#Edit and retcon!!!! They are in fact NOT related

[veilith]

He's infected my mind help me He's all I've been thinking bout for two days SAVE ME

[vexy-hexy]

I hope this isn't a hot take, but Scott Cawthon is a shitty writer

The reason the lore makes no fucking sense is because he just randomly adds or retcons things with no explanation and, at this point, I think he just enjoys watching people (especially MatPat) go crazy theorizing

Like, the man may as well have confirmed dream theory a few years ago, only to go "wait, never mind, here’s Sister Location and everything is real, I promise"

I doubt even Scott understands his own story because it was written with the same grace and talent as an edgy middle school kid trying to write the next Jeff the Killer, so they shove everything they think is cool into the story, whether or not it fits

People say "oh, he didn't realize it would be more than (however many) games. He didn't plan that far ahead," but that excuse should only get you so far when you are writing a story

It's pretty clear that after at least game 4 (some say game 3, so I'm being nice), he stopped caring about the story and began just duct taping things he thought were interesting into a story that could've been wrapped up with MAYBE 5 games (1, 2, 3, 4, and pizzeria Sim with something in the other four to explain Baby and Molten Freddy, or get rid of them, I don't care), but instead it's a cluster fuck of weird details that DON’T MAKE SENSE

Look, I think a lot of us, myself included, can sometimes confuse a good CONCEPT with a good STORY

The storytelling of FNAF is dog shit, but the concept is just SO good, which is why people like the FNAF VHS tapes so much: these people are able to take a terrifying and interesting concept and make a truly good implied horror story with it in the way Scott NEVER could

And don't get me started on the books: First, they're not canon, then they're canon, but also, some stories may only be canon in another alternate universe or something, but if you actually want to understand something, you need to read some of the books

Your story should not have to be told across multiple different media for it to be even SLIGHTLY coherent. It's fine if you want to add in details that aren't too important to understanding the entire thing (like, we don't specifically need to know the names of each kid William killed, but it's a cool fact to know. Or maybe expand on how Freddy's and the incidents affected different people), but, as cool as it was, Golden Freddy being possessed by two children is a pretty crucial point to the rest of the series to be in just some activity book that so easily could've been overlooked as something fun to do related to FNAF (IMO)

Not to mention, we apparently can't even agree on the name of the Crying Child who, I think, was the catalyst for this entire story (because we can't even seem to agree if Elizabeth or CC died first)

TL;DR FNAF is a great concept, and it's been shown that it can make a great story by people who are much more skilled than Scott Cawthon (or maybe they just care more about this series than it's own creator, I don't fucking know)

Also, sorry if I'm incoherent or get anything wrong, I typed this while I was incredibly tired, but I did try to edit it as much as I could the past few days

[calocera]

Your posts about SNW Spock makes me so curious, could you please explain how they've done him wrong since he seems very different from the original series :O Are they making him more human despite the SNW taking place before the og?

yeah i can! im not the best person to talk about it probably since im a pretty recent trek fan and also tos/spock arent parts of trek i care about as much as a lot of other fans, but i have opinions for sure!!

firstly just up front i do not like ethan peck as spock. he does not look like spock or act in a way i am satisfied with. it feels like the only reason they cast him was because he has a deep voice. so i am going forward in this with haterism for him specifically not JUST how he is written in snw

Spock is written not like a vulcan but like an anhedonic human. actually not even anhedonic, just like a human raised in vulcan society trying to blend in. like there is nothing about him that feels genuine he just feels like woobiebait for 2012 tumblr to make flower crown edits of because he is awkward and quirky. every scene involving spock is a joke about him and his demeanor, everything he says is a wink wink nudge nudge "lol vulcans act like this and its so stupid lol logic is silly" like i can physically feel a laugh track whenever hes on screen. i enjoy jokes about vulcans but it isnt funny when there isnt anything else. its like spock showing emotion, it isnt satisfying when its a constant and not a little treat peppered in. in snw hes stifling a giggle or screaming in pain or being oopsie awkward silly every time he gets a focal scene, it takes the magic away because now it isnt a rare break in character its just how he is. Ive seen a lot of people defend this aspect as him being young and therefore less mature than in tos, but hes like approaching 30 :\ i get him being less mature but he doesnt act like a sheltered 30 year old he acts like someone freshly 18. at this point its just like…MAKE A NEW CHARACTER!!!!

as a point of contrast, i like how uhura is written in snw (in season 1 anyways, she has barely appeared in s2) she is obviously younger and is growing into her spot on the crew, but they arent hinging her character on the 1 or 2 pop culture uhura moments, retconning anything about that that doesnt align with modern media fandom, and calling it a day; they actually expand on her character outside of like idk her doing a sexy dance and her sitting at the phone (though i guess it is easier for her since she had barely any character in tos anyways). meanwhile they DO do that with spock, his bullet point top 10 iconic spock moments of sometimes being awkward and showing emotion are now the only things he is allowed to do. tldr flanderization

i also think its interesting that it is this way since ethan peck played spock in discovery and there hes the exact opposite. hes extremely serious and vulcan; which fits the tone of the show (regardless of my opinions on the tone of disco). i just dont understand how that spock translated into the snw spock. they are not the same guy.

anyways on to the biggest plot related gripe with him...how he interacts with women!!!yay!!

first theres how they decided to have multiple episodes about his, apparently, strained-yet-loving-and-involved relationship with tpring. the inclusion of t'pring feels stupid because other than the 1 minute of cheap "oh i remember her!" from someone seeing her on screen for the first time what point is there to her returning when the ONE canonical fact about her is that she and spock A: had an arranged marriage, B: did not meet in person since they were children, and C: hated each other. its not like there is a huge contingency of t'pring/spock shippers holding out since 1967 so what value does reintroducing her as a character serve? i assume its as some kind of attempt to give a woman who previously had no real character something to do, but her existence on snw is STILL only about spock and her relation to spock so there isnt any sort of feminist level up happening. including her was not interesting enough to justify retconning the plot of the most iconic episode of star trek. especially when multiple episodes tonally and stakes-wise rely on you caring about them as a couple, and anyone watching who knows who she is already knows that her and spock dont have any relationship to speak of in the future so who is this for? if you really really just NEED spock to have sex with a woman why not make a new character? that would also suck but at least it wouldnt be timeline interfering. im not even a huge continuity purist "oh no!!the timeline!!!plotholes!!!" but when the situation is the writers deliberately breaking the continuity in large ways and the outcome isnt even fun? stupid.

and now his relationship with chapel. i am way more annoyed by this one since its just gross. so from tos the only thing with them is that chapel has a crush on him and spock is not interested. also worth noting that its such a non-plot related thing that it only is revealed under the influence of alien drug virus that makes you horny. and they decided that not only was that enough to base a whole reciprocated romance arc around, but now since theyve introduced tpring back into the story, spock is now a cheater??? what is the POINT of breaking canon to introduce spocks girlfriend only to go "well actually hes horny for his coworker" like...that isnt how love triangles work youve just done a character assassination. the man who would rather kill his best friend than have sex with his wife is now fucking both her and the woman who confessed to him and he got so mad he crushed a computer with his bare hands. ok 👍. i just hate that they chose spock to be the romantic center of the show. anyone else could have been the character who gets into relationship drama why spock? there are multiple new characters who could have taken up the position. and its not like spock has nothing else to do as a character without it

to say things specifically about the most recent epsiode since it was particularly annoying and showed things that happen throughout the series:

firstly spock just does shit thats stupid. illogical even. i know the whole logical fallacy moment with vulcans but when it isnt a point of note in the show and rather just happens as if its a normal occurrence for spock as a person im like...he would be a laughing stock on vukcan and not have any of the positive reputation he holds.

the plot of this ep was basically that spock gets turned completely human and they just miss literally the whole point of it. vulcans have MORE emotion than humans, they ACTIVELY suppress it. yet when spock is turned human he just experiences human emotion completely emotionally? he should be having an EASIER time suppressing his emotions. and OMG he gets a BONER because he sees a hot WOMAN LOL LOL isnt that funny? spock got hard isnt that hilarious? its just so cheap. they act like being human makes him a completely different person, they played it like the voyager episode where belanna gets split into human and klingon BUT in that case she was literally split into two different people (this ep had a lot of issues too ie racism but that’s a different can of worms); here spock just becomes human he still has the same memories and training and history...why would he forget what its like to be a vulcan. they could SO EASILY make excuses too but they just didnt care. and anyways bada bing bada boom the ep ends with him and chapel hooking up which i already complained about and could complain about more.

i think thats already too much so im gunna stop myself here but trust theres more i hate and other people have probably talked about this better than i have :')

blade nation

[luce-speaks]

Hi pal! I sent over a passage for director's commentary on Laid To Rest Chapter 4, I'd love to hear your thoughts! :3

i've never watched a DVD director's commentary so i actually don't know what's supposed to go here. i have taken the opportunity to be incredibly long-winded (what else is new). enjoy!

to preface: these are screenshots directly from the original google doc! every major writing project i work on starts in the notes app for drafting, then moves to google docs for editing. once in the google doc, it gets its own background color to help me tell them apart. laid to rest is green for forsyth!

forsyth’s inability to just “do nothing” is a running theme in this story (not to mention something i personally relate to), and this is totally one of those moments. it’s a nice contrast to python, who is great at doing nothing and generally thinks forsyth needs to get better at it.

python has no reason to believe that forsyth even has a book with him. he just says things. forsyth’s answer is also a hint that this story happens before the forsyth and lukas support.

i had a whole talk with my beta reader about this bit and "sir ghost", because forsyth, as a very proper aspiring knight, would not be inclined to use the title incorrectly! but there wasn’t anything good to replace it with (“mister ghost” sounds weirdly anachronistic and a little british), and i didn't want to take it out, so it stuck anyway. the line about forsyth being relieved was basically a retcon fix to that issue! also, i think it’s funny how much python hates the nickname...

