decided to check how disgusting the weird sexual dimorphism in the comics would be if the roles were reversed. to no one's suprise. its also incredibly foul
For @mesdelostrescaballeros2024 ‘s Three Caballeros September event!
Week 1 - Zé
September 3rd - Saudade
Sometimes he remembers things that happened forever ago. Not very often, mainly because the memories are faded and fuzzy, faces blurry with no real features, but there were times where he would catch a certain smell or noise that would make him remember.
The clean smell of ivory soap.
Light curtains blowing from a breeze.
A soft warm blanket.
A woman, softly humming a gentle tune that has no real melody.
These things and a few more reminded him always of her.
His Mãe.
There weren’t too many memories, he had gotten lost when he was barely three years old, so sometimes he wondered if the memories he had of her were real and not something he made up to not feel so sad as a child. He had no recollection of his Papa and hoped that was because his small brain could only think of her and not that she was a single mom, who then lost her child. When it was quiet and no one was around he would think of her and get a strange ache in his chest that would grow almost until he could no longer breathe.
The way she would laugh, a little nasally, which he wondered if she had given him her nose because his laugh sometimes sounded like that too.
How she would rock and hold him, a constant movement, as if she were dancing him to sleep which he liked to think was where he got his love for it.
He would wonder what his life would have been like if he hadn’t wandered off, if she had found him after only a few days, held him close as they went back home. Maybe he wouldn’t be so lazy or such a con artist, maybe he would have had a better education and been able to put his smarts towards a conventional goal. Would she have been proud of him if he did well in things like school or sports? Would she be proud of him now?
That thought always gives him such an overwhelming feeling of loss that he panics and has to district himself somehow. He sometimes hates these memories because he had people there for him when he was a child, Nestor and Pedrão’s families, warm and welcoming to him even though he had been just a kid off of the streets. They had loved him like they were his actual parents, made sure he didn’t go hungry and that he had a warm comfortable bed to sleep in each night.
They were his family.
He felt ungrateful when he would get these thoughts in his head, like they weren’t enough for him and they had somehow lacked what his mãe had been. How would he even know? He never really knew her.
Zé let out a loud sigh, mentally pushing all the longing and sad thoughts out of his brain and body with that breath. He shook himself, the goosebumps on his arms rising under his feathers with a small strange chill before it settled. Then, like that, he was okay again and he pushed himself up to go help Nestor in the kitchen, grinning when he saw that the vulture was covered in flour.
“You only needed a cup! How did this happen?” Zé laughed and rolled his eyes when Nestor gave him a very rude hand gesture in response.
For @mesdelostrescaballeros2024 ‘s Three Caballeros September event!
Week 1 - Zé
September 1st - Dance
When people asked him where or how he had learned to dance, José never really had an answer for them. He had never gone to any fancy class to learn how to move, he had gone to a samba school but unlike the name implied it wasn’t a school per se. It was something he had grown up doing, watching those around his neighborhood when he was a chick, moving their bodies to the rhythm of the music and letting themselves get carried away with it. Nestor and he would dance around the street when they were small, with chubby arms and legs trying to mimic the steps the adults were doing.
If you were social, you had to know how to dance, and the more José grew the more social he became. It also helped that the better he could dance, the more girls he impressed.
Before long, by his late teenage years, he was able to move just as well or even better than all those adults he had watched dancing before. He didn’t even have to think really about the moves anymore, letting his body move on its own with the music and he would grin when he would hear the whistles and encouragement from the women.
Sometimes even the men.
Without dancing, Zé knew his life would be soulless. Yes, he would have music, because you can’t have dancing without it, and he would have food and other pleasures, but without dancing? Não.
He smiled thinking about how he had first danced with Donald while telling him all about Brazil, the first time Panchito pulled him close during a slower part of a song, teaching Zico and Zeca the basic steps and winning a contest with Ro with their perfect in-sync movements. Dancing had brought him so many great memories with friends and family and he looked forward to every get-together to make more memories with them as he moved.
“Zé!” He heard Nestor call, looking over to see him and Panchito waving him over, the rest of their large group outside already kicking his Birthday party into high gear. “Hurry up!”
“Don’t boss me around!” He said back with a laugh. “I’m the birthday boy, the party can’t start without me!”
“Oh, we’re going to!” Nestor yelled back and Zé rolled his eyes with a grin when Panchito let out a loud cackle. “I’ll take all your presents and drink all the alcohol.”
“I’ll eat all the food!” Panchito chimed in.
“Babacas!” He yelled, jogging over to them just as the music grew louder and he could already feel the rhythm igniting the need to move.
“Let’s party!” He yelled when they got to the group, cheers erupting as he took a drink of cachaça and started to dance.
Dancing wasn’t something Panchito ever really thought about too much.
Maybe it was because he had grown up with it all around him.
His mother teaching all her children from an early age on how to go with the rhythm when music was played, from holding them as small chicks on her hip as she moved about to actual lessons as they grew older. The parties that his brothers took him to once he was old enough and he watched how they pulled the girls close to them and moved so well to the beat that he couldn’t help but be impressed even if they were his annoying older brothers. Sometimes watching amazingly dressed dancers perform the Concheros dance when his dad would let him come to Mexico City with him to help with work needing done there.
Moving his feet and hips were something that just happened and luckily he was good at it, especially once he started to take music seriously.
Learning to move well while holding his guitar and holding a note had taken some practice, his brothers laughing at him and his sisters offering all of their annoying opinions. Eventually he was able to move his hips without missing a single cord or becoming too breathless to sing at his full potential, which he could not help but gloat when the girls started to pay more attention to him than the other boys around.
