So in Rise there’s a small running gag where whenever one of his family members try to assume what Leo’s doing it cuts to him doing basically the opposite of what they’ve just said.
Raph: Hey! Where’s Leo?
Mikey: I’m sure wherever he is, he’s trying to save us
Raph: Leo probably talked his way straight into Big Mamma’s dungeon
But the interesting thing about this gag is the reverse isn’t true, when Leo guesses his families actions he’s almost always correct in predicting their actions
Leo: Look I bet the only reason we’re here right now is ‘cause Donnie inputted coordinates
Donnie: After inputting Shredder’s previous coordinates on the X-Y-Z and D for Donnie axis, I have calculated that this is the sight of our final resting spot
Leo: Mikey Razzed his Tazz
Mikey: Whip-o-Rama!
Leo: April finally used her crane license
April: ‘Why would you get a crane license April?’ BECAUSE THIS!
Leo: And Raph is going to put it all together in a plan to defeat that led head with this mystic collar
Raph: Wow Leo that’s remarkably accurate
Leo being able to predict his families actions to a near perfect accuracy shows his skill as a strategist & potential as a leader but the fact that the reverse isn’t true, that Leo’s family CAN’T seem to predict Leo’s actions to a almost humorous degree shows that while Leo has an understanding of his family, his family fails to truly understand him.
I just can’t stop thinking about the fact that Leo knows his family far better than they know him.
That’s the thing. All of them are genuine, but Leo puts up a front. He never allows them to see what he is truly feeling, even if it’s good. Leo needs to have control of what people think of him, so he builds a character and lives through it, acting, be it because he fears they won’t want him around anymore or because vulnerability is scary.
But the thing about putting up an act is that you need to know your audience. You need to know what will make them laugh, or cry, what will make them concerned and what will make them relaxed.
It’s not that Mikey, Raph and Donnie don’t know Leo or don’t take him seriously, it’s just that they do what people generally do when judging others: they use themselves as measurement. In all the ocasions op shows about the bois trying to guess what is of Leo, it always reflects on what we know they would do: Mikey has no knowledge of tactical escape, so when in need to save his brothers he would probably rush off and go on the same moment; Raph is known to punch his way through things, so again, it wouldn’t be a surprise if he was captured in that situation.
Leo, on the other hand, studies the people around him to know how they act so he can either mimic or find their buttons.
It’s a defense mechanism I know very well, so it was easy to recognize other people doing it. By knowing how other people work, one can predict conversations and situations to reach the best possible outcome and avoid criticism, reprimands and disappointment.
Leo knows how his brothers work not because he observes them out of love, but to know how to best deffend himself in a dire situation- be it physical of emotional.
Just how much ‘practice’ does one need to have to be able to go up against someone like Big Mama…
sorry to add to an already long post but:
my god THIS is why i love rise leo so much. i love crafty, political plots, and i love crafty, political characters, especially when they’re done well. with leo, this is a running character trait throughout the series: he’s decisive, incredibly observant, good at taking in and utilizing information on the fly, and a lot smarter than he makes himself out to be, not to mention his intuition.
he’s also ridiculously overconfident (or, at least, pretends to be), which makes him even more entertaining and unpredictable than he already is. that, combined with his charisma, enhances a character type i already love
when/if leo fails in some way, his cockiness can generally make up for it. either the others already expect him to fail (haha inferiority complex loop /hj) so they won’t have high expectations for him, or he can play it off as a joke. this also creates extra secret storytelling opportunities such as making him be serious about something/a failing of his feel a lot weightier (see: rottmnt movie) or he can subvert expectations to get what he really wants (see: lair games.)
but this also means that when he wins at something, or outplays someone, it feels earned. the audience is satisfied – despite everything, you want to root for him. i can think of several key moments where this characterization really shows through, and they’re some of my favorite parts of the show.
