#just in case I never end up doing the comic you guys still deserve a fully colored Kitty

[browngonzo888]

Okay so I promised myself not to show any work too early but there’s nothing wrong with showcasing my take on older Kitty Bubai

#psychonauts #kitty bubai #drawing comics #psychonauts 2000 #MindWarp comic #just in case I never end up doing the comic you guys still deserve a fully colored Kitty #lol she still a catty jerk but who else but Kitty #also still a cosmo girl <3

[jvstheworld]

The Buffy Re-watch: S2E11 (part 2)

Ted

Trigger/Content Warning still in effect for this episode just in case.

Buffy, Joyce and Ted have dinner, Buffy is sent to her room, then Buffy goes out to patrol. She was probably out for about an hour at the minimum, maybe up to 2. So how long as Ted in her room for to be able to read her diary before she got back? Also, 'Vampire Slayer' kind of explainable there Ted.

The threat of being in a mental institution is something we kind of see happen in the comics. During the transition between LA and having just moved to Sunnydale. We see in 'Normal Again' in season 6 what it would have been like if she did end up there.

Buffy in shock after killing a 'human'. It's a massive difference between her reaction and Faith's next season.

I don't like the questions the police ask Buffy during the interrogation scene. If her hit her first, which he did, couldn't that be grounds for self-defence. My knowledge of criminal law is lacking since I haven't done it in a while (I was originally a law student at university before switching to journalism. Still had to learn law for journalism but it was less intense and more focused on legal matters like defamation and copyright).

Yeah, Giles would understand the guilt that comes with murder. I'm surprised Buffy even went to school, I would have just avoided everyone.

The gang wants to help while Giles takes over patrol. Luckily Willow notices Xander's change in behaviour after eating the cookie and knows that something is sus with it.

Ted drugged it. How much of the food he cooked did he drug? PSA: don't drug people or their food. It's illegal. I talked about this before in 'Reptile Boy' this is just a different circumstance, but it still stands. Just don't do it.

Cordelia coming through with the research on Ted. We appreciate her help.

Jenny may have been harsh to Giles earlier in the episode, but she needed to do what was best for her at the time. Her apology just comes at a bad time when vampires are around.

Where did Ted come from? Seriously. He comes from the side of the room where Buffy's bed is. It would have made more sense if he came from the side where her closet, because he could have been hiding in there, but the implication is that he was hiding under her bed waiting for her.

Jenny, use the stake, not the crossbow. Because you could hit Giles.

Ted is a robot/android reveal!

Cordelia's sense of style coming in to hep find hidden doors to secret basements of horror.

Ted has literal skeletons in his closet, from his first four wives. That he kept locked in there. And probably could never leave. Holy fuck.

After seeing Ted glitch, Joyce gets wise to Ted's weirdness.

Cast iron skillets- they make good weapons, just watch Tangled.

Joyce forgives Buffy for what happened after finding out about the other wives and the attempted kidnapping. Does she not know that he was a robot yet? Because Joyce knows by season 4, but it seems like she doesn't know here and Buffy is trying to cover that up.

jenny and Giles are back together again. We like to see this, but it won't last long unfortunately. It makes Cordy and Xander happy too, at the very least.

Robo Ted is a nightmare of a character. His victims deserved better than the life they were subjected to because of him. The terror they must have suffered knowing that one wrong move and he could hurt them or kill them. The worst part is knowing that things like this happen in real life. The only fantastical element to this episode is the fact that he is a robot. How many horror stories have you heard of women being in abusive relationships and not being able to leave because the man they are with won't let them, because they control so much of their lives. Not being believed about the things you have suffered due to them because they put up such a good front of being the nicest guy around to everyone but when you're alone with him, there is nothing stopping him from showing you his true side. Joyce was lucky that she had Buffy to see through Ted's bullshit and to stop him before she ended up another one of his victims. Not everyone is so lucky to have that support behind them. I know in my own circumstance, while nowhere near as extreme as this, or many other stories you might find out there, I didn't have the support needed to be able to get out of it quick enough before plenty of damage was done. And years later I am still dealing with what happened. I hope any of you reading this never have to suffer this, and if you have, I am sorry that happened to you and I hope you are able to get to a better place in your life.

I'm going to leave it here. This turned into a heavier episode that I thought. Tomorrows episode will be a bit lighter.

#buffy the vampire slayer #buffy summers #rupert giles #willow rosenberg #xander harris #cordelia chase #btvs s2 #buffy rewatch #tv show thoughts

[monstrology]

thinking about that final scene of Justified: City Primeval episode 5 between Raymond and Raylan.

*I'm sure there's nuances to this I'm missing without reading the book, but this observation is mostly Raylan-centric because of that.

Raymond: So what do you want to know about the Oklahoma Wildman? It's all there. I left my old case files clean. Raylan: I ain't got those kinda questions. I want to know what's missing. Why I think I can't trust anybody. Why it's all a shit sandwich. Raymond: Look at you, still giving a fuck. Raylan: I try. Raymond: Ah, you remind me of me, man, when I started out. Except you're old. Raylan: I ain't gonna sleep at night if this son of a bitch wins. Raymond: Back in the day, first started out, guy I tangled with....Freddy Keck was his name. He was cute. You know, Freddy shot through my front window one night, not to kill. More like, "C'mon man, let's do it." Like it wasn't nothing--cowboys and Indians. Except Freddy was for real--a stone killer. Raylan: How'd you get him? Raymond: Eh, we couldn't. Raylan: You didn't get him? Raymond: I said we couldn't. Raylan: So what happened? Raymond: Showed up at my house one night. Raylan: He got tired of the games? Raymond: I know I was. But he says, "We're gonna sit and have a drink." It was all a big mix-up. Said if I had any sense of humor, I'd see how comical the whole thing was. He's chattering away. Yeah, he walks behind my bar, reaches down, and then... [pop noise]. Shot him. Raylan: He drew on you. Raymond: Eh, I shot him. Raylan: He had a gun on you. Raymond: Eh, I don't know. Raylan: You don't know? Raymond: Think it was a church key. Raylan: He had a bottle opener in his hand? Raymond: Yeah. What I remember is he's still talking. Hole in his chest, eyes wide open, still talking. I don't know what he was saying or who he was saying it to. I didn't care. The guy would never shut up. Anyway, I cleaned my fingernails with the bottle opener, and that was that. And I sleep just like a baby.

And it reminds me of everything about "Fire in the Hole," episode 1 of the original show. Boyd and Raylan sitting at a table, reenacting the confrontation between Tommy Bucks and Raylan. Tommy, who Raylan tells Boyd, had the gun under the table. How did Raylan know when to pull? Boyd asks.

Tommy went first. "He pulled first, so I was justified." And then Boyd goes to pull on Ava and Raylan shoots him first. Right in the chest, slightly off target.

And there Boyd lay, "hole in his chest, eyes wide open, still talking," like Raymond's Freddy, at least for a little while. Until he heals and then we spend 6 seasons with the most talkative shitkicker in Kentucky. A guy who never shut up.

Presumably, Freddy dies from his injuries and Raymond goes on to live his life supposedly unaffected. He sleeps like a baby. And Raylan implies that he won't sleep until Clement is caught, feeding into his personality of relentless pursuit as a marshal that we've seen throughout the original show. Regardless of his own personal struggles with his love interests or his daughter, Raylan prioritizes the mission of his job over all else. He's particularly insulted by Clement because he went after Willa, which ironically made Raylan push her away so he could go after Clement.

Raylan goes to sleep at night at peace because Tommy pulled first, his shot was justified, and Tommy received the justice Raylan believes was deserved for what happened in Nicaragua. Of course, there's a whole list of consequences that follow that at his job and from Detroit, but he justifies it for himself.

"But what troubles me is, what if he hadn't?" Raylan asks Winona at the end of Justified ep 1. "What if he just sat there and let the clock run out? Would I have killed him anyway? I know I wanted to."

What if there was no justification? What if the criminal in front of him, whom he knows deserves retribution, doesn't commit another crime upon him that it justifies his own violent act? He wants to shoot Clement, he wanted to shoot Tommy. He just needed a reason, first. To stay morally sane and just within himself.

For Raymond, there was no solid justification. He didn't know if Freddy was reaching for a weapon beyond a past history. Freddy was in RAYMOND'S house, behind RAYMOND'S bar. If Raymond had a weapon there, Raymond would know it. Even if Freddy had a weapon on his body, his movement wouldn't be towards the bar, but to his person. He comes up with a bottle opener to open a drink for their sit-down, but Raymond pulls on him anyway, without looking for the proof, without the justification to return fire.

Raylan continuously, confusedly, tries to insist Raymond's narrative fits his own moral code. "He drew on you. He had a gun on you." Raymond denies it. He had no clue. He couldn't get Freddy the legal way, so he got them the violent way, instead.

And he sleeps like a baby.

Raylan, who wondered if he would have killed Tommy if he hadn't pulled first, sits here ~15 years later and the first thought he has about a situation like this is still "they have to pull first--it's justified that way." I doubt he would have slept like a baby, not because he doesn't think Tommy deserved it regardless of pulling first, but because it would have shaken his own morality, the conception of himself that he's built in contrast to the criminal background he grew up in and worked around. It troubles him that he even questions his morality, without having acted on it.

Of course, Raylan is dubious by consistently nudging criminals towards making decisions that thus make pulling justified, but that's the gray side of law enforcement for you. There's also the question of Raylan's trajectory had it followed the book and his shot had killed Boyd. He apologizes to him as he lay bloody and fading away, and yet his survival suggests a subconscious decision to spare an old friend's life regardless of who pulled first--technically, Ava was the one with the loaded and aimed weapon and Raylan was defending her, after all. Raymond, meanwhile, cleaned his nails with the item that accidentally killed Freddy, unconcerned for the nuances of the incident.

All of this just highlights a stark difference between the two, Raylan and Raymond. And even though Raylan doesn't mention his past at all during this story and insight into Raymond's history, you could hear the echoes of Raylan's past in it, looking at all the parallels of two men in similar circumstances with different outcomes.

#justified: city primeval #raylan givens #justified #this is a lot of word vomit and character analysis but i just wanted to share what's been rattling in my brain since I watched last night!! #they said let me remind you of the ghost of raylans past aka boyd crowder #excuse any typos or formatting i wrote this on the tumblr text block

[machifuwa]

World's Most Beautiful Mirror | Epilogue 2

Shinobu: That's right... I do like to collect ninja comics and others related to that but...

I don't remember many details of the ones that were mass-produced because they were popular before.

I'm afraid that one day I'll be forgotten as one of the "common idols", as well...

Koga: Yeah. I'm thought of as a degraded copy of Sakuma-senpai by many people, that giant piece of light named "Rei Sakuma"ーBut one day, I myself will be forgotten.

It's...scary.

Well, I shouldn't end up like that, though~? I've been working hard these days to write songs and find my own personality, yeah!?

Shinobu: Oogami-dono, you don't look like Sakuma-dono as much as they say, though?

Koga: Oh, really? Well, as for your unit, you're a pretty unique group of "Heroes and Idols!"ーa group of uniquely crazy people, so I feel like you'll be remembered. I'm not sure, though~

Shinobu: Oogami-dono really is kind...♪

Koga: Aah?

Shinobu: ...Fufu. In that sense, "2wink" may also be remembered because they are twins, which is very rare.

Koga: That's right but, it's probably complicated for them too.

Everyone remembers that they're twins. But, only a few people will know which one is Yuuta and which one is Hinata.

And since they're idols too, there's probably times where they'd think, "I want you to look only at me!"

In such a case, It's hard to be thought of as "the other twin," ain't it?

Shinobu: Could it be that Yuuta-kun's recent irritability is due to his budding desire for such things?

Koga: Aah? I don't know, I ain't Yuuta, am I?

But. I wonder if that's what the "Producer" was thinkin'.

That's what I'm guessin'. He seems to be the typa guy who knows how hard it can be to forget "oneself"ーfrom his own experiences.

Shinobu: ? Oogami-dono, are you acquainted with the "Producer" by any chance?

Koga: No, I don't know him at all, but that's the only thing that was written on the CD booklet he has ever released under his own name.

"I got what I deserved. I was acting as if I was parasitic about other celebrities, and that's the reason I lost my sense of "self", he wrote there.

He wrote that in the booklet when he put out that CD, because he wanted people to find that kind of him, and he wanted everyone to know about it.

I heard that the CD didn't sell well, though.

Shinobu: Well, that's just something, that poor thing...

Koga: Heh, if sympathy can get people to buy CDs, anyone can be a top idol.

He was a strong man, and after that, it seems he stopped working as an individual and went back to bein' a parasite.

And, well, he built a fortune, he's well connected and even now he's still goin' strong. Don't feel sorry for him. He became a happy dude in his own way.

However. To the world, he looks like a carefree and frivolous parasite, but because of his true feelings leaked out, it remained in some people's hearts for a long time.

The words he spit out as a normal human being, who wasn't a parasite, overlapped with what Yuuta said in "SS".

Shinobu: ...What exactly happened in "SS"?. Yuuta-kun, you've changed a lot since then.

Koga: Hmm. If he hasn't said anythin' to you, I can't tell you what's going on and what's not, but...

...That Yuuta, he gave up.

Even though he said somethin' like he was feelin' refreshed after tellin' me his true feelings, he didn't make a face like "I want you to understand me like that" at all.

