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clevercorvidae · 4 years

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BNHA Common Misconceptions

I’ve been seeing wayyy too much bs on my dash lately. So I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on some Controversy™

***Spoilers For The Manga***

1. “What the HPSC did to Hawks wasn’t bad”

A government organization putting a young child through rigorous training so that he can be used as a tool is bad. I don’t know why I have to spell that out

Hawks had to abandon his real name at a very young age. That’s damaging for a kid’s sense of identity. His identity as a person no longer has any separation from his work as a hero. Being a hero is all he is now. I wouldn’t be surprised if (provided Hawks’s wings are gone for good) he has an identity crisis after this arc because he can’t be “Hawks” anymore.

Hawks is based on Lionel Messi, a soccer player recruited at a young age in return for paying for his medical procedures. I’ve seen people say that Hawks chose to be a hero. One, he was a child, young children shouldn’t be making decisions like that. Two, we know based on context clues that Keigo was more than likely living in poverty, possibly with alcoholic parents, and we literally are told that the HPSC payed for his family’s living expenses. Do you really think Keigo had much of a choice here?

I’ve seen people say “it’s just like what UA is doing”. First of all, UA is called out for being irresponsible and endangering their students IN UNIVERSE. Second, Keigo was a young child, the UA kids are 15+. There’s a huge difference.

2. “Mitsuki isn’t abusive”

Honestly when it comes to her smacking Katsuki, I could excuse it as a joke done in poor taste and not hold it over her as a character.

Hitting him WASNT just discipline tho. You should never, ever, under any circumstances hit your kid. Fuck that noise.

What I really have an issue with is what she SAYS to Katsuki. Her guilt tripping him isn’t a throwaway line either. He repeats the sentiment that he is responsible for Kamino during Deku v Kacchan 2. It’s one of the main reasons he fights Deku.

Horikoshi says that Katsuki has a good relationship with his mother. In that case, he did a horrible job at presenting that. What is written in the canon is what should be used as the basis for how we interpret her character.

3. “Shigaraki chose to kill his family/was born evil”

No...just...no. He was FIVE for crying out loud.

He wanted to be a hero, and took extra care to play with kids that had no friends. He definitely wasn’t born evil lmao.

His quirk manifested while he was having an emotional crisis. Decay is controlled by emotion so of course it went haywire.

He didn’t even know it was him doing it at first.

“But Shigaraki said he WANTED it to happen” Shigaraki is an unreliable narrator. What we actually SEE tells a very different story. He reaches out to Hana and his Mother for help. His grandparents are just caught in the shockwave. The ONLY person he killed on purpose was his father.

Now when it comes to his father, he had just beat him and locked him outside. He’s FIVE, and he has no healthy outlet for his anger and frustration. Hell, we see that in his “itchiness”, he only feels like this in the house, because his father makes him suppress his love for heroes and his dream to become one. He takes joy in killing his father because it’s the only release he’s ever experienced.

The fact that you guys forget that this is an abused child with no real control over his quirk that just got beaten and locked outside... Nope, no reading comprehension here.

4. “The League of Villains are justified/are a revolutionary group”

...Shigaraki has stated over and over again that he just wants to destroy everything. He doesn’t care about reform or improving anything. That one panel in Ch. 222, where he says he wants to destroy everything I think sums it up perfectly.

He wants to destroy EVERYTHING good or bad or neither or both. There’s a newborn baby, a field of flowers , Nine, various heroes, the UA kids, etc all varying in innocence.

The rest of the league have very different goals and reasons why they continue to support Shigaraki. Twice wants to protect the only people that accepted him. Spinner just wants to have purpose for his life. Toga wants to live the way she wishes with no consequences. Compress is also here.

The only “revolutionary” is Dabi. But his views are not universal throughout the league.

Even if they were trying to improve things. They have killed countless innocent people, they’ve tried to kill the UA kids too. That’s not ok. And it’s not erased by the fact that they’ve done good. (I do appreciate them for killing the MHA version of the KKK, truly epic of you)

5. “Hawks is abusive”

It’s not abuse to manipulate someone for info when you’re a double agent. It’s kinda shitty, and you could argue that it was unnecessary for Hawks to do so in context. But it’s not abuse.

Y’all need to stop using the word abuse/abusive tendencies to describe all immoral actions

I’ve also seen people say that Hawks has abusive tendencies (as in he’s abusive in all his relationships with other characters) and...do I really need to explain why that makes no sense at all?

6. “Twice deserved to die/it was necessary to kill him”

Feel like I need to remind people that we’ve only ever actually seen Twice kill one guy and that was one of the KKK guys.

Twice isn’t evil, even Hawks admits that he is a genuinely good person. Good people don’t deserve to die.

It wasn’t necessary, and here’s why: Hawks could’ve just knocked him out or even just severely injured him. (Or the HPSC could’ve just grown a brain cell and sent more people to back him up, making it easier to hold back his quirk and arrest him)

Hawks shouldn’t have killed Twice, he only killed him because he’s been raised as a child soldier and I wouldn’t be surprised if what he told Twice about taking out villains was a direct quote from the HPSC

Also, Hawks would’ve killed Twice with or without Dabi’s intervention

Something I do have to say though is that Hawks was right not to just let Twice go. It’s tragic because Twice WAS leaving to help his friends, but the other side of that tragedy it that his friends are terrorists. If he was allowed to leave a shit ton of people would have died (again that doesn’t mean he deserved to die either, don’t get it twisted)

The WHOLE POINT of Hawks v Twice is to make you question who the bad guy is. Both characters are morally gray and the only reason they even have to fight is because of the outside forces controlling their fates. It’s supposed to be tragic it’s supposed to be unclear who is in the right, so stop arguing about it.

7. “Bakugou is abusive/irredeemable” (I know it’s been talked to death but I still see it everywhere)

People are, in fact, allowed to grow past the person they were in middle school.

Most people get hung up on the “throw yourself off a building” line. Which is fair, but again, he was in middle school.

People also say “he hasn’t apologized yet”. Yeah? And? The story isn’t over yet. Horikoshi has already acknowledged that too. I don’t know what you want? People who like him know that his arc isn’t over yet.

I’ve seen a lot of people denying his character development. In the beginning of the series he was a bully and let his ego control him. I don’t think he’s bullied...anyone since Deku v Kacchan 2. He insults people but they obviously don’t take it seriously.

He’s also gone from preferring to fail a final exam to avoid working with Deku, to following him into battle against Shigaraki.

Also, when he actually likes and respects someone he doesn’t mistreat them. This is the same thing with Hawks where y’all NEED to stop misusing the word abuse. He was an abusive friend to Deku when they were kids, that’s it.

8. “Rei was abusive too!”

I’m BEGGING YOU to learn what the term “abuse” means istg

She had a psychotic break. She genuinely thought it was her abusive husband coming through the door, and she acted out of fear.

“Well that’s not an excuse” yes it fucking is. Not to mention that as soon as she realized what happened, she sobs hysterically because she hurt Shouto and tries to use her quirk to help him.

I genuinely don’t understand why people think this

9. “Dabi actually does care about the league”

Listen, I know it sounds harsh, but y’all need to get your heads out of your piles of headcanons.

We know next to nothing about how Dabi feels about just about anything. But we do see that he’s aloof and distant with the league, he doesn’t put in more than he needs to. The rest of the league think of each other as family. Dabi straight up says he doesn’t give a shit about them.

“What if he was just putting up a front for Hawks” Why? Why would he do that? When asked who he was he answered him. He tells him how he feels about hero society and Stain. Not to mention that he was getting ready to kill him. If he was hiding his true feelings about the league I doubt he would’ve so easily said that he didn’t care about them but rather how useful they were.

At this point it’s just wishful thinking. Based on everything we’ve seen in the series so far and everything we know about Dabi, I think it’s safe to say that he doesn’t care about them all that much. If he secretly does care about them, I’d say it’s likely that he doesn’t even know he does.

Idk why all of a sudden villain stans and hero stans are feuding over things that shouldn’t even be up for debate in the first place. Sorry if this came off as super aggressive, I’m just sick of seeing this stuff all over the place. If anyone has anything to add go ahead

#bnha #bnha spoilers #discourse #bakugou katsuki #Hawks #keigo takami #dabi #league of villains #mitsuki bakugou #shigaraki tomura

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the-final-sif · 4 years

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I lied, I’m not actually clearing out my inbox today b/c someone left a super amazing comment on ‘a soft tongue and sharp teeth’ and so I’m going to write an analysis/breakdown/ramble of all the things I had going on in that fic because I want to and it’s one of my favorite bnha fics.

Warning! Discussion of suicidal thoughts/self-sacrificial suicide/kidnapping/child death/general fucked upness we see in BNHA ahead.

