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plasticnightmaredoll · 3 years

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So, the "Justice League" finally got its own movie, eh? Oh, that thing from 2017 was just trash. It's gone. We don't need to look at it anymore.

But in all seriousness, it's great people called out for the Zack Snyder cut of the movie and actually got it! And, yes, it is a vast improvement over the Joss Whedon cut.

Now, my feelings about the DCEU have been pretty divided:

I actually did enjoy "Man of Steel" and found Superman to be relatable and likable for once (I'm not a Superman fan and don't come for me)

"Wonder Woman" was very entertaining and easily the best entry for me in the movie series so far.

"Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" was a hot mess. Lots of good ideas but it was executed poorly. It felt kind of cheesy at times, especially that whole "Save Martha" thing. Jesse Eisenburg is not a convincing Lex Luthor. Ben Affleck is not a good actor and is a terrible Batman/Bruce Wayne. He's not as bad as George Clooney, but he's not much better either.

"Wonder Woman 1984" was a massive glow-down. Poor quality writing, Maxwell Lord was a weak villain, Cheetah was laughable, and the ending was so goddamn corny! Not to mention, it took ages for anything interesting to happen, and what was the deal with Steve Trevor possessing another dude's body? I mean...what?

Haven't seen "Suicide Squad" in its entirety but I do know and have seen enough to decide that it's a huge misstep. Haven't seen "Birds of Prey (And the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn)" either but I have some interest in it so perhaps someday.

Haven't watched "Aquaman" but probably will eventually but I'm just not very motivated to see it. I like Jason Mamoa as Aquaman/Arthur Curry, but...I don't know. The trailers didn't really grab my attention.

The 2017 Joss Whedon version of "Justice League" was terrible -- worse than "Batman v Superman," worse than "Wonder Woman 1984." I thought the movie moved too quickly, lacked proper character development, and had some bad CGI (I mean, Mustache Gate, am I right?)

Onto the Synder Cut for "Justice League!" Spoilers ahead, of course:

These are really a collection of thoughts, opinions, and observations I had while watching the movie. I have only seen the 2017 film once and honestly don't want to watch it ever again, not even to "refresh my memory" of some details.

Steppenwolf

Steppenwolf was such a pitiful villain in the Whedon Cut. The CGI for him was terrible, and he looked like some weird dude in armor. His personality and motives were paper thin as well. He was a throw-away, token villain, and the only things memorable about him was his name and voice.

In the Snyder Cut, not only was Steppenwolf's CGI much more refined, his character design was imposing. His armor seemed to be alive, too, always shifting slightly, this way and that, which was an impressive sight. His motives, while nothing too deep or extraordinary, gave him a little more depth: he pissed off Darkseid and had to make up for it, and was clearly afraid of what could happen to him if he failed.

The name and voice obviously were still memorable but combined with the other improvements to his character, they were icing on the cake.

That being said, I don't think Steppenwolf is as intriguing or even remotely sympathetic as Loki and Thanos in the MCU.

Darkseid

Was Darkseid even mentioned in the Whedon cut? I can't remember and I don't want to watch that shitty movie again just to find out. However, I don't recall Darkseid making an appearance or even being spoken of in the 2017 version. Now, I haven't read DC (or Marvel) comics, so I don't know a lot about the guy, but he is supposedly one of the more iconic villains.

His motives are pretty simple, though: command and conquer. There isn't a lot of depth so far in the movies but he does pose a much larger threat than Steppenwolf did. You could tell Steppenwolf was intimidated by Darkseid, who was about as cold and menacing as they come. He's a complete villain in that regard, having no emotions and only seeking power for himself.

He looked great in the Snyder Cut. He was actually really fucking scary-looking. He made the beefcake Steppenwolf look like a puppy.

I'm glad that Darkseid made an appearance, even if he didn't fight the Justice League. It alludes to a much broader story, as well as foreshadows an epic boss fight down the line -- assuming the Snyder Cut is popular enough to convince the studios to make a direct sequel and not just abandon things in favor of some sort of soft reboot.

Superman/Clark Kent/Henry Cavill/Mustache Gate

Let's get this out of the way: Henry Cavill is hot af.

Ok, now that we got that out of the way, hooray for Snyder for getting rid of those nasty reshoot scenes involving Henry's CGI'd mouth! Can't say I missed them, you know? I mean, in the 2017 Whedon Cut, you could always spot reshoot scenes based on whether or not Henry's mouth looked normal and totally strange.

I think the 2017 movie had Superman grab Batman by the neck and ask, "Tell me: Do you bleed?" I'm relieved that was removed from the Synder Cut because it added too much of an evil tone to Superman, and we could clearly tell he was most upset with Batman upon being revived.

One massive problem with the 2017 movie was that it made every member of the Justice League look like bumbling idiots without Superman's help. It was downright embarrassing and unrealistic. I mean, you're telling me that Wonder Woman, a goddess, can't take on Steppenwolf? Or Victor Stone, a cyborg with incredible abilities? Making Superman key to winning isn't the problem, it's how it was done in the 2017 movie. He's already OP but that shouldn't mean his comrades have to be useless in comparison.

Superman was allowed to be OP in the Snyder Cut without making his team look incompetent. Like in the Avengers movies, everyone in the Justice League had a purpose and all of them worked together to defeat Steppenwolf. Superman obviously was key to winning, but, again, it wasn't like he was the only capable one during the battle.

I did like the black suit. It's kind of ominous but also very cool at the same time. But is it also foreshadowing something? I don't know...I haven't read the comics so I really don't have any idea lol.

Batman/Bruce Wayne/Batfleck

One glaring issue I still have is Ben Affleck is a mediocre actor at best and he's a terrible Bruce Wayne/Batman. I mean, they couldn't have found anyone else? Someone with, like, good acting abilities?

Martian Manhunter

This whole time -- THIS WHOLE GOTDAMM TIME -- Martian Manhunter was hiding in plain sight! General Swanwick, who I remember from "Man of Steel," IS Martian Manhunter. I didn't see that coming. I mean, I knew Martian Manhunter would appear in the Snyder Cut but I didn't know he'd have an alternate identity, let alone that of an existing character in the DCEU.

As much as I did like seeing him, I am glad he didn't play a big part because the movie already has plenty of characters as is, and introducing yet another one could have slowed things down and taken away from developing the plot.

The Runtime/Pacing

I mentioned already that the Whedon Cut felt rushed and needed much more time to develop its characters and plot. While I had doubts about whether or not making "Justice League" four hours long would be a good idea, it turns out that it was just what the story needed.

Character development was actually existent, and Cyborg/Victor Stone received a detailed backstory, and Flash/Barry Allen got some extra tidbits added to his character's story/background as well.

I actually thought Victor was a fascinating (if a bit tragic) character in the Whedon cut and was disappointed that he just sort of, like, popped up and fought alongside the other Justice League members with the tiniest amount of depth.

Despite an epic 4-hour runtime, it didn't feel slow, nor did it feel like any scenes were "filler." Every scene had a purpose and kept the story moving at a steady, comprehensible pace. It felt more like a 2.5-3 hour movie, honestly, which is a feat since pacing can often be one of a film's biggest issues ("Avengers: Endgame" also accomplished this feat with its 3-hour runtime feeling more like 2-2.5 hours but with no negative side effects of that). Breaking the movie into chapters, including an epilogue was a tad strange because it's not a very common thing, but I think it helped break up the epic 4 hours into separate, manageable but still cohesive pieces. Also, they helped easily transition from one portion to the next smoothly without any awkward cuts.

The Flash/Barry Allen/Ezra Miller

Barry still amused me in the Whedon Cut. He brought some good-natured humor and charm to the movie, preventing it from being too brooding and intense.

I think Ezra is a talented actor and does well in the Barry Allen role but he is, unfortunately, a problematic person. I mean, if he gets recast, he gets recast but hopefully, they pick someone else who has some acting abilities worth noting (i.e. Not a Ben Affleck type of actor)

The Final Battle

It was a huge improvement over the 2017 cut, as everyone was key to winning the final battle, not just Superman. It is meant to be a team of costumed heroes defeating a villain, not just one OP member of the team outdoing everyone else.

That being said, I felt that the final battle was a little bit anti-climatic. I don't know what it was but I just thought that it would be longer? I expected more to happen? More fighting? Not sure how to describe it, but I do feel like it wasn't as impressive as it could have been.

The Epilogue

A dystopian future involving an evil Superman and Joker somehow working WITH Batman was just...crazy. I mean, evil Superman, I can believe, but Joker and Batman working together (even reluctantly) is quite a sight.

Based on what I've been reading, this nightmare Bruce has could be setting up not one but two sequels for "Justice League." I would like to see how things will play out even if things get kind of dark. I'm getting the impression that Darkseid will kill Lois Lane, thus breaking Superman emotionally and making him compliant. That is unless Bruce intervenes in this timeline and prevents that from happening...but at the expense of his own life. Oh dear...

I definitely enjoyed the Zack Snyder version of "Justice League," and would definitely watch it again and again and again. I already have forgotten the majority of the Whedon Cut, and after seeing Synder's version, I think the 2017 movie will be rendered null and void. I hope it is just expelled from the DCEU canon entirely. That, and we get the "Justice League" sequels, preferably from Zack Snyder (Say what you want but I think he is a pretty good director for the most part and seems to really care about this work).

I honestly want to see a fight between the Justice League and Darkseid because I think that's what we're trying to build up to, and seeing as how Darkseid is one of the legendary villains in the DC comics, I would be extremely disappointed if this doesn't come to pass.

Also, as much as I like Batman/Bruce Wayne, seeing him sacrifice himself to save the team, including Lois and thus Superman's sanity, would be something else. It would bring everyone even closer together, for one, and I think that the negativity shared between Batman and Superman in the past would be completely forgiven. I'm not saying there isn't forgiveness now, but dying to save Superman's wife would change everything....if that makes sense? Does it make sense? I'm terrible at explaining my thoughts sometimes.

#justice league #zack snyder #dceu #snyder cut #zack snyder's justice league #superman #wonder woman #the flash #cyborg #martian manhunter #darkseid #steppenwolf #batman #barry allen #bruce wayne #diana prince #victor stone #aquaman #arthur curry

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dillydedalus · 3 years

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march reading

kinda forgot about this i guess. anyway feat. uh, magical ships, dubious mental health institutions (plural) & a parisian building with 99 rooms.

the forever sea, joshua phillip johnson (forever sea #1) i firmly believe that more fantasy lit should be set on ships bc ships are inherently a sexy setting & you could have pirates which are extremely sexy. this has ships (and pirates) and also a sea made of grass? a magical plant sea on which ships sail via magical fires, so conceptually i’m very into it all. the plot is fine, but the protagonist kindred has a very bad case of Main Character Syndrome so prepare for mild annoyance throughout. also while i generally enjoy book magic vs wild magic i wish more works would treat them as two ends of a spectrum rather than ~book magic bad and boring, wild magic cool and *~natural*~. but overall i think this series has potential. 3/5

jagannath: stories, karin tidbeck ([partially?] translated from swedish by the author) really cool collection of sff stories by tidbeck, many of which veer into mild horror and some of which are influenced by swedish folklore and especially swedish fey stories. i enjoyed most of these a lot, especially the existential call centre horror story, the ‘god won’t let me die’ one, and a taxonomy of a cryptid that goes a little off the rails. 4/5

annette, ein heldinnenepos, anne weber a novel in verse about anne beaumanoir, a real person who was a résistance member during world war 2 and later supported the algerian national liberation front, for which she was sentenced to 10 years in prison (she escaped to tunisia and later algeria). she’s clearly a very impressive and interesting person & i conceptually enjoyed the idea of writing a modern hero(ine)’s epic, but i feel like the language could have been a bit more stylized to match the form. 3/5

salvage the bones, jesmyn ward (audio) bleak but ultimately hopeful novel about a black family in the days before and during hurricane katrina, although the focus is on the family dynamics, the 14-year-old narrator discovering that she is pregnant, and the kids trying to keep the puppies their dog china just had alive and well. enjoyed this, altho i did it a bit of a disservice but listening to it a lot of short chunks. 3.5/5

regeneration, pat barker (regeneration trilogy #1) set mostly at a military hospital for soldiers with shell shock during world war 1, this novel explores the existential horror of war, psychological treatment (& the horrible absurdity of treating traumatised men just enough so that you can send them straight back to Trauma Town), and the meeting between siegfried sassoon & wilfred owen. i find i don’t really have much to say about it, but it is very, very good. 4/5

how to pronounce knife, souvankham thammavongsa a short story collection mainly about refugees and migrants from laos to canada, many focusing on parent-child relationships and being forced to work in low-paid jobs, often ones that are damaging to their health. the stories are very well-observed and emotionally nuanced and detailed, but with 14 mostly very short stories, the collection as a whole felt a bit samey, which i guess is something i often experience with short story collections. 3/5

faces in the water, janet frame horrifying semi-autobiographical novel about a young woman stuck in new zealand’s mental health system, moving to different hospitals but mostly from ward to (more depressing) ward in the 40s/50s. while there is a shift in attitudes during her stay that sometimes makes the wards more tolerable, mostly the patients are neglected, abused, and the threat of electric shock therapy and lobotomy always hangs over them. 3/5

the upstairs house, julia fine fuck why did i read so many books about mental health conditions this month??? this is another entry in my casual ‘motherhood as horror’ reading project, in which a new mother develops post-partum psychosis & imagines the modernist children’s book writer she’s writing her dissertation on and her poet sometimes-lover haunting her and her child (margaret wise brown & michael strange, who are real people i was utterly unaware of). this does pretty good on the maternal horror front, but i wasn’t entirely sold on the literary haunting. 2/5

1000 serpentinen angst, olivia wenzel a very interesting novel about a woman struggling with grief over her brother’s suicide, an anxiety disorder, the (non)state of a (non)relationship and discrimination/marginalisation based on her identity as a black, east-german, bi woman (while also being, as she notes, financially privileged). much of the novel is written in a dialogue between the narrator and an unnamed (& probably internal) interlocutor, which was p effective for a novel more focused on introspection than much of a plot. 3/5

atlas: the archaeology of an imaginary city, dung kai-cheung (tr. from chinese by the author, anders hansson, bonnie mcdougall) fictitious theory about a slightly-left-of-reality version of hong kong and how maps (re)construct the city, very heavy on the postmodern poststructuralist postcolonial (and some other posts, i’m sure). in many ways my jam. unfortunately my favourite parts of this were the author’s preface and the first part (fictitious theory of mapping alternate hong kong); the rest felt very repetitive and not particularly interesting, altho i’m sure i was also just missing a lot of cultural context. 2.5/5

under the net, iris murdoch .........i liked the other two murdochs i’ve read (the sea, the sea & a severed head) quite a lot so either i was not in the mood for her very peculiar style of constructing novels and characters or, this being her first novel, she just wasn’t in full command of that peculiar style yet but man this was a slooooooooog. don’t stretch out your modern picaresque with an incredibly annoying narrator over more than 300 pages iris!!!! 2/5 bc this probably has some merit & i just wasn’t into it

the impossible revolution: making sense of the syrian tragedy, yassin al-haj saleh (tr. from arabic by i. rida mahmoud) collection of articles and essays saleh (a syrian intellectual & activist who spent 16 years in a syrian prison) wrote from 2011 to 2015, analysing the reasons for, potential and development of the revolution, as well as some background sociological discussion on the assads’ regime. very interesting, very dense, very depressing. wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as a first read on the topic tho. 3/5

angels in america: millenium approaches & perestroika, tony kushner the page to tumblr darling quote ratio in this is insane (”just mangled guts pretending” and so on) and also it just really slaps on every level. also managed to get me from 0 to crying several times. brilliant work of theatre, would love to see it staged (or filmed). 4/5

life: a user’s manual, georges perec (german tr. by eugen helmlé) 99 chapters, each corresponding with a single room in a parisian apartment block; some chapters are basically ‘here’s the room, here’s a long list of objects in the room, that’s it bye :)’, some are short insights into the lives of the people living there, some (the best, mostly) are long, absolutely wild tales that are sometimes only tangentially connected to the room in question. why are the french like this. 61/99 rooms

sisters in hate: american women on the front lines of white nationalism, seyward darby (audio) nonfiction about women’s role in white nationalist hate movements, mainly based on the stories of three women who are or have been involved with various contemporary american alt-right/racist/neonazi hate groups, while also looking at general social trends and the history of white women’s role in white supremacy. interesting and engaging if you’re interested in this kind of thing. if you’re both politically aware and internet poisoned, it’s probably not much that is completely new to you but still worth reading. 3/5

starting in april i will be Gainfully Employed (ugh) & thus probably not read as much or read even more bc i have no energy for anything else

#the books i read #long post

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threephasebird · 3 years

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Hello friend, it's Nicole from TAD discord, so sorry for awkwardly & randomly sliding into your dms. I've noticed that you've been reblogging a lot of The Untamed recently and I have just finished The Untamed & literally cannot think about anything else. I'm obsessed. Anyway, I've also noticed from your blog that your favorite seems to be JGY and I find that *fascinating*. He's very much not my fav, but he's such a complex character that I would love to hear your thoughts & feelings & analysis?

And to be completely clear, I will never try to debate with you or say your opinions are wrong or immoral or anything. I'm not an anti, I've stanned plenty of villains in my time. I'm just genuinely curious. I think the fact that you have such different feelings about this character is part of the beauty of stories and a testament to how complex and smart this particular story is.

Hello friend! First of all, thank you for your ask -- I love talking about my fictional faves, so there’s no need to apologize at all! There are definitely people out there who have already posted much more cohesive and succinct character analysis for JGY, but I’ve sat down for a bit to find an answer to the question of why I, personally, like him so much. I ended up finding six possible ways to answer this question, which I’ll list below and then go into (a lot) more detail under the cut. Hope you enjoy!

