#with a couple characters from the series thrown into a different universe

[harmonizewithechoes]

.

#so I’ve been doing little writing exercises with prompts #but I’ve been wanting to get into writing more fanfics and stuff #but it’s just so intimidating you know? #I just checked ao3 for my favorite book series #idk why I’ve never done it before tbh #but!! there’s only one fic there!!! and it’s not even the actual series it’s a crossover fic #with a couple characters from the series thrown into a different universe #which means it’s a blank canvas!! #there’s very little if any established fanon!! #I can do whatever I want #so exciting #literally the best possible news

[thankskenpenders]

Sonic Prime: "Season 2"

Eight more episodes of Sonic Prime are out! They're labeled as "season 2" despite just being the next eight episodes of the first (and presumably only) season, allowing Netflix to market it as multiple seasons without having to give the cast and crew raises. They love doing that shit to their original cartoons. Ugh.

Anyway! Last time, I gave the show some leeway because it was still finding its legs. This time, though? We're now two thirds of the way through the series, and sadly, I think it's time to accept the truth:

While there are parts I like, a lot of this show... kinda sucks?

This multiverse sucks and Rouge was robbed

Previously, I noted the pattern of each universe spotlighting a different friend of Sonic's (Tails in New Yolk City, Amy in the jungle world, Knuckles in the pirate world) and predicted that, hopefully, Rouge would get her time to shine next. And with 16 episodes left, surely there's time to explore new worlds that are more interesting than the jungle and pirate worlds. Those were just the warm up act. Right?

...Right?

Nope! That's it! There are no more worlds.

This multiverse show where anything is possible really is just about another Eggman-controlled dystopia world, a jungle world, and a pirate world. That's all they came up with! Just those three, and two dead worlds that don't really count - one a featureless wasteland, the other a ghostly echo of the original Green Hill dubbed "Ghost Hill." (Sonic's friends appear here as holograms stuck repeating a single line each. It gets old immediately.)

The jungle and pirate worlds and their inhabitants being so overwhelmingly generic becomes unforgivable the moment you realize this is all we're gonna get. It just leaves me wishing they'd thrown this whole concept out and finally made a normal Sonic cartoon with no twist in its premise. A few of the new takes here are good, particularly Nine as a darker riff on Tails, but so many of them don't feel anything like the fun characters they're supposed to be. They're stock cartoon characters wearing the Sonic casts' skins.

I'll admit my bias is showing, but god, Rouge is REALLY done dirty by this setup. The normal Rouge we see in the first episode is so fun for how briefly she appears, but then in all the other worlds she's reduced to a generic action girl with zero personality. What's her purpose, exactly, when every AU version of Amy is ALSO a straightforward action girl? It drives me absolutely insane that they gave us a PIRATE ROUGE and she doesn't care about treasure. They do nothing with this! How!!!!!!!! She's just never gonna get her turn. It's so obvious that Rouge is only in this show so that they can have another girl, but you could swap her out with another character like Blaze and it'd make no difference.

Speaking of the pirates, though...

The way things play out in the pirate world is so stupid

Previously, with the Paradox Prism shard within reach, Captain Dread Knux was regressing into his old obsessive personality. I'm fine with this. Sonic and Dread both want the shard, they're gonna fight over it. Obvious stuff. But the actual impact it has on the story is maybe the stupidest bit of writing in this entire show so far.

Basically, while fighting a couple of the Eggmen and their robots at sea, Sonic has to briefly run over to the enemy ship to fight them and grab the Paradox Prism shard while Dread and his crew remain back on their ship. Dread goes "Oh my god, look! Sonic's abandoning us! Traitor!" While Sonic is... like 200 feet away. Still in clear view. Fighting the guys who are trying to kill them. Retrieving Dread's beloved treasure for him.

And yet, Dread's crew buys this! And when Sonic runs right back over with the shard in hand, they're all like "HOW DARE YOU BETRAY US" and turn on him.

It's just. What?!

This isn't a huge part of the "season," but I highlight it as maybe the worst moment of the show's character writing. I'm reminded of Thorn Rose's backstory from last time, where she was depicted as suddenly snapping one day when she saw her friends pick one too many berries in the jungle. Sometimes a character just needs to pivot for the story to work, and they aren't really interested in getting there smoothly.

The Chaos Council fucking sucks

I tried so hard to like these guys, but they drag the show down so much.

The choice to have a team of five different Eggmen really just means that Eggman has been split into five one-note characters. Four of them revolve entirely around the most trite, predictable, boomer-ass jokes based on their ages. The teenage one is whiny and just wants to play video games. The young adult one is a vegan hipster who does yoga. The old one is cranky about all the whippersnappers and has a bad back. The baby is a baby. These are jokes that would've been tired if this show aired 20 years ago.

The odd man out is Mister Doctor Eggman, the middle-aged one with a toupee who's the stand-in for regular Eggman. But even he kinda sucks. The other four all being one-note joke characters means that he has to be the straight man of the group, so he's just very dry and serious and plot-focused without any of Eggman's fun eccentricities. He's neither particularly funny nor particularly sinister, which is just about the worst place for an Eggman to be.

He doesn't even have any incompetent robot lackeys to bounce off of, because the unfunny alternate age Eggmen fill the quota for bumbling secondary villains. But also, like... Orbot and Cubot are in this show! They were in the first episode! Where are they? God, I never thought I'd miss them so much...

But, okay. It's not ALL bad.

The highlights

There's a recurring theme here, which is that the best episodes are the ones where Sonic is pitted against a foe who can match his speed and they just let the animation carry it.

The first of the new episodes is mostly about Sonic fighting Shadow, and BOY is their fight fun to watch. Said fight happens because Shadow blames Sonic for shattering the universe and doesn't trust him to fix things. Shadow wants to restore their world, but he refuses to see the various AU counterparts as the same people Sonic once knew, and he doesn't really care what happens to them. Ultimately, though, he begrudgingly accepts that Sonic really is the only one who can hop between dimensions for Plot Reasons, and therefore lets him go try to do things the nice way. He sadly spends most of his time waiting around in the void between worlds, but in the last episode of the batch he and Sonic get to team up against the Chaos Council's forces and it's very cool.

As far as recent interpretations of Shadow go, this is a good one. He's a great foil for Sonic, which just makes me wish he could travel with Sonic to the different worlds. He's cynical and overly pragmatic in his approach, but his points aren't entirely wrong. His anger feels justified. They even let him have some snark! And Ian Hanlin is really great in the role - definitely a contender for Shadow's best voice ever. He just sounds so natural.

The other speedster Sonic fights is Chaos Sonic, the Chaos Council's take on Metal.

He can talk! Deven is basically doing a Jaleel impersonation for him? People are very mixed on this.

The idea behind Chaos Sonic is to turn Sonic's obnoxious smack talk and zingers back around on him, and I don't hate this idea, even if a lot of fans find him annoying compared to Metal Sonic. (Some comparisons have been made to Archie's Shard, but I assume this is a coincidence.) Like the rest of the script, his dialogue certainly isn't anything to write home about, but the fights he gets into with Sonic and co. are so damn fun and dynamic that I have to like him. I also like how expressive his eyes are on his dome screen face, and the animators have a ton of fun with the fact that his torso and head can rotate 360 degrees.

Unfortunately, he's destroyed at the end of his debut episode. I'm praying he gets rebuilt, because this show desperately needs better villains than the Chaos Council.

Again, the animation in Prime is maybe the best animation in any official Sonic media, period. I just wished I liked the characters and worlds enough to be invested in more of the fights. It's hard to care about the dozenth group battle against the generic Eggforcer bots and the baby in his Fisher-Price mech.

The note we end on

After fighting a giant glowing replica of the normal Eggman for... some reason? Episode 16 ends with Sonic and Nine getting into an argument over what to do with the Paradox Prism shards. Sonic wants to restore his original world, but Nine still wants to create a new, better world out of the one that's just an empty wasteland, believing he doesn't belong anywhere else. Nine angrily runs off with the shards, and Sonic is distraught as he realizes that Shadow was seemingly right about how he shouldn't trust Nine.

I kind of like this conflict, mostly because Nine is the standout character of this show. But my main problem is that we don't know what will happen when everything is fixed.

The logical assumption is that the alternate worlds will just... stop existing, right? That must be the idea if Sonic and Nine are treating restoring the original world and creating a new one in the Shatterverse as mutually exclusive options, right? If the Shatterverse disappears, will Nine and the rest all stop existing, too? The show seems unwilling to discuss this possibility, so I'm left not really knowing what the stakes are in this conflict. Nine becomes a whole lot more sympathetic and Sonic becomes a whole lot more monstrous if restoring the world will erase most of this show's cast from existence, but the thought that this could even happen doesn't seem to have crossed Sonic's mind. Sonic seems to want to take his AU friends back to the regular Green Hill - he at least wants to introduce Nine to his normal friends - but like... he can't really do that, can he? They're not gonna have four Tailses running around.

I don't really know what direction this is all headed in. I guess we just have to keep watching, even if I'm past the point of accepting that this show is mostly very mid.

It's just frustrating that everyone else working on this show is clearly giving it their all while the writers at Man of Action phone it in for so much of its runtime. The scripts drag this show down so, so hard. There are moments and episodes I like, but you have to slog through so much mediocrity to get there.

#tkp post #other media

[abalidoth]

what is cosmere? (is that what its called?)

The Cosmere is a big, interconnected fantasy universe that is the setting of most of the works by the author Brandon Sanderson. The cool thing about his books is that each series is contained to its own world, and you can read any of them in isolation without realizing you're missing anything, but if you read them all you get a sense of the larger plot happening behind the scenes as those worlds start to collide and things cross over.

Brandon's magic systems tend to be very rule-based and well-defined, with a lot of twists being characters finding interesting ways to use those rules of magic. This lends itself well to the crossovers, because all the magic systems (as different as they are) share the same underpinning principles.

Here's some quick rundowns of different series and standalones in the Cosmere:

The Stormlight Archive

Planned ten-book series, currently four books are out.

A massive sprawling epic about the world Roshar, that's hit by a hurricane about every four days, and all the life has adapted to survive that environment. Knights Radiant -- superpowered individuals with a close bond to a spirit -- are starting to re-emerge in the world after being absent for centuries.

Because there are so many characters, this is where a lot of the character fandom tends to focus their efforts. I wouldn't recommend starting with it, though -- the first book alone is a thousand pages. I'd wait until you have a sense of Brandon's writing. But it's very good.

Mistborn

One trilogy (completed), one tetralogy set a couple hundred years later (completed), two trilogies some time in the future.

