I Think Stephanie Meyer Is Just Really Good At Writing Horror Scenarios, Interesting Side Characters

I think Stephanie Meyer is just really good at writing horror scenarios, interesting side characters and amazing backgrounds and would be great at self inserts, but then she just goes and makes the self insert a blank main character that is stuck in a love whatever shape with some weird age gaps thrown into it.       

Whenever I read her books as a teenager my overthinking brain just filled in all the blanks when it got to her main characters being bland, I just imagined them as beeing like I was with opinions and interests. And I always enjoyed all the worldbuilding she had in the Host and the other vampires aside from Edward with those fantastic background stories that sounded so interesting.

And as a teen I didn’t realize how bad the age gaps were, just because I felt so adult as a teen, that I figured it’s cool for a 26 year old guy to be hot for a 17 year old girl. If I see a 17 year old now I think: that’s a kid. But I guess the appeal as a teenager to have an older guy into you because he sees how adult you are, when everyone in the real world doesn’t is there and psychologically understandable. But it just does not hold up to me nowadays. If I wanted to read a self insert, I’d go and read a self insert not read Bella Swan making terrible life decisions and being cool with child grooming werewolfs or Melanie flashing Wanda with makeout sessions of her way too old boyfriend, that only doesn’t sleep with her because they don’t have birth control.                        

I totally get why you have issues with this only being such surface level right now, though I do have the feeling that at some point we’ll get Spinner flashbacks too, like we did for Toga, Twice, Tomura and Toya so far (only those who have at least one name starting with a T get a backstory XD) that will explore that topic more.

Because with most societal issues it was like that:

At first we have Shoto saying his father trained him too much and Stain saying that some heros are in it for the wrong reasons.

And by now we have Toyas abuse flashbacks, Hawks killing Twice and Best Jeanist supporting both Endevour and Hawks after it was made public.

At the beginning we had Tomura seeming like a boring just evil villain and his team of also just evil, crazy villains,

but by now we see them as the humans they are with their very good and bad traits alike and that they have very good reason to go against society. With Toga being told to suck it all in, Twice being left on the streets until he became mentally ill, Dabi being abused, Tomura being both abused and groomed and we can make clear assumptions about Spinner and Compress, even without having flashbacks to get the full picture.

And we have not just Spinner adressing the quirkism. Yes the Quirk-KKK were obviously a very over the top version of that,

but early on we learn from Tsuyu that she got bullied for her looks and has much more typically human features than Spinner does.

Shinso gets quirk discriminated during the entrace exam even though he has an extremly strong and useful quirk.

Eri gets told she is evil because of her quirk.

Toga gets told to just ignore her own bodyly wants and needs because blood quirks are wrong and strange instead of finding a way on how to cope with it in a healthy manner.

So it isn’t just the one villain, but it is Spinner who has the stronges heteromorph appearence in combination with a weak quirk that doesn’t make up for it in the eyes of society.

And with pro heros it seems to work just like in our world: think about the many celebreties getting bullied at school and beeing called ugly when now they are considered beautiful and even if they aren’t conventionally beautiful they are an inspiration for people.

I bet at least one kid made fun of Best Jeanist neck and he is very human looking. But then you have people with extremly strong features like Gang Orca, who is about as Orca looking as Spinner is Lizard looking, but he is a pro hero so he is cool and strong, not to mention he has a really strong quirk for fighting.

I mean we have Centipeder, Hound Dog, Selkie, Nezu is an actual mouse with a quirk but none of them face on-screen discrimination because they are the cool guys, pro heros,, respectable teachers, they are “in” and they have strong quirks.

And the fact that the League does not care that Spinner looks like a Lizard and has a weak quirk compared to all of them (he is the only C-rank villain in the executives of the PLF later) says a lot about them.

We know from his one flashback panel that he pretty much spend all day locking himself in and gaming, which is understandable if you face quirkism on a daily basis, the way he looks isn’t something he can just change and it’s nothing he should have to change in the first place.

Neither should there be any need to have a strong quirk to be respected by others. We saw quirk discrimination right at the beginning against Deku, but he gets it solved by getting a quirk and doesn’t seem to think about it anymore, which is strange considering Bakugo bullied him for years because of it any the rest of his classmated made fun of him aswell.

And we have that lovely panel of the childrens book with the terms that quirk based discrimination, especially the heteromorph kind is not ok and you should not do it.

