#I've become a fanboy of this series

[roosterforme]

The Dirty Details | Rooster x Reader

Summary: The details of how Bradley lost his virginity come as a surprise to you. When you learn how and why he became a consent king, your heart breaks for him. You vow to do everything you can to always make him feel as loved and comfortable as he makes you feel, in and out of the bedroom.

Warnings: Angst, fluff, mentions of sex while intoxicated, mentions of sexual assault

Length: 2200 words

Pairing: Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw x Female Reader

This was written to accompany my series Is It Working For You? along with a bunch of my one-shots and other series, but it can be read on its own! Check my masterlist for the reading order.

When you walked into the Hard Deck with Bradley's arm slung over your shoulder, you looked up at him and said, "This is the first time we've been here together since we got married."

"You're right," he rasped, kissing your forehead. "And now I've got this new hardware on my finger that repels all other women."

"Oh, that sounds nice," you told him with a laugh as you led the way through the huge New Year's Eve crowd. "That one over there is looking at you, Roo. Hold up your left hand."

He rolled his eyes and chuckled. "You're the only one I'm looking at, Baby Girl."

"That's Mrs. Bradshaw to you."

Bradley smirked when you smiled at him. "You're just begging to leave early, aren't you?"

You shrugged casually, but you knew for a fact that you'd be able to get Bradley to leave before midnight if you bugged him enough. If you told him you wanted him to take you to bed, he'd be leading you back to the Bronco right away.

But instead you walked into Jake's open arms and hugged him. "Angel," he drawled as he turned you to face the bar. "Your cute coworker is here."

You searched the bar area, and sure enough your eyes found Cat Coleman's, and she waved to you. "Why don't you go talk to her?" you suggested, but Jake adamantly refused. 

"No, it was just an observation," he said before wandering over to Nat. He was so transparent, it was ridiculous. 

"Okay, Jake," you muttered, and then Bradley was handing you a beer.  

"Hey, how was your trip to Maryland for Christmas?" Nat asked as she gave you a hug.

Before you could even respond, Jake loudly said, "Didn't you hear? They didn't even go anywhere at all. Rooster here has been trying to figure out how things work since he lost his virginity on their wedding night. Missed Christmas all together since he's been trying for weeks to find the clit."

You started laughing, and you could feel and hear Bradley's laughter behind you. 

"Hey, Hangman," he said, chuckling. "Fuck you."

"Yeah, Hangman," Nat replied. "That's not how Rooster lost his virginity. I know the whole scoop on that one." She was wiggling her eyebrows and looking smug.

"You do?" you asked Nat, suddenly shocked at the realization that you had no idea about any of the details of your husband's first time.

You turned to look up at Bradley as he sipped his beer, cheeks pink as he met your gaze. 

"Yep," Nat replied, her tone teasing. "Seventeen years old in the backseat of his car with a college girl. An older woman!"

"Really?" you asked Bradley, and he just nodded at you. "She was in college? How old was she?"

"Twenty," Bradley told you quietly while Nat and Jake hooted loud enough to get Payback and Fanboy in on the conversation, too. You could vaguely hear them all comparing their own virginity dirty details, but all you could see was the strange look on Bradley's face.

"What's wrong, Roo?" you asked, wrapping your arms around his waist. "Would a quickie in the bathroom make you feel better?" You started to pull him toward the hallway with a grin, but he just shook his head. 

"Nah. Not tonight."

You couldn't remember the last time he had turned you down in any capacity. Had he ever? Certainly not recently since you'd come off birth control, since you'd become his wife. You were honestly a little stunned. 

"Tell me what's wrong."

"Nothing, Sweetheart," he replied, kissing your forehead. "Wanna play pool?"

But you could tell something was definitely bothering him, even after you agreed to be his partner against Jake and Javy. Because he was awfully quiet compared to how he normally was, and his smile just wasn't quite reaching his eyes. 

But he still pulled you into his arms whenever you were near him, so you let him play a few rounds of pool and have another beer before you tugged on his hand. "Ready to head home?" you asked, tucking yourself against his side. 

"You don't want to stay until midnight?" he asked, eyebrows raised as you looked up at him. 

"No. I want to take you home, Roo."

It took twenty minutes to say goodbye to everyone which meant that you were just pulling into the driveway at the stroke of midnight. Bradley had been singing along to his Motown playlist, and when he put the Bronco in park, you climbed onto his lap. 

"Happy New Year, Baby Girl," he rasped. Then your lips softly met his while he finished singing Baby I Need Your Loving. 

"Will you tell me what's wrong now, Roo?" you asked. You didn't want to press him if he didn't want to talk about it, but he'd been fine when you first arrived at the bar. 

"It's nothing. It's so stupid," he whispered, taking the key out of the ignition and sighing as he climbed out with you in his arms. Once he set you down, you strolled up to the front door with him right at your heels, and you paused with the key in the lock. 

"Okay. But you listen to me all the time. Even when it's something stupid."

"You never say anything stupid, Baby Girl," he kissed your cheek as you opened the door. He was being lovely, but you wanted him to open up for you. He always felt better whenever he did. 

When you made your way to the bedroom and turned on the lamp on your nightstand, Bradley's beautiful face was bathed in soft light, but his brow was pinched in frustration. You pressed your lips together to keep yourself quiet, and a minute later, you were rewarded not only by your husband in just his underwear, but also by his voice. 

"You know how Nat said she knows how I lost my virginity?" 

He was looking down at the bedding and running his fingers through his hair when you whispered, "Yeah?" You crawled to the middle of the bed, but he remained standing next to his side. 

"Well, she doesn't really know what happened. Nobody does." He laughed a bit awkwardly. "Well I guess one other person does."

You nodded and patted the bed. "Do you want to talk about it?"

"No," he grunted as he collapsed back against the pillows. "It makes me uncomfortable."

And for the first time ever, you felt like maybe he didn't want you to touch him. You were dying to know what was bothering him. No matter what it was, you wanted to try to fix it, try to give him comfort. That's what he always did for you. But you were at a complete loss right now, silently begging your husband to keep talking. 

He swallowed hard, and you watched his Adam's apple move against the scars on his neck. "Yeah, I was seventeen. Yeah, it was in the backseat of my mom's old, white station wagon that I had been driving. Yeah, it was with a girl who was in college. Her name was Morgan."

You licked your lips and kept your eyes on him while he looked at the ceiling. "I told you this was stupid, Sweetheart. I don't know why it still bothers me." When he reached out for your hand, you felt instantly better and worse at the same time. "I was drunk. It was a little while after my mom died, and I was living with her cousin Brenda. You remember Brenda, from when we were in Virginia?"

"Of course," you replied, playing with his fingers. "How could I forget? I met her when we got engaged. She wants us to come visit again this summer."

"Yeah," Bradley agreed. "Brenda is great." Then he paused for a few beats. "And you know, she tried so hard to make me feel comfortable and welcome there, but I just... didn't. I spent my senior year of high school partying with this group of college kids. We'd all go out in this wooded area near the lake and drink cheap liquor on the weekends. It was right after Mav pulled my papers. A couple months before my eighteenth birthday."

When he reached for you, there was no hesitation as you scrambled into his arms. You settled against his chest, his warm skin and the steady beat of his heart calmed you immediately, and you hoped you were giving him some comfort as well.��

"That girl, Morgan? I thought she was so cool at first. She was studying anthropology. She was smart. She got me drunk and didn't get upset when I talked about my mom. We would make out by the lake. Then one night, I was so drunk, and she told me to take her to my car. I thought we were just going to make out in the backseat."

"Oh, Bradley." You felt sick to your stomach. 

"I didn't tell her no, but I was too drunk to say much of anything. She knew that, but we did it anyway. In the back of my mom's car." 

You squeezed him tight as tears leaked from your eyes. "Roo. She took advantage of you. She should have never. That is not okay."

He sighed, and the sound of it made more tears fill your eyes. "I've never told anyone about it before. I feel a little better now."

"I love you, Roo," you promised, meeting his eyes. And somehow he was the one wiping your tears away when you were supposed to be comforting him. "You sweet man. That wasn't stupid. And you can tell me when something is bothering you. I want you to."

"I know," he agreed. "But sometimes it's hard to think about that night for more than a second. I try not to."

Then you sobbed as realization washed over you, and he pulled you a little closer. "Oh, Bradley! I've convinced you to have sex with me when you were drunk! More than once!"

"No, no, stop," he said firmly, kissing your lips. "It's not the same, Baby Girl."

"But if I ever made you feel uncomfortable-"

"No," he said, shaking his head. "We are in a committed relationship. We have been pretty much from the start. I always want you, and I initiate it 90% of the time when I've been drinking. You always have my consent, and I know you'd stop if I ever gave you the impression that I didn't want it. And I know you would never hurt me."

"Never," you agreed, letting your cheek rest on his shoulder. After a few minutes, you whispered, "You know, there's one really positive thing that came from this though."

"Is there?" he asked, a little skeptical as you stroked your fingers along his tattoo. 

"Yeah. You're the consent king. And I think you always were, even before we met."

"Hmm," he grunted. "Yeah, that's really important to me."

"I love that," you told him, kissing up along his neck until you reached his lips. "And I love you. And you're mine. And Morgan can take her anthropology degree and fucking kick rocks while she thinks about how terrible she is."

Bradley laughed. And your face melted into a smile as you realized how tense your body had been. 

"I fucking love you," he promised. And you knew he did.

-----------------------------

When you woke up the next morning to Bradley's lips on your shoulder as you were draped across him, you whispered, "Happy New Year."

"Mmhmm," he hummed against your skin. You wanted him in the worst way. He was so big and warm, and he smelled so good. He was yours. He was your husband. He was patient and sweet and everything you needed. And now, especially today, you wanted to make sure he knew that you really saw him. 

"Is it okay if I touch you?"

His lips paused on your shoulder as he rasped, "Yes. Please, touch me."

So you let your hands roam along the muscular planes of his abdomen and chest. You gently dug your fingers into his bicep. You grazed the scars on his cheek with your nose.

"Will you let me kiss you, Roo?"

He responded by kissing you first. His mustache was rough against your skin, but everything else about his embrace was so soft. His lips lingered before chasing yours over and over again.

Your voice was soft, lips brushing his. "I want to have sex with you, if that's what you want."

He kissed his way along your jaw to your ear. "I see what you're doing here, Baby Girl. And I love you for it. Yes, I want to have sex with you, too."

So you took it nice and slow, and you made sure he was comfortable, even though you were certain you could read all of his cues by now. But you'd remember to take that extra step here and there. It wouldn't be hard to do, because he always gave you more than you ever expected. You'd always remind him that what he wanted and needed was important to you, because that was exactly how he made you feel every day.

-------------------------

This one hurts a little bit. Because this really happens. I hope you can't relate to what Roo went through here, but if you can, I love you. Thanks @mak-32 and @beyondthesefourwalls.

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#bradley rooster bradshaw x reader #rooster fanfic #rooster x you #rooster x reader #rooster x female reader #bradley bradshaw imagine #bradley bradshaw fic #bradley bradshaw fanfiction #bradley bradshaw x you #bradley bradshaw x female reader #bradley bradshaw x reader #bradley rooster x reader #bradley rooster bradshaw #top gun imagine #top gun maverick imagine #top gun fanfiction #top gun maverick fanfiction #roosterforme #the dirty details #rooster bradshaw fic

[vanvelding]

I'm going to say one of the nicest things I can about a show about Star Trek: Lower Decks

They played us like a string quartet.