…and how quickly forsyth switches to ‘oh, no, sir is only for knights’. forsyth doesn’t see the irony here. i do.

python has no idea how much the stealing comment offends forsyth, but if he did, he’d say it anyway. i don’t think the same goes for the second insult—it’s very personal to forsyth, and it might be a bridge too far for him. but he has no idea, so he just goes ahead with it! also in this part: i wanted lukas’s presence to be felt as a character even though he wasn’t around for most of the story. in this case, we see how forsyth looks up to him for being level-headed and tries to follow his example in a social situation he doesn’t know how to handle :)

“Oh my god, Forsyth, you can’t just ask people why they’re dead.”

i don’t think it comes across clearly, but this was supposed to be a real autism moment for forsyth. the original draft had something like “forsyth notices a sarcastic edge to his voice—he doesn’t mean it.” like, this is a cue that forsyth successfully picks up on, but he does it very consciously / it doesn’t come naturally to him. i ended up changing it because i couldn't get the original to flow right, but i hope it still carries the general feeling.

python is snarky. what else is new

ok nerd time SO!! you know by this point that python has lost his memories, right? well there are actually two types of memory, implicit and explicit! explicit memory encompasses facts you know and things that have happened to you, while implicit memory includes reflexes, muscle memory, and how to do things. it’s common for amnesia patients to retain their implicit memories but not their explicit ones—so, for example, you might remember how to ride a bike, but you wouldn’t know how or when you learned that. i’m playing a bit fast and loose with the rules here, but as you can see in this scene, python’s instinctive reactions about things stay the same (dislikes nobles, likes archery, etc), even though he doesn't necessarily know why he feels that way about them, which makes for some interesting dynamics. more on this later in the story!! also, this plotline takes some inspiration from the game Ghost Trick, though I can't really go into detail about how for spoiler reasons :)

one other fun thing about this scene is python starting to be more visible! i had an interesting conversation with a friend about how ghosts would convey themselves. if it were the other way around and forsyth were the ghost, i think he would tend to be more upright and would stand on/near the ground to emulate a living person (sort of in denial about being dead). python's default is either doing little flips in the air (showing disinterest) or laying "like in a hammock" (humorously making the most of his ability to fly).

thanks for the ask!! this was really fun!

[coupleofdays]

Alright, it's time to finally compile my thoughts about how the premise of Tron Identity fits, or rather, doesn't seem to fit, together with Legacy, and my thus far failed attempts to make them fit. Long post with spoilers ahead.

First of all, I would like to state that I'm not opposed to the retcon that Quorra isn't in fact the last surviving ISO. I like to compare it to Superman: Depending on which continuity you're reading, Kal-El is either the only survivor of Krypton's destruction, The Last Kryptonian, or he's one of several survivors, including Supergirl, Krypto, Zod, the whole bottle city of Kandor, etc. Both of these premises are compelling to me: There's certainly a poetic tragedy of being the absolute last survivor of a calamity that wiped out your people, but I think that many people can also relate to the concept of a small group of survivors of a catastrophe trying to preserve and perhaps re-establish their culture. Similarly, Quorra being The Last ISO is interesting, but I see plenty of story potential in her being one of several survivors, perhaps trying to find and rescue her kin trapped in the Arq Server. And from what I can recall from watching Legacy recently, I think that they technically never outright say that Quorra is the last of her kind, though it is of course very heavily implied.

EDIT: Okay, Kevin does specifically call Quorra "the last ISO". Nevermind, then.

With that said, I think the main problem with the idea that Kevin Flynn created a backup server to which he migrated a bunch of ISOs can be summarized thus: Why the hell didn't he tell Sam? I guess the question could also be "why didn't he tell Quorra?", but I honestly have a difficulty seeing a scenario where Quorra isn't aware of the Arq Server in some way. I think that one of the very first things Kevin would tell Quorra when they meet after the Purge would be that he's saved other ISOs, I just can't imagine why he would keep her thinking that she's the last survivor. And even if he didn't tell her for some reason, I still think she would have suspiscions, since I imagine that most of the ISOs remaining on the Grid would notice if Kevin suddenly sneaked away some of them without telling anyone.

I have tried to figure out some explanations for why Kevin never told Sam about the Arq Server, and I have seen some possible explanations by other Tron fans, but none of them seem to hold up perfectly, for reasons I will explain below:

Kevin did tell Sam, we just never saw it in the movie: Okay, I guess there could be some moment when they're talking, like on the Sailer, and Flynn says "Oh, by the way..." I would probably have to do a rewatch of Legacy, but I suppose it could be possible that Sam isn't motivated by "I have to save Quorra, she's the last of her kind" and instead by "I have to save Quorra, so she can reunite with her fellow ISOs". The big problem with this idea is that once Sam got out, I have to imagine that his top priority would be to check on the Arq Server as soon as possible. Even if Sam procrastinated for whatever reason ("I have to start building a themepark ride!"), I imagine that Quorra would be on his ass about it every waking moment, for obvious reasons. But as I understand it, the premise of Identity is that the Arq Server hasn't been visited by anyone from the outside since the end of Legacy. It's been running by itself since 1989 up to our current present day year of 2023, perhaps even longer, and that's why it's in danger of running out of power. I don't think that works if Sam is aware of it.

Kevin thought the Arq Server had stopped functioning/was destroyed/was stolen: This was a scenario I saw someone else here on Tumblr suggest, and it's certainly a tantalizing idea. The idea of some as yet unknown third party carrying around a copy of the Arq Grid in their pocket is particularly fascinating, but I would assume that Kevin would tell Sam about it in that case: "When we get out, we have to find the person who stole the backup." Kevin believing that the server was destroyed or nonfunctional in some way is probably the scenario I have the least problems with, though I imagine that in that case he would at least have told Sam "I tried to make a backup, but..." I think it's especially interesting to imagine a conspiracy where someone inside the Arq Server somehow managed to "hack" it to fool Kevin into thinking it was shut down, perhaps some unscrupulous ISO who wanted to rule it for themselves?

Kevin forgot: And I don't mean "Oops, it just slipped my mind", I mean that something happened to his memory that erased his knowledge of the Arq Server. I had actually started sketching out a piece of fanfiction in which Kevin at some point before Legacy is temporarily captured by Clu (though later escaping, of course), and during his capture Clu manages to access this particular memory from Kevin's identity disc, and erases it for evil reasons. I liked the idea that Clu would know about the Arq Sever and was plotting to visit it once he got out, while Kevin was no longer aware of it, only regaining the memory when he reintegrates with Clu, and being unable to tell Sam before he disappears. However, I couldn't fit this together with the timeline of when Kevin meets Quorra (as I understand it, according to Tron Evolution that happened very shortly after the betrayal and purge). For the reasons stated above, Quorra would have to be aware of the Arq Server, and if Kevin got his memory erased after meeting Quorra, I have a hard time believing that she wouldn't mention it to him at some point after he escaped from Clu.

So there you have it. I really wish I could fit together Identity and Legacy in some way, since I really do like the game and all the concepts it introduces. It's possible I have missed or misunderstood something in my thoughts described above, and I'd be more than happy if someone points it out. It's also possible that the creators of Identity will come with some explanation in the promised sequels, that this whole thing is an intentional larger mystery that will eventually be revealed.

[cornyregans]

Hi, it's the Hermia/Miranda anon again. About the Capp siblings' (or cousins') birth order. Yeah, as you had mentioned, Miranda is placed in Consort's (and Goneril's) memories as the eldest but I think the Albany's memories are strong enough evidence for Miranda being the fourth child as they match the order of creation of Goneril’s branch in-game. I assume, that the developers had tried to cut the loose ends as they were retconning the storyline but they forgot to edit the Albany’s memories as well. As for the evidences of Tybalt being the eldest kid in Goneril’s family – look no further than the 95 Bard Boulevard (N003_Lot128) – if you open that file via WordPad and search for the “N005” word, you can actually see the entire Goneril’s branch + Tybalt’s old info there, meaning that they had occupied that lot before. Also, Tybalt seems to have very specific relationships with his cousins (i.e negative daily relationships towards them) and his so-called uncle Albany (the lifetime relationship towards him is very high (65+) which is higher than towards Consort) for no apparent reason.

It also seems like that they had tried to make Cordelia as the eldest child in the family tree during the retconning but for some reason they either dropped the idea and/or had no time for that. Idk, everything seems to be too convenient to be just a mere coincidence.

Hi again! :D

Yeah, the birth orders in Veronaville are a hot mess because of how contradictory the memories are, especially when matched up with the age bars. Goneril and Consort remember Miranda being born before Hal and Desdemona (which is reflected by their age bars), whereas Albany remembers the opposite (even though he remembers potty training Miranda before Hal's birth). Consort remembers Miranda being his oldest grandchild, followed by Tybalt, then Hermia, with Juliette being the youngest of the teenagers; however, if we were to go by the age bars, then Tybalt would be the oldest, then Juliette, then Hermia, and finally Miranda. Not to mention, there's also Tybalt remembering Cordelia and Caliban dying when he was a toddler, as well as Consort and Goneril's differing accounts as to when Cordelia died in relation to the births of Hal and Ariel.

This problem isn't unique to the Capp family, either, as the ABC Montys also have a few contradictions. Basically, Patrizio remembers Bianca being his oldest child, followed by Antonio, then Claudio. That said, Antonio's age bar lists him as being 18 days away from elderhood, whereas Bianca has 23 days, and Claudio had 23 days before he died. Thankfully, the fifth gen Montys are more coherent in that regard.

