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it-happened-one-fic · 10 months

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Thats How You Know - Leona

Author Notes: This fic is actually for the @briarvalleyarchives "Anthems of Old" event. It was inspired by its namesake song, "That's How You Know" from the Disney film Enchanted. It's surprisingly nerve-wracking to be posting a fic for an event, but I had fun writing thing and had to curb the urge to not just rip of the scene from the film. As per usual, reader is gender neutral. I hope you enjoy.

Type: Fluff/ romantic/ gender-neutral reader/ sfw

Word Count: 1782

“You know he likes you, right?” Ruggie had leaned over to look you in the eye better as he voiced his question, but you looked away as soon as his words registered.

His question drew a sigh from your lips that didn’t quite match the odd smile on your face as you kept your silence. You weren’t quite able to answer his question, even as Ruggie frowned at your silence.

The truth was that, in a lot of ways, you felt like Leona did like you just as much as you liked him. But he never really did anything to show it if he did, which left you with questions.

How could you really know if he did like, much less love, you?

Despite what others said, you weren’t certain. You knew you liked him. After all, you’d taken to picking up on his interests, worries, and other such little tidbits that made up the individual that was Leona. They’d affected you, becoming interests and worries of your own.

What had started out as curiosity and wanting to get to know him better had swelled from there. You’d fallen in love with Leona. And while you knew that Leona didn’t hate you, the matter of romantic interest was….. Well, it was a whole other can of worms that you weren’t nearly as confident about.

Or at least you weren’t until recently.

It had started out simply enough, with a small note being left on your desk on top of a stack of books. The note itself was pinned in an elegant but largely unfamiliar hand and mentioned the upcoming practical magic test.

Something you knew you were going to flunk, what with your lack of ability to practice magic.

But after just a little bit of studying, it became clear that maybe you had a better chance of passing than you had thought.

The books in the mysterious stack handled the subject well, showing intensive instructions for how to draw an appropriate magic circle that would help you pass the test without having to actually use magic.

That wasn’t what really caught your attention, though. What caught your attention was the signature on the reverse side of the note, which you hadn’t found until you’d given it a closer inspection.

Elegant and small-lettered, the signature was barely noticeable but easily capable of causing a smile to appear on your face.

Leona Kingscholar.

You’d known he’d helped Ruggie get caught up with the rest of the school in terms of tutoring and having uniforms when he’d first come to NRC, but you’d never expected him to help you.

Perhaps he did care a bit more for your concerns and troubles than you’d thought….

You’d thanked the Savannaclaw housewarden after you’d passed the test, but he’d brushed off your gratitude with an almost trained ease.

“You help Jack out with his work, so if I give you stuff, I don’t have to tutor him myself,” A lazy smirk had spread across his features. He’d looked over his shoulder at you as he’d walked off, throwing a final comment back at you, “Less work for me that way.”

His words had caused you to frown slightly, but you shrugged them off. He wasn’t wrong after all. You and the other first-years often studied together to help each other with your problem subjects. If you could teach Jack things, then Leona wouldn't have to worry about it. Though you were pretty sure he’d never bothered with that in the past either.

But what followed the next day had you forgetting your previously dismissive thoughts.

You and Grim both stared down at the bright yellow flowers that greeted you from your doorstep. At odds with the otherwise dreary day, they smiled brightly up at you from the discolored wood of your porch. They were one of your favorite flowers from the ones you’d seen since coming to this world, simply due to how happy they looked.

You frowned at the blooms even as you knelt to collect them. They were tied with a rough cord, an oddly rugged touch to such a sweet sentiment.

You fingered the cord slightly before taking them inside to plop in a glass of water before heading off to the botanical garden for Potionology class.

Except when you at last reached the botanical garden, you froze. Staring at the familiar yellow flowers that greeted you, yet again, with smiling faces from alongside jaggedly cut stems that had no doubt been where your little bouquet had once resided.

It could have been a coincidence that Leona spent large amounts of time in the botanical garden where these pretty little flowers, that perfectly matched the color of yellow he wore on his dorm uniform, grew.

It was a color that was slowly becoming one of your favorites as the days wore on and was possibly one of the reasons you did like these flowers so much

Either way, the oddness of it all was enough to make you wonder and smile to yourself at the possibilities.

You were still smiling as you were chopping the potion ingredients and you almost missed the grin Ace was wearing when he leaned over closer, “So, anything interesting today?”

You frowned, immediately suspicious since you knew good and well that Ace didn’t bring those flowers when he’d just claimed they aggravated his allergies mere seconds ago.

His question, though, was incredibly fishy considering that getting a bouquet of flowers from an unknown sender was definitely an interesting start to your day.

“I got some flowers this morning…. Some of those yellow ones you said you were allergic to,” You eyed him skeptically, but he merely snorted.

“Ooh, got an admirer, have we, Prefect?” He bounced his eyebrows at you before laughing at your eye roll and continuing on.

“My day had a weird start too. First thing this morning, Deuce informed me that Jack apparently overheard Ruggie telling Leona that you couldn’t read minds.”

The redhead’s grin was sly now as he shouldered you playfully, “Weird, huh? Would’ve thought everyone knew that. After all, if you could read minds, you wouldn’t have needed those books to help you with the practical magic test, right?”

You blinked in surprise at the redhead, ignoring the teasing tone he used in favor of thinking about this new information.

The rest of class went by in a blur until Ruggie came trotting over, an exasperated expression on his face, “Y/n, hun, help a guy out?”

You sighed almost immediately at his wheedling tone but found yourself turning to face him anyway, “What is it, Ruggie?”

You were fully prepared for some sort of grand tale about how he had too many jobs and needed help running something to a class or that he’d found some sort of new couple deal and wanted to go on a fake date in the name of sales.

But it was none of those things. Instead, you were met with a sandwich being shoved into your hands, “Give this to Leona for me. I haven’t got the time, and he’s miffed with me anyway. You’re a real pal, bye!”

He was skittering away, waving with his signature snicker, before you even had a chance to object. You glanced Ace’s way only to be met with a rapid head shake, “Oh no, he gave that to you. You’re on your own, Prefect.”

The redhead backed away like you were carrying a bomb and quickly abandoned you to your newfound work. You rolled your eyes at both of the men’s dramatics but turned on your heel, striding towards where Leona always napped with a sandwich in hand. You had some questions you wanted to ask him anyway.

You stepped into the clearing to see him sitting there with some food already in front of him, causing you to frown at the sandwich in your hand.

He looked up at you with his tail flicking in an oddly energetic fashion behind him. Unlike you, he didn’t seem to be surprised in the slightest bit. In fact, he almost seemed amused by your confusion.

“About time you got here. I’d almost begun to suspect that Ruggie had somehow missed you,” His words were delivered with the customary smirk, and all of the various pieces snapped into place.

“So, the flowers were from you?” You grinned slightly as you sat down across from him and started unwrapping the sandwich in your hand, only to find that, rather than his preferred variety, it was your favorite kind of the sandwiches offered by the cafeteria’s deli. A rare luxury that you couldn’t usually afford.

Leona looked down at the food in front of him and, instead of answering your question, posed one of his own, “So, have you got an answer for Ruggie’s question yet?”

Your eyes widened slightly at his nonchalant question, and your mind went racing back to just a couple of days ago, when Ruggie had been questioning if you knew how Leona felt about you. “You heard him?”

Leona grinned outright at your shock, “Oh yeah, I heard the whole conversation.” He looked up at you, ears twitching almost pointedly as he leaned back. Totally relaxed despite your own embarrassment.

“You ought to pay better attention to your surroundings. Herbivores like you have to be careful if you don’t want someone catching you off guard.”

He was so smug, but you found yourself recovering from being flustered as a thought registered, “But that’s how you came to know how I felt. Right?”

He snorted before leaning forward, entering your personal space with a single easy motion that had your previous confidence failing you, “I already knew. You’d already proved that plenty of times.”

Mercifully, he leaned back, “So, have you got your answer?”

You found yourself smiling slightly at his question this time despite how pleased he seemed with himself.

Because of course you had your answer. After he’d done so much to prove that he did care and that he paid special attention to you, how could you not?

He’d known that you’d needed help on a test, that you liked those flowers in that specific color, and that you liked this sandwich. They were all little things, but those little things made up who you were. And he’d taken the time to do all of those things just to show you that he did care and did like you because he’d overheard Ruggie’s question and correctly interpreted your own concerns even though you hadn’t voiced them.

Paying attention to little things like that and taking the time to reassure you…. That's how you know that someone loves you.

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fishyfishyfishtimes · 6 months

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What Is and Isn't a Fish: an Essay and Guide by Fishyfishyfishtimes

A simplified list of the animals I discuss can be found here!

Hello folks! I created this post to have a kind of definitive essay/explanation of what is and isn't a "fish", starting with defining the term and going over animals that fit and don't fit the bill. As other fishblr artists, writers and educators must know too well, some people are confused about where this term begins and ends, mistaking other aquatic animals for fish. I have my fair share of arthropods and cnidarians as fish fact requests in my own askbox, heck, some years back a friend of mine asked me if clams were fish. The event that finally made me decide to write this was someone requesting that a fish-only account draw a crustacean, pondering to themselves if they count as fish.

I don't want to hold it against these people. It's impossible to know something when you've never been taught! So that's what I'm here to do, hopefully achieving a pretty correct and universal view ^^' If I make any mistakes please correct me. I'm learning all the same as everyone else is.

Definition of fish

Immediately, we run into a bit of a problem with the definition of fish. See, what the term "fish" means has fluctuated for centuries! For a long time, pretty much any animal that lived in water was a "fish" — I say "pretty much any" instead of "every" animal because for a long time sessile animals like sponges or corals were thought to be plants. This is why we have such remnants in our language like shellFISH, starFISH and jellyFISH, they lived in water so they were called such!

Occasionally these definitions would be changed for cultural convenience too. Many Christian churches take part in Lent, and in the Catholic church red and white meat is forbidden on Fridays and Ash Wednesday. In the Middle Ages, in my own country, Finland, this abstinence of red and white meat could last up to 140 days! To make fasting easier, many animals were labelled fish for convenience so they could be eaten as well. These newfound "fish" included seals, beavers and swans, pretty much just anything that was aquatic or semiaquatic in nature.

Nowadays just going off of looks or behaviour won't do, though. There has been much more of an effort to define fishes coherently based on their anatomy and phylogeny, which is great! Problem is, that's easier said than done: fishes are an extremely diverse group, and uh.. not really a single group, either. I'll show you:

As you can see from this heavily simplified phylogenic tree, fishes are not a singular group like, say, mammals are! The animals that we group under "fish" are actually a part of several distinct lineages of animals, some more closely related to us than each other. Heck, tetrapods, which include amphibians, reptiles*, and mammals, are fish themselves! Phylogenetically speaking. Our ancestors were lobe-finned fish, and, well, you never stop being the previous taxon even when you evolve into something else. If you try to exclude tetrapods, no such unified group as "fish" exists. Still, when discussing fish, we tend to want to avoid talking about every vertebrate ever and instead focus on the very specific aquatic ones we mean when we say "fish". This is why many definitions of the term "fish" still exclude tetrapods, even if we share a common fishy ancestor. "Fish" describes more of a lifeform than it does a clade, much like the term "worm"!

