So, I’d like to take some time to address how Yuri on Ice handles the concept of “love” within the context of the characters’ interactions, mainly Yuuri and Victor, but also in regard to everyone else. It seems like ever since episode 4 when Victor proclaimed that being tough on Yuuri was “how he showed his love”, the word “love” has been thrown around left and right without a second thought. So when Yuuri refers to “Victor’s love” or Victor refers to “showing his love”, what exactly does it mean? Is it romantic love? Sexual love? Friend love? Familial love? Love of the sport shared by coach and pupil? I think it’s both a combination of all and none of those at the same time. It’s something wholly unique that is actually really difficult to pin down. Let’s start at the beginning.
Hinata: Hinata glows. It makes him impossible to ignore on the court, adding to his effectiveness as a decoy. The brightness and intensity depends on his level of focus. If he’s asleep, it’s practically nonexistent, and when he’s playing, he’s like a beacon.
Kageyama: Kageyama has prophetic dreams, which can show him things from a day to two weeks in advance. The gift of prophecy honestly isn’t very useful to high schooler. He can’t choose what he sees, so it’s mostly just, “Hinata will forget his lunch today and I need to bring extra” or “There will be a surprise sale at the store next week, gotta tell mom,” stuff like that. He hasn’t had a vision about volleyball since middle school.
Tsukishima: Tsukishima is an empath. It’s a useful skill when sizing up opponents during matches, but dealing with people whose emotions always run high (i.e. “hotblooded”) gives him frequent migraines. He can also get feelings from things like clothing.
Yamaguchi: At first, Yamaguchi thought he could turn invisible. It’s really an ability to lightly manipulate the perception of those around him and simply trick their brains into thinking he’s not there. He often slips into it accidentally when he’s feeling self conscious. Tsukishima, because he only trusts what his eyes tell him and has never seen Yamaguchi as someone to overlook, is the one person Yamaguchi’s power won’t work on.
Tanaka: Has a hyper-developed sense of smell. If he needed to, he could track you across town based on your shampoo and what you had for breakfast this morning.
Nishinoya: Is supernaturally lucky. Not enough to make things unfair in a match, but he always wins rock-paper-scissors, always finds money on the ground, his shoelaces never break, and he’s always on time no matter how late he leaves.
Ennoshita: Any food he makes stays perfectly fresh until it has been eaten. His tea never gets cold, the ice in his drinks never melt, the fruits and vegetables he cooks with never spoil.
Daichi: Dogs are inexplicably attracted to him. There is a large but friendly pack of stray dogs that regularly walk him to and from school, and whenever he travels to a new place, all the local dogs will usually come out to meet him.
Suga: Suga gives people the little things they need. Before he leaves his house, he will pick up three paperclips,a napkin, a pen, and a pair of socks. He gives the paper clips to a woman he passed on the street, who, unbeknownst to both of them, will have her dress rip and will use the paperclips to repair it. The socks go to a man who will step in a puddle during his lunch break and ruin the socks he’s wearing. The pen and the napkin go to a man who will end up using both to repair his coffee maker when it breaks in about an hour. Suga knows none of this; he knows only that the items are needed and that these are the people who need them.
Asahi: Asahi can talk to spiders. Which is both incredibly useful, as there are an awful lot of spiders and they know a great deal, as well as incredibly stressful, because Asahi doesn’t like spiders. At all.
That is- a reflection of why he is doing what he is doing.
Putting aside any bias that comes from ships or preferred characters, I believe that the whole fandom can agree on two things:
Viktor has a fascination with Yuuri.
Viktor broke his promise to Yurio.
Now, based on the wiki and the episodes, some of things we know about Viktor also include:
He is forgetful. (Yurio)
He only thinks about himself (Coach Yakov)
He is all about surprising people
He does thorough data gathering (trying to learn all about Yuuri to help him out)
He’s straightforward and serious about work
Current Analysis of him?
Viktor is motivated by selfish goals in helping Yuuri and rejecting Yurio, and he is rather fake, personality wise.
The biggest tip off here is the fact that his own (former) coach calls him selfish. Viktor is not only beautiful, but highly gifted (being at the top of his game when he was 16), and very charismatic. This is a man who has probably never been told the word ‘no’ in his life.
Yurio says that Viktor’s forgetful, but I find it highly unlikely that Viktor is, especially in regards to something ‘work’ related. Rather, he likely choses to be ignorant of certain things because he was simply allowed to. All he probably has to do is smile and go ‘oops?’ and the whole world would forgive him.
But, as Yurio also mentions, being able to surprise people is key when in a performance business, and Viktor was slipping from his throne. How could he surprise people now?
