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positivelybeastly · 5 months

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Have you ever wondered if Hank would be better of without the X-Men?

So, this is an interesting question, and I hope that this answer is similarly interesting - mostly because it starts, like most interesting answers, with, it depends!

I think that when Hank was just first starting out as an X-Man, as a member of the Original Five X-Men, it was a genuinely good environment for him.

Yeah, he was a seventeen year old involved in superheroics far beyond his logical grasp, but it was very much to his benefit that he was with people who understood what it was like to be ostracised for powers and gifts that you were granted by birth, that you struggled to control, that you had to hide to get by.

He wasn't really, truly fulfilled as a normal high school/college student - he kept having to hide just how brilliant he was, both physically and mentally, for fear of sticking his head up above the parapet and being kicked back down. For all his flaws as a mentor, Professor Xavier was an intellectual equal (at first, anyway) for Hank, someone who could meet him on that level and engage with and nurture him.

And it really can't be understated just how good it was for Hank to make friends his own age, because he really just did not have that many of them beforehand. I can name one, Jennifer Nyles. That's it.

So Bobby was obviously an amazing anchor for him, and Scott and Warren ended up being good, stable friends who, at least at that juncture, were good influences on him, keeping him focused - I also think that Warren, especially, would have been a very stabilising presence for Hank, as the only other physically mutated mutant he had seen up until that point (not counting Bobby, who can turn his Iceman form on or off).

Once he'd gotten over his thankfully brief period mooning over Jean (fuck off, Bendis), they ended up becoming extremely good friends, too - their shared emotional sensitivity and capacity for compassion and love made them really good friends, which is something you see come back quite a bit in the 90s and in New X-Men.

It's also telling that it's when he leaves the X-Men here, he ends up fucking up his life fairly quickly, falling into bed with a Secret Empire spy and turning himself furry in a fit of intellectual hubris - he needed them to occasionally drag him out of the lab and remind him, hey, Hank, the rest of the world still exists! If he'd had Bobby, Warren or Jean present to keep his head screwed on, he genuinely might not have done such a dumb thing to himself - or if he had, he would have been with people who could've helped.

Where it gets a lot muddier is when it comes to X-Factor in the 80s and then just the X-Men from the 90s all the way up to, well, now. The problem is that Hank is . . . Hank is really useful. He's often the heart of the team, so he's the guy that a lot of people come to for advice about their problems, or, at the very least, someone who feels the need to care for people who are having problems (you see this a lot in New X-Men, where he's constantly taking it upon himself to be there for people).

But he's also the big guy AND the smart guy - he's, like, three parts of the Five Man band group archetype all in one, which is honestly why you see him almost constantly on the flagship X-Men teams, like X-Men Blue in the 90s, the New X-Men in the early 00s, the Astonishing team in the mid 00s, etc, he's just useful on a team.

But the problem is that Hank has a really hard time looking at a problem and saying, no, I can't solve it, or, no, I don't have the time to do that, or, no, that's not something to do with me. He's just not wired that way. He's inclined to help. He's inclined to try. He's inclined to study and poke and prod and heal and learn. He's been like that since he was a child, when he was dismantling bus engines on the school lawn - this happens because that, that happens because this, because because because - he wants to know. He wants to solve.

So, what happens when you give him problems he can't solve?

He tried so damn hard to fix the Legacy Virus. He tried so damn hard to fix the Decimation. He threw himself into the problems, he pushed himself to his limits, he did things he knew he shouldn't be doing, he put himself in danger, he put others in danger, he didn't think clearly - because I need to solve the problem. I need to help. I need to fix this. Because if I can't, no-one can.

And the problem is, on the X-Men, that's generally true!

There is no-one on the X-Men who can do what Hank can do! The instant the news came in about the Decimation and just how real and far reaching it was, who did everyone look to? They didn't look at Cyclops or Emma Frost or Wolverine for solutions, they looked at Hank, and he thought, well, if I can't do it, who can?

Genuinely, back in 2005, who stood a chance of fixing the Decimation? Look at the X-Men rosters. Look at the list of the 198. Who the fuck can solve this? Maybe Mr. Sinister? MAYBE? And that's if you trust him to?

And that pressure is just so ugly and unpleasant and crushing for Hank, because Hank is a social butterfly. He loves to talk to people, he loves to make people laugh, he loves to get vocal, repeated affirmation that he's good, that he's a genius, that he's loved, that he's cared for, because he's so frightfully insecure and anxious and dysphoric. And the instant that you shut him in a lab or send him out on a mission by himself, it's like you're setting a pressure cooker on the highest setting to see how long it takes before it bursts. He needs a social life.

Even when the X-Men spurned him after the failed intervention (which, fuck, that could be its own post), they STILL had to go back to him! Ororo Munroe, goddess of the elements, mistress Storm, the leader of the X-Men, told Hank that she was contemplating giving him to S.H.I.E.L.D for crimes against time and space and nature in Uncanny X-Men #600. And yet, the instant the M-Pox happens, who does she turn to?

She turns to Hank. Poor, dependable, unable to say no, Hank.

You see it even again in Rosenberg's Astonishing X-Men. Havok doesn't know who to talk to about his weird dreams and tech problems, so who does he go to? Does he talk to anyone at the Xavier Institute? Does he talk to an Avenger?

No, he goes to Hank. Who's living a completely normal, happy, academic life at Harvard. He's trying to heal Banshee from the Apocalypse infection. He likes to eat Portobello Patty Melts.

Within five minutes, Reavers turn up and start shooting up the place, and Hank loses his job.

Because Havok, like every other X-Man, has a learned pattern of behaviour - if you have a problem, go see Hank. He'll fix it.

Suffice it to say, this is not a good thing for Hank. No wonder he fucking cracked. No wonder he just started losing it. No wonder the version of him we see in Battle of the Atom has lost his wits. He has to be the doctor, scientist, biologist, mechanic, engineer, armchair psychologist, pathologist, linguist, chemist, physicist, pilot, athlete, genius, to basically an entire community of people.

By this point? Yes, Hank would absolutely be better off without the X-Men. Hell, I feel like he was better off without them from 2009 onwards, where you can see an appreciable difference in how happy he is to be working at S.W.O.R.D versus how he is at the Jean Grey School or on any of the X-Men teams he joins after that point.

This also highlights why he's so different on the Avengers and Defenders, why he's so much happier and goofier and light-hearted - it's not just because his boyfriend Simon Williams is around (though that certainly helps), it's because they usually have, like, four geniuses on a team at any one time, and it lightens the load. He doesn't have to be every genius under the sun, he can afford to just be the big strong guy and take it easy a bit. The positive reputation and public affirmation that comes from being an Avenger versus an X-Man certainly doesn't hurt, either.

There's also a weird, distorting effect that Hank's years away from the X-Men has caused - he was one of the original X-Men, so he has tenure and prestige, and he's generally one of the oldest around, so he knows what he's doing, but he also missed out on a very long period of time for the team (1974-1991) where a lot of very strong friendships, like Kurt-Logan-Piotr, Jean-Ororo, etc, formed, so he doesn't have that bond with them.

There's a distance.

Everyone knows Hank, but not everyone knows Hank. There is such a clear, defined difference between how someone like Scott or Jean talks to Hank, versus how someone like Kitty or Ororo does. I really don't think it's a coincidence that if you look at who's around when Hank is dying in All-New X-Men, it's mostly people who know him but don't really know him - it's Logan, it's Ororo, it's Kitty - so when he says he's fine, even as his heart is bursting in his chest, they believe him. They don't know how to tell if he's really fine or not. If that had been Jean, or Scott, or Warren, that would not have happened.

But what about Bobby, you cry!

What fucking about Bobby. The guy has the emotional sensitivity of a brick, and I'm firmly of the opinion that he and Hank stopped being truly close friends during the Utopia era, when Hank tried to emotionally confide in him about his PTSD and Bobby just told him to sit and spin on it. You compare how they are in Defenders and X-Factor or 90s X-Men with how they are during the JGS era, and it's night and day clear that they're not close anymore.

But that's yet another discussion, for another time.

TD;DR: the X-Men were a good place for Hank initially, but as time has gone on, and the mutant community's problems have become increasingly more dire, they've become a profoundly toxic environment for him. He doesn't have fun, he doesn't have many close friends there, and they treat him more and more like a utility as time goes on. When we get our resurrected Beast back in a few months, I hope he goes back to the Avengers and never returns.

#vinial453 #outofmuffins #character analysis #Wow I wrote a lot huh . . .

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goddamnwebcomics · 9 months

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My Not-so-Brief Review of Gene Catlow (Part 5)

In this part we'll talk about the villains and first half of Matt's group.

Characters (Part 4)

In terms of non-redeemed antagonists, you’ve got arguably the biggest one in form of Furry Unity group, they’re relevant in the first arc, acting as the other extreme to Michael Alan Avariss. Mason is their leader and I’ve already talked in length about him and his shitty would-be redemption in the hands of Masonite. Honestly Furry Unity should’ve been the main antagonist of this comic after Avariss exits the scene, as they’re shown to be quite dangerous, even if their existence and how every character treats them is murky, when humans have shown to have done much worse things to furries. Speaking of, let’s talk about the first villain of this comic, Michael Alan Avariss. He is a brutal furryhating corporate executive, but he is also shown to have depths, especially when it comes to his wife and son. While an intimidating antagonist, his defeat and lack of effect in the plot really make him more pathetic and pathetic on retrospective. His existence is also the biggest proof Albert didn’t always intend the comic to become World of Friends propaganda as even with his questionable moments of humanity, he is still an irredeemable monster who’s killed hundreds if not thousands of furries with his influence. That makes his defeat even more pathetic, as Cotton mocks him and then he gets arrested. He doesn’t even bail himself out of jail, he just stays in the shadows for the rest of the comic with occasional flashbacks. I’ve already talked about the Hosts and how they failed spectacularly as a concept, so let’s talk about the villain of the second arc, the faceless original animen, also known as Evil Stagglers. We never see their faces but they are stated to be hideously ugly. Their plan with Gene and Catwhis is also questionable as they don’t really do anything. Then Crendall and Elder Mother show up, Crendall punches one of them in the face and then Cotton wipes them out. The last irredeemable villain I can think of are the “Evil Children” of the Amphibians, that Matt gives physical bodies to in form of his puppets, we learn nothing about them but they seemed to be the Final Boss of the Entire Comic, being able to wreck Tane’s cat utopia and even fatally damage the Amphibian homeworld’s leaders, but due to Albert’s death it’s likely we’ll never learn anything else about them, and what exactly was their relationship with Matt.

And then we get to my favourite group of the entire comic, Matt’s crew, the Family that is loyal to Matt. I feel like the strongest incarnation of this group is when Stuart and Tassy were still part of the group as it feels like the group just turned into a mess after they left. This group is formed after the old Family Power loses it’s energy, and a new Family Power kitten is formed to fight the Hosts. Oddly enough we never see this kitten after its first appearance. Did it die when Big Cats took away Matt’s powers? That would be cruel. Either way, the part of Matt’s crew who we didn’t get to see backstab him includes Burke, the accountant of the family, Carson, Matt’s “Legal Muscle”, Taria, the group’s receptionist, Clay, goblin cat who constantly wants to fight people and Cydnee, Matt’s matagot partner in crime. I think that Taria is the most nothing member of the group, she was obviously gonna backstab Matt next, but she also does have a fierce side to her with her calling out Carson, and also being genuinely angry that Stuart and Tassy left Matt’s group. Clay is a petty little shit, and I don’t think he was well established enough outside of getting his ass kicked by Matt. Then we get to characters I have a lot to say about. Carson went from being somewhat untrustworthy of Matt to being very loyal to him, an issue with him is that he is perhaps a bit too loyal to whoever is in charge, and he doesn’t tolerate criticism of any kind. I feel like he’s kinda self-sabotaging the group with his behaviour. However it all changes when he begins to get tormented by Forzoi. Once fierce and threatening lion is reduced to a nervous, anxious wreck under Forzoi’s fierce mindrape. You really gotta feel bad for him, and is it really a redemption if Forzoi was trying to FORCE him to redeem himself? Carson really had no option or Forzoi would have literally killed him. And then we have Burke, sweet, lovely, relatable Burke. Burke is too pure for this hellish comic. He starts off with his homosexuality being strongly hinted at, and he even has a crush on Matt. However he starts becoming a much deeper character, the Big Cats almost kill him due to his bad immune system forcing Matt to call the help of his traitors. Even when the group falls apart, Burke is immensely competent and a workaholic to the max. We really learn more about him when he takes a vacation but happens to share a plane with his ex-boyfriend, Sulfur. The scenes between Sulfur and Burke are deeply emotional and some of the best written dialogue in this entire comic. Sulfur doesn’t really want to throw Burke under the bus even if he’s with a group he obsessively hates. Burke and Sulfur, even with their dysfunctionality, are the best couple in this entire comic.

#gene catlow

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gavin-plz-call-me · 3 years

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The Brothers + Dateables & Luke react to MC owning a cat named lucifer

A/N- To attempt to avoid confusion, the demon Lucifer’s name will always be capitalized, while the cat lucifer’s name will never be capitalized.

“Now,” Diavolo said, obviously nearing the end of his speech, “Do you have any more questions, MC?”

You nod, “Is my cat up there all by himself?” you ask, “I don’t want him to get lonely, and without me he wont have anyone to feed him.”

The men, no, the demons in front of you stared, all obviously dumbstruck. You had been ripped out of your home, brought to a strange place, and told you were to live here for a year, and your first thought was of your cat? What a strange human you were.

“We can arrange someone to take care of your cat,” Diavolo said, smiling wide, but your face fell at his words. Diavolo seemed to sense your discontent as he spoke again, “Or we can arrange for your cat to be brought here?”

“Yes, please,” you spoke almost immediately.

Diavolo called for a demon named Barbatos, telling him to go to the human world to retrieve your cat. He disappeared then reappeared in a matter of seconds, your cat laying comfortably in his arms.

“Oh, lucifer,” You cooed, taking your cat away from Barbatos, kissing the cat’s forehead.

The hall went silent once again, before someone, the demon they introduced as Asmodeus, spoke up, “Honey, that’s Barbatos.” He said, a slight chuckle laced within the words.

Confused, you glance back up at the hall of demons, you point to your cat, “No? His name is lucifer.”

Lucifer

Can't decide if he's confused or insulted.

He's confused because, who the hell would someone name a cat of all things after a demon

and he's insulted because WHO THE HELL WOULD NAME A CAT AFTER HIM?

He's one of the strongest Demons in the Devildom, much stronger than a mere housecat, the insinuation that he, Lucifer, avatar of pride, shares anything in common with a cat has him fuming.

Of course, he shows none of these emotions outwardly, keeping his face stoic as always.

And any one of his brothers who dare joke about this cat's name will be hanged from the ceiling in a matter of seconds.

Is fairly annoyed with their shared name in day-to-day life, and not just because it's insulting.

But, many times a day, Lucifer'll hear his name called through the halls and, when he goes to investigate, one of his brothers is cooing over the damned pun intended cat.

Will eventually get used to lucifer and will definitely be seen cuddling with him.

Is like the dad who insists he doesn't want a cat, but as soon as he gets one they're inseparable.

At the end of the day, he loves that damn cat.

Mammon

Laughs out loud at the revelation that the cat's name is lucifer.

Until he realizes now he has to look after the human and the cat.

Will complain about it in typical Mammon fashion, but he warms up to lucifer about as quickly as he warms up to you.

Buys him a bunch of cat toys when he has the grimm, and loves to play with him

especially with a laser pointer.

Also loves to cuddle, but always acts very tsundere about it.

"What is it lucifer? Oh, of course, you want to cuddle with the Great Mammon."

Will either steal lucifer from your room at night, or sleep in your room to cuddle with him and totally not you, of course, but you should be honored he's even sleeping in your room.

Leviathan

Thinks it's hilarious as well.

Though he prefers anime, Levi is well versed in other human media, especially classic Disney films, so, because of Cinderella, he's well aware that lucifer is a popular cat name in the human realm.

That doesn't make it any less funny, though.

WILL NOT allow lucifer into his room.

He has too many expensive figurines to risk it

Plus, he doesn't want to risk Henry 2.0 getting hurt.

Will only play with, pet, or cuddle with lucifer if he initiates it.

"He probably doesn't want to be pet by a gross otaku like me," as if cats know what otakus are.

Will, at some point, sew lucifer a costume that looks suspiciously like what his older brother tends to wear.

He may or may not have been hanged for that one, but it was totally worth it.

Satan

Like Lucifer, Satan is conflicted.

On one hand, cat! He loves cats, he wants to pet this cat all day, and give him kisses and cuddles and love.

On the other hand, Satan would rather his soul be ripped apart than give love to something named after Lucifer.

Will try his hardest to completely ignore the cat's existence.

Has to leave the room if lucifer comes in because he can't trust himself to not pet him.

Is like this with lucifer until he sees him respond to the name luci as well.

After that, you cannot separate Satan from lucifer even if you tried.

Spoils him rotten.

The two are often found reading together in the library, Satan leisurely petting lucifer.

Fights with Mammon at least once a day for lucifer and always wins.

Goes on long rants about how cat lucifer is much better in every way than demon Lucifer.

Asmodeus

Another one who thinks it's hilarious.

Definitely thinks lucifer is cute but hates all the shedding, so he usually keeps his distance.

Like Levi, Asmo doesn't allow lucifer in his room.

Will constantly complain about fur getting all over his clothes.

Has had to buy more lint rollers in the first year you spent in the Devildom than he had bought in the last century.

Constantly posts pictures of lucifer on his Devilgram because, despite being a furry monster, he is just the cutest little kitten around.

Beelzebub

Thinks the name is a bit weird but accepts it pretty quickly.

It's just a name, after all, lots of people who are very different share names.

lucifer's food has to be hidden from Beel because he can, and will, eat it.

"It just smelled so good, and I was so hungry."

Apologizes by buying him some luxury cat treats that took all of Bee's willpower not to eat on the way home.

At first, he won't interact with lucifer unless lucifer approaches him.

Beel is so big, and lucifer is so small, he doesn't want to crush the little cat.

But with enough time and reinforcement, Beel will pick lucifer up himself for some much-needed cuddles.

Before Belphie comes down from the attic, Beel'll bring lucifer up to their room at night when he's feeling a bit more lonely than usual.

Beel will invite you up to his room as well.

Belphegor

Finds out about lucifer after everyone else, due to the whole, being locked in the attic, thing.

Hears Asmo trying to coax lucifer into a good pose from down the hall.

"Oh lucifer, cutie pie, you gotta look at the camera."

Is surprised that Asmo is still alive talking to Lucifer like that.

Is even more surprised when he turns the corner to find Asmo talking to a cat, not his eldest brother.

Thinks it's hilarious, but Lucifer is already over it so teasing him about it doesn't do much.

Won't actively seek out lucifer's attention, but will gladly nap with him.

Beel continues his habit of bringing lucifer up to their room for cuddles when Belphie returns, so the three of them usually end up in a big cuddle pile.

Bonus points if he brings you up too.

Diavolo

Thinks it's very amusing.

Laughs about it, probably for a bit too long.

He can't help it, especially because he knows Lucifer is most definitely a bit upset about it.

Will tease Lucifer once or twice about it, but will ultimately leave it alone.

When he visits the House of Lamentation, he'll give lucifer a nice pat, hello, but won't go very far beyond that.

Barbatos

Read lucifer's name tag while he was collecting him from the human realm.

Wasn't surprised in the slightest because nothing ever surprises him

Is definitely excited to see everyone's reactions to his name, and is not disappointed.

If given the chance, he will spend hours brushing lucifer's fur and pampering him

but doesn't get the chance to do so often, if ever.

Solomon

Has had a cat named lucifer in the past.

I mean, he's lived hundreds of years, it's not out of the realm of possibilities.

Named his own cat lucifer because he thought it was funny, and the humor hasn't faded since.

So he's very amused by this new lucifer in his life.

Will unabashedly cuddle and play with lucifer whenever he's given the chance.

I mean, this lucifer reminds him of his own cat, so he becomes pretty attached pretty quickly.

Whenever he visits the House of Lamentation, he'll hold lucifer until the very last minute he possibly can, and will be pretty sad when he has to leave.

Will joke about stealing lucifer, may actually try to steal him.

Simeon

Like Levi, Simeon is pretty well versed in human media, so the concept of cats named lucifer isn't new to him.

Still finds it a bit funny nonetheless.

Tells Michael right away.

Likes cats well enough, and, when he's in the House of Lamentation, will seek out a few pets from the kitten

but he doesn't venture to the House of Lamentation too often, so he never grows too close to lucifer.

Luke

WHY? WOULD YOU NAME A CAT? AFTER A DEMON?

There are so many better names for a cat!

Like whiskers, or oreo, or simba.

Is genuinely confused, and maybe even a bit concerned.

He's afraid you were consorting with demons before coming to the Devildom and that's why you named him lucifer.

After his brief stay in the House of Lamentation, Luke is absolutely in love with lucifer.

Plays with him constantly.

Wants to pick him up, but doesn't know how to.

Luke will end up getting scratched eventually, but Luke forgives him.

Bakes lucifer special cat treats and hopes you'll let him feed lucifer one.

#obey me #obey me shall we date #obey me lucifer #obey me mammon #obey me levithan #obey me satan #obey me asmodeus #obey me beelzebub #obey me belphegor #obey me diavolo #obey me barbatos #obey me solomon #obey me simeon #obey me luke #obey me mc #gender nuetral reader #obey me headcanons #obey me gender neutral mc

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tlbodine · 3 years

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The Horror Genius of Five Nights At Freddy’s

I’ve been playing FNAF: Help Wanted VR on my Oculus Quest lately (a birthday present to myself -- I know I’m late to that party!) and it’s reignited in me my old love of this series. I know Scott Cawthon’s politics aren’t great, but I don’t think there’s any malice in his heart beyond usual Christian conservative nonsense -- and I think he stepped down as graciously and magnanimously as possible when confronted about it. Time will judge Scott Cawthon’s politics, and that’s not what I’m here to talk about. I want to talk about what makes these games so damn special, from a horror, design, and marketing perspective. I think there’s really SO MUCH to be learned from studying these games and the wider influence they’ve had as intellectual property.

What Is FNAF?

In case you’ve somehow been living under a rock for the last seven years, Five Nights At Freddy’s (hereafter, FNAF) is a horror franchise spanning 17 games (10 main games + some spinoffs and troll games, we’ll get to that), 27 books, a movie deal, and a couple live-action attractions.

But before it exploded into that kind of tremendous IP, it started out as a single indie pont-and-click game created entirely by one dude, Scott Cawthon. Cawthon had developed other games in the past without much fame or success, including some Christian children’s entertainment. He was working as a cashier at Dollar General and making games in his spare time -- and most of those games got panned.

So he tried making something different.

After being criticized that the characters in one of his children’s games looked like soulless, creepy animatronics, Cawthon had his lightbulb moment and created a horror game centered on....creepy animatronics!

The rest, as they say, is history.

