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noraguthrie-deactivated20211117
i hate when ppl act like the only reason to not like a "sad" ending is because you can't take it or whatever. personally as a tragedy enjoyer, i hate a poorly written ending. i hate an ending that is just kind of a bummer. i hate an ending that feels mean-spirited to the audience. i hate an ending that's redundant. i love a sad ending that is thematically consistent, poignant, and bespoke to the rest of its narrative.
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Doflamingo deserves a redemption arc (not in canon) (not in my AUs, either) (he doesn't deserve it I just want it) entirely because it would be so, SO funny to have him-- his personality, his aesthetic, his general aura of malice, all unchanged-- but on the good side.
Like. Bear with me. You're a revolutionary who's supposed to be meeting with an ally and the guy who shows up is a ten foot tall bird man dressed in pink and feathers who smiles like he's just learned that humans can bleed and is delighted by the news. You think to yourself Ah, fuck I'm gonna die, who screwed up our intel this bad? But then he doesn't kill you, and he says he's got the information the Revs need, which is... great, you suppose? It doesn't help that he's accompanied by a Small Child playing with a set of scalpels (god, you hope he's playing, but he sure looks like he knows what he's doing) and the younger Donquixote brother, who is a looming, smoking (literally, this man is on fire), grim-faced shadow in a matching feathery coat.
Your incredibly ominous new friends invite you for dinner and you accept because you're a little worried about getting murdered in a back alley and Oh, great, the whole crew is just Like That. Doflamingo makes a toast that sounds like you're definitely going to get murdered tonight, but hey, at least your last meal is pretty extravagant?
Then you get attacked by Marines and watch as this cackling menace drops out of the sky to rain feathery pink doom down on the opposing ship. He can turn men into puppets-- he's not killing them though? So, small wins? The younger brother trips down a flight of stairs and sets himself on fire.
You decide to ask for a desk job when you get back to Baltigo.
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And now for some Law headcanons, most of which are for a Cora Lives AU (ie: pretty light-hearted).
- His favorite colour is yellow, but he thinks it's too childish to admit. If someone asked, he'd say blue.
- Related, he's very easily embarrassed. He tries to project an image of maturity and confidence but he's too insecure about it. Doesn't help that he's one of the youngest members of his crew.
- Terrible coffee addiction. It's Cora's fault.
- He's a great artist. He designed his own tattoos and the crew's Jolly Roger and does remarkably true to life portraits, but he's gifted when it comes to anatomical drawings. No surprise there: how many other anatomy artists can take out their own organs for a live subject?
- Related: He does his own tattoos, as well as for the rest of the crew. With his Devil Fruit, he doesn't even need a tattoo machine to do it.
- Autistic, like Cora, but he's more aware of it. Before the destruction of Flevance, he struggled to connect to his classmates.
- His dislike of bread is due to the texture, but he's never been able to get people to understand that. He was surprised that Cora never questioned his repulsion or tried to talk him into eating bread. That ended up being an early bridge in their relationship.
- Most of his crew would guess that Law only reads nonfiction. Only the members he grew up with know about his comic collection.
- Penguin and Shachi have the tolerance to cold of huskies, and Bepo is a literal polar bear, but Law didn't do well in the cold when he was younger. He was stubborn enough about it that they often had to haul him back inside themselves, even when he was cold enough that his lips were turning blue.
- Secretly, Law is a little annoyed that he never even got close to Cora's height, despite his growth spurts when he got into his late teens.
- Law is very aware of the ways he's been influenced by both Doflamingo and Cora, for better and worse. Despite how much he hates Doflamingo, deep down he's grudgingly grateful to have learned from him. He's much less conscious of all the ways in which he is like his parents.
- Contrary to the assumptions of Marines who only know the "Surgeon of Death" by reputation, Law has a strict moral code (for a pirate, at least). He tries not to kill, but he won't stop his crew from killing. He'll permanently traumatize people with his Devil Fruit, but he tries to exercise his vicious streak in ways that won't murder and/or mutilate.
- He absolutely will kill for his crew.
