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isadcrajade · 4 years

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💀 * [ barbie ferreira + cis female + she/her ] —— have you met isadora oliveira ? they are a twenty-one year old sophomore currently studying fashion design & merchandising. they live on keating house, and word around campus is that this aries is loyal + warm, as well as self-objectifying + obsequious. i wonder if they’ll make it out alive. chocolate covered strawberries, gothic platforms, lingerie under leather jackets.

hiii bbies it’s me (gabby) finally here again to post this finalized, messy version of isa’s intro! she’s a brand new never-been-played muse of mine so it’s def bound to be a bit more scattered & less developed than ezra’s, but also much shorter? so i mean there’s a bonus lmao alright here we go:

so isadora (also known by many nicknames such as isa, izzy, iz, & dora the explora if ur trying to piss her off vgbjhksjs) was definitely not brought up in a world of prestige and recognition like the one she’s become so accustomed to in attending holloway university

growing up in the small town of lisbon, maine the only reality isa knew during her childhood was that of living as the only child of a woman who was (TW) both a compulsive liar & and compulsive hoarder. their house was floor to ceiling with things her mom collected as well as garbage built up over time- her condition had already driven isa’s father out of the house when she was just three years old, and she never had a relationship with him as a result

she was still fairly young when she realized the true severity of her own situation, just how abnormal it was compared to that of her friends. she missed out on so many rights of passage during her upbringing like birthday parties, sleepovers, etc. for much of her life her own living space / bedroom were just as bad off as the rest of the house, given her mom’s inability to keep from passing her hoarding tendencies onto her daughter. isa simply didn’t know any better at the time. to her, that was normal.

not only was her mom a compulsive liar & hoarder but she was also extremely neglectful, often leaving isa to her own devices in the dangerous environment they called home. as a result of this she (TW ED) developed harmful coping mechanisms surrounding food, regularly overeating to combat negative feelings of loneliness, and this went on from the time she was just a little girl all the way until she was in high school

high school was rough in many ways- she suffered depression, anxiety, experienced bullying at the hands of the more popular kids for her weight & her mother’s financial situation, and was all around extremely isolated from her peers- the only person she really had to depend on was her cousin (WC) . she had so much respect and envy for her cousin, they had more of a sisterly dynamic than anything, she was just so gorgeous and everything she did just seemed so effortless, to the point isa couldn’t help but idolize her and consider her a best friend.

like, remember when spongebob said he hoped that by being in squidward’s presence some of his artistic ability would rub off onto him? that was deadass isa & (WC) in high school jhbksnjs my girl was so sure if she just spent enough time with her she’d inherit some of her pretty & cool

high school was also where she reached a turning point when it came to her home environment, able to put a name to her mom’s condition after years of struggling with her strained and toxic relationship with her mom, and ultimately changed the rest of her life. she stayed the night at (WC’s) one night and after she fell asleep, isa stayed up watching TLC- it was there that she first discovered the TV show ‘hoarding: buried alive’ and realized there was a name for her mother’s infliction- but more importantly, learned that there was help available for her condition

when she went home to excitedly tell her mother that she’d basically discovered a cure, a means to change everything for them... she certainly hadn’t been expecting the reaction that came: her mom, who’d always been so indifferent toward her, so lethargic and uninterested in what she had to say, was suddenly listening very clearly- and she was not happy. isa had never heard her mom scream like that, had never really heard her express any heightened emotion, but it was in that moment at 17 years old, just a few weeks away from her 18th birthday, that she realized what she needed to do. she had no choice but to make plans to leave her mom behind.

the final weeks leading up to the big day she was counting on as a turning point consisted of her cleaning out her own space, little by little, enough that she had somewhere to set up her secondhand laptop and webcam. blowing out the candles on her 18th birthday cake came with wishing for a whole new life, and she was determined to make that for herself by any means necessary.

(TW SEX WORK) isa spent half her 18th year in her room working as a successful camgirl, showing everything but her face, & of course always being careful not to dox herself. she eventually earned enough money to start buying herself nicer clothes, but it didn’t take her long to realize she wanted more from life than just rotting away in her hometown. she bought herself a higher quality webcam to keep making money... and a nice sewing machine, something she’d always dreamed of owning.

all her life she’d been drawing and sketching as a means of escapism, it’d always been therapeutic to her to be creative and conjure up unique designs for outfits in her mind, drawing models in all shapes and sizes to represent her fantasy outfits. but she never felt like a visionary, even though anyone with an eye for fashion who got a look at her work could see that she had the natural talent and potential to be.

isa had been an a straight-A student her whole life despite having almost no support at home from her mother growing up, and with plenty of encouragement from (cousin WC), she plucked up the courage and applied for holloway university, with ivory falls being far enough from her hometown of lisbon, but still in the same state so that she could go and see her mother from time to time (bc although their relationship is quite strained now, she still loves and worries about her)

the next summer she received her acceptance letter at holloway u for the coming fall semester, and the fact that she’d been able to make it into such a prestigious school made her feel so proud of herself that she completely underwent a massive arc of character development; evolving into someone so much more confident. realizing that plenty of people found her desirable as she continued to earn money through cam shows had been part of that transformation, but realizing she was talented enough to get accepted into the fashion design and merchandising program at her dream school had a completely different effect on her.

( TW BODY IMAGE ISSUES ) isa decided that as she entered college, she was no longer going to be the meek, insecure girl constantly playing the role of the doting, loyal fat best friend to the ‘prettier main characters’ she’d always been sidekick to- she told herself that she was the main fucking character in her life from here on, and has spent her entire college experience up to this point just,, navigating as she figures out what that really means to her

still has a terrible underlying tendency to be overly-loyal and a bit obsessive with girls she closely befriends, if she has any kind of jealousy towards them. but ! is a lot more confident than she used to be, and it shows in the way she dresses and carries herself, as well as in her long-term goals (to transfer to FIDM for her final years of university)

( TW ED MENTION ) as a young adult, she’s mostly she’s replaced the compulsion to deal with her body image issues by using food to cope that she had as a teenager... by using sex to cope instead, so she’s definitely a bit promiscuous but does her best to keep that Her Own business

personality-wise she has a massive heart & is loyal to a fault but is also wild AF & loves a good time! never rly dabbled in drugs until she got to college but since then has acquired an interest in trying everything under the sun, even if it’s just one and done. mostly though she just likes to get really drunk & stupid. used to feel like she was constantly living in her cousin’s shadow, & in some ways she still does, but she’s trying hard to make herself believe that she’s reached a place where she won’t be playing second fiddle to anyone, ever again

i’m gonna shut the hell up now & stop pretending i know this character better than i do bc i deadass do not jbhnjss like she’s literally brand new so lemme go head & leave plenty of room for development!

same story as ezra i’ll have a full connections page posted for her soon but in the meantime some ideas i have are: friends, frienemies, ex friends, high school bullies, classmates, old high school friends, people she gets fuckt up with on the reg, people she hooks up with on the reg (any gender, she’s bisexual / biromantic), someone she had a crush on in high school / has pined for from afar maybe?? someone who used to watch her cam shows?? someone she almost kinda dated but Not? someone who she hooked up with while they were dating someone else?? idk that’s what i have for now but there’ll be more where that came from <3 xoxo like this or hmu !

#holloway.intro #this is a hot ass mess #but i'm rly excited to finally play her x

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linkspooky · 5 years

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Hey, I’ve been reading a lot of your BNHA metas, (they’re all absolutely awesome btw) and I was wondering about two things, what kind of mental illness do you think Shigaraki has? And I read a post somewhere that speculated that he might have suffered a tbi when his father hit him with the tree sheers, do you think that might be true?

Hello anon, thank you for your ask!

I will try to answer your questions the best I can, however beforehand I think it’s important to note that I don’t really like diagnosing characters outside of like specific examples where the authors tell us this is the disease they were attempting to portray, or headcanons. Shigaraki clearly shows signs of mental illness, but I don’t think Horikoshi writes characters by looking up a list of symptoms in the DSM and then writing them based on that.

Also yes, the two clearest examples of mental Illness (Shigaraki, Twice) are both villains but I have faith that the mental illness of Shigaraki is an instance where it’s used to humanize him and show how much of a victim of a system both characters are, rather than just to give the villain traits that are abnormal and therefore creepy and dangerous.

I can’t give you a specific dianogisis but I can give you a more in depth look at several symptoms that Shigaraki displays.

Excoriation

Excoriation disorder is an obsessive-compulsive spectrum mental disorder that is characterized by the repeated urge or impulse to pick at one’s own skin to the extent that either psychological or physical damage is caused. In Shigaraki’s case it’s clearly a stress response that is aggravated the more violent, unstable or dangerous a situation he is put into.

Which is why I find claims that Shigaraki is content with violence, or likes being a killer and is comfortable living this way to be false. Because Shigaraki’s own body constantly rejects him. He feels a compuslive need to scratch and harm himself because his body cannot handle the stress of being violent. It’s a stress response because Shigaraki does not actually on some level want to be doing these things, and living in a constant state of stress and harm makes him more compelled to vent his stress by following his compulsions.

The compulsion he feels can sometimes get so bad that in childhood he was rolling around the floor, crying and frantically scratching his whole body. This is not what All for One said and him holding back his urge to kill, but rather Shigaraki responding to the stress. Shigaraki is seven and was put in front of two homeless people who were threatening to harm him and he already came from a physically abusive household. He’s in unbelievable stress with no healthy way of venting it, and thereofre he compulsively self harms.

GAME TALK

In general Shigaraki uses a lot of game talk. This is not so much a symptom of mental illness necessarily as it is a coping mechanism, but the goal is for Shigaraki to distance himself from reality. Basically it’s a mechanism for rgaining control because if you imagine life as just one big game where you are the player, you feel much more in control then some random kid who lost his family in a freak accident then got picked up by a super villain. Gamespeak is also a way of being deeply impersonal with the situation, in case it goes bad Shigaraki can say it’s just game over. It’s a layer of distance between him and reality, like I said, escapism to cope. His insistence of using game terminology for everything could also be seen as a “special interest” but once again that depends on your intepretation Shigaraki shows a whole cluster of symptoms that overlap with a lot of things.

HIGH ATTENTION TO DETAIL

Shigaraki in a fight where he and AIzawa are jumping around trying to kill each other, Shigaraki is able to notice a detail as minute as when the hair falls over Aizawa’s eyes it stops, and also that his quirk was weakening because the tiny seconds long windows were getting shorter and shorter.

This is an extremely small detail to notice. Hyper-sensitizing, or hyper-attention to detail is another sign of mental illness, because usually the brain filters out superfluous details like this because otherwise noticing everything in that fine detail would overwhelm the senses.

Immaturity

Shigaraki is completely unable to handle his negative emotions like a well-rounded adult. Though, I dislike how All Might and the others phrase it in this discussion because it is a pretty ablist description (downright sick in the head, a toddler’s sense of feeling like he can do whatever he wants). (the ablist part is that they’re using symptoms of his clear mental illness to dehumanize him.)

Regardless, Shigaraki of course does act like a man child, constantly talking about games, giving up easily, not having the patience to converse with others especially in situations he does not want to be in, throwing tantrums.

Children who are abused and neglected especially to the extreme extent that Shigaraki has, show long term developmental (that is term for the process of growing into a full adult) and behavioral problems. To the point where some studies have shown even the brain’s chemistry is permanently effected and the brain grows differently.

Children need a stable environment, and also positive role models for what adults act like to grow into full fledged adults, Shigaraki had neither of those. In fact he was also raised almost entirely outside of society except for the first five years of his life, so there is also no outside influence on his upbringing as well, which is why he is like a child, egocentric, unable to handle his emotions, because mentally he was never given the chance to develop past one.

ISOLATION

This is something that Shigaraki showed at the start of the series, but also has shown to develop past. At first he never left his room and from the several trash bags it’s quite obvious he spent long periods of time in there without taking care of himself or the environment around him in any significant way.

Shigaraki is no longer isolating as a result of having gotten closer to the league, he is basically available to them at all times and does not shut them off in any significant way. Which in this quick tangent we can also talk about symptoms Shigaraki does not have. Shigaraki is able to read a room pretty clearly, and knows how to hide himself in a crowd enough to keep Deku hostage with no trouble at all, and even leave the scene with Uraraka there without provoking her into attacking him or tipping her off what he was doing right away. Shigaraki is fairly competent at reading other people and he does have social skills so he’s not like someone who never sees the light of day or cannot interact with others and is clueless on how people think.

He’s also shown to be capable of making emotional connections with other people, and also of being considerate to those people’s needs. Which also shows that Shigaraki is capable of communication and also has an awareness of the feelings of other people and the ability to empathize, he is just choosy about who he makes connections with. He is definitely not someone unable to form an emotional connection with another person.

Shigaraki also shows a pretty flagrant disregard for all social norms, but that can be a result of being raised outside of society all of his life.

Shigaraki also likes to piss people off on purpose, almost like he is testing their boundaries and what he can get away with the same way a child playing around might.

Dissociation

We have seen Shigaraki experience Dissociation in both senses of the word. First we have seen him physically detach himself from his feelings, and his own body in the middle of a fight and still continue on in a fugue-like state.

He experiences dissociation in the sense of the word meaning periods of detachment to your body, drifting away from your consciousness, severe feelings of alienation from himself, extreme difficulty concentrating or holding focus to the moment, his perception of both time and the area around him slipping to levels that are borderline hallucinogenic.

Dissociation is a mental process where a person disconnects from their thoughts, feelings, memories or sense of identity.

Shigaraki also displays traits of what is more classicly known as Dissasociative identity disord. He has two names, and clearly considers the life of Shimura Tenko to be separate from Shigaraki Tomura for a long time at the start of the manga. It might not be full on DID, but he at least dissociated his memories away from himself long enough that he forgot all of them like those memories belonged to another person, not Shigaraki but rather Tenko.

Shigaraki also foils Twice pretty heavily who developed actual dissociatve identity disord. He even shares similiar symptoms of speaking to himself when he speaks to the hand of “father”. I am not saying he has full on DID like I said I’m not diagnoising just that he displays several symptoms of it. He also came from an abusive household at an incredibly young age, which is where DID most commonly manifests.

Shigaraki also shows signs of flashbacks when his memories return at inconvenient times during fights when direclty exposed to violence, or he experiences a trigger reminding him of his past. Flashbacks are a symptom that have the most in common with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

To answer your question on whether Shigaraki has a brain injury from when his father hit him with shears, there is evnidence suggesting he could have suffered brain damage, especially in the symptoms that he shares with Twice. However, at the same time Shigaraki also would have developed brain damage either way. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is something that permanently rewires the brain after exposure to trauma. His brain has suffered a traumatic injury regardless of whether or not it was the garden sheers that did him in.

Suicidal Ideation / Self Harm

Shigaraki in general wishes to not exist, or to destroy everything so it will not exist anymore. Even if it’s not a direct wish for suicide that symptom is called suicidal ideation. It’s intrusive and persistent thoughts of suicide. The likely cause is once again, Shigaraki is absolutely not comfortable living like this, and is constantly overwhelmed with stress and pain and is seeking an escape.

Shigaraki also actively seeks out harm. The same way he obsessively compulsively scratches, he puts himself into harmful situations like the extremely painful hellish surgery the doctor said he did not even have to endure if he did not want to. He feels compelled to harm himself, even when he is not fighting against someone else. He inflicts harm on himself becauseit is once again an unhealthy way to process his emotions. Oncce again all of these symptoms are there not to make Shigaraki out to be terrifying and incomprehensible because he is mentally ill, but rather to show he is a human being caught within the cycle of abuse with extremely unhealthy methods of coping with that fact.

