We know Shanks was a baby celestial dragon left behind when Garp and Roger fought the Rocks pirates (making him being from the West Blue a lie) but all we know about Buggy is that he is from the Grand Line and was probably brought on at about the same age as Shanks. Pretty sure the implication is that they were both babies but that leaves several months difference not accounting for them being slightly different ages in general. So here’s my thought, I think there has to have been a reason Roger thought his ship was the only place a couple babies could go instead of somewhere safer. We know Shanks background so that one’s obvious, but what about Buggy. I think Buggy is from an island in the Grand Line where everyone has red noses like him but something happened and he ended up alone.
One idea I have is that his island was made up of entertainers that the celestial dragons liked to take as personal slaves but something caused them to revolt which lead to a Buster Call. Baby Buggy was hidden away and managed to survive until Roger found him. I just think there’s an interesting dynamic to have Shanks biological family be the reason Buggy lost his.
I have this idea for a time travel fic where Obito manages to do something that ends with Team Minato all returning to their bodies at some point before Kannabi bridge at the moment of their death. Of course, for Rin it would be the Sanbi incident, and I’m thinking for Minato it should be the Kyuubi attack, then Obito from the fourth shinobi war. So these three are coming from pretty bad moments in time and they find waking up in the past a second chance to fix things. Minato and Rin don’t know what’s going on, but they think Obito dies at the bridge and saving him is one of their major goals. Obito has a plan, he wants to change everything and go after things like a real fix-it, he gets Rin and Minato on his side easily, and then there’s Kakashi.
Kakashi died in his sleep, probably sitting in a chair on his deck watching the sunset, surrounded by his ninken and maybe with Tenzo or Gai sitting next to him. (I’m a kakayama and a kakagai shipper but it can be whoever you want or no one if you don’t want to have shipping involved.) Anyway, when Kakashi wakes up in the past he’s horrified. He has spent his entire life fighting for Konoha, first as a solider, then as Hokage and finally as an advisor, working towards real peace. And they succeeded. (I choose to ignore all Boruto related stuff, I kind of like combining this idea with my Daimyo Kakashi fic idea.) Whatever you imagine future Konoha being like, I like to think they brought the shinobi age to an end. They were moving past the time of mercenaries, fighting and war in favor of real progress. Details aside, Kakashi died feeling genuinely accomplished, having lived a long and full life, he was ready to pass on and he is not thrilled to find himself in the past.
When he finds out Obito is behind it, he is absolutely furious. He had mostly come to peace with what Obito had done, but he is now confronted once again with just how selfish and shortsighted he is. I imagine this fic mostly from the POV of Minato and Rin, maybe Kushina too. They are completely confused, they remember Obito as a happy and brave young man, and Kakashi as a cold and detached kid with stunted emotional growth. They have no idea what’s going on, they’re in favor of changing things and trying to fix it, Obito is trying to convince Kakashi that this is a good idea. All Kakashi really cares about is whether or not his future still exists somewhere and completely done with things otherwise. He doesn’t think it’s a future worth giving up just to appease his regrets. He’s also tired, Kakashi died from old age so he was, like >90, and he has no interest in repeating it all again.
I’m not really sure what to do from there, I just think it’d be an interesting set of dynamics.
My extremely belated list of Fairy Tail ships:
Natsu x Lucy
Gray x Juvia
Erza x Jellal
Wendy x Chelia
Levy x Gajeel
Laxus x Mirajane
Elfman x Evergreen
Freed x Bickslow
Lisanna x Cana
Loke x Mama Pisces
I’ve seen a few social media fics where in-universe characters argue about whether Batman or Superman is better, usually as an extension of the Gotham vs Metropolis debate. I was thinking about them and it occurred to me that no one within the DC universe would actually view Batman as being on par with Superman. Like, if Superman was real, this overpowered alien hero who saves people from actual natural disasters, he wouldn’t be considered “Metropolis’ Hero.” He’d be the World’s Hero, even the Gothamites would probably put him on a totally different league from heroes who operate primarily in their city. Yeah, sure, he debuted in Metropolis but he fights hurricanes and falling airplanes and alien warlords, EVERYONE would be invested in him.