But as Spinner sais himself: mutant is getting used more and more but not in formal settinsgs, because it is downgrading.

And the "mutant exclusionist comitee” are so far the only kills Spinner had in the manga. We especially saw Toga, Dabi, Tomura killing people on multiple occations, but Spinner specifically only when he went to kill the mutant haters, which is very telling about his position in the story is.

The Leauge is compromised of those who were let down by society to the point where they snapped and Spinner is the side of them that shows the quirkism and how harmful that is.

So I totally understand your frustration of not getting more into that topic, but from his usual way of framing in storytelling (I made a post about how that was done with the Todoroki family aswell) I would say we are just not there yet and it will come up with Spinner’s background later in the story.

Something that frustrates me is the depiction of Quirkism and the death cult that hates people with Mutant Quirk.

The death cults are a caricature of bigots and hate groups that serves as nothing more than as a plot device. For me, it comes off as Hori only skimming the surface of a systemic problem while petting himself on his back. The death cult is simply a extreme manifestation or a parody of bigotry.

When people think of hate groups, they would think of people who openly hates minorities or wear weird ass garment to signify their hatred of a marginalized group. In reality, bigotry is something that can internalized even in the "best" of us.

Not every bigot is a death cult member who wears black. It can be simple as Dabi calling Spinner a "lizard" or Shouto calling that police a "mutt" despite it appearing harmless to the audience or the characters in the story.

And for me...the most dangerous villains in Spinner's story is not the death cult. The villains are the hero society. When Spinner's feeling is dismissed...I wonder how long did he have to tolerate this injustice. The people around him who overlooked his pain or minimized his experience...

But it doesn't matter...because he's a 'villain'...

I propse a slightly different version:

Just because I do think that Endevour wouldn’t kill Dabi, but also wouldn’t be any use if it came to a physical fight with him, considering what happen last time. And Hawks would go for the kill and his favourite hero having a different opinion about that would be a blast to read. “What do you mean, you don’t want to kill your firstborn?”

Shoto in the background gets ready to take down Hawks.

I figured out how to uphold the shounen required fight scenes while also having natsuo non violently talk dabi down:

Shouto calls natsuo over to talk to Dabi. The two have a good heart to heart while Shouto beats the shit out of enji and hawks.

Like this? Yeah, I'd enjoy that

@owlsinathens At this point it doesn’t matter anymore. I see a squid, I see 8 legs, I see a Greyjoy.

Chainmail Octopus Headpiece by Vanessa Walilko, made by connecting over 12,000 rings by hand

This is so gorgeous. I want one, but do probably not want to pay for that one.

But to be fair I already have a few including this one (and the matching earrings), a wonderful gift from by finace.

But this is more Euron Style.

Chainmail Octopus Headpiece by Vanessa Walilko, made by connecting over 12,000 rings by hand

This is a perfect example of framing done right in writing.

We are first shown that Shoto got abused, but not enough to see the full picture. For all we know at the beginning Endevour seemed to just have trained with Shoto too much, but because Shoto does want to become a hero it doesn’t show as horrible as the actuality of it is.

Then we see him noticing his bad behaviour and wanting to better himself. We see through Natsuo that there is more to it, than just overtraining Shoto, but again we don’t get a clear picture of what that means.

We see him after that in a light of a man who is trying to better himself and does want to be worthy of the title of Hero No. 1. And then we get the real hit of the Toya backstory. Dabi was heavily forshaddowed to be Toya and so was Endevour being more abusive than we already knew.

But we couldn’t fanthom how bad it would be, because we saw his victims starting to cope with it in a going forward and forgiving manner, especially Fuyumi. And since Shoto so far doesn’t even notice himself that he is a victim of abuse we didn’t see how bad Endevour really was.

And then we get this.

If we got this at the beginning we would have just straight up hated Endevour with no nuiance whatsoever, he wouldn’t be seen as a layered character and just as a horrible abuser (which he was to all of his family) and the focus would just be on this one family, instead of the overall picture that the No. 2 Hero can just get away with this.

Because of this excellent done framing we get to see that bigger picture while simultaniously getting important backstory for multiple characters and seeing Endevour just as what he is: an abuser who still hasn’t learned that he can’t seem to grasp that not everything is about him.

Watch me! They have been watching for years and it was a very different picture than what the public and the readers saw and now we finally get the full story.

bnha manga: *tries to make us feel sympathy for enji*

also bnha manga: