On the subject of Alastor and friends, I do think he's fully capable of developing friendships with others.
However, I think he has a low empathy threshold, and his self-preservation instincts from having been a black man in the south in the 30s (while also working in a white dominated field), as well as the fact that he's been surviving in hell for close to a century at this point, are two factors that win out over any care he may feel for others.
That being said, I think it's interesting that Rosie, who has known him for that near century, felt comfortable enough to call him out on the idea that he would just leave the hotel residents to die. Namely because one of the silhouettes he uses against Rosie is Niffty's.
Alastor hasn't had any scenes to indicate that he genuinely cares for Charlie, Angel, or Vaggi beyond that he finds them entertaining and/or useful to an extent.
He has with Niffty, on multiple occasions.
And something that I think is important about his relationship with Niffty is that she actively makes it clear she cares about him in return.
She's the only one who's been shown going out of her way to help him with no (apparent) strings attached, and is openly affectionate.
With everyone else at the hotel? They've either largely ignored him or only come to him when they need something.
He had to make a deal with Vaggi just so he could be assured that he wouldn't have to participate in something he hates (TV) again after he helped her with the second commercial. They could have easily asked him to advertise on his Radio Show, but instead went out of their way to make him film a video commercial. Hell, they could have even just asked him for filming equipment and done the actual filming theirselves considering their only guest at the time was Angel Dust. Their schedules weren't exactly busy at that point in the narrative.
Charlie barely cared when he was captured, focusing more on her social media war with the Vees than on the fact that he was, as far as she was aware, kidnapped. Vaggi was even less concerned (although her reasoning for her lack of concern was understandable, and she was right that he was planning something).
When he and Emily get hurt, Charlie runs to Emily, the one she's known for maybe a few weeks in universe. Not Alastor, who she has been living with for over half a year and frequently relies on.
His seemingly genuine friendship with Rosie is marred by the fact that he was in servitude to her for nearly a century. Meanwhile, he is to Husk what Rosie was to him. Same issue, different font.
Sir Pentious was only interested in him because he wanted to prove himself to the overlords by beating him.
The only times Angel has spoken to him was to flirt (as far as I can remember). Cherri and Baxter meanwhile have had little to no interactions with him.
Mimzy, his only known friend from his living life, is a white woman who frequently uses his care for her to her advantage. Essentially treating him like her own personal attack dog. Mind you, this is a friendship that posed the risk of getting him killed simply by association due to the time they lived in, and it's implied she had him doing favors for her anyway, which would have increased that potential outcome significantly.
Vox, while he had genuine feelings for Alastor, still tried to team up with him to use his powers for his own benefit, and waited until Alastor was at least slightly inebriated to shoot his shot.
Alastor is somewhere around 130-150 years old, and the only times he's been shown genuine care (as far as the audience is aware atp) is from Niffty, Emily (who went out of her way to try to save him), Husk when attempting to warn him about Mimzy, and likely his own mother. ...That's a very small number of times for such a large time span.
Everyone else wants something from him, and they don't hide it at all.
None of this is to say that Alastor is justified in his more negative behaviors. Dude is in hell for a reason. But I can't really blame the guy for treating almost everyone else like pawns when they more or less do the same to him in the grand scheme of things.
Considering that "an eye for an eye" is a running theme in this show, I wouldn't be surprised if Alastor only begins experiencing "positive" character growth once someone begins treating a relationship with him (platonic or otherwise) as something other than transactional.
Presently, I can only see Lucifer and Emily being able to fulfill that need.
From what we've been shown thus far, Alastor doesn't have anything material that Lucifer objectively needs, aside from potentially being his executioner. (Which he could make a deal with literally any number of powerful sinners to do. Alastor isn't inherently special in this possibility).
Emily, meanwhile, isn't the kind of person who would develop a friendship with strings attached.
I think being met with genuine, no-strings-attached, companionship will confuse Alastor and drive him up the wall. It will be a nearly foreign experience to him. It'll take him out of his comfort zone, and make him more vulnerable than he's ever been in the show thus far. I'm very interested in seeing how he'll react.
Again, no one has to believe the "Graffiti King is Wreck" theory, and maybe it's not true, and that's fine, but this sentiment among the pushback has been bugging me:
"The studio just isn't that creative/they were cutting corners for budget/time/animation constraints etc., reasons, so reusing Wreck's design makes sense." Entirely possible, sure. But also...
