The Same People (1/5)

Post canon designs ideas

look at this adorable fan art my heart can’t take it ughhh twins w/ twins so cute!! 🥹

Drawing spooky characters during October. Day 16. Muzan Kibutsuji.

So the footage of Owen training the tiny raptors in the new Jurassic World kind of (inadvertently, I think) confirmed something that always bugged me about the social dynamics mentioned in the first film.

Owen’s using the term ‘alpha’ wrong.

Of course, the concept of pack alphas is rooted in a lot of erroneous studies anyway. But if we take his actual assertions about it and Blue’s behaviour at face value, then Owen is wrong. He’s not the alpha. Blue is the alpha. The pack follows her cues, that’s why they go with her when she decides to follow the Indominous, and it’s also why they listen to Owen - because Blue does. If Blue stops, so do the other raptors. They’d don’t just wait it out to see who’ll win, they immediately follow Blue’s lead.

Blue’s the leader. 

Owen is, actually, the mediator.

He is the one who stops disputes between the raptors and defuses tense situations. He is permitted this status precisely because he’s physically weak (compared to raptors) but socially important. His social importance was created by rearing the raptors and forming emotional bonds with them. But they know full well that he’s squishy and beatable (though they probably don’t realize just how lethal some behaviours might be for him, comparatively). Blue knows she can kill Owen and that Owen is not strong or very useful at leadership decisions for a velociraptor pack. She accepts his input because he’s dad.

So since Owen actually isn’t even in the running for pack leader, and challenging him would be pointless because then you’d just hurt him and cost the pack a socially important member, and also probably get beaten up by Blue, he is the ideal mediator of disputes. His intervention de-escalates situations by reducing the amount of violence that’s permissible. 

But because he was using so much containment and physical force (even if it was through equipment, obviously) to keep the raptors in check, I think Owen misjudged his placement in the raptor social group. Especially since he actually was tougher than them when they were babies. He thought they listened to him because they believed he was stronger than them, and that this was an illusion he had to maintain.

That was never actually the case, though. Blue knew Owen was way weaker than her the whole time. She just valued him anyway.

There’s probably a metaphor about toxic masculinity in there somewhere.

Older and Wiser

Small and big 🤐

lil sketch between commissions, have my take on muzan in the heian era

Why Muzan’s “natural disaster” line was kind of accurate, actually

This Muzan line is so interesting to me because it’s the closest the manga comes to ever saying the quiet part out loud. There was nothing Muzan could’ve done to change what he became.

By the time he killed his doctor, he was already in the middle of his human to demon transition. He had pursued a cure to his illness (reasonable), his doctor had done his best to make an experimental cure for him (reasonable), the cure had unintended side effects (reasonable), and side effects had included amplified anger and murderous intent (unfortunate).

Natural disasters just happen. They don’t have agency. The reason you don’t take revenge on an erupting volcano is because it didn’t make a conscious choice to kill people. No one is to blame for the disaster. Likewise, Muzan had absolutely no agency against his fate. Even if he had started out as the world’s nicest human, even if he made exclusively good choices considering the information he was given, he would’ve ended up becoming a demon and eating people. The only immoral “choice” he made was killing his doctor, but if the medicine he was given was making him a demon anyway, the likelihood of that occurring during his first demonic rampage was extremely high. Regardless of whether he conquered the sun, whether he took his medication as prescribed, whether he was a good or bad human, he would’ve ended up with a near insatiable taste for human flesh. With no support network to hold him back from his urges until he was capable of settling down, his evil was essentially inevitable.

A lot of people say that Muzan is interesting because he’s one of the only pure evil villains with no redeeming qualities, but I disagree. He’s interesting because he’s one of the only villains who became evil by accident, in the process of pursuing something good.

On a more critical note, I think that the fact that this line from him is so clearly meant to be seen as inaccurate or bad speaks to the author’s lack of consideration for the moral implications of their plot. The moralization of illness in KnY has always bothered me. What, in the eyes of the author, should Muzan have done as a human? What is the moral of his story? Simply don’t be chronically ill? That seems a bit ableist. If you are ill, accept that you’re ill and just let yourself die as god intended? Also seems a bit ableist. Only take proven, known cures that are guaranteed to not have side effects? A little anti-science, or, more charitably, a misunderstanding of how the scientific process works… so what should Muzan have done instead? Much to think about.

alexa play "i can hear the bells" from hairspray 👬💒

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Do you feel Overhaul with his Yakuza and the Meta Liberation Army make better Villians then the LOV.

Also do you think they were more competent in their goals compared to the LOV.

Well let's look at each of them.

Overhaul wanted to get rid of quirks and bring the Yakuza back into power for the boss that he had put into a coma. He committed horrible crimes in pursuit of this goal, but he did successfully find a way to remove quirks from people under the power of his own organization.

So he was absolutely the most competent, and I wonder how he would act if he found out that Midoriya was originally quirkless. It also could've been really cool to see like, Looking to the Future(heroes and quirks) vs Living in the Past(No quirks and the golden age of the Yakuza)

The MLA were quirk-supremacy, might makes right, kind of people, and that's pretty much just the world's view at large taken to the extreme. The idea of the original founder wanting free quirk use in a time where everyone was terrified of them could've been a cool theme to explore, instead they folded to a group of exactly six people. Gigantomachia also showed up, but the end result would've been the same if he hadn't.

Incompetent. Maybe thematically interesting. Most of their leaders don't even have powerful quirks of their own, they're only in charge because of the influence/money they have. Automatically proving that their own philosophy of quirk supremacy is meaningless.

The League of Villains overall, just wanted to do whatever they want and be free from consequences. Shigaraki wants to destroy things. Dabi wants to kill Endeavor and whoever else he chooses. Toga wants people's blood(consent optional). Compress was just a thief that wanted to Robin Hood-style deal with corruption, and ended up not doing anything like that. Twice just wanted somewhere to be accepted, he's the exception. Spinner was a victim of discrimination that jumped in the first ideological extreme that popped out at him. Their individual goals all turn into "tear everything down and leave nothing(except maybe the stuff we like)."

The League was also pretty incompetent. Nearly all of their successes were built off of what All for One had built. Doctor Ujiko and the nomu, Gigantomachia, hell, even Kurogiri. The League didn't do shit by themselves, but somehow they were the main villains of the series.