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#MAN I SURE DO LOVE THE HUMAN SKELETON SYSTEM
astraltrickster · 8 months
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I feel like we're dealing with a bit of a catch-22 here.
On the one hand, I don't want to be buying tumblr merch and premium options to REWARD the garbage decisions they're making right now, and I know enough about how upper management at tech companies operates to know that they WILL see an influx of money right now as basically saying either "ohhhh, so they LIKE these changes" - or, if they actually listen to the staff members fielding feedback, "ohhhh, so THREATENING to make the user experience worse gets us money!"
On top of which, I don't want to encourage an OVERLY friendly relationship between the company and its userbase. Tumblr may be...by FAR the best we've got at its scale, despite the fact that they literally seem to be trying to hide that fact where they're not threatening to change it outright, but they are still a company. They're still inclined to make shitty decisions and lose touch with the userbase in the interest of Company Bullshit.
On the other hand...if we DON'T try to get them to at least break even, we're going to lose the site eventually, and possibly have some REALLY heinous shit go down in its death throes. Definitely not today or tomorrow. Maybe not for many years; it's hobbled along on life support via changing hands for many years already. But it will happen. They can fake it for a significant time if there's enough demand, enough hope - tumblr's not the only one pulling it off - but a company CAN'T go on forever when it's hemorrhaging money. Money doesn't become a nonissue when it's not YOUR paycheck.
I'm sick of the illusion that the internet is an immaterial, intangible thing...except when we're criticizing mining and energy usage and basically implying it shouldn't EXIST. It's not just a fake thing that exists in our phones and computers and the LITERAL ATMOSPHERIC clouds. Servers cost money to buy or rent, even when the software running on them is a buggy mess. Staff and contractors cost money to pay, even when the skeleton crew your company has is laughably insufficient for the scope of its services - we want them to expand staff to respond to tickets and improve their moderation system faster, well, with what money?? You want these improvements made with whose man-hours?? I wholeheartedly agree with most of the userbase that this Twitter-knockoff layout and some of their other stupid ideas lately are a huge waste of the ones they're paying for, but that doesn't mean they can redirect 1,000 man-hours from an ill-advised project and magically get a 10,000 man-hour project done!
Consider the moderation system. It's bad! It's biased! We've proven this! It's also mostly automated. What are our potential solutions here?
Go back to fully manual: Puts real human people through a PTSD meat grinder. For this to be done even REMOTELY ethically demands hazard pay, short hours, and the best mental health care coverage money can buy. Where are these human moderators getting paid from, let alone if they're going to be paid fairly?
Modify the software: ...they're already trying; retraining a whole system is easier said than done, especially in the very likely event that posts that are taken down by report-brigading innocuous content are feeding BACK into the system as "This Is What A Bad Post Looks Like." I'd love it if they could do it better and faster - but again, with what money?
Train their OWN software from the ground up: Requires EXPERT software engineers to build the framework AND a large human moderation crew in the short term to hit that "good post"/"bad post" button all day; refer to the problems with fully manual moderation. No one is quite sure how to bulletproof a moderation system against report-brigading in a way that won't ALSO deprioritize reports against content so heinous that everyone who sees it reports it. Once again - where is the money for all this labor coming from?
Every option is human labor that must be paid for. Every single possibility.
Anything else that needs doing? Fixing search? Human labor - money. Improving the bot filters to ban more bots and fewer real people? Humans have to do that - needs money!
So the money-seeking WILL continue until they're breaking even or better, or the site shuts down completely. Those are the two options. You cannot anti-capitalist Theory your way out of them. You can have your grand ideas for how things will work in a healthier, restructured economy, but that's not the point we're at. For now? Operating at a deficit = enshittification or shutdown. Those are the options. There is no third one. The level of hostility I see from some users against the very concept of tumblr BREAKING EVEN is absolutely absurd and completely detached from reality.
But what's the conclusion? Where do we go from here? Fuck, man, I have no fucking idea.
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damazcuz · 2 years
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One thing I really and truly do love about Metro is the moral points system. Narratively I feel it serves the story well from game to game and contributes to the feeling that every little thing Artyom experiences really matters down the line.
In 2033 the moral points (MPs) serve to show not just that Artyom is doing good things or bad things, but showing that he's learning about the world. Hes never left his station before and he's naive and he has to learn how the world is, how it works. Whenever you find some hidden cache with a skeleton and get a positive MP it's not because it was morally correct to find it, but because Artyom has learned something new about the world outside of his station. You get moral points listening to enemies chat about the world. Finding things. Passing through the world unseen. And by the end of the story it doesn't just come down to x number of points = good ending, it's more like, if he's seen enough and learned enough he gets to choose. Peace or violence.
And we know the peaceful option is the noncanonical ending. Because he learned a lot, but Artyom was afraid, and naive, and in that split second, chose wrong. And he has to live with that. Then Last Light gives us moral points again, but this time the points serve to show "can Artyom, and by extension humanity, ever change?" And if you do show that you've changed, by sparing lives, by forgiving, the little Dark One sees that its possible to do so for you, so maybe for humanity too... and the ending isn't a choice this time, not on Artyom's part, but a choice of the Dark Ones to come back and reach out one last time to save humanity, even the man who tried to wipe them out. You're given another chance because you showed that you could continue to learn and grow.
And then in Exodus, the MPs serve to show that your actions have consequences not just in the grand scheme, but immediately. If you can't spare the religious cultists who fear you, their leader won't call them off from killing your blood brother. If you don't do enough to help the enslaved people of Caspian, your friend will step up to do what you wouldn't and leave you. If you terrorize the forest brotherhood and kill them, no one will stand up for you and your companion will be wounded. And by the end of the game, the cumulative consequences of your actions hit you; did you keep your people together and keep them safe so that they can save you in turn, or did you drive them away and lose them? I really do love it; your choices and actions matter and it's different from game to game and level to level. I've lost Damir before because I didn't kill any innocents, but I also didn't do enough to help the people in a level. I've also saved Alyosha purely by not killing anyone.
Anyway I'm sure there are other games that do the same thing but it really REALLY works in Metro and drives Artyom's story along. I love these games.
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Hello it is I connection terminated the random Tumblr user!
Ideas had:
Directly after waking upafter being controlled by a bunch of psychotic clowns for like a year Michael went to Henry for help. Henry built him the end of skeleton shell so he could do stuff again But also made Michael internalized the idea that his life is basically useless unless he does vigilante stuff. Also the idea that it basically didn't matter at all what happened to Michael himself as long as he could still walk and punch...
"Nightguar" Michael Is introduced at a charity event hosted by William. (I think he definitely has a "oh you have dead parents I have dead children isn't that so sad" talk with Bruce at some point) Also Tim is there. Then suddenly as Williams giving this speech about "Look at these new robots I made they have a criminal detection system will protect Any children who walk into my establishments!". When Michael bursts in through the glass ceiling and tries to kidnap/maybe kill his dad. But because The crowd and Batman don't know the context it just looks like scary villain came down from the ceiling and is now trying to kill nice children's entertainer William Afton. Basically Michael runs after that and has a little rooftop fight with Tim. Throws down a flash Bang and then runs away.
All of the fun times can easily disguise as humans everyone except baby is just really bad at acting normal. It's also not something they need to do much-
Michael has a lot of hang-ups about being the only non-human member of the bat family for so long. Like everyone else can kind of take off the mask and do normal people stuff (mostly). But Mike physically can't do that.... He also happens to live in a city where most of the metahumans are villains and most of the heroes are normal human people. He kind of sticks out and sometimes gets mistaken for a villain (Kind of a loose adaptation of the whole looking like William hence people wanting to attack him thing for cannon)
Whatever kind of ghost or something like that Michael Charlie and most of the other cast from fnaf are Makes anyone who is in the presence of them feel really Uneasy.. This kind of fades the more time you spend around the person. (This is a head cannon I have for normal fnaf too I just think it'll be fun here)
Cassidy's powers are based on how much pain herself and the people around her are in. Either emotional or physical. she shares a vessel with Evan (because it's easier To say then crying child) His constant sadness is A Perfect power booster! If you're wondering what her abilities are she can trap people in nightmares, Teleconesis, Telepathy, Reality bending,
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Thank you for listening to my ramblings here's a sketch of Cassidy! More of a little concept sketch than her final design LOL but I hope you like it
Ah! Hi! Sorry for taking so long to answer I was recovering from my sister’s second baby shower (I didn’t have a panic attack at this one yay) but it’s been a few weeks and now I’m ready to type! (mainly hearts and key smashs)
HENRYYYYYYY!!!!!! I know you have good intentions but you are giving my blorbo even more of a complex than he already has :(
*lights up the bat signal to let Bruce know to make sure he has the emergency adoption papers ready*
Of course William would have the fucking audacity I want to hit him (and I know that that man is so good an actor probably the only member of the batfamily to notice anything off would be Cass and ether she’s not settled enough to go to galas yet or literally hasn’t joined the family)
There is no doubt in my mind that he pulled out the “I am so sorry about the loss of your son Mr Wayne. There is no pain worse than the loss of a child. I would know” I want to break his nose
Is it really a robin teen vigilante romance if it doesn’t start with a misunderstanding and a fight?
Of course she’s a good actor, she loves playing pretend. kill me
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I have no words for this one just tears
Tim: Hey guys! this is my boyfriend Michael.
*the entirety of Young Justice about to beat up a corpse Because he has bad vibes*
Tim making distance between them with his bo: Back! Back I say!
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I love her so much💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕💕 her little hat is everything to me
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mssf-milk · 7 months
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For how long you have been a sinner of chans ?
Finally I have the time to answer this ask thank god
CW: HUGE RAMBLE INCOMING
As you may already know, it all started with DEFORMOGRAPHY, a fic that I stumbled upon on complete happenstance, searching for Sans/Reader fics to indulge myself in. The tags shook me, but I was intrigued enough to open the work. And I loved it immediately. Some scenes in it managed to greatly disturb me, which made it very memorable. This fic introduced me to an idea I've never thought about before.
After that, as I usually do with things/ideas that catch my interest, I started searching the world wide web for more stuff to satiate my inquisitive mind. I found art on Pinterest, found more fics centered around the idea of a human tormenting the short funny skeleton man, but eventually the fire calmed down. I even forgot about it for a while.
But it lingered. I'm not sure if the idea wouldn't leave my head right from the start, or on re-read, but after reading all the similar fics to it that I could find, I realised that
It still.
Wouldn't.
Leave.
I HAD to see more of this. And so about I started writing something. Not sure when, but probably in April or March. The first draft(??) I was writing was quite different from what turned out in the published work. The idea was the same, but the execution was different, you know? Maybe I'll post it someday, if I manage to find it and think it isn't cringe or something idk. The first attempt was mainly done to get it out of my system, because by god I cannot exaggerate how FERAL this concept made me. I remember shaking from the dopamine bro.
Eventually, I picked it up again and started over, which happened in May, this time approaching it more seriously and deliberately (even though at first I'd procrastinate on writing a lot because of perfectionism). After a lot of mulling over the different ways I could execute this concept, and thinking over the possible plotholes, the first chapter was eventually posted in August.
Fun fact: What if I told you that I wasn't interested in necessarily Chara/Sans at all? That's right, to me, the concept and the whole idea came before the ship itself. In a different timeline, there's probably me, writing a fic for Frisk/Sans or Sans/Reader, just with the same premise. It's just that when making those character sheets for fun, I brushed away the possibility of "The Human" in question ever being Frisk (because of their kind personality), and so just filled it in as "Chara/The Human". It eventually lead to me thinking of the Human being specifically Chara and no one else, and removing the possibility of it being a reader-insert at all.
(Huh, I should post these sheets I was making during that time here someday)
Side note: this is also why wholesome and good Chans content is... I do like it, but it's not what I'm looking for, you know? I'm here for the messed up no good dynamics full of misery. Yay!
So... end of the line is, I do not know.
Does it count from ever since I got hooked by the general idea? From when I started writing my own? Or only from when I solidified Chara as Sans's "lover"?
I guess it's up for interpretation.
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sensarna · 2 years
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I'm going to go on a little tangent here.
If your opinions differ from mine - that's okay. I just want to get it out of my system.
For some reason the idea of Sanji - a character that I love despite all the weird shit he's been doing since the time skip - having an exoskeleton does not sit right with me.
Yet, him, possibly having some Lunarian genes? I can work with that.
Why? Because, despite being the result of whatever Judge has done to him, it explains some of the crazy stuff that he can do. Setting himself on fire without damaging himself or his clothes? Lunarians can produce and control flames. Having a body that can withstand insane amounts of damage? Apparently Lunarians are very fucking sturdy. Him being the speedy boy he is? Maybe it's Lunarian genes or maybe it's just him. Who knows, I sure fucking don't.
But Sanji having a secondary skeleton in his body? That is possibly made of metal ? Nope. I don't like that.
And I know that it's a very likely reason as to why he survived Queens attack ("very likely" because it's probably more exoskeleton + Lunarian durability) but it just feels too much for one guy. I don't want his fathers experiment to end up as a success. It would just make him a Germa soldier who is not a complete asshole.
Some might argue that since the Raid Suit was destroyed then him becoming the way his father expected him to be will not happen, but for me it's more to prevent or at least slow down his moral decline since we already saw the augmentations in action. He is basically Chopper before the time skip - there exist a possibility of acquiring more destructive power in exchange for his sense of humanity and control.
Sanji, in my opinion at least, was supposed to be a failure in the eyes of his father BECAUSE he does not have the powers like his brothers and is basically a normal human being capable of basic human empathy. After surviving the Hell that was his father and brothers, escaping, and going through Hell AGAIN he stayed with the man who, despite being a pirate, was a better father figure than Judge will ever be. He lived at the Baratie with Zeff, honed his skills as a cook and a fighter and then was able to set sail to find the sea of his dreams despite the risks of meeting his biological family. Sanji went through insane hardships while sailing through the Grand Line with the crew that became a family, where every member has insane dreams and seemingly unachievable goals. They loved his food and loved him and his flaws and his code and Sanji cared for and loved every one of them. He ended up becoming stronger than ALL of the Vinsmokes while being that "weak human emotional failure" (fuck Vinsmokes).
BUT since the idea of him being the only "100 % human" while being physically stronger than the rest of the "family" going forward was thrown out of the window because his enhancements started to wake up, why not make it so that the little bit of "weird crazy" that he can do is because he was only 99% human and that 1% allowed him to do stuff that he shouldn't, like SETTING HIS LEGS ABLAZE, but only because he worked with what he had been given and achieved something unexpected.
(I have a theory that Judge was trying to give Sanji either Lunarians durability or speed since his Raid Suit was created for stealth, and he wasn't really expecting Sanji to develop Pyrokinesis, hence why one of the other brothers can create fire.)
AND NOW THAT 1% IS GETTING BIGGER.
If he is becoming stronger because of Germas genetic enhancements, then it would be better to concentrate on the thing that, quite possibly, was there all along, but was smaller than expected and is now affecting him more because of the Raid Suit. Move him from 99% human and 1% Lunarian to 70-80% human, 20-30% Lunarian. But only that. No exoskeletons needed.
Does this explain fire? Yes. His ability to withstand a sword to the head? Possibly. Does this gives him the necessary requirements to create and survive Ifrit Jambe? I think that yes. Insane speed boost? Yep. Do I think that all the new stuff will be explained by simply stating that he is now more of a half breed? Hopefully, but I don't really know if Lunarians can snap their bones back in place so easily.
For now I hope that there will be some sort of regression in the future so that Sanji wouldn't rely too much on the power of instant bone reconstruction or that the exoskeleton will be somehow removed from his body completely by Law or by any other means. And if the "probably Lunarian" thing is confirmed then Sanji developing and/or mastering the ability to temporarily increase his endurance and control and manipulate fire might be a great addition to his battle kit. In that case I don't really see the reason for exoskeleton to exist at all.
(Although I will say that I am not sure where I stand with the rapid healing abilities, since I don't think it's something that can be removed surgically or if Lunarians also have that ability).
In summary: I don't want Sanji to be more like Germa. I don't want him to be more like Vinsmokes. If his fathers heritage is gaining on him, I hope there will be a spin on that idea. For Vinsmokes - he is still a failure. Even with enhancements he is still incomplete in his fathers mind.
But I'm sure he could work with that 👒
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artistconk · 3 years
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pov u see a post that lets you use ur hyperfixation from year 7
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sketcheydyslexic · 3 years
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Don't mind me asking yet I got curious :3
What about some spicy headcanons for the star sanses ?
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Okie dokie, thanks for the ask!
i swear, to everyone who has sent asks- im working on them! im not ignoring you guys u^u (writing request are closed, but art request are open!)
also- please know that my headcanons often times dont link together into a character build up thing, think of each post as its own little timeline ;P
SPICY headcanons for the Star sanses (+ cross)
⚠️sugestive/mature content under the split!‼️
Blue (swap):
he gets a little annoyed by the ‘hes so sweet and innocent’ misconception a lot of people have with him and dream- he is a grown skeleman damn it.
he is a ‘good guy’/‘nice guy’ but dont take his cheer and kindness as him being childlike or nieve. Blue knows his way around things, you dont need a lot of experiance to know just what to do.
your his first time around with a human, or anyone really. He’s never had the option or time to get close and intamate with somone else in between his time before and durring being one of the star sanses.
you both ALWAYS talk about things before you hop into them. nothing to wild and meticlus, there just has to be some level of cumunication. and you have a sturdy safeword system inplace.
he is more dominate leaning, thats mostly due to the intinctual part of him- so if rolls were to be reversed, he wouldnt mind, not one bit.
most papyri and sanses very much so love thigh highs, and just thighs in general.
