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satorkive · 7 months

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REWIND: JUJUTSU TECH—2006

“gojo-sensei, i’m home.”

megumi who just got home from school called out for his teacher. his training with nobara and itadori ended a little bit late.

he found gojo sleeping in the couch with a laptop on. he stared at his teacher’s face with dry tears streaked on his cheeks. megumi who became curious because gojo didn’t let his vulnerability out and he’s probably crying because of something he had watched.

there were various tapes scattered around the table and the laptop had the pause button. he quietly placed himself in front of the laptop and pressed the play button.

in the beginning there was darkness, but a girl their age or probably older than them sat in front of the camera.

she looked pretty. megumi thought in awe. although there was a dull look in your eyes and your skin looked like blood had been drained out of you, you looked effortlessly stunning.

“satoru, if you ever watched this tape, i’m already dead.”

megumi slowly blinked at your blunt words. oh.

you let out a humorless laugh. “i’m sorry for my… vulgar words, satoru. i…” you looked down as you played with your fingers on your lap.

“y’know how i have this weird, but strong sense of intuition that always happened when i predict? i have that feeling—the exception is, i can feel it in my soul that i would already die. in this mission. that the higher ups assigned to me.”

the spiky-haired boy observed how you took a deep breath as if you were resisting the urge to burst out.

“i’m sad because i won’t be there to witness you slaughtering them.” you gave the camera a sweet smile.

your smile dropped and you looked away from the camcorder. the grainy effect made you look more… vintage. just a memory from the past. you were once someone’s person and now you were just someone’s memory…

“i’m sorry if i wouldn’t be able to fulfill my promise to you—to never leave you behind. i’m sorry if i wouldn’t be there to wipe your tears when you cry. i’m sorry if i wouldn’t be able to lend my shoulders for you to cry on. i…” your voice cracked and tears started to fall like crystals on your cheeks.

megumi could feel the pain she’s feeling and his lips turned into frown.

“i’m sorry if i was giving up, not bothering to fight for my life because to be honest, satoru, i ask myself at night with the question: who am i doing this for?”

when the teenage boy looked at you, he felt like you were seeing him. like you were sitting in front of him, asking a simple question.

“is it for the civilians so they won’t have to endure anymore? is it for the children so they won’t have to go to war anymore? is it for the future so they would be able to live a peaceful life? or…”

“is it for the selfish elders who send children to fight for the sins they have committed?”

oh.

“why do the children have to pay for their forefathers’ sins?”

a sob broke you out and megumi could only watch in pain as you went hysterical.

it was saddening to see you—a person who clearly the world doesn’t deserve—need to sacrifice your life for the betterment of the world.

that’s how a jujutsu sorcerer works, unfortunately. you clearly don’t belong in this world. in this cruel, awful world.

“whoever manages to find this tape, i hope you will take care of my friends—satoru, suguru, and shoko. i hope you will give them the patience to grieve and to mourn. i hope you will be able to give them the care and support they deserved. i hope you will be able to see them for who they are, and not for what they are. i hope you will be able to see hope during the darkest times. and i hope you will be able to feel grateful even if your life is just a borrowed time.” you tilted your head and delicately smiled.

you let out a last giggle. “this is [last name][name], signing off. goodbye.” you pulled the camera closer to your face and gave a smooch.

the laptop went black and megumi could only blankly stare at the wall.

what a world they live in.

such a life doomed from the start and they could only wait as death came for their friend.

what a… life.

you didn’t know then, your death is the beginning of all tragedies.

#🫧 — riri’s love letters!#i love ‘toru #REWIND: by satoru #jjk #jujutsu kaisen #jjk angst #jjk x reader #gojo satoru #gojo x reader

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holybibly · 6 days

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This is a little preview of my new series and yes, bunnies, this is a whole series from me. I hope everyone is ready for an erotic dystopia?

Decadent dystopian erotica with majestic dragons - second teaser for today

Glass House Ateez x reader

Everything changed in an instant.

The king was dead, and thousands of dragons took to the burning skies. The old world was over, and a 'new age' was in the making—an age of gods and monsters.

