blasts the control panel with two shots.
“How long will that buy us?” You ask. Shifting on your feet and doing a poor job of keeping the nerves from your voice. Regretting volunteering for an assignment you clearly weren’t ready for.
“Not long enough,” Echo replied dryly.
“That’s very helpful thank you,” you said with only a hint of sarcasm as Echo gives you five more seconds to catch your breath before he starts moving deeper into the tunnels. Hugging the wall with his body as he taps the side of his helmet to turn on the light there. You just reignite one of your lightsabers.
You couldn’t see his face behind his gray and red helmet, the matching colors of the squad you’d been newly appointed, the same squad who were not at all happy to have a Jedi babysitting them. Especially one so young. A newly minted jedi knight. A product of a war that needed more commanders and generals then there were master’s and knights to fill. You hadn’t been ready for the trials, you’d tried to argue against them, but your master said you were ready, and you had passed them easily enough. Yet, the seed of doubt had remained. Growing and festering like a vine around your heart, all the way until you’d been sent to Kamino to work with a newly minted, highly specialized squad. They’d been on assignments before without a Jedi, but a recent mission had gone sideways and resulted in half the team coming back in various casts and bandages, requiring month long stays in Bacta tanks before they could resume training. Plus, they’d gained a new member, a former Arc Trooper and rescued POW. Since then, the Generals had decided the Bad Batch could use a Jedi’s supervision. At least temporarily.
No one on the squad had been happy with your appearance. No one that is except for Echo. He always made sure you had a seat and were included in plans, even if the others looked at you suspiciously and had on more than one occasion tried to leave you. He stood up for you when the others got snippy or ignored you entirely. You knew realistically that he was simply doing it because he was used to following a Jedi’s command, part of you couldn’t help the warm feeling that spread over your chest every time he did something kind for you. A feeling you did your best to mediate away every morning. To little effect.
“Come on, the coordinates Tech gave us show the control room should be down this hall and to the left,” Echo’s voice cut through your wondering thoughts and brought you back to him.
Nodding your head you searched up ahead through the force for any signatures of life but found nothing. You took that to mean the other members of your squad had done their part in causing a diversion leaving you and Echo free to get the stollen plans and leave behind a virus that would wipe out the Separatist’s systems here.
Easy.
“Hey! You’re not supposed to be here,” a droid called when you unlocked the door to the control room. His metal finger pointed at you while he reached for his blaster. Echo and you were swifter.
“Get the files to Tech and plant the virus I’ll watch the door,” you said. Stepping back into the hallway as Echo inserted his scomp link into the port and began to search for the files.
“On it commander,” he replied. His eyes shifting over the screen far faster then you could keep up with.
You really wished they’d drop it with the commander title and just call you your name but, that seemed a habit you couldn’t break any of them of. Though you got the impression only Echo actually did it as a respect for your authority, of which you question daily. Especially now as you flicked your gaze to the hallway, a sense of dread building at the base of your spine as you could hear the banging of droids firing against the metal door. You tried to find the peace within yourself that always seemed easier for those around you to find. Imagining you were back at the Temple, sitting underneath the flowering tree in the courtyard as you watched the pink petals float down to the pebbled ground. The image only helped for a moment as you refocused your attention back to Echo. He seemed unfazed by any of it. Working quickly and silently aside from the faint whirring of his scop every now and then. Somehow, he looked more at peace then you did.
“Are you almost—”
Bang! The sound of the door at the end of the hall being blown to bits made you wince and reignite your saber on instinct. Echo was already beside you when you turned back to get him. His hand on your bicep as if he intended to yank you somewhere. The sounds of droids shouting orders and marching down the hall in time with your rapid heartbeat made you ignore whatever Echo’s hand there had meant and instead trade your sabers out for your comm link as the pair of you raced down the hall.
“Tech please tell me you’re there?”
“Yes, commander we read you,” Tech’s voice was staticky. Probably due to being underground but you hoped he could hear you enough as you sprinted for your life. Opening and closing any doors you came across.
“We’re going to need an immediate pick up!” You shouted a little more frantically then you meant to.
“Sorry commander that’ll have to wait,” Tech said again.
“Wait for what?!” you shouted back.
“It seems your earlier light show display set off a series of silent alarms that alerted the commander of the base that we are here. So, we’re—” There was a pause as the static grew worse and Hunter’s muffled voice could be heard shouting something about Fighter’s on their tail. “Yes, yes, I see them. We’re fine.”
“Tech!” Echo shouted now through his own comm.
“We will have to use the secondary agreed extraction point as the first one is now overrun.”
“We won’t make it to the second extraction point,” Echo says as you force open another door which had dead ended in a hanger bay. There’s no way out.
“See this is why we shouldn’t have agreed to work with a Jedi. Or a reg,” Crosshair’s voice drawled over the comms. You didn’t need the force to sense his aggravated disapproval that he and his brothers were being forced to reassess their plans for the two of you. That they were being thrown back into danger because of you.
“Stow it Crosshair,” Echo snapped. “Just be at the extraction point. We’ll make it there.”
You did not share his hope as you slammed the door on a droid’s face, ducking the incoming blaster shot he’d managed to get off. They were right. This was your fault. Your poor leadership instincts had led you and Echo to be trapped down here while the others were trapped in the sky.
“Copy that,” Tech’s voice said plainly and then the comm cut out.
The second extraction point was several miles away from the command tunnels you were in now, there was no way you were going to make it there. Not trapped like you were with a virus about to short circuit every piece of technology in here and a battalion of droids outside the only blast door you could see.
“Commander over here.”
You didn’t know when Echo had left your side, but you followed his voice until you found him halfway in a small gunship used to protect the supply ships that came in and out of here. It was just big enough for two people. A pilot and a gunner.
“Can you fly this ship?”
“I—” The droids were carving their way through the door. You couldn’t do this. Sure you could fly the ship but what then? The mission had gone wrong because of you. If someone else would have been here they wouldn’t have needed lightsabers, they wouldn’t have tripped the silent alarms. Echo would be safe. The men you were supposed to lead and protect would be safe.
“Commander,” Echo’s voice pulled your attention back to him as he pulled his helmet off and looked at you with a face that was so stern yet he had the softest pair of eyes you’d ever seen. “Our only way out of here is this ship. Now I can’t fly it, so I need you to do it. Okay? Can you do that? Please,” he added. His attention still solely dedicated to you despite the banging and shouting coming from behind the pair of you and the racing of your own heart. Right here there was only him. Only Echo.
“Yeah,” you breathe out. Clearing your throat and nodding your head. “Yes, I can fly it.”
“Then get in and get it started, I’ll open the bay doors and we can go.” He’s gone again before you can argue.
Hoping in the cockpit your hands move on their own. Using your memory and placing trust in the force that hums around you louder than before, you flip the engine switches and grip the controls steering it around into position as you wait for Echo to swing himself up onto the wing and then flip into the gunner’s seat behind you.
The canopy doesn’t close fast enough. You’re too focused on the controls. The force tugs and pulls your attention to the back but you ignore it in favor of making sure you don’t crash. It’s only after you hear a muffled scream of agony that’s quickly swallowed up by the sound of the roaring engine that you bother to look back. To see Echo’s shoulder smoking with a brand-new blaster wound through it.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
“Echo, we have to stop,” you begged as you marched through the heavy underbrush in search of the clearing that was pinging on your outstretched data pad. “Please, I know I’m no doctor, but I can patch you up.”
“It’s fine commander I’m… fine,” Echo’s voice was weak and even though he’d turned off the sound on their walk so you couldn’t hear the pained breaths and heavy pants, you could feel them there. Feel them in the way his force signature wavered and spiked. Hotter and louder than it usually was and growing colder.
“No, you’re not fine you—”
“Commander please!” he panted loudly. Resting his scomp against a tree to get some weight off his legs as he looked over at you. You winced at his harsh tone and even if you couldn’t see his face, the way he lowered his voice showed he regretted it. “I’m fine. There are scouts looking for us and if we don’t make it to the extraction point, we could be stuck here.”
“And if you bleed out on the way there then were both dead anyway.”
“No, you’ll be fine. You keep going if I start to—”
“I’m not leaving you Echo! You’re stuck with me out here, so if you pass out from blood loss then I’m going to sit down right next to you and face whatever comes for us. Even if it kills the both of us. It’s my job to protect you, so stop arguing with me and sit down so I can patch you up.”
Echo stood frozen in front of you before finally solely nodding his head. “Okay.”
“Okay,” you repeated. Walking over to him and helping him sit so you could take off his shoulder piece and helmet to assess the damage. It wasn’t as bad as you expected, but his blacks were quickly filling up with blood and the circular wound was blackened. You pulled a Bacta patch from your kit and carefully applied it to his shoulder. Apologizing at the slight hiss that left his lips as you did so.
“It’s fine Meshla,” he whispered. His eyes widening when we realized what he’d said. Apologizing and looking away as you went back to work.
“What does that mean?” you asked.
“What?”
“Mesh’la,” you repeated.
He looked away again and flushed a faint pink along his pale cheeks. Pausing for a moment before looking back over at and giving you a gentle smile. One you’d never seen before.
“We make it out of this I’ll tell you,” He promised.
“That’s not fair,” you whined. Leaning down to kiss the bandage you’d put on his shoulder without thinking about it. “How will I know if we don’t make it out?”
“I…” he gaped at you for a moment, and it was only his bewildered expression that made you realize what you’d done. Now it was your turn to blush and duck your head. Handing him back his shoulder piece and helping him attach it without looking anywhere near his eyes.
You force lifted his helmet over to your hands as the pair of you stood. Running your fingers over the edge of it before offering it back to him. His gloved hand brushed yours for the briefest of moments when he took it back.
“Then I guess it will just have to be a mystery,” he said quietly again. His tone almost hinting that he was smiling again, and it was enough to make you meet his eyes again. Rewarded for a fraction of second with a smile you could tell used to cross his face more often.
“We’ll make it out,” you said firmly. Wrapping your hands briefly around the hilts of your lightsabers and finding yourself calm again despite it all. Not because you’d imagined the tree at the Temple, or your master’s kind teachings, but because Echo was smiling at you.
“You know I meant if we survive the whole war, right?” he almost teased as he clicked his helmet back into place. Leaving you with only the memory of his smile to reply for the rest of your life.
“No, no, no can’t change the rules like that,” you argued with no intentional malice. Letting yourself laugh quietly for the first time in…. too long. “You alright enough to walk again?”
He nodded his head. “Wherever you lead commander.”
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Thank you!! (To the rebloggers of the CHICON 2007 J2 Breakfast Video)
I’m not sure of the proper Tumblr-ish way to thank all of you who recently reblogged my post, so please let me know if I’m violating some sort of etiquette or doing things in a weird/awkward way. I tried to put this in a comment on my original post, but I was too wordy!
I wanted to give a big “thank you”, though! I was kind of thinking this project was just going to fade into obscurity, so I was really happy and surprised to find several notifications when I woke up this morning. It was so encouraging to see the interest, and I’ve appreciated your comments both in the tags and in the reblog texts, as well as just the fact that you thought it worth reblogging.
The day I posted the Breakfast video, I started on the main Jensen/Jared/J2 panels from the same CHICON 2007 convention. I figured if nothing else, even if no one else was interested, I’d want to have a complete set. That will likely be the next thing you see from me, but I’m very slow, especially now that vacation is over, so my output speed won’t be impressive. I do hope to get faster with practice.
The Breakfast video was my first time ever doing any video editing, not counting one very short and very pathetic attempt a few months ago with free software. When I did this one, I purchased some proper software and I’ve been learning both the new software and video editing concepts as I go. I'm more of a words person than anything else, so this is way outside my wheelhouse, but it's something I'd been thinking about a lot lately and I thought I'd give it a try. If nothing else, it's fun to learn a new skill. I've found it to be surprisingly absorbing. The skip-meals-because-I-don't-want-to-stop-what-I'm-doing kind of absorbing.
If I do more, my intent was to progress through the cons by date starting from the oldest. However, I’ve found that some footage is just such poor quality that the upscale process I’m using doesn’t work on it no matter what combination of settings I try. I could still edit the original videos together as-is and then add subtitles and additional content like what I added here, but I guess people would be less interested if the video quality is too bad. So I figured I'd skip over the ones I couldn't get a good set of upscaled videos for and focus on the ones where I felt like I could get a tolerable video quality. Maybe someday either the technology or my skills will improve and I can go back to the ones I skip, or maybe someone else in our fandom with more skill in this area will be able to accomplish more.
(@kerkhofbloemen, unfortunately, it looks like most of the L.A. 2008 footage falls in that category, but I only experimented with a couple of the main videos briefly a few days ago. I’ll put some more effort into it after I finish CHICON 2007 before I completely write it off as being beyond my current abilities.)
Editing in the extra content has been the most fun part of the process for me. So many of their cultural references go completely over my head, because I guess I live under a rock! I had a moment of pure glee when I Googled “Montgomery” to try to figure out what Jensen was talking about when he picked his mic stand up. I immediately saw that Montgomery Gentry photo and burst out laughing because it all finally made sense!
Thank you very much @blue-chimera @sensitivehandsomeactionman @afacefromamoviescene @soulmates-for-real, @winchestersbaby067 @arwenadreamer @takikojou @kerkhofbloemen @stoneyggirl2 @unepetitefrancaise @jensenbeingjensen !
(I hope I didn’t miss anyone! If I did, it definitely wasn’t intentional. The reblog count on my post shows 12, but I only saw 11 names.)
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Some targeted follow-up on 383, courtesy of a disgruntled Mina Stan
(Or, Why the chapter post for 384 is late.)
Ooo-kay, @randomvongenerico, I’ll dance this time because you’re just barely on the right side of “politely asking questions” for someone who, judging by their own page, is probably pretty new here. But please know that I came very close to hitting the block button the moment I saw, “Why do you even care about heroes? Aren’t you a villain stan?” at the very top of a notification chain of twenty-seven comments on my chapter post. The next time you have as much to say about someone’s post, I strongly urge you to just reblog it and add your thoughts rather than indignantly spamming the comment section and then sending a bunch of the same stuff word-for-word via ask when you don’t get a reply in less than 48 hours. Some of us do have lives and commitments outside of Tumblr.
That said, as with last time I got a detailed reply that seemed to genuinely want to hear my reasoning but also edged over into belligerent/condescending territory, I’ll have to ask you to forgive me for being somewhat blunt at times. Digs like, “Or are we going to say Mina is being rude and impolite for having trauma now?” have not earned you the most patient reply I’ve ever put down in writing.
I’ll take your questions and points roughly in order you sent them, though I may omit points I have nothing much to say about, or rearrange them. Anyone who wants to see rvg’s full set of replies in the original order and context is invited to check the comments here, at least until such time as I deem it less of a headache to hit that block button after all.
For everyone else, for the purposes of gauging your interest, this post contains discussion of the following topics:
Mina as she's affected by BNHA's tendency to shortchange the interiority and development of its women. I hit this one from a few different angles.
How the series treats physical damage and how that impacts what I call out as problematic or don't (e.g. why Shinsou's brainwashing got compared to a war crime but Mina's acid did not).
The Sludge Villain, why he shouldn't have been involved in the second war at all, and how his return fails to address the flaws in Hero Society he was originally used to establish.
The circumstances of Midnight's death and the impact of the narrative's ongoing refusal to allow people panel time to grieve for her.
Saving villains, who that maxim applies to, what it means for the heroes' responsibilities, and what it means when they fail to live up to said responsibilities. Specifically addresses Hose Face and Gigantomachia.
Replying to wild presumptions re: which characters I should or should not care about, as well what situations I ought or ought not overthink.
A fair number of intersections between the above topics and other less substantial diversions, including a retraction on my part for a mistake I made in the chapter post that rvg brought to my attention.
Hit the jump.
I think the “pure psychological scarring” thing is just referencing Mina’s trauma from her first encounter with Machia. It’s just there to remind the readers about Mina’s trauma, since it’s been a while since the last time it was brought up. Shonen does this sort of exposition all the time. I wouldn’t think too deeply on it. Like, I mean, it’s technically not an incorrect statement. Mina was mentally and emotionally scarred by Gigantomachia. Or are we going to say Mina is being rude and impolite for having trauma now?
It’s true that the specific line about Machia embodying psychological scarring overlays Mina in a way that’s doubtlessly intended to remind the reader of her trauma. However, if that’s the only function Horikoshi intended the line to serve, he’d have done much better to put it in a text box, delivered to the reader via omniscient narrator. Instead, Mount Lady is the one delivering it, and she is explicitly thinking about Machia in relation to “ordinary people,” flashing back to the scene of carnage left in Machia’s wake, as countless civilians scream and cry for help. She’s not even slightly thinking about Mina in that moment, for all that the same sentiment applies.
When I criticize Mount Lady’s mode of thinking, therefore, my point is not that people are wrong to have trauma,[1] but that it is wrong to dehumanize the source of that trauma. Machia has feelings and thoughts just like any other human—treating him like a symbol of pain rather than a human being, something to be stamped out like a disease or a curse, is the same sentiment as Gran Torino blaming All Might’s pain and the smearing of Nana’s memory on Shigaraki’s very existence. As with Shigaraki, there are reasons that Machia turned out the way he did, and talking like he’s some kind of free-roaming trauma elemental obfuscates the chain of failures and wrongdoings that produced him to begin with.
Incidentally, I wrote a twenty-thousand-word essay on the mass arrest of the Paranormal Liberation Front, so I promise you are not going to get anywhere with advising me not to overthink this manga. If Horikoshi didn’t want his readers to take his societal issues seriously, he shouldn’t have presented them as the root cause of so many problems; if you didn’t want to read a detailed meta dive tackling the chapter’s philosophical shortcomings, you probably should have abandoned ship somewhere around the time I started waxing verbose about the ethics authors sign up to engage with when they make the decision to put their protagonists in skintight catsuits and call them Heroes.
On which note:
I have some questions about your logic about the morality of the methods and tactics here, if you don’t mind. So brainwashing and calling Machia mean things is crossing the line, but throwing acid at him is okay? You criticize Shinso using his Quirk on Gigantomachia, yet you don’t take any issue with Mina melting his claws(…). Why? I guess brainwashing is just too much of a villain Quirk, so it just can’t be used heroically?
Judging by one of your later comments, you did some archive-diving to find out if I’d ever talked about Mina before the Chapter 283 post. Judging by this question, that archive-diving did not include the Chapter 282 post. Please see it for a lengthy explanation about what specifically I object to in Shinsou’s use of his quirk on Machia, and a much briefer aside about what kinds of uses I’d have been completely fine with.