(Spoilers for 4x09: "The Inner Fight")

Lower Decks was sold a Star Trek/Rick & Morty mashup from the start. The first scene is a drunken Mariner literally harming her sidekick, Boimler. It practically screamed, "Mariner & Boimler a hundred tours! Double-u, double-u, double-u dot Mariner and boimler dot com!"

But of course, it also had Star Trek references. One of the earliest is "Who would win in a fight? Khan or Roga Danar?" Why would anyone else in The Federation know or care who Roga Danar is? And there's no imagination on display for the oldest referential paradigm, "Who would win in a fight?" Lazy. Bullshit.

Of course before the end of season one, Lower Decks showed us it was more than that. Boimler was gaining the kind of experience he needed. The story hinted very strongly that Mariner had been in Starfleet a LONG time. She wasn't a omnicompotent mary sue; she was a Commander with her own philosophy/trauma that compelled her to remain an Ensign.

It was a good show and it stood on its own. The references were used well to create interesting stories ("Twovix"), as part of the setting ("Hear All, Trust Nothing"), or just as a gag here and there ("Kayshon, His Eyes Open" and, like a dozen others). The references to the setting become the background radiation, remarkable in how deep a cut they really are (Vendorians?). I've described it to many people as "Star Trek, but everyone has watched Star Trek."

What it wasn't, was related to its namesake. "Lower Decks" was a surprisingly heavy episode about the younger members of the Enterprise crew and their perspective on the missions of galactic import that the viewer usually enjoys an omnisicent view of.

Lower Decks mentions our main cast don't have that omniscient view, but Mariner is a stone-cold badass, Rutherford was part of a secret effort to develop artificial intelligence, Tendi is the Mistress of the Winter Constellations, and Boimler--actually Biomler is no more exceptional than any other Starfleet officer.

So when we get our main cast and the senior officers into a room and they mention Nick Locarno, our thought is, "LOL, another reference. This one from TNG. Not particularly deep. LOL, Boimler is a Beverly Crusher fanboy. I guess it makes sense, they have the character model from the episode with Tom Paris. Clearly, Robert Duncan McNeil is happy to do some voice work. We'll probably make a reference to how much he looks like Tom Paris.

"lol"

Look, if you figured it out then pat yourself on the back. Me? I filed away another reference. I didn't realize that Nick Locarno was connected to the episode of TNG that was this entire series' namesake. The characters even say, "Who?" which is one of the first times they don't get a Star Trek reference. Because Nick Locarno isn't a part of the Star Trek universe they view with an enthusiastic fandomness; it's part of their dramatic history, whether they know it or not.

"ha-ha, I guess Nick Locarno is too deep a cut for the show that called back to Morgan fucking Bateson."

But whatever, A-plot/B-plot. Gags about Starfleet habitually rolling up to seedy establishments in uniforms while looking for information, which is subverted by Captain Freeman being fucking genre savvy (also, wasn't she going to be promoted before getting arrested at the end of season two? I guess getting framed for a crime was deemed to be not very 'admiral-able'). Mariner ends up in a cave with a Klingon taking shelter from a crystal rain.

The pieces are there. Mariner was an ensign during The Dominion War. Two to three years before The Dominion War, Wesley Crusher left Starfleet, our Nick Locarno expy Tom Paris was recruited to Voyager, and Sito Jaxa was an ensign.

And Nick Locarno is in play.

We could have figured it out! We're in the narrative and emotional third act of this series (Tendi gave us the "We'll always be friends" speech last week)! Everyone regular just sat in a room trying to figure out how to help Mariner; we were one fruit salad analogy away from an intervention with Dr. Migleemoo!

Mariner escapes from Cardassian interrogation chambers for fun!

But Locarno is just another TNG reference, like Beverly Crusher. Background radiation. The season's story arc is something original to Lower Decks, which it's proven it's unafraid to do at this point. The series has no relation to "Lower Decks"

And then they fucking hit us with it; Beckett Mariner knew Sito Jaxa. They were friends. Then Jaxa died.

That's Mariner's trauma (that and The Dominion War).

And I didn't see it because I came to see Lower Decks as a series that stood on its own merits as a show while calling back to earlier Treks in a light, non-committal way. And I credit that solely to the writing of the show which leveraged both of those qualities to make an entertaining show that I like before, but now respect.

Just amazing stuff.

#star trek #star trek lower decks #star trek lwd #lower decks #lower decks spoilers #star trek lwd spoilers

[star-anise]

i see you have discovered history professor bret deveraux, my beloved. i highly recommend his battle of helm's deep and pelennor fields series if you want to learn about historical battlefield tactics (and operations and strategies) and his fremen mirage series if you want to learn about the facist view of history and why it's complete and utter bullshit. his series on sparta is also phenomenal

I'm having such a good time working through his back catalogue. AGreatDivorce on Youtube has recorded audio versions of many of his posts, which is a godsend for me.

The Fremen Mirage series was a balm to my soul after having to deal with SO many "military history buffs" and SFF reply guys who think that violence is the pinnacle of human achievement, and therefore acknowledging the personhood of anyone but the apex warriors is like, taking resources away from the war effort or something.

For the uninitiated, the "Fremen Mirage" is what Devereaux calls a "pop theory of history" that believes:

that a lack of wealth and sophistication leads to moral purity, which in turn leads to military prowess, which consequently produces a cycle of history wherein rich and decadent societies are forever being overthrown by poor, but hardy ‘Fremen’ who then become rich and decadent in their turn. Or, as the meme, originally coined by G. Michael Hopf puts it, “Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.”

And then in his series he applies rigorous historical analysis to this idea, and takes it apart like Christmas wrapping. It's almost as fun as the Sparta series, where he demonstrates that Spartans would hate their modern fanboys, and also aren't actually as special or amazing as they're made out to be.

After a while, though, I got tired of the military side of things, and gone wandering. What I've found most refreshing this week were posts that take a step back from direct pop culture criticism and just simply lay out the material realities of life in the past. The really basic building blocks that help us get in tune with the daily life of the past. Stuff like the Lonely City series.

Or the clothing series! I said that I've been trying to figure out just how rare or common looms were, and while I've been looking at archeological evidence of loom types, he's just found the numbers that let me calculate it.

I'm using a base unit of 5 yards of cloth, which is, with a generous hand wiggle, enough to make one person's outfit, maybe two.

According to these estimates:

In the early middle ages, using a hand spindle and warp-weighted loom, that might take about 70 hours of weaving and, at a low estimate, 500 hours of spinning. If someone devoted eight hours a day to nothing but spinning yarn, it would take them over two months to have enough to weave with.

In the Late Middle Ages, with the invention of the spinning wheel and horizontal loom, that figure would go down to 180 hours of spinning and 30 hours of weaving. The change in technology reduces the time down to almost a third of what it was before!

This really settles for me the question I had about my early-medieval fantasy setting, which is that there would be a lot of looms, a loom in every household, and that it would not at all be out of place for even aristocratic women to spin and weave on a regular basis.

Which like, to be cranky about fantasy heroines who hate sewing: In that kind of world, embroidery is a luxury. Weavers and spinners have to bust their butts just to put clothes on everybody's backs. Spinning and weaving that much is gruelling work that I would absolutely understand hating. However, it is not stupid, silly, or useless. Being able to embroider—to do something primarily decorative and artistic, just because it looks good and feels nice—is likely to be more of an escape from drudgery than the drudgery itself.

It really can't be overstated, how much the Industrial Revolution was a textile revolution. Our relationship to cloth and clothing has transformed out of all recognition over the last 300 years. There are undeniable advantages to this, because it frees us to do so many other things with our time. But it also makes it tough to look back into the past clearly, because it's so easy to forget that the burdens we've shed still existed back then.

#medievalism #staranise original

[callsigndragon]

A Rebel In My Soul | Chapter 1: The best of the best

Pairing: Jake "Hangman" Seresin x Fem!Mitchell!Reader

Word count: 1,8k

Warnings: swearing, brief mention of death, Hangman being an asshole, reader has Rebel as a call sign (it is easier than use y/n all the time), enemies to lovers (i'll add more warnings in the future chapters)

Summary: Y/N "Rebel" Mitchell is one of the best aviators of her generation. She grew up hearing the adventures and stories of Maverick, her father, that he used as bedtime stories. She became an aviator with her best friend Bradley "Rooster" Bradshaw and now both of them have to come back to the Top Gun Academy for an important mission. Only the best of the best is called for this mission, including the southern idiot called Jake "Hangman" Seresin. Both of you had hated each other since day one. Now, having to work together once more, you count the days for this mission to be over, not only to never see Hangman again, but to also cut all connections again with your father.  

A/N: Okay so I saw Top Gun Maverick a few days ago, and I swear I've been living on Rooster and Hangman's fiction since then. I had this idea in my head, to make a whole series of Maverick's daughter, Rebel. I hope it turns out well.

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Y/n "Rebel" Mitchell was not supposed to be here. That's what her father thought. Maverick knew that the chances of survival in this mission weren't exactly high, that's what they called him. Maverick was an expert of going against the odds.  

That's one of the many things that you two had in common.  

When Maverick saw Rooster's picture in the screen, he thought he was going to pass out. He couldn't risk the life of his best friend's son. He swore to Carole that he would take care of him. But if he wanted to have a relationship with him again, he knew that he couldn’t interfere in his career. Not again.  

After the initial shock of Rooster’s image, he saw yours. His little girl. Another girl that he couldn’t keep by his side. Rebel was only a few years younger than Rooster. And, as if he hadn’t learned the lesson the first time, he tried to pull his daughter’s papers. He didn’t want her to become a pilot and risk her life every time she was in the air. Of course, when she find out, Rebel swore to never speak to your dad again.  

And that’s how the hardest mission on Maverick’s life began.  

You enter the Hard Deck, looking around to see any familiar faces. You see the one and only Hangman playing pool with Coyote. You knew them from the academy. Thanks to your dad, you entered Top Gun with Rooster.  

“Rebel?”, you hear a surprised voice behind you.  

You turn around and see the face of one of your best friends. “Phoenix? Oh my god, what are you doing here?” you say while getting close to hug her. “I missed you so much”  

“You thought that they could call the best of the best and leave me out of it?” says Phoenix turning around to introduce you to the two tall men behind her. “Rebel, these are Payback and Fanboy”  

“Nice to meet you, guys. Guess who’s here”  

Phoenix looks around the place until she sees Hangman, she sighs while rolling her eyes.  

“They need to be desperate to bring an asshole like him”  

Fanboy and Payback laugh at Phoenix antics. “Come on, he is going to be soooo pissed when he sees me”  

You and your little group move towards the pool table, Hangman raising his eyes just as you get closer. “What do we have here? If it ain’t Phoenix! Oh well well, good little Rebel is also in the building! And here I thought we were special Coyote”  

“Special like you? No thanks, I'll pass” you retort, making Fanboy and Payback laugh.  