The entire story is about how children with strong quirks are seen and treated as tools/weapons by adults in BNHA’s universe. They’re forced to grow up too quick, to fight to defend themselves or surrender to that fate. I wanted to tackle this through the eyes of one such child who we’ve seen subjected to that by both heroes and villains.

Katsuki is the focus of the story, he’s the only one whose given a name throughout the story, and he’s one of only two characters allowed to “Speak”, that’s because this is his story, his and the child’s. The fundamental core of his story is that he is the one who gets to decide it. He would rather die than allow anyone else to control him or his story, so he and the child are the only ones allowed to actually speak in it.

Pronouns only ever refer to one character. He/him = Katsuki. She/her = Momo. They/them = the child (I’ll talk more about why in a minute).

One of the primary metaphors of the story is Katsuki holding his sharp teeth over his tongue. Katsuki has notable sharper teeth in the manga, and here they also represent his general willingness to fight. His anger, his guarded nature, his strength. His tongue represents himself, his agency, and his story.

Katsuki gets his quirk, and the moment he does in the story, others demand it from him. It starts with just his friends who demand he keep showing it off, something he’s happy to do and which seems harmless. Then it slowly escalates when more powerful people start taking notice.

This manifests in many ways, the attempted kidnappings, the sports festival, people around him trying to forced him into change one way or another and him refusing.

Katsuki also starts the theme of ‘biting his tongue’ early on in the story. Here, it actually has two meanings that converge into the same core theme. He metaphorically bites his tongue when he refuses to tell anyone about what happened to him, because he no longer trusts anyone after what happened. Only himself. Later, he resolves to more literally bite his tongue to take his own life if he’s ever unable to escape. So he can’t be turned into a weapon.

In both cases, for Katsuki, biting his tongue is him denying other people any say in his story on the most ultimate level. He refuses to tell anyone else what happened to him, because it is his story, and by telling it, other people could turn it into their own narratives. So they won’t hear it at all. Similarly, by killing himself he’d be taking control over his own story in the most final way possible. He can’t be used as a tool or a weapon if he’s dead. So that’s his final solution, if he has no other way out, then he will end his story there to stop them from taking it from him.

Or at least, he refuses to tell his story until he meets someone who truly understands it. The child.

We have a city being destroyed, and a few more characters come into play. The most important two are Momo and Hawks, with mentions of Eri.

Momo has also had people try to use her for her quirk her entire life. She’s been reduced down to it by a lot of people, but has managed to at least somewhat overcome that with her intelligence. Still, her understanding of what it’s like is why she’s the third pronouned character and why she’s the one whose able to figure out how to communicate with the child.

Hawks is a case where he was turned into a weapon/tool by adults. He gave in and gave up his freedom. He understands the pain of it, at least on some level. That’s why he’s noted as one of the few people able to enter the bubble of destruction without harm. Because he kind of understands. But he’s not able to pass through safely like Katsuki, and he’s not the one the child wants because he gave in. Hawks gave up on his freedom, so he can’t really understand the choice the child is making.

Eri is another case where a child was turned into a weapon. The bullets made from her blood are the proposed solution, and they don’t work because of who they were created from.

All these characters lead to Katsuki entering the bubble of destruction enclosing the city. Katsuki is the one allowed to enter because he understands.

His journey is broadcast outwards, as a gift to him from the child. Because the child understands how hard it is to tell this story, and so they give Katsuki a platform to tell it where nobody can take his story from him. Nobody else can interject, interrupt, or try to change it.

All anyone else is allowed to do is listen to it and accept Katsuki’s story as he presents it.

Also I’m going to note that I use the repetition of Katsuki’s age a lot here because I want to hammer home how young all these children are as they’re forced into these fates.

When Katsuki reaches the child, he notes that the child does not have sharp teeth. This is meant to mean that the child did not have Katsuki’s same willingness to fight back/lash out, not until it was too late and they’d gotten a serious head injury, one that caused them to lose control over their quirk.

The child is bound too, which tells Katsuki that someone had tried to kidnap them. He understands upon seeing them what’s going on, that the child had adults try to turn them into a tool/weapon. Since they’re no longer able to control their quirk properly, the child made the choice to overuse their quirk until it killed them rather than allow themselves to be turned into a tool/weapon.

I want to note that the child is never described in any detail physically. They/them are used for the child the entire time. They are never given a name, hair color, eye color, etc. That’s all on purpose. Because this child is meant to be every child forced into this situation, who’ve had to make this choice. They could be any child, because this issue is so prevalent in bnha.

In his effort to make the child feel less alone, Katsuki tells his own story to them, about how adults don’t listen when you say no, and about how he’d fought back and made them. He tells his own story, making himself vulnerable for the first time in a long time, because he knows he can trust this child not to take his story away from him.

Likewise, the child trusts Katsuki with their story too. They ask him to tell their story like he tells his, not the story of a victim, but the story of a hero, and he does.

Katsuki then offers comfort the only way he knows how, by singing a lullaby that he remembers from before he got his quirk. Bringing back memories of a time before adults saw them as tools, as weapons, as nothing more than their quirks.

He offers them one last chance to be a child, to be a person, to be human again. To be treated as they should’ve been the entire time.

Katsuki clings onto the child long after their gone, finally crying and unable to let go and accept their death because not only is it tragic, but it’s his very first time seeing his own story from the outside. It’s the first time he realizes how fucked up all of this really is, well and truly.

Aizawa enters here, earlier in the story he was the only one to protest Katsuki entering the bubble. He’s often one of the few characters in BNHA who actually treats these children like children, who protests against sending them out into the field, who protects them.

In the end, he’s only one person though, and he tries, he tries so hard, but he can only do so much. Often times all he can be is there to comfort them afterwards.

Aizawa still tries, he sits with Katsuki, he lets him cry, and he comforts Katsuki. Treating him like a child, because Katsuki still is one.

Very purposefully, Aizawa does not say anything here. There’s nothing he can say that will make things better, so instead he stays silent and lets Katsuki/The Child tell their stories and have that control. Rather than trying to shift it by telling them everything’s okay when it’s not.

Afterwards, everyone is left shaken by their sudden understanding of Katsuki’s world. But Katsuki isn’t because this is just his life.

To him, as hard as it was, this is just a reality of life. He hates everyone who forces children to make these choices, the circumstances of the choice are tragic. But the choice itself is not to him. It’s the heroic thing to do. It’s powerful. It’s maintaining your own agency and humanity against all else.

We see this when he meets the child’s parents, he makes sure they know who the hero was that day. He holds to his promise and keeps telling the child’s story how they wanted it told.

When Katsuki’s answering how he’s moving on, you’ll notice I used “their” to describe the child in his eyes. That was very much so on purpose and goes back to the idea of the child he encountered being symbolic for every child that’s been forced to make this choice.

After all of this, we finally get to the sweet pea flower Katsuki finds after he’s gone through his grief and started moving forward again.

So, sweet pea flowers mean goodbye, but with a grateful/happy tone to them. It’s meant as both a ‘thank you’ to Katsuki from the child for sharing his story and comforting them in their last moments, but it’s also meant as a reassurance that this was a happy ending for them. This was their choice, that they made to keep power over their own story. It’s a choice that hurt them to make, but it was still theirs. They don’t regret it.

The flower is crystal rather than organic matter so it won’t die. It’s a permanent reminder for him, an endless symbol of their story and choices that will live on after them.

As such, Katsuki puts the flower in with his will. Because he understands the meaning, and he wants to pass it along. If he dies, he’ll be going out on his own terms. And he won’t regret it. His story will be his until the end.

Okay this has gotten very long, and I didn’t even get to everything.

Anyways, a soft tongue and sharp teeth is my favorite short bnha story I’ve written, I was basically possessed while writing it, and there’s like 10 million little details in it that I’m very proud of.

thank you for coming to my ted talk.

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linkspooky · 4 years

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Scummy Heroes are to Blame

My Hero Academia has always been about this idea. In a literal society of heroes, there are people who do not get saed. Even though the literal job of heroes is to save people, heroes have become not much more than a militant branch of the police force in hero society under the thumb of the hero commission.

This conflict comes to a head in Dabi, Twice, and Hawks who are all three of them people who weren’t saved by heroes.

1. A Society Where Heroes Don’t Save People

Most of the heroic characters on their side of the story have a very vague idea of what a hero is, almost like that’s thematic or something. There seems to be two types, heroes who save people, and heroes who defeat villains, with the latter being the more popular one. However, there have been a couple of moments that idealize what a hero should be.

Both Mirio and Deku say that a hero should always act to save a crying little girl in front of them.

Twice says that someone who helps their friends can’t possibly be a bad guy. These are simple heroic ideals that we see Hawks a heroic character completely fail to live up to in the coming chapters.

Twice is hardly acting like a villain in this scenario. He’s acting nothing like the threat to hero society that Hawks imagined him to be with his great ability to create almost an entire army of duplicates with his quirk. He is crying, and begging for help, like a person would.