in bug busters, he’s the only one who doesn’t trust big mama. when the others get captured, he’s able to avoid the same fate by (ostensibly) predicting what was about to happen and fucking off. it’s his observation that allows them to get into the safe and ultimately leads to their “semi-victory” (plus being a better judge of character concerning draxum during the roof scene)
in ‘the ancient art of ninja hide and seek’ (one of my favorite episodes), leo is (iirc) the first to really reach an understanding about splinter’s techniques and successfully utilize them, leading to his brothers following suit.
i mean, i don’t even have to say anything about many unhappy returns or lair games – you already know
but one that really sticks out to me that i don’t see a lot of people discussing is one of the most beloved episodes of the show: the clothes don’t make the turtle. in it, we’re offered one final piece of background that at first seemed insignificant, but was something i couldn’t stop thinking about on my second watch-through
i’m not talking about him being the one to realize the key to getting out of the montage (though that certainly is part of it), i mean the reason they were there in the first place: leo’s obsession with houdini’s journals.
raph remarks about how the journals must be special, if leo’s so excited about them. and i mean, of course they would be. leo’s crafty, he’s good at getting in trouble, but he’s also good at getting out of it. he’s the type to play dirty. and while i’m sure most people recognized it, that little detail adds so much more to leo’s characterization (at least in my mind).
there’s many others, of course - those were just what stuck out to me.
(i could also segue into the inferiority complex stuff and all the other, angstier details, but this is long enough as is, so i’ll wrap it up)
i wish we had more time to really focus on this aspect of his character in the show, because it seems so underutilized in the fandom. honestly, its probably the main reason why i love his character so much.
and while there are a ton of angst opportunities here (which the fandom has obviously recognized + as an earlier addition pointed out,) there is also a TON of opportunity for taking advantage of that sense of satisfaction.
i mean, this is a fandom with a built-in future version of the characters! from what we see of f!leo, he’s free of his inferiority complex and has taken on the face of the resistance – he seems a lot more sure of himself, and even happier with/more accepting of who he has become.
so you have to wonder: how would these skills translate into leo as an adult? when he’s had time to grow and learn? if you think he’s crafty now, how much more cunning would a wise, future version of him be??
Introduced in Borderlands 2 was the ability to customize the player’s character with a variety of Skins and Heads. With nearly 100 Skins and over 20 Heads to choose from, it should be an obvious answer that not all of these are immediately obtainable by the player. A large majority of both are found by looting, killing, and completing Challenges. From having to fight Raid Bosses to turning in Missions, this guide is meant to inform the player on who to kill, where to loot, and which Challenges to complete in order to further customize their favorite Vault Hunters to their liking.
I’ve been seeing an increasingly large amount of people get into fic binding lately, which is fucking amazing! I love each and every one of you guerilla publishers! With the history of fandom takedowns, purges, and the bull shit legislation corporations try and start every few years, it’s so good that fics are being given permanency.
I’ve noticed that fic binders seem to be focused on longer fics, ones in the 50k onward range, which makes sense and is great because these fics absolutely deserve to be put into print! But, the thing is, my favorite fics have almost always been short one-shots, and no one seems to be talking about binding them.
So! I’m gonna show you how to bind short one-shots.
Having gone to this University, and having personally played hide and seek in the Harris Fine Arts Center, I guarantee you that NOBODY finds hiders unless they, too, are familiar with the bowels of the HFAC. Once you get down to the practice-room levels, time stops completely and you could walk up the back stair and end up in 1967. The halls change at least 8 times an hour, there’s no way you’re getting back out the same way you came in. When the lights start going off at 10 the whole bottom 3 floors descend into some subsection of the fey realm. I once hid up on the balcony stage access fire-escape thing of a lower-level theater, and 3 faculty walked by under me and not a one of them noticed the hulking, wheezing asthmatic lurking above them, half dangling off a rickety metal ladder that probably wasn’t supposed to be climbed. A fellow hider friend came and found me, and we sat up there for 30 minutes listening to some distant clicking sound before we realized nobody was actually going to find us. We had no cell service, and no internet to reach anyone. We got lost trying to get back out, and once we resurfaced, everyone else was gone, the building was empty, and we just went home to eat ice cream. Nobody knew where we had disappeared to, and nobody bothered to check if we were there before leaving. For all I know, they just assumed we had been lost to the gaping maw of the HFAC basement and when they saw us at church on Sunday it was probably like they’d seen a ghost. None of us ever mentioned it again.