Well, what better way than to become the coach of an ice skater who was internet popular despite placing poorly in the last few competitions? Not only would no one expect it, but people would find it downright endearing of Viktor to have taken under his wing someone who was such a big fan of his work.
On helping Yuuri
Why would you say that though?! He’s so sweet and flirty with Yuuri!!!
Okay, first- that’s another thing that he’s known for: being flirtatious. And Yuuri is such a big fan that Viktor probably downright enjoys his innocent and unquestioning personality towards him.
Second, Viktor only acts like that in front of Yuuri; in front of an audience. And I say this because- BAM- MY (in my opinon) DAMNING EVIDENCE!!! (This is right after Yuuri pleads for Viktor to watch him carefully.)
From the moment I saw this, it bugged me. Viktor looks, in no way, happy. He looks bored, like he doesn’t care, and is simply saying what he knows will make Yuuri happy and motivated.
We’ve seen Yuuri’s range of facial expressions. We’ve seen Yurio’s too. Happy, sad, flustered, put off, tired, etc.
But 99% of the time we see Viktor, he’s all smiles and careless peacefulness. This, right here, is one of the few times we see him without some kind of ghost of a smile- and here, no one is looking.
It takes little effort to make him look even somewhat pleased by Yuuri’s willful words, but in these frames, where you can see detail, there’s no sense of happiness. I mean, look at this pic below. It’s such a far away shot but you KNOW, Viktor is smiling.
On why he pushed away Yurio
Continuing on with the notion that Viktor is a selfish guy, there is a possibility that he pushed Yurio away because Yurio threatens his legacy.
Viktor was, to quote Wiki, ‘at the top of the world’ by age 16. Because his birthday is in December, this is also the year he debuted in the senior division.
Yurio though, is entering the senior division at age 15, a year younger than when Viktor did, and he- arguably- has just as much talent as Viktor. With Viktor’s mentoring, Yurio could easily surpass everything that Viktor did at his age. Yurio is promising talent, and Viktor knew it from the moment he saw little Yurio skating.
When he was little, Yurio tried a move that Viktor was known for. But Viktor didn’t go out of his way to say “Let me mentor, or give you some tips.”
But now, with Yuuri (who also mimicked Viktor’s moves), Viktor jumped at the opportunity to go mentor him.
Why? Probably because of the publicity it will bring. Back when he saw Yurio, he was probably still wowing the crowd on his own, and didn’t need the extra ‘wow’ that Yurio would bring. Now though…
In choosing who to mentor, Yuuri would definitely be a better choice to make Viktor look good, because Yuuri had a number of visible flaws that he could fix up. And who would take the credit when Yuuri will visibly blossom?
‘Wow, Yuuri’s changed and become so much more confident now, ever since Viktor came around as his coach.’
Yurio, though, as we all saw from the match, can already wow the crowd with what he’s doing. But he himself knows he can definitely do more. He wants Viktor’s guidance to become that best version of himself.
As a talented genius, Viktor must have seen that Yurio could have done better too, but instead of berating to help him grow, Viktor tells him it was his best work. It was almost like telling Yurio to settle for the talent he was pulling out now.
Firsts. Miyuki never really thought much about those; he had baseball and baseball had his life and he never really expected the myriads of firsts during his years in Seidou.
It’s his smile, Miyuki thinks, the thing that first got to him, his smile, his golden eyes and fiery enigma; Sawamura Eijun is a heat of blaring energy with wild pitches and wild soul that sucks him in with nowhere there to run.
Firsts. Curiosity woven in sun-hot magnetism, attraction, a pull towards bright, open eyes, and a warm, foreign feeling settling in between his bones, in the cracks of his very being. A confession, spilled between quivering lips, and kisses, charged with electricity, bruising, wanting, exciting. It’s a thrill of midnight secrets, warm, damp breath agains his skin and fingertips down down and past the waistband of his baseball uniform.
They play on the edges of a first love, not falling, nor staying still; wobbly steps of lingering touches and teenage uncertainty, of trembling fingers and precious moments burnt forever in their chests.
The first time they allow themselves to cross yet another line is the day Miyuki finds himself packing clothes and books into boxes, days after his graduation; not planned, just an idea at the back of their minds, sparked and kindled by each of their kisses, turned into a wildfire by the day Miyuki is supposed to leave.
(Fear burns stronger than certainty, Miyuki finds out.)
Sawamura comes as the storm he is—no warnings—and sucks Miyuki in, like a whirlwind of energy, want and desperation. His lips tremble hard as they kiss and the small whines raising from his throat send shivers down Miyuki’s spine; electric shocks, reminders of an inevitable parting.