Swap is no exception for this- he will burry his head in those tighs if you let him. he might grovel if you want hi to.
no need to really worry about breathing with him, of course he needs to breathe- but perks of being a monster skeleton are, that he can suck in oxogen through his rib gaps. youve asked him about it before, and he dosent knoe either, so being a smartass he says ✨magic✨
he keeps a lot of his fantacies in his mind untill the right time to talk about them, he knows most of what you are and are not comfortable with- he will always put your heath and comfort over satisfiing a want brought to him by wandering thoughts durring his heat.
he was damned determined to go through the proper steps of a relationship, he wouldnt shoot you down if you offered to move a little faster though. or if you wanted to move slower than the ‘standard’ pace.
hinting at things you want to happen or like dont go over his head esily. he is hyper attentive to you, he aims to be the best date-mate youll ever have. he also enjoys the wandering mystery of trying to figure out all your levels, like a complex puzzle and his rewards for copleteing every level to unlock your soul are neverending.
the way these events play out with him very heavily on who you are and how your relationship came to be. if your his soulmate, if you are a friend who turned his interest from plationic to romantic, if you are a rival turned lover, if you were somone who he saved, if you saved him... the posibilitys and timelines to go down are endless.
he swings two very difrent ways at the same time. he can really get into and apriciate a heavy kink scene, but he also loves the wild romantic slow burn pace. he needs love and true connection, in a sexual setting or otherwise. he wouldnt be able to do the whole ‘one time fling’ or ‘friends with benifents’ thing, he just isnt built like that.
he really really really likes intercural sex (thigh-fucking). its one of the first things he brings up when your have your little talks.
also. durring his heats, he is super into the Bukake side things. not other people covering you, he wants to cover you all by himself. could it be a way of fluffing his feathers for how much longer he cccan go and how much more he can give than human men or just anyone else? yeah, probably.
actually bukake might not be the right term for it in his case, a form of breeding kink probably fits more. he dosent just want to paint you with his magic, he wants to fill you full of it. of course you wont run the risk of pregnancey without two mutal intents to make a child, so less than normal worry there.
heat or not, he understands ‘no’ and wont push it.
He's always been a you get yours before I can chase mine kind of monster
He doesn’t really like extreme rough stuff
He likes to hold your hands
He likes to massage you, sexual leading or not. He loves your skin and how the tension leave your very soul as he works loving circles with his thumbs.
Ink:
well. he is a grey-asexual. so building up to the point of having sexual atraction for you will either take a while for him to notice or be an unexpected sudden for him. and there is even the posibility he just wont feel sexual attraction at all.
at first, he wont tell you about his urges for you, fearing it might be his body medically wanting to relase the magic buildup. he woulsnt forgive himself for misleading you into beliving it was anything more than that. he wouldnt be able to finish if it did stear down that path, his mind racked to his very soul that he was using you, even if you assuer him he isnt.
its when the thoughs of you plague him after his heats, after he is certain it isnt a magic buildup, durring when his mind isnt blank in foucus on medical releif- but his date-mate.
he isnt ignorant. he knows very well why its happening- he just dosent want to confuse things and act on inpulse like he always does. you were the one thing he would feel for if he lost you.
He is either on his freaknasty shit or he wants some nice soft, sweet, love makin’.
He is the type to rail you on a bathroom sink in the middle of a party, making direct eye contact in the mirror.
Experimentalist, he is available to try anything (within reason) at least once. He especially enjoys indulging your fantasy- it just hits different to be able to make them come to life for you.
Try to embarrass or make this man feel shame. I dare you. He can feel it, but you either gotta work at it or know just the right cords to pluck that day.
He really likes to service you. In anyway. If he feels like he is useful to you, helpfull, making your life easier, or even relieving a little bit of stress.
He likes to keep one hand under your head and one on your hip or around your waist, he likes to feel connected to more than just one half of you.
Dream:
He isn’t childish, he has seen some shit, and been through some shit. He just chooses to be positive, kind and caring. His aura doesn’t really help with the misconception but he is an adult with all the adult tendencies.
Intent sharing really does him in. Not sex but love making.
He really, really likes finishing at the same time. Something about it just hits different and will leave him thinking about it for days
He kind of wants to test out his nasties fantasy- the ones he gets when it's late a night and you are away, not a soul around to hear his thoughts
Pro gamer move: if he is worn out/drained from a long fight... Give him time to heal and rest just a little, then have some fun while he actually can't do anything himself. That's something that will pop in his head at random times in the day, just to make him blush and need to take a break from what he was doing.
He loves tummy and thighs! All of them, every shape and size.
So... A garter belt and some thigh highs... That's a surprise tool to help you later ;)
He likes to run his hands through your hair.
He likes a little rough sometimes.
Wear his crown, I dare you.
He likes to praise you- not the way he lifts other people up, but in a very special, only you get to hear way.
He eats it for his pleasure. He gets off because you are, and that is not linked to him being powered by your good feels.
Cross:
He’s a bad guy, but he’s also,a good guy?
He will either always make sure you are okay with something or have a safety system in place.
You guys have a code word/signal thing, to communicate silently When you are out together.
He will love you, but knows how to make sure you still feel that love when he is railing you.
Nobody is perfect, our skin has little freckles, scars from accidents and maybe not accidents in some cases, this list goes on.... But that's why he love yours so much. Marks along your skin that tell your story. He loves to pay close attention when he is laying with you in afterglow, massaging your muscles and recalling the stories you told him about how you got each one.
All the Booty rubbs you could ever dream of.
Pretty vanilla most of the time, but mans can get his freak nasty on. It's the first time in a long time that he's had someone where sex wasn't just a coping mechanism, or a going to help in his heats....
He is more than aware of himself and how he is, so he is trying to keep himself in check for every little thing that he doesn't need to- so basically he dotes on you.
Again- he can get into some kinky stuff. He is pretty open and would be willing to try just about anything if you talked to him about it. - this is part of the reason why sex is on the tamer side, he wants to talk about more spicy things before you guys try them.
Being a brat or teasing him has a weird side. He isn't patient, he just has good enough self-control to not snap but you'll have to wear at it for a while. when he’s a little jealous? Nope. His patience goes from 6mm of solid steel to a wet paper bag.
He won't hide his intent all when he's jealous. Does he not have any control over it or does he want you to feel how much he loves you and wants you to only love him?
He not one of the worst at communicating his feels but he is still a bad guy with some trouble- so non-verbal ways of communicating are the best way for him I truly explain what's happening in his soul. Like intent sharing.
Anyways- he would thoroughly enjoy it if you sat on his face. Suffocate him darling, he wants to drown in that ass and thighs.
He likes to finish with you, your hand, or your lips wrapped around him. Seeing himself smeared across your chest is pretty nice too.
He likes to cup your face in his hands or hold your home close to his.
He knows you like his coat, and wear it without a shirt because of the soft inside... He's thought about fucking you into a pure bliss while in his coat, and he really likes that visual.
He likes taking you out on a date or something nice before sex. Not every time is planned but if he know to expect it he will make sure to have a gift or a day out with you planned. He just wants you to have a nice day, and a nice experience outside of sex- you put up with a lot for him.
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onepieceheadcannons · 2 years
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So this wasn't requested but I wanted to give some random Headcanons
Now this post definitely isn't for everyone's taste,
Now I know quite a bit about ABO dynamics and I haven't seen any headcanons on what each strawhat would be. Now if you do not like ABO, do not worry this will be my only post with it that isn't requested and I won't be offended if you skip this.
This definitely isn't the most detailed it can go but it's like 3 am for me and I just want these HC's outta my mind.
The Strawhats
Luffy;
This man is an Alpha, I mean how else could he become Pirate King.
Now I mean no hate to omegas, I think they should be highly respected. But based on what a society in ABO is like, it makes the most sense for Luffy to be an Alpha.
He is protective and strong, plus conquerors Haki is very similar to pheromones. He would do anything for his crew and he wants them safe.
He wouldn't be appealed to have an Omega, it wouldn't be on his agenda and he'd handle a rut very privately.
He would fight his way to the top fairly and wouldn't discriminate against betas and omegas.
I'm also down to hear anyone's different opinions on any of these.
Zoro;
I can see him in many different ways, I can see him as an Alpha but I can see Omega with insecurities about it, but my most confident answer is Beta.
The reason why is because his undying loyalty to Luffy. He would fulfill the role as a Beta quite well. He would be able to avoid the hormones of others and be quite unbothered by all of it. He would work slightly harder to be the greatest swordsman especially if Mihawk is an Alpha. He wouldn't of presented before his best friend died but if she began showing signs of an Alpha, he would probably feel the extra competitive edge to be better.
He wouldn't care if someone is an Alpha or Omega, why should that shit matter to him.
And he wouldn't really care about what his partner was.
If he was an Omega, he would use suppressants and be damned if anyone knew. He would probably beat himself up over it and would build a high tolerance to pheromones. He would NEVER let someone help through a heat unless a long term relationship. And he would never be caught in an Mpreg situation.
And if he was an Alpha, he would accept Luffy as overall Alpha. He wouldn't feel like fighting it and he has the serious demeanor. He would protect any omegas but refuse to participate in a heat. He would fight himself a shit ton and never let his guard down.
Usopp;
Beta man, there's no way he'd be an Alpha. I mean he would always feel sad about it most likely, wanting to be brave and strong. He would probably have some lingering thoughts about the system, he wouldn't see Omegas as less than but he would probably assume that Omegas and Alphas are meant together and he has to find a Beta.
Until his crush on Kaya, the caring Omega. He would fight himself internally over it but she wouldn't care if he was a Beta. She probably was told she had to find a nice Alpha but that wouldn't affect her, she really cares about Usopp. She even goes to medical school to fix him up.
He would be disturbed by Ruts and Heats, he would get flustered and stay away from whoever was having one at the time.
Sanji;
Just like Zoro I can see any of them,
But I'm leaning Beta/Omega. No offense if you are like 😡 I want an Alpha Sanji don't disrespect my man's like that
Reason why I can see Omega, he is quite loving and I think he'd make a great dad. He loves ladies so much and being an Omega wouldn't stop him. I mean hey, look how much he likes fiesty women. He definitely wouldn't be against a female alpha, as long as he doesn't know about the extra appendage during a rut.
His family storyline would play into this, his dad would've been pissed if all Sanjis siblings are an Alpha but Sanji was a "weak" omega son. He would definitely be an angry and powerful Omega, training his tolerance to pheromones. And oh my god he'd be so angry if Zoro is a Beta/Alpha.
He would avoid Alpha men, I don't see him ever wanting to date one. I think he may be a little fruity but it's so internalized he would never be okay dating any male. He would probably hope for any female, but preferring an Omega/Beta.
If Sanji is a Beta, he'd be right up there with being a supporter of Luffy. He would definitely offer to help Omegas through a heat (and promptly get turned down) . He would be frustrated anytime an Alpha was in a rut and avoid being near them at all costs. It would piss him off especially if they wanted one of the crew.
His preferences would stay the same as if he were an omega.
And as an Alpha, oh my this man would be the most respectful ever. He would be damned before he let himself with an Omega without consent said before the heat was even close. He would protect his Omega at all costs. And he would let them bite his neck back. And he would defend any omegas in a vulnerable position. He definitely has a savior complex about it though. But he definitely would believe he could only have an Omega.
Brook;
He is a skeleton, this wouldn't even affect him.
As a human tho, I could see an Omega with his love of the arts and his love for Laboon and his crew. But I don't have much of detailed one for him. Beta, possibly but that's the easiest to presume someone as.
Chopper;
He is a damn reindeer. I just wanted to include my besties name but yeah he is a reindeer no way in hell would this affect him and he'd just make suppressants for everyone. Even with the human human fruit, that wouldn't add abo to his form.
Franky;
Now there's a chance that now as a cyborg this doesn't affect him. But pre cyborg or if it did, I see him as an Omega.
This man cries his heart out (which I love dearly about him) and he is such a big bro/dad figure.
He wouldn't care what anyone was but as a kid he may have had some trouble with the concept until Tom taught him better. Esp with Ice for Brains, who I could see as an Alpha/Beta so Franky may have felt less than.
Robin;
Alpha or Beta, but she isn't an Omega.
She holds herself up with an air of stoic and dark humor/themes. She would be quite a helpful Beta and she'd protect any Omega friends. She would feel very strongly about Omegas being seen as the same as everyone else. And she would feel very insecure if she was made to submit to anyone unwillingly.
I can see Alpha tho, (esp Frobin <3), she lets Franky let his tears out and she is such a good friend. She would struggle to let her feelings out which would make her line in Enies lobby even more important. She would be experienced and she would probably offer to help an omega she was very close to but she wouldn't settle down unless you are Franky or a very solid partner to her. She wouldn't care if you were another Alpha or Beta though, she'd love you for you.
Jinbe/Jimbei;
Now I don't know if Fish people/men would even be affected but if they were.. he would be...
Alpha, but in a very nonchalant way. He was a warlord, and not just anyone would get that. He wouldn't ever make someone submit and he would fight for rights for everyone esp Omegas in his community. If he did settle down, it wouldn't matter to him. Just as long as he can share his feelings in a safe place.
But beta would work as well, he is quite devoted to his crews and is a loyal person in general and shows alot of care to Luffy during the timeskip.
I also haven't finished Fish man Island yet so I have little to work with.
Nami;
I did save her for last, this is probably the most biased one. I mean as you guys will learn, she's my girlfriend/wife, so I may see her slightly different than someone else would.
Now I feel like as many of the others, she can fit in all three. I mean everyone is going to show traits to each kind which is why I try to explain myself for each.
Alpha, i can see this. She's very fiesty and she sure as hell wouldn't want to submit to anyone. She would be a little embarrassed during a Rut and she would use suppressants. She would be fine with not being top dog but she definitely wants her respect, she's the entire reason they get anywhere.
She isn't looking for romance but she'd be fine with anyone as long as they were worth it. I think an Alpha male would be her least likely pair though, that person would have to be quite honorable and prove themselves to her as good enough.
If she's an Omega, she would be quite angry about it. She wouldn't want to be perceived as weak and sure as hell would use suppressants and she'd be damned if an alpha helped her through a heat. The only way she would, would be after a super solid relationship where there's extreme trust. She would slap the crap out of Sanji if he tried anything or suggested anything, she wouldn't have any patience especially after she had to deal with the bullshit she heard her entire time with Arlong and other crews stealing treasure.
If she was a beta, she'd probably go after another Beta. Keep thing simple. She would eyeroll at any alphas and she would be over the whole alpha/omega bullshit.
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Who Are the Four Horsemen of the Dream SMP Apocalypse?
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Art by: Viktor Vasnetsov
[TW’s: torture, death, murder, manipulation, alcohol, substance abuse, discussions about the end of the world, religion, starvation, violence, implied gambling, blood, alcoholism]
Word Count: 3.5k
INTRODUCTION
Hopefully I finish this before I feel too sleep-deprived, but I’ve been thinking about the presence of horsemen in Quackity’s “My Enemies” stream. These mysterious, hooded figures are quite odd to say the least, and their involvement with Las Nevadas still remains unknown. There has been a debate on whether there were three horsemen or four, and in my opinion, I believe that there are four horsemen present.
Why four? In the first scene, three horsemen arrive at the Dream SMP on a dark and stormy night. They seem to have come from the south, entering Eret’s castle from the back. As they stop to pull their Netherite swords out, air raid sirens are heard from the distance.
Similarly, in the last scene, Quackity is seen placing a book in Wilbur’s memorial before leaving, riding his skeleton horse, Ossium. The scene cuts from first person POV to third, and we see a hooded figure, presumably Quackity because of how both came from the same direction. Additionally, air raid sirens are also heard from a distance.
[MORE UNDER THE CUT!]
I theorize that these two scenes take place at the same time. The prequel scenes only began after we see the sequence of Quackity torturing Dream, and it ends after the flashbacks of Wilbur. We can synthesize that both these scenes are set at the same time, and that these horsemen are going to meet at a certain point on the prime path.
What may suggest that these four horsemen are supposed to be parallels to the biblical four horsemen?
Firstly, seeing the bits they do, Quackity and Schlatt do know a lot of biblical references. Schlatt has compared Tubbo to Jesus once, and Quackity has said many prayers as jokes in the Dream SMP. It’s just… easy to take inspiration from biblical symbols and references, and also, the four horsemen are just very popular figures in history, so you know, why not?
Also, this may also sound RIDICULOUS, but the fact that this stream establishes that Tommy got resurrected three days after he got killed is actually very reminiscent of, well, you guessed it, Jesus Christ. 72 hours is oddly specific, and I don’t think the cc’s made it that way for no reason. Tommy’s parallels to Jesus—which is a VERY funny phrase—could imply that the Dream SMP might draw more parallels to Christianity, and the four horsemen could be another one of these references.
Also, Quackity mentioned how in Las Nevadas, he made four casinos for him and the rest of El Rapids. So, we know four is a number we can associate with Las Nevadas, and there’s a chance Quackity gave these casinos to three other people. Four casinos, four horsemen.