The Genius of FNAF’s Horror Elements

In the first FNAF game, you play as a night security guard at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a sort of ersatz Chuck-E-Cheese establishment. The animatronics are on free-roaming mode at night, but you don’t want to let them find you in your security room so you have to watch them move through the building on security camera monitors. If they get too close, you can slam your security room doors closed. But be careful, because this restaurant operates on a shoestring budget, and the power will go off if you keep the doors closed too long or flicker the lights too often. And once the lights go out, you’re helpless against the animatronics in the dark.

Guiding you through your gameplay is a fellow employee, Phone Guy, who calls you each night with some helpful advice. Phone Guy is voiced by Cawthon himself, and listening to his tapes gives you some hints of the game’s underlying story as well as telling you how to play. A few newspaper clippings and other bits of scrap material help to fill in more details of the story.

Over the next set of games, the story would be further developed, with each new game introducing new mechanics and variations on the theme -- in one, you don a mask to slip past the notice of animatronics; in another, you have to play sound cues to lure an animatronic away from you. By the fourth game, the setup was changed completely, now featuring a child with a flashlight hiding from the monsters outside his door -- nightmarish versions of the beloved child-friendly mascots. The mechanics change just enough between variations to keep things fresh while maintaining a consistent brand.

There are so many things these games do well from a storytelling and horror perspective:

Jump Scares: It’s easy to shrug these games off for relying heavily on jump scares, and they absolutely do have a lot of them. But they’re used strategically. In most games, the jump scares are a punishment (a controlled shock, if you will) -- if you play the game perfectly, you’ll never be jump-scared. This is an important design choice that a lot of other horror games don’t follow.

Atmospheric Dread: These games absolutely deliver horror and tension through every element of design -- some more than others, admittedly. But a combination of sound cues, the overall texture and aesthetic of the world, the “things move when you’re not looking at them” mechanic, all of it works together to create a feeling of unease and paranoia.

Paranoia: As in most survival horror games, you’re at a disadvantage. You can’t move or defend yourself, really -- all you can do is watch. And so watch you do. Except it’s a false sense of security, because flicking lights and checking cameras uses up precious resources, putting you at greater risk. So you have to balance your compulsive need to check, double-check, and make sure...with methodical resource conservation. The best way to survive these games is to remain calm and focused. It’s a brilliant design choice.

Visceral Horror: The monster design of the animatronics is absolutely delightful, and there’s a whole range of them to choose from. The sheer size and weight of the creatures, the way they move and position themselves, their grunginess, the deadness of their eyes, the quantity and prominence of their teeth. They are simultaneously adorable and horrifying.

Implicit Horror: One of the greatest strengths to FNAF as a franchise is that it never wears its story on its sleeve. Instead of outright telling you what’s going on, the story is delivered in bits and pieces that you have to put together yourself -- creating a puzzle for an engaged player to think about and theorize over and consider long after the game is done. But more than that, the nature of the horror itself is such that it becomes increasingly upsetting the more you think on it. The implications of what’s going on in the game world -- that there are decaying bodies tucked away inside mascots that continue to perform for children, that a man dressed in a costume is luring kids away into a private room to kill them, and so forth -- are the epitome of fridge horror.

The FNAF lore does admittedly start to become fairly ridiculous and convoluted as the franchise wears on. But even ret-conned material manages to be pretty interesting in its own right (and there is nothing in the world keeping you from playing the first four games, or even the first six, and pretending none of the rest exist).

Another thing I really appreciate about the FNAF franchise is that it’s quite funny, in a way that complements and underscores the horror rather than detracting from it. It’s something a lot of other properties utterly fail to do.

The Genius of Scott Cawthon’s Marketing

OK, so FNAF utilizes a multi-prong attack for creating horror and implements it well -- big deal. Why did it explode into a massive IP sensation when other indie horror games that are just as well-made barely made a blip on the radar?

Well! That’s where the real genius comes in. This game was built and marketed in a way to maximize its franchisability.

First, the story utilizes instantly identifiable, simple but effective character designs, and then generates more and more instantly identifiable unique characters with each iteration. Having a wealth of characters and clever, unique designs basically paves the way for merchandise and fan-works. (That they’re anthropomorphic animal designs also probably helped -- because that taps into the furry fandom as well without completely alienating non-furries).

Speaking of fan-work, Scott Cawthon has always been very supportive of fandom, only taking action when people would try to profit off knock-off games and that sort of thing -- basically bad-faith copies. But as far as I know he’s always been super chill with fan-created content, even going so far as to engage directly with the fandom. Which brings me to....

These games were practically designed for streaming, and he took care to deliver them into the hands of influential streamers. Because the games are heavy on jump-scares and scale in difficulty (even including extra-challenging modes after the core game is beaten) they are extremely fun to watch people play. They’re short enough to be easily finished over the duration of a long stream, and they’re episodic -- lending themselves perfectly to a YouTube Lets Play format. One Night = One Video, and now the streamer has weeks of content from your game (but viewers can jump in at any time without really missing much).

The games are kid-friendly but also genuinely frightening. Because the most disturbing parts of the game’s lore are hinted at rather than made explicit, younger players can easily engage with the game on a more basic surface level, and others can go as deep into the lore as they feel comfortable. There is no blood and gore and violence or even any explicitly stated death in the main game; all of the murder and death is portrayed obliquely by way of 8-bit mini games and tangential references. Making this game terrifying but accessible to youngsters, and then marketing it directly to younger viewers through popular streamers (and later, merchandising deals) is genius -- because it creates a very broad potential audience, and kids tend to spend 100% of their money (birthdays, allowances, etc.) and are most likely to tell their friends about this super scary game, etc. etc.

By creating a puzzle box of lore, and then interacting directly with the fandom -- dropping hints, trolling, essentially creating an ARG of his own lore through his website, in-game easter eggs, and tie-in materials -- Cawthon created a mystery for fandom to solve. And fans LOVE endlessly speculating over convoluted theories.

Cawthon released these games FAST. He dropped FNAF 2 within months of the first game’s release, and kept up a pace of 1-2 games a year ever since. This steady output ensured the games never dropped out of public consciousness -- and introducing new puzzle pieces for the lore-hungry fans to pore over helped keep the discussion going.

I think MatPat and The Game Theorists owe a tremendous amount of their own huge success to this game. I think Markiplier does, too, and other big streamers and YouTubers. It’s been fascinating watching the symbiotic relationship between these games and the people who make content about these games. Obviously that’s true for a lot of fandom -- but FNAF feels so special because it really did start so small. It’s a true rags-to-riches sleeper hit and luck absolutely played a role in its growth, but skill is a big part too.

Take-Aways For Creatives

I want to be very clear here: I do not think that every piece of media needs to be “IP,” franchisable, an extended universe, or a multimedia sensation. I think there is plenty to be said for creating art of all types, and sometimes that means a standalone story with a small audience.

But if you do want a chance at real break-out, run-away success and forging a media empire of your own, I think there are some take-aways to be learned from the success of FNAF:

Persistence. Scott Cawthon studied animation and game-design in the 1990s and released his first game in 2002. He released a bunch of stuff afterward. None of it stuck. It took 12 years to hit on the winning formula, and then another several years of incredibly hard work to push out more titles and stoke the fires before it really became a sensation. Wherever you’re at on your creative journey, don’t give up. You never know when your next thing will be The Thing that breaks you out.

If you want to sell a lot of something, you have to make it widely appealing to a bunch of people. This means keeping your concept simple to understand (”security guard wards off creepy killer animatronics at a pizza parlor”) and appealing to as wide a segment of the market as you can (ie, a horror story that appeals to both kids and adults). The more hyper-specific your audience, the harder it’s gonna be to find them and the fewer copies of your thing you’ll be selling.

Know your shit and put your best work out there. I think there’s an impulse to feel like “well, nobody reads this anyway, so why does it matter if it’s no good” (I certainly have fallen into that on multiple occasions) but that’s the wrong way to think about it. You never know when and where your break will come. Put your best work out there and keep on polishing your craft with better and better stuff because eventually one of those things you chuck out there is going to be The Thing.

Figure out where your target audience hangs out, and who influences them, and then get your thing in the hands of those influencers. Streaming and YouTube were the secret to FNAF’s success. Maybe yours will be BookTube, or Instagram, or a secret cabal of free librarians. I don’t know. But you should try your best to figure out who would like the thing that you’re making, and then figure out how to reach those people, and put all of your energy into that instead of shotgun-blasting your marketing all willy nilly.

You don’t have to put the whole story on the page. Audiences love puzzles. Fans love mysteries. You can actually leave a lot more unanswered than you think. There’s some value in keeping secrets and leaving things for others to fill in. Remember -- your art is only partly yours. The sandbox belongs to others to play in, too, and you have to let them do that.

If in doubt, appealing to furries never hurts.

Do I take all of this advice myself? Not by a long shot. But it’s definitely a lot to think about.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go beat The Curse of Dreadbear.

#horror analysis #writing advice #fnaf

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lucemferto · 3 years

Text

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT PH1LZA (or Why Philza is a Victim of Narrative Circumstance)

Heyo! Per request I am posting the script to my video of the same name here on tumblr. I must warn you that just reading the script will probably not give you the full experience, so I would encourage you to watch the video (linked above).

There might also still be a lot of grammatical errors in the text, because I don’t proofread.

Intro

LAST TIME ON LUCEM FERTO

Okay, so! I don’t want this to turn into a reaction channel OR a Dream SMP channel for that matter! [echo]

Well, I lied.

[Intro to “Luc is pretentious about the funny blockmen. Episode 2”]

I swear, I’m working on other stuff. It’s just that my dumb lizard brain has only capacity for one interest at a time!

So, something you might not know about me, is that I am on tumblr – who am I kidding, most of you will know me from tumblr. Before starting this whole YouTube thing, I thought that website died years ago – but as per usual reality proves me wrong. I’m also on Twitter and Reddit, but I get the most engagement on tumblr – by far! – and I need those sweet, sweet numbers for the serotonin!

Anyways, one of my favourite past-times on tumblr is to razz Philza Hardcore Minecraft – that’s his full name – for being a frankly awful father [clicking away] – wait, wait, no! Philza fans, this isn’t a hit piece on him, I promise! Please come back!

This is video is meant to be a companion piece to my previous video about Technoblade and the Doomsday event – you can tell by the shared nomenclature – so you should probably watch that one before you proceed. Unless you don’t want to, which is also perfectly understandable.

DISCLAIMER: This video is mostly about the character Philza plays on the Dream SMP. Whenever I talk about the content creator Philza, I will say so properly. Also, Spoiler Warning for Dream SMP Season 2.

… What is that? You’re wondering what the Dream SMP is? Well, if you had just watched the other video like I told you to do, you would know, because I explained it pretty well there. But in case you don’t know, here’s the cliff notes.

Dream SMP is the hottest New Media Series on Twitch right now! It has it all: gaslighting, child soldiers, Machiavellian political intrigue, Hamilton roleplay, desecration of the dead, shounen protagonists, SO! MUCH! AMNESIA! Filicide, furries, a red egg that’s definitely homophobic and teenagers inventing nuclear warfare. And it’s all done in Minecraft – yes, the funny block game where the only way to emote is to crouch.

And you say the perfect brief doesn’t exist!

Now, you might be wondering, why do I want to talk about this? Well, it’s because Content Creator Philza is one of least controversial internet personalities that I can think of. That man exudes pure comfort. So, it’s just very, very amusing to me that his character became one of the most controversial figures on the SMP, only outshone by Tommy and Technoblade.

And it’s not just amusing, it’s also extremely interesting! I want to dig deep to uncover and discuss the dynamics behind why that is. How did it come to this point? How did a man who appears genuinely so pleasant create a character that inspires so much discourse!

Now, if you watched that Technoblade video – like I told you to twice now! – you might know, that I am the resident character analyses hater of fandom! And that impression is false and slanderous! Don’t tell other people that I hate character analyses! I love them!

It’s just that, in the Dream SMP in particular, there is an abundance of character analyses! Every streamer has at least two very good essays written about them, exploring every possible angle to view their characters and backgrounds and everything. All I’m saying is: I don’t have anything to add on that front.

So, instead I want to pursue a different approach – something, that I feel is a bit underrepresented in the fandom! And I’m not just talking narrative analysis – that’s right, this episode we’re going even more pretentious! – I’m talking Transtextual Analysis!

Now, what is Transtextuality? Well, unfortunately it has very little to do with actual Trans people – #transrights, just in case that wasn’t obvious – but instead describes a mode of analysis with which to put – to quote French literary theorist Gérard Genette – “the text in a relationship, whether obvious or concealed, with other texts”.

Basically, you know how the L’Manburg War of Independence heavily quotes and borrows from the hit musical Hamilton? That’s transtextuality! A lot of the analyses surrounding how Tommy mirrors the Greek hero Theseus, who was invoked by Technoblade multiple times in the series, are already doing transtextual analysis! So, it’s really not something that’s new to the Dream SMP fandom.

But how does this apply to Philza and how he is looked at and judged by his parental skills? Well, there are multiple forms of transtextuality, two of which we will discuss today.

But before we continue, I gotta do that annoying YouTuber thing. I know these videos don’t look like much, but I spend a really long time making them. I work fulltime and I try my best to keep up, but sometimes I can’t. So please, like, subscribe, comment to give me some algorithm juice – I really need it – and most importantly share it! Share it with your friends, share it with your family – I’m sure Grandma is very interested in what I have to say about Philza Minecraft.

And I’m trying to be better! If I sound at all different for this video, it’s because I finally bought a new pop filter, so I can hit my plosives without it sounding like there’s a thunderstorm in my room. I hope it makes a difference; it was a very cheap pop filter, so maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it sounds worse – that would be bad!

What was I talking about? Oh yeah, CHILD NEGLEGT!

Intertextuality: Why is Dadza?

You know what’s really interesting about the Dream SMP – aside from, you know, most things about it? Very few of the characters have concrete, fleshed-out backstories – and that’s pretty weird! In no other medium or genre could you get away with something like that – at least for long-form storytelling!

So, how does Dream SMP get away with this? Well, it’s because every character on the Dream SMP is basically a self-insert – and I don’t mean that in the “This character is based on me”-kinda way, but in the “This character, for all intents and purposes, is me!”-way. This, like many things that are fascinating about the Dream SMP, is owed to the fact that this series didn’t start off as a continuous drama – it started off as a Let’s Play.

And while we can talk about how someone’s on-camera/on-mic persona is in some ways a character, it’s still miles off of being an actual, fully-realized, separate character in a storyline.

This is where Intertextuality comes in.

Intertextuality is a subset of Transtextuality. It describes how the hypertext, which is the text, you’re currently engaged with, uses another text, the hypotext, to supplement itself. The interconnection the hypertext establishes with the hypotext, through stuff like allusion for example, uh-hum [Hamilton], can colour how an audience interprets the hypertext. Basically, Hamilton and Theseus are the hypotexts; the Dream SMP is the hypertext.

So, what does this have to do with backstory? Simple: The backstories of the characters in the Dream SMP consist basically of nothing but intertextual references. Through intertextuality their content effectively substitutes their character’s backstory.

You can see it everywhere. Wilbur’s and Schlatt’s relationship and rivalry is hugely enriched, if you are aware of their shared history like SMPLive, for example – I think anyway. I haven’t watched SMPLive, because … there’s only so many hours in the day and I cannot keep up with the Dream SMP and catch up on SMPLive and live a healthy life – which I already don’t do, so…

BadBoyHalo’s and Skeppy’s relationship, which has become the crux of the Crimson-Storyline of Seasons 2 and 3, is hugely supplemented if you know that they’re also very close as streamers and in real life.

Another great example of intertextuality is basically Technoblade’s entire deal. If you just look at him completely within the text of the Dream SMP and try to transplant his entrance to any other medium: It would be extremely weird! Like, he’s just this guy that comes in in the middle of a very climatic arc, no build-up, no explanation what his deal is, and he’s treated like he has always been there. In any other medium that just wouldn’t work – at least not without a flashback or some sort of exposition!

But because of stuff like Minecraft Mondays, the Potato Wars, his Duel against Dream and SMPEarth, we understand that he is a Big Deal!

Anyways, to bring all of this back to Philza Minecraft: What kind of hypotext informs how the audience sees his character? Well, this is where I will have to talk about SBI.

SBI is an acronym that stand for State Bank of India, the 43rd largest bank in the world and…

It also stands for Sleepy Bois Incorporated. Sleepy Bois Incorporated is a loose assembly of content creators, consisting of Philza, Wilbur Soot, TommyInnit and Technoblade. It is most well-known for its very endearing family dynamic – a dynamic that is frequently acknowledged and played up by the creators involved. Tommy is the youngest brother, Wilbur and Techno are the two older brothers and Philza is of course the dad. And when I say, it’s played up, I really mean it! Wilbur seems to be especially enamoured with the idea and leaves no opportunity untaken to bring it up – which we will come back to.

And I’m not saying that they’re faking this and this is somehow an act. While I know none of these people personally, it appears to me, that this is genuinely how they interact – if a little exaggerated for the streaming experience. Even when they’re not consciously playing into the family dynamic, their interactions still very much lend themselves to that interpretation by the viewers.

Philza especially just radiates Dad-Friend energy – so much so that it has become a huge part of his brand identity – yay, I can bring that back (check out my Christmas video if you want to hear me ramble about that). The nickname Dadza stuck even before SBI was a thing.

So, even if we completely disregard SBI – which we shouldn’t for reasons I’ll get back to – Philza has cultivated an image of strong paternal guidance. He is, in my opinion completely deservedly, regarded very positively. He is highly respected and in turn seen as a voice of reason.

All of this would eventually inform the hypotext of the character Philza within Dream SMP.

Interlude: Before Dadza & November 16th

Okay, so now we have established that a) Dream SMP heavily hinges on intertextual readings by the audience to supplement character backstory and b) that Philza’s entire deal is that he’s the dad-friend – more specifically that he’s the dad of SBI (not the bank). I think you know where this is going.

So, yeah, ever since it was on the table that Philza could join the Dream SMP, it was immediately assumed that he would take on the paternal guardian role all these traumatized people on that server so desperately needed – and with good reason! Like I said before, the audience at this point was trained to take intertextual interpretations as basically canon or at the very least canon-adjacent.

I want to emphasize that this is most likely not done deliberately. I’m sure content creators Wilbur and Philza didn’t sit there and said: “Yes! We will rely entirely on the audience’s inclination to interpret our characters intertextually to define character Philza!”. Like, obviously that did not happen.

But it’s also important to remember that unlike with traditional media and the fanbases cultivated there, the separation between the Dream SMP and its audience is almost non-existent – and purposely so. The story events are streamed live, Chats are acknowledged in canon and even outside of livestreams creators are extremely involved with the fandom. So, the weight of fan-expectations is equally amplified and will more likely be incorporated into the writing process. Case in point:

[Wilbur “I miss Philza”/Philza about Wilbur]

During Wilbur’s villain arc, even before his official involvement, Philza became a prevalent point of discussion. The hope that he would be the one to snap Wilbur out of his downward spiral was not only wish-fulfilment on behalf of the fans; it also very much played off of the intertextual reading of the SBI-dynamic in relation to the Dream SMP.

Of course, this still doesn’t make Philza and Wilbur canonically blood-related – but it definitely used the “paternal”-dynamic of SBI to build-up tension and drama.

And that ultimately brings us to November 16th. The Grand Finale of Season 1 and Philza’s first canonical appearance on the SMP.

Now, for this I want to pull back from the transtextual analysis and talk about simply narrative analysis: What is Philza’s narrative purpose on November 16th?

Philza serves as the last threshold on Wilbur’s Villain’s Journey – to appropriate Vogler’s version of the monomyth for a minute here – he is what Vogler calls the “Threshold Guardian”. He is the last enemy the Hero faces before completing his quest – in this particular case Wilbur’s quest is to blow up L’Manberg. Multiple people have at this point tried to dissuade him from this course of action: Tommy, Quackity, Niki and others. So how come this Philza moment is not redundant in terms of dynamics compared to these prior scenes?

Well, it’s through our intertextual understanding of Wilbur’s and Phil’s relationship. Because Philza does not just occupy the role of the Threshold Guardian – he is also implicitly the Mentor. Before Phil there was no character in the storyline that held a higher position of moral authority than Wilbur – Dream and Schlatt, while at points more powerful in terms of actual authority, were never positioned by the narrative as Wilbur’s superiors in the same way as Wilbur was to Tommy, Tubbo or even Niki.

Before November 16th all challenges Wilbur faced were from people narratively subordinated to him. But that trend is broken with Phil. That is why he is the Threshold Guardian, why this confrontation is at the climax of Wilbur’s arc. Because Phil is the last thing tethering Wilbur to whatever morality he held before his villain arc; Phil is the last, moral obstacle Wilbur has to discard before gaining his reward.

And, just a quick sidenote, because I’ve seen it around the fandom a bunch: When I’m referring to Wilbur denouncing his morality, I’m using that in terms of narrative analysis. I’m mentioning it, because Wilbur’s character can very easily be read as mentally ill or neurodivergent and some people have – rightly! – pointed out that the excessive vilifying when talking about his character is … problematic, to say the least.

So, I just want to make clear, this isn’t a character analysis, I’m being purposely broad when talking about Wilbur and Phil.

In the end, Wilbur takes that final step and gets his “reward”: As his final request his mentor takes his life and vanquishes the evil – the dragon of Wilbur’s story slays the dragon of L’Manburg. It’s very Shakespearean in its tragedy – but beyond the larger theatrics it’s not really used to further characterize Phil – at least in the context of Season 1. There’s not a lot of focus on his characters internal conflict during November 16th.

Phil, like Techno, is very utilitarian in how content creator Wilbur writes him: He serves as a moment of hype; an obstacle Wilbur has to face; a participant in the tragic climax of Wilbur’s character and ultimately takes on his implicit and expected role of mentor and guiding figure to the rest of L’Manburg.

I think not a lot of people talk about how Philza does not join Technoblade during November 16th. He takes the side of L’Manburg – he fights against the withers and he joins Tommy, Tubbo and the others at the L’Mantree, thus framing him as loyal to the L’Manburg administration – even though Season 2 would make his loyalty to Techno central to his character. But more on that later.

What’s also important about November 16th is that this is the day when the general intertextual interpretation became canonized text.

[You’re my son!]

Wilbur is made Phil’s canonical, biological son. The intertextual interpretation of SBI as it pertains to these two characters on the SMP was completely reinforced by the narrative. Or to put it in Fandom terms: The headcanon became actual canon. At least when it came to Wilbur … but what about Philza’s “other” children?

Well, that leads to our second form of transtextual analysis:

Paratextuality: Is Dadza?

These titles are just getting better and better.

The Paratext is defined as all those things in a published work that accompany the text. It comes in two forms: One of them is the Peritext, which are non-diegetic elements directly surrounding the text – like chapter titles, author’s notes, and stuff like that. Translated to the medium of the Dream SMP, it would be stuff like this:

[Examples]

And, trust me, I could make a whole separate video about how people on the SMP use their peritext as a tool for storytelling – I’m looking at you, Ranboo – but that’s not what we will talk about in the context of Dadza.

