Fincayra

Stuff is supposed to be here, I guess?

[deadsprout]

i dont want to be in a fandom that critisizes the choices of fictional characters like they are human beings. i want to see THEORY and ANALYSIS and STORY STRUCTURE and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT!! I WANT PARALLELS AND MOTIFS AND VISUAL CUES!!! They're not REAL they are TOOLS so stop acting like they are people who made bad choices and should be punished. of course they made bad choices!!! that shit is funny and cool to watch!!

[rubyleaf]

You know, when I see fictional characters who repress all their emotions, they're usually aloof and very blunt about keeping people at a distance, sometimes to an edgy degree—but what I don't see nearly enough are the emotionally repressed characters who are just…mellow.

Think about it. In real life, the person that's bottling up all their emotions is not the one that's brooding in the corner and snaps at you for trying to befriend them. More often than not, it's that friendly person in your circle who makes easy conversation with you, laughs with you, and listens and gives advice whenever you're upset. But you never see them upset, in fact they seem to have endless patience for you and everything around them—and so you call them their friend, you trust them. And only after months of telling them all your secrets do you realize…

…they've never actually told you anything about themselves.

[rubyleaf]

Adding onto this: characters who are so deeply repressed that they don't even realize they're not fine, or at the very least not supposed to be fine. Characters who do tell you about a situation they're in that should be bad, but instantly laugh it off saying they can handle it (spoiler: they can, in fact, not handle it). Characters who laugh with you and listen to all your woes and much later you learn that they were actually going through something at least equally bad at the time, but they wave it off and don't want to speak of it. Characters whose main coping mechanism seems to be "don't think about it" on endless loop.

Basically, the fictional embodiment of the "this is fine" dog.

[xxfincayraxx]

Could you imagine how horrifying it would be to be a physicist in the Marvel/DC universe? Absolute madness—forget about the laws of nature, forget maths, forget logic; here we follow the laws of whimsy.

[poppedbubblgum]

Necromancer au pt.3, pt.1 pt.2

Heart pirate time! A few details I didn’t draw/ write above under the cut:

Doffy is still trying to hunt down Law after his escape, meanwhile Law is trying to find a way to bring Corazon back, which ends up being a lot more complicated than he expected. They’re not necessarily pirates in this au but I couldn’t take away The Polar Tang, I love her too much. Law actually commissioned her while in a shipbuilding town in exchange for his medical services.

Since I don’t think I’ll get around to drawing this, Bepo was originally wandering the north in search of his brother like in canon, but was ostracized for his appearance as a mink. Law came across him in the snow just as he was about to die, and offered to revive him.

Law can only revive someone soon after death, when their soul still lingers. He has about an hour after death to do it.

Since the soul is not a part of the body when they’re undead, their senses are greatly affected. Their eyesight and hearing remains the same, but they can hardly taste, smell or sense touch. Almost like they’re feeling something through a veil, if that makes sense. They still make physical contact a lot however, as a little helps more than nothing, and bringing their souls close together helps too. Law is the only source of warmth they can feel, since he’s their source of magic.

Most crewmembers joined the group by sheer coincidence, as in Law just happened to be there when they died. Their newest member, Jean Bart, was a former slave left for dead after a beating.

Every crew member is given the ability to talk to Cora, and are made aware of their goal to free him. They all know this isn’t a permanent arrangement, but want to stick with Law to experience more of life.

[lu-t-ik]

Ulquiorra with tattoos is what I really needed

[angkis]

[sacred-portal]

[kkobweek]

Uchiha Obito Art Refs (Anime & Manga)

Feel free to use these as refs and for inspiration & we can't wait to see your works on @kkobweek when the event starts!

