April 2: Favorite Character, Episode, Movie, and/or Song
Most people seem to be doing them all, but I'll be skipping movie since there's only 2 of them.
Favourite Character:
MY CRINGEFAIL SON IVAN!!!!
I relate to him immensely, even his dynamic with Edward I'd say I can somewhat relate to with someone in my life. It's uncanny. He tries his best to be outgoing but anxiety and self esteem issues sure are fucking bitches, so he can only really do it behind a mask. Even in S2 whilst his whole outlook may have taken a bit of a rollback, that's honestly realistic, not everyone can just keep marching and continuously improving themselves, there are setbacks and holes you can fall into at times.
I wish we knew more about his personal life beyond his backstory of getting bullied as a child + what vague stuff we have of his hero academy days, a lot of heroes suffer from this, however.
His passion for his hobbies is also just like me. He's cringe but he is free, just like many of us wish to be.
Runner up is Keith I love the Autistic dog man
Favourite Episode:
I gotta go with Sky's The Limit. The title is a very OH GEE WHOS FOCUS EPISODE IS THIS kind but genuinely it doesn't prepare you for the content. There's a wholeass lore drop, an intense fight scene with a robot, and of course Keith being Keith. It also puts into focus just how much pressure heroes are put under when it comes to the rankings, and second place apparently not being enough for Poseidon Line is a very corporate reality. It's go big or go home. The ending is also like OH MY GOD IM CRYING???? Like, we know Cis isn't very capable of behaving like a human, but Keith doesn't realise she's not human at all, he treats her as any other person and falls harder than an anvil for her despite their short time in contact. It makes me think that Cis had a potential to be something, someone more than she was initially made for. And these two are a bit of a guilty pleasure ship that me and like 2 other people in the west side seem to ship and yes I will be taking those "Keith is still lowkey in love with her even in S2 era" crumbs thank you-
Favourite Song:
Oh shit this is where it gets tricky. I have so many, so I'll split it into categories:
OP: Earth Diver
ED: Pilot
Character Song: GHHHAAAAAA DONT MAKE ME CHOOOOOSE
Other supplementary Song: Orion Wo Nazoru Hero Cover
I can't really put to words for Earth Diver, but I really like how it starts and kinda soothes you into the song before it really kicks. The lyrics are also very passionately sung.
I really like the calmer tone of Pilot and even though the explicitness of the shippyness isn't as heavy as Aida, the subtlety honestly fits them more. The credits themselves are also just beautiful; the visual aspect of them hits immensely hard in ep 14 especially since you saw what could happen to their suits in the fight the episode prior, and they're both no longer in their prime. Closing it out as they stare at the sunset makes me emotional and Proud Fiesta I love you but goddamn why did you return for Episode 25 that was a fucking mood killer I stg.
I love a lot of the character songs, with the ones from Best Of Hero very enjoyable romps, especially Mikirezakura and Thanks and Thanks Again, the energy these two songs have makes you wanna coreograph something. Some other highlights are POWER OF JUSTICE and Aaa Hero Suit. (Also Hidden Heroism actually kinda sucks it tries to be Mikirezakura 2 and thus loses out on an identity of its own which is very disappointing).
I love the harmony of the heroes cover of Orion, I can really picture them all in recording booths singing next to each other...who's the cheering guy, though? I've listened to this cover so many times and the line the cheering guy seemingly sings just sounds like Hirata's Kotetsu, I don't get it. I get wanting to balance the lyrics between groups and characters evenly but that was an awkward way to do it.
I've been wanting to make this meta post for a long while, but since there was no way to reach any truly solid conclusions, I always ended up setting it aside.
But since today's prompt is fan theories... I figure I might as well give this the best go I can!
Today on "Aria fixates on scraps of collateral canon in an attempt to better figure out the Tiger & Bunny timeline, since the authors just will not give us the info straight up, dammit": when did each of the characters debut as a hero?
(under a cut for length and screenshots of actual excel spreadsheets lol)
So, we know the answer to that question for sure for about half of the heroes: Wild Tiger debuted in NC1967, Barnaby in NC1977, and the three new kids in NC1980 (at least in Stern Bild; Subaru worked for a little while as a hero in Panjourney before joining Hero TV).
(Yeah, the hero card of himself Kotetsu picks up in the pilot is technically for the '76-'77 season of Hero TV, so maybe it saying he's got 10 years of experience means his debut was actually in NC1966... but nothing says the cards don't get updated as the season goes on, and this isn't too relevant to my number crunching, anyway.)
As for the rest of them, we can make at least an attempt at (vaguely) guessing by analyzing the experience data on the Hero Cards, which you can see for Season 1 and The Rising here on the amazing Merch Wiki (shoutout to @tnbscans 😘), and for Season 2 here in an older post of mine, or here on Twitter (both courtesy of @Kazuko_01 over there).