1) I like him because his motivations as a villain are complex and understandable

2) I like him because there’s no easy solution to his conflicts

3) I like him because he interacts with the story in a unique way

4) I like him because when we see him on top of his game, it’s fun to watch

5) I like him because LXC likes him

6) JGY is very small and has dimples

So, onward! (2.7k)

1) I like him because his motivations as a villain are complex and understandable

One possible way of looking at JGY is that throughout the entire story, his end goal is to eliminate all of the Jin family and come out on top as sect leader, chief cultivator and most powerful person in the cultivation world. However, I personally find it more intriguing to think that his specific plans shifted throughout the story and that he didn’t follow a long con the way NHS did, but that the common ground in everything he does is that he’s motivated by wanting security. Then, everything that he does afterwards is a step-by-step escalation when no matter what he does and how far he comes, his goal is always dangled right in front of him, but ultimately impossible to reach.

When he joins the Nie clan, on a superficial level it seems that this place could offer him the security he wants and needs, especially with NMJ protecting him -- but on the flip side of the coin, no one apart from NMJ and NHS seem to respect him, and his security entirely depends on NMJ’s goodwill. It’s an exteremely fragile position that could probably only ever last for a limited amount of time. Even if JGY never killed the guard captain and wasn’t thrown out of the Unclean Realm, how would the future have looked like for him? NMJ’s life expectancy was low to begin with, and once he had died (of natural causes, in this hypothetical case), NHS wouldn’t have been able to hold the same protective hand over JGY as his brother, and JGY would have become the disrespected advisor to the disrespected clan leader. (On a side note, I personally don’t think JGY released XY to get the yin iron -- I think it makes more sense that he wanted to use XY as bargaining chips against WC, seeing how he goes to free him immediately after WC asks for NMJ to release XY, to save the Unclean Realm and, in extension, his own ass.)

After JGY is thrown out, he’s basically out of options -- it’s go big or go home, because which other clan would take him in now? So he sets his sight on being recognized by JGS once more, and in order to succeed, he derives the plan of becoming a spy under WRH and do something so “heroical” that after the war, JGS has no other choice but to accept him into his clan. And at first, it seems like he succeeds and that he finally gets everything he wished for -- his father recognizes him as a son and gives him a position, he’s part of the Jin clan, he has power, he’s secure! But then it turns out that he was wishing on the monkey’s paw. His father doesn’t truly recognize him, and even in the Jin clan he’s disrespected (by JGS, by Madam Jin, by Jin Zixun), he doesn’t truly hold power (he just has to do whatever JGS tells him to), and he’s not secure (JGS instrumentalizes him because he’s useful to him right now, but does that mean he’ll be useful forever? So there’s a constant threat there).

I think the only reason JGS officially adopts JGY is that it allows him to claim the victory over WRH for the Jin clan and to expand his own power. Instead of JGY being recognized, JGS instrumentalizes him from the very first second and to make it worse, he makes JGY his attack dog the same way WRH did. I think the things JGY does under both WRH and JGS are absolutely horrifying, but I can’t help but also feel horrified for him. Under WRH, I think he tells himself that whatever he does is the lesser evil because it’ll end the war quicker, and that it’ll all be worth it in the end, and as a result, he loses parts of his own humanity there. And then under JGS, it’s the same fucked up shit again, except that this time, he also wants so very badly for JGS to value him, and in addition, he’s also completely out of options now. Without wanting to excuse the things he does under JGS, the only alternative at this point is for him to leave the Jin clan and the cultivation world as a whole, and I do think there’s a definite possibility that JGS would have him killed if he did because he knew too much about JGS’s plans.

Without passing judgment on his involvement in JZX and JZX’s deaths, as well as him killing NMJ and JGS for now (the latter being the one thing that I’m personally most horrified of), I don’t see JGY as a villain who enjoys being the villain the way XY does. I think he’s constantly horrified at himself and compartmentalizes to a degree where he’s actually derailing his own plans. Him throwing out XY immediately after killing JGS reads to me as him wanting to close the chapter of everything they did under JGS -- I think he must have acted out of a visceral emotion there or else he wouldn’t have left XY to die at the side of a road so carelessly (and, in effect, allowed for someone to live on with detailed knowledge of his own deeds). After rising to power (and finally, seemingly, really getting the security he’s always wanted), he doesn’t use that power to become WRH 3.0, but instead to do genuinely good things (such as building the watch towers). That’s not supposed to mean that him not being a cruel despot makes up for everything he’s done, but I find it interesting to think about from the perspective of, what kind of person could he have been if this opportunity had been given to him freely -- if his own class and social standing didn’t prevent him from that? I think he’d have become an incredibly powerful cultivator and clan leader if he’d have the same privilege as JZX.

In a way, I see JZX, WC, and JGY as narrative foils. WC shows us who JZX might have become if JGS treated him the same way as WRH treats WC. But, JGS doesn’t -- he shields his own son from this part of the Jin clan, and basically allows him to live in a completely different reality as JGY! JZX’s whole character arc is one of personality development, and becoming a hero, and falling in love -- he doesn’t have a clue about his father wanting to get his hands on XY and the Stygian tiger amulet and arguably about at least part of the war crimes he commits against the Wen clan. It’s not part of his life. In a way, JGY is the sacrifice being made to allow him to live his life unaware because in him, JGS found someone else to do his dirty work.

2) I like him because there’s no easy solution to his conflicts

Sometimes, when you want to be a villain apologist, all you need to do is point at one or a few bits of the story and say, “well if they hadn’t done that...”. (See, for example, Anakin Skywalker -- you wanna write a RotS canon divergence fixit? Just have Obi-Wan come back approximately one hour earlier and you have it, because before Anakin kills the Jedi even the Younglings he’s basically completely redeemable.) With JGY, you don’t get to have that. There’s no single turning point where you could say, “if he had picked the other option, he could have had a happy ending”. And part of the reason for that, which makes him a tragic character in my eyes, is that he crucially lacks options at many turning points.

In order to write a canon divergence AU for JGY where he comes out unscathed and redeemable, you’d have to go pretty far back in the story, and even then, you’d have to work hard to find a solution to his story that doesn’t a) rely on someone saving him (such as: LXC brings him to Cloud Recesses, or: JGS has a change of heart, frees his mother, and sends them a comfortable monthly pension), b) having him be dependent on someone else’s goodwill (such as: staying in the Unclean Realm in a delicate position).

If we don’t want to go back right to the very beginning or change fundamental parts of the story, well... As I’ve mused about above, if we let him stay in the Unclean Realm, he’d have never reached his goal of security either. If he never became a spy during the Sunshot Campaign, he wouldn’t have been accepted into the Jin clan and would have been out of options. If he never committed the atrocities for JGS, JGS would probably have kicked him out or killed him. (I do think there’s a lot of truth in what JGY tells NMJ in the empathy flashback, on that instance.) If he didn’t kill NMJ, there is a distinct possibility that NMJ would have killed him -- we see him try three times on screen, after all. (I’m leaving out the parts about him being directly responsible for JZX’s and JZX’s death in the show, as well as for controlling the corpses at Nighless City and JYL’s death, because it’s not in the book and I think it takes away from WWX’s character. As for QS’s and their son’s deaths...I personally do not see strong motivation for him to kill them, but in the end, we just don’t know which is, on a side note, a thing I really like about The Untamed/MDZS! Sometimes we just don’t know because the only people who know for sure can’t tell us anymore.) One option could be for him to confide to JZX, bring him over to his own side, and non-violently overthrow JGS, which would be a good and satisfying ending both to his and JZX’s character arcs -- but I also think there’s a high possibility JZX would hold JGY responsible for what he and JGS did, and never trust him with power again.

(Again, one thing I really do not wish to excuse away is how he killed JGS, and I just. Desperately wished he didn’t.)

I’ve been going over and over the possibilites for fix-its and canon divergence AUs, but in the end, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that the only real choice JGY has throughout the story is whether to remove himself from the narrative or stay in it. He could make the choice to give up his mother’s dream, reject his father, and leave cultivation world (and, on a meta level, the story!) to become a “nobody”. (Small side note, though -- living on which skills?) If he doesn’t -- well, as soon as he enters the game, the cards are stacked against him.

To pick up on the meta level comment, I do find it fascinating that in a sense, JGY not only has to struggle for respect and recognition within the story, but that what he does also serves to keep his character part of the story. He could choose to give up and leave (and thus come out of the story redeemable), but then he wouldn’t be part of the story anymore.

3) I like him because he interacts with the story in a unique way

Continuing with the last point, JGY interacts with the story in two unique ways that distinguish him basically from all the other characters. He’s not actually supposed to be part of the story, but that he basically claws his way in. But that also means that his class and social status cannot be removed from any of the conflicts he encounters in universe -- they’re at the heart of all of them. In the empathy flashback, he says to NMJ, “You always scold me for indecent scheming. You always say that you are just and straight [...] A decent man shouldn’t resort to devious stratagems. [...] You’re of noble birth and have profound cultivation. What about me? How can I be the same? First, I don’t have the foundation of cultivation. No one has ever taught me that since I was a child! Second, I don’t have any background. Do you think that my position is very solid in the Jin clan of Lanling?” What I find so intriguing about this scene is that he’s right when he says he’s different from the others both in text and on a meta level because most of the other characters are never faced with the same decisions and have a natural place within the story (apart, to some degree, WWX and XY, where also interesting parallels can be drawn). And the other characters are, in a way, self-righteous to judge him when almost none of them come out of the story without blood on their hands -- WWX’s revenge, JC torturing demonic cultivators after WWX’s death, and so on...The entire cultivation world (even NMJ! even LXC!) were complicit in the war crimes against the Wen. But when the cultivation world turns against JGY, they are the most appalled by the things I as a viewer would be the most lenient towards (murdering JGS), and don’t care at all about the thing that horrifies me the most (murdering the sex workers).

There’s an interesting post by @pumpkinpaix analysing how class dynamics work in the story, which I highly recommend! I don’t want to repeat what has been said there already in much better ways than I can, but among other things, it makes some really interesting points about how much JGY’s class is tied with his motivations.

4) I like him because when we see him on top of his game, it’s fun to watch

Aside from any analysis, part of the reason why I like him so much is that when he’s acting as a villain, he’s just so much fun to watch. When WWX breaks into his vault in paperman form and JGY has approximately 5 minutes to get rid of the head, the torture bench (?) and anything suspicious, contact and inform Su She, run to a different building and come back, and nonetheless he manages to convince everyone but WWX and LWJ that he’s the victim in this situation, it’s just. Peak entertainment? For a short time, he’s on top of the game, and then he’s backed into a corner and becomes sloppy, and finally loses it all due to sentimentality (if he didn’t want to take his mother’s body with him and say goodbye to LXC, I’m sure he could have fled the country). I think Zhu Zanjin did an amazing job as an actor to portray how JGY is constantly assessing everything, how 23638 emotions flicker over his face in half a second, how his whole body language shows the constant anxiety and pressure and stress and fear he’s under, and how we actually get to see in his microexpressions when JGY chooses a path and commits to the acting and emotional manipulation to follow it through.

5) I like him because LXC likes him

Here’s a secret: Actually, LXC is my favourite character. And LXC loves JGY a lot. So I’m kind of contractually obliged to at least love JGY a little bit as well?

On a more serious note, I’m very intrigued in their relationship because I do think what they had was genuine. I view it as two people being very open and honest and true with each other, while placing a lot of things outside the brackets and crossing them out. LXC even says that he was aware of some things JGY did (which ones? how? I need to know) but that he justified them to himself. I think they both realised that they could have had something very special, but under the given circumstances, LXC wouldn’t have been able to help JGY (see: point 2) even if he knew everything. Still, they were obviously very close and trusted each other as much as they could. I think in the end, when LXC seemed to have decided to stay and die with him, JGY pushed him away because he was the only genuinely good part of his life, and he felt like he couldn’t rightfully deprive the world of LXC. It’s all very tragic, and I’m very intrigued to explore what they could have been in a slightly softer world.

6) JGY is very small and has dimples

I can only speak for myself, but when I was watching, I was so prone at any point to believe in him no matter what was revealed. Look at him! Could this man do something wrong?

#buttercup-the-bard #ask #jin guangyao #the untamed #cql #meng yao #mdzs #my post #cql meta

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satoshi-mochida · 4 years

Link

Tobyfox has provided a status update on the second chapter and beyond of Undertale sequel Deltarune in celebration of Undertale‘s fifth anniversary today.

First, here are the latest screenshots from Deltarune‘s second chapter:

Get the full update below.

Introduction

Hi everyone.

If you’re reading this, you must have been sticking around for about five years.*

I want to express my gratitude for everyone that has supported and encouraged me over this time.

Thank you.

I’ve said it many many times before, but I didn’t expect the simple game I made to receive so much attention. Because of that, many interesting things have happened, and now I can even spend my time making another game.

It seems both of us received a lot of happiness from this occurrence.

If it’s okay, I would like to keep striving to do things that make both of us happy.

Let me know what you think about that.

*Since the Undertale demo released in 2013, the game has really existed for 7 years. It’s already been more than 25% of my life…

Deltarune

I will make another.

I am making a game called “Deltarune.” It is the second game in the Undertale series.

The game will be released in many “Chapters,” the first of which I released two years ago on Halloween. Since that time, I’ve been working hard to figure out the rest of the game.

However, it’s a game that’s much harder to make than Undertale.

Graphics are more complicated and several times more involved.

Systems are more complicated.

Exposes the weak points of my creative and artistic ability.

Plot is much harder to tie together (more characters, more important locations).

Significantly more content than Undertale in one playthrough (especially cutscenes).

I have only made one game ever.

Unlike Undertale, this is the type of game that would normally have many designers working on each aspect of the game.

A story writer, a composer, an audio director, a map designer, a battle designer, a minigame designer, and an overall director. Instead, all of those roles end up handled by me.

The good news is that a few months ago, I completed a significant milestone regarding the game’s design. I completed readable outlines for every chapter in the game, including first-pass dialogue for almost all the cutscenes, examples of the music, etc.

Although certain details are still hazy, the flow of the game and all major events and battles that take place are now clear.

In summary, I largely spent the past two years writing, composing, designing, and drawing. However, that’s not the whole story.

We had actually attempted to develop the game since the time too. Development started around March 2019 and a 99% work was spent on investigating engines alternate to GameMaker, which I used for Chapter 1.

Without getting into the details, I decided a few months ago to go back to GameMaker after all. It still felt like the best fit for the project. So using Chapter 1 as a base, we’ve started creating Chapter 2 since May 2020.

A lot of progress has been made since that time. I believe we can complete this chapter, content-wise, before the end of the year (not accounting for translation, bugtesting, and porting).

I feel very confident. And the strange thing is, even though we ended up using the original engine, I don’t regret the lost time, either. Not only was I still busy designing the game, but during that long period, I was able to think of many ideas that make the game’s story and characters better.

I’m glad that I’m making the Deltarune that I have now and that we are making healthy progress.

Deltarune Status Estimate

■ Chapter 2 (04.15.20 – 08.13.20)

Phase 1: Design

Main Design: 100% (dialogue, etc.)

Initial Setup: 100% (stuff involved setting up people to make the game, adding debug tools, documentation, etc.)

Phase 2: Implementation (05.01.20 ~ 08.13.20)

Art: 90%

Cutscenes: 80% (90% are started, needs 2nd pass)

Bullet Patterns: 70% (enemies are mostly completed, bosses are about 40% done, needs 2nd pass)

Non-Bullet Battle Elements: 30% (Some ACTs are done and enemies are fightable, but interactive ACTs need to be completed and polished and the bosses aren’t programmed outside of bullet patterns)

Audio: 80%

Maps: ??% most are started or placeholder, most need 2nd pass. NPC interactions are completed in all spots where written.

Other: 65%

Phase 3: Finishing

Balancing: 0%

Bugfixing: 0%

Translation: 0%

Porting: 0%

(Honestly, a lot of stuff FEELS like 80% to me, but the truth is that what’s there is quite rough now. Polish ends up taking a lot of time, so the real actual time value may be around 50% done…? We’ll see what happens. It’ll be a lesson for everybody.)

■ Chapters 3 and Beyond

Phase 1: Design

Story and General Game Progression (first-pass): 100%

Cutscene Dialogue (first-pass, lacking cutscene instructions): 95%

Map Design (textual): 70% (varies per chapter, earlier chapters totally completed)

Map Design (drawn): 0% (this takes a lot of wrist energy so I don’t do it until we start programming)

Enemy Design (conceptual): 90% (all bosses are known)

Enemy Design (bullets / visual): 80% (varies per chapter, earlier chapters totally completed)

Music (concept): 95%

Music (completed): 50%

Visual Design:BG Concept (first-pass): 75%, Important Character, Bosses (first-pass): 100%

Phase 2

Sprite Art: 20%?

Other Content Creation: 0%

Phase 3

Release Readiness: 0%

(These numbers can be somewhat deceptive though. My true design style is to reach the moment where we have to make something, then suddenly think of something different at the last minute. This is always how it’s been with me and my work. It feels like no matter how much I plan, everything comes down to what I think of at the last second…)

Team and Disability

You may have noticed from my phrasing, but yes, there is a team helping me create the game. Other than me, there are about three active team members working day-to-day, with a few other people pitching in from time to time.

Their roles of the main members are overall content implementation and organization, bullet pattern implementation (part-time), and art (Temmie). Other than designing, I still have the role of system programmer.

I’m extremely grateful to have a team helping me carry out my design especially because of my disabilities, which have also made development more difficult.

Although I have long suffered from wrist and hand pain, about five months ago my wrist was the worst it’s ever been. I could not play the piano, use the mouse, and barely could use the keyboard. I navigated everything through voice to text.

Through weightlifting, exercise, and various equipment I have been able to somewhat increase the stamina of my wrist to an extent. Various solutions have included trackball mice for each hand, using voice to text whenever possible, using a foot pedal to click the mouse, etc.

Now I can use the mouse and keyboard for a certain amount each day provided I take frequent breaks. I wish I could work without stopping. Once the world situation improves I would really like to take physical therapy again and/or investigate surgery to repair my wrist.