I love Spider-Man, I love fanfiction, but it’s nearly impossible for me to enjoy fanfiction about Spider-Man. It feels like every one out there is about some infantilized teenage Peter Parker, and I hate it. It’s not that I have a problem with teenage Spidey, though I’ll be honest it’s not my favorite iteration, it’s just that most stories have him as the only teenager in the hero community, which ruins all of his best relationships. One of my favorite comic book friendships is that of Peter Parker and Matt Murdock, Spider-Man and Daredevil are great together, but most fanfic with them has Peter as this goofy innocent kid and Matt as this grizzled adult mentor type, which kind of sucks because they can be a real riot together as friends. I hate having Spidey cut off from all the other superheroes because of the age gap, and that’s not even touching how the Spidey being written in these fanfic is usually completely unrecognizable as Peter Parker. It’s tiresome and makes me want to avoid all marvel fanfiction in general, which sucks. That’s all.
So I’ve never really liked how OUAT integrated most of the Peter Pan mythos. Killian Jones is my favorite character but he doesn’t really match the Hook from the novel. Stuff like their version of the Pan, Frankenstein and Oz characters bother me because unlike the other fairy tale characters, they come from a single definite source. The Frankenstein stuff is hopeless and there’s already one fanfic author who made Whale actually work for me as Victor and whose characterization I use for my headcannons. So here’s my thought for Killian (which completely ignores all of the stuff about Wendy and her brothers that they added, it doesn’t add much to the plot anyway).
Killian is not the Hook from the Peter Pan book and neither is the Pan that the gang fights in Neverland. The book all happened mostly as written but at some point Wendy returns to Neverland after that adventure and something g happens. Maybe during one of spring cleaning trips? I don’t know, whatever the case Wendy ends up in the world of the Enchanted Forest along with the crew of James Hook. James himself is, of course, dead, in the stomach of the crocodile. Wendy, as Red-Handed Jill, takes over as captain and she leads the crew for a while in their new world. Everyone in the crew is unfamiliar with this world as they all come from the same world as Wendy. Neverland was supposed to be connected to an alternate version of Earth, a slightly more magical one than the Land Without Magic where folk lore and the like are real and stories like Peter Pan and Alice and Wonderland and Mary Poppins can take place. Maybe King Arthur’s Avalon was real in this world and stuff like the Trojan War and the Odyssey actually happened (I’m also ignoring season 5 here). The details of Wendy’s home world are not important, I just think those additions are neat.
Anyway, Wendy sails as captain for some time before disbanding the crew. During this time, she falls in love with one of her crew members, an Irishman named David Jones, Davvy for short. The two end up having two boys together, Killian and Liam. At some point Davvy, who took up as captain with some of the crew members who wanted to keep sailing, ends up cursed with the Flying Dutchman because the name is just too convenient for that to have never come up. Wendy goes ashore and raises her boys, helped by Mr. Smee who managed to have his own son at some point. Killian and Liam are raised on stories of England, and on Peter Pan and Neverland. Which is why when Killian ends up losing his hand to his own crocodiles he takes up the moniker of his childhood stories.
Meanwhile, whatever happened that led to Wendy and the pirates being sent to the Enchanted Forest also led to Neverland being opened up to it and being infected by its foreign magic, weakening Peter. Some timey-wimey stuff happens and children from this new world star dreaming of Neverland. One of these kids is a boy named Malcom who would one day manage to find his way there in person. Malcom takes out Peter and takes over as Pan. He’s who the gang fight in Neverland and Rumpelstiltskin sacrifices himself to kill, permanently because he doesn’t need to come back and cause problems.