“Miyuki—I.. I need-,” Sawamura pleads, unsaid words hanging in the space between their lips.
“I know, I know.”
“Please.”
And it all goes downhill from there, Miyuki’s resolve crumbles and melts away and they peel their clothes off on the way to the bed; shaking hands and trembling bodies, Miyuki’s first happens days after his graduation day, unplanned and unexpected, with names spilled from parted lips like prayers.
They’re clumsy and unexperienced, and it takes some time until they figure it out, but they both discover the sweet ache of anticipation and the striking bliss of being so close to someone so dear; Miyuki opens up in Sawamura’s hands as a flower-bloom and gives and gives until he’s spent.
And honestly, it should have been sweet and slow, yet it’s anything but. It’s desperate, and fast, and overflowing with raw emotions and unsaid words and God, isn’t it perfect. There are fingers twisting in Miyuki’s hair, damp, quickened breaths against his mouth, words dying in his throats and his heart can barely take it.
They don’t last long at all and it’s with his fingers between naked thighs and wet, sloppy kisses against the curve of his neck that he comes and Sawamura follows with the sweetest sound of surrender and Miyuki feels his blood white-hot in his veins, flowing from the tip of his ears all the way to his toes.
“Are you okay?” is the first sentence Miyuki musters when he collects himself enough to speak. He props himself on his elbows so their eyes meet.
Sawamura just stares back with big, glassy, golden eyes. His lower lip quiver as he opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again.
Miyuki just strokes the skin under Sawamura’s eyes with his thumb, slow and gentle, saying it’s okay with no words, just mellow whorls over freckled skin.
“W-wait for me?” Sawamura whispers finally, his voice breaking at the end and Miyuki feels the words like a punch in the gut, painfully raw with emotions that flow right though his body as realisation settles at the back of his mind. How big of a deal was this first for them and the emotional impact it might have on Sawamura, on him too, on their relationship.
“It’s just a year,” he tries, his voice coming awkwardly high and cracked, “we’ll make it.”
“What if I—”
Miyuki shushes him then with a light press of his lips on Sawamura’s. He feels so heavy; his body and heart, they weight him down as an unpleasant feeling builds heavily in his stomach. Fear, it’s raw and scary, he thinks, as he cradles Sawamura into a tight hug. You’ll make it, is what he doesn’t say.
His eyes begin to sting unpleasantly, myriad of emotions threatening to well over again. Open and exposed, right here in the arms of the person who cracked his mask and made himself home in the space between his bones, he lays scared and so in love it hurts.
Sawamura mumbles something into Miyuki’s neck, something that sounds like I’m sorry and don’t worry, his hand caressing Miyuki’s back in slow, sweet circles as he works his fears and frustration out, warms palm on sweaty skin, reassuring, present.
“I—,” Miyuki tries, but his voice comes brittle. They lay in silence, hugging, until Miyuki speaks again, “Sawamura.. was this too much?”
Sawamura’s hand on his back stills for a second and Miyuki tries very hard not to fall apart.
“Yes,” he mutters, “and also no. I wanted this. Was is too much for you?” Sawamura asks, voice small.
please tell me the wildest shit that happened in homestuck’s fanbase, its like listening to old tales that can’t be true but are.
Well there was the girl who nearly killed herself by soaking in a bathtub full of vodka and grey sharpies to try and dye her skin for her troll cosplay. And the fact that a bunch of fans sent the creator a MASSIVE horse dildo that later ended up in the comic. And the two people who spent $10,000 dollars a piece to have their OC’s appear for one frame and be immediately killed. And the one time a homestuck flash update ended up DDoSing newgrounds by accident. And the totally irregular update schedule made it so there was an application developed to tell you when the comic updated. The culture around homestuck is really surreal to look back on just for the sheer volume of alternate universes and fans works and in jokes and subcultures that developed within one fandom. It really makes me wonder if anyone will be able to capture that level of obsessive enthusiasm again. Like people joke about Steven universe being the new homestuck and I can see some parallels but that fandom still seems way smaller and way less messed up than homestuck at it’s peak.
It wasn’t just internet concentrated either, it pretty much set up a lot of standards and practices for conventions today. In-characters panels were no where near as popular until Homestuck popularized them and now there’s ones for every fandom out there, versus only a scattered few (mostly Hetalia) before Homestuck had 5 going at any given con. The concept of a “draw party” was also a Homestuck invention, I believe, draw parties being midnight meetups at dead parts of the con center where people sat around, trading art cards and generally hanging out but with the common theme of them all being Homestuck fans. “Gotta go fast” and “first” took on whole new levels because as soon as a new design were released the first person to put together a cosplay for it got an intense amount of notoriety, mainly because it was generally just a few hours after the design appeared. Hell, I was once at a con where Homestuck updated on Friday and the next morning someone had made the cosplay in their hotel room and wore it to the con.
