I Just Want Them To Be Happy

headcanons of adult kirishima with long or short hair are a blessing

but pls consider: mullet

also bonus:

do you think bkdk have canonical feelings for each other and if so, in what way?

wig ok ive thought about this a lot

honestly, canonical feelings in a romantic way— like love or lust, nah. i don’t really believe that.

that isn’t to say that they don’t have a million complicated feelings piled up when it comes to each other. i definitely believe they care about each other deep down, and even ‘love’ each other platonically. their care for each other factors into their mutual obsession w/ one another that they don’t know how to handle.

as in, it’s clear in canon that izuku has always cared for katsuki. constantly wanting to help him, always reaching out to him if he can. like in season 1, he was literally willing to sacrifice a secret—that could’ve seriously put the entire world in danger—to make sure katsuki’s mental health was okay.

that was something that i don’t think he would’ve gone out of his way to clarify for anyone else, but given the fact that izuku has been frequently running after katsuki his whole life, he feels some sort of entitlement to him. i don’t wanna say it’s ‘love’, because that’s not what being in love probably is, but it’s definitely more than how izuku just ‘cares’ for people. the way he sees katsuki is on another level, imo. and this is just one example.

like there’s also,,,, you know— the sludge villain incident, when katsuki got kidnapped, the final exams arc, etc

meanwhile, on the other hand, i believe katsuki also cares for izuku deep down, while not knowing how to show, or even wanting to convey those emotions at all. his hyper fixation on izuku showed right since the first season— in which izuku began a new life with his new power, and katsuki cared deeply for him and only him at that time. he made izuku’s ‘moving on’ all about himself, demanding to know answers and getting frustrated at the fact that izuku had ‘betrayed’ him. to me, even if katsuki doesn’t realize it himself, that says “i care about you and what youre doing, and i especially care about how you think of me”. that says “i care” in a bit of a messed up way. he feels like izuku is obligated to his benefit.

like ok. who knew he would whine so much and feel so insecure about deku ‘tricking him’ when he originally could’ve ignored izuku completely and focused on himself.

in addition to that, i think subconsciously, katsuki sort of feels some sort of level of intimacy with izuku, and sees him as sort of a ‘safety net’ in a way…?

like. why would he tell all this shit to izuku if he didnt feel something about izuku— if he didn’t feel like he needed him in some way? (like esp the line about todoroki. there was literally no reason katsuki had to tell him that but he for some reason just blurted his insecurities to izuku as if it were nbd, which is a big deal for him considering katsuki originally wants to think he can ‘beat everyone’) (and once again this is just one example of a few times)

listen,,, so basically i sorta went off topic but all in all i think they care about each other deep down, esp each other’s success. i think they ‘love’ each other platonically, while also subconsciously feeling some sort of permanent attachment to one another, because they do need each other— and that feeling is mutual.

Your eyes were straining as you stared down your opponent, but you refused to give in, not this time. Not even the sound of your roommate getting home, could deter you from your goal. You. Would. Win!

As soon as your roommate saw you, they groaned loudly and rolled their eyes. Dropping their things on the ground heavily, they stomped past you, smacking you in the face with a pillow as they went, and ruining your staring contest. Squawking indignantly, you flailed as you fell over, quickly pushing yourself back upright and hurling the offending pillow at your roommates retreating back.

“I almost fucking won that time you glittery turd!”

You could almost hear the roll of their eyes as your roommate called back irritably.

“It’s a fucking figurine! Get over it! It can’t do shit!”

Grumbling you turned back towards the figurine, scowling intensely at it as you flipped it the bird. 

“Next time you little shit” You grumbled, rubbing at your stinging eyes.

Silently, the figurines smirk widened.

When you start to stir this morning, you cant help but wonder if you’re having a particularly odd dream, the stats hovering behind your eyelids, making that the only real conclusion. Opening your eyes and blinking a few times, you frown in confusion. Hanging before you in the air, are the same set of stats you could see with your eyes closed. They seem to be gaming stats of some sort, something that confuses you since, whilst you enjoy them, you rarely get the time to play them anymore, so you generally don’t dream about them. Sitting up in bed, you find the stats following you easily, somehow not obscuring your vision. You’re still convinced this might be some kind of weird dream, despite the cold slowly seeping into your feet, now that they are touching the floor. With a sigh, you try to pay attention to the stats again, deciding that you may as well fuck around with them, since its just a dream. 