Instead, we will focus on the second form of Paratext, the Epitext, which consists of all authorial and editorial discussions taking place outside of the text. That’s stuff like interviews, private letters or J. K. Rowling’s Twitter Account – you know, before she decided to become a full-time asshole.

[Wilbur: Transrights]

After Season 1 ended, Wilbur indulged pretty heavily in providing epitext for the Dream SMP, something he had not done prior to November 16th. His paratextual additions ranged from the playful, like assigning DnD alignments to various SMP members, to the extremely impactful, like the whole three lives system!

You probably think, you know where this is going. Wilbur provided some epitext about how Tommy and Techno either are or are not biologically related to him … and I have to be honest I thought that too. But then I began looking into the impenetrable web that is the SBI-canon on the Dream SMP and found this!

[Ghostbur explains family]

So, it wasn’t paratext, it was just straight text. Said in character, in canon, without any implication that we the viewers should question this. The text of the SBI family dynamic was explicitly linked to Dream SMP-exclusive lore, namely Fundy being Wilbur’s and Sally the Salmon’s son. This is as clear as Philza’s anguished declaration on November 16th in establishing the intertext as text. And because Wilbur also had a very heavy hand in the discussion of paratext around that time, it gave his character’s words even more “canonical” weight. Metatextually speaking, this very much read like the author giving exposition through his character – exposition that we should understand as reliable.

And, by the way, before I continue, I need to give a huge, huge shoutout to kateis-cakeis on tumblr, I hope I pronounced that right, who was just so quick in providing me with these crucial clips. Without him I would have looked for days because these people don’t archive their shit! And the Dream SMP Wiki was NO help, by the way! I love what you guys do, but stuff like this belongs in the Trivia section on characters’ pages!

Anyways, basically during the entirety of early Season 2 the SBI family dynamic was basically canon to the SMP. Sometimes it was only alluded implicitly, again letting the intertext fill out the rest.

[Philza clips]

But just as often it was just explicitly talked about – both in the text and in the paratext.

[Fundy clip/Wilbur “Twins” clip/Tommy clip]

So, I know what you’re thinking: “Why is this part called paratext, if the entire family tree is just textual”. Well, that last clip might give you a hint, as to what I will talk about. Notice how Tommy, one of the people most directly impacted by the canonization of SBI lore, is both unaware of and seems generally unenthused about it, to put it nicely? Well, that would soon turn out to be a much bigger deal than anyone could have imagined as he wasn’t the only one.

[Technoblade decanonizes SBI]

Yeah …

This happened on 20th of December. Regular viewers of this channel will remember that I put out a 90-second joke video, where I complain about this very development. And while I was mostly kidding around, the core idea is still true. The paratext provided by Technoblade and established text were in direct contradiction with one another – and that brought a lot of confusion into the fandom. Confusion, that would soon be followed by frustration.

Because Techno only decanonized himself as part of the SBI family dynamic – but what about Tommy and Tubbo, the latter of which was incorporated into the dynamic exclusively within the lore of the Dream SMP. Was this still canon or wasn’t it?

What followed was a muddled mess of contradictions, intertextual implications, text and paratext in conflict with each another. It was for the most part inscrutable to figure out how Tommy and Philza related to one another. I’ll spare you every comment made about this – mostly because I want to spare myself from looking for all of them.

In the end, the current status is that their familial relationship is … unclear. Philza said, again in paratext, that it’s ultimately up to the writers to decide, whether or not Tommy is his son … which, I personally think he and Tommy should be the ones to establish that, but I’ll come back to that later.

But why is all of this important anyway? Why would this ambiguity create such an uproar, such controversy – especially when it comes to Tommy’s character? What makes Tommy’s and Philza’s relationship such a target for discussion in the fandom?

Well … this is where we will have to talk about the storyline of Season 2.

Interlude II: Tommy’s Exile and Dadza in Season 2

Okay, Season 2. This is where the spoilers are, so I will just sneakily drop this again. It took me five seconds to google this gif and I will milk it for every penny it’s worth!

At the beginning of Season 2, Philza’s narrative role has not changed much from where Season 1 ended. He is in L’Manburg dispensing earthly wisdom, being a paternal figure to Fundy, Ghostbur and Tubbo, helping with the nation’s rebuilding efforts; just generally occupying the role of the mentor.

[clips]

And then came … the Exile. The Exile Arc took place between December 3rd and December 15th during Season 2 of the Dream SMP. It revolves around TommyInnit getting exiled from L’Manburg and slowly getting psychologically tortured and broken down by Dream. It’s a really great arc, at least in my opinion, that explores and deepens a lot of Tommy’s character relationships, whether that be Tommy and Dream, Tommy and Tubbo or Tommy and Ranboo. One relationship, however, is noticeably missing.

So, yeah, Philza spends basically the entirety of the exile doing pretty much nothing of consequence. And that’s not a problem specific to him – One big criticism I would levy against the Exile Arc is that a lot of characters are left spinning their wheels. Which is why we get zany stuff like El Rapids, Drywaters, Eret’s Knights of the Roundtable, Boomerville – anyone remember Boomerville, that was a thing for 5 seconds, wasn’t it? – basically a lot of storylines are started and then unceremoniously dropped. Now, I will talk more about this, when I make a video about Season 2 of the Dream SMP … in ten years, look forward to it.

In the case of Philza, this inaction was especially damning, because at this point it was still a considered canon that he was Tommy’s dad. So, the fans were left with a situation, where just a few weeks prior Philza was occupying a paternal role for Fundy and Ghostbur … but now, that his youngest son was in a very concerning predicament – to put it lightly – he was nowhere to be found.

So why is that?

Well, the most obvious answer is that Dream and Tommy didn’t write him into the storyline. We’ve seen that Tommy wasn’t particularly interested in exploring a familial relationship to Philza, at least at the time. And it would just not fit in with what Dream and Tommy tried to do with the Exile Arc: they wanted to tell the story of Tommy being isolated, completely under Dream’s mercy, slowly worn down and manipulated. If Philza had been constant presence for Tommy during that time, it would have definitely shifted the narrative focus. That doesn’t mean that they couldn’t have done that, it’s just a matter of fact that they didn’t.

This also reveals another truth about content creator Philza’s character work, that I think is extremely crucial: He takes what the writers give him. Outside of a few choice moments, he doesn’t seem particularly interested in expanding or even solidifying his character on the SMP.

What I’m saying is that he is very go-with-the-flow: Wilbur wants to enact a Shakespearean tragedy? Philza’s up for it. Fundy wants him as a parental figure and mentor? Philza’s here for him. Tommy, conversely, doesn’t want him as a paternal presence, even though it would make sense for Philza’s character, as it was established so far, to be there? Philza will oblige.

The reason I’m mentioning this is because, while Tommy and Dream were unwilling to utilise Philza in their storyline, someone else was more than happy to. Which leads us back, like it always does, to everyone’s favourite Porky Pig-kinnie in a crown: Technoblade.

Technoblade and Philza, from everything I’ve seen of them, seem to be very good friends – and they share a lot of history even outside SBI. So, it’s commendable that they would collaborate on a storyline together.

A consequence of that, however, is that Philza’s narrative purpose shifts completely with very little transition. His entire character changes from being the Mentor-figure of L’Manberg to being pretty much exclusively defined as Technoblade’s ally; his man on the inside. It is a very sharp turn from the end of Season 1. Their relationship is once again informed via intertext – this time the Antarctic Empire on SMPEarth serves as the hypotext – but there isn’t a huge effort made to smoothly integrate that aspect of Philza’s character into the larger narrative framing around him.

How much the narrative utilisation of Philza has shifted can be very easily observed through the Butcher Army event on December 16th, a story event that I like less and less the more I think about. Here Philza is used to show just how corrupt and violent Tubbo’s administration has becomes. He is no longer the respected mentor, he is now the stand-in for the oppressed populace, similar to Niki’s role in Season 1. On a narrative level, he is here to prove a point.

If you’ve seen my Technoblade video, you know how I feel about … just that entire storyline, so I will not reiterate too much on it. I just want to make clear that I’m not principally against this development – if they wanted to truly explore Tubbo going down a dark path and getting corrupted by power, so much so that he would even treat the person who effectively raised him like a prisoner, I would be extremely here for it, I cannot stress that enough.

The problem I have is that it’s just so sloppily done. It is not coherent with how these characters behaved and, more importantly, how they were narratively framed prior to the Butcher Army event. Fundy gets one token line about Phil being his Grandfather – a far cry from the very emotionally complex relationship they had established at the beginning of Season 2 – and Phil then callously disowns him.

The major problem simply is that we don’t see how Philza changes from Mentor-figure to embittered, oppressed citizen. And there was enough time to build to that. During the entirety of Tommy’s exile Tubbo was pretty much spinning his wheels and Quackity and Fundy were opening up plot cul-de-sacs that didn’t end up going anywhere. This is time they could have spent on developing their relationship to Philza and the dark path they were going down – but again, Season 2 video.

There is not much to say on Philza’s narrative purpose and framing beyond the Butcher Army event. He remains pretty much exclusively Techno’s consigliere with his role as Mentor to L’Manburg a distant memory. He has some cute character moments with Ranboo, because content creator Philza is just big dad-energy whether he wants to or not, and whenever he and Ghostbur share a scene suddenly the narrative remembers that there are people other than Technoblade that should exist in Philza’s inner world. But aside from that, Philza’s storyline in Season 2 remains … pretty definitive is the nicest way I can put it.

Most importantly his relationship with Tommy continues to be completely unexplored – whether by chance or choice – and that combined with ever vaguer paratext leaves “Dadza” in a very peculiar situation.

Conclusion: Is Dadza a Good Dadza?

So, the question to end all questions. The big, obnoxious text, that I will probably have put in the thumbnail – I haven’t made it yet, but I know myself. The honest answer is: I couldn’t tell you.

I have, in the past, been expounding the virtues of narrative analysis. That is because I feel that Narrative Analysis and Textual Analysis, like in this video, can provide certain tools that Character Analysis lacks. Often times I see people trying to get at a writing problem or query and getting frustrated because they’re not using the toolset, they need to figure out what they want to figure out.

But I’d be a hypocrite if I pretended like everything could be solved through the modes of analysis I prefer. And I think the Dadza-issue is exactly such a case.

I set out to explore why the Philza-Tommy-“Dadza”-relationship has become so controversial. It’s a combination of expectations build up through intertextual readings, that were partly canonized – something that is very common for the Dream SMP – conflicting pieces of paratext, which only serve to muddle the issue further and a text that is not only completely uninterested in actually exploring Tommy’s and Philza’s relationship – as it stands right now they might as well be strangers, narratively speaking – but also completely changes Philza’s narrative purpose as it relates to characters like Fundy or Tubbo about half-way through with little to no transition.

That is why I say, that Philza’s character is a victim of narrative circumstance. Because unwittingly, through all of these factors and decisions, there is not coherent reading of Philza that frames his parental skills in a particularly kind light.

The question of how we can judge Phil as a paternal figure ultimately falls within the purview of the character analysis – and that’s a very multifaceted issue, highly dependent on which POV you focus on and how you interpret the other characters in that POV’s periphery.

To put my cards on the table, I think that Philza is a very flawed father/father-figure – and I find that absolutely okay. Flaws are the spice of character building. He is not Cinderella’s Evil Stepmother – but he’s also definitely not Mufasa. If we were to read Philza as a paternal figure, then he would have made a lot of mistakes and decisions to the detriment of his “children” – least of all everything that happened on Doomsday.

But I also have sympathies for Philza fans who are tired of the Dad-Debate and would like to have his character judged independent from his relationship to Ghostbur, Fundy, Tubbo and Tommy.

Ultimately, to bring it all to a point, I’d like to end with saying, that I think that Philza, out of all the characters on the SMP, has the potential to be on of the most intriguing, multifaceted ones. There are all of these different patches of story, character moments and narrative and transtextual implications, that, if brought together, could create a beautiful tapestry of the character Philza.

You have his relationship with Techno, which holds the potential for so much emotional conflict and vulnerabilities, you have his time as mentor of L’Manburg, which is just criminally underused; the complex relationship between him and Ghostbur/Wilbur; and – for me, personally – most intriguingly this weird, almost uncomfortably distant non-relationship with Tommy. That last one is intriguing to me, because it contrasts just so much with our intertextual understanding of the characters and streaming personas – and it just holds the potential for so much conflict, so much drama, so much angst. Which I live for!

And, yes, I do believe that most of this is narrative happenstance, that this was largely not intended by Philza or really any of the writers. It’s just what happens when hybrid-roleplay-improv a long-running, livestreamed storyline in Minecraft.

But I want them to realize the potential they have on their hands, because it could – with barely any adjustments – turn Philza from a victim of narrative circumstance to a champion of it!

Outro

Thank you so much for watching this video. Usually, I don’t record outros this standard, but after this beast of a video I felt it necessary. I hope that whether you’re a Philza fan or a Philza critical or just completely uninvolved in the whole thing, there is at least a little entertainment you could get from this.

I want to take this opportunity to say that my next few videos will probably not be Dream SMP related – a sentence which undoubtedly lost me a bunch of subs – simply because I don’t want to burn out on it. I genuinely enjoy watching the SMP and being exhausted by it would be something I wouldn’t want to force on myself.

But who knows what will happen? The Karl Jacobs video was something I did spur of the moment because the idea just came to me – so I can’t guarantee that the next video won’t be a three-minute joke about Purpled or whatever.

Anyway, my concrete plans for future Dream SMP videos are essays on Season 1 and Season 2 as well as one for Tales from the SMP.

Before that I have a longer video in the works, which I’ve already teased a bunch, so I hope it will finally be finished sometime. And I also may be working on something … eboys-related? Maybe. I’m not making any promises!

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veeranger · 4 years

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So you want to watch Precure!

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(Google Docs Vers & Changelog)

Maybe you follow people who like it, maybe you just love magical girls and never got into Precure, but there are over a dozen seasons and you don’t know how to jump in. Never fear, this masterpost is here to give you a rundown of Precure, and hopefully by the end you’ll have an idea of where you want to start.

What Is Precure?

Precure (short for Pretty Cure) is a Toei Animation franchise started in 2004 and has been on the air nonstop since then. It’s a magical girl franchise, y’know like sailor moon or ojamajo doremi or other such shows. The main demographic is children so you don’t have to worry about any weird “fanservice” or panty shots or anything nasty like that, it’s very G rated.

What Are The Shows About?

In a general sense, Precure is about a team of 2-6 middle school age magical girls fighting bad guys and giant monsters and saving the world on a weekly basis with pretty outfits and big flashy finishers and the power of love and friendship. Each season follows a pretty standard formula (toku fans should be pretty familiar with it for the most part), and each season is around 48-50 episodes long.

In keeping with this toku-esque formula, most seasons will feature mid season additions to the cast, in the form of new precure heroes. For the sake of not spoiling these shows, these mid season cures will not be mentioned in our plot overviews unless they appear extremely early or something like that. Just know that almost every season will feature an additional cure joining the team later in the show.

Additionally, every season has at least one movie, these days there’s usually two per season. Usually you’ll find the movies are a standalone self-contained romp, and a crossover movie with the preceding seasons, with a focus on the most recent 2-3 teams. These movies might as well exist in a continuity of their own, and have absolutely no bearing on the plot whatsoever, save for one except which I’ll mention when we get to that season.

Why Should I Watch Precure?

Because it’s good. It’s a really stellar franchise with a ton of content and genuinely engaging characters and stories. Also this isn’t your mom’s magical girl show, these girls throw punches, and kicks, and big lasers. Precure is pretty well known for being extremely hands on with its combat compared to other magical girl shows, though don’t expect the same kind of fights you’d find in kamen rider or anything. Also a main draw for a lot of people is the amount of gay subtext in, frankly, every season. While there’s only one season with an explicitly confirmed gay relationship between two cures, every season has varying levels of subtext between cures, it’s pretty cool. We won’t discuss the subtext in every season overview but trust us, it’s in there.

What Show Should I Start With?

It doesn’t actually matter which season you watch, every season is a new setting and with new characters and set in a new world (except for two sequel seasons i’ll explain later), so you’re free to watch whatever you want in any order! We’re going to spend the rest of this post talking about each season to give you, the beloved reader, a glimpse at what each season has to uniquely offer. Don’t worry, there’s no spoilers down there.

Futari Wa Precure (We Are Pretty Cure) & Futari Wa Precure Max Heart

The original precure show that aired in 2004, and even received an english dub. Misumi Nagisa is a star lacrosse player living a normal life until one day a shooting star she wishes on turns out to be a fairy that careens right into her room, or rather, smacks her right in the face. The fairy, named Mepple, explains he comes from the Garden of Light, another world that’s been taken over by the evil Dark King and his Dark Zone in order to capture the Prism Stones, a number of heart shaped crystals that, if collected, could give Dark King the power to destroy not only the Garden of Light but also the Garden of Rainbows, Earth itself. Meanwhile, Yukishiro Honoka finds a box in her grandmother’s shed containing an item just like the one that smacked Nagisa in the face, and inside is the fairy Mipple, who explains the situation to Honoka. The two fairies, seeking to be reunited, drag Nagisa and Honoka along and the four of them end up meeting up, but are attacked by an emissary of the Dark Zone. Mepple and Mipple grant the confused duo the power to transform into the warriors of legend, Precure. As Cure Black and Cure White, Nagisa and Honoka manage to fight off their attacker and protect their new fairy partners. The girls are then more or less dragged into the battle against the Dark Zone, as the only hope for both Gardens, they fulfill their duty as legendary warriors despite their hesitations and desires to go back to being normal teenagers.

Futari Wa doesn’t exactly have any major themes to speak of, it’s just your standard magical girl vs evil bad guys kind of thing, forgive it for being the first season. What it does have to offer is the relationship between Nagisa and Honoka, as well as the action in fight scenes. The girls don’t start the season as best friends, in fact they barely even know each other’s names when they’re first flung together. It takes a few episodes and a major fight between the girls for them to really start opening up to each other, but soon enough they become inseparable and support each other in everything they do. It’s clear, especially near the end, that the girls cling to each other for support and strength in the face of the increasingly overwhelming odds they face as the Dark Zone gains strength. It’s very compelling to see their relationship deepen in the early season and see how deep their bonds truly go near the end.

Futari Wa received a sequel show, Futari Wa Precure Max Heart, picking up the story where it left off in the first season’s finale. Honoka and Nagisa are still the main characters, and they’re still fighting the Dark Zone, but this time they’re joined by a mysterious girl named Hikari, who can transform into Shiny Luminous, not a precure but precure-ish. This time the girls are trying to recover the heart and soul of the Queen of the Garden of Light, before the Dark Zone can recover and destroy the queen in her weakened state. Also their precure costumes have changed slightly.

The first season (that is to say, not max heart) is currently one of the few seasons available with official english subtitles on the streaming platform Crunchyroll

Futari Wa Precure Splash Star

Hyuuga Saki (Cure Bloom), a tomboy who loves playing softball, and Mishou Mai (Cure Egret), a quiet transfer student and aspiring artist, meet each other by chance one day under the Sky Tree, where they discover two creatures from the Land of Fountains named Flappy and Choppy. The two girls transform into the legendary Precure and are tasked with restoring Princess Filia and the Seven Holy Fountains, which were sapped of their power by the evil forces of Dark Fall.

Splash Star's main theme is the appreciation of nature. The main focus is on the girls rediscovering their relationships with their town and the nature and people in it. You get to meet a whole cast of characters in their community, who have a lot of heart and charm behind their writing and the show does a good job of getting you genuinely invested in their stories.

Unfortunately the romance in Splash Star isn’t much better than Futari Wa's (sorry to any Fujimura/Kazuya fans), but the main girls themselves are so engaging that it's easy to ignore. The villains are pretty goofy, but entertaining if you can accept that the show doesn’t take itself very seriously. There are two villains in the latter half of the season that really stand out, though. Without spoiling too much, I can promise you their character arcs will tear at your heartstrings in the best way.

If you've watched Futari wa Precure, Splash Star will probably feel familiar. Although it's the first "reboot" series in the franchise with completely new characters, Toei overall played it safe and Saki and Mai in many ways still feel like "Nagisa and Honoka 2.0". Splash Star is different in enough other ways to make the show stand on its own merits, but if you watch it immediately after Futari wa you might find yourself feeling some deja vu. Personally, I think it's interesting to see what Splash Star builds on and explores when compared to Futari wa, since it has many of the same themes and character archetypes but they play out quite differently.

Yes! Precure 5 & Yes! Precure 5 GoGo!

Nozomi is a cheerful, carefree girl, but she doesn’t have a dream. One day she meets a hot guy and finds a mysterious item called the Dream Collet, capable of granting any wish once all the fairies known as Pinkies are gathered inside it, in the school library. She discovers that the hot guy is actually a tanuki from Palmier Kingdom named Coco, and that the Kingdom has been destroyed by the Nightmare. Coco’s dream is to restore his kingdom using the Dream Collet, and Nozomi decides to make it hers as well.

She’s joined by her jock friend Rin, Urara, an aspiring actress, Komachi, a writer, and the rich student council president Karen. Together they form Yes Sentai Fiveranger Yes Precure 5 and work together to prevent Nightmare from obtaining the Dream Collet before they can gather all the Pinkies. They also save Coco’s “”””””friend””””””” and fellow hot guy squirrel, Nuts, and he joins them as the second mascot/handsome love interest.

The theme of Yes is dreams and heterosexual furry romance. It pulls off the dreams part very nicely. The het furry romance is bad, mostly because Coco is Nozomi’s teacher at school and also her love interest. However, Coco and Nuts are fairly gay and if you look past the romance part they have very good dadly relationships with the rest of the team.

Yespre, like Futari Wa, received a sequel show, Yes! Precure 5 GoGo!. After the defeat of Nightmare some time ago, a new faction called Eternal rises up and starts stealing treasures from various dimensions. When Eternal targets the Rose Pact belonging to the Cure Rose Garden, the precure are called back into action to fight against Eternal, with new cure outfits, a new fairy named Syrup, and a new cure-like teammate named Milky Rose.

Fresh Precure!

Fresh is sort of the defining series for modern Precure, introducing a lot of plot and thematic elements to the franchise that would be used repeatedly later on.

A concert Momozono Love attends is attacked by a monster called a Nakewameke. When Love stands up to it, she is nearly killed, but is saved when she is chosen by a mysterious power to become Cure Peach. She is joined by Inori and Miki as Cure Pine and Cure Berry, and, together with the talking ferret from the Kingdom of Sweets, Tarte, they have to prevent Labyrinth, a grey world led by Mobius, from taking over the Parallel Worlds and transforming them into identical, machine-like dictatorships, and also figure out the secret behind the Magic Baby, Chiffon, that Tarte is entrusted with.

Fresh’s themes are happiness and nature/technology and donuts. The donuts are important. Labyrinth operates by gathering misery; the Nakewameke are created from it and their function is to create more of it and fill the Sorrow Gauge. All the girls (and the mascot) have love interests and their familial relationships are explored a lot to bring out the general stakes and emphasise what they’re fighting for.

While Fresh is very strong in characters, plot, and thematics, its lack of budget is very apparent. It looks terrible. Fortunately, it isn’t that difficult to get used to the bad animation once you get into the show, although the lack of means tends to show up at inopportune moments, like new powerups.