As to the difference between hurling acid at someone and brainwashing them to attack their own allies, while it’s certainly true that doing the former would be a horrific crime in real life,[2] that’s down as one of the places where I’m spotting the series its premise. To wit, physical attacks like Mina’s acid are only ever going to be as impactful as the plot needs them to be, and the plot has a history of being wildly erratic about that impact.[3]
You can call accuse me of having a double standard if you like—picking and choosing what I hold to realistic standards—but in essence, I view Mina melting Machia’s claws with acid as Shounen Battle Action Damage. There’s definitely a point at which it would stop being that—if she’d used it on his face instead of the tips of claws he could potentially just retract and grow in fresh—but if I were inclined to complain about every hero who uses a power that would cause ghastly mutilation if used against criminals in real life (acid, fire, concussive blasts, etc), we’d be here all week. Shinsou’s brainwashing doesn’t get that handwave because it’s fully and completely effective.
Btw, Kirishima hearing about Midoriya and the sludge Villain was already established. We have known this since we got Kirishima’s backstory in the Yakuza arc. So this didn’t come out of nowhere.
This is a 100% fair point. I very clearly remembered Kirishima shaking his funk because he saw the clip of the interview with Crimson Riot; I’d completely forgotten that the Sludge Villain attack was one of the things contributing to his funk. Having looked back over it, it still seems weird that Kirishima doesn’t show any sign of recognition in this chapter, but it’s certainly possible that that’s just a consequence of the breakneck storytelling. Regardless, consider that complaint retracted, and thanks for the refresher.
What do you mean we don’t get anything of Mina against Machia and overcoming her fears and previous failure? That’s literally what the chapter is all about. She doesn’t freeze under fear this time and instead jumps into action to save her friends and come in clutch to guarantee the win for her team. She’s the actual MVP here. The actual problem here is that the whole thing gets sped up and abbreviated. What should’ve been 3 or 4 chapters of this battlefield, gets presented and resolved in one chapter.
One of my longstanding issues with BNHA is the difference between the levels of interiority that are permitted to the male characters as opposed to the female ones—how much they’re allowed to dictate their own internal narratives via having their thoughts shown on-panel, and how much room the story affords that exploration. Following are some examples:
Mirko has no thoughts we’re permitted to access about her traumatic double limb loss. While Endeavor’s story of wrestling with his sins and trying to better himself as a person is a prominent, recurring storyline, carried out in the foreground to such an extent that some people complain it’s actually sublimating Shouto’s arc, Mount Lady grows from a money-hungry fame-chaser to a responsible and determined hero completely off-screen.[4] Tamaki and Mirio get dedicated multi-chapter solo battles peppered with emotive childhood flashbacks; Nejire gets a beauty pageant that takes up a grand total of four pages, exactly one (1) of which is dedicated to Nejire’s actual participation.
And so on and so forth. The only two gals we’re really allowed to get into the heads of in a consistent, sustained way are Toga and Uraraka, with perhaps Jirou or Momo as distant runners-up, though Jirou's interiority is mostly concentrated in the Cultural Festival arc and Momo's is virtually all rooted in her bouts with paralytic self-doubt. That's pretty pitiful compared to the number of dudes who get sustained attention paid to their internal landscape.
That issue is largely what I’m getting at when I kvetch about not being shown Mina overcoming her fears. When Kirishima first gets overwhelmed by Rappa, the reason he gets back up is given a backstory flashback that takes up almost two full chapters.[5] Those chapters are the one and only reason we have any context at all for Mina’s PTSD flashback against Machia in MVA. She’s not allowed to “tell” that trauma to the audience herself; we know about it because we got it filtered through Kirishima.
Likewise, when she comes through against Machia in 383, she just—does it. There’re no extended scenes of her wrestling with her fear, drawing on her experience to overcome it; we don’t get a flashback to her training with Bakugou or Shouto.[6] She just tells us about it in a single sentence, then gets a third of a page dedicated to a collage of old scenes. And then, again, she pulls through in a moment of crisis in such a way that her moment of awesome is in service of giving a dude an opening to solve the problem instead of doing it herself.
The coming-through-so-a-dude-can-pull-off-the-finisher pattern is a significant problem with the general power balance in the class: the girls do support while all the heavy-hitters are boys. And doing support is fine! There are a healthy share of boys doing support, too! Kirishima’s own big moment in the Hassaikai arc is playing support so Fat Gum can get in the finishing blow, for example. The problem is not girls having support roles at all; the problem is that while there are boy support students, there are no heavy-hitter, A-list offense-oriented girl students (at least not in Class A). And actually, Mina has always been both interesting and frustrating for me in that regard because she feels like she should be a heavy hitter, but up until this exact chapter, she’s never really treated like one.
It’s never been clear to me why fire and explosions are so much more A-list material than acid, save that Mina doesn’t have Shouto or Bakugou’s intense determination to pull her up to their level from the beginning. Acid is also the kind of thing that could so, so easily have been called a villain quirk, especially in combination with Mina’s mild heteromorphic appearance. She doesn’t ever seem to attract that accusation, however, possibly because she’s so chipper—indeed, in a narrative that had more time for her, I wonder if we’d find that her chipperness is, at least in part, a defense mechanism she maintains for exactly that reason. As it is, though, her personality keeps her as a fun presence in class without ever letting her seize a larger piece of the narrative for herself. But I’ll always wonder what she would have looked like if she were hiding negativity for the same reasons Shouji hides his scars, or if she’d had Bakugou’s burning desire to be #1.
Instead, her most significant backstory moment gets relegated to a flashback intended to advance a male character, while her big moment in the story is freeing Shinsou and saving Mount Lady more or less on the backswing. Admirable in its own right, certainly, but part of a larger pattern when it comes to the roles the Class 1-A girls play on the battlefield.
(I know Machia literally has a Quirk that makes him feel no pain, so that attack did nothing to him. Which in retrospect, makes the poor handling of Mina’s spoltight worse, because it sorta makes it seem like the biggest feat and most powerful move she has ever performed in the series was inconsequential. Yes, I know she literally saves Mt. Lady by using it, but still).
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The Sludge Villain being faced by a character that has had an encounter with him before like Midoriya or Bakugo would be too obvious and on the nose. Horikoshi can be pretty basic at times, but he’s not that basic.
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Mina saving Shinso from the Sludge Villain isn’t the important part, the important part is her saving Kirishima from the Sludge Villain.
I’m unclear on why that would be more basic than e.g. Muscular showing back up for no reason save to get clowned on by Deku, or the incredibly twee return of the woman All Might saved at Kamino, but to each their own basic bar, I suppose. On the matter of Mina’s biggest and most powerful move being arguably inconsequential, I agree completely. As I said before, it’s entirely possible that Machia could just regrow the claws—he clearly doesn’t have them in his “base” form, so it’s entirely down to an arbitrary call on Horikoshi’s part whether the damage to them would stick if he retracted them entirely and then regrew them. We haven’t gotten a good look at his right hand yet to see one way or the other, so the jury’s still out.
As to the Sludge Villain and who gets to face him, two things:
1) He didn’t have to come back at all. I can’t help but feel like the only real reason he does is that Horikoshi’s enjoying throwing in callbacks to bit characters from early chapters, rather than because there was any real groundwork laid for their return: the Sludge Villain, the baby in the cloud-pattern onesie, the star-head guy Deku talked to in the first chapter, Jin’s boss from his MVA flashback, etc. At least the returnees from USJ have a modicum of prior association with the League of Villains and thus, indirectly, AFO. The Sludge Villain doesn’t have that, and, honestly? Given his characterization in 383, I’m confused about why he joined up with AFO’s group at all.
It was a specific point of note that when AFO freed the prisoners from Tartarus, the only task he gave them was to rampage, to go wild. When Muscular shows up to bust open the prison Gentle’s in, he tells them they’re free, to do with their lives as they will. We even know from Kashi Kashiko (the guy in 334 who ShigAFO tries to unload New Order onto) that more than one person was freed and immediately headed to the boonies. Given that all the Sludge Villain wants is to sneak away from this fight without getting hurt, why wasn’t he one of those?
It’s always possible AFO called in favors for the jailbreaks, of course—the Warp quirk makes him an enormous danger to anyone he wants to have in his presence when he decides to call in a chip—but there’s been no indication of it if that is the case, I assume because the story doesn’t care about its shallower convict characters.
2) Another reason you might consider critiquing this as a meaningful victory for Mina is that her defeat of the Sludge Villain has literally nothing to do with who she is as a character and the work she’s done. She defeats the Sludge Villain because she just so happens to have a liquid-based quirk that can effectively be used to harm him. She only used the souped-up damage quotient to get through Machia; presumably, a much less corrosive version would have been perfectly sufficient against the liquid-based Sludge Villain.
And that’s particularly annoying because one of the key points the Sludge Villain was originally used to establish was the way that heroes just stood around not even trying to fight him because they didn’t have the right quirks, and why that was a failing of the current system. So when he returns—at the climax of the series! Almost four hundred chapters later!—it would seem the perfect time to explore how the heroes have improved. We should watch them determine that they have to fight him even though they don’t have the ideal quirks for it. We should see them use ingenuity and their surroundings to come up with a work-around, assuming we don’t see them apply the Save Villains maxim to convince him to back off.
But we don’t get any of that. Instead, Team Hero just so happens to have Mina on hand, who just so happens to have the right quirk. It’s a damn waste, is what it is. Not only does the Sludge Villain have no personal relevance to Mina whatsoever, only twice-displaced relevance via Kirishima, she doesn’t even get to defeat him via determination or wits, skill or training—she could have sneezed on him and won. I can’t imagine finding that rewarding for a character you really like.
Finally, I disagree that the important part of this scene is Mina saving Kirishima from the Sludge Villain rather than her defeat of the Sludge Villain in and of itself. She doesn’t save Kirishima from the Sludge Villain; Kirishima is in no danger from the Sludge Villain. He’s Class A’s premier defensive tank character! The only way Sludgey could pose the slightest threat to him is by trying to hijack his body, but Sludgey already has a body he seems perfectly satisfied with and is trying to use to escape. The worst he can do is smack Kirishima around a bit, which, again, is going to be wildly ineffective. He could possibly also attempt using Shinsou’s quirk, but Kirishima is entirely aware of Brainwashing’s operating conditions—note that he doesn’t say a single word to Shinsou the moment he becomes aware Shinsou’s compromised.
Mina saves Shinsou from the Sludge Villain, not Kirishima.
On regards on her developing her new technique due to training with Bakugo and Todoroki, I don’t see the problem. All of the students learn from other adults and eachother, as well as inspire one another. The only problem I have with the Bakugo and Todoroki thing is that we never got to see those interactions. There’s so much stuff we should’ve gotten to see from class 1-A during the aftermath of the first war and we never got.
You are welcome to not see it as a problem. I would probably see it as much less of one if the story cared enough about Mina to actually show us any scenes of her fretting about her strength, wanting to improve herself, and psyching herself up to whatever degree she might have needed to in order to approach Bakugou about private training.
Hell, it wouldn’t even need to be a full scene—BNHA gets plenty of mileage out of 1–4 panels of characters interacting in ways that aren’t immediately explained and then dropping the explanation thirty chapters later. Shinsou’s training with Aizawa was like that, for example. Why not make the time for Mina? Other than, as you bring up, the unseemly abbreviation of the aftermath of the first war. The story at that stage has zero time for any of the students other than Deku—Mina’s hardly the only character whose arc suffers because we don’t get to see her reactions to such a sea change in the society she’s lived in all her life, or the trauma of what she experienced the day of the raid. I’m not going to refrain from critiquing the writing just because it’s not any given character’s fault that their arc is missing huge chunks that are being papered over with flashbacks and retroactive explanations for the scenes we didn’t get.
To be fair about the Midnight thing, no one really had any actual established connection to her. With Momo, Midnight just was her hype woman like two times, and then she entrusted her with the plan to sedate Machia. With Mineta it’s kinda hard to take it seriously because their one meaningful interaction is full of the usual pervy jokes that are synonym to Mineta. I guess Horikoshi tied Mina to the plotline of Midnight’s murder because Mina is a more emotional character, so there’s more he can do with that (and then he barely did anything, but what little he did, did show some great shots from her).
All of the things you cite are things that give both Momo and Mineta more established connections to Midnight, which is exactly why I brought them up as people who should have been involved in the confrontation with her killer. I also brought up that those connections are themselves fairly thin and that Midnight doesn’t really have any strong connections with any of the students. This is in large part why I continue to believe that Midnight being the most emotionally significant hero death during the war[7] is pure cowardice on Horikoshi’s part. Mina getting the final say on that death is just the latest way the story is writing off dealing with it.
Midnight gets no funeral. Aizawa, one of her closest friends, immediately shuts down Mic when he tries to bring her up in the hospital, and neither of them ever bring her up again—for heaven’s sake, Mic doesn’t even think about her in Chapter 372 when bringing up what Aizawa has lost! And when someone finally does want to actually talk openly about Midnight’s death, who is it? Not Momo, who Midnight trusted and praised, or Mineta, an openly admitted fan of Midnight, one perv to another. It’s—Mina, who liked her classes, who is emotional about the death because she’s a good person who’d be emotional about the death of anyone in her social circle, not because Midnight was in any way special to her. For heaven’s sake, she registers her first opinion ever on Midnight the chapter after the deathblow is struck.
And then, to top it all off, there’s that tossed-off, perfunctory line about vengeance, which no one Mina is facing that chapter even brought up, and which she herself immediately shuts down. So not only do I not feel any impact from Mina rejecting revenge because she’s never been shown struggling with a desire for it, but it just feels like another case of Midnight being brought up only to get immediately dropped again. To wit:
Aizawa, who won’t or can’t think about her, chooses instead to focus on his students. Mic brings her up the once and then drops the subject at Aizawa’s request, apparently never to think about her again, despite being given an excellent opening to do so in his confrontation with Kurogiri. And Mina makes three, bringing up how much she liked Midnight Midnight’s classes only in the context of how stewing on the desire for revenge is bad.
And so the narrative just moves on. And it sucks, and Midnight deserved better, even if only in her memory.
…Also, just for the record, Mineta is an incredibly emotional character. He cries as much Deku does! He openly, habitually worries about classmates when he knows they’re in danger somewhere he can’t reach; he worries about Midnight during the war. Yes, he’s a primarily a joke character (and the jokes are outmoded and sexist), but so what if his scene with Midnight is full of the pervy jokes that define him as a character? Midnight is also a perv! She was contributing a perfectly adequate amount of pervy jokes to that scene all on her own! Indeed, that was part of the humor of it—Mineta the lech running afoul of Midnight’s theatrical sadism and being incredibly in love with it even as he runs around screaming about how he’s ever supposed to beat her.
Mineta has been a much-improved character from the war onward so I, for one, would not have any problems at all with taking him seriously if he were allowed to seriously mourn.
In regards to the Mina and vengeance part. Remember again that Mina is a very emotional character. Also remember that when she heard about Shoji’s backstory, she angrily stated that the kind of people who hurt Shoji “should be removed from existence” (I think you said Mina was 100% right in saying that, if I’m not mistaken). So while yes, Mina is a very cheerful, kind and friendly girl, we know the war and her inability to help deeply affected her. The problem is that we never got to explore that or see her go through it. Her inner struggle got resolved off screen in the background before her shinning moment.
You know, I thought about bringing up the Shouji bit in the post. I didn’t end up doing it because that moment doesn’t break the pattern I otherwise described: “Mina doesn’t hold onto anger; she doesn’t brood; she’s extremely well-adjusted in that she cries when she needs to, to get it out of her system, and then she bounces back.”
That all still applies! Indeed, as I said in the post you reference, her comment in Koda’s flashback is clearly presented as hyperbole. She says it in the heat of the moment and no one even blinks because they understand that she’s not seriously suggesting that e.g. all bigots should be murdered in their beds. No one takes her aside afterward to have a gentle talk with her about appropriate levels of bloodthirst or tentatively ask her if there’s anything she needs to get off her chest. After she says it, Shouji gently acknowledges that she might be right[8] and then moves the conversation along; within the next few exchanges, she’s joined the group encouraging Shouji about making new, happier memories for him going forward.
I’m sure the war and her inability to help did deeply affect her. Those things affected everyone. But we didn’t get to see it, so I’m simply not going to accept the story insisting on how noble she is for eschewing the vengeance she was never shown to be contemplating to begin with.[9] You’re welcome to fill in those blanks yourself; god knows I have characters myself in this series for whom I’m willing to make those reaches. But then, my blank-filled characters are mostly in prison right now rather than active in the plot and trying to do emotional heavy-lifting for which the author has woefully ill-equipped them.
Regarding Midnight’s killer. I just didn’t like that part in general. Idk about you, but I don’t like that Horikoshi wrote Mina trying to find common ground with the guy who went out of his way to mercilessly kill a severely injured woman when she was on the ground, too weak to defend herself, and posed no active threat to him. Like, couldn’t you have just let Mina kick his ass? Like, I know the story is setting up the kids reaching out a hand to “save” the villains. But seriously? If there’s one villain who should get his ass kicked, it’s that guy.
This is another clue that you definitely haven’t poked around my backlog in any depth. No. Just no. Trying to save the villains means trying to save all the villains. No exceptions. Anything less means the heroes are just picking and choosing based on personal bias. That means this guy and the rest of the PLF. It means the Tartarus escapees. It even means All For One himself, if anyone can manage it. The heroes are not arbiters of justice. It is not their job to play favorites based on who they’ve seen crying and who they haven’t; it is their job—or so Deku and the general direction of the narrative would have us believe—to save people in crisis.
Should it be their jobs to do all the emotional labor and hand-holding that’s required to talk down someone whose crisis has led them to endanger others? Maybe, maybe not, but the story has been exceptionally clear that they’re the only ones in a position to do it; God knows their justice system isn’t. But given that the climax of the series is revolving around saving villains, if that isn’t the heroes’ responsibility, then whose responsibility is it, and why aren’t we reading the story about them?
I’m sure some people would point that, in-universe, saving people is only half of a hero's job description, and the other half is defeating villains. That’s true enough in the world as it now stands. However, Deku—in what’s clearly meant to be a big inspiring moment—tells the OFA tribunal in Chapter 305 that One For All is a power meant for saving, not killing, and that he learned this from All Might. In 326, in a scene that I have some issues with but that is also obviously meant to be taken sincerely, Stain alludes to the influence of All Might on the next generation, to the embers he left behind being nurtured by the ones who don’t give up.