He already thought that I'll never understand, and what's worse is that he looked as if he didn't believe in me. Of course.

I've never been able to understand his feelings.

I'm such a disappointing senior, y'know, it's no wonder he has given up on me.

Shinobu: ……

Koga: But you know, it must be tough not to be understood by anyone. Even a transcendental person like Sakuma-senpai can't stand it.

So I at least tried to tell him that there were some people who might understand what he was goin' through.

Shinobu: That is...?

Koga: I'm talkin' about the parasitic bastard that no one understood.

At the time, the guy whined about how no one was looking at 'him' back then is now a very popular "Producer" who is loved in and out of the industry.

From his way of life, I thought that Yuuta and Hinata could learn somethin'. Not sure.

I thought, at the very least, that guy would never pretend not to see Yuta and Hinata...so I told Hinata.

It would be a shame to kick away a man who is supposed to understand us, thinking he is our enemy, right?

Prev | All | Next

Season: Winter

Translated by mars

Proofread by machi

#enstars #ensemble stars #shinobu sengoku #koga oogami

[nokingsonlyfooles]

Over an hour of pro-mutant content deserves another chance, and nobody's interested in voting on what I oughta talk about, so here we go again! Brigitte Empire could use your clicks, and I need inspiration for more deep dives - win-win!

So while I have your attention, let's talk about why Magneto and the whole of mutant-kind are more useless than one average protester with silly dyed hair and a brick...

You've seen the Pyramind Of Capitalist System around, but here's a refresher.

A funny thing about pyramids is that the bottom layer has the most bricks.

Thank you, Marsha, for demonstrating proper brick usage to us all. Rest in power.

And, like, it needs it to stay where it is, or else the whole thing comes crashing down. Humanity has crashed quite a few pyramids in its time, so everyone taking part in that broken system knows this, even if they want to pretend it'll never happen again.

So what does Everett Christensen mean when he calls the X-Men's ability to take up arms and fight back against injustice a "power fantasy"? We have that ability and we do it all the damn time. You, too, can move metal with your mind... and your hand and arm, and throw it at a cop. Hell, if you've got your friends with you, you can flip the damn cop car, and de-arrest each other, if it should come to that. You can get yourselves killed that way, but look at the pyramid. They can't kill all of us or they won't eat.

When it gets so bad that individuals stop seeing their individual lives and happiness as worth fighting for, they become willing to do things we do not want them to do, things that kill lots of people and make big changes. We know that. We like to pretend the people who founded our nations were the good guys and any violence they did was mild and justified, but you know that ain't how it is. So where does the "power fantasy" come in?

What I think he means, sadly, is that he's internalized the abuser's lie that if you get knocked down, it was your fault for standing up. The "fantasy" is that you'll be allowed to hit back and accomplish something. The cycle of progress and backlash that's scaring the hell out of us at the moment (we're still dealing with the backlash) can be parsed as "WHY ARE YOU MAKING ME HIT YOU??" If mutants use their power, they might hurt someone with it, and if it looks like minorities might hurt someone with their power, the majority will never stop hitting us. So mutants can't win. That is not something we can allow the minorities in our audience to see, because the majority will see it too, and beat the crap out of us. Progress is not a real option.

I would say that eternal victimhood is not what we're after either (and that sort of existence tends to produce people who DGAF anymore and hurt others anyway), and we could probably stand to see a few cautionary tales about minorities who perpetuate the cycle of abuse, just in case any of us happen to acquire a smidgen of power.

"Can't poor people just BUY housing?"

"Can't trans people just BUY rights?"

I would also say that you're probably not going to get the nuance and continuity to tell that sort of story well from a blockbuster Marvel product that has Disney clinging to its shoe like a turd. I don't know how Secret Empire - United shook out (long-running comics with dodgy continuity are not for me, and that's okay), but I'm guessing everything went back to normal or everything took place in an alternate timeline that we won't revisit unless another writer picks it up way later. 'Cos that's how shared universes roll.

Waaaay back in web 1.0 days, I ran a message board-based story with multiple writers in a shared universe, so believe me when I tell you: people do not like it when you tear up a world they are using. They're busy trying to tell their own stories and they expect things to stay approximately where they are. Everyone ends up doing a Hero's Journey where their characters return changed and the world stays right where it is. Character development can be slow and realistic (but not always in comics, where dueling writers may want to take the same character in totally different directions), but anything done to the world will be sharp and swift and involve as many characters as possible... Then it will get reset and forgotten.

How many post-Endgame plotlines needed the blip, or gave it more than a throwaway reference? And nobody mentions the stillborn god egg, because that movie didn't do well.

The X-Men and their Marvel friends live in a universe that's very close to ours, with more kinds of people in it. That's the baseline, and we need to get back there because the other writers can't be expected to put their plotlines on hold to deal with whatever shit Magneto crushed recently.

"A minority terrorist just destroyed the Golden Gate Bridge and led an all-minority attack on San Francisco? I'm sorry, but Ant-Man is having daddy-daughter time with Cassie and he will not lift even one tiny finger to help clean that up. And nobody else cares either!"

When you hear about the latest mass shooting, you hold your breath, cross your fingers and mutter, "White, male and uncomplicated... White, male and uncomplicated..." or something similar, don't you? You know if the bad guy belongs to any marginalized groups at all, there's gonna be a backlash. In the comics, that doesn't happen unless it's needed for a specific plot, and then it only lasts as long as that specific plot. There are only so many panels in an issue and Ant-Man's BAE doesn't have room to note anti-mutant sentiment is really high right now 'cos of what happened in Wolverinicon #47 or whatever, unless it has something to do with what Ant-Man is up to.

Ultimately, that is the real power fantasy you'll find in the comics, and it's never going away because it's a structural issue. You can push for change all you want, and suffer, and win small victories, and your friends can even die, and everything will stay basically the same and no one will care.

Oh, no! Jean Grey died again?! Well, I hope she comes back in time for our weekly Bridge game, because Colossus is a terrible partner!

Tony Stark can have more money and tech than God, and fly around in his little suit punching all the terrorists he wants, and have zero effect on global politics. Reed Richards can be the superest genius of all time, but if he actually fixed anything there wouldn't be any conflict or plot, so he builds cool toys instead of ending world hunger. Do you want all your problems solved or do you want an engaging narrative? You can't have both!

And that's why long-running comics are not for me! If I need a little nihilism in my life, I'll just watch The Big Lebowski again. At least it's funny.

Some people, and I think the author of the article I'm looking at might be one of them, equate the structural issues of shared universes to the systemic issues we have in real life. Well, the Arc of Justice is long, maybe too long for me to see it, or for anyone I care about to benefit from it in my lifetime. It doesn't need me to stand up and make sacrifices and maybe get my friends hurt or killed. The best I can do might be to keep my head down and try to survive.

Sometimes that is the best you can do, yes, but not always. Tellingly, Mr. Christensen's words are from 2017, before the summer of BLM. A whole lot of people got together, stood up, pushed, and yelled. And there was violence. And people got hurt and died. And the majority got real scared and started screaming and lashing out... But we got some motherfuckin' legislation out of it! You know how goddamn hard it is to cram anything meaningful through our broke-ass system these days, but look at how fast it offers us folks in the bottom tier some concessions when we unsettle the pyramid. And we're not done yet. "Defunding the police" is part of the conversation now, and no matter how much they yell and scream and distort what it means, it's not going away.

We go back and sanitize revolutions and revolutionaries. The fantasy that the good guys don't do violence takes hold, and when a real revolution takes place (near us, because I didn't see many conservatives in the States flipping out about the Arab Spring), even the people who would benefit from the changes are tempted to pull back and say, "No, you can't do it that way."

I remember reading an editorial from a Black mayor in the South, equivocating about her son's desire to participate in the BLM protests. Yes, intellectually, she knew the Civil Rights protests of the 50s and 60s were a thing, but there were buildings on fire and angry white people and her kid might get hurt. Maybe it wasn't going to make any difference and he didn't need to do that, ya know? But this is a mayor we're talking about, a person with enough authority to reign in that scary police presence and make things a little bit safer for her son and others like him. She could've used that editorial space to yell, "Hell yeah! Mess with my kid and you mess with ME!" But she saw violence, she got scared, and she thought it was more important to say, "I don't want this."

Violence isn't the answer. Violence isn't a solution. However, when violence happens, it snaps a lot of people out of their ignorant comas and makes then realize there is, in fact, a problem, and it affects them. Then they start groping around for a compromise, fast. Anything to make it stop, with the least upset possible, so those guys at the top of the pyramid don't fall off and the property and capital stops taking damage! PLEASE!

"Oh, God, come baaaack!"

Well, not anything. We've collapsed a lot of pyramids and there's a procedure. First, they offer concessions to some of the folks on the bottom. The good guys. The ones who just want to be normal. "Hey," say the folks at the endless dining table, waving a small bunch of carrots, "we know you guys don't like violence either. We'll let you be normal if you help us make this stop. Could you just hand us the bad guys? The freaks, losers and weirdos? The ones you don't like either? We'll clean them up for you and then we can all get back to our lives, okay?" And the stick, if they need it, is, "There's going to be a backlash and people are gonna get hurt. The longer this goes on, the worse it's gonna be!"

Oooh, boy, and we DO know who we're willing to throw under the bus for a carrot, don't we? The bottom of the pyramid has its own underclasses, which are meticulously maintained with the help of the folks on the higher tiers. Divided, we are much easier to control. After Stonewall, trans people, poor people, and minorities got kicked to the curb, so that Ellen could have the privilege of sitting next to George "War Crimes" Bush at a nice dinner, with smiles and tolerance. The Ellen-tier gays are still out there, kicking trans and minority folks in the face and saying "Get your shit off our flag!" And there are some trans and minority folks who are willing to aim a kick at the folks under them on the ladder too. (I'm multi-racial and nonbinary, and I know exactly what level of standing that gets me. If "real" trans minorities get a carrot, I'm toast!)

There are endless intersections and complexities and the State is doing violence that benefits all of us, though some more than others. If you use money and own property (or hope to) then the police are willing to shoot uppity people in the face to preserve that privilege for you. And they will present you with a bill, subtly addressed to your anonymous tax dollars. It doesn't matter if they would just as eagerly shoot you in the face on an individual basis; as a group, we are part of that pyramid. If we don't take it apart, we're helping to hold it up. Even if the goddamn thing is crushing us.

But if we do take it apart, people are gonna get hurt and die. The State gets an automatic pass on all its violence and its body count is so huge it's invisible. The good revolutions, the ones that existed in the past and are over, also get a pass. If you and your friends get together and fight back right now - inconveniencing people who just wanna buy a coffee and go to work - you're gonna get screaming, crying, pointing, and the blame for the inevitable backlash. Maybe history will clean up your revolution after you're dead, and maybe it won't. In the meantime, the upper classes are gonna play Deal or No Deal and keep upping the amount they're willing to offer you to give up your suitcase of progress. No matter what, people will eventually get tired and settle down, and then it's time to see what the backlash will grab away from you.

That's the reality. You have the power to fight back, and they have the power to offer whatever it takes to stop you from fighting back; you can't fight forever, and then they'll yank back whatever progress they can. Oh, and some of your friends will probably help them do it.

"Jean, for fuck's sake, we just want to live our lives in peace!"

That is why, despite so many well-documented collapses, we seem to keep rebuilding the same damn pyramid every time. It's frustrating, but it's entirely different from the endless resets needed to keep a shared story universe intact. We can change. The violence is not meaningless spectacle, it's part of the process. We real-world mutants can fight back, and win, and fuck each other over, and fuck up, and fight back some more, and still win.

However...

...when it happens, look to your left, look to your right, and make damn sure you're actually fighting for progress, not a reversion to an imaginary past where nothing needs to change ever again or even a safe space to eat your damn carrots. I know it hurts and you're tired, so don't waste your energy picking up a bucket and trying to help the tide go out. It's just gonna come back in again - bigger, stronger, and more disruptive than ever...

(It's a metaphor for the cycle of progress and backlash, Bill.)

...but that's how beaches are made.

#Youtube #x men #brigitte empire #long reads #deep dive #violence #systemic injustice #power fantasy #mutant and proud #is jean grey dead or not right now? #i can never keep track

[gamebunny-advance]

Probably the Last of my Thoughts

Pikmin 4 Spoilers

Actually, while I previously thought that Dingo either has special solo missions or that he collects things in 100% areas, I think some of his side dialogue actually implies that he might be a "free pass" for dandori challenges or that he might act as a helper in such levels. So what I'm thinking now is that if you keep failing the challenges, then he may offer to either clear them for a cost or he's an AI that gathers items on his own alongside you to make clearing the dandori challenges easier.

If that's the case, then I do hope there's still a great enough incentive to do them yourself. I support "easy-mode" accessibility options as long as there's still incentive to take the challenge on yourself. Either way, if this really is what he does, it seems like the game is going to value "completion" over "challenge" which is giving me Pikmin 3 vibes in a way I'm not certain about.

Also, I didn't realize until my latest run that you collect pieces of Shepherd's diary and logs from her predecessors. They're probably going to be the source of most of the lore, but since half of said lore is gonna be from her point of view, she may turn out to be a well-rounded character the same way Olimar was in the first and second game. Now I just wonder how many people besides me are going to care about it since she's not the player character.

