#THE SHADOWS ARE SIMPLY. THE MINOR LEAGUES IN-UNIVERSE

[hanayumi]

𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐤-𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐛𝐞𝐝

— bonten!sano manjirou x fem!reader x sanzu haruchiyo 🔞

part 2 of brittle to the bone || prev.

if mikey is harsh, imposing, unyielding, then haruchiyo is just that with playful charisma superimposed over cruelty.

wc. ~9k

tags/warnings noncon, predator/prey dynamics, yandere undertones, knifeplay, mild bloodplay, forced infidelity, self-harm, degradation, overstim, mind break, mentions of gunplay, minor character death(s)

notes he’s very mean

snapshot;

Soft. Soft.

Haruchiyo parrots the word in his mind. Almost as if within it holds the secrets to the universe — and that if he keeps saying it, keeps feeling the weight of this single featherlight syllable on his tongue, that it’ll give him a revelation of sorts.

Your skin looked soft and your hand was soft and he can’t help but wonder if every inch of you down to your bones is soft.

∗

Be good.

‘Be good’ — by which Mikey meant, you suppose, no speaking to others in the compound, no leaving the house, no stepping inside anywhere but the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen… all the places that you’ve been wandering in-between for years without ever going outside. Is there anything else?

Well, you can’t bother yourself to remember. It’s not like you can do anything in here that’ll piss him off anyway. The time you’ve had to spend alone has started to blur into an impalpable being — an amalgamation, of sorts — warping and slowing your perception of reality to a tenth of a millisecond whenever Mikey isn’t around to monopolise your attention.

…I’ll reward you like a good little bitch when I get back. Can you do that for me?

Don’t leave the penthouse. Don’t enter rooms you don’t know. Don’t speak to anyone other than Haruchiyo. It should be pretty simple. Yeah, you can definitely do that for him. You can be good. You can. You’ll show him.

(As long as Haruchiyo doesn’t kill you before you get a chance to.)

You close your eyes, an image of the man with roseate hair floating into your memory. His lilting voice, the rattling of his pills, the way he kissed your hand after introducing himself and the way he smirked when Mikey made his announcement. A prickling chill runs down your spine like cold water. 

You clench a bundle of the sheets into your face, burrowing into the lingering scent of Mikey, and decide that you hate the way Haruchiyo speaks. In a slow, condescending drawl, smirk bared, revealing the carious fangs of a seasoned predator, the narrowed slits of his eyes scrutinising (for what, you have no idea) as if he thinks of your life as even more insignificant and disposable as the dirt between his shoes. 

There’s another thing, too. Something that fills your little heart with enormous anxiety and forces you on simmering coals within his presence, even now when you’re all safe and sound in this room with its four white walls and thick, locked door.

You can read that grin like an open book.

He thinks that your relationship with his boss has an expiry date. That it’s only a matter of time before you’re disposed of, too. That, without question, you were only there as a form of stress relief, your sole purpose being to tend to his boss’ every need. An emotional outlet, of sorts.

(You hate it because you know he’s right.)

But you don’t tell him that, don’t want to offer him the satisfaction — instead you scamper from his gaze, always slipping out of a room just as he enters it, going as far as to strategically plan out your daily activities to ensure that you wouldn’t be catching any glint nor shadow of that vibrant pink.

And for the most part, it’s working. And even if it didn’t, he has a funny way of looking at everything and anything as if it were leagues beneath him, so much so that you find it easy to simply duck your head and deem yourself unworthy of staying in his presence any longer than you already have. It’s weird, how simple it is to evade him — how predictable, easy, like child’s play. When he has just about given you as much attention as one would to a stray twig obstructing a sidewalk.

So, just like every other nagging worry, you stuff Bonten’s-Number-Two-Sanzu-Haruchiyo away in a cabinet for safe-keeping.

Time without Mikey also means that you’ll at least get a bit more time to yourself (albeit a large portion of it would be spent calculating how to avoid the man he left in his place). 

You’re using it wisely, you think — alternating between counting the grooves in the ceiling to toying with the strands of velvet rug in the middle of the too-spacious bedroom, to daydreaming until sprawling scenery of the outside-world blooms behind your eyelids… okay. So you haven’t been able to get anything truly productive done. So what? The word ‘productive’ feels alien in your mind — almost as if there’s something fundamentally cursed about its three syllables, as if it belonged in a realm unattainable to someone like you. You haven’t had to worry about being pro-duc-tive in years. It was always Mikey, Mikey, Mikey.

At some point, you think dismally, I’ll have to get up. But now is not the time. So you count, and count, until you feel your consciousness slipping away, and your eyelids droop, and you sink into a deep, dreamless sleep. Sleep that blunts the ache of isolation and the burning of your bruises, tip-toeing featherlight over your skin like a reminder of the person who left them. 

(Mikey doesn’t leave sticky notes on the fridge telling you to remember to brush your teeth and comb your hair. Everything he gives you comes from himself: his flesh and bone, his pain, his heart, his bruises.)

When time meanders forward, and inevitably touches upon evening, and you stir from sleep feeling an unbearable feeling of emptiness in your stomach (almost as if a large cavity was drilled into your abdomen), you shake the drowsiness away starting to feel an oncoming panic that Haruchiyo somewhere somehow found a way to sneak something into your breakfa— oh. That’s right.

You didn’t even have breakfast.

Your gut howls in agony. Reluctantly, you unwrap the self-made cocoon of blankets, preparing the mental artillery required to slip out the bedroom. 

Haruchiyo seems to be missing from the kitchen, which is a good thing, a pleasant thing — though you aren’t stupid to assume that he is shirking his duties as your ‘guardian’. Living in a sprawling penthouse with just two people, minus the seclusion, leaves you enjoying an overwhelming sense of privacy most of the time. But now? Now it feels like there’s bear traps under every tile in the floor, shuriken blades concealing themselves behind every groove in the ceiling (there were about 200 that you counted before dozing off).

It takes a few furtive glances down the corridor and you (fruitlessly) keep a knife within arm’s reach (‘I don’t know why I’m doing this it’s not like I’m even capable of wielding a knife’), but you get to work quickly, preparing a decent meal the only way you know how. The purple blemishes lining the expanse of your neck and thighs still throb in protest when you move, although now it’s become a dull, persistent, guileless ache. You’re all alone, since it appears that your housekeeper is nowhere to be found — got scared away, maybe?

Come to think of it, staff don’t stay for very long around the Bonten building (either that or the numbers are endless; every day you see a new face), and you were always too busy to pay attention to anything but the hulking man demanding your attention.

Even so, something about that particular woman made the word ‘bold’ pop up in your mind in thick, underlined letters.

She’s been around for a few weeks now, looking to be about the same age as you (maybe a little older?), and always wore her black hair pinned back neatly, revealing youthful and bright eyes. She isn’t permitted to stay long — no longer than when she finishes up cleaning and cooking food that’ll last the next few days — and neither of you know each other’s names. Though she did offer you the most sympathetic of smiles when the smell of good food left you poking your head into the kitchen. You think of it sometimes, when you’re lying in bed sleepless.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done this on my own, you frown, wiping sweat from your brow. Not that you haven’t cooked before, you have — you just can’t remember when. Your fingers curl feebly around the vegetable peeler, strips of potato skin falling onto the cutting board like ribbons. How long has it been, since you’ve put so much care into something other than Mikey? Again, you’re reminded of how much of your time that he eats up on the regular, like a blackhole both in his presence and absence; like a mechanical heart that your empty cavity of a ribcage can’t pump blood without. The thought alone should petrify you.

Don’t think about that.

There you go again, fretting over things that can’t be fretted about. You stubbornly follow the woman’s phantom movements from what little you gleaned from watching her from afar, guiding your hands over a boiling stove. The sizzles generating at the bottom of the metal pot reminds you of firecrackers. If your memory serves you well, there should be extra seasoning in the top cabinet. And you have to remember to work fast, too, just in case Haruchiyo decides to stick his head out in curiosity.

One by one, along with those forbidden thoughts, the various base ingredients are banished into the pot. Minutes later, you taste the thick broth with a spoon and damn, you realise, this actually tastes kind of good. This actually feels kind of good.

Yeah… yeah no, maybe you’re starting to get the hang of it. Maybe it’ll actually turn out okay after all — the next two days, your isolation, this makeshift stew. Not as good as the woman’s, but you reckon she’d give you a pass for trying. It’s only been a few days tops, but you cave and sigh; you kinda miss her presence. It gave you something to mull over amidst constant chao—

“What the hell are you doing?”

Your blood freezes.

At the doorway, Haruchiyo looks dishevelled, pissed, a single olive eye twitching. Your legs caramelise into a thick hardness, rooting you to the ground. The pot continues to sizzle above the flame. Since when did he…

“C-cooking?” you begin warily, glancing for the nearest exit, trying to keep an impervious look on your face even though every second that slips by a silent fear creeps up on you like a chokehold. You flinch as he stalks closer with the air of a forensic inspector, looking over the mess that is the kitchen, the wildly strewn pots and pans and utensils — all because you panicked and couldn’t find the ones you were looking for.

(Around the counter? No—that will take too much time. What if you shoved your way past him? No, god no—are you stupid? He’d catch you immediately—)

“You’re dumber than I thought,” he snarls, his mouth donning that prized scowl, leaning forward before you can react and jabbing a finger at the cutting board. “You don’t even know how to handle a fucking knife?”

“Wha—huh?”

You blink; the pellets of onion, potato and carrot lie limply on the scuffed wood. Misshapen little pieces, some thick and some way too thin. Your hands lie frozen in time, one grasping at a chunk of orange and the other gradually growing slick around the knife.

He clicks his tongue in disdain.

“At this rate, you’re going to kill yourself before I do.” Haruchiyo and the long tendons of his fingers pry the weighted blade out of the comfort of your hands. Insistently, in a way that tells you he’s mad—oh god he’s mad— but strikingly, without a touch of malice. Is he mad? Is he sober? He won’t turn it—the knife—on you—right? Your breath hitches.

“Mikey would maim me to a pulp if you succeeded in that little stunt,” he arches a brow, as if using Mikey’s name in such a manner left a bitter taste in his mouth. For some reason, blood rushes to your ears as you watch the man in an unbuttoned suit hunch over the cutting board. You give him space to examine the ingredients, biting your tongue in shame. “If you wanted food you could’ve just said so.”

You could’ve just said so.

Something doesn’t feel quite right about his words, but you’re too relieved to dwell on it. You are graced with a sliver of respite, a moment’s peace; at least you know Haruchiyo has no intentions of killing you. He can’t. Probably.

The silky-smooth incisions he makes on the vegetables and meat send a tremor down your spine, each chop bouncing around in your eardrums. He’s helping you and yet, you almost feel bad for wanting to run. You don’t want to know where he learnt to wield a blade like a razorlike extension of his fingers.

“You know a lot,” you whisper, biting your lip afterwards, minutes in when the aimless hovering becomes too much to bear. What the hell are you doing, trying to make small talk? 

“I know enough,” he shoots back, long lashes fluttering like large silver fans as he turns around to squint at you. He likes to look at you as if you were some ancient vase excavated from the earth, you realise. Or like a fossil. As if you originated from a completely different time from him.

Nothing much of a conversation passes between the two of you after that; you awkwardly go through the motions, trying your best to stay away. He mutters some weird cantation under his breath as he sections off the potatoes from the carrots, moves them over to a plate as he readies the meat.

It’s almost faelike, how systematic of a man he is. How quick he is to catch on, requiring minimal instructions from you, despite seeming like a person of inferior culinary calibre.

When he’s done, Haruchiyo pats his hands on his thighs, breathing a sigh. His gaze mulls over the piping stew still bubbling with the newly-added ingredients, before plucking itself away and landing on the door to the study just a distance from the kitchen (his hiding place; his deep cavernous den). Just before he saunters to the room, twisting a hand on the door knob, he says, “I don’t cook, so don’t expect me to.” 

(You didn’t.)

It was a brief encounter.

In the early dusk, long after your meal, you hear him crawl out of the study like an emerging creature of the night, and when you’re halfway through turning over a page in a novel (a dusty old one that you found hiding inside the drawers of the bedside table) you hear the sound of cutlery scraping against ceramic, echoing from where the kitchen must be.

It’s strange, the gladness that washes over you — you hadn’t really expected him to react, let alone try your cooking. Come to think of it, you weren’t even sure that he ate in the first place. (He said he doesn’t cook, but he knows the ‘correct’ way to use a knife? Odd.) You frown, none of the words on the page construing a decipherable meaning to you.

Maybe, just maybe, sharing the same space with Haruchiyo won’t be so bad after all (now that you know he eats and sleeps like a human being, is normal-functioning in most aspects of his physical body).

With this thought in mind, you carry on business as usual in your small corner of the house, lightly pondering which part of Japan Mikey has found himself embroiled in.

At nightfall, your ears unwillingly pick up loud thuds down the hallway, and you triple-check that the door is locked before climbing into the soft covers, stifling a shiver. Regardless of whether he’s been oddly tame or not, it’ll take a while to get used to this — the strange, unexplainable things that go bump in the night. 

The bed… feels emptier. Desolate. Something feels odd, like the calm before the storm. It’s just your imagination. You close your eyes, falling asleep imagining Mikey’s arm around your hip. Ironically, you can’t seem to sleep well without him.

∗

What is this?

He’s felt like this before, of that he’s certain. A longass time ago. Judging from the huge blip in his memory when Haruchiyo tries to recall, it must’ve been eons since then. Eons and eons and then some, back when inactive volcanoes still spat real, smouldering lava — he’s sure it’s been that long.

It’s curious, and it amazes him more than it disgusts him. He should be disgusted, the logical part of his brain adds; he should have just minded his business and carried on as usual. He should have let you cut yourself in that dangerous manner (what’s a tiny cut going to do, add another notch to the scar-ridden pole?) — let you experience what it’s like to live life with an impish brain. 

He wasn’t intending to interrupt. Ten, fifteen minutes must’ve ticked by, with him standing there in silence (you are quite the careless one). He couldn’t push down the onslaught of annoyance at the way you bent over backwards to reach the top shelf — are you trying to make his job difficult on purpose? Haruchiyo is a lawless beast, sure, but even beasts have their master’s orders to abide by, along with a special place in hell for those who don’t obey orders. Maybe that was your goal — maybe you wanted him gone. Maybe deep down you’re a spy sent to eliminate Bonten from the inside.

That is how he almost relished in pure excitement, at the promise of bloodshed regardless of how minor.

And yet, and yet, when he saw the flat silver falling just millimeters short of slicing into your soft digits, something compelled him to step in. (To help? Or to finish the job? No, he knows why. It was to chase this surreal, abstract feeling.)

Soft. Soft.

Haruchiyo parrots the word in his mind. Almost as if within it holds the secrets to the universe — and that if he keeps saying it, keeps feeling the weight of this single featherlight syllable on his tongue, that it’ll give him a revelation of sorts.

Your skin looked soft and your hand was soft and he can’t help but wonder if every inch of you down to your bones is soft.

He wonders how you had the time to teach yourself how to cook. Or if you’d already known before you were brought here (in any case you didn’t look very experienced). If the flavourful explosion in his mouth attests to his boss’ favourite dish. Comfort food, his brain supplies. What is that? He never understood the little nuances that people sprinkled in their vocabulary, though the terms lingered in his head like pesky flies. (If it’s shit, it’s just shit, right?)

He’d been so used to the staleness served at dilapidated bars that he’d forgotten almost completely what it means to have a proper meal. If it wasn’t stale or nasty it was too fancy for him to stuff down his throat — he has always been a picky eater, wanted things to be just right, but somehow the smell alone was enough to entice him out of the study.

And when he took the first bite, something strange happened. A feeling akin to warmth flooded his veins. (It’s amazing, isn’t it? It was like poison. His head started spinning and his mind morphed into a jumbled maze of thoughts; so deeply entrenched in its twists and turns he was, left palm slowly running across hedged walls, groping for an exit. Or trying to find whatever treasure, salvation, lied in the middle.) It never ever struck Haruchiyo that you might’ve snuck something extra into the food to incite this wild reaction in him. No— you’re too innocent for that. Kind. Warm. Trusting. Soft…

Not once did you knock on the door. Not that he expected you to. Not that he wanted you to. (You’re stupid but not that stupid.)

He must’ve been in there for hours, oscillating between the fabric of time and space, consciousness and unconsciousness blurring into one. 

Flashes — funny things, like trusting someone, like cutting his fingers by accident as a kid, sitting outside the doctor’s office (“What are they going to do to me?” a young boy with flaxen hair whispered. “They will put you in stitches. It will not hurt. Just a few pricks, nothing more,” someone whispered back… who?) — materialise before his consciousness often. Uninvited. Unwarranted.

When he is awake they come to him like blessings, like offerings to a long-forgotten deity. When he is asleep they take on the sparkle and sheen of a fairytale — so blurry and blinding that he could never hope to brush his fingertips across such an ethereal feeling in his mortal life.