Thus, if All Might is meant to be the ideal because of his tireless efforts at saving people, and Class 1-A—key members of whom are moving towards saving villains—are being modelled as the collective successors of All Might, it only makes sense to assume that, yes, the series wants us to accept that villains are people who also need to be saved. That means all of them, not just the ones who look easy. What kind of successors will the kids be, if they can’t go even farther than All Might did? If they just turn their backs on anyone who they don’t have the exact right quirk inspiring monologue to save, aren’t we basically just back where we started?
Incidentally, let’s talk about this characterization of Hose Face, which allegedly makes him a villain who doesn’t need to be saved, but just needs his ass kicked: he “went out of his way to mercilessly kill a severely injured woman when she was on the ground, too weak to defend herself, and posed no active threat(…).”
Twice was too weak to defend himself from Hawks when Hawks tried to put a feather sword through his forehead. He posed no active threat to Hawks when Hawks stabbed him in the back. Shigaraki floating in tube stasis posed no active threat to anyone, certainly not Mirko or Mic, both of whom did their level best to kill him by destroying the tube and all its systems that were keeping Shigaraki alive. The PLF had their guard completely down the day of the raids, which certainly didn’t stop Cementoss from ripping the building in half with no warning—how many people do you think might have been in rooms five or six stories up when the floor ripped out from under them and sent them plummeting 50+ feet towards the shattered concrete and broken wood below?
They’re villains, sure. They were going to hurt a lot of people, sure. But aren’t heroes supposed to be better than villains?
Further, I have to contest your assertion that Midnight even was “severely wounded” or “posed no active threat.” Yes, she’d taken a few hunks of concrete to the face and fallen through the canopy, which would severely injure any normally fragile human, but again, this is BNHA, where physical damage is only as severe as the plot demands.[10] Midnight went from splayed on the ground to starting to push herself back up in a single panel, had gotten to her hands and knees two panels later, and was just getting a foot on the ground, preparing to push herself back upright, when Hose Face hit her from behind two pages later.
I can remember being unsure how that fight would go back when the chapter dropped, because, just as the scene cut away, Midnight managed to whip her head around and shoot that fierce glare at the oncoming enemy. Midnight had an AOE attack that was extra effective against dudes, and all of the people coming at her that we could see were men. It was entirely plausible to me at the time that she would win, that she just stopped answering her comm line because she had to focus on the fight.
All in all, she had recently immobilized dozens of people on Hose Face’s side and was clearly still a threat. What would you expect him to do, detour the whole group the long way around just so no one would hurt her? Let Machia get even farther ahead of them by standing back and waiting for her to finish getting up so they could have an honorable fight? Come on; she was part of an army of heroes who'd just attacked their base. Of course he didn’t stand back and hand her the opening to knock them all out with sleeping gas. And no, he didn’t go out of his way to kill her—he and his group were following Machia and just happened to run across Midnight in the path Machia had taken.
Cripes, you make it sound like he spotted her unconscious on the ground eighty feet away in another clearing and decided to run over and cut her throat before rejoining the group. No. Remember, he’s a member of the MLA, the only group in the series that explicitly styles themselves as an army. His attack on Midnight should be read as a soldier fighting an enemy soldier—it’s quick, it’s brutal, it’s merciless. Because, as far as he’s concerned, he’s at war. Both letting a hero go because she was injured (but not so injured that she wasn’t trying to get up again) or wasting time going out of his way to murder someone who’s already dealt with (because he gets his jollies from murder) would have been acting counter to the mission.
I’m not going to tell you he was morally correct—he’s a villain, a cultist, an unabashed quirk supremacist, someone who would have been on the front lines of any terrorist attacks the PLF were planning by virtue of the regiment he was associated with—but just in terms of tactics, he didn’t do anything the heroes haven’t done or sought to do repeatedly over the course of both war arcs. If you feel it’s okay for them to cross those lines but not him because they’re heroes who want to help people while he’s a villain who wants to hurt people, then it’s his allegiance that’s the real problem, not his tactics.
(And, just to be clear, the reason I’m okay with him killing Midnight but not Hawks killing Twice is because of their respective allegiances. Hose Face is a villain. I don’t hold him to a hero’s moral code because he never claimed it to begin with, so he’s not being a massive hypocrite by not adhering to it.)
Any comment on the Mina and Kirishima interaction? What are your thoughts on the “you’ve always been my hero” line?
If I had a comment on it, you can generally assume it would have been in my chapter post. I don’t have much interest in the lens on Mina that, because it frames her as Kirishima’s hero, means we see her heroism almost entirely through his eyes. Again: he gets the two chapter flashback lovingly detailing his personal history, doubts, and motivations; she gets to be a figure inside his flashback rather than ever being able to frame her own. Ochaco may not ever get two chapters dedicated to her backstory, but at least what flashbacks she does get come to us filtered through her. Though, I will say that I find Ochaco’s romance plot largely tiresome, so I do hugely appreciate about Mina and Kirishima that they legitimately are just friends and I don’t have to watch Mina’s arc get devoured by blushing and fumbling crush behavior.
Since you asked, I can think of a scenario in which Kirishima telling Mina that she’s always been his hero would have worked much better, at least for me. It’d fit right into all the post-war material we didn’t get because the story was so laser-focused on Deku.
Start by showing the readers Mina approaching Shouto and Bakugou about training with them. Don’t have them ask why (because Bakugou wouldn’t care why and Shouto would just take the request at face value, especially if she explained that they both have techniques she thinks she could benefit from learning; Shouto would understand that), but have Kirishima notice or otherwise find out about it, and have him bring it up to her later on.
Then, because Kirishima and Mina are friends and should be able to have these conversations with each other, especially in the particularly vulnerable states they’d be in after the war, have Mina actually confide in Kirishima that she’s feeling shitty about freezing up when facing Machia.
Have him remind her of the time he did the same, and expand on what she already knows. I checked back over his Hassaikai arc flashback, and I notice that, while he apologized to the other two girls that were there for freezing up and being unable to help, and while he tells Mina later that he’s saying goodbye to his old pathetic self, he never actually tells her that he admired her courage (unless it’s in some other scene of theirs I’m forgetting about, which is entirely possible; feel free to give me a cite if so). The closest they get to openly acknowledging the way Mina inspired him is her observing that his new styled hair spikes resemble her horns. Have him say it out loud to her after the war, then, when she’s in an emotionally raw place and needs to hear it.
Thus, when he calls her his hero again after the Sludge Villain encounter (if we must indeed keep the Sludge Villain encounter), it becomes a reiteration and callback to that bonding moment, and implicitly him congratulating her on overcoming her fear—like he always knew she would, because she’s his hero.
Why do you care about Mina, btw? You’re a villain stan, correct? So why do you care about Mina’s moment to shine being handled poorly and not receiving the proper care and attention it deserved, if you don’t mind me asking?
Good lord, rvg, just because I’m a villain stan doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to care about bad writing affecting the heroes. If the heroes’ writing were better, it would improve everyone’s treatment, including the villains! If the students’ writing were better, I might actually care about the kids more than I do! If the girls’ writing were better, I would have infinitely less to complain about re: the disparity in how fleshed out they are compared to their male counterparts!
Anyway, I like plenty of heroes. I have observably positive feelings for about a third of Class 1-A[11] and only particularly negative feelings about Deku and Kaminari. I love Monoma and Tamaki. On the pro side, I adore Nighteye, am a thoroughly unapologetic Best Jeanist appreciator, and want to watch way more of Rock Lock mouthing off at more people higher ranked than him. I think Haimawari Koichi is everything Horikoshi desperately wants Deku to be and is failing to write him as being. There are plenty of others I at least think are good company when they’re around (Fat Gum and the Wild Wild Pussycats, for example), and some I would be happy to embrace if the series could stop being so incredibly indecisive about how it wants us to read them (Hawks and All Might are big offenders here).
I realize this is a hyper-divided fandom—we might as well start asking all those manufacturers who made the team affiliation T-shirts for the Twilight or MCU fandoms to make us some Team Hero and Team Villain shirts—but I promise you it’s possible to like characters from both sides of the divide. You don’t have to lock yourself into one position or another.
Frankly, I think most of these characters deserve a final arc better than the one they’re in. I’m just louder about it for the villains because they’re the ones who are going to be left to suffer or be forgotten if the actual ending isn’t up to snuff, whereas I fully expect the heroes to get a lavish epilogue chapter that crams cameos and last second answers into every nook and cranny of the panel layout.
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All that said, rvg, I'm not sure you'll see this at all, as I don't seem able to tag you, which I'm unsure if means you blocked me at some point after spamming my comments and also my ask box or just that tumblr is being tumblr. If you do, feel free to respond if you like, though I'd prefer a reblog and less vibrating indignation if you do. I hope I've made it clear that I really and truly have nothing against your pink blorbo. Indeed, so far as I can tell, we both think her scene was pretty poorly handled; you're just more willing to do the mental legwork on fleshing out her characterization than I am.
Which is fine, but maybe ratchet back on lashing out at people who don't make it a priority to read depth the author is not providing onto characters that aren't their blorbos. Cheers!
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FOOTNOTES
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[1] And way to be, like, super unnecessarily confrontational with those words you put in my mouth, by the way.
[2] And, yes, also a war crime—even more of one, actually. Forcing captured enemy soldiers to fight their own is only officially a war crime in international conflicts, but Japan is a signatory to an amendment to the Rome Statute that classifies the use of chemical agents in armed conflicts as a war crime in internal disputes as well as international ones. Give or take whether the clashes between heroes and villains meet the criteria of “protracted armed conflict between governmental authorities and organized armed groups or between such groups” anyway.
I’m inclined to say the use of licensed and regulated abilities like quirks makes the combatants “armed,” but as much research as I’m willing to give this footnote doesn’t immediately clarify how long hostilities need to drag out to count as “protracted.” Certainly the presence of the PLF makes the villain side an “organized armed group,” though.
[3] Dabi’s blue fire is my go-to example: it reduces back-alley thugs to twisted blackened husks but barely even singes Hawks’s forearms; it melts carbon fiber cables but leaves his outfit completely unscathed. Given that Horikoshi can’t even keep Dabi’s damage output consistent with itself across all of his appearances, I damn sure don’t expect consistent damage output between characters.
[4] Sure, Endeavor’s connected to one of the lead students while Mount Lady is not, but that’s all on the writing. There’s no reason that Mount Lady couldn’t have been connected to a student via a meaningful internship or a past acquaintanceship save that Horikoshi chose not to write her such a connection.
[5] That come, I might note, after he already has gotten back up. Perhaps Horikoshi had been doing this “spoiling the outcome before we see the process” thing for longer than I thought…
[6] Recall that the story managed to make time for a flashback of Deku getting training from Ochaco, Tsuyu and Sero as a lead-in to the conversation between Bakugou and All Might about the latter hiding something.
[7] Or, more cynically, the only one, given how tertiary the characters start becoming immediately after her.
[8] And for what it’s worth, when I said that she was right, I was saying that the world would, in fact, be a better place without bigotry. Obviously the answer is not, “Kill all bigots in their beds,” but I wish the group had talked more about what Mina said because it would have been a more frank, more honest discussion about how to fight bigotry than the provided answer of, “Put a bag over your head and hope it goes away on its own if you and everyone like you just act with inhuman levels of patience and calm at all times for the next hundred years.”
[9] Give or take her dramatically shaded angry face in Chapter 338—a face she is making along with the entire rest of her class sans Aoyama, so, again, really not impressing upon me that Mina particularly is a character struggling to avoid losing herself to revenge.
[10] So, you know, all those people who fell from upper floors of the Villa were probably also fine. But it’s one or the other, isn’t it? Either that kind of fall is enough to severely injure people so Cementoss knowingly enacted an opening gambit that stood a high chance of maiming or killing an unknown number of people, or people in BNHA would walk it off with nothing worse than a few abrasions, in which case Midnight was in no significant danger.
[11] In seating order, I like: Aoyama, Tsuyu, Iida, Uraraka, Ojiro, Tokoyami, and, from the war arc on, Mineta.
#bnha#bnha 383#class talk#pink alien on parade#sludge villain#bnha midnight#(deserved better)#bnha critical#bnha damage physics#stillness talks more#randomvongenerico#spent four days working on this so I need a tiny break#but I'll get the next chapter post up ASAP
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Finally making a post about this guy, wanted to wait to make an animation but that would take too long d,fjdkj
“Alright people, you know the drill by now, let’s do this one more time.”
[original panels]
This is Spider-Sketch, worlds sleepiest superhero. Born a generic snowy tiny town in Canada, parents moving back and forth until ending up having to leave him with his aunt and uncle in Vic York. (A mix of Victoria and New York, in sort of a limbo on wether or not it’s in Canada or in America) Going off on a trip and never returning, causing him to be raised by May and Ben from there on out.
Putting the rest under the cut to avoid this post being too long
Spider-Sketch’s real name is Hunter Oaks, he inhabits Earth-757 (my favorite number with my 2nd favorite number on the end) and ends up finding the spider society due to 757 Doc Ock getting into shenanigans involving multiverse travel. (Who will get his own post once I redesign him)
For his powers Spider-Sketch has everything you would expect, wall crawling, web swinging, enhanced strength, spider sense, etc. and some of his own ontop of that. Those being much higher pain tolerance (maybe even some sort of thin invisible exoskeleton?), enhanced hearing (because of the bunny motif) and maybe a few others if I can ever come up with any good ideas.
Rather than the classic tale of losing uncle Ben, Spider-Sketch loses aunt May instead. Another thing, rather than being in love with MJ, Hunter rather takes interest in Akheku’ s spidersona, Athan.
Other than a few obvious (and a few less obvious) deviations Spider-Sketch is pretty much just me, Canadian, Stubborn, artsy, etc. He’s constantly trying to convince villains to be good guys instead, trying everything he can to give everyone a redemption arc despite being told repeatedly to cut it out.
When it comes to Venom if it weren’t for the canon they would’ve likely been completely inseparable. Getting along like two peas in a pod despite one’s murderous tendencies and the others desire not to harm anyone or anything. Venom also has been slightly tweaked to work closer to how he works in the movie with Eddie rather than just being a black suit, he’s sort of part of the suit and part of Hunter at the same time, because I can and because I think it’s cool.
Anything else I’ve forgotten or that I add in the future I’ll add in a reblog most likely. His whole universe and story are still very much in progress
Some other art + reference sheet (kind of)
#spidersona#earth 757#Spider-sketch#into the spider verse#info post#across the spiderverse#art#venom symbiote#venom#comic panels#comic redraw#panel redraw#spider man
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I edited my headline to be clear that this blog is a fan blog. I never claimed to be an official translator or anything like that. OX did never answer the request for permission to translate their work, so this is all for fun and without any connection to the artist but if you want to put it so negatively “messing” with their work. (I guess/hope Old Xian is probably really busy and doesn’t have time for concerns over small creators interacting with their works. Of course I would take the translations/edits down immediately if they personally ever happen to contact me about it and disliking it for whatever reason or if they make a statement online that they are uncomfortable with people playing around with their creation) Please remember fanfiction, fanart, edits, … are the same category as fan translations and technically require permission from the creator to be anything near legal as well. If nothing is commercialized it’s basically not a crime that’s traced I guess? I’m doing this in my free time and without ever charging anyone anything. The art work doesn’t belong to me and I hope that’s clear since I put OXs name and where to find the original whenever I post a translation.
I barely interact with most of the followers who came here but I’m happy many people seem to enjoy it ❤️ Again: I’m not claiming to be accurate and I just do fun stuff with editing, and what I feel like. I’ve done it many times before and people minded their business if it wasn’t their cup of tea. So I’d rather keep a small community around to gosh over the same things and not have loads of people on this blog with expectations I don’t want to live up to. I’m not here for anything but joy for myself and friends. There are sooo many cool fan translations you can follow instead if you’re upset about what I’m doing. I chose peace and fun over everything since this is my blog. It’s the internet not real life, please just pass by and ignore/block it if you don’t like it, since it’s not my responsibility to make anyone feel better at my space. And respectfully anyone please unfollow me if there is an expectation of me to serve you in any kind of way or make you feel comfortable at my own fan bubble here. We disagree and I’m not going to put up with negativity. I’m here for positive interactions and to have fun with a fandom I enjoy, which is mostly 19 days at the moment. I literally have a crack ship/cursed ship or whatever you call it in my header so where do those expectations come from? Typesetting is fun, not a job or duty to me and I’ll keep doing my own fanservice 😊 I also don’t want to justify stopping what I’m doing right now if I don’t feel like it anymore one day.
If you are really bored and want to play detective, start comparing OXs originals with the posts :D I made a few small edits here and there that didn’t change the context, and that I didn’t mention. Nobody noticed before or only a few wondering about hearts or (for me) funny additions. Yesterday I wanted to clarify I was making fun to keep a distance from the original because it changed the subtext with the small smile on Cheng’s face. (Look at least closely if you’re here to roast me. The second panel of him had a change of the corner of his mouth too and none who complained did even see it…)
I also apologize to anyone who’s disappointed because this wasn’t communicated clearly enough from my end. I will keep addressing actual changes like before! Now there are so many followers already and I had to block a few being rude, I felt pressured to make a statement, but actually we’re strangers and I don’t owe you anything guys.
Last but not least: I am so happy about all the positive comments and funny tags (yes I read them whenever I can hehe) in the reblogs. Thank you so much for sticking around 🥰 and thank you for liking too!
Summery: We switch between accurate translations and a more direct communication sometimes (but most of the time we stick to the original as close as possible). I edit small stuff sometimes because I would like to have “more” in there (or what I personally think is fun). So I will keep addressing changes to be clear in the future.
If you want to talk about it feel free to do so nicely :)
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It has been one year since Kentaro Miura passed away. A year ago, I had said that I didn’t have the energy to get out a reflection or my own experience with Berserk. A lot’s happened in that year for me, and to be honest I still don’t think I can comfortably talk about it. That said, I will talk a little anyways.
I first stumbled across Berserk shortly before ending high school, this was a decade ago, so Fantasia had just gotten underway not too long ago, and the first and second of the Golden Age films had just released. Needless to say (since this blog exists) I got sucked in immediately, and it held my attention for years to come. At one point I also helped run the posts for some of the rewatches on /r/anime, which lined up with the start of this blog (they ended as the 2017 season began).
Berserk’s depictions of camaraderie, loss and recovery resonate with me in a way that few things in the medium have ever done. I do not think that there is a true equal to it, and while I hope one day there will be, I can’t help but wonder if there should be. Though not truly complete, even the point at which did conclude evokes such a feeling of gentle melancholy that I keep finding myself coming back and experiencing it. It punches me straight in the chest every time, as it always has.