#Anonymous #metasks #shigaraki tomura #mha meta #shigaraki meta #my hero academia #shimura tenko #tomura shigaraki

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jj-lynn21 · 4 years

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Doctor Istvan Günther intern at large

@lokis-favorite-follower

Day June 3rd prompt: "What a hunk" word count: 2,833 Fandom: Bill Skarsgard character: Self-insertion

warnings: This is mostly just fluff and a dash of angst.

Bill sits in the administration office waiting area with his business manager, Jake Glassgo. The secretary attempts to hold her cellphone to take a picture to send to her friends. Jake notices.

He leans in hiding Bill’s face with his hand, “You want me to take her phone?”

Bill sighs, “I’ll try to ask nicely, first.”

He walks over to the woman’s desk with a kind smile on his face. “I don’t want to be a dick, but I’d appreciate you not taking random picture of me here. I am trying not to get any press or fanfare right now. I can give you one good selfie for you to post in a week when I am done, alright?”

She nods excitedly.

“What’s your name?” He reached for her phone and she gave it up willingly while getting lost in his emerald gaze.

“Pam Pitson,” She smiled. At least she thought she smiled.

“Nice to meet you Pam.” Bill deleted photos she had already taken. He glanced through her social media to see if she posted anything yet. She hadn’t. He held the camera in front of them tilting it to get a good angle for them both to look their best. “Smile, Pam.” She did and he snapped the photo and handed her back her phone. “Remember don’t post that for a week or it will breach the contract I’m about to sign and you will be fired.”

She was blushing so enamored of him she would agree with anything. She manages to get out a, “k”

The intercom fuzzes with static before the manager asked, “Ms. Pitson, I am ready to see Mr. Skarsgard and Mr. Glassgo now.”

Pam answered, “I’ll send them right back Mr. Garrett.”

Bill and his manager sat in the office with Mr. Garrett. Mr. Garrett handed them a stack of papers to sign. Mr. Glassgo took out a stack of paper from his briefcase for the hospital administrator to sign.

“All the staff throughout the hospital were informed you will be here for the week.” Mr. Garrett said as he signed the paperwork given to him. “They will not be bothering you for autographs or photos. If someone does please inform me. They know the consequences.”

Bill nods as he finishes signing papers, “they will treat me like the rest?”

“For the most part,” Mr. Garrett informed him. “our interns are questioned about possible diagnosis and medical conditions. You will not be put on the spot in any way. You will be going through a quick overview of how to do a basic assessment and asked to do that during rounds. A Doctor will reassess the patient when you are through which is a normal procedure. Others in the group may also assess the patient. The other thing we can’t control is patients recognizing you.”

“Understandable,” Bill thinks for a moment. “what about those getting ready for surgery. Doctors visiting right before surgery would wear a mask and in recovery wear masks?”

“Yes, also patients in reverse isolation in which the Doctors have to wear masks and gowns because the patient could be in danger from outside germs.” Mr. Garett said. “You can go into those rooms if you do exactly what the team leader tells you.”

“Of course,” Bill agreed, “I would never want to put anyone in danger. Learning what to do in those situations would be helpful.”

They all shook hands and Bill parted ways with his manager to start right away. Mr. Garett took Bill to the Doctors' locker room to get a white coat and Stethoscope. Then he took him to a new class of interns that was due to start in minutes. Most of them were seated.

"This is Doctor Istvan Günther," He used Bill's middle names for slight anonymity. "He is joining you all in this learning process. I expect the best from you all. "Doctor Günther, take a seat. Good luck. Feel free to come to me with any questions."

Bill sat in the back. Doctor Marker, the head of surgery was also the head of the internship program. Today's lecture was on viral pathogen control inside the hospital. Bill took notes on the lecture and also on how the students around him were acting.

After the lecture, Doctor Marker separated the class into small groups to work in different departments with the head Doctors in those departments. "Doctor's Standard, Henshire, Staplton, and Günther follow me. This week we will be assessing patients before and after their surgeries. You will be viewing a tonsillectomy, heart catheterization and coronary artery bypass this week." Doctor Marker walked quickly.

Doctors Standard and Staplton whispered and giggled glancing at the new tall intern joining them. All of them had been doing rounds in different departments for weeks. They had all gotten a form letter Bill would be joining them at some point.

"Doctor's I would appreciate, professionalism, " Bill told the gigglers.

"I'd appreciate working with all professionals," Doctor Henshire murmured.

"Sorry Doctor Günther," I'm Breanna or Doctor Standard if you will. The rude mumbler is Doctor Henshire. He is just a little cranky baby to everyone so don't take anything he says personally."

"I'm Doctor Jason Staplton," He smiles. "It is a pleasure to have you work with us. I think what you are doing to get more realism into your work is great."

"Yeah," Doctor Standard looked up to him with big blue doe eyes. "Any questions you have, we have no problem trying to answer. Anything, at all."

Bill smiled nervously, "Thank, I appreciate that."

They get to the door of the first patient. Masks and gloves are outside the door. Doctor Marker put his mask and gloves on and the others follow suit.

"This patient, female 25 years old presented with pain on the right side of the throat, difficulty swallowing, A hoarse voice, fever, swollen lymph nodes, yellow coating on the tonsils, and a severe recurring sore throat over the last year. Who would like to tell me why she is here?"

Doctor Staplton jumped on the question first. "She needs her tonsils taken out."

Doctor Mark nodded, "Correct Doctor Staplton. We will go in and each access here one last time before her surgery. Then you will watch me in the observation room. She was just medicated for surgery minutes ago. How should we proceed when we walk in her room? "

"We should inform her on the dangers of the surgery before checking her vitals," Doctor Henshire said smugly.

"No Doctor Henshire," Doctor Marker glared at him. "The patient is told of the dangers and all possible outcomes in the initial consultation. We need to make sure she is relaxed and in good spirits before going to surgery. Talk kindly to her. Ask her if she has any questions. Answer her calmly."

Everyone walked into the room.

The patient was smiling. Her eyes were glossy from the medication. "Hey there Doctor sexy eyes." She giggles looking at Bill. "Those eyes belong to Bill Skarsgard. What a Hunk." She giggles again.

Bill chuckles nervously.

Doctor Marker picked up her chart on the end of the bed. "How are you feeling Miss Johnston?"

"Dandy as candy," She smiled. Her eyes were a little droopy.

"We are going to listen to your heart and check your lymph nodes before you go down to surgery Miss Johnston." Doctor Marker flipped through her chart. "Looks like blood pressure and blood work are good. These interns are Doctor Standard, Doctor Henshire, Doctor Staplton, and Doctor Günther."

They all listened to her heartbeat and felt under her neck. Bill went last and did as he saw everyone else do. She was smiling ear to ear as he heard her heartbeat so steadily. He glands were so swollen even he could feel how abnormal they felt.

As they were taking her vitals the transporter came in with the gurney. They all walked to the operating room.

Miss Johnston looks up at Bill. His hand on the rail walking along side. She reached for his hand. "Will, you be there when I wake?"

"Bill takes her hand," His eyes light up with a smile. "Yeah, I promise I'll be there."

He was not sure if that was an appropriate response from a Doctor. He made a mental note to ask later.

"Thank, Bill," she murmured before they wheeled her into the operating room.

Bill followed the other interns up some stairs, "Was it alright for me to hold the patients hand and reassure her like I did?" He threw the question out for any of the others to answer.

"No," Doctor Henshire chastised instantly.

Doctor Standard glared at Doctor Henshire, "To elaborate on Doctor Henshire’s comment, it is not something most Doctors do. Sometimes a family member will walk with the patient holding their hand before they get to the operating room. It is fine to comfort a patient before surgery and I think you helped her be in good spirits which is important for a Doctor to do, in my opinion."

" I think holding a patient's hand is fine if it makes them trust you better, Doctor Staplton chimed in, "You just have to watch you don't get to emotional invested in the patients. If you do that, this place will rip you to pieces emotionally."

"Yeah," Bill nodded, "My brother offered me that advise also. He is a Doctor in Sweden. I tagged along with him last week but I really wanted to see things inside of a hospital in the States for the character I will be playing next."

They sit in an enclosed glass room over looking the operating room. Doctor Marker explains everything he is doing step by step. He wants his students to be ready to join him in the operating room and eventually perform the procedure by themselves. Bill's eyes are big and interested as he watches and takes notes. He also takes notes on how the others are reacting to watching.

Bill is standing at Miss Johnston's bedside when her eyes flutter open, "Don't try to speak Miss Johnston. If you can keep the secret you know who I am I will bring you something special when you feel better tomorrow." He winks.

She smiles and nod yes that she will keep it a secret he is there. Then she nods back off to sleep. She is unsure if he was really who she thought he was with the preop shot and the haze she was still in when she woke in recovery.

The interns followed Doctor Marker for ten hours checking in on patients. Also learning about the paper work that must be done. "It is an important part of the job," he told them. Other than stopping in the cafeteria for 15 minutes to grab a coffee and a snack on the run they had no real break. But finally the exhausting day came to an end.

"Hey Doctor Günther, we are going for a drink at Cleats," Doctor Staplton looked to Bill as they hung up their white coats in the locker room. "You want join us?"

"Thanks man, um Doctor Staplton," Bill said politely. "I have some more work to do tonight. Then getting some rest." Bill wanted to make sense of his notes while they were fresher in his mind so he could make character suggests in the script to show the director next Monday.

"We will see you tomorrow at 4am then," Doctor Staplton walked out with Bill.

"Sure thing," Bill said excitedly. Most of them seemed to be cool with him being there. "I'm looking forward to learning more."

The next morning as he got to the last light before pulling into the Doctor's parking lot in his rented black kia telluride with tinted windows he saw the vultures. Media trucks, reporters and camera people covered the entrance to the hospital. Bill shook his head as he pulled into the parking lot.

When he parked he took his phone out to call his manager, "I had one good day before they all found out. Any patient or visitor could have informed them. Can you be here within a half an hour. Bring some signed posters of my characters. I have a fan I want to visit before leaving today. And bring Mr. Mike."

His manager and bodyguard, Mr. Mike, got there within twenty-five minute. They all went to the administration office to have another chat with Mr. Garrett.

"I'm sorry about all that craziness out there, " Mr. Garrett apologized.

"I don't think it was your people Mr. Garrett," Bill shook his head. "Everyone was pretty cool yesterday. I'm sorry they are in the way out there. Why don't you go out to give a statement that I was here yesterday researching a new role. I'm going to visit a patient I met yesterday before I leave through the back. I'm really sorry about the media barrage."

"I'm sure they will leave once I tell them you are not here," He shakes Bill's hand.

Pam comes in to take notes for an amendment to the original paperwork that both parties do not blame employees for the media presence. Bill agrees that instead of a week, one day was enough to get the information he was looking for in the experience. She typed it all up and both parties signed. The amendment was attached to the original contract that Bill's manager and Mr. Garrett had handy.

"Pam you may share that picture tonight after work as long as say I was only here one day," Bill smiles kindly.

Pam got excited, "Of course Mr. Skarsgard."

Bill's manager and bodyguard follow him to the lockers. Bill gets the coat and stethoscope in his assigned locker. He grabs a mask from the secretary at the closest desk. They get on the elevator to head to the eighth floor where Miss Johnston was taken after her recover time.

Bill walked in her room. His manage walks in with him holding a bag of posters and things signed. Mr. Mike, stands at the door.

"How is my first ever patient today?" His sparkling green eyes smile at her.

She drops her spoon in her oatmeal mid-bite, "Doctor um Günther." She turns beat red. "I was sure I hallucinated I saw you. I, are you..."

He took his mask off, "You weren't that out of it Miss Johnston."

She was so surprised, "call me Jen, um Bill?"

He chuckled, "Yeah, you can call me Bill. You didn't tell anyone you thought you saw me, did you Jen."

"No, I really thought I dreamed it. "She laughed.

"Good," he smiled as he sat on the edge of her bed. "Who's your favorite character I've played?"

"Oh I love a lot of them for different reason and some of them really just need more love to help them..."

He sat just listening to her paddle on for a moment.

"But Mickey is the best," She giggled. "Such a lovable little small time criminal. He deserved better. I cried to hard at the end of that movie. But I have also already pre-cried for..."

"Okay, No spoilers." He fake pouts like Mickey. "I don't know if I know how my projects based on books ended yet. Sorry I made you cry so much."

"It is like you are killing me with these tv shows and movies and I love it," She giggled more.

"Well, I have a few things for you before I go." Bill grinned. Mr. Glassgo hand me the Mickey things."

His manager hand him a two rolled up posters and a funko pop of Mickey from Villains.

Jen unrolls a poster and stares at it. Then stares at Bill and stares back at the poster.

"Pretty silly, right?" Bill chuckles. "Its a one of a kind poster. The back is signed. The other one is just the original poster from the movie Villains."

She unrolled it, "Thanks, Bill. I really appreciate you stopping by and all these things. But especially just holding my hand before I went into surgery."

"You are welcome Jen," He gets up. "I have to go. You know what Mr. Glassgo?"

"What Bill?" his manager answers.

"Just give her the whole bag of stuff you brought." Bill grabbed the bag and tossed it to her before leaving.

Jen squealed as she reached for it. Posters and funko pops for everything he has ever been in and a few posters for movies not yet out.

He got out of the hospital without being seen. The hospital administrator made a statement so most of the media were gone by the time he drove back to the hotel. The ones that stayed tried to continue to interview hospital personnel, but most people had no contact with him. Those that did knew not to comment to the media.

By 8pm Pam sends the picture of her and Bill to all her social media with the hashtag #whatahunk

#bill skarsgard #Istvan Günther intern #Doctor #bill istvan günther skarsgård #june2020writingchallenge #fluff #angst

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pillarsofeternityhypestorm · 4 years

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Welcome to HypeStorm

This is a small part of a story I’m writing that takes place in the world of the Pillars of Eternity games. It concerns a cast of almost entirely original characters, besides the Watcher, the games’ protagonist (seen below), who doesn’t have a preset identity anyway.

My intent is for the final draft to be easy to follow even for someone who has never heard of the Pillars franchise.

This is not a step-by-step retread of the games’ events, but it does take place at the same time, starting a little after the end of the first title.

While the major events of the second game are impossible for the characters to ignore, they also have new canon-friendly problems and unfriendly cannons to address.

This is not fan fiction. It’s just regular fantasy where I’m coincidentally stealing someone else’s world because I am a badass and a thief.

This excerpt is from the first chapter of the story’s third and final act, which coincides with the end of the second game.

Act 3/Chapter1

Bunting stood at the front of the Godhammer, the massive ship bucking and bouncing into increasingly dangerous waves. Behind him stood the full power of Rauatai, its immense fleet forming encouraging wings on both sides. Within the cohort sailed Vailian galleons, adra-fused technology decorating their hulls. And filling the ocean around them were royal Huana seastriders, keeping pace as ancient magic accelerated their thrust. They had done it; the impossible. Bunting and his allies had gotten a cadre of self-righteous jackasses to all point their boats in the same direction. United in purpose, they rocketed toward Ukaizo, a prize they all craved for different reasons, never sharing elevation as the waves and wake kept them flowing violently across the seas.

The storms guarding Ukaizo were yet distant. All around the mighty coalition were optimistic sunlight and clear skies. Shouts of confidence and purpose escaped from every vessel. If anyone had a chance to save or ruin the world, it was the legions gathered here. Brick met Bunting at his post and stuck out his hand for a triumphant shake. Bunting grabbed it with emphasis and they grinned as their friends beamed behind them. Presumably. That’s how they would remember it. It’s possible some of the crew found the whole thing melodramatic. They might not have been smiling. Not entirely important, but it would be misleading to say everyone actively volunteered to mirror the duo’s emotions to form a picture-perfect frame of the tone of the situation. If any dissent was happening, Brick and Bunting showed no acknowledgement, too absorbed in self-congratulation. They had brought Eora the defense it deserved. All that awaited now was victory.

