you wanted to be a good friend, because you loved your friends, but the truth was that everyone else somehow had a pamphlet on being normal that you never received. most of the time you learn by trial-and-error. you are terrified of the next big mistake you make, because it seems like the rules are completely arbitrary.
you've learned to keep the prickly parts of your personality in a stormcloud under your bed - as if they're a second version of you; one that will make your friends hate you. it feels feral, burning, ugly.
instead, you have assembled habits based on the statistical likelihood of pleasing others. you're a good listener, which is to say - if you do speak up, you might end up saying the wrong thing and scaring off someone, but people tend to like someone-who-listens. or you've got no true desires or goals, because people like it when you're passive, mutable. you're "not easy to fluster" which is to say - your emotions are fundamentally uninteresting to others around you; so you've learned to control them to a degree that you can no longer really feel them happening.
you have long suspected something is wrong with you, but most of the time, googling doesn't help. you are so-used to helping-yourself, alone and with no handbook. the reek of your real self feels more like a horrible joke - you wake up, and, despite all your preparations, suddenly the whole house is full of smoke. the real you is someone waiting to ruin your other-life, the one where you're normal and happy. the real-self is unpredictable, angry.
your real self snarls when people infantilize the whole situation. because if you were really suffering, everyone seems to think you'd be completely unable to cope. but you already learned the rules, so you do know how to cope, and you have fucking been coping. it's not black-and-white. it's not that you are healed during the other times - it's just that you're able to fucking try. and honestly, whenever you show symptoms, it's a really fucking bad sign.
because the symptoms you have are ugly and unmanageable for others. your symptoms aren't waifish white girl things. they're annoying and complicated. they will be the subject of so many pretentious instagram reels. if they cared about you, they'd just show up on time. you care, a lot, so deeply it burns you. you like to picture a world where the comments read if they loved you, they'd never need glasses to see. but since that's a rule you've seen repeated - "one must never be late or you are a bad friend" - you constantly worry about being late and leave agonizingly early. there are no words for how you feel when you're still late; no matter how hard you were trying.
so you have to make up for it. you have to make up for that little horrible real you that you keep locked in a cabinet. you are bad at answering emails so every project you make has to be perfect. you are weird and sensitive so you have to learn to be funny and interesting. you are an inconvenience to others, so you become as smooth as possible, buffing out all the rough parts.
all this. all this. so people can pass their hands over you and just tell you just the once -how good you are. you're a good friend. you're loveable.
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If I remember correctly you created Machete around 2007-2008. But when did you create Vasco? (I'm sorry of this has been asked before, I couldn't find anything)
First finished pictures of Vasco are from 2018, but even before that I had been thinking it would be interesting if Machete had had one (1) romantic relationship in his youth before he was ordained. I just didn't have a name and design for him yet.
In the earliest sketches of Vasco, he first looked a little bit like a bordercollie, then like a spaniel or a setter. He had a darker color palette as well, sort of chestnut brown with white markings, but combined with the overpowering whiteness of Machete he looked kind of impassionate and drab, so I kept making him warmer and lighter until he became the golden boy he is today. The name came later, I just thought Vasco sounded friendly and charismatic. (Also the old finnish word 'vaski' means brass and bronze, and even if it's a tedious connection and doesn't factor into their canon at all, it felt too fitting to me personally and I had to go with it).
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sorry sometimes i think about mako and my heart hurts so much. this kid raised himself and his brother on the streets in homelessness and utter poverty from eight through fifteen, promptly after seeing the violent death of his mother and father. he turned to the triple threats because they couldn't survive as a pair of wretched kids without any adult support, and the environment forced him to turn into the exact character that killed his parents in a terrible twist of irony. and after sheer-fucking-luck hits and they aren't homeless anymore, their livelihood wavers on the outcome of what's a literally game to everyone but them; and after things are finally starting to look up and their team is going places and things just might be okay, his gradually stabilizing world unceremoniously expands and everything goes to shit.
and the city that chewed him up and spat him back out, ruined him as a child and took away his ability to stay afloat in a true sense of normalcy as an adult — when it's on the verge of destruction and falling to pieces before his eyes, he gives himself to save it with the full expectation to die. he went from the kid who didn't and couldn't care about anything outside of himself and his brother, to finding redemption for his younger self in his police work despite its injustice against him, to willingly sacrificing himself to a world that had never loved him.