Uchiha Obito anime episodes: 32, 99, 104, 105, 106, 112, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 134, 139, 140, 141, 142, 176, 197, 198, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 208, 210, 211, 212, 216, 221, 228, 248, 249, 252, 253, 254, 255, 256, 261, 263, 264, 276, 311, 324, 325, 326, 328, 329, 330, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 350, 359, 362, 363, 364, 365, 371, 372, 375, 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 385, 386, 387, 391, 392, 414, 415, 416, 417, 424, 425, 458, 459, 463, 470, 471, 472, 473, 474

Kakashi refs coming soon!~

[ohnoitstbskyen]

What’s the difference between Ascended, Aspects, Freljordian demigods, Aurelian Sol, and whatever Soraka’s got going on? Are they all just different varieties of League gods?

Hoo boy, okay, so. First of all, Riot have been pretty adamant that there are no gods in Runeterra, every god-like being that exists in that universe is actually a spirit or just a very powerful being of some kind, but definitely no real gods, no matter how much it seems like they are definitely writing these characters to be actual literal gods.

I don't 100% know why they are so insistent on this, but I imagine it has something to do with censorship and ratings agencies, or maybe they just don't want to have to establish any actual theology on Runeterra. Volibear isn't the god of storms for real, he's just a super powerful spirit that can create storms in the Freljord, but not all of them, so please don't ask us whether every single thunderstorm in the Freljord was something he did deliberately. That sort of vibe.

To go through them point by point:

Celestials & Aspects

The Celestials are beings like Aurelion Sol and Bard, which exist as cosmic entities operating on levels of power and motivation beyond human understanding. They came into existence with the universe itself, and tend to busy themselves governing various parts of its operation. They are, again not gods (Riot is very insistent on this), but Aurelion Sol literally made every star in the galaxy, he's functionally the progenitor god of Creation.

Some of them, though, like to interfere in the mortal world of Runetera in various ways, and they tend to use mortal vessels to do it. That's where we get Aspects: Aspects are mortals who are chosen by the Celestials that live on Mount Targon to contain their power and be their avatars in the mortal world.

Leona is the Aspect of a Sun celestial, Diana of the Moon celestial, Pantheon is the Aspect of War (or he was, until Aatrox killed it, but he retains access to many of its powers), and Zoe is the Aspect of Twilight, and so on.

Soraka is another Celestial in mortal form, but she is NOT an Ascended. Rather than possess a mortal, she created a mortal body for herself and poured the whole of her being into it, which is causing her body to permanently burn up from the inside while she regenerates it with her magic. She lives on Runeterra and acts as a mysterious mystical wise guide and mentor to mortals who need it.

Ascended & Darkin

Ascended are somewhat similar in kind to the Aspects, but usually lesser in power. The Ascended are also human beings infused with Celestial magic and power, specifically with the power of the Sun, although as far as I know, that power is drawn not from the Celestial of the Sun who empowers Leona, but directly from the physical Sun itself. This means the Ascended aren't possessed by Celestials and retain full free will, at the cost (or let's be real: benefit) of being transformed into furries, which extremely coincidentally just so happen to closely resemble the gods of the Egyptian pantheon. but again, they are definitely not gods, please don't put it in the newspaper that they are gods.

I don't know exactly how canon Riot considers this anymore, but the lore was that the Aspects of Mount Targon gifted the power of Ascension to Shurima in order to produce Ascended that could serve as shock-troops in the war against the Void, which is a swarm of extradimensional horrors that are constantly trying to eat the world. Whatever the case, the Ascended DID fight the Void, and it traumatized and corrupted them so badly that they degenerated into body-horror blood monsters called the Darkin.

The Darkin fell into civil war and it got so bad that The Aspect of Twilight (not Zoe but her predecessor in the role) decided to use some magical trickery to imprison them all in their weapons, which is where they've stayed for a few thousand years, getting even more traumatized and mentally destabilized by the total sensory deprivation and solitary confinement. If any mortal touches a Darkin weapon, it immediately assimilates them and uses their flesh as a new host, and then goes on a killing rampage about it. That's where you get your Aatrox, your Varus and (eventually, once he devours Kayn) your Rhaast.

