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lone-sk · 4 months

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Hey, so! I thought it would be fun to do a tier list of all the games I played for the first time this year, and discuss my thoughts on them. Tiers are unordered, thoughts below the cut.

Super Meat Boy -

Just a fun ass time. Excellent platforming, a great difficultly curve, fun level gimmicks, and a solid amount of content. Basically as flawless as a video game can get.

The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth -

I've never played a roguelike where each run felt so unique. All the different shit you can do with ability synergies and items is insane, the skill ceiling for this game is practically infinite. This is what the roguelike genre has the potential to be, and every other roguelike is now worse because they aren't this good.

Dark Souls Remastered -

Yeah, the combat is improved in later entries, but the level and world design here is unmatched. Each segment flows together so seamlessly, combined with the top notch atmosphere and aesthetic for an unforgettable experience.

Psycholonials -

A really exceptional visual novel that talks about the pandemic, the internet, and just kinda what its like being a young adult nowadays. Captures a lot of weird and intense feelings. It makes you feel so emotionally drained after every chapter, and I mean that as a compliment.

Persona 5 Royal -

There are so many interconnected systems in this game, but they're all so balanced and intuitive. The developers thought of everything, and every time you get complacent, they pull another trick out of their sleeves to keep you on edge. Masterclass of pacing. Plus, the visual style is leagues above anything else out right now. The RPG mechanics are even somewhat manageable as well. It just feels good to play, and never really fumbles.

Class of 09 -

A visual novel that is both really funny, and really profound. Kinda similar to MTV's Daria, with a lot more edge. I do appreciate that there is a message - several really - at the core of it's various endings, and it's not just being edgy for the sake of it. The voicework really caries the experience, especially in contrast to the inconsistent artstyle. I get that they want to go for the shitty deviantart anime style, but some of the endcards just look bad.

Class of 09: The Re-Up -

Pretty much a direct improvement in every way. More scenes are hand illustrated now, and the artstyle looks a lot more palatable now. The voice actors are given more challenging scenes, and they absolutely rise to the occasion. There are less endings, and less content overall, but it's higher quality.

Cruelty Squad -

Everyone seems to talk about this games art style, but honestly, I just really liked the gameplay. Lots of high skill movement mechanics, paired with challenging level design, and a dash of immersive sim mechanics make for an engaging experience.

Melty Blood: Type Lumina -

A fighting game that combines the mobility of a platform fighter, with the combos and depth of a traditional fighter. Takes the best of both genres with none of the cons. I only wish the netplay was better.

Shenzhen I/O -

A puzzle game that involves programing and arranging circuits. Fun, but very challenging. Or maybe I'm just dumb.

Pentiment -

Disco Elysium but set in a 15th century European monastery. It's well written, and has cool art, but doesn't really have the memorable, interesting characters of Disco. Plus, it asks the player to learn a lot about medieval history. Like a lot.

Dead Cells -

A fun enough roguelike, but it runs out of steam pretty quickly, faster than you'd expect for this genre. After a while, you run out of good long term progression unlocks, and the difficultly curve really spikes. I got stuck at a point where I could beat through all of the stages easily, but then the end boss would wipe me out really quickly.

Hotline Miami -

Lots of visceral, gory gameplay. The aesthetics and art direction are on point as well, more so than normal for one of these games that was clearly made for a gamejam. The controls do kinda suck though, the lock on mechanic is especially unintuitive. It's almost impossible to play on controller.

Exa Punks -

Another fun programming puzzle game. The gimmick of having little robots you give commands to is fun, and kinda reminds me of those websites that teach coding in similar ways. The only problem is that the objective of levels can be unclear.

Watch Dogs 2 -

I'm surprised a Ubisoft sandbox is this high, but this game really grew on me. The gameplay is mostly similar to the stuff you can do on the hacking skill tree in Cyberpunk 2077, but more fleshed out and intuitive, really fun stuff. The story, too, is surprisingly pretty good. They also push the messaging pretty far, nothing that's proper like, anti-corporation or anything, but it's pretty anti-silicon valley, anti-walled garden tech, stuff like that. Shattered my incredibly low expectations, good job guys.

The Coffin of Andy and Leyley -

Overrated as fuck in my opinion. It starts out strong, but the pacing gets flattened by the end of chapter 2, and it feels like the developers don't know where to go from here. There are so many little bits and pieces of the story, with the cult, the demons, the weird shit to do with blood types - and I don't think there's any way to take these ideas, build on top of the story so far, and have something cohesive, or satisfying. And if you're just here for the incest, it's only in one scene at the end of one of the possible endings, so what the hell was even the point.

Shadows of Doubt -

A procedurally generated detective game, which gets points for letting you do pretty much everything. Like it's an admirable level of detail, you can do shit like break into the phone lines in order to trace someone's call. It just doesn't really click with my brain, I guess. Like it could be tutorialized a bit more, so the player has a better idea of what they can do. Plus after a while, you exhaust all the different cases there can be, and they all get predictable and formulaic. I do hope there are more content updates in the future, this is a great base to build off.

Psychonaughts 2 -

The world and characters in this game are all really good, but the story is really a drag for me. The first game had this goofy, silly vibe to it, but the story here is so overly focused on like, acknowledging how fucked up it is that you can go into people's minds and change their personality like that, which I always thought was kinda the joke of the original. Plus the gameplay is like, just okay, although a lot of the levels are too long, which feels like a weird complaint, but I ended up getting bored a lot.

Pseudoregalia -

Excellent platforming with dogshit level design. Once I left the tutorial stage, I was constantly confused about where I needed to go, and what I needed to do, and even where I was. Just some of the worst game design I've ever fucking seen. Abysmal shit. But, the movement is pretty spectacular, so I did end up finishing it. I hope people find out how to mod level packs in, that would be hype.

Pizza Tower -

I had the same issue with this game that I did with Mario Odyssey. The main character has such a distinct and refined moveset, so why am I spending half of most levels as someone who is not the main character? I don't understand this focus on captures. I still had a lot of fun, but it's frustrating as fuck, when you want to play as the fun character with the deep, high skill ceiling moveset, and the game does not want you to do that for some reason.

TIS-100 -

Another puzzle game for smart people, which is brought down a bit from not really having an art style. I dunno, I get wanting to be minimal and cool, but at least give me background music, come on guys.

FAITH: THE UNHOLY TRINITY -

I do respect the commitment to the Atari 2600 art style, but if anything this just proved why most "retro"style games went for the style of later console games. The gameplay is literally almost nothing, and I have a hard time getting into any story that's told in 90% text logs. The style makes for some effective horror, outside of that I had a hard time getting anything out of this.

ALAN WAKE II -

I feel like the devs did not consider the combat system here. Like the entire point of making combat clunky and resource - dependent is to force the player to pick and choose their battles. It falls apart when you're constantly forcing them to kill enemies. That, and the corkboard puzzle sections don't really require any thinking to solve, you can just brute force them. They aren't very intuitive either, it's such a transparent way to just, progress the plot instantly. I did like the story though, for the most part, and the visual style is pretty fantastic. Lots of eerie, abandoned scenes, I love it.

Hotline Miami 2 -

Whatever improvements to the art style and gameplay are negated by the terrible level design. Lots of wide open spaces, where an enemy off screen will shoot you, and you have to duck out of cover, spraying at them with an SMG that has random spread. Lots of glass, lots of levels that only really have one route, lots of getting killed by random enemies you didn't even notice. Just really frustrating stuff.

Teardown -

The tech used here is really cool, I just wish they used it in a better way. The levels are barely passable, there's no real difficulty curve, or ideas that get expanded upon. It still feels like a tech demo.

Hiveswap Act 1 -

It's a perfectly inoffensive point and click adventure game. The art is well made, I like the story, and I thought Joey and Xefros were cute together. It's just missing something to really bump it any higher. It's short, and the puzzles are all either obtuse as fuck or super easy to solve. I also have a hard time figuring out who this is for. I don't know if Homestuck fans or point-and-click adventure fans would get a lot out of this.

Yakuza 0 -

I had a hard time getting into this one. The main story is just too soap opera for me. So many characters with complicated relationships, so many dramatic declarations and cutscenes. The combat is also just okay. The side content is really great, but it's hard for that to carry the entire experience for me. What a weird game.

Critters for Sale -

It's difficult, because I think there's a lot of cool techniques here that would help push visual novels as a medium forward. Lots of cool visual effects and fun mini games. Being very clear and upfront about how many endings and routes there are. Good menu and UIs. But the stories are just, not very good? Like I can remember maybe one or two individual moments, but most of the game I've totally forgotten about. Except for the Death Grips storyline, what the fuck was that?

Far Cry 3 -

Everyone gasses up the main story on this one, but lets be honest, it kinda sucks. Vaas is great, but who gives a shit about any of Ethan's friends? Or Ethan himself? Plus, the gunplay and exploration were both so generic. They were probably impressive like a decade ago, but now? I can get this same experience in 20 other games, do something interesting with it, or get out.

Not for Broadcast -

A game that really had me, and then really lost me. At first, the gameplay is mostly basic video editing stuff - keeping the camera on the person talking, censoring curse words, stuff like that. Ok, makes sense, it's fun. But they slowly add more gameplay that's just busy work, and the story really goes off the rails, and I couldn't take it seriously anymore. It basically turns into watching Monty Python skits while solving a Rubik's cube.

Gunfire Reborn -

A roguelike fps that just kinda sucks. The "roguelike" elements don't change anything massive about your run, just enemy placement and weapon pick ups. And it runs on like, Borderlands progression, where you're just looking for stuff with the bigger number. The combat feels shitty too. Shitty movement, abilities and guns that don't feel satisfying to use, what a terrible experience. I hate how every FPS makes "difficult" enemies by just adding more HP.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch -

Boring as fuck. The story was boring, the combat was boring, the world was generic, I feel like I've played this game twenty fucking times already.

Jedi Fallen Order -

Dark Souls if it sucked. You can always tell if a game was made in Unreal Engine if it has shitty, floaty movement, and for a soulslike, not having precise movement really fucks with the entire experience. There are also too many ranged enemies, which is a problem when your character is melee focused. The levels suck, and the story is shit. Fucking Star Wars fans will buy anything.

Bastion -

It's Hades, but everything is 1% as good. I guess it was interesting to see the roots of certain ideas, but everything is just slower and not fun. Literally no reason to play it now outside of some historical curiosity.

City of Gangsters -

There are so many interesting systems here. You can set up specific routes for your crew to perform at specific times, down to the location, and action, but honestly, it just doesn't scale well. In video games that revolve around storing shit, the complexity ramps up much faster than it does in most games, and if you don't provide the player the tools for handling it, it's just overwhelming. I appreciate the ambition, but this needed like, another half year of dev time, minimum.

Outcore -

I've never played a game that was this self conscious. You can skip pretty much all of the gameplay, although it's not like it offers a lot outside of rip offs of better games. So much could have been done with this concept of a desktop buddy coming to life, but instead, I am presented with a rip off of the Flowey fight from Undertale. Guess it's not plagarism if you frame it as an homage. Get the fuck out of here.

Clone Drone in the Danger Zone -

It needs more. More upgrades, more enemies, more weapons, more arena designs. As it is, it feels like a gamejam game.

Hiveswap Act 2 -

Oh my god the story is so terrible. Imagine thinking that it's a good idea to introduce 30 characters in a 4 hour game. Barely any of them are interesting, either, and even if you do end up liking one, it's not like they can be a significant part of the story, because we've got 29 more of the fuckers to introduce. Plus there's an Ace Attorney segment like halfway through which is really hard to get through if you've never played one of those games. I don't see anyone enjoying this, outside of the really hardcore Homestuck/troll fans, and even then, do you know how much fan fiction for this series exists? And how much of it is really good?

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linkspooky · 3 years

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Shigaraki and Dabi

Heroes hurt their own families in order to help complete strangers. Words said by Shigaraki, and lived by Dabi. If you haven’t noticed, there’s quite a lot of parallels between the two of them. Especially their childhood selves, dark haired hero hopefuls whose hair turned white due to stress and eventually fell and became villains. They were the children closest to the heroes, the son of Endeavor, the grandson of Nana Shimura, and yet both of them fell through the cracks the hardest. Let’s talk about the foiling of these two, under the cut.

1. Father Says No

Both Shigaraki and Dabi are characters who grew up in a strict, patriarchical household where the father was the head of the household and determined all the rules.

The Shimura household was built by Koutarou, who held all the money, and therefore determined all the rules. The same can be said for the Todoroki household, which only came into being to fuel Enji’s ambitions. This is something Enji literally thinks, his first priority when having children was not to love and raise them, but to raise heirs that would carry on his quirk and make up for the weakness in it.

Enji also literally used his financial wealth and status to pressure her family into arranging a marriage. In the households, the patriarch is the ultimate authority and cannot be questioned. Koutarou sets the rules of the household because he has all the money. Endeavor sets the rules of the household because these children are there to be his heirs. Toya and Tenko both break the rules in their father’s households in some way and become scapegoats.

Ironically, they break the rules in opposite ways. Tenko, because he wants to become a hero.

