#starlight ask

[mutalune]

Aizawa has said on a few occasions that he was most certainly not the first choice to go back in time. I’m pretty sure you mentioned who was supposed to go; is it a spoiler to list the order? Did any of them have more info than Aizawa?

i don’t think it’s a spoiler because i was careful to take out stuff i’ll talk about later, but i’ll toss it under a read more just to be safe!

so first up is all might: he was absolutely the first choice. in fact, he’s the one who reached out and used his All Might #1 Hero contacts to get the quirk specialist+science people together to figure out if time travel was feasible and get the Logistics sorted out. he documented everything just in case he wouldn’t be able to go, but he fully expected to be the one going back in time.

the next option would’ve been nedzu, who didn’t have a lot of info but def could’ve figured it out way quicker than aizawa is - except he was in hiding For Reasons I Won’t Say and they couldn’t find him to actually send him back.

third option, which i feel like might surprise people: present mic. he was more famous than most heroes and had a broader base of support than some of the more niche ones (he had music fans, talk show fans, AND heroics fans), he was smarter than the average bear, and he had a likeable personality that def could’ve swayed people in the past to support any initiatives or missions he tried to get started.

it would be spoilers for me to tell you why he couldn’t go, so i won’t!!!

after that, it was pretty much a “this can only go back x number of years, so we can’t send back anyone who wasn’t born that year or they’ll be shoved out of existence. we can’t send anyone back who would have been a kid that year either” - because a kid wouldn’t have enough independence/time/stamina to make changes until at least they hit puberty - and since they’re going back to their Actual Bodies in That Year, they have no way to predict how their brains would be affected by having Adult Memories in a Child Body with Child Emotions and Child Mental Capacity (because like. there’s a physical aspect to memories and thoughts and feelings, and sending an adult back into a Child Body could cause some real crazy shit to happen. + kids don’t have any emotional control really so they couldn’t be trusted to make decisions that weren’t based on their emotions/trauma/etc.)

(i was a psych major i have Opinions about time travel fics where they go back to their kid body and age-regression fics where when they get back to their Normal Age everythign is just hunky-dory lmao)

so: there was a fairly limited list of people at that point due to their casualties, and like.

aizawa was OLD.

i forget how old i said he was, but he was OLD and there weren’t many heroes his age (or even a decade or two younger than him) left because It Was the Apocalypse. so the ones that could reasonably do something about the LOV and wouldn’t be a child - of those, the month or so leading up to when they would flip the switch and send someone back, aizawa ended up being the only (and also last, because he was old and tired and didn’t WANT to live through this hell a second time really. like he’d do it if he had to because someone had to and he has a sense of duty, but he also was at the point that nonexistence sounded pretty dope) option left.

and that my friends is how you farm Gourmet Survivor’s Guilt~!

[mutalune]

Hey! I hope November is treating you better than October! (Other than the first tuesday. It lasted like a whole week! Crazy!) Do you have any branching stories of your AU? Like would Izuku’s birthday phone call have happened in the original universe? What if Aizawa had a password from Nedzu so he could approach him early? That the time travel aspect of your fic was so ... ill-prepared? is absolutely fascinating. Finally, yours is so good that I’m even recounting it to Datemate! Ihopethismakesit!

first off plz tell your datemate that i said hi because that’s so fucking cute and i hope they’re enjoying the recounting

second off november is going MILES better than october thank you so much for the well-wishes <3

third off thank you??? for your kind words???? seriously appreciate it so much <3

okay onto the fun stuff - i don’t have anything written that’s branching off from the AU, but i have Ideas if you’re interested in hearing them!! (i’m gonna try not to spoil future things in my fic and not give too much away but i’m also Dumb so read at your own risk lmao)

izuku and his dad - AU vs OU

in general, the way i view a lot of the stuff with izuku’s dad is that if izuku had been even a teensy-bit more genuine with his dad in the Original Universe, his relationship with his dad would be way different than the Original Universe. i see the OU relationship between them as unmatured - Hisashi cared about izuku in the OU as well, but he never looked deeper into izuku’s life other than a cursory “oh he’s doing well, his grades are good, he’s healthy, he made it into the high school he wanted.”

and that’s because in the OU, izuku only had all might and his mom as role models. Inko gave him kindness and strength and determination. all might gave him hope and something to aspire towards.

all of that makes the wonderful being that is Canon Deku and i do adore that boy, but Hisashi does Not Like All Might and he wouldn’t be able to handle a tiny deku’s gushing over the hero that destroyed his quality of life. and deku hadn’t been socialized enough to talk about anything EXCEPT all might or heroes - a consequence of having no friends except your busy working mom.

so even if izuku had been open in the OU to a relationship with hisashi (which i don’t think he was, because i think without aizawa there to help him be confident, he would default to protecting himself and hiding and he wouldn’t have the safety of aizawa’s love/support to shield him from if hisashi had rejected him in any way - better to stay away than risk getting hurt and rejected by the only other adult that was semi-obligated to give a damn about him) - i don’t think hisashi would’ve been open to it himself

(i think i said this in an A/N somewhere but i have literally no idea of when AFO and all might had their Big Blowout Fight in canon, so for my purposes, it happened pre-fic when izuku was 6 lmao)

Hisashi has some amount of trauma from that fight - who wouldn’t after losing their sight and most of their face? - the same that all might does, even if we don’t see all might explore that very much. and as someone who has her own trauma, i know i go into “AVOID!!!! AVOID AT ALL COSTS!!!!” mode when i come across any kind of trigger.

multiply that by 100x because it’s Your Son who You Adore More Than Anything Even If You Don’t Know Him That Well Because You Also Have Family Trauma - yeah, i can’t imagine hisashi being comfortable with more than the bare minimum kind of relationship with his all might fanboy son.