Sadly there were also downsides which is where the crazy stories come from. Homestuck was something absolutely new because it was a perfect storm of being huge, having almost all characters you could cosplay require body paint, and having a really disproportionate amount of fans being very young and inexperienced at how conventions worked.
Many conventions put limits on body-paint after Homestuck got popular because of young, inexperienced cosplayers not sealing their makeup and tarnishing convention centers. Going to a small con that forbids body paint? Homestuck is why. Homestuck became feared at a lot of cons because a non-consensual hug from anyone at a con is awkward and shitty, but if it was from a Homestuck fan you ran the risk of having grey stains all over your costume, and I had seen it happen to people on multiple occasions. Homestuck was also the first fandom to finally force conventions start making rules and limitations on fan-run photoshoot gatherings, which they had previously just ignored or discouraged all together. Homestuck shoots were so big conventions had to start working with them. The Saturday photoshoot at Otakon that Alex and I ran at Homestuck’s peak had an estimated over 700 attendees, and the next year was the year Ota started regulating their photoshoots through official channels.
Speaking of that photoshoot and crazy stories, Michael Guy Bowman and Tavia Morra, two of the most prominent members of Homestuck’s music team at the time, literally showed up on a whim with a guitar and asked Alex and I if they could perform a three-song set in the middle of the shoot, then came back for the next day’s shoot in their Mobius Trip and Hadron Kaleido costumes and did it again.
Don’t even get Alex started on how she ran in-real-life Promstuck events in Manhattan for years with official venues, decorations and literal tickets.
Being in Homestuck for the time I was there was an incredibly surreal experience, because having been going to conventions for years before Homestuck, and having been somewhat in the center of these events (Homestuck was the only fandom where I was considered a “BNF”), I can still see the way Homestuck has changed aspects of fandom events at cons. I was in one of the first in-character Homestuck panels back in the summer of 20fucking11 and ended up being in some incredibly popular ones in 2012-13 that still get hits on YouTube today. Alex and I’s model for photoshoots are still being used by friends and people who we don’t even know who run other fandom’s events. Some cons I had reached out to so I could get official approval to run photoshoots of hundreds of people are still using my model and system to regulate shoots at their events years later. Hell, by the time I was hitting my peak along with Homestuck I was going to 10 conventions a year and running an average of 3 photoshoots per con, not to mention an average of 2 in-character panels per weekend that I was either in or running. At some of the cons I attended staff knew me so well because I had to secure the shoot details in advance and had so many panels under my name they had my number listed under “in case of Homestuck issue call her” because Homestuck was a category of attendee cons literally had to separate from other attendees and learn to anticipate ahead of time. I will emphasize, I was never on staff, they just knew me as the liaison for the massive hoard of grey 13 year olds that scared the shit out of them.
When people who have been in the fandom five years like me try to emphasize how big Homestuck was we’re not just talking haha it was huge, Homestuck fundamentally changed the landscape of conventions for years and a lot of those changes stayed.
OHH MAN PROMSTUCK, the final event clocked nearly 500 attendees and cost roughly $12,000 when the whole thing was wrapped. That’s barely the tip of the iceberg when it comes to this sort of discussion though.
Homestuck was a phenomenon because with frequent updates and no defined update schedule, the hype train never stopped. Frequently fandoms will go through phases of an explosion of content and then a resting period, which can easily be tracked by when new content appears. With things like TV shows, video games, or even most webcomics, having a schedule means you could tell when everyone was going to be freaking out, and the subsequent planning around that meant the hype train could be quantified. The problem with Homestuck was those curves couldn’t be tracked, especially because there was NEVER any warning what KIND of content we were getting. One day could be an update dropped at 5 AM EST that was two kids pelting each other with fruit. 4 hours later we could get a flash that killed 17 people. Then it could be THREE DAYS before another update where haha it was retconned that was a dream none of those people are dead. It was fucking anarchy. Sure there was a WAY to define the plot but knowing what was going on or what was coming at any given moment was fucking impossible, and the break between these updates is what spawned “update culture”.