I never really bonded to the Pikmin 3 leaders despite them having personalities, since their main goal (collect fruit) seemed so impersonal despite the urgency of their situation, and the comic relief moments never really landed for me. It's just not funny to me for Charlie to be the butt of every joke when he doesn't seem to really deserve it most of the time. Like, I get the set-up of having the great respected hero be kind of bumbling, but that only really works if you see them in their prime beforehand. So he just starts bumbling and disrespected and ends bumbling and disrespected.

It kinda felt like they were going the same route with Shepherd, with her apparently being an accomplished captain but only being found in compromising situations, but I think her diary is either gonna really help or hurt that. From extra dialogue from the rest of the rescue corps, they all seem to really respect her, and vice versa, and despite her current achievements, she, just like you and everybody else, have been thrust into a challenging situation that you're having to suddenly adapt to. There's probably even more riding on her, since she has a legacy to live up to, so I'm interested to see if that plays into her character at all.

I'll also say that I like hearing the extra dialogue about and from the other guys too. While they do seem like archetypes first, and characters second, the little bit of character I've already gotten has endeared me a little more to them than the aforementioned Pikmin 3 leaders. Maybe it's because their archetypes are already more "extreme" than, "nice plucky boy" and "bitch," so there's already more room to add subtle details about them in the side dialogue. For example, even Collin, who seems to be the generic "nice guy" like Alph, has a relatable backstory about working to fund his education. And there's Dingo, who despite going down Charlie's route of being the tough guy with fantasies of romance at the very least has a reason to have a crush on the captain where Charlie seemed to pursue Brittany just because girl.

I'm not saying any of this deep or innovative characterization, I'm just saying they're more likeable upfront than 3's leaders. It feels like they're actually a group that had some history together, vs. 3 where they were essentially strangers learning and failing to get along without any emotional payoff for that journey. Like, I can imagine these guys around a campfire and telling stories together into the night.

However, that's all on the side and isn't gonna make or break the game either way. You don't play Pikmin for the story or characters, you play Pikmin because the puzzle solving of trying to do everything as efficiently as possible is addictive. Pikmin has never been a social sim, so a good story/characters are just a bonus rather than a necessity. However, I also think that kid of thinking is part of why I find Pikmin 3 so unmemorable. Of course, the game being fun in itself is a great point, but if the game is too easy, and the characters aren't relatable, then I probably won't have any lasting memories of it.

But I'm pretty hopeful for this game.

#gbunny writes #pikmin 4 #spoilers #hopefully this'll be it for a little bit #i think i've got everything out of my system #now i just gotta wait a month for the game to actually come out #anyway i'm talking a lot of shit about the P3 fellas #but i don't hate them #i just don't like them more than the hocotatians who came before them #and i'm liking the new varied cast much more #the problem with P3's leaders is that the hidden depths to their characters are SUPER buried in the end of day notes #since the game is so easy #you're likely to always hit a story beat at the end of every day #so you're not gonna get the 'misc' diaries #like did you know that alph is into poetry and has several poems he can read at the end of the day? #i didn't until i read it on the wiki #things like that just don't come up in the main game most of the time #and since i didn't experience it myself #i just don't have high opinions of the P3 crew #the addition of the piklopedia in deluxe probably helped that a little #but i just couldn't bring myself to get that game twice #so i dunno if i'd feel differently if i'd played that version

[nyadversary]

i think i've talked on here before about how when i was a kid (10-ish) i read a whole bunch of silver age justice league comics, and how they were hilariously, bafflingly stupid, but there's one in particular that sticks in my head because it had i think the worst twist ending i've ever read in my life. this was a long time ago so my memories of it are pretty fuzzy but i think i remember the basic plot. it was like...

so there's a new villain, whose name i wanna say was "the maestro" or something — i'm not much into DC beyond having read silver age justice league so i've no idea if this character ever got used again, apologies if any other writers did something cool with the guy later but anyway. in this, the maestro is a guy who goes around committing robberies while playing music that compels onlookers to dance (it's pre-recorded music, and sounds like normal popular music). the compulsive dancing prevents anyone from being able to stop him, including the justice league, who fail to defeat him while he pulls off several heists. for whatever weird reason they all wind up doing different dances, and commenting on what type of dance they're doing in their dialogue — i remember green arrow saying that he "can't! stop! dancing! this! toy! soldier! march!"

eventually they track the maestro to his lair (i think he had a standard-issue underground villain lair, probably in a cave) and they rush in, confident they can defeat him because they don't hear any music playing. but the maestro catches them off guard and reveals that actually, it was never the music making them dance, but some sort of mind control ray that you actually can't hear. he uses the ray on them and... forces them all into specialized bubble traps designed to prevent them escaping? superman is in a kryptonite bubble, green lantern is in a yellow bubble, you get the idea. he then gloats about how he's defeated the justice league.

so while you're still processing how stupid all of that is (fairly stupid, but typical silver age levels of stupid), you turn the page.

and then it's revealed that the entire thing was a comic within a comic. the actual justice league is sitting around in their base reading the same comic we've just read. none of it was real. it turns out that they've all met to go through their fan mail and they've received a letter from a fan with this comic attached. the letter read something like "dear justice league. big fan of you guys, love your work. however i am really worried because i've realized that there's a hypothetical scenario in which someone could defeat you, and i can't see any way you guys could escape if something like this happened to you. please see attached. write me back i'm very concerned."

if the twist was that this was actually the maestro workshopping an idea he had for taking down the justice league, i'd actually accept it — that's funny — but that isn't the case, there's no reveal at the end. this is legitimately just a fan of theirs who sat down, invented a new type of guy to get in an imaginary beef with the justice league, and then got real worried that the guy he just made up would actually be able to defeat the justice league using a type of mind control ray that makes you dance uncontrollably, another thing he just made up. so he drew the whole thing out as a comic, in loving detail, and sent it in as fan mail. this is utterly deranged and no one comments on it at all. instead the justice league decides this is deserving of a serious, thought-out response so they all sit around and discuss how, actually, they'd totally be able to defeat this completely fictitious supervillain in a fight. i think what they eventually decide is that it definitely wouldn't work because the atom (new member as of an issue or two before this one) can't hear when he's real tiny, so he would have figured out it wasn't the music making him dance, and so they would have gone in to the final showdown prepared. they then draw this out as a comic (actually i think they make wonder woman do it, because She's The Girl and she handles all the "secretary" duties, which includes this bullshit apparently) and send it back to their fan. the... end???

utter madness. i still don't know what to say about any of it

#you could really just write anything back then. #my nyas? #i have english major disease

[chronocidalrage]

The Future and Shit

The truth is that if I got to make the comics and movies I want, but my life was otherwise completely the same, I would be perfectly happy. I don’t need fame or whatever. I just want to make the things and be the guy who made those things.

Like I wanna do this stuff, but I don’t really wanna change my life much. That means I must technically like it.

My fear of change is holding me back. Either it’ll be a waste of my time or it’ll change things too much. Truth is, I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. I don’t HAVE to go into that career if something works out. I can choose.

SUSIE AND I GOT REALLY HIGH AND WENT TO SEE THAT AUSTRALIAN PINK FLOYD COVER BAND

I don’t even really fuck with Pink Floyd but it was kinda amazing.

All music is combinations of 8-12 notes. It’s “more complicated than that,” but that’s effectively it.

I’d be cool with flying through space as I died. Hopefully that’s what I see or feel in the end.

JUNK FOOD It’s not only making it harder for me to ever truly believe that I AM “good enough,” but I don’t need it. I’m good enough without it. Remember that. You’re good enough without it.

I’M CALLING IT NOW FOR THE SAKE OF HISTORY IN CASE ANYONE EVER READS THIS: The unspoken thing that happened between Rachel and Tino on the Bachelorette is that when Roe v. Wade got overturned, Rachel was upset because she’s a woman and apparently a decent human being, and Tino accidentally revealed himself to either be pro life or not fully pro choice. This hurt Rachel’s ability to love Tino, as evidenced by her apparently telling him “I don’t know if I can still love you.” She said the thing that happened was “personal” and anything abortion related is personal, and it apparently had “nothing to do with Tino,” so she was probably just depressed about the world like many of us were and it filtered into their relationship and led to problems. ABC agreed to edit it out because so much of their viewership is in middle America and they didn’t want to touch that subject with a 10 foot pole. When Tino brought it up on the finale (ambiguously) and Rachel was like “do you want to get into this now?” in a somewhat threatening way, she was effectively saying “do you really want to out yourself as not being pro choice?” I’m convinced. Oh yeah, I watch the Bachelor and stuff even though it sucks. Susie and I enjoy it together.

ATOM I just felt how lucky I am to have had Atom. It’s weird. You can know something is true your whole life but it’s not the same as feeling it. You can know something is hot, but it’s not the same as touching it.

Atom at this point kinda feels like some sort of dream. Some sort of amazing thing, like all the most amazing stories and shit I have in my head. But he was actually real. I really got to have that and talk to him and live my life with him. Unreal.

You called me your eternal best friend and it was perfect. We are eternal best friends, it doesn’t matter if you’re not here anymore. You still are. Our friendship is eternal.

And it’s worth pointing out that although you didn’t get to reach the highs that you deserved, you at least never had to feel this pain that I’m feeling. You died having me. That makes things a little better I think. Losing you is the price I pay for still having options and a future.

I also think things have been harder because you used to be my proof that I was good enough. I was always good enough to you, usually even better than good enough. And then life started challenging me more, and you started falling apart, and your friends and family failed to come through for you. I based so much of my life on your judgment and now I was questioning your judgment. Maybe you didn’t know what you were talking about? But you loved people for who they REALLY were. Not for who they were in every moment. You saw their true selves, in many ways their potential. Dan has so much potential. So does Chad I guess. You saw all my potential. Things getting hard for me didn’t change my potential or who I really was just like your life not going as planned didn’t change who you were. Just because things got hard doesn’t mean you were wrong at all.

The stuff we remember is the stuff that was either better or worse than you expected. But you were almost ALWAYS every bit as great as I expected you to be. I can probably count the times you were “worse” on one hand. Because you were always reliably amazing at your baseline. So my brain didn’t record enough of it. I fucking hate that. So many times together where we were both perfect and happy and lacking nothing and I don’t remember them because you gave me that so consistently and reliably. Fuck.

I want food and movies because they’re both a way to make NOW enjoyable, and they feel like a reward for the past. They make the past and present seem good so I don’t feel like I have to worry about the future. It’s all about avoiding the future and change. Because change comes with new standards.

Life is like the middle of Park Street station. You can go forward, backwards, or you can stand still in the middle. If there’s cool stuff going on in the middle and you keep getting rewarded for where you’ve already been somehow, you don’t feel the need to go anywhere.

It’s all past, present, and future. I’m too nervous about the future. I spend my time focusing on my past and present. Reading about stuff I like and know. Analyzing my past. Ruminating. Doing stuff I can do now. Stuff is the same. But tasks that come with changes, new futures, the unknown, I avoid. I’m future avoidant.

Remember going to see Casino Royale? It was so fucking cool and exciting. Like we couldn’t believe we were seeing a new James Bond movie that was that good. Dude just came out and owned the series in one movie. Incredible. Wish I could remember more of what we said about it when we saw it, but I know we completely agreed.

I just remembered. I used to feel guilty watching him drive away when we saw movies together. I forgot that we started meeting each other instead of driving together. When did that happen? When I moved to Dorchester. It became easier to meet there. At Kendrick or TSG it made sense to drive together. Wow. I forgot. I hated seeing him drive away. I felt so weirdly guilty making him drive there and back alone.

ALSO, it has occurred to me that Atom may be the only person I’ve ever truly believed actually loved me. Ouch.

Holy shit. Atom and I both believed that the only person who ever truly loved us was each other. Like only me and only him. We felt great together, but lost apart and it completely threw off our reads of other relationships. We had trouble with standards and boundaries because they were never needed when it came to us. We were always on the same page.

When I said him doing coke made him more like Batman instead of Superman and how that was better I bet that really did make him feel better.

So over the last few years, we both were like “do they not love me anymore? Am I failing to love them like they deserve?” We were thinking the same thing. Him drinking made me feel like he might not love me. Me distancing myself made Atom feel the same. Me not being able to help him made me feel like I was failing to be loving. Him not being able to get happy enough to feel like he didn’t need alcohol and not being able to give me what I seemingly needed made him feel like he was failing.

I realize now though that we both believed it was temporary. Short of one of us dying, I think we both firmly believed we would salvage it eventually, it would just be hard until then.

So that’s why I feel unloved. Because I only really believed Atom loved me. And part of me believes I’ll never feel loved again. Because I don’t fully believe the supposed love I receive from others.

I should think about how I love lots of people who are not perfect and me being frustrated with them does not make me not love them.

Again, sorry I talk about this so much but as you can see, we were close and I’m still struggling with it. I think that’s why I was so fucked up after I saw THE ROAD. It reminded me of me and Atom.

[thankskenpenders]

Folks.

I am tired. I am so tired. I don't want to be making this post at 6 a.m. on the Saturday following the release of the new Sonic movie. (I would have made this post earlier in the night, but the ask box is still off because I'm supposed to be on hiatus while I finish my game, so I'm only hearing about this now.)

