Heytemporary - Heytemporary

man. spinner and shoji were two characters that i really enjoyed and wanted to see more of... until i did get to see more of them and horikoshi stomped on my dreams...

spinner goes from being one of the best characters to being ridiculously one-dimensional. the heroes don't do jack shit, until it's revealed at the last second that they did, meaning that everything the 'bad guys' did was ultimately useless. kurogiri being in a hospital made no sense; the guy is a high-ranking villain who is far too useful to the villains to give up, he should be in a highly secure location like tartarus. shoji goes from being someone who i really enjoyed to being someone with ignorant beliefs, despite him accusing his friends of being such people.

seriously, shoji's rant on how the 'people from the city' wouldn't understand because they 'had it easy'. NEWSFLASH: discrimination happens everywhere. yes, it's a lot more rampant outside of cities, but it still exists within a city. heck, i had someone scream racial slurs at me while i was walking home, and i live in a big city. to say that someone had it easy just because you had it worse is a horrible thing to say, especially when it's coming from someone who is supposed to be empathetic.

this is not shoji's beliefs. this is horikoshi's beliefs. he could have easily had shoji say something like 'you have had it hard. that being said, people are more willing to turn to extremes outside of the city'.

also, shoji's whole 'violence to get what you want never works out!!' is wrong. i'm not saying from a moral standpoint - that's perfectly fine. but it's historically wrong. yes, there are such a thing as peaceful protests, but they have never worked out as well as those that fight violence with violence. blm riots, for example, were the thing to force the government to take a closer look at why people were rioting and do things to prevent more property damage.

another thing i found troubling was how the mutants became enraged at a person of colour, specifically black, for trying to intervene and empathise with them, screaming that he could not understand. it's supposed to imply that racism wasn't a concern after quirks emerged, as people found other things to discriminate.

which is... very idealistic. if that were something people would really do, then racism wouldn't be a thing after sexism came to light. and neither of them would exist after the lgbt or the neurodivergent. but that's not what happened.

if someone else arises that people could discriminate upon, people would just add that to the list of things to discriminate on.

horikoshi could have drawn anyone for the mutants to yell at. he chose to use a person of colour. it comes off as very tone-deaf and it was just another sign that the mini-arc would screw up.

spinner losing his mind was bad. as in bad-bad. as in, there were so many ways to write this fight, and he chose this? instead of being a battle of ideaologies, it's shoji convincing the rest to step down, then trying to beat a mind-less spinner.

it could have been one of the best fights, with shoji's belief that using violence to solve your issues will only make it worse, and spinner arguing that using violence is the only way to do it with the state of their society.

no matter who won, in that case, it would be ultimately up to the readers to decide who truly won. who had the stronger argument, who made the more sense, all that jazz...

instead, shoji yells at a bunch of people about how 'destroying property isn't good' and 'violence is never the answer', all the while using violence to subdue him.

that could have been could, if it was commented on. if there were some sort of self-awareness.

but it's not and there is none. it went from being an arc i was really looking forward to reading, to something i can no longer stand.

shoji. spinner. you were both done so dirty

I think one of the main gripes when it comes to Midoriya fan’s, who specifically speaking suffered bullying and/or abusive friendships (I do consider their relationship an abusive friendship due to being childhood friends and Midoriya considering Bakugo as a friend) and actively dislike BKDK, is the lack of portrayal of his feelings particularly negative ones not the positive ones which are emphasized in the manga (To the point where some people think Horikoshi is using Midoriya as a mouthpiece to elevate Bakugo which it doesn’t sit right with a lot of fans especially with the kind of history the two of them have). It doesn’t help the fact that Horikoshi technically has the right ingredients to start addressing this type of bullying/abuse such as having actual friends that look out for him which can give him another reference point and the narrative opportunity (actually, I think it should be extremely esencial for his character because you can’t portray a decade of bullying/abuse, especially physical and verbal, without at least showing consequences and showing him heal from those experiences) to actually question which can help address one of Midoriya’s flaws, specifically hero worship and low self worth. It doesn’t help that his admiration of Bakugo is not contextualized as a coping mechanism (and show the actual consequences such as emotional repression) and it isn’t challenged unlike his admiration for All Might where at least it was partially addressed. Actually, I’d argue that Bakugo’s redemption arc is incomplete because of the lack of elements mentioned earlier which is why you have so many fans thinking that Bakugo’s apology is more closer to gaslighting rather than genuine apology because he never directly addresses the specifics and is far more vague (Most of his peers don’t even know or understand why he’s apologising in the first place which is a missed opportunity when it comes to the rest of the class especially considering that there’s characters with anti bullying stance such as Ashido Mina).

