Bruce And Dick Are Both Emotionally Repressed But In Kind Of Different But Parallel Ways. Like, The Repression

thinking about that one trope where the hero is dying and reveals their secret identity at the last moment so they can die known and as the true person they were, not the hero name they designed. how, if dick were out as nightwing and were to be somehow in a life or death situation he literally could not see a way out of, and he was with a civilian who was comforting him in his final moments, he literally would have to die as nightwing and not dick grayson or else risk exposing the rest of his family. even if the civilian swore up and down and made a blood oath to never speak a word of this, dick would be unable to bring himself to allow himself the mercy of dying as dick grayson or hearing the name his parent's gave to him one final time

HOW UA SHOULD HAVE ENDED

Hard cut to Klaus talking to the girl on the bicycle

Klaus: “Did we save the world or screw it up again?”

Bicycle God: “You were never the problem”

She holds up an action figure of Reginald and crushes it in her bare hands. Marigold lights emerge from it. Golden light envelops everything

Hard cut to Klaus waking up in bed. He is wearing pajamas covered in marigolds.Street noise can be heard from outside.

(From offscreen) “You okay, Hon?”

Klaus looks over and Dave is cooking breakfast in their flat

Klaus: “Yeah, just had a weird dream.”

Looks out the window and sees an empty lot where the Hargreeves mansion should be.

Klaus: “Wasn’t there a building there?”

(Naïve Melody by the Talking Heads begins to play over a montage)

Diego and Lila Are wrangling their kids into the camper van. One of the kids gives Lila a picture of her family in a field of bunch of orange flowers (marigolds)

Luther is stripping and the obsessed lady in the crowd is Sloan. He has a marigold in his mouth. He takes it out and gives it to her.

Viktor is playing the violin with Harlon. Sissy is setting the table. She sets a bouquet of marigold into a center vase.

Allison is gardening while Clare and Ray play in the yard. She is planting Marigolds.

Five is teaching at some university. An older woman comes in. “Dolores” he says as she kisses him.

Jennifer serves Ben at the dinner. Closeup on her pouring coffee. He has a Durango flower tattoo that says “Jennifer” and she had a marigold tattoo that says “Ben”

Cut back to Klaus staring out the Window

Dave: No, been an empty lot as long as I can remember

Klaus, smiles: Yeah, I don’t know why I thought that

Camera Zooms out from the window as music continues

Reginald, voiceover: And that is how our unlikely heroes manage to create one timeline where everything was fine.

BTS footage plays with the final credits 

probably for the best that we don't get any sort of openly public system/identity reveals postcanon bc beyond all the tense interpersonal drama do you have any clue how insane liu mingyan would become. A Man In Another World Loved Luo Binghe So Intensely He Was Plucked From There And Brought To This World, Where He Became Luo Binghe’s Star-Crossed Lover, And Now They're Still Together Beyond All Odds Of Fate That Sought To Tear Them Apart. soulmate freak shit novel ft. a million words of porn would've hit xianxia chinese bookshelves within the week.

The full comic is finally over!!! Thank you for following it ~

I've talked about it before but we need more beast keeping peak shen yuan au where he is as terrifying as he is sweet.

I want him to take a bunch of juniors on a night hunt and see a little fluffy animal and go "listen up, that's an invasive species! Whenever we see these we have to do this-" and then he traumatizes them by reducing it to a bloody mess.

He sees a hungry cub whining helplessly and goes oh poor thing I'll find you some food... then he returns covered in gore and drops dripping raw meat in front of it. He looks at his fellow disciples and says "what? It's carnivorous."

Older disciples LOVE watching new students follow shen yuan around like lovestruck ducklings when they first join the peak... then they go on a mission together and come back shaking going "what the fuck was that." It's a rite of passage

Had an idea for a video game reverse transmigration AU so here goes:

There’s a popular online cultivation game called Proud Immortal Demon Way that’s been making the rounds recently due to a new encounter players might run into that was unlike anything they’d ever experienced in other games.

In this encounter, the atmosphere would dim out of nowhere and from a distance, a boss character would start approaching them. Suddenly, their character would be grabbed out of nowhere by the incredibly handsome and imposing figure with red and black robes, a black sword and a full mane of hair. The man would look at their character before dropping it while clicking his tongue, usually saying something like, “Another empty husk…” before turning to the player’s screen and staring at them for a few moments. Even if the player tried to attack the boss character, it would ignore the attacks, hardly gaining any damage at all.

Then the character would furrow their brows and turn away. “You’re not the one.” he would say, and he would leave through a portal made with his sword.

The encounter happened only once per account, and the only hint that it was about to happen was a small voice calling out “Shizun?” from off-screen.

One day while Shen Yuan, under his somewhat popular streaming name PeerlessCucumber, was grinding enemies before a big raid, he heard the iconic and long-awaited “Shizun?”.

Rather than run away or attack like most players did, Shen Yuan was excited to finally, FINALLY get to see this legendarily unbeatable and good-looking NPC for himself and happily ran up, chattering happily to his viewers as he wanted to show them what usually happened when one encountered this particular boss.

The boss started his usual routine, picking the player character up and tossing it aside with an annoyed mumble before turning to the screen— no, to Shen Yuan.

His head tilted then and that— that wasn’t part of the routine.

A somewhat unsettling smile made its way onto the character’s face as he approached the screen, seemingly getting closer to Shen Yuan.

“Found you, Shizun.” he said.

That was the last time anyone saw the boss in-game. There was a video clip roaming around of PeerlessCucumber’s facecam, where an arm reached from off-screen into his room, strangely from about where the man’s screen should have been.

Then the stream cut and PeerlessCucumber hadn’t streamed for over a year.