(*birds are reptiles! This could be a whole post in and of itself, but I'm not here to write about that. Someone else has most likely taken up the task!)

Hooray, it's definition time! As stated previously, fishes are an extremely diverse group of thousands of species, and what terms might apply to the Atlantic cod may not apply to the yellowfin tuna or giant mudskipper, let alone a Pacific lamprey! Encyclopedia.com defines a fish as "an ectothermic chordate that lives primarily in water and possesses a cranium*, gills that are useful virtually throughout life, and appendages (if present) in the form of fins". Encyclopedia Britannica notes that "the term fish is applied to a variety of vertebrates of several evolutionary lines", instead highlighting five classes. These five classes are left partly unspecified, but ones that are mentioned are jawless fish, cartilaginous fish and bony fish (which still includes tetrapods, however), and the two classes left can be assumed to be two classes of extinct fish. Wikipedia defines a fish as "an aquatic, craniate**, gill-bearing animal that lacks limbs with digits". Tim M. Berra, an academy professor and ichtyologist, defines fish as "poikilothermic***, aquatic chordate with appendages (when present) developed as fins, whose chief respiratory organs are gills and whose body is usually covered with scales".

(*cranium=upper part of the skull **craniate=an animal with a skull ***poikilothermic=an animal whose internal temperature varies considerably)

From these more or less detailed definitions we can gather many defining features for fish: a cranium-having chordate, primarily aquatic, gill-bearing and uses gills as their main respiratory organ, lacking any limbs with digits, instead having their limbs be in paired and unpaired fins when present. Most fish are also ectothermic, meaning their body temperature is determined by their environment, but some can heat up parts of their body or their entire body in the case of the opah. Most fish also have scales, but not all, just like how most fish are fully aquatic, but some like lungfish or mudskippers can spend considerable time out of the water. Such is the way of these magnificent and diverse animals!

Finally, with all this out of the way, we can get into...

What is a fish!

Here, I will be detailing animals that are fish! Well, at least the broadest strokes; there are more than 30 000 fish species and if I listed them all we'd be here all life. I shall instead go over the major classes and list, in short, some groups that belong in them.

Jawless fish (Superclass Cyclostomi)

Jawless fish are often a topic of debate, especially in matters of their relation to each other and to jawed vertebrates. Evidence seems to point to hagfish and lampreys being closest related to one another and to lampreys being more closely related to jawed vertebrates than to hagfish (which would make hagfish craniates but not vertebrates). In the phylogeny tree above I decided to portray hagfish and lampreys as a monophyletic group, as molecular studies and microRNA analysis seems to point to a monophylegic superclass. Please note that this could go either way, though.

Jawless fish is a group containing two extant fishes, hagfish (class Myxini) and lampreys (order Petromyzontiformes)! Jawless fish are more "primitive" than other groups, for example both lack true vertebrae and scales. Still, they both have craniums and gills and they are aquatic, and so they have earned their place among fish!

Cartilaginous fish (class Chondrichthyes)

Surprisingly, I've found that this group has a lot of confusion surrounding it. I have received many a request confirming if sharks are fish, or asking if I'd cover a shark "even if it's not a fish". So I'll say it now: good news, sharks are indeed fish! So are their cousins, rays, skates and chimaeras, also known as ghost sharks! All of these fish have a primarily cartilaginous skeleton, tooth-like dermal denticles and lack gill covers and a swim bladder. Out of all the sharks, I also want to highlight that the whale shark, despite its confusing name, is a shark and not a whale. So, it is a fish!

Ray-finned fish (class Actinopterygii)

Name any fish, and there's a 96% chance the species name you said belongs to a ray-finned fish. Unless, like, you really like sharks. But this isn't about them.

Ray-finned fish are the biggest group of fish and incredibly diverse! It has your seahorse, your pufferfish, your bass, your tuna, your anglerfish, your clownfish, your salmon, your sturgeon, your lanternfish, your perch, your oarfish, your gar, your sardine, your moray eel... and this is only a tiny, tiny fraction of the groups that belong to this class! Defining features of ray-finned fish are that they tend to have a swim bladder and a bony skeleton (some exceptions though. Sturgeons, for one, have evolved a cartilaginous skeleton but they're still ray-finned fish). The largest group of ray-fins, the teleosts, also have leptoid scales, which are thinner and more flexible and grow with growth rings.

I want to bring special attention to some members of the ray-finned fish which tend to have a lot of confusion surrounding them and their heritage: eels and seahorses. Many people think these two are not fish due to their strange anatomy, like lack of scales or (many) fins and their elongated bodies, and I wouldn't blame them! Seahorses belong to family Syngnathidae, which also includes seadragons and pipefish. Eels, meanwhile, make up the order Anguilliformes. All of these long friends of ours are fish!

Lobe-finned fish (clade Sarcopterygii)

I shall merely focus on the fishy fishy fish individuals of this class, which excludes tetrapods. Lobe-finned fish house the two extant species of coelacanths, and six extant species of lungfish! These fish are bony and their fins are placed at the tips of fleshy, lobelike stalks, resembling the limbs of tetrapods. It is thought that the common ancestor of coelacanths and lungfish and tetrapods had similar structures that then became the four limbs the members of our clade typically have. Coelacanths and lungfish are wonderful fishes and deserve a lot of love and respect, not only because they're our closest cousins but because they're unique and we have so much to learn about them!

So, these are the fishes! There are also extinct groups of fish, namely class Placodermi (armoured fish) and class Acanthodii (spiny "sharks"). I'm moreso an extant fish account however, and so I shall move onto...

What isn't a fish?

Now we get into the real meat of this post. Without further ado, here are some aquatic friends of ours that can be mixed up with fish very often!

Crustaceans (subphylum Crustacea)

Many of our hard-shelled many-legged friends belong here! Crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp, krill, isopods, triops, barnacles, copepods, you name it! Even though many crustaceans are aquatic or semiaquatic and have gills, you'll find that they're invertebrates that lack an internal skeleton (so no cranium, not even vertebrae)! We still love them though!

Mollusks (phylum Mollusca)

Creatures both soft and hard-shelled! Cephalopods like octopuses, squid, nautilus and cuttlefish, bivalves like clams, mussels, oysters or scallops, gastropods like sea slugs and snails and chitons go here! These friends of ours are also aquatic and have gills, some even have the suffix -fish (cephalopods used to be called inkfish, even!), but their lack of an endoskeleton is even more obvious than the crustaceans'. They're invertebrates, and therefore not fish!

Chelicerates (subphylum Chelicerata)

This group has many animals that are very hard to mistake for fish, namely spiders and scorpions, but horseshoe crabs and sea spiders are two groups of extant marine chelicerates! Both groups are aquatic, and horseshoe crabs have gills. However, they're both invertebrates, lacking a cranium or vertebrae. Other aquatic chelicerates exist, but they're usually very small, like water mites.

Cnidarians (phylum Cnidaria)

This phylum has the sessile corals and sea anemones and the usually more mobile jellyfish and siphonophores (includes the infamous Portugese man o' war!). I imagine corals and sea anemones are mistaken for fish less due to their sessile nature, but they're good to bring up nevertheless. None of these animals have a backbone, or, any bones really. They lack gills, they lack fins, they even lack the bilateral shape of fish. Jellyfish, despite the name, are indeed not fish! Some people suggest the name sea jellies be used for them instead, and I think it's much cuter.

Echinoderms (phylum Echinodermata)

Animals like starfish, sea urchins, brittle stars, sand dollars, sea cucumbers and feather stars go here. It seems that this pesky "-fish" -suffix is hard to shake off, as now we have the starfish. Once again, all of these slow-moving bottom-dwelling friends of ours are invertebrates, as they lack vertebrae or a cranium. Interestingly though, they are among our closest invertebrate relatives! So we ought to give them some props for that. I also want to mention that starfish can also be called sea stars, which ought to lessen confusion about their being too.

Comb jellies (phylum Ctenophora)

Comb jellies look a lot like jellyfish, but they belong in their own unique phylum! They have the same deal going on; they are invertebrates, they lack gills, they lack a cranium, they are simply aquatic.

Lancelets (subphylum Cephalocordata) and tunicates (subphylum Tunicata)

A double feature, because I wanted to save space didn't want these guys to be all alone! Lancelets and Tunicates, like sea squirts and salps, are chordates, which you can find in the phylogenic tree I drew all the way in the definitions section. They share many a feature with vertebrates, like a bilateral bodyplan, a notochord at some stage of life and a post-anal tail, but I'm afraid they're still not fish. They lack a cranium and their notochord does not develop into a vertebral column! Sorry friends, you tried. We can still hang out at the chordate convention.

Annelids (phylum Annelida)

The infamous bobbit worm, bone-eating worms, sea mice, giant tube worms, feather duster worms, spoon worms, bristleworms in general, leeches... many, many worms go here! Pretty self-explanatory: they are invertebrates, even when they live in water. They're extremely cool invertebrates too! I suggest taking a look at some of them, there's many interesting species.

Flatworms (phylum Platyhelminthes)

Flatworms are another very diverse group of worms, having many species both terrestrial and aquatic, however mostly I want to put attention into the free-swimming marine flatworms. They may swim beautifully (and fence with grace), but they are nevertheless invertebrates! Flatworms can live a variety of different lifestyles, from predators to parasites.

Amphibians (class Amphibia)

We've made it into vertebrates now! Amphibians include frogs, salamanders, and caecilians. While they have limbs with digits in their adulthood*, they can be easily confused for fish in their larval stages! This is no surprise, as they use gills to breathe underwater and tadpoles lack any limbs at all for a while. Many amphibians later transition into a terrestrial or semiaquatic way of life and lose their gills, not to mention gain their digit-having limbs.

(*excluding caecilians)

...Well, many amphibians do this, but not all. It's important to mention there are also species of aquatic salamanders which can bear great resemblance to fish with their elongated bodies! Amphiumas, which are sometimes mistakenly called "conger eels" (which is an actual species of fish), are aquatic salamanders with small residual limbs and both working gills and lungs. Giant salamanders and mudpuppies/waterdogs have lungs and gills as well, and lead an aquatic lifestyle — olms are close relatives of mudpuppies. Sirens, meanwhile, lack hind limbs and only have small front limbs, along with retaining their gills in adulthood. Among aquatic salamanders I also want to bring up one most often talked about species: the axolotl! They remain in their larval form, have external gills and lead an aquatic lifestyle. It can be hard to tell with aquatic salamanders sometimes, but these friends of ours are amphibians and not fish, even if they've rejected the land life.