I think this time, unless by some miracle Studio Gaga decide to continue from leftover plans and details, I will allow this blog to finally rest. Its original purpose served, I don’t have the heart to pore over old episodes and panels in the way I’d done it prior. I’ll go back to quietly, if now sadly, rereading or rewatching Berserk in full every month or two when the itch starts.
As before, my twitter (mostly active) is linked in the sidebar, alongside my MAL (actively updated) and my main Tumblr, which is similarly quiet (though I might start blasting out Spice and Wolf posts when the new show rolls around).
Thanks for sticking around and listening. I only ran this side project for a short time, but I met or heard from a ton of people, and I am thankful for sharing the experience with each of you.
This will get reblogged once or twice across the day, but I wanted it out at midnight to start the 6th off.
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I posted 853 times in 2022
101 posts created (12%)
752 posts reblogged (88%)
Blogs I reblogged the most:
@pirateherokillian
@wyntereyez
@hollyethecurious
@killian-whump
@kwistowee
I tagged 744 of my posts in 2022
Only 13% of my posts had no tags
#colin o'donoghue - 158 posts
#killian jones - 132 posts
#captain swan - 75 posts
#captain hook - 41 posts
#icymi - 39 posts
#curious replies - 37 posts
#911 lone star - 32 posts
#cs ff - 31 posts
#words by hollye - 31 posts
#ask game - 27 posts
Longest Tag: 92 characters
#emma enlists killian to come to a family dinner so he can take some of the heat off her from
My Top Posts in 2022:
#5
CS AU: Pan Says... (2/?)
Summary: After waking up in a strange room with a naked stranger, Emma and Killian must endure the twisted game their kidnapper insists they play in order to gain provisions and avoid punishments.
A/N: Sorry I took so long to update. Originally, this part was going to be much longer, incorporating several prompts that were sent to me, but I have opted to go about it differently now. In an effort to highlight each prompt (or the bits of prompts I’m fusing together for a single scene), I’m going to keep the updates focused on one or two Pan Says scenarios as well as their reward/punishment.
I am still taking prompts, so if something comes to mind please feel free to send it in an Ask. Nothing is off limits, as I don’t really have triggers and very few things squick me out, however, I cannot guarantee every Ask will make it into an update. I’ll continue to take prompts until an end game for the fic emerges.
Lots of love to @ultraluckycatnd and @kmomof4 for their exceptional beta skills on this one!
Rated M & eventual E /Also available on ao3 and ff.net / buy me a coffee / add to tag list / Curious? Come Ask Me! / Part One
Prompt & Content Warnings: This prompt came from the csmm Discord - “Tell the other something you don’t like about them.” I don’t think there are any additional content warnings that apply to this part that weren’t listed for Part One, but as with every update to this fic: read at your own risk!
Part Two
“Swan, will you please come sit down?”
“I can’t. I can’t sit down. Not while you’re so calm. You should be yelling at me. Why aren’t you yelling at me?”
“I don’t want to yell at you. There’s no reason for me to yell at you.”
“No reason?” Emma shouted, rounding on him as he sat on the edge of bed, finally halting her frantic pacing. “Killian. I blew it. Failing Round One, that was all--”
“That was not your fault, Swan.”
“Yes, it was! Don’t try and make me feel better about blowing our chance to get out of here. It is my fault. I pulled you into the damn kiss.”
“Aye, you did.” He stood, the pillow still firmly in place over his groin, and Emma had to force herself to not keep glancing down at it every few seconds, focusing instead on his exasperated expression and increasingly frustrated tone. “But in your desperation to get us the fuck out of here, it seems you failed to notice my lips were halfway to meeting yours before your hand even met my shoulder!”
Taken aback, Emma’s lips parted, but he barreled on before she could respond. “That kiss was going to happen, Emma. Whether you initiated it or not, that kiss would have happened. We both fell for Pan’s tricks, and blaming ourselves or one another will do us no good. We have to keep our wits about us and focus on being constructive, because sooner or later he’ll be back to commence with Round Two and God only knows what fresh hell awaits us.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t classify what I have planned for you as hell,” Pan stated over the speakers. “In fact, I’m prepared to make you a very generous offer.”
“Save it.”
“Now now, Emma,” Pan tsked. “Let’s not be hasty.”
The sudden slide of a metal panel startled Emma, causing her to stumble back. Killian moved to stand in front of her, both of them unnerved by the sight of a now exposed window looking into the room from the outer hallway… and that which lay on the other side of it.
Two masked figures, dressed all in black, stood shoulder to shoulder facing them with long, black, pronged batons gripped in their hands.
“Meet my Lost Ones,” Pan said. “Round Two sometimes requires a bit of encouragement in order to really get going, so they’ll be doing my bidding if necessary.” A long pause echoed through the room before Pan spoke again, his tone low and applying a clear measure of threat. “I’d advise you both in making that necessity as infrequent as possible.”
The panel slid closed, hiding the window and the shadowy specters from view, and Pan’s voice was once again jovial.
“As I was saying, I am prepared to make you both a very generous offer!”
“What offer would that be?” Killian questioned through his clenched jaw, reluctantly playing along.
“Pan Says you can earn everything back if… you both spend two full minutes appreciating one another’s naked body.”
Furtive glances were exchanged, and Emma could see the slightest shake of Killian’s head, ready to refuse.
The action did not go unnoticed by Pan either. “Oh, please. Don’t act so noble. You both got your fill of each other’s backsides while taking turns in the shower, so what’s the big deal in paying equal attention to each other’s fronts?”
Emma hated that he had a point. They’d both been guilty of ogling each other in the shower, the only difference in his request was that there would be no sneaky peeks. Actually, that was not the only difference. This time, when she and Killian admired one another, it would be with the other’s full consent. Killian had already given his last night in a blanket statement, but based on the way he had his head craned upward, doing all he could to avoid looking at her at all, he would need for her to reciprocate his words if he was going to agree.
“Killian, look at me.” He shook his head, his Adam’s apple jumping and his teeth grinding in agitation. “Last night you told me I had your consent. Remember?” He nodded, but kept his gaze skyward until she took his hand and brought it up to rest against her sheet shrouded chest. “Well you have mine, too,” she told him, her eyes piercing into his, imploring him to understand why she needed him to agree. When he still seemed unsure and unwilling to relent, she quietly murmured, “Please. I don’t want to give him any reason to send those two in here. ‘Cause we both know they won’t care about our consent, only Pan’s rules.”
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66 notes - Posted January 2, 2022
#4
CS AU: Conviction (3/?)
Summary: The story had been front page news for months. Scandalous details of a married woman of low birth and with limited means, murdering her husband; hatcheting him to death in order to save her own life and that of her unborn child - or so she claimed. No evidence to support her allegations of abuse had been presented during the trial, but in the end, it was the fact that Mrs. Cassidy was with child that saved her from a verdict of murder in the first degree, a judgment that carried the death penalty for both men and women alike. As an act of mercy, a lesser charge was issued, one that spared her life but now made her Misthaven Penitentiary’s problem to contend with, and more specifically, the Captain of the Guard charged with keeping order within its walls.
A/N: I continue to be blown away by the response to this fic. Thank y’all so much!
In answer to a question I received after the last chapter posted, this fic IS written entirely from Killian’s POV.
Thanks to my amazing betas, @snowbellewells and @kmomof4. Also, shout out to @sotangledupinit for the assist in defringing (there, @teamhook, is that better?) Killian for the art.
Rated T-M (for themes, mentions of abuse, murder, and attempted assault) / Available on ao3 and ff.net / buy me a coffee / add to tag list
Chapter One | Chapter Two
Chapter Three
As the weeks passed, the Captain of the Guard and his unusual charge settled into a familiar routine. Every night Killian would spend time outside her cell, talking with Swan about all manner of things. He would bring her books to read so they might discuss them, and she would share with him the local gossip she’d heard from Granny or one of the other ladies Elsa had recruited to keep her company during visiting hours and the morning walks he still oversaw before leaving each day.
It warmed his heart to see her cell filled with items gifted to her or crafted by her own hand with the yarn and knitting needles she’d come to master. Soft blankets, hats, and booties were overflowing the trunk Marco, the town carpenter, had made for her to hold such keepsakes. Another trunk had been approved to house the garments she’d collected through the generosity of her new friends in order to accommodate her expanding waist and keep her warm during the frigid nights as winter swiftly settled over the prison.
Nights like this one.
Killian turned up the collar of his overcoat and shivered past the drafts seeping in through every crack and crevice within the old stone prison. With a new, heavy blanket in his arms, he made his way to Swan’s cell, intending to spend a few moments with her while Officer Booth (who had replaced Robin on night watch) finished his patrol.
A few of the prisoners nodded at him as he passed, the cold making sleep difficult for them, and one or more groused under their breath at the sight of the blanket. Towards the end of the block, dirt-stained arms hung over the cross brace of the barred door, and one of their newest inmates, Will Scarlet, gave Killian a look bordering on insubordinate as he cheeked, “Something to help keep the missus warm, Captain?”
Killian ignored the man’s question, pausing before his cell only to issue him an order to get back in bed.
“It’s just…” Scarlet continued with a tone of ribbing. “I think someone’s beat you to it.”
Killian’s brow arched up his forehead. Before he asked the thief what he meant by that statement, the soft sound of Swan’s hushed laughter perked his ears. Setting off, he rounded the corner and found Booth standing outside her cell, a bright smile stretching over his usually wooden features as he passed a thick quilt through the bars.
“Officer Booth,” Killian barked, causing the man to balk and snap to attention. “Have you finished patrol?”
“No, Captain,” the man answered.
“Then I suggest you get back to it before I write you up for dereliction of your duty.”
Booth gave his captain a stiff nod, his eyes flicking back towards the cell as if unsure whether he could risk saying anything more to the woman inside. Resolving it wasn’t a risk he was willing to take, Booth made his way past Killian and back to the cell block to continue his patrol. Killian’s flickering jaw muscle practically chased him as he went.
“He was only checking on me,” Swan said, her face pressed between the bars with a look of alarm pinching at her features. “Officer Booth has always been kind, he’s never done or said anything improper. He’s--”
“I know, Swan,” Killian assured her as he closed the distance between them. “I know August is a good man with no… untoward intentions. But he does have duties, and he’s new to the night shift. Many of the men think standards can be lowered during the night because the inmates are asleep, when really it’s the time to be as vigilant as possible.”
Swan nodded, chewing on both her lip and his words before her eyes fell to the blanket in his arms. An amused sound huffed from her chest. “Is that for me?”
“Aye,” Killian replied. A swell of heat rose up the back of his neck, prickling behind his ear until he reached up to paw at it. “I thought you might need an additional blanket to help keep you warm, but it seems Officer Booth has already seen to that comfort.”
His eyes flicked down to the quilt tucked beneath her arm, then back up to her face, which was covered with an expression of affection. Normally, he would have been pleased to see such an appearance, yet for some reason he found himself rather perturbed by the sight of it.
“He isn’t the only one,” she told him, turning to the side and gesturing to a stack of quilts, afghans, and other spreads teetering upon one of her trunks. “Every visitor I’ve had this week has seen fit to bring me at least one.”
The irritation that had flared within his chest subsided when he realized her temperament was because of all the care and kindness she’d received from the community at large and not just from a single, particular source. He also resolutely refused to examine that initial annoyance any further, choosing instead to focus on the issue he could see swirling within the depths of her green eyes as she vacillated over giving it voice.
“What is it, Swan?”
“I know it’s probably against regulations, seeing as there aren’t enough for everyone, but…” Her eyes turned pleading as she gazed up at him, and Killian knew no matter what her request might be, he was unlikely to refuse her. “I have more than enough to keep me comfortable while others must spend the long nights absolutely freezing. Would it… would it be possible to have these extra blankets dispensed to other inmates? Perhaps the older, frailer ones?”
Killian stared down at her, stunned. It really shouldn’t have surprised him that she would be willing to share her excess with others she felt were more in need, but such mindsets were not at all commonplace within the hardened walls of a prison, or among equally hardened prisoners.
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66 notes - Posted April 24, 2022
#3
CS AU: Conviction (5/?)
Summary: The story had been front page news for months. Scandalous details of a married woman of low birth and with limited means, murdering her husband; hatcheting him to death in order to save her own life and that of her unborn child - or so she claimed. No evidence to support her allegations of abuse had been presented during the trial, but in the end, it was the fact that Mrs. Cassidy was with child that saved her from a verdict of murder in the first degree, a judgment that carried the death penalty for both men and women alike. As an act of mercy, a lesser charge was issued, one that spared her life but now made her Misthaven Penitentiary’s problem to contend with, and more specifically, the Captain of the Guard charged with keeping order within its walls.
A/N: My apologies for not updating last week. While I am determined to maintain a regular, weekly schedule, I'm afraid I've fallen behind on my wiring, and therefore I can't guarantee there won't be more skipped weeks. Now that my homeschool semester is over, I'm hoping to get more writing time so I can catch back up. I just ask that y'all be patient with me.
Thank you for all the lovely comments! I treasure them, and am so thrilled y'all seem to love this story as much as I do! Also, thanks to my amazing betas, @snowbellewells and @kmomof4. Also, shout out to @sotangledupinit for the assist in defringing Killian for the art.
Rated T-M (for themes, mentions of abuse, murder, and attempted assault) / Available on ao3 and ff.net / buy me a coffee / add to tag list
Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Snow swirled and the frigid air burned in Killian’s lungs. The scent of pine danced in his sinuses and tickled his tongue, the aroma of the season stirring those feelings of good tidings even though there had been no great joy in his days for the past few weeks.
Actually, that wasn’t completely true. Despite the rift between himself and his brother - a chasm that had only grown wider since his brother’s decree, forcing Killian from Swan’s presence and the pleasure of her company, while removing any comfort his might have given her - there had been moments of elation and gratitude to help lighten the otherwise gloomy December days.
Elsa had wasted no time in acquiring the services of a few masons and the blacksmith, converting the old offices along the upper level of the officer’s wing into a much larger cell for Swan and her swiftly approaching arrival. The men had offered their time and materials, free of charge, and word had spread regarding the prison’s forthcoming addition, spurring the townsfolk into actions of charity, not only for Miss Swan, but the entire prison as well.
The soft crunch of compacted snow, mixed with the shuffle of freshly fallen flakes echoed beneath Killian’s boots as he made his way up the long drive towards the prison. He stopped for a moment, adjusting the bulky item in his arms so he could tighten his scarf, a slight shiver traveling down his spine when the winter breeze whispered across the thin layer of perspiration dampening his skin from the exertion of carrying the object from town. A ring of faint laughter tinkled through the air, and Killian knew the carolers he’d passed in the village must be making their way to the prison.
He remembered lamenting many months ago about how they were to make it through the winter without the assistance of the convent. He never would have imagined the outpouring of care, kindness, and compassion they had received from the town’s residents, from necessities like foodstuffs and fuels, to the indulgence of new clothing for the prisoners and a collection for the officers’ uniforms, as well as decorations and community visits to help lift the population’s spirits. Killian could not remember a more festive or exhilarating Christmas season in all his years, and though Elsa had certainly had her hand in making it happen, Killian knew the true prompting that had brought the whole town together to rally around Misthaven Penitentiary was Emma.
A cloud of vapor briefly hung in the air from where Killian had exhaled heavily. Emma. His Swan. Not a day had gone by that he had not thought of her, and not simply because the work being done on her new cell was happening, quite literally, before his very eyes day after day. He’d timed his arrival during those first few shifts he’d reported for duty with when she’d usually be out on her walks, so he would at least have the opportunity to see her, perhaps even speak with her. However, his brother had accounted for such an action and had issued new orders regarding her yard time. Now that they were back to full staff, they no longer had to depend on the off-duty night shift to perform the task, so she was worked into the day rotation schedule, usually escorted from her cell when Killian was in the training room with one of the new recruits.
The sound of his boot falls interrupted the quiet once more as he trod up the path towards the prison gate. Two of the recruits were milling about in the yard, most likely awaiting the arrival of the carolers. They snapped to attention as soon as they spotted him, one moving quickly to open the door for their captain, whose arms were still laden with an object he hoped to deliver before the visitors’ arrival.
It was a yearly tradition, the carolers beginning their Christmas Eve serenade at the prison before moving through town and finishing at the church for the Silent Night Service. They would spend some time visiting with the prisoners first, encouraging them with conversation and perhaps a small, gifted token, like a piece of peppermint or some other candy, to commemorate the holiday, then sing a few carols before moving on. Killian had always enjoyed the Christmas Eve caroling and the festivities it brought with it, the guards finding ways to make their own merriment as those off-duty joined the on-duty shift for a celebratory toast after the carolers departed, but this year… The rift between him and Liam would most likely sour whatever toast their warden made, and the only person with whom he wished to share Christmas he was forbidden from seeing.
That hadn’t stopped him from bringing her a gift, though.
Depositing the item in his office, Killian straightened his appearance, smoothing down his hair, which had become tussled by the winter wind, and took in a steadying breath as dread gnawed his gut. Never before had he been anxious to face his brother, not to this degree at least, and he wondered if the damage both their words and actions had caused to their relationship would be permanent. In addition to keeping his distance from Swan, as ordered, Killian had done all he could to avoid Liam these past few weeks, dispatching another officer to meet with the warden in his stead and begging off all of Elsa’s invitations to share dinner with them now he had his evenings free. When the rare moment occurred that he had to report to the warden’s office himself, he had been overly formal and guarded with a rapport of extreme professionalism, a conduct Liam had reciprocated in kind.
It had not escaped Killian’s notice that the officers walked on eggshells around them both, nor could he deny the strain it was starting to have on Elsa, who desperately tried to get the two brothers together so they might discuss the matter rather than allow it to continue to fester. Killian would be lying if he said the glimmer of tears in her eyes when he’d turned down the offer to spend Christmas with them hadn’t made his heart twist painfully in his chest, but he knew he’d only bring the celebration down with his sullenness, and he wasn’t about to make her sister or her sister’s family uncomfortable with the added tension his presence would bring.
Besides… Swan was supposed to be moved into her new cell Christmas morning, and Killian wanted to be there, even if he couldn’t share the occasion by her side or give her the gift he’d worked on with Marco himself.
Exiting his office, he glanced across the corridor as he passed the new cell and paused. Philip and Thomas - two of the newest recruits and set to make officer after the first of the year - were bustling around the space, depositing firewood into the nook beside the hearth and positioning the new furnishings into place, readying the cell for its new inhabitant. A copper tub sat in the corner, partially hidden behind a partition that would provide her privacy when she bathed, the fireplace allowing her not only warmth, but the ability to heat water without the assistance of the guards. A rocking chair faced the hearth, a fresh mattress was laid out upon the suspended frame on the opposite wall, and a wardrobe filled the opposite corner, ready for Swan’s and her baby's belongings to be transferred from the trunks they’d been packed in for months. A smile lifted the corners of his mouth, a moment of gladdened contentment pushing past the longing that had been hollowing out his chest cavity day by day.
