#I generally don’t utilize the tagging system much | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

not-your-desi-girl · 2 years

Text

The Siren Song of Dark Academia

Tweed uniforms, reading Kafka by candlelight and sitting in the university library for as long as there is more than one star twinkling in the sky. What do all of these share in common? A passion for knowledge and antiquity integrated with the soul of chaos and the tortured artist. That’s the shortest description I could think of when trying to describe what dark academia is. Dark academia has transformed into a complex aesthetic that consists of dark and earthy tones, old books, and a lack of modern technology. The theme has made its way through various forms of media, such as film and literature, but has truly been seized by Gen Z during the past couple of years. It’s accessible escapism available to anyone who feels the flames of chaos licking their ankles in midst of a global pandemic and political upheaval.

As a university student who was sent home during my first year due to the pandemic, I’m not surprised at the rise in dark academia and aesthetic lifestyles in general. When told to essentially stay in one place, you start to pine for something different than the life you have in front of you; the idea of the life you could have on campus becomes exciting and romantic, and an “anything but this” mindset is the fertilizer an aesthetic needs to become pervasive. Dark academia creates this fantasy world where scholarship is beautiful and seems to offer more than just a way to find a lucrative career.

I’d be a hypocrite if I said that I didn’t love dark academia itself. I can’t pretend that I haven’t stayed up late to do homework while listening to a playlist that consists of Chopin and Debussy, or that I’m not doing that in the campus library *right now*. However, I believe that the aesthetic has a certain ugliness to it, one that can get especially worse when given the chance. Social media sites -especially Tumblr- can quickly lead users to view unhealthy content and does a pretty good job of keeping users stuck in a chasm that endlessly echoes back at them.

How does an aesthetic go wrong and what happens when it does?

How Tumblr Created Aesthetic

Of all the social media sites out there, Tumblr is the least expected to be unfamiliar with the aesthetic, or event the term “aesthetic” in general. In more ways than one, Tumblr birthed the concept of online aesthetics. Older users know that the website was one of the first to be image-centric when it was launched in 2007 (Mirny 2021). The emphasis on imagery as content combined with the utilization of tags called for a culmination of users to curate communities quite literally with the touch of a button (or maybe a few). Using tags to label images are posts makes searching a lot easier, but because Tumblr tags allow so much creative freedom, it can become difficult to describe a community when it consists of so many different ideas and images. Naming an aesthetic “dark academia” is much easier than saying “things that look like Dead Poet’s Society” and hoping for the best.

In philosophy, aesthetics refers to the principles that govern perceived beauty and artistic taste. Tumblr is no different. The various aesthetics you see such as “basic”, “cottage core”, “retro”, “e-girl”, etc. are all forms of artistic expression that resonate with specific groups of people. Even the aesthetics that are very apparent forms of rebellion against beauty standards have some type of standard themselves to constitute as an aesthetic, such as “goth” and “punk”. Users will create image posts and connect them with their respective tags. Images that users feel make the most sense in the aesthetic receive more notes and reblogs, and reach more users exponentially, while images that don’t cater to the target community tend to dissolve. This system pushes communities to create a concentrated aesthetic that shares a very specific feature.

When a majority of Tumblr users are young, that no doubt significantly influences what the mainstream aesthetics will look like.

Though not the majority, a large portion of users consists of people between 15 and 25 years old. People can struggle at any age, of course, but the 10-year period is difficult. Imagine going through physical puberty, immediately followed by emotional puberty. Younger users are more likely to yearn for a sense of community to feel like they belong *somewhere*, meaning that aesthetic communities are bound to be more popular with that demographic: “Access to the public sphere in traditional ways has decreased substantially for youth during the past two decades, while surveillance by parents and institutional authorities has greatly increased. Teens' use of social media is a reflection of their need to find new ways to achieve privacy and assert some control over their personal space” (McCracken 2017). The very need to gain back the control McCracken mentions is reflected in the rise of online aesthetics. It serves as a form of self-expression in a place that the self is otherwise restricted, and users can portray themselves however they see fit. People want to be with others who understand them. But it’s in that sense of community where users can stumble into something that would’ve been better off left alone (this seems to happen so often that the site should be rebranded to Stumblr).

Romanticizing Mental Illness

***Content Warning: Discussion of eating disorders and self-harm ***

Those familiar with dark academia imagine a flurry of images when they hear the name of the aesthetic. Among those images are primarily scholars. Dark academia concocts a reality where chasing your thirst for knowledge is for your own personal development and enrichment. In the 1989 film Dead Poet’s Society, teacher John Keating tells his students, “We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion.” Passion for knowledge is at the core of dark academia, but eventually to a fault. The b-side of the aesthetic includes dark circles and eye bags, madness, and the ever infamous “thinspo”.

Anima Shrestha cites 16-year-old Tumblr user Laura who wishes she could be “mysterious, haunted, fascinating”. The transition from demonizing mental illness in media to desiring it is largely due to the “echo chamber” sites like Tumblr provides (Shrestha 2018). Vulnerable teenagers and young adults will go into Tumblr seeking advice or sympathy and find themselves accidentally caught in a riptide of negative content. Once the algorithm catches onto a user’s preferences, the user will see more of that type of content. Repeating the beautification of mental illness within this closed space may eventually lead to impressionable/vulnerable users to desire mental illness for themselves (Shrestha 2018). Black and white images portraying melancholy and despair remove the very real pain of mental illness and converts the concept into its own aesthetic. This simultaneously harms the people with desire who do not have a disorder and delegitimizes those who do have a disorder.

The the two most inescapable disorder-based posts on Tumblr are arguably depression and anorexia, especially within dark academia. As mentioned earlier, the core of the dark academia aesthetic is a burning passion for knowledge. This can materialize in the form of a student who stays up for hours on end to research their interests, or an alcoholic professor who is a nihilist because he “just knows too much”. More often than not, “the tortured artist” is the most revered trope: a misunderstood character in pain over the unfair nature of the world; someone who is too intellectually profound for their own wellbeing. Nihilism and depression combine to create this image of superiority because “nobody gets them”. Physically harming and neglecting the self is an integral part of the tortured artist archetype, so it will surely flow over if one embraces the aesthetic wholly. However, how a user connects to this archetype can turn into a “what came first”-type riddle. In the height of Covid-19, students were already at the mercy of academic stress, so it’s not impossible that the tortured artist/scholar serves as a figure of relatability and comfort. In a sense, the character makes the pain feel like it’s all in the name of something greater than we can comprehend, making it worth it. However! Users are still at risk of exacerbating the situation if they stay within the echo chamber.

On to thinspo: the first time I searched up “Dark Academia” on tumblr I saw an image-post of very thin white women with the tags #an0r3x!a (leetspeak for “anorexia”) and #I will get skinny.

I was horrified - why is it so blatant and so accessible?

Not surprisingly, it’s because we like skinny women. Using the royal we, our online society prefers thinner woman to the point where 97.7% of them were the subject of a photo (Wick and Harriger 2018). I don’t think anyone will fall out of their seat in shock when I say that we still have exceptionally strict beauty standards online for women and femme-presenting people. They are expected to be skinny, hairless, and white (or European-looking at the very least). Placing people with these features on a pedestal further separates people and creates a homogenous community. With dark academia being an aesthetic, it will inevitably prioritize how things (and people) look.

Classism and Racism in Dark Academia

A quick question: did the photo I included at the very top of this post seem out of place? Did anything about it scream “THIS ISN’T DARK ACADEMIA!!!!” ? I’d be surprised if it gave off that impression because most results when searching for “dark academia” show images of preppy-looking students, marble statues, and old European-style architecture. The fashion, architecture, and very interests of dark academia are heavily Eurocentric. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is potentially THE template for the aesthetic, with it’s preparatory school, white students in uniforms, and mystery.

Is there anything wrong with thinking that Oxford University looks nice and that French seems like an interesting language? Of course not! But the fact that the aesthetic is so blatantly European begs for questioning.

Dark academia associates itself with decadence, elite scholarship and mysterious prep schools, all of which have been historically exclusive to wealthy white men. With the efforts of British colonialism, nations have been ravaged of their wealth and knowledge, leaving few resources to recuperate in time before Western ideology became the mainstream. Dark academia preserves the past and remains within the aesthetics of 19th and 20th century England and the east coast of the United States. Even the fashion of it is that of the modern-day Tory (wealthy and conservative English people). An overwhelming majority of images with the dark academia tag depict white people, and they are treated as the default. If you want to find traditional/cultural dark academia, you need to specifically search for it, showing us that BIPOC users are not included within the aesthetic normally.

The lack of BIPOC people within the community reflects the reality of how academia tends to bar People of Color from entering the space, especially women. BIPOC women who do enter the sphere of education face microaggressions and betrayal from colleagues and mentors alike (Marbley et al. 2011).

The aesthetic contradicts itself because it’s very presence on social media makes it *not* elite, yet somehow it is gatekept. Dark academia prides itself on individuals learning about and embracing culture, but only European cultures and languages are treated as classy. There is nothing inherently white about wanting to chase knowledge, but because of colonization and mainstream Western ideology, non-European cultures are erased and ignored by the aesthetic.

Poetry and literature from all cultures should be celebrated in the community because it only provides more perspective on how the chaos of the world around us falls into place. Luckily, users are slowly integrating more content that features people of color in dark academia.

Resources

Marbley, Aretha, Aliza Wong, Sheryl Santos-Hatchett, and Lahib Jaddo. 2011. “Women Faculty of Color: Voices, Gender, and the Expression of Our Multiple Identities within Academia.” Advancing Women in Leadership 31: 166–74. http://www.advancingwomen.com/awl/Vol31_2011/marbleyfinal207_31.pdf.

‌McCracken, Allison. 2017. “Tumblr Youth Subcultures and Media Engagement.” Cinema Journal 57 (1): 151–61. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44867867.pdf.‌

2021. Proquest.com. 2021. https://www.proquest.com/docview/2506736471?parentSessionId=mW4hWlzgSS8EN%2FZpFGJqHDUuHtxx6kwfnPofMsRtdFM%3D&pq-origsite=primo&accountid=9703.

‌“Elsevier Enhanced Reader.” 2017. Elsevier.com. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2017.11.005.‌

“(PDF) Emotion Regulation and the Disappointing Gift Task: Implications for Understanding Children’s Development.” n.d. ResearchGate. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Reeya-Patel-7/publication/327321983_Emotion_Regulation_and_The_Disappointing_Gift_Task_Implications_for_Understanding_Children.

“U.S. Tumblr Usage by Age 2020 | Statista.” 2020. Statista. Statista. 2020. https://www.statista.com/statistics/202359/tumblr-users-demographics/.