Hawks is faced with a person crying because someone they trusted, and wanted to be friends with and treated like a person betrayed them, and used them as a tool to complete their bojective all along. Hawks is faced with not a villain, but a victim.

Hawks is, slaughtering copies of the true companions that Twice does everything for. Attacking a person who is helpless and crying out in frustration. Coldly deciding to kill someone who says out loud that the only reason they want to fight is for the happiness of their friends.

In a traidtional sense Twice is the one fighting with Nakama power, and Hawks is the character who the power of Nakama has failed to reach and is instead cutting those same friends down. Despite the fact that Twice is a terrorist and a murderer, and Hawks is a hero who has wholly dedicated his life to saving others the framing of the situation has been entirely flipped. It’s Hawks who looks like the villain, and Twice who looks like the hero struggling to fight for his friends.

This is where the nuance of the series kicks in. Hero and villains are not strictly defined roles, they’re only called that because hero society dictates they are.

One of the first things that Shigaraki says in the series is that heroes using violent suppression in order to defeat villains is just something that creates more violence in the end. Something which All Might pointedly refuses to listen to, accusing Shigaraki of just being a bad person who enjoys violence. Ironically this is something Shigaraki is utterly dehumanized by and accused of over, and over, and over again.

However as we learn more of Shigaraki’s story we learn that Shigaraki was a kid with heroic ambitions, who was failed by society at every level. The reason he’s violent is because he was exposed to violence again and again as a kid, his violent impulses were literally beaten into them.

The black and white morality of hero society blames victims for falling, and then insists the reason that they fell in the first place was because they were bad people. Hero society again and again intentionally lets people fall and then villainizes them rather than sympathizing with them as victims.

If you fall its entirely on your own, and also a sign of your character. You have to get back on your feet on your own merits. If you fail to make it back into society than it’s not the fault of society, you’re just a bad person for becoming a victim in the first place.

Mirio and Deku both believe that you should always help a crying girl in pain like Eri, but at the same time if they had not saved her at that exact moment, if they had let her grow up like Shimura Tenko grew up, to develop violent tendencies, to act like anything other than the perfect crying victim then she would have been left behind the same way Shimura was, the same way Twice is at this exact moment.

In a society overflowing with heroes, there are people who are ignored and do not get saved. Shimura Tenko as a five year old, wonder if it’s his fault for killing his family that no one came to save him. Already by that time he’s internalized the idea that a bad child like him doesn’t deserve to get saved.

Twice even says the same as well. In hero society only the good and the virtuous get saved. People like twice who are broken are left behind and forgotten, because it’s more convenient for society to function that way.

I relate this idea to Albert Camus, the fall. A book that explores the idea of who is guilty for society, and comes to the conclusion that everyone is guilty.

The Fall operates on the premise that all are guilty. This is indeed a classic argument for Camus, but the narrator of this novel goes so far as to suggest that all men are murderers, even if only by accident or through negligence (like not saving others from death). Since the novel was written in the aftermath of WWII, this is a particularly poignant argument. This sort of "universal guilt" makes any attempt at judgment completely hypocritical. A guilty man condemning another man of guilt is absurd by nature.

Everyone who participates in society creates it actively. I’ll explore this idea with Hawks more in a minute, but related to who is responsible for hero society it’s important to look at the conflict of heroes and villains. The heroes themselves blame the villains for all the ills of hero society. However, it’s important to remember who holds all the power. Sure, there are outliers like Re-Destro who are corporate millionaires with a vast infleunce, but for the most part all of the ruling power in society belongs to the heroes. While the villains are for the most part, homeless people, outlaws, with little resources or influence of society as a whole. Villains are outcasted and blamed for society, despite being you know... outcasts, people outside of society.

Which is why Villains themselves will always be nothing more than a symptom. Even the League of Villains themselves is just a rebellion. They’re not rebelling for the hell of it, they were created in direct response to problems already presence in society, and they demand that society address those problems. The ones who hold the real power over a corrupt system are heroes, villains are always going to be reactionary to that corrupt system. Sure, the answer might not be ‘destroy the entirety of society to make it better’, but the League are also the only people trying to do anything. Only the outsiders and the outcasts seem to be aware that something is wrong in the first place, because they’re the most directly affected by it.

So, like Camus we are asked to consider who is really responsible for the fall of society?

2. Twice and Hawks, to be an individual or member of society.

Which is why the way Hawks acts the past two chapters is so unheroic, even in accordance of the very loose ideas of what the story set up as what a hero is. Hawks isn’t trying to save Twice. He’s trying to save himself, his own cosncience, because he thinks it’s wrong to kill a “good person” like Twice. He’s acting to save Twice with no regards of what Twice’s wants and needs are.

Rather than try to understand and sympathize with Twice, Hawks approaches him using his entire identity as a hero as a wall between them. He acts in the role of a hero, I am going to capture you the villain and put you in jail. Hawks makes this impersonal as possible and sinks into the role of being a hero, while Twice is still acting as Twice the person.

However, Hawks only cares about saving Twice. Because Twice is the one he dubs as a good person and therefore worthy of being saved. He doesn’t care enough to empathize with the rest of the league, even though Twice cares more about his friends than his life.

Which is what Twice explicitly calls out. That Hawks is not acting like a hero in this situation. He’s not acting selflessly. He’s not trying to save anyone. He’s only acting in ways that satisfy himself. Hawks is acting to reinforce his incorrect world view, that he has to be the one who makes sacrifices for the sake of a faceless majority, even if that person they’re sacrificing is crying and begging in front of them.

Twice brings up the idea that Toga despite being a killer out for blood is also a person who was incredibly kind to him in a moment of weakness. Which is something we the reader know, that all of the members of the league of villains, violent as they are are still people, who are capable of both good an bad. Most of the league members didn’t even fall becausethey were bad, but because of abusive circumstances, parental abuse for Toga, Shigaraki, failure of the social safety net in Twice’s case, victim of societal prejudgice in Spinner’s case.

What Twice suggests is that all of these people that hero society leaves behind are still capable of good, capable of selflessness. Shigaraki is again and again called one of the most violent characters in the series who only cares about destroying for its own sake, and yet he’s the one who gave Twice a home.

The league faces this accusation constant times. That the reason they do crime is because they’re bad people, that they don’t think about how other people feel at all, that’s the only explanation for why they would strike out against society.

And time and time again we’re shown the opposite is the case. Dabi thinks about the heroes he’s killed so much he feels himself slowly going insane. Shigaraki feels such intense remorse for killing his family in what was a total accident, that not only does he take all the blame on himself for years, but he also purposefully triggers himself with their dead hands so he’ll never escape from the guilt of killing them. These are all people fully aware of the bad they are committing underneath their actions, but also who believe otherwise that they have no choice but to do these bad things.

The league of villains has to rebel, because the response of hero society to all of their damage has always been the same thing. Exactly what Hawks does this chapter.

Shut up and take it. Hawks is telling Twice to lie down and stop fighting against him because 1) he doesn’t want to kill Twice and it would be easier on his conscience, and 2) this is what Hawks has always done.

Hawks always chooses to sacrifice himself. He always chooses the good of society over what he personally wants. He’ll always choose the worst option for himself if it means he can do better for others. Hawks in the face of Twice’s individualist rebellion can’t really handle it, because Hawks has never fought back against his own shackles of society.

His plan has always been if he does everything the hero commission tells him to do then... that will somehow help him achieve his society where heroes have more freedom and agency in their lives. I’ve been over Hawks’ backstory a few times, but it makes sense for Hawks to be caught in this negative feedback loop. He’s been conditioned to fight all alone and achieve everything on his own by sacrificing himself his entire life, he’s basically had the ideals of a self sacrificing hero forced onto him. His personality has been intentionally molded to heroics, the same way that Shigaraki was molded to become a villain.

Which is why when Hawks gets someone who genuinely sympathizes with him and treats him like a person, and suggests to hawks something that he has never heard in his entire life, that he can rely on other people, that he can trust other people, that he can let other people help him Hawks genuinely does not get it.

He chooses to fall back on what his abusers have taught him, rather than to trust Twice’s genuine good will. Which is once again common abuse victim behavior, a lot of abuse victims regress and fall into bad patterns because their abuse is what they know, whereas healthy relationships and boundaries are unknown to them.

Twice even says so, that Hawks actions are pitaible here. How sad is it that hero or villain, nobody in the world trusts Hawks? He doesn’t have a friend on either side now, and he’s trying to kill the one person who sympathized with him genuinely as a person because Hawks doesn’t know what to do with that sympathy, or escape the cage he’s been trapped in his entire life.

The difference between Hawks and Twice is that while they have both been wronged by society, Twice fights back with his legitimate grievance against society, whereas Hawks will never fight back. He chooses to let himself suffer if that means that the faceless majority will be spared his suffering. It seems like Hawks is making the sefless choice here, but in choosing not to fight back he’s also repeating the evils of hero society.