Caecilians are a bit less known overall, but they can also cause a lot of confusion due to their long, limbless body. While most caecilians live underground, some are aquatic in nature, and can therefore be mistaken for fish! However, caecilians breathe via the use of their lungs and through the skin and don't have any gills at all.

Reptiles (class Reptilia)

Most commonly mistaken for fish in this group are sea snakes, sea kraits and water snakes, sea turtles, turtles, penguins, and other (semi)aquatic birds. Sea snakes and water snakes bear a very strong resemblance to eels, but they are indeed just snakes adapted to an aquatic or a semiaquatic lifestyle! The same goes for sea turtles, turtles overall, and penguins. They all need to breathe air and they lack fins, even if their flippers, webbed feet and built-in paddles may look like fins! They also have wholly different types of scales (or feathers!!) than what fish have, even if they share the feature. I assume that other aquatic reptiles, like the marine iguana and crocodilians are better read as reptiles thanks to their limbs with digits, but I want to give them a reptile shoutout anyway. They’re aquatic or semiaquatic, but they are air-breathers and fin-lackers all the same!

I also want to mention one specific extinct group of reptiles, ichtyosaurs! These marine reptiles were rather shark- or dolphin-like in appearance, which is actually a really good example of convergent evolution! Like all other reptiles, they also needed to breathe air and they had... erm... well, I'm not sure if I can call the bones in their flippers digits, but, that's what they used to be, so...? They were cool reptiles and among my favourites! There were many other aquatic reptiles too, but I will only mention just the ones now. A paleontology account would be better-suited to list you allll the marine reptiles.

Mammals (class Mammalia)

Our home class! Some of the aquatic friends we have in this class include whales like baleen and beaked whales, dolphins (orcas go here), porpoises, belugas, narwhals and sperm whales, pinnipeds like seals, sea lions, walruses, and sirenians like manatees, (occasionally known as sea cows) and dugongs! We also have some semiaquatic buddies like hippopotamids, otters, beavers and platypuses! Whales and pinnipeds especially often cause a lot of confusion due to their very streamlined, fishy appearance. They are, however, air breathers that feed their young with milk (some dolphin calves are even born with some hair), and their ancestors were land mammals! The same goes for pinnipeds and sirenians too. True seals, fur seals and sea lions still have fur even! Hippos, otters, beavers and platypuses are a bit more obvious as mammals with their fur and.. distinct air-breathing.. but I wanted to mention them anyway. Their adaptations to aquatic life are just one example of how fascinating evolution can be!

And here we are! A hopefully comprehensive list of fishes and non-fishes, beginning with the ever-shifting story of the term "fish", phylogeny, and why some animals are called fish when they really aren't. I hope you have found useful and interesting information in this post, and perhaps learned something new! I bid you a farewell! :D

#fish guide #fish essay #fish #fish facts #fishfact #marine biology #biology #zoology #long post #jawless fish #cartilaginous fish #ray-finned fish #lobe-finned fish

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boywifesammy · 6 months

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im sure everyone’s seen the argument by non-wincest shippers that canon weirdcest moments can be explained off as particularly close brothers. i’ve seen wincesties respond by straight up denying it, but honestly, i see where they’re coming from. they do TECHNICALLY have a point, yet still, it fundamentally doesnt sit well with me.

if you isolate all of these little incidents they could be perceived as purely brotherly. its got me thinking about what exactly makes wincest so appealing, and why i as a wincest shipper immediately have an exasperated reaction to people insisting that sam&dean are purely platonic.

i also see this argument frequently bundled with the stance that “weirdcest isn’t a justification for shipping wincest” (which is a whole other can of worms altogether— the puritan culture of ship culture rn), but you gotta take a step back and just ask yourself… why am i so intent on seeing these characters as platonic?

the prevailing argument ive seen is that siblings CAN be terribly close without being incestuous. this is totally fair. i’m not saying that if you are particularly close with your siblings in a sam & dean type manner that you are incestuous. obviously relationships between family is vastly complex & changes with the culture you grew up in.

the only problem here is that people try to go so far to explain sam&dean’s relationship as to not paint it as romantic. if they weren’t related, it’d be insane to think they weren’t romantic. they are consistently and repeatedly put in situations and exchange dialogue that’s used to convey romantic tone in western media. my point here being— the writers know that they are doing. and they are doing it INTENTIONALLY.

yes, certain cultures find extensive physical touch and kisses between siblings platonically acceptable. yes, you can be very close to your siblings without wanting to fuck them. but that is such a reach given what you are being presented with. you are missing the fundamental thematic point of supernatural: family horror!!

by so steadfastly arguing that sam&dean cannot be read as romantic you are purposefully ignoring the the text. you are glossing over the repeating themes of generational trauma and incest that are touched on time and time again, with john’s father abandoning him, mary’s parents being hunters, the struggle she went through to get out of the life but how family trauma & the past permeates itself into your being. you are ignoring the benders, the ghost pregnant with her fathers child, and the time azazel KISSED MARY in HER FATHERS BODY.

supernatural pushes incestuous themes SO HARD. it purposefully plays with & explores the double-sided blade that is family. it touches on a REALLY TABOO subject without being overwhelming or heavy handed. of course its going to attract people who enjoy these themes. OF COURSE we’re going to look at the two homoerotic brother leads and see something between them! it’s intentionally placed in the script! its a valid reading of the text!

this is why i get frustrated when people say that wincest shippers are twisting canon for the sake of shipping, because we’re not. when people say this they are taking a piece of media that is intriguing in how it handles a socially unacknowledged part of the human experience and forcing their viewing of it on others. they are saying that you aren’t allowed to enjoy those themes because it is inherently wrong or shameful to EXPLORE THE TOPIC. i dunno. that sounds pretty authoritarian to me.

it’s totally fine to be grossed out by incest or avoid wincest because it makes you uncomfortable. what ISNT okay is to say its an exaggerated reaction to canon, because it really isnt. in fact, its a pretty normal & sane conclusion to come to after seeing those two. the fact that they aren’t explicitly incestuous might even enhance this idea. it touches on the unspoken secretive nature of family trauma and the complicated, messy reality of crossing boundaries with blood without being cliche or overdramatic.

im going to incite occam’s razor here: yes, they could just be brothers. yes, you can explain it all away as particularly close siblings. yes, you can argue that it isnt explicitly canon. but really, why would you do all that when the show incessantly implies that they’re more? and more importantly, why are you so quick to say that a topic cannot be explored because it’s complicated? is that really the sentiment that we as a society want to hold regarding media?

#oc #supernatural #spn meta #dean winchester #sam winchester #wincest #samdean #fandom discussion #anti censorship #<- will not be using the word pr/shp because im not a fan of it #it does the idea injustice because it isnt just about shipping but media censorship & social literacy as a whole #but yeah. this has been floating in my brain and i needed to get it out #if any of you have thoughts pls reply or elaborate in tags!!#this is something thats very important to me and i wanted to put it out there

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vasito-de-leche · 4 months

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I've read all of your Reverse: 1999 related posts about a hundred times already and I'm still mesmerized! I love how your writing is fluid and meticulous — all of your analysis feels so precise that it might as well be official.

I was wondering if you could write a one-shot or headcanons about Forget Me Not with a human partner, whichever you believe to be more fitting; to extend what you said in his relationship headcanons. It's such a fascinating concept... at least I think so.

If you are not feeling up to it, I beg of you to at least write some of your thoughts about this. That would make me more than happy!

;R1999 FORGET ME NOT - Relationship Headcanons (2)

Compilation of headcanons about Forget Me Not's relationship with a human partner. A continuation of this post.

thank you so much for the kind words! I really love talking about blorbos so it means a lot to me that you like my work!! for this post, I went for HCs since I already wrote two FMN fics lolol

warning for abusive/toxic relationships!

Even though this is a continuation of the first relationship post, I feel it would be nice to bring back that one point I made about Forget Me Not's potential relationship with a human or mixed - just so everyone knows the themes this post will dwelve into!

The way I see it, all of Forget Me Not's relationships naturally lean towards unhealthy and dysfunctional dynamics, regardless of his partner's status. Being a pure-blooded arcanist only means you're simply trading a specific set of problems for different ones.

So when it comes to humans (note, humans, not mixed - that's a whole different can of worms) Forget Me Not is at his worst. After all, you represent everything that he sees wrong with this world, he's conflicted and torn between his hatred and his love.

He's a difficult character to grasp, but it's clear that he's fully dedicated to Manus Vindictae's goals, as they align with his own unique set of experiences and emotional baggage - this means that he would need a lot of work, effort and time to reconcile with many, many things such as being in a relationship. Especially one with a human. And yet, I don't think it's impossible for him to grow and change as a person.

On the subject of Forget Me Not's mentality towards a human partner.

I want to stress the fact that Forget Me Not is, above all, a cowardly man - it's easier for him to act behind the scenes and react accordingly than to be upfront and confrontational.

He's manipulative, but not controlling.

And one can argue that manipulation is just a different type of control, I agree! But I feel there's a bit more of nuance in this context. Compare characters like Arcana or Constantine to Forget Me Not - the former use manipulation as a means to an end, it's just one of the many tools they can employ to maintain their control over their respective groups. But they have other ways to remain on top. Forget Me Don't doesn't have anything else. When it comes to Forget Me Not, his manipulation comes across as the single thing he can do to win, or turn the tides to his favour, even if it means winning by the smallest of margins. Chances are he's already mentally prepared himself for the worst, anyway.

This originates from the fact that he's fully accepted the fact that he's inferior, that the universe will constantly try to undermine and step all over him, dealing the worst hand for him over and over - so for someone like him to win, he needs to outsmart and pull the strings from behind the scenes, to cheat at a system that could never allow him to get his way. Hence all the emphasis on his two-faced and contrasting themes (a snake in the grass, waiting to reveal itself. a docile and put together bartender, controlling the flow of the market, etc).

Why do I bring this up? Because when it comes to something as unfamiliar and daunting as falling in love with a human, Forget Me Not doesn't have it in him to even take the first step or decide how he even wants to approach the situation. He knows he's already at a disadvantage, and so he defaults to manipulating.

A lot of his behaviour is heavily dependant on your personality and the way you see his actions. Again, it's much easier for him to adapt like this than to confront why he's having so much problems admitting he might've caught feelings for you.

Basically, this is a lot of text to give some insight to why he manipulates you. It's not done out of the desire to control and dictate your every move, your every thought, let alone mold and/or break you into a more ideal partner - Forget Me Not can barely take responsibility for his own life, don't expect him to do that with yours. He does it because he's very sad, pathetic and desperate, that's about it!