Future Plans

Once we finish Chapter 2, I would like to use it as the base to create future chapters from. After gaining experience from this chapter, I think making future chapters will be easier.

Part of me wonders if we could make the game faster if we increased the size of the team and did something insane like create multiple chapters in parallel. However, another part of me understands that, adding more people doesn’t guarantee that the game will be created faster if it’s not done properly. I’m already just barely avoiding becoming a bottleneck on development even with a team of this size, due to my physical limitations.

To that end, I am interested in making a list of people that could potentially help me make the game. I’m not 100% sure if I’m going to ask anyone to help, but I think if I could find just 1 person that works well with me, it’s worth asking.

Chapter 2 is proceeding at a good pace, so if we do take anyone on, it will probably only be for Chapter 3 onward. So please understand that anything you send in may not have an immediate result.

People I Am Looking For

Feel free to send in your portfolio if you have the following qualifications:

Worked in the game industry before

Worked under NDA before

Have professional references

A degree of creativity while also being okay with just following directions

Fluent in English

People I Might Actually Use

Music Transcription / Basic Arrangement (Part-Time)

I usually start making songs by playing the piano and singing. An important step after this is to take this basic outline and transcribe it into melodies and chords. Though there are not too many remaining songs to transcribe, it would still help my wrist to have someone else start this process for me. Although I know many musicians, I’m sheepish to ask for help to them, because the main role is actually just to help me compose my own music…

Helpful qualities:

Good at transcription.

Can stand listening to me sing.

Optional: can use an old version of Fruity Loops.

Bullet Pattern Programming (Part-Time)

I’m looking for someone to help me program bullet patterns into the game. These people will work from text and visual designs to create fun battles that match the feeling of the game. I already have one person helping with this, but I think a second person would help a lot. You have to be able to use Gamemaker Studio 2 to manipulate objects on the screen / okay with using pre-existing scripts to accomplish this.

Helpful qualities:

Sense of fun and understanding of player perspective and gameplay balance. This aspect is [many times] more important than programming ability.

Reliable.

Able to make patterns based off of visual/text instructions.

Fine working with a poorly made battle system.

Able to sprite bullets.

Good visual / timing sense.

Minigame Programming (Part-Time)

There are a few minigames and small interactive events in the game, which appear in and outside of battles. These could take any kind of form… who knows what I’m thinking! Have you made a game before?

Helpful qualities:

Same sense of humor as me.

Some level of spriting ability is useful.

You have to have made a game that is fun.

Ability to work together with me.

Unlikely to Hire, But Send Me Your Information Just In Case

Cutscene Programming (Part-Time)

Besides the battles, the largest amount of content in the game is definitely the cut scenes. You will have to understand Gamemaker Studio 2, but the majority of the work is simply using a scripting system that I created to make characters move around the screen. The most important quality you can have here is not programming ability but the ability to efficiently use the system in order to create scenes with a good sense of humor, timing, and emotion.

I’d strongly prefer to hire someone I know to do this because it involves the story. So I most likely won’t hire anyone else.

Helpful qualities:

Can take text instructions and impart a proper sense of timing, humor, and weight to them.

Fine working with a custom scripting system (or smart enough to make something better that makes the game easier to make).

Art (Part-Time)

Sprite art—Temmie has already drawn a massive amount of art for the game, and continues to do so. And I actually already have a few other artists that have helped me that I’m more than happy to keep working with if things become more overwhelming. So currently I actually don’t need any more artists.

However, personally, I’d really like to build up a portfolio of available pixel artists and even concept artists. It’s not as if this is the only game I will make during my life. Anyone chosen for this game needs to be able to match the style of the game, but I’m interested in seeing people with different styles as well. Knowing that I have different options can open my mind up to different creative pathways.

Helpful qualities:

Can take bad looking sketches and turn them into art that looks good (magic).

Don’t mind if your work gets completely drawn over or thrown out.

Anyone that can draw cute or cool poses is good.

Uninterested in seeing people that have an art style outside of the scope of the game.

Write (Full-Time)

Someone needs to transform into a new wrist for me.

Helpful qualities:

Flexible.

Doesn’t hurt.

Musical sense.

That’s everyone I’m looking for. The only other kind of person I might hire would be a single jack-of-all-trades type that can do any sort of things such as cutscenes, bullets, or even system programming, with a good degree of visual flair. (But if you can do those sorts of things, aren’t you busy making your own game already!?)

Anyway, I’ll show you the e-mail now. Just make sure you read these rules first:

Don’t send in e-mails about anything else!

Don’t send to other team members, Fangamer, etc. about helping out!

Got it? Then please send your information to this e-mail address:

[email protected]

Since Fangamer will be sorting through the e-mails for me, we’ll stop taking e-mails at the end of September so they don’t get overwhelmed. Ultimately, I’m only looking for one or two people, and to make a list of the rest of the potentially helpful people in the world.

Undertale is available now for PlayStation 4, Switch, PS Vita, and PC via Steam and GOG. Deltarune Chapter 1 is availble for PlayStation 4, Switch, and PC via Deltarune.com.

#Deltarune Chapter 2 #Deltarune #Undertale #Tobyfox #RPG #Gematsu #long post

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quillyfied · 5 years

Text

Mega Good Omens Fic Rec Post 1

OH BOY Y’ALL IT’S HERE

This is the first string of fics I would wholeheartedly recommend from my bookmarks (probably first of three, we’ll see). There are 65 fics sorted into 9 categories: Jaunts Through History/Canon; South Downs; Post-Apocalypse; Bus Ride/Night Before/Heaven and Hell; AU/UA (UA is Universe Alternate, where everything is the same, just...a bit to the left. I feel like that term has more nuance, idk); Soft; Touch-Starved/Body Worship/Wings; Bonus; H/C /Whump/BAMF. These will be the same categories for every fic rec post in this vein. I try to include warnings for sex and gore, if applicable, but please check the tags of each fic before you read, just in case.

Mega GOmens Fic Rec Post MASTER

PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF I BROKE A LINK OR MISATTRIBUTED SOMETHING.

I don’t read explicit works and I’m not a big fan of Human!AUs so there’s not any of those, but there’s a bit of just about everything else. Please enjoy! Hope the ReadMore works, sorry for folks on mobile if it doesn’t!

JAUNTS THROUGH HISTORY/CANON

1. Bright With His Splendour – Daegaer (T, specifically book-verse. This is an exquisite look at the developments in Crowley himself, especially as it relates to his war-related traumas in the War in Heaven and later WWI. The Arrangement is Aziraphale’s idea here, which is awesome. Highly emotional and visceral.)

2. Whatever Road We Choose – @ri-writing (T, the one where Aziraphale gets jumped by some demons and Crowley nurses him back to health, and Aziraphale has to confront his worldview when he realizes Heaven never responded to his call for help. Quiet and powerful as Aziraphale starts to realize Crowley isn’t everything he thought he was and maybe Heaven isn’t, either.)

3. Linked – @chekhov (T, the one where Crowley shows up in Bukhara and Aziraphale has to pretend to capture him so his angel intern doesn’t destroy Crowley entirely. Has a lot of fun moments and emotional growth in play. And yearning. Lots and lots of yearning.)

4. The Demon Favourite – @kanna-ophelia (T, the one where Crowley is posing as a nobleman and manages to build himself a little ramshackle family, and Aziraphale takes care of them when Crowley gets himself discorporated. Extremely tender, lots of Crowley cooing over babies.)

5. Akashic Records – @penig (Generally G, one T, the series where Crowley is head-over-heels from the start and broadcasts it loudly, and Aziraphale is in Panic Protective Mode. The series is gorgeous and vibrant, the characterizations are so spot-on and yet fresh, the dialogue is perfect, the character growth is delicious. I can’t gush enough about this one.)

6. But The Old Love Was Not So – BuggreAlleThis (G, the one written in the style of Le Morte d’Arthur about Aziraphale’s final few days in the court of King Arthur. Hilarious with the promise of emotional pain to come in the second half.)

7. flightless bird (dumb, wild, and free) – JennaCupcakes (@veganthranduil) (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale make out for half of history while Aziraphale has an ongoing existential crisis about being a broken angel. Poignant, sensual, culminates in a deliciously fraught confrontation where Aziraphale has to finally sort himself out and Crowley says some hard but true things. I once spent three hours trying to find this fic again without remembering the title so now it’s kinda ingrained.)

8. Nanny Knows Best – @patricianandclerk (M, rest of series is T, the one where Crowley endures some truly horrible experiences while serving as Warlock’s nanny. Adorable relationship between Warlock and Crowley, and it’s only getting better. The dynamic with Aziraphale is nuanced and beautiful. Rating for sexual harassment and groping, and it’s a bit of a difficult read at times during those moments, so be careful.)

9. The Holy Essence of Experience – Dragonsquill (T, the one where Aziraphale and Crowley have loved each other almost since the beginning, but have been very careful to not put a name to it. The yearning is real and so gorgeous. The scene just before they come up with their plan to avert Armageddon haunts me.)

10. The Arrangement – @writeonclara (T, the one where Aziraphale and Crowley try to get a handle on this sex thing. Non-explicit, hilarious, and unique! I can only assume the rating will probably be going up, which makes me sad because it’s hard to find nonexplicit fics that still deal with what sex brings to a relationship, but what’s written for now is well worth it.)

11. And After – @randomacts13 (T, the series where Crowley and Aziraphale work through their self-worth and have lots of flashbacks. The first one involves Crowley taking care of a seed that keeps dying and leaving another seed behind, which is not at all feeding into his self-hatred; the second has Crowley and Warlock gluing coins to the sidewalk; the third is about Aziraphale on a one-way flight to Complete Mental Breakdown if he doesn’t get some help for his anxiety and repressed emotions soon.)

12. The road to rapture has a lot of pit stops – emmagrant01 (E but only for the sixth chapter, the one where Aziraphale and Crowley have shared five kisses throughout history and one where they meant it. People like me who don’t like explicit material can skip Chapter 6 (or just read until they smooch) and go straight to the epilogue. The rest of it is amazing; every kiss is believable in context and has such good lead-up. Very romantic, very good.)

13. Round and Round the Garden – SanSanFanFan (G, the one where Brother Francis and Nanny Ashtoreth get up to some hanky-panky beneath a willow tree while Warlock sleeps in his pram. Just sweet and silly fluff.)

14. Flecks of Light and Dark – volunteerfd (T, the one where Aziraphale learns to deal with his emotions. Has a really beautiful recurring thing of Crowley and Aziraphale making up stories of who they’d be if they were human, and Aziraphale doing his best to do good and help even when Heaven ties his hands.)

15. Before the Water Rises – VitreousHumor (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale become friends while helping a village make rafts to escape the Flood. Has a lot of really cute moments and some pretty exquisite romantic tension.)

16. Beneath the Stars – @brooklynbabybucky (G, the one where Crowley asks Aziraphale to cut his hair. Just has some really lovely imagery and a sweet bonding moment.)

17. lit in the darkness – @toedenandbackagain (M, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale share a bed sometimes throughout history. Warnings for some sexual content in chapters 7 and 14, but each chapter has its own warnings in the description. Presents some beautiful bonding moments and the absolute finest pining known to man.)

SOUTH DOWNS

18. The Play’s the Thing – volunteerfd (G, the one where Aziraphale is cast in the local production of Hamlet and Crowley is trying his best to be supportive of his truly awful actor husband. Hilarious and light and absolutely a classic.)

19. Parsley, Thyme, Sage, Daffodils – @mostweakhamlets (NR, the one where Aziraphale has a cooking YouTube channel and Crowley is camera-shy. Tackles PTSD in a really thoughtful way and is Peak Soft Cottage Husbands aesthetic, it really packs in the most warm fuzzies in a small package.)

20. to carthage then i came – @lvslie (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale move to the South Downs and learn to work through their issues around being together and being their own people after cutting ties with Heaven and Hell. Poetic, poignant, the last chapter is a thing of absolute beauty. Very heavily symbolic, that one.)

21. A Better Place for Us to Be – @befuddledmackem (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale tour a particular cottage. Deeply emotional, the Absolute Best Real Estate Pr0n if you also secretly watch HGTV and weep, has completely ruined any future house-buying opportunity I might have because nothing will be this sweet and perfect.)

22. Something We Were Withholding Made Us Weak – trieduntrue (M, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale move to the South Downs and very carefully orbit into something more like a relationship. Exquisite tension, beautifully-done pining and slow-burn, really fun bits of world building. M is for a sex scene at the very end but it’s easy to skip over, it’s small.)

23. reasons wretched and divine – @stammiviktor (T, the one where Crowley storms out after a fight and finds himself in an actual conversation with God. Highly emotional and a great look into Crowley’s head, both in how he feels about God and how he feels about Aziraphale.)

24. The Sprawl of Life – @dietraumerei (T and G, the series where Crowley and Aziraphale settle into village life quite well. Has sex-positive asexual characters, which is fun (brief note about that: it’s not explicit, but the places it happens, there is clear leadup and it can get a bit intense, so take care of yourselves). Has touches of angst that balance beautifully with the fluff, lots of BAMF Aziraphale for the soul.)

25. Seashells and Fingerpainting – Vagabond (@waffleironbiddingwar) (T, and I recommend this one specifically from the series, can be read independently: the one where Gabriel is sent to the South Downs for a time out. This is quite possibly the best Gabriel character study I have ever seen; it’s tender and heartbreaking and somehow you find yourself rooting for Gabriel to figure out why he’s being punished despite yourself. All the warm fuzzies. All of them. Read the whole series, it’s great!)

POST-APOCALYPSE

26. Laugh When It Sinks In – @tenoko1 (G, the one where Crowley helps Aziraphale build a home in the bookshop flat. Another one that feeds right into my interior decorating itch. So sweet and uplifting, will absolutely make you feel proud of Aziraphale.)

27. Chosen and Unchosen – Bookwormgal (T, the one where the kids have to go save Aziraphale and Crowley from Heaven and Hell. Has some EXCELLENT Warlock characterization and some really good tension between him and Adam, and the angst is properly upsetting. A right good adventure romp that’s really starting to ramp up.)

28. Resonance – Macx (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale become something Else. Good world building, beautiful romance, and Gabriel getting told off. Love how Crowley and Aziraphale growing into their new roles is handled, and how Adam unexpectedly ties in at the end.)

29. Falling Heavenward – @kanna-ophelia (T, the one where Crowley unexpectedly has to win his angel back because of a really twisty deal with Heaven. This one is a pretty wild ride, but I would say the centerpiece is Fallen Gabriel, who becomes Asmodeus. It becomes a battle for Aziraphale’s heart, though Asmodeus isn’t in it for the feels so much as the revenge, obviously. Really interesting premise and something to read if rooting for Crowley is a way you like to spend your time.)

30. A Leisurely Stroll Down – Saturniidae (@Saturniiddae) (M, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale have to fight for their relationship. Has some sexual content that isn’t explicit, and gore that really sort of is. I have thrown things and cried a little at this one, but that was the price for reading while it was still updating. Absolutely gorgeous in every way. Also has God speaking through a household object and it’s hilarious.)

31. From God’s Perspective – Unfortunately (T, the one where God comes down personally to interfere in Her children’s business. The absolute best portrayal of God in any fic ever, really humanizes her in the best ways. I love how she interacts with her angel and demon children. It’s almost more of a character study of God than anything. And yes, the Sound of Music is sung.)

BUS RIDE/NIGHT BEFORE/HEAVEN AND HELL

32. Worth Knowing – summersage (T, the one where Aziraphale and Crowley discuss the Fall and manage Miltonian angel sex despite it. Has a take on how the Fall works that I was thinking about but couldn’t find words for until this fic, and it’s absolutely fantastic. The Miltonian angel sex is esoteric and weird and not at all erotic, but it is beautiful. The mortifying ordeal of being KNOWN indeed.)

33. Legendary Lovers; Your Hand in Mine – @tenoko1 (G, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale regroup in a hotel instead of his flat and have a bit of a knock-down-drag-out. Crowley is angry and scared and so in love he can’t stand it, and Aziraphale is practically going at light speed in confronting and knocking down his own barriers, and it’s highly emotionally charged and wonderful.)

AU/UA

34. Love of My Life – @ellewrites4 (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale get together very early and make it work all throughout history. Gorgeous romance, and the fallout from the Holy Water caper and the bandstand breakup are EXQUISITE. Peak emotional turmoil, sweet boundary negotiation, forgiveness and love and anxiety and fear—just delicious.)

35. True Love and High Adventure – @grifalinas (T, the one that’s a Princess Bride au. Absolutely on-point casting, wonderful writing style, the perfect escape fic for a little while. Incomplete but still worth the read.)

36. Inverse Omens – @amuseoffyre (T, the one where Aziraphale is a demon with a p0_rn shop and Crowley is an angel running a community center from a bombed-out church. Y’all recommended this to me on my demon!Aziraphale rating post, and it’s AMAZING. Perfect characterization and a wonderful retelling. Warning for Chapters 11 and 12, Aziraphale’s Nanny Ashtoreth messes with the Dowling parents in far more direct ways and there’s scenes of Mr. Dowling jerking it, so take care, friendos. Also Aziraphale makes the filthiest double entendres and it’s delightful. Also also Crowley needs all the hugs.)

37. A Blaze of Light – @wingedspirit (T, the one where Crowley is Raphael and he and Aziraphale make a Pact instead of an Arrangement. This one is a wild adventure, friends, and a riveting one. The Pact puts an interesting spin on their developing relationship, and by the time it gets to TV canon, it’s already off the rails in the best ways. Also Crowley has some pretty heavy depression that manifests in his former Archangel-level powers blowing up a bit, which is cool. Should be wrapping up soon and I’m pumped for it!)

38. it’s high time that you love me, cause you do it so well – mygalfriday (T, the one where Crowley can’t physically say the word “love” but can diddly dang well show it if he wants. Already super sweet but the confession scene at the end is just incredible.)