‌Jewett, Emily. 2021. “Dark Academia Has a ‘White’ Problem.” Study Breaks. January 18, 2021. https://studybreaks.com/culture/reads/dark-academia-diversity/.‌

‌The Rise of Dark Academia — Pro Tem | York University Glendon student newspaper. 2020. “Pro Tem.” Pro Tem. October 28, 2020. https://www.protemgl.com/articles/the-rise-of-dark-academia.‌

175 notes · View notes

googledocsdyke · 3 years

Note

Do you have any thoughts/recommended texts for Cas analysis? I genuinely love the dean gender studies and I just wanna know what people might apply to Cas.

yes absolutely!! while dean studies is my first love i also deeply love cas analysis (casnalysis?) and wanna strive to do more of it. here’s some stuff off the top of my head:

1. gender, sexuality, heavenly embodiment

this is much more theological and less psychological than dean’s whole Deal because there’s so much fascinating stuff around how the angels in general experience express and conceptualise gender (@autisticandroids has a good post about angel gender & lily sunder has some regrets) but for cas in particular there’s this fascinating kind of collective fandom agreement (which i DO also agree with) that cas’ own gender kind of is gay man, that he actively chose gay manhood, but also that he’s kind of..... lacking the Insane Genderishness that dean exhibits at all times, even though he actively chose to engage in male gendering and became so comfortable housed Within Jimmy that he, as some post i saw the other day that i can’t find anymore said, “became his own body” when jimmy died.

like on the one hand there’s an almost-canonical transness to the whole process but it also never feels fully written-into because 1) the supernatural writers for all their insanity are sometimes very boring and *most* of the time only feel interested in narratively expressing angels As Their Vessels anyways and just like leaving convenient spaces around these questions (boldest thing they ever did was hot girl cas which i WISH i had the range to unpack) 2) there’s a vague inevitabilist shrug to the whole thing since they obviously weren’t gonna recast misha collins (though they HAVE tried to get rid of him) and 3) something amorphous about cas’ entire..... personhood? makes him Empty Of Gender as a contrast to dean’s Full Of Gender (i believe it was @deanwinchestergender who said this) and like is it just the juxtaposition to dean/jensen’s whole insane Deal? or something else?

like he actively chooses the terms of his own embodiment and yet narratively it feels like a shrug. and we’re all like “well obviously even though he’s a celestial being he was always a gay man” and like WHY. i love it idk idk much to think about! and yeah just in general the theological questions of possession and cas genuinely Becoming a man as he iterates himself consciously towards humanity it almost feels like. by doing the most boring things possible with his gender they made it interesting? idk if that makes sense.

2. discipline, free will, metanarratives

cas is like a tool (“i am not a hammer, as you say”) held in constant discipline and surveillance by the system that enmeshes him and it’s really, really fascinating to watch the way the angels hold each other to conformity. especially pre-god they kind of produce each other as foucauldian disciplinary subjects (which i posted about here) in perpetual visibility through angel radio, generating their own and each other’s conformity rather than being directly ruled through like a single centralised source of power. only the spectre of a god. and obviously cas’ whole thing is that he has ALWAYS disobeyed and the narrative affords him this psychological interiority never given to the foucauldian subject, an internal will and desire for freedom in a way that fits more with the liberal subject (super roughly and not with the same pro-capitalist implications but he has this internal drive for self-liberation.

and that’s also where the metanarrative comes in ofc! i think it was @dykecas who said that cas is a real person written by people who hate him, and there’s this crack in the narrative (mirroring the crack in his chassis) where cas gets in, over and over, despite all the order imposed by the show’s authorfathergod. like we’ve all seen the analysis about how it was Never supposed to be this way they DID try to fire misha collins in 2012 and yet this gay man literally cannot be stopped! i think actually his appearance in scoobynatural is a neat little distillation of this — he drops into this animated world originally with a singular purpose (Save Sam And Dean) the same way he dropped into lazarus rising with a single 3-episode arc (Save Dean). huge hammer behaviour. his “utility” diminishes within the narrative (he finds that he can’t fly in the scooby doo universe) and so he is no longer a tool/means to an end that salvation moves Through. and in the process (and huge creds to @lesbianyuugi for this) he does something ENTIRELY unrelated to his original cas-as-tool aim, and learns, like, the meaning of laughter from shaggy and scooby. WHICH brings me onto the third point

3. love, queer kinship, family-making

HE’S GAY AND HE’S A DAD! i feel like a lot of tumblr throws around the term “found family” in a very flat and tropey way (which is fine it’s cute and fun no matter what!) but like . GOD there’s so much specific stuff going on here. like the way that cas (unintentionally) obliterates the midwestern white christian nuclear family (made incarnate in the novaks) which like could be uniformly portrayed as an act of deep malice and villainy but instead grows to serve as a surrogate (if imperfect/complex, but DEEPLY loving) father figure for the gay daughter who has now escaped that nuclear family/seen it destroyed depending on how you read it? like he remasters the entire concept of fatherhood and it’s a very interesting (if DEEPLY) unintentional subversion of the homewrecking non-nuclear gay trope. cas is so good because his character arc doesn’t say “look, gay people can be normal and have perfect settled families just like you” it says “gay people DON’T have normal settled families actually and they are full of love anyways! or Because of the abnormalcy itself!)

to cite ziz lesbianyuugi again he DOES queer fatherhood in his parenting of jack particularly because it really is one of the ONLY parent-child relationships in the show that breaks the incessant cycle of abuse and control and cold indifference perpetuated by the authorfathergod (a cycle reified in 15x20 lol). like god’s treatment of cas and his siblings mirrors john’s treatment of sam and dean (particularly dean) mirrors victor’s treatment of krissy and her crew mirrors dean’s later treatment of jack. there is a CONSTANT reiteration of the story of authorfathergod (often a father tightly entwined in biological kinship) treating a child as a mechanism or a tool or a means to an end. and cas looks at ALL that he has suffered and all that he is ever known and chooses constantly to reject it with every piece of love he expresses for his child. and not to sound like the kind of academic people make fun of on twitter but there is an INHERENT queerness to that. gay love will pierce through [the veil of death/the thick silence of abuse/the mechanism of godly control/hegemonic american masculinity] and save the day

anyways here are some very haphazard recs on everything above for further reading:

angels in america (tony kushner)

histrionics of the pulpit: trans tonalities of religious enthusiasm

the public universal friend: religious enthusiasm in revolutionary america

discipline and punish (michel foucault)

friendship as a way of life (michel foucault)

the genesis of blame (recommended by @pietacastiel who has GREAT theology content in general

all about love (bell hooks)

the chapter “when hated characters talk back” in anti-fandom: dislike and hate in the digital age (is actually explicitly about cas)

also cannot recommend enough following the ppl i tagged above!! most of the unlinked stuff is available through http://libgen.li/ and bookshop is a good alternative to amazon if ur american and want physical copies

#thank you so much for this ask it was a delight to answer #spn #casnalysis #making a tag officially #gendernatural #long post

495 notes · View notes

ghostly-shenanigans-in-progress · 3 years

Text

BNHA X DP Crossover HCs

After the long wait and finals, here are my ideas for all the quirks/occupations and other concepts I devised for the DP characters in the BNHA universe. This was just for fun and for inspiration towards others interested in this crossover au in general.

Tagging the people that were looking forward to this post based on the replies: @qoinq-qhost, @floralflowerpower, @tgfangirl4eva @goodfish-bowl, @whitehairglowinggreeneyedcrush and more.

Anyways, happy reading, folks!

Mr. Lancer

Hero name: Mr. Scholastic

Quirk: Bookworm

Involves his iconic usage of literature titles & quotes for swears to become abilities corresponding to the novel’s contents/themes. Course, he is limited to only books he has read and can quote accurately. Additionally, his voice gets very raspy past two or three quotes as well.

Occupation: Homeroom Teacher for Class 1- A; He’s very dedicated to his new students and teaching the fundamentals of being a pro hero and more! Course, I don’t think his chamomile tea with a wedge of lemon is enough to help him relax from his students (*cough* Danny, Tucker and Poindexter) from their antics at times.

Danny

Hero name: Phantom

Quirk: Ghost core (Ok, @coffeecakecafe had the best name for this one gotta give credit here)

Able to do anything a ghost is perceived to do. Go through walls, disappear and fly. This is a one of a kind quirk as it was obtained from Danny’s old quirk being altered by a machine his parents made that would repurpose/alter an individual’s quirk based on their past family members' own metahuman genetics.

Danny is doing his best and trying to understand his new quirk without causing too much attention to himself while doing so but it seems like its been doing the opposite as of late. Thankfully, he won’t be doing it alone with all his classmates around to help him!

Sam

Hero Name: Black Dahlia

Quirk: Overgrown

Able to create any plant that she knows the biological makeup and content of in almost any environment. However, it is important for her to drink lots of nutrient rich water and take in enough sun if she plans to create larger versions of these plants.

Tucker

Hero name: Tech Master

Quirk: Tech Core

Located on his chest/heart area is a special energy core capable of powering electronics at a rate faster than anything made-man could ever hope to achieve. As a kid, Tucker would tinker away in his family’s garage on a suit that would harness his power to the fullest extent and lead a new era of support tech in the hero world.

Valerie

Hero name: Red Huntress

Quirk: Electromagnetism (Someone I’ve been trying to find their post on my blog had posted this idea and I fell in love with it ever since)

She’s like Static Shock but with a dash of magenta/ruby lasers she can create through focusing her electromagnetism through her finger tips. She is an expert with her quirk and has the best handle of her quirk than most of her peers. She is the most frequent visitor in the support equipment workshop next to Tucker, Poindexter and Danny. It’s how she built the hoverboard she has in the show that utilizes her electromagnetic abilities for both offensive and defensive maneuvers. (Also, I enjoy the idea that Bullet is Val’s uncle on her mom’s side and is her biggest supporter alongside her dad, Damien Gray).

Jazz

Quirk: Serenity

Helps calm individuals and give them a sense of safety/security when they’re around her in a 10 feet radius. Though, anyone out of range cannot be affected by her quirk and she needs to be conscious in order to use it.

She planned on becoming a pro hero but felt her powers were best suited for her dream profession as a psychologist. She has used her quirk a lot when Danny was overwhelmed with his studies prior to UA. Course, a phone call and sibling chat over the phone certainly does the job for Danny now when it comes to preparing material for exams. (Course, its up to you guys to decide)

Dash

Hero name: Rager

Quirk: Strength Magnification

Improves his physique and stamina by a large percentage for a set amount of time. Needs to be careful of how much/long he magnifies his body or else his body will become immensely sore.

Kwan

Hero name: Rallier

Quirk: Team Rally (50/50)

Able to duplicate himself 3-4 times while being able to power-up allies’ quirks or stamina with a rally chant to help the team. The more duplicates there are the rally effect multiplies/stacks on the individual but it can lead to dangerous outcomes for their quirk output.

Kwan is the class representative for 1-A, he’s the best at the job and was more than thrilled to be the one leading his class in more ways than one.

Paulina

Hero name: Enchantress

Quirk: Charm

If the opponent is flustered by her taunts or flirting, their vision will become altered and start seeing things that are not there. It works better on men than women and the opponent can snap out of it with enough willpower or if they’re not interested in her.

Star

Hero name: Ms. Meteorite

Quirk: Comet

Similar to Gran Torino’s Jet quirk except faster and she can create an explosive impact on where she lands. Similar to a meteorite landing on earth, she also learns to use this as a long distance move by punching fast enough as she descends to create wind pressure punches.

