#(At least you know they’re dangerous from the outset)

[sodacowboy]

saw someone reciting a poem over a video and it was about how a love that burns isn’t actually good bc it won’t last long and how a river is a better comparison and isn’t that such bullshit lmao

stars burn for billions of years, more than enough warmth and passion for a lifetime

rivers however, will wear you down and reduce you to a mere grain of sand when you were a mountain before

[batrogers]

sick prompt: 37

"Go lie down before you pass out.”

Characters from That Broken Promise. Rated G, 400 words. Light Link-shipping.

(Relevant context: Chief is a trained emergency medic, Skyloft is severely chronically ill in ways that would make a cold dangerous.)

IIII

Link watched Chief pace the edge of camp a third time and propped his chin on his hand. They were stopped for the last few days, out of an abundance of caution: Far, Ordon, and Rabbit had fallen ill and Chief had been petrified at the idea of Skyloft catching it. Nobody had argued.

But Skyloft (and Outset, Four, and Minish) were in a tent about a hundred feet away, while Far, Rabbit and Ordon had recovered in their tents, and Chief had been in and out checking on them. When he wasn’t doing that, he was trying to convince Link to go join the others.

As his pacing came back nearby again, he tried to start that up once more.

“I don’t want to see you ill.”

“You’re lucky Outset didn’t punch you,” Link said mildly. “And that I love you dearly and admire you and wo’t do the same. Neither of us is fragile in the way Skyloft is, remember?”

“We still don’t need more people getting sick.”

“They’re almost better, and you know that.”

“I don’t have half the supplies I need if someone like Skyloft caught this—”

Link stood and moved in front of Chief, blocking him with his body so he could press his hand to his forehead. Skin to skin, he could feel the problem he’d already suspected from Chief’s obvious discomfort and flushed face.

He didn’t need to speak. Chief submitted to the check for several seconds before he turned his face away with an audible grumble.

“I’m fine,” he insisted.

“If you’re trying to get rid of me so I don’t catch it from you, you’re mistaken,” Link pointed out very mildly. “How about you go lie down before you fall down instead?”

“You need me—”

“It’s a cold.” Link tugged gently on Chief’s shirt and turned him around before pointing deliberately over his shoulder, his arm brushing his skin to their tent. “If you go do it now, I won’t make you fuss about me joining you. I’ll wake you when dinner’s ready. Alright?”

At least he was easy to manipulate with worry, Link supposed, and as Chief went to tuck himself into bed, he sat to make good on his promise of food.

(When he went to wake him in an hour, he was dead asleep in a bundle of blankets and Link went back on his word to let him sleep.)

[ayamturd]

late│technoblade

summary: three times you said i love you, and the one time technoblade says it back

prompt: “I’d do anything for you, whether or not you ask me to”

warnings: fluff and major angst, blood and death descriptions, dsmp spoilers

pairing: in-game romantic!technoblade

a/n: this is my entry for @burntcilantro​‘s 500 writing event!! much love and congratulatory to min, they’re an amazing writer and an even better person (they’re so nice, give them the support they deserve)

also i separated some of the dsmp events and spaced them out (so there’s more time between for plot purposes lol)

wc: (2.0k) - m.list

“Why are you so stupid?”

You were sat on top of a chest, holding one leg with your arms while the other was currently being wrapped by Technoblade. While you giggled at his insult, you winced once he tightened the gauze on your ankle with a glare. 

“It’s not funny, y/n.” He leaned down to bite off the rest of the wrapping, finishing the fold as you huffed at his seriousness.

“I told you to watch the house, not climb onto the roof and play a fun game of risk. What were you thinking?”

His stare was heavy and made you feel little as he looked down at you. The tone of the room changed as you lost the humor in the situation, his concern overpowered by the anger laced in his voice.

“I just wanted to help,” you stated, turning your face away, discouraged, with your arms crossed. “You’ve been getting the all the resources lately and haven’t let me even step off the damn property.”

Looking down, you fiddled with your fingers as to avoid his gaze. “I wanted to try and fix the wood panelings that have been leaking, that’s all.” 

The silence was harsh, and you swallowed deeply at how uncomfortably stiff the air became. Technoblade opened his mouth to speak but quickly closed it shut with no words to voice.

With a shaky breath, you gripped the edge of the wood and slowly lowered yourself onto your foot; you didn’t plan on staying here just so he couldn’t say anything more. Technoblade was quick to steady his arms around you in case you fell, but you immediately pushed his hand away aggressively and stood with all your weight on your healthy foot.

Arms out to balance, as you tried to take the first step on your bad foot, you crumpled into your self with a yelp from the pain and collapsed. Ready as always, Techno caught you from behind and guided you to the nearest chair. 

You flinched from the small movement but sighed once sitting again. Techno crouched in front of you to check how you physically were, but your eyes were closed shut as you tried to collect your breathing. 

“Y/n,” Techno call out. Calming yourself down, you opened your eyes to meet his; he was much more sincere before, his face soft as he spoke gently to you. 

“Hey, I’m sorry.” Looking down, Technoblade paused as to gather his thoughts before explaining himself further. 

“I know I’ve been overbearing since the attempted execution,” you reached a hand towards his cheek when he mentioned the recent event, which he leaned into as he continued with closed eyes, “but please know it’s from a place of concern. I just- I don’t want anything to happen to you. I can’t let anything happen to you. I-I…”

“I know. Trust me, I know.” You spoke for him as you pulled him into your chest, hugging his large frame as best as you could. He relaxed into your hold with a sigh of relief. 

“I love you, Techno.” You kissed the top of his head, and he only burrowed himself deeper into the hug.

“I’m so sorry, love.”

Technoblade was hunched over on the front lawn, hands on his head while trembling from the overwhelming pain of the voices. He whimpered at your words, indicating he heard you to some extent.

He had come home, alone, and fell to his knees at the sight of you when you opened the door. Immediately, you had rushed over to him and skid to your own knees to comfort him, but he grunted from your attempts to touch him; even when under the influence, he was still conscious enough to fear for your own safety relative to the blind rage of the voices. 

You had tried talking to him, attempted to get him to give you any context to what was causing his anger, which he answered with snarling growls in return. “Tommy… left… betrayed. Chose government.” 

While broken into murmured words, you understood instantly and tried to bring him back in spite needing to quench your own anger from Tommy’s departure. You rested your palms into the snow, lowering your head as much as possible to meet his bowed head. 

You peered up at him despite his own eyes screwed shut from the unbearable chaos that roared within his head, and called out to him as softly as you could. It was a stretch, but you hoped you could soothe him down by talking.

“Hey bubs, just listen to my voice, alright? You hear me now yes? You can understand what I’m saying?” Patiently waiting, you watched him closely until he gave the smallest nod, fists still pushed against his skull and twisting from the ache. 

“That’s good, that’s really good, love. You hear my voice, now listen to my words.” Slowly, you leaned close enough to whisper to him directly. 

“I’m here, okay? I’m so sorry about Tommy, I know how much you cared for him. I still care for him too, and I know it hurts right now, but rest assured I’m still here. I’m here Techno, and I’m never leaving you.”

With clenched teeth, he let out a sob at your declaration and pushed his head against you. You took his permission to touch him promptly, gripping him with as much strength as you could carry so he felt stable and secure. 

You squeezed him, desperate to ground him from slipping further, and rocked the both of you. He released a shuttered breath, and you kissed his skin gently.

“I love you, you know? I will always be here and I’ll always love you, no matter what.”

He clutched you with his entire being, your words and presence more than he could ever ask and want. 

“Why do you have to be too reckless for your own good?”

You grinned widely at his words, smile almost sadistic as you glanced at him with your arms propped on the axe you carried above your shoulders. 

“What ever could you mean?” Despite the roll of his eyes, he did nothing to hide his own amusement to your eagerness to the upcoming destruction you were to bring. He chuckled, his deep laughter making you smile more softly to how genuine he was as you walked besides him. Hand raised to wave his rocket launcher, he focused ahead proud. 

“We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?” Turning to look at you again, you stared at him adoringly and smirked slightly while bashful to his confident manner. “We are indeed.”

It became relatively silent as you walked through the layered snow, feet crunching from your steady pace. You continued to take random glances at him, Technoblade doing the same until you both heard a loud groan. 

“My god, you two are insufferable, I can’t deal with this right now.” Dream sneered at you specifically, as if you were the cause for his own discomfort, and walked through you both.

“I’ll meet you guys there instead, but hurry.” Swiftly, he pulled out an ender pearl and threw it a few yards ahead towards the portal, his figure disappearing altogether. 

You stared in disbelief from his actions until a cough interrupted your thoughts once more. “You know what,” Phil avoided looking at you both, his hands tapping together awkwardly as he walked ahead as well but turned to address you while moving backwards. 

“I’ll see you guys there too, just, be sure to be quick?” You both nodded wordlessly, and he took his leave in fast haste. 

Standing there alone, you risked another glance at him and met his eyes, laughing loudly at the circumstances. 

Technoblade held a hand to his face, body shaking from his laughter while you were endlessly giggling, holding your stomach from the pain. Eventually, your fits faded with large smiles, and you faced him with a shake of your head. 

“I didn’t realize we’d be one of those couples.” Technoblade sighed, though you could tell it was for play, and nodded. “A shame really, I never thought this day would come.” 

You giggled again, and chose to move closer, tilting your head upwards at him with a sweet beam while leaning onto your axe. He gave you a small smile in return, however his faded immediately after. 

Lifting his open hand, he cupped your cheek and bent down to kiss your forehead, touching yours together after with his eyes closed. “Promise me you’ll be safe? I trust you to protect yourself, but for me, stay safe when things start to go bad?”

While you knew it was impossible to guarantee you’d stay away from the majority of the danger, you knew better than to leave his concern unanswered and open. 

“I promise,” you murmured, “for you, I promise.”

He pulled you against his chest this time, engulfing you completely and holding the back of your head earnestly to his heart. 

“I love you,” you voiced, your words muffled into his armor and coat. He hummed while looking ahead, his eyes trained on the glowing portal that called towards him. This was a war he refused to leave with mercy, the price of your peaceful lives together on the line. 

“No…”

There was too much blood. The thick liquid stained every surface and soaked through his coat that he pushed against your wound. 

Internally panicking from your tight expressions of discomfort, Technoblade desperately searched through his inventory for something, anything, that could heal or at the very least help you. He was forced to face the reality that he used all his potions during the midst of battle and combat. He couldn’t do anything. 

“Why, why why,” he snarled, his eyes clouding with an outset of tears he couldn’t care for. “Why are you so stupid.” His voice caught in his throat from his conflicted emotions and he tightened his hold on the fabric pushed against your stomach; the pain had faded at this point, and you were numb to the constant pressure he tried to hold. 

“I’m so sorry, love. I lied.” Your voice was light and strained, but Technoblade refused to accept the situation for what it was. He turned to a perched crow, screaming at it to get Phil and scaring it away with a slash of his sword, before tucking his head down in an almost silent plea. 

“Why do you have to be too reckless for your own good?” he whispered. Though he tried to be delicate, he couldn’t help how tight he held your hand. 

“I’d do anything for you, whether or not you ask me to.” You gave a tired grin as your eyes began to droop, hand tightening on his, however incredibly weak in comparison. 

“I asked you to be safe,” he cried, body stricken with grief as he abandoned his hold on your stomach and instead shakily held your face, your own blood smearing against your skin from his callous fingers. “I needed you safe.”

You placed a hand over his, using all your strength to relish in his touch and kissing the inner of his palm. “Yet you needed my love more.” 

He choked out a sob from your admittance, and pulled you into his chest, your body limp, as he rocked you slightly. “I’ll always be there for you, and love you more than I could for my own safety.”

The ruins echoed the wails of a tormented heart on the broken landscape of a haunted battlefield that called for death and devastation. The smoke and clouds of destruction reigned above, and despite the final end to the corrupted nation that was built on nothing but lies and deceit after a helpless man’s death, Technoblade couldn’t bring himself to care. 

“I love you,” he uttered, the words he struggled for oh so long to express finally free from its cage. “I love you, y/n. I love you so much.”

His words fell on deaf ears, and he screamed in agony at the truth that laid before him.

He was too late.

[4ragon]

thoughts on dadworth?

Oh? You want to know my thoughts on dadworth? You want to know my thoughts on dadworth? You come into mY HOUSE AND YOU WANT TO KNOW MY THOUGHTS ON nah sorry I don’t know what the fuck this bit is supposed to be but yeah, fuck yes to dadworth.

(Also I’m just assuming this is about Miles and not about Greg. I’ve discussed Greg previously, in case that’s what you wanted. But now I’m writing about Miles Edgeworth and no earthly force can stop me.)

So Miles Edgeworth is such a great and fun and well rounded and three dimensional character even just in the trilogy alone. But one thing that doesn’t really get explored in the main series is this whole new side of him that you don’t see until he just sort of starts taking random teenagers under his wing.

Like. Okay. Miles Edgeworth. When you think of Miles Edgeworth, you don’t really think “Nurturing” or “Kind.” He’s stoicism and logic and cold hard facts. He gets annoyed easily, he snaps at people. And then Kay jumped into his life, and suddenly he also has to be responsible for this overexcited, hotheaded teenage girl who loves to brag about being a criminal. Practically everything about Miles Edgeworth doesn’t seem to line up with this. Yet he feels responsible for her from the outset. He worries about her, cares about her wellbeing. After all, she had saved him from his kidnapping, and earlier than that, she had saved him from Calisto Yew. And maybe he was sort of forced into this situation at first, but he clearly grows to care about Kay so much by the end of AAI, and especially in AAI2.

And it’s such a different dynamic than Maya and Phoenix. Maya and Phoenix are best friends, and they care about each other, and yes Phoenix feels responsible for Maya in a lot of ways, but they’re much more “constantly bickering siblings” than Edgeworth and Kay. They’re goofier with each other, teasing each other. Miles Edgeworth is not nearly as patient as Phoenix is, and yet with Kay, and later on with Sebastian, he starts becoming far more patient and understanding even under that layer of sarcasm. These are kids that annoy him, but he cares about them so much that he’s willing to put everything on the line, especially for Kay. They’re trying their best, and I think he sees a lot of himself in them. He is possibly one of the only people who understands Kay’s loss, and he sees a lot of untapped potential in Sebastian.

And that's just so fun? It’s such a new dynamic. With Gumshoe he’s very short-tempered, and he and Franziska are constantly in competition with one another, but with these teenagers, we see a completely new side of Edgeworth, still very serious and stern but with kids that he can see need his guidance. And unlike with Phoenix with Maya, Miles at least has this preconceived notion of “I am the mature adult” in most any scenario he comes across. He’s the mature one, he’s the responsible one. He was the same with Franziska, especially as a child. And that feeling of responsibility comes out in full force with Kay Faraday, the world’s most rambunctious teenager. And it comes out in full force when he stumbles upon a traumatized Sebastian Debeste and takes the time to talk him through everything that’d just happened to him.

Actually, as I talk about it, I think it’s especially fun just how different these kids are from him. Kay Faraday is this hotheaded, excitable, confident teenage girl who’s perfectly willing to run headfirst straight into danger. And Sebastian is this sort of goofy, ditsy young man whose confidence had been both his defining feature and been casually ripped away from him. And these are not the kinds of people Miles is usually interacting with, which just makes it really neat to see. Past him coming to Phoenix’s defense in the first grade, we don’t get to see him taking on this role of a protector for anyone, let alone people so very different from him in personality.

I just have a lot of feelings about found family, man. No matter what you think about these dynamics, it’s so clear that Miles cares about these kids who keep stumbling into his life. He just cares so fucking much, guys. He constantly tries to act like he doesn’t, but at his core he is a man who cares deeply about the wellbeing of people in his life. He cares about these kids, and wants them to succeed and be happy. And I love that.

[blackkatmagic]

Caaaan we get a sneak peek at those Ferus Wips, pleaaasde~ ?

“Where are we going?” Leia protests, tugging at his hand, though she doesn’t stop moving. “My father is back there—”

“I know,” Ferus says desperately, and pulls her sideways, one sharp jerk as he practically throws them both behind the jut of a decorative half-wall. In the same moment, there's a thud of steps, loud in plain armor, and Ferus sees how Leia's eyes go wide, the way her mouth instantly snaps shut. He drags her in against his side, curling around her as he ducks beneath the delicate iron scrollwork, and Leia clutches at the rough cloth of his jacket, perfectly still and silent as the stormtroopers march past.

A child shouldn’t have to have any idea about stormtroopers, or how to hide from them, but Ferus is desperate enough that he doesn’t feel anything but grateful.

He gives it a long three minutes after the last one passes before he straightens up, loosening his death grip on Leia and trying to stop the pounding of his heart. “You okay?” he asks, and Leia looks at him, looks in the direction the stormtroopers disappeared in, and pauses.

“They're here because of me, aren’t they?” she asks, and the fact that her voice doesn’t even waver makes Ferus's chest ache.

“Because of what you can do,” Ferus corrects, because he’s lied to everyone for years but he isn't going to lie to Leia about this. Obi-Wan had said—

But then, Obi-Wan seems to forget that Anakin didn’t have one child, he had two. Leia is just as powerful as her brother, and Ferus isn't about to let her suffer for that.

Leia's grip on his sleeve goes tight, and her expression wavers just for a moment. “And—my dad—” she starts, and then stops short, biting into the inside of her lip. Trying not to show a reaction, Ferus thinks grimly, and—she’s only twelve, on a diplomatic trip with her father that was supposed to be easy. Ferus almost hadn’t shadowed them on this one, because there was so little risk at the outset, but—

Best that he didn’t, clearly, Ferus thinks grimly, and wraps an arm around Leia's back, hurrying her forward with him as they break from cover and bolt for the line of trees that edges the next sprawling mansion. At the end of the street, butted up against the deep forest, there’s a ruin of white stone and glass, and Ferus's quick research into this planet didn’t turn up much at all about what used to be here, but—it’s a hiding place, at the very least, and it looks unguarded, which is invitation enough.

“Just a little further,” he tells Leia, and doesn’t risk a glance back over his shoulder even if he wants to. The planet’s curfew starts soon; anyone who spots them will likely pass them off as father and daughter hurrying to get home, and not immediately comm the authorities, which is all Ferus needs. Just a chance and he can get them to the spaceport, get them off-world, and then—

Then something. Training Leia, maybe, but for that he’ll have to find a Force nexus that will hide them, because otherwise Vader and the Inquisitors will just follow their presence in the Force like a beacon. But that means supplies, and arrangements, and days of travel. More chances for Leia to slip, control worn down with stress and exhaustion, and lead the Empire right to them.