You can see it in his monologue to Twice. The one hero that Hawks idealizes the most, is one of the most abusive members of hero society. An abuser who did to his own children what he hero commission did to Hawks. Hawks holds up to an ideal the most toxic element of hero society, the idea that heroics is just numbers. Hawks runs his hero agency the exact same way Endeavor does, efficiency, above all else, it’s just Hawks cares more about saving people and Endeavor cares more about catching villains and resolving cases. His ideal hero is somebody impersonal like Endeavor, who puts efficiency and speed above all else. Hawks’ goal is to be the most effecitve tool possible.

In Hawks’ choice to side with hero society however, we see him passively repeating the abuse that was done to him.

Hawks encourages Endeavor of all people to train his interns hard. Because the hero commission is planning to use a bunch of fifteen year olds as their backup in case their main plan fails. Which means Hawks is actively encouraging what was done to him, (being robbed of his childhood and raised as a child soldier solely for the purpose of being a hero) to be done to the UA students as well. He doesn’t really interact well with Bakugo, someone who is also a child prodigy who has been affected all of their lives due to the fact that he had a quirk suited for being a hero.

By choosing to passively do what he’s told, Hawks ends up perpetuating Hero Society’s ills. Hawks’ offer to Twice isn’t really one that will genuinely save him (ie guaranteeing the safety of him and all of his friends if they stop violently resisting) but rather he offers Twice the chance to conform so he can fit in with society’s ideals. Just like Hawks always takes the choice to conform himself rather than try to be an individual in any way.

Which is why we finally get to Twice’s accusation. That Hawks isn’t acting heroic. He’s not trying to save the person in front of him that’s crying and begging for help.

Why does Dabi get the jump on Hawks? It’s because Hawks’ wings aren’t meant to be used as weapons like this. he always trained himself so that his feathers could hear even the faintest cries for help. Suddenly Twice is literally screaming for help in front of him, and Hawks ignores him. He’s no longer acting like a hero, and so therefore his wings that can hear anything are now deaf, just like Hawks is trying to be by repressing everything else but his mission.

3. Dabi and Hawks

Once again there’s a point of foiling here. Twice and Hawks are both loners to their respective organizations. Dabi never tells other people what his intentions are and he acts with a begrudging sense of teamwork at best.

As much as Dabi complains that he doesn’t care about Shigaraki’s backstory, that he doesn’t want to play friends with the rest of the league, he still in the end gives his absolute all in the fight against Deka City, and fights to the point where he’s literally burning himself alive on the inside because the elague asked him to.

Hawks and Dabi are by nature very two faced people. They are both made up of two individuals, the person they present to the world and everyone around them, and then their real self which they choose to keep hidden.

They are also total opposites in how they present themselves. Dabi acts like he’s callous and cold on the surface. He pretends to be someone who enjoys killing, when Snatch accuses him of being behind a string of murders he basically laughs it off.

However, we’re shown in private that he’s the opposite of his public persona. Rather than someone who can laugh off what he’s done, and enjoys being a villain he thinks about what he’s done so much, with so much remorse that he feels himself going crazy. This is the opposite of how Hawks shows himself. In public Hawks is a very likable, carefree guy, who is totally dedicated to saving other people. Whereas when he reveals what is his “true self” in front of Twice, he plays the role of ruthless villain the same way that Dabi does with snatch. He even goes so far as to taunt Twice for trusting him.

The way they both present themselves is totally reversed, Hawks plays the good guy while deep down he considers himself to be the conniving bad guy. Dabi plays the bad guy while deep down he considers himself to be a very conscience heavy person who knows what he’s doing is wrong but is trying to accomplish some kind of good.

There’s a reason that Hawks’ entire face is shown in shadow in this cene. Hawks is incredibly repressed. He represses his ruthless side, in order to play not only the hero, but the helpless tool of the hero commission. The reason he’s shown in shadow is because his repressed side is coming out. All of his cold caluclation, the fact that he doesn’t trust a single person, all of these are traits that Hawks himself is unaware of but are nonetheless part of who he is as a person.

Dabi expresses what Hawks represses. Hawks has all the bad traits under the surface to appear good, Dabi wears all of his bad traits on the surface to appear bad. They really are inversions of one another, and they’re also both fixated around the ideal of heroes.

There’s a lot of debate over whether Hawks or Dabi gave the narration line “It’s the fault of us scummy heroes” it actually doesn’t matter who said it, the reason it was drawn over both of them is because it applies to both of them. Hawks and Dabi are both people who were failed by, and even manipulated by scummy heroes in their life, Dabi by Endeavor, and Hawks by the Hero Commission. When Hawks even admits that heroes were not what he thought they were, and he feels trapped and used by them to Twice the image that appears in his mind is Endeavor’s back turning away from them.

Dabi and Hawks have been wronged by heroes, and raised and molded to be heroes as child soldiers and they both keep this idealized image of a way heroes should act in their heart. However, both of them have completely opposite responses, Dabi rebels, and Hawks submits.

They have opposite reactions to their abuse, Dabi externalizing by trying to change the world around him (persecuting scummy heroes who don’t fit his stadndards) and Hawks internalizes he tries to change the world by changing himself. Dabi punishes others for not reaching the ideal of perfect hero that he holds, whereas Hawks tries to change himself and tries to become the perfect hero that is always selfless, and always chooses to save the most people possible.

Neither of these are healthy choices, and both of them are destructive. You can’t even argue that Hawks’ choices only harm himself anymore, because we see him literally choosing to murder a person that is crying and begging in front of him, because he’s convinced himself he doesn’t have any choices in this situation. Just because you don’t make a choice for yourself doesn’t mean you’ll never harm someone, in fact your refusal to act on your own will can lead you to do something you don’t want to do and being unable to stop yourself which is clearly the case for Twice and Hawks.

The one difference between Dabi and Hawks however, is the people surrounding them. Dabi is antisocial, always acts like he’s not a member of the group, and yet the people around Dabi choose to trust him anyway.

Hawks and Dabi say a lot of things about who they are, but then reveal who they are in their actions. This too, is where they are inverses of each other. Dabi constantly insults his friends, doesn’t act like he’s a part of the group, says he doesn’t trust them, but ultimately when the chips are down Dabi gives his all to fighting with the league of villains. He complains about it the whole time, but he does it. Part of the reason why Dabi ultimately sides with them is because Shigaraki does give Dabi this trust to go off and do his own thing as long as he comes back at the end of the day.

Dabi could have easily turned out to be someone just like Hawks, not interested in the goals of the League of Villains as a whole, and instead just there to use them for his own benefit. I believe his actions in the latest chapter show that he’s not. Dabi goes out of his way to save Twice, because Twice actually is a comrade to him no matter how much Dabi pretends otherwise.

Now we don’t know if Dabi ultimately invited Hawks into the league knowing that he would betray them, or what his plans are, but ultimately his actions are the opposite of Hawks. Hawks the hero chooses to kill Twice in this scene. Dabi, the villain chooses to save Twice. Dabi is in a sense fighting for his comrades in this scene, where Hawks is fighting against the idea of camraderie and trust. He even, literally kills the symbols of all of twice’s comrades when he pulls duplicates of them. Hawks and Dabi are very similiar people, but in different environments, Dabi exists in ane environment of trust, Hawks in one where no trust exists, and because of that Dabi is able to make better choices in the moment.

We see Hawks’ visor shatter in this scene just like it did in the pro hero arc, and it’s important to remember what the signfiicance of that visor shattering means. His visor is basically his mask he wears at all time. The thought he expresses when his visor shatters is what is underneath the mask, that he’s not good enough.

Hawks decision to always sacrifice comes from his own sense of inferiority. He doesn’t feel like he’s enough to save the people he wants to save. The reason he doesn’t try sincerely to save Twice is because he doesn’t think he can. His self worth is so abysmally low. The reason that Hawks doesn’t try to fight back, to try to be a person, to do what he wants which is clearly not to hurt Twice is because Hawks himself has never been in an environment that sees him as a person.

Which is why Dabi gets the upper hand on him. Hawks can make plans, he can act as ruthlessly as possible, but you can’t suppress yourself to the extent that Hawks does. Everything that’s suppressed will eventually come out. If suppression worked, Dabi wouldn’t have half of his body burned off, Twice wouldn’t be split in two, and Himiko wouldn’t have gone crazy with blood lust. What Hawks was suppressing was how much he did not want to hurt Twice in that moment. He wasn’t being true to who he really was, and what he wanted, and as Dabi calls him out for sentiment tripped him up.

What Hawks needs to do is ironically, not learn to be a better hero, but learn to be like Dabi. If he would only allow himself to be true to himself then he would have been able to save Twice in that moment. Hawks, Twice, Dabi, all three of them are good people but the current hero society doesn’t allow them to be good. They all have to learn to fight against society to be the individuals they want to be.