Also, the fact that none of the Capps or Montys (both gens 4 and 5) have any memories of their siblings being born doesn't help in narrowing things down, either.

I'm not super familiar with the creation order of Veronaville's premades. Tbh, it's not something I had the means to personally look into until I started playing Sims on a PC a few years ago. Even then, I try not to go into the neighborhood widget too much, as I'm terrified of corrupting my game by accident. That said, I know that Consort was the first sim created (since he's the telescope shover), and I believe Cordelia and Caliban were probably third and fourth, and I have a general idea of when some of the other premades were created in the development timeline. Other than that, however, I'm kind of up shit creek without a paddle. I can definitely see Miranda being added to Goneril's branch later in development, though (which might also partially explain Ariel's existence, since they're from the same play). While it could mean she was intended to be on the younger side, it could also mean that she was always intended to be the oldest, but she was just added to the game later than Hal and Desdemona. On the other hand, Hal and Desdemona might have been intended to be teens who were older than Miranda, but were retconned into children later on.

With Tybalt, I was unaware of that file even existing. That said, it doesn't surprise me, considering how well Tybalt would have fit as Goneril's son on both a programming and referential level. As I mentioned in a previous post, Tybalt's facial features (specifically the angy brows and sunken-in cheekbones) match up very well with both Goneril and Albany. As for the Shakespeare stuff, Tybalt being Goneril's son would have made him Juliette's cousin, which would have more accurately reflected Tybalt and Juliet's familial ties in Romeo & Juliet. I also never paid much attention to his ltr with Albany, but it doesn't surprise me when taking all of this into account (especially since he wouldn't be living with Consort if he was Goneril's kid in the final product). As for his relationships with his cousins, they could be holdovers from earlier in development; however, said relationships also line up with Tybalt's personality (specifically the 2 nice points) and his views on the feud, so they could have just as easily been something the devs always intended.

Wrt Cordelia's place in her generation's birth order, I can see the argument for her being the oldest or the youngest of her siblings. On one hand, her children are all older than Goneril's in the final product. As such, designating her as the oldest would probably be the most palatable option from both a programming and cultural perspective.

On the other hand, Cordelia being the eldest of her siblings is contradictory to Shakespeare canon. In King Lear, Cordelia is younger than both Goneril and Regan, so her being the youngest of that generation's Capp siblings would better reflect her origins. Also, while not related to her original incarnation, Cordelia Capp is Juliette's mother. I find this interesting because Juliet Capulet's mother in Romeo & Juliet had her first child when she was younger than her nearly 14-year-old daughter. While this doesn't point towards Cordelia having Juliette (or Tybalt) that early in life, it definitely raises the possibility that she might have had her children when she was on the younger side.

Finally, given how TS2 is programmed, I think it's safe to say that "oldest" and "firstborn" aren't exactly the same. For example, Goneril could have been the firstborn of her siblings, but if you exclusively played Cordelia's family, then she would become the oldest of the four. In this case, Tybalt, Juliette, and Hermia would all end up closer to adulthood than Miranda, despite the latter being listed as the firstborn teen in Consort's memories. The only times this wouldn't make as much sense would be in cases where two sims live on the same lot (like Juliette and Hermia, though this discrepancy might be a holdover from when Hermia was Regan's daughter).

Tbh, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the messy birth orders (particularly the one involving the Lear Capps and ABC Montys), so much so that I have a little series of essays in the works to discuss them, though I've only posted one so far (/shameless plug). As such, I didn't go into much depth here as I otherwise would, and instead just covered some of the basics.

Thanks again for the ask!~

EDIT: I just remembered that Consort wasn't actually the first Veronaville premade to be programmed into the game -- Bottom Summerdream was. I had completely forgotten about this since Consort's the neighborhood's telescope shover; however, this is only the case because Bottom is too young to take on the job. As such, it stands to reason that Consort was the second Veronaville premade created, and therefore the first Capp to be programmed into the game.

[bananabrain0]

In Celebration of Love: X-Men Edition

For this Valentine's day, I made a list of my favorite couples from the X-universe, and here is why you should pay attention too 😏

Ororo Munroe x James Logan Howlett

Related Fanfics: Lone Wolf Cabin (Explicit), Trip to the Waterfalls (Explicit)

RoLo is my first-ever ship. Their dynamic is exciting. She is the unattainable goddess (or so she tells herself), while he is a man with a long past with nothing else left but his own animal side. Through time, Logan was a wingman to Ororo's X-Men leadership.

He was also there for Ororo right after she parted with T'Challa to serve her people, the mutants. It is only so interesting to see that Logan stood by her side, a supportive friend and a lover, while she was in a post-Wakandan era of finding her own purpose yet again.

Nature is a constant companion. Take a winter cabin, woods, and fresh air. Is it not liberating to see these two together?

Scott Summers x Emma Frost

Related Fanfics: Essense of Emma (Explicit), Uncanny X-Men: Sex & Cigarettes (Explicit)

Scemma infected me from the first pages of the New X-Men.

Emma is a complex character, a femme fatale. With a difficult past to reconcile with, she is one of the prime examples of a villain turning into a main character. Scott, on the other hand, seemingly clings to her corrupted nature at first. Next, he makes an active choice to be with Emma and to build his own life regardless of who is woman by his side. As the result, the two formed the most interesting power couple/fight couple.

They never lost their spark on the page. I also absolutely LOVE the "two leaders being together" dynamic. Usually, in a relationship, one of the parties assumes a submissive role. Here, Scemma gives me the air to breathe - a hope that two powerful personalities can in fact thrive together.

Destiny x Mystique

Related Fanfic: Viva Las Vegas (Explicit)

Ok. Hear me out.

The fact that two lesbian terrorists survived all censorship and, to this date, are one of the longest and most consistent power couples in the X-Men universe still baffles me. I like their ambition and shared sense of humor.

Are they good parents? Debatable. Are they fighting for the right cause? Depends. Are they ready to burn the world down for each other? Absolutely fucking yes.

Wanda Maximoff x Pietro Maximoff

Related Fanfic: Murder at Polaris Express (Explicit)

'Nuff said. Crucify me for this. 😏

There is nothing to be ashamed of. Incest is a taboo in our civilization for a reason - two genetically similar humans have low chances of creating a child with maximized odds for survival and top health. No-go. It makes total sense. But! I am waiting for a retcon explaining how they were both not-blood siblings and simply met each other under the circumstances of Magneto's found family.

I shipped them since around 2005. I shipped these two so hard, I persuaded my ex-boyfriend to dress up as these two troublemakers for Halloween. Yes. Ex-boyfriend. Yes, he agreed willingly. Yes, we went to a party like this. MCU's Age of Ultron made us horny, and I refuse to apologize for what my mind desires.

[eaglefairy]

As I promised a while ago, here are some thoughts I had from the last few chapters of xenoblade 2, presented in rough chronological order:

I liked Mikhail in Torna a lot, and I liked what they revealed for his backstory here too. Honestly I was even kind of cheering on his revenge in killing Indol even though the other half of me was like "wait no that's bad don't kill the whole Titan"

Amalthus is like. I get him, yeah, and he's a perfect philosophical foil to Rex, but he's not really interesting to me in any way except for how he managed to get and keep power for so long without anyone noticing, like "banality of evil" kind of stuff

I'm really glad for that conversation with Jin near the end because it reassured me that they did in fact have a reason to make Blades the way they are and it wasn't just a horribly thought out piece of worldbuilding. It seems to me like the point they're trying to make is that the Blade-Driver bond and the endlessly reincarnating nature of Blades isn't inherently a bad thing as long as the humans don't take advantage of the Blades' dependence on them, and Indol's religion has made everything a lot worse for Blades because of its teaching that they're inherently lesser and subservient to humans. I still vehemently disagree with that idea (that Blade dependence on humans is Fine Actually) due to the reliance on good choices by humans, but I at least respect that they're making a point

Once again the osmosis of xc2 lore from people who don't like it has failed me, because I thought that they made it so Zanza was just Klaus' "evil half" and really Klaus was good all along, guys! (gag). I like the actual reality much more, where it's more that the Architect is a version of Klaus who didn't get what he wanted and tried to fix the damage he caused while Zanza got exactly what he wanted and so didn't care about the damage. They both started at the same point (genius asshole) but diverged after The Experiment

Althought speaking of the Experiment, now I'm confused. What's the point of the Trinity Processor if the Conduit is what actually made things happen? How do they relate? I feel like I might've missed something wrt that

(Also side note yeah I know that the Conduit is important to the wider Xeno-series lore, but I neither know nor care nor care to know about any of that. I'm happy just staying within the -blade series)

Finally I'll admit that I don't like the change from "creating a universe" (xc1) to "opening paths to other dimensions" (xc2). To be fair this is an incredibly minor change that affects basically nothing in the series and really just boils down to a change in wording. I just personally hate retcons on principle; if I liked it the first time, why would I want it to be changed in a sequel? And so anything like this instantly gets a disproportionate response out of me lol

Last thing I thought of while editing this: what are the abilities of flesh eaters?? I thought they were basically just Blades that weren't dependent on Drivers and could bond Blades of their own. I was willing to accept Nia switching between Driver and Blade forms after her awakening as a hardware limitation or something until I saw the cutscenes were she physically switches between the two forms on-camera. It isn't just an outfit change either, her ears change size and shape! Is that something all flesh eaters can do? Something all blades can do? Is it specific to just Nia, and if so then why?