What is the purpose of the four horsemen in the Dream SMP? When the air raid sirens went off, we can think of these four horsemen as the bringer of chaos or danger into the Dream SMP, very reminiscent of the purpose of the original four horsemen in Christianity. We can also connect it to the end of the world, as these four only appear when the world begins to end. This can imply that these four, who are most likely allies of Quackity in Las Nevadas, are somewhat connected to how the Dream SMP will end.
Now, who is who? Admittedly, it is difficult to find a definitive answer on which member represents what horseman, so I’ll try my best considering all the possibilities for each. I’ll add my own ranks on how probable I think they are, but I have to specify that these are subjective- I am not a beacon of truth, y’all.
So let’s get started.
Firstly, I want to discuss who might NOT be a horseman to narrow it down a bit:
Any minors might not be involved. In Sam’s face reveal stream, aka the first stream mentioning Las Nevadas, Quackity and Sam agree they don’t want Tubbo and Tommy to participate in underage gambling. Don’t know if this applies to Ranboo and Fundy (since he might be canonically a child? Who knows), so they get more of a pass, but the clingy duo might not.
The Syndicate. I’d like to think that the Syndicate, as well as Dream, are Quackity’s main foils of the server. As they are the richest and also the most skilled in PVP, Quackity stands no chance against them even with his sharp tongue. As these people are foils against Quackity, and also probably hate his guts, Quackity might not hire them at Las Nevadas. I theorize he’d probably use Dream as a watchdog against the Syndicate, but that’s a theory for another time. 
Additional point about Dream: he’s in prison.
Anyone from Kinoko Kingdom because it’s clear Quackity severed all ties with them.
The Eggpire is half-half. They can possibly join, but also can’t, Quackity can manipulate them into joining only for their inevitable demise, or Quackity wouldn’t wanna associate with them after the explosion incident. They’ll at least get a few passes in some categories, but again, not entirely sure.
CONQUEST
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Also known as Plague, Pestilence, and in some occasions, both Jesus Christ and the Antichrist, Conquest is shown to be riding on a white horse, donning a victor’s crown and a bow. There are many interpretations of Conquest, especially with their ambiguous morality. Some people can perceive them as bad, representing the origin of many wars. Some people claim that they represent pestilence and plague as their arrows are slathered with the infections they want to spread. In some cases, they can also be interpreted as good, as their description is heavily reminiscent of Jesus Christ himself. Others would rebut that there is also a possibility that they might be a fake replica of Jesus created by Satan, thus making them the antichrist.
Sam (8/10)
Sam is my first choice when it comes to Conquest because, firstly, he fits the appearance. He is one of the only people in the Dream SMP who dons a crown, and they also possess a bow which they frequently use. I’d say that Sam as Conquest matches with his ambitions as a member of the Badlands, Pestilence or Plague match with his possible crimson infection, and Antichrist matches with his inability to keep Tommy, the possible Jesus figure on the SMP, alive or safe. 
My only issue is: would Sam be one of the three who arrived at the Dream SMP in the beginning? Sam is very strict with his job as warden, so it is unlikely that he would be seen far from it.
Any of the Eggpire (7/10)
As Conquest is heavily depicted with pestilence or plague, any of the Eggpire may fit under this category. As their goal as the Eggpire is meant to conquer the Dream SMP, this also matches with the goal of Conquest. Additionally, one of the Egg’s weaknesses is Church Prime, something heavily resembling Christianity, so if the Egg is its opposite, we can view the Egg as somewhat of an antichrist. 
I say Punz, Bad, Ponk, and Hannah have a higher chance of being Conquest, while Ant is a solid ‘maybe’. Punz could’ve been the one who blew up the Egg, Bad can be easily persuaded by Quackity, Ponk is one of the only capitalists of the server that may participate in Las Nevadas, and Hannah’s character heavily fits the theme of pestilence when it comes to nature. Additionally, I like to believe that Conquest was the horseman on the skeleton horse (that isn’t Quackity’s), especially since they were holding a dandelion in one shot, something that could be attributed to “pestilence” because a dandelion is a weed. This may imply that Hannah could be part, but because they haven’t interacted much beforehand, we wouldn’t be sure. More insight on Punz: he once mentioned he upholds his duties as mercenary more than he might love the Egg, so there’s a chance Quackity bribed him to join Las Nevadas.
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The main con to this is that: why would the Eggpire willingly join Quackity, or why would the Egg allow them to join Quackity? I can see that Quackity might break their brainwashed states because he has a good way with words, but people like Bad, Ant, and Punz have stated that they’ve been fully controlled by the Egg. Also, Quackity makes it clear he wants to eradicate his enemies, so he might not want any members of the Eggpire to join Las Nevadas… unless there’s a traitor?
Schlatt, Mexican Dream, or Wilbur (6/10)
Heavily connected with winning if you take Manberg, Mexican L’Manberg, or L’Manberg into mind.
Wilbur also has a memorable crossbow, but I don’t know if that counts as a bow.
Any dead characters have a high chance of joining Las Nevadas because of its possible connections to death and the revival system of the SMP.
Other possibilities with short explanations and low but possible odds:
Eret: Has a crown, his betrayal can be seen as a “win”, has Tommy’s bow from the duel. Can be seen as an antichrist figure.
Jack: As he is against Tommy, he can be seen as an antichrist figure. Might be working with Las Nevadas because of his deal with Quackity.
Ranboo: He’s a minor, but he also has a crown and a bow so, maybe? He’s not much of a conqueror or winner, though.
Connor: Didn’t really conquer much, didn’t really win much, he’s just here because of Schlatt, honestly.
WAR
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War is depicted to be holding a raised sword as they ride atop a red horse. After conquest, war is expected to follow, and War is tasked to break any type of peace on earth. He is tasked to kill, or make humans kill each other. The prominence of red symbolizes bloodshed or immense anger, something very present in war. Multiple depictions of War show him with his sword raised upwards, signifying the start of a battle.
Schlatt (9/10)
The man’s literally torn the Dream SMP apart (/lh). This man is always keen on fulfilling his goals, and if it means he’ll have to fulfill them in the most twisted of ways, he will do it. Him winning the Election brought immense conflict in the Dream SMP, and many people were torn apart on which side was the right or wrong side. One of Schlatt’s prominent colors besides blue would be red, as it is the color of his tie and the color of his ghost form’s horns. Red could represent the bloodshed of those who died during the Manberg-Pogtopia conflict, or red can signify the anger Schlatt had for his own cabinet.
Schlatt was also gifted a sword by Dream called “Shclatt”. The sword only holds heavy significance because of how Fundy treasured it like an heirloom.
Wilbur (8/10)
Another good possibility too as Ghostbur was recently seen to admire red a lot more than blue in one of Tommy’s streams. We can also view the creation of L’Manberg as a place that broke the peace in the Dream SMP as they didn’t really NEED to create L’Manberg and declare war, yet, he did. Red can also resemble his anger for what has been done to L’Manberg- everything is pretty self-explanatory, honestly.
My only qualm with Wilbur being one of the horsemen is how we can’t really… tell if he’s in the Dream SMP? He seems to be very clear on the fact that he does NOT want to return, so he might not even be there when the four horsemen became a thing.
Any of the Eggpire (7/10)
Honestly? Same reasoning as the first explanation for the Eggpire. This also applies for why they might not be one of the horsemen.
Do I even need to explain the red part, or do we just all understand that red is literally their brand.
The Eggpire practically breaks peace in the server and is keen on taking control of the entirety of the Dream SMP. The Egg is shown to be ruthless towards anyone, and will even let some of its followers kill people if needed. 
I see Bad as someone who might qualify for this position more because he initiates a lot of the activity in the Eggpire. Same goes for Ant, Punz, and Ponk, but they don’t really take initiative most of the time.
Jack Manifold (4/10)
The only reason I kind of added him here was that he wanted to kill Tommy, but Jack isn’t entirely selfish or peace-breaking. I do think he might play a role in Las Nevadas, especially since if Quackity has access to the nukes, only Jack and Ranboo might be the only two who helped him gain access.
Jack is also… very angry at Tommy. Rightfully so, because he basically surrounded a good portion of his life trying to kill Tommy only for him to realize that that might not be his purpose in life. He blames Tommy for a lot of the loss in the server, so he has a lot of anger, but he has no one to vent it all out to.
Other possibilities with short explanations and low but possible odds:
Eret: Did the first betrayal, but that’s about it. He’s also participated in several wars against others who disagreed with him being the king.
Ranboo: Participated in wars, but is a peacemaker so, y’know.
Fundy: While he does possess Schlatt’s sword, he isn’t much of an initiator of wars as much as he is merely a follower. He has shown that he is quite angry at those who have used him, but the anger has dissipated lately into some sort of sadness/denial.
Connor: He’s mournful that Schlatt, a close friend, has died, but he isn’t really one to be angry. He tried living far away to make his own independent nation, but it didn’t impact much of the story. He also one possessed “Ghostbur’s Stabbing Knife”, which could represent the sword.
FAMINE 
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Famine is seen to be holding a scale (presumably for food) as they ride atop a horse. Famine is also denoted to be the only one speaking, saying “A quart of wheat for a denarius! And three quarts of barley for a denarius! But don’t ruin the oil and the wine!”. This statement basically means that we have to pay a full day’s worth of earnings for a bit of wheat and barley but oil and the wine, something not considered human necessities, can have the same prices. This shows an unfairness when it comes to acquiring basic human necessities. This is especially damaging to the poor as Famine’s statement can possibly make the poor poorer, while the rich remain the same. It is implied that the wider the gap between the poor and the rich, the closer we are to the end of the world.
Fundy (9/10)
This may be a long answer because I am biased towards Fundy, but Niki once stated that Manberg was in some sort of a famine because of the destruction of farms. Because of this, certain citizens have resorted into eating spider eyes from the EXP farm, but it was notable that she was practically calling out Fundy, someone who literally advertised spider eyes to any person he talked to in the Dream SMP.
Fundy is also hinted to be heavily connected to these hooded figures somehow. In his dream, he was chased by one until he slept in a black bed, the color of Famine.
Additionally, in his dream, he held baked potatoes (food) which could be related…? He’s also a libra so… scales…?
He is also a notorious prankster in the Dream SMP and will bargain for anything as long as he profits from it. He’s not the richest by any means, but he loves doing pranks that involve stealing belongings from other people.
Schlatt (8/10)
Similar reason to Fundy as he was the president of Manberg responsible for these famines. Additional note for this is that he also taxed Niki, one of their only food sources in Manberg. 
Schlatt also likes to joke around about being rich, earning money, or being a businessman often, especially with the entire Schlatt coin joke. Connected to Famine’s trait of making the rich richer, possibly?
Famine’s statement can also apply here as it is implied that if humanity doesn’t possess the basic of necessities, they might at least have wine which won’t provide any solutions to humanity’s starvation at all, but it will distract you from your starvation by making you heavily drunk until you finally die. This is very reminiscent of how Schlatt died.
Sam (6/10)
Sam is one of the richest people on the server, matching Famine’s want to keep the rich rich. Only problem here is that Sam is at least very generous and provides a lot of people with resources when needed.
Sam could possibly be connected to Famine because of how he treats Dream in prison. In an attempt to torture Dream, he starves him, cutting his food supply.
Same problem remains with Sam not being able to join whatever the hell the four horsemen are because of his duties as warden.
Any of the Syndicate (1/10)
Only giving an exception here because the Syndicate is exceptionally rich and is more selfish about it than others. Low chances, but Ranboo… might? But it’s still a bit iffy for me. Niki might as well because of her connections to the Manbergian famine, but still on the fence with this one too.
DEATH
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Death is often depicted riding a pale horse, but some variations have called the horse light green. Death does not don a weapon themselves, but they are always accompanied by Hades. Hades in Christianity is the place or state of the departed spirits, meaning Death has contact with those who have died. Sometimes, Death is depicted with a scythe similar to the Grim Reaper, but some say Death has no weapon at all as Death themself is the weapon. Death is not only meant to collect souls and end lives, but they can also represent the end of an era of humanity.
Quackity (10/10)
I would say Quackity can fit any other category, but I am so sure that Quackity is death because of how death and toying with death seems to be one of Quackity’s main themes in the Dream SMP. Quackity, once hesitant about killing others, has been shown to now impulsively want to kill others: first with Techno, then Ranboo, then Dream. 
Quackity will also most likely acquire information about revival on the Dream SMP, so he is in close proximity with Hades, or in the Dream SMP, the Void. This also heavily ties in with the idea that he will make others gamble away their canon lives only for him to resurrect or return their canon lives if they ever successfully gamble it back. 
Quackity is also known to be very powerless in terms of PVP and battle, but you know what he succeeds in? His own words. He is his own weapon that can get him whatever he wants as long as the person he’s up against is in a vulnerable position. 
He is also confirmed to be one to have a skeleton horse, and some depictions of Death’s horse show that it is very corpse-like.
A bloody scythe can also be seen in Quackity’s first lore teaser, and that can be attributed to Death.
Other possibilities with short explanations and low but possible odds:
Schlatt: First owned the revival book but he literally does not know its contents. Fits the “they are their own weapon” trait.
Dream: The only exception I can give. But again, he is literally in prison…?
Wilbur & Mexican Dream: Only putting these two here because they have experienced death. These two fit the “they are their own weapon” category too.
Connor: Wants to revive Schlatt, but that’s it.
CONCLUSION
Honestly, my first conclusion for the four horsemen were Sam/Conquest, Schlatt/War, Fundy/Famine, and Quackity/Death, but I only see Quackity as Death to be something that is HIGHLY possible. For Conquest, I shift between Sam and one of the Eggpire, for War, I shift between Wilbur and Schlatt, and for Famine, I shift between Fundy and Schlatt. Again, no definitive answer, but I’d love to hear your own thoughts on this.
I am very tired, but also remember to reblog if you do enjoy this! Again, would love to hear your own insights, and would appreciate any type of discussion! :D
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worldviewcast · 3 years
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The Origin of Worldview
So this is going to be a semi-personal, but also a semi-explanation post about alot of the background info regarding Worldview.  Yes it’ll be a long somewhat boring wall of text for many of you, but to ME it’s words I feel need to be said and it would mean the absolute world to me if people would take the time to hear me out.  Even if its only gonna be the five of you that continue on after this. Anyway...
Worldview technically started forming in my mind when I was probably about fifteen. (For reference, at the time of writing this, I’m about half a year to thirty-one) I was really into doing comics, I had done probably a hundred pages of a really dumb fantasy comic I came up with when I was TWELVE, a Sonic fancomic, and every morning on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I would upload my micron inked and colored pencil story about some DnD characters into the school scanner to post on Drunkduck which is probably all still there today. Adventure’s Guild is missed in my heart, for sure.  But in between looking for my first job, the constant writing and doodling I was doing, and my schoolwork I was tossing another idea around in my head. A really DUMB idea, cuz ya know I was FIFTEEN. And I wanted to call it ‘My Big Brother the Ninja’. At the time I was influence by all the dumb anime I was watching and my best friend at the time who always wore black and stood about two feet over me. I don’t know if he’ll ever read this, but trust me if he knew I was talking about this he would recognize this story right away.  Well. My first job came around, along with my post secondary college work, and then a tech school I paid for, and.....life really started to get in the way of development. I was more focused on drawing Adventures Guild and other doodles for a long time, and soon enough taking care of my daughter took precedence over everything, and then I started sewing, and doing conventions....and the idea of ‘My Big Brother the Ninja’ was just stuck in the back of my head. Sitting. Waiting. Forming slowly as it waited for its existence - its time in the sun.  And at some point I decided I wanted Android/Robotic like characters too...some of my FAVORITE series are Kikaider : The Animation and Chobits (the books, not the infants show they try to pass a a fully written anime) - things like that. So I KNEW long before Worldview had a proper name I would be writing robot characters with a twist. But I couldn’t figure out what that twist was, what would make it work. The whole idea was still....building. It needed a push.  Right around the time My Hero Academia came around everyone with a creative mind seemed to be suddenly struck with a similar idea - what if unique powers WEREN’T so unique in a world?  This is fairly common now, but at the start of MHA I remember finding it weird that suddenly every half the new shows out had a whole population of super powered badasses in a world where living daily life with it was more the norm than the exception.  And I remember finding it REALLY weird this all came out the same time I evolving a similar idea for my own thing.... I wish I could prove I was evolving this ideas before I saw em but I can’t. I have a much deeper theory about the evolution of cultural art and how influences drive creative minds to similar conclusions but that’s a LONG mental dive for another day.  ANYHOW.