#dabi #hawks #takami keigo #twice #jin bubaigawara #hawks meta #league of villain meta #mha meta #my hero academia meta #lov meta

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boog-shitposting-edition · 4 years

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So I been playing a ton of Kenshi and watched all of the Mandalorian in a single day shortly before and it’s got me thinking about what makes what I consider a good action hero, because there was definitely a time where I thought the phrase “good action hero” was an oxymoron.

I grew up around some angry, unstable dudes who had that bad habit of watching horror movies and opining that in the same situation they would simply shoot the monster with the gun the character was holding. I got some views on the model of masculinity that sees the male ideal as functionally a tool for performing violence, condescension and occasional reddit-approved banter with all other emotional responses pared away or suppressed. This seems like a good way to manufacture a product for performing labor rather than developing a whole functional human being. So I generally veer away from that sort of thing pretty hard.

So I’m resistant to the Mandalorian at first, right? All the ads are basically star wars apocryphica and a power armored fighty gun boy. The last star wars thing I’d seen was The Rise Of Skywalker and my faith in the franchise is low. But it’s been a hot minute, the hype dies down, and my girlfriend is a better and more patient fan than I’ll ever be so we give it a go. And the first thing that really nails it for me is what a DORK the mando is. I’m delighted, his life is violence interdispersed with being an absolute buttfumble disaster. He slips and falls over things he could never have predicted, he burns his life down for a baby he finds in the desert. Pedro Pascal references Boba Fetts stiff menace and plays it off as someone who has no social skills other than stiff menace and it’s FASCINATING. Him explaining to the village woman who is obviously into him that he hasn’t taken the armor off since he was thirteen isn’t a badass declaration of martial devotion, it is the single saddest and most awkward interaction I have ever seen filmed and it hits all the harder for the fact that this is a character I’ve mostly ever seen as an action figure with a spring loaded missile backpack. Instead of being a faceless emotionless action-cudgel, Pedro amps up the body language in his acting to really sell you this heavily psychologically damaged, desperate, viking-space-catholic mess with no life skills other than violence and a devotion to his people’s creed that borders on obsession. Rather than paring himself down making him a psychological fortress, the Mando is an incredibly obvious walking raw nerve (”I’m not sad-” “Yes you are.”) So, Kenshi.

I’ve heard about this game on and off a few years and finally got it a few days ago. It’s been in early access since 2012, appears to be mostly getting finished by its modding community, and glitches like absolute woah. There’s no core storyline, just a post-apocalyptic setting with some surprisingly detailed autogenerated NPC interactions with some options for starting conditions and the sole goal of surviving. It’s essentially a rapid sequence of story prompts hidden underneath a closely interlocked system of XP grinding, survival mechanics and dismemberment algorithms, and is appallingly my shit.

My first run at the game got pretty far, went from a lone confused desert wanderer to a 13 man village running a tidy copper-mining operation to trade with the ant people. In the early game, fight mechanics are basically a death sentence; my first character immediately got her leg torn off by a goat and I had to restart. All skills grow only by excersizing them; you have to fight to get better at fighting, you have to LOSE fights to gain toughness, and when you lose a fight the consequences can range from “these bandits are stealing all your food” to “this monster is eating your leg/heart/head” to “these slavers are taking your character away and your game experience is Different now.” And while I was proud of myself for finding a way to survive, grow and thrive with a low-combat squad, once I tried the basebuilding mechanics that basically just meant my town was a source of free food and money for local bandits while my squad starved to death, unable to abandon our locale. So I got fed up and restarted.

As mentioned the game gives you different start positions; wanderer gives you 1 character, some money and pants. Guy and his dog gives you a dog, which is fun. Exiled officer starts you with good skills and the hatred of your former commander, which complicates things. Cannibal Hunters starts you already in a fistfight with 30 cannibals. It’s exciting times. But I figure this time I’d like to start my squad a LITTLE more capable of defending themselves, so I look at the Holy Sword start; you’re a bandit who starts with a stolen holy weapon, minuses in most skills, no money and a 20,000 bounty on your head from both major factions.

So I proceed to character creation and notice I can pick whatever I want for player species/subspecies with this start. There’s robot people and warriors made of stone and baseline humans and all sorts of fun options, but you remember those ant people I mentioned before? In game they’re called the Hivers, you find ‘em in 3 recruitable varieties (prince, worker drone and soldier) and they have an interesting in-universe quirk; ones that grow up in the hive are pheramone-addicted, chemically wired into the needs and wants of all of their fellows, but if you’re away from your kin for over a fortnight this addiction dries out incredibly fast and cannot be reinstated. Hivers who ever spend any time away from the hive are declared “lost ones,” and are often taken advantage of in the outside world as they long for a new community.

In survival sims I dont often play dedicated fighters, I always feel like being a brutal fight-beast isn’t really in the spirit of finding a niche to exploit and growing from a fumbling plebian to a major power. But I was already starting this game with my ONLY advantage being a nice sword. And the soldier hivers gain a buff to experience gained for melee attack and toughness, and a debuff to literally all else.

Manual labor. Science. Engineering. Farming. Cooking. First aide. In a setting that heavily prioritized your ability to survive using multiple vital skill sets, my character would start with negatives in his skills for putting on band-aids and FEEDING himself. So I gave it a go.

Getting more wild here, it turns out the Holy Sword opening also takes place in a time in the setting with more recent warfare, so a bunch of the starting villages are destroyed and it appears that more of the nearby cities are controlled by the factions that have a bounty on me. So my character CAN’T rely on other people or meet anyone to recruit at first. He can run, he can scrounge and scavenge, and as mentioned above starting characters can take lethal damage from GOATS so he can’t even hunt for food; the only way I was getting a meal was if I robbed someone or ran into merchants on the road I could hawk my salvage to for a scrap of bread.

He eventually finds someone willing to join him on his travels in spite of being flat broke, a shek named Ruka running from a dishonerable loss on the battlefield, and comparing their skills he’s so useless for everything besides combat that I assign him to bodyguard her. And again, this game’s appeal is that the survival mechanics make good story prompts, so imagine that in character.

“Fine, I need a change. I’ll join you.” “Thank god. Lead the way boss.” “What?”

Things regarding my characters bounty are starting to heat up in town, so we head north into hiver territory. We get attacked by bandits and heavily injured, my soldier gets knocked out, so Ruka picks him up and carries him until we find a hive town. I saw these guys all the time in my last playthrough, I survived by selling to them, they’re super friendly, should be fine. Ruka walks into the local shop and before I can have her ask for directions and a medikit the shopkeeper is already shouting- “SKREEE! LOST ONE! GET OUT! LOST ONES BRING MADNESS”

Apparently, my protagonist being a hiveless hiver means there’s a THIRD faction that’s hostile to him; his own goddamn people. Ruka has to leave him under a tree not just outside but like 50 feet from the edge of town, and just has to hope none of the local wild megafauna eats him while she rushes back in to buy things from the now abruptly friendlier shopkeep.

I’m finally sitting there, having Ruka watch my soldier hiver sleep while she cooks scavanged meat and waits for him to finish healing, that I realize what the story being generated here is and it’s a good one; a Hive soldier whose only skills are violence, frantically scavenging and stealing to survive until he can find the one circumstance where he’s comfortable, sacrificing himself to protect others. He steals a sword that’s obviously important to two major governments, just because he knows it’s powerful and thinks that power will justify his continued existence as a hiveless soldier drone, essentially buying his way back into his people’s good graces by performing his function. Literally wandering the world until he found a single person who was willing to boss him around again and devoting himself to their defense to a state of pathological damage just to feel like he has a hive again. It’s sad. It’s badass. It’s deeply, unsettlingly pathetic.

But I also think it’s what makes a really really good gruff action hero!

Hypercompetence in violence is really interesting when you acknowledge the damage it can do to your humanity in the storytelling! The Mandalorian is unsuccessful in repressing his empathy response so he just tries to tough through the pain it causes him as best he can, until he meets The Child and it snaps. The Hiver is essentially playing pretend at being still valued as a product for committing violence, even in the face of being openly rejected for his previously esteemed role. This stuff is INTERESTING.

TL;DR version, a lot of these “supersoldier raised by the military/fight wizards/karate” characters are super boring and obnoxious when they’re put forward as power fantasies, and really interesting when you realize that being raised by Fight Wizards is why they’ve never had a girlfriend and called their handgun “mom” once.

#kenshi #star wars #mandalorian

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thespiralgrimoire · 4 years

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So just realized that all of the female cast members (and probably some of the male ones) are based on fairytales Grey is Cinderella, Noelle is Snow White, Vanessa is rapunzal, Yuno might be Peter Pan or at least Sylph is tinkerbell

I got an ask similar to this quite a while ago, but it was a little more cumbersome and I wasn't sure how to respond to it....