His view on love is also an important thing to discuss in this specific point - in the first post I talked about how Forget Me Not is quick to catch feelings, he falls hard and fast. This still applies despite everything I just mentioned.

In the context of this relationship, love and hate simply go hand in hand to the point where he cannot tell one from the other.

He latches onto you like a parasite because you're the only person who seems to care for him or give him the time of day. As negative or harmful as his interactions with you could be, he's addicted to your presence.

If his partner is oblivious to his actions and ties with Manus Vindictae.

I decided it's easier for me to just tackle all the big possibilities, so here we go!

This is possibly the best outcome for Forget Me Not, a partner who is entirely oblivious to his unpleasant sides and morally corrupt actions. It doesn't even matter what your opinion on Manus Vindictae and their goals might be, because you don't know he's related to any of it! This way, he doesn't have to unpack any of those complex feelings and thoughts, nor think too hard on the fact that you're a human - who cares? You're not tainted with all that unnecessary knowledge.

And this would also allow him to continue living in denial, to indulge in a delusional fantasy in which he gets to be happy without putting any sort of work into being a better man. It's perfect for him!

The top priority is to keep you in the dark, and he'll do pretty much anything to make sure you never find out anything that could paint him in a negative light. If he could edit his own files - the ones that the Foundation had - to erase all traces of his past, then he would have no problem gaslighting, lying and playing all these mind games so that you only focus on how loving and doting he is as a partner. All while telling himself that he's simply protecting and shielding you from the horrors of the truth, that he doesn't want you to deal with the stress.

Forget Me Not could continue with this façade for years, presenting his best, most gentlemanly persona to you. It's easier for him to be vulnerable, to allow scarce moments of quiet, gentle intimacy, now that he has a way to excuse his actions.

I'd say that the only thing that could ruin it is, as usual, his own mind. He's the one who took all these precautions into maintaining the fantasy of a perfectly normal relationship, and yet he'll start spiraling into depression over that exact same thing. What if you were faking these feelings all along too? He made you fall in love with a fake version of himself because there's no way you'd love the real thing, etc etc.

Depending on how long you two might've been dating, I can see him choosing to disappear from your life without even saying goodbye. One day, he's just gone and he makes sure that you cannot find nor follow him. Alternatively, he can fall victim to the usual impulses and confess everything he's been hiding, to scare you away and see how you'd react to the truth.

If his partner is aware of his actions and ties to Manus Vindictae, while being very vocal against it.

This dynamic is the one that absolutely leans heavily into a very codependent, toxic mindset. The relationship itself makes no sense: you're a human, therefore someone who Forget Me Not resents and loathes. And he's a member of Manus Vindictae, a group you recognize as extremely dangerous and biased, rejecting all of their ideals.

And yet, you two stick together exactly because of that. Whether you have good intentions (wanting to fix him, save him, what have you) or not, it doesn't matter because Forget Me Not will instantly assume that you're exactly like him: you want someone who sees you for who you are.

Knowing that you openly disapprove of everything that he does and says is addictive, as he's spent a good chunk of his life concealing all of these aspects. Knowing that someone sees him in his totality, without turning away, without fear, it gets to his head pretty quickly. You're the only one who knows him and you continue to stand up to him, all while claiming that you care for him - Forget Me Not eats that shit up. It's a type of affection he's never been shown.

But the more you call him out on his bullshit, the more you attempt to help or challenge him, the more Forget Me Not will sink into Manus Vindictae's mindset - because he loves to see you put so much effort into a lost cause like him. His manipulation tactics are used to make you believe, just for a moment, that you can truly change him for the better. He pretends to breakdown, to reconsider his lifestyle, just so you don't feel disheartened and continue pushing him.

In the previous post, I said that Forget Me Not would get a little unhinged around his crush - this also applies here, but on a much bigger scale. Everything he does is a cry for attention, he wants you to witness everything and still come back to him every night.

Given how self-destructive Forget Me Not can be, he would never think of ending the relationship. It doesn't matter if you begin to pose a threat to Manus Vindictae or The Walden or whatever, he'd gladly give up everything he's worked for if it means having his life ruined by your hands.

If his partner is aware of his actions and ties to Manus Vindictae, but supports him wholeheartedly.

One would think that having a supportive partner who encourages Forget Me Not to never change and to commit as many crimes as he wants as long as he has fun, would be a dream come true - but he's much too paranoid to accept this reality, always expecting to have the rug pulled from under him the second his guard is down.

Now, when I say "support" I mean a lot of things! From truly siding with Manus Vindictae and hating humans as well, to simply being there for Forget Me Not no matter what - as usual, it's up to you!

Your never-ending kindness throws him in for a loop and he channels all that energy into figuring you out. What do you get out of this? Forget Me Not wants to know the catch, and he grows more and more vulnerable each time you show him that there's no catch - you just love him, that's it. All of him, scales and all. At his worst and at his best.

Confronting the antithesis of everything he's believed in is difficult, but overtime I think Forget Me Not would slowly reconsider things - if you, a human, coud love him so earnestly regardless of his constant hatred and bitterness towards the rest of your peers, well... Maybe he can learn a thing or two from you.

This dynamic is the most confusing, however, as Forget Me Not will be clinging onto you like his life depends on it only to keep you at arms' length, emotionally and physically, for the next few weeks. A lot of back and forth between those contrasting aspects, cold and hot, love and hate - but this is good because it's a sign that he's reconsidering things, that he can't just make up his mind with a half-assed excuse. Here, Forget Me Not lacks that conviction and confidence from the previous two points, he doesn't know how to get the upperhand when faced against such brutal, honest love.

His manipulation tactics come across as a half-hearted attempt to get you to slip up or to distract you from the fact that he's losing his edge. Forget Me Not relies on his distant and intimidating persona to operate, but none of that works on you, and so he attempts to keep up the façade to make himself look cruel and heartless.

I think this is when you get to see Forget Me Not at his most pathetic and saddest self - the way he's been lying to himself and to the world for years, how hard he tries to have power to make up for the fact that he has any substance as a person. How afraid he is of letting you in his life because by doing so, he'll have to step out of his bubble and face the consequences of his actions.

#reverse 1999 #reverse: 1999 #r1999 #reverse 1999 headcanons #reverse 1999 x reader #reverse 1999 forget me not #hmm not my best post i think #i feel like i keep repeating myself when talking about FMN

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ewingstan · 4 months

Text

So there's a few ways we've seen the public hostility to capes be framed.

There's complaint 1, the general "all parahumans are more trouble than they're worth," which has been something that's at least been brewing since Worm (a lot of Cauldron and the PRT's activities being focused on tamping down on this perception). A fairly common trope in superhero media. You see it everything from the X-Men to the Civil War comic event. Hell, its popular enough that the last two comics I've read (Chainsaw Man and Clown Corps), which are pretty much as different as you can be while still being in the same vague genre and medium, both had "Villains try to get everyone to fear superpeople indiscrimantly" plots.

But then there's the more specific complaint 2: "cape heroes aren't justifying their presence because they directly cause violence without lowering the amount of crime and violence overall." Now, Capricorn is obviously framing it in these terms because he's trying to appeal to the police he's talking to; he knows that's a complaint made about cops and he wants to make them feel like they're on the same side fighting the same battles (and in turn kinda claiming that both capes and cops are "against" a public who criticizes them). But I'd also say that the text itself wants us to consider complaint 2. Worm basically endorses it; a lot of the book reinforces the claim that capes/cops are integral to how a system gives rise to villains/criminals and largely fails to deal with such problems in a useful manner.

The question is whether Ward is best interpreted as making the opposite claim, endorsing Tristan's argument against complaint 2. Its certainly sympathetic to the frustrations of the "don't tell us we didn't make a difference when you weren't there to see" crowd—it almost has to be, given our narrator. But whereas in some parts I read Ward as saying "yeah its frustrating, but they're right, you aren't making a real difference and are part of the problem" other times it does portray Breakthrough making real changes for the better that couldn't have been accomplished other ways by fighting ontologically evil enemies (see: Teacher).

Again, kinda hard to do a story from this POV and completely avoid that. Disco Elyisum probably does the best job of it and I've still seen people argue that it doesn't avoid it entirely (still unsure where I land on that). Zdarsky's Daredevil (man I need to catch up on that) tries to avoid it in a way that doesn't really cohere; largely because it tries to be anti-prison while still framing characters like Spider-Man as paragons. Though in that at least it kinda works with Matt Murdock's whole pattern of righteous violence followed by intense doubt and guilt followed by newly directed righteous violence. I guess I'll have to keep reading to see how things ultimately land.

#leo reads ward #ward 10.5 #wardblr #parahumans #wildbow #sorry for the daredevil tangent that comic's just kinda fun to poke at #reminds me of ave wiseman's critique of how the two knives out movies show changing public attitudes towards the justice system #leo says

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pomegranate-pen · 2 years

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hello! do you have any dating headcanons or platonic headcanons for fin the human? in adventure time?

thank you for requesting!!! I haven't watched Adevnture Time in a while, so I hope this doesn't seem ooc!

Platonic and Romantic headcanons for Finn The Human!

Platonic:

Finn is extremely friendly and sociable with anyone he meets. He has this heroic goofy energy to him that always seems to make others around him feel energetic.

If you aren't the best at fighting, expect weekly visits from the blonde human. He’d hang out with you for the day and you’d both walk around the area you live in. in the land of Ooo, anything is possible. Whether it's giant worms eating a library or a giant slime monster attacking a village, it is always best to be on your guard. That’s why Finn always patrols around your area with you to make sure nothing suspicious is going on.

If you’re more of a fighter then expect many trainings with Finn. He’d challenge you to a sword fight or wrestling that often ends with you both laughing it off or one a bit injured. At times, he asks for your assistance during a rescue or fight. He has a lot of fun when his friends are fighting with him more than he does alone.

There are those rare moments where Finn opens up a bit. He speaks about his struggles with love or stress over some bad guy. Finn isn’t one to show these emotions much, so when it happens, do be there for him and comfort the boy.

If he ever finds himself in love with someone again, he’d go to you for advice. Asks what he should wear or how he should act. The human is pacing around the room with a multitude of papers stuck all over your living room. The night passes by with long talks on how the date should look and what must happen, completely forgetting time itself during the whole ordeal.

Just like anyone else, Finn only wants your well-being and happiness. If he ever finds out there’s someone who is hurting you or causing you danger, he won't hesitate on fighting them. Whether you want him to do so or not, it's sadly not up to you. The human cares for his friends dearly and he promised himself to do anything to protect the ones he loves.

Hanging out in the tree house is a must. He invites you to the movie nights with friends, playing cards while Jake has left to spend time with his kids, sleepovers… it becomes a place full of memories for you two. And in a way, it has become a bit like your second home.

