The Devil Has And Always Will Be A Gentleman. // Ice Devil Slayer!gray Fullbuster Aesthetic

MDZS is about love. Not about romance.

Not to be fake deep but Wei WuXian’s “always remember human kindness, always forget bad things they’ve done to you” is one of the most powerful messages I’ve read in a long time. It’s not new, it’s not original but it doesn’t matter because now and forever, we’ll always need stories about love. And WWX is so good; he’s unbelievably good, illogically good, he’s good despite everything and everyone. His every decision is motivated by the purest, the kindest love. 

Honestly, if someone asked me what is MDZS about, I could go into details and try to explain its original plot full of twists, but I could also say it’s a story about love. I know what you think - “But Soshi, MDZS is a romance, it’s supposed to be about love. You didn’t discovered a new America”… The truth is no, not every romance is about love. Making your character declare sentimental confessions and kiss in the rain is not showing feelings. Compare to the pretty epic intrigues and plot twists, WWX and LWJ’s love story is anything but epic. Yeah, they have some big and dramatic scenes like fighting with the turtle or “come back to Gusu with me”, I can’t deny, but much more often their relationship is so down to earth and boring: they study together, they sleep together, they eat together, they travel together, hey drink together. WWX undresses LWJ when he’s drunk. LWJ carries WWX when he doesn’t feel well. And when they fight, instead of covering each other with their own bodies and screaming names, WWX and LWJ go separate ways, saying that they’ll meet later because everything is going to be all right. It’s so anticlimactic. It’s so normal. It’s so tender. Soft. And it doesn’t happen often, but when I am reading about them, I really fall in love with their love and think that I would like someone to love me as much as they love each other. Despite their fails and flaws - come on, this relationship is far from being perfect. Is there anything more beautiful than loving for imperfection? 

But this is all just a drop in the sea of love. WWX and LWJ’s love - romantic love - helps them keep going. Carry one. And take care of so many more people. Now I’m going to cry but MDZS is a romance story where romantic love is never ever portrayed as bigger than other kinds of feelings. It’s a story about friendships, siblings, parents and children, about born family, about made families, about human relationships and being good to everyone, because we never know what other people have gone through. It’s about Wei WuXian and Wen Ning and how some words, unimportant to us, may mean the world to someone else (or hurt, like during WWX and JL’s first meeting), how we should always smile because we never know when we’re going to change someone’s day. Good things are coming back, we can find love in a place we would never expected it to be. It’s a story about Jiang Cheng and how people wither without love. In the end, under the layers of complicated plans and difficult schemes, those characters are so simple. They just wanna feel loved. And if we had more people like the Lan brothers, if we were loved for who we are and not for who we are supposed to be, then we would have more WWX and less Jin Guangyao.

You know what I also appreciate, in some bitter sense? That the author doesn’t pretend everything is going to be fine and if you’re good, people will be good in return. Evil gives birth to evil. But evil things happen to good people. Even when they don’t deserve it. You can do everything, but someone will still stab you in the back. Life is brutal, full of loses, full of pain and tears. No matter how much you try, you’ll always face hate. And this life is worth living. That’s Wei WuXian’s message: happiness is a choice. It’s easy to present some happy-go-lucky epicure singing “don’t worry, be happy” but WWX is so beautiful because it’s not portrayed as something easy. Being happy is a hard work and requires too much effort… but in the end it’s worthwhile. Because you choose; to look at someone who stayed, to enjoy the meal, to drink, to laugh when you want to cry, to try, again and again and again. (Sorry, I became emotional writing it. That’s what good literature does to you) Still, it’s so hard to let go and never mourn what is gone but WXX makes a decision that he wants to focus on small things. I wrote about it before - WWX and LWJ’s love is built on little moments. It’s amazing: WWX’s name is repeated by mouths of the most important people, his actions affect politics and change the whole world! He’s the perfect chosen one! The most powerful! And yet… his reward in not a kingdom, or fame, or gold, or even being someone special. The only thing that matters is sleeping in peace, drinking good alcohol and enjoying music. This is why WWX does it. This is love. 