Because a common thread was that these recollections (or fairytales, or glimpses into the ether, or as he personally likes to call them, fever dreams) never lasted long.

The feeling always, always chose to leave last — that silent poking and prodding going on without his consent, shady dealings happening at the edges of his conscience that scream at him to mourn for a past innocence, something that he has no chance of ever recovering. Memory, in this way, comes like slippery eels in the palm of his hand: if he’s lucky, he’ll catch one. If he isn’t, oh well.

“Fucking hell,” he grunts, plastering his spine to the back of chair in hopes of relieving the pain throbbing behind his eyelids. Defeat tastes acrid, bitter, on Haruchiyo’s tongue; it’s no use fighting the waves of agony strobing like a heat wave.

His arm adeptly loses feeling and the metal spoon crashes down onto the plate. It’s empty now, and his stomach is somewhat filled. Yet this shitty-ass migraine chooses to latch onto his brain like a leech. God. Can’t you just—I don’t know—let me off? This one, goddamn time, Haruchiyo curses. He’s pissed. He’s sure he left an extra stockpile of that good stuff somewhere…

Old habits die hard, but it’s difficult to dwell on it when all he can feel is gratefulness for his own foresight. Mikey finds ways to avoid him a lot when he doesn’t feel like entertaining his highs, kinda like throwing a bone to stave off a dog’s abundant energy. But for the most part, he lets Haruchiyo do his own thing — lets him chew on the proverbial bone to his heart’s desire. Thus, once again, Haruchiyo finds himself with a fistful of pills. (It’s the only way he knows to curb the pain.)

He’d really meant to pounce on you by now, he thinks, as he swallows another. Gulp. He meant to already sink his claws into your neck, the same way Mikey does. Gulp.

But he can’t. Right now he can’t even stand straight his head hurts so bad. As if something from within him wanted to turn his body inside out, displaying his innards.

And, fuck, when the itch resurfaces again like an old friend, there’s little he can do to stop it. (When has he ever been the type to argue with instinct, after all? If anything… he is a slave to it. It’s understandable. Mikey’ll forgive him. He’s too used to running free, veins pulsing at the first whiff of prey. It doesn’t do anyone good to cage a wild animal.)

Haruchiyo and his dimmed gemstone eyes, clouded over with a drug-filled haze — a comfortable, fitted collar around his neck and the leash held firmly within his grasp. A slave. A weapon to his own instinct. Nature proclaims that it’s law for predators to hunt prey. How many girls has he killed? How many that look like you and how many just to satisfy this instinct of purging prey.

Haruchiyo has lost count at this point. Everything blurs and twists into one: pill-shaped candy, the boy with pale hair, the warmth of the food that felt like a paperweight on his tongue… you clutching the tip of your finger, thick blood gushing out. (The ‘what-if’ that would’ve happened if he hadn’t interfered.)

Deeper and deeper, he starts to feel dizzy, as if he were plummeting down a rabbit hole. He stumbles from the kitchen and into the living room, heads towards the noise that made his ears prick up like a predator groping for blood. Thirst. He’s unbearably thirsty.

It’s not you— is that you? He goes rigid; blinks away hysteria. It’s you.

All he can think of is you— all he can think is, Mikey will forgive him.

∗

At an abandoned dock two cities away a figure sits patiently, embroiled in a decrepit darkness. Moonlight creeps across his hunched back like vines over a wall. Dark bangs fall messily across his face with some strands still matted in a sticky substance. Sweat, or blood. Mikey scrunches up his nose. If you were here, he wouldn’t have to worry about cleaning himself up.

But you aren’t. And the thought is enough to wind a bunch of thorns around his chest.

The cylindrical shape feels strange as heck against the insides of his mouth. He’s poked his tongue through the barrel a few times before, out of pure curiosity, like a cat toying with a ball of yarn trapped in its mitts. But the taste? Well, it’s just as he expected it to be — bland. Flavourless. Unappealing. Just as unappealing as life without you.

(The fuck? Takeomi called me all the way here just to deal with this?)

Then again, he did take a longer time than usual to exterminate the local pest populace. Mikey doesn’t know if this particular thorn in his side is exceptionally formidable, or if he is exceptionally off his game today. (Huh — no, that can’t be it. It’s not as if he saw hostile figures blurring into two then three then four like a cheap ninja trick, even as he struck them down unfazed; not as if, after the tenth one the blood got too heavy for him to focus, and everywhere he turned, intrusive images of your skin plagued his psyche like a disease… no, that can’t be it.)

(…Right? Right. No way.)

He’s miserable. He wants to go home. He wants to hold you and he wants to make you taste the barrel of the gun as he is now — make you run your tongue along its concave shape and ask if you can taste the gunmetal on your teeth and call you pathetic when you start trembling like you always do. Would you let him? (Of course you would. There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for him.) You are obedient, Mikey likes that about you, and you’re always willing to go along with his whims — though, he frowns, it’s mostly because you’re scared. Probably.

Somewhere in the dark a rat squeaks, scuttles into a crack, leaving the timid cry resonating within jagged walls. It reminds him of yo— he throws his head back and gives a long, hard groan, one that spirals in the stillness. 

Okay that’s it. He clutches his head. I’m getting out of here.

“Oi. Come, Senju,” he calls monotonously, not waiting up before hopping down, setting his course deeper towards the direction of darkness. A barely audible pair of footsteps follow close behind. But Mikey’s thoughts are occupied; he thinks about the flat surface of the gun and what colour it’d make your skin turn, and he thinks about Haruchiyo sitting faithfully in the penthouse, doing his job. (He’s a little worried, and that’s an understatement.)

Mikey sighs, nose breathing in the musty, oppressive smell of the sea.

One more day and he’ll be back where he was with you; one more day and he’ll be home. But at the very least, he thinks, this little business venture has turned out to be the tiniest bit amusing. His first time exploring Japan in months and he’s already got himself a souvenir to take home.

∗

It’s… raining.

A fine, feathery, bountiful rain that’s only noticeable from ripples of water cascading soundlessly on the full-length window, and floating umbrellas shielding commuters from the downpour hundreds and hundreds of floors below.

From your bird’s-eye view, they all but resemble dewdrops of microscopic colour, so far away that you can barely tell they’re alive. You press your palm flat against the glass, feeling the heat of your own skin absorb the cool surface, feeling the tiny vibration brought forth by the morning raindrops on the other side.

How long has it been? Since you’ve been on that other side?

A backdrop of grey paints the city. A familiar view, but one that you’ve never quite gotten used to. It’s quiet. Way too quiet, at that.

Where is Haruchiyo?

The chill spreads to the tip of your toes when they meet the marbled flooring. You slip off the couch, contemplating the merit in searching for a man you would otherwise do triple somersaults to avoid. Is this a good idea? You chew on your lip. It’s not. But where is he?

You’ve been feeling uneasy for the whole morning. Earlier there’d been a crash (multiple) coming from the hallway, and besides making you drop your book it also brought with it a nauseating wave of anxiety. Not that you expected Haruchiyo to be quiet at all times, goodness no (last night was a test of your patience), but there was a certain instinct imbued into you that made the hairs on your forearms stand on end whenever things were a hint out of the ordinary.

A certain intuition that came part and parcel with living with dangerous, scheming people.

Why is he grunting like that?

(That was a grunt, right? No… no, it definitely was.)

There was the sound of something sharp, like metal, grating against the floor — what was that? You scurry over to press your ear to the door, listening hard for anomalies, trying to conjure up hypotheses in your brain that don’t equal to Haruchiyo throwing a messy fit or getting ready to jump you or — well, kill you.

A clunk. Several thumps. A knife, maybe? Or he could be moving furniture, or, or—he could be practicing with his rumoured katana (you’ve never seen it but heard people talk about it in hushed whispers) — there’s no way to know for sure. All these unidentified sounds send seismic fear rippling through you.

With Mikey there was no need to question anything, because it was only a matter of time until you found out. But now that you’re alone — alone and defenceless and the most vulnerable you’ve ever been since you were fresh out the womb — it strikes a waning courage in your steps as you venture into the unknown, sweaty palms encircling the cool metal door knob, trying your hardest to stifle the click it makes when it unlocks.

Slowly, you tiptoe over to the source of the sound. Because it couldn’t hurt to just take a peek. Right? Just to check in. Just to be safe. Just to make sure he isn’t putting funny stuff inside your cupboards.

And. Well. If you were being honest, being Mikey’s little pet must’ve changed you a lot.

Complacency that thickened your skin, artificial layers of cosmetics over baby-smooth doll fabric. The false sense of protection under Mikey’s invisible iron fist comes with its own, hefty price. It must have gotten to you somehow. It must have done something to build up that liquid courage in your veins, in its own twisted way, surely, because—because no sooner than when you poke your head through the doorway into the living room do you see it.

See them.

You stare at the pile of grisly red organs splattering the cold hard floor; stare at death itself.

And, on top of it, as if crowned the victor, no one but Haruchiyo hunches leisurely over the grisly mound of flesh. Cleaning the mess behind his fingertips with his tongue. Eyeing his handiwork. The glinting edge of the tiny scalpel in his hand still dripping with scarlet, sharp edge pointed towards god knows what’s left of that person ohgod—

Your gut drops to the floor in horror. That uniform. That’s her. That’s the woman. Shit—fuck. What was once a sweet young woman is now a mangled corpse by the hands of Haruchiyo. Something… something is terribly wrong. She doesn’t look like she’s been dead for minutes. No, her eyes are far too cold. Like gaping holes. There is blood from her mouth, no, there is blood everywhere —

Haruchiyo hums, his rosier-than-cotton-candy hair dip-dyed in scarlet. Drip, drip. “Looks like… ah, I’ve roused the attention of our reclusive little rabbit.”

It’s the same man who’d grasped your hand in a courteous gesture just the day before, who’d saved you from slicing your fingers, the same goddamn murderer who’s just got his hands on the only person in years to address you like a regular human being. Idiot. You’ve done it this time. You’re a fucking dumbass. He’s a murderer, murderer — he’s going to kill you.

You’re next.

“What’s wrong, little bunny?” His grin only widens at your stupor, your slow, petrified jaw hanging agape. “You look scared. Do I make you feel scared?”

Your legs won’t budge; you whimper.

Run. Runrunrun — your body is screaming at you, imploring you to hurry the fuck up and run for your goddamn life, but you don’t. Pleas fall on deaf ears. Your body is caught in a bear trap, forcing you to take in the gruesome scene before you. There is so, so much blood. More than you’ve ever seen in your life. And all of it, all of it, is hers. 

Just the other day she greeted you with her usual warm smile. Just the other day she was a living, breathing human, who ate and slept and radiated heat.

“Your face tells me you want to run,” he trills, eyes narrowing into slits. “Gonna run away?”

His tone is shrill as a sharpened blade, deranged, with every word mounting into maniacal glee. “Run with your little tail tucked between your cute thighs, back to your big, strong Mikey?”

Bloodshot and unfocused eyes zero in on your face and his body convulses like a zombie erecting from the dead, joints creaking like bars of scaffold. Slowly, assuredly, he rises to one knee, he points the scalpel at his own collarbone, and wait, wait, why is he— 

“Look here, little bunny,” he coos, a big wide smile twisting the scars on his mouth; his wrist twitches, yanks, the blade following suit, dipping obediently into his own flesh. His own skin. His own blood that leaks pure sparkling scarlet from a thin crevice. 

A scream tears through the room, one you can only feel is yours from the vibrations ringing in your hollow throat — he doesn’t wince. Sheer horror sends your body flying back, hands clasped tight in front of your face to shield you from the deep dark red. This is a nightmare. This can’t be real. Red is matted to pink strands of hair, red is glittering across his mouth like the snout of a beast, red is slowly advancing across the carpet. Wake up. You tremble, whimper. This is bad this is bad this is bad.

A cackle rips into the air, one with a chilling, blood-curdling echo bouncing off the walls, and no sooner than when he takes a step forward does the impenetrable cement in your veins crack. 

Fight or flight.

You turn and bolt, feeling the weight of your numb appendages carrying you as far as possible, away from that—that sickening blood, that red crawling ever so closely towards you like hot, molten lava—

You race, stumble, dive into Mikey’s room (Idiot! Mikey isn’t even here! The exit — you have to get to the exit!), managing to grab a spare key off the counter before fleeing like a bat out of hell towards the front door, salvation, the only way out.

“Where do you think you’re going? I’m not done with you yet.”

But then your back’s hitting the wall as you scramble to flee, jolts of the impact swelling up your spine as you hurtle into a dodge when Haruchiyo lunges, bloodied fingertips snatching your wrist and pulling pulling yanking, until the keys crash to the ground with a deafening clatter, until you’ve been sucked into the floor with a scream clawing at your throat, until you’re submerged limb by limb into that deep deep red that you hate.

“NO no no no no, letmego, letmeg—”

“Shh, shh!”

The cool tip of the blade drags along your cheek, thinly scraping against the surface, slicing into half the wet tracks that tears have left on your face so that slivered carmine wells up through the broken skin. His body has no right being this warm, pressed up against you, your knees and arms already going slick with blood. It’s over. He’s caught you.

Your eyes stay screwed shut amidst the barrage of hot tears bursting behind your eyelids. He has you pinned down for good, you realise, a strained whimper fighting its way in the back of your throat. There is no escape. The pain is real. You can feel the slim thread of blood rolling down your cheek, mixing with the tears — only for him to lean closer, lapping up the traces of it with a satisfied chuckle.

His saliva leaves a slimy, wet sensation on your skin. It’s the worst feeling you’ve ever felt in your life.

“Please… I won’t tell anyone… I won’t tell Mikey— please, just let me go…”

“Ah ah ah.” The man — Sanzu Haruchiyo — hushes you again, a finger on your lip, his shuddering breath fanning erratically on your face, his voice fading into yet another hysterical chuckle. But it’s deep, breathy, and taunting, thrumming loudly in his chest, and sending a tremor through your very soul. “I think you’re forgetting a teensy, tiny fact, little bunny— Mikey’s not here.”

Your nose fills with iron when he is this close. Haruchiyo’s eyes — those bulging, green masses of insanity — shift and convulse as if you were faced with the mouth of an abyss. His grip on your wrists tightens to an agonising degree the more you plead and squirm, leaving you with no choice but to hold your breath, hoping desperately that someone will come to your rescue.

Where is Mikey? 

You’re going to die here. You’re going to die here… and there’s nothing you can do about it. Pushed up against this psycho killer, who’s just murdered a person innocent of all crime, an outsider who shouldn’t even have been here. Is this how you find closure? From someone other than Mikey? 

Manjiro… the thought is enough to shoot a terrible pain in your heart, something unwarranted like denial, like indescribable terror, like—like regret. 

I never told him I love him.

Twin dilated pupils absorb the sight of your writhing, suffering form, shuddering in their sockets from unmatched euphoria.

“Why don’t we play a little?”

∗

Truth be told, Haruchiyo doesn’t know what time of day it is, what day it is, and all he remembers is feeling fatigued with an indescribable, insatiable hunger. He thinks he’s never felt so dissatisfied in his entire life.

But this… this is nothing short of a feast, isn’t it?

“You…” he begins, seething through his ultra-wide grin. “You’re a huge slut!”

His hands, not knowing where to touch, land greedily on every inch of your traitorous skin. Groping, taking, as if the gates to heaven inexplicably opened; a creature of hell, he is — a pitch-black entity descending upon a fine-feathered angel. He can’t stop himself, not when you’re so helpless to fend him off.

“If I had known… that you would be going around getting wet at every man touching your little pussy like this…” He bites back a laugh, the scarred edges of his mouth contorting. 

You look confused — terrified, but mainly confused. And scared as to why he hasn’t ripped apart your insides yet and god you’re fucking delicious. Your nightdress has long been torn to shreds. Blood — not yours — is splattered everywhere on the marble flooring. Haruchiyo’s obscene groans come like second nature at this point. It’s good, it’s too good — your cries, your shivering, your scent, the way that he can taste how salty your tears are and hear the wetness gathering at his fingers. 

“You’re a damned whore, aren’t you?”

You look stunned, stupefied, as if your little brain can’t comprehend what Haruchiyo wants to do to you, as if the squelching noises coming from between your thighs are a mechanism separate to your conscious body — as if they don’t tell him all he needs to know. 

“S-stop,” you snivel, wrists straining in his grip, though he thinks it couldn’t possibly hurt from the way you can’t help your half-moans, so delicate and frantic, flitting about in his ears like a pair of small butterfly wings. “Stop, please, a-ah, don’t touch me there—”

“Here? Oh, but what if I want to?”

Frankly, this is the most fun that he’s had in ages — your kitten-like mewls and crystalline tears, soft hips twisting fruitlessly and the friction only serving to make his blood rush south, adrenaline sizzling in his veins even more so than when he was in the midst of mutilating that dumb placeholder, that fake…

“You feel so nice and soft inside, little bunny.”