Toya, because his flawof the flames being too harsh for his flame constitution and burning his own skin makes him unable to become a hero and carry on his father’s legacy.

Quick tangent to explain what I mean with Toya. This is speculation, because we haven’t been shown the exact details, so feel free to point and laugh at me if I’m wrong. Endeavor says (incorrectly) that if Toya had reached his goal for him, that all of his pent up negative emotions would have disappeared just like that. (They wouldn’t.)

Which means, Endeavor once again projected himself on his child. Toya was supposed to fix all Endeavor’s hurt feelings for him. So, when Toya failed at the training. When Toya wasn’t good enough. When Toya was flawed.

Which means it’s likely, Toya went in Endeavor’s mind from being the one who could carry his dreams, to being the one that Endeavor could scapegoat to blame for his negative emotions. Which meant, at some point he tossed Toya aside. At that point he started treating Toya differently. Toya probably pushed himself more and more to try to go back to the way things used to be, which is probably why his hair turning white, he started to crawl to Natsu every day.

There’s also a lot of similiarities and differences between their households.

Enji wanted his children to be born heroes. Koutarou’s rule was no heroes allowed.

Shimura and Toya both had a sibling they would run to and confide in. For Shimura it was Hana, and for Toya it was Natsu.

Shimura Tenko is the youngest sibling in the household. While Touya Todoroki was the oldest.

On the surface, the Shimura household seems more comfortable than the Todoroki household. Shimura receives a lot of comfort from his other relatives, his grandparents, his mother, his sister. However, none of them really confronted the problem in the household and at the end of the day Tenko was still getting beaten.

The Todoroki household also doesn’t seem like it was a place of much comfort for Toya. It really does seem from flashbacks that all he had to confide in when things started going wrong was Natsu (again feel free to taunt me cruelly if I’m wrong).

So, you have Tenko who is quietly and gently denied by his family, and Toya who suffers all alone in his household, either getting beaten himself, pushing himself too hard in training, or hearing his father beat his mother and Shoto.

However for both of them, it’s a gradual accumulation over time. The stress of the household overtakes them. Their hair turns from its original dark coloring to white from the sheer stress of it alone. They, as children, are made to bear the stress of their entire unhealthy household, because they are the scapegoat.

Endeavor genuinely believes that if Toya had somehow lived up to his promise he would never have turned abusive.

Kotaro believes that it was Tenko who was upsetting the peace of the household, because he would just not stop it with the hero talk.

They both soak up all this stress until it explodes outward. However, the incidents that turned them from Tenko -> Shigaraki, and from Toya -> Dabi are entirely different.

Toya committed what was essentially a suicide. He either staged his own death, or failed at his own suicide and survived. Tenko didn’t kill himself, he killed everyone else around him. Shigaraki destroyed the household that was denying him.

To simplify the manner in which they lash out. Touya destroys himself, Tenko destroys other people, especially the ones he believes are oppressing him or his friends.

Well you say, Dabi is trying to take down endeavor. However, Dabi still sees Endeavor and himself as one in the same. His flames are Endeavor’s flames.

One last thing, Dabi and Shigaraki are both marked by their father’s abuse. Dabi was burned by Endeavor’s flames. Dabi literally lives with third degree burns, looking like a living zombie. Then makes his burns even worse by using his flames in the self destructive manner Endeavor taught him.

Not only does Shigaraki still carry the lip and eye scars from being beaten up with a gardening tool, but Kotaro’s hand reaching out to his face is a symbol that Shigaraki keeps on him literally to this day by wearing a hand over his face constantly.

2. Friendship and Ideals

So I think all the subtle differences in their backgrounds is what leads to them expressing themselves differently as adults. There are several similarities between them, but I think hardcore Shigaraki fans can tell you all the reasons they prefer Shigaraki, and hardcore Dabi fans can do the same with Dabi.

I think a lot of it has to do with their relationships to their families. Families define how you connect with other people.

Shigaraki was instructed to always keep his family close to him. He’s always confronting his own feelings about his family, his pain from his family, that’s why when he lashes out he also takes his own personal feelings and pushes them outwards. Shigaraki isn’t concerned with right or wrong, moreso, these are my feelings. I reject the society that rejects me. What Shigaraki is concerned first and foremost, is feelings. His own feelings of being rejected, and also the feelings of people who were rejected just like him.

Shigaraki is the heart of his group. He’s the person they all rally around, because they gave him a place of belonging. And, Shigaraki has also expressed several times murderous monster that he is that he cares about the individual feelings of those closest to him. I won’t let you trample on Twice’s feelings, his first thing to do when waking up is order the league to be close to him.

Unlike Dabi, we’ve also seen Shigaraki directly confront the feelings of his missing family once more. He forgives his sister, he tries to comfort his mom. He destroys his father again. He tells his family that he denies them. He tells his grandfather that he still hates her.

I would say that Shigaraki carries those feelings with him, while Dabi dissociates himself from his feelings.Shigaraki directly confronts those feelings because Shigaraki is the heart, feelings are what matter more to him.

Dabi has feelings, obviously. Dabi has feelings even if he processes them in a way that’s not easy and palatable. Everyone in fact has feelings (though sometimes I wish I didn’t). Everyone expresses things in their own way if not in the typical way.

Dabi is completely closed off in regards to his own feelings. He’s not like Shigaraki who is open enough about them he’ll tell his backstory to the whole league on the spot. In fact that’s another difference, the league generally knows Shigaraki’s issues, when they had no idea about Dabi’s.

When really there was no good reason not to tell them. What are they not going to be up for murdering the number one hero?

Friendship is a priority for Shigaraki. Individualism is a priority for Dabi.

Dabi’s feelings towards the league are a messed up jumble, but his behavior towards them is pretty consistent. He takes every oppurtunity he can to insist that he’s not a part of them, that they’re all crazy and he’s the only sane one, that he doesn’t care about their feelings. This can’t all be Dabi just being tsundere or whatever, it’s physical steps taken for Dabi to distance himself from others.

Dabi’s individual goals are more important than his connections to other people. Shigaraki has no distinct goal besides empty lashing out and therefore connects to people with similiar hurt feelings than his.

Remember, Dabi self destructs. It’s likely, Dabi sees himself as a martyr. An individual willing to burn himself to take down the society with him. He’s trying to die for some cause like stain.

So before I develop on this tangent one more difference in similarity between them. Shigaraki’s family is dead. He can’t really do anything but carry on their feelings with him. Tomarau means, to mourn.

Dabi on the other hand, his family is still alive.He could have before the whole killing spree just shown up on their front doorstep. The reason he hasn’t, is because he can’t forgive Endeavor’s sin.

Whatever pushed him this far, whether it be a strong sense of justice, or a desire for personal revenge. Dabi values that, more than he values his connections with other people, even his own family who is still alive. This is once again the complex way Dabi handles his feelings, it’s likely he pushes his family away, the same way he pushes the league away and doesn’t process them. That’s why he says I thought about it so much I went crazy. He just insists he doesn’t care, and doesn’t think instead. Shigaraki lives constantly confronting his own feelings, Dabi lives by avoiding them.

Dabi is impersonal, aloof, and only ever thinks of himself as an individual. He will cooperate with others if it suits his needs, but the bond of the league hasn’t quite reached him yet. There’s a consequence for this.

So twice dying was Hawks fault. Because Hawks you know, stabbed him.

However you could say, Dabi’s planning centering all around himself, and what he can accomplish as an individual, meant he failed to accomplish that Twice might get hurt as a result of him letting Hawks into the league as a Spy. It’s an unintended consequence, but still a consequence.

Dabi showed up to save Twice but couldn’t. Then afterwards Dabi uses Twice’s death in the most gratuiotious way possible. Dabi insists once again he doesn’t care, that he never cared about Twice except as a tool that would have made fighting the heroes a lot easier.

Shigaraki destroys everything around him. He destroys for the sake of the people around him. Dabi destroys himself, his own feelings, he self destructs. When people get caught up in his flames they’re sacrifices for his cause.

Their priorities and the way they lash out are different. Dabi cares more for ideals than people. Shigaraki cares more for people than ideals.

However, they don’t have to destroy each other. Shigaraki trusts Dabi. Shigaraki of all the members of the league (with Toga as well) is the heart, is the best at sympathizing with the pain of other people because he is constantly in pain himself.

Dabi made a mistake and as a result Twice got killed. He gambled with too high of circumstances. Twice let a secret slip and invited the heroes to the League’s compound. Twice brought Chisaki for a meeting and because of that Magne died. This kind of scenario has happened before. Of course Dabi insists that his motivations were less pure than Twice’s, he didn’t care what happened to the rest of the league as long as he got the dirt he wanted for his big reveal.

I’m not suggesting that Dabi is secretly a sweetheart, or a misunderstood angsting teddy bear. Just that Dabi is currently closed off from all of his feelings, that’s why he denies too the feelings of people around him and their attempts to reach out for him. Dabi has refused the compansionship of the league.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Characters can develop. Shigaraki especially has been shown to reach out to people multiple times. Kurogiri is fond of him. Himiko and Twice in their moment of weakness, are convinced to stay on Shigaraki’s side because he shows their face to them. Spinner basically questioned why he was even staying with the league at his lowest point when he thought they had no reason to be there, and it was Shigaraki who he found his cause in.

Dabi is lacking something. He’s burned off and emotionally stunted his ability to develop connections with other people.

Shigaraki is lacking something. He is, again and again, told that he needs a plan besides destroy everything. Shigaraki is very observant of the world, and understands the truth, but he can’t get people to listen. Unlike Dabi who planned to such an extent, that he literally made a live public broadcast to turn public opinion against Endeavor because that was more important than winning a fight.

It’s true Dabi and Shigaraki could turn against each other, because Dabi doesn’t value people, because Shigaraki considers his lashing out more important than his ideals. They could also be the ones to balance each other out. We’re at an important turning point now, Dabi can either break off from the league now that his individual mission is compelte, or he can finally be reached by the league.

I think Shigaraki might reach him, because even though they’re grown up so differently they started in the exact same place. They were both boys who wanted to be heroes, and just wanted one person to tell them it was okay, that they could be heroes too.

#shigaraki tomura #shimura tenko #dabi #todoroki touya #todoroki toya #league of villains #league of villains meta #mha meta #my hero academia #my hero academia meta #my hero academia theory #bnha 291 #bnha 291 spoilers #lov meta #league of found family #todoroki family

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poptod · 3 years

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hey there ☺ do you think you can write a soulmate au with ahk where you hear each other's thoughts? and ahk thought he didn't have one all these years only to hear you while he's at the museum and then you try to find each other?

notes: wonderful idea. also i noticed my method of doing requests is do it almost immediately after i get it or wait four months before i get it done so sorry about that, but i hope you enjoy this!

WC: 1.5k +

There are many versions of yourself, all talking over one another in an attempt to control your mind for once. Sometimes it's hard to decipher if your actions are the result of someone in your head tugging you in a different direction. There is the person you believe yourself to be––what you imagine you come off to people as. There is also the person you truly are, and what people actually perceive you to be. So despite there being several voices, they are all reiterations of yourself in some way.

Except for one.

One of them speaks in a voice that is not your own, in a voice you've never heard anywhere but echoing in your skull. Since you despised asking questions as a child, it took you until you were twelve to realize that no, you weren't insane. It was someone who would love you, who had the potential to grow close to you simply by the strings of fate. Your soulmate.

Someone who gave you nightmares for years.

'Get me out of here!' He would scream, sending your heart pounding while you tried to sleep as a child. 'Please, please, I need to see the stars,' he sobbed, 'I did nothing to deserve this!'

Once you grew old enough to deal with the screaming beyond what you thought was a schizophrenia disorder, nighttime brought a deep sadness to you. For some reason, your soulmate would never think during the day––which was incredibly odd––and during the night, the only time he was awake, he would scream and beg and cry until you could feel the hoarseness in your own throat. For your entire childhood, you stared up at your ceiling at night, eyes burning as you tried to calm the screaming.

It was all you could think about, as though the screams had muted your connection to him and strengthened his connection to you. Every now and then you would try to think, try to calm him down, but he never quite heard.

Then, one evening in winter, it stopped.

You were lying in bed, rolled onto your side as you once again listened to the man's yelling thoughts. But then he stopped, and both your hearts skipped a beat, followed by an incredibly clear thought: Thank the Gods, blessed Ra and Khonsu.

That evening you darted out of bed, jumping to your desk where you typed in with slamming, lightning-fast fingers, "khonsu." Ra you already knew––everyone knew Ra, and by connection Khonsu would probably also be a God. The only question you were left with was why you were hearing the thoughts of someone who worshipped Egyptian gods two thousand years after that civilization died.

As you continued your research, his thoughts continued.

They took my tablet?

Who are these people?

This man has no idea what he's doing, does he?

Why is he screaming at the Hun?

He's got my tablet.

About halfway into the night you gave up on your research, instead listening intently to the thoughts. With you entirely absorbed in your soulmates thoughts, you had little room to send your own words to him, which unbeknownst to you, would've reached him if you tried.

