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doctorofmagic · 2 months

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Doctor Strange's disability: a (much needed) chronological review

In view of recent ableism and drama on the other social hellsite involving Doctor Strange's disability, here's my response, based on *CANON* material. (link to the thread on said hellsite here)

Stephen disability is established since 1963, back in Strange Tales #115. The story is focused on a flashback which portrays his journey from the decay of his medical career because of a car accident to his path towards the mystic arts.

Note that, in this very same issue, the Ancient One never says he would heal Stephen's *hands*, but perhaps Stephen would find the cure within. In other words, Stephen was supposed to heal his heart and soul from arrogance and egoism through magic, not a physical cure.

Also note that there are limitations within every aspect of comic books' universes. In this case, we're talking about magic. Magic is not a miracle thing. It demands training and, most recently as established by v4, a cost (Doctor Strange v4 #4).

Another clue that "magic can heal anything because it's fantasy" is not a valid argument within Marvel's magic world, as seen in The Oath. Stephen had access to the Otkid's Elixir, which could heal any disease, but the formula was lost in order to save Wong's life.

One last example comes from Spider-Man Family #5 (2007), featuring Morbius and Spidey. It establishes that healing demands the exact same price when it comes to magic.

Long story short, it's clear that the magic side of Marvel does not offer a solution to diseases through magical miracles. So this argument is totally invalid ~within~ this established universe.

Now back to Doctor Strange... No, he isn't using magic to heal his hands unlike some misleading accounts are claiming. In fact, there are several panels which show that he's actually in constant pain. Here's some examples:

- Doctor Strange - Sorcerer Supreme #48 (1992).

- Captain Marvel v10 #6 (2019)

- Doctor Strange v4 #1 (2015)

He also struggles to hold a pen and write, relying on magic to do so, as seen in the Book of the Vishanti.

Then comes the stupid argument I saw.

"Oh, but Google says his hands are healed!" is not a gotcha moment you think it is. We had FOUR MAIN BOOKS after that (Surgeon Supreme, DODS, Strange v3 and current v6). Allow me to clarify the details in chronological order.

Stephen indeed made a "magic" gamble and healed his hands. That much is correct. But it's not all (panels from Doctor Strange v5 #19 - 2019).

Waid continued this storyline in a new book called Dr. Strange (Surgeon Supreme), which would portray Stephen's duality as the Sorcerer Supreme and a brilliant surgeon. Except the book was cancelled at issue #6 (2020), leaving the character in a kind of limbo. Now enter MacKay.

MacKay kept a little bit of the former storyline as seen in Death of the Doctor Strange #1 (2021). On top of that, his hands appeared healed. However, that lasted only until Kaecilius murdered Stephen and stole his hands.

Stephen's temporal duplicate used a regenerative spell to bring original Stephen back through Kaecilius' body and the stolen hands. In here, we can see that his hands are scarred just like after the car accident (DODS #5 - 2022). OG Stephen died a second time with scars as well.

Stephen is indeed seen writing in v6 but it's not clear if he's using magic or not. Besides, he's not working as a surgeon anymore. Moreover, MacKay considers Stephen disabled as seen in this recent issue of v6 (#7 - 2023): "My own connection to the aether, the magic of the world, the power of the Vishanti, the power of the Sorcerer Supreme... Gone. Without all of that? I am just an old man with useless hands and a blade in his stomach."

In conclusion,

As of CURRENT DOCTOR STRANGE RUN by Jed MacKay and Pasqual Ferry, in the year of our lord Vishanti, 2024, Stephen Strange is a disabled character and no magic or ableism will erase that. Thank you very much.

#doctor strange #stephen strange #tw: ableism #marvel comics #character analysis #meta

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ijuststareatstuffhereok89 · 4 months

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"Time & the Trickster" A Loki/Doctor Who crossover

by ijuststareatstuffhereok89

Prologue: The Stone

The Loom is breaking. The Timelines are in chaos at the TVA. Just as Loki realizes he may have to sacrifice himself, O.B. offers one last Hail Mary that may spare his rueful fate...until it shoots him across time and space instead, to the most Norn-forsaken place imaginable: Syracuse, New York.

CHAPTER WARNING: violence toward our poor Loki

MASTERLIST

Time Variance Authority Outside of Time and Space No Time and Every Time, AM and PM

It was as if Loki was gazing at a gallows, just waiting for him on the other side of the door. A gallows just for him.

An abstract gallows, to be sure, one snarled and twisted by the fraying timelines. The Loom wasn’t going to hold them much longer. Victor Timely’s tens of repeated failures had yielded no progress. Loki had just finished spending centuries’ worth of time jumps learning everything he could about time, physics, and metaphysics. It all came to nothing but false hope.

Zapping his way back to Point A one last time, he knew what was needed. Only a God could survive in the temporal void long enough to reach the branches and save them. That left one of two people in the room with the ability.

Loki knew now that Sylvie would never see reason. The parts of ‘a Loki’ that were driven by self-preservation were too strong in her. Perhaps one day, after centuries behind that fast food counter, she’d have a moment of clarity. But reality couldn’t wait for that to happen. Even in the repeated attempts to calm her bloodlust in the Citadel there had been in no change in her resolve. Sylvie was lost, but pity would come later, after Loki took the glorious burden upon himself to save the universe.

I can keep the timelines stable as long as I keep my hands on them…at all times. For all time.

It was the single worst case of irony that reality had ever known, or at least that Loki in his thousands of years of travels had never known: that only now he would be getting a throne. The Throne of Time awaited him, only instead of eternal glory, it would bring him eternal imprisonment, forced to watch the eons pass by as if each were a vignette on a stage. He would have to watch Mobius die, as well as Sylvie and OB and everyone. Even Thor, for no creature was truly immortal. He would have to stand by as all of consciousness fell back into the void of death and rebirth at the end of it all.

And indeed, at the End of Time, where would he be?

After one final look around the room, everyone looking back at him with expectant apprehension, Loki took in one deep breath and began his march to the Loom. He felt a solid hand on his shoulder, and didn’t need to turn to know it was Mobius.

“What the SHIT are you doing?” he whispered frantically.

Looking into his worried eyes, Loki felt a stabbing pain in his chest. If only we’d met somewhere else, you brilliant man, I would’ve shown you the world.

"I know what kind of God I need to be. For you. For all of us,” he said, his voice faltering in spite of his wish that he sounded more sure.

“Wait!! I have one more idea! Look!”

Loki looked back beyond Mobius and Sylvie. OB was running back from somewhere he’d slipped away to. No one had even noticed that he’d left the room. He carried two small pebbles in his hand that to the unknowing witness would look like two small pieces of emerald, or perhaps tinted glass.

He was closer to Sylvie, so he pulled out her hand first, placing one of the dead Time Stones in it. It began to glow softly, a dull gray-ish green. The light was pulsing weakly, but it was clear that something in her skin was activating the time magic within the stone.

“Loki! Catch!” OB said quickly, tossing the stone at Loki, whose godlike reflexes caught the dangerous relic with ease. It also glowed green upon touch, only a much brighter, indisputable forest green.

“How is that possible?” asked Mobius. “How did we never think of that?”

The God of Tricks turned the stone over in his palm, as if doing so would give him some kind of clue. “Well, it’s quite lovely, OB, but I don’t understand--”

“Time Stones thrive off of the energy of the timelines and work by being linked to every single one, enabling the one who uses it to hop from time to time! Maybe if you throw one of those at the timelines while it’s active, it’ll act like a pill and regulate the streams again!” OB suggested enthusiastically. “But only if it’s active, and it looks like the only place they work in the TVA is…well, in the hands of a Loki variant.”

“Are you suggesting we give aspirin to the Temporal Loom?” Sylvie scoffed, the weakened stone in her hand blinking with every other syllable.

“You sure that’ll work?” asked Mobius with skepticism.

OB shook his head, “Oh no. It’s a long shot. Odds in the trillions, and that’s just a guess,” he admitted bluntly. He looked at Loki and twisted his lip into a hopeful smile. “But it’s worth a try, right?”

Loki looked down at the brilliant stone he held. Something within the stone felt like it was attuning itself to him. Small threads of green light were radiating from the stone and digging into his skin, illuminating it from underneath, as if his very veins were filling with the power of the Time Stone.

Looking up one more time, Loki shrugged. “Indeed,” he said under his breath. “Well, here I go.”

“Loki!” Mobius shouted one more time. “Let her do it,” he said, pointing back at Sylvie. “She’s the one who caused all of this.”

“I don't know, her stone doesn’t look as strong as yours,” said OB, now at Sylvie’s side and watching the pathetic pebble in her hand barely flicker in tandem with her breath. “If we have one chance to do this, I think it has to be you, Loki.”

The more Loki stared down his permanent imprisonment within the twisted vines of time, the more he realized that he’d been fooled the entire time…and by none other than himself! He’d assumed that every variant of himself would have every capacity to grow that he had. Perhaps Sylvie did, and Loki was only looking at a portrait of who he had been as a rash, physically-driven youth.

It didn’t matter anyhow. If this worked, Sylvie would be going back to the counter at McDonald’s. If it didn’t, Sylvie’s mind would always be at that silly little place, unable to see the world past the end of her own nose no matter how many people suffered for her choices.

“I’m sorry, Mobius, but I think we both know it must be my action,” Loki said softly, gently taking Mobius’ hand in his own. “Have an extra slice of pie for me.”

“Go throw it,” OB suggested. “Quickly! We’re out of time!”

Victor stood clueless behind everyone else. “This has been a remarkable day” he mumbled.

Finally going beyond the door and into the temporal space, Loki felt the stone begin to burn in his hand, the sensation not only pressed against his flesh, but in his bloodstream.

One last breath, and Loki reared back, pitching the Time Stone toward the Loom.

As if the air were too thick, the stone’s speed was almost too slow to make sense, slowly floating toward the fraying, entangled timelines in an arc. It fell in a spiral toward the Loom, increasing speed as if it were being sucked directly into the messes of fibers.

The God’s breaths slowed to a standstill, his veins still on fire with green energy from the stone. Loki suddenly felt as if he’d turned into a marionette as hundreds of points on his body were suddenly yanked, throwing him off of his feet and into the air behind the stone, flying at incredible speed toward the epicenter of energy.

As if the Time Stone was pulling him by invisible chains, Loki was dragged along until he reached the Loom, after which a strong updraft knocked him unconscious, the last thing to grace his open eye being Mobius’ frightened stare.

Around his lifeless, floating form, the green clouds, rogue lightning, and whipping winds began to form a time vortex, shooting the helpless god through each and every reality, one by one…

Syracuse, New York, USA June 9 7:19pm EST

“Get off my shit!”

Loki awoke with a start, his head roaring, his skin tingling, and his vision blurred. Hungover from the unexpected trip, he felt weakened and confused. The skinny man yelling in his face wasn’t helping him regain his bearings.

He was splayed rather unflatteringly among a pile of garbage bags filled with clothes and cans. Frommhis view, he could begin to see that he was in some sort of alleyway surrounded on three sides by brick. The sky above was dim and overcast.

“Oh, Norns, what is…?”

“I said, GET OFF MY--

“--my shit, yes, that much we’ve established…”

The angry skinny man was impatient to the point where he started shoving Loki to his feet, urging him away. “Find your own awning!” he called after him as he finally managed to throw Loki into the street. “And some clothes, too!”

Loki looked down, realizing for the first time that he was stark naked. His clothes had been torn from his body in transit across the realities. Well, at least it wasn’t my skin.

The street was full of potholes, the environment claustrophobic as it could be for being outdoors. The air smelled of sewage and tar. A sign hanging on the corner building nearby read S. Salina St.

Looking down into his palm, the stone remained aglow in his grip.

Now, where in the Norns am I? Loki asked himself, keeping to a nearby shadow in hopes no one was nearby to see his nudity.

It felt like dusk was at hand, though the thick greasy cloud cover did little to explain the actual position of the sun. The air was warm, humid, and unpleasant. Rain was inbound, as evidenced by a building darkness rolling in from the western horizon.