“Fellas, this here’s Bag man” explains Phoenix  

“Hangman” 

“Whatever. You’re looking at the only Naval aviator on active duty with a confirmed air-to-air kill” says Phoenix. You look at her, wondering why did she decide to say that to the new guys. She can’t stand him, why praise him then?  

“Stop” responds Hangman, his ego being inflated.

“Mind you, the other guy was in a museum piece from the Korean War”  

There it is. Phoenix roasting the shit out of Hangman. That’s your girl.  

“Cold war” adds Coyote, as if it could make Hangman look cooler.  

“Different wars, same century” says Payback. 

“Not this one” adds Fanboy. You’re really beginning to like these two.  

The look in Hangman’s face is priceless. See Hangman got on your nerves every time you two were in the same room. But Phoenix was always ready to mop the floor with him because “nobody messes with my girl”  

Phoenix was like the sister you never had. And by the looks of it, Payback and Fanboy will be joining the Hangman’s roasting squad soon.  

“Who are your friends?” asks Coyote, trying to change the subject.  

“Payback”  

“Fanboy” 

“Hey Coyote” you say looking at Hangman’s friend 

“Hey”  

“Who’s he?” you ask while signaling with your head.  

“Who’s who?”  

Your little group turns to look at the dark blonde-haired man who has been eating the whole time. He raises his head, looking surprised of all the attention he is getting all of a sudden. He is cute.  

“When did you get in?” asks Coyote  

“Oh, I’ve been here the whole time” answers the man, smiling.  

“The man’s a stealth pilot” jokes Hangman, always trying to be the funny man of the hour.  

“Literally” 

 “WSO, actually” 

“With no sense of humor” Hangman gives the pool stick to Phoenix and leaves.  

“I’ll get us something to drink” you say approaching the bar. Seems like Hangman had the same idea.  

“Penny, my dear. I’ll have four more on the old-timer" you hear him say, looking at the poor guy that surely had made the bell ring before. You feel you stomach turn when you see the face of your father. Penny looks at you, a little pout in her mouth, knowing how this whole situation is making you feel.  

You don’t make eye contact with him. Instead, you choose to talk to Hangman.  

“Need help with those?”  

“What, you’re afraid I’ll let them fall?”  

“No, I was just offering” you mutter.  

Hangman looks at you like you’ve grown a second head.  

“What?”  

“...you okay?”  

“Yes? Why?”  

“Because you’re being nice to me”  

Before you can answer, you see Rooster entering the Hard Deck. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and his usual aviator glasses. He’s tanned, more than usual. You know the moment he sees Maverick hell is going to break loose. You need to avoid the confrontation.  

“Roos!” you call him, running towards him.  

“Look at that, my favorite Rebel!” he catches you in his arms, hugging you. “Did they call you too? You didn’t tell me” 

“Well, it is a secret mission, how am I supposed to say anything?” you ask, stealing his glasses and putting them on.  

“Fair point” he says, while letting you on the ground. “The others are here too?”  

“Yeah, even bagman”  

He chuckles when he sees you rolling your eyes. “Come on”  

You go with the rest, ignoring the feeling of your father’s eyes following you around.  

“Bradshaw, is that you?” calls out Phoenix.  

You two get closer to her. “This is how I find out you’re stateside?” 

“Yeah, I just thought I’d surprise you” 

Phoenix leans in the pool table, aiming at the next ball before pulling the stick in the opposite direction, hitting Rooster. He bends in pain and you can’t contain your laugh. Just like the old times. He looks up to her, smiling “It’s good to see you” 

“Good to see you too”  

Hangman comes back from the bar, beers in hand, looking directly to Rooster. He gives one to everyone except you and Bob. Great, now you have to come back to the bar again. 

“Bradshaw. As I live and breathe” he says while stealing the stick from Bob’s hands. 

“Hangman, you look... good”  

“Well, I am good, Rooster” he hits one of the balls, his aiming never failing. “I’m very good. In fact, I am too good to be true” 

You can see the rest of the aviators looking at each other, shaking their heads in disbelieve. Yeah, you stopped being surprised of Hangman’s ego long ago.  

“So, anybody know what this special detachment is all about?” Payback asks.  

“No, mission’s a mission. They don’t confront me”

“As if can care about something” you whisper to Rooster.  

“What I want to know: who’s gonna be team leader? And which one of y’all has what it takes to follow me?”  

“Yeah, like they would let someone called Hangman be the team leader” you declare, while taking off Rooster’s aviators. 

“Hangman, the only place you’ll lead anyone is an early grave” 

“Whoo!” Fanboy says before sipping from his beer.  

Hangman walks closer to the both of you, a smirk ready in his face, and mischief in his eyes. The guy’s an asshole. Hot and good at his job? Sure, but still an asshole.  

“Well, anyone who follows you two is either gonna run out of fuel” says while looking at Rooster “Or get themselves kick out from the team” Hangman finishes his sentence looking at you.  

It is true that you aren’t one to follow the rules to a T. You gained Rebel as your call-sign because of it. Your father always told you that sometimes, you need to stop thinking and start doing. And you have lived up to it ever since. It got you in trouble several times, but you were the first of your class, and even Hangman had trouble following you. You were really fast.  

Iceman told you once that you were just like your father. You really hoped you didn’t.  

“But that’s just you, ain’t it, Rooster? You’re snug on that perch, waiting for just the right moment that never comes. At least she has more balls than you”  

The group stays silent, Hangman’s words echoing in the air, some of them looking at the ground. Seriously, what’s wrong with this guy? You walk closer to him, raising your head to look at him straight in the eyes.  

“Well, at least we have people willing to follow us. Have you looked around? Nobody will follow you as a team leader”  

If looks could kill, you would probably be dead by now. He leans over you, his face so close that you can feel his breath in your cheek. Green eyes piercing your own. If this guy was a bit less of an asshole you wouldn’t mind having something with him. But hell will freeze over before you even consider even being around him for more than ten minutes.  

“I would never follow someone like you” 

“Remember when I asked for your opinion? Oh yeah, me neither” you step aside, getting the stick from his hands and giving it to Bob.  

Hangman goes to sit with Coyote, Phoenix getting close to you and Rooster.  

“Well, he hasn’t changed” 

“Nope, sure hasn’t” 

“You know, everyone’s entitled to act like an asshole once in a while, but he sure does abuse the privilege” 

Both of them laugh, you stay with Phoenix while Fanboy nods in the direction of the other aviators entering the Hard Deck. You don’t recognize most of them.  

“What the hell kind of mission is this?”  

“That’s not the question we should be asking. Everyone here is the best there is” Phoenix is right. These are the best of the best, actually. Hell, Hangman is one of the best, even if it’s hard to admit. You two are fast as hell, of course you’re faster. But he has a hell of an aim, something you’re not as good as him. So, if you have been brought here to learn...  

“Who the hell are they gonna bring to teach us?”  

Phoenix asks the question you were pondering. You were trained by the bests and now you are the bests. Who can possibly teach you more than you already know? And then it hits you.  

“Oh shit”  

The person that is going to teach you is the same old man that is going to pay for this round of beers your friends are having.  

Pete “Maverick” Mitchell.  

#top gun x reader #jake hangman x reader #jake hangman seresin #jake hangman x fem!reader #top gun fanfiction #top gun maverick #hangman x reader #top gun maverick fanfic #jake seresin x reader #hangman seresin #hangman imagine #jake hangman fic

[mggsttn]

Why we need MPW S2:

First post I've made on here, let's go!!!

SOOOO...

I just finished MPW, which has been my comfort show for the last 9 weeks. (I've watched it so many times, I don't need subtitles at this point and no I don't speak Japanese lol) I'll sum up my thoughts on the show at a later time, but right now I wanna list some reasons why we NEED a S2.

1. How did Yoh and Segasaki start dating in the first place??

In the flashbacks we get to see how they met and how they started talking, but we never get to see how they went from this:

To THIS:

Going off of @notfreetoday timeline, there's 2 years between them meeting and Segasaki's (not) proposal and then 3 years between the proposal and when they start living together. Like THAT'S A LOT OF STUFF MISSING. When did they become closer? When did they realize they had romantic feelings? Did Segasaki's "friends" give them shit? Etc, etc. I personally need like a whole ass prequel series.

2. Does the manga sell well?

I need to see what happens after Yoh and Man-san publish the manga! I wanna see people fangirling (fanboying, fanpersoning) about it!

3. Do these two ever learn how to have a conversation for Pete's sake??

I'm aware that the whole thing is they aren't good at communicating and that's where the conflict for the plot comes from but we see them both grow and get better at communicating as the show progresses. In the finale Yoh FINALLY starts to get it but I still think there's a lot we can see there. (See @notfreetoday post about the importance of Amae in MPW for more details on how these 2 communicate.)

4. We need to see these two go on a date where THEY TAKE A COOKING CLASS.

Like PLEASE. SOMEONE SAVE SEGASAKI. This is the face of a man who is suffering but he's in love so he's dealing with it.

TLDR: this is an amazing show, my personal comfort show, and I think there's still A LOT in this world and to this story that we can see!!!

#my personal weatherman #mashiko atsuki #higuchi kouhei #finale #plsgiveusseason2ofmpw

[exo-raskreia]

U being anti IH what if the same thing happens to gjhm and they become canon but don't have as much material as other ship?

I'm not sure if you're asking this with malicious intent or if it's a genuine question from a fellow shipper, but here we go.

(Oncoming lengthy response)

I've actually had this thought before. What if despite his different writing style, the general hate the Bleach ED got, & just how ridiculous it sounds, Gege pulled a Kubo? After all, he's a fanboy of the man (I wonder what he thinks of the Bleach ED? Is he aware of how it was received?).

I would be shocked, conflicted, & worried.

To start with, while neither ship should be compared due to how fundamentally different they are, I will say this. Despite several interactions, IH severely lacked chemistry, trust, & meaningful moments. Meanwhile, GojoHime with less on-screen interactions & a playful dynamic, have shown us a deep trust for each other & have worked together to achieve their shared goals. Despite being a minor side character, Utahime is one of the few people Gojo trusts & one of the three adults he calls by first name with no honorific. This already puts them leagues above IH, who were barely friends at best & acquaintances at worst.

So, I wouldn't want GjHm to somehow get the IH treatment in the end. I wouldn't wish that on any shipper, heck, I even feel sort of bad for the IH's, cuz despite becoming "canon" out of nowhere 7 years ago, they still. don't. have. content (especially from the author himself, who has shown no particular interest in his endgames. They don't even have a family sketch 🫢). Makes you wonder who really lost here (as IR has still gotten some content over the years post-ED...).

GjHm already gets enough hate for simply existing, despite it being a smaller ship with a smaller fanbase in the JJK fandom (the antis are threatened by the potential it has, not to mention it's the most popular JJK straight ship in Japan), so if Gege were to pull a Kubo, the hate would increase, especially towards Utahime, who of course would amass the most hate from this freakin' fandom that's obsessed with Gojo. It'd be a tough time for us fans of the ship & Utahime.

After dealing with the aftermath of the Naruto Shipping Wars as a soldier in the NaruHina army lol (don't even get me started on why NH is NOT like IH, plus we actually have content 🤪), & then witnessing the disastrous Bleach ED & the general hate it got, I do NOT wish to go thru this again. Whether you win or lose, if it isn't done properly, you'll still deal with criticism left & right... (why can't more battle shounens be like Fairy Tail when it comes to slowly developing the ships throughout the story? There'd be less drama...)