39. Hold the Line – sum_nemo (T, the one that’s a Pacific Rim AU. I adore PacRim, you guys, and this one is just *chef’s kiss*. Puts Crowley as Raleigh (lost his twin sister copilot) and Aziraphale as Mako and includes a pretty painful shared past between them, which is already simmering and delicious. Can’t wait to see where this one goes.)

40. The Truth Remains – @wanderingalicewrites (NR, the one where Crowley was Raphael, had a good relationship with his siblings, was in love with Aziraphale, and knew he was destined to Fall. Aziraphale is still in mourning for Raphael and Crowley is still working out the point of his existence, so there’s some very good pining and existential dread up in the mix. A highly interesting take on the situation and very, very good at punching you in the feels with the flashbacks to Heaven and how different things are now, especially with the other Archangels. LOL it just updated while I was writing this and I am UNDONE, I am in PAIN, the bandstand scene always hurts but NOT LIKE THIS. ALSO MORE ARCHANGEL FEELS, HOW DID THIS HAPPEN)

41. Everything Dark and Unseen – @enjambament (M, the one that’s a Psyche and Eros retelling. After the Fall but before Eden, Heaven and Hell need a truce, so they marry Crowley and Aziraphale to keep the peace in a symbolic sort of binding. A beautiful romance, an excellent action sequence, the cutest OC creatures, the best OC angels, and I wish there was a continuation of how canon progressed with this monumental change in their history bc I am THIRSTY for more. Rated M for a kinda-sorta sexy scene but there’s not really Efforts sooo…it’s more sensual than sexual? I guess? Either way, highly recommended.)

42. The Name of the Star is Wormwood – LusBeatha (T, the one where Crowley was Raphael and the Fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil was a fly agaric mushroom. It is exactly as eccentric as it sounds, but presented in such a way that it actually makes sense. It jumps around in time, but the storyline taking place in the present is looking like Armageddon 2.0. Beautifully written, great take on canon.)

43. Sticks and Stones – @justkeeptrekkin (T, the one where Crowley takes on the guise of Casanova while trying to get over Aziraphale and Aziraphale shows up, whoops. GORGEOUS imagery, the most scrumptious pining, and if y’all appreciated the 2005 Pride and Prejudice dance scene, the one in here will about blow that one out of the water, if you can believe it. Knocked the breath right out of me.)

44. Yearning to Hold You Close – @guanin (T, the one where Aziraphale has a relationship with King Richard and asks Crowley to help save him, and there is a big sticky mess of feelings when they realize Richard and Crowley look almost exactly alike. In part inspired by David Tennant playing Richard II. A delicious, delicious emotional quandary where Crowley and Richard both wonder if Aziraphale only loves them because they look like each other, and Aziraphale doesn’t know how to say what he feels. Very sweet, very emotionally fraught.)

SOFT

45. Just This Once – @julia-writes-fanfic (T, the one where Crowley and Aziraphale kiss in the 90s and it’s amazing. The drunk 90s kiss is already good, but them revisiting it sober in 2010 makes both even better.)

46. A Sky Full of Stars – @kedreeva (G, the one where Aziraphale takes Crowley someplace where they can see the cosmos. The first GOmens fic I ever bookmarked, so I felt like including it, because it’s unbelievably sweet and has amazing visuals.)

47. The Serpent and the Seagull – @ineffably-good (G and T, the series where Aziraphale misses Crowley so he gets a little pet snake. Frederick the snake is among the best of the GOmens OCs, hilarious and foul-mouthed and once Crowley starts being able to understand him, it only gets better. Frederick likes helping his pets work their problems out so they’ll leave him alone to sleep. It’s extremely cute.)

48. The Discerning Black Swan – @lwtis (T, the one where Crowley is definitely not projecting on a black swan desperately trying to court a white mute swan in St James’ Park. I love how Crowley interfaces with his emotional problems through the swan, and the visual of the two swans is gorgeous.)

49. What A Demon Dreams – @whatawriterwields (G, the one where Crowley has some weird dreams, dude. I love the symbolism and the imagery in this one, it’s really vivid. It’s hard to pull off a concept like this so I respect how the author is able to do it and make it work.)

TOUCH STARVED/WINGS/BODY WORSHIP

50. Sunlight – crorvid (M, the one where Aziraphale is a touch-starved angel. Doesn’t deserve the M rating, in my opinion, but Aziraphale does feel the touching during their makeouts very intensely and it’s incredibly satisfying.)

51. The Curious Attractiveness of Others – @giddygeek (T, the one where Crowley finally gets to groom Aziraphale’s wings and Aziraphale gets to show Crowley how tender that can be. Another one with some great world building tucked into the corners, and emotionally satisfying grooming.)

52. Broken Wings – werebear (@werebeary) (T and M, the series where wing grooming is incredibly intimate and I got the vapors from the tenderness. Also the first time I saw anything about preen glands. The second one is rated M because the preening gets a bit…intense. Not sexual, exactly, but it’s close. Very passionate.)

53. Birthmark – Linebreaker (G, the one where Crowley has a scar on his lower back and a sad story to go with it. This one needs a bit of a harder rating, imo, and there’s one line that’s a bit Much, but otherwise it’s a sad and beautiful look at a potential reason why Crowley hates the fourteenth century so much. Lots of Crowley body worship packed into few words, very satisfying.)

54. They Are A Pale Picture of You – @ineffablefool (T, the one where they go for a walk during winter and things are just Soft. Ineffablefool has a wealth of body-positive asexual GOmens fics, but I think I like this one best, it’s sweet and adorable and some jerk who insults Aziraphale’s weight rightly gets the worst day of his life. Also Crowley compares Aziraphale in his winter wear to a plump little bird and it’s cute imagery.)

BONUS

55. Ineffable Bureaucracy Drabbles – Shift7 (T, the series of short fics where Gabriel and Beelzebub are kinda-sorta falling into friendship and being very judicious about it. Lots of paperwork, very orderly.)

56. Ineffable Bureaucracy – @eshnoazot (T and G, a series of longer fics where Gabriel and Beelzebub are navigating a careful arrangement of their own. Still lots of paperwork, of course, but there’s also emotional friction and conflict resolution. Excellent characterizations. Wednesday night Thai and Friendship night is a+++++. Gabriel deffo called a board meeting to talk about his feelings.)

57. A Bentley Sang in Berkeley Square – CastielHamilton (G, the one where the Bentley is sentient and a good, good girl. She is doing her best and I love her. Basically the series from her point of view.)

58. Fairest and Fallen – VitreousHumor (T, the series where Beelzebub and Gabriel encounter each other a few times and Gabriel tries his best to remember their shared pre-Fall history. Poignant, sad, and beautiful.)

59. Observer Effect – SquarePudding (T, the series where the Grigori in charge of recording Aziraphale’s Earthly movements starts to ship him and Crowley and records their romance. The Grigori, Rezathaniel, is a precious baby who needs to develop a better palate outside of “greasy literal garbage” and has 0 chill when it comes to their ship. They’re kind of like a celebrity blogger at this point but watching their character growth in the first story is very sweet.)

60. Soul of Vellum, Heart of Chrome – @29-pieces (G, the one where the Bentley and the Bookshop are sentient and very protective of their owners. This one is going to KILL ME with the plot I wasn’t expecting—Heaven and Hell are hunting Aziraphale and Crowley down again, so the Bentley and the Bookshop do their best to help. They’re doing so good and I’m so proud of them, it’s not their fault things went a bit south. Precious beans. Good, good things.)

61. Real Fire and Brimstone Stuff – @jessikast (G, the one where college-age Warlock helps accidentally summon his Nanny and a lot of things start to make sense. A very sweet story about Warlock getting closure and getting back in touch with Crowley and Aziraphale through the weirdest means possible.)

H/C /WHUMP/BAMF

62. Broken Hallelujah – @atlantis-is-burning (T, the one where Hastur comes to kill Aziraphale and Crowley and it’s ugly, folks. It is kinda gory and it is injury-ridden and painful, very touch-and-go for a bit. It ends well, though, and Hastur gets his, which is the Best. Tore me up one side and down the other in all the best ways.)

63. Fall Here – @marbledwings (T, the one where Aziraphale and Crowley are easing into a relationship in fits and starts, and then Crowley gets snatched. This one was AGONIZING to wait for it to update, so be glad it’s complete, because it gets pretty dark for a while. Be warned of torture, though it’s mostly implied and it’s the aftermath that’s dealt with most. It absolutely sticks the landing at the end, and has a great characterization of Michael.)

64. how deep the sand – Handful_of_Silence (G, the series where Aziraphale is trapped in a glass bubble in a wizard’s basement for fifty years and the ensuing aftermath. Feels mostly book-verse, but there are some cues from the show. Intense and realistic and emotional and heavy, drags you through the darkness and you appreciate the light all the more for it. A beautiful story.)

65. you taught me how to love, (it’s me who taught you how to stop) – @clankclunk (G, or the one where Aziraphale comes to find out that you can’t just rush into a relationship after six thousand years of repression. This one is absolutely murdering me. The angst is real. The hurt is real. I’m hoping the fluff and comfort promised in the tags is coming soon because WOW. Has a fantastically haunting view of what happens to angels, who are highly emotive beings, when they fall into depression. And Crowley’s adverse reactions to praise and love are so realistic and painful. Ouch.)

#good omens #good omens fic recs #mega gomens fic rec list #guys i'm so tired but it's so worth it #i love all of these #can't wait to rec more later

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raspberryfanfics · 4 years

Text

nejiten fanfic binging guide

My recommended Nejiten fics. All stories are complete and are good enough to be reread again and again:)

Narutoverse

Exceptions by IncessantOblivion — The first Nejiten fic I have ever read, also one of the closest to my hearts. Though the author admits it, it does have themes of sexism and homophobia, but not strong. It portrays Tenten as extremely inexperienced and though I’m not a fan of authors who write her that way, I’m glad she is shown as independent otherwise. Despite the criticism and obvious flaws, the romantic scenes are written perfectly and I get a huge wave of feels every time I reread it. Besides the slight hints of sexism, this story is the most favourited Nejiten story on FFn for a reason: you’re so emotionally connected to it. My chest literally constricts every time I read it, it’s so good.

Land of Pretend + Reality by trilliumgt — The first story, (Land of Pretend), despite being without a super solid storyline, is just so heart-wrenching. I’m pretty sure I cried the first time I read this and the sequel but even if it didn’t trigger as much as an emotional reaction, it was surprisingly not boring. Though “Reality” wasn’t as “feel-triggering”, it was very well thought out.

About a Daddy and a Nanny by syaoran no hime — Perhaps one of my favourite Nejiten fics of all time. I was originally skeptical of this fic because of the title since Daddy and Nanny fics can be ridiculously degrading. They tend to be overly cliche where the female character is a useless Mary Sue. Yet when I gave it a shot, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was most definitely not cliche in the slightest. It may not be the best fic I’ve read in terms of romanticness, however, the humour is unbeatable. Before class, I had read this on my phone and couldn’t stop laughing because the author writes Tenten to have an alter-ego nanny, (very minor spoiler), and she is absolutely hilarious. The romance lies in the unspoken words and the reminiscence, not in the make-outs, but in a way, that just makes it what it is. It’s the type of fic that makes you wanna laugh and cry and smash your screen at the same time. The story is so so sooo good.

SharpBladed Spirit by FenixPhoenix — Dark and a little gruesome, therefore rated M. It isn’t so much a romance, rather an adventure story with a side serving of the two love interests. Nonetheless, it’s captivating, character development is phenomenal, and every character is strong and moves on the plot.

On Qipao Flirting and Buying Drinks by needdl — While this is only a two-shot, it is such a beautifully written story. The best part of it isn’t the romance, but the reactions to change and change itself. Characters change in subtle ways and the creative ways of expressing Neji’s reactions to Tenten becoming more and more feminine make me smile constantly. What I also love is that it has a slight feminist viewpoint to it in the fact that she embraces her femininity, which is the whole point of feminism (in which femininity is embraced just as much as masculinity and the belief that all are equal, which hopefully you are up to date to because it’s 2020 for kami’s sake). Anyways, the first part of the story is absolute pure fluff but if you read the second part, (especially on Ao3)...well that is some hot stuff let me tell ya.

In Front of Every Star by NessieGG — A short story with lots of fluff, angst, and feminism. (YAY!) It loaded with small snippets of moments, sadness, and really makes you think about your own values. Would you leave the love of your life to save your home country? What I love about this story is that the pain the characters feel may be selfish but they are completely realistic. It reflects off of our own lives, trying to let go of our feelings after letting go of the person. Every piece of it is flawless.

Ms X by Blade Rewind — This was the second-ever Nejiten fic I’ve read, and though short in the chapters, it certainly gives a lot of content. It’s light, airy, fun, and a little bit cliche, but in a strangely good way. The writer executes a classic plot with grace and humour and there isn't’ a point where you wanna die because of the unoriginality.

On Sex by Lotos-eater — I was skeptical about this at first because sometimes titles like these indicate really bad smut, which is almost as bad as an overused cliche. However, this was exactly the opposite. While there is certainly mature content, it isn’t in the way you’d think. Sex is portrayed as an obstacle in this story and approaching it is awkward in every way. Kissing is awkward, touching is awkward, in fact, this is a romantic story with no romance whatsoever. I don’t know how the author pulled it off, but it was simply amazing. It is hard to read not because it is bad, but because you can really empathize with the Neji and Tenten as they try to have sex with non-existent chemistry. Yet my favourite part of this story is the amount of complexity within each character and the way Gai is written in a much more different light. I never imagined Gai to have a dark side and this story executes it perfectly.

Alternate Universes

Complexities of Blackmail by Aquarius Galuxy — I read the summary for this one and was impressed at the word count so I quickly jumped aboard my first AG Nejiten fic train and just...wow. So like, I don’t know where to start. It’s a military space AU and what I love is that up to a certain point, everyone’s backstory until Naruto Shippuden era is almost exactly the same as the Narutoverse. Team Gai is a predeveloped relationship but had deteriorated. Blackmail is very explicit, lots of smut, but damn is it quality smut. It might not be your cup of tea, but if you don’t mind it, this story is amazing. Neji is slightly out of character, but you can understand why with his motivations, even though I personally wouldn’t write a story with the situation. Development is great, chemistry is over the top fantastic, and there’s a perfect amount of angst. It is a bit lengthy but so worth it. Every other character involved is so unique, I loved seeing Izumo and Kotetsu getting a bigger role, Ino was so in character; highly, highly recommend.

f 2-8, ISO 100 by Aquarius Galuxy — Of course, we have another AG fic and this one has sex scenes, but not as *cough* rough *cough* as Blackmail. The maturity mostly comes from the fact that Tenten is a photographer and art can sometimes be...graphic. Yet I have an appreciation for this fic since it states that art is art and the fact that AG came up with the photography is like aiming a shot, (since Tenten never misses). Neji is a politician and pianist, which is a suitable career that both covers his genius and soft side. Once again, great chemistry. This fic flows like a river, it’s so beautiful.

Cutting Water by Nessie GG — A historic AU in which Tenten the leader of a prestigious clan in China and Neji is an ambassador from Japan. Reads more as an adventure and friendship story resulting in romance in the last few chapters rather than just romance. The details are amazing and the style of the writing makes it so elegant, perfect for the time period. It’s the type of story that mysterious and sophisticated at the same time.

Perfidy by KNO — Similar to Cutting Water as it is a historical AU. Its backstory is vaguely similar to Mulan, however, in this case, the hot general doesn’t forgive her immediately. Tenten, who was saved from dressing as a guy to serve in the army, is sent to train another generation of female soldiers. It’s a great story, a great plot, though it does tend to run on uselessly at times. However, it is solid otherwise.

Breathe Again by Kicho-Keynote — A modern AU in which Neji is an army veteran. The story is slightly dark, as it deals with PTSD and triggering situations. Each character is complex and the development is simply amazing. Everyone has visible flaws, relationships are so well-developed, and it has brought me to tears several times. There are several mentions of ShinoTen, and even though it’s not my favourite couple, it plays a huge role in the story so just a warning. Thankfully, it doesn’t go into detail about their personal lives and it still is a Nejiten story, despite other love interests. It also runs on at parts but overall, it’s extremely well developed.

Authors

Aquarius Galuxy @aquariusgaluxy — The “Papabay” of Nejiten fics. Every story is beautiful, perfect, and intimate. Chemistry is always there. Everything is so beautiful and each has a different mood. Nothing is half-assed and it is just...I wish AG was still active I love those works so much.

KNO @zealousheart — If Aquarius Galuxy is the “Papabay” of Nejiten fics, then KNO is the “Ghost Bananas”. KNO’s work is creative, light, complex, and meaningful. The best part is, if you compare the earlier works to the more recent ones, you can really see the difference in skill level and how much KNO has improved.

Goldberry — Do you need one-shots? Goldberry has plenty. Though there are only a couple stories, there are one-shot collections, drabbles, and a whole bucketload of one-shots I haven’t even got to. It’s pure Nejiten Heaven

NessieGG — More one-shots but guess what? They’re all AU one-shots! Now, this is Nejiten AU heaven!

needdl — All of needdl’s works are filled with fluff. They are adorable, sweet, yet some of them are sincere and romantic.

Cyberwolf — There are so many short light drabbles from Cyberwolf, each an idea that seemingly came from random thoughts but ended up on FFN for all of us to read.

MOST OTHER AUTHORS MENTIONED IN THE SUGGESTED STORIES ALSO HAVE OTHER NEJITEN WORKS, JUST NOT AS PLENTIFUL OR MOSTLY NEJITEN AS THE ONES LISTED ABOVE. I SUGGEST YOU CHECK OUT THEIR PROFILES AS WELL!