She threw three Imperial officers off a balcony. Most initiates can't manage that until they’ve been training for years, and knowing that, Ferus doesn’t have a lot of hope that her next accident won't be just as powerful and just as dangerous.

“I have to warn my dad,” Leia says, tugging at Ferus's sleeve again, though she doesn’t stop moving as he ducks beneath a barrier made of trees trained into a fence and pulls her towards the entrance to the ruin. “He doesn’t know—”

“He knows,” Ferus promises, and slows, checking for guards. He knows that at least one Inquisitor is nearby; he felt them land, knows precisely who would be called to drag a senator’s child away to be trained for the Empire. If the Inquisitor managed to sense them before Ferus got to Leia, if they know what to look for, Ferus has very little hope of making it out of this without a fight.

He’s fought Inquisitors before, and beaten them. But Anakin knows Ferus's presence, and a fight is too great a risk. If Ferus has to reveal himself as a former Jedi, he will, but the fallout will be catastrophic, particularly when Ferus is trying to escape with Leia.

“Do you even have a plan?” Leia demands, keeping her voice low. Ferus opens his mouth to reassure her, then promptly trips, practically falling down a steep ramp of white stone. Leia yelps, tumbling after him, and it’s all Ferus can do to grab her and leap, catching an overhang of stone before they can go spilling down and into the darkness.

“Getting you off the planet is my only plan,” Ferus says, and hitches her up, trying to keep his feet steady on the slick stone. “Can you—if you can get on my back—”

Leia makes a derisive sound, but she twists, scrambles up, gets a foot in the hand Ferus offers and lurches up, wrapping her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck. There's a precarious moment as Ferus feels his boots sliding, and he curses, takes half a second to check their surroundings, and then pushes off hard, launching them off the spur of stone and out over a long, narrow pool that glitters strangely. There's a walkway crossing the water, and he, tumbles over, lands lightly on it, and puts up a hand to steady Leia.

“All right?” he asks.

“Fine,” Leia says, muffled, and a moment later she shoves enough of her hair out of the way to see and demands, “You’re like me? I thought you were just another one of Dad’s assistants!”

Ferus smiles wryly at the outrage in her voice. “Yes, I'm like you,” he allows. “I used to be a Jedi.”

Leia's breath hitches, her arms tightening. “Like—a real Jedi?” she asks, and in the vast, echoing space around them her voice is thin. “Like the peacekeeper Jedi?”

There's too much Ferus could say, and not enough words. He swallows, one hand twitching towards his lightsaber, and hesitates for a long moment before he answers. “I never finished my training, so I'm not sure you should call me a real Jedi.”

“Well, you're more of a Jedi than anyone I've ever met,” Leia says tartly, and Ferus can't help the strangled half-laugh that slips out, a little rueful.

“That’s not saying a lot,” he counters, and hears Leia's unimpressed snort. Hooking an arm under her thighs to hold her steady, he casts a look around them, half of his attention trained on the entrance. “We should—if there’s a back entrance, we should try to hide near it, just in case.”

Leia pushes up with he knees, leaning over his shoulder, and points ahead of them to a tall doorway. “This was a Kwa Star Temple,” she says, like Ferus is an idiot for not knowing that. “Dad and I toured it this morning. Whuffa worms used to guard it, so there are tunnels underneath that run out into the forest.”

Something flickers in Ferus's chest, almost like hope, and he pauses, half-turns as he looks around them. Not what he expected, but—this would have been on the very edge of the Kwa Holdings, one of the last remnants in this part of space after their conflict with the Gree Enclave escalated. “A Star Temple?” he asks. “You're sure?”

“Of course I am,” Leia says, withering. “I read.”

Ferus huffs in amusement, but instead of heading in the direction Leia pointed to, he takes a flight of stairs up, double-time and moving quickly. “If it’s a Star Temple, the Infinity Gate will be at the top.”

There's a moment of startled silence, and then Leia asks, a note of something like excitement in her voice, “You know how to work an Infinity Gate?”

“So do you, technically,” Ferus tells her. “They're powered by the Force. If we can get it running, and use it, it can get us off the planet before the Inquisitor finds us.”

“Inquisitors,” Leia corrects tightly, and a moment later she wriggles down from Ferus's back, grabbing his hand instead as she matches him up the steps. “There were three of them when my father answered the comm.”

Kriff. Something cold pools in Ferus's stomach, even though he tries not to show it. One Inquisitor he might be able to handle, but—three will overpower him instantly. He was always good, and Palpatine’s training and years fighting left him better, but there's no way he can face down three of Sidious’s enforcers and walk away alive. Even getting to the spaceport just got a lot less possible.

“You look like you're about to curse,” Leia says, eyeing him. “Or cry.”

“I only have one lightsaber,” Ferus manages. “That makes three on one a little difficult.”

Leia pulls a face, tugging Ferus left around a trio of tall pillars. “I thought Jedi were supposed to be the best warriors in the galaxy,” she says pointedly.

Ferus gives her a wry smile. “I told you, I didn’t finish training. And besides, the Inquisitors were all Jedi once, too.”

[onecanonlife]

In which Tommy travels back in time and tries to prevent a nightmare from happening to everyone he knows. Everyone else, meanwhile, is highly concerned.

(fic masterpost w/ ao3 links)

(first part) (previous part) (next part)

(word count: 4,391)

--------------------

Part Eight: Fundy

The easy part is deciding to run.

It’s all a pretty clear-cut process. The rules were stated at the outset, though he’s got no idea what was Wilbur’s idea and what was Tommy’s, considering how much Tommy seems to care about this whole thing. But none of them are unreasonable or anything like that, nothing that he’d find objectionable. He just has to declare his party’s intention before election night, not rig the vote, not join his vote with any other parties, and not seek endorsements from people who are banned from the server. And be a citizen of L’Manberg.

There’s nothing wrong with any of those, or at least, not that Fundy can see. And—he wants to run. He wants to look all the rest of the players on this server in the eyes and make them see him, respect him, listen to him. For himself, because he is awesome and capable, and not because they think he’s an extension of someone else.

So deciding to run is pretty easy. It’s not like he’ll even be the first; Quackity’s already declared his intentions, though he’s running solo, and doesn’t seem to be taking it too seriously. He considered trying to become his running mate, but Niki, when he explained his idea to her, seemed pretty on board to run with him. Niki’s really cool like that, and honestly, he’d rather team with her than with anyone else. So he’s running. He’s going to do it. He’s going to.

The difficult part is going to be telling Wilbur.

So he’s not procrastinating. He’s definitely not procrastinating. It’s just—there’s other people to talk to about it, right? Other people to tell? And it’s not like it matters what order he goes in. So that’s why he’s here, at the base of one of those big towers that Eret is building, hoping to find them here. It’s getting late, but the sun only set a little while ago, so they’re probably still around.

This can be like a practice run. A trial, for telling people about it. And Eret’s always listened to him, and they’re not even running themself, he’s pretty sure, so this will be good, to ease him into it. Not that this is something that needs easing. But it’s good to practice things, even if it’s not something that necessarily requires it. He’s just being responsible, which is a trait that anyone would value in a president.

The tower’s still a work in progress, but it’s pretty easy to get to the highest level. He’s almost certain that Eret is still here, and he’s right about that, but on a second glance, it turns out that Eret is asleep. They’re sitting upright, their back to the most completed section of wall, but their head has lolled to the side, their glasses close to slipping from their nose. He can even see their eyes—closed, of course. They’re definitely asleep. Definitely a little weird, since it’s not even that late, but he has noticed that they’ve been looking a little tired lately. Probably because they’ve sort of been responsible for a lot of L’Manberg’s development, build-wise.

He should come back later, probably. Except, that can’t be comfortable at all, and it’s really not that late, and the tower’s not finished yet, so the whole place is kind of exposed. Not the safest area to be taking a nap in after dark. Mobs might be able to get in, and then where would Eret be?

And also, he’s been psyching himself up this whole time, and if he doesn’t tell Eret here and now, he thinks that he might end up waiting until tomorrow to tell anyone at all. Not because he’s nervous! It’s just—late, and he’s spent time getting up here already, so he wants to do what he came here to do. That’s it.

So he creeps forward, not too loud but not trying to be too quiet, either, and crouches by Eret’s side. As he moves, something glimmers, and he squints, but—no, it’s just Eret’s jewelry reflecting the torchlight. They’ve taken to wearing a good bit of gold, lately.

“Hey, Eret?” he says. “Eret? It’s your pal Fundy. Maybe wake up?”

Eret doesn’t wake up. But their brow has creased, so, encouraged, he continues.

“Not a great place to go to sleep, probably,” he says, and he reaches out to give their shoulder a tap. “I mean, I know you’ve seemed pretty tired lately, but yikes. Maybe not good. C’mon, wake up.”

Eret still doesn’t wake, but they start to breathe quicker, which is probably not because of him at all. Are they having a nightmare? If they’re having a nightmare, he should definitely wake them up, because friends don’t let friends have nightmares.

“Hey,” he says, and shakes their shoulder more vigorously. “C’mon, man, I wanna tell you something.” He glances at the sky; the tower doesn’t have a roof yet. “And it’s getting just a little bit late, so you should probably go sleep in your house and not here, and I still need to go by the office so I can tell Wilbur—”

Eret gasps, lurching forward, jamming their sunglasses back over their eyes in the same motion, and Fundy jerks back a bit on instinct. He has no idea why they wear those all the time. Maybe it’s a light sensitivity thing. Or maybe they just want to look cool. But now’s probably not the time to focus on that, because Eret’s breathing is still way too fast, and they were definitely having a nightmare, from that reaction, so he inches forward again.

“Hey, Eret,” he says. “Sorry about that. Are you good?”

For a moment, Eret doesn’t reply. And when they do, their voice is—kind of weird. He’s not sure how to describe it, except as off.

“He failed,” they say, between gasps. “He tried, and he failed. That has consequences.”

“Uh,” he says. “Who failed?”

“But I wasn’t there,” they say. “I wasn’t there, so how did I—but the universe itself shudders, with a thing like that. What were the consequences? Something like that shouldn’t be interrupted.”

This must have been some dream.

“Something like what?” he asks.

Eret looks directly at him for the first time, though he has the strangest feeling that they’re not seeing him at all. He can’t see directly behind their glasses, but around the edges, there’s something like a pale glow. But he must be seeing things, some kind of weird reflection. Of the moon, maybe, or the stars.

“Dream tried to resurrect him,” they say. “But he couldn’t finish. That’s a dangerous magic to tamper with. You never, ever start a spell that you can’t see through to the end. And it had its blood.”

“Uh,” he says. “Sure thing. What exactly are you talking about?”

Eret falls silent. And then, they say, “Fundy?” Their voice is normal again, though he still can’t quite put his finger on what the difference was.

“Yep, that’s me,” he says. “Seriously, are you okay?”

“I’m—fine,” Eret says, and then again, “I’m fine.” They sound far more confident the second time. “Sorry, I was—dreaming. I’ve been having a lot of strange ones of late. It’s nothing to be concerned about.”

“Dreams can be weird,” he agrees.

Eret laughs. “Quite.” They stretch, tilting their head to side to side, wincing when something cracks. “Thank you for waking me. I’m not quite sure why I decided that was a good position to sleep in.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” he says, and Eret smiles, bringing their knees closer to their chest and laying an arm across them, twisting their torso to turn toward him more. It makes something burn in his chest, a comfortable warmth, at being given their full attention.

“Was there something you’d like to talk about?” they ask, and that warmth grows. “I can’t imagine you came up here just to prevent me from getting a crick in my neck.”

“I mean, that was part of it,” he protests. “I wanted to be a good friend! But um, yeah, actually, there was something I really wanted to tell you.” He hesitates, and Eret nods at him, encouragingly. Now that he’s here, about to say it out loud, he feels like his whole body is buzzing. It is kind of a big deal, actually, doing something like this. But he lets himself blurt it out. “I’m going to run for president!”

There’s a beat, and then, Eret’s face breaks into a wide grin.

“Really?” they say. “That’s awesome! I’m really happy for you, man.”

His tail starts wagging. “Yeah?” he asks.

“Of course!” Eret says. “That’s a big deal. I’m really proud you’re going for it. Do you have a running mate? And a name?”

He grins. “Niki’s running with me,” he says. “We’re going to be Coconut2020.”

Eret laughs again. “Coconut?” they ask. “Any particular reason?”

“Coconuts are good,” he says. “We both like coconut. We’ve bonded over coconuts.” He narrows his eyes. “Don’t mock our coconuts.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it. Coconuts are good. Fair enough.” Eret tilts their head. “What did Wilbur say, if I might ask?”

And just like that, his euphoria dies down.

“Oh,” he says. “Right, um. Actually, you’re the first person I’ve told! Other than Niki, of course.”

“Oh!” He can hear the surprise in their tone, and he cringes away from it, a bit; he knows very well, of course, that Wilbur probably should’ve been the first to hear it. But it’s not like what he doesn’t know will hurt him, and he—he just wanted to practice. That’s all. “Well, in that case, I’m honored.” A pause, and then, “You’re not worrying about it, are you?”

“What?” He laughs, and he definitely sounds nervous. “No. No, why would I be nervous?”

“I think you don’t need to be,” Eret agrees, leaning toward him a bit. “I know Wilbur’s been busy these days, but he cares for you a lot. I think he’ll be quite proud that you’ve decided to take the initiative.”

“You think so?”

“I do. I wouldn’t say you have anything to worry about.”

“Okay.”

He feels a bit better, hearing that, and he knows that Eret is right. He’s never doubted his dad’s love for him, after all, even if he’s doubted Wilbur’s faith in him in a lot of other respects, and this is exactly the kind of thing he needs to do to make him stop doing that second thing. To make him see that he’s a man now, able to take care of himself, to do great things. If he goes far in this election, if he manages to beat him, even, then he’ll have to acknowledge how grown up he’s become. Will have to look at him with pride in his eyes.

“Okay,” he says again. “Thank you, Eret.”

“Of course,” Eret says. “I wish you the best of luck.”

It’s time for him to go, then. This practice went pretty great, actually. He feels like he can do this now. He feels good. Pumped. Hyped up.

“Thanks,” he says. “Are you gonna go get some actual sleep now?”

“I might stay up a while longer,” Eret says. They stretch, and then rise to their feet, and he follows their example. “I’d like to get a little more done with this tonight. And I’ll admit, my dreams haven’t been very kind to me lately.” They pause, and he’s not sure what to say to them; it always sucks, of course, to have nightmares, but he can’t offer much more than a basic commiseration. “I can’t help but feel like something’s missing.”

“From the tower?” he asks.

Eret smiles. “That too,” they agree. “I like it so far, but it feels a bit plain.”

He considers this for a moment. Eret’s not looking at him, is staring out at the lands beyond, visible past the incomplete wall. They’re absentmindedly twisting one of the bracelets around their wrist, and that gives him an idea.

“If you wanted to spice it up a little, you could always try some gold accents,” he suggests, and Eret jerks, turning their head toward him. “I noticed you’ve been liking gold a lot lately.”

He’s not sure why that makes them go pale.

“Maybe,” they say, softly. “Maybe.” They smile again, but this one’s a bit shaky. “I’ll bid you good night, Fundy. And really, good luck. But don’t get too worked up about it. You’ve got this.”

He nods, grinning. “I’ve got this! Goodnight, Eret!”

He leaves Eret to their tower. It’s to the office from here, and it’s definitely well into the night by now, but he knows his way around this nation like the back of his hand, even in the dark, and there’s plenty of torches to see by anyway. He considers, for a moment, that Wilbur might have already turned in for the night, but he casts that thought aside. Wilbur’s always working, even long past when a reasonable person would have hit the hay.

Tommy accosts him just outside the building that’s been serving for L’Manberg’s headquarters, sliding out of the darkness with a smirk on his face and his hands in his pockets. Fundy regards him warily. Not that he doesn’t like Tommy. He does, even if he’s been a little weird lately. But that’s an expression that screams trouble. And what is he doing out and about at this time of night anyway?

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks, and Tommy raises an eyebrow.

“What, can’t a boy look?” he says. “Do you need me to avert my gaze? Are you perhaps up to some crime and wrongdoing?”

“What? No,” he says. Trying to decipher Tommy is, on occasion, like attempting to navigate a parkour course blindfolded. “I’m just—” He bolsters himself. Stands straighter, puffs his chest out. “I’m running for president. So I’m going to go tell Wilbur.”

He speaks it like the challenge that it is. As much as he likes Tommy, he’s competition in this case, as Wilbur’s running mate. Tommy’s mouth forms an ‘o’, and something flickers in his eyes.

“Really?” he says. “Well, good on you, getting in on it early. Before election night.”

He frowns. “Yeah? Aren’t those the rules?”

Tommy nods, and then doesn’t say anything else, and this, this is why Fundy thinks he’s weird. It’s like sometimes, he just says weird things without elaborating, or even without realizing that it’s something that should require elaboration. Tommy’s just a weird guy overall, really.

“Okay,” he says, more to fill the silence than anything else. “Is there something you wanted to talk to me about? Or can I just go in? And I’m not moving out of my house, before you start that again,” he tacks on.

“I’m telling you, the real estate in that area is not good. Rather not poggers,” Tommy says. “It’s a dodgy part of the SMP, it is.”

“The only one anywhere near there is Punz,” he says, exasperated, and immediately berates himself for letting himself be drawn into this conversation again. That’s another weird thing; apparently, Tommy has recently taken offense to the location of his house, and has made persuading him to move somewhere else a priority. He can’t tell whether he’s serious, or whether it’s a long and involved bit.

Tommy nods sagely. “Dodgy,” he says. “But nah, you go on in. Wilbur’s still there, far as I know. Good luck.” Tommy steps away, and then stops, frowning, and turns back. “But maybe make sure Wilbur knows that you running against him isn’t, like, you disowning him or some shit. He wouldn’t take that well.”

“Why would that mean I was disowning him?” he demands. Wilbur wouldn’t think that, would he? Surely, even he wouldn’t jump to so drastic a conclusion. Unless he would, and him doing this is going to ruin their relationship, and he’s making a terrible mistake. But no, he’s not going to think like that. If Wilbur does have that attitude, that’s on Wilbur. Not him.

“It wouldn’t,” Tommy says seriously. “But, y’know, one thing leads to another.”

“How would that lead to me disowning him?”