Basically what I’m saying is Campus Police had no hope of finding them in the first place and probably lost an officer or two if they actually conducted a real search, because nobody except Senior art majors or veteran custodians actually knows how to navigate that building and make it out in the same dimension they entered from. Not at 11pm anyway.
This is better than any horror story and it’s all fucking real apparently
Alright, I’m back, and this time I’m writing for the Fem!Medic.
First things first, I find it easier to call her Miss Medic. Alliteration and all that. Anyway. I’ve been thinking on her a lot and I’ve been poking around, I don’t know exactly what the official design is for Miss Medic in the community, but so far I’ve been impressed with some of the stuff I’ve seen.
Here’s my version of Miss Medic.
I apologize for the sketchy quality. Microsoft Paint is my tool of choice for coloring. (also my only tool for coloring.) She’s based off of a couple different pictures.
Like, this is literally exactly her face and hair as I imagined it. Exactly. The. Face. Exactly. Like, don’t even look at the face on mine. Just use this one. The glasses for mine are different though. I like the circle glasses, they just need to be bigger. This was inspired by this picture I don’t have a citation for. Sorry whoever drew it. It’s not mine (duh).
I like the large circle glasses on this Medic, and my mind’s eye also originally liked the bun. I don’t know, maybe the bun will be reserved for the backstory, and the hair by doctor-assisted-homicide is the hair for present day… yeah…. I like that.
The rest of the Medic I drew was inspired by a red jacket I had lying around (It looks pretty exactly as it does in the sketch. I’m too lazy to go get a picture of the real one deal with it) and the Male Medic’s uniform. I stepped away from the skirts I’ve been seeing, mostly because it seems impractical to run in a pencil skirt.
Some other headcanons I have about Miss Medic; her Dove’s name is Andromeda. We’re genderbending the Medic, why not his bird?
Also. The Syringe gun and the Bonesaw are both fantastic weapons, but why can’t the Medic (either/both Medics) use other surgical tools as weapons? I think a scalpel or some surgical scissors would make a great emergency shank.
Alright, so you’ve seen the design, what about the story? I haven’t seen a lot of backstories written for her (probably because I haven’t been looking too hard…. whatever. If anyone has a cool one let me know).
First off, how you classify the AU is very important to how Miss Medic’s story changes. If the AU is one where the Medic is still the medic, just as a girl, then his previous backstory, whatever that may be, stands. However, if the AU is one where there are the original nine mercenaries, AND the fem fortress team, then that’s another story. Literally.
Alright stop stalling. I’m AUing in the sense that there are two teams out there, a Male and a Female. Which means Miss Medic and the Medic are two different people.
I don’t know exactly what the Medic specializes in, if anything, but Miss Medic is a specialist in Neurology. She knows absolutely everything there is to know about nerves, the nervous system, neuroscience, basically everything about nerves. She finished Med school, and was on her way to becoming a neurosurgeon, when she falls victim to a car crash. This paralyses the Medic’s legs, specifically because the spinal cord was severed in the Lumbar Vertebrae. Unable to walk or stand, she is unfit for duty.
Not to be kept down by her injuries, Miss Medic threw herself into research and development of a way to fix her legs. The result? Miss Medic’s Medigun formula.
It reinforces the nervous system, strengthening neurons and healing damaged ones.
To regain the use of her legs, Miss Medic injects the formula. It’s more potent that way, and works faster than the mist from the Medigun. It’s also what gives Miss Medic her passive healing ability. The Male Medic’s is caused by his leaking Medigun, but Miss Medic’s doesn’t leak because it was built for her by the lab boys, who wanted maximum efficiency. The Formula is only strong enough to give her back her legs if she injects it, and only lasts so long as it’s in her bloodstream. When the drugs wear off and are naturally filtered out, the cure stops working and she becomes paralyzed again.