But, unfortunately, the ride never ends

The short version: Based on descriptions of certain scenes from fans, Penders believes that some of the echidna backstory stuff for Knuckles in the new movie is inspired by his work, like Sonic Chronicles before it. Because he was not involved and he is the legal owner of all of his Archie Sonic material, he is looking into pursuing legal action. (A lawsuit is not happening at the moment. We are at the "he's tweeting about wanting his lawyers to talk to Paramount's lawyers" stage. Well have to wait and see what happens after that.)

(This post will contain spoilers for some exposition dump lore stuff in Sonic 2. It does not spoil the ending or anything like that.)

Instead of paraphrasing him, here are his own words:

Now, a disclaimer: I haven't seen the movie. I'll be seeing it Monday at the soonest. I can't currently say how close the echidna stuff is to Ken's work

Based purely on his word here, the claim that Enerjak is in it because an echidna powers up with the Master Emerald sounds like a massive reach compared to the obvious inspiration the Nocturnus Clan took from the whole Dark Legion saga. Like, Sonic Team created the Master Emerald, and it's a power-granting macguffin belonging to the echidnas. That's just what it is, and it has been since before Penders wrote the whole Enerjak storyline. (And hell, I can't believe I'm saying this, but Ken should give himself more credit if he thinks "echidna who powered up with the Emerald" is all Dimitri/Enerjak is. That's one of his more fondly remembered characters!) Knuckles' dad in the film, on the other hand... well, again, I haven't seen it, but at least one person I know who's seen it genuinely thought it was Locke, so uh... he might have more of an argument there. Or it might literally just be "Knuckles has a dad." I don't know yet. Many people in his Twitter mentions are saying they're completely different, but people have been saying that about the Nocturnus Clan for years and that's complete bullshit, so I'm withholding judgment. I'll comment on this further in a few days after I've seen the movie

However, like me, Ken has also not seen the movie yet. He may or may not have a case here, but I think that him tweeting out all of this before he's even seen it with his own eyes is extremely foolish. Yes, fans are making comparisons, but there's also a segment of the fandom that's constantly tattling to him and snitching tagging him on Twitter over every little thing because they want him to start shit. And boy, this really doesn't do anything to dispel the "Penders thinks he owns the concept of echidnas or fictional characters having parents" jokes that I've been trying to clear up for years. Thanks, Ken

Look. Most Sonic fans don't like Penders. This goes without saying. But in all fairness, I will say that if they did base anything off of the material that Penders owns (and, again, can't confirm or deny that myself right now), then he should be compensated for that. Whatever your opinion of the old Archie legal battle, he owns that stuff, period. And no matter how much you like these movies, Paramount is not your friend. They're a huge media conglomerate, and this movie is gonna make hundreds of millions of dollars. They can afford to throw a comic guy a bone if they used his material. Comic creatives deserve to be compensated fairly for their work, even ones we don't like. Yeah, this whole situation is absurd, but I don't want folks to lose sight of that

Hopefully, if he does have a case, that's all that happens. He gets cut a paycheck and it ends there. If he doesn't have a case, he's up against fucking Paramount trying to defend their latest tentpole blockbuster film franchise. Whatever happens, I sincerely doubt that this will put future films in any sort of danger, so please don't let that fear color your response to this news. He does not want to cancel the movies. He wants royalties. And again, there is no lawsuit happening right now. Please do not go spreading around rumors about there being another lawsuit. We're currently at the phase where he tweets about wanting to talk to his lawyers, and tweets are not legal action

But boy. It just never ends, huh? Jesus fucking Christ. Whatever the end result, I bet Paramount's gonna be going over the story ideas for the Knuckles show with a fine-toothed comb. Or maybe they'll just pay Penders off and lean into it. Who knows! I don't. I am not a lawyer, I am a random furry artist who has become the Sisyphus of the Sonic comic fandom. Like Sisyphus, my torments never end, so expect more posts about this as this situation develops (if it goes anywhere)

(In the meantime: please don't bother arguing with Penders on Twitter about this. I know it's fun to try to ratio him, but no argument, no matter how airtight, is going to convince him of anything in the court of Twitter. Even if he is often full of shit, he is right when he says that he's successfully argued the case for his copyrights in court, and you are a random Sonic fan presumably less than half his age. It's not worth it. Go enjoy your weekend.)

#sonic 2 spoilers #sonic movie spoilers #sonic movie 2 spoilers #tkp post

[moonlit-imagines]

Headcanons for being an Avenger with the power of persuasion

Avengers x reader

warnings:

a/n: towards the end this branches off into the fatws timeline but there’s no explicit spoilers

prompt: anonymous: “Can you do hcs for the avengers with a reader who has powers like Allison Hargreeves from The Umbrella Academy?”

the avengers were a little iffy about you because......someone with your power was hard to trust at first

“mind control isn’t as fun as it sounds, you guys. i really don’t wanna keep my guard up at all times when i’m at home base” -clint

“yeah, i’m not sure if i trust this one yet. i mean, i’m totally immune to mind control, but what if they mind control someone to come after me? and they have easy access to the place?” -tony

“excuse me, did you just say you were immune to mind control?” -nat

“he most certainly is not” -wanda

i mean, you get it and all. you heard stories of the avengers’ past encounters. it couldve messed them up

and they had no character references for you

you were new and mysterious

and your powers could be dangerous if you used them the wrong way

“well, i say we take a chance on them. they might surprise us” -cap

“i knew you would say some crap like that” -tony

“i thought a surprise was the opposite of what we wanted?” -bruce

you were put on the team soon after, but you had to have a buddy on missions

*pretending that we have deaf/hoh!clint like in the comics* you were buddied up with clint since your powers were auditory

“you can’t sign me an involuntary command, can you?” -clint

“no, sir” -you

“cool, cool, cool” -clint

stealth looked good on you, ngl

you were able to get behind heavy gunmen and whisper commands to them

“simon says you are an avenger now, shoot the enemy” -you

“simon says i am your new boss, take out your ex-coworkers” -you

“simon says give me your keycard” -you

“simon says i’m not the enemy, you are” -you

“not bad down there, y/n!” -sam

“thanks! now can somebody give me a lift to that one all the way up there?” -you

you proved yourself that day, so everyone got a lot more comfortable with you

and you made a promise that day that you’d never use your powers on them

but occasionally someone would ask you a simple favor, like putting them to sleep or making them focus on a project

“i think the focus one could be a fire hazard” -you

“so just come and get me! or let me die, that’d be fine, too” -tony

“whatever...simon says focus on the new tech” -you

time went by and things got tough, especially when the sokovia accords rolled in

“i wasn’t even there for that, mr. secretary” -you

“and i’m aware of that, mx. l/n, but you still pose a threat to people around the world. you have the means to walk into any place you want and do anything you want. you can see how that makes people uneasy, don’t you?” -ross

“i’ve never used my abilities for anything but good” -you

“what y/n is trying to say is—” -steve

“he knows what i’m trying to say, but apparently that’s the issue” -you

you were “grounded” with wanda

and pretty pissed about it

“i can understand why i’m here, y/n, but you? what did you do?” -wanda

“i intimidate men in charge, i guess” -you

sounds about right, huh?

but clint broke you out

“finallyyyyy! vision is such a drag” -you

and when you got to germany, you were conflicted with yourself

should you use your powers on the teammates who wanted you locked away?

if you got into their comms, you could stop it in an instant

but that’d take some time

“hi, simon(e)! i’m, uh, scott! i think you’re pretty neat!” -scott (p.s. y/n’s hero name is simon/simone. whatever you prefer idrc)

“thanks...and what do you do?” -you

“he shrinks!” -sam

you snuck out to the pavement and tried to hack their comms, but could only do it one at a time

so you got the spider kid

“simon says stick the cat man to the side of the plane” -you

but that cat had claws

alright, it might be harder than you think

“oh god, simon(e)?” -scott

“what is it?” -you

“i’m a little nervous for my next trick...would it be too much to ask if you did your little command thing for me?” -scott

“ughhhhh...simon says, go on with your ‘trick’” -you

and all the sudden he shot up into the air

“oh, nice” -you

you really hated fighting with these guys, but you were out of options and now cap wanted you to come with him, he wouldn’t leave without you

“steve, i’m sorry. simon says leave without us” -you

and that he did, which left you to be caught by a hair

“so close, weren’t you?” -tony

“simon says go to hell” -you

“very funny, guess i’m immune to mind control, after all” -tony

having a mouth restraint place on you that tony had been saving ever since you joined the team

one that “team cap” heavily protested the second they saw it

“tony, that’s wrong! don’t you trust them enough not to do that? they’re going to hate you after all of this” -wanda

“it’s either me or them. at least mine is comfortable” -tony

kinda fucked lol but understandable ig

having to testify without a voice, only able to type or write

but eventually you made your case and were able to make a deal, but part of that deal was to keep your mouth sealed when in the presence of authority since your voice was deemed a weapon ;)

kinda a dick move if you ask me

so you said fuck that and became a fugitive with steve + friends

but used your powers less and less

again, only for favors because it was hard to get peace in these crappy motels

“simon says kill that roach, oh god” -you @ steve

“you were an avenger and you can’t kill a roach?” -sam

“don’t start with me, sam, or you’re sleeping on the floor” -you

“you wouldn’t” -sam

“don’t test me” -you

waiting and waiting for some kind of turning point that didnt come until alien invasion 2.0

and you tried so hard to stop thanos from snapping, but the stones got the best of you as you were frozen in time

but fortunately you didn’t dust

leaving you to get a rematch against thanos when the time would come

and reuniting with tony just for him to lecture you with the rest of the team

“go fuck yourself, tony” -you

“oh, thank god they didn’t say ‘simon says’” -that raccoon you’ve known for like 3 weeks

“do you ever shut up?” -you

“no, he does not” -nebula

anyways your time did not come and you waited five years for another chance

and although you did not redeem yourself on your own, you were just glad that your side, humanity, had won

but just before thanos had ceased to exist, you told him

“simon says to feel the pain of loss for all of eternity” -you

it may have been cruel, but it’s what he deserved

the next step was for you and sam to be pardoned of your crimes

but you didn’t exactly part ways just because...what else was there for you to do? the two of you were close after your time on the run

and all was well until he decided to give the shield up

“oh, bucky’s gonna be pissed” -you

“he’ll be fine” -sam

now, bucky had mixed feelings about you

he was nervous about your powers, but you did save him

and he knew what it felt like not to be trusted

so he gave you a chance and partnered with you after the “new captain america” and the “flag smashers” fiasco

legally, if you used your powers on a government official/soldier you’d go back in the slammer, but it was quite tempting, even if it were just a “simon says punch yourself in the face”

and off to madripoor you went with...zemo

“are you going to persuade me into something petty, mx. l/n?” -zemo

“i’ve gotta make it worth it, honestly, but there’s no rule against me doing so, so at least i won’t feel bad” -you

and who knows what’s next?

taglist: @alwaysananglophile // @rorybutnotgilmore // @locke-writes // @sweetheartliz07 // @queen-destenie // @natasha-danvers // @lokihiddles // @frostedficrecs // @lotsoffandomrecs // @johnmurphyisqueer // @teenwaywardasgardian // @pappydaddy // @captainshazamerica // @freya-xo // @ravenmoore14 // @thisetaernallove // @ofthedewthesunlight // @canarypoint // @zoeyserpentluck // @randomawesomeperson102 // @ghost-bich // @wonderful-writer // @of-a-chaotic-mind // @groovyfluxie // @procrastinatingsapphictrash // @lxncelot // @swanimagines // @randomfandomimagine // @petersgroupie // @agentshortstacc // @rosadiaz-sarayvargas-harleyquinn // @werewolf-himbo // @comiocudequemtalendo1 // @mochamoff // @the-marvel-meme-emporium // @summersimmerus //

#marvel #avengers #marvel imagine #marvel x reader #avengers x reader #avengers imagine #fatws imagine #fatws #fatws x reader #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes imagine #bucky barnes #sam wilson x reader #sam wilson imagine #sam wilson #captain america x reader #captain america imagine #tony stark x reader #tony stark imagine #wanda maximoff x reader #wanda maximoff imagine

[gemma-collins-ily]

OMG I LOVED your latest Kaz fic titled "Crossing of His Fingers and Ankles"!!! If you would, would you kinda do a part 2 of them making the (attempting to) watching the sunrise together a once a month activity and the other crows catching them asleep on the couch together and teasing them?

Form of Love

a/n - awwww, this is a little shorter but I really love it as of now! The cutenesssssss! Thank you so much for the compliment, and the request of course! I really enjoyed writing it xoxo ❣️💝

Warnings: nothing???

Tagged: @mrs-brekker15 (released early for you xoxo hope you feel better!)

This is the part two of Crossing of His Fingers and Ankles!

It would always end the same way.

Kaz half-heartedly cursed you internally for the sole reason that he used to be able to get through an entire night with only cold, long since brewed coffee and his will to work.

Now, it was all he could do to stay awake for a few hours into the night at most.

But he could never truly be mad at you: partially because his predicament was both benefiting him and ruining his business all at once. See, now he could get a proper night's rest and the bags under his eyes were gradually fading, it was true, but he managed to complete far less paperwork, no longer powering through till dawn.

This would be no problem if he weren't so stubborn in deciding that he specifically had to do all that paperwork on his own. There were others in the Dregs who would jump at the chance, needing something, anything, to fill their days, but Kaz simply hoarded his workload to himself.