Over the course of the morning, you mess with all of your stats, finding you can move them around with a brief thought. To your surprise, and delight, they seem to work, but as the day wears on, you start to realise that this might not be a dream after all. 

As you sit there, absently using your increased strength to open that jar you’ve been trying to crack into all week, you contemplate what this might mean for you. Is it permanent? How far reaching can you make this? What will you do with this kind of power? Already you’ve used your charisma to convince the crabby old landlord to give you a few more days to pay rent, a usually impossible task. You’ve used your luck and found a hundred dollars stuck in a hedge outside, and you used your intelligence stats to finish the essay that you had been stuck on all week, because you forgot all the subject matter. Luckily, no one else seems to see the small window of stats. You even figured out how to make the little window fold away to one side, almost invisible, if you weren’t already aware it was there.

A soft hiss of air interrupts your thoughts, the jar opening with surprising ease. Suddenly, your stats glow brightly the numbers increasing on each and the small letters above the stats finally draw your eyes up,something you hadn’t really paid attention to until now. You watch as the simple “Level: 1″ slowly shifts to “Level: 2″, and it dawns on you that this might just be the beginning. 

It was hard to believe that this house had once been bustling with activity and life, the now decaying walls once having been littered with memories of the past. Sitting in what use to be a glass sun room, you peered around silently at the decay, nature having long since begun to overtake what ever it could, forcing it’s way between glass and rusted metal.

Seeing the evidence of the time that had passed, only made your condition even clearer, a heavy weight forming within your chest at the reminder. Those who had known you had long since passed on, though you couldn’t help but wonder just what they would think if they could see you now.

Nothing had changed about you since that day so long ago, your features remaining forever frozen at the age that the accident had happened. You wondered how everyone had reacted, how they must have felt after your apparent death.

There hadn’t even been a body to bury, though enough blood had been spilt that your death would have been unquestioned. 

Despite the years that had passed, you still didn’t know what had made you like this, nor did anyone else. You’d met many beings since that day, demons, witches, even a couple of reapers. Though every single one had somehow been able to sense your unnatural state, none had been able to understand it, nor offer you any answers to the things you didn’t know.

It was frustrating, but after all this time you had finally decided to just let it be. 

It was agonising knowing that those you loved were long gone, that anyone you chose to let into your life from now on would also one day leave you. But worst of all, was knowing that you would never get the chance to say goodbye to the one who meant the most to you. 

It was why you had finally come back here after all this time, some part of you unable to let go until you finally got to say goodbye, even if only to a silent grave.

Unfortunately, until you could locate where that was, you couldn’t really do much about it. It didn’t help that they had never even told you their real name, even after all the years the two of you had spent drawing closer to each other. You hoped they had ended up having a happy life at least. A life filled with love, even if you couldn’t be there to give it to them yourself.

Perhaps visiting that old funeral parlour of theirs, would grant you some answers….. if it was even still around now that they had passed.

anyone else remember being like 13 years old and watching that scene in how to train your dragon (2010) where hiccup carefully navigates the maze of lines toothless has drawn between them without breaking or stepping on any of them and with his back to toothless and eyes shut to demonstrate how he’s willing to put total faith in him not to harm him or run away and to show humility and a desire to establish a natural bond of mutual trust instead of the arrogance to try to force toothless to submit to his will and hearing the music crescendo and fade into silence as he finally crosses the last obstacle so that they’re standing mere inches from one another, tension built on years of bad blood between their two races, so immense it’s almost like a physical barrier, separating them, and after what feels like forever toothless presses his nose gently into hiccup’s outstretched palm and it fits perfectly like it was made solely for that specific purpose, and feeling all the hairs on your neck stand up and a stifling sensation that brought actual tears to your eyes rise in your throat as it touched something profound and full of unspeakable yearning inside you

Person A: “Yo, you wanna explain why we have two of the fakest F.B.I agents I’ve ever seen, sitting in our kitchen nursing hello kitty mugs?”

Person B: “They’re here to ask questions about our landlord, apparently.”

Person A: “Fuck that, I don’t care what they did, their rents cheap as shit, and they’re actually nice.”