This is a general problem with Horikoshi's writing. He's using RL issues like bullying / domestic abuse / institutional indoctrination / racist discrimination / neurodivergence as "spicy setting" that he manipulates as he pleases but never really takes a moral stance on it.

I feel like he "copied" much of his "themes" from existing comic books, but without fully understanding how those comic books used the superhero setting to make social commentary. That's why he doesn't really land well any of the issues he's raising, because it's just a patchwork of stolen settings without a moral guideline.

Deku's writing is especially problematic, because on top of the above, Horikoshi is so afraid to make Deku unlikeable that he never lets him feel negative emotions or fail at anything really. The saintly portrayal became the biggest flaw that dragged Deku down as a character.

Writing Notes: Metafiction

Metafiction - a self-conscious literary style in which the narrator or characters are aware that they are part of a work of fiction.

Often most closely associated with postmodern prose, it involves a departure from standard narrative conventions, in which a self-aware narrator infuses their perspective into the text to create a fictional work that comments on fiction.

This kind of fictional writing can appear in novels, short stories, plays, video games, film, and television.

Characteristics of Metafiction

Breaking the fourth wall: Breaking this boundary between writer and reader blurs the lines between real life and fiction. Metafiction often directly addresses the reader, openly questioning the narrator’s own story.

Self-reflexive: Authors use self-reflexivity, or self-consciousness, to reflect on their own artistic processes, drawing the audience’s attention away from the story and allowing them to question the content of the text itself.

Experimental: Metafiction is often experimental in nature, fusing a number of different techniques together to create an unconventional narrative. Metafiction can also experiment with the role of the narrator and their relationship to the fictional characters in the story.

The main purpose of metafiction is to highlight the dichotomy between the real world and the fictional world of a novel.

Metafiction can be used to parody literary genre conventions, subvert expectations, reveal truths, or offer a view of the human condition.

Often used in postmodernist fiction to comment on the world that our character inhabits, metafiction helps give a work of text more significance by providing an outward, exploratory look of a self-contained world.

Examples of Metafiction in Literature

The Canterbury Tales (1387): Geoffrey Chaucer’s classic anthology of interconnected stories that parody the conventional elements of fiction. Chaucer blends linguistic styles and rhetorical devices to craft a collection of stories within the overall story, regularly breaking the fourth wall to address the audience directly and apologize for any offense the narrative may cause.

Don Quixote (1605): Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote is essentially a book about books. In the prologue, Cervantes breaks the fourth wall by commenting on his process of writing the book, in which he urges the reader to make up their own mind about the written text. The ensuing novel discusses the adventures of the protagonist, Don Quixote, who has gone mad from reading too many chivalric romance stories.

Giles Goat-Boy (1966): John Barth’s fourth novel is a prime example of the metafiction characteristic of postmodernism, featuring several fictional disclaimers in the beginning and end, arguing that the book was not written by the author and was instead given to the author on a tape or written by a computer.

The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969): Written by John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman is a historiographic metafiction novel about a love story between a gentleman and a governess in the Victorian era. The book features a narrator who becomes part of the story and offers several different ways to end the story.

Slaughterhouse Five (1969): In Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut includes his own voice as a character in this non-linear narrative. The main character has been “unstuck in time,” oscillating between the present and the past with no control over his movement, emphasizing the senseless nature of war.