Being friends with Finn means being friends with Jake. If you find yourself not liking Jake much and even having some sort of rivalry with him, that would become a problem sooner or later. Jake is Finn’s brother and best friend. They hang out with each other daily and trust each lots. Finn would probably do everything he can to make you guys get along. Whether it's inviting you in the tree house or for an adventure, which coincidentally Jake is in as well, he’ll try it all.

Finn always comes to you for love advice, but you should definitely not go to him for one. He doesn’t really know what to do. He’d just tell you to be yourself and help you out on some date plans, but that’s probably it. However, if you ever need advice on fighting monsters or knowing all the ways in the Land of Ooo, he’d be more than happy to help.

Romantic:

He’s a sucker for you. Practically head over heels in love.

He’d at first be shy and a little bit stuttery when he realizes he likes you. He’s still the exciting adventurer he was before, but you tend to see him blush a lot on different occasions.

He’s unsure of what to do. You’d think having so many love interests in the past would’ve helped him by now, but he’s confused about how to make a move. He’d most likely go to his friends for advice.

It takes some time, but he finally does confess at some point. And when you accept it, he’s over the moon. He’d give you the prettiest smile and hug you. It's all just really sweet.

Hanging out in each other’s houses become way more frequent than before. At times you’d two just stay for days in the house. It has come to a point where you both have spare clothes and objects in each other’s place.

In terms of PDA, Finn is surprisingly quite shy. He doesn’t mind small kisses and hand holding when you’re outside, but that’s about it. Everything else he believes is way too embarrassing to do out. in private though, he’s the one to initiate the cuddles and kisses. He feels more confident and comfortable there.

Holding hands in dangerous tombs or old run-down castles is an absolute must. Wants you to be around him at all times. Who knows what kinds of monsters could be lurking around the place.

Is a bit protective of you. Although he knows you can handle any danger by yourself and are fully capable of surviving without his assistance, he can't stop himself from worrying for the worst. In adventures, when setting a fire and a small tent to sleep in, you often find him still awake in the middle of the night. If you ask him what the reason was, he’d shrug it off and tell you to go back to sleep.

“there could be monsters around, I gotta stay alert.” His eyes suddenly twitch from the lack of sleep.

You’d literally have to force him into bed. Reassuring him continuously that nothing will happen and that everything will be fine.

Dates are usually just crazy adventures. Whether it's fighting Ice King or trying to get an ancient fruit so Jake could make a pie with it, it's always fun and exciting.

There are occasions where dates are just you two in the comfiest clothes while watching a movie. Those are the times when the snow becomes a blizzard and the blizzard gives you an excuse to stay in. ugly sweaters giving you magnificent warmth during the shivering cold and hot cocoas right in your hands, the small marshmallows hovering on top of the drink. Head on his shoulders, you take a deep breath and just softly smile. Soon, you felt his head bump into yours a bit as he holds your hand. Eyes glued to the small screen BMO was providing.

Finn isn’t one to get jealous, but he does hate people who hit on you when they know you two are a couple. At that point, Finn tells the person to back off and holds your hand the entire time. If he notices that you're uncomfortable around the said person, he’d make up an excuse and take you away. At those moments, Finn’s clutch on your hand is tighter than before and his pout is apparent. If you tease him for it, he’d become extremely blushy and look away.

“what?! N-no! I wasn’t jealous! Why would I be jealous of a jerk like them?!”

“then why are you blushing?”

“I’m not blushing! It’s just…suddenly really hot in here!”

“Finn, we’re in the Ice Kingdom.”

Braiding his hair becomes one of your favorite activities. His hair is very well kept and shiny and fun to play with. He’d be too shy to admit, but he likes you playing with his hair. Your touch is soft and soothing, making him want to lay down and rest.

Marceline and Jake always tease you two. both think you two are adorable and are happy for their friends. But that won't stop them from pranking you.

---

#adventure time #adventure time x reader #finn x reader #finn the human x reader #x reader #reader insert #finn the human #finn #fanfiction #jake the dog #finn mertens #finn mertens x reader #headcanons #headcanons event

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gale-gentlepenguin · 2 months

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Tell me more about your feelings on Hazbin Hotel.

Part of me doesn’t want to answer this question, because of how popular this show is on Tumblr.

And I know that people will be like.

“What do you know, you’re a Christian, of Course you’d have some problems with it.”

Yes, I am going to disclose that. I am a Christian. Not ashamed of that. Still working to be a better one. But I can be objective enough to view it as a writer, and that at most my personal bias will only be a slight enhancement of my view.

And these are my unfiltered thoughts on this show.

But for my opinion of Hazbin hotel. The original Pilot was interesting. A place trying to reform sinners in the last place people would think to be reformed. (Spoilers ahead)

That pilot premise is interesting. You see Hell as a cesspool of the absolute worse people. (Like Los Angeles but with more cannibalism) and it takes the “Hell is other people approach”

The songs were fine, the animation was great, and the characters introduced were intriguing. So much potential depth to them, theories can speculate. And of course the big question of. “Can someone in hell actually be redeemed?” And we even have a character pointing out “of course not, they’re in hell. Their chance was before this?”

It raised this question of, if you know your doomed, why try to be a good person? And That is fascinating.

Then the show finally airs. And it’s just another “Heaven is corrupt” storyline. And it’s not even done well.

(The whole retelling of creation made my eyes roll. Trying to make Lucifer to be the good guy? How original (sarcasm). And not even done well. Because it’s Charlie narrating this, which makes it be like Charlie knows all this and is doing all of this pointlessly)

Hells gonna rise up against it and all that. The hotel was basically pointless.

The show goes on to constantly contradict itself at numerous points that leaves me more confused.

Yes there is an interesting character (Alastor) but outside of a great soundtrack and animation… the writing of the show is a mess.

It feels both rushed and too slow. The characters are speedrunning their arcs, yet the plot is crawling.

Let’s then not forget the fact that Angel power and weapons are said to be the only thing that Perma kills sinners and angels. Yet sir pretentious dies and instead of permadead, goes to heaven? What fucking logic is that?

Also it says how only Angel weapons and powers can hurt angels (they make a whole point about it) only to show Vaggie and Lute have a whole ass fight hurting eachother with tables and s***. Unless they’ve been blessed them chairs…

Also where do the souls that perma die go? Detroit? Because if Sir pretentious can go to heaven after dying, what the deal with all this? Is Hell actually hell? Seems more like purgatory.

And then you include the helluva boss lore as they take place in the same universe. And MORE questions get added.

But that’s a can of worms for another time.

More importantly, Charlie, the main character hardly gets any development moments. Her issues are TOLD not showed.

Vaggie is also a mess too, like her whole thing is protecting Charlie, and helping her. But then she gets told that she has to fight For Love and that’s how to win? You mean what she’s BEEN DOING THE WHOLE TIME?!

All the stuff with Angel Dust, the writing for that is fine when showing the messed up situation he’s in, but then after the Song “Loser, Baby” he’s suddenly months sober? Speedrunning a bit too much.

Side note: HOW DOES HEAVEN NOT KNOW HOW PEOPLE GET INTO HEAVEN?!

Like they genuinely seem like they don’t know? From my understanding, there is no Big Man making all the calls. Thats not corruption. Thats incompetence.

So if it’s just angels in charge, THEY should know. Like show that they’re tilting the scale or maybe denying certain people that DO follow the criteria. Because with the incompetency of it, it basically leaves the door open for potentially EVERYONE to get into heaven.

Yet then the show shows how awful people in hell are, like it’s clear there are people that deserve hell. Maybe I’m overthinking it, maybe I’m not thinking about it enough. But it’s a really dumb system.

But the biggest glaring hole in this show is the fact that there is no point for heaven to actually do the purge in the first place.

Hell being overpopulated shouldn’t matter. Only Angel power and weapons can actually hurt angels. Why would they worry about an uprising. Heaven could easily wipe hell. The only people that could probably do damage is Lucifer and the leaders of the rings of hell. And even then… That’s like 7 against ALL OF HEAVEN!? Even if we assume overlords and some high level demons could do similar… Heaven still takes it. (But then again the Lute and Vaggie fight might contradict that. Hard to say it’s so confusing)

That all aside, is it an awful show? No. It’s just so riddled with plotholes and pacing issues.

Would I recommend this show to people? No.

Would I recommend the sound track? Probably, the songs are catchy. Can’t deny that.

Everyone has their own opinions and tastes, but the show has too much of a mess for me.

#Gale’s thoughts #hazbin hotel #hazbin spoilers #now everyone if you can grab your pitchforks and touches #line up in a straight line. you can complain about my opinion

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battle-of-mid · 1 year

Note

iwould like to hear your rant about lmk wukong's character assassination. In detail. if possible. please

(takes long drag of cigarette) it really did all start with the show itself coming out. see, after ROTTMNT came out, i don't think we could really expect flying bark to be "faithful" to its IPs and while whether that was a good thing for the TMNT franchise is absolutely something that can be discussed by people that aren't me, it's a whole lot more sensitive when you're handling a show based on a cultural treasure -

LEGO's line of toys dedicated to a sort of journey of the west spinoff is, in my opinion, an objectively good idea. other than boosting sales it feels kind of inevitable considering just how much LNY stuff they'd put out already, you know? to put it simply i don't have any problems with the lego monkie kid IP in concept, just with the way FB decided to run with its execution -- which ended up landing it squarely in "hot mess" territory.

basically - and i promise that this is relevant to wukong specifically, bear with me - i think that the first red flags were the fixation on their rendition of the six-eared macaque: a character that they've changed from being a single-use "evil twin" character that served the original Journey to the West's allegory for enlightenment (ie. that he was a manifestation of SWK's worst impulses) and then immediately fucking died when the situation called for it. he didn't show up for more than one storyline. they retcon a looooot of SWK's actual backstory as detailed by the book itself in order to make room for sadboy LEMH content so the writers could get their shipfix for him and SWK (which is annoying on more than one point, if you remember what I said about the evil twin thing. if you catch my drift. average flying bark moment)

but to put it simply i genuinely think they just made him... way too much of a lazy fucking self absorbed asshole? the beginning of the show has this which feels like a one-off gag but they double down on it later which makes they didn't write sun wukong -- this is after he's supposed to have ascended to victorious-in-strife buddha, mind you, and it ends up feeling less like sun wukong at any point in the storyline and more like... well, goku. from dragon ball super. which is its own, mostly unrelated can of worms in and of itself.

the thing is this is a character that's been used historically as an allegory, as representative of the people, objectively a cultural icon no matter where in china-influenced asia you find yourself (fantastic analysis of the problem with the way LMK pays homage to that allegory here), and also used in reference to, like, diaspora kids. this is a character that baaasically any chinese person with any kind of connection to the culture is going to see themselves in - especially in his reckless identity and subsequent ascension, you know?

and the main problem here is essentially that when you do this with a character that exsits as part of a media franchise... it's fine? it's whatever. people can just skip that. but when you are doing this as an attempt to adapt a piece of historically and culturally important literature - one that is made for children, one that is infinitely more accessible to diaspora children of that culture than any other adaptation that would be directed towards their age demographic, it feels like a punch in the gut. it's a level of disrespect that just really really hurts, all because the people in charge of it feel like they have to flanderize their characters for their fandom or they'll, like, die.

this isn't exactly organized nor is it every thought i have on the matter but basically tldr they forgot they were writing sun wukong and not their oc

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lgbtiba · 7 months

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SO THAT ANTOINE LORE HUH.