And then the sky shattered.

From all sides, illusory magic faded, betraying the previously hidden pirate incursion. Cries of violence and alarm rang out as a hodgepodge armada of crafts of every possible size, quality, and stench was revealed. Bunting’s disciplined forces kept their formation but their foes respected no such uniformity. Some, only manned and gunned on one side (with an unusual surplus of cannons), fired point-blank into the Huana navy. Others had come unequipped and instead bee-lined for the Vailian crafts, emptying their entire abnormally-sized crews onto their decks. And yet another third, their figureheads spiked and reinforced, simply collided directly into Rauatai’s flanks. The chaos was indecipherable, the ambush both seeming planned and undirected. Bunting grasped for a reaction, knowing the others were waiting for him to give an order.

But nothing came to him. The din of cannon fire flooded his ability to think and it paired poorly with the thousands of discordant thoughts he could sense emanating from all angles. Time seemed to slow. Brick was staring at him with a dumbfounded expression. That’s generous. Brick stared at him with a dumb expression; two outclassed men trading blank glances. Bunting noticed Keff improvising, trying to speak up some magic into existence, but it seemed like the vastness of the situation paralyzed her as well. To aim anywhere would hit everything, there were dangers and allies and choppy waters everywhere at once. Wallace was standing still in his massive armor but his eyes danced intensely, fruitlessly trying to assume which side they’d be boarded from first. Vann had his fists clenched and his legs bouncing in place, clearly agonizing over the fact that the enemy was beyond the range of both his opinion of how far he could jump and his actual ability to jump. They were all burning valuable time.

To not be such a rotten pessimist about the whole thing, at least they weren’t actually burning, which was not a luxury many Huana had. Armored sailors shouted in terror as enemy flamethrowers scorched their decks and opened their hulls. This was admittedly tragic, but it struck Vann as a little amateur. Yes, the Deadfire natives had been caught unaware with no chance to respond by a vicious foe with little regard for their own safety, but the blue-skinned godchild felt they could have held it together slightly better. Vann didn’t think that was too much to ask.

A whole Huana division splintered as some ships sunk and others careened off course. This was a lot of careening. Very few, arguably none, of the combatants on either side had ever witnessed this much careening before. A landmark occasion unfortunately marred by the circumstances. This thought and a thousand more paraded through Bunting’s head all too fast and all too slow as the Vailian position became more and more compromised. The Vailians had brought along civilian experts to help operate their bizarre contraptions, and those helpless academics found themselves more and more isolated as their military counterparts were pushed back and murdered by the surprise pirates.

Wallace grabbed Brick by the shoulders and shouted something into his face but it was impossible to hear. By the look of the dwarf’s thundering but wrinkled expression, Brick could surmise it was not about commemorating all the noteworthy careening. The Godhammer shook tremendously as cannon fire found its mark in and around its path.

And then there was Griddle, dagger in his mouth, sword in his hand, determination in his eyes, and Wallace’s lunch in his pocket, coming down fast from the crow’s nest. His offhand arm was enclosed majestically around a long rope that flew with him down and then off the Godhammer. Vann thought he was playing it up a bit. As he glided unsecured into the air, Griddle concluded he was playing it up a bit. The thought had first struck him seconds earlier when the complex and responsible plan to jump into the open sky and aim for the enemy had first formulated, but now he was sure. Vann’s gaze met his own as he soared, implicitly communicating that, yes, what Griddle was doing was very impressive and heroic, but that Vann was still counting it as showboating. Griddle grimaced at his incomplete win.

The pirate who Griddle landed on failed to grasp this nuance, or Griddle for that matter, as the experienced sea dog introduced the criminal’s torso to the ship’s deck. This sent a very unwelcoming message to the rest of the buccaneers onboard. With a roar that was clearly too confident given the situation at hand, Griddle dodged one blade and blocked another, keeping rhythm with his opponents as he began to liberate the Vailian boat from its occupiers.

The rest of the Godhammer jumped into action, Griddle’s initiative rallying them out of stasis. Vann joined him with a mighty rope-assisted leap, just barely bridging the gap before coating a nearby adversary’s visage with punches. Bunting yelled ship-related commands in the jumbled order that they came to mind at the crew, who got the gist of what he was getting at and steered closer to the fray. Wallace and Brick nodded at each other and took up posts at opposite sides of the vessel, barely getting into place in time before a torrent of pirates flooded the Godhammer with arguably unkind intent.

Some never got to find out what it felt like to walk Bunting’s flagship, as Keff instead spoke forceful words that shoved them off their trajectories into the sea. The remainder that survived were struck by Keff’s quarterstaff, a fate not normally categorized as the better of two options.

The stoic nationalism of Rauatai held even as their footing did not, with soldiers quickly defending or abandoning their damaged homes with uncanny precision. Their ships not embedded with enemy timber held their pace, and the pirates tasked with assaulting them found every inch of combat to be an unpleasant affair. They were still numerous and unrelenting, however, and hope never emerged of Rauataian aid coming to the rest of the fleet.

This was the last view of the battlefield Bunting took in before a cannonball and a pirate touched down on his position simultaneously. Bunting and his assailant both careened, one more bittersweet moment, into different directions as the wood beneath them shattered. The explosion also staggered Brick and he found himself retreating, tripping backward into the middle of the ship as unsteady pirates wobbled toward him. Keff whirled around and froze them with terse lyrics, but also lost her standing as wobblers of her own charged/fell against her armor. Wallace’s stance did not falter, and his sword peacefully passed through the shaken attackers’ necks.

Back on the captain’s deck, Bunting saw a different sword raised high and about to connect with parts of him he selfishly considered essential. The pirate standing above him swung downward and then upward as Bunting shot him in the head. Bunting couldn’t even hear the pistol go off, but, what, was he complaining?

Griddle and Vann were finding great success in their own endeavors, the pirates being unable to coordinate effectively against the outnumbered duo. Curiously, Griddle saw that the savage murderers had no structured plan of attack beyond their initial move. This suited Vann, who found kicking them all directly to hell to be cathartic and productive. But the two of them could not be everywhere at once, despite their foes’ perspective that Vann did seem to do just that. Other Vailian ships were losing stride or stopping entirely as their crew were massacred.

Bunting looked down the diameter of the Godhammer and saw Wallace standing over a fallen Brick, trying to coordinate with Keff as they created headcount discrepancies for the pirate’s roster. The rest of the crew was frantically working as cannons thundered, somehow keeping the ship on course. Bunting shot another pirate, whose whole day and skull were thrown off. The residual soul energy from the impact of the bullet flowed into Bunting as he concentrated, mumbling. A strongly worded suggestion journeyed from his mind to the encroaching intruders.

Brick found himself in the unenviable situation of fighting boarders on his knees, unable to find time to get up. Had he been shorter, his life would have been as well, but his commanding height allowed him to simulate fighting as an undersized human, which was enough to keep his head attached. This normally would have been comical to his opponents but there was something about being skewered by two rapid blades that kept them rather unamused.

Wallace, too, was keeping his vitals intact, as well as those of the crew members cowering near him. Keff was proving an inefficient bodyguard to the sailors near her, however, as she was too occupied with crushing a pirate’s chest to stop others from putting their knives into a nearby deckhand. The killers moved to strike another when Bunting’s spell found them, tampering with their priorities in the subtle way that makes one want to murder one’s closest friends. They found themselves suddenly in battle with their crewmates, who were caught off guard by the magical betrayal only long enough to have their entrails given some time to tan in the sun. Brick took this reprieve to stand up and use his sabers to coerce more pirates into having this experience.

Keff breathed a sigh of relief and exhaustion. She also coughed out a little of her own spit but it would have been a little callous to call her out for being unhygienic at that moment, so everyone pretended not to notice. In addition to seeing her friends making this mental decision, she also spied the conflict stabilizing, as the pirates had already won all their surprise encounters and were now being rebutted by those who had not been sunk in the first phase. Vann and Griddle gave each other an embrace that seemed to mock Brick’s and Bunting’s earlier. Their emotions were earnest but it was clear there was a bit of a dig there, as well. It was not over-pronounced, but it was there. Their ship had been rendered captainless, however, and they were moving further and further away from the Godhammer.

Bunting turned to his helmsman to instruct him to close the distance to Griddle and Vann but he collided facefirst with a mind-controlled pirate. The pirate looked down at Bunting’s frazzled frame and smiled, his thoughts artificially twisted into viewing him as a trusted confidant. Bunting shoved him into the ocean. Brick grinned as he ushered his own problems into the water. Wallace made sure their torsos were transparent before doing so.

Turning again to signal the crew, Bunting again began to utter his homebrew recreation of proper shipspeak, but as he spoke, an imposing frigate passed unharmed through the center of one of Rauatai’s finest, its occupants coming into view as it continued its trajectory unhindered. Many well-armed pirates accented its edges, but Bunting only noticed one figure, whose face was transfixed into a wild, unyielding smile. Its clothes were battered and its torso was horridly bent, but Bunting recognized it immediately. The deranged body belonged to a specific individual, of course, but Bunting saw much more than that. Contained within that mangled and maniacal silhouette wasn’t just a person. It was the end of the world.

#pillars of eternity #watcher wednesday #deadfire #poe #ocs

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chibivesicle · 6 years

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into the Ogata fray

Hello Golden Kamuy peeps on tumblr, I’m toeing into the fray in regards to the most talked about character (in my humble opinion) Ogata. Apologies this is a bit long but whatever.

As work is about to get a lot busier in about a week, I figured I gotta do this now or never so here goes nothing. Also, I’d love to thank the peeps who have been having a great dialogue on this already I’m looking at #hundredogatas and #goldenkamuyhunting for some great analyses.

I already posted some of my comments over on Mangadex in regards to chapter 165, Flag Bearer, trying to wrap my head around Ogata’s motivations and his role in the series.

I’ve really taken to the idea that Ogata is a fundamentally hurt character who has been hurting for so long that he doesn’t even know it anymore. He had normalized his “abnormal” feelings. As a result of his normalization to this he became in a ways “dead” to a lot of things, I agree with many others that he does have feelings but he keeps them buried deep down for the most part and the occasionally bubble to the surface.

The first instance of his feelings/humanity bubbling up are quite early on. Others have already highlighted he did not kill Huci or Osoma when going after Tanigaki. He is quite clear that he does not believe in unnecessary violence or actions. The second time this pops up is in the showdown in Barato. He saves Shinpei the gangster son and even though he calls him a weakling he is the one who allows him to be free of his meddling parents and move off on his home. Yes, he’s drawn as a tough character but you see no malice or meanness in his expression, just a straight up explanation that he doesn’t like people who lack action or volition. I felt he was just making a very firm point.

Throughout the series, I’ve always read Ogata as an individual who views himself as a self made man. He rose to his position as a Superior Private through skill and hard work and in part by not making too many waves. He highly values individuals who take control of their lives and their actions and have some sort of purpose; the people he dislikes the most are those who rose by family/title/rank which is obviously due to his horrible childhood/father issues that left him realizing that the concept of noble blood is pointless, especially given the fact that his own father made terrible military decisions.

I feel that Noda-sensei likes to have his humanity bubble up occasionally and Asirpa will be the character who pulls it back to the surface due to her parallels with his brother.

As he is an astute observer of his surroundings and what we know of Lt. Tsurumi’s ability to manipulate people for his best outcomes I hypothesize that he recognized the “deadness” in Ogata and wanted to groom him to be the elite dirty deeds man of his select group from the 7th. Tsurumi just keep pushing him further, first trying to get at him through his brother and then to assassinate his father. Tsurumi thought he had groomed the ultimate stealth man for his future jobs. These two parts of pages from ch. 165 just really highlight how “checked out” he was as a sniper in the trenches. You could almost hear Ogata’s internal dialogue as “another day, another kill, another paycheck”.

This entire scene is so sterile, he takes his sniping very seriously but he’s so distant that he’s in his no emotion zone.

When ch. 165 gives the flashback with him and his brother discussing their roles on the battlefield and how he can’t get his hands dirty for the sake of his honor and their own father’s crazy ideas, I still feel torn on the situation. I agree that Ogata’s brother loved and valued him as a human being and as he observed his brother closely (in the revised ch. 103) he did see that his brother had qualities that he lacked. But I’d be as pissed as I’m guessing Ogata was at how hypocritical this point was to him. It was almost as though it was egging him on to “go ahead and shoot” just to beat his brother in a philosophical argument to get back at their father.

While trying to put things in chronological order, I feel that Ogata reached his breaking point with Tsurumi’s manipulation of him after he killed his father.

Here we have him thinking maybe shooting my brother might be a bad idea but i’m still hesitating just sooooo slightly with that just slightly less dead look . . .

to his oh you smooth talking bastard fake smile. Granted this is from the original ch. 103, but I think it really gets the point across that he knows he’s been played and he’s hyper aware of the power Tsurumi wields over others.

I take it from this point on his goals began to differ and lead to him deserting. I think it took a long time for him to feel confident that he could leave. It was clear he at one point did feel intimidated by the power Tsurumi had over him based on how awkward his body language with Tsurumi was in ch. 164. He’s totally informal when he’s sitting 99.9% of the time, yet he sits in seiza and buttons up his uniform.

Here is his more informal, I’m totally hogging the heater while observing everyone around me/listening to Tanigaki’s story.

After he leaves the hospital he is now in his “liberated” form which is shown by his longer hair. According to Noda-sensei in questions from readers in Young Jump that were translated by the peeps over at Kamuy Central, Ogata grew his hair out as he had become liberated. What he was liberated from was unclear but it was a physical sign that he had changed somehow. It is clear that his character has a beef with the military hierarchy and how many men died to poor decisions - which we later learn were his father’s to an extent. This is early on when he’s discussing the type 30 rifle while sniping Tanigaki and how he continues to disagree with the whole “noble blood” line repeated by Tsurumi and backed by Koito to an extent. With his new hairstyle he definitely expresses himself more to the other characters while he maintains his distance.

His immediate interaction with Hijikata is both pay attention to me and praise me (shooting the watchtower bell/skin on his head) but also, I’m gonna push you and sass you with my confidence b/c I know things. Plus, he immediately makes a cutting remark about “what happens to your subordinates?” If he were totally dead on the inside or missing his humanity he wouldn’t ask about the little guys being lead by Hijikata. Again, I think this hints at his dislike of unnecessary violence.

We know he has issues with crappy fathers/poor leaders of people. The angry screentones not only when Hijikata cuts off Asirpa from speaking but how he’s like she was about to say my father . . .

As a keen observer of people, he’s looking out for leadership qualities either actively or maybe even passively. I’d like to make a really big leap for a minute and point out the cover to ch. 71

This cover has a quote from Matthew and features Tsurumi as the false prophet with Tsukishima and Nikaido. Note that in the “Last Supper” scene here (ch. 81)

Ogata is in the place of Matthew. If we go with the Asirpa is Jesus hypothesis, saving men with dark pasts to redeem themselves than I don’t think Noda-sensei just picked a quote from Matthew at random. Keep in mind Kiro is Judas, Sugimoto is Peter and Shirashi is John. Also remember that Matthew was a tax collector and not trusted or accepted by others but Asirpa clearly cares about him through the series. This leaves Ogata as the only person to argue against Tsurumi based on his shootout with Tsukishima in the taxidermists place as shown here

He is clearly telling Tsukishima that Tsurumi used these sentimental things to get men to follow him and dedicate themselves to his cause. We learn much later that there is no way his motivations are based on surpassing his father - that was always a line Tsurumi told others but he does admit the he never knew what Ogata was thinking.

