#oof i hadn't animated something in a While

[kit-williams]

Skyfall

tw: stalking, obsession, male yandere

She slipped her mask back on as she entered the bustling hive for the first time in her life. She sucked in her breath as she immediately started to text her "benefactor" though he acted like a close friend to her at this point as she knew him for so long.

Vixen: I'm going to die here. Zookeeper: No you're not. Zookeeper: Not while I'm watching over you Vixen.

She didn't know why she needed to be here of all places. So far her clients hadn't needed her to leave her planet but her keeper needed her to move. Things were moving in the background that she couldn't see but her friend had always had her back. He was there from day one since she dove into the underbelly of reality. She could see the unseen hand that pulled on normal people's lives and she originally wanted to be a hero... until the Inquisition found out about her.

It was when she was assigned Keeper. Or rather keeper unveiled that he was working for said Inquisitor that she had accidentally found. So he vouched for her.

Vixen: So is this when you're going to confess your love for me keeper? <3 Zookeeper: Har har darling you're cute but not that cute. Vixen: OOF right between my ribs. Zookeeper: You use the lock I sent you on all your bags and pockets? Vixen: *Attached is a picture of her bags and pockets* Zookeeper: Good girl. Vixen: <3 Of course. And how can you not find me cute? Zookeeper: I gave you that mask for a reason Vixen: I'm crying for real, right now. Vixen: So heartless

She smiled under her mask as she continued through the sea of people holding her bag tightly as she heads to the inn that keeper had paid for in advance. She knew she wasn't the only animal here... afterall he was called zookeeper for a reason.

Zookeeper: Awww you know I was teasing right? Vixen: So when are you going to tell me you're some dirty old Magos just flirting with me? Zookeeper: Would you care if I was? Vixen: Are you hot? Zookeeper: What if I was just rich? Vixen: Hmmmm will the sex be good? Zookeeper: I could get you any toy you want my little vixen. Vixen: I'll think about it.

She rolled her eyes heading inside to the inn and checking in as she went to the dingy room. Vixen took off her mask for a moment to run her fingers through her hair as she felt uncomfortable about working for the Inquisition but she was doing good... protecting the Imperium from the Great Enemy whoever that was.

Vixen: I might go get a drink. Zookeeper: no you wont Vixen: Okay Lord Buzzkillington Zookeeper: >_> Zookeeper: Really? Vixen: Okay better response. Why can't I get a singular drink? Zookeeper: I have to come visit tonight to leave off a packet of information. So I need you to take that sleeping pill Vixen: Oh I should wear something nice <3 Zookeeper: How about nothing at all? Vixen: I want a date first if you get to see my tits. Zookeeper: fine wear those cute night shorts... the green ones Vixen:... should I be concerned that you know what clothes I brought with me? Zookeeper: It's my job to know dear Vixen: yes and you want me to drug myself Zookeeper: Oh please if I wanted you I could list all the times I could have taken you Vixen: please dont Zookeeper: then behave Zookeeper: play your Abhuman crossing game

She pulled out the game pad as Vixen played her games like Abhuman Crossing and others until keeper told her to take the pill and go to bed. She wished him a good night after changing into her night clothes and took that pill. Sleep didn't take long to hit her.

Vixen was fully out like a light when her keeper came to visit... she didn't feel the way his fingers moved up her left calf and danced up the back of her leg reaching the swell of her ass. The appreciative hum as he kissed her shoulder and the shell of her ear. "Hello Vixen." He says softly feeling her hair against his face he shivers, "Soon my dear... soon." He says before leaving what he came to give her not before taking a trophy from her bag.

------

Zookeeper: Just get the avian burger Vixen: Why? Zookeeper: Its yummy Vixen: Have you eaten here? Zookeeper: yes. Secret love of mine

She paid the thrones as she sat down lifting her mask up eating the burger and just looking over the innocuous message that keeper had left her last night. She was meeting up with another animal under the keepers care but all that 'Collie' was doing was leading her to where she needed to collect something.

Vixen: Why me... Zookeeper: What do you mean dear? Vixen: Why me? What made me stand out? Zookeeper: Your skill Vixen: hey keeper Zookeeper: yes Vixen? Vixen: Would you tell me your name?

There was a quiet between the two of them as she waited. Vixen found out a hive wasn't so glamorous and perhaps her parents were right... to be thankful when her great great great grandparents had earned enough to leave the hive they lived on. It was dirty it was dangerous... she watched a man get mugged before some ganger just seemed to come out of nowhere and do some weird justice.

Collie was dressed up in a weird outfit and strange colors as Vixen followed them down into the lower hive. She was thankful of the complex mask that she wore as it made it bearable to breathe. Collie fully embraced their motif. As Vixen watched all the fur on them sway they wore a thick collar of it that draped over their shoulders and down their chest made of dirty white fur and golden browns. Vixen couldn't tell what gender they were but it didn't matter.

"In there. I'll be here to take you back up when you're done." Their androgenous voice spoke as Vixen nodded and went inside the small building.

It was nearly claustrophobic with the amount of papers lying around and the large cabinets but she remembers keeper's instructions and continued to the back room. The first thing vixen noticed on a side table was a sizeable tabletop miniature fully painted of a hydra.

Vixen: Keeper I'm here Vixen: Keeper?

She waited a few moments getting closer to the hydra but the drawer of the table it was on was open slightly and she saw a picture. Of her? She pulled it open and the door locked but she didn't care as it was full of dozens and dozens of pictures of her ever since she stepped foot on the hive.

Vixen: KEEPER! WHAT IS GOING ON

Her mask 'rang' and normally she wouldn't answer it as no one was to know what the communication 'number' was but she wasn't given the luxury to not answer as it answered for her.

"Hello, my little Vixen." A deep and distorted voice spoke to her.

"Who the fuck is this?!" She swallowed trying to keep her calm.

"Language sweetheart. Now your little Keeper didn't tell me you were something... divine. Do you like the hydra? You can take it since this room is most likely going up in flames after you leave."

"Are we not going to talk about the pictures?" She asked softly.

"No. I had to find out who is going to be knowing about this. Just a few pictures." The voice says sounding far too pleased, "I kept the best ones though... I doubt I would ever get tired of taking pictures of you. What do you say Vixen? After this you just let me watch you let me take my pictures..."

"Ugh you creep."

"Awww Vixen... fine. The information you want is on the table," He says as she looks around for a camera before going over to the table and looking at all the files. Vixen swallows as she sees several with the label of the Inquisition on them, "These are all the things you wanted to know Vixen. Aren't I nice? Think of me as the voice that keeper couldn't use."

Vixen looks up at the ceiling, "Are you keeper?" She says but the pause is uncomfortably long.

"No." He finally says but the pause told Vixen what was left unsaid. Either this is a persona he has put on... or this is the painful reality of who keeper is. "Look at the files some of what you need to decode what I am giving you is in them."

She opened the files and desperately looked through half censored items just feeling sweat gather on her brow. Vixen recognized some of what was in these files as things she had done. She found what she needed highlighted in teal as she continued on and on forgetting that Collie was outside. She was diving deeper and deeper into the Inquisitions dirty laundry... well the laundry of the Inquisitor she had brushed up with.

The final folder she opened up and Vixen screamed running to the other side of the room. "NO NO NO I'M NOT TOUCHING THAT LET ME OUT! OH BY THE THRONE LET ME OUT!" She screamed and desperately tried to open the door.

"Keep reading Vixen." Her on call voyeur demanded, "You have to realize what has been going on!"

"I WANT TO BE IGNORANT!"

"And let the Imperium crumble under the weight of THAT?! Vixen listen to yourself!" He snarled into her ear as she turned around with trembling legs and forced herself back over to the table.

He was right in a weird way... she didn't stop when she saw the banner of the Inquisition flash on her screen because she was trying to be a hero. She looked down at pict of two people meeting... faced blurred but that damned 8 pointed star haunted her nightmares. They were flirting with Chaos... Vixen read and read and read about secret deals... about the amount of lives that were happily traded over to them to give the Imperium what? No it wasn't even benefiting the Imperium... it was only benefiting the Inquisitor. She pulled out that last damned page.

"Vixen... my sweet little Vixen don't cry." He cooed to her as her shoulders shook and she held the pages close to her chest just feeling disgusted because of what she did... people died probably horrifying deaths. "Take the hydra with you... I made it for you."

She sniffles loudly ignoring the drawer full of pictures of her and looking at the blue, teal, and green hydra. "It's lovely." She said as she put it and the papers in her backpack.

"Yes my dear. Now I'm going to tell you something before I set this all ablaze. If he tells you his name... don't trust what it is."

"What's your name then?" She asks.

"You'll find out soon enough. I will see you soon enough Vixen. Please take care." He says with such fondness before the stops the connection and when she leaves the room the door locks back up and Vixen rushes back to Collie.

Zookeeper: Vixen? Vixen: Hey Zookeeper: Are you alright.

Vixen wondered if this was just a ploy but she still wanted to live in ignorance.

Vixen: Yeah. Will you tell me your name? Zookeeper: It's Alpharius Vixen: Alphy! Alpharius: And you wonder why I didn't want to tell you my name Alpharius: Alright head back to your room. There's a machine there hooked up and ready to go once you're done with the cypher just type it into the location and the rest will be taken care of Vixen: Okie dokie Alphy Alpharius:*Sighs* Has me telling you my name cheered you up? Vixen: Immensly Vixen: *Immensely Alpharius: Good enough for me

She did as she was told wishing Collie good luck as they only replied with a wave before heading back down to the lower hive. Vixen wouldn't hear about the explosion that happened from a room in an abandoned building catching fire she was far too busy just trying to figure out this cypher. Vixen stayed locked in that inn room for days letting keeper or Alpharius order her food.

Five days of trying to break this cypher.

Vixen: I've finally got it. Alpharius: Do not type it here. Just type it in the terminal I gave you and then wait for my instructions. A lot is going to happen in a short amount of time and I am making sure you stay alive.

Vixen knew he was serious given he texted a lot in short sentences but when he was verbose? She was trained to listen.

She looked down at the cogitator waiting for her input and she typed the code... Omegon

#warhammer 40k #Yandere #Yandere Space Marine #Space Marine #Yandere Alpha Legion #Alpha Legion #male yandere #tw: yandere #tw: stalking #tw: obsession

[autumnbrambleagain]

edit: rant edited to reflect how Snoot Game treats gender identity b/c i hadn't really done more than look at a few convos about it

I'm GBH, Goodbye Volcano High got like, the worst fucking shake

Disclaimer, I haven't played it (there is a very special irony in this that i'll get into in a bit), but I've watched people on youtube play it, and I think it's. Fine? It's fine. But everything surrounding this game, everything that happened to and around it, it's fucking wild. I've never seen a game get such a poor serve-up on the tennis court before.

It gets put up on the big console premier along huge AAA budget games. That's rough. A small intimate-scale VN about the end of the world as a metaphor for growing up and leaving highschool and changing and also a non-metaphor for the world ending as itself a metaphor for the new generation entering into what feels like an absolutely hopeless, pointless future (spoilers: the future is pretty fucking dire (the present is already fucking bad))?

Those are some rough themes! That isn't doomchief and master slayer punching guys! And not to denigrate doomchief! These are some ROUGH themes and the trust that those themes will be handled WELL isn't something you want to give out so readily! Those are themes that are easy to fuck up! Fair! But still. Oof!

To have your relatively small scale game put up as a launch title alongside mass-consumption AAA games. Ouch.

I'll admit: the art style was pretty rough, it's really rough on first look. I made fun of it too.

Then it comes out the MC is enby, that it deals with queer themes, and 4chan-esque folk go nuts over it. Snoot Game comes out which, apparently, seemingly, actually not bad! A lot more ironic but with serious themes handled, apparently earnestly, and it's overall... good!? Even some critical accounts suggest it isn't, at least, bad? Whichever: it comes out faster than GVH does, so it now has a parody-competitor dealing with the same themes, but not just as a JOKE but actually putting effort into it too. Like. That's the thing. Snoot Game DEALS with strong themes of growing up, of becoming a person, it DEALS with the themes GVH is saying it will deal with... and it uses the characters to do it too.

And it does it, by some accounts, WELL.

Ouch!

Granted Snoot Game is from 4chan and apparently I'm now reading one of the themes is Fang accepting they're a woman and they were just being enby to try and be different, and while it seems like it DOES handle it very seriously, and like, the game seems to penalize you for being shitty about their gender, and like, detransitioning IS a thing! I don't want to give TOO much trust to a 4chan-derived game either. I'm literally enby, but I also wasn't always enby, but like. Having a game where the message of "you were only trans because you were pressured into being different", it's, ehhhhhhhh not great no!

TBH without going through Snoot Game I can't really speak about it but Snoot Game overall isn't the main point, the main point is:

Some people are already now primed with associations and expectations, you already have a doppleganger as your competitor. OUCH.

So like.

Pretty rough.

And while Snoot Game, from the compressed summaries of it I've seen, seems to actually have honest heart and love in it in its final form, a lot of people just seem to be along for the hate-ride against GVH at this point because "eww the alphabet rainbow furries."

And then the writer has to step down because they found out she's into child por--wait, it was just 3d animations? That someone else made? That she was watching and criticizing as part of an article on how dumb video game porn is?

Oh. See, there's a difference between "the author is an active pedophile" and "the author watched a Harry Potter porn animation to write an article on the concept of video game porn," but in our modern era there's really never a distinction. Drawing something bad is the same as doing it in real life. Looking at it at all is the same as doing it in real life. If you see a woman's ankle on the street, make sure to head immediately to confession or God will judge you for the rape you have committed in your heart.

We live in such a media-literacy dead-end zone that people are calling the original Lolita book child porn. We live in such a media-literacy dead-end timeline that people are saying the only media that should be permitted to exist is happy comfort fluff where nothing bad ever happens because if you make bad things happen in fiction it means you're an evil villain :3 i'm not an evil villain, though, i don't watch bad media!

So of course it's fine to ruin careers because that's not EVIL. I didn't look at the BAD media so I CAN'T be evil. So you know, we have this modern purity pandemic of people thinking they're heroes for getting people to kill themselves because they drew or wrote "the wrong kind of thing" and are therefore EVIL and we're in a post-DnD world the cultural well got poisoned by DnD's secular take on evangelical protestantism's absolute morality of saved-vs-nonsaved. You're Lawful Good, you know you're Lawful Good. Whatever you to do Chaotic Evil people? That's fine. You can do whatever you want to them. You're Good.

Anyway, then it gets delayed to remove all her influence from the game, because at this point, even admitting you know what sex is online seems to be enough to ruin anything you touch tbh. Humanity's doing great, btw.

Like I can find twitter posts of her apologizing for "hurting people" by having seen harry potter porn. Your species is insane, just btb.

GVH finally comes out quietly and everyone's so fucking. MAD at this game. Hardcore 4chan whateverfolk hate it because there's queers and highschoolers. Other people dislike it because Snoot Game already came out and now GVH feels like fanfiction of THAT to them. They already met these characters, enjoyed them written like they were in Snoot Game, so how they come off in GVH feels worse. And you know, sure! That's a rough fucking shake when a fanfiction comes out before your actual release and it's good! For others it's tainted because a ""sex perver"" had worked on it. For others the art style and that it premiered alongside big name AAA games as a launch title was enough to slot it firmly in the derision zone. For some, because the queer community cannot NOT devour its own tail, it's doing queerness wRONG (Fang's parents MISGENDER and DEADNAME them!!! you can't put that in a game that deals with gender as a theme!!!!)

