#All I do is analyse them and conjecture about why I think this character is more evil than this one

[starsnhiseyes]

Don't DM me my DMs are full of me sending analyses of the Always Sunny characters

[mybg3notebook]

Gale Summarised Analysis

Disclaimer Game Version: All these analyses were written up to the game version v4.1.104.3536 (Early access). As long as new content is added, and as long as I have free time for that, I will try to keep updating this information. Written in May 2021.

The majority of sources used for this article are in the game itself (this includes my Gale-solo playthroughs as well as a combination of the videos by munmomuu and selphie1999), and the few dev’s notes provided by pjenn. Gale as origin is not taken into account since it’s not finished and has little to none Gale-related content. There will be little datamining content as well since pjenn said the game contained almost no gale-related notes (only in the Weave and in the Revelation scene).

Additional disclaimers about meta-knowledge and interpretations in (post)

The number between brackets [] represents the topic-block related to (this post), which gathers as much evidence as I could get.

We can infer about Gale by analysing what he approves and disapproves of. Sometimes, we can even lightly infer some information from his neutral reactions, but let’s be honest: this way of analysing a char is pretty poor since it leaves everything to speculation. Neutral reactions can only be analysed, in very rare instances, by contrasting the same situation in other contexts, and seeing what other options Gale approves or disapproves of. With these considerations in mind, we can proceed to describe this character.

Disclaimer: this is a meta with my personal interpretation of the character, sticking as much as possible to the facts and leaving little to “desires” or “projections” of what I want him to be. If I do so, I will state it explicitly in the text for the sake of analysis honesty. I want to be clear about what is canon (facts shown in bg3 EA), from what’s personal interpretation with little proof.

Understanding Gale (integrated text)

We are none of us monsters. We are merely hatcheries for monstrous things. So we fight them

---Gale 

Collecting most of the information provided in-game, we know he has a cat, a Library, and writes poetry sometimes. One of the first things that Gale will reveal is that he is a private person. He easily and clearly sets boundaries from the first moment, showing Tav where they stand. The second aspect he makes us aware of is his pragmatic thinking and his preference for diplomatic approaches. A third aspect that stands out on its own: he is a very verbose person, maybe as a result of his academia background in combination with his poetry hobby. He also has a bad posture when talking, but I’m not sure if this is intentional or a bug.

We can assure that Gale certainly is a man of the city [13], and may have a decent social status. It's impossible to say for sure if it's noble or rich or both, or it is just a natural consequence of being a wizard scholar: he is frustrated by the harshness of the camping life, he misses the civilisation of the city which offers well cooked meals, soft beds, and scented baths. Not by chance he is the only companion in the group who would approve of giving Oskar 200 gold to fight “the discomforts of the road” [13]. However, he adapts. Despite the lack of luxuries, he managed to survive in the wilderness.

Gale and his link with magic is unquestionable. Magic is life for Gale, metaphorically and literally speaking since it's magic what allows him to stay alive despite the "orb" in his chest. If we talk about Magic, we have to talk about Mystra and the Weave. The Weave is not only the embodiment of Mystra, it's an extension of Mystra herself. It extends across many planes of existence and is in almost all parts of Faerûn. By dragging power from it, Magic can be performed. 

Mystra, for lore reasons and conjectures that I will discuss in the post "Mystra and her Chosen ones", turned teenager/young adult Gale into one of her Chosen, making their relationship more intimate and granting Gale a deeper access to the Weave. This put Gale into the category of an archwizard. It's clear that Gale was and still is a devotee of Mystra, which could give us a hint of his alignment since she is a neutral good goddess and she expects for her Chosen to align around it.

Gale likes confidence, in others and in himself. He is confident in his looks (he has described himself as a “handsome devil” and answered during the romance/Revelation scene that he knew he was beautiful under the light as well as Tav). But beyond these two lines, qualifying him as a narcissist seems extreme. He is surely very confident about his knowledge, and we see he is not just mere words: his Mind Flayer knowledge is at the the same level of what githyankis know. If we compare how Astarion/Tav struggled with the book of Thay, and then we see how Gale manages it (sadly the scene is not complete yet in EA, and there is almost no datamining info of Gale), we can conclude once more that his knowledge and power of the mind are real (he is, so far, the main companion who allows us to explore the lore of the game in a deeper way during his conversations). We also know it's a bit more complicated to intrude into his mind using the tadpole because he has knowledge and mental tools to protect himself (check the post about the Tadpole inside Gale). He is certainly a very verbose and confident scholar, who knows his limits, and in occasions he seems to dabble into an ego-teasing play as an attempt of levity, displaying his “insufferable side”, as he has described himself (his self-awareness of these traits is remarkable, and it is the reason why I avoid qualifying him as arrogant. Arrogant chars are hardly self-aware of their own bad manners or insufferable traits). But we can see it's usually done as a joke or, with an evil Tav, as an aggressive reaction. For a deep analysis of this aspect, check the post about "Gale Hypotheses- Part 2", section: "Narcissism". 

Based on his approvals and disapprovals, we can see that Gale has a strong preference in avoiding fights, violence, and bloodshed [1]. He will always prefer diplomatic and persuasive approaches [2]. Reasoning is his best weapon, but if the individual we are dealing with can hardly be persuaded, he would approve of a deception or an intimidation as long blood is not spilt. Here is where we see his pragmatism in action, all the time. His primary goal at every moment is to avoid bloodshed. His philosophy could be summed up in the line “the means [as long as they don’t kill gratuitously] hardly matter if the end is worthy”. And for Gale, nothing is more worthy than life [3]. This doesn't cover only the life of innocents he cares about, it includes the life of the most dubious characters as well, such as Rugan or Crusher. Gratuitous death is meaningless for him. During the scene of Nettie we can have a glimpse of his philosophy towards life: he viscerally hates treating life as if it were nothing: 

Gale: How dare she snuff out life with as much thought as snuffing out a bloody candle? […] It's not right to feel the cold breath of death in your neck, then move on as if it was nothing but a soothing breeze. One respects life by fighting for it, and one respects death by fearing it.

Gale: One should never be afraid to live life to the fullest.

Probably the limited amount of life he has due to the "orb" increased his sense of respect for life and its celebration. I personally understand Gale as a character who embodies the perspectives of a seriously ill person, knowing that their life may be short, but they will try to make the best out of it. 

He doesn't only respect life per se, he also cares about its dignity. This can be seen in his explicit rejection to undead existences such as Connor (he explains that it would be merciful to put an end to his undead nightmare), or in his disapprovals of humiliation and torture [9]

 We could suspect that this emphasis in protecting any life comes from the fact that only people who are alive can (sometimes) be forgiven or/and change. This is not explicit, but since he is a character who talks about being better and wiser than his previous self, about acknowledging mistakes, about forgiveness, this interpretation seems reasonable. 

These concepts of kindness and compassion combined with “the mistakes of the youth” are repetitive in his interactions and approvals [5,12]. Of course, they echo in his soul since they are reflections and desires of his own experience. This pattern covers forgiving children in particular [5], and disapproving hard judgements [16], especially on matters whose story is not fully understood by Tav. This means he doesn't like quick judgements when he doesn't know the whole story first. This scenario can be easily seen during Karlach's quest, he reserves his judgment until knowing Karlach's side: There are always two sides to each story.

Gale: I have to say I don't know if agreeing to this hunt was such a wise idea. Who's to say who's the real villain in this tale of devils and masquerades? [...]When we track Karlach down, let's chat before we chop.

Similar concept appears during his Revelation scene, when he encourages and keeps asking Tav to listen to him first before judging. This is also the reason why in his Loss scene he would disapprove if Tav quickly assumes that his loss of Mystra was due to arrogance. Tav judged him without knowing the whole story. However, once Tav knows the whole story, Gale will accept any judgement from them without approval penalties during the Revelation scene.

He approves all actions that imply helping others in hard times and disapproves of them if they were done out of greed [4]. He is an animal lover [6,7]. Being kind to animals and treating them good will increase his approval, while animal cruelty will earn his disapproval. Same goes for humanoids: any display of gratuitous violence that could have been prevented with a trick or a diplomatic approach, any humiliation forced upon others, any torture or situation of slavery, is disapproved [8, 9, 11]. 

In particular, Gale seems to advocate the philosophy of “give others their own medicine”[18] or in other words: poetic justice. We can see this during the Myconid colony; he approves of helping the Myconid to avenge the young killed by the Duergar, adding the comment: “Wicked killers deserve wicked ends”. He is implying to give them a similar, wicked medicine to the Duergars. Another less deadly situation of this kind is shown during the foot situation with Crusher: Gale is the one suggesting “pungent poetic justice” and telling Tav that they should force Crusher to kiss their feet. 

The most iconic scene, however, is during Nettie's, if Tav lies during her interrogation. As a hot-headed reaction, Gale states that he would have poisoned Nettie if this situation would have happened to him. Although, after calming down, he approves of and confirms Tav's actions [if Tav managed to persuade Nettie to give them the antidote]

Gale: A taste of her own medicine is what she deserves! […] But you handled it, and you handled it well. 

 In this scene we also see a pattern: Gale is shown as a fallible human; his most visceral reaction during the first moment is anger and indignation, giving us a hint that he is not so rational when it comes to emotional states. An extremely obvious, human concept. 

The scene of Nettie trying to kill a potential menace (the victim of a MF) reverberated in his consciousness, projecting immediately a fact in his mind: if he ever dares to reveal his "orb" problem, and anyone knows what a danger he represents—no matter how stable it looks—people will want to remove the menace by killing him. 

This is the reason behind his words “It's just that, had it been me... had it been...” Gale knows that this simplistic and common thinking in removing what's dangerous would end up turning into a more destructive tragedy in his case than in any infected victim of the tadpoles. So this combination makes us see, for the first time, an emotional Gale. After some seconds, he cools down and returns to his more rational, diplomatic, and moderate self. What we can read here is that Gale would be very prone to rush decisions or to make mistakes under emotional circumstances. We will learn later that the other mistake he made under emotional stress ended up with the "orb" stuck in his chest. A third mistake was done during the party, once more under the emotional stress of a potential abandonment by Tav due to the true nature of the orb. 

Everything related to the “orb”—which is his most traumatic experience—naturally makes him more emotional and prone to mistakes. To see how truly traumatic the "orb" is in his life we can notice the following patterns during the meeting scene: he speaks about the tadpole in a relaxed, rational way, despite the traumatising experience. He first asks for an archwizard instead of for a cleric, because his priority is the orb. Gale's main fear is not the tadpole, but the orb. If we remember his words after the consumption of the artefacts, we realise he lives in a permanent state of anxiety and raw fear, and probably pain too, given his facial gesticulation when anything interacts with the "orb" (whether artefacts or Tav's hand). His banter with Shadowheart reinforces the concept that he always has a knot in the stomach. When he accepts the deal with Raphael, it seems to be related to the orb, not to the tadpole. The effect of the "orb" has ceased, but the tadpole is still in Gale's head since we still need to roll against a high DC and not only against a 1DC during this scene, so we can assume he still has the tadpole despite Raphael's deal. See the post about "The Tadpole" in Gale for more details.

Gale is a character that represents human experiences deeply related to growing up: mistakes done in the past, and the acceptance of not being forgiven despite the desire of wanting to. This can be easily seen during the conversation of the second tadpole dream, where Gale's mood is foul and we learn that his deepest desire is for Mystra to forgive him, but he also knows it's impossible for that to happen. He detects the lie in this dream because he has accepted that Mystra will never forgive him. Gale is the story of mistakes done during youth with grave consequences, of acknowledging them and trying to make them right, of surviving those mistakes, and depending on the interpretation, he is also the story of an ill dying man, with a gentle vision and deep care for life. 

The great majority of his approvals are based on actions that show kindness and compassion, both reiterative concepts that are so important in his character that they come from his lips when we see the goblin party: 

Gale: The shadow within is spreading like poison, corrupting kindness and compassion. [Only after a tough DC of 15]

In combination with: Gale: I don't know myself anymore. All this... It's not who I am. Around you, I'm not who I want to be. I should leave. 

These lines show how, in a sudden change to an evil path, Gale would start doubting his own morality, explaining that the cause of it is the "orb" itself, corrupting the most core aspects of his personality. This corruption may or may not be lore-related. It's not completely clear what Gale's "orb" truly is. For more details, check the post of the "Orb".

 His constant critical thinking comes from his advocacy to non-conventionality [15]: a true scholar will always explore all the options and hypotheses before reaching a conclusion. Therefore, Gale would approve of any non-conventional way to fix a problem [15] as long as it doesn't potentially cause harm or bloodshed [1,2,3,8,9]. Due to his own background, Gale will always advise to be very careful of the consequences of one’s actions. This can be easily seen when, after encountering the caged goblin Sazza, Gale would advocate to explore the possibility of reaching Gut Priestess to cure the tadpole. However, when Tav helps Sazza to escape, Gale will comment briefly against this action.

Gale: I know I said it's not inconceivable a goblin priestess could help us. And yet... was it really wise to set another goblin free so she can arrange introductions? […] consider the consequences. What if she leads her entire tribe to the grove? Tav: I don't care, I owe this grove no allegiance. Gale: No allegiance, no. Though we don't need to sign its death warrant

Once more we see that Gale is up to using any (unharming) means to get a goal, but not at any cost. He has a clear line he doesn't like to cross: life [3]. Avoiding putting other people's lives in danger is very important for him. We see this concept over and over in most scenes.

He doesn't likerushed decisions, and in that same train of thoughts, he will disapprove any use of unknown magic or tricks when nobody in the group can truly understand how they work [17], for example the tadpoles or Raphael's deal (he is against accepting it quickly, but he will approve of having a more cautious attitude and carefully thinking about it). 

Since the moment we meet him, we can infer he is obsessed with the artefacts. It's obviously understandable: he doesn't want to die, but also, he doesn't want to kill all those that will be caught in the eruption of the orb. For this reason he will insist on the loot in the Temple Ruins despite knowing that grave robbery is not correct. 

Gale: Bad form, isn't it? Grave robbing? […] Let's have a look at the loot. It isn't for your pockets only. 

He keeps pondering life over death: although he respects the dead, he will always value more the living creatures in the present. This is also what pushes Gale to suggest Tav to open Rugan's chest. Stealing from the evil Zhentarins is not something that will weigh on his consciousness too much. Besides, he knows it belongs to a wizard: meaning that the chance for it to contain a powerful artefact is really high. Similar suggestions will be said about the Idol of Silvanus, but talking with him in the camp will show us that he won't approve of taking it, only as a last resort. He keeps pondering the living over a sacred piece of stone, since he knows the druids won't take the stealing very peacefully. Once more we see Gale's respect and care for life, trying to minimise damage as much as the circumstances allow him.

Gale is also a survivalist. He doesn't want to die, he loves celebrating life in its more mundane and small details. He is an emotional character for a wizard, a bit strange since they are usually portrayed as more rational and cold, losing their lives among dusty books. However, Gale has shown in many scenes that he prefers to survive without killing, but if he has to, he will do it, dealing with the weight of it in his consciousness because killing unprovoked affects him (scene in the camp after killing the druids, or the goblin party scene). 

His moral in preventing gratuitous death sometimes will conflict with his own survival, especially if he is by an evil Tav's side. He couldn't accept bloodshed when other peaceful options were available and possible to reach. This is clearly shown during the goblin party, where Gale's consciousness suffers and feels the corruption of the "orb" killing the kindness and the compassion inside him. He accepts that wanting to live is a powerful drive, but he doesn't support this massacre, questioning if all that blood was necessary. A Tav killing the tieflings seems to lose the possibility of pursuing Gale romantically, at least in EA so far. For Gale, survival is important, but the means to do it (when they can cause death) matter too. Life is worth preserving.

 The usual archetype of survivalist tends to be an individualist one who would survive at any cost without remorse because that's the “law of the jungle”, the strongest must survive. However, Gale seems to embody a different concept of survivalist that it's hard to put in words: a sort of communal survivalist, trying to survive in coexistence with his community: he wants his survival to imprint the least harm possible (even though sometimes it would not be possible), trying to help those around him as long as his condition allows it; for example, despite wanting Gut's potential cure for the tadpole, he would disagree in helping Sazza escape because she will lead the goblins to the Grove, no matter the fact that doing this will grant them their introduction to the priestess. 

His list of approval shows that his sense of survival is always pondered with the consequences that it can cause on others (check the post with the "Extensive list of Gale's approvals"). The whole concept of the "orb" has this motivation as well: he wants to live and survive, but he also can't give up because his body would kill many, so he needs to do as much as his moral allows him to keep it in check. If he cannot do it any longer, he promises to minimise the disaster as much as possible by erupting in the deep Underdark or in a desolated corner of Faerûn (and considering his ridiculous list of approvals and disapprovals, we know he is honest in not wanting to kill gratuitously). Gale acknowledges his own mistakes, trying—to the best of his ability—to deal with them without catching others in them. Although all his speeches keep emphasising that he is a mere human, and plans may fail. 

At some point, if he wants to survive “not at any cost”, he will be forced to ask Tav for help during the scene of the stew (available only for medium approval or higher). As a gesture of honesty, Gale will set a boundary before making this request, acknowledging its unfairness but giving Tav the decision to proceed or not. He is not denying to explain the details later, but at the moment he can't speak the “why” of his condition no matter how curious Tav is. Tav will decide whether they can keep their curiosity on the matter. 

We will understand later that this impediment comes as a precaution as well as consequence of his personal trauma with Mystra and the "orb" (See post about "Gale: Manipulation, Lies, and Trust"). So, he is very clear about setting the conditions in which this conversation will happen from the beginning. The easiest way for Gale to avoid this whole situation would have been by simply lying, but he opted for an honest approach with clear out-loud reservations, knowing he was asking for more trust than he was allowed to, but the intention behind is more than important. There is a clear, huge contextual detail that we can't miss: this scene doesn't happen because of Gale's whims, he is forced to ask for help since his condition “is not a patient one” and will endanger everyone if not kept at bay. 

This detail where Gale explicitly asks for an exchange of trust is not present if Gale's approval is neutral or lower. In this case, Gale would not care about giving a context to his strange request: he doesn't trust Tav and he doesn't expect to be trusted either, he only wants the artefacts to keep his condition in check for his sake and the sake of others. We can understand this change of attitude depending on the approval as he doesn't want to give any extra explanation to someone he is not interested in building a relationship with. For more details, check the post about "Gale: Manipulation, Lies, and Trust".

I personally support the idea that nobody in canon Faerûn is free of racial prejudices since Forgotten Realms lore has been created based strongly on fantasy racism. I've read that WotC wants to move forward and improve this aspect in 5e, but so far what they allowed Larian to do with the Tieflings in BG3 seems to show the contrary. So, since apparently we are going to face fantasy racism anyways, I will try to analyse racial prejudices from all chars. When it comes to Gale, it's a bit far-stretched to point out unjustified racial biases. He has a vague comment about Rashemi that some people may consider a faerunian saying. Personally, I think that line is a bias forced into him to have a particular dynamic with Minsc (the Rashemi “silly” companion -we all can see where Larian seems to go with this). Gale clearly sees tieflings, gnomes, and even goblins as people, and has a cautious attitude towards some githyanki (at least that's what we can infer with Lae'zel when we find her in the cage), but given the githyanki lore it's pretty reasonable to see them as dangerous creature that could kill people on the spot. So far, he seems to have no racial preference either [10]. 

As it was said before, he prefers to avoid killing people, but that doesn't mean he won't do it if his life depends on it. He will prefer persuasive and defusing approaches, but if he needs to kill to defend innocents or his own life, he won't hesitate. So therefore, stories about characters making mistakes or having violent excess in an effort to protect themselves or what they hold dear will be understood by him but hardly approved [19]. He tends more to approve a call out of that excess than approving an excuse for it.

Gale has deep abandonment issues that can be easily seen when he defends Astarion from being handed over to Gandrel. We need to put this in context before going on: for Gale, Astarion represents a danger as a vampire who attacked one of them during their sleep. By the display of meta-knowledge, we know with certainty that their approvals and disapprovals are mostly opposite: What one approves, the other will disapprove and vice versa. Getting rid of Astarion should be something that Gale would approve, however, he doesn't. If we explore his comments we will realise that what Gale disapproves from this situation is Tav's abandonment. After Mystra's abandonment, he knows very well that “Loyalty is such a very rare commodity”, and the few situations in EA in which Tav can display abandonment, resound strongly in Gale. 

Gale is a scholar with a strong balanced rational side. But unlike the trope, he also embraces an emotional side that, so far the info we received in EA, it's the side that makes him prone to mistakes. 

As an amateur poet, Gale loves words. We can obviously notice this in his verbose attitude, but also in the way he carefully uses words. One of his characteristic words is “spectacle”. He has also shown a reiterative—although not always—uneasy use of the word “fun”. Using “fun” as a way to describe the night spent with Gale gives him a slight uneasiness. “That’s a word for it.” He disapproves of using the word “Fun” after the Mayrina/Connor situation, in which scene Gale alludes that “your new company may be a proof of how depraved and twisted you are to see that tragedy as “fun”. Personally I think this is a direct allusion to Astarion, who considers Mayrina's situation as “entertainment”, in the same way he considered as “fun” the show of Arabella's death (two of several instances where he used that word). Gale also doesn’t use the word sex during EA, instead he uses romantic ones such as love-making, intimacy, art of the night/body. In the most technical case: coitus (used only when he is talking about “goblinoid intimacy” in the expression “post-coital snack”). These details are showing not only his poet/romantic side, but also his interpretation of sex from his perspective: sex can only be possible through a connection. We know he doesn’t engage in casual sex with Lae’zel if he is not romanced, and his romance can only potentially start if Tav shares that deep connection with him through the Weave. 

Another detail related to words is that Gale has always used an infection/disease-related vocabulary to explain the “orb” stuck in his chest: infested, taint, shadow spreading 

[…] I failed to control [this chaotic magic]. Instead it infested me. […] This Netherese taint... this orb, for lack of a better word [..] […] the shadow within is spreading like poison, corrupting kindness and compassion. [...]

Gale apparently has a particular way to sense magic. I have no way to check this in-game, but it seems very strange how he immediately identifies magical artifacts without casting Detect Magic. There are some extra scenes as well where he says to taste or smell the magic in some objects. Even his encounter with Shadowheart, besides being considered a flirt, could be also interpreted as him detecting the magic that we saw later in her hand or maybe the dark magic that blocks her memories, since Gale pointed out about a curtain covering her soul: “if the eyes are the mirror to the soul, yours have dark curtains across the mirror” (a very ominous flirting if it’s only a flirt)

This makes me suspect that, if the "orb" is not giving him this skill, it may be a consequence of having been Chosen of Mystra (for more details read the post about "Mystra and her Chosen ones"). If this is the case, he may have hindered remains of theirs powers when it comes to detect magic at will.

Gale has a perception of magic with all the senses: he sniffs and tastes magic. During the mirror scene you have an option related to [Arcana] tag where he “Sniff the mirror, trying to understand the nature of its magic”. A wizard Tav will just “Inspect the mirror”. He also said that he could “taste” the magic in the necromancy book and in the runes of teleportation. 

What we know of his family is little: when he was a kid there was a housekeeper in his life (mentioned only once during the scene of the harpies) and his mother that seemed to have personally raised and cared for him (mentioned twice: in the ruin temple scene, and in his banter with Wyll) 

Tav: Why care about decorum in a long-abandoned tomb? Gale: Because my mother raised a gentleman. Then again, to be alive is to be curious. 

Wyll: Between the orb and the bug you've got more than your fair share of unwelcome passengers. Gale: What can I say. Mother always taught me to be a gracious host.

This post was written in May 2021. → For more Gale: Analysis Series Index

[addictedtostorytelling]

Hey! I’m a HUGE fan of your CSI analyses!!! I’m only catching up to them now as this is the first time I’ve rewatched CSI since 2015. I’m not sure if you already made a post about this but I guess I just want to hear your opinion on it: do you think Sara knew that Gil was going on a sabbatical? I’m not sure as to what the general consensus is when this episode aired as I didn’t watch it live but from what little I’ve read on old forums and reviews, they think she first heard it along with the lab. I personally didn’t think that’s the case - I think he would’ve told her. When she told him “so you’re going”, it wasn’t really a question. Do you think they had a talk about it? Would Sara have encouraged him or would she be - well, not opposed - but not a fan of it? I mean at this point they’ve been dating for around more than a year, right? the only reason I could think of as to why the “goodbye” felt so impersonal is that they already said their goodbyes in private. But also: wouldn’t she have driven him to the airport? Or is it just to keep their cover? But friends drive friends places right? Ah sorry I’m just rambling now, I’m having a lot of feels - Sara looks so sad, my heart is breaking

hi, anon!

thank you so much for your kind words. i’m glad you enjoy my analyses. ❤

i do have a couple of old metas about the scene in question posted in this tag, but my understanding has changed somewhat since i initially wrote them, so i’ll add my current take here under the “keep reading,” if you’re interested.

long response below.