Gods, Spirits & Demons

This is the category for Ornn, Anivia, Volibear, The Seal Sister and so on. The Freljordian people worship them as gods, but they are, technically, only extremely powerful nature spirits, manifestations of the nature of the Freljord itself, which draw power from the land and to a lesser extent from their worshipers. There are many, many lesser nature spirits, which might be worshiped as gods by particular tribes or hold power over particular areas, but Ornn, Anivia, Volibear, The Seal Sister and the Iron Boar are the most powerful and most widely revered.

On a similar note, Ionia is absolutely choked to the gills with spirits, because those lands are soaked in magic. They are usually not worshiped as gods specifically, but take the shape of everything from dragons to living trees to sprites and will-o-wisps and which roam fairly freely in Ionia. This includes characters like Lillia, who is the daughter of a magical tree of dreams on whose branches the dreams of mortals grow and mature, and it includes Ivern, who is an extremely powerful and ancient nature spirit formed from the soul of a magical tree.

Demons are distinct from spirits, in that rather than drawing on the power of the land or fountains of magic, they draw on the emotions of living things for their powers. The most powerful demons are known as The Ten, who get their power from the most primal emotions that living things feel. Fiddlesticks is the demon of Fear, and Nilah somehow draws her strength from Ashlesh, the Demon of Joy, whom her order has imprisoned. We don't know who the rest of the Ten are yet, but Riot seems to have that worked out somewhere in their internal deep lore.

Swain has a lesser (but still powerful) demon of secrets called Raum bound in his arm through some sort of deal, Evelynn is a demon of anguish and pain, Tahm Kench is a demon of addiction, and Nocturne is a demon of nightmares.

Besides those, there are an untold number of lesser demons, who feed on more and more specific feelings, and thus are less and less powerful because there's simply less of that stuff around to feed on. They are often called Azakana, and may be demons that feed on feelings as niche as, like, noblemen's fear of their extramarital affairs with handsome commoners being discovered. Yone hunts the Azakana and collects their mask, although even he doesn't know quite what for.

Death

This is where we place the Kindred. Technically they are merely Spirits of Death, but more than perhaps any other category of creature, Riot keeps writing them as Literal Gods of death and I don't think it makes sense to think of them any other way.

The Kindred take on many different shapes all across Runeterra, seemingly influenced in large part by the expectations of the people or creatures who are dying, but their most popular visage is that of a Lamb and a Wolf, hunting together. Lamb's merciful arrow ends your life if you accept that your time is up and go gently into that good night, but Wolf hunts you down and rips you to shreds if you resist and fight to your last breath, destiny be damned.

The Kindred are there for every death on Runeterra, they are the mediators (as far as we know) of all forms of death everywhere, and by far the most classically "anthropomorphic embodiment of universal existence" style god in the lore that we know of. Where a god like Anivia only really has power in the Freljord, the Kindred have power everywhere there is life. Only the undead escape them, and even then, only temporarily.

In Conclusion

YES Runeterra has tons of gods, it obviously has gods, you can't walk five feet in that universe without tripping on a god, but they tend to be gods with hard limitations on their power and influence, and rarely have powers on the level of bending reality itself.

Even Aurelion Sol, who literally makes stars, can't snap his fingers and undo causality, for example, or suspend the laws of physics wholesale.

Riot's weird insistence on "no gods in Runeterra" is more of an affectation, a bit of a put-on, than an actual narrative principle, and most of the gods of Runeterra can be understood very comfortably through the lens of various non-Christian religions like Norse or Greek mythology, or the hero/god characters of something like Polynesian myth.

[tikkety-tok]

such rage in such a little body

[dorbu]

[casmick-consequences]

i think he needs to ca

he needs to calm his ti

calm his t

[kratt09]

people who don't wear glasses are so weird like you just wake up and your eyes are pussy fresh??

[kratt09]

thats not the word I meant to use

[coldspicyy]

None of these words are in the bible.