And then you have people who don't care about ANY of that, who are upset that everyone dies in the end and "your choices didn't matter", despite your choices affecting your relationships with the other characters. Granted? Sure! More actual endings beyond the end-of-the-world concert would be great! But comparing it to Mass Effect 3 where NOTHING mattered because the Reapers destroy everything and you pick one option at the end and their implied consequences before like 4 different changes to the ending came out to retcon "oh yeah everyone in the galaxy is stranded, everyone probably dies anyway, you accomplished nothing everyone's still dead" ? ?

The world's ending. That's the point. It's what you do with the time left that seems to be the point? Yeah? No? I'm not saying it HIT that theme well, and I'm not saying it actually failed at it either. I honestly think it did FINE. The criticism i keep seeing is "everyone died so nothing mattered." Buddy. Buddy. YOU ARE GOING TO DIE. Please do not let that convince you that nothing you ever did mattered.

Among all that it came out buggy, apparently, and the music minigame isn't like. Super. Good. Doesn't matter too much if you do well or not. Not greatly designed? So you know. The game also has just general internal problems too mechanically, so people without a dog in the race just don't enjoy playing it? Like, the art style was all on the creators, like, it's... it's not GREAT I'll be real! It's really weird. It's humans in those latex dolphin masks the memes weren't off base even i was laughing at it and groaning at yet another piece of media whose theme was "leaving highschool is like the world ending"

but like.

GVH isn't like. I dont' think this is some great amazing the best game ever. The art style's grown on me but in the way where you learn to ignore how it looks. But like, I see people complaining it's too whiny--wait, the characters aren't depressed ENOUGH about the world ending--honestly, honestly,

I think I like it? I haven't played it but I've watched it and I think I like it. I'm not like, this is probably the last day in a while I'll ever even think about the game, it isn't going to stick with me for years and years, it didnt' make a big impact on me--but I liked it well enough???

At this point, my default assumption at this point is if someone strongly openly firmly dislikes this game it's not at all for any good reasons--or rather, that it's not on the value of the game in-and-of-itself. This poor game was saddled with all this WEIGHT on top of it. Can you even dig it clear of this external context and examine the game itself for what it is anymore?

I'm writing all these words and like. I haven't PLAYED it i've just watched other people play it. I'm not even BIG into the game it's like... it's okay!

But oh my god I cannot get over what a fucking. BAD serve-up the game had leading to its release and just beyond. Oof. Ouch. God. That's real rough, buddy. I have never seen something get this POOR a serve. What an absolute rough, ravage, unfair birth for a thing into the world!

I think if the game congealed out of the aether (and maybe with a more... better art direction?) it'd be fondly remembered in small quantities?

Instead it's just... the actual game itself is just BURIED under all this mess.

It's fucking fascinating to me, honestly. It's far more fascinating what happened to this game than the game itself at this point, and that, too, isn't very fair to the poor game. I, too, am here not to talk about the game, to care about the game, to have anything to say about the game. I am PART of this problem I'm talking about. Instead of addressing the game I'm talking about the context that was built around it.

I'm here because I remembered the drama, looked into all the drama, then went to watch the game and, after seeing ALL of that, EVERYthing I read through to get to the game itself, actually seeing the game was just... like... for this? All of that, for this?

Huh.

#long #autumn says things #autumn rambles

[animeomegas]

Omg monarch in need some short hcs about what happens with Minato, alpha reader, Naruto and kakashi after the incident (I’m so glad kakashi is getting some love in this my poor baby I can imagine how distressed he must’ve been🥺🥺)

Okay, I thought about it, and I want to write a few little snippets from the years for this family! Enjoy, queen 😉 @queenondeezmatatas

tw: miscarriage mention.

Naruto's first birthday:

Minato doesn't celebrate Naruto's first birthday.

He just can't. Everything is so fresh on the anniversary of his mate's death. He spends the day in bed, and he feels so guilty about that, but... he can't pretend to be happy.

He's so grateful that you, his best friend, are there to look after Naruto. To buy him a cupcake and a little candle in the shape of a 1.

And he's even more glad that you took a photo of you and Naruto with the little cupcake and candle, so that Minato has something to show Naruto in the future and something to frame for his bedside table of course.

After his birthday is over, Minato feels guilty for missing it and goes a little crazy on gifts for Naruto as an apology, who is very excited by the new army of stuffed animals he now has.

"Come on, Naruto, let's go see oma!" you bounced him in your arms as he giggled. You'd just fed him his little cupcake and the sugar rush was in full effect. You'd planned to leave Minato alone today, but Naruto was insisting on seeing him, using one of the few words he knew over and over again to make his point.

"Oma! Oma! Yes!" he babbled, still giggling.

And it was his birthday, so you felt bad for denying him the chance to see his own oma. But as you knocked and then slowly opened up the door to Minato's room, you suddenly felt nervous; you didn't know what state he was in. Was this a good idea?

"Minato, I-"

"Oma! Oma! Oma!" Naruto yelled, wiggling in your arms and demanding to be put down. You did as he wanted and watched as he waddled over on unsteady feet to Minato's bedside. You could hardly see him in the dark room.

"Hey, Naruto," you saw the shadowed figure of Minato sit up and tiredly address his son, voice rough. "What are you doing?"

"Oma, up!" Naruto demanded, and you watched Minato pick him up and settle him on his chest as he laid back down.

You moved closer to them both and you could see the tear stains on Minato's pillows and the red rimmed eyes and nose. He hadn't showered or eaten the food you brought in for him this morning. You sighed sadly. This was to be expected.

And then Naruto decided it was time to jump. On Minato's chest.

You heard the 'oof' noise of all the air in Minato's lungs leaving him, but before you had time to intercept Naruto, he had grabbed a handful of Minato's hair to balance himself.

Minato weakly tried to sit up, but Naruto remained firmly gripped on, and it took the two of you working together to unlatch his fingers.

Naruto wiggled as soon as you took him in your arms.

"No! Oma, up!" he shouted, holding his arms out to Minato, who just looked so exhausted and depressed, that you immediately backed away towards the door. He needed time. You shouldn't have come in in the first place. You were going to take Naruto to your room and let him tantrum it out.

"No! Oma, oma!" Naruto wailed dramatically. "Oma, up!"

"Oma's sleepy Naruto," you tried to coax him as you exited the room and shut the door behind you. "Come on, let's go and play with some of your new toys!"

You only hoped things would get easier with time.

2. The first time Naruto called you appa:

You and Minato talked around your role in Naruto's life a lot. Neither of you were too keen to push the issue or give it a definitive label.

You loved Naruto dearly. You raised Naruto with Minato. You were an alpha parent figure.

Naruto called you by your name, following Minato's example.

But when he was about 3 and started to spend time with other families while you and Minato worked, he saw that other people had appas. But he had one too?? He was confused, but he wanted to have an appa like everyone else and he kinda did, but it was different?

So, when you, Minato, Naruto and Kakashi were having dinner, Naruto suddenly dropped a bomb.

"Come on, Naruto, you can eat a bit more," you tried to coax him to accept the spoon of mashed potatoes. "Look, Kakashi is eating his, he's a big boy for eating his food."

Kakashi looked vaguely embarrassed to be spoken about in such a way, but didn't protest.

"No, appa, I don't want it!"

The room seemed to freeze. You whipped your head over to Minato was was staring at you and Naruto with a complicated expression on his face. His knuckles were white as he gripped onto his cutlery.

Kakashi looked like he'd rather be anywhere else, and Naruto picked up on the mood change and started to fidget in his seat and bite his lip.

"Naruto-" you started before Minato cut you off.

"Naruto, don't be difficult for appa, okay? Eat the last bit of mash, there's only two spoons left."

Your heart constricted in your chest as Minato made an obvious decision.

"I-I'm... Kakashi, you needed some more kunai right? The shops will close soon, why don't we go now?" Minato changed the topic and stood up suddenly. Kakashi stood too, eager to leave the awkwardness behind.

It seemed that Minato had made a decision, but that he still needed time to process it. That was fine. Everything was fine.

"That's fine, Naruto and I will play together while you're gone, as soon as he finishes his mash that is."

You hesitated before continuing.

"Do you want to play with appa, Naruto?"

Naruto grinned at you, and you almost winced against the pure sunshine.

"Appa!" he squealed excitedly. "Play now?"

"Eat your mash first."

"Noooooooo."

3. When you and Minato finally crossed the boundary between friends and lovers:

Kakashi was on a mission, Naruto was staying with Shikaku and Yoshino for a play date with Shikamaru, now just about to turn four.

And you and Minato ended up drinking together on the floor of the living room, just laughing and sharing stories and enjoying the peace for a bit.

But the emotions ran high, and you kissed him without thinking about it.

The alcohol stopped you from thinking about how much of a bad decision this is. All either of you could think about is the feeling of the other one, how long it had been for both of you, and how much you felt for each other.

It ended up a one night stand that both parties agreed to forget.

Neither one forgot though. Things had changed even if neither would admit it.

And then Minato got pregnant.

Minato clutched the test with a trembling hand.

He'd ruined everything. He'd behaved like a teenager and now he was facing the consequences.

What was he going to do? How was he going to tell you? How...

He ended up crying on the bathroom floor, terrible memories being dragged to the surface to mingle with the fears of the future.

He'd ruined everything.

That's how you found him.

And then had the longest and most awkward talk of your life. You agreed to try and make this work between you two for the new baby. So you didn't confuse Naruto. So people wouldn't think badly of Minato, who needed the respect of people to be hokage. He was the first omega hokage and he could already imagine the fallout if certain clans or groups of civilians found out he'd conceived with a one night stand, best friend or not.

It was almost scary how well you fell into the relationship together.

It was natural and so easy to love each other.

And it started to become real. After three months, it felt like any other relationship. You loved him and he loved you. Naruto was used to the affection between the two of you now, and Kakashi had raised a few eyebrows at first but no longer reacted.

And then Minato has a miscarriage.

"Shh, it's alright," you soothed Minato, rubbing his back. "Let it all out, it's okay to cry."

"I'm just so confused," he cried softly, leaning into your shoulder.

"Why are you confused, darling?"

"I didn't want this pup originally, but I still did kind of want them and looked forward to meeting them, and now I'm confused about how to feel. Does that make me a bad oma?"

"That's normal. I feel the same way. I'm sad, but things are a lot easier this way, it's hard to deny that. You're not a bad person for feeling like this, I promise."

"But I'm also confused because," he sniffed and wiped at his eyes. "Because there's no reason for us to... continue now... but I want to, I want to keep going like this, but..."

"But?" you asked, nervous.

"I'm scared," Minato breathed out like he was just realising this for the first time. "After what happened to Kushina, I... I'm terrified."

"There doesn't have to be anything big or scary right now, let's just... see how we go. There's no rush, no expectation. We can simply be us, like we've always been, whatever that might mean."

Minato opened his mouth to reply, but the front door opened and cut him off. Kakashi was back from taking Naruto to the park.

Minato hurriedly sat up and wiped his eyes, plastering a smile on his face.

"You guys are back! How was the park?"

4. Naruto's graduation:

You and Minato stood outside the academy with baited breath. Minato had taken the afternoon off to be here to hear Naruto's result. You had faith in him, but the nerves were still there. He'd be heartbroken if he failed.

You absently rocked your youngest pup in you arms, leaving Minato to distract you older one with little jutsu tricks as she oohed and ahhed over them, begging to start the academy early.

And then the doors swung open and a small flood of children barrelled out, the bright blond hair easily spot between them.

And he was grinning and proudly clutching a hitai-ate in his hand.

You whooped and laughed as he ran towards you and his siblings.

"I did it!!! I told you!!!" he cheered, throwing himself into Minato's arms, who ruffled his hair and embraced him tightly.

"We knew you could do it!"

"Naruto! You did it!" your older daughter shouted, hugging around Naruto's thigh. Naruto laughed and bopped her on the nose. He was such a good big brother.

He turned to you last, gently hugging you so as not to hurt his baby sister.

"I did it, appa," he whispered, burying his face into your shoulder. "I did it."

"You did," you said proudly, wrapping an arm around him. "And I'm so proud of you."

#minato x reader #hcs #omegaverse #a/b/o #headcanons #naruto #alpha!reader #reader insert #tw miscarriage

[basuralindo]

M, S, and U for the ask game?

Hi! I'm writing this with a migraine so sorry if it's not super coherent, I tried lol

M - Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

Okay I'm gonna assume this is for twst since, yeah. So, I think Lilia would be the most fun and low drama to hang with

S - Show us an example of your personal headcanon (prompts optional but encouraged)

Ooh, this one's a challenge, partially because I have a headache and don't completely understand it -the wording is kinda weird. Uhhh the first one that comes to mind is that I'm choosing to believe that all the overblotters are actually related to the great seven. Like, it's already confirmed for Malleus and Idia, and they described the beastmen as having specific animal dna yeah? So if Leona has lion dna and is from the royal family of the savannah where the king of beasts ruled, that could imply a blood relation to Scar. Kalim said he has relatives in the royal family, which implies he could be a distant descendant himself, and the Vipers have been serving his family time out of mind, so it's not a long shot that they could be the same family Jafar was from. Azul's species and appearance is really unusual among mermen, and also exactly like the sea witch, and he comes from a line of mages including a grandma who was described as having a similar role in their town to Ursula. So like, why not? I have no direct linkup to make with Riddle and Vil, but it's not unusual for royal families to have a bunch of offshoots well into the modern era, so it's definitely plausible. 乁⁠(⁠ ⁠•⁠_⁠•⁠ ⁠)⁠ㄏ

U - Three favorite characters from three different fandoms, and why they’re your favorites.

Oof it's so hard to pick just one character from each story, but let's see. I'm watching castlevania at the moment, and there's so many good characters, but it's season 3 and Isaac is really stealing the show, so, Isaac. I really love the growth throughout this season, the way he grows, and the reason for changing. I'm enamored by the idea of him setting out for revenge with enough hate to condemn all humankind, and being met with little acts of human kindness along the way until he's inspired to look at himself as something worth valuing who deserves to want things, and by the time he reaches his target, he's run out of hate and replaced it with a will to live. Not to mention his personality, which is hard to break down into highlights, he's just a good and interesting character, I adore him. Crowley from good omens, moreso the book than the show. When I first read it back when I was like, 10 or so? I think? It was one of my first encounters with a character who was slated to be the badguy categorically, would always be perceived as the badguy because of what he is, and isn't trying to fight it, but is just a compassionate person anyway. It meant the world to me at the time and is still really important, he was a childhood hero to me and supportive fixation. Aaand kinda obscure pull but Miles from the Miles Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. I haven't read since I was a kid, but I remember him being a fun complex action adventure gremlin, and the series itself was really engaging with a lot of social concepts that I hadn't been exposed to before in stories, including the first time I'd ever heard about a trans man! And Miles himself was a protagonist dedicated to defending the marginalized, rather than the trope of hero who vanquishes the strange and scary. I had a massive crush on him for a while there.