This just adds onto that rant I had the other day and I love it so much they're even more similar, it's insane how it's probably not even on purpose!

The French had their plane brought to the island by the Federation for Baghera (and Pierre maybe? possibly?), they had plants in there, Kameto and Antoine to make that happen. Etoiles could very well just Some Guy who just happened to be a total beast, brought in as collateral like the pilots and is now a big problem and being sought out by the opposing team. SO arguably only one of them doesn't have any past connections to the Feds.

THe brazilians, though, likely crashed in on complete accident. Although Sofia said it's possible there was sabotage previous to them sailing, Felps was terrible at driving it, even admited he has no idea how to work a boat; plus the boat itself was very shitty and cheap according to him and Cellbit (just the fact it was Felps driving should sell how unpredictable it wouldve been even for the Feds). Speaking of Cellbit, he's 100% Bagi's brother. He doesn't seem to remember his childhood at all, his earliest memories start at the Huger Games war, wich he was already 15 years old for. The gêmeos do mistério lore is only started on developing so we have no clue as to what the hell happened to them at all, but it is safe to say they have a ton of history with the Federation. The other 5 as I mentioned on the other post, have lived completely separate to anything involving the Federation as a whole. Forever is questionable but his actual blood relationship with Baghera is a can of worms I do not have the energy to open right now. In conclusion that's decidedly just 2 out of 6, the rest are only getting into shit with the feds over stuff that's happening now

#THIS S SO LONG WHAT ON EARTH #qsmp #qsmp french #qsmp brazilians

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yggdraseed · 4 months

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Women in Jujutsu Kaisen, Part 2: Sacrificial Lioness

This is the second part in a series of three posts. If you haven’t read the original, I don’t think it’s entirely necessary to do so, but it might provide some helpful context.

I’ll be the first to admit I may have buried the lead, in a way, with my first post on this subject. When people criticize GeGe Akutami’s portrayal of women, they don’t really target the Shibuya Incident and what came before. They level their criticisms at the events post-Shibuya, and so the events post-Shibuya are what I’ll be mainly talking about here.

I had intended to cover all of that in one post, but the first part of this analysis was already so long that about twenty very funny free-thinkers on Reddit all rolled their sleeves up and commented some variation of “Too long, won’t read.” It still cuts me like a knife, to this very day.

Now to everyone else, let’s review. Jujutsu Kaisen received a lot of praise early on for its portrayal of women, but over the duration of the manga’s run, there have been a very vocal segment of the fanbase who have problems with how that portrayal has developed into the current state of the story. Not only that, some even go so far as to say that GeGe didn’t just get worse at writing women, that GeGe secretly hates women, either because of conscious misogyny or passive, culturally-ingrained sexism that they just aren’t aware of.

So, I have quite a few problems with this take. Everyone’s entitled to their opinion, of course, but when it goes from having differing interpretations of the text in front of us to people speculating about the moral character of the author… well, you need to really work for that one. It’s one thing to say “Oh, the author meant well, but this just wasn’t quite good enough” — but to say the author had malicious intent is a different can of worms entirely.

How does an author go from writing women with such care as I have illustrated in my first post analyzing the subject to suddenly just bumbling around, screwing everything up? Why would an author who’s a misogynist write such vibrant, strong-willed, even inspirational characters like Nobara and Maki? Did GeGe randomly decide they want to sabotage their own success for mysterious reasons? Did someone secretly replace GeGe with an evil robot clone of GeGe to fulfill some secret plan to ruin the whole manga? Well, maybe. Or maybe this manga isn’t what a lot of its readers initially thought it was.

Everything But the Text To try and explain what I think about all of this, it’s going to be necessary to discuss things outside of Jujutsu Kaisen’s story. We’ve already started asking questions about GeGe Akutami’s values as a person, so the conversation can’t just stay limited to the characters, worldbuilding, themes, and other elements specific just to what’s within the manga’s pages. I tried to avoid doing this as much as possible in my first post, because once you start examining influences on the writing or reading of a story from outside of the story itself, things get messy. People are complicated, and often a locked box; that goes for readers and writers alike. Nobody can peer inside of another person’s heart or mind, so it’s hard to say anything concrete. Suffice to say that I am not going to make a habit out of trying to read tea leaves and divine an author’s thoughts and values, and I encourage you to not make a habit out of it either. That being said, let’s dip our toes into it just this once, and proceed with caution.

Even when you look to author interviews, it’s difficult to say for sure if an author can recall every single thing that was consciously or unconsciously influencing them when designing a character or planning a story’s structure. On top of that, good author won’t give away twists or reveals planned for the story’s future. They want you to read the damn thing, after all, not use substitutes for reading it. For example: would GeGe really tell us if Nobara was dead or not if the intention was to have her be revealed to have survive?. Would GeGe tell us if she’s alive or dead if the intention was for it to be ambiguous? And beyond that, while this is just my own interpretation, GeGe seems to be very closed-lipped about what the story’s themes are so they don’t color the reader’s experience. It’s a story that doesn’t give you neatly arranged answers to every question, so of course GeGe doesn’t want to make the audience thing there’s a “correct” or “incorrect” way to interpret what characters say and do.

Of course, there’s a corollary to all this subjective interpretation talk. It’s one thing to look at a character’s actions and try to interpret what motivates those actions, what they’ll do in the future, and what ideas are being worked out through that character. It’s something very different to try and use the story like reading tea leaves, to act like you can divine the author’s personality and moral values outside of what they choose to give away.

…On the other hand, every author puts a little bit of themselves in what they write. Their beliefs, their tastes, their assumptions about other people and life in general. For instance, GeGe clearly has a taste for horror, Japanese mythology, Buddhism, martial arts movies, and pro wrestling. We can see this in the way that Jujutsu Kaisen doesn’t just borrow Buddhist imagery like the names of bodhisattvas or how they’re depicted in art, but in how the themes of the story are heavily informed by the way Buddhism emphasizes death and the relationship of the self to the whole. You can see GeGe’s love for martial arts movies in references to said movies, e.g., the references to The Raid in Yuji’s fight with Choso. And you can see GeGe likes pro wrestling or at least has respect for it by the way that Yuki’s technique is named Bom Ba Ye.

A slight tangent: I hate Viz. Viz has bungled the official English release for Jujutsu Kaisen in ways I didn’t think were possible. Clunky, out-of-character dialogue and outright mistranslations aside, they completely failed to get the name of Yuki’s technique across. See, in Shonen Jump’s publications and in other manga, there’s this thing called furigana. Most Japanese is written in kanji, but for readers who struggle with kanji, furigana are included as a postscript spelling out the same word in hiragana so it’s easier to read. However, lots of authors — including GeGe — will use furigana to add extra meanings in how you pronounce something. For another example within Jujutsu Kaisen, the name of Todo’s technique is spelled in kanji as 不義遊戯, which translates to “Immorality” or “Unjust Game.” But the furigana are ブギウギ, or Bugi Ugi — Boogie Woogie. When adapted to the anime, they default to the furigana, so we get the wonder and the majesty that is Boogie Woogie.

Yuki’s technique is the same. The kanji read 星の怒り, which can be translated in a few different ways. TCB went with “Fury of the Stars,” which if you ask me is a hell of a lot cooler than going wiith “Star Rage.” But once again, the furigana are read differently. ボンバイエ — Bom Ba Ye.

The term Bom Ba Ye originates from the championship match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, held in Zaire and popularly dubbed The Rumble in the Jungle. At one point the crowd began chanting “Ali, bombaye! Ali, bombaye!” Which more-or-less translates to “Ali, finish him! Ali, finish him!” It became heavily associated with Ali after that. And after a match they had with each other in Japan, Ali gave Antonio Inoki his blessing to use a variation on the bombaye chant for his ring entrance music. Given how Inoki passed away last year, it seems that GeGe intended this to be, in part, an homage to the architect of Japan’s pro wrestling scene. So yeah, fuck Viz.

Tangent over. So yes, there are ways to get a feel for an author’s sensibilities from what they write, but it’s not some telescope into their psyche. And unless someone can give me evidence that GeGe Akutami looks down on or hates women outside of hot takes about the outcome of certain fights in this manga, you are never going to convince me.

People try to assign metrics to this series to gauge GeGe’s seriousness about female characters, and those have never impressed me either. I already touched on this in my last post, but the outcome of a fight does not determine a character’s value. To step outside the pages of Jujutsu Kaisen once again, let’s look to other Shonen Jump luminaries for some helpful examples that might be easier to digest.

In Naruto, we have the iconic fight at the Valley of the End when Naruto tries to stop Sasuke from leaving the village to join Orochimaru. Naruto loses, but in the long run, Sasuke is proven wrong and a mountain of misfortune befalls him and the village as a result of his selfish, obsessive actions. He ultimately comes back to join the village in the final act, after having his assumptions about the world and the people around him disproven.

My point is that despite Shonen manga being so heavily focused on battle and getting stronger, there has always been a throughline where being strong by itself doesn’t make a character right. And Jujutsu Kaisen riffs on that by having lots of cases where strong characters are dethroned by intelligent tactics, teamwork, or simply a blind spot created by their own limited, strength-oriented view of the world. Strength and winning fights are not the sole criteria for a character’s value, and that’s not just true for Jujutsu Kaisen, but for more conventional Shonen as a whole.

The other metric I see people attempt to use is screentime. If one character gets 50 pages and another character gets 70 pages, that means GeGe values the character who got 70 pages more and the character who got 50 pages is a bum, is worthless to the story, and GeGe hates that character, is how the argument goes.

I hate math in general, but especially when people try to use it as a shortcut or a way around actually engaging with a story. This is like a more insidious version of the power levels problem some Shonen and their fan communities have, where people use something so arbitrary as the number of pages or panels a character appears in to evaluate their importance — both to their subjective experience, and from the perspective of the writer.

Let’s do what we did with strength and fight outcomes again.

In One Piece, Shanks is a character who almost never appears. Hundreds of chapters will go by with no insights into what Shanks is doing. But if you would say that Shanks doesn’t matter to the story of One Piece, you would be laughed out of the entire One Piece fan community for just how stupid that take is. Shanks is the reason the story of One Piece happened, because he saved Luffy’s life and entrusted him with a goal: “Take this straw hat, keep it safe for me, and return it to me when you’ve become a great pirate someday.” He doesn’t need to appear very often, he is never far from the reader’s mind and casts an immense shadow over the story.