Haruchiyo shoves his fingers past the lips of your cute slit, prodding and poking like it’s his first time touching a virgin. Warm, tender, and suckling on him like a fawn to its mother’s breast… the gentle clasp of your pussy against his fingers feels like nothing short of heaven. God almighty, no wonder Mikey couldn’t keep his hands off of you. His cock becomes erect, the tip becoming sensitive as it strains against precum-soaked fabric.

He watches you squirm, watches as your tits heave with every breath you take. For the first time Haruchiyo is close to you, closer than ever before, to the point where if he brandished the scalpel now there’s no telling whether he’ll lose control and gouge your pretty eyeballs out in a fit of blind lust. Just like he did to so many others before you — just like those other porcelain, fragile, counterfeit dolls. (Except there’s really nothing that comes so close to perfection as the real thing.)

“What do you think is stopping me from killing you, hm?” 

He poses this question in the midst of circling your shining pearl, bringing you closer and closer to climax, coaxing panicked moans out of you as if the realisation just hit you that maybe he will rip apart your insides after all. 

Then, when you whine out instead of replying, Haruchiyo pauses, pressing his weight against your soft body for good measure, keening at your smell. He sighs—

“It’s because torturing you fucking turns me on.”

You used to smell like roses — like Mikey. But the you in this moment smells like sex, sweat, and potent iron, blood from his fresh killing and blood from his own flesh and bone; he has never felt such uncontrollable desire in his life. This is it, he thinks, this is the treasure waiting for him at the end of the maze. 

His lips latch on and suckle on your exposed nipple, tongue circling and biting and lapping hard until it draws cries of pain. His face returns to your neck, a slimy tongue sticking out and coating you with saliva, feeling himself quiver with desire when your entire body convulses. His hard length grinds against your inner thigh like a mad dog, eager to insert itself into your warm and inviting hole. 

But not yet. Just a little more.

He releases your wrists. Sharp nails latch themselves onto your scalp, straining against the roots of your hair to tug you eye-to-eye with his gaze. People like to say that Haruchiyo gets a spine-chilling, deranged gleam in his eyes when he’s in the middle of torturing someone — what do you see this time?

A monster? The devil himself? Or something more divine? Otherworldly? Something like a god?

His teeth sink into his bottom lip; not bad, he credits his brain, eyeing the tremble of your lip and the way tears cascade down your cheeks and jaw and drip onto your breasts, he might just crave to make you worship him. More than anyone else. More than his King; make you become his own private devotee.

“Does Mikey also do this?” Haruchiyo’s gravelly voice whispers filthy vice in your ear. “Does he? Tell me.”

Your back hits the floor. He sticks another finger, two, then three, inside your cunt, wriggling and feeling for the one spot that makes your toes curl and your back arch. Your non-stop whining, your incoherency, your lack of capacity for full sentences, all of it is starting to unravel his control — spilling out like a spool of thread underwater, dispersing never to be reeled in again.

“Tell. Me.” 

“N-no!” you rasp, hips quaking. 

“Liar,” he smiles. You’re a liar. You’re a filthy liar. He saw you. “What does he do to your little clit, huh? Rub, rub. Oh, you feel so soft and slippery here.”

“Stop, please, a-ah! It’s too much, it’s too much…”

“It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay,” he is quick to comfort, fingers speeding up, abusing your tiny nub, as if his ears were blotting out your frantic cries and tearful struggle. So, so sensitive. He almost feels like you’ll break. “Cum all you want. Again and again. We’ve got all day.”

He attaches his lips like a parasite to your cheek, licking at the small cut, sucking every drop of blood that leaks out, all while his fingertips never cease their momentum. You resist and jerk away from his face, only for him to wrench your jaw tightly in place.

“No, I don’t want to cum, I don’t—” You struggle like a rabbit with its hind legs bound, teeth sinking into your bottom lip in a feeble effort to mute your cries of pleasure. “I-I’m gonna—”

You cum without warning; a spray of liquid pools at your entrance, your thighs spasming under him as if charged with electricity. He coos as if to cheer you on. Fuuuck. He’s not done. There’s no way. Droplets of your juices taste like dews on his tongue; so much he wants to do, but he only has two hands. 

As you reel, incapacitated with the afterglow of your orgasm, his palm lets go of your face to wrap around the flushed tip of his cock, giving a few sharp pumps, imagining what it feels like to be buried in your warmth. Well, he won’t have to imagine much longer.

“So pretty, you’d put every other girl to shame,” he mutters, pressing a kiss to your forehead, and another to your lips, silencing your whimpers. “I hated you, god, but turns out you’re good for at least one thing.”

“Let me… let me go…”

“Nah. But did it feel good?” He wants to break you. He wants to see you drowning in so much pleasure that you collapse and black out and crave nothing but his cock.

Your face scrunches up. You’re looking at him, he thinks. Though your expression looks weird, and you’ve stopped struggling.

“Mikey… Mikey’s gonna… he’s gonna be so mad,” you start to hiccup, tears dripping silently onto the marble, bottom lip trembling. Haruchiyo goes still, watching you cry at a loss for words.

He’s confused.

Mikey? Really? At a time like this? And he sees it again. That blatant softness that filters over your eyes — that ickiness. You’re so in love with his King that it’s pathetic.

It hadn’t been obvious before, but it is now. It’s thickening the skin between your heart and the outside world: it’s still there, the veins permeating the layer of visibility just barely, but the pulsing is faint.

And he sneers. Who do you think you are?

“You came because you’re a disloyal whore and you know it. Looks like you didn’t really love him after all, huh?”

At his words, you let out a hurt-filled gasp, as if they made their way into your heart and deposited lashes of agony there. Your mouth hangs open with tears still streaking down your face. The sight makes him want to coo at you.

“Look — you’re all messy and slick down here.”

Before you can tell him to stop, his fingernail scratches your abused clit, hard and fast as if trying to coax another orgasm out of you. Just one more. You can endure it, right? He’s watched Mikey do worse to you. He’s watched Mikey splay your legs open at his mercy and threaten to let every man in the room have their way with you.

Your body thrashes in retaliation but it’s no match for Haruchiyo’s strength, helpless to fight back as he pushes you further and further until you splutter and give a keening cry.

“What would Mikey think if he saw you like this?” he laughs, tuning out your pleas to slow down. “He’d fucking kill you.”

Another spray of your juices — another sharp scream of pleasure. By the third, fourth, your body starts trembling in overstimulation.

“I’m going to make you cum, again and again. Until you regret ever coming here. Make you regret trying to tempt my King.”

Haruchiyo mindlessly nibbles at your ear, before brutish hands reach down to force your legs wider. It’s about time, isn’t it? His cock throbs painfully at the wait.

“No, no, no… you can’t—”

He ignores you, rearranging his hips so they align with yours, gripping your abdomen like a vice as if trying to bruise. More, more, more. All his filthy fantasies start to spill out of the crevices in his brain. All he can do is watch the lavish black rush out in an endless downpour, and he, wrought with an incurable thirst, helps himself to your body, spellbound by the adrenaline you incite in him and the softness and warmth that you—

Ouch. He feels a prick.

From his shoulder, a tiny cut. A warm drop of blood beads at the broken skin. Ah. you’ve got your puny, trembling fingers on the handle of the scalpel.

How clever. A laugh bubbles from his throat.

“Oh, little bunny. Are you sure you want to do that?”

His hand removes itself from your body, snatching the blade out of your grip. You panic and try to retrieve it, but in your moment of desperation he chuckles and slides his cock in, stuffing you with inches of his length at one go, stretching you out like a cushy sleeve. 

You yelp, foal legs kicking at air. Haruchiyo takes the time to tuck the blade away. 

“Stupid, stupid,” he clicks his tongue as you wail in defeat, tiny paws padding at his chest like you want him to pin you down harder — like you crave for him to abuse your little hole until you can’t walk for the rest of the year. “You’re just a little stupid, aren’t you? Gone all mush-brained from me teasing you?”

He wastes no time in bottoming out, leaving the tip brushing against your womb, beating on the squishy walls again and again. His pace is manic, uncaring, straight from the get-go. Nothing can compare to you. Your tight, slick walls accommodate him so lasciviously, so perfectly, that he swears you know what you’re doing. 

“You know what? I’m not even mad. Not when you’re the best fuck I’ve ever had.” His King has an eye for quality, he thinks, adjusting his grip so he can thrust deeper in you.

A mess of blood, cum, tears — a mess that he has made you, forced onto you like ink on a canvas, and he bled a bottomless black. You’re coming around slowly, letting the ink sink into your putty flesh and submitting yourself to the sensation, hips unknowingly rising to meet the timing of his thrusts. That’s more like it, he licks his lips. You’re cute. Obedient. He wouldn’t mind taking you home.

“Hey, hey. Here's—uh—an idea. Why don’t you become my own cocksleeve? I’ll tell Mikey that you—hah—fought real hard, but you just couldn’t resist putting a thick, hard cock inside you. I’ll tell him you couldn’t help it.” 

Haruchiyo chuckles mid-pant, having grown rather fond of you and your insides. He’s heaving like a beast, sweat gathering at his forehead, eyes squeezing shut to ride out this pure bliss. It’s a first for him. Has he been doing sex wrong his whole life?

“After my King disowns you… after he throws you out on the streets… I'll pick you up and give you a home. this little pussy… I’m going to make it my own.”

“Ah, ah— sto— ah…”

You’ve gone stupid for good, now. Your eyes are rolling to the back of your head, mindless babbling spilling from your lips (he can barely make out Mikey’s name in poor, broken syllables), your breasts bouncing and pussy twitching as it overflows with juices. All words are lost to you in this state. 

And yet you’re still hugging his thickness diligently, just like a custom-made cocksleeve. He really ought to reward you. Haruchiyo reaches down to stimulate your clit and shudders at the feeling of you clenching tighter.

That far-off look in your eyes, your thighs periodically convulsing with spurts of cum spraying out pathetically between your folds — it’s almost too good to be true. You’re spent, brainless, mouth agape and tongue lolling out with drool overflowing from the sides when Haruchiyo finishes in you. He can make out broken parts of your speech: feeble efforts of voicing his name.

Not Mikey’s. His.

“You’re mine to play with now,” he says, throwing his head back in laughter at your pitiful mewls. “What do you think? You don’t have any objections, do you?”

Without thinking, with a heightened lust that betrays all logical thought, he sheathes himself again, all the way to the brim with a heady groan. The cum still potent and thick inside your hole spills out and paints his cock in a hot mess of liquid.

Your mouth opens in a silent scream, eyes glazed over with so much pleasure that you look as if you were far, far above the clouds.

“I'll take that as a yes.”

#tw yandere #tw noncon #tw overstimulation #mikey x reader #tokyo revengers smut #yandere mikey #yandere tokyo revengers #sano manjiro x reader #haruchiyo x reader #yandere haruchiyo sanzu #🐝; sweet syrup #tw bloodplay #tw degradation #tw infidelity #tw mindbreak #chiyu; dark #tokyo rev x reader

[scorchedhearth]

Hi! I found your notes on my anti-honest ask very interesting! So if I interpret what you say right in means that you think it's a terrible idea, but a logical conclusion? Could you elaborate on that more? I'm very curious and I'm not super familiar with lanterns lore so it's always nice to learn more.

hey! yeah, that’s what i meant. i maintain that jason should not interact with lantern lore, a/ because the batfam is already annoying enough as it is they don’t need more books or to interfere more than they do and b/ it doesn’t make sense for him to go on space adventures and leave gotham, he is a pretty grounded character and i dont see him involved in the kind of fights or situations lanterns are, he works best as a minor league character. so that’s why it’s a terrible idea for me

but his ideas and morals are pretty similar to sinestro’s and his corps, the whole control by fear idea. jason’s deal as red hood is that with his threat of death he can reign in and control crime in a way bruce who doesn’t kill cannot, and even bruce’s use of fear as batman, hiding in the shadows, etc, is undermined by his underlying hope, he doesn’t kill and will never use lethal or total solutions because he has hope and believes in a better future, which in turn the city is influenced by. jason doesn’t believe in that, he doesn’t rely on hope or love, he’s fueled by his anger and the use of fear against the criminals to make them do what he wants

which is the same thing sinestro uses (and i’m mostly thinking of sinestro corps sinestro, although even before the whole yellow corps thing he was already one to use fear for control, as shown by his work on korugar as a green lantern). to put it simply, sinestro’s backstory is that he was a green lantern who wa excellent before being banned from the glc, he had a near-perfect record and the most peaceful sector, and he prided himself on the control he had over it. on his home planet korugar, and by extension throughout his sector, he basically instilled a totalitarian rule where everyone was too afraid to act out because of the punishments or consequences they’d face from sinestro and his brand of justice, something he kept on as a villain with his qwardian ring and as an opposing force to the glc, and later on when the sinestro corps was created, they took this philosophy and applied it. the sinestro corps are powerful in the universe because they use fear, inducing fear in others with their rings and constructs and being fueled by that emotion from within themselves and from others but also by being feared by the universe for what they’ll enact if people don’t follow their orders, which is pretty similar to how jason thinks and works in gotham. it’s jason’s methods pushed to the extreme, which is why making him interact with other lanterns, especially as red hood, should raise some flags for them because they’ve spent years fighting sinestro, who is one of if not the biggest threat and villain they face

the biggest difference is that jason applies this only to criminals and things related to it, he doesn’t patrol the city threatening to shoot anyone who does something bad, he lets bad things happen because he believes crime will always exist and cannot be stopped, so he only threatens big actors like mafias or drug rings instead of small people who don't have a big reach, and he forces them to act in ways he approves, crimes he judges correct. sinestro is more about total control and forced peace, where any crime, even minor, will be highly punished and anyone, ‘bad’ and ‘good' alike, will face consequences if they act out. but the root is there and shared between the two, which is something the green lanterns do not follow, they are here to help and assist when they’re needed not to rule over other beings with fear and threats, free will and not forcing themselves or people into situations is a big part of what the corps believes. that’s why parallax was such a terrible thing to happen to the corps, because lanterns are not supposed to decide to re-write history or go to such extreme lengths as hal did (in addition to all the murdering and violence), and why as soon as jason says something along the lines of ‘the only way to help gotham is to make criminals afraid of myself and consequences they could face so they act in the ways i judge correct’ it should not be overlooked by other green lanterns

#and i include kyle in the lanterns at large #he didn't face sines tro as much as the others but he knows him #asks #exhausted-pigeon

[ao3feed-brucewayne]

Illusion

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/mc6SQrq

by STLHero

To the team and the majority of the Justice League, she was just someone that didn't follow their beliefs. That she was some kind of cold-blooded woman, who simply believed that all villains should die. Yet, the shadows of her past would come back to haunt her and she would forever be forced to confront the past that she wished to bury.

Words: 2035, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Young Justice (Cartoon), Naruto

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Categories: F/M

Characters: Uzumaki Naruto, Uzumaki Naruko, Bruce Wayne, Kon-El | Conner Kent, Wally West, Clark Kent, Kyuubi | Nine-tails | Kurama

Relationships: Pairings are undecided - Relationship

Additional Tags: Female Uzumaki Naruto, Crossover, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Smart Uzumaki Naruto, Uzumaki Naruto Needs a Hug, Friendship, Angst, Family, Morally Grey Uzumaki Naruto, Tags May Change, Minor Character Death

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/mc6SQrq

#IFTTT #bruce wayne #batman #the dark knight #the cape crusader #gotham #dc universe #ao3 #ao3feed

[davidmann95]

So RWBY/Justice League is apparently a crossover that's actually going to happen. Of the little we know right now, how do you think that's going to pan out?

Anonymous said: Those questions about Superman and Batman in RWBY seem prescient, because I'm hearing that an official crossover is in the works

Anonymous said: Um, so there's a legit Justice League/RWBY crossover coming

Anonymous said: So, that official DC/RWBY crossover, huh?

Anonymous said: So, how about that DC/RWBY cross, eh?

Anonymous said: No more speculating how Superman would fit into RWBY when DC themselves are providing their own answer XD

The immediate thing that leaps out beyond the Kingdom Hearts* level of utterly out of nowhere berserk this premise is: while the RWBY comic had a couple minor sequel hooks, and I don’t know how it did in its original digital chapters or in trade, as a monthly periodical it was selling poorly enough that DC didn’t bother to print its last physical issue after the return from the Coronavirus shutdown, and while I thought it was great a lot of fans complained about its art and characterization throughout. I hoped for that sequel, sure, but I wasn’t expecting the book to be regarded internally as anything but a sales failure, nevermind not only continuing it but tripling down in the most extreme and bizarrely specific way possible that’s neither intuitive (unless you have special interests like me) nor surface-level ridiculous enough like Batman/Elmer Fudd that people will buy it just to see how it works. I don’t understand why this comic is happening when no one but me wanted this.