he's a desperate people pleaser, socially and emotionally stunted for the adult he had to be as a kid, unable to navigate interpersonal relationships easily yet still trying his damned hardest. he's intensely and entirely devoted to the things that matter to him and for so long it was only him, bolin, and ensuring their survival — yet by the end, that devotion has expanded to protecting the rest of the world. he starts out entirely self-reliant and ends in trusting the people he cares about to know their own needs, to be able to take care of themselves, to be okay without him despite having spent so much of his life defined by his role in others' well-being.
just. what the fuck i'm such a big fan of this fictional guy and i'm unashamed about it at this point. also let him cry please (if you won't i'll do it i'll let him cry)
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it is healing to come onto this blog and see basic respect for diasbility after being in other corners of the fandom and reading the words “snowkit could never be a warrior because he wouldnt know what anything is. he wouldnt even know what a clan is because nobody could explain it to him” said in full seriousness
Im..... That statement is so ableist I cannot even imagine the worldview you'd need to have in order to come up with that.
They really think the only way anyone learns anything is through verbal-speaking-words-noises? No one has ever observed something before? Not even once?
This is beyond touching grass, this person just fell out of the fucking Jurassic Period when all they had was ferns and stegosaurs.
I just...
OH YES. I remember my first day of Society Lessons as a hearing person, where the everything was explained to me. Via Audiobook. FIRST they spoke and said, "you are standing on the ground." It was a life changing revelation, and the world began to spin.
But it did not stop.
THEN they said, "there are fingers on your hands." The sensation of flesh and bone crackling into existence is indescribable, but I did not yet know pain, until they told me, "that hurts." I began screaming immediately.
And yet... it continued.
They explained so much. Chairs. Tables. Walls. The sky. Frogs. Ionizing radiation. Breathing. I was told all of it, in one sitting, and only then did I understand. Only when my ears were bursting with normal hearing knowledges, did they begin... my final test.
A strange wall-chair-finger emerged from the sky-of-the-wall, stood on the ground several times, until it was in front of me. A second one came behind it, this one slimmer. The audiobook gave these things names;
Human. Father. Mother. Door. Walking. It was completely impossible to know what these things were until that very moment.
I watch a human dip a hook into water and produce a fish, and I recall my Society Lessons where they called that "fishing." I am decked in the face by a nefarious hooligan, and I have only the audiobook to thank when I know I have been "punched" by a "bad guy." It was only the magic of verbal-speaking-words-noise that made me understand that there are "other people" and that they "do stuff."
Sometimes, even, in "groups."
Before the Society Lessons Audiobook, I knew nothing. I was pure, innocent, uncorrupted by concepts such as "parents" and "door." I am grateful every day that there is no such concept as "being shown things" or "simple logical reasoning" or "looking."
Blessed be those amongst us who escape the horrors of the Society Lessons Audiobook. I pray that you never learn what anything is. Be free! Free as a bird, which also knows nothing and famously cannot learn. 🤗
DEAF/HOH FOLLOWERS I'm losing my mind do you want me to bump a 'Hearing Disabilities Herb Guide' to the top of my priorities? Something you can use to bludgeon whackadoodles like that. This is ridiculous
Obviously not a MEDICINE guide but like; common causes of hearing disability in clan cats. Accommodations for hearing loss vs congenital deafness. Actual difficulties of not having that sense Clan-by-Clan. Debunking of misconceptions like... not being able to learn APPARENTLY.
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Izuku 1/2 - better name pending -Snip
"You haven't used your quirk."
Izuku looked up from the snack he got at the vendors.
"The first two events of the Sports Festival are over." Todoroki stated. "You could have handled the obstacle course with ease with your wings, no one would have been able to touch you. Instead you handicapped yourself."
"This is not a criticism I need to hear from someone who's only been using half their quirk the entire year." Izuku pointed out.
"It's not a criticism, I just wanted to know if...if we're doing it for the same reason." There was an edge of desperation in his voice. An almost need that somebody would understand.
"It's not just that I'm not using it." Izuku unscrewed the the cap of his water and pour some on his exposed arm, where it beaded up unnaturally. "I've made it so I can't. There was a time when these water-based transformation quirks were a lot more common, so they developed a type of waterproof soap to prevent accidents."
"Why?' Todoroki breathed.