One cool thing about this series is that it follows one world (Scadrial) from a vaguely Renaissance tech level in the first trilogy, to 1920s in the second series, and eventually 1980s in the third and space-age magic in the fourth.

The magic itself is very intricate and all woven around metals -- there are people called Metalborn who can ingest metals and burn them in their stomachs to get different effects, including super-senses, strength, and Magneto-ish metallokinesis. That last bit makes the gunfights in the second series particularly fun.

The first book is a heist novel about robbing a thousand-year-old God-Emperor blind. It's a pretty good place to start, although it's a pretty hefty novel to start with.

The Emperor's Soul

I'm putting this one in a different category from the rest of the one-offs for a very good reason -- it's, in my opinion, the single best place to start reading the Cosmere.

It's a novella (just over a hundred pages) about a forger named Shai who uses magic to rewrite the histories of objects. She is captured by the government of an empire to reforge the soul of their Emperor, who has been left braindead after an assassination attempt, in the 100 days before the mourning period is over.

It's a fantastic meditation on art, a cool introduction to the way Brandon writes both characters and magic systems, and Shai herself is one of my favorite Cosmere characters. If any of this sounds at all interesting to you, I recommend you check it out.

One-offs

Brandon has also written a bunch of one-off novels in the Cosmere.

Elantris: His first book, and the one that my tattoo is from. About a prince who is affected by a dark transformation and thrown into a city of fellow undead, and the princess betrothed to him who arrives just in time to be told he died. Good, but suffers from some first book issues, pacing problems, and weird plot cul-de-sacs. Set in the same world as The Emperor's Soul, although there's basically no crossover.

Warbreaker: About a world where souls (Breaths) are bought and sold, and used to animate objects to do work, ruled by The Returned, living gods who require a steady dose of Breaths to live. One of my favorites, and an essential if you'd like to get into the crossover-y parts of the cosmere, as it introduces a bunch of elements that show up later (Especially in Stormlight)

Tress of the Emerald Sea: The first of his wildly successful Kickstarter project books, it's a fairy tale style story about a girl who braves a sea of bubbling, deadly spores to rescue the man she loves. It's lovely, especially if you're into a more Diana Wynne Jones kind of vibe to your fantasy. Probably a pretty good place to start!

Yumi and the Nightmare Painter: The third Kickstarter book. About a shrine priestess who stacks rocks to draw spirits, and a man who paints the nightmares that roam the streets of his city to banish them -- they become trapped in each other's places and must learn about each other's worlds to survive. This is currently my ABSOLUTE FAVORITE cosmere novel, oh my GOD it's so good. I'm not sure it's a great place to start, as a lot of the conclusion might feel a bit rushed if you don't have a good feel for the vibe of how Brandon writes magic, but honestly it might stand alone just fine even then.

The Sunlit Man: Fourth Kickstarter book. I haven't read this one yet.

Novellas: There are a bunch of novellas and short stories, some set on worlds we haven't otherwise seen, some set on Roshar or Scadrial.

If any of this sounds good to you, I recommend you give his writing a shot. He's one of my all time favorite writers (the tattoo should prove that, lol) and the Cosmere fandom is by and large wonderful and welcoming. I've made many lifelong friendships there.

#cosmere #brandon sanderson #stormlight archive #mistborn #tesseranswers

[demonslayedher]

Why is it that demons are averse to wisteria? I have been trying to look into the meanings behind wisteria but I can only find what wisteria symbolises in European cultures. Is the relationship between demons and wisteria something that already exists in Japanese folklore, or something Gotoge decided, and if so, what might have been the reasoning/symbolism for choosing that particular plant over others?

AHA!!!! I knew I had written this up before, I just couldn't find it! I finally remembered that is was in my longer post theorizing that Muzan was from an offshoot of the Fujiwara clan! That wasn't exclusively about wisteria, but I'm copying-and-pasting here the long part that was, see below the cut. The Prof. Owada I refer to below is a retired Shizuoka University professor who wrote a book called “Japanese History of Demon Slayers” to directly capitalize on the success of Kimetsu no Yaiba, and to dive into a lot of ties between the series and what it may pay homage to throughout Japanese history and culture. It is not an official Shueisha publication and therefore not canon material, but it takes canon and fan theories into according pretty thoroughly. Since he's already done the breakdown of "why wisteria" I'm simply borrowing it. Short answer: No, this does not already exist in Japanese folklore and is unique to KnY. However, Gotouge usually has reasons for things and people love to ponder those reasons.

One such question is, why were wisteria lethal to demons? According to Prof. Owada’s research, there is no historical basis for this. Some of the talk online is that: 1. Wisteria are in fact poisonous, and consuming too much of them would cause vomiting and diarrhea (though I’ve also seen people make jam out of them because of the fragrance, so, like???) 2. Beans are thrown around at Setsubun to ward off demons (like so, Feat. Muzan and Kimetsu Beans), and wisteria are of the bean family 3. Wisteria like sunlight, so perhaps like Nichirin, they soak up some of the sun’s properties that are lethal to demons 4. In the language of flowers (Hanakotoba), wisteria symbolize kindness, welcomeness, refusing to leave someone’s side, being drunk with love, being straightforward and truthful, not losing the humanity in one’s heart, thereby containing a lot of meaning contrary to the conduct of demons Interesting, but some of its kind of a stretch. While still finding it a stretch to apply it to wisteria being poisonous to demons, Prof. Owada goes on to say that since ancient times, while the wisteria has some negative connotations of how it was sometimes written with characters meaning “doesn’t heal” (不治) and growing downward with smaller and smaller flowers like symbolize the slow downfall of a family line, it conversely also carries positive connotations of longevity and flourishing family due to the fact that its vines grow upward.

Now, you might picked up at some point that the Japanese word for wisteria is “fuji.” Not to be confused with Mt. Fuji (that’s written differently), it IS the same fuji as in “Fujiwara”: 藤.

Prof. Owada goes on to explore the association with the use of Wisteria crests in Kimetsu no Yaiba, especially on the houses of supporters of the Demon Slayer Corp. His recurring thesis is that the pandemic is partly responsible for Kimetsu no Yaiba’s popularity since demon legends have long since had origins in epidemics, and he supposes the Wisteria crest has a protective effect on the houses, similar to a talisman used in a lot of real life rituals for warding off illness and then often displays in or on the entries of houses to protect the family every year (I have one such item gifted to me, it stays by my doorway, along with a couple sticks of charcoal (but the culture of charcoal is a post for some other day)). The talisman is in reference to a god of Hindu/Chinese origins being treated with hospitality by the So clan, so although other families perished in disaster/disease, he promised to always protect the So clan descendants, so the talisman says “Descendants of the So Clan” so that any household may try to claim that divine protection. The gratitude-exchange of hospitality and protection and sure sounds familiar! Prof. Owada isn’t done yet. While the crest design used in Kimetsu no Yaiba isn’t an actual family crest in in real life, there are lots and lots and lots of family crests that use a wisteria design and have the character for “wisteria” in the name. Any time you hear “—tou”, like Satou, Saitou, or even Gotou, you can typically assume it’s 藤. It’s very common nowadays, but the first family to be granted the use of this name was the Fujiwara clan, when one of the pre-Heian and very powerful emperors granted their clan head this surname, which was a major honor, and it marked the start of the Fujiwara clan’s political dominance (there was already influence leading up to this, but meh, we like clear-cut stuff to simply centuries of history, don’t we?). Furthermore, although we often think of the Fujiwara clan for their influence at court, and we might think of the Minamoto clan for warrior heroes who fought demons, Prof. Owada concludes his argument of wisteria’s protective influence by pointed out a long list of Heian period Fujiwara warriors who also were the heroes of demon slaying legends, stating that their name has also long been tied with demon slayer culture.

#kny nerdery

[classicequinox]

Fic FAQ: Where your love has always been enough (for me)

Hello, I thought I'd compile the most frequent questions I've been getting for this fic here for easier viewing/in case you have the same question! :) WARNING: SPOILERS ABOUND

Do avoid reading if you're not up to date with the current chapter, or if you'd rather wait and see how things go as new chapters are released!

1. How old are all the children? Their ages will of course increase with time since this fic spans so many years, but as of chapter 19 (Shouto's birth):

Touya: 10 Fuyumi: 6 Natsuo: 4 Shouto: 0

Keigo: 9 Emiko: 9 Geten: 6

Hana: 10 Tenko: 5

There are some differences from canon since this fic was planned long before all the children's ages were confirmed in the manga!

2. When is Hawks going to appear ? As of chapter 23: very, very soon...

3. Is Touya/Hawks going to be a thing? Yes, they most definitely are! Don't worry I wouldn't be so evil as to tag them for only that angsty DabiHawks scene set in canon :')

4. When is AFO going to do something/why isn't All Might doing anything about AFO? No, I haven't forgotten that AFO exists (and neither has All Might) but unfortunately, there are only so many plotlines that can be actively followed at once :') Let's just say, AFO is up to his usual scheming behind the scenes and All Might is actively dismantling various of his organised crime units.

(That being said, we should get a little preview of AFO in a couple of chapters from C23!)

5. Is Izuku going to make an appearance? Definitely!

6. Are any of the Todoroki children also from Enji's canon timeline/going to travel back in time from the future? Unfortunately not, for 2 main reasons:

1) It's a little universe breaking since the way the branching timelines work, even if the kids travel back, it'd be this AU timeline's version of them who would travel back rather than their canon versions (who would still be stuck in their sucky canon childhood with canon Endeavour)

2) It'd make for a whole story of its own that wouldn't fit into this already very giant fic :')

BUT on both those notes, I'm very willing to break the universe's space-time rules and explore the delicious feels in a spin off! It's still a long way to go (I'd probably want to complete the main fic first), but I imagine any of the kids (Dabi, anyone?) would have a pretty interesting reaction to being thrown into this AU

Feel free to let me know which characters you'd most like to see in that scenario :)

7) How long will this fic be? Good question :') While my headcanons stretch out across the kids' childhoods and deep into their teenage years and beyond... in the name of good storytelling to avoid bloating this fic too much, this story will likely end pre-canon, albeit with a long canon era epilogue.

Projected total chapter count (subject to change): ~30-35

Before I get a lot of screams and angry yelling: I do still intend to flesh out and post those headcanons I mentioned as stories in the same series. Whether as a single actual slice-of-life sequel or multiple character-focused fics or a mix, I haven't yet decided, but there's that!