“Damn,” Loki whispered. “I…”

He took off down the street and around the corner onto S. Salina, scurrying in such a manner that a mouse could beat him in a footrace. He used his godlike ability to absorb detail in order to learn as much as he could about this place.

Wait a moment…I can control my time jumping!

How simple! Loki rolled his eyes and chuckled. He sucked in his breath and clenched, just as he’d taught himself to do in order to control his phasing.

Seconds went by. Perhaps a minute. Nothing happened when the reaction should have instantly drawn him back to the TVA.

“Hey Di, look at the naked guy shitting himself across the street!”

Two women were sitting on a porch across the way, a small white dog at their feet, staring directly at Loki as he squinted and attempted to force himself through space. He was suddenly the most self-conscious he’d ever been in his entire life.

“Hey Mister, what’re you doing with no clothes?” shrieked the other. “How much’ve you had?”

“Yeah, he’s drunk,” agreed the first lady, trying hard to hold in a laugh.

“It’s gone! My time phasing!” Loki whispered aloud. He snapped his fingers, attempting to bring some cover to his body with seidr, only for the stone in his hand to dim its glow. “Magic…none of it works here.”

The two gleeful ladies continued to mock Loki from across the street. “I’ll give him this, he’s hot.”

Di raised an eyebrow. “Kinda looks like that guy from the movies, doesn’t he? Loki! He looks like Loki!”

“Holy shit, you’re right! He’s dead on for Loki!”

“Of COURSE I look like Loki, blast you!” he swore, beginning to move towards them, not bothering to check and see if any vehicles were bearing down on him. “Because I--”

“--dude, don't come any closer! Just because I don’t like the cops doesn’t mean I won’t call ‘em if you’re gonna…” the larger of the two women got up to reach for a cell phone perched on the railing.

“What? No, ladies, I just need to know where I am and how to get to--”

“--dude, get out of here, and stop by the Salvation Army or something on the way because no one wants to see that!”

“Speak for yourself, Di.”

“Where am I?” Loki asked, slower this time.

“Yeah, he's drunk,” mumbled Di. “Dude, you’re on the south side! Near the park!”

“Did you say that I need to find an army?” Loki asked, backtrack, unsure about which way was up.

“Mister,” continued Di, “head that way and you’ll be downtown in ten minutes. Someone’ll either help you or arrest you up there.” She pointed further up the road, which led to a bright district of flashing neon and nightlife about to get underway with the sunset. “Ain’t nothin’ down here for you except fentanyl.”

The larger of the women quickly ran inside and came back a few seconds later with a small fleece blanket in a nasty shade of hot pink. “My daughter doesn’t use this anymore. Use it to cover your junk. I don’t want it back.”

She threw it down to Loki, who gratefully wrapped it about his waist, tying it off at the hipbone. It hardly qualified for more than a belt, only covering him from below his navel to a few precious inches below his…other time stones.

“Thank you, madam,” he mumbled. Without further awkward conversation, he left the two women to their excited giggles and whistles and headed in the direction he’d been given.

He didn’t even have any shoes, as was quickly made evident by the painful tar gravel that burrowed between his toes and under the balls of his feet as he paced himself, deliberately avoiding eye contact with anyone as he fled from shadow to shadow, hoping to remain unseen despite at least being minimally covered now.

“Hey buddy, nice skirt!”

“The gay bar is on the west side!”

Loki was still exposed to catcalls and insults nearly the entire way up the trashy, unwelcoming city. Even as he approached a larger, brightly-lit square accompanied by live music from several different outdoor patios, he could feel the eyes bearing down on him.

This place is deplorable, Loki thought. No magic, no help…

“Ew, guy! At least put on a skirt that covers your crack all the way!” a woman called from behind him.

“Hey, there are kids here, man!” a huge man with a shaved head stepped into Loki’s path, causing him to stop short. The man had about three inches on Loki, and even though his Asgardian density made him about the same weight as the sizable human before him, Loki wasn;t sure he wanted to risk an altercation in his present state. He smelled of beer. “Put your dick away, alright?”

“Let me pass,” Loki mumbled. “Please. I’m on my way to the army.” He tried to throw up a defensive arm, which the man caught with ease.

The skinhead laughed. “Jesus, what I have to deal with…”

Without warning, the asshole laid out a direct punch to Loki’s temple, sending him to the sidewalk. He was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Regents Park, London, England June 10 12:19am GMT

“Oooh, talk to me! What did they do to you?!”

The Doctor, frustrated, removed the magnifying goggles from his face and squinted as he looked up into the undercarriage of the TARDIS console, trying desperately to find out what had stranded him here and how to fix it.

Having barely made it out of yet another fray with the Cybermen, The Doctor’s beloved TARDIS had been hit, or perhaps bombed from within somehow (who could tell?). Barely landing safety in a place the TARDIS recognized as a ‘favorite’ location (London, England, early 21st century), The Doctor quickly learned that whatever had attacked him had destroyed what held the Time Vortex in place within the TARDIS’ core.

The Doctor’s ship was nothing more than a wooden box, sitting in a public park on Earth in 2023. Nothing, not the screwdriver, not The Doctor’s own ingenuity, was yielding any hope.

“Maybe Jack could…oh no, no, no,” he thought out loud, shaking off the idea. While it was true that Captain Jack Harkness could always be assumed to be waltzing around somewhere at any given place in time, what did he really know about TARDIS mechanics?

The Doctor sighed. Thinking about Jack always eventually brought his thoughts back to Rose. She may have been as human as anyone else around, but sometimes her intuition would shine through, triggering some epiphany in his head and bringing about the best answers.

That was Rose: brilliant in the most unexpected ways.

“If only it were easier to fall through realities,” he bitterly mused. “Or at least find a good fix-it shop that has equipment to jumpstart an Eye of Harmony…very basic stuff, not sure why it’s so hard to find--”

He was interrupted by a sudden, instantaneous flash of emerald, brighter than the sun, sending The Doctor squinting and crouching to the floor. Though he couldn’t see what had happened, for a brief moment, he heard the TARDIS breathe, as if the Vortex had been restored within it for as long as the luminous green assault filled the interior.

“What?” he asked nobody. The flash of green ceased, as did the TARDIS’ temporary recovery.

“WHAT?” he asked himself, running up the stairs to the top of the console, looking at every screen and pulling every lever he could.

Something had triggered the Time Vortex within the TARDIS, as if it were being given a push by an external force somewhere else out there in the world…something with enough time energy imbibed in its core to do so.

Perhaps if it was something he could find and bring back to the TARDIS…

Running to the doors and flinging them open, The Doctor was just in time to catch a streak of green flash across the night sky, heading southwest and missing London by a long, long shot. As it left the airspace above England, the TARDIS grew dark and cold again.

The Doctor’s mouth couldn’t close as his brain tried to keep up with his eyes.

“What?? WHAT?!”

TAGLIST: @crashingwavesofeuphoria @kkdvkyya @red-shirt-mania @misschris1412 @salvinaa @marygoddessofmischief @spiderstyles04 @fireflymoonwitch @mochie85 @loz-3 @lcolumbia1988 @lokilurker @eleniblue @gruftiela @starkzdaughter @mrsbarnes-avenger @thedistractedagglomeration @km-ffluv @lokisgoodgirl @holdmytesseract @itsthattimedarling @wolfsmom1 @scully2u @shinisenko @mischief2sarawr @ririsutty73 @lulubelle814 meg81589 @gloriuspurposeposts @theonetruepotato87 @linllewellyn @wistfulclueless @etherealkistar @tinydancer40

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arbiterlexultionis · 7 months

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Instant Eternity

Time travel involving the infinite realms is truly a bizarre thing. Sometimes it follow one set of rules, and sometimes that set of rules may as well not exist. Usually, however, it works in one of two ways, the first is when the time travel is achieved through artificial means such as clockworks portals and allows for the altering of the timeline as one would expect time travel would allow. The other type of time travel is through natural means, portals usually, and it’s just that, Natural. That portal to the past opened up in the past the same moment it did in the present. If you step into the portal in the year 2000 then you already stepped out of the portal hundreds of years ago. It’s A Thing That Already Happened. Danny himself experienced this, as while chasing Vlad through time they fought in the middle of a Roman coliseum and, whoopsy daisy, set a really big fire. A fire which Danny had learned about years before he even had his accident.

So, the infimap can take the user anywhere, anywhen. And the infimap is just that, a map. It doesn’t make new roads, it just drags you across already existing paths. So it is a natural form of time travel, if you use it to go in time to kill your grandfather in order to insure your never born your interference will result in your grandparents falling in love and your birth.

Danny realizes that anytime he needs to heal from a battle or has gone 156 hours without sleeping or eating he can use the infimap to pop back to the past for a few days and then have the map bring back to the “Present”, exactly one second after he left. A three week vacation that lasted one second. At first he’s really wary about using this, worried about accelerated aging or getting lost in the time stream and a hundred other issues. At first.

It’s been months sense the accident. Sam and Tucker have both shot up several inches. Danny, on the other hand, hasn’t grown sense the accident. At all. They fought a ghost who could rapidly age opponents, a single slap turned Tucker into a decrepit old man. The ghost wrapped his hands around Danny’s throat and spent 5 minutes trying to strangle him while Danny bought time for Sam and Tucker to pull off the plan. The sucked him into the thermos, his influence on time ceased so Tucker returned to his proper state. “Jeez it sure is lucky he didn’t try and age me, right guys? Ha ha ha”. Danny gets blasted through a natural portal while making a trip through the zone and spends years trying to get home, not aging a day.

He can’t deny it after that, can’t ignore it. He’s immortal. He’s going to live forever. He’s going to watch his friends and family whither away and die out. He’s going to have to spend the rest of his life wandering from place to place trying not to get outed as the same 14 year old who save someone’s great great grandma 100 years ago.

After having his first middeath crisis, suddenly the only reasons he had to not spend years on end wandering the world and the past is gone, even if he loses the infimap, worst case scenario he’ll just take the long way home. Suddenly, he’s dreading the next 80 years of the “Present”. He decides that if he’s going to watch his friends and family grow old and frail he’s going to make sure it’s takes as long as it possibly could, from his perspective. By the time they’re 20 Danny’s gonna have 200 years under his belt.

He becomes a temporal tourist, hopping into the past every time the late night fights and schoolwork become to much. Spends years in every civilization imaginable, mastering every skill he can, leaving legends in his wake.

I feel like Danny and his adventures do have a lot of potential for story’s, as it’s a pretty good setup for having Danny in any type of time period or historical event for extended periods of time, fighting in the trenches of World War I, exploring the Americas during the era of colonialism, sailing the seas a swashbuckling vigilante pirate. I, however, have most of my related ideas being based around crossovers. So most of that will be in part two, so that people who like to filter out all that can still see this post.

#danny fenton #danny phantom #fic prompt #dp au #story prompt #writing prompt #danny phantom au #dp #Danny’s Immortal #temporal tourist #Temporal Tourist AU #Danny the next time Vlad goes on and on about his TWenTy YeARs ExperIANce: That’s cute #Dash pulls up to start something and Danny fresh from spending 13 years as a baker in Ancient Rome is just like Who’s this strange child?#He completely forgets about a English project for Lancer and when Lancers standing in front of his desk asking for it #Danny just like “it’s in… Um… in the bathroom “the bathroom? “yes “ okay go get it. Now.#Danny comes back two seconds later with the best project Lancer has ever seen. it’s autographed by Shakespeare #he had to ask what the project was before he left.

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1-d-a · 2 months

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Amélie's eyes, those bright windows that celebrated my presence every morning, have closed forever. She will no longer walk by my side, my inseparable friend for thirteen years. Her body got cold right in my arms, leaving me with a maelstrom of diverse feelings, among which impotence and pain have fought in silence, shaking parts of me that were asleep. But against all this, an immense gratitude prevails at my core... for Amélie's mere existence, and for all the times she saved my day with her special energy. Such a loving, fierce, protective, playful and enthusiastic creature she was; I always felt lucky to witness her intensity.