Here we have a scene where a bunch of actors who made their own costumes to pretend to be one guy still has some visual diversity. You can see that a couple costumes are at best slight color swaps of each other, and some more closely mimic original E-Soul than others, but there's still some diversity of design. Longer chest pieces, off-center circles, a couple different helmet designs (particularly for the eye shapes), even entirely different color palates when you look at the yellowish-brown and pink one and the white/silver one.
You see this again when we have the final round. Three different designs. And this is ignoring that Yang Cheng's final armor against E-Soul and his armor after he joins MG, and old E-Soul's armor (and he has a couple of those if I remember), are also different. That's at minimum like... eight armor designs? For people all trying to be the same person?
Bug(?) Ctrl Alt Delete is clearly very close to the middle design, just yellow/orange. Again, potentially aping E-Soul. He's not, so far as we know, an actor: he works for MG, and has actual powers (or maybe he's a paid, superpowered actor like Nice and Wreck were). Maybe he also started as one of those E-Soul actors, like Yang Cheng did. Maybe, like folks have speculated, he's the E-Soul lookalike who won the contest, and that's why he looks like this.
Lin Ling's had three costumes - technically four, if you consider his Nice costume falling apart - now. Nice has three, considering he can take his usekh off, and he's got his dancer costume (four if you count his outfit in the flashbacks where he's a child). Smile's had three (his superhero costume, his biker costume, his Fear-dosed costume).
It seems extremely random to me that in a show that has rather different character costume designs (say what you will about character design, the costumes at least are decently different from each other; even though Nice and Wreck, for instance, share design elements, they are visually very easy to tell apart, same with Ms. Blazing Fire and Mr. Matchstick, and even Bowa and Queen, who are also both from the same company and have similarly designed costumes, are easy to tell apart) and so many for just one character, would replicate near exactly one costume design from a character for a different agency with a somewhat different powerset, for no reason other than, what, animator laziness?
Even Bowa and Queen looking similar kind of supports the theory that there is a reason when similarity exists. Bowa and Queen are both top heroes at DOS. But clearly Mickey doesn't have Little Johnny redesign his costume after Little Johnny goes to DOS, and Lucky Cyan's costume doesn't look like Bowa's or Queen's, outside the sort of tabard shirt that she wears resembling Queen's a little, and even then they're from the same company, and it's likely whoever designed their costumes did so intentionally, especially since it's already happened once with Bowa and Queen. If companies like Treeman, MG, and DOS at least sometimes have their heroes mimic each other (within the same company) visually, why does DOS have one of their heroes mimic someone from another company, and not one of their own heroes?
Does the animation studio cut corners? Oh definitely, you can see them copy-pasting certain characters in 3D crowd shots (and as some folks have pointed out, X's glasses keep changing shape). We literally start the story with one guy pretending to be another guy followed by an arc with another guy doing the same thing for a different guy, with a little kid who looks a bit like the first guy. Clearly some of the E-Soul actors are copies, but also they're supposed to be. But something like Wreck's costume, at least as apparently duplicated for Graffiti King, just minus the cape and physical crown, is so weirdly and unnecessarily detailed when, if the goal was corner cutting, they could have gone with something simpler that would have looked different and new (we've got multiple characters who are just dudes in capes with special hats/helmets, it's not like it would have been hard to be different), and most of which wouldn't have been lost to most of the audience who didn't pause the video. But the studio didn't do that. They chose to replicate Wreck's costume.
This is also a studio that actually has designed a lot of extra side characters. I can't say all the designs are the most original things in the world (and one is clearly just a Cardcaptor Sakura reference, but I assume that's intentional), but the costumes don't look identical or near-identical without reason, as with heroes aping E-Soul from MG, or Lin Ling pretending to be Nice. DJ Shindig, Firm Man, Enlighter, Nine, Mr. Matchstick, Vortex, Ah Sheng, the Ruby-Sapphire Masters, Crash, Blankster, Phobiaclone, Magic Shadow... these are all side characters who have rather unique costumes, and what, for whatever reason, the animation studio fumbled real hard in an episode they presented five entirely new character designs for the Ruby-Sapphire Masters, Sparkling, the Constructor, and Dreamy Granny? They screwed up specifically for the one they spent an inordinate amount of time focusing on? Graffiti King is a centerpiece of the extras attacking X and he got the allegedly least amount of work just because the animation crew ran out of steam and creativity in the final episode of the first season? The same studio that stuck that poster of Smile shattering in the first two minutes of episode 1, visually between Lin Ling and Nice, right before Lin Ling sees Nice apparently kill himself?