[godmodebeginswithlesbians]

au contraire, mon ami

[transarsonist]

dont weird pussy, that's woke stale. penis absolute.

[saintjosie]

i’m sorry cock is in the bible?

[freeformtarsier]

Matthew 26:34 KJV

Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, That this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice.

[saintjosie]

huh i didn’t know edging was in the bible either

[virtualgirladvance]

Of course it is, they've been waiting over two thousand years for the second coming

[synder-sync]

[provecfy]

I think instead of lame excuses like "Cass is away in Honk Kong" or "[x bat] is doing stuff from his team of heroes" or just ignoring Steph's existance altogether, it would be funny if fanfics took members of the Batfam out of comission by having them have their own fanfic-related cliché adventure

Like, a Jason-centered fic where he asks Alfred where is the replacement and Alfred just goes "oh, Master Timothy has just been possesed by himself from thee-years into the future and is away trying to prevent our horrible deaths" and that's it, Tim is having his own time-travelling fix-it fic in the background which is why he's not mentioned

Babs on a Babs-centric fic where she could really use some advice asking Bruce on comms where her Batgirls are and Bruce non-chalantly answers "Steph has been hit by a love potion and Cass has offered to help her to her apartment", Babs waits a moment and comments "oh... do we get the 'congrats on kissing' banner ready for tomorrow?", "no, I think it's a slow burn, give them a week" and the rest of the fic happens without them

Dick, entering a room and finding Duke "hey, is Damian acting weird this morning or what?" "I think he said something about being stuck on a time-loop until he learns the true meaning of christmas" "aren't we on july?" "Yeah I thought so too but when I asked he mentioned he had already gotten my help on two loops so I just left him be" "well I needed help with a case, you in?" and the rest of the fic is a Dick and Duke team-up

[tenderwatches]

sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four

[ofoceansandtombsanew]

Real Talk: Ace Didn't Need to Ask For Help, It's On Garp

i always hate when i see comments about how ace was an idiot or ace should have just asked garp for help because, no? like dawg wtf do you mean?

the one thing we have been told repeatedly across the manga and anime is that ace could have lived his entire life being perfect and he still would have ended up on that podium

he could have become a marine, a police officer, a teacher, a chef and all of that would have been reduced to nothing the moment his parentage was discovered

yes, ace became a pirate of his own volition, but sengoku never mentioned his piracy

he never mentioned all the criminal activity ace did as the captain of the spade pirates or even later as the second division leader of the whitebeard pirates

you know what sengoku did bring up though the moment he got on that damn podium? ace's parentage

he mentions nothing that gained ace his bounty to begin with when he gets that den den mushi in his hand. why?

because it doesn't matter that ace is a pirate. what matters is that they are eradicating the last gol d roger's bloodline

bear in mind that they were killing pregnant women and young children who could have even had the slightest possibility of being roger's lover or kin

akainu deadass says that he doesn't care if every other pirate at marineford escapes as long as ace and luffy died and he would ensure their deaths personally. and for what? not their piracy. none of their crimes. not even for ensuring that the truth that certain countries and lands that were actually saved by pirates instead of the marines never got out

but because their fathers were gol d roger and monkey d dragon respectively

solely because of that, he deemed neither of them deserved to live

and as far as garp goes - i love garp as much as the next person but garp has never done anything for ace to trust him enough to ask for help even if he felt he deserved to ask

garp's negligent parenting coupled with the abusive words ace grew up hearing led ace to believe he didn't even deserve to be born. when he even asks garp if his being born was a good thing, garp can't even tell him 'yes'. he just says 'time will tell'. my brother in the blue seas, that is an elementary schooler questioning his right to exist

ace is defeated by blackbeard in episode 325 (chapters 434-441), luffy hears about his execution being set in episode 416 (chapter 522) and then finally ace is killed in episode 483 (chapter 574). that is 158 episodes and 140 chapters total and in that time what ace receives from garp are conversations that boil down to