When he came back, however, he introduced his new husband, Luo Binghe to his viewers. His new husband looked strangely familiar to anyone who'd played Proud Immortal Demon Way.

If anyone feels like expanding on the fic feel free, this brainworm was stuck in my head and I have too much homework to write anything longer than this 😅

He’s an asshole but he’s MY asshole Masterlist

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

thinking about the motif of debt/repayment in scums villain e.g:

"It was merely a wave of a hand to you both, but to me, it is a debt I'd pursue through ten thousand deaths." -Zhuzhi Lang

"A drop of kindness should be repaid by a torrent." -Zhuzhi Lang

"Qi-ge will remember this loyalty; in the future he'll definitely repay you." -Yue Qingyuan

"To think that a lifetime's moment of loyalty actually had to be repaid with so much" -Shen Qingqiu, on how Original Yue Qingyuan got pierced by 10 thousand arrows to save Shen Jiu

And probably most famously, "Everything that's happened in the past, I'll repay it all to you today." -Shen Qingqiu

the crux of Proud Immortal Demon Way is, after all, revenge. tianlang jun taking revenge on the cultivation world, luo binghe taking revenge on his scum teacher, qiu haitang taking revenge on shen jiu -- so it makes sense that the same ardour would be given to repaying good things as it was to repaying bad.

and. if you think about it. every character either successfully repays their debts OR has their original motive resolved eg: zhuzhi lang dies protecting tianlang jun, shen qingqiu "dies" absorbing binghe's demonic energy OR luo binghe's teacher no longer being scum, su xiyan never actually betraying tianlang jun

except one character.

yue qingyuan failed to come back like he promised. he failed to prevent qiu jianluo's abuse. he failed to save shen jiu from burning to death. when he found out shen jiu didnt die, he failed to resolve the original motive by telling him "i actually did come back for you." when he tried, it was too late and shen jiu had died and he failed to realize he was talking to a different person.

in a world defined by reimbursement, qi-ge failed to ever reimburse shen jiu.

Headcanon that Shen Yuan was hotter than Shen Qingqiu, actually.

Like yeah SQQ being a cultivator gave him a boost to enough attributes + being in a stallion novel where everyone is either unrealistic hot or dog's butt ugly got the Shen Qingqiu body extra points, and he wasn't bad looking to begin with. Plus not being ill is vastly more important to the new Shen Qingqiu than those extra hotness points (Without a Cure notwithstanding). But part of the reason why he's kind of like, meh, at least I'm not hideous or anything, is because Shen Yuan's original body was a knock out.

I also like him as chronically ill, and, as many people know, beauty standards and sustained suffering are not as incompatible as they should be. Shen Yuan was conventionally attractive in part because conventional beauty standards seem to want everyone slowly dying all the time. But even setting that aside, the man had flawless bone structure, an appealing figure, captivating eyes, and the kind of voice that stopped people in their tracks.

All of which was a contributing factor to his antisocial lifestyle, actually. Despite the fact that Shen Yuan does enjoy company and requires a certain baseline of social enrichment for his enclosure, his internalized homophobia and closeting did not play well with overtures from interested parties (regardless of gender). The only way to minimize the odds of him being asked out on dates was to essentially become a shut-in, especially since even Shen Yuan can only make so many excuses before he himself starts to notice that he's going to a lot of effort to avoid specifically that avenue of socialization. Far better to just remove himself from any risk of it, and then vocally lament that oh no he's just too much of a nerd to get anywhere with women!

Anyway this largely doesn't matter much outside of sheer comedy potential for any situation where SY gets his old body/life back. Like imagine a reveal scenario where the System is going to transport them back to their old lives.

Shang Qinghua: well bro I guess this is gonna be the ultimate test of love, right?

Shen Yuan: what do you mean?

Shang Qinghua: our husbands are gonna see what we looked like back before we were glorious cultivators! they're going to have to track us down in our mundane, kinda shitty pre-transmigration lives! it's gonna be at least a little embarrassing, right?

Shen Yuan: *gets his old body back*

Shang Qinghua, normal human with average looks: ...

Shen Yuan, exemplary 11/10: ?

Shang Qinghua: what. the fuck?? bro what the fuck why are you hot???

Shen Yuan: don't make it weird

Shang Qinghua: make it weird??? why were you sitting at home reading my shitty novel when you could have been out there building your own harem???

Shen Yuan: stop exaggerating

Shang Qinghua: oh my god you've always been like this. this is it, isn't it? it wasn't even brain damage from the transmigration or something--

Shen Yuan: hey

Shang Qinghua: --you've just always been completely unaware, haven't you? every time I wrote a beautiful woman who didn't know her own appeal you'd be jumping down my throat--

Shen Yuan: because that's a stupid trope--!

Shang Qinghua: --JUMPING DOWN MY THROAT EXACTLY LIKE THAT but this whole time THIS WHOLE TIME it wasn't even a glow-up issue, you've just been that, personified, yourself--

Shen Yuan: look I know I'm not ugly but I'm not I'm hardly that good-looking

Shang Qinghua: YOU ARE NEVER ALLOWED TO CRITICIZE THAT TROPE AGAIN! oh my god. how many broken hearts did you leave behind when you died?!

Shen Yuan: none, I wasn't even seeing anyone--

Shang Qinghua: yeah full offense but I am nottt taking your word for that. I bet you had a harem you didn't know about in this lifetime too. I bet you had a fan club, like an anime prince

Shen Yuan: *mumbling*

Shang Qinghua: what was that?

Shen Yuan: I said... only in high school...

Shang Qinghua: oh my god

Shen Yuan: it wasn't a big deal!

Shang Qinghua: *frantically trying to see if he can find any trace of it on the internet now*