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In no particular order, here's a list of Donquixote Rocinante headcanons that I've written into or at least gestured at in pretty much everything I write about him. Full disclosure, these are very self-indulgent and have little to no backing in canon (cw: his canon backstory and long-term unhealthy coping habits, look I write a lot of angst you know what you're getting into):
- He enjoys reading in his free time, especially very light-hearted fiction, and has a soft spot for Terrible Romance Novels
- He really enjoys doing his makeup, and finds it soothing. Surprisingly, he's very good at precise lines (he can do a killer winged eyeliner), but ends up favouring styles he can put on quickly and touch up easily.
- There are pretty gnarly scars left on his wrists from when he was tied up by the angry mob as a kid. When he gets stressed out, he tends to rub at them or, subconsciously, try to cover them up.
- He also has chronic pain from injuries received during that time that went largely untreated until Sengoku took him in.
- He takes his coffee with no cream and so much sugar. Just an intolerable amount of sugar. Except when he's upset and blaming himself for something, in which case he takes it without sugar (which no one noticed until Law). He's aware that he does this, but it's not so much an active choice as a compulsion to self-punish.
- He enjoys music and will sing to himself while absorbed in a task, but will also probably use his Devil Fruit to make sure no one notices.
- Autistic, but he'd never notice because Sengoku and Law both are too. Anything he does notice, he just assumes is the result of all the childhood trauma. (I don't think the one piece world has very much psychiatry yet, but I suspect they have identified PTSD-- similar to how we started talking about shell shock after WW1-- and enough work has been done on that to diagnose Rocinante).
- His eye colour shifts dramatically depending on the light. It looks anywhere from deep brown to bright red.
- His dislike of bread isn't due to intolerance, but again because of his Horrible Childhood-- eating mouldy bread gave him food poisoning on enough occasions to permanently put him off it and he flat out refuses to ever try it again.
- He's a very tactile person and is secretly very glad that Law has grown to enjoy hugs over the years.
- His clumsiness is caused by god-awful proprioception, but he's learned to compensate for it with very specifically trained Observation Haki. The effort this takes is too much for him to bother using it all the time, so he just bites the bullet and accepts the clumsiness.
- He picked up smoking in order to fit in better with his peers and is kind of annoyed with his younger self because of how much money he has to spend on cigarettes now.
- Sengoku's white goat was Rocinante's originally. The goat's name is Holden (metatextually, the goat is named Holden because that's the protagonist of The Expanse series of novels, and his ship is the Rocinante. Credit for this joke goes to my girlfriend).
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if you have some rotating around in your head, perhaps spare us crumbs of Law and Cora's dynamics with the Heart crew? ๐ฅบ
- I see most of the crew as being relatively close in age range (maybe a 5-6 year range, not including outliers), but somehow Law continues to be one of the youngest crew members. He has no idea how this keeps happening. Thank god Bepo is still the baby of the group.
- Cora, on the other hand, remains the oldest by far until they pick up Jean Bart. Some of the crew will jokingly say he's the crew dad.
- Because Cora is there, Law isn't as tense as in canon. Although Law is definitely the captain, having an older, more experienced first mate (and, crucially, so much less guilt) means that he's more comfortable accepting help and delegating.
- Related: Cora puts a lot of work into supporting Law's position as captain. It's a reversal of authority for them, but Cora, coming from a Marine background, is very aware of how a chain of command works (and how it doesn't). Especially early on, he was careful to defer to Law on major decisions and not undermine him. It's an added complexity in their relationship, but it worked out pretty well.
- The first crew member to join was Ikkaku, who was trying to get out of a rocky situation. Her early days were a little rocky, as she was suspicious of them and they weren't quite sure how to fold a new member into the pre-existing dynamic. In the end, it was actually Doflamingo's takeover of Dressrosa that broke the ice. Seeing their reactions to the news humanized them to Ikkaku, and her help keeping things going while Law and Cora were trying to emotionally recover solidified her place in the crew. Since she was the only non-Swallow member on the crew at the time, she has the best sense of how much taking down Doflamingo means to Law. She understands, more than the rest, that Law hates him.
- All the non-Swallow crew members joined after Cora and Law got their bounties, so those who kept track of wanted pirates knew of them by reputation. Reality didn't quite live up to intimidating expectations, however. Rather than terrifying, super powerful pirates, the Hearts are a cheerful, extroverted bunch, with a grumpy but kind captain and a goofy, charming first mate.