Until her last days she made me feel useful and appreciated. She used to read my body language better than anyone; she understood many of my emotions and sometimes tried to join me in them, giving me the most sincere company. So many times I talked about 'my loneliness' like an idiot, simply because I struggle to find genuine understanding with human beings, but the truth is that I was never alone while she was around.

Now that her little bed is empty in a corner, now that her remains lie under the trees, I won't say that I will miss her… because everything that enters my heart stays strongly in my mind.

Amélie, my irreplaceable friend… is still present. She will always be a part of me, I am grateful for everything her life offered to a needy human like me. And I am also grateful for this bittersweet melancholy that her physical transformation is giving me; like a dark, but warm and safe mental space… where the temporal life of all creatures has an implacable meaning.

#•𝐃)))

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yui-samidare-reborn · 1 year

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The Past returns (1 Year blog special)

Lightning cracks across the sky just like it had done last year. The wind blows rapidly as trees sway while someone works on their computer, Akira has returned. His finger clack away at his keyboard as he chomps down cheeseballs. There seems to be an odd celestial event occurring, the sky swirls a bit as it looks like rain is about to break from the sky, but it does not.

Akira: The Samidare Paradox should allow for a weakening of the temporal barrier, at least temporarily.

He decides to test it, Akira creates another doorway, and focuses on a moment in the past before plucking someone and dropping them in 2022. As the mist subsides, a man with oddly shaped hair drops his knife on the ground.

What is this place?

Hello Mikado Shinsen..or should i say, chairman of the Victims Catharsis Committee?

His cold eyes look around the world. Something has changed, time had marched on.

So: The disaster which was foretold of came to pass?

Yes. Junko Enoshima rose like a force of nature...

he pauses as he looks at Akira.

If i were alive, she wouldn’t have. The Apex Detective would have sought to her demise. That was Samidare’s problem, she proclaimed to be about the greater good, but when push came to shove, she decided to save one life over billions.

If the Detective King Couldn’t stop her, then how could you?

I had connections, dear boy, an entire network of recruiters, judges, politicians, union bosses and oh so much more in my back pocket.

So, we should just kidnap Yui right?

No. We should set in moment an event to truly engineer her downfall. Not as fancy as kidnapping her and her loved ones, but one to truly end her career as a detective, thus calling into every case she’s ever been involved in, and once that’s over, she’ll beg to be sent back to where she came from.

However, the sky soon became unstable. The fabric of time was starting to unravel, the just didn’t know it yet.

—————————————-———

@mystery-orphans-club, @ anyone who wants to join.

#yui samidare #danganronpa rp #mikado shinsen #akira tsuchiya

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lokiondisneyplus · 6 months

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SPOILER ALERT! This Q&A contains spoilers for Season 2 of Loki.

Season 2 of Marvel Studios’ Loki expands upon the inner workings of the Time Variance Authority, where the God of Mischief has been working tirelessly to save, well, all of time.

That includes introducing new characters, like Ke Huy Quan‘s Ouroboros. As the TVA’s dedicated handyman, everything inside the institution was either created by him or is currently maintained by him. When Loki and Mobius enter his workshop, they become his first visitors in 400 years.

Little do they know, Ouroboros is an integral part of their quest to prevent the branches of time from overloading the Temporal Loom.

Following the end of the actors strike and on the heels of the Loki Season 2 finale, Quan spoke with Deadline about joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe, his character Ouroboros, and his own full circle career moment.

DEADLINE: It’s so great to get to talk with you about Loki. You haven’t really been able to talk about your role, due to the actors strike. What have you been waiting to say?

KE HUY QUAN: When I decided to become an actor again, [being part of the MCU] was at the top of my wishlist…They all welcomed me with wide open arms, and I was so happy. I was patiently waiting for the show to come out so we can go and celebrate it and tell the fans. Then, of course, the strike happened. I just want to tell everybody how proud of the show I am. How happy I am with it. And working with Tom Hiddleston, Owen Wilson, the entire Loki family has just been incredible. We made this last year in London. I was there for four months, my wife and I were there. It was one of the best four months of my life. I’ve done a few shows before, and this was the first time where I didn’t want it to end. I was so happy. In fact, I’ll tell you this. We were scheduled for reshoots this February, and I was waiting. My wife and I were looking forward to spending more time in London and with our Loki family. And all of a sudden we were told, ‘Oh, we don’t need any reshoots. It’s all good.’ I was kind of disappointed. I was actually disappointed that we didn’t get to go back because of how much fun we had… So we made history. We make history two times. One is the first series of Marvel getting a second season and the second is the first time a Marvel show didn’t have any reshoots. I’m so proud of that.

DEADLINE: It is quite a feat to not have any reshoots. So that was probably one of the few times you were excited for reshoots.

QUAN: A lot of times actors dread doing reshoots, because you have to go back. You have to get back into character. But for this, I was really happy. I was looking forward to it. It’s so ironic, because the more I wanted to do, it’s like, ‘Oh, we don’t need it.’ But this is a testament to how great the show is and to how great a Leader Tom Hiddleston is. Working with him has been incredible. It was such a masterclass on how to be a great actor, a great leader, and most importantly, a great human being. He is so kind and humble.

DEADLINE: When you first read the script, what did you think of your character, Ouroboros? What were you hoping you could bring to him?

QUAN: Well, first of all, when I read the script, I instantly fell in love with Ouroboros. It was so well defined on the pages, and I can see him right away. This character was not based on comic books, so it was created by our showrunner Kevin Wright and our head writer Eric Martin… I instantly wanted to play him. And I remember this was at a time when Everything, Everywhere All At Once had just came out. It was paying only in New York and in Los Angeles. My agent said, ‘You’re gonna get a call from Kevin Feige tomorrow.’ Now you have to understand, when I became an actor again, joining the MCU was at the top of my wishlist. I was so excited and I said, ‘Could this be it?’ I was driving. I picked up the phone. And on the other end I hear, ‘Hi Ke. This is Kevin Feige.’ He went on to talk about how much he loved our movie and how much he loved my performance. Then finally he says, ‘Ke we would love for you to join the MCU family.’ I was driving at that time. I start tearing up, and I couldn’t see the road anymore. I said, ‘Kevin, can you give me two seconds?’ I pulled the car over, put it in park and I said, ‘Please continue.’ He says, ‘We have this great character for you, Ouroboros. I really love him, and I think you will be perfect to play him.’ He told me about Loki. He told me about the MCU. He spoke [with] so much passion and enthusiasm in his voice. It brought me back to the day when I met him for the very first time on the X-Men set when he was just an associate producer, and I was an assistant action choreographer…He loves this universe so much. He has such a vast knowledge of this universe. And little did I know only 23 years later, I get to work with him. I get to play a wonderful character.

DEADLINE: I’m glad you mentioned that. It is quite the full circle moment.

QUAN: You know, that’s why I love the name Ouroboros. It’s s a snake eating its own tail. I had a wonderful time working with Kevin on set. It was at a time where I didn’t think I would ever step in front of the camera again. It was also the time where I questioned whether I would have a career working behind the camera. It was when I just graduated from USC film school. I didn’t know what I was going to do. I knew I didn’t want to leave this industry. I love it so much. So to be able to do that and to come back again in front of the camera… I’m very fortunate.

DEADLINE: Your comedic timing is so spot on in Loki. I’m thinking of the scene where Ouroboros manages to recreate the Tempad after 19 months and losing his wife. What’s the secret to nailing a scene like that?

QUAN: I don’t think much about it. I gotta credit Kevin Wright and Eric Martin. They really beautifully created this character Ouroboros. The dialogue, when I was reading for the first time, I laughed out loud, because he’s so quirky. He’s so weird and funny. Yet, if you think about it, who is this guy that’s working in the basement of the TVA for more than 400 years with no friends? No interaction with anybody. His only encounter was with Mobius when he got lost. Yet he still takes his job so seriously and so passionately. It has a lot to do with the beautiful dialogue that they came up with.

DEADLINE: Do you think O.B. stays in the basement for another 400 years or will be venturing out more often?

QUAN: When you get a taste of what friendships feel like… Loki is addicted to that. So I’m sure O.B. will be as well. When you don’t have it, you don’t know what you’re missing. But once you have it, you keep going after it. So I would assume that O.B. would periodically, when he’s not too busy, he would go up the elevator and go say hi to Casey and B-15 And just to mingle with Mobius, because he loves Mobius.

DEADLINE: What scene are you most proud of?

QUAN: I love Episode One, that scene when he’s talking to Mobius in the present and Loki in the past. That is so creative… It’s so is so well written. It’s so funny.

DEADLINE: How did you feel when you read the script for the finale?

QUAN: I was blown away, because I didn’t see that coming. It’s so beautiful and so poetic. When you have a character who wants to be on the throne all his life, and he finally gets to be on it. But he can never leave. He made the ultimate sacrifice…To me, Loki is the ultimate hero because he made the sacrifice without recognition. Nobody knows he did this, except the team. No one in the Sacred Timeline is going to ever know that. If we’re lucky in life, we would have people like that with us. The unsung heroes.

Loki is streaming on Disney+.

#loki #ke huy quan #ouroboros #O.B.#interview

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cookies-and-music · 2 months

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Ghost. - part 13: Lost Boy

My suggestion for this chapter is Lovely by Billie Eilish, who, apparently, fits perfectly into this fanfic.

Part 1 here - part 14 here

PAIRING: TVA!LokixOC

RATING: ALL

TAG LIST: @kats72 ; @mischief2sarawr

SUMMARY: Loki meets sombody at the TVA he once knew. Unfortunately she doesn't seem to remember him.

Midgard, 1994

Lydia was in the scientist's study, or perhaps it was some sort of laboratory, in 1994. Soon, the room filled with people. Her friends, as Loki had called them.

Apparently, the woman, the doctor, was the one she trained with at the TVA gym, and she had engaged in a friendly competition with the jet ski salesman, who was also an analyst, whatever that meant, on who could solve more cases in the same amount of time.

Lydia had never seen them before and Loki's stories were just that. Someone else's stories.

"So, you're some kind of cop?" the man asked her.

"More of a secret agent" she replied.

"How secret can it be if you're telling us?" the scientist/writer asked.

"Forget it," Loki emerged from a time door, interrupting the conversation. "It's better if you go back home."

Lydia exchanged a confused glance with the doctor.

"What do you mean, forget it?" the woman asked.

"You need to go back home, I was wrong," he sighed.

"No, wait" the jet ski salesman interjected "First, you tell us the fate of the world depends on us, and then... nothing?"

"I'm sorry, I was wrong, I just…" Loki glanced at Lydia, it lasted only a moment before he lowered his head, shaking it "wanted things to go differently. You need to go back to your place, it's right this way."

"No, it's not." A blonde figure emerged from a time door.

"Sylvie…" Loki widened his eyes.

"The branches are dying. If we don't hurry, there might not be a home to return to, for any of you."

Lydia observed her, but she wasn't familiar either. She sighed, feeling her fingers tingling, she looked down but didn't see her fingers, just filaments.

"Loki" she managed to call and gave him a terrified look before disappearing.

Loki saw that scene three times before he got a hold of his abilities and went back in time. And back to the TVA.

Several centuries later.

Loki watched with tears in his eyes as Timely managed to load and send the range multiplier onto the frame. Loki cheered for a moment before the frame collapsed again. It was the billionth time he had tried. He glanced at Lydia, who had a mournful face, it was the billionth time he had seen that too. He thought back to what she had said to Sylvie when they had argued. Lydia was right, it all started with the death of He Who Remains; that moment had marked their destiny.

Loki went there and spent several years there. It took a long time before he could truly talk to He Who Remains, and when he did, he realized that everything, everything, had been a waste of time.

He was tired, disheartened. He had to find another way to fix everything but was starting to run out of ideas. He had promised Lydia that he would find a solution, for centuries he had clung to that promise because finding a solution would mean saving her life and all his friends'. But he was wavering. The loneliness he felt was destroying him.

