If you’re still taking asks for the 5 hcs of an AU…! AfOhiko AU where Gran Torino actually just stole the design of Captain Hero for his costume (changing the color palette only), figuring that he’d never linger anywhere long enough for people to put two and two together. It’s old-school, and really, kinda dated. Except All for One notices him, and proceeds to make things weird.

*points and laughs at the nerd*

1- Sorahiko's path to heroism was... Unconventional. By the time he designed his hero outfit, he didn't exactly have any designs of his own to show off his own personality or mission or style. But, Sorahiko's anyways been a fan of the classics. Classic cars, classic movies, and especially classic comic books. So he just takes Captain Hero's costume and picks the colors he would rather wear, calls it a day.

2- No one else noticed. No other heroes, no civilians, no villains. Not En, not even Nana. It's not exactly a poplar comic, and he changed enough, and he doesn't stay and chat or get caught on camera very often. Until one day, when En was doing something Sorahiko would call "the height of stupidity", and Sorahiko ran in, grabbing and shoving him out of the way of AfO's attack. And AfO stares, and tries to figure out why this guy looks familiar, he's pretty sure he hasn't seen that quirk or face before. It buys them enough time to flee.

3- the next time AfO's seen him, he's put it together. A Captain Hero recolor! His little brother's favorite comic hero (used to be his favorite too) protecting his quirk's current user. Must be the universe's idea of a joke. He addresses both of them- "One For All, Captain Hero."- and that makes both start. AfO doesn't really bother to remember many hero names. AfO usually just goes by quirk, if that. AfO should be calling him "that pest" or "guard dog" or "Jet" or maybe "Torino."

Not "Captain Hero." En has no clue what that even means.

Sorahiko's soul is trying to leave his body.

That confirms to AfO that it was on purpose on this hero's part, and he says he hasn't read that comic in a while. Perhaps it's due for a reread. (He doesn't mention he never did finish it, after his brother told him too, then died.)

Sorahiko can only come up with the words "Well, it's a classic."

AfO agrees. "Does it also get better with age?"

The awkwardness manages to increase. Nana causes a distraction, and they flee.

4- This just gets worse every time they meet. Sorahiko isn't sure if he's being mocked, flirted with, or just confusing AfO. He's called "Captain Hero" each time they meet. En's given up on trying to understand. Nana decides to hunt down the comic and give it a read at this point. Sorahiko considers changing his costume, but 1- he really doesn't want to let AfO win, 2- idk it seems to be kinda keeping them all alive right now so

5- Nana is the first one to point out that AfO has been slowly changing his look though- little things, one by one. He's taking more inspiration from the Demon King in the Captain Hero comics. (Sorahiko noticed it too, but was refusing to voice it.)

Sorahiko is pushed past his limit by that. He goes on patrol alone, hoping to get a chance for AfO to see him without threat to OfA, so he can just bluntly and directly ask "Ok, dude, what's your deal?"

AfO gives him that chance, and just smiles and shrugs. "Just want to get to know someone with a common interest better."

so in an attempt to actually use positive thinking, anytime i fuck up and my brain reacts as if ive cause a minor apocalyptic event, i compare my fuck up to the 4 minute fuck up committed by the crew of the uss william d porter.

and only today, as i was having to explain what happened to my mom when i was explaining the whole comparison thing, did i realise that most people dont know about it and ive decided that needs to change because its objectively hilarious.

...which is a weird thing to say about an event that occured on a warship in 1943, specifically november 14th.

see the uss william d porter was a fletcher-class destroyer but you dont need to know what that means, just that she had guns that went bang bang and that she was escorting another ship, the uss iowa, to cairo.

while they were on their way there, they performed some gun trials like testing the anti-aircraft guns or the torpedos. and while they were running a torpedo drill, the crew of the porter managed to fire a live torpedo straight at the iowa which you know, in terms of a list of things to do while escorting a ship, shooting a torpedo at them is not on that list.

especially if the president of the united states is on board.

yeah so fdr was on board and the gun trials were actually his idea, and part of the trials was that they were conducted under radio silence.

and that means the crew of the porter couldnt just call the iowa to be like "move out the way, we accidentally shot a torpedo at you."

but they did have signal lamps and you know, the signalman on board was trained to signal this exact kind of message.