__________

before we dive in, an acknowledgement:

you know how with icebergs, only 10% of the thing is visible, and the other 90% is underwater?

gsr is like an iceberg in that at any given time we (as the viewing audience) are only seeing and/or hearing about the barest fraction of what’s going on between them, while the majority of their relationship is unfolding off screen, completely inaccessible to us.

any discussions that grissom and sara have regarding his sabbatical prior to his departure in episode 07x11 “leaving las vegas” are, unfortunately, part of that “underwater” portion of the ol’ gsr iceberg.

since we don’t actually get to see said discussions take place or even hear about them after the fact (if indeed they happen at all), everything that follows here will essentially be conjecture.

i’ve got a lot of gut feelings based on my read of these characters and this arc, but i can’t really do much to substantiate them because i don’t know enough about what is going on between grissom and sara off-screen during this time.

with that admission in mind, let’s start by recapping what happens around the scene in question just to give ourselves some context for this discussion:

the beginning of s7 between episodes 07x01 “built to kill,” pt. i and 07x10 “loco motives” sees the usually indefatigable workaholic grissom perhaps for the first time in his career showing signs of professional burnout. the depravity he encounters on a nightly basis is starting to weigh him down, and especially with cases involving children and innocent victims. the puzzles which once invigorated and intrigued him now just give him a headache—sometimes rather literally. he appears distracted, disappointed, and exhausted both at the lab and in the field.

in the meanwhile, completely separate from his discontentedness at work, grissom continues to have a romantic relationship with sara, whom he has been secretly dating for almost two years now. despite his malaise otherwise, he is very happy with her, and she with him. she is one of the few things during this period that makes him smile.

through these first ten episodes, grissom, sara, and the team work the first leg of what will be the season-spanning miniature killer serial case. after exploring many false leads and dead ends, they eventually identify one ernie dell as their prime suspect; however, before they can have him arrested, he kills himself while livestreaming (see episode 07x10 “loco motives”). since the killings stop immediately in the wake of his death (and don’t start up again until after grissom’s sabbatical much later in the season), the team incorrectly assumes that dell was indeed to blame; they remain as of yet unaware that his adult foster daughter natalie davis is actually the culprit. they therefore consider the case closed.

having previously been invited to teach a four-week graduate seminar at prestigious williams college in williamstown, massachusetts as a visiting lecturer (see episode 07x08 “happenstance”), grissom now takes the opportunity to do so, feeling at liberty to leave vegas for a while since the miniature case has been wrapped.

he does not inform the majority of the team of his decision to go on this sabbatical until the day that he is set to depart for massachusetts.

the circumstances surrounding grissom’s decision to go to williams and sara’s role in said decision are unknown to us. while episode 07x11 “leaving las vegas” suggests that there is some tension between the couple surrounding grissom’s departure, we’re not told what the nature or source of this tension is.

grissom departs vegas at the end of episode 07x11 “leaving las vegas,” which takes place on 01.04.07 within the universe of the show. he remains in massachusetts teaching at williams between episodes 07x12 “sweet jane” and 07x14 “meet market.” he then returns to vegas during the events of episode 07x15 “law of gravity,” which takes place on 02.08.07 within the universe of the show. his seminar runs for a little over four weeks, and he is absent from vegas for five weeks in total, accounting for travel time. during this time, sara is shown to experience anxiety regarding his absence, and he himself is shown to miss her.

in episode 07x13 “redrum,” sara receives a package containing a cocoon on a twig from grissom. sara places the cocoon in a vivarium in grissom’s office and intermittently visits it there for the duration of his sabbatical.

in episode 07x14 “meet market,” grissom writes sara a love letter which notes their awkward parting, explains how difficult it is for him to put his feelings for her into words, and quotes from shakespeare’s sonnet #47 in an attempt to better express what those feelings are. however, he ultimately does not send sara the letter while he is away and instead brings it home to vegas with him at the end of his sabbatical. sara later discovers and reads the letter at their condo in episode 07x22 “leapin’ lizards.”  

while grissom is gone, team graveyard experiences friction under catherine’s leadership, particularly after she and new-to-the-lab csi level iii michael keppler dupe the team into unknowingly participating in a “reverse forensics” operation in order to bait a suspect in another homicide case (see episode 07x13 “redrum”).

when grissom returns to las vegas in episode 07x15 “law of gravity,” his reunion with sara is a happy one, with no hint of underlying tension. however, sara’s nervousness regarding whether or not grissom fully reciprocates her feelings and/or considers their relationship as permanent as she does continues until much later in the season, when grissom finally provides her with some unmistakable proofs that he deeply loves her and wants to be with her in the long term (see episodes 07x21 “ending happy,” 07x22 “leapin’ lizards,” and 07x24 “living doll”).       

now, let’s take your questions one at a time, okay?

first off, does sara know that grissom is going on sabbatical prior to the day of his departure?

when answering this question, i used to say “no” or at least “if so, she doesn’t know he’s leaving much in advance beyond when the rest of the team finds out.”

however, now i think differently.

here’s why:

by s7, grissom and sara are almost certainly living together, and because they are, i think that unless he were being very purposefully duplicitous and going out of his way to deceive her, it would be very difficult for him to accept an out-of-state teaching position, generate a course curriculum, and ready himself to travel to the other side of the country without sara ever becoming aware of what he was doing.

the kind of work that grissom has to put in in order to get his williams seminar up and off the ground is not unsubstantial.

he is going to be elbow-deep in prep, and hiding what he is doing from the person he lives with would be immensely difficult given not only the volume of tasks he has to do but also his time constraints for doing them.

when one starts teaching at a new university (whether as permanent faculty, adjunct, or visiting), there is a lot of administrative back-and-forth that goes along with taking on that new appointment. 

baby boy has a syllabus to craft, course materials to procure, a schedule to work out, and readings to decide upon—and since his class also includes an online component, he also has to set up his online learning space and upload all of the necessary items to the web.

in addition to having to pass background checks, complete training modules, and submit all sorts of identification (which he might have to do via fax or email given that he is not yet on campus), he also has to engage in lots of remote communication with the department he is joining just to work out the specs and logistics for his course.

in the weeks leading up to the start of the semester, he likely receives and has to reply to dozens of emails. he is undoubtedly on the phone with the department secretary multiple times and also attending multiple virtual meetings and training sessions (which were a thing even back in 2007).

he has to place his textbook order with the campus bookstore, talk to liaisons from various campus agencies, and make sure his course is listed correctly with the registrar.

prospective students are very likely reaching out to him, asking about the work requirements for his class and trying to see if they can add or drop, as needed.

there’s a lot of administrivia—and grissom must attend to all of it while sara is at home with him.   

i mean, they work nights together, and then they come home, have a few precious waking hours between the morning and early afternoon to share each other’s company, go to sleep during the late afternoon and evening, rise, and return to work again at night. 

at least when they’re not working double and triple consecutive shifts.

their shared waking time at home just so happens to coincide with regular business hours, so if grissom has a phone call scheduled with the dean, department head, and/or department secretary at williams ahead of his arrival, then he’s making it while sara is in the next room, able to overhear him.

he’s also emailing the campus bookstore from his laptop while she’s sitting on the couch beside him watching tv.

he’s got pages and pages of mosquito palp diagrams spread out over their bed as he searches for the right one to match the lecture he has planned for day #3 of the seminar, and in the meanwhile she’s getting ready to turn down the covers so that they can go to sleep as soon as he’s done.

he’s asking her, “honey? have you seen my copy of deborror and delong’s introduction to the study of insects? i could have sworn i had it on this shelf, and i need to check it for the reading list—,” and she’s reminding him, “you mean the seventh edition? you left it on your desk.”  

and then on top of all of the academic prep, she’s also watching as he packs clothing and amenities enough to get him through five weeks of new england winter, books himself airplane tickets, and says goodbye to the dog.

of whom, by the way, she will be the sole caretaker while he’s gone.

so she knows he’s going before he goes.

she absolutely does.

there’s just no way to hide all of that readying from your spouse when the two of you live together and share a very restricted schedule for getting things done during daylight hours.

the show might insist—however unrealistically—that the other members of team graveyard don’t learn about grissom’s sabbatical until the day he ships off to mccarran, but sara’s well-aware of what’s happening prior to that point.

she has to be.

so.

next question:

wherein lies the tension we sense in grissom and sara’s goodbye scene in episode 07x11 “leaving las vegas”? if sara already knows that grissom is going, then why does she seem so upset to see him leave? doesn’t she support his decision?

the short answers to these questions are:

the tension lies in grissom and sara’s different understandings of the significance of his decision to temporarily leave vegas and in many unspoken feelings between them.

even though sara does know about grissom’s sabbatical in advance, she still appears upset when he leaves because she worries that his decision to go reflects a lack of investment in her and their relationship on his part.

she does support grissom’s decision to go, but she also worries immensely about its implications for her and their relationship.

to elaborate:

as you mention, sara’s “so you’re leaving” isn’t a question but rather a statement.

however, it’s not exactly one that makes her sound pleased with or even fully reconciled to the idea of grissom heading off on his own.

sara’s body language in the scene further suggests displeasure and guardedness on her part; she’s got her arms crossed over her body like a protective barrier, her voice sounds choked up, and when grissom finally exits the locker room, her expression appears distressed, as if she were on the verge of tears.

for grissom’s part, he looks and sounds awkward, like he doesn’t exactly know how to comport himself, given the situation. 

of course, even if sara fully supports grissom going to williams, it makes sense that she still might be sad to have to say goodbye to the man she loves, knowing that she’s not going to see him again for over a month. 

it also makes sense that she would be guarded, given that they are at work and they have to be careful not to reveal their romantic relationship through either their words or their actions toward each other.

because, after all, anyone could walk into the locker room at any time and see her and grissom together.

that said, there’s more to sara’s behavior here than just her sadness to part from grissom and her carefulness not to get them caught.

“sadness” and “carefulness” are, after all, not necessarily equivalent to “tension,” and there is some palpable tension in this scene.

to get an idea of where this tension comes from, i think we have to take a step back and look at sara’s larger story arc for the season, beyond just this scene.

by this point, grissom and sara have been together since mid-s5 or early-s6. they’re living together and sharing a life but still keeping their involvement with each other on the d.l. while at work. on the one hand, they’re very happy together, but on the other hand, their situation is not without its complications.

in addition to having to keep their relationship a secret from the world, another stressor for them is that they happen to have different love languages from each other, with grissom primarily expressing his love through acts of service and gift-giving, while sara primarily recognizes love through words of affirmation.

this difference between how grissom expresses love and sara recognizes when she has received it lies at the root of sara’s s7 arc, which sees her questioning the extent to which grissom reciprocates her feelings and envisions a long-term future for them as a couple. that he seldom verbalizes what’s in his heart causes her concern. ditto for the fact that he seems (from her perspective) very comfortable with keeping their relationship a secret.     

as i talk about in this post,

sara’s main storylines in s7 revolve around her 1) concealing her relationship with grissom from their coworkers, and, 2) “wondering if grissom views their relationship in the same way she does and if he feels as deeply for her as she does for him.”

by this point in her and grissom’s relationship, she is 100% in—“grissom or no one,” “we’re sharing our lives,” “if he popped the question, i’d say yes,” “till death do us part” in.

and about 90% of the time, she believes that grissom feels the same way as she does.

but then there are still those few lingering doubts.

most days, she is highly aware that many of the insecurities she has are a her thing—that she has trust and self-esteem issues rooted in her childhood trauma, and they’ve got nothing to do with grissom, per se; they’re just byproducts of growing up under the circumstances she did (i.e., living in an abusive household for the first nine or ten years of her life and never being adopted out of foster care thereafter).

armed with knowledge of her own tendencies, sara is typically able to talk herself out of these kind of “oh my god, but what if he really doesn’t love me as much as i love him? what if he leaves me?” spirals—and especially when grissom is present and able to prove to her through his demonstrably affectionate and devoted behavior that he loves her deeply and isn’t going anywhere.

but then there are occasions—few and far between though they are—when something in grissom’s behavior—something outside of sara’s head—actually serves to stoke her doubts.

maybe he says or does something insensitive.

maybe he is uncommunicative about his feelings when she really, truly needs him to be otherwise.

maybe there are moments when she perceives that he fails to match her intensity—that she feels like she loves him so much she can hardly breathe, but he doesn’t seem to reciprocate, or at least she can’t be sure if he does or if he feels to the same degree that she does, and the uncertainty kills her...

still.

as long as these occasions when something in grissom’s comportment toward her or their relationship throws her off happen at intervals with lots of solid, faith-building, “we’re on the same page” moments in-between, sara is good; she can talk herself down off of whatever ledges she gets on, contented in her knowledge that grissom loves her, and she loves him, and their relationship is built to last.

she only ever truly gets tripped up when for long periods of time, those solid, faith-building, “we’re on the same page” moments don’t happen—like, say, when grissom goes on a five-week sabbatical on the other side of the country from her...

in this case, him leaving her behind on such awkward terms + her tendency to doubt her own lovability = a recipe for disaster, which comes to a head in episode 07x14 “meet market,” when her conversation with jesse at the host club causes her to wonder if she’s going to have to keep waiting her whole life for grissom to truly “sweep her off her feet” (i.e., to invest in their relationship to the extent that she has).

she doesn’t altogether doubt that grissom loves her, but she does worry that maybe he doesn’t see their relationship as a life partnership in the same way that she does—or that perhaps he is somehow cooler in his affections toward her than she toward him.

one of her biggest fears is that she has somehow come on “too much, too quickly”—that while she’s already thinking wedding bells, he’s still back in the “we’ll see where this goes” phase and will freak the fuck out once he realizes that she’s been so far gone for him from day #1.

she probably can’t help but think back on the times before they were dating when she would “come on strong” and he would spook and emotionally retreat, which is what happened when she first moved to vegas and then later when she asked him out after the lab explosion (see episode 03x22 “play with fire”); she does not want a repeat of those experiences now that they’re actually in a relationship.

grissom choosing to go away on sabbatical for a month stabs at the heart of all of sara’s insecurities, and therein lies the tension and upset that we see in the scene in question. 

in addition to the facts that she’ll miss him while he’s gone and that she can’t even properly say goodbye to him given that they are at work, sara is standing there wondering if the very fact that grissom is leaving bodes ill for their relationship and what his decision says about his feelings for her overall. 

she’s feeling incredibly vulnerable and not getting any of the reassurances she might need in order to talk herself out of her fears. she’s tense because she is in emotional freefall and bracing for the worst.

—and that brings us to the matter of whether or not she actually supports grissom going on sabbatical in the first place.

i’m not sure when exactly in his decision-making process grissom first talks to sara about his plans to go on sabbatical. 

she knows about them at least by the time he starts prepping for his course and getting ready to leave town, of course, but what about before then? is there a chance that he consults with her as he’s still deliberating whether or not to go or does he make the decision unilaterally only to then tell her about it after the fact?  

in any case—and, honestly, i can see him going either way on this one; either asking her because he needs some encouragement to do something that’s out of his comfort zone or neglecting to do so because he is only thinking in terms of the professional and doesn’t really consider that his decision has any bearing on his personal life—i think that sara’s reaction would be the same.

her m.o. would be to outwardly support him—to say, “yeah, absolutely! that’s a great opportunity. it sounds awesome. you should go.”

she would be the supportive girlfriend, because that’s just how she rolls.

and, honestly, her expressed sentiments here would largely be genuine.

she knows: williams college is a great school, and the gig they’re offering grissom is a good one. being paid to travel out east and talk about something he’s passionate about for a few weeks is a sweet deal.

particularly if she is aware of the professional frustration he has been experiencing at the lab as of late, then she probably does support him going and knows that his doing so will benefit him.

because she loves him, she wants him to experience good things.

—it’s just that she also supposes that for as much as him going will be good for him, it will also be bad for her.

remember: sara often doubts her own lovability (much as grissom does his), and she’s had experiences with grissom in the past where she feels she’s come on too strong and “spooked him off.”

she is absolutely ready to commit to him forever, but she’s worried he isn’t on the same page—and the fact that he’s “running away” to the other side of the country for five weeks does nothing to assuage that concern.

she considers that if he is willing to leave her (even just for a month), it may be a sign that he’s tiring of her altogether. she also considers that he may be ready to overhaul his life top to bottom and that taking this appointment at williams is his means of “testing the waters” before he does so.

his going touches on some already exposed nerves for her.

one of them is the secret status of their relationship.

not only can sara not say a proper goodbye to grissom in the locker room, but she also can’t publicly acknowledge how much she misses him while he’s gone.

since she and grissom live together, she can’t very well invite warrick, catherine, nick, and greg over after shift to hang out and keep her company in his absence. she also is unlikely to go out on the town with anyone on the team, just because, by this point, she’s been with grissom for a couple of years already, and her social life has evolved in such a way that she’s not really in the habit of spending time with any of her coworkers besides him outside of work; frankly, it would be strange for her to call up any of the other team members out of the blue and invite them out to the bar or to accompany her to a museum or what have you.

so there’s an isolation and a loneliness factor in play.

but there’s also just the whole weirdness of not being able to acknowledge the biggest, most important part of her life to anyone besides grissom himself.

in some other, better world where their relationship status were public, she could maybe go with him to or at least visit him in williamstown for a weekend or two during the time he planned to be away. she could keep a countdown to his return running at work, undoubtedly earning some ribbings from the boys about how pathetic she was but also their support and encouragement. “just two more days until the bug man is back. you’ll make it.” maybe catherine would take pity and take her out for drinks after shift some day. maybe she could walk into and out of the building on the phone with him and not have anybody say boo.

but that’s not her reality.   

her reality is that grissom has packed up and left her for a month, and because no one can know about their relationship, she has no choice but to sally forth, pretending that nothing is wrong in her life, even though she is anxious, lonely, and missing him so much her arms actually ache.

having to feign unaffectedness in his absence just highlights how bizarre and untenable their living circumstances are.

the whole situation probably causes her to question how long they can keep doing things in the way that they are and if there’s ever going to be a finish line to this “secret dating” race that they’re running.

it also likely causes her to question if grissom is at all as uncomfortable as she is with their current status quo.

does he ever feel trapped like she does? guilty? isolated? like their whole life is some kind of surreal tragicomedy?

is he ever going to want to come clean at work that they’re together?

for how long are they going to keep up the pretense?

for as long as they do, their relationship will always in some ways remain in a state of suspended animation.

it’s not like they can get married if they’re living a double-life like this, right?

of course, this line of questioning undoubtedly plays into what (i think) is perhaps the biggest source of anxiety for sara regarding grissom’s departure overall.

namely, her concerns about how his feelings compare to hers.

as discussed above, she knows for herself that grissom is the love of her life and that she wants to be with him forever, but if he can abruptly decide to just up and leave her for a month without seemingly having a second thought about doing so, she’s got to wonder if he feels the same.

when he comes to her either floating the proposition of the sabbatical or else having already made the decision to go, she probably questions why he feels the need to leave at all—if perhaps she’s done something to drive him off or if there’s something lacking in her to where she’s not fulfilling his needs. 

at this point in her life*, she can’t imagine ever willingly leaving him for an extended period of time, so the seeming ease with which he makes the decision to leave her for over a month causes her to feel very insecure indeed.

* that she does eventually depart vegas in s8 and s9 speaks to just how dire her situation is at that point—that she literally feels as if she has no other viable choice but to go or else do irreparable damage to herself, grissom, and their relationship.

we don’t know to what extent sara is aware of grissom’s professional burnout at this point, though there are some indications throughout s7 that she has noticed that he’s not exactly been his usual workaholic self as of late (see, for example, her reaction to his behavior in episode 07x10 “loco motives”).

if she is aware that he’s been struggling, then she may worry that she seemingly hasn’t either been or done enough to uplift him. she may also worry that if his malaise gets bad enough, he will be tempted to simply walk away from everything in vegas—herself and their life together included.

her fears about being unlovable certainly loom large, to the point where when he approaches her about the sabbatical (either early or late in the game), she likely asks herself, “is this the beginning of the end?”

his leaving trips all of the alarm bells in her head—and she has no way to silence them, given that

a) she doesn’t dare to voice her fears or concerns to him lest in doing so she somehow makes things worse, 

and

b) she doesn’t dare to voice her fears or concerns to anyone else, as their relationship must still be kept a secret.

it’s not like she’d ever go to grissom in the days before his departure and ask to sit down and talk through her apprehensions. she could never bring herself to ask him for reassurance—she needs him to reassure her without her having to ask or otherwise it defeats the purpose—or to request any specific course of action from him (such as daily skype calls) while he’s gone. since all of her experiences and anxiety are telling her that one wrong move will scare him off forever, she can do nothing but suffer in silence and hope that eventually he’ll come back to her someday of his own volition.

of course, in the meanwhile, it’s not like while she’s sitting there fretting, she can turn to catherine and say, “hey, i’m really worried that grissom is getting ready to leave me, and this sabbatical is basically his ‘practice run.’ can you please tell me if i’m blowing things out of proportion or not? my gauge on issues like this one is kind of broken because i’m an abuse survivor with intense attachment issues, and everyone i’ve ever cared about before has at some point abandoned me, so—”

i mean, those are just not actions sara has the emotional skillset to undertake, even if she were to feel at liberty to take them from a logistical perspective (which, of course, she doesn’t, because, you know, “secret dating”).

so.

next question.

why doesn’t sara drive grissom to the airport?

this one comes down to logistics, pure and simple. 

the events of episode 07x11 “leaving las vegas” take place (per a date we see on catherine’s phone when adam novack calls her) throughout the day on 01.04.07.

when grissom is first seen at the lab opening his present from hodges, the hour appears to be sometime in the mid-morning. presumably, he has either come in for an early shift or is working a double carried over from the night before. 

he remains at the lab throughout the day. 

sara is not present at the lab or in the field for the majority of the episode.

in fact, we don’t see her until that penultimate scene in the locker room, when she’s just come on to work, shortly prior to the official start of the graveyard shift at 11pm.

at this same time, grissom is departing for the airport.

considering that she is on her way in as he’s on his way out, sara can’t be the one to drive grissom to the airport. she’s got a whole shift ahead of her, and he has to leave long before she’ll punch out.

like he says to sara, once they say goodbye, he’s got a cab to catch.

maybe if he had had time to go home between his early shift and the start of graveyard, she could have been the one to see him off, and they could have had a proper goodbye. 

but the way things are, they’re two ships passing in the night, and they can’t be open about what they’re feeling because anyone could walk in on them at any moment and uncover their secret.

so.

what do we get when we tie all of these factors together?

we’ve got two idiot geniuses in love.

one of them is burning out on their shared work and feels he needs to go away to get his head straight. eventually, an opportunity to do so presents itself to him, and he takes it. for him, this decision is solely professional in nature. it has everything to do with “recharging his batteries” for work and nothing to do with him wanting to get away from his girlfriend.

in fact, because he’s the king of compartmentalization, the idea that his going away could in any way really affect his relationship with his girlfriend doesn’t even truly occur to him.

the problem is, the delineation isn’t so clear where his girlfriend herself is concerned.

to her, his decision to leave town for a month does indeed reflect on their relationship and does have implications with regards to the way he feels about both her and them as a couple. whereas he sees the matter as wholly a professional one, she reads personal notes into the situation.

in her view, his decision to leave at least potentially casts doubt on the depth of his feelings and calls into question the very nature of their arrangement. though she supports him pursuing such a fine opportunity for himself, she worries that his doing so may eventually result in him leaving her behind in the dust. if he could just say in an unequivocal, straightforward way what was in his heart for her, then she would be reassured. but the uncertainty kills her. it leaves her anxious and heartsick.

she feels as if she is waiting for the whole rest of her life to be decided, and she isn’t sure what kind of decision he is going to make.

of course, eventually, he realizes the error in his thinking—not before their awkward parting from each other takes place but seemingly in the moment itself, as he finds himself missing her before they’ve even fully said goodbye. 

suddenly, it occurs to him: he’s not just heading off to get his professional groove back; he is also leaving his girlfriend whom he loves more than anything else in the world behind him, and there will be consequences for him doing so—not just in terms of how she reacts to his absence but also in terms of how he reacts to it himself.

there is an emotional toll he didn’t anticipate.

in their moment of parting, he perceives for the first time how, despite the outward support she has expressed for his decision to leave, inwardly, she has trepidations. he also realizes that he is asking her to do something huge for him—to wait for him while he goes off to get his head straight—without having adequately acknowledged the enormity of what he’s asked. it finally occurs to him how much they’re going to miss each other and that every action he takes (regardless of his motivations) has an effect on her and their relationship; that there is no clear separation between “work” and “home” where she is concerned; that there is no part of his life that doesn’t include her because they are together in every sense of the word.

the trouble is, once he leaves her behind, he doesn’t know what to do to make up for his previous obliviousness or to improve the situation at present. because his communication skills are lacking (and particularly in terms of how he finds expressing his deepest feelings in words almost overwhelmingly difficult), he can’t figure out how to let her know where he’s standing emotionally. he tries writing her a letter but ultimately never sends it because he feels that what he has written is inadequate.

of course, because he doesn’t communicate with words where he’s at—and especially not how very much he’s missing her!—she has nothing to go on when she tries to gauge the state of their relationship and his feelings for her while he is away. she is thus left to imagine the worst.

—which, of course, full of self-doubts as she is, she does.

now.

to step back from this narrative for just a second, while i know that it perhaps appears in canon and also that popular fandom consensus agrees that grissom and sara have zero contact for the whole five weeks that he’s gone—and i actually used to myself believe that they didn’t have contact, as well—i don’t suppose that such is in fact the case.

people mostly base the assumption that grissom and sara go 100% radio silent during grissom’s sabbatical on four main pieces of evidence, as they see things:

first, that we’re never shown any phone calls or letter exchanges between grissom and sara on screen between episodes 07x12 “sweet jane” and 07x14 “meet market” while grissom is away;

second, that sara seems so starved for contact from grissom, as is depicted in the cocoon scene in episode 07x13 “redrum,” when she is thrilled to receive the package he sends her but then disappointed to find that said package contains no message from him or personal touches;

third, that grissom is seemingly unaware of the whole “reverse forensics” fiasco from episode 07x13 “redrum” and its subsequent fallout upon his return to the lab in episode 07x15 “law of gravity;”

and finally, that grissom’s unsent letter to sara (which we are only able to hear read in its entirety come episode 07x22 “leapin’ lizards”) talks about their parting from each other as if the parting were fresh, even though grissom writes it several weeks into his sabbatical (during the events of episode 07x14 “meet market”).   

however, i find that these “evidences” are more open to interpretation than perhaps they might initially appear.

certainly, we don’t see grissom and sara calling or sending letters to each other* at all on screen during the five weeks when grissom is away from las vegas—but with gsr, not seeing something take place on screen doesn’t mean that it isn’t happening at all; it just means that tptb aren’t showing us that it is.

* notice that i say “sending,” because, of course, grissom does write sara a letter that he then chooses not to send.

even when grissom and sara are living under the same roof, we don’t get to see much in the way of their interactions outside of work, so that we wouldn’t be privy to their phone calls and emails while they’re located 2,500 miles away from each other isn’t necessarily anything unusual, in terms of how the show typically depicts them and their relationship.

also, regardless of what we do and do not “see,” i think we do get some hints that they are in fact in contact with each other, beyond just grissom sending sara the package.