- Related: it's something of a rite of passage among the Hearts to see Cora take the brakes off. When a fight goes sour, or someone threatens the crew, or they just need to make a show, Cora can go from 0 to 100 in a snap. Law might be the real powerhouse, but he's always vaguely threatening (comes from hanging around Doflamingo as a kid). Cora's anger always comes as a shock to new members.
- Cora and Law are still the only members of the Heart Pirates with bounties. This is partly because they're the only members with Devil Fruits; partly because with their uniforms, most of the Marines they fight don't bother to try to tell them apart; and partly because Sengoku keeps "losing" any paperwork proposing bounties for the rest of the crew (read: feeding it to Holden the goat).
- Every few months, the crew tries to get Law to participate in music night. They've never succeeded, but they're convinced that they'll wear him down one of these days.
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It kills me that in his last moments, even when he can't explicitly say anything to Law without giving his position away, Rocinante still tries to give Law closure and hope. He makes sure Law knows that the "I'm sorry for lying, I just didn't want you to hate me" was meant as an apology to him, but I'm not sure Law realized that the rest of Cora's last words were for him too. His assurances that Law isn't going to become destructive and hateful like Doflamingo. That Law has beaten fate. That Law is free-- I don't think Law internalized any of that until much, much later. Certainly not until Doflamingo is defeated and Dressrosa freed. Maybe not until Sengoku tells him to accept that Rocinante just loved him.
picking a title for a work makes you suffer worse than christ on cross. like do i pick edgy song lyrics? pretentious latin legal phrases about blasphemy? a medical term that shows my Nerd fascination with bodies? a single-word title that just encompasses the Whole of the work? do i dare to dream and name my new beloved heir of my lands and estate after a meme?
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I continue to rotate in my head the question of why Rocinante points his gun at Doflamingo, but does not shoot. The question, to clarify, is about both these actions. Why does he draw his gun; why doesn't he pull the trigger?
It's a really interesting bit of background characterization which is mostly overshadowed by Rocinante's speech and Law's panic. Rocinante draws his gun, and the members of the Donquixote crew react, but are stopped by Doflamingo. That's part of why I'm fascinated : Doflamingo lets Rocinante point a gun at him. Does he expect to be able to avoid a bullet? Does he think (correctly) that Roci won't shoot him?
Rocinante draws the gun, aims it, cocks it, but does not try to pull the trigger. Is it a bluff to make Doflamingo pay attention to him, and avoid any chance he might notice Law? Does he intend to shoot, but decide he's too likely to miss? Does he intend to shoot, and discover he can't bring himself to do it?
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Anonymous asked:
For the wish you would write prompt, the first things that came to mind were all ideas youโve already floated, which is surely cheating! But Iโd love to read about Ikkaku or another member joining the crew in a Cora lives au, or Cora bonding with one of the other Hearts because they both love romance novels! (Basically I just want crew interactions, you write them so well!)
I actually had the bones of a fic about Ikkaku joining the crew already started, and yet this took a week and a half to write. But I had a lot of fun with it, so thank you very much for your prompt!
If anyone would like to send in a prompt, I am still accepting them, although I will probably not be going through them too quickly.
Ah shit I forgot: this fic is part of the Then Somebody Out There Loves You AU. I've added it to that series now!
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We're far enough out from posting that I can admit now that Owens from Fearful Symmetry is actually one of my favourite One Piece OCs. I invented him for a fic that I never ended up posting (or finishing), in which he played the role of Generic Asshole who eventually becomes begrudging friends with Rocinante, but he really took on a life of his own after that. I've never had occasion to actually use him in anything, so he's just like. Blorbo from my head.
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The best thing about writing Law's backstory is that I can throw in little details about his charming classmates, and their lives, and their families, and the places they live, and their plans for the future, the whole time you'll know-- without me telling you! That's the beauty of fanfiction!-- that all these delightful young students and their families and friends and neighbors and acquaintances are all going to die very very horribly after prolonged suffering. So instead of going "oh, Patricia lives in the blue house by the docks, that's nice" you are left with the wonderfully gut-wrenching knowledge that Patricia and her friend Isaac will never achieve their dreams of travelling together and in fact will never make it past the age of about ten.