"never Wanted To Dance" By Mindless Self Indulgence

Cece’s fashion

Everybody stop what you’re doing RIGHT NOW and celebrate the last Out of Touch Thursday of 2020

Ch 54: Hope

Tozuka likes to visually contrast his characters and this chapter has some great moments. I love how the light plays on their faces on this cover-- Juiz looks divine and Billy looks human.

Billy's friend is named Tella, and it's kinda obvious what his Negation ability is. I love how his antenna looks like the Under logo. In just a few panels, we learn a lot about him.

Tella is extremely loyal to Billy and follows him unquestioningly. As the radioman, he would've needed to stick close to Billy constantly during their mercenary days, so they were already quite close before Under began. If Billy is concerned that Tella could be an easy target for Juiz's ability, it's because Tella's loyalty to Billy is especially strong and pure.

Juiz plays narrator in this scene, standing straight and tall as she explains Billy's plan while he sits in silence, mostly avoiding eye contact with her.

What does Billy want to do with Ark?

The only way he could've thought that would make a decent trade is if he doesn't really know how the Loops work...

Juiz doesn't hold a grudge against him for the rebellion. She'd rather keep working together to collect Artifacts so they can reach their true goal of killing God.

Billy looks surprised that she'd offer to forgive him. His eyes look like he can't forgive himself, either.

Billy is unshaven-- scruffy, even--sitting down and side-eyeing Juiz. His face is drawn with a lot of worry lines and tired creases. Juiz's face is as smooth as a doll's and her eyes look straight ahead.

OK, first of all THAT HEART! What's that?! We've seen all of the other Artifacts in this panel, but the little heart is something new. I really hope it's a D. Gray-Man reference, but it could be Sailor Moon or something entirely different. It kind of looks like folded paper, so maybe it's a Valentine??

And the lore keeps coming! The Artifacts were created by God to defeat God?! Is God just that much of a masochist?

If UU is a metaphor for writing and God is the author, then it would make sense for them to have given the characters tools they could use to challenge the plot and to keep things interesting. A little bit of danger and tension to move the plot along...

It's curious how they seem to be parts of a suit of armor. Are they intended to used by one character who wields all of them or divvied among many characters? Does each Negator have an ideal Artifact?

Back to the conversation, IMO Billy's right to be resentful of the way Juiz has hidden this info for so long. These people were trusting her with their lives, and yet she was the only one who knew the whole story. I don't blame him a bit for being pissed. As a mercenary, he trusted his crew fully, as we can see with Tella.

Juiz has a traditional, top-down style of leadership that depends on a hierarchy (despite the fact that it's called a Round Table). She gives the orders, and the Union follows them even if they don't fully understand the situation until after the mission. When they report to her, she says things like, "That's what I thought..." but there doesn't seem to be any reason for her to have been so cagy.

Billy asks her how she even found out about the origins of the Artifacts, and she opens an entire new can of worms by talking about Ark.

EXCUSE ME?!?

The loops don't just go on forever?! Ark has a limit? Why? How? WTF even is Ark?

I love this page.

The backgrounds, the expressions, the clothes and hair--even how tightly their coats are fastened is contrasted here. It gets even more topsy-turvy because both of them are acting outside of their usual personalities: Juiz has begun to be honest with Billy while he's let his cool, no worries, gunslinger persona slip into a slightly vulnerable, sullen, and wounded version we've never seen.

What will happen when Ark runs out of gas? Does that symbolize an author giving up on writing a good story? What happens to God if this world is destroyed for good? What happens to Victor?

Juiz tells him that Ark can only take one person and informs him that there's no way he could make enough progress to gather Negators and Artifacts in just one attempt. After all, she's looped enough times that she knows what would change about the world and what wouldn't, along with how to use all the Artifacts.

For the first time in the conversation, Billy stands and meets her gaze, demanding to know why she kept all this info to herself.

Now she's the one avoiding eye contact.

(Also, it kinda sounds like she explained it all to one person, but it didn't work out so she just never tried to tell anyone else. Is that true? She never explained everything to anyone except Victor? Not even in any of the other Loops?)

Victor such a bossy pants. (Also that flashback in black and white representing their black and white outlook...)

I wonder what happened that made Victor say it was all too much for her. What was the straw that broke the camel's back? Could it have been that Juiz and Victor had some major setback or defeat? Was it that the Lincoln assassination wasn't prevented??