Midgard, 2073. Temporal Branch 39,618

The house was empty at that moment, but someone, many people, surely lived there. He climbed the stairs and went to the only lit room. There lay an old woman in a bed, under layers of blankets.

"Did you remember my coffee, Liam?" The old lady turned to him.

"I'm afraid not, I'm sorry" Loki said to announce himself.

"Well, what are you doing at the door? Come in."

Loki took a few hesitant steps towards her, who pointed to the chair near the bed. Loki sat down and looked around. The bedside table was full of medicines, and there were a couple of oxygen tanks in a corner.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm eighty-seven, dear, it's already strange that I'm still breathing" she tried to laugh, but the laughter quickly turned into a cough.

He kept his gaze low.

"You seem lost," the woman observed.

"I think… I am" Loki looked at her thin arms and knotted hands resting on the blankets.

She looked at him with the tenderest look Loki had ever seen.

"You know, young man, you remind me of someone" she began "He too was very lost when I met him and had a truly terrible character" She managed to drag Loki into a little chuckle, but seeing how she suffered through the laugh, Loki's eyes immediately saddened.

"He had mournful eyes, just like yours, and I fell in love with him. Not right away, but for a lifetime."

"Where is he now?" Loki asked as his eyes moistened.

"Oh, he's very special, you see, he doesn't age like me, and he doesn't have time to deal with a dotty old lady."

"He should be here" Loki lowered his gaze.

"Oh, no," the old lady covered his hand with her knotty one "he must protect the world, I would never want him to be here watching me wither away. I've had a good life, I've saved the world many, perhaps too many times, and I've had a family."

"But you're alone" tears filled his eyes.

"You're here."

A few tears streamed down his cheeks.

"Why are you crying, boy?"

"I don't want to be alone, Lydia" he said with a broken voice, wiping his face with his hand.

"My dear, you needn't worry about that" she squeezed his hand with the little strength she had "you have great power. You're altruistic, generous, and kind. And good people never stay alone; they just have to trust others and welcome them into their hearts."

"What should I do?" he said, sniffing and taking a breath, trying to calm down.

"Oh, I don't know about that, but I know you'll figure it out, and when you do, just remember one thing: you must not be afraid. You are very loved, and when you are loved, there is nothing to fear, Loki. Love gives us courage." She laughed lightly between coughs as she transformed into filaments between his fingers.

FINALLY I GOT BACK! Soo... sad ain't we? Well, this last part was written way before the hole chapter, it was so clear in my mind and so teary, unfortunately. Let me know if you wanna be added to the tag list. Next chapter will be the last related to canon events, but the ff is not over. We have around 6 more chapters. A special thank you to @mischief2sarawr who's a lovely supporter and also added me to their public reading list. Check out their blog for amazing reading suggestions!

Cheers everyone.

#fanfic #loki series #loki #loki laufeyson #loki x reader #loki x oc #loki season 2 #loki x reader images #loki x you #loki x y/n #tva!loki #tva!lokixreader #tva!lokixoc #tom hiddleston #ghost #loki tva

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occasionallyprosie · 2 months

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Devotion - Chapter 7: "Started Young"

Dev finds an old friend, who apparently had spent the entirety of the war in a battle on another plane of existence with himself… or rather, eight other versions of himself.

Read On AO3

First <<Previous | Next>>

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Dev sensed him. Finally, that faded divine courage came into his senses and he whirled around and was running.

"There you are!" He nearly slid across the ground as he found the kid, dropping to one knee in front of him as he held his face and checked him for injuries on instinct. "Where have you been?! Are you alright? There's so much dark residue on you!"

The kid, the hero and spirit of the Four Sword, barked out a slightly strained laugh. "I don't even know, Dev. I'm so, so confused."

Dev grew concerned before it hit him. He let out a small noise of relief. "The timelines merged, kid," he said gently, and the kid startled.

"They what? There was multiple?!"

"Three, and you remember how I told you there was a spirit that inhabited my sword before me?" The kid nodded. "She's back because she didn't die in the other timelines."

The kid's jaw dropped. "IS THAT WHY I'VE SPENT THE LAST —HOWEVER LONG FIGHTING EIGHT OTHER VERSIONS OF MYSELF?!“

Dev winced. "Probably."

He stared at him. "What the—Okay. Okay this is fine. Just..." he held his 'breath' and Dev watched him slowly calm down. "Right," the kid looked at him again, "what did I miss?

"Want to come meet the new hero?" Dev asked. "We just ended a war."

"You what."

"His name is Link, so we really need to get you a nickname, kid."

"I—Fine."

"Rainbow? Prism? Spectrum?"

"Do not call me Rainbow," he threatened. "Spectrum is fine."

"Great."

A beat passed.

"I cannot believe you fought a war without me."

"There it is."

Dev was leading Spectrum to meet Link, only to see a dauntingly familiar portal and Link disappearing through it.

It shut almost the moment Dev saw it. It took everything in Dev to trust that his Sprite was right, that it was okay, that it'd be fine.

"What was that?" Spectrum questioned.

"That... That was a portal," Dev said a bit shakily. "A temporal one, time magic. It... I've seen it before, it either takes the hero, returns them, or brings monsters. Want to go hunt some oddly strong monsters?"

Spectrum blinked and stared at him. "That's an option? Absolutely."

Soon enough, a couple years later, Link returned and he had a knowing look in his eyes when he came back. He grinned when he met Spectrum. A few days later, he'd made a passing comment on Dev being a hero when they were alone.

"I'm no hero." Dev chuckled when Link said it.

"Really?" Link challenged, looking over at him. "Labyrnna, Holodrum, Hytopia? None of those rings a bell?"

Dev hummed slightly. "Oh, they ring bells." He stood up, and he saw Link raise an eyebrow with a bit more gall than Dev was used to from him. "Yes, a very, very long time ago, I was a hero. I was born Hylian, called to save the world, got a sword, and a triangle on the back of my hand. Then I killed the incarnate of evil, and I did it again. Yes, once upon a time, I was a hero. But I'm not a hero anymore."

"Not anymore?" Link prodded, seemingly a bit confused.

Dev just laughed softly. "Kit, I'm millennia old. I've seen Hyrule rise to its golden age, fall into decay, and it is still trying to rebuild itself. I've watched friends and family live, die, and be born again. My time as a hero ended the moment I became a spirit. That doesn't mean I'll stand aside, I still fight, but I am here to protect and guide you." He tapped Link's chest. "You, and other kids like Mask and Tune. Heroes who are still heroes, who have lives to live. I. Am. No. Hero. And by the mercy of the goddesses, I never will be again."

Link caught his wrist. "Dev, you're a hero to me. And to all of Hyrule."

"Let me live my retirement in peace," Dev teased lightly. "You may be a little lion with all that energy, pride, and strength to protect those you love, but let me just be a guide and helper, not a hero. I did my time."

Link stared at him and there was sadness in his eyes. "Okay," he said softly, letting go of his wrist. "Yeah, okay."

Link died of old age. Dev was a face amongst the masses and Spectrum tugged his arm to lead them from the funeral.

Fi wanted to go dormant, so Dev let her. He refused to do the same.

He and Spectrum went out to explore, slaying monsters and forging something new, building magical weapons and jewelry then Dev ended up having to carry.

They went out to other countries, Dev knew he'd sense the birth of the next hero, Fi said they would, and they explored the far reaches of the world.

Thousands of years passed, and they came back just in time.

There was no hero in this cycle. Well, there was, but...

A six-year-old child tugged his sleeve. "Can I go home now?"

A great calamity was about to befall Hyrule and though there were guardians and a princess with Zelda's sealing power learned and ready, the hero was a tiny child.

He and Spectrum shared a look.

"Link?" Dev knelt by the boy. "Thank you so much for meeting us. Go home now, we just wanted to say hi." The parents were crying, they knew the fate their son had been called to, but Dev wasn't about to let a six-year-old fight this battle.

Little Link lit up and ran back to his parents. Fi murmured to Dev about it, but they had long since handled any differences in their methods a while ago.

"I'll do it," Spectrum said as they headed toward the castle.

"You'll have to. Have fun," Dev said as he took Spectrum's hand and transformed.

Spectrum went to the castle and the guards let him through. A green and blue tunic, bright red hair, a violet sash around his waist and matching ribbon in his hair to hold the long locks back, Spectrum marched up to the throne room and he knelt in the center of the room.

In the end, it was a quick and simple fight. Over before it was finished.

Dev disagreed with the decision to just seal the darkness; he would have much rather destroyed it.

Spectrum agreed, but neither were allowed back into the castle after the battle.

Little Link grew up happily, not a single other calling to adventure took place. Dev and Spectrum made sure of that.

Ten thousand years passed before the next one happened.

Dev had let Fi win for the past five thousand years. While Spectrum went off and did goddesses know what, Fi and Dev fell dormant within the Korok Forest beneath the protection of the Great Deku Tree.

He roused when a presence approached and was instantly aware of the thick darkness in the air. It was coming back and...

The boy who drew him was no older than twelve. He stopped Fi from even testing the boy, he saw the fear but also clear determination, not in an arrogant way, but this boy had come here, gotten through the Lost Woods, and was trying to draw the sword because he had to. Dev could see it, Fi faltered near immediately and they went willingly.

"He looks like you," Fi said. "You came to me just like that, scared, but determined. I knew you wouldn't take no for an answer, not because you wanted to wield me, but because you knew you had to."

Dev had made a slightly affirming sound. This kid already had the weight of the world on his shoulders... and Dev had every intention of lightening that load as much as he could.

"You're not bad," Dev said after Link beat a guard in a fight and was left to train alone. Link didn't talk and Dev was invisible to everyone but his wielder. "Incredible for your age, actually."

He stood beside Link, who gave him a curious look as he pulled out a fire rod and held it like a sword.

"Copy my moves," he told him. Link nodded and Dev guided him through battle techniques long forgotten to the people of Hyrule. He taught him how to execute a spin attack, how to do a downward thrust, and many other things. He taught him to fight with precision.

Link was a natural, a born fighter, and after a point, Dev started teaching him other things.

The boy was isolated from everyone, partially but not wholly by his own choice. The princess whom he had to protect outright hated him, then the champions who he was meant to fight alongside were distant from the boy that Dev got to know. Mipha was closest, and Daruk tried, but Revali drove Link deeper into his corner purposely and Urbosa did it accidentally due to her protectiveness over Zelda.

Dev would sit with Link in his quarters, coaching him through peaceful things. He taught him to knit and to sew. He taught him how to crochet too, then how to dye wool. He taught him how to cook in the kitchens, and how to cook over a campfire. He took Link out to the forests one night and taught him how to forage and make food good for eating. He taught the twelve-year-old boy how to read, horrifying himself with the knowledge that literacy and education wasn't the standard even in the most rural parts of Hyrule anymore.

Link opened up to him.

He'd grin and giggle and even sometimes quietly ask questions or make an almost sassy comment. Dev was determined to get the kid out of his shell just a bit more.

Then it struck. After accompanying the princess to the base of Mount Lanayru and to as far as an underaged individual could go, after coming down to the base of the mountain, and then the sky lit up red.

Not a day later, in the twilight before dawn, Dev was feeling his magic drain to a point it had only once before.

He poured his magic into Link, into Fi, the former managing to stand up again and the latter giving her all to keep him alive. Even for all that, even after destroying dozens of guardians, Link couldn't do it.

The Master Sword chipped, it cracked, and Link couldn't quite stand back up.

The power of the Triforce saved him from immediate death. Fi and Dev panicked, and they had Zelda put Link in the Shrine of Resurrection.

They lasted long enough for Zelda to ask them to give Link the memory of her leaving them in the forest. After that, it all faded and for the second time, Dev was forced into dormancy as he had drained himself completely just to keep one boy alive. Something he had done thousands of years ago... and had failed.

Next>>

#short lil thing #linked universe #lu legend #linkeduniverse #legend lu #fanfic #lu warriors #lu wild #lu four #sword spirit legend #fi #loz fi #linked universe fanfic #linked universe fanfiction #linked universe au #prosie writes #devotion au

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yamcha-thelonewolf · 5 months

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🫀The Heart's Savior.