SO THAT WAS A REALLY LONG WAY OF SAYING: yes, the phone call would’ve happened, but it would have been:

“hey happy birthday”

“thanks”

“how’s school”

“it’s fine. how’s america”

“it’s fine. americans, ya know.”

*awkward silence*

“okay talk to you next year.”

regarding nedzu and aizawa

honestly that’s one of those things i hadn’t even considered when writing this fic if i’m being honest. like the whole reason i started thinking about writing this fic was “how can i give aizawa a tiny izuku to protect and care for without killing inko or making her a Terrible Mother” because that was most of the fics i was seeing (which are all still fun to read don’t get me wrong but i like inko and i like writing women and i am a lesbian who Loves Women!!!!) and i just started writing and THEN made the plot and actual details fit with the first 5 chapters i wrote lmao

i think, though, that nedzu is such a wildcard. like i haven’t read the manga so maybe he’s more understandable in that, but it seems to me like his motivations aren’t very clear. he’s not really a dumbledore-type figure in my eyes - he’s not the general of the battle against the LOV, even if he has authority and has a position and has the intelligence, ya know?

he’s very inscrutable to me, and he has his own bias and own motivations that are intriguing to consider - but i can’t imagine aizawa trusting a past-version of nedzu to work towards the same goals he’s working towards.

like, aizawa thinks he’s logical. but at the end of the day, i write him as a “loved ones comes first, the world comes second” character. and whether he can admit it to himself or not, he knows that nedzu would put the world first.

and it would scare him that nedzu might see izuku (or any of his students, or hizashi, or nemuri) as expendable if that means avoiding the future aizawa came from. with nedzu being as smart as he is and as inscrutable as he is, aizawa could end up as his pawn towards whatever *nedzu* thinks is the best course of action, even if he was completely honest with nedzu.

this is something that i don’t think has come up yet, but aizawa *knows* he’s not the smartest guy. like he knows he’s not an idiot, but he knows that hizashi is WAY smarter than him, and he knows that he wouldn’t be able to beat nedzu in a game of checkers, let alone a life-size game of war.

i could see a version where aizawa gets all might’s help and has some sort of “i know this thing that you never told anyone else, i’m from the future, help” type of password, or i could see him doing it with just about any other pro-hero or any of his students, but i really can’t see a version where he would enlist nedzu first. i think he would want to set some of his plans in motion that even with all of his intelligence, nedzu wouldn’t be able to stop.

(does aizawa even have plans? no he doesn’t, which means he would wait to involve nedzu until he came up with a plan, but he can’t come up with a plan b/c he is Not a Strategic Thinker, so he keeps fixing small problems and saying that when he comes up with a plan he’ll call nedzu, and then he’s fighting the LOV singlehandedly because he’s a moron.)

aizawa isn’t a big picture guy, to me. he’s the best and worst person to send back in time because of it lmao - he’s the best because he is smart and sneaky and (if he had all of the right information) he would find the easiest, quickest solution. he’s the worst because he would be the guy who, given the chance to go back in time and stop someone from destroying the world, he would go “okay i’ll just kill that guy before he becomes a Big Huge Villain” and then not realize “oh wait that just means someone else will step in a fill the void and now i don’t know who that guy is so that’ll be harder and all of my future knowledge is For Nothing” (cough CHISAKI cough)

WOW THIS IS SO LONG i hope if you read it all the way to the end you enjoyed my babbling or at least didn’t hate it enough that you won’t ever open my fic ever again~

in all seriousness, thank you for your ask and thank you for giving me a chance to babble about some of this stuff because i have BIG OPINIONS and a lot of thought has gone into this AU and what the OU of my AU (that is in and of itself a canon divergence/AU of canon lmao) would look like. it was really fun to dive into this onto a medium that isn’t just another document on my google drive~

i hope you’re having a lovely november and if you do anything for the holiday season, you have fun with it~! (also plz feel free to stop in and chat more/ask more if you want to!!! i’m trying to be better about being on tumblr more often lol)

[mutalune]

Hey!!! I loved tmagr so much! I fell in love with erasermic bc of it 🥺🥺 and now it’s like my fav ship

ayy!!! i’m glad you’re enjoying it!!!! also i’m lowkey laughing at the fact that my fic is the one that made you fall in love with erasermic when meanwhile those two idiots aren’t getting their shit together anytime soon in tmagr and it’s been 95% longing and 5% dumbassery!!! 