Gege keeps saying the manga will end soon, so that means if he wants to make anyone canon by the end, he'll have to start now. JJK is a battle shounen with no romance, but if despite this, GjHm are to be canon, then their moments leading up to it will have to be quality > quantity. Is there enough room/time to develop them the way we would wish? Doubt it, so we'll need at least a couple flashbacks to further justify them (and boy, we're still waiting for their flashback after Gojo's unsealing, if that ever comes...).

Basically, even if it's a few moments, they need to be impactful enough to make even the casual readers/viewers think, "I could see them ending up together." Subtlety & slow burn are usually the best fit for battle shounens, after all, &/or maybe a little further (once again, like Fairy Tail). With that said, out of all the potential ships in the series, I personally view YutaMaki as the most likely to become canon by the end; their moments, far & few in between, are enough to convince me that they could be endgame (that is, if the capricious Gege so wished 😓).

So far, we've seen nothing of what Gojo & Utahime truly think of each other. To reiterate, they have a silly dynamic but have shown to trust each other implicitly. Why this is, we can only guess. I mean, Utahime has risked her life for Gojo twice already (investigating the mole & buffing him against Sukuna). Where is this supposed "hate" she holds for him? It's stated in the databook that she hates him most of the time, so how does she feel at other times? 🤔 And Gojo, despite his teasing, has shown he cares for her, saved her, & obviously trusted her with the aforementioned important & risky tasks.

Just what is going on with these two? Is it really so impossible that there could be something more here? Whether now or later? Gege would just need to give us a little more... Though at this point, there's only so much we can hope for, considering his writing style & how things have been seemingly going... Gotta keep our expectations low...

(What if—delulu plot twist—GjHm are already together, either secretly this whole time—like some ppl have wondered, as this could further explain the immense trust in each other—or got together during the timeskip, & all we need now is the big reveal with a/some proper flashback(s) to explain it? LOL. Just a silly idea 😜).

Anyway, in general, I wouldn't want GjHm becoming canon at the cost of its beautiful potential. We'd need some more moments to justify it, or else I'd have to put back on my old "army uniform" to defend my ship if need be. So, despite how unlikely it would be, I can only hope Gege does NOT pull a Kubo (well, he's more likely to kill everyone off or something like that 🙄).

I'd rather he pulled a Sorachi (author of Gintama) & left things open-ended, keeping the fandom from turning into utter chaos...

(Maybe only that side might lose it, tho, lol. They get bothered by anything that doesn't adhere to their ship despite them being down here with us in Delulu Land, oop-).

#gojohime #gojo and utahime #ask #reiapost #anti-ichihime #anti bleach ending

[stillness-in-green]

On Heteromorphs and Heteromorphobia (Arc XIX - XXI-a, Star & Stripe to Final War-a)

Okay, so, I had intended to make one last post to cover through the hospital attack, but as my work week kept me very busy, the write-up on the hospital stuff itself is not finished yet. However, when I checked the word count on the S&S arc up through the end of what I had on the hospital--somewhat shorthanded notes on the first two chapters that would need considerable fleshing out, and bupkis on the second two chapters--I found it was already at seven thousand words, far over the four to five thousand mark I've been aiming for per post in this series. So, this week's somewhat shorter post covers from where we left off up through Chapter 369, the last chapter before the hospital material starts. Hit the jump!

The Star and Stripe Arc (Chapters 329-334)

Chapter 329: 

AFO explicitly pins the blame for Spinner’s difficult life on his being a heteromorph and notes that many in the shadows empathize with his cause, leading to an explanation for the Spinner fanboys from 318: Spinner is becoming the face of a movement!     

Much of this stirring up of heteromorphs around the country is being done by the remnants of the PLF, particularly Spinner’s PLF advisors, who have been putting up posters about Spinner being the voice of discontented and mistreated heteromorphs, posters that also suggest a coming reckoning in grand language steeped in cult mentality: gather soon, liberation, fruition, neutrality is a sin.      (And not just Spinner!  The line about neutrality being a sin is from a set of posters about the tragedy of Toga Himiko, picking back up the tack Curious had wanted to take in using Toga’s story to realize Liberation.[1] It’s unclear whether Spinner’s advisors are also putting up the Togaganda or whether that’s being handled by some of the other remnants we’ll see later.)      The beauty of this is that once heteromorphs are stirred up enough, they’ll be gathering comrades and spreading the word of their own volition, even to those with no contact with the PLF.  Of course, the people ultimately behind this are Skeptic and AFO, neither of them heteromorphs, and both with transparent ulterior motivations, though Skeptic at least is still holding to Re-Destro’s ideology of Liberation and likely does view the subsequent mob activity as helpful to heteromorphs themselves, as opposed to the mere means to his own end of becoming the Demon King AFO has in mind.      [1] And which Skeptic had once scoffed at, feeling Toga a poorly suited choice for that sort of mythologizing.  I wonder if he’s just gotten more desperate or if he’s acceded that Toga’s just fine for bringing about Liberation provided that it’s Liberation à la Shigaraki Tomura?     

But how about Spinner himself?  Well, he looks unconvinced, to say the least.  More on this later, when he gets more context on what the reader is already seeing.     

Chapter 333: 

There’s one lone heteromorph outside of Agpar in Star’s crew.  He’s not a very extreme one—tall but not inhumanly so, with a snouty facial structure and long, upward-pointing ears—but he is still the only heteromorph I’ve yet seen in the default masses of a uniformed group of military-types.  Like, BNHA’s masses of riot squad type cops are all baseline, the guards at Tartarus were all baseline, the probably-JSDF guys in the movie are baseline, and so forth.  These folks are often wearing helmets, of course, so there might be some minor divergences scattered amongst them, but there’s only so much divergence that a helmet and full-coverage uniform will hide!  Odd skin tones, yes, unusual eyes, sure, but not protruding facial features or anything other than very small horns, and divergent body plans are right out.     

The U.A. Traitor Arc (Chapters 335-342)

Chapter 335: 

All Might very conspicuously omits Spinner from the list of threats facing the hero side.  In the moment, it reads like All Might doesn’t view Spinner as a threat.  And sure, why would one random, weak-quirked lizard guy constitute a threat worth mentioning, right?  Later on, we’ll find out that the heroes were trying to keep Kurogiri’s location on the down-low, so this omission may simply be an effort to avoid having to discuss the target of the mob that’s brewing by not bringing up the mob to begin with.     

While I assume that’s Horikoshi’s reasoning for this scene playing the way it does, I do think there are some questions raised by later chapters that imply that heroes are underestimating the situation quite severely.  To wit, it’s already known that the obfuscation has failed and an attack on the hospital is coming—even someone as removed from villain goings-on as the Ordinary Woman had heard about it, news which she relayed to Shouji.  I can’t believe that Hawks and company wouldn’t have intel to match that, if only via also learning of the attack from Josei-san.          If the heroes already know the hospital assault is coming, though, why on earth is it so under-defended?  They can’t possibly be running the risk that an attack set to be led by a member of the League of Villains (as they might presume to be the case thanks to all the posters everywhere!) would choose to target the hospital at random, or that it’s just some kind of generic protest that won’t be trying to breach the walls—surely they must know the mob is coming for Kurogiri?  But then why such paltry numbers of defenders?       I can only assume that the heroes badly, badly underestimated how deep heteromorphic anger and pain ran, and thus equally badly underestimated how many people would show up for the attack.  All Might, being part of that central group of planners, is also one of the people being proven deeply ignorant about, and dismissive of, both the suffering endured and the danger presented by the heteromorphs he knows are coming.     

Shouji immediately picks up on the omission and indirectly challenges it when he says, “It’s safe to assume the list goes on,” which All Might deflects with, “Yes.  They will likely amass more allies,” still not talking about who those allies are going to be.  May I say, then, that if there’s any extent to which All Might doesn’t want to talk about this because he doesn’t want to field questions about why a mob of civilian heteromorphs might choose to ally themselves with the League of Villains, it doesn’t reflect particularly well on him.     

Chapter 341: 

Skeptic gives us the line that ties together every single crowd scene demographic we’ve seen over the course of the entire manga:

My vindication, let me show you it.

There are a few subtly different ways you could read this, so I checked with my translator sis-in-law about her take on it.  She said that what Skeptic’s implying here in the Japanese is that, taken as a whole, a telling proportion of criminals designated as “Villains” are heteromorphs.  That is, by inference, heteromorphs are overrepresented in Villain-level criminality.      So why might that be?  Well, look back at everything I’ve said through this whole essay to date: o Discrimination runs rampant in this society, from minor microaggressions perpetrated by otherwise heroic characters all the way up through dedicated, violent hate groups.  Those facing discrimination may have reduced opportunity, thereby pushing them into harder choices, which may make criminality more difficult to avoid.      o Heteromorphs make up a larger proportion of the population in seedy, rougher areas, suggesting they’re probably lower income, proportionally, than non-heteromorphs.  Lower income means the necessity of facing harder choices, as above.      o The very nature of heteromorphism leading to the laws being applied to them more strictly—for example, if a heteromorph gets into a fist fight with an emitter, the heteromorph’s very body being a part of their quirk may make it more likely for them to be charged as Villains for illegal quirk use than the emitter.  (Think of something like Mandalay not thinking of Spinner as having used his quirk during the training camp, but him being categorized as a villain regardless.)          o Bias against heteromorphs leading to the laws being applied to them more strictly.  If the person in charge of deciding how prosecutors are going to handle an accusation against you, and they just reflexively don’t like the look of your face, or are even openly heteromorphobic, of course you’re more likely to get treated like a Villain than someone a baseline prosecutor more readily sees the humanity in.  This problem in particular will self-perpetuate—more heteromorphs being prosecuted as villains means more cops begin to perceive them as inherently more prone to villainy.      Skeptic doesn’t say outright that criminals who are designated as Villains are more frequently heteromorphs compared to baseline types who committed equivalent crimes, but it sure is easy to read as an implication!  After all, why else would he need to specify “Villain-designated criminals” as opposed to simply one or the other?  If all he meant is that heteromorphs make up a larger demographic percentage of criminals and/or of Villains than they do a demographic percentage in the general population, he could just say that.  It would still imply that there’s some unjust reason for that, but “villain-designated criminals” means that he’s suggesting that the numbers are out-of-whack specifically at that intersection, the place where “criminal” gets modified to “Villain.”     

He goes on to say, “No matter how hard heroes and the government have tried to illuminate our society, the light can’t reach every dark corner.  Plenty of heteromorphs hold deep grudges against the so-called heroes,” referencing ideas of light and illumination that will come up again in the hospital attack.      Most literally, we could say this refers to rural discrimination, far away from the advanced, “integrated” cities, and the way heroes cluster around those urban areas because that’s where the money and fame are at.  But I think it can cover my points above, as well—think back to the purse snatcher from the first chapter, who got run down by a whole passel of heroes and then paraded around in front of cameras in a muzzle, like an animal, for—stealing a purse.  Called “pure evil” by Kamui Woods for—blocking traffic?  Gosh, I wonder if that guy might hold a grudge against heroes?     

