My brother just turned eighteen and thinking about him being stuck at the age he’s at now sounds like the worst nightmare ever. Any romanticism teenage me felt about vampire like Edward and Stefan is gone forever, now I just pity them.
I love Spider-Man, I love fanfiction, but it’s nearly impossible for me to enjoy fanfiction about Spider-Man. It feels like every one out there is about some infantilized teenage Peter Parker, and I hate it. It’s not that I have a problem with teenage Spidey, though I’ll be honest it’s not my favorite iteration, it’s just that most stories have him as the only teenager in the hero community, which ruins all of his best relationships. One of my favorite comic book friendships is that of Peter Parker and Matt Murdock, Spider-Man and Daredevil are great together, but most fanfic with them has Peter as this goofy innocent kid and Matt as this grizzled adult mentor type, which kind of sucks because they can be a real riot together as friends. I hate having Spidey cut off from all the other superheroes because of the age gap, and that’s not even touching how the Spidey being written in these fanfic is usually completely unrecognizable as Peter Parker. It’s tiresome and makes me want to avoid all marvel fanfiction in general, which sucks. That’s all.
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.
I have this idea for a fun MadaTobi time travel fic where Madara and Tobirama accidentally go back in time to before Konoha was founded, this is in an everything is good world where Izuna didn’t die and the whole thing was just an accident. They end up at a point where Madara and Hashirama are, like, 16 and Tobirama and Izuna are 12. So Madara and Tobirama have had basically no interaction at this point, and then suddenly these adult versions of them show up bickering like an old married couple and clearly pining after each other. They also know way too much about each other, it’s freaking out their clans because you get to know people in a completely different way when you live in the same village and work together every day than when you have bordering territories and only really see each other during skirmishes. Tobirama complains about Madara’s sleeping habits and references having tea with other members of the Uchiha clan; Madara has a lot to say about Tobiramas’s work habits and insane experiments, he’s also obsessed with this one Senju bakers sweet rolls or something. Little stuff like that that just completely blindsided their clans. Maybe Hikaku and Touka are there too to make snide comments and just gleefully watch their respective clan heads (Hashirama would have given up the title to his brother in order to become Hokage) drive everyone around them insane while dealing sexual tension that freaks out teenage Madara and kicks the Senju clan into overprotective high gear (because again, 12). I don’t know, I just foresee a lot of comedy potential for someone who is a way better writer than I am.
One thing that’s always buggged me about Fairy Tail is that we never get an entirely clear idea of how much time is passing, like in a general sense. Sure some arcs we know for sure happen within a set amount of time between each other, like Tower of Heaven happens enough time after Phantom Lord and for long enough that the guild is completely finished by the time they get back. Since Tower of Heaven itself probably lasted around a week, at most, that means it had to happen a good few weeks, if not months, after Phantom Lord. However how much time has passed since Lucy joined the guild is never entirely clear, just kind of alluded to. We have to make a few logical assumptions to try and figure it out and rely on the info we get from the side story chapters that make up the filler episodes for context. None of which are completely trustworthy, of course, but it’s the best we got.
This has been bothering me ever since I decided to rewatch some of the earliest episode. Like, how much time passes, exactly between episodes 2 and 3? We know episode 2 has to happen either the next day or the day after the end of episode 1, depending on the travel time between Magnolia and Hargeon. Close in time, however you think of it, but who knows how much time goes by between episodes 2 and 3. Long enough that Lucy manages to find an apartment and get all moved in as well as develop something of a rapport with Natsu and Happy, they certainly seem closer by this point. However it’s still a short enough time period that Erza isn’t back from wherever she’s gone off too. I don’t know, it just kind of bothers me because when I think about it, most of the story arcs seem to happen so close together that you could arguably say not even a full year goes by between the first episode and Tenrou, which I don’t like, I just wish things were a little extended that the arcs take place over a longer period of time.
So the one thing about the old Superman movies I’ve never liked has been the Jesus analogy. The idea that Joe-El sent his son to earth so he could guide the humans and be their savior. I think Smallville did this too and I didn’t like it then either. Why would a man from a completely different planet who has never been to Earth and has no reason to care anything about it except as the planet where his son is going so he doesn’t die on Krypton care at all about saving humanity? He was facing certain death as his planet died around him and risked a lot n the chance that his son would survive being sent away in a ship, why would he spend any time creating a plan where he ordered his son to be alone and isolated apart from the species he was being sent to spend his life around. It just doesn’t make sense.
I’m getting pretty annoyed with the trope in fic that Morpheus is out of touch with the modern day. I get that he talks pretty formally and is an ancient being, but he’s also the personification of every living thing’s collective unconsciousness. He’s going to know all the same everyday stuff of any modern person that’s in their unconscious mind. The fact that he was trapped for a century, or 80 years depending, wouldn’t change that. Especially if you consider the comic canon that he’s Dream for the universe, not just Earth. Just because he missed humanity’s jump in tech doesn’t mean any of it is new to him. There are probably plenty of alien planets with similar and more advanced technology he would have known before he was imprisoned in the first place. I just don’t like that idea and I see it way too often.
Sakura’s excitement for her team assignment had faded somewhere around the first hour mark, after all the other teams had been collected by their jounin-sensei. Sasuke has resolutely ignored both her and Naruto the whole time and even the hyperactive blond himself had run out of steam in their long wait. His stupid prank was in place and all three were staring somewhat mindlessly at the chalkboard ahead of them.
It was just as Sakura had resolved to go ask someone if they’d been forgotten that the door to the classroom finally opened. A Kunoichi stepped into the classroom, the eraser balanced on the top of the door fell neatly on top of her head with a plop, prompting a cloud of chalk dust to puff into the air and settle on her head. Naruto immediately started guffawing over it while Sakura jumped to her feet and tried to apologize while internally she was pleased at the silly prank’s success. Sasuke made no real movement.
The Kunoichi who was to be their sensei observed them silently, head tilted slightly. She was pretty, even with most of her face hidden due to the mask covering the bottom half of her face and her hitai-ate tilted to cover her left eye. She was dressed in a standard Shinobi uniform and had her long silver hair pulled back into a ponytail. With a small nod she addressed them, “My first impression of you? ... I hate you, now meet me on the roof in ten minutes.” And with that, she vanished in a swirl of leaves, leaving the three Genin gaping after her.