So my original idea in ‘My Big Brother the Ninja’ was the Ninja would be the weird super power in the normal world.  NOW I wanted the NINJA to be the ‘normal’ one...and the younger sister would be the WEIRD one because she DIDN’T have some sort of power or ability.  I fell in love with this new dynamic and now things were REALLY starting to come together in my mind, what kind of powers were people gonna have, just HOW mundane was it gonna be, how many fantasy elements did I want to have?  Because I already KNEW another element I really wanted to include was modern day Paladins - and YES I WILL be covering modern-day style Paladins in Worldview proper, but this meant the universe needed a Deity system, a hierarchy or pantheon.  And the world just started to grow....but something was still MISSING, the binding, the elements of what all I wanted to do -  Aaaaaaaaaand then came UNDERTALE.  And yes this ENTIRE long post is just me mini ranting about how WV came to be so people can TRULY understand just HOW much is inside MY universe so we can stop tagging it as part of the UT Multiverse please and thank you - it’s not that I don’t UNDERSTAND the confusion, but here is your ultimate ‘for the record’ post regarding mine and @little-noko ‘s personal frustrations. Undertale was obviously a HUGE part of pop culture, personal experiences, my life, MANY of my readers lives, I GET why the emotional connection is there and why its the first thing that comes to mind - but the ONLY part I truly was fascinated by with Undertale was the way the Souls were.  PHYSICAL Souls - an actual magical entity that represented a person - THIS idea.  This was my missing piece.  To say artists get inspiration from other artists is beyond an understatement - even Sans and Papyrus are references to Helvetica, right? If not references, inspired by, or ‘great minds think alike’, whatever your argument there....its not uncommon.  And Souls being PHYSICAL was the element I wanted to play with - the idea I wanted to expand on, and so much more I want to go into detail about but don’t want to go into spoilers yet so I’m not going to - and the absolute CRUX of my frustrations when dealing with ‘WV is just UT with different characters’.  Worldview has.....humans. Only humans, divided into four race. Mechanoid. Masic. Skeleton. Metazoan. (The last one exclusively because I wanted an excuse to draw cute cat girls, so sue me)  A pantheon of Gods. It’s own world map. Special BIOLOGY that I have developed to work specifically with the races I have built. Ability trees (diagram to come, don’t worry, we’re just still working out the kinks).  It’s own countries, nationalities, and even it’s own tangible form of afterlife which I blame watching WAY too much Supernatural on but HEY Reapers are freaking COOL man.  It’s absolutely gut wrenching painful to have people argue with me over a world that I have nurtured and slowly tended to for a good fifteen years...now that it finally, FINALLY gets a chance to exist and be worked on....I feel like the one binding element I finally found and played with and tried to expand on is the ONLY element that people care about. As if absolutely EVERY other element that I want to show just - doesn’t EXIST. We started with Finch because its a good transition from the old projects to the new and it’s the earliest event in the timeline - nothing more than that. But I’m almost starting to feel like that was a mistake because it’s TOO familiar.  There’s no going back now, and thats fine. But it does make me anxious to move on to the next ‘chapter’ we’ll be delving into.  MAN.  I hope that helps clarify a few things.  I love answering questions (those that I can) about  WV...so my ask box is always open.  For those that made it, thanks for listening. :) 
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pokedashwarrior55 · 3 years
Text
Raincloud HC and Mini Fic
BENTHOMAAR/VANIA HC DUMP.
 CAN BE READ PLATONIC OR ROMANTIC BUT THESE TWO WOULD BE PERFECT FOR EACHOTHER EITHER WAY
Inspired By @parachutingkitten
- They saw each other at the nya tribute but didn't get to actually meet
-Bentho became king of merlopians but struggles with citizens seeing him as a real king, as many still are distrustful of the surface world
-He has gluttonous there as the royal scientist and Gripe helps him out, but the citizens still don’t view him has a true king after what happened with Kalmaar
-Bentho and Vania have a cordial meeting for royal business
-Vania is struggling less with her people and more with her city economically recovering.
-Bentho wants to bind the kingdoms somehow, since her kingdom is so inland that if they had good relations with a mountainous region it's one step closer to accepting him.
-They are skeptical of SURFACE DWELLERS not humans so it's a good try. 
-establishes trade and economic relations with each other. Maybe trade or sell deepstone and bioluminescent stones for jewelry and architecture in return for some shintaro product unavailable under the sea. Maybe a metal or type of cuisine? Not sure. Flowers perhaps since they have so many in the garden. 
-Both relate to having less than respectable family members and share experiences with defeating them
-share new ruler problems they face and can relate to each other very well
-benthomaar can keep up with the bubbly energy of Vania and they both have a backbone to keep their bond from being too unhealthy, fluffy and overly optimistic.
-bentho has trauma from kalmaar's abuse and goes overboard to try and impress vania and thinks he has to be the best damn guy and best royal ally possible to keep her current friendship
-Vania is pretty easily impressed and is very vocal with her admiration so he'll be overwhelmingly happy and confused when she latches on so quickly.
-she'll show him around the sky city, bentho never been so high up, and can introduce him to her allies down below.
-Bentho loves the caves much more than the city in the sense that it's more comforting and all the underwater streams and lakes remind him of home.
-all streams lead to the ocean so I'm not surprised if they find out the water is connected to merlopian seas some how
- this can also work to compliment the kingdoms
- Like Merlopia can reach out and achieve diplomacy with another kingdom instead of being so islationist, and shintaro struggles with moving on from a unsustainable and horrific economic system so they could help eachother alot. 
-Both very isolated so coming together may be a good step for both countries’
-Merlopians could be accepting of geckles and munce since they live below the surface, and the shintarins live high above it (so they couldn’t flood it even if they wanted to). It’s baby steps towards liking the rest of NINJAGO as a continent. 
-When they become closer friends she Opts for calling him Ben or Benny, since she is so outgoing and bubbly like that, but immediately backtracks and asks if it was ok and apologizes, saying she went over the line
- He would stand up for himself and deny BENNY but I think Ben would be a cute name between the two uwu
-Benthomaar is naturally formal in his ruling and has to push himself to relax while Vania is very lax and friendly with her ruling but needs to push herself to be demanding and formal (She took awhile to use the “Princess” card against Halmaar, opting instead for mutual understanding)
-ok quasi-fic time
___________________________________________________________
FIC SKELETON (might finish writing someday but here’s the basics with some interaction)
 summary: : They spend the day learning about each other kingdoms, and in turn eachother. 
________________________________________________________________
CHAPTER 1: Shintaro
Vania goes about giving Bentho a tour of her city and he is overly courteous of her. She finds it cute at first but then she starts worrying if Benthomaar thinks she can’t handle herself.
Introduces Bentho to Chompy. He finds the dragon very cute and that gets a big smile out of him, really showing off his very sharp teeth. Chompy loves him immediately and starts to climb over him and sit on his head and stuff. Bentho reciprocates pretty much immediately, no stranger to the values of an animal's unconditional love. (The only love that ever seems unconditional in his experience.)
 He has trust issues from Kalmaar and tries extra hard to earn love so he goes overboard sometimes, he’ll be the sort to open doors literally all the time, agree with her ideas more aggressively than is really needed, go out of his way to try and physically protect her from perceived threats, etc. Not knowing this fact, and being insecure about her own leadership skills, she thinks he is babying her, or worse, pitying her. She eventually tells him that she can indeed handle herself. 
“I can handle myself Benthomaar, you don’t have to do all these things for me.”
“I… Know that”
“You’re very sweet and I appreciate your generosity but… this”, gestures to all the things he bought or given or made for her, and gestures to the situation they were in where he immediately went to protect her from, “simply is too much”
The walk back is a tad awkward after that. Bentho remarks he’s never been so high up before and he does seem very dry from the heavy winds and cold air. 
Good thing it’s about time to show him the lower parts of the Kingdom anyway. 
“Halmar, I am escorting Benthomaar down through the mountain. Can you be in charge while I’m gone.”
“As you wish my queen”
Benthomaar looked the armored man up and down. “Halmaar? Are you of royal blood too?” he asked.
“What?” Halmar bluntly questioned aloud to the merlopean king before sputtering out in a bow, “I mean, Pardon?... Your majesty” 
“Benthomaar this is Halmar. My right hand advisor and head of our defensive force.”
“Oh. In my people, -Maar is given to that of royalty. ‘Halmaar’ means Brave Sea. ”
“Well I can assure you he’s very brave.” Vania beamed as Halmar recovered from his bow. “And will protect the city while I'm gone” she reminded him playfully, as she moved benthomaar out of the temple. 
________________________________________________________________
CHAPTER 2: The Dungeons
Going through the dungeons vania remarks on her father’s previous ruling over it. They share stories and struggles. 
Talks about her father and how the ninja came to help. Goes into the topic of her ruling struggles. 
“Now that I have helped bring King Vangelis, my father I mean, to justice, people expect me to fix everything. They come to me asking for plans to retain Shintaro's glory, or with pleas for more funds. The people put so much faith in my father and, although his actions were Terrible… it made the city so wonderful for everyone living here. I don’t think I’ll be able to make Shintaro prosper the way he did. I love my people but they expect so much of me all at once. I admit It is very difficult to keep track of it all.”
“That sounds rough, but at least your subjects care for you. The people of Merlopia don’t see me as their king...and they have every right to. I helped the surface dwellers and my actions led to Kalmaar’s death. In their eyes I am a traitor…. Many don’t follow my commands unless they are directed through Gripe. It’s understandable they won’t respect me… I was adopted after all...”
“Well I respect you. Why, from the past--” counts on her fingers with a tongue sticking out “-- three hours I’ve officially known you, I’d say you’re a wonderful ruler! I hereby royally dub you a great king! You can tell your people that!”
*Small air laugh recovering from his Sadness* “Thank you, Vania. I don’t know how much they’ll regard a compliment from the mouth of a ‘surface dweller’, though”  
*Smol vania /hj sad pout to one side*
“But I appreciate it, really!!” He corrected arms waving at his front, trying to recover from his previous, in his eyes, disrespectful remark (also in his eyes failing horribly at doing so. He needs to queen to like him. This isn’t going well and-)
“I know you do.” she beamed, “ Now Come on, I see the cart tracks we’re getting closer!!” she happily stated, almost skipping past the new King.  
Bentho looked onward at the long haired blond who was trying to walk and balance on the rim of the track, and smiled with relief that she is so easy going at him. He essentially disregarded her royal decree to her face and she brushed it off like nothing. Trimaar had always honored heavy respect towards other royals but it seems this Queen runs things very differently. Even the day had been tame. It felt more like some playdate than an official royal gathering,but with how stressful becoming King had been it was a pleasant change of pace. 
“Hey Bentho! We’re HEeeereee!” Vania waved excitedly as the other royal caught up to her standing near a steep ledge leading down to an opening with a large passageway. 
Have to go down a large mountainous trench first to reach the dungeons. Benthomaar prepares to scale down the cliff but Vania brings out her wings and tells bentho to hold on. She flies him down the cave--
(Flying is vaguely exciting, but also vaguely terrifying. He’s never really had to deal with the possibility of falling before. Buildings in Merlopia aren’t that tall and you literally can’t fall underwater, there’s always something supporting you.) 
The two meet up with the chancellor of the geckles first. He welcomes Queen Gania and her friend Genthomaar and he asks first for trial by mino, but Vania orders him off. Scoffing at her majesty’s boring overriding of their usual procedures he opts for a simple vote for bringing the new unfamiliar face to the munce queen. Bentho gets rocks thrown at him and the geckles cheer as they escort the two to where murtessa is. Vania giggles at him.
 Next up is the muntz. 
So she'd challenge him to a quick duel to see if he is a fitting ally. Naturally Benthomaar rocks with a spear, so he's good, but he'll be really confused at first and probably not want to fight her.
He doesn’t win, but Murtessa sees through his fighting that he has a good heart, and a brave one. She declares him an ally of the Munce. King Menthomaar. And then gives him a hearty slap on the back and invites them all to dinner. They politely decline (Vania, to preserve her stomach. Munce food is, ah, something else.) 
Murtessa thinks Bentho is a good kid and a good fighter. She thinks it's funny how polite he is, though. Gives him some royal advice that he’d be a little better off if he would carry himself like a king. “Confidence! Important in every Munce ruler!” 
Bentho finds her and Munce a bit...much, but they also kind of remind him of the Maaray back home so he also finds it kind of familiar. (Also he doesn’t know it, but shark Merlopians are kind of rough and tumble, too. Like Munce, but without tight knit families or a set kingdom.) 
________________________________________________________________
CHAPTER 3: Merlopia
Goes back to the temple to discuss whats next. 
“If we are going to be partners in this royal engagement, I think you should see My homeland. Merlopia”
Vania just laughs at his wording
“What did I say?” Genuine confused babi just trying to be overly courteous cause he feels like he must be a GOOD KING. ULTRA KING.
Brings her to the beach. He signals her to wait there and he dives into the water to ask nya for some help in bringing Vania down the depths. She knew the bare basics of what happened but seeing nya in such a state made her a tad saddened. 
“Nya. Can you help bring my friend to Merlopia?”
Nya nods all slow and goddess like. “You helped me defeat Wojira, correct? For that I’ll grant you this.”
“Thank you, nya”
“That’s NYA??” 
“Do I… know you.”
She just frowns at that question. She knew she and nya were not super close but to be forgotten like that. Ouch. “I guess not”
Nya makes a large air bubble and descends quickly down the depths. And like cool camera pans and junk and bentho is riding the wave nya is making outta the bubble and vania sticks her head outta the bubble for a sec to meet his gaze and feel the current go by. Fluff insues
“Don’t worry there is air in the palace”
Vania just loudly exclaims in relief cause honestly she was prepared to be living in a bubble forever. 
Nya just...disintegrates. Which is a bit strange to see, even for Vania who usually likes weird stuff. But she doesn’t linger on it long because ooooohhh Merlopia is so pretty! I mean Shintaro is pretty too but this is a whole different kind of pretty. It’s like the gardens of Shintaro, but that’s the whole city. It’s so colorful compared to the flawless Ivory City. 
They tour around a little bit, with Vania looking at everything in interest. She even likes the Royal Ripper Sharks (who are being treated a bit nicer now that Kalmaar is gone, and are sicced on people far less frequently than before.) Benthomaar gets a bit nervous when Gripe runs up to him with a bunch of kingly concerns and kind of tells him a lot of noncommittal responses. 
Since they declined dinner with the Munce, Vania’s stomach starts rumbling, and she embarrassedly admits that she was pretty hungry. 
Benthomaar invites her to dinner in Merlopia. 
They eat  while discussing trade stuff and diplomacy? (And also their day and the G&M and such.) 
Also a fun chance to make up some Merlopian culture and food, and for him to share it with her. Unsurprisingly, it’s a lot of fish. But that’s honestly great because they don’t have a lot of that in Shintaro. There are a few streams a hike away that she's had every now and again, but for the most part fish isn’t something eaten often in Shintaro. 
Benthomaar is pretty happy with this set-up because he had been eating dinner all by himself which was very lonely and wistful.  It's much nicer with her company, and he needs her to know that, and really wants her to stay around and to like him so that they can do this again. So his super-manners-having-to-prove-himself-worthy-of-friendship kick in again and he starts getting super formal and passing her stuff and offering dishes a little overzealously and such and she's like "this again what the huh?"
“My lord, you're...doing it again.” 
“Sorry, I’ll do better.” 
“Better? You’re doing just fine. Really. The meal is great, the presentation is beautiful, and you’re being so kind. I just...don’t need this much attention at once, that’s all.” 
No I’m not it’s not good enough. I’m not good enough. * frowns silently * *internal screaming * 
They decide to meet again later to discuss trade and commerce deals and both bow goodbye after dinner, but soon as she leaves the dining room and gets lost roaming the temple (this palace is constructed like the caves how do they find anything) eventually ends back up at the dining room, where benthomaar is cleaning up the table and stacking the used dishes and they both realize that she can't get back up on her own. They share a laugh and Bentho promises to escort her back up.
Vania wonders why he is cleaning and not the palace servents so she decides to help him clean up, since it seems his people weren’t going to. 
The end
(Also Nya is busy being a goddess somewhere else, so they’ll have to get her transportation back at a later date. With any luck there’s an air-breather-friendly manta saddle that they can use for her.)
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They are too precious for this world someone please do more of thisssss
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tossawary · 3 years
Text
Chapter 25: “Home Sweet Home” of “pride is not the word I’m looking for” quotes and commentary. Not a full list of favorite quotes or full commentary. 
-
 Anyway, Shang Qinghua makes himself  so fucking sincerely annoying that the Huan Hua Palace Sect cultivators can’t figure out how to politely tell him to fuck off fast enough. Shang Qinghua makes outlandish assumptions about how many thieves there are (at least a dozen, he’s sure, probably twice that) and what methods they might be using (special invisibility talismans, he suspects); Shang Qinghua repeatedly apologizes for being too busy with important things for Cultivator O.B.B. at the last Immortal Alliance Conference, then tries to commiserate with the man about having to get important things done without getting any respect for it; Shang Qinghua also anxiously wonders if they should all go to Zhao Hua Temple Sect to report what happened here, since there’s a troublesome demon and also some sneaky rogue cultivator thieves on the loose out here! He gets turned down immediately, but assures everyone that he’ll at least let Yue Qingyuan know everything that happened here right away! 
 Liu Qingge pretty much just stands there scowling silently the entire time - he’s no Shen Qingqiu for sheer menacing  "I can and I will ruin your entire life"  glares, but he’s still pretty intimidating. He does a great job! No notes! 
 Shang Qinghua nearly pats himself on the back as he and Liu Qingge leave less than an hour after he arrives.  “Holy shit, I’m good,”  he thinks, a little giddy with the successful extraction.  “That’s a skill that good ol’ Liu-Shidi will never have!” 
 -
AN: Of course this has a high chance of backfiring. Is Shang Qinghua going to weave webs of lies anyway? Of course. 