Now, characters the author doesn’t consider important do often appear. One Piece has a number of examples, like Tilestone. Tilestone is as minor as minor characters get, in terms of hissignificance to the story and in terms of how many pages of that story they appear in. So, what’s the difference? Well, Tilestone is a gag character. He exists to bolster the number of colorful characters who appear in the story; worldbuilding and set dressing as a person. Other than that, he adds a bit of comedy and texture — Tilestone is incapable of speaking without yelling, and this creates friction with other characters and complicates things involving him. An equivalent in Jujutsu Kaisen could be the trio of curse users that Megumi, Itadori, and Ino fight in Shibuya. Minor, extremely minor characters that serve a bit role.

All Things Tsukumo Yuki I think it’s time to bring this fully back around to Jujutsu Kaisen. We’ve gotten some context, now, by looking at other Shonen Jump series and some clear cut examples of how a character’s value is not determined by win-loss ratios or page counts. We’ve seen how even in these goofy Japanese comics for teenage boys, there are things going on under the surface that aren’t immediately apparent if you only look at what characters say and do and what happens to them. There are ideas being worked on under the surface. Let’s take this understanding, and apply it to the most contentious fight in all of Jujutsu Kaisen and ground zero for arguments that GeGe can’t write or doesn’t respect women.

That’s right, no more hemming and hawing at ringside. We’re crossing the top rope and mixing it up with Yuki Tsukumo vs. Kenjaku. It’s Yukimania! Snap into a Slim Jim!

So, let’s start by pulling together a profile of Yuki purely off of what the story gives us. She’s one of the older active characters when you don’t include life spans extended by unnatural methods, as she was already an established sorcerer and making a name for herself when Geto and Gojo were on the verge of graduating from high school. Already considered a Special Grade, she was notorious for not accepting missions and for generally thumbing her nose at the jujutsu sorcery establishment.

Her only real involvement with the wider sorcery world was mentoring Aoi Todo, her only known student. Yuki’s habit of asking people their type — a personality test that lets her gather info on other sorcerers without them realizing it — unabashed confidence and sincerity, and general flair for theatrics all have rubbed off on him, and we can assume it’s her tutelage that moulded Todo into such a stand-out, being able to reach First Grade as a sorcerer despite still being a student at the Kyoto Jujutsu Technical School, not coming from a sorcery family, and not having an inherently powerful technique. Fun fact: Todo’s scar comes from one of his training sessions with her. She got around by motorcycle and spent a lot of time overseas, researching sorcery and the soul with the aim to completely overturn the established order: she wanted to break the deadlock between sorcerers, humans, and cursed spirits.

The conclusion Geto had reached about the futility of trying to exorcise curses when human emotion was constantly creating more was old news to her by the time of Hidden Inventory and Premature Death, and she was searching for a way to prevent cursed spirits from being born. After Toji’s death posed a dead end for erasing cursed energy from the human race completely, she gravitated to the idea of making all human beings sorcerers, thus giving them the control over their cursed energy that prevents sorcerers from creating cursed spirits. Now, while Geto had the idea of killing all non-sorcerers, Yuki never actually condoned this. But she didn’t shut Geto down for this thought of his, either. She told him that he was going to have to make a choice whether to keep going down that line of thought and where it would lead him, or to reject that line of thought entirely. This is something that I think people get confused on, so let's put a pin in it for now.

We learn during the events leading up to her fight with Kenjaku that Yuki is a former Star Plasma Vessel, and we see that she is openly hostile to Tengen. Once the fight itself unfolds, we learn that Yuki’s cursed technique is Bom Ba Ye — the ability to increase her virtual mass.

Virtual mass is a phenomenon where an object behaves as if it has more or less mass than it actually does. So, Yuki’s technique doesn’t cause a perceptible change in mass for her — but her surroundings will be affected like her mass is increased. This means she can still move and fight unburdened while adding the devastating force of a huge mass increase to her attacks. As part of a Binding Vow to improve the effect of Bom Ba Ye further, the only viable targets for this virtual mass increase are Yuki and her shikigami-cursed tool hybrid, Garuda. It also seems that, due to the fluctuations in virtual mass occurring around her, Yuki can’t be targeted by conceptual techniques like what Kenjaku’s most powerful cursed spirits use. Her virtual mass changes so much that it’s as if the definition of who and what “Tsukumo Yuki” is becomes subject to change, meaning that techniques that interact with concepts on a metaphysical level can’t affect her.

As for her personality, Yuki is very direct and straightforward. She doesn’t mince words or hide her intentions — if she likes you, she’ll tell you. If she wants you dead, she’ll tell you that, too. She’s a rebel, and you can see that in everything from her choice of transportation to how she talks to what she occupies herself with. Gojo wanted to reform jujutsu society, but Tsukumo wanted to tear it down entirely. She’s an ethical anarchist who wants to create true equality — either making it so everyone’s a sorcerer, or so nobody is a sorcerer — and cut right to the chase with fixing the problems in the world. There’s a sense of urgency that propels her to fight hard, live hard, and make sure the world changes in a profound way before another generation has to climb up through the muck that the old guard has burdened them with.

During the run-up to the fateful fight with Kenjaku, we see Yuki’s interactions with Tengen and Choso unfold. She takes a liking to Choso — he’s her type, after all. A hard-working guy who may not have a lot of charisma, but makes up for with dedication and a willingness to fight for what he believes in. Choso confides in her about the guilt he feels for inadvertently making his brothers fight each other to the death, breaking down crying at the fact that he not only sent Eso and Kechizu to die, but that he made Yuji, the baby brother they didn’t know they had, land the killing blow. We also see the animosity Yuki has for Tengen, and how she sympathizes with the other Star Plasma Vessels who merged with Tengen. It’s implied that she’s able to sense their presence and get some idea of their thoughts and emotions within Tengen, but she refuses to share that knowledge.

Once we get to the fight, Yuki puts Kenjaku through the wringer. Kenjaku has mostly skated by through every fight with a combination of Geto’s cursed technique and crafty tactics that always give them the advantage. Choso goes out first to gather information for Yuki before she tags in, and although he’s on the verge of death, he forces Kenjaku to use a technique besides Cursed Spirit Manipulation. Knowing now that one of Kenjaku’s saved up techniques is related to gravity, Yuki enters the fray. She ends up immediately putting pressure on Kenjaku that we haven’t seen anyone else come close to managing, one-shotting a Special Grade cursed spirit and breaking Kenjaku’s arm with one punch — a punch so strong that it breaks through a barrier put up by Tengen, the foremost expert on barriers. From there, Yuki and Kenjaku engage in mind games, close-quarters combat, and Choso even joins in another fine round of Jujumptsu Kaisen before Kenjaku calls one of Yuki’s bluffs, expands their domain, and chips away at her until Yuki is dealt a blow to the stomach, destroying her body’s ability to produce cursed energy. She has Tengen move Choso to safety, then sends her cursed technique out of control, increasing her density until she turns into a black hole. Between her willpower and Tengen’s use of barrier techniques, they restrict the black hole’s growth so that it loses momentum and fades. Kenjaku survives by revealing that the technique they retained from using Kaori Itadori as a host is actually Anti-Gravity System, that they’ve been using technique inversion, and that they managed to endure with Anti-Gravity System until the black hole dissipated. But before she died, Yuki left Kenjaku with these last words: “You control gravity, but aren’t you thinking too small!? Gravity, mass, time, it all boils down to…”

Aside from a brief appearance in Todo’s flashback and in the Hidden Inventory/Premature Death arcs covering Gojo’s past, showing up to save the students trapped by Uraume’s ice in Shibuya, and helping to set up the plan to combat the Culling Games, that’s all she wrote for Yuki’s appearances in the story. However, that’s not the end of her influence. We’ve got Choso carrying on her will by surviving because she protected him, we’ve got her research into the soul that Choso passed along to Itadori, and we’ve got those last words to Kenjaku. It all boils down to… what, exactly? Kenjaku is someone who prides themselves on these plans spanning centuries and these ambitious designs for a new form of cursed energy-based life, and yet, Yuki mocked them for still “thinking too small.” This might be one of those things that’s left up to interpretation, or it might be we’ll learn the rest of what Yuki said to Kenjaku at a pivotal moment — but setting her last words aside, she’s still got a lasting influence. Time will tell what will come of the things she’s left behind.

Subtext, More Than Words So, that’s the text. We’ve covered everything we can get out of just looking at the events of the story and the words and actions of the characters. But, that’s not the whole story. There’s still a lot of subtext left, and a huge part of Yuki’s story plays out entirely in subtext.

Let me pose a question. Why have Yuki fight Kenjaku? Matching up Choso to fight Kenjaku is pretty obvious: Kenjaku tortured and experimented on Choso’s mother, manipulated him and the other Death Paintings, and ultimately abandoned them. Classic revenge fight.

But while there isn’t a clear reason for Yuki to fight Kenjaku other than to guard Tengen on the surface, there’s a very interesting reason in the story’s subtext. Yuki is a former Star Plasma Vessel — as in, one of the candidates who didn’t merge with Tengen. This doesn’t seem to convey any special abilities onto her, but it does give her a very unique relationship with sorcerer society as a whole and Tengen specifically — which, when you really get down to it, are the same thing.

Tengen isn’t some secret traitor, and isn’t some malicious conservative presence. Tengen is the system, and is the passive stand-in for all the people who benefit from or participate in the system whether they realize it or not. It’s why Tengen doesn’t have a distinct human appearance. With her mastery of barriers, Tengen keeps the whole of jujutsu society functioning — and in order to prevent her from evolving to something beyond and potentially hostile to humanity, the Star Plasma Vessel merger is held every few hundred years. Young people, human beings, have their future and their unique, independent identity stolen in order to hold up the status quo. Used up like raw materials just so that the system doesn’t change or face any challenges to it.

Yuki narrowly avoided that fate, and you don’t need to squint very hard to see that having this potential outcome foisted onto her has heavily influenced her view on life. The point of her being a Star Plasma Vessel wasn’t to set up some sort of future plot point where the Star Plasma Vessel would be used to stop Kenjaku or something, it was to contextualize why she is an ethical anarchist. She came face to face with the possibility of being reduced to material so the system can keep going, and she wants to tear the system down to protect future Star Plasma Vessels from being used up like she almost was. It’s her self-imposed responsibility to the future. Not something forced onto her, but a fate and a mission she chose.