In a show where they love referencing and interweaving other things, foreshadowing, and teasing fans into coming up with theories and thinking about what's happening? Like with X confirming in Episode 24 that he was the guy who gave that coin to Lucky Cyan when she was singing on the street in Episode 9?
Ah yes, in this superhero show, a genre known for secret identities, reboots, reimaginings, and superpowered people taking on new identities (e.g., nearly every Robin, Ms. Marvel, Bucky, Falcon, Wonder Girl), and generally about public life versus private life and the demands of celebrity and fandom, which involves:
Starting with Guy 1 whom we knew pretty much nothing about seemingly killing himself for no given reason and his agency forcing Guy 2 to pretend to be Guy 1. Guy 2's arc concludes with him becoming himself but also with a new alias.
The first arc with Guys 1 and 2 included a fight with Guy 3 who was holding a fake version of the woman Guy 2 was in love with hostage
A second arc where Guy 4 does stage performances as Guy 5 along with a ton of other actors, and Guy 6 hires some other guys to assassinate Guy 4, but they fuck up by killing Guy 7, and then Guy 4 ultimately killed Guy 5 and takes Guy 5's place, while Guy 6 is revealed to have been some other guy in disguise this whole time
A third arc involves a girl having to fight between living her own life and being pushed into the saint people want her to be, whose best friend struggles with the role he was given as one who brings calamity
A title character who has seemingly one of the few secret identities... who is Graffiti King's nemesis
Yes, that show, which clearly loves fucking around with secret identities and personas, would definitely never have one guy with a secret identity/other identity take on a new one/pretend to be someone else. Yup. Truly impossible. Especially when it seems like a crewmember actually shared some behind-the-scenes stuff that showed that Wreck's original phone profile photo was a purple squiggle arrow, like Graffiti King's main color and squiggly arrow power?
Is there some hidden Wreck lore I'm missing that's making people believe this isn't Wreck? (as someone who adores Wreck, and has searched everywhere, I know of literally nothing that goes against the theory, we truly know very little about him to oppose it). Most of the backlash was before we even knew that Wreck and Graffiti King have different English VAs, and none of the opposition I've seen references that at all. It's just people being mocking about how it's not real, like it's so obvious and self-explanatory. It's just become accepted that it's not true and anyone who believes it is desperate and/or otherwise being ridiculous.
I've seen bad fan theories. I've seen flimsy ones. This is neither of those. That doesn't mean it's true, it just means it lacks a lot of what makes weaker theories more open to not being true.
Is the reason people are against it just that people assume Wreck is dead and that's it? As if the whole idea behind Phobiaclone isn't that he died and Shang De revived him? As if that's not potentially also what happened in some form to Nice, based on his appearance? Do people not know who Red Hood is? Did people sleep on the Young Justice animated series with Roy Harper's story in particular? Or Superboy's? Do people not remember when Robin went to work for Slade in Teen Titans? Did everyone forget one of the better-liked MCU films, Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Most importantly, Li Haoling, To Be Hero X's director, previously worked on another donghua that adapted a book that stars mostly a bunch of characters with secret identities (Heaven Official's Blessing), including the protagonist and love interest, who both have multiple secret identities, which is central to the plot.
I don't know, be coherent in your arguments. I've repeated that I wouldn't be shocked if the theory is wrong, but even the easiest way to "disprove" it is never used, and the rare times people cite "evidence" against it, it's things that are easily explained.
