#(s2 is LONG okay)

[fruity-blogs]

GUYS.

GUYS.

I'M NOT DOING OKAY.

THEY REALLY CHANGED THE VINYL DISC INTRO TO EKKO AND POWDER. THIS IS THEIR "WHAT COULD'VE BEEN" 😭💔

[h3lian]

Jayvik got my ass. Attempting to do this between things.

[mobius-m-mobius]

Lokius + touch in season 2 / (season 1)

[patheticwhimsy]

Good Omens + Our Flag Means Death

[m0rninglatte]

"Heavy is the Crown"

[lanschpaket]

Mugshots (Arcane S02 analysis on Jayce)

No, not the ones you're thinking of. I post this, cause I think it needs to be out there, but full credits to my GF who actually called out the significance of the symbolismn back while S01 was airing

Buckle up, this is gonna take a while

I think everyone remembers this shot from S01, it's the Progress Day episode

The symbolism at this point. Jayce being the front man. Jayve covering up Viktor. Viktor always the person in the background not seen by anyone else, cause Jayce is standing in front of him.

Now in S02, analyzing scene, seeing more, now that I know what to look out for. I found the mug again. Therefore have these mug shots:

In these still the mug reapears in Jayce's lab it's on the desk behind him where he sits and watches over Viktor. The entire scene it's never really about Jayce, but mostly concern about the city but more importanty also about Viktor's wellbeing. The entire time, we see the mug, but the motive is not visible. Also, Viktor is not in these shots. The motive is always on the backside, cause it's not Jayce that matters at the moment. Even for him, all that matters right now is Viktor. Jayce even gave up an being on the council just for him

Let's continue

This shot was very important to me as I was looking at it. Back then, very dominant and zoomed in, the mug covered Viktor up entirely.

Now we have Viktor in the center of the image. And a crushed Jayce right in front of him. The real Jayce in his emotional state and not the famous inventor Jayce doing great for Piltover. Without Viktor Jayce isn't complete. He is not the man he can be. A part of him is missing. So we only see half of the motive on the mug, cause Viktor is there, but not really.

NEXT!

The next scene we get to see the mug are right after Viktor comes back to the living. Jayce being happy to have him back, convinced they can go back to where they where, before he gave it all up and sacrificed this relationship for fame and the council. Telling Viktor about it in the happiest state we have seen him this far this season.

We get Viktors vision of the desk and his look on the blueprints, which immediately makes him think of Sky. So full motive Jayce, cause for the longest time Jayce feels complete again, but also oposite of it Sky, which makes this scene look like some sort of crossraods for Viktor imo. We know which path he chooses. He leaves Jayce and follows his own path

So now to the last mug shot. I am not really sure, nor 100% convinced about my thoughts on that. But so far I think it show us that Jayce is recovering. He goes back to his roots. He prepares tea, after Heimerdinger and Ekko sneaked into his lab, but this time it's not just Jayce. It is Jayce without Viktor yes. But it's Jayce doing Hextec stuff with others. Making room for other personalities and not just him. His "him" back then only existed with Viktor, but Viktor not visible. This new Jayce, finds himself again where he started and allows room for others to stand with him. Truly together

thanks and shoutout to my beloved gf, who showed me the significance of the mug in the first place and got me into the heaviest brainrot this year :3

[humming-fly]

Happy to report I have finally started listening to Malevolent and to no one's surprise I am already obsessed (I'm almost done with s2 atm please don't send me spoilers yet sdlkfj)

I'll skip over my usual formality of having one normal art post before diving into shitposts let's not waste anyone's time here

[nonbinarylesbianherb]

[arcanebrained]

Arcane Season 2 Episode 7 - Pretend Like Its the First Time

[ghostorbz]

Forgot to post this

[mini-tiny-art]

watching arcane season 2 !! (no spoilers i haven’t finished yet lmao)

[sarucane]

Ed Teach's Stories

From practically the moment we meet him, Ed's identity is unstable. We know who is he (Blackbeard) from context, from the story told by the the room around him, by Izzy and the flag his crew. But the thing is, Ed doesn't fit the story of the Mad Devil Blackbeard. Two of his first few words are "good" and "love" for crying out loud. He's called "Blackbeard," but his beard is grey.

This instability exists because Ed himself isn't sure what story he's telling--or wants to tell. "I shouldn't be bored, I'm fucking Blackbeard!" All through his early episodes Ed is in increasingly desperate tension with his own identity. He's trying to tell stories within stories, wanting all the stories to be true at the same time, yet aware of the reality that the world is constantly trying to wipe one or another of the stories away. And not really trusting that he can tell the whole story of who he is.

