cryingcuttlefish

[cryingcuttlefish]

reposting this cuz op asked me to do it separately of them, general context is “someone tells law no one dies until the last time their name is said” and anyway man is awake for at least 4 days straight thinkin abt it

[cryingcuttlefish]

sometimes i want to reach through the screen and shake sabo by the shoulders because. god. there's just so much going on with him.

he's first introduced through the veil of luffy's memories- here he's just another feral jungle kid, sticking it out with ace and luffy, the 'nicer' brother in young luffy's eyes. and then boom. you find out he's a runaway noble trying to escape his abusive, neglectful family- and this changes nothing, they still get to become sworn brothers, but just as quickly as this is resolved, his asshole of a dad takes the three of them hostage. and what does sabo do? he gives up the little sliver of freedom he'd fought for, is willing to become miserable and lonely again if it means ace and luffy are spared. and then he comes home to find that in his absence, his parents have already found a replacement! great!

and he doesn't even get to address how fucked up that is, because stelly runs his mouth and now sabo's too busy trying to figure out how to stop his brothers and their home from getting burnt to the ground. he never gets to give them a proper goodbye- he exhausts himself trying to reach them, but he can't because. you know. he's ten. so where does this leave sabo? ten years old, with nowhere to go- he sets out to sea to try and start over, and for the crime of wanting to escape a terrible life, he's punished with an explosion to the face. he loses his memories, his brothers lose him- and so the cycle continues.

then the army saves him, takes him in; he's essentially a child soldier, with how prodigious of a fighter he is from the get-go. but hey, he thinks he's finally found his footing, even if his past's a blur to him- then it all comes flooding back. in the worst way possible. he sees his brother's corpse and he remembers, but it doesn't matter, does it? he's too late, ace is gone, and sabo's lost ten years of a life he could have shared with his brothers. we don't even know how (if, even) he recovers from this- except for a single passing statement from koala, asking him if he's 'had that dream again' because he'd been crying in his sleep. this is never brought up or addressed again. great!plus, we never do find out if getting blown up at the ripe old age of ten could have left any lasting fire-related trauma; and if it does, what does that mean for sabo, who's pretty much made of it, now?

both of these questions are answered at once- sabo treats the fire as if it's ace. it's ace's legacy he's carrying on, and it's ace he seeks freedom for. he copes by making sure ace lives on in his flames, and how can he ever hate the fire living in him if that fire is all he has left of the brother he never got to see again?

i just have to wonder about him, because he's got so many Issues that just. don't ever get addressed? every time we see him deal with his grief (episode of sabo, his own retelling of events in dressrosa) we never really discover anything about him. i wonder how it felt to finally remember the childhood that eluded him, just to find out he was an unwanted, replacable child. how he feels, living with the knowledge that he could have done something to save ace, that he'd failed to remember the two people he loved the most? i wonder just how terribly that guilt must weigh down on him- because where luffy's already begun to heal, sabo still sees ace in everything he does. his title of flame emperor is a direct callback to ace's final attack in his fight against blackbeard. he talks to his goddamn fire like his brother is still in front of him, which is sweet and heartbreaking and, considering his backlog of unaddressed trauma... incredibly unhealthy. i know these will probably be left unresolved for the sake of moving the story forward- but god, sabo, are you okay?

[cryingcuttlefish]

I love the ASL dynamic of

Portgas D Ace, a son of two people with the will of D/the Pirate King

Monkey D Luffy, Grandons of Marine hero Garp the Fist and Son of the most Wanted Man Alive, Dragon the Revolutionary

And Sabo, a nepobaby, poor by choice and keeping up with the other two by just being a Freak

[cryingcuttlefish]

Tbh Ace dying at Marineford is peak older sibling behaviour not (just) in a heroic emotional way but also in a petty way. Like if MY silly little brother publicly rescued me from a govt execution I would also immediately have to one up him by sacrificing my life for his as an assertion of Sibling Dominance

[cryingcuttlefish]

It's still so strange to me how apparently taboo it is to like a post on someone's Instagram from a month ago when there are posts still circulating on Tumblr from 1550 BCE

[cryingcuttlefish]

"I would like to know who is Luffy's mom-" you mean HER??????

[cryingcuttlefish]

Fucked up how humanity discovered electricity and radiation and made machines and learned to make airplanes and cured diseases and our takeaway isnt that "Some Magic Is Real And Here's Why", but that magic is fake this is big boy science and it's totally not magical

[cryingcuttlefish]

Dio Brando is such a world class hater it's insane. Kid hated his adoptive brother so much he decided to make it his whole family tree's problem. Haunted an entire gene pool for over a century just cause his punk brother got in the way of his inheritence. It took a temporal armageddon and a full world reboot just to scrub away the consequences of his fuckin around and he still shows up as a cowboy weredinosaur to ruin everyone's day. A master class in causing problems on purpose.

[cryingcuttlefish]

Joel's 'I love my wife' energy gets me every time

#joel smallishbeans #smallishbeans #hermitcraft season 10 #smallishbeans ep 13

[cryingcuttlefish]

i hate this weird trend in fandom where subtext is seen as a Bad Thing and is only done if the creators are too cowardly to commit to showing something. i hate to break it to you but nuance and layers are what make stories interesting, if you have no subtext then you have a very flat story

[cryingcuttlefish]

I missed the beginning of the event so I’ve only now gone back to watch Martyn’s intro and…

I love that Martyn has like A Job; he’s doing tech and set up stuff, he’s reading the donos like a champ. Still a non-hermit hermit-friend but with Work Experience. Like someone was like ‘oh we need a dono reader,’ remembered Martyn has done it, and reached out.

Meanwhile. Jimmy is Just There.

It makes perfect sense! Don’t get me wrong! Once Grian and Martyn are in the same location there’s like a 99% chance he’ll be there too. Not to mention Ranchers, old Evo friends, and just the life series in general-

But it is incredibly funny cause it’s like:

The Hermits, their IT guy, and also Jimmy.

Who is Jimmy you ask? He’s Jimmy. What’s he doing? Being Jimmy. Next question.

[cryingcuttlefish]

Welcome to my little✨Convince-Suguru-Challenge!✨

Help Gojo make some compelling moral arguments!!

[cryingcuttlefish]

twitch streamer toji

#baby megumi #hes so little #so silly #not a thought in that baby head

[cryingcuttlefish]

deleted scene

[cryingcuttlefish]

talking to future gojo and geto

[cryingcuttlefish]

i love when tropes subvert expectations because they could have made the pirate king's son some douchebag antagonist or an obstacle to luffy's dream but instead we were given an older brother with so much love it still looms large even two years after his death. ace was born into a world that scorned him for existing, and still he found an endless reserve of unconditional love for luffy, enough for him to put his anger aside and raise this scruffy boy on his own. his father being the pirate king has been a thorn in his side for as long as he's been alive, yet he didn't hate luffy for making it his goal; instead, he went around showing off luffy's wanted poster and telling anyone who crossed his path that his little brother was going to become the king of the pirates.

and then he died with the sole regret of not being able to see luffy reach his goal, but he died happy to know that he was loved; that even if it changed nothing and didn't save him it was there. he got to die in the arms of the person who loved him the most, got to spend his final breaths thanking him for all the love they shared in the short time they were given together, and i think it's just so incredibly sweet and heartbreaking that of all the paths ace's character could have gone down, they chose one that had love at the center of it all.

[cryingcuttlefish]

caesars assassination but with empty cardboard tubes