Every month, you would figuratively drag him to the sofa, and if he were to blatantly refuse, you would only smile knowingly. Long ago was it acknowledged that you could persuade Kaz to do almost anything, to your mass benefit, and his mass disadvantage.

You only needed to be there, words unspoken yet present in your mind and he would be won over before you even opened your mouth to speak.

Yes, you only watched the sunrise together once a month, but you would spend every free night you had with Kaz, scanning over documents and each of you holding them before your face, pretending to catch the light to read fine print, when really, you were sneaking regular glances at the other over the papers.

He appreciated you giving up your time for him, and often thought you should use it for anything else, but in the end, he wouldn't ever stop your evenings together voluntarily.

It could be selfish, but your excuse was that he was still working, to which he would raise an amused brow. You did work together, although he'd eventually have his gaze on you for minutes at a time, it being too tempting to resist.

You did the same of course, admiring the strong tea shade of his irises and the slope of his nose, or his fingers moving nimbly amongst the papers.

When he'd catch you directly looking at his glove clad hands, he'd swiftly whip out a pack of cards and preform a magic trick, never ceasing to adore the twinkle in your eye that showed how marvelous you thought it to be.

After a while, he could bear to do the classic trick of palming a coin and pretending it had appeared from behind your ear. That sparkle of amazement made it worth it for him. It always would.

You were the only one he would willingly give kruge to, no matter how big the amount. Kaz desired to gift you the world, believing you deserved it and you constantly reminded him he had already given you all you wanted.

Kaz would always smile genuinely and warmly at those words, that crooked smile, the one that slanted minorly to the left and the one you loved. More than everything.

Now, he could barely stay awake long enough for your scheduled sunrise observing. When the first light made itself known, you would plonk down onto the couch, Kaz following a moment later, and you would revel in the sun drifting across your skin, plus the colours painting the skies.

Ketterdam was truly beautiful. You only needed to know how to see it, and when.

Kaz never actually looked at the sunrise for long, instead choosing to stare at you, enjoying the look of bliss on your face.

He may break the usual promises he made, and you futilely agreed to, knowing Kaz would allow you to slumber anyway, but he would never stop curling up on opposite ends of the couch with you.

That was the one promise he would always keep.

Inej was the first one to discover you together, vulnerable as you slept away, Kaz too.

She was ever the early riser and had knocked softly against his oak door, hoping to drop off the knowledge she had gathered on the streets and leave early, not needed until the heist meeting later that day.

When he had not answered, she had rapped her knuckles against the wood a little more sharply, then pushed open the door a crack.

She couldn't believe it when she observed you and her boss limp on the sofa, your head facing his way, and his lolling in your direction because you had been looking at each other, slow blinks hindering your view until you had drifted off.

He had forced his eyes to stay open just a little longer, if only so he could appreciate you for a small increment of time more.

Her eyes had widened comically and she instantly knew what she had to do. She shut the door carefully behind her, and tiptoed to each of the Crow's rooms individually.

Jesper groaned and held his pillow over his head, attempting to block out the noise.

"Jes, get up, you need to see this."

For Nina, she needed a slightly stronger approach. She needed to get them up quickly, she wasn't certain when you would wake. So, the Heartrender was woken by a nice cup of water to the face.

She spluttered as she came to her senses and Inej hushed her before she could shriek in shock.

"Meet in front of Kaz's office. There's something you've got to see." She hissed.

Once Matthias and Wylan were awake and up, they met up and Inej put a finger to her lips as she opened the door.

Nina spotted you immediately and awwed breathily, Jesper and the others following her gaze before simultaneously gasping.

Nina heard your heartbeat quicken and ushered them out, your eyebrows furrowing as you woke to fragmented whispers from what seemed to be down the hallway.

You decided Kaz should sleep in so snuck out of the room and to yours, dressing before jogging down the stairs to breakfast.

When you entered, the chatter abruptly stopped and your head cocked to the side, curious as to if you were being left out of anything.

Suddenly, a snicker was heard and you snapped your eyes to Jesper, who continued to chuckle before speaking.

"Having a good time with the Boss, were we?"

You groaned audibly as you realised they must have witnessed your moment together, ran a hand over your face and sat on a chair, muttering to yourself all the while.

"Kaz will not like this..."

"Not like what?"

He sounded concerned, it flimsily masked and laughter broke out again as you blushed, embarrassed.

"It's too early for this, guys."

"Hmm, you could always take a nap in Kaz's office?" Was Nina's teasing response, no hesitation in her tone.

Kaz's face hardened into the one he used during business, and when he spoke, his voice was cold as stone, "None of you will speak of this."

"Ever." He reiterated, making sure they understood.

As soon as he left, the snickering restarted and now you too joined in, finding the soft Kaz from the evening before and early morning hours of that day so contrasting to the one you had just seen.

The Crows would consistently burst into his office in the mornings after that incident, and Kaz became more alert, although never able to stop himself from falling asleep under the sun.

Usually, he would manage and as soon as they left, he would drop the facade and his head would gradually drop toward his chest, then he would shake out his limbs in an attempt to stay conscious.

You would wake as it happened and would either call his name quietly, or prance downstairs to grab him a coffee. It would rarely be black, instead you added just a tad of milk to sweeten the liquid.

Your shared advantage with Kaz was that they did not know you fell onto the sofa together monthly, and had only caught you together a few times.

At every opportunity they had in the Slat, they would poke fun and jest jokingly about you and Kaz.

Jesper would wink at you suggestively and you'd only drop your head into the table, Inej sometimes placing her hand between before your forehead smacked down.

She teased you a lot less than the others did, so glad for Kaz after knowing of some of his hardship, but would still join in with her own little quips now and then.

Even Nina and Matthias knew not to bring up the situation in public or in the Crow Club. You could be used against Kaz, and he would never want that, believing it could be one of the only things to break him.

Almost daily, you would end up asleep, head and neck supported by a cushion on top of the table.

And almost daily, Kaz would find his heart melting at the sight of you feeling comfortable enough to sleep and be at your most vulnerable with him.

It was a form of love only you shared, and it was beautiful in its own way.

Most importantly, almost daily, Kaz found himself promising you to wake you, all while beginning the crossing of his fingers.

And ankles. Just in case.

#kaz brekker x reader #kaz brekker x you #kaz brekker fluff #kaz brekker imagine #kaz brekker fic #shadow and bone x reader #shadow and bone x you #shadow and bone imagine #shadow and bone fic #grishaverse imagine #kaz brekker #kazzle dazzle

[makeste]

BnHA Chapter 320: Deku vs. Class 1-A

Previously on BnHA: Flashback!Kacchan was all “fuck Deku and fuck his stupid goodbye letters, I need to speak to somebody in charge.” Endeavor was all “hello, I am Somebody In Charge.” Kacchan was all “listen up asshole, you need to let us go out and collect our wayward nerd because you stupidly left him alone with All Might and that’s a fast track to disaster right there.” Endeavor was all, “[self-incriminating silence].” Rat Principal was all, “okay sure, have fun kids.” Back in the present, class 1-A was all “hi Deku” and Deku was all “I’M FINE!!!!!” and Kacchan was all “THAT’S WHAT I THOUGHT YOU’D SAY YOU DUMB FUCKING NERD” and so the kids all got ready to fight, because OF COURSE they’re gonna fight. Sorry guys, but yeah it’s happening.

Today on BnHA: Kacchan is all “what’s up Deku you look like a possessed Rorschach test, so anyway how are the new quirks coming along.” Deku is all “they’re coming along like THIS” and uses Smokescreen to try and get away. Kacchan is all “PHASE ONE COMMENCE”, and Kouda, Sero, Jirou, and Ojiro leap into the fray to shower Deku with heaps of love and violence, because this is a shounen manga and kicking someone’s ass while simultaneously proclaiming your undying admiration for them is just how it’s done in these parts. The KoudaSeroOJirou squad then passes the baton to Satou, Momo, Tokoyami, Kaminari, and Shouji, who are all “fuck this mask” and do a bunch of stuff to tear Deku’s mask off because they’re the real heroes. Shouto is all “LOOK AT THE LITTLE CRYBABY, THAT’S RIGHT, GO AHEAD AND FUCKING CRY and by the way let us share your burden please,” and once again I swear this is all very deeply moving and touching within the actual context. The chapter ends with Tsuyu being all “look at me. I’m the cliffhanger now,” and damn.

lol what

I don’t think anyone was expecting that. I mean, not that I’ve got anything against Tsuyu or anything. anyways it’s a very nice cover and I love the colors and I hope this means Tsuyu’s gonna do something badass

also, “Deku vs Class A” -- pretty much the expected title, but it’s still got me hyped nonetheless fuck yeah let’s go

IIDA ANGST

Iida Tenya really said “fuck the uniform code, we’re leaving the helmet at home today.” sorry kids, prim and proper C-3PO Comic Relief Iida has left the building. can I interest you in some Serious Iida

meanwhile Kacchan is all “sup Deku, I heard you got a few more quirks, and might I just add that you look like the Snyder Cut of Detective Pikachu”

“you look like a tarred and feathered squid” okay easy there Kacchan. I mean it’s all true of course, but still

“thank you all for coming” OH EXCUSE ME SON, WERE YOU PLANNING ON GOING SOMEWHERE. LET’S JUST SEE HOW THAT PLAYS OUT

yep and there’s Smokescreen, right on cue

okay Horikoshi, I leave it in your hands. hopefully you can come up with some more interesting combos than my dumbass predictions lol

LOL THIS ISN’T A COMBO AT ALL

“explosions solve everything” -- Horikoshi Kouhei, 2021. something something shockwave, something something handwave ta-da no more smoke. lol okay then

oh, ouch

he would know, wouldn’t he. nice application of one of your many hard-earned life lessons, Kacchan

by the way you guys, just as an experiment, I’m going to try to anticipate some of the discourse this week in the hopes of preemptively addressing it and thus saving myself some time later on lol. so here’s our first test run!

ANTICIPATED DISCOURSE: “oh my god what a fucking hypocrite can you believe this fucking guy”

PREEMPTIVE REBUTTAL: it’s precisely because Kacchan has been in this exact situation himself that he’s able to recognize his past self in Deku now and call him out on it. just because it took him sixteen years to get it through his head that he can’t accomplish every single thing completely by himself doesn’t mean Deku has to go down that same path. so yeah, maybe it is a bit hypocritical, but if you insist that the only people qualified to call out stupid shit are people who have never done a single stupid thing in their own lives, then what you’re basically saying is that absolutely no one on earth is qualified lol. so yeah, I’d have to disagree

and one last unrelated note, I’m willing to bet the whole “you didn’t even say a word before you ran off” thing is possibly the first thing Kacchan’s said in this whole encounter that actually does stem from genuine hurt rather than his tough-love-harsh-truths strategy. I’M TAKING NOTES HERE HORIKOSHI. at this rate it’ll take twice as many chapters as DvK2 for them to hash out all the stuff between them, geez

anyway so I gotta say, so far Deku vs. Class A is looking an awful lot like a DvK3 wearing a hat, trenchcoat, and sunglasses lol

OH SHIT I TAKE IT BACK??

FUCK YEAH, YOU GO KOUDA. and I guess he ditched his mask as well! excellent

so far the strategy here seems to be “Kacchan says all the mean tough love shit while the rest of 1-A balances it out with warmth and kindness”, which actually works pretty well imo. Deku is one of those people that doesn’t usually need a Kacchan Translator anyway, but just in case, this is very efficient

mm but of course Deku is slingshotting himself away with Blackwhip. all right then, who’s up next!

FUCK YEAH

okay but seriously you guys, what is going on with Sero’s face in these last couple of chapters though, it’s really starting to unnerve me. is he trying to emulate Kacchan’s whole asymmetrical facial expressions thing?

in fact let me just quickly hit pause here because,

ANTICIPATED DISCOURSE: “SERO IS TOGA??!”