I think this is an interesting take but personally I think it's a little reductive. There are definitely some similarities between the BC ladies and the Disney princesses, but I think to say that any of them are based on Disney princesses is a disservice to them as characters. While the BC universe is definitely loosely based in a European fantasy setting, I would think that the fact that it's written from a Japanese perspective would mean that the similarities to our classic Western fairytails can't be taken for granted.

HOWEVER, there is also the point to be made that the Disney Princess stories are based in tropes that show up in a LOT of traditions and stories, so maybe it would be more accurate to say that these characters' stories contain a lot of the same elements that appear in folklore all around the world?

That being said, I think it's fun to play with what we know, and I don't know a lot of Japanese fairytales. So let's take a look at some of the ones you listed, because I spent $75,000 on a Bachelor's degree in English literature and I don't get to use it much.

☘️ Of all of these, Grey is DEFINITELY the most obvious one. Like, it’s every element of Cinderella... The step sisters, the mistreatment, the false identity. But I think that’s is very important how it differs from the classic tale to play on Grey’s sense of self.

The classic Cinderella story doesn’t paint Cinderella as a self pitying damsel who needs to be rescued. She is upset with her situation, she knows it’s not fair, and she knows she’s entitled to a nice night out, especially after she puts in the work in to make an outfit appropriate for the occasion. Her step sisters’ vindictive nature ruins this for her, not any fault of her own, which is why her fairy godmother steps in to right the wrongs of her situation.

Grey doesn’t have the sense of self that Cinderella has. Be it through abuse or quirks of her own personality, she’s a rather passive victim to her step sisters’ bullying, and instead of doing what she does despite of them like Cinderella, she does everything she can to please them. The ending result is more or less the same: they can’t be pleased. In both cases the step sisters retaliate violently: in Cinderella’s case, they destroy the dress she’s made for herself, and in Grey’s case, they drive Grey into the woods, taking her attempt to please them as a personal insult.

Grey gets no fairy godmother, and no ball. And unlike Cinderella, she gets rescued by a “prince” character (as much as I loathe to call Gauche that, but an analogy does exist there, so let’s acknowledge it.) Gauche saves Grey in the literal sense, and he also gives her the courage to better her situation, which eventually leads her to develop a sense of self that is not “her step family’s doormat.” She varies from Cinderella in this way because Cinderella never had to make this personal jump in her narrative; she started her narrative already there. Whereas Grey was desperately trying to become something that someone would respect, Cinderella knew from the start that she was worthy of more than the world had given her.

But the nice thing about Grey’s narrative is that she IS working to be this person! She’s got to put in the work to get to where Cinderella is, but who knows? Maybe by the time she isn’t afraid to be her authentic self, she’ll get some help from an exterior source (a metaphorical fairy godmother character) or maybe that power will come from within (with this new magic she’s using to save Gauche?). If we stick with the fairytale princess narrative, her reward would be Gauche. Just like Cinderella was rewarded for her strength during an adverse time in her life, Grey will be rewarded for overcoming her insecurities.

☘️ I... gotta come clean here, I read “Snow White” but my brain went “Sleeping Beauty”, and I was all ready to talk about THAT fascinating analogy. So apologies if this one is a little lackluster while I get my fairytales straight.

I think this one is a little flimsy, but again, I prepared to talk about the wrong fairytale. Would we paint Magicula as the evil queen, wanting Noelle dead because she’s “fairer”? Or would her siblings be an abstract reading of the “evil queen” because Noelle looks too much like their mother, and therefore is the bane of their existance, like Snow White was for the evil queen? The Black Bulls as the seven dwarves is the one part of this I’m really digging, because it’s hilarious. But I think this one is a hard sell. Noelle has failed to be a victim to any serious threat for more than a few minutes because she’s always surrounded by people who fight tooth and nail for her, and she’s fighting every second to be stronger. Of course, that furthers the “Black bulls = seven dwarves” thing, which is just. So great. Snow White never had to do anything but housework. She doesn’t get stronger because strength was never a part of her equation.

☘️ Vanessa as Rapuzal is eh. She’s a classic princess trapped in a castle, but she’s the second one of those in the series (Charlotte being the other). In both cases, Yami saves them with a strange mix accidental concern and casual heroism. I think this says more about Yami as an accidental prince charming than it does about either of them as Disney princesses.

I haven’t seen Tangled, but from what I’ve gathered, there’s an analogy to be made here between Vanessa and Tangled Rapunzal being trapped by their mothers under the guise of caring for them. Hell yeah, can’t deny that connection! But it’s far from a sign of a fairytale princess. It’s just shitty parenting. Unfortunately, it’s rampant across all cultures, and therefore appears in all forms of media.

Charlotte’s case is, I believe, supposed to be a parody of a “strong independent woman” (which is a big problem I have with how she’s written but that’s a different conversation). There very well could be a specific fairytale that fits Charlotte’s case (Sh. Shrek?) but I think it’s meant to be more of a parody of the false persona she puts out than anything else.

Yami is really the one to look at here, since it’s not a coincidence that he’s rescued TWO of these fairytale-princess-knockoffs over the course of the story, and they both have unrequited crushes on him (although Vanessa’s is mostly for show). While Charlotte is a parody of a strong independent princess, Yami is a parody of Prince Charming. He doesn’t want the role, he didn’t ask for the role, he’s not looking for the role... He’s just doing what he’s doing and if he happens to rescue some ladies in peril, it’s just part of his day of wandering around busting through walls like the Koolaid man. That’s not a jab at Yami’s character. It doesn’t mean that he’s not a hero. Yami’s whole shtick is that you don’t have to be a conventionally handsome dude in a cape with a winning smile to be a hero. That’s the mantra he’s built the Black Bulls around. His whole character is a counterpoint to the traditional hero stereotype with Fuegoleon (and to a lesser degree, Nozel) as the point he’s countering.

Yami and the Black Bulls exist to make the point that there is more than one way to be right, to be strong, to be brave, to be heroic. You don’t have to look, act, think, or feel a certain way to be on the right side of things.

☘️ Okay so Yuno as Peter Pan is the one I’ve really been chomping at the bit to talk about because while I don’t think you’re right, I can’t decide if you’re wrong???

I don’t know what other stories and traditions could influence Bell’s design, so based on what I know, she’s a dead ringer for Tinkerbell. Moving past that.

Yuno as Peter Pan has me WILDING because he’s literally the host for an unborn baby. I don’t know how much harder you can drill in the “Never grow up” theme.

Does it really hold up past that though? I kind of want it to, just because the very premise of Yuno as Licht’s baby screams it so hard. But I don’t think it does.Which is a shame, because it could.

Yuno was a crybaby as a kid, which is a very infantile trait, but when he and Asta made their pact to be the wizard king, he went the opposite direction of “never grow up” and rapidly matured in order to accomplish this dream. We don’t really know how else Yuno may have changed besides “he doesn’t cry anymore”, but from the way he acts and the way he’s treated at the orphanage, it seems to me that a lot was placed on him. And that carries into his magic knight career. Because of his talent and his resolve, he was made to face some very adult problems at a very young age.

Major manga spoilers ahead!

This carries into the current events we’re seeing, too. There is no semblance of “never grow up” in the way that Yuno acts or is being treated as a member of the Golden Dawn. He’s the vice captain at... what, 16? 17? and he’s just found out that he’s also the next heir of a kingdom that he does not call his home-- that’s he’s considered the enemy for his entire career. Then he’s forced to handle the violent deaths of half his squad, the severe injury of the other half, and the kidnapping of his captain, which leaves him in charge. We see him give a big old holler about all this, but I what’s really interesting to me is that he doesn’t cry. The most infantile part of his identity, which he abandoned to get where he is now, does not come back to him in a moment of weakness, at a time where he very much has every write to feel like a helpless child. Whether he wants to or not, Yuno is no longer allowed to be a child, and he will never get the opportunity to be one again.

I guess you could say that this may mean that we’ll see him want to be Peter Pan, that he’ll grow nostalgic for the days where everything was simpler and he had the time to cry, the freedom to be scared and confused and feel sorry for himself. I would love to see that explored in his character, but I really don’t think that we’ll see it happen. In both the meta and the story universe, there’s no time for Yuno to have that breakdown and regression. It wouldn’t fit the pacing and Yuno’s got shit to do. Yuno isn’t Peter Pan. He’s lost the chance to be.

So in conclusion, I can see why a lot of people want to assign fairytale roles to characters in Black Clover, and I do think that the creators play with the concept themselves, but I think to boil any of the Black Clover characters down to a single character or fit them into a single fairytale is a disservice to the characters themselves, and overlooks everything else going on with them. None of the black clover characters are “based” on a fairytale character. Their stories may take inspiration from them, but there is far more going on with each and every one of them to ever take such similarities at face value.