(* The Kingdom Hearts comparison is apt because they were similarly close to the top of things I’d love to see cross over with the DCU that would obviously never, ever happen because that’s too precise and random a combination of my interests. Even if this is legally possible where that isn’t, that would still be conceptually simpler.)

I was asked a couple times in the past about how Superman or Batman could make sense in RWBY’s setting, and it turns out I was closer with the latter than the former - that rather than a dimension-hopping traditional crossover, this is reverse-engineering what the assorted members of the League would look like if they had always been part of Remnant ala JLA/Planetary, some of the old DC/Marvel crossovers, or the more recent Batman/The Shadow. Which actually fits really well with the series regularly evoking assorted fairy tales and mythologies with their characters; this bunch is just one more set to be added. Though that raises several more thoughts and questions:

* The solicit refers to them as Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, and Diana Prince, but will they actually be referred to as such in the story, and will people comment on them not fitting with the color-based naming conventions of that world? Or will they be renamed and evoke their sources purely through iconography, ala Ruby not literally being Little Red Riding Hood?

* How much will the origins of the assorted characters be changed? Batman, Cyborg, and Aquaman would all make perfect sense within the ‘rules’ of the setting with few major alterations, but will Superman still be from Krypton and Green Lantern a space ranger, or will they simply be ordinary humans with thematically reminiscent backstories and Semblances/weapons that evoke the classic powers? I think the latter could work, but I imagine the former is more likely (even if Bennett might keep it vague on some of the details to preserve the aura of mystique and avoid changing the shape of the world too radically) simply because everyone’s surely aware that fans would complain about being ‘ripped off’ for getting the characters ‘in name only’ otherwise.

* Speaking of changes to fit the setting, between being a Faunus and the apparent low-tech traditional armor look of his suit, is Bruce Wayne in here not operating from a position of wealth? You’d just think as a given the Wayne family would be easily plopped in as business rivals to the Schnees and Alfred would be on a first name basis with Klein, but it seems Bennett might have something very different in mind. Also, little disappointing he simply has a katana rather than those collapsible batarangs that turn into swords that Ellis always gave him which would fit perfectly here. And, as so many have already asked: how miserable is he every second of every day in a world where everything is also a gun. At least this isn’t a universe where anyone’s gonna think he’s irresponsible for training teenage sidekicks.

* And if we’re going into individual characters: RWBY Barry Allen is adorable, what the hell. He just looks so dopey and hapless, I sure hope he doesn’t ever have to die to stop the Anti-Monitor. We’re definitely getting a meeting with Harriet that retcons in that he’s the other person with a speed Semblance she mentioned running into, and if he’s tapping into the Speed Force then the jokes that that’s what Harriet does are probably gonna become at least a little bit canon.

* Are the Themyscirans magic, given all magic has a very important common root in this world?

* I don’t think there’s a dud redesign in the bunch? These are all really inspired in their own ways, which is good because unlikely as it seems this is I believe the first time we’ve really gotten any sort of official interpretation of “here’s what the DCU would look like as a Shonen”. Go ahead and say the hell with it and make it Earth 28, I’ve thought before making that an anime Earth would fit with the map.

(By Ag_Nonsuch)

* Bunch of obvious ways these characters can play off of each other: Ruby is paralleled with Wonder Woman on the cover, and I’m curious how Bennett will play that, but she makes most sense next to Flash, a super-fast fan made good, or Superman, a character she so deeply if unintentionally evokes on so many levels I felt I had to make clear when describing her that I didn’t solely appreciate her as a psuedo-Superman analogue. Weiss makes sense up against Batman either as a wealthy heir or a Faunus who’s likely faced his share of pain from the Schees who either way are cold perfectionists defined by inner pain stemming from their families, or Wonder Woman/Aquaman as fellow ‘royalty’. Yang is paralleled with Superman on the cover and that makes sense with the two country bruisers with issues regarding their lost parents, though she’d also make sense with Aquaman as the ‘temperamental’ members a lot of the time of their respective teams, or Cyborg as they both deal with their relationships with their bodies after requiring prosthesis. And Blake pretty much has her pick: like Superman she uses an article of clothing to ‘pass’ and shares the commitment to justice, she and Batman are dark children of privilege (or not in this case, though in this world they’re both Faunus), she and Wonder Woman both left the island homes where their people were safe to try and make the rest of the world better, she and Aquaman are both Faunus royalty, and Green Lantern is about overcoming great fear and in Jessica Cruz’s case specifically about the guilt of running away.

* Will this be entirely flashbacks to the pre-series/Beacon years, or will those be flashbacks set from a ‘present’, and if so when? What happened between the siege of Haven and the train setting off for Argus is the most loosely-defined period in the story and is right on the heels of the end of the original RWBY mini, so I’d imagine it fitting here. And given they apparently join together “to take on a force unlike anything they've seen before” rather than purely the character work of that previous book, what might that be?

* Hey, superhero comics/superpowers as an idea already exist in this universe, will that come up?

* If we can get one single scene in this and it’s going with a “yes they’re still aliens and magic and whatnot” premise I want Clark, who hasn’t thought of being Superman yet and therefore is still at least somewhat hiding his powers, being wracked with guilt over not pursuing becoming a Huntsman and therefore not being there at the Fall of Beacon. Which is a ridiculous thing to take the blame for, but of course he would, he’s Clark, culminating in trying to apologize to JNR for Pyrrha dying he feels in part because he was a coward (when they don’t even have the faintest concept for why he would think he should have been there or could have done anything).

* Once all’s said and done, how is their presence in the world justified as not being a factor in the series proper? It’s simple if they’re ‘ordinary’ analogues who can go off to quietly have adventures elsewhere, but if not then some of them either have to be shuffled off stage or presumably left with their stories incomplete, with a little afterward of “and they went on to be the greatest heroes of all...later, after the scope of team RWBY’s main adventures so that we never have to directly address them again” to avoid them becoming unavoidable major factors in the war against Salem.

In the end, will it be DC’s best comic? No, though I imagine one of their better ones this year. Will it be among the ones I look forward to most each month? Right up there with Yang and Reis’s Batman/Superman baby, this is a miracle freak of fate and I’m gonna appreciate the universe bending over backwards to make entertainment for me and me alone while it lasts. Given I finally checked out RWBY in the first place because I was curious about Bennett’s original comic, this is a heck of a full-circle moment.

#RWBY #Justice League #Batman #Flash #Wonder Woman #Superman #Green Lantern #Aquaman #Cyborg #Barry Allen #Jessica Cruz #Ruby Rose #Weiss Schnee #Blake Belladonna #Yang Xiao Long #JNPR #Marguerite Bennett #Aneke #Stephanie Pepper #Emanuela Lupacchino #Opinion

[aros001]

Going in blind: Watching season 3 for the first time. Random thoughts.

Episode 1: I know in the original series She-Ra was the sister of He-Man so I'm curious how much of that will be carried over to this series. Not saying He-Man has to make an appearance, same as how Batman didn't need to show up in Teen Titans. That was Robin's story, not his, and similarly this is Adora's story, not Adam's. Regardless, it makes sense why Hordak was so annoyed with the baby Adora in Shadow Weaver's flashbacks. To SW, there was something different and special about the baby, but to Hordak, whom seems familiar with the world before Mara separated Etheria from the rest of the universe, including Eternia potentially, Adora is just another "First One" child like he's seen many times before. Special in comparison to those who only know Etheria.

Great clap-back from Catra to Hordak, and not entirely unfounded. It's debatable how much he actually cares about conquering Etheria. He has others leading his forces in his war yet all his focus is on his portal creation.

According to Entrapta, productivity of the Horde is up 400% ever since Catra became Hordak's 2nd in command. I wondering how much of that is Catra's direct doing? Is she genuinely just that good of a commander? Is it because she's properly delegating and Scorpia has been handling most of the load? Or is this just because it's in comparison to Shadow Weaver? Entrapta said Catra's focus on First Ones' tech has been greatly aiding them and SW definitely focused more on magic, which was an aid mostly to herself since everyone else in the Horde seems to fight only with weapons and technology. And most of what she saw of SW while she was Hordak's 2nd was her being obsessed with bringing back Adora rather than fighting the war.

Episode 2: Let's see... Hordak's easily an adult and Entrapta is...[checks google] late twenties, early thirties. Oh good, then let's sail this ship!

But yeah, that was a heck of a backstory for Hordak. This reminds me of a video by a Youtuber named Savage Books comparing the villain Steppenwolf in the theatrical and Snyder Cut versions of Justice League and how, while he still wasn't a great villain, just a small addition made him a much better villain, that being a failure in his past and the desire just to go home. And in this case, Hordak is the much better, or at least way more developed, version of that. One of many clones of Hordak Prime but having a defect that labelled him a failure and had him cast out to Etheria, a "backwards world" as he's called it before. If he can conquer Etheria, perhaps by building a portal that'll bring forward Prime's army, he believes that'll prove to Prime that he is not a failure and that he can return home to rejoin his forces. Just this bit of backstory adds SO MUCH to Hordak, including new insights on his past interactions, and keeps him from being a flat character like theatrical version Steppenwolf. His lack of tolerance for failure makes sense when he himself is trying to prove that he's not. It gives him compelling motivation to want to conquer Etheria beyond just power and greed. Not motivation you're meant to agree with but one you can still understand.

I like the story with Huntara too. It's a nice little tie-in to something Adora was talking about with Glimmer and Bow last episode. Adora defected from the horde, not because she was different but rather very much in spite being very much like every other soldier there. She wanted to believe Shadow Weaver may have at least some goodness in her too and now we have Huntara as a fellow defector who realized the evils of the Horde, even if she chose to stay out of the war entirely after.

Episode 3: I legit thought Catra stabbed the goat lady for a second.

After Scorpia asking her why don't they just stay in the wastes I'm seeing a bit of a parallel between Catra and Hordak. They've both found a place where they can be the top dog, where they can do and have basically anything they want; her with the wastes and him with the Horde. They can be happy. ...But there's still this pull they're feeling to somewhere else. Catra back to the Horde and Hordak back to Prime. Because they feel they have to prove something; prove that they're not failures. They could be happy but they can't let go.

And that scene between Adora and Catra at the end. That was such a great line read from Catra's actor. "She left me for you. Everything that's happened is because of you." I got chills.

Minor note: While I'm only judging off the Mara hologram, which didn't have color, I do think the She-Ra outfit looks better with pants than shorts like Adora's She-Ra form. I think it makes it look sleeker, if that makes any sense.

Episode 4: Catra's spiral has turned into a drill and its taking her down as far as she can go. Though something I had to a laugh a little at myself over was that my biggest "Catra, no!" reaction wasn't to her wanting to open the portal but rather when she lied to Hordak and said Entrapta let the princesses in. She was actually a positive influence on Hordak's life and Catra with one move just destroyed that relationship and all progress Hordak had been making.

I'm guessing there's going to be some kind of long-term effect from Shadow Weaver continuously siphoning off Glimmer's magic. The woman is basically a parasite and the magic she uses is very different from the kind Glimmer does. I can't believe it never occurred to me that since Shadow Weaver trained Glimmer's father there might be a connection there between the two of them later in the story. While we don't know about anything that might've happened after she left, SW clearly had enough affection for Micah still to not kill him. I could see her trying to take Glimmer on as a student later like she did him.

Episode 5: There is something kind of hilarious about it being Scorpia's jealousy of Catra and Adora's closeness that causes her to be the first one after Adora to pick up that something is off.

11 is my favorite of the Doctor Who Doctors so naturally I'm comparing all this to the crack in Amy Pond's bedroom wall. Whatever goes in gets forgotten about and basically never existed. Though does that mean Bright Moon isn't going to remember the Horde? Basically that entire place got sucked up in the collapsing reality. There shouldn't be at war anymore because their enemy literally no longer exists.

Adora and Catra had their own little Star Trek 3 moment there.

Adora: "If we don't help each other, we'll die here!"

Catra: "Perfect! Then that's the way it shall be!"

Catra's just so far down her spiral she doesn't even care about getting her own win, just so long as Adora doesn't get one, despite just minutes ago clearly loving having Adora back in her life and on her side, to the point was trying to resist remembering the old reality. Her "perfect" world was them together again but when given the chance (another of many. I love those cuts to their past woven in there) she slapped the hand away.

I'm sure I'm wrong but I'm starting to theorize Madam Razz is actually Mara and just at some point went kind of crazy and started thinking as and Mara were two different people.

Episode 6:

"You are everything I ever wanted in a son. This... This is everything I ever wanted in a life. ...But I've got responsibilities, Van. And...I have to...go now."

-Superman, Justice League Unlimited: For the Man Who Has Everything

That was my favorite episode of JLU, where Superman is trapped in this world that isn't real but still perfect in every way, and the only way out was to give up everything he'd ever wanted, including a son he remembers watching grow up, even if it never really happened. With a similar premise, this definitely helped elevate Angela up a bit for me, whom I was kind just meh with before. I didn't dislike her but I didn't really care much for her either. This episode gave her a lot to work with though, with the heavy sacrifice she made. Not just saying behind to pull out the sword but just simply forcing herself to accept her husband is gone and not coming back. I was right that they wouldn't remember the Horde, but I definitely didn't think of the full effects of them never existing. They never exist, Bow never becomes a rebel instead of a scholar like his dads wanted. They don't exist, Micah never dies in battle against them. Glimmer gets to grow up with her father in her life. Everyone, most especially Angela, has to reject everything they would love to be real in favor of what actually is.

I'm guessing we're going to have Shadow Weaver taking advantage of this situation, trying to act like a teacher and mother-figure to Glimmer now that she's basically a orphan.

I talked before about how Catra and Hordak seem to have a parallel between them, especially regarding failure. Catra seems like she has a very hard time accepting her own failures and mistakes and thus why she more or less uses Adora as a mental scapegoat for all of it. Nothing is ever really her fault, it's Adora's, or Shadow Weaver's, or Hordak's. It makes for a great moment when Adora finally punches back, both literally and figuratively. She's not going to accept responsibility for Catra's actions anymore. She gave Catra every chance to make the right choice and she didn't, so now she has to finally live with the consequences. Heck of a glare She-Ra gave Catra at the end. Very much a "If I ever see you again..." and it certainly scared Catra, at least for a moment.

Now, someone go save Entrapta from Beast Island!

Season 3 verdict: Easily the best season thus far. I know this was technically the second half of season 2 but even in comparison to the full season 1 there was just so much that happened in this, so much that got revealed, and so, so many moments of emotion or tension. Weirdly I feel kind of disappointed that Hordak Prime is probably going to come in now and be the new big villain. I really like our Hordak's motivation and Prime seems like he might just be the generic conqueror for power that Hordak seemed like he was going to be at first. Not saying those types can't work. I love All For One from My Hero Academia and Frieza from Dragon Ball. Those guys are pure evil and selfishness, but they also have a captivating presence/charisma to them.

Naturally, since I bring her up the most out of all the characters, I'm very curious to see what happens with Catra now. She's basically nuked every positive relationship she had with anyone. Entrapta's gone, she threatened Scorpia, Hordak's not going to trust anyone including her anymore now that he thinks Entrapta's betrayed him, and Adora firmly sees her as an enemy. She has no one (those under her direct command don't count) and it's entirely her own fault.

Original Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrincessesOfPower/comments/o0trfz/going_in_blind_watching_season_3_for_the_first/

#she ra #she ra spop #random thoughts #reddit repost

[rebuiltbionicle]

OC: Voakol

Voakol was a notorious crime lord sporadically active in the trade cities of the Southern Continent. An ex-Dark Hunter of ambiguous origins, she carved a reign of terror across every settlement she and her minions graced, confounding all efforts by Toa and any others to apprehend her. Though hardly the only crime lord the Matoran Universe ever saw, and nowhere near the most powerful, Voakol was the most infamous and remains the image of crime in the biomechanical conscience.

Voakol was a member of the Orani species. A great deal of effort has been put into interviewing Orani caravans and settlements to see if they could identify a missing member of theirs that could have been Voakol. This is impractical, since rebuilding bodies is a thing and hundreds of Orani had left their communities without telling where they were heading. The most popular theory was that Voakol was a bureaucrat in the League of Six Kingdoms that was sentenced to death for embezzlement but escaped. The Shadowed One personally hypothesised that she was a survivor of the Orani he drove from Odina, seeking revenge.

Voakol enlisted in the Dark Hunters very early in the organisation’s history. She impressed the Shadowed One with an excellence in infiltration and an overall competence in combat. She was given the codename Prowler and made to run “collection” missions, which in essence was thievery. Over time, the Shadowed One began to suspect Voakol of plotting his overthrow. Having gathered plenty of other recruits with her talents, the Shadowed One sold Voakol out to the Sontynn Clan (a criminal organisation based on the Southern Continent) she was sent to steal from. The Sontynns had her thrown down a flooded open shaft mine.

