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I fucking love Hank Green’s pro-mola mola rant. Finally someone is standing up for our good friend the Sunfish
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ESTO ALGUIEN YA ME LO CONTÓ, QUE SIENTES ASFIXIA AL SALIR (pero esto nunca lo esperé, a esta presión ¿quién puede vivir?) - Composition Monday
© Erik McGregor - erikrivas@hotmail.com
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I was passing by the 55 gallon tank today when I came across this little dude! Barely more than eyeballs and fins.
Just a Lil guy! Despite having a large group of Bluespotted Sunfish in this tank for over 4 years and seeing them breed, this is the first survivor.
I’m pretty sure these two are the parents. They’ve own the left third of the tank.
Bonus! Everybody out at dinner time.
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Remnants of my very brief time in Vtuber fandom before I realized I couldn’t participate in a fandom where the characters were even tangentially real people. And it’s not even that I can’t take the characters and lore and run with it, it’s just the fans and fandom itself was unbearable. Couldn’t do it.
Sunfish is Hakka/Shinri which was (is?) not a very common ship I think because they pretty quickly fell into a sort of jokey father-son thing but personally speaking I found that whole dynamic kind of juicy, myself.
[[MORE]]I had two docs going, edgy version was (going to be) very horny and violent and dub-conny and involving Hakka’s corruption, and that didn’t really get off the ground at all. Soft version was sort of playing with what I imagined their in-universe relationship to be, Hakka realizing he might have been a little hasty in claiming Shinri as a father figure. The entire contents of the doc is as follows:
Some background:
You don’t have a father.
Maybe he’s dead, or he left one day and never came back; maybe there’s some stock phrase buried deep in a long forgotten dialogue tree that alludes to him but only in passing, or
maybe you never had one at all; maybe before the repeated stress of constant corruption on the servers responsible for Xenokuni irreversibly warped the code of your universe and opened your eyes, no one thought to give you one. Like, he’s just not there, never was, never will be. Irrelevant.
You don’t have a father, and that probably didn’t bother you when you were asleep, because you didn’t know any different. It still doesn’t, not really, because you’re an adult and the family you do have is more than enough. You’re not a small, impressionable kid in need of a father-figure so you can grow up well-adjusted. That ship has long since sailed. You’re already grown, for better or worse.
So, if that’s the case, then explain this:
There’s a man you know who comes around occasionally to ask for help with the corruption. He’s a big dude, with sharp, kind eyes and a deep, rumbling voice, and you won’t see him for months and months at a time until he turns up at your door out of the blue to ask for an exorcist, and your mother, deeming you old enough and capable enough, sends you out with him to do the job. He can fight the things just fine, but there’s safety in numbers and he needs your help to quarantine and purge the code afterward; purify it. He’s older than you but younger than your mom, quiet and thoughtful, always interested in how you’ve been since the last time he’s seen you even though he never, ever talks about himself, and it is deeply, profoundly cringe how excited you are to see him whenever he turns up. You trail behind him like a lost puppy, running your stupid fucking mouth nonstop about every insignificant thing that’s happened to you since you last met and catching every fond chuckle and oh yeah? that’s cool to store in your cheek for later like a hamster hoarding seeds until you’re so full you think you’ll burst at the seams.
And when you’ve felled the beast together and you’ve purged what’s left of it for good, he pats you on the back and says good job, Hakka, you puff all up like a rooster, beaming. Once, afterwards, he bought you dango from the old stall parked in front of the temple and you sat on the crumbling steps and ate together and no amount of torture could ever make you admit how fucking giddy it made you.
You don’t have a father, but if you did, you think you’d want him to be like Shinri. That’s probably a weird thought to have about a dude you don’t see very often and is probably like, less than ten years older than you, but it’s not like you have much experience in the matter.
Here’s how it started:
The weirdest, longest day of your whole fucking life begins with a chance encounter with a goofy, lanky asshole in a top hat and heels and ends what feels like a billion hours later, far from home, in the bougiest tavern you’ve ever laid eyes on. The only thing stopping you from going berserk on all these motherfuckers on sight is that by some bizarre chance Shinri is there too, always positioned a half step in front of you; he probably thinks he’s protecting you from them, but it’s definitely the other way around. Fortunately for them, you respect Shinri enough to let him talk you down.
“We need someone like you,” he says, and you bristle like a cat at the idea that he and they are already a we. You saw him first. “No one else can get into the code of these things and purge it like you can. You’re strong, and people need help.”
“You’re staying with these clowns? Why??”
“I don’t know,” he shrugs. “They asked?”
You know so little about Shinri, you realize, not for the first time. He’s never mentioned a wife or husband or kids, sure, you’ve made note of it, but he’s also never mentioned parents or siblings or even friends. Maybe this is the first time anyone’s ever asked him to be part of something?
So you agree to stay too, because you’re weak to the flattery, and you know he’s right, and also, maybe, it’s a little bit that you can’t bear the thought of going back to Xenokuni and never seeing him again.
In time, when the dust has settled and he’s making sure you write back to the temple and let the family know you’re safe, you find the opportunity to roll your eyes and call him dad, playfully, just once, but before you know it, it sticks, becomes habit. In a small way you hope it lets him know that he’s special to you, and that you appreciate him, but more critically, maybe, it’s a reminder to everyone else that what you and he have is thicker that what he has with them. You saw him first.
He’s yours.
Here’s how it’s going:
You dream of that time Shinri bought you the dango. Telling the story, you realize you probably sound like you were nine years old, but the sorry truth is you were nineteen. In the dream, you watch his teeth catch on the first dumpling and pull it off the skewer to tuck back into his mouth with his tongue. At the time of the memory, you hadn’t had the accident yet, but the you in the dream must be you now, because as he eats, you greatly admire his sharp-but-polite upper canines and think I’m just like you now.
Nothing else of note really happens in the dream, it’s just a re-visitation of a memory, watched through older eyes. When he’s done with the dango, Shinri leans back on his hands, shifting to eclipse the sun’s low, evening rays with his significant size, and waits for you to finish chewing. His cool, blue-green eyes slide over to you and–okay, in the memory he says I should get going and you answer by not asking him to stay for dinner even though you really want to, because you know he’ll say no and it’ll hurt your feelings, but in the dream, he smiles a crooked sort of thing and says Is it nice? and you answer “Is what nice?” out loud, with your real-life mouth, pulling you blearily back into the waking world and to the telltale soggy crotch of an honest-to-god wet dream.
Okay?? Okay. It’s not your first and it won’t be your last, but like. Goddamn. Usually something actually happens in those dreams.