Or was it that Victor somehow knew that the Ark was running out of fuel, so he wanted Juiz to go live a regular life and just give up on the idea of killing God? Maybe he thinks ignorance would be bliss and the Negators should just do their best to live normal lives without worrying about all this stuff going on behind the curtain.

Juiz is so pretty I can't even

He just wanted her to be happy and not have to live with the burden of being the leader of the Negators and having a near-impossible mission Groundhog Day existence. That's really sweet, but... killing God would allow everyone to be happy and live without so much suffering.

FINALLY, Juiz tells Billy that she'll tell him everything. It's cool how she extends across two panels on this page like she's stepping outside of her usual comfort zone.

How much does Juiz really know about Billy's ability? Was she already aware of it from previous Loops? How much does she know about the potential of all the abilities?

FUUKO IS THE ONE! Victor knows it! Juiz knows it! Andy knows it! Akira knows it! Fuuko is our special miracle girl! And with that revelation, Juiz asks Billy to rejoin her.

But Billy seems uninspired. And his expression changed to something more certain and determined.

He calls out to Tella to pass him a cube, and Tella immediately springs into action. He's so incredibly dependable, PLUS this means he's been listening to the entire convo and was never out of the loop (hehe) on what was being said. It implies a level of transparency he has with his team (or at least with Tella) that Juiz didn't have with hers.

I love his line here. "You've always been right. But that's not good enough." Absolutely ice cold.

UMA Burn eats the cube and begins to transform. Meanwhile, Juiz pulls out her own pokeball and feeds it a cube. Spoil, that delightful imp, immediately begins trash talking. Bless him.

Billy and Juiz face off with these almost-smiles on their faces like they both knew it would come to this. They each know the other is too stubborn and idealistic to back down.

And they're not just going to let their UMA battle it out, since they each draw their weapons. Juiz admitted earlier that Billy's power was more useful than hers. Does she really think she can overpower him here? And will we be getting more sassy Spoil one-liners?

Masterpost

At it again, from another angle this time.

‘Old’ weapons. Or at least redundant, as a species traverses into space the new technology makes an old gun or even older sword/arrow/spear and so on useless and nearly powerless. The new weapons are ‘ray this’ and ‘beam that’ ‘plasma so and so’ .

Ofcourse this makes sense, the energy based weapons are far less wasteful and lighter, easier to carry and easier to handle. No need to sharpen weapons with a plasma blade and even then, why use close quarters weapons if you have access to stun, kill or poison rays and many more.

On top of that many civilisations prefer to forget their less then stellar past and make analog weapons obsolete. When the humans joined the council many expected them to do the same. They didn’t, production stopped yes, but interested people could still partake in lessons and the old fashioned ways were shown off in museums. Training to be part of a spaceship crew still included lessons in their old weapons as an opportunity to be prepared for going to “newer” worlds.

So with that in mind i have a few little vignettes ideas and for ease’ sake its gonna be on the same ship, the Serpentine.

Important crew:

Primoz, captain -Limoyh a four armed species-

Krag, second in command (brother of Primoz)

Kit, dokter -avian, bird like, she has feathers like a swallow-

Ortez, ASR (all species resources, human resources in space) -kiltak, insectoid species, think ants but exoskeleton-

Lugea, helmsperson (does the steering) -rock like alien-

Artex, engineer/mechanic 1 -also Kiltak-

And then our humans:

Kamari, navigator -Eritrean woman- (has cat named Sidra)

Markus, weapons expert (knows how to use them and upkeep, also shields) -Swedish man-

Petrus, mechanic/engineer 2 -Italian man-

Lilly, administrator/note keeper (learns languages for fun)-english woman-

Yes i know all of this could have also been accomplished by saying they are all from America… nope this is more fun. This is under the assumption that to get into the joint academy for space faring you need to be able to speak and write English.

Obviously there are more people on the ship but these are most important

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1. Sparring

Ortez was having a good day, the serpentine had left port and was making good progress toward their next destination on w-kl-18, referred to as deltax by it’s residents, for a routine drop off.

In port on Unity (the planet where the council resides and the universal court is) they picked up the final crew members among who a ‘team’ of humans. Pre bonded humans were supposed to be less chaos inducing and easier bonded with the rest of the crew. Ortez was rather happy the captain listened to him on this matter.