(more on those hints in a minute.)

as for said package, while some may view the cocoon scene in episode 07x13 “redrum” as proof that sara hasn’t heard from grissom at all until he sends her this gift through the mail, i’d argue that this assumption is never actually confirmed in canon. 

sara is eager to receive the package, yes, and she’s also disappointed to find that it contains nothing but the cocoon, yes, but those points in and of themselves aren’t proof positive that she hasn’t heard from grissom at all over the last several weeks.

they just show that sara is excited that grissom has sent her a surprise and then disappointed to find that said surprise doesn’t contain any kind of personal message from him.

there’s no reason to think that she isn’t also sometimes talking on the phone with him during the period when the package arrives.

that grissom seems to learn that sara has housed the cocoon in his office only upon his return to the lab in episode 07x15 “law of gravity” also doesn’t mean that they haven’t talked about the package since he sent it; she may have just been cryptic about what she did with her gift when he asked her about it over the phone or via email while he was still at williams.

i mean, that’s exactly their style of flirting: “i sent you something. i trust you’ll find the right place to put it.” “i found the right place, all right. you’ll see.”

as for grissom’s seeming ignorance about the reverse forensics debacle from episode 07x13 “redrum” when he returns to the lab in episode 07x15 “law of gravity,” the key word here is seeming, because i actually think this is where we get a hint that grissom and sara have had some contact while he’s been away after all.

hodges is the one who approaches grissom wanting to talk about the operation’s fallout.

grissom does not, of course, typically enjoy talking to hodges—and especially not when hodges is grandstanding, which he definitely is in this scene.    

hodges says, “the lab almost went to hell in a handbag while you were sabbaticalling. i'm sure you talked to catherine, but just in case you didn't, lot of hurt feelings, so in case you talk to nick—”

grissom then cuts him off. “i’d rather hear it from catherine, thanks.”

note that hodges is the one who assumes that grissom has heard about the debacle from catherine, and grissom never either confirms or denies that such is the case. also note that when grissom shuts hodges down, all that he says is that he would rather hear catherine’s take on the situation from catherine herself, as opposed to hearing about it from hodges as a third party.

nowhere does he claim to be ignorant of the situation altogether.

so then cut to the next scene in which we see grissom, when he runs into new csi level iii michael keppler in the hall and briefly stops to speak with him.

in this scene, grissom approaches keppler, whom he has never met before, and calls him by name. he asks if ecklie has still slotted keppler to work days. he also inquires about the case keppler is currently working, showing familiarity with its details. in the process, he makes reference to keppler’s “hometown,” seeming to know that keppler is from trenton, nj originally.

now.

to the best of our knowledge, grissom has so far only talked to hodges and keppler since returning to the lab.

that he knows about the case keppler is currently working perhaps suggests that since he first arrived to work, he has also checked in with judy the secretary to be briefed on his team members’ current activities; it makes sense that she might tell him that keppler was presently working with nick on a homicide case.  

while it’s possible that judy may have also told grissom details about who keppler was and what ecklie’s intentions for him were, it seems unlikely that she would mention that he was from trenton or that she would describe him in enough detail that grissom could recognize him on sight, despite never having seen the man before.

so where did grissom hear so much about keppler before ever meeting him?

that grissom would need to talk to catherine in order to learn her perspective on the reverse forensics debacle (as per what he tells hodges) suggests that he has not spoken to her since the whole mess happened. it is therefore unlikely that she is his keppler “source.”

he seemingly also hasn’t spoken with warrick since the fiasco took place.

ditto for nick and greg, likely.

maybe ecklie might have filled him in on the fact that keppler would be temporarily working with the team while he was away and even mentioned that keppler was originally from jersey, were he and grissom to have been in contact during grissom’s sabbatical.

still.

for my money, the most likely candidate to have told grissom anything is sara.

she couldn’t have been the one to fill him in on the case keppler is currently working with nick, of course, as she’s off at a garbage dump working a case of her own when keppler and nick first pick up the callout. 

but everything else that grissom knows about the man could have easily come from her—and particularly since he very much seems to be “already in the know” the minute he arrives at the lab.

to me, his already established knowledge of keppler suggests that he’s been hearing about the guy all along—which further suggests that he and sara have indeed been talking all along.   

so if grissom and sara have indeed been talking, then why is sara still anxious while grissom is gone and how come grissom’s letter references their parting as if it were a fresh wound?

well, because this is gsr, and with them “talking” and “communicating” are often two different things.

there is conversation happening between them; it’s just not emotionally expressive—just not about anything important; not what’s really on their minds or in their hearts. they’re both suffering for being separated from each other, but they’re relegated to chatting about the weather and day-to-day activities, never delving in to the matter of their deeper emotions.

sara is gritting her teeth and pretending it’s a grin for the sake of seeming like a “cool girlfriend.” she’s downplaying how much she misses grissom and how anxious she is about what his absence means in terms of their relationship. she’s never letting on how scared she is to lose him.

when they call or write, she asks him about his teaching and voices nothing but support and enthusiasm for what he’s doing. if he asks her how she’s doing, she deflects (“well, hank and i watched a hepburn and tracy marathon on cable over the weekend. your blanket now smells like dog, by the way. i’ll be sure to wash it before you get home”), never actually expressing her true feelings, or at least none of the negative ones. she’ll talk about what’s happening at work, certainly. mention how this or that case is going. fill him in on the new guy, keppler (“it’s like he stepped out of a noir film. very off-putting”). but that’s about it.

on grissom’s end of things, he’s doing much the same—talking about his teaching (because that’s what sara mainly asks about), trying to figure out if the edge he hears in her voice is because she’s mad at him or because maybe, possibly she misses him as much as he does her, though of course he wouldn’t ever dare to ask. for as heartsick as he is for missing her and for as worried as he is that they parted on a sour note, he won’t complain because he knows he brought this situation on himself. so he voices enthusiasm for his teaching. and he accepts sara’s half-answers and dodges without prodding. and he writes her a letter but never sends it because he’s not sure if even the bard of avon himself is a good enough wordsmith to express the depths of his love for this girl.

in the letter, he talks about their parting as though it were still fresh because, in some ways, for them, it is.

though weeks have passed and they’ve spoken fairly regularly in the interim, the specter of that awkward goodbye and all of the fears and trepidations underlying it still looms large. it’s colored all of their interactions since. it’s unresolved. still affecting them.

he wants to address it so that they can finally move past it, though he doesn’t quite know how.

so.

to hop back into our narrative: 

our two idiot geniuses in love spend five weeks apart. 

five anxious weeks.

during that time, they are in contact, though they’re not truly communicating about anything of substance. 

he’s worrying that he’s fucked things up by making the decision to leave without considering the personal implications of him doing so. he can sense that she is upset but he doesn’t know how to really broach the subject or do anything to fix the problem remotely—and especially not when she seems so thoroughly committed to withholding her true feelings from him, regardless of anything he might say or do.

on her side of things, she’s worried about the meaning of everything. he left, and she doesn’t know what his leaving indicates, in terms of their relationship. he seldom voices his feelings, and so she’s not sure what they are. she’s feeling the strain of keeping their shared life a secret more strongly than ever, but at the same time she doesn’t dare to complain because she doesn’t want to upset their delicate balance. so as not to do anything to spook him, she elects to suffer in silence, holding her breath as she waits for some kind of confirmation that he loves her in the same bone-deep, forever kind of way that she does him.

but for as anxious as they both are, somehow they’re able to weather the storm.

and when his time away is up and he finally returns and they’re physically sharing the same space once more—able to show their love for each other, even if they can’t adequately verbalize it as of yet—whatever tension that had been present since their parting very suddenly dissipates.

or at least it does so for the moment.

of course, as the rest of the season plays out, we see that she still longs for reassurance from him as to the depth of his feelings, and he still struggles to find a way to prove to her once and for all that he is just as much committed to her as she is to him. both of them chafe under the restrictions necessary to keep their relationship a secret from the world. as they start to look toward their future, they more and more want to be open both to each other and in general, until finally the events of the season finale take place, and everything comes to a head for them.

anyway.

that’s my take on the whole situation.

like i said at the top, it’s more conjecture than analysis, so take it for what you will.

thanks for the question! please feel welcome to send another any time.          

[basketballandtextbooks]

Speaking of analyses, what's your interpretation of Kenny? (I feel like he's the one character that really doesn't get talked about in the same manner as other characters. Sure, he gets praised often for being a good boi and there's discussions/theories of his curse, his homelife, sex... But as far as him as a WHOLE, as a person, I don't tend to see that a lot. I think that's why his fanon interpretations feel like a disconnection: He's quiet, his hood being down doesn't mean he'll "talk more")

To even begin delving into all of the aspects of Kenny’s personality, we’ll first have to divide up subsections to how he behaves in certain circumstances, ascertain his motives for doing so, and then finally combine all of that information into a cohesive assessment of his thoughts, feelings, and agendas. And as a bonus, I’d like to discuss how these traits would most likely change and develop over time.  All that said, I just really like his character so instead of doing all that fancy essay work, I’m just going to babble about him. We’ll start with what is both the most and least important aspect to Kenny; his relationship with death.

Death has haunted Kenny for his entire life so far as we, the viewers, are able to tell. The current in-series explanation for his ceaseless bouts of death involves his parents in a cthulhu cult before he was even born. The details here are vague, but the implication that leaves us with is that this is a lifelong affliction. Flashbacks as early as preschool support this theory as we’ve seen Kenny die in a firecracker accident back then. Kenny’s feelings towards death are made clear in several lines and yet more nonverbal cues. He’s scared of death. It’s painful and he hates it. Even knowing he’ll come back, or at least assuming he’ll come back, that doesn’t stop him from screaming, running, crying out, hiding, and outright declaring how painful and unpleasant he finds death. This at least tells us one thing about Kenny’s personality going forward that will be important to understanding further aspects: He hates pain. He’s had plenty of pain, pain beyond what a normal person could ever imagine, and he hates it. One conjecture we can make from this knowledge is he’s extremely unlikely to self-harm in a violent or painful way, such as cutting or punching himself. He has shown a brief interest in pain for sexual pleasure though, as seen with his stint of asphyxiation for masturbation. The attempt killed him but we never get a follow up on whether or not he found it enjoyable, therefore it can be read as either “Kenny enjoys pain for pleasure, specifically asphyxiation” or “Kenny tried pain for pleasure once and as it resulted in his death, he doesn’t want to do it again” or “Kenny will try anything sexual at least once”. Among these readings, the third is most likely the most accurate while the first two can be entirely up to the opinion of the interpreter. They have equal canonicity behind them.

His hatred of death and pain has led him to become bitter and angry towards the people around him on many occasions. For example, when Kyle was dying Kenny was incapable of feeling sympathy for Stan’s sadness over it when Stan was so consistently apathetic towards his own death. It’s clear that Kenny doesn’t want Kyle to die and cares about the well-being of all of his friends (sacrificing his life for them on many occasions) but it was particularly painful to listen to Stan talk about how sad he was that a friend of his was dying in the hospital. If we pay attention to the timeline, this happens before Kenny dies in the hospital and Stan refuses to visit him, which would solidify every feeling of resentment he felt when Stan was worried over Kyle. During that time, Stan had had no trouble visiting Kyle in the hospital so from Kenny’s perspective, Stan just didn’t care. Still, he clearly cares for Stan and his other friends which is why we hear the repeated “Where’s Stan?” that breaks our hearts every damn time. It’s worth noting that Kenny has a teddy bear in the hospital that is never seen before or since, it’s very likely a bear from the hospital gift shop given to him by one of his visitors. So either Chef, his parents, or Kyle bought him the bear. A personal favorite headcanon of mine is that Kevin stole the bear for him but there is absolutely no evidence to support that hypothesis. Logically the culprit is either Chef or Kyle, considering the McCormick’s money troubles, and it would be very in character of Sheila to insist he buy something for his friend at the gift shop. Another thing to note is that Kyle is the only one of his friends, aside from Cartman, who visits him in his hospital room. Butters sends a card and there are visible gifts that build over time. We know for a fact during the episode where Kyle was dying that the teacher would have the students make cards for a sick classmate, so the card and gifts are most likely a byproduct of that. It is worth noting that while Kenny was dying such a slow and painful death, Kyle was the only one who was able to stay at his side. Stan found it too painful to watch him die and Eric was off on his mission to ‘save’ Kenny. I believe this impacted the way Kenny viewed his friends in the future, distancing himself from Eric and opening up to Stan less and less. His relationship with Kyle remains dubious and the other kids in his class he keeps an emotional distance between.

One cannot address the issues of this episode without also delving into the issues regarding the length of his death and revival. It’s implicit in the show that Kenny has no idea how long he will be dead for, a few hours or a few years, and there is very little consistency in how he is revived. Most frequently he revives via a literal rebirth (one notable instance of this causing his mother to have a miscarriage), but he’s also had instances of reviving back into his own corpse or literally appearing out of thin air. This leads us to the explanation that he doesn’t know how long he’ll be dead, where he’ll go, or how he’ll revive. This loss of control in his life causes him to put a significant distance between himself and anyone he might care about, for fear that his condition would ruin any chances of maintaining the relationship.

This is especially apparent in his complicated relationship with Cartman (which we will address in more detail later). During his extended period of death, Cartman was the driving force in finding a ‘Kenny replacement’ and Kenny’s self-proclaimed BFF. Both Stan and Kyle joined these attempts cheerfully, but Cartman was the most determined. He tried with both Tweek and Butters, succeeding in finding a best friend in Butters and making Butters an on-again-off-again addition to the ‘main four’ while also maintaining a close (and complicated) friendship to Cartman. Butters was compared to Kenny on several occasions during this transition and showed both agitation and resentment over the comparison. Eventually putting Kenny up on a pedestal as someone ‘great’ because of all the times the guys assured him that “Kenny would do it if he were here”.

It’s worth noting that the two individuals within canon who clearly and canonically remember Kenny’s deaths are Cartman and Timmy. While an explanation for Timmy’s knowledge is still left up in the air, there are a few potential explanations for Cartman’s retained memories. One explanation that I normally prescribe to is that Cartman has Kenny’s eyes and by taking a body-part of Kenny’s, he can now see Kenny’s deaths. This explanation isn’t perfect, as Cartman showed signs of understanding Kenny’s condition prior to that episode, but its one potential explanation. Understanding his condition could have been a basis for the initial development of their friendship or it could have been a secret shared when they were still close that Eric was naïve enough to believe. Although, Eric’s understanding of Kenny’s condition could very easily be an explanation for his own apathy towards other people's deaths (like how he murdered Scott’s parents). Ever since he could remember, his best friend had died and come back, at the age of 8 or 9, how could he possibly have a complete understanding that Kenny’s case wasn’t normal. He could have very well expected Scott’s parents to return the next day the same way Kenny did. While it’s also possible he committed those murders knowing full well that their deaths were permanent, it is still hard to believe that he’d even be capable of taking death seriously after seeing Kenny die so many times.

Continuing further, Kenny’s fear of death does not make him cowardly, quite the contrary. Some stand out sacrifices that he made while scared would be during the meteor shower trilogy (he owed nothing to those people and still gave his life to protect them) and during the hunt for Eric’s parentage, sacrificing his life to save the hospital. He was scared both times and they were ultimately selfless acts. What makes them stand out even more though is how dependent his friends were on him during both instances. They had full and complete faith and trust that Kenny would save the day. Even without cognitively remembering Kenny’s condition, they still trust him with their lives and know he’s the sort of person who would save them.

It’s very likely that this is a reason that Kenny grew into a more and more protective person as the seasons go by, in a way this faith that he’d save them is some of the purest positive feedback he gets from his asshole friends. Whether intentional or not, there was a part of Kenny and his friends who viewed him as a protector above all else. These sorts of implicit expectations can really affect a person’s development. It is most likely due to a combo of this aforementioned expectation and Kenny’s growing cynicism about his own deaths, that he accepts the role so whole-heartedly.

Kenny has a strong association with drugs from early seasons, where rumors of him sniffing paint were prevalent and an instance of him snorting alien coke occurred. His hedonistic personality and inability to die seemingly leading him to believe that he was invincible. And therefore he doesn’t need to worry about the negative effects of recreational drug use. This all changed after the events of major boobage. It should be evidence alone that by the end of major boobage, all rumors about Kenny and drugs ended and he was never again referenced to indulge in recreational substances, especially considering their earlier prevalence, but the series goes even further to show us that he not only got clean, stayed clean, but has developed a dislike for recreational and addictive substances.

Kenny would never do recreational drugs of any kind as a teen or adult and he is unlikely to drink alcohol either. It is very likely he dislikes weed, meth, and beer in particular. Kenny exhibited addictive behavior during Major Boobage and he was addicted to cheesing. However at the end of Major Boobage, Kenny stated firmly that he did not want to be addicted, would quit immediately, and he decided firmly to avoid drugs henceforth. His entire character arc for the episode was learning that he did not like the recreational use of drugs. It’s interesting that the fans interpret this episode as proof he would do drugs considering the entire plot of the episode was about his character growth in that specific regard. It’s like watching an episode where Stan learns to accept his gay dog and saying he will always be homophobic and never change because he started the episode not accepting his gay dog. It’s boggling.

However it is worth noting that Kenny relapsed at the very end of the episode by 'getting high on life'. While this could be evidence that he’d ‘never’ get clean (again disregarding all other evidence to the contrary) but it actually shows something that is quite telling for his ability to stay sober. His friends were quick to help him and pull him back from it. This alludes to him continuing to have support from friends and family during recovery. Recovery is a hard and difficult thing that is nearly impossible without a support network. This is a shockingly optimistic moment when understood through the lens of how difficult it is to fight for sobriety.

However the evidence that Kenny has chosen to stay clean doesn’t stop there. Aside from all rumors about him sniffing paint and other implications dying down all together, we have an extremely telling scene with his parents in a later season. During the superhero trilogy Mysterion startles his parents while they are getting high (specifically on weed). His parents state, fearfully, that Mysterion has been threatening them to stay off drugs and attempt to hide the pot from him, knowing he wouldn’t approve. This is telling in a few ways but one that is significant is that Kenny hated his parents' use of drugs, including ‘harmless drugs’ such as marijuana so much that he would go as far as to threaten them. We very rarely see an outright aggressive or threatening Kenny and we almost never see him show any ill will towards his family. Kenny is shown over the course of the series to be very fond of his family. His hatred of recreational drug use would have to be quite intense for him to go as far as to threaten his parents. The implied subtext of this scene is that Kenny considered what they were doing to be an extremely bad thing. So bad that he would threaten people he loves enough to terrify them that badly. This shows that since the Major Boobage episode, Kenny's attitude towards drugs has definitely grown negative. Moreso, the threat of staying off drugs was paired with the threat to ‘treat their children better’, leaving the heavy implication that he views those two as linked.

Even further evidence provided for Kenny’s continued sobriety and dislike of recreational abuse of addictive substances. During The Poor Kid, when Kenny was out of options with his foster family, he resorted to providing them with alcohol. Showing that he firmly believes that the best way to destroy people is to give them addictive products like alcohol. Further evidence that he feels negatively towards the drugs and alcohol. It’s played off as a joke in the episode but it’s clear that Kenny has strongly associated alcohol with destroying people.

Despite drugs and alcohol playing a major role in several plot lines that follow, Kenny is never shown to have an interest in them. As stated above, in early seasons he’d happily snort alien coke and now he never so much as approaches drugs positively. It’s extremely indicative that this change and interest in sobriety is long-lasting.

Finally we also see Kenny joining Stan's band that he created out of frustration with his situation on Tegridy Farms. Stan has grown to hate weed and what it represents and it is currently causing his family life to be much worse than usual. Kenny, as shown in episodes like The Scoots, loves his friends a lot Stan included. Watching his friend in so much pain can only cause him to view the substance as even worse. It is very likely that while they were working on the band and practicing he heard Stan's complaints as well. Kenny is actively watching as marijuana tears the Marsh family apart. He also watched Stan’s struggles with alcoholism and Stan’s fathers struggles with addiction as yet further examples of how these substances can destroy lives.

During TFBW game, there is a drug subplot that Mysterion actively works to put a stop to. Again, never once part-taking in drugs and actively fighting against their spread in his city. It doesn’t get any more blatant that that. Kenny is far more likely to join the DEA than he is to get high behind the gym. Kenny would never indulge in recreational drug use, specifically meth, weed, and beer, because of his experience watching them ruin families and strain friendships. As well as his own experience with drugs when he decided that he did not want to live that kind of lifestyle.

There’s a bit more evidence that delves into the realm of headcanon, but it is a logical extension of deductive reasoning based on the canon content we are provided with so I will include it as well. We know that Kenny and Satan developed a friendly relationship during Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. We also saw Satan give Stan a very simplified and child friendly lecture on addiction, as though he’d given the same lecture before. While there is no evidence of this, it isn’t a stretch to imagine the person he’d previously helped through their addictive tendencies was Kenny.

To be clear, this isn’t an anti-drug PSA. I don’t care what characters do or don’t do drugs, this is merely establishing that for Kenny specifically with the character arc he’s had, it is very unlikely and borderline insulting to his struggles for sobriety. However Kenny’s connections to drugs also open up some interesting relationship details as well.

During the major boobage episode in particular all of his friends join forces to get Kenny clean, Kyle in particular spear-heading the effort. Stan was there and Butters was there but neither showed as much passion or commitment for assisting Kenny’s progress to sobriety as Kyle did. Even putting his own neck on the line by hiding a cat in his room (with Sheila Broflovski as a mother, is he suicidal?). It’s yet another case, like with the Kenny Dies episode, where all his friends offer very passive support and Kyle offers a very aggressive and consistent support. It’s shown a pattern thus far of Kyle feeling in some way responsible for Kenny’s wellbeing. Which could be explained by a few things, Kyle’s obsessive and passionate personality or perhaps he feels subconsciously guilty for all the times he’s left Kenny for dead. Really we have no way of knowing why he’s doing this but we do know he’s starting to develop a pattern of protectiveness towards Kenny. What’s even more interesting is during both instances Kenny is too far gone to notice. During Kenny Dies he’s frequently asking for Stan and during this episode he’s angry and belligerent that Kyle is taking away his high. Making both tasks thankless endeavors on Kyle’s part (which is also a little unusual because Kyle loves to be praised for his hard work). Kenny’s relationship with Eric is at a low during this episode, Eric caring more about cats than his old BFF and Kenny now knowing that Eric won’t even make an emotionally dishonest attempt to be there for him. I would be interested to see how Kenny in specific felt about Eric facilitating the drug trade during TFBW considering his sobriety and the fact that Eric was never there for him through it. Butters and Stan just don’t stand out as particularly good or bad friends during this episode, they’re just sort of there and listening to Kyle’s instructions. 

However, it’s worth noting that when there were rumors about Kenny getting high in early seasons, Eric was a mentioned accomplice, which makes it even more interesting to think about how Kenny’s sobriety might have solidified the growing rift between the two. Perhaps they used to be the kind of friends who got high behind the gym together and now Kenny won’t and Eric thinks he’s a pussy with sand in his vagina. It’s just an interesting nugget of characterization to explore. How specifically did Kenny’s sobriety impact his relationship with Eric? It’s an engaging question I wish more fans would ask because I would love to see the potential answers and hypotheses’. It’s also worth noting that after Stan’s own struggles with sobriety and addiction in later seasons, it’s possible that Kenny could have become Stan’s sponsor or perhaps that the two of them connect over this unique struggle in their lives that their other friends wouldn’t have as complete an understanding of.

There’s a lot and a little to be said about Kenny and his relationship to his siblings. The clearest picture we get of his relationships with them is his obsessive protectiveness of Karen, even going so far as to deny her own wants and needs (as seen in the TFBW dlc) in order to protect her from all perceived danger. Even if the danger is as mundane as ‘being lame’. But to get a better idea of his relationship with his siblings, I’d like to start from the beginning.

Namely, before Karen even existed within the narrative. In the early seasons with Kevin and Kenny as the only two McCormick children, we see a passive and friendly relationship (a stark contrast to the Marsh family siblings). Kevin does nothing aggressive towards his brother and he is seen peacefully playing with Kenny as well. While this does not make it impossible that Kevin isn’t a friendly sibling, from the context we see him in for the early seasons, there’s no reason to assume he isn’t a kind older brother to Kenny.

Which brings us to the impossibility of Karen’s birth. As stated above, Kenny revives most frequently through rebirth and he dies far too frequently to allow Carol a successful pregnancy.  And we know that, to Kenny’s knowledge, he was the youngest McCormick child during the episode that confirmed he gives his mother miscarriages. He tried to give her a miscarriage before doing so on accident, hating the idea of having a younger sibling more than anything.

This is something that also lends to the idea that Kevin is a kind older sibling and that he is fond of his parents, regardless of their flaws. It’s explicit within the episode that Kenny doesn’t want a younger sibling because he doesn’t want to share that love. He wants Kevin to spoil him and his parents to spoil him and he doesn’t want to lose that to someone younger and cuter. Perhaps his attachment to being spoiled could be because he’s so relied upon by his friends as a protector that he is loath to lose the one type relationship he has in his life that places him as someone to be protected rather than doing the protecting. This is conjecture, but it would make sense with the characterization we’ve seen thus far.

But how did Karen come into being? The ongoing theory in fanon is that she was born during the year Kenny was dead and his friends replaced him but going through the aging timeline, it’s unlikely he was dead a full year (more likely only a few months) and even if the timeline matched up, Karen is six years old when she is first introduced, only 3 years younger than Kenny. Which means she had to have been born long before this incident. Another ongoing theory is that she’s adopted or a foster child, but those are relatively unlikely as well. The McCormick household has a fucking meth lab in the back yard. There is no adoption agency that is going to give them a child. And this theory ignores her clear resemblance to both Kevin and Stuart.

This is why I believe the most likely source of Karen is through a third party and Stuart. There are no adoption hoops to jump through if Stuart is her biological father and it explains the familial resemblance. It’s not difficult to believe Carol would accept her as her own due to how desperately she wanted another child.

As for how Karen was conceived, that’s up for interpretation. She could have been a product of infidelity or a case of someone else carrying her for the McCormick’s as Carol is effectively baron. I will say that Stuart’s infidelity is more likely purely because of the age. If they’d asked someone to carry Karen to term for them, Karen should have started living with them when Kenny was three and yet, she doesn’t join the family until the age of six. There could be a myriad of reasons for this that can be left entirely up to the interpretation of the viewer but the only logical way for Karen to exist as she does is that she is Kenny’s half sister.

When Karen showed up, Kenny clearly grew immediately attached and began to mature quickly. Taking part in less shenanigans, taking responsibility for her well-being, protecting her from bullies, playing with her in his free time. Kenny didn’t want to be an older brother but when push came to shove, he accepted the responsibility whole-heartedly and fully embraced his younger sister. Even more meaningfully, he didn’t care about whether or not she was fully blood related and treated her as a sister just the same. It’s possible one of the reasons he didn’t see any need for blood to create familial ties is growing up with Kyle and Ike nearby and knowing that it wasn’t blood that made them brothers. It’s also possible that he just has too much integrity to treat her as anything less than his baby sister.

One thing that should be noted about children Kenny’s age is modeling. Children, especially under the age of ten, are extremely susceptible to the behavior modeled for them. For example, children who have older siblings who mistreat them are far more likely to mistreat their own younger siblings. It’s a monkey-see, monkey-do time of life. Therefore I would like to present with this as my evidence that Kevin was just as kind and protective as Kenny is to Karen. He’s at an age where he models what he sees around him, treats others how he is treated. The other sibling relationships he’s close to is Kyle and Ike, which while loving took awhile and is significantly less overtly affectionate at times, and of course the Marsh siblings who have an overtly negative relationship until very recently in canon.

Meaning it’s possible he modeled how to treat a younger sibling after how Kyle treats Ike but it’s difficult to imagine him playing kick the baby with Karen. It’s more likely that he grew up with a protective older brother who spoiled him and he is now passing down the behavior that he received.

In short the McCormick siblings have a complicated but interesting relationship. There’s a lot to be said about how while Kenny was being conceived (with Stuart and Carol constantly getting high at a cult and subsequently arrested) that Kevin was only three years old and he wouldn’t have been able to fend for himself at this time. He might have attached onto Kenny so strongly out of loneliness over the severe neglect his parents subjected him to.

It’s worth mentioning that one place Kenny remains determined to indulge is with his hobbies, specifically with magic the gathering, his psp, and nascar. Kenny has for the majority of his characterization been defined by his hedonism. Doing what felt good, when it felt good. It’s why he has such a striking and intriguing character arc over the course of the series. Going from a pure hearted and selfless hedonist (an interesting combo in itself) into a more mature and more reserved individual who denies himself those simple easy pleasures (such as drugs).

But he still has a desire for escapism and so he pursues his hobbies with a passion and protective zeal that can be alarmingly violent. He doesn’t just love his hobbies and desire to indulge in them, but he also wants them to be respected and he despises a mockery being made of them. He doesn’t just enjoy them, he becomes masters at them. He pours all of his passion into being an amazing Magic player, into achieving the highest score in his favorite game, into murdering the one who mocked Nascar.

Wait, that last one doesn’t quite belong. We’re going to put a pin in that one for further exploration in the Cartman section, but it’s worth mentioning that his passion for that sport is so intense that he would be willing to commit murder. While the characters in South Park are outright murderous by nature, Kenny is one of the least homicidal in town (it’s a relative term) and as such, his turn to homicidal rage in defense of his hobby is notable.

He knows Cartman, he knows this is probably a phase and Cartman will get over it, if it was any other circumstance he’d probably be laughing his ass off at home that Cartman was making an idiot of himself on live TV and driving a vagisil car while eating the cream. It’s objectively hilarious and something that Kenny would normally have laughed at and moved on. He’s shown discomfort with Cartman’s escapades before but he’s never taken it so personally. Even when it was a direct attack against Kenny.

There is a part of Kenny that just can’t tolerate his hobbies being so openly mocked and made a sham of. Even during cock magic, he felt deeply uncomfortable with the spectacle the game he loved was turning into, doing everything he could in his limited capacity to continue to treat it seriously and play with integrity. Kenny loves his hobbies with a passion that we don’t see from him for much else.

One potential explanation for this is the emotional distance he has with other people that I alluded to before. He has a lot of love to give and a passionate personality but he dies. All the time. No one remembers, those that do only use his death for their own gain, and while he’s dead even his closest and dearest friends will attempt to replace him or actively resent him. People can replace him. People can betray him.

Playing cards? They have no autonomy. They can’t change after his death; they just wait for him in his room until his revival. Nascar? Sure, he might miss a few races but he can always catch up or just watch new content. Kenny has found an outlet for all the love that bubbles up inside of him that doesn’t rely on people who he’s learned to mistrust.

There is also something to be said about his addictive personality and it’s very possible that he uses his hobbies as a replacement for drugs. Indulging in healthier hobbies in an attempt to replace the ones he now views so negatively. A strong support of this theory is that before Kenny’s sobriety he was less passionate about hobbies and after his sobriety, he is clearly and consistently more obsessive about his hobbies. (further evidence of his continued sobriety, fucking fight me fanon. don’t even tell me you do it for the angst, a struggle for sobriety is way more angsty than a momentary high. ya’ll just want him to do drugs/alcohol because you do and you kin him.)

Kenny’s love for his hobbies is quickly becoming a defining trait but also it’s worth noting that his hobbies are social in nature. He didn’t pick up drawing or writing or origami, things he’s shown an interest for in early seasons, he picked up Magic and Gaming and Nascar, all three when indulged as hobbies are inherently social. You watch Nascar with people, you play Magic with people, especially in this day and age, you play videogames with people.