You weren't quite sure what to think of him for the following couple weeks. At first your assumption was that he was the insane one projecting his insane thoughts to you, but his quieter thoughts led you to believe there was something different in him. It is true what they say––geniuses are often tortured minds, and though you wouldn't classify your soulmate as a genius, he was clearly a knowledgeable philosopher of sorts.

He thought often of the human condition––the rise and fall of civilizations, the cruelty and the mercy of men that began the stories of bloodstained battlefields. Most of the time you just listened. Now that he wasn't screaming, his voice was soft and more of a comfort than you ever thought it would be.

Sometimes he got very sad. After a while you learned to not question the logic of his thoughts. Instead, you simply tried to understand what he meant, accepting him for where he was in his life.

I miss my brother.

I wonder what happened to my best friend.

I didn't think I would ever be this far from the Nile and the sun.

I abandoned my people, didn't I?

If only I could find where my sister was buried. Would that even make me feel better, though? What closure will I gain from seeing her tomb?

... if she even had one.

There's a melody going on in his head, right now. Something that could put you to sleep if you weren't currently working. It's nothing you've heard before, that you're certain of, and judging by the tone of it and your soulmate's previous thoughts, it sounds Egyptian.

Despite the museum being closed, most of the lights are still on. One of the night guards had a very strange insistence about it, but wouldn't tell you why. Oh well––questioning people is above your paygrade, since you aren't getting paid for this. It is volunteer work. Not that you mind; ever since realizing the voice in your head was Egyptian, you've gotten a palate for history. Currently, however, you're dealing less with history and more with files. The curator at this museum asked you to sort through the records of all the different exhibits that are here, or were once here at some point, which made a very large collection. Massive, actually––you're only sorting through A, and it's going to take you a couple weeks.

He's humming softly to himself. The tune carries into your work, and you allow yourself to enjoy his voice as you sort, going over every record to look for exhibits no longer displayed. For this you have a chart in your other hand––a log of all the exhibits currently public in the museum.

Although you're supposed to be concentrated on your sorting, you find yourself more entranced with the melody in your head, and the clearest thought that rings in your mind is, 'that is beautiful.'

The humming stops. Dead in its' tracks, about to reach its' peak, and it stops.

'My mother sang it to me,' he says, 'before I slept as a child.'

"Holy shit, are you talking to me?" You say out loud with bulging eyes before you can stop yourself. The moment you realize what you said, a bright blush coats your cheeks and you slap your hand over your mouth. But he doesn't seem to mind––actually, he laughs, and it's sweeter than summer sugar.

'You must be my heart,' he says in an astounded tone, and you can practically see his dream-filled eyes. You sit puzzled for a second before replying.

"Do you mean your soulmate?"

'Well... I suppose yes, that could be one of the names,' he says, and it only adds more onto the lists of questions you have for him.

"What is your name?" You ask first, hardly realizing you're still talking aloud to yourself.

'My name is Ahkmenrah," he tells you, and it takes less than a millisecond before the dots connect in your head. Instantly your eyes dart to the sheet in your hand, and near the top of the list, there it sits––Ahkmenrah.

'I know this must be confusing for you,' he continues, 'but I am from another time. While I lived then, I dreaded that I didn't have a heart, as I heard no voice. That fear has carried on into my next life, but now that you're here –'

"Oh I'm here alright," you say, unbelieving of both your circumstances and your unblinking acceptance at them. "I'm, like, two floors below you."

"WHAT?!"

A voice from above catches you, but as the same word rings in your mind, you realize with great glee that he instinctively yelled 'what' without thinking. You laugh, and the thought of your laughter reaches him.

Less than a minute later you can hear footsteps pounding down the stairs, landing at the closed door before the handle wrenches open. You quickly move to your feet, facing the man whose voice you know so well, who haunted your childhood and enchanted your adulthood. You can barely hide the grin that spreads across your face––whatever magic has brought you to this moment, you thank everything you can for it, your attention ensnared by the soft features of a 4,000 year old Pharaoh.

He pauses once he enters the archive, eyes finding yours immediately. His mouth hangs open slightly as he scans you, absorbs every feature on your body and face, and barely moves even to breathe for a good minute or two.

"I – I'm sorry, I j – I just realized I didn't ask your name," he says quietly, a small, ginger smile growing on his lips.

"(Y/N)," you say, but you don't quite know how your brain worked to make the word. You certainly didn't consciously choose to speak.

"I have waited thousands of years for you," he says, impossibly softer as he steps forward. He's really quite harmless, you realize––for all the fear you had of him as a child, he's nothing but a sweet-faced boy.

"Was it worth it?" You ask, and your voice cracks ever so slightly.

"My heart," he breathes out, affection lacing his name for you, "it was worth every second."

#ahkmenrah x reader #Ahkmenrah #Night at the Museum #rami malek

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army-of-mai-lovers · 3 years

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Jet and Yue’s Deaths: Were They Necessary?

Two of the most common ideas I see for aus in this fandom are the Jet lives au, and the Yue lives au. I’ve written both of these myself, and I’ve seen many others write them. And while yes, fanfiction can be a great way to explore ideas that didn’t necessarily have to be explored in canon (I’m mad at bryke for a lot of things, but not including a Toph and Bumi I friendship is not one of them, even though I wrote a fic about it), it seems to me that people are mad that Yue and Jet are dead, to varying degrees. There’s a lot to talk about regarding their deaths from a sociopolitical perspective (the fact that two of the darker-skinned characters in the show are the ones that died, and all the light-skinned characters lived, is ah... an interesting choice), but I don’t want to look at it that way, at least for right now. I want to look at it as a writer, and discuss whether these deaths were a) necessary for the plot and themes of ATLA in any way whatsoever and b) whether it was necessary for them to unfold in the way that they did, or if they would have been more impactful had they occurred in a different way.

(meta under the cut, this got really, really, really long)

Death in Children’s Media

When I first started thinking about this meta, I had this idea to compare Jet and Yue’s deaths to deaths in an animated children’s show that I found satisfying. And in theory, that was a great idea. Problem is: there aren’t very many permanent deaths in children’s animation, and the ones that do exist aren’t especially well-written. This may be an odd thing to say in what is ostensibly a piece of atla crit, but Yue’s death is probably the best written death in a piece of children’s animation that I can think of. That’s not a compliment. Rather, it’s a condemnation of the way other pieces of children’s animation featuring permanent character death have handled their storylines.

I’ve talked about this before, but my favorite show growing up was Young Justice, and my favorite character on that show was far and away Mr. Wally West. So when he died at the end of season 2, it broke me emotionally. Shortly thereafter, Cartoon Network canceled the show, and I started getting on fan forums to mourn. Everybody on these fan forums was convinced that had Cartoon Network not canceled the show, Wally would have been brought back. And that is a narrative that I internalized for years. Eventually, the show was brought back via DC’s new streaming service, and I tuned in, waiting for Wally to also be brought back, only to discover that that wasn’t in the cards. Wally was dead. Permanently.

So now that I know that, I can talk about why killing him off was fucking stupid. Wally’s death occurs at the end of season 2, after the main s2 conflict, the Reach, has been defeated, save for these pods that they set up all over the world to destroy Earth. Our heroes split up in teams of two to destroy the pods, and they destroy all of them, except for a secret one in Antartica. It can only be neutralized by speedsters, so Wally, Bart, and Barry team up to destroy it. It’s established in canon that Wally is slower than Bart and Barry, and it’s been played for laughs earlier in the season, but for reasons unexplained, the pod is better able to target Wally because he’s slower than Bart and Barry, and it kills him. After the emotional arc of the season has wrapped up, a literal main character dies. There’s some indication at the end of that season that his death is going to cause Artemis to spiral and become a villain, but when season 3 picks up, she’s doing the right thing, with seemingly no qualms about her position in life as a hero. In the comics, something like this happens to Wally, but then he goes into the Speed Force and becomes faster and stronger even than Barry, in which case, yes, this would have advanced the plot, but that’s probably not in the cards either.

In summary, Wally’s death doesn’t work as a story beat, not because it made me mad, but because it doesn’t advance the plot, nor does it develop character. Only including things that advance plot or develop character is one of the golden rules of writing. Like most golden rules of writing, however, it’s not absolute. There is a lot of fun to be had in jokey little one off adventures (in atla, Sokka’s haiku competition) or in fun worldbuilding threads that add depth to your setting but don’t really come up (in atla, the existence of Whaletail Island, which is described in really juicy ways, even though the characters never go there.) But in general, when it comes to things like character death, events should happen to develop the plot or advance character. Avatar, for all of its flaws, is really well structured, and a lot of its story beats advance plot and develop character at the same time. However, the show also bears the burden of being a show directed at children, and thus needing to be appropriate for children. And as we know, Nickelodeon and bryke butted heads over this: the death scene that we see for Jet is a compromise, one that implicitly confirms his death without explicitly showing it. So bryke tasked themselves with creating a show about imperialism and war that would do those themes justice while also being appropriate for American children and palatable to their parents.

The Themes of Avatar vs. Its Audience

So, Avatar is a show about a lone survivor of genocide stopping an imperialist patriarchal society from decimating the rest of the world. It’s also a show about found family and staying true to yourself and doing your best to improve the world. These don’t necessarily conflict with each other, and it is possible for children to understand and enjoy shows about complex themes. And in a lot of cases, bryke doesn’t hold back in showing what the costs of war against an imperialist nation are: losing loved ones, losing yourself, prison, etc. But when it comes to death, the show is incredibly hesitant. None of the main characters that we’ve spent a lot of time getting to know die (not even Iroh, even though he was old and it would have made sense and his VA died before the show was over--but that’s a topic for another day.) This makes sense. I can totally imagine a seven year-old watching Avatar as it was coming out and feeling really sad or scared if a major character died. I was six years older than that when Wally died, and it’s still sad and terrifying to me to this day. However, in a show about war, it would be unrealistic to have no one die. Bryke’s stated reason for killing off Jet is to show the costs of war. I’ve seen a lot of posts about Jet’s death that reiterate some version of this same point--that the great tragedy of his character is that he spent his life fighting the Fire Nation, only to die at the hands of his own country. Similarly, I’ve seen people argue in favor of Yue’s death by saying that it was a great tragedy, but it showed the sacrifices that must be made in a war effort.

Yue

When we first meet Yue, she is a somewhat reserved, kind individual held back by the rigid social structures of the NWT*. She and Sokka have an immediate attraction to one another, but Yue reveals that she is engaged to Hahn. The Fire Nation invasion happens, Zhao kills Tui, and Yue gives up her life to save her people and the world, and to restore balance. Since we didn’t have a lot of time to get to know Yue, this is framed less as Yue’s sacrifice and more as Sokka’s loss. Sokka is the one who cares for Yue, Sokka is the only one of the gaang who really interacts a lot with Yue on screen, and Sokka is the one we’ve spent a whole season getting to know. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call Yue a prop character (i.e. a character who could be replaced by an object with little change to the narrative), she is certainly underdeveloped. She exists to be unambiguously likable and good, so we can root for her and Sokka, and feel Sokka’s pain when she dies. In my opinion, this is probably also why a lot of fic that features Yue depicts her as a Mary Sue--because as she is depicted in the show, she kind of is. We don’t get to see her hidden depths because she is written to die.

In light of what we’ve established earlier in this meta, this makes sense. Killing off a fully-realized character whom the audience has really gotten to know and care about on their own terms, rather than through the eyes of another character, could be really sad and scary for the kids watching, but not killing anyone off would be an unrealistic depiction of war and imperialism. On the face of it, killing off an underdeveloped, unambiguously likable and good character, whom one of our MCs has a deep but short connection with, is the perfect compromise.

But let’s go back to the golden rule for a second. Does Yue’s death a) advance the plot, and/or b) develop character? The answer to the first is yes: Yue’s death prompts Aang to use the Avatar State to fight off the Fire navy, which has implications for his ability to control the Avatar State that form one of the major arcs of book 2. The answer to the second? A little more ambiguous. You would think that Yue’s death would have some lasting impact on Sokka that is explored as part of his character arc in book 2, that he may be more afraid to trust, more scared of losing the people he loves, but outside of a few episodes (really, just one I can think of, “The Swamp”) it doesn’t seem to affect him that much. He even asks about Suki in a way that is clearly romantically motivated in “Avatar Day.” I don’t know about you, but if someone I loved sacrificed herself to become the moon, I don’t think I would be seeking out another romantic entanglement a few weeks after her death. Of course, everybody processes grief differently, and one could argue that Sokka has already lost important people in his life, and thus would be accustomed to moving on from that loss and not letting himself dwell on it. But to that, I’d say that moving on by throwing himself into protecting others has already shown itself to be an unhealthy coping mechanism. Remember, Sokka’s misogyny at the beginning of b1 is in part motivated by the fact that his mother died at the hands of the Fire Nation and his father left shortly thereafter to fight the Fire Nation, and he responds to those things by throwing himself into the role of being the “man” of the village and protecting the people he loves who are still with him. Like with Yue, he doesn’t allow himself to dwell on his mother’s death. This could have been the beginning of a really interesting b2 arc for Sokka, in which he throws himself into being the Avatar’s companion to get away from the grief of losing Yue, but this time, through the events of the show, he’s forced to acknowledge that this is an unhealthy coping mechanism. And maybe this is what bryke was going for with “The Swamp”, but this confines his whole process of grief to one episode, where it could have been a season-long arc that really emphasized the effect Yue’s had on his life.