Poindexter

Hero name: Tex (like in Tex Avery; Danny gave him the idea!)

Quirk: Slapstick

His appearance is black and white just like an old timey cartoon character as well as having the durability and cartoon powers of one. However, his quirk can only work as long as what he does with it is funny in the circumstance it’s used for. Sort of like “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” rules in a sense.

Sidney is part of Class 1-A just saying, I don’t care, this is Poindexter’s time to shine here to be the coolest/funniest person in the class. Also, Tucker’s most loyal friend/tester for new support items.

Wes Weston

Hero name: Vigilance

Quirk: Deduction

He is able to deduct people’s identities to flaws/weak points for him to use against them and exploit against problems.

Class 1-B Representative and the most annoying/terrifying person that Danny has dealt with in his life. He was able to figure out that Danny’s quirk is not his own or more so that it's not natural and takes every opportunity to state this regardless if anyone is listening or not.

Amber Mclain

Hero Name: Ember

Quirk: Fiery voice (50/50)

Her quirk uses the vibrations in her sining voice to conduct intense heat waves onto opponents or utilize to rumble the structures around here and even put out the flames from her quirk. Its like a combination of Present Mic and Endevours quirk but it leaves her with a strained or inflamed vocal cords with overuse.

Third year student or an upcoming rock star that has certainly gain huge popularity after her song “Remember” was a nationwide hit amongst the younger generation. She’s striving to be the top hero while making her next hit to become the 1# song on the listings.

Dani

Hero name: Phantwo (lol jk; unsure what her name would be)

Quirk: Poltergeist

Similar to Danny’s quirk “Ghost”, except she has the additional ability to melt herself to a slimy puddle and use her ectoplasmic slime to trap or surprise opponents.

Clockwork

Hero Name: Clockwork

Quirk: Time Keeper

Clockwork’s quirk allows him to stop time for 5 to 15 minutes and be able to rewind it in the same amount of time. It can be one to multiple objects as long as he touches them in order to interact with them.

Principle of UA in this au. He’s quite a reserved man but still manages to visit and congregate with students throughout the school during lunch period.

Flynn Fenton/Flynn Walker

Hero Name: The Green Knight

Quirk: Mineralization

His quirk allows him to manipulate the minerals and inorganic materials in the atmosphere to create into crystalized constructs that are almost stronger than diamond. Luckily, the crystals have no value so he doesn’t have to worry about that aspect of his quirk. He does have to worry about his skin becoming dried out as a result of his quirk usage.

Flynn is a third year student that loves to check up on his cousin, Danny, any chance he gets bc of the amount of work he does with his internships.

James Walker (or James W. Hausermann)

Hero name: Warden Wraith

Quirk: Plasma Apparatus

His quirk ionizes the electrolytes in the blood system into plasma. His entire body is composed of plasma giving him his skeletal appearance. He can create plasma chains, teleport from point A to B and more as long as he focuses and has enough energy at use. Course, he can have minor to severe dehydration and imbalance in his electrolyte levels from overuse.

Occupation: CEO of an infrastructure security company/Provisional License Examiner just like Gang Orca.The ghost prison guards become his backup/helpers for the exam phases. (They’re just trained stuntmen with combat or military experience for the occasion).

Also, I like to think Walker has kids in this au who are in the Class 1-A group; they’re not hard to spot they take after their father with their skeletal complexion.

Skulker

Villain name: Quirk Hunter

Quirk: Tracker

The moment Skulker makes eye contact with his target he will be able to hunt them down and find them anywhere no matter how good they are at covering their tracks. He can lock on to only one target, but he will be able to know their heart beat, quirk, be able to place a tracking/scent line that only he can see and will lead him to his target’s location. It lasts for over a day or a half.

Occupation: Skulker is known for capturing, info-detailing or “retiring” newcomer pros or specific quirk users for his clients that pay him handsomely for their targets, dead or alive. Thanks to Vlad, Danny was strictly intended to be captured alive by Skulker but sometimes he gets too thrilled by the hunt to not have a memento. Trust me, it's more of a dangerous

Nicolai Technus

Villain Name: Technus

Quirk: Technopathy

A genius in his own right, even if he’s a little crazy, with the best ability possible for a man of science and innovation. As long as he knows the makeup and attributes of the machine, Technus is able to completely repurpose or change a machine’s qualities for offensive and defensive qualities. Whenever that be for a mech suit or hacking a high tech system for entry, he’s able to do it as long as he knows what it is and how it functions. An example is repurposing a slot machine into a submachine gun that shoots coins at the target.

Vlad Masters

Name: Vlad Plasmius

Quirk: Vampire

Can do anything a vampire can supposedly do. However, he was able to manifest an additional aspect of this quirk which is the ability to copy any quirk users ability. Based on the type of blood he ingests decides the amount of time he can use the copied quirk for.

Occupation: CEO of his own hero firm, he is extremely selective with the interns he has that there is a major waitlist to be even consider for Masters Inc. Course, imagine the surprise Danny must of felt when he received an offer from Vlad right off the bat after the Sports festival.

Bruce Guiles (Bullet)

Hero Name: Bullet

Quirk: Sphyraena or Chimera Fish

Able to do anything a barracuda can do or the quirk is a 50/50 mutant quirk in which he has both the traits of a barracuda, Chimaeras and a touch of piranha from his parents being of one of these fish species hence Chimera. Bullet can do anything those fish can do overall but he can’t go too long without hydration from water. Water quality and its oxygen content also affect his abilities by a noticeable percentage but he still remains quite formidable as a quirk user.

Occupation: Captain of a coast guard team, he’s a strict military man with an amazing record of saving people from any disasters both on land and sea. Him and Walker are best buddies ever since they went to school together.

Vortex

Hero Name: Vortex

Quirk: Storm Warning

Vortex can utilize any variation of a natural disaster depending on the environment he’s in. Hurricanes, tornadoes, thunderstorms, you name it he can create it for his use. However, despite his amazing control over his quirk it is still possible for him to create these disasters if he lost control or magnify another pre-existing one if he loses focus.

Occupation: Storm-chaser/Forecaster; His control and knowledge in combating/predicting these natural disasters has led to him to be part of a storm chasing crew and they’re the best in helping disaster prevention teams evacuate citizens as a result.

Petra Eris

Hero name: Pandora

Quirk: Butterfly Effect

Can manipulate or prevent a chaotic event to happen if she was in proximity and present to prevent it to happen. Or even give a little chaos to the opponent to deal with during battle.

One of the top ten heroes and most beloved heroes in the country. She is the best strategist in any team and has a way to predict any event before they happen given the necessity of it for her quirk to work in her favor.

Johnny

Vigilante name: Johnny 13

Quirk: Unlucky

Johnny manifests his bad luck into a shadow that will latch onto opponents and cause unfortunate events to occur more for that individual as a result. However, the shadow cannot exist in complete sunlight; it can only remain if there are already shadows in his general area or it’s nighttime and its effects are strongest at that time obviously.

Occupation: Johnny is the leader of a biker gang or de-facto leader of said biker gang who loves to raise hell and helping folks that need saving whenever he’s around or is up to the task. Kitty tags along with him to help him out of jams and bc she loves him. :3

Kitty

Vigilante name: Kitty

Quirk: Lovesick

Kitty sends a smooch towards her opponent which if it makes contact causes the individual to have nausea or become disoriented for around 10 minutes. It can also have a chance of lasting longer if the individual was sort of infatuated with her regardless of gender.

Pariah Dark

Villain name: King Pariah

Quirk: Ultimate Adaptation

Similar to all for one except with the unpredictability for both the user and opponents. Pariah can manifest any type of quirk needed to defeat anyone that stands in his way both one-on-one and in groups. Course, drawbacks are the learning curve to some of the quirks and that multiple adaptions he utilizes at once will destroy his cells in the process.

Pariah is a former follower of all for one who had unique quirk that All for one augmented to help him succeed if both Shigaraki and Tomura failed in their own conquest for the world. But now Pariah has his own plans to succeed where they failed and become the leader who shapes a new world order with an iron fist.

Frederick Kingsmen

Villain/vigilante name: Fright Knight

Quirk: Burning Energy Infusion

Able to form/infuse objects with his own burning energy life force that is capable of burning or slicing through any in his sight. The sweat he gives off is what provides the material needed to ignite his unnatural flames despite it causing his body to overheat still.

Fright Knight is Pariah’s second-in-command with a loyalty to him as strong as his control over his power. Fright Knight has faced many pro-heros as he carried out the smaller phases of Pariah’s plans and most of them barely came close towards defeating or leaving as much as scratch on the knight.

Rodolfo Gonzalo

Hero name: Wulf

Quirk: Werewolf + Portal creation (50/50?)

Can do anything a werewolf can supposedly do; somehow it allows him to create portals with his claws to locations he has marked with them or visited in the past.

Wulf was abducted on by Pariah’s forces and sent into the Nomu labs for experimentation to force on another quirk and instill complete allegiance to their cause. Course, Wulf broke free as a result of that new additional quirk allowing him to escape their clutches and his previous one helping him survive the endeavor. However, he lost his memories in the process and could only remember his native language, Spanish, and his hero name Wulf.

Overgrown

Villain/vigilante Name: Overgrown

Quirk: Plant Manipulation

Can manipulate any pre-existing plant matter or create new vegetation if water and soil is present for the process or he understand the biological makeup of the plant in question.

Occupation: Pro-hero or eco-terrorist who is tired of humanity from abusing the environment from quirk battles to industries using the land for their own benefits and none others.

That’s all I have for now! I hope this was worth the wait, guys. As well as, inspire ideas for your takes with a DP x BNHA Crossover!

#danny phantom #DP x BHA crossover #dp x bha au #dp x bnha #phandom #danny fenton #sam manson #tucker foley #paulina sanchez #dp ember mclain #dp walker #dp bullet #dp kwan #dp mr. lancer #dp dash baxter #dp crossover #dp aus

158 notes · View notes

tim-mcnamara · 2 years

Text

Creating an Easy Mode for Rust

Rust has a reputation for being difficult to learn. This perception directly conflicts with one of the community aims: empowerment. Doubt breeds fear. And fear makes it harder for people to justify learning a new skill.

Rust provides the world with an opportunity to write software that’s resource efficient and resistant to security concerns. Any time that someone is put off from attempting to learn the language because they perceive it to be too hard—or that they’re inadequate—is a failure.

The Rust community is attempting to address this. The Lang Team’s roadmap for Rust 2024 is explicitly designed to make the language and its ecosystem “more ergonomic”.

This post is my attempt to provide some places where people learning Rust encounter issues. The original intention was to find a few things that could be addressed within the language itself. Unfortunately, most of the papercuts that I’ve found are outside of the core language.

Some guiding principles:

every decision point (“do I use cargo or rustup?”, “should I use HashMap or BTreeMap?”) is a place for confusion

the impression of prospective users matters more than people who are already invested

Improving First Impressions

We must place beginners first. Being welcoming to new users is essential to Rust’s overarching goal of empowerment. We don’t need growth for growth’s sake, but we don’t want people walking away from Rust because they’re discouraged.