A thousand years ago, the fires of revolution blazed across the face of the world. Dragons—the creatures of ancient legends and children's fairy tales—reduced the once prosperous world to ashes in a matter of minutes. Rivers of black blood coursed through the veins of the streets, flooding the cities and lands in their wake. The sky was a blaze of purple flames and electric shocks. The church was reduced to rubble, and the royal family was executed in a public display. In the eyes of the dead, the unspoken horror in front of these majestic creatures remained forever, and in the sparks of the flames, they shimmered like precious sea stones.

There was a bitter smell of burning flesh and ash in the air. It was the smell of dreams on fire—the smell of a future in decay.

It was the beginning of the end of ancient life. The beginning of a new world. The Age of Immortality has begun.

All the legends turned out to be true; dragons did exist. They had always lived close to us, lurking in the velvety darkness of the night, waiting for the hour. Waiting for the hour to come when the power would be in their hands. Dangerous, unbridled, wild creatures of magic and the elements, predators at the top of the food chain. They had come into the world to rule, not to obey, and now, at long last, their time had come.

The world was at anarchy. Dragons were killing, raping, and enslaving races and lands as if it were an amusing child's game. They drank blood as black as the night from golden bowls, and they ate our succulent flesh as our bones cracked under the pressure of their razor-sharp teeth. They would hold orgies in the midst of the torn corpses and revel in their omnipotence. Those were the days of darkness. A time of terror, when the very word danger was a synonym for life itself. And so it went for several years, until the ultimate power fell into the clutches of the deadly Children of the Night, the oldest of all dragons.

The majestic Hala.

Eternal as the moon itself and deadly as the uncharted depths of the ocean, they inspired burning terror in all who encountered them. To their people, they were nothing more than a myth, a legend written on fragments of tablets. Forefathers, ancestors—they had hundreds of names, but each one inspired more fear than the last. They were predators among predators, bristling with animal dominance and primal, unbridled sexuality. They exuded power and sinfulness. They were the ones who defined the rules and set the boundaries of what was permissible.

With the arrival of Hala, a new phase in the history of the world began.

Humanity was enslaved, and dragons became the dominant species. As the years went by, the human population began to decline rapidly, with fewer and fewer humans, until "our" species reached the status of gatherers. Angelicus Nova, or Angel Stars, was what we came to be called. Human existence took on a strange religious orientation; we were worshipped, idolized, and adored, but despite all this, humans remained nothing more than a rare exchangeable currency, nothing more than an expensive trinket that was prestigious to own and could be broken with a flick of the wrist.

The human being also became one of the ways in which money flowed endlessly. These institutions were known as "glass houses." Gateway to heaven. They would be the equivalent of strip clubs or luxury escort houses if you and I were in the old world. The rules were the same: "Look, but don't touch." Girls and boys were expensive pieces of family jewelry that rested under the glass of fancy display cases. Our masters showed us off to the greedy eyes of the world with all the pride and ostentation that dragons have.

In spite of their possessive, animalistic nature, dragons were nothing more than swaggering bastards with inflated egos and delusions of grandeur.

Humans could be anything as long as dragons owned us—a muse, an innamorata, a nymph, an angel, a siren, or even a goddess—but like everything else in the universe, we came at a price.

The 'glass houses' were only in operation at night. During the day, all the 'jewels' rested and tidied up after tiring hours of contemplation of the world through the bluish glass of the display window. Nice, obliging workers in starched white collars were busy with the cleaning, scrubbing the baroque decorations of the vetrines with great care from a mixture of sperm, drool, and other secretions. You looked at it with an almost reverent awe, finding it disgusting to the point of bordering on the pornographically beautiful.

You could see it as real art—crude and original, but art nonetheless. There was something particularly mesmerizing about it, almost hypnotic, about the way the thick, pearly sperm dripped slowly from the golden flowers.

Of all the glass houses that ever existed, "Eros" was the most beautiful. It was the jewel in the crown of the New Empire, and you were its goddess. There were rumors that the Hala themselves were customers of 'Eros'. But rumors were only rumors. If they were ever to visit your 'home', you would know about it, for they would be where all men ended up—at your feet.