“Do you need something, Captain?”
The question brought Killian back to his purpose. “No. Thank you, Thomas. Carry on.”
Leaving the recruits to finish their work, Killian turned and fortified himself before raising his hand to knock on the warden’s door. Dutifully, he waited until he heard his brother bid entrance.
“Killian?” Liam said, standing from his chair with a perplexed yet tentatively relieved expression. His hair was as unruly as Killian’s, but where the wind had been responsible for the younger Jones’ appearance, it seemed the chaotic nature of Liam’s hair had been caused by his fingers continuously running through the curly strands. “I was not sure you’d return for the festivities when Erik informed me you’d already left for the day.”
Killian lifted his chin, his hands tucked behind his back with his posture board straight as he addressed his warden. “I had an errand to run in town, sir.”
“I see,” Liam commented, wincing a bit at the curt edge of Killian’s formal tone. Making his way around the desk, Liam paused when he reached the front edge, wringing his hands for a moment before letting them fall to his sides. “I was sorry to hear you refused our invitation for Christmas,” he said. “And not because it means I must endure Elsa’s sister and brother-in-law without the aid of my li...er, younger brother.”
Killian’s brows twitched, nearly pinching together in disbelief at the correction. Was his brother attempting to make amends? It wasn’t like Liam to concede, to ever admit he might be wrong, and if it was his intention to make things right then it surely had to have been prompted by Elsa.
“I offered to take the Christmas shift so Thomas could spend the holiday with his wife. I felt the other recruits deserved to spend the day with their lady loves as well.”
“And the fact Mrs. Cassidy is moving to the cell across the hall tomorrow morning had no bearing on such an offer, I’m sure.”
Killian stiffened further, his posture becoming more rigid as he geared up for another row with his brother, but the spark of anger Liam’s quip had ignited was quickly snuffed out with his brother’s next words.
See the full post
69 notes - Posted May 15, 2022
#2
WIP Wednesday: New CS AU Sneak Peek
Summary: The story had been front page news for months. Scandalous details of a married woman of low birth and with limited means, murdering her husband; hatcheting him to death in order to save her own life and that of her unborn child - or so she claimed. No evidence to support her allegations of abuse had been presented during the trial, but in the end, it was the fact that Mrs. Cassidy was with child that saved her from a verdict of murder in the first degree, a judgment that carried the death penalty for both men and women alike. As an act of mercy, a lesser charge was issued, one that spared her life but now made her Misthaven Penitentiary's problem to contend with, and more specifically, the Captain of the Guard charged with keeping order within its walls.
A/N: This fic was inspired by the true account of Martha Casto who was incarcerated in the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1843 for manslaughter. I first heard her story on an episode of Who Do You Think You Are, featuring the lineage of actress Cynthia Nixon. While I have taken some details of Martha’s crime and sentencing to weave into the story, mine will not be a retelling of the accounts of her time in prison. Also, while I am setting this fic in the same time period as the inspiration (mid-1800s), I will be taking some historical liberties.
Thanks to my amazing betas, @snowbellewells and @kmomof4. Also, shout out to @sotangledupinit for the assist in debanging (don’t make it dirty, people) Killian for the art.
Rated T-M (for themes, mentions of abuse, murder, and attempted assault) / updating weekly on Sundays / buy me a coffee / add to tag list / Curious? Come Ask Me!
Sneak Peek from Chapter One:
“Mrs. Cassidy, I am Liam Jones, Warden here at Misthaven Penitentiary, and this is my Captain of the Guard, Killian Jones.”
Killian gave the woman a curt nod and tried to focus his attention on the words Liam was speaking. Not that he really needed to. It was the same speech he gave to every other inmate who passed through their doors. Albeit, no other inmate had ever had the privilege of receiving these remarks within the warden’s own office. A change in protocol that further iterated how remarkable a situation they all faced.
Remarkable. Yes. Such a designation seemed apt as Killian took in the woman before him. He was not sure what he had expected of Mrs. Cassidy, but the thin-framed young woman before him certainly was not it. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, and only reached his chin. Though she had to be petrified of what lay ahead, her countenance betrayed none of her trepidations. Standing stiff-backed with her head held high, she struck Killian as a tough lass. Tough and bloody beautiful to boot.
His job just got a whole lot harder.
A small grimace passed over her features when she turned back towards the door, having been dismissed by the warden and ready to be led to her cell. Her delicate hands clenched and released, the red welts from the shackles clasped around her wrists stood out in stark contrast to her pale skin. Killian ground his teeth together, a response he’d involuntarily given into a number of times since seeing her disembark from the prison wagon with chains binding her wrists and ankles. It was standard procedure when transporting prisoners, but Killian could barely stomach the sight of those restraints on a woman, regardless of her crime.
Escorted by his fellow guardsman, Robin, Killian marched his prisoner along the corridor towards the catwalk that allowed them to cross over to the other side of the upper level. While passing the manned cells, Killian did his best to shield Mrs. Cassidy from the other prisoners’ view, but it didn’t stop a few taunts and lewd comments thrown her way by one of the more hardened inmates. Pulling his baton from where it rested at his hip, Killian slammed it against the bars as a warning.
“You’d best hold your tongue, before I remove it,” Killian said in a hushed, menacing tone that matched the look he stared the man down with until the perpetrator backed away.
Out of instinct, Killian reached out to grasp the woman’s arm in order to prompt her forward, but retracted his hand when he saw her flinch. He had to bite down on his tongue to keep from apologizing, reminding himself she was just another prisoner and had to be treated as such in order to maintain the necessary balance required for order and discipline within the prison.
They made their way across the catwalk, down the opposite side, and around the corner to her cell without further incident. Robin unlocked the cell door, swinging it wide, while Killian knelt down to remove the shackles around her ankles. The length and layers of her skirts made it difficult to locate the keyhole on the first side, until they suddenly hitched up, revealing her boots and metal irons surrounding them. Killian flicked his eyes up to see Mrs. Cassidy had bunched the fabric up in her hands in order to make the work easier for him, and he was once again tempted to break protocol, swallowing back the thank you that threatened to slip out.
Once her leg irons were removed and handed off to Robin, Killian gestured her inside the cell and closed the door behind her with a loud, jarring clang, causing her to flinch once more.
“Hands,” he ordered. His tone was a bit harsher than he meant it to be, so he was thankful when she slipped her hands between the bars without hesitation.
Like the shackles at her ankles, Killian made quick work of the restraints around her wrists. Anger flared within him at the sight of the red, raw skin revealed beneath the heavy metal, and this time he could not hold back the apology slipping past his lips when a hiss escaped her from the fresh air stinging the open wounds.
“I will have a salve brought to you that will help with those,” Killian told her, passing the wrist restraints off to Robin, who nodded his understanding of the implied order before heading back towards the officers’ station.
“That isn’t necessary,” the woman replied, gingerly rubbing the skin surrounding the welts and sores.
“It’s standard procedure,” Killian informed her, lest she think he was offering her special treatment. “As the warden mentioned, meals will be brought up for you to eat in your cell. Your dinner should arrive within the hour. Have you any questions, Mrs. Cassidy?”
“Emma,” she replied sharply.
“I beg your pardon?”
She sighed and set her features with a firm resolve. “I do not wish to be addressed as Mrs. Cassidy. Please, call me Emma.”
“I am afraid that will not be possible,” Killian told her, attempting to keep the sympathy out of his voice. “My brother feels such familiarity would be inappropriate.”
“Your brother?”
Killian bit back a curse at the carelessness of his words. “I meant, the warden,” he corrected.
“Right,” she nodded. “Jones. I should have realized the connection.” Robin returned and handed the jar of salve and a square of clean linen to her through the bars, which she accepted with a timid thank you. “How should I address you and the other guards if I have need?”
“You may address the guards as Officer, or include that title with their surname.” Killian gestured to Robin. “For instance, this is Officer Locksley.”
Robin offered her a polite nod which she returned before flicking her gaze back to Killian. “And you?”
See the full post
80 notes - Posted April 6, 2022
My #1 post of 2022
CS AU: Conviction (1/?)
Summary: The story had been front page news for months. Scandalous details of a married woman of low birth and with limited means, murdering her husband; hatcheting him to death in order to save her own life and that of her unborn child - or so she claimed. No evidence to support her allegations of abuse had been presented during the trial, but in the end, it was the fact that Mrs. Cassidy was with child that saved her from a verdict of murder in the first degree, a judgment that carried the death penalty for both men and women alike. As an act of mercy, a lesser charge was issued, one that spared her life but now made her Misthaven Penitentiary’s problem to contend with, and more specifically, the Captain of the Guard charged with keeping order within its walls.
A/N: This fic was inspired by the true account of Martha Casto who was incarcerated in the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1843 for manslaughter. I first heard her story on an episode of Who Do You Think You Are, featuring the lineage of actress Cynthia Nixon. While I have taken some details of Martha’s crime and sentencing to weave into the story, mine will not be a retelling of the accounts of her time in prison. Also, while I am setting this fic in the same time period as the inspiration (mid-1800s), I will be taking some historical liberties.
Thanks to my amazing betas, @snowbellewells and @kmomof4. Also, shout out to @sotangledupinit for the assist in debanging (don’t make it dirty, people) Killian for the art.
Rated T-M (for themes, mentions of abuse, murder, and attempted assault) / Available on ao3 and ff.net / buy me a coffee / add to tag list
Chapter One
“You cannot be bloody serious.” Killian’s eyes jumped from the order in his hands to his brother’s face. “They’re sending her here?”
“This is the only prison within Misthaven County,” Liam reminded him, seemingly unperturbed by the proclamation that a woman, who had just been found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to serve five years for the crime against her husband, would be housed within the stone walls he was charged with overseeing as warden.
Killian shook his head and tossed the missive onto the imposing mahogany desk in front of him. “This is madness,” he said, running a hand through his hair while trying to grapple with the logistical nightmare the magistrate had set upon them. “Her presence will cause chaos among the other prisoners, to say nothing of how she will affect the guards.”
“I see no reason why her incarceration here should cause such disastrous waves of which you seem concerned.”
Killian stared slack jawed at his brother, who had resumed his seat and began scratching quill to parchment. “Brother,” Killian began with an incredulous tone once he again found his voice, “We are not equipped to see to the needs of a woman here, especially one who is with child.”
“We will see to her needs as we do the men under our supervision. However,” Liam held up his hand to stay his brother’s protest, “I recognize that a few concessions will be necessary in order to ensure her safety and well-being whilst she is here.” Setting the ink he had just finished applying to the page, Liam stood and handed the paper to Killian. “As Captain of the Guard, I entrust these added measures into your authority. See to it the other guards are aware of my instructions and that they are upheld.”
Killian grit his teeth, but held his tongue. He knew a dismissal when it was issued, and though Liam was his older brother, he was also the prison warden and Killian’s superior. Positions Killian respected, even if he did think his brother was being purposefully obtuse about the reality of the circumstance about to befall them.
Upon exiting his brother’s office and returning to his own, Killian settled himself in his desk chair and read over the principles by which Liam would have them all handle the presence of Mrs. Cassidy. Pinching the bridge of his nose, Killian released a long sigh before glancing out the window that looked across the open corridor to the upper level cells that stood adjacent to the officers’ wing. From where he sat, Killian had a clear view around the corner to the secluded stretch where lay the cell Liam had determined would house the infamous ax-murderess.
The story had been front page news for months. Scandalous details of a married woman of low birth and limited means murdering her husband; hatcheting him to death in order to save her own life and that of her unborn child - or so she claimed. No evidence to support her allegations of abuse had been presented during the trial when neighbors and members of the man’s family had come forward with their testimonies of character, painting the victim in portraits of virtue while his wife was further vilified. In the end, it was the fact that Mrs. Cassidy was with child that had saved her from a verdict of murder in the first degree, a judgment that carried the death penalty for men and women alike. As an act of mercy, a lesser charge was issued, one that spared her life but now made her Killian's problem to contend with.
And she would most certainly be a problem.
Keeping order within the prison was a challenge on the best of days. They were woefully underfunded and understaffed. Though not as deplorable in condition as other prisons Killian had seen, Misthaven Penitentiary had always relied on the charity of the local convent to see them through hard times. With its closing earlier in the year, and the nuns dispersed to other parishes, Killian was not sure how they would fare in the upcoming winter. To say nothing of how they’d fare having an inmate of the fairer sex within their midst.
A scoff of scorn erupted from the back of Killian’s throat when he read back over his brother’s edict. No man shall enter Mrs. Cassidy’s cell for any reason, lest it be a matter of life or death. Liam was a damn fool if he thought such a decree would dissuade some of the more… unsavory members of their guard from the temptation the woman would present, and it would be left to Killian to maintain order and discipline, not just from the sentenced population, but from his own men. A task he was not relishing in the slightest. Nor was he overjoyed by his brother’s commands that essentially made him her own personal jailor, a notion which left him with a sour taste in his mouth and equally unpleasant sensation in his gut.
Checking the time on his pocket watch, Killian stood and made himself presentable for the shift change. Liam would be addressing the whole of their guard staff, informing them of the impending arrival of Mrs. Cassidy, as well as a dozen or so other new inmates to follow, which meant longer shifts would be required in order to make the necessary preparations. Killian’s hopes of spending some time along the coast while the autumn weather was still agreeable were well and truly snuffed out, much like the desk candle he extinguished before leaving his office.
~/~
“Mrs. Cassidy, I am Liam Jones, Warden here at Misthaven Penitentiary, and this is my Captain of the Guard, Killian Jones.”
Killian gave the woman a curt nod and tried to focus his attention on the words Liam was speaking. Not that he really needed to. It was the same speech he gave to every other inmate who passed through their doors. Albeit, no other inmate had ever had the privilege of receiving these remarks within the warden’s own office. A change in protocol that further iterated how remarkable a situation they all faced.
Remarkable. Yes. Such a designation seemed apt as Killian took in the woman before him. He was not sure what he had expected of Mrs. Cassidy, but the thin-framed young woman before him certainly was not it. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, and only reached his chin. Though she had to be petrified of what lay ahead, her countenance betrayed none of her trepidations. Standing stiff-backed with her head held high, she struck Killian as a tough lass. Tough and bloody beautiful to boot.
His job just got a whole lot harder.
A small grimace passed over her features when she turned back towards the door, having been dismissed by the warden and ready to be led to her cell. Her delicate hands clenched and released, the red welts from the shackles clasped around her wrists stood out in stark contrast to her pale skin. Killian ground his teeth together, a response he’d involuntarily given into a number of times since seeing her disembark from the prison wagon with chains binding her wrists and ankles. It was standard procedure when transporting prisoners, but Killian could barely stomach the sight of those restraints on a woman, regardless of her crime.
Escorted by his fellow guardsman, Robin, Killian marched his prisoner along the corridor towards the catwalk that allowed them to cross over to the other side of the upper level. While passing the manned cells, Killian did his best to shield Mrs. Cassidy from the other prisoners’ view, but it didn’t stop a few taunts and lewd comments thrown her way by one of the more hardened inmates. Pulling his baton from where it rested at his hip, Killian slammed it against the bars as a warning.
“You’d best hold your tongue, before I remove it,” Killian said in a hushed, menacing tone that matched the look he stared the man down with until the perpetrator backed away.
Out of instinct, Killian reached out to grasp the woman’s arm in order to prompt her forward, but retracted his hand when he saw her flinch. He had to bite down on his tongue to keep from apologizing, reminding himself she was just another prisoner and had to be treated as such in order to maintain the necessary balance required for order and discipline within the prison.
They made their way across the catwalk, down the opposite side, and around the corner to her cell without further incident. Robin unlocked the cell door, swinging it wide, while Killian knelt down to remove the shackles around her ankles. The length and layers of her skirts made it difficult to locate the keyhole on the first side, until they suddenly hitched up, revealing her boots and metal irons surrounding them. Killian flicked his eyes up to see Mrs. Cassidy had bunched the fabric up in her hands in order to make the work easier for him, and he was once again tempted to break protocol, swallowing back the thank you that threatened to slip out.
Once her leg irons were removed and handed off to Robin, Killian gestured her inside the cell and closed the door behind her with a loud, jarring clang, causing her to flinch once more.
See the full post
85 notes - Posted April 10, 2022
Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →
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I posted 738 times in 2022
50 posts created (7%)
688 posts reblogged (93%)
Blogs I reblogged the most:
@weissroseschnee
@mollyflood
@daisysmartheart
@dicknouget
@boobitchcraftt
I tagged 157 of my posts in 2022
#one piece - 38 posts
#rwby - 27 posts
#anime - 12 posts
#monkey d luffy - 11 posts
#nico robin - 10 posts
#blake belladonna - 9 posts
#yang xiao long - 9 posts
#rwby ice queendom - 8 posts
#weiss schnee - 8 posts
#nefertari vivi - 8 posts
Longest Tag: 66 characters
#what if the crew just spent a few hours sharing their backstories?
My Top Posts in 2022:
#5
So, The RWBY Panel Summarized:
Barb was so happy to be here she cried. We all cheered for her (and the others of course)
Video message from a Japanese writer involved with Ice Queendom shown. Starting next episode (Ep 4) it will be original story rather than the loose adaptation. Clip from episode 2 shown in both Japanese and English to show how LKAB are adapting the adaptation of their own original lines. (Barb made a joke about “we heard you liked dubs so we put a dub in your dub so you can dub while you dub”)
New merch shown. Streetwear for Yang and Blake, car accessories, Banpresto Qposket figures, YouTooz figures coming soon, new partnership with Makeship, showed off shadow boxes and acrylics. LKAB tossed merch hidden under their seats into crowd. While unboxing Qposket figures Blake’s arms fell off. Yang arm jokes were made.
See the full post
231 notes - Posted July 1, 2022
#4
I don’t see many people talking about it, and certainly not in my follower circles, so I’ll spread the news here.
This man
Got Married~
So congratulations are in order for Dan and his new wife!!
279 notes - Posted February 4, 2022
#3
Recent events make this post necessary as a reminder:
This blog supports Arryn Zech.
This blog does not believe in undermining or denying Arryn Zech’s history of relationship abuse, and takes her concerns in such matters as they pertain to RWBY: Ice Queendom seriously.
This blog stands with Arryn.
So anyone who thinks she’s some “diva throwing a tantrum over nothing cuz she wants time in the spotlight”…
Can kindly go and fuck themselves with a splintering sledgehammer.