[penguinkyun]

claire fantastic essay as usual but since i was also recently unhinged about spica im gonna add to this but with the goro and sarina chapters edition instead. rest of this is under the cut because its also quite negative about the writing of these characters in general

(warnings for canon child death)

claire's already said a lot about how the characterisation and in general writing of every single character comes off as incredibly uncanny and just off in a "the vibes are so so off" way so im just gonna jump right into it.

spica in general feels a lot like a retcon of goro and sarina's relationship - the little of which we see in the manga - in so many ways and especially in the way it strips them of a lot of their emotional complexity they had.

in the first chapter of the manga, goro paints a story of a lively, hopeful twelve year old child with a terminal illness who loved idols and was very optimistic. we see how even though he wasn't her actual doctor, he still cared for and acted like a substitute caretaker (we later learn he also did this for several other long term patients but i digress). we learn that this child was doomed from the start and that both doctor and patient knew it. there's this anticipatory grief tinged into their every interaction, and its a story of two people who deeply cared for each other, despite knowing one of them would die in a very short amount of time.

and spica strips a lot of this away.

in spica, goro, a qualified doctor, is shown to be unaware of the true progression of the disease, the truth of which was hidden by sarina and the personnel around him and and what he can't believe about instead is...failing to know that about sarina? what?

In the manga, goro's disbelief is nowhere related to the disease - it was what sarina was admitted for and both of them knew, even if they pretended otherwise, that she wouldn't survive in a next month or so - but instead being helpless to bring her parents to her. its his most iconic panel, his sheer rage at sarina's parent's neglect and his near incomprehension of it too. he remembers her love for her parents and what aqua says here is referring to that exact helplessness - that he was unable to give her her family and disbelief that any parent would abandon their child this way (it says a lot about his character too)

he was still aware of it, but the fact that he was shown to be unaware that sarina was going to die in a few months/weeks (which he is implicitly aware of in the manga) and his disbelief was related to that instead of her being alone on the day she dies...it feels lot like it was changed to act as a way more emotional soap opera version of the story, instead of the complex feelings surrounding the matter (and fits into the broader themes onk has relating to motherhood and parenthood and abandonment)

spica also writes sarina in the same way ai is written. im just going to quote what claire says:

This is part of a much broader and more troubling trend in Spica of Hajime Tanaka simply not being able to write young women in a naturalistic and human way. It's difficult for me to express exactly what it is that feels so off other than to say that it's Covered In The Fucking Ooze in a way typical of Men Who Can't Write Women

she feels a lot like a carciature and incredibly similar to IncestBait!Ruby from 123 onwards in a way that is so dissimilar to how she is written in the manga that it kinda of gives me whiplash. Goro is also written as much more tolerant of her "Sensei Marry Me!" than he is in the manga - where he shuts it down quite quickly.

and that brings me to this. *heavy sigh*. we were discussing this in the brainrot discord and the way goro and sarina are written feels a lot like it was done so to fan the flames of aquruby for more traction. in chapter 3 when goro is grieving sarina's death, he is instantly accosted by an old hookup, who just asks him if he's grieving a girlfriend and a lot of emphasis is placed on this, even though goro shoots it down, stating he doesn't think of sarina that way and but struggles to name the care because he wasn't even her parent or the doctor assigned to her care. while even in spica its a stretch to assume there was romance in any way involved (ew) the random and weird emphasis placed on it just has creepy undertones which are just. completely absent from the manga lmao.

that's not to say that spica does everything badly - the way sarina's viewpoint of goro shifts from brother to friend to parent to literally everything under the sun shows how at that point, goro was really all she had and highlights the aspect of goro's (which also shows up in aqua) character of "living his life for others wishes" along with sarina's loneliness.

all in all, i just don't think spica matches with a lot of onk's themes and complexities at all and honestly raises my blood pressure just thinking about it. thanks for reading this addition (anon i don't think you asked for two long essays xD)

different anon! but i 100% upvote other anon's comment of you being the professor of hoshino-aiology 😎👍 your posts about her give me a newfound appreciation for her and imo you should be the one writing 15 year lie frfr 🤧👏✨️

and if you haven't written anything abt it, could you share your thoughts abt the spica ai chapter? i liked ai and saitou in it but i was shocked at how intense the b-komachi bullying was :0 poor ai 😢

THANK YOU ANON…….. god can you imagine what this manga would be like if i had been given that kind of creative control. you're going to read my 15 volume hoshino ai backstory flashback and you're going to love every single chapter of it!!!

When it comes to Spica, I have pretty mixed feelings on that first chapter. For transparency's sake, I broadly dislike the novel overall and I think it takes away from the relationships it depicts more than it adds. Like I mentioned in a previous ask, my issue with Spica (and its depiction of OnK's world and characters) is its tendency to flatten and simplify many of the interesting interpersonal wrinkles that characterize these central dynamics in the main story. This is much more evident in the GRSR chapters (as outlined in that post) but you can absolutely see it in Ai's chapter as well.

POST-WRITING CLAIRE EDIT: So while this post initially started as me broadly skimming some of the issues I had with chapter 1, it has ballooned into a much, MUCH longer essay about what it is about Spica that I disliked and why, broadly, I think it fails to work both as a standalone piece and as an addition to OnK as a canon. I'm pretty negative about the book in this post and very critical of the writing so if you really liked Spica and it would bum you out to see me take it apart, feel free to skip this post.

On the surface, Ai and Saitou's dynamic is pretty true to the main story and I will admit that I do enjoy their rapport in this chapter and just that we got a chapter focusing on this relationship full stop. Ai and Saitou's relationship is one I've always been particularly soft for and getting a whole chapter that was basically just exploring its early days was really nice. But it's also a very rose tinted view of that relationship in a way I think does it a bit of a disservice. I discussed this in my OnK anime rewatch but Spica's take on Saitou (and thus on his relationship with Ai) frames him as a wholly positive and supportive figure whose desires for money and success in the entertainment industry are explicitly, textually said to be secondary and unimportant to his uncomplicated kind desire to support them as they succeed. There's almost this sense of "wow, isn't it so noble and cool that saitou is kindly allowing these tweenage girls to work themselves ragged making money for his company!!!" that's a bit icky to read.

This is in line with the bizarre ways Spica portrays idol culture, in particular the 'oshi'/fan dynamic. This is another thing I've discussed before, so I'll borrow my previous words on the topic:

The Japanese text of [chapter 137] takes this dehumanization a step further: Rather than the wasei-eigo term アイドル (aidoru), when calling [Ai] an idol, Gotanda uses the word 偶像 (guzou) - an idol by its original definition. It goes beyond just reducing her to an animal - it’s objectification in the very literal sense. Ai is an idol, a ceremonial object of worship, an inanimate vessel for the dirty desires of the people around her. [...] Spica [...] depicts the moment that Ai starts down this road, committing herself to being an idol who will love and support everyone, even people who hate and scorn her. This is framed by the novel as being something of a breakthrough for her and being liberating for it but I came out of it feeling deeply unsettled in a way I don’t think the novel wanted me to be. [...] Spica depicts the moment that Ai goes from アイドル to 偶像 without seeming to realise that’s what it’s doing and thus does so in a way that is not just uncritical but wholly celebratory. In a lot of ways, this makes sense - Spica, broadly speaking, is about the “oshi” part of Oshi no Ko: the emotional fulfillment of not just receiving support but in the act of giving support yourself, in cheering someone on and seeing them succeed. Spica depicts these sorts of relationships in a straightforwardly and uncritically positive light, even in cases of parasocial relationships between fans and celebrities.

There was a lot on that topic that I left out just because that chapter review was already getting so fucking long and unhinged but Spica's entirely uncritical and celebratory view of idol culture in general always leaves me feeling deeply uncomfortable every time I engage with the text. There's a degree to which this can be excused, because Spica takes place in the POV of characters who have drunk the industry kool-aid and thus would not necessarily interpret some of this stuff with the same critical lens as a reader. A charitable interpretation of the material is that, like Viewpoint B and 45510, the story is choosing to refrain from commenting on these troubling elements for the purposes of allowing the reader to have their own take on it.

This would be nice… except it's just not how Spica handles emotional beats at all!

When talking about Spica in the past I have jokingly referred to it as being written like 'the emotional equivalent of the Superdictionary' and by that I mean that it has absolutely no restraint or subtlety when it wants you to Feel Something. When Spica has an emotional beat, it hammers it in until any organically resulting resonance with the material has been reduced to a fine paste. When it has Thoughts and Opinions about a topic, it will explain them to the reader in excruciating detail so there is no risk of the reader taking away anything that wasn't intended by the author.

My point is that there is every indication that Spica's straightforwardly celebratory portrayal of idol culture and the way fans respond to idols is something intended to be taken at face value with no further interrogation. Spica is, by and large, entirely uninterested in acknowledging the ugly underbelly of exploitation, dehumanization and misogyny that drives idol culture and idol fandom.

I think the best way to illustrate this is to look at the scene near the end of the chapter where Ai finally sits and reads her fan letters. The first two are genuinely warm and sweet but the third always jumps out at me in a way I don't think was intended by the author;

“Hello, Ai-chan. I'm a devoted listener to your streams. B-Komachi's songs and talk shows have honestly become my sanctuary. I'm currently stuck working to the bone at a terrible company. They hardly pay me anything, and every day I just want to die. But what keeps me going is knowing I have your streams to look forward to every week. I’m not even kidding. Ai-chan, you're my reason to live!"

The story does not for a second pause to linger on this letter but I want you to stop and really take it in. While we know nothing about this letter's author outside of what's written here, but given that they have a job they can be presumed to be an adult. In addition, the final line of the letter in Japanese is 『アイちゃんは俺の生きる希望！』, using the masculine first person pronoun 俺 (ore), implicitly gendering the writer as a man.

An adult man writes to Ai to traumadump on her uninvited about his suicidal ideation and telling her in no uncertain terms that she is the sole, singular reason he is alive. Ai is a twelve year old girl.