You were content with the life that you were living. There was no tragedy and no misery, no abusive family or abusive peers, no bullying and harassment at school—no, you had it all great. You were born here at Eros—the growth and blossoming of a beautiful flower. Your whole life has been within the confines of glass rooms and silk sheets, but unlike your dreamy friends, you weren't in need of rescue.

Your name is Aphrodite. Born in the radiance of the Creator. A goddess among goddesses, carved out of marble and mother of pearl. Your hair falls to the ground in waterfalls of pearls and silk. Your eyes are the eerie silvery moonlight in half-darkness, the deadly attraction of jewels in velvet lashes. Your lips are the succulent, juicy, forbidden fruit that every man would like to taste. The pain of your kiss is going to be the last pleasure of life.

You are not a delicate, pure lily; you are not a passionate, fiery rose; you are a narcissus reveling in the crystal of mountain waters. You love yourself to pain, to death, to despair, and in all the New Empire, there was none more beautiful than you.

Original sin. The primordial beauty. You are desire in all it manifests and begins to manifest.

The naked goddess, clad in snow-white fur like armor, is the goddess of love and ecstasy.

You've never been conceptualized; you've always been enigmatic.

You have been the object of worship. Your beauty has been sung in songs, and your love has been professed in a thousand languages. "Eros" was the site of visits from the mightiest and most powerful dragons of the New Empire. They all crawled at your feet, stroking their thick, greased with their cum cocks, greedily as they burned your skin with their golden gaze. They licked the deceptively thin glass of your display case with their long, sometimes split tongues, leaving muddy streaks on the perfect surface of the glass. The mighty and great dragons, unaccustomed to humiliation and submission, urinated like bitches in heat at the mere sight of your bare shoulders and long neck covered with diamond serpents, their eyes shining like stars in the twilight of your silken chambers. They would drip their sperm onto the icy marble floor until it collected in small, glistening puddles, and then they would lick it up as if it were the sweetest nectar in the world. Ambrosia in the truest sense.

Behind the glass walls of Eros, they were dominators, predators, and the rulers of this world through fear and pain, but here in this garden of Eros, they were nothing more than whores—shameless and needy. Slaves to your beauty, desperate to please you.

Their moans are always a delight to you. The moaning of your name.

The scenarios have been repeated to the point of being painful. Sugar-sweet subs with outstretched tongues and pretty, tear-stained faces. Dominant alphas with sweat-glistening skin and eyes rolling with pleasure.

Dragons fucked other dragons; orgies and bacchanals were staged; they were subjugated and subdued. They growled, moaned, squealed, and purred; some were fucked like a port slut, and some were licked for hours until they passed out from hyperstimulation. Some masturbated in front of your window, enjoying the fact that you were there to watch them, and there were others who would spend their heat and ruts in front of your window.

The list could go on and on: bondage, darkphilia, breeding, voyeurism, humiliation, objectification, and breathing games.

You were saturated with this game.

There were so many ways in which you could spend your evenings in the company of others. It was all designed to excite you, to make you beg, and to make you plead. Each of your visitors secretly hoped that one day you would strip off your luxurious furs and assume the position that was right for them—submissive, naked, and ready to accept whatever it was they were giving you.

It was an act of power; it was a position of strength, but here you were the strength. You were power.

No one would ever have the temerity to lay a hand on you. Goddesses are always untouchable.

You entertained yourselves by teasing them, mocking them, and fanning their flames of desire and passion. Dragons are creatures that are very dependent on their emotions and their desires; they feed on their power and their magic, but when they do not get what they want, it burns them from the inside; it breaks and crumbles them, like a cookie that has been bitten.

It was delicious, but you were full. Thank you, next.

You never denied that you were a sadist; you had a taste for pain; maybe it was a kind of revenge for the destruction of your family; maybe not. They came to you for that feeling; the dragons wanted to be punished and tamed, and the feeling of pain made them cum harder. As they say, Orgasm is a little death.