--- Feel free to ask if you have questions that aren't listed here! :)

#fanfic #mha #faq #endeavor #todoroki family #my fic #where your love has always been enough (for me)

[astoryadaykeepsrealityaway]

Book Review: Twisted Games by Ana Huang

Ms. Ana Huang did it again. That’s the tea. That’s all can say. This book had me on my knees, just as much as Twisted Love did. The tropes in this book were completely different from its predecessor, but it also somewhat has some similarities. In some ways, I personally preferred the explosive relationship between Ava and Alex, as compared to Bridget and Rhys, but this book makes up for it in terms of the spice and steamy parts. 

Twisted Games follows our FMC Bridget Von Ascheberg, who is the princess of a kingdom called Eldorra. Despite being of royal blood, Bridget craves a life of freedom, where she’s free to study and do what she wants. Bridget met Ava, Jules, and Stella at Thayer University and always had a bodyguard with her due to her status. When her old bodyguard decides to resign due to some family obligations, Bridget gets a new bodyguard, and almost immediately both parties get on each other’s nerves due to their very opposing personalities. Rhys Larsen, who used to be in the military, just got a new assignment, which is to be the bodyguard of the princess of Eldorra. Despite his initial impression of Bridget, Rhys soon realises that the princess is not all she seems to be. When Bridget’s brother suddenly abdicates the throne for his own reasons, Bridget is suddenly thrown into the spotlight for having to take his place as the Queen of Eldorra. Due to this new circumstance, Rhys and Bridget have completely no way they can be with each other. 

In terms of the plot, this book had so much more depth and the trope of forbidden romance made Rhys and Bridget’s relationship so much more steamy and wholesome. Just like Twisted Love, Rhys has his fair share of ‘You’re Mine’ moments, which makes him a very overprotective partner, which aligns very well with his character. Twisted Games gets half a star less than Twisted Love for one reason, which is the sequencing of the novel.

It is quite clear in the books that the events that are taking place will align with what is happening in the other characters in their own books. Because of this, Twisted Games has some unnecessary time skips which caused me some confusion as I was reading it. Other than the sequencing, the age gap between the MMC and FMC also caught me off guard at the start of the book. It took me some time to get used to the 11-year-age gap, however, the tension and the neediness between both characters made up for it. Also, the jealousy scenes were absolutely *chef’s kiss*. 

In general, this book might have been a little bit of a letdown, but it was exactly what I wanted for both Rhys and Bridget! This book was amazing and the spicy scenes had me in a chokehold throughout my time reading them. Besides, an added bonus was seeing hints of the next Twisted couple sprinkled all throughout the book, and I am super excited about it! Can you guess who the next couple is? It’s none other than Josh and Jules, which I have a strong feeling is gonna be my favourite couple in the series!

Rating: 3/5 stars

#booktok #bookworm #ana huang #twisted series #booklr #twisted games #bridget von ascheberg #rhys larsen #jules ambrose #josh chen #stella alonso #christian harper #ava chen #alex volkov

[herrmannhalsteadproduction]

Congratulations on Not Dying (Happy Birthday, Chris!) [Chapter One]

Summary: This is Part Sixteen of my series A Herrmann/Halstead Production. It is an AU where Christopher Herrmann's mom had an affair with Pat Halstead resulting in a baby. The series follows this OC character (Rebecca "Bex" Herrmann) as she grows up and gets to know her brothers and the various Chicago teams. It is very much an AU, just to underscore that. It doesn't follow the same timeline and characters will follow different paths.

Click here for the Series Rundown where you can find the links to read all of the previous installments (which I highly recommend you do so that this one makes sense.)

Rating: Teen and Up

Relationships: Christopher Herrmann & Original Female Character, Christopher Herrmann/Cindy Herrmann, Jay Halstead & Original Female Character, Will Halstead & Original Female Character, Jay Halstead & Will Halstead, pre-Greg 'Mouse' Gerwitz/Original Female Character, pre-Will Halstead/Connor Rhodes, Assorted OC Couples

Warnings: Language, Light Angst, People Making Bad Decisions

A/N: To underscore my previous note, this is an alternate universe so things have unfolded differently. This will not follow the canon arc exactly by any means. But I hope you'll still enjoy it!

Chapter One

Bex

Chris was turning forty and she would have made a big deal out of it no matter what, but—

He also almost died this year.

Bex really hated thinking about how close she came to losing him so to counteract all of that, she’d thrown herself into planning the best surprise party ever.

She just wanted a moment where everyone came together to show their love for Chris not because he was hurt, but because he was still there.

If she’d asked him about having a party, he’d have downplayed the idea of a celebration—probably would have suggested they all have a beer at Molly’s aka something they did every week anyway. Hence why she’d gone rogue with a surprise.

Everything was coming together perfectly.

She had them booked into the party room at one of Chris’s favourite restaurants. There’d be plenty of room for eating and mingling and dancing. The cake was ordered. Most of the decorations were bought. She had plenty of people on board to help with set up.

It was going to be amazing.

So far, the hardest part was getting Chris out of the way. Cindy had plans to whisk him and the kids away to the Lincoln Park Zoo for the day, but he was still making noise about working at Molly’s that evening. Cindy said if worst came to worst, she’d just shove him in the trunk.

The regular support staff was covering the bar so he couldn’t complain about that later (he still would, bless his frugal little heart) and a babysitter was booked in for the kids.

Bex looked at the clock. Seven a.m. T-minus twelve hours until party time.

No problem.

“Bex, I’m so sorry, but I got called in,” Will said as he rushed into the kitchen and poured himself a coffee.

“What? No!” Will was supposed to be one of her main helpers. He knew the whole plan from start to finish. Jay was supposed to help too, but he’d been…off the past couple of days.

She knew why. Erin had gone back to New York and it didn’t take a genius to read between the lines about what had gone down between the two of them after seeing them at Molly’s that last night.

They were both adults. They could make their own decisions.

Bex just wished they hadn’t made that particular decision. Not when she knew how much it had to be hurting Jay especially. People didn’t always see it, but just like Will, when Jay loved, he did it with his whole heart. And the people he loved kept leaving him.

He wasn’t talking about it to her yet and she was giving him space, but the clock was ticking on that. Brooding Jay was always a recipe for disaster.

Ugh. And now she was left with wrangling Brooding Jay all on her own.

“Please tell me it’s not a whole shift,” she begged Will. “I know you have to go, but I really wanted everyone to be there tonight.”      

“Don’t worry,” he assured her as he started throwing things into his lunch bag. “They only need me to cover part of someone else’s shift so I’ll be done by two. Four max.”

She shot him a dubious look.

“I’ll be there!” He grabbed his stuff, gave her a quick one-armed hug, and hurried out the door.

Bex frowned after him and picked up her phone.

Bex: Hey! Are you working today?

Connor: Yup, but only until 4. I’ll still make it to the party.

Bex: Excellent. You’ve been drafted into Official Party Business. Officially.

Connor: That sounds ominous.

Bex: Will got called in. Your job is to make sure he leaves with you today. Please!

Connor: Sure

Bex: I know stuff might happen and you guys might have to stay. I get it. Bex: But if it’s at all possible to leave on time, please please please make it happen!

Connor: Bex. I’m on it. Don’t worry.

Bex: Thank you!!!

Okay. She huffed out a breath. That was the best she could do on that front. With almost everyone in their circle working as first responders, missing out on events was unavoidable sometimes, but she had her fingers crossed that the majority of their gang would be able to make it out for this one.

Her phone buzzed and she swiped to check the new message.

Jay: Sorry, Bex – going to be late. Have to head into work for a bit. Will try to be quick.

Bex banged her phone against her forehead a few times before responding.

Bex: No worries! Will you still be able to pick up the balloons later?

Jay: Yup

Bex: Awesome. Thank you!

She tossed her phone down onto the kitchen table and scrubbed a hand down her face. Okay. Not the end of the world. Jay still grabbing the balloons was a huge help. She still had other helpers.

It was going to be fine.

Her phone rang. The number for the restaurant flashed across the screen and she answered it.

“Ms. Herrmann, this is Kaitlyn from Arturo’s. I am so sorry, but we have to cancel your booking for today. There’s been a flood in the kitchen and we have to close for repairs.”

Kaitlyn went on about a possible rebooking date and somehow Bex managed to politely decline and hang up.

Well.

Shit.

***

Super Secret Birthday Party Group Chat – Team 51

Bex: 911 EMERGENCY SOS HELP Bex: ANYONE WHO IS AVAILABLE PLEASE COME TO MY PLACE

Kelly: What the hell, Bex?

Bex: NO TIME FOR QUESTIONS

Matt: We should probably just go there.

***

Bex

Twenty minutes later, Matt, Kelly, Gabi, Shay, Stella, Sylvie, Otis, Joe, Capp, Tony, Uncle Mouch, Uncle Bo, and Donna were all crammed into her living room.

Bex paced the floor in front of them as she explained the situation. “So, we have no venue, no food, no tables, no seating, no dishes, no music, and no dance floor,” she said, ticking the items off on her fingers. “All we have is a few decorations and balloons once Jay picks them up. And a cake as long as the bakery is still running.”

She ran a hand through her hair. “Maybe I should call them and make sure.”

Donna looked up from her phone, pausing the rapid-fire texting she’d been engaged in. “Cindy’s suggesting we use their house.”

“Won’t they be home before the party starts?” Bex asked. "Kind of defeats the purpose of a surprise."

“Cindy says she can keep him busy,” Donna shrugged. “The backyard is nice and big. The kitchen has plenty of room for us to cook. I’m guessing that’s the only way we’re going to manage food at this point.”

“I think Fifty-One can handle a proper barbeque,” Uncle Bo said with a confident nod.

That was…that was definitely a good start. Bex was starting to feel a little less grim about the whole thing. “What about tables and chairs? Do we need tablecloths?”

“I’ve got a buddy with a connection at a party supply place,” Matt said. “It’s a bit of a drive to get there, but he should be able to set us up with tables and chairs. If we take my truck and Capp’s, I think we could do it in one trip.”

“And we don’t necessarily need tablecloths, Bex,” Stella said, getting up to pace and plan with her. “We could get some tea lights for the tables and some fairy lights for the yard?”

Bex nodded, getting into the idea.

“And honestly,” Shay chimed in. “No one is going to stress if we have paper plates for this. None of us are fancy."

"Speak for yourself,” Uncle Mouch sniffed before cracking a smile.

Donna swatted at him with a laugh. “You know you’ve got plenty of hands willing to help out with the food,” she said to Bex. “We can do a big shop and take it all over to Chris and Cindy’s.”