#anon #ask #ask game #anon ask #fandom drivel?

[nysus-temple]

Regarding the greek mythology couples poll you did, may we know why they are your faves?? 👀

OOF all of them have a lot to talk about for me but it's painfully obvious how biased i am towards Odysseus & Penelope. Gotta try to talk about all of them and not stay stucked with those two tho xD

Odysseus & Penelope > LORD. WHERE DO I BEGIN. The Odyssey is my favourite literature work from all time and Odysseus is my favourite hero, so that's something already. The fact that he always found all parts of Penelope to be... Good. Like. You know. He liked the fact that she could mess up with him. I'm never getting over the end of the Odyssey in which she makes him prove it's truly him with the whole bed and tree shenanigan. HOW SHE CRIES AFTER FINDING OUT THAT IT'S TRULY HIM. HOW HE CRIES TOO. The fact that Odysseus had EVERYTHING any mortal could only dream with, he even was told to be turned inmortal by Calypso, he could have abandoned so, so many times... And, yet, he still wanted to go back to her. He STILL justified Calypso why he wanted to. To Circe. TO EVERYONE ELSE. He was willing to keep traveling and suffering just to get back. How even if he was part of the oath he didn't want to go to war because he had Penelope AND a son with her. He DID NOT want to leave all that to her. How he choosed Penelope even when he was supposed to be one of Helen's suitors. Just imagine you're Penelope, and as much as you love you cousin Helen, you're a little... Sad, that you're irrelevant. Not for the suitors, but even for your dad. The fact that Odysseus came up and... Choosed you. You. He literally could have gone for any other woman who could give any kind of fame to Ithaka, just like Helen could. But he still choosed you. For fuck's sake, nowadays romance novels CAN'T write this trope good, but in the myths it was written down perfectly. He loved her for being Penelope. He loved her for being her. He decided to keep hurting himself for her. I just adore how Odysseus... Perhaps found someone he could connect with? Because he liked schemes and she coud trick him, the smartass who screwed up a lot of stuff with schemes, and she tricked him. He maybe felt... Free??? Odysseus was never honest. Never. I'm 100% sure he could be with Penelope. Only her and him knew about the bed and the tree ( well and technically Euriclea, but like, it's not the same with the grandma lmao ). I'M SO SORRY I EXTENDED SO MUCH WITH THEM I SAID I WAS GONNA SUMMARIZE I JUST AAAAAAAAAAA they're madly in love. Move on. I'LL BE MORE QUICK WITH THE REST

Demeter & Poseidon > TRAGEDIES !!! THEY'RE TRAGIC TO ME. We know very little about it, i know, that's what i mean. We will never be able to know what happened between them besides the damn desire excuse. We'll never know if that daughter they had was actually Persephone or not. WE'LL NEVER KNOW BECAUSE WE DON'T HAVE SOURCES BECAUSE TIME GETS RID OF THEM... But they'll always be dear to me. Just imagining Poseidon giving little fishy creatures to her, since she's more used to plants than animals, and how she opens up to him like that. Because they're both the middle ones. The ones who don't know where to belong exactly. And how much could have been done with their daughter... If time hadn't taken them from us.

Hector & Andromache > Bro....... The Iliad chapter in which he takes his helmet off in order to not scare their son, that's literally the only chapter in which you forget this work is about war. How he held him. How Andromache begged him to live. How much he was willing to sacrifice for them to live. HOW HE FREAKING DARED TO DIE WHILE SHE WAS WATCHING IN SO MUCH PAIN. HOW MUCH PAIN ANDROMACHE FELT WHEN HIS CORPSE WAS DRAGGED AROUND THE PLACE. HOW NOT EVEN THEIR CHILD GOT THE TIME TO BE FREE. Pain. I love pain.

Aether & Hemera > Primordial favourites !! Hemera feels always left out from her family since her parents are, you know, Night and Darkness repectfully, and her, as her name states, is the Day. She can never spend time next to them since they're opposites besides being family. BUT AETHER CAN. Aether can be with her even when their parents are around since he's more than just light. So they kind of just... Stay together. Without doing anything. Just feeling that the other is there is more than enough.

Menelaus & Helen > EURIPIDES SAID IT'S HELEN WHO CHOOSED MENELAUS INSTEAD OF HER DAD MAKING THE DECISION AND I'LL DIE ON THAT HILL. Them in the Odyssey hit SPECIALLY hard. They seem to be... Happy. Like they always should have been. Because Helen deserves someone who appreciated every part of her, not just because she was the famous most-beautiful-woman-in-Greece. How they were just staring at eachother when Telemachus arrived at Sparta... They are so important in the Odyssey too.

Hyperion & Theia > i might love them for their children more than themselves lmao aNYWAY- i just, like the parents of my favourite celestial trio, okay !! AND THEY'RE TRAGIC TOO. Hyperion sided with Chronus during the war of titans-gods, you know, meanwhile Theia didn't, she stayed outside of it. And by following archeological foundings, perhaps we can guess that she had done that to stop Helios, Selene and Eos from going to Tartarus. But Hyperion insisted in fight, so, you know... TRAGIC. How do the three siblings feel after all of these??? How her mother feels after Hyperion is trapped in Tartarus and they will never see him again AGHHH

Zeus & Hera > They aren't actually at the level of the others tbh, i just felt people weren't giving them enough appreciation. I like them just as much as the rest of the couples i didn't include in the poll, let's just say. They're messy and you all need to learn to live with that !

i talked way more than i should have with Odysseus & Penelope so i went on fast mode with the rest ;v;

#in conclusion: Nysus loves pain #greek mythology #odypen #answered #anon

[sumi-sprite]

Number 4 for the Choose Violence ask game

4. what was the last straw that made you finally block that annoying person?

Oof. It was actually two people on the same day. Extremely recently, like, maybe three days ago?

First was someone I have blocked before but un-blocked after a while because it wasn't like they were mean or anything, just wouldn't fucking leave me alone about updates on one of my fics for about FIVE YEARS. Dude, I already warned you and others about not fucking bugging me about that shit, I don't care if it was five years ago, I don't care we talk like, once a month or something (we weren't even friends wtf) the rule still applies you. You would think the NUMEROUS PSAs, PMs, updates on my life being too busy for fic stuff, etc would have been enough (again, over the course of FIVE YEARS), but apparent-fucking-ly not! I don't care if you "love" this fic so much you just "can't help it", get a life. Christ.

Second was someone here on Tumblr. Fandom talk, extremely awkward, great art though I will admit! But they were in a very angsty teen phase (they told me they were 21, which I did not believe for a second) with a very unhealthy obsession and equally unhealthy desire to see doom and gloom; they're that person that begs for hope in the darkness but the moment it's presented, they reject it because clearly whining and crying over the Big Sadness is the better option. Like, they apparently genuinely had full breakdowns because of a children's book series and one other movie and its ending. Told them over and over again I was sorry these things made them feel so bad, maybe step away from these things?? Buuut no, they're a clear masochist and I was getting low key sick of it but didn't want to be outright mean to them. Got on the topic of the movie (9) and out of curiosity, I went and rewatched it (I hadn't seen it since it came out in I think 2009?) and gave my opinion. Dude had another fit when I mentioned the ending of the film was rather good and pretty satisfying, but apparently that wasn't the responce they wanted. Bruh threw a bitch fit because apparently a bunch of steampunk ragdolls from a fictional B- movie were worth crying over. I made to reply but noticed the text bar wasn't letting me (I think they turned off messages, I don't think they blocked me because I could still see our message history and I could see their blog) so I said fuck it and blocked them. They also had a weird habit of using asterisks unironically, for example :*looks down* like...full stop.

If you're reading this person mentioned above, seek help or cut the bullshit. It's not cute, we're not in a fucking anime, this is not how you interact with people. This is coming from a socially anxious and awkward autistic person. Seek help.

I lost my sense of smell to COVID two weeks ago, and yet I can still smell and taste the bullshit, and it is PUTRID coming off these two.

#ask sumi #shut up sumi #ask #answer #test post #meme #sumi rants #sumi woke up and chose violence

[seyaryminamoto]

Hey! Hope ur doing good. I wanted to ask ur opinion on Korra and what ur thinking of her story and how she’s like as a avatar. I’m asking because I’m always really interested in ur posts where ur analysing characters and their traits yk. Especially when they’re long. I just love reading them! I don’t think anyone has asked u this before at least not that I’m aware of. I’ve been scrolling through ur latest posts and haven’t seen that much asks about korra.

Oof... xD what a question.

People generally don't talk about LOK with me because that's... not really my area of expertise, for one thing, let alone of personal interest. I actually unironically loved LOK Book 1 when I first watched it, I binged that whole season in like 2 days or so, and I was sooooo eager for more...

... But then I got more and I ended up not enjoying most of what I got at all @_@

Because I didn't enjoy it, I generally don't touch LOK and don't bring up my grievances with it since the people who do love the show are within their rights to enjoy it without people like me talking about everything the show got wrong and everything it should have gotten right. I outright had in mind to make a huge set of posts to explain my takes on LOK, episode per episode... and then I didn't do it because it was going to take me waaaaaaay too long and I wanted to do stuff with my time that actually made me happier than that x'D

But anyway, with this in mind, if you really want to know my take on Korra, her story, her role as an Avatar and just... everything about her show? I'll put it under the cut.

Concept-wise, I loved Korra. Hell, I still remember how I first came across the character, got to know her in that first episode, and thought she was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. I am one of those allegedly rare souls who absolutely vibed with Book 1 Korra and who ADORED the character to the point where, back in my not-so-fond time of being an admin in an ATLA group on a social media site I would rather not name (?), my admin identity was based on Korra herself :'D

This, I hope, should explain that I was not, unlike a lot of people, an insta-hater of LOK. I actually gave the show a chance and, on first glance, I loved Book 1 completely and I was so HYPED about the show's future based on this starting point. Later on, however, I discovered my creative juices were just... not jogged at all with LOK, whereas they were going completely bonkers over ATLA XD hence, I focused on creating content for ATLA, which slowly led me to treat the original show with a little more distance than I did at first. That helped me put a lot of things into focus, things that I didn't notice or acknowledge right away, both in ATLA and LOK.

The problems I ended up seeing in LOK upon later rewatches were problems a lot of people saw on their first approach to the show. They totally went over my head the first time xD but after acknowledging said problems, I genuinely thought that these unresolved issues would get better over time, that the show's upcoming seasons would patch up what hadn't been addressed properly in the first season and all such complaints would be unnecessary...!

... Boy, was I wrong.

First things first, what I loved most about Korra was how spirited she felt. She was so charged with personality and with life that I couldn't get enough of seeing the character reacting to the world around her. It was masterful in terms of animation and voice acting, more than anything, and I just LOVED the first episode of the show in particular because it introduced us to a wholly different concept for an Avatar, opposite to Aang in virtually every way that mattered. While I had no objective problems with Aang and his development, the way a lot of people did, I couldn't relate to Aang personally... but I could with Korra. She was a sheltered girl who had no real experiences beyond the world she had been locked inside and raised in... something I felt was terribly relatable to my own personal experiences :'D she was a severe social inept due to that upbringing, something slightly more extreme to relate to xD but even then, I struggled befriending people as a teenager and I found it pretty interesting to see a character facing a similar struggle.

It wasn't, at all, the same with Aang. He made friends relatively easily and quickly, bonding with people and becoming friends for life with them no matter how different they might be from him. He had all this worldly knowledge, even if outdated, and he had a huge trauma that was not relatable at all for me, despite I absolutely could empathize with his pain and loss. In Korra's case, her problems felt slightly more mundane and they resembled my problems, to some degree.

Seeing Korra grow and become a better person would have been, of course, my ideal concept of what this show would shape into. From the moment we're introduced to this character, she's not at all an ideal person. She's a child at the time, recklessly and carelessly breaking her own family home's walls simply because she discovered she has powers and nobody can stop her from wielding them. It's a fun choice for a character introduction, and yet... later reflection on the subject made me realize that this is indeed how Korra's problems as a character started. She could break a wall, she could make a mess of her own home, and her parents would only stand by and smile awkwardly, zero discipline enforced on her, zero consequences to be had.

Hence, it's no surprise that she neglects and dismisses discipline once she's older (with Katara's approval, too, which isn't completely surprising but certainly not helpful), and continues to dismiss it often in the rest of the season. When you introduce a character who has a flaw that can be SO detrimental, not only to her growth but to her relationships with others (her lack of discipline can absolutely cause unnecessary chaos, and it does very often in the show), the ideal course of action would be for the show to make the character reason with said flaw and realize she has to get a grip and not act like this anymore...

... But technically? The show doesn't do this with Korra at all. If anything? The writing in LOK just enables her, continuously, and holds her accountable for very few things, constantly praising her to infinity and beyond, disregarding the disasters she leaves in her wake. And it's not just with discipline, but with everything.

When you see a character like Korra butting heads with another stubborn character like Tenzin, it can be easy to sympathize with Korra if you have had authority figures in your life who were unyielding and barely ever were open to listening to you. But see... Tenzin is forced, constantly, to change and adapt to Korra. Korra, in turn, never has to do the same with Tenzin. Even when Tenzin is right, the narrative makes him wrong. Even when Korra has done things she shouldn't have (like the infamous destruction of the spinning wooden gates during that training exercise), she does nothing to make up for it. I'm still bothered, to this day, by thinking about how she destroyed something EXTREMELY valuable for the Air Nomads... and then it was Air Acolytes fixing it, and Tenzin supervising them, and Korra only showed up to say a couple of things and didn't even OFFER to help out with patching up what she broke, something that ends up feeling symbolic of Korra's journey altogether.

The more these things happened, the less relatable Korra became. The harder it was to feel that she was someone I could understand, even if the traits through which I had first bonded with her were still very much present in the character. But then the infamous love triangle/square/disaster started, and she became even less relatable, and a more unflattering character, than she ever needed to be. Her social ineptitude I mentioned earlier was slightly endearing at first, such as not knowing she needs money to buy any food, fishing in ponds where it's forbidden, and so on. But it wasn't quite so endearing when the show doesn't make her face true consequences for it in far more serious situations than the ones in the first episodes: people constantly focus on how wrong Mako was in the Makorrasami mess, and I won't pretend he's not wrong because he absolutely messed up too... but Korra was far from blameless. Korra absolutely shouldn't have experienced any sort of territorial jealousy over a guy who, yes, she liked, but with whom she has no established romantic relationship and who was well within his rights to date whoever he pleased. For all she could have known, he could have had a girlfriend BEFORE meeting Korra: what right did she have to be jealous of Asami's relationship with him, under any circumstances? It felt wrong, utterly. I've had brief crushes on people who happened to have other people in their lives, or who weren't interested in me, and I NEVER pretended they owed me anything or had led me on somehow... and yet that's 100% how Korra acts over Mako in Book 1, with no justification.