You could play this game for hours on end, letting the fur expose your boobs and pressing it against the cold glass as you went. It was magnificent—tall and plump, as if it had been milked with milk—with pink nipples the color of magnolia blossoms. There was something animalistically seductive about it—an appeal to their natural reproductive instincts—that evil thought of possible pregnancy. Their whimpering made you laugh, and the sounds they made were so sweet—desperate pleas and long, long moans.

"Let me taste you; I want it so much. I was a good boy, such a good boy."

There were other days when you would let your hands run over the bare skin of your thighs, leaving long red streaks that stood in erotic contrast to the silk of your pale skin. You smeared the clear, shimmering liquid of your juices along the line of your neck, in that most exciting place for dragons, where their teeth locked in a mating mark, as if branding their mate in the most perverse of affiliations.

"Tell me I belong to you; please say it. I'll do anything you don't want. Own me, use me; I want to be your toy.".

Sometimes other girls would be brought into your shop window to put on an erotic show. Exquisite nymphs and rosy-cheeked Lolitas would explore your tender skin with their soft, wet tongues, leaving traces of hungry kisses, until at last their lips would close on the most intimate spot between your thighs.

On days like this, the whole of 'Eros' would shake with furious, jealous growls and thunderclaps. Dragons were terrible possessive, and even though the "scene" itself would excite the hell out of them, the jealousy would burn through their veins from the inside out, like a deadly poison.

"You belong to me, and only to me. You are mine, mine and mine alone. I will tear this girl apart, and we will fuck in her blood until there are no more conscious thoughts left in your pretty little head, until you remember nothing but my name.".

But no matter what their words were to you, you didn't have a care in the world. Nobody would dare touch the goddess, and if they tried, they would not only lose their hands but also get killed.

That was the law of the New Empire—all the people who were left were protected and sheltered in an incredible way. There were very few of you, and if there had been any harm to even one of you, it would have been a real tragedy. Only once has there been a breach of that law, and the consequences have been terrible. No one wants a repeat.

In any case, your life in the Garden of Eros was a pleasure. Maybe it was some kind of perverse way of looking at the world and love, but you didn't have any desire to change anything; everything was great.

Have you ever wondered if there might be another version of you out there? Perhaps, somewhere in a parallel universe, humans would still exist as the dominant species, their countries and cities would be prosperous, and you would be living a different life—a normal one. There, in that other universe, that other Aphrodite—no, not Aphrodite—you would have an ordinary name, not a divine one, something cute, something sweet, and always with a hint of shyness. It is probably there that you would have experienced your first love, that you would dream of a prince who would take you off into the sunset, and that "and they lived happily ever after." You would have been embarrassed to talk about sex, and you would have blushed horribly if his fingers had been in your knickers. But you weren't her. And she wasn't you. You don't want to be saved from sinning; you want to become one of them. You want to experience forbidden pleasures. You want to subjugate and dominate.

You're not in need of a prince; you've already had a king, or rather, eight kings. The day will come when everything you have ever dreamed of will come true, even if you haven't met any of the Hala yet.

You want power; you want to sit on a golden throne in a castle high up in the sky, and so it shall be. They say that love is a great strength, but they fail to mention that it is also the greatest weakness. And you, like no one else, know how to use it to your advantage.

This is not a pink fairy tale. There are no rainbow ponies pooping rainbows and eating fairy dust. No, this is a rotten world. It is full of debauchery, violence, and sex. You could say, "Come and rescue me. I'm waiting for you," but no, you have to rephrase it as "I'm waiting for you to crawl on your knees and lick my heels, and from that moment on, I will own you.".

Yes, that sounds much better.

It's already eight o'clock; time to get ready; you're leaving soon.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the most famous glass house in the New Empire. Tonight we have wet aesthetic cunnilingus as our main course, and for dessert, a mind-blowing orgasm. You have a choice of starters. Drinks are on the house. We accept cash and checks. If you wish, you can leave a tip for one of our "jewels.".

Our hope is that your time at Eros will be an unforgettable experience.

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lphoenixspiritl · 2 months

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I cannot for the life of me find the post that inspired this 😥

After much debate and none to few threats to his council Zuko threw open the doors to the vaults and hunted down every prize brought back to his forefathers as trinkets of conquest.