Heartcatch Precure!

Featuring character designs and art direction from Ojamajo Doremi’s character designer Umakoshi Yoshihiko, and written by Ojamajo Doremi and Onegai My Melody writer Yamada Takashi, Heartcatch should look and feel familiar to fans of either franchise, especially Doremi.

After having a reoccurring dream about someone called Cure Moonlight being defeated trying to defend the “Great Heart Tree”, the shy and reserved Hanasaki Tsubomi moves in with her grandmother and ends up inheriting the will of Cure Moonlight and becomes the newest precure, Cure Blossom. Finding out her grandmother used to be the legendary Cure Flower, Tsubomi vows to protect the world as a precure and learn to change herself for the better. She’s joined by her new friend and the first person she saved as a precure, Kurumi Erika, a loud girl with a big heart who means well, but doesn’t hesitate to speak her mind. Erika becomes Cure Marine and the two become Heartcatch Precure, the newest precure in the long legacy of those who have stood up to the evil Dune, a mysterious invader who destroys planets and turns them into lifeless deserts. Heartcatch Precure fights against Dune’s minions: the mask wearing Professor Sabaku, his Desert Apostles, and the mysterious Dark Precure. Along the way they meet the former Cure Moonlight, now stripped of her power, and try to help her cope with her defeat.

Heartcatch Precure’s main theme is flowers and flower language. Everyone has a “heart flower” that the Desert Apostles take and use to create their monsters every week. As an interesting result of this, the monster of the week will be the main character in the plot of the week and often their big monster form will vent about their issues which will usually lead to a resolution when the precure return them to their regular bodies. Heartcatch also has a very nice backstory and lore to it. Unlike most iterations of precure, the Heartcatch girls are not the first precure to exist in their world, there are dozens maybe hundreds of precure that came before them, fighting against Dune and his forces for hundreds of years. It adds a lot to the narrative in small ways, especially later on in the season. Also the fight scenes are extremely excellent, especially when Moonlight is involved.

Suite Precure♪

The musical paradise of Major Land falls under siege by the forces of Minor Land, led by King Mephisto. His goal is to steal the living notes of the “Melody of Happiness” and remake them into the “Melody of Sorrow”, throwing the world into a permanent depressive state. As a last resort, Queen Aphrodite scatters the notes into the human world and tasks Hummy, the cat-like fairy, and the Fairy Tones, to find the notes before the forces of Minor Lands can capture them. In the human world, Hummy meets Hojo Hibiki and Minamino Kanade, two girls who were best friends as children, but drifted apart as teenagers because of their tendency to bicker with each other. The two find themselves thrown together again by fate and transform into Cure Melody and Cure Rhythm to protect the things they hold dear. Not long after, the two rekindle their relationship and become closer than before, despite their bickering. Soon the girls run into the mysterious Cure Muse, a girl who appears to be a precure like them, but hides her face with a mask and refuses to join in their fight, claiming to be neither friend nor enemy. Melody and Rhythm battle against Minor Land and the giant Negatones they create from the notes they gather, as well as Siren, another cat-like fairy who used to be Hummy’s best friend before turning to evil and joining Minor Land.

Suite Precure’s main theme is music, and it is a very encompassing theme. Hibiki and Kanade bond over their piano practice, the town they live in celebrates music frequently and is aesthetically music themed, and their powers take the form of musical instruments. Harmony is also a large theme for the two girls. Their precure power increases as they harmonize with each other, and the early season is very much about them learning to harmonize with each other. Suite also features several extremely well done mystery arcs, about the identity of Cure Muse, and various other things that I can’t very well talk about without risking spoiling things myself. If you manage to go into Suite not knowing anything consider yourself extremely lucky and be super sure not to get spoiled. The show staff went to great lengths to hide certain things, including leaking fake cure designs, and creating a second version of the second dance ending to further mask the identity of Cure Muse until her true reveal.

Also something to note, usually precure movies have nothing to do with the plot of the show itself and can be watched whenever but the Suite movie is best enjoyed right after the arc revealing Cure Muse’s identity is concluded, it has a nice resolution to plot elements in that arc and sets the stage for the last few arcs of the show, so be sure to watch it then.

Smile Precure!

Written by Kamen Rider Kabuto head writer Yonemura Shoji, Smile Precure is the second season to feature a 5 girl team after Yes! Precure 5 Gogo!. Running late to her first day of school, resident happy-go-lucky klutz Hoshizora Miyuki runs face first into a small creature called Candy, a fairy from a place called Märchenland. The two are attacked by an anthropomorphic wolf named Wolfrun, and Miyuki transforms into Cure Happy to fight against Wolfrun and the big clown faced monster he summons called an Akanbe. After Candy explains that the legends say there are five precure, Miyuki recruits four new friends: the hot blooded Akane (Cure Sunny), shy artist Yayoi (Cure Peace), responsible older sister Nao (Cure March), and refined student council vice-president Reika (Cure Beauty). The five of them become Smile Precure and fight against Wolfrun and his allies in the Bad End Kingdom, who attempt to revive the slumbering Pierrot by trying to put the world in a “Bad End”.

Smile Precure’s main theme is fairy tales, in a general sense. The Bad End trio are based off of the big bad wolf (Wolfrun), the oni from Momotaro (Akaoni), and the witch from Snow White (Majorina), and Miyuki herself is utterly captivated by fairy tales. The secondary theme is happiness, and the happy go lucky tone of the series often turns on its head during serious arcs to deliver extremely powerful emotional moments. Smile Precure is light on plot, and most episodes are an ultra happy experience, but the show knows how to get serious when it needs to and Smile is exceedingly competent at pulling off drama when the time comes. Smile knows how to get you invested in its characters and use that to pull on your heartstrings during the big moments. The last 10 episodes of the show are the absolute pinnacle of the show’s emotional drama, and each cure gets her own episode for closure before the finale sets in and emotionally destroys you. Also you get to play rock paper scissors with Cure Peace during her roll call so that’s always fun.

Doki Doki! Precure

Doki opens with Trump Kingdom’s destruction by the Selfishness as Cure Sword looks on, helpless. Switching to our world and brighter topics, we meet Aida Mana, Student Council President of Oogai Middle School, whose dream is to become the Prime Minister of Japan. Whenever Mana sees someone in trouble, she’ll help them out, so when a monster attacks the city, Mana does the obvious and tries to stop it. And when, chosen by the fairy Charuru (Charles? Cheryle? Cherry?) to become a Precure and defend the world, she meets Cure Sword, she has to befriend her and help her restore Trump Kingdom and find her happiness.

Mana (Cure Heart) is joined by Rikka (Cure Diamond), her studious companion and supporter, and also the immeasurably powerful and rich (in that order) Alice (Cure Rosetta). Together they have to unravel the mystery of the man who gave them their transformation items, the missing princess of Trump Kingdom, the strange, evil girl called Regina, and Ai, the chaotic neutral baby who hatches out of an egg.

Dokipre’s theme is love and selflessness. It also has Deep Lore, a lot of which is established in extra-series material. The show does try to explore concepts like past cures and manages a very nice repeating pattern effect with the plot, in terms of past and future happenings. There’s a lot of foreshadowing. Compared to most Precure seasons it’s very plot-heavy and even the filler usually ends up being plot-relevant.

Happiness Charge Precure!

The 10th anniversary of Precure! The Phantom Empire is spreading across the world, and Precure are rising up all over the globe to fight them off. In Japan there are two active cures, Cure Fortune, strong and capable, and Cure Princess, scared and unsure of herself. As Cure Princess, Shirayuki Hime, struggles desperately to do her duty as precure, Cure Fortune refuses to work with her for reasons Hime doesn’t fully understand. Realizing her only hope is to find a partner to work with, Hime bumps into Aino Megumi, a super friendly girl who has a tendency to drop everything and help others any time she sees someone in need. Megumi becomes Cure Lovely, and bolstering Hime’s confidence, the two of them become Happiness Charge Precure, tasked with protecting Japan from Queen Mirage and her Phantom Empire. The two are joined by Cure Honey, and eventually Cure Fortune, and the four of them receive support from Blue, the God of Planet Earth. As the girls continue to fight and defend Japan, they are assaulted by Phantom, the ruthless Precure Hunter who has defeated and trapped countless Precure in his Precure Graveyard, and the Oresky Trio, the Phantom Empire generals who oversee the invasion of Japan.

Happiness Charge Precure’s themes are romance and happiness. There are several arcs dedicated to the budding romances of the cures, and the backstory of the show is heavily tied to romance. Happiness might as well be Megumi’s middle name, she makes it her business to spread happiness to as many people as she can, and takes every chance she can to help others. Happiness Charge is also the first season to have form changes for the precure, each cure has a small selection of forms they can change to for different big attacks, and this concept would later be expanded and used as a core concept in Maho Girls Precure. Like Heartcatch before it, Happiness Charge exists in a world where multiple precure exist, but unlike Heartcatch all those precure exist at the same time in the present day. Other precure teams make cameos every so often and the concept creates a great world in which the whole planet is being protected by teenage girls with superpowers, creating a wonderful sense of scale that really makes the big victories of Happiness Charge Precure feel even bigger.

Go! Princess Precure

The first precure series to take place at a boarding school! Years ago, a young girl named Haruno Haruka meets a very royal looking person named Kanata who gives her a Dress-Up Key, a big key shaped like a dress. A teenager now, Haruka starts attending Noble Academy, a prestigious boarding school, all the while holding tight to her dream of becoming a true princess, in a quasi-literal sense. Not long after starting the school year, Haruka meets Pafu and Aroma, two fairies from the Hope Kingdom desperate to revive the legendary precure to fight back against Dyspear and her minions who steal dreams to create their giant Zetsuborgs. Realizing what her Dress-Up Key is meant for, Haruka uses it and the Princess Perfume to become Cure Flora. Together with student council president Kaido Minami (Cure Mermaid), and Amanogawa Kirara (Cure Twinkle) a fashion model with huge aspirations, they become the new Princess Precure, tasked with learning to become true princesses along with protecting the Dress-Up Keys from Dyspear’s forces.

Go! Princess Precure’s main themes are princesses (duh) and dreams. Dreams are a driving force behind all of the cures, and most of the plot of the week characters. Dyspear steals dreams to make monsters, and the precure fight to return those dreams. Characters follow their dreams with conviction, pride, and full commitment. This is also where the princess theme intersects, since it’s Haruka’s dream to become a true princess. One should note that princess is used sort of liberally in this series, it’s not that Haruka wants to somehow become someone of noble birth or have political power, she just wants to be strong, kind, and beautiful, the traits of a true princess in Princess Precure’s own terms. Also she wants to wear pretty dresses and such but who can blame her really.

Mahou Tsukai Precure! (Maho Girls Precure!)

Quite literally putting the magic in magical girls for the first time in the franchise, Mahou Tsukai Precure was the first season to have its cures be actual magicians. Izumi Riko lives in the magical world, a world where magic is real and she attends a magical academy to hone her craft. She leaves the magical world to travel to the “non-magic” world, to search for a legendary item called the Linkle Stone Emerald. In the non-magic world she ends up catching the attention of another girl, Asahina Mirai, who sees her using magic. After trying to show off some magic and messing it up, Riko is attacked by Batty, a servant of the dark wizard Dokurokushe, who is seeking the Linkle Stone Emerald as well. As fate would have it, both Mirai and Riko carry stones that turn out to be the Linkle Stones Diamond, and the two of them use them to become Cure Miracle and Cure Magical, the legendary Mahou Tsukai Precure. Additionally, the power of the Linkle Stones grants life to Mirai’s lifelong companion, a teddy bear named Mofurun. Having discovered the world of magic and become a precure, Mirai is invited to spend time in the magical world learning magic alongside Riko, before the two, joined by Mofurun and a baby fairy named Ha, return to the non-magical world to search for the Emerald and protect it from Dokurokushe and his minions.

Mahou Tsukai Precure’s main themes are bonds and separation. It’s strengths lie in how it shows the relationship between Mirai and Riko. The show takes its time building their relationship in the first dozen or so episodes of their adventures in the magic world, highlighting their similarities and differences as they grow closer and learn to live with each other and fight as precure together. Well before the halfway mark it’s clear how strong their bond is and how deeply they care for each other, and the lengths they would go to for one another. Mahou Tsukai is an emotional ride in so many ways, every emotional moment hits its mark and the more you get attached to the characters the more the show will hit harder and harder with its moments, both sad and happy. Even side characters get satisfying and emotional conclusions to their storylines outside of the episodes they’re introduced in, it’s all wonderfully crafted.

KiraKira☆Precure A La Mode

Another return to the five cure format, Kirapre is also the second season to feature a sixth team member after Yes! Precure 5 Gogo!, as well as the second season to feature high school age precure after Heartcatch Precure. Usami Ichika is in her second year of middle school and loves sweets, especially making sweets. One day a hungry fairy named Pekorin finds her way into Ichika’s kitchen, and after being fed teaches Ichika about Kirakiraru, an energy source that exists in all sweets, and something that can be stolen and used for evil, leaving the sweets gray and tasteless. Utilizing the power of kirakraru in the shortcake she baked for her mother, Ichika becomes Cure Whip, one of the legendary patissiers, Precure. One by one other precure appear, the smart but shy Arisugawa Himari (Cure Custard), the rock band headliner Tategami Aoi (Cure Gelato), the fickle catlike Kotozume Yukari (Cure Macaron), and the responsible and helpful Kenjou Akira (Cure Chocolat). The five of them fight against the evils of Noir and those he has influenced: Julio, the mysterious masked boy who runs “experiments'' using kirakiraru, and Bibury, a mean spirited girl who uses her talking doll to steal kirakiraru and create monsters.

Kirapre’s main motifs are sweets and animals, and it has a pretty general togetherness and happiness theme going on, the standard precure stuff, mostly viewed through the lense of sweets and sweets-making. All the precure work as patissiers for one reason or another and it’s the main way the team bonds early on. The team, as well as the people of their small town, love sweets as a part of their culture and sweets maintain an important role as the emotional tie that binds most things together in the story. Overall Kirapre is a wonderful show with a great cast on both sides of the conflict, and a lot of care has been put into the show to make sure characters have their moments to interact with each other as well as have their own stories , even on a team of six every precure gets more than enough time to shine on her own. Kirapre is at it’s best when it takes two girls and puts them together for an episode, letting each unique dynamic play out in a fun and satisfying way. Kirapre is also noteworthy for the almost inarguably canonical relationship between two of the cures. It's not exactly explicit and it does leave something to be desired, since this is a Toei children's show, but there’s not really any other way to read the evolution of their relationship or their duet song, so I’m more than satisfied calling it canon.

This season is currently one of the few seasons available with official english subtitles on the streaming platform Crunchyroll

HUGtto! Precure

Precure’s 15th anniversary! This season is in many ways a celebration of all things Precure, bringing together a lot of familiar elements from past shows into one. Hugtto! is another five cure season whose main themes are destiny and future. Nono Hana (Cure Yell) is a thirteen-year-old girl whose dream is to be a "cool and stylish woman," although she worries that others see her as childish. One day, a hamster named Harryham Harry and a magical baby named Hugtan fall out of the sky into Hana's house. They're being chased from the future by an evil organization called Criasu Corporation, who are trying to use Hugtan's power to freeze time forever. Hana makes friends with two of her classmates: the responsible class representative Yakushiji Saaya (Cure Ange) and the reclusive ex-figure skater Kagayaki Homare (Cure Etoile), and together they fight Criasu while taking care of Hugtan and figuring out the many mysteries surrounding her. Expect some light sc-fi elements and an emphasis on modern technology/social media.

Hugtto! explores its themes primarily through the lenses of childcare and the workplace, giving us a look at how each girl comes to terms with the transition from childhood to adulthood. This season does a good job of letting each member of the team shine; you spend several episodes with each girl (or duo of girls) and there's a real sense of a complete character arc for all of them. The romance aspect is, unfortunately, pretty bad: there’s a return of hetero furry romance between Harry and Homare, and Hana’s love interest exhibits some really creepy behavior towards her. There’s uncomfortable age gaps in both of these relationships too so it’s a just a bit…. Yikes. Thankfully, it’s fairly easy to ignore like past seasons, but a warning for it nonetheless.

Something that makes this season stand out is its LGBT subtext; there's a TON of it even compared to the normal amount that Precure is known for. Without giving away too much, two of the cures this season are heavily coded as lesbians (though not with each other per se), and there's a subplot concerning a side character who is pretty explicitly (well, as explicit as Toei dares to be) a gender non-conforming man/nonbinary person in love with another man, and it's all very wholesome and presented in a positive light. Again, this is Toei, so don't expect anything too radical, but I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised with how Hugpre handles it.

Finally I'll just say that while Hugpre is a fantastic season on its own, I would personally recommend waiting to watch it after you've seen some other seasons (notably Futari wa). It's not required, but since Hugpre is an anniversary season, there are a few episodes (especially near the end) that will really hit different if you have an emotional connection to the franchise already. Ultimately though this is a fairly minor part of the show, so watching this season first won’t ruin it or anything like that, it’s just something to keep in mind.

Star☆Twinkle Precure

Precure… in space! Our protagonist, Hoshina Hikaru (Cure Star) loves space and cryptids, to the point of drawing her own constellations. One of her constellations is an adorable alien puffball, who warps into Hikaru’s room almost immediately after she draws it. The puffball quickly befriends Hikaru, who names her Fuwa. They are later joined by Prunce, the team dad friend/alien mascot, and Lala (Cure Milky), a humanoid alien who is an adult in her own culture. After our initial duo gets off to a bit of a rocky start, they are joined by the student council president, Kaguya Madoka (Cure Selene) and a biracial upperclassman who is considered to be the “sun” of the school, Amamiya Elena (Cure Soleil). Together, they explore the universe and befriend all sorts of aliens, while also defending them from the Notraiders, who want to rid the universe of all imagination. On top of that, the universe is dying and the cures need to find the 12 astrologically themed Star Pens to save it and the 12 Star Princesses. This series is notable for attempting to break the “monster of the week” format, instead making it a “fight of the week”.

The major themes of Star Twinkle are space, imagination, and maturity. The cures have to explore the universe to find the Star Pens, and in doing so, visit a bunch of different planets. About half the series is spent on Earth, but the world still feels developed! Honestly speaking, the theme of imagination is forgotten pretty quickly and I’d refer to it more as free will. The theme of maturity is where Star Twinkle really shines. All of the cures have had to grow up too fast in some way, and the series is partially about just allowing them to goof off. Lala is considered an adult on her planet, and this plot point is treated realistically. Well, as realistically as it can be. This is one series I’d recommend avoiding spoilers like the plague for, because part of the fun is in how the plot twists are pulled off. Also Star Twinkle is notable for featuring the first ever dark skinned precure, as Elena is half-hispanic.

Healin’ Good Precure

The currently airing Precure season, as of this writing. The Byogens seek to revive their king by inflicting viruses on Earth, the Healing Garden sends three medical interns to combat them. These interns, fairies named Rabirin, Pegitan, and Nyatoran, along with a baby fairy princess named Latte, journey to Earth to find partners to become Precure. They end up meeting Hanadera Nodoka, a kindhearted girl who was hospitalized for most of her young childhood. After Nodoka risks her life to protect Latte, Rabirin chooses her to become Cure Grace. Joined by older sister type Sawaizumi Chiyu (Cure Fontaine) and the outgoing Hiramitsu Hinata (Cure Sparkle), they form Healin’ Good Precure, and defend their friends and the Earth from the Byogen’s newest wave of attacks.

This season is currently one of the few seasons available with official english subtitles on the streaming platform Crunchyroll.

Where To Watch Precure Online

Unfortunately for us, Precure isn’t really a thing in the west. There was a dub of Futari Wa back in the early 2000’s and Smile and Doki both got “adapted” into Glitter Force over on netflix (I don’t really recommend checking those out), but really Precure just doesn’t exist over here.

However, as mentioned above, there are currently three seasons avalible for streaming on crunchyroll. The original Futari Wa Precure, Kira Kira Precure A La Mode, and the current season, Healin’ Good Precure.

Beyond these isolated examples of official releases, you can really only watch precure online on streaming sites or through torrents. You can find precure pretty much on any major anime streaming site, kissanime, gogoanime, the works. You can also try your luck torrenting the seasons, i’ve found that pretty much every season has a working torrent you can find on sites like nyaa.si or the like. For more recent seasons you should have little difficulty getting torrents, and last time i checked every season was on one of the aforementioned streaming sites. What I’m saying really is there’s no single place to find precure, but it’s not impossible to find for sure.

Thanks for reading this post, I hope you decide to check out precure and I really hope you end up loving it.Thanks to my wonderful friend @meltorights for writing the sections on Yespre, Fresh, and Dokipre, to @wonderlilane for writing the sections on Splash Star and Huggto, and @cure-cosmo for writing the segment on Starpre.

If you have questions feel free to drop me an ask I’d be happy to help. I will literally go out of my way to help you if it means getting someone new into precure so please do not hesitate by any means.

#Apple Post #precure #pretty cure #magical girl #anime #toei animation

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the-resurrection-3d · 3 years

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so what was ever good about acotar anyway?

For some reason, I’ve been very tempted to reread ACOTAR lately, and so I’m going to just make a quick list of what I remember specifically endearing the book to me back when I first read it in 2016 so we can compare notes later. This will, however, also include some retroactive criticisms now that we’re four years on from ACOWAR ruining everything forever.

Twigger warnings for discussions of abuse, csa and neglect, as well as me using my complimentary R Slur Pass.

For some context:

>Be 18yr me in 2016.

>Be in your first semester at college.

>Be so fed up with YA romance that you avoid books just for hinting at them in the summary.

>Be also brainstorming a series with your roommate called The Cuckmaster Saga.

This is probably going to sound embarrassing, but I’m being completely sincere when I say that part of why this book excited me was simply the novelty of finding a YA romance book that I liked.

I’d fallen out hard with YA in general by this point in my life, partially because of a string of fairy tale “retellings” that clearly gave zero fucks about the source material beyond using the iconography in its marketing. Folklore had been my special interest for a while, and my excitement for the series and all its little extra niche references coincided with finally getting to study folklore in a true academic setting.

Which leads me to point one:

I love the idea of combining BatB and the Tam Lin ballad. I know some people have complained about this, but honestly, I enjoyed finding a retelling that mimicked the mix-and-match structuring of a lot of folktales. ACOTAR isn’t even the messiest or least coherent mash-up by a huge margin. Unfortunately, this aspect of the series severely lessened as it went along — remember when we all thought ACOWAR was going to be a Snow White retelling and then there was just one scene with poisoned apples? Lmao.

[If anyone wants an author who does YA mash-ups that are actually YA, I’d recommend Rosamund Hodge, whose books are always interesting in their sheer weirdness even when the story itself slightly falters. I mean, I wrote a whole 20-page thesis on her Red Riding Hood/Maiden Without Hands retelling and still didn’t cover everything I had thoughts on. (Tragically, however, I must inform you all that she is a Catholic Reylo. Rest in pepperoni.)]

