Reverus

I listened to Deviser this week, which is a sci-fi horror podcast about what happens when bad literary analysis goes unchecked

I read somewhere you wrote Ares/aphrodite/Hephaestus In a fic, is this true and where is it? I had that same idea, and so happy!!

Thanks for the interest! I did start a PJO reading the books fanfic where they feature and its still only ne chapter even after all this time 😅, but its on my ao3 account also under RaysReads!!!!!

all i know is that if noel and mischa got married, noel would take mischa's surname. mischa would be like "no, no, i want to make sure that you know how you’re an equal partner in this relationship” blah blah blah and noel just takes mischa’s face into his hands and says “my whole life, i’ve had to bear the name of my father who abandoned me. to exchange it for the title of the man i love is the greatest perceivable honour” and like also he does it so mischa can keep any possible tie to his homeland from which he was ripped. but mischa doesn’t need to know that. on the inside mischa is a wounded child wandering through the forest, but he now has a guiding light in his husband.

what does horror mean to you guys? Like, is it an artistic expression, maybe a type of comfort, etc etc. Love your podcasts!!! 🫶

I guess I see it much like any genre - as a kind of licence, based on audience expectation and audience trust, to take them to certain places.

For me the only difference with horror, and what really excites me about it, is that it's a particularly flexible licence, with fewer hard requirements, and the driver is given more scope to go to stranger, bleaker, and darker destinations in pursuit of something interesting.

So we can debate whether elevated horror or torture porn or soft Halloween spookadoodles or whatever counts as 'real' horror (or indeed whether The Silt Verses should be called contemporary dark fantasy instead), or like Stephen King in On Writing, we can try and impose some kind of hierarchy of the audience's emotional responses, but horror resists these attempts to clearly classify it: humanity's collective understanding of the genre remains broad and mutable enough to include existential terror, cosy ghost stories, transgressive body horror, bleak and violent nihilism, and goofy Lovecraftian kitsch.

I love some of this stuff as great art and hate some of it as trash (and love some of it as trash as well), but the joy of horror lies in the fact that it's such a big, anarchic, permissive playground.

Horror is the sign on the door that simply promises, 'Bad things are going to happen.'

a few pieces i did last month on the patreon

Oh my god you love percy *and* you like teen wolf?!?!?!?!!!! Ive found my kin oh my god!!!!!

TW SPOILERS DON'T READ IF YOU HAVEN'T WATCHED

UGH

WTF

ALLISON JUST DIED

I'M GOING TO CRY

i didnt realise ao3 was started in response to lj deleting account relating to p//edophi|ia and they explicitly support the posting of such works yikes

saddest fucking tag i've ever seen in my life. why not just cut off his dick while you're at it

Lately I’ve seen posts about [the lie] of Deku not knowing what triggered the awakening of Black Whip. And yeah, it can be agreed, that was weird. But Deku is not typically known for lying. The thought of Kacchan knowing how much he means to Deku (still)… could that have been scary to him? Because Deku has a hard time saying how he feels to Kacchan in particular, that will always be a possibility. 

But, there are still two other options left that we can’t ignore. Horikoshi not wanting to acknowledge it in a shounen manga? I used to wonder this a little bit, but after some thinking I’m starting to believe it might simply be: Deku is not fully remembering his traumas. Let’s dive down this rabbit hole!

Deku not remembering what happens in the times where he loses control of his heart might be a thing. 

Like with Shigaraki.

Kacchan specifically asked him “Do you remember what I told you when I got stabbed?” And Deku said he didn’t. But lets think about this for one moment.

Those could have been Kacchan’s last words to Deku, so it seems pretty poignant and noteworthy that he should forget them so easily, right? Maybe they were never even committed to memory. Because maybe, he has no clearcut recollection of what happened after at all. The Kacchan obsessed Deku not being able to remember Kacchan’s potential last words to him is a HUGE tell. 

Even the fact that his lack of memories of that particular time was brought up during their conversation is quite strange and seemed a little inorganically placed there…  possibly to establish a pattern? matte matte matte!  Thinking back, hasn’t this already happened multiple times now? With this, Deku Not Remembering TRAUMATIC Events Properly has actually become a thing. 

Because it also happened during their training camp, when Deku collapsed after the complete defeat and loss of Kacchan.

Speaking of which, when Kacchan was taken, Deku got super angry and possessive. It’s still amazing to me that his possessive behaviour towards Kacchan was noted and acknowledged by a third party in the manga. And that is why I want to say because of this one instance, Horikoshi not wanting to acknowledge the real trigger of Black Whip in a boys manga and make Deku “lie” for personal and professional reasons: I am gonna rule that out.

Because Horikoshi has already once acknowledged how much ownership Izuku feels over Katsuki’s existence, by his own imagination and creation through Compress, which in itself was a pretty odd exchange for a shounen manga to have in the first place. It means Horikoshi has shown from very early on he is not afraid of explicitly expressing the complex and sometimes nonsensical feelings the two protags have for each other.

Back to the story: When he lost Kacchan to the villains, Deku completely lost all cognition and cried out loud in unfiltered despair as he crumpled on the ground. Deku was in so much pain, not from the injuries, but the anguish inflicted on his psyche from losing the one person he cares about more than anything.

This image was so powerful that the anime left it unanimated there for five seconds. The scene was so powerful that anyone who saw it understood how important to him Kacchan is, if they didn’t know that already. I wouldn’t be surprised if the ones there gossiped a little bit because Kirishima, who wasn’t even there, seemed to be especially empathetic towards Izuku after it happened.

