Madtank95 - MadTank

Fairy Tail Question

Is Lucy’s luck ever really explored? They hint at there being something special, especially around the Tenrou Arc but nothing ever really comes of it. I think it would have been neat to take that plot device and actually go somewhere with it, Celestial Spirit Magic as a whole really could have gotten more development, I think. The idea of it has so much potential and the Heartfilia family history too, a matrilineal line of celestial spirits who may or may not come from nobility in a country where the Princess/Queen is also a celestial spirit mage? (was that ever confirmed in the manga or it is it anime only?) I guess the worldbuilding in general is a lot of wasted potential. Mashima gave us such a wonderful world and then never really explores it, kind of reminds me of the lost potential in Naruto and its political landscape which could have been so interesting and then was ignored in favor of cliche shounen power boosts and big energy/monster fights.

Green Arrow

If I had a nickel for every time the CW made Oliver Queen’s love interest their tech support OC instead of his canonical girlfriend from the comics I would have two nickels, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it happened twice.

BNHA Headcannon

Gran Torino adopted All Might. Toshinori met Nana when he was in middle school, like 13. Since he’s an orphan she decides to take him in, before All Might became the Symbol of Peace a lot of systems were pretty corrupt, including the foster care system. Obviously Nana can’t adopt Toshinori herself since that would draw All for One’s attention, so Gran Torino does it.

Scooby-Doo AU-ish

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.

Baby Milo

Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D’s Headcannon

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.

The Yu-Gi-Oh Problem

I’m going to completely ignore Zexal and on.

I really liked Yugioh 5Ds when I was younger, I don’t really know why considering it was kind of a blatant cash grab, but the English theme was really catchy and I really loved Yusei’s voice actor, I might have had a bit of a crush on Yusei in general. I guess I just totally fell for the cheap “edgy” gimmick, which is funny because it isn’t like DM and GX weren’t dark themselves, but whatever. Yusei is definitely the best protagonist of the three. Anyway, my problem.

DM anime happened in, like, the early 2000s, and GX was supposed to be 10 years later with 5Ds a couple decades after that in some nebulous future point. But all of the shows were produced in the mid to late 2000s, so all of the tech looks pretty much the same across the three shows, though 5Ds has some generic futuristic looking stuff that still manages to look out of date. This really doesn’t work with what we now understand of the progression of our tech, by the time of GX everyone should have migrated to touch screens and, like, holo decks and stuff, not still using the clunky duel disks. And who even know by 5Ds time, the digital age is making things pick up steam, fast. None of it makes sense, as driven home by Dark Side of Dimensions when Kaiba and Yugi has their ridiculous high tech VR duel, makes it look like VRAINS should be the series that comes in 10 years instead of old school GX. Whatever.

The Fanfiction Question

The one thing I’ve never been able to understand are those unfinished stories that have no proper explanation as to what happened to the author. The ones that say they haven’t been updated in years but when you read the author’s note it sounds like they are still writing it and plan to regularly update, some even specifically promise an upcoming update that never came. What happened? I get that since it’s fanfiction these stories are being done at the author’s leisure and we can’t expect too much, but is it that hard for the author to write a quick note saying they’ve abandoned the story or they’re going on hiatus? Why just leave it without explanation? The not knowing is one of the most frustrating things about fanfiction, even when compared to the over abundance of horrible out of character stories.

DCU

It’s probably my Superman bias, but I get really bothered by the trope that has all of the Supers being scared of the Bats. Like, sure, Batman and his kids are cool, but come on, it’s SUPERMAN, he’s the strongest superhero in the world and the rest of them are almost as strong. Superboy I, Superboy II, Supergirl, Power Girl, all of them, it’s just not happening. They respect the Bat Clan, they are incredibly intelligent and well trained heroes, but they aren’t going to seriously be able to beat the Supers, nor would they actually want to. They’re friends, they trust each other. I get that it’s short hand to show a character is bad ass by having their allies be scared of them, but I’ve never really understood why genuine friends who cared about each other would act that way. So yeah, that’s just me.

ATLA Thoughts

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.