“It shouldn’t,” Tommy says, and then grins again. There’s less light in this one, less levity. It’s actually a little unsettling. “Don’t mind me. Go talk to Wil. See you later, Fundy.”

“Okay,” he says. “Bye, Tommy.” He watches as Tommy walks away, and realizes, with some frustration, that he forgot to ask why, exactly, Tommy was hanging around here. Oh, well. He can’t let himself get worried about what Tommy’s doing, even if it’s always best to have half an eye on the guy. Trouble follows him.

But then, trouble kind of follows all of them.

He goes inside, and finds his way to Wilbur’s office. It’s not difficult; he’s been here before, though not often. The door is closed, and he hesitates in front of it, his nerves flagging. But then, he inhales, remembers Eret’s excitement and encouraging words, the way that Tommy didn’t make any disparaging remarks, and—he can’t expect a completely positive reaction, probably. He’s declaring himself as a political rival to his own father.

But he doesn’t need the reaction to be entirely positive. He just wants to look Wilbur in the eyes and see respect there.

He knocks.

Waits a beat.

“Come in,” comes the voice, and he slides the door open.

Wilbur’s at his desk, chin propped up on his hand, glasses slipping down his nose. His eyes are focused on whatever paper’s in front of him, narrow and squinting as they dart across the words, and his other hand grips a pen tightly, though he doesn’t seem to be doing anything with it at the moment. After a second, he glances up, and his gaze locks on Fundy, and Fundy suddenly feels very, very unprepared.

“Hello Fundy,” Wilbur says, and he sounds a little unsure, like he has no idea what he could possibly be doing here. He feels a little bitterness start to well up. “Is something the matter?”

Of course that’s his first instinct. That something has to be wrong. Because he thinks of Fundy as a child, always getting into scrapes, always needing help.

“No,” he says. “Nothing’s wrong. But can I talk to you for a second?”

Wilbur sets the pen down, sits up a little straighter. “Of course,” he says. “I’ve always got time for you.”

Then where have you been? he doesn’t say. Why are you always working? How come you almost never do anything else these days? And even when you’re around, why do you act like I’m still a little kid, like I didn’t fight in your revolution, like I haven’t been here the whole time?

“Great,” he says. “That’s great. Listen, I’ve got something to tell you.”

“Alright,” Wilbur says, slowly. “Go on.”

He takes in a deep breath.

“I’m running for president,” he says.

For a moment, there is silence.

“I see,” Wilbur says, still slowly, like he’s working through it in real time, and he continues, feeling an odd burst of panic, like he needs to get all of it out now, before Wilbur can reply, can say anything, can shut him down or question him or anything like that.

“I haven’t marked my name down yet, but that’s my next stop,” he says. “Me and Niki, we’re going to be Coconut2020.”

“You and Niki,” Wilbur repeats, and he nods.

“Me and Niki,” he says, and then pauses. It’s out there now. He’s said it. And Wilbur’s just staring at him. He’s got no idea what that expression’s supposed to be. It just kind of looks—blank. Which, frankly, is not the reaction he was hoping for, and he shifts uncomfortably. “So, yeah. That’s what I was here to say.”

Wilbur is quiet for a long, long moment.

“Have you thought this through all the way?” he asks, voice quiet.

“What? Yeah, of course I have.” He crosses his arms. “This is what I want to do. You’re not gonna be able to change my mind.”

“But—why, then?” Wilbur asks. The blankness is finally fading, replaced by—Fundy’s not even sure what, but he is sure that it’s not anything good. Which makes anger rise up in him; honestly, who is Wilbur to deny him, at this point? Why does Wilbur think he gets a say in this when he’s barely spoken to him at all, these past weeks? “Why do you feel the need to—do you think I’m not suitable? Is that it?”

“Not everything’s about you, Wil,” he says. Even though this kind of is. But not in the way he’s thinking. “I think I’d be a good president, so I’m running. That’s all it is. It’s not that complicated.”

“I think it is a bit complicated,” Wilbur says, “considering you’re my son. I—I didn’t expect this from you.”

That’s the whole point, he doesn’t say. You never expect anything from me.

“It’s not,” he insists. “It’s not complicated. Don’t make it into something it’s not. I’m running. That’s all. This isn’t—my being your son doesn’t come into it.”

“I disagree,” Wilbur says. “I—you do realize what you’re doing, don’t you? I’ve never wanted us to be enemies, Fundy. But this—we’ll be opponents. I won’t hold back just because you’re my son. An election’s an election. Even if—and that’s a side of me you’ve never had to deal with. That I’ve never wanted you to deal with.”

Despite himself, doubts flit across his mind. Did he think this through? But then, he hardens his resolve. This is what he wants. To challenge Wilbur. To make him back down, if he can manage it. To force him to acknowledge him as someone to be reckoned with. And if that comes in the form of taking his country from him, then all the better, right? Wilbur won’t be able to ignore him then.

“I can hold my own,” he says, and before he can stop himself, he continues, “And why does this even matter so much to you, anyway? Why do you need to be the one in charge?”

If he’s not mistaken, he thinks Wilbur rears back a bit, at that question. But it’s difficult to tell. Wilbur never lets anything show that he doesn’t want to, making him frustratingly difficult to read.

“I founded this country, didn’t I?” Wilbur says. “Didn’t I lead us? I just want to continue to protect this nation. I want to be able to do what’s best for it. I want to see it flourish, and be strong, and—if it’s the people’s will that that happens under someone else’s hand, I’ll accept that. But if I can continue to guide L’Manberg, then I want to do so.”

“I mean,” he says, “it kind of felt like Tommy was the one who won it for us.”

Wilbur stills. And then, inclines his head, lips twitching up. It’s a smile, though for some reason, Fundy has a hard time seeing any joy in it, any happiness at all. But then, he’s probably reading too much into things, putting emotions into an expression that simply aren’t there. Because when Wil’s not being overbearing, he’s being distant. There’s really no inbetween.

“That’s true,” he says. “Tommy did.”

Silence falls again, thick and stifling.

“Um,” he says, after a second, “that was all I had to say. I think I’ll just go, now.”

“Alright,” Wilbur says, and it doesn’t seem like he’s going to say anything else, so Fundy turns to the door, an odd emotion settling into his stomach. It might be disappointment—he’s not sure that he got what he wanted from it, though the fact that he was able to rile Wilbur up at all is an accomplishment. And he managed to hold his ground, and he thinks that says something.

Except then, Wilbur says something else, and it gives him pause.

“I am proud of you, though,” Wilbur tells him, and he stops before his hand closes around the door handle, fireworks going off across his skin.

“Yeah?” he says, and turns around again. Wilbur’s still looking at him, meeting his gaze evenly, though there is something tight about it, something off. But he’s smiling, and Fundy decides not to examine any of it too closely. Because the words rattle around in his brain, in his heart, and then settle.

“Of course,” Wilbur says. “I suppose I don’t say that to you enough, but I always am. And in this—I’d be lying if I said I liked the decision. I don’t want this to—” He stops, and swallows, an oddly audible break in the flow of his words. “But that’s me, isn’t it? Good on you for—for having the balls, I guess. For going after what you want. Just be sure that you can handle it.”

A double-edged sword, then. How many times does he have to say that he can handle something before Wilbur finally believes it? But still, he said he’s proud. That he always is. And that has to mean something. Has to mean everything, in the end.

“I can,” he says. “Thanks, dad.”

Wilbur smiles again. Oddly, it still doesn’t look happy. But it’s very likely that he’s stressed and tired anyway. He didn’t consider that before. Maybe he really should’ve waited for another time to bring this up, another time that wasn’t late at night. But what’s done is done, and he’s said his piece, and Wilbur wasn’t quite enthusiastic but he did say that he was proud of him, which all in all, is much better than it probably could have gone. His chest is buzzing, still.

So he smiles back at Wilbur, and exits his office.

And later, after he’s made everything all official and he’s meeting with Niki in her bakery, going over their plans and forming his own in the back of his mind—a last resort, just in case it looks hopeless—she asks him, “How did it go? Telling him?”

And he considers that for a moment.

“Honestly,” he says, “I think it went pretty well.”

[azuregard]

How Rhea Views Edelgard in Crimson Flower

Word Count: 2,296

I’ve been thinking about how Crimson Flower portrays the Edelgard/Rhea conflict. In the route itself, Edelgard is clearly not a fan of the archbishop, but Rhea seems much more concerned with Byleth. While I do plan on analyzing how effective this decision was, I felt like it would be a good idea to offer my two cents regarding the way Rhea views Edelgard first.

When it came down to it, I figured it would be better for me to present the less-opinionated piece first. Unlike the other piece, where I point out what works and what doesn’t, this piece is more focused on analyzing certain quotes in an attempt to make sense of this decision from an in-universe perspective.

One more thing I want to mention before I start is that the analysis is largely looked at from Rhea’s PoV. As such, the language I’m using to describe Edelgard might come across as somewhat harsh. A lot of things tend to get lost in translation on the internet, and I will admit I’m not the best at expressing myself, but I figured I’d address this now just so you know that this analysis isn’t an excuse to attack her (and as someone who likes Edelgard, I have no intention of doing so, but that doesn’t mean that I don’t think there’s any room for improvement).

With that out of the way, I hope you enjoy this dumb little analysis.

The Flame Emperor Unmasked

“You have disappointed me, Edelgard. To think that a descendant of House Hresvelg would dare betray the holy church…”

—Rhea (White Clouds Chapter 11: Throne of Knowledge, Event: Fateful Farewell)

If you chose to teach either the Black Eagles or the Golden Deer, this first quote occurs after you defeat Edelgard at the Holy Tomb. To explain the context of this quote, Edelgard has led the imperial army into the tomb to plunder the crest stones contained within. While Edelgard isn’t aware of what the crest stones are, Rhea is, and given that they’re the hearts of slain Nabateans, the archbishop is justifiably not happy about it.

That said, while Rhea is obviously furious with Edelgard in this moment, she also expresses her disappointment that a member of House Hresvelg betrayed the church in such a manner.

“Professor, kill Edelgard at once. She is a danger to all of Fódlan. Such a rebellious heart cannot be allowed to keep beating.”

—Rhea (White Clouds Chapter 11: Throne of Knowledge, Event: Fateful Farewell)

Rather than perform the task herself, Rhea orders Byleth to kill Edelgard. While this might not seem strange at a glance, anyone who has played Ashe and Catherine’s paralogue is likely familiar with the following quote:

“Lady Rhea is going to personally execute the bishop. I have been appointed as her guard. I want your help protecting her. So what do you say? Will you come?”

--Catherine (White Clouds Paralogue: Falling Short of Heaven, Before Battle)

As you can see here, Rhea is not above executing heretics herself. Unlike Lonato and the Western Church members from chapter 4 (and Seteth and Flayn’s paralogue), the bishop in Ashe and Catherine’s paralogue is the one leading the Western Church. Like that bishop, Edelgard was the one leading the charge against the church at the Holy Tomb. That, combined with her high status, would probably make one assume that Rhea would be the one to personally take her life.

Rhea ordering Byleth to kill Edelgard makes sense when looking at it from an out-of-universe perspective; what with this being the catalyst for the player choosing between the two women, at least if they chose to teach the Black Eagles. That said, when looking at it from an in-universe perspective, it seems odd considering the above Catherine quote. Rhea wasn’t hesitant to execute the western church’s bishop, but she isn’t willing to do the same with some girl who led the imperial army to defile a holy place and, in doing so, likely caused her to relive a traumatic moment in her life.

“To flee is futile, wicked girl. The Church of Seiros will raise its entire army against you, until you have been captured and punished! You have defiled the Holy Tomb, dishonored the goddess, and humiliated your brethren. That crime will never be erased, even if you burn in the eternal flames, and spill all of your blood into the goddess's soil!”

—Rhea (White Clouds Chapter 11: Throne of Knowledge, Event: Fateful Farewell, Azure Moon/Verdant Wind/Silver Snow)

Again, Rhea vows to make Edelgard pay, but she doesn’t specify that she will be the one who will punish her. In fact, she states that the church will raise its entire army against Edelgard, which seems to imply that someone in that army will be the one to perform the deed. This comes to fruition in every route where Rhea utters this particular line; Byleth ends Edelgard’s life in Verdant Wind and Silver Snow, while Dimitri is the one to strike her down in Azure Moon.

The Fall of Garreg Mach

“No matter your reasons, I cannot permit you to go on living any longer!… You must know what a fool you are! The greatest of sins is to make an enemy of the goddess herself!”

—Rhea, to Edelgard (Crimson Flower Chapter 12: Outset of a Power Struggle, Battle: The Battle of Garreg Mach)

Edelgard and Rhea’s pre-battle quote is another interesting one since it’s a lot less hostile than it ought to be. Edelgard’s actions in the previous chapter amounted to not only her defiling a holy place, but also in Rhea experiencing a pseudo-Red Canyon Tragedy. Yet despite this, Rhea and Edelgard’s pre-battle dialogue isn’t nearly as heated as the one-way dialogue Rhea has with Byleth.

“You... How dare you betray me... You worthless piece of garbage... I will punish you myself!”

—Rhea, to Byleth (Crimson Flower Chapter 12: Outset of a Power Struggle, Battle: The Battle of Garreg Mach)

Rhea’s pre-battle quote when Byleth approaches her is much more hostile compared to what you would get if Edelgard was the one to do so. She is in no mood to entertain the idea that they had a reason to turn against her, and she makes it clear that she will be the one to punish them for their decision. While she mentions that she cannot permit Edelgard to go on living, she doesn’t explicitly state that she will be the one to end Edelgard’s life the way she does with Byleth here.

“So you have sullied yourself by joining with the rebels? I hope you came prepared to breathe your last.”

—Rhea, to units who aren’t named Edelgard or Byleth (Crimson Flower Chapter 12: Outset of a Power Struggle, Battle: The Battle of Garreg Mach)

Rhea’s generic pre-battle quote is a middle ground between the two unique ones she has with your lord and avatar. She’s not as hostile as she is with Byleth, but this dialogue strikes me as her being willing to kill the unlucky unit you picked to stand against her (at least compared to Edelgard).

In addition, Rhea doesn’t point out that the unit in question has a reason to turn against the church. As such, she doesn’t distinguish characters like Ashe (whose adoptive father and brother turned against the church and paid with their lives) from characters like Annette (whose father is a devout member of the church). This lack of distinction on Rhea’s part leads me to believe that their betrayal did not sting Rhea as much as Edelgard’s or Byleth’s.

Finally, given Rhea’s status as the map’s ultimate target, she doesn’t move from her assigned position. As such, you will probably only see the pre-battle quotes if you initiate combat, or place a unit close enough to Rhea that she feels the need to defend herself. This, combined with Rhea deploying the monastery’s strongest military force when she emerges, makes me believe that she was hoping that someone else might finish the job against Edelgard and anyone not named Byleth.

Return to Tailtean

“Mother... Oddly the rain has come to fall yet again. At this place, once again... I will fight to take you back... The one who keeps me from seeing you again... I will be sure to return them to the earth from whence they came. The foolish descendant of Hresvelg who bares her fangs at me will suffer the same fate…”

—Rhea/Seiros (Crimson Flower Chapter 17, Field of Revenge, Event: Field of Revenge)

While you could argue from this quote that Rhea is no longer hesitant to kill Edelgard, I have to respectfully disagree here. Even though Rhea states that Edelgard and Byleth will suffer the same fate (that being “returning them from the earth from whence they came”), there is a moment earlier in the chapter that makes me think Rhea isn’t as keen on taking out Edelgard as she is Byleth.

Dimitri: “There is only one person I am after. I have no interest in any other prey.” Rhea: “I will take you at your word. Erasing the other child's existence is my task, and mine alone. I will get you back, Mother... I promise…”

—Crimson Flower Chapter 17, Field of Revenge, Event: Preparing for the Final Battle

While Rhea mentions that Edelgard will suffer the same fate as Byleth, she never mentions that she will personally be the one to enact that fate. Given the dialogue provided above, I would argue that she is relying on Dimitri to do the job for her.

“King Dimitri! There is no retreat for the Knights of Seiros! Fight until none are left standing! Slaughter them all and send them straight to hell!”

—Rhea/Seiros (Crimson Flower Chapter 17, Field of Revenge, Event: Field of Revenge, if not defeated before Dimitri falls, pre-v1.02)

“No... It can't be... There is no retreat for the Knights of Seiros! Fight until none are left standing! Slaughter them all and send them straight to hell!”

—Rhea/Seiros (Crimson Flower Chapter 17, Field of Revenge, Event: Field of Revenge, if not defeated before Dimitri falls, post-v1.02)

The above two quotes only appear if Dimitri is taken out before Rhea at Tailtean. As you can see, there is little difference between the two besides 2–4 words. That said, I would argue that they aren’t all that different. On the surface, they point out Dimitri’s defeat; however, if you look at them with the final quote I will be providing, they could also be Rhea realizing that it’s becoming more likely that she is going to need to take care of Edelgard herself. She realizes that there’s still a way around it, that being if one of the knights gets there first, but the odds of that happening are decreasing.

“An ancestor of the Hresvelgs, who became Adrestia's first emperor... He saved me. Supported me. Gave his all to the cause of defeating Nemesis. That I should find myself here at Tailtean, striking down his scion…”

—Rhea/Seiros, to Edelgard (Crimson Flower Chapter 17, Field of Revenge, Event: Field of Revenge)

This is easily the most important quote that I provided, as it both reiterates the previous quotes and shows us the reason Rhea seems so hesitant to be the one to take action against Edelgard. First of all, it calls back to all of the times Rhea mentioned Edelgard’s noble house. Back in the eleventh chapter, Rhea expresses disappointment in Edelgard, a member of House Hresvelg, for betraying the church. This quote clears up why: Edelgard’s ancestor was someone Rhea clearly thought highly of, and as his descendant, Rhea believed Edelgard should have known better (hence why Rhea stated that Edelgard “disappointed” her).

Unlike Edelgard, who channelled Nemesis when invading the Holy Tomb, Wilhelm gave his all to defeat the crusty old bastard. In invading the Holy Tomb, Edelgard caused Rhea’s trauma to resurface; in contrast, Wilhelm likely served as a pillar of support for Rhea after she lost everything.

Edelgard’s actions from chapter eleven onwards were the opposite of how Rhea remembered Wilhelm, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she saw them as Edelgard disrespecting the memory of someone she cared for. Yet at the same time, given her motivations and relationships, she’s obviously still bound by the past. Rhea knows that Edelgard is doing terrible things that the Wilhelm she knew would never even consider, yet she can’t bring herself to punish her like she did the other heretics because of that connection.