Love the fact that Shang Qinghua can shamelessly act like a total pushover, while actually manipulating someone so that he gets the results he wanted. Some snobby sect leader walks into a negotiation room, prepared to use SQH as a doormat, and Shang Qinghua is probably internally like, “Bro, me and my jelly spine welcome you to hell.” 
 He gives them the rundown on what happened, but, to his complete lack of surprise, that doesn’t seem to satisfy interrogators like his little sister-in-law and his fellow transmigrator. They have so many questions! And Shang Qinghua doesn’t have enough answers for them! 
 No, he doesn’t know what Huan Hua Palace Sect knows or thinks they know. No, he doesn’t know how they knew about that place. No, he doesn’t know whether the monster was just a local opportunist preying on distracted cultivators or something more sinister. No, he’s not experimenting with the creepy special item or discussing it at length here. No, Luo Fanli and Peerless Cucumber are not allowed to poke at the creepy special item! 
 Why the fuck would he ever let them do that?! 
 All Shang Qinghua knows is that Luo Fanli and Peerless Cucumber should eat their vegetables and then go to bed! Because they all have a long journey back to the sect in the morning! And also that words cannot describe how painfully old he feels as soon as he says this. 
-
AN: I’ve been thinking about a Demon Trio fanfic in which Mobei-Jun finds himself in a similar position with Luo Binghe and Sha Hualing. 
Mobei-Jun and Shang Qinghua are, like, bare minimum twice the age of Luo Binghe and Shen Yuan. Like, yes, neither Mobei-Jun nor Shang Qinghua are old old by the standard of the PIDW world. Yes, MBJ and SQH are stunted as all get out. But the fact that they have bare minimum 2x the life experience as Bingqiu is, in my opinion, funny as hell and severely underused in fanfiction. 
Like, imagine Mobei-Jun unintentionally dadding new demon LBH in SVSSS. Mobei-Jun being like, “Don’t eat the meat from this monster. It makes you hallucinate.” Or being like, “These people aren’t politically important enough to be shown this kind of respect. Look down on them properly and go sleep, or no one will ever respect you again in demon politics.” 
MBJ looking at SVSSS LBH and SHL like, “Damn, who raised you?” 
Because, like, I love to joke about Mobei-Jun being an oblivious fool, but that’s in regards to human culture. Mobei-Jun operating on demonic culture + his level of arrogance in regards to how he’s handling SQH suggests that MBJ can be politically savvy among demons when he wants to be. Also, the mental picture of MBJ being like, “Eat your weird demon vegetables, there’s nothing wrong with them, you picky half-breed brat,” is extremely funny. 
I’ll probably turn this into a separate post. 
Shang Qinghua does  not  miss the man’s unconcealed  “oh, great, some of my favorite problem people are back, probably with bad news”  expression when they arrive. The man is not at all impressed to hear about the drugged-up Shadow Cave Wolf Spiders or the evil, murderous, madness-inducing plant they fought on their mission, but the Qian Cao Peak Lord is reluctantly, partially placated by the jar of three-eyed skeleton tears Shang Qinghua super thoughtfully brought back for his inspection. Mu Qingfang really likes his research projects! 
 Shang Qinghua lets himself feel kind of good about this gift - he’s the man who gets things and gets things done - and ignores the Weeper’s Eye whispering in his head,  “He has resigned himself to the untimely deaths of everyone he knows.” 
 (Wow. Oh, Shang Qinghua knows that feeling!) 
-
AN: Mu Qingfang doesn’t think that everyone around him is inevitably going to die, he’s just extremely aware of how dangerous the world is and how reckless cultivators can be. Also, for many years, he was fairly certain that Liu Qingge and Shen Qingqiu were headed for bad ends. 
This felt like a good place to insert some optimism back into the sect in general. Luo Fanli has been cured and is willingly going to visit her sister, Liu Qingge has got a hold on his self-destructive tendencies, Mu Qingfang thinks things are getting better, Shen Qingqiu’s health problems have been essentially fixed, Qijiu might actually work their shit out, Shen Yuan shares his real name with Shang Qinghua, and so on and so forth. 
It felt like a good contrast with and buildup towards Luo Binghe’s Skinner mistake (not everything is rosy yet, there are still growing problems), the secret basement, and the encounter with Bing-Ge. 
Only to flip that around and then bring some surprise Moshang into things! 
“I have now been informed that, after learning that you had returned and, at the very least, completing the duties that were intended to have him reflect on his actions, he has disappeared yet again,” Shen Qingqiu continues. “This second disappearance has set some of the other junior disciples into a renewed panic, which has concerned some of the senior disciples, which was, apparently, cause to alert me.”   
 “Ah,” Shang Qinghua says. 
-
AN: Shen Jiu should not be in charge of a bunch of children, but it is funny to imagine him going through the same “be a less shit person” adoption process as Shang Qinghua. Like, oh, it would be so easy for him to be cruel about this situation, but fuck you if he’s going to be outdone in the recovery and redemption process by Shang Qinghua of all people. 
Shang Qinghua: *grows into a kind of decent person* 
Shen Jiu: “Fuck you. That’s not allowed.” 
Shen Jiu: “...” 
Shen Jiu: “Well, if THAT FUCKER of all people can do it...” 
 Shang Qinghua doesn’t have to look long or far to find his nephew. He finds the young protagonist sitting despondently on the doorstep of his own Leisure House, sniffling into his sleeve. Peerless Cucumber of all people is sitting beside him and keeping him company. 
  “Focusing on other people’s lives is easier than looking at his own.” 
 “-think a drowning man first has to save himself… or else he’s only going to bring down the people he’s trying to save,” Peerless Cucumber is saying. 
 Binghe nods. 
AN: Going by, like, the everything of SVSSS, Shen Yuan really is the asshole going, “I’ll die before I look inwards to recognize and deal with my own emotions.” Also, going, “Yes, I’m a hypocrite who won’t take my own advice. And what about it?” What a repressed nerd. 
 Shang Qinghua clears his throat to get their attention. Both kids (well, teenager and young adult, but still...  kids)  look up and then stand up quickly. Luo Binghe takes a forgetful step forward, before he wobbles into an appropriate respectful bow instead. 
 “Shang-Shishu!” 
  “How dearly this boy is loved!”  the Weeper’s Eye declares, in its soft way inside Shang Qinghua’s head.  “More than life itself! More than death itself!” 
 “Ah, never mind all that,” Shang Qinghua says, and steps forward to wrap his nephew in a quick hug instead, keeping the creepy talking eye oriented away from his nephew. “You’re a little too late to talk to me about your mission before your shizun did.” 
 Binghe, who was just relaxing into the unexpected hug, freezes. 
 Shang Qinghua knowingly pats the poor young protagonist on the back.
  “Oh, shit” is right! 
AN: Uncle Shang really is adorable. Still kind of knocks me for a loop writing it, though, given that the SVSSS SQH and LBH relationship is... nothing like this whatsoever. Look upon the field of SQH and LBH content and see that it is relatively barren except for the stubborn motherfuckers with excellent taste in character exploration. 
-
  “Ahhh, well, I’ll be there too for this potential family reunion, bro,” Shang Qinghua assures him. “Maybe we can finally get to the bottom of where this ‘Shen Yuan’ name came from.” 
 Peerless Cucumber makes a strange expression. 
 “What?” 
 “...It’s my name.” 
 “What?” Shang Qinghua repeats. 
 “It’s my name,” Peerless Cucumber says again, quietly. “It’s my real name.” 
 “Oh.” 
  “Huh,” Shang Qinghua thinks, having been operating on the assumption that the System made the name up for its mysterious backstory. Well, that gives new dimensions to Peerless Cucumber’s criticism of the scum villain! 
 “You can use it,” Peerless Cucumber says, with an air of determined nonchalance. “Everyone else is doing it.” 
 “Ah, alright. Thanks.” 
AN: This is probably the part where I would have made Shang Qinghua reveal his original name in turn... IF HE HAD ONE. It drives me... kind of wild that we get the Airplane Extras and we STILL don’t get 1) Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky’s original name, and 2) MOBEI-JUN’s name. 
Which actually makes things a little more interesting here, in my opinion, even though not having those names gets a little frustrating in terms of fanfiction writing. With Mobei-Jun, you get to explore the fucked up possibilities of him not having a name outside of his identity as the future Northern King. With Shang Qinghua, you get to explore him being a squirrelly little fuck who refuses to let anyone into his life. 
So, because we don’t have Airplane’s name, we actually get this mildly interesting dynamic in which Shang Qinghua doesn’t even really think to reveal it to Shen Yuan. We don’t see this part, but Shen Yuan is actually a little miffed by this degree of secrecy, which is going to come up later. (Shen Yuan doesn’t like the fact that Shang Qinghua has as much power over him as he does.) 
I personally do not hold the headcanon that Airplane’s name was “Shang Qinghua”. It’s a little too on the nose for me. At that point, the only reaction to transmigrating into SQH kind of has to be, “Ah, well, I was asking for that!” Maybe Airplane projected his worst qualities onto Shang Qinghua, but I don’t think he went so far as to give the character his own name. 
Airplane’s main identity when he died appears to have been Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky, and we know that he wasn’t particularly close to his divorced parents and any step- or half-siblings. So, the only names that are really relevant post-transmigration are “Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky” and “Shang Qinghua”. By the time that SY gets here, he’s firmly entrenched in those identities, and his original name is completely irrelevant. I could honestly believe that Airplane just doesn’t think it matters anymore. 
 Shang Qinghua’s nephew, in the way of a true young protagonist or  fucking cannon fodder, got the bright fucking idea to slip away to speak with the concubine called Butterfly privately. 
 “I thought: what if she didn’t want to speak in front of that lecherous old man? What if she wanted to get away from him?” Binghe confesses. 
 “She was the demon,” Shang Qinghua guesses. 
 Binghe nods, voice breaking. “It was…  I was  really,  really stupid, Uncle.” 
 “Well, at least you know that,” Shang Qinghua sighs, and pats his sniffly nephew on the back again. 
 Oh, he can see why Shen Qingqiu was  pissed the fuck off now. Shang Qinghua kind of wants to start yelling! Or maybe just screaming, coherently or otherwise! 
 Except yelling isn’t going to help much right now. 
 Shang Qinghua listens as Luo Binghe recounts being captured by the demon and then waking up bound by Immortal Binding Cables - of being so terrified that he could barely breathe with it. His only hope was Ning Yingying and Ming Fan tattling on his disappearance and a senior disciple tracking him down on time. The skinner demon apparently nearly killed Binghe, crooning over his young and beautiful skin, except a flash of warm light intervened and dropped an unstable part of the ceiling in on them before they could hurt the captured protagonist. 
 “Fu-Shijie and Shizun arrived after that and k-killed it,” Binghe says. “Uncle, it was all  stupid luck!  Shizun said I should have been dead and that, between my efforts and the demon’s, he had no idea how I wasn't! And he was right! It was  so close! If the ceiling hadn’t fallen in like that-! Fu-Shijie suggested the ropes might be faulty and it could have been an unconscious use of spiritual energy, but I didn’t do anything! It wasn’t me!” 
 It  sounds like the System to Shang Qinghua, intervening again at a crucial moment to prevent the premature death of the protagonist. Just thinking about how close his nephew came to dying without him knowing is nearly enough to inspire a cold sweat! Shang Qinghua can’t speak about the System, so all he can really do is keep hugging! Keep holding on for dear life and saying soothing nothings to his crying nephew! 
AN: I wanted to include the Skinner mission, but I didn’t want to redo it onscreen because that’s been done in many fanfictions before and I felt that there was really no good reason for Shang Qinghua to be a part of it. The reason I wanted to include it is to show how the plot is off the track of the SVSSS (and PIDW) stories, with the changed LBH and the changed Original SQQ. 
LBH wants to be a hero, but he’s not there yet. 
 “...Don’t put yourself above him… or below him. Tell him what you want and listen to what he wants, and don’t be surprised if things don’t change all at once,” Shang Qinghua advises and, at Yue Qingyuan’s look, quickly raises his hands. “Ahhh, not my business, I know! Not my business! I just… I hope it works out! I hope you two get something better out of this mess! Aha, make the sect meetings a little less awkward and… things.” 
  “He has never known what better looks like. He will always be Yue Qi, the slave boy. No matter what he does.” 
 “...Thank you,” Yue Qingyuan says finally, thoughtfully. “I appreciate your… restraint in this matter… in recent months.” 
 Aha, yikes. 
-
AN: I know that some people wanted more stomping on Yue Qingyuan, but... like... this man is as or nearly as traumatized as Shen Qingqiu. His childhood fucking sucked. He broke his own soul trying to save Shen Jiu and failed. He made some shit decisions where Shen Qingqiu was concerned, but the logic and trauma he’s operating on are pretty obvious. He was trying. 
Part of the theme around the Qijiu and Moshang arcs has also been “an eye for an eye”. Like, are you guys really going to keep on not communicating with each other and then fucking up and then taking chunks out of each other? How many misunderstandings and upset over misunderstandings are you going to throw at each other? Where do you put your foot down and say, “I don’t want to live like this forever. We can be better than this. I want better than this.” 
Like, it can’t just be hurting each other back and forth (this applies to Qijiu more than Moshang, in which MBJ definitely carries the weight of this fuck-up). It can’t just be privately nursing hurt feelings forever. The options here are “fix it” or “live like this forever”. Fixing it won’t happen immediately, but the other option fucking sucks, so every little step helps. 
So Shang Qinghua here is just like, “Bro, I’m tired. My anger has cooled a lot. I just want all our lives to suck less. I hope things work out for you.” 
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theangrycomet-art · 3 years
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Early Mornings at the Atoms
Kaiden stirred, a drowsy fog over his mind as a familiar- but nevertheless strange- sensation drug him from his sleepy mindscape. Moist but not wet sandpaper rasped along the bottoms of his feet, wiggling in between his toes.
Blinking, his brain slowly registered that is was coming from not one, but three separate areas.
“ARrgh- BLT!” He griped, exasperated as he pushed her fuzzy heads away with a slobbery foot. “GROSS.”
BLT jumped back a step, unperturbed.  Bacon yipped, Lettuce nipped, and Tomato yawned at him as she stretched, tail rattling with excitement. Lettuce grabbed at his pajama pants, tugging them. 
She snorted as he pushed her away again. 
“Knock it off,” he groaned tiredly, burying his face in the pillow. Too soft, as usual, he felt as though he were drowning in the bed. Thinking of his quilt at home, he glared at the comforter covering most of him, slinking his foot back underneath. 
Maybe he could just stay in bed until the Weekend had come and gone. 
Patting the space beside him, BLT hopped beside him and launched off the bed. Running circles, her claws clacked loudly against the floor. Her barks echoing a bit against the bare walls, she slid to a stop beside his door. 
Nosing at the desk chair situated beneath the door handle, she whined, licking at the brass door knob. 
So much for that. 
“I’m coming.” Sitting up, he palmed at the night stand, waiting until his glasses clicked in his hand. With a yawn he shoved them on his shirt, not bothering with putting them on. 
Wasn’t like there was anything he wanted to see in this house beside BLT.
Kaiden tried to ignore the tightening in his chest as the sounds of the house made it to his ears. 
With a low whine, BLT exchanged a look between her heads before meandering over, nosing his leg. Smiling weakly, he scratched at the base of her neck.
His body at this point decided that it was in fact awake and that it needed to be tended to. He groaned again, cursing the near empty water bottle on his nightstand as he shuffled his way across the floor. 
BLT’s saliva made his feet sticky against the flooring, but he didn’t particularly mind. It was just some sealed stone, just like the rest of the house. It’s not like it would stain or anything. 
Moving aside the simple wooden chair, BLT wriggled in excitement, tail rattling as he unlocked the door. Once it was open, she still. Poking her heads out, Bacon looked left, Tomato looked right, and Lettuce checked the ceiling. When she’d decided the hallway was safe, she trotted happily to kitchen. 
“Good girl.” He said, trying to ignore the conversation from the opposite end of the hall as he closed his door, locking it behind him.
Feet padding silently, he forcibly steadied his breath as BLT waited for him at the kitchen entrance. The scent of caramel coffee drifted along the air, almost too sweet on his nose. She waited until he was nearly at the entrance before checking the room, same as she did the hallway. 
He managed a smile- 2 in one morning, that had to be a new record- and followed after her as she signaled the clear.
“Morning, Mr. Grim.” Relaxing, Kaiden waved at the skeleton reading the news as he sipped his coffee. How he did so without lips, much less a digestive system alluded him. However, he did not have to figure out the visual conundrum, seeing as the great Grim Reaper had his human disguise on. “Hair cut?”
“Very funny.” He said dryly, though his teeth flashed him a wry grin as Kaiden rummaged through the cabinets for some plain coffee. Flicking, the tied back dreads, he mused. “But I do think I like the new look.”
BLT sat next to him hopefully, eyes large and pleading as she begged for some eggs.
“I like it- it suits you better than the last one.” Poking his head from behind the wooden door, Kaiden held his chin theatrically, amused. “It’ll be a real hit with the ladies.”
“Oh hush and enjoy your nasty black coffee.” He chastised, smiling as he flipped out his newspaper. Watching him out of the corner of his eyes socket, his smile faltered, staring at the inky marks splattering up the young mans neck.
Frowning, he opened his mouth, before shutting it with a clack of teeth. 