Guys, we have come to the end, but how is it that they say? The end of something will be the beginning of something else. There will always be so much to say about Yamcha and I don't want to stop that soon. For now I would like all Dragon Ball fans to consider this topic, not because I wrote it. I am well aware that I am not the first person to talk about it, and I am glad that someone other than me has noticed, but in Yamcha's case it is never enough. The more the merrier! Even at the cost of repeating ourselves…. It doesn't matter! In latin they used to say repetita iuvant, meaning that something by dint of being repeated is eventually learned. Can it stew? Maybe. But it's still better than keeping quiet, right? And I believe that all of us Yamcha fans have a sacred right to protect one of the most misunderstood and unnecessarily mistreated characters ever.

Well, it's time to begin, but before we go into the last, most important chapter, I would like to remind you one last time of the previous two parts, so that we have a clearer and more obvious situation. I mean, at this point it's really impossible to ignore that Yamcha is useless. PART 1: The Past PART 2: The Present

PART 3: The Future

It is no accident that I wanted to divide the topic in a temporal sense. As I had said at the beginning, in the Androids and Cell Arc, Yamcha has seriously contributed to improving the past, the present and the future. He didn't fight with his muscular body, but by bringing the resounding strength of his heart into play, he made sense of Dragon Ball's most important chapter. At least it is the most important to me. Not only because it is the first and only time the warriors are really all together, but also because this is where the story begins to expand with the appearance of alternate realities. Everyone does their own thing, and while I regret that Yamcha was not given a real action moment in which to shine (with the exception of the fight against that Cell Junior together with Tien to save Goku), I'm still glad that in the same arc in which Toriyama tried to completely sideline him, Yamcha left his mark. And believe me, it is a very important mark.

We could say that Yamcha saved everyone's mood, everyone's heart, everyone's soul…. The meaning will always be the same. We are not on Planet Vegeta, where everyone is callous and devoid of humanity. We are on Earth, on that planet that made Goku an outstanding saiyan and especially the protagonist everyone has loved for years. This means that if you can't feel pure emotions, you can't go anywhere. You can't even get on the Flying Nimbus! We learned this with OG Dragon Ball: if you don't act from the heart and for the heart, you certainly won't make a good end. This is what Jackie Chun/Muten Roshi explains to Tenshinhan when he tries to convince him to abandon the path of evil and take the path of good. It was an important teaching, and it saddens me that Akira Toriyama has completely forgotten it since forty years later he has failed to reward the character who most of all was a living heart.

If you think about it, this is really Goku's strong point: his heart. In the beginning he always acted for the sake of someone else: he wanted to look for the dragon ball with four stars because it reminded him of his grandfather, then he collected them all to bring Upa's father back to life, then again to save Krillin, Muten and Chiaotzu. Always thanks to his heart he became a Super Saiyan for the first time and thanks to his good feelings he was able to save the earth many times. So it is really his heart that made him legendary. It is because of it that he was able to go on, become stronger and be the ultimate hero. ...So... Why should Yamcha be any less? He is a human, so what? He possesses superhuman strength. There is nothing different from a saiyan awakening his feelings. Both of them go against the grain. They are two sides of the same coin. Whatever...

To recap:

Yamcha saved the past. He has taken care of Goku since he was little, helped him when Goku's innocence hindered him, always supported him, and always stepped forward whenever he was in danger of getting hurt. Finally, he took care of his heart, the most important core of Goku's character, during his illness.

Yamcha saved the present. While everyone feared the worst or simply struggled without much success, Yamcha was always ready to comfort and warm that chill that could have turned the present into Trunks' horrible future. He took care of Tien, or at least he would have liked to, then Gohan and finally Krillin, helping him to hope on his chance with Android 18. It seems little, but in everyday life such a turnaround is more important than a victory against an invincible monster. After all... What remains when peace returns?

Although The Past and The Present show how big Yamcha's heart is, we still have to admit that up to now he has taken care of his friends. This is an easy thing to do. I mean, any human with a heart of gold would do all this for someone he loves, but Yamcha's value goes beyond that. After all, it is when you leave your comfort zone that you truly realize how much you are worth, and that is what I am referring to when I say that Yamcha has been the strongest of all. Nietzsche once said:

Love your enemies because they bring out the best in you.

It's true. By loving those who hate you, those who have hurt you or simply those who do not appreciate you, you become incredibly better, because you can overcome the evil you get and make it your strength in a sense.

That's exactly what Yamcha does, but you know, I even believe that he doesn't do it completely to feel better. I think he does it because he knows how to love. That's always the point: by knowing how to love he automatically knows how to forgive and overcome the hatred that he would have the right to feel. Therefore, dear friends, today we will talk about how Yamcha cared even for those whom he was not bound to love for different reasons. I want to say this will be the part that will touch me the most. I'm pretty sure I'm going to be sentimental as hell but I can't help it. Yamcha is a treasure chest of emotions and I want to express them just as he would. To talk about what follows means first of all having to come to terms with the most humiliating thing of all: Yamcha and Bulma's breakup. I don't want to dive into details, not in this topic, but what I do want to point out is that for me Yamcha never cheated on Bulma.

Look at him. One who has cheated would not react like that. You can see that he is pissed off and disappointed, rather than mortified or distressed about the mistake he made. I am more accepting of the speculation that Bulma simply preferred Vegeta, although here we open a big digression about yet another writing problem in Dragon Ball. Consequently, as I see it, Yamcha suffered the breakup as a real tragedy, came out as a victim of it, and therefore his heart was severely wounded by it. With these things in mind, it is logical to think that what we see from this point on is literally a saint-made man, because not only does Yamcha accept the new reality with Bulma, but he even stays by her side to continually watch over her until the end of DBZ.

Once again Yamcha stays. He is there, he does not back down, and with his head held high he faces the greatest disappointment of his life, because without ever forgetting this we must consider that his goal was (is) always love. He strongly desired to marry Bulma and have children with her, but in the end she chose to do this with the one who had once killed her boyfriend.

Heartbroken and disillusioned, Yamcha would have many reasons for never speaking to Bulma again. Yet he does. He stays close to her, and in facing this great humiliation he proves not only that he has that usual big heart, but also that he is seriously better than those who treated him as if he were worthless. Yeah, I am really talking about Vegeta. I hope I am not annoying any Vegeta fans, but believe me, for any Yamcha fan it is impossible to accept certain attitudes that the saiyan prince had with the earthling.

Don't worry, though. I am not going to denigrate a character to glorify Yamcha. It's not my style and frankly he doesn't need it. He already shines on his own, it's just that unfortunately his brightness is obscured by super energy attacks. I will simply show the evidence, but more importantly I will talk about how Yamcha loved even Vegeta and Trunks.

Actually, why he helped Trunks should not surprise us. Trunks did nothing wrong to Yamcha. He is simply the son of Bulma and Vegeta, and even if that means Yamcha has lost his Bulma forever, that is certainly not a valid reason to hate this boy. Well, if we clearly allow ourselves to be guided by instinct and the most impetuous emotions, it is quite normal to think that Yamcha may also have felt frustration at seeing that son who should have been his. Trunks is the most concrete form of Yamcha's humiliation: not only is he not his son, he is even Vegeta's son. From this point of view, Trunks represents the beginning of a new hope for the planet but also the end of Yamcha's hopes. It's a subplot that nobody gives a damn about, but as much as I love Trunks, I can't help but think every time I see him, "oh boy, Yamcha's downfall is coming."

Whatever… These are assumptions we don't have to worry about. Yamcha may have had a small moment of annoyance with little Trunks, but he is still an innocent child, and what's more, although he is Vegeta's son, he is also Bulma's son, and Yamcha loves Bulma. Now as a friend, but he still loves her. So loving Bulma necessarily means loving Trunks as well. This to me is a great proof of his inner strength that I mentioned earlier, although at this point I wonder... Is his strenth really that inner? It seems so damn noticeable to me. Now let's take a closer look at the whole situation.

Through Trunks' words we learn for the first time about the breakup between Yamcha and Bulma. Trunks very naively explains that the main reason was Yamcha's attitude toward the girls. Bulma got fed up and so she broke up with him once and for all. Leaving aside the fact that Yamcha playboy is a kind of joke, because we have seen many times how in reality he has always been the exact opposite, it is highly probable that this statement is unfortunately the result of Bulma's usual hysteria toward Yamcha. I say "usual" because we have plenty of evidence on this. For example, in OG Dragon Ball we saw how she was pissed off at Yamcha simply because a fanclub of pretty girls had formed for him. This trifle had been enough for Bulma to leave Yamcha alone in the city, and go with Goku to search for the dragon balls. It is not hard for me to imagine that much of Yamcha's alleged faults were simply in Bulma's head. Perhaps she feared losing him and consequently imagined realities that Yamcha would never allow.

The fact is that in my opinion Trunks' explanation should not be taken as true. Future Bulma told his son a lot of lies, surely for good, because living in such a tragic time it was right to ease the boy's soul by telling him about his father's noble deeds. The point is that Future Bulma knew perfectly well that Vegeta was neither a saint nor a hero. She never knew the Vegeta of the Buu Arc. She had only experienced the impassive, distant, indifferent, and untamable Vegeta, the one you still had to worry about because you still couldn't tell if you could trust him or not. But Vegeta was still the father of her son, and her son was the only thing she had left of Vegeta. So out of love for her son, Bulma has elevated Vegeta, and as one does when telling a fanciful fairy tale in which one exaggerates many things, Future Bulma necessarily has fictionalized how she and Vegeta ended up together. I try hard to think of it that way. I find it in very bad taste that Future Bulma spoke ill of Future Yamcha, who died and did not have a chance to tell his side. So I just assume that she told this bullshit not to insult Yamcha's memory but to comfort young Trunks. As I said, the lie about Yamcha is not the only one. To glorify Trunks's father, Future Bulma also tells that Vegeta had a hidden and "warmer" side, but in reality even she was not sure about that because in the future Vegeta had never shown affection toward their son. It was a supposition she made up to give her son hope.

In short, through Future Bulma's words we can imagine that Future Yamcha is a moron, while Future Vegeta is a pretty decent man. Cold but decent. Mind you: accusing Yamcha of being "something of a playboy" does not just mean that he is a jerk who gets off on girls. Above all, it means that Yamcha is unintelligent, vile, and without dignity. But when Trunks gets into the time machine and goes back to the past, which for us is the present, all the cards get messed up and a very different reality jumps out. From here on, the paths diverge. There are those who believe Future Bulma's words and those who find the whole thing a terrible stretch. True or not, everything Yamcha does in this saga completely negates the idea that he was a shitty person with no brain or heart. Trunks sees that, but he also sees something more important: Vegeta is not as worthy as he thought.

In this scene, the tension is very high. It is not just a clash between a saiyan and an earthling. It is a clash between one who has lost everything and one who has taken everything. After all, Vegeta took Yamcha's life once and a few years later he took his girlfriend. The way Vegeta tries to cut Yamcha out of Dragon Ball has always bothered me, simply because many fans have taken all his insults against Earthlings as true. Nowadays, unfortunately, there are many who believe that Yamcha is really scum. Seeing him in this scene with that clenched fist, his gaze threatening but equally filled with goodness tugs at my heartstrings. However, the best part of this scene is really Trunks' reaction.