After a few years absence, Voakol reemerged, killing the Sontynn Prime and assuming control of the organisation. The Sontynn were kept in line through threat of death; the attempt to expel Voakol led to some fairly gruesome electrocutions. Their usual rackets were replaced by a spree of mass poisoning in Lela Metru, culminating flooding the streets with it via airship. The airship was shot down and Voakol was believed to have perished with it. The Sontynn Clan was hunted to the last by Toa and the whole affair considered concluded.

After another few decades absence she reappeared in Tobin Metru, and would spend the rest of her career around the Lela, Tobin, Emoni, and Ordrid Metrus. Voakol would usually rally a few desperates as her minions, go on a murderous spree, and disappear for a few years after narrowly avoiding capture. Though nowhere near the most powerful crime lord in the corrupt Southern Continent port cities, and her actions fairly minor compared to them, she terrified the public like no others did. Stories about her were told well beyond the confines of the cities she frequented.

Her acts were numerous and difficult to fully encapsulate. “Voakolologists” ceaselessly debate the “canon” acts of hers and which were simply similar to her style. Many theorise that there were multiple Voakols sharing the identity, and that the original perished with her airship. This is generally assumed false but is convuluted by the time she chose to create dozens of body double of herself. That story is one worth elaborating on:

Some centuries after her return, Voakol was married to a Krerdu named Ouzon. Her motives are unclear, since there was no practical gain for her. Though it seems out of character, it’s likely she just really cared about them. They were partners in crime for some hundred and forty years until Ouzon was arrested by the Brotherhood of Makuta and forced to serve as a indentured soldier. Voakol was incensed and dedicated herself to hounding their platoon to try and rescue them. The Brotherhood caught on and recalled them to Destral. Voakol, against better judgement, tried to infiltrate the island to rescue them. Her minions were captured upon landing, while Voakol made it to the fortress before capture.

According to Brotherhood records made public after the Reformation, after Voakol’s capture Botar arrived to take custody of her. The Makuta remembered Botar from his taking of the Barraki, and confronted his right to take their prisoner. Given the Barraki were never heard from again, Teridax would have been happy to let him take her, but unfortunately Icarax was in charge. Icarax started to fight Botar (which the Brotherhood record blames on Botar being undiplomatic, while Voakol claimed to have manipulated them) during which Voakol was able to flee and hid within the labyrinthine fortress for some time before escaping. Ouzon disappeared after these events. They likely died under Brotherhood servitude, though a fringe theory claimed they became the Dark Hunter Guardian. This is unlikely; Voakol would have known about it and done something about it, and so would the Shadowed One.

When she reemerged, she began brainwashing and modifying other Orani into duplicates of herself. She was obviously paranoid about being caught, though it’s only after the Order revealed itself that it’s understood she was fearful of the teleporting Botar snatching her away. She suffered severe insomnia and went partially mad. She lashed out even more violently than usual and the other crime lords of the port cities chose to cull her organisation. She escaped and went missing for some centuries.

In her absence, the port cities made a earnest effort to cull organised crime. Voakol returned in the Clans’ death throes, and made an attempt to turn the cities back into crime ridden hell holes, but failed. However, the head of the Utror Trade Company approached her. They intended to turn the trade ports of the Southern Continent into their own personal fiefdoms, and wanted hired muscle more on hand than the Dark Hunters to deal with dissenters. Voakol became Queen of Crime across the southern Metrus, though she was clearly on Utror’s leash and hated it.

The Utror Trade Company was dissolved in the Continental War and the cities Voakol frequented sacked by the Northerners. In the chaos of war many soldiers and Toa took it upon themselves to try and kill Voakol once and for all, but again she vanished. By this time Voakol had become a legend in her own right. She became a public domain villain in fictional stories, and on the darker note one of the bandit tribes of the Southern Continent inland modeled themselves after her. One possibly apocryphal story claims that Voakol took command of the Voakol Tribe to fight against the Concealed Eternals.

Voakol would only been seen sporadically until the end of the Matoran Universe, with century long gaps between her bloody reappearances. Toa, Makuta, Dark Hunters, and more domestic authorities offered rewards in excess of a hundred million widgets for her head (or live capture in case of the Toa). Voakol’s final confirmed appearance was on Hagah Nui, during the beginning of the Reign of Shadows. She and her minions attempted a takeover of the city as her private playground. The Shadow Toa army forged on Destral dealt with her. The confrontation ended with her being hurled from the city’s facsimile Coliseum. Her body was gathered up and confirmed dead. Makuta had the corpse paraded across a dozen cities as a demonstration of a new age.

Some have claimed this was a propaganda stunt by the Makuta using a duplicate, and that Voakol escaped once again. There are claims she changed identity again and fought under the Barraki in their rebellion, though there is no evidence of this. There have been no sightings of Voakol since the Great Evacuation.

...

Voakol’s appearance and traits were well documented. She was an Orani and had the typical lean humanoid figure of one, though was shorter than average. She was not particularly agile, but light-footed and a prodigious sprinter. Voakol’s casing was primarily purple and secondarily green, and notably used gold Kanohi and tools.

Voakol used multiple masks across her career, but was best recognised as wearing a Kanohi Volitak. She was skilled with the Mask of Stealth; she knew its potential and limitations inside out. She could disappear better than most Huna users, and it was a skill she learned to use even without it. She had a fondness for acids, poisons, and electricity, and had a rhotuka launcher with all three powers.

Stories told about Voakol gave a great variety of motives and ideologies to her, mostly about some sort of nihilistic view of the world where nothing mattered, or that she was trying to bait the Toa into breaking the Toa Code to stop her. People who met Voakol and lived have stepped forward and pointed out that she was nowhere near that sophisticated. They report that she was a narcissist that enjoyed killing to make herself feel powerful, that all her schemes were a giant game to her, and that she was a giant coward afraid of any consequences. They do concede that Voakol was just as intelligent, patient, cunning, and strategising as usually portrayed.

#bionicle #bionicle rebuilt #oc #figures #sorry this doesn't really seem up to scratch #I just felt like writing it #Enjoy my edgy Joker-ripoff from that dream I had #I’m only half satisfied with this but it was getting way too long #I want to make a more wholesome OC next

[that-shamrock-vibe]

TV Review: Crisis on Infinite Earths (Spoilers)

Part One: Supergirl

Spoiler Warning: I am posting this review the day after the episode airs in the U.S. so if you have not yet seen the first part of the crossover or are waiting for the entire crossover to become available then don’t read on until you have.

Overview:

We have SO MUCH to discuss! So much so that my Easter-Egg section which is usually more or less a minor tag-on at the end of these reviews is possibly going to be the same size as a lot of these other sections we are going through because, as promised by Marc Guggenheim, Easter has come early and we were treated to quite a few very tasty Easter-Eggs, one of which had me cheering at the screen.

But with Part One of this 5-episode crossover already giving us so much action, drama and emotion, it’s not only a question on how the Multiverse survives, but how the rest of the crossover does as well.

In the Beginning:

I love a good theory of evolution story, and we have heard in Arrow over the past season that The Monitor has been around for eons so it stands to reason he was around at the start of creation itself.

I just the sentiment of “In the beginning there was one singularity that soon spawned a multiverse”. It’s a lot like Doctor Who’s first rock theory from “The Runaway Bride”. I don’t know enough about the beginning of all life to actually determine what created the universe, I am more inclined to believe evolution than creationism, but I do like this idea of one reality spawning many.

I wasn’t so crazy about the visuals of this, especially considering in the past whenever we have viewed the Multiverse it’s always been within the Speed Force so we’re used to that blue energy rather than this red darker energy but it seems to be in-keeping with the theme of the crossover so I’m going with it.

Also LaMonica Garrett, who deserves some sort of award recognition not only for appearing as a series regular in both Arrow and The Flash this season but also wearing what I’m sure is the heaviest outfit created, but selling it very well, even the cheesy prophet of doom voice he has down rather well.

Multiverse Annihilation:

Alright so this was obviously to be expected that we would see some if not a lot of Earths be destroyed during this crossover, but my god they don’t pull punches in starting by letting you know “Yeah we’re killing off a lot”.

Now the Earths we see erased during the opening of this episode are Earth-9, Earth-66, Earth-89 and Earth-X. Of those four, we have only ever seen Earth-X which was the Nazi-ruled Earth from two crossovers ago.

Now while there was a great and uncredited cameo here from it and we’ll discuss that further down, would anyone really be sad if a reality where the Nazis won and ruled was wiped out? I know there are inhabitants on that world and for the most part they are innocent and good people, but you would think just maybe find a way to evacuate them like they do on Earth-38 later and then if it goes extinct then fine because it’s not exactly a good reality.

Both Earth-66 and Earth-89 also has great Easter-Eggs just in the name and we’ll discuss that also further down but it is interesting that both Earths-66 and 89 only focused on Gotham City whereas this was the Supergirl episode of the crossover.

Rallying the Team:

Okay so Harbinger, who either was Lyla Michaels but is now an emissary of the Anti-Monitor or simply likes using her Task Force X codename, appears to all the major heroes just as we saw her do in last week’s episode of Arrow and summons them all to Earth-38 aka Supergirl’s Earth.

I have to say as well, I know they’re on a TV budget and can’t really afford to have as many characters in one scene as say Avengers: Endgame did, but the fact they cheapened out and only gave us two Legends (Sara and Ray), rather then also showing Nate, Constantine, Mick and Charlie as well does seem a tad unfair especially considering they’ve been absent from screens the longest, some may say for the better considering the way their show is going.

Also, I will probably talk about this more with the Batwoman episode tomorrow, but they need to clarify the timeline of her show. When we first met her in Elseworlds last year she was Batwoman, but the start of her season saw her become Batwoman, and now she’s still hunting for Alice? How long has it been?

Also, as expected, Tyler Hoechlin’s Superman and his Lois Lane join the party after Argo City is destroyed and they send of their newborn son in a pod to safety. Argo City’s destruction also sees the death of Kara’s mother Alura played by Erica Durance but because I know who’s coming in tonight’s episode and the possibly jokes they’ll make about it I am okay with that as a Smallville fan.

I do always like it in these crossovers when the heroes either first meet or reunite, this time Oliver’s daughter but from the future Mia Smoak and Batwoman are officially introduced as Batwoman reveals herself as Kate Kane, to Oliver’s bemusement.

I do wish also that there was more time spent on character interaction because that is usually what I enjoy most about these crossovers, we had a little bit of that with Brainy and Ray, but Elseworlds I felt established a great repour for Batwoman and the Trinity yet that wasn’t really seen here.

My biggest complaint in this Supergirl episode though is that both Brainy and J’onn were never seen in their natural forms. I know it’s costly and timely to have them look like Brainiac 5 and the Martian Manhunter, but when they just look like Jesse Rath and David Harewood, no matter how great these guys are it’s a comic book crossover event and I would love to see more comic-booky character looks.

Alright so, Harbinger sits down the newly formed or reformed or updated team because they’ve come together now four times to help save a world or multiple worlds or now reality itself and just need to be called the Justice League and get it over with, but anyway I digress.

She instructs the team that the tower that randomly appears was one of many placed by the Monitor on Earths he thought were at risk...why he didn’t just place them on every god damn Earth if he could see the future is beyond me but that’s what we’re getting.

I did like a couple of interactions before going into action where Oliver seamlessly interacted with Barry, Sara and Mia without making it seem forced.

My favourite was the interaction with daughter Mia when he effectively passes on the mantle of Green Arrow to her despite the fact she’s not ready to lose him. I don’t know whether or not the spin-off series focusing on Mia as New Green Arrow has been confirmed yet but we know she will become Green Arrow in the near future.

So Oliver, Mia, Ray and Kate go off and battle the Shadow Demon army that are swarming the tower trying to destroy it for the Anti-Monitor, while Barry, Kara and Clark are off trying to save the people.

I will admit Ray didn’t annoy me quite as much as he has done in recent seasons of Legends during this episode. I did love his interactions with Kate about her suit getting an upgrade and then her asking him to upgrade her batarangs, when Brandon Routh is good he is good and he is pulling double duty in this crossover so let’s hope he’s very good.

Also at this time Lois, because she needs something to do, has gone to Earth-16 with Brainy and Sara to retrieve baby Jonathan who wound up going through a wormhole and ending up on a parallel world...in the future...2046 to be exact.

This was, I feel, there for two reasons. 1) Another Easter-Egg appearance but this time in-house as it references Legends Season 1, but also 2) To still keep the events of “Star City 2046) canon despite the fact that in that episode Connor Hawke was actually John Diggle Jr. and in present day they are not only two separate people but also adoptive brothers...and also we know Oliver is supposed to die so how is he alive in 2046? Well it’s an alternate reality version who apparently can’t remember meeting Earth-1 Sara before.

Our two other teams rallying really only serve to give the rest of the Supergirl cast something to do as Alex enlists Lena to help either build or activate portals to get the inhabitants of Earth-38 to safety while Dreamer and Kelly help get those inhabitants onto ships including the Legion Cruiser that J’onn is piloting because apparently Brainy was given it by the Legion before they left with Winn despite the fact they left in the Legion Cruiser. It doesn’t really make sense but I enjoy seeing that ship again so I am letting it slide.

Saving the Multiverse, Take 1:

This may be quite cynical for me to say but this is what the remainder of the episode was, the first attempt at saving the multiverse because Earth-38 is where The Monitor wanted the heroes to make their stand against the Anti-Monitor.

The Anti-Monitor does not appear in this episode and his army of Shadow Demons are 1) Poorly rendered compared to the likes of the Time Wraiths and 2) Quite easy to defeat when you consider Darkseid has Parademons and even Thanos with his legion of horribles.

In any case while the Supers are trying to fix the tower to make the sky not red which works margingly well before they exhaust themselves, the other heroes are on the ground battling the Shadow Demons. I would have maybe liked if Ray had to cover the Supers while they were doing what they do because it seemed slightly daft that the Shadow Demons wouldn’t try and stop them but that’s what we got.

It was a very small-scale battle and I know we’re only in part 1 and usually it’s the final episode we get the big battle but this was still small scale considering what is at stake here.

The biggest surprise of the battle was Kelly Olsen, who I haven’t really liked all season as she seems pointless other than just being Alex’s girlfriend who always needs saving, apparently has the Guardian armour left to her by James who retired from vigilantism to take over a newspaper in his old hometown and that’s why he left despite never actually being part of these crossovers, his dopplegangers were.

This was also a very low-powered battle. Think about it, the Supers, Flash and Atom all have CGI powers or tech yet we didn’t really see much of it, aside from the Supers trying to fix the tower. Maybe they’re saving the budget for later episodes but it better pay off.

The Monitor comes in as the prophet of doom to basically tell them that they’ve lost this battle but the war still rages, so transports everyone aside from Oliver to Earth-1 Star City.

Oliver refuses to leave and makes one of the most poignent comments I have ever heard him say when The Monitor says “It’s time” and Oliver asks “Has everyone been evacuated” The Monitor responds with “No” so Oliver responds “Then it’s not yet time”. From the trailer I thought this to mean it was time for his death, but actually this was something The Monitor was trying to prevent as he did not see him dying this way, but he does.

Stephen Amell delivers both this line and scene very well. I have never been the biggest Stephen Amell fan and do feel as if he goes to the corny side a little too much but here, given the interactions he had with Barry, Mia and Sara in the episode, and knowing that Arrow is ending and he is supposed to die, it was minorly emotional which is the most emotion he’s ever got out of me.

Fallen Arrow:

The Monitor returns a battered and bleeding Oliver to the Arrowcave in Star City Earth-1 where the rest of the heroes have returned to. Along with the news that they were somewhat successful at evacuating Earth-38 before it was destroyed, it seems that Oliver does actually die in this episode.

First of all, the fact that Supergirl is disheartened to know they didn’t save everyone is stupid because they only worked to evacuate one city compared to the entire planet. Secondly, we know that the episode of Arrow after this crossover will not include Stephen Amell...but to lose him on part one of the crossover does seem like a red herring.

Also I do not think he would die on any other show but his own and that part isn’t until January 14, so I don’t think this is the last of Oliver we’ve seen.

However, out of nowhere, Pariah appears. Pariah is Harrison “Nash” Wells who is the latest Harrison Wells to appear on The Flash and was the main focus of the Crisis teaser at the end of every Arrowverse show over the last two weeks.

I have to say 1) His suit makes him look like Doctor Doom and 2) I haven’t had the time to be as invested with this Wells as I was with Harry Wells or H.R. Wells or even Sherloque Wells to supposedly feel bad for him that he has become Pariah as his penance for freeing the Anti-Monitor.

He is however another harbinger which sounds stupid to say as there is a character literally called Harbinger but not only is Lyla one but so is the Monitor and now Pariah. I’ll be curious to see where this leaves him after the crossover because, unlike almost every crossover before, this is the one that promises ramifications across the multiverse.

Easter-Eggs:

Alright here we go, as I said in the opening Multiverse Annihilation alone, there were multiple Easter-Eggs that not only connect the Arrowverse to various other DC properties but also just have some very cool cameos.