392 notes - Posted March 28, 2022
#2
Roronoa Zoro for the past 1042 chapters: I don’t believe in God, I believe in Luffy.
Zoro now: …This changes nothing, I know what I said
452 notes - Posted April 8, 2022
My #1 post of 2022
If I knew that handsome emo man would be waiting for me in the Dream World every night, I’d have regulated my sleep schedule a long time ago.
1,559 notes - Posted August 5, 2022
Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →
#tumblr2022#year in review#my 2022 tumblr year in review#your tumblr year in review#Well this is cool to know
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Yitzhak!
is a character! who Gregadiah What-Is-Math Rucka gave us almost no information about!
I've gone through Tales Through Time #6: The Bear and #1: My Mother's Axe with several magnifying glasses and done a lot of googling and taken my copy of the Tanakh off my shelf for the first time since (well, since the last time I needed to read Torah for TOG reasons, which I think was Booker Passover headcanons) and here's the best I can come up with.
In The Bear we meet someone who goes by the name Isaac Blue:
Read on for a lot of comic panel analysis and historical research and Jewish flailing!
So what do we know about this Isaac Blue person?
He's Lorge, he's got curly hair, he's basically a taller version of Joe as drawn by Leandro Fernández (ie an antisemitic stereotype why the fuck did they approve this character design?? and then why did they double down and copy-paste it to Yitzhak??):
He's got a mezuzah on the doorpost of his house in Alaska!
I screamed about the mezuzah way back in January in this post where I (very reasonably) assumed this character was Joe and spun myself a tale about how Booker is still Joe's brother so the mezuzah stays up even though Booker isn't welcome in that house for a century. Bottom line: the mezuzah is a tradition with origins in the commandment from Deuteronomy 6:9 to "write the words of G-d on the gates and doorposts of your house" and evolved over the course of the Rabbinic period into the modern mezuzah we see here.
I did unnecessary levels of google image search to glean absolutely no useful information about Yitzhak’s origins from this panel:
I've decided the variant cover of TTT 6 is Yitzhak because of a panel in My Mother’s Axe, shown here, and what's likely an unnecessarily deep reading of Exodus, discussed further down:
The person at the right of the bottom panel is wearing the same clothes as in the TTT 6 variant cover and has the same shoulder-length curly hair and hairy forearms.
Left to right, the people in this panel are Lykon (I'll never get used to him being white in the comics), Andy, Noriko (I think? why doesn't Andy mention her by name here?), and Yitzhak. Andy's robe has a stereotypically Greek design on the sleeve cuff, and I had to stop myself 10 minutes into a Wikipedia rabbit hole because Gregorforth doesn't think that deep about this shit. The solid clues as to timeline that we get in this panel are:
Andy's iron axe
the presence of Lykon, who Andy first met in 331 BCE
So all we know is that Yitzhak is an immortal, he was a contemporary of Lykon, and he's Jewish.
Isaac is the most common Anglicization of Yitzhak (which in turn is the most common Anglophone transliteration of יִצְחָק), and Greg always uses the (transliterated) Hebrew when he refers to this character. Yitzhak is the long-awaited child of Abraham and Sarah in Genesis, the child who G-d commanded Abraham to sacrifice but spared at the last minute. I see what you did there, Gregory.
Why Isaac Blue? This is where I pulled out my Tanakh. According to the New JPS translation, blue is the first of three colors of yarn listed in Exodus 35:6 among the gifts requested of the Israelites to construct the priestly garments for the Tabernacle and later the Temple. Then in Numbers 15:38 the Israelites are commanded to "make themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages; let them attach a cord of blue to the fringe at each corner."
And now for sandbox timelines party! Gregadiah gave us ALMOST NOTHING to go on, so I'm gonna make my own fun.
I, like many modern Jews, think the stories in the Tanakh are foundational mythology that are valuable because of how they've shaped our people but that contain some fucked-up shit and either way aren't meant to be a record of historical facts. Modern scholarship generally agrees that the community we now call Jews emerged as a distinct group of Canaanites sometime in the late Bronze Age (cw this video's host says the Name of G-d aloud despite being a religious studies scholar who knows that is not a name anyone but the Temple priests are allowed to say). The first non-Biblical written record of the people Israel is from an Egyptian source c. 1200 BCE, and the Biblical kingdom of David and Solomon was probably an exaggeration of whatever really happened during the Bronze Age Collapse. We start getting into historical-fact territory a few centuries into the Iron Age:
588 BCE Solomon's Temple destroyed, Babylonian exile begins
538 BCE Cyrus of Persia allows Jews to return to Jerusalem
515 BCE Second Temple construction complete
332 BCE Alexander the Great At Something I Guess conquered Judea, beginning the Hellenistic period of Jewish history — 331 BCE Andy & Lykon find each other
167 BCE another jerkface Greek king desecrated the Temple and basically outlawed Judaism
164 BCE recapture of Jerusalem and Temple rededication during the Maccabean Revolt
70 CE destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans, beginning of the Rabbinic period of Jewish history that we're still in now
What if... and hear me out... what if immortals come in pairs, and the pairs are:
Andy & Quynh
Joe & Nicky
Booker & Nile
LYKON & YITZHAK
What if Yitzhak was a priest of the Second Temple? What if he and Lykon killed each other just like Joe and Nicky would in the same city around 1300 years later, but instead of enemies-to-lovers speedrun with an absurdly long happily-ever-after, when Lykon died permanently Yitzhak decided to separate from Andy and Noriko and become the hermit we later see in Alaska?
We don't know how old Yitzhak is compared to the others, only that he was a contemporary of Lykon at a time when Andy was using an Iron Age version of her mother's axe. Other plausible origins for him:
a Jew of the early Rabbinic period, maybe a child or grandchild of people who were still alive before the Second Temple was destroyed
a Judean of the Second Temple era under the Romans or Greeks or Persians, maybe a priest, maybe not
an exilee in Babylon, maybe of the generation who got to return, maybe of the generation who was exiled (he doesn't look like he was 50 at his first death but who knows, he could've been mortal for both)
an Israelite of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah, maybe a priest of Solomon's Temple or again maybe not
an Israelite wandering in the desert with Moses
THEE Yitzhak, ben Avraham v'Sarah, our patriarch who was brought up for sacrifice and then spared, and then spared again, and then spared again, and again, and again...
or! he could also be a Canaanite or other Levantine who predates the people Israel, who at some point in his very long life chose to join our mixed multitude, who like Andromache before him (and like Avram and Sarai would in this case do after him) took a new name to reflect the magnitude of influence this people has had on him
Why do I keep saying Yitzhak might have been a priest? It's thanks to the one detail in the artwork I could plausibly connect to solid research without getting a PhD real quick. Take a look at the gorgeous detail on the opening of his robe in the TTT 6 cover. He's dressed in rags, holes and dirt everywhere, rough stitches probably from hasty repair work — except for the neck opening. Compare that to this description from Exodus 39:23 of the construction of the priestly garments for the Tabernacle: "The opening of the robe, in the middle of it, was like the opening of a coat of mail, with a binding around the opening, so that it would not tear."
The next verses describe the intricate designs for the hem of the priestly garment. Yitzhak's ragged garment looks like the hem was torn off entirely.
Am I overthinking this? Yes I am! You're welcome!
My friend and historical research hero @lady-writes is in a Discord server with Gregadiah and asked the man himself some questions about all this. He clearly thinks he's being sneaky?? No shit Yitzhak is Jewish, dude, I want DETAILS!
I will not be giving up my Jewish Booker headcanon, I've put too much thought into it by now, the internalized shame of antisemitism explains Booker's depression too well for me, and it just adds so much richness to Booker/Nile both being children of forced diasporas. Fortunately (for him, not me, bc I'd do it anyway!) Gregothy supports fan headcanons even when they're not in line with his own:
One last thing before I close like 100 research tabs and go back to writing historical fantasy and/or porn! I love that, despite that atrocious caricature of a face design, our canon Jew and our fanon Jew are both Lorge and Soft and Kind, flying the face of the antisemitic stereotype of Ashkenazi Jewish men as small and weak, but also not falling into the New Jew / Muscle Jew stereotype that Zionism created. (I am trying SO HARD not to talk about Israel/Palestine for once ughhhhhhhhhh) Anyway here's a (US-centric but very good) primer on both these stereotypes of Jewish masculinity. Is this why I'm forever projecting my transmasc diasporist feels onto Jewish Booker the service sub? 🤷🏻♂️
I’ll reblog a second version of this with full image descriptions so that there’s a version accessible for folks who need IDs as well as a version accessible for folks who get overwhelmed by walls of text.
#TOG POC Love Fest#yitzhak#jewish booker#tales through time spoilers#tales through time#tog meta#tog#jewish things#mine#antisemitism#hi i'm an antizionist jew no i don't really want to talk about it
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I admit I'm a sucker for adorable animals in videos and pictures. With all the troubles in the world today, sometimes it's nice to vicariously immerse myself in piles of puppies, kittens, and other cute critters. Unfortunately, sometimes the media I'm consuming is a source of troubles itself. Many times ignorance about animal behavior is at the root of the cruelty, though there are situations that are born out of greed for money, prestige, likes, and so forth.
Obviously some of these videos have worse origins than others. The upset gecko gaping its mouth at its supposed rival in a mirror isn't being nearly as badly mistreated as the loris that's starving to death due to an incomplete or incorrect diet. What's important is developing a critical eye for this sort of media and learning more about how to assess whether the animals involved are actually enjoying themselves or not.
Here's some sauce for those of you who want to read further:
http://blog.whyanimalsdothething.com/ - Why Animals Do the Thing (@why-animals-do-the-thing) is a great start to learning more about animal behavior, which ones are healthy and which ones indicate stress (here's an especially good post that goes into even more detail about some of these viral videos and photos: http://blog.whyanimalsdothething.com/post/128327199132/animal-science)
http://thehsi.org/2015/04/01/the-cruel-cost-of-cute/ - the Herpetological Society of Ireland explores more about the cruelty behind staged frog photos and more
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/whimsical-wildlife-photography-isnt-seems - more on those staged photos, including some good links throughout the article
http://chimpsnw.org/2013/10/take-action-tuesday-new-childrens-book-exploits-anjana-and-tiger-cubs/ - goes into more detail about how TIGERS and similar organizations exploit wildlife for profit
http://www.rabbitwelfare.co.uk/pdfs/BathingBunnies-RO.pdf - if you absolutely must bathe a rabbit, here's when and how to do it as safely as possible
Species portrayed: Domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris), Sunda slow loris (Nycticebus coucang), orangutan (Pongo sp.), tiger (Panthera tigris), white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), scrub frog (Rhacophorus sp.), rhinoceros beetle (Dynastinae sp.), domestic rabbit (Oryctolagus cuniculus), tokay gecko (Gekko gecko)
12-11-19 note: Hey, I’ve added a transcript of the comic panels above down below the read more cut. I have to run to an appointment now but will try to add neat links people post in the notes later on. Meanwhile, please reblog this version so that more people can enjoy this comic, including those who may have trouble reading the written text or who use text readers. Thanks!
Comic transcript:
[Panel 1: a puppy plays in a grassy field on a computer monitor] title: Not So Cute Animal Videos. Feeling stressed? Why not watch some cute animal videos online?
[Panel 2: the puppy is now looking quizzically out of the monitor at the viewer] I hate to be a downer, but unfortunately some of these videos actually show animals in distress. (Sorry, I know you were trying to destress.)
[Panel 3: a Sunda slow loris is being tickled by a human hand and has its arms raised in defense] A viral video from a few years ago shows a slow loris raising its arms as it is tickled. It’s not having fun; instead, it’s trying to access venom glands in its arms, glands that were surgically removed. Like other slow lorises in the pet trade, it also likely had its canine teeth pulled out without anesthetic, and was originally poached from a wild population along with the rest of its family. Lorises are cute, but they make poor pets and most die very young.
[Panel 4: a young orangutan is bottle feeding a tiger cub] In 2015, a video appeared showing a young orangutan bottle-feeding tiger cubs. it was created by T.I.G.E.R.S, a facility that separates cubs from their mothers to be used for cub-petting and photo sessions. Not only is this stressful for all animals involved, but the facility breeds tigers, ligers (lion-tiger hybrids not found in nature) and other exotics only for display and “experiences” for tourists, not reintroduction into the wild. (I’ll go deeper into the problems with cub-petting and other such attractions in a later comic.)
[Panel 5: two whitetail deer are shown, one of which seems to be asking for food like bread, an apple, and a cookie] It’s not just captive animals, either. YouTube is full of videos of people feeding deer. Even in cases where the deer aren’t being fed something that will make them sick, it encourages them to see humans as a source of food and lose their fear of us. This leads to the deer being more aggressive in seeking food, as well as more deer hit by cars, not running from hunters, and other deer-human conflicts. Artificially increasing the amount of food in the habitat causes overpopulation, which means more deer dying of starvation and disease, slow, painful ways to die.
[Panel 6: a frog is riding on the back of a rhinoceros beetle, but looks as though it is in distress] It’s not just videos, either. Those photos of frogs riding beetles, holding leaves, or dancing, are often staged by gluing the frog in place or sewing fishing line through its toes and posing it like a marionette.
[Panel 7: fishing line runs through the pads of a frog’s toes] So how can you tell which media is legitimate? First consider the source. If it was made by a cub-petting “sanctuary” or that otherwise profits from animal “encounters”, be skeptical. Look at the animal’s expression and body language without anthropomorphizing--judging them by human expressions. For example, many animals show fear or pain with an open mouth similar to a “smile”.
[Panel 8: a white domestic rabbit is sitting on its back legs in a bathtub of water, with a distressed expression] To responsibly enjoy cute animal videos, learn about animal behavior. Ask rabbit owners whether that bunny in a bath is having fun, and they’ll tell you no! It’s actually trying to stay above the water so as to not drown, and is under severe stress. Remember that behaviors that are positive in humans are often distress signals in animals. Look at it this way--each new video is an opportunity to learn something new!
[Panel 9: a tokay gecko has its mouth open in a threat display while next to a mirror showing its reflection] If something looks too good to be true, research it. If a video showing a lizard “smiling” at a mirror goes viral, search online for “lizard smiling at mirror” plus a word like “scared” or “cruelty” or “bad”. Chances are someone will have written about why this animal is stressed and upset, not happy.
[Panel 10: The cute puppy from the first two panels is now happily playing with a ball] Thankfully there are lots of cute animal videos and pictures that show animals genuinely having fun. With a little care and research, you can enjoy these guilt-free!
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Smallish update because I’ve seen some missunderstandigns going on.
Ok, so yesterday was a day.
I am still reeling of a lot of it, which is why I have not been able to do a transcription of the panel (although the ones I’ve reblogged, made by other people, are very accurate and their only “fault” is not being in my head to know why I had some troubles translating Guillermo’s long answers as he spoke too quickly and too passionately so I had to paraphrase rather than translate literally as I did with the shorter answers, and at some points, I admit my short term memory may have failed me)
I am trying to get the panel off the facebook page to put it on my youtube (With permission from Harlecon’s organizer, Harleyquinnarts, whom you should all follow in Instagram and follow Harlecon on facebook because she’s amazing and made this possible by giving us the space to have the panel. BTW, I have heard that there IS a version already on youtube? If it is, please, please, please, put a link back to Harlecon on it, yes? These small cons deserve all our support)
I am ALSO trying to contact Adrian Fogarty, the dubbing director (NOT the translator, as some people are mis-reporting) who is, in the end, the one who has the answers as to where the hell the “Me too” came from.
Which is the missreporting I;ve seen going around, and which I need to adress.
During the panel, Mr. Rojas went from talking about the “Original” Script to the “DUB” Original Script without making it obvious that there was a different. Understand, for MOST actors, when they talk about the Original Script, they’re NOT talking about the Original English Script. They don’t get that. They get the Original TRANSLATED script, which can be then FURTHER changed by them or the director in order to fit cadence, and lip sync.
And yes, we come again to my old nemesis, lip sync.
So he said that the original script said “Me Too”, as a reply to Cas’s “I love you”, and THEN Alejandro Fogarty, who has a TON of experience adapting on the fly, and is a very respected dubbing director, changed it to “And I you,Cas” because it fit better Dean’s lip movements.
This DOESN’T mean that Fogarty ADDED the Me Too. IT WAS on the Original DUB Script that Guillermo was reading.
He said that Dean didn’t reciprocate Castiel’s words too, but that was AFTER he said he didn’t HEAR what Dean originally said (Which, granted, could be him misremembering as he admitted he had a bad short term memory). This is not to say that he lied when he said Dean didn’t reciprocate, but that that’ts the reason why two different versions of what he said may be running around. This was when I said that then we had to ask Fogarty about the origin of the dub script “Me Too” as he’d probably be the one who knows.
He also said that while it was a surprise, that the writers had been very subtle creating the story between Dean and Castiel, and that it made SENSE.
There are a few things I could say here about voice actor culture, but I won’t as it could muddy the issue and I want to wait until I finish the transcription.
What he corrected from my previous assumptions was that there was no Warner Bros quality control. They finish dubbing, then send it to air and as far as HE knows, there’s no WB exec checking the files. He admitted he might be wrong on that, but it’s more probable that he’s right. So IF the “Me too” was added, there would be no final check to stop it. HOWEVER, there has been no request to RE-Dub the line, so we can assume that, now that the horse is out of the barn, WB and CW don’t really care that, in Mexico and LataM, Dean Winchester is bisexual, canonically.
Which brings us back to the REAL question: Where did that Me Too came from?
Now, I want to make clear this I DON’T BELIEVE THERE’S A BIG CW CONSPIRACY TO KEEP DEAN STRAIGHT. What I do believe is that, due to a bunch of mismanagement of the series, PR, confusion of what their demography is, old-boys club mentality AND good ol’ network censorship, they may have ended up accidentally creating the ILLUSION of one.
And to be honest, I preffer to know the ACTUAL truth, which could very well be a rogue dub director (Which, if you check my previous posts, was a possibility I raised, that if there HAD been a rogue dub translator, the director HAD to be on it too), or a different audio version sent from the US.
I’ve seen script captures from the Original English Script that were leaked, and there Dean doesn’t reply ANYTHING. Not “Me too”, not “Don’t do this, CAs”. HE just goes 404,File not found, Being Loved by an angel, doesn’t compute.
So we know that DEan’s answer in english was Ad libbed by Jensen.
However, we also know that Jensen had to re-record some lines.