MDZS message is universal. Maybe it’s hard to imagine that we have an adopted brother for whom we sold our soul. But we can decide that children playing with their kites are enough to smile… or that we need position, money and respect to feel truly happy. Because you know… it’s all a matter of decisions. Sometimes we need a reminder that the smallest things are good enough to keep us alive.

possibly my favorite trope in the hobbit fics is the dwarves underestimating a hobbit’s appetite and either fretting that they’ve been starving bilbo or worried that he has some kind of eating disorder

Bilbo: *stuffing his face as only hobbits can and oblivious*

Thorin: *acting majestic but having internal panic attack* have we not been feeding him enough?

Fíli: where do you suppose he’s putting it all?

Kíli: do you think he’ll explode

Me, watching the prequels: ugh who even cares about the stupid clone troopers

Me, a mere 5 episodes into The Clone Wars: I DO. I CARE ABOUT THESE STUPID CLONE TROOPERS.

Reading amazing fanfiction, then forgetting to bookmark it

“Hawks/Dabi did everything right.”

[Or: Dabi and Hawks are ideological masterpieces and picking a side explains your kind of moral-justice.]

Let’s take off our fandom-glasses for a moment and look at the gorgeous canon conflict between Dabi and Hawks and “the injustice of morality”.

Now, the goal is to destroy an ‘unjust’ society. Which will inevitably kill many innocent people. Though: Some of the leagues members are genuinely good people (Twice) or just got abused by the system (Dabi) and see no other choice. Dabi sees his action as “justice”, since he longs for revenge against the man/system who did him wrong. [- But this brings him in conflict with his understanding of moral-pain, as he knows the people he kills have family. - To the point where he cried blood.]

His moral ideology is the extreme opposite of Hawks’.

When Hawks joined the league, he acknowledged the problem of “injustice”. He saw the flaws of the system and felt genuine sympathy for Twice. But he is unwilling to risk a single civilian life for changing it.

The bloody fun starts when Hawks is gets confronted with the “Trolley-Problem”.

This is a version of an ethical dilemma from 1967, surrounding the question: Do I stick to the “moral code” by not hurting a criminal or do I choose the “best” outcome, by causing a criminal’s death?

In a survey around 90% of the respondents said: “It’s okay to let one person die, to save the larger number of people.” This is the natural human ideology of “Utilitarism” and also occurs in social animal-species behavior.

BUT If you make it more “personal”, let’s say: You like the person and you have to kill them yourself – And Hawks liked Twice. - Even if it still saves a thousand lives, the reaction is completely different now: Only 10% of the respondents would still do it. Because now it “feels” wrong.

Even if “not killing this person, because you don’t want to feel wrong” would lead to “letting thousand people die, but feeling right”.

Well, Hawks does not feel “heroic” - Even before he killed Twice, he had huge doubts about his own dignity.

[He jokes he doesn’t want to be No. 2. He thinks his back isn’t broad enough. He jokes he isn’t “Top-hero”-material. (ref: ch. 188; ch.185)]

Hawks is one of the most intelligent characters within the MHA Universe, and his way of approaching problems is not influenced by “situational factors” but by “logical weight.”

Hawks took the harder choice and forced himself to suppress his own moral instincts for this. [Remember, he saved Twice’s life risking his own out of pure reflex. Hawks is a selfless hero, to a point where Dabi relied on it:]

[In fact, Hawks is so selfless, that he sacrifices his own “wish to feel like a good person” so save the larger number of people. ]

“Ah. Cool motive, still murder.” Does the end really justify the means?

Let’s say (solely hypothetical) Hawks killed Twice – but Toga copies Twice’ quirk, and over hundred million civilians of Japan die nonetheless. Hawks has now killed a good man, without direct logical weight behind it.

Someone could (or will, because I’m fucking going to) conclude that the righteousness of Hawks action might solely depend on its success. ( – At least till we include numbers in Hawk’s imaginary litigation. Because Twices quirk included “exponential growth of fighting power”, the heroes’ chances of winning would run asymptotic to zero, which would result in the death of over a hundred-million people. Not taking the “risk” of beeing injustice would therefore have been illogical from Hawks’ perspective.)

So was Hawks ‘injustice’?

From Dabis point of view: “Well- Yes of fucking course.”

Because Dabi’s character personifies the exact opposite ideology: “deontological theory”, which focuses not on the product of his acts, but the intrinsic value of the act in and of itself. Dabi approaches problems complete and utterly “selfish”.  - No, this does not mean that he can’t do things for others out of sympathy- It means that he acts bird-free after his own instinctive moral-code and makes his decisions because he feels like they are the right thing to do. - Like a normal human - just a little more extreme. 