Even though he’s given up on connecting with people on a deeper level and puts a distance between himself and others, he still pursues hobbies that connect him to them. This indicates that he could still be trying to reach out to others and wants a deeper connection. But on his own terms. He doesn’t select hobbies that the others are already into to attract them to him, he’s pursuing hobbies he likes. Stubborn and selective boy. I haven’t listed all of his talents, skills, and hobbies here, mind you, just the ones relevant to my points (meaning I left out details about his passion for singing because that appears to be a natural talent and sports because he enjoys them but shows no real passion for them)

I’ve probably put off talking about his friendships for too long at this point but a part of me wanted to save this for last, as so much of what there is to say about his friendships with others is indicated in other segments. But the as this is an entirely unstructured attempt at explaining my thoughts and headcanons about Kenny McCormick, I don’t believe it matters the order I go in so here is an overview of his relationships with a few key individuals in his life.

We’re going to start with Kelly. Not because she’s the most influential or most important, but because her impact on his personality is striking in a way that I have to wonder why more people don’t address it. Prior to meeting Kelly he didn’t have as much resentment towards his friends over his condition and after meeting her, for reasons that will become obvious soon, the seeds of pain grow into something larger.

For those of you who are largely unfamiliar with her, she is Kenny’s first girlfriend. She developed an immediate attraction towards him and began to pursue him with a hesitant intensity. Kenny, as he does with most people who approach him so passionately, treats this with confusion and hesitance. She’s hyper logical, goes at her own pace, and treats the fact that Kenny would like her as a matter of course.

Her pursuit of Kenny isn’t what’s most notable but it is worth noting how he responds to someone pursuing him. It’s the confusion that strikes me the most, he’s not used to being treated like something special, and he doesn’t know how to reply. It’s a far cry from the smooth talking flirty Kenny of fanon. Kenny is far more likely to respond with hesitant interest, confusion, and eventual flustered flattery to a romantic pursuit based on how we’ve seen him respond in canon. This isn’t to say he couldn’t develop a more flirtatious personality with age, but it’s worth noting that within canon we don’t see a hint of that as of yet.

The impact that Kelly truly makes on Kenny’s personality isn’t a romantic one though. Although it is my belief that he will grow to view it and gestures like it as romantic ones in the future, but that’s a headcanon digression. Her contribution to his development is simple:

She saves his life.

While no one else would, no one else tried, no one else thought it was possible. It’s very likely that his friends all have a sense of subconscious learned helplessness in regards to Kenny’s death and therefore don’t fight it because, to them, it’s an inevitability and Kelly was only able to do this because she was not previously exposed to the multitude of Kenny deaths.

But the fact is that a person claimed to care about him, wanted to date him, and then when the worst thing about his life was going to happen again, she saved him. In this moment Kenny associated on some level caring about him to saving him. The fact that Kelly saved him meant she cared and by extension, the fact that no one else saves him or even holds him in his dying moments, means that they do not care about him.

Let’s return to that moment of lost empathy and sympathy when Stan was grieving Kyle’s illness. Perhaps on some level he’d just grown to understand that Stan wasn’t the sort to try helping his friends when they’re in mortal peril, made an exception that it’s not that Stan didn’t care, it’s just that Stan wasn’t the type to try saving another person’s life. Or grieve. Sure, it frames Stan as an awful person but to Kenny, Stan being an inherently cruel person was far less painful than the horrible knowledge that Stan did care. He just didn’t care about Kenny. In this moment he’s able to see the moment that Kelly saved him, because she cared about him, and all the moments that neither Stan nor his other friends even tried to save him. To add insult to injury, he dies right then and there and Stan still doesn’t care.

He’s left with the horrible implication that his worst fears about his friends are right. It’s not that they don’t remember because they can’t, it’s that they just don’t give a fuck about him. It’s terrifying, worse than even the prospect of a friend dying.

Which is another matter, as Kenny is semi-frequent in the underworld(s), it’s difficult for him to fully empathize with the idea of Kyle dying. Normally the terror of a loved one dying is that you’ll never see them again, but for Kenny it’s likely he’d still see Kyle every Tuesday. While he words to protect his friends and clearly loves his friends, when they’re lives are in peril like this, it’s sometimes difficult for him to empathize. He doesn’t want them to die but there’s a bitter part of him that’s unable to grieve if they do.

Kelly’s selfless and kind act, one that showed Kenny a moment of what it was like to feel loved, left such a terrible lasting impact that we can see seasons and seasons later. "ALL THE TIME! I die all the time! And you assholes NEVER remember!! Remember! Try and fucking remember!"

Now this can’t be entirely attributed to Kelly, obviously, but I think she’s an important contributing factor to his descent into bitterness that is entirely under-explored. And I also find the way he continues to pursue the relationship with her after she’s left back to her home state to be really telling about how loyal he is within a relationship. Even with his own financial and logistical issues in dating a person who lives so far away, he does his best to visit her whenever he can. She clearly meant a lot to him and it will forever taunt me that we never got an onscreen breakup. It’s also notable that he shows the same level of respectful loyalty to Tammy while dating her. This showcases a clear pattern of treating his significant others with kindness, patience, loyalty, and respect.

Now that I’ve spent ages talking about a girl most fans don’t even remember existed, let’s start in on Stan. Stan seems to hold a special importance to Kenny, it’s difficult to say exactly why (but I’m sure if I dig more I can find out) but moreso than Eric, Kyle, or Butters, Kenny seeks out Stan’s approval in one way or another. It’s very subtle, sort of a ‘blink and miss it’ thing but it can be blatant. The aforementioned moments regarding Kyle’s hospitalization and his own hospitalization. In more subtle moments, we can see Kenny gravitate towards Stan while Kyle and Cartman have their tiffs.

One possible explanation for his attachment to Stan is his horrified “oh my god, they killed Kenny!” frequently by the time Kyle has joined in with “you bastards!”, Kenny is already too dead to hear it. So it’s possible that he puts a lot of weight on their friendship because he views Stan as one of the few people who react to his death at all.

(I can’t help but wonder how gleeful Kenny must have felt that Stan chose his side during the Black Friday trilogy)

Regardless of the reason, Stan appears to be the one among them that Kenny has distanced himself the most from. He’s shown to be very compassionate in most situations but in later seasons when Stan is struggling, Kenny is frequently distant or unresponsive towards it. This seems to be mending in the most recent seasons, with episodes where it shows that they’re fond of one another but even then, there’s an undeniable rift. Despite being Stan’s friend for longer and what most would consider closer to him, during the band episode Stan interacted more with Butters and Jimmy than he did Kenny.

This is also possibly explained by Kenny’s under-explored shyness (something I don’t know if I’ll even get the chance to dig into because I’ve already been going on for so long and I’m barely through half of the things I want to talk about). But I believe that Kenny has put some emotional distance between himself and Stan due to the moments that led him to believe that Stan does not ‘care’. One example of this is during the Cthulhu trilogy, when he explodes in response to his friends questioning, he gets upset with Stan’s reactions but only explodes to Kyle’s, despite their questions being equally ‘offensive’. Perhaps he’s put up more emotional walls with Stan and he’s more prepared for him to be insensitive than he is with Kyle.

Kyle is a complicated relationship to define. On one hand they’ve both had moments of cool apathy towards one another (Kyle during ookie-mouth and Kenny during Cherokee Hair Tampons), although both of those situations are easily understood under the lens of the other stressors. Kyle claimed to “not care about Kenny” but it was only in response to being asked to spit in one another’s mouths. Kyle is a canonical germaphobe (in weirdly most regards other than poop, which he is strangely very comfortable with) and being asked to let someone else spit in your mouth would be trying even if you had no issue with germs. As for Kenny’s moment, as explained above, he was far more concerned with the implications of what it meant for his friendship with Stan at that moment. And not entirely unreasonably.

Kyle’s strange because despite not being Kenny’s closest friend by any stretch of the imagination, he’s been there for Kenny during most of his pivotal character moments in one capacity or another. In a way, Kyle is the one constant in his life. He holds Kenny as he dies in Wing, he stays by his side in Kenny Dies, he fights for his sobriety in Major Boobage, he invites him to become a Jew Scout in Jewbilee, helping him out in The Coon, there are weirdly numerous examples of their friendship and yet there is no explicit focus on it. It’s also worth noting that among all his friends, Kyle was the one Kenny chose to view the meteor shower with and this was during a time where he was still objectively closest to Cartman. And the same can be said for the Coon episode, Kyle was the one Kenny went to for help.

It’s difficult to define their relationship because while they have a strong pattern of a deep and supportive friendship, they also never even attempt to be one another’s ‘favorite’. Although Kyle does seem to be the most protective of Kenny among the main boys (this is of course only a relative, the bar is really low). For example, despite all the boys having lice in Licecapades, Kyle was the only one who came forward to save Kenny from the sock bath. It would take a whole other essay to fully dissect how their relationship works but to simplify it, it appears that they rely on one another.

During Jewbilee, Kyle has complete baseless faith that Kenny will save them. There’s no reason for this other than he just knows that Kenny will. Moses is captured, an all powerful figure, and Kyle still thinks his parka wearing little friend has got this covered. Conversely Kenny comes to Kyle when he needs help, like with Mysterion’s “You’re the smartest kid I know”. It’s just interesting how much they rely on one another and never make a big deal of it. Their friendship is based on an understated mutual trust.

Cartman on the other hand takes any and all trust, and throws it in the bin. If Kyle requires an essay to explain, Kenny’s relationship with Cartman needs a dissertation. That said, I’ll make an attempt to keep this short and to the point. Eric and Kenny do seem to at one point have shared a mutually beneficial friendship, with both of them liking Kyle and Stan more than they liked one another but still clinging to one another in a strange and desperate loneliness. One of the ways they bonded over the course of their friendship was a similar sense of humor. They both enjoyed crude and childish jokes more than either Kyle or Stan did and therefore they were able to indulge in them with one another. The trouble was that Eric had a malicious edge to his humor and Kenny did not. Eric was willing to take things farther than Kenny ever was, potentially purely to prove to the world that he would. A perfect microcosm of why this aspect of their friendship fell apart is found in How To Eat With Your Butt. They both found the ‘butt’ school picture to be hilarious in the beginning but when real people were looking for their son, Kenny dropped the joke immediately but Eric pushed further. These sorts of moments increased in frequency, leading Kenny to pity Eric above all else and Eric to both love and despise Kenny in equal measure.

Eric was still the person Kenny reached out to more than most people, like during Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, but the strain on their friendship began to show more and more and then… Kenny died. Eric knows about Kenny’s deaths, possibly the entire reason he spent all his time trying to make a clone Shakey’s rather than actually saving Kenny’s life. But more time passed between this death than any other and Eric, who has abandonment issues but that’s a whole can of beans to explain, decided he needed to replace Kenny. The trouble was his first attempt, Butters, wasn’t the same. Neither was his second attempt in Tweek. And while Butters did eventually replace Kenny as Cartman’s ‘best friend’, it still wasn’t the same. Eric had lost that friendship for good and still longing for a taste of it, he’ll often still seek out Kenny’s opinion on things. Kenny meanwhile came back to life (we’re going to skip over the sharing a body possession arc, not because it isn’t relevant but because it’s just WAY too much to cover in a short span of time) and found that his best and worst friend had replaced him. In some ways it was a relief, being Cartman’s number 1 friend (especially when Cartman clearly wanted Stan and Kyle’s approval more) was never a great role. But at the same time, being replaced is never a pleasant feeling and it really bloomed that horrible terror that had begun to grow with Kelly and Stan. His friends don’t actually love him, he’s replaceable, they don’t need him. He begins to close off more and more through this and starts to focus his attention on spiting Cartman in small ways (like as Mysterion). He can’t help but be a little resentful and a little uncomfortable.

This discomfort can also explain a lot of why Kenny appears so uncomfortable around Butters during Going Native, not wanting to be called Butters’ best friend and not wanting to go on the trip with him to begin with. Overall Kenny seems to veer from apathetic to Butters to uncomfortable with him. There’s no single scene in the show where he actually seems to show any affection towards Butters. He was forced to go on the trip during Going Native, he had to listen to Butters call Nascar ‘stupid’ endlessly with Cartman, and he just… doesn’t spend time with Butters. They’re seen in the background together, but so are Clyde and Kenny or Annie and Kenny. This isn’t to say Butters has had no impact on his life, but even when he’s on a trip to Hawaii with Butters, he spends his free time writing letters back to his friends or hanging out at a bar alone instead of spending it with Butters. Butters does seem to hold a certain level of affection for Kenny though, whether this is due to Cartman’s influence (the constant comparisons that put Kenny one pedestal as the ‘best’ kind of friend) or due to an actual affection for Kenny, that’s up for debate. I lean towards the former because it’s more consistent with Butters’ overall characterization and it also gives the progression of their relationship a… progression. In the latter interpretation Butters’ fondness for Kenny seems to spring from nowhere within the scenes we’re provided with. In the former, Butters’ fondness is based on his own insecurities and the significant trauma that Kyle, Stan, and Cartman put him through. There really isn’t anything worth dissecting with the Fun Times With Weapons incident, Kenny doesn’t appear to be particularly apologetic nor does he do anything to protect Butters from the hell that follows. Strangely Stan seems to be the most obsessed with getting Butters’ help, although in the most misguided ways possible. Furthermore, during the Cthulhu trilogy Butters is imprisoned and forced to eat his own poop to survive throughout the entirety of it and Kenny just… didn’t care at all. The initial imprisonment was clearly Cartman’s doing but even after Cartman was kicked out and Kenny assumed leadership, he made no effort to free or protect Butters. Whether this was out of resentment or apathy is left up to interpretation. Put plainly, Butters and Kenny do have a strange connection although that connecting piece appears to just be Cartman and without Eric, that bond is nearly nonexistent. (istg if i get another message calling me a bunny hater… guys, im not being mean or an anti, this isn’t about ships, this is about talking about how kenny actually feels and behaves towards other characters within canon. and no, kenny did not invite him to game night. it was very clearly a joke that no one invited him… that said, if someone did invite him, it’s more likely to have been kyle who invited him due to kyle’s response when butters first entered the house)

Kenny also has some interesting relationships with the secondary cast that is worth mentioning (Craig, Timmy, and Bradley in particular) but I’m not sure how long I’ve been typing for so we’ll put a pin in that.

Fuck, I had a lot more bulletpoints I wanted to get to in order to expand fully on his character and I haven’t even gotten to the ‘conclusions’ section but my fingers fucking hurt. Here are the bullet points I didn’t get to, if you’re really curious feel free to ask for more details on any of them:

Anger issues

Mischief

Wisdom and foolishness

Growth

Prostitution 

Sex

Parents

Work

Protective

Shyness / Quiet / timidity

Loyalty

Resentment

Hedonism

Pride and poverty

[seyaryminamoto]

Benders not of the 4 elements

Hey, I found your fic a few days ago, and I just wanted to say that I’m really surprised at the quality (in a good way lol.) There’s a few things I disagree with (for example, Iroh’s portrayal - he comes off much more as bumbling to me rather than someone hiding something, as well as the personalities of a few characters, but I won’t go into it here) but generally it’s actually very well written! I do have a question, though: what’s with the mentions to benders that aren’t from the 4 elements? That’s the biggest contradiction to canon I’ve found, and it honestly seems rather confusing, considering that’s it’s not a very significant detail at all to change, but still feels ‘off’ to me, I guess. I’m at chapter 107, so maybe there’s something I’m missing from the later chapters, but I still find it weird especially since I’ve always found the natural symmetry of the four elements rather satisfying.

Thanks for the submission! It’s good to know you’ve enjoyed the story and you consider it’s of good quality :D

We could probably spend a very long time talking about why I portray Iroh as I do, but I could probably just summarize it and then direct you to many analyses of Iroh’s less flattering canon traits, which compelled me to portray him as a much murkier character than canon did...

I can understand why you perceived him that way, but Iroh wasn’t merely bumbling in the show, especially considering he becomes Zuko’s moral spine and acts far more seriously throughout the final season of the show than he did beforehand. He has canonical ties with the White Lotus which, as you have already seen, isn’t portrayed at their most flattering either in my story, since I’m hinting at separate factions and corruption within their very group… and of course, once you pay close attention to Iroh’s actions when you watch the show, you might notice Iroh is not only full of contradictions and several displays of highly hypocritical behavior, but he’s also a complicated character who committed terrible deeds in the past, deeds that the show is happy to gloss over and excuse him for at every opportunity. I’ve turned him into more of a mastermind with his own agenda to give the character a more serious tone, as well as to acknowledge his constant rivalry with Azula in the show, where they were outright portrayed as the two forces battling over Zuko’s soul (a rivalry that, to my utter confusion, seems to go ignored by the majority of the fanbase despite it was a major theme for two whole seasons).

Alright, so, for further analysis of the character: Ursa vs. Iroh in how they handled the sibling relationship between Zuko and Azula, sexist behavior displayed by Iroh during the show that he’s not called out for, Iroh’s not-so-humorous reaction at Zuko’s entitled behavior (a display of his serious side as early as the first episode), analysis on Iroh’s three different “faces” and how they play into viewer’s perception of the character. I figure there’s more... but I’d rather not spend all day digging into my blog’s archives for it xD

In short, my portrayal of Iroh really isn’t gratuitous, or just an attempt to make him more problematic than necessary. Sure, it is a much darker Iroh than seen in canon, or in most other fics... but even in a recently released book, Legacy of the Fire Nation, Iroh is portrayed speaking of Ozai far more sympathetically than he speaks of Azula. He outright blames her, rather than Ozai, for the misfortunes Zuko suffers during his younger years, when it’s plain as day Ozai is the main culprit for most of Zuko’s problems, if not all of them. So, if recently released canon material presents an Iroh that behaves so mercilessly towards his niece, I’d think I’m not that far-off in how I portray him...

Anyways! Closing that point, since that’s not really why you’re here...

The thing with elements is that, despite what you may have thought while watching ATLA, it’s absolutely feasible and possible for there to be more than four. Many cultures have five elements rather than four (Ancient Greece had aether as well as the typical four, I believe Hinduism featured the void, there was Heaven in Japanese culture...), to say one thing.

And then there’s China, they also have five... but they don’t even have air in their five mythological elements.

Those five elements are the ones featured in the Chinese Zodiac’s cycles, for instance. Curiously, the Avatar world’s calendar features the years named after the animals of the Chinese Zodiac (can be seen in the Library episode, specifically): yet, while borrowing their calendar, their four classic elements are different from the five elements Chinese Mythology relies on. Curious, isn’t it? :’)

Avatar wasn’t the first big story I got invested in that featured the elements as the setting’s magic system. I started off by being a huge fan of a particular show where there were no less than TEN elements: Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Metal, Wood, Thunder, Ice, Light and Darkness. In Avatar, some of the elements I’ve described here have turned out to be subsets of other bending skills: Thunder (in Avatar, Lightning) a subset of Fire, Ice and Wood of Water, Metal of Earth. With the background I had, as a fan of that other show, I was quite amused to see elements that other cultures and stories have separated and distinguished from each other tucked into umbrellas of each major bending art of the Avatar world...

In ATLA’s finale, the lion-turtles that are both loved and hated in the fandom showed up with a huge sudden twist: energybending. This has been loved and hated too, and it can be interpreted as though energybending is the superior form of bending, sure... but what the lion-turtle says is:

“In the era before the Avatar, we bent not the elements but the energy within ourselves.”

It virtually proposes that energybending itself created each bending art. Who’s to say, then, that even within LOK’s concept, there couldn’t have been more than four lion-turtles granting bending powers? Or that, if there were more, they might have been able to grant even more powers than the known ones? I’d even go so far as to say that the lion-turtle, by saying “we”, could have even been referring to humans with abilities to energybend, and that this skill wouldn’t have to be relegated to lion-turtles alone. Seeing as, before LOK arrived, the understanding of the matter was that firebenders had learned to bend from dragons, waterbenders from the ocean and moon, earthbenders from badgermoles and airbenders from sky bison, why not assume these lion turtles taught people how to ENERGYBEND, just as all those other animals had taught them how to bend the elements? :’D it was, before LOK, a perfectly acceptable interpretation of this big, last minute revelation. And the implication that the Avatar’s arrival happened AFTER the energybending era was over, could even be read as a hint at another erradicated culture: energybenders themselves.

At any rate, I’m pretty sure that I wrote the early chapters of Gladiator, where I first brought up the topic of various other bending skills, long before LOK’s big “Beginnings” episodes had aired, based mostly on that lion-turtle quote and my own previous experiences with other magical-element-based settings. This, paired with the implication that energybending used to be the main bending form of the past, and that it was lost to time, felt like fair basis to suppose that perhaps there could be even more bending arts that could have been lost to time in the Avatar World. I mean, if you think about it, had Aang been killed irremediably somehow in Sozin’s time, an entire bending race would have been gone. Why would it be impossible for previous bending groups before the Avatar’s time, the period the lion-turtle referred to, to be erradicated too?

It was all, of course, conjectures, theories and guesses. But, at that point in time, said conjectures and guesses were perfectly plausible, as, like I said, LOK’s lion-turtle based mythology hadn’t been established properly yet.

There will be some exploration into a certain kind of bending I referred to (namely, lightbending, which will have a different basis than what Azula has heard or read about so far). Still, my idea was basically to propose that a world that has been a victim to so many wars, where there are strange skills that only a few people practice (like combustion bending, or blood bending, or plant bending), it was possible that entire groups who practiced unusual subsets of bending could have been victims of other kinds of wars, just as airbenders were. And that, if the connections of those subsets with their parent elements were lost to time, in contemporary times it could look like those subsets were whole elements of their own that were decimated through warfare.

Soundbending, also mentioned early on in Gladiator, was often debated in the fandom as a possible subset for airbending before LOK was finished airing (there were huge theories on the subject). I featured Azula talking about it once because I thought it might become a thing in the franchise’s future (and then it didn’t :’D). Plantbending seems pretty instinctive to the waterbenders we see using it, yet, as most waterbenders seem to spend their whole lives in the poles, it’s natural that they wouldn’t think to bend plants since they wouldn’t really need to... hence, it’s another perfectly plausible bending skill that could have been practiced in the past, when, presumably, waterbenders fought earthbenders for territory in the large continent. Once the waterbenders settled in the poles, the skill could have been lost easily enough. The bending possibility itself isn’t gone, for it’s a subset of water, but if there were whole tribes (like the Foggy Swamp one) with a culture based around plantbending, wars could have easily seeen them destroyed and their bending art “lost”.

So, in the end, Gladiator won’t end up warping the whole four-element concept, despite canon itself kind of lends for warping by adding the fifth, energy, but I do explore these other possibilities of bending largely inspired by my other experiences in certain stories with more than four elements. I’ll stick to working within the parameters of bending subsets, and I do explore certain strange bending things that have absolutely no connection with anything that happened within the show... yet, while I didn’t start out with a set-plan on how I’d work with these bending possibilities, by now I can safely say the idea is to perceive them as subsets that resulted in small clusters of cultures of their own, cultures that were lost to time and warfare, just as airbending nearly was.

I hope this is a satisfactory and clear enough answer, if you don’t like it that’s fine too, but four elements, while they may sound very instinctive to us in modern times due to how popular it has become to split things in those four (the western zodiac, for instance, divides the zodiac signs in the ATLA four elements, as you probably know), it’s not a given, absolute thing that, when speaking of elemental magic, it has to be those four elements and nothing else. The number of elements can vary in different cultures, the types of elements can vary too, and testing a few bending possibilities beyond canon’s boundaries sounded like a fun enough idea to hint at, as long as I didn’t pull off something completely OP like VOIDBENDING... just imagine that, someone with the ability to create black holes xD sucks their whole world into it and that’s that, story over (?)