So he could’ve ad-libbed again, something different (Either by choice, or by the director’s request. I frankly don’t know nor care. I just assume that there were two different readings and the “wrong” one was sent to the Latam Translator. Wrong here to mean “not the one that aired in the US”)
And the only way we’re going to get closer to which was it, is asking the dub director, which is what I am trying to do. And I do hope that by now, you trust me enough to know that, IF the answer was “Oh, yeah, we decided that it was more logical” , I’ll tell you straight (Or, you know, organize another panel so that you hear it from the horse’s mouth just as I did with Guillermo Rojas)
Also, yes, Guillermo didn’t say the words “I ship Destiel” or “I am a Heller”. However, he DID say that the ending of the arc of Dean and Castiel having a love story was the closing of the series, that Dean reciprocating Cas’s feelings made it make sense and that it was beautiful. So he is a heller, in spirit if not in name.
ETA: I had to fix Adrian Fogarty’s name as someone pointed out I wrote “Alejandro Fogarty” and this proves that I need at least a week of sleep as this show has broken my brain.
#mexican supernatural dub#supernatural dub#mexican dub#dean winchester is bilingual#dean winchester is bi#Guillermo Rojas is the MVP#Guillermo Rojas for Soldierboy
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Your Content and Accessibility For the Blind
Hello everyone! I was thinking about accessibility and wanted to make a post to help creators. This is going to cover general accessibility for blind people interacting with your content. Some of it may be obvious to some and this is by no means comprehensive, so feel free to add anything you think of that is helpful. Also, I wanted to include some ideas for DeafBlind people, but I am not DeafBlind or D/deaf, so I simply listed some general accessibility ideas. If anyone has any other tips or things to consider, please add them in a comment or message and I’ll include it here.
Remember, blindness exists on a spectrum. This post will focus on making things accessible for totally blind people, although these tips can also be beneficial for people with residual vision who use screen readers to reduce eye strain, for small text, for clarity, etc. D/deafness and DeafBlindness are also on spectrums. Some DeafBlind people have some hearing, some vision, a little of both, or none of either. If someone asks you for better or different accessibility services for your content, listen and try to accommodate them as best you can. I have provided some links and resources here to attempt to explain accessibility for blind people, which will include blind people who are DeafBlind. The point is accessibility issues can come from both sides whether it be the audio or visual sides.
Some general helpful links:
AFB’s Advice for image descriptions here
Screen-readers here
Improving Accessibility for the DeafBlind community here
How DeafBlind People Use Technology and The Importance of Braille and Transcripts: Understanding Assistive Technology
Online Content:
GIFs, Pictures, Fan-art, PSA and info posts, Memes, Screenshots of Text Posts or Screenshots of Twitter Threads- Provide an image description on your original post! This is the best option, as you probably know your content best and what you wish to draw attention to. More importantly, every reblog will include an image description, which means the blind person doesn’t need to hunt for an image description in the reblogs! If you know more than one language, include image descriptions in those languages.
Note: Always include descriptions when you post images with or about blind people or characters. Particularly fan-art you made of blind characters. If you don’t, consider why and think about how it would feel to be shut out of something about yourself.
What should you include?
Write Image Description in brackets and include End of Image Description at the end for clarification. As for what you should describe, it depends on what the picture is. Include where it is from. For example, “a screenshot of a Twitter thread by BlindBetaIsAwesome”. Include the text and describe any GIFs or images it includes. Write everything out as they appear. Describe emojis as well. When writing out screen names or hashtags, capitalize the first letter of each word. Otherwise screen-readers read it oddly. For example instead of #accessibilityfortheblind try #AccessibilityForTheBlind. If you think someone will want to search a name, include a link.
You should describe what is important in the image, especially for conveying information or humor. General ideas include: image origin, who is in the image, what they’re doing, any relevant colors or clothing, objects they’re holding, their facial expression, any emojis, and any text in the image. Blind people do like to know about color. For NSFW stuff, include ‘NSFW’ at the start, but other than that, yes, blind people also generally like NSFW things described.
Fanfiction:
Generally, fanfic is very accessible to screen-readers and Braille Displays. However, there are a few ways you can make it more accessible.
Pictures: Include alt-text for any images you post such as artwork or character social media posts. Describe it like you would any other image. Alt-text is different from an image description because instead of a screen-reader saying “image” when it finds an image, it will describe the image. An image description is the text included beneath the picture that everyone can see. Including some kind of description, especially for plot-relevant images, can allow all blind readers to experience the fic.
Chat conversations: Again, for hashtags and screen names, capitalize the first letter of each word for the ease of screen-readers. For characters who don’t use capitalization much, you can add a hyphen between each word to make it easier to read like this: blind-beta-likes-fanfic-too.
Emojis: Screen readers can’t fully read emojis like this one that uses keyboard slashes and symbols to create an image ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (image description: emoji of a person shrugging with both palms lifted upwards. End description.) However, they can read emojis that come on a phone such as 🧁which screen readers read as “cupcake”.
Podfics are also good for hearing people with no vision or reduced vision. Having a podfic with good quality (maybe one that can describe images found in the story) will reduce some of the issues listed here and give blind people another, fun way to interact with content. However, I would try to keep in mind the things I mentioned above for the sake of screen-readers and Braille Displays, which are particularly important for some DeafBlind people who may want to read your fanfic and may not be able to hear well enough to use a screen-reader.
Lastly, keep in mind that any kind of comic may be inaccessible to some blind people. Write with them in mind. Include a message at the start of the story, maybe that it contains material from the comic, graphic novel, or print cartoon. If you know of a comic dub, link to it. If there is none, include details in the story so that a non-manga or non-comic reader would be able to understand.
Web-Comics/Web-Graphic-Novels:
First, I did research and found a comic book store for the blind called Comics Empower. Unfortunately, when I click the link provided on Twitter and the articles I read, the site seems to be down.
However, this is about you all and sharing your comics with blind readers. You have a few options:
Alt-text. This is descriptions directly ‘inside’ the image, which is not visible to everyone. You can read about alt-text for comics specially here and you can read general info for alt-text for screen-readers and Braille Displays here.
Image descriptions. These are descriptions of each comic page (hopefully with a paragraph for each panel) that can be visible to anyone. You can describe your comic, who is in it, what they’re doing, and what they’re saying, probably beneath the image.
Comic Audio Performances. These are accessible to both blind and sighted audiences. These are videos using actors for the dialogue, sound effects, and moving comic panels. Pros for this style include increased viewership, increased accessibility for the blind, and perhaps more revenue if you have a way to monetize the content. Cons include that it is more work, could potentially cost money when hiring actors initially, may not be accessible to anyone with hearing loss, and may still require a bit of audio description for some panels that are hard to follow with only sound effects.
What can you do?
A few ideas I had were to use a combination of image descriptions and audio performances to make the comics accessible to a number of people who may be blind, or DeafBlind. Having options is helpful. For ther issue of some panels needing extra description in order to make sense, I thought of including time-stamps and descriptions in the description section, labeling it as image descriptions for the blind. Include dialogue for reference. Or an audio description could be added such as:
Audio narration: “Bee sits on a couch writing.”
Sound Effect of a purring cat.
Audio narration: “Blind Beta picks up an orange cat and puts him on the couch next to them.”
Dialogue: “I’m so glad I have a cat to cuddle with!”
I will touch on this in the video section, but while it is sadly not possible to add audio descriptions onto YouTube as of 2021, you can add them manually through websites you like YouDescribe. For your comics, I suggest, reading about YouDescribe, downloading the app, creating a narration transcript for your web comic performance, and posting the described audio performance onto YouDescribe. Post both versions as close to the same time as you can, and include a link to the described version in the YouTube description. A glance at YouDescribe will tell you not all videos are available with descriptions and not all blind people are aware of this service. Not all videos are searchable in their library either. However, it is an option I wanted to include.
You could also simply include the audio narration in your main YouTube video if you would like. Or any combination of my suggestions you feel comfortable with.
YouTube Videos/Video Clips:
I wanted to cover YouTube videos and video clips shared on websites like tumblr. For small clips, image descriptions and transcripts could probably be listed together. I have seen this done and it seems to help people.
Again, the original poster should post the description with the video. This is because they know the most important parts and because all reblogs of the post will include the description, so no one will have to hunt down a description that may not exist.
For the clip or clip compilation, mention where the clips come from, who is in them, and what they are doing. You could probably have a separate paragraph for each clip and include times-stamps if possible.
For videos you post on YouTube, descriptions can be very helpful! Unfortunately, YouTube does not support adding an audio description track at this time. Ideally, YouTube would have a description track one could turn on and off such as with subtitles. Until then, if you want to add a description, you should add one yourself when you post the video onto YouTube or any other website.
Before I get into how, let’s go over something else.
What videos need descriptions?
-Recipe videos - especially ones with only text. Ingredients, steps, measures, methods, any flourishes or special scenery (such as when shopping for ingredients) should be described. Blind people don’t just want you to read the recipe to them. They want to know what is happening in the video and how it is being done.
-Tutorials - These often contain a voice-over and accompanying images to demonstrate. A creator can opt to simply include more visual description along with the other information in the voice-over or add extra narration later (see the “How?” section below). For these videos, make sure to avoid or expand on any visually dependent parts such as “click here” or “fold here” or “when you finish, it should look like this”. Videos that contain only text and demonstration, however, will need a more traditional audio description the same as any other video.
-Silent aesthetic videos - Sometimes containing music or focusing on natural noise, these videos are usually vlogs with soothing activities or daily routines. They often show scenery, pretty things, or tours. Because these videos are silent, sometimes containing only text, they are not accessible. However, they can be easy to describe, perhaps in a soothing or educational fashion.
-Music videos - Because these videos are by nature visual, they may not be accessible. They may also have inconsistent, poor, or changing lighting for aesthetic purposes or set changes. This means audio descriptions would be helpful.
-Text-based videos - Obviously these are not accessible or may be difficult to read depending on font size, style, or background. For these, putting the text in the description may suffice. Label it so that blind people are aware they are getting the same material. If the text includes pictures or short clips, you could also simply include your own narration on the video itself or see the “How?” section below for another alternative.
-Game Play-Throughs - Games can sometimes be completely inaccessible pe very difficult depending on the person’s level of site. A lot of video games a not accessible or difficult to play, with quick-moving graphics, perhaps small text, or other difficulties. Because of this, blind people may enjoy game plays on YouTube for video games and mobile games.
-Skits or other performances - Think of these as Netflix shows with audio description tracks. Blind people may miss out on some visual humor, plot elements, or other fun visual aspects like costumes.
-Original Films, Animation, Clips From Shows - Again, think of it as any TV show that needs to description to cover visual aspects of what is happening. Scenery, characters, what they’re doing, any text, facial expressions, etc.
Pet videos- Because pets are cute and they should be described! Especially because these videos are sometimes hard to follow, such as a pet doing a trick.
How? How Do We Provide This?
There is always the option to add your own audio descriptions. However, that way confuse already-existing narration or may not be possible for already-published videos. You may also have trouble speaking and wish for someone else to provide audio descriptions. The video may be a music video or one you want to remain silent for the aesthetic. You may want to add a description to a video you enjoy that is not one you uploaded personally.
A free website and mobile app called YouDescribe can help with that. It allows people to add audio descriptions to videos on YouTube. You can even describe videos on a wishlist. Find out more here.
If you describe your video or have it described, be sure to link to the YouDescribe video in the description of your YouTube version so that people can find it easily, or note that it is available on YouDescribe.
Here is a link to the website
And a link to the app.
This site may be a bit too niche, but I figure if it helps one person, I’ll be happy. My entire blog is niche, when you think about it- targeting writers who specifically want to write and read about blind characters. It’ll be fine.
Keep in mind that audio descriptions may not be accessible to all DeafBlind people. An inclusive option could be to include a description under your video so people with Braille Displays can read it.
Print Books, Audiobooks, Large Print Books, or Braille Books?
Let’s get into something you writers might be interested in. Books! Let’s say you wrote a book with a blind character. How do you make sure it can be accessed by blind readers? You want to have a few options.
Print books - These are accessible to people with reduced vision. It is also possible to scan print books to read with voiceover, but I can’t imagine many people buying books simply to scan unless they borrowed/found it. So it could be an option, I suppose. Scanning books also takes time because you need to do each individual page.
Audiobooks - Audiobooks are great. They are accessible to blind people who can hear. They are cheaper to produce than Braille books, take up less space, and are better for the environment. They can be expensive when you buy them. Libraries have extensive collections now, however, because libraries don’t usually have any Braille books and very few large print books, not all blind people use them, even for digital access. However,many blind people love audiobooks so it a good way to make sure your content is accessible.
As of now, my library app is accessible with a screenreader, so reading audiobooks is possible. E-books are not currently accessible with a screen-reader on this particular app.
Make sure to release your print books and audiobooks at the same time or as soon as possible. It isn’t fair for blind people to have to wait, although there are cases where not having an audiobook is understandable. Keep in mind that the less options you have, the less accessible your content will be.
Large Print Books - I used to get large print books myself. I would say it is less likely publishers will want to publish large print books because they are, of course, larger and take up more space. (Not as much as Braille books, but we’ll get into that.) As you may assume, they are also less popular with readers. Publishers make exceptions for textbooks, so if you are making a textbook or an educational book, particularly one with drawings, publishers might allow it. They also might consider making large print editions of children’s books. Large print books can sometimes be found at libraries, although they are usually crammed into their own limited section. That shows how rare it is for large print books to be printed compared to regular-sized books. I have an extra note about this in the children’s book section, but for the most part, I think you can get away with not having a large print edition of your book.
Braille Books - I should you one doesn’t just make a Braille book. Feelings toward them are generally complicated. They can wear down over time, cost a lot, and take up a lot of space. One volume of a book is several volumes of Braille books. Libraries don’t generally have them- you have to request them from various places like The National Library Service for the Blind (NLS). For more information about obtaining or borrowing Braille books, look here.
Braille Books have largely been replaced by refreshable Braille displays and audiobooks. However, they are still important. They can also help DeafBlind people, if a book cannot be read on a Braille display (see the section on e-books below). My suggestion would be to skip Braille books unless you are writing for children (see the Children’s Books section) or your book contains many diagrams that need to be embossed.
Children’s Books -
I wanted to briefly discuss children’s books. With children’s books, you will, of course, want to have a print book and an audiobook available, perhaps even someone reading the book on YouTube. If the book has pictures, descriptions of the pictures would be nice. This is also where I think large print and Braille books may be not only possible or more likely, but important. Children are just learning to read and will continue to explore a love for reading. Therefore, a lack of reading material can be challenging.
If possible, you may want to consider asking your publisher if large print or Braille versions are possible. While websites are available so that children can get books, you may want to ask for your book to be published in these formats if your story has a blind MC.
Braille literacy is declining in the blind community, with children (and frankly many others) choosing to use VoiceOver and audiobooks to read rather than Braille. Being able to read helps reinforce spelling, grammar, meaning in ways that are not possible with having things read to you. That said, children should also be encouraged to learn technology and use audiobooks when they feel comfortable.
If you are publishing a children’s book, particularly with a blind MC, consider what your options are for increasing accessibility.
E-Books:
This is one of the more accessible options, as it can be read with a screen-reader or Braille display. E-books are also common enough that they are released at the same time as print books. The text can usually be adjusted and readers usually have a Search feature. However, accessibility is still a problem with e-books. While authors cannot fix this, they should be aware of it. You can read about accessibility issues here.
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I hope all this helped somewhat. I provide sensitivity reading for blind characters for anyone who is interested.
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Clandestine
For MegOp Week 2021
Prompt Day 5: Secret / Domestic
Continuity: IDW1
Rating: Teen
Relationship: Megatron/Optimus Prime
Characters: Megatron & Optimus Prime
Warnings: Suggestive themes (one suggestive comment about panels)
Summary: In which Optimus meets his paramour on a rocky planet.
Crossposting: In a reblog.
Fic under cut.
When a pair of arms wrapped around his shoulders from behind as he sat on the edge of this sheer cliff, Optimus should probably have worried. Instinct told him to throw the assailant off of him and down into the ravine below.
But he didn't.
Suppressing battle protocols that were so reflexive by now that they were practically hard-wired, he leaned back into the hug, relaxing. His battle mask popped open with a loud click before retracting into his helmet.
Opportunities like this were rare. Each one had to be cherished, even if they had to meet in secret on isolated, barren worlds at unusual times. The orange sun in the arid sky of this uninhabited rocky planet was already setting, a chill in the air. Meetings were arranged via unconventional means. A coded message would be transcribed into a data slug which was then hidden inside a bullet. These were then shot via a third party into the arm of a predetermined combatant to be retrieved unknowingly by a medic believing the data slug to only contain a highly-classified field report for Optimus' optics only.
"Here I thought this particular bullet had gone astray," Megatron said, "The original mech assigned to deliver it had gotten waylaid and foolishly gave the job to Misfire."
A mistake in two syllables.
"It seems, miraculously, the bullet ended up in the right place." An unfortunate scout had ended up punched in the arm by Misfire and the bullet was lodged in the resulting dented armor. It was sheer luck that the bullet made it to a medic as opposed to simply falling free and being lost somewhere, especially since no one but the medic really understood just what the bullet was for.
No one but the two of them.
They'd gone to great lengths to prevent from being compromised. It would look rather… suspicious at best or downright treasonous at worst. The leaders of opposing armies in a conflict that had escalated to the point of planetary destruction being paramours in secret? Rumor alone would have been bad enough, but to be caught in the act? The optics of the situation would be disastrous.
“Well, I, for one, am grateful.” Black hands patted windshields and pawed at wipers, bullying the truck away from the edge of the cliff. “Besides, we only have a few hours before I need to return and give a false report of my whereabouts.”
“I’ll need a new lie myself,” Optimus said, allowing himself to be scooted clear of the ledge. “They’ll only believe I went off to meditate for so long—”
“I’ve never once known you to meditate.”
That was true, unfortunately. Optimus could never quite grasp it as a concept. The moment he would sit still, his mind would race with everything that had been weighing on him. No longer buried by day-to-day busyness, thoughts would take to the freed bandwidth of calm with wild abandon, filling his circuits with anxiety. Meditation, Optimus determined, was not for him. Luckily, he now had access to a different outlet, though not as frequently as he’d like.
Their current relationship, one of hidden warmth and affection, was relatively new, at least in comparison to the span of their lives. In the past couple of thousand years, the situation had changed. Animosity had been stripped back with occasional gestures appealing to how things had been before the miners’ riot Megatron had instigated on Croteus-12—of course, the former miner would argue about who exactly started it.
All of this… secrecy had started with a few funny looks here and there, then a held out hand on the battlefield to prevent a fall, and finally slipping away and arranging the first clandestine meeting to just reminisce about their former friendship. One meeting had turned into several and the situation had escalated. Now they were sneaking around like a couple of adolescent new-builds as opposed to acting their damn age.