No, better wait him out. Neither Kaiden or KD liked being interrogated. They’d come to him eventually. Still, if he was right, he should say something. 
“Any plans?”  He asked instead, assessing the boy as he punched the little plastic cup of grinds into the machine.
Tomato licked Grim’s knee as Lettuce and Bacon had yet to take their eyes off the plate.
“Just practicing evasive maneuvers, as usual.” Kaiden answered with a strained cheerfulness. The coffee dribbled out just as he slid his mug beneath. Glancing at the silver machine, he frowned at his reflection before adjusting his shirt higher up his neck. “You?”
“Dunno- it’s my day off. I might have me some fun.” 
“Good luck. Bon Bon has plans and I’m pretty sure your gonna be dragged into them if you aren’t fast enough.” His voice echoed as he brought the mug to his lips. “BLT, no begging. What do good doggies do?”
BLT whined and begrudgingly spun in a circle until she was facing Kaiden. Sitting with poise, she lifted her paw and tilted her heads cutely. 
“Good girls.” Smiling, he reached into his pocket and pulled out three bone-shaped biscuits, tossing one to each head.
“Blegh.”  Glancing at the hell hound, Grim sighed and split his remaining eggs into three. “Here, you mutt. I don’t have time for them if I’m gonna avoid that brat’s chores.”
Rattles filled the air as BLT’s tail helicoptered, taking the eggs with abandoned glee. Kaiden chuckled as he made his way out of the kitchen. 
“If you rinse that off I’ll wash it later,” he said as Grim straightened, popping his back. “You get out of here while you still can- I’ll stall Pinky and the Brain for as long as I can.”
“You’re such a good kid,” Grim watched Kaiden wave his hand in acknowledgement as he made his way down the hall. Once out of sight, the bringer of death kneeled down to the hell hound. 
“Keep an eye on him,” he ordered, scratching each set of ears before he took the plate back, rinsed it off, and made his escape.
Kaiden, for his part, surpressed a groan as he made his way down the narrowish pathway, all too familiar voices teetering down the hall. He ignored the pictures along as the bored holes into his back, gripping his mug tightly. Taking a sip, he let the drink burn his tongue as he made his way to the bathroom. 
Kaiden’s nose pinched at the scent of espresso and the ever current smell of ancient algae that came with Drake’s presence. It wasn’t his fault, and Kaiden knew he did his best to cover it and that most people couldn’t even detect it. But with his sense of smell, it was all Kaiden could do some days to stand near him. 
Making his way to the doorway, he raised an unimpressed brow at the spectacle. 
“For the last time if you don’t put your nasty tentacles away I’ll make you.” Bonnie snarled. 
She had been up for at least an hour, seeing as her hair was in a presentable state as opposed to a frizzy rats nest. Headband keeping the orange strands in place, he glanced at the mirror to find her- surprise surprise- glaring at Drake. 
For his part, the Nergling remained understandably unimpressed by such sentiments as he sipped his coffee. Politely ignoring her, he continued getting ready, his tentacles handling trivial things such as brushing his hair and pulling up his pants as he reserved his hands for more important things, such as his caffeine intake. 
“Mornin’, Drake.”
The one holding up his hoodie perked up at seeing Kaiden. Drake whipped his head around to see his brother yawn, fangs flashing.
“Kay! Well this is a surprise!” He said in delight, handing over his cup to a tentacles, empty-handed now that his pants had been taken care of. “Normally you try and sleep the day away.”
“You mean hide away in his room.” Bonnie frowned suspiciously at her eldest brother.  
“Good morning to you too Bonnie, see you’ve woken up on the wrong side of the bed per norm.” He resisted the urge to slip into his customer service mode as he remembered something helpful. Sipping his coffee, he leaned in the door way, nodding to Drake. “Hey, do you still have that theater brunch thing at the Diner this weekend?”
“Uh- yeah.” Eyebrows flying up, Drake tilted his head in confusion, expression as exaggerated as ever. His tentacles paused, turning towards Kaiden. “It’s in an hour, why?”
Yeah Kay, why? He wasn’t really sure if it was KD or Kaiden chastising him. Swirling the dregs of his coffee, he scrambled for an answer that would keep him busy.  
“If you want I can drop you off-” Kaiden internally cringed as Drake lit up. 
“REALLY?!” Kicking himself, he watched him buzz with happiness. Fluttering around the bathroom, retreating tentacles knocked Bonnie into the counter. 
He was worse than a puppy with the zoomies.
Why on earth is he so excited for a ride on his bike? Marveling, Kaiden blinked wide eyed as Drake made incomprehensible noises. It was too early for this- and yet he had signed himself right on for it. 
Bonnie, for her part seethed. Smacking the tentacles out of her face, she crossed her arms, scarlet irises glaring up at him in spite of the step stool. 
“Since when do you offer rides on your stupid bike?” She asked bluntly, crinkling her nose.
God why can’t she be stupid? KD griped as Kaiden scrambled for an excuse. Luckily, he didn’t have too.
“Shut up!” Drake hissed at her. With an irritated huff, he continued, poking her in the chest. “It’ not stupid it’s dashing!”
Kaiden raised an eyebrow as Drake turned back towards him, continuing as though the exchange didn’t happen. 
“I would LOVE a ride.” Flashing a sharp smile, he glanced at his hoodie. “I just need to find the proper jacket!” 
With a giggle, he... there wasn’t another word for it, scampered off to exchange his clothes, nearly tripping on BLT in his rush.
“HISS!”
“Sorry baby girl!”
Scratching his head, Kaiden watched Drake disappear into his room, clothes being flung out into the hall way.  
“He is way to excited for 5 minute drive.” he deadpanned, before glancing at Bonnie, who continued her death glare. 
In spite of the concrete slab of dread settling in the pits of his stomach at the oncoming drive, he smiled at her around his mug. 
“Now, now, Bon Bon, don’t be jealous.” Her glare intensified as she began to sputter in outrage. Waving to her dismissively as he walked down the hall, he smirked. “Green isn’t a flattering color on you after all.”
“I am NOT jealous.” Stomping her foot, her stool toppled out from under her with a clatter. Yelping as she hit the ground, she scowled at the doorway as both her brothers chorused.
“This is why you don’t stomp on your step stool.”
“Oh when I get my growth spurt.” she muttered, pushing herself back up. 
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floxalopex · 3 years
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I don't know if somebody already did this specifically. But yh the heck let's go.
WARNING 1: THIS IS NOT A POST FOR SENSITIVE PEOPLE AND/OR MINORS. (it contains gore and sexual themes and more).
And yes, SALT. Lots of salt.
WARNING 2: this has nothing to do with Christianity specifically. Atheism isn't hate towards your god(s) and/or its believers. Although there are many forms of atheism (some of which are so strong and violent they make me furious) think about mine as a general form of indifference. I hate the Church state, yes, but sorry I have that "at home" so please don't blame me. I don't like Abrahamic religions in general, but I've grown up with one.
I'm thankfully not a cult survivor, but I can understand some things.
WARNING 3: living in a very religious contest I have many beloved friends and relatives (starting with my mother) who believe in their god a lot. So if my words are too disrespectful tell me, I really don't want to hurt anybody.
Okay.
So.
I've seen many similarities between the cult Horde Prime put his clones in and your very average, very white, very western idea of Christianity.
1) Theophagy:
First of all, I really don't know much how this thing is lived in other Christian countries, but in mine they put a lot of emphasis on the Eucharist.
As far as I've seen I think it's pretty obvious how much in ancient cultures there's a very carnal and very grounded idea of the spirit. That can result in believing the soul to be the "psyche", so literally "the breath of life", the coordination of your sinapsis togheter (to me a very poetic definition of how our whole being ourselves is just us being our central nervous system) or it can lead to you eating the ashes of your granpa so you get his good qualities (something some cultures still do today). They said that the head of Orpheus was buried in the island of Lesbo and that's why its land was filled with amazing poets like Sappho. There's this very, sorry, brutal idea of the embodyment of the soul, the talents of a person, that even a piece of corpse is considered a magic thingy.
This is no different in the very old, very ancient, very rural Christian religion (at least in the most common version of it, we have many flavours of one truth apperentely).
When I was in High School we studied a lot Bacchus and the Baccanalia, because there are several commedies about it. My teacher, being very religious, was almost ashamed to admit that a lot of acts of those festivities (let's say that the most normal thing was for women to give their milk to animal cubs) were actually not very dissimilar in their rawness to certain habits of the religion.
So, what about Horde Prime? (me *yh, what about it, stupid ADHD?*). I have seen a post in the past explaining that yes, even though spacebats have the dentition of a frugivore bat and not haematophagus bat, the scene of Prime recharging in his throne with all those disgusting cables filled with green liquid referred as "the life force" of his clones...well, it's surely something.
Looks like a sort of sci-fi vampire thing. Which is very cool and I love this headcanon. So again I kept thinking...what is THAT amniotic fluid? I am a student, so correct me if I say something wrong.
Amniotic fluid is a combination of water 99%, proteins, glucids, fats and some salts (...it's even effective for electric conduction...the heck is that pool).
The most similar body fluid is plasma, so blood less cells. Even the serum, so plasma less proteins, is very similar.
Now, stated that Prime is a manipulative jerk, stated that I don't know much about aliens' physiology, stated that that fluid can come from blood potentially, in Church they say this:
*and Jesus said: "This is my body/blood which I offer in sacrifice for you"*
Apart from it being very creepy, there's this idea in the whole religion-thingy: if you are human you are a selfish monster, so monstrous you made our Lord and Savior die for your sins for how messed up you were.
So basically you don't become a sinner, you are concived as one. Humanity is sin itself, it can never lead to something good.
So are the clones. That's why Prime, in his benevolence, feeds them with himself. To make them pure, to protect them from the outside world. To make them remember who their strenght comes from.
If you don't want to read all of this just go for the Futurama soda episode, it's basically the same thing. Bleah.
2) Corpse feticism and more.
Again, don't know you guys, but here we are filled with mummies. I went in a place in Palermo and ...my gosh why did I do that.
We have everything here, hands, heads, feet, teeth so many of them, dead babies, dead virgins, dead popes, dead elders, all of them for half the prize, but only if you call today.
We are. Filled. With these atrocities. At least we don't touch them anymore.
Sometimes I wonder if, apart from the "hygene", people in Middle Ages used to die at the honorable age of 13 also because they kissed those... thingies there.
So, can we please talk about Horde Prime collection of "previous selves"?
This man has a whole room filled with corpses of himself. In the Vatican you can find corpses of dead popes as well, preserved and even dressed in a very good way. In Italy in general we have these, I remember a whole room in a town near my city filled with skeletons of "saints". Personally I find it very disturbing because you are basically not allowing that body to rest and serve its last biological purpose, especially if you consider that most of these "saints" were mentally impared young kids who were killed brutally and died as "martyrs". In ancient Greece the WORST thing you could do to a corpse was to leave it unburied, without dignity.
It's getting darker now.
I like both headcanons for Prime, that of a spoiled (maybe even sexist) royal of a lost culture who wanted to conquer the universe and that of him being a sort of ancient evil spirit, but I personally like to stick with the latter.
Imagine the old bodies of the clones Prime used for himself. Pushed to their limits. Clones dying young is horrific as well, but like these people were forced to go on. Not to die. Not to age as much as possible. And now that they are dead they can't even rest. They are a show off for anyone to see. Their brains preserved and their literal dead flesh still tormented for reading.
One may ask me, then what about corpses in formalin for medical use? Well, one thing is a donor or a dead fetus or a corpse nobody claims. That's the story of the skeleton in my university, a young male who didn't eat much. A very lonely man. Well at least now he is well loved and appreciated, ah if only he knew that.
The point is, we respect them. We are grateful for the informations they give us. Gosh, I know I'm creepy, but I even cuddled one bone once. We know they probably suffered. Like, search for HeLa cells. That lady has my highest respect.
But Prime? Those are. Vessels. Just that.
Anyways, apart for the "respect the deads thing" I found Hordak's behaviour in that room that of high distress. Like, ehm, any normal person? Search for "Convento Dei Cappuccini", that place I was talking about in Palermo. The fact that I heard kids cry and "MEMENTO MORI" everywhere.
Everyone and everything is afraid of death, I just accepted that fear because it's normal. That doesn't mean I want to be reminded of it every week, especially if I'm a 7 yo kid.
Honorable mentions: that horrible art collection.
3) Double standards
When I went to catechism my teacher used a very feather hand on males and an iron fist on us ladies. We weren't allowed to wear trousers, to play football, to raise our voice. We were forced to be very clean, to sit with our legs as closed as possible. I heard it was worse before, at least we could play volleyball and weren't forced to knit.
We were however "encouraged" to sing and bake stupid cakes for Sundays. Mind you, I'm very feminine, but one thing is liking ribbons one thing is being a slave.
The boys...well, they could literally do anything. They broke things, used petards, beat each other. They were NEVER reproached, the teachers would say "oh, they are just boys". Like once I was so engrossed. I remember I had to sit behind a guy with his butt almost uncovered (because the lower you put the helm of your trousers the cooler you were) while I had to stay still with my head high, chest out, belly in and legs closed for 2h. The problem was: I almost pitied him. I was like "poor thing he doesn't know how to behave properly". That's so crazy, I was piting a free soul while I had my hands handcuffed because I truly believed the bullshit they put into my mind.
Now, imagine how did Horde Prime's clones feel about Catra and Glimmer.
They can dress as they please. Eat non amniotic fluid. Catra can even go wherever she wants.
To me, they didn't feel envious. As they should! That's how far an indoctrination can go.
Take Yudi interaction with Catra, he believes everything he is saying.
But I think deep down he knows, they all know, the truth, juding by his bitter reaction after being possesed. He knows he is the slave here, not the free man. But he wants to believe the other way round.
I think that yes, of course Prime kept Glimmer and Catra (and Hordak) because he needed them to conquer Etheria. But that is also a good way to show to the poor clones of how lost people far away from Prime's light can be. Slaves of their bodly needs and slaves of their individuality.
4) Sexual abuse
Do I need to explain this? Plus all those sick touches Prime gives not only to Hordak, but to Glimmer, Catra and Adora as well?
I don't know much about other countries, again, but here the Church is a real cancer. If a priest gets accoused of raping children he just gets put into another Church far away, and generally he keeps being a pedo even there and the game goes on.
I wouldn't exately say that Prime is a pedophile but clones are pretty innocent and neotenic to me so...idk.
Of course, Prime is his own state and his own rules, so yh. Raping all day. That's why I don't like to ship him with anything rather than a 100 m fall. Not even with his clones, sorry I know its kinky maybe but he is a monster.
Also, the way the clones feel like...honored to be raped. That's so sad. Maybe he convinced them this is the only right way they could experience sex and intimacy. I really don't know.
One thing I'm sure of is that Christian religion likes to often put shame on some "impure" acts. That's the name. The most impure of all is masturbation. If you are a male ...mmm well it's okay dear, it's not your fault you are male and so a sex starved animal. But if you are a girl? Ihhh oh dare you bitch.
Mind you, I fall in the ace spectrum but I did too have puberty and needs, and these thoughts in my head made me only conflicted.
Last thing. More of an asking. And more irriverent, so please stay away if you don't want to read.
So basically I understood I was atheist at 5 yo, just because I read two different versions of the birth of the Universe, one in my science book and one in my Bible (MY Bible, I still have it, was a gift of my aunt) and preferred the science version. I still felt conflicted, like once during a religion lesson at School (well...I don't blame Mussolini much in this case, I mean the Vatican wasn't still recognizing country indipendence and we needed a compromise) the teacher told me to stop drawing dinosaurs with Adam and Eve because they never existed. I mean...yes that's anachronistic but still I felt very sad, dinosaurs were cooler than that story. I remember I even made an experiment "if I say I don't believe in god will I get thunderstruck?". It didn't happen so I was like "oh cool, science wins". But then CATECHISM ecc ecc. The fun fact is that they think atheists are those who don't study religion, while I was the most zelous of the class.
So.
I just wonder...my baby boy Hordak is a man of science, what were his thoughts after his separation from Prime. I mean of course he still believed, but also not as much after some time. Entrapta is a support system for him of course, but he accepts her affection quite easily on canon. Which is amazing, still... maybe he was already doubting his devotion?
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popculturebuffet · 4 years
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Amphibia Reviewcaps:  Scavenger Hunt/ The Plantars Check In
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KEITH DAVID IS HERE! KEITH DAVID IS HERE AND NOT IN SHADOWY STINGER BITS BUT FULL CHARACTER! And okay other stuff happened I guess. Anne deals with her insecurity over her girlfriend being way more smart and acomplished than her, then the Plantars meet King Keith David, followed by Sprig reinacting the plot of Home Alone 2 mixed with a bit of Blank Check. You know that forgetable disney movie about the white dumbass who uses his computer skillz to get rich and has to deal with the mob.. I assume. I really have no idea exactly what blank check was about and neither do you. KEITH DAVID, under the cut. 