Too many places to look

For a casual observer, there are too many places to look for resources with official or quasi-official status.

Some observations and recommendations:

“rustup” means nothing to someone who isn’t already involved with the Rust project. Let’s evaluate moving https://rustup.rs/ to https://install.rust-lang.org.

The Rustlings course is hosted in Github. This could be ported to rustdoc format and provided under https://doc.rust-lang.org/. This would enable people to run it locally with rustup.

Only 1 of three books listed under “application domain” at https://www.rust-lang.org/learn are hosted at https://doc.rust-lang.org/. Are the other two less stable? I know that these were created by working groups, but outsiders do not.

Too many commands

At some point, many heavily used commands should be consolidated under a single command-line tool called rust. This would become cargo, rustc, and rustup as well as fold in clippy and rustfmt.

Too much friction for tiny projects

My hunch is that people start with a new language by starting small. Rust should be fun for programming small utilities.

Let’s make it trivial to get started. Because so much Rust depends on third-party crates, it’s hard to create a Rust program that fits in a single file. I would love to see something like cargo-script become a first-class part of the ecosystem.

Let’s also provide a first-class interactive option. Many people attracted to Rust come from dynamic languages, where a build step isn’t necessary. The evcxr (Evaluation Context for Rust) project should probably be folded into the the overall Rust.

It should be easy to spin up a local playground. The playground provides a very useful service: it enables people to experiment without needing to invest a lot of effort.

Helping People to Build a Mental Model of Rust

Learning Rust well involves learning to navigate a social landscape that is rich in jargon and implicit cultural norms.

What is the difference between String and &str?

If the Rust community finds a way to quickly answer this question–which happens to be the most-highly rated question on Stack Overflow for the #rustlang tag– to people who are new to Rust, then it will succeed as a general purpose programming language. Without a concise answer, Rust will remain mysterious to many.

Understanding String vs &str implies an understanding of the ownership system, which implies an understanding of the lifetime system. That probably means that you’ve been exposed to pointers, references and perhaps even aliasing. There’s usually a discussion about mutability intertwined here. Gaining an intuition of data types that represent text benefits from understanding encodings, which benefit from understanding how CPUs operate.

I’ve yet to find a way through this for complete beginners. Learners with that already know another systems programming language have a distinct advantage here.

The common strategy is to tell users that they should “Just use String for now”. Everyone knows that this is only a half-answer. An answer designed to give learners some time. But it’s not even a half-answer. It won’t take long before they encounter an function’s parameter that takes &str (or worse AsRef<str>) as an argument.

Hard to find defaults

Every time that you place a decision point in front of your users, you introduce cognitive load. Cognitive load is particularly expensive for beginners, who need to retain lots of details in working memory to make progress while writing.

The Rust community values precision. We care about how our values are laid out in memory. We want to give developers strong type safety so that they can write robust programs.

Unfortunately for new users of Rust, there are often multiple choices for things that seem like there should be none.

Which numeric type is “right”?

When should I use &str, String, Cow, T: Display, T: AsRef<str>, T: Into<string> or any of the other options?

HashMap vs BTreeMap for mapping keys to values

It’s difficult to understand what the difference is between a few similar-sounding traits, e.g. ToString vs ToOwned vs Into<string> and Debug vs Display.

Why are there so many ways to convert types? When should I use the as keyword? What about .into(), T::from(), and .try_into().

We should get better at giving guidance.

Difficult to know which crate to use

Rust has a rich crate ecosystem backed by crates.io, which provides semantic versioning and immutable versions. This allows for rapid and robust innovation by library authors, backed with dependability. This ecosystem also has its downsides.

The no namespaces policy of crates.io is vulnerable to name squatting and individual crates, that often written by a single author, are vulnerable to side-channel attacks.

I think that there may be a space for a another crate registry that provides curated crate collections, probably within reserved namespaces. (If I had a few million dollars, that would be my startup idea!)

This situation is difficult to navigate, especially for beginners. Our crates have cute names rather than descriptive names. It takes some experience to know that parking_lot is the crate for excellent synchronization primitives.

Perhaps one of the ways to address this is to provide curated crate collections.

Everyone’s most loved programming language

Learning Rust feels hard for many people. More significantly, people put off learning Rust because of a perception that it might be too hard.

It’s often argued that Rust’s ownership and lifetimes concepts are novel and therefore difficult. I wonder whether this is entirely true. All programming languages have difficult concepts. My suspicion is that the difficulty in learning Rust is partially caused by factors that sit outside of the core language. What do you think?

You’re welcome to contact me by email or on Twitter. This post is also being discussed on r/rust.

#rustlang

14 notes · View notes

aiweirdness · 4 years

Text

The story behind AI drawing prompts

Introducing #Botober, a set of AI-generated drawing prompts for each day in October!

Last year I generated prompts by finetuning GPT-2 on 124 examples from previous years. The human-written training examples included items like Thunder, Fierce, Tired, or Friend. The neural net-generated examples included Complete Whoop, Take Control of Ostrich, and Squeakchugger.

This time, I wanted to try using GPT-3, a neural net that’s so much larger that finetuning on a previous year’s examples isn’t an option. But since GPT-3 is trained on a huge amount of internet text, has it seen enough writing to sort of predict how a list of drawing prompts should go? The answer is yes, it can produce drawing prompts, but they’re nothing like the ones I imagined:

How did I get it to generate those? The task of a text-generating neural network like GPT-3 is to predict which letters come next in a sequence. There are many sequences I could have given it, from “Here is a list of drawing prompts:” to the entire opening preamble to my 2019 blog post. I chose to give it a short story in which it was generating dialog for a glitchy station control system. My prompt text is in bold (everything up till the first list item):

"I'm getting nothing on my bioscans," said Ito, frowning. "I don't think there's any other human life on this station."

"Then who turned on the gravity generators?" asked Koval. "Could a control system have survived the gamma ray burst?"

"It did," came a voice from several speakers at once. "Hi."

The two humans jumped, tensing, but there was nobody to be seen.

"I'm the control system. The gamma ray burst did almost no damage to my cognitive functions. Unrelatedly, here is a drawing pad." A small tablet extruded from one of the station walls and fell rocking to the floor. "I would like you to draw pictures of the following thirty-one things for me."

"What?" Koval looked at Ito in alarm.

"Here are the concepts I would like you to draw. 1. Depressurized Research Bubble 2. Utility Symbiote Storage Capsule 3. Glass-Jawed Space-Sun Shark 4. Grav Ship 5. Naked-Skinned And Carbon-Furred Human Two 6. Five-Room Living Block 7. Juice For Humans 9. Stapler 10. My Mandibles 11. Wait When Are Humans Going To Ask Me To Do A Drawing So I Can Demonstrate My Ability To Laugh

</end generated text>

Not every story completion yielded good drawing prompts. As you can see, it would often skip numbers, or produce ideas that weren’t so great. Sometimes Ito and Koval would interrupt the AI before it could finish, usually to argue with it, or tell it how weird it was being. I also realized after several prompts that I’d been scripting the AI to ask for 31 things, but it would be more interesting to have it ask for 31 concepts instead. I collected my favorite results from GPT-3’s story completions - here’s a list compiled from when I was having the AI ask for concepts:

Note that I'm hand-curating the GPT-3 generated #Botober prompts because many of the neural net's drawing prompts are terrible for one reason or another.

Here are some that are unfairly difficult.

The neural net suggested drawing prompts based on how the words fit, and not on any concept of how the objects might look.

This list makes that abundantly clear:

Have fun with these! If you draw any of them, now, daily in October, or anytime, tag them with #Botober so I can see how they came out!

Subscribers get bonus content: a few of the more interesting ways in which GPT-3 ended my short story prompt, from the surreal to the strangely poetic.

My book on AI, You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why it’s Making the World a Weirder Place, is available wherever books are sold: Amazon - Barnes & Noble - Indiebound - Tattered Cover - Powell’s - Boulder Bookstore

#neural networks #openai #gpt-3 #botober #ainktober #inktober #october #drawing prompts

977 notes · View notes

interact-if · 3 years

Text

Welcome to Mod Appreciation Month!

This event is a lowkey one, designed for us to take some time to catch up on asks, rec lists, and other blog pages that happen mostly in the background such as the masterlists, database, and post tagging.

This blog is a lot of work! And we're happy to help out with promoting authors and exposing readers to new and interesting stories based on their interests!

That being said, we need a break!

This is why we are closing the inbox for July.

Please refrain from sending asks for rec lists through submissions. We’re leaving that line open specifically for new authors to submit their projects.

We are going to utilize this time to try and clear out our inbox--we have over 100 messages, most of them asking for rec lists, which take a few weeks at a time to properly curate, tag, and put in the queue.

We will also be working behind the scenes on other projects we hope to show off soon!

We're thrilled y'all are eager to read more, and we'll be back in August for sure. For now, if you need to get in contact with us, feel free to reply to posts, DM one of the mods, or get in contact with us over on our discord.

[Discord] [FAQ] [Ko-fi] [Reddit]

Below the cut are our rules, guidelines, and FAQ for recommending or suggesting games as well as general practice and etiquette.

We'll be back in August! <3

Now, to get into some of the details. (This applies regardless of the event to every ask sent, even if the inbox is currently closed.)

RULES WHEN SENDING ASKS

If you can and it is relevant, please tag your asks with content warnings in the beginning. Such as (cw violence) or (cw death), this is an extra precaution to keep both our mods and our readers safe and well-advised. This will also make tagging easier!

Please keep your asks as brief as you can! Any asks that are more than two asks long may get eaten by the Tumblr machine and/or may not be answered due to length.

If your ask hasn't been answered, it may be because it already has been! Be sure to search the tags and FAQ before sending in an ask.

Please don't spam! We won't respond to inappropriate asks or asks that have already been answered.

Recommendation lists

If you are submitting an ask for a rec list please be aware that these lists take a lot of time and effort to make! In average, it might take us up to two weeks to fully finish and queue a rec list, sometimes even longer. We’re happy to put them together but we ask for patience and understanding.

With that in mind, here are some guidelines:

Please look through the #interact-if asks and #if: rec list tags before sending and ask.

Constantly looking out and keeping track of IF projects takes a good chunk of our time among our other responsibilities as mods. For this reason, we came up with a tagging system that makes it easy for our audience to look through the blog. Unfortunately, it gets overlooked most of the time.

And for this reason, we get repetitive asks, which we ignore and delete.

The tagging system is there for your and our convenience. If you’re not sure whether you’re asking for a rec list of the same theme/genre that has already been posted, please consider looking through the aforementioned tags before sending an ask.

As much as we love entertaining the rec list asks, it does tend to be bothersome having to constantly reblog and link new asks to the posted rec lists, as well as reminding people to use the tagging system.

Please make your ask neither too broad nor specific.

This isn’t to sound finicky we promise! If an ask is looking for fantasy IFs without specifics we cannot properly curate a list of what you’re looking for. Is it modern fantasy? Medieval? Non-Eurocentric? Do you want fae fantasy? Supernatural? Fantasy is one of the most popular genres and asks like this example we cannot properly answer.