#neji hyuga #nejiten fanfiction #fanfiction #tenten #team gai #Rock Lee #naruto #narutoverse #nejiten #neji #Maito Gai #might guy #raspberryfanfics

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edwad · 5 years

Note

Based on your response to the comment regarding the use of Althusserian concepts; would you say a revolutionary process necessarily involves conscious elements? And are there other concepts of the state that you prefer over the instrumental view of the state?

i guess my argument would be that, even outside of revolutionary scenarios, the traditional understanding of class tends emphasize consciousness in a peculiar (and moralistic way), which is to treat The Capitalists (bad guys) as extremely aware of what’s actually going on while The Workers (good guys) suffer from “false consciousness” (overstated in the secondary literature, compared to its relative non-existence in the primary sources. engels used the term like, Once). the problem then is about whipping up proletarian consciousness (often assumed to be somehow automatically revolutionary after that has been done) against the deliberate attempts by capital (understood here as a group of people) to obscure the realities of the system. althusser’s work is an elaboration on this view.

marx, however, had a completely different approach, which is to focus on the way that capital (now appropriately understood as an “automatic subject”, as a self-moving substance with its own logic) obscures itself. in the unfolding of capital’s categories, marx shows how the money-form covers the tracks of the law of value’s operation at a higher level of abstraction so that there appears to be a contradiction between the “theories” of value and money, when in reality the paradox is immanent to the system and not a matter of conflicting understandings (the common criticism that marx contradicts himself between value and money, value and price, etc stems from this confusion).

what this means is that the concepts are generative of multiple understandings of the concepts themselves, and that these appear contradictory so that these conceptions are often developed into one-sided theories of political economy. this is why marxs project takes the form of a genealogical critique of political economy, which requires interrogating the social forms in order to understand why they appear the way that they do, and why they, bearing the function of social mediation, determine our actions in such a way as to produce and reproduce everyday life, i.e. capitalism, thereby naturalizing it.

this involves an implicit theory of knowledge and necessarily has huge ramifications for how we can understand the development and limitation of class consciousness, because the object under investigation presents itself in a distorted manner. as marx says,

“Reflection on the forms of human life, hence also scientific analysis of those forms, takes a course directly opposite to their real development. Reflection begins post festum, and therefore with the results of the process of development ready to hand. The forms which stamp products as commodities and which are therefore the preliminary requirements for the circulation of commodities, already possess the fixed quality of natural forms of social life before man seeks to give an account, not of their historical character, for in his eyes they are immutable, but of their content and meaning. Consequently, it was solely the analysis of the prices of commodities which led to the determination of the magnitude of value, and solely the common expression of all commodities in money which led to the establishment of their character as values. It is however precisely this finished form of the world of commodities - the money form - which conceals the social character of private labour and the social relations between the individual workers, by making those relations appear as relations between material objects, instead of revealing them plainly. If I state that coats or boots stand in a relation to linen because the latter is the universal incarnation of abstract human labour, the absurdity of the statement is self-evident. Nevertheless, when the producers of coats and boots bring these commodities into a relation with linen, or with gold or silver (and this makes no difference here), as the universal equivalent, the relation between their own private labour and the collective labour of society appears to them in exactly this absurd form.

The categories of bourgeois economics consist precisely of forms of this kind. They are forms of thought which are socially valid, and therefore objective [my emphasis], for the relations of production belonging to this historically determined mode of social production, i.e. commodity production. The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour on the basis of commodity production, vanishes therefore as soon as we come to other forms of production.” [v1: p168-9, penguin ed.]

all of this is to say that the existence of a class unconsciousness does not require a class of evil puppeteers working behind the scenes to obscure the real functioning of the capitalist mode of production; the system generates its own obscuration independently of social actors and, as marx says, involves “a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers” [v1: p135], which also necessarily applies to the capitalists themselves. all of this is why fetishism is so important to marx, and runs throughout the 3 volumes of capital, explicitly reappearing at the end of v3 when marx tackles the trinity formula. it is only after this is explained that marx closes the chapter on “the revenue and its sources” [part 7 in engels’ edition, divided into smaller chapters] with what we now have as a fragment of the final “chapter” of the three volumes of capital: “classes”.

i dont think this ordering of the sections is an accident, as the elaboration on classes could only come after the clarification of the fetish-forms of the trinity formula, which necessarily complicates the notion of a class of omniscient agents directly overseeing and controlling society, and which also affirms the existence of “the three great classes of modern society based on the capitalist mode of production” [v3: p1025, penguin ed.], contrary to the earlier position developed at the beginning of the communist manifesto where he says that the bourgeois epoch has “simplified class antagonisms”, with the increasing reduction “into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat”, which is generally the starting point for most marxist perspectives on class struggle in capitalism.

an alternative theorization/critique of the capitalist state (and with it, the theory of knowledge as it relates to the development of consciousness) would deal with the historically specific nature of capitalist social relations, especially the distinct form of impersonal domination where political and economic rule are divorced from one another in a way that differentiates bourgeois society from others, such as feudalism, where the serf stood in relation to the landlord as the former’s direct political-economic ruler. under capitalism, however, your employer at a retail establishment does not hold direct political power over you, just as the state which you must otherwise obey does not directly control whether or not you may quit your job in retail and move to some other industry. this is the sense in which the onslaught of capital involves the dual constitution of the “free laborer” and “legal subject”, with the former involving the historical “freeing” of labor from the land (and the corresponding freedom to starve to death if one does not submit to wage-labor), while our equivalence as legal subjects in labor contracts is dealt with by marx in a single sentence: “Between equal rights, force decides.” [v1, p344]

obviously, if we were politically and economically ruled by capitalists in a direct way like that which characterizes feudalism, and which is suggested by the instrumentalist conception of the state, this separation would not need to exist (although the conspiracy theorist’s rendering of the theory would be that this separation is an intentionally illusory one meant to make us feel as if we are free, even though this is, as i already suggested, something generated by the system itself regardless of any class malevolence). any critique of the state worth paying attention to must be able to grapple with all of this, and i think the best starting point would be the work of legal scholars like pashukanis and the german state derivation debates beginning in the 1970s, as well as some more recent elaborations by those associated with the “open marxist” tradition (holloway, clarke, bonefeld, etc).

#communism

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simonxriley · 4 years

Note

2, 5, 6,?9, 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20 🖊

Thank you!

Fun meta asks for writers

5,6 and 14 are answered here!

2: Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

The outbreak section to Jade Helm, there’s a lot that’s going to happen and I can’t wait to see peoples reactions. Developing Liz and Ghost’s relationship moe in When The World Falls and the one-shot where Ghost takes his daughter to help adopt the newest furry family member while Liz stays home with little Tommy.

I also have a new one-shot planned, that was actually kind of mentioned by a mutual when his rework was announced. But Tachanka accidentally hurts Skylar with his new launcher, angst with a happy ending.

9: Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?

I’m a longfic writer and a pantser, but sometimes I wish I could be a plotter and could just write drabbles. I plot some things, like the big events that take place, other than that I just wing it. When it comes to me and my thought process on new ideas, they never manage to be just a drabble, always more.

10: How would you describe your writing process?

Uh bad. I tend to open the doc write a paragraph or so and then get distracted for like an hour and do it all again. It’s a vicious cycle.

12: Do you want your writing to be famous?

Not really. acknowledged, yes. Famous, no thank you.

16: Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)

I’m about to in like a few months, where Jade Helm will turn into a multi POV story for a few chapters. Other than that, not really.

18: Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

When The World Falls has like 2 AU’s. You have your canon version which is where Liz and Ghost end up together and eventually get married and live happily ever after. The first AU is that everything stays the same like it did in the games and Liz ends up with Price and they have a son together. The second one is like the first AU only Liz and Price never fully get together and Liz goes back to Dunn where her and Price co-parent their son together.

Jade Helm has one AU, but I think I might trash it because it was the same only it has Tachanka’s canon kids involved but they don’t exist to me so 🤷‍♀️. They updated his bio way to late for me to even care about his canon family. His and Skylar’s life has already been planned.

20: Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

*internal screaming* Jade Helm isn’t about the outbreak, yes it’s a major event but the whole concept of the story is about two people who can go through hell and back and come out on the other side stronger and more in love than before. I think people don’t fully get that, which is kind of annoying but whatever. I also have been hinting at a future guest that will appear in chapter 24 and it’s honestly not that hard to figure out, I’ve mentioned them quite a bit.

Liz finding a group that actually treats her with respect and like an equal. Joining the 141 was the best thing to happen to her, she doesn’t have to show her worth anymore. Plus she also gets the meet a man who understands what it’s like to be apart of an abusive family and for both of them to find love within each other and a happy life together.

I could talk about so much but, spoilers 😔

#chuckhansen

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houseki-no-suffering · 5 years

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so since your the almighty one everyone comes to to theorize things i'm here with somethin of curiosity. i've seen people before mention that if cinnabar went with phos or was least involved in all of this none of this whole disaster would've happen. your thoughts? and how right or wrong do ya think this assumption is? ljksfljksf just curious lol.

thanks for the trust, im just a nerd with a blog.

Talking if’s and but’s is fun for speculation’s sake but take whatever im about to say with a few grains of salt because these are just farfetched hypothesis. also sorry this came out super long, im very verbose when it comes to shinsha

I’ve touched on the subject of Shinsha going to the moon with Phos a few times (like here), but I think its important to determine when, exactly, Shinsha would come with Phos.

Are we speaking of a completely different timeline, one where Phos asked Shinsha to become their partner since the very beginning? If that’s the case, I cant really see Phos becoming interested in finding the truth about Sensei or the lunarians and the two would keep on being good friends until one of them was abducted or someone else decided to embark on a journey to unveil the truth.

Are we speaking of a timeline where Shinsha accepts to go to the moon in chapter 52? That’s a tricky one because Cinnabar had pretty strong reasons to refuse to go. Maybe im just very paranoid about characterization, even if this is not fanfic, but it would be very out of character of them to come with Phos and put aside their pride for the umpteenth time, after Phos used them and brushed them off over and over during the years.

I think that the reason why people say that if Cinnabar went with Phos this whole disaster (the rift btw moon and earth gems, the night raid and Phos becoming a war criminal) wouldn’t have happened is because Cinnabar has always been good at channeling Phos’ chaos.

What Cinnabar brought to Phos’ personality was direction, caution and insight. It is not by chance that, the second Phos could no longer rely on Shinsha for counsel, things rapidly escalated toward madness.

The last of Phos and Cinnabar’s conversations happens in chapter 61, way too late to mend things: Phos should have talked with cinnabar sooner, but under Lapis’ influence and crescent grief they were growing colder and more impatient and they never understood Cinnabar enough to know that Shinsha was truly interested in helping them. Phos hurt Cinnabar for the last time in chapter 52, proving Cinnabar once more that they were not the right person to help Cinnabar and that Shinsha’s trust had been misplaced. Their last conversation, in chapter 61, can be nothing else than a disaster.

I’ve written a whole meta on how Shinsha was about to shake Phos’ outstretched hand. If Phos didn’t take back their offer, Shinsha would have come with them to the moon.

To mend things and have Shinsha come with Phos, then, we’d have to change an important line of dialogue like the one where phos takes back their offer (“can we go together?… or so I’d like to say”) and/or when phos pretends not to hear shinsha when cinnabar asks them to please not go.

we gotta make it so that either shinsha swallows their pride and explains things to phos, or phos doesnt pretend they didnt hear them.

Now, I’ll give myself and other Shinsha stans out there a moment to contemplate the fact that we were robbed of Shinsha in lunarian clothes, as well as the fact that we were robbed of the amazing and heartfelt dialogue that would have followed phos hearing cinnabar’s plea and listening to them. This manga is so cruel, truly.

With Shinsha on Phos’ side, im gonna explore two possible scenarios among dozens that might have happened:

Canon divergence 1:

Shinsha and Phos go to the moon alone following that alternative dialogue in chapter 52. This means that the first time phos goes to the moon, cinnabar is with them.

for this plan to work, phos probably doesnt need cairn’s complicity. i imagined cinnabar and phos could be abducted in a scene reminiscing of chapter 2, when they first meet and cinnabar saves phos.

on the moon, phos is not alone to face the truth of the dusted gems, they’re not alone to listen to aechmea’s explanations and lies and they’re not alone bargaining with aechmea. cinnabar is shrewd and attentive, patient, smart, and they always advised phos well. add to this the fact that, since they agreed on coming to the moon together, these two dumbasses finally made a few steps toward proper communication.

as the power team ive always known they can be, shinsha and phos balance each other pretty well. i can see shinsha convincing phos to stay on the moon longer to learn more about the truth (phos only stayed 2 months the first time). Assuming that Shinsha doesn’t accept (pls don’t accept) to have someone suppress their poison (assuming its something the lunarians can do), their mercury is a pretty strong weapon and it could give them some bargaining power over the moon people.

also im not sure how the pearl eye thing would work: to control them effectively, aechmea would need to implant a spy on both shinsha and phos, but would he be afraid of their mercury? after all it’s something even lunarians have “a hard time” healing padpa from after the night raid. so let’s give divergence!Shinsha self-confidence points for finding out their mercury is cool and good.

now things start to become really different from canon. shinsha is considered reliable by the earth gems, so with two gems rather than only phos to advocate for the moon people’s cause, the earth gems might be more prone to believe them and phos might not need to pull off their rebellion thing.

which means no rift between moon and earth gems, which means no cairnmea arc, no night raid, no nearly-dead padpa and no to at least a dozen new emotional traumas for our phos.

i wish i could be more precise than this, but at this point the story could develop in so many directions that i’d leave it to your own imagination. my biggest point of concern is phos becoming human. if they dont acquire the pearl eye they wont be human enough to activate sensei and that would be a huge problem.

Canon divergence 2:

Shinsha follows Phos to the moon the second time Phos goes(chapter 62). this makes less sense character-wise, but I’m gonna explore this option anyway because it allows me to include other gems as well.

Cinnabar’s judgment is trusted, they’re smart. If Shinsha decided to come, other gems might follow their example, like Rutile. Rutile wanted to go and they’re friends with Cinnabar. They might gloss over their attempt to ask for Sensei’s permission if Shinsha guarantees for Phos’ plan. However, if Rutile comes, Padparadscha will stay on earth (as Rutile says in chapter 62). Even if Padpa came to the moon, they would be under Rutile’s influence and/or they’d have to take Rutile’s feelings into account. It’s possible that they would have less room to operate freely.

If Padpa and Rutile come, a lot of other gems could follow. To the point it would be hard to keep the escape a secret. The rift between moon and earth gems could run deeper than in Canon: worst case scenario there could be a fight between the two groups, best case scenario the two groups talk it out and some gems decide to trust Phos while others stay on earth. Cairn is a wild card whose behavior im not entirely sure about. Its possible that they would simply not follow Phos if Phos already had a partner with them (Shinsha) and we’d be spared the whole cairnmea arc and if that’s not something worth celebrating I don’t know what is.

Once again, if Shinsha is with Phos, they’ll push Phos to think before they act. They could help Phos strengthen their position as leader and use their mercury to give the gems some bargaining power over the moon people. I can see Shinsha acting a little like Amethyst 84: interested in the moon, maybe more wary, cold, objective…

The night raid would not necessarily be the failure it was. Shinsha would be on Phos’ side and spare Phos the emotional trauma they woke up to in chapter 72, when they realized that Cinnabar, the one person they thought a friend, attacked them. With Phos and Padpa’s strength, numbers and Shinsha’s mercury on their side, the moon gems would win. Earth and moon gems could finally talk and solve the problem.

The question is whether Phos was human enough during the night raid. If they asked Sensei to pray, would he activate already? Otherwise, everyone’s efforts would be in vain and the earth gems could assume the others lied or maybe aechmea could decide to turn everyone to dust and implement yet another plan.

soooo to sum this up: yeah, i do think that if cinnabar came with phos a lot of drama could have been avoided. maybe not all of it, maybe new drama would have ensued, but that’s life. still, it would have been very out of character both for phos and for cinnabar to go together to the moon. and ichikawa would never give up the cairnmea arc.

#houseki no kuni #land of the lustrous #hnk #cinnabar #phosphophyllite #pinktatertots99 #meta #kinda #at times like this im reminded that i am but cinnabar trash and i always will be #i miss the times when they used to be a relevant character #we would get full chapters about them #god #that sounds unreal #the things you take for granted #thanks for the question tho it was p fun to speculate about

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ladyherenya · 4 years

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Books read in July

With one or two exceptions, these were books were sources of FEELINGS.

Favourite cover: The Enigma Game, nut most of these covers are a good fit for the stories they represent.

Reread: “The Marriage of Mary Russell” by Laurie R. King, “Something Worth Doing” by Elizabeth and I also listened to quite a bit of Code Name Verity (by the same).

Also read: “Monster” by Naomi Kritzer.

Still reading: A Wizard’s Guide to Defensive Baking by T. Kingfisher.

Next up: Stars Above by Marissa Meyer.

(Longer reviews on LibraryThing and Dreamwidth.)

Descendant of the Crane by Joan He (narrated by Nancy Wu): Princess Hesina of Yan, believing her father to be murdered, opens an investigation into his death. She’s driven by her aching grief and by her fierce desire for truth and justice -- for all her people, as well as in this matter of her father’s death. But the truth is much harder than she expects. I thought this was incredible, but sometimes stressful! Compelling characters, complex family dynamics (I especially liked the sibling relationships), intricate prose and worldbuilding, and startling twists that turned out to slot neatly in with the other puzzle pieces.

Riviera Gold by Laurie R. King: This takes place in July 1925, immediately after Island of the Mad. Mary Russell leaves Venice for Monaco, hoping to see her former housekeeper -- and discovers that Mrs Hudson has been accused of murder. As always, I love Russell's first person narration and her observations of the world around her. The historical scenery is particularly vivid: cliffs and ocean views, the Monte Carlo casino, expats with questionable pasts and connections, smugglers, Jazz Age artists, bronze casting. Moreover, it’s all relevant to the mystery Russell is unravelling. I also liked the indications that Russell and Holmes’ unconventional marriage works for them.