PREEMPTIVE REBUTTAL: no

oh snap looks like Jirou’s getting in on the action too!

poor Jirou probably spent days racking her brain trying to think of something she could bond with Deku over. is Horikoshi doing these in reverse order of the kids who have had the most interaction with him? that would explain why poor Kouda didn’t get a flashback lol

omg. well that answers that

so by my count, Satou and Hagakure are the only ones remaining in this first tier of kids who Still Appreciate Midoriya even though they’ve barely ever spoken two words to him in their lives lol. so they’ll probably be next, and then we’ll get to the next tier of kids who are pretty good friends with him but not quite besties. and then we’ll move on to the IidaRokiRaka trio, and then lastly, to the boy who is in a tier all his own

BUT FIRST, A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR

and by “sponsor” I mean the Dekuangst. just in case that wasn’t clear. indeed, many thanks to the Dekuangst for making this all possible

(ETA: okay so this whole “take me away” line seemed pretty weird to me, and sure enough it’s yet another one of those cases where only the verb is specified, and the object is left to the reader’s interpretation. so even though the translation says “take me away”, I’m pretty sure that what Deku’s actually saying is “take you away” -- as in, his loved ones will be taken away by AFO.

and that is literally the way he phrases it, though -- the verb used is “奪う” (ubau), meaning “to snatch away; to dispossess; to steal.” which, god, that hurts my whole goddamn heart though, because for him to say it like that?? not “AFO will kill you”, but “AFO will take you away from me.” he can’t have nice things anymore because of AFO. he can’t be around the people he loves because AFO will hurt them. he can’t have happiness because AFO will take it away from him. anyway so where the fuck is AFO right now, motherfucker I just want to talk.)

by the way can Ojiro just extend his tail to whatever fucking length he wants or what because it’s like twelve feet long in this panel lol

WOOO FUCK YEAH TOKOYAMI

YOU LOVE TO SEE IT!! BUT WHERE’S YOUR FLASHBACK? YOU’VE HAD A BUNCH OF INTERACTIONS WITH HIM, THAT’S NOT FAIR

okay so now Satou’s stepping in which is back to my anticipated order, so maybe Toko will finish his little moment afterward

dskfjfkk

“REMEMBER THAT TIME DEKU BORROWED SATOU’S FOOD COLORING” Horikoshi says, sweating. “AND REMEMBER THAT TIME HE, UM, SMILED IN HAGAKURE’S GENERAL DIRECTION”

actually I am curious about what Hagakure’s part will be because, you know, the whole traitor thing lol

(ETA: funny how we just skipped right over it huh. can we get a traitor reveal countdown started here? definitely getting close to that time.)

whoa lol wtf

MOMO??? THIS HAS MOMO WRITTEN ALL OVER IT DAMMIT

-- SWEET MOTHER OF FUCK

“SORRY MIDORIYA-SAN, I LEFT MY FUCKING CHILL AT HOME IN THE LOCKER NEXT TO IIDA’S HELMET” holy shit lmao

and here I thought she’d get a flashback to her time on the Baku Rescue Squad or something. but nope, no flashbacks from Momo, only terrifying sci-fi torture devices

poor Dark Shadow is such a trooper omg

“why am I the only one who has to make prolonged contact with his smelly disgusting self” taking one for the team there DS

FUCK YEAH KAMINARI NO JUTSU

THE PRICKLY BASTARD WHISPERER STRIKES AGAIN!! don’t suppose you brought any clean clothes you could sneakily force him into huh Kami

okay here we go, so now Shouji and Tokoyami are joining forces

um excuse me this is fucking awesome

wonder how he’ll break free? don’t think he’ll reveal Fa Jin until the end of the chapter, so maybe Air Force or something? idk

TOKO GETS AN EXTENDED MOMENT BECAUSE HE IS A TIER TWO PATREON REWARD LEVEL FRIEND YAY

WHY IS MOMO MAKING THIS FACE LOL YOUR THING WAS WAY WORSE

and Shouji just casually hitting him with what is easily the best comment from anyone yet. too bad Deku’s just gonna ignore it. you deserve better Shouji

KAMINARI OMFG

it only just occurred to me that Kami is currently trapped inside Dark Shadow right along with him lmao omg. realest one in the entirety of BnHA, right here. we will never forget your sacrifice

aaaaaaand Deku’s yeeting himself

do you really hate the thought of taking a bath that much my dude

oh shit the mask!!

-- oh shit the feels

o(TヘTo)

fuck. and I mean, we knew he was crying, that was a done deal. but still, to see him in this much pain is just...

and the acknowledgement that he knows they’re worried about him, but that it doesn’t change his mind one bit. this, right here, is why they have to be a bit harsh with him, you guys. because they’re up against the full, unbridled stubbornness of Midoriya fucking Izuku, and if they don’t match that stubbornness with an equal stubbornness of their own, they basically don’t stand a chance

(ETA: quick note that there is apparently another mistranslation here -- rather than saying that his friends are oblivious to the danger, what Deku is actually saying is that none of his friends have activated his Danger Sense once throughout this entire fight. which I had been wondering about, and it turns out Horikoshi actually confirmed it. so basically none of the kids bears any ill intent toward him, and there’s literal proof right there.

incidentally, as @class1akids​ pointed out, this also casts an interesting light on this chapter in terms of who hasn’t fought Deku yet. not to play the Hagakure Traitor Music for the billionth time you guys, but I’M JUST SAYING lol.)

anyway, but the good news is that they all seem to understand that. and the even better news is that we have reached the tier 3 friends!!

“OR ELSE” lol, great to see Shouto wielding his friendship just as aggressively as Deku once did towards him. I do love a good role reversal

p.s., ANTICIPATED DISCOURSE: “why is Shouto being so cruel to Deku can’t he see how hard this is on him”

PREEMPTIVE REBUTTAL: this is a callback to the classic “even heroes cry when they have to” Shouto line from chapter 137. Shouto is clearly following Kacchan’s lead here and going for the more ruthless approach, knowing that the gentle approach isn’t getting through to him (if anything it’s only making him more stubborn as we saw on the previous page). basically it’s his way of pointing out that even heroes are still only human, and so is Deku last time he checked

ah okay, and there Tsuyu is at last

okay real talk, I get why Tsuyu is included in the tier 3 friends, because she was one of the first people to team up with Deku going all the way back to USJ. but that said, this probably would have had more impact if their most recent interaction hadn’t been like 150 chapters ago

but anyway though it’s still a good speech. maybe not quite a cliffhanger-level speech, but a good speech nonetheless. in a way though, I’m glad to see that Horikoshi seemingly didn’t give a fuck whether he ended this on an actual cliffhanger or not for once

and that “headed toward the climax” part has me excited too, ngl. because if we really are getting to the so-called climax this soon, that makes me even more certain that there is indeed a DvK3 in the forecast. so I presume that next week (or I guess two weeks from now) will be the tier 3s along with the remaining tier 2s like Kirishima and Aoyama

and then after that, well... [orange and green banners being hoisted] [sound of screeching airhorns and vuvuzelas in the distance] [sound of All Might approaching in his car which I didn’t notice until I looked back at this page a second time whoops] THE PROPHECY WILL NOT BE DENIED

#bnha 320 #midoriya izuku #bakugou katsuki #asui tsuyu #tokoyami fumikage #kaminari denki #todoroki shouto #class 1-a #bnha #boku no hero academia #bnha spoilers #mha spoilers #bnha manga spoilers #makeste reads bnha

[clanwarrior-tumbly]

OHSHC: Mitsukuni (Honey) x Fem!Reader Fluff

A/N: Okay so this was something I wrote WAY back in 2013 when I was obsessed with Ouran Highschool Host Club. So I did make a bunch of revisions (like fixing typos and changing up some of the events that occur).

But if you wanna read the original check it out on my DeviantArt!

Welp, hope ya'll enjoy this!

It was a lovely Friday afternoon. School was out and most students were eager to go home. 

But you, on the other hand, decided to visit the Host Club for a few hours. You always looked forward going to it everyday after school, though not just because you desperately wanted to be swooned by handsome men.

You just liked to observe the hosts indulging in their element, be it Tamaki’s flamboyant acts or the Hitachiin twins’ performances. All the while, you drank tea and ate delicious pastries whilst chatting with other ladies who babbled about their crushes.

Most had their eyes on Tamaki, for obvious reasons, but for you there was a different host that stole your heart every time, without fail:

Mitsukuni, or “Honey” as everyone liked to call him. 

You did have a slight crush on him, considering you both shared classes and hung-out quite often on the weekends. But even after all the years you’ve known him, you never actually acted on this crush, not wanting to take away his duties as a host.

Besides he might treat you extra “sweetly”, but you assumed he was like this with all the other girls.

Unbeknownst to you, however, Honey didn't see you the same way as he saw them. To him you weren't just another visitor to entertain.

He saw you as something, well, more.

........

'Okay this wasn't...what I expected. But I guess I'll have to stay for a little while longer..' You sighed as you looked down at the blonde who was now laying on your lap.

Honey must've had a sugar crash, since he fell asleep on the same sofa you so-happened to be on, even though the club meeting had ended fifteen minutes ago.

'Poor guy must be tired, running around and entertaining..he deserves at least this.' Relaxing back against the sofa, you gently stroked his hair with one hand, and kept Usa-chan wrapped around your free arm. You were sure he wouldn't mind it, given that he's let you hold it before.

All the while, you hummed a gentle song, taking note of the tiny smile that adorned his sleeping face. You knew very well that you shouldn't move, but you didn't mind it. 

Being able to get this close to him made it worthwhile.

Haruhi, Mori, and Kyoya would glance over every so often while they were cleaning up, smiling at the scene. Meanwhile, Tamaki and the twins were hiding behind a nearby couch, looking at you with comically-wide eyes. They wondered how you've managed to not wake up Honey at all, and how you were so calm.

You looked over and gave them a bemused smile, waving politely. Honestly you didn't know what their deal was. They were staring at you like you were about to invoke the wrath of god.

Or in this case the wrath of the loli-shota.

"H-How does [y/n] do that?" The frenchman stammered as he gazed at the twins.

""It must be Nekozawa's sleeping magic. Maybe she's in cahoots with him."" The brothers replied, trembling too.

"You guys are acting insane." Haruhi sighed as she walked past the three with a porcelain tray in her hands. "She’s known Honey-senpai for years, so..it's obvious they're close. Doesn’t take a genius to know why she’s not afraid of him.”

"But why does she keep choosing him every time she visits?!! A-Am I somehow unworthy?!!" Tamaki cried out, already tearing up. "It makes no sense!! Mommy!! What do you make of this?!!" He swung his head to the already-annoyed Kyoya.

"Tamaki..our job here at the club is to make every girl happy, right? That includes Miss [L/n]-"

"B-But-But..she could at least give me a cha--!!"

"If you'll let me finish..." The black-haired male huffed. "Like every girl here, she has the right to choose whichever host she desires. You don't get to make that decision for her. So I suggest you keep it down, lest you wake up Honey-senpai." Fixing his glasses, he turned back to his laptop, ending the conversation.

Tamaki pouted in defeat and got up from his hiding spot. The twins followed him to where you sat and crouched down, now more curious than fearful.

"Gentlemen." You sighed quietly, waiting for them to get to the point so they could leave you alone.

"How are you able to keep so calm??" Hikaru hissed.

"We told you how he acts when his nap is disturbed.” Kaoru added. “You’re taking a big risk-”

“You’re overreacting a bit.” Finding it hard not to chuckle at their bewildered expressions, you kept your gaze on Honey instead. "I see no reason to be terrified of him waking up from a nap. People get cranky after naps all the time. But they eventually get over it, don't they?"

Then you glanced back up at the three, smiling reassuringly. "I do believe that little “horror story” you told me. But don't worry, if anything happens I'll protect you guys, okay? Nothing bad will happen to anyone here...especially not Honey.” You patted the sleeping blonde’s head.

The twins were relieved--moved, even--by your response, but Tamaki on the other hand seemed a bit freaked out by your promise to protect them. He tried grabbing your shoulders to yell about how “guys should protect girls, not the other way around���, though the duo managed to restrain him.

"B-Boss!! Cut it out!"

"You're gonna wake him!!!"

Unfortunately, the commotion they were making was exactly what stirred Honey from his rest. The three hosts immediately retreated back to their hiding place, expecting their fellow club member to awaken in rage.

But all he did was open his eyes and rub them tiredly. 

"Morning, Hon." You chuckled, ruffling his hair lightly.

As he realized you were still in the same spot as before, he smiled up at you. "Did I really sleep all night, [y/n]-chan?"

"No, only for a little while." You allowed him to sit up, and you handed him Usa-chan. "Have any good dreams?"

"Hmm..yeah, I did." Honey took his rabbit plushie, legs swinging as he tried to recall the details. "I..we were at a fair with lots of cake and ice cream! Then I...o-on the ferris wheel I might've..." He hugged the rabbit closer, to the point of hiding his blushing face.

You tilted your head in curiosity. "Might've what?"

"A-Asked you out and..and k-kissed you."

His response stunned you, and you could feel your heart skip several beats. In truth you've had similar dreams, although you never did get to the kissing part--instead you'd wake up with disappointment, never knowing if he accepted your confession.

"You know I dreamed of that, too. But..I never knew what your answer would be." You sighed despondently. "No matter how much I try to fall back asleep..I can't finish that dream. It's a shame.."

He shyly looked up at you, and he set down Usa-chan before taking your hands into his own. You gazed at him with surprise, wondering what he was going to do. "Honey? What-?"

His face inched closer to yours, and before you knew it, he kissed you perfectly on the lips.

Yep! Right here and right now he was kissing you!

The kiss tasted sweet, much like his personality and all those desserts he's had throughout the day. And you were in shock that this was really happening, but you smiled into the kiss, wanting to return it before he got the wrong idea.

When you both broke apart, Honey's eyes were large and tearful. But they were happy tears. "Y-You really do like me? But..I-I thought...I was too-"

"Honey, there's nothing about you that I don't love." You chuckled. "You're a good-hearted, smart, strong, and kind man. And that's all I could ever ask for. We've been great friends for a while and...the fact we share the same dreams must mean something."

"Something like...u-us being a couple, right?"

"Exactly, and right now..I wanna make those dreams a reality. Will you help me make them so?"

He was so overjoyed that he embraced you tightly, nearly crushing your spine. But you hugged him back, resting your chin on top of his head. You could feel his vigorous nod and knew that this is what he wanted for so long.

Of course he was probably still worried about his position as a host, so you looked to the others in question. "A-Ah..I meant to ask-"

"I see no issue with this," Kyoka smiled lightly. "I trust that this newly-blossoming relationship will not interfere with club activities."

""We knew you two were gonna get together eventually."" The twins spoke in unison once more, although they were just glad that Honey didn't snap at anyone this time.