Lifting Optimus into his arms after adjusting his grip, Megatron continued, “That’s one thing we have in common. The complete and utter inability to properly relax.” Optimus could have assisted with relocating, using his legs to actually walk to somewhere less precarious, but it was… comforting to be carried like something to be treasured. No one ever carried him, not unless he was incapacitated. Even then, that job was done by a medic. He was the Prime, after all. It would have been undignified for him to be carried like a frightened civilian being evacuated from a war zone.
“I suppose… I suppose that’s true, old friend,” he said, looping an arm around his lover’s neck to better hold himself up. Even if he was being carried, he wanted to be an active participant.
“Call me ‘old friend’ one more void-damned time and I’ll leave you here with your panels stuck open.” The threat was toothless, of course, even if he knew that Megatron disliked being called that. Sometimes it was worth it to get under his plating a little though to see a flash of that familiar temper outside of battle. “When the next dust storm rolls in, you’ll regret your choice of words.”
“You won’t do that to me,” Optimus countered, chuckling quietly as he listened to the sounds of Megatron’s footfalls against the rock below. Perhaps one day, he thought, they could find a way to end the war and live a normal, peaceful life. Perhaps their relationship was just what they needed to do that… if they could overcome the political obstacles.
“No, but I’ll think about it—There ought to be an outcrop of rock here somewhere to hide under.” Megatron indicated a direction off to the side by inclining his head.
“I’m certain I can come up with something more interesting for you to think about, old friend.”
The next thing Optimus knew, his rear end was colliding with the rocky soil. Megatron held up his hands, palms out in disavowal, palms that Optimus knew in short order would be all over his plating.
“You’re right, Prime. Walking would be better for you. Can’t let your struts get stiff in your old age.”
Still worth it.
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✧ TEXTURES – A TUTORIAL BY EVANSYHELP.
In this (long and image-heavy) tutorial, I’ll be showing you how I make textures, as requested by a very kind anon. I use Photoshop CC 2019 but you should be able to replicate my methods on most editing software. Please like or reblog this post if you find this helpful!
Index.
Ethically Sourcing Your Images.
Finding The Right Image.
Making Your Texture.
Other Tricks I Use.
Quick Recap.
Making Textures Without Images: Speedrun.
Outro.
Ethically Sourcing Your Images.
I will be explaining a couple quick ways to make textures without any images at the end of the tutorial, but since my personal favourite way involves images and that’s specifically what the anon requested, that’s what the majority of the tutorial will be focused on.
The first step, naturally, is finding an image to use. My personal favourite site is Unsplash, but there are plenty of options out there.
What you need to keep in mind is what kind of license the images have. Unsplash is free for personal and commercial use with no attribution required, which makes it perfect for things like this. There are more sites like this in my free for commercial use masterlist (linked at the end of the post), but unless you’re using them in products you’re selling (like graphic commissions), the commercial aspect isn’t something you need to worry about. Just check the site/photographer’s rules to make sure you’re allowed to edit the images for personal use, and whether attribution (credit) is required.
Another important thing to keep in mind is that these sites typically never allow you to redistribute the images as they are. That means you can’t just go to Unsplash’s texture category, save the images without any changes, and reupload them in a texture pack on Tumblr. That’s stealing. We don’t do that.
Finding The Right Image.
Knowing what kinds of images will make good textures is a learning curve. My first couple texture packs are rough compared to what I make now, because I basically taught myself with no guidance and learned through trial and error. But with practice, I learned what worked and what didn’t.
You want your images to be HQ, either with no ‘subject’ (ie. a person) or with a large background. Higher contrast is better but not super necessary. You should hopefully be able to envision what kind of texture you want to make before you even touch the image.
Making Your Texture.
For the majority of the tutorial, this is the image I’ll be working with. Credits can be found in the link at the end of the post.
Open your canvas. You can make specialised textures, like 100px for icons or 540px for Tumblr graphics, but I personally prefer to make them large for versatility. I’m using 800px in this tutorial. Once you’ve chosen your size, upload your full-size image into the canvas. This is where the fun begins!
Drag the image around into a nice position. Or use Edit > Transform to rotate, flip, and warp the image in different ways. Or use Edit > Free Transform (Ctrl+T) to change the size or the angle more precisely. Or probably some combination of all three! With Free Transform, make sure this aspect ratio anchor is selected so you don’t butcher the quality of the image, unless you’re warping it intentionally:
This is all very individual to each image you use. You might want to flip one, shrink another, put another at a 30 degree angle. Just experiment until you end up with something you think would look awesome as a texture. For the sake of providing a good example, I flipped this image vertically, shrunk it to 80% its original size, and rotated it until it looked like the smoke/cloud was coming from the bottom right corner. This is what we have:
Then we move onto enhancing. Textures work best when there’s a lot of contrast because it’s easier to manipulate the blending modes. So if your image isn’t already high contrast, these adjustment layers (Brightness/Contrast, Levels, and Selective Colour) are your new best friends:
If you don’t see this on your Photoshop, go to Window > Adjustments and it should pop up. Again, just experiment, because different images will require different things. Essentially, you want to make the darks darker and the lights lighter. Something I like to do is add a Selective Colour layer and use the Black slider. Pick out the primary colour of the image, and then Whites, in the drop-down menu, and move the bottom slider (left to lighten, right to darken) until you’re satisfied. Like so:
So with those Selective Colour settings and the following Levels settings, here’s the before and after of my image.
Much better contrast! If you want to end here, you can, but I personally prefer grayscale textures a lot of the time because it makes it more versatile. Instead of being forced to make a blue graphic because this image is blue, I can make any colour graphic I want with one simple black and white Gradient layer. Photoshop does have a default Black & White adjustment feature, but I prefer using Gradients.
Pro tip: if your image doesn’t have a pure black, you can keep the darkest parts of your image dark by using the left slider, shown below.
A lot of the time, I’ll also decrease the opacity of that Gradient layer, to somewhere between 80% and 95%, so just a hint of the original colour comes through. This gives it more dimension in my opinion, while still keeping it mostly neutral. Here’s 100% vs. 85%:
You may find that you want to add a little more contrast after. With this texture, I decided to grab another Selective Colour layer, pick ‘Black’ in the drop-down menu, and pull the Black slider up to +40. I also settled on 95% opacity for the Gradient. And here’s the final product!
Other Tricks I Use.
That covers how I make a lot of my easier textures, but here’s a quick run-through of other, slightly more complex tricks. I’ll be working with this image (again, credit at the end of the post):
This, of course, is not as obviously texture-worthy as the previous example, but I love textures with strong lines, so here’s how the magic happens! I wanted to get rid of the detail on the bottom half, so I used the Polygonal Lasso tool to select it:
Then I used the eyedropper tool (the 4th symbol under the polygonal lasso in the image above) to select the blue of the sky and, on a new layer, painted that selection completely blue. I decreased the opacity to 90% just so it wasn’t a total block colour, but not enough that you can really see the lines. I repeated this process for the sky, so it looked more consistent with the bottom half.
Then, using the eyedropper tool again and making a new layer for every colour, I went in with a small soft paintbrush and painted out the harsh vertical lines on each segment of the stripes. I didn’t want to make them totally perfect, but I painted over the bulkiest interruptions.
I added a black and white Gradient layer, using the slider tool I showed you before to darken the darks and lighten the lights, and decreased it to 50% so that it wasn’t totally black and white but still more neutral than the original. Here’s the result:
Another fun way to shake things up, which unfortunately will require Photoshop (CS6 should be fine, not sure about earlier versions), is the Filter Gallery. Go to Filter > Filter Gallery, and you’ll find a TON of effects that change your image drastically. Most of the default settings are nightmarish, but you can play around with the settings panel on the right.
Here’s just a few results that are possible with the Filter Gallery, labelled for convenience. You can view the HQ versions in the link at the end of the post.
Quick Recap.
So you don’t have to reread this obnoxiously large tutorial every time you want to reference it in the future:
Choose a HQ image.
Resize, rotate, flip, and/or warp.
Enhance the contrast.
Black and white!
Paint over problem areas!
Filter > Filter Gallery.
Making Textures Without Images: Speedrun.
We’re almost done! There are some tools built directly into Photoshop that can allow you to make textures completely from scratch, and I’ll briefly cover my favourites here.
The first is pattern fill layers. I spent too many years not appreciating the patterns feature in Photoshop, but they’re great. Go to Layer > New Fill Layer > Pattern, click ‘OK’ on the box that pops up, and another box will pop up to let you choose your pattern.
By themselves, they are UGLY. It can take a while to figure out how to use them. But if you change the scale, change the blending mode, and change the opacity, you have thousands of textures at your fingertips. And if you add two or three together? Billions of possibilities. I can do a more in-depth tutorial on patterns if y’all are interested, but here’s two examples I just whipped up in a matter of minutes, using two patterns on each:
The next feature is gradient fill layers, and the gradient tool. Go to Layer > New Fill Layer > Gradient… to select a gradient (or make your own!) and an angle, OR use the gradient tool (featured below) to drag the gradient across your canvas manually. On its own, boom, that’s a gradient texture. Paired with a pattern or put through the Filter Gallery? Even better!
The last is brushes. Brushes can be great for textures because there are so many kinds. You want to make a paint splatter texture? Paint splatter brush sets are everywhere! You want to make a smoky texture? You can get brushes that look like smoke! Smudged? Scratchy? Grunge? Halftone? Light leaks? Torn paper? Brushes have your back.
With all of these features (and things like actions, too!), your saving grace is going to be this little cog wheel shown below, and the list you’ll find under the Reset/Save/Load section. There are SO many more options built directly into Photoshop that you don’t even see right away, because you have to add them manually from this little cog wheel.
And you can download countless more patterns, gradients, and brushes from sites like Brusheezy and DeviantART. A couple tutorials on downloading and installing them can be found in the link at the end of the post, but remember, download these things ethically. If you want to sell products that use a custom brush, it’s your responsibility to find brushes that are free for commercial use. If you don’t want to credit the creator, it’s your responsibility to find resources that don’t require attribution.
Outro.
I think that’s everything, guys! If you found this tutorial helpful or otherwise enjoy my content, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi! I offer exclusive rewards, like custom graphics, to everyone who donates.
Due to Tumblr’s latest rules about links, you can find the credits list, the promised bonus tutorials, other important links, and the full-size HQ versions of the textures made in this tutorial over here.
Thanks for reading!
#rph#allresources#completeresources#itsphotoshop#chaoticresources#photoshop tutorial#photoshop resources#photoshop help#ps resources#ps tutorial#eh#eh: tutorial#tutorial#ps help#texture#*100#*250
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Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.
Interview with Dreamshaper
Dreamshaper has 54 stories at Gossamer. Her stories often feature Mulder and Scully exploring their feelings in ways you really, really wish you could’ve seen on the show. I’ve recced some of my favorites of her stories here before, including Found in Memory, Just By Existing, Purpose, and Promise. Big thanks to Dreamshaper for doing this interview.
Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?
I'm not at all surprised people are still reading X-Files fanfic! There's a deep catalogue of good and interesting fiction there, and the X-Files still has cultural significance. And of course there were the recent seasons to bring it back to mind. I think if you had asked me in 2000, I might not have supposed that it had this kind of staying power. So now I'm thinking of this interview as a time capsule--what will my answer be in 2040?
My own fic was not designed to have staying power. If anyone is reading it now, bless them, they are kind and patient. I would only recommend probably reading the first and last things I posted just to see what kind of growth is possible. The first time I ever posted fic, someone told me to never write again. I was a teenager. I was crushed but I went on writing anyway, and I worked hard to improve.
What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?
I think of two things. As for the show itself, I still think of Mulder/Scully as the ultimate in romance. I can still picture certain moments from the episodes, from the movie. I look for pairings with tension that reminds me of theirs--an almost-regency level of UST, but with a modern element of danger.
As for the fandom itself, I grew up in it. My entire online life and the core of how I participate in fandom was formed here. I was 17 or so when I started writing and posting MSR. I was 18 or 19 when I started meeting fans in real life. I was fortunate enough to fall in with people who were equal parts gracious and nerdy, and while my own nerdiness is innate, I remember and emulate the kindness which was shown to me.
I have an entire side post to this question about how strongly I disagree with the current age stratification in fandom--this idea of not interacting across artificial age divides is tragic to me.
Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?
ATXC, and mailing lists. I don't actually remember the names of all the mailing lists! I can picture myself sitting in my kitchen on my computer, and what the emails looked like--the font, the signature lines--but not the names. I can even remember specific conversations we had! One of them must have been Scullyfic, because I remember the first meetup being planned. Is that right? Was it the Scullyfic meetup? [Lilydale note: Probably was Scullyfic. There was a big email flurry when the first Scullyfic mailing list meetup was being planned.] My mind was absolutely blown by the idea of a fan con. Now I've led panels at a dozen of them.
I remember some of the arguments, too. It's funny that some of them are the same arguments I still see here and there, like whether or not criticism of a fanwork is valid. Real Person Fic being this unbelievably shameful thing you had to ask to be shown, and the doyennes of the fandom would have given you the cut direct at Almack's if they'd found out, you know?
This was also the era of AIM and ICQ. mIRC too, right? I spent a lot of time in channels. I absolutely loved when people started to be more open about themselves in chats. I was always so interested in how fandom fit into people's lives. Some people I talked to were moms, college students, people who had interesting careers, and they all just found ways to make fandom work for them. They had a need and were meeting it, despite the pressures of their offline life.
I don't know how to explain the impression that made on me, but--it normalized fandom. That seems obvious, maybe, but I hadn't known this was something you could integrate into your everyday life.
It also normalized the idea of women taking their own needs as primary, in a way that went beyond what I was exposed to in my home life, or through the feminism of the 1990s. There was this wild intersection of the--the domestic and intellectual life of women, and the playful life of women, just making itself known to me in a way I'd never seen before. That was enormous. Absolutely a foundational experience for me.
My experience was that ATXC and email lists were like, these surface-level interactions where people figured out, roughly, if your mind ran on a similar track to theirs, and then you were invited to make deeper relationships in more private corners of the internet. Social media filled both functions at once, I think, for a while. But the privacy was missing. I'm not surprised that Slack and Discord are starting to fill that private corner gap--everything old becomes new, etc.
What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?
UST and monsters. This is still an unbeatable combination for me!
What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?
I loved romance novels--I read so many of them. Somehow, before we even had a computer at home, I started to tell myself romance novel stories with Mulder and Scully as the lead characters. This was how I talked myself to sleep--I wasn't a good sleeper. Then when I got online and did whatever search led me to ATXC, I was just shocked. Shocked! Can't do the surprise justice, in this era where fanfic is relatively mainstream. Other people had also independently invented this thing I loved! But they wrote their ideas down! I jumped on the bandwagon immediately.
What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?
It's like my relationship to my childhood, frankly. Foundational, but I don't think about it all that much on a daily basis, right? I smile and reblog gif sets. I get nostalgic. I get embarrassed by social mistakes I made. I feel the way many of us do about memories from our teenage years. I wouldn't be who I was without it, but I'm not still in it.
Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?
I was. I've spent 20 years in fandom! I did some beta work for someone who'd started writing slash--The Sentinel. The actual Sentinel, not just an endless loop of Sentinel AUs based on Sentinel AUs based on etc. I had some idea at the time that I was queer, but this was my first real exposure to romances that weren't straight. So I tore my way through the early 2000s slash fandoms as they developed: The Sentinel, Due South, Stargate Atlantis. Popslash, where a mix of good writing and absurdity ruled. Bandom, where I met my wife. Since then, many smaller fandoms.
It's hard to compare any of these things to each other, let alone to the X-Files. In each one, I was lucky enough to find a circle of women who were strong beta readers and good friends. I never wrote as much or for as long as I did in the X-Files.
Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?
I watched the new episodes. I've shown friends important episodes--I remember that a few years ago, another friend and I tried to hook a third friend on the show by binging some favorites--mostly shippy MOTW, so it was like, Arcadia, Triangle, Bad Blood. Fun stuff!
We finish watching and I'm like, well? And? And she says, that was fine, but I'm more of a man-pain, secret babies kind of person? I'll never forget it. She had no idea but she'd hit the nail on the head! We were wheezing with laughter. We went back and watched mytharc episodes, which was much less fun for me, but much more interesting to her.
Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?
I don't read X-Files fic often. I look at new things sometimes, and I've reread a few old classics, but my reading taste has changed so much. I still love straight romance, but it needs to be fast and sharp in a way that is hard to find.
I read fic in other fandoms when I have time. In the past few years, I've finished a degree, had a daughter, renovated a small Victorian and then sold it and bought another one during this pandemic--so time has been short. Currently I read some Untamed fic, some Good Omens fic, Magicians, Schitt's Creek...a sampler. Whatever friends are writing, whatever they recommend.
What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?
I never have a favorite of my own fics. I'm never satisfied. The second I post something, I'm always full of regrets. I've written fics that did very well and still hated them a month later. People have asked me over the years to move more of my stuff off Livejournal and onto ao3, but I do it really reluctantly and only by specific request. Everything's ephemeral! Let the old works diminish, and go into the West!
Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?
I have no oldies to dust off. I do periodically think of X-Files stories I would tell, but I don't have enough time for current interests--and so it goes.
Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?
I do. I was most recently writing in The Magicians fandom. I posted a couple new stories in an old fandom last year--I'd written Good Omens fic fifteen years ago, and then again for the Amazon adaptation. I have a pile of original novels in various stages of completion, but I'm never happy with them. One day I'll figure myself out, perhaps, or I'll just keep writing myself this and that and leaving it all in a drawer.
What's the story behind your pen name?
So AOL had a character limit for user names--I think it was 10. I was a teenager at the time I was coming up with the one I'd use for fandom, so I went with Dreamshaper. It was kind of literal, in the sense that I was going to share the stories I'd been telling myself to help me sleep. But the character limit meant I went with Dreamshpr, which I later liked because of the alternate reading of Dream*shipper*. A reminder to the younger fans that we were the original shippers!
I would also come up with new pen names when I wanted to experiment with a fic that didn't fit my usual style. I don't remember any of them. I probably did that a dozen times, so, sorry to those poor completely abandoned stories.
Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?
Giddygeek on tumblr and ao3. I'm most active on twitter, but largely about my domestic life with dips into fandoms or original writing; message me on tumblr if you're an old friend who'd like to reconnect elsewhere.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?
Just gratitude--I'm so glad that I found people to share an obsession with, and that they were good people, at a time in my life where that made a significant difference to me. I don't know where I'd be now without my time and my growth in this fandom!
(Posted by Lilydale on December 22, 2020)
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