It is fucking hilarious in retrospect that SJM clearly knows a bunch of different folktales and folkloric creatures but thinks it’s believable for shadowsinger powers to have no theorized origin “even [in] the rich lore of the warrior-people” (ACOFAS 65). Bro fuck outta here.

But this leads into point two — Feyre and her family. It’s very obvious that SJM based Nesta and Elain’s dynamic with Feyre off the common folktale trope of having the youngest sibling be the only competent person in the room (and Katniss Everdeen). I thought it was honestly a lot of fun to see this trope done with some interiority; you can practically hear Feyre seethe about what useless hoes her sisters are between every line. I genuinely giggled through these parts on my initial readthrough.

I’ve seen some people complain that Nesta and Elain’s behaviors aren’t realistic in this situation, but au contraire! Nesta and Elain’s actions in book one are (...almost) perfectly realistic. Without revealing too much, my grandmother grew up in poverty with a few older sisters, and yet my great-grandmother would make her do all the work and constantly force her to give up her possessions (like her car) to the older sisters whenever they wanted them. Even to this day, when they’re all in their 70s and 80s, one of these sisters still relies on my grandma to do basic shit like balancing her checkbooks. I’ve also observed similar dynamics play out plenty of times between an adult child and an overindulgent parent, with people literally ruining their lives and bodies all for the sake of sitting at home all day buying furry porn off the internet.

Nesta and Elain are basically the psychology of this type of person split in two — Elain the soft, delicate, perpetually victimized front they put on for the world, and Nesta the ice-cold, bitter, and aggressive bitch they truly are.

Honestly, the only thing I would change about this set-up is either keep Ma Archeron alive or give Papa Archeron more personality than a plank of damp wood. What’s truly missing here is a parental figure enforcing this fucked up dynamic — I don’t remember it being clear that Feyre’s always had this role, just that she took it on after her mom’s death. Making it clear that Feyre’s always been forced to be this way — alongside giving the mom more characterization — would have gone a long way towards making this dynamic feel more realized and less like the narrative using trauma and pity as a shortcut towards reader engagement.

Then again, that would require SJM to have a female villain in this series who isn’t a rapist, and quotes I’ve seen floating around from ACOSF make it pretty clear SJM doesn’t know same-gender sexual abuse even exists.

Anyway.

Point Three (or rather 2B): Feyre realizing she doesn’t have to hang around her family just because she feels obligated to love them was a fucking banger. I loved it so much; having a story, especially a YA story, that showed you aren’t obligated to love a family that treats you like shit was so special to me. Especially since I was also leaving my family for the first time, and going home to visit them every other weekend felt like being hit point-blank with a Psyduck blast.

Thankfully, my relationship with my family has gotten a lot better, but I’m still really disappointed that Nesta and Elain were forced back into the story, rather than them reaching out to Feyre and making amends because they wanted to do better. The closest we got to this was the revelation that Nesta almost made it to the Border by herself after Feyre was taken, which was definitely badass, but also unfortunately the only Nesta scene I’ve liked in this entire fucking series. If SJM was going to force Feyre to regress into being Nesta and Elain’s tardwrangler again, then she should have followed up on Amren’s line in ACOWAR that Feyre treats Nesta and Elain the way Tamlin treated her.

“I asked them to help once—and look what happened. I won’t risk them again.”

Amren snorted. “You sound exactly like Tamlin.”

[. . .] and I said, “She’s right.” (169-170).

But I’m sure everyone who’s read ACOSF knows how well that’s going.

Point Four: the femindhjdfhfdh I can’t even write that with a straight face. I mean let’s be real, I too enjoy seeing female characters I like become queens and all that other stuff, but it was clear to me even on my initial reading of ACOMAF that it was all shallow and designed to help delineate good guys from bad guys without much in the way of nuance. It certainly took me out of the experience a little, but at least it ties into the books’ themes of recovering from abuse and shacking up with a Certified Women Respecter.

My actual point four: Truthfully I only bought this series for the meme of having the first shitty love interest getting cucked in the second book. ACOWAR gave me some complicated feelings on Tamlin, and I honestly think he should have just stopped appearing in the series after that — BUT, having him be dragged back in once per book just to call him a cuck and cockslap him around a little bit is fucking hilarious. Pointless! But hilarious.

I also think that this kind of arc is a great critique of the standard “happily ever after,” acknowledging that in real life, you’re much more likely to just pass from one abusive household to another because you don’t know what healthy love, communication, and boundaries are. (Arguably many folktales are the fantasies of women who are well aware of this reality but want to imagine a world that’s otherwise). I definitely have a lot of problems with SJM’s claims of “sex positivity,” but acknowledging that Feylin used sex as a means of avoiding communication was another great touch.

I wish that this whole King of Hybern shit was completely cut just to focus on these themes more; it’s very clear SJM only included it because fantasy series = BIG EPIC WORLD-ENDING STAKES!! I've read maybe ten pages of Throne of Glass, so I can't speak for how she handles epic fantasy there, but I know for me and a lot of other stans, the Hybern plot had licherally nothing to do with what we liked and connected to in these books.

But I must soften here, because I totally empathize with feeling like big stakes are “necessary” for a fantasy story and that no one would want to read your books without them. YA fantasy is the reason why TV Tropes coined the term “romantic plot tumor,” after all. (Source: I’m making shit up.)

What else… what else… uhhhhh. I think that might be it, at least for substantial things I don’t have to qualify too much. I of course have plenty of little things I used to like but have now been tainted because ACOWAR ruined everything forever and ACOFAS danced on the graves (such as how I liked Lucien but everyone in the books shits on him now to the point it’s stopped being funny). But this post is too long anyway.

#long post #anti sjm #abuse tw #csa tw #r slur #neglect tw #what's been eating feyre archeron?

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le-poor-writer · 3 years

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A Christmas Miracle

A cold winter night, with lights from shops and street lamps illuminating the square. From each shop, you can see colourful decorations of shiny or glittery ornaments and green garlands. Jolly voices singing blessed songs about the holidays, blasting from the speakers. Drowned out by the chatter of city folk as their feet hustle along the walkway. Each and every one of them dressed in layers to keep themselves warm. Vapour from their mouths rising and disappearing into the sky. Colliding with gentle fluffy snow that fall ever so lightly. So many movements at this moment which people called Christmas Eve. Amidst all of this, an angel watches over them silently.

Simeon sat on one of the benches. His gloved hands tucked away in the pockets of his long grey coat. A white scarf wrapped around his neck, showing people how warm he felt. Well, winter in the human world wouldn't be that cold for angels. But he had to dress the part. The last thing he wanted was people staring at him for dressing so lightly and he was also well aware that his usual angel garb would definitely defy the fashion standards of the human world. He had to admit, he's doing pretty great to camouflage himself among the humans. Still, he somehow earned a few stares. Their gaze kept darting between him and the ground. Was there something on his face? He took a glimpse of his reflection on one of the windowed stores, nothing seemed to be strange.

The angel tilted his head to the sky and leaned against the bench, waiting for his coworker. Every angel of the Celestial Realm was assigned by Michael to spread Father's blessing to the humans on Earth. Simeon and Luke were assigned to this bustling city. They had started from the church and went around the streets and buildings. For every person they pass will receive the blessing. Simeon rarely worked alongside Luke, but he can already tell that they will get along fine. Luke might be boisterous and opinionated at most times, but that is because he is honest, genuine and has a strict set of values. Simeon can see why Micheal has him under his wing. Hence he looks forward to be Luke's partner in the future. Before Luke, he was always working together with Lucifer.

A deep sigh escaped his lips. Simeon wondered how Lucifer is doing in Devildom. How long has it been since The Great Celestial War. Decades? Centuries? He suppose it has been a few hundred years. He couldn't really be bothered anymore to keep track of the exact time. Despite how the situation has cooled down since then, he knew Father was still a little angry at Lucy. He was after all the Lucifer Morningstar, a magnificent and beautiful angel. To think that he would wage a war against Father and going as far as becoming a demon. However, Simeon was well aware of the reason behind the war. Perhaps Lucy too is still mad at Father until this very moment. Simeon just hoped that he was no longer angry at him.

It was never his intention to have made his brother into his enemy. However, during that time they both had very different opinions. Lucifer would forsake the rules of Celestial Realm for love and Simeon believed that the laws existed for a reason and are to be abided. Yet, as those long years passed he wondered whether it was truly worth it. He did not regret holding on to his belief. It happened, his choice had already been made. And as he closed his eyes he could see the deep wounds from both parties. Arrows fell upon them all like rain and weapons clanging in their ears. He could hear cries of battle and agony. The metallic smell of blood and how smoke choked their lungs.

"Simeon."

The angel opened his eyes. He noticed a blond boy standing in front of him. "Are you done, Luke?" he asked, eyeing the big fancy red paper bag.

Luke lifted the bag towards Simeon. "There were a lot delicious looking sweets in there. So I tried getting a little bit of everything including the one that Michael wanted."

Of course Michael would ask Luke to get human world confectionaries. That darn sweet-toothed angel. But Luke seems to be getting a fair share for himself too. Baking is his hobby after all and sampling sweets from another realm would certainly add to his ever growing list of recipes.

"Is there something wrong, Simeon?" Luke stared at him with his big blue and yellow eyes.

Simeon smiled gently. "Nothing Luke. I'm just feeling a little tired."

"Oh... let's go back then."

They both strolled among the crowd. Simeon would like to hold Luke's hand so he would not get lost, but got scolded by the young angel instead. Grumbling about treating him like a little kid when he was in fact already serving directly under Michael. Simeon could only listen quietly in amusement. He was mesmerized with the twinkling decorative lights draped over the leafless trees dusted with snow. Admiring how the humans managed to find beauty even in the bleakest object. Everything was already aesthetically pleasing in the Celestial Realm. However, at times he found it hard to appreciate the beauty of his environment. Not that he did not appreciate Father's creation. It just felt different after whom he considered his brother, left.

"Ho ho ho! Merry Christmas!"

They passed the centre of the city square where an old man sat under a huge decorated pine tree. The man was big. He had a thick white moustache with a long beard that reached his chest. He was donned in a red coat with furry white collar and cuffs. His trousers were also red with white fur cuffs. A red hat with a white furry pompom attached was sitting on his head, it looked like a nightcap to Simeon. The only thing not red and white was the black leather belt and boots he was wearing. This old man was sitting on a lounge chair with a line of children in front of him. Simeon wondered what on earth is going on.

"It's Santa Clause!" Luke exclaimed.

"Santa Clause?"

"Children of the human world believe that this old man called Santa Clause would grant any wish they had for Christmas. He has a factory in the north pole and hundreds of elves work for him. Most of the time children asked for toys but in the movies sometimes people wish for Christmas miracles."

Simeon stared at Santa Claus for a moment before making eye contact with Luke. "Do you want to go meet Santa Clause?"

"Simeon! Don't treat me like one of those human kids. I'm an angel and I'll have you know that I-" Luke began to chastise as he stomped away from the square.

Simeon apologized as he scurried after him. Chuckling softly as his ears endured another one of Luke's grumbling. At the same time, he found it funny how human children put faith in such make believe, though they had always been imaginative beings. He could also see how this was a capitalistic marketing strategy in the human business world. The toys and the movies. A franchise after the infamous Santa Clause. The idea of it all was intriguing. A being that could grant whatever you want for Christmas. It's like Father, but the once in a year fairy tale like holiday version. And the idea of a Christmas miracle that comes with it.

There is a nice ring to it. For thousands of years, humans had always asked for miracles. An event that could change their lives for the better. Or even something that brings assurance to their rocky hearts. And the idea of a miracle that happens with Christmas does give a special feel to it. Miracles don't always happen on the spot, or they could never happen at all. Yet humans still ask for it. They hoped for it. Simeon looked at the stars in the sky and wondered. Father had granted some of the miracles that humans wished. If an angel were to ask for it, would Father grant it too? He didn't know any angels that had asked for a miracle. That was because there was never a need to, everything they needed and wanted was already there in the Celestial Realm. Everyone is happy and content there. Except for Simeon.

There was something in the Celestial Realm that he wanted but does not exist there. Or at least what he wanted was in a different realm. But would Father allowed it? Simeon's heart began to beat faster in both excitement and nervousness. He did not know whether he should ask for it or not. But tonight is Christmas Eve isn't it? The night where Father tells them to spread his blessings to every being on earth. Simeon at this moment is walking on earth. And a Christmas miracle is also a blessing right? Right?! The angel took a deep breath and whispered a little wish to his heart. A feeling of relieved washed over him and his shoulders began to feel lighter than before.

It was only a few minutes later when he thought everything was rather ridiculous. He did not get the sense that something amazing was about to happen. The atmosphere was the same as it had been hours ago. Well, he suppose that all he needed to do was really acknowledge that he was still very much upset over the fact that Lucifer left the Celestial Realm and that his scars had not yet healed. And that he really did regret some of his choices. He should really accept the outcome already and start moving forward. Besides, now he has Luke. And he swears he will try to be a good mentor and brother figure to the young angel.

Simeon and Luke had finally reached the Celestial Realm after a lot of detouring in the human world. Simeon couldn't wait to get home and rest. It certainly has been a long day for all the angels. Luke has invited him to taste the confectionaries he bought earlier. He seemed extra jubilant to return. Hugging the paper bag that was a little too big for his size. Simeon had offered to carry it, but Luke insisted it was his duty to have the sweets delivered to Michael personally and he will see through it. Which reminds Simeon, he would like to have a word with Michael about his habits of having people get him his large amount of souvenirs. Though, he wasn't sure how to approach his superior about. Lucifer would have easily told Michael off... or not.

At a distance, one of the angels called out to Simeon and Luke. She approached them immediately and relayed her message. Apparently Michael was waiting at their humble abode and wishes to see them as soon as possible. Luke cheered and skipped off happily while Simeon internally groaned. Seems that the guardian angel of confectionaries could not wait for his sweets and pastries. He swears one day he will think of a way to tell him off. Luke seems to not mind however. So now he's not sure what exactly he needed to tell Michael. Perhaps if Luke feels alright about it then everything is well?

"Simeon!" Michael greeted him, a Belgium waffle in his hand. "You took your sweet time."

Was that pun intended?

"I'm sorry for the delay Michael. But it seems that Luke has already arrived with your sweet delicacies." Simeon motioned towards the said waffle.

"Yes, I was waiting for this." he popped the remaining waffle into his mouth and chewed quickly. "But that's not the only reason why I wanted to see you both."

Was it not?

Michael handed him a letter. "I received this today and I believe both you and Luke are suited for this."

Simeon took the envelope carefully. On the back of it the name of the sender surprised him, Lord Diavolo of Devildom. Wasn't he the son of the Demon King. If Simeon remember correctly, the last time he saw the Demon King was a thousand years ago during a ceremony. Now, what could the future king of Devildom possibly want from Michael or even the Celestial Realm? Surely this isn't a Christmas greeting card like the ones he had seen in the human world. He turned the envelope over and saw a seal with initials R.A.D..

#obeymember #obey me #obey me simeon #angel simeon #om! simeon #om! luke #lucifer #om! lucifer #christmas #slight angst #simeon #obey me fanfic #obey me shall we date #miracle

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theropoda · 3 years

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3, 4, 6-8, 11, 13-17, 19-22, 26-30 uwu

WOO LAD THAT’S A LOT THANK U!!! this got long and i wrote an essay or two LOL so im putting it under a readmore!

3: Best game you’ve ever played? WEEEELLLL.......let me preface this with two things: one, i am a FAKE GAMER as in my laptop is not at all made for gaming, it’s piss poor, so a big chunk of games i’m interested in is because i watched a playthrough of them lol. i have a 3ds but only 3 games on it (animal crossing new leaf, tomodachi life, nintedogs & cats). second, i’m very bad at choosing favorites of things.....BUUUUT .....i choooooose, in no particular order, OFF, pigeonetics, elder scrolls oblivion, pathologic classic HD!! i’m more than likely forgetting a few though, so sorry about that

4: Worst game you’ve ever played? as i said above, cannot choose favorites, neither can i choose whatever the opposite of favorites is but...uhh, does lif even count as a game? like lif, the stupid little furry flash game i remember playing on some shady website. it was surprisingly very active with a BUNCH of people there but i kept dying like every 5 seconds....AWFUL

6: A game that’s changed you the most? WELL define Changed.....ummm aha first thing that comes to mind is OFF. it’s one of those things where you never knew you wanted something so fucking bad until you saw it--and it’s like that for me. i NEVER knew i loved that odd, surreal, colorful, “looks playful and simple in some parts but incredibly violent and unnerving in other parts” aesthetic til i played it. like aesthetically i love that game to BITS and something about it just stuck with me til the end of time.

later in life (meaning, past year or so) it changed me because it taught me a lesson about storytelling and creative endeavors. a very useful lesson. which is: things don’t really need to have a meaning. stories, art, music, writing, whatnot, while it CAN be deep and meaningful, while you CAN use it as a way to communicate with the world about all kinds of heartfelt things, it can also be...nothing, really.

once i, as usual, got ridiculously overwhelmingly sad about small things. specifically seeing other people around me come up with all kinds of deep and meaningful characters and stories, sometimes putting them into webcomics or writings of theirs, and they were all so well-thought out and detailed and what i envied most was people put a lot of themselves and their experiences into them, venting and coping through them, whilst also making these larger-than-life grandiose complex stories and worlds and so on and so forth.

it made me look at my own ideas and get mad/frustrated at how shallow they were. but then i remembered OFF and i felt better because Fun Fact, mortis ghost has a now-abandoned dA account and if you go through the comment section on his profile, he answers a lot of fan questions and he mentions several times that the game didn’t really have a “meaning”, it didn’t really have a “deeper story” or moral or anything, really. i’m paraphrasing this but i vividly remember him saying “i wanted to make a game, so i did”.

that made me feel a lot better because it made me realise that sometimes art--especially stories, in my case-- doesn’t NEED to be DEEP or have MEANING...sometimes it can just BE!!!! sometimes it really can just be all about AESTHETICS like who GIVES a shit if there’s a hidden meaning if you take the first letter of all of your characters’ names and put them backwards, sometimes all that matters is if they just VIBE with you y’know....

yume nikki is similar in this regard bc that game doesn’t have any story other than “collect egg” and yet it’s so impactful. that game doesn’t have a story or meaning it just IS........ :) GOD THATS SO LONG IM SORRY ABOUT THAT but yeah. funny violent ghostbusting baseball man is a game that changed me :)

7: A game you’ll never forget? OFF AGAIN LOL,,, it’s just so memorable because of how unique it is. visuals, soundtrack, story, everything is so memorable. unforgettable. oh god you can tell how much i love this damn game can’t you

8: Best soundtrack? yakuza 0, OFF, there is a picture (another game by mortis ghost, again composed by alias conrad coldwood who also composed OFF), pigeonetics (the entire soundtrack of which is here), jojo’s bizarre adventure all star battle and eyes of heaven, silent hill 2 & 3, undertale....probably forgetting more but all of these...earcandy

11: Hardest game you’ve played? i am a shitty gamer so this is Most games i’ve played lol!! but uhh..well you see. hardest game i remember playing as of recent is pathologic classic hd in which it’s...not only hard to understand what any character is saying at any given time lol but also, i don’t think it’s HARD it’s just...you need to focus. you REALLY need to fucking focus and pay attention in this game. so i wouldn’t say its HARD, but i’m only putting this here bc it’s in recent memory.

i say recent memory because the true answer is susceptible to “yeah, but now you’re older, it must not be so hard.” as in if i played it now i think i’d have a way easier time. but when i was around....10-12 years old i had several ps3 video game adaptations of animated movies and i had SUCH a fucking hard time with them. g-force, bolt and up in particular were fucking HARD. like genuinely, the hardest time i had EVER had in my live playing video games is tied to these three fucking games. g-force and bolt ESPECIALLY. one particular level in bolt took both me AND my sister around a year to fucking finish.

again, i was baby, so i bet i’d have a much easier time with them now that i’m 17. but for now, in my experience, bolt and g-force for the ps3 were harder than pathologic classic. i think icepick lodge should take a few notes for them for pathologic 2.

13: A game you were the most excited for when it wasn’t released yet? STREETS OF KAMUROCHO...i spent the entire day of its release anticipating its launch lol

14: A game you think would be cool if it had voice acting? hmm..most games i like and know about do have voice acting so i dunno....i guess it would’ve been kind of cool if morrowind had like, full proper voice acting. but i can understand why it only voice acted things like greetings and battle insults because GOD that game is SO...complicated...and as a result, the conversations are so lengthy and text-full. playing morrowind is really like a goddamn book! if it was voice acted i’m sure all that information would have to be shortened bc i know no one is going to fucking voice act two whole paragraphs

15: Which two games do you think would make an awesome crossover? pigeonetics and yakuza in which instead of being about the criminal underworld it’s about shady and unethical pigeon clubs, breeding, racing, etc etc...a lot of illegal shit does happen in the world of pigeons especially when it comes to racing; prized racers have been kidnapped and held for ransom before. and then there’s Avian Cucking: The Sport, where people breed the sexiest pigeons (horseman thief pouters), release them outside to seduce other people’s sexy pigeons, and bring them back and keep ‘em, drama ensues. will kiryu ever escape his past as a professional pigeon-napper, and find solace in his new life as a pigeon hobbyist? find out now by playing YACOOZA......

JOKES ASIDES i don’t know i really don’t....umm, pigeonetics and animal crossing somehow?? :O... like, instead of managing your own town it’s managing your own loft!...orrrr, the jojo games (all star battle & eyes of heaven) with yakuza, because i think they’re somewhat similar because they’re both haha Wacky Silly AND serious over the top fighty-fighting.....or maybe a crossover with OFF and discover my body, which, despite being an incredibly short and obscure indie game i still love to bits for what it’s worth. WAIT ANIMAL CROSSING AND MINECRAFT THAT WOULD FUCK SO HARD OH MY GOD

16: Character you’ve hated most? From what game? i can’t think of any character i like, HATE...with a burning passion.. there are a few i dislike or have a complicated relationship with though.. i’m not interested in the series anymore but ouma from drv3...i’ll admit that he is a bit fun sometimes, especially in the very early beginning he’s a likeable brat but as the game progresses he becomes more irritating than anything and i have an issue with him in regards to writing, despite the fact that i have never been awake in any english class ever lol. it’s too long to put in this already long post but i’ll keep it at that. if you like him, well, good for you for finding joy in something i couldn’t! but he just doesn’t do it for me.

AH I JUST REMEMBERED....MINE......FROM YAKUZA 3....maybe i’d change my mind if i watched a playthrough of y3 again, because i think you always absorb something better on your second watch (tho i honestly Dont have the energy to do that all over again, the yakuza games are too fucking long), but i really hate his writing. spoilers for y3 but, i think mine’s writing, alongside other things in the game, were super messy...and a big part of why i hate him is that not only is he one of those “could’ve had great potential but fell flat” sorta guys but also his love for daigo is seen as some fans as good gay rep and i?????/.............um....WELL let’s just say that, i think people nowadays will see any gay character ever in any circumstance and say it’s good gay rep just based off the fact that A Gay Character exists....he was Not, good gay rep imo....he was not, let alone, Good. .........

