This is just a fluffy thought for a world where nobody died and everything is happy. Sakura has a massive crush on Ino so when Ino comes to her and tells her she likes Sasuke because he’s cool and strong Sakura sees it as a challenge. She then proceeds to give it her all to best Sasuke at everything and prove to Ino that she’s the one who’s cool and strong. Thus the SasuSaku rivalry commences for Ino’s affections.
Ino catches on pretty quickly to Sakura’s intent and falls head over heels but being a little girl, instead of just telling Sakura her feelings, she goads her on, gushing over Sasuke to her so Sakura will go after whatever skill he’s mastering, challenging him. Sasuke has no idea what’s going on, there’s this little pink monster who keeps antagonizing him and their respective blond best friends just goad the whole thing on (in this world Kushina and Mikoto were teammates and made sure their sons had plenty of play dates growing up).
The adults naturally figure the whole thing out and find it suitably adorable. I picture the story being teeth rottingly sweet, like a long one shot going over their whole lives with Sakura and Ino eventually figuring things out and falling in love. I know with this pairing it’s the norm to then pair off the boys but honestly, I adore NaruHina, so we’ll say Karin was brought to Konoha by Kushina as a fellow Uzumaki and raised as a sister to Naruto, so Sasuke can still nab himself an Uzumaki there. Honestly, though, ship the boys however you like or don’t at all, this is about SakuIno at the end of the day.
It’s just a fun thought I had, I just really like the idea of Sakura and Sasuke as rivals, I’ve always thought that if you get rid of her infatuation of him Sakura would find Sasuke really annoying and that a rivalry would come naturally to them. Also the idea of Naruto as the peacemaker of Team 7 is hilarious because we know his temper would get the better of him and he’d fail miserably, poor Kakashi would have just the worst group of little monsters to wrangle.
So Lex Luthor is just the worst but you can kind of get where he comes from if you assume Superman hasn’t told anyone he came to Earth as a baby. Like, it’s always been my assumption that he let everyone think he came not long before he made his hero debut so no one has any reason to think he has a secret identity. I mean, he tells everyone his name is Kal-El and that he came from Krypton, which is true, so why would anyone think he has a third name? But this idea also leads people to think he excaped Krypton as an adult, which for someone with Superman’s ideals and moral code doesn’t make sense. Clark would never abandon his friends and family willingly. So if you’re Lex, you see this ultra powerful alien being who left his own planet without trying to save anyone else and came to a different one that gave him superpowers and is worshipped for doing things that, with his abilities aren’t all that hard to do. The hero thing is easy when you don’t have to give anything up to do it. It absolutely makes sense not to trust him, the whole situation is super suspicious and that worst case scenario is basically Omniman from Invincible. Of course Lex is also a narcissist with a god complex, so there’s that dynamic coming into play but it was just a thought I had after watching the show.
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.
A lot of modern takes seem to like making Agamemnon an all out bad guy, and I’m not saying he’s secretly a sweetheart or anything g or even that he didn’t deserve to die, but I am of the opinion that he’s more complicated that just being an arrogant douche. For one thing, I wholeheartedly believe that he loved his daughter. The sacrifice of Iphigenia acting as his punishment would not make sense if he didn’t love her. It was beyond cruel that he chose to kill her and I defiantly think Clytemnestra was justified in killing him (not for some of the other thing she did, but definetly for that specific act), but however pathetic and insufficient it turned out to be, he did love her.
I think it’d be interesting to have a protagonist who is an expert in medieval history get transported into the standard savior is summoned to defeat the demon king scenario. Like, even basic knowledge of that time period would make anyone super distrustful of the church and monarchy, since they are almost always just the absolute worst. So you have someone with that background and instinctive mistrust faced with exactly those kind of people claiming that they’re there to save the world. The gimmick is that the king and head priest are actually completely sincere but the protagonist just refuses to believe people in those positions could possibly be good. I’m imagining some kind of gag story with that premises, I just think it’d be funny.
Alternatively, you take the medieval history expert and have them be reincarnated in a world where everyone has complete and total implicit trust in the church and or monarchy because of divine right or something, real or imagined, and the protagonist just has to deal with their modern sensibilities of democracy in the face of classism. Or something. It’s not a fully fleshed out idea.