[See, Dabi recruited Hawks into the inner circle of the League, without trusting him - because he doesn’t trust the League either. (He said this and acted like this several times.) Just like Hawks, Dabi is a lonely and paranoid man. But other than Hawks, he is driven by the injustice he experienced. He uses on his own pain as fuel to fight for the things he right now sees as “good”.)

- Dabi got exploited and abused by the hero-system? -> He will destroy said hero-system as revenge, to create momentary “justice” for himself.

- Dabi gets the chance to benefit from a hero? -> He will recruit him without much caring for long-term consequences.

- Dabi loses a valuable ally/partner trough a hero? -> He will kill/torture said hero as revenge.  

Dabi is more “justice“ fixated than Hawks.

Dabi would never kill a man he likes for the “greater good”. (He also does not care about the “liberation”-ideology, or anything regarding the “freedom” of regular civilians. Which is shown in his fight against Geten and again in his monologue in chapter 267.) He only cares about the ‘injustice’ of the hero-system. Dabi clings to his “humanity” more than Hawks does and he reacts to his own pain with highly emotion-driven actions. He clearly does not care about the long-term effects his actions have on him- or everyone else. 

[Neither Hawks nor Dabi expect a long life, but both deal with it very differently.]

From Dabi’s point of view, Hawks is injustice, because he killed a good man, right here and now and the consequences – good or bad – do not matter. (“The action in itself was amoral.”)

[It is very interesting to see the reactions within the fandom, paralleling Dabi’s exact ideology to the point where some wanted Dabi to punish Hawks in the name of justice. Dabi’s moral-code is to lesser extents portrayed in many shonen-protagonists (e.g. Gon from HxH) – and sometimes criticized as immature.]

Actually, both sides can be reduced to:

Dabi’s: “Think for yourself and do whatever the hell you recognize as righteous right now.” and Hawks’: “Think for the others and do whatever the hell is necessary to bring the maximum good to society.”

…And I also think thats pretty fucking cool.

Me: Not that I’m a snob but I dont like e readers I like the feel of the paper the smell of a book

Also me: Spends hours glued the phone eyes squinting and red reading fanfiction

Do you guys ever have a time when your thoughts mindlessly wander to one of your OTPs and you’re heart just clenches and you smile a little and you feel instantly happy because you just love that ship so fucking much.

I keep seeing posts on social media thanking the OFMD cast and crew for their work and not mentioning Taika, and it's driving me to distraction because Taika is absolutely fundamental to the existence of this show.

There's a huge chance the show wouldn't have been picked up at all if Taika hadn't attached his name to it. And he didn't just attach his name and walk away - he played a key role in developing the show. David has said that he was looking at the history with Taika and they both went 'omg Stede and Blackbeard were fucking' and decided to centre the show around that. Taika pushed for Rhys to play Stede. Taika saw Nathan's comedy on instagram and went 'yep that's Lucius'. Taika was desperate to play Ed, and fought to play him. Taika has spoken about how much he loves playing Ed, how it made him fall in love with acting again, to the point where he wears some of Ed's jewellery and has gotten some of Ed's tattoos actually inked on him. He poured everything he has as an actor into Ed (some of the stuff he had to perform, particularly at the beginning of S2, is difficult) and the show simply wouldn't work without it. Taika directed the pilot. He loved the show enough to juggle filming S1 with post-production on Thor: Love and Thunder. When the show's budget was slashed by 40%, and could no longer afford to film in LA, Taika would have been key to moving production to New Zealand - and if that hadn't happened, S2 wouldn't have happened. When a director went off sick with Covid during S2, Taika jumped in to direct half an episode and then didn't take a director's credit on it.

You do not have to like Taika. You do not have to agree with everything he does/says. But what we are not going to do is erase the absolutely key fundamental role that Taika has played in OFMD. This show simply would not exist, probably not in any form, but certainly not in the form we see and love, if not for Taika's continuing and multi-level contribution.

just a thought

people always say “why do you ship them, they’re just friends” or “gross stop shipping every two people of the same sex who make eye contact” well MAYBE if you gave us quality lgbtq+ representation that we deserve we wouldn’t keep doing this