Jewels and swords and gold, the accountants and historians spent days identifying items that had sat forgotten in the dust and the dark for nearly a century. Piece after piece was meticulously researched and documented over the next weeks and months as each one found their way home.

It was the right thing to do after all, right?

To apologize, right his father's wrongs and build faith in the new brow that bore the crown.

It was a task he was proud to take on until they found it, nearly forgotten at the bottom of a chest, that dusty glint they almost missed. That small unassuming knife is what broke him. A strange curved blade set in bone carved with the moon set amongst the waves, if anyone would know it would be the ambassador.

Bursting through her door nearly breathless he set it in her hands. Eyes wide her fingertips brushed along the worn bone settling into the grooves as if they were made for her. The ulu fit in her palm melting into the shape of her grip. Then the tears began to fall and with it came the weight of the sins of the father's before him.

He could do nothing but hold her as she wept for those that were taken from her and those she would never meet, the parts of her she would never know. The sins of the father could not be undone but like that blade forged in fires neither of them would ever know, he could forge a promise that this would never happen again, that he would breathe his last breath before he ever committed the same sins as his forefathers.

#zuko x katara #zutarian #zutara #zuko #katara #katara x zuko #so sick of colonizer zuko bs #rereading and realizing you wrote it for your own diaspora

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alastyr-not-alastair · 3 months

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My boy my wonderful boy my son I love him so much

This isn’t a scene in my upcoming fanfic (yet) but I couldn’t resist drawing Rainbow Steve when I got hit with the inspiration to write and honestly? I was pretty happy with how the drawing turned out

And of course a bonus baby Rainbow Steve who’s about 5 apples big and got out of the test tube 20 minutes ago

I have so many head canons and beliefs and I must scream

I vaguely remember at some point in one of the Steve series, the younger the Steve the brighter they are, so I naturally thought “baby rainbow…. Pastel……..”

His eyes are supposed to be all the colours but since colouring hates me, it just looks grey instead in this pic

I do believe that his hair ends up brighter once he’s older but as a small child? It’s far more dull. His little sweater should be a colour shifting type thing but I have no clue how I would even draw that so

#I LOVE HIM SO MUCH AND JUST REALIZED I NEVER POSTED EITHER OF THESE HERE #sins of the forefathers #ASK ME ABOUT MY FANFIC #favremysabre #rainbow steve #steve saga #favremysabreart #my art

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mclennie · 4 months

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In the prequel, Suzanne Collins continues exploring one of the central themes of the THG trilogy: how the adults and government in the series use children, the most innocent in society, for their own aims.

This is primarily seen in the original trilogy with the cruelty of the games, where the government has deemed it legal and proper to take custody of children, throw them in harm's way, and make them kill each other to pay for the sins of their forefathers.

In TBOSAS, we get to see how Lucy Gray and the other tributes were dehumanized and thrown in cages to be gawked at by Capitol citizens who viewed them as little more than animals. They were kept in chains and survived on handouts, with some tributes having to entertain Capitol citizens for food (tbosas, pg 96).

But it's also clear Capitol children aren't as protected in Capitol society as expected. Dr. Volumnia Gaul makes Clemensia Dovecote retrieve the proposal she claims she worked on with Snow from the tank of rainbow snakes, knowing she could be seriously injured. She even hides the truth of Clemensia's injury from her parents, saying she has the flu.

This makes Snow, who witnessed Clemensia's injury and the death of his classmate Arachne earlier by another tribute, reel at the implication that the Capitol puts little value on children's lives, whether Capitol or district.

"He buried his head in his hands, confused, angry, and most of all afraid. Afraid of Dr. Gaul. Afraid of the Capitol. Afraid of everything. If the people who were supposed to protect you played so fast and loose with your life... then how did you survive? Not by trusting them, that was for sure. And if you couldn't trust them, who could you trust? All bets were off" (tbosas pg 116).