Spica frames this as an entirely good, wholesome and affirming moment for her. It's one of many similar moments where Spica's celebration of idol culture clashes so strongly with the main story's that trying to make them tonally cohere is almost impossible. In fact, mild tangent, but I was working with the Spica TL team on chapter 1 right around the time chapter 137 dropped, and reading the ending of this chapter back to back with 137's tearing down of Ai's exploitation at the hands of the idol industry was some real injury-worse-than-whiplash inducing shit.

To be clear, I don't need Oshi no Ko to have a huge UM ACKSHULLY THIS IS WHY THIS IS BAD!!!! digression every time characters have positive interactions with the concept of idols. It is fundamentally dishonest and lacking in nuance to portray idolhood as something entirely and unrelentingly negative or to act like idols hate every single second they spend as idols. Sarina and Gorou's POV chapters do a very good job of highlighting what I talked about earlier - Spica's ruminations on the 'oshi' part of Oshi no Ko and how a relationship of support can be emotionally fulfilling both for the person being supported and the person unreservedly providing it. But that's purely from a fan perspective and I think it would be really interesting to Spica to take the opportunity afforded to it by being in Ai's POV to properly interrogate what Ai enjoys about being an idol.

But the way it chooses to do so just feels atonal both with Ai's arc and relationship to idolhood as portrayed in the main story and ways the manga has talked about 'oshi' culture in chapters published before and after Spica's release. It clashes with Oshi no Ko in ways I find difficult to satisfyingly reconcile.

This sense of clashing with and contradicting Oshi no Ko is an issue Spica has more broadly, in big and small ways. Some of this is just small, incidental details but other issues are larger and added all together, it results in a sense that Spica was not written by a person fully keyed into Oshi no Ko's world and characters. Like, just off the top of my head, here's some things that stuck out to me just from chapter 1:

Ai notes that she was separated from her mother a long time prior to the story's timeframe but given the ages give for her in 131 and here in Spica, it cannot be more than three years max since she was removed from Ayumi's care.

B-Komachi's formation and Ai's joining the group are both said to have happened 'three months ago' as of chapter 1's timeframe and thus to have happened more or less at the same time. This contradicts the Akasaka written material that consistently frames Ai as being one of the senior members, yes, but as having joined the group after Nino, Takamine and Watanabe.

The portrayal of Ai's bullying by the other B-Komachi members in no way matches Nino's account of it in 45510. This isn't even in a way you can put to Nino being an unreliable narrator. The details are so different that the only way to reconcile them is to assume these are two separate instances of bullying and that Nino just. Didn't mention the first time it happened for no reason.

On the subject of the bullies, the two girls targeting Ai are implied by their physical descriptions to be Takamine and Mei. While we don't really know anything about Mei yet, the vicious and unapologetic hostility Takamine displays clashes with her 'tough love' roughness that we are shown in the main story. In addition, this contradicts 45510's very explicit statement that Ai's bully was IMMEDIATELY fired from B-Komachi, no questions asked, the instant Saitou knew who she was. There is no indication in Spica that Ai's bullies so much as get a slap on the wrist for their behaviour.

Spica attributes B-Komachi's current success almost entirely to Ai and portrays her as working very hard on set and communicating with every other member of staff almost excessively to the point of annoyance. Not only does this contradict the early manga's portrayal of Ai as being antisocial and uncommunicative on set prior to her being sent to Lala Lie, it also contradicts chapters that were released following Spica that explicitly credit Nino as the key figure for B-Komachi's initial boom of success and states that Ai joined the group after Nino had cemented their popularity.

There are absolutely ways that you can handwave these contradictions and sew up the internal logic but to me, the nature of these contradictions matter to me less than the fact that they exist in the first place. This implies, especially given that some of these are in material written by Akasaka after Spica was published that he and Tanaka were, to some degree, not on the same page about the book's material.

There's some other things scattered about that aren't necessarily direct textual contradictions but nevertheless feel really out of step with OnK's takes on these characters. And like… I have tried to be relatively measured and good faith in my critiques so far but there is a part of chapter one that makes me so just bees buzzing around in my brain flames on the side of my face blood boiling in my veins insane that you must allow me to just uncharitably tear into it.

[Ai:] “Ah, now I get it. Are you buying a gift for your girlfriend, President? You like them young, after all…“ Finally, it clicked. The president, being considerably older than his girlfriend, needed the insights of a girl closer to her age in order to pick out the perfect gift. If that was the case, that explained why Ai had been roped into this. [Ai:] “Well, not that I should be getting into your business or anything, but…President, be careful when you mess with underage girls, okay? Nowadays, you’ll seriously end up in jail.”

I'M SORRY. WHAT THE FUCK AM I READING RIGHT NOW. SHE WOULD NOT FUCKING SAY THAT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This moment actually makes me so angry that it is difficult for me to clearly and calmly articulate what I find objectionable about it. I understand that it sounds very dramatic, but this is the first in a very consistent line of Spica bringing up the idea of adult men engaging in romance and/or sex with underage girls with this blithe, jokey and dismissive tone that entirely undermines everything Oshi no Ko itself says about CSA. The fact that it starts off this trend by putting these words in the mouth of Ai, WHO IS HERSELF A FUCKING CSA VICTIM, and treats the entire exchange as a throwaway joke honestly makes me feel a little bit sick.

This is part of a much broader and more troubling trend in Spica of Hajime Tanaka simply not being able to write young women in a naturalistic and human way. It's difficult for me to express exactly what it is that feels so off other than to say that it's Covered In The Fucking Ooze in a way typical of Men Who Can't Write Women. Ai's bullies in chapter 1 are so cartoonishly and stereotypically catty and mean that they barely feel human and they are written with all the distinct individuality as Thing 1 and Thing 2. The more complicated, two-sided conflict between two flawed people as seen in Ai and Nino's relationship is totally absent here. It's just the most vapid, stereotypical depiction of Teenage Girl Bullying you can imagine.

On top of that, there is a consistency with which Tanaka puts the topic of sex into the mouths and minds of these young women that fees… icky and offputting to me in a way I find difficult to articulate. In general, the voices of these young girls feel off and inauthentic in a way the main series never struggles with. For all I've criticized Oshi no Ko for in the past, something I think Akasaka is consistently and surprisingly good at is writing female characters who feel just as distinctly well realized and fleshed out as his male characters and that he does so in a way that does not rely on completely degendering them - their experiences as women are important to and inform that their characterization but does not entirely rule it. Despite overwhelmingly centering girls as the heart of its narrative, Spica barely feels capable of writing them as people.

All this together gives Spica this really strong sense - to me - of not really fitting in with the spirit of Oshi no Ko as a story. It's not just that the narrative voice is different but that there is an underlying flavour to Spica's takes on this world and its characters that clashes with the original. The cast as a whole just feels off, not blatantly OOC in a way you can directly point to but just enough to feel uncanny and give me a THEY WOULD NOT FUCKING SAY THAT!!!!! moment for almost every single person with a speaking line. It feels, as I put it on the Oshi no Brainrot server, like a thing that exists not because there was a part of the OnK narrative that worked best as a light novel but because somebody, somewhere thought a Oshi no Ko light novel would make some money and decided to have one churned out.

oh my god anon I'm so sorry lmfao you did not ask for this GIGANTIC ODYSSEY OF A POST!! This was just one of those asks that tapped into a topic I had already been having extensive conversations with myself about in my brain (I have a very boring job with a lot of time spent alone lol) and the more I typed, the more of those thoughts spilled out. I think a big part of why I am so compelled (derogatory) by Spica's missteps and mishandling of its material is that there is so much potential here and so many points where the material really comes close to just being flat out good.

A moment in chapter 1 that I think about a lot is Ai thinking about why she hasn't been reading any of her fan letters - because the last letter she got was her mom's lawyer telling her that Ayumi had gone missing after her release from custody, thus confirming for Ai that she had been abandoned to the system by her. Because of her association between those emotions and the act of reading a letter, she simply can't bring herself to open any of her fan letters because of the lingering anxiety.

Not only is this an entirely human and believable traumabrained anxiety kid fear for her to have but it's totally in line with Ai's flaw of avoidance and unwillingness to engage with or confront things that make her anxious or uncomfortable. It's also paid off wonderfully and in spades when she does finally confront that fear and is rewarded for it by an avalanche of love and support from her fans. It's one of the few moments in Ai's chapter where I think Spica really does well in conveying what a person like Ai gets out of being the 'oshi' in the oshi/fan relationship.

But this otherwise great moment is ruined by like… all that shit I said up there lmao. Spica is just laced through with this issue where moments that come so, so close to working and being really good are just marred by other issues in the text around it or trip themselves up in other ways. It's frustrating both because it comes so close to doing fresh and interesting things with the characters and because… I didn't want to dislike Spica! I was so, SO excited for it to come out and so willing to give it the BOTD even as summaries leaked and I was put off by the plot beats. But the more time I give to it in my brain and the more I try to engage with it in good faith, the more I come away frustrated and feeling like my time has been wasted.

[stylishanachronism]

So it is in fact Watcher Wednesday, I have a headache, the neighbors are still firing off fireworks and setting off all the car alarms on that side of the street, here’s a sliver of an essay about Pillars of Eternity and sheep.