Anyhoo that was my really far reach, but getting back to his idea to keep his distance from people but ultimately wants to be loved aspect. I’d state that Ogata hides some of his feelings towards others through is constant jests or teasing, despite having a hard time accepting that Tanigaki didn’t kill his comrades (who he def cared about a lot, which seems out of character at first) he gave Tanigaki the nickname “bear cub” and it stuck with others calling him that. He also snarked at Tanigaki that if he wanted his nose cut off so badly he could do it for him. I don’t think he meant this but it is clear he hides behind is sassy/sarcastic remarks. As Tanigaki is the most innocent (and most similar to his brother) i’d say this spills over into his first harsh sadistic attitude towards him “beg for my help!” to “the dog did more than you.” to the harsh but in some ways likely true/protective “go back home”. He says one thing but his actions speak otherwise just like the gangster son back in Barato.

Despite bitching about Sugimoto slowing them down while fleeing the 7th, he lets Asirpa treat him here

He’s being a bit pissy and I love the arms crossed body posture but you can tell he’s just being pushy to make sure they don’t get caught.

My absolute fav scenes of how he keeps his distance are the beach ones here where everyone holds hands and jumps while he watches over them.

Which then highlights him in the background several panels later while Asirpa and Sugimoto talk about beach kamuy etc.

He frequently is shown with his back towards many other group members, which would imply trust to an extent, he expects them not to stab him in the back so to speak. When he shoots the herd of reindeer he states that they are just like people with one on the lookout - in the groups that he has been a part of he’s the lookout.

He may be alone and isolated but he’s always playing an important protective role towards others. I’m not sure to what extent he realizes that he does this but he’s almost always drawn looking back while others are looking forward or looking the opposite direction of the rest observing everything. He def is a protector of others, especially those who cannot fully protect themselves.

Ever since the beginning of the series we’ve know most character’s motivations for the gold but his remains a complete mystery. Another tumblr post mentioned it could be the geisha debt that his mom had that he inherited, which makes sense to me, but really we still don’t know why he even joined the military. Being a solider wasn’t going to be enough at the rank of a superior private to pay off that debt . . . . I want that question answered for me - yes, it was clear he was a sharpshooter from a young age but he clearly could have been a successful hunter instead of a solider. I hope we get answers to this in the manga.

As others have stated, since he was the only character to really respect Asirpa from the get go other than Sugimoto and that they are clear foils of how different people deal with PTSD, our current story arc will hopefully work in how Asirpa will save him by treating him like a real human being and in return he will protect her from older men/the establishment from using her. For most of the series Ogata and Kiro were separated and we know that he knows more about Kiro than Kiro likely realizes. The benefit of being a quiet introvert means a lot of the characters don’t notice him or read him as well as they could.

These recent panels highlight how he actually gets Shirashi and Asirpa to realize something is off and it likely has to do with Kiro. I love how he gets Asirpa to realize they were being targeted for a reason and that stressed out look on Kiro’s face is so perfect.

Ogata knew that both Tsurumi and Hijikata knew of the links to the partisans in the far east and that Wilk and Kiro were linked. He just needed to clue in the nicer party members to this fact. He had to betry Sugimoto to get close to Kiro for him to play his hand. He’ll protect Asirpa b/c that’s what he does.

I could go onto some other points but I should stop here. Phew. I think I could leave those for later posts. Like how he shows affection through teasing ALL the TIME.

#golden kamuy #ogata hyakunosuke #hundredogatas #goldenkamuyhunting #yamaneko

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fledgeling-heroes-r-us · 3 years

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Side Swapper Introduction: Shadow Weaver

Introduction Name: Daesii Ta’arkin Soelle Also Known As: Tarquin Soul (originally by Cynthia, later his human world alias and preferred name), Tarq Age: 17 Birthday: January 28th Species: Hybrid. Half shadow meister, half feldarhl Blood Type: Unknown Astrological Sign: Aquarius Gender: Male Sexual Orientation: Heterosexual Past/Bio: Tarquin was born as the second son of Crothe, king of a dimension named Death Valley, and his second wife. The two were forced to marry and produce a child by the kingdom's council, in an attempt to strengthen the meister species as it suffered from plague. As he was an unwanted child, he sometimes found it difficult to bond with his parents, and bonded better with his father and his brother's mother than he did his own mother, though this was likely primarily due to the fact that the valley was having an extreme negative impact on his mother's mental state. Having the ability to sense life and death, and considering the poor state of his kingdom, Tarquin also found life in the valley to be emotionally damaging to him, despite the fact that he knew nothing else. Being royalty in a time of unrest, Tarquin and his family were targets of abduction and assassination attempts, and when the culprits were caught they were often tortured for information and then executed publicly, things Tarquin either witnessed first hand or was aware of anyway due to his sensory abilities. As he ended up being susceptible to the plague sweeping his home dimension, Tarquin was often kept isolated, only allowed to see his tutor and parents at set times of the day, though his elder brother often broke isolation to see him. When he was seven, his older brother told him about the stories his human mother had told him of her home, and how it sounded like a paradise, and how shadow meisters could open rifts to that world. Okolio, the elder brother, took Tarquin to this world to start a new life, as both of them found the valley to be a disturbing and scary place. Earth honestly wasn't that much better for them, being a loud, bright and confusing place with overwhelming sensory input, and, being children, they clearly hadn't thought things through and had to go from living in a palace as royalty to trying to survive on the streets. Eventually, their behaviour on the streets and their abnormal appearances had them catching the attention of others, specifically three other super powered youths, around the age of Okolio. Two of these three teenagers, Nolan and Edward, wanted to become vigilante heroes for reasons Tarquin never really understood, and convinced the other three boys to join them in their dumb hero work. The team even was vaguely successful, for a group of stupid kids playing hero. They did actually stop a few crimes here and there. This all ended when a pro hero by the name of Greenfield slaughtered Okolio during one of the kids' 'missions'. Unable to do anything but bear witness to the murder, Tarquin began to think about tracking down the man who killed his brother and getting revenge. The others in his team were unable to get him to come away from this new obsession, and the team as a whole began to come apart at the seams. Eventually, during a particularly nasty argument, Tarquin lost control of his powers, causing severe injury to the self-appointed team leader, Edward. He later died from his injuries, and Tarquin fled. He later joined a school claiming to aid those with powers, hoping to learn to control them. This is where he had his first encounter with the heroes, who had infiltrated the school after a tip off that the school was actually a cover for a group wishing to capture subjects for experimentation, similar to if not the same as the facilities that held Luca or Ruby Dagger. Tarquin himself never learnt their plans, and wasn't at all interested in the deeper secrets of the organisation. He was just there to learn to control his powers. When the chaos kicked off, rather than lend anyone a hand, he used his powers to make a getaway. From that point on, his clashes with the heroes tended to be as a result of him causing trouble, either due to poor power control, committing crimes to survive or as part of his drive to track down Greenfield. Plus, he just now generally had a petty dislike of heroes, so he liked causing them trouble. When he finally did manage to track down his brother's killer, he found himself very ill equip to deal with him or take him down, and came away from the resulting fight badly injured. In moments, it seemed like everything had changed, as Greenfield put a bounty on his head in the underworld and he found himself being hunted. Injured, starving and scared, with nowhere to turn to, in desperation he fled to Circle Headquarters to beg for help. Being good people at their core, the heroes agreed to help him. In time, he agreed to help save others again, and was drafted into a new hero team, where the other heroes on his team could watch over him and make sure he behaves. About Him/Her Personality: Tarquin is a quiet person who finds it difficult to trust others. He wants to see the good in people, but is so used to people baring their worst that it is difficult to see past that. He has low self-esteem due to his poor health and lack of control, and never truly learnt how to deal with his emotions. His powers make him quite sensitive and he finds he is easily upset. Regardless of this, due to his shy nature and lack of trust towards others, Tarquin prefers not to burden others with his concerns or worries, and tries to keep himself to himself. He finds himself often thinking along one train of thought in an almost obsessive nature, and struggles to change focus. Occupation: Hero, crown prince of Death Valley Likes: Shiny things The dark Picture books Plants and animals Photographs and the memories they hold Dislikes: Greasy food Loud and chaotic environments People who try and pry into his personal life Sweet food and smells Himself, probably Hobbies: Sightseeing, learning new things Fears: Death, mostly. Also one time Nolan showed him what Pokemon are. He finds them terrifying and is glad they are only fictional. Due to all the death he sensed at hospitals in his home dimension, he also finds being in and around medical buildings and rooms makes him very uncomfortable. Strength: Tarquin knows his limits well and knows when he can and cannot push himself. His sensory abilities help with stealth and allow him to avoid detection. Weakness: Tends not to mention important information, such as dietary requirements, which leads to his poor health. His inability to trust others causes problems of its own, as does his obsessive personality. He also has poor control over his own powers, which can easily cause him to accidentally harm his own allies. Talents: Tarquin isn't sure what his individual talents are. He's sure everyone has a talent or two, but no-one's ever called him talented for anything involving not using his powers. Appearance Height: 6'3 Cup Size: N/A Skin Tone: Powder blue Eye Color: Blue Hair Description: - Color: Black - Highlights: N/A - Length: Shoulder length - Style: Shaggy, unkempt - Worn: Loose Extra: - Scars: Tarquin's scars are mostly across his arms and torso, and so are most commonly covered by clothing. - Piercings: Nasal stud on the left side. - Tattoos: N/A - Facial Features: As a carnivore, his teeth are very different to those of a human. If they were to be compared to an animal, they would be most like those of a feline. - Scent: Well, his breath probably smells a bit vomity...otherwise I don't normally think about what my characters might smell like. Whatever the others wash his clothes in and whatever body washes are available, tbh, he doesn't care. Then again, tea tree and mint shampoo has a really nice smell to it in his opinion, so maybe that. - Other: Underweight, black claw-like nails. Relationships Father: Crothe Mother: Noth Siblings: An older half-brother named Okolio, and a younger half-sister named Viahar Relatives: Step-mothers Cynthia and Han-Linn Best Friends: Unsure. He supposes he would consider Whisper and Hex to be his closest friends at the moment. He also is very fond of Persephone. Friends: The other members of his team, certainly. Love Interest: Whisper, Persephone (formerly), Lolyo (formerly) Hero Information Code/Hero Name: Shadow Weaver Place of Origin: Death Valley, Shadow Dimension Residence: Australia Affiliations: Teen Titans, Circle, Hellwing Academy Team Mates: Whisper, Hex, Crayon, Zhen, Astral, Shard, Beacon, Luca (current team) Leo, Lolyo, Demon, Edward (Old team) Mentors: Potentially the members of his previous team would count, as well as the members of his current team. Allies: Circle and Squad. His allies as a villain are probably all gone now. Enemies: The main one is probably Greenfield. He's also pretty sure Nolan has been manipulating him for ages and he's also just made loads of enemies in general. Powers and Abilities: Flight, shadow manipulation, electrokinesis, the ability to open rifts between worlds and the ability to sense lifeforms, but not identify them - for instance, he could tell you a building is occupied, but not if it's occupied by people or vermin. His ability to sense life also doubles as an ability to sense the moment of death. Weapons: None Transportation: Prefers to travel on foot or via his powers, but will travel by vehicles if he must. Extra Information Quotes: "I can't trust them not to hurt you...that's the problem." "We don't need subtle!" Theme Song: Never Turn Back - Crush 40 Food: Beef, beef is good Drink: Plain water Color: Baby blue Animal: Birds Flower: Imperial Hysen, a flower native to his home world. They are a rare, large plant that grow few and far between. Their leaves are small, and of a very pale green colour, and the flowers that grow are large and can come in dark pink or powder blue with layered petals. Season: Spring

#original character #character file #Shadow Weaver (Tarquin Soul)#heroes #villains #Jinx Characters #side swappers #runaway prince trope go brrrr

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fandumbstuff · 6 years

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Favourite films from 2017

1. Star Wars: The Last Jedi Directed by Rian Johnson

Star Wars fans suck, and I’m so happy to see Disney wrench the franchise from their greasy paws and deliver it to a general audience. Rian Johnson picks up where J. J. Abrams left off by fleshing out the character development of the new franchise leads. Poe learns hard lessons about sacrifice. Rey and Kylo’s complex relationship is given more layers. Even the oft-criticized Finn and Rose subplot is an important bit of character development for Finn to gain unconditional courage. The movie is highlighted by standout performances from Adam Driver and Daisy Ridley, a career best Mark Hamill and an iconic turn from Laura Dern. Rian Johnson delivers rousing action sequences (_that _throne room scene) and emotional highlights. Accompanied by polished sound design, visual (and practical) effects, and John Williams doing what he does best, The Last Jedi is one of the franchises best. It brings the franchise into a new era, reinstating the true spirit of Star Wars- that anyone can be a hero, as long as we look to the stars and hope

2. Lady Bird Directed by Greta Gerwig

It’s hard to stand out in the field of coming of age movies, but Greta Gerwig manages to do it and tell a story that is simultaneously unique and relevant. The often-ignored daughter-mother relationship is given full attention, exploring some poignant moments in middle age and young adulthood equally well. This is an incredible script that makes every plot detail and situation count, giving the actors a lot to work with. Saoirse Ronan and Laurie Metcalf deliver in spades, playing off each other with incredibly nuanced performances. Gerwig performs marvellously, allowing her actors to find the moments of humour and melancholy in her script, and creating a visually pleasing movie to boot. That she manages to do this all in her directorial debut is a remarkable achievement.

3. Logan Directed by James Mangold

Hugh Jackman is given a great vehicle for his final performance as Wolverine. Adapted from Mark Millar’s Old Man Logan, the movie hugely surpasses its source material. While it maintains the gritty sense of violence from the graphic novel, its emotional substance is much more… substantial. Logan is a superhero film that finds a distinctive voice both in terms of its visuals and its temperament. Its characters aren’t simply grappling with “doing the right thing” but with debility, lethargy, loneliness and remorse. Jackman and Patrick Stewart explore these themes expertly. They’re accompanied by Dafne Keen’s standout performance as Laura/X-23 forming an emotional crux to carry the story. It’s a story that stands out from the others in its genre, and one that I certainly consider one of the best.

4. Get Out Directed by Jordan Peele

In Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, he manages to tell a story that is remarkably relevant and important, without ever losing his distinctive creative voice. Get Out is very much a horror movie, but Peele lends a fair bit of levity whenever he can. He drops scares that are so jarring they’re practically self aware. The movie is sold by Daniel Kaluuya’s incredible lead performance, as we’re left to ponder the sheer ridiculousness of his circumstances, slowly evolving into genuine terror. This movie has a very clear message, and despite its importance if there are those who may complain that it’s too heavy handed, they need only look to it’s masterfully crafted finale. Watching the movie in a crowded theatre gives you a shared experience, where we all jump at the same scares, laugh at the same jokes, but most importantly feel the injustice that presents itself at the end, and cheer for the twist. It’s this shared experience that is Peele’s master stroke. A perfectly enjoyable finale that leaves us pondering the very real message of the film.

5. Wonder Woman Directed by Patty Jenkins

This is the most important superhero film since 1976’s Superman. Bringing to life the most iconic female superhero of all time took a long time to happen but it delivers in spades. Patty Jenkins has given the DCU it’s finest film yet, establishing a convincing mythos with interesting characters. Amidst DC’s penchant for dark brooding characters, Diana is a breath of fresh air: a hero that is compassionate and optimistic, even slightly naive. This lends to a truly compelling character arc that allows her to learn firsthand how complicated “the world of man” is. Gal Gadot commands the lead role expertly. She is the most convincing superhero performance since Christopher Reeve, and just like him it’s to bring to life an icon- a role model that she will forever be associated with.