#grey #vanessa enoteca #noelle silva #charlotte roselei #yami sukehiro #yuno #black clover #spinda tea #call me a big fuckin bottle rim glasses wearing pocket protector pointdexter nose in a book nerd #but I really miss writing essays #I would fucking LOVE to do more of these #if anyone wants me to #but no one probably does LOL #bc fairytales

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cat-stark · 5 years

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theonsa + university shenanigans!

anon, this is quite possibly the most ridiculous thing i’ve ever written, but i had a blast.

THEON: Babe, I’m willing to do a lot for you, but not this.

THEON: I’ve grown as a person since you’ve seen me last.

THEON: I have a conscience now.

ROBB: Um???

ROBB: I saw you three hours ago?

ROBB: Also you have the moral backbone of a chocolate eclair?

[read on ao3]

THEON: Oh fuck off with the John Mulaney quotes. I hate Jon for making you watch him.

ROBB: It’s like his duty. I’m pretty sure John Mulaney is the only successful English major, so Jon needs someone to look up to.

THEON: Literally how the fuck did you land Margaery?

THEON: Speaking of whom, I’m not willing to help you cheat on her.

ROBB: Did you use ‘whom’ correctly? God how stoned are you?

ROBB: And excuse??? The fuck??? You dare???

THEON: ??? You literally texted me “So there’s this girl…”

ROBB: For JON, but go off I guess

ROBB: Also don’t fucking play like you’re suddenly honor bound.

ROBB: You’re just terrified of my girlfriend

THEON: Also true, but she’s not special. I’m terrified of a lot.

ROBB: You’re a lot.

ROBB: But are you going to help or not?

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In Theon’s defense he hadn’t really expected his night to wind up like this.

On the other hand - and why the fuck was he debating the other side, when he was literally talking to himself in his head, and trying to defend himself? - he should have known that nothing good was going to come out of tonight. Sure, he hadn’t expected to wind up in Sansa fucking Stark’s dorm room wearing nothing but skin tight swim shorts and holding a goat in his arms, but honestly, he should have expected something along those lines, considering that Robb had texted him about a girl.

(The last time Robb had texted Theon those words they had wound up drunk at a bar, where the girl in question had convinced the two of them that the circle of life meant that every time someone died, their spirit was put into whatever being was born at the exact moment of their death.

Bran had been forced to come rescue them, and he was the one who had convinced them - when they were sober - that he was occasionally possessed by a raven with three eyes.)

Theon had fucking known better, but he was in a shitty mood, because had received his financial accounting exam back, and he had done abysmally well, thereby destroying his dreams of being kicked out of the business program, and god forbid doing something he actually cared about instead, like teaching seven year olds how to tie their fucking shoes and how to read an analog clock. It was fucking tragic and Theon Greyjoy was the only person for the job, but if his father found out about all the early childhood development classes he’d been taking, he would have bigger problems than the one he had currently found himself in.

Which was…yeah, it was a problem.

Not only because he was standing in the middle of Sansa Stark’s bedroom, as previously mentioned, but because she was sitting cross legged on her bed - and fuck crossing her legs did nothing to hide just how fucking long they were - wearing nothing but a long-sleeved Winterfell University shirt that was too big for her. Theon reckoned it might have been Robb’s, which honestly just made her kind of hotter. He probably ought to do some serious self-reflection, or at the very least, talk to Sam about it. But Theon was comfortable with his level of fucked up, and Sam was only any good at psychoanalyzing someone when he had at least two joints. Theon would rather just smoke the joints himself.

Even worse than what she was wearing - which, really all Theon could think about was removing her clothes - was the wide eyed stare Sansa was currently fixing him with. Her eyes were already so fucking wide and blue. It should literally be illegal. At the very least, against the fucking handbook. Theon hadn’t been aware that the school had a handbook until Jon had brought it up at some point - fucker probably jerked off to it, fucking weirdo - but they did, and he was fairly certain that Sansa Stark’s big blue Disney princess eyes were violating some sort of obscure rule. Jon had already pointed out a handful of small clauses that Theon would be mildly concerned about, if he ever managed to think about something other than Sansa fucking stark. Which he didn’t exactly manage often. Which brought him to his current problem.

“You’re lucky my roommate isn’t here.”

Theon blanched. Good god, Theon would literally never hear the end of it if Margaery had been in here. As it was, she was probably already smirking at his expense from wherever she was. Robb’s girlfriend was terrifying, and insanely omniscient. She was the only one who could actually rival Bran Stark - and that little asshole was an actual psychic, Theon refused to believe differently. She probably had some innate sense for things like this.

This being the fact that Theon was stupidly in love with her best friend, who was currently wearing only a long-sleeved shirt and panties, and not tiny shorts like Theon had previously assumed.

God he was hyperventilating.

“This is all Robb’s fault.”

Sansa rolled her eyes. “Well obviously.”

“Also a bit Jon’s. He’s into this girl now.” Sansa’s eyes lit up, but Theon barreled forward. It was Marge’s job to keep her up to date on the gossip. Also, Theon didn’t actually know who the girl was. “And apparently she wanted to do this G.O.A.T. yoga. All of the signs were advertising it in the student commons.”

Sansa nodded along, as if all of this was making perfect sense. Theon could have kissed her then and there. He could have kissed her just about any time of day. Thing was, he never did. Fucking coward.

“Well, G.O.A.T. yoga took itself a little too seriously. They had actual goats.” Theon paused dramatically, waiting for Sansa’s reaction. When the expected surprise never came, Theon’s brow furrowed. “Who has goats at yoga?”

“Um. Well it is goat yoga? I’m…perplexed by your confusion here Theon.”

He rolled his eyes. “Well yeah, but like, greatest of all time yoga. Like Gregor Clegane is the greatest of all time.”

At that, Sansa sat up straighter. “Setting aside your blatant disrespect as sheer ignorance , and praying that you aren’t serious, considering that Sandor is by far the superior Clegane, goat yoga is actually a thing. It’s not G.O.A.T. yoga. It’s literally yoga with goats.”

Theon’s eyes darkened - gods Sansa was hot when she talked sports. She was hot all of the time, but now Theon was imagining fucking her in a jersey, and nothing else. When wasn’t he imagining fucking Sansa, honestly though? His fantasies were rarely that original - they just featured Sansa.

(He wasn’t Pod. Poor fucker actually admitted - while drunk off his ass - that he had once created an entire Dungeons & Dragons level fantasy, complete with actual dice and a dungeon master - not in a kinky way. But Pod had also had a threesome, so needless to say Robb, Theon, Jon, and Sam had all shown up to Pod’s the next time he invited them to try D&D.)

“The flyers clearly were marked as G.O.A.T. As in the letters of ‘goat’ spelled out, with periods in between each one.” Theon was growing a bit agitated, but that might have more to do with the goat that was currently squirming in his arms.

“Theon. It’s goat yoga. I promise. It does not stand for ‘greatest of all time’.”

Theon gaped at her. “Then why the fuck would they put fucking periods in?” Sansa burst out laughing, and the goat bleated angrily in his arms, and tried to kick out. “No, honestly. You’re the marketing guru here. You have to know how to make posters and shit for communications, right? Haven’t you taken a class on advertising yet? Surely you know that’s a fucking stupid thing to do?”

Sansa frowned. “I’m an agricultural economics major.”

Theon stared at her, mouth slightly ajar. “Robb told me you were doing communications!”

She snorted. “Robb doesn’t even know what major he is.”

Which - fair fucking point.

But also -

“God that’s hot.”

Sansa’s eyebrows rose even higher - if possible - and Theon felt himself wanting to sink into the ground even more - if possible.

“There’s…literally nothing remotely hot about my major,” Sansa said slowly. “There is an incredible dearth of ‘sexy agricultural economist’ costumes. Not even on Etsy. I’ve checked.” She said this so primly and matter-of-fact, that Theon had to do a double take, before realizing she was absolutely serious. Meaning she had been searching for sexy costumes.

Sansa did the incredible thing - okay, every fucking thing she did was incredible, but this was actually supernatural or some shit - where she read his fucking mind and said, “Halloween is just around the corner.”

And wasn’t that a fucking glorious thought, Sansa Stark in a sexy Halloween costume? God, Theon was already half hard thinking of it, but he was holding a goat, and that felt vaguely sacrilegious. Or something. Theon worshiped the Drowned God, but he was pretty sure one of the faiths had something to do with goats. Point was, it was a highly inconvenient time for this problem to arise .

“You could wear whatever you want, you’re the sexy part.”