...and uh never mind, the signalman did manage to successfully tell the iowa that a torpedo was coming toward them but wasnt as successful when it came to the direction the torpedo was coming from.

not all hope is lost though because the signalman could still use the signal lamp to correct his previous mistake and-, never mind, he announced that the porter was reversing, which she wasnt.

yeah so at catastrophic mistake number 3, they broke radio silence to warn the iowa and she managed to turn out of the way just in time which meant no one got hurt. and even though the inquiry into the incident led to chief torpedoman (fantastic job title btw) lawton dawson being sentences to hard labour, fdr intervened and waved away his sentence, saying it was all an accident.

but yeah, so thats my new measure for "how much did i really fuck up?" and when i compared accidentally picking up a pencil case without a tag on it in wilko, turns out it was a very minor fuck-up. yes, the cashier had to ask another worker to grab a duplicate so they could scan the barcode, but i didnt nearly kill the president during wartime via accidental friendly fire

beloved

watching the sdcc panel and i am just very :) about how sweet their answers to “what are some of the micro moments from the game that have stuck with you the most over the years?” are. taliesin saying what the fuck is up with that which was the first like The Party Gets To Know Each Other moments of c3. travis saying asking his wife if he could kiss her in campaign. marisha going way back to the cannonball competition in campaign one. ashley choosing the beauyasha date but also just the silly goat noise matt made. liam adding onto that to compliment matt roleplaying grass so well and then saying his favourite moment was writing a story for laura and reading it to her as caleb for jester. and then matt saying that was his answer, and that his favourite moments of the game are when they find ways to give gifts to each other whether tangible or not. and sam saying his favourite moments have less to do with the story and is more so when he can just. see his friends across the table from him. when marisha perches and when laura and ashley are (badly) drawing dicks and liam saying he loves when sam sneezes and ashley tells him to stop it and just. yeah. they Are an extremely popular online powerhouse, but i’m so happy that they’re also friends building a world together out of gifts to and love for one another.

like i Am so enamoured with the characters and the world of exandria but the moments when you can feel the love that those people have for each other reach out from behind the stained glass of their performances (to steal a metaphor from brennan lee mulligan) are so extremely special and i am endlessly grateful that they decided to share their silly little home game with the world.

anyone ever heard of Them!

Prompt 163

Danny pinched the bridge of his nose, taking a deep breath, counting to ten and then letting it out. Why was this always his luck? Alright. Okay. Time to move again thanks to Dan pushing his body too far again, and ending up in his core. This was not how he was expecting to spend his days when he ghost-adopted his clone and sort-of son now actual son. Welp, he’ll throw a dart at the map to figure out where he’ll go next. 

Hm. Well, pack up Ellie! They’re moving to a place called Smallville, you always wanted a horse, right?

THIRTY FIVE

it is. so weird to me that I'm having to say this again after a real-life cartoon supervillian already once ran for president on a platform of hatred & fascism and won, but.

it's November, please fucking vote

The Final Fifteen is about Terry Pratchett's Death

read on Ao3

The final fifteen is obviously a major plot point, and serves a role in a story that was written long before Terry Pratchett was ever diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. But the scene itself wasn’t written until just a few years ago, during the writing of Season 2. In fact, the scene came about during a park bench conversation between Neil Gaiman and John Finnemore.

Others have noted that the non-romantic kiss that signals the story moving into the third act is a Neil Gaiman staple. The function of such a kiss, from Gaiman’s perspective, is to communicate.

In 2023 we are seeing a lot of stories written by men, for men, about men who are best friends and discover that their friendship can go deeper than the norms of society would usually allow; that platonic and romantic love are not so far apart, and perhaps the better word for a relationship that can be described this way is intimacy.