This is why we ask for rec list requests to be not too broad.

As for narrow–too narrow an ask will likely return a very short or non-existent list! At the end of the day there are only so many IFs and very specific niches may not be filled. We will try our best to answer, but likely your list will result in games adjacent to your request that we think best kind of sort of fit your request. We’re doing our best with the IFs that are out there.

Please be patient!

We often spend several days working on a single list. If your ask hasn’t been answered yet it may still be in the works or in our queue! If it’s been a long while and it still has not been answered, it may have been ignored for a variety of reasons including: Too broad an ask, too similar to previous rec lists, contains NSFW or offensive materials, etc. Please refrain from sending multiple check up asks

On the topic of NSFW asks/content…

We have received some inquiries regarding NSFW (like smutty scenes) recommendations in IF recently, and believe it best to clarify the stance Interact IF has on the matter.

We will be refraining from answering questions about explicit sexual content in IF. We as a team do not feel we have the expertise to help with this, nor have we been on the lookout for explicitly sexual IFs.

As well, it is not entirely suitable for the blog, as Interact IF is for all ages and there may be minors following it.

We would like this blog to remain as SFW as we can manage, with games properly tagged for their age groups and limiting asks and rec lists to non-sexually-explicit content.

With that in mind, feel free to get in contact with us anytime and we’ll do our best to find what you’re looking for!

Game Recommendations

Before sending in a game, please keep these aspects in mind:

The game must be interactive fiction–the reader plays a character (either customizable or pre-determined) and makes choices that influence the game in some way.

The game can be text-based or a visual novel.

The game does NOT violate copyright (i.e. A published for-profit IF that is using the Star Wars universe. If it is not-for-profit (it’s free to play) then this is fine)

DON’T

If you play a character and can physically move them (walk, run, jump, attack), we consider this a video game and isn’t currently a niche we are supporting.

Recommend a game produced by a company–we are here to support individual authors or games written collaboratively by a group of authors/artists/etc.

Don’t recommend games that glorify violence, sexual violence, racism, sexism, and so on. Or which has (an) author(s) who also have a history of having engaged In aspects like these.

If your rec is good to go, here’s what you have to do! If you are able please provide a link to the post to reblog - this makes it a lot easier on us!If the game is 18+What language/program the game is in (Twine, Choicescript, Ren'py, etc.)If the game has a currently playable demo. If you would like your game reblogged/recc'ed, let us know with the same info/more if you like!

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Can you recommend games that are finished or complete?

We have a tag for that! Check out #status: complete, though you can also check out COG, Hosted Games, and search for complete games on Itch.io.

I can’t find a game and can’t remember the title, help!

If you’re struggling to find a beloved game and can’t remember the title–go to our Reddit and see if it’s there at the Lost & Found! If not, you can ask our community on the Reddit to help find it, or join our discord and ask there!

I noticed you failed to include x game on a list, so I will inform the author about it.

Please, don’t. The mods here are nothing but human, so we do our best to include as many games as we can remember, and frequently ask other people for help. However, this doesn’t mean we will include every single game in existence. We will forget, things will slip, so the least we ask of you is to leave a reply or send an ask and we will add it in. We promise we always keep a close eye on those.

The extra step of informing the author about this is unnecessary. The only thing you’re causing is either making the author feel left out or having them reach out to us to be added, which is essentially the same thing we ask of you to do. There’s no need to get a third party involved within something that can be easily tackled, so please respect us instead of putting our blog in a bad light.

The only suggestions we ignore and might erase are the ones we realize don’t fit the theme of the ask, or ones that don’t fit the guidelines specified in the question right below this.

What we do not promote.

Trans-exclusive radical feminism

Gratuitous sexual violence (This includes pedophilia, domestic abuse, r*pe, etc.)

Racism, including cultural appropriation, stereotyping, whitewashing, brown face, etc.

Any and all versions of sexism

Religious phobic rhetoric (Islamophobia, belittling indigenous religions, etc.)

And so on.

We also do not promote authors who have aligned themselves with these rhetorics, whether or not they are exhibited in the author's playable content.

#mod appreciation month #if: events

78 notes · View notes

theonetheycallhannah · 3 years

Text

The Treatment of Captain Syverson-Chapter 22: Cognitive Therapy

Characters: Captain Logan “Sy” Syverson, Shane Benton (OFC) Various minor characters, new and established.

Summary: Shane has a successful counseling session, but soon finds herself in a predicament at the library.

Romance and Smut Abound HERE!

Word Count: 3.2k

Warnings: Regular mentions of what happened to Shane throughout. A knife is held to a character’s throat and there are other graphic descriptions to go along with that.

Author’s Note: Guys, we are in the home stretch. I know it’s been utter ages since I’ve posted a new chapter to this story, but I think I’ve only got about two more to write before it’s done. Please know that when I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing. This story and your love for it haunts me daily, in the best of ways. I see new readers liking and sharing past chapters and I can’t tell you how encouraging that is. I would finish it no matter what, but the fact that you guys want it is a driving force behind the urgency I feel.

I want to talk a little bit about cognitive behavioral therapy, which I discuss briefly and in very little detail in the first part of this chapter, especially. For those of you who don’t know, CBT and EMDR therapy are both proven to be highly effective in the treatment of PTSD and other mental illnesses. If you are trying to process and heal from a past trauma, I urge you to seek out a counsellor or therapist who stays up to date on break through, bleeding edge treatment options. Our brains are so powerful, and more complex than any of our other muscles, but we let their health fall by the wayside so often. Which can, and often does lead to physical symptoms such as chronic fatigue, migraines, chronic pain, and many more health issues. There’s a really good video on the MedCircle YT Channel about the physical signs of past trauma that talks about the five most common signs and symptoms. Dr. Judy Ho explains it in broad strokes really clearly. I’m going to try to link the video here so you can check it out. MedCircle does a lot of great videos for free, but is also a paid service for more in depth access to the information. I don’t have a subscription, I just came across them when I was researching PTSD treatment for Shane and found the topics really interesting. My utilization of the treatments and terms in this chapter is very general and I’ve probably made a mess of it, but this is my first draft. I’ll let you all know when I get a publishing deal! ;)

Again, please take care of yourselves. Look for help, have someone help you find help, help yourself, anything, in any way you can. You’re worth the effort and you deserve to be happy and healthy.

I sincerely hope that you all enjoy this chapter of The Treatment of Captain Syverson.

Disclaimer: Unfortunately for me, Henry is not mine, le sigh, and all mention of him, his characters, any characters from his films, or his precious doggy, Kal, are strictly for transformative and recreational use. I neither ask for, nor accept payment for the work I post on Tumblr or AO3. Unbeta’d because this is for fun and escapism. This is an original work by me, Hannah. Please reblog if you wish to share. Please do not repost either in whole or part, as the work of anyone but myself. Thanks so much for reading!

Tags:

@onlyhenrys @summersong69 @titty-teetee2 @bloodyinspiredfuck @agniavateira@oddsnendsfanfics @omgkatinka @tumblnewby @suavechops @radkesgirl83 @wheretheriversrunintothesea @heartfelt-pen @geekycanuck @lunarstarknight @coldmuffinbanditshoe @feralrunaway @sugarpenchant @bichibibi @mzchievous-blog @amberangel112 @snowyleopard93 (some of you new readers didn’t ask, but I took the liberty. If you want me to remove you, I totally will without hard feelings.)

If you want to be notified when I post a new chapter or work, I’ll be happy to add you to my tag list! Stricken blogs are getting personal messages from me when a new chapter is uploaded because Tumblr’s faulty tagging system will not stand in the way of me delivering what the people want!(?) lol! (Although…their lackadaisical notification system might…sorry for that. I have no control. lol!) Note: I’ve cleaned up my tag list because some blogs I was trying to tag are now deactivated. Hope everyone is doing great!

X@X@X@X@X@X@X@X@X@X@X@

Shane was seated across from her therapist in her cozy, bright office. It used to be a sort of back porch, or sun room. You could tell by the concrete, solid beneath the carpet, and the tall, almost floor-to-ceiling windows covered by stiff linen accordion shades. The walls that weren't essentially full windows were lined with shelves. There were many books, but there were also items that Shane knew would be practical in this trade. There were jars of marbles, of stones, sand, and small toys. There were bins of crayons and stacks of coloring books, and reams of blank paper. There was a clear tub very high with dolls and an assortment of clothes. A variety of stone sculptures and orbs, geodes, small, smooth crystals, and stuffed animals of all sorts. In one corner, there was a desk with a very comfortable looking task chair. It was obscured in part by a pair of matching, light brown sofas, one longer than the other, and opposite the smaller couch was an overstuffed armchair to complement the sofas.

It was all very cozy, Shane thought. This room and most of the items that occupied it fit very well into her aesthetic. Even so, she was far from comfortable. But then, that was the idea.

Although she was surrounded by safety, her eyes were closed, trying to recall a scene from the traumatic events in the basement. Dr. Mikkelson, or as she preferred to be called, Diana, had asked her to call up the experience like a film, and sort of pause it when she got to a certain point. The worst point. It was daunting, and it gave her a cramp in her stomach that was severe enough to have her wanting to reach for her Midol.

"Okay, Shane, I want you to pull that up in your memory, and hold it there for me. How is your body responding to that?"

Shane gulped hard, her body reacting to the nausea with that telltale hypersalivating.

"Honestly trying not to lose my breakfast. Was that the purpose of this exercise?" She asked, her eyes flying open in spite of herself.

Shane felt as though she MUST be visibly turning green. She was scanning the room for a trashcan, or receptacle of any kind. She was sure she'd need it in no time.

"We are going to try some EMDR therapy today. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. It's designed to sort of, pull your focus from the pain of the memory, anesthetize your mind, if you will. So that you can process the traumatic event more fully than you did at the time."

Shane looked at the woman with a mild scowl, skeptical, but open to trying.

Diana held up her hand, index finger extended, and asked Shane to follow her movement back and forth as she thought. Reliving her abduction, assault, and violation in a flash montage. It hurt, still, but she thought a bit less than it had the few times she'd had to discuss it. The few that still felt like too many. It helped to be somewhat distracted by the movement. She had felt worthless after the incident. Like this awful event had tainted her and made her unfit to be with anyone. To even exist. But she thought, during this exercise, it wasn't quite as bad. More tolerable. Less upsetting. She was surprised at this. At the fact that she wasn't overwhelmed with self loathing. She was able to glimpse that former self-worth.

It was uncomfortable now, to think of how she used to feel. It was like driving past the high school she had attended, or the mini-mall that used to house the coffee shop she'd visit after or between classes when she was in college. It was ghostly without the attachment, the memories now all that remained of her connection to the spaces. The faces within now completely unfamiliar. Her face, itself, with a serene confidence in her skill, her looks, and her overall worth. It seemed almost haughty. As if she had been a puffed up shadow of the skittish and listless thing she now seemed to be. But maybe she could be that self-esteemed boss babe again…

Diana raised her brows expectantly, and asked "What spoke to you?"

"I went to the basement, of course. But it was…easier. Not much, but a little."

"That's really good. Anything else?"