So if you’ve been following along at all, you’ll know I have a dearly held headcanon that Edér, outside of seasonal agricultural work, supports himself by knitting elaborate ring lace shawls (no seriously what the fuck is he supposed to be doing all year Obsidian answer me who is making his socks), because canonically most of the Dyrwood’s production is tied up in fancy wool and fancy timber. More specifically, per the guidebook, “Wyr (“wire” - Aedyran) wool, gal glas (“green thorn” - Glanfathan) timber, Glanfathan deer hide, tin, lead, iron, copper.” (PGB1, pg 48), and it’s telling that the particular types of wool and timber are specified, as they aren’t for any other country(1). This is surprisingly well supported in game, between the set dressing in the Gift, the shipwreck scavengers beneath the bridge, and Dyrford’s main industry, namely tanning and dyework, as well as the lack of either crop industry on a wide scale, or food prepared for shipment in the Gift. (It does raise the question of ‘where are all the sheep’, but considering Obsidian knows nothing about textiles and the fact adding Yet Another model probably wasn’t the best use of their time, I’m cross about it but I’ll excuse it)

Fun fact: shipping roving is a waste of everybody’s time. Shipping thread on a scale that would enable somebody else to turn it into cloth is less so, but it’s significantly more expensive. Cloth takes up a lot less space than either option (especially roving), and is a lot harder to damage/a lot easier to protect during the process, especially since there’s a smidge more evidence(2) that wyr wool is a fine, light, long fiber wool, and therefore prone to matting in its base state.

This is not in the game at all, and barely barely barely in the guidebooks, but that set of facts means the Dyrwood is probably known for its weavers and knitters, and they probably import a lot more dye than even Aedyr, who are implicated to buy dyed in the wool textiles(3), which leads to the idea that the Dyrwood and Readceras have very strong economic reasons to get over their differences, (which is openly canon, but without explanation) and in the meantime Stalwart’s smuggling business? Almost entirely dye into the Dyrwood. The same economic pressure would explain why Aedyr was so eager to go back to trading with them, instead of being deeply pissy about dealing with a ‘failed’ colony, as they are with Readceras.(4)

On another tack, this takes everything about the Pearl Bluffs and makes it actually relevant to Defiance Bay as a city, because shelling out municipal funds on adventurers because one of your priestesses is having bad symbolic dreams is... a little sketchy, considering the state of the city, but if hiring those adventurers also gets rid of a major predator in the closest accessible good grazing land? Sheep are much more valuable than dreams, and that’s a reasonable expense. (It also explains why there’s absolutely nothing there, because local grazing land > mildly inaccessible but well placed military infastructure, because if I was worried about invasions by sea (which Defiance Bay canonically is), having some sort of lookout on the cliffs above the port would be a good idea, but not if it would hurt the city’s main industry.)(5)

Circling back around to the lack of crop industry, I know mechanically nobody wanted to animate Yet Another field of wheat (or what have you. There’s a lot of options there but they didn’t put it in so We Just Don’t Know(6)), and so it’s not that they don’t exist it’s that they aren’t pictured, just like the dozens and dozens of little towns that ought to be peppered across the place, which must exist but aren’t pictured (or named), but like... I desperately want to know what Obsidian thought everybody was doing all year, and where they were supposed to be living. (Let’s face it, I want a real map, with county lines and everything.) I am, obviously, proposing that in addition to the many many necessary industries (coopers! more blacksmiths! every single citizen from the age of being able to hold a pair of needles knits and spins so they don’t go naked! glaizers! lumberjacks! carpenters! butchers! I could go on!), that pretty much everybody is involved in some sort of fiber production, mostly wool but linen as well (preparing flax is No Joke), or otherwise dye preparation in some form or other, but like... what did Obsidian think. Where are the sheep?

Footnotes:

1: Per the guidebook: Readceras produces “Vorlas (purple dye), corn, corn flour, wool, cotton (minimal), lumber“ (pg 50), the Republics “Iron, copper, silver, glassworks, ships, spices, clocks, and astronomical equipment” (pg 52), Aedyr “Iron, fine steel, cotton, dyes, lumber (a major export of many varieties), spices” (pg 54), and Eir Glanfath “Gal glas (“green thorn” - Glanfathan) timber, Glanfathan deer hide, gold, adra shell (the odd shell material found in Engwithan ruins), rare fungi“ (pg 57) even though their exporting adra makes zero goddamned sense. No other countries/cultures have listed products, though Deadfire made a good effort at showing the exports of individual cities in the Deadfire. I’m not citing it because I’m too lazy to go copy all that shit down by hand, though.

2: The evidence on wyr wool is, very basically, it’s either a long fiber wool (wire like, able to be drawn very fine), or a short fiber wool (wiry, coarse). Long fiber wool is more desirable, and more likely to be specified out on a consumer level, versus a more ordinary short fiber wool, where knowing the provenance really wouldn’t change much. Long fiber is also a much lighter wool, the sheep more delicate (not by much, but still), and the Dyrwood’s climate as shown doesn’t particularly require a hardier sheep. Without actual sheep to look at, or somebody on staff with enough textile knowledge to incorporate said knowledge literally anywhere, there’s not a ton of evidence either way, but I have my biases, and finer wool suits them so that’s the argument I’m making.

3: “Aedyran clothing is known for being relatively simple in construction and often using large, colorful striped or checkered patterns for accents.” (pg 54) Trying to dye stripes is a misery. Trying to dye checks is worse. Weaving stripes or checks, on the other hand, is very, very easy, but requires you to dye the thread before it’s processed.

4: I would cite the guidebooks here, but since they never actually come out and say ‘there was five years of famine and it was not great’, I can’t, but uh, there was (at least) five years of famine and it was not great. A fraction of the population wandered off to make candles in sufficient quantities that they’re a minor Dyrwodian import (”Many a Dyrwoodan lord who illuminated their keep (and cursed all Readcerans) unknowingly did so by the light of Eothasian candles.” (PGB2, pg 81), in reference to The Bright Shephards, said fraction with the candles), and another went to the Deadfire, where they were delighted to finally be successful farmers (”To the delight of these wayward pilgrims, their crops took to Deadfire soil better than they had in Readceras,” (pg 80), in reference to the Children of the Dawnstars), even though they... don’t actually grow anything in common with Readceras, and meanwhile Aedyr continued to be dicks about the whole mess, even as Readceras proper finally got their feet under themselves, and managed to get the Vorlas properly established to the point where it’s their main export. (Look, Vorlas is fantasy indigo, and indigo takes a couple of years to like, not die at the first hint of literally anything going wrong. It’s more finicky than roses, especially since they’re not growing it in a region it’s built for, there’s a reason everything went to shit.)

5: It also explains some of the bounties, because ‘dangerous thing that only bothers *really* stupid travelers’ is a much smaller problem than ‘dangerous thing that bothers fairly defenseless essential livelihoods’. Also mechanically you’re paid for the Caed Nua bounties but like... Caed Nua is setting the bounty? so you aren’t being paid you’re just saving the house a lot of money to get somebody else to do it. You need to defend your sheep as well as your roads, I guess is what I’m saying?

6: Look, someday I will dig through every recipe I can get my hands on, in game or in the cookbook, and come up with a list of things the Dyrwood probably grows for food, but today is not that day, so right now your guess is as good as mine, as long as your guess is ‘not corn’.

[gch1995]

Fanatics like yourself tend to view any sort of discipline as abuse, so your kids are going to grow up to be horrible spoiled abusive bullies, just like your lord and savior Satanakin Buttfucker. And when they inevitably get punished by the world because you won’t punish them, you’ll yell at the village for not raising your brats for you. Sounds like a horrible parent to me.

You know what, nonny, I think you need to let it go!

You don’t seem to understand that your side of the fandom has been winning for the past 13 years now! The original EU canon novelizations for the PT and OT, which were largely approved and/or edited by George Lucas as an extension of canon for the movies, is considered Legends now since Dave Filoni, Bob Iger, Pablo Hidalgo, and eventually Disney took over the franchise in 2012, and started rewriting everything that made Luke, Anakin/Vader, Padme, Leia, and the Skywalker family line at all complex, relatable, and interesting characters, in spite of their flaws. The complex, dynamic, nuanced, morally gray, and tragic characters that the Skywalkers once were has been getting erased to put them into narrow categories of good and evil, so that characters like Kenobi, Rey, Ahsoka, the Republic government, and the Jedi Council can be elevated and sanitized. Never mind the fact that the Skywalkers were the main characters of George Lucas’s series. For better or worse, the series was about Luke Skywalker and Anakin Skywalker. You have won by scaring off half this fandom and George Lucas! A lot of our canon, the original canon that was true to George Lucas’s vision, has been actively getting retconned in the past 13 years since the release of the 2008 TCW movie and TV series.

Yes, I know that George Lucas was involved in the running of that movie and show for the first few seasons, which is why he actually stuck to some of his points about how, in spite of being well-meaning, the Jedi Council fucked up and contributed to the fall of their Order, the fall of Anakin, and the fall of Dooku. However, Anakin, Padme, and Obi Wan are largely different characters than they were in the PT and OT movies and novelizations because of Dave Filoni, Pablo Hidalgo’s, and Disney’s hatred of the prequels, or desire to cater to the fandom that wanted Vader to be a male power fantasy cartoon villain.

Obi Wan actually comes off as more of a dick than he was in the PT films/novelizations. For all of his flaws of being blindly hypocritical, a coward in regards to his own emotions, and rather self-righteous, at the very least Obi Wan was generally pretty consistent in sticking to the Jedi Order’s rules until the end. He was wrong, and the end of Revenge Of the Sith showed his cowardice and underlying vindictiveness in regards to Anakin. In TCW, while he’s still too dedicated to the Order, he also had a crush on another woman, who he almost let go for the Order, but then he openly blasts Anakin for getting married to Padme behind the Council’s back, which doesn’t make consistent sense with the timeline either because, even if Obi Wan low key knew about Anakin’s relationship with Padme, he clearly never mentioned that he did to either of them, or even admitted to himself that he knew. In Revenge of the Sith, when he tells Padme that Anakin has fallen to the dark side and realizes she’s pregnant, he says “Is Anakin the father? I’m so sorry.” So like, at the back of his mind, Obi Wan knew that something had to be going on between Anakin and Padme, but he never mentioned it because he did care about Anakin like a little brother. It also was kind of his fault that they ended up falling for each other since he knew that Anakin was head over heels in love with Padme in AOTC before allowing him to go to guard her alone on Naboo, but still requested for him to take the mission, anyway, so it would look bad for him as a padawan master in front of Yoda if he’d ever found out. There’s no subtlety in his characterization anymore.