He seems really upset. Somehow it's as if he wants to stop it, but not just because Vegeta is taking it out on Yamcha. Trunks comes from a future where love no longer exists. There is only fear, anger, frustration. He lives in a world where there is no time to laugh, joke, play, simply feel human, and he suffers a lot from that. His warm melancholy is directly proportional to the cold evilness of the two androids. With this interpretation in mind, I am quite convinced that in this scene Trunks saw the two androids in his father. Or rather, it is as if Trunks was upset by his father's coldness very similar to that of androids. Understand me, it is as if he at that moment is witnessing the confrontation between the two times: Yamcha represents the happy past, Vegeta the ruthless future. Moreover, Trunks in those days is fully experiencing the reality he desires in his time. There is his father, there is Goku, there are his friends, laughing is still possible but most of all, the planet is so alive that hope and love do not even have to be searched for in a mad rush because they are part of it. They have not yet been eradicated as in his future. As I had already said, hope and love are precisely what convinced Trunks to accomplish this feat. Not only that. If you remember what I wrote in the previous part, I openly stated that Yamcha is the representation of these two feelings. So... Joining all the dots, it really seems that in this scene Trunks is standing up for his own ideals. If Yamcha is love and love is what Trunks wants back in a world now filled with hatred, it is only natural that he would side with the earthling. I mean, he is fed up with witnessing injustice. Besides, Trunks has respect for Yamcha as Fighter-Z. He knows that Yamcha also tried to fight against the androids and that unfortunately he did not succeed, so it is natural for him to stand up for him. It is that code of honor that is created between warriors. Well, I really think Trunks realizes here what I was saying at the beginning: Yamcha is not that much of an asshole and Vegeta is not that much of a saint. At this point Trunks seriously needs proof that negates everything he is observing. It is just a detail. The best is yet to come.

Before we get to that, I would like to briefly address the relationship between Yamcha and Trunks. We have come to understand by now that Yamcha acts out of love and precisely because of this he does not look the recipient in the face. The fact that Trunks is Vegeta's son does not matter to him. Trunks is a good guy who even though he materialized the separation between Yamcha and Bulma still saved the world by going back to the past. Moreover, as already mentioned, he is Bulma's son. All this is enough for Yamcha to respect, love and protect him.

This is a decisive moment. Trunks' death acts as a catalyst for the final fight, but more importantly it makes Vegeta bring out that "side." Everyone remembers the prince's anger against Cell after seeing his son die, but... How many remember who was the first to rescue Trunks?

Come on, seriously?! I would never have said that. ...Yes, hell, yes. Of course would have said that. There are so many characters who witness this tragic death but it just so happens that the first one to intervene is Yamcha. I don't think it's random. And even if it was, that's pretty damn consistent with his character. You see. He reaches Trunks even before Vegeta, but that certainly does not mean that Vegeta loves Trunks any less. I just mean that, despite all that Trunks represents to Yamcha, Yamcha rushes to save him, moved again by that unconditional love that distinguishes him from all others.

The very brief scenes in which Yamcha protects Trunks' corpse together with Tien are wonderful. For two sensitive souls like Yamcha and Tien, it is really the least to defend the one who allowed them to live a little longer. It is really moving to see how Yamcha and Tien take care of the body to prevent it from being profaned. Little does it matter to them that there are dragon balls and that Trunks can be brought back to life even if full of scratches and wounds. The respect for the corpse is the only priority, with or without dragon balls, and this attitude is so human that it brings tears to my eyes every time I realize how special these two earthlings are.

I mean... Trunks's corpse could have been lying there somewhere and been picked up at the end. He was dead, not unconscious like Android 18. Watching over his body was not strictly necessary, but Yamcha and Tien do it anyway. And they do it because they are the best characters in Dragon Ball their humanity is their secret weapon. A pity that for Toriyama it is just a joke.

The relationship between Trunsk and Yamcha is only part of the whole. We could trace it to the same kind of paternal bond that Yamcha establishes with Goku and Gohan, but in Trunks' case it becomes even more fascinating because he is literally the son she would have wanted with her Bulma. Of course, it's just a feeling. I highly doubt that Yamcha ever realized that he possessed "daddy-like" attitudes, and then we also have to say that protecting someone younger than you doesn't mean you do it because you have the makings of a father. To be precise, Yamcha does have it, but he certainly doesn't act thinking that everyone is his missing child. That's just the way he is, and that's why I insist on the idea that he could have been a perfect dad. Perhaps the most perfect.

I am insisting on the father figure because Future Trunks strongly misses his dad. He tells us that he was too young to remember him and that the idea of meeting him for the first time in the past moved him. But why did it move him? Let's remember it: thanks to Future Bulma. With her fantasies about Future Vegeta she colored Trunks' dark life a little, even though at the time she was not sure what she was telling. It didn't matter. All that mattered was that Trunks at least grew up with the idea that the past was a good place thanks in part to his father. As we read in this scene, therefore, we understand that Trunks has a serious need to create memories of his own. It is also a way to give a visual image to his mother's stories, like when a child prefers a book with pictures to a book with only text. That is why Future Trunks stays close to his father, observes him, that is all he needs. As we have noticed, however, things are not quite as he imagined them to be. Vegeta is not what he expected, but the joy of being able to be with him is enough for him to accept him as he is. But... Is it really enough? Think about it. After such a long and difficult journey, after so many legendary tales and especially after so many expectations, how much can it hurt to return home with fewer answers and so many more questions? We do not know exactly what happened during the training between Vegeta and Trunks in the Room of Spirit and Time, but we can safely assume that Vegeta did not open up as Trunks would have liked. It was certainly an emotional moment for him, but not enough to say, "yeah, man, he's really my dad."

The decisive moment occurs precisely during Trunks' death. Earlier we saw that the first one to rescue him is Yamcha, but "obviously" nobody cares because all the attention goes to Vegeta. I understand that. This is the moment when the saiyan prince finally shows his feelings for someone else for the first time. It is not just revenge. Behind Vegeta's reaction is love, and this very feeling will make him frighteningly strong. This naturally amazes everyone, but I am sure that the reaction of the Z-Fighters is due not so much to the increase in his strength as to the fact that Vegeta is having an emotional reaction of this caliber. No one has ever seen him like this. He has officially changed for the better. I am sure Vegeta fans recognize in this scene the split between the ruthless Vegeta of the saiyan saga and the Vegeta we will see in the Buu saga. A new Vegeta has just been born, and everyone has noticed him, even Yamcha who has not had a positive idea about him until then. Actually, it must be said that Yamcha had forgiven Vegeta before anyone else. When Yamcha was still with Bulma, he had agreed to let the saiyan be hosted at his girlfriend's house.

Tien had been the voice of truth. Perhaps his third eye had glimpsed the future, I don't know, but it is quite disturbing to think that some time later this fateful decision would seal the break between Bulma and Yamcha.

What matters for now is that Yamcha has the gift of forgiveness. He did it with Tien when he broke his leg and, although in a different way, he did it with Vegeta who committed much more heinous acts against him. The only difference is that Vegeta never apologized. Once again it is Yamcha who takes a step forward, or rather three steps forward: he forgives the man who killed him, he forgives the man who took away the woman he loved and finally he forgives the man who deprived him of the chance to become a father. Excuse me, but I believe that these three battles are much more intense and difficult than any of the battles we see in Dragon Ball between our heroes and strong monsters. Especially if we think about the fact that Yamcha stays, which doesn't mean that he is just there: the way Yamcha is, it means that he learns to love even those who hurt him and especially to act for their good.

There is only one problem. Trunks cannot see all the love that Vegeta radiates for him. The essence of this scene lies precisely in the fact that finally Future Bulma's tales of Vegeta become real, but what good is all this if Trunks has no way to witness it? A new tale is needed, but this time a real one, based on facts and no longer on memories. A tale that can definitively confirm that Vegeta has a good side and especially cares about his son. So someone must necessarily step up and help Trunks hope again just because of this fantastic news.

...You again, Yamcha?! Then it is a vice! Or maybe you are simply the most beautiful Dragon Ball character ever. Well yes, guys, it is indeed Yamcha who tells Trunks about Vegeta's unexpected heroic feat. He could have told them Krillin or anyone else, but Yamcha's sensitivity precedes all others. In a sense it is as if he is the first to realize that Vegeta has actually changed. We are at the end of the battle. Trunks has been brought back to life and everyone is at Kami's palace. After some small talk and the twist between Krillin and Android 18 (to which Yamcha contributed), the fighters part ways to return home. Yamcha and Trunks head to West City and it is during this journey that Yamcha confesses to the boy what happened. To many it may seem like the least, but think about it very carefully: how many in Yamcha's place would have done the same? I mean, at that moment Yamcha is praising Vegeta for what he did for Trunks. In different words, Yamcha is praising the very man who took away his life, his woman, and the possible marriage he has dreamed of all his life. He had no reason to do it, yet he did it. He could have kept quiet, or told Trunks anything else by deliberately omitting the part about Vegeta out of some sort of personal revenge, but he does not. He does not do it because Yamcha's big heart does not allow him to act in such a mean way. At this very moment he no longer cares what Vegeta did to him. It was enough for him to see him go crazy over Trunks' death to change his mind and accept the fact that Vegeta has changed. That is all Yamcha cares about. Yamcha cares that love guides people, and in this case he cares that Bulma and little Trunks are finally in good hands. The rest no longer matters. The disappointment, humiliation, and anger he feels toward the whole disastrous situation that happened between him, Vegeta, and Bulma is water under the bridge. Yamcha has officially moved on. But it's not just about that. Here Yamcha demonstrates superhuman empathy. He never heard the revelation that Future Trunks told Goku when he first appeared. He did not hear that Trunks had no memories of his father and that this distressed him terribly, yet Yamcha senses this. We have seen how he has formidable intuition, so I am not surprised to believe that he sensed this need in Trunks. He must have imagined that in the future he misses his father figure, and so without a second thought he wanted to give him that warmth that you feel when your father loves you. Once again Yamcha went further and reasoned about situations that are much broader than people think. He took care of the present, but he also took care of the future, and this time without receiving anything in return. Telling Trunks about Vegeta doesn't change his life, but it certainly improves it. It enriches him and he just through all this love that he literally gives to anyone feels stronger and better. Making others feel good is his personal mission. Here we can see that he did it, he got his victory. Trunks' face as he says "my father did?" is full of pride because simply the circle has come full circle. Trunks got the confirmation he was looking for because he knew because of Future Bulma, but he needed to verify it. Yamcha gave peace to his tormented soul.

So guys... I hope it's clear to everyone that if this iconic scene exists, it's really because of Yamcha. I mean, surely Vegeta and Trunks would have said goodbye to each other regardless. But the power of this scene lies precisely in the fact that Trunks knows exactly what happened, what Vegeta did for his son, and as we have seen if he knows it is precisely thanks to Yamcha. In short: Yamcha helped redefine the relationship between Vegeta and Trunks. Yamcha, who as we have seen is the bearer of hope, finally made sense of why Trunks embarked on this journey. He made all of Trunks' dreams come true and in a way allowed him to become stronger, because let's face it, what allows Trunks to beat the androids in his future is not just the super training and battles he does in the past, but more importantly the chance to have experienced all the emotions he was missing and that motivated him to improve his time.

When Trunks returns home, one of the first things he does is tell about the very thing his father did. And if he tells it, let us remember, it is always because of Yamcha. Do you see what I mean? He doesn't give a damn about winning against Cell and the androids. What Trunks takes with him is mostly the emotions accumulated during this incredible experience. Telling about how those monsters were beaten would not have added anything new, because they live in a world where people fight for survival. Telling instead how love and teamwork made all the difference is completely new for him. That is what really matters. We are humans, not robots. There is no point in struggling if you don't have emotions with you. Trunks finally got them. He is finally different from the androids and can now defeat them.

