Q: Whom among the cast residing in the World of the Living have a license?
Kubo: Besides Chad, most of them do. When heading to the hotel and match venues, Chad usually takes the train.
It such a classic Chad move, that despite being world champion boxer he chose to ride a train instead of drive a car because he can reduce pollution and save money from gas price.
Tall giant, but still humble and down to earth, never forgetting his root.
i answered an ask on here ages ago that asked for advice on how not to feel discouraged when your fic doesn't receive a lot of kudos. i couldn't find the link to the ask, but at the time, i remember talking about how relative numbers are in fandom (i.e, the number of kudos really depends on how big your fandom is, how popular your ship is, what tropes you write etc). and that these numbers are really not personal or even reliably indicative. i did also say something that bears repeating here, which is that a lot of fics i love have an insanely low kudos count, and that some of the best works are the ones that cast a net to a very specific group of people.
anyway- i've been reflecting a lot on my writing lately, and anon, if you're still out there and wondering, maybe this will help -
i've been posting fanfic since i was fifteen (been writing it a bit longer than that), and the first fandom i ever posted for was the batman fandom, predictably, the batfam fandom, because it was huge at the time and had all the tropes that pulled young people in. characters to get excited about! a plethora of interpersonal relationships to explore! every fanfic i wrote began receiving hundreds of kudos overnight, not because they were great - frankly, they were awful. they had terrible grammar, zero formatting, plot holes, all the makings of a story written by someone really young with zero idea of how the world works. i wrote about feelings. about family. about relationships where nothing goes wrong and everything is fine and fluffy all the time. where conflict was extremely contrived - and easily resolved. i wouldn't touch an idea if it had a sad ending, and i wouldn't dare write something if it was a controversial topic in the fandom. the comments i got then were probably from young people like me, who hadn't read a lot of stories and hence thought mine were amazing. and i'm not being derisive to my younger self here. i love that she actually made the leap and began a hobby that the me of today enjoys so deeply and dearly. but the me of back then was not nearly this well-read or experienced and it showed.
there are a lot of people like me, young people, who started out like this and actually built huge platforms off of their popularity. you see a lot of harry-styles-fanfic-turned-movies or twilight-fanfic-turned-movies today, mainly because of this popularity. young people like reading stories by other young people because they don't have a measure yet of how anything works, so they are far more forgiving of continuity errors and suspend their disbelief more easily - if they have any at all. and casting the widest possible net will always bring in the most people because your fear of being disliked in your fandom keeps you from alienating other fans. from writing things that will alienate other fans.
i started writing batman fanfic on a whim again late last year, and i don't receive nearly as many kudos as i used to on my older account. a part of me did wonder - have i actually gotten worse? do i write badly now? which surprised me because i know how to keep my tenses straight now. i'm better at punctuation (even though i still throw semi-colons and em dashes around at random). i write things that i like reading back. i write sentences that i like. if i had to pick between the fics of then and the fics of now as a true representative of my writing style, i would pick the fics of now.
that's when i realized that the only difference between those fics and these ones is that i'm more sure of myself now. i know what i like, even if it's not popular, even if most people in the fandom don't like it or agree with it or are even interested in it. i'm not afraid of writing what i want. i like what i write now so much, that even if it only got one kudos, i'd still be very happy because i was content even before i hit 'post.' maybe all the lovely comments i got back then helped build my confidence to get here. maybe that appreciation was what a young writer needed to keep going at this hobby that's actually quite difficult, can't be monetized, and can't even be discussed in detail when you're with polite company. maybe those comments were what fueled me, back when the writing alone wasn't enough. but i'm so incredibly happy with what i write these days that i wouldn't trade it for any amount of kudos in the world. finding my voice, finding what i like to write about, finding iterations of a character that appeal to #ME has been so fun that i actually don't mind my audience growing smaller. the comments i do get these days feel 10x more immense to me, because i know these are people who fuck with an extremely specific vision and not the popular fanon one. i've been writing more than ever lately (and hopefully i haven't jinxed that by saying it), and it's been so satisfying to me to read my own words back. if you're still here, anon, all i can hope for is that you find something you believe in so much, you'd take the "risk" of posting it - even if you know it'll draw smaller numbers. lately, the first commenter on any of my fics has been reaching an elevated status in my mind because that's the person who didn't wait for anyone else to decide if it was good, they just went ahead and decided it for themselves. so, if you've got a first commenter out there, i also hope you'll take an extra moment to appreciate them :) happy writing!
I made chad in my tomodachi life game, And he's got a crush on Linda Belcher from Bob's Burgers. Thought you should know... luv ur Orihime analysis btw 🩵
oh my god. i was thinking about how orihime's shun shun rikka can only heal what it can see, and how this plays with ulquiorra, whose entire shtick was his trust in the visible world. and there's immediately this palpable tension because orihime trusts in the heart, while ulquiorra's predominant imagery is the eye. and how, despite the limitation of her powers in this regard, orihime is able to imagine a reality that doesn't match her present. she imagines realities where her friends win and her heart wins, even when the odds are stacked against her favor. and in the tower, she momentarily loses faith because ichigo dies and she tells herself she'd been delusional for this trust. but in the end, ichigo does come back in part due to her cries (+ whatever else shit he's got going on. chemically). the narrative rewards her and her heart over ulquiorra and his eye. essentially, the story is built in such a way that, with orihime's limitations, with her powers being what they are, she should align ideologically with ulquiorra. but the tension of her character is the tipping scales between her ability to "reject" reality and her ability to accept it. and whether she knew she was doing it or not (obviously she was having a breakdown then), she did actually reject reality by calling out to ichigo's heart in a moment of desperation. both ulquiorra (due to his beliefs) and orihime (due to her powers) have to constantly contend with imagination vs reality. but orihime wins because she dares to dream. she knows the world is shit but she dreams that a better one is possible and that's why she stretches out that hand to ulquiorra. it's not enough to see reality, you have to shape it into something better!!!!
[source to the klub outside answer about orihime's ability + the uncanny similarity to ulquiorra in the wording.]
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