Padme is relegated to a tertiary character, so Filoni can add in Ahsoka as the main lead in TCW instead, and when Padme does appear on screen, she sometimes comes across as being a rather two-faced mean girl and strong woman™️

They flanderdized Anakin’s negative traits to foreshadow Vader a billion times over, even when what he’s doing is justified, and/or isn’t any worse than Obi Wan, Ahsoka, and the rest of the Order is doing in TCW (08-21). Whereas he was just more of a clingy insecure type attachment in regards to Padme in the movies and novels before falling to the dark side, they took that one scene where he choked her in a blind rage, paranoia, and frantic effort to avoid abandonment when he was high on the dark side and dissociating after seeing Obi Wan step out of the ship looking ready to kill him right as Padme was telling him she loved him but couldn’t be with him, and tried to make his entire relationship with Padme look like a mess of him being a toxically masculine, possessive, and controlling jackass.

While it was not an excuse for force choking her in the movie at all, that clearly was a crime of passion he made in his blind rage, fear and paranoia when he was completely out of his damned mind after having a mental breakdown on the high of the dark side for the first time, not this deliberate murder attempt because she “no longer fit his narrative.” The point was that it was entirely out of character for Anakin to do and to show how fucking out of his mind he was. If that’s just “who he always was” with Padme all along, then what was the tragedy in his fall? What was there for Padme to ever love? What was there for Luke to ever save?

Additionally, there was also this recurring trait in the narrative of the OT and PT movies and novelizations that Anakin became so deferential with his desires, his needs, his emotional/mental health, and his moral compass in regards to trying to fit in, please, and/or protect the ones he loved with Padme, Obi Wan, and the Jedi Order, only ever rebelling to try to be true to his own heart in secret, that it eventually caused him to have a complete mental breakdown in Revenge of the Sith. If he finds it so easy to publicly rebel and stick up for himself and his beliefs, then the sympathy and tragedy of his fall is also undermined. Anakin’s downfall was that he was too afraid to displease Padme, Obi Wan, his mom, and eventually even Palpatine to the point that his loyalties and trust between the people he loved became confused and fractured when he had a mental breakdown in Revenge of the Sith. This is consistent with what we see in regards to his conflicted heart between Luke and Sidious in Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi Order.

Anakin’s greatest downfall is how he has no sense of faith in himself. Even when he’s high and deluded on the dark side, he’s not interested in world domination unless he has a family member or loved one to defer to. Even though Sidious manipulated him to turn on everyone he ever loved in his fear and desperation, and openly treats him like garbage after he gets burned alive and put in that suit, he still has trouble letting go of his love for this guy he logically knows is the worst because Anakin Skywalker’s sense of self-worth is so low that he’ll latch on to anyone who was nice to him once forever, for better or worse.

Anakin/Vader was very much a Byronic Hero, a tragic hero, and a tragic villain with clear signs of deep emotional/psychological damage and mental illness that clearly never got properly treated in the narrative. Even if C-PTSD and BPD weren’t the official mental illnesses that he was diagnosed with in canon, it is clear that George Lucas and the writers of the OT and PT movies and novelizations incorporated several of those symptoms into his characterization. Not that mental illness is an excuse for crimes, but it makes sense why they would become dangerous when the person suffering from them is constantly in an abusive and oppressive environment of war from which options for healthy support, escape, and mental health treatment are limited to non-existent.

Then, you have Dave Filoni and Pablo Hidalgo openly admitting in the DVD behind the scenes that they didn’t like Anakin’s portrayal in the prequel movies because it was “too whiney,” so they deliberately rewrote him to be a “mix of Han Solo and Luke” because they wanted a more macho male power fantasy of the young man who became Darth Vader that made his fall seem more inevitable to cater to fans like you, nonny, who bitched that Anakin was “too whiney” in the prequels for years, rather than just taking his abuse from Obi Wan and the Council like a “good victim,” and sucking it up.

That has been how they’ve been rewriting Anakin/Vader since TCW (08), and it’s never going to stop because Disney is a cash cow that keeps catering to fans like you who wanted for this character to be the male power fantasy villain you thought you were going to get when you first watched “New Hope,” and are disappointed that you never fully did or will be able to get, even under Disney, if only because they can’t totally retcon his backstory by outright saying the Jedi Council and Republic did nothing wrong since Anakin/Vader wouldn’t have any reasons to turn on them at all.

So when I actually point out that the writers of the Disney version of the now “official canon” Star Wars actually did something right in terms of staying true to George Lucas’s original vision in an Obi Wan Kenobi comic by showing us how both he and the Council were very emotionally negligent parents to Anakin Skywalker who didn’t do enough to protect him, your response is to still deny that they did anything wrong, even though the narrative of your fucking Disney™️ Star Wars canon is outright showing you they did wrong by allowing him access to Palpatine alone!

I’m not a parent yet, but how is it good parenting to isolate children from their families and friends, to refuse to allow them to form healthy attachments, to refuse to allow them to develop any sort of faith in their sense of self, to refuse to allow them to have their own personal lives and relationships outside of just you, to teach them how to use lethal weapons, to completely gaslight, deny and shame them for having completely valid concerns, fears, desires, and negative emotions as “dangerous,” “selfish,” and “greedy,” and to completely refuse to emotionally and/or financially support them if they decide they want to leave, so they can groom them to be submissive soldiers for their order?

I could understand if Anakin and these kids were fully consenting, emotionally, physically, and mentally mature and stable adults who had full knowledge of what being a Jedi entailed, and who knew they could leave anytime without being cut off, impoverished, and/or shamed by the rest of the Order of “peacekeepers of the galaxy.” However, that’s not how they are running things in the prequels. What the Jedi system was doing to Anakin and these other members in the Order was abusive. Abuse is about breaking down and isolating victims to make them feel totally dependent on their abuser. Child endangerment and neglect happens when their well-being is risked and/or overlooked. You can’t deny that is what happened to Anakin Skywalker and these other recruits in the prequels. You just can’t.

If any adult was caught treating their kids in any of the ways the Jedi Council treated Anakin and those other recruits under their care in the prequels, they wouldn’t just get off with CPS for being “well-meaning” in their abuse, endangerment, neglect, and exploitation of them for warfare and politics of “the greater good.” They would be facing serious charges and jail time.

The entire Order didn’t deserve to be mass murdered in Order 66. Nor was Anakin right to participate in it as an adult. Nor does it mean that he didn’t deserve negative consequences for it. That was wrong and he does hold responsibility for making that choice, regardless of the mitigating factors of poor emotional/mental health, limited support, and limited escape options. No, the Council are not responsible for him making that choice to turn on them. However, they are responsible for allowing him to speak alone with Palpatine when he was a child under their care and for condoning and practicing that systematic abuse, corruption, emotional neglect, and oppression that created that emotional/mental instability, anger, desperation, moral confusion, pressure, and those insecurities in Anakin that lured him in that dark direction.

[the-arctic-commune]

If you haven’t seen yet, Dream posted a quick (less than 3 minutes) video on his DreamXD channel, showing some prerecorded and edited Dream SMP scenes.

“This video is a random short video giving some context to my character on the SMP.“

SPOILERS for that below the cut.

So uh. What was that?????

First off it’s absolutely hilarious that Vikkstar and LazarBeam came on the SMP but didn’t stick around, and now the canonical reason we’ve never seen them again is that Dream hunted them down, captured them, and repeatedly tortured them to death for an extended length of time. What an incredible retcon.

HOWEVER.

What was that scene with Ranboo? Was it implying that his prison visit was.... real? Or that it took place in a shared dream world with the two of them? Or was it some kind of reality-bend of the “real” Dream SMP? Or maybe it was referencing the Obsidian Crying Box? How does this clip relate to the fact that they seemed to not know each other at all during the prison break? Is the implication of the final clip that BBH gave Ranboo the prison plans?

Please share your thoughts or opinions! I’d love to hear your interpretation of these scenes.

[mickeys-malarkey]

Update: yes, my copy came, and omigOSH I'M SO HAPPY!!

Everything they changed in the BATIM section is so consistent with my theories with the extremely exciting “exception” of:

They kept Allison & Tom's wedding invitation!!

Forgive me, I've just gotta infodump about this or I'mma explode; my bestie still hasn't watched a BATDR playthrough so I gotta be careful of spoilers with her—

I wasn't sure if they would keep it because, on the one hand, taking it out would be consistent with how Nathan Sr. seems to have tried to change Henry & Allison's Official Story™ in BATDR to make Joey a perfect Schrodinger's redeemed saint/irredeemable monster depending on which part of his lies you wanna believe, control Henry & Allison, and add icing to Joey's torment cake by allowing Henry & Allison to still be friends in the Ink World while Joey has to continue playing the Decoy Villain role he doesn't want now that he's permanently trapped in his Bendy body due to his human body dying. And, on the other hand, everyone who took the Memory of Joey's story to mean that everything we've ever known about Henry & Allison has definitely, officially been completely retconned and replaced with the new story would take its removal as 100% confirmation of this so-called “retcon” because it would mean the removal of Allison saying, in 1952, that Joey's studio is the reason she & Tom met, and the resulting implication that the Memory of Joey lied about Allison having met Joey sometime in the 1960s, her surname having already been “Connor” when that happened, etc. So, the fact that they kept it in says a lot— in real life, it reconfirms for the third time that no, Henry & Allison's stories have not at all been retconned!!! Meanwhile, the in-universe implications for it still being included and also the render of Tom being deleted are equally exciting considering my theories on:

Allison having always been Nathan Sr.'s employee rather than Joey's and having been used to keep Joey in line just as much as to destroy Susie and make her desperate enough to agree to becoming Alice.

