It’s kind of funny to go through AO3 and see how pervasive certain canon has become that has either been implicitly or explicitly contradicted by the text. Little stuff and big stuff scattered throughout.
Like, how everyone assumes Kakashi only read Icha Icha, but I’m pretty sure the implication is supposed to be that, during the bell test, it was his first time reading the series. Then there’s all this stuff about how Kakashi never taught Team 7 anything just because we never see it in the page. It’s pretty clearly implied that time has passed between the bell test and the Wave Arc, with the assumption being that training happened during that time. I think Kishimoto just doesn’t like drawing training scenes. Then there’s the bit about Sakura being super weak, like yeah, she’s not written super well and she’s definitely weaker than the boys, but her standard is still super human. Sakura, even in the first half of the manga, would be able to beat any regular person without any kind of problem. Sasuke seems to lose a lot of personality too, he didn’t get all stoic until after the time skip, he’s actually pretty expressive throughout the first half. Then there’s the idea that Naruto was outright abused by the citizens of Konoha. Okay, so we have no idea how he was taken care of between baby to kid in an apartment, but there’s nothing to indicate that he was treated nearly as horribly as a lot fic seem to write him to be. In the flashbacks it looks like he was pretty much the target of a lot of neglect and poor treatment with a lot of glares and people talking badly about him. But I don’t think there’s any evidence he was physically harmed. Not that abuse needs to be physical to be bad but people seem to really like to turn Naruto’s backstory into just the worst. The Sandaime might have made a lot of mistakes, but I don’t think even he would have allowed Naruto to be the regular target of people throwing things at him and feeding him rotten food. I don’t know, it’s just kind of funny how things got all twisted around in the fandom.
I was rewatching the first season of the show and I had some thoughts about how they wrote Zuko. I think it’s really interesting how in the first two episodes they had Zuko as just the full antagonist. Only to turn around in the third and make you root for him by pitting him against the immediately dislikable Zhao. You also had his ship be revealed to be so much smaller than the others after making it seem larger than life next to the Katara and Sokka’s village. I just find it really fascinating how we were being primed to support him from the very beginning.
I don’t actually have much interest in the Harry Potter fandom, not anymore. I think the entire series is overrated and that there are way too many Hogwarts AUs out there.
That being said, America would absolutely be sorted into Slytherin no matter what he likes to say about him being the Hero.
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 was feeling nostalgic thinking of the show and had this thought, where did Yusei, Jack and Crow learn to ride their duel runners? The show says that the duel runner Jack stole from Yusei was the first one he built, but they already knew how to drive and do so well enough that Jack became the King of turbo duels shortly thereafter. All three do some pretty spectacular stunts while riding, and that’s not the kind of thing you learn in a day. So I was thinking, Satellite’s a dumping ground for junk and trash, and something that probably became a lot less popular after duel runners were invented are regular old motorcycles. What if the guys found some, or parts of some that Yusei and Crow then built into bikes, and taught each other how to ride. Martha’s great but there’s no way she had the time to keep constant supervision over all the kids she was raising all the time. It’s canon that Yusei, Jack, and Crow had the time and lack of supervision to get caught up in gang fights, so clearly they had pretty free reign to get up to who knows what. So we’ve got three pre-teen boys with little supervision who find and reconstruct some old motorcycles where they then teach themselves how to drive. They would have had plenty of space to run around and I imagine they probably dared each other into doing stupid stunts. They also probably taught themselves turbo duels with regular duel disks. I’m just picturing them being the adrenaline junkies that they are and doing all sorts of stupid stuff that probably eventually ended in the three beat up motorcycles being destroyed and then after they met Kyousuke and made their gang. We never got a full idea how long that stuff went in for, but I’m guessing only like a year or so. So, pre-teen trio teach themselves to drive and run their bikes into the ground over the course of a few years. Then the three, probably age 14-ish meet Kyousuke and all that stuff happens. The three split after the gang fell apart, at some point Yusei falls in with the three friends we see at the start of the show and he builds his first duel runner. This was something he probably started after their motorcycles broke and worked on off and on over the next three-ish years until Jack steals it at age 16-ish. Two years later and we’ve got the beginning of the show with Yusei at 18.
So this is really late but I was thinking about Civil War and wasted opportunities recently. They should have had the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man be the one introduced, with maybe Tony going to his dorm or apartment to do the whole “I know who you are come to Germany with me” thing. They could have had Flash as his best friend and Zendaya playing a kick ass Mary Jane Watson. I can’t get over how the Michelle Jones character was just so bland and a waste of her talents. Also all the other MCU casting has been horrible, and yes I mean Tom Holland too.
I’ve noticed something of a trend in BNHA fics that kind of group all of the adult characters into being in the same peer group. This isn’t the case, there’s some pretty drastic age gaps between them all. Most of the teachers, (Eraserhead, Midnight l, Present Mic and the like) are all in their early 30s, they really aren’t that far off from being young adults themselves. I don’t know about all of the various heroes but Endeavor is 45 and All Might is 10 years older than him. All Might did not attend UA with his rival or any of his colleagues, he’s too old. I’m pretty sure he’s actually been being All Might for longer than most of his teacher colleagues have been alive. It just seems weirdly common for people to make him younger so they can have some high school romance back story in shipping fics, or just because they don’t seem to realize it. The whole point of All Might is that he’s been around a really long time, you lose some impact if that isn’t the case.
