Kieran Appreciation Post

So here are a bunch of pictures of my son one of my favorite characters ever.

Kiki from his concept art 🍭🥹

look at me drawing him normal for once instead of being a little weirdo

this photo from twitter inspired me to draw this silly bird...

two mimir...

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EXTRA:

what if we walk around kitakami & visit signboards together while holding hands...................................

lets talk it out buddy

alright, i'm gonna be honest that when we are given instances of a character's sexuality being anything other than straight and people literally only focus on the 'likes the opposite gender' part of it? that's fuckin toxic and ick.

there's so few representations out there (though more and more are coming each day) but in a major franchise for the wording to be so ambiguous as to lend us to CANONICAL bisexuality and y'all just........................... sit there and make them so straight?!?!?!

no. do fucking better, okay? can't believe i'm getting this heated about the pokemon fandom right now but we have AT LEAST two- if not three- canonical instances of BISEXUALITY within the newest game and people are ERASING it. Arven is coded to have a crush on the character regardless of your gender. Drayton asks the player character on a DATE (and it's fucking called that) regardless of their gender. the more ambiguous one FOR ME is Kieran, but far be it from me to stand in the way of the Kieran/Juliana shippers because if Arven and Drayton are coded to be at least SOMEWHAT interested in the player character regardless of gender......... then fucking Kieran is too.

every time i see a fic or post that talks about any of these characters with EXCLUSIVELY heterosexual language, i cringe. let these fuckin bi little disasters be bi.

thank you for coming to my tedtalk.

Yes speak them facts!

Various Kieran and friends™ AU sketches for my good friends on discord ft my own kibby kieran haha having so much fun interacting with these awesome creators!! AU's in order belonging to @basilcatchup @ask-hakkyo-au @angelabsol @marisol124 @skyedancer2006

Ahhh I love all those Kierans!! ❤️

Trips and drops everyone’s Kieran AUs.

The legends arceus one though must be wild, like imagine getting isekaid when you’re mid having a mental breakdown. You wanted to be stronger? Ok then go wrestle all of gods creatures with your bare hands and document it.

young (ex) champions and their silly gluttonous kaijus

as is customary for me, sprites of the brainrots

M🟣CHI M🟣CHI

vs the Nobles

i'm seeing a lot of Pokémon SV DLC analyses where people say 'Oh, Kieran's fixation on Ogrepon is because he sees it as a path to strength; Carmine's bullied him long enough that his shield against admitting his weakness to himself is adoring a legendary creature'. And don't get me wrong – these interpretations certainly hold water – but I've actually been working from basically the opposite angle for all this time.

By all means, Kieran idolises strength, but he inhabits Carmine's shadow – he's the weak sibling, and probably has been for a long time. Yet, rather than fixate on the fantastical power of the Loyal Three, he identifies himself with Ogrepon – the downtrodden, ostracised creature cast out to eke out a subsistence. A terrible demon that wasn't quite terrible enough to cause anyone any lasting harm. The creature defeated by heroes, rather than the perfect, heroic figureheads themselves. He's enamoured with the downtrodden; he sees himself in its grief, in its being cast out and excluded. He's been cast out and excluded all his life (and he can't be a bad person, right? It's not fair – he's hated senselessly, surely, rather than for some reason?) – he sees himself as harmless; so the ogre, too, must be harmless, mis-blamed. Strength is thus in resistance; in growing a shell to tolerate others' inexplicable cruelty. So Kieran looks to Ogerpon, and he thinks that the meek shall inherit the earth, and it gives him the strength to tolerate long nights with poor company. Others are villains – not him, not this creature – and he's safe in the knowledge that at the end of the day, at least an ogre can go down in mythology as the putative sole survivor of its trials.

In this sense, Kieran's like Penny – he finds himself in a position of weakness, of being victimised, and forms himself an armour of being an underdog, of being the thing that bites back. Yet while Penny's position is that the underdog might muster the strength to bite back and restore justice, Kieran's view is that at least the underdog was worth loving. He's inert and preoccupied with his inertia. He can't understand that maybe he could be a human, with the capacity to grow, the capacity to sin. And when Carmine is cruel to him, he reaffirms his own contrarian mindset more – she says I am worth little for my weakness, so my weakness is all I am worth; my weakness is my strength.

And yet he chases strength, because he has to to survive. So when the player comes by, and supports him, maybe he has the safety to walk away from his preoccupation with being an underdog, to enjoy strength for strength's sake. And then, he starts losing, but this time, there are stakes, since he can't just withdraw and be consoled by the fact that withdrawing is right, is right, is right. Thus, he must get stronger. And then, when Ogerpon turns out to favour Juliana, who's become Kieran's idol for all that strength means, rather than Kieran, who's Kieran's selfsame designated weaklingpatheticscumidiot——well, what can Kieran do but fracture, since his whole ideology, his whole premonition that he might have the right to inherit the earth, has been fractured? And, under stress, he pivots from one extreme to the other. All he knows is that weakness is now unbearable. He must get stronger. Must get stronger. Must get stronger—because otherwise he's doomed, he's nothing. He has no myth to dissolve his identity in any longer, so he reshapes himself around the only other standard he's ever known. And it twists him and it breaks him into tiny pieces, because suddenly, the last thing he can bear to be is Kieran: Kieran, the downtrodden and meek boy. He has to flip on his axis; he must become the designated villain of his story by popular imagination, or else be subsumed in the fact that he's going to die someday without any place in the world. He has to play a part, because he's been consigned to one so long, and he can't think of anything other than heroes and villains, enemies and martyrs. He can't be the bad guy. Strength is now goodness; weakness is now evil. And he can't reconcile who he thought he was with who he must become, and as a result, all he can do is try to destroy the person who's destroyed his ideology.