“The restaurant refunded my money so I think I can still cover most of this,” Bex said, doing the math in her head.

“We’ll chip in too,” Kelly offered and everyone else nodded.

“I can do a beer and booze run from our supplier,” Gabi offered. “Get us a bit of a discount.”

“My cousin’s a DJ and he owes me a favour,” Otis piped up. “He’s got a portable dance floor too. It’s not huge, but I think it would fit in with what we’re setting up.”

“That would be amazing,” Bex said, her shoulders finally starting to lose some of their tension. “Thank you so much, all of you. Seriously, this is amazing.”

“It’s what we do, Baby Herrmann,” Uncle Bo said, wrapping her up in a hug. “You know that.”

She really did. And she’d never stop feeling grateful for it.

But she could be grateful and organized at the same time.

“Okay, huddle up,” she said. “We’ve got just over ten hours to make this happen.”

***

Will

Will felt awful for abandoning Bex, but he couldn’t leave the ED in the lurch either. They were short-staffed and he didn’t have all the details, but he heard they were getting slammed.

He jogged up the sidewalk and headed for the glass doors.

A quiet whine had him pausing until he heard it again.

There, to the right of the doors, tied up to a post by the bushes was a shaggy brown dog with the saddest little face.

“Hey, fella,” Will said, crouching a slight distance away and holding out a hand. The dog crept forward and sniffed at him before nudging into his hand. Will took the invitation and gave him a few pats. “What are you doing out here, hunh? Where’s your owner? Inside?”

The dog sighed and laid down at his feet.

“I’ll go check, okay?” He gave the dog one more pet before standing and walking inside where he instantly got swept up in the chaos of the ED.

***

Chris

Cindy had that look in her eye and she’d been on her phone more than usual.

Something was up.

But seeing as how it was his birthday…

He’d allow it.

Chris grinned to himself before noticing one of his children attempting to scale the fence of yet another enclosure. For pete’s sake—

“Annabelle!”

Hopefully they all survived to see whatever it was Cindy had up her sleeve. Click here for Chapter Two Click here for Chapter Three Click here for Chapter Four Click here for Chapter Five

Click here to read Congratulations on Not Dying (Happy Birthday, Chris!) on ao3:

And here is the tag list (let me know if you wish to be added or removed):

@sorry-i-spaced, @iunnowatuwant, @multifandomgrl08, @thegirlwhowishedeveryonelived, @ivyalmighty, @thewannabewriter, @foxes-and-cats, @sensitivemallysix, @lexhalstead3

#chicago fire #chicago med #chicago pd #one chicago #christopher herrmann #jay halstead #will halstead #halstead brothers #oc character #rebecca 'bex' herrmann #halstead sister #found family #team as family #alternate universe #not canon #not beta read #my first fanfic series #A Herrmann/Halstead Production #light angst #low self esteem #bad decisions #sibling conflict

[aylinaliens]

Any 🌶️ book recs?

hello anon!! of course i have 🌶 book recs! i prefer meatier plot wise but i do have a few that is straight up the ‘plot what plot’ tag.

the kiss quotient + the bride test by helen hoang: these two books were like my intro into 🌶 adult books so they have a special place in my heart. not only does it have good rep for those on the spectrum but the relationships/spice is so good. the kiss quotient is about a woman with asperger who hires a male escort to ‘teach’ her how to be better in the bedroom. the bride test is set in the same universe! this has a forced marriage/marriage of convenience and wjxjwjjxd the SPICE!! esme & kai are my beloveds <3

the mindf*ck series by s.t. abby: full disclosure GO LOOK AT THE TRIGGERS because this series is heavy. heavy HEAVY. a ceral killer who wants to exact revenge on this small town falls in love with the FBI agent that is assigned to her case. sounds messed up and it is but the romance between lana and logan stays surprisingly wholesome?? and the spice was so good. this series is a crime/thriller first and a romance second so be aware of that

get a life chloe brown (+ the next two book in the series) by talia hibbert: rarely do i blush or have any physical reaction whilst reading but hdjwjxjd yeah this series has me 😳 the whole time. the series follows a trio of sisters who all get their love story. the brown sisters are equal parts hilarious and lovable. i can’t even pick a favorite one or couple because they all are so good

it happened one summer by tessa bailey: this book is literally just a schitts creak au skdjwjjdjd piper bellinger is a spoiled rich girl who is sent to a tiny little coastal town with her sister after she throws a party that is a little too out of hand. she ends up meeting a rugged fisherman. it’s the grumpy x sunshine trope on steroids. the spice…idk what kind of water tessa bailey is drinking but it’s next level. this sequel about pipers younger sister was actually one of the books i picked up today and i’m so excited to start it!!

how to fake it in hollywood by ava wilder: this is a newer release that came out like two months ago so it’s not recommended that much and !!! i’m so confused why?? as soon as i got the arc i completely devoured it in a few hours. it’s an age gap (in a non-weird way) between a hollywood starlet and an A-lister who fake dates for publicity. this one is heavier but the smut we get is *chefs kiss*

promises & pomegranate by sav r. miller: this is one of my ‘plot what plot’ book cnjwjdjs this is a very loose hades & persephone retelling with a little bit of mafia romance thrown in. the whole thing was weird but the 🌶 was excellent even though some of the scenes made me set the book down because they got a little bit too wild (and maybe not in a good way)

a brush with love by mazey eddings: this is what i like to call my ‘comfort soft smut 🥺🌶’ book. if you read fanfic you know what i mean by soft smut. the whole book is so fluffy it makes me want to cry. and the smut is so sOft it gives me butterflies. it’s a little slice of life that follows two dental students who fall in love. the tension and chemistry between harper & dan is sizzling!!

romancing mister bridgerton by julia quinn: this is the only book the bridgerton series that has manage to put me in a chokehold. penelope and colin are my idiotic beloveds who i love to hate. slowburn (SLOWBURN as in 10+ years) and friends to lovers is my weakness. i frequently think about multiple 🌶 scenes from that book every weak because it was that good…without getting too graphic let’s just say mirrors hit differently for me now

dating dr. dil by nisha sharma: THIS BOOOOK!!!the 🌶?? legendary. it has the typical fake dating/engagement trope but the dynamic between the characters was everything. i’m a suck for bickering and the antagonizing slow push and pull that exists. and kareena/prem push and pull a lot. the spice was also steamy too

mistakes were made by meryl wilsner: the fact that i got an arc for this book is still so surreal like ?? what did i do to deserve this?? okay so for those who crave the ✨sapphic✨ 🌶 you need to check this out. it’s about a college senior who hooks up with her best friends mom. the two have a one night stand and the very next day they are thrown together. i loved this GIMME more adult sapphic 🌶

delilah doesn’t care by ashley herring: another ✨sapphic✨ book because <3 the spice…A H jdjwkdksjdkd it was so ??? i can’t even ??? how this book manages to be so sweet and so hot at the same time is a mystery

one last stop + red white royal blue by casey mcquiston: pretty sure these are two of the most recommended lgbtq+ spicy-adjacent books out there but i thought i would throw them in anyways because despite how hyped they are i adore these books so much!!

the lady’s guide to celestial mechanics by olivia waite: lesbian historical regency era 🌶 romance?? need i say MORE????

fingersmith by sarah waters: this is an older book but it inspired the handmaiden film (if you haven’t watched it gooooo check it out pls). it’s more plot heavy but yeah…historical sapphic spicy books 🤧 love them dearly

neon gods by katee roberts: …another hades & persephone retelling because ?? i am utter weak at the knees for them. it’s another ‘plot what plot’ book for me

ali hazelwood books: i would not say her books are SPICY because they only have like two scenes (talking about you the love hypothesis) but the novellas get very very smutty. ali hazelwood is my guilty pleasure author. her books kill my brain cells but they are entertaining enough to make me forgive the flaws

i hope this helps anon! these book vary on 🌶 level. i didn’t just want to give you a list of all the popular spicy booktok favorites so i tried to throw in some more less talked about ones! if i’m not watching dramas i’m reading so if anyone wants recs let me know because i love gushing about my favorite books

#i’m also fairly new to the 🌶 genre! i’m slowly working through my backlog on KU and my TBR #ya/historical fiction/fantasy are my true loves but i’m trying to expand #so if anyone has any book recs for me those are welcome too cjwjdjwjjd #kay answers #books #kay reads #this blog was going to be a bookblr but then i watched extraordinary you/cloy and went ‘nevermind’

[sparatus]

Exponential Differentiation Series Masterpost

welcome welcome, we’re now [checks notes] 3 major installments and some extras into my big no-reapers au, so it’s probably high time i actually make a big masterpost for it, huh?

Features

Premise: 50,000 years ago, the Protheans were able to complete the Crucible, but by the time of firing, their population had been reduced to unsustainability. Their technology still remained for the later species, but the Reapers would never return. All’s well that ends well, right? Well, not quite. When a routine artifact retrieval on Eden Prime once more goes awry, new Special Tactics candidate Matteo Shepard is thrown headfirst into the fray, hunting down the mysterious team that attacked the colony - and stumbling across something so much bigger than they ever could have imagined.

Our Hero: Matteo Shepard, DMAB nonbinary (they/he pronouns). Native of Terra Nova, Matteo’s mother disappeared at a young age, leaving their family fractured and their trust in others on shaky legs. When their team’s investigation into the disappearing colony of Akuze leaves all but themselves and two others (that they know) dead and them needing intensive psychiatric care, they withdraw in on themselves, not wanting to get close enough to other people to be hurt again. Unfortunately for them, the universe disagrees with this plan.

The Crew: The Normandy crew has been supplemented with a whole host of other Shepards imported into a different canon OCs to flesh out the crew, as well as a couple familiar faces - Nihlus Kryik, mentoring Shepard for the Spectres, is a fixture on the team, and his rude shadow Saren Arterius is (very grudgingly, because the boss said he had to) coming along for the ride. Beyond the Normandy’s hull, the rest of the galaxy’s got a lot of new faces too, both friend and foe, ranging from Saren’s secretive family to the batarian Resistance and back again! Both canon characters and OCs join the party to bring the awfully empty galaxy to life...

Most Wanted: ... including the antagonists, of course. An entirely new team of mini-boss antagonists causes problems for Shepard left and right as Shepard explores the depths of Cerberus’s depravity, and an enemy often overlooked gets their own time to shine, with a subplot all their own, because I think they deserved better and had a lot of potential, and I’m the author so I decide the subplots, dammit. (You didn’t think I mentioned the batarian Resistance up there just for fun, did you?)