The reason for this is that the injury, in this case her severed nerves, had time to heal over before she tried to heal it with the formula. This is also probably why the Medic can’t heal the Demoman’s missing eye. All the other wounds healed by the Medigun are recent wounds, usually ones that are still open and fresh. The Demoman lost his eye long before the gravel wars, and the medigun can’t heal what’s already been healed.
Anyway, Miss Medic opens a clinic. She can’t come back to the surgical community having miraculously recovered from the injury she received, so she runs a quiet little office for old people suffering from the early stages of certain neurological disorders, and has a 100% success rate with the use of her new cure.
She stays there and conducts business until she’s contacted by Miss Pauling. She offers her a proposition she can’t refuse. Namely, money. Lots of money. She offers her a position in an experimental new wing of Redmond Mann’s army in the Gravel Wars, the all-female team. The hope is that coming from a new angle of attack will give them an edge, and the girls are that new angle.
This team is stationed and trained up in Coldfront. It’s cold, male teams get switched out pretty regularly, and unfortunate accidents can be arranged up in those snowy mountains.
The mercenaries are expected to be just as good as the Male teams, and they’re given access to their tech. Miss Medic combines her formula with the preexisting one.
They all train pretty hard, and sharpen their skills against unsuspecting BLU teams. Usually these are the ones Blutarch (Cough the Administrator cough) doesn’t care about and wants disposed of. Because of all the snow, the white obscuring and blending in with the RED team’s signature color, they start being called the Pink team. (I will find a ridiculous acronym for PNK some other time) It’s not their official name, and no one would dare address them as such, but it’s a nickname nonetheless. Albeit one that is treated as a ghost story.
Most of the BLUs up in Coldfront don’t actually believe the PNK team exists. They haven’t seen it, or seen proof of it, and the BLUs who go up against the PNK team don’t come back. (Side note. I do enjoy the thought of the BLU Soldier talking about how they’re going to “destroy those RED ladies!” etc etc only to find that they will, in fact, be fighting an actual team of RED ladies.)
Time passes, the team becomes pretty well acquainted with their new jobs, and eventually they get good enough that Coldfront isn’t a challenge anymore. It’s time to move on to the Big Leagues.
That story, although incredibly interesting and full of detail, will be put on hold for the moment while I talk some more about Miss Medic. This is her post after all.
I headcanon (is that a real verb?) that Miss Medic wears neurotoxic lipstick. She started development on it after she was paralyzed because she wanted some way to defend herself. It’s proven itself to be useful on missions, when she runs out of ammo or a BLU Spy underestimates the Medic and attempts to ahem disrespect her. All it takes is skin on skin contact between her lips and her victim for the poison to take immediate effect. She is protected from her own weapon because of the medicine she has to take everyday, as well as just a general immunity built up over time from using the stuff.
Headcanon number two (honestly at this point it’s more like headcanon number 264) is the FemHeavy. I don’t have many ideas about the Heavy Weapons Gal, but I do think that the Medic-Heavy team still stands. Enough so that the Heavy will take care of her Medic, and that the Medic trusts the Heavy enough to have her keep an emergency syringe of Miss Medic’s medication in the last space on the Heavy’s bandolier. Also the Heavy’s name is Anya.
That’s it for now, the next post I make will probably be about the PNK team joining the RED team in their standard base of operations.
So… Lately I’ve been playing some Five Nights at Freddy’s… And exploring Youtube… and also developing an entire AU for stuff I found on Youtube… If anyone has seen the MMDxFNAF stuff that’s out there, you know that some of it is really good. They have human models for the animatronics, and my favorites are…. (I don’t know who to credit them to.. I’m really sorry about that, but just know that they aren’t mine in any way)
Foxy and Bonnie from FNAF1
Chica from FNAF1
Freddy from FNAF1
Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica from FNAF2
and Last but not least, Mangle
So, I don’t really have any way to tie this into the original story. Sorry, I don’t. I will use bits of it if they fit what I see, but other than that there’s really not a super huge amount of original plot in this.