Then the show makes things worse when the whole subplot of Hiroshi's membership with the Equalists comes up. Korra's attitude around Asami not only feels terribly unfair for the most part, but when she's finally trying to put aside her childish jealousy, suddenly Hiroshi is a bad guy and Korra has evidence, only she doesn't, only she maybe does! And in the process, she keeps pissing people off in her constant pursuit for "the truth" at the cost of antagonizing her new friends, all of which ends up rewarding her, in the end, with Asami being dejected and depressed over her father being a piece of shit, while Mako concedes Korra was always right and he totally should have listened to her. Yeah, let's not count in the fact that Korra started out feeling frustrated and jealous that she couldn't get Mako and Bolin to come live with her in Air Temple Island, and that now she got exactly what she wanted at first, at the cost of uncovering a very dark and horrific secret that makes Asami's life pretty much a living hell.

The thing is... it's all convenient for Korra. It all falls perfectly into place for Korra. It's not fair to the character... because it doesn't challenge her in any way that counts. When Korra's character gets challenged in Book 1, it's usually by Tenzin or by Mako and who gets the final victory in any of these circumstances? Typically, Korra :'D it's always Tenzin and Mako realizing Korra was right all along and that her way of going about things is better or acceptable or agreeable...

... and as awful as it feels to say the words every Korra hater said and that I used to be in total disagreement with, the truth is that the show as a whole proves that the haters were right: Korra learned nothing.

It's frustrating because of how much potential her character has. She GENUINELY has that potential! But the writing, of course, is biased as fuck and that bias saw to it that her very agreeable and fun character traits would become actively detrimental for her character growth. Where it takes work for Aang to achieve certain things (like unlocking the Avatar State or connecting with his past lives), Korra could pull off those things whenever the plot required her to do so. Hell, even in the case of her "airbending punch", she unlocks airbending because according to the creators, the lock on her other three bending abilities somehow cleared the path for the airbending :'D it was not, like in Aang's case, a matter of being taught FORCIBLY how to connect with the earthbending side of his nature when given no other choice by Toph. It was not, like in Aang's case, a situation of learning firebending and accidentally going too far with the skill, causing him to swear off it out of fear of causing harm to other people. No, in Korra's case, it's just that the plot requires her to airbend and her airbending is NOT the kind of airbending we're used to. She didn't do what she does in episode 2, where she uses airbending motions to dodge attacks at the last moment... she didn't do anything she hasn't ALREADY been doing constantly: Korra just punched something, and a burst of air came from her fist. That's literally it. There's no real character growth required for her to reach this point, all she needed was for Amon to block her other three elements for her airbending to come through.

This is why Korra's arc fails. It's not because she's a bad character from the core: she absolutely IS NOT. She's got sooooo much potential and capacity for growth, and the writing just squandered that potential constantly, never challenging her with anything other than bending, constantly making adverse characters back down because she was too cool not to back down for, and never giving her a chance to deliver on the premise of her own show: this is the story of an Avatar who was an Avatar before being her own person. Aang is the exact opposite concept. Aang is in denial about being the Avatar when things start out, he doesn't even want Katara and Sokka to know who he is right away because "he didn't want to be [the Avatar]". With this as a starting point, what could have been a more interesting character to develop than someone whose ENTIRE life revolves around her role, her skills, her power... to the point where she has NO IDEA who she really is?

But the thing is... this show never delivers on that premise.

No, in fact, it constantly seems to think it delivered on it, and yet it never did.

It's not chance that Korra herself tells Tenzin she feels her story is unfinished in Book 4. That there's still so much for her to do and that this doesn't feel "over". It's a ridiculous and ironically brilliant thing for the writing team to feature because it seems to hint at and suggest that we WILL see more Korra adventures in the future, in comic book form! (as we did)

But... Aang's adventures were also brought to us in comic book form after his story was done. And there was no Aang mournfully thinking "wow this feels so unfinished" right before the credits rolled.

Gotta wonder why that's the case, huh? :')

Basically, the show had no purpose. And why didn't it have a purpose? Because Bryke and company were so busy trying to make people respect their show and their new protagonist that they didn't ever slow down to think about what kind of story they were telling. It's no chance that Book 1 feels like the strongest entry to me, to this day: it's the only one where they weren't constantly fighting the fandom by trying to prove that their show was worth our time. The fact that Book 2 has a literal scene of Tenzin telling Aang he's trying to be like him but failing, only for Aang to give the most obvious speech to him (you're your own person, you're valuable because of you, you don't have to be me, blah blah blah) tells us more than enough about the priorities of the showrunners when they were creating the overarching story of Legend of Korra: they had no idea what they were doing. All they wanted was for people to like it, and people didn't like it, so they doubled down on trying to make them like it by bringing out EVEN MORE fanservice and more characters consistently claiming Korra was THE BEST and that everyone should worship her.

Honestly, think about it: Tarrlok tried to cajole Korra into joining his gang and she actually agreed to it at one point, manipulated easily as she was. Unalaq wanted Korra on his team and manipulated her to get her to be his ally in opening the portals (and the worst part is he got away with everything in the end :'D). Zaheer outright wanted to kidnap Korra so she would be a Red Lotus member for whatever reason and he tells her, in Book 4, that "her potential is limitless", ergo, he admires her. Kuvira constantly tries to tell us she's "so much like Korra", and tries to convince Korra that she's right and that Korra should be on her team too. Every villain, with the exception of Amon unless I'm forgetting something, tried to convince Korra that she was "super special" (which, you know, water's wet?) and that she shouldn't be their enemy but rather, she should be helping them achieve their goals.

Aang faced a lot of villains in his own time, too. The first one was Zuko, who simply wanted to capture Aang to get rid of his banishment. The second one was Zhao, who wanted to capture Aang for his personal advancement and the Fire Nation's success in the war. The third one was Azula, who wanted to capture Aang, Zuko and Iroh for the Fire Nation's sake and because her father would approve of her, if she did. The fourth one was Long Feng, a manipulative bureaucrat who wanted to continue to hold absolute, tyrannical control over a city and thought the Avatar would be an obstacle for that. The fifth one was Combustion Man... who just wanted to kill Aang because that's what he was hired to do. The sixth, of course, is Ozai, who simply wants to kill Aang because he thinks that will guarantee his absolute victory in the war.

Of course, there are other lesser villains, but these are the ones that come to mind: not one of them tried to recruit Aang to their cause because he was powerful. Not all of them are notorious examples of great villains or antagonists, no... but Aang was an obstacle in their way. Aang was a problem to be rid of. Aang wasn't someone they could charm into joining their ranks: he was a problem. He was a kid who messed up their plans and ruined their biggest goals.

Korra, though? Korra, for most her villains, is an asset. She's capable of so many great and grand things that they think they'd be better off with her on their team than on the opposing team, which of course means that Korra has to prove she's "a good person" by not joining them no matter how compelling their arguments might be! (even if, in the end, she might wind up doing whatever they want her to do, as was the case with Unalaq). This would be interesting and it might even hold some sort of narrative momentum if only this tendency of villains who are actually Avatar fans ever broke its own, persistent and annoying and repetitive cycle: if Korra, at some point, was genuinely compelled to join one of them, the story would have been more interesting. Conversely, if any of them had eventually laughed off the notion of joining forces with Korra, for instance, then at least we'd have someone like the ATLA villains who simply thought Aang was a problem to get rid of. But the very tendency of writing villains who VALUE Korra is just another symptom of the same illness: Bryke and company wanted the whole fandom to worship Korra and had no idea how to achieve it, so they made even the villains get in on the Korra-worship agenda and they're constantly praising her to hell and back because that way maybe the fans will think Korra is great!

And it's just extremely sad... because they didn't have to TRY. They barely did. All they had to do was take her character seriously and build her up in a coherent way, without destroying the traits that made her loveable, relatable and interesting!

And yet that's exactly what they DIDN'T do.

Book 1, like I said, already had a lot of problems. Even then, this season is literally the only bit of LOK that I would look back on fondly, TO A DEGREE, because it actually had so much more potential than its own creators recognized. We're faced with writing problems that consist of Bryke thinking the key to creating a powerful female character is to pretend she's entitled to everything ever, no matter if she hasn't earned it, and to give her anything she could want. You know, only for her to conclude, later on, that she feels like she hasn't done enough and that she hasn't made enough progress :>

Book 2 doubled down on everything negative about Korra in the first season. It freaked me out to see it because I was genuinely telling people to not worry about Korra's development in the first season because it would get better in the next ones :'D that everything left unresolved and mishandled from the first season would be better in the future!

... And then it wasn't.

When I started Book 2 and the first scene was Korra abusing the Avatar State for... a game? It was about the worst sign pertaining what was coming in the future. After an entire episode, and a season-long arc, where Aang COULDN'T trigger his Avatar State because of his inner conflicts and his locked chakras and everything we know about, here's Korra taking advantage of the past lives' power for something as meaningless as a race against a bunch of toddlers. It was far from endearing, it was virtually outrageous for me, and I couldn't understand why the hell this was the first thing we're shown when starting a new season of the story that ended with a girl finally coming into her own as the Avatar by helping people with, yet again, a power-up granted to her by the sheer essence of plot convenience in the Book 1 finale. I didn't even HAVE a huge problem with that finale, personally, despite it felt too easy to sort things out that way... but seeing that this was how Korra was taking advantage of her fully-fledged Avatar powers was the strongest red flag they could have given us that early on.

Then, the rest of the episode continued and I was more than a little shocked to see no sign of the Korra I actually liked from Book 1 there. The playfulness was reduced to that single scene that was very unpleasant for the reasons I explained above, the enthusiasm was nowhere around... hell, most people used to find her pouting tendencies from Book 1 hilarious and I was one of them: no pouting, though. It was such a simple, casual design choice... and it's a choice they tossed aside because, what, the toxic fans who hated Korra had made fun of it, maybe?

The Korra in the first episode of Book 2 attempts to feel more mature. She's not. She's more soulless, though, she's definitely less herself, and she's got none of the spirit I used to love about her. Can I blame the animation for that feeling? Well, I can acknowledge that they didn't do her any favors, Studio Pierrot soooo dropped the ball with Book 2's many episodes they had to animate... but it's not only the animation, it's still the writing. There's this persistent need, through the first half of Book 2, to worsen Korra... in order to make Mako look better, most of all. And I've never been a Mako hater... but this is fucking bullshit xD you can't "better" a character by ruining the other one deliberately so that the one you picked looks better? The only thing you'll convince people of is that they both suck. And of course, doing this with Korra right after spending two years whining because people didn't like their main character is just absurd. Her character growth did NOT need for her to become a civil war advocate with nothing but violent reactions and responses to EVERYTHING.

Look, I know it has turned into a meme in the fandom and all... but the whole "I'm going to threaten this judge by holding his head between my very dangerous dog's open jaws" situation is appalling to me. This is NOT heroic behavior. And what the guy confesses is so stupid and pitiful it's even more pathetic to see Korra having to reach such extremes just to hear... that her uncle hired a bunch of criminals so he could somehow cause his brother to get himself banished? Like... for real? Are you serious? It's yet again an attempt to whitewash a "good" character (Tonraq, in this case), all be it to show how BAD the bad guys are, when there's absolutely no need for that. Tonraq could have messed up and been responsible for his mistakes. Unalaq could have just as easily taken advantage of that matter and become chief because the catastrophe his reckless brother unleashed just happened to play PERFECTLY into his convenient set of skills. I mean, the concept still feels bad at its core, but it's not quite as bad as "I paid a group of criminals to induce my brother to fuck up and awaken 'dark spirits' that will attack the city so that only I can save everyone and I will be the hero, haha!", like... as usual, there's no accountability. There's nothing the heroes can be held accountable for, because the bad guys are always to blame for everything. Even with a concept quite as baffling and STUPID as hiring a bunch of criminals just to fuck with your brother.

Anyway, back into the subject... Korra continues to act like she's possessed by some rage demon throughout Book 2, all the way until she gets mind-wiped, conveniently. Have I ever mentioned I HATE memory wipe storylines, more so when they're just a temporary, simplistic resource to generate cheap drama? :'D well, I hate memory wipe storylines, more so when they're just a temporary, simplistic resource to generate cheap drama.

The fact that Korra's whole insane behavior is somehow twisted into a finding a solution because "she connected to Raava" is, yet again, a way to see how no developments in this show makes the slightest bit of sense because they're in fact NOT related to character growth in the slightest. It's sudden random events that happen and that characters react to in completely unnatural ways: suddenly, after this random loss of identity, Korra regains her senses and she's a perfectly agreeable normal human being again (... though still devoid of many personality traits that made her fun in the first season, because they're gone forever :'D). She loses her connection to her past lives in yet another obvious metaphor of LOK being its own thing and not needing ATLA to build itself upon (which is fundamentally stupid considering THIS IS A SEQUEL ergo IT NEEDS THE ORIGINAL which ISN'T A BAD THING!!!), and we're somehow told that Korra doesn't NEED to be connected to the past Avatars because she's super powerful all on her own: there's zero build-up for this development, zero warning that she's going to turn into a giant blue spiritual Megazord and go punch Unavaatu in the nuts. Remember back in the day when people said energybending came out of nowhere, and that the lion turtles were too convenient, and that just featuring them in pictures in books at the library or in Piandao's mansion as statues was NOT build-up? Well, Korra's big spiritual transformation makes ATLA's last-minute deus ex machina MASTERFUL in comparison. This was such a jumble of random resources with no connection between each thing and the next that I just... I can't understand it. I seriously can't.

Then there's zero attempt to regain the bridge between Korra and her past lives. It's practically framed as "she's better now if she stands with her own strength". Korra's diehard fans went wild because look how STRONG our girl still is without the other Avatars! She's the BEST!

... When the truth is that there's no worldbuilding explanation for this extremely convenient power-up, let alone is there any SENSE in all these characters just briefly mourning the death of the connections only for it to be ignored and forgotten in the blink of an eye. It's a super artificial way to kill the chances for Korra to grow the way Aang did, to learn based on the wisdom of her past lives the way Aang could (and that as far as I know, Kyoshi did too in the novels). The past lives were NOT a crutch, not an obstacle, not a problem. They were actually pretty damn helpful when they wanted to be... hell, Aang bailed Korra out in Book 1 because the plot decided it was convenient! How exactly are we acting like her loss of connections to her past lives is a good thing now? It's honestly absurd, especially when they never did anything to fix this or restore it, or for Korra to properly mourn it after it happened. It doesn't feel like that much of a tragedy because it just has no bearing on the events of ANYTHING past Book 2's finale.

But then Book 2 ends with Korra deciding somehow that Unalaq, the uncle she killed and whom she was fighting all along, was right :> that the division between spirits and humans needs to end. Look... the concept is not that bad, I'll grant you that. But the delivery? The "I won't be the bridge between spirits and humans anymore!" concept? That's outrageous. Visualize the barrier between both worlds as a dam: Korra tore down the dam and said she wasn't taking responsibility for whoever got slammed by a massive tidal wave in consequence of her choices. That's what it feels like. Korra's entire experience with spirits so far is "I can waterbend them out of being evil", a concept just as outrageous as taking away the barrier itself... and she thinks that, as Vaatu is gone, by declaring they'll all have to learn to get along, everything's going to be peachy? How does anyone reach this conclusion? Spirits and humans have been shown to be fundamentally different. We've seen spirits in ATLA and they weren't cute and cuddly. Spirits can be DANGEROUS. Humans can be DANGEROUS. Let humans waltz into the spirit portals willy-nilly and vice versa, and it can be disastrous!