[normal-thoughts-official]

ok not to be That Magnus Stan but seeing your last ask... how do you think adhd/sensory issues might intersect with kink for Magnus? (You don't have to answer jkjljljljkllljlk)

i mean pls be That Magnus Stan tbh, and id be more than happy to answer it 👀👀👀

also the ask you’re referring to is no longer my last ask because it took me a while to finish this up, but anyway

ok so there's plenty of things that apply the same way to the both of them - like hyperfixating on their characters when planning roleplay, definitely the whole thing about how domspace (well, subspace for magnus, but u get it) feels a bit like hyperfocus? like his senses are just honed in and particularly for an adhd person that's just great news. like usually his head is all over the place but when he's in subspace he gets that quiet and he's just focusing on his own pleasure and everything else quiets down for a bit

in that sense i feel like it's the opposite of what anon said about being overwhelmed, like, i feel like the enhanced sensations are good for magnus because again adhd = brain desperately looking for stimuli at all times, so when he's engaging in like, orgasm delay/denial, gangbang and the like, he has a clear thing to focus on, sometimes even more than he can really process, and that kind of satisfies his brain?

udhdudndid that sounds stupid but i hope you understand what i mean, like, of course sensory issues could become bad and he might need to safeword but when he's in the proper headspace and he just allows himself to be washed over by the pleasure and let go, it feels like finally his mind is clear. i don't know if i have adhd, but it definitely feels that way for me. also, he might actually need the overstimulation in order to focus and feel pleasure, sometimes. like anything less he just.... wanders away jdhdudjdi i also feel that way

also, warning again just in case! im not saying "wow ppl with adhd are subs". im just conjecturing about how a person who happens to have adhd and be into subbing (and like, specifically the kind of adhd and kinks i hc for magnus) would feel in regards to how those things overlap and change their experience with their pleasure. or well, magnus specifically, not just any person with adhd. but anyway

also that thing i said about following orders and just letting go, like- usually his mind is going a mile a minute, and as a political leader and someone who's been on his own most of his life etc he just worries all the time. how to present, gesticulate, speak, what to say, what to do, he's always hyperaware of his own movements (because he has to) and worrying about others and their pleasure and comfort and shit, so to get to just lie back, not move - be unable to move, even - follow orders and be a good boy? that's some A+ shit right there

you know? he doesnt have to be anxious about anything or try to keep his thoughts and movements in check and guess ppl's reactions or even worry if he's just following orders - orders he knows he'll enjoy, that he's agreed to, planned for, with someone that he trusts - and feeling the pleasure that comes from that. a huge part of his usual thoughts is finally muted and that helps him feel relaxed and mellow and get into subspace. which again, he craves, because usually adhd brain is just aaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAA and so subspace is a very welcome and even needed break

even from a neurological standpoint, like... adhd is basically lack of norepinephrine in the brain, and orgasms, especially intense ones, release a lot of that, but I'll try not to nerd out too hard here. tho i might have to go back to that in a minute

isnt it performance art that i had a genius thought that i loved and halfway through finishing the last sentence i just forgot it

oh yeah! thinking specifically about rsd and how this comes into play for someone who's into humiliation kink. there are several psychological analyses that postulate that one of the things attractive about bdsm is that it allows you to explore fears and generally bad situations in a controlled environment. kinda like reading fiction or doing extreme sports. so in that sense bdsm is attractive because it allows you to act on those fears and turn them into something 1- safe, 2- under their control, instead of the other way around, and 3- pleasurable

and like... dont get me wrong it's not that magnus is into being told "ur ugly and no one loves you" or something lmao but in a way humiliation kink is enacting a fantasy of rejection/belittling, except turned inside out? like "you're my good little fucktoy, you were made to be fucked like this, you slut" is degrading and belittling and on the verge of calling someone worthless... except positive. because that's what makes them so great to fuck? so in a way this kind of play flips the tables on many concepts because being a "slut" or a "toy" feels like a compliment. and in this process of degradation you are taking the fear of being worthless and making a scenario where that being true is exactly what makes the person worthwhile

idk i might be reaching a bit here cuz i think im into humiliation that's way more hardcore than i think magnus would be like i straight up enjoy being called worthless lmao but i feel like that makes sense, the way that humiliation/degradation play takes your fear of rejection or shortcoming and is like "but if that were true.... that would make you good" like o shit can't argue with that

and again like.... obviously that's all a very careful line as you're dealing with some sensitive stuff, which is why doms need to go through training to be able to deal with the physical and mental implications of what they're doing. and none of this is conscious of course, i don't think magnus is out there thinking this through deeply or anything, im just saying it's a part of what makes bdsm subconsciously appealing to some ppl. but my point is, rsd might play a part in why magnus is into that mix of praise and humiliation. like i think he needs the praise for reassurance even during play, which alec is more than happy to provide ("you're so beautiful, look at you, so perfect like this, i love you,"), and that kind of play where rejection, praise, and pleasure are all kind of one and the same is appealing because it just makes it all the more overwhelming without actually being negative and your mind is just lost in the almost contradictory stimuli but the pleasure and the positive wins out and you just feel so relaxed and good? yeah

but there's also like, the way that impacts the negative possible outcomes of bdsm. namely, rsd and subdrop

rsd is kind of obvious so i'll try to be brief: it's a sensitive issue and if he's not in the proper headspace for it, it can have the opposite effect and go very wrong very fast, because his reaction to rejection is hyperamplified by it. so if it has the opposite of the desired effect - rejection overpowering praise and pleasure - it might go south so fast he doesnt have the time to yellow. like he can't prevent it before it happens, you know? which is also why i think he wouldn't go Super Deep into humiliation and why the mix with praise is key - which is another way in which they are compatible because alec sure does love praising him

as for subdrop: if you don't know what that is, basically BDSM play is very intense and releases a fuckton of endorphins all at once very fast, so, sometimes, the sub doesn't come down from their orgasm as much as falls facefirst back to earth. meaning, their brain empties itself of endorphins, which leaves them feeling hollow and depressed, sometimes also moody, hypersensitive/prone to crying, fatigued, and just generally bad

which is one of the many reasons aftercare is important! and also proper dom training! with proper aftercare, you can prevent that drop from happening, by keeping the sub feeling positively. reassurance, touch, and other forms to bring physical and/or psychological relief and/or pleasure helps keep their brain from just crashing once the rush of endorphins is over, so it lasts a little longer and they can come down from the high gently. work those neurotransmitters yall! keep them up and running!

so anyway i feel like subdrop is not only a bigger deal for ppl with adhd (because adhd is already a lack of neurotransmitters so fucking up your balance even further is Very Bad), but also more likely to happen if you're not careful, because the "regular" adhd brain already has a lack of neurotransmitters, which keep those endorphins running. so adhd ppl might "run out" of them even easier

NOTE: i'm not affirming that, this is a shot in the dark. i have no data or research to back that up and im nowhere near an expert in neuroscience, i just know the basics. so don't take this part too seriously and definitely don't quote me on it

but anyWAY yeah. my point is, subdrop can be a problem so it’s something that he tries to be prepared for, have some snacks before and after, do proper aftercare, etc. like i said, it’s mostly preventable, although sometimes stuff like this happens even if you do your best. but anyway

and there’s another thing too, which is that one possible sympton of subdrop is feeling rejected and alone. which is super fun when you have rsd! so yeah. subdrop can be very bad for magnus. and like, don’t get me wrong, i’m not saying it happens every time or super frequently or something, but it IS something he has to watch out for possibly more than others haha man thinking about how camille didn’t care about this at ALL. he knows it can be bad, but he’s also learnt how to prevent it for him, and as the healthy bastards that they are, magnus and alec talk about that in length. during alec’s Research™ he comes across that concept and he brings it up with magnus and makes sure that he knows everything there is to know about how and when magnus experiences subdrop and how to deal with that. he also makes magnus promise to let him know if he ever has it, because alec WILL drop everything to go and give him extra care. and it’s sweet

on a better note! BDSM has been shown to be associated with lower levels of rejection sensitivity among practitioners. so that’s nice? like obviously magnus won’t find the cure for his rsd with BDSM or anything, but i like the idea of magnus opening his eyes one day and realizing that hey, ever since alec and i have been doing play more often, i’ve been feeling a little less affected by rejection?

also like, BDSM as a whole helps enhance trust and communication in a relationship (obviously it needs to already be there for the BDSM activities to take place and like please everyone everything i’m saying here is on people who enjoy it. how you perceive these actions is heavily influenced by whether or not you enjoyed them so i’m not saying that BDSM is great for everyone, i’m saying that it’s great for people who are into it. so don’t go thinking BDSM will do your relationship good or something, k? k) for obvious reasons, so that also helps magnus feel more secure you know. so that’s a positive way that these things interact too 

and okay, i think that’s all i have? not that this isn’t gigantic but like you know. i don’t know how to end this other than uh i had fun answering that ask! also, again, i’m not a psychologist or a neuroscientist and there is actually pretty little research on the psychological effects of BDSM as most of the discussion seems to be centered on “is kink a disease?” due to stigmatization, so like, please, i’m doing this for fun, alright? i tried to make it as accurate as possible and also i get Into It and dive deep into research sometimes so while this is a somewhat educated guess, don’t take everything i say here as face value

in short, thanks for asking! 

[weaselandfriends]

Hymnstoke XIII

Have you heard the story of bladekindEyewear the Blind?

In infinite folly, this man strapped knives to his eyeballs, depriving himself of sight. Nonetheless he was known as the wisest man in Homestuck Tumblr, with a wicked pack of classpect analyses. As Homestuck progressed through its lengthy sixth act, he developed a wide sleight of theories as to how it would end and what it would mean when it ended that way, focused most famously on each character's SBURB class and aspect (classpect for portmanteau).

When Homestuck ended, and then ended a second time, he turned out to be wrong.

In a recent post, he made this comment about his wrongness:

BlastYoBoots  04/26/2019:  part of why all my theories were wrong is that they were arrogant and misguided and just all-around regrettable and I thought I "knew" what Andrew morally wanted out of a story when he wasn't after the same thing at all

I bring this tale to your attention not to drag our Sosostris through the mud. In fact, I'd say he's unduly harsh on himself here. He may indeed have had a decent grasp of Hussie's moral purposes regarding Homestuck—in 2013. It has been a long six years since then, during which Hussie followed in the footsteps of other noted New England authors J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon and vanished off the face of the planet. It would be fair to theorize that what Hussie "wanted" out of Homestuck changed considerably in those years. And the truth is, because Hussie has disappeared so utterly, any illusion of knowing his "moral" goals has completely dissipated. It's not even clear at this point how much of the Epilogues he wrote. What statements can possibly be made about authorial intent outside of baseless conjecture?

Mr. Eyewear had the unfortunate position of writing critical analysis of a work that was not yet finished, a position not often imitated by critics throughout the ages. It's relatively easy to look at a work by a long-dead author and make some grand, sweeping statement that "this is what it means." Because the author is literally dead, Death of the Author becomes much less controversial to apply. Even now, after the dust has settled, a new installment of Homestuck may unexpectedly arrive that obliterates any previous critical insight on what Homestuck "meant." Homestuck is ostensibly over, but the Epilogues left plenty of room for continuation.

Someone who read the previous Hymnstoke installments came to me and said (paraphrased), "Do you really think Hussie knows anything about Gnosticism? It's far more likely he googled it and used a few names here and there to sound smart." Thinking about it, I wouldn't be surprised if this turned out to be his modus operandi for the Pale Fire and Waste Land quotes I wrote so lengthily on in previous Hymnstokes as well. Wouldn't it make so much sense if Hussie googled "Literary quotes about April" and put in the Waste Land quote without ever having read the poem, without understanding its historical or literary context?

Would it matter?

Hussie may or may not be ignorant of literary history, or his own literary moment. In that Stanford interview he flatly denied any knowledge of "post-irony." But the author's ignorance doesn't excuse the work from the world. Homestuck itself is rapidly becoming a historical work, fading from the immediate cultural consciousness. Yet it has left a mark. How many works will be created in the coming years that draw heavy inspiration from Undertale, which itself was heavily inspired by Homestuck? And if we take Homestuck's most explicit inspiration to be Earthbound, what works inspired Earthbound? What works inspired the works that inspired Earthbound?

Whether Hussie knows what DFW stands for or not is inconsequential. Homestuck is not a work in a vacuum, neither the beginning nor the end. Con Air, the Greek Zodiac, Insane Clown Posse—whether the reader knows what those things are doesn't matter within the space of Homestuck, because Homestuck invented new meaning out of them all. Whether Hussie, the author, knew what Gnosticism, post-postmodernism, or Dadaism were—I would argue that is similarly inconsequential. Homestuck repurposed all of those -isms, either knowingly or unknowingly, into something new. It is the act of repurposing that is the most important part, not whatever those things were before.

So bladekindEyewear observed Homestuck through the lenses of knives strapped to his eyes. From that perspective, he conceived of what the facts (the text of Homestuck) "meant." I'll also be looking at Homestuck through a certain lens. Neither lens is the same as Hussie's lens. No lens except Hussie's can be Hussie's lens: that is something the postmodernists realized, that "truth" was fragmentary and differed from person to person. Perhaps even different within each person; the Hussie of 2013 may have a different lens than the Hussie of 2019. Put succinctly: No absolute truth exists.

But Homestuck, I feel, moves beyond the problems proposed by postmodernism. In Homestuck, differing lenses, even completely opposite lenses like "irony" and "sincerity," "science" and "magic," "time" and "space," or "author" and "reader" (as seen in the Epilogues) become blurred, indistinguishable, ultimately reconciled as essentially the same thing. It's that reconciliation that I think is Homestuck's most meaty—or candiey—thematic component.

With that in mind, let's continue.

What is under the rug is much worse than any trap you can imagine.

It is a member of a species that you do not recognize, with a ghastly furred upper lip.

I don't even know who this is. Jeff Foxworthy? I guess I might not be a redneck.

Soon these lugs will learn to show you some respect. You made this town what it is after all. Wasn't nothin' but a bunch of dust and rocks before you got here.

Okay. I was right. I knew it, all along when I was reading the Epilogues I knew something was off. I felt certain, and now it's been confirmed for me.

Homestuck does not use smart apostrophes, while the Epilogues did.

For those not in the know, a smart apostrophe is curved based on the text that comes around it, like so: ’

A regular apostrophe, by comparison, is not curved: '

As you can see in the quoted text, Homestuck proper uses your regular dumb apostrophes. Which is good, because smart apostrophes are the devil. They frequently get slanted the wrong direction and conflict aesthetically with Homestuck's monospaced, geometric Courier font. Yet all throughout the Epilogues, smart apostrophes are used. It drove me insane. I hate those things.

Can't overthink this time stuff.

I guess I should actually talk about the Intermission. Internally, it's pretty straightforward, borrowing liberally from Problem Sleuth. But what exactly is its purpose? Yes, on a purely plot level, elements of the Intermission return in Act 5. Spades Slick remains a character who exists all the way until Collide, although he is one of the unfortunate casualties of Act 6's awful ending and is too dead to get any kind of relevancy redemption in the Epilogues, unlike similarly extraneous Act 6 characters Jane and Jake.

Fundamentally, then, the relevance of the Intermission extends only as far as Cascade, with elements malingering longer but never amounting to anything new. Many things will extend only as far as Cascade, which eventually becomes Homestuck's midpoint. In earlier Hymnstokes, I mentioned a few times that I didn't think I had much to say about Act 5. I said that because, while Act 5 is impressive from a technical standpoint, it's a lot less dense in meaning compared to early Homestuck or Act 6. It functions a lot like a machine with many perfectly-placed parts (or rather, parts that were retroactively made to look perfectly placed, depending on how improvisational you think Hussie wrote) that slot together like a machine, rifle, or clock to create a flawless cascade of storytelling. I'll talk more about this kind of "clockwork storytelling" when I actually get to Act 5, but for now one might consider the entire Intermission to be one of those perfectly-placed pieces, and the Spades Slick storyline culminates in Cascade to slot alongside the other pieces in a satisfying way.

One might also interpret the Intermission as a primer for certain elements that will become important in Homestuck proper, such as the aforementioned "time stuff" that gets its first real exploration here before becoming a convoluted but finely-wrought entanglement in Acts 4 and 5. Toss in vague foreshadowing to Lord English and the Intermission's existence is at least purposeful, regardless of whether one considers it necessary.

But what about structurally? I mentioned in the previous Hymnstoke that the Intermission is similar to Act 5 Act 1 and Act 6 Act 1 in that it dramatically downscales the tension, introduces a slew of new characters, and shakes up the tone of the story. Each of these three parts are nostalgic for "Old Homestuck," the Homestuck that is more like Problem Sleuth, and they feature many text commands and faffery like what you see in Act 1. By juxtaposition, then, each emphasizes how far Homestuck has developed across its run, and the differences only become more striking each successive iteration.

The Intermission is probably the fragmenting point. In Homestuck proper, there are no more kids to introduce. John, Rose, Dave, Jade, for each of them we've cycled through the database-structured INTERESTS and INSTRUMENTS and WEIRD PARENTAL FIGURES. Bit by bit that kind of content will vanish in favor of a new sort of storytelling, and the Intermission is where it becomes obvious that this is happening. Jade's introduction already subverted most of the established tropes, and the Intermission reads like a parody of them, with the Midnight Crew's set of traits being plaintively ridiculous (each keeping a different kind of candy in their backup hat, each having a different kind of smutty material, et cetera). Act 5 Act 1 will also be parodic in its approach to these database traits, but I think in a less effective way, as the differences between the kids and the trolls are less extreme than the differences between the kids and the Midnight Crew. Furthermore, the Intermission really drives the nail into the coffin of Problem Sleuth, severing Homestuck finally from its predecessor. Act 6 Act 1, by comparison, is more of a wistful yearning for Act 1 than any kind of new take—which might itself be meaningful in the grand scheme of things.

Still, it might come in handy down the road. Lord English is supposedly indestructible. He's rumored to be killable only through a number of glitches and exploits in spacetime. The doll may ultimately help you work the system if it comes to that.

This line, along with the way Problem Sleuth ended, was probably the primary driver that led to people expecting a final boss fight with Lord English on par with the one with Mobster Kingpin. Although the Epilogues were a fantastic ending, it's still underwhelming to think about just how poorly-conceived Collide and Act 7 turned out to be. Of course, the Problem Sleuth sort of ending is definitely more of a "clockwork" storytelling style, and Act 6, as has become clear by now, has a much different style.

Dirk, the ultimate inheritor of the clockwork style—he specifically describes storytelling in terms of machines—has as one of his INTERESTS robotics and technology. Lord English, likewise, is surrounded by a clockwork motif. Of course, these characters will eventually become explicitly linked via the method of Lord English's creation. But unlike many other INTERESTS, which turn out to be irrelevant, this machinery fascination ties in to Homestuck's final thematic dichotomy. But more on that when we reach the Epilogues.

29/1000 CLOCKS DESTROYED

I guess we know what side of the dichotomy Spades is on.

This is the same calendar Dirk has in his apartment in Act 6. I remember I once had this theory that the Midnight Crew would be reunited at the end of Homestuck even though the B2 Hegemonic Brute was dead because it would be revealed that Hearts Boxcars was still in Dirk's calendar and would come out riding Dirk's mini Maplehoof.

I don't know why I had this oddly specific theory, and it was probably obvious it wouldn't happen.

And thus ends the intermission, with an eye toward the next bizarre deviation in the storyline (Act 5 Act 1).

It's been awhile since I last read Homestuck. My memory of Act 4 is dodgy, so I might actually stumble upon something new. But as I mentioned earlier, the Intermission is the big, obvious breakpoint between the old, Problem Sleuth style of Homestuck and the new, clockwork style. The database-driven character creation will gradually fall away (minus a parodic revival in Act 5 Act 1) and narrative elements will become more consistently introduced with an eye specifically toward Cascade. For many people, this is when Homestuck starts to "get good," and I think it's because there's something innately satisfying about a finely-crafted machine slotting into place. There is a kind of intrinsic beauty about it, art for art's sake if you will, and that is also what seems to draw Dirk toward it.

But more next time.

[egdocument]

About the EvaGeeks wiki and why you shouldn't trust it, concerning mainly one user.

On the subject of EvaGeeks: Let’s talk about the manipulation of information on the wiki, and perpetuated “nastiness” on the forums that has persisted for several years now. THIS IS A MIRROR OF THIS GOOGLE DOCS FILE. (My twitter post.) You can share this post or the original document freely, use parts of it, etc. I want this document to simply serve as a warning to new Eva fans and those less familiar with EvaGeeks and their history - as well as an update for people who haven’t seen the current state of it.

NOTE: If you can’t read any of these images, these are Imgur albums containing all of the notable ones: https://imgur.com/a/z2mGvvX https://imgur.com/a/oAgufc3

The intent of this document is not to “take down” the wiki or forum, obviously. The intent is simply to inform people of the dangers of trusting this site with their Eva info. It might be the best we have but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve it. I would actually love to see a more community cultivated version of the site with less biased information, but I fear that will never happen. The anxieties of any one (or many) individual(s), which have prevented consistent change until now are well justified, and it is not within reason to blame the outsiders for never bothering to correct the myriad of issues with the wiki. Please extend kindness to other Eva fans and approach sites like EvaGeeks with the appropriate scrutiny, if you aren’t already. We’re divided enough as it is.

Before I begin, I must state: All of the information presented is publicly available, either through main pages, chat logs or history. And yes, the link to join the Discord server and verify the information given in this is publicly available too. I will not link it myself, as I want to avoid any possible harassment of the users I speak about here. Harassment is NEVER the answer in any kind of conflict. This behaviour I don’t believe can go unchecked, but that doesn’t mean the consequences of it should be any kind of conflict towards any user. I will be naming them here so you are aware, but I really do have to advise you, as a reminder, DO NOT HARASS OR ENGAGE WITH THEM. The rule of thumb is that these issues are more systematic than you might think, and blaming or taking it out on a singular person or even a whole group is never justified. Targeted harassment, even with reason, especially never helps to remedy an issue, because it forces the person to double down on their behaviour and beliefs. Causing unnecessary pain to a person is never okay, and the ‘offences’ committed here aren’t deserving of it in the first place. Please also consider the feelings of the people who use the server and EvaGeeks site; not everyone is your "enemy" or your "target" (and frankly, no-one should be) and despite the feelings echoed in this document, EG is not a monolith of a singular opinion or belief.

The purpose of this document is to inform people of the ways EvaGeeks fails objectivity and has existed to push narratives and exclude outsiders for far too long. With new people coming into the Eva fandom (and there of course being others who have been around for quite a while but just aren't aware) I feel like now is the best time I could write this.

As for what prompted this, an anonymous member of the Discord server contacted me regarding the behaviour of one particular user they were concerned about. Said user had expressed considerable bias in the past and was admitting to making large edits to pages on the wiki very recently, and the person who contacted me felt unequipped to bring the issue to light themselves.

A decent amount of this document will be dedicated to presenting said user's contributions - while I feel someone always had to address the EvaGeeks Problem at large, it doesn't help that this user has essentially incriminated himself here to expose the problem in its entirety. 

There is quite a bit of pretense I must discuss before I get into the subject of the wiki pages themselves. I suggest you read all of it; the start of the wiki section will be in heading text if you’d like to skip to it. I’m sure information on the biased editing of wiki pages is privy to anyone who has used the server or the site itself, but at the server’s current status of 60 entire members, I know not everyone has, or is aware of what the problem actually is. Please note that the person who contacted me has requested anonymity and I will be complying. I will not include screenshots of their conversation with me, and anything I quote from them will be paraphrased so nobody can go full Sherlock and analyse their typing patterns. It sounds silly and it’s probably just paranoia, but they shared my concern here. Any conflict we can prevent is for the best. EvaGeeks, of course, has a culture very much promoting the idea that it’s the “number 1 source for all things Eva”, and for English speaking fans it definitely is - you’d be surprised the amount of people who still, after all these years, think this site is consistently reputable. For the sake of context, I’m going to assume that you are not all that familiar with the site’s history or nature, so I’m going to provide a little bit of information about it for those without any first-hand experience. The forums in particular cultivate a very join-us-or-get-out type community, where those who dare to go against the grain get incentivised to leave the site; they’ll claim this isn’t the case if asked and obviously the site is NOT a hivemind but that doesn’t mean it’s not insular. I can vouch for myself and many others who refuse to go in more than a few threads for fear of discussion turning particularly nasty. Even the server member who came to me about this has stated they feel it “might not be a hivemind but it sure feels that way.” Silencing dissent, even when officially-backed, is part of their culture. You don’t have to personally harass everyone who has an opposing thought to you for it to not feel acceptable, you just need to have a history of mocking those who do. If you want some previous, notable cases of “discussion turning nasty”, here’s some off the top of my head: 1. The AWL Incident - In which ADV VA of Rei and director of EoE dub, Amanda Winn-Lee, joined the forums for discussion and was promptly harassed by a user. Most of these messages have been deleted but you can view what remains of her post history here.  2. Recently brought to my attention: upon beginning translation of the Episode 24 drafts, EG forum user LiLi was subjected to incentive to leave, mostly in the form of homophobic disgust in replies to her thread or others they were mentioned in. Any information that goes against the cultivated narrative, even when it is literally officially licensed content, is only ever considered with a degree of reluctance. The fact these drafts co-exist with other pages concerned with this episode is almost a miracle. You can find plenty of repeat instances of the above if you want to (more to do with homophobia and misogyny than outward hostility, but honestly it’s the same thing.) A look at basically any EvaGeeks thread concerning pairings or the female characters will unearth a variety of awful comments from many other users, not that that would be surprising to anyone who has spent more than two minutes in the fandom. Now, of course, that’s very relevant to the topic at hand even if it doesn’t seem to be. The EG wiki and forum have quite a bit of overlap and circular influence on each other as you’ll see later if you aren’t already aware of it. For a short summary before we jump into things and analyse our subject of the day, this essentially means that anyone with an opinion or information the majority doesn’t like will never get in a position good enough to edit the wiki and keep the edits there. This has resulted in many articles filled with conjecture and fan speculation that serve to shut down other viewpoints, whether it’s intentional or not.

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ON THE TOPIC OF THE EVAGEEKS WIKI

The issue surrounding homophobia and downplaying of references to LGB content in Eva, through proxy of fan-dictated content control and translation is not a new one by any stretch of the imagination. I'm sure you're all very well aware. It’s far from the only issue present in the fandom but it will be our subject of conversation today. Any ‘one instance’ of this persistent behaviour from Eva fans is never going to be enough to summarise how insurmountable it really is, though, so today I instead draw your attention to one user of the wiki who goes by the name of FelipeFritschF and his recent, frequent updates to pages concerning Nagisa Kaworu.

[TOPIC: FELIPEFRITSCHF]

I must reiterate here: although this document is mostly concerned with this user and will contain a number of receipts from various places, it is NOT supposed to function as a hit piece or inspire any kind of mob. Leave this guy the hell alone, just be aware that he’s the one making most of these changes and isn’t a particularly impartial party, to put things lightly.

Now, before we really get into things, it should be stated that the EvaGeeks wiki requires approval to get your edits there, as stated at the bottom of the homepage, here:

This means that anyone making consistent edits to the wiki has in fact been approved, and this isn’t the result of lack of maintenance.  

What you’ll find is that it is consistently Felipe making edits to the pages in question. Kaworu’s bio page, for example, is almost entirely edited by Felipe, which we can see from the “History” tab of the article.

This is barely half of his edits made in the last few days. Take a scroll through it yourself if you’re so inclined. This hilarious bit of waffle was added by Felipe a few days ago and since revised since by him, as shown here. 

(As an added bit of comedy, the man who decided to add in the Japanese in the first place apparently didn’t know the difference between 好意 (kindness, what Kaworu actually says) and 行為 (action). It’s been fixed since but I still think it’s quite funny.) Now, as anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of Japanese knows, 好き is not actually a very ambiguous word at all. I think it goes without saying, though, and I’m not here to have an argument about translations with you all (for the record, Kanemitsu’s now scarily infamous translation of this scene is perfectly fine with me in a vacuum, it’s just literally everything else surrounding it that’s the problem. Also, regretfully, I will have to speak about this nonsense later when it becomes relevant.) I’m using this as an example instead, to show how utterly ridiculous this guy’s additions to these pages are. He’s not even making a point here. It keeps going past this excerpt, and I suggest you read the whole thing (Kaworu’s page is linked above.) The point of bringing this up - and when I eventually discuss the Netflix translation when it’s necessary - is not to complain about semantics, although I’d argue that’s what’s happening in these articles, honestly. It’s just helpful when proving the actual point of the editor being incredibly unreliable and biased in how he phrases and omits things.

On the page dedicated solely to Shinji and Kaworu’s relationship (which is basically identical to their section on Kaworu’s page as far as I can tell), we can see that Felipe has also edited this several times, and even credits himself with expanding the version on the Evangelion Fandom Wiki now copy and pasted back to EvaGeeks.

The kind of “discussion” (very much not discussion when added to a wiki page supposedly presented as factual information, is it, frankly?) would be fine if it was happening in the EvaGeeks forum itself (and happen does it ever, but that doesn’t change the inappropriateness of this particular behaviour.) What I find disturbing is that in the past few days, this user has gone out of his way to make some already worrying articles even worse, presumably in an attempt to silence discourse, or add more fuel to the flames, surrounding the new Netflix translation. He has a whole page on that one, too, one which is very up-to-date in some regards and not at all in others, despite only being added a few days before me compiling this information. Frankly, going through this whole page on its own is a huge waste of my time considering how BLATANT it is in its biases, but I’ll do it anyway. It IS only a Theory and Analysis page (which is essentially an EvaGeeks free-for-all), but I think it’s quite bothering that the site even allows Theory and Analysis pages that consider only one viewpoint and are written by one person. The forum, presumably, is connected to the site for a reason. 

I’m just going to link it here, for the sake of brevity. https://wiki.evageeks.org/Theory_and_Analysis:Kaworu%27s_lines_in_Episode_24 I suggest you read this before continuing. For a slight departure, the original theatrical Funimation dub of 3.0 is partially available for viewing online, although the audio is in cam quality so you may want headphones if you have plans to watch what’s there. The home media dub’s major changes are to issues with lore and localisation of jargon. While not directly mentioned in this article, it is implied from the subject that this is what it’s about; it’s been speculated that the very literal translation of Episode 24 in particular has come about due to Khara’s embarrassment with how Funimation’s theatrical dub of 3.0 handled Kaworu and Shinji’s relationship rather loosely. Despite these claims, every instance of the two sharing (honestly pretty awkward and unnecessary) flirtatious back-and-forths are still present in the home media version, barring an instance in the stargazing scene where Kaworu’s dialogue was translated even worse than it is in the final dub. If you don’t believe me, do the comparisons yourself. It may not be conclusive, but I think it puts mostly to death the rumour that “a Khara employee was there and saw how people laughed at the Kaworu and Shinji scenes and demanded it needed to be changed for the final release and now that’s being reflected on the new translation”, which is what it tends to boil down to. 