So there’s all sorts of ideas and headcannons for how vampires work in the Buffyverse, most of the ones we meet are mindless which completely contrasts just how much personality we get from the Whirlwind. The meta explanation for this of course is that most vampires are just plot devices rather than actual characters the way Spike, Angel, Darla and Dru are. Then there’s the whole Angel/Angelus dichotomy vs how Spike doesn’t change too much after he gets his soul aside from a better moral compas. So I was thinking, we know vampires are made when the human soul dies and a demon takes over the body, but what if it’s essentially a demon soul that takes the place of the human one but leaves everything else intact. Like, people are made up of mind, body, and soul and it takes all three to make a person, so a vampire is still 2/3 who they used to be but the demon that replaces their soul completely changes who they are on a fundamental level. Just how evil the new vampire is depends on what kind of demon ends up reanimating them. So poor Angel got reanimated by a particularly nasty demon and since as a human he was unfulfilled and pretty immature, the demon has a lot more influence over who he becomes as Angelus compared to Spike who, I would say, had a weaker demon reanimate him and probably a stronger presence from the other 2/3 of William, he was a poet and a pretty passionate guy, so the demon didn’t have quite as big of an influence. Of course, the rest of the Whirlwind trained him to suppress his more human aspects and let the demon have more control. The chip wouldn’t let him have his demon have free reign so his more human sides could come out more. That’s why when he got his human soul back it wasn’t as big of an adjustment, because he’d kind of already been making space for it. Angel on the other hand had his properly evil demon running loose completely before his human soul was stuffed back in without warning. It was a far harsher adjustment, traumatic enough for him the completely wall off the demon aspect in his mind to the point even some memories were actively repressed along with it. They just ended up with two very different demons and started out as two very different people, which is why they ended up being two very different vampires. All vampire are as unique from each other as humans are.
So I’ve never really liked how OUAT integrated most of the Peter Pan mythos. Killian Jones is my favorite character but he doesn’t really match the Hook from the novel. Stuff like their version of the Pan, Frankenstein and Oz characters bother me because unlike the other fairy tale characters, they come from a single definite source. The Frankenstein stuff is hopeless and there’s already one fanfic author who made Whale actually work for me as Victor and whose characterization I use for my headcannons. So here’s my thought for Killian (which completely ignores all of the stuff about Wendy and her brothers that they added, it doesn’t add much to the plot anyway).
Killian is not the Hook from the Peter Pan book and neither is the Pan that the gang fights in Neverland. The book all happened mostly as written but at some point Wendy returns to Neverland after that adventure and something g happens. Maybe during one of spring cleaning trips? I don’t know, whatever the case Wendy ends up in the world of the Enchanted Forest along with the crew of James Hook. James himself is, of course, dead, in the stomach of the crocodile. Wendy, as Red-Handed Jill, takes over as captain and she leads the crew for a while in their new world. Everyone in the crew is unfamiliar with this world as they all come from the same world as Wendy. Neverland was supposed to be connected to an alternate version of Earth, a slightly more magical one than the Land Without Magic where folk lore and the like are real and stories like Peter Pan and Alice and Wonderland and Mary Poppins can take place. Maybe King Arthur’s Avalon was real in this world and stuff like the Trojan War and the Odyssey actually happened (I’m also ignoring season 5 here). The details of Wendy’s home world are not important, I just think those additions are neat.
Anyway, Wendy sails as captain for some time before disbanding the crew. During this time, she falls in love with one of her crew members, an Irishman named David Jones, Davvy for short. The two end up having two boys together, Killian and Liam. At some point Davvy, who took up as captain with some of the crew members who wanted to keep sailing, ends up cursed with the Flying Dutchman because the name is just too convenient for that to have never come up. Wendy goes ashore and raises her boys, helped by Mr. Smee who managed to have his own son at some point. Killian and Liam are raised on stories of England, and on Peter Pan and Neverland. Which is why when Killian ends up losing his hand to his own crocodiles he takes up the moniker of his childhood stories.
Meanwhile, whatever happened that led to Wendy and the pirates being sent to the Enchanted Forest also led to Neverland being opened up to it and being infected by its foreign magic, weakening Peter. Some timey-wimey stuff happens and children from this new world star dreaming of Neverland. One of these kids is a boy named Malcom who would one day manage to find his way there in person. Malcom takes out Peter and takes over as Pan. He’s who the gang fight in Neverland and Rumpelstiltskin sacrifices himself to kill, permanently because he doesn’t need to come back and cause problems.
OUAT mostly stays the same through to the end of season 3A, after that so what you will. I just like picturing Killian surprising Emma with knowledge of the Land Without Magic that doesn’t make sense based off of what he learned from his mom.
Anyway, that’s mostly my idea for a premise for a canon-divergent fic that I think would be neat.
Why is Peter Parker infantelized so often in fanfic? When has he ever acted like any of those portrayals in the comics? And I don’t count obvious pandering like certain stories in the post Raimi era.
Peter Parker is a sarcastic asshole who gives ridiculous nicknames to his friends and doesn’t know the meaning of minding your own business. He loves his friends and family deeply and is incredibly overprotective of them. He’s also insanely overpowered with most of the people he’s facing. Spidey isn’t an Avenger who faces galactic wide cosmic threats, though he’ll help out if they need him. Spidey does the every day stuff, street crime and weird criminals with powers who like to dress up and make a show of it all.
And Peter Parker certainly is in no need of Avenger parental figures, he has Aunt May and Robbie Robertson and Curt Connors and even J Jonah Jameson. The entire idea of the gross Dad!Tony and Son!Peter and Superfamily stories make me want to scream.