But no, Korra does this because Korra felt like it, on a last minute reflection on something with zero build-up until then, because it never occurred to her that Unalaq might have a point until that very final moment of the Harmonic Convergence. And then Book 3 begins...

... and we find her choices backfired on her stupidly because there's some crazy spirit wilds in the middle of the city she's sworn to protect :')

The show proceeds to show us the consequences of Korra's actions for the FIRST TIME, consequences she is grieving about and that she doesn't know how to sort out...!

... Only to then excuse the whole thing by saying that airbenders are suddenly a thing in the world again BECAUSE the spirit portals were kept open! :D oh YAY! Korra's choice was the RIGHT ONE! She fixed everything wrong with the world and the spirit wilds don't matter at all!

This is basically the way this show handled every challenge thrown at Korra. It's what they did with Korra's jealousy over Asami back in Book 1, which spiraled into all that drama and into Korra still being in the right in the end. Was it at a cost? A cost that didn't affect Korra personally at all, so who cares. Same goes for this: she doesn't fix the wilds, she just takes off on a trip to collect airbenders everywhere! And ironically that becomes the most dynamic moment of later LOK seasons for me, the very few episodes where Korra and her crew are looking for airbenders. Then that period ends bluntly when the true evil to end all evils, AKA Su Beifong, shows up for the first time and decides to take over the whole show just because she can :')

But as we're focusing on Korra, the truth is that Korra in the middle of Book 3 feels a little less unpleasant (USUALLY) than she does in Books 2 or 4. She's not greeeeat, but she's not that bad. Still, I don't entirely appreciate the whole bullshit Beifong family drama, so everything that shit splattered on is garbage to me xD Lin's constant efforts to keep Korra safe from a madman and his gang who are perfectly willing and eager to kill Korra are completely dismissed by not only Korra herself but by the very damnable Su... and Korra seems to have no moment of self-reflection about how wrong that is, about how Lin is actually trying to do her duty of keeping her safe, even if in a way Korra doesn't really like. There's nothing of the sort, she just does whatever is convenient for her, no thoughts or fucks given.

The true horror of Book 3, though, is when the new airbenders are taken hostage by the Red Lotus. This is truly the moment, the scene, where all my respect for Korra withered and died: Aang had known Katara for like 5 hours when Zuko showed up and terrorized the Water Tribe. In order to keep Katara and her people safe, Aang turned himself in to Zuko, no doubt hoping to escape when the right chance arrived, but he turned himself in anyway. He knew that, if he hid, if he resisted, Zuko could do WORSE to these innocent people than he already had. His personal fears were never important: Aang marched into that ship and asked Zuko to leave the Tribe alone in exchange for his surrender.

In contrast, Korra hears about the whole "Air Nation" being in danger of extermination in the hands of a creep like Zaheer, and she HESITATES. She DOUBTS. She is DRAMATIC and WEEPY... over turning herself in to save the airbenders, aka, the single thing she got right when she kept the portals open. AKA, the one nation EVERYONE has been hoping could be restored someday. The last thing left and necessary for balance to start coming back to the world for real and for the Hundred Year War's toll to finally decrease, if just a little, since the damage that period caused will never truly go away.

This was the very first population to be a victim of genocide at the hands of Sozin.

And Korra DOUBTS about giving herself up in exchange for their safety and freedom.

Look... it's just embarrassing. It's just insane. You can't present this as such a horrible threat, so much worse than the Fire Nation was for Aang, because it's not. Korra is already ten times as powerful as Aang is in ATLA's second episode, the show is CONSTANTLY telling us what a powerhouse Korra is: now, is she going against a team of four crazy bastards and she has NO IDEA what they'll do to her? Then at the very fucking least she could have come up with a plan to help the airbenders escape while keeping Zaheer and his crew distracted with her own extremely powerful bending, since the show has reiterated non-stop that no one is as cool and strong as Korra! SHE is what they want. How is it that hard to at least TRY to think outside the box and do something interesting for a change? How is this Avatar meant to be loveable and wonderful when she's unwilling to take risks and chances if they'll put her in danger, when other people she should value ARE in danger already, and she seems to prefer to stay safe herself? How are we supposed to root for this "hero" when her top priority seems to be... herself?

It's horrible. It's terrible xD I wish it weren't because like I said at first, Korra has SO MUCH potential, SOOOOO MUCH... and the writing team just did her so dirty. She didn't develop at all. She was stunted and stuck in this pitiful state of whining about nobody liking her while everyone worshipped the very footprints she left in her wake. She was unable to make the difficult choices that needed to be made because she was so wrapped up in her own selfishness and fears that she spent an episode making sad faces because "oh I guess I have to sacrifice myself to save all those people I supposedly am fighting to protect, woe is me". This is just... insulting, outright, for a character of this caliber. I know she's not supposed to be a genius on any level, but this is just more than that: an Avatar who hesitates to save others in the face of danger is an Avatar who thinks THEY are more important than the people they're supposed to protect. And they wanted us to think she was a fully developed Avatar when she acted like this? For real?

Finally, Book 3 ends with Korra poisoned, fighting a very weird, violent fight against Zaheer, flying around just as he did, while being close to death. The incoherence in Su pulling the metal out of Korra's stomach when it entered her body through her skin rather than via ingestion still gets me to this day. Like... you're saying Korra's bloodstream pushed most of that mercury into her stomach, dragging it all the way there, EXCLUSIVELY there, I don't know, at most maybe a bit in her lungs too? XD I mean, come the hell on. It was almost funny to see Toph pulling it out through the skin in the next season because the minute I watched that incoherence in Book 3 I just screamed everywhere that it made no sense to extract skin-based poison through a stomach pumping, and then Toph completely validated me xD still, Korra's Book 3 final struggle was very important for a lot of people because she was effectively handicapped for a time. She was depressed, she lost a lot of things, she seemed incapable of speech even, if I recall right... she was very badly wounded, that much is a fact and nobody can deny it :'D but... you know, it's kind of sad for Korra's whole grieving process over her wound to be as self-centered as it is. She's gone through a terrible thing, there's no denying that... but we see absolutely no sign of Korra saying or believing that she made the right choice, or that she's relieved the airbenders are safe, even if the cost was so steep... no. Basically, it's all Korra grieving and mourning her ability to move around and be her old self.

At this point? Korra effectively has been broken by the writing team to SUCH AN EXTENT that she doesn't even feel like herself anymore. I'd call it a destructive character arc if there was sense and purpose to it at all, but there isn't. It's all for EXTERNAL purposes, really, and that purpose is to make people feel bad for Korra. Which is just the most detrimental thing a writer can do in order to make their character likeable. Didn't we start out with a confident, clumsy, enthusiastic girl who had no concept of what the real world was like, but that innocence of hers was just outright endearing? And now... we're with a girl who finds the real world is pretty much shit on top of shit, a world that beats the everloving crap out of her, that destroyed her confidence and that left her feeling she was worthless just because she can't move around or bend.

... As a slight plug/side table thing, I literally have been posting a couple of arcs in Gladiator where Azula struggles with a pretty severe health problem. While she definitely would rather be back to herself and even has moments of serious panic upon finding she can't bend blue fire anymore, let alone with the strength she could before, she's not quite as self-involved as to think that this is a horrific tragedy. No, she's pulling through gradually, actively looking for ways to get better, and keeping a relatively positive mindset so she can confront this whole recovery without causing extra trouble to the people who are taking care of her. Granted, this comes after a massively long arc of character growth that also includes Azula having acted terribly, sooooo long ago, when she caught a simple cold and she refused to acknowledge it as such. She was reckless, she was careless, she wasn't listening to her healer's orders and did whatever she wanted, even if it nearly killed her. In her growth, she has learned better progressively. She's no longer as rash and reckless as she used to be, and she understands she has to be patient and show restraint with certain things. Her sacrifice, her physical suffering and impairment, is terrible... but the wound she took, and the severe damage her body suffered, helped her save her nation. When the alternative was an actual massacre of her hometown, the Azula I'm writing would never think her life is more valuable than ensuring her people are safe.

Thus my absolute shock upon seeing that Korra falls apart in such a self-involved bubble of misery because she can't be as strong as she used to be anymore. Like... I'm not saying this is BAD as a concept? But it doesn't look good when she managed to defeat the big bad AND succeeded at saving a whole population of an endangered nation with her sacrifice. Should she be dancing around happily? No. Should she be acting like her personal tragedy is more important than the salvation of the airbenders? I honestly doubt it. It's not a good look. A lot of people actualy really enjoyed this arc because they felt that it spoke to how hard disability can be, to how much a person can struggle to feel useful after they lose something they thought they needed... but instead of going on a journey of acceptance and growth, of understanding that she is MORE than her bending (something that this damn show has constantly implied she'll learn but she NEVER does), Korra just grows even more dejected and miserable than she ever has been, and we're just along for the depression ride.

It's not WRONG to depict a character depressed over a disability. What's wrong is for this character to have been on a potential journey to find who she is and she still doesn't have a clue, three whole seasons later. It's WRONG for this character and all her true, core traits to get beaten into submission by a mix of ruthless criticism by an extremely unforgiving fanbase and a staff of writers who were so desperate to please those fans and to bring them back to watch their show that they did ANYTHING to make them happy. Who, exactly, was happy to see Korra like this, though? Those who despised Korra and said they wanted her to die, basically? Is that the target audience they were going for, the people who dropped the show in episode 2?

Korra didn't need to go through what she did. She did because the writers had no idea what they were doing, as far as I can tell, something I've reiterated throughout this post. They had no true journey for her, no actual charted path for the character, and they made mistake on top of mistake and then pretended it was character growth: it was CRUEL. Giving Korra all these brutal beat-ups and taking away so much about her core traits, and I don't mean bending and past lives, but her SMILES! Her JOY! Her ENTHUSIASM! Her INGENUITY! Everything about Korra gets killed systematically, season by season, until we're left with a husk of a character who has no idea who she is after three seasons of attempting to find out the answer to that question.

And that same show ends without her having found that answer at all.

Why else would she think about how she feels like she has so much left to do? Why else would she feel her story is unfinished? Because Toph's lessons in the swamp are not enough. Because Zaheer's pep talk (which is such a stupid concept, my god...) is not enough. Because everyone's constant assurances and support are NOT enough: Korra has no idea who she is because this show DIDN'T LET HER DISCOVER IT. It's really that simple.

Her entire identity revolves around violence and fighting. Around conflict and bending. That's really the core of what they've let her build herself around, and then all the show did was constantly, consistently, reiterate that this WAS her and that she was great exactly as she was. When you have a whole story built around an imperfect protagonist who has every right to be as imperfect as she was, and you spend every waking moment telling her that she is PERFECT and that everyone who says otherwise needs to go down? The story sounds more like propaganda than an actual narrative journey xD it's what I'd expect to see if a dictator decides to make a movie about his life. It's NOT what I'd expect to see in the growth journey of a young woman finding her place in the world.

Book 4 then introduces us to a wholly new character, Korra-sans-personality, who happens to look a lot like Korra but has lost her sense of self and purpose to such an extent that she has become the B plot of her own show :> That still gets me to this day, man...

Korra then proceeds to try to figure out who she is in underground fighting rings. Because that's indeed where you find out who you are, I suppose, I should know considering I keep writing gladiator fights, right? xD but the kicker is that it's useless. Korra is haunted by visions of herself, posessed by the Avatar State and driven mad with grief and pain. She gets haunted by that vision all the way until she meets Toph, and then she has a Luke-Yoda situation going on with Toph that, yet again, gets us nowhere because Toph, where we would expect her to actually deliver proper wisdom and slam Korra with blasts of reality, just ends up being so irrelevant to Korra's growth that I can't remember any dialogues they had other than the time Toph explained the Gaang's adventures in the most disjointed and ridiculous way possible. It was a fun team-up, don't get me wrong... but it was pointless. Korra learned how the banyan tree connects with the whole WORLD?! Well, gee, that's great! And did she have to do something special to figure that out? Did she have to undergo trials and give things serious thought to be able to connect with the tree's spirit?

Oof, I don't even know but upon returning to the transcript (because nobody can bother me to actually watch this again, my god, no xD), I find that Toph actually also gave Korra the stupidest monologue in the show (or one of the stupidest anyways): the one about how she should LEARN something from her enemies! :'D

... When the fuck did anyone expect the Gaang to learn something from THEIR enemies? This line of reasoning is just... so outrageous. It's connected completely to the LOK obsession of making the villains these complicated, tortured souls (... except Unalaq) who had something of value to do and they just went about it the wrong way! But they were cool, though! They totally had the right idea, that's why Korra left the portals open! And that's why the Earth Kingdom has to become a republic! And that's why there should be a non-bending president in Republic City!

Aaaaaaand that's why this show sucks.

Like... Amon was interesting, I won't deny that. But see... Amon was WRONG. Amon wasn't just "going about things the wrong way", he was WRONG. People all around our world, without bending, are not born equal. The world does not provide them with equal opportunities. There's thousands of people who have everything they could hope for and MILLIONS of people who can't have anything they want. Inequality is bad. We are not arguing that it's good. But what we are arguing... is that the equality Amon advocates for is an equality DOWNWARDS. It's an equality that TAKES rather than giving. He's not unlocking non-bender chi-paths in order to let them bend so that this single factor that apparently gives benders a social advantage can be accessible for EVERYONE: nope, he's blocking bender chi-paths so that THEY can't bend. He's not empowering non-benders, he's depowering benders. And when you actually look at Republic City in Book 1...?

Just what do we see nonbenders doing? Going by the logic that benders constantly showcase their power so that most the people who don't do that AREN'T benders, we see one non-bender, presumably, selling a phonograph. We see one living as a hobo in the street. We see two living it up as the richest people in Republic City (three, presumably, if we count the cabbage cart heir whose father went from being a tortured soul in ATLA to being rich enough to start a company). We see a whole group of them living as completely ordinary people who got rounded up by a Tarrlok on the verge of insanity. We see a bunch of them being SUCH GREAT FIGHTERS that many benders can't even compete (as in, the Equalists). We see one as one of the top leaders of the United Nations' Armed Forces. Does this sound like an unequal society? Does this sound like ALL non-benders are living in dirt and suffering from the constant, persistent oppression of the VERY EVIL BENDERS?!

... And what about the benders?

Criminals. Working as base level blue-collar workers in factories. Entertainment, and getting paid very poorly even in success, going by Mako's reaction when his supposed payment arrives and his boss takes it all away right afterwards. We see them as part of the army, as part of the police. We see them as part of an admittedly very unequal council.

