Silly Interactions I Had In Marvel Rivals

Guilty Gear really went and took their queer Grim Reaper character, Testament, who had been absent from the franchise for a full decade and brought them back as a canonical Transfem Enby with the character saying in their reveal trailer how much happier they are as themself now, and I am fucking living for it.

From this

To ten years HRT

Also their canonical pronouns are they/them.

bonus:

:inhales and slams hands on the desk: akechi. palace. pitch.

disclaimer: the setting for this is all about vibes and aesthetics, it kinda got away from me when i started hashing out the plot around it two months ago so now we're here. in hell. (i'll probably have to make a secondary post i made wayyy too many concepts,)

yes i made an ost for this idea, here is a youtube playlist of chill european jazz

AU details under the cut-

Akechi Goro's palace is "Ampitheatrum Doloris”.

KEYWORDS: Akechi Goro, Tokyo Highcourt, Amphitheater

Akechi's psyche is a massive collection of locked doors, puzzles, and contradictions. He wants to be seen but not understood—heard but never known, ect. This makes his palace infiltration a waking nightmare (affectionate).

His palace is made up of five main layers. They each mirror a stage of grief:

1) There is the outer layer of with the appearance of a Venice-esque water canal maze, there is a door that must be opened to reach the entrance to infiltrate the second layer underneath the amphitheater. The puzzle's actually pretty sentimental and revolves around Akechi's interest in literature.

(This layer is depression, Goro mourns what he lost and the fact that the choices he made for the sake of revenge ultimately led to nowhere. This is reflected in how desolate/meandering the outer layer feels, it is the largest and most time consuming part of the palace for this reason. It takes weeks to finish. AKA, Akira and Morgana have a terrible, no good, very bad month of May.) 

2) The Labyrinth under the amphitheater; it is full of shadows for the arena champion to use as fodder for the enjoyment of the masses. ‘Loki’ resides here—this layer’s theme loosely plays on the Minotaur myth. 

The only way to escape is through a pulley/elevator mechanism which leads to the surface after shattering the Champion’s chains by force. Loki taunts in Old Norse, but gives Akira (and the party by extension) genuine hints on how to escape.

(This layer is anger, Goro is always angry, about the hand he’s been dealt, the futility of his own actions, and the fact that his life has always been a dead end, written in the stars.)

3) The Audience Stands; full of human cognitions and Akechi’s former clients and fans, despite everything, like Sae, he sees them as ‘people’ and is disgusted by them. Their compliments are shallow and empty, surface level like Goro’s facade. Cognition Sae is delegated to a middle manager-type role, and leads Akira and Co. through puzzles.

Different cognitions from Akechi’s shitshow of a childhood throw riddles based around philosophy and the nature of justice at the party, if the answer is ‘wrong’, there’s a mini-boss fight. Answering everything correctly yields a prize—a key, this process is made difficult by all of Robin’s ‘hints’ (which the Thieves can directly ask for) being lies.

(Bargaining. Goro always thought he could still salvage his revenge despite his enemy being essentially invincible, even now deep down he thinks he can salvage all the effort and sacrifices he put in.)

4) The Stage; Robin Hood appears proper instead of in cameo appearances, this is the lead actor's stage. To earn the right to stand with him, Akira has to have to prove his worth in one-on-one combat while showing the crowd a rousing show. The goal is to use the key obtained in the bargaining layer to unlock the Performer's cuffs.

(Denial, Goro doesn’t believe he needs or deserves saving or a life outside of his revenge, he believes there is no other way forward.)

Hereward and the 'treasure' are in the Imperial box area, which I'll save for part 2 of this I think! The second half of this'll have less focus on the environments and more on general plot and character design.

was for ShuAke Week of 2023 <3

clockwork / sad kids

So today I want to talk about puberty blockers for transgender kids, because despite being cisgender, this is a subject I’m actually well-versed in. Specifically, I want to talk about how far backwards things have gone.

This story starts almost 20 years ago, and it’s kind of long, but I think it’s important to give you the full history. At the time, I was working as an administrative assistant for a pediatric endocrinologist in a red state. Not a deep deep red state like Alabama, we had a little bit of a purple trend, but still very much red. (I don’t want to say the state at the risk of doxxing myself.) And I took a phone call from a woman who said, “My son is transgender. Does your doctor do hormone therapy?”

I said, “Good question! Let me find out.”

I went into the back and found the doctor playing Solitaire on his computer and said, “Do you do hormone therapy for transgender kids?” It had literally never come up before. He had opened his practice there in the early 2000s. This was roughly 2006, and the first time someone asked. Without looking up from his game of Solitaire, the doctor said, “I’ve never done it before, but I know how it works, so sure.”

I got back on the phone and told the mom, who was overjoyed, and scheduled an appointment for her son. He was the first transgender child we treated with puberty blockers. But not, by far, the first child we treated with puberty blockers, period. Because puberty blockers are used very commonly for children with precocious puberty (early-onset puberty). I would say about twenty percent of the kids our doctor treated were for precocious puberty and were on puberty blockers. They have been well studied and are widely used, safe, and effective.

Well. It turned out, the doctor I worked for was the only doctor in the state who was willing to do this. And word spread pretty fast in the tight-knit community of ‘parents of transgender children in a red state’. We started seeing more kids. A better drug came out. We saw some kids who were at the age where they were past puberty, and prescribed them estrogen or testosterone. Our doctor became, I’m fairly sure, a small folk hero to this community. 

Insurance coverage was a struggle. I remember copying articles and pages out of the Endocrine Society Manual to submit with prior authorization requests for the medications. Insurance coverage was a struggle for a lot of what we did, though. Growth hormone for kids with severe idiopathic short stature. Insulin pumps, which weren’t as common at the time, and then continuous glucose monitoring, when that came out. Insurance struggles were just part and parcel of the job.

