Hanazawa found the Beast on the rooftop that night. It was rare for it to go out into the open like that – it had been proven that neither sunlight nor clean air could do it any harm, but it kept away from those elements anyway. Usually, at least.
Tonight the Beast sat on the rooftop, watching the clouds gather at a corner of its piece of sky. It was destined to be a stormy night.
“You bring your staff,” it said – sounds like scratches on wooden doors grated on Hanazawa’s ears, even more tangled and undecipherable than usual.
Hanazawa just pushed his steps.
“It’s been half a year,” he said.
The Beast looked up at the moon, more and more obscured by grim clouds. “It has. It has. Days are counted, day after day after day. It’s all noted down. Noted down.”
Hanazawa came to stand behind it. The crystal on his staff glowed a hazy blue. “I have this feeling,” he said, light as a breath, “that only a fruitless plan brings.”
If the Beast could laugh, maybe it would have. Instead, Hanazawa could only see its shoulders tremble and its head duck down. No sound came from it for a minute. “Aren’t you in love?” It said, long after the trembles had stopped. “Aren’t you? Didn’t you say…” it huffed a burst of broken branches, “didn’t you say he was fascinating?”
Hanazawa’s grip on his staff tightened.
“That,” he said, “can never become love.”
The Beast looked up at the sky again. Maybe it would have howled if it could.
“One can’t love a stranger one has never talked to.”
With a swift movement, the Beast stood up, just as Hanazawa raised his staff. “So that’s your answer,” it rasped, “so that’s it. You– won’t try. You won’t try. You won’t…”
“You pushed me to it,” Hanazawa said, amidst the wind and the crunches of branches broken off of their trees. They masked the crack in his voice, enough for him too to ignore it. “It’s all on you! I know it. The things I said, the things I did, the things I–we– the things we create… none of it reached him.”
The sound of shattered wood swept through them both. “I am him!” The Beast cried, swung its head back. “Your efforts just aren’t enough yet! Not yet! You haven’t loved him strongly enough yet! You haven’t loved us–”
“Then I am not the one,” Hanazawa said, quietly, and even the wind couldn’t mask the tears in his voice. “I am not the hero.”
The Beast was quiet for a moment. Hanazawa fancied seeing disbelief in its eyes, but all trace of that illusion soon disappeared. When it crawled towards him, its back curved down, back mist curling around its limbs, its stare was blank.
“You are crying,” it whispered, like grasses singing on a meadow, “you are crying. You are regretting. You won’t leave.”
Hanazawa let the tears fall.
“You want a hero,” he said, staff in a crushing grip, the metal almost vibrating. His feet were planted firmly on the ground.
Rain started to fall.
The Beast pounced.
—
this request
came in just as I thought of this dastardly AU I named Hero and the Beast, in which it goes very slightly like the Beauty and the Beast fairytale, but Teru is a sorcerer hired to defeat the dark being inside this abandoned castle, and the Beast is kinda like ???% except it’s also singled-minded on trying to bring its core (the Prince/Mob) back online by making him feel wanted/loved/safe enough to come out again. The Beast has been asking sorcerers and knights coming to kill it to become friends instead (it kills anyone who doesn’t agree, of course), and thus far it has only succeeded in goading Teru into it by building up on his hero complex and insisting on his so-called duty to save everyone in distress. That ficlet above is kinda the fallout of that.
so i was in front of Van Gogh’s Starry Night at the moma yesterday and this girl in front of me took a picture with the flash on (WHICH YOU DONT DO!!! EVER!!! BECAUSE FLASH IS TERRIBLE FOR PAINTINGS!!!! THERE WERE SIGNS EVERYWHERE SAYING NOT TO USE IT!!!!)
so i said “hey, dont use flash”
AND THIS MOLDY ASSBABY turns around, gives me the dirtiest look, takes ANOTHER photo WITH HER FLASH ON and fucking!!!! walks!!!! away!!!!!! and ive never come so close to beating the ever living shit out of someone before in my life.
Starry NIght is one of the most important, beloved works of art IN THE WORLD and youre such a entitled piece of shit that you risk damaging it just to get a fucking photo??????? and you know what? it doesnt even matter that it was starry night, ANY piece of art deserves to be shown safetly. just because an artist isnt famous doesnt mean you get to put their work in jeopardy. art is so fucking imporant to our histories and cultures, to our very humanity, and it makes me furious when people dont respect it.
this has been a psa from an angry art history student thank you and remember to turn off your flash
how it damages the painting is what I will now explain since OP just went on a rant but didn’t explain why it’s bad for paintings. Older paintings especially but also newer ones. Have you ever wandered why museum lighting is filtered into a dull yellow? Why it seems to be so dark but you don’t really pay it any mind until you step outside and you are instantly blinded by the sun?
Sunlight, full spectrum, will FADE paintings, and can even cause chemical reactions in some that cause flaking, particularly those that have been restored with certain compounds. YOU ARE LITERALLY ERASING THE ARTWORK WITH EACH FLASH.
White spectrum light is bad, blue spectrum is WORSE. light filtered through yellow filters seems to do less damage and that is why they ask you not to use flash. There are cameras now with settings for museums that disables the flash and still manage to pick out the artwork. For artists the world over, this is a huge chunk of history that can not be recreated once it is gone. Please. Respect the rules in a museum.
hi OP here, thank you for explaining! I honestly didn’t realize so many people didn’t know how harmful it is, so originally my post was just because i was angry people were being willfully harmful. But i realize now that a lot of people don’t know, so educating is the key!!
You don’t eat 8 spiders a year
in your sleep. It’s so unlikely for a
spider to crawl into your mouth at
night that there’s no formal medical
or scientific record of it actually ever
happening. Spiders get most of the
information about their surroundings
through vibrations, so your heartbeat,
breathing, and snoring usually
scares them away. SourceSource 2
Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.
Like he will not be happy at all.
For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.
This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).
Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.
And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.
I will always reblog this.
I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by
R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.
This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.
There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.
Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.
The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.
And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.
Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.
So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done.
In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier.
And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.
You can read an article about it here. But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize.
¯_(ツ)_/¯ 
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