I was like sensing me spiralling but I just. didn't???
it was reaching the point of "I'm probably annoying my friends by being dramatic or whatever and they're probably sick of my bs" but then it was just a "no that's not true. you know that's not true". and it stopped
I am actually so happy like. this has not happened without like external factors. and okay this is probably not gonna be like a new normal. but holy fuck. holy shit. just fucking, yay??!?!?!?!
i'm feeling extra spicy tonight so i'll just say my grievances: everytime i see a USian say shit like "anime is for guys it seems, why is it that most anime fans are guys who say a lot of things"
it always gets me angry and ready to type "WELL that's because you only see shonen-centered spaces. go to joseimuke spaces and you'll see that ur wrong" but then i realized.
this is the consequence of the US mostly only importing shonen and ultraviolent seinen in the 80s and 90s.
that's why anime and manga 'culture war' in twitter to me sounds that weird chuds have no idea that anime not made for guys are a thing. like if you show them joseimuke anime they'd yell "WOKE AGENDA RUINED ANIME" because that's all they know!
animanga spaces in the western world would've been a better place if they practiced diversity in manga publishing/anime importing in the 90s
Had a good grip on my life. Did an internship at a hospital and planned to start my apprenticeship as a geriatric nurse this autumn. Finished trauma therapy in March. Stopped abusing substances. Moved forward with my transition. Established a stable social environment with friends who support me (and who are mostly like 30 years older than me because I tend to get along better with older people 🤷🏻♂️).
And then the next level of trauma came. Not in that I remembered more traumatic incidents. But that now, that I processed the incidents, I can see their impacts more fully. Their consequences - and there's one thing in particular that I can't live with. I think about it 24/7 when I'm not distracted. As it is now, I can't just leave it like that so I'm waiting to get an appointment at an advice center for victims of violence to maybe start the whole process of going to court for what I witnessed (or find a different way to live with the Thing).
On the other hand I doubt my "memories". I got told my doubt is more like denial. A mechanism to protect myself. But who knows. So maybe no court after all. But. I need. To do. Something. Because if I can trust my memories, I have to shine some light on what happened. Couple of days ago I realized that I've been obsessed with this "memory" since 2019.
But speaking about what I saw and experienced could end in me losing my entire family (at least that's what I think, fear). Dramatic. Pretty sure they would doubt me too. And maybe rightfully so, who knows.
But anyway. That's where I'm at atm. Not knowing whether to go left or right. What to believe and not to believe. If I can trust myself. Oh wow, more drama, Mika. There's more tension in me than I can cope with in a healthy way. Strength training works. Other than that I manage by getting drunk in the evenings to fall asleep and getting drunk during the day to avoid my thoughts and get shit done. But I haven't been doing this for long. (It always comes and goes in phases.)
I know I'll find a way, though. I always do. And although all of this sounds difficult to me, I'm still fine somehow. I'm chilling. But maybe I'm just numb.
hi, do you think that radio hosts and articles suddenly mentioning how good friends h&l are means anything? it's been happening a lot lately but i don't want to get my hopes up
Hi dear,
No it means nothing.
They did this in 2020 during that promo cycle, and every promo cycle before it. All these articles are in irrelevant and tiny internet gossip sites, not mainstream media. And radio stations *always* rile up fans bc it boosts their engagement and listening audience. It means nothing.
I think it doesn't suit every ship. Or, rather, I think it fits some ships REALLY REALLY WELL and others not at all, so I'd read it for some specific ships rather than others!
Friends with Benefits : A
For the sole reason that the potential for mutual pining is ASTRONOMICAL and the whole fic HAS smut but doesn't revolve around the "they're going to fuck" point because they already are! It's about the "Oh he remembered some very specific thing about me" or "what did they mean by that compliment" and that's!!!!!! That's really really good.
Reader insert : B
Ok. Ok sit down. I have a TED talk about this.
I think reader insert gets a LOT of shit for no reason. And I don't know how to explain this but I think it stems a lot from a "point fingers at cringy things so you are accepted by the community" "I'm not like other [insert demographic here]" mentality????
Like... I know it's not for everybody but ultimately it isn't harming anyone. It's fantasy. It's wish fulfillment. We all need to be honest here and come to terms with the fact that we ALL wished to be part of our favourite piece of media at some point.
I also have a whole other theory that reader insert is actually a way to hide beloved OCs because reader insert is more accepted overall than OCs, and honestly, that's ALSO dumb, OCs can be GREAT
I won't read reader insert because it IS reader insert but if the plot sounds good??? Why not! Not a big big fan of the second person narration though. Not a big fan of Y/N either. I'd much rather read a fic that celebrates its OCs rather than reader inserts who don't commit because at the end of the day, I never project myself on the reader. Y/N is ALREADY an OC to me
