biting each other counts as affection, right?

A Hardenshipping AU sideblog run by Ellis (he/him) and Nick (he/him), mainly so we have a place to whatever we do with it instead of it being scattered around our main blogs. Will mainly feature our AU, but we'll also reblog general hardenshipping content. In this house we adore Maxie and Archie. ❤️💙

[primal-leaders-au]

Primal Leaders AU Info Post

Hello! I am Ellis, and this is a blog me and my husband made for our Hardenshipping AU.

The AU focuses primarily on the post-game of ORAS (with the ORAS plot getting melded slightly with Emerald's, so both Groudon and Kyogre got summoned), with Archie and Maxie having been possessed briefly by the Legendaries they summoned, and having to learn how to handle their new existence as not-quite-full-humans, and the Legendary powers they now have.

May also has Legendary powers, and basically ends up as their adopted daughter.

(May/Brendan/Wally, Steven/Wallace, Matt/Tabitha, Shelly/Courtney, and Amber/Blaise are also present ships in the AU, but aren't the main focus!)

You can find the designs for Archie and Maxie, plus a good handful of headcanons and additional info about the AU here.

Also here's the playlist Nick put together for it! (It's constantly getting updated btw)

-El

[chateauofmymind]

best kinds of characters either:

is/has been an active suicide risk

doesn’t or cannot consider suicide a real option and so is left with an inarticulable feeling of circling the drain

[cola-collective]

[joelletwo]

[ID: diagram of a person going from thinking "im in love with you" to ??? to saying "im going to fucking kill you im serious"]

[haganez]

guy who keeps trying to make u wanna kill him bc he finds your bloodlust hot

[magmaquas]

getting really into cross stitch lately. here’s a few little sprites i made! the plan is to maybe make them into pins, and make the rest of archie’s team + maxie and his Pokemon also!

[magmaquas]

thinking about how pokespe maxie seems to be left handed

he's often shown with a bottle in his left hand. (pouring with his left hand in one instance, and using it to drink straight from the bottle in another)

when archie gives the special device for the submarine to maxie, maxie takes it in his left hand

when controlling both groudon and kyogre, he controls groudon actively with his left hand and kyogre passively with his right.

even after this, he consistently holds the red orb in his left hand, providing contrast with archie, who holds the blue orb in his right hand.

[the-ultimate-dissapointment]

Couldn't just get divorced like normal people and now it's all of Hoenn's problem smh

[primal-leaders-au]

been working a little on the new blog this morning and i just wanna say

there's a good chance we'll lose some of you in the move, for one reason or another, and while i'm happy to respect that, i will definitely miss the more hardenshipping focused audience we have here. i do hope that most of you will follow us once we move over to the overall AU blog but i'd totally understand if some of you are only here for the hardenshipping focused stuff

either way i really appreciate the folks who've been following us here for a while now! i recognize most of the urls i see in the notes as "regulars" and it really makes me happy that there's people who have enjoyed what we've made here

so whether or not you stick around and follow us to the new blog, or decide you're not interested, i wanna say thank you <3 it's been a really nice experience having this blog for the past year and a bit. typically both nick and i tend to be pretty quiet in fandoms, and don't interact a whole lot due to past experiences leaving us a touch jaded. but we've been really touched by how much people have seemed to like this au (and me especially, since so many people have liked the art i've done for it!). i'm honestly a little nervous about the reception the overall verse au will get (for multiple reasons) in comparison, but i'm just glad that people seemed to like what we've done here

while i don't agree with everyone in it (no one is ever going to agree with everyone on a fictional thing!), i have to admit ive been pretty charmed by the hardenshipping community here. i'm not sure if i'd really consider us part of it, i don't think we post enough fanworks to really be more than just kinda on the outskirts, but i do really like the community itself.