I think the best part of this scene is Future Bulma's reaction. Here we learn that she had indeed ventured a little in telling Trunks about Vegeta. She was not sure about Vegeta's good side either, but she still told her son about it to comfort him. We can see how shocked she is to learn such news. From here we can infer that Future Vegeta was not even a partner in attendance. Somewhat like the Vegeta of the present. In fact, his closeness to Bulma and Trunks occurs after Cell Arc. Not having been able to experience it, Future Bulma was left with the idea that Vegeta had an unexplored good side that she never really saw. She only guessed at it. Therefore, we can say that Yamcha's words have resolved even Future Bulma's doubts. In the present, Yamcha must have noticed the substantial difference between him and Vegeta vis-à-vis Bulma. If Yamcha was affectionate and close, Vegeta is distant and cold. He probably resents that Vegeta behaves this way toward Bulma. Assuming Yamcha sensed that Trunks' future was loveless, it is easy to imagine that he also thought Future Bulma was left alone with her conflicts. After all, Vegeta's change occurred only in the past because some events were changed with Trunks' arrival. It is an exception. I like to think that Yamcha also wanted to help Future Bulma by letting her know that Future Vegeta could learn to love if he had a little more time. Why he did this we will never know. We may think that he did it because Yamcha still loves Bulma, but that would be reductive. Yamcha did it because he just loves. Giving hope is what he does best. It is quite ironic that Yamcha helped the same person who besmirched his memory by telling that he was some kind of playboy. I think it is particularly noticeable here how great Yamcha actually is. Of course he does not know what Future Bulma actually told about him. Trunks only reveals it to Goku, and the only one who hears it is Piccolo. But I am sure that even if Yamcha had known that Future Bulma did not speak highly of him, he would still have done his best to take care of her in every time arc. Lastly he simply enhanced Vegeta's own image. I think it is the most immense act Yamcha could do: to love his greatest enemy. I proudly say that Yamcha, after taking care of the past and the present, has saved even the future. Without exaggeration, he is the one who maintained the link between these three time arcs. If I may say so, he is precisely the one who most represents the theme of this saga.

I would like to conclude with two thoughts...

Any nostalgic Dragon Ball fan knows full well how important Goku's grandfather is. Son Gohan is a kind of angel who watches over the little saiyan from the very beginning, via the dragon ball with the four stars. There is one scene in particular that moves me so much. This is the exact moment when Son Gohan relinquishes this role of guardian angel to Goku's friends. If we want to dwell on Yamcha, I think he is the one who most of all took these words literally. Not only because indeed Yamcha took care of Goku during his illness, but especially because he extended this commandment. Yamcha has really taken care of everyone who is connected to Goku for some reason, precisely because Goku's happiness also depends on those around him. Taking care of Goku also means taking care of his affections, and Yamcha, as we have seen, has done this with everyone. He took care of his wife Chichi, his son Gohan, but also Tien and Krillin, two of Goku's great friends, and finally the saiyans and Bulma. I like to think that it all starts from this very scene, even though Yamcha has always been inclined to help anyone.

At the end of the Cell Arc, the carefree atmosphere of Dragon Ball returns. The one we can't do without, the one that brings us back, when gags were the soul of this story. The reason for all the laughter we witness at Kami's palace is Yamcha. He is the one who makes people laugh because he is afraid of Android 18 and he is the one who relieves the tension by entertaining everyone with his jokes. Among these jokes is one really particular one that on the surface makes him look like an idiot.

Theoretically we should mock him because he has not exactly been lucky in love. His one experience was shattered. Bulma even describes him as a playboy, so his line seems rather grotesque. Butl... After all we've seen, did Yamcha really say bullshit? Okay, he may not be lucky in love relationships, but who says that the love he is talking about is only that which is born between two guys? We saw through him that love is not only between lovers. Love can be between friends, brothers, fathers and sons, ex-girlfriends and even rivals. It doesn't matter who gets it and how they get it: the important thing is only to get it. Yamcha is the one who most spreads love in Dragon Ball. He is the one who gives soul and humanity to Dragon Ball. It is sad to think that he is the one who does not get love in return. But he doesn't care. By giving love he feels loved.

Since hope is what Dragon Ball is based on…. I continue to hope that Yamcha, too, will one day get his well-deserved victory in battle. Because... Let's face it, as a character he has long since won.

Thank you, Yamcha.

Thank you for coming so far. This is definitely my most difficult and exciting topic. It was crazy to write so much about Yamcha but it was worth it. I don’t care how many people read. Having left this opinion could be useful in the future, maybe not, but it’s okay: analyzing Yamcha’s soul was like rediscovering the beauty of being human. I think that’s the most important thing.

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literary-illuminati · 7 months

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Book Review 50 – Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel

I read this book over the course of one day and two flights,, which on the one hand was probably not the best way to do it but on the other is kind of appropriate given the prominence of travel and dislocation to the narrative. Anyway, reading so quickly and then spending a week on vacation without time to work on this review does mean that my thoughts are all a bit vague and muddled, so apologies about that in advance. Anyways!

The only other work of St. John Mandel’s I’ve read was Station Eleven, which was easily one of the best things I read last year and good enough to put this on my TBR as well. I went in basically entirely blind, beyond the basics of ‘time travel’ and ‘COVID novel’. It might just be that my expectations were too high, but frankly I found it a fairly disappointing read, and pretty strictly inferior to Station Eleven in just about everything – the later even manages to be a better pandemic novel despite the handicap of being published in 2014. My main reaction to finishing it was something along the lines of ‘that’s it?’ and then going back to staring down at the clouds.

The book jumps POVs a fair bit, but the deuteragonists are an author on a global book tour in the days before a pandemic sweeps the world (and moon) in the 22nd century, and a bit of an aimless failson in the 23rd who gets a job investigating a temporal anomaly through the power of nepotism and goes back to interview her and a few others across the centuries who were touched by it. The detective is the one who drives essentially all of the plot and makes all the choices – none of the POVs are really filled with a surfeit of passion or drive, the author is the only one who seems to particularly like her life – but by wordcount and focus I very much got the sense that the author was far more of the book’s emotional heart than the 20th or 21st century POVs. (Which is something of a shame, because I found both of them rather more compelling in the screentime they did have, being honest).

The plot is, well, thin. Our 23rd century POV (a hotel detective) is repeatedly told that he will be tempted to do something (save the author from her scheduled pandemic death) and warned of consequences if he does, repeatedly promises that he will not, and then as soon as the chance presents itself does the thing with basically no warning or introspection, after which he faces almost exactly the consequences he was warned of. He is then saved through the power of a supergenius sister ex machina, and the whole anomaly is tied up in a neat time loop in a vague reality-as-narrative sort of way. As a work that’s more literary than genre the characters all felt kind of flat and static, no one ever really surprised or fascinated me.

And as far as it as a science fiction novel goes, I don’t know – there’s a decent chance it’s a much more impressive read if you haven’t zoned out scrolling past dozens of pages of earnest debate on the simulation hypothesis and read/watched however many different time loop stories before? It could have all fit pretty nicely in a mid-season Doctor Who episode, honestly, and I don’t really mean that as a compliment.

Emotionally, the experience of living through COVID is pretty clearly at the heart of the thing. Both the sense of pure terror at realizing your survival is a matter of luck and statistics, the isolation and alienation from the world that’s part and parcel of lockdown, the sort of awesome horror at looking back across history and realizing how totally unremarkable seeing such mass death around you is over the centuries, how in a generation it will be nothing but a bit of trivia. This stuff was definitely more compelling than the rest of the book, though it did fall prey to a rapidly growing pet peeve of mine and just kind of forgot all the ‘essential workers’ who weren’t doctors or nurses and just kind of write them out of the universal pandemic lockdown experience.

Anyway yeah, not in any sense a badly written book, but I found it a disappointment.

#book review #sff #sea of tranquility #emily st john mandel #lit

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scarlet--wiccan · 5 months

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Do you have a good reading order for JeriWanda?

Well, they haven't actually been in very many comics together, so you can pretty much just read everything. This is also a timeline of Jericho's friendship with Pietro.

Avengers & X-Men: AXIS (2014) #8-9-- Jericho is resurrected after his death in New Avengers (2010), and teams up with Pietro, Erik, and Doom to save Wanda and end the Inversion crisis.

Uncanny Avengers miniseries (2015)-- Jericho and the twins are part of an expedition to Counter-Earth.

Uncanny Avengers ongoing (2015)-- Jericho and Pietro are main cast members throughout the series. Wanda joins the cast in #26; she and Jericho officially become a couple in #30.

Doctor Strange (2015)-- features a large supporting cast of magic characters, including Wanda and Jericho, especially in the Last Days of Magic storyline, spanning #6-10.

Civil War II (2016)-- Wanda, Jericho, and Billy are part of a magic team that performs a large spell to banish a Celestial from Earth. This scene is depicted in several other event tie-ins.

Avengers: No Surrender (2018)-- A crossover event comprised of Avengers legacy issues #675-690. Wanda and Jericho appear, as a couple, throughout the event.

Quicksilver: No Surrender (2018)-- following the previous Avengers event, Wanda, Jericho, and Synapse help Pietro escape a frozen temporal plane.

Avengers: No Road Home (2019)-- Wanda is a main cast member and makes frequent references to their relationship; Jericho appears in the final issue.

Empyre: Avengers (2020)-- an event tie-in. Wanda and Jericho have a storyline together.

Strange Academy (2020)-- Jericho is a headmaster at the newly-formed Strange Academy. Wanda is a faculty member, but has a much smaller role in the series. Their relationship is never addressed, and it is not acknowledged again for the next three years.

Scarlet Witch (2023)-- issue #9 lampshades the fact that Wanda and Jericho have been on a "break," with a hint that they still have feelings for each other.

If you want to do a more comprehensive read, you can supplement this list with Scarlet Witch (2014), Darkhold (2021), Trial of Magneto (2021), and Savage Avengers (2019). Wanda and Jericho are not in these books as a couple, but they are major storylines for the two of them individually. Wanda also has a pretty big role in Secret Empire (2017), but I wouldn't waste my time reading it if I were you-- you just need to know she got possessed by Chthon again, and eventually gets better, which leads into her rejoining Uncanny Avengers in #26.

#wandajericho #wanda maximoff #scarlet witch #jericho drumm #doctor voodoo

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kalcia · 1 year

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This year has been very difficult for me. It all has started around a year ago, when I caught covid.

I have underlying neurological condition (temporal lobe epilepsy) which in the combo with covid has completely fucked my right hand and right leg.

This year I’ve spent at 4 hospitals, seeing dozens of different doctors, done countless of tests, received many scary and ridiculous diagnosis, received invasive treatments (immunosuppressants, immunoglobulins, even Botox injections in my hand which btw, put my hand out of commission for 3 months and made everything worse) for said conditions only for them not to work.

All of that just at the end to hear the doctors finally go back on their crazy diagnosis and entertain the idea of post covid neurological damage (despite the discharge papers from the last hospital stated ‘for further diagnosis’, I was basically left to fend for myself…).

All in all, for all tense and purposes I should be a healthy individual (as healthy as a person with autoimmune conditions can be). Because aside from certain things in my spinal fluid everything is absolutely fine!

I’m right handed, or I should say I WAS right handed, since I’m still unable to use my right hand to it’s full potential and I’ve no idea if I ever will. I can’t eat, draw, write with it. Movement is very slow, so using mouse or keyboard is difficult as well. Carrying things is difficult as well, because I seem to be lacking ‘gyroscope’ in my hand ;)

But I’m walking normally again, so at least that! Muscle spasms/tremors in my right hand lessened (basically gone) as well. And it’s all thanks to physical therapy that NO doctor suggested I should do!

This year has been very hard for me, physically and mentally, I’ve struggled a lot, I thought of the worst. But I think I’m slowly accepting my limitations. I have very supportive family and friends and I think I wouldn’t have been able to continue like this if it wasn’t for them.

Heh… @fawn-eyed-girl used a words ‘tenacity’ and ‘determination’ to describe me and I think they are accurate, because I’m overcoming the obstacles that life has thrown at me. I didn’t accept defeat and I’ve decided to learn how to draw with my left hand.

As @neutronstarchild said: it’s all in my mind, my knowledge and skill, and hopefully talent are all in my mind, hand is just an extension.

So all the art you are seeing me post this year has been done with my non-dominant hand, that is slowly turning into my dominant hand ;)

Sorry about the long post, I just thought I’d share this years summary, in the hope of next year turning out better!

Ps. In 2020 my husband and I had planned a trip to Japan as our honeymoon, but covid happened and we had to postpone, we are planning to go in March next year (saving up mode - on!)I’m still in the process of learning how to eat with chopsticks lol

#kalciart

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thewakingcloak · 4 months

Text

The State of Things Past

this post is mirrored from the Studio Spacefarer Patreon! please consider supporting me, and you’ll get access to devlog posts, gifs, and other info before the public!