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Scavenger Hunt
And with Marcy’s big intro out of the way we’re back to simplier problem of the week episodes, though this one does lead into the next which does have some solid plot progression, and the new setting and fresh injection of Marcy mean they do feel a bit newer after the road episodes. Like a good road trip after all that time you finally get to see the sights, enjoy the place and just relax. And also eat because your usally hungry when you first arrive, which is what the plantars and new addition Marcy are doing to start.  Marcy’s treating, because she’s friends iwth the king and as we learn next episode the king gives his friends acess to the royal treasury because he’s a seemingly nice dude. Again, more on that in a minute. While Hop Pop marvels at Marcy’s smarts and analytics, a messag efrom the king arrives.. and yes I too have “A MESSAGE FROM THE KING A MESSAGE FROM THE KING’ from hamilton in my head right now. 
Turns out the King likes to send Puzzle grams, basically sending marcy on scavenger hunts to tell her something because their both massive dorks. And it is taking ALL my willpower not to jump right ot the keith david of things, but for the sake of profesionalism I will stay here. So our party splits up: Marcy, Anne and Sprig go off to solve the puzzle and see the town while Hop Pop ends up staying because you can get free shit the more you eat, which yeah is a nice thing and all but is usually not worth what you spend. But it’s not his dime so fair enough. The king’s toilet’s are probably gold with gems and the softest seats in the land. I mean if I were king of the world I”d want the best toilet in the world. I’d also install free health care and other good stuff, but I’d expect a really nice crapper as one of the perks of the job. 
Anyway the hop pop plot really is just him eating a lot to get free stuff and showing up at the end , so i’ll focus ont he main plot which is pretty standard: Anne is insecure about how smart Marcy is, and TRIES to out marcy her in solving the puzzle, while befrending various people: Resucing a girl’s cat/caterpillar from a tree, befreinding an old lady and doing her nails, and then bonding with the gnatcho cart lady.. which made me want nachos bad, who enocourage a dispondent anne to be herself and try anyway. But yeah Marcy suceeds instead, Anne gets depressed, then Anne tries TOO Hard on the last clue when Marcy is stuck and ends up in the sewer with the alligators.. which unlike real life sewer gators, were put there on purpose by marcy to eat garbage when she redid the sewer system.. because of course she did she’s the best. It’s a really nice gag. They escape the gator when the various people Anne helped form a chain, along with an exasperated hop pop and Polly.  Then sprig blabs about Anne’s insecurity, and Marcy comforts her, pointing out that while she’s a genius and what not.. she dosen’t.. get people. Anne does, which.. I found a nice twist. The first thing she did,g etting the cat, made me think “oh their going to go with her physical skills”.. but instead in a nice twist that made me like this episode more, it’s her heart. And it’s not something they pulled out of thin air: While it hasn’t really come into play a lot this season, last season was all about Anne slowly connecting with the town and being suprisingly good with people.. she can be blunt, dosen’t think things through.. but she does have empathy, problem solving and a desire to genuinely help people who need it. It’s a hard trait to learn and it’s one she does with natural ease. It’s a nice bit of showing her character and what she’s good at. Also the message turns out to be “bring the plantars” which.. yeah the second the first clue was bring, even without next episodes description, I could’ve guessed. And they close the episode as all episodes should close.. feeding nachos to a  sewer gator. 
Final Thoughts I:  As you could tell by how easily I sped through it, the episode was...eh. It’s not bad, but no episode of the series has been truly terrible. It honestly, and this kind of complaint is overused, feels like filler. And granted I rarely watch anime, I know cartoons work different.. but this episode feels like it’s just there to provide more Marcy before we focus primarily on the Plantars again, and before the plot turns them against her.  Which isn’t a bad thing mind and she’s great as she was last week.  The problem is Anne. Her feeling down about herself, while a normal human emotion.. just dosen’t jibe with her normal brand of overconfidence. It’s not entirely out of the blue for her not ot feel as smart as marcy, it’s just set up poorly. We could’ve easily used a flashback or something to the human world to help make it feel like a more longstanding issue, than one that just crops up because Polly said a thing after a full episode of her being totally fine with Marcy being way smarter than her. Even the intro has her entirely fine with it. It would’ve flowed better if she played off she was fine, but secretly was trying to one up her and did feel dumber versus that being spelled out so early, as it woudl’ve fit more with the character. So yeah this one’s more just forgetable, a stop gap between two plot important episodes. And I don’t mind catching our breath after the last episode given it was a huge one what with introducing a new major character and a new setting and having a lot of action set pieces, I just know the show can do that BETTER, as seen with HandY Anne following up , if a year after, from the emotionally draining season 1 finale, they just.. didn’t this time and it just flopped a bit, but still had enough nice moments and good bits to make it still enjoyable. 
That’s something I do have to give the show credit on as I have been hard on it, as i’ve said reviwing more forgetable episodes is hard: Most shows don’t make it out of season 1 without at least one terrible episode. OK KO had “Let’s Not Be Skeletons”, Ducktales had “The Beagle Birthday Massacre” (And i’m a huge fan of Lena as a character, just to be clear, her debut episode was terrible for other reasons) , Steven Universe had Arcade Mania,  Adventure Time had “Freak City” and Legend of Korra had “The Spirit of Compettiton”.. and really the whole love triangle plot but that’s a story for another day.. all of these are really..e xcept arcade mania that one’s just dull and pointless. But i’m not: My point is it’s still a really good sign the show hasn’t really flopped over in the span of two seasons, with even the annoying quarallers pass still having some really good stuff to it. I may be critical, because as a critic that’s my job no one pays me for, but I do love this show and want to make it clear it’s still excellent. I’d rather watch this episode again than any episode of “Hoops”.. seriously I have no interest in that show and I question why Jake Johnston thought signing on for it was a good idea. Then again, Keith David was in this
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And this
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And BOTH of these
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So I can’t blame Jake for wanting an easy paycheck when Screen Legend Keith David has done far worse for one. Speaking of Keith David....
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The Plantars Check In 
IT’S TIME. 
We’ve had a sample of keith david with the omnoius end from last week but now we get the full package. And i’ve made no secret how much I absolutley love Keith David or how excited I was to see him joint he cast. The main is a voice acting and regular acting legend. Sure he usually does bit parts, but he does the hell out of them. 
The man also has a longer history in disney than I ever realized. While I knew he played Goliath and Dr. Facilier, I had no idea just how much minor voice work he’s done for disney over the decades, doing a LOT of minor roles during the 90′s and even vocing Mufasa in “House of Mouse”, subbing for James Earl Jones which.. yeah if anyone’s the next Jamers Earl Jones, it’s Keith. He’s the king of making a meal out of side rolls and on the ocasions he gets a big one he makes a damn buffet of it, as seen with Gargoyles and Community. 
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So yeah, I love the guy and was excited for his first full apperance and pleasantly suprised.  We open at what looks like a comibation of the temple of time and Hyrule Castle for Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time and I swear that’s what their going for with the background music here.  Anyways after Lady Oliva tries to keep things formal, and reveals King Andrias has been king for over a thousand years, which makes things even more interesting, he .. happily hops off the throne, gives the Plantars a friendly greeting and then a bear hug. I was expecting him to be stern yet nice, for now, but this is a nice change of pace and i’ts shown by the way Olvia acts towards this behavior, wishing he’d be proper because “Most unorthodox” and all that monocle popping nonsense, that this is normal for him. So it’s not ENTIRELY an act for their benefit. He is apparently nice to his immediate subjects, vistors and especially Marcy. It’s also lovely to see Keith David play such a diffrent character from his usual villian, stoic badass or hilarious grandpa rolls, instead playing a cheerful and boisterous king. He honestly reminds me a lot fo River from star vs the forces of evil. Which by the way I also love Alan Tuduk and regret not bringing him up in either review river’s been in so far. 
Anyway, we then get some more plot stuff as he meets anne, and we get a nice bit of him doing the “thumb of approval” and marveling at anne’s awkawrd fistbump in response. But it’s down to buisness, he wants to send his loyal knight and new friend he just met home, but needs the box. While anne reveals she don’t got it, with Hop Pop acting nervous as he realizes “oh shit, maybe lying to my surrogate grandaughter about something this important when we’re ont he way to a place where people will naturally want ot see the thing, and STILL not telling her after meeting Marcy and knowing sh’ed want to know about it too has started to backfire!” And yeah while he has sympathetic motives, and clearly knows SOMETHING about the box, and I supsect King Keith David does too but give me a second, his not telling Anne what he did at any time is only going to make it harder to trust him later, especially if Marcy ends up betraying them. He also notices something I actually failed to notice , as did Anne: The colorful stones on the calamity box are drained of color. So the King’s going to have to reserach this for a bit, with Marcy helping obviously and since Anne’s usless at research, the king instead happily treats the plantars to a vacation on him while they sort thigns out: A stay at the nicest hotel in the city, on his dime, and acess to his royal credit card, which given he’s king of everything means he just gave them the unlimited funds code. 
Before we move on, my thoughts on the king: He’s hard to read. I do think he’s genuinely that nice a person.. but he CLEARLY has a dark side, having subjugated the toads and the frogs, which had to have happened under him as he’s first in his line and both remember the status quo as only such. Hop Pop dosen’t even question the way things are or one god king ruling over all for over a thousand years. The question is did he do so because he didn’t know better, because he thought he had to, or because 
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I do n’t know what that’s from but expect me to be using it a LOT from now on. My point is it’s hard to tell what his game is here. He could be a cruel asshole masquerading as a fun loving king on the service to sugarcoat his shadier actions.. or he could be a well intentioned extermist, doing awful things for what he sees as the greater good and possibly having lost the plot, or his empathy over thousands of years. Or he genunley could have no idea what he’s planning is bad and see no harm in it due to a different set of morals, again due to being immortal. There’s a LOT of intresting directions they can go with this character and i’m curious to see just what sort of vilian, or possibly good guy all along though I doubt it, he will be and given both grime, more recently i’ll admit but still, and sasha have been complex villians instead of one dimensional assholes, the show will no doubt give us something spectacular. HOpefully i’m not tempting fate but if I am, screw it, i’m rolling those dice. This is going to be godo and I can’t wait.  It’ll also be intresting to see if he genuinely values marcy or is putting on the good king act and puzzles and all that to manipulate her. After all we’ve seen with Sasha that she’s easily manipulated, as far as we can tell, and sees this all as a game.. it’d be easy enough to lead her along by playing int othe genre and her desires to get her to play his game the way he needs her to. Though it’s also a question of if Marcy will see it or back the wrong side... though she MIGHT. while she isn’t great with people, she does know games and half the time a benevolent ally will turn out to be a dick in sheeps clothing. Though i’m hoping that isn’t the case for Marcy. But we’ll see..
Anyways with the first third or so of the episode down, the Plantars Check in, TITLE DROP, and Polly, Anne and Hop Pop all put on comfy robes and relax, while Sprig being sprig wants to go exploring though hop pop refuses to leave him wiht the card because of course he does. And honestly having done a few road trips myself.. yeah usually when you get back to the hotel first you want to just relax and crash, maybe go out for dinner or something with your friends, which they already did ahead of time, and recharge before doing allt he fun vacation stuff. Though I also relate to sprig as I too have been in hotels with arcades and pools from time to time as a kid and a teen and wanted to go do the fun stuff while everyone’s tired. Thankfully I also liked to read or play my various game consoles, from the game boy advance up to the switch on my most recent vacations,so I understand his restlessness.  The rest of the episode goes about how you’d expect, with Sprig taking the card once hteir asleep and adventuring around and getting into various hilarious one off gags via montage, before loosing the card and fighting over it with a Bellhop Named Belle, played byt he always wonderful and always talented Krstien Schal.. about two episodes late for the gravity falls homage but never too late to do some voice acting. Sprig gets the card thanks to futurama caffine bullet time, saves paige and then saves her from firing by talking like a rich kid asshole to save paiges job before collapsing and being woken by everyone else wanting to go do fun shit. 
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Final Thoughts 2: This one was better. While again I sped through the recap section this time.. it was funny> While the plot was a simple: kid sneaks out and does something he’s not supposed to yet and gets into trouble and ironic ending and all that, it’s funny enough to be enjoyable, Kristin is game as always, and the gag of Sprig using the card to wave off the snooty man at the counter is great. While most of the meat of hte episode is with the king at the start, the rst of it is still an enjoyable come down episode after the plot heavy first third of this one and marcy at the gates and does the job way better thant he previous episode. While it doen’t have a lot of tie to character or what not, it dosen’t WASTE any either. I didn’t realize till this episode that while sprig certainly hasn’t been unterutlized, he really hasn’t had his own episode this season, sharing Quaraller’s Pass with poly and only having subplots in “A Caravan Named Desire” and “Marcy at the Gates”. Here he gets a plot to himself and while it does nothing for his overal character, it’s entertaining enough, with some great gags like the caffine bullet time, the aformentioned rich people gag and the hair bit being the best “Now to put on my hat!”. It just lets the character loose to have a fun side story. See I can dog on an episode for WASTING a good opprotunity, even if I understand the stress of production and what not.. but I won’t dog one for just having fun and letting a character have the limelight if it’s still entertaining which this was. The problem with say “Scavenger Hunt”, “The Ballad of Hopidiah Plantar”, “A Caravan Named Desire” and “The Ballad of Hopidiah Plantar” is that while their not BAD episodes, they had far more potential. This one knows it’s basically home alone 2 meets blank check, but actually entertaining, and justh as fun with it. Is it hte best episode ever? Probably not. But was it fun and a nice change of pace, as well as relatable to me and thus giving me a bit of the warm fuzzies, especially in this hellscape of our lord 2020? Absolutley.  That does it for this week. if you liked this review i’ve reveiwed the rest of the season so far , just check the Disney tab on my blog, along with many other shows, and i’ll be covering the show weekly for the rest of the season, along with Ducktales when it comes back next month, so follow if you want more of that and random reblogs and such. You can also shoot me an ask if you have any things you want my opinon on, any episodes you want to request or you can direct message me to outright comission an episode of any aimated show for me to review for 5 bucks a review. Either way, till we meet again, bwahahahahaha. 
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everamazingfe · 3 years
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You Can Ride On My Rocket 69 - Chapter Ten
Fic Summary: Jeremy has recently awoken in this strange world, 210 ten years after he was put to sleep, and is now the lone survivor from his vault. Trevor's a radio host from Diamond City who's barely left the station, lonely in his own right and isolated from the rest of the Wastes. When they meet, Trevor finally gets a chance to see the rest of the wasteland like he's always wanted, though Jeremy becomes more of his bodyguard than Trevor does his companion. They meet various people along the way, some being friends like the odd throuple they meet in one of the neighboring city, or foe like a certain Diamond City guard. Both are wary about bringing up their pasts, but the wasteland has a strange way of bringing people together.
Chapter Summary:  Jeremy and Trevor learn the truth about Vault 111, and Trevor takes a little vacation to Good Neighbor and makes some strange bedfellows. This chapter's song is "Maybe" by The Ink Spots.
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Words in this chapter: 4296 Pairings: Jeremy/Trevor, Michael/Gavin/Lindsay, Jeremy/OC Warnings for this chapter: Mentions of death, minor character injury, alcohol use
Notes: There's a link to the first chapter of this fic as the source of this post! Click it to go read this fic over on A O 3, or you can search up the title or ‘everamazingfe’ on the site! This is also my longest chapter ever, and there’s some art to go along with it, but that’s in a separate post.
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The vault had clearly remained untouched since the pair had last been there, the dust that coated everything undisturbed aside from handprints on the cryopod and dust wiped from the terminal's keyboard. Trevor was back at that terminal, typing and clicking away as if it would get him any closer to accessing the menus hidden behind the password screen. Jeremy stood at the pod, his forehead and hand pressed on the glass. 
A groan of frustration came from the computer, followed by a soft thud as the side of the monitor was hit, and Jeremy turned his head. "No good?"
"Nope. No good," Trevor muttered, shaking his head and huffing in frustration. "I'm gonna try and find another terminal, maybe one of the others won't be so broken. Just... Hang out here." He let out another huff as he picked up his bat, leaving the room to explore the vault more. There were radroaches everywhere, but with the mods Jeremy had made to the swatter in his hands, it killed them in one swift hit. He didn't remember there being so many the last time they were there, but maybe they were just getting bold. 
Trevor figured his best bet would be the overseer's office, maybe the computer there would have some sort of master control system. He didn't know. Computers weren't really his thing, but he was trying his best to be helpful. He made his way down the hall towards where he figured the overseer's office, but before he reached it, he found another room full of those same pods. That terminal was unharmed, and though he wasn't sure he wanted to know what it held, he looked anyway. 
What it held was rather appalling. Whatever malfunction had caused Jeremy's pod to open had shown mercy on him, because he was the only one to make it out of there alive. The cryogenic array and life support systems had long gone offline, and everyone left in the pods had thawed and begun to rot. It was easy to figure out that something similar had happened in the room that held Jeremy's husband's pod, and in every other room in the vault. The realization that he was standing in a room full of corpses, already entombed with their family and friends, made him stagger back, bile rising in his throat. He'd suspected it, but the confirmation was something he wasn't ready for. 
The overseer's terminal didn't bring Trevor much better news either. The all-clear that was supposed to come from Vault-Tec never did. The resulting incident, as staff of the vault rioted and overthrew the overseer, was one of chaos and horror. The skeletons littered about the vault had made that clear, but somehow those were easier to stomach. They didn't still look like people, and from the sound of the memos he found, they weren't meant to make it out of the vault alive either. 