Like how Rhea views Byleth as the closest thing she has to her mother, you could argue that Edelgard’s ancestry makes her the closest thing Rhea has to Wilhelm. Unlike Byleth, who becomes a new Nemesis when they take Sothis’ spine and heart with them upon siding with Edelgard, Rhea doesn’t have anyone else she can project onto the tiny emperor (at least that she’s aware of).

The latter half of the above quote isn’t filled with the determination you would find when she is pitted against Byleth in this route. Instead, she seems upset by the turn of events. In her mind, Rhea knows that Edelgard needs to pay for betraying the church and disrespecting Wilhelm’s memory. At the same time, Rhea’s fondness for Wilhelm makes her unwilling to perform the act herself, at least until she feels she doesn’t have any other choice.

After everything that’s happened, Rhea finds herself facing off against Wilhelm’s descendant at Tailtean, and she’s aware that Edelgard intends to kill her. As such, Rhea knows that she has to strike down the descendant of someone she cared about if she intends to live and reclaim all she has lost.

[toaarcan]

One ship exposes everything wrong with TRoS

Heaven help me, I’m back on my bullshit.

Alright, so, I enjoyed The Rise of Skywalker when I watched it. I actually watched it twice, once on my own when I rushed to see it as soon as possible in order to beat spoilers, and once with my family, in what was a semi-annual new year tradition for us during those four years that a Star Wars film released.

But that doesn’t mean it was good. I enjoyed Transformers: Dark of the Moon the first time I watched it, and that movie’s still a steaming pile of shit. I was admittedly fifteen when I saw DotM, but still. 

My point is that I’m fully capable of enjoying crappy films.

But there’s one thing, one thing about TRoS that exemplifies so many of the problems with TRoS as a whole, if not everything (And by that I mean with TRoS specifically, the woeful treatment of John Boyega and Kelly Marie Tran is a Whole Trilogy Problem). And it’s a ship. Specifically this ship.

The Resistance Y-Wing. I hate this ship with the fiery passion of an exploding star, and to talk about why, we need to first go back to The Last Jedi and its conspicuous lack of Y-Wings.

One of the things that I disliked most about the Sequels before TRoS put all the other problems into stark light was the lack of new ships. Instead of new vehicles, we got shinier, sleeker versions of the ships from the original trilogy. And I disliked this because it’s the opposite of what the Prequels did.

Episodes I-III don’t feature more primitive versions of the X-Wing and TIE Fighter, but instead have similar vehicles that evoke the classics while still having an identity of their own.

The ARC-170 looks kinda like an X-Wing, but it’s bigger and has more weapons and crew, and you get why the well-funded Republic can afford things like this while the scrappy Rebels can’t.

The Eta-2 is a predecessor to the TIE Fighter, but it being employed exclusively by Jedi makes a lot of sense, of course a precognitive wizard with superhuman reflexes can do well in a light, unshielded ship, while in the hands of the Empire’s military they’re just expendable swarm fighters.

But then in the Sequels, rather than evolve the ships into new forms, they just made new incarnations of the X-Wing, TIE Fighter, A-Wing, TIE Interceptor, B-Wing, and of course the Y-Wing.

Well, except for one movie: The Last Jedi.

At the outset of the film, we’re introduced to this ship.

This is the MG-100 StarFortress, AKA “That ship all the Star Wars Youtubers hate”. It’s designed to be a much heavier and bulkier version of the B-Wing Starfighter, and is even made by the same people.

From questions about how the bombs “fall” toward the Dreadnought (The answer is magnets) to claims that they’re completely useless because most of the ones in the film died so easily, these things have been put through the wringer by the fandom, and honestly they don’t deserve it? What destroyed the StarFortresses in the film wasn’t their own weaknesses, but them being deployed in too tight a formation. It was a tactical fuckup, not a problem with the ship’s design.

And given that the whole point of the battle over D’Qar is that Poe makes a tactical fuckup to kickstart his development into the new leader of the Resistance as a whole, adding another layer makes sense to me.

But we live in a post-CinemaSins world of media consumption, where every plot-point that isn’t spelled out with a flowchart and an audio commentary by the writers is actually a plothole. 

We also live in an era where Star Wars fans pine for the days of the Legends canon where everything about new ships, species, and worlds was explained in background lore and books, and are angry that the new Canon is... doing exactly the same thing?

Seriously, how much exposition and lore dumping is actually present in any of the Star Wars films? Not a whole lot. And that applies to all three eras. 

So the StarFortress’ appearance in the film and the lack of Y-Wings led to a bevy of armchair writers demanding to know why the Resistance weren’t using Y-Wings and why they were using those “Resistance Bombers” that are just ‘terrible’.

Answer? Because the Y-Wings sucked shit.

Seriously, go back to the Original Trilogy and try to keep track of the Y-Wings, and see what they actually do, and you’ll find that what they do is “Explode, mostly.”

We’re first introduced to the Y-Wings in A New Hope, and they’re supposed to be the ones performing the Trench Run while the X-Wings cover them, and to their credit, they try.

And then they all get blown up by Vader and his wingmen before they can even take a shot at the exhaust port. Well, except that one that appears with the rebel ships flying away from the Death Star.

Where the fuck were you when the X-Wings were doing the attack run?

The Y-Wings got absolutely wrecked.

Ancillary media would go on to explain that the Y-Wings were beat-up old vehicles that were no longer fit for purpose, but the Rebels had to use them anyway because they had basically no money. They’d stripped down the ships and removed a bunch of their more costly features just to make them viable, and the results of that were pretty clear.

Of course, the Y-Wings were still present in the later films. They don’t do anything in The Empire Strikes Back, but they play a role in Return of the Jedi.

Naturally, that role is mostly “Get blown up while the other ships do the important stuff”.

Despite supposedly being a fighter-bomber that was designed to do significant damage to capital ships, does the Y-Wing play a role in the destruction of the Executor? Does it fuck. Destroying the Imperial flagship’s deflector shields and the subsequent suicidal ram attack on the bridge are tasks that are both performed by the goddamn A-Wings. Y’know, the light interceptors?

The Y-Wings get shown up at their own job by the ships that are there to protect them from TIE Fighters.

Ancillary media again explains why they’re still there. While the Rebels have a newer, better fighter-bomber in the B-Wing, the B-Wing is expensive as fuck and also really difficult to fly. 

A non-centreline cockpit that rotates will do that to a ship.

Still, the B-Wing was a better bomber than the Y-Wing ever was (And the StarFortress was better than them both at that role).

All this adds up to a simple fact: There were very good reasons why the Resistance weren’t using Y-Wings. And there were even reasonable reasons to choose the StarFortress compared to the B-Wing itself, given that the Resistance are still undermanned and under-funded, especially with the New Republic getting nuked midway through The Force Awakens. It being easier to fly and having more armaments would have made it a viable choice for the Resistance.

Buuuut oops, people didn’t like the StarFortress and we can’t make the Internet angry at us again! Better put the Y-Wings back in for Episode IX, and show them destroying a Xyston-class Destroyer, that’ll make them happy!

And sure, okay, giving the Resistance a fighter/bomber is probably a good idea. And they already have New X-Wings and New A-Wings, so where’s the harm in a New Y-Wing?

Alright, alright, sure. But why the fuck does it look like this?

If this is a new ship, why is it already stripped-down like the ones in the Original Trilogy? Why doesn’t it look like the actual brand-new Y-Wings we saw in The Clone Wars? 

Now that’s more like it. Still visibly a Y-Wing, but with more of an identity of its own. 

Seriously, “Literally the same ship but without its armour pulled off” has more of a unique identity than the crowd-pleasing New Y-Wing.

And that, in and of itself, is the essence of The Rise of Skywalker.

It’s blind, empty fanservice, rushing to include as much nostalgia-pandering as possible to try and get the fanbase back on-side after The Last Jedi didn’t do what the fanboys wanted it to do.

This is a whole near- three hour movie whose only message is “Yes, Youtubers making TFA critiques longer than an entire season of TCW, we hear you, we’ll make it for you, please love us!”

And, almost entirely predictably, it was shite.

It was riddled with plotholes and none of the scenes had any time to breathe because the movie was too desperately trying to rush itself to the next crowd-pleasing scene in a desperate attempt to wank off as many disgruntled fanboys as it possibly could.

Luke with his green saber! Jedi Leia! Chewie gets a medal! Lando! Luke raises his X-Wing out of the water! The main villain is a testicle in a bathrobe again! Snork origin! Original-flavour Star Destroyers! Rose doesn’t exist! Rey had a super-special secret magical bloodline the whole time and Luke and Leia totally knew even though Luke has literally no idea who she is in Episode VIII! Luke actually was just afraid of the bad guys in Episode VII, none of that self-imposed exile for his own mistakes nonsense! Y-Wings.

I mean fuck. Disagree with Luke’s portrayal in TLJ all you like, I certainly have my issues with it, but I lay those at the feet of JJ for making Luke’s absence into one of his fucking Mystery Boxes, and then deciding that, even though last time Luke sensed Leia and Han might be in danger, he abandoned his Jedi training, hopped in an X-Wing, and flew halfway across the galaxy to try and save them, he wouldn’t do shit when the First Order pointed a star-powered System-Killer 9000 at Leia, and Han got himself killed trying to redeem Kyle Ron. Like how in fuck was Rian supposed to explain Luke’s inaction in VII?

But regardless of the problems with that Luke portrayal, at least Mark Hamill gave it his all. Hell, it might be his best performance in the Star Wars franchise!

 In TRoS, he shows up in a bad wig, waves a middle finger at TLJ, and ascends to his final form as a Lightsaber Delivery Boy, because apparently all you need to kill a Sith who literally clawed his way back from death is two lightsabers. Haunting Kyle Ron? Nope. Providing guidance as a ghost? Not really.

And y’know what the kicker is? It didn’t fucking work. Lucasfilm and Disney fucking gutted this trilogy, sliced out the integrity, surgically removed the soul of Episode IX in a desperate effort to make the Internet’s most unpleasable fanbase happy, and it didn’t work. They still hate it! Now they just concoct hour-long videos about how much they would’ve preferred to have the Trevorrow script (Which is admittedly much better, albeit still with it’s far share of giant flaws), which was probably thrown out because it wasn’t fanservicey enough!

The Rise of Skywalker is an awful film. It’s a loose collection of nostalgia-baiting moments, roughly stapled together around the skeleton of a plot that was never properly developed. It’s a Frankenstein’s Monster of a movie, but, and I say this with full offense, the Victor Frankenstein in this tragic story isn’t Lucasfilm or Disney or Kathleen Kennedy or Rian Johnson, or even JJ Abrams. It’s you, Star Wars Fandom. It is your monster. 

[alyss-spazz-penedo]

@w1lmutt I know I just did part nine of the unedited v!Wind fic but I crave validation had most of this tenth part done already, so, here you go! *hands you thing*

<<First Part 9 Next>>

The sound of battle draws the heroes like lightning to uncovered metal.

This is the scene they stumble upon: Phantom, limp on the ground, and Tetra, standing over his body, one hand upon the assembled Triforce.

“Go away,” she orders, and for a moment the heroes think she’s talking to them. “We don’t need you anymore.”

Then the Triforce pulses, once, an acknowledgment.

It’s like the world freezes. Like the very air stills in their lungs as they realize the magnitude of what they’re witnessing.

In that endless heartbeat, there is only the girl, and the power at her fingertips.

“We’re going to create a new Hyrule,” Princess Zelda declares to the Triforce—to the gods themselves. “And we don’t need an eyesore like you around to do it.” Her hand clenches into a fist. “You can come back to us when it’s done, if you must. But until the new kingdom built, I want you gone. Disappear, somewhere so far away that not even Ganondorf’s remnants can reach you. That’s my wish.”

The Triforce glimmers, one final blaze of gold, before lifting gently into the sky. It splinters. The pieces separate, Power and Wisdom and Courage, flying up and up and up, fallen stars returning to the heavens.

With one last twinkle of divine light, it disappears.

(That light will not reach mortal eyes again for many generations to come.)

~o0o~

In the aftermath, Time approaches Tetra first. “What was that about?” He prompts, direct, as unfazed as ever.

Tetra side-eyes him thoughtfully, righteous indignation simmering down, before closing one eye in a wink.

"Just Link being an idiot. He doesn't seem to realize," and here her words turn acidic, clearly directed at the dazed boy just beginning to sit up in the sand, "That I can just ask my first mate exactly how long I've been out for."

"Actually-" Phantom starts. Stops. Springs to his feet, sudden, eyes wide as saucers. "Oh shit, the pirates," he breathes, with no small amount of horror.

"What is it? What have you done now?" Tetra demands, the only one more exasperated than worried.

"I, uh..." Phantom backs away as subtly as he can manage, which is not very. "I kind of... forgot them in the cave?"

"The... cave.”

Phantom looks down at his feet. "...On the other side of the island?"

“Might this be the same place you mention had a way off Outset Island?”

The boy nods meekly. “I was using the ship for that,” he croaks.

“The same ship the monsters tried to lead us to?”

Phantom digs his toe in the sand.

With mix of amusement and bone-deep weariness, Time asks, "And might there be monsters in this cave of yours?"

"I'm sure they're fine," Phantom mutters in a tiny voice, hunching in on himself. "They can take care of themselves."

Tetra, who has been looking steadily closer to popping a blood vessel with every passing second, finally explodes. “YOU SUN-ADLED LAND-LUBBING CHUCHU-BRAINED MORON! What are you waiting for?! Go! Get! Them! NOW!”

~o0o~

“I got this,” Phantom assures them all as they stop before the edge of the cliff. He gives a testing swing of his sword and, finding it now too heavy to comfortably wield, fixes on a pair of power bracelets with a small dissatisfied noise. His second swing is much smoother.

Hewn into the stone of the cliff are crude platforms of wood, forming a path down to sea level. Patrolling the narrow walkways between those platforms are flocks of Kangarocs and curious little one-eyed creatures the two natives call “Miniblins.” According to Phantom, this is the only way to get to their destination by foot.

“We’re all experienced fighters, you know. We could help,” someone points out. Phantom snorts.

“I’ll keep that in mind if I think there’ll actually be a fight,” he says cockily, bringing his sword up to rest on one shoulder. “But for now, I got this.”

It would be more convincing if Phantom didn’t still have bruises on his face and scrapes on his hands. If there weren’t a paper-thin quality to the boy’s bravado. If it didn’t seem like he needed this on some level—this reminder that he was still capable, still powerful in his own right.

No one’s quite comfortable letting the teen throw himself at the monsters alone. But Time nods his assent, and the rest of them follow his lead, even Tetra.

Their agreement secured, Phantom proceeds to stalk down the planks in a disturbingly Ganondorf-like manner.

Before the incredulous eyes of their onlookers, the monsters scramble to get out of the boy’s way, clawing their way up the sheer rock or hopping down to the paths below, only to panic anew when Phantom reaches their level in his continued descent. A not insignificant number of the creatures just dive right into the ocean below, choosing to take their chances in the waves rather than before what is clearly the second coming of the apocalypse in Hylian form.

“...Think he could do that with monsters from other time periods?” Legend asks into the stunned silence.

“Fifty rupees says no,” Warriors quips back.

“You’re on.”

“Are you guys coming or not?” Phantom calls back from the first large platform, tapping his foot impatiently. The group trails down after him, picking their way cautiously—not all of them are quite so capable of flight, after all. Their guide waits for them to catch up, counting heads like a comically short school teacher making sure her students are all there, before he starts off again, terrorizing the monster anew.

It would be a more intimidating display, they all think, if Phantom didn’t cower whenever Tetra got too close like a child with an angry parent, or do his damnedest to keep at least one person between them at all times.

(Oddly enough, the shield he hides behind most often is Twilight. Phantom’s reasons for this are simple:

1) He’s tall

2) He’s usually the closest

3) He’s the most willing—in Phantom’s eyes—to murder a man in his sleep given sufficient reason, and therefore clearly the most dangerous of the lot.

All of this, unfortunately for Phantom, rather ignores the fact that Twilight will happily throw him to the wolves at far less prompting than a nasty look or two from Tetra.)

“So what exactly are we walking into?” Someone finally asks Phantom. “It’s been nearly two days since the curse was lifted. Are you sure these pirates will still be where you left them?”

Phantom huffs at the questioning. “They’ll be there. Jabun’s Cave only has one entrance, and they wouldn’t have been able to open the doors.” He nods down at the bottom of the path. Floating on the sea’s surface and anchored to the stone cliffs, the largest platform yet awaits them. A pair of enormous doors open onto that platform—shoddy things, little more than massive slabs of wood lashed together haphazardly, but more than big enough to give a crew of Hylians difficulty. There are gaps in the uneven planking, some big enough for a child to squeeze through, but nothing that could accommodate a boat; anyone who escaped would have nowhere to go but up.

Legend whistles slowly, as if impressed by the sheer level of the fuck-up he's witnessing. "Are you telling me you left these guys trapped for two days in a cave filled with monsters? I thought you were friendly with these pirates."

Phantom not-so-discretely steps to put another person between him and Tetra, shoulders hunching defensively. "They'll be fine," he insists. "There's enough provisions on the ship to last anyone a few weeks, and the monsters know better than... to..."

Phantom trails off with a frown as they approach the final landing. There are a great many Kangarocs dotting the cliffs around the door—too many. They prefer to nest inside; they should be tending to their young in the cave, not crowding each other off perches in the open air.

"Something's wrong," he concludes, and readies his sword.

[zaph1337]

Monster Hunter Rating 23: Plesioth, the Water Wyvern

Hey, guys. Sorry for not posting yesterday, but that day was stressful for a couple of reasons I’d rather not get into, and I couldn’t start writing this until close to midnight, so I decided to finish it today (which is why I’m going off the Monster List order rather than the Quest List, as an anon suggested). But don’t worry, ‘cause a shark dragon’s worth the wait. Let’s see what Plesioth has to offer!

(How it appears in Monster Hunter 1)

(How it appears in Monster Hunter Generations)

Appearance: Plesioth is an interesting take on the “shark dragon” concept; unlike Cephalos/drome, which had a clear divide between head and neck, the head of Plesioth, which is more in line with sharks like the great white, is the same width as the neck, which has the same width as most of the body. This gives Plesioth a body type closer to a fish like some kinds of koi or carp than a dragon. Speaking of carps, despite being a shark dragon, Plesioth has carp-like scales and even colors, which seems weird, but according to Wang Fu, a Chinese scholar from the Han dynasty, Chinese dragons, which influenced descriptions of dragons in Japan, had features reminiscent of several animals, including scales like those of a carp. Now, this could be a coincidence, but even if it is, it’s a pretty cool detail.