Fireweed by Jill Paton Walsh: A short bittersweet novel from 1969 about two runaway evacuees living on the streets of London during the Blitz. It’s very vivid, particularly the details about wartime London -- but there’s also a thread of ambiguity, because the narrator is looking back on a time he doesn’t fully remember and didn’t always understand. In the end, that becomes a bit unsatisfying, yet I like how the story allows one to fill in some of the gaps for oneself. I wish I had discovered this at thirteen -- I’d have appreciated it even more and been fascinated by the experience of fending for oneself.

Aurora Burning by Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff: After everything that happened in Aurora Rising, Squad 312 have been labelled traitors but they are not going to let that stop them from saving the world. This is fast-paced, with some excellent twists and frustrating developments. Sometimes the action was engaging; other times my eyes glazed over. Sometimes the multiple POV was a strength; other times I felt it hindered me from becoming really attached to anyone. Sometimes I was amused by the characters, and other times the qualities which make them amusing became irritating. I think the things I liked outweighed the things I didn’t care for?

The A.I. Who Loved Me by Alyssa Cole: Trinity is working from home after a traumatic accident when she meets her neighbour’s strange nephew, Li Wei. This science-fiction romance has mystery, humour and moments of very pointed commentary. I enjoyed Li Wei working out how to act like a human again, and the interactions with Penny, the Home AI assistant. There is more going on here than either Trinity or Li Wei initially realises, which is great --- but that reveal indicates that some important, interesting parts of this story have been glossed over. I might have liked this more if the flashbacks had been expanded.

“Monster” by Naomi Kritzer (from Clarkesworld Magazine, issue 160): This alternates between Cecily’s time in China, looking for an old school friend, and the history of that particular friendship. I don’t regret reading (well, listening to) this, but I don’t know if I liked it. It is tense and uneasy, and left me wishing I had someone with whom I could discuss interpretations of the ending’s implications.

Gravity is the Thing by Jaclyn Moriarty (narrated by Aimee Horne): This grew on me. In the end, I loved it. For twenty years, Abigail’s been sent chapters of a mysterious self-help book. The story alternates between the present, as Abigail learns more about The Guidebook, and her reflections about her past -- particularly her brother, her marriage, being a single mother. At times this story is uncomfortable but the way everything is drawn together -- and seeing Abigail make sense of her life -- was unexpectedly satisfying. Compelling. I also liked the Australian setting, the Aussie audiobook narrator, some of the whimsical parts and how Maybe The Real Treasure Was the Friends We Made Along the Way.

The Enigma Game by Elizabeth Wein: Like The Pearl Thief, this is a prequel/companion novel to Code Name Verity. In late 1940, nineteen year old Jamie is an RAF pilot in northern Scotland. His friend Ellen, a driver for the aerodrome, is staying at the same pub as Louisa (newly-orphaned, half-Jamaican), who is caring for an elderly German woman. Together they discover a way to keep Jamie’s squadron ahead of the Germans. I loved this. A powerful exploration of identity, secrets and the problems of prejudice. I was delighted (and also devastated) by how this story fits in with Code Name Verity. The bits about flying are lovely.

Hamster Princess: Giant Trouble by Ursula Vernon (aka T. Kingfisher): After Ratpunzel, Harriet’s next adventure involves magic beans, a giant bunny and a hamster who wants to form a band. There is something very soothing about making tea. You have to concentrate on the whole process, and then you have tea. Even someone as decisive as Harriet had to make tea sometimes and think things through.

Kind of Cursed by Stephanie Fournet: Millie has been dealing with a lot -- losing her parents, gaining guardianship of her younger siblings, a miscarriage and a relationship break-up. She’s decided to avoid men for the next decade. But it’s hard to avoid Luc, who is overseeing the renovation of Millie’s kitchen. Watching Millie find the support, comfort and happiness she so desperately needs gave me warm fuzzy feelings. This has the right I-need-a-hug-vibe, the right ratio of emotional hurt/comfort, for me. In another story, I might have had issues with how quickly the romance becomes a serious relationship, but the characters’ choices made sense in context.

Fall Semester by Stephanie Fournet: This romance between a depressed literature professor and a graduate student with a terminally-ill father was an interesting experience because I was aware of its weaknesses and yet it was such a compelling dose of FEELINGS that I really enjoyed reading it. I also have something of a soft spot for stories about universities -- and perhaps was feeling tolerant, knowing it was the author’s first novel. (Weaknesses included: the prose style is serviceable but bland, an odd fit for protagonists with backgrounds in literature/poetry; their serious issues deserved more focus; and some of Malcolm’s reactions have uncomfortable overtones of entitlement.)

You First by Stephanie Fournet: More compelling feelings, which kept me reading, but in hindsight, didn’t completely sell me on the age-gap or the short time-frame. If only it hadn’t largely skipped over showing the characters navigating an interesting challenge introduced in the final act in favour of an epilogue which picks up some time later! Seriously, if you’re going to throw in that particular complication, then I at least want to watch them deal with it. I’m not grumbling too much. I cared enough about seeing the characters’ situations improve, which counts for something. And what did I expect, reading three romance novels in a row?

Like No Other by Una LaMarche: Two teenagers meet in a New York hospital elevator during a blackout. Devorah is a Hasidic Jew, Jaxon is black. Devorah is not allowed to socialise with boys outside of her family, let alone anyone outside her community, but she and Jaxon keep finding ways to see each other. This was fascinating, but also frustrating -- I was frustrated with Devorah’s culture for making her feel like she would be disowned if she put a foot wrong, and also frustrated, perhaps unfairly, with Jaxon for not fully appreciating the risks Devorah faces. However I liked the ending a lot.

#Herenya reviews books #Joan He #Laurie R. King #Jill Paton Walsh #Amie Kaufman #Jaclyn Moriarty #Elizabeth Wein #Ursula Vernon #Stephanie Fournet #Una LaMarche

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https-bkg · 4 years

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Bakudeku fics to read during quarantine

I would appreciate if you reblogged/liked this if you used it! Please 🥺

Uncompleted:

The Way You Used To Do by edema_ruh

"We're really sorry," his father says, in a teary-eyed, wobbly way. "But your friend, Izuku, he's... He's gone, son."

Katsuki can do nothing but blink up at them for moments that feel like an eternity, eyes darting between both his parents in obvious confusion, disbelief, and, more than anything, indignation.

"What the fuck are you two talking about? The damn nerd is standing right beside you!

During a battle, Midoriya gets hit by a villain whose quirk detaches his soul from his body. Stuck in a ghost-like state, the boy enters a race against time in order to save himself from permanently dying. Much to his luck - or lack of it -, the only person who can see and talk to him in this state is no one other than Kacchan.

Alternatively: Deku and Kacchan are soulbound.

This fic is my all time favorite bakudeku fic. updates are not too far in between, characterization is PERFECT, bakugou's development, and the LENGTH of this fic is genuinely supreme. I will 100000000% say with my whole heart that this fic is perfect.

Bad At Love by officiallytrash

(abandoned)

Class 1-A is put to the test in one of U.A.'s classes and tests where they face a faux-villain they can't seem to win against. During the two-day fighting, Bakugou noticeably becomes more and more shaken by the faux-villain.

Midoriya wants to help him and to become his good friend once again. Bakugou knows there is more than friendship in his own head but wants to keep Midoriya close, if only to keep him safe. But with jealousy, friendships, and their dreams on the line, they have to get even closer to help the other.

been awhile since I read this since it hasn't updated BUT this fic is amazing with it's characterization. It's realistic and a breath of fresh air.

The Art of Indifference by qye

Bakugou is used to being the center of attention- be it anger, confussion, or fear (mostly fear) everyone always gives him a reaction.

Until all the sudden, Deku doesn't.

What a fucking asshole.

FUNNY!! ANGSTY!! AMAZING. CUTE. IM IN LOVE, AND YOU WILL BE TOO.

The Space Between by Kanae_vR

Holding his expensive camera tightly between his hands, Midoriya Izuku looked up at the once-white letters displayed on the black storefront banner. “The Hard Luck Bar,” he murmured to himself, unsure if he was getting ready to enter or flee.

Amateur photographer Midoriya Izuku is stuck in a rut and desperate for a change of pace. Deep in his city's grimy underbelly, he finds exactly what he's looking for in the form of an underground punk sensation on the verge of their big break, fronted by a foul-mouthed firework of a human being.

Loud, brash and passionate, Izuku may have just found the creative spark he needed, as well as something new to set his soul ablaze.

Craving a rocker!Bakugou fic? Badabing, badaboom. This right here is perfect. In character and beautiful.

the baking prodigy in all-might pajamas by lucyheartfilia

College AU in where angry art major Bakugou Katsuki kind of, sort of falls in love with a cute, green-haired nerd that likes to bake in his all-might pjs at questionable hours of the night.

cutecutecutecutecutecuteCUTE.

Once Again From Better Days by limesicle

Katsuki wakes to find himself reset. It's a time when quirks are just starting, and he only remembers a bit about happened the first time. He remembers enough to know Deku is someone he hurt a lot. He remembers enough to know he had to watch Deku fall. He remembers enough to try to make things better this time.

Achingly beautiful,,, ANGSTY,, in character. Amazing.

Completed

Sink to Swim by cinnabee

“Kacchan, I think we’re supposed to--”

“Supposed to?” Katsuki whirled. “Supposed to? Will you fucking.. Listen to yourself? Shitty Deku, we just woke up in a dungeon and you want to play some villain’s game? Like it’s a goddamn puzzle we can just solve?”

As if there's any other choice.

WARNING: dark. very dark. ANGSTY. shit made me sweat. even tho it's dark the beauty of it cannot be missed

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You by Seeress

Stress-release sex was another one of their things. Friends with benefits, it was called. No strings attached. Just a bit (or a lot) of fun under the sheets.

By the time Katsuki noticed, it's been almost 3 months since he last heard from Izuku.

Three years into their friends-with-benefits arrangement, Izuku begins to behave oddly. And Katsuki has difficulty dealing with it.

:/ too sad. heartbreaking. so beautiful.

Kacchan by KyuukaKoinu

Izuku always called Bakugou "Kacchan" growing up. But when peer pressure from others and society get in the way, the two boys grow distant and the nickname is buried. While Katsuki is running away from his emotions, Izuku is stuck trying to figure out how to cope with a broken heart. Kai Chisaki steps in to show the boy a new path. Will Katsuki figure out his own feelings in enough time to save him from the mysterious man?

[Izuku-centric / BakuDeku EndGame / Alt Overdeku ending is the very last chapter!]

Aight listen,, I ain't one for fics with a lot of smut.. but this plot was well-written and very interesting. It grabbed me and didn't let go.

Threads of Fate by hallyu1

It started with a dream—a dream about a prince. Izuku, future Chief of a remote tribe, is a dream-seer. And as he grows he will come to realize that his power is both a gift and a curse. When he meets the prince in his visions—The Dragon King, Bakugou—he must decide which path to follow. Change the future, or embrace the fate he had foreseen?

Will always hold this fic close to my heart. It's gorgeous.

2,645 Miles by mynameis152

Izuku wants so badly to get to the other side of the country without his parents realizing he's missing. He just wants to find out who he is.

Katsuki is desperate to make it to Los Angeles without being caught by the police, desperate to fix his mistakes.

Neither know what to expect, but on a roadtrip across the U.S. involving four fugitives, two oblivious runaways, a high risk crime ring, and a police taskforce, the two will discover that there's more in store for them than what they originally thought.

Who knew country bakugou and country kirishima were so powerful??? I did. I knew this bc of this fic. This fic is genuinely awesome. Definition of awesome.

Dream Sweet in Sea Major by showtiime

The day of the Hero Incident ends much more horribly than anyone could've imagined, but only Izuku knows that. He thinks as long as he forces himself to push through it that he can get over it, but of course, that's not how things go. His mom, friends, teachers, and even his childhood friend-turned-rival take note of his odd behavior and try to help, but he refuses to talk about what really happened. How long and how thin will Bakugou's patience go until Izuku finally confides and accepts the help he needs?

(in this fic, Shigaraki takes more from Izuku than he should've, Katsuki comes with the class that day at the mall, and there are still finals to be taken. Plenty can happen in only five to six weeks.)

Look at the WARNINGS! The way this story is written... I've never been in his situation but I felt it. Absolutely beautiful

Spider’s Web by infectedscrew

When a series of seemingly random attacks all over Musutafu leave civilians and heroes alike Quirkless, Inspector Midoriya is put on the case. Little does he know, he’ll be teaming up with the only person who has come out of an attack unscathed and Quirk intact—Katsuki Bakugo.

One of the first bkdk fics I've ever read and I haven't seen many people rec this so—here you go. It's SOOO good. It's like a movie and it's so well written. Absolute genius.

Leftovers by brichibi

When the rest of the class heads down the reality of the situation sets in — they’re both missing class at the best hero academy in the country, their classmates flat out calling their scuffle stupid.

Izuku still doesn’t feel like it was, though, especially when Uraraka asks the million dollar question:

“Did you two make up?”

That. That’s why that fight felt like it was worth it, even if, technically, Izuku can’t answer her. Have they made up? Is this making up?

He actually doesn’t know.

[Or: the house arrest fic where it is, somehow, more awkward to talk through feelings than it is to fight]

AMAZING AND SOSOSO CUTE. So glad I found this fic after thinking of it for so long. It's the perfectest oneshot ever.

#bakudeku #katsudeku #bakudeku fic #katsudeku fic #fic rec #bakudeku fic rec #katsudeku fic rec #bnha fic rec #ao3 #ao3 fanfic #mha #mha fic rec #my hero academia fanfic #quarantine #stay safe out there #bnha

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murasaki-murasame · 5 years

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Thoughts on Sarazanmai Episode 5: “I Want To Connect, But I Can’t Be Forgiven”

I’m just gonna go and open a window and casually scream into the abyss because this show is already destroying me and we’re only :) five episodes in :)))

We’re already rapidly approaching the part where the established episodic patterns start getting broken, and oh boy I can only imagine how the rest of the show will go from here.

Anyway, thoughts under the cut.

Oh boy where to even begin with this one. There’s already so much happening and we’re not even halfway into the story, lol. Part of me’s still slightly worried that we haven’t really gotten into anything related to Sara, Reo and Mabu, or the apparent otter-kappa conflict going on in the background, but this episode does make it more clear that those parts will get more important soon enough. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if the next episode mostly wraps things up with Kazuki, and the second half of the anime is focused more on Reo and Mabu.

But anyway, on the topic of Kazuki, there’s a whole lot to say about him after this. I ended up being mostly right in my guess that he was adopted and that Haruka’s disability was caused by an accident that Kazuki feels responsible for, but it was still interesting to see how it all played out. I think one of the things that surprised me most is how, in spite of everything we learned, it still feels like there’s a lot going on with the topic of Kazuki’s birth mother that we don’t really understand yet, and there’s the whole lingering question of why Haruka apparently had her scent pouch. So I think there’s some further reveals to be had there. I was kinda confused about how casual Kazuki’s birth mother seemed to be about reuniting with him, since that’s not really how you’d expect it to go, especially since it also didn’t seem like she was looking to bring him back into her family. It made it come across like she was kinda oblivious to how much turmoil the adoption situation had put Kazuki in, but I want to wait until we learn more before I try and judge her.

I reread the last few chapters of the ReoMabu prequel manga recently, and it’s gotten me wondering if there’s a deeper connection between Kazuki and Sara than what we’ve seen thus far. At the very least, it feels like too much of a core, recurring part of the story for it to not have some deeper meaning to it, though most of all I just think it’d be a bit lame if there’s nothing more going on there.

Specifically, I was wondering if maybe the ending of the ReoMabu manga was about Sara transforming into her teenage self and leaving her dads, but deciding to leave a clone or a sibling of herself behind for them to raise in her absence, and I was wondering if maybe that hypothetical other baby could somehow be Kazuki himself. I don’t really feel confident in that theory after this episode, at least not after how we outright saw Kazuki’s birth mother, but I still feel like there’s something going on with how the ReoMabu manga ends on the confusing note of Sara leaving but them seemingly still having baby!Sara with them, and there’s also the fact that Sara’s connection to those two has yet to come up in the anime, but it doesn’t look like they’re still raising her.

The whole reason why Kazuki has even been doing this whole cross-dressing ruse in the first place still feels kinda mysterious and confusing after this episode, but I think the simplest explanation just based on what happens in this episode is that Kazuki has a lot of self-loathing about his “fake” connection to Haruka, and the whole situation with Haruka’s accident, so he probably doesn’t feel able to connect with Haruka ‘as himself’, and so he latched onto whatever alternate persona he could find instead. I still feel like it’s deeper than that, but I dunno.

One thing that stuck out to me in the flashbacks was the part where Kazuki and Haruka talked about how Kazuki has been ‘dressing differently’, and how Kazuki ‘doesn’t want to look like his family’. Which makes me think that Kazuki developed a habit of cross-dressing sometime after learning about his family situation, before the whole Sara thing began. And if that’s the case, then I think there’s probably more to the idea of Kazuki cross-dressing than just Sara being a convenient persona for him to adopt to connect with Haruka indirectly. But it’s kinda hard to piece together the logic of it if Haruka did get into regular cross-dressing if it was to ‘not look like his family’. I mean, unless we assume that he actually is trans. If it wasn’t for the whole Sara thing I’d assume that it was just about him, like, getting piercings and stuff to try and assert his individuality, but I don’t think it’s that.

I’m curious to see more of Haruka’s side of things, since I think there’s more going on with him than what we’ve seen, going by stuff like the mystery of why he has Kazuki’s mother’s scent pouch. I think that he must know something about Kazuki and his birth mother, since the entire reason for his accident seemed to be that he was afraid that Kazuki was going to abandon him. Which makes me think that Haruka knew that Kazuki was meeting with his birth mother, and he assumed that it meant Kazuki wanted to go back to his real family and leave him behind. So I wonder how Haruka might have known about that, since Kazuki apparently kept his meeting with his mother a secret.

I also get the feeling that, even though on some level he’s probably hurt for obvious reasons now that Kazuki’s whole secret has been revealed, he probably cares more about being able to connect with Kazuki. I think that if they were able to talk things out, Haruka would just be happy about being able to properly connect with his brother, without the whole Sara thing.