What does this tell me? Yes, politically, non-benders deserved representation, but it's not like they NEVER had it: Sokka existed! :'D and we know for a fact that he was the outright LEADER of this council in his time! So it's not like the city had some tradition along the lines of: "Hey, non-benders are not allowed to be in the council because you're inferior beings, go fuck yourselves," otherwise Sokka wouldn't have been part of that council, let alone its leader. Compare this situation to the actual, real-life situations of discrimination of people of certain communities and groups of people, be it racial or sexual or ethnical or religious minorities: how often do you see any of them in positions of power? When did we start seeing them there? It wasn't that long ago. But here? Here we know a non-bender was in power in this city at the very least like... 40-50 years ago. Hell, let's not even stick to Republic City: all the monarchs we know from the BIGGEST city in the Earth Kingdom are NON-BENDERS. Princess Yue in the Northern Water Tribe also was a non-bender, and there's no sign that her father was a bender either. Again, compare this to our real world: how many members of minorities in nations that oppressed them EVER held positions of power the way the non-benders did in ATLA AND LOK? Let alone 70+ years ago?

Ergo... it's just more of the same problems with worldbuilding: Bryke just cannot help but tell, don't show. It's bad, yes, that the council in Korra's time is just benders... but that's literally the only thing people can point to as evidence of inequality. It's literally the ONLY thing that gets resolved because it's the only thing that's a true issue. Amon basically turned bender-on-non-bender violence into his war standard because... his bender father abused him, sure. But he was a bender too :') hell, his father WASN'T a bender anymore by the time he's abusing him. Doesn't this say enough about how the problem is NOT the weapon, or the ability, but the specific individual who wields it? A non-bender with a sword can kill just as many people as a firebender can. Was he going to advocate for taking away all weapons from non-benders too? Honestly, Amon turns something into a huge problem by completely misinterpreting his own society, he victimized thousands of people, whether they were guilty of misusing their bending or not, and then the show wants us to think HE WAS RIGHT :') He was just extreme about it! That's really the problem!

Apply this to literally every other villain, only, Amon is the only one whose cause made at least a little sense despite a close inspection of the issue proves it really doesn't. Unalaq's crusade with spirits NEVER got an explanation and it's the stupidest plotline the franchise ever gave us. Zaheer and his nihilistic anarchic bullshit was basically just a terrorist doing fuckall and causing disasters, murdering as many important leaders he could under the banner of "liberating people" from whatever fictional chains Zaheer said existed around them. Sure thing that the Earth Queen was a piece of shit... but does that mean Zaheer's approach made any sense? :'D no, it doesn't. Does that mean Zaheer's solution was reasonable at all? No, it doesn't :'D But Toph says "he believed in freedom", and that's just fine and dandy, isn't it? His entire ideology is absolutely absurd, it's not even something worth breaking down the way Amon's is, and we're supposed to think "he had a point". Kuvira then is the anti-Zaheer and she wants ORDER, ABSOLUTE ORDER. And yes, that evidently is wrong too, just as Zaheer demanding for absolute freedom, zero societal structure, let people do whatever they want, is fucking ridiculous. Both are wrong! People don't deserve to be forced to be anything they don't want to be, the way Kuvira did, and people shouldn't be given the chance to do ANYTHING they want because, heh, next thing we know the entire world would be burning down when some really bad folks decide they can just kill whoever they hate because hey, why not? No consequences, after all! And so on and so forth, steal from anyone you want to steal from, do whatever you please and if you hurt someone in the process, that's not important. That's basically what Zaheer champions.

It's even childish, frankly, and the show's insistence that it's valid is even more childish. But the real reason all of this sucks is because these villains, boring and lame as they all are, ALWAYS WIN.

No, it's not because Korra didn't defeat them, she always does and saves the day :') but then she decides they had a point. Then she thinks maybe they were wise. Then she thinks maybe they were doing something useful for the world and she has to give it a chance even if most the time they're just exacerbating worse problems than the ones that actually existed. And the thing is that this obsession the show has with its own villains being justified... makes Korra something Aang never was.

It makes Korra a counterattacker.

It makes Korra a character who REACTS, rather than a character who ACTS.

She has NO initiative, not really, because the bad guys need to show up and step up for Korra to take them down.

Therefore, all the initiative in the narrative is with THEM. And Korra is only here to react and respond.

This turns Korra into a character with next to no agency. She's not a hands-on leader, she's not someone who inspects the city she's supposed to be dealing with and figures out solutions for mundane problems. She's not someone who gets called to help out with problems internationally when something unpleasant is going on. Nope, she's just reaction-girl, and she only gets to react to whatever's going on around her. Zero initiative, zero agency, at least as far as her narrative function is concerned. Because yes, Korra totally picks fights and does things when she wants to... but when it comes to the NARRATIVE? The villains are the ones who carry the narrative in this show. We're just watching how Korra will eventually stop them but they're the ones doing things constantly, often getting away with them or nearly doing so, and she keeps getting pummeled and wrecked by the enemies in the process, constantly going on depression sprees because everything she does fails, every choice she makes is wrong, she can't get anything right, and so on and so forth.

Thus why Korra's character arc just can't feel right. Thus why Korra is not the same character I grew so fond of the first time I watched this show. She still is in the position of reacting to Amon in Book 1, but her arrival in Republic City IS a sign of agency... and probably the only actual one she ever displays. Everything else she does, on broad narrative strokes, is responding to something else. She's never ahead of the curb, she's never choosing enterprises to undertake to help in important stuff like getting the city more organized after the plant mess happened, or investigating dangerous leads and complicated operations herself... no, she has to respond to whatever the villains did or whatever her own choices in responding to the villains result in, and so on and so forth. Meanwhile, Aang and his group take the initiative from the get-go because the Fire Nation IS the status quo at this point in time. They're the subversive elements who are fighting and contesting the Fire Nation's control. They're traveling the world, getting Aang some lessons in all the bending arts he doesn't know, making allies and enemies in the process, helping people pretty much everywhere they go, setting people free of Fire Nation tyranny in a myriad of ways...

Meanwhile, Korra is the enforcer of the status quo. Korra is the one who has to defend and protect it at all costs. The villains are trying to alter things, she has to stop them. Then, after stopping them, she ends up realizing they were right in some way or another, so by all means, the villains win the war even if they lose the battle. Again... how are we supposed to root for a hero like this? Why would we?

Anyway, back to Toph... Toph apparently taught Korra to let go of her fear of her previous enemies. There's no actual thought given as to why Korra fears them at all. What is she so afraid of? Why are they haunting her at all? Nope, she just has to deal with it which, as we know, is Korra's motto since she was 4. But then there's no reasoning given to why these villains scare her so much, why she's so worried about them even when they're not a threat at all anymore. Obviously someone is going to come here and say PTSD and psychological disorders do not obey logic... but see, neither does this show, so why is it pretending it does? :'D Korra supposedly works out her fears but she really doesn't, as far as I remember she gets another vision of herself back during her battle with Zaheer when fighting Kuvira and that makes her useless all over again... so, in short, this nonsense wasn't sorted out with Toph, hence the lesson was a waste and a failure. Korra is still afraid.

Fast-forward to Zaheer and Korra's latest misstep in the chronicles of her depression: he tells her she's still afraid and she says it's his fault, blah blah blah, Korra then proceeds to trust this dipshit to help her meditate past her blockage and oh my, it works! She has to ACCEPT what happened to her! Which, yes, is a difficult process that I'm not mocking... but this doesn't even get anywhere CLOSE to the ten thousand things Korra should really be pondering and meditating on. There's SO MUCH Korra has to resolve, so many things she has to deal with, and this whole subplot was brought out just to give her one thing to do that, ultimately, did NOT help her find the path into discovering who she was beyond the Avatar, beyond the extraordinary bending :'D As usual... how does this make any sense? How is THIS what we're supposed to be thrilled about in her growth process? If she can't even deliver on the very premise of the show at its very last legs, how could this show EVER reach a triumphant, glorious conclusion...?

Oh. By making Korrasami canon, of course.

Thus comes the time for the rant that was always meant to be:

KORRASAMI DESERVED BETTER THAN BEING CANONIZED THE WAY IT WAS

No, I'm not saying that mainstream media was ready for Korra and Asami to make out in front of the audience when the curtain was closing. No, I'm not saying that we needed more kisses and outwardly displays of affection. No, I'm also not saying it's Nickelodeon's fault that we didn't get that, because someone DID compile a resource a few years ago showing how Nickelodeon was actually pretty surprisingly progressive by even featuring documentaries and stories about kids coming out and pro-LGBT content in order to encourage young kids to accept themselves and each other as they are. Something Disney didn't do. Something I suspect Cartoon Network also didn't do. Hence, Nickelodeon might not have greenlit a fullblown Korrasami romance due to the complications of parents being twitchy and harebrained about the way cartoons are "indoctrinating" their children, but if Bryke had taken this concept seriously since day 1, I honestly don't think Nickelodeon would have responded to it remotely as badly as people think they might have.

Seriously, Asami being an equalist was an old concept they had for the character and it would have been AMAZING. Better redemption arc than ANYTHING the rest of the franchise ever did. I would have loved everything about it and I probably would have been shipping Korrasami like FedEx if Korra had been the one to give equalist Asami a chance to do better, to be her friend, even though Asami did all the things she did. It would have been a million times more powerful as a concept than ANYTHING LOK put forward.

But then they scrapped that concept and we wound up with what feels like a half-finished story when it comes to Asami. Korra and Asami's interactions largely take place in Book 3, where they finally start feeling more like they're friends... but look at any shonen anime, and tell me you cannot write a story, a friendship, between two characters of the same sex and inject it with as much romantic subtext as possible. Look at Naruto, where the whole lifeforce of the show was the relationship between two boys who were friends, rivals and everything they could possibly be, as they grew older and their bond continued to be what basically motivated them to do just about everything they ever did. Naruto was a huge story, insanely popular in a country with a generally terrible relationship with anything to do with homosexuality... and yet this manga was published there, the anime featured two kisses between these two characters, even (admittedly, they're not intended to be romantic but comedic), and it still went on to be one of the most successful anime and manga of all time. How, exactly, does anyone justify that Korra and Asami get like 3 palpable scenes of lead-up to a romantic relationship when there's so much content out there in media that features what feels like build-up for a romance WITHOUT going into romantic territory at all? It's really absurd to me. Korra and Asami could have had SUUUUUCH a good friendship, absolute goals friendship, with really fun dynamics... and they just didn't because the show was constantly sleeping on Asami and making her a satellite for every other character (Mako, her dad, Korra, hell, maybe even Varrick).

So. Korrasami deserved better. This ship is not bad, objectively speaking, and fic writers have done marvels with it. Canon dropped the ball with it SO HARD that I don't understand how people still can't have a more critical view of it. A fair number of people identified the "Korrasami is canon" move for the pandering it was, for the shield against criticism that it was, because ultimately, Bryke pretended their whole story was about which ship was going to be canon and effectively distracted EVERYONE from discussing that, oh no, Korra's development MAKES NO SENSE! :'D She got NOWHERE! She achieved NOTHING OF VALUE! :'D she just responded and reacted to everything else that had agency, decided THEY were right in the end and sulked about how bad she was at her job. Korra's growth is just... backwards, damn it. It's just wrong. We didn't see her coming even CLOSE to achieving her potential, if anything I'd argue she constantly did WORSE. And the show constantly pretends she's doing better!

*SIGH*

My conclusion about Korra's growth is a very depressing one. I've recently talked with a friend about another character from another franchise whose personal arc makes no sense. Upon discussing that, I kind of came up with a term that might fit the kind of character arc Korra went through. If this concept already exists, I take no credit for it... but what Korra went through is not a growth arc:

It's a humiliation arc.

This isn't about turning a character humble when she was haughty, it isn't about turning a character selfless when she was selfish... it's about humiliating her at every turn until she's virtually a husk of who she was at first. She gained everything she THOUGHT she wanted when she started out, things that were pretty shallow, all in all, but the tragedy of the character is that she actually never learned what she truly did want. She never understood who she was, and upon getting "what she wanted", she feels like something isn't right. Something is missing. She has all the approval of all her friends, all her mentors adore her, even her enemies think she's SO COOL, she has learned all four elements, spiritbending, metalbending, the Avatar State...! And yet she feels hollow. She knows her journey isn't over, worse yet, she HOPES it isn't... because the person she is, right now, is not who she ever hoped to be. She got "everything she wanted," at a cost she still didn't manage to understand: the cost was her true identity. The cost was her innermost self, the person she thought she'd find at the end of her journey and then she never did. The cost was her happiness, her enthusiasm for life, everything that made her worth rooting for: all of it is gone, and all the rewards, then, are meaningless because she can't even rejoice in her successes without constantly thinking she's a failure.

Hence... a humiliation arc. Why? To please people who hated Korra and compel them to watch as the character they have a hateboner for gets thrown under every proverbial bus the showrunners and writers could come up with. Zuko? Redemption arc. Aang? A solid growth arc. But Korra? Nope, she needs to be humiliated instead. That's where it's at when you're writing female characters, of course :')

Ultimately, LOK is full of wasted potential. Korra is a great example of it, not the only example, but still a great one. I genuinely, unironically loved this character when I first met her, and now I outright told Netflix to stop recommending the show to me because I don't care to revisit it, ever. Korra had so much potential as a character, her world and her setting also had a ton of potential, but everything got completely fucked over by a bunch of mediocre villains, all in all, who were completely sure they were great, and who convinced a LOT of people that they were, and suddenly Korra isn't the protagonist of her own story at all: every villain is more important to the plot of her story than she is. How does this make sense for her character? Why would this be the story we wanted to see? It flat out isn't, at all, at least for me.

So, in conclusion... Korra should have been better. Korra DESERVED better. Korrasami did, too. We could have had the greatest sequel to a pretty damn great TV show already... and we didn't because Bryke spent more time suffering over how to make people like their show than actually thinking about what they were trying to achieve with it. There's no purpose to it. People can talk all they want about Korra's spiritual arc but ultimately, that arc doesn't exist. There's no such thing as a spiritual arc because the last thing Korra learned in all this nonsense was anything spiritual. She never took long enough to really think ANYTHING through, and when she actually had that time (as in, her two years running around the world and escaping from everything), she didn't use it for anything other than struggling to go right back to who she used to be as a fighter. There were zero thoughts given to everything else.

This girl had it in her to be the greatest female protagonist we'd seen in media in who knows how long. She could be a symbol of female empowerment DONE RIGHT. Instead, she's everything done wrong. She's storytelling done wrong. And it's not at all her fault as a concept, as a character... it's, as always, a problem caused by writers with no sense of direction and very amateurish concepts of what storytelling needs to be. Nobody needed to be told Aang was great every ten minutes, the kid outright was going to be set to boil in oil in one episode because a village hated the Avatar and he, being the hopeless dork he is, was ready to face that until providence (or a gang of rhinos, rather) saved his ass at the very last moment xD Meanwhile, LOK is permeated, ALL of it, with people constantly reassuring Korra of what a talented powerful woman she is. Is that what strong female characters are? People with no confidence, who constantly lose more of it, who are humiliated by circumstances they can't ever overcome but then told "no no no, you're really strong and brave and the best!" and that's it? Really?