"you did this to yourself"

"i just wanted you to become a fine marine"

"i don't have sympathy for criminals but i do have sympathy for family"

and garp actively preventing those who wish to save ace from reaching him. yes after akainu strikes ace, garp does react viscerally with instinct to protect his grandson, but that's too little too damn late at that point

garp having his moral dilemmas mean nothing when, however long ace spent in impel down, he isn't trying to help him

garp having his 'wishing things had been different' thoughts mean nothing when garp is preventing people from saving his grandson

there's a reason garp lets dadan beat and berate him when they reunite in windmill village and it's because he knows she's right

over the course of 20 years, garp has consistently chosen work over ace and luffy. as much as i love dadan and co, bandits are not a good choice to have raise your grandkids and then be the surprised pikachu meme when neither of them wish to become marines

garp's inability to see past the system he disdains yet clings onto actively shoots him in the foot

prevents him from seeing that ace is right when he says he never could have become a marine

luffy could have never become a marine. i do hear arguments saying that luffy might have had a fair chance considering garp is biologically his grandfather but i say that's truly up in the air considering how, even with that knowledge, akainu still wants to put luffy on a poster

but that's all to say, asking why ace never asked garp for help is ridiculous

the fuck would ace look like asking the man who has done nothing but

unintentionally fostered ace's resentment towards luffy in their early childhood

told ace it was his own fault he landed where he did

falcon punched marco halfway across marineford

for help?

and that's not even mentioning the fact that up until that point, ace didn't believe he deserved to live. he didn't think he had the right to exist. the only thing that kept him going up until that point was hoping he'd find an answer that justified his being born and his love for luffy and sabo. ace tells luffy in his dying breaths if it weren't for the two of them, he would have gave up on living a long time ago

yes, garp loves ace and luffy

he loves them both dearly but he is also incapable of putting them before work, before his ideals of justice. these two truths can coexist at the same time. garp's stubborn to a fault and his moral dilemma resulted in both inaction and the prevention of ace's escape

so to say that marineford would have gone differently if ace had asked is seriously undermining the character work. because in reality, it's up in the air on whether or not that would have done anything. ace asking garp for help could have gone either way and that's the beauty of the gray area regarding garp's actions during the summit war

and yes, i can get why it's frustrating that ace turned around to fight akainu when he could have just left and got it back in a blood a different time

but aside from ace having a temper about specific topics, we do get an answer as to why he couldn't bring himself to runaway when we finally are able to dive into his past with luffy and sabo:

he doesn't want to run away from any situation because ace is deathly afraid of losing something if running away ends up being the bad call

and in that moment, luffy was behind him

even if akainu hadn't talked down whitebeard, ace would have inevitably turned back around because he wouldn't have been able to shake his fear of losing something or someone he cared about

as long as there is something precious for him to potentially lose, ace will never run

he was doomed from the start

his being the son of gol d roger doomed him from the start

and that's what makes ace so tragic

[eriochromatic]

Cross Guild for Halloween!!!

I reread witch hat atelier a couple days ago so I wanted to do an AU,,,

[xxfincayraxx]

One thing about the Naruto ending that bothers me, I guess, is that it entirely breaks out of the established tone.

I adore the first half of Naruto. Kishimoto tells us early on—and with a show of gory violence—that the Shinobi world is utter shit. It sucks to be a child soldier, and there is nothing you can do about it. No wishful thinking will change anything. Love is not a band-aid you can slap on any wound. Love did not save Zabuza and Haku. It did not save the children in the Chūnin Exams. It did not save Kakashi, Obito, Kushina, or Minato. Love is not enough; the world is cruel. Kishimoto tells us that repeatedly.

There are no good guys, no clear black and white; every Shinobi is caught up in the violence. So the question is: How will Naruto make it better? How will our hero rise, and what will he do differently than those before him? It’s an exciting journey to watch.