In the case of Yue, I do lean toward saying that her death was necessary for the story that they wanted to tell (although, I will never turn down a good old-fashioned Yue lives au that really gets into her dynamism as a character, those are awesome.) However, the way they wrote Sokka following Yue’s death reduced her significance. The fact that Yue seemed to have so little impact on Sokka is precisely what makes her death feel unnecessary, even if it isn’t.

Jet

Okay. Here we go.

If you know my blog, you know I love Jet. You know I love Jet lives aus. Perhaps you know that I’m in the process of writing a multichapter Jet fic in which he lives after Lake Laogai. So it’s reasonable to assume that, in a discussion of whether or not Jet’s death was necessary, I’m gonna be mega-biased. And yeah, that’s probably true. But up until recently, I wasn’t really all that mad about Jet dying, at least conceptually. As I said earlier, bryke says that in the case of Jet’s death, they wanted to kill a character off that people knew and would care about, so that they could further show the tragedies of war and imperialism. Okay. That is not, in and of itself, a bad idea.

My issue lies with the execution of said idea. First of all, the framing of Jet’s original episode is so bad. Jet is part of a long line of cartoon villains who resist imperialism and other forms of oppression through violence and are punished for it. This is actually a really common sort of villain for atla/lok, as we see this play out again with Hama, Amon, and the Red Lotus. To paraphrase hbomberguy’s description of this type of villain, basically liberal white creators are saying, “yeah, oppression is bad, but have you tried writing to your Congressman about it?” With Jet, since we have so little information about the village he’s trying to flood, there are a number of different angles that would explain his actions and give them more nuance. My preferred hc is that the citizens of Gaipan are a mix of Earth civilians, Fire citizens, and FN soldiers, and that the Earth citizens refused to feed or house Jet and the other Freedom Fighters because they were orphans and, as we see in the Kyoshi Novels, Earth families stick to their own. Thus, when Jet decides to flood Gaipan, he’s focused on ridding the valley of Fire Nation, but he doesn’t really care about what happens to the Earth citizens of Gaipan because they actively wronged him when he was a kid. That’s just one interpretation, and there have been others: Gaipan was fully Fire Nation, Gaipan was both Earth Kingdom and Fire Nation but Jet decided that the benefits of flooding the valley and getting rid of the Fire Nation outweighed the costs of losing the EK families, etc, etc. There are ways to rewrite that scenario so that Jet is not framed as an unambiguously bloodthirsty monster. In the context of Jet’s death, this initial framing reduces the possible impact that his death could have. Where Yue was unambiguously good, Jet is at the very least morally gray when we see him again in the ferry. And where we are connected to Yue through Sokka, the gaang’s active hatred of Jet hinders our ability to connect with him. This isn’t impossible to overcome--the gaang hates Zuko, and yet to an extent the audience roots for him--but Jet’s lack of screentime and nuanced framing (both of which Zuko gets in all three seasons) makes overcoming his initially flawed framing really difficult.

So how much can it really be said, that by the time we get to Jet’s death, he’s a character that we know and care about? So much about him is still unknown (what happened to the Freedom Fighters? what prompted Jet’s offscreen redemption? who knows, fam, who knows.) Moreover, most of what we see of him in Ba Sing Se is him actively opposing Zuko and Iroh. These are both characters that at the very least the show wants us to care about. At this point, we know almost everything there is to know about them, we’ve been following them and to an extent rooting for them for two seasons, and who have had nuanced and often sympathetic framing a number of times. So much of the argument I’ve seen regarding Jet centers around the fact that he was right to expose Zuko and Iroh as Firebenders, but the reason we have to have that argument in the first place is because it’s not framed in Jet’s favor. In terms of who the audience cares about more, who the audience has more of an emotional attachment towards, Zuko and Iroh win every time. Whether Jet’s actually in the right or not is irrelevant, because emotionally speaking, we’re primed to root for Zuko and Iroh. In terms of who the framing is biased towards, Jet may as well be Zhao. So when he’s taken by the Dai Li and brainwashed, the audience isn’t necessarily going to see this as a bad thing, because it means Zuko and Iroh are safe.

The only real bit of sympathetic framing Jet gets are those initial moments on the ferry, and the moments after he and the gaang meet again. So about five, ten minutes of the show, total. And then, he sacrifices himself for the gaang. And just like Yue, his death has little to no impact on the characters in the episodes following. Katara is shown crying for four frames immediately following his death, and they bring him up once in “The Southern Raiders” to call him a monster, and once in “The Ember Island Players”, a joke episode in which his death is a joke.

So, let’s ask again. Does this a) advance the plot, and/or b) develop character? The answer to both is no. It shows that the Dai Li is super evil and cruel, which we already knew and which basically becomes irrelevant in book 3, and that is really the only plot-significant thing I can think of. As far as character, well, it could have been a really interesting moment in Katara’s development in forgiving someone who hurt her in the past, which could have foreshadowed her forgiving Zuko in b3, but considering she calls Jet a monster in TSR, that doesn’t track. There could have been something with Sokka realizing that his snap judgment of Jet in b1 was wrong, but considering that he brings up Jet to criticize Katara in TSR, that also does not track. And honestly, neither of these possible character arcs require Jet to die. What requires Jet to die is the ~themes~.

Let’s look at this theme again, shall we? The cost of war. We already covered it with Yue, but it’s clearly something that bryke wants to return to and shed new light on. The obvious angle they’re going for is that sometimes, you don’t know who your real enemy is. Jet thought that his enemy was the Fire Nation, but in the end, he was taken down by his own countryman. Wow. So deep. Except, while it’s clear that Jet was always fighting against the Fire Nation, I never got the sense that Jet was fighting for the Earth Kingdom. After all, isn’t the whole bad thing about him in the beginning is that he wants to kill civilians, some of whom we assume to be Earth Kingdom? Why would it matter then that he got killed by an EK leader, when he didn’t seem to ever be too hot on those dudes? But okay, maybe the angle is not that he was killed by someone from the Earth Kingdom, but that he wasn’t killed by someone from the Fire Nation. Okay, but we’ve already seen him be diametrically opposed to the only living Air Nomad and people from the Water Tribes. Jet fighting with and losing to people who aren’t Fire Nation is not a new and exciting development for him. Jet has been enemies with non-FN characters for most of the show’s run at this point. There is no thematic level on which the execution of this holds any water.

The reason I got to thinking about this, really analyzing what Jet’s death means (and doesn’t mean) for the show, was this conversation I was having with @the-hot-zone in discord dms. We were talking about book 2 and ways it could have been better, and Zone said that they thought that Jet would have been a stronger character to parallel with Zuko’s redemption than Iroh and that seeing more of the narrative from Jet’s perspective could have strengthened the show’s themes. And when it came to the question of Jet’s death, they said, “And if we are going with Jet dying, then I want it to hurt. I want it to hurt just as much as if a main character like Sokka had died. I want the viewer to see Jet's struggles, his triumphs, the facets of Jet that make him compelling and important to the show.” And all of that just hit me. Because we don’t get that, do we? Jet’s death barely leaves a mark. Jet himself barely leaves a mark. His death isn’t plot-significant, doesn’t inspire character growth in any of our MCs, and doesn’t even accomplish the thematic relevance that it claims to. So what was the point?

Conclusion

Much as I dislike it, Yue’s death actually added something to atla. It could have added much, much more, in the hands of writers who gave more of a shit about their Brown female characters and were less intent on seeing them suffer and knocking them down a peg, but, in my opinion, it did work for what it was trying to do. Jet? Jet? Nah, fam. Jet never got the chance to really develop into a likable character because he was always put at odds with characters we already liked, and the framing skewed their way, not his. The dude never really had a chance.

*multiple people have spoken about how the NWT as depicted in atla is not reminiscent of real life Inuit and Yupik people and culture. I am not the person to go into detail about this, but I encourage you to check out Native-run blogs for more info!

#jet #yue #bold text #italics #death tw #murder tw

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9worldstales · 3 years

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MCU What if Ep 1-2-3: My two cents

So, I’ve been watching the “What if” series. I won’t beat it around the bush, I’m enjoying it but at the same time I get the feeling this series is aimed at younger audience, younger audience which isn’t deeply familiar with the movies and needs to be feed a simpler storyline.

In fact from the way they present it in each episode 1 single change should be the one which gives life to a parallel universe in a sort of domino effect… only, from what I could see in those 3 episodes, there are actually multiple unconnected changes, 1 presented more markedly as if it were the one starting everything and the others… just there for unknown reasons but they aren’t remarked and might easily be missed by who doesn’t remember well the movies.

Characterizations are also simplified, with heroes more black and white than grey, and a general toning down of the drama. This isn’t necessarily tied to the short time, 30 minutes in the hand of a good storyteller are plenty of time to construct a complicate, adult, emotionally engaging story… but a complicate story requires an audience willing to put its mind to understand it, or capable to handle a more morally nuanced plot or that wouldn’t be too distressed by a more emotionally engaging one.

This kind of audience is clearly not what those stories are aiming at.

This isn’t meant to say they’re bad, they’re perfect for young audience, passing on a good message, being overall funny and giving them the chance to enjoy the heroes they love in a different setting.

Dialogues are nice, their voice actors so far delivered good performance, the art isn’t bad and the stories can feel still intriguing enough.

However, if you think too hard at them, especially in comparison to the original movie, the story tends to crumble or feel morally poor or mess up the characterization or some other thing.

Overall I think the “What if” so far are more enjoyable if you don’t really remember well the movies and, anyway, judge them as stand-alone more than “What if” based on how a single divergence from the plot could create a new timeline.

Some examples?

Pick “What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?”

The divergence supposedly happens when Peggy decides to stay in the room.

Erskine: Agent Carter, wouldn't you be more comfortable in the booth? Peggy: No, I'd prefer to stay. Watcher: There. That's the moment that created a new universe. When asked to leave the room, Margaret "Peggy" Carter chose to stay. But soon it would be her venturing into the unknown and creating a new world.

Only, in truth, it’s not just Peggy who was meant to go to the booth and didn’t.

EVERYONE was meant to go to the booth… only they all stay and Kruger, the spy from Hydra, who was seated in the booth BEHIND Peggy in “Captain America”, in the “What if” episode attacks the lab during Erskine’s explanation and not, as he did in “Captain America”, after the experiment took place, using as a distraction a bomb he left in the booth, and not on the floor of near to where the experiment was taking place so that it can kill Erskine.

And, to be really accurate, Erskine, in “Captain America”, asked Peggy to move to the booth when Steve was already lying down for the experiment, while here we see him asking her so while the two are standing next to each other and he hadn’t started undressing yet.

And there’s a reason why in the movie things were done like that.

Of course in the movie everyone was in the booth, it was safer should something go wrong with the experiment.

Of course Kruger waited for the experiment to be carried on, if it didn’t work there was no point in stealing a vial of a serum that didn’t work.

Of course Kruger left the bomb in the booth and made it explode when he was outside of it, so that he was sure it would create distraction but not harm him.

Overall, it’s not just Peggy that acts differently, it’s Erskine, who asked her to move in advance, it’s all the people there, who didn’t move to the booth, it’s ESPECIALLY, Kruger, who originally aimed to see if the serum worked and, in this case, steal it and kill Erskine so he couldn’t produce more and instead he now doesn’t check if the serum works and kills, for unknown reasons Chester Phillips, who didn’t even have a weapon in his hand and so didn’t pose a threat.

Even the placing of the bomb is poor because, since there was plenty of mechanisms in the lab, it could have triggered a series of explosions that were to destroy the whole place, himself and all the serum included.

But how many young viewers noticed all this or worry for the risk of everything exploding or realize that causing an explosion outside of the room in which the serum was worked as a diversion so as to take people away from that place, while if the bomb were to explode there, everyone would converge in that place, with hydrants possibly as no one worries about fire spreading but they should… even if there’s magically not as much as there should be.

And tragic scenes get tamed down, we don’t see Erskine die, we might not even realize he died in the explosion, young viewers might not remember or not like Chester Phillips so when he’s shoot he doesn’t leave an impression and Kruger’s shape gets shoot down by Peggy so we don’t have him committing suicide.

It’s not a complain, it’s a logic choice to make the series more palatable to a younger target by toning down the violence and the drama in it.

And so we reach the big event of the episode.

John Flynn would want Stark to get the serum injected in himself (forgetting there were men of the MP around him who shouldn’t be all dead) but starts to complain when Peggy volunteers to take the serum herself. Peggy does anyway and again things are tamed down, as Steve ended up screaming so loud in “Captain America” Peggy feared they were killing him and they considered stopping the experiment but Peggy doesn’t scream at all.