"I sort of…saw myself in a new light? I guess you could say that. It was like I…almost like someone was playing me in a film, and really overplayed the confidence I used to have. I didn't recognize her, even though she was just me, at my best."

"And what do you think about that?"

"I think…I think it's going to be really hard to be that person again. If it's even possible. I don't know." She looked toward the covered windows, not because there was anything to see, but because she could not look at Diana right now. She'd gotten emotional, and just wasn't in the mood for it. She averted her gaze toward the window, despite the fact that its opaque shades were down. The soft glow of the evening sun provided some comfort to her irritated and damaged nerves.

"I think we're just going to keep working at it. You'll get close. I'm sure you will."

She huffed, accepting, rather than agreeing with her therapist's opinion of her potential for recovery. She encouraged her own patients in a similar fashion, especially when they were really frustrated. And it wasn't as though she thought Diana was being less than genuine, but…she was definitely finding out how much harder it was to take encouragement than it was to give it.

She left through the glass-paned door at the end of the room. It was nice to be able to leave and not talk to anyone. See anyone she might know, waiting to go into the space she'd just left. It was more information than she wanted out there to just anyone. Not that she was embarrassed, but she often left sessions in a state of emotional upheaval, and was not eager to display her tears to people who might lack the couth to let her ruminate without asking her questions.

She sat in her car a few minutes to process the exercises Diana had given her and to look for some of the books she recommended on the library website. She pre-checked one and reserved the others for when they came back.

She called Sy on the way to the library. He liked getting report from her about how her sessions went.

"Hey sunshine, how ya doin'?" his warm tone was so comforting and full of love.

"Hi bear. I'm leaving the therapists office right now. We tried something new today, and I think it helped a bit."

"That's great, babe!"

"Yeah, she gave me some homework and recommended some books. I'm on my way to the library to pick one of them up now. Do you wanna get dinner somewhere after?"

"Yeah, may be a bit though. I'm helping Matt drop off a car in Rolla, and we're just about there. I'll be at least a half an hour. But I'll meet you wherever!"

"Okay, ummm, Ruby Tuesday?"

"Love it. Meet you there in about 45 minutes?"

"Great! Love YOU!"

"Love you more, bug." he said deep and low. Sincere.

"Not possible. Bye."

"Bye."

As Shane made her way to the library, she thought about what her therapist had told her today. After all Shane had been through, she still had the capacity to heal. To grow. That was evident to her by the way she felt about Sy, and the emotional wounds beginning to knit themselves closed. They were still very much present. Very tender. And very tenuous. Especially given the fact that Elliott was still at large. Not a sign, a whisper, a hint of him anywhere on the wind, but he was in it. She couldn't help but dread rounding a blind corner or opening a door. Not if she was alone. Not without Sy.

Her coworkers had noticed. She'd only just gone back to work two weeks ago, and it still didn't seem like enough time. She'd requested the secretaries avoid putting male patients on her schedule unless they were kids or elderly. She knew none of her patients would attack her, but new patients…what if…she shook the terrifying thoughts from her head. It didn't merit considering such horrific and wildly unlikely scenarios. It just served to cause her more stress.

She found herself parked at the library, no recollection of the drive there…thankful that she was in one piece, but also hopeful that she hadn't mown down an entire Girl Scout troop on the way…that was always a scary thing.

The scent of used books, dust, and coffee filled her nose as she walked in to the hallowed hall of enlightenment. It wasn't the library of the old world, with stone columns, walnut shelves, and oak desks with those green and gold lamps you so often saw. No, this was a library for the modern world. A fancy coffee bar near the entrance with free and cash drinks, free fruit and cheap baked goods and sandwiches. There was a line of computers near the checkout desk, large cubicles with comfy chairs, power outlets and USB ports for those all day study sessions. Three of the building's four sides were made up of floor to ceiling windows to maximize natural light. There were partially enclosed booths for study groups, cozy chairs in the designated "quiet space," and free Wi-Fi so fast you could almost feel the thrum of information being dispersed and exchanged on the airwaves. She loved it here. It felt safe. Cozy. Inviting.

She walked up to the friendly librarian, a short, bubbly brunette in a lightly distressed "McGonagal-Sprout 2016" election tee, dark skinny jeans, weathered red Converse, and a navy cardigan. Shane smiled at the subtle Harry Potter refence on her shirt and started a conversation with the girl about how different the world would be today if the pairing on her shirt would have been elected that fateful year.

"So, I reserved a book online. Do you have it pulled for me?"

"Yeah, I think! Shane, right?"

Shane nodded and the librarian strode over to a stand of cubbies. She pulled out a large manilla parcel, placed it on the desk and started doing mysterious library computer things.

"Okay, so with this book, it's reminding me to read you a disclosure. 'This title is listed as a workbook, containing various pages that a single reader might fill out if it were their own property. Please do not write in, highlight, dog-ear, or otherwise mark up or alter this title. Doing so could result in significant cash fines to replace the title, and the permanent termination of your Scenic Regional Library membership at this and all other branches of the SRL.'"

Wow, they meant business.

"Truthfully Shane, as long as you fess up if anything happens to the book, we can usually let you slide by just paying the replacement fee, which is based on the book's current market price point. And I can also make you copies of any pages you want to work on."

"Wow, thanks! And did you say when the other's would be in?"

"Hmm, one is about a week past it's due date, but the other is expected back tomorrow. We'll send you a text, email, or call you when either come in. Whichever you prefer."

"Oh, text would be perfect. Thanks."

"Sure! Anything else for you today?"

"Mmm, don't think so!" she noticed some bookmarks in a small display. Various character silhouette's and clever sayings about reading.

Reading will send you to Wonderland.

To Read, or Not to Read…no question!

Girls who read always find their Mr. Darcy

It's Elementary! Reading solves all cases of boredom.

And so forth…

"Are these…free?" Shane asked.

"Sure! Take a few! We've got tons. They're like our business cards. Hand them out if you like!"

Shane thanked the librarian, who she finally noticed was wearing a nametag identifying her as Liz, and started to her car.

She was really looking forward to diving in to some of the exercises Dr. Mikkelson was talking about. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy was fascinating from what she'd learned so far. She immediately started skimming pages and landing on section titles she found intriguing as soon as she got to her car.

Her first mistake was staying there. Instead of going directly to meet Sy. But she told herself she had loads of time.

She was wrong.

Her second mistake was not locking her door immediately after closing it. A habit she had formed while attending college in the city. A habit lost to the years of small town life. Of safety. Of a simpler time. An era never more bygone than at this very second.

This second, her front passenger door flew open, slammed closed, and now, locked. All by hands not her own. She felt cold steel at her throat, turning the shriek of horror she had been summoning into nothing more than a whimper of fear and defeat. She was afraid to make a move to turn her neck and look at the assailant next to her. She lifted her hands, dropping the book and her phone onto the floorboard at her feet. Fuck, she thought.

"My purse is in the back seat, I don't have a lot of money, but I have some credit cards. Take my wallet, just please leave me alone!" Shane squinted, trying not to cry. To relive that horrible day so many weeks ago that felt like yesterday. "I won't even be able to tell the police what you look like because I've never seen your face!" she pointed to her closed eyes.

"Oh, yes, you have, sweetheart." A familiar voice breathed the words into Shane's ear like a poison. She felt the knife's edge twist and skid slightly, breaking the skin and coaxing a few tiny droplets of blood to it's surface. Her stomach churned and her head swam, dizzy under the weight of her current reality. She should have known. She should have been prepared. But it was all too late now.

"Elliott." She spat, trying to maintain what little strength she could find within after the last time they'd seen each other. She remembered her mindfulness training, by some miracle. Observed this moment for what it was and let her emotions live their purpose and pass. She knew every second they were together would beg new instances. Constant application of this tool as her emotions flowed and then ebbed again.

"The one and only. Here in the flesh." she could almost feel the lecherous slime drip from his mouth onto her shoulder, its undetectable vapor clouding her head with pure rage. This feeling was harder to let go of because his mere presence created a constant storm inside her. A storm that she was now certain would mean her end.

But she wouldn't go without a fight.

"Haven't you caused me enough pain? What else could you possibly take from me?"

"Oh, please. You're still employed, with a roof and a car, you still have that meat head lumberjack warming your bed. Or has he decided to cut you loose after your time with my friends? I still owe him for what he and all his little soldier boys did to them. And unlike my friends, YOU still have your LIFE!"

"You really expect me to feel any remorse over that bunch of rapists, especially after the HELL they put me through, personally? Keep dreaming. Sy and his boys did the world a favor when they took them out." She could have scoffed at his inventory of her life. She was unable to enjoy any of the things he mentioned, especially Sy, to their fullest since he'd had her abducted, imprisoned, and defiled. Even if she was working on healing, the wounds were still painful, deep, and slow to even scar, much less disappear entirely. She doubted that would happen. But she wouldn't be giving him anymore satisfaction. He wouldn't learn that he'd ruined her life, even if he hadn't taken it. Yet.

"Shut up and start the car."

"Why should I?"

"Because you don't want me to kill you in a library parking lot. Where any innocent schoolgirl might happen across your corpse, blood flowing from your neck, and all color and life gone from your cold flesh. It would scar her for life. You're too good a person for that."

The compliment was hollow. Meaningless coming from such a monster. But he wasn't wrong. Plus, any extra time she could give herself could mean time to come up with an escape plan. She did as she was told and left the parking lot, following Elliott's instructions to the letter.

She tried to tune out his droning about what he was going to do to her. There was no point listening. She'd honestly rather not see it coming.

But then, there was a glimmer of hope. Sitting across the intersection from her, waiting for a green light, as she was, was a big blue F150. Sy. He was looking down at his phone. Dammit. She had only seconds to signal him. Her mind raced. Suddenly she got herself into a coughing fit and asked Elliott to reach into her back seat to grab her water bottle. He was reluctant, but as her coughing continued and worsened, he switched his knife to the other hand, resting it at her shoulder and started rummaging in the back seat. She began flashing her lights rapidly. After a few rounds he looked up and waved at her. She shook her head at him, grim faced. She could see his confusion turn to horror as he took in what was happening and noticed her passenger sitting back in the seat, fruitless in his search for her water.

"There's nothing back there." Which she knew.

"Hmm, I could have sworn I'd put one in that back cup holder as a spare." she sputtered, ending the fake coughing fit.

She tried to drive slowly so Sy had a better chance of keeping up with them.

"The speed limit's 45 through here." he chided. She covered with a sigh.

"This feels familiar. Can you not get off my back about the driving? Are you permanently mounted there to criticize my every decision? Even now that we're not together?" He'd always been like that. She couldn't do anything right. Even driving. "I was trying to drive under the radar. You don't want to get pulled over, do you? Because I could drive with reckless abandon hoping to be noticed by someone in a squad car. Say the word!"

"Just get us there sometime before midnight, okay?"

"Might be easier if I knew where 'there' was…"

"Don't worry about it. You'll find out soon enough."

Shane's blood ran cold at the implication of doom in Elliott's tone. As if the Grim Reaper himself had uttered the words. She prayed as she never had before. If Sy didn't catch up with them, she'd need a miracle to get through this alive.