This is a chart of the experience values in all the available hero cards:
The reason Barnaby's values are in yellow is that they really, REALLY tried to throw off all of my math 😅
See, the experience values seem to only take into account how many seasons of Hero TV (or an equivalent of it) you've appeared in, however briefly. (At some point I thought maybe becoming the King of Heroes would grant you bonus exp, but Karina doesn't seem to get a boost from the '79-'80 season, when the CD dramas tell us she tied with Keith and became the Queen of Heroes.)
Barnaby took essentially all of NC1979 off, spent a quarter of NC1980 in the Second League, and his score during the Rising is still an absurd 3/5. The only possible way that can even remotely work is that the time off is discounted entirely AND that the exp values aren't strictly proportional to your years of experience, but more along the lines of a curve (stretched every time to accomodate the longest career, Kotetsu's) where having been a hero for at least a season before, as opposed to being a rookie, gives you an additional point on the scale, and each subsequent point requires more years of extra experience.
(This would make a certain amount of sense: there's a lot of difference between being a total rookie and someone who's been on another season, or two, but not that much difference between having worked 9 or 10 seasons before.)
The crucial facts to make this work, and the reasons I had to discard a lot of other possible ways map the years to the exp values, are:
The cards, in spite of having 5 possible scores in S1 and The Rising and 6 possible scores in S2, really only ever have a baseline plus four extra values above it, since the 1/6 or 0.5/3 score in the S2 cards is unused (hence me counting the scores as "out of 3"). I initially thought maybe it was because all the S2 kids had some prior experience, since Subaru used to be a hero before coming to Stern Bild, but the manga tells us Thomas for sure did not, so it's not that (RIP Subaru for them ignoring your days as Hello Goodbye);
Bunny skips ahead two notches between his debut in the 1977-78 season and the 1979-80 season in The Rising;
Antonio goes from having max 5/5 experience along with Kotetsu in S1 to having a score of 2.5/3 (or 5/6), along with Nathan, Keith, and Ryan, in S2. This means he definitely debuted after Kotetsu, but before Nathan and Keith (and almost certainly Ryan).
With all of that in mind, this is the best possible thing I could personally come up with:
I marked down the two most likely ways to map the years to the exp values for each set of cards that still somehow work at the bottom (with blue being min experience if you debuted that year, and red being max). The fully grayed-out years are downright impossibilities (again, not counting Subaru's time as Hello Goodbye, since the cards don't); the softer gray is "very unlikely", the mid blue is "possible", and the deeper blue is "most likely" (thin border) or "sure" (thick border).
I didn't really try to come up with an arrangement that would let any of Ivan, Karina or Pao-Lin debut any earlier than NC1976, because a) both Ivan and Karina have conversations with their bosses in the pilot episode that really make it seem like the just-concluded season was their first, and b) as it is Pao-Lin already became a hero at TWELVE YEARS OLD and that's enough of a headache for me, thank you very much.
The riveting conclusions, assuming this makes any sort of sense at all (and that I didn't put way more thought into this than the people who made the cards did):
Antonio almost certainly debuted in NC1969 or NC 1970, two or three years after Kotetsu;
Ryan (whose experience outside of Stern Bild seems to be fully counted, sorry again, Subaru) doesn't appear in the S1 cards, so it's a little harder to narrow his debut down, but since he's apparently younger than Barnaby, which would make him a teenager for most (if not all) of his possible range of debut years, I'd very personally tend to put him more around NC1973 than anywhere else;
Nathan and Keith most likely debuted in either NC1971 or NC1972... but I would strongly argue that the only really viable year out of these two is NC1972. That is the year Tomoe died, and Nathan and Keith, before episode 1x09, had no idea at all that Kotetsu was ever even married, let alone a widower with a daughter. I simply cannot imagine Nathan, especially, witnessing a colleague she sees pretty much every day go through the loss of his wife, and not prying enough, either with Kotetsu himself or with Antonio (who is not terribly good at keeping Kotetsu's secrets, see ep 1x09 again), to eventually find out what was going on. If Tomoe died before October, when the 1972 season of hero TV started, Nathan and Keith, debuting that year, would have met Kotetsu only after the fact, which seems a lot more plausible.
(Yes, that last thing does support my cute headcanon of FireSky being almost polar-opposite rookies together, but to be fair, the headcanon itself came directly from this math, and not the other way around.)
If you read all of this, we are true siblings in T&B nerdery and ILU forever. Especially if you have any ideas on how to make the data make more sense, lol. 💚
This has got to be one of the silliest things I've ever written, but ngl, had a blast doing it. Short story about the Karuizawa Cabbage Theory. Geography is woefully in accurate since Sternbild is supposed to be a version of New York City, and well Karuizawa is a resort town in Nagano, Japan. Still the fans think he drifted on the river all the way to Karuizawa, so it stays.