Even Snow gets put into harm's way when Dr. Gaul asks him to retrieve Sejanus from the arena, with the peacekeepers guarding the arena lying to him that they "have his back" (pg 231). But when the pack of tributes goes after Snow and Sejanus, the peacekeepers don't do anything to save them, forcing Snow to kill Bobbin in self-defense. When an angry Snow complains to the peacekeepers, they all say they were following Dr. Gaul's orders (pg 239).

And it goes back to something Sejanus says when confronting Gaul in front of all his classmates. Shouldn't the government protect everyone, district and Capitol alike? (tbosas 92). Not in Panem's society, where children are seen as complicit in their parents and grandparents' crimes, where their innocence is stolen from them, where they are asked to kill or be killed.

#tbosas #lucy gray baird #coriolanus snow #thg #a ballad of songbirds and snakes #suzanne collins #the hunger games #katniss everdeen #peeta mellark

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townofcrosshollow · 1 year

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It's 2186. You wake up and jack your brain into the holoverse work portal while your android catgirl wife prepares you a breakfast of plain bran flakes and genetically modified oat milk. It is the day once known as Thanksgiving in the former United States of America, which of course was abolished after colonization by the Empire of Canada. You pay 20 PodTokens, the equivalent of $428.25 CAD, to access your podcatcher of choice, and another 50 to open the newest episode in your feed. The voice of Charlie McElroy III blasts directly into your mind through your neural podlink. Xe says, "Welcome to Til Death Do Us Blart, the eternal podcast our forefathers cursed us to endure as repentance for our comedy sins. Us five, the eternal council, will now commence our yearly ritual to praise the shadow man." The sound of screams echoing through an office building can be heard for about 15 minutes, and then an ad for Roblox 5 plays. You smile to yourself and nod. This was a good year.

#incoherent rambling #death blart #mbmbam

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the-one-and-only-aroace · 7 months

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The nature of the riordanverse is cyclical. Everything happens over and over again, and the desire to end it is what repeats it. Percy will never get a break until he dies, because then some other dumb kid is forced to serve gods they will go unacknowledged by. He saves kids the knowledge of war until he falls and then a 14 year old is back on a quest, not having the time to mourn the girl who died too young. Jason will always be the hero, like Percy, to save some kid, some child. He will play the part of the hero, as the gods play him as. The act of saving them damns them further, the only way to fix this is to convince yourself that tragedy is honorable.

Some monstrous force will always rise again, some forefather. Because that’s is what sons do, they devour their fathers. And fathers crawl their way out of their graves, seeking revenge for a sin they made. The nature of creation is that proof of it must be eradicated. And when those sons aren’t strong enough to defeat their fathers? To sever the threads to which bind them? It teaches fathers what noose to tie to make their sons scream. And to break the chain of family, to lay the story to rest? You must learn to love the rope that chokes you, so that it is not one eventually used against you.

Apollo will always fall in love with humanity. He can’t be apathetic, it’s a wound that will never heal. Opened and opened again and again. His only choice is to convince himself the pain feels good. He can not change mortality and love it at the same time. He learns to love the grief, for it is his greatest comfort.

To end a cycle is to perpetuate it. Heroes serve the gods until they die too young. Fathers and sons can not stand to see the other live, but cannot help but become fathers and sons. Apollo will fall in love with humanity, with his own grief. Because Apollo can be a hero, can pretend he isn’t a son, but he cannot be apathetic.

#trials of apollo #toa #pjo #percy jackson #hoo #cycles #riordanverse #meta

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superectojazzmage · 5 months

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Of everything that happens in the new issue of Immortal Thor, this scene stands out the most to me as something I feel will be one of the most important scenes of both the issue and the run as a whole.

In the very beginning of gods, of Earth, of humanity, of stories, among the very first incarnations of the archetypes that Thor and Loki embody - the mighty warrior and the devious trickster - see each other and immediately get into a fight out of sheer revulsion of everything their twin stands for.

Good vs evil. Light vs dark. Order vs chaos. Brawn vs brain. Control vs freedom. Life vs death. Fate vs choice. Peace vs war. Mundanity vs magic. Law vs crime. Creation vs destruction. Love vs hate. And many more. Clashing opposites, battling for supremacy. A cycle of violence and debate passed down the generations, from father to son, mentor to student, predecessor to successor, and so on. Brother waging battle against brother just to prove a point, to fulfill their role in the story. An ideological blood feud applied to archetypes and titles and narratives. Trickling all the way down into it's present expression... Thor and Loki.