Anyway. Fazbear Entertainment specializes in entertainment robotics. These androids can sing, dance, and play instruments just like humans, but can be programmed to perform, eliminating the need for practice. They have artificial intelligence so that they can interact on their own without the need for an operator, and don’t experience fatigue or other human mechanical shortcomings (such as the need for food or air). These robots are very popular, and started out as experimental technology in Children’s restaurants.
Different establishments have different models, so that explains the difference between the FNAF1 and FNAF2 models. Because they have Artificial Intelligience, they also have their own distinct personalities. They always come in sets of four - Bonnie, Chica, Foxy, and Freddy. The varying personalities play off each other, so Fazbear Entertainment sells the lot in the four-pack format.
Freddy was the first to be developed, hence his name is Freddy Fazbear. He is the ‘leader’ of the group, if there is one, and is usually what could be called the ringmaster- announcing his friends when they perform.
Bonnie, as well as being specialized to play his guitar, is a pretty good waiter and butler and will often be seen escorting parties around the restaurant when he doesn’t have a performance scheduled.
Chica is very popular with the younger children, and is very sweet. She usually has some kind of treat to give out, and loves to play games like hide and seek or duck duck goose.
Foxy is popular with the older children, as well as the teenagers who still come to the Pizzeria, because of his dashing Buccaneer style and the engrossing Pirate stories he’s well known for telling.
Unfortunately, Foxy doesn’t get as much time entertaining as the other three, because he doesn’t sing in the band. At one point he attempted drums, but gave up when he put his hook through one of the skins. As such, he’ll hang out at the cove and wait for his kids to come back, and to pass the time he started dancing while the others were singing. He doesn’t get much time to show it off though, because although he’s rather good at it the band doesn’t like sharing the stage or the spotlight.
Freddy, Bonnie, and Chica aren’t mean to him for being Foxy or anything, it’s just that he doesn’t perform with the band and the band likes performing; so, Foxy often ends up in the shadows for the simple reason that he’s not in the light.
Each group at each establishment is aware that there are other restaurants in other cities, but they really only see the other models when they all get recalled to Fazbear Entertainment for a Software update.
It’s at one of these updates that the FNAF1 group meets the FNAF2 crew. Waiting in the large open warehouse floor, the groups passive aggressively glare at one another, up until the point that someone bumps into someone else, or works up the nerve to say something snarky.
This is where I become biased toward my favorite character, and give Foxy a nice character subplot type thing.
Different models usually end up facing off with their doubles, so it was no surprise that Foxy and Mangle ended up at each other’s throats. Insults were thrown, teeth were bared, until finally Mangle said that she was a better dancer than Foxy. He, Indignant, challenged her.
That was the lead in that I imagined for this video by Foll Doll (X)
In the end, they both came away with a respect for each other. The two become friends, and wanted to dance more- resulting in (X) and (X), also by Foll Doll.
The two enjoy goofing off, as most friends usually do, resulting in (X) by oni gamer.
Mangle, similarly to Foxy, became overshadowed by the band and was left in her cove. Unlike Foxy, her Pizzeria was home to a younger demographic because the characters were 'cuter’ (or something like that) and so she was left looking after the children who weren’t interested in watching the band play.
This is where some of the original story comes in- these younger children did tear Mangle to pieces like they did in FNAF2. So much that some parts of her weren’t able to be fixed. On her next visit to Foxy, she told him what had happened when he had asked, and he did everything he could to help fix her up - even going so far as to giving her a spare wig of his and helping her style it.
This results in this alternate model of Mangle that I see a lot of videos using.
The two still dance together, and now Mangle is more difficult to rip apart.
I didn’t originally put the two together with the intent to ship them, (I personally enjoy the brother/sister feel of the two protecting one another) but I suppose it could be made that way.
That’s all I have for that story, but I also really enjoy (X) and (X) by Tecno Blaze. They are really high quality, and I love how the choreography and staging reflects the lyrics of the songs.