Love and All That: It's no Truck Shepard and the Space Kissing Adventure, of course, but we're not leaving romance off the table entirely! There's both established relationships and budding relationships for the discerning connoisseur. A couple of them are even majorly plot relevant, check the AO3 tags. Endgame for Matteo themselves is with Jack, but we have to get there first ;)

Links

Full Series: Exponential Differentiation

Broken Mirror: Start here! The first fic in the series. 333k words, completed. The adventure begins on Eden Prime, as usual, but takes a turn for the Something Else when the beacon is assaulted instead by a human strike team, launching a manhunt across the stars that quickly spirals into something so much bigger than Shepard ever could have imagined. [LINK]

Blood in the Water: A novella in-between-quel set maybe a month after Broken Mirror. 50k words, completed. Shepard is taking a much-needed break from the hunt for Cerberus when an unwelcome guest turns up on their doorstep with dire news. It's a race against time to stop batarian terrorist Ka'hairal Balak and his genocidal plans, but this time, with some help: half-mad salarian Spectre Gurji Taeja and her pals from the batarian Resistance, Tarvok and Teezh Shad'derah. [LINK]

Where the Wind Rests: Two-shot glimpsing what Nihlus has been up to while Shepard was dealing with Balak. 8.6k words, completed. Nihlus takes a detour to Palaven to visit Saren and get an answer for an important question. [LINK]

In the Land of Giants: The second major installment. Currently in progress! With Hislop dead and Terra Nova safe, Shepard is back on the hunt for Cerberus. A friend's disappearance and a strange message both point them to Omega, where they encounter a surprising new ally... [LINK]

The Weight of Memory: Novella companion piece to In the Land of Giants. Currently in progress! While Shepard and Nihlus continue the hunt for Cerberus, Saren returns home to Palaven to get his new leg built and adjust to retirement. Unfortunately, the problems for the Arterius clan are getting too big to just retreat from and wait for the storm to pass... [LINK]

#mefanfic #no reapers au #mass effect #mass effect original trilogy #matteo shepard #exponential differentiation series #exdiff #kryterius #vakarennis

[davidmariottecomics]

The Continuity Conundrum

Hey, welcome back! 

As so often happens, I was scrolling through Twitter one day over the winter break and saw the very talented up-and-coming artist Kara Huset post a couple of polls about whether or not the Big 2, Marvel & DC, are due for a reboot. A lot very thoughtful and passionate takes from the people commenting. A little while later, I saw a post I can't source now because I've lost it talking about the idea of elastic continuity and the importance of being able to let it have give and take when you need it for the story you're telling. And then this morning I saw a very good thread from Comrade Bullski on Twitter about the strangeness around the history of the Justice Society of America, tracking them from being the first super-team to being one of the first major retcons in comics that made them from another universe to their extended runs that kept them locked in the past up to the one decade where they basically got to just be a modern day superteam with everyone else and beyond. 

Understandably, all of this got me thinking about the value of continuity in comics and the ways in which it serves to enhance and restrict the medium. So, I want to talk about that: the good, the bad, the compelling reasons to throw it out entirely and the reasons it is often one of the most helpful tools a creator can have in their corner. 

I've Done a Couple of Hard Relaunches

While I don't usually bring out my bona fides on something like this, I do think in this particular case, they speak to where I'm coming from so we're all starting at the same understanding. I have spent an awful lot of my career in comics working on bring new life and direction to existing, long-running titles. Notably, in 2019, we launched a brand new Transformers universe, often referred to as IDW 2.0, that stood on it's own from all other TF iterations, particularly our previous 13 year run. In 2018, we launched Sonic the Hedgehog, again, a brand-new version of the series totally separated from the last 24 year run with another publisher. I've been involved in standalones for various mini-series and OGNs, revivals of long dormant franchises, and general cleaning-up of stories that didn't always mesh together but that were in need of having some connective tissue. I have preserved continuity, helped build new ones, and have thrown it out completely when it was to the benefit of the story. Having met it in all it's forms, I think I have an insight that not everyone working in this industry does. 

Real Quick: What is Continuity? 

Again, just so we're working from the same terms. Continuity is the way in which past, present, and future events are connected and their meaning is reinforced as a form of consistency. It applies at all sizes of scales. It can be as simple as making sure that if a thug is drawn holding a knife in his right hand in one panel, in subsequent panels that depict the same thug, he continues to be holding the knife and/or righthanded unless an action in the story requires differently. And when we're talking about characters who have publishing histories of 8 decades or so, continuity allows for the events of previous stories to be remembered and reused in telling current and future stories. 

So What's so Bad About it?  The big issue that people will point to with continuity is that it is daunting. Action Comics has been published off-and-on for 85 years and over 1050 issues. The characters featured have had many decades and many thousands of other stories published about them outside of that particular comic, that are often still considered meaningful and true to Action Comics. From the exterior, if you thought to enjoy the latest issue, you had to know the exact events of all those other thousands of issues, not because they are necessarily relevant but because they could be, that would be a lot. 

When you're telling a story, you often want to make the accessibility threshold low. By being clear and concise, you allow more readers/viewers/whatever to hop in and engage with the work. As more work gets added to continuity, it continues to raise the bar on the accessibility threshold, which can be a major turn-off to potential new readers and returning readers who don't remember/know/have full context for all the details.

It is a system that inherently gets more complicated and convoluted each time a new work is added. It is a dense thing to sort through, often to the point of being impenetrable. 

It is also a very flawed system. While the idea is that continuity is supposed to clarify and solidify events in relation to each other, it makes contradictory information very obvious--whether that's two events happening simultaneously when they can't possibly be to rewriting and sometimes ejecting previous stories for the new story to make sense. Taking the earlier example I shared of the Justice Society of America, things that had to be altered at various points included whether or not it made sense for there to be multiple Bruce Wayne Batmans and Clark Kent Supermans, whether or not the JSA existed before the JLA in a single universe, how the JSA members maintained their relative youth despite having been adults fighting in World War II. If they were in their 20s to 40s in the 1940s, that puts them in their 100s now, for the most part, though they still primarily look like they're in their 40s to 60s at the latest. 

All-in-all, the problems primarily come to the amount of responsibility that you want to give to creators and readers alike to know the details and the legitimacy of stories (including the making illegitimate of other people's stories) that is built into the system. 

Okay, So What Happens if We Get Rid of it?

If you throw continuity out, it often opens up your options. I look at say, the DC young readers books, all of which operate in their own worlds, maybe linked to other volumes by the same creators or loosely tied with someone else's work, but they are largely standalone and easily accessible because of it. Prior knowledge is a tough ask and removing that barrier can open up the story to new audiences. 

Open interpretation also can help give characters new life. Before the past decade, if you liked Gwen Stacy, you basically had a handful of Spider-Man comics in the 1970s that she starred in without being the main character, and then the occasional revisiting of that time in stories that reinterpreted/retold it (Spider-Man: Blue) or that changed the circumstances of those stories, often in ill-informed ways (there's a lot of weird stuff with Gwen, Norman Osborn, and the Jackal...). Now, she's Spider-Gwen/Spider-Woman/Ghost Spider, and she's the hero of her stories and she's in a cool band and she's got her own universe of stories. The flip side to that being, so much of what informs the Spider-Gwen stories, particularly the early ones, is being framed in contrast to the understood continuity. It is about how things are different from what the expectation is or how they worked in the Spider-Man comics. So even when you remove a character from the trappings of continuity--you open them up to reinterpretation and not having to be constrained by certain "fixed" events, they are often still subject to it because their story is told is other to what is established. 

And therein lies the big issue with why it's so hard to fully remove continuity. Continuity is shared information. For as much as it can be a headache, it can also be a bridge to mutual understandings, and a way of texts interacting and responding to each other. For as much as it raises the bar of the accessibility threshold, it also adapts to create new connection points throughout the publishers' history that aids other readers and creators in bringing things together. 

But You Said You had Done Some Reboots I did. And it was hard. There are things that will get left behind: characters, characterizations, ideas, plots, growth, that may never get picked up again in an official capacity. And that's a bummer. But when I've done it, the trade-off has always been quickly starting to establish a new continuity and deciding what pre-existing knowledge to play off of--it may not be in continuity with anything else, but what do we expect the audience to understand about the world or the story that helps ease their burden because they can make more connections more quickly? I've been pretty proud of the answers the teams I've worked with have come up with. 

Lastly, as a note, I want to touch on "elastic continuity" again, which I think maybe is often the most helpful thing. The idea of elastic continuity is that the details can be adjusted as long as the spirit is true. If Punisher and Iron Man were both still in the Vietnam War, similar to what happened to the JSA, it would make them much older in the current comics than they're usually depicted. And so the war that Punisher served in and that Iron Man was injured in changes with the times, to keep that central part of their story true while fitting better for the ease of access to a modern reader. 

Not to sound inconclusive, but I think there are advantages to reboots. I think there are advantages to sticking with existing continuities. I think often the deciding factor is how much is getting cut or written out or otherwise "lost" (not that most media is actually lost nowadays) relative to how inviting the changes are. And if you are a person looking to work on a property and in a position to pitch something, keep all that in mind when suggesting starting over. 

Talk to you next week! 

What I enjoyed this week: Vaccine booster (Enjoyed is maybe a strong word, I was out sick the next day, but I do like being vaccinated for the safety of myself and others), Blank Check (Podcast), The Menu (Movie), Chainsaw Man (Manga), Honkai Impact (Video game), Shin Megami Tensei III (Video Game), Nancy (Comic strip), Abbott Elementary (TV show), White Noise (Movie), Sweat & Soap (Manga, finally actually finished it and it was delightful!)

New Releases this week (1/11/2022): Godzilla Rivals II: Rodan vs. Ebirah (Editor) Godzilla: Monsters & Protectors - All Hail the King #4 (Editor)

New releases next week (1/18/2022): Sonic the Hedgehog: Scrapnik Island #4 (Editor)

Announcements: Arizona Comic Book Arts Festival - 2/25! It's a one day comic-focused event in Phoenix, AZ. Tickets are only $10. Attending artists include me, Becca (who once again is dropping some new stuff on their Patreon, see below), Mitch Gerads, Steve Rude, John Layman, Henry Barajas, Jay Fotos, Jeff Mariotte, Marcy Rockwell, John Yurcaba, Andrew MacLean, Alexis Zirrit, Meredith McClaren, James Owen, Ryan Cody, and many more! Come and see us! Becca'll have some very cool new merch, too! 