It also goes without saying that NO ONE PERSON is “the most qualified” (holy shit, is this entry not even bothering to hide how biased it is) to translate an entire TV show, let alone something like Evangelion. Let us not forget that Kanemitsu’s claims that he respects “ambiguity” are not even true to begin with. EvaGeeks itself is a shining example of Eva fans, of which Kanemitsu is one and this is even discussed in the article, not being impartial enough to be tasked with discussing Evangelion! (There is obviously issue with citing the ADV translation as a source of all truth; if you read further into the thread on my tweet [the kitchen scene in EoE], I provide extra context for those interested, which I am aware has been spread around Discord and other places without that context included. Of course, I’m not an unbiased source either as you can probably tell from my tweets nor am I claiming to be, so please feel free to discuss these things in other places if you want. I’ve just got the tweets I have on hand here. Sorry about that.) Next, the repeat claim that this is “Khara’s licensed translation and thus the most accurate version” is pretty obviously nonsense; I’m sure I don’t need to point out to the audience that Japanese companies meddling in localisation has ended poorly in the past, or that Khara uses questionable translations from the dubs of the Rebuild films on licensed merch from time-to-time, or that the translation was fairly obviously not overseen or even QA’d by anyone following Kanemitsu’s translation work judging from the myriad of grammatical errors, missing subtitles and overly literal, poor sounding phrasing present in the final work. (Do I need to source this? Just watch the damn thing.) It’s not even like the ways it was translated have been consistent through different versions on Netflix; some were translated from Kanemitsu’s English to other languages judging from the obvious mistakes being present in multiple tracks, and some were barely even translated at all - the Italian version, the dub of which is mysteriously now missing, was so bad people were commenting that it sounded like Shakespeare or that it was translated word for word from Japanese. I dunno about you, the reader, but something about “Khara only bothered to check very rigorously the English version for their specific requests with the translation” doesn’t sound like what really happened to me. It’s more like they’ve just sent a translator they have worked with before to work on a project of theirs. Apologies for engaging in speculation, but that’s all this whole article is anyway. It’s just something I noticed from skimming through the page, but I find it quite interesting that Felipe makes a blanket statement about the excerpts from Schizo and Prano “being wrongly attributed to Anno” and then the source he provides for that is just someone on the EvaGeeks forums saying the same thing with little proper sourcing, when that was never really the intent of their post anyway. An interview summary exists where Anno has stated he wrote both books himself, and if you haven’t seen it, here it is. It’s obviously flimsy at best, but Tokyo Otaku Mode is an officially licensed Evangelion distributor. If Felipe is going to parade around his love for the Very Official Khara Subtitles Of NGE he can at least extend the same gratitude to other forms of official information; I mean, frankly, this article is about as reputable as anything in the Netflix subtitles are.  Lastly, another thing I found quite interesting is his strange love for the ADV VHS subtitles. I really, really think this is obvious, but subtitles changed in later versions of the ADV release were changed because they were deemed incorrect. I don’t have sources for this so take it with an absolute grain of salt but I believe there’s even a commentary track on the Platinum release where the translator talks in depth about why she translated episode 24 as she did. It’s not exactly a better word than Kanemitsu’s, but if we��re considering translator’s word as law for whatever reason like Felipe is here, we might as well consider hers, too, right? Oh, and actually, have a look at the sources used on that article. Most of the sweeping statements he makes have absolutely no backing beyond what he’s piecing together from old and irrelevant interviews (when discussing the Netflix translation) as well as...linking Kanemitsu’s job history...I mean, sure, the guy is qualified, but do I really need to go over this again?

INTERMISSION: Speaking of sources, you might have noticed from perusing these articles yourself that EvaGeeks has a very low standard for sourcing to begin with, which is likely partially to blame for how things like these articles can even exist in their current forms in the first place. A site that doesn’t have such a lenient policy on sourcing, though, is Wikipedia. Felipe, of course, cannot stay within the confines of the fandom and has decided to have a go at providing some information to Kaworu’s actual Wikipedia page as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Kaworu_Nagisa&action=history Felipe is far less to blame for the state of Kaworu’s Wikipedia article, which is honestly pretty bad to begin with. There have been plenty of other people editing this one and the rather homophobic “Relationship with Shinji” part of the article has been present for a while before he started editing it. (The fact this article literally uses someone being explicitly homophobic as a source is not surprising for Eva fandom, but holy shit, am I disgusted every time I reopen this page. I'm not even going to bother figuring out who added that one.) I do wonder if his reasons for not desecrating this page the same way he has on EvaGeeks is because he knows it wouldn’t stay up for particularly long. Reminder that he is also the main editor of the same pages on the Evangelion Fandom Wiki, which is essentially a copy and paste of EvaGeeks. Of note is this little tidbit I found:

This is what Felipe then deleted, as this is apparently not relevant, despite literally being about Kaworu’s relationship with Shinji. I mean, I’m sure this could have been put in somewhere else and perhaps phrased a bit better, but why the hell would you outright delete that kind of information? It’s supposed to be a wiki, not your own personal opinion chamber. BTW, this is the thread post he links as a rebuttal to that person adding it, and it’s probably for the best it’s presented here with context: https://forum.evageeks.org/post/886380/NGE-Ep24-Script-First-and-Second-Drafts/#886380

He clearly thinks he has a point here, but I’m not sure what exactly he’s going for. Basically everything he’s saying is conjecture, and while I can kinda see where he’s coming from it sure does completely fail to address the intent as explained in this interview. “Read the whole interview” is very dismissive, especially when the interview in full doesn’t exactly contradict the initial point. It does say quite a bit, how he will disregard official information when his wiki articles themselves are full of nothing but rambling.

Here’s another relevant and quite funny Discord screenshot:

Felipe is making a pretty hypocritical statement here. I’m sure he does have a point - there’s probably been quite a bit of vandalism happening to these pages which isn’t exactly surprising (again, Eva fans are not often rational people, please be honest with ourselves). That being said, I think there’s a particular irony to the man who has written many very, very long paragraphs on the wiki pages he has control over trying to stop people from thinking there might be anything but “ambiguity” between a pair he doesn’t like.

In the case anyone reading has forgotten: the purpose of a wiki should be to provide unbiased information on the material it discusses. Obviously the repeating of “innocuous” statements about how “ambiguous” it all is, in the vain of EG’s now made fun of ‘we don’t know what he really meant by that’ and ‘why Kaworu is so intent for Shinji alone to have happiness remains a mystery’  are pretty obviously intended to downplay the very, very obvious “subtext” and leagues of official information provided.

It kinda goes without saying that WE CAN INFER THESE THINGS FROM THE ACTUAL INFORMATION ON THE WIKI, you don’t need to add a disclaimer to everything going “well we just don’t know what it means!” (even in instances when we do know what it means, but that’s almost besides the point). You don’t need to add in these statements, unless you’re trying to sway people into ignoring what's presented by the show. If you want people to draw their own conclusions, you are in fact capable of presenting information without commentary - in fact, that's kind of the whole point of a wiki. Yes, Eva is ambiguous at times, but talking down to people like they need this reminded to them constantly is an absolute waste of time and energy. It’s almost as if the editor has been trying to cultivate a narrative and has been getting away with it because you can’t really prove these statements are biased unless you do the research. (I mean, you can from context, but it certainly hasn’t done much to get them removed, has it?)

You can view the editing history of any given EvaGeeks article on their own pages if you want to see just how many times these things have been added in by Felipe. And obviously, no, it isn’t just his fault - there are other users, several, in fact, credited with the editing of these pages, many of the edits serving the same point as Felipe’s paragraphs on “ambiguity”. He’s just the most concrete example of a biased editor. Also, yes, I do recognise this has all happened within the few days post the release of Eva on Netflix and that it was likely prompted by that. But we know at least one of the mods is aware of it given how Felipe talks about it in the EvaGeeks Discord server. It’s also quite funny I’ve seen people linking these pages like they're some kind of "gotcha" in response to tweets discussing the new translation, as if they haven’t been invented out of thin air in the past few days.

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Now, frankly I’m sick of staring at EvaGeeks, and if you want any more information on these articles and others with instances of the same thing happening, you can have a look at it yourself.

Originally, this document contained far more screenshots from Felipe. My desire for this to not turn into a hit piece has lead me to remove a great deal of these messages. I do suggest, if you want to, you join the server and make your own conclusions. Even beyond what the member told me about I found myself agreeing with him fairly frequently when he was being reasonable - this doesn't change my concerns regarding the presentation of information on the wiki, though. The anonymous member was mostly concerned about this user having basically all the control over Kaworu's wiki articles, seeing as he has far too high of a stake in everything. Not all of these messages are inflammatory or even necessarily bad or wrong, but I find that to anyone privy to the “revelations” about the EvaGeeks Wiki here, they paint an interesting story, to say the least.

It’s starting to sound like he perhaps has just had some bad experiences. The following few messages are part of the same conversation.

I find it interesting how he flipflops from not understanding anything about the whole Eva Parallelism Theory Thing to suddenly being all for it when it concerns things not about the gay stuff.

Comments on how ‘manipulative’ Kaworu is

Because Kaworu is very pro instrumentality, and this definitely isn’t just a theory, I mean, it’s even talked about on the wiki, guys! (And I’m not even touching on the yes-men in this server.) Oh.

Oh no.

For the record, this page is clearly still under construction, and to point out any one thing about how bad it is would be essentially just poking a stick at a beehive. At least this one is so absolutely poorly phrased it’s doubtful anyone could mistake it for any kind of proper information. I also find it incredibly funny whenever pages on the wiki use the forum as a source. Relevant: Qmisato’s post on his defending of Shinji sexually assaulting Asuka: https://qmisato.tumblr.com/post/183082754484/yesterday-i-was-invited-to-evageeks-official

In response much later. I really can’t see it as being framed as “fun teenage romance”, also why is the word romance suddenly being used to talk about Asuka and Shinji after the whole debacle with Kaworu? He’s said before he doesn’t see Asuka and Shinji’s relationship as romantic, either (and GOOD! It’s not!)

(Also - it’s not sexual assault when Shinji tries to kiss Asuka in her sleep, but it IS when Kaworu does the exact same thing to Shinji? Make up your mind, dude.) Turning this sort of thing into Shipping Discourse is frankly not the right way to go about it, but it is perhaps notable that despite what Felipe says, he is in fact an Asushin shipper. (I don’t feel the need to post all these images in the document as its cluttered enough as it is.) At this point it’s rather adhom and I feel irrelevant but I do think it’s relevant that through all of Eva fandom, those who have the most issue “understanding” (more like accepting, I suppose) LGB subtext, are those who also are really attached to a fairly morally grey het pairing themselves. Again, seriously, there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this and assuming the worst of someone because of the pairings they like isn’t my intent here, it’s more that I find this pattern has always been prevalent and it’s bothering me I’m seeing it STILL in 2019. ESPECIALLY from a wiki editor who inserts so much of that into his work on the site. 

  You’re probably sick of reading all of this (and I’m getting sick of writing it), so I’ll wrap up the part on Felipe quickly: Yes, I just dedicated several pages to screenshots of mostly innocuous (when considered out of context) stuff one guy had to say. I feel more obsessive than I’d like to admit, and frankly I have no business with this person. We’ve spoken twice on EvaGeeks threads if you can even call it speaking. This task was given to me by a member of the community who was concerned about his behaviour but didn’t want to publicise it themself and I feel a little out of my depth here. I at least hope we can come to the conclusion I wanted to here, that I fear may have been lost in this whole great mess of language - no one person should have THIS much sway over the state of a wiki that’s supposed to be impartial, especially when they have not been quiet with their biases in the first place, and it is the failure of everyone involved in the maintaining of the wiki itself that this sort of behaviour has been allowed in the first place. 

The guy can have whatever opinions and theories he wants, obviously. I don't give a shit; he's not even that bad compared to the grand majority of Eva fans to begin with. Don't think this document exists to "cancel" him or thoughtpolice, I truly, genuinely, do not care what is said inside this server anymore. It doesn't concern me. I mean, it's a fucking cartoon, for god's sake. This only becomes an issue when opinions are expressed on a wiki, for reasons I have reiterated many times now. EvaGeeks lacks the objectivity required to function as a wiki and I'm trying to make that clear. 

[ON THE TOPIC OF THE EVAGEEKS WIKI AND COMMUNITY IN GENERAL] As for who can edit the wiki and what they’re allowed to say: As you can see from the nature of people’s posts in this thread, you’re given access to do very specific things, and although I haven’t bothered going through the process myself (as I find it would be quite redundant, trying to fix such an inherently broken system), I’m guessing it’s very easy to get your edits reversed if you post anything they don’t like. Take that as conjecture of my own.

I have it in decent faith that the approval process involves whoever of the mod team is there at the time coming to an agreement based on people’s applications. Obviously this is a decent idea for a system, and I’m sure there are legitimate reasons as to why EG has to be locked down as much as it is; judging from the state of other fanon wikis I’ve seen there’s likely to be a decent amount of vandalism, especially in a fandom as passionate as Eva’s is. However, I think it’s fair to say that the complete restriction of updating these pages to those approved by a mod team who, while I’m sure are very reasonable people overall, certain individuals of which have displayed concerning behaviour and biases of their own in the server during my brief look around. I won’t be naming anyone in particular from the mod team as I don’t feel like I need to add any more targets of shame to this already horrifically negative document, but I have gotten the general impression (in case it needed confirmation, following the remaining of these specific changes on the wiki) that some mods, not all, aren’t the most nonpartisan individuals themselves. I do happen to be decent acquaintances with at least one of them so, again, please don’t consider this a personal attack.

My concern here plainly is that I don’t think a group of mods who have routinely failed to prevent events like the ones mentioned earlier, nor seem to have much of an issue with the myriad of examples of people being openly homophobic and misogynistic on their own forum are really in the position to be choosing who of the Privelleged Few get to control the Eva meta-narrative here. As I was writing this, I was alerted to the state of the primary Japanese Evangelion wiki as a source of cross referencing for what these things can look like if done right. If you take a moment to browse it, even if you don’t speak any Japanese and have to use an automatic translator it should be very obvious how something like this differs greatly from EvaGeeks. Kaworu’s page, for a relevant example, doesn’t have present any of the nonsense statements about ambiguity or overwritten descriptions of everything. The wiki respects the reader’s intelligence enough to know that it is, in fact, a wiki, and thus tries its best to be factual. His page is fairly decent in size and states things we know are fact rather than theory. There’s no attempt made to influence or confuse.

Oh, and just in case you think the mods aren’t actually active or present enough to know what Felipe is doing, his particularly awful page on Kaworu in episode 24 got a shoutout from the official Twitter account two days ago.  

If you are going to join the Discord server to verify things yourself* or do further digging, again, please be cautious of other users inside and do your best not to start anything. I am an occasional contributor to the forums and I’d prefer not to get my account flagged or to experience harassment myself, if any EvaGeeks members are still reading this document and disagree with my conclusions. I may not have posted much since I joined earlier this year, but despite everything I find the forums to be valuable for connecting with other fans and have enjoyed the positive feedback to my SIRP translation! Those who have spoken to me there have been very kind (including Felipe himself), and I must reiterate that this is not targeted at the whole site, or even at just Felipe. I simply believe there is more than enough evidence to suggest there have been consistent, systematic failures to recognise and correct the utter lack of objectivity present. I seriously don’t have any personal issues or beef with this guy, either. I wouldn’t have done this if it wasn’t someone else who came to me about it.

*It should be noted that the person who spoke to me has pointed out certain members have been concerned about outsiders joining and screenshotting the chat. They may remove the public link to join if this document were to cause a huge issue. I will leave the server following the publication of this document and I have no plans to join again. I can’t speak for those who may join of their own accord but I do hope people have heeded the disclaimer I made initially.

Thankyou to all the people who have extended their own kindness and support during the creation of this document, to the anonymous person who tipped me off and the lovely Eva analysts I know for offering their own experiences with EvaGeeks and further supplementary information. If this whole document reads like the product of a bad mental health day, I guess it is. Also yes I know how hilarious it is that I’ve spent all this time creating what essentially amounts to an EVAGEEKS CALLOUT POST but I mean. Someone had to say it. Why not make an utter buffoon of myself in the process?

[bonearenaofmyskull]

How does one write meta? I am someone who is terrible at critical analyses and has trouble even finding themes in books (eng lit was hell for me!!) but I would love write meta for shows/movies. I just don't know what to look for and how to break it down. Please help me, if you don't mind! I want to be able to articulate/explain why I like or don't like and what I think about the work, character, relationship or topic. I feel like I need a guideline. Also how do you know if a work has substance?

Uh…….

Welp, if all your years of education including, evidently, college hasn’t taught you how to critically read a text (written or media) and write about it in a way that you feel confident in, then I seriously doubt there’s anything I can say in a single post to instill that confidence. That said, I can say what and how I do it, more or less. 

1. Watch the thing. A lot. And then some more. 

My typical schedule for when Hannibal aired in S2 (I wasn’t posting regularly in S1 and S3 was over summer so my schedule got shot all to hell) was to watch the episode the night it aired (Friday), read the questions I’d get about it in my inbox, watch it again right after, get up in the morning on Saturday and read the next set of questions, watch it AGAIN, start drafting answers, and watch it again at least once more that day and two or three times on Sunday. I would get an Amazon copy of the episode so when I wrote anything about any detail in it, I would go find that spot and rewatch it again, maybe two or three times. So my meta responses, unless it was something super quick and easy, typically had no less than five viewings. After the end of a week, no less than ten or twelve. 

At this point, I’ve watched “Aperitif” 27 times just for my job. Overall I think it’s around 70. Meta is time-consuming.

(A small tangent: This–along with the fact that each ask I answered tended to spawn two or three more asks–is something that informed my occasional testiness when someone would come along, say something inaccurate that would mislead or confuse people, and then, when I would say something to them about it, would say, “This is only my opinion!” or “I’m not writing for school!” or “I’ve only watched it once and I just wanted to share my feelings!” or “All interpretations are valid and equal!” Well, some of us are putting in a lot of time and effort into our interpretations and into helping people understand things before and in the process of publishing meta, and others’ lack of these directly makes my work more difficult and time-consuming. It’s frustrating.)

2. Look for patterns.

Hannibal has fairly obvious patterns because Bryan Fuller is many things, but–generally speaking–subtle he is not. So you see the same lines repeated (”They know”), the same images repeated (eyeballs with reflections), the same strains of music (go go Brian Reitzell), the same general topics (transformation, consumption, the human propensity for violence, God), and so forth. But this is true in all texts: if it bears repeating, it will bear examining. This is where themes (in books or otherwise) come from, along with the kinds of lessons that characters learn (or should have learned) through their experiences. 

3. Back up your opinions with text.

If you can’t back it up with text, you don’t have meta. You have headcanon. And sometimes headcanons are just wrong interpretations not because anything in the text directly counters them them, but because multiple things point toward countering them. Interpretations are fine, but they need to have multiple and/or significant portions of text to support them. 

I occasionally get into “the author is dead” debates with people, but as a rule of thumb, if you want to maintain any respectability in this endeavor, imo it’s worthwhile to look at a thing from the perspective of what you think the authors (including actors, directors, writers, etc) were trying to accomplish, and then look for details that support that. So like the “Bedelia cut off her own leg” argument–in the sense that you can’t definitively argue that she didn’t cut off her own leg, since they don’t show on screen who did, the claim that she cut it off herself is weaker than the claim that Hannibal and/or Will did it for her. There are pieces of evidence that imply that Hannibal and/or Will did it, but there is only conjecture to support that Bedelia herself did (”she could have…” this that, or the other). You cannot argue from an absence of evidence, and the evidence of an author’s thinking will be there, in the details. 

4. Study, look things up, and learn to write and argue. 

If Hannibal decides to quote Nietzsche, it don’t matter that you ain’t read Nietzsche in twenty-odd years and never read that particular piece at all. Go do your research, cuz somebody gonna ask. Not only that, but somebody gonna read that shit that is a fuggin philosophy major, so you better get your goddam ducks in a sweet little tidy row. 

Read what other people write about the topic you want to write about. If you want to write MCU meta, get your ass in the MCU meta tag (or whatever it is that they use) and read what people are saying. Some of them are going to be hella smart and help you understand things you didn’t know you misunderstood.

Same with writing. Learn to do that shit, if you don’t know already, on all levels: we’re dealing with ideas here, but there are also organization, voice, sentence fluency, word choice, and conventions. Reread and edit your shit. I recommend being linear in your organization–I’ve known people who wrote beautiful meta that you wouldn’t ever get any sense of what the point is till the absolute end. Don’t do that to people. Make a point, support it, draw a conclusion. Writing 101 stuff.

Learn to recognize logical fallacies so that you don’t do them when you don’t want to, and so that when you do want to, you can hide them so people won’t call you out on them. And so that you can call out others on them. 

Make no mistake: meta is argument. It’s only pretending to be expository.

With that in mind, know what you’re capable of. If you can’t run with the big dogs, stay on the porch. Especially if you’re easily hurt and/or have self-esteem issues. So much of fandom is all about lovey feelings and not leaving unasked-for criticism on people’s fic and all that–and I support that–but meta is an exception to this. It just is. Everyone is going to be jumping for a chance to tell you how wrong you are, even if they don’t write meta themselves and only watched the show once and just have feelings. 

5. Know your audience. 

Here’s an example of what I mean: I received an ask some years ago about whether or not Hannibal ever was in love with Bedelia, maybe even just a little? Even if it wasn’t like how he feels about Will??? 

Look, I’m a Hannigram shipper, and I wasn’t making any bones about that matter at the time I got that ask. But obviously that was from someone who shipped Bedannibal and really just wanted their poor soul to be soothed, and I can guarandamntee you I found some way to answer yes, in a way that was honest and that I could textually support, even though I myself would not call that relationship “in love.”

If you can, be on the side of your readers. They will be the people who are asking you questions. It doesn’t hurt to demonstrate kindness, as much as you can, without sacrificing the integrity of what you have to say as a meta writer. I’ll be the first to say I’ve made a lot of enemies on this blog because of various arguments I’ve gotten into, and I haven’t always known how important this is. But the people who come to you with questions deserve the best you can possibly give them.

How do you know when a work has substance?

It should be able to check several if not all of the following boxes:

Addresses the human condition in a non-trivial way (needs to be arguable and worth arguing about)

Contains complex characterization (no black and white major characters)

Displays text complexity (you gotta put in some effort to get it)

Exercises intertextuality (allusions to the greater world, other texts, history, etc.) 

Displays artistic quality (in all areas: writing, cinematography, acting, etc.)

Utilizes multiple varying artistic tools (metaphor, symbolism in writing, for example, or an appropriate variety of camera angles)

Controls and maintains a tone appropriate to subject and message

Note that being contextually relevant (dealing with important social issues) is not something that I listed here. Many on Tumblr would say that it should be. You should be at least vaguely aware of how your particular venue (Tumblr vs. reddit, for example) is going to affect your audience’s expectations of such things. 

[blueinkedfrost]

Heathers - Bud Dean

Bud Dean has about three canonical personality traits - explosives obsession, exercise/fitness obsession, not a very good parent. Four personality traits if you count his and J.D.'s sarcastic roleplaying exchanges as a trait. Everything else is absolutely conjecture.

Bud's other important trait is that, for a character who has 2.5 brief scenes in the movie, he's a real spotlight stealer. He's extremely interesting! This is why he tempts people to conjecture about him.

In terms of defending Bud, he's not the worst character in the movie! He only killed one person and a memorial oak tree, and in both cases was legally acquitted of responsibility. He's not a very good parent, but none of the other adult characters are particularly good either.

And, very importantly, what is 'Bud' a nickname for? I think his full name should be Burton, as it makes a nice little reference to Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying, which you should definitely read without spoilers.

Here are my Bud conjectures, in the order that we get information in the movie.

The first thing we learn about J.D.'s home environment is that he moves around a lot but there's a Snappy Snack Shack in every town.

J.D. I've been moved around all my life. Dallas, Baton Rouge, Vegas ... Sherwood, Ohio. There's always been a Snappy Snack Shack ... Keeps me sane.

This early in the movie, 'Keeps me sane' just sounds like hyperbolic banter. Later we realise that J.D. has some very serious issues, and Snappy Snack Shacks as his one source of stability in an unstable life were not an adequate means of support. When Veronica comments on J.D.'s motorbike, he explains a bit more of his background:

J.D. Yeah, just a humble perk from my dad's construction company. You've seen the commercial, right? "Bringing every state to a higher state".

Then it's Veronica who says the company name and Bud's name, 'Big Bud Dean Construction'. So the background here is:

Bud's business causes him and his son to move around a lot - we'll figure out that the constant moving and having no friends has a negative effect on his son's mental state. Maybe Bud would've been a better parent if he'd sent J.D. to boarding school. It seems like Bud prioritises his work over his kid, although in his defence he needs to earn a living. 

The company's clearly doing well enough to have popular T.V. ads. Bud's very competent at what he does. 

Naming your company after yourself makes you a self-made man with a high opinion of your creator. (It's not even just 'Bud Dean Construction', it's a boastful 'Big Bud'.) In contrast, Veronica's family, established in Sherwood, might have inherited money, as her parents seem to lead pretty leisurely lives.

We meet Bud in person when he walks in on J.D. and Veronica watching television (Veronica quickly removes her hand from around J.D.'s shoulders). Comparing Bud's physical appearance to Veronica's father, he has a lot more grey in his hair; it's possible Bud's meant to be older, although different people go grey at different rates and he is very physically fit.

Bud and his son communicate by putting words in each other's mouth. This roleswapping exchange is offputting, and an indication of the chaos that surrounds J.D.

J.D. Hey, son, I didn't hear you come in. BUD. Hey, Dad, how was work today? It was miserable. Some damn tribe of withered old bitches doesn't want us to terminate that fleabag hotel.

This exchange makes me conjecture that Bud's on the more misogynistic end of the Heathers spectrum, although this movie sets the bar pretty low (J.D. has the dubious distinction of 'only male character to show a vague awareness that date rape is wrong'). Veronica says 'bitch' too and she'd probably identify as a feminist, but Bud uses particularly vivid, imaginative language to denounce these women - tribe of withered old bitches, then later the judge told them to slurp shit and die. (Which the judge probably did not literally do.) This combined with the backstory on Bud's wife and Bud's dismissive attitude toward Veronica makes me think Bud doesn't think much of women.

Bud and J.D. then talk over an anecdote in "fucking Kansas", where Bud was arraigned but acquitted for illegally blowing up the Memorial Oak Tree with thirty fireworks attached to the trunk. Bud is willing to break the law and clever enough to get away with it, and doesn't care much for trees, environmentalism, or history. J.D. repeats the story as if Bud's told it many times before.

Then there's a nonverbal exchange that's quite interesting. Veronica offers to shake Bud's hand and he refuses, walking on a treadmill and giving her a perfunctory wave instead. He's clearly very interested in exercising and not very polite to her. Veronica leaves in a hurry soon after.

J.D. Veronica, this is my dad. Dad - Veronica.

VERONICA. Hi. (Bud refuses her handshake.)

J.D. Son, why don't you ask your little friend to stay for dinner?

VERONICA. I can't, uh, my mom's making my favourite meal tonight. Spaghetti, lots of oregano.

After the role reversal conversation and the handshake refusal, Veronica seems to find Bud offputting and leaves quickly. Since Veronica later asks J.D. 'Do you like your father', she doesn't find Bud likeable. However, in Veronica's second encounter with Bud, she's sarcastic about him within his earshot ('the beaver's home'), so she probably doesn't find him particularly scary or threatening.

J.D.'s last line before Veronica leaves is this tantalising beginning of a reveal, that Veronica is completely disinterested in asking for more information about:

J.D. How nice. Last time I saw my mom, she was waving from a library window in Texas. Right, Dad? BUD. Right ... son.

There's an earlier script version that gives more information about Bud's attitude here:

J.D. The last time I saw my mom, she was waving out the window of a library in Texas. Right, Dad?

BIG BUD DEAN stops rowing to grin a You-Think-You're-Tougher-Than-Me-But-You're-Not smile to J.D.

BUD. Right, son.

Bud literally killed J.D.'s mother while he watched, but instead of thinking that some kind of emotional support might be appropriate, he sees mentions of her death as a tough-out contest. Bud probably wins that contest, and along with it a 'bad parenting' prize. The way J.D. brings up his mother's death makes it feel like an unhealed wound - J.D.'s poking at the scab, trying to get some sort of reaction out of his father that he doesn't get at all.

In Bud's second appearance, J.D. and Veronica are again in the living room. Veronica threw the photo of J.D.'s mother at him in frustration, not knowing what it was. Bud walks in with a videotape, gloating over how We beat the bitches ... the judge told them to slurp shit and die. He shows the video of his deconstruction job.