Plesioth also have a lot of spiny fins, which are similar to those of several species of bass, though the Plesioth’s have spines which extend beyond their membranes. Their wings are also modeled after these fins, but their greater size means that it’s easier to see the gradient on the membranes, which, by the way, looks really nice and complements the colors on the main body really well. I really like this design! It nails the water dragon look really well and has some nice touches that accentuate that. It’s definitely my favorite design out of all the monsters I’ve talked about so far, so y’know what? 10/10.

Behavior: Plesioth are ambush hunters that feed on both under- and above-water prey; for the latter, they prefer to wait until the landlubbers get too close to the water’s edge, just like a crocodile. Their sensitive hearing means that they’re likely to hear the footsteps of anything coming for a drink, but it also means that really loud sounds can frighten them and cause them to flail wildly. They’re territorial enough to regularly patrol their “turf,” but they also fear confrontation due to having weak defenses, and will avoid picking fights if at all possible. Once a Plesioth decides to fight, though, it can be rather persistent, even coming out of the water to attack its target.

Now, that’s not to say they’re uncomfortable on land; they may not be the apex predators that they are underwater, but they’re still a force to be reckoned with. Not many predators will try to feed on something that’s 65 feet long at its smallest and 127 feet long at its largest. Oh, yeah, did I not mention that this thing’s the largest monster I’ve talked about so far? My bad. There are larger monsters that pose a threat to Plesioth, though, which is why these wyverns never like to be far from a body of water. They have to surface at some point, though, because for some reason, they don’t have gills, meaning that they can’t breathe underwater. This a dragon that’s so devoted to an underwater life, it gave up wings that could be used to fly for wings that act as fins, and it still needs to breathe air!? Get your act together, evolution! Okay, it kinda did; they can breathe air both through their mouths and, like amphibians, through their skin, but I don’t see how considering they have scales.

Finally, I should probably point out that like real sharks, Plesioth are viviparous, meaning that they have wombs, rather than lay eggs. And also like real sharks, the babies in the womb will fight and eat each other. Ah, the majesty of nature can be so nauseating at times. The concept of a monster that’s the top of the food chain underwater and still formidable on land is pretty cool, but the fact that Plesioth can’t breathe water is ridiculous. I guess they needed an explanation for why it would ever spend time out of the water? Well, whatever the reason, it’s not like Plesioth are likely to be in danger of something attacking them when they stick their heads out to breathe, so it’s not that big of a deal. 7/10.

Abilities: Those spines aren’t for show; they contain a sleep-inducing neurotoxin that’ll put you to sleep after a single scratch. The wiki also says that Plesioth can inject the toxin through bites, but it only specifies the neurotoxin being in their fins, so I dunno what’s going on here. Speaking of biting, Plesioth have powerful jaws that can crush the armor of some monsters, such as Carapaceon, so you know that getting bit by it has got to suck. They also utilize their size for attacks such as tail swipes, hip checks, and charges. The most notable attack Plesioth have, however, is their ability to fire a stream of highly pressurized water that they previously swallowed while swimming. In real life, pressurized water is used industrially to cut and shape steel, so that tells you what kind of pain you’re in for if you get hit by that. Plus, if it’s anything like the stream fired by Mizutsune, it inflicts Waterblight, a status condition which temporarily decreases the speed at which your stamina recharges, and take it from an Insect Glaive main, that’s not fun. 8/10.

Equipment: So, several Plesioth weapons have Cephalos parts in them, and the weapons as a whole have a similar aesthetic, but they’re still distinct, at least in my opinion. Let’s start off with the Great Sword called the Finblade:

I like how the membrane has the gradient on it to show that it’s from the edge of the fin. I also like the handguard next to the handle; the curve makes it fit the water aesthetic. Next, we have a Lance called the Aqua Spear:

Hey, gotta have a trident in here somewhere, right? Having a membrane between the trident’s points and the shield’s spikes is a nice touch, and I like how the shield looks with that ring of green surrounding its core. But I gotta have a weird weapon somewhere in here, so here’s a Bow called the Dragonhead Harp:

Yes, this is a Plesioth weapon. No, there are no other monster materials used in it that could say otherwise. I honestly don’t know why it looks like this, but it has the Outset Island aesthetic from LoZ: Wind Waker. It even looks like it could be a cannon for your ship in Phantom Hourglass. There is one thing linking this with Plesioth, though: the “feathers” on the arrows in the quiver are made from Plesioth fins. It’s a small detail that really brings the weapon together. As for the armor, there’s unfortunately not any pictures of normal Plesioth armor on its equipment page, and I don’t wanna scrounge around the wiki, so here’s the Gunner version of the “G” armor from MHFG:

I mean, I get it; it’s a diver’s wetsuit with Plesioth fins. The problem I have with it is that there’s not much Plesioth there; the only things here that I can confirm to be from Plesioth are the fins that serve as details, not the main makeup. But there’s another armor set that...look, I had to show it, all right? It’s called the “Apukaru” armor, and while it’s made from both Plesioth and Hermitaur parts, I think there’s enough Plesioth there to warrant showing it here:

Is this armor for hunting monsters or going for a leisurely dive in the Bahamas? Okay, the diving suit the female set is based off of is most certainly not used for leisure, but you get my point, right? This is straight up diving gear made for war! The red parts match up with Hermitaur, but the fins and scales are all Plesioth, and they’ve done some really clever things with the former. First, both suits have the fin membranes as the membranes on their flippers, which is to be expected, but then you look at the female set and realize that the crown on top of the diving helmet is made of the fin membrane. That’s kinda gross, but also hilarious. Also, why is there a princess crown on top of the diving helmet!? It’s such an unnecessary detail, but it adds so much. This equipment gets a 9/10 for being both aesthetically pleasing and goofy as all get-out.

Final Thoughts and Tally: I knew I was gonna like this monster as long as they did it right, and they did it so well that it’s probably my favorite monster in the series (not that I know of many, but semantics). The little details in its design, the fact that it’s dangerous on land and king in the water, the battle prowess, the equipment, and the fact that it’s a freaking shark dragon all make Plesioth the biggest fish in the pond. I’d say that it’s probably gonna go downhill from here, but oh, don’t worry. We’ve got some special guests coming soon. 8/10.

[darkspellmaster]

Sex and the Castlevania series

So you may have all heard by now that the new seasons of Castlevania will have more gore and sex involved in the series. And for me at least this is a bit of a surprise. Not because Castlevania has not had sex as part of its storyline, (how else are the Belmonts going to be born), nor that nudity would be shown (see the Succubus for example) but in how it’s going to be used. 

As a player of the games, one thing has always stood out to me about the Castlevania series and the idea of fan service and sexuality and sex itself, it’s never used as a means of just titillation. There’s always a meaning behind it. And the reviews have me wondering if this is going to still be the case with the show, or is it going to be used as an “Oooh look how edgy we’re being this season.” because that’s not what sex in Castlevania is about. 

Sex, or the idea of intimacy between two romantic partners, has always been at the heart of the backstory of the Castlevania series. From the outset there’s has always been a sense of family and love and devotion in Castlevania. Even with the Arcade edition of Haunted Castle in 1988, the addition to the story of Simon was that he was newly married to his bride Selena, who was taken by Dracula. Years later Selena and the Mysterious Woman in Simon’s Quest II were mixed to create Linda Entwhistle who was Simon’s girlfriend in the book series based on the games. 

Years later during the more story-driven games that came out, sexuality and intimacy became part of the game in how it was presented. Namely the use of sex as a way to pull the innocents to the darkness ala the Vampire Brides in the original Dracula, and the loss of innocence (as with Lucy in the novel) and the idea of devotional love that conquers that darkness and temptation. 

In this sense, we’re seeing the use of the deadly sin of Lust acting as a temptation to the heroes as a means of making them be killed for their wanton desires. Yet love and intimacy also plays a huge part in fixing issues in the story and leading to tragic and happy endings. 

So with that in mind, I want to do a quick walkthrough of the way sex and love is used in these games and discuss why the idea of sex and violence shouldn’t be on the table with Castlevania as a metaphor as much. 

Let’s start with the timeline, rather than the game order because it makes more sense that way. 

The story of the Belmont Clan and Dracula are intertwined for all time, this is just a fact of the matter and not just some random accident. And Love plays a huge part in this story as the cannon story stands right now. Prior to this, Castlevania was a fun romp through the idea of beating up Old Universal Monster Movie characters (every one of the main bosses in the first game was tied to some form of Universal Horror Monster and it even has some Hammer Horror connections as well). But with the growth of the franchise, it was clear that a story needed to be told, so over the years, that story had evolved until in the early 2000s we got the very first story in the Belmont vs Dracula timeline in the form of Lament of Innocence. 

Now Lament isn’t just a story about the loss for Leon and his world view that there is nothing lurking in the dark. It’s the loss of friendship and of love, but also it’s the reinstatement of belief of the good of people and that there are those that can and will stand up to the darkness and that even as one loses everything, you don’t have to lose your soul in the processes. 

But let me start from the beginning in this case. Leon Belmont was a knight templar in the crusade. He was best friends with and cared deeply about his fellow Crusader Mathias Cronqvist. Now Mathias was a man of science and of learning and of a lot of things, he wasn’t a fighter the same way Leon was, so he was more into spells and magics, something that his family kept mostly from the Church at the time. 

Both Mathias and Leon were in love and devoted to the women that they felt deeply for, that being Leon’s fiance Sara Trantoul, and Mathias’s wife Elisabetha. Leon’s devotion to Sara was known by everyone, especially Mathias and this is very important since it’s Leon’s Love of Sara that drives him to abandon his cause with the Crusades and pretty much take up Vampire Killing for the rest of his life, training his children and their descendants, on how to defeat the man that took that love from him. 

Mathias, on the other hand, was emotionally devoted to Elisabetha, and, given the way he speaks of her, it’s clear that the devotion and love was returned. So much so that his love for her basically poisoned his mind and made him into the monster that would later come to regret his actions. As it was, Elisabetha died due to illness and Mathias abandoned the Crusades, became ill, and holed up in his home unable to be reached by any of his friends, Leon and Sara. It’s only when he learned that Sara was in danger from Walter Bernhard that he was able to get out of bed and warn his friend Leon of the danger, but, by then, it was too late and Sara was captured and taken to Walter’s castle. 

Now one of the huge parts of the story of Lament is is that it deals with devotion, honor, and the choices we make based on love. So while Leon is trying to save Sara he meets up with an alchemist, Rinaldo, who had lost his daughter Justine to Walter and was unable to save her. 

Leon renounces everything; his baron title, his home, his lands just so he can cast off his duty to go and save Sara. His love for her runs that deep that he’s willing to go into the Castle of Walter with just a sword and prayer and god save anyone that gets in his way. Rinaldo is far more of a pragmatic person and in this way juxtaposes Leon’s love of Sara.  Whereas Leon is far more optimistic about his chances against Walter, Rinaldo knows the bitter truth, that Sara has no hope of making it out of the castle and not becoming a vampire in the process. 

This becomes an important part of Leon’s story as he traverses the castle to try to locate Sara and comes across a number of characters that play a part in the story and the idea of love. Medusa, though not a sexualized being in this one, mentions that the whip he’s using is far more powerful than that of the version that Rinaldo used to save his daughter. 

Now, why is that? One could speculate that Rinaldo lacked the will to save his child, or that he knew the truth and couldn’t bear to have to take his daughter’s life. His feelings, however, whatever they lacked, caused the Whip to fail in what it needed to do, and thus he was forced to kill his own daughter. Leon on the other side of things has nothing but the will and drive to save Sara, and his love for her and desire to bring her home urges him on. This love, this need to help her, is what makes that whip work. That need for protecting something, it’s why Trevor needed to find Sypha and Alucard to eventually come to a reason why the Vampire Killer came to him. 

Joachim is an interesting one in regard to love in this game and how it is presented. Walter seduced the young man with the idea of immortality and when Joachim gained his Vampire state he realized that Walter was above him and rebelled. This lead to Walter putting him in captivity and driving him mad, for his own amusement. But how is this love? It’s a very dangerous and bad form of it, as Joachim both loathes Walter but also seems obsessed with him. He hates him with all he is, and at the same time wants to overpower and control him. This same sort of hate and love is what drives Mathias as well in his story. 

Then there’s the Succubus, the one character that really hammers in the idea of desire/Sex and love in this game and the differences between them. So the Succubus in Lament is an actual boss, vs. just being an enemy. She has no name, but her role is critical in understanding what’s going on in Walter’s castle. This succubus had previously disguised herself as Justine for Rinaldo, allowing him to lower his guard and possibly may have harmed him in the process. His rejection of this form of his daughter may have to lead him to make some critical mistakes. Mistakes that Leon doesn’t seem to make. Namely, after a bit, he sees through the Succubus using Sara’s form to trick him. 

Leon recognizes that the woman isn’t Sara based on her actions and way of moving, showing that though his connection with Sara he can’t be tricked and lured in by kind words from a monster. This is the opposite of what happened to Mathias. 

As I said there’s a tragedy to the love and sex in this game and the use of it. Walter luring Justine away with his beauty and her desire for him lead to her downfall, which leads us into Mathias. (We will circle back to Leon, I promise.) For Mathias Elisabetha was his whole world and when she died while he was away it leads him to reject all of his desires for hope and love and feelings. He lost his way and decided to renounce God and live as an immortal as revenge for God taking away his beloved wife. In order to get what he needed, he made a deal with Death, and the two decided to use Sara as bait for Walter and Leon was to be his sword. Mathias’s own devotion to Leon, and some of his humanity as well, shows up later in the story where he sympathizes and connects with Leon in regard to his own loss. Showing that they’re the same and that Leon should join him, which Leon rejects. 

This moment in the game is interesting because by this point in the story Leon has learned about how to defeat Walter and that Sara was bitten. In a lot of Vampire lore, biting is used as a way to indicate, in some cases, a sexual desire or a need that is fulfilled in a more intimate way. After all the neck is a body part that is known for being very much something that can be used for erotic aspects of lovemaking or showing desire. Which brings us back to the fact that Sara didn’t want to be turned. This wasn’t a choice on her part, unlike Joachim, and it leads to her rejecting the idea of wanting to remain a vampire. She desires death over having to be a monster and leads to Leon, at first vehemently rejecting Rinaldo’s order to kill her, and then accepting Sara’s desires to become one with the whip. 

It’s an important moment because it shows that Leon is willing to ignore his own desires for that of Sara’s, again showing his selflessness in putting what she wants ahead of his own, showing his love and devotion in a more adult and complex way. Sara’s own love is what fuels that whip and her need to protect Leon are the quintessential factors of  Love (Leon) to the opposing one of Lust (Walter) and in this case. 

Trevor and Sypha come next in regard to the issue of love and sex and while the show is clearly going to be showing more of their romantic escapades, it should be noted that the game doesn’t really make much mention of it at first, as Sypha in the game has a bit of a love triangle going on with Grant and Trevor as the main choices, although it seems like she only had eyes for Trevor. We know the two eventually had children but Sex, or lust, in the game never was a thing. Their devotion to each other in the show is telling, and in other games, both do pair up frequently, even in Judgement there’s an underlying tension between them. 

It’s of interest that in the show, we get to see the two of them acting as a couple, much like how Lisa and Dracula were shown acting like a couple. But actual sexual acts are, as with Lisa and Dracula, put on the side and in the case of Trevor and Sypha it’s only hinted at and not a full on display. Which falls into the same idea that most Castlevania games seem to have, the hero’s love interest typically is not shown engaging in sexual activity, or rather, only after bad things happen. 

I’ll jump to Richter and Annette, because that seems to be the next one in regard to how sexuality is used heavily in Castlevania. So in Rondo of blood, Dracula has Shaft take Annette since she is engaged to Richter Belmont. In a scene with him during the game, Annette threatens to take her own life rather than have relations with Dracula who intends to drink her and turn her into his bride. For the original version there’s a dramatic moment where Annette is talking to Dracula and he tries to lure her into becoming immortal to stay with him. She says she will not fall in such a cheap manner, the implications there are more along the lines of sex and him taking her physically from her fiance Richter. In the PSP game, if you take too long or go the wrong route you get the bad end where Annette has been transformed into a vampire and is placed in an overtly sexual outfit, down to a thong and bodice. Her hair goes down rather than the updo she has when she’s not turned and she very certainly is meant to be a temptress and a signal that Richter failed to save her from the deviousness of the vampire. 

This idea of sex, or the sexual, being used as a temptation and a devious thing in Castlevania has been around for a long time. However for every moment of some devious succubus being in the way of the hero, there’s always a moment of love that shows the positive side of it’s nature vs. the lustful side. Again, looking at Annette and Richter we get a moment when he frees her of her embracing him and happy that he’s there to be with her. That she knew he would come and that everything will be okay. 

Sexuality plays a heavy role in tempting Gabriel Belmont in his game, Lords of Shadow. During the game, as he tries to get to see his dead wife with a specialized mask. During the game he meets the Vampire Carmilla who offers to him a chance to become a vampire and enjoy the idea of a lustful existence. Every inch of her in the game is designed to pretty much be a temptress and lure Gabriel from his path to finding a way to see his dead wife. Yet it’s in this moment that we get to see how deeply his affection for his wife runs as Gabriel rejects this offer even more violently than with other Lords of Shadow that he’s faced. It’s a pretty strong moment for him as a character, and shows a deeper feeling in regard to his connection to his late wife. 

The reason I bring all these moments up is because even in the games where there’s hints of the sexual, as Vampires now are associated with Lust and temptation, the show uses sex as a means of connecting it with violence and some pretty dark ideas. Which contradicts the idea of how Love is the most powerful thing to defeat the darkness in Castlevania. 

Take Hector’s story right now. In the show we have his sexual encounter with Lenore which is contrasted with Isaac’s battle with Legion. The idea here is to show that both Isaac and Hector are being used, one being brought to his knees via false affection and entrapment by a woman who doesn’t love him and is using him as her own pet, who later slips the ring on him to collar him as she would a dog or cat. While the Isaac, even though he’s doing a good thing in defeating Legion (and i’m still damn sure that woman is Death in a false form) was used to destroy the wizard in the tower, releasing the village. In both cases manipulation was used in order for the opposing party to achieve their goal. 