Pic of the Week: Becca made this wallpaper of their character, Drew, publicly available from their Twitter to use as a phone wallpaper. They have more wallpapers as well as an alternate version of this art on their Patreon. They're doing weekly art prompts this year, so there's going to be a lot of art coming! Check it out! 

#comics #comics editorial #continuity #superheroes #karahuset #justice society of america #jsa #bunny girl #beccabeean #arizona comic book arts festival #idw

[a-reader-and-a-writer]

Hi Vee! 🥰 I would love the director's commentary on Eternally Yours! 💖

Ahhh! Thank you, Katy! You know how excited I am about this series so thank you for asking about it!

So for Eternally Yours, I was trying to think of an idea for a Halloween fic that also fit in with one of the Whumptober prompts. There had been a lot of talk of werewolves, zombies, and vampires around that time and I had always wanted to do a vampire fic, so I thought why not? And Rick in Jotenheim was just a natural fit since we are always trying to come up with different ways he could have survived. I wanted it to be a little different, so I decided to go with the idea that he was already a vampire when he was stabbed and that Reader was the one who was a vampire longer and changed him.

For Reader, I just started writing and as I went, I realized I wanted her to be pretty old. So I tried to change how she spoke and carried herself in a manner that felt as if she had been around for centuries while also adapting with the times when necessary. Once I found her voice, it helped me shape more of her backstory and I aged her even further. It makes for a good contrast with Rick who is still relatively new to the whole vampire thing and views the living and time very differently than she does, and that's something I plan on addressing more in future parts as well. She is so different from the usual characters I write and it is so much fun!

Ideas I have for the future include how Reader met Rick and they fell in love, how/why reader turned him, more information about vampires in this universe, Rick dealing with having to leave his old identity behind and start a new life after Jotenheim, meeting other vampires both good and evil, and of course, some good old whump and hurt/comfort thrown in there too 😆 And I am always open to exploring other ideas/scenarios with these two because I have really fallen in love with them individually and as a couple.

Fanfic Writers: Director’s Cut

#thanks! #friend ask #ask game #director's commentary #eternally yours #rick flag #rick flag x reader #vampire!rick flag

[addictedtostorytelling]

Alright I'm onto season 5 of TTW! 😍 all the way but I gotta know: is there a tone shift I should be looking out for? I'm a bit annoyed at myself for worrying because I'm not a big believer in Men of Singular Genius™ and while Sorkin's style is obviously a huge part of the show, so are the actors/directors/producers/writers room etc. At the same time, I'll be heartbroken if it sucks now lol. So I guess my question really is, how do you feel about auteur theory?

hi, @clintbeifong!

while i would say that the storytelling is maybe not quite as tight in the later seasons as it was in the beginning just on a general level, i don't think the show completely sucks after sorkin's departure by any means. 

at the top of its game during s1-s4, tww was one of the best-written shows in tv history, consistently putting out powerhouse episode after powerhouse episode.

from s5 on, it’s maybe not quite so regularly breathtaking, but nevertheless it’s still really, really good prestige drama, dropped down from an “a+” to an “a-” overall but still with some occasional moments of sheer excellence, which crop up often enough that i can’t recommend skipping out on anything.

imo, there are still some really quality storylines and standout singular episodes (a few of which i would even count as favorites)—it’s just that there are also some more meh ones and a couple of absolute clunkers* thrown in for the first time, as well. 

* without spoiling anything overly specific, there's one particular main character's storyline from the final season that is almost universally loathed by the fandom and felt to be ooc.

some beats they hit, some they miss, but generally there is more to praise than to criticize, and particularly as s7 ends on a strong note.

to make a very superficial comparison to another show we both enjoy, i much prefer the later seasons of tww to the later seasons of csi and feel like whatever change in quality there is is far less precipitous with the former than the latter.

for me, with tww, the post-s5 change isn’t so much about quality as about what types of stories the show chooses to tell, and, honestly, i think that change has less to do (overall) with sorkin's departure than it does with the fact that the show was aging, both in terms of production and premise.

just by nature of there having been some cast turnover out-of-universe and it being the start of a new election cycle, with bartlet on his way out, in-universe, we start to see more and more "outside of the white house" episodes and storylines as the show goes on, in addition to the core group of characters splintering off from each other to take part in different pursuits and be used in different ways and combinations than what we'd been accustomed to before.

that's not to say that the senior staffers are always necessarily apart from each other or that the core relationships are neglected.

it's just that the structure of the administration does turn over on multiple levels and "next steps" become an inevitable narrative focus. some old timers leave, some new folks step in. people’s roles evolve. it’s less about the “day to the day problems faced by a presidential administration” and more about that administration preparing for an inevitable transfer of power.

so to me it's definitely different but not by any means wholly bad. there’s still a lot there to enjoy.

ymmv, of course.

as for auteur theory just in general, when it comes to television especially, i don't believe in it.

most showrunners who fall into the category of what could be called "auteurs" tend to really be somewhat glorified "idea men," who come up with great original notions for shows and maybe devise an influential set of rules of engagement re: storytelling choices to start out with, leaving a strong initial imprint on their projects; however, just by the collaborative nature of the beast that is making a television series, there are ultimately too many other creators and artists involved in the making of any single television show—and especially any single television show that runs beyond one or two seasons—for just one guy to be god almighty, even if originally the whole thing was more or less "his baby."

whether it be sorkin or zuiker or shonda rhimes or whomever else, the pattern i see over and over again is that the so-called auteur comes up with a great initial premise; puts their stamp on the first few seasons (where they often serve as lead writers and frequent directors in addition to filling the showrunner role), doing a lot of the heavy lifting in shaping the characters and creating what will be the hallmarks of the show/franchise; but then somewhere along the way they inevitably shift into producer mode and move on to new projects (oftentimes expanding their own “cinematic universes” with spinoffs and other tie-in series), leaving the original property largely under the creative direction of others, despite sometimes still retaining a nominal ep credit.

but, honestly, even before they "move onto the next thing" in any kind of official capacity, the shows these creators make have already inevitably become collaborations—frankly, from the very beginning—as much the product of the collective decisions of the staff writers and episode directors and set managers and crew and cast and editors and network execs as the person who first pitched the script to the network to begin with.

tv storytelling is fundamentally a group endeavor, and even showrunners with particularly unique aesthetics and distinctive voices aren’t solely responsible for the expression of their interior visions in the end.

certainly such is the case with aaron sorkin.

for as much as the walk-and-talks and spitfire dialogue and hopeful idealism of s1-s4 of tww are all his innovations and essential to what makes tww recognizably tww, the fact is that from the pilot, other people started to get their fingerprints on that production, to the point where there is a lot that is quintessentially tww that isn’t attributable to him.

for example, janel moloney's acting choices laid the groundwork for donna to become a main character long before sorkin realized the potential for the character to be more than just a bit part. donna’s recognizable donnaness came from an actor’s vision, more so than anything in the script or direction.

the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, you know?

anyway.

all of the above is to say that i think you’ll still find s5-s7 of tww both recognizable and enjoyable, as long as you can hang with some of the shifted narrative priorities inherent to the story world at that point.

i’d be interested to know your thoughts once you get into it.

happy watching, if you decide to finish the series!

#answered #clintbeifong #asks: tww #let's talk shop

[libertyreads]

Book Review #18 of 2024--

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu. Rating: 3 stars.

Read from March 7th to 10th.

I've waited about 12 hours after I finished the book to finally sit down to write my review. This is such a hard book for me to rate and an even harder book to discuss. It's translated from the original Chinese and it feels like I'm having little success with translated works this year. To be fair, this is the first year I'm really trying translated fiction so it might just be me. There was also the issue of writing style. I was told in college that American literature is mostly written in a linear style and so that's what we're used to; whereas a lot of Asian literature is written in a more circular style--often ending the story in the same or similar place it started in. But this one felt a lot more like a spiral. It discusses a lot of the same issues just with a different slant as the story goes on.

My main issue lies with the writing style...I think. I don't love coming back to the same topics over and over throughout the novel. Also, due to this, the novel feels less like a Science Fiction for me and more like a Literary Fiction with Sci-Fi elements thrown in throughout. Which feels so weird to say given how many hard Sci-Fi elements are needed to progress the plot. But we really did spend so much time discussing politics, the human condition, and evolution that calling it a Sci-Fi doesn't feel right either. I agree with others who say that the characters took a backseat in this story. They felt flat and cartoonish. And it's not like they took a backseat in order to further the plot. It was in order to discuss these topics that seem so important to the author. There's a reason I don't read Literary Fiction. I would also say that the hard Sci-Fi elements in this one are also suspect. I don't know nearly enough about actual science to point out the things that are wrong. But I feel like I do know enough to know when something seems too unbelievable. Because this book spends so much time trying to break down the science behind everything it makes it hard to suspend my disbelief.

I think there were a couple of topics that hit home for me but even those felt like beating a dead horse at the end. I also like the idea of first contact with aliens where the humans don't even understand their place in the universe or how crafty and manipulative the aliens can be. There was a plot twist in the last 40 pages that paid off really well for me in particular. But that part of the story was so small that it didn't impact the rest of it the way I had hoped it would. (I'm trying to be vague so I don't spoil it.) It was a moment of satisfaction in the novel that I hadn't gotten from it up to that point. And I think it's what lands the story in the 3 star rating for me. If it weren't for that, I think I would have landed around the 2.5 star rating. I won't be continuing the series or watching the Netflix show in the future.

#book review #book reviews #booklr #bookblr #bookstagram #books read in 2024 #2024 reading challenge #goodreads challenge #goodreads #bookish #the three-body problem #the three body problem #cixin liu #liu cixin

[lexiereadsbooks]

House of Earth and Blood Review

House of Earth and Blood (picture borrowed from Google)

I devoured this book (like usual with SJM) and rate it ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Spicy level 🌶️

Synopsis

Half-Fae, half-human Bryce Quinlan loves her life. By day, she works for an antiquities dealer, selling barely legal magical artifacts, and by night, she parties with her friends, savoring every pleasure Lunathion—otherwise known as Crescent City— has to offer. But it all comes crumbling down when a ruthless murder shakes the very foundations of the city—and Bryce’s world.

Two years later, her job has become a dead end, and she now seeks only blissful oblivion in the city’s most notorious nightclubs. But when the murderer attacks again, Bryce finds herself dragged into the investigation and paired with an infamous Fallen angel whose own brutal past haunts his every step.

Hunt Athalar, personal assassin for the Archangels, wants nothing to do with Bryce Quinlan, despite being ordered to protect her. She stands for everything he once rebelled against and seems more interested in partying than solving the murder, no matter how close to home it might hit. But Hunt soon realizes there’s far more to Bryce than meets the eye—and that he’s going to have to find a way to work with her if they want to solve this case.

