I’ve been seeing this trend in modern takes of the Odyssey that want to focus on Penelope where they have it as her not really knowing her husband. Like, they have Penelope and Odysseus getting married and him having to go off to Troy after only, like, a year in or something. I love the idea of focusing on Penelope but I hate this particular take. In some tellings, Odysseus and Penelope were married for 8 years before he left and Homer made a point of describing them as being like-minded. I’ve always thought Penelope was supposed to really understand her husband and his mind because she works the same way. I just would like there to be some basis for the reunion we get between them in the original poem, that’s not a couple who doesn’t know each other.
Why is Hashirama portrayed as such a bad brother in fanfic so often? Or Butsuma being monstrously abusive? Or the Senju clan hating Tobirama because of his looks? I get wanting to garner sympathy for the character but I personally hate the idea of Tobirama having a family that can’t stand him.
Give me long suffering Senju who have long since grown used to weird explosions and odd looking experiments. Give me sappy, overprotective Hashirama who loves to spoil his only remaining baby brother. Give me a Tobirama who is loved and supported by his family and clan.
So Zuko spent almost three years looking for any trace of the Avatar before Aang came out of the ice. What if, alongside investigating the air temples for information about airbenders, he also tracked down spirit tales. The Avatar is the bridge between the spirit world and the human one, it would make sense that Zuko would consider any spiritual activity to be possibly Avatar related. I think a fun story would be about the misadventures Zuko and his crew get up to tangling with whatever spirits they end up coming across and having to deal with in their search.
This could either be a funny slice of life type story or a more serious one. One of the Avatar’s main duties is dealing with problems between spirits and humans, with him gone there’s probably been all sorts of things going wrong on that front. An interesting idea could be Zuko being forced to handle some of these problems just because he stuck his nose in it and realizing just how important the Avatar really is to the world. I’ve always though the Avatar isn’t nearly as important to human politics as they are to human-spirit relations. That could be a cool AU, with Zuko wanting to make sure Aang does his duties like he’s supposed to.
I don’t know, this is kind of just a stream of thoughts, but I think fics exploring the spirits of the ATLA world are really interesting and I love stories with Zuko’s crew, so combining the two would be awesome.
So the thing about the BatCat wedding, of which there were so many mistakes but in this particular case my problem is with the wedding party, look, I love Alfred and his relationship with Bruce, but he would not be the best man, he would be his father and whatever role in the wedding that that that would have held. Bruce’s best man would also not have been Dick or any of the other Robins because they are his sons and that is a different relationship.
Bruce’s best man should be Clark with Diana as his second groomsmen, that’s just how it needs to be.
I like Spuffy as a couple, I intensely dislike Bangel, but I really like Angel as a character. Angel might actually be my favorite character, I just can’t stand him with Buffy, I think they bring out the worst in each other. My problem, why do so many Spuffy stories have to come with Angel bashing? They give plenty of evidence for why they don’t work together that doesn’t take from either character. Why do they have to turn Angel into this huge bully? Why can’t they just have Angel naturally mature away from Buffy? I get he had a lot of problematic behavior around her when he was with her, treating her like one of his former victims minus the killing at the end, but he hadn’t been around humans in decades, he didn’t know how to act around them. Angel’s show is all about him learning to be human, really, Buffy showed him that he could be redeemed, that’s why he’s so attached, but they don’t work. Also, what’s with everyone saying he lost his soul because he had took Buddy’s virginity? It was about her acceptance of him, he felt absolved by her so he could feel truly happy for a brief moment. After Angelus returned, Angel realized he could never be absolved by someone else, he just has to be better on his own and help people. I’m just frustrated by people feeling the need to detract from Angel as a character in order to boost Spuffy, Spuffy doesn’t need it, Spike and Buffy work as a couple on their own because they’re compatible people.
A lot of modern takes seem to like making Agamemnon an all out bad guy, and I’m not saying he’s secretly a sweetheart or anything g or even that he didn’t deserve to die, but I am of the opinion that he’s more complicated that just being an arrogant douche. For one thing, I wholeheartedly believe that he loved his daughter. The sacrifice of Iphigenia acting as his punishment would not make sense if he didn’t love her. It was beyond cruel that he chose to kill her and I defiantly think Clytemnestra was justified in killing him (not for some of the other thing she did, but definetly for that specific act), but however pathetic and insufficient it turned out to be, he did love her.
It’s really frustrating that AO3 conflates Past relationship tags with the overall relationship tag. If I’m trying to find fics about a specific ship, I don’t want to have to deal with stories that are actually about a different relationship and the one I want is already broken up. I wish there was a feature for just ships that are past or temporary. It’s really annoying when people tag a ship that they plan to break up or are actively writing negatively about. Everyone is free to write about whatever ship they want, I just find it kind of rude for people to tag ships they don’t actually like so that people who do like it and are specifically searching for fics about them end up having to deal with fics that are the exact opposite of what they want to read.
The same thought goes into Tumblr and other social media post where people tag ships that they’re actually against and force people who do like them to read their negativity.
My extremely belated list of Fairy Tail ships:
Natsu x Lucy
Gray x Juvia
Erza x Jellal
Wendy x Chelia
Levy x Gajeel
Laxus x Mirajane
Elfman x Evergreen
Freed x Bickslow
Lisanna x Cana
Loke x Mama Pisces
Yamato is a Senju, maybe even a direct descendent of Hashirama. That’s why the Mokuton worked with him, he had the right genetics for it from the beginning. It was a combination of the right blood and how young he was when the experimentation happened that allowed Hashirama’s cells to stick.