For Lenore it was to get Hector to trust her enough to trap him and use him in her own way and for her own needs. She controls him now, making it impossible for him to escape from them, or so we are told to believe. On the other hand you have Isaac who, while used, acknowledges that he was so, accepts it, but is free to move on as the use of him wasn’t against his will, nor was it something changing him down. Rather the manipulation was used to not only stop something terrible, but also show him that there were others out there that were worth saving. Thus, in the poster, we have Lenore holding onto a bound and trapped Hector, and Isaac not quiet twisted up in thorns. 

The use of violence that we see shows that there’s a thin line in this world causing people to become entrapped by their own desires. For Isaac it was his revenge, for Hector it was his need to feel human again. Which brings us to the point where Rosaly comes into play in regard to Hector’s story. In Hector’s game Curse of Darkness, we see how his life drastically changed when he and she connect. From where he was in the story she brought the idea of hope and light to him, vs the darker aspects in the game that hint at someone who was cursed to believe he is a monster. In this way, I hope that if they bring in Rosaly we can see the opposition to Lenore’s way of using him for gratification and chaining him to her. 

On the other side of things, and something a bit easier to get at, is the idea of  trauma through the use of sex as shown in Alucard’s story. In the show we get to see Trevor and Sypha in bed, but it’s clear what’s happened there and the idea is that it’s less about their sexual encounters with one another than about their growth as a couple and how they interact outside of the bedroom and how they show love for one another. We see also they have a sense of betrayal when dealing with the Judge and the idea of Sypha’s world going from it just being fun and doing the right thing, to realizing the world is not black and white, and that not all people are good. 

In Alucard’s case we see the idea of the twins (I’m using the term as it’s easier for me to call them this, it doesn’t mean I’m saying they are twins just that they look alike) as filling a void and clearly being a representation of Trevor and Sypha (They even share the first initial of their names) that Alucard is looking for. Through their interactions we see that Alucard is, like Sypha in the other town, trusting them regardless of how many red flags they raise. The whole issue comes to a head when, after sharing a lot of things with them, Alucard is seduced by the two while trying to sleep. During the scene, as with Hector and Isaac, we see the sex as being connected to the violence of the battle that Sypha, Trevor and Germain get into. The twins end up wrapping Alucard in iron rings, much like Hector is imprisoned by Lenore with the ring, so to is Alucard. We see then that like Hector he’s betrayed and harmed by the emotional aspect of the betrayal. But unlike Hector who feels trapped, Alucard now feels anger at those that hurt him. 

The sexual act leads into the idea of him no longer trusting humans, especially with his heart. This of course is being used to drive Alucard to decide to lock himself back to sleep until the time of Richter and Maria (the warrior and the Mage), three hundred years later. The idea here is that the physical act of it is being used to show people being harmed in vulnerable states, and that sex is used as a tool to harm or destroy others just as certain acts of violence can. 

Yet, part of the story line of Alucard is that Maria chooses to go after him even after he says he’s cursed. Again, like Hector and Rosaly, showing that love is more of a counter to the anger and hate that seem to embolden those that would do bad in the world of Castlevania. So then, I must ask, why is the sex in the show being used not as it should be, showing how love can change someone, but rather as a connector to the violence. That wasn’t the idea of Castlevania, so I have to wonder what Warren is driving at here. 

[zrtranscripts]

Season 9, Mission 5: Sandstorm

Summer Holiday

~

[ship horn honks, waves crash on shore]

PETER LYNNE: Listen, all I'm saying is he could have dropped us off a little bit nearer.

JANINE DE LUCA: Our captain was clear from the outset, Peter. Our information on Tunisia is limited. He did not wish to deliver us to a port which might present unknown dangers. Or docking fees. Hence the empty stretch of coast we've landed on.

SAM YAO: Oh, it's nice though, isn't it? The sandy cliffs, the crystal blue sea, the rocky beach. Way better than that tiny ship's hold. Not that I didn't enjoy helping Janine tick “win 1,000 consecutive games of chess” off her bucket list. Oh, oh hey, careful how you carry the briefcase, Five. Remember, it's got Veronica inside. [shouts] You okay in there, Veronica?

VERONICA MCSHELL: Sam, for the last time, this case contains hardware running a full copy of my personality connected to a full suite of sensor systems, including auditory. You do not need to shout. Janine, Amelia gave me a message to play upon our arrival in Tunisia. Stand by.

AMELIA SPENS: Hello, Tunisia team. Let's make this super clear: you are not over there sightseeing. You're infiltrating a secret base codenamed Red Scorpion at the behest of General Bakari. He's directed you to a city near Red Scorpion called New Agadir. Until you reach New Agadir, where you must impersonate the mercenary group Death's Hand, you should pretend to be independent UK traders.

This is a covert mission, so if things go badly, I can't help you. Remember, the red fungus endangers the whole world. If it's in Red Scorpion, we need to know. Don't mess this up. Amelia out.

PETER LYNNE: Right, right, right. So just-just to make sure I've got this right, we're in another country with no support and we left our only doctor on the boat. Fantastic!

VERONICA MCSHELL: It's fortunate Maxine was present to identify the measles outbreak on the ship. If we hadn't left her to take care of it, it might have become a pandemic, Maintaining herd immunity via vaccination has proven almost impossible since the apocalypse.

JANINE DE LUCA: I see a road atop the hill heading west. Miss Spens’ preliminary scouting identified settlements on the Tunisian coast. That road leads to an outpost called Kalaat El-Amal. From there, we can arrange transport south towards New Agadir. Miss Spens also provided me details of a contact she's established in New Agadir who can assist us, a man by the name of Mohammed Boujettif. We must find him there.

Aside from anything else, we may need him to take Dr. Myers’s place in Death's Hand, although if he has no medical experience, that could prove difficult. The alias of the team member Dr. Myers was to impersonate is Doctor Death.

International subterfuge... it has been some time. Remember people, we do not know how the apocalypse landed here or what dangers await. Watch out for each other and keep your wits. Up the hill to the road, run!

~

SAM YAO: Oh, I thought the going would get easier once we reached the top of the hill, but now the road's covered in sand!

PETER LYNNE: Well, there's not much to stop it blowing in from the desert. As far as local scenery goes, you've got potholed roads and sand dunes and that's basically all you're going to get.

SAM YAO: So I get that we're pretending to be traders for now, then when we reach New Agadir we'll be impersonating Death's Hand, but what do we do if the actual Death’s Hand show up? I mean, my briefing said my cover is someone called Sven “Psycho” Mountback, who I don't exactly want to meet.

PETER LYNNE: Well, Amelia is recruiting the mercenaries now for a job in the UK. That's a trap that'll keep them out of our way. And they mostly work in the shadows, so their faces aren't well-known. So in theory at least, we should be able to pass for them. And Bakari swears he can get them - by which I mean us - onto the base.

JANINE DE LUCA: Gamma 1 insertion protocols, as Tom would have said.

FRANCES DEMPSEY: (in the distance) Guys, it's me!

SAM YAO: Does anyone hear that? Look, behind us. There's someone coming up the road dressed like a deckhand from the ship, waving.

FRANCES DEMPSEY: Guys, it's Frances!

PETER LYNNE: Oh, you've got to be kidding me!

JANINE DE LUCA: Miss Dempsey, what are you doing here?

FRANCES DEMPSEY: I, uh, stowed away on the ship. Hid in a storage crate, swam to shore when I'd heard you'd landed. Bribed a sailor to tell me when you did. A bit wet from the swim. I know you didn't want me to come, but I swear I'll be useful.

JANINE DE LUCA: Miss Dempsey, this is unacceptable! You were expressly forbidden...

SAM YAO: Uh, Janine? Usually you don't drift off when you're berating people.

JANINE DE LUCA: The sky, it's turned white. Winds are rising. If my memories of Algeria hold true, this indicates an incoming dust storm. We must get to cover quickly.

FRANCES DEMPSEY: Does that mean I can come?

JANINE DE LUCA: It means, Miss Dempsey, that since there is no way to get you back to the UK, you are unfortunately in danger with the rest of us. There, gleaming structures on the horizon. Kalaat El-Amal. All of you, in that direction. Run!

~

[wind blows]

SAM YAO: The outpost is ahead. Yeah, I think I see an outer wall. It's hard to make out in this sand. [spits] It really gets in your teeth, doesn't it, Five?

VERONICA MCSHELL: Changing global weather patterns, likely brought on by a large increase in methane emissions from decaying flesh, have left this region more prone to dust storms. My sensors should have alerted us to the stormfront. And I failed to predict Frances's arrival.

FRANCES DEMPSEY: Um, quick question. Why is the suitcase talking?

PETER LYNNE: That's our... computer expert, Veronica. She's our expert... who is also a computer.

SAM YAO: Guys, look behind you. There's-there's like a solid wall of sand looping towards us.

JANINE DE LUCA: We're on the storm's periphery, but the eye is approaching fast and the dust already feels cutting in these winds. Everybody switch to comms, cover your mouths. You should have desert goggles and masks in your packs. Miss Dempsey, take mine. I will use my shirt.

PETER LYNNE: Wait, wait, wait. Janine, that's ridiculous. She can have my mask.

JANINE DE LUCA: It is done, Peter, there is no time to argue. I see no rocks large enough for shelter. Our only hope is reaching Kalaat El-Amal before we're subsumed. Run!

~

[wind whistles]

FRANCES DEMSPEY: God, it's like being in a blender full of dust! Getting hard to balance in the wind. Five, grab my arm so we don't get separated.

JANINE DE LUCA: I do not see the road! Does anyone have a visual?

VERONICA MCSHELL: Janine, I have run estimates on the wind speed and density of the storm. There is less than a 3% chance of our surviving.

PETER LYNNE: Oh, fantastic! Thank you, Veronica. Helpful as always.

VERONICA MCSHELL: If I'd warned you of the storm sooner, you might have been able to shelter near the cliffs. I'm sorry.

PETER LYNNE: Janine, not to seem overprotective, but obviously you should take my mask. I'm literally indestructible!

JANINE DE LUCA: You have an anti-P-type bomb in your body, Peter. Inhaling sand might damage it. We cannot risk that. I appreciate you're afraid of losing me after the Hebrides. I let you join this mission because I trust you, but I'm as worried for you as you are for me. Do not disobey my orders!

[zombie shrieks]

SAM YAO: What was that?

PETER LYNNE: Look, those are human shapes being whirled about in the wall of sand behind us. Some are missing limbs or torn in half. They're all thrashing about. Yep, they're zombies.

JANINE DE LUCA: We cannot let them catch us. We have no idea if the zombie virus has variants here. Even if we survive the storm with our cure stocks intact, they might not be effective. Likewise Mr. Yao's immunity. We can't let them catch us. Go!

~

[wind whistles]

SAM YAO: Five! Five, is that you? If you can see me, I'm waving.

FRANCES DEMSPEY: Sam, we see you! Five and I are to your left. Keep moving through the dust.

SAM YAO: Oh, thank God. I can barely make out your outlines. I was worried you were zoms. Have you seen the others? We were trying to keep hold of each other, but the winds kept knocking us down. Storm's interfering with comms beyond point blank range.

FRANCES DEMSPEY: Everyone's been scattered, visibility's practically zero.

VERONICA MCSHELL: I'm trying to calculate everyone's probable vectors, but there are too many variables. At home, I would have more processing power, but this portable me can only handle so much.

During our voyage, I heard Peter talk about Frances's desire to join the mission, but my limited resources did not allow me to model her probable behavior. I was also unable to perceive the worsening weather because my capacity was devoted to reviewing mission files. My limitations have undermined my usefulness.

FRANCES DEMPSEY: Not as much as this sand will if any of it gets in your circuits. We've got to get you inside, Veronica. Janine shouldn't have given me her mask. What if she chokes? She's the most important person to the mission.

SAM YAO: Don't think like that, Frances. We just got here. We're not losing people already, not like the Hebrides. I promised Sara we'd come home safe, that we'd bring her fun travel stories.

JANINE DE LUCA: [static] Repeat. [garbled audio] Repeat.

SAM YAO: Janine!

VERONICA MCSHELL: I am detecting faint electromagnetic activity. It may be the outpost.

[zombie growls]

FRANCES DEMPSEY: Sam, behind you!

SAM YAO: Oh God, that whirling wall of zoms is almost on us. Five, speed up! They're just gristle and bone, the flesh is torn right off them. The wind’s tossing zoms straight at us. Run, everyone! Head south... gah! That way, I think. Just run!

~

[wind whistles]

SAM YAO: That's it, Five, keep holding my hand. I've got Frances, we're in a chain.

[zombies growl]

FRANCES DEMPSEY: Everybody duck! Oh God, did you see that? A flayed zombie torso, ripped to shreds by the sand. It flew right over our heads in the wind. I'm sorry, Sam, I shouldn't have come.

SAM YAO: Frances, it's okay.

FRANCES DEMPSEY: Peter warned me it was dangerous. I just, I really thought I could help. But I know you're all scared of losing people after the Hebrides, but you're all at risk here and I'm making it worse.

JANINE DE LUCA: Mr. Yao, Runner Five, this is Colonel De Luca. Mr. Lynne and I have made it into Kalaat El-Amal. Can you hear? They have equipment monitoring your approach. They're boosting our comms. They're sealing the entrance against the weather and activating a signal beacon on the outer wall.

SAM YAO: There! Hard to tell in this suit, but those look like... yes, flashing yellow lights ahead.

JANINE DE LUCA: The gate is in front of you, but it is closing fast. If you don't hurry, you'll be trapped outside. Sensors indicate torn zombie flesh has made that swirling storm wall infectious. You cannot risk being engulfed. You must get inside. Run!

~

[alarm blares, gate creaks and slams shut]

SAM YAO: That's it, Five, we're in. Made it through that gate by inches. Don't see anyone around, just a big metal room with big metal doors. Gate must be automatic. First bit of wider world we've seen since Z-Day, Five, give or take Finland. I wonder how people here are doing.

FRANCES DEMPSEY: Guess we're about to find out. We're okay, everyone's okay. We all made it.

VERONICA MCSHELL: And my estimations of Kalaat El-Amal's location were accurate. It will take me time to get used to operating at this capacity, but I will persevere. I am confident I can keep the team safe. After analyzing the Hebrides files, I know how much difficulty you all have without me.

[door rattles open]

SAM YAO: Janine, Peter!

JANINE DE LUCA: It's good to see you all intact, including you, Miss Dempsey. It seems you've left me no choice now but to consider you one of the team. The locals were rather shocked to see us approaching through the storm.

SAM YAO: But they let you in, so they're friendly, right?

PETER LYNNE: Oh, they are very friendly, and very worried. You see, apparently the last few foreign traders to visit Kalaat El-Amal carried serious diseases. Measles, flu, multiple poxes. So they're putting us under quarantine until we're vetted, for a period of no less than three months. That means if we can't find another way out of here, the whole mission is over.

~

[autumnblogs]

Day 43: Openbound

We’ll principally be doing Act 6 Intermission 3 today, so expect lots of pictures in this one!

Believe it or not, I initially didn’t like Openbound very much; I felt like it kind of dragged on my first readthrough, and generally had a pretty hard time getting myself to care about the Dancestors. They’re a pretty unsympathetic bunch.

Then again, lots of Homestuck characters are pretty unsympathetic! I’ve been really feeling that in the second half, as retrospect allows me to view a lot of secondary characters through the lens that we’re not intended to get attached to them.

That said, Openbound is actually pretty key to helping us understand the second half of the comic, I think, and makes explicit a lot of the themes that it explores, and how it builds upon the first half.

I think that the theme of Openbound as a self-contained work within Homestuck that we can use as a tool to decode Homestuck can be concisely stated like this; “Nostalgia and a desire for unity with the past causes toxic stagnation.”

So, aside from the introduction that we’ve already gotten to Meenah through the short conversation she had with the other kids, this is our first real opportunity to get to know her! Boy is she obsessed with money.

Money, like Cake, is a symbol that is associated with the Aspect of Life. As an aspect principally associated with Raw Power - the power to do what you want, unfettered by the stringent restrictions that are associated with Doom - it’s natural that Life would be associated with money.

The origin of money in history is pretty nebulous; it precedes the invention of writing, so any theory concerning its invention is ultimately conjecture. What I think is interesting about money is that the move toward a monetary economy in history mostly (but not always) happens as a result of the fact that it is way more efficient to collect taxes; the state mints standard coins, only accepts taxes in the form of standard coins, and propagates them into the economy by buying goods and services from the market.

It’s a tool of government, and even though Meenah may abrogate her inheritance, the Princess can’t escape her birthright. Money offers control, security... and power. What makes all of this extra interesting is that money is effectively worthless in the afterlife. Here, there’s actually nothing for her to really buy or spend it on; anyone can dream up whatever they want with ease.

It’s a nice bit of callback humor that Meenah has the same reaction to discovering the Thorns of Oglogoth that Rose does, but unlike Rose, Meenah actually does destroy them on the spot.

For being so headstrong and dangerous, there are ways in which Meenah is really pretty surprisingly sensible.

Lord English can destroy ghosts - this has always been a pretty disturbing thought for me. I may have said something to this effect before, but if I haven’t I’m a free-thinking Theist - raised in the Church, and largely independent in terms of beliefs, but I’m still pretty convinced that there is some kind of life after death. It doesn’t bother me nearly as much in works that have final death as a general presupposition, but it always bothers me when some kind of eternal life after death exists in a setting, and can be arbitrarily denied by evil beings with some power or another, like how some Demons and Liches can destroy or devour a soul in Dungeons and Dragons.

In Homestuck though, it fits with the themes established by the ways in which everyone God Tiers - spiritual power can be pretty arbitrary, and generally signifies very little about the moral worth of the one who has it; it does not intrinsically elevate the one who has it. It fits with its general criticism of power and the powerful, whether that’s the Mayor’s hatred of Kings, or the associating of corporatism with the worst parts of Jane’s characterization and Crockercorp in general.

Lord English has the power to destroy ghosts and end the lives of immortals not because he has attained to any kind of heightened spiritual awareness. He’s just some douchebag who through cosmic serendipity was in the right place at the right time to become basically all-powerful.

I adore Meenah’s spark. Who gives a fuck if Lord English is invincible? She knows exactly what she’s going to do when she gets her hands on him, and she’s got a plan from the outset. I think it’s also interesting the way that even though Meenah is absolutely taken by the spectacle of power, it isn’t sufficient to make her want to join up with English. Only soft power works on Meenah Peixes; emotional intimacy, friendship... keeping her entertained. All of these are the actual way to moderate her violent and dangerous personality.