Trevor let out a long sigh, scrubbing his hands over his face as he tried to process what he'd learned. It was all so much. Vault-Tec was pure evil, that much was certain, and he was glad he never had had to deal with them. The Institute was bad enough as it was. He slid down the desk until he was sitting on the floor, looking over at the skeleton of the overseer nearby. "Were any of these people ever supposed to leave? Were you?" 
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Jeremy hadn't budged from the pod since Trevor had left. His eyes were still fixed on it, on his husband inside. The harsh reality of the situation was all around him, but he refused to accept it without concrete proof. The man couldn't be dead. He had fought for years in The Great War, only to die a week after getting home? It just seemed too cruel, Jeremy couldn't accept that as the truth. But he knew that the man inside didn't deserve a life out in the wastes, either. Maybe he was better off in the pod. 
"I wish I was still in mine," he whispered, examining the lines of the other man's face. "I wish I could remember you." He put his palm flat on the glass, his fingers curling against it. "I remember us. I remember... Our life. But not you."
Something about coming out of cryofreeze must have fucked his brain up, maybe he'd gone without the life support functions for just a little too long after thawing, before his pod had opened. Or maybe his mind was protecting him from something bad. Jeremy didn't know. But luckily, his eyes still worked fine. At least he could still see him clearly. He inspected him closely, committing his face to memory and filling in the gaps where decay had caused the skin to fade away. The man inside the pod still looked as handsome as he did in all those photos from before the war, in Jeremy's mind. But what was underneath wasn't muscle, or bone. 
Jeremy pressed his nose right up against the glass, almost like he was trying to push through it to see better, his eyebrows furrowed together in confusion. 
"What the hell?" He squinted and looked even closer, and all at once his breath was ripped from his chest. 
When he got it back, all he could do was scream. 
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"Trevor!" 
The pained cry echoed off the walls of the vault, and Trevor's head snapped to attention. It was Jeremy. For a moment, he was excited, thinking that maybe he'd finally gotten the manual release switch to work, but as the other man screamed again, he knew that it was anything but joy in his voice. He'd never run faster, but the vault was maze like and confusing. When he found Jeremy, the man was no longer standing calmly and staring pensively into the pod, but repeatedly punching the glass. 
"Jeremy, what-"
"-He's a fucking synth!" Despite Jeremy punching the glass again and again, his knuckles bloodied and bruised, there wasn't a single crack in the surface. "That's not my husband, that's a fucking synth!" Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he hit the glass one last time before he turned to face Trevor. "He's... Trevor, he's..." He choked on his words, covering his face with his hands as he dropped to his knees. "This is worse than him being dead."
Trevor approached slowly, kneeling down in front of him and tentatively putting a hand on Jeremy's shoulder. It was shrugged off, so he decided not to push it. Looking towards the pod, he saw that Jeremy was right. How had they missed it? Wires and metal, all on display. A false bone faceplate and synthetic skin that didn't look quite right upon close inspection. One of the earlier models for sure, the newest ones had no differences from their human counterparts, but he didn't think that they existed before the drop. "That's sick. That's... That's downright disturbing." What business did the Institute have with a Pre-War corpse? "I don't even know what to say." What was there to say? 'Sorry that the man you love turns out not to be a man at all?' Bones were easier to break than that thick glass, especially when Jeremy was the one throwing the punch. 
"Was my whole life a lie?" Jeremy took a shuddering breath, trying to keep everything from fading to black around him. "Was he even real? Did he ever even love me?"
"No, no... The Institute... It wasn't around before the bombs. There's no way." Either the man was somehow always a synth, or they came and swapped his body out. But that didn't answer the question of why? What was so special about him that they'd sentence everyone else to death? He realized now that this was probably the source of the malfunction that had doomed the other pods, and they'd probably cut off the manual release to keep anyone from finding out. "He was real when you knew him. I'm sure of that." 
Jeremy scoffed. "Great, so then the Institute is a bunch of graverobbers. What are they, the fucking Resurrection Men?" 
"I don't know who that is."
"They're... Fuck it, nevermind. We need to find those fuckers." His tears had gone from distraught to furious, his whole body running red hot with anger as his fists clenched at his sides again. The Institute had taken so much from him. They'd taken a peaceful death from him, and now they'd gone and taken away the only thing that had ever made his existence bearable. That hurt more than all the hits he'd taken out in the Commonwealth combined. 
"No one knows where they are, Jeremy. Otherwise they would've been taken out decades ago."
"Even better, we'll be the first!"
"Where would we even start?" 
"I don't know!" Jeremy was shouting now, standing up abruptly and startling Trevor in the process. Pointing at the pod, Jeremy continued. "He might still be out there! He could be out there, alone and scared and wandering the wastes like I was before I met you, or the Institute could be doing shit to him, and I don't know which is a worse fate. We have to find him." He lowered his hand, hauling Trevor up. "I have to find him."
Trevor just stared down at Jeremy, finding his footing and freeing his arm from his grip. "I don't know if I'm gonna be able to help you."
"Then forget you, I'll do it myself." He started to walk away, but Trevor grabbed him by the shoulders to stop him, and Jeremy met his eyes with a flare. 
"Stop! Wait. I meant I don't know how to help you. But... Remember how I told you 'bout how I was brought up by Nick Valentine?" Jeremy nodded, though he was uncertain. "He's a detective, back in Diamond City. He can help you." 
"Oh." Jeremy instantly relaxed, his glare being replaced with a softer expression. He'd thought that Trevor meant that he wouldn't help him. "Well, I guess we're going back to the city, then." 
"Guess so," Trevor agreed, letting out a sigh. At least Jeremy seemed a bit less worked up now, but he still felt a bit on edge. "All this back and forth is fucking exhausting."
Jeremy nodded in agreement, shaking out his hand and pulling a bundle of gauze from his pocket to wrap it with. "Hey, Trev?" He said once they were back on the elevator platform, looking at the other man for a few long moments before he actually hit the button to take them back up. 
"Yeah?"
"I'm sorry. And... Thanks."
Trevor shrugged, looking down at his feet. "That's what friends do, right? Help each other?" He looked back up at Jeremy now, a soft smile on his face. "And when they can't, they point them in the right direction."
"Yeah, exactly. But, uh... We gotta be careful out there, alright? I can't lose you too."
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"I can't lose you too."
The words echoed in Trevor's head as he stared up at the sky. They were camped out in some abandoned house somewhere halfway between Sanctuary Hills and Diamond City, Trevor's own exhaustion nearly making him collapse and Jeremy's injured hand making it hard for him to hold a gun well enough to protect them. The roof was long gone, but the walls were intact enough that they could barricade the holes, and there were some mattresses left on the floor that were perfect for sleeping on. Only, Trevor couldn't sleep. Jeremy was snoring way too loudly beside him for that, and his armor was uncomfortable. 
The sky was always so clear, aside from the occasional radiation storm that rolled through, and he wondered if people before the war ever got the chance to appreciate it like this. Jeremy had said no, that the lights of the cities were so bright that you couldn't see the sky anymore, when he'd asked. He couldn't imagine living without being able to see the stars. They'd always brought him some sense of comfort, and if he was a smarter man maybe he would've taken the time to learn their names. But he wasn't, and that information wasn't available to him anymore even if he was. 
Trevor let out a sigh and rolled over, his eyes on Jeremy now. The words still replayed in his head, over and over. They had since he'd said them. Maybe he was putting too much meaning into them, but to him it felt like proof that someone finally cared about him. No one ever had before. His parents had abandoned him, leaving him to end up just another Diamond City orphan until Nick took pity on him. Nick had cared for him as much as a synth could, but he'd still said, "My hands are tied," when Trevor had gone to him with complaints about Ian. Everyone in Diamond City shunned him and didn't do anything to protect him, that had all been Jeremy. Because he actually cared about him. And he realized, as he lay there listening to the ambient noise of the wastes and the loud snoring, that he cared about Jeremy too. 
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"I'm not going back to Sanctuary again."
"Not asking you to, Trevor."
"But Nick said he wants to go look at the vault, take a look around. So we gotta go back." 
"You don't have to go."
"Yes, I do." 
The conversation had been going on like this for around ten minutes now, Nick and his assistant Ellie standing by and politely pretending that they weren't eavesdropping. Trevor was reluctant to let Jeremy leave without him, despite being in no shape to travel. Whether it was because he was too scared to be on his own, or too scared that he wouldn't be there to help Jeremy in case things went bad, Trevor didn't know. But regardless, staying in Diamond City without Jeremy sounded terrifying. For all he knew, Ian could be back on duty, just waiting for a chance to catch Trevor alone. 
"Look, Trev... You're exhausted. I am too, but... I gotta go back there with him, I have to start trying to get this figured out. And you? You need to rest, I'm sorry but you look awful." Jeremy didn't like the sound of leaving Trevor alone either, but there was really no other choice. He at least had army training under his belt, he could run of too little sleep for far too long if he needed to, but Trevor didn't have that. And, admittedly, he'd been pushing the other man a bit too hard since they'd gotten back out in the Commonwealth. "Look, I'll take you to Goodneighbor, how about that? I'll bribe Michael to keep an eye on you, set you up with enough caps for a room at the Rex. How's that sound?" 
"Sounds a lot better than staying here."
Jeremy smiled at that, clapping Trevor on the shoulder. "Great. Nick, I'm gonna go do that, then I'll be back." 
"Don't worry about it. Take your time," Nick assured, waving them off. Both he and Ellie watched them as they left, the pair still bickering quietly. When the door shut, he turned to her and spoke. "I'm glad the kid's found a friend, but I thought he had a better head on his shoulders than that." 
Ellie shrugged, returning to her desk and writing up a report to go into the case file. "I dunno, Nick. Seemed like they're more than that to me."
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing, nothing, it's just..." She smiled. "Intuition, I guess."
"Right. 'Intuition.' Just be careful you don't end up like Piper, sticking your nose where it doesn't belong."
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Good Neighbor without Jeremy was just boring, Trevor decided. It wasn't the comforting retreat he thought it would be either. Instead of worrying about the people around him, he was just worried about Jeremy. Spending time with Lindsay, Michael, and Gavin at the Third Rail was a decent distraction during the day, but there was nothing like that when he had to go back to the hotel alone. 
"You should check out the Memory Den some time," Gavin said one afternoon a few days into his stay, passing Trevor a Nuka Cherry with the cap already off. "Some people like taking a trip down memory lane when the real world stops being interesting enough for them."
Trevor scoffed quietly, taking a long sip from the soda. "Yeah, I'll pass. Most of the memories I've got, I don't wanna revisit."
"Not even your night with Lindsay?"
Trevor spluttered, nearly spilling his drink all over himself as he stared at Gavin in shock, who could only grin wryly back at him. "You know about that?"
"Course I do, it's not like I don't talk to them," he said, chuckling as he popped the top on a Gwinnet Stout for himself. "We're quite close, y'know. The three of us are. We talk. And Lindsay loves to talk about you, they'd been dying for you to some back ever since you left."
"I don't think that's true at all." His cheeks were as red as his soda now, and he just wanted to run away and hide. 
"Oh, but it is. You really impressed them." Gavin was getting a great deal of joy out of making Trevor squirm the way he was, and he glanced behind him towards the stairs that Lindsay was coming down right then. He winked at them, putting a finger to his lips when he made eye contact, quickly lowering his hand when Trevor was looking his way again. "So, tell me Trevor-boy. Were they as good of a neighbor as their songs claim? Oh, come on! Don't be shy now." 
"Okay, well... Honestly? They were great. I mean, just... So sweet, and so perfect, but... I don't think that's gonna be happening again." 
Both Gavin and Lindsay's face fell, and he leaned in close. "Why not?" 
Trevor bit his lip nervously, hoping he hadn't upset the other with his response. He swirled his soda around in the bottle, staring down into it before he looked up at him. "I don't think I was that good of a neighbor." Saying that he was dealing with some complicated feelings about Jeremy felt like he'd be confessing too much to someone he barely knew, and it wasn't Lindsay's fault that those feelings had only gotten more complicated since the last time he'd been around. 
"Oh, Trevor." Lindsay's voice came from behind him, and they wrapped their arms around him from behind him, making him bristle. "Don't be so hard on yourself. I think you were the best neighbor, but... I'm not against giving you a chance to redeem yourself." 
"You... You set me up!" He cried, pointing at Gavin accusingly, but the only response he got was a wink as he knocked back the beer. "This is the worst. You're the worst, Gavin." 
Lindsay laughed and unwrapped their arms around him so they could sit on a stool beside him, asking Gavin for a glass of wine when he was done being a dick. "I'm sorry, darlin', but it was just too cute watching you get all flustered like that." 
Some version of the same antic happened every day, and he didn't know how he hadn't gotten wise to it at that point. After the fifth day of being in Good Neighbor, he took Lindsay up on their offer of redeeming himself because he just couldn't stand how lonely his hotel room was anymore. It was much the same as the first time they had spent the night together, and it didn't really fill the void. 
The next night, Lindsay invited Trevor back to the apartment they shared with Gavin and Michael. Not for sex, but just so he wouldn't be alone at night anymore, because it really seemed to be getting to him. He'd swapped his Nuka Cherry for whatever beer Gavin had on hand, and they'd all started to get concerned. They all considered him a friend, they thought he was sweet and fun to talk to, and he had good choice in music, and they weren't going to let their friend be miserable if they could help it. Trevor was better after that, switching back to soda after his nights were filled with games of Blast Radius instead of listening to his own voice on the radio, staring up at the ceiling because he couldn't see the sky from the window. 
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Jeremy wasn't doing much better, either. Nick Valentine, as nice as he was, just wasn't as good company as Trevor. That was his biggest problem with the synth, really. That he wasn't Trevor. The man's voice did play over the radio, but he knew it wasn't the real deal. The real deal was, hopefully, safe in Good Neighbor. 
The trip back to Sanctuary had been easy enough, but a tour of the vault didn't really tell Nick anything that Jeremy hadn't already told him about the situation. He'd expected as much, but it didn't hurt to look for any sort of calling card that may have been left behind. Their trip had taken quite a few detours, too, because of Nick wanting some help looking into other cases that he had on the docket. Jeremy had been reluctant to help, but he figured since he was being helped for free, it was the least he could do to pay him back. Once they were back in Nick's office in Diamond City, he relayed the information to Ellie for her to write up and add to the case file, and spoke with her to try and figure out the next step. She said something, and Nick's face lit up, knocking on the desk to get Jeremy's attention.
"Lucky for you, where you're gonna want to go next is where you have to go anyway," Nick said finally, turning to Jeremy, who'd nearly fallen asleep in the chair he was seated in. "In Good Neighbor, there's a place called the Memory Den. People usually use it to try and look back on fond memories, but I think in your case, it may be the key to figuring out what happened while you were on ice." 
Jeremy was glad to not have to roam all over the Commonwealth again, and even more excited that he'd get to see Trevor again. Next time, he wasn't going to be leaving him behind. "Great, I'll look into it."
"Come back to me if you get anything useful." 
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It was another day at the bar for Trevor, another day wishing that there was something he could use to get in touch with Jeremy somehow. Letters were useless, and he was pretty sure that a Pip-Boy couldn't receive any messages from terminals without being hooked into it.
As usual, he was leaned against the bar, chatting with Gavin who stood next to him, and Michael and Lindsay who were seated on the other side on the stools. The Third Rail wasn't open just yet, but Trevor had taken to helping Gavin get the bar set up and keeping the other two company as they waited for opening time. And though it wasn't open, it seemed like Michael had forgotten to lock the door back up behind them, because heavy footsteps started coming down the steps. The conversation immediately stopped, Trevor and Gavin ducking down below the bar as Michael moved to stand in front of Lindsay. 
"What the fuck are you doing here?" Trevor heard Michael say, but it wasn't in anger like he'd been expecting. He and Gavin glanced at each other in confusion, the Brit silently reaching to grab a pistol that was stored beneath the counter just in case. 
"I'm here for Trevor. Guy at the Rex said he'd been hanging out with you guys lately."
He recognized that voice, and he knocked the gun out of Gavin's hands before popping his head up to confirm what his ears had heard. "Jeremy! You're back." 
"You didn't think I'd forgotten about you, did you?" Jeremy asked, a grin spreading across his face when he saw Trevor stand up from behind the bar. Barely a moment passed before Trevor was stepping out from behind the bar, running up to Jeremy and wrapping him in a hug. "Whoa, okay... Guess you did," he laughed, awkwardly raising and lowering his arms a few times before he settled for wrapping them around Trevor, hugging him back tightly. 
"No, I didn't, I just... Missed you." The confession made Trevor's cheeks go red, and after a minute he pulled away from the hug. "But... I'm glad you're back. How'd the search go?" 
Jeremy made a noncommittal noise, gesturing vaguely. "It was kinda pointless, to be honest. But I know where to go next. Some place called the Memory Den?"
"Oh, well I could have told you that! You didn't need some crackpot gumshoe for that," Gavin said, "That's where I told Trevor he should go when he started getting bored." Michael reached across the counter to thump him across the head. "What? I did!" The ghoul just cut him a look, and Gavin stuck his tongue out at him in response before quieting down. 
Trevor cleared his throat, turning back towards Jeremy with a smile. "Hey, at least we know where to go. And it's not very far, either. I bet you're even more sick of wandering around the wastes than I am at this point."
"You've got that right," Jeremy said with a chuckle, heading over to the bar to take a seat and motioning for Trevor to join him. "Mhm. But we're not going there right now. First, I need a drink."
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