And on the topic of Sara, we got to see her in the flesh in this episode, and it certainly looks like she’s some kind of a kappa that has a human form it transforms into. Which I think was fairly obvious by this point, but it was nice to see it laid out explicitly. It’s also worth noting that it also means that she is indeed a real person who is separate to Kazuki. After the narrative misdirection in episode 1, I was wondering if maybe there’d be some larger twist about Kazuki literally being Sara, somehow, but they seem to be pretty distinctly separate people.

Since we’re nearing the halfway point, this seems to be where the patterns are breaking and things are coming to a head, which is happening on a few different fronts. For one thing, Kazuki’s big secret has finally been laid bare for everyone to see, so we’re gonna have to see how that whole mess pans out now. This is also the first time that they’ve failed to defeat a kappa zombie, so now they’re gonna be stuck in their kappa forms until they actually beat this one. Which might be difficult, since Kazuki seems willing to just live as a kappa forever now. Last week, Reo and Mabu said that they’d try and raise the desire power of their next victim, but I get the feeling that the main trio ‘losing’ wasn’t because the kappa zombie was tougher than usual, but more because Kazuki was so viscerally unwilling to acknowledge whatever truth was being made apparent by his secret leak that the entire process forcibly stopped. Which seems to be about the mystery of why Haruka had Kazuki’s mother’s scent pouch. It looks like Kazuki probably has an idea of what it means, but it’s somehow so extreme and shocking that he refuses to look at it.

Considering how it looks like Kazuki is going to have to come face to face with his current situation in order for them to beat the kappa zombie and return to normal, I think a lot of this will probably get answered and resolved in the next episode, so I’m really curious to see how it turns out. And after that, it looks like Reo and Mabu are gonna be more important in the second half.

And on the note of those two, we got another post-credit stinger scene that was about them this time. I think I’ve basically already been spoiled on this from stuff I’ve seen on twitter that I guess was from people who’ve read the first light novel volume, so it wasn’t exactly a surprise to me, but it was still a good scene. My understanding of the situation is that Mabu is maybe possibly dead, but his body is being kept alive by some outside force, and thus he has a mechanical heart, and he apparently needs to be ‘maintained’ regularly. It also looks like his situation has also lead to him becoming emotionally dead, which you can really see when you read the prequel manga about them, in which Mabu was a huge dork who was very emotionally expressive. Which really makes their whole current situation even more tragic.

I was reading a translation of a recent magazine interview where Ikuhara said that these two have a ‘completed relationship’ that has begun to fracture, which gets to the heart of why I think they’re such a surprisingly interesting duo. It just seems very rare for Ikuhara to write about characters that have regular, healthy, adult relationships like this, especially not ones between gay men. So it’s interesting to see him writing about how a pre-existing relationship can be warped by time and circumstances.

We’ll see how it goes, but it looks like Mabu’s ‘maintenance’ might involve him pretty much going out and sleeping with random people, which on the one hand seems kinda odd, but on the other hand we’ve already heard about the idea of ‘desire energy’, so maybe casual sex is literally the fuel source for Mabu’s mechanical heart. And if that’s the case, there’s a whooooole lot of interesting subtext going on there, especially when you think about the ‘desire/love’ conflict that’s been set up. I’ve also been wondering if this series would end up exploring monogamy vs polygamy via the conflict between them and the main trio, and so it’d make sense if their own relationship is currently in conflict because of the struggle between casual sex and faithful monogamy. I get the feeling that Reo wants to have him and Mabu stay strictly faithful to each other, but he also might not want to force himself to regularly have sex with him just as a fuel source for Mabu’s heart, since that would be all kinda of messed up, and it’d probably make Reo feel insecure about the validity of their relationship. And so Mabu has to find other people to have sex with, and because he seems emotionally dead now, he doesn’t understand Reo’s concerns. Reo’s mocking line about how Mabu ‘is just seeking pleasure’ also seems to play into the whole desire/love conflict.

I’m really curious to see where things go with these two. I have a feeling that Reo might end up allied with the main characters, given that it seems like he’s only working for the otter empire because he needs to.

I still wonder if they’ll show off their backstory in the anime, especially with them having raised Sara, but we’ll see how it goes.

#murasaki rambles #sarazanmai #this got pretty long but there's a lot to say about this episode lol

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hobimo · 5 years

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Hello!! If you’re seeing this then it means you’ve read the final chapter of It Happened Quiet!! Thank you very much for making it all the way through :’’))

I figured, since this sort of my first time writing this much of a thriller/mystery kind of thing that there would be loose ends I didn’t manage to quite tie up, or details that probably deserve more explanation than I gave them, so I’m just going to write a big long masterpost about the fic, basically. I considered writing this like a big fancy essay but I haven’t written anything formal since high school, so you’ll have to excuse the informality :’’))

CHARACTERS

1. Yoongi

In the fic, Yoongi is 25 years old. In the past 14 years, he’s lived a very quiet life, going to school and befriending Namjoon, Seokjin, Jungkook and Jimin. He’s relatively unaware of his witch heritage and very dismissive of it in general, chalking it up to superstition.

The events of what happen in the forest when he and Hoseok go into it as children is very murky a) because I wanted to be sort of dark and never really clear but also b) because I couldn’t make up my damn mind about what I wanted. (pls forgivi). The breakdown is basically yoonseok go into the woods one day and they’re in for a big surprise and through some unclear turn of events, they have a falling out, and they’re just kids and they’re tired and hungry and scared, and things get thrown way out of proportion and they separate, and then things fall apart. Yes, Yoongi did intentionally leave Hoseok behind. Not through ill-will, he was just a kid and he was frustrated and scared and just wanted to get home, but as you can see the guilt literally eats him up as soon as he’s out and he can’t go back for Hoseok.

The majority of the flashbacks are experienced by Yoongi, as weird dreams or distorted memories or whatever, but they’re not necessarily his. That’s an important point I did try to reinforce by having Taehyung have memories that mirror Yoongi’s exactly. It was my attempt at playing the unreliable narrator card. I hope I did it justice :’’)

Anyways, story goes on, Yoongi chooses Taehyung over his friends when they have some weird inquest at his home, and then Jungkook does his big I release you and then taegi fall in love whatever it’s just like that in the countryside.

Something I did try with Yoongi was to have the witchy feel come back in the later chapters following his talk with Namjoon when his eyes go blue. I made him make sage oil instead of his sage-steeped-water-thing and threw in a few references to his mother doing it but never fully explaining it because she knows Yoongi isn’t his full self anymore. Essentially Yoongi’s “ghost” in the woods was his ‘witchy’ half. At least that’s what I tried, obviously he stayed kinda witch-boy aesthetic but you know.

2. Taehyung

Taehyung is my son and I love him. In Yoongi’s part of the story, he does show up with no memory at all and that’s because Yoongi’s half-life in the woods says give those to me, referring to his memories. By the time he reaches Yoongi’s door he’s basically a total amnesiac.

Obviously, I tried to give Taehyung and Yoongi as much parallels as I could. See: the cows, being called a ‘witch’ (even though Taehyung is 100% NOT a witch), the piano, etc. I also had him get involved with Hoseok mostly because I wasn’t prepared to try and fit in Taehyung’s gay awakening in the 8 chapters we had (but also so I could imply some sexy taegiseok poly), but also because I wanted to flesh out Hoseok’s character. Vhope were always going to be involved but originally I wasn’t going to reveal quite as much as I did in chapter 7. But I still had fun writing it so it’s whatever.

Some key points about Taehyung worth noting are how he chooses his friends and family (his siblings, his town) over Hoseok, especially with his line “You only have me, but I have a lot more than just you.” This is basically the mirror image of what Yoongi does when Jungkook confronts them, which gives you a little more insight into Taehyung’s character at the time. When he was shaking his head in chapter 6 it was more of a ‘don’t do it Yoongi please don’t do it’ instead of a ‘they’re speaking bs you should choose me’. Taehyung remembering Jungkook is something I justify since Jungkook is obviously more powerful than a witch half-life in the woods, so obviously the memories belong more to Jungkook than they do Yoongi. But also it was just fun.

Taehee and Taewoo live long and happy lives despite losing their big brother in the war. Taewoo becomes a farmer that moves down the valley, and Taehee ends up marrying Jungkook in the sixties. (It was Jungkook’s attempt at keeping her safe. It was very wholesome don’t go yikes on me!!! It also implies Taehyung has descendants in town but we don’t ever see them.)

Taehyung is the ‘fairy’ of the story. In return for the mortal body he gave Hoseok (blood and bone) Hoseok essentially made him into a fairy that could grant wishes. I thought it was cute, since Hoseok had called Taehyung a fairy earlier and stuff. (The alternate title for this fic was also “The Witch, the Fairy and the Woods” so.)

3. Namjoon

Namjoon is essentially god!!!! Even though he clowns the concept of god!!! There’s not much to say about him, I’ll get into it when we get to the LORE section of this mess of a masterpost. You can call Namjoon god or death or whatever makes you happy. When he said he was the ‘bad’ guy compared to Jungkook, it’s because Namjoon is essentially Jungkook’s boss and will have to punish him for breaking the rules as a shrine god. We’ll get to that later!

It is implied in the epilogue that Namjoon had more influence than he let on. If you’ll remember in the earlier chapters Yoongi says something like he has “less than 65,000 won to his name” and yet Namjoon transfers Seokjin “500,000 won”. Basically I was trying to hint that Namjoon was trying to nudge Yoongi along the path that would take him back into the woods by removing the vast majority of his savings. Food for thought!

Essentially Namjoon was just a fun venture fo me, I’d always wanted to write a character who knew everything but was just distant and mysterious enough to drive someone insane. Also when I was younger and read The Fault in Our Stars the author-guy mentions that the Flower Man in his story was God, and I’ve always kind of wanted to do that too. That’s about it for him. :’’)

4. Jungkook

I do feel like Jungkook’s character has been quite explained already in the fic, but he’s wonderful so we’re going to talk about him a bit more. As previously said, he’s the shrine god, and that means he lives his life in a constant cycle of reincarnation, essentially. Mortal body turnover may be a better way of putting it. He’s essentially the founding spirit of the town and the land it’s on, and has been for however long the land has been there outside of the woods. The runes on his arms don’t really mean anything when they appear in chapter 6, they’re just sort of symbolic of Taehyung—something of the woods—touching something he has no right to. If Yoongi had grabbed him, there would have been none of those markings.

Though he was obviously cold to Taehyung, Jungkook is a character I tried really hard to make very kind. He’s not bitter towards Taehyung, but he knows he has a job to put things back in their rightful order, and that involves sending Taehyung back to the woods. I’m sure he would have loved to tell Taehyung about what happened to his siblings, but alas, things didn’t work out that way. Rip.

5. Jimin

Jimin is the current Park, Jungkook’s direct servant and bOYFRIEND. Jikook love each other a whole lot and that’s why Jungkook risked it all to just be with him. It’s not mentioned in the fic, nor is it especially relevant, but Jungkook did have Jimin’s parents sent away when they started to get romantically involved because the elder Parks were obviously against it. As Namjoon says at the end of chapter 9, they’re going to live a very long and happy time together.

It did break my heart not to have vmin be best friends, and in the original drafts of the fic they were going to become somewhat friendly, but things didn’t work out that way. I think it was at least interesting for Jimin to be the way he was in the fic.

6. Seokjin

Owner of The Best dialogue. As said he’s part of some low-key exorcist order that the author didn’t spend enough worldbuilding time to fully develop, but it’s just a very low-key, very very top secret Order of families that have been going for ages and ages that are aware of the position of gods and stuff. Very different to witches. He is 100% normal human, and his father did die before he came to the village where Yoongi lives, and so his mother Mrs Kim decided she didn’t want her son to die the same way and had them stationed in this remote ass place. I’m not sure what else there is to say about him other than he’s Extremely Valid and I love him.

7. Hoseok

Namjoon calls him the ‘mouthpiece’ of the forest, but’s a bit more complicated than that. There’s a large part of Hoseok’s character that is still fundamentally him, but it’s a little bit funked up, as you can probably imagine. As you can imagine, deep down he still is that ten year old boy that got abandoned by his best friend in the woods, so he’s grown pretty possessive of the idea of Yoongi, since he couldn’t ever have him. His whole schtick with Taehyung is completely genuine, though.

I did spend a lot of time justifying how to make him older, since I did want to imply that Taegiseok poly at the end of the fic, and I figured Taehyung’s implied wish for a friend would have enabled Hoseok to grow with him. Also I just wanted a grown-up Hoseok. In the original drafts of the reunion scene, Hoseok was going to be naked, but I ditched that when I was writing chapter 7 because I doubt Taehyung would have even considered going near a naked boy in the woods.

8. Min Insook

Yoongi’s mother!! A bona fide witch, she relocated to the countryside with her husband some time before Yoongi’s birth and then her husband died. I don’t know why, but he did. She was obviously planning on using the ‘ley lines’ for her witch magic and stuff, hence why Yoongi’s early childhood is filled with odd mentions of forest gods and his mother making things at the counter, but after her son gets caught by the forest and leaves his ‘witchy’ half behind, Insook basically abandons all of that in favour of raising him normally.

I did wait until chapter 8 to reveal her name for no real reason other than I hadn’t thought of one. Sorry guys :’’))

Her death is completely natural and unrelated to the schenanigans of the story. She really just does get sick and ends up dying from it because she’s too proud to ask for help. HOWEVER, as Taehyung kept bringing up, some of her is left in the house. Her ‘ghost’ or half-life, whatever, stays in the house in an attempt to keep Yoongi from going back to the woods, since she says the instant Yoongi’s free of them that she ‘won’t let’ him go back. She made the choice for him. This continues for the rest of Yoongi’s twenty-five years, basically, until Yoongi has that weird dream where he meets his other half and basically sticks himself back together, turning his eyes a proper light blue like Hoseok’s and Taehyung’s, and giving him whatever witchy dominance he needs to break whatever binding spell is on him.

The white moth that appears in the epilogue is basically her metaphorical presence. It’s on the urn (her ashes) and Yoongi lets it outside, symbolising that he’s going to be free of his grief about her and that he’s broken free of her spell and whatnot. The household fae works mostly the same way, except that Yoongi releasing it is way more metaphorical in that he’s removing everything of a home (household) he used to see there. It’s basically the equivalent to him packing up and leaving.

As you can see this isn’t organised at all, and I apologise. Hopefully it still improves your understanding somewhat :’’)

LORE

Gods, Woods, Fairies

I did say throughout the fic that the word ‘fairy’ was very important and had several meanings. The epilogue covers the last one. They were:

1. Fairy = gay man (shown through Taehyung)

2. Fairies grant wishes (Yoongi wishes he went back)

3. “Before gods and monsters, they called them fairies.” (Mostly pertaining to Jungkook’s connection to the word.)

Obviously, you guys came up with WAY more complex and meaningful versions than I did, but they were the ones I had. Every interesting comment I got about the meaning of the word ‘fairy’ I basically accepted as canon, so thank you all for them :’’))

Gods

As previously stated, this is where we discuss Jungkook and Namjoon. This concept of gods is something I’ve had sitting around for a while. Basically it goes like this:

There are gods of people (Jungkook) and

There are gods of nature (the woods).

And then there’s Namjoon who’s essentially Mr Big Boss but whatever.

Gods of people like Jungkook are obviously fully equipped to understand and judge their subjects as best they can. He has a domain, the village and the surrounding land and all of its people, and he has a job: whenever they die, he has to make a judgement on their souls, basically. The idea that the god always has to have a reincarnation that has lived through every generation of people is so important here, because only then does he have the context to judge people’s choices fully. He was a young man during the war, so he can judge the soldiers that died on his land. Hence why he only really gets to the age of ~30.

Therefore, by choosing to love Jimin instead of finding a woman to love for a few decades and having an heir, he’s broken this rule that's been set that gods have to live through every generation and fully understand all their subjects. Jungkook will grow older, more distant to the younger people of the village, less able to judge them properly, and then once he reaches a certain age he can’t face the people without giving away his immortality.

Namjoon calls himself the ‘bad guy’ in this scenario because he will be the one taking Jungkook aside and fixing the mess he’s made. Namjoon is very kind, though, so the worst he’ll probably do is make Jungkook just restart the Jeon line, because losing Jimin is probably enough suffering.

The gods of nature like the woods are far less sophisticated. They don’t have this human range of emotions because they don’t have subjects to judge when they die. They’re gods of places and stuff. They are sentient, but not as people. Hence, when Hoseok more or less gets turned into the embodiment of the woods, he still retains the majority of his personality since the woods has nothing to replace it with. He’s just a little bit wilder.

I really hope this makes sense!! Please feel free to ask me more about it, since this particular lore is something I’ll definitely be re-using in future fics.

MOTIFS

The white deer

Honestly, I was very wary of overusing the white deer. I did try to sow some seeds in the early chapters that Yoongi is a little bit obsessed with it, seeing as he carved wood to look like it and even gets up when the white deer gets near his house—so don’t take it to be completely legitimate. The fact is, we’re never going to know what really went down in the woods between Yoongi and Hoseok, but the white deer is a scapegoat for Yoongi to unload his reasoning on, basically. It’s definitely a real thing, though, if you see a white deer in the wild make sure you nod to it and all that. It’s just that in this fic, it’s obvious Yoongi is kind of obsessed with it.

Also deers do eat birds. I watched a video where a faun ate a baby bird and I’ve been traumatised every since, but I thought it was a a valid image to use in that scene.

Sage

Honestly, I’m not sure about the validity of sage. If you’re native American and you know the proper rituals, that's a completely different ball game and you’re by Far the expert here. I’m just a babie who knows Nothing, but sage is something that keeps coming up pretty often in fics like these. In my family it’s more common to use things like rosemary or that tree I think is called a ‘money tree’ (I have no idea what it’s called, sorry.)