17: What game do you never tell people you play? can’t think of any games i wouldn’t tell people i play.. idk exactly what this question’s asking. does it mean what game you don’t tell ppl you play bc you’re embarrassed about it...? i’m not very embarrassed by any of them. the only thing that comes close, i guess, is uhh lioden and wolvden. i’ve only interacted with those communities a LITTLE TINY WEE BIT, yet of what i’ve seen it’s a goddamn dumpster fire and i’d never want to be associated with them lol

19: Which game do you think deserves a revival? i’m well aware it’ll never happen and that it’s more a wet dream than anything but...PT/silent hills..... on a more realistic/”could happen” note, PIGEONETICS!!!! SERIOUSLY, it’s an amazing game about amazing animals and it teaches genetics in a very simplified and efficient way!! genetics is SO hard for me to understand, i fucking hated studying it but this game really helped me understand how it works AND its super engaging and interesting!! HOWEVER, of all the pigeon genes we know of, only a handful were seen in pigeonetics and i’d LOVE a sequel that employs new game mechanics AND new genes!! i wanna learn about bronze and stencil genes! i wanna learn about phenotypes like grizzled and pied!!! genes like sooty and dirty!!! @ UNIVERSITY OF UTAH GENETICS DEPARTMENT PLEASE IM BEGIGNG YOU

20: What was the first video game you ever played? earliest memories of Gaming involves me at my aunt’s house playing two games: super mario brothers and some kind of trapeze game. i don’t remember anything else though

21: How old were you when you first played a video game? i can’t remember but i must’ve been REAL tiny.... 6-9 years, maybe??

22: If you could immerse yourself in any game for one day, which game would it be? What would you do? immerse myself meaning go into their world...? huh....on one hand i’d like to go in the world of yakuza 0 to play in the arcades and do whore related activities but i’d also love to go into the world of animal crossing (and i’m pretty sure i’d be some sort of generic dromaeosaurid in that game!!) and shop, chat with villagers, do chores for them, go fishing, bug hunting, eat delicious fucking food like the apples mangos peaches cherries etc etc.....OH AND FOSSIL HUNTING THAT’S THE BEST PART!! though it would definetly be a little weird, to be a little dinosaur and finding a fossil of a...little dinosaur....i guess the non-sentient species went extinct and the dinosaur i am is some kind of, descendant of a sapient non-avian dinosaur that survived the k-pg extinction event...oh but who cares all i want is a cool little ambulocetus fossil or something. and some cherry pie :)

26: Handheld or console? my old ps3 just went kaput one day years ago so i haven’t used it in years so i can’t compare well... but i’d say handheld, because it lets me like DO stuff more...would love to get a console one day, a ps4 maybe but i’m kinda worried it’ll make me stay in one room all day wasting away my time when there’s other stuff i can do, y’know? but something handheld like my 3ds, on the other hand...i can do stuff with it. i can take it to my room and play it between breaks i take as i clean the room and fold my clothes, i can watch something on the tv and play the game during ad breaks, i can take it outside too if it has charge to last me a while! so....handheld i guess

27: Has there ever been a moment that has made you cry? yakuza 0 and undertale in particular have ALMOST made me fucking bawl with many of its moments....yakuza 0 especially, after that Fucking Ending i had trouble sleeping because oh my fucking god. video game people SAD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

28: Which character’s clothes do you wish you owned the most?

29: Which is more important, gameplay or story? HMMM....well, if i were to play a game with a shitty story but really good and fun gameplay i’d probably continue playing it for the gameplay. but if i played a game with shitty gameplay but an interesting story, there is a chance i’d play it more for the sake of the story but also i might just quite and see the rest of the story on youtube or something. i’m more likely to go through a boring story for fun gameplay than go through boring gameplay for an interesting story, so i guess gameplay is more important to me....that is, WHEN i actually own and play a game as opposed to when i just watch someone play a game because i don’t own the game but wanna know abt the story lol

30: A game that hasn’t been localized in your country that you think should be localized? i have no idea how video game localization really works....but i assume localizing a game in india would mean something like, removing content according to cultural norm and also somehow translating it into the 22 official languages..? or just two or three language if it’s tied to a particular state, which seems way more doable. i honestly have no idea? i’ve never interacted w the indian gaming community that much to be honest, all i know of it is of the video games i’ve seen sold in some game stores and a few whispers about like solid snake or whoever from my school’s cafeteria....the most popular games here, to my knowledge, are those very streamable games like fortnite and PUBG and your call of duties and whatnot. those generic shooters. and even then, that honestly isn’t the “indian” gaming community bc this country is so FUCKHUGE, it’s just tamil nadu. one state.

soooo, according to what little i know of gaming interests in where i live, i don’t think any of the games i like should be localized here bc i don’t really think there’s an audience for it as far as i can tell :( maybe animal crossing? it’s a fun little games for all ages and i think it has a chance of becoming popular here, so maybe that is worth a shot! but i can’t think of any other game that i like that really has an audience here (other than Me lol)

#asks #stommevrouw #THANK U EVIE THIS WAS SO FUNNNNNNN #WOOF haha this made me tired #im probably hitting the bed now! thank u!!

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thatishogwash · 4 years

Text

To See You Again

KuroDai Week 2020

May 6th, Day One : Earth / Sky

AO3

Kuroo could not fathom why he was chosen for this job out of all the available angels. He had no interest in earth, whether that involved the creatures that inhabited it or physically being on it himself. He did like the small furry creatures but there were plenty of those above, where Kuroo liked to reside. Everything on earth was too much, contrasting points that made Kuroo’s headache.

It was just so ugly. The small bits of natural places the unfortunate creatures left alone were still beautiful. Tiny patches of forests, the stretching scrublands, and the vast deserts Kuroo never minded. But the city he found himself in was horrid. It was full of noise, constant and unfamiliar. The smell was atrocious, it was equal parts too bright and too dark. He could feel the press of humans against him, not just the physical body he was forced to inhabit to walk on this plane of existence without frying the ridiculous creatures minds but they pushed and pushed on him from every direction.

Anxieties, fears, pettiness, ambition- it all threatened to break him apart.

Why were there so many of them and why did they all congregate in one tiny area?

Kuroo turned down an alley, taking a deep breath and immediately joking on the putrid smell and taste around him. Why were humans so filthy? And why did they insist on poisoning the planet they lived on? Did they think there would be no consequences for their actions?

Kuroo had spent the majority of his long existence not minding humans much. The few he interacted with up above were usually quiet and polite, some skittering around his edge of vision as if they feared direct contact. He did not concern himself with those from below because he hardly had a reason to leave the comfort of his home.

Then he was given a mission to complete, apparently a job that only he could do though there certainly wasn’t a shortage of angels who wished to take a trip to the mortal realm. But this was important and he was asked by the high council to complete this mission, so he would do his best to finish as quickly as possible and return home.

Never one to have walked the mortal realm before, Kuroo had to have a point of contact. Someone who knew of his kinds existence who would assist him. Kuroo just wished this person didn’t situate themselves in a dirty back alley in an overly crowded city.

The inside of the tavern was just as dingy and worn down as the outside but at least there were only a handful of patrons scattered about the decent sized room. The putrid smell of the alley fortunately did not carry into the establishment either but the occupants were less than savory. Not a single one was human either, which worked just as well for Kuroo. He hasn’t the knowledge to dance around the human customs they all held so tight onto.

Walking to the man polishing glasses behind a long wooden counter seemed to be Kuroo’s best bet. He wasn’t even sure who he was supposed to meet with, just that they knew he was coming.

“Well hello handsome,” Pale gray eyes looked Kuroo up and down, briefly pausing on the space just to the sides of Kuroo. He felt the need to pull his wings closer but resisted, knowing they were well hidden. Some humans were born with the sight but they usually did not live long enough to learn that the creatures who hid amongst them did not want to be seen. This one in front of Kuroo was no mortal, though he belonged to this realm as much as the humans did “Now tell me pretty boy, how does an angel find themselves in a place like this?” He leaned against the counter, the dim lighting making his silver hair appear darker.

Kuroo felt the need to shift restlessly. Handsome? Pretty boy? They sounded like terms of endearment but this man hardly knew him.

“I’m looking for a guide.” Kuroo stated honestly, the local language came easily to him. “They were made aware that I was coming.” An eyebrow was raised as the smaller man leaned against the counter, appraising Kuroo once more.

“Did you walk around in those sheets?” They asked, smirk curling up the corners of his mouth. Kuroo looked down at his clothing, he could have sworn he chose something that was in fashion the last time he had peaked in on the humans. Things couldn’t have changed that much, could they? He hadn’t paid much attention while walking but the few occupants of the tavern were dressed quite differently.

“Suga what’s going on I felt-” The voice cut off and Kuroo turned towards it automatically.

Kuroo had always been obedient, he had wanted to please those that gave him orders and he had only come close to even questioning them on one occasion. What felt like a lifetime ago, many of a human's lifetime that is, a group of angels had been cast to the earth for their disobedience and Kuroo’s core beliefs had been shaken. He had been close to them, had fought by their side, slept curled together, had grown and watched over their land. When they had fallen it had felt like a piece of Kuroo had gone with them.

“Tetsurou.” Only an angel could true name another angel and no matter what had happened the one in front of Kuroo was an angel, had been an angel.

“I’m called Kuroo in this form.” Kuroo motioned needlessly to his own body. He watched a small uptick in their mouth.

“Sawamura.” He took a deep breath, broad shoulders shifting before bringing up a hand to rub at the back of his neck. All his movements were so human it nearly surprised Kuroo. Dai- no, Sawamura, had always had a love for mortals. “Of course no one thought to mention it was you they were sending.”

“Will that be a problem?” Kuroo glanced over at the man behind the counter, who was leaning against it with his head propped up on his hands, a big smile on his face as he watched the two of them.

“No.” Sawamura cupped his chin, looking Kuroo up and down with a slightly pained expression. “This will require a lot of leg work.”

“Am I not appropriately attired?” Kuroo spread his arms, tried to keep the smile off his face because he had already gotten the impression that he was wearing the wrong thing.

Kuroo knew he should be feeling something like dread consuming him at this moment. Sawamura had fallen, his wings had been destroyed, Kuroo could feel the wrongness about the other angel like a cold hand down the length of his spine. But standing there in the same room with someone he had grown with, someone he had loved wholeheartedly, he could only help but feel sudden elation. He was so different, short but broad, hardened by years spent in the mortal realm but still with that aura of kindness he always radiated.

There were only a few that Kuroo was comfortable enough to be his true self around and apparently neither time nor space could change that one of those few was Sawamura.

“I can help with that!” The man behind the counter volunteered enthusiastically.

“Wait-” But the man already had his hands planted flat on the counter and used them to valt himself over the top and land gracefully before Kuroo.

“Come along pretty boy.” Kuroo looked at Sawamura in question even as he was pulled further into the building.

“It’s fine, Sugawara won’t harm you.” Sawamura exchanged a look with the grinning Sugawara who pushed and prodded until Kuroo willingly followed him.

“So you know Sawamura from up there?” Sugawara whistled as he pointed upwards. Kuroo couldn’t fault the other for his questions, he was curious about Sawamura’s current life so perhaps they could exchange information.

“We were created together.” Kuroo answered, earning a surprised look from Sugawara as Kuroo followed him up a set of narrow staircases that led to a wide and round room. “Have you known him long?” Kuroo thought Sawamura had fallen about two or three hundred years ago by human standards.

“I found him after- well, you know.” Sugawara made a vague motion but Kuroo understood what he meant. He stepped over to a standing wardrobe, pulling it open and Kuroo stared in shock at the sheer amount of fabric it held. “He was pretty injured, I didn’t even know angels could be that hurt.” It took a lot to injure an angel. Mostly another heavenly being, though inner fighting didn’t happen often. Falling was different, it was devastating

“Is this necessary?” Kuroo looked at the large amount of clothing Sugawara was pulling out, instructing Kuroo on how to wear it all.

“We’ll have to do something about that too.” Sugawara pointedly ignored Kuroo’s question, eyeing the spear Kuroo was holding. Kuroo simply tapped the spear against the ground twice and let it become a simple leather bracelet on his wrist. “Convenient. I can’t believe you walked down the street wearing that, holding a seven foot spear and no one called the police.”

“Humans tend to see only what they want.” Kuroo pulled off his robes and tried on the different pieces of clothing. He didn’t see the point of changing his bottoms, or pants as Sugawara called them, three separate times or his top eight times but he didn’t feel like arguing.

“Perfect.” Sugawara clapped his hands together. His smile should have held joy but there was something quite mischievous about the look.

Kuroo didn’t enjoy the pants, they were tight and restricting but he did like the heavy boots. The top was fine, Sugawara called it a V-neck, and Kuroo liked the long sleeves. He hadn’t fussed much when Sugawara had pulled out a pair of scissors, cutting off Kuroo’s long hair.

“One more thing.” Sugawara stepped in front of Kuroo, his smile turning sharp as he pointed the scissors at Kuroo’s chest. “You might look down on Sawamura but he means the world to a lot of people here so you better watch yourself, mmkay?” Kuroo felt genuine surprise as he looked down at Sugawara.

Many times Kuroo found himself wondering how Sawamura was. There were no rules against visiting the fallen but it was frowned upon and Kuroo had his own duties to see to. He worried that he would be alone or hurt. The human world was one of harsh realities, cold and distant to those raised elsewhere. But it seemed Kuroo needn’t have worried for Sawamura had carved out his own life here.

“I don’t look down on him.” Kuroo answered honestly. He wasn’t really threatened by the scissors, most likely they would break if met with Kuroo’s skin but he still wanted to avoid a confrontation with someone Sawamura cared about.

“You don’t? But you’re up there and he was forced to be down here.” Sugawara was clearly confused.

“I know that.” Kuroo tilted his head, wondering what Sugawara’s point was.

“Don’t you think, I don’t know- you’re better than him or something? His wings have been damaged, he can’t return home, he’s an outcast to your kind.”

“He can return home.” Kuroo ran a hand through his newly short hair. Sugawara had still left a couple inches, more than he himself had or Sawamura had. “He just has to repent.”

“Repenting, is that difficult?” Sugawara asked to which Kuroo shook his head.

“He has to apologize.”

“Apologize?”

“And mean it.”

“And mean it?”

“Why are you repeating what I’m saying?” Kuroo asked. “Angels are allowed to make mistakes, we are not perfect creatures. The fallen are still angels, no matter the state of their wings. Sawamura will come home when he chooses too and he will be welcomed back.” Falling itself was meant as the punishment, living on earth a small part of it. Kuroo supposed two or three centuries seemed like a lot to a human, but it was fairly insignificant to a celestial being. Kuroo had always believed that Sawamura would return, the others with him.

Sugawara was silent as he led him back to the tavern. Kuroo smiled as he spotted Sawamura once more, walking up to him and only pausing slightly when he saw him start to turn red.

“Are you alright?” Kuroo asked worriedly, peering down at Sawamura.

“Fine.” Sawamura shot Sugawara a hard look before sighing. “Ennoshita you’re in charge!” A quiet affirmative was heard from behind another door.

“Oi!” Sugawara threw his arms open.

“You’ll only instigate trouble.” Sawamura tugged on the hem of Kuroo’s shirt, prompting him to follow the shorter angel out of the tavern.

“Sugawara threatened me.” Kuroo said once they were on the street. It didn’t smell nearly as bad as before, and the heavy push of emotions wasn’t as overwhelming.

“Did he?” Sawamura sighed as he rubbed the back of his neck once more, looking up at Kuroo out the corner of his eye.

“He’s protective of you.” Kuroo was happy about that. As long as Sawamura seemed content than Kuroo wouldn’t push him to return home when the mission was over, no matter how much Kuroo personally missed the other angel.

“I won’t let anything happen to you, even from Suga.” Sawamura stated plainly. Kuroo smiled at that, happy to hear that Sawamura was as protective as always. Kuroo leaned down a bit.

“Is there something wrong about the clothes he picked out? You keep looking at me.” Kuroo asked, head tilting as he watched Sawamura flush red once more.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Sawamura mumbled, earning a laugh from Kuroo.

Sugawara had nothing to worry about because Kuroo would make sure that nothing happened to Sawamura either, he swore on his life.

#kurodaiweek2020 #kurodaiweek #kurodai #haikyuu #my writing #haikyuu!!#Kuroo Tetsurou #sawamura daichi

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tekkai · 4 years

Note

Tell us more about your relationship with Furry husband!!! What is the dynamic like????

Oh no don’t get me started. No but seriously thank you so much! I love him so much and this is an essay of my love to the leopard furry that is my husband

It really just boils down to the fact that I thrive for the opposites attract troupe and the idea of grouchy blood-thristy leopard man Rob Lucci with me, the human equivalent of a labrador, sends my heart aflutter.

Long post beneath the cut

I don’t believe people can change quickly or easily but I’m in love with the idea of two people helping each other grow and complementing the other’s strengths.

I’m soft and sensitive while he’s cold and stoic.

He’s my emotional rock, grounding me when I get over-whelmed. At the same time I’m very in touch with not only my own emotions but those of other peoples. I’m very sensitive and can read him quite easily. He trusts me enough that he’s starting to open up a little and I’m more than happy to help him explore the depths of his emotions.

In exchange while I tend to get lost in the big picture, he’s able to focus and break down problems into smaller pieces. When I’m feeling overwhelmed he helps refocus my attention and has an almost mystical ability to turn monstrous tasks into more manageable small projects. I’m still a chaotic mess but he’s done wonders to help me organize different aspects of my life.

Every time he’s appeared in canon since the time skip my husband has looked so stressed and I’ve made it my mission to help anyway I can. Like I said, I’m a lab trapped in a human body. I just love people and am always making jokes or trying to make my people smile. He appreciates my enthusiasm for life and optimistic world view.

I just am so in love with the idea of him being his usual grouch around his subordinates that obviously wants to bite someones head off but the moment he comes home he softens and is able to relax around his happy-go-lucky wife.

Lucci is almost arrogantly confident while I second guess everything. Being around me he’s become ever so slightly less abrasive towards other people and in turn he’s helping me work on my own self confidence.

He’s very supportive of my work and casually brags about me??? I’m not used that kind of support and get turn into a flustered stuttering mess every single time he complements me in front of someone else.

He knows I’m a little insecure and makes such an effort to make sure I feel beautiful and important. His complements are so specific and sincere I want to cry. He’s not big on public displays of affection but sometimes when we’re out together he’ll lean down and whisper such genuinely sweet praise/loving words to me that my brain just short circuits and I need a minute to reboot my system.

We’re definitely an unconventional power couple.

Lucci is known for his abilities within his organisation and is feared both by his enemies and his allies.

In this world I’ve carved out my own little niche and am passionate about my work. While I’m not the best scientist I’m well known in my own right for my research into the living dinosaurs and their relationship to the birds in the One Piece world. I’m happly married to my furry husband and get to play with dinosaurs what more can I ask for in a s/i.

Although we’re very different we can recognize and respect each others strengths. We’re equally powerful in different ways and are very supportive of each other’s ambitions.

The strong protect the weak troupe.

In terms of strength he exceeds the definition of super human in this world. He’s stupidly powerful compared to the average person and is an absolute sadist in battle, literally turning into a leopard-human hybrid and toying with his prey until they either succumb or he gets bored.

Alternatively, I’m a baby. Even in a world of ridiculous power levels my self insert is a lover not a fighter. I can hurt people in other ways but I’m significantly weaker than the average person and mostly rely on my own wit to avoid injury.

Lucci is so protective and careful around fragile little me. The only thing he hates more than insults being hurled at himself is a harsh comment aimed at his wife. With enough pleading I can usually talk him down from out-right mauling the critic and his intense glare is usually more than enough to send them scurrying.

My family is often my biggest critic and although they mean well they tend to come off a little strong. He knows he can’t tear them apart but as soon as I start to get uncomfortable he’s quick to either physically remove me from the person in question or redirect their attention and change the topic.

Extrovert/Introvert Dynamic

I’m the extrovert, albeit an awkward one, and the human cat is my introverted husband.

I’m very social and he humors my attempts at reaching out to others. Unfortunately most couples I’ve tried to befriend have been scared off but you can’t fault a girl for trying.

Very slowly I’m getting him to dip his toes into my world of outdoor festivals and late night dinner parties.

At the same time my introvert husband is helping me slow down and appreciate the time we have together. For the first time in my life I’m enjoying silent cuddles and the inherent peacefulness of just existing in the same space. Usually silence makes me anxious but I feel so safe around him I can just relax and savor the moment.

Of course I still get stir crazy but we’ve definitely had an effect on each other.

I tend to talk… a lot. Especially when I get passionate about something. Lucci doesn’t mind holding a conversation but he definitely appreciates when I can lead the conversation. He’ll let me ramble on, watching as accentuate my points with elaborate hand gestures while he watches me with the softest smile. He finds my passion endearing and I’m more than happy to hold an audience. If I start to lose momentum he’ll interject with a question and I’m always happy to start rambling on again.

We’re both monsters and I love the angst

We both have the ability to become human monsters. In the beginning there was a lot of hesitance from both of us for how the other would react to this revelation. Spoiler alert: We are both more than okay with this information about the other.

He not only can become a giant leopard human hybrid but has a horrible reputation. For the longest time he hesitated to even touch me because he hated the thought of staining me with what he perceived as blood soaked hands.

On my part, my S/I is more or less the devil. I don’t want to hurt anyone but I carry a lot of guilt over what I’d done in the past. I also carry a lot of baggage from people using me for abilities in the past and I’m reluctant to talk about what I can do.

Trust was built slowly between us as we each worked through our own issues and gained faith in each other. Patience was a huge theme while we’re dating, and continues to be into our marriage. We’re very observant people and if the other needs more time to work through an aspect of relationship/get comfortable with a new concept or mile stone we’re both happy to let the other set the pace.

The responsible adult and the child at heart dynamic

In reference to that post about the sled dogs.

Lucci has his life in order and is an extremely responsible adult ™. While he’s calling to get our taxes in order I would have absolutely been plotting to adopt a dozen puppies to raise as sled dogs.

I tend to be a dreamer at heart and my ambition tends overestimate my reality.

Lucci is very much the responsible one in this relationship. Although he is not at all a dog person, if it means making me happy, he would suggest instead of starting with 12 puppies he would recommend adopting one first and then considering more.

While Lucci brings a level headed maturity to the table I try to keep things fun. I know most of my ideas are far-fetched but thats not the point of my thought experiments.

Progress has been slow but not only has he come to indulge in my hypothetical outlandish dreams he’s started to contribute to my fantasies.

“Angel, if you adopted a team of sled dogs we’d have to move somewhere cold. Then I’d have to find a new tailor…” It’s not much in terms of elaborate couples fantasies but he’s humoring me and my gods do I appreciate it and run with it. I’ll spend the next few days trying to find a tailor in the arctic before chasing a different idea.

We have a running joke where I’ll overwhelm myself and exclaim “I need an adult” before soliciting affection from my emotional-support leopard.