I do have mixed feelings on what they’re doing, as it does look like they are actually trying to combine every DC TV property and possibly movie into the same multiverse which is crazy but it could possibly work.

Titans:

This is the one I cheered at my screen for in a similar way to when they played the Smallville theme while showing their version of the Kent Farm in Elseworlds last year.

As mentioned before, one of the Earths wiped out by Antimatter is Earth-9. On this Earth we focus on San Francisco and two costumed heroes as Antimatter obliterates everything, Hawk and Jason Todd’s Robin. These characters are portrayed by Alan Ritchson and Curran Walters who are the actors portraying these characters in these suits in Titans over on DC Universe.

It was rumoured some time back that Titans would appear in this crossover but never confirmed, I know because for my job I’ve reported on everything to do with Crisis.

Now clearly there’s nothing to say these are the same characters from Titans, particularly as the end of Titans Season 2 saw Jason Todd leave the Titans and we don’t see Nightwing, Dove, Starfire, Raven or Gar, but considering Black Lightning is joining the Multiverse it stands to reason that Titans can as well.

This does also mean that Titans is now on Earth-9, while Arrow, The Flash, Batwoman and Legends are primarily on Earth-1 and Supergirl is on Earth-38.

Batman ‘66

Speaking of other Earths, we have two others that are wiped out in the opening and both focus on Gotham City, why? Well we have Earth-66 which features an elderly gentleman in red walking his dog and seeing the red skies exclaims “Holy Crimson Skies of Death!”.

This gentleman is portrayed by Robin veteran Burt Ward and the character is confirmed to be Dick Grayson of the Batman 1960s series.

This is wrapped up very nicely and honoured in the fact that the Earth is numbered 66 to pay homage to the fact that 1966 is the year the Batman series begun.

Batman ‘89

Similarly, the other Earth we see obliterated is Earth-89. Here we see another Gotham City with a man reading an edition of the Gotham City Gazette that shows a distorted image of Batman with the headline “Batman Captures Joker”.

The man reading the paper is revealed to be Alexander Knox portrayed by Robert Wuhl, reprising his role from the 1989 Batman movie starring Michael Keaton as the Dark Knight and Jack Nicholson as The Joker.

It has also been rumoured before that Michael Keaton would reprise his role as Batman in this crossover, while I still choose to debunk these rumours, it’s official that the 1989 Batman is now canon within the Arrowverse. This takes the Arrowverse from simply being the DC TV Universe to an actual Multiverse spanning TV and Film, something the MCU hasn’t properly managed to do yet.

Star City 2046:

So as mentioned before, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow’s first season had an episode titled “Star City 2046″ where the Legends arrived in a dystopian Star City where Deathstroke’s son Grant Wilson was the new Deathstroke and Connor Hawke was the new Green Arrow and revealed as John Diggle Jr, Diggle’s son which at the time was crazy because Diggle had a daughter Sara before Barry created Flashpoint and replaced Sara with John Diggle Jr...keeping up?

So in the future of this Post-Flashpoint timeline that this universe is now in, we see that Connor Hawke and John Diggle Jr. are two separate people with Connor being the biological son of Ben Turner aka Bronze Tiger and John Diggle Jr now being the leader of the Deathstroke Gang.

This of course caused conflict with that episode of Legends, but because Legends never really follows the rules anyway I think everyone simply let it slide but now we have a loophole way of explaining things.

It turns out that when the Legends travelled to Star City in the year 2046, they also travelled to a parallel Earth, Earth-16. Now this is still in the future so I don’t think they’re saying it’s set, but what they are saying is it still happened and they didn’t overwrite their own lore basically.

We do only see Oliver here, who still has a cybernetic arm from before which Sara remembers and uses to her advantage, but Oliver doesn’t seem to remember that this Sara is not his Sara despite them having a rather candid conversation in that episode.

Also Joseph David-Jones portrayed Connor Hawke of that Earth in “Star City 2046″ so of course it makes sense for him to return as the Connor Hawke of Earth-1 in the future, but why didn’t he appear in this episode if he is already part of the cast of Arrow this season?

The Ray:

Briefest of cameos and unfairly uncredited in my opinion but we see a brief glimpse of Ray Terrill aka The Ray portrayed by Russell Tovey flying through the skies of Earth-X before being obliterated. Tovey first portrayed The Ray in “Crisis on Earth-X” two years ago and was part of the first openly gay male relationship in comic-book history with Wentworth Miller’s Leo Snart.

He then went on to voice the character in his own short-lived animated web series Freedom Fighters, but to see him return in live-action even for a brief uncredited cameo shows how much Tovey respects both the character and this universe and I love him even more for that.

Jonathan Kent:

Alright so I’ve mentioned baby Jonathan a couple of times because we knew Lois was pregnant at the end of Elseworlds last years however now seeing Jonathan Kent Jr. I am excited for what this could mean going forward.

In the comics, Jonathan is the son of Superman and Lois Lane given the full name Jonathan Samuel Kent to honour both his grandfathers and is a Kryptonian-Human hybrid who becomes the new Superboy and teams up with Damian Wayne, the Teen Titans and the Legion of Superheroes.

So when Brainy mentioned him going through a wormhole and time-travelling I thought they may be setting up that he’ll be taken in by the Legion, Mon-El may return with a grown-up version of him later in the season or something, but no he’s safe and Lois has him back.

The one thing I will say about him is I hope the writers don’t relegate Tyler Hoechlin’s already minimal Super-Antics into simply being Super-Dad. The odd dad line is funny but I hope that’s not all he is.

I am going to wait until Part 5 to rank the entire crossover but if they keep the momentum that Part 1 managed to accelerate then this could be the greatest TV accomplishment ever and could even rival Avengers: Endgame in how they literally bring worlds together.

So that’s my review of Crisis on Infinite Earths: Part One, what did you guys think? Post your comments and check out more DC TV Reviews as well as other TV Reviews and posts.

#arrowverse #dc tv universe #dc universe #dc comics #dc #dc multiverse #multiverse #supergirl #supergirl 5x09 #crisis on infinite earths #crisis on infinite earths part one #superman #lois lane #oliver queen #green arrow #clark kent #barry allen #the flash #batwoman #kate kane #alice #arrow #dc's legends of tomorrow #legends of tomorrow #white canary #ray palmer #the atom #brandon routh #the monitor #anti-monitor

[anautisticdragon-blog]

Marvel vs. DC

I've wanted to write this one for a while, but I'm going to sum it up before I begin: DC does diversity and social issues better than Marvel could manage in its wettest, wildest dreams.

That's going to annoy fans. So let's even include my personal bias, just as a disclaimer: I'm really not fond of Marvel's lack of continuity, nor am I a fan of Bendis.

With Morrison's New X-Men, Grant looked at the problems which plagued the X-Men and how every time the books would just go back to telling the same stories. He wanted to unshackle these books from that curse, and he set up the means to do precisely that.

He weaved everything together so masterfully, Corporation X, the second mutant boom, the much needed nod to how mutants aren't all just these beautiful poster models, et cetera. Honestly, how can you stand for the downtrodden if you come across as the one per cent?

Being an X-Man must've had an amazing dental, physical, and mental health plan. No one dared to even be anything less than a perfect icon of the status quo, it was basically what Magneto always wanted. It was really quite difficult to distinguish between what separated him from Xavier.

Grant fixed that. Mutants could be less than beautiful and that was okay, mutants didn't always need to have MacGuffin powers and that was okay too. Then, at the very end, he edited the Marvel Universe to remove mutant prejudice.

That's wild.

It's the end goal of everything they'd just been striving for since the '80s, and the reason they had been locked in this neverending cycle. Now the X-Men could tell new stories. Stories about how it was okay to be interesting, diverse, and not just a living god. It was incredible, I had more hope for the X-Men at that point than I ever had.

Marvel retconned it with the very next issue. Prejudice returns, everyone is beautiful again, and every gift Grant gave them was generally pissed over. Marvel hates continuity. They're so wantonly, gaggingly desperate to tell exactly the same stories over and over and over again.

One of the worst casualties of it all was Beast. Before Morrison, Beast was nothing more than a one-dimensional, Silver Age character. Grant gave him a third-dimension, a dichotomy. Certainly, it was a bit of an old trope (Grant loves those), and yet he used it to give Hank McCoy depth he'd never had in all his years as an X-Man.

Bendis took that away. No more feline Beast for us, no more dichotomy, no more third-dimension. Hank is just a Silver Age airhead again.

Marvel is basically Groundhog Day. This is their problem and I promise you this will all tie together and go somewhere. This Groundhog Day syndrome is at the root of all of Marvel's problems, and why DC are trouncing them right now on every story-telling front.

So, they did it with Iron Man, too.

Tony Stark was always weirdly technophobic for what could only be described as a self-made transhumanist. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you can see him operating on himself to give himself upgrades. Not in the comics.

Warren Ellis was the first to set out to fix this -- Extremis. Extremis was pretty okay. I'd say it was definitely a step in the right direction, but Tony still had this technophobic edge to his personality that caused dissonance in anyone who had any minor level of familiarity with technology.

Tony seemed oddly unfamiliar with the tech he'd supposedly been building. Had it turned out that -- in fact -- Tony was just a pretty face, and the real tinkerer and putterer was hiding in his shadow? That would've been interesting!

They didn't go that way, though. So they had to cure Tony of his technophobia. From Extremis we moved onto Matt Fraction's run where Tony really learned to trust technology; In fact, it proved to be more reliable and faithful to him than people did. His distrust moved away from technology to authority, government, and powerful figures like the Mandarin. This provided a strong focus, it provided the reader with reasons.

It reminds me of Mark Waid and Eobard Thawne. Eobard, the Reverse Flash, was just a two-bit Silver Age airhead of a villain. Just evil because evil, no more to it than that. Waid fleshed him out by having him become an obsessive stalker, a crazed fan whose vision of Barry Allen was so idealised that the real Barry couldn't live up to it.

This gave Eobard Thawne a reason to be Barry's villain. Similarly, Tony's newfound distrust of very powerful people and authority gave him a reason to distrust a self-styled, preening, entitled figure like The Mandarin. A character who fancifully imagined himself as an emperor.

It also allowed Tony to explore technology and realise that he wanted to spend more time simply working on it and helping to create heroes to combat men like The Mandarin than showboating hismelf. It set up the scene for both Rhodey and Pepper to replace him as Iron Corps.

Continuity! Evolution! A bold new di--RETCON! Now Tony's a technophobe again who was starkly (heh) terrified of his old technology and went back to sticks, rocks, and showboating because that's what Tony does at Marvel.

And this brings me to why I dislike Marvel. You might've heard that their editors actually blamed their push for diversity for their waning sales. It couldn't have anything to do with this Groundhog Day syndrome of theirs. No, no no no. Of course not. It has to be diversity, right?

Well, no. And, weirdly, yes? You see, their attitude toward diversity is inauthentic. It isn't genuine. I think everyone's catching on. That black kid who's going to be Iron Man? That's Cat Beast, you see? Soon to be replaced by technophobic Tony, completing the cycle.

The new Lady Thor? Cat Beast. Falcon as Captain America? Cat Beast. It'll all revert. It's because they don't actually have any passion behind it. Why did Falcon become Captain America? Oh, he and Steve Rogers had an argument and now he's wearing Captain America's uniform because reasons.

Then he got Cat Beast'd, now he's Falcon again. Steve Rogers is Captain America again. Groundhog Day, everyone! It's Groundhog Day!

Lady Thor? Lady Thor is there because... Um, er, other realities? Reasons? No one really knows, but everyone knows that it's a gimmick. It's not really intended to stick. She'll get Cat Beast'd, and ultimately replaced by Man Thor again.

I mentioned the Iron Corps, right?

This is because of how DC handled things with the Green Lantern Corps. The best example I've seen yet of HOW YOU DO THIS RIGHT.

Hal Jordan? He's being a space cowboy. John Stewart? He's leading the Green Lantern Corps. Your old favourite lantern? Heavily featured in the Green Lantern Corps. New, young, diversified lanterns? Meet Cruz and Baz!

DC does do it wrong, occasionally. I feel like what they did with Barry and Wally was just a massive clusterfuck. That Barry is still present as the League's only speedster is depressing, it's very much contrary to the Lantern Corps and it feels a little Marvel-y, to be honest. It's all about the editorial staff pushing their tastes.

So DC isn't perfect. No. Are they doing almost everything better, regardless? Heck yes! Do you care about social issues? Check out Green Arrow, Batgirl & the Bird of Prey. Do you want diverse characters? Cyborg, Blue Beetle, New Super-Man and many others have you covered. Do you long for nuanced stories that cover a character's life outside of being a hero? Superman has you covered. Do you want old-fashioned superhero comics? Action Comics, Justice League, and Detective Comics have your back.

DC is inclusive. And... AND AND AND... DC never, ever Groundhog Days. If DC does something? Then it sticks. This is why I respect them so god damned much. Even if it's begrudgingly, sometimes. You know? They deserve it, they really do.

The New 52 was a failure, they knew that. So, what's to be done about that? Reboot it and just forget it ever happened? No! Do something really clever and make all continuity matter, forever! That's what DC had done up until the New 52, so it's not that unexpected, but it is refreshing.

They could've been cowardly and just set the clock back to a pre-52 state. They did actually have some pieces in place for that (Waverider, Pandora, et al). Instead, they did something much, much more compelling. They made it all matter. So any new characters they'd introduced and fleshed out? They got to stay, along with the old stable!

And that's why DC will always be better than Marvel. I mean, you know, along with the fact that I don't think that DC has featured nearly as much snuff porn and women getting kicked in the vagina as Marvel has given us (thanks, Bendis). So that's also a feather in DC's cap.

Plus, when a woman is empowered in DC comics, it doesn't just feel like a silly, colourful, 'this is my l'il Universe which is separate from everything else' gimmick (looking at you, Squirrel Girl, sorry). They really are there, in the prime reality, and working to make a difference.

Batgirl & the Birds of Prey is better than just about anything that Marvel has done in its long history. So we're back to being inclusive, can I talk about that some more? Young readers? You've got young, experimental comics with the Young Animal and Wildstorm imprints. Gay audience? You're covered, too! Especially notable, here? Apollo & Midnighter.

When DC does it, it feels authentic, real, and genuine. They put a lot of heart into the story, to set things up. It's a long, drawn out process of handing over the mantle or switching focus. Sure, they screw up occasionally but for the most part they get that right.

It's not BOOP DIVERSITY GIMMICK, which is very much Marvel's schtick. It's why no one is satisfied with Marvel, not even an old, haggard "SJW" like me. I see Marvel's insensitive, tacky gimmicks for what they really are.

If Marvel cared to understand how to do this even remotely right? Apollo & Midnighter, Batgirl & the Birds of Prey, Shade the Changing Girl, New Super-Man, and... Doctor Endless.

Oh. My. God. Doctor Endless. Here's why I'm inspired to write this. It's not just a tacky BOOP DIVERSITY GIMMICK thing, it's not a magical one issue replacement of an existing character. They put in the effort to create new characters that people would care about, it shows DC cares.

Marvel, by comparison, feels like a soulless corporate machine. They're doing diversity not because it's ethical, or inclusive, or it makes people feel good, but rather because they think they're widening the net to sell more of their hugely overpriced comics.

If you replace five existing characters with LGBTQ versions BECAUSE REASONS (without any actual reasons) in a one issue span? It's meaningless. It’s insulting. It doesn't carry any weight or gravitas. It's hard for people to get behind that as their new hero because it all just happened so suddenly that it feels like a trick, they're feeling like Marvel will tug the rug out from under them the moment those characters lose popularity. They'll be gone as suddenly as they appeared.

Inauthenticity, a lack of genuineness, and just an air of being con men. Along with an inability to ever change, evolve, or grow. This is what I think of Marvel as being, now. Like I said, they had some really obvious chances with X-Men and Iron Man to grow. They could've launched off of Matt Fraction's stories to set up an Iron Man Corps, it would've been glorious. They could've had a number of Iron heroes, each with their own fleshed out story which is separate from Stark's own. No tackiness or gimmicks needed.

And you know Marvel is going to just Cat Beast every diverse character. Give it a couple of years and no one will ever remember any of these people they invented over a one issue span, no one will remember that Falcon was Captain America because it happened and it was gone again so quickly that it was forgettable.

It's Groundhog Day, everyone! A really gimmicky, shady Groundhog Day!

There are actually a lot of characters like that throughout Marvel's history, who've either been forgotten or have lost most of their development due to Marvel's love of the reset button. DC only flirted with the reset button once and it almost doomed them. They learned from that.

So now that Doctor Endless is here, they're now here to stay. They're always going to be in the DC Universe. Everything is. Grant fucking Morrison is in the DC Universe as The Writer or somesuch. Yankee goddamn Poodle and Captain Carrot are still present. I LOVE IT.