Korra may be one of the coolest fighters in the Avatarverse. Korra may be one of the coolest concepts in the Avatarverse. But Korra was never allowed to find out whoever the hell she was beyond being a super cool fighter and the Avatar. To this day, I wager, she has no idea. And to this day, her creators surely still think they did right by her when the reality of the matter could not be more different. She deserved better is what I say and what I will always say, and I really wish she could have been allowed to shine in a much more organic way than by turning into a giant Megazord and killing her own relative. Unfortunately, her backwards journey, instead of building her up into greatness, was hellbent on destroying her, and so we find ourselves with a completely demolished, heartbroken and helpless girl in the place of the hopeful, enthusiastic, innocent and charming one we met when the first episode aired. Seriously... is this the journey of a strong, young woman growing into her own? Is that all we have to look forward to? Not the silent, subtle peace Aang experiences at the end of his own story... but the life-shattering misery Korra had to face over and over again until she lost herself even more, despite she never even knew who she was?

It'll never be fair. It'll never be right. I love what I know Korra could have amounted to... but the potential she embodied was not explored in any way through the character we saw onscreen. And that's always going to be the ultimate tragedy in that story: Korra should have been MORE.

#futuristicbelieverjellyfish #oh boy I took forever with this one #I'm sorry #but I have too much to say :> #guess that's the flip side of not talking about LOK in general x'D #when someone brings it up I just start and don't stop #anyway #I hate that I have such a conflictive relationship with Korra's character #I really wish I didn't #but I stand by everything I say here #it's my personal opinion #so everyone's allowed to disagree #but I don't think it's really that wrong for me or anyone to say... #that she deserved better than the deal she got #soooo much better...

[codenamesazanka]

I wish i had the guts to start a ship war, but sadly, I don't. :(

But before any shipping - before Spinaraki - I'd already been super interested in discrimination metaphors in Boku no Hero Academia. It's part of what drew me to the series! And I was eager to explore it:

February 28, 2019, after we got early spoilers for Chapter 218, I was babbling my ideas about the bnha world and how people with different quirks would have different experiences.

March 4, 2019 had me posting more worldbuilding brainstorming. I wondered about mutant-type quirks and how they might be accommodated for, and note that it reminded more of an analogy to the social model of disability. But I had assumed that appearance-wise, everyone was used to everyone looking different.

I first posted Interference by Half on March 9, 2019, but I had already been researching stuff about Japan wayyy before then. I wanted to play with the worldbuilding, wanted to figure out how quirk discrimination in the story would look like:

Here's a passage from Chapter 2, which came about because I wondered if there would be discrimination in medical settings - that healthcare workers might be reluctant to treat someone with a 'dangerous' quirk.

(Chapter 1 has my Tenko being super fantasy-racist towards a heteromorphic character. 😰 This was before I knew it was a thing, that it might be considered rude to treat someone like an animal instead of a full human being asked on their animal-quirk appearance. Not proud of this! Gotta either retcon it or integrate and address in future chapters. And yes, I swear, I'll update it. I promise!!)

March 15, 2019, when My Villain Academia officially started, I remembered that, oof, Dabi had called Spinner a lizard last time we saw the League, and realized that it had been an microaggression. It was around then that Dabi started dropping down the ranks of my favs, and while that was the same day I coined Spinaraki, I hadn't been a Spinner stan nor hardcore Spinaraki fan yet.

April 27, 2019 - after Toga's chapter came out, with the revelation of quirk counseling, I finally started to think about drawing parallels between quirk discrimination and racism. I thought, perhaps quirk counseling was sorta like teaching the basics of tolerance and the issue of racism - everyone is equal, your quirk is your own, discriminating against people for their quirks is bad, don't do it. Yet Himiko knew and felt her quirk was was different, but she wasn't able to address it with anyone because they wanted her to be 'normal' - which reminded me of American race colorblindness (which I knew how it felt to be both perpetrator and victim of).

And from then on, the allegory had been stuck in my brain, churned around. When I thought about story concepts, I started to use my experiences and how I felt as basis to explore how bnha characters might feel. When I tried my hand at amateur, pseudo-sociology of the bnha world, I, in my opinion, decided that perhaps quirks doesn't fit one perfect analogy, but multiple ones - especially disability and racism - depending on context and situation. That while it reflect irl discrimination, it has also became something of its own - and at the root, it was examining social constructs that lead to hatred and oppression when people started treating it as immutable fact.

Accommodation of quirks is one facet of the overall issue; but judging people based on their appearances, declaring them not human, the fact that heteromorphic traits varied on a scale, the accepted standard of a typical, 'normal' appearance - I thought, hey, that parallels racism.

This is all my observations and ideas, of course, but I did not randomly woke up one day and decided to related heterormorphic-discrimination to racism for shits and giggles. I've put thought into it, I've researched stuff related to it, I've applied my own experiences to it, and I've connected it to my interest of diverse experiences in fiction - all carefully and over the past two, almost three years. Maybe this is poor use of my time; maybe my conceptualization of this is completely stupid, fine; but I have never treated this subject as trivial, and I have never dove into this for the sake of a ship or ship war. Like I said before, fantasy and sci-fi explorations of discrimination have always interested me, ever since I was a child look at the books in my middle school library, wondering why everything so was simplistically white.

I'm not trying to trivialize anyone's experiences - I'm offering my own take in a fandom where people ship Dabi with Spinner, people have asked me to write fluffy friendship fics of Dabi and Spinner, and though I've never said this, it's brought me great discomfort to see people dismissing the attitude Dabi has - and not even finding a way to have him examine and change himself - to put him with Spinner to make a harmonic found family thing for their 'aw' needs. Not that I'm telling people it's horrible of them to ship Dabi/Spinner - I know my take emphasizes the differences between them, and others won't see it that way. I just... wish I could've share my thoughts, without needing to put up my experiences for public consumption just so people would stop saying I'm a brainrotted, childish racist.

Anyways, I'm examined the evidence. 'Quirkist' is too board a term to specifically identify the heteromorphic-discrimination Spinner faces; while 'heteromorphphobe or heteromorphobic' is is too long and possibly too easily read as heterophobe. Dabi's a fantasy-racist.

#nalslastworkingbraincell #I need a tag for this discourse #so my good followers can block it #and to record this shitfest #dumdum debacle

[dany36]

officially done with tales of zestiria!! overall, i really enjoyed the game and i'm glad i finally sat down and played it. more junk thoughts below.

so it's definitely not as bad as i had heard people say it was. i was really surprised when i saw just how much of a bad rep this game gets, but...i can definitely see some things as to why people don't like it... one of the things i had heard was that there was barely any character development in the game, and i agree with that. i was 35ish hours in when suddenly people were already talking about going into the final battle and i was like...what?! no sub-story about rose or eizen or lilah that goes more into their past/characters like sheena in tos or something?? i guess we did get more into edna with that sidequest about eizen (it was nice seeing her show emotions for once!), but other than that, i really didn't feel like the game focused on ANYONE else at any point in the story. they just sort of get introduced into your party and are there to help sorey in his quest.

speaking of sorey, i REALLY didn't care for his character at all. i think he's the only one where i was super apathetic towards in terms of character and personality. even zaveid, who i thought i was going to dislike because of how annoying i found him in berseria, grew on me and learned to like him. i don't know, i guess when i compare him to other protagonists in the tales of games i've played, he really is the most forgettable of them all. like, when he "sacrifices" himself and goes in a sleep slumber, i felt no emotion whatsoever. as soon as i got rose in my party, i switched to using her as my main (which never happens lol i'm boring and usually stick to main characters as my Player 1--emil, lloyd, luke, velvet, dude with the purple hair in vesperia for the amount i played in the game) cus i was just like wow give me someone more interesting PLEASE. so, sorry to sorey fans (if there are any) but to me he's one of the most boring aspects of the game...and he's the damn shepherd!

and continuing on that point, i think the plot in this tales game is also probably the weakest one out of the ones i've played (weak main character, weak plot). the game starts off with the simple premise that sorey is the shepherd and he must get rid of the Lord of Calamity, and...that's pretty much it. in other tales games, you start off thinking your objective is A, but then as you journey along, a plot twist occurs and you realize now that objective A really was just a small task in what is your true objective. Something like this never happens in the game, so the pace just pretty much stays the same throughout the entirety of the game. sure, there are some cool moments (rose's introduction and her learning to armatize will forever be my favorite), but they are scattered out and about and honestly in this game i can't really remember something as impacting as luke sinking that one city (haven't played tota in a while lol) or palmacosta being destroyed in tos or velvet finding out the truth about her brother.

but anyway, the rest of the cast, i absolutely loved, so it's truly a shame that they were stuck in a sort of forgettable plot. i already talked about edna and rose being my favorites, but lilah (that scene with the oregami...OOF...OOF!!!!) and zaveid are cool too. alisha is barely in the main game, but it was great seeing more of her in the DLC and showing her struggle of what she wants to do (her combat also seems cool for the couple of fights but i had to stick with rose...sorry!). i only wish we could have had more skits showing the party interacting with one other. i don't know if it's just me but i really felt like there were barely any skits in this game, which is sad because most of the cast is enjoyable and it's a shame we didn't get to see them talk with each other in skits more!

i had seen people say that it's best to play zestiria and then berseria so you can catch all the references in berseria, but...to be honest, i don't think i would have enjoyed zestiria as much if i had played it first! prime examples are the eizen sidequest and the sidequest where you FREAKING FIND MAGILOU'S TOMB. like...hello??? when i got to the eizen sidequest, i 100% would not have given as much of a shit on killing that dragon if i hadn't played berseria beforehand. it really made me sad knowing the tragic ending that eizen wound up having. and finding magilou's grave being guarded by her friend also broke my heart. like...seriously!!! that was something that i also would not have given another thought if i didn't know who magilou was. so yeah i don't regret playing berseria first since i actually think it enhanced the experience a bit more.

gameplay-wise, i really enjoyed it! took me a while to get the hang of the equipment system, but once i did, chaining combos with Rose was a blast. i also really enjoyed how easily you could change party members (unlike in tob where it costs 1 BG!) in the middle of a fight. and MAN i never get tired of seeing those sweet, sweet mystic artes animations. <3 <3 <3 it increases any character's coolness factor three-fold.

my main gripe in berseria was the terrible dungeon design. at the beginning, zestiria did a better job at putting in puzzles in dungeons so as to not make the same mistake that berseria did, but then...towards the second half of the game...it was pretty much all berseria-like dungeons of endless same-looking rooms with endless enemies (the DLC dungeon being a prime example of this). which is honestly just terrible and boring, but at least the gameplay makes the fights seem not AS tedious...

i also felt like zestiria did a better job with the music than berseria did. i can hardly recall any song i liked in berseria (there's like two or three i'd put in my vgm collection), but for zestiria, i'm gonna need to hunt down quite a few. also, i could actually remember the names of the towns/locations and what they looked like. in berseria, i felt like i was going town after town but for the life of me i couldn't remember at ALL what we did there in the first place. i really just felt like i was passing through each town not learning much about the place, but in zestiria i really got a feel of each town, so that was nice!

oh, and the ending i felt was...kind of weak lol especially cus...no one talked at all??? it was so weird haha in tos, tota, dotnw, and tob we have the characters at least saying SOMETHING in the ending but in toz it was just...animations and that's it lol. so glad we got a DLC cus i would have been PISSED seeing just rose leave off like that without saying a word and then...they show us her GRAVE??? i always think "wow i wish they would show us how the future of (insert favorite characters here) are like!! :)" but seeing rose's grave made me so sad (as well as eizen's and magilou's) like nononono you do NOT show my favorite characters just DEAD!! >:'v but anyway, yeah i mean it was an ok ending but nothing that made me feel with a great gap in my heart like tob's or tos's did. like mikleo seeing sorey again at the end? cool. did it make me feel something like when tear sees luke again at the end of tota? sadly, no. :(

and last but not least, the DLC. i mean, i absolutely LOVED seeing the girls in the team going out on their own little adventure and just interacting and talking with each other!!! lailah + edna + alisha + rose...who doesn't love that?? we got to see more of rose being the badass that she is and uh yeah her and alisha? totally gay for each other...like that last scene before they kill the final boss?? just A+++ material (except that terrible last dungeon AND the HORRID design of the last bosses??? dragons with purple bright titties so that the player will know they're FEMALE dragons??? LMAO)

oh wow i wrote more than i thought i would but uh yeah. all in all: DEFINITELY NOT a bad game, has a great cast of interesting and fun characters (except sorey) but sadly the game doesn't delve too deep into them as in other tales game, DLC was a fun addition to see more of who i thought was going to be a greater protagonist in the main story, but overall when compared to other tales of games, the weak plot puts it second-to-last in my list of tales games i've played. would i play it again? definitely :)

WHEW, ok, now off to watch the anime!! <3

#junk #tales of zestiria #toz #wellp that was a lot haha #forgot to say that i really don't like the intro song to this game!! #tos's orchestrated intro still the best hands down no i will not take criticisms on that thank you

[sainadazai]

Chapter 5

^^^

A/n Hey I drew a lil doodoo drawing of y/ns suit

So yeah, this was a quick one when I was bored. Maybe Ill do more art for this book and better art later. I also apologize for the body type being on the side of thin- curvy.

I simply drew the common body shape for MHA's animated style, and then made the thighs a lil thicker because I felt like a garter deserves some nice thighs . If its not your body type, or it offends you, I apologize, and I can take it off this story if it bothers anyone.

Anyway..

-

On the way out of school that day, you could faintly hear the quarrel of two boys from your class, the ones whose fight earlier scared Ojiro. They seemed to have so much in common, and yet it pitted against them. They needed a wake up call, but it wasn't yours to give. The yelling was hard to just walk by, but you did your best to tune it out, you'd ease dropped enough earlier when you watched them put their hearts into their battle on the screen.

Still, your mind was preoccupied, so you walked past them easily, not even sparing a glance. Eyes stuck to the ground in concentration. Just trying to follow the little scrapes and grooves in the sidewalk you stood on.

Todoroki said thank you, after you apologized. As if he'd never heard it before, that's what his voice sounded like. Like no one ever noticed that fear he had in those heterochromatic eyes. Whatever happened to him, stuck with him. Bothered him, even. You could just tell.

Why hadn't you said something more? Or maybe all you said was all he neede-

"Oof!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't see you," He did see you, he saw you from meters away, looking at the ground. Perfect time for him to execute his plan.

You looked up from your spot on the ground, having fallen over. There stood Shoto Todoroki, in all his deadpan glory, looking down at you. He wasn't offering a hand so you did your best to stand on your own while keeping your underwear hidden. The boy didn't seem like the type who would look, but you never know.

"Ah, don't worry, um, its my fault anyways." You had been waiting for the chance to talk to him, but now he stood in front of you, there was nothing you felt comfortable saying. Earlier in class you totally embarrassed yourself in front of him, and then scared him. In a mean way too, in a trauma way.

"I don't really see how it's your fault."

So he did want to talk to you? He could have simply left after the brief apologies, but he stayed, protesting your claim. That and the privacy, made it much easier to respond to the boy.

"Well, I was staring at the ground, so not really the best way to walk through a place where anyone else could be." You kept your gaze at his shoes, to prevent from overthinking and getting flustered. This was supposed to be the beginning of a great friendship.

"Hm, you always look at the ground?" He pondered seriously, as you used his voice to block out the sounds of yelling a couple hundred meters away.

What was he implying with that question? Did he mean it as an insult, or was he just curious? He always seemed so sincere with his words, blunt but soft. It was strange to you, but it felt trustworthy.