Haruhi and Mori only flashed smiles at you two, the latter happy about his cousin finally confessing to the one he loved. He’s known about it longer than anyone at the club.

Once you let go of Honey, he jumped up and grabbed your hands, pulling you to your feet. "Takashi!! Can [y/n] come over for the weekend??"

"Sure, why not?" The tall male nodded.

"Yaaaay--huh? Tama-chan?" Honey blinked as he noticed the only one who didn't react positively was the club leader himself, who was sulking in the corner. "Aren't you gonna say anything?"

"Yes..I'd say we're all done here," he sighed in an exasperated tone. "If [y/n]'s happiness lies with Honey-senpai then...that's how it is, I guess. The host club is dismissed. You’re all free to leave now."

Of course, that wasn't the kind of send-off anyone expected. But the other hosts left, figuring Tamaki would eventually get over it. Though you told Honey to wait outside for a moment, not wanting to end this day on a sour note.

You reentered the now empty music room, seeing the princely-type staring out the window solemnly. Part of you felt guilty for not spending more time with him, even though he was often a nuisance trying to steal your attention.

"Hey, Tamaki-senpai..I have a feeling I somehow offended you by choosing Honey over you. And I'm sorry-"

"Nonsense." He glanced back at you, the brightness returning to his violet eyes. "I'm so obsessed with trying to charm every lady that it turned me into a blind fool. Until now I never realized that, in the end, it's what makes you happy, not me. I won't get in the way of your relationship with Honey-senpai. Cross my heart."

He made a gesture to seal that promise, smiling softly. "I mean it. I'm very happy for you two and I wish you all the best."

Knowing that he wasn't angry or upset anymore, you smiled and rewarded the "king" with a peck on the cheek. He gasped lightly and stared at you, touching the spot where you kissed him.

"Thank you. It's because of you and this club that I got to know Honey even more so...I owe you at least this. Have a good weekend." You winked before you turned on your heel and ran after your new boyfriend, leaving an incredibly flustered Tamaki alone in the room.

'Ahaha..her heart may belong to another, but she took the time to repair mine.’

#ohshc x reader #ouran highschool host club x reader #honey senpai x reader #mitsukuni x reader #mitsukuni haninozuka x reader #fluff #ohshc fanfiction #ohshc #ouran high school host club #mitsukuni haninozuka #honey senpai

[soundsfaebutokay]

So I've recc'd this video before, but it deserves its own post because it's one of my favorite things on youtube. It's a Tedx Talk by comics writer, editor, and journalist Jay Edidin, and I really think that it will connect with a lot of people here.

If you live and breathe stories of all kinds, you might like this.

If you care about media representation, you might like this.

If you're neurodivergent, you might like this.

If you're interested in a gender transition story that veers from the norm, you might like this.

If you love the original Leverage and especially Parker, and understand how important it is that a character like her exists, you will definitely like this.

Transcript below the cut:

You Are Here: The Cartography of Stories

by Jay Edidin

I am autistic. And what this means in practice is that there are some things that are easier for me than they are for most people, and a great many things that are somewhat harder, and these affect my life in more or less overt ways. As it goes, I'm pretty lucky. I've been able to build a career around special interests and granular obsession. My main gig at the moment is explaining superhero comics continuity and publishing history for which work I am somehow paid in actual legal currency—which is both a triumph of the frivolous in an era of the frantically pragmatic, and a job that's really singularly suited to my strengths and also to my idiosyncrasies.

I like comics. I like stories in general, because they make sense to me in ways that the rest of the world and my own mind often don't. Self-knowledge is not an intuitive thing for me. What sense of self I have, I've built gradually and laboriously and mostly through long-term pattern recognition. For decades, I didn't even really have a self-image. If you'd asked me to draw myself, I would eventually have given you a pair of glasses and maybe a very messy scribble of hair, and that would've been about it. But what I do know—backwards, forwards, and in pretty much every way that matters—are stories. I know how they work. I understand their language, their complex inner clockwork, and I can use those things to extrapolate a sort of external compass that picks up where my internal one falls short. Stories—their forms, their structure, the sense of order inherent to them—give me the means to navigate what otherwise, at least for me, would be an impassable storm of unparsable data. Or stories are a periscope, angled to access the parts of myself I can't intuitively see. Or stories are a series of mirrors by which I can assemble a composite sketch of an identity I rarely recognize whole...which is how I worked out that I was transgender, in my early thirties, by way of a television show.

This is my story. And it's about narrative cartography, and representation, and why those things matter. It's about autism and it's about gender and it's about how they intersect. And it's about the kinds of people we know how to see, and the kinds of people we don't. It's not the kind of story that gets told a lot, you might hear a lot, because the narrative around gender transition and dysphoria in our culture is really, really prescriptive. It's basically the story of the kid who has known for their whole life that they're this and not that, and that story demands the kind of intuitive self-knowledge that I can't really do, and a kind of relationship to gender that I don't really have—which is part of why it took me so long to figure my own stuff out.

So, to what extent this story, my story has a beginning, it begins early in 2014 when I published an essay titled, "I See Your Value Now: Asperger's and the Art of Allegory." And it explored, among other things, the ways that I use narrative and narrative structures to navigate real life. And it got picked up in a number of fairly prominent places that got linked, and I casually followed the ensuing discussion. And I was surprised to discover that readers were fairly consistently assuming I was a man. Now, that in itself wasn't a new experience for me, even though at the time I was writing under a very unambiguously female byline. It had happened in the letter columns of comics I'd edited. It had happened when a parody Twitter account I'd created went viral. When I was on staff at Wired, I budgeted for fancy scotch by putting a dollar in a box every time a reader responded in a way that made it clear they were assuming I was a man in response to an article where my name was clearly visible, and then I had to stop doing that because it happened so often I couldn't afford to keep it up. But in all of those cases, the context, you know, the reasons were pretty obvious. The fields I'd worked in, the beats I covered, they were places where women had had to fight disproportionally hard for visibility and recognition. We live in a culture that assumes a male default, so given a neutral voice and a character limit, most readers will assume a male author.

But this was different, because this wasn't just a book I'd edited, it wasn't a story I'd reported—it was me, it was my story. And it made me uncomfortable, got under my skin in ways that the other stuff really hadn't. And so I did what I do when that happens, and I tried to sort of reverse-engineer it to look at the conclusions and peel them back to see the narratives behind them and the stories that made them tick. And I started this, I started this by going back to the text of the essay, and you know, examining it every way I could think of: looking at craft, looking at content. And in doing so, I was surprised to realize that while I had written about a number of characters with whom I identified closely, that every single one of those characters I'd written about was male. And that surprised me even more than the responses to the essay had, because I've spent my career writing and talking and thinking about gender and representation in popular media. In 2014, I'd been the feminist gadfly of an editorial department and multiple mastheads. I'd been a founding board member of an organization that existed to advocate for more and better representation of women and girls in comics characters and creators. And most of my favorite characters, the ones I'd actively seek out and follow, were women. Just not, apparently, the characters I saw myself in.

Now I still didn't realize it was me at this point. Remember: self-knowledge, not very intuitive for me. And while I had spent a lot of time thinking about gender, I'd never really bothered to think much about my own. I knew academically that the way other people read and interpreted my gender affected and had influenced a lifetime of social and professional interactions, and that those in turn had informed the person I'd grown up into during that time. But I really believed, like I just sort of had in the back of my head, that if you peeled away all of that social conditioning, you'd basically end up with what I got when I tried to draw a self-portrait. So: a pair of glasses, messy scribble of hair, and in this case, maybe also some very strong opinions about the X-Men. I mean, I knew something was off. I'd always known something was off, that my relationship to gender was messy and uncomfortable, but gender itself struck me as messy and uncomfortable, and it had never been a large enough part of how I defined myself to really feel like something that merited further study, and I had deadlines, and...so it was always on the back burner. So, I looked, I looked at what I had, at this improbable group of exclusively male characters. And I looked and I figured that if this wasn't me, then it had to be a result of the stories I had access to, to choose from, and the entertainment landscape I was looking at. And the funny thing is, I wasn't wrong, exactly. I just wasn't right either.

See, the characters I'd written about had one other significant trait in common aside from their gender, which is that they were all more or less explicitly, more or less heavily coded as autistic. And I thought, "Ah, yes. This explains it. This is under representation in fiction echoing under representation in life and vice versa." Because the characteristics that I'd honed in on, that I particularly identified with in these guys, were things like emotional unavailability and social awkwardness and granular obsession, and all of those are characteristics that are seen as unsympathetic and therefore unmarketable in female characters. Which is also why readers were assuming that I was a man.

Because, you see, here's the thing. I'm not the only one who uses stories to navigate the world. I'm just a little more deliberate about it. For humans, stories formed the bridge between data and understanding. They're where we look when we need to contextualize something new, or to recognize something we're pretty sure we've seen before. They're how we identify ourselves; they're how we locate ourselves and each other in the larger world. There were no fictional women like me; there weren't representations of women like me in media, and so readers were primed not to recognize women like me in real life either.

Now by this point, I had started writing a follow-up essay, and this one was also about autism and narratives, but specifically focused on how they intersected with gender and representation in media. And in context of this essay, I went about looking to see if I could find even one female character who had that cluster of traits I'd been looking for, and I was asking around in autistic communities. And I got a few more or less useful one-off suggestions, and some really, really splendid arguments about semantics and standards, and um...then I got one answer over and over and over in community after community after community. "Leverage," people told me. "You have to watch Leverage."

So I watched Leverage. Leverage is five seasons of ensemble heist drama. It's about a team of very skilled con artists who take down corrupt and powerful plutocrats and the like, and it's a lot of fun, and it's very clever, and it's clever enough that it doesn't really matter that it's pretty formulaic, and I enjoyed it a lot. But what's most important, what Leverage has is Parker.

Parker is a master thief, and she is the best of the best of the best in ways that all of Leverage's characters are the best of the best. And superficially, she looks like the kind of woman you see on TV. So she's young, and she's slender, and she's blonde, and she's attractive but in a sort of approachable way. And all of that familiarity is brilliant misdirection, because the thing is, there are no other women like Parker on TV. Because Parker—even if it's never explicitly stated in the show—Parker is coded incredibly clearly as autistic. Parker is socially awkward. Her speech tends to have limited inflection; what inflection it does have is repetitive and sounds rehearsed a lot of the time. She's not emotionally literate; she struggles with it, and the social skills she develops over the series, she learns by rote, like they're just another grift. When she's not scaling skyscrapers or cartwheeling through laser grids, she wears her body like an ill-fitting suit. Parker moves like me. And Parker, Parker was a revelation—she was a revolution unto herself. In a media landscape where unempathetic women usually exist to either be punished or "loved whole," Parker got to play the crabby savant. And she wasn't emotionally intuitive but it was never ever played as the product of abuse or trauma even though she had survived both of those—it was just part of her, as much as were her hands or her eyes. And she had a genuine character arc. My god, she had a genuine romantic arc, even. And none of that required her to turn into anything other than what she was. And in Parker I recognized a thousand tics and details of my life and my personality...but. I didn't recognize myself.

Why? What difference was there in Parker, you know, between Parker and the other characters I'd written about? Those characters, they'd spanned ethnicities and backgrounds and different media and appearances and the only other characteristic they all had in common was their gender. So that was where I started to look next, and I thought, "Well, okay, maybe, maybe it's masculinity. Maybe if Parker were less feminine, she'd click with me the way those other characters had." So then I tried to imagine a Parker with short hair, who's explicitly butch, and...nothing. So okay, I extended it in what seems like the only logical direction to extend it. I said, "Well, if it's not masculinity, what if it's actual maleness? What if Parker were a man?" Ah. Yeah.

In the end, everything changed, and nothing changed, which is often the way that it goes for me. Add a landmark, no matter how slight, and the map is irrevocably altered. Add a landmark, and paths that were invisible before open wide. Add a landmark, and you may not have moved, but suddenly you know where you are and where you can go.

I wasn't going to tell this story when I started planning this talk. I was gonna tell a similar story, it was about stories, like this is, about narratives and the ways that they influence our culture and vice versa. And it centered around a group of women at NASA who had basically rewritten the narrative around space exploration, and it was a lot more fun, and I still think it was more interesting. But it's also a story you can probably work out for yourselves. In fact it's a story some of you probably have, if you follow that kind of thing, which you probably do given that you're here. And this is a story, my story is not a story that I like to tell. It's not a fun story to talk about because it's very personal and I am a very private person. And it's not universal. And it's not always relatable, and it's definitely not aspirational. And it's not the kind of story that you tend to encounter unless you're already part of it...which is why I'm telling it now. Because the thing is, I'm not the only person who uses stories to parse the world and navigate it. I'm just a little more deliberate. Because I'm tired of having to rely on composite sketches.

Open your maps. Add a landmark. Reroute accordingly.

#Jay Edidin #LGBTQ #autism #mind and body #gender norms #why humans need stories #Leverage #Parker #Abby posts Leverage #my faves #Youtube #I did my best with the transcript #sorry for any mistakes

[hello-nichya-here]

People who go out of their way to demonize Azula while sweeping Iroh and Zuko's flaws under the rug just make Iroh and Zuko look worse.