Spinner articulates what he was almost certainly feeling back when AFO was first talking him up in 329: that he’s average dude, not some messiah, that he’s only here for Shigaraki, not to serve a great cause.  Still, Skeptic says, the common people are waiting for him; he’ll be the one to pull a trigger Re-Destro no longer can.  The very perception that he’s someone average, Just Another Heteromorph Like Us That Got Tired Of It, is what makes him such an inspiring figure.     

Chapter 342: 

All the students in the little montage bidding farewell to people at U.A. are those whose parents we’ve met, all also there in the scene, with one conspicuous exception: Shouji is talking to the Ordinary Woman, who is most certainly not any relative of his.  I grow more annoyed by her lack of a name by the chapter.     

This chapter features one of the manga’s starkest examples of the dehumanization of villains: Uraraka’s dialogue about how it had never even crossed her mind to consider Toga Himiko’s circumstances and beliefs.  Toga is, of course, a seventeen-year-old girl, only a year and a half older than Uraraka herself, and one who first went on the run at fifteen.  They’re so close in age, even met over the summer, yet Uraraka only realized—truly understood—that Toga was “a person too” when she saw Toga crying.      Further, when confronted when this realization, Uraraka’s instinct is to try to quash it, to assume that even thinking this way makes her some kind of villain-apologist freak, so she has to banish those thoughts by going out and staring at scenes of immensely traumatic destruction to remind herself of what Toga had a hand in and thereby banish her human compassion.      This is not framed as being about heteromorphs, but just last chapter, it was laid out for the reader in black and white that heteromorphs make up an outsized proportion of “Villain-designated criminals.”  Thus, in turn, they’re proportionally more likely than any other group to be subject to the dehumanization faced by villains, and here we see just how extreme that social conditioning is even in a nice, empathetic, thoughtful girl like Uraraka.     

The Final War Arc (Chapters 343-369, for now)

Chapter 345: 

Geten’s #3, a heteromorph right on the border between resembling an animal and just being weird-shaped (if anything, he looks more like a heteromorph based on a Pokémon), calls the heroes Mammonists, a term referring to followers of Mammon, a personification of wealth/lust for wealth.[2]  Professional Heroism as HeroAca’s Japan practices it is an inherently capitalistic endeavor.  It’s wildly commercialized, rewards competition before cooperation, and dehumanizes the human assets that keep it going, hero and villain alike.  Calling heroes Mammonists, therefore, echoes Stain’s accusations, and recalls Mount Lady’s grin way back in the first chapter when she stole the “kill” from Kamui Woods, all in the interest of fame, benefits, and government pay.      [2] In the Japanese, haikin shugisha, literally “money-worshipper”; jisho even gives Mammonist as a direct translation.      I want to reiterate a few points I’ve talked about before, as well as add a few new considerations, to get at what I think is telling about not!Greninja’s Mammonist accusation as it relates to heteromorphobia:     o Mount Lady’s bonus chapter established that more rural areas see less heroism.  This impacts heteromorphs like Shouji and Spinner both because there’s no one around who’s both willing and able to save them from the abuses they suffer[3] and because there are no heteromorphic heroes around to serve as role models.      o Tomura’s Chapter 237 flashback established that rougher areas are slower to see hero agencies established in them—the men shortly to be murdered by Tenko complain about a bunch of new hero agencies being built in the area lately.  That’s over a decade prior to canon, sure, but many long years more since the establishment of professional heroism!      o I’ve demonstrated that higher concentrations of heteromorphs in an area can serve as a visual shorthand for it being a poorer, rougher place to live.      o A hero’s ranking depends on incident resolution, public approval, and social contribution—all things that disadvantage those who work in rural areas.      o Two characters in Class 1-A were admitted as “recommendation” students, i.e. those who can take smaller-group versions of the exams, as well as getting the benefit of an interview portion.  Those two characters are Momo and Shouto—both baseline, both powerful, both wealthy.  Does U.A. offer scholarships?  Any financial aid for underprivileged students?  Any programs to seek out promising youth who may not have the connections to get recommendations?  Who knows!  But, we sure do have a telling window on who gets small-batch exam privileges.[4]      [3] Of course, if you take Vigilantes as canon, there’s no guarantee heroes would have helped them anyway—the people attacking them were doing so with pitchforks and pesticides, after all, not quirks.  That firmly puts those attacks in the category of “not a hero’s job.”  But let’s give Heroes enough benefit of the doubt to assume that even a pretty materialistic one would probably not have stood by while a crowd of adults attacked a ten-year-old with farming tools unless they themselves had already been raised to such violent heteromorphobia—which, if they’re content to be working in such rural areas, odds are they were.      [4]    This particular argument is, I admit, much weaker when you factor in Juzo, Tokage and Inasa, but if Horikoshi didn’t want to make some unfortunate implications about who benefits from the recommendation program, he shouldn’t have made 100% of the recommendation students in the Main Character Class baseline, powerful and wealthy.     

Taken all together, it’s easy to understand why someone might accuse Heroes—especially Heroes who bust out the kind of exorbitantly expensive, last-minute constructs the heroes have just busted out—of being money-obsessed.  Successful heroes live and die on commercialism, on public recognition, on their “brand,” and that structure keeps the money flowing—from the government to heroes, from civilians into the Hero industry, from heroes to the vast array of production companies supporting them on all fronts.  The whole industry is a prayer wheel that turns on money.      Now, Geten’s #3 is a pretty flashy dresser himself—those pinstripes!—so whenceforth this “Mammonist” accusation?  Well, I would point out that he is a heteromorph, and reiterate the story’s frequent utilization of heteromorphs to visually communicate lower income brackets.  Perhaps he himself has experience with poverty, even if he’s clearly doing better for himself these days.  If so, then it’s very likely that the beef that drives his embrace of Liberation ideology is that the Hero System first criminalizes public quirk use for non-heroes and then monetarily disincentivizes getting help where it’s truly needed, all while pouring money into Heroics elsewhere like a busted oil tanker spewing crude into the Gulf.     

Chapter 349: 

Spinner is visually suspended between the desire to change the world he lives in and the desire to destroy “the warped imbalances (…) that we all just came to accept.”  He embodies both—he’s someone who once resigned himself to his warped lot in life, who came to the League because he wanted so desperately to change, because he wanted to believe that change could be brought about by only a single man, and who fell in love with the promise of destruction.  Hero Society never promised him either, so he came to the only people who could.     

Chapter 353:

This chapter places Spinner firmly at Central Hospital, here to retrieve Kurogiri.  The group he’s leading is entirely composed of heteromorphs, including two of his three PLF advisors; this, combined with the set-up about heteromorphs looking to him and Mezo “I want to feature him in the story” Shouji’s conspicuous presence, hints at what’s about to go down at this location.     

Chapter 355: 

AFO’s got a snappish “fowl duo” thought about Hawks and Tokoyami—just “two birds” in the Japanese, but still dismissal of them as animals.     

Of the ones we can see, AFO has exactly one vestige with tiny little horns; every other one attacking him is baseline in their general appearance and build.  Not exactly beating my heteromorphobic accusations there, big guy.     

Chapter 358: 

ShigAFO brings up appearance and form in his monologue about how the post-Advent world is a world beyond hope of a status quo, full of disparities that lead to a lack of understanding, and thence to fear and rejection.  It touches on similar themes as Nedzu’s speech back in 323, but with an ultimately fatalistic bent.     

Bakugou relates this all to Deku—their past relationship, as well as Deku being brought back to U.A.—but, as we will see, the arc’s got some heavier hitting stuff in mind for talking about disparities giving rise to fear and rejection.     

Chapter 363: 

Mirko’s gets another self-referential animal quip that only exists in Caleb Cook’s colorful localization.  The line rendered as, “If only I’d been one hop faster!” only references being one step faster in Japanese.

----------

Next time, I will finally actually cover the hospital! Hopefully it will be in a week, but it's only half-written and is, I suspect, going to require a lot more editing to strike the right balance on discussing what I think is relevant and simply complaining about how egregiously bad it is as a resolution to this whole aspect of the worldbuilding. Followers who read my posts on those chapters will likely find my bitching familiar, but this is piece is bound for AO3 eventually, so it needs to be able to stand on its own without too much reference to other posts.

In any case, it should be up in one or two weeks, depending on how busy work keeps me.

On the topic of work, and with a number of new followers around, this is probably a good time for me to point out again that I'm in a pretty tight financial situation, so if you've been enjoying this series of posts and are of a mind to throw a few bucks my way, I do have a ko-fi you can use to do so!

Thanks for reading, all!

#bnha #bnha meta #bnha worldbuilding #heteromorph discrimination plot #iguchi shuuichi #bnha spinner #plf advisors #my writing

[honey-dew-woo]

One Admiral's Daughter | Rooster x Kazansky! Reader

Heyo! Sorry for not posting for awhile, life is so busy! Anyway, hope you enjoy, Series #2!

Masterlist | Chapter Two

------------------------------------------------------------

Cold beer, hot men. That was the two things I'd use to describe the Hard Deck. The bar owned by my non-blood-related Aunt Penny Benjamin had become a safe space for me over the years. Making it through Top Gun Academy with some of the biggest jerks I had met in my life and my former lifelong bestfriend , Bradley Bradshaw, the Hard Deck became a home to me. Sure, a testosterone filled, alcohol infused, and noisy home. But a home nonetheless.

And it was at this safe haven that I had chosen to brighten up my night at. The past few months had been hard, with my father's health deteriorating every single day. I had put in a form request to be re-stationed, to be an instructor's assistant at Top Gun, so that I could be close to home. Now, I had been 'officially' re-called to Top Gun for some mission they told me they'd tell me about later.

"Hey, Blizzard. It's good to see you." A woman's voice broke me from my thoughts, as I turned to my left to see Natasha 'Phoenix' Trace fill the empty seat beside me.

I smiled at her, and watched her order a beer from Penny. "It's good to see you too, how have you been?" I asked, smiling as Penny handed us both beers and I nodded in thanks.

Phoenix paused before answering, making a thinking face as she sipped her beer, speaking as the glass met the polished wood of the bar. "I've been okay. Really I'm just excited to hear what the hell this mission is. If they re-called me, Hangman, Payback and Fanboy, and you? There's definitely something up." She spoke, looking at me before nodding her head towards where the former men were. "Come play with us." She urged, before standing up and grabbing my hand to drag me with her.

"I was gonna come anyway!" I laughed, following the black haired girl through the busy bar.

After making it to the pool table, I mentally groaned as I noticed Hangman look up at from where he leaned over the pool table. "I thought they wanted the best pilots," he paused, before sinking a red ball into a pocket and standing up, "not the dangerous ones?" He smirked, staring at me.

I smirked, crossing my arms before responding to him. "You're just mad because I beat your ass in dogfighting ten times over." Queue a scoff from the cocky blond male, accompanied with an eyeroll.

I could vaguely hear Phoenix calling someone else over to our possé as Hangman responded. "You did a maneuver that was absolute bullshit, and against the rules!" He pointed at me, widening his eyes to emphasize his point.