#nougatships #Ah I ended up writing way too much #But tbh I'm sure I'm forgetting important stuff #Lucci is currently my longest self ship and our relationship has grown so much since then #I apologize for the inevitable typos this is less of an essay and more of an unbridled gush #Furry Husband #But thank you again #I just love him so much #;-;

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antagonisms · 4 years

Photo

BASICS

Name: Evan Czarnecki

Gender & pronouns: cis male, he/him

Species: werewolf

Age: 27. Jokes about being 63, because he was a wolf for 6 years, which is 42 dog years + those 21 normal human years. Either way, age is a really weird concept now.

PERSONALITY

Traits: Pretends to be flippant to put the world at a distance. Vulgar as a means of distancing himself from genuine vulnerability. Perceptive, but won’t let you know that. More self-aware than he lets on. Self-absorbed. Self-destructive. Loves being seen, hates being known.

Moral alignment / MBTI / enneagram: Chaotic neutral. INTP-A. 5w6.

Values: In other people, he likes independence, open-mindedness, the ability to dress well, a lack of tolerance for bullshit, genuine altruism, and resilience.

Flaws: Judgmental. Narcissistic as a defense mechanism. Occasionally rude, but mostly just cheeky. Not a team player. Reckless. Hedonistic. The brokest bitch in Blackrock.

HISTORY

( shorter version is in the app. i just like details. trigger warnings for child abuse and sex as self harm.)

1) CHILDHOOD

You had a family, once. Your mother’s a piano teacher and your father is — you don’t know, really, but he’s got enough old money to buy nice things even if he’s stingy on principle. He’s polite, and she’s funny, and your fellow patrons at Sunday Mass love all three of you because you’re down-to-earth, surface-level beautiful — a perfect American family.

But they don’t know what happens inside the too-big house at the foot of the mountain. Your mother’s a pessimist, and your father’s a sniveling piece of shit who copes with his worthlessness by making everybody feel small. He’s kinda good at it. They’re both as loud as they are erratic and it’s all a matter of bracing yourself for when the floor inevitably falls through. You make do, mostly. You hide in your room. You lock the door. You put your ears behind headphones. You drown out their screaming matches and your too-loud mind.

It all falls apart when Mommy decides she hates Daddy more than she loves you. No goodbye. No explanation. She just leaves.

Her departure plants a lesson you will later find impossible to uproot: love is earned, Evan, you’re not working hard enough. At least your father stayed. At least he sometimes loved you. At least, you think so. He might have loved you when he took you fishing, or gave you that book you really liked, or when he buys you clothes that look really nice. You flip through your mother’s old sheet music and fumble through the piano keys, and you think he might love you when he watches you fill this house with her memory without saying anything.

But mostly, he’s not very kind. You don’t want to think about it anymore.

2) ADOLESCENCE

You inherit your mother’s cynicism and your father’s stingy heart. The skill you develop is as much a sense of humor as it is a safety net. If life’s a joke, beat it to the punchline. By the time you’re fifteen, you can no longer pretend that your world is worth saving. You keep it at arm’s length. Your mind makes a mockery of the darkness to keep its jaws at a distance, because if you couldn’t do that, your pitch-black pessimism would swallow you whole.

Growing up feels less like maturing and more like mutating. By the time you’re sixteen, you stop feigning perfection to earn the affection of a father who’s heart is colder than your Blackrock winter. Popular misconception claims control is a word you never learned, but that’s just what you let everyone think. The truth is: control is a lesson you pried out of your body when the need for acceptance evolved into a need to rebel. You’re an embarrassment, Evan. Adolescence meant insurrection. You’re a failure of a son. Pills and booze and boys and girls biting the hand that hit him. Your heart is a bullet and your mouth is a shotgun and you will make yourself repulsive if the alternative is admitting that — Evan, I wish you knew how difficult it is to love you.

You only apply yourself when it matters. You get into Stanford. You take a loan. You don’t let your father pay for tuition, because you’re not letting him control your life anymore. You leave your tar pit town the way your mother did, and it’s only a matter of time before your goodbye is permanent.

It gets better as much as it gets worse. You leave home, but home doesn’t really leave you, and you don’t recognize your body when it’s not in pain. You’re beautiful, though. People see you and want to make you theirs. You let it happen. Too-rough hands salve the ghosts of bruises your father left you. This is the ugliest way of putting it: you feel damaged. Every person you kiss has too-sharp teeth, and maybe that’s exactly how you want it, because if this body doesn’t feel like it belongs to you, then offer it up in a way that feels good.

You always leave first. You love much how it tears them apart. This is your inheritance: your Momma’s love of leaving, and your Daddy’s stingy, stingy heart.

3) THE BITE

Unlike your mother, you tried to come back. Your father called one night, asking if you wanted to return for Christmas, and the small, stupid flicker of hope that your pessimism couldn’t kill begged that you give him a chance.

He didn’t change. He argues about the degree you’re taking with the money you don’t have and insists on carving a future for you, his way. He doesn’t like your independence. He doesn’t like your protests. Your fights are explosive until they aren’t, until a raised fist reminds you exactly what violence he’s capable of.

At least he sometimes loves you. Maybe he loved you when he picked your wounded body up, carried you out of the woods, and bandaged up bite on your side. Maybe he loved you when he brought medicine to your room, and maybe he loved you when made you chicken soup just the way you liked it, even when you didn’t ask. Maybe he loved you when he sat by the side of your bed, and talked about his father, and his father’s father, and how none of them really knew how to grow up without making their sons feel small.

But the fever is strange. A new kind of anger tears out whatever capacity for forgiveness you might have had. Your bones are changing. Something wretched twists and grows inside you, and with a hot flash of pain, you’re something new entirely.

You have one last coherent thought before the wild takes your mind completely.

I have to kill him. So you do.

3.5) THE THINGS YOU DON’T KNOW

The news of your father’s death spreads like wildfire in Blackrock. It’s not your father’s mangled body that causes intrigue, it’s your disappearance. Wolf attacks, while uncommon, aren’t exactly rare, and everyone’s heard the folktales. Neighbors assure that you were there during the evidence, but the police find no evidence of carnage, not a pound of flesh nor drop of blood to support the fearful need to conclude that there’s nothing supernatural about this. You can’t prove the Czarnecki kid isn’t a werewolf, the gossipers say. Nobody can even prove that he’s dead.

4) WOLF-HOOD

You don’t know what strange circumstance landed you in your new body, but maybe you don’t care. Maybe the bite and the fever killed you, and the Buddhists were right. You don’t really know if you earned enough good karma to deserve this reincarnated form, but either way, you’re never letting it go. You hunt deer. You roll around in the snow. You snarl at any predator that dares to get near, and bite the ones that move into your space without permission. Sometimes you walk into the backyards of strangers and wait for children who aren’t afraid to try and approach you. You don’t eat them, because just because you’re a monster now doesn’t mean you don’t have principles.

You lie down. You let them rub your belly.

It’s a really nice life.

5) NOW

Six years after you thought you died, a woman drags you out of the woods you back into your body. Even a lifetime of pain couldn’t prepare you for the shift back. New bones tear your animal flesh apart, piercing your skin open to make room for your wretched old body. It aches in too many ways. The people — the wolves — the ones who did this to you, they tell you this is your home now.

So it wasn’t Buddhism. Maybe it’s the Catholics who’re right; eternal damnation does await the unrepentant sinner, and it looks like this: you’re here, trapped in a frat house for furries, without a cellphone, a car, or clothes of your own, or money to pay a doctor to confirm whether or not you’d acquired a tapeworm.

You realize you owe Stanford 213,000 dollars.

You are a very tired wolf.

TLDR:

Evan has a bad childhood. He becomes a wolf. He kills his father. He mistakes lycanthropy for reincarnation and lives in wolf-nirvana for six whole years. You drag him out of nirvana. The realization that he didn’t actually die puts him in a terrible mood.

CONNECTIONS

( So uhhh I wrote up possible prompts for the existing werewolf skeletons before I knew what anyone was like and I think they can be good jumping points! If you don’t feel this fits your character, or if you want a different sort of dynamic, just message me! )

1) WOLVES (AND BITTEN HUMAN)

ALDER: You’ve seen him at his ugliest — a small, scared creature writhing on the floor, that horrific cross between a howl and a screech leaving his shifting throat. Now there’s a flare of red-hot resentment in his eyes whenever he looks at you, and it makes you wonder if he’s more monstrous as a human than he is a beast. You saved him from death. You realize you cannot save him from life. He’ll never forgive you for that.

HEMLOCK: You are a bootlicker and he does not like you.

HICKORY: It’s not your job to keep the feral wolf in line, but your brother seems to resent whatever circumstance it was that landed him the role of mongrel babysitter. Consider picking up the slack. The guy’s only half-terrible — sullen and strange but mostly manageable, and maybe earning his trust is only a matter of affording him the patience that nobody else wants to offer. If it’s an opportunity to prove this pack your worth, try taking it.

MAPLE: You’ve worked too hard to protect this pack, to earn your position. Now your lot has dragged some feral creature out of the woods, offered him their home, their humanity, and still, he has the nerve to be ungrateful. He makes it clear that he doesn’t trust you. He makes it even clearer that you cannot trust him. Maybe the demons in your head are concussed, but the new demon in your home now insists on giving you a migraine.

PINE: You are a mirror of lost days. You are the young flighty creature he once was and can never become again. Home is a word you might have both forgotten, but circumstance has offered you both a new roof over your heads, and a family to go with it. Maybe these similarities should draw you closer, but there’s a glimmer of resentment in his eyes whenever he looks at you. You don’t know why it’s there. It could be pity. It might be envy. It must be grief.

OAK: He had a father, once, and that shit didn’t end well. For some reason, he sees it fit to pass some unearned blame on you, and now years of buried resentment are yours to bear. Family’s a broken word, he seems to think, but you cannot let him break yours. Still, it’s evident that he lacks the capacity to be as self-sufficient as he’d like, and as long as that’s true, it’s your thumb he’ll be under. You know he needs you. Offer an open hand, or pull the leash tighter. The choice is yours.

REDCEDAR: He shows up at the bookstore to read a new title of Animorphs every other day and you don’t know how that makes you feel.

WILLOW: He might take more kindly to you than he does the others. You’re both new to a home you’re not sure will ever welcome you, and more importantly, you both wanted this. The bite. This beastliness. The difference is that he’s certain. Your condition is a new part of yourself that you have yet to fully love, but he seems to think he can teach you. Man and beast are equally monstrous, he tries to convince you. So let’s be the kind with bigger teeth.

2) OPEN CONNECTIONS

( Open to humans ) has taken an interest in the Czarnecki Werewolf Conspiracy. They’re familiar with the incident — a dead father, a missing son, and the wolf that allegedly kill them both. All the facts line up too neatly, and when somebody who looks to be the ghost of one Evan Czarnecki returns to haunt the streets of Blackrock, they think it’s finally time they get some answers.

( Open to humans ) once knew Evan. Yeah, the kid who always got straight A’s and played piano for Catholic mass? What the actual shit happened to him? They’re watched Evan go from familiar face to murder case overnight, but now, the town recluses have found a new adoptee — and he’s the splitting image of the boy they once knew. Maybe it’s time to reconnect.

3) VAGUE CONCEPTS

he uhhhh (spins wheel) flirted with ( open ) at last drop for free drinks and then realized that spending six years as a wolf made him de-acquire the taste of liquor and now he’s having a crisis

( open ) tells him he needs therapy. evan laughs

this is actually very hard he’s so unsociable

jsut message me... we’ll think of something

#shipper.#about.

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wetalkinboutbooks · 5 years

Text

The Bird King by G. Willow Wilson

Summary

The Bird King is a 2019 fantasy novel set in 1491, the novel takes place in the Emirate of Granada during the territory’s final days. The story concerns the flight of Fatima and Hassan, a concubine and mapmaker, respectively, from service to the Emirate’s last sultan. (Taken from Wikipedia)

We follow Fatima and Hassan on their search for the Bird King as they avoid soldiers of the Spanish inquisition, and meet a variety of characters along the way.

Our Ratings:

→ Geena: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

→ Kae: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Overall: The Bird King is an amazing book that manages to be complex yet light-hearted. It touches on subjects like faith, love, and friendship. The characters are engaging (and absolute drama queens) and the plot is fast-paced so there’s never a dull moment. The dynamic between the characters leads to the funniest situations that will have you dying. In summary, reasons to read this book if you haven’t already:

A- ONE SUPER FUNNY BOOK PLZ READ IT

B - THE DRAMAAA OF FATIMA AND HASAAN

C - Vikram

D - Stupid

~ Spoiler-full discussion below ~

The Good:

→ Hassan and Fatima’s Relationship

Geena: The best thing about the bird king (aside from the horse named Stupid) was Hassan and Fatima’s friendship. IMO it was so wholesome and they were so in love (PLATONICALLY!!!!). When Hassan said seeing Fatima walking around was like seeing his heart outside his body…… a BITCH DIED!!! Also, the fact they would take shots at each other constantly? Loved it. HOW COULD I FORGET… HASSAN CONSTANTLY BEING HORNY AND FATIMA BEING LIKE “CAN U CHILL!”

Kae: OKAY MOOD LMAOOO. So boom. Geena covered it. We love this book! Hassan and Fatima are the definition of the 💯 emoji. But these bestie-bitches are DRAMATIC af. I’ve never seen two best friends who love each other as much as they do. They’re hugging and crying one moment, then the next they’re jealous that one of them is talking to someone else. DRAMATIC. I love it. Have we talked about Gwenny and Stupid yet?

Geena: WE HAVEN’T TALKED ABOUT THEM, the perfect accessories to the Hassan-Fatima duo. Gwen is the token white boi, there for Hassan to thirst over and Fatima to learn how to sail a ship. Stupid on the other hand…. God bless that horse all it did was drown and then LIVE!!!! The absolute legend. BUT Kae HOW WOULD YOU DESCRIBE GWEN AND STUPID? HMMM

Gwen: I only love God

Also Gwen: *sleeps with Fatima on the deck of the ship while Hassan is 3 feet away*

Kae: Well... Gwennec. Ol’ Gwenny Gwen Gwen. Gwen, the Monk who FUCKS. PAHAAHA. Gwen was a new Monk who was at first, totally against helping our favorite bestie-bitches. But Fatima was all “Don’t test me white boi I will kick ya ass.” And Gwen lowkey thought it was hot so he let them slide. He taught Fatima and Hassan how to sail while Hassan made googly eyes at him and definitely wanted to tap that. But, as previously stated, Fatima and Gwen got it ooonnn. Hassan found out and as like “Fa, I can’t believe you slept with my husband who doesn’t know we’re married yet!”, and that was basically that.. Then we have Stupid. The horse who was just as damn stupid as his name. The horse lived to spite the Grim Reaper just to prove it would breathe another day. We also haven’t mentioned our Jinn friend and their literal lifesaver/guardian angel, Vikram.

Geena: VIKRAM, aka another dude/djinn/dog man that Hassan wanted to fuck but couldn’t :( Vikram was essentially the only one in the group that had a substantial amount of brain cells, and spent most of the time trying to make sure Fatima didn’t accidentally kill herself. The fact that he saw his death and it was in the arms of a “beautiful woman” should sum up his character really well.

Kae: Geena is sooo right. Vikram was the only one with brain cells because Fatima and Hassan both shared two. Our loveable, dramatic, but also a little dimwitted faves wouldn’t have survived any of their adventure without Vikram. He lead them through a Jinn filled tunnel that Hassan made. Escorted them across the land with the Inquisition right on their asses, and fought off whoever tried to hurt them. Initially, he agreed to save them because of a debt he owed to Fatima’s Sultana. But in the end, Vikram helped them because he wanted to. He was a weirddog/man/Jinn who just wanted Fatima and Hassan to stop being dumbasses for five seconds. But they couldn’t so he was constantly annoyed and probs wanted to eat them to shut them up. BUT WE STAN THAT FURRY LEGEND BECAUSE WITHOUT HIM, OUR ESCAPEES WOULD BE DEAD-EEE. Also he was one suave, smooth talking mofo and I feel like if he walked up to you and said “You’re lovely, but you’re an idiot. It’s okay, because you’re pretty tho.” that compliment sandwich would go right over your head and you’d thank him.

Geena: ok FIRST OFF I would be like “why do you have a tail” but god Kae you hit all the points.

The Bad AND The Ugly

→ The Sultan and His Mom Being Pedos

Geena: Ok so, Fatima is 17 and I’m assuming the Sultan was in his mid-thirties, because he has kids Fatima’s age 👀. So I am sure it was historically accurate, the fact that the old ass man had a 17 year old concubine, but that doesn’t make it any less gross!!!! What’s worse is that Fatima’s mom was originally a slave for the sultan, so when she was born the sultan’s mom raised her and had her instated as a concubine when she was 15!!!!!! Scuse me while I 🤮.

Kae: Yea, Geena said it all. The Sultan was ewww. Fatima was his favorite and I guess he talked to her like she wasn’t a concubine? She was treated very well. For a concubine. Probably better than any concubine I’ve read about Like, she had rights and could talk shit without punishment. But still, DISGUSTEEENNNG. Our girl was groomed so we do NOT stan the Sultan.

→ Luz

Kae: we also have our main villain, Luz. She arrived at their palace to play peaceful, but she had ulterior motives that involved her spreading the word of the LORDT and taking Hassan in to be tried for Witchcraft and all that magic shit. Because if we didn’t say it before, Hassan can draw anything on a map and make that place a reality. Luz has this little worm in her eye that basically makes her super weirdly strong and badass. But fuck Luz. When Fatima finds out that Hassan is to be tried for witchcraft, she goes to him so they can both escape. Fatima wants to be free and she doesn’t want to see her bestie die. So what do they do? They dip. And now our friends are on the run.

Geena: UGH Yes, can I just say the moment that Fatima realized that Hassan would get canned she was like “fuck all these people” and peaced out with Hassan? Friendship goals… But yes LUZ!! I enjoyed reading her as a villain because she genuinely thinks she’s a good person and that her life’s mission is to “Save” people like Fatima from people like Hassan. You really end up liking her in the beginning, and then she turns around and murders a few people and you’re like…. Ah…… i see….. aND THEN it turns out she was being controlled by some brainworm that was also trying to get to the Bird King and you kind of wonder…. How much of what Luz did was her being a violent inquisitor and how much was the worm controlling her… you kno? She redeems herself by dying, so I guess she gets…. Like one (1) right.

Kae: Damn girl! Well said!!! LITCHERALY that is a perfect summary of Luz’s character. I can’t say anything else because it’s been SAID. Villains are always interesting when they don’t see themselves as the bad guy. They’re righteous and unforgiving because they believe they are doing the right thing. That’s what scary about them.

Conclusion

Kae: Okay, so in conclusion. This is an amazing book and in all honesty, I enjoyed the hell out of it. I was never bored reading it. Hassan, Fatima, and Vikram had quite the adventure and all the dramatics of made it that much more enjoyable. They left the palace in hopes of freedom. Hassan and Fatima got the idea of The Bird King from a story they liked to read, but never knew the ending. So they continued the story on their own, making it up along the way. In hopes of escaping their new fate to Luz and the Inquisition, Hassan drew up a map to the Bird King in hopes to find it. Their journey took them to meet Gwennec who sailed them to said island, where they discovered used to be inhabited long, long ago. Soon, others began to show up on the island. Hassan even got him a MANS. A DOCTOR. Whew. He’s got taste. The island is also forever changing and some of the remaining inhabitants are Jinn.

Geena: Kae summarized the story really well!!! The journey to the end was an absolute trip, but G. Willow Wilson tied up the story neatly. We get to see Fatima become less dependent on Hassan (thanks to his doctor bf who told her to chill out) and Hassan finally find the happiness he deserves. Gwen, unfortunately, doesn’t make it to the end (press F to pay respect). Luz essentially sacrifices herself by taking the map Hassan drew, getting off the island, and ripping it up. Why does she do this? Because to make a place or passage Hassan drew disappear the map has to be ripped. And leaving the map to the island wasn’t an option because the Spanish inquisition never stops!!

Kae: And if they ripped the map on the island, the island would cease to exist! Upon arrival to the island, everyone had their ships wrecked. Luz got fucked up on the shipwreck and that worm thing got ripped out of her eyes and then it became a monster on the island that was NOT to be trifled with. Since Luz got all jacked up, she was gonna die anyway and no one wanted her to stay--

Geena: Everyone said “u cant sit with us” to luz. OKAY DISCUSSING THIS BOOK MADE ME REMEMBER HOW MUCH IT MADE ME LAUGH, GENUINELY ONE OF THE FUNNIEST BOOKS I’VE READ. 10/10 FOR ME!!

Kae: LMAOOO HONESTLY. XPECIALLY FATIMA NEVER HAVING WALKED SO FAR BEFORE AND BEING A BIG OL BABY. but she DIIIID have messed up shoes that blistered so I’ll give her that BUT YES HASSAN WAS A DRAMA QUEEN “waaah, I have red hair and im pale BUT I'M STILL HOT AND I LIKE TO F U C K” But yeah, Luz got voted off the island and voted herself off the island, ripped up the map, and then they were safe and lived happily ever after. Vikram even made his final appearance to say his goodbyes to Fatima, even though he hates goodbyes. I give this book a 10/10. It was funny, the characters were likeable and relatable, and it was just a good adventure read.

#the bird king #G. Willow Wilson #diverse books #book review #the bird king review #book blogging #booklr

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rorykillmore · 6 years

Note

and i'd love to hear about any aus you've been thinking about/working on!

okay so lately i’ve been getting nostalgic about charmed, as sometimes happens with me,

but i’ve always loved the idea of playing with charmed aus because the universe is so extensive! you can get so creative with translating character concepts into it! and it’s just really fun in general?? so i’ve been thinking about building on that more often buuut for lack of a core concept to center anything around rn, i thought i’d just talk a little bit about the ideas i have for my characters! some might be subject to change depending on how much i keep developing this, but

okay so lucille i think would probably be some kind of darker, underworld-aligned species. i’ll just say a demon to make it easier. lucille is some species of demon, but probably with some human blood in her background. human traits probably initially manifested more in her brother, thomas, than they did her, but after he died she started struggling and succumbing more and more to grief and guilt (which full-blooded demons can’t typically experience) and probably ends up trying to explore that and grow from it at some point?

to reflect the redemption arc she went through on denny i even like the idea of her eventually making a deal similar to the one drake made, where he got to be human for a year but then had to die at the end of it. i mean,, that’s really sad but i also feel it’d be kind of rewarding for lucille in a charmed au. she’d really get to experience life properly for the first time and learn shit about herself and it’d have all the more meaning for her if there was some kind of time limit on it.

siobhan -- easy one, she’d be a banshee!