But the further we go along in Shippuden, the more this status quo Kishimoto established begins to crumble. Suddenly, love and friendship are enough—not because something has changed or is different, but because Naruto, as a protagonist, wills it to be so.

Suddenly, the uncertain promise of a better future for the Rain Village is enough to "save" Nagato and Konan. Suddenly, the promise of friendship is enough to bring Sasuke back to the village—not because anything changed about Konoha, but because Naruto wills it so. Suddenly, Itachi’s love is enough to redeem him and turn him into a hero in the eyes of the narrative. Suddenly, all five Shinobi nations become best buddies because, this time, Naruto is there.

And I wouldn’t have a problem with this if it were earned success. But in my humble opinion, it wasn’t. Naruto changed nothing to earn this peace. He fought his opponents and won, but how many Shinobi did that before him? Why didn’t they succeed to change the world? Why were their dreams doomed to fail, but not Naruto's? Is it because Naruto made lofty promises about peace? Because he shouted them into the faces of his enemies? Why did anyone put their trust into this kid when he had nothing concrete to show for it? Naruto is strong, yes, but what did he do besides fighting and winning? He is just one of thousands of Shinobi with dreams and hopes. He is not special. Strength alone should not be enough to gain someone’s trust—especially someone like Nagato or Obito. Yes, even for the protagonist. And no, the “Talk no Jutsu” doesn’t make him special; other characters also have empathy.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I love Naruto as a character. But I think his lack of meaningful character development in the last stretch of the show really hurt its narrative. He had a really good arc before the time skip: a child slowly growing up and realizing the horrors of the world. He starts as a brat and steadily grows more mature as he learns about the world.

And there would have been a perfect opportunity to push Naruto’s development even further: his talk with Nagato. That could have been the moment where he truly questioned his dream for the first time. Why does he really want to become Hokage? And what kind of Hokage does he want to be? Evidently, all the previous ones contributed to senseless war and death.

This could have been the moment where Naruto, for the first time, truly and completely lost a battle of ideals. It could have pushed Naruto a step further, leading him to ask deeper questions about the Shinobi system and seriously think about change—about concrete things he wants to change. But alas, he doesn’t (or at least nothing comes out of it). And in the end, it’s not systematic changes or reformations that save the world; it’s the power of friendship that brings peace, simply because it’s Naruto’s friendship. And isn’t that a slap in the face to the tone and themes of the first few Naruto arcs?

It really begs the question: Why was Naruto’s love enough, but no one else’s was? Why was their love not enough?

[cognitiveleague]

Something I really enjoy about the Dressrosa arc is the narrative comparison and contrast presented between Law and Doflamingo.

Oda, especially post-timeskip, devotes a lot of storytelling to looking closely at protagonists and villains alike, asking the audience to join him in exploring questions of “what made them like this?” and “does it matter what drove them, at the end of the day?”

And Dressrosa is one of the places where those questions hit the hardest for me, because one after the other, he shows us two children — both having experienced a fall from (different degrees of) privilege and into incredibly traumatic situations at a young age, both victimized for things they had no means of controlling as children. Law and Doflamingo are both shown as being radicalized by that trauma and loss of control, rejecting the gentler values their parents tried to instill in them because they reached a point of not being able to see a point in compassion, or hope for any justice but revenge.

In the present, Doflamingo hasn’t really known for a very long time who Law truly is, but in a sense, he wasn’t wrong when he saw himself in the way a younger Law reacted to the loss of his former life by wanting to lash out at the world. In that moment, there was something in Law that DID reflect his own wounded inner child’s rage, and in a strange way, he clung to the connection he felt with that worst possible version of Law long after Law had discarded it and moved on.

The question implied there is “what made them different in the end? What redeemed Law, and what (if anything) pushed Doflamingo past the point of redemption?”