My smirk didn't falter, resting on my face proudly. "No one cares about the rules in war, Hangman." I grinned, "And if you do," I leaned closer, placing a hand on his chest to steady myself as I stood on my tippy toes to reach my mouth to his ear, "You're dead." I finished, pulling back and patting him on the chest in his shocked look.

I could only laugh and he shook his head, no longer smiling before returning to his game of pool. I turned my head to see who Phoenix had brought over, before taking a shaky step back.

"Bradshaw."  Both Hangman and I spoke, and I turned to blond man to realize his smirk was back on his face.

"As I live and breathe." he teased, as I moved my gaze back to the friend I hadn't seen in so long.

He kept his focus on Hangman, who went back to his game of pool. "Hangman," he acknowledged, as the blond male lined up his cue stick for a shot, "you look good."

Hangman paused for a moment before responding, "Well, I am good Rooster," he then shot the ball into it's pocket and finally looked up at the brunet male, smirking, "I'm very good." He winked, before slowly rounding the table, "In fact, I am too good to be true." He finished, hand on his hip and the other clasping his cue stick.

Bradley rolled his eyes in retaliation, Phoenix shaking her head alongside him. Rooster then turned to me, nodding and a smile placed on his face despite Hangman's 'goodness'. "How are you, Blizzard?"

I placed my hands on my hips before responding, "I'm mighty fine Rooster, how about yourself?" I smirked, picking up my beer from the small table that I stood next  to, taking a sip.

The man could only smirk back before speaking, "They way I hear it, you're more than fine, Lieutenant Commander Kazansky." His eyebrows raised, acknowledging my latest rank-up.

My friends who hadn't heard of the news turned their heads towards me in shock and awe. "Don't spoil all my surprises now, Bradshaw." I smirked, glancing around before patting Bradley on the shoulder. "You'll leave me with nothing left." I spoke more seriously.

"Lieutenant Commander?" Phoenix asked, nudging me with her elbow as Bradley excused himself from the group. I had a sneaking suspicion as he waltzed towards the jukebox that he wasn't going to chose a song from the machine. 

I turned to my fellow female pilot, beaming a bright smile before responding. "I'm a Top Gun Assistant Instructor. I have more confirmed dogfighting kills than anyone else at the Academy." I boasted, taking pride in myself as Hangman scoffed, still at the pool table.

"Please, Blizzard. We both know I'm the better pilot." He grinned up from where he leaned against the table.

My eyes narrowed as my smirk could only grow wider. I opened my mouth to respond, running my tongue along the bottom of my top row of teeth before responding, "Let's not start a fight you can't win, Seresin. Not in here at least." I spoke, raising my eyebrows briefly before lowering them back down in challenge.

Unfortunately before I could hear his witting respond the jukebox cut out and the piano keys started. "I believe that's my cue." I smiled, and then Penny rang the bell prompting an 'overboard!' chant. 

I smiled to myself, walking past the piano and patting Bradley on the shirt, who looked up at me, mocking taking off his hat as I walked by. "See ya later, Bradshaw!" I smiled, walking out of the bar.

"After while, Blizzard!" I heard him call out, a wide grin taking it's form on my face as I made my way to my car, shaking my head.

#bradley bradshaw x kazansky reader #bradley bradshaw x reader #bradley bradshaw x mitchell!reader #bradley rooster bradshaw #rooster bradshaw #rooster x reader #rooster x kazansky reader #ice man #ice man kazansky #ice #top gun #top #gun #maverick #topgunmaverick

[anarchistauthor]

The Last Jedi, the Last Good Star Wars Movie

I'm gonna go ahead and preface this by saying, I have no idea how this will play with my social circle here on Tumblr. I know how my Twitter and Bluesky friends feel about SW, but not y'all. I don't think I've ever even seen a post about it here, and I don't care to go look. Bottom line, I have too many opinions and not enough people who agree with me, so now you have to suffer through this essay. You're welcome.

I was a fan of SW at least as early as I have memories. I'm 29 years old, which means I grew up firmly in the prequel era, and watched them young enough that I didn't even realize older people hated them. Obi-wan was my hero, not my mentor, I never really identified with Anakin and always liked Obi the most. But, and this is important, I loved Star Wars and thought all of it was good. I read one EU book set between episodes 1 and 2, I watched as much of the original Clone Wars series as I could, and I played lightsabers during recess in school. I am at least as nostalgic as every gen xer who laments a bygone era when SW was good because they don't understand that they just liked things better as a kid. But, the difference is, that kind of person tends to despise everything about the sequel trilogy, in my experience. Not so for me.

The Force Awakens was a pretty good movie in my eyes, when I first saw it. I did notice the deja vu, I had very little actual interest in Rey as a character, but just having a female force user at the forefront was huge to me, and it was certainly, at least, a solid foundation for the next two movies. My biggest TFA hot take is that Kylo Ren was the perfect antagonist for this movie, as basically a spoiled shithead who is a fanboy of his grandpa and wants so, so badly to be cool like him. I was also the sort of person who got really invested in the ~mystery~ of Rey's origin, and the speculation of her parentage.

Enter TLJ. My first emotion, at several points during this movie, was dismay. I couldn't believe they just made Rey some random person, after setting up that her background was vague and mysterious! I couldn't believe that Luke never fought anybody and then he died! But, very quickly after, I had time to process my emotions, and I realized that this movie was something special. It manages to "yes, and" TFA while also roasting me for investing so much passion into the questions it rose. "You thought she would somehow be Obi-wan's daughter? Are you serious?" And when you get angry at that, you're met with the obvious question, "Why should it matter?" It shouldn't. We want to see the characters we love come back, but when it comes to this girl, this hero, why should she have to be related to some old dead guy in order to be special? The Force is everywhere, it lives in all of us. That is the central point of TLJ. And, arguably on purpose, this film pissed off Star Wars fans more than anything ever could.

TLJ isn't just a movie that taunts the audience for speculating based on its predecessor, it taunts the audience for being overly invested in the entire franchise. TLJ looks at its series, it looks at the people who watch it, and it demands that you question your relationship with the material. It calls you a fool for assuming that an emotionally-stunted young adult like Luke would become a well-rounded mentor, for assuming that he was incapable of being tempted by darkness, for worshipping him as a pure hero. Because, who is Luke? He was a kid who was bored with simple life, got pulled away into a galactic conflict, and pretty much stumbled his way through saving the world. Even at the final moment, he was very close to murdering his father out of rage. Do you think that's just gonna go away after Palpatine died? Just because Luke put his sword away? No. It also mocks you for assuming Snoke is going to be important just because he's a large man in a fancy chair. He's a parallel to the Emperor, so you assume he'll be the same, and the movie roasts you for it by killing him off unceremoniously. And the Poe plot? That is nothing but one giant own on everyone who loved Poe assuming that the cool guy hotshot was the most important and competent person in the fleet.

The intent of all this playful mockery, I believe, was to get viewers to question how they idealize the past of the franchise. That's what it did for me. But, mediocre white dudes don't like being mocked, as we all know. They take it VERY personally, and they blew up the whole thing. They harassed creatives involved, sent death threats to poor Kelly Marie, and all in all went berserk about this movie for children about space wizards. How dare it move on?! How dare it not just be about my nostalgia?! Not just white, not just men, but I don't feel any need to deny that that's the primary demographic. There was already some backlash to TFA, but TLJ pulled no punches, and the most perpetually-offended fandom in the world lived up to its name. It's really that simple. And as a result, the Disney Overlords scrambled to make them calm down. Enter...Rise of Skywalker.

I. Fucking. HATE this movie. Apart from the fact that it tries to undo everything I loved about TLJ, it's poorly made in more conventional ways. Rushed pace, aimless writing, having no idea what to do with the characters, (not to mention giving the black protagonist a black girlfriend who has all the same backstory and traits as him, lest anyone ship him with Poe) it is the epitome of a movie that only exists for nostalgia, but it can't even do that well. If there's one lesson I've learned from the sequel trilogy, it's that JJ Abrams is not only a trashfire of a director, but he is utterly incapable of reacting to what happened in the previous movie, because he spent so much runtime just calling Rian Johnson a liar! "Rey's not no one, instead she has the most asinine backstory in the history of the franchise." To me, it reeks of a man who despised the way Rian responded to him, and is just desperate to overrule it. As a writer myself, I can't even imagine doing something like that instead of doing my best to work with what came before. The definition of hack behavior.

TLJ was a movie that tried to move Star Wars into the future, to divorce it from idolatry of the past, but ROS is a movie designed with intent to reel it back in, to say, "Hold on, art and creativity are great and all, but Disney gotta make them nostalgia bucks." A return to hero worship, to centering the leads of decades ago, to feeding the lore rather than telling a story. And the fact that it followed a film that told the story it wanted to tell and didn't give a shit how you felt about it, it's just insulting.

This is going to sound like cheesy artist babble, but to me, the art of creation is sacred, in a way. Not literally holy, but just beautiful and meaningful. Even if what comes out is bad, it's worth doing if done with sincerity. That's how I see TLJ. But given the way both fans and the rights holders reacted to it, I'm depressed and pessimistic regarding the future of the franchise. The Phantom Menace was the first movie I loved, and I still like it today. I'm sure I'll love TLJ forty years from now, and I'll probably continue to watch new SW movies when they come out. I don't know if I'll ever love a movie in the franchise again, but I can have hope. This is a movie that proved Star Wars was capable of being better, and that doesn't change just because neckbeards hate it more than they've ever hated anything. This is still going to be the franchise that has TLJ in it, and the haters can't take that from me.

#star wars #the last jedi #essay #fandom #media critique

[sanjoongie]

Series~

į ժօղ'է աąղղą ҍҽ ąӀօղҽ ąղվʍօɾҽ

2022 Kinktober {M}

2023 Filth Fest February {M}

2023 Arousal August {M}

Wips Graveyard ~ old ideas that i've lost the motivation to write but the idea should be out there/ exposing the pretty moodboard i made and don't want it to go to waste ><

2023 Revember {M}{A}

2024 Filth Fest February{M}

Thirst Week {M}

Tipsy Drabbles {M}

Series

1.The Bucket List~{M}{A}{F}{TW}: Ateez, Jung Wooyoung x Choi San x Reader(f) x Kim Hongjoong ~Completed~

ღSummary: You take a summer off to check off your personal bucket list but what you don’t realize is you become a beacon of hope for three lost boys {Summer Event for Kvanity network}

ღGenre: Modern Supernatural Au, Vampire Au, Shapeshifter Au, Incubus Au

2. Twilight Academy~ {M}{A} Ateez, Park Seonghwa ~Ongoing~

ღSummary: You’re a new teacher at the Twilight Academy, bumping into a supposed teacher and sleeping with them the day before you start. Little did you know… it wasn’t simply a teacher you were sleeping with

ღGenre: Modern Fantasy au, strangers to lovers

3. Breed! {M} OT8 ~Ongoing~

ღSummary: when you and your boyfriend San are abducted by 7 aliens for the sole purpose of said aliens learning how to breed the human way

4. Library of Illusion {M} OT8 ~Complete~

ღSummary: The loss of your love drives you to unimaginable lengths, through incomprehensible stories, just to acquire an artifact that would revive him. Will you succeed, or will you get sucked into a story, never to return? Welcome to the Library of Illusions, where nothing is as it appears to be, and yet anything is possible, as long as you play by the rules.