thank you for the ask!!!!! the holiday season has been stressful at work so i probably won’t have an update for at least another week (if not more...) but comments and asks like this make sure it’s always on my mind and i’m always thinking about new things to add to the fic lol 

[mutalune]

@i-hate-liking-batman​

You say this and yet I have become SMITTEN with your writing you beautiful person. I am smiling so much as I slowly read more of your fics and love every single one!!!! Stealing my heart with your cute author comments and lovely characterizations!!! If you want to get swept off your feet with compliments I have no problem in complying!!! It's not hard to complement such an amazing person♡♡♡♡♡♡♡

the universe really said “you want to complain? you really want to complain???? alright here you go don’t say i never did anything for you” and plopped you over here didn’t it 

aka: uh hi wow thank u??? i’m glad u like my fics so much and i’m actually intensely flustered by your reply so i don’t know what to say????? i might die if u keep complimenting me considering how red my face got with my first readthrough of this response 

[mutalune]

Hi this is a quick note to say that I've read throw me a goddamn rope like three times since I bookmarked it on the third bc it's just such good fucking writing & also following Aizawa "logical decisions only (makes an emotional decision) fuck" Shouta has been a JOY & a BLESSING. I wasn't expecting you to go down the route you did with mic but I'm HERE FOR IT & thank God you've gone down the route you did with nemuri (1/2)

bc not enough people touch upon her being a fucking teacher as a "18+ hero" ma'am that's illegal. Thats- thats illegal. There was a specific line that caught me while I was at work but I said "I'll remember it" & then promptly forgot where it was so I guess I'll tell you why I loved that line when I find it again on the 4th, 5th, and 7th read-through!!!! Oops!!! Anyway this is just a psa: your fic is so fucking good & I can't wait to see how c14 is resolved!! (2/2)

@gogogadget-im-going-gogoat

i’m fucking sobbing at “Aizawa ‘logical decisions only (makes an emotional decision) fuck’ Shouta” because that’s p much the perfect way to describe this man.... thank you for that god i’m wheezing 

i’m so so SO happy that you’re enjoying my current passion project <3 this fic has been a lifesaver during the wild time that is 2020 and it means a lot to know that it’s being enjoyed by other people - especially to the point of? rereading??? that’s wild for me to think about b/c i avoid re-reading my work whenever possible so it makes me Warm and Fuzzy that you’ve read it? more than once???? thank you omg 

and thank you again for saying nice things about the characterizations!!! i really like hizashi and nemuri and badly wanted to flesh them out a ton, but i was afraid that my Decisions with them might go over badly. so i am EXTREMELY thrilled to hear that my characterization of them, flawed and all, is being appreciated. <3 <3 

thank you so much for these nice words ;__; i super appreciate it and hope that you continue to enjoy it all <3 

[unbloomingmoonflower]

Tis Starlight! What are some people, both NPC and mutual, that Shuri would buy a Starlight gift for, and what gifts would she buy?

I would gift Shuri some chakrams, designed with the symbols of her tribe, to honour her heritage.

Nonnie, I hope you're aware that Shuri would cry tears of joy at receiving that gift. Especially with symbols of her tribe upon them because Shuri is very much proud of her heritage (she will probably also hug and nuzzle you with her horn in affection).

As for gifts, there's...a lot of people to give gifts for. Her spouses, close friends/moots (and said moot OC's kids if they has them), and her children get presents, of course.

And since that list of people to gift-give for is super long (longer than that positivity ask I got, because those moots are on the list), I will say Shuri wouldn't buy a gift; she'd make one.

Lemme explain:

After finally retiring as a Warrior of Light, Shuri's taken up weaving and smithing, with culinary on the side (thank you, culinary guild), so she would give handmade gifts of either clothes, jewelry or weapons crafted specifically for that person (a motif they may have/favor, for example). Yes, she would also include food. She didn't learn to make starlight-themed food for funsies! (Actually she did, but don't tell her you know that).

Like, take Estinien, for example: Shuri would make him a new spear, with a carving of a dragon along the handle (since Esti finally understands the dragons now) to gift him for Starlight.

Shuri only uses the best-quality materials to make these gifts for her friends/moots, loved ones, and the children because in her eyes, they deserve nothing short of the best.

[mutalune]

Hey! I just wanted to drop a note to let you know I think you're a brilliant writer. I just reread dearly beloved for the tenth(? conservative estimate? what even are numbers?) time and I loved falling in love with it all over again. Thank you. ♡

okay first off thank you for this!!! i never got a notification for this so i hope it wasn’t too long ago ;__; but even if it was, it was a really nice experience to open my inbox and see something so sweet.

second: i’m so so happy that you enjoyed dearly beloved so much!!! that’s one of my favorite fics i wrote and it means a lot to know that you liked it so much and have REREAD IT???? wild. 

thank you so much for this message <3 

[mutalune]

baby yoda

this is the KINDEST thing ever said to me i’mma cry thank u... i love the baby so much 

are we talking “immensely powerful but needs a nap after doing one (1) thing” baby yoda or “so smol and helpless poor baby” baby yoda b/c i feel it all tbh