Person B: “My thoughts exactly.”

Person A: “….”

Person B: “….”

Person A: “…..And the hello kitty mugs?”

Person B: “Oh I just wanted to see if they would actually use them.”

Person A: “…Should we offer them biscuits on that god awful barbie plate next?”

Person B: “Oh fuck yes.”

Male and female brains aren’t wired differently

New research, published in October in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that despite size discrepancy, there’s no functional difference between men’s and women’s brains. “Male” brains and “female” brains simply don’t exist. In fact, there’s significant overlap.

On reptile and invertebrate cognition...

Something that bothers me when people talk about the cognitive limitations of certain animals is that vague, human-centric words get thrown around and treated like Indisputable Science. When really, the definitions attached to those words are really important.

Example 1: “Reptiles don’t feel happiness”

Well, what exactly do you mean by “happiness”? Do you mean the exact combination of cognitive and emotional sensation that constitutes human happiness? Reptiles certainly don’t experience human happiness, but neither do canines or birds (which don’t even experience mammalian happiness), and we don’t usually go around saying that dogs or parrots don’t feel happiness. We understand that dogs and parrots experience a positive emotional state that is similar to human happiness.

Reptiles aren’t as cognitively or emotionally complex as dogs, parrots, or humans, but they still experience pleasure and can form positive associations. Should we call that happiness? Is a positive emotional state, characterized by high levels of pleasure, an absence of pain, and all current needs being adequately met not a primitive version of what we call happiness?

Same with “reptiles don’t feel emotions”. Well, no, they don’t experience anything approaching the intensity of human emotions, as they don’t have big, thinky cortexes to attach meaning to the emotional reactions of their limbic system. But recent studies have shown that reptiles do have a primitive version of the limbic system and even the neocortex (that whole “reptile brain, mammal brain, human brain” theory has been all disproved by recent science).

At the very least reptiles experience the primitive emotions of pleasure and fear. There are even reptiles that mate for life and form social bonds (even to the point of caring for offspring that are not their own) and reptiles do actually have their own version of the hormone oxytocin (it’s so similar that vets can administer oxytocin to eggbound reptiles to make them lay). So there’s likely more emotional complexity there than we currently understand.

Example 2: “Tarantulas can’t learn”

What do you mean by “learn”? Do you mean that you can’t train a tarantula to spin on command? Or do you mean that a tarantula isn’t capable of changing its present behavior based on past experiences?

Pretty much any animal that can encode memories of past experiences can learn. Recent science has shown that even some plants may be able to somehow encode past experiences and become desensitized to repetitive stimuli and they don’t even have brains.

Like most animals, tarantulas will dampen their reaction to repeated stimuli. A tarantula that is regularly picked up will eventually have a less dramatic response to the stimulus of being placed into a hand. That’s a type of learning.

Tarantulas can also learn to associate a particular stimulus with an event that repeatedly comes afterward (like Pavlov’s Dogs). They will very quickly attune to the set of stimuli that occurs right before feeding time or their cage being opened. That’s learning.

Fun Fact: Studies have shown cockroaches can learn this way too and that cockroaches can recognize and show preferences for individual humans. Hissing cockroaches placed in the hands of someone they recognize are less likely to defensively hiss than when placed in the hands of a stranger.

This may seem like a silly thing to be bothered by, but the reality is that the way we talk about animal cognition can have a real, tangible impact on their welfare.

People can jump pretty quickly from “reptiles don’t experience happiness/emotion” to “reptiles can’t experience pain/discomfort”. Which can lead to devaluing the welfare of reptiles or assuming that as long as the animal is alive and not actively ill or injured there’s nothing else to worry about. This kind of thinking is a big part of the major pushback against enrichment in certain reptile keeping circles.

Similarly, enrichment is almost unheard of in most of insect and arachnid keeping despite the fact that there is a growing scientific consensus (and even a handful of studies) that invertebrates can benefit from enrichment. There also aren’t any welfare laws governing experiments on invertebrates (except cephalopods) because they’re largely considered to be akin to instinctual robots and unable to feel pain or discomfort.

As people who know the difference, it is really important to use specific language and explain what we mean when talking about the cognitive capabilities of animals (especially often maligned and misunderstood animals).