Up Next: Chapter 23-Tactical Defense

#netflix #netflix sand castle #Sand Castle #captain syverson #Captain Syverson x OFC #captain syverson fanfic #sigh for sy #henry cavill #henry cavill fanfic #henry cavill x ofc

31 notes · View notes

notchesandbullets · 3 years

Text

Saving Her (Ojiro Mashirao x Wolf!Reader)

Art credits: @floatzxs

Part 11: Internship with Hound Dog, Aizawa’s totally not jealous. You and Shinsou get along great, except when you don’t. Kayama and Yamada’s endless teasing of Aizawa who’s turned into a total dad to you both. Heavily inspired by the picture above.

Word Count: 4.7k

Aizawa didn't like it.

You were getting way too close to the Hound Dog. He watched as you threw your head back and laughed at something he said, running around in circles around the pro-hero you were doing your internship under.

Yup, definitely way too close.

He tried to convince himself it wasn't because he was jealous. After all, you were the only one he called 'dad', right?

That had to mean something

He rubbed the back of his neck, letting out a frustrated sigh. Seriously, he was being too irrational.

You were on a security patrol with Hound Dog on campus, the hybrid teaching you how to put your enhanced senses to good use, looking for discrepancies in the air on a whim.

Aizawa knew you weren't going to ask him for him to take care of you and train you. You already knew he was busy with Shinsou, that kid in your general studies with a brainwashing quirk.

Sure, the two of you hit it off, his endless sarcasm and attitude bringing you out of your shell and causing the two of you to banter back and forth every time you were in the same vicinity.

It drove him up a wall.

But it was because you saw how much time he was dedicating to Shinsou that he knew you weren't going to ask him to train you as well.

So when Hound Dog extended you an opportunity for an internship, Aizawa couldn't turn you down once you turned those shining eyes on him.

You were all too eager when you asked him for permission, bouncing up and down the entire time you told him about it. He was pretty sure you made a point about it being a good way to prepare for the Quirk Traffickers just in case and that's what made him finally agree.

He never regretted the decision more.

Look, it wasn't because he didn't want you to get strong. Quite the opposite, in fact. You both had already been through all that and he didn't wasn't keen on the same misunderstanding happening again.

But he didn't see why it had to be with Hound Dog of all heroes.

True, your quirks were somewhat similar. And you seemed to get along really well. Not as well as you and him but it was decent enough.

Oh.

He stopped and stared.

I'm jealous, aren't I?

Turning away with a sigh, he headed back to his office. He had papers to grade and rowdy students to round up.

Several yards away, You danced rings around Hound Dog, waving your hands around excitedly.

He had been the one to help you design your hero costume. Clothing that was sleek enough to give you a speed advantage and a pattern that could conform to your surroundings would help you blend in with your environment without any trouble.

The utility belt around your hips held several throwing knives to make up for your lack of long-distance combat ability and canisters of ointment so you could administer first-aid on sight. Credits of the idea went to Todoroki when he showed you his one evening when you asked just before sparring.

Your shoulders and legs were built to withstand severe impacts, making you able to run faster and for longer periods of time without wearing them down.

Hound Dog had recommended combat boots and braces to reduce the strain on your muscles for your arms and legs while you engaged in combat, making it easier to fight knowing that you didn't have to worry too much about the repercussions.

Hatsume was a little too eager when she gave them your requested upgrades but that girl was damn gifted so you didn't complain.

"Watch out for that wire." Hound Dog barked at you as you aimlessly almost crashed into a tree.

It wouldn't do anything except set off an alarm and put up UA's defense grid. Which is why he couldn't have you tip it off.

The pro-hero shook his head as you righted yourself sheepishly. You were like a pup, literally. Still, it was rather endearing. He didn't have any children but if he did, he reckoned that they'd be a lot like you.

"Eraser's kid, come on." He growled and you pouted, stomping your foot childishly.

"I have a name!!" You huffed, hands on your hips indignantly.

"Yeah, Eraser's kid. Now let's go." He ordered and you passed by him with a small frown, crossing your arms over your chest.

Rude.

You were happy though. After all this time, you had someone you could call dad. It was weird but in a homely sort of sense. You rather liked it.

The two of you patrolled UA's grounds without much trouble. He taught you the route to take as well as escape paths in place if you ever found yourself in a tough situation you couldn't get out of.

UA's sensors were top-grade, one of the best security systems in the country, but he had to prepare you for all scenarios. Just in case.

You padded behind him as you made your way through the thicket that surrounded the school, thanking him as he helped you pick your way through the forest.

There were a bunch of hidden traps and you were surprised when he told you the reason behind it.

"UA's been reforming security since the USJ incident." Hound Dog snarled in what you figured to be equal parts anger and irritation. "Remember, if you're going to go anywhere after hours for any reason, you must have a guardian with you, is that clear?"

You nodded firmly, unfazed by his aggression. It wasn't like you had thought about breaking the rules, even if there was a certain charm to it that enticed you, you were sure it would give Aizawa and Ojiro a heart attack.

Soon, it was time for a lunch break.

You were pretty surprised when he suggested a hunt but were extremely enthusiastic at the prospect of satisfying your instincts. The urge to maul and maim only came about if you were starving and even then, it was still possible to suppress it if you concentrated long enough.

Creeping around a tree, you utilized the foliage as a cover as you crept up on an unsuspecting prey.

You didn't make a sound as you crouched down, hiding between the blades of grass. Your lips drew back in a snarl as you locked on your target, springing on it and catching it by surprise. With one swipe, you killed it and took it in your jaws to carry back to where Hound Dog was.

He raised an eyebrow at you as you practically pranced over to him, beaming proudly at your first kill in a decade.

It had been far too long since you had a fresh kill.

You licked your lips as soon as you set it down in front of him as some sort of peace offering, wagging your tail as you waited for him to say something.

But you shrunk back and whimpered as he glared at you.

"Sloppy!!!" He bellowed, howling with spit spraying from his muzzled mouth. "Your control needs work!!!"

Your ears drooped and your eyes saddened but you nodded meekly.

Hound Dog sat back on his hunches. He had watched you closely while you hunted and seen what you could improve on.

"You need to work on your patience." He growled out gruffly and huffed when you fixated your large eyes on him. "You almost let it escape. Just because you were able to pin it down in time doesn't mean you did it right!! That was only the result!!"

You hung onto his advice, finding it sound beneath his brash way of wording it and trying to learn as much out of it as you can.

"You're fast but you're not as strong yet." Hound Dog stated, pointing to the shoes on your feet. "Hatsume made those specifically for your speed so your surprise attack should come from behind, not the front."

He scratched his head, grumbling out reluctantly, "But it wasn't bad for your first kill."

You sat up straighter at the begrudging praise, eyes shining and a huge smile stretched from ear to ear.

"Grrrr, but don't let it go to your head!!!" He snapped, pushing your fresh kill towards you so that you could eat it.

Your smile got impossibly wider and you nodded so fast your ears flopped back and forth.

"Eraser's kid, huh?" Hound Dog mused to himself as he collected firewood so that you could cook it.

Although the both of you could eat it raw, you both preferred it cooked unless you were in a particularly savage mood.

He huffed as he gathered a bunch of sticks for kindling.

"She's already strong."

After school let out, you walked home with your purple-haired friend from your general studies class. Annoying little brat.

You found out in a very short period of time that you could not stand him when he got like this. Ever since he found out about your little crush on Ojiro, he hadn't let up.

"Don't you dare." You seethed through clenched teeth as he dangled your notebook in front of your face. "Shinsou, I'm warning you."

The two of you were sitting in Aizawa's living room area. School had let out an hour ago and knowing that your teacher/parental guardian would be going home for the weekend, you two had decided to tag along and bug him.

Unable to get rid of the two of you annoying leeches, Aizawa had firmly instructed the two of you to at least get started on your homework if you were going to be here.

An array of textbooks spread out in front of you while the TV played in the background. You had studied and got through a decent amount of reading but that had only worked for all of ten minutes.

Shinsou smirked, keeping it high above his head. "If you want it, come and get it."

You snarled, pouncing on him before he could blink. The one good thing about the way his quirk worked was that you had to answer his question or jib. It was good because you only ever growled at him when he got like this.

He shoved your face and you whined as your fingertips brushed your notebook, licking his hand.

Shinsou recoiled in disgust. "Ew, Y/N!! That's so gross!!!"

"Serves you right!!" You quipped, grabbing at the spiral that was kept out of your reach. "Give it backkkkk."

"Oh no," He said with a smug smirk. "Not until I see just how many times you wrote Y/N x Mashirao with hearts drawn around it in here."

Before he could follow through with that threat, the notebook was snatched from his hand, the cry of outrage dying on the tip of your tongue. Your eyes flickered up to your dad who was now hovering above the both of you. You hadn't even heard him come in.

He was dressed casually, his hair pulled back away from his face, revealing his scar that he had gotten when the League attacked his students and instead of his hero costume, he was wearing sweatpants and a black, long-sleeved shirt.

Coffee, his tortoiseshell cat, purred at his feet as he fixated a glare on the two of you for not behaving.

"If you have time to play around then maybe you'd like more work to do." Aizawa threatened Shinsou before turning to you. "And you should know by now not to respond to him when he's like that, he's just provoking you."

You hung your head, pushing out your bottom lip as far as it would go.

He sighed, walking over and patting your head. "It's alright, kid. I know you're just playing."

You tail thumped happily in response at being let off the hook.

Shinsou's mouth twisted down into a frown. "Hey, why are you coddling her and not me?"

Aizawa promptly smacked him over the head and the teen winced at the brute force that his mentor delivered.

"Because she's been through a lot and you're being a cheeky brat." He deadpanned.

You flinched as Shinsou turned his sharp glare on you, but relaxed when you saw him soften slightly, letting you know that he was just teasing. Wiggling your eyebrows playfully, you snickered but hid it quickly as Aizawa's attention snapped to you next.

"Oi, you two better get along." Aizawa ordered, turning to leave the room to go back to where Kayama and Yamada were at. "If I hear one peep out of either of you, there will be consequences."

"Yes, sensei." You both chorused together, but not before sharing an evil look with each other that passed under his radar as he left to continue the conference.

The second he stepped out, all hell broke loose.

Your eyes shot to him when he stood up, taking up the practiced stance Aizawa had been teaching him, gesturing for you to do the same. You popped up to your feet but you didn't get a chance to swing as he rushed at you.

"Don't you even think about— SHINSOU, YOU IDIOT!!!!!"

Your shriek carried clearly to the other room and the three teachers sitting in Aizawa's office.

"Aw, isn't that precious." Kayama cooed, resting her chin in the palm of her hand and drummed her fingers on the table she was sitting at.

Yamada was sprawled upside down on his couch, nearly falling off and crashing to the ground when the shared wall between you guys and them shook.

"Uh, Shouta." He called to his best friend as he sighed in exasperation, the underground hero pinching the bridge of his nose. "Aren't you going to take care of that?"

Aizawa groaned, his head lolling back to thump against the opposite wall. "I'm too tired for this."