5. Blood Moon Series {M}{TW} Ateez, San and Wooyoung ~Ongoing~

☾Synopsis: Times are rough with one of your good friends missing, but times are even rougher when you wake up to your roommate being fed on by a vampire.

6. Fanboys {M}{crack} Ateez, Hongjoong, San and Wooyoung ~Ongoing~ note: this is a Social Media Au, but will have some written parts

❧Synopsis: As an idol, you make a fake twitter account, posing as “Mingi” and become friends with your fans

Ateez As~ 

As Fallen Angels{M}{A}{TW}{F}: ~Completed~

ღSummary: in which ateez leave heaven for you, some with a bang and others with a whimper

In Skirts{M}: ~Completed~

ღSummary: in which ateez put on skirts and what follows in nothing short of magical (and sexy)

As Rockstars {M}: ~Completed~

ღSummary: in which ateez are in a band and you just joined and… it’s a little bit more convenient to have a girl member than find a groupie…

#series masterlist #ღatz #topaz's work #topaz's masterlists

[saintsenara]

as part of my attempt to get attention on the internet, @celestemagnoliathewriter sent a lovely message about bookbinding, which tumblr decided to eat.

that actually seems apt, i suppose, for my best girl myrtle elizabeth riddle (née warren). after all, she starts the story being mercilessly teased by olive hornby and her gang of villains; she feels awkward, disjointed, and unlovable; nothing ever seems to go right for her; and she'd just like to be noticed and liked for who she is.

and she gets all of these things, teaching us all a crucial life-lesson in the process: no matter how annoying you are you can still finesse yourself into being anyone's dream girl.

yes. even a sinister teen edgelord who spends his evenings killing roosters and coming up with anagrams of his own name, who aspires to rip his soul into shreds and become a dictator, who hates your parents and everything they stand for until he accidentally becomes your dad's biggest fanboy. turns out all he needed was a firm hand (behave) and a chocolate frog or two.

i think this may well be the thing i've enjoyed writing the most. certainly, i was chuckling self-indulgently at a lot of it - the rabbit! the sugar mice! slughorn's party! - but i also liked that so much of it - the cave! myrtle's journey to body neutrality! dumbledore! - ended up being so straightforwardly hopeful. for a series which prides itself on the value of choice, so much about the arc of harry potter canon feels inevitable - and the direction tom riddle's life takes is one of those things.

this, with its emphasis on the transformative power of chance encounters, of love and luck and longing, of tiny kindnesses takes a different view. and, as the comments have told me, the little flickers of a changed world we get as a result have reduced more than one reader to tears.

myrtle would, i have to say, approve.

#asks answered #bookbinding #attention seeking behaviour

[yurisorcerer]

That was really good!

Gosh, I have many thoughts, but I'm not sure how well I'll be able to articulate them given that I'm kind of tired at the moment.

So, my main love here is for the characters. I think people tend to sell Dungeon Meshi on its worldbuilding and I do get that (it's very complex and is quite well thought-out), but the characters are what really grabbed me. I don't think there was a single member of the main cast I didn't love. Laios is such a delightfully weird monster manual fanboy and I 100% agree with the people who say he feels neurodivergent and that this feels intentional. Senshi is awesome and it's very funny how the manga is extremely horny for him. Chilchuk brings a profound Divorced Dad energy to the cast that I think is great for bouncing off of the other characters. Izutsumi is interesting by how she contrasts with the earlier party members, I want to think about her role in the story more. I think she was kind of meant to give us an "outcast's perspective" of sorts? I think she's good at being that, but I feel like having blown through most of the manga in a few days may have hampered my appreciation of some of the more subtle aspects of her character.

Marcille, though, is my favorite; as someone who is also a really fussy eater and just kind of tightly-wound in general I found her really relatable. She's also super, super, super pretty and cute but we don't need to get into that right now. I cannot be the first person to point out how, when she becomes the dungeon lord, her behavior starts feeling extremely manic, right? I suffer from delusional episodes that include very difficult to ignore intrusive thoughts, and I thought the whole bit she went into about how being the dungeon lord feels felt very familiar in that respect, and it really hit home for me.

(On the flip side, having your desires eaten by the demon seems similar to depression. I've been there, too.)

Other stuff! I like the whole overarching theme of eating both in the literal sense and as a general metaphor for going through one's life. In the very last chapter Marcille says something to the effect of, perhaps this journey was to teach us to accept death, and I don't think that's necessarily the entirety of what the series is going for, but that's part of it definitely. There's a whole circle of life thing going on here. The manga is very....sensory? Lots of focus on taste of course but also scent and feeling. Lots of really strong imagery along those lines throughout the entirety of it.

I set the worldbuilding aside earlier but it is super neat actually, also. I still don't love the general conceits of a western-style fantasy setup, but I think this is honestly about as well as it's possible to do this material. Everyone has a motivation for their actions that feels inspired by experience and history rather than just Dwarves Do X and Elves Do Y and so on. There's a LITTLE of that, but not nearly as much as is typical for this kind of thing. In particular, I liked the orcs. Their usage as a symbol is perhaps somewhat fraught (I'm not the person to make that call either way), but it felt like it was coming from a good place and they're just treated so much better here than comparable people in other media, idk. It felt nice to me.

The art! The art is fucking gorgeous, like, if I wanted to get someone to read this manga this is one of the things I'd mention. The entire dungeon feels so wonderfully lived-in and ancient. You can practically feel the stonework in some panels. (Sidebar here! The anime is really good at capturing this, do watch the anime it's fantastic.)

Some other random stray thoughts:

-The circumstances she gets it in obviously suck, but Marcille's dungeon lord outfit honestly serves hard and everyone should get off her case about it.

-I ended up liking the captain of the Canaries a lot more than I thought I would. He's just an interesting character all around.

-I also really love Sissel / Thistle / apparently how you romanize this is a source of some contention. I feel sooooo bad for the guy. He just wanted to keep everyone safe! It's not his fault that his idea of keeping everyone safe ended up being influenced by a lion-headed demon from outside of reality and corrupted into a suffocating hellscape for those same people! OK maybe it's a little his fault

-I like the diversity in appearances across the characters. This is a thing I wish more manga did this well.

-Laios' kingly titles in the final chapter, RANKED from MOST to LEAST badass: 1. Laios of the Three Heads (based as fuck, makes people ask questions when they hear about you in a history book several centuries down the line), 2. The Demon-Eater (badass and very specific) 3. The Vegetable-Armored (basically gets the same reaction as #1, but with a more comedic lean) 4. Demon King Laios (this honestly seems pretty disingenuous but it is dope) 5. The Dragon-Slayer (very generic, also not even the most impressive part of what he did) 6. The Lord of the Dungeon (Crusader Kings 2 auto-generated-ass name) 7. Pervy Tallman (this sounds like a bad comedian)

-I want to kiss Marcille on the lips

-who said that

-haha I wouldn't mind the Canaries coming to arrest me am I right fellow lesbians

-who said that (part 2)

anyway yeah really good manga highly recommended. I'm not sure if it's a (get out the scare quotes folks) "Personal Favorite" per se, but it might become one over time. Usually such things take a bit to settle with me. The fact that I have any interest in reading it again is a good sign, though. 90% of the time when I'm done with media I'm fine with never revisiting it again. Dungeon Meshi I would very much like to revisit, both in the form of the anime that's airing right now and also I think I'd like to re-read the manga in a few years when I'm at a different place in my life to see what I think of it a little farther down the line. I liked it a lot, and I think it will stick with me.

#Dungeon Meshi #Delicious in Dungeon #yurisorcerer talks about media #spoilers

[everyneji]

Bouncing off this post here, I want to talk a little about Neji and romantic relationships beyond just my shipping preferences. Though I wouldn't call this very exact meta either, as there's nothing to really go off of.

The truth is, Neji died before his love life was relevant. I know a lot of people think that he and Tenten would have ended up together but I'm not so sure. I believe he would have stayed uncoupled like his teammates in canon. Team Gai are Team Comic Relief and have genuinely had the most wholly platonic team-centric content of any of the Konoha 12 and the only crush we see from any of them is Lee's on Sakura, which was never gonna happen. I doubt Kishimoto would leave only Lee uncoupled of the team. At most, I think Neji would end the series with an implied off-screen Hyūga wife and a kid.

To add to this, as far as spin-off/AU/filler content goes, we only see 'Neji is a perv' 'Neji has a sister complex' 'Hinata considers Neji a romantic rival' 'Neji is unaffected by Sexy no Jutsu', none of which are a serious attempt to answer the question of 'What does Neji want?'

I also wonder if Neji could even marry out of the Hyūga clan, not just because of his caste status, but because he's a nobleman. He's not likely to be taking someone else's name. Historically speaking, men tend to be the only ones who can start a new branch clan, but in canon the equivalent of this is Hizashi being sealed. Hyūga seem to keep to themselves; Himawari and Boruto imply that the white eyes are a recessive trait. Hinata marrying out is an exception because she was already effectively disowned and she's marrying the Ninja Saviour.

(Of course, if Kishimoto wanted it to happen it would, the Hyūga entering the modern world and changing, but I'm working within the understanding of what we have.)

Narratively speaking, Neji is also far more intertwined with the destiny of the Hyūga clan than Hinata, whose story has centered her feelings for Naruto from the jump. I have a hard time seeing him leaving his family behind for love. Though he's had some very valid issues with his family, he's also fully embraced their techniques and their name; he just wants the respect and equal treatment he's owed within that.

With no canon evidence of romantic interest to go on, I personally focus on how Neji is like Gaara, that is, such a Naruto fanboy that it becomes its own beast of the headiest affectionate feelings we see displayed from them. Neji smiling so genuinely at what could be his final moments because he's thinking of how Naruto saved him is pretty intense.

'Hope is a thing with feathers, that perches in the soul ...'

I've touched on it in another post, but I also think it's sincerely amusing that when Hinata sacrifices herself in the Pain Invasion Neji goes "Why'd she do that?" His own dad sacrificed himself for love! And he has to know of her feelings for Naruto. He even asks if she wants to see Naruto off at the end of part one and hears of how the mere sight of Naruto gives Hinata the vapours. Yet he just doesn't get it ... until you fast forward a bit and put him on that battlefield with Naruto and Hinata in danger, and suddenly Neji's taking the bullet. As he dies in Naruto's arms, he says, "Naruto, Hinata-sama is willing to die for you. So remember you hold more than one life in your hands. And it seems that my life too may have been one of them." He directly parallels himself to Hinata (who sacrificed herself for love of Naruto) and says Naruto holds his life too. I mean, alright!

I'm not saying Kishimoto deliberately wrote Neji in love with Naruto but I think so long as Neji and Hinata are foils to each other who are both moved by the same man, you can derive interesting interpretations from that.

To return to 'what would Neji want' my personal answer is 'Someone able to offer perspectives he had not considered.' It's not just about being challenged -- the person needs to have a real point to make that they can back up. This suggests the person in question would need a certain strength of character, intuition, and likely the power to influence the world around them. This is generally what I go with when writing, but of course, it remains all headcanon.