In the first season of OFMD, Stede wears a different outfit every episode. Yet Stede remains the same: despite his internal tensions (almost despite himself) there's a stability to his identity. But all through both seasons of OFMD, Ed putting on a new outfit means he's trying to tell a completely different story about himself.

And underneath this cacophony, there's Ed. And Ed is himself a chorus of stories, a living contradiction. A patricidal murderer who was protecting his mother; a paragon of masculinity who longs for softness and fluidity; a man renowned for violence and madness who has in fact carefully cultivated that reputation and is extremely careful with his violence; a killer who doesn't kill, yet who does kill all the time just at a bit of a remove; a half a dozen names and personas and yet always Ed; unloveable, yet deeply loved.

At the beginning of the show, Ed isn't actually good at telling his own story. He's good at listening to other people's stories, and conforming himself to them often without conscious effort. But when he tries to really tell his own story--asking Stede to run off to China, singing his break-up song song, going to become a fisherman--he fails. We don't understand in the first season why his judgement clouds, why he becomes weak when he tries to tell his story. But in the second season after spending half an episode in Ed's mind, a painful truth is undeniable: Ed, like Stede, doesn't think he's worthy of telling his own story.

So instead of telling his own story, Ed let other people tell his story. In the first season, Ed built off what Izzy told him he had to be. But he couldn't lose himself in Blackbeard, no matter how hard he tried. So in the second season, when Ed couldn't face living with his contradictions anymore, he wrote an ending worthy of Blackbeard.

All this, because Ed thinks he can only be "himself" by telling one, single story about himself. By denying his contradictions, rather than embracing them. Splitting himself in two to tell himself a story, rather than telling the story himself.

What Ed doesn't believe or trust is this: For Ed to really be himself, he has to be impossible. Two contradictory things, at the same time.

The second season of OFMD is about learning to embrace all these contradictions. In each episode of OFMD, character look at the same object or situation (a wanted poster, a unicorn, a velvety suit, a relationship, a past trauma) and they tell two completely different stories about it. Sometimes one of those stories turns out to be wrong, but more often than not both are true, and something else--something beautiful-- is born from the place where those contradictions meet. And the characters, Ed most of all, learn to accept and balance this dissonance.

Thematically speaking, I'd argue that's why the second season of OFMD is more fantastical than the first: fantasies are contradictions, real and not-real at the same time. And isn't that what transformation is, in the end? What you are and what you are not, meeting and becoming "you"?

Transformation isn't all good. At first, Ed's fantastic stories hide his pain or invoke despair

But later, the fantasies make their way into reality. The impossible begins to shape reality--and opens a way for hope.

In the last episode of S2, Ed emerges from the waves as the kraken--but there's 3 musical tracks playing, three themes: the kraken, Ed, and Blackbeard. Then he reads a love letter, and has a deeply romantic moment with his boyfriend. He puts on a new outfit to escape the British, yet his personality doesn't change at all. When Izzy first apologizes to him, Ed says "I'm the one who should be apologizing," but then Izzy changes his entire understanding of their relationship. Becomes the first family figure to offer Ed permission to be himself.

Contradictions galore, and yet Ed is still Ed. Both who he was formed into by other people (his father, Izzy, Pop Pop) and yet who he is.

In the final scenes, Ed begins to finally accept the tensions of his life. He tells Zheng that yes, he wants to kill Richie--but he doesn't go on a revenge quest. And while before his forays into being someone else meant changing his name, his clothes and mannerisms, his whole story, he doesn't act like that at all in the last scene of the ep.

And Ed's been able to do all this, to come this far, because of Stede. Stede, who Ed was drawn to because he was a "fancy man who leads a brigade of imbeciles," yet had won a fight with Izzy. Stede, who looked at Ed at his lowest moment, after Ed had admitted that the entire basis of their friendship had been in bad faith, and said, "I'm your friend." Stede who, even knowing Ed wouldn't want to hear from him, poured his heart into letters about how their bond was unbreakable.

Stede is everything he is, all at the same time. And when Ed was drowning in his own contradictions, (a rope tied around him that he could not undo and yet had put on himself) trapped somewhere "inevitable, yet impossible," Stede appeared as a fantastic, beautiful creature and brought him home.

Stede lets Ed be everything he is, and sees it all as true and worthy of love. Even when Ed fucks up, it's all right.

And sometimes, telling two different stories about something doesn't lead to a fragmented self, doesn't drive people apart.

Sometimes, it means understanding. Means acceptance, safety, connection.

From discordance (contradiction), harmony. A gentleman can be a pirate. A man can be a bird, or a unicorn. Izzy can have been one of the good ones and a fucking nightmare. And Ed can tell all his stories, they can all be true--and he can still be Ed.