BUD. I put a Norwegian in the boiler room. Masterful! And then, when that blew, it set off a pack of thermals I stuck upstairs. Some days it's great to be alive.

Bud has a high opinion of his own talents (warranted - he clearly did a good job of demolishing the hotel) and loves destruction. The video seems to be much more for enjoyment than analysing his work; he watches it and laughs. Deconstruction is a job that clearly someone has to do, and lots of people like explosions in moderation - but, for Bud, he loves them. While watching the video, J.D. clearly also starts to feel excitement and consider how he could blow up Westerburg High School. Like father, like son.

When Bud leaves, Veronica asks J.D. a question.

VERONICA. Do you like your father?

At that point in the story, Veronica's disturbed about the three murders J.D. planned and she's also noticed Bud's love for destruction - it's plausible that she asked that question hoping for a definite 'no, I'm not as destructive as my father'. She doesn't get that definite no.

J.D. I've never given the matter much thought. I liked my mother. They said her death was an accident, but she knew what she was doing. She walked into the building two minutes before my dad blew the place up. She waved at me, and then ... boom.

(The camera zooms in on the picture of a light-haired woman casually dressed on a beach, in sunglasses. The sunglasses probably symbolise 'we didn't need to find a stock photo that looked like Christian Slater'.)

Since Bud literally pulled the trigger on Mrs. Dean, it's tempting to take the way she died as symbolic of It's-Just-Possible-That-I-Might-Have-Had-Some-Issues-With-My-Husband. The death was ruled an accident; she would have walked into the building of her own will; Bud probably didn't know she was there. If Bud was a decent or semi-decent spouse, then forcing him to literally kill her was a shitty thing to do. (Similarly, Martha's method of committing suicide would've been horrifying to the car driver, but in Martha's case, she didn't know that it would be one specific driver.)

While it's not spelt out, it's easy to picture Bud as an awful or abusive spouse. Ruling Mrs. Dean's death an accident was probably quite lenient from the coroner, considering that Bud was responsible for securing the demolition site and could have been considered negligent. In this real life example where a person was killed in a demolition (it's a very sad story), the contractor's responsibility was certainly considered. In some religions, there's a stigma against suicide, which means that ruling a death accidental is considered kinder to the family. Maybe the Deans are (nominally, anyway, as they don't seem remotely devout) Catholic.

(By calling her Mrs. Dean, I'm even making an assumption that they were married, which also isn't explicitly stated - but it's a pretty safe assumption.)

J.D.'s line on whether he likes his father is I've never given the matter much thought. I liked my mother. His mother was the better parent of the two, with J.D. feeling affection for her but indifference to his father. I think J.D.'s line reminiscing about his mother is a genuine emotional moment from him. Not long after this, J.D. shoots the radio playing 'Teenage Suicide' for no obvious reason. He's an impulsive character, but also a pretty calculating one, so it's hard to understand what motivated him there. Unresolved anger from reminiscing about his mother's death seems a convincing explanation.

Bud's final brief scene in the film actually shows him in a relatively positive light. While J.D. is building the bomb to blow up the school, Bud knocks on his son's door. He's not seen, only heard.

BUD. Hey, pop, I need some help with my homework!

J.D. Not right now, tiger, I'm a little busy.

Bud tries to reach out and engage his son; his son asks him to back off; and Bud respects J.D.'s boundaries and does so. (Of course, in this particular case, obviously things did not end well.)

And then J.D. goes off and tries to blow up the school with a trigger in the basement and packs of thermals in the gym. Veronica says the line Like father, like son. She literally means that the bombing style is the same. But it's really tempting to extend her line to mean more. J.D. displays a lack of empathy and concern for human life. Could those traits be inherited from his father? Bud doesn't show much empathy and concern for his son, and doesn't seem to have any friends or any interest in remarrying. Bud's exercise habits are solitary exercise, on his personal machines (not even at the gym with other people around!). Bud shows some grandiosity in his opinions about himself, such as calling his company 'Big Bud Dean Construction' and his interpretation on exactly what the judge told the protesters. It's tempting to read Bud as the 'sociopath who succeeds in business' stereotype - someone who channels his love for explosives into mostly legal channels, is willing to break the rules (see also the Memorial Oak Tree), and doesn't care for other people's feelings.

In a movie that uses a lot of colour symbolism, Bud's colour scheme greatly varies - a red and grey tracksuit in his first scene, (bright) blue and black in his second, unseen in his third. He prefers casual clothes or exercise clothes. Red is used to symbolise power (Chandler's scrunchie); grey seems pretty neutral; blue is Veronica's colour, symbolising intelligence; black is J.D.'s colour, symbolising destruction. Power, intelligence, and destruction pretty much fit Bud's character, although it's weird to see him in blue as he and Veronica hardly have anything in common. The photo of Mrs. Dean shows her in light colours, perhaps showing that she was more vulnerable and weak.

In terms of what I like about Bud, I really like his competence and his sarcasm. He's obviously good at what he does (blows up hotels, runs a successful company, keeps physically fit). He's clever enough to blow up a memorial oak tree without getting caught. His exchanges with his son show that he's rather verbally apt. Bud seems to be doing exactly what he wants to do in life with no inner angst whatsoever, which is a lot more than most Heathers characters can say.

Overall, how terrible a parent was Bud? It's pretty open. In the suicide note for Heather Chandler, J.D. contributes Suicide is the logical answer to the myriad of problems life has given me, which you can imply that he was also using to talk about himself. 'Myriad of problems' sounds like there might be more to J.D.'s issues than 'My mom died and I move around a lot', but that's a major conjecture. Bud clearly gives his son enough pocket money to support a motorbike, a smoking habit, and a convenience store habit, as well as way too much access to weaponry. Bud's not very emotionally supportive, and rather neglectful; his son stays the night away from home on at least two occasions (before killing Heather and before killing Kurt and Ram) without Bud apparently caring much.

Given J.D.'s issues, it's tempting to blame his father to a greater or lesser extent. However, J.D. is seventeen, not seven, and responsible for his own actions. J.D.'s penchant for killing other people's bullies seems like it might tie in to past bullying he experienced himself, where if he went after his own tormentors it would be too much like admitting weakness. It's believable enough to assume his father was one of the people who hurt him, whether by action or neglect. J.D. seems to mind when Heather Chandler targets Martha and when Kurt and Ram target the nerd at the funeral, in a twisted way of showing empathy; J.D. also has some feelings for his mother and for Veronica, despite how dark he becomes. Bud isn't shown to care for anyone at all.

Through Bud's exercise obsession, he's physically tougher than his son, and he seems more emotionally callous as well. No wonder he survives the movie where his son doesn't.

Go Team Bud?

[snicketsleuth]

Was the sugar bowl empty?

Question: So, are there certain answers that haven’t been revealed? Is there an actual answer to what the Sugar Bowl is? Answer: The mystery of the Sugar Bowl is clear enough that one that about reader a year writes me and has figured it out, and that fills me with pleasure. That makes me think it’s not too obscure. If no one ever wrote me about it I would think, “Oh I didn’t do it enough.” But because one person a year who will write me and say, “I figured it out.” The whole answer of the Sugar Bowl is solvable. [A Series Of Unfortunate Questions with Daniel Handler” (Link), Interview of Daniel Handler by Dana Schwartz, 18th of January 2017 for Observer magazine]

After much consideration, rumination and meditation, I’ve decided to put the matter of the sugar bowl to rest. Given Daniel Handler’s recent comments on the sugar bowl mystery, I have no choice but to revise my opinions on the matter extensively.

There will be two articles on the topic:

The one you are currently reading deals with the sugar bowl as it’s presented to the characters of the series in-universe. It involves plotpoints discusses in “All The Wrong Questions” but details from this series are not necessary for the new theory to work.

The second one (Link) will analyse the themes, messages and allusions of “A Series Of Unfortunate Events” and the way they square in with the new sugar bowl theory. Hopefully this should convince people that it fits witthin the literary strategy that Daniel Handler intended.

Full disclaimer: although it’s been in the works since January,  this theory was partly written as a response to another article about the sugar bowl secret (Link). Its author, Jacob, attempts to combine two of my articles about the sugar bowl (the Horseradish Takedown and the Microphone Conjecture) into a more satisfying and unified theory. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a second opinion, it’s one of the most thorough analyses I’ve read on the sugar bowl in the last 10 years. Most interesting is Jacob’s comment that I’ve stumbled upon the solution of the mystery without realizing it. I would argue that Jacob's own insistence that many volunteers are wrong about the sugar bowl’s true nature, and that it may actually be worthless to most members of V.F.D., IS the key to the mystery. We just need to apply that deduction to the entire narrative, on a massive scale.

Because I now sincerely, truly believe the sugar bowl to be secretly empty. Or at the very least to contain something unimportant (sugar, for example). Most of V.F.D doesn’t know this. You might be asking yourself: “why would so many people risk their lives for a container whose contents are completely unknown, or sacrifice the lives of others for an object of no real value?”

That’s the wrong question. The question we should be asking is...

...”why wouldn’t they?”

Once upon a time, there was a secret society called V.F.D.

The organization had an enormous problem at its core: because it trained spies, it encouraged curiosity amongst its younger members, yet protecting sensible information was also key.

The hallways of the Wade Academy were tricky for sneaking, but I’d had a very demanding sneaking instructor. Our final exam began early in the morning, with our instructor entering a small cabin in the middle of the woods and sitting blindfolded in a folding chair. The woods were full of crackly dead leaves, and the floor of the cabin was covered in fragile glass figurines. To pass the class we had to sneak up on him by midnight. When he arrived at the cabin that morning, the entire class was waiting for him. I’d snuck into his office the night before and shared the location of the cabin with the rest of the students so we could sneak up on him before he even arrived. I received the top grade in the class and a three-month suspension. [Shouldn’t You Be In School?, Chapter Nine]

We are entering people’s homes, taking young children who show exceptional observational and/or notetaking skills, and isolating them, for long periods at least, from peope they know. We assign them to strangers and scatter them across the globe, performing errands that are perplexing to them, until their ankles have healed, until we know they can be trusted, and until we know that no one is searching for them any longer. Then, finally, we bring them to headquarters so they can learn the skills they need before they are reintroduced back into society, in order to make sure the world remains, as we say, quiet. [Lemony Snicket’s un-Authorized Autobiography, p.39]

To prevent volunteers in training from finding out too much and too soon, a diversion was set in place. It was V.F.D.’s own spin on the Santa Claus story, with a dash of Holy Grail thrown into the mix. The story went that the organization owned a mysterious an incredibly valuable object: the legendary sugar bowl. Whenever the apprentices asked what on Earth that sugar bowl contained, their mentors just shrugged and insisted that the truth was too terrible for children to learn.

“And you still won’t tell us why the sugar bowl is important?” Violet couldn’t help asking. “It’s not the sugar bowl,” Captain Widdershins said, “it’s what’s inside it. Aye! I’ve already said too much! Aye! There are secrets in this world too terrible for young people to know! [The Grim Grotto, Chapter Six]

"I don’t want you to understand,” the captain said, putting his arm around her. “That’s why I haven’t told you why the sugar bowl is so very crucial. There are secrets in this world too terrible for young people to know, even as those secrets get closer and closer. [The Grim Grotto, Chapter Four]

The promise of revealing that secret was used as a “reward” for good behavior. In reality, it was more of a way to shape and control these youngsters in the direction V.F.D. intended. Inquisitive kids wasted their time investigating the sugar bowl mystery, while the actually valuable intel was safe from their grubby little hands. Once they became full-fledged members, the adults were informed of this deception (although many teenagers realized the truth all on their own anyway) and carried on the tradition with their own apprentices.

Inside the enclosed safe are the documents and required materials for Disguise Training, Phases One and Two. Under normal circumstances, new volunteers like ourselves would not receive disguise training until our years of apprenticeship were finished, but we have not been under normal circumstances for quite some time. [The un-Authorized Autobiography, p.96]

Disguise Training Phase Two : Various Finery Disguises [...] Optional Materials: Sugar Bowl [The un-Authoriized Autobiography, pp.101-103]

Over time, the sugar bowl legend grew more sacred, more complex. V.F.D. acquired an actual sugar bowl and kept it hidden and secured within the Museum of Objects, even though it contained nothing important whatsoever. The volunteers, after all, had to keep up appearances. To build up on this tradition, mentors started not taking any sugar bowl into their tea or coffee, and instructed their apprentices to do the same.

“Sit down, sit down,” Kit said, taking a bite of a pastry covered in powdered sugar. […]“But this J. S. isn’t necessarily a wicked person,” Kit said. “Plenty of noble people would check into the Hotel Denoument and order sugar in their tea. Not to sweeten it, of course- tea should be as bitter as wormwood, my brother used to say, and as sharp as a two-edged swordbut as a signal. Our comrades and our enemies are all after the same thing-the Vessel For Disaccharides.” [Kit Snicket - The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Two]

[…] And in the coffee shop, located in Room 178, a villain requested sugar in his coffee, was immediately thrown to the floor so a waitress could see if he had a tattoo on his ankle, and then received an apology and a free slice of rhubarb pie for all his trouble. [Lemony Snicket - The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Seven]

It was all symbolic, of course: the truth was bitter as horseradish (or coffee), and “tea” was a synonym for “truth” in many variations of slangs. And one should never “sugar-coat” the truth with empty platitudes (or unhealthy disaccharides). There was a lot of symbolism involved: new members understood that the sugar bowl was a metaphor for the quest of knowledge. They eventually found out that the sugar bowl contained nothing yet meant something useful: a religion doesn’t need to rely on facts to inspire helpful advice. The V.F.D. saying that tea should be as bitter as wormwood and as sharp as a two-edged sword was actually a quote from the Old Testament. The insistence that volunteers should not put sugar in their coffee was also V.F.D.’s parody of Judaism’s dietary laws. That should have been enough of a clue to anyone well-read enough to realize the sugar bowl was nothing but poetic imagery:

3 For the lips of an adulteress drip honey And smoother than oil is her speech; 4 But in the end she is bitter as wormwood, Sharp as a two-edged sword. 5 Her feet go down to death, Her steps take hold of Sheol. [Proverbs 5:4]

“I also brought you some tea,” he said, revealing a tray containing a teapot and three cups. “I thought it might fortify you for the trial.” By “fortify,” the manager meant that a few sips of tea might give the children some muchneeded strength for their ordeal, and the children thought it must be Frank who was doing them such a favor. “You’re very kind,” Violet said. “I’m sorry there’s no sugar,” he said. “That’s quite all right,” Klaus said, and then hurriedly flipped to a page in his commonplace book until he found his notes on the children’s conversation with Kit Snicket. “'Tea should be bitter as wormwood,’” he read, “'and as sharp as a two-edged sword.’” The manager gave Klaus a small, unfathomable smile. “Drink your tea,” he said. “I’ll knock in a few minutes to bring you to trial.” [Lemony Snicket - The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Eleven]

But then the Schism happened, and the dream turned into a nightmare.

Because volunteers were now at each other’s throats, a great number of adults from the organization died and an enormous amount of knowledge was lost.

“It’s complicated and confusing,” Olivia explained. “They say that long ago it was simple and quiet, but that might be a legend. There was a schism in V.F.D., a great big fight between many of the members, and since then it’s been hard for me to know what to do. [The Carnivorous Carnival, Chapter Seven]

"Well, the Hotel Preludio is a lovely place," Kit said, "but the Hotel Denouement is more than that. For years, it's been a place where our volunteers can gather to exchange information, discuss plans to defeat our enemies, and return books we've borrowed from one another. Before the schism, there were countless places that served such purposes. Bookstores and banks, restaurants and stationery stores, cafes and laundromats, opium dens and geodesic domes- people of nobility and integrity could gather nearly everywhere." "Those must have been wonderful times," Violet said. "So I'm told," Kit said. "I was four years old when everything changed. Our organization shattered, and it was as if the world shattered, too, and one by one the safe places were destroyed. [The Penultimate Peril; Chapter Two]

This resulted in a “lost generation”: full-fledged members who had no idea the sugar bowl story was a hoax even though they now had already started training apprentices of their own. The legend, for better of for worse, had become fact.

"It was not always this way, Baudelaires," Dewey said. "Once there were safe places scattered across the globe, and so orphans like yourselves did not have to wander from place to place, trying to find noble people who could be of assistance. With each generation, the schism gets worse. [...]  Since the schism, all the research, all the observations, even all of the books have been scattered all over the globe. It's like the elephant in the poem your father loved. Everyone has their hands on a tiny piece of the truth, but nobody can see the whole thing. [The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Eight]

Our comrades and our enemies are all after the same thing-the Vessel For Disaccharides. [The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Two]

Their superiors could have stopped the whole thing, but V.F.D. was in such a state of disarray that the deception had to continue. Nobody truly believed their own colleagues anymore. They had more pressing matters to attend.

And then it got worse.

The children who were born at the time of the Schism had their own grievances. They had been raised with nostalgic tales of how great V.F.D. used to be before the Schism happened and volunteers started competing against each other. They had been, repeatedly, denied the most basic of information about their own organization because their mentors were afraid of leaking secrets to its enemies. And they were very, very reckless.

“How can you be certain?” I sighed. “I’m scarcely certain of anything, Widdershins.” Widdershins gave me one last nod. “That sounds like apprenticeship to me,” he said. “None of us are certain of anything.” [When Did You See Her Last?, Chapter Thirteen]

First amongst them was Lemony Snicket.

Fed up with the organization’s current methods, Lemony staged a coup. He gathered a great number of young dissatisfied volunteers such as his siblings, Hector, Widdershins, Haruki, Josephine or Monty, and he devised a plan. They were going to steal the secret society’s most valuable asset for their own: the sugar bowl. With it, they would have the means and the gumption to restore the organization’s glory days.

“How much does your chaperone know,” I asked, “about your secret trip here?” He smiled at me. “You can’t tell them everything,” he said. “They wouldn’t understand.” “Who taught you that?” “You did, Snicket. Remember? You said we could make our organization greater than ever, but only if we stopped listening to our instructors and found new ways to fix the world. It was quite a speech you gave. It almost got you thrown out for good.” “Maybe they should have thrown me out. In Stain’d-by-the-Sea the world looks harder to fix.” “Remember what our associate said,” my associate reminded me. “No reality has the power to dispel a dream.” [When Did You See Her Last?, Chapter Thirteen]

“Exactly,” I said, watching Ellington frown out of the corner of my eye. “We represent the true human tradition, the one permanent victory over cruelty and chaos. We’re an invincible army, but not a victorious one. We’ve had different names throughout history, but all the words that describe us are false and all attempts to organize us fail. Right now we’re called V.F.D., but all our schisms and arguments might cause us to disappear. It won’t matter. People like us always slip through the net. Our true home is the imagination, and our kingdom is the wide-open world.” [Shouldn’t You Be In School?, Chapter Nine]

Naturally, the adults got wind of the plan but found themselves in an embarrassing position: if the youngest members realized the entire sugar bowl affair was a sham, the organization would descend into chaos. Dashiell Qwerty was one of the adults who realized the danger. He asked Lemony’s mentor, S. Theodora Markson,  to send him away to the most remote town possible where he wouldn’t cause any trouble. Gifford and Ghede, on the other hand, were talentless volunteers who had never been told the truth about the sugar bowl. Intent on capturing the prize for themselves, they failed to steal it from Kit Snicket. The young apprentice had been caught by the police during the heist and had no choice but to hide the sugar bowl in the city’s sewers. If she ever found out the truth about its true content, she kept her mouth shut. The organization had proven it was willing to go great lengths to keep up the deception: her brother had escaped at least one kidnapping attempt and she had been almost thrown in prison for her betrayal. V.F.D.’s status quo was, for the moment, preserved.

“The sugar bowl secret coul slip their minds entirely. This could lead to grave misunderstandings during coded communication, and we can’t afford that.” [R. - Lemony Snicket’s un-Authorized Autbiography, p.41]

A few years later, Lemony and his friends became adults. They were now a minority amongst the volunteers who knew the sad, sad truth: the sugar bowl mystery amounted to nothing. So why not use that deception for something more… useful?

The Schism had given rise to a number of criminals who exploited V.F.D.’s numerous resources to commit horrible deeds: their old classmate Count Olaf was amongst them. They were the volunteers’ greatest shame, but the organization let them free to do as they pleased as long as they didn’t leak any secrets. The Snicket siblings wanted to change that. They were going to lead the villainous volunteers into a trap, collect evidence on their crimes and throw them in jail for the rest of their lives. With the rabble out of the way, V.F.D. would finally prosper. But how?

The sugar bowl conspiracy was the perfect tool to ensnare Olaf and his allies. It just needed a little push in the right direction. Greed was after all their greatest weakness…

The second-greatest weakness was Esmé Gigi Geniveve, a student of Olaf. She was stupid, she was vain, she was materialistic: she was perfect. Lemony’s girlfriend Beatrice was assigned the task of gaining her confidence, trust and friendship. They would regularly meet for tea and exchange information about the organization. Esme would then spill all of Beatrice’s secrets to Olaf.

And I would hop like nobody has ever hopped before, if I could somehow go back to that terrible Thursday, and stop Beatrice from attending that afternoon tea where she met Esmé Squalor for the first time. [The Hostile Hospital, Chapter Two]

What a wonderful and profitable day! My former acting teacher will finally get his hands on not one but two enormous fortunes!" "Your former acting teacher?" Violet asked in horror. "You mean you've known Gunther's true identity the entire time?" "Of course I did," Esmé said. "I just had to fool you kids and my dim-witted husband into thinking he was really an auctioneer. Luckily, I am a smashing actress, so it was easy to trick you." [...]  "I want to steal from you the way Beatrice stole from me." [The Ersatz Elevator, Chapter Ten]

Most of this intel consisted in grandiose stories about the sugar bowl: how powerful it was, how valuable, how precious. Once Esme got her hands on it, she would finally become the innest person in the world! All lies, naturally. But Esmé believed them, and therefore Olaf believed them, and therefore all the villainous volunteers believed them. Beatrice was the one manipulating her, pretending to betray Lemony.

"Actually, the coffee isn’t bad,” one of the white-faced women said, “even if it is a little bitter. Could someone pass the sugar, please?” ‘Sugar?“ shrieked Count Olaf, erupting in anger. He stood up, grabbed one end of the blanket, and pulled as hard as he could, scattering all of Sunny’s hard work. Food, beverages, and dishes fell everywhere,and Sunny had to duck to avoid getting hit on the head with a flying fork. "All the sugar in the worldcouldn’t save this terrible breakfast!” he roared, and then leaned down so that his shiny, shiny eyes stared right into Sunny’s. [Lemony Snicket - The Slippery Slope, Chapter Six]

Lemony and his friends then led the villains on a wild goose chase. Kit had retrieved the sugar bowl from the sewers. Every time Olaf and his allies tried to steal it, they found out it had been moved to another place. And every time they failed, they would leave evidence of their crimes behind. Beatrice and her co-star Bertrand had managed to infiltrate Olaf’s troupe by that point. Olaf and Esme trusted them completely. During their performances, Beatrice would slip in information about Olaf’s activities in code, and Lemony, acting as a dramatic critic in the audience, would collect it.

When you take your bows after Friday’s performance, I will be sitting in the front row, but do not acknowledge me. As you take your bow, drop one of your hatpins off the stage. That will be the signal that it is safe to meet at the usual place for our midnight root beer floats. [The Beatrice Letters, B.B. to L.S. #4]

My darling Beatrice, reports are coming everywhere from Tedia to Paltryville that the performance of “My Silence Knot” are splendid, and that your performance as the Baticeer is the highlight of the show, even surpassing the performance of the Brae-man. More importantly, reports are coming everywhere from T. to P. that you have gathered nearly all of the evidence we need. [The Beatrice Letters, L.S. to B.B. #5]

After a while, Lemony felt they had found enough evidence. He asked Beatrice to marry him, which she accepted. He even went as far as to place fake sugar bowls at his own wedding venue, a V.F.D headquarter where his enemies would certainly show up:

Here at the Vineyard we want to please our customers, so the sugar bowls will all be in place, we promise you. [The un-Authorized Autobiography, p.84]

As a way of giving a final middle finger to Esme, Beatrice made sure she finally found the sugar bowl… only to steal it back from her at the very last minute. She probably never even found out its contents. And if she did it, so what? Esme was obsessed with her social status. She would have to play along this collective delusion, otherwise she would be forever branded as an idiot.

"Then you know all about the sugar bowl,” Esmé said, “and what’s inside. You know how important that thing was, and how many lives were lost in the quest to find it. You know how difficult it was to find a container that could hold it safely, securely, and attractively. You know what it means to the Baudelaires and what it means to the Snickets.” She took one sandaled step closer to Dewey, and stretched out one silver fingernail-the one shaped like an S-until it was almost poking him in the eye. “And you know,” she said in a terrible voice, “that it is mine. ” “Not anymore,” Dewey said. “Beatrice stole it from me! ” Esmé cried. “There are worse things,” Dewey said, “than theft.” [The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Nine]

But if this were a book about me, instead of about the three children who would soon run into someone they had hoped never to see again, I might pause for a moment and tell you about something I did many years ago, that still troubles me. It was a necessary thing to do, but it was not a nice thing, and even now, I get a small quiver of shame in my stomach whenever I remember it. I might be doing something I enjoy–walking along the promenade deck of a ship, or looking through a telescope at the aurora borealis, or wandering into a bookstore and placing my books on the highest place in the shelf, so that no one will be tempted to buy and read them–when I will suddenly remember this thing I did, and think to myself, Was it really necessary? Was it absolutely necessary to steal that sugar bowl from Esmé Squalor? [The Hostile Hospital, Chapter Six]

Olaf, feeling furious, kicked Beatrice out of the troupe, and gave the main role to Esme. Then Lemony, feeling cocky, published an article in which he slammed Olaf’s talent, revealed to the general public he was a criminal and informed everyone Beatrice had accepted his marriage proposal. This was the moment Olaf and Esmé realized they had been manipulated by Lemony and Beatrice from the very beginning. They had to act fast: Lemony was sitting on an enormous pile of evidence, which would soon be given to the authorities.

There was only one thing to do: framing Lemony for the crimes he was trying to expose.

And it worked. Lemony was on the run. Ruining his marriage and career was a small compensation for Esme’s and Olaf’s humiliation. The villains were now embracing their status as enemies of V.F.D. and started leaking the organization’s secrets through their pawns Geraldine Julienne and Eleonora Poe. Worse, Esmé and Olaf still had no idea the sugar bowl was a sham, and they started killing other volunteers to discover its location. Their bosses, the Man With Beard But No Hair and the Woman With Hair But No Beard enabled this. Because they had known the organization before the Schism, they suspected the truth but kept mom: this sugar bowl chase was the only way to control the destructive urges of their minions.

The woman with hair but no beard nodded. “Infant servants are so troublesome,” she said. “I had an infant servant once; a long time ago, before the schism.” “Before the schism?” Olaf said, and Sunny wished Klaus were with her, because the baby did not know what the word “schism” meant. “That is a long time ago. That infant must be all grown up by now.” “Not necessarily,” the woman said, and laughed again, while her companion leaned down to gaze at Sunny. [The Slippery Slope, Chapter Six]

Years later, Beatrice and her husband Bertrand tried to make amends for their mistakes. With Kit Snicket and Dewey Denouement, they devised an overwrought plan to collect new evidence on Olaf and ask for a retrial which would put all the villains in jail. They were, once again, going to use the sugar bowl as bait. Because of his treachery, they knew Olaf could potentially be corrupted. So they sent their children away to Briney Beach and invited Olaf into their home.

My discovery of a torn pant leg shows that Sunny, an infant and the youngest Baudelaire child, played a key role in the dinner party held at the Baudelaire mansion quite some time before it was reduced to a smoking pile of rubble. Third-hand reports suggest that just after the sugar bowl was placed on the table, Sunny shrieked, "Funcoot!", which either meant "My gums hurt!" or "I believe I may have seen someone lurking outside." [The Dismal Dinner, part 3.]