6. Blade Runner 2049 Directed by Denis Villenueve

It is truly incredible that a sequel made 25 years after its predecessor can maintain the same tone and feel of the original, while lending a new creative voice. The original Blade Runner is one of sci-fi’s most contemplative stories, and it’s incredible that 2049 doesn’t do anything to damage this aura. It asks important questions while expanding on the franchise’s greater theme of what it means to be human. Denis Villeneuve is quickly becoming one of the most distinctive visual filmmakers currently working in Hollywood, and with this movie and Arrival it’s clear to see why. Hans Zimmer along with Benjamin Wallfisch manages to deliver some of his best work in years with a soundtrack that pays homage to Vangelis’s iconic original score. And then there’s the legendary Roger Deakins-lighting each scene with a painterly stroke to add a bit of nuance to already strong performances.

7. Thor: Ragnarok Directed by Taika Waititi

Perhaps more than any director in the MCU, Taika Waititi delivers his own distinctive creative voice to his entry in the franchise. While its easy to get carried away by the stunning 80’s visuals and synth score from Mark Mothersbaum, it’s Waiiti’s signature wit and charm that really shine through. He makes Thor, Loki and Hulk (and Banner) more likeable than they’ve ever been in the MCU and introduces new characters like Valkyrie and the Grandmaster that are instantly noteworthy. Stellar performances from practically the whole cast help to sell this, and we’re left with a movie that fully entertains while gearing us up for the MCU’s next big offering.

8. The Post Directed by Steven Spielberg

Amidst all the hoopla surrounding Ready Player One, Spielberg manages to sneak away and make a movie with his dream team of Tom Hanks, John Williams and Janusz Kaminski. And include Meryl Streep. I mean, just on paper this looked to be a sure-fire success, and shockingly it doesn’t disappoint. It is absolutely a movie that speaks volumes about the current political climate in the United States, but it also honours the importance of investigative journalism and freedom of the press. Hanks delivers an incredible performance, but it is purely to support Streep’s powerhouse portrayal of Katharine Graham. She charts a fascinating and incredibly relevant character arc to show us just how important it is to find your voice and your courage in the face of prejudice.

9. The Big Sick Directed by Michael Showalter

Being such an incredible comedic talent, Kumail Nanjiani is finally given a chance to create a personal story. Along with his wife Emily V. Gordon they deliver a comedy movie that is so much more than just funny. It is deeply affecting, introducing us to two leads that are charming and worth rooting for. Culturally, relationally and physically, they contend with serious struggles that makes their character arcs incredibly meaningful. This is one of the strongest screenplays of the year and a testament to passionate storytelling.

10. The Shape of Water Directed by Guillermo Del Toro

The Shape of Water is very much Guillermo Del Toro at his best- telling an extremely humanistic story under a fantastical lens. As per most of his movies, it features an isolated hero searching for self-actualization. Mirroring this character with that of a monster, he subverts the idea of abnormal for a sense of harmony. He trusts his audience to be empathic, to see the benevolence in the creature and the compassion in Eliza. This is balanced by his clear depiction of immorality in Michael Shannon’s Colonel Stickland. Supported by incredible compositions from Alexandre Desplat and ethereal cinematography from Dan Laustsen, Del Toro once again proves that he is one of Hollywood’s most affecting storytellers and that even the most high concept fantasy stories can be poignant ones.

Honorable Mentions

War for the Planet of the Apes (Directed by Matt Reeves), God’s Own Country (Directed by Francis Lee), Mudbound (Directed by Dee Rees), Call Me By Your Name (Directed by Luca Guadagnino), Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (Directed by Martin McDonagh), The Florida Project (Directed by Sean Baker), Phantom Thread (Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson), Logan Lucky (Directed by Steven Soderbergh), The Disaster Artist (Directed by James Franco), Wind River (Directed by Taylor Sheridan)

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rem-is-best-almond · 7 years

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[Review] Dance with Devils Shiki Natsumezaka/ Kirael’s route

Shiki is a fallen angel and serves as the treasurer of the student council. Any sort of pain turns him on and he's able to turn your seemingly ordinary actions into something morbid in his head LMAO 😂😂 I started this route having quite low expectations for Shiki since I'm personally not a big fan of these Do-S Do-M characters but he turned out to be quite a guilty pleasure and I really loved his development in his human route. Unfortunately, his devil route is something you'd expect from an episode of Criminal Minds and was all sorts of nope :)))

[Spoilers under the cut , this is a summary of his whole route, including some CGs]

Left Door routes: Rem Lindo Roen

Right Door Routes: Mage Urie

<< Previous (Urie) Next (Rem)>> Final Thoughts >I

After learning about the grimoire, Shiki self invites himself into Ritsuka's home despite her protests in order to keep an eye on her. Since Lindo's MIA due to being injured during the common route , Ritsuka eventually gives in and lets him stay until Lindo comes home from the exorcist society. During the duration of his stay, Shiki causes quite a few inconveniences for Ritsuka including getting her lectured by her teacher for staying with her ‘boyfriend’(Shiki) when she’s underaged and pulling her into the bathroom when he’s taking a bath. Despite being upset with him about these, she decides that it’s safer to let him stay there when he protected her from an attempted assault by the vampires.

Shiki then takes Ritsuka to an art gallery and there they saw a painting of a lonely fallen angel. Shiki tells her the story behind that painting and is surprised that Ritsuka empathizes with the fallen angel in the painting. On the way home, they encountered a bunch of vampires who are after the Grimoire. Shiki escapes with Ritsuka by flight, revealing that he was actually a fallen angel. He tells her that he got banished from heaven for saving his friend and fell. But since he had angel’s blood in him, the devils in the demon realm also isolated him and thus he felt lonely. He says that he got attracted to Ritsuka because of how similar they are, both being different from the people around them. Ritsuka wonders if Shiki won’t be lonely again if he manages to go back to heaven and encourages him to try to go back since he still has his wings.

One night, Shiki ends up having a nightmare so Ritsuka brings him back to her room and promises him that she won’t leave him alone. Eventually, Azuna finds out that Ritsuka has been living with Shiki all these time and is hurt that Ritsuka never told her anything about this. Things end badly between them as Ritsuka leaves with Shiki. After hearing the news of Lindo’s return, Shiki gets upset and leaves for a bit. As the school festival rolls around,Ritsuka and Azuna still haven’t made up with each other and this upsets them both. Lindo comes to see his little sister, having recovered from his injuries and is confused at how distant they are towards each other. Azuna explains to him about the situation and he encourages her to go make up with Ritsuka.

Meanwhile, Ritsuka who ran away from the both of them bumps into Shiki and they go around the festival together. At the school dance, Urie and Mage try to make a jump on Ritsuka but end up getting butthurt when Shiki chimes in saying that Ritsuka is his for the night because he asked first. He takes her out to the Garden and they dance until a loud crash interrupts them. Turns out it was the vampires and Shiki was the one that let them in. As he flies her into the sky, Shiki says that he’s doing all this to betray Rem because he wants Ritsuka all to himself and wants her to be in despair cause it turns him on. He tells her the true reason he was casted out of heaven was because he killed his friend and the humans that they were supposed to protect.

As Ritsuka witnesses Azuna dying because she shielded Lindo, she falls into a depressed state. In her broken state, Shiki often comes to her house to ‘play’ with her, savouring the look of despair on her face. Ritsuka eventually stops being depressed and after listening to Azuna’s voicemails requesting a make up between them during the school dance, decides to confront Shiki. She finds him at the school garden and tells him to stop trying to break her cause she won’t give in to him no matter what.

Shiki refuses to believe this and decides to go kill Lindo and Azuna, who turned out to be in critical condition at the Exorcist Society. Ritsuka doesn’t want to be a pushover so she clings onto him to stop him as he flies into the sky. On top of the Tokyo tower , they are confronted by an angry Jek who starts attacking Shiki but he just moans in pain instead of fighting back. Ritsuka tries to shield him but Shiki ends up protecting her instead, saying that no one can hurt Ritsuka because she was the only person that made time for him. Because of this, Shiki’s wings got heavily ripped apart by Jek. Ritsuka uses her holy ring and manages to defeat Jek as he falls down from the Tokyo tower.

Devil route:

Not long after this incident, Ritsuka receives news about Azuna’s death along with Azuna’s dagger from a nurse at the exorcist Society. She’s heartbroken and Mage who was with her there comforted her. Shiki sees all this and gets turned on at how heartbroken she is and wants to see more. Ritsuka resents Shiki for causing Azuna’s death but can’t bring herself to lash out on him because of their promise so she avoids him instead. Rem comes to inspect on the incident with Jek and ends up comforting Ritsuka when she tells him about her regrets towards Azuna.

Shiki gets jealous seeing this so he kills Rem in front of her.This traumatises her and now the poor girl is terrified of Shiki, what’s worse is that he blames it all on her. Shiki wants to see her terrified even more so he kills Mage and Urie in front of her house just when she was about to ask for their help. Ritsuka decides to isolate herself and Shiki in her grandfather’s old house to prevent him from killing anyone else. She drowns herself with caffeine to stay awake so that Shiki won’t run off elsewhere to kill people. Unfortunately, she eventually falls asleep out of fatigue and Shiki gets bored. So he decides to bring a ‘gift’ for Ritsuka. He ends up bringing a dead Lindo to her, much to her horror.

Devil end 2 (Bad end):

Ritsuka wants nothing but to run away from Shiki. Roen takes this opportunity to get her on his side and keeps her in a barrier he set up. Eventually, Shiki finds out and kills Roen. He takes Ritsuka out of the barrier and shows her that he had brought Maria back from the Vampire’s HQ, half dead. He then kills Maria infront of her, sending Ritsuka into an eternal trance as she fell into despair. In the epilogue, Shiki ends up killing every one of Ritsuka’s classmates and anyone that Ritsuka had interacted with before, hoping to see her despair filled face but since Ritsuka is now a living corpse, she doesn’t respond and just stares blankly in front of her.

Devil end 1 (Good end):

Ritsuka decides to stop Shiki once and for all. She follows him to the Vampire’s castle where her mother still remained unconscious. Just as Shiki was about to kill Maria, Ritsuka takes Azuna’s dagger and stabs him in the heart. In his final words, Shiki tells Ritsuka that he had intended for all this to happen ,so that the both of them could feel pain together. He says he loves her and dies. In the epilogue, Ritsuka brings Maria back home, claiming that she herself was a broken person after all that happened.

Human route:

Back at the school’s infirmary, they find out that Shiki might not be able to fly again and Ritsuka blames it on herself. She leaves the room to calm down for awhile and Shiki wonders why it doesn’t feel good seeing her cry anymore. He wanders into the streets to think things through and Ritsuka comes back to find him missing so she goes on a search for him. She encounters Roen and he decides to forcefully kidnap her because he wants the grimoire for his Maksisu sama. Shiki comes running to her rescue and Roen eventually reveals that the method to take out the grimoire is to kill Ritsuka. Shiki is unable to defeat Roen because of his injuries so Ritsuka lets her power loose and manages to fend him off. When she wakes up, Shiki’s wounds have healed and he also brought her back to the third library. Rem comes in to talk to Shiki and he ends up lying that he doesn’t know how to get the Grimoire out of Ritsuka. Shiki goes back to Ritsuka and eventually they confess to each other and shared a few kisses. After taking her home, Shiki starts taking care of Ritsuka like the good boyfriend that he should be ^^

Strange phenomenons start happening and turns out it’s the doing of the Angels’ in heaven. They are buttmad that the grimoire's vessel got involved with a former angel, Kirael, Shiki's angel name, and threaten to destroy the world to rid of its malevolence if they don't hand over Ritsuka. Rem questions their sudden interference after staying silent for so long and the angels say that some of Kirael’s blood has been mixed with Ritsuka's and this is causing the grimoire to react abnormally. Turns out, Ritsuka had drank some of Shiki’s blood during their kiss at the library. Ritsuka’s heart starts beating violently causing her to be in pain. Rem and Co eventually find out from Roen about the method to obtain the grimoire and Shiki escapes from them with Ritsuka.

Human end 1 (Good end) :

Shiki flies up to the heavens and confronts the two Archangels. He makes a deal with them that he will protect both the world from destruction and the grimoire from destroying it in exchange for not handing Ritsuka over to them. The arch angels agree to his offer but rudely lets them fall back to the ground 😑😑 some kind of archangels you guys are. Thankfully, Shiki manages to stop them both from being crushed like watermelons. Ritsuka’s heart starts beating violently causing her to attack anyone at close range. Roen sees shit going down and nopes the fuck outta there because he doesn't want to get BBQ-ed. Shiki insists on saving Ritsuka and ignores how his body gets zapped to get close to her. The other guys and Ritsuka are like “DON’T DO IT” but Shiki ignores them because he’s used to pain. The Grimoire finally vanishes and Ritsuka wakes up to find Shiki injured severely. They kiss before he dies as the angels finally stop their zapping party and praise Shiki for managing to fulfill the deal. Ritsuka's not pleased with their stuck up attitude and calls out on their bullshit. So the angels granted Shiki a new life and it starts raining white feathers ノ(・ω・)ノ

Shiki is brought back to life as an angel but has to leave to do his angel duties. Before he leaves, he promises Ritsuka that he would always be watching over her from above and flies back to the heavens with a pair of white wings.

In the epilogue, Ritsuka goes back to her ordinary life again. Somehow, they managed to rescue Maria from the Vampire's lair so she's well and alive too. One day, She comes back home to find none other than Shiki waiting for her. He tells her that he's now a human cause he got bored in heaven and scribbled all over the archangel’s face 😂😂😂 They decided that he's not suitable to be an angel but he's not that terrible to be a devil so they turned him into a human instead lolololol. With this, they both shared a kiss and lived happily ever after.

Human end 2 (bad end):

As the both of them are running from Devils and Angels, the wacko exorcists go about slaughtering girls who they suspect is the grimoire much to Ritsuka’s guilt. They end up hiding in a warehouse along with a mother and her injured child but unfortunately for them, the exorcists were able to find them and end up killing both the mother and the child. This triggers Ritsuka’s powers and she kills the two exorcists. Lindo and Azuna managed to find her but due to her mistaking them for the same exorcists, before Shiki could stop her, she ends up killing them too. Because of this, Ritsuka barely has any of her sanity left and expresses her growing thirst for destruction. In the epilogue, Shiki flies into the sky with Ritsuka in his arms as they watched the world get destroyed into nothing. Ritsuka has given up on any will to live and they both await judgement as the lighting finally zaps them both to their death.

Concluding Thoughts:

I came in here expecting to have a very intense hatred for Shiki because of his devil route but surprising enough, I was almost tearing up at his human route. Not to mention, compared to Urie’s route, Shiki’s route didn’t really made me feel like flinging my vita out of the window at all. I’m not saying that Shiki never did anything wrong but his actions mostly resembled that of a selfish child’s so it was hard for me to be mad at him. Truthfully, the only time he crossed the line if you don’t count the devil route is during the Vampire’s attack in chapter 9. Most of the time, he wasn’t harming Ritsuka and I wasn’t mad at him for being possessive of her because I can reason with why he’s acting that way. Overall, although he’s not my best boy ,I felt like his Human route was the best one out of everyone. His Devil route was such a horror fest it’s best forgotten tbh I did enjoy the thriller aspect of it tho The only way you could somewhat enjoy it is if you like psychological horror and Yanderes but one thing’s for sure, this route would give you nightmares.