[storge]

WATANABE YUTARO as Tatta Kodai Alice in Borderland S2

[bookshelfdreams]

do it. gimme the Izzy straight-coded meta 👀

I feel like I need to preface this by saying that Actually, Izzy Is Straightcoded would be the inflammatory clickbait title I'd give this if it were written to draw traffic & ad revenue to my shitty website. So don't take that term too seriously.

There has been a lot of ink spilled about Izzy thinking he's in a story where one can only be subtextually queer. Some even by yours truly, but the more I think about it, the less sense it makes. What would be the purpose of queercoding Izzy?

In general, villains* aren't queercoded to show that men being attracted to other men is bad. It's often the outcome; but it's not why the trope exists. It exists because cishet people tend to be (and are encouraged to be) profoundly uncomfortable with gender nonconformity, and so, making a character gnc becomes a quick and easy way to make him appear twisted and untrustworthy. If he** can't even obey the fundamental rules of his own gender (rules that are inherent and unchangeable!) what other rules does he disobey?

Or: If a man is insufficiently masculine, he can't be trusted to have morals. The villain isn't gnc because that's an evil trait to have; rather, the gender nonconformity is a symptom of his evilness. Being evil is what enables him to embrace his feminine side, and embracing his feminine side is what others him and marks him as a villain.

This only really works when he's contrasted with a hero (or heroine) who is Doing Gender Correctly. The villain is foul to highlight how good the hero is. The Hero will be honest and straightforward, brave, physically powerful; the Queercoded Villain treacherous, cowardly, and physically weak. The hero is a Proper Man, a Good Person. The villain an Improper Man, and therefore, a Bad Person.

Of course ofmd fundamentally rejects this. The shorthand wouldn't work, because ofmd simply doesn't think effeminacy is creepy. It's uninterested in moralizing self-expression; it just lets people be how they are. There's a wide range of expressions of masculinity on this show, and none of it is inherently bad. People are allowed to be hypermasculine, flamboyant, and anything inbetween, can express their gender in whatever manner they want, and it's all fine - as long as they are authentic about it. Be however you are, but be yourself, and this is what Izzy fails at. The repression marks him as a villain. The strict adherence to what he thinks a Real Man Pirate ought to be like. He's very preoccupied with enforcing a traditional (and toxic) masculinity on himself and others. It's no coincidence the characters he antagonizes the most - Stede and Lucius - are also the most effeminate ones. And I know, I know anglophones have a much more casual relationship to twat and cunt, those don't nearly feel as uncomfortable for y'all as they do for me, so I don't want to assign too much significance here, but he is the only character who constantly uses this kind of language, and also the one who uses the most gender&sexuality based slurs (as far as I remember).

All of this while being clearly, obviously queer himself! I do not feel like I need to explain this; his flustered reaction when Lucius asks him if he's ever been sketched speaks for itself. The fact that he meets Stede and immediately slices his shirt off of him, speaks for itself. And so on.

Izzy isn't straightcoded in the sense that the story wants us to believe he's exclusively attracted to women. Much like a queercoded villain doesn't need to be shown to be attracted to men (and can even be shown to be attracted exclusively to women!) to still be queercoded. He's straightcoded in the sense that he's a stand-in for restrictive and toxic gender roles that society enforces on people. He buys into the idea that there's a way of Doing Gender Wrong, and this is presented as a tragic character flaw. Something he has to overcome to be able to do the thing that actually marks a hero in this show: express himself authentically.

Part of why I found his death so moving is because it enables him to set right the toxicity he spread. His rehabilitation arc was about himself; about finally allowing himself to be, accepting love, accepting community. His death was about taking responsibility. About fully recognizing the hurt he caused. Looking death in the face enables him to finally abandon the last shreds of that toxicity, to apologize and be granted forgiveness. In the end, he was not beyond saving, and the harm he has done will be healed.

*Izzy is introduced as an antagonist to both Stede and the central romance of this romcom. I'm not gonna debate this; if you disagree, fine, but you clearly have such a fundamentally wrong different view of the show that it's pointless for us to try and convince each other.

**of course Queercoded Female Villains exist s well, but they are a whole different can of worms and less relevant to this discussion

[infinitelystrangemachinex]

There's a conversation we need to have about Jayce, thinking he's once again doing the objectively good thing, somehow finding a way to make saving Viktor's life about himself

Ripping Viktor out of death and into birth, bringing him into the world against his wishes, the Frankenstein and Frankenstein's Monster of it all

But first I have to scream incoherently and cry facedown on the floor for about 24 hours

[lilkitten156]

i have a little head canon that after the end of arcane, jinx decides to grow her hair out again. It takes a long time to grow, and it never gets to be as long and unwieldy as it was.  She lets the memories walk beside her, not grabbing at her heels or blocking her path. This time, her braids do not seem to weigh her down.