Neil Gaiman has made it clear in interviews that his friendship with Terry Pratchett was deeply intimate. They began collaborating on what would become Good Omens in the 1980’s, endured a tumultuous experience together through the first publication, wherein Neil offered to martyr himself on behalf of Terry if the book failed, and then spent the better part of two decades touring the world, meeting the people who loved their work. Neil would even off-handedly remark that Terry’s fans were so cheerful, and Neil’s seemed like they were ready to kill themselves; wouldn’t it be nice if they got married? From the outside, it looks very much as if Terry was Aziraphale-coded, and Neil was Crowley-coded, working together in an unexpected partnership to make the world a little bit more tolerable for the humans inhabiting it. I am not conjecturing that Neil and Terry had romantic inclinations the way their fictional characters do, but I think it is fair to say that their opposites-attract intimacy became an important part of who each of them were.

In 2007 Terry Pratchett was diagnosed with posterior cortical atrophy, a rare form of Alzheimer’s. As the disease progressed, he began to lose himself, and knew that the person he used to be was slipping away. He wanted to end his life on his own terms, and die as himself, but England did not and still does not allow for voluntary euthanasia or assisted suicide. He advocated for the right to die but never achieved it, and ultimately succumbed to the disease in 2015. Neil Gaiman has spoken a lot on the topic of death, and one answer of his that resonated with me reads:

Mostly it feels terrible. It even feels terrible when it’s someone who has been in a lot of pain for a long time or has not really been there for a long time and you know that Death has in some ways been a blessing: suddenly you are mourning the whole person. 

It doesn’t get easier as you age. It gets stranger. The point where you realise how many people you used to know and like who aren’t there any longer, and you cannot talk to them or see them or laugh with them is painful in a way that I had never expected. The first time that someone you had a romantic relationship with dies and you realise that there had been moments both of you shared and now you are the sole custodian of those moments and one day you will be gone and they will be lost forever is peculiarly strange and hard. 

~~~

The entire show is seeded with references to Terry Pratchett, but the most important one is the one that’s missing. Neil Gaiman cameoed as a sleeping moviegoer in S1E4, but a long time ago, he and Terry had discussed cameoing as sushi restaurant-goers, because sushi was weirdly prominent in the book. That cameo would have been in S1E1. But when it came time to do it, Neil couldn’t. Not without Terry. 

Neil: I was gonna say our location is a Chinese restaurant we’d had turned into a sushi restaurant. So Terry and I, Terry Pratchett and I, had a standing… not even a standing joke, just a standing plan, that we were going to have sushi - there was going to be a scene in Good Omens where sushi was eaten and we were gonna be extras, we were gonna sit in the background, eating sushi while it was done. And I was so looking forward to this and, so I wrote this scene with it being sushi, even though Terry was gone, with that in mind and I thought: Oh, I’ll sit and I’ll eat lots of sushi as an extra, this will be my scene as an extra, I’ll just be in the background. And then, on the day, or a couple of days before, I realized that I couldn’t do it.

Douglas: You never told me this before either. I might have pushed you into doing it, had I known. I think you were right not to tell me.

Neil: I was keeping it to me self ‘cause I was always like: Oh, maybe I’ll be… this will be my cameo. And then I couldn’t. I was just so sad, ‘cause Terry wasn’t there. And it was probably the day that I missed Terry the most of all of the filming - it was just this one scene ‘cause it was written for Terry and all of the sushi meals we’d ever had and all of the strange way that sushi ran through Good Omens.

~~~

In the Final Fifteen, it is clear that Crowley and Aziraphale want to stay together. They love each other. They each know that the other loves them. There’s nothing that needs to be said, no convincing that their bond is true and real and precious.

But Aziraphale has to go to Heaven, and Crowley cannot follow him there.

I cannot speculate what it must have been like for Neil to endure losing a friend who, though I’m sure he desperately wanted to still be in his life, he also knew that life had become a burden to him, and grieved that Terry was not able to choose the time and manner of his departure from this Earth. This sort of complex grief, we fan-ficcers know, is the kind that is often best processed through story-telling. 

I think that what we see Crowley going through in the Final Fifteen, alongside its importance to the story arc of Good Omens overall, is Neil processing his grief at losing his friend Terry Pratchett, and even the kiss, that violent, terrible, awful kiss, was the symbolic representation of Neil saying goodbye.

Absolutely sending me that vasco sleeps butt fucking naked with his weird little Victorian doll boyfriend

Different strokes for different folks.