I remember vividly when CVS Caremark, a pharmaceutical management company, changed their criteria and included gender dysphoria as a covered diagnosis for puberty blockers. I thought they had put the option on the questionnaire to trigger an automatic denial. But no - it triggered an approval. Medicaid started to cover it. I got so good at getting approvals with my by then tidy packet of articles and documentation that I actually had people in other states calling me to see what I was submitting (the pharmaceutical rep gave them my number because they wanted more people on their drug, which, shady, but sure. He did ask me if it was okay first).

And here’s the key point of this story:

At no point, during any of this, did it ever even occur to any of us that we might have to worry about whether or not what we were doing was legal.

It just never even came up. It was the medically recommended treatment so we did it. And seeing what’s happening in the UK and certain states in America is both terrifying and genuinely shocking to me, as someone who did this for almost fifteen years, without ever even wondering about the legality of it.

The doctor retired some years ago, at which point there were two other doctors in the state who were willing to prescribe the medications for transgender kids. I truly think that he would still be working if nobody else had been willing to take those kids on as patients. He was, by the way, a white cisgender heterosexual Boomer. I remember when he was introduced to the concept of ‘genderfluid’ because one of our patients on HRT wanted to go off. He said ‘that’s so interesting!’ and immediately went to Google to learn more about it. 

I watched these kids transform. I saw them come into the office the first time, sometimes anxious and uncertain, sometimes sullen and angry. I saw them come in the subsequent times, once they were on hormone therapy, how they gradually became happy and confident in themselves. I saw the smiles on their faces when I gave them a gender marker letter for the DMV. I heard them cheer when I called to tell them I’d gotten HRT approved by insurance and we were calling in a prescription. It was honestly amazing and I will always consider the work I did in that red state with those kids to be something I am incredibly proud of. I was honored to be a part of it.

When I see all this transgender backlash, it’s horrifying, because it was well on the way to become standard and accepted treatment. Insurances started to cover it. Other doctors were learning to prescribe it. And now … it’s fucking illegal? Like what the actual fuck. We have gone so far backwards that it makes me want to cry. I don’t know how to stop this slide. But I wrote this so people would understand exactly how steep the slide is.

In Two Years, He will be the same age as when they started to scrutinize Biden's age being not competent enough anymore to hold the house. Hold that over his head.

I've seen different takes on Akechi and his attitude toward his fame in fic I've read but I think a lot of them oversimplify things. Usually he's portrayed as being disillusioned or annoyed by his fans, and while I think that is true to an extent, it's also a lot more complicated than that.

Goro gets his self worth from other people. His success, his skills, his perception, are all how he values his worth as a human being. So when he first achieves fame, becomes Tokyo's new sweetheart, of course that's all going to go straight to his head. People love him. They're obsessed with him! He's going to revel in that, in the feeling of being liked and adored for the first time in his whole life.

And I think that there's always an underlying fear and bitterness, because that love is for a fake version of himself. People love the Detective Prince. They don't love Goro, and they never would, not if they knew the real him.

But all that doesn't really hit him until the public turns against him. The superficial and fickle nature of their love is abundantly clear once they all turn on him. I think it's then that Goro really starts to sour on the public and fame in general.

But of course, he still gets his self worth from what others think of him. No matter how much he wishes he didn't care what ignorant strangers think about him, on a deep level he can't quite control, he does. They hate him even as the Detective Prince. Even when he's the ideal person, even when he's erased every bit of his unlikable traits, he's still not good enough, and that hurts.

By the third semester, he's probably relieved to not have the public's eye on him any longer. He no longer has to perform the image of a perfect Detective Prince. But I think part of him probably misses it too. Misses being known and adored by strangers, misses being loved, even if it was by people who could never understand him. Which makes him hate his fame all the more, because he shouldn't miss any part of it. He shouldn't want the approval of others, he shouldn't care what anyone thinks. But of course he still does. He can't stop caring, not when he's cared for so long, when that's the only basis on which he's measured his self worth for as long as he can remember.

But he's done performing. He's done acting the perfect role of the lovable hero. Akechi is free to finally be himself. So Akechi stops trying to be liked, stops trying to be loved, and starts pushing everyone away instead. Because if he's not able to be loved, what's the point of even trying?

Goro thinks his true self is inherently unlovable. He's a failure and a murderer and there's no possible way anyone could overlook that. He thinks the only reason anyone ever liked him at all is because of his perfect fake public persona. And that's what makes Akira so incomprehensible to him. Because even when Goro drops that persona, even when he becomes the person he thinks he is--the asshole who no one could ever love--Akira still loves him. Akira sees the real Goro, and he likes him. Goro can't use his true self to push everyone away. It might work on the Phantom Thieves, but it just makes Akira love him even more.

Shuake Princess Bride AU where Sojiro is reading a bedtime story to a feverish Futaba. It's about the pissed-off Prince Akechi getting rescued by the country boy-turned-masked thief Joker. Because Westley has that cheeky confidence that suits Joker and Princess Buttercup has Goro's haughtiness and poise. I can imagine Joker pretending he's totally not Akira to get the tea on himself from Akechi right before Akechi loses it and pushes him down the hill.

Yusuke can be Inigo Montoya because they're both dramatic, Ryuji is Fezzik because they're supposedly dumb but have a good heart. Only difference is that when the storybook ends, instead of being disgusted by the kissing, Futaba is fujoing out. Sickness cured by fairytale yaoi

Oh also the author of the story is Maruki

Tying shoelaces is never easy 👞