Recent discoveries support my suspicions about the fateful event hosted by the Baudelaire parents before their death. Near the end of the meal, baby Sunny Baudelaire looked out the window and began to cry with a clarity and force that would soon characterize her ability to bite things. Her cries alarmed a number of guests who were in the process of passing around the sugar bowl. [The Dismal Dinner, part 4.]

There, they made him an offer: information on his allies against the sugar bowl. What they hadn’t anticipated was that Olaf had by then figured out Beatrice and Bertrand had murdered his parents. He was never going to accept any kind of “deal” from them. He made sure to lit the Baudelaire mansion on fire and left.

Here and there, the children could see traces of the home they had loved: fragments of their grand piano, an elegant bottle in which Mr. Baudelaire had kept brandy, the scorched cushion of the windowseat where their mother liked to sit and read. Curiously enough, Mr. Baudelaire’s brandy bottle was found on the remains of the dining table, with no coasters nearby. This would indicate that either the coasters were burned beyond recognition, or the Baudelaires had received a visitor who had no manners whatsoever. [The Bad Beginning: Rare Edition, pp.12-13]

But Count Olaf just sat there as calmly as if they were discussing the weather. Certain kinds of weather-severe rainstorms, for instance-have a dampening effect on fires, which is displeasing to arsonists. There have been reports of alleged arsonists so reportedly displeased with the weather that they have been rumored to pound their beverages on an unprotected wooden table. [The Bad Beginning: Rare Edition, p.98]

Despite this tragedy, the plan had to continue somehow. But Kit, Jacques and Dewey had to find the sugar bowl first. It had last been seen in the hands of Beatrice, so the search for a potential survivor of the Baudelaire fire became of prominent importance. Eventually it found its way to the headquarters of the Mortmain mountains, then to the Stricken Stream, the Gorgonian Grotto and the pond of Hotel Denouement. And every time, the villains would arrive too late to acquire it. This was very much deliberate. Dewey was leading to a fake “last safe place” where all the villains could be trapped and forced to attend their own trial: the Hotel Denouement. There, the volunteers would produce all the available evidence and put their enemies in jail for good. Dewey had even acquired the loyalty of a Judge of the High Court to make sure everything went smoothly.

She handed it to Klaus, who unrolled the paper and squinted at it behind his glasses. ”'J. S. has checked in,’“ he read out loud, ”'and requested tea with sugar. My brother sends his regards. Sincerely, Frank.’“ [Kit Snicket & Klaus Baudelaire - The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Two]

"It is a shame,” agreed either Frank or Ernest. “If only there was something that could make the dish a little sweeter. I’ve heard that certain mushrooms are available.” “Sugar would be better than mushrooms,” Hal said unfathomably. “According to our calculations, the sugar will be laundered sometime after nightfall," replied the manager, equally unfathomably. [Lemony Snicket - The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Six]

All he had to do was to make the villains believe the sugar bowl was going to be delivered at the hotel, when it was in fact delivered as its secret underground library within the pond.

"It doesn't matter, Baudelaires," Jerome said. "Olaf won't dare unleash the Medusoid Mycelium unless he gets his hands on the sugar bowl, and he'll never find it." "I'm the only one who knows which words will unlock the Vernacularly Fastened Door," Dewey said, ushering the children back toward the entrance of the hotel, "and there's not a villainous person on Earth who has done enough reading to guess them before Thursday. By then, all of the volunteers will present the research they've done on Count Olaf and his associates to the prosecution, and all their treachery will finally end." [The Penultimate Peril, Chapter Eight]

Once again, the plan failed. The trial had to start in advance, before the protagonists and the entire evidence could be reunited. Then the Baudelaire orphans and Count Olaf made an unexpected alliance to burn down the hotel and escaped. Many villains died in the fire, but many volunteers as well.

If you read my theory about J.S.’s true identity (Link), and the one about the taxi driver (Link), then you know that Lemony was the one who ended up getting his hands on the sugar bowl. He was at the Hotel Denoument partly because the sugar bowl would be there, and could be used as a bait to confront judges with incriminating evidence against Olaf and to prove his own innocence.

I have at last learned the whereabouts of the evidence that will exonerate me, a phrase which here means "prove to the authorities that it is Count Olaf, and not me, who has started so many fires." Your suggestion, so many years ago at that picnic, that a tea set would be a handy place to hide anything important and small in the event of a dark day, has turned out to be correct. [Lemony Snicket to Kit Snicket - The Slippery Slope, Chapter Five]

But now Lemonyfinds himself with a moral dilemna: what is he going to do with the sugar bowl? His plan to steal it in order to lead V.F.D. failed. His plan to use it as bait to collect evidence on the “villainous” side of the Schism failed. His plan to bring it to the hotel and confront Olaf in a Court of Law failed. Beatrice’s plan to sell it to Olaf in exchange for information failed. Disasters and catastrophes, with so many lives lost or ruined in the process... and for such little results.

When I am able, I go out walking on Briny Beach very early in the morning, which is the best time to find materials important to the Baudelaire case, and the ocean is so peaceful that I feel peaceful, too, as if I am no longer grieving for the woman I love and will never see again. But then, when I am cold and duck into a teashop where the owner is expecting me, I have only to reach for the sugar bowl before my grief returns, and I find myself crying so loudly that other customers ask me if I could possibly lower my sobs. [The Carnivorous Carnival, Chapter Five]

Now that both sides of the Schism believe the sugar bowl is lost forever, maybe it’s time for the damn thing to fade into obscurity. No one must know he has it. With no prize to compete over,  the war within V.F.D will finally end. He will take that secret to his grave — for Beatrice.

Read the second part of this article here: (Link).

[apensivelady]

Making sense of Nick Spencer's take on Steve Rogers

So, I’ve been thinking about the whole Hydra Cap thing since Civil War: the Oath, and I realised something. The vision that Steve says that Ulysses showed him may not be Steve’s desire, it may be a prediction of a future that, amidst their inner fights, all superheroes but Captain America failed to see.

Before I go on, I gotta make something clear: I really dislike Nick Spencer’s take on Steve Rogers, I do think he doesn’t truly get the character - even though he thinks he does -, and I don’t think Marvel should have given the green light to this storyline. However, I am analysing what I believe to be Spencer’s ultimate goal with his story, even if I may not approve of it.

Let’s start by remembering that Spencer said that

Captain America is not just one of the most recognizable faces in the Marvel Universe. He’s an inspiring figure, somebody who brings people together. Everybody here obviously gets that. What you hope is that this story, in its own very different way, highlights those things and only continues to elevate the character in importance, and only serves to illustrate how powerful that symbol is.” (Entertainment Weekly).

And that

But what I think I can say with confidence is that with this story, our intention and our hope is that in its own unique way, it reinforces what everybody already knows about Captain America, which is his power as a symbol and what that means.” (Daily Beast).

In summary, Spencer wants that, by the end of his story, readers will see nothing but a reinforcement of everything Captain America has ever been. Is this being done in an abusive manner? Probably. Nonetheless, Spencer affirms that he will reinforce what everyone already knows about Captain America.

Let’s now turn to the story itself. So, as most know, Steve Rogers had his reality altered by a cosmic cube. The altered reality in which he is currently living is one where Hydra is good, an organisation that believes in making the world better. But how? I’m not even talking about how can Steve believe Hydra is good if we know what it has been throughout the years, I’m talking about Steve believing Hydra is good within his current reality. As far as Steve knows, a) Hydra was responsible for the death of both his parents, b) his mother regretted being for a short period of time a member of Hydra, c) Hydra took him out of his homeland after his parents deaths, relocating him to Europe, d) throughout his childhood, he tried time and again to run away from the Hydra base he was kept in, and e) Hydra considered euthanizing him while he was still a child (although, this last one the readers know for sure, but it’s not clear if Steve himself knows it). So, how come that, as time went by, Steve subsided to Hydra and became its model pupil? What made Steve comply?

Well, we don’t know. This story has yet to show us why Steve believes in Hydra, if he knows all of the above. We do know that one of the times Steve tried to run away he was stopped by the Kraken, who lectured him on the bigger picture, the importance of the collective versus the individual, the things we are meant for, and etc. But why would Steve simply agree with this lecture and, consequently, with Hydra from then on? It doesn’t really make much sense.

As the narrative progresses, we only get to see the Hydra we all know, so how come Steve Rogers, if he is still everything he has ever been, as Spencer proclaimed, doesn’t see Hydra for what it is? I don’t know. There’s no explanation for this yet and I cannot come to any sort of conjecture. All I have to say regarding this matter is that in most ways Steve Rogers still is the character we all know and love.

Something that caught my attention is the fact that Steve’s transformed memories have been presented in shades of grey and one other colour, either red or green. Most of the flashbacks are in shades of grey and red, but a small number of them is presented in shades of grey and green. I don’t really know why, as this is something else that has not been explained yet. However, I have a feeling that the red memories are deeply connected to the conception that the Red Skull has of Hydra, while the green ones are connected to the conception that Steve has of the organisation, whichever this may be. As comics readers know, in the comics Hydra’s symbol is mainly green, not red. Notwithstanding, in Spencer’s run, the Red Skull uses Hydra’s symbol mainly in red, for obvious reasons, I suppose.

As we know from Spencer’s story, Steve aims at killing the Red Skull because to him the Red Skull’s vision of Hydra is wrong; he needs to destroy this vision in order that Hydra reaches its true purpose. As we have yet to see why Steve believes Hydra is a decent organisation in his alternate reality, an organisation that has nothing to do with the Red Skull’s wishes, I believe that the vision that Steve mentions in Civil War: the Oath is not a glorious future he wishes for. While superheroes were busy fighting each other, the Red Skull grew stronger and stronger, adding daily to his ranks; with superheroes divided it was easy for the Red Skull to rise to power. “United we stand; divided we fall”.

The vision revealed to Steve is the doomed future that would take place, if superheroes kept their inner quarrels above helping people and making a better world. Stuck in a battle of egos during Civil War II, superheroes forgot about the common folk and their woes. Under these circumstances, the Red Skull can pretend to be a beacon of hope for the common people, promising to solve their problems, rise to power and turn the world into that which Steve saw. However, this is not what he himself wants.

The fact that Steve became director of S.H.I.E.L.D. makes us think that now the world is doomed, for he will become some kind of fascist dictator. Civil War: the Oath does give us that impression. Notwithstanding, issue #10 of Captain America: Steve Rogers shows us that Steve is uncomfortable with the fact that Sharon turned that position down in his behalf. He doesn’t feel comfortable in that position. This is why I think that Steve is yet to explain what he believes Hydra to be; from what we know thus far, he doesn’t approve the things we usually associate with Hydra, so an explanation must come.

This is what I believe Spencer is going for. He crafted his story in such a manner that we will only get the whole picture when his run ends; meanwhile, he’s making sure that his story gains awareness through controversy and polemics. Is this a good or clever strategy? I don’t really think so, but I believe this is Spencer’s plan.

Perhaps something interesting will come out of this story when it’s over and we get to see the whole picture, but right now I feel like it will only be remembered as “the one where Captain America was Hydra”.

[ramjfkclub]

Week 7 - Tramps Like Us

It's Friday the 22nd of November, 1963.  The time is 1.30 p.m. In the hour since it happened, Dealey Plaza has become a scene of confusion and everyone's looking for answers. Amidst the panic, someone approaches the police with information - that three men were seen running towards the railroad, behind the grassy knoll.  "They jumped on a stationary freight train. I think they're still there."

The police ran to the railroads and immediately searched the train. And there they were -  huddled in a dark corner in one of the carriages. Accompanying them was an overpowering smell of cheap wine and a bag containing, amongst other things, a knife and a tin of spam. 

Were these men involved in the assassination? And if they weren't, why were they hiding on a train so soon after the crime? 

With a police force not in the mood to take any chances, the men were arrested and marched through a shell-shocked Dealey Plaza. 

And the weird thing, apart from the spam, is that we wouldn't know their names for 30 years.

In the official investigation of Kennedy's death, these men are only mentioned once, by a Detective Harkness -

MR HARKNESS - We got a long freight that was in there, and we pulled some people off of there and took them to the station

MR BELIN - You mean some transients?

MR HARKNESS - Tramps and Hoboes

MR BELIN - Were all those questioned?

MR HARKNESS - Yes sir, they were taken to the station and questioned.

MR BELIN - Any guns of any kind found?

MR HARKNESS - Not to my knowledge

And that was it. In the entire 26 volumes of The Warren Commission, three men who were arrested at the scene of the crime are given less than 50 words - about the same amount of coverage as a story about the young Lee Harvey Oswald killing some fish. There's no attempt to investigate, check the arrest records, or even track the men down.

It was only in 1966, when their photographs emerged for the first time, that people really started to ask questions. 

“Hang on, they don't look like tramps. Ok, maybe the one at the back with the bag of spam does, but the guy at the front's wearing a tweed jacket!"

"Why is the tall one in the middle smiling? The President's just been shot!"

"Why does that woman look so horrified? What does she know that we don’t?"

"Look at how clean shaven they are!"

In an environment of suspicion following the official investigation, legions of amateur detectives treated the photographs as yet another lead that had gone unfollowed. Because, put simply, if Oswald didn't do it then someone else did. Could this be the breakthrough to solving the most difficult question of all - "If not Oswald, then who?"

It seemed the photographs provided the answer and the three tramps became the who (not to be confused with The Who, although that would have been amazing).

There was only one problem in closing the case - when investigators requested the arrest records from The Dallas Police Department they were told they'd gone missing.

With a lack of positive identification, it became open season for anyone and everyone who sought to solve the mystery. In the mid ‘70s, for example, investigators pointed to similarities between the tramps and some of the men involved in the Watergate burglary.

And to be fair, if you looked hard enough there was a resemblance -

Meanwhile, an assortment of charlatans and con men stepped forward debunking those theories and claiming that THEY were the tramps. In books and exclusive interviews, they would then tell wild stories about the day they went to Dallas and shot JFK. One of those men, bizarrely, was Woody Harrelson's dad - a convicted murderer who claimed to be the smiling tramp whilst he was off his head on cocaine.

I mean we’ve all been there but, again, there was a resemblance –

The desire to implicate the tramps peaked in Oliver Stone's JFK where they received star billing - an ominous presence stalking Dealey Plaza and leaving the viewer in no doubt as to their involvement. According to the film, they weren't tramps at all - they were hired assassins. 

Yet ironically, it was that film that finally provided the answer.

In the aftermath of the controversy it generated, a raft of previously unreleased documents surfaced in 1992 relating to all matters of the assassination. And in amongst the declassified witness testimony, and previously unseen medical reports, there were 3 documents released from The Dallas Police Department - the arrest records from the 22nd of November, 1963 for Howard Doyle, John Gedney, and Gus Abrams.

They were just three tramps after all - held for four days and released without charge.

Doyle, the tramp in tweed, was subsequently interviewed in 1992 and explained that they had spent the night before the assassination in a hostel where they had a change of clothes, a bath, and a shave. The next day, at around 12:30pm, they were wandering the railroads near Dealey Plaza looking to hop a train to Fort Worth. Suddenly they heard the chorus of sirens and, without knowing what had happened, thought it best to keep out of the way.  

It was the same philosophy they held to when they saw the photos throughout the years, implicating them in the murder of the President.

As Doyle said - 

"I am a plain guy, a simple country boy, and that's the way I want to stay. I wouldn't be a celebrity for 10 million dollars."

He then ends the interview, exasperated, shouting at the camera – “LIKE I SAY, THE TRAMPS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!" 

I love that. Their iconography had become so strong that even he refers to them as The Tramps.

Investigators then tracked down John Gedney, the smiling tramp, who corroborated Doyle's story. In the intervening years he had sobered up, got a degree, and moved to Australia. And finally Gus Abrams, the tramp with the spam, hopped trains and lived the life of a hobo until he died in 1987. His sister was shown the photographs and confirmed his identity. 

Their story was over - another mystery that unraveled to a benign anti-climax and made everyone, except them, look stupid in the process. 

They just wanted to find the quiet coach but, instead, got dragged and marched into a mess that lasted for years.

Seven weeks in and you'd be forgiven for thinking this a variation on a story you've heard before - on the dangers of over analysing and unfounded speculation. We've seen similar tales with The Umbrella Man and Babushka Lady and, maybe, you're even now starting to question my own obsession with this subject - if all these stories have dead ends, then why does it captivate you so much?

But let me quickly tell you the story about another tramp. 

In 1964, an alcoholic vagrant called John Elrod walked into a police station in Memphis and told them something had been preying on his mind. He proceeded to tell the police about the time he shared a cell with Lee Harvey Oswald in the days after the assassination. Having dangled that particular carrot, he then went further and said that Oswald told him about his involvement in gun running with some right wing extremists. His cast of characters included, amongst others, Jack Ruby and the owner of the only store in Dallas who sold ammunition for a 6.5 mm Mannlicher Carcano.

The Memphis Police turned Elrod over to the FBI where he was subsequently dismissed as yet another crackpot looking for attention. They pointed to the fact that there was no evidence of Oswald sharing a cell with anyone and, most crucially of all, that the Dallas Police Department had no arrest record for a John Elrod on the 22nd of November, 1963. 

That was the end of that. The fourth tramp vanished without a trace - a solo project without any of the pointless speculation and conjecture given to his contemporaries.

But in 1992, when The Dallas Police Department released their files, a journalist found a crucial piece of information. It was next to the arrest records for the three tramps, and, like them, had been hidden away for 29 years.

It was the arrest record for John Elrod - dated the 22nd of November, 1963.

And if you're smiling at that revelation then you've answered your own question. 

See you next week.

Martin Fitzgerald (@RamJfkClub)

[sandragrar-blog]

GAME RESEARCH

As part of my research I decided to look at some top played games on the market and analyse their structure. I also decided to do a small research into some of the artist who specialise in concept art and illustration.

I also forgot to mention before that before I changed my mind from creating a MMORPG game to platform game I had a character sheet which I created a few years ago and which I though would be a cool idea to use in a horror game. I tough it would be nice to mention it here.

CHARACTER SHEET:

Name: Aaron

Surname: Krause

Nickname: None

Rase: Hybrid (half-human half-demon)

Age: 70 yrs old

Occupation:  Solitary Traveler

 Personality:

How many feelings human posses, joy, excitement, sadness, regret, anger, shame, delight, agony, so many of them flows through one body, so many of the wants to be seen, to show that they are present in such a pathetic being, a single being, a human being however different from others, much more fierce, furious and yet so quiet, graceful and strong. Sometimes underneath an iron mask, sometimes without it; wolf hunter, evil hunter is hiding his face. Beautiful by day, beastly by night. On one side so gentle and caring, at the same time cold, and on another side beast with borderless limits, filled only with rage, his beast’s fury, the one who lays deep down, lays by day, lay while sun carries on its endless battle for dominance, and when it’s losing, when the night falls, the beast is waking up its senses. Not with its body, not with a scream, not with its touch, not with his lies, but with the senses it misleads his thoughts, which no longer wander the winding paths of conjecture, path leading far away to something unknown to anyone or anything. He only sees, hears and feels the moment. He feels what should not, what should squirm under the ground, what should be killed and tattered of its sheath of holiness. He feels something corrupted, destroyed from within, eaten away by the toxin, they have no right ... he should not feel them.

He only wanted peace, he wanted love, longed-for but betrayed, the one he was ragged off. He did not want to feel, he did not want to fight, but the beast doesn’t wait, it does not tell later nor now. It’s just there, it’s simply there opening its eyes. Without hurry, it’s slowly rising.

He has the time that other do not have, has life, which is hard to take, has the power which can not be described, and still writhes in amok, in the agony of his infirmity, infirmity towards the beast, which should not be there, which should never be born.

Profundity, he vainly searched for it, because he was already at the bottom, for years, for centuries, at the very bottom… But not alone, reflection of the night surrounds him and reminds about the rage, without happiness, about the sadness and regret, about the tears and innocent blood, of the blood so valuable, irreplaceable and precious to him.

Still blindly rushing ahead, sometimes innocently, sometimes with a smile on his face, joy in my heart, with envy, tears and sorrow; these are his emotions, and only his, shown during the day, when the rays of the sun illuminate his face, his, only his.

Could it be any different? Could he have a loving family, kids and a dog? Happily spend time: eating and sleeping, feel the longed-for love, feel what was stolen? Would it be possible? How many times he caught himself on thinking about the the warmth, how many times has been snatched from the abstract sleep by a sharp pain, pain of wounds and scars. Unnoticeable during the day, but burning, like iron embedded in the fires of the underworld, at night.

Focused, calm, with a noble goal, but in his hands it looks like an offal, something that has never had its place, unnecessary, repelled, treated from afar. But he walks, not too fast or slow, just walks like a man, a man tending towards God. Stumbling and getting up countless times, but he knows that he will wait, patiently looking at him. He does not support nor cheers, he simply looks and wait until another of his sheeps will cross the gate.

However Aaron, ah the poor Aaron, wander along the way dazzled by his senses. He was supposed to be next to the one he considers as the most powerful a long time ago, the one who he will bestow his grace upon him, but night falls and he still strays.

The evil plays with him and swagger, with satisfaction, that the sheep won’t gain

happiness. That a dream, so pure and innocent, is defiled. How it mixes senses and misleads.. But the sheep still believes, does not lose hope and keep right on going… Despite the anger, the sin, the unforgivable offense which he committed with full awareness of it, he stills believes and pushes forward, but the gate is already closed…

How many feelings human posses hope, care, desperation or rage, how many times he experienced happiness and how many times sadness. Emotions are interwoven, pour out so easily, even the unwanted one, even these most secret…

Thoughtful and yet so sensitive to the slightest noise, with empty eyes and yet so clear and sharp. So many contradictory things are visible on his scared face. Neither warm nor harsh, maybe caring, maybe indifferent. Verbose and yet quiet, dominant though lazy, not fond of crowds, who feels like a wild animal, it takes time to gain his trust. A wild animal does not ally with the weak, does not looking for a herd nor a pack, it seeks brother who will follow him into battle… So far alone, in an empty world, he lamented, wept. He is not not ashamed of tears, but did not use them often. He knew their meaning, he knew their value, but without them there is no him, there is no longer a man, there is only a beast.

He stopped, sat down, but did not forget. He did not forget about his goal. He chose this place, he chose this town after a long search, thoughts and quarrels with himself. His lair was in the place he wanted to destroy which he wished to be gone. And there is where his history begins, grim, filled with many emotions, and yet the last, so he thought, and will go… where his heart desires.

The gate, to the closed gate…

 *He is too quiet ( he is not shy, he doesn’t like to talk)

*Mean

*Unfriendly

*Possessive

*Envious

*Aggressive

*Antisocial

*Honest

*Caing

*Longing for human warmth

*Protective

*Collect old books

 Weakness:

*Women and children

*Weak against people with good hearts

*Human warth makes him careless

*Claustrophobic

 Appearance characteristics:

 Height and weight: 183cm, 56kg

 Appearance:

Skinny body, horrible, as if touched with disease, however you can still see the muscles, he doesn’t look weak. Creature, dressed in human skin, as white as bones, which you could see sticking out of his body. You could count almost every one of them, as well as his tendons and muscles. Tired face, grey, sad, lonely, so pitiful, begging for a little bit of attention, caring, but he never received it. Pain giving scars all over his body and face, deep, even more emphasizing the temples and cheekbones. However he didn’t care for his looks, he knew that it is his fate. Claws, slim and lean almost like a pianist's fingers, however with every touch, grab, brush he realized more and more, that he is unable to recreate the delicacy of a pianist, even if his claws were slim, oh right… claws, another tangible proof that the is not a human, at least not fully and he is not going to be one. Every time evocative sadness and unbearable longing for his mother. Back then, when he was still with her, he looked normal, like everybody else.

Sometimes when he walked through a city, he heard people shouting, “I’m different than others”, he couldn’t stand them, he would look at them with the deepest hater and disdain he would ever feel. They didn’t understand, they couldn’t. They thought that it is only a personality. Humans are all the same, the only thing that differ them is a pack of feelings and values they carry.

They are beautiful. He thought so. Cream, firm and soft skin, hair in so many colours and what he though was the most beautiful in them, were eyes. Deep, reflecting their souls. He didn’t have them, everything about him was colourless, grey and empty. Quite long, white hair, always wearing a hairband, sometimes goggles, ear piercing, collarbone piercing and prison tattoos.

Pensive, majestic attitude lonely wandering around the city, with his head raised, it was the only thing which was noticeable. He never hesitates to step forward, he makes it with a great hope, power and determination that’s the reason why people would turn around to look at him. Sometimes he would greet them with a small smile, sometimes with short look, and when he will notice something other than fear he would drop his head down, smile and keep on going.

 Distinguishing marks:

*Scars on the face

*Prison tattoos

*Claws instead of fingers

*Fangs

*When angry, his eyes turn red

 Additional info:

*Carries an old gun, antic, has sentiment for it

*He trains a lot (different type of martial arts)

*Quite often has nightmares, suffers from insomnia

  History:

A child of a man, a demon, and a beautiful woman, a human, polish. In his eyes she was so beautiful, more beautiful than any flower, than any colour. Radiant smile which he saw until his 4th birthday. He didn’t know the truth, he had no idea. He had a loving family, he was happy, he didn’t wish for anything else. Innocent, pure child, didn’t know that the happiness doesn’t last long… A cold night, red moon, the child woke up… so young, how was he at fault? How was a 4 years old child at fault to witness this?

 15 August 1944

 They lived in a village, had a huge villa, forest for their own, estate. Everyone was aware of the danger, demon suggested to move away, he was powerful, he could do whatever he wanted, but beautiful woman only smiled, and he read from her mind : “We have a baby”. The demon dropped to his knees and hug her, they looked majestically at this moment, like from a fairytale about never ending love.

“I want him to be raised here” she cut the silence. The man look at her disturbingly. “I want him to see the beauty of these lands, I want him to love his homeland as much as he does me.”

Time has passed, the war begin to calm down and the days of happiness full of the sunshine became an everyday reality for the loving family. However something went wrong. Quarrels, at the beginning rarely but with time they bigger stronger and occurred more often. Tears, escape, and fake smile of the mother. The boy didn’t understand, didn’t know.

“HE IS A DEMON, HE CAN’T STAY HERE! HE MUST GO WITH ME TO THE OTHER WORLD! I DON’T WANT TO LOSE YOU!’’

I WON’T GIVE UP MY SON! HE IS MINE! I WON’T LET YOU DO IT!”

A few more quarrels, a few more days, a few more sleepless nights later. Again, he woke up from a nightmare, he ran to his parents bedroom as he usually does, but what he saw there was much more disturbing than his nightmares, much more from the beat which visited him every night. Crimson, it was everywhere, in the middle of the bedroom was a body, it seemed so fragile, small. Next to the body was a kneeling beast, horned, terrifying. Aaron didn’t recognize this image, but he knew the woman’s face, it wasn’t radiant anymore, wasn’t smiling. It was clam, surrounded by crimson, at this moment something had broken. The man looked up to see his son, but it wasn’t a little puppy which he used to know. The beast has awaken, a fox like form wrapped around his son. Black like tar with glazing red eyes, and the son himself had a face of the devil. Fangs, eyes no different than a wild beast and claws. Anger, range and senses are the only things which he could feel.

He woke up a few days later, he was in the bedroom, but he couldn’t remember anything from last night. But he knew that something has changed, it wasn’t the same anymore. His body, his mind, priorities, plans, ambitions everything has changed. From this day he walks his own path, alone, training, reading, gaining knowledge, killing, experiencing. There was no regret or anger, there was just a plan. With the time he felt disgust, not only towards the beast but also to himself. He wasn’t fighting only with demons, but also with himself.   

And the history is going on, but a new chapter just began, maybe filled with love and happiness, but for sure it will be filled with crimson, the same crimson from that night. The last chapter, a long story comes to the end, but it won’t be easy, short. History is ending...