I hope people forgive me for this very speculative post, I just ... got carried away writing it so hey. Here ya go! 👋

#not everyneji #neji hyuga #long post #cw incest #.'hinata princess of WHAT' still makes me cackle #.i think of it everytime i see someone call her a princess

[here-lies-golden-kamuy]

hello, super happy to see a new gk blog! I was wondering, who are your favorite gk characters and why?

Hello @wallmouse! Thank you for your question (and for being my first ask on this blog, I was quite thrilled to see it!) <3 I have to admit, it was both easy and difficult to answer this question, I'm just bursting at the seams trying to contain my love for these characters! Maybe we have the same favorites, I'd love to know!

I just listed my top three and added some special mentions down below. I realized I couldn't do more than three....it would be too long if I did, HAHA!

I tried censoring spoilers so that other people who are new or maybe haven't catched up with the manga can read it as well! SPOILER-FREE BUT AS ALWAYS, A LOT OF THOUGHTS <3

Ogata Hyakunosuke Maybe the Lone Mountain Cat isn't as Alone as He Thinks He is

I've recently been immersing myself in GK again and it made me remember how much I love Ogata! I literally made my first post and meta about him, that's how much he means to me!

Ogata, Ogata, Ogata...where do I start? I think ever since he became more prominent in the series - starting when he woke up from the hospital and escaped - I think I was drawn to his very mysterious personality.

Throughout GK (at least, until the latter points of the story), we had no clue whatsoever what Ogata wanted out of everything that was happening to the characters. Why did he want the gold? Why did he go against Tsurumi? Everyone had their own ideas about him, but his true desires and self was kept hidden from all the characters, even us readers!

Ogata keeps people on their toes, always the enemy or stranger in the group and never a true ally, much less a friend! He's driven and cocky, but also patient and calculating. He tries to play his cards right, and usually, it pays off! When it doesn't pay off, I still can't help but root for him in the end, because at some point in GK, I began to truly care for him and his safety and well-being.

Ogata is a character of shadows and mystique. He is both so full and so empty, and I love the paradoxes within him. Quite truthfully, he triggers my "i can save him" hindbrain, HAHA (his backstory was an interesting mix of tragedy and horror in my opinion!). And though I know he'd rather shoot me down than let me take care of him, I still wanna <3

Koito Otonoshin This Koi Fish isn't Just a Pretty Face to Look at.

Koito!!!! KoiTO!!!! KOITO!!!!!!! [monkey screa-] I love him so much!!! He's actually one of the first characters that I truly fell for in GK. Originally when he was introduced, I didn't really bat an eye for him. Sometimes even, he would be annoying because of his initial introduction as another Tsurumi Fanboy TM (sigh).

But when he was further solidified as a character in the Karafuto Arc, I was thrilled to get to know him more! He's so annoying (affectionate) but he also was someone who had a refreshing vibe from the rest of the soldiers in the Sugimoto's Karafuto gang gang.

Of course, this is because he's the uh....least traumatized out of all the soldiers in GK. But I loved his enthusiastic and carefree youthfulness, I loved his appreciation for the good and nice things in life, and I loved how he stood out in his radiance amongst his group mates!

His backstory and his eventual growth...I was howling in that arc and the more he developed as a young man and as a character to truly root for!!!! I wholeheartedly enjoyed seeing him grow and become a person who acknowledges his flaws and limitations, but still wants to be more - not for his own gain, but for the people around him. He's so swoon-worthy, isn't he?

Koito is a character that exemplifies light and hope. He wears his heart over his sleeve and isn't afraid to get down and dirty with his authentic self and I truly adore that in him. He makes me want to praise him for being such a good guy, I wonder how he'll react to the compliment hehe~

Tsukishima Hajime The Moon is so Lovely Tonight, isn't it?

Hajime.... [with so many emotions] Out of the three, Tsukishima is the one that makes me feel so much, it's sometimes overwhelming! He wasn't meant to stand out in the first few chapters/episodes, but whenever I watch it now, I can't help but happily shout his name when he does show up. Kind of like calling out to him too, as a certain second lieutenant does.

Where do I begin! I think what drew me to Tsukishima was the fact that he was a solid foundation for the seventh division. If you think Tsurumi is the one that keeps people in line within the seventh division....I'd also like for you to consider Tsukishima! Sure Tsurumi is the one that leads and spurs the men's hearts toward their goal, but Tsukishima is the one who's actively keeping everyone together. You could say that he's the unofficial mother hen of the seventh division, and honestly....he is.

With Koito, you get to know him more in the Karafuto Arc and it's devastating!!!! His backstory just drew me in and never let me go. His misguided sense of loyalty, service, and self were so painful to accept and to see, and you can't help but want to reach out to the pages and shake him!!!! Hajime! You matter!!!

He's someone who makes you want to have a good and peaceful life in the future. He's someone I really grew to love and appreciate because you know he's a good man deep down in his cold exterior. He's a man that got so broken, he couldn't see anything good out of the shards and pieces of him.

Tsukishima is a man who drowned in the darkness around him. Again, like Ogata, he makes me want to care for and love him (men who make me go 'ohhh i can fix him' activates my hindbrain the most). But I think unlike Ogata, he's someone that actually wants that gentleness and would turn towards it, rather than shun it away.

SPECIAL MENTIONS

Those are my top three (again, I love them all equally, so there's no one higher or lower), but special mentions are the following: Tanigaki, Kirawus, Sugimoto, Ariko and Kikuta (I like them both equally too), and Ushiyama! In my current rewatch I'm also starting to appreciate Shiraishi and Hijikata more, and I hope I get to know them more this time hehe.

Thank you for your ask, once again, love! <3

#ogata hyakunosuke #koito otonoshin #tsukishima hajime #mod speaks #i answer #golden kamuy headcanon #golden kamuy headcanons #golden kamuy imagine #golden kamuy imagines #golden kamuy ask blog #golden kamuy #ゴールデンカムイ #here lies golden kamuy

[ticktockmyclockworkhart]

I'm perhaps one of the most easy to please Pokemon fans ever. I wouldn't identify myself as a nintendo fanboy or anything even though I love a lot of their IPs (largely because the number one prerequisite to being a "nintendo fanboy" is hating Nintendo more than anything on earth it seems), but I will be the first to admit my standards are much lower than they should be. I eat up everything Pokemon related like the blindly eager little consumer I am, I've beaten every main series game and damn near every spin-off.

All this to say I think it says something when even I haven't beaten BDSP yet, and not for lack of trying. But the game bored me to tears. I've reset my saves on that game more than any other I have in the hopes that "well, maybe the next file I'll be more attached to". I can eat my way through new Pokemon games when they first come out in a few days and never put them down, but whenever I'd put BDSP down I'd have to reset my file again when I picked it back up because I no longer cared about whatever I had going on.

I've been grappling with this for a long time, trying to figure out what it is about this remake that makes it the one Pokemon game someone as easy to please as me couldn't care enough to finish. I'll be fully honest when I say I'll happily take whatever table scraps Game Freak cares to toss me and I'm not proud of that fact lol. I love Gen 4, it's one of my favorite Gens, and I actually like the BDSP artstyle too, I think it's a fun way to keep the spirit of the original games, though it really would have been cool to see Sinnoh at full scale and free to explore in 3D.

But today after another attempted replay I think I figured it out. It's the dumb. Fucking. Experience Share.

Pokemon is a turn based RPG, battling is literally the main gameplay loop and I found that I kept putting the game down because I would get so incredibly bored by the battles. None of them felt necessary and all of them felt way too damn easy. Pokemon Scarlet/Violet had this problem too, I noticed, but what got me to finish those games was I'd never experienced the story before and I wanted to see it finished. But with BDSP I know the story, so why should I finish it if the battles are such a drag? In the original Gen 4 I'd make a point of battling every trainer on every route. I'm very meticulous about my leveling and my Pokemon all need to be within one level of each other, lol. So my incentive for fighting every trainer was to keep my team at a high enough level and also to keep my levels rounded out. But with that EXP share they're always rounded, or god forbid they have different growth rates and I have to keep putting Pokemon away to prevent overleveling which just bothers my OCD more than anything lmao.

It also makes me care so much less about my Pokemon. I cared about my team because I took time to individually raise and train each Pokemon, and if I don't care about my Pokemon then frankly I barely care about the game. In Scarlet/Violet where trainer battles have become entirely optional for the most part I barely did any of them! And in BDSP all I am is annoyed by the trainer battles. There's next to no new content to keep the game interesting and give me a reason to keep playing, and when the main gameplay loop isn't even fun anymore, why would I play at all?

I was worriedly thinking that maybe I'm just getting old and it's hampering my enjoyment of the games (Terrifying thought) but I have just as much fun with ROM hacks that I did with older games. Most notably, there's no broken EXP share. Can't we at least get the option to turn it off? I get trying to find a solution to make grinding less of a miserable drag, because grinding is always the worst part of playing Pokemon, but the broken exp share hasn't made grinding less tedious, it's just made battling as a whole feel hollow and boring.

I still want to beat you some day, BDSP, I really do. Nothing makes me feel sadder than being bored by a franchise I love and I know can do better.

[starleska]

OKAY I heard robot suggestions and (un)fortunately for you, Transformers Animated is in fact the show I know like the back of my hand and these next few paragraphs are me showing restraint in talking about it.

I feel like the Constructicons are a good guess (particularly Scrapper), but for my money the robots to beat in like... the vibe I've gathered as Jeremiah anon are Thundercracker and Skywarp. They're clones of Starscream, one of the main villains (who is also Very Good) who each exemplify a trait of his, egomania and cowardice respectively. They only appear in a couple episodes but they're great.

(Did I mention he made the clones himself? He's like that. Genuinely great character.)

My personal favorite is Prowl, like... to the point that I didn't want to bring it up as Jeremiah anon because I was positive anyone who knew me would ID me on that alone. He is The Blorbo for me, the holder #1 spot. (And he's voiced by Jeff Bennett who ALSO voiced that one version of Red Hood I mentioned so maybe I just have a vocal "type".)

I will get back to you if I think of more. If you need a sampler of the human villains, like... almost all of them feature in SUV: Society of Ultimate Villainy, except Prometheus Black AKA Meltdown, but he has like three episodes all his own.

i absolutely fucking love triggering the huge fixation you Transformers fans have, it makes my little autistic heart happy 😂💖 that ask was a few minutes old!!!!! i am blessed on this day to be subjected to the robot infodump 🙏 so in an effort to gain more information about Scrapper i went and watched this video and oh my God. i am in tears. did i just watch two non-sentient construction vehicles become sentient and gain car-chasing libidos? 😂😂😂 while i couldn't tell you anything at this stage, i'm very charmed by Jeff Bennett's voice for Mixmaster - i'm a fan of his work from his Fanboy and Chum Chum days 🙈 you can't be blamed for enjoying that voice;;;; ahhh, i'm drowning in all the lore!! 😭😭 it's super tough to know where to look and what to watch...a few pals have tried to give inroads, but i think this is a franchise you just gotta throw yourself into somewhere and start working your way through the piles of series and comics 😖 it's much the same for trying to find a prospective blorbo...perhaps every single one of you will be wrong, and it'll be some weird-as-shit robot that no one else has given a second look. or is there a stan of every single robot in the franchise out there? 🤭

#transformers #transformers: animated #f/o suggestions #starleskasks #long post