Vasco finds sleepwear kind of unnecessary and restricting. He doesn't insist on sleeping nude and can go to bed decently dressed if the situation calls for it, but if it's up to him and he's comfortable and in trusted company, he prefers wearing very little.

Machete gets cold easily and has weird body image issues, not being properly covered tends to distress him. Plus he has a thing for high guality garments and wants to look pretty or at least passably presentable even in bed.

so we know you love diasomnia endlessly, but who is your favorite character from each of the other dorms

this is SO hard to answer, because so many of the characters are, like, those pet adoption ads that say "MUST STAY TOGETHER, CANNOT BE SEPARATED". it's all about the relationship dynamics! and I think everybody in the main cast is pretty neat, honestly; there isn't anyone who doesn't have something I really like about them. but if I haaaaad to choose...

Hearts - Trey, partly because I do like me a good Mom Friend™ character, and partly because he pretends like he's all sane and normal, right up until he does something to prove he's just as much of a dipshit as everyone else. you're not immune, sir.

Savana - BUFF 👏 TSUNDERE 👏 WEREWOLF 👏

Octa - this one took a lot of soul-searching, because I do feel like the Octatrio is at their very best when it's all three of them, especially when they're in full Ed Edd n Eddy mode. but in the end, Jade ekes out a win, because sometimes you get this Jade:

and then when he gets back from his nice mushroom-foraging hike, you get this Jade:

Scara - Kalim, my sweet little moron. such a good heart, so few braincells.

Pome - 90% of the time when Rook shows up, you know it's going to a be fun time watching a silly little man dance around and break into song for no reason and wax poetic about the beauty of, like, a chair. always a delight!

except every once in a while, he'll bust out something that is absolutely insane even by Twst standards:

this isn't a complaint, it's just. why is he like this. I want to study him under a microscope, except I'm afraid of what I might find.

Igni - MUST STAY TOGETHER! CANNOT BE SEPARATED! ...but I would probably go with Ortho, just because right now I'm pretty invested in his Learning Emotions story arc and looking forward to seeing it progress. he's a good boy who will post your cringe fanfic publicly if you annoy him

...and at this point I'm calling technicality because the ask says "other dorms", and I genuinely do not think I could choose between the Dia boys at this point. let's see how episode 7 goes first!

No one will understand you--you are all alone

[ID: Colored digital art featuring Lionblaze holding Dovepaw in StarClan and Hawkfrost holding Ivypaw in the Dark Forest. Their positions are mirrored vertically, linked by Dovepaw and Ivypaw's twined tails.

In the top half of the image, Lionblaze holds Dovepaw close to himself, shielding her with his paws, and he growls protectively at the viewer. Dovepaw seems to be uncomfortable at Lionblaze's overprotectiveness, trying to get out of his grasp. She has a solid yellow halo behind her head, and there's a larger yellow ring around her and Lionblaze. Six disembodied eyes are watching them. Outside the ring are several winged StarClan cats, with halos above their heads and around their wrists.

In the bottom reversed half of the drawing, Hawkfrost draws Ivypaw closer to himself, smiling deviously as he covers her face with his paws. Ivypaw looks away with a downcast expression. She has a solid red halo behind her head, and it's dripping like blood. Behind her and Hawkfrost is a dark purple forest of dead trees. Six paws claw upwards towards StarClan. Where the two sides connect are clouds and dripping blood.

The second image is identical, except that it is flipped so that Hawkfrost and Ivypaw are on the top. End ID] ID written by @curlfeatherstar

morally grey

thinking about soft forehead kisses given to luffy by zoro post battle. when luffy can finally relax and let his guard down. zoro kissing every new scar of luffy's. letting his mind drift off peacefully while zoro takes care of him. zoro making sure to whisper soft things, and that he's so proud of him. both holding each other just as tight, after coming back from the brink of death yet again. letting their heartbeats calm down, knowing the other is safe now. zoro makes sure to shower his captain with all his love and affection that he deserves after every battle, and the crew knows well enough to leave the two alone for the next few hours.

two lesbians who hate each other but can't get enough of one another.

truly what a guy