As Bryce and Hunt race to untangle the mystery, they have no way of knowing the threads they tug ripple through the underbelly of the city, across warring continents, and down to the darkest levels of Hel, where things that have been sleeping for millennia are beginning to stir...

With unforgettable characters and page-turning suspense, this richly inventive new fantasy series by #1 New York Times bestselling author Sarah J. Maas delves into the heartache of loss, the price of freedom—and the power of love.

Review

So, the reason I didn’t give this a 5 star is because I felt like some of the dialogue was overused— like “Alphahole”. It was funny a couple of times but the amount of times it was used was eye-rolling. There was also a lot of info dumping lol like I was confused about everything for about 100 pages but then I started to remember all of the different details about the universe and lore. I think it’s because it’s more complex than the ACOTAR series with more types of characters, but they’re all thrown at you really quickly so I think that’s where I got confused. 

The tension in this book was really good. There were points where I literally could not put the book down and couldn’t hear anything my boyfriend said to me because I was so absorbed in what was happening. I’m able to see images in my head like a movie, and while SJM’s writing isn’t the best, it’s easy to read, and that makes it all the more enjoyable to me imo. 

I really liked Bryce’s characterization-- she likes to have sex, she’s funny and smart. I really liked how she doesn’t take shit from anyone, even super powerful beings when she herself has no power. I thought it was really refreshing to see this in a character, how she can navigate and survive in a world with her wits and resources, not with magical abilities. 

And Hunt, god, he’s amazing. Super powerful, but is under the thumb of others since he’s enslaved. Lots of angst, but also lots of love in that man. I don’t want to say too much about him so I don’t give anything away in this section. 

I did love the relationship between Hunt and Bryce. I love the tension, their humor, and the little moments between them. I think their relationship is well developed and I like how they’re vulnerable with one another. Hunt Athalar is hot af, and Bryce is too. I also liked how Bryce isn’t described as small- she’s strong, she’s thick, and she’s a bad bitch.

I loved the forced proximity trope, I eat that shit up.

There’s really no spice in this book, there is one scene after the halfway point of the book, but I found that so didn’t particularly mind? The tension kept hyping me up for it but it was almost always interrupted with something relating to the case they were working on, and since I was intrigued about what would happen next I didn’t really mind much.

I’m not usually a fan of different perspectives in a book, but this one was well done in my opinion. Each character had something going on pertaining to the mystery so it never felt boring or slow. The book itself can be slow at times, but I actually kind of liked when the characters had to restart their way of thinking to include new information. 

I also really liked how Bryce has actual parents in this book-- It was nice having family interactions and seeing the dynamics of it since her parents are both human (her biological dad is Fae) and they have like a normal family relationship that I thought was really cute. Love them. 

AND Ruhn!! I loved their dynamic as well, and how you get to see their different perspectives of their relationship. It’s wholesome and I think Ruhn’s character is super well fleshed out and interesting. My favorite part about him is that, even though he and Bryce had a falling out, he still cares for her wellbeing and safety. 

I also LOVED the plot. I know other reviewers were able to predict what was going to happen but I literally could not. I was constantly intrigued and surprised by the mystery plot, and there were several instances where I had to put the book down to process the information given and collect my thoughts about it. It’s fucking crazyyy

Though confusing, I ended up falling in love with the world SJM created. I think the urban world she built is very interesting and beautiful. I like the lore, I love the diversity of races and orientations and how none of the characters feel exactly the same. 

I thought the dynamics of the races were really interesting as well, especially with the Angels. 

I’m currently reading the next book in the series, House of Sky and Breath and will update with another review here when I finish it :) 

Talk to me in the comments: Who was your favorite character? Who would you have liked to see more of? 

Spoilers Below ⬇️ 

I’m not going to reveal every spoiler, but just focus on the ones I really enjoyed. 

Danika was absolutely my favorite character other than Bryce ofc, but I just loooved her. I know she was mainly used to develop the plot of the story, but I just thought she was so interesting and cool. I almost cried at the end when she helped Bryce through her Drop. I just knew that she was going to die at the beginning though, I knew that’s what SJM was going to do since she was trying so hard to attach us to her character. 

I think my favorite part of the whole book was when Ruhn wasn’t upset about Bryce having more of the Starborn power than he did-- he was excited and proud of her too! I really appreciate that even though Bryce herself didn’t think he would be like that. 

And Micah?? At the end when Bryce killed him (which was fucking badass btw) I was like that’s enough slices and then she vacuumed him up too which was honestly hilarious to me. I was glad that we were able to see what Bryce was doing while Hunt was at the Summit, I thought it was interesting to see it in other characters perspectives as well. It just added to the tension super well. 

My favorite FAVORITE part was when Bryce would take pictures on Hunt’s phone, I thought it was so cute and it helped him better connect with his surroundings and kind of humanized him and helped him develop and actual life. I really really liked that. 

SJM was fucking clever with putting the Horn in Bryce’s back tattoo. That was a great plot twist imo

#sjm #crescent city #bryce quinlan #hunt athalar #house of earth and blood #book review #bookblr #hoeab

[buckyownsmylife]

plagiarism and bullying

I am not sure how much readers of this community know about what’s been happening, but I know pretty much anyone who writes has been going through hell the last couple of months because of authors who have grown too big for their own heads - and have effectively managed to poison the entire community with their behavior, which is precisely what I feared.

And I am sick of it.

I am sick of what can only be described as psychological and emotional harrassment, done privately so people feel isolated and scared to post anything.

I am sick of people thinking they own tropes, alternate universes, clichés, pairings, characters, even GENERAL PLOT POINTS that no one can possibly possess and take ownership of.

I am sick of these same people being the ones who can’t see an idea being thrown in front of them before attaching themselves to it until the original author is forced to pull back on something they’ve been working on because this other person who they considered a friend posted it before (oh yeah. I know all about those of you who are calling out people as plagiarists while stealing WIPs from your friends).

So let me give it to you straight - and this is coming from someone who is actually a victim of plagiarism myself.

Every time one of you points a finger at someone else and shames them privately or even attacks them publicly for writing a story that has the same generic set-up (Steve finds your fanfiction, Bucky loses himself to the Winter Soldier, reader needs to be rescued by one of the supersoldiers) you’re doing all of the people in this community a disfavor, by 1. making everyone scared of publishing anything, because the entitlement for the littlelest things seems vindicated now and 2. you’re taking away from actual instances of plagiarism and authors who are having their entire works stolen.

Think of it this way: can I feel entitled to the concept of sex pollen? only one bed? in vino veritas? why can I feel entitled to this concept that I apparently came up with but that can be rewritten in a thousand different ways?

If someone else can take that generic summary and run with it in a way that’s their own, YOU WOULD NOT BE ABLE TO TRADEMARK IT. It ISN’T an instance of intellectual property and it most definitely isn’t plagiarism.

You all have common sense. Use it. It’s one thing to copy an entire premise of a series, keep the same AU and character and change the lines of dialogue. It’s an entire different thing to create your own stepfather Bucky series, or mobster Steve series, or Alpha all of Chris’ characters (here, have one of “my own” ideas), with your own premise, your own ideas for each chapter and the other details of their relationship with the reader.

Or are you telling me from now on, there can be no more alpha!Bucky’s heat taking over him suddenly, Steve and Reader have to share a bed on a mission, stories with reader, charles and lee as a pairing or any other unusual one? Is that what we really want? To be the only suppliers of a certain trope, pairing or au? Can you see how your ego is affecting the entire fanfiction community hee on tumblr? Why authors are giving up on providing their fictional universes to welcome us into after a lousy day?

If your work inspired someone else’s, there’s a simple way to resolve it: reach out to the writer, confirm it was actually inspired by yours and ask them to give you credit. Credit is the actual solution for works that have been inspired by other works, but not bullying, not threats, not forcing someone to delete their own versions of a story we’re all actually sharing because bottom-line? We are all stealing Marvel’s characters and placing them on Shakespeare’s plot lines and the only thing we can do about it is add our porn and our own personal interpretations, imagination and developments.

And that means, of course: writers, if your story was inspired by someone else’s, please give them the proper credit. As I’m sure you’re aware, we are very quick to identify when something is similar to our creations, and it’s a fucking awful feeling. It’s what created this whole witch hunt over plagiarism in the first place, but while in 8/10 cases it isn’t actually plagiarism, it fucking sucks and it could have been easily prevented when it was just a matter of recognizing you aren’t the seventh wonder of the universe and actually got the inspiration to write that story from someone else.

In the same way, DON’T STEAL PEOPLE’S IDEAS WHEN THEY TALK ABOUT THEM. And no, THAT’S NOT PLAGIARISM either, it’s just common decency. They might even be okay with you writing the same idea, but it’s always nice to let them know and give them credit. Especially if it’s someone you consider a friend, but even more so if it’s something you saw as a snippet of a WIP on your timeline (as a general rule, I wouldn’t work on anything I thought intriguing only after I saw someone else was writing it).

And finally, still keeping that other point in mind: you don’t have the right to stop someone from working on something similar to what you’re writing. Can you imagine how many people are writing, at this exact moment, stories with the same premise? Of course, once it’s out, there’s a high chance the projects will be completely different, since each writer made it their own. I am willing to bet most of them didn’t copy from one another, they just happened to be interested in the same things - which is often the case here, prevented you aren’t an asshole that does what I described in the last paragraph.

I don’t know about you guys, but I am excited to read more stories about magical boading schools and I definitely hope J.K. Rowling won’t stop me from getting that.

Similarly, I beg you. You want to write your mafia!andy series? Please, do. The world needs your story. Just make sure it truly is your story that you’re telling.

tl;dr: plagiarism is a real issue, but never an excuse to bully people and traumatize them from writing. Writers, learn the difference between plagiarism and inspiration. If you do think it’s actual plagiarism you’re working with, please follow the following steps:

Before accusing anyone from plagiarism:

1. Actually talk to them without threatening or manipulating them so you can understand what happened and let them know how you feel. 80% of the times they’ll apologize and give you credit for it. 

2. Unless you’re the reincarnation of William Shakespeare (and so being, you have the rights to all of the tropes and plot twists created in modern literature. go you!) - and prevented the “plagiarism” isn’t so obviously truly plagiarism, that it can be proven with two screenshots placed side by side - talk to someone unbiased who will tell you if what you think was stolen was actually stolen. There’s a good chance you’re being delusional and thinking the entire world is aware of your stories and looking forward to take advantage of your hard work on them.