...actually charmed banshee lore isn’t toooo different from siobhan’s family curse, save for the fact that banshees in this universe essentially ‘infect’ each other (if you’re a witch who’s stagnated in deep grief or pain and you hear a banshee’s scream, you slowly begin to transform into one). so yeah siobhan starts out a witch, gets turned into a banshee at some point and loses her humanity, is a pretty spooky villain for awhile. maybe at some point there’d be hope of turning her back though?? like whatever involvement rocket or red would have in this au, maybe they’re the ones to do it.

sara.... i dunno, i’ve considered a few aus where she’s a witch, but she could also potentially make for a very interesting whitelighter? a sassy damaged whitelighter who kinda stumbles her way through helping people sometimes but can also be very good at it; kind of paige-esque. because sara’s death in her canon is like, an infamous event, and sure characters die and come back all the time on charmed. but with how much sara’s death changed and transformed her (and how she has to leave her old life behind afterwards), i think it’s appropriate to bring her back as a whitelighter, and have her get assigned to watch over a group of ragtag, time traveling witches who are supposed to save the world. you get the picture!

i’m keeping heather a witch because i really like the ideas you’ve already come up with re: her, duke, and mcnamara kind of being this buffy-esque teenage demon fighting trio!! and then like meeting/joining up with veronica later on and stuff. one little twist i was considering adding in (appropriate to heather’s character,) is maybe making her a witch/demon hybrid? which... isn’t a fact she’s keen to disclose because if revealing you’re a witch is dangerous in normal society, revealing you have demon blood is dangerous even in magical societies. she has a slightly more aggressive nature and more destructive powers because of it, but is by and large pretty firm about defining who she is and what she wants to be.

okay and for madeline, i’ve kind of fallen in love with (no pun intended,) the idea of her being a cupid! i love. charmed’s cupid lore. a cupid is essentially a like a whitelighter where after you die, if you were a good person in life, you get offered a ‘higher calling’, except instead of being a guardian angel you’re essentially just... an angelic matchmaker?? you spread love, help people fix their relationships, etc. i feel this is something madeline would be genuinely good at, but also like, i can think of nothing more appropriate than giving her a job where she literally has to meddle in people’s relationship bullshit. she’d LOVE it.

trish would be a witch who i’d kind of envision playing a role similar to prue where she’s like, a really headstrong, formidable, slightly obsessive force of nature in the magical community who has a pretty established reputation for taking down demons. i’m not sure what her active power would be... maybe one of the elemental powers?? or maybe something like molecular combustion like piper has. it’d be something pretty in your face, much more offensive than defensive.

i also had the the thought that an interesting thing to throw into trish’s arc is to have her... join up with the avatars at some point?? or be strongly tempted to. because in this au, trish is still... trish, she still struggles a lot with wanting to save people and wanting to save herself and not wanting to be helpless. so this organization offering her a shitton of power and also the opportunity to save the world would be IMMENSELY tempting for her, and of course if you remember anything about the avatars, things would spiral into disaster from there,

dolores... man i still haven’t settled on a strong idea for her, i feel like, because there are so many different directions i kind of want to go in. one thing i do feel strongly about is she would be a GREAT character to demonstrate like, what absolute assholes the elders can be in service of the “greater good”. the elders seem like a good standin for the park engineers in this context because like, both are all-powerful forces (in their respective settings) who oversee things and have no moral qualms with manipulating events as they feel they need to.

so one idea i’m playing with is dolores being a witch (or possibly a witch/whitelighter hybrid?) who has some kind of Big Destiny she’s involved in that the elders are Very concerned with. but it kind of fucks with her life a lot and puts immense responsibility on her, so at some point she kind of just decides to fuck off and break free onto her own path

...but the elders don’t like that, and reset her memory so they can train her for their purposes from scratch

so you’d still get those same elements of like, her trying to figure out who she really is and what’s really true and trying to break free from something really huge and complicated?? yeah i think i like this

sophie-anne, of course, would be a vampire! easy one! i honestly can’t remember if much is known about charmed vampires except for that a) they’re considered outcasts even in the underworld, b) they live in clans and are run by queens, c) are actually mostly women (with some exceptions i remember) for some reason. basically i’m pretty sure that charmed vampires are a bunch of gay demon ladies who decided they were fed up with the underworld’s bullshit. so that all translates pretty well for sophie! she’s the queen of one of the more prominent clans and basically just likes to chill. and flirt with witches sometimes, which exasperates her advisers constantly because don’t draw their attention, sophie!!! maybe she also turns cloud at some point, depending on whether you’d want to translate that aspect into a charmed au for him

as for camille... i think she’d either start out a normal human, or some kind of witch with pretty chill powers who doesn’t usually get involved in the witch/demonic conflicts. camille just wants to live a quiet life, basically. BUT in this au she does have a ~destiny~ as a future whitelighter, but it’s evident to like. basically all of the powers that be that she has a lot of shit to work out before she’s ready for that. so camille would basically be the character in this au who gets ASSIGNED a whitelighter to try to help her through things as my opportunity to explore that. i’m not sure who it would be yet but i just feel that is the best way to translate some of her pre-existing character stuff and play with some really interesting growth. camille with a guardian angel would be a disaster. but she’s also so unwaveringly kind and resilient as a character that i think she’d ultimately make a good whitelighter herself if she had someone to work through some things with. so.

i wasn’t sure what concept to settle on for sly. maybe he’d be a wizard... ? i remember wizards kind of being this like, offshoot branches of witches who are kind of mischievous and sometimes untrustworthy (and also they’re almost entirely extinct and the remaining survivors seem to have a lot of issues with that, which... is fitting for poor sly...). do you remember that wizard who wanted to become the source of all evil so he could use the power to revive his entire species? yeah i feel like sly in this au would ultimately go up against that kind of well-meaning but very dangerous villain and really struggle with it

alternatively maybe he’d be a werewolf or something, to express the fact that he’s a furry, but i don’t have as much of a developed idea for that,

delia is both easy and difficult to fit into this au. obviously she’d be a witch of some kind, but i’d have to figure out some kind of extra edge to express the whole supreme thing. maybe she comes from an especially powerful bloodline like the halliwells, or maybe she’s some kind of demigoddess... ? idk i’ll think of something interesting

and honestly i feel like some of my cats would actually work very well as familiars, especially if i could figure out some interesting characters to pair them with

#long post #BECAUSE I HAD A LOT OF IDEAS APPARENTLY #thanks giz i hope you enjoy this!!!#i am already kind of hooked on this au #cuts dennys lvad wire #digitaldragoon

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wirednavi · 6 years

Text

Umaro, the School Mascot

From the Rats’ Book of Names:

The name of Yeti is Unsubstantiated, that which can be experienced but never proven to others.

The heralds of Yeti are indistinct figures in the trees or the snow; howling wind; a sourceless anticipation of fear and wonder

The weapons of Yeti are storm and snow; lonely accidents; the play of light and shadow on the peaks; surprise

You turn Yeti aside by refusing to see; being calm and collected in the face of wonder; staying in a large group

Yeti kills you by drawing you to find it in ever more dangerous places; luring you to fall to your doom; destroying your credibility in the eyes of your peers

Yeti is drawn to explorers; the lonely; fires in the wilderness

Yeti hungers for your attention; the disbelief of your peers , AFFECTION

You may kill Yeti by publicly presenting definitive proof of its existence; denying its reality to its face; tracking it relentlessly until it is hounded from the world

Yeti is reborn when an explorer sets out find something others do not believe exists, and never returns

You may escape the attention of Yeti by accepting that things you cannot prove are false; remaining safe at home

Umaro, the School Mascot

Academics Skill: Reluctant Sports Skill: Air Bud Blood Type: A Favorite Foods: Yak ribs, okonomiyaki, flavored snowcones Age: Everyone assumes you’re about the default character age. They are wrong. Animal: Rabbit

You are the School Mascot, Umaro!

That’s not your real name, of course. It’s just what the students call you.

Your real name - your essence - is the Mystery Yeti, who is named Unsubstantiated. When eyes first watched the snowy peaks and wondered if anyone or anything could live there, your eyes looked back. When tales were first told of figures glimpsed through the snow but never clearly seen, you added your howl to punctuate the telling. You are that which people wonder if the wilderness hides; you are the sound among the high peaks that might be the wind or might be a monster’s howl. Explorers found signs and traces of your passage, and the boldest and luckiest came face to face with you, but brought back to their fellows only tantalizing hints and no proof.

Once you were everywhere and nowhere, on the wilds of Earth and other worlds besides, but those wildernesses are gone now. The Outside is no place for you to live; when everything is ambiguous, there’s nothing left for you to be, no certainties to brace your story against. Since the sun fell, you prowled the Far Roofs and wandered the peaks near Soma Village, where you felt most at home.

But there was a feeling that something was missing, a feeling that had grown in you for years - for millennia, really. You saw the people in their camps and towns below you, talking to each other, getting to know each other. Being there for each other. When you were in the Far Roofs, no one could really be there with you. They could only glimpse you, get hints of your presence but never confirm it, no matter how hard they tried… or how hard you tried. Out there, you could practically stand in front of them and they’d never notice you until you were already vanishing. And over the many, many years, you learned how painful it was to be alone.

So last winter, you followed one intrepid explorer of the Far Roofs back to Town. You spent months lurking in the high places, peering over eaves, watching and learning and trying to figure out how you could meet people. How a creature of mystery and ambiguity could become part of something real.

And finally, you discovered how you can interact with people. It’s not that they can’t see you - it’s that they can’t recognize you. Out in the snowy mountains, the only thing they could mistake you for was a snowdrift, or the wind in the trees - some part of the empty wilderness. Here in Town, though, you just had to figure out something they could mistake you for.

All it took was a dye job. A very, very large dye job.

Instead of your old white fur, you sport the School’s colors: black with gold highlights and a big School sun-and-stars crest on your chest. You take great pride in it and have it retouched weekly. Now everyone knows exactly what you are. What else could an oversized furry humanoid animal painted the school colors be? You’re Horizon School’s Mascot, of course!

Everyone’s got lots of theories on who ‘you’ are underneath the fuzzy suit they think you’re wearing. John Wicked? Impious? The Principal himself? A rotating group of students all sworn to secrecy and the service of school spirit? When the Debate Club takes the stage to argue, you’re there to cheer them on. When the American Football Club loses to the away team from St. Vita’s again, you’re there to buck them up! You get lots of hugs and pats on the back and just about everyone’s happy to see you.

It is the best.

You presume the Principal knows something is up, and possibly the Student Council as well, but if they care they haven’t let you know. Or maybe they approve. After all, you’re helping out the School, right?

So right now, life is great! You feel like you’re part of something, and you’re learning all about the strange and delicious foods they have in Town and the strange and amusing faces people make when they realize you’re just going to wander around town dressed in your mascot outfit. You genuinely care about all these students and want to help them out. And when you don’t want to be around so many people, you just climb up to the roof or the outside of one of the towers, or let your black-and-gold coloration camouflage you against the corridor wall, and watch over the students quietly like you used to watch the fires of the explorers in the valleys below.

You’ve can’t remember ever being happier. You’re going to be the best mascot School’s ever had, and everyone will love you for it.

And you’ll never have to be alone again.

Skills:

Superior Abominable Snowman 3: See description below. Ganbatte! 2: You’re great at inspiring people, rousing them up, and cheering them on. Careful 2: You’re surprisingly gentle and quiet when you need to be. Fuzzball 1: You’re warm and soft to the touch. Enunciate -1: You can communicate just fine, but the finer points of diction are beyond you.

Superior Skill: Abominable Snowman 3:

You’re an enormous shaggy apelike snow monster. You’re supernaturally difficult to gather evidence on - you leave no tracks, and photographs of you only show a distant figure or an out-of-focus blur that might be a hairy arm. You’re naturally camouflaged - you blend into similarly-colored backgrounds undetectably. (If you were still colored white, you’d blend into snow - but now, you blend into the School walls.) Cold temperatures, storms, and high altitudes don’t affect you, and you can climb almost anything and never lose your footing or your grip. You have the keen senses of an animal. You’re extremely strong and tough, but not as much so as someone with Superior Vitality, so you don’t get your full Edge in direct physical contests.

Perks:

Level 2 Bond: I won’t let anyone prove the existence of the Yeti. Level 2 Affliction: I am easily mistaken for something I’m not. Level 2 Connection: The Horizon School Level 1 Connection: the Free Spirit: You followed them back from the Far Roofs. What a great dancer! Level 1 Connection: the Virtuoso: They help touch up your paint job regularly.

XP Emotion: Fist-pump / salute

Basic Quest: An Exciting! Quest: “Urrruughhhgoooo Team!” 15 XP quest; Gain an XP towards it whenever you decide that someone around you is in need of encouragement and launch into some over the top way to cheer them on or raise their spirits. This can be as simple as an overstuffed Yeti hug, or as involved as an extended cheerleading routine.

Miraculous Arc: Creature of the Light 2

All the mystery of the wilderness is in you, and the possibility of the unknown in far and unfamiliar places. You are the shadow glimpsed between the trees and the figure seen through the snowstorm. You are fundamentally an unknowable, unverifiable thing; not even the Fortitude rats, intrepid explorers that they are, have ever proven that you exist.

(They believe you exist, of course. The rats are far too experienced with Mysteries to let a little thing like a total lack of evidence stop them. They’re such impressive explorers, really! You’re very proud of them.)

Tireless

You have endless reserves of energy for being you. As long as you hide your true self, and continue to mysteriously appear to explorers and vanish without a trace every now and then (and don’t have your Divine Warrant stripped from you miraculously), you have access to 3 Miraculous Will.

Well-Lit

You are a creature of drama and wonder, and as such, you can always have exactly the lighting you want. By default, you’ll always be positioned in the best available lighting for your purposes - if you’re sneaking, you’ll find the shadows, and if you’re dramatic, you’ll find the stage. But it costs you 0 MP to demand better lighting from the world - from a dim moonbeam to highlight your mysterious figure atop the School to a spectacular spotlight extravaganza before you launch into a cheer.

Auctoritas Magister

There is more to you than flesh and blood, or even magic. You are made of stories and uncertainty and wonder, and sometimes your actions have the weight of the sacred.

For 0 MP, starting mid-scene you can cause your actions to become inviolate even by miracles. A Level 2 Auctoritas protects your actions and their effects from miracles, Cthonic Actions, and the Outside. Such powers fail to make any changes which would stop you from executing your action with as much success as it would otherwise have had. For instance, if your action is to lead people in a cheer, miracles would be unable to:

Make you unheard

Prevent people from joining in

Remove you or your audience from the scene

Make people dislike your cheer any more than they otherwise would

But could still:

Harm you, as long as you could still lead the cheer

Build a wall around you and your audience to trap them

Increase your cheer to earth-shattering levels

Doom those who do cheer to a terrible death (after the cheer is over)

If you need to use this more than twice per chapter, it costs 1 MP each time.

For 4 MP, you can instead form an Intention when you invoke this ability; for as long as you sustain that Intention, the Auctoritas protects it, your person, and any other Intentions you make.

Appear

The most fundamental nature of the Mystery Yeti is to be seen, briefly, and then vanish without a trace into the wilderness, leaving only a lasting impression and sense of wonder and discovery. So it is given to you to do just that - to appear with the signs and symbols of your coming, and disappear without a trace. These days, you often do it just to check in on the students you know and see how they’re doing.

Over the course of a few minutes, you can materialize anywhere there is someone to whom you have a Connection, appearing out of whatever is most evocative of you. You might pop your head out of a snowbank, or take the place of a statue covered in a throw rug, or just de-camouflage from in front of the black-and-gold school seal. If there’s nothing appropriate nearby, then you just manifest out of gusts of cold wind and a growing sense of school spirit. When you leave the scene, you vanish the way you came, fading back into something that is revealed to not have been you at all.

You can’t really use this to leave a place. If an intrepid explorer is trying to search for you, using this ability to be in a scene somewhere else will usually have you fade back to where you were just in time for the confrontation, but if that’s not possible the whole power becomes Unreal and you end up in two places at once for a bit.

Transfix

With a word or a gesture, or just a still presence, you can convey a feeling of profound amazement and wonder in onlookers. You can cause one of your slow, careful mundane actions to be so compelling that it is impossible for anyone around you to pay attention to anything else. Additionally, the action rises to a minimum Intention of 4, and ignores level 1-2 Skill penalties. This is great not just for appearing mysteriously to travelers in the midst of a snowstorm, but also for creating that perfect hush as you stand up to start a cheer! To use this costs 0 MP the first couple of times per book, and 4 MP a third or further time.

Obsession

To meet Yeti among the high peaks is to be changed. It is a moment of wonder that stays fixed in the mind. Even though they’ll never be able to prove it to others, even if they aren’t sure themselves that you were real, those you show yourself to will never be the same.

For 0 MP, you can cause your actions to have a profound emotional impact on observers you select. You can’t choose what that emotional impact is, but there’s no escaping that it causes them to feel something - it’s a moment that will stay with them forever. This is effectively a miraculous attack, and anyone trying to lessen its impact will have to take the equivalent of a Serious Wound. You can use this again in the same chapter for 1 MP, or again in a few hours for 2 MP.

Open the Vault

You can make your actions be reminders to people, as well, drawing up their history and emotions from within them. For 0 MP, you can cause an action of yours to evoke a flashback in a target which evokes a particular emotion or kind of experience; usually, you use this to evoke wonder or flabbergastment or ‘the first time you discovered something important’, but around School you’re very good at evoking school spirit or ‘that time when you won big’. Any mundane actions the target takes to try to hide or reject what you’re making them feel suffers an Obstacle of 2. For 1 MP, you can do this again in a chapter, or 2 MP to use it again in a few hours.

Divine Warrant

Normally, it would be bad for you to trick people into thinking you’re a human in a funny suit, or making them doubt your existence. It would be bad for you to lurk around, watching them from the heights while you stay hidden. It would normally even be bad for you to give an encouraging cheer to School students when they are secretly plotting to end the world.

Yes, doing those sorts of things would be wrong for most people… But not for the Mystery Yeti, who is named Unsubstantiated!

Once per session, if you haven’t benefited from other Issue-granting powers, you can invoke an appropriate Wicked Action or (maybe Suffer Metamorphosis) and gain a point of the Vice issue. When you do, you work yourself up about your purpose in doing so, and either you describe the way you allow yourself to do whatever it is you’re doing as a high calling, how the wilderness must have mystery and uncertainty and lurking things or else it ceases to be the wilderness at all...

Or there’s a break from reality, and the high, cold wilds manifest around you briefly, and snowstorms gust around you even in the midst of summer, and a sense of fear and wonder at what might be out there, over the next mountain. As a mysterious dweller of the wild peaks, what you’re doing is appropriate, and so you bring the wild peaks and the mystery to you.

When it’s over, the world recontextualizes what just happened - maybe it just seemed like the towers of School were mountains for a minute, or maybe a drift of dandelion blossoms just floated by that seemed like a snowstorm. Maybe the snow just melts away surprisingly quickly and leaves puddles for the janitorial staff to grumble about.

Actions you take under Divine Warrant never seem metaphysically and spiritually incorrect or tabu. However, people and beings of power are free to judge perceptions of the matter as misleading.

A Sense for Sin

There are some things you just have a sixth sense for, things intimately connected to the purpose and meaning of the Yeti. You can tell when…

Someone within about a mile is exploring, especially in high or wild places, and what they’re hoping to find.

Someone in the Region is attempting to find definitive proof of the Yeti, and broadly how they intend to do it and how close they are to their goal.

Someone within about a mile is in bad spirits and needs encouragement or a hug.

You always have an effective Intention level of 2 to learn these things, with 4 Edge against most methods that would be applicable, and you can substitute your own Intention if it’s higher to overcome Obstacles; distance is not an Obstacle to these actions.

When you do sense these things, you gain a Level 2 Connection to them for the rest of the chapter, so you can immediately Appear to them and give them a fuzzy hug, or quietly remove the stray Yeti hairs they’d obsessively collected while their back is turned, or whatever.

Miraculous Arc: Become Somebody 1+

Your Role is the School Mascot. You are the black-and-gold patterned dancing anthropomorphic animal that fills everyone with school spirit. Everyone assumes you’re one of the students in a fuzzy animal outfit, because what else could you be? A Yeti? Hah! Yetis don’t exist! You do wish people would stop trying to attach jackalope ears and horns to your head, but it’s all worth it, because they wouldn’t bother if they didn’t care about their mascot!

Your Failing is that you long for companionship. You’ve been lonely for so long that it feels like a permanent part of you, but every day around School is like a warm fire in the cold mountains.

Frantic

When you were up in the mountains, everything was simple. Lonely, but simple. You understood how to live, and it was rare that anything worried you - you were in your element, living the story that made you, and nothing could really hurt or even change your story for long. You like your new life in Town better, but it’s so much more complicated, and you’re always worried one of the rats will find out your secret, or that the students you care about are going to get in trouble without you there to cheer them up, or… or anything!

Whenever you can meet its condition, you can take the (Be In) Trouble Action. When you do, you gain 1 MP, up to your starting maximum, and for each additional group XP the action gains, you gain another MP.

The Wages of Sin

You understand loneliness. You think there is probably no one who understands it as you do. It is in your bones, as old as the glaciers and twice as cold. It makes you sad, to see so much loneliness in the world. So many hearts hurting, reaching out for each other, like yours.

When you concentrate, you can take a miraculous action to see how people’s loneliness and need for others is affecting them, or the situation around you. You can even read when people are hiding their loneliness, and if there’s someone in particular they’re missing or longing for, you can get an impression of who it is. If you currently have a Vice or Sickness Issue that’s related to your loneliness, you can add that Issue’s rating as Strike to this ability.

Harmonious Souls

But you’re not lonely anymore, not while you’re the School Mascot!

Being the School Mascot means you stand for something - but not some vague ideal, but people and togetherness and school spirit and your friends cheering you on! What could be better than that? You’re not a mysterious, unique creature lurking unseen on the Far Roofs, you’re everyone’s big fuzzy friend!

You’re so in tune with your Mascot-ness that you can see when other people are standing for things too. Spend 1 MP and you gain a Level 1 Affliction: I understand people when they are like mascots. You can tell when someone really cares about the things they stand for, or whether they’re just pretending. You can see how much they want people to believe in what they’re showing. You can tell who’s the heart or the center of a group of people, who’s binding them together in purpose and camaraderie.

If you spend a few hours away from anyone who harmonizes with your Role like this, the power fades.

Your Truths

These things are true about you, so true that they resist even miraculous attempts to alter them:

You are the Mystery Yeti, who is named Unsubstantiated.

You are the School Mascot.

You long for the companionship of others.

All these Truths are protected by a level 1 Auctoritas, and you can buy additional Truths to add to this list with recharge tokens.

Adaptable

Your determination to be the Mascot transcends worlds and time. Wherever you go, however you end up, you find a way to bring people together and inspire them.

For 2 MP, you can create a temporary Level 1 Affliction:

I belong here.

This gives you the following effects:

You gain a free Level 1 Connection to the environment.

You have a free +1 Tool bonus to being a representative of a group or organization there, inspiring people to competence in this new situation, and bringing people together as comrades.

You’ll sometimes get miraculous coincidences and bursts of inspiration from the HG to help you belong and to act as a proper mascot.

You have a lot of trouble remembering that you haven’t always been here and done this. You can normally work around this, but if the HG gets you into trouble because of it, they are likely to also give you an MP.

Like any other Affliction, it takes a miracle with at least 1 Strike to overcome it - in this case, any miracle which would make you feel out of your element or make you less part of your new context.

#chuubo's #cmwge #chuubilis #creature of the light #become somebody #ffvi-chuubo's #this is a really ideosyncratic project but i guess we'll see how it goes

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