(Really makes you wonder why any of their classmates don’t point out how they really feel for each other to the both of them. For example, if Kacchan had known how Izuku acted (see above) after he got taken, would DvK2 have even happened at least in the way it did with him being delusional about how Izuku feels about him? I seriously doubt it. He might even have wanted to get to the bottom of Izuku’s strong feelings for him because in Kacchan’s shoes, and with their history, I would find it super confusing and even a little sussy.)

So after that complete mental breakdown in front of some classmates, Deku was in hospital on copium. You know, with the big dopey “I am dissociating from reality” eyes he gets. He actually even thinks the words: “I don’t remember a single thing.” 

He even begins to dissociate again the second he remembers mama Inko’s words during her breakdown about the dangers of him becoming a hero. (Said after he escaped Shigaraki at the mall.)

He either doesn’t want to or isn’t able to think about the traumatising, negative happenings in his life and by internalising all of it, maybe he has simply become horrible at processing and controlling his feelings and emotions and gets these almost borderline (bpd) type attacks when his emotions overflow their smolbean container. (The one above of him crying on the ground in particular resonated very strongly with me.)

When his classmates came, that got him remembering what happened again and Deku broke down crying because losing Kacchan had become a serious ptsd for him. This was an event so traumatising that his mind couldn’t cope with knowing it ever happened and sort of lost track of it to protect his heart. Deku locked everything away inside because he didn’t want to experience his broken heart anymore.

So is it really Deku not wanting to admit to AM and Kacchan that Kacchan’s honour was insulted and stuff just kinda happened?

(Side note: That is some major side-eye there, Kacchan. This could be way over-analysing things but the drawing of Kacchan’s always distrustful face and that speech bubble about external catalyst ending up over it feels uncoincidental and awkwardly funny to me. Like Horikoshi intentionally omitted out the real trigger from the dialogue but drew a panel that carries a 4th-wall-breaking air of “BUT WE ALL KNOW THE TRIGGER AND HES SITTING RIGHT THERE”.  Sadly, the anime gave the side-eye no justice lol.)

Or is it a bigger issue of Deku internalising everything bad that happens so much to the point he forgets it ever even happened?

I think we have enough evidence here to suggest the latter, that he wasn’t lying, at least not intentionally. Him forgetting a lot about traumatic experiences that cause him to lose control is being used as his defence mechanism because he is unable to cope with processing certain stuff.

Namely, Kacchan’s presence being forcibly removed from him,

a terrifying new quirk springing forth from his body because he feels so much empathy towards how hurt Kacchan was about the issue, before he could even process his feelings of anger at Monoma for insulting his Kacchan,

and the thought of Kacchan getting hurt or dying.

I think that these events were so traumatic for Izuku that his mind became warped and confused about what actually happened. It’s not that he’s being intentionally misleading when directly asked “why”, but due to unknown mental issues, he feels negative experiences too strongly and not being able to cope with his feelings and the subsequent [Feral Mode: Activate]s can make him an unreliable narrator of his own memories and story.

When it comes down to it, I think Kacchan is so deeply imbedded in Deku’s heart, his sense of empathy with Kacchan is so extreme that any attack against Kacchan is always taken very personally (see: Possessive Deku) and Deku goes wild and loses control of himself and his emotions (see: Feral Deku), and for at least three instances it has gotten to the point where he doesn’t seem to remember the circumstances surrounding it.

And lastly, we simply can’t overlook the pink elephant of an underlying theme in the manga. The pattern of him losing control and acting crazy for the sake of Kacchan. It’s definitely there. That pattern exists. But maybe, to Izuku, during the times he loses control, it all just becomes a blur to him.

I think one of the big strengths of fanfiction as a medium is that it can, on average, assume the reader has a way higher degree of familiarity with canon than like…canon can. If you’re in the Star Wars AO3 tag you probably like Star Wars enough to remember more things about it than the average Star Wars-enjoying-ten-year-old. Which makes it way easier for fanwriter a to get to the juicy stuff and really engage with the worldbuilding or minor characters without having to spell out like. Who Wedge Antilles is for everyone who forgot or never noticed him in the first place. You could write a book about Wedge in the old EU because EU readers could also be assumed to be serious fans, but you can’t make a new canon Disney+ show about him. Those cost money to make and are intended for a broader audience.

And all this means that like. A good fic writer can and often will surpass canon when it comes to like. Thematic resonance and stuff, because they can really dig into something. Star Trek 2009 gave Kirk a new, more generic tragic backstory because it couldn’t expect the average moviegoer to be familiar with Kirk’s old, way more interesting tragic backstory. (Frankly, I’m not sure jj abrams knew about TOS Kirk’s backstory) whereas I have read a LOT of well-written, interesting, deeply resonant fanfic examinations of Tarsus IV, and what it means for Kirk’s character that he’s a genocide survivor. Star Trek 2009 answers the question “why did Kirk cheat on the kobayashi maru?” With “‘cause his dad crashed a spaceship when he was a baby.” A close examination of TOS canon implies the answer is “because he lived through a real-life Kobayashi that did have a win option, but which wasn’t taken.” BUT—and this is significant—even the TOS canon movies can’t really assume knowledge of the full TOS tv show, so that implication is never examined or made explicit. Instead it’s fanfic (and maybe spin off novels? Idk I’ve only read 2 trek books, if there’s one out there that covers this that would be really cool) where we get dives into that thread, where Kirk gets a commendation for original thinking because he can look a testing board in the eye and say “I’ve seen what happens when someone is entrenched in this kind of thinking, and I cannot let it happen to me. I understand the lesson, but it’s not hypothetical anymore and it never will be. I did what I had to do.” And that’s interesting! That’s meaningful! That can’t happen in a summer blockbuster. But it can happen in fic, easily, and that’s a strength of fic, I think.