overall, i've had a really great time with this blog. i spent years struggling to keep hold of my love for pokemon, due to some previous experiences making it hard for me to really have the same love for it that i had when i was younger, but making this au has brought that love back tenfold, and the fact that people have enjoyed it has really just been the cherry on top. trust hardenshipping to bring me back, i guess. i really enjoyed the ship back when oras first came out and it got a huge boom of popularity, and i consider hoenn to be my starting region for the series, so... it really did feel like coming home, in a way, and the fact that people have been so nice has really made the experience a good one

i really didn't intend for this post to be this long lmao. but uhhh. i guess i just hope that when we swap over to the new blog, i'll at least still see some of you there, even though we won't be solely focused on hardenshipping! if not, i totally understand, and im just glad you've been here for this blog

[ariadosage]

I think twunk Maxie should be the new norm , we need to retire skinny men

All that volcano climbing has gotta do something to the man

[ariadosage]

I know the funny joke to make fun of Maxie and Archie for having dumb plans and being idiots but honestly I don't fully believe that's the reason for them doing all of that

In a way I see it as a parallel , to how May and Brendan have a much healthier rivalry where they help each other grow. Maxie and Archie are opposite in that way as the both of them are willing to drag one another to hell to prove a point

You don't get to the point of saying "I'm gonna flood the earth to make the world better" or "I'm gonna dry up the whole ocean with a major drought for humanity" without there being some emotional baggage of some kind

[ariadosage]

finally deciding to post my own headcanons for captain magma over here

i changed the dark red sweater thing hes wearing to black simply bc i didn't like the color palette , glasses are yellow tinted ( his eyes all kinds of sensitive ) to match his belt thing. all around warmer colors

hes more tan , all that mountain and volcano exploring means your gonna get cooked.

version with and without freckles , i love the freckle hc.

more about maxie in general below the cut

Intersex trans male ( hyperestrogenism , he began to take T around his late 20s ). Npd , Autism and schizo-spec ( the first two are the most common hcs for him the last one is just projection from my end #schizogang )

he is a middle child , his younger sister being Ariana and his older brother being Byron. He hates Ariana and she hates him. he doesn't speak to Byron often but has no disdain for him anyway. he shares the cowlick with Ariana , which comes from their mother

Team Magma was founded around two to three years after him and archie fell out. he had a really bad crash after it all went down and he considers those to be *the* worst years of his life. his outfit was made to cover up most evidence (self harm) of those years.

As mentioned above its why is also so skinny , for a long time he dealt with a Eating disorder. after the events of ORAS he began to eat more so he looks fuller ( ill edit that some other day). he absolutely still loves pudding though.

[primal-leaders-au]

tbh i think one of my fave ways of characterizing maxie is

he is genuinely incredibly intelligent, and yet also an enormous idiot

[ravioliet]

they should invent a disproportionate emotional response that goes away when you understand it's disproportionate. they should invent a way to logic yourself out of emotions

[ravioliet]

why are so many people calling me spock. not what i'm called

[primal-leaders-au]

have i mentioned that i love numel

[primal-leaders-au]

imagine you're some dude in sinnoh who's the newest gym leader in the region (a role that your own dad originally asked someone else to fill!! you only got the role bc the other dude turned down the offer!!), and not only did your older sister run off and join the weird space obsessed criminal group in the region (who tore a rift in the space-time continuum!), but your mom also fucked off to a totally different region and got with the leader of the yakuza there (and had another kid with him! surprise you have a half-brother!)

and then you find out your cousin in another totally different region... looks at smudged writing on hands.... is the leader of an ecoterrorist group that summoned the primordial embodiment of the earth and nearly ended the world (oh and he's half lizard bc of it now)

[primal-leaders-au]

you know, for all the "roark, mars, ariana, and silver are all related" fanon, i'm really amazed i never see people including maxie in that?

him and roark look so similar, it's genuinely surprising that i've never seen people headcanon them as related in some way

[magmaquas]

THIS IS INSANE?? i can't get over the specific way he words this. "a friend who you consider to be your rival". not just a rival, or a rival who is also a friend. a friend first, and a rival second.

maxie gives off the vibes of someone who is very careful with how he words things, and he's obviously talking about archie when he says he has "someone like that".

this implies that, despite everything, maxie still sees archie as being his friend before his rival, and that makes me SO emotional