While neither Rose nor Meenah is a parallel character to either Gendo or Rei from Neon Genesis Evangelion (I think, actually, that Dirk is the character who most strongly parallels both of them), this bit reminds me of the way that Ritsuko describes both of them;

Rose says of herself and Meenah, “You’re not very good at this, are you? ... talking to people.”

Ritsuko says of Gendo and Rei, “They’re not very adept (at)... living, I suppose.”

The same can really be said of a lot of characters in Homestuck, particularly the ones who primarily find their identity in some form of power-seeking. Whether it’s Rose, or Dirk, or Meenah, or even someone as innocuous as Jake, none of them is particularly adept at living.

Rose is pretty conciliatory with Meenah; given her attraction to danger and darkness, it’s probably not surprising that she makes such an obvious pass at Meenah in spite of the fact that she probably knows what their relationship was in another life.

Further evidence that Rose is the horniest Homestuck character.

“you know how it is with ancestors

they just kind of hold this inexplicable power over you”

Dave continues to progress down the path of not giving a shit, as did Sollux before him.

He’s not quite to the level of reluctance that he eventually adopts, of choosing to just not engage with English at all.

Gods are, to some extent, aware of the various narrative forces that govern their existence.

About the only thing this piece of nasty trash has in common with Karkat is the extent to which they both blabber, and he helps create contrast with the other, somewhat more likable dancestors. Kankri is pretty much openly contemptible, and really in the worst way. I’m almost inclined to call him a concern troll because of the extent to which his verbal essays exist purely to make him feel better about himself. Any time it comes time for him to listen to people who historically actually suffered from the systems they were involved in, Kankri shows his true colors, slut-shaming and misogynistic.

Unsurprisingly, The Other Thief is also the vector for English’s ideology in her session, “turning us against each other to make us stronger.” While Kurloz may be a worshipper of English, and Damara may have thrown in her lot with the demon because of her nihilistic despair, Meenah (rather like Dirk!) is clearly driven toward a life of violence, and restless action for its own sake.

Now we’re starting to get some insight into Feferi’s style of rulership, which in turn, probably gives us some insight into Jane. For Feferi, leadership means taking power away from the people you’re leading if it seems like they have the potential to hurt themselves (or to be a drain on society if left to their own devices). It represents a violation of agency, perhaps not so severe as the kind that Vriska perpetrates usually.

Feferi and Jane are the sort of people, I think, who want to create a perfect world - but it’s important to them that they’re the one who’s creating that world, and less important that the world is perfect for anyone in particular. Just perfect.

https://homestuck.com/story/5288

John’s whole self-conception, and especially his conception of himself as a man, and someone who might be growing up to take on the same roles as his Father, is tied up in the icons of dadliness and masculinity in the movies that he likes.

So we should expect that his disillusionment with his past will change the way that he thinks about his future, and what he’s going to do with it. It’s a shame that this line of questioning never goes anywhere in Homestuck proper, but I’ll use it as evidence in the “John/June Egbert is trans” folder. Reminds me of how my decisive lack of affinity for the Boy Scouts serves as a nice little retrospective bit of evidence in my own trans narrative.

Based on the number of trans Eagle Scouts I know, I feel like there’s a certain extent to which it be like, a fast-track to figuring that out about yourself, like, you tried all the boy stuff and just decided, nope! Not for me.

https://homestuck.com/story/5290

Man, especially if we continue to read this section of Homestuck as conflating the characters and the audience, this whole section reads as John not just having a meltdown about Con Air, but also generally having a meltdown about his own story so far - everything he’s done in Sburb, etc. It just all feels lame and shitty in retrospect, when it was something that was kind of exciting at the time, at least up until the point where his loved ones all dropped dead there at the end.

It turns out that there was nothing particularly edifying about John’s suffering.

https://homestuck.com/story/5300

Teens can be such monsters. It’s the anniversary of Bro’s Death too. Davesprite is probably as broken up about that as John is about Dad, but it’s hard for boys/men to talk about that kind of thing with each other.

Cronus is even more of an incel than Eridan. He may be the most singularly contemptible character in Paradox Space. Do I hate anyone more than Cronus? No, I think I do not.

I won’t have a lot to say about the middle leg of Openbound; it’s relatively empty of substance, and not much that happens in it is ever relevant again compared to the first and second legs.

I like to think that this leg of the journey is, more than anything, a chance to ruminate on some joke characters who were already parodies; parodies of parodies, a joke made at the expense of an existing joke. The kind of thing Dirk Strider would write, basically.

Hey check it out, the Year of Our Lord 2012, and Andrew was starting to show some mild sensitivity in his choice of words. Just mild enough to have the lowest character in the story show a tiny bit of sensitivity himself.

This leg of the adventure does give us some more insight into Meenah’s character. Just like Vriska, she’s all about being a hardass super-murder, until she starts causing problems for the people she actually cares about.

Being Evil Sucks.

This is a really weird sentiment for Karkat to have in light of like, everything else about the latter half of the comic. I mean, he hasn’t exactly had the epiphany yet that the ideas that he has about being a leader are kind of awful and shitty, so it’s possible that he’s talking the Condesce up to avoid thinking about that. IDK.

He also immediately claims he’ll leave behind the meteor to go and join Meenah’s army, so maybe Karkat is just in a pretty low place in general? That tracks.

Karkat’s little conversation with Terezi explains at the two thirds mark of Openbound exactly what this whole thing is about.

Almost the entire second half of the comic is about examining the character’s guardians, and their relationships with them. The Guardians - Grandpa and Bro especially - are hyped up to be these outrageous badasses, both in-and-out of universe, and their ambivalent relationship with their kids creates this ambiguity throughout the comic about whether the kids are worthy, whether they’re living up to their parents’ legacy - and it’s the kind of thing that plagues them throughout.

But the thing is, Ancestors can be lame, or even terrible. They’re not really anything to aspire to, and the image of success that they project onto the world is one of learned confidence, and usually that only if they’ve really managed to make it.

Even the best parents are flawed, and instead of trying to measure up to them, growing up healthy usually means learning what those flaws are, and committing not to reproduce them.

Parents don’t suck; they can be awesome, and generally speaking, for a long part of our life, they’re all we’ve got. It’s hard not to love them. But we shouldn’t turn them into idols.

(On another note, it’s one hundred percent fitting for Terezi’s Ancestor to be an outrageous coolgirl. Terezi is perpetually anxious about being cool enough, the sort of person who is breathlessly fun to be around, who commands the attention of everyone around her, and she’s surrounded by them wherever she goes.)

https://homestuck.com/story/5340

John’s distress leads him to dream about his dead Dad, and boy is he angry. He spends a lot of the second half of the comic seething in rage directed at whomever is responsible for all the suffering he and his friends endure, dishing out beatdowns toward those responsible, but I’ve never gotten the impression that these little outbursts of his are particularly rewarding for him.

https://homestuck.com/story/5358

That was quite a blow. He knocked out like a tenth of Jack’s health bar.

https://homestuck.com/story/5387

Depending on where you’re standing some really totally different things can matter to different people. From Vriska’s point of view, the things that happened back when she was alive totally don’t matter at all anymore - only the matter of Cosmic importance that is fighting Lord English.

But the stuff that matters to the people she left behind, and the suffering she’s responsible for - especially for putting Terezi in a position where she had to slay her - all of that still matters very much to the people who are alive, which is what makes her self-conception as someone who is on the side of the angels now really... not sit well.

She clearly hasn’t changed all that much. She just thinks, as usual, that now that things are even, now that the score is settled, things can go back to the way they were before.

https://homestuck.com/story/5388

Tavros and Vriska are really bad for each other in general. Like, it’s not good for her to be around someone as pliable as Tavros is, and it’s plain to everybody that it’s not good for him to be around her either; whenever he’s around her, he apes her bogus inflated self-esteem in all the worst ways.

https://homestuck.com/story/5397

Tavros’ explanation of what Vriska does suggests that storytelling has become kind of a ritual for her - a means by which she is attempting to connect with her Ancestor, by performing the same actions she is, miming her - still the same old Vriska.

That’ll be all for now. Cam signing off for now - join me for the thrilling conclusion to Openbound tomorrow, Same Cam Time, Same Cam Channel.

[chrysalizzm]

i uh. realized people follow me now because of uh. you’re human tonight on ao3 asdjgfs

i have content!! behind the scenes content as promised. i do outlines for my fics as a general rule of thumb just because i personally can’t write things to a satisfying finish if i don’t Do That, and so - here are my chapter/plot outlines for you’re human tonight ^^ (i have no idea if this is interesting content or not i thought i’d put it out there because i think outlines are kinda fun hhhh)

chap 1 fundy

subtitle: an inkling

fundy makes an iron golem gone wrong, dream makes it go boom

chap 2 purpled

subtitle: uh oh social interaction

purpled shelters a fugitive, gets his house explosion-proofed as thanks

this is probably gonna be the only chapter with a funny title hh oh well

update: it’s not and i’m pleased with myself for branching out with my dry humor

chap 3 sapnap

subtitle: dust to dust

sapnap’s dying via wither effect, and he knows respawn’s around the corner but goddamn if it doesn’t hurt til then. dream skids in around the nether fortress corner, drops all his weapons cradles sapnap’s head in his hands, has always taken death much harder than anyone sapnap’s ever met. at the last few seconds, when death creeps up like a shroud, dream starts to hum to him hoarsely, pressing his forehead to sapnap’s, and in the final moments sapnap doesn’t hurt at all. the last thing he hears is dream whimpering. he visits dream’s bunker the next day, knocks on the door over and over, but there’s no sign of life there. sapnap shrugs, bites his lip out of guilt for forcing dream to sit there watching him die (if temporarily), and moves on.

the chapter that introduces dream’s primary ability of soothing hurts. put a lot of emphasis on the fact that sapnap ached up until the moment dream started humming, because for dream to do that is pretty frivolous considering once sapnap died he’d respawn and the hurt would just disappear but dream wanted sapnap to have a peaceful last few seconds. emphasize how abnormal it is that withering stops hurting. 

chap 4 ponk

subtitle: beaches dry of sugarcane

dream visits ponk after george burns down the first tree. when ponk arrives to the second tree to move in, he realized dream made the tree flourish, grow healthier and bigger. 

chap 5 sam

subtitle: fuck this shit i’m out (edit: the official subtitle is “oh god oh fuck”, i changed it last-minute)

dream picks sam’s brain for manhunt strategies while the latter is mining for redstone. sam stumbles upon a spawner and reels back, trips, nearly misses the moment dream sweeps him behind him and his eyes flash beneath the mask and when sam gets back up, dazed, there’s nothing but the splay of cobwebs all over the walls. 

chap 6 punz

subtitle: lines drawn

in an unrelated skirmish, punz drives his sword up to the hilt in dream’s chest, relying on respawn for dream to not feel any pain and for punz to get paid. dream doesn’t die. this is understandably alarming. 

can we get some funnies in chap? just a few laughs?? a lil funny for mr luke punz man?

can we get some panicky dry humor for real tho because punz strikes me as someone who copes with morbid humor and dream spluttering up blood is def a situation that punz would not know how to deal with

chap 7 wilbur

subtitle: so about that date

wilbur makes platonic moves on dream while dream fake texts his fiance under the table. wilbur also accidentally vents to dream about his little brother tommy and how afraid he is that tommy will get himself hurt for how reckless he is. dream siphons some of his anxiety from him, smiles as they depart from one another. wilbur notes that dream is shaking when they leave. 

chap 8 skeppy

subtitle: get wrecked noob

dream walks skeppy through some pvp. when skeppy demands a rematch w tommy and gets a lil stage fright kinda sorta thing, dream siphons his anxiety and his nerves and goes full soccer mom with bad and skeppy loses 5-2 but like!! he won!! against tommyinnit!! HH

is there any mental image nearly as powerful as dream wastaken, the soccer mom

chap 9 jack

subtitle: mandatory volunteering

after tommy goes on another one of his destructive rampages lmao, dream enlists jack, newest-comer, to help him rebuild stuff bc underclassmen have to do whatever upperclassmen tell them to do thems just the rules. after rebuilding a statue near the community house, dream pats it fondly, and when tommy sneaks back to set in on fire for shits and giggles, he finds that it’s fuckin fireproofed AGAIN

rebuild efforts, i promised monuments rebuilt so thats what theyre gonna fuckin Get

chap 10 antfrost

subtitle: twist the knife

ant on what ends up being an unpublicized manhunt: dream stops the manhunt because he’s triggered a raid and by the time the hunters get there, alarmed by the screaming and the fire and dream’s unresponsiveness, the villagers are all dead and there are raider corpses everywhere and dream is lying near the bell on his side, whimpering. (what the hunters don’t know - dream tried to fight off the raid but was overwhelmed and witnessed the village get slaughtered, he took the pain of the villagers that weren’t dead but were dying.)

segment: There’s a reason they do the manhunts, and it’s not just for them to horse around and try to kill one another for a few days. Antfrost is the newcomer but he’s always been good at reading people and from the outset he knew that Dream was someone filled to the brim with the restlessness that characterizes humans, that never-settling wanderlust, and his brain works too fast for the rest of his body sometimes, and he just needs an outlet. It’s part of why he eggs Tommy on in their little war games, why he holds onto those discs even though he doesn’t need them, why he gets that delighted look on his face when someone tells him that Tommy’s griefed them or stolen from them or otherwise ruined their morning. Antfrost thinks the only times he’s ever really seen Dream silent, Dream waiting, Dream unmoving, are when Dream is 

chap 11 karl

subtitle: head in the shallows

karl, sapnap, george, and dream have a sleepover after mcc 11. karl, nearest to dream, wakes up when dream starts tossing and turning from a nightmare. when he tries to shake dream awake, dream’s eyes fly open and he slams his fist into the wall behind him and the earth, the literal earth, the entire slab of it, shudders like an earthquake. sapnap and george sleep like the dead, so it’s just karl and dream staring at one another. finally karl asks, concerned, “do you want some tea or water or anything?”

chap 12 hbomb

subtitle: a maid’s burden

“i want to dress up as a maid for fundy,” says hbomb with false bravado. fundy’s fiance levels a very impassive look at him for an awkward minute or two and just when hbomb thinks he’s misread dream and fundy’s relationship dream says “i’ll get you a wig” and the entire chapter is just dream idly twisting the fabric of reality to get hbomb the items he needs to put the outfit together

pranks, i promised pranks, theyre gonna get pranks

chap 13 alyssa

subtitle: message in a bottle (edit: official subtitle is “ship in a bottle”)

alyssa’s leaving, at least temporarily. 

alyssa tells dream it’s getting dangerous on his server, doesn’t relish the expression that brings to his face, but he holds her hands and nods and bids her safe journey. when alyssa returns, running for something (later we’ll learn she had heard that dream was bad, that he might be dying), she finds that her house is completely inaccessible by everyone save her, placed in complete stasis by someone. 

start of the chapters leading up to festival arc. build unresolved tension in this one. 

chap 14 niki

subtitle: life doesn’t discriminate

wilbur and tommy are relentless, they waste no time; niki is willing to wait for it. 

the night before the duel, she goes to dream and holds a sword to his throat and demands he call it off, even though she knows it’ll mean little because of respawn, tells him she won’t stop hunting him down until he gives up l’manberg. dream smiles a little sadly and pats her hand and her fright, her rage, it simmers back down, and the anger that had swarmed her and made dream out to be the devil dies down until it’s just her friend, who was playing along with tommy til it got serious and he got cocky, who’s just as in over his head as she is, and maybe niki’s soft but she likes that about herself, that she’s always the first to forgive. niki is looking at the healing cut on dream’s neck, uncovered by any bandages, when dream shoots tommy, a clean shot that causes no suffering.

a long chapter, probably. i think at some point in this i want to mention niki’s respect for dream for apologizing during the first pet war, for not letting things get any bigger until fundy came back. some parallels can be drawn here - that dream let the fire die down in the initial stages of the pet war, that dream won’t let go of the l’manberg war now, and it occurs to niki that she doesn’t know dream nearly as well as she thinks she does if she expected him to act exactly the way he did during the pet war. she’s got what she’s wanted - dream’s remorse, proof of dream’s humanity - even though it’s not in the form niki wanted it. 

chap 15 eret

subtitle: crown of thorns

the king in name only consults with the true leader. 

they’re both upset about pogtopia’s exile, eret arguably more so because they think their early betrayal of l’manberg somehow butterfly-effected into the current dumpster fire, and as they talk eret works themself into a full panic attack reflecting on things that were, things that could’ve been - and the tide washes out all of a sudden, and eret’s left with the same looming hollowness they’d been feeling before, no dregs of the panic, they’ve never had a panic attack that left them feeling normal after - but dream is now wheezing like he’s about to die and eret immediately walks him through the panic attack, levelheaded even as they’re confused out of their mind. 

chap 16 quackity

subtitle: water to blood

quackity is a snake in the grass. 

quackity at schlatt’s side during the few weeks of his presidency. he knows schlatt from before, has been his friend, so he knows when his friend is acting off. the cynical, straight-faced humor is still there, his completely bland delivery and brazen showmanship, but it’s twisted to the left somehow, to make it so that those qualities that make up his friend have rotted, hurt people. quackity eventually goes to dream after schlatt first overdoses with a lot of questions, maybe even to confess that his allegiance has begun to shift because he can’t go to pogtopia and he can’t go to schlatt - and dream just gives him a long, sad look before lightly patting quackity’s shoulder and says “i can’t guarantee anything - just that you’ll be safe” and shooing him off and as quackity heads back to manberg he realises all the hostile mobs are avoiding him like the fucking plague. 

it’s big q!!!! fattest ass in the cabinet!!!!! pog!!!

fun fact this chapter’s subtitle was almost “chekhov’s gun” until november fucking 16th of 2020

chap 17 tommy

subtitle: most disputes die and no one shoots

tommy learns how a legacy dies.

a compendium of tommy watching the madness consume wilbur. it needs to be emphasized in this chapter that wilbur becomes an entirely different person when they’re ejected from manberg, that he becomes obsessed with the legacy he’s created and watching it crumble is what twists him; when dream gives tommy his crossbow, tommy, out of desperation and a need to have an older sibling again, asks what’s wrong with wilbur; dream’s face hardens and he asks tommy to take dream to wilbur. it’s a terse meeting, the only one they have before techno and before wilbur completely loses it and demands the tnt; wilbur says a lot of things tommy doesn’t understand (it’s complex mythological jargon hinting at dream’s status as a god but could be misconstrued to refer to dream’s status as simply the world owner) and at one point wilbur sneers, “are you trying to play god, dream?” and dream lurches forward and grabs wilbur by the wrist, and there’s a completely silent moment where tommy feels the air suck out of his lungs and there’s an off buzzing in his ears and he fancies he hears something that sounds, just a bit, like dream, whispering desperately wilbur wilbur wilbur it’s me it’s me listen listen listen then a shrieking, acrid wave of no and tommy reels back and when he looks up dream has staggered back, his hand to his mouth, blood dripping from somewhere beneath his mask, sounding like he’s gagging or maybe he’s sobbing, as wilbur shrieks in a voice that is entirely not his “get out get out if i can’t have l’manberg...” and tommy understands, finally, as dream sprints out. that’s not wilbur.

a distinction needs to be made perfectly clear in this chapter, as with schlatt’s chapter: it’s not them. they’ve been twisted out of control by something bigger than them, something that wants to toy with the young god running an oasis of peace for his people. it doesn’t need to be outright said in this fic; in another we can delve into the madness and who did it and why. for now, just make it clear it’s not explicitly anyone’s fault.

chap 18 techno

subtitle: colosseum

dream had to let techno in first, you know. 

techno and dream have interacted often - the duel, the championships, they’re friends more than acquaintances now. but techno was called in by someone wearing his brother’s face that he honestly doesn’t recognize from his voice and when he arrives at spawn, before tommy fetches him, he sees dream sitting cross legged waiting for him and they talk about the situation, dream giving techno a quick brief. when tommy comes, crying “techno, this way, this way to pogtopia”, and crossbow bolts are being fired at techno, dream gives him a lil wave goodbye (or what techno thinks is a lil wave goodbye but what actually turns out to be putting a swiftness effect on him).