With Rebirth, DC has made a stand. They're not going to use the reset button to fix the time they -- thanks to some poor judgement -- flirted with the reset button. They're leaving that thing well, well alone.

So while Squirrel Girl enjoys a short stint of popularity as one of Marvel's gimmicks (and this kills me because I adore Ryan North and love his writing), off in her own Universe? Black Canary exists in the Green Arrow, Birds of Prey, and Justice League of America books being generally just the most kick-ass woman ever.

I used to be such a Marvel fan, it's funny. It's just that I began to notice their over-reliance on that bloody reset button back in the '80s. It got boring by the '90s and I was fed up of it. Morrison's X-Men and Fraction's Iron Man gave me some, infinitesimal glimmer of hope, but...

I watched DC continue to grow, grow, and grow. I mean, I'd always had some love for DC thanks to the DCAU and the Justice League, but I was iffy about the comics because they took away one of my favourite characters as a gimmicky stunt (and that felt like a very Marvel thing to do). With Rebirth? I couldn't stand it any more.

I can forgive DC for its one, flawed, gimmicky stunt. The horrible, egregious error that was the New 52. I forgive you, DC. It's okay. It really is okay. You've done everything to make up for it.

However, Marvel is doing reboot after gimmicky reboot all the time. GROUNDHOG DAY, EVERYONE! All of those new first issues, and nothing ever, ever changes. It's just a new issue one to tell exactly the same stories, just with a shiny, new gimmick! And when diversity and social issues are their shiny, new gimmick? I feel especially dirty.

DC is as authentic as Marvel is just a soulless, corporate beast who's only in it for the money. Yeah, sure, DC is a company, too. Owned by Warner Bros and definitely also in it for that money, but it feels different. You can tell by reading the comics, it really feels genuine.

If DC has a book featuring women? It'll often be written (and sometimes drawn) by women. If DC has a comic book featuring minorities? It'll often be written (and sometimes drawn) by those same minorities. This is really obvious with New Super-Man, Batgirl & the Birds of Prey, and so, so, so many others. It really shows.

And there are just too many honest-to-god genuine things going on at DC -- for those who pay attention -- for me to think it's all just a bunch of clever ploys to draw in the money. There's too much effort. If you're just doing it for the money, you do it like Marvel, and you'll succeed all the more. Marvel is simply better at making money than DC comics has ever been.

Sorry, DC.

But DC comics puts out some damn good comics. And they're trying. It's not gimmicks, they are trying and I can tell. I love them for trying.

You need only look at Doctor Endless to fully understand why DC are trying, whereas Marvel is just taking the piss (and your money).

It genuinely reminds me of the Nostalgiasaurus Parx thing I was talking about, recently. Where it turns out that the tyrannosaur had feathers and scales, it wasn't merely scaly as has been incorrectly reported so frequently of late. When people heard it really might've been a Nostalgiasaurus Parx, though, instead of a Tyrannosaurus Rex? Well, it was like their football team had won, or something. Fireworks, celebrations, people crying in the streets, riots. Crazy shit.

I guess that some of us want to preserve the status quo no matter what, right? Some just want to uphold that, keep it steady, no matter how much jury-rigging they have to do, no matter how much Don Quixote-esque self-delusionary nonsense they have to engage in just to keep the world as this overly simple construct that they already knew everything about.

Others? Well... I imagine that this is a scale, where it kind of slides and it has extremes. But on the other end of this sliding scale? I imagine that people will become more open-minded, they'll actually want a constant evolution of change borne out of an ever growing understanding. They can accept that the world is changing around them. There are likely traits and quirks that get swapped between and around to dictate where on this scale a person sits, but that's how ultimately it seems to be.

It also, quite interestingly, ties back into the toxic ideals of perfection that some people have and how problematic they are. And the importance of valuing being humble and understanding diversity instead of just upholding the status quo as some kind of holy default state that must never, ever be questioned.

Marvel kind of does the status quo thing. Yeah, they have gimmicks, and tomorrow it'll be a new gimmick, but they're doing the same kinds of stories they always have. Miles Morales comes along and could serve as the Spidey on the Streets role that people enjoy, allowing Peter to slip into the background as an older person and enjoy a family life, perhaps even take on a team leadership role. Growth, yo! But, no... Peter's still a small-time bank robbery solvin' sort of guy. Which makes Miles Morales utterly redundant, since that's what they brought him in to do.

So Morales was a gimmick. Peter being a teacher, then Peter being a CEO? Gimmicks. Nothing will stick. Ultimately, Peter's always going to be dealing with gang bangers and hoods. He's always going to be stuck at that frozen point in history, never to evolve, grow, or change. And that's Marvel.

Which is... why I prefer DC, and that's that, I guess?

#marvel comics #dc comics #doctor endless #genderfluid #rant

[fallenworldarising]

Astraea

Real name: Veronica Dantes

Shadow Name: Astraea

Real Age: 34

Apparent Age: late twenties

Path: Obrimos

Order: Silver Ladder

Backstory: Veronica was born as the eldest sibling in a multigenerational family. As she grew up, she gained more and more responsiblities, her hard-working parents relying on her to help raise her younger siblings, to care for her old, wizened grandparents and, hopefully, to excel at classes. It wasn’t an easy life, but thankfully, she was surrounded by love and warmth of familial hearth - it wasn’t a thankless task, especially as her siblings grew as well and started to help her around.

Due to her diligence and smarts, she managed to earn a scholarship in an Ivy League university, majoring in Astronomy (and minoring in Philosophy). During her last year of colleage, she was invited to participate in a study circle by students she didn’t previously associate with - she came from a working-class family, and they were scions of privelage, there simply weren’t enough things they had in common. She agreed, though, finding it prudent to cultivate friendships rather than enmities.

It turned out that the leader of the study circle was a Proxima, working for the Silver Ladder, and she saw potential in Veronica, the strength of conviction she displayed during debates in philosophy classes, and the longing her soul felt when she touched the stars in her studies. When she was sure that Veronica was a Sleepwalker and an Awakening waiting to happen, the Proxima introduced the student to the Adepts of her Order.

Her Awakening almost seemed like a natural progression of her academic studies - she took to her Thrice Great mentor’s teachings quickly and easily, although she had to be convinced that the Ptolemaic model of the world they use is merely a Supernal correspondence, rather than something they would argue really exists - the Planetary Courts, though, are undoubtedly real and powerful. Choosing the name Astraea, after the maiden of the perfect world embodied in the constellation of Virgo, she embraced her new life.

After a long apprenticeship, she decided to settle down on her own. Accepting a position in the local campus’ department of Physics and Astronomy, she’s now eager to scout for new or potential Awakenings, or perhaps foster a talent in a way her own was fostered.

Description:

Astraea is a Creole woman in her mid-thirties, although she looks younger due to a mixture of sober living and a touch of Heaven imbuing her. The Aether filled Veronica with confidence evident in her posture and in the intensity of her amber-brown eyes. She dresses conservatively, as befits a person who teaches younger generations, although she favours golden jewelry which includes a few very subtle magical hints. In private, she favours more colorful dresses and pulls out more of the occult jewelry. Planetary spirits seem to like it. Nimbus: Astraea’s subtle magic leaves behind the feeling of Greater Purpose, confidence mixed with desire for a better, more just world. Her greater workings unleash the full majesty of her Nimbus - the azure aura radiating from her body like a corona of the Sun, with golden stars moving through it guided by purpose behind her spells. Astrologically inclined people may read the intent of the magic as they observe the configuration of stars - war-casting may depict an ascendancy of Mars, while spells for far-seeing are visualized as Mercury in Aquarius, for example.

Arcana: Forces 2, Prime 4, Space 2, Spirit 3, Time 2

Legacy: The Thrice-Great

#reach to the stars #character intro

[cuprum63]

Pathfinders AN 3

Author’s notes for paragraphs 31-51 of Pathfinders.

P32:

I was the insult that broke her

Lucy was born into wealth and was turned into a vampire for no known reason. Cixi longed for eternal life, had a vampire for a teacher, and still wasn’t turned.

monster hunters that comprised the Yihetuan

The Yihetuan are the Boxers. In this universe, they were also legitimate monster hunters.

P33:

The conflict resurrected Dracula by the end of first month.

Circa early December 1899.

merchants who sold invincibility potions as late as 1748

Harmony of Dissonance: the merchant sells medicine jars for 10,000 gold.

the formula itself dates back to the mirage skeletons from before the First Crusade.

Lament of Innocence: the mirage skeleton drops the invincible jar relic.

P34:

Surprisingly, she wasn't in China because of him or the Boxers; she'd come in search of new recipes for her tinned foods empire.

Jonathan Harker wrote about getting recipes for Mina in Dracula. As he’s confined to Exeter by this point, she has to step up and get them herself.

The Harkers have diversified into canned foods by the time of the Boxer Rebellion. Mina’s idea is to see if any foreign foods were adaptable to British tastes. China happened to be next on her tour.

Her mission to build a teleportation node in Peking was a cover story to her own allies

Another parallel with Lucy. Mina’s not loyal to her own group.

she'd grown to hate Jonathan and their son by then

Again, Mina is the reincarnation of Lisa. Loving Jonathan and their son is betraying Dracula and Alucard. Loving at all is betraying herself. This is a reversal of Alucard’s words to Dracula at the end of Symphony of the Night.

I have to add that I wrote Mina and Lucy as two different aspects of Lisa. Lucy, until her turning, had Lisa’s personality and even her visage, but no skills. Mina grew up an orphan, acquiring knowledge and strength, but little of Lisa’s empathy.

and longed to feel the joys of adventure, battle, and good food once again.

A reference to Clan Murray’s motto. As for good food, check out all the food items in the Castlevania games.

P35:

section of her bodyguard

Lucy’s slipping into modern British Army terminology. Here, section refers to the unit size—around eight bodyguards.

only to find that every estate needed to be guarded and staffed

Ever hear of “lumpy assets”? This is a similar idea. You buy one thing and create so many other problems that you’re thrown all the way back to square one.

she employed even more servants and mercenary retainers from wherever they could be found

Mina’s solution, enabled only because of her marriage to Jonathan and the money she looted from Castlevania.

P36:

Unlike any hunter before or since, she infiltrated Dracula's hideout, evaded all detection, and slew him as he slumbered.

This is consistent with Mina’s secretiveness. She and Lucy started so many fires in their youth and were never caught. She taught Lucy a way to become independent. Mina even killed Quincey and covered it up. She’s a natural assassin.

Anyway, not the finest hour for Dracula’s minions.

P37:

She was fleeing up the Yellow River; I chose to outflank her at the Dragon's Gate.

There’s more than one Dragon Gate around; Lucy’s referring to the one in at Longmen. A Dragon Gate is a waterfall that in myths, Asian carp jump over…

old Chinese legend

The legend tells that a carp that successfully jumps the waterfall becomes a dragon.

P38:

one of their leaders neutralized

Pay attention of the word “neutralized.”

P39:

We shadowed Morris and Lecarde as they traveled across a war-torn Europe to eliminate Elizabeth Bartley.

Castlevania: Bloodlines, set in 1917.

one of the Draculinas was betrayed by her servant, Sandor,

Dracula’s Daughter (1936), meaning one of the Draculinas took an alias of Countess Marya Zaleska and was also plotting against Dracula.

At Dark Oaks, we prevented Caldwell from usurping Dracula's power for herself

Son of Dracula (1943). Dark Oaks was a New Orleans plantation and home to the Caldwell family. Katherine “Kay” Caldwell manipulated Alucard (Dracula) into marrying and biting her because of her fear of death. Obviously, in this universe, whomever she manipulated was neither of the Tepes men.

treasure hoard hidden on that Okinawan island

Among other things, the mythical M-Funds of Major General William Frederic Marquat. Here, the funds are named after Mina Murray, and they are not Japan’s property.

and on the mainland, the fifteen swords stolen with the help of Sergeant Cody Belnades

Sign Cody Belnades’ name in cursive. Compress and fudge the writing a bit. The ‘e’ looks like an ‘i’, the ‘n’ turns into an ‘m’, the ‘a’ becomes an ‘o’ if you end too high and especially if you mix it up in the ‘d’, the downward motion used for the vertical line in the ‘d’ looks like an ‘r’, and the ‘s’ blends into the end of the ‘e’ if it’s too small. 

His name becomes Cody Bilmore. He’s the one responsible for the Honjo Masamune’s disappearance, and the swords have never left Japan.

P40:

Schneider clan after they fell in with the Nazis

Reinhardt Schneider was a playable character in the noncanon Castlevania 64. Vampire hunting is still a type of genocide, and as his descendants were blond-haired, blue-eyed, tall, and strong, they embodied the Nazi ideal.

Holmwood LLC

Major antagonists to Arikado and crew in later fics.

Harkers felt our wrath in 1986

The first Castlevania was released in 1986.

elderly Quincey A.J.A.X. Harker's life

Quincey Harker was born on November 6, 1898 in this universe. He would have been 87-88 when he was killed.

His initials stand for “Abraham John Arthur Xavier,” as adding “Jonathan” would be redundant because of Seward. This is where Xavier Lecarde comes in: with his name, the X can be added.

AJAX, also called Typhoon is the name of another Konami game. From this game is the song “Command 770,” remixed as “Golden Bough” for Kokoro Belmont in Otomedius Excellent.

counterfeiting of the AH-64 and F-14

In A-JAX, you fly the Tom Tiger (AH-64) and Jerry Mouse (F-14). The A-JAX 2 Jerry Mouse is also a playable aircraft in Airforce Delta Strike.

P41:

Dracula had been vindicated, his evil surpassed many times over by other forces.

All the tyrants of the 20th century.

God's own flocks committed sins with abandon and still called themselves holy.

Look up any of the Abrahamic religions’ abuses in the 20th century alone, and how many people now belong to no religion. Mathias Cronqvist would be nothing unusual if he’d lived in modern Europe.

Church's crimes be revealed

Among these crimes was the war on Dracula. No matter how justified, the Church deployed a military force to assassinate a sapient being who had legally done nothing wrong. It sends a message that dissent will not be tolerated, and no matter where you run, you will be hunted down.

P42:

Madmen control nuclear powers or slaughter countless innocents while their lackeys gush at how wonderful it is to be creating their paradise.

Welcome to 2017.

Being weak or a victim has not only become acceptable, but desirable.

Tumblr in a nutshell. This is the same excuse used by the HIV+ to avoid being tested and therefore having to disclose their status. For that matter, it was the same mindset that Gandhi encouraged—weakness to invoke sympathy from others.

Meanwhile, people like me end up having to clean up their messes.

The masses have more tools available to improve their station in life than ever before, yet they are firmly committed to remaining ignorant.

You have computers. You have cell phones. You have the internet. You have search engines. Stop hiding in your echo chambers and use them.

P43:

Ecclesian who volunteered her unborn child to serve as the vessel for Dracula's reincarnation

In this universe, a baby receives a soul after birth.

She simply had to get pregnant with her husband from Japan seven months ahead of schedule.

Late April 2016, for a due date of late January/early February 2017. Shortly after the Iraqis retook Hit.

Japanese-Brazilian-American pilot

A clue to the Ecclesian pilot’s true identity..

who stepped up in late November.

Probably around Thanksgiving, if shooting for the solar eclipse on August 21, 2017. Also, this means Soma’s mother wasn’t the first choice.

Phoenix isn't one to leave survivors.

Survivors as in enemies or descendants.

P44:

San Diego hospital

The baby is automatically an American citizen by being born on American soil to parents subject to American law. The Japanese father means the baby is also a Japanese citizen, and while Japan doesn’t recognize dual-citizenship for adults, it does for minors.

P45:

This paragraph changes the meaning of a lot since P39.

Born into nobility, you died from disease and your husband declared war against God.

Elisabetha Cronqvist.

Returned as a doctor, you were burned as a witch and your husband went mad against mankind.

Lisa.

leave behind the drudgery of the match factory

Wilhelmina Murray from this universe.

You became a teacher, then a legal secretary,

Canon from Dracula.

then a vampire hunter and mercenary commander

Inspired by the Fury of Dracula board game and Mina’s role in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comics.

Memsahib

A term for married white women in India during the Raj. Also from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and a hint of the Harker business empire’s composition by 2017.

established a crime family to uphold your values as the times changed

To be covered in the fic where Quincey Harker dies.

P46:

Dracula and his son fought against each other in your name, interpreting your memory according to their own beliefs.

Castlevania 3 to Symphony of the Night.

Your former coven sister and apprentice, the first Draculina, still has flashes of self-doubt even now, when she has grown more powerful than any Dark Lord.

Lisa, in this universe, truly was a witch.

The first Draculina is a dark reflection of the games’ vampire hunters. She serves as the penultimate boss of my planned fic series, and the battle is planned to last several chapters against the entire Sorrow crew at once before they end up being whittled down.

The final boss, in case you’re wondering, is a duel between the instigators of the entire series.