Sure, in had been scientifically proved women are built to handle pain better, but very likely Peggy’s lack of scream isn’t because she’s tougher, it’s again to not upset young audience.

So, while Steve lies on the ground and no one comes to help him, Peggy comes out of the experiment enhanced. But here we’ve the real core of the episode, John Flynn decides the experiment is an absolute failure. Why?

Flynn: Sixty million dollars and all the hope in the world down the drain. I was promised an army. I was promised peace and salvation. Instead, I get a girl.

Basically the real core of the episode, the real theme is that Captain Carter will have to fight discrimination based on sexism.

Peggy: You have a Super Soldier. Flynn: Women aren't soldiers, and they sure as hell don't fight on the front lines. They might break a nail.

Undoubtedly this is an important matter, it’s a good topic to make an episode about, to give young girls an heroine, to show to them and to the boys what an absolute moron Flynn was in discriminating Peggy, also presenting boys being supportive of Peggy and trusting her. Howard Stark, Steve Rogers, and then Bucky and everyone else, all the men who see Peggy fighting are ultimately supportive and admiring of her. This is important. But Flynn’s sexism is better remarked if we don’t remember what happened in “Captain America”.

Steve Rogers: Sir, if you’re going after Schmidt, I want in. Col. Chester Phillips: You’re an experiment. You’re going to Alamogordo. Steve Rogers: The serum worked. Col. Chester Phillips: I asked for an army and all I got was you. You are not enough. Senator Brandt: [to Steve] With all due respect to the Colonel, I think we may be missing the point. I’ve seen you in action, Steve. More importantly, the country’s seen it. [to his aide] Paper.[the aide shows them the news paper (‘The New York Examiner’ Vol. XCVII No. 33.634, Wednesday, June 23, 1943), headlines: "Nazis in New York - mystery man saves child"] The enlistment lines have been around the block since your picture hit the newsstands. You don’t take a soldier, a symbol like that, and hide him in a lab. Son, do you want to serve your country on the most important battlefield of the war? Steve Rogers: Sir, that’s all I want. Senator Brandt: Then, congratulations. You just got promoted.

I mean, Rogers was a male and he too was judged ‘not enough’. Brandt has him tour the nation in a colorful costume as “Captain America” to promote war bonds, while scientists study him and attempt to reverse-engineer the formula.

Chester Phillips was likely killed because otherwise they would have no reason to deal with Peggy the same way he dealt with Steve ‘one is not enough’, only it wouldn’t have been a sexist problem, just math (though it could be argued Phillips never trusted Steve to begin with). This causes the message ‘sexism is dumb’ ends up feeling forced because it’s basically pasted over a previous narrative of ‘not being enough’. If you want, you can read it as always discrimination and discrimination it’s always bad, but it still cheapens the message.

All this not to say that the episode isn’t awesome if seen as a stand-alone… it’s just that when you compare it with “Captain America” it feels weaker.

And then there are the other discrepancies, like the Hydra bringing the Tesseract to Berlin and not to Azzano (a sign somehow Schmidt and Hitler didn’t have a fall out) with Stark using it to power up an “Hydra Stomper” suit that proves if he had had the right power sources and technologies he could have built “Iron Man” too.

They’re not bad points (actually I loved the “Hydra Stomper” suit and how Peggy rode it the way Tekkaman from “Uchu no Kishi Tekkaman” used to ride Pegas in my childhood memories) but again they’re divergences without a clear reason. Schmidt and Hitler shouldn’t get along better solely because Peggy got the serum.

And that’s the first episode.

“What If... T'Challa Became a Star-Lord?” is also clearly aimed to a younger audience but with a goal different from “What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?”

Watcher: What you call destiny is just an equation, a product of variables. Right place, right time, or in some instances, the wrong place at the wrong time. As fate would have it, at that very moment, a Ravager spacecraft was arriving on Earth to abduct the spawn of the Celestial, Ego. But in this universe, Yondu outsourced the assignment to his subordinates. Yondu: You morons grabbed the wrong kid!

For start this episode doesn’t try to rewrite a single movie, but by taking pieces of assorted movies “Thor: The Dark World” (for Tivan) “Guardians of the Galaxy” (for the idea of the setting), “Black Panther” (for T’Challa), “Avengers: Infinity War” (for the Black Order), “Captain America” (Tivan has his shielf), “Thor: Ragnarok” (TIvan has and uses Hela’s headpiece, talking of her as if he knew her and we can see he also has Thor’s hammer), “Thor: The Dark World” (Tivan has Malekith’s dagger) creates a completely different timeline by changing something that happened in 1988 and then jumping straight in… 2014, I presume, where a lot is different but we aren’t meant to see the process due to which things were changed, just to accept how T’Challa, kidnapped as a kid by the Ravagers, managed to make the difference.

In fact the whole theme of this episode is that T’Challa is a hero and a role model that gets success and admiration by TALKING TO PEOPLE AND PERSUADING THEM TO DO THE RIGHT THING. He’s meant not to have a character arc but to create a world that’s the best possible for people.

In fact we’re told just by talking with Thanos he persuaded him to stop his whole plan without using violence.

Korath: How exactly did you stop Thanos, the Mad Titan, from decimating half of the universe? Oh, no. Thanos: I'm a big enough man to admit when I'm wrong. T'Challa here showed me there was more than one way to reallocate the universe's resources. T’Challa: Sometimes the best weapon in your arsenal is just a good argument.

I mean, he doesn’t just turn the Ravagers into Robin Hood’s “merry men”, he talks with Thanos and Thanos decides to change his ways.

This is great, a wonderful message, a message against violence, a message about the power of the words and it makes T’Challa a real hero who, just by talking, saves the universe from Thanos but… but T’Challa from the movies was maybe not so good at persuading people from not doing wrong but he still had something amazing that made him very human and, at the same time a role model.

T’Challa wasn’t perfect, he made mistakes… but then he would admit them and correct them.

In “Captain America: Civil War” he wants to kill Bucky in retaliation for what happened to his father…

Natasha Romanoff: T'Challa. Task force will decide who brings in Barnes. T'Challa: [He clenches his fist.] Don't bother, Miss Romanoff. I'll kill him myself.

…but then he understands killing his father’s murder would be wrong and even stops Zemo from committing suicide.

T'Challa: Vengeance has consumed you. It's consuming them. [He blinks ruefully and retracts the claws in his gloves.] I am done letting it consume me. Justice will come soon enough. Helmut Zemo: [Holding a gun Zemo smiles thinly.] Tell that to the dead. [He tries to shoot himself but T'Challa grabs him just as he fires.] T'Challa: The living are not done with you yet.

And the same goes in “Black Panther”. At first he doesn’t want to ask Killmonger his name because he knows he is his uncle’s son and this would give him the right to compete for the throne as well as expose what his father did…

Killmonger: Oh, I ain't requesting nothing! Ask who I am? Shuri: You are Eric Steves. An American black operative. A mercenary nicknamed Killmonger. That's who you are. Killmonger: (LAUGHING) That's not my name, Princess. Ask me, King? T'Challa: No. Killmonger: Ask me. T'Challa: Take him away.

…but then he’ll acknowledges they had wronged him, will show him Wakanda’s beauty and will change things in Wakanda. T’Challa in the movies isn’t as perfect as T’Challa in the “What if” episode. He can’t solve everything and make the world perfect. He isn’t always right. He gets angry, vengeful, afraid of the truth. But then he rises above this and does the right thing.

“What if” T’Challa is a model of perfection that’s admirable… but that sits simply too high above the original T’Challa who also had to deal with Thanos but didn’t even think he could change his mind just by giving him a talk… and with good reason.

Younger kids might not realize because they might have not fully grasped how Thanos was a genocidal maniac, who massacred millions even prior to the snap, tortured his daughters and even removed body parts from Nebula. They might swallow it was just that easy to talk him into not doing the snap, and Thanos only needed someone to tell him it was wrong… and that in truth he loved Nebula… but for older viewers while beautiful, this is simply unbelievable.

And what about Yondu and the Ravagers? Just because they had T’Challa they became good and righteous. This is how Peter Quill described Yondu in “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” which still gives a sympathetic portrayal of Yondu:

Quill: He wasn't my father. Yondu was the guy who abducted me. He'd beat the crap out of me so I'd learn how to fight and he kept me in terror threatening to eat me.

But T’Challa doesn’t seem to have such complains against Yondu.

Now… In Quill’s case Yondu kept Quill so as to protect him from Ego…

Yondu: Once I figured out what happened to the other kids, I wasn't gonna just hand you over.

…yet he kidnap him and tells him his home was destroyed so as to manipulate him into staying… but this is so easily forgotten by T’Challa to the point children might not even realize it was there. Yondu was a good dad for him, he kidnapped him because T’Challa was basically wasted at home.

Yondu: Sometimes you need to hear a lie to see the truth. You're just like me, T'Challa. T’Challa: I am nothing like you. Yondu: You're an explorer, Star-Lord. And for people like you, like us, the past ain't nothing but a prison. You don't belong down there with them. You belong up here with us, with your family.

Although T’Challa doesn’t seem to agree at first… in the end all is forgotten.

Yondu: Look, T'Challa, I just wanted to say... T’Challa: There's no need. I was the one who told you I wanted to see the world. All you did was show me the universe.

and

T’Chaka: (Voice shaking) My son, my son. I knew you would find your way home to us. T’Challa: I'm sorry it took me so long. Let me introduce you to the family I made along the way.

All this is to basically excuse the premise, something horrible like kidnapping a child is passed as not really something terrible so that kids wouldn’t deal with its emotional implications and can even think that it was a pity that, in the normal universe, it was Peter Quill that was kidnapped… without realizing that kidnapping is bad and that in T’Challa’s case Yondu wasn’t even doing it because he wanted to protect him. Actually it’s unexplained why, all of sudden, Yondu felt the need to keep T’Challa and completely forgot about Quill, didn’t even care about making sure Ego wouldn’t find Quill despite, thanks to T’Challa, becoming a better person. It’s another change, one that people knowing the movies is bound to notice but not kids.

So again, for who knows the movie well, the story ends up being weak and this is also because, while T’Challa could persuade Thanos off screen not to commit genocide… all of sudden his persuasive power isn’t even really tested out with Tivan. Tivan is the big evil… yet he’s somehow less fearsome than Thanos because we clearly don’t want to scare the kids.

So again, wonderful for young audience who doesn’t remember well the movies… not so solid for who’s older.

And so we move to “What If... the World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?” which is absolutely my favourite so far. This one at a first glance seems to be a “What if” of a comic named “The Avengers Prelude: Fury's Big Week”.

The awesome thing of this story is we don’t know what changed the universe, we only discover that someone is killing off the Avengers before they could become the Avengers, starting with Tony Stark.

The mystery is, at a first glance, cool, the idea original, Natasha gets a big role as she investigates and even fights things along with Fury and, again, children will likely not really realize how the “What if” is actually changing the settings even when they’re supposedly not related to the change that caused this parallel reality, the death of Hope van Dyne. I mean, we can start our list of changes with the random funny things that has no reason to happen because Hope’s death shouldn’t have made Coulson and Barton to be so appreciative of Thor’s hair, something they never bring up in the movie…

Coulson: Whoa. I got visual on the intruder. He's a Caucasian male, mid-twenties with... really great hair. Fury: Excuse me? Coulson: It's an accurate description. Sir, he's gorgeous. Fury: I need eyes in the sky. Barton. Barton: Already on it. He's making a move on the hammer. One shot, one kill, sir. Just say the word. Fury: Hold your fire. I wanna see this. Barton: Whoa. Coulson wasn't lying about the hair. That's nice.

…to continue with more plot related matters like how Betty should have known Banner had intruded in her lab dressed up as a delivery boy and was now hiding in a wardrobe… but if we want we can forgive them. Maybe Hope’s death really changed some things in weird ways we couldn’t predict… but the place with the biggest revolution seems to be Asgard… which actually shouldn’t have been affected by by Hope’s death AT ALL and instead the situation is completely different from how it were in “Thor” to the point I could write a 20 pages meta on the changes. But, if we assume this episode is aimed at children, it works because the “Thor” situation was complicate and here instead they show solely some random and confuse elements that children might have picked up from talks about the movies… but that weren’t like that in “Thor”.

And again we have messages that can be good for children, how a father will love his little girl, how Nick Fury will save the day even without the Avengers, how:

Fury: S.H.I.E.L.D. is people, people willing to give their lives for something greater than themselves to save the world from men like you.

…and how in the darkest time new heroes will always come to save Earth as when Loki take over because it seems there are no more Avengers, Fury can still count on Carol Danvers and Steve Rogers.

Coulson: The Avengers fell before they had a chance to rise. May they rest in peace. Fury: They can, but we won't. The Avengers were always meant to be more than a team. They were an idea, the affirmation of humanity's need to believe that in our darkest hour, we will find our heroes. Watcher: I believe that in this universe, as in every other, hope never dies. As long as someone keeps their good eye on the bigger picture.