"What do you mean?"

"You always seem to be looking at the ground, like in the quirk assessment test, and when you were beating me earlier. Why do you do that, L/n?" Todoroki took a step forward, standing one meter away from you.

"I guess to distract myself?" You were guessing out loud, but again something about it felt okay. Like you could say whatever you wanted and he would still just be there, curious eyes staring down at you.

"What are you distracting yourself fr-"

"You were super cool in the training earlier!" You almost yelled at him, not feeling like describing the eyes that felt so prying on you every time you spoke. Similarly not wishing to relive all the years where talking got you beat up in alleys on your walk home, and black eyes began to mark your face more commonly than not. It's not like that would be important to him, at least your wounds healed.

He had that trauma, whatever it was, constantly screaming at him in the mirrors or reflections of himself. A scar that widens his stoic eyes at the mere presence of heat, something that must hurt him very badly. Your childhood bullies are nothing to him, so it's best to talk about anything else.

"Oh, um thank you, L/n, but you were the one who won after all. I won't let you best me again, you know."

"Oh, I um, I'm not sure that win was fair.." You rubbed the back of your neck, hiding your embarrassment for your actions earlier. It didn't seem to cross your mind that what you did was actually what you were supposed to do. All you could think of was the look in his eyes that you put there, and you didnt ever wanna see it again.

Todoroki could sense that feeling of guilt in you, he'd felt it plenty of times before. Alone in his room when he dreams of his mothers face, sitting at his desk at school, thinking of all of the times he lost control of his quirk as a kid, in training. He learned to see it in others, you felt like it was an unfair win because you had scared him. That was your job, though, wasn't it? Why were you so upset at your success? He didn't understand.

"Did you break a rule, or something?"

"No.."

"Then how could you have cheated?"

"I just.. Look whatever happened to you eye-" you stopped as you noticed him stiffen. It wouldn't be nice to make him relive his trauma either, so what were you meant to say?

"I just shouldn't have used heat, I could tell that was a burn scar and it was a cruel thing to do." you looked down at the ground feeling like the shittiest hero in the world.

"You were playing the villain, though, weren't you?" He spoke again, seeming to have regained his stoic presence and stone face.

"I guess I was, but I'm here to become a hero. A hero wouldn't do something like that."

"Maybe they would." He started talking with certainty that disobeyed his use of the word 'maybe'.

"Huh?"

"Not all heroes are what you think they are, L/n." He looked you dead in the eyes, the intensity of his aura growing and it almost felt like you were supposed to cower in fear. Still, you held your ground, despite now being only inches away from him.

"Sounds like you speak from experience," You tilted your head becoming more outwardly spoken and allowing your thoughts to exit your mouth.

"That's a topic for another day, goodnight, L/n." With that, he turned away and walked stiffly out of U.A.'s gates. Leaving a million questions to run through your mind.

Did this make you friends now? When would that other day come? Had you just eternally ruined your chances at being a hero? Was he right? Were some heroes bad, like you? Were you bad? There were too many questions for you to answer yourself. So you settled from going home and making some dinner with your parents, you missed them, after having to be friends with other kids all day. They would be your comforting escape from highschool, or well, two days worth of highschool.

-

When you arrived at the barrier-like gates of your school the next morning, you were rushed with reporters. They were men and women, tall and short, circling around you all at once. You could hear the sweet and kind voice of Uraraka from afar, but you couldn't see her over the swarm of reporters. It was terrifying.

"What's it like having all might as your teacher?"

"Is the hero course majorly improved by the symbol of peace's presence?"

"Why did All Might become a teacher?"

"Have you done any training with the number one pro?"

Being here almost felt like being in your own mind. Swarmed with questions you don't have the answers too, or the confidence to answer them if you do. It was overwhelming, the world began to spin around you and your palms grew sweaty. E/c eyes shot in every direction to find an escape but they couldn't, you were trapped. Then, little black dots started to crowd up your vision like ants in your eyes and you fell unconscious.

The brown haired girl who had been happily indulging reporters noticed your fall and ran to you, grabbing hold of your arm. She wasn't really sure what had happened, but she decided to just take you into class with her. The reporters busying themselves with other arriving students.

Ochako took it upon herself to take hold of your backpack and drag your limp body by it, all the way up the hill and into the buildings of U.A. She wouldn't admit it, due to being a bit shy, but you caught her eye on the first day of school, and she'd been meaning to befriend you. Unlike the group of girls who she noticed had adopted you, Ochako spent her first few days with Deku and Iida. Securing herself in a nice little group with them.

However, you were very pretty, and adorably shy, and she really wanted to be your friend. Then after your awesome performance in yesterday's training, she was set on it. This was a great opportunity for her to help someone out, and make a new friend!

Strange looks came from every direction as the short, pink-cheeked girl dragged your seemingly lifeless form through the halls. They were both concerned for you, and confused at her calmness in the situation. However, no one spoke on it, fearing a hero class student might have some weird reason to do a strange thing like this.

Well, no one until Deku. He had been excited to greet his friend until he noticed her unusual baggage.

"Hi Urarak-Is that L/n?!" His eyes shot wide and he almost jumped back.

She looked down to you, and then back up at the freckled boy, "Oh, yeah" rubbing her neck she added, "She sorta passed out by the reporters and I couldn't just leave her there!"

"Oh my god! Is she okay? Should we take her to recovery girl? What if she has iron deficiency? Did the reporters zap her with some sort of quirk?"

"Deku...Deku...DEKU!"

"Wahh!?Yes?"

"She is fine, I think she just got overwhelmed." Uraraka tried to calm him. She wasn't all that sure about your condition herself, but it didn't seem crazy like Midoriya was implying. You just looked panicked. Her head turned as soon, Todoroki walked up to 1.A. 's door.

"Oh, hello L/n.." he looked down at you, kicked your side a bit to check if you were dead or not. Honestly, he wasn't very surprised to see you passed out in the halls, having assumed you were met with the reporters as well. Todoroki couldn't blame you for falling unconscious, he wished he could have, too.

At his nudge, you stirred awake, and then all at once, shot up to your feet defensively. "A-All Mights cool, okay! He's fine, he's just fine. Please I-" Then your eyes cleared and you were no longer in front of the school. The people surrounding you were no longer reporters, but your classmates.

"Oh, um, hi..guys?"

"I already said hello to you, L/n."

"While I was unconscious?"

"Yes."

"How does tha-"

"Get outta my way you losers!" The puff of blonde hair and rabies stormed through the halls. Back slumped like an angry old man, scowl resting on his face. He was not excited for school after yesterday, and those damn reporters made it worse, bringing up the sludge monster incident. So imagine the rage when the annoying girl who placed just behind him on almost everything was at the door, looking stupid, and nervous, and in his way.

"L/n! You better get out of that doorway!"

You squeaked, not because bakugou's empty threats scared you, but because if you defied him, that meant speaking words. He seemed pretty good at words, so you didn't want to test it. His voice was also way too loud for someone who had just woken up from what you thought was a near death experience.

People were scary.

Soon enough, however, everyone was settled in class. You, in your seat next to Todoroki, who didn't seem quite as cold as the day prior. Not to say his face was any less stone-like or his voice was any less monotone, but the aura around him wasn't as intense. That comforted you as Aizawa began the days homeroom period.

"Decent work on yesterday's combat training, you guys. I saw the video feeds and went over each of your team's results. Bakugou, you're talented, so don't sulk like a child about your loss, okay?"

Said boy huffed a breath "Yeah, whatever."

"And midoriya.."

He continued talking about how Midoriya has to break himself to use his quirk, but you tuned it out because the memory of seeing it was pretty gross.

"L/n, your battle with Todoroki was risky, he was less than a foot away from a victory by the time you took action, additionally, you're going to have to get those nerves under control. We can't have you apologizing every time you use your quirk. It's a waste of air."

His call out of your name was enough to shock your eyes open, but him criticizing your work in front of others? That was terrifying. You knew he was right, about everything, it was his job to be, after all. Still, it hurt to hear, considering it wasn't like you intended on being shy. Your body just clamped up and started to sweat when other people came around. It got super hot and loud and scary until you muttered an apology, nothing about it was voluntary. If anything, you really wanted to be extroverted and say what's on your mind and be bold. The world just seemed to have different plans, you supposed.

"Sor- I mean, uh, yes sir!"

Todoroki shot you a side glance , internally a bit proud at your ability to stop the apology that rested on your tongue. He was having an internal battle with himself about why he wanted it and why he didn't. The argument points being; it's adorable when you're shy, it's kind to apologize - versus - you being confident yesterday was arousing, and making quick progress is a sign of intelligence. A tough battle for the young boy's mind.

"Today we'll be choosing a class representative. Hurry up and choose before class ends." Aizawa zipped himself away in his sleeping bag and the class was left confused. Until you suppose everybody wanted to be class rep. Then there was an abundance of screaming and begging. From the red haired boy, the pink skinned girl, the kind girl from lunch. The whole class thought they would be worthy leaders. You heavily disagreed.

From your experience in previous schooling, class representatives were meant to be somebody smart, strong minded, compassionate, a good leader. These were just a ton of kids begging for attention, really, you aspired to be just like them.

Aizawa was right, though, you needed to get the whole shy thing under control, and fast if you wanted people here to view you as a threat. So you decided you probably wanted momo as class rep and slumped in your seat to strategize ways to be more bold.

While you were zoning off in your seat, Iida took charge of the situation, you guessed it was always going to come down to a vote, but good on him for 'coming up with it.'

"Hey, L/n."

"Wha?! Oh todoroki, um, yes?"

"Who are you choosing?"

"Um, Yaoyorozu.."

"Why?"

"Well, she is smart, and kind, and probably a good leader, so"

"Okay. Me too then."

His words didn't make sense to you. Was he agreeing with you just because of something you said?vIt couldn't be. Maybe he was insisting that he, too, was a good leader. That would make more sense than agreeing with you.

"You're a good leader too?"

"No. I will also vote for yaoyorozu."

"B-b-but...WHY!?!" your eyes widened in shock as you whisper-yelled at him.

"You don't want me to?" he asked, still in deadpan.

"I-well I do, B-but um, nevermind." It was better to return your gaze to yo[ur desk. He would think you are weird if you said something about it being because of you. He probably just also saw those traits in momo, it had nothing to do with you.

-

There were almost tears in your eyes. It felt as if the whole world was rooting against you, cheering for your failure. Eyes were watching and glaring, it felt like it'd be better to just curl up into a ball on the floor. Be so small they cant see you anymore, then maybe the universe would stop hating you so much.

They were out of soba for lunch. You would rather starve.

Next to you, on the way to some random table, momo was complaining about how Midoriya was president. She didn't understand what he really could do, being that he was so shy to attention. He reminded her of you, but she would never say that. It would make you nervous, like you and he were competitors, and he is so much nicer than you.

"Hey! Over here!" Ashido called to the two of you, waving her hand frantically.

"As I was saying, he does show some signs of good leadership, but im worried he is too nervous right now."

"Mm, yeah.." Your hand came up to wave at said boy, who had been making an uncomfortable eye-contact with you for quite some time.

Over at Midoriya's table, the conversation about pros had shifted to you. As Iida was explaining his family business, or hero-business, it led him to the memory of having been told a story about you. About your dad, to be precise.

"Yes. And I dont think I'm the only descendant of a pro in our class."

"What?!' Ochako screamed, eyes wide and shaking in excitement.

His gaze flickered to where you walked slowly next to a rambling black haired girl. No lunch in hand and mind seemingly elsewhere.

"Yes. I recall the story of one rising pro from years ago, under the name of Magneto. He was almost in the top ten ranks after less than a year of hero work, and climbed quickly. His private life was kept under wraps but his last name was L/n. That, and the metal quirk lead me to believe that the L/n of our class is his relative in some way." Iida presented the information with less gestures than he used for his own family, but more like he was solving a mystery, one he seemed quite proud to have deciphered.

"Oh I know Magneto, he retired around the same time All Might got famous." Uraraka added.

They were both quite indifferent at this information, but Midoriya was thinking a million miles a second. He knew exactly why your relative retired. In the battle where All Might saved over a hundred people, and became famous, the battle he'd watched a thousand times as a kid, Magneto was injured, along with his pregnant wife. It caught the news a couple days later and he had written down everything.

So was this hero your father? Uncle? Cousin? Is this how you got to be so strong? He was so busy feeling in awe of you he began to stare. Lost in the gate of your stride, and the stillness of your lips, how they were pursed in a straight line as if you disagreed with something. Those e/c eyes were however lost in thought. Until you spoke something quietly and looked up at him, holding eye contact.

He blushed slightly at being caught and decided he should just wave, and you waved back.

From the other side of the table, Todoroki could hear everything. He could acknowledge that you were strong, with or without a famous dad, but he wondered if the pro-hero dad thing was the same for you as it was for him, He'd hope not, he assumed not, too. Even if your life wasn't what he had thought it was, you always smiled so brightly. When you thought no o[ne was looking, you'd smile at Midoriya's success, and the fighting of the kids in front of you. Sometimes he even caught you smiling to yourself in class, as you just wrote down some English questions.

That smile didn't feel like it came from struggle, or masking pain, it felt genuine. He found that he really liked that.

"Warning Level 3 Security Breach!" 

#todoroki fluff #shoto torodoki #todoroki shoto x reader #mha todoroki #todoroki x reader #mha fanfiction #mha fluff #momo yaoyozoru #yaomomo #momo x reader

[ask-phyllis]

Hiya Phyllis! So I have kind of a problem with this dude? So like around two months ago, we started chatting (we've been in the same discord server for a while but hadn't talked because there were like 30 people in it and I only joined because of a friend) ANYHOO. Ofc, I developed a crush because why wouldn't I :/ but I wanted to like form a good friendship first because that can help you get to know someone and all and I'm running out of room to type hold on

Discord dude anon part three oof. Anyway. It honestly feels like im "carrying" the friendship on TOP of our conversations. But we've played animal crossing together online(we live in seperate countries which is a problem ik) and we have discussed a few rather personal things so it isn't if we're just acquaintances ya know. But he's mentioned before how barely anyone in our discord server talks to him(he doesn't talk to them much either though so I'm like??) This is gonna be a part four I'm sorry

Discord dude part four: so yeah he complains that he's lonely and no one talks to him, yet he doesn't talk to the others and! I've! Been! Talking! To! Him! Ik I said I had a crush but goddamn it's hard enough trying to be his friend when he puts maybe 2% into the friendship? And that's being generous. Idk I'm just kind of depressed about it but I think he'd think I was overreacting or something if I brought it up. It's been a week since we've chatted and he's sent nothing. Not even a hello :/

(not sure if part 2 got lost, this is all i received)

He’s afraid of being rejected, so he waits for other people to come to him. That doesn’t work very well of course because we all need to make a little effort with people in order to hold their attention. So until he learns this he’s going to continue this cycle. 

There’s something universally attractive about someone who won’t give you the time of day (I think we’ve all been there) but ask yourself if it’s serving you to dote on someone who isn’t noticing or appreciating your efforts. He’s making it clear that he isn’t at a place in his life where he can give much of anything back to you, so think about if this is a friendship you want to continue.