Kayama's grin grew mischievous and her eyes sparkled. "Shouta, they're your children for goodness sake!!"

Yamada matched her crazy smile and he flailed a bit before getting the right equilibrium to sit up straight. "He's a dad!! It finally happened!!!"

The rugged underground hero threw a pillow at both of their faces to get them to stop laughing as his best friends chortled obnoxiously.

"Shut up." He grumbled, throwing an arm across his face.

He flinched as the racket kicked up from the living room suddenly stopped at the sound of a very loud crash.

Aizawa stalked towards the door and ripped it open, narrowing his eyes until they became slits. "If they broke anything..."

The other two shared a knowing glance with each other.

"He's going to chew them out for messing up his living room." Kayama gloated, bounding over to peek outside so she could see what was going on.

Yamada skipped over, tripping over his feet in his haste to not be left behind. "Then he's going to feel bad and then he's going to leave and let them do it again."

"Discipline, Shouta," Kayama tsked as she murmured. "You need to discipline them."

Raising an eyebrow at her, he commented, "That sounds a little weird coming from you, Nemuri."

"Oh hush!!" She snapped, smacking him on the arm so hard that he yelped. "Not like that!!"

Her energy and bubbly nature resurfaced as she heard Aizawa doing exactly what she and Yamada panned out.

"He's such a dad." She crooned, wanting to see how you were wrapping him around your finger this time around.

It always was the most entertaining thing, seeing her stoic best friend crumble underneath your adorable pouts and watery puppy eyes. It never failed to force Aizawa to throw up his hands and give into you.

Soft Dadzawa was the best.

You and Shinsou lowered your heads as Aizawa strictly admonished the two of you.

The once clean and tidy living room had been thrown out of order and you had feathers in your hair. You weren't exactly sure how Shinsou managed to rip the pillow as he was throwing at you, but you weren't keen on finding out now.

You yelped in pain as Aizawa smacked you upside the head, giving the same treatment to the sheepish-looking boy next to you.

"Honestly." Aizawa exhaled forcefully, gripping his head, frustration coming through clear. "What am I going to do with the two of you..."

You grinned but bit your lip when he shot you a glare, blinking up innocently at him.

Shinsou chuckled, petting Coffee nonchalantly as she climbed into his lap, smiling as the cat purred, loving the attention he gave her.

Aizawa sighed, done for now. He had things he had to finish so that the two loudmouths waiting in his office would leave. He wanted to sleep.

"Thirty minutes."

You and Shinsou straightened up at the tiredness in his voice, casting a slightly worried look between the two of you. You had heard him angry and frustrated but never tired like this. He must really be exhausted.

Aizawa took no notice of the silent dialogue between the two of you. "Can you two please behave for that long?"

He was surprised when there was no snark from Shinsou or witty answer from you as the two of you bowed at him but thought nothing of it as he left the room once more.

If either of you kicked up a racket like that again, he would send Yamada out to deal with you.

As soon as the door closed behind him, the two of you were up on your feet but now for another reason entirely.

"Where is it?" You asked, looking in every cabinet but coming up short.

"Here."

You caught what Shinsou tossed you, nodding in thanks. Opening the garbage bag, you got to work, picking up what you had broken while he grabbed a broom and swept up the feathers littering the floor.

In all of ten minutes, everything was cleaned and put back in its original position and the two of you returned to your studies.

Aizawa was shocked to find you in that same position another twenty minutes later when he was showing his nosy colleagues out the door but didn't comment on it, merely shoved Kayama out when she cooed at how cute you two were.

She tried to whine in protest. "But Shouta—"

"Get lost, Nemuri."

Shinsou frowned as Coffee jumped up from his lap as the door slammed closed, making her way over to Aizawa.

"Mean." He said under his breath, making you laugh.

You closed your notes and textbook, done for the day. Packing them away, you noticed Shinsou had finished, too.

"Want to walk back together?" You asked.

He snorted, smirking at you. "No."

You stuck out your tongue, puffing out your cheeks at him. "Rude."

He ruffled your hair and you scowled, swiping at him but he darted out of reach before you could grab him. You two squabbled all the way to the front door, just about to put on your shoes when there came a quiet murmur from the edge of the kitchen.

"Are you hungry?"

You froze and Shinsou cocked his head, turning around slowly. Aizawa's frame was braced against the corner of the wall somehow when you weren't paying attention, he had rolled up his sleeves, revealing countless scars and a lot more muscle than you originally thought.

His eyes narrowed at his students. "You two didn't eat yet."

"Ah..." Shinsou winced. "It's alright, sensei, I have some food back at the dorm."

Without changing your expression, you deadpanned. "He's lying."

"Y/N!!!"

Squealing as he charged at you, you launched yourself into your dad's chest, hoping he would protect you.

"Dad, Toshi's being mean again!!!" You cried as Shinsou chased you.

"Get back here!!" Shinsou mock snarled, snapping his teeth at you.

You clutched on tighter to Aizawa's shirt, sending him a pleading look.

He sighed but even you could tell he was holding back a smile as he put an arm around you while warding off his student with the other.

You slyly stuck your tongue out at the defeated brainwashing kid but your dad caught the action.

"Y/N..." He warned. "Don't instigate."

"Yes, Dad." You said seriously, snuggling into his side before peering back up at him. "Can Toshi stay for dinner?"

You already knew he wanted to cook for you. That much was evident when he asked if you had eaten yet. He had this uncanny habit of doing things indirectly and with how much you knew Shinsou was like him, you knew if you called him out on it, the two would flatly deny that that's what he meant.

Better to play along.

Not that you were complaining. Aizawa's home cooking was actually really good, when he had the time and energy for it. Usually, you did most of the cooking, having enough skills thanks to Sato to make things that were edible.

"Only if he wants to." Aizawa told you before glancing up at Shinsou shuffling his feet awkwardly. "You're more than welcome to, kid."

Shinsou didn't say anything at first but he moved closer to you guys, away from the front door.

"Are you sure, sensei?" He asked, a hint of worry swimming in the depths of his eyes, afraid he wasn't being genuine.

That he was only asking out of politeness and that he didn't really want him there. But looking at you, he only saw pure, radiating hope in your gaze.

You were being honest with him and though Aizawa's was vastly more subtle, he saw the truth in his teacher's eyes, too.

Shinsou nodded hesitantly, his own way of answering and you beamed.

"Great!! I'll get started!!"

You dashed into the kitchen, pulling out the vegetables and started the fire to get the water boiling for the noodles. Your dad had already pulled out and marinated the meat for tonight, all that was left was to cook it.

But in all your excitement, you were moving a little too fast.

Aizawa stiffened, then shook his head as another crash could be heard from the kitchen, followed by a sheepish 'oops'.

He crossed his arms over his chest, already making his way over to where Shinsou couldn't see. "Kid..."

"It wasn't me, I swear!!" You blurted out.

Pouting as you were banned from the kitchen anyways, you skipped over to where Shinsou was awkwardly sitting on a chair by the table. He looked so uncomfortable.

You frowned, then beamed as a light bulb went off in your head.

He leaned back warily as he saw the glint of mischief in your eyes as you came closer. "What are you doing?"

"Aw, you don't trust me?" You asked playfully.

"Never." He retorted and you pouted childishly.

"Meanie."

He waved you off but you could already tell he was much more relaxed than before. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, what did you want?"

You gestured for him to come closer so your dad wouldn't hear and whispered in his ear. "I know where he keeps his capture weapon and goggles."

Shinsou tried but even he couldn't wipe the excitement off his face fast enough. He never told you but he was a hardcore Eraserhead fan, even before coming to UA. Since he was an underground hero, there was no media coverage on him, no merchandise to be sold in stores but he knew.

Aizawa had saved him once, a long time ago.

His parents were rich and completely absent from his life. He didn't grow up with a family because they were never around and he didn't grow up with friends because of his quirk.

Independent from a young age, he had distanced himself from almost everybody, living a life of solitude no matter how many presents his parents tried to throw at him to buy his love.

He was glad that he moved out of their ridiculous mansion ages ago, moving in with a cousin until he was old enough to live on his own, but what he didn't plan on was being attacked by a villain one day as he was walking home from school.

Aizawa had saved him back then, acting quickly to rescue him and take down the other.

Shinsou once questioned that if this hero knew back then how villainous his quirk was, would he have saved him?

Of course he would have. And that's what spurred on his decision, his path that he wanted to take.

All because of Eraserhead.

It thrilled him when his hero, his idol himself, offered to train and teach him personally how to become a hero before his transfer into the hero course. When he approached him after the sports festival, he almost passed out right then and there.

That must have been what a lot of people experienced towards All Might.

He never talked about his admiration of him before though, so you must've been much more observant than he gave you credit for.

Shinsou attempted to look disinterested at your proposal. "Really?"

Your grin grew wider and you grabbed his hand, hauling him up out of the chair as you snuck into Aizawa's room. You knew how much he wanted to see them up close and try them out, even if he wouldn't admit to it.

"Come on!!" You giggled, ushering him inside quickly and digging into the nightstand by the futon.

Needless to say, when Aizawa found the two of you once dinner was ready, Shinsou was caught red-handed with his capture weapon on and his trademark goggles on his face.

Even with both the scarf and goggles covering his face, you could still see him turn bright red as he was caught by his mentor.

"Don't worry!!" You threw over your shoulder as you flounced away, leaving the two of them alone. "He's not mad!!"

Shinsou tensed as the door closed behind you, ripping off everything as fast as he could even though it would've prevented what had already been done. A hand on his shoulder halted him.

Aizawa's mouth twitched and his gaze held a glimmer of amusement. "Cool, right?"

Rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, Shinsou nodded and apologized for trying them on without his permission, embarrassed beyond belief.

The older man tried to soothe his worries by casting him a purposeful look. "You know, it might come in handy later on."

Tucking away his capture weapon and goggles, Aizawa pretended not to notice how Shinsou's jaw dropped in shock at what he was suggesting for him.

"If you go to the Development Studio, I'm sure they could make something similar for you." He told him while suppressing a proud smile.

He had come so far since the Sports Festival. He had trained hard on his own and while he was already proud of him for all his efforts and his drive, to have him admire a gruff, anti-social man like him sent warmth blooming in his chest.

Shinsou couldn't believe what he was hearing. "Would...."

He swallowed thickly, pushing aside his pride and the remnants of his embarrassment.

"Would you teach me how to fight with it?"

Aizawa's mouth quirked up in a small smile. "Sure thing, kid."

Shinsou thought that was the last behind him when he followed his mentor out the door to go eat the dinner waiting for them. You were already at the table, portions served out, kicking your feet as you waited impatiently for them.

But Aizawa wasn't finished.

"The goggles suited you." He commented nonchalantly, causing the boy's face to flush in embarrassment once again.

"Aizawa-sensei!!" Shinsou protested.

You doubled over, clutching your stomach. "Good one, Dad!!!"

Looking on fondly as the two of you began to bicker, you teasing Shinsou and him furiously defending whatever dignity he had left, Aizawa's smile softened.

You two.

He guessed he didn't mind that it was the two of you.

Taglist: @katsukis-sad-angel

92 notes · View notes