Sansa’s lips quirked into a smile, and it was enough to halt Theon’s impressive attempts at kicking himself with his own mind. Or maybe he should just call up Arya, and ask her to do it for him. Come to think of it, he actually had an unending list of fierce women who would happily kick his ass. Speaking of -

“I’m hiding in here. By the way.” Theon blurted out the words, knowing that he was making less sense the longer he stayed in the presence of Sansa. It was a casualty of proximity, but frankly, since it was her fucking fault, she should be used to it. Even Dr. Lannister had been rendered speechless by her, and the man never fucking shut his mouth. Thank god he was head over heels for Dr. Tarth, because oh gods, Theon couldn’t compete with a smug, blonde asshole. It was exactly Sansa’s unfortunate type.

Not that Theon was really in competition. He was quite content pining from afar.

“You’re hiding in here. With a goat.”

But really, what sort of questions could even be asked? No, truly, what the fuck was a beautiful young co-ed supposed to say to her older brother’s best friend, who was currently dressed in indecently tight swim shorts that Loras had given him as a gag gift last Christmas, that had the words ‘OLYMPIC GOLD’ printed in large blocky letters across his ass, clutching a squalling goat to his chest? It was like a fucking Renaissance painting - one that Sansa had better just accept and move on.

Really, Theon was far too sober for any of the night’s events to be remotely justifiable.

“Well, I already explained the G.O.A.T. yoga.”

“Goat yoga, and yes, go on.” God, she could hear the periods that Theon put in the word. He needed to fucking marry her. Maybe he should ask Gendry for advice. Sure, the man had literally proposed to the girl who took his virginity - approximately two hours after said deflowering took place - but Arya hadn’t killed him. Plus, the two fucked off to Vegas to actually get married - and Theon was still holding onto that tidbit for the opportune blackmail moment - so clearly he had gotten the whole desperation angle to work for him. And since Theon had significantly less than what Gendry was working with, he felt like he definitely had more desperation than his hopefully future brother-in-law.

“So we were there for the girl. Jon’s girl. But like…Dany was there too.” Honestly, that should have been enough information, but Sansa’s face was still carefully blank. “She had a goat Sansa. Dany.” She still wasn’t seeing the problem. “Daenerys Targaryen! She had a goat! I had to save him!”

“You do realize that Dany is the president of the ASCPA chapter here? She literally spends her Tuesdays trying to get people to sign pledges to go vegan. On Saturday she hosted the rally to protest the poaching of lizard lions. Theon you were there !”

Okay. That was technically a fair point.

Counter: Sansa had also been there, and she had been wearing thigh high boots paired with a long-sleeved dress that left Theon uncomfortably hard for the rest of the rally, and completely oblivious to whatever was happening around him.

“I mean, I didn’t think she was going to hurt the goat.” Now that Theon’s mind was a little clearer, he could see how ridiculous the idea had been. Dany did seem particularly attached to animals, and she seemed compassionate enough. She had zero regard for Theon’s mental health, considering how many times Theon had tried to stop by Yara’s for some decent fucking food, only to hear through the ridiculously thin walls, Dany screaming something about riding a dragon. Complete with his sister’s moans that were honestly more traumatizing than his childhood.

Fuck, he was probably going to blab that to Dr. Tarth on Monday, and she would start analyzing his relationship with his sister, make him cry, and gently scold him for trivializing his actual shitshow of a childhood. But whatever, it was a coping method, and it was his .

“Then what did you think?”

“Er,” Theon scratched the back of his head, which was a habit, and which looked effortlessly cool - a fact Theon knew , because he swore up and down he saw Sansa’s eyes darken a little - except it wasn’t quite as effortless or as cool, because he was still holding a fucking goat. “I may have been concerned that she was going to do some sort of ritualistic blood sacrifice that involved fire, a goat’s blood, and the full moon.”

Sansa stared at him, mouth open, for a full sixty seconds. It was terrible, because it gave Theon ample time to think about everything he’d like to do with that mouth and - fuck .

“Theon, have you been watching Riverdale alone again?”

Theon pouted.

“Robb has an evening class now, and Jon only likes period dramas.” Sansa also liked period dramas, and being classy and high brow with Jon. But she also watched women’s wrestling with Arya, and Spanish telenovelas with Rickon, and getting wine drunk and watching trashy reality television with Bran. And of course, Riverdale with Robb and Theon.

“Well why didn’t you ask me to watch it with you?”

Theon’s brain was currently short-circuiting. There wasn’t really a decent response to that, considering the answer - “I’m so fucking in love with you, and I may have already picked out the tie I’ll wear at our wedding, but also I want to fuck you a dozen ways into next Saturday, but also I want to sit down and talk mortgages and student loans with you,” - sounded fucking insane, and Theon wasn’t about to blow the best relationship he’d ever had. Even though their relationship consisted of Sansa being his best friend’s little sister.

Too impatient for Theon to answer, Sansa rolled her eyes, and began pushing books off of her bed, reaching for her laptop. “Theon, put the damn goat down, and get over here.”

He was maybe hyperventilating. He was pretty sure this was how most porn videos in a college setting began. Which - hey, he wasn’t complaining.

Taking a seat on Sansa’s bed, tentatively, he watched as she booted up her laptop, willing his heart not to skip a beat when he realized that her wallpaper was a picture of the time Theon had grabbed her round the waist and spun her wildly at the pumpkin patch, in the middle of a cornfield. It had been a disastrous outing, in which the Starks had discovered that Bran had hay fever, Jon had spent a literal hour picking a pumpkin, Robb had cried when he thought of all the awkward looking pumpkins that wouldn’t be selected - and then tried to take all of them - and Rickon and Arya had brought a godsawful mask so they could take turns scaring the living shit out of people in the corn maze. Gendry had also cried.

But Sansa had looked so lovely, with her cheeks flushed, and her eyes shining bright, that Theon hadn’t been able to stop himself. He had just reached over and started swinging her around, delighting in her shrieking giggles. By the time he had realized that Catelyn was taking pictures, he was too drunk on Sansa’s happiness to care.

The loud dun-dun of Netflix startled Theon out of his thoughts, and he glanced at Sansa, who was looking at him with the sort of tenderness that made him feel like she was performing the softest, most delicate vivisection known to man. He felt bare, but he still couldn’t look away from her Disney princess eyes.

(Seriously, it was incredible that there wasn’t a brightly colored animated musical about her. Then again, all of the things Theon imagined doing with her were not appropriate for children, and yes , Theon would of course be cast as her Prince Charming.

Suck it Jaime Lannister.)

“Hey. Any time you want to watch, just call. Seriously Theon. I’m right here.”

Theon swallowed, and nodded, and watched the small smile drift across Sansa’s lips. He longed to reach out and touch it - with his fingers, his lips, anything - but it wasn’t the time. Theon knew that. People could say what they wanted about him - and fucking hell there was plenty someone could say - but he had a good sense of timing. He wasn’t just waiting for some elusive, obscure ‘right moment’. But he was waiting all the same.

For now, Theon planned to do nothing more than curl up with his best friend’s younger sister, and watch the terrible teen soap opera on Netflix, while chilling, and decidedly not Netflix and chilling. And Theon knew there was every chance in the world that he would fall asleep in this bed, and he knew it was equally likely that Theon would spend all morning lazily kissing Sansa Stark if she allowed it, which - yeah, he kind of thought she might. But those were all maybes, and Theon never planned a fucking thing in his life.

The goat currently lying on the floor of Sansa’s bedroom was testament to that.

MARGAERY: [image]. Oh my god. Can you actually believe these two?

ROBB: What the fuck?

ARYA: fucking bless

GENDRY: Is that a goat?

JON: When Theon wakes up, please flip him off for me.

MARGAERY: With pleasure.

ARYA: did they plan this?

JON: Please, Theon doesn’t make plans. Speaking of which, Marge, on second thought, please pour ice cold water over him to wake him up.

ARYA: why do you text with punctuation???

JON: I’m an English major. It’s practically required.

ARYA: is it also required for you to be a little bitch?

ROBB: BURN

ROBB: But seriously guys. Why the fuck are Sansa and Theon cuddling with their eyes closed?

MARGAERY: It’s called sleeping dear.

ARYA: literally every fanfic i’ve read starts with this

JON: If you’re going to use the word ‘literally’, please use it correctly

MARGAERY: Oh sweetling. Every fanfic I’ve written starts with this.

ARYA: jon i will l i t e r a l l y kill you

ARYA: and links or it didn’t happen marge

MARGAERY: [link]

ARYA: fuck me up, bedsharing and enemies to lovers

MARGAERY: I love this fic more than your brother

ROBB: Wait…I thought that was the one where the characters are banging? Like literally all the time????

JON: For the love of the gods, please use literally correctly

ROBB: You only care about grammar this much when you get laid, so Theon and I say you’re welcome

ARYA: speaking of theon and getting laid last night…

ROBB: WHAT IS GOING ON?

GENDRY: Is no one seriously going to talk about the goat?

#theonsa #sansa stark #theon greyjoy #gendrya #theonsa fic #my fic

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