the continued adventures of an internet user who was frozen in 2004 and defrosted in 2021: some things are just the way you left them
previous 2004 internet user comics are here: one, two, three, four, five; or just in my 2004 tag
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Arranged marriage AU with Barbarian Bakugou who is so daunting to be around at first. He’s all gruff curses and broad shoulders and scarred cheeks and neck and jaw. He scowls constantly, stares at you while your parents auction you off like some show pig, but doesn’t say much to you besides a grunt of his name. You’re terrified, thinking that he’ll be cruel to you, that you’re being set up for a life full of unhappiness and terror and regret.
But he’s the exact opposite. Bakugou is gentle in ways a man of his size typically wouldn’t be, but he shrinks himself for you. Not in a way that diminishes his status as the newly appointed king, but to respect you, show you that you’re beside him instead of behind him.
He picks you berries on his hunts because he knows the smell of a fresh kill brings nausea to your stomach. You find him along with the other maidens and helpers around his village, sitting beside them, big fingers holding tiny little flowers that he weaves into a crown for you. When he sets it on your head, he purses his lips, mutters something under his breath in his language that you’re still not too familiar with, but sure it means something along the lines of pretty and soft.
And when he finds you bathing in the river only few have access to, he’s sweet the whole time. Doesn’t make a spectacle of you being naked, and is relieved when you don’t instantly cower when he wades his way over to you. You try not to stare at the clawed scars that decorate his pec and jaw when he stands above you, and it helps when he suddenly dumps water all over your head. He shushes you when you splutter, continues on with cupping his hands and letting the water run off of your hair and down your shoulders, scrubbing at your skin until your flesh squeaks. He doesn’t expect you to do the same for him, but he hums in satisfaction when you push him down a little lower so you can wash the crown of his head.
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I’ve seen this a few times, but I don’t think that Stede’s flashback to his childhood after killing Low should be read as him fulfilling (or trying to fulfill) the role of a man that his father tried to impose on him. That flashback comes at a point where he’s halfway into a panic attack, he’s visibly upset and near tears, and his immediate response is to run and hide. It’s associated with trauma and a pretty obvious horror at what he’s done.
The whole scene is Stede facing someone who is, in fact, just like his father and who starts praising him when he behaves like a “real man.” But that’s not something that Stede wants, and it consistently hurts him (we see that on his face). If anything, he’s facing his father and is torn between killing the man who continues to hurt him and things he loves and keeping faith with the little boy who didn’t want to hurt anything. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so important that Ed goes to check on him—because Ed has been that little boy too.
None of that speaks to a man who feels or is trying to feel that what he’s done was a positive, “manly” thing that he needed to do to earn respect or love. It’s facing his trauma and not really knowing what to do about it. His response when Ed comes to his door is for his emotions to finally break at someone actually expressing love and care for him and concern for his feelings. And those emotions are the soft ones that his father tried to kill—love, concern, gentleness and compassion, even passion.
It just seems a mistake to read that sequence of events as Stede trying to fulfill his father’s requirements. It’s more him wanting to kill his father and being broken when he does.
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