Left Door routes: Rem Lindo Roen

Right Door Routes: Mage Urie

<< Previous (Urie) Next (Rem)>> Final Thoughts >I

#Dance with Devils PS Vita #Spoilers #Shiki's route Summary and review #shiki's route #Shiki Natsumezaka #Kirael #Rejet #Dance with Devils #Otome #Otome Game review #Shiki CGS

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her-culture · 7 years

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Tim Burton and the Cult of the White Freaks

by Archita Mittra (20), India

I almost didn’t write this article. When I was 12 or 13, I went through an intense punk phase, complete with electric blue highlights, ripped jeans, inscribing Green Day lyrics on the walls of my room, and a vocabulary of extremely colourful expletives. I was a devoted rebel without a cause. I was suffering from a severe identity crisis. I’ve always been a weird person. I’ve always liked the strange and eccentric characters. I took to writing emo poetry and creating morbid art, because I couldn’t speak, because for the most part of my childhood and my teenage years, I didn’t have the right words, the right face, the right personality, to fucking speak. I’m 20 now, and I still make morbid stuff, and things have changed, but only a bit. I close my eyes and I’m back there in that dark room with no light, a child with sewn lips, trying to articulate a trauma that knows no language. Somewhere in that demented darkness, I discovered, among other things, the films of Tim Burton. I fell in love with him and just some months back, I think, he betrayed me. This is why I almost didn’t write this article. Let me tell you why I fell for him in the first place. My skin’s brown as a dried walnut, and I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it’s going to stay that way, even if in my fantasies I’m white as Mia Wasikowaska’s Alice exploring a Gothic wonderland and having tea with a Mad Hatter wearing too much of white face paint. And, for as long as I could remember, that was a problem to everyone else. Why wasn’t my skin tone as fair as my parents, all my relatives would whine at every wedding and social gathering that my shy and introverted self was forced to attend. In holiday pictures, people teased me by asking if I was adopted. My classmates and I would play a game where the person with the lightest skin tone would win. During the annual school play, I was supposed to be grateful because I was getting to wear an expensive and exquisitely beautiful gown, pretending to be a spoilt stepsister and not the beautiful and oh-so-white Cinderella. Hey, at least I got the limelight for a bit. And yeah, it’s so okay, that even the colour pencils I use to make my art, label the peachy-pink tone as ‘skin’ and my brown flesh as well, just brown. Brown as tree bark, I suppose. For a long time, I kept telling myself that my shyness, my social anxiety, my crippling depression wasn’t because of all the bullying I had to endure at school, wasn’t because I was darker than everyone else around me, that it was just a manufacturing defect. Isn’t it normal for people to make fun of those who st-st-stammer? Isn’t it abnormal to st-st-stammer when you’re talking about the things you love and the things you fear? So, I did the only thing I could. I stopped talking. I wrote instead, but even that frightened me. Tim Burton was the best friend I never had. Because his films with all their Gothic visuals and macabre aesthetics, were about people supposedly like me. Beetlejuice wasn’t my first Tim Burton film but it is significant in two respects. One, it was Burton’s breakthrough film that landed him the offer to direct the blockbuster Batman films and kick-start the superhero industry. Two, it introduced to the world what is now regarded as the popular stereotype of the Goth girl: the charming Lydia Deetz. For my depressed 14 year old self who was tired of making up imaginary friends to play with and slitting wrists, the black-clad, eye-liner-wearing psychic and photography enthusiast became both my role model and my mirror image. She was introverted (yay), creative, super duper depressed and could talk to ghosts. She was me! Of course there was something strikingly wrong with this image and I tried to ignore it by smearing a shit load of face powder on my brown brown face: she was white. Years later, Tim Burton’s trademark vision gave way to the pastiche dark fantasy comedy Dark Shadows, which although failed commercially, greatly pleased me aesthetically. Johnny Depp was playing a delicious vampire, fashion icon Helena Bonham Carter was a psychologist, a sassy teenage girl was later revealed to be a werewolf, the whole family was as dysfunctional as mine and the soundtrack included both the Carpenters and Alice Cooper. What else could a lonely POC girl, steadily losing her mind in a world of Gothic films that reflected back her own emptiness and strangeness, ask for? And even now, despite everything that has happened to me, Edward Scissorhands still remains as one of my favourite films, and although I pride myself as the type of person who doesn’t cry while watching a movie, my eyes were watery by the time Edward and Kim had parted ways and Edward remained in that dark castle, lonely as he ever was, making snow with his scissor hands. I was simultaneously Edward, this misfit-monster abandoned by God and his parent, and Kim, the suburban girl, slowly tasting what it is to love a stranger whose heart is so familiar and to dance for the first time in snow. And I thought, as I watched the pain in Edward’s eyes that it was Burton and not Edward, who was pleading to the audience to look beyond appearances and voicing for the first time, his childhood issues of alienation and misrepresentation. Soon after watching the film, my diary entries (I kept several journals because I didn’t have ‘real life’ friends to talk to) began to be addressed to a mysterious man named Edward while the Johnny Depp fan art I made bore the note ‘the only Edward I ever loved’ much to the annoyance of my Twlight-obsessed classmates. The movie wasn’t perfect, but then again, most beautiful things never are. And I’d long outgrown my fangirly love for Depp, long before those allegations about abusing Amber Heard began. But the love story with Tim Burton doesn’t end here. In 2010, when Alice having slain the Jabberwocky is preparing to leave, the Hatter softly requests her to stay. Alice promises to come back but the Hatter is unconvinced, saying she won’t remember him. Alice was not ready to comprehend the implications of that exchange, but I did and it terrified me to death. Tim Burton’s movies were the wonderland I would run away to, to escape my harsh reality, to forget this world that wouldn’t treat me as one of them, because I wasn’t fair enough, because fuck it, I wasn’t normal enough. I was trapped in the world of the Mad Hatter, a dream concocted by Alice, a world that is fragile and ephemeral, a world that disappears the moment Alice wakes up and forgets her dream. I’ll come back to this later, but for now, let me tell you the final lesson I learnt from watching Tim Burton’s movies: I learned to hope. In his delightful stop-motion animated feature Frankenweenie, Victor attempts to bring his dead pet dog Sparky back to life and he does so with disastrous consequences. Watching it and remembering all the pets I’d loved who died and would sell my soul to bring back, I was filled with a childlike sense of hope and the realization that I wasn’t alone for believing in and desperately hoping for impossible things, I wasn’t alone in being misunderstood and misrepresented. For once being the weird kid in class and scribbling poems and doodles on the sly, didn’t matter. Not having people to connect to, or appreciating me for the messed-up person I was, didn’t matter. I was okay. I didn’t have to be normal like everyone else, because there were people like Tim Burton who could totally get me. At least that’s what I felt when he said stuff like, ‘I think a lot of kids feel alone and slightly isolated and in their own world.’ And as much morbid a Tim Burton film may appear to a first time viewer (especially if it’s Corpse Bride), Burton’s characteristic brand of Gothic-ness wasn’t so much as a celebration of death, as it was a celebration of life. Working within the Hollywood system, Tim Burton has managed to retain his personality and also be, subversive. And that was so fucking inspiring to me. Why then did this man, who dresses up in black, whose films have tried to teach me to fall in love with myself and to believe in magic, miracles and impossible things, suddenly, betray me? Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children should have been my perfect film. After all, it’s a film about kids who are eccentric and don’t fit in, has time travel and a love story thrown in the mix and a secret house where they can be themselves. It is exactly the stuff I relate to and enthusiastically devour. But this is what Tim Burton did. When asked about the lack of diversity in his films, he said ‘Nowadays, people are talking about it more. But things either call for things, or they don’t. I remember back when I was a child watching The Brady Bunch and they started to get all politically correct, like, OK, let’s have an Asian child and a black — I used to get more offended by that than just — I grew up watching blaxploitation movies, right? And I said, that’s great. I didn’t go like, OK, there should be more white people in these movies.” In that singular moment, my whole carefully-constructed illusion came crashing down, so efficiently, I didn’t even realize it. Okay, I told myself, I’m a POC and I’m not ‘called for’. All through my life I have been worshipping a man in whose imagination, I have no space, I do not exist. I’m the Mad Hatter in Alice’s world, alive for a short time, useful as a plot device and erased out of the narrative, the moment Alice returns to the real world. Is this the kind of space WE occupy in the white imagination? Okay, I tell myself. At least unlike Steven Moffat, he isn’t famous for saying a string of problematic things. Okay, perhaps it was someone else’s fault- maybe Ransom Riggs or a Disney executive didn’t want too much tampering with the too-white source material( Never mind what he did with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by adding a back story to Willy Wonka that I totally loved). Plus if he really suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome, as his ex-partner Helena Bonham Carter claimed, we shouldn’t take his words to heart. Maybe he didn’t mean it. It’s just one blunder, I told myself. It doesn’t change anything. But it did. It changed everything. I couldn’t make any more excuses. Taking a look at his entire filmography-a career spanning over three decades- I realized that casting white, pale-as-death people is his artistic and directorial choice. It’s his fucking personal and creative choice. He just said that out loud. And it’s shoved into my face that this is a world running on white privilege and racism and hate crimes. That it’s the discrimination that POC face on a daily basis both from the whites and the communities who have internalized such values is the reason why I’m too afraid to even consider studying abroad in the UK or USA because Brexit and Trump administration yada yada, why I’m never ‘pretty enough’ to be considered to take part in college fashion shows built on patriarchal beauty conventions, why I still spend a part of my earnings on cosmetics that promise me ‘fair’ skin. My skin color isn’t an issue, most charming hypocrites will claim, it’s my shyness and weirdness and my lack of fucking ‘normal-ness’ that’s to blame. I wish someone would just tell me that I was born okay, that I am okay, that I’m not some sort of manufacturing defect most people think I am. In other words, Tim Burton’s niche audience wasn’t as inclusive as I made it out to be. It had outsiders and misfits yes, but only the white ones. Tim Burton’s fan club is a cult of white freaks, not Black freaks, not POC freaks, not any non-white freaks. I can’t be a part of this fan club, because in their world, I don’t exist. I am not ‘called for.’ When Ash Davis responds to Burton’s comment, she writes this brilliant article and says, ‘I write fanfiction for the people Tim Burton says are not ‘called for’. My mind, likewise, is a movie theatre where I edit my favourite films and include myself in the lead. I change the endings, add more romance when I’m lonely, put on costumes so outrageous that my mum won’t even let me wear on Halloween, deliver the dialogues my mouth will never speak, and feel a sense of belonging that is every bit delightful and artificial and illusory. In the films I direct in my mind, I look like the typical Tim Burton heroine. I’m white, not brown. This is what the white gaze has done to me. When I fell in love with his films, I thought I was seeing myself reflected back in Jack Skellington, in Lydia Deetz, in Edward Scissorhands, in Ed Wood, in Willy Wonka, in the Mad Hatter, in young Victor, in the Corpse Bride, in Ichabod Crane, but I never saw myself. I only saw what I wished so desperately to be seen as. Do I stop watching Tim Burton films after that racist comment? No. A part of me still hopes he’ll apologize or better yet include people who actually look like me in his next film. A fangirl, can hope, right? After all his films did help me to get through some dark times, albeit in a twisted way and I can’t erase those tense growing-up years when his oddball characters were all I could hold onto. But at the end of the day, he belongs to the mold of white film directors who make white movies for a predominantly white audience and think diversity POC-narratives aren’t important at all. But do Tim Burton films help me feel less lonely and less marginalized and less threatened by the big bad world out there? Not a bit.

#tim burton #white washing #whiteness #film #animated film

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linkspooky · 5 years

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Ougi and Araragi

Hi! I was wondering if you could write a meta about Ougi from the Monogatari series.

It’s impossible to talk about one of them without talking about the other, so let’s discuss the unique relationship between Ougi and Araragi underneath the cut, the special relationship between a boy and his shadow.

1. Character Concept: The Jungian Shadow

There’s a lot that can be discerned about Ougi just from the type of character they are. Their relationship with Araragi defines them entirely, without Araragi there is no Ougi.

Ougi’s design is intentionally meant to parallel Araragi’s. Araragi has a very bland light novel protagonist kind of look to him (hence why he never gets any cover art) his only distinguishing feature is that his hair is styled to cover one eye at almost all times. This is because Araragi’s primary character trait is obfuscation looking at things through only one eye you are never going to get the entire picture.

If Araragi’s character design is plain and normal, because that is what the primary protagonist type of these kind of series are an ordinary high school boy, then Ougi’s is the opposite, their design is attention grabbing and unique. If Araragi is normal, Ougi is visibly abnormal, you can already tell there is something subtly off by looking at them. What Araragi hides underneath the surface, Ougi is.

The primary feature of Ougi’s face and the one you notice immediately is their eyes, large, dull eyes, which are the focus of their entire face. Ougi is always shown staring forward with those eyes, unblinking, directly at you. It’s symbolic, eyes are symbols of insight, if Araragi obfuscates then Ougi sees everything. Ougi also wears the Naoetsu high girls uniform. They take the appearance of what Araragi cares about the most, a girl that he can save. Their skin is pale, and their hair dark, which could mean two things, either black and white, light and shadow kind of thinking that Ougi represents or, it’s just supposed to make them look like the kind of ghost that is common in Japanese horror.

Finally, Ougi’s sleeves are so long that their hands are almost never shown. This indicates two things, one human hands are signs of intimacy. What are your hands for? is a pretty famous quote from Evangelion, by never showing their hands Ougi cuts off intimacy because they exist as a symbol of isolation. The next is that Araragi is characterized as someone who always reaches out a helping hand, whereas Ougi is the opposite they stress individual agency and often leave others like Nadeko to their own fate. They may orchestrate things from the shadows, but ultimately Ougi never directly acts, and let’s the characters decide to step off the cliff all by themselves.

The fact that Araragi a boy, makes Ougi appear as a girl is also a play on binary gender. Ougi is technically genderless, but they appear as a girl initially because themes of binary opposition, and black and white thinking are at play in their character. Araragi is someone who tends to see the world in a binary way. Light and dark, black and white, male and female, they assume there is some kind of proper order to the world that needs to be followed. When Araragi begins to let go of these ideas Ougi is freer to express their gender any way they like.

A binary opposition (also binary system) is a pair of related terms or concepts that are opposite in meaning. Binary opposition is the system of language and/or thought by which two theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off against one another.

Ougi is based primarily on two ideas. One of them is a pretty obvious reference to the King of Distortion from Boogiepop, which is the series which started what we now call ‘Light Novels’ in Japan by popularizing urban stories with heavy sci-fi or fantasy elements. Araragi even directly references the king of Distortion.

“Tell me, what are you thinking about now...?” “Don’t suddenly become the king of Distortion.” Out with the cool quotes, scolded my sister. I deeply reflected on it. (Nekomonogatari White).’

The king of Distortion is a character who’s physical appearance and personality changes with every character they interact with, and who is able to enter the dreams of other people and see the desires in their heart after which point he makes an attempt to correct them.

While the King's personality changes with whatever person's form he is taking, in general, he seems to share a soft-spoken, calm and collected attitude each time, always seeming confident, most likely because of his knowledge of distortions in the hearts of each person's subconcious he enters. He claims his goal to be to 'turn the people's suffering into gold', which involves having people deal with their inner turmoils and coming to terms with them, which is why Boogiepop does not consider the King an enemy of the world, as he doesn't truly do anything particularly villainous.

King of Distortion like Ougi is also born from a single character’s regrets. The King of Distortion was born the moment Shirou Tanaka arrived at the Moon Temple. The main cause for the King's creation was the pent-up regret Shirou felt after entering a relationship with Naoko Kamishiro even though he didn't love her, figuring that he would just develop feelings for her later. After the girl's death, Shirou's self-hatred grew as he realized he wasn't particularly affected by her death in any real way. These feelings were also amplified by the fact that he knew about Akio Kimura, someone who truly loved Naoko, and deserved her way more than himself. These complex feelings of his manifested as the King of Distortion, a being born from Shirou's MPLS evolution.

King of Distortion is an entity born from repressed regrets and self hatred, what a character refuses to acknowledge about themselves or confront. Therefore, both King and Ougi are Jungian shadow archetypes.

Both as one, one as both.

One is both, both are one.

The Niounomiya siblings with their slaughtering magic.

He and she pass their time in the same body.

Passing their shuttered time.

Passing their shuttered space.

She is Jekyll, and he is Hyde.

One as both, both as one.