It’s a good message about hope… but again, it’s something for children. We’re meant to believe Earth could be conquered in one day time without struggle whatsoever… and that only the heroes could save it. Children might not remember it but in “The Avengers” humans tried to nuke New York to stop Loki… the idea they would just sit and say ‘whatever’ to Loki’s domination makes it look as if they actually agree with him to an adult… but, of course, the battle of New York is something we might not want to show to a little child.

And now… something else that’s relevant.

I said the “What ifs” are good stories for children… but we’re talking of young children here because if the child is a little older they can end up passing a completely wrong message.

Remember "What If... Captain Carter Were the First Avenger?" and how it tackled sexism as an absurd behavior to keep? How Captain Carter overcomes it? By using her supersoldier powers to beat the Nazi. She shows as a supersoldier she works.

Does she turns over the concept that ‘Women aren't soldiers, and they sure as hell don't fight on the front lines. They might break a nail’?

At most she proves she can be a soldier. She doesn’t fight using the fact she’s a woman as her strongest point, she fights using her super strength as her strongest point… where Steve Roger’s strongest point wasn’t his enhanced strength but his moral values. Peggy proves as a super soldier she’s equal to Steve… but Steve as a super soldier proved he was better than Red Skull. Peggy’s actions in the story doesn’t cause people to revalue women in general, just her. People either aren’t sexist and accept her regardless of her genre (Howard, Steve) or they’re sexist but accept her because she is strong.

It’s meaningful that when she thinks Steve is dead Flynn goes back to his old mindset…

Flynn: She should never have been in the field in the first place.

… because the truth is he never changed it. Peggy had only yelled at them to stop calling Steve “Hydra Stomper” as his name was “Steve Roger” and Flynn decides she, not Steve who actually died, should have never been in the field.

They don’t show how Peggy got information from Zola, which seems to imply all she did to get them was to beat him up. Chester Phillips in “Captain America” manipulated him into talking with his intelligence only.

Do you know which were Peggy’s abilities in the universe in which she isn’t a super soldier? She’s a Master Martial Artist, an Expert Marksman, a Master Spy, an Expert Tactician, a Thief and can speak and read English, Russian and German fluently as well as use a convincing American accent.

This is hardly noticeable though in her own story.

Howard: Should we not have a plan? Peggy: Who needs a plan? I have a shield. Howard: A shield is not a plan. Oh, Carter...

She was a tactician!

Now… she has a shield. But whatever girl wants to be like her won’t have a shield, nor a super serum. To be a real role model for girls who aren’t anymore children Peggy needed to have qualities they too could have that would empower her. The only good moment is when she understands what Howard plans to do:

Howard: If I can get to the controls, I can transpose the ingress and do science stuff. Peggy: You mean transpose the polarity and reverse the suction? Howard: Being the genius is my thing.

But again, the irony here is that this is no genius plan, middle school students had probably seen him being done in movies and cartoons already. It might seem genius idea to kids, but when you’re older it hardly sounds like one… and when Howard complains all in the machine is written in German they don’t have Peggy show her knowledge of it, and translate the words as she fight, she just fight and he’s supposed to figure things out.

“Captain America” is a role model for what he has inside. I’m sure Peggy Carter has plenty of things inside her as well… but “What if” makes it more about the super strength she has gained.

Where Steve gains Phillips’ respect, Flynn’s respect is more a façade due to her successes thanks to her super strength, and that respect gets pulled back as soon as she gets upset by his behavior. Sure, Flynn is a worse person than Phillips in this black and white world but this too is part of the narrative. If Peggy can’t permanently win over sexism in one person, it’s not real victory at all. If what’s remarkable about her is how she fights (due to the serum) then who didn’t have it, will never have a hope. Peggy Carter was more of a female model when she wasn’t supersoldier, she felt more of a role model in “Captain America”, when she got to do this with her own strength:

Peggy Carter: Put your right foot forward. Gilmore Hodge: Mmm… We gonna wrassle? Cause I got a few moves I know you’ll like. [suddenly Peggy punches him hard in the face. Col.Phillips drives up] Col. Chester Phillips: Agent Carter. Peggy Carter: Colonel Phillips. Col. Chester Phillips: I see you’re breaking in the candidates. That’s good!

…than when she punched Nazis thanks to being a super soldier. Peggy has never been a fragile Fräulein, but this episode seems to remark she’s not one merely because she has taken the serum.

As a result… she sets an impossible role model for girls. If the key to be (partially) respected and accepted by males is to get the super soldier serum and/or the shiled… well, that serum doesn’t exist, not does the shield.

And a similar problem exists in “What If... T'Challa Became a Star-Lord?”

Teaching a small child he can solve problems by talking and not by hitting is important… but passing the message that you can stop bullies or worse just by talking to them is again setting an impossible role model. People like Thanos can’t be stopped with just words. People like Yondu and the Ravagers wouldn’t become Robin Hood and his merry men merely because they have with themselves a young boy who tells them the right things… and what Yondu does to T’Challa is worse than what he did to Quill and having been kidnapped as a child shouldn’t be waved off so easily. We’re not talking of Yondu finding an orphaned T’Challa and raising him, if he had picked up N’Jadaka after he lost his father it would have been different, but here, he just ripped a child from a loving family, a family he loved back. And it’s almost presented as a good thing because this causes the universe to be saved by Thanos, Yondu’s lie giving T’Challa the motivation to try to to make the universe a better place.

Nebula: You lost your home, and now you save everyone else's.

And problems continue with “What If... the World Lost Its Mightiest Heroes?” because there, the solution, the hope, is presented solely by the superheroes. No one opposes to Loki, the whole Earth is expected to be saved by Captain America and Carol Danvers. The one who refuses to kneel to Loki is Fury, who’s considered special. We don’t have in this story a lone old man who’s standing stubbornly despite the threat.

LOKI: Kneel before me. [The crowd ignores him. Three more Loki's appear, surrounding and blocking the crowd from escaping.] I said KNEEL! [While the crowd quietly kneels, Loki embraces out his arms with a wide smile] Is not this simpler? Is this not your natural state? It's the unspoken truth of humanity, that you crave subjugation. The bright lure of freedom diminishes your life's joy in a mad scramble for power, for identity. You were made to be ruled. In the end, you will always kneel. ELDER GERMAN MAN: [As the words resonate to the kneeling crowd, an elder German man refuses to kneel and stands, heroic.] Not to men like you. LOKI: There are no men like me. ELDER GERMAN MAN: There are always men like you. LOKI: Look to your elder, people. Let him be an example. [As Loki is about to execute the man with his scepter as the light glows blue. Right as the energy beam shoots out, Captain America arrives, diving in just in time to block the blast with his shield, and knocking down Loki]

So basically in this series heroes set impossible standards… and are the only ones who can save the day. It can be fun for an adult, as he doesn’t need role models… but for a boy who’s no more a small child but not yet old enough to do without viewing heroes are role models, the heroes presents a standard that is something unattainable. And this is bad because he too might enjoy watching the show, but the show gives him no hope… where ironically, Marvel movies were about giving positive role models in which you could identify.

Overall I stay my case, the “What if” series is definitely enjoyable… but the bar for the target audience is set to a very young age, they don’t really follow the idea that one small change can realistically change everything because they actually intrude plenty of small changes for their setting to work, and might end up not giving the right message if you’re in between a age between a small child and an adult. Of course future “What if” episodes might change, and I will probably still love them because I adore what if… but I would love them even more if they had aimed to a target audience a little older… making their heroes, more realistic role models which can be emulated and if they had respected their own premise, that ONE SINGLE CHANGE can create a completely different new reality.

What changed in the Peggy episode wasn’t just Peggy not sitting on the booth. What changed in the T’Challa episode wasn’t just Yondu sending his subordinates to pick up a kid. What changed in the mightiest heroes episode wasn’t just Hope dying.

The fact you need more changes in order to make the difference makes the initial point that one change can make the difference void. You destroy your own premise… and this is not really a great idea.

But whatever, I guess if the idea is that the audience is really young, they didn’t expect the audience to pick this up but just to swallow their idea that ‘a moment created a new universe’.

MEDIA MENTIONED:

Movies: “Iron Man 2” (2010), “The Incredible Hulk" (2008), “Thor” (2011), “Captain America: The First Avenger” (2011), “The Avengers” (2012), “Thor: The Dark World” (2013), “Captain America: The Civil War” (2016), “Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2” (2017), “Thor – Ragnark” (2017), “Black Panther” (2018), "Avengers: Infinity War” (2018), “Captain Marvel” (2019)

Comics: “The Avengers Prelude Fury's Big Week” (2012)

#mcu what if #mcu iron man 2 #mcu the incredible hulk #mcu thor #mcu captain america the first avenger #mcu the avengers #mcu thor the dark world #mcu guardians of the galaxy vol. 2 #mcu thor ragnarok #mcu black panther #mcu avengers infinity war #mcu captain marvel #9 worlds study

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mattelektras · 3 years

Note

Dont know if you answered this yet, but whats your opinion of MCU Yelena?

i haven’t seen the movie but i’ve read spoilers/seen/promos/gifs/other people’s recollections of it so make of that what u will.

first off i think the casting is great so no complaints there

and that’s where my no complaints policy kind of stops because there’s really not much that’s very yelena about her at all??

her relationship with nat is very watered down and simplified and really that does both of them an injustice because they’re grown adult women and they have a relationship that’s a lot more complicated than grew up together sisters besties like this is the mcu so i can’t say i expected much but it’s frustrating

616’s yelena has this huge overarching theme of like. identity. ie who and what the black widow name means, what it means to her specifically and the difference between being THE black widow and being a girl raised in the red room trained to be a “black widow”

like. yelena is nat’s “equal or better” wrt skill but the point is it isn’t JUST about skill, and yelena was still young and abrasive and hard headed and couldn’t understand why she couldn’t beat nat but there’s also a line from nat about how “a spy is very difficult to stop once she’s found what makes her unique” and THAT is what yelena’s arc is about

but mcu yelena has none of that??? they’re not bothered about defining who yelena is as opposed to nat, or who she is to the black widow name but they’ve never done that with nat either like. they rarely refer to her as the black widow, we don’t know where the name came from, we don’t know how nat was deemed worthy of it so how are they gonna deal with it in regards to yelena?

if they do her taking the name to homage her dead sister then that’s just. a completely different fucking character??? yelena was primarily an antagonist to begin with, meant to reflect natasha’s character in a black mirror kind of way with yelena caught up in the Literals and origins of the black widow as opposed to herself as the black widow so idk it’d be meaningless to me for that to happen because the conflict and turmoil would come from the very predictable place of Am I Good Enough instead of i KNOW i’m good enough and i’m going to prove it. prime example of the mcu just not having the range

yelena doesn’t WANT to be free of where she came from or what’s been done to her. she’s proud of it in a way and as much as she begrudgingly admires nat in a lot of ways, she’s disappointed in what she’s become ie spy to avenger and that’s what makes her and their relationship so unique from a character perspective because nat’s TRYING to save her and do something we all objectively know is better for her but she doesn’t see that she has any problems because she’s so caught up in it

where IS that in the mcu??? she’s so soft and empty of any real uniqueness or anything that separates her from natasha. i saw someone say she reads more like the oc from that black widow teen novel or whatever it was and they were RIGHT they’ve made her so much more palatable for a big screen audience n it’s just not her. she’s just seems like a shallow nat 2.0. there’s none of her begrudgingly learning that she is in fact a person with inherent value not just valuable to her country as a spy

the revelation that she’s a victim and has been abused by this organisation comes very simply to her and then that’s just. that. it doesn’t change the trajectory of her character or make her rethink things

one thing i will say is that they kind of captured her personality??? yelena is a lot more matter of fact and biting in her responses. she doesn’t use theatrics or her sexuality like nat does and i can kind of see that in the ‘that’s disgusting’ bit w the pose??? its just in that stupid ass humour way they’ve have to do everything in the mcu

idk there was just no nuance to her imo. and it didn’t leave her w much room to grow or change other than maybe she’ll be the black widow to honour nat one day which comics yelena would absolutely never do

#bw spoilers #q & a #anonymous #a lot of things would’ve been fixable if they had t waited 10 years

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cockasinthebird · 4 years

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congratulations on reaching 500 bb, you deserve it!! can i ask for prompts 7 and 115 please?

Dear anon, Thank you!!! And thank you for sending in prompts!!

7.��“I want you now.”

and

115. “Come here.”

Not in this particular order, though, but still used quite well, and while I did actually struggle just a tiny bit with deciding which idea I should go for of the numerous ones that came forth, I’m still v satisfied!!! I’ll probably have to write the other ones at some point, but first!

1.8k words, enjoy~

“Harrington!” his voice carries over the roar of a dozen teenagers talking and gossiping throughout the cafeteria.

Everyone goes dead silent, staring at Billy, then they all whip their heads at Steve, who’s frozen with his teeth biting into a piece of meatloaf.

“Come here!” Billy shouts with his eyes burning holes into Steve.

Cautiously he turns to look at Billy, fists tight at his sides, brows pulled strong together in a stern stare.

“What did you do?” Nancy whispers to Steve, leaning across the table.