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973): This story by Thomas Pynchon is the poster child of postmodern literature, using a complex, fragmented structure to cover various subjects such as culture, science, social science, profanity, and literary propriety. In this particular narrative, Pynchon questions history and how it gets created, and also how it affects both society and the individual.

Source ⚜ More: References ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs

Unintentionally toxic friend Kirishima. Kirishima is a good person but because he’s more of a follower type than a leader type despite setting a good example of how to be a positive and good person, by simply choosing to be friends with Bakugo, he unintentionally made 1-A subconsciously accept any of Bakugo’s and Aizawa’s abuses, especially towards Izuku. Perhaps due to some situation like a temporary class transfer with 1-B or other classes/schools to foster good connections for a few weeks, the 1-A students just stop interacting with Bakugo and seem a lot better until they come back together. And then they start arguing legitimate concerns against Bakugo.

I mean like... yes? I can see it. Kirishima who is so convinced things are fine, completely oblivious to how Midoriya flinches. I mean Bakugou is so manly and cool and like Aizawa is the teacher right?

However after an injury, Aizawa is temporarily out of the classroom (and this time has to stay out) letting a new teacher in who pegs Bakugou as a bully and Kirishima as an oblivious follower. They then make it clear the truth about Bakugou because the kids honestly don't seem to realize it.

imagine getting mad because people don't like you glorifying and fetishizing rape/abuse

he doesn't even understand the concept. he's like a dog he saw it elicited a positive response and therefore copied it exactly. doesn't mean he doesn't have that sentiment though

Why Muzan’s “natural disaster” line was kind of accurate, actually

This Muzan line is so interesting to me because it’s the closest the manga comes to ever saying the quiet part out loud. There was nothing Muzan could’ve done to change what he became.

By the time he killed his doctor, he was already in the middle of his human to demon transition. He had pursued a cure to his illness (reasonable), his doctor had done his best to make an experimental cure for him (reasonable), the cure had unintended side effects (reasonable), and side effects had included amplified anger and murderous intent (unfortunate).

Natural disasters just happen. They don’t have agency. The reason you don’t take revenge on an erupting volcano is because it didn’t make a conscious choice to kill people. No one is to blame for the disaster. Likewise, Muzan had absolutely no agency against his fate. Even if he had started out as the world’s nicest human, even if he made exclusively good choices considering the information he was given, he would’ve ended up becoming a demon and eating people. The only immoral “choice” he made was killing his doctor, but if the medicine he was given was making him a demon anyway, the likelihood of that occurring during his first demonic rampage was extremely high. Regardless of whether he conquered the sun, whether he took his medication as prescribed, whether he was a good or bad human, he would’ve ended up with a near insatiable taste for human flesh. With no support network to hold him back from his urges until he was capable of settling down, his evil was essentially inevitable.

A lot of people say that Muzan is interesting because he’s one of the only pure evil villains with no redeeming qualities, but I disagree. He’s interesting because he’s one of the only villains who became evil by accident, in the process of pursuing something good.

On a more critical note, I think that the fact that this line from him is so clearly meant to be seen as inaccurate or bad speaks to the author’s lack of consideration for the moral implications of their plot. The moralization of illness in KnY has always bothered me. What, in the eyes of the author, should Muzan have done as a human? What is the moral of his story? Simply don’t be chronically ill? That seems a bit ableist. If you are ill, accept that you’re ill and just let yourself die as god intended? Also seems a bit ableist. Only take proven, known cures that are guaranteed to not have side effects? A little anti-science, or, more charitably, a misunderstanding of how the scientific process works… so what should Muzan have done instead? Much to think about.

Who are you to talk about friendship?

Prompt by @ironicreality

I’ve been writing out entire chapters for the last two, so let’s go for an actual prompt this time.

Derision is a bad episode for multiple reasons. But the nastiest one are the fumbling retcons and how they effect the characters.

And Marinette is no exception. See, because while the writing team *really* wanted to give Marinette an excuse for all her stalking, they also made her into one of the worst friend’s imaginable.’