Dancing was something second nature. Something that he found fun to do especially with other people, but it had never been something that he loved or needed, music filled that area of his heart. So when he met Donald and José he wasn’t quite sure how to react to how much they loved to move, almost more than they did creating music.
He knew that Donald and José had known each other for a while before he had come around, sometimes feeling a little unsure as to where he stood when they would laugh at inside jokes or were off talking in their own world. It was never more apparent that they were more in sync than he was when they started to dance. The strangest thing to Panchito was that they didn’t even need music to dance, José would just start tapping a beat against a table or start whistling a tune and soon Donald and him were moving about the room with their hands clasped. The first few times it had happened, Panchito had felt awkward, something he rarely felt, not understanding and not wanting to intrude on their moment so he would go somewhere else to work on a new song or something for them.
It was around the fourth time that as he got up to go, a hand grabbed his arm and he looked over to see Donald grinning at him. “Where you going, pal?”
He looked across the room when he heard José laugh. “If you want to leave, meu amigo, you have to pay the tax.”
Panchito frowned in confusion. “Tax?”
José picked up two hotel pens and started to beat them against the notebook Panchito wrote their music in, the beat becoming louder as he drummed. “Yes! The dance tax! If you wish to leave you must dance with us, at least for a little bit!”
Being pulled around by Donald that first time had been strange but fun, Panchito unable to stop his laughter as Donald tried to twirl him but his height made it a bit difficult.
After that first time, even if he didn’t join in, Panchito never felt like an outsider anymore. From then on if he saw Donald shift a certain way or José start to rock his shoulders and they had no music he would make it for them. He would grab his guitar and strum a lively turn, the two of them yelling in excitement as they started to dance with everything they had. José had even let Panchito try his hands at the parrot’s magical umbrella, the Brazilian bird chuckling as he tried to get it to make sound when it had no strings or mouth pieces. José promised lessons if Panchito ever wanted to really learn and then played an amazing trumpet solo on it like it was nothing.
However, on the days he wished to join, he would use his voice to give them something to dance to. Spinning, swaying and shimmying with his friends as he sang loudly to any song he thought they might enjoy.
He was truly impressed with their moves.
When he had joined the group he had assumed that Donald would have no rhythm or moves, the duck’s flat feet and lack of Latin flare didn’t seem promising. He admits freely that it had been wrong of him to think that way, his friend able to move easily to any beat he played. Donald was also able to watch any complicated move that Panchito or José did and after only a few tries was able to pull it off with no real issues.
Panchito always felt a source of pride when strangers who judged Donald the way he had in the beginning were shocked and surprised when the duck started to dance. Panchito would always let out the loudest wolf whistle when Donald started to shake his hips, the stereotypical duck waddle turning into something tantalizing instead of awkward and he loved how red his friend would get at the attention.
He had also learned that he loved to watch Donald dance because of how happy it made his friend. The duck was usually so filled with anxiety and rage that when Panchito saw all of that fall away he wanted to give the loudest grito ever out of happiness. His dearest friend deserved to be happy all of the time.
Then there was José.
The Brazilian parrot was on a whole other level when it came to moving to the music. Having the skills and rhythm to move to the beat was essential when it came to being a good dancer, but the way José moved? It was more than that.
When José danced, everyone took notice, heads turned immediately as soon as José took those first steps.
The samba.
Panchito could still remembered the strange embarrassed feeling he had the first time he had heard José say that word. His accent curling around the letters when he said them, wistful and slow, as if he were speaking of a lover he could never forget and it made Panchito blush. He had thought the parrot was being dramatic, after all it wasn’t unusual for men like José and himself to have a love of the theatrics every now and then, so he had just pushed past the warmth in his gut, laughed and they moved on.
He had been a fool to laugh at that.
The samba was not just a dance to José he came to learn, it was so much more.
It was his art, the way he would twist, turn, shift and thrust was done with the same amount of love Panchito poured into his singing and playing.
It was his life, the way he could never truly be completely still, except for when intoxicated but even then he would dance best he could until he passed out.
It was in his blood. Generations of culture and love of his country pulsing through José’s veins as he moved, Portuguese coming out of his mouth fast as he moved so perfectly to the beat. Sometimes it struck Panchito dumb just watching how this frustrating and breathtaking friend of his could give himself so fully into something when in other areas José kept quiet.
The closer Panchito got to José, the more he could see that the parrot’s laidback and easygoing attitude was not truly who José was. He could be insecure, melancholy, angry, irrational, excited, petty, mean and sweet. It took years before the veil of José Carioca was pulled completely off and Panchito was allowed to meet Zé.
However, before José allowed him to see these feelings on his face, Panchito realized he expressed them through dance. The way he would stamp his feet roughly, movements become sharp and precise when he was angry or a softer sort of dance with small steps and his hips rolling slower when he was sad. After that, he learned that José was just like him, but instead of using his voice he used his body and it was truly beautiful.
Donald as Athos, Panchito as Porthos, José as Aramis
The AU that I am surprised I have not seen a lot of! Moreso basing this on the novel by Alexandre Dumas, one of my favorites of all time <3 more to come for this AU, for sure...
A noble warrior. A grandiose genie. A family in the making.
To think, from their first appearance in DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, Faris and Gene would have zero interest in each other let alone on a platonic level.
Unlike their original counterparts, their rebooted characters have never met each other. Yet, for my fan idea, these two would meet after the finale and change their lives for the better.
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
yousharknotpass
blakekathryn
andulkaphoto