Author: Lalunameli
Title: Yuri on Cabbages
Rating: PG (language)
Characters: Yuri Petrov (ooc, amnesia), and Kotetsu T. Kaburagi
A/N: Unbetaed, barely proofread, will fix mistakes as I come across them.
Yuri Petrov...
Kotetsu sat at his desk staring at the screen looking at a blurry photo submitted to him from his client, of a man with similar hair (though unkempt) selling cabbages. The former Hero Supervisor had been missing for almost a year ...which coincided with the permanent loss of his powers and the last time he and Barnaby had seen Lunatic. While it was hard to make out Lunatic's face in the glare, that same untamed curly hair resembled that of the cabbage seller's, who had not bothered to tie it back. A sharp contrast from the Director, who was so meticulous about keeping a neat and tidy appearance.
Kotetsu's current line of work as a Private Investigator for Anything Goes Investigations opened him up to contact from people from various walks of life, which is how found himself taking on the case of the missing Director. He had been approached by a woman by the name of Elena, who had said she was previously in employment as his mother's caregiver, until her untimely death. Apparently her employer had gone missing while she was recuperating in the hospital for injuries sustained during a robbery attempt in which Yuri's mother Origa, had been fatally wounded. Elena had survived; however, upon her release from the hospital, she learned that Yuri Petrov had been missing since the attacks on city by Gregory Sunshine and the controlled NEXTs. Fearing the worst, she sought out the services of Kotetsu to launch a search for the missing Judge.
This was how Kotetsu found himself in a small resort town called Karuizawa (of all places!) interviewing a strange cabbage seller, who looked unmistakably like his former boss, yet whose mannerisms were anything but.
"I honestly don't remember much prior to ending up here" said the Cabbage Seller amicably smiling at Kotetsu.
Smiling, thought Kotetsu Is he actually smiling at me? And what's with the casual speech?
The Director always spoke so formally around them and was known to be stoic. The Cabbage Seller on the other hand was all smiles, with a carefree demeanor.
"What do you mean you don't remember?" asked Kotetsu bluntly
The Cabbage seller tucked an unruly lock of hair behind his ear.
"Well the people here say I was found drifting in a nearby river badly hurt. They didn't think I'd actually make it! But I guess they brought me to a hospital or something... I'm not really clear on any of it. To be honest I don't really remember a lot of things, so they kinda look out for me." He smiled sheepishly at Kotetsu
"Yikes, sounds like you had a rough time" he responded still weirded out by Cabbage Yuri's mannerisms. "So are you tellin' me you don't remember who you are at all?"
"Not at all!" replied Cabbage Yuri enthusiastically "They've taken to calling me 'Kawabe' (A/N: riverside/riverbank) around here because of where they found me. Suppose it could be worse and they could have called me Cabbage Guy or something..."
He paused for a moment and furtively looked around. Seeing no one was around he looked at Kotetsu conspiratorially.
"Hey Mister, you wanna see something cool? But you can't tell anyone. Promise?"
Kotetsu had a sinking feeling of what this "something cool" was.
Shit-shit-shit... he thought to himself.
"Sure, go for it..." he hoped his nervousness wasn't showing.
"Look what I can do!!"
The tell tale signs of blue light from NEXT power activation appeared, as a bright blue flame errupted from Cabbage Yuri errr Kawabe's hand.
"I dunno if this was because of my accident but it sure looks cool!"
I KNEW IT. Thought Kotetsu. I knew this asshole was Lunatic! And now he doesn't even remember...
"Ummm hey, isn't that kinda dangerous? Shouldn't you be careful where you're waving those things around?"
Cabbage Yuri Kawabe's eyes widened as he quickly extinguished the flame.
"Oops, you're right! My bad!"
'Oops' and 'My Bad'??? Where the hell did he learn to speak like that!! I gotta try to deal with this before it becomes a problem.
"Listen I'm gonna level with you. I'm here because I run a Private Investigations office and..."
"...And you're on a case?!??" asked Cabbage Yuri excitedly
"Yeah something like that. Anyway while I'm here I kinda need someone who knows the area. Whaddya say, you interested?"
"Am I ever!!! That sounds like fun!"
Fun! thought Kotetsu exasperatedly, Why do I feel I'm going to regret this...
The two men shook hands as Kotetsu tried to figure out what the hell he was going to do next to keep up this sham and why the hell this was his best idea to keep Lunatic close.
ETA: Look at this lovely artwork from @lidoxia (aka @kalineas ) of Cabbage Yuri! I'm so honoured and happy to see him genuinely smiling!!
From original post:
Unlikely I'll continue this. I am long retired from fanfic writing, but thought it might be fun to dust off the cobwebs and write something silly.
I know the offical TnB Week was years ago, but I want to keep up the celebration tradition because it was so much fun. I hope you, the fans, agree. For this week, I'll be posting a poll about certain things about the series. Well, here's the first one:
If you could spend one day with one of the Sternbild Heroes, which one would it be?