Already it's clear that cycles of this sort are going to be a very large theme of Immortal Thor. The concept of recurrences and stories being retold over the years have been talked about a lot by the narrator. The comic goes to great lengths to draw attention to how Thor and his cast and, by extension, their own world in the form of comics are falling into patterns that transcend through time. And I feel that's going to be the crux of a great deal of the plot.

Loki hates the cycle. In their roles as both the goddess of stories and the god of mischief, they abhor stagnation and repetition. They want to be free of the roles "assigned" by the narrative. They want to be free of the debate, the never-ending battle of good and evil that ha destroyed their family time and again. Thor would want to be free of it too, if he realized he were part of it. But he struggles to do so. He's a rock in the sea of time. A god among mortals, a child of two worlds watching in confusion and grief as his human friends age and change and die around him while his divine brothers and sisters continue to stay the same. In this, they are trying to do what Gaea wanted to do but couldn't; to break the cycle.

Toranos and Utgard-Loki don't want to break the cycle. They ARE the cycle. Embodiments of the sins of the forefathers carrying down to their children. Representations of the archetypes of Thors and Lokis at their absolute worst, shorn of all true depth and compassion and true belief in their aspects in favor of continuing the godforsaken argument. Shades of the old festering in the blood of the young, infesting them with their baggage, holding them back from growing better, and lashing out at them when the new generations fail to meet the standards of the elders. And they may not even realize they're doing so.

This isn't the first time this theme has come up in Al Ewing's work.

Immortal Hulk presents the conflict between the Hulk and his archenemy, the Leader, as a similar generational feud. Both in a literal familial sense (the Banner and Sterns families being divided and warring after Robert and Samuel Sterns turn on each other) and a larger ideological sense (people using the power of gamma for good or ill, going all the way to the first Hulk being born from a leader's selfish desire to misuse magic as a tool of conquest). Sometimes the thoughtful man is the hero, sometimes the brute is. But they always fight. Senselessly and pointlessly. And the Green Door and the horror it brings was only stopped... by breaking the cycle. By defying it. By Hulk choosing to never sink to Leader's level, or those of his predecessors, and instead choose to forgive.

And Ewing makes clear cycles and wars spanning centuries like this are common in the Marvel Universe. The Eternity Mask is passed down generations of men and women, always fighting for freedom against those who would deny it. Nick Fury passes his name and identity and role onto his son. There's always an Ant Man, inheriting their predecessor's problems, and there's always an Ultron, trying to claim dominion. Arakko and Krakoa alike are divided between those who hold to the old ways and those who seek new ways. Ebony and Ivory Kings do their work, from within and without. On and on, the wheels turn.

It even goes back to the very beginning. To prior multiverses. All tracing back to the first super battle, the first superhero and first supervillain - Lifebringer-One and Anti-All, the cosmic knight and the entropic dragon - fighting for the fate of the nascent world.

Effectively, Ewing views and represents the narratives of superhero comics as we know them, as a sort of repeating song. The metatextual commentary is that all this has happened before and will happen again, because humanity will always dream of heroes battling monsters. There will always be a knight and a dragon. A warrior and a trickster. A superhero and a supervillain.

But he also acknowledges how this can go too far. How comics can fall into stagnating loops of repeating stories and stall status quos. Spider-Men being denied their stories because editors want to live in nostalgia instead of the now. X-Men getting their progress towards coexistence undone because writers can't handle change.

And this is all what Immortal Thor is about and will be about. The struggle for balance between opposites and extremes. Cyclical narratives and worlds. Ideas and stories being inherited and passed on. And all of it a commentary on comic books themselves and their history and role in culture.

It's brilliant stuff.

#immortal thor #the immortal thor #thor #mighty thor #thor odinson #loki #loki laufeyson #marvel #marvel comics #marvel 616 #earth 616 #marvel universe #al ewing #comic books #comics #media analysis #character analysis

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