I enjoy the classic Superman movies well enough, they’re campy fun, but I really hate how they portray Jor-El and Clark’s relationship with humanity. Why does being Superman have to be some kind of grand mission he’s destined to go on? And the whole thing about him having to stay apart from them is just really weird. I guess it’s part of the Jesus analogy they were going with? But I hate that too.
Superman isn’t a chosen one, his birth parents didn’t send him to Earth with some mission to serve and/or lead humanity. They didn’t care about humanity, Earth was convenient because kryptonians look like humans and it has a yellow sun, so they knew their baby would be safe and could blend in. The only thing Jor-El and Lara cared about was getting their son off of Krypton so he would be able to live, what he did after that was entirely up to him, they just wanted him alive.
This idea’s shown up other places, I remember it clearly from Smallville where the Jor-El AI was almost an antagonist, I didn’t like that either. The AI should just be a database sent with Clark so that he would have information about his species, it didn’t have any purpose beyond giving him a piece of home.
So, yeah. That’s always bugged me, especially when it was used as an obstacle for Clark and Lois being together. Why would his parents ever want him to live alone his whole life? Doesn’t it make more sense for them to want him to find a romantic partner (if he’s interested in that)?
That’s one of the reasons I’ve never understood Superman II. Why does Clark have to give up his powers to be with Lois and why does him being Superman mean they can’t be together? It’s such a weird plot line. Those movies really wanted to make him some kind of god figure didn’t they?
I really do prefer the version of him where he’s just a guy who wants to help but not let I take over his life, so him mom made him a suit.
Don’t know if there’s anything out there that contradicts this but as far as the main manga goes, Luffy met Shanks when he was about 6 or 7 and living in Foosha village. He went to stay with Dadan afterwards and lived mostly in her care until he was 17, but what about before? I think it’s pretty common fanon that Luffy was mostly cared for by Makino and was otherwise some kind of wild village child. We also know that he had to have been with Dragon for at least a bit before being handed over to Garp, but we don’t know what age that happened at, only that Luffy was young enough that he didn’t remember his dad at all. So here’s my thought, what if Luffy was, like 3 when he ended up on Dawn Island? That young enough to not have any permanent memories. I don’t know, I just like the idea of Dragon actually getting to raise his son for a while. Maybe Dragon decided to take Luffy to Garp after Luffy’s mom was killed in a raid or something. There’s just room to play around with things.
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.
Velma is a conspiracy theorist and cryptid obsessed, fascinated by all myths, legends and folklore and even the mention of magic of any kind. Sure she’s a scientist, but that just means she wants to figure out how and why the magic works, it doesn’t make her a sceptic.
None of the gang are sceptics, they can’t be, not when they go around with a talking dog familiar and his lanky warlock companion.
Shaggy’s the only one who actually has any magical ability but it’s Velma who’s figuring out how he can use it. He found Scooby when he was seven, playing in the woods behind his house when suddenly there’s this little brown puppy smiling at him and talking to him. Shaggy didn’t think anything of it, Velma became obsessed with figuring out what he was, Fred went into denial about if for a solid year and Daphne just shrugged and said that the talking dog was weird but cool and moved on.
Daphne has always been good at accepting things that most people would be stopped in their tracks on, Shaggy too, of course, Velma and Fred are the ones who need the explanations, though Velma will accept a magical one while Fred would prefer an actual scientific one. He’s a mechanic and an engineer kind of person, strictly in the confines of the hard sciences even though the life he lives means he can’t deny the fact that science isn’t actually the end all be all.
It was Velma’s idea to start the road trip the summer after they finished high school, she was determined to find an explanation for Shaggy and Scooby. There were rumors and stories about the supernatural all over the place and it gave the gang some vague goals for the trip. Daphne, always looking for a reason to get out of her too big too quiet mansion of a home, was all for it and Shaggy has always been willing to go along with Velma’s schemes. Fred was the one who took the most convincing, but he came around eventually, like always.
The road trip became a tradition, any time they had a long enough break between their classes at university, or cooking school in Shaggy’s case, they hopped into Fred’s van and headed out to see what kind of adventure they’d get into this time. Sometimes they stumbled onto real magic and sometimes they didn’t, but an adventure was an adventure either way.
Velma became incredibly skilled at detective work, Fred grew increasingly able with trap building, Shaggy practiced his magic and Daphne had all sorts of chances to use her many eclectic skills.
(Growing up the surprise child of a rich couple with five already grown daughters led to a wide range of lessons from sewing and music to fencing and martial arts to literally anything she wanted to try out ever.)
Mostly the gang just lived their lives, it just so happened those lives included jetsetting around the world and dealing with an absurd amount of insane mishaps.