While the second question (as is often the case) is up to a lot of interpretation, the answer (as with Big Mom in the following arc) seems to me to lean toward “while his choices were his own and he ultimately has responsibility for them, it’s also true that when he was young and vulnerable and poised to go down a path of destruction for himself and everyone around him, the adults in his life used his brokenness to their own selfish advantage, encouraging him along that path instead of teaching him better; whether or not it absolves him of ANYTHING at this point (and it certainly doesn’t absolve him of EVERYTHING), there is a tragedy in the fact that we will never see who he might have been if he wasn’t encouraged and enabled to embrace his worst impulses.”

That tragedy is a core part of Corazón’s story — Corazón’s big brother who never grew past fear and rage and clinging to the selfish comfort of the memory of how easy their past life of privilege had been, who thought he loved him on some level, and who on another level probably knew he never developed the capacity to truly love anyone but himself. I think it’s probably why Corazón didn’t pull the trigger fast enough, when it came down to it — even after seeing what a monster his brother had become, even after dedicating his whole adult life to stopping him from hurting even more people, part of him still remembered the wounded, frightened child in his big brother, and the times he’d tried in his selfish way to protect him. Something in him still had sympathy for that child, and wanted, if not to believe, then at least to hope (even against all evidence) that enough of him was still in there that HE wouldn’t pull the trigger without hesitation, either.

We know how that story ended. It was far too late for his kindness to save Doffy by then, if it had ever been possible — there might have been something left in him that could feel something akin to regret over killing Corazón after the fact, or at least greedily resent the loss of him, but if there was, it wasn’t able to stop him.

But in the end, Corazón’s kindness — his compassion, his determination to believe that even a deeply wounded, deeply flawed world was worth placing his hope in and fighting for, his unrelenting love — was worth it, because it saved Law. It was enough to save the bitter, broken child Doffy saw so much of himself in.

Corazón took Law away from the adults who would have enabled him the way Doffy was enabled at his age, and put in the hard work of showing him, day after day, that while his pain was worth acknowledging and sympathizing with, he was worth more than just revenge — he was worth love, and healing, and the fight for a world better than the one that had hurt him so badly. He taught him not a naïve hope like the one the adults in Flevance had tried to give him, but a stubborn, bitter hope, one that laughed and spat a bloody declaration of victory right in the face of the enemy even when their backs were to the wall, hope with its teeth bared in defiance of a world that Law already knew to be unjust and pitiless.

That is what made Law’s story end differently than Doflamingo’s, and how we ended up with the version of Law that we and the Strawhats get to know - a man determined to trudge on, in spite of his own pain and disillusionment, as the bearer of lights that would otherwise be lost, those left in his hands by people he saw (still sees) as having been kinder, gentler, more deserving than he was of survival. A man who covered his body with reminders of the love that dragged him kicking and screaming into the light when he’d given his own heart up for lost, who named his crew in honor of that love, who devoted the rest of his life to making sure that love and that sacrifice mattered. A man all too familiar with his own worst impulses, who struggles to see or to trust in his own kindness, but who has chosen to be a defender like Corazón was to him, to be a healer like his birth parents were to those around them, to be not a tyrant like his former mentor, but a leader who loves and respects the people who follow him, and who is genuinely cared for by them in return.

And, despite his own misgivings, despite not being someone who reads to strangers as warm or caring, he is kind. He has chosen, through the love that was shown to him, to be a genuinely good man — faithful and just to his friends and allies and those he’s seen wronged in front of him, unwilling to demand sacrifices of others that he wouldn’t give of himself, determined to fight back against the ugliness and apathy and cruelty of the world, to wrest every bit of hard-fought justice he can from life not only for himself, but for others who have been crushed down by life.

It’s thematically fitting that he specializes in surgery, even completely aside from how suited his power is for it. As a character, his narrative is fundamentally about having chosen to become someone who can offer the world a surgeon’s sort of kindness —not warmth or softness, usually, but the mercy of a sharp, careful blade, a steady hand, and a clear understanding that sometimes, you have to roll up your sleeves and do the ugly, messy work of cutting away what’s too damaged to save before the healing can begin.