It’s why she doesn’t dissuade Geto directly when he proposes killing all non-sorcerers. She can’t in good conscience pursue a future of freedom and indivduality if she makes a young person’s choices for him. Remember, she’s well into adulthood while Geto is just late into his adolescence during their conversation together; to her, he’s still a kid. And so, she gives him her advice, and tells him he has to make his own decision at some point, then commit to it. It ended up being one of the contributing factors to Geto’s downfall, but the alternative was for Yuki to take his freedom of choice away by pressuring him to do what she thinks is right. The outcome wasn’t clear at the time, but what was clear was what Yuki’s personal ethics told her to tell him. It’s why she sympathizes with Choso. She probably went through a similar crisis as Choso, a feeling of being dehumanized: her by being told she might have to surrender her individual existence as a human being to merge with Tengen, Choso by being half-human, half-curse. Even though Choso wants to die for her, she tells him that he’s only died as a curse, and has Tengen protect him so he can live as a human. Yuki won’t allow someone to die to protect her. She won’t use other people to further her goals or escape the consequences of her choices.

It’s why, finally, she has her first and final fight with Kenjaku. Because when you get right down to it, the ultimate goal of the Culling Games — to merge the non-sorcerers of Japan with Tengen after she’s been allowed to evolve beyond humanity, all in order to create a new form of cursed energy-based life — is very similar to the way the Star Plasma Vessel merger was used to sustain the status quo through Tengen. They both rob human beings of life and agency in order to further the goals of an individual or small cadre who seek to benefit from it. Yuki isn’t fighting to protect Tengen, Yuki is fighting to protect the people of Japan from being consolidated into a single non-identity by Kenjaku’s experiment. Yuki is fighting to protect every non-sorcerer from having their individuality and, indeed, their lives stolen like hers almost was.

And in the end, she loses the fight to kill Kenjaku, but preserves her ideals even in death. If Black Hole hadn’t had its growth contained by her willpower and Tengen’s barriers, it would have killed Kenjaku, without a doubt. Anti-Gravity System would have eventually used up all of Kenjaku’s cursed energy, leaving them unprotected from the ravages of the singularity. But at the same time, it would have meant destroying the planet and all life on Earth — and killing Kenjaku at that great a cost would have been such a Pyrrhic victory that it might as well have not been a victory at all. So Yuki gave it her best shot, and bet on the people she had protected to finish the fight if her final gambit didn’t succeed.

If I may indulge in a pet theory, I suspect that Yuki is going to get the last laugh. I suspect that the ultimate downfall of Kenjaku’s plan will, either before or after the merger, be the conversion of every non-sorcerer in Japan into a sorcerer. Sorcerers can protect themselves from the merger while non-sorcerers can’t, and it would be the ultimate refutation of the way Kenjaku sneers at modern humans and sorcerers as weak and helpless. Give them all cursed techniques and see what fresh hell they create. Imagine Sasaki, Yuki, Saori, and all the non-sorcerer humans we’ve seen awakening innate techniques all at once, and what kind of chaos and new possibilities that would create. We’d get Yuki’s goal of a world without cursed spirits and Gojo’s vision of an age where the term “Special Grade” can’t do justice to the level of sorcerer running around. It would make the Golden Age of Sorcery in the Heian era look like a god damn clown college by comparison, if you gave nuclear physicists, philosophers, CEOs, stay-at-home moms, historians, mathematicians, bakery owners, NEET otaku, and every other shade of human being in Japan their own unique cursed technique to use, it would prove just how small Kenjaku was thinking by limiting their view point to just themselves and their ideals — even a thousand years of experiences wouldn’t prepare them for that.

But I digress. My point is that there is a lot more to Yuki than just what’s shown on the pages of the manga, and it’s a disservice to her to act like she had no point as a character. Did she only get one fight? Yes, and it’s one of the most bombastic, high octane fights in the series, packed with strategy, style, and the top shelf violent action GeGe is known for. Were her appearances limited? Yes, and each appearance makes the most efficient use of time possible to make her stand out, as well as giving the reader food for thought — if they’ll just try a taste. Did she die violently? Yes, and that’s not a problem.

Pain, Suffering, and What Lies Beyond Pain and Suffering Let’s step out of the series one more time. When left with no further recourse, people will often argue that the way women are written in Jujutsu Kaisen is bad and wrong because of the violent injuries or deaths they suffer. I’m here to tell you that this is the worst argument of all because of the alternative it implies. Saying this implies “Women can only fight if they win. Women shouldn’t die in manga, and if they do, they have to die pretty without any ugly injuries.”

Now there is absolutely a precedent for the suffering of women being used for cheap, borderline pornographic exploitation. One of the great problems of the Shonen genre is how the deaths of female characters are used purely to motivate the male main character by holding a woman hostage, injuring, killing, or doing even worse to her to force him to fight. One of the great problems of the horror genre is maiming women for cheap shock value. Given that Jujutsu Kaisen sits at the intersection of Shonen and horror, there’s good reason to be concerned about how often women die in Jujutsu Kaisen.

I’m sorry to once again harangue you about other manga in a post about Jujutsu Kaisen, but the Big Three of Shonen manga are all notorious for having subpar depictions of female characters. One Piece’s writing for female characters isn’t terrible, but their visual designs almost invariably fall into the sex bomb supermodel type or the fat and dumpy, borderline meanspirited parody of an old woman type with very, very little in-between. Bleach has the audacity to set up two arcs back-to-back where the goal of the entire arc is to rescue a damsel in distress. Naruto is notorious for sidelining female characters, marrying off 90% of them at the end, and making jokes out of the female characters who don’t get married. Sakura spends the whole series chasing after Sasuke, who has shown indifference at best and open animosity to her at worst, and her ultimate reward is getting married off to an absentee husband and father.

Once again, however, context is everything. The above examples are problematic for robbing women of agency and using them as tools to further a male character’s growth. People accuse Nobara’s death of being this, but when you look at the context, this isn’t the case at all. She isn’t taken hostage, she chooses to chase Mahito and secure the kill, because it’s what she does. She goes for the kill when she’s got her target on the ropes. Her dying doesn’t lead Yuji to get some power up like some people claim it does. It breaks him. Yuji ultimately ends up defeating Mahito, but people always leave out everything between Nobara’s death and his win. He breaks down, his soul crushed, the Black Flash that he’s used to such great effect being used on him by Mahito — a turnaround that not only crushes any feeling Yuji may have had of being special, but that also helps make Mahito’s case that he and Yuji are just the same. It’s only Todo’s intervention and Arata putting Nobara’s condition into stasis, thereby giving Yuji faint hope she might make it, that saves him from giving up and letting himself die. He ultimately defeats Mahito not because of Nobara’s death giving him some power-up, but because Mahito got too comfortable with winning and gave Yuji a reason to never stop seeking his destruction. Yuji wins the fight not because Nobara dying sent him into a quasi-Super Saiyan rage of power, but because he refused to let her death or Nanami’s death be meaningless, and that meaning gave him the enduring core of inner strength that a flimsy nihilist like Mahito lacks.

The Shonen genre is defined by battle — often violent battle — or other challenges that the characters have to overcome. Growth through adversity is the name of the game, and a bad Shonen will only have growth, never adversity. It’s why overpowered isekai protagonists often evoke so much disgust from the broader community of Shonen enthusiasts: they’re a vehicle for cheap, easy wish-fulfillment that asks for nothing in return.

In a series where fighting is the norm, if women aren’t put on the front lines of those defining battles, that immediately creates a sense of inequality. It carries the implication that the author believes women can’t fight, or shouldn’t fight. If women do fight, but always lose, then it implies the author believes women are weak and need men to protect them. If women fight, but always win, on the other hand, then they don’t have a chance to face the same growth through adversity that makes their male counterparts interesting and fulfilling to watch. The best Shonen battle manga are so enjoyable because you get to see characters face challenges they’re not guaranteed to come out of victorious (or even alive), dig deep, and grow as people in order to overcome the adversity that they face. So, what do we get in Jujutsu Kaisen? Well, for one thing, we see Nobara facing a weak, but crafty cursed spirit early on. It takes a child as a hostage to manipulate her into not fighting it directly. This near failure on her part is not due to her being a woman, it’s explicitly due to her being from the countryside, where curses tend to be more animalistic and less inclined to strategy due to the lower population density and, thus, lower concentration of cursed energy. Nobara quickly learns from her mistake, and uses the cursed spirit’s severed arm (courtesy of Yuji) to kill it before it escapes. We see her get split off from the main trio twice: once in the juvenile detention center, once during the fight with the Fingerbearer and the Death Painting brothers. Both times, she doesn’t just let herself be taken captive, she immediately starts fighting. She’s got a mountain of dead cursed spirits underfoot before she runs out of nails in the first case, and in the second, she’s putting up so much of a fight that Eso tries to run away from her before Yuji and Kechizu show up. She then proceeds to turn the whole two-on-two fight around by using Resonance to turn Eso’s technique against him and Kechizu, eventually forcing him to deactivate it.

And we see Yuki, allowed to fight and die for what she believes in. The sacrificial lioness who bared her fangs at injustice and chose to die for her ideals, never letting others go to the slaughter in her stead, never using them as stepping stones. Sexism doesn’t just come in the form of putting women down — it also comes in the form of sanitizing and idealizing the idea of a woman, putting her on a pedestal where she has no agency. A golden cage is still a cage, and nobody can truly be happy unless they have the freedom of choice to take risks, fail sometimes, and keep learning and growing through it all. To hand female characters easy victories without a challenge is as much of a disservice as to give them no victories at all. And a woman’s wish fulfillment power fantasy amounts to about as much as a man’s wish fulfillment power fantasy: everyone is entitled to wish things were easier, to have whatever they want, and to seek out stories where just that happens, but at the end of the day, it’s going to crumble when you’re met with the bittersweet milieu of reality. Personally, I am always going to be more interested in watching people fight, take risks, learn, self-actualize, and overcome challenges.

Jujutsu Kaisen’s appeal is that no victories come easily, the losses mount, the scars deepen, and the wounds never heal. But there’s meaning in fighting even if you lose, and the more bitter the failures you face along the way, the sweeter victory will taste if you get there. It would be disingenous if GeGe Akutami put so much effort into making the female characters self-driven, independent, and formidable, only to then leave them untested and hand them victories without subjecting them to the same adversity as the male characters. Willpower means nothing unless it’s tested, and success is meaningless unless the risk of failure is also a possibility.

Here we arrive at the end, on the far side of a post more than twice the length of my last one. I’m not going to apologize, but I am grateful to those of you who kept reading through all of that. I don’t have any grand concluding statements, because I think that this whole beast speaks for itself. Hopefully this will all be worth the investment of time and energy on my part and yours. My next and final post in this series is going to be much shorter, much more focused, and much more personal. Look forward to it!

#jujutsu kaisen #nobara kugisaki #yuki tsukumo #akutami gege #feminist literary analysis #shonen #thematic analysis #manga analysis #spoilers #jjk manga spoilers

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