Jonathan sits next to her, honestly looking more scared than Steve himself. Everyone else looks almost excited, as if they’re waiting for a chance to see blood, the tension palpable in the air, thick and electric like a storm is brewing.

He doesn’t answer, simply drops his food on the tray and stands up, immediately causing a wave of not that hushed whispers.

Steve’s gonna get his ass kicked. Billy boutta tear Harrington a new one! Dead man walking.

It’s kinda hard to ignore. The ocean of students separate before him like he’s Moses as he walks through the crowd. They’re all laughing, snickering, jeering, as the old King Steve approaches the reigning Keg King.

Nice knowing ya, Steve. Good luck. Just give up now, it’ll hurt less. If I were you I’d run away.

But he doesn’t register any of it beyond simple background static, because the way Billy is staring, leering, is setting his soul aflame, triggering his fight or flight instinct, getting him a tad bit too excited.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Billy hisses at him, canines exposed through a scowl.

Steve frowns right back, crosses his arms. “I dunno, you tell me.” They’re standing so close that he can smell Billy’s cologne, feel his harsh breathing against his lips.

Billy looks away from Steve and over his shoulder, going from one peer’s curious gaze to another’s bloodthirsty one, then snarls, “What the FUCK are you all staring at?”

And at that they all scramble around, returning to their places, but it’s painfully obvious that they’re still paying attention, glancing over shoulders with perked ears.

A fist closes around the fabric of Steve’s expensive, short sleeved, open button down.

“Not here,” Billy whispers sharply, nostrils flared, a finger rubbing against the slightly exposed patch of chest hair Steve has to offer.

Steve gets pulled along by the shirt, out of the cafeteria, down the halls of Hawkins High, outside, underneath the bleachers, and isn’t released till Billy shoves him against the chain link fence that spans the outer borders of the football field.

Within a second Billy’s on him, lips meeting roughly with such a deep hunger it leans toward too much, but Steve follows his lead, moving fingers up to pull at the golden mullet, breathing ragged through his nose.

Billy’s thick fingers tear through the buttons of Steve’s shirt. He has been staring at him all day, the pale blue shirt having been opened just enough to expose the top of his chest, a hint of hair, and it is a fair move on Steve’s behalf, considering it’s at the start of summer and sweltering hot, nearing 90 degrees already.

But Billy hates it, in a sense, as he could not focus all day, Steve’s pale skin just teasing him, daring him to stare, inviting him to touch. And perhaps it’s because he’s seen Steve fully naked, flushed, moaning beneath him, marked up in purple and red, that he can’t just go on about his day whenever Steve shows just a bit too much. Short shorts, tight jeans, crop tops, and unbuttoned shirts. It just flicks a switch now.

As he leans away from their brutish kissing, he stares at the patch of hair now fully on display, then catches Steve grinning like the cat that ate the canary.

“You wore this shirt on purpose, didn’t you?” barely an actual question as Billy runs his fingers through Steve’s dark, rather soft, chest hair.

“I did,” he responds, sounding a bit more winded than Billy.

“You know what it does to me,” another clear statement.

“I do-” Steve starts with a sensuous chuckle, but winces an interruption as Billy tugs on a few strands of hair. “Ah-h, asshole.”

But they both laugh at that, humoured by Steve’s obvious teasing and insinuation that follows wearing this shirt, unspoken but still heard. Billy leans in, doesn’t kiss Steve even as he opens up with wanton; his need to taste Billy again palpable.

“God,” Billy growls out hot, and Steve eats it right up, squirms a bit under the hand flat on his pecs. “I want you, now.”

“Hmmm…” Steve hums as if he’s actually contemplating something, as if it wasn’t his plan from the start of his morning to end up like this. “How?”

Billy spreads his legs out on the backseat of the camaro, not that there’s a lot of space to do so, but enough for Steve to kneel there, balanced precariously on the edge of the bench, as he kisses Billy; a bit softer now but no less passionate.

As Steve makes his way down, across the jaw that tastes of aftershave, the neck that smells of cologne, the chest that beats like a drum, Billy thunks his head against the window, gazing at the tree tops surrounding them where they’re parked in the forest.

Wet, eager, pliant lips follow right behind where Steve’s fingers undoes the buttons of Billy’s dark fuchsia shirt, tongue out to taste the summer on his skin. When he reaches the border of jeans and pulls at the belt, Billy looks down at him to run a hand through his hair.

Brown eyes shoot up, dark and amber, filled with lust, desire and a certain tenderness they haven’t addressed yet. Which Billy doesn’t really want to, just in case it would ruin everything, because he doesn’t believe he can trust his own heart with such a delicate matter, with such a pretty boy.

Steve raises himself to kiss Billy, pushing his tongue in to curl them together, sweet and wet and dear, before he pulls off by an inch with a complacent smile.

“You were really convincing back there,” he laughs quietly, unhooking the belt.

“Oh yeah?” Billy chuckles back. He’s got one arm resting across the backseat, the other up to grab at the headrest for the driver's seat.

“Yeah, had me worried for a moment.” A button pops free and the zipper runs loudly.

“Good, ah-” Billy bites back a moan as Steve’s warm and slightly sweaty hand reaches into his trunks. “Wanted to- fuh-ck- wanted to sell it, make it believable.”

He gasps and groans as Steve works his hand along Billy’s full erection, staring down at those soft, pale fingers squeezing around him.

“Shit Stevie…”

Steve chuckles warmly, smiling as wide as he can go, eyes lidded and heavy with a heated gaze at how Billy becomes breathless by his touch. He scoots down the seating, lying down as much as he can, legs bent into the air, as he faces the girthy cock that throbs in his grasp.

Looks up through lashes to watch how Billy bites into his lower lip, brows pinched together with anticipation as Steve pulls his dick free from its reins. Feels a gentle hand petting his hair when he skims his lips across the burning skin, runs his tongue from the base up to just under the head, following the curve of it with the tip of his tongue.

The hand in his hair is heavy, comforting, pleading, and Steve opens his mouth wide, smears the droplet of pre against his flat tongue, then sinks down on Billy’s cock, stretching his lips around the thickness of it.

Instinctively Billy bucks his hips up, making Steve gag loudly - but he doesn’t pull off, just makes a slightly annoyed sound as he adjusts to the intrusion prodding at the back of his throat.

“Fuck! Fuck, sorry Steve, you just- ah- yes-” at least he tries to apologize, but the way Steve has the head of his leaking prick rubbing against the palate of his mouth makes it a real struggle not to thrust into that gorgeous, slippery heat.

“Mmh, arrh, look so pretty with your lips wrapped around my cock like that, baby,” Billy moans out as Steve starts bobbing his head; fingers tugging on his hair to set the right pace.

Steve says something, not meant to be heard, rather for it to vibrate off of his tongue and through Billy’s steely erection, making him leak worse, groan louder, as Steve swallows around the head.

"God, fuck- you suck dick so so good, harrh- ahh-"

With both hands in his hair now, Steve moves faster, rolls and twists his tongue, pressing against the bulging veins, swipes against the weeping slit before daring to push his way down to nuzzle his nose against Billy's crotch.

"F-faster," Billy begs as nicely as he can, voice on edge and rough.

And Steve's happy to oblige; let's himself be controlled by Billy's eager lust, fists lifting him up till only the head of the thick cock is inside of Steve's mouth, then gently but with intent thrusts back in.

It's sloppy and obscene as he fucks into Steve's throat, throbbing erection drenched in spit, drool running down Steve's chin as he relaxes.

"Yeah, fuck, I'm-I'm so-" Billy trails off with a loud groan, thighs tensing, head hitting the window as he throws back, shoving Steve fully onto his dick as he cums, a lot, warm and salty and overflowing almost.

Steve swallows the best he can around Billy's cock, like he's sucking on a lollipop, hollowing his cheeks, working the muscles in his throat to milk Billy dry.

As Billy gasps for air, chest heaving, prick softening up real quick, Steve pulls off and licks his lips all satisfied, earning himself a breathless laugh from the other.

He makes a bit of a show of it, really letting his tongue slide from one corner to another, mouth wide open, crawling further up to then kiss against Billy's lips with an all too happy smile.

"You're incredible," Billy hums with appreciation and something close to adoration, his fingers brushing through Steve's thick hair, caressing him and soothing where he's been yanking and pulling on dark locks.

"I try," Steve chuckles.

"Your turn now." And Billy starts pushing Steve away, looking down at the bulge in his jeans, clear as day.

But Steve shakes his head and catches Billy's hand as it initiates a dive for hard flesh.

"Later. Pick me up after school and I'll let you fuck me blind here in the backseat," Steve purrs directly into Billy's ear, then removes himself entirely to climb back into the passenger seat.

#Harringrove #My Writing #Lemon #Anonymous #Mystery Prompt #500 followers

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nanoland · 3 years

Text

new chapter (hellblazer fic)

(earlier parts are here; whole thing is here)

The Cave, part 10

John Constantine + The First of the Fallen, gen fic (for now), no warnings

‘In the desert,’ John thought, unsure quite why, ‘I saw a creature.’

Nicotine withdrawal was becoming a problem.

So was exhaustion.

His feet told him he’d been walking over uneven rock for around six hours – which couldn’t be right, surely? – while his brain had that sludgy feeling that usually resulted from forty-eight hours without sleep – and that was definitely wrong because he’d been dead recently enough that the blood was still drying on his trenchcoat, and dead was basically the same as being asleep.

To make matters worse, he was overdue to take his antidepressants, hidden in one of his trench’s seven secret pockets. Hated swallowing them dry, was the thing, and he didn’t have a cup of tea or glass of water to hand.

And then there was this arsehole to contend with.

“I’m following the example set by blessed Saint Anthony,” he told John insistently, clutching his shoulders. “You know, of course, that he went into the desert.”

“Did he, now?”

“Indeed! To purify himself. To get closer to God the Almighty, praise His name.”

Leaning against the cave wall, the First of the Fallen rolled his eyes.

‘Naked, bestial, squatting upon the ground’, John thought, the rest of the poem coming to him in drips and drabs.

He rubbed grit from his left eye. “Saint Anthony. Desert. Demons. Right, I remember. Legenda Aurea. Jacobus de Varagine. Wise old Ant took up the life of a holy hermit – settled down a million miles from civilisation and survived off grass and rainwater.”

“Oh, yes, of course. Foregoing nutrition and bodily hygiene is an entirely necessary step in reconnecting with the Creator,” the First of the Fallen mused. “John, I’ll be honest; this person bores me. Would you mind terribly if I killed him?”

“Shut up. Where was I? Yeah, Anthony was attacked by demons and he ran to hide in a cave. They followed him in and beat the shit out of him. His friends dragged him out and patched him up, whereupon the infuriating shit announced that he’d be going back in to let the demons beat the shit out of him some more.”

The First of the Fallen chortled and clapped. “Splendid! Another essential element of piety; masochism.”

“Will you shut it? Anyway, then God finally pulled his finger out and made the demons flee. Anthony asked where the fuck he’d been earlier and God said, basically, that he’d wanted to wait and see if Anthony would chicken out or not. Which… yeah, that’s about what I’ve come to expect.”

How did the rest go? Right: ‘I saw a creature, naked and bestial, who, squatting upon the ground, held his heart in his hands. And ate of it.’

The artist prodded the would-be saint’s shoulder, making him yelp. “In God’s name! Who are you? What are you?”

She said something that the First of the Fallen translated as, “Why do you smell so awful?”

At that, the saint scowled. “I am punishing my sinful flesh by shunning earthly pleasures and indulgences. If God wishes me dirty, then I shall be dirty.”

The First of the Fallen translated that, then translated her reply as, “‘You are utterly mad. Please remain at a distance.’ I must say, John, I agree. Of all my Father’s sycophants, none ever annoyed me half so much as the ascetics.”

John shrugged. “Eh. More palatable than a lot of holy rollers, if you ask me. I’ll take a brainsick, grubby lad like this over a fashy grifter running a megachurch any day. What’s your name, kid?”

“Edmund.”

“And these demons who were bothering you… are they still here? Can you point ‘em out to me?”

“No. They disappeared when I laid eyes on you. That’s why I assumed you were angels.”

“Yes, well, much as I’d like to take credit for that, Eddie, and contrary to popular opinion, demons don’t actually turn tail at the sight of me. More often these days, they point and laugh. And I’m not really getting a whiff of anything infernal, save for His Nibs over there. I think you might have hallucinated ‘em, mate. Understandable. Stuck down here with no food, water, or company, hell, my brain would start to make its own entertainment too.”

The First of the Fallen stretched. “For my part, I certainly wouldn’t ask a single one of my minions to waste their time tormenting an inconsequential little wretch like you.”

“Jesus, you – would you back off?” John shouted, overprotective and aware of it, feeling his face contort into a snarl.

Stupid. The bastard was only doing it to rile him up. He knew that. He’d known it for decades.

Only perhaps not, because the temperature dropped and the air grew thin. Many-limbed shadows danced along the cave walls as John’s nemesis seemed to grow a metre. The stink of butchered meat swelled in his nostrils.