Like I mentioned in my previous post, The Waking Cloak has been in development for eight years.

ProtoDungeon: Episode III has itself been in development for a few years, pretty much since 2019 (oooof). I've gotten plenty of questions about how the project is coming, as well as the occasional question of whether The Waking Cloak / ProtoDungeon is even alive at all at this point. Thank you for asking this. It means people are still interested in these games.

Okay, but still, what happened? Why are things taking so long? Well, this post is the first in the Christmas Carol series, in which the ~Ghost of Spacefarer Past~ appears to explain things (wooo spooky explanation sounds).

Progress has been made, very slowly, on ProtoDungeon: Episode III. I'd love to have done more, but, well… in the time since I released Episode II, we continued adjusting to parenthood for our first kid, went through the pandemic, had a second baby (who is now almost 3yo), and survived through a series of really difficult events, which culminated in a move to a new house in a new town and the start of a new chapter (but that last bit we'll save that for the Ghost of Christmas Present so he feels useful).

But yeah, it's been a rough ride. My wife and I are intentionally open about what's been going on. At the same time, the internet is an extremely public place, and I don't want to overshare, or worse, trigger anything for anyone, so I'll try to keep this list brief:

Two miscarriages (the first one was late term, and absolutely, brutally devastating)

The loss of our faith community due to the pandemic

Loss of job for my wife due to the pandemic (the pandemic was unkind to teachers)

Loss of a dream job prospect for my wife (same issue)

The great Texas freeze and power outage (us huddling under blankets in shifts through the night with our newborn infant (he's fine now!))

Severe, life-threatening post-partum and post-natal depression

Family covid and two-week cabin-fever quarantines (twice, despite being vaccinated and careful)

The death of my grandma (we were not able to attend her memorial due to aforementioned covid and living on the other side of the country)

Multiple heart attacks for my father despite his active and healthy lifestyle

Autoimmune disease scare for my wife (may still be a thing, just dormant?)

etc., etc., ad infinitum.

A lot of people have had things significantly worse, so this is definitely not an attempt to "compare griefs" as it were. This is just context for, no matter how much I wanted it to be otherwise, the fact that I didn't have the mental or emotional (or temporal) space for creativity. It was one thing after another, and we were just trying to keep our heads above water.

Even when we'd mostly recovered from the hits that just kept comin', we moved away from what my wife lovingly refers to as the "trauma house", and she started a teaching job at a brand-new school. Both were good things, but they were pretty big transitions, and it takes time for the ol' brains to adjust. We love our new home now and have a bit more breathing room.

Okay but also I HAVE been working on ProtoDungeon. Dev was really sporadic, but it did happen. The next post will have more detail on the status of Episode III, but there were kind of two big things I worked on during the past three years, big shifts in the foundation of ProtoDungeon and The Waking Cloak.

First, I switched game perspective. I made a few posts about this a while back, but PD/TWC interiors were originally like Zelda interiors (where you see the insides of all four walls). There are good reasons to do this, but it was also kinda making me crazy. So I switched to a more natural front-perspective, keeping things consistent with the exteriors. It definitely was the right choice for the game I wanted to build, but it took time.

Second, and building on that, I made the game fully faux-3D. You can walk behind or in front of stuff--not something the old Zelda games did, and still pretty rare for 2D games. I was toying with the idea for a long time, but I played through an old PlayStation title, Alundra, and that convinced me it could be done. It's way harder than you might expect, and it was a massive block for me for literally years. I was able to slowly work my way past it and finally resolved it with a 3D z-tilting method, but dev slowed to a crawl.

And that's it for now! The ghost releases you from your vision of Spacefarer Past….

Thanks for reading :)

#gamedev #indiedev #the waking cloak #devlog #devblog #game development #protodungeon

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adventure-showdown · 6 months

Text

What is your favourite Doctor Who story?

ROUND 1 MASTERPOST

synopses and propaganda under the cut

The Left-Handed Hummingbird

Synopsis

He took up a firing stance, holding the thirty-eight out in front of him. "Mr Lennon?" he said.

1968: Cristian Alvarez meets the Seventh Doctor in London.

1978: The great temple of the Aztecs is discovered in Mexico.

1980: John Lennon is murdered in New York.

1994: A gunman runs amok in Mexico City.

Each time, Cristian is there. Each time, he experiences the Blue, a traumatic psychic shock. Only the Doctor can help him – but the Doctor has problems of his own. Following the events of Blood Heat and the Dimension Riders, the Doctor knows that someone or something has been tinkering with time. Now he finds that events in his own past have been altered – and a lethal force from South America's prehistory has been released.

The Doctor, Ace and Bernice travel to the Aztec Empire in 1487, to London in the Swinging Sixties, and to the sinking of the Titanic as they attempt to rectify the temporal faults -- and survive the attacks of the living god Huitzilin.

Propaganda

First story from Kate Orman! It’s weird, strange, and uniquely her! (@finalpam8000 )

Human Nature

Synopsis

"Who's going to save us this time?"

April, 1914. The inhabitants of the little Norfolk town of Farringham are enjoying an early summer, unaware that war is on the way. Amongst them is Dr John Smith, a short, middle-aged history teacher from Aberdeen. He's having a hard time with his new post as house master at Hulton College, a school dedicated to producing military officers.

Bernice Summerfield is enjoying her holiday in the town, getting over the terrible events that befell her in France. But then she meets a future Doctor, and things start to get dangerous very quickly. With the Doctor she knows gone, and only a suffragette and an elderly rake for company, can Benny fight off a vicious alien attack? And will Dr Smith be able to save the day?

Propaganda

the tv adaptation of this has tighter writing but the book has. idk a lot of stuff in it that's interesting that unfortunately didn't make it into the episodes. i think they should fight (October)

Lungbarrow

Synopsis

"Nonsense, child", retorted the Doctor. "Grandfather indeed! I've never seen you before in my life!"

All is not well on Gallifrey. Chris Cwej is having someone else's nightmares. Ace is talking to herself. So is K9. Leela has stumbled on a murderous family conspiracy. And the beleaguered Lady President, Romanadvoratrelundar, foresees one of the most tumultuous events in her planet's history.

At the root of all is an ancient and terrible place, the House of Lungbarrow in the southern mountains of Gallifrey. Something momentous is happening there. But the House has inexplicably gone missing.

673 years ago the Doctor left his family in that forgotten House. Abandoned, disgraced and resentful, they have waited. And now he's home at last.

In this, the Seventh Doctor's final New Adventure, he faces a threat that could uncover the greatest secret of them all.

Propaganda

cornerstone of weird doctor who lore and jokes about looms (anonymous)

Is it good? No. But damn if it doesn't cause some good fandom fights. #LoomRights (@eighthdoctor)

The Blood Cell

Synopsis

"Release the Doctor — or the killing will start."

An asteroid in the furthest reaches of space — the most secure prison for the most dangerous of criminals. The Governor is responsible for the worst fraudsters and the cruellest murderers. So he's certainly not impressed by the arrival of the man they're calling the most dangerous criminal in the quadrant. Or, as he prefers to be known, the Doctor.

What does impress the Governor is the way the new prisoner immediately sets about trying to escape. And keeps trying. Finally, he sends for the Doctor and asks him why? But the answer surprises even the Governor. And then there's the threat — unless the Governor listens to the Doctor, a lot of people will die.

Who is the Doctor and what's he really doing here? Why does he want to help the Governor? And who is the young woman who comes every day to visit him, only to be turned away by the guards?

When the killing finally starts, the Governor begins to get his answers...

Propaganda

12 and Clara's greatest adventure, some really exciting moments, cool plot, a very good side chracter, just fun times (anonymous)

Engines of War

Synopsis

"The death of billions is as nothing to us, Doctor, if it helps defeat the Daleks."

The Great Time War has raged for centuries, ravaging the universe. Scores of human colony planets are now overrun by Dalek occupation forces. A weary, angry Doctor leads a flotilla of Battle TARDISes against the Dalek stronghold but in the midst of the carnage, the Doctor's TARDIS crashes to a planet below: Moldox.

As the Doctor is trapped in an apocalyptic landscape, Dalek patrols roam amongst the wreckage, rounding up the remaining civilians. But why haven't the Daleks simply killed the humans?

Searching for answers the Doctor meets 'Cinder', a young Dalek hunter. Their struggles to discover the Dalek plan take them from the ruins of Moldox to the halls of Gallifrey, and set in motion a chain of events that will change everything. And everyone.

An epic novel of the Great Time War featuring the War Doctor as played by John Hurt.

Propaganda no propaganda submitted

#round 1

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csolarstorm · 6 months

Text

Thoughts on Loki, Episode 2-5: Science/Fiction

Can these characters just cool it with the dying metaphors for one second? First we get pruning, which sends people to the end of time, which is basically purgatory. Mobius gets pruned, Loki gets pruned. Sylvie feels left out so she prunes herself.

Now that pruning is old, spaghetti-fying takes its spot this season as the new way to not really die at least not permanently. Not only does p-p-poor Mr. Victor Timely "die" heroically, we can assume everyone else got spaghetti-fied in the explosion of the Temporal Loom. And then when Loki gets the gang back together in Ep. 5, they get noodle-d all over again! Not to mention the poor record store guy, whose first reaction to the incomprensible failure of spactime was to warn and/or protect Sylvie. Aw, what a guy.

I have to confess I still don't understand the Temporal Loom. It's taking raw time and weaving it into timelines, and without it...time falls apart? Without it, time is "raw" and organized time doesn't exist? Okay, then how did the universe work BEFORE the Temporal Loom? Does every universe have a TVA and a Temporal Loom literally creating their timeline? Why does the fabric of spacetime literally depend on Kang? That doesn't seem right.

It would make more sense if "raw" time is still something people can live in, and the Loom was just organizing "raw" time for He Who Remains' timeline. But after Episode 5, it's pretty clear that the literal fate of the multiverse depends on the Temporal Loom working, and I find that a bit ridiculous. Hopefully I'm missing something.

I have a theory about Loki's time jumping. We see him meeting himself at different points in time several times in the show. He really seems fractured, scattered throughout time. What if this is what it's like to be spaghetti? Maybe each of these Lokis are a single noodle of the Loki scattered through time, and each noodles looks like a snapshot of Loki, until they glitch and twist and collapse on themselves, snapping to other times like a noodle attached to another end.

Does this theory affect anything? Absolutely not.

In the next episode, Loki, the fledgling God of Stories, will attempt to rewrite the Temporal Loom explosion so they can save the TVA and all time, always, because apparently the multiverse needs the TVA to function. As he keeps trying, we are sure to see more explosions and more spaghetti before he figures it out. And that leads me to my point:

Dying and being reborn with new knowledge is such an integral theme to Loki. This new Loki is a symbolic reincarnation of the Loki that that Thanos killed. He made friends, learned humility, fell in love, seriously considered questions about the greater good, and then acknowledged his power and responsibility as a voice in the reform of the TVA.

Whenever he experiences metaphorical "death", he learns information that changes his entire paradigm. When he's pruned in the first season, he goes through his own little Divine Comedy. He learns perspective about himself from spending time with his variants. He learns about Alioth, a pivotal piece of the multiversal war. And he meets He Who Remains, who changes his entire perspective on existence.

In Season 2, Loki's rebirth after the explosion of the Temporal Loom shows him his friends and their backstories, what gives them joy and why he wants to save the TVA so badly. With this new understanding of what he really wants, he is able to control his time jumping, as if he's been reborn onto a higher plane.

The fall streaming schedule this year has been a gold mine. There was Gen V, Loki, Rick and Morty (ironically the spaghetti episode is coming up...or is it on purpose...) and now even the return of Invincible. Loki has come really close to the quality of last season, and it does a good job of doing something really different and yet thematically the same to keep a coherent and gripping show.

#Loki #mcu loki #Loki show #Loki series #Loki season two #Loki season 2 #mcu #marvel #marvel mcu

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