Eragon

The Eragon series is very important to me! That poem Yoongi recites is something I also use whenever it’s late at night and I start to freak out for whatever reason. When I first read it, it really stuck, and because I’m unimaginative I just gave Yoongi the same poem. Eragon was also a big part of my tween years, so I did just insert it straight into the fic. I haven’t read it in a VERY long time, though.

Final Notes

Taehyung’s initial wounds when he comes to Yoongi’s door are based off that one redidt post where op meets some strange man in a forest whose face is red with blood and he freaks out when he sees her old Walkman. I’ll definitely update this with the link when I find it again.

A major inspiration for this fic was the song “It Happened Quiet” by Aurora, and also some at by @feelfei on twitter that she has sadly taken down. I have the image saved, but I don’t know if I should attach it to this post without her permission, so I don’t think I will. It’s a very game-cam-esque drawing of a naked Taehyung in the middle of the dark woods with glowing eyes. It had the caption “something that came from the forest” and it was really inspirational to me (it’s also the image of the playlist)!! The final inspiration was the song “Human” by Sevdaliza.

I think that should be everything I have to say about this fic!! If you have any more questions let me know and I’ll be sure to update this as well. Thank you all so much for reading all the way through It Happened Quiet, it really means a lot to me. You’ve all been super kind and I wish you all the best!!

EDIT: finally found an excerpt of the original reddit post!! i think it’s been taken down tho rip. but you can see it here:

I could see that his nose and lips and part of his forehead were all gone. It was like they'd been sliced clean off. He was bleeding bad, and I saw that the knees of his pants were red too. He looked me over and he saw my Walkman and he screamed. He just kept babbling and touching his face, and I realized he wasn't wearing the right clothing. He had some kind of weird grey cloth jacket and almost formal pants on, and the jacket had these weird buttons and red borders on it. -- the only thing I could really understand: 'Don't touch me! You'll make me go back there!'

took me a while and it’s not the complete post but the fact that I found anything is nice! Thank you again!!

#cryptid #long post #re: it happened quiet

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aviculor · 5 years

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Part 5 is a story of trying to doxx someone problematic

The mystery of Diavolo’s identity is built as the driving force of the entire saga, but it’s ultimately inconsequential. He’s not someone who we (both in the sense of the protagonists and in the sense of the viewers) know or have met before; he’s an entirely original character who was never seen before that moment. Even after we are made aware of who he is, there’s no major shock or real payoff to this knowledge. It did not lead anywhere. Doppio himself was introduced late in the game directly before the reveal, so it’s not like there was any emotional impact to learning he was secretly the boss’ alter ego. Doppio showed up and was immediately outed as the boss who has Dissociative Identity Disorder. It’s simply a thing that happens, rather than being a big reveal. From a storytelling perspective, Doppio might as well have not existed at all and the boss simply had a public persona like Tobi in Naruto. The only noticeable benefit Diavolo gained from his obsessive desire for anonymity was being able to pretend he was a muggle who’s in the wrong place at the wrong time...since Doppio for all intents and purposes was. But in truth, all this subterfuge worked against Diavolo in the end since Giorno was able to steal Passione by simply saying he was the boss when no one could actually dispute it.

But why did Diavolo care so much? What exactly did he stand to lose? It’s not as if hearing the words “You are a split personality of Vinnegar Doppio!” would cause him to vanish like a demon being exorcised. It had no bearing in his defeat whatsoever. The logical conclusion would be that he wanted to keep Doppio safe since sharing a body with a silly manchild who anyone could get the jump on is kind of a liability. Although since Doppio managed to hold his own against Risotto, the strongest assassin in Passione, and the fact that Doppio is a Passione member to start with, I’m actually not sure if that’s the correct answer. Plus, covering up his birthplace and daughter is several steps beyond not wanting people to recognize “him” on the street when he can’t defend himself. Diavolo just wanted to be a complete ghost. So why? Was there any actual purpose to be found at all, or was it nothing more than a personality quirk akin to Kira’s hand fetish?

It’s worth wondering who actually came first. It’s easy to read Doppio as a glorified secret identity, a disguise, a mental shield, a B-grade Diavolo, especially when ”Doppio” means “double”. But that’s not “double” as in “substitute/decoy”, but as in “set of two”. Plus, Doppio is the one with a full name. Which is an honor typically reserved for important characters. “Diavolo” is simply Italian for “devil”, and while everyone’s name is like that, it gives the impression of an assumed alias a lot more than the other way around. The person in Diavolo’s backstory is certainly closer to Doppio in personality...aside from the whole “kidnapping and torturing his mother and razing his village to cinders” thing, but it was suggested meeting his mom was what triggered him into developing DID. Chapter titles “My Name Is Doppio” and “His Name Is Diavolo” present Doppio as someone who introduces himself and Diavolo as someone who needs to be introduced, which wouldn’t make much sense if Diavolo was the “real” one. Additionally, Polnareff’s (imaginative, fantasy-anime) description of DID includes that one personality will vie for control over the other one. Many people have speculated that Doppio was the original and Diavolo was the splinter, and if you accept this theory, it starts to put some of these loose pieces together.

Diavolo wasn’t erasing his past, he was erasing Doppio’s. He wanted to eliminate any evidence that Doppio was the original person, in a bid to delegitimize him. No birthplace, no age, no records, no memories, no friends, no family, no one who knows his face, etc. Diavolo’s master plan involved reinventing himself from the ground up, leaving no evidence of his life before Passione which would unveil that Doppio was a person and he wasn’t. Diavolo restricts access to Doppio’s memories and feeds him only selective information, causing him to be in the dark about their true nature even as he died. When the fortune teller begins to pry into Doppio’s personal life, telling him he’s actually an adult who has a daughter, what happens? Diavolo steps in to silence the man and keep Doppio completely clueless. You see, if Doppio knew the truth, Doppio could fight back and overtake Diavolo instead of the other way around. Diavolo’s end game was to be the sole occupant of their body, the 'real' one. That was the 'everlasting climax' he didn’t want interrupted. Whether this would involve Doppio’s death or just keeping him disenfranchised like what King Candy did to Vanelope in Wreck It Ralph...we have no concrete answer because we have no way of knowing exactly how far Araki would have taken his ‘artistic license’ regarding DID.

Diavolo founded Passione at roughly the same time he discovered the stand arrows and awakened King Crimson. It was all in 1986, directly before the events of Stardust Crusaders, shortly after he torched his hometown. Which in turn was shortly after Trish was conceived. You know, it seems odd that Diavolo would allow for that kind of glaring, hull-breaching oversight in his bid for having no past or connections, and it’s also wildly out-of-character for him to love someone. But it’s not for Doppio. Trish was Doppio’s daughter, not Diavolo’s. After all, that thing with the scent of their souls was just shameless bullshit. I’m actually starting to picture Diavolo's deception towards Donatella Una as being him interfering in Doppio’s relationship to throw her off ‘knowing’ him, since murdering her would be opening a can of worms he did not yet have the ability to avoid.

But discussing the timeline brings me to one other point: King Crimson. It’s ostensibly Diavolo's stand, but Doppio has access to Epitaph when Diavolo permits it...almost like how Diavolo controls Doppio’s access to his own memories. And it’s repeatedly rendered that Diavolo speaks through KC, as if KC is a shorthand for Diavolo himself when he’s not active. What if, staring us right in the face, King Crimson is Diavolo? Or in other words, being exposed to the arrow in Egypt allowed Diavolo to assume his own quasi-physical body by way of controlling the stand, and this is what inspired him towards establishing his own personhood and scheming to usurp Doppio. What if, in an alternate timeline were Doppio were to learn what Diavolo’s been doing to him and fought back, he took control of King Crimson since by all accounts it’s just as much his stand as it is Diavolo’s?

If I’m right about all this, then it’s really a shame Araki never fleshed any of it out because that would have made the final arc far more interesting and easier to follow.

#jjba #jojo's bizarre adventure #vento aureo #vento auero spoilers #discourse #wmg #long post

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doedipus · 5 years

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I finally finished moyashimon

it’s honestly one of my favorite anime/manga that I’ve read in a long, long time. there are definitely some aspects of the work that frustrate me, but it’s not quite enough to sour the work as a whole in my eyes. if you’re in the mood for a really chill slice of life series with a lot of well-developed and respectfully portrayed female and queer characters, definitely give it a shot.

first of all, to anyone who’s only seen the anime adaptation, definitely, definitely, definitely look into the manga. some of the best parts in the series happen after the anime ends, esp. the craft beer adventure in volume 8 and american road trip in volume 10. plus, if you’re like me and are mostly drawn to the work because of kei, her involvement in the story only starts ramping up immediately after the anime ends, and she’s essentially the main character of the last 3 volumes. Plus, ishikawa and his team have a lot of fun with the medium that doesn’t always translate into animation.

All in all, picking up the manga is 100% worth your time if you’re even vaguely intrigued by the premise

more detailed thoughts and a handful of good reaction images under the break

I think overall the beer, france, and america arcs are the high points of the series.

The beer arc sticks out to me mostly because of stuff happening in real life during the time I was reading it. Basically, some of my friends talked me into taking a beer tasting class at uni with them. I’d never really liked beer very much beforehand, but it turns out I was just drinking the wrong kinds of beer. I’ll put my life on the line for a good IPA now that I know what that even is.

The beer section of moyashimon has mutou go through a similar process- she starts out by going on a huge tirade about how craft beer sucks and it’s only appealing to pretentious weirdos, and then over the course of the volume, they go over what different kinds of beer are like, how they’re made, etc. It ended up giving me a good idea of what to look out for in the beer class, and it was fun being able to compare what I was sampling to what the fermentation lab crew talked about.

There’s also a pretty cute gender-affirming moment for kei in there, where the gang gives her a women’s costume for the faux oktoberfest celebration the book culminates in. it’s a small plot point, but I liked it a lot.

The france and america arcs are pretty similar and I like them for basically the same reasons. Essentially it boils down to them tying really dynamic plotlines in with the usual culinary intrigue. There’s a real sense of tension to what’s happening in the story, and the food stuff is more directly related to what’s happening in the story than it usually is. In a lot of the other plotlines, the writers have a tendency to frontload all the technical stuff into one or two extended dialogue scenes, which can be kind of hard to get through in comparison

I also found ishikawa’s assessment of american food pretty fun to read through, and a lot of his comments make me want to try out some western restaurants in japan if I ever end up going there. For instance, he has the characters talk a lot about how burgers and stuff are much sweeter than they’re used to them being in japan, and it’d be neat to have a point of comparison for that.

Also the america arc is where kei and marie probably do gay things, which I am very down for

ultimately, I think upwards of 90% of people who stumble upon this series now, 5 years after the last chapter and last episode were released, are here specifically for kei. she’s the strong bad to sawaki’s homestar: you might not know it yet, but she’s the reason you’re here. if you’re impatient and wanna speedrun straight to the part where she transitions/goes full time/whatever, it’s halfway through volume 4 of the manga and episode 10 of the first season of anime. there’s a lot of fun plotlines that happen before that point that really deserve attention on their own merit, though.

I’m a big fan of kei’s characterization. she’s possibly my favorite trans (or trans-adjacent josou danshi, post-colonialism ho!) character I can think of, and certainly the best I’ve seen written by a cis author. being manga, there’s some dumb missteps that happen, but they seem to be mostly a result of the creators not knowing better rather than them just putting her in to gawk at like a lot of other creative teams tend to do. plus, I think a lot of it boils down to localization error. for instance, the scanslation I read consistently has characters and margin notes refer to her as “he,” but like, japanese doesn’t really use gendered language the way english does, so it’s more representative of the scan team’s biases than the writers’.

One of the things I really like about Kei’s depiction is that the author doesn’t try to make excuses for her behavior. There’s no throwaway line in her backstory about how her parents saw three crows and a capybara on the way home from the hospital and decided to raise her as a girl. She’s clearly attracted to Sawaki, but that’s never framed as her primary motive for transition. She just flatly explains that she thought about it real hard and decided that this was best for her. To me, that’s a much more compelling narrative than one where it’s something either foisted upon the character or something they just sort of haphazardly stumble into.

Another thing that sticks out to me about Kei is that she exists in a series that doesn’t construct its cast as a harem around a singular main character or the reader, which gives her much more room for personal motivations and interests. Like, even though I love Luka from steins;gate to pieces, she and the rest of the female cast in that series really only exist in order to be Okabe’s, and by extension, the viewers’ romantic interests. This ends up sort of limiting their ability for character growth because at the end of the day, they all have to remain available and receptive to Okabe’s advances. As a result, Luka can never really call Okabe out for mistreating her because the writers won’t risk making her route or subplot unappealing. The same goes for plenty of other series trans characters find themselves in, and it shows. So many of them are either smug tricksters there to tease viewers or utterly submissive waifs, and often lack development beyond what’s necessary to get otaku motors running.

Since Moyashimon doesn’t use that kind of restrictive casting structure, the author is able to untie Kei’s sense of self-worth from how Sawaki feels about her and allow the romance subplot to take a back seat while the cast works on their various projects. As a result, she ends up being more independent than most other trans characters and her self-confidence is more genuine. She’s designed from the ground up to be a more complete character, and it makes her inclusion in the main story as well as her subplot with Sawaki feel organic.

on the other hand, as punlich pointed out in their post, the series does take a couple passes at introducing characters that seem to be designed with the intent of giving the reader an outlet to vent their sexual frustration around kei, particularly marie and madoka. the former is frequently referenced within the work as being a cis palette swap of kei, and madoka is another of itsuki’s proteges who begins insisting that she’s going to marry sawaki shortly after she’s introduced and receives little characterization beyond that. Marie ends up being a strong character in her own right, but the work probably would’ve been better off if they’d given her basically any other design.

at least in my reading of the work, neither is really taken seriously as a preferable alternative pairing to kei/sawaki, since marie ends up being more into kei than sawaki in the end, and madoka just makes sawaki uncomfortable more often than not. it’s a clear step up from works like steins;gate, re:zero, blend-s, or oregairu, where the trans or GNC character is the one who’s never taken seriously to the point of being a joke inclusion more than anything. still, it’s irritating that the creators would feel the need to include that sort of character, given how they’re usually pretty good about not harem-izing their cast.

uh, and speaking of that, fuck most of volume 11. the central plotline for that section is that the school holds a beauty pageant for the cast, which is, uh, wildly out of character for the series to say the least. it’s to the point where I’m inclined to suspect some form of executive meddling. like maybe they were gonna get dropped due to lack of readership and the brass told the creative team to do a dumb fanservice arc or something. they talk in a sidebar about how they changed editors around the start of this arc, so I have a hunch that has something to do with it? I guess only they would know, though. it’s not like I can read any interviews or anything lol.

there’s still good content in there, and like I mentioned earlier, it’s when kei starts to really dominate a lot of the screen time, which is a big plus. it’s just dumb and out of place.

I also kind of found the conclusion to kei and sawaki’s “will they, won’t they” subplot really unfulfilling. namely, there really isn’t a conclusion to it at all. at the end, it’s clear that kei’s finally become comfortable with her attraction to sawaki, but sawaki is still kinda hesitant about going anywhere serious with someone he’s been friends with since forever. and like, I can get that, it’s sort of a natural aspect of where that arc would have to go, it’s just a frustrating note to end on. it seems likely that they would get together in the future, at least. (and that’s why you should read my fanfics!)

One thing I really liked about the ending section is sawaki comes up with some proactive uses for his superpower. for most of the series, it’s just a vehicle for ishikawa to exposit about his fascination with microbiology and fermented cuisine, which works great with the lower-key tone the series went for. still, the ways he uses it at the end are pretty clever, and it would’ve been neat to see him go on to use it in other ways. It’s frustrating that one of the uses he comes up with involves doing mouth-to-mouth with madoka, however.

I kind of get the feeling that the series got cut short because a lot of plot threads get addressed and tied up really quickly and sloppily in the last four or five chapters, while a ton of others just sit there. idk if it was a popularity thing, or if ishikawa decided to go all-in on maria the virgin witch, or some other factor, but I guess that’s kind of the nature of serial fiction. it just goes on as long as the creators and publishers are engaged with it, and then it’s over and they all move onto something else.

I’m being pretty hard on the ending portions of the series, but honestly pretty much everything not directly related to the beauty pageant or madoka is really solid. I’m just laying it all out there so nobody gets caught off-guard by the jankiness more than anything.

For one reason or another, moyashimon really struck a chord with me, and it’s kind of hard to put into words why. A big part of it is that kei is a character that I feel a sort of kinship with, which is a rare occurrence as a trans person. She feels like a real person that I’d meet through a message board or discord lobby. The rest of the cast has shades of that as well- the students feel like people I could have met in school, and itsuki harkens back to aspects of professors I’ve had, from his weird sense of humor to his rather alarming past working for the military. It’s easy for me to subconsciously insert myself into their fictional friend group. I guess it’s kind of like how people tend to engage with redlettermedia or ensemble let’s play channels like game grumps or super best friends play. Reading about the gang’s antics confers a sense of belonging that I’m perpetually starving for.

Another aspect of it is that it’s just fun to indulge in someone else’s hyperfixations for a while. It’s why sci-fi authors like heinlein and crichton are so influential, and why internet personalities like cgp grey or jon bois are so engaging: they’re really adept at articulating how utterly captivating some concept or ideology is to them at the moment. Somewhere between most and all of what ishikawa has to say about food and microbiology goes directly over my head, but the passion he has for those topics is readily apparent in every jargon-infested, chart-saturated debate he has his characters get into, and I love it. In that sidebar he goes on about his relationship to his editors, he mentions that the top boy editor chewed him out a couple times for basically trying to sneak a textbook into the magazine. It ends up being compelling based on passion alone, even if I only really internalized a fifth of what he actually had to say.

Is moyashimon for you? Ultimately I don’t think it’s really for anyone besides ishikawa himself. But if you’re at all like me, chances are you’ll fall in love with this bizarre and charming edutainment series anyway. If any of this sounds even remotely interesting to you, I can’t recommend checking it out highly enough.

#moyashimon #anime #trans #effortpost

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