Then it was over. Scowling, the First of the Fallen tossed his hair back like a sulky diva and stalked away, grumbling, “Fine. Enjoy your fascinating new friends.”

The artist watched him leave, eyebrows high, then shook her head, said something derisive-sounding, and opened up the goatskin pouch she wore at her waist. From it, she withdrew a handful of nuts and berries. These were presented to the saint and to John with a two-word sentence; evidently an instruction.

Eyes narrowed, the saint whispered to John, “Has this female been sent to… to test me?”

“Eat your nuts and don’t be a twat, there’s a good lad,” John muttered.

He left them to get better acquainted and wandered after the First.

Upon finding him pacing with his arms tight across his chest a little way down the tunnel, he said, “‘Is it good, friend?’”

The First of the Fallen snorted. “‘It is bitter – bitter.’”

“‘But I like it,’” John continued, smirking. “‘Because it is bitter.’”

“‘And because it is my heart,’” they finished together.

John leaned against the cave wall. “Gimme a ciggie.”

“Bloody addict,” he muttered, snapping his fingers. They appeared in his left hand and he chucked them John’s way.

John lit up, conscious of hungry yellow eyes watching him, and sucked in a gorgeous lungful before exhaling with a borderline-indecent sigh. (Pretended not to notice how the First’s throat bobbed.)

“So how many memories do we think this cave has?”

“Hundreds. Thousands. I can smell them everywhere. Those two just happen to be among the most visible, probably because they were stupid enough to become deeply emotionally attached to this ghastly place.”

“It’s one of them locations what acts like ghost flypaper, then? Hmm. And my dicking about with magic got it all discombobulated and upset.”

“Most likely.”

“It’s probably not that inclined to let me out, then. Which would explain why we’ve been walking for ages and haven’t reached daylight.”

“Indeed.”

“But you could leave. If you wanted to. Highly doubt some grumpy old hole in the ground has the power to imprison you.”

“I could, yes.”

“Haven’t, though. Why’s that?”

“Constantine, the day I feel compelled to explain my actions to you is the day I willingly surrender my crown to Nergal and settle comfortably into the grave.”

John laughed, walked up to him, took the cigarette from his lips, and offered it. “The day you need to is the day I settle in right alongside you.”

Nose wrinkling, he took it and gave it an experimental suck. Then he made a face, smoke spilling from his lips, before handing it back. “Revolting.”

“Eh. Acquired taste.”

#hellblazer #john constantine #first of the fallen #constantine #fanfic #my fic

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linkspooky · 3 years

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I would like to ak you about Stain and Dabi, at the very least Stain seemed to consider Deku and Shoto "true heroes", with All Might at the example to follow. Meanwhile it seems Dabi doesn´t believe real heroes exists, not even All Might. Why do you think that´s the case?

So your question here is whether Dabi is following Stain’s will or not? Dabi’s ideals may not line up 1:1 with Stain, but I would say he’s far more loyal to Stain and his ideals than to anybody else in the manga. He may even be more loyal to Stain to the point of being disloyal to the rest of the league of villains. A comparison of ideology and methods of both Stain and Dabi underneath the cut.

1. Stain’s Number One Fanboy

There are lots of aspects of Dabi’s reveal that were clearly inspired by and are even a continuation of what Stain did that made ripples in society. First and foremost Stain’s greatest success was that he got the actual public talking about him.

This has always been the difference between the League of Villains, and Stain. Even when the League of Villains has points to make and try to communicate with others, they often get dismissed as villains who chose to be villains for selfish reasons. With Stain, even characters like Deku who are often too naive to grasp this can recognize why Stain’s motivations eventually pushed him into becoming a villain.

Stain is the one villain so far we’ve seen the heroes react to with something other than, “Well obviously they just chose to be a villain, because they’re evil, mean, nasty and selfish.”

To us, the audience Shigaraki makes more sense as a character. We know exactly why Shigaraki does what he does because we see him as a human. However, Shigaraki is not human to hero society.

Someone like Stain is more palatable, because his ideals are a warped version of Hero Society’s own. Rather than being someone who rejects the idea of heroes entirely, Stain merely says, I want the number one hero to be like All Might, pure and selfless. Every hero should be like All Might. Stain only rejects a certain type of hero, not all heroes in general, and not the way Heroes are given too much license and power in this society.

Stain notices the flaws within hero society, however rather than addressing it as a societal issue, he believes if he kills a few posers then the real heroes will step up. Stain takes what is a societal issue, and wants people to take individual responsibility for it. Which is why he ends up taking it out on completely innocent people too. There are family legacy heroes who are just in it for the job, and the glory (cough, cough, Endeavor) but Tensei was not really one of them. It’s not really Tensei’s fault that all of hero society is corrupt, at least not particularly more than anybody else is, he’s just a well meaning guy doing his job.

This is why Stain’s actions can blur the line between justice, and personal revenge. Stain thinks that it’s okay to kill people in service of a cause, but in this case isn’t he just beating up someone who was otherwise a good guy because he wanted to someone else to take the blame for the ills of society?

It’s true Stain will go as far as to spare, or even save those he deems as worthy, but at the same time it’s only ever on his personal value of worthiness. He also, only saved Deku from a nomu after his battle was already lost. When they were getting in the way of him killing Tenya, he was only a little bit relucant to try to kill both of them because they were in the way of his mission at the moment.

So anyway those are all of Stain’s bad points. Stain emphasizes the exact same kind of survival of the fittest and individualism that only saves some people in hero society and damns all the rest in the first place. Stain’s good points, he actually did mean what he said. Stain genuinely believed his actions were going to make the world a better place.

Stain called Endeavor a fake, he also insists on personal responsibility that he has to do something to be the one to fix society he can’t just pretend to be ignorant of it. Stain as we know was a hero student, but couldn’t stay a student when he began noticing all of society’s flaws. In a manga where most characters are ignnorant, the fact that Stain is one of the first characters to point out something might be wrong here, and then had to act on at least his personal sense of justice does mean something.

Stain’s wors also managed to reach people and stif them up that there is “something wrong here.” They got a response out of people. Which as we’ve been seeing this arc is hard to do. The fact that villains are only evil because they choose to be is just so ingrained in things that it’s hard to shake off.

So I’m going to list three ways Dabi primarily took after Stain.

Televised Broadcast

Insistence on Personal Responsibility

Heroes Must be Pure

The reason Stain reached so many people is primarily because of the broadcast. It’s how we see it reached even Dabi himself who was apparently either just a minor crimminal, or living in hiding until that point. Dabi realizes that nothing is going to happen, no concrete change will happen, even if he’s right, unless he gets the public on his side.

This is also why even though Shigaraki has some points to make, almost no heroes listen to him. Shigaraki one does not know how to make his point in an understandable way, and two does not know how to play the game of public opinion.

Dabi always mentions casting public doubt on heroes, and making a stir in thenews. As long as they get a foot in the discussion, they’ve won somehow.

Stain reached so many people because his news coverage was a spectacle, and it sparked mass debate. Dabi has been aspiring for a long time to cause the same kind of spectacle and stirring. That’s why he intentionally lets Endeavor gets victories to build him up, that’s why he burns people and leaves them to be found to increase his own notoriety. He was creating a narrative to sell to the public, one that would be easily digestible. Taking inspiration from Stain, he wants to make another news blitz to throw everything into question. He wants to be just like Stain, seen as someone driven to villainry by their intense ideals, and their desire for a betterworld.

In fact Dabi is even a lot smarter than Stain in some aspects. Stain attracted the wrong crowd. For the most part after the news story died down, the most people that came to the league were those not really invested in his ideals. However, here comes Dabi who knows exactly how to frame himself. Just look at the difference between the way he addresses other people, and the way he addresses Shoto and Endeavor.

Dabi’s playing his cards as best as he can to create a narrative that will get talked about, because the greatest impact that Stain left behind is that he got the masses attention for a litlte white.

Number two - Individual Responsibility

Just like Stain, Dabi takes everything on his shoulders, for good or ill. He’s a staunch individualist. In some aspects that means Dabi can’t ever leave well enough alone. There are some injustices he can’t forgive, so he goes out of his way to punish them.

Part of what is happening really is just consequences for Endeavor’s actions. Something that both the rest of society, would have just let him get away with. Dabi, Stain as individuals, can’t swallow any kind of injustice, and can’t be quiet about the things they notice as wrong or hypocritical in their society.

Hypocrite or not, I believe Dabi is moved by some kind of ideals, some idea of justice. One that easily overlaps with personal revenge, in the case of Stain, that can very easily branch out and beat up perfectly innocent people who have nothing to do with it besides the fact that Dabi is in a bad mood and wants to feel like he’s punishing an individual for the ills of society.

For good or ill, Dabi does repeat Stain’s habit of purging as well. Like I said because of the overemphasis of personal resposnability, the belief that an individual has to overcome society all on their own (pulling themselves up by their bootstraps), if someone fails to meet Dabi and Stain’s sliding scale of standards, whoever they are, they may just decide it’s appropriate to murder them.

This behavior also lashes out and hits people who were almost completely unrelated. Tensei gets hit by Stain’s purge. Dabi’s plan to invite Hawks into the league (probably to dig up dirt on him) ends up hitting Twice as well.

However, there is also a strong sense of personal responsibility that should be noted. Dabi is like one of the only league members to express remorse over killing people. Not just live on television, but also to himself in the aftermath of the pro hero arc.

There’s also a tragic element for this as well. Dabi’s decision that he has to do everything on his own, means he can’t open himself up to cooperation. He can’t accept the friendship, the sympathy, or the sense of community for the leaguethat’s been offered to him multiple times. Of course, it’s sadder for Twice because he’s dead. But at the same time Dabi can’t trust anyone, can’t work with anyone, it’s extremely unhealthy and self destructive behavior in the end.

#Heroes must be Pure

Here is where Dabi and Stain differ a little bit. It’s also where Dabi differs from his brother Shoto. Both Stain, and Shoto were inspired to beieve that real heroes exist because they witnessed All Might. Shoto beliees even if his father is corrupt, he can become a hero like All Might which is the utlimate way to reject his father.

For both Stain and Shoto, they can believe that good heroes exist because they have All Might as an example. As far as we know, Dabi doesn’t even seem to mention All Might.

So for Dabi, we still have the idea that heroes need to behave a certain way, heroes need to be pure. He points out that Endeavor is a bad pillar because he’s not ideologically pure, he’s not a hero who saves others like All Might. He also believes like stain that if he culls the bad heroes, then the good heroes will rise up from that destruction.

However, I think Dabi himself may have trouble believing the idea that good heroes even exist.

Dabi shares the same purity / stain motif with Stain himself.

Once things are stained they’re impure. Impure things need to be cleansed. He can’t forgive the dirty past of either Endeavor or Hawks. He can’t let someone who has already dirtied their hands pretend to be a hero.

However, I think Dabi goes a step beyond Stain in that Stain thought if he picked off a certain amount of heroes within the society then the good heroes will do better. Dabi must believe that there is no way for a hero to remain ideologically pure in this society. So, his attacks are levvied at the society that’s incapable of producing good heroes.

Stain had a tendency to attack individuals while demanding ideological purity from them, Dabi has the same habits but he goes one step further and suggests that society is ignorant, that society needs to question whether these heroes it uplifts really are good people.

Which is also what I think leads to what you said that Dabi treats Deku and Shoto differently than Stain would. Dabi can’t believe in real heroes, so he sees the kids aspirations to be a hero as proof of their ignorance.

I would say he doesn’t think Deku or Shoto could be a true hero because one, he doesn’t see them as individuals, he looks down on them as kids. Two, he believes they blindly follow the false heroes. He even mentions directly he doesn’t really see Shoto’s individual will, or his desire to become a hero to save his mom. He just thinks Shoto is the perfect puppet Endeavor raised him to be. Dabi is unable to separate himself from Endeavor’s abuse of him, and therefore he’s also unable to separate the idea of Shoto from Endeavor.

So yeah, that’s the best way I can explain it with “the vague approximation of Dabi” that canon has given us right now. Basically Dabi is pretty loyal to Stain actually, he follows Stain’s ideals to the letter,he copies his strategy, he even has the same flaws, individual emphasis, black and white thinking, blurry line between “sacrifice for a better society” and “vigiltante justice because I think I’m right.”

The main differences come from either Dabi just seeing the UA kids as either kids who don’t know better, or blind followers in the system. (This makes sense if you realize Dabi is someone who was raised by a hero since childhood, not someone who just became a zealot like Stain). And Stain has All Might for his idea of a “pure hero” whereas Dabi either believes no good heroes exist period. Or no good heroes can exist in the current society. I hope that answered your question, nonny!

#Anonymous #stain #dabi #toya todoroki #touya todoroki #todoroki touya #todoroki toya #mha meta #metasks #league of villains #league of villains meta #i can't believe you got me talking about stain this much #i don't even like stain #his greatest contribution to the story was when Shigaraki stole his hype all his followers and then made them into his found family #shigaraki is passing off bong hits with his college age and teenage rebel friends and compress the one adult and designated driver #meanwhile stain is just sitting in a jail cell bored

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