Without you, Van Helsing's coalition fell apart.

Also from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Without Mina, her team of Allan Quatermain and Orlando fell apart in 1969 and would not reunite until 2009.

P47:

You won the duel that day at the Dragon's Gate.

Inspired by two Yu-Gi-Oh! episodes, of all things. Like the duel between Solomon Muto and Arthur Hawkins or their grandchildren, Yugi and Rebecca, Mina had Lucy dead to rights and surrendered instead.

You spared me and chose to surrender your mortality and identity for my sake

Here, Mina finally shows where her true loyalties lie: with Lucy.

and like a carp that becomes a dragon, you were reborn into the power you deserved

This is where the legend from P37 is explained if you weren’t reading these notes.

Lucy isn’t saying that she turned Mina into a vampire, but that the Dragon’s Gate was a place where a chosen hero can absorb power. Or it’s one of those locations where you can pick up permanent stat boosts, like the HP/MP/Heart Max Ups from the games.

There’s also the issue that Dracula means “son of the dragon.” By defeating Lucy, Dracula’s last bride, Mina has become a dragon herself. Partially inspired by the Yakuza series, where one of the themes is that there can be only one dragon.

demi-savage hidden under layers of trained refinement .

The demi-savage comes from Clan Murray’s coat of arms. Lucy is saying that under her mask, Mina is a warrior.

your name will be known as the harbinger of the end.

Again, a point from League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (volume 3). While Mary Poppins is fighting the Antichrist (Harry Potter), Oliver Haddo tells Mina that she is to be the harbinger of the apocalypse.

Lucy says “your name” because Mina’s new identity is Mina Hakuba. The kanji for Hakuba mean “white horse,” and a white horse is associated with the first horseman of the apocalypse. Adding to this is if Soma doesn’t equip Mina’s Talisman at the right time, he ends up reverting to Dracula.

P48:

Only my sisters—you and the Draculinas—have ever remained loyal to me, and now I must choose a side.

Lucy’s never been loyal to the Draculinas, as she said long ago in P1 and P10.

I can save you from sacrificing yourself at the cost of damning the world, or I can let you be reborn once again as a mortal and become your enemy in the future.

Mina is the last person on Earth Lucy loves. Lucy doesn’t want to let Mina kill herself to be reborn, but she knows she must.

P49:

There never was a choice, was there? This is still your path to walk, no matter my wishes.

Two meanings here: Mina’s life is her own choice, and Lucy is loyal to her.

Maybe in your next life, I will be the one to help you find your path.

They won’t meet until 2045, but Mina has been on Lucy’s trail since around 2038.

P50 & P51:

Farewell, Mina.

And welcome back.

Mina is finally named. Mina Harker dies and her soul is transferred into Mina Hakuba.

#castlevania #fanfic #behind the scenes

[ao3feed-brucewayne]

Illusion

by STLHero

To the team and the majority of the Justice League, she was just someone that didn't follow their beliefs. That she was some kind of cold-blooded woman, who simply believed that all villains should die. Yet, the shadows of her past would come back to haunt her and she would forever be forced to confront the past that she wished to bury.

Words: 2035, Chapters: 1/1, Language: English

Fandoms: Young Justice (Cartoon), Naruto

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence

Categories: F/M

Characters: Uzumaki Naruto, Uzumaki Naruko, Bruce Wayne, Kon-El | Conner Kent, Wally West, Clark Kent, Kyuubi | Nine-tails | Kurama

Relationships: Pairings are undecided - Relationship

Additional Tags: Female Uzumaki Naruto, Crossover, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Smart Uzumaki Naruto, Uzumaki Naruto Needs a Hug, Friendship, Angst, Family, Morally Grey Uzumaki Naruto, Tags May Change, Minor Character Death

source https://archiveofourown.org/works/41204646

#IFTTT #bruce wayne #batman #the dark knight #the cape crusader #gotham #dc universe #ao3 #ao3feed

[supatheblog-blog]

College Admissions Mania, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Safety School

In all my years at Bergen Tech, I always had college admissions in the back of my mind, ever-present quite like a shadow that lingers behind your back in the sunlight. However, I never really pictured how such a process would occur. After all, I am the first of my immediate family to attend college - my parents went to technical schools, while my grandparents never received any education further than high school. It's a world both familiar and yet alien to me. And not only I, but my entire family as well, have learned many intricacies and details about applying that simply weren’t present within our minds previously.

There is little that needs to be said about the difficulty of getting into any given college, more so for the more academically prestigious universities than any others. The amount of tasks I had at hand seemed daunting, and it made me question the purpose of secondary education at all. I wondered - what does it mean to get a college education, and how does that assure you any amount of success? I believe that I’ve found my answer, and it may be surprising to hear, especially coming from a Bergen Tech student who has been striving to achieve academic excellence for the 4 years he has been attending.

The truth is, college education is what you make of it. Frank Bruni makes the case for this position in his book “Where You Go is Not Who You’ll Be.” He argues that attending college presents “a singular opportunity” for a student to reflect on themselves, explore the wide world and all its many facets, and construct a new identity for themselves (Bruni 10). Indeed, throughout the book he notes various famous personalities and businessmen who did not attend the most prestigious universities like Harvard or Yale but still fashioned a successful career and lifestyle for themselves. Therefore, he goes on to say that we are not defined by the institutions we attend but how we go on to use the skills we’ve developed and the bonds we’ve made. You could go into college expecting to be majoring in law, and end up pursuing a career in graphic design, for example. This has alleviated many of my concerns about how my future would end up and if I could succeed despite the possibility of not getting into a prestigious university. No matter what happens, I know that if I try hard and persevere, I can make it through, no matter where the journey takes me.

Another discovery I’ve made during the college applications season is that colleges are not always looking for the best and brightest as the common belief dictates. Gladwell, in his article “Getting In,” makes a case that admissions boards have always been discriminatory in one way or another while also adopting practices such as the “‘best graduates’ approach” that looked towards personality and athletic ability while determining which students would be most successful after college (Gladwell 8). I was shocked after reading about how certain minorities have been barred from entry to create more diversity or simply reduce the number of a group. Ultimately, the college admissions board’s personal opinion is what allows entry into the college, not simply having the most talent or promise.

These two readings have given me much to think about while I am undertaking one of the big decisions of my life. I came into Bergen Tech with the idea of going to an Ivy League and prospering. However, I now aim for a more balanced, down to earth approach to which colleges I apply to, while still realizing that I can be successful anywhere as long as I try. And just attending will be such an amazing accomplishment, not only for me, but for my entire family as well.

[that-shamrock-vibe]

Point of Interest: Why the Legion of Super-Heroes Introduction is Important to the Arrowverse

So with Supergirl on a break as the CW has seen fit to alternate Mondays between Supergirl and Legends of Tomorrow in 2018, I thought I'd give my opinion on one of the show's major plot-points this season which is the introduction of the futuristic Legion of Superheroes and also validate why I feel this is one of the shared universe's greatest strengths at present.

Backstory:

So who are The Legion? Well in the comics they debuted in Adventure Comics #237 way back in April 1958 as a team based in the 30th Century who were founded by teenage Superman superfans Lightning Lad, Cosmic Boy and Saturn Girl in honour of their idol Kal-El aka Superman. As the decades have gone on and the fanbase has increased for the team they have become more of a mainstay in the comics and now serve almost as the futuristic version of the Titans or Young Justice team being a law enforcement organisation with its own rules and regulations for protecting the peace.

Throughout the years and several reboots the team has recruited many “Legionnaires” including Superman while he was still teenage Superboy, Brainiac 5, Supergirl, Mon-El and Superboy aka Kon-El. There are also many others however none have been introduced in any media outside the comics or as fan-service cameos when the Legion has appeared in the DC Animated Universe.

Arrowverse Version:

While this isn’t the team’s first appearance in live-action, it is the first major recurring appearance having only made minor appearances or cameos beforehand which I will discuss further down. Having said that, during the first half of the season they have pretty much been in the background as a team aside from episode 10 which was titled “Legion of Super-Heroes” so it makes sense they were in the foreground for that one but the three episodes that followed before the mid-season break did not really focus on them as a team and instead individuals, more specifically Mon-El and his arranged marriage to Imra despite his feelings for Kara and also Brainy being jealous of Winn. Also it does seem as if we are not going to see any more Legionnaires outside of these three and personally I feel that is a missed opportunity for the show and the Arrowverse at large.

Now of course as I stated before Mon-El has been a member of The Legion in the comics before however in the most recent incarnation as I think it has been through two reboots in the team’s tenure. However everyone did guess that when Mon-El went through that portal at the end of Season 2 that he was going to the future and would join The Legion. However I do not think anyone expected him to start up the team let alone lead it because again he’s never done that in the comics. Some fans have theorized that this version of the character is a composite of both Mon-El and Superboy from the comics which I find personally weird because that would effectively make him and Kara cousins but maybe that’s a thing on Daxam and Krypton and who are we to judge? But also it is stated that Mon-El formed the Legion of Super-Heroes in honor of Supergirl and I personally do not like that even though it’s her series because the team is supposed to be a Superman fan club and changing the foundation of a long-standing team such as this is just in service to the girl power theme the show constantly pushes.

For instance in Gotham recently they have made Barbara Kean the new Demon’s Head as she is now the leader of the League of Shadows...however from what was teased in the reveal it does seem it is going to be largely focused on the Sisters of the League which is a deviation from the comics but a different spin which I personally like. But if the Legion of Super-Heroes has no deviation from the source material and is supposedly the same team that it should have the same foundation, especially considering Superman has already been introduced into the series and we have seen a Legion Flight Ring in the Fortress of Solitude suggesting he has already met them...

Saturn Girl is the only founding member of the original team to be introduced into the Arrowverse and personally I am okay with that because of the three I find her the most interesting. I am not too keen thus far on Amy Jackson’s performance as she seems more robotic than Brainiac 5 and he is essentially a robot whereas Imra is supposed to be an alien woman from Saturn’s Moon of Titan, which on a side-note is another example of there being co-morbidity between DC and Marvel because of course Titan is the homeworld of Marvel supervillain Thanos which we will apparently visit in the upcoming Avengers: Infinity War. Irregardless I do like how they have depicted her telepathic powers so far, again they have not shown much but in terms of being an actual vigilante she is the one to get the most screen-time as she teamed up with Supergirl, Livewire and Psi on that mission to Fort Rozz. Again this does seem like Supergirl as a series pushing the female agenda given that the character’s introduction to the series was announced at the start of the season and Brainiac 5 who is male was only announced when he was introduced in Episode 10.

Speaking of Brainiac 5, I am a massive fan of all things Brainiac. I think in his original form he is a superb supervillain and a perfect nemesis for Superman. He has had many great incarnations in various media including TV Series’ both animated and live-action most recently Krypton which I am starting to watch along with everything else I am watching and my uni work, but also in video games most notably Injustice 2. In the comics Brainiac 5, also known formally as Querl Dox is originally thought to be the great-great-grandson of the original Brainiac who is ashamed of his ancestor’s villainous deeds and makes it his mission to atone for them by joining The Legion. However it is later revealed Brainiac is in fact an android and Querl Dox descends from Brainiac 2 but is apparently cloned from Brainiac 1. It’s all very confusing and to be fair Supergirl does nothing to even address Brainy’s origins so unless you want to know it’s not something you have to know. I am not overly keen on Brainy’s design, for a start he’s blue whereas in the comics he’s green and secondly he has hair that makes him look like Doc Brown from Back to the Future as opposed to the shorter more youthful blonde look he has in the comics. I do appreciate them using the three dots motif that the original Brainiac is known for and also that Season 1 villain Indigo aka Brainiac 8 also had despite that fact Brainiac 5 usually does not sport them in the comics and they do make the character look slightly cartoonish.

On the subject of Indigo, there is thus far no mention or reference to suggest that Brainy and Indigo are in any way related to each other despite the fact that one is called Brainiac 5 and one is called Brainiac 8 and they both come from the same planet just 10 centuries apart from each other. Also it is slightly puzzling that a modern day Brainiac is called 8 whereas a futuristic Brainiac is called 5 but I digress. I know I haven’t really reviewed Supergirl as I have done with Arrow and The Flash but again since starting uni I cannot fit in episodic reviews of shows I watch anymore because I barely have the time to do movie reviews these days, but just to get my thoughts out there I really disliked how Indigo looked. Firstly she looked more like Mystique than how she does in the comics, again if they had made her green it would have been more faithful. Also Laura Vandervoort tried god bless her but her superhero heyday was as Supergirl in Smallville.

Now the series has referenced another Legionnaire, I think Mon-El mentioned having a friend in the 31st century named Ayla who in the comics is the Legionnaire codenamed Lightning Lass who is the sister of founding member Lightning Lad. The team has stated there are at least three unidentified members other than themselves so both Lightning Lass and Lightning Lad could be members as well as Cosmic Boy because the latter two along with Saturn Girl have always been the founding members in all incarnations of the team. However again why there has been no mention of a Rokk or Garth even by Imra yet there has been mention of an Ayla is maddening to me because again it’s pushing the female members of the team more than the original and faithful members.

On a final note about this universe’s version of the team. I do not like the fact the team are uniformed identically, it really annoys me. As much as I love the X-Men film franchise it annoys me about them too because it almost strips them of their identity. Particularly when you consider Team Arrow, Team Flash, the Legends, every supervillain depicted and even Black Lightning all have costumes similar to the comics.

Previous Versions:

As I mentioned earlier this isn’t the first incarnation of The Legion outside of the comics, the first that came to my attention was on Smallville Season 8 which is also a CW DC series and in my opinion did more in 1 episode to establish the team than Supergirl has done in the series so far. For a start they introduced the team with the original founding members Cosmic Boy, Lightning Lad and Saturn Girl, they established the team was founded on what they believed was Superman’s ideals, also they allowed the creation of Brainiac 5 and depicted the origin of said character in a more organic way than established here. Yes they went straight from Brainiac to Brainiac 5 by simply reprogramming the original which I guess brings in the clone angle from the comics but either way it was pretty straight forward and the recurring villain that James Marsters brilliantly portrayed for 5 seasons on and off transitioned into the reformed hero when he returned in Season 10. Also Supergirl is briefly a member during Season 10 as she goes to the future before going off to fight in the war on New Krypton.

Other than live-action the team has made multiple appearances in animation, firstly in the DC Animated Universe of the 90s-Early 00s and then in their own, albeit short-lived, series trying to capitalize on the success of the original Teen Titans series.

Benefits to the Arrowverse:

So now we’ve gone over who the Legion of Superheroes are, why do I believe the team are one of the stronger current installments to the Arrowverse?

Well the Legion’s primary base of operations is in the 31st Century, now yes while the Earth-38 (Supergirl’s reality) variant of the team is currently operating in present day, they could easily travel back to their own time and even take Supergirl with them to see what the future is like either if Reign remains victorious or after she is defeated.

However as has been stated numerous times, the Multiverse consists of 53 different realities including 16 numbered Earths, 5 unidentified Earths and the Nazi ruled Earth-X. Also it his widely known that there are various doppelgangers of most characters. Barry Allen of Earth-1 has an Earth-2 counterpart as well as Killer Frost, Cisco Ramon, Ronnie Raymond, Martin Stein, Iris West, Joe West, Nora Allen, Oliver Queen, Robert Queen, Floyd Lawton and David Singh as well as Earth-X counterparts of Kara Zor-El, Oliver Queen, Tommy Merlyn, James Olsen, Felicity Smoak, Winn Schott and Leonard Snart. Also seemingly a Harrison Wells on every Earth. So it does stand to reason that on at least a couple of Earths there are variants of the Legion of Superheroes.

Also because the team operates in the 31st Century, Barry Allen or the Legends could travel to the future and meet them in order for the team to ally them in a mission. This could also introduce new members including founders Cosmic Boy and Lightning Lad, that’s just on Earth-1. Also it is a public fan-theory that Smallville exists on one of the 53 Earths which already has its own Legion team so that is already another variant right there.

I do not believe the Legion can hold it’s own series for the pure and simple reason that Legends of Tomorrow is already a team series and the similarities are too close. However they could easily become recurring support for Supergirl, the Legends or Team Flash potentially in a future four-way crossover or a two-part story in one of the four series’ the universe comprises of.

So what do you guys think? Do you think the Legion of Superheroes has a place in the Arrowverse or do you think they’re just a plot-device on the current season of Supergirl. Post your comments and check out more DC TV posts as well as other posts.

#arrowverse #dc tv universe #legends of tomorrow #legion of super heroes #legion of substitute heroes #the flash #supergirl #cosmic boy #lightning lad #saturn girl #mon-el #brainiac 5 #brainiac #brainiac 8 #smallville #lightning lass #superman #superboy #earth-x #crisis on earth-x #kara zor-el #oliver queen #tommy merlyn #winn schott #james olsen #jimmy olsen #james marsters #felicity smoak #barry allen #floyd lawton