The thing with update culture is that most content creators are aware of, and plan content updates around, the idea of what the fans will be feeling and thinking once that content is done being distributed. For TV shows, episodes are released with beginnings, middles, and ends- a narrative arc that allows people to start thinking about media the way the creator wants them to, leading them along with little trails of plot and puzzles to solve. But Homestuck’s updates weren’t planned like that, because they came in chunks of whenever it was done, a carry-over from the original Choose-Your-Own-Adventure format. Because of this, people were theorizing about thing that’d be fixed in the literal next page, but because we didn’t have that information, the weirdest shit started being produced. It also didn’t help that Homestuck has some fucking weird shit happen in it! And sometimes fan theories wouldn’t resurface until literal YEARS down the line (Tricksters, anyone??) and people would be screaming and throwing themselves on the floor. There was no predictability, and therefore ANYTHING WAS VALID. And it created an incredibly interesting, though HORRIBLY chaotic space, that by god, was so much fun. Homestuck was a large-scale production media produced like a fanfiction author and because of the size of the audience lead to PANDEMONIUM on a scale that can’t be easily replicated.
Like it’s not really appropriate to say “oh x is the new Homestuck” because the very nature of Homestuck’s creation and population ensures there will never BE another phenom like it. The landscape of fandom, due to Homestuck, has changed, because update culture can’t exist without the perfect storm of described attributes that this comic had- that now no one else can replicate because Homestuck caused people to move away from that style of storytelling BECAUSE of the hectic fandom! It all feeds into itself. (Sort of like the story of this comic, honestly.) The Homestuck fandom experience will likely never happen again because of the way Homestuck shaped the fan scene. And that’s cool to know about!
Also I feel I should clarify on some of the above points. To begin, they’re all fucking true. – The sharpie dyeing story is unfortunately real. It’s original source is 4chan, the OP posted it on their personal tumblr blog (which for some reason still routes to my page if you google it). It can be found here. – The horse dildo was also real. It was sent as a joke because of a series of horse dick jokes mentioned in the comic; for those not in the know about Homestuck, there’s a character who talks a lot about horses and their rippling muscles. Hussie included it as a find-able item in a later walk-around minigame flash. – Two people did in fact donate $10,000 to the Homestuck kickstarter to have their fantrolls be canon and then murdered. While I don’t personally know the story of the female fantroll, the one in the top hat (Nektan Whelan) was actually made by an American Army veteran who read Homestuck while deployed in Iraq. He credited it was part of what helped him stay positive during active deployment. I can’t find the link to this conversation because it was on formspring like 4 years ago but if anyone has the link, let me know, I’d be curious to have it archived. – The Homestuck flash in question that killed Newgrounds was Cascade. Hussie recorded that at that time he received over 1.2 million unique pageviews trying to access it at once, world-wide. It also crashed the main Homestuck site and forums, then megaupload, and (for a VERY short time), Twitter and Livestream, because people started streaming it and tweeting the links. Someone made a comic about how that experience felt and as someone who was there screaming at Newgrounds to let me in, I can promise it’s accurate. – The update notifier was a godsend, and people would design specific macros, sounds, and images for their notifiers. It became a mini-culture in itself how you heard about the update. For a long time, I used to make tumblr posts about it. Update culture, and how fast you got to the update, was so real.
Anyway, hi, I’ve been in the Homestuck fandom for more than 5 years now, talk to me about it. It’s been a hell of a ride.
Even if you’re not into Homestuck the fandoms cultural significance is fascinating
So a while ago I went back to reread a few of the older haikyuu chapters just for the fun of it, but while I was reading I picked up on a couple of things I didn’t notice the first time I read it, specifically with this page.
I know not a lot is known about Kageyama’s home life except for a few gestures the animators throw in and a few headcanons but thats just it. And this page really struck me on a lot of possibilities of what his life at home is like.
The first thing that gets my attention is that the lights are on, obviously someone must’ve been waiting for him (or possibly someone else) or was just courteous enough to leave the lights on for him.
The second thing that got to me was that even though he literally slammed the door and is stomping through the house, no one greets him back. I know he didn’t announce that he was back but he made his entrance blatantly obvious. Note that the house looks pretty quiet too, there’s no noise going on besides what Kageyama’s interacting with.
The lone pair of feminine sandals and the single key shows that he’s probably an only child, living with his mother or he’s like Tanaka and is living with an older female sibling/relative.
But despite the fact he’s not greeted doesn’t mean they’re not looking out for him, since they obviously found the lil tykes poster and brought it back for him. Whoever brought it back obviously supports him playing volleyball, and even if they’re not there all the time but their intentions are good at heart. And even though Tobio just leaves the flyer on the ground, he recognizes the efforts they made and goes to the gym the next day.
I think its p neat that Furudate leaves in subtle details like this, it really gives a depth to what a character is like without outright stating it. Sorry, if someone’s done this already, but I just felt the need to point this out.
Aowyn Tumblr Backup 