"Because," Izuku seemed to falter for a second before steeling himself. "I love my quirk. I love how useful it can be in being a hero. But I am NOT my quirk. My potential, my capacity to help, to grow, to achieve, those things are me and not a magical transformation. So many people see a hero and their potential as as nothing more than their quirk and they're wrong." Izuku ended his impromptu speech with a snarl.
Todoroki sat down hard. Blood pounded in his ears as Midoriya's words repeated themselves again and again in his ears I am not my quirk.
Because his quirk was all he'd even been. He'd been born for it, his siblings had been born in their attempts to make what would be his quirk. His childhood, his training, everything he'd ever been was because of his quirk, and the bastard that gave him half of it.
I am not my quirk
They're wrong
"Todoroki, are you okay?"
"Do you really believe there's more to me than my quirk?"
Izuku was quiet for a moment. "Todoroki, who do I need to have Sensei beat up?"
Sheer confusion brought him back to his sense for a bit. "What?"
"If I beat them up I'm going to get expelled. Sensei, he -he really doesn't care."
"He doesn't care about going toe to toe with the number 2 pro hero?" Todoroki asked skeptically.
To his surprise, Midoriya grinned. "Well, the last pro hero was a hugely disappointing fight, so this would probably be a treat."
"Who was the last hero?"
"Not gonna name names, but someone who thought me being quirkless meant I should be abused and be thankful for the opportunity to serve my betters."
That was sick. "I hope your Sensei kicked his ass."
Izuku grinned. It wasn't a nice grin. "He did." Then his grin faltered. "I was a late bloomer. Eight years old."
"Did things get better?" Todoraki asked.
"Almost immediately." Izuku said bitterly. "But that was almost worse because, things didn't really change, I just wasn't someone less evolved, so how they treated me was wrong. But...that's not why it was wrong and the next quirkless person or person with an unactivated quirk would be treated just how I was. So I want to change the idea that quirks are what's important. I'm going to do my best to win the sports festival quirkless. I'll show everyone just what the quirkless can do!"
Todoroki's hands gripped his knees. "My father, Endeavor - the number two hero. He bought my mother because he wanted her quirk. He wanted to create a strong enough quirk to unseat All Might. It took him four tries to succeed. He doesn't really care about my siblings, just me - his masterpiece."
"And your mother?" Izuku was almost afraid to ask.
"She's been in a mental hospital since I was small."
"Consider his ass kicked." Izuku took a swing of his water. "Todoroki...I completely support you not using your fire today, but you're going to have to use it in hero work eventually. So," Izuku grinned. "How would you feel about using it in a way impossible for Endeavor?"
"Impossible for Endeavor?" Todoroki tilted his head like a confused cat. "For all his faults as a human being, he's a master of the flame."
Izuku snorted. "Master? His abilities are no fire, yes fire, and unreasonable amount of fire. What I'm talking about is being a rescue hero."
Todoroki let out a small laugh at Izuku's description of Endeavor's capabilities. The first Izuku had ever heard him make. "What do you mean a rescue hero? I'm clearly most suited for combat."
"And according to the people growing up the only thing I was suitable for was a training tool for actual quirked people to practice their quirks on, so fuck was people say we're 'suited' for'." Izuku paled. "Please don't tell my Mom I said that. But your quirk would be perfect for rescue work."
"How so?"
"You can make fire at will. You could keep people warm in an avalanche - and your ice could do the opposite in an overheating situation. You could be light in a cave in or night rescue. You could combine your fire and ice to make fresh water, or use your fire to cook. Your ice could act as supports to prevent further collapse, kind of like Rock Lock's quirk. You would be an AMAZING rescue hero. And all of it would be using both sides of your quirk to help and comfort rather than just attack. And that's kinda of what I meant by something Endeavor wasn't capable of. He's sort of a combat monster, for a given value, but that's all he is."
That was...that was a lot of things no one had ever told him before. He was told since his quirk appeared that he was going to be the best hero, and to do that he needed to take down villains. But to Midoriya, he had potential outside of combat. To help those that needed it the most without causing harm. That the fire he hated so much could be used as a gentle warmth.
Midoriya was right. That was impossible for his father.
"A rescue hero. I...I think I like that. Thank you for you guidance."
"We both have something to prove." Midoriya he'd out his water bottle like a toast. "Let's mess with their conceptions."
Todoroki grinned and tapped his own water bottle to Midoriya's. "Let's"
~
"Your sensei is BATTLE GRANNY!!!!!!!"
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