“that’s not my brother, dream,” says techno, and dream’s mouth wobbles and he says, hoarse, “i know.”

techno Suspects, but only knows that dream has world-manipulating powers and thus standard minor god powers. he doesn’t let dream know he suspects. 

chap 19 bad

subtitle: run devil run

bad trusts dream, perhaps against his better judgement. 

dream comes to visit bad and skeppy on neutral grounds in the interim leading up to the festival that everyone on the server is side-eyeing and side-stepping. bad considers his friend and the owner of the world as he gives dream an impromptu tour through the escape route he and skeppy have dug out, wonders with a little reproach how dream could let things get to this point, then, soft, gentle as always, acknowledges that dream is only human kindly. when he says that, though, dream’s face crumples, as though those words hurt him more than any criticism bad’s given him in the time he’s known him, as though bad had driven a blade into his heart, and bad doesn’t understand but he lets dream run away from that. when a small flock of creepers explode over the tunnel the night before the festival and bad grumbles that he has to fix it, he learns dream left him with a fortified escape tunnel.

a/n: i’m sure the irony isn’t lost on you.

chap 20 tubbo

subtitle: cadmean victory

what say the sacrificial lamb?

tubbo is coming to terms with the fact that he might not make it out of office in one piece and it’s not his first time respawning but the older members of the server always, always did their best to shield the younger ones from death. he runs into dream by complete coincidence while he’s avoiding pogtopia (mostly wilbur) and manberg (mostly schlatt), caught between two strangers wearing his friends’ faces. he looks at dream, who looks back at him impassively, and tubbo starts to cry, because it finally hits him that even with his death and respawn nothing will be fixed, nothing can change, the poison’s run too deep into the veins of dream’s beautiful little world and now nothing can be right anymore and it feels like he’s shattering into tiny, aching shards - and then dream kneels before him, takes his hands, presses his forehead to them, sighs like his heart’s breaking, and tubbo feels a small calm thread back into him as dream stands abruptly, jittery. dream, with hands that shake, grips tubbo’s shoulder, hovers for a second, then his head jerks up and he bolts into the forest, clambering up a tree with admirable ease and disappearing away into the leaves as schlatt suddenly emerges from the bushes nearby with a joyous, plastic “hey! tubbo!”

chap 21 george

subtitle: lantern burns low

a moment in the night; george is visited by a specter. 

dream comes, pale, and asks george if there is anything wrong, is everything okay with you? takes george’s caught-off-guard face in his hands and says george george george, are you - and george catches a glimpse of dream’s powers (is he safe safe does he hurt no but fear but anxiety there are dregs hush now quiet now he is safe all quiet quiet quiet he’s safe) and he says, stricken even as the constant thrum of nervous energy he’d kept with him fades out, “dream what was that,” and dream presses his hands to his mask where his eyes are and says, despairingly, “they don’t get to have you too,” and staggers back out. 

george is the first person dream overtly “comes out” to. this is also why george doesn’t see dream til the festival. 

chap 22 schlatt

subtitle: the empty throne

dream visits schlatt in his office. 

schlatt, possessed by madness, has no idea what he’s saying but it feels right, it’s exactly right, everything is in his hands, and when dream approaches, his hands facing up, is he there is he there yes yes yes tainted polluted this is twisted this is madness madness madness dream reels back, shaking, and schlatt leans in and leers, not even knowing what he’s saying, “you can’t even fix it, young god,” and relishes the way all the color drains from dream’s face.

=)

chap 23 dream (edit: this monster ended up being split into three for pacing purposes and also if i left it together it was gonna be. h. 14K WORDS. also the drama of a cliffhanger at what most people thought was going to be the last chapter was too good to pass up don’t @ me

subtitle: do you feel like a young god?

running, running, running again

finale!! dream takes everyone’s old hurts into himself, takes the madness from schlatt and wilbur, promptly passes the hell out because no one should be doing that, wakes up, gets the shit hugged out of him, and explains a little, and gets told that he’s loved over and over. 

i uh! take questions! i like talking about this story, there’s a lot i still want to show, and even apart from that i just really love mcyt haha

[bananaofswifts]

At the outset of the first screening of the documentary “Miss Americana” Thursday night at the Sundance Film Festival, it was clear at the outset that it was not necessarily Taylor Swift’s core audience filling the Eccles Theater for the premiere. The opening scene has Swift trying to write a song at the piano while one of her cats walks across the keys. When that occurs as the film hits theaters next Friday, it’ll draw appreciative screams from the Olivia Benson- and Meredith Grey-loving faithful. Here? Not so much, except for a few younger fans who got into the balcony’s back rows via the standby line. But when the doc starts the take a more political turn about two-thirds of the way through, documenting Swift finding her voice as an outspoken advocate and activist, that’s when the Sundance audience started to sound a little more like her core demo, at least in short, loud bursts of appreciative whoops and hollers. The most critical scene in the film has Swift trying to convince the men in her camp that it’s important that she step up and make an endorsement for the Democrats in Tennessee’s gubernatorial and senatorial elections. When one of them warns that the president could come after her, and she emotionally declares that she’s fine with that, it was if she’d just launched into a surprise version of “All Too Well” in concert. (Donald Trump does eventually respond by saying he likes Swift’s music 25% less since she laid into the White House for working against passage of the Equality Act.) Afterward, Swift and director Lana Wilson came out for a 15-minute Q&A, discussing how they first met through Netflix — which will release the film for streaming day-and-date with its theatrical run Jan. 31 — and how their rapport developed. “We started the process not really knowing if we were going to end up with a documentary — it was just sort of like: Let’s film, let’s see what you see,” Swift said. “And this was completely in her hands. And I really appreciate all the hours we talked. Those interviews — there were a lot of hours that she had to hear me talk about my feelings.” Added the singer, “I think one of the things about you is that for so much of my life in the public eye, when I get sad or upset or humiliated or angry or go through a really horrible time, I feel people lean in with like this hunger. And you never did that to me. And that was what made me feel okay about feeling sadness, anger, humiliation around you, because I felt like when I got sad, you did too. And so it made all of that all right. It didn’t make me feel like, ‘Oh, she feels like she’s got a good part for a movie now.’ And I really want to thank you for that.” Wilson extolled the scene in which Swift explains her imminent political coming-out to her worried family and members of her team. Said the filmmaker, “The scene where you discussed with your team and family that political endorsement, it’s so powerful because of the politics, but also because it’s watching you with the people who love you the most in the world, saying, ‘You know, I love you. You’re looking out for my best interests, but I have to disagree and do things my own way.’ That’s a moment that’s so many of us have experienced in our lives at one point or another, and I thought it was so powerful as this coming of age event, and the profound ending of this multilayered process you went through to lead you into that decision.” Swift explained the dynamics that went into that tense and emotional meeting. “My dad has always just been so terrified about my safety since I was a kid,” she said. “The fact that my job entails standing on a stage and, you know, there’s so many threats we get on a daily basis, but nobody ever knows about. And we try to keep that stuff under wraps as much as possible, but my dad is the one who has to see it. And so for him it was all about, ‘What could happen to you if you say this? Is my daughter in danger? And is this the moment when I should have stopped it from happening?’ “I had been speaking to my mom so much about it, and she went through the trial with me in Denver, which was a really horrible experience to have.” [Swift prevailed in a lawsuit in which she alleged sexual assault, having been groped by a radio DJ at a meet-and-greet.] And I had all the privilege in the world and financial support and the ability to pay for a brilliant lawyer. And I won that trial, but without all that, I don’t know what would have happened. So it taught me so much and, and it was the women in my life who were there every single day going into court. You know,, our political opinions are defined by what happens to us in our life. So that was one of the things that happened to me in my life, and seeing what’s happening in my home state, and then it all culminating and having to have a conversation with people who have been so wonderfully supportive of me through my entire career, feeling so afraid for my safety. And it’s a really real moment for me to watch that back.” Things got lighter with the last question, as the moderator asked: “I want to know where Meredith, Olivia, and Benjamin are at this very moment while the world premiere of your film has been happening.” “Well, they’re right in the back row. Just right up there,” she said, looking to the balcony as the crowd turned its collective necks. This was deadpan. “No, they’re not here. I wish they were, but unfortunately they don’t care about anything that I do. But I love them so much. Detective Olivia Benson and Dr Meredith Gray and Benjamin Button — the loves of my life. Thank you for asking about them. I will tell them. They will not care, but I do.”

[gear-project]

Do you have any tips/advice on playing the Missing Link?

Alright, since some of you may not be familiar with some of Guilty Gear's "older" mechanics, I'll give you some tips:

1. Blocking is pretty much the same as in most fighting games, with exception that you need to hold down the Respect button to perform Faultless Defense (for most that's the L1 button, check your control settings).  It will burn through a lot of your built-up Chaos Gauge if you were on the offensive, but at least you won't take damage while guarding, and you can even block better while in mid-air.

In more modern GG games, it's a lot easier to do this because you burn less Tension (that's the Chaos gauge by the way), you can also use it to cancel your movements briefly if you have the meter.  It's useful for sudden stops and fast falls if you're in the air, or just want to jump really quickly.

2. It's a lot harder to turn around in GG1, but at least you can take advantage of this with the Taunt button in mid-air.  If you manage to airdash behind a character, press the Taunt button and you'll make a sudden turn and can quickly attack them from behind.  If you're fast, you can land an airdash combo and attack their backside!  Practice this a bit in training mode and you'll get the hang of it.

If you’re blown away by an attack, try using Up+Any Button to perform an Aerial Recovery.  It’s a tad different from more modern ways of recovering, but it’ll get you back on your feet so you can block at least.

3. As you probably already know, the Respect button also doubles as a "charge" button for most characters (Axl, Testament, and Justice are the only exceptions to this).  If you input your respective character's "charge move" and begin to charge up the attack, you can briefly cancel the charge and reset your character's position.  This is a LOT like a Roman Cancel!  So when you perform a string of attacks, whether they are blocked or not, whether they HIT or not... you can input your charge attack and "cancel" the combo to continue the previous string of attacks.

Here's an example (using Sol Badguy):

Heavy Slash > 623+R (Charge) > Heavy Slash > 623+R (Charge) > Heavy Slash etc.

Some charged-based combos are really powerful and REALLY broken, but they still have a certain amount of pushback, so be careful how long you try to do them, forward momentum from a ground dash or breaker dash will help extend the combo.

4. This one's very important... if you find yourself in a pinch, where your Lifebar is in the Yellow, assuming you've lost half your health gauge, remember that you've entered Awakening Mode (Kakusei Mode) and for the rest of the round, you can perform an unlimited number of Chaos Attacks (called Overdrives in later games).

So if you're wounded, you can perform moves like Sol's Tyrant Rave (632146+H) or Ky's Ride the Lightning (41364+H) over and over and it doesn't even cost you Chaos Gauge meter!  Take advantage of this whenever you can.  Even Sol's Dragon Install can be buffed and re-buffed for an extended period while in this state.

5. Let's assume that your opponent is putting you under a LOT of pressure, if you have some Chaos meter, if you're blocking, you can perform a Gamble Attack (later called a Dead Angle guard cancel).  To do this, you need to press Forward+2 buttons while blocking.  It's a bit more costly than Faultless Defense, but it'll help you get back on Offense a lot quicker.

Also, please remember that some attacks of the same strength will clash.  If you manage to clash against your opponent 3 times in a row, both of you will be pushed back and you’ll have some breathing room.

6. Momentum is very important in this game, especially if you have Chaos meter.  Assuming you have a full gauge, you can charge at your opponent and RAM in to them!  This is called a Breaker Crash dash attack!  (Slow characters like Potemkin and Kliff can't really do this move, but others can!)  You can use this not just as a way to attack opponents, but to extend combos after a knockdown or blowback!  You'll have to do some experimenting with it though.

7. Certain counterhits will result in a Dust blowback, just like when you hit Dust (Slash+Heavyslash) input to knock someone in the air.  If you're quick to react, you can press the Up button to perform a Homing Jump which leads in to an Aerial Gatling combo, it takes practice and reflexes, but take advantage of it whenever you can.

8. Gamble Attacks aren't the only move that can be canceled while Guarding.  If you press Punch+Kick either while guarding or during a sequence of attacks, you'll initiate a Danger Time Instant Kill poke.  The screen will go red and you'll have a chance to input your Instant Kill.  But be alert and be FAST because if the opponent inputs theirs before you do, it's the end of the match!

If you know your opponent is trying to Instant Kill you, perform 214214+any button to try and escape the Kill attempt, and they'll dash behind you and you'll have an opportunity to attack them immediately afterwards.

Danger Time itself is often random and risky, but if you get used to taking advantage of it and can read your opponent (not just the CPU), it turns in to a very powerful mind game.

Also, be very careful, as some attack counterhits will also initiate a Danger Time poke, like many of Testament's moves.

9. Charge attacks aren't the only way to extend combos!  A lot of your arsenal of attacks can be jump-cancelled.  That's right, you can jump after an attack hits or is blocked.  You can use this in the form of Instant Airdash Combos.  The input's a little tricky as you have to press Up and Forward-Forward (88 or 77 after a ground attack that can be jump canceled), but with enough practice you can dash in on your target in the middle of a combo and use the momentum to extend your attacks.  This is super effective on big characters like Potemkin and Justice.

10. Take advantage of spacing.  If your opponent is far away from you and they aren't attacking, this will give you a safer opportunity to charge up your moves.  Ky Kiske and Kliff can often take advantage of this with their projectile pressure.  Use Ky's Level 2 or Level 3 Stun Edge and you can really lay the hurt and pressure your opponent.  In Kliff's case, his Reflex Roar Level 3 can wipe out 50% health in a single blast!  He's very powerful.

Is your opponent running away?  Catch them with Potemkin's Level 3 Graviton (623+R/P Slide-Head)!  Potemkin can also use Nitro Hook to close the gap on his opponents if they try to retreat (he later gets to use the move Hammerfall~).

Also, moves like Chipp's Ten'i Teleport (22+any) and Sol's Riot Stamp (214+K or 66+K) are really good at keeping you in your opponent's face when needed for pressure.

Axl and Millia are especially good at keeping their opponents at bay with their respective moves, so if you like poking people at a distance, give them a try.

11. Finally some tips for fighting bosses Testament and Justice.

For Testament: either try to poke him from a distance or pressure him as much as you can, because he's good at laying traps on the field.  His combo strings are very long, but he doesn't charge cancel, so be patient and wait it out if you're blocking.  If he brings out his EXE-Beast on the ground, be ready to jump and you'll take less damage in the air, just watch out for Grave Digger.

For Justice: at the outset she likes to spam her Michael Sword and Imperial Ray, so you'll need something powerful that can either interrupt those attacks (Potemkin's Graviton, Axl's Chain Trap, or Sol's Volcanic Viper/Ky's Vapor Thrust), or something that can stun her at a distance, like Stun Edge or Gunflame.

Like Testament, Justice has a very long string of gatling attack combos, but she can't charge cancel either, so wait it out if she's in your face.

If her Health is low, she'll begin spamming Gamma Ray, so be ready to use Faultless Defense, or a fast move that can interrupt the startup of her attack.  The more you harry Justice with pressure attacks, the less of a threat she'll be.  Just watch out for moves like Valkyrie ARC and SBT, as she'll use those if you pressure her too much.

Characters like Axl or Potemkin have a slight advantage in that they can attack Justice at long range, so use that to your advantage.

12. Last but not least: how to unlock Baiken!

Obviously you can only use Ky or Sol.  I choose Ky because he's easier/safer to use.

Again, take advantage of Level 3 Stun Edge, most A.I. can't deal with it, so it does a ton of damage, even if they block it.  While they're blocking, charge up another Level 3.

Get used to dodging Instant Kill pokes, as after Stage 8, the A.I. will step up its game and the game gets harder.  But, they can't Instant Kill you if they can't touch you, so play keep away with that Level 3 Stun Edge.

Ky can also endlessly spam a mid-air Stun Edge if you're practiced with its input.

Ky's Stun Dipper is also useful in that it causes knockdown, use this for Okizeme frame advantage and charge up your Stun Edge while they're on the ground.

If you've been training and get used to Testament and Justice' patterns, you can wreck both of them with Level 3 Stun Edge.

After that, you just have to fight Baiken and unlock her.

Don't worry, even if you lose a round or match against Baiken you can still rematch her and try again without starting over.  Baiken's a pushover compared to Testament or Justice (in this game at least, she gets stronger in later games).

----That should do it!

If you're still having trouble, just experiment in Training Mode some more till you get the hang of things!  Be sure to read the manual and get a full grasp of the game’s mechanics!