OUAT mostly stays the same through to the end of season 3A, after that so what you will. I just like picturing Killian surprising Emma with knowledge of the Land Without Magic that doesn’t make sense based off of what he learned from his mom.
Anyway, that’s mostly my idea for a premise for a canon-divergent fic that I think would be neat.
So Zuko spent almost three years looking for any trace of the Avatar before Aang came out of the ice. What if, alongside investigating the air temples for information about airbenders, he also tracked down spirit tales. The Avatar is the bridge between the spirit world and the human one, it would make sense that Zuko would consider any spiritual activity to be possibly Avatar related. I think a fun story would be about the misadventures Zuko and his crew get up to tangling with whatever spirits they end up coming across and having to deal with in their search.
This could either be a funny slice of life type story or a more serious one. One of the Avatar’s main duties is dealing with problems between spirits and humans, with him gone there’s probably been all sorts of things going wrong on that front. An interesting idea could be Zuko being forced to handle some of these problems just because he stuck his nose in it and realizing just how important the Avatar really is to the world. I’ve always though the Avatar isn’t nearly as important to human politics as they are to human-spirit relations. That could be a cool AU, with Zuko wanting to make sure Aang does his duties like he’s supposed to.
I don’t know, this is kind of just a stream of thoughts, but I think fics exploring the spirits of the ATLA world are really interesting and I love stories with Zuko’s crew, so combining the two would be awesome.
There’s this kind of annoying trend in Naruto fanfic where Naruto is basically abused by the whole village, constantly getting yelled at, only being sold rotten food, his teachers purposely sabotaging him, people actively attacking him, etc. This has always bothered me because it feels like writers are taking things way too far in his treatment. Especially when they include other ninja acting that way when that’s never really shown. I mean, yeah, there’s was that one guy who threw a mask at him and no one really went out of their way to be kind besides Iruka and the Hokage but they never show evidence that he was constantly being tormented. I just can’t imagine that if things were taken to that extreme that one, the Hokage never would have stepped in or two, that Naruto would have put up with things to that degree. It makes me uncomfortably to read, and I like canon-divergent stories where someone takes him in and raises him, but I hate reading about him being treated like that, it just doesn’t seem realistic and makes me sad. It also doesn’t make Konoha worth saving, if it’s people are that bad, why bother with it? I like it having flaws and exploring its corruption is interesting, but people take it to an extreme that just makes it seem flat and dull. I’m just really not a fan of every civilian in Konoha being a fear driven, pack mind orientated monster towards Naruto.
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.
One thing that’s always buggged me about Fairy Tail is that we never get an entirely clear idea of how much time is passing, like in a general sense. Sure some arcs we know for sure happen within a set amount of time between each other, like Tower of Heaven happens enough time after Phantom Lord and for long enough that the guild is completely finished by the time they get back. Since Tower of Heaven itself probably lasted around a week, at most, that means it had to happen a good few weeks, if not months, after Phantom Lord. However how much time has passed since Lucy joined the guild is never entirely clear, just kind of alluded to. We have to make a few logical assumptions to try and figure it out and rely on the info we get from the side story chapters that make up the filler episodes for context. None of which are completely trustworthy, of course, but it’s the best we got.
This has been bothering me ever since I decided to rewatch some of the earliest episode. Like, how much time passes, exactly between episodes 2 and 3? We know episode 2 has to happen either the next day or the day after the end of episode 1, depending on the travel time between Magnolia and Hargeon. Close in time, however you think of it, but who knows how much time goes by between episodes 2 and 3. Long enough that Lucy manages to find an apartment and get all moved in as well as develop something of a rapport with Natsu and Happy, they certainly seem closer by this point. However it’s still a short enough time period that Erza isn’t back from wherever she’s gone off too. I don’t know, it just kind of bothers me because when I think about it, most of the story arcs seem to happen so close together that you could arguably say not even a full year goes by between the first episode and Tenrou, which I don’t like, I just wish things were a little extended that the arcs take place over a longer period of time.