Yep; all those stories about Marinette getting betrayed by her ungrateful friends, and she’d canonically be like at least some of those salt-fic caricatures of the cast.

Because until Season Five, we had no idea about Socqueline. This kind girl who sacrificed and suffered for Marinette’s sake.

This downright heroic person who was supposed to be Marinette’s shield in school and who was expelled before she could graduate. This precious friend of Marinette’s- who she *never so much as mentions* for four and a half seasons.

Can you imagine standing up for a younger friend in school against a dangerous girl with the power of the state behind her? Then suffering an expulsion right before you were supposed to Graduate- which probably meant that you had to beg another school to accept you to do so and forget about getting into a good one with the Mayor fucking you over.

Then to add insult to injury: your younger friend just ghosts you for ten months while you’re pulling your life back together?

So here’s the prompt:

—

Marinette meets Socqueline for the first time in nearly a year. Socqueline isn’t happy to see her.

things that happened to me when i was a woman in STEM:

an advisor humiliated me in front of an entire lab group because of a call I made in his place when he wouldn't reply to my e-mails for months

he later delegated part of my master's thesis work to a 19-year old male undergrad without my approval

a male scientist at a NASA conference looked me up and down and asked when i was graduating and if i was open to a job at his company. right before inquiring what my ethnicity was because i "looked exotic"

a random male member of the public began talking over me and my female advisor, an oceanographer with a pHD and decades of experience, saying he knew more about oceanography than us

things that have happened to me since becoming a man in STEM:

being asked consistently for advice on projects despite being completely new to a position

male colleagues approaching me to drop candid information regarding our partners / higher ups that I was not privy to before

lenience toward my work in a way I haven't experienced before. incredible understanding when I need to take time off to care for my family.

conference rooms go silent when I start talking. no side chatter. I get a baseline level of attention and focus from people that's very unfamiliar and genuinely difficult for me to wrap my head around.

like. yes some PI's will still be assholes regardless of the gender of their subordinates but, I've lived this transition. misogyny in STEM is killing women's careers, and trans men can and do experience male privilege.

Ironically, Aizawa's expulsions would make sense if UA wasn't a Japanese school. While dropouts, transfers, and kicking students out of the Hero course for not meeting standards would legitimately be a thing, in fact, some schools would probably want to have a student who made into the Hero Course but have other issues at hand. The problem is that since UA is in Japan and is a Japanese school, the cultural context about expulsions and the black mark is fundamentally a serious liability and business in Japan compared to the west. Having a black mark in Japan is enough to prevent someone from getting a normal job and MHA Japan would not have enough time to develop away from this mentality, thus causing more problems down the line.

The manner in which Aizawa gives his students black marks instead of basic transfers to the General Course, since full expulsion from UA would be too extreme given that a 2-A does exist in canon, would mean that the moment that these black marked students graduate, they would not get basic jobs even if they graduated from the top school in Japan. There is a difference between changing courses of student and being given a black mark and while both could happen, getting a black mark is a gunshot wound to the person being kicked down the steps. Aizawa ironically is creating more villains and vigilantes on the streets by his actions and those students are very likely to die due to societal pressures and being forced into poverty. It would be an extremely minority that could have back-up plans and money to survive a black mark in Japan.

And let's not get onto Stain as he's just crazy. He would support Aizawa's expulsion of students on the basis of weeding out the weak heroes early. He just forgot that having a black mark is a death sentence in Japan.

See this is why I just don’t get the black mark thing. Like unless Aizawa is meant to be a big bad villain it makes no sense. Him temporarily expelling students to shove them into Gen Ed for a bit is much more reasonable if they need a reality check and fits his personality more. Still a bastard but not some jackass villain. And then he softens as he learns he made the wrong assumptions becoming a better teacher! See?! Way better. Instead we get this.

Also he can scare them with the idea of a black mark but not actually give them one. Fits more to with his logical ruse shit.

There’s a reason I drop canon Aizawa and it’s cause his shit makes no sense.

Stain would approve. Hes a bitch. I really do not like him.