The humans had been more diverse than he expected and were currently what they called ‘settling in’. He was on his way to the rooms they had.

‘Stop it please we’ve been here less than 4 hours!’ The soft voice he recognises as Lilly’s is barely audible over the loud clanging sounds. Rounding the corner Ortez sees a terrifying scene. The two human males locked together with two sticks made of metal baring teeth at each other, with a push the olive skinned man, he remembers is called Petrus, breaks the hold and goes in low swiping at the tall mans legs making Markus fall over.

Ortez is about to intervene when without a sound the dark skinned leader of the group seemingly appears without a sound behind him and runs into the fray with a similar stick.

Whacking Petrus stick away from Markus’ throat she steps inbetween “stop it. You’re scaring our ASR. We want to make a good impression remember.” The men look right at him and both put down the sticks, Markus puts his hand up in a ‘wave’ “sorry about that, Ortez it was right? We were just sparring.’ Moving further into the room he uncurls his front two claws tapping at the metal poles “sparring with this? We usually only do body to body training, this seems rather old.” Petrus speaks up to that “ah yes those are old earth weapons, we like keeping up a bit of skill with several kinds as a side activity. Don’t worry tho, we train with blunt weapons.”

Not entirely appeased the insectoid looks to the imposing woman, who seems entirely at ease even though two people had been fighting. When she caught his eyes, she smiled that terrible toothy grin “truly don’t worry, like Petrus said they are blunt and it is a way for us to let of some steam and keep in shape. But next time we’ll do it in the training rooms… right boys?” Pinning the two men with withering stares they nodded quickly.

Ortez did not know humans released steam, but he felt right now was not the moment to go into that. Saying his goodbye he skittered to inform the captain.

This was bound to be interesting.

~~~~~~~~~~~

2. “The Roman empire”

“So you are telling me that at any given moment you could be thinking about a several thousand years old society that no longer exists and it would surprise nobody?” Artex was perplexed, when he and Petrus were working on the reactor core Lilly had wandered through and mentioned this old civilisation sparking heated debate. She thought the greeks were far more interesting but Petrus had been unmoved by her arguments. The other man speaks while pushing some buttons “well yea, the empire made great strides and amazing structures, Lilly just prefers the mythos of the greek while i enjoy the focus on millitary prowess.” Shrugging he looks up “don’t you guys have something like that?” Artex stretches his legs, all 6 of them in a wave like motion “not really, when change happened the history books were changed to make it seem like it was always that way” the human makes eye contact “wait so how do you know how to play -old civilisation- as a kid? We play fought with wooden sticks, wooden swords and branches we cut to look like guns…” that horrofied the insectoid, raised with violence like it was a normal thing.

Almost like they never left their dark ages

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3. Whats in a name (bit off topic but the idea just kinda happened)

Te very first time the humans were introduced to their new crew there was a bit of a hiccup. When Kamari introduced herself they looked up a bit confused but went further down the row. After Lilly they came back around and referred to Kamari as moon. Now Kamari recognised the strange look, they had translators that only had basic human translation, which means that her name “Kamari” which comes from Arabic and is a word for moon/soft glow of the moon, is translated fully but not as name so when they speak to her it translates out of their language to English which would be moon. This is luckily easily fixed with an update, but it was something that stil spoke of how new the human race was to the cosmos.

Her cat Sidra made them laugh as that means Star so she was the moon with her star.

(Random thought about how multiple human languages could screw with translations)

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Soooooo kinda had a 4th story that is pretty sad but also bad ass, but this is getting too long already

Imma write that in a new post over the coming days

Hopefully people like this, if you have prompts you’d like to see with this crew feel free to ask.

On my recent cabbage merchant art someone commented on this man’s sheer resilience and how he was the Sisyphus of ATLA and that inspired me.

[ID in Alt Text]

collection of posts for a very specific dynamic

I am literally claustrophobic

have you ever wanted to know what tma entity you're an avatar of? now you can know :)

finally done with the challenge!! Thanks to everyone who requested characters :DD

The last one is penguin chillin with the Penguins of Madagascar requested by @kirah-zh

the edit itself

this edit is getting taken down from tiktok every time someone reuploads it, its straight up censorship at this point

Im not even american but im having a great time with this

DONT LET THIS DIE

credit to miraculousgastropod for the original

on sight