Both are one, one is both. Hitokui Magical - [x].

Robert Louis Stevenson wrote the now famous tale, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a story famous for its astute psychological insight that “Man is not truly one, but truly two.”

In Stevenson’s novel, Dr. Jekyll is a well respected doctor who cares deeply about the admiration of others and strives to be a good human being. In his laboratory he concocts a potion that when ingested transforms him into Mr. Hyde a primitive, unruly and destructive man. Reflecting on the nature of his transformation, he discovers a truth about the nature of a human being.

“I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man; I saw that, of the two natures that contended in the field of my consciousness, even if I could be rightly said to be the either, it was only because I was radically both.” [Source.]

The shadow exists in a dual relationship with the persona, developing in turn with it. In Jung’s terms the self, is the sum total of the psyche. Both is one, and one is both.

The persona comes from the latin word for “mask”, it’s the elements of personality which arises “for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience.” [Source.] It’s a simple idea, the way you talk around your friends is different from the way you talk in front of your grandmother. People are constantly choosing consciously which parts of their personality to show in front of others, especially in relation to how they would like to be perceived. It is a performance, but that does not mean it is not real. Every part of the identity matters.

It leans heavily on embodying only one’s best qualities, leaivng all those negative traits which contradict the Persona to form the “Shadow.” Jung called the shadow the part of the psyche the unconscoius aspect of the personality. Because one tends to reject or remain ignorant of the least desirable aspeccts of one’s personality, the shadow is largely negative. It consists of everything which exists outside of the light of consciousness, but it can be both positive and negative. “Everyone carries a shadow”, Jung wrote, “And the less it is embodied in a person’s life, the blacker and denser it is.” The shadow is unscious, things which our mind experiences but we cannot control, dreams, desires, instincts.

Without a well developed shadow, a person can easily become shallow and extremely preoccupied with the opinions of others, much like how we see Araragi act in Monogatari. Jung believed that, not wanting to look at their shadows directly, many people project those flaws onto other people.

In terms of literary theory then, the Jungian Shadow archetype is a character who is made up of all the flaws that the protagonist refuses to confront. They challenge the protagonist merely by existing, because the protagonist wants to look away and leave those qualities unacknowledged. Often, they are an antagonist merely because the protagonist projects all of the flaws they cannot see into themselves, onto that other person.

2. Araragi Koyomi - He Obfuscates

It is impossible to see the shadow without the light. It is impossible to describe Ougi without first talking about Araragi Koyomi. Just like Ougi, let’s start with the origins of his character. While this is just my own personal speculation I’m not NisioIsin, Araragi has always read as written in response to two things to me: First Ii-chan, the protagonist of his first series Zaregoto, and second harem protagonists in general.

II-chan and Araragi are both very flawed and non-confrontational human beings, but whereas Zaregoto is a story about how II-chan really does not want to change himself and instead just kind of wants to stay treading water, wants to never cause any more ripples, wants to hold onto the fragile sense of self he has Araragi’s is a story of a bad and hypocritical, shallow kind of person striving to grow up and become a good person, acquire depth.

The stereotypical harem protagonist is this, a plain guy with no personality who somehow gets girls to fall all over him, often for showing them the bare minimum of kindness. Monogatari is partially a deconstruction of harem series because it shows the kind of circumstances that would cause all these girls to fall all over one guy, literally they are all so deprive of affection that the smallest show of kindness does actually make them fixate on Araragi.

The thing is Araragi does have a clear personality. He is very cynical, he’s judgemental of other people, he really likes to snark. Part of the reason he likes talking to Senjyogahara so much is he can be meaner, and sharper tongued than he normally presents himself as around people. He has traditional black and white views of justice. He tends to meddle. He is observant, but his style of thinking is flawed because he tends to jump to conclusions quickly rather than thinking out the details slowly and methodically. He’s almost constantly anxious, but usually responds to the anxiety with avoidance. However, a lot of his more distinct personality traits sound more negative rather than positive, so Araragi has a version of himself he presents to others who he is less close to. This ‘self’ is much more vague, and wishy-washy, very go with the flow. Despite the fact that Senjyo and Hanekawa both comment that Araragi is well known among the students as a delinquent, Araragi himself says that he’s a typical high school student with a completely normal personality. He defines himself as vague on purpose, that sole purpose being to appear as more acceptable to others, because like an ego that refuses to acknowledge his shadow Araragi is very shallow and defines himself entirely on the opinions of the other people around him.

He is lacking a sense of self, or rather that sense of self eventually escapes from him when his shadow runs away Peter Pan style and becomes Ougi.

Araragi has three primary character flaws that manifest in the form of Ougi, Araragi is a hypocritical altruist who only cares about weak girls that need to be saved, Araragi obfuscates, and Araragi only thinks in black and white.

Araragi is not someone who helps people because it is the right thing to do. He does not do good deeds because they are good. He only helps others because there is something he gains out of it. One thing that’s important about Araragi is that he has a cripplingly low self esteem, to the point of self harm, self flagellation, and even suicide attempts.

He literally says so when he finds Kiss-Shot’s body, his first response is not to call for help but rather to try to let Kiss-Shot kill him, apologizing for living such a worthless life until this point. It’s not just that Kiss-Shot was in trouble, Araragi also made it about his own self loathing.

Araragi seems selfless to a fault, but he’s actually very self obsessed. While it’s true that Araragi desires to be a good person, and improve as a person, his methods for self improvement are faulty. He’s obsessed with appearances, and it’s more like he wants the appearance of a good person rather than actually having to put in the work at first. He wants to feel like he’s saved others. He wants to feel like he is someone worth something. He saves others because it increases his self worth, and also once again he gets something out of it. Araragi saving women that are weaker than him makes him feel special, like somebodyy needs him.

He wears the persona of a hero, rather than actually trying to be one. It happens again and again in the series. Despite the fact that Araragi actively does heroic things literally all the time, he also denies any role of being a hero because he does not want the responsibility of being one. Araragi wants the world to be burger king, he wants to have it his way. He wants the best of both worlds, Hannah Montana style. He wants to save girls, but he doesn’t want to be their hero and be entirely responsible for them.

“Araragi-kun, even if you can become a star, you can’t become a hero.” “I can’t become a star.” I shook my head. “I can only become a vampire.” And I even failed at that. “I see.” So you’re not going to be - my hero.

Nekomonogatari: White (Hanekawa and Araragi)

Take his actions in Nekomonogatari. Araragi claims it’s impossible to be a hero, he says that Hanekawa cannot be saved and calls for her to take personal responsibility and face everything that is wrong with her life. However, rather than trying to just support her with that difficult task Araragi immediately jumps to self harm.

It’s impossible for Araragi to become a hero, but he can swallow a katana and then trick Hanekawa into killing him because that is somehow easier than facing his feelings for Hanekawa head on. Araragi prefers bloody, painful self harm to the terrifying ordeal of being known. Araragi knows that Hanekawa is in need of help, but the fact that she is such a messy person different from the person he originally saw her as, makes him afraid of her.

The thing is human beings are really sloppy. They are a messy gray, and Araragi wants to save them, but he really is just a kid out of his depth with a lot of things. He sees the abuse of Hanekawa’s household, and because he’s literally never even encountered an abusive life he gets so terrified that he runs away screaming. He does care about Hanekawa, but she’s far too complicated for him. He does not even want to touch that mess. It’s much easier for him to see Hanekawa as a hero, all black, or all white, then try to attempt something he does not know how to do and could screw up Hanekawa even worse.

Once again while it is not Araragi’s responsibility to fix an abused girl, and it makes sense a normal high school kid does not understand coping with abuse at all, Araragi at the same time wants to help her. Instead of just admitting that he can’t do anything for Hanekawa, he play-acts at being a hero.

Here’s the thing about Araragi, have you ever once seen him try to save a boy? He only cares about helpless girls because those are the kind of people that heroes save. He does not care about people that are stronger than him, because then he is depending on them rather than the other way around. Araragi only interacts with about three male characters in the story significantly.

Oshino, who is an adult figure that Araragi aspires to be like, and then Kaiki and Seishirou who he both views as rivals for the two most important girls to him Senjyogahara, and Seishirou. Do you notice there is a far different tone in Araragi’s interactions with Seishirou and Kaiki? Araragi absolutely refuses to see Kaiki as anything other than a villain, and while Seishirou is clearly a victim, Araragi cares very little about actually saving him and instead prioritizes competing with him over Kiss-Shot.

Once again this is dude psychology that is present in Harem series. Did you notice if male characters do show up in harem series they are oftentimes, either comic relief, they are terrible people for the main character to look good in comparison, or they are old men mentor types. That is because any other man who would exist in a harem series is automatically competition for the girls. Araragi does not want to compete, he does not want to feel inferior to anyone else, because he always feels inferior all the time therefore he never has any male friends.

Therefore it’s hypocritical altruism, while Araragi is willing to help and that’s a good thing, he also never once helps unless there is something he gains from it. Even if it’s a chance to exercise his self loathing. Once again Araragi’s self loathing is incredibly harmful, he literally gets bones broken, limbs severed, and organs torn out almost every time he helps someone. Not only that but it’s always the first solution he jumps to. This is not the behavior of a healthy person, this is the behavior of someone attempting to punish themselves. Helping these girls by martyring himself is an act of attrition for Araragi, because he believes he deserves pain for all of his hypocrisies, but once again it’s still self obsession. Just hating yourself, just beating yourself up, is different from having to do the actual work of facing yourself and picking yourself up. Araragi will always choose dishonesty over honesty, obfuscation over seeing things clearly.

Araragi’s primary strategy of dealing with these many hypocrisies and contradictions in himself, and keeping his ‘ego’ in balance has always been obfuscation. Araragi is observant, but he presents himself as ignorant. He always goes on claiming how stupid he is, and how he’s nothing more than a worthless washout.

This is because Araragi was raised with an overpowering sense of responsibility. While his parents are not necessarily bad parents, they are police officers. He was raised made to feel responsible for things like justice, saving others, and especially made to feel responsible for his own flaws. Police officers are also symbols of justice, who as human beings often fall far short of the law and authority they are supposed to represent, because symbols are symbols and humans are humans.

Therefore, what Araragi wants to avoid at all costs is feeling responsible. He wants to be important, but he never wants to take the responsibility of actually being important. This is his immaturity, the part of him that refuses to grow. For Araragi, if situations are too complicated for him to handle, or he fears his meddling will only make things worse and therefore he will be indicated as responsible his response is to just avoid it entirely rather than struggle or try.

This is shown in the case of Sodachi Oikura, once again someone that Araragi knew about and sympathized with but at the same time could not comprehend. Sodachi lived in horribly abusive circumstances, and both times Araragi encountered her he was a child. Araragi at the same time takes far too much responsibility, and far too little. It’s completely understandable that Araragi a middle schooler had no idea what to do to deal with what was obviously an abusive household, most adults are pretty useless when it comes to handling abused children. Yet, at the same time Araragi avoids any responsiblity whatsoever, he just forgets about Oikura claiming he has a bad memory depsite encountering her at three different significant parts of his life. Rather than struggle and fail, it’s better for Araragi to just not know anything at all therefore it can’t be his fault.

When Ougi drags Araragi through Sodachi’s case, Ougi ‘deduces’ everything, but Ougi’s catchphrase is I only know what you know. Ougi cannot have come to a conclusion that Araragi did not already know or was not capable of figuring out on his own, Araragi just did not think of those things because it was too painful to think.

This is also present in his dealing with other characters. There are several characters who have heavy romantic crushes on Araragi while Araragi is already in a relationship, Nadeko, Hanekawa, etc... Rather than ever just going through the awkward interaction of rejecting them it’s much easier to just pretend he never even notices their affections. Therefore we see him hypocritically, have a girlfriend, at yet at the same time constantly hang out with other girls who have a clear attraction to him and romantic feelings for him and never do anything about it.

Nadeko turns into a god because of obfuscation, both on Araragi’s part and on Nadeko’s. Nadeko is called out for what a hypocritical person she is never wanting to face anything directly, but that behavior is only a reflection, a foil to Araragi’s own, hence why Araragi was never able to save her.

Once again, Nadeko clearly has several problems with her personality, and she also blatantly hits on Araragi several times despite one being a middle schooler, and two Araragi having a girlfriend. Rather than just reject her outright, or acknowledge these parts of her personality, Araragi chooses to ignore everything and reduce her to being a cute girl. Nadeko puts on the act, and Araragi perceives. He then ignores all of her feelings, until they repress more and more and then bubble out into a jungian shadow expression that is Snake God Nadeko who just indulges on all of her instincts and desires and gives up conscious thought and her persona completely.

Ougi always mocks Araragi has a helpless fool, because that is what Araragi wants to be, helpless, foolish, and therefore not at fault when there are unintended consequences of his actions.

Finally, Araragi only thinks in black and white. This is also part of his obfuscation, he never wants to acknowledge how complicated people are. When he’s forced to confront the ugly side of people he almost always looks away.

Black cats, white cats, hmmm, I wonder what that means. Araragi was only disappointed with the idea of justice, because he wanted to believe in it in the first place. He wants to believe that things like heroes can exist, and that his black and white perceptions of the wolrd are real. Araragi craves that order more than anyone else, perhaps even more than his younger sisters who just play at being heroes of justice. The reason he becomes so disillusioned is because he expects there to be an order of things, for their to be roles just like in a story, for their to be a sequence of events with meaning.

Araragi expects narrative rules to apply to real life. For life to have meaning. That is why he is a story teller. There are monsters and oddities, and humans with a clear line between them, despite the fact that Araragi himself is someone who blurs these lines by existing as a quasi vampire. Araragi’s life is a story that he tells himself, and that’s why it’s so important that his perceptions are so off. In Tsuki he even gets called on this twice, he calls his increasing vampirism punishment instead of just consequences for his actions and he’s told not to think he’s so special that god would go out of his way to punish him. Tadatsuru asks why they are facing off like this, why Araragi is protagonist and he is antagonist.

Araragi does not like acknowledging how sloppy the world is, because that makes him feel insignificant and weak. It would make anybody feel that way, because it means acknowledging that we are not as in control of things as we would like to be.

3. Oshino Ougi - They Reveal

Ougi Oshino is Ougo Oshino.

They are a vague existence, Araragi refuses to define them because defining Ougi means defining themselves and that kind of confrontation is the last thing Araragi wants.

Ougi Oshino is born out of a desire for Araragi to punish himself, the same way he always seeks external punishment by allowing people to beat him up and rip out his intenstines. Rather than confront what is inside of him, Araragi externalizes it and confronts it as an external force which he projects upon.

Ougi is a shadow born from the light of Araragi’s ego. It was not the darkness that created them, but rather Araragi himself and the shadow he cast. Therefore while Ougi can be seen as a corrective force, they actually embody all of those flaws that Araragi has, and their own character traits are always in response to those flaws.

Wheraes Araragi is a hypocritical altruist, Ougi is someone who exists to fix people’s mistakes, or punish them for their mistakes rather. Despite manipulating them, Ougi also ultimately leaves them up to their own fate. He leads them up to the cliff but does not push.

Ougi is a hypocritical fixer, because while he seems to be punishing others for their mistakes he really only exists to punish himself in the form of Araragi. All of the ‘mistakes’ he corrects are just Araragi’s own mistakes foiled in other people.

Nadeko is a foil to Araragi, she represents his own feigning of innocent and being unknowing. Kaiki is a foil to Araragi, he represents how much of a fake Araragi is by pretending to cling to ideals of justice and saving others but also denying them as well. Sodachi is also like Araragi, they both prefer to wallow in misery than try to work towards their own happiness. Araragi even says his famous line with his relationship with Shinobu, an ending where everyone is miserable, where nobody gets what they want. There are serious problems with his current relationship with Shinobu, a power imbalance, and both know they cannot last this way forever but rather than attempting to fix their relationship they both cling to the way thing’s are.