Iroh and Zuko have been given perspective; Azula hasn't. All Zuzu has to do is talk to her, show her the errors of both her and his ways, and she'll change her mind. There already have been too many tragedies like Zuko being mutilated and Iroh losing his own son; when does it stop? Zuko is a (justfiedly) angry man, who's got plenty of issues and used to constantly lash out at anyone who did not kiss his ass, but he is reasonable when he gets his head out of his butt. If he can be, then why she can't?

"Not every character deserves redemption" say this to Aang and he'll airbend your ass into the next episode (that's probably not going to receive a good budget by Nickelodeon). He was willing to give Ozai a chance, even while fighting him. When he was trying to burn the Earth Kingdom to the ground and kill him.

Also, if Zuko is such a *ooooh* saint as you portray him to be, then he has no reason to not give her a chance. I'm not saying Azula did not bad things (she did), but she's also only a child (14 years old) and Zuko has also done plenty, plenty of bad things himself (while being older - 16 years old), but has been, although in a very unfortunate manner, been blessed with enlightenment of the bad things that are happening in the world and that they need to change during his exile. Had he not been given that, they would probably be side by side in the end (and they would've won because they're unstoppable together).

Zuko giving her a chance to become a better person, doesn't ruin his redemption arc, but makes it better. The guy who had so much resentment and jealousy for his little sister, who was also entitled to the Fire Nation throne despite not even being the main heir (neither to the original line of succession - Lu Ten, Iroh - nor to his father's eyes - Azula), who had to capture the Avatar and help his father destroy the other nations just to deserve a small bit of respect that he (much like his sister) naturally deserved but never got, becoming the Avatar's best friend and peacemaker, willing to rule alongside his sister to break the cycle of family hatred and power struggle, all while giving her a different point of view and making her a better person not only gives her an opportunity to have a redemption arc and a chance to recover, but also reaffirms his own by proving that it did not only happen, but it still happening as he continues to become a better person

And the best part: Zuko is allowed to be his own character. He realizing his sister being stronger, smarter and more talented than him, doesn't make him weak, stupid or unskilled. And that, naturally, no matter how much you train there'll always be someone better, but that doesn't make your efforts pointless. He doesn't need the Fire Nation throne to be his own person, and me saying this is not saying he can't rule; he can, but he needs to find a reason other than respect (because he shouldn't have to become a tyrant to deserve the natural appreciation a father should have for his own children, and neither pretend to be someone else's dead son).

If he wants to rule the Fire Nation with kindness... than he needs to be kind himself. And not only to Azula, but to his uncle, to Mai, to Ty Lee, to the gaang and to all other characters that, willingly (or unwillingly) he hurt, like Song and her mother, the Kyoshi Island and South Water Tribe inhabitants, his crew, etc.

He has the knife and the cheese. He can cut and share it with other people and stop them from starving or he can throw the knife away and eat all of the cheese, while giving excuses as to why the other people are dying, and watch as they stab him in the back. And in the comics case, he can also throw the cheese away and shove the knife up his ass, apparently.

But this is my opinion and it's just that.

Unrelated: if you want Zuko to have a more unique fighting style in comparison to Azula, why not make him combine his swords with his firebending'? Sure, Sokka uses a sword, but Zuko uses two and the former also uses a boomerang as well. Ah, this is probably just a topic for another ask and this one is already too long anyway...

It could also be a comedy bit with Sokka pointing that out to him and he's like "Huh? Is that legal?" or something, I don't know.

THIS IS THE TYPE OF QUALITY CONTENT I CRAVE!

#asks #azula deserved better #zuko deserved better

[alfredolover119]

I looooove your zukka rec lists! I recently became Avatar-obsessed, never got a chance to watch it as a kid and only just got through it all! I was wondering if you'd consider doing a specifically angst rec list? I love fluffy zukka everything, but sometimes you just gotta have your heart ripped out of your chest and put back in after being thoroughly blended.

thank you! i relate heavily to “recently became Avatar-obsessed” haha. as for the angst list, i sure can try! warning: all of these have happy endings because im a crybaby who can’t read unhappy endings. also, p much all of the fics in the completed section were featured on my other lists but this is specifically the ANGSTY ones >:^)

angsty zukka wips

first, most obviously, feels like we only go backwards by @oldpotatoe

-currently at 102k with 19/27 chapters posted; rated teen

-the amnesia fic. the amnesia fic. the amnesia fic. you know. i haven’t actually read it yet because, as previously mentioned, i’m a crybaby and am waiting for it to finish up but, from my understanding, this fic will murder you in a dark alleyway with no remorse. if u like zukka angst, you’ve probably already read this, but just in case!

An injury leaves Sokka with amnesia. His last memory is of the failed invasion, of leaving his father behind in enemy territory on the Day of Black Sun. Of hopelessness. Rage. // But then he wakes up, and the war is over. Suddenly, he must come to terms with the fact that years have passed, and that he's somehow the Southern Water Tribe Ambassador to the Fire Nation. He is also supposedly friends with banished-Prince-turned-Fire-Lord Zuko, of all people. Close friends.

Yeah, nah.

and i’ll do anything you say (if you say it with your hands) by @goldrushzukka

-currently 38k with 6/8 chapters posted; rated mature

-holy shit. holy SHIT. modern au based on the “my cat likes my fuckbuddy and i am falling in love” trope(?). maybe it’s just because of how the last chapter ended, but oh my god. this one made me cry. made me want to commit violence. when it’s not angsty as hell, it’s pretty funny, but holy shit. ao3 user nebulastucky please.

It’s supposed to be a one night stand. Pick up some guy at a bar, barely remember his name and never learn anything real about him, send him packing in the morning with a thanks for the ride and a cup of coffee to-go. That’s how it’s supposed to go. // But then it’s the best sex Sokka has ever had, and he thinks he’ll hate himself if he never gets to have it again.

Violet Blossoms and Celestial Objects by @hollypunkers

-currently 15k with 2/? posted. rated teen.

-this is the sequel to blue (an angsty, zukka rewrite of book 2-- go read it if u havent!)! !! this is a book 3 rewrite. only two chapters in and mrs hollypunkers is really abusing the miscommunication tag, as zukka writers seem to enjoy doing. im excited to see how the world and story develops with the changes to the story! you should be too!! its very good! obviously spoilers for blue lmao

Having sided with the Avatar in Ba Sing Se, Zuko not only must navigate his new relationship with Sokka but returning to the Fire Nation as a banished enemy. His own journey of self discovery and personal growth must now coexist alongside the personal struggles of every other member of the Gaang as together they blaze a treacherous path toward an unsure victory against Zuko's own father and nation.

breakable heaven by @fruitysokka

-currently 71k with 9/11 chapters posted. rated teen

-swt ambassador zuko! soon to be chief sokka! fake dating ur best friend to get out of an arranged marriage! what could go wrong!!! i also haven’t read this one ((see: i’m a crybaby who is being hurt by too many zukka wips already)), but it has been hanging out in my marked for later for months. from what i understand, this fic has: angst.

With his twenty-first birthday looming just around the corner, the Southern Water Tribe Elders have decided that Sokka, next in line to be Chief, needs to get married. Sokka does not want that, but he does need to get them off his back until he can figure his way out of it. What better way to do that than to pretend to date his best friend (and newly minted Ambassador to the Southern Water Tribe) Zuko? // Seriously, this is a foolproof plan. Maybe one of Sokka's best. Absolutely nothing can go wrong.

angsty zukka fics (completed!)

(i’ll put these in wc order)

lighthouse beam by @incorrectzukka

-7k, rated g

-a modern college au!! zuko’s inner-monologue is very angsty in this fic. typical zuko. also per usual, theyre both fucking dorks. they sort themselves out in the end, but not before The Angst. zuko is semi-deaf in this fic and also he has a bit of internalized homophobia.

Sokka’s breathtakingly beautiful and he’s smart and makes other people laugh. Zuko has a half-burnt face and a deaf ear. It’s not rocket science. // Or, Zuko falls in love with the boy in his Philosophy class.

This Isn’t My Idea of Fun by @khaleeseas

-9k, explicit

-moon spirit/nwt prince!sokka, no war to be found here! admittedly this isnt THAT angsty but like. the angst IS present. zuko is still the prince. a lovely childhood friends (though they hated each other for a minute haha) to lovers story. 

If you asked Zuko, he and Azula saw far too much of Chief Hakoda of the Northern Water Tribe’s children growing up. It wasn’t until they were older, and Azula pointed out that - duh - their families were trying to set them all up, that he realized why. // He was told by his mother to be polite. These people were their friends and allies, and though their nations were as different as they came, harmony between nations was the most important thing. // It wasn’t his fault the Chief’s children were so annoying.

put your lips close to mine (as long as they don’t touch) by @celestialceci

-9k, teen

-modern au! zuko and sokka are college roommates. zuko goes to spend the summer with sokka. again,, not really that angsty but-- its there!! the detail and feeling of Home in this story make me happy. zuko is insecure as hell here too. if ur into that. 

Zuko hates his home. He likes college alright, but he likes Sokka even better, his assigned roommate turned best friend. Spending the summer with Sokka will be fun, a welcome change of pace he desperately wants. It probably won't awaken anything in him... right?

the thing about dancing by anodymalion

-9k, teen

-yes. this one right here officer. it makes my heart ache. also trans sokka! which is cool. but the zuko angst in this one. hurts me. not so much relationship angst as it is zuko learning he deserves happiness angst. i’m sure u know The Type.

The first time a attendant spills Zuko’s tea and doesn’t immediately fall to her knees, begging the Fire Lord’s forgiveness, it is not anger but a resounding warmth that fills his chest.

i could (never) give you peace by @zukkababey

-10k, mature

-OUCH. OUCH OUCH OUCH. boys please learn to communicate im begging u. also zuko.. zuko, dude. as the tags of the fic say, hes “really going through it” in this one. YOUCH. post-canon.

Zuko almost said it. He almost said the words I think I’m in love with you, but he choked them back down at the last second. // Zuko would never be able to be what Sokka wanted. They might have needed each other during the summer, when two boys with too much weight on their shoulders found comfort in each other in the only way they knew how. // But now Zuko was Fire Lord, and Sokka was leaving.

this love burns so yellow (becoming orange and in its time, exploding) by @meliebee 

-18k, teen, major character death 

-i lied. THIS is the one, officer. found family.. good mai and zuko and toph friendships.. . ozai escapes prison and tries to overthrow zuko. OBVIOUSLY angst ensues. poor boy. he Does heal in this but it gets worse before it gets better. angst angst angst angst.

Ten months after Zuko is crowned at seventeen, he faces his first coup.

Anything for You by beersforqueers

-23k, explicit

-istg. this is probably one of my favorite zukka fics. its PAINFUL. modern au where theyre broken up but sokka hasnt told his family yet so zuko goes home with him for kataang wedding. a bit smutty, but the plot oh my god ohgm y fuvk. made me cry the first time i read it. (see: crybaby!me) insert that one picture of the horse with the caption PAIN. 

In which Sokka and Zuko have broken up but Sokka hasn't told his family yet. So when Katara and Aang's wedding weekend rolls around and he doesn't want to break Gran-Gran's heart, he asks Zuko to pretend to be his boyfriend for one last weekend. // Things don't go as planned.

Moving Mountains by @thefangirlingdead

-64k, mature

-so. when i read this the first time it was in one sitting. soulmate au set within canon era / the comics, to an extent. soulmates can hear each others thoughts. i will happily say this is slowburn, jesus christ. champagne without the cham. 

Soulmates are chosen by the spirits and can hear each other’s thoughts. Sokka thinks it’s cheesy and dumb. Zuko thinks it’s poetic justice that he doesn’t have one because he doesn’t deserve it. Cruel irony is finding out that the prince of the Fire Nation (and the person currently hunting you) is your soulmate.

In the Soft Light by @voidcenturyscholar and @romancedawning

-83k, teen, graphic depictions of violence

-moon spirit!sokka living in the northern water tribe. zuko is sent to the northern water tribe as a cultural liaison. iroh is the fire lord but while he is away taking care of lu ten after his injury ozai steps up. i cannot express how many emotions this fic made me feel. background yuetara. i would almost say found family?? but. anyway. plenty of angst to spare here with a healthy dose of enemies to friends to lovers.

As the newly appointed cultural liaison to Northern Water Tribe, Zuko is the first Fire Nation Citizen to step foot inside the city's walls in nearly a century. He's determined to prove himself—to the Fire Lord and to his father—even if the Water Tribe's spirit-touched prince seems to want nothing to do with him.

That Midnight Sky by @zukkababey

-103k, teen

-now now now. tms... modern college au where sokka agrees to tutor zuko in physics because zuko has to maintain straight a’s and physics is just not doing it for him. so. thats cool but THEN azula moves in, randomly, with zuko. to hide the fact that sokka is tutoring zuko, they fake date! what could go wrong!! the mutual pining in here combined with the angst... wonderful, tasty. everyone read it rn. also SLOWBURN 

In Zuko’s strict family, needing a tutor is just about the worst thing you could do. Failing a class, however, is even worse. The only rational solution? Take up Aang on his offer to find him a physics tutor and have Sokka—beautiful, smart, handsome Sokka—tutor him in secret. // When Azula’s arrival threatens to reveal Zuko’s secret, it’s up to Sokka to convince her this definitely isn’t what it looks like. See, he’s actually… Zuko’s… boyfriend? // Hmm. There’s no way this could get complicated, right?

#zukka #zuko #sokka #angst #zukka angst #atla #avatar: the last airbender #fic recs #zukka fic recs