A good rule of thumb? Don’t do to others what you don’t wish would be done to you, and make sure to apply that rule to the way you approach the situation and treat the person you were so quick to consider a villain. I’ve yet to see (in this community, since I got here) a situation where the writer accused of plagiarism when confronted has been anything other than kind and remorseful, ready to remedy the situation once it’s been brought to their attention.

If you’re so certain of being right, there’s literally no reason to be aggressive to someone who’s not treating you rudely.

#eyre rants #i am signing off for the foreseeable future

[nikakistos]

The Perfect Closure of EreMika

The title is pure clickbait (as always), there will be lots of tags (as always) and this post will be huge. As always. So, let’s examine and evaluate the perfect conclusion of the most important relationship in Attack on Titan. We will analyze why this is the best conclusion they could have gotten and of course we are going to talk about what their scenes meant for their relationship, their feelings for each other and the themes of the story.

First, let’s ask the question: What was the purpose of this chapter? Ending the fight obviously, but also giving closure to the relationship between Eren and Mikasa. Now, there were 3 questions that needed to be answered in order for the two of them to have closure. 

Why did Eren say to Mikasa that he hated her?

What does Eren feel for Mikasa?

What would have happened if Mikasa had given Eren a different answer back in chapter 123?

Isayama answered all 3 of them in a spectacular way. Let’s see how he did it. The chapter literally starts with Isayama, via Mikasa, setting up the closure. This was achieved by having her wonder if this really was the end for her and Eren. Could it be that their last interaction ever ended with him saying that he hated her? 

Isayama answers that with a big, fat NO.

That’s the purpose of Mikasa’s vision. Mikasa’s vision is not there to introduce us to Alternate Universes or to portray her as a delusional fangirl that can’t cope with reality. It’s purpose is to answer the above 3 questions. And that it does.

Essentially, Mikasa’s vision is a “What if” scenario. If Mikasa had chosen the ideal for her answer back in chapter 123, Eren would have abandoned everything and lived with her. This means that Eren is also in love with her.  He said that he hated Mikasa, because he wanted her to forget him. That’s why he also asked her to throw away the scarf.

Mikasa though, being the truest representation of all major, positive themes in the series says no. She chooses to remember him. That’s essentially the meaning of life. That’s what Armin taught to Zeke back in chapter 137. Memories of everyday life. That’s the meaning of life. Back in Trost, Mikasa said that she couldn’t die, because she wouldn’t be able to remember Eren. Even back then, Mikasa always knew the true meaning of life. 

Afterall, the series heavily criticizes the usage of memory manipulation. Deleting memories or altering them have been methods empoyed by the Royal Family for years, hiding the truth from the people. One of the themes of the Survey Corps is remembering their fallen comrades and carrying on the torch. Mikasa forgetting Eren would be an insult to the themes of the story. As would be if Eren was revealed to have been sending fake memories and dreams to Mikasa out of pity for her. 

Finally, Mikasa decides to kill Eren. Not because he hated her or because he didn’t have romantic feelings for her. Because she had to save the world and because that’s exactly what Eren wanted. Back in chapter 133 Reiner foreshadowed Eren’s desires. He explained that it is very hard for Eren, mentally, to handle the murder of the entire human race. Through Reiner, Isayama reveals that Eren wants someone to end it all for him. That someone was Mikasa. That’s why Mikasa knew where to find Eren. His relieved face when he saw her swinging the blade said it all. That was Eren’s design and Mikasa delivered.

And so, the chapter that starts with Mikasa thinking that the only closure she would get with Eren was the “I’ve always hated you”, ends with the first and the last kiss between the two of them that puts all of her worries to rest.

Is Mikasa delusional?

I’ve seen this being thrown around, so i have to also tackle said point. No, Mikasa is not delusional. This wasn’t a fantasy that only she experienced. This dream of hers is the same dream that Eren had back in chapter 1. Eren experienced the exact same things she did in the dream. We even see him with his titan marks. It is clear as day that they shared these moments.

Also, i have to give credits to Isayama here for his usage of “itterasshai”. The word generally means “Go and come back safely” and is usually said to people leaving the house. For Mikasa, Eren is her home, but she is also home for him, as shown in the RtS arc:

These were the perfect parting words for the two of them. Nothing else could encapsulate their relationship better. Eren of course, won’t come back, but that’s the irony of the word here.

Moving on to the next point, Mikasa’s characterization in this final arc is about her seeing Eren for the person he truly is and stop ignoring his faults. It starts from the Marley arc and it concludes with chapter 123 where she realizes that this was simply part of Eren’s nature.

He always had it in him to become the monster that he became. However, he always had a different side to him. A side that had been shown to her a few times. At first, when he wrapped the scarf around her and later when he asked her “What am i to you”. Finally, it manifested as a desire to live quietly with her in their shared dream. It would contradict her development and characterization in the final arc, to have Mikasa start seeing an incomplete Eren again, after realizing earlier who he really was. Mikasa understood who Eren truly is and she accepted him and continued to love him anyway, even though she didn’t agree with his genocide. 

It is not out of character for Eren to run away with her either. At least not in that instance. The series highlights the moment that he asked Mikasa “What am i to you” as a pivotal one. Sure, under normal circumstances, Eren would have chosen to fight, but we saw him breaking down just moments earlier. The only person that could have saved him was Mikasa. Alas, that wasn’t meant to happen.

In any instance, the biggest indicator that Mikasa is not just a delusional girl who kissed the decapitated head of the man she loved, when he never really loved her in the same way, is Ymir’s face at the end of the chapter.

Ymir, as i have mentioned in previous posts, is a girl who never knew real love during her lifetime. She didn’t understand what she was looking at, when she first say a couple kissing with their friends cheering them on. And after that she was sentenced to a cruel life, with a man who never loved her and only viewed her as a tool. This girl, remembers longinly that scene of the couple kissing for 2000 years. She was waiting for 2000 years to see real love again.

She witnessed that through Eren and Mikasa. In a scene that would have otherwise been painted in a negative light, Ymir’s warm smile at the sight of the final act of love between two people who never got to be together the way they wanted to, clears any and all doubts regarding Eren’s feelings for Mikasa and the latter’s sanity. Eren reciprocates Mikasa’s feelings and he was alive for enough time to kiss her back, before completely fading away. Eren and Mikasa replaced the married couple and Ymir replaced the crowd that was cheering at them from 2000 years ago.

Of course, one might ask, could Eren really kiss her? Didn’t she just take advantage of him? No, he did kiss her. The way the scene was directed, it shows us that the events, which take place in their dream, mirror the events in real life. Just look at Eren’s lips one moment before Mikasa kissed him and compare them to the picture above, where they kiss. They are different.

 Also, you have to remeber that decapitation doesn’t kill immediately and does not immobilize facial muscles. That was the entire reason that Eren and Zeke managed to get the Coordinate. Eren survived long enough from Gabi’s shot to make contact with Zeke. Even his facial expression changes as you can see below:

More importantly, was there really any chance that Ymir would look at Mikasa beheading and kissing Eren, while also smiling in approval, if Mikasa was a delusional girl who was unable to understand Eren’s feelings for her up to the very end? Most of all, do you think she would have allowed him to die, without experiencing real love? She died in such a way and she stayed for 2000 years in the Paths waiting for someone to show her real love. Eren was her benefactor. Would she ever allow him to die in such a way, when she was being mistreated (sexually and in many other ways) by King Fritz? I doubt it. Actually no. I don’t doubt it. I’m sure this is not the way we are meant to interprete the scene.

Eren’s relationship with Mikasa, from the very start, is an allegory for the world of AoT. The world is cruel, but is also very beautiful. Eren’s story with Mikasa starts with him murdering in cold blood her kidnappers (cruelty) and then warmly and gently welcoming her to his family by wrapping a scarf around her (beauty). Their story ends with Mikasa decapitating him (cruelty) and kissing him (beauty).

Eren’s tendency for violence has always been portrayed as going hand in hand with his better side. That side has always been represented by Mikasa. It is only fitting for them to have their most beautiful moment happening almost at the same time as their most cruel one. This is how Isayama juxtaposes this duality:

If we interprete this scene as Mikasa being delusional and Eren not being in love with her we get a very disturbing and creepy scene, between an obsessed, psychosis-suffering girl who can’t understand the feelings of Eren, a genocidal maniac who never had any chance or willingness to live a normal life, even though there are hints of that, and a 2000 year old ghost who just happily smiled at the decapitation and forceful kissing of her emancipator. I am pretty sure this is not the message Isayama wants to send. Not simply, because it is a disservice to Mikasa as a character and to her relationship with Eren, which has been one of the most prominent and consistent part of the series from the very first chapter, but because it is also a huge disrespect to Eren as a character as well. Does anyone really think that Isayama would choose to write Eren’s death like that? Not a single important person in the entire story has gotten such an exit. Not even Floch. Even Zeke, who thought that his father never loved him and only used him as a tool, got to see that his father truly did love him, before finally dying. Of course Eren and Mikasa would get the same treatment.

What i mean to say is that Eren and Mikasa’s closure won’t be recontextualized in a way that will paint their feelings for one another and their relationship in a negative light. If anyone’s expecting that, he/she will be disappointed. Eren and Mikasa were confirmed as a canonical couple in chapter 138.

On the other hand, if anyone’s expecting that this wasn’t their real closure and that they will get an even happier ending, he/she is also coping hard. Eren died here in this chapter. There won’t be a scarf rewrap (i’m here to eat my words if it happens), because Isayama gave the couple a kiss. A kiss that was in the makings ever since chapter 50 dropped. And of course, there is not going to be a baby born to Eren and Mikasa. Like, no way it’s happening. Eren is not coming back to life as that would turnish the series and it’s ending.

In conclusion, Eren’s relationship with Mikasa ended in the same way it started. Violently and Beautifully. Tragically and Happily. They acted on their romantic feelings for each other the very moment they had to part ways forever. This is how Isayama hurts us. The essence of a bittersweet conclusion.

EDIT: EATING MY WORDS AS PROMISED. EREN DID REWRAP MIKASA’S SCARF. HE KEPT HIS PROMISE.

#attack on titan #AoT #aot meta #aot 138 #aot spoilers #aot theory #shingeki no kyojin #SnK Spoilers #snk theory #SNK analysis #snk meta #snk 138 #ymir #shingeki no kyojin ymir #eren yeager #eren #eremika #Mikasa #Mikasa Ackerman #zeke #zeke yeager #floch #kiss #canon #eren x mikasa