Repression and obfuscation is always favored over directly addressing the issues, especially the things which Araragi probably cannot control, or fix, like the complicated nature of abuse. Ougi claims they operate out of some imaginary set of rules that totally exist, but once again Ougi is the hypocrisies of Araragi laid bare. They are every bit the hypocrite that Araragi is.

They are just punishing other people who reflect Araragi’s negative traits. Those who do not acknowledge their shadow, will project their flaws onto other people and see themselves in other people in order to cope.

Ougi is made up of Araragi’s repressed desires. They are a girl he wants to save, which is the only type of person Araragi interacts with. At the same time, they are also connected to Oshino, who is Araragi’s model in the series for adulthood and maturity. Oshino who is always able to figure things out, and very self-collected often making fun of Araragi for his youthful excitement and his naivete for not knowing much about the world.

While Araragi presents himself as an idiot, Ougi is intelligent an capable of figuring things out from scraps of information. Araragi jumps to conclusions, Ougi is deductive and a good thinker. Ougi Oshino already knows Araragi better than himself, therefore Araragi does not have to carry any of the burden of self reflecting, or making himself known to other people around him.

During Ougi and Arraagi’s first meeting in the anime, he hallucinates that the classroom that he is locked inside of floods with water. The depths of the water, the shadow, dreams, these are all the realm of Jung. If the conscious mind is the water’s surface, then the subconscious is its depths.

Araragi obfuscates, whereas Ougi reveals the uncomfortable truth. Ougi always positions themselves as a detective. In the realm of stories, it is the detective who makes the big reveal at the end. After all Ougi even says when they are locked in the room together, because there is no famous detective that Ougi themselves will play the role and announce the culprit.

However, Ougi’s reveals are just as hypocritical as Araragi’s obfuscations. Ougi takes the shadow to be representative of the whole self, because they themselves are a living breathing Jungian shadow, but just like Jekyll and Hyde man is both. He is not one or the other, he is both at the same time. Ougi always act with the assumption that there is some kind of truth to be revealed, that this is just like a detective novel where there is a reveal waiting at the end.

Ougi takes the repressed desires to count as the “truth” of the whole mind, and ignores the conscious mind entirely. Therefore, in their view Nadeko is only capable of being a selfish cute girl who sees herself as a victim, Hanekawa is only something scary which Araragi must avoid. They at the same time as Araragi both read the same black and white narrative of the world. They do not care at all for the persona, or how people choose to present themselves. Desipte what Kaiki said to Nadeko that people can choose to be whoever they want to be, and they can try as many times as they like.

Ougi also views themselves as inhuman, and therefore incapable of doing anything, or defining themselves as anything outside of their role. Ougi is in a way, just as repressing of themself as Araragi is. They even lament this in front of Tsukihi, that once the detective reveals the mystery the novel is over. That if anybody would know the truth of them, they would come to hate them because they are abhorrent.

Ougi by repressing concious thought, silences other people and what they have to say about themselves. The only thing that matters is the repressed, what Ougi dictates as the truth must then become the truth. It’s just as much a limited way of saying the world as Araragi’s is. Hence Ougi’s famous catchphrase, I don’t know anything, you’re the one who knows. Ougi sees themselves as a person fundamentally incapable of knowing anything other than outside the bounds of what Araragi already knows.

Which is finally where the black and white thinking comes in. While the two of them seem like polar opposites, their views of the world are actually the same. Ougi wants what Araragi wants, for the world to exist like this is a story. For there to be roles, and order and most importantly meaning. The same way that Araragi just ignores things that fall out of step with their roles, when people contradict the way Araragi sees them he just pretends to be oblivious rather than see them as complex human beings. Ougi actively goes out of their way to punish people, for not playing the role in the story they were supposed to play. He acts like a corrective force, pushing people back into their roles. His wrongful assumption is not that people improve by “correcting mistakes” but rather there was a proper path in the first place. That there was a hero’s journey they were supposed to be going on. There is no path, there is no meaning, it’s all senseless but Ougi exists out of a desire for things to be sensible.

Ougi exists as Araragi’s opposite, because Araragi assumes that things like binary opposites exist in the first place. Heroes and villains, crime and punishment. They both believes these things exist in a fundamental order in the world, and they are not just made up values that humans invented and give meaning to.

“Let’s not joke. Virtue is the antonym of vice, not of crime.” “Are vice and crime different?” “They are, I think. Virtue and vice are concepts invented by human beings, words for a morality which human beings arbitrarily devised.” (No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai)

For both of them clinging to these hypocritical beliefs are better than the alternative, admitting to their own helplessness in the face of a world that is mostly indifferent to them.

That’s why, when they are separate both of them choose to stick to their ultimately restricting and punishing roles, as protagonist and atagonist, persona and shadow, hero and villain, rather than just trying to acknowledge themselves and live as people.

Both is one, and one is both. Araragi Koyomi and Oshino Ougi have a relationship that ultimately results in not antagonism, but rather union and acceptance. Just like the King of Distortion is not an enemy of mankind in the enemy, Ougi was never an enemy to Araragi in the first place. Araragi never needed to hate himself or punish himself. The true path forward lies in union and acceptance.

You can never be anything more than yourself, nothing more and nothing left.

#monogatari #monogatari meta #mg meta #araragi koyomi #oshino ougi #meta #nisio meta

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newmayhem · 4 years

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Risika’s powers

As always, I’ll keep using original names in the titles and if I’m talking specifically about the original iteration and in quotations and stuff, but I’ll be referring to everyone by their new names in all other situations.

So in the OG text, Alejandro had started experiencing his witch powers and this indirectly kicks off the chain of events that leads to Remedios being changed. I always thought that it was kind of odd that even though they were twins, Remedios didn’t also get her powers around the same time (though we know from her use of fire after her final fight with Andros that she does have witch powers). The more I thought about it, the more I wanted to explore the alternative scenario- what if Remedios’ witch powers had also manifested while she was human?

I mean, I know that in terms of the narrative, it worked out the way it did because Alejandro getting involved with Pandora and training to become a triste was contingent on him feeling very confused and isolated about his powers, which wouldn’t have happened if Remedios was experiencing the same thing.

But what if Remedios did get her powers, but chose to keep it a secret from Alejandro?

It would be objectively shitty of Remedios to keep her powers a secret from Alejandro because she saw first hand how much he was suffering feeling like he was monstrous and abnormal. That’s interesting, so let’s keep going with it.

So Remedios is doing this objectively shitty thing that’s negatively affecting not only Alejandro, but also herself (because it can’t be easy for her to go at this alone either). Why would she do that? What would she have to gain from it?

I had mentioned in the racelifting post about how Remedios and Alejandro might differ in their respective outlooks on the oppression and discrimination they’ve faced- Remedios is angry and resistant while Alejandro has kind of bought into it and is hoping to improve his situation by playing along. In the og text, Alejandro was the one who was very concerned about damnation and inflexible in his morals (so like, he’s a rule-follower who readily subscribes to whatever society has taught him). He clearly saw his powers as a curse and proof that he was damned, and in the new cultural context of my rewriting, this would feed into the prevailing belief in colonial Mexico that pretty much anyone who wasn’t white was, in their very nature, in league with the devil.

So what if Remedios thought differently about her powers? What if she saw them as a blessing, a way for her to fight back against her oppressors? What if she believed that these powers were passed down to her and Alejandro through their mother and it was a way for her to feel closer to her mother (and her heritage that she knows so little about)?

If this were the case, it could be that she didn’t tell Alejandro because she didn’t want to risk feeling the shame and guilt towards her powers that Alejandro does towards his. It’s possible that she’d see these powers as the only way she has to feel strong, the only connection she has to her mother and her heritage, and she doesn’t want Alejandro to take that away by making her feel like it’s a curse and that she’s morally obligated to reject it (because of the little we saw of him in the og text, the biggest characteristic I could pick out was that he’s super judgy/self flagellating/holier than thou).

And what if through her newfound powers, Remedios begins to see a dark side to herself emerge? Like, she’d realize that she doesn’t just want to use her powers to protect herself, but to make her enemies suffer. Perhaps she even revelled in the power she could have over others.

This would have some very interesting implications towards both her relationship to Alejandro, but also her relationship to her own sense of morality (which plays a big role in how she reacts to her vampirism).

I also think it would be cool if Remedios went out of her way to try to practice using her powers in secret.

But yeah, I think this definitely adds a more interesting angle to Remedios. Whereas in the og text she’s more or less a typical ingenue- innocent, unambiguously good, and occasionally feisty, there wasn’t much else to her (mostly because we didn’t actually get to spend that much time getting to know her), but this adds things like moral ambiguity, character flaws, hidden agendas, which all are clues to some deeper desires/fears/general interiority.

I’m also particularly interested in what this means for her relationship with Alejandro, because this change would indicate that there were fissures forming in their relationship and it would only be a matter of time before things came to a head, but before they could, they were forced apart and never really got the chance to confront it. Maybe this is what led to the more-or-less idealized portrayal of Alejandro that we got from Roksana’s first person narration?

Ok, now that I’ve made this a thing, I have to follow through with it. We need to see how her relationship with her powers changed in light of her transformation. We know that she keeps her powers even as a vampire, so that must have been a comfort to her. But I don’t think her powers came back right away, which, though she had other things to think of at the time, it would’ve set her off on a low key panic.

Something else to consider is that she must’ve realized that she was a witch (and much later on, that she was of the Tlahuilli line). How would that information have impacted her? Would she have wanted to investigate it?

I think this was something that she’d always wanted- to have power and to belong to a community, but it’s now been tainted by the vampirism. She always wanted to know more about her mother and that part of her identity, but even though with this introduction to the nyeusi world she has a viable starting point and the time to investigate it, she is still sort of beholden to the social norms that govern that world. Basically, she’s pretty sure no witch, knowing what she is, would be willing to talk to her, let alone help with her genealogy project.

However, I do think this might be where Jager would come in. He’s been around for a while and would most likely have very extensive knowledge about everyone, and Roksana trusts him (to an extent).

I don’t think she’d actually get very far in her research anyway, but this could be one of the driving forces in the rewrite that propels her towards making her return to vampire society/getting revenge on Andros.

#In the Forests of the Night #amelia atwater rhodes #Den of Shadows #Nyeusigrube #Risika #Roksana #Alejandro #characters

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noapkaplan-blog · 5 years

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Normality in Sex Education

*Spoiler Alert*

Last week in class, the new series Sex Education was raised in discussion. My curiosity was piqued, so I took the opportunity to binge watch the series, which unexpectedly served as a bridge between last week’s reading of Michel Foucualt’s Abnormal lectures, and this week’s dive into Michael Warner’s the Trouble with Normal. Like in the Abnormal lectures, masturbation is central to character development in Sex Education. There is however, a fundamental reorientation of social values regarding sexual self-gratification. Far from the 19th century pathologization of onanism, Sex Education celebrates the act as the ultimate indication of sexual health. This plays out in the narrative of two characters, Otis and Aimee. Otis, raised by a sex-therapist, is already theoretically familiar with this new social position that masturbation is normal and healthy, yet he finds himself unable to commit to the practice. Drama ensues when he discovers that his mother has been secretly writing a book about his disfunction. Here we see the clinical pathologization of the inability to masturbate, a complete one-eighty from 19th century medical discourse. In the final episode, Otis and his mother reconcile when she tells him that her diagnosis of his sexual dysfunction, “and your not repressed, or disfunctional, or unusually stunted, or any of those things I said in the book, and I’m sorry.” He responds by saying, “I am all those things mom...I’m not normal.” She immediately reacts with, “of course you’re normal,” and they embrace. All he wants, it seems, is the familial and psychiatric affirmation of his normalcy. Notably, the final scene of the first season shows Otis achieve his goal for the first time, triumphantly overcoming his anxiety and embracing this new healthy norm. Aimee on the other hand, is initially unaware of the positive potential of masturabtion. In fact, she seems to unknowingly carry some remnants of 19th century repulsion toward the act. This legacy perspective is easily excoriated and with permission from her pseudo-sex therapist, Otis, she embarks on an all-night exploration of self-pleasure. She emerges free from legacy constraints, ready to engage in healthy and authentic sex with her boyfriend. In both of these examples, Sex Education, reveals the inversion of how masturbation was formerly pathologized.

The themes of shame and dignity, covered in Michael Warner’s the Trouble with Normal, are also central to the plot of Sex Education. Which most characters in the show are to some degree both driven and constrained by shame, these forces have the most dramatic impact on Ruby and Eric. Ruby’s narrative has many of the ingredients of what Warner calls the “Monicathon,” referring to the political scandal involving Monica Lewinsky and former president Bill Clinton. A photo of Ruby’s vagina has been shared widely amongst her peers with the threat that her identity will revealed if she does not atone for her mistakes. Ruby is petrified that her classmates will find out that the photo is of her and enlists Otis and Maeve to discover who leaked the image. On a general level the scenario appears to be a kind of “Monicathon:” a female friend leaks private information related to sex, with the potential to debase the identity and reputation of the individual depicted. As Warner suggests, “sexual shame is such that exposing it taints a person, no matter how moral or immoral the sex might otherwise be. The publicity given to sex was itself punitive” (19). In Ruby’s case, shame is not derived exclusively from the fact that a sexual image is publicly circulated; the main stated cause of same is that her sexual organ is not normal in appearance. The discussion of her irregularly large clitoris is what produces the deepest shame. Ultimately, Ruby’s dignity is reestablished in a schoolwide assembly when her friends and gradually more and more classmates stand up and claim that “it’s my vagina.” Here we see an example of solidarity through direct action in public, a type of activism that Warner laments is quickly disappearing. In Ruby’s case, dignity is achieved through others in what could be argued is a statistical affirmation of her normalcy. When enough people publicly claim that “it’s my vagina,” the numbers would indicate that her vagina is normal and thus acceptable. Warner explains that this remains one of the most widely used strategies for establishing normalcy: “Under the conditions of mass culture, they are constantly bombarded by images of statistical populations and their norms, continually invited to make an implicit comparison between themselves and the mass of other bodies” (54).

Eric’s storyline includes shaming from all directions: he is bullied at school, his family criticizes his loud apparel, and he is even attacked by a stranger on his birthday, targeted because he is dressed in women’s clothing. The assault is enabled by the fact that Eric is alone, Otis was supposed to join him, but abandoned him to spend time with his crush and business partner, Maeve. Eric is isolated from the support of family and friends and cannot seek to have his identity affirmed externally. Instead he must find a sense of innate dignity. At first he attempts to conform to the straight aesthetic of his peers; however, this approach seems to drain him of joy. He is only able to find dignity by claiming his identity and reasserting it through his bold choice of attire in a public forum, the school dance. His father offers to drop him off and takes the opportunity to express his concern, “ Eric, wait, are you sure you want to go in like this? His soon answers resoundingly, “yes!” And his father asks again, “are you sure, you’re sure?” Eric explains, “This is me...I’ll be hurt either way, isn’t it better to be who I am?” His father then lauds Eric for his bravery and they embrace. With his newfound confidence, Eric is able to stand up to his long time bully, Adam. In a fun twist, Adam, finally able to recognize Eric’s dignity, is turned on by his self-assured attitude and soon after they become lovers. It seems that Ruby and Eric represent two the divergent understandings of dignity explored in the Trouble with Normal: “Dignity has at least two radically different meanings in our culture. One is ancient, closely related to honor, and fundamentally an ethic of rank. It is historically a value of nobility. It requires soap. (Real estate doesn't hurt, either.) The other is modern and democratic. Dignity in the latter sense is not pomp and distinction; it is inherent in the human. You can't, in a way, not have it. At worst, others can simply fail to recognize your dignity” (36).

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