Nathan Sr. having orchestrated the ink pipe explosion that infected Sammy in DCTL in order to punish Sammy for trying to help Joey when he (and Jack) realized what Nathan Sr. was doing to him and the studio and also to punish Joey for daring to accept Sammy's help/“trying to ruin his game of Murder Puppets” by having a conscience.

The events of TLO having happened because the events of DCTL knocked sense into Joey & Allison, they were trying to get Bill's dad's help escaping Nathan Sr., Nathan Sr. found out what they were doing, and he decided to force them to come back to him by orchestrating Bill's “death.”

Joey having declined the wedding invitation because he knew Nathan Sr. would be there and he was literally in hiding trying again to escape him after JDS shut down.

Nathan Sr. having orchestrated Gent's downfall as well in order to punish Allison for failing to draw Joey out of hiding so that he could get his claws back into him (and having predictably framed Joey for it and confused the heck outta Allison because that's literally just his standard abuser “villainize & gaslight your victims” M.O., of course he's gonna do that).

Nathan Sr. having orchestrated Evan's death partly to ensure that nobody could fact-check Archie's story in FTB.

Nathan Sr.'s biggest history-editing project being the editing of everything and everyONE related to Gent (including/especially Tom and what events he, specifically, was and wasn't involved in/responsible for) so that he can cover up his own involvement in events by distracting us with his newest Decoy Villain: Alan/Allen Gray/Grey, who doesn't even seem to actually be a Real World human but instead a Child of the Machine created from a combination of pieces of the souls of multiple Real World humans just like Audrey, Big Steve, Heidi, Archie, etc. etc. etc.

And many other things related to those theories!! Definitely adding an Updated Employee Handbook section to my joint analysis of FTB, BINR, and oddly now also BATDR's achievements because wowzah do those things look to be significantly more lore-heavy than BATIM's were/translation of the BATDR Archives into a list of reading comprehension questions. 😝

Hey gang! Today is the release day for the updated version of the Bendy Employee Handbook. I went on a trip to my local Barnes and Noble and found it, there was only one on the shelf.

The way this was advertised was that it was the old handbook plus new information to act as a game guide for Dark Revival. My reason for picking this thing up was less about what they added and more about whether or not things would be changed from the original version. To no one's surprise, things were in fact changed! But not in the ways I expected. I'd like to make a post talking about it later, I've got a lot of thoughts.

That said, if any of you have questions about this book, feel free to pop into my askbox and ask them. I've gotta get cooking (literally, I'm making bacon soup for dinner shortly here) but I'll try to answer later this evening or tomorrow. A reminder, please try to tag your spoilers for this book if you post about it. There's not really a lot to spoil, but you know me by now, I care about letting people experience things at their own pace.

[italwayshadtobeyou]

Hey y’all, I’m returning to Tumblr after a long time off, but completely new to Tumblr SPN fandom, and I’m looking for moots. Unfortunately, the current tagging cluster system is sabotaging my attempts to find people with similar preferences, so I’m hoping this will cross show up in some nice people’s search results if the tags fail me again. (Note: I follow from my main, @brunnismemorybank .) This account may contain NSFW text and canon-level suggestive/violent images. No DNI/DNF, but minors please don’t send DMs.

Things I like:

Dark canon-divergent AUs (Endverse, Boy King, actually-scary Deanmon, etc.) and case fic

Fic, edits, and meta for gencest, Wincest, Samruby, & Samwena

Some of the more nuanced depictions of John, Mary, & Bobby-- where they’re as screwed up as Sam and Dean, but they’re still trying to achieve something good

Sam Winchester. Sam Winchester possessed by Lucifer. Sam Winchester being a semi-accurate Biblical antichrist.. Sam Winchester mourning Jess. Sam Winchester in love with Dean. Sam Winchester needing comfort. Sam Winchester kicking ass. Just SAM WINCHESTER.

Continuity in canon. For me personally, continuity is like David’s harp... Ahhh.

Things I dislike:

Stupid retcons that assign Sam and John’s relationship to Dean, change the date at which they learned about certain monsters, or make hash of monsters’ and spirits’ established powers and weaknesses.

Stupid people who can’t tell the difference between AUs and headcanons

Misha & Cass. I try not to put too much wank on this blog, but I block Misha- & Cass-related tags, get salty about untagged content, and have no patience with minions trying to spread false rumors or organize boycotts. Same with Destiel and hellers.

RP. No shade if you like it-- I just get annoyed when it breaks up my own  dash.

RPF. If there’s only an occasional post, I’ll just block your tag for it; however, like with RP, following an RPF-heavy account would waste my time.

Anti-shippers. I was raised by right-wing fundamentalists, & I’m not interested in exploring the mirror version of that experience. 

Everything I know about the upcoming prequel, except for the fact that they somehow snagged the competent Robert Ulrich as their casting director.

Mpreg, A/B/O, watersports, scat, age regression, and all-human, role-reversal, or different-sex/gender AUs.

Personal info below the cut, for people who worry about weirdness cooties:

Floridian by way of Alabama, raised in the country but now in a city, white, bisexual, agnostic, female, classical liberal, pro-shipper, occasional activist for animal welfare & privacy, gender-critical feminist, homeschooled (K-12), BDS supporter, Millennial, autistic, spoonie, gardener of native plants, and... IDK what else... brunette? Public identification isn’t my strong suit. That said, I don’t consider fanblogging activism, and therefore I don’t really care which of these boxes you do or don’t tick, as long as you’re polite & don’t try to convert me.

I currently own the dreamsofghostsandstars.net website, which I plan to shutter at the end of the year. You can find my fanfiction at dreamsofghostsandstars on Ao3.

[carmensandiego-dreams-collection]

i genuinely love all your takes and man i didn't even realize it was only 7 eps compared to 10 lol. i thought they handled mental health really fuckin poorly in s4 (carmen's "lack of empathy", graham's... osdd..?, and other things but those two stand out). your opinion on zack and ivy's character is really smart and i've been thinking about just how much could have been done with them in terms of, yknow, teaching carmen, and how little they were actually treated like friends (especially in the end). and THANK YOU for mentioning how cultlike vile is because it was one of the biggest things ive picked up on 😭 and i constantly think about how they introduced shadowsan apparently having like, ninja speed for ONE episode, and then never mentioning it again or explaining it or even like bringing up he did that. it was a good show but MAN did it go downhill

I actually misspoke, it’s 8, but for some reason my brain always thinks it’s 7 lmao. I went ahead and edited the original post for correctness. But that means it’s really only one less than season 1! Plenty of room! I don’t know why everyone was so insistent that the studio is somehow to blame when the show clearly wasted its own time, even if another season would have padded things out more comfortably.

Also, can I just say how relatable the phrase “graham’s…odd..?” is? I’m glad I’m not the only one who has trouble even describing what his whole deal was, to the point he’s sort of holding up my production schedule. I’ve rewritten his character’s section of the video many times, but no matter how I try to evaluate his scenes I am at a total loss to pinpoint what the intention behind his character even was or how he was supposed to fit into the story. I’ll get it eventually I guess.

Season 4 suffers from many things, but I think what if suffered the most from was a general lack of vision. I don’t think anyone had any idea of how to end the story; there’s no buildup to anything in the finale, there’s no real resolution to Carmen’s crusade against VILE, and the plot is everywhere. And that’s honestly why the Mindwiper exists in the first place—it’s a deus ex machina that only serves to alter the characters and story to whatever the writers want, even if it doesn’t make sense. There are zero rules for how it works, it’s mere existence is so overpowered you’d think it would play a role in the greater espionage plot (but it doesn’t), and the rules we DO know get retconned when the show feels like it.

The writers wanted Evil Carmen for shock value, so they made it so VILE could completely rewire her brain to be whatever they wanted, and the Mindwiper is the perfect tool for doing that! Never mind that it did absolutely nothing to explore her character, her memories, or her relationships (in fact, I daresay it actively sabotaged a lot of them).

It could have been a really interesting element if used correctly, but it became such a writing crutch towards the end that I genuinely wish it wasn’t in the story. Not having it would have forced them to actually write a complex, well-developed relationship between Carmen and Grey with no “easy outs” (and actually decide what they wanted to do with him early on instead of having him hang around forever doing nothing), and it also would have made them come up with an ending that confronted “the darker side of Carmen” without depriving her of all agency.

Now, with that being said, I feel like there were many points at which you could at least salvage parts of it-- I kept waiting for the Faculty to get monkey’s paw-ed by making Carmen so ruthless that she overthrew them, which would have at least been entertaining. Or you could have had it so Carmen only lost her memories, creating a situation that asked if she would have stayed in VILE if they had accepted her from the beginning and offered her a sense of community. But that would have risked letting Carmen make mistakes, so��nah lol.

I know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I also think that Zack and Ivy are really weakly written characters overall, which may have contributed to their treatment. Of course, the writers are the ones that wrote them that way in the first place, so it becomes a chicken and egg argument rather fast, but my point remains. The concept of them is fine and I obviously don't hate their characters, but I think if I were to rewrite Carmen, I would spend a lot of time retooling them into something that captures the audience’s imagination as much as Carmen does.

I think it’s fairly obvious no one on staff had any passion writing for them -- the racecar backstory is so poorly researched that no one, in a show about geography, even bothered doing a five-minute google search to see if car racing even happens in Boston (spoilers: it doesn’t). NASCAR is a sport that began during the US's prohibition era, when people selling illegal alcohol began to hotrod their cars to escape police patrols, and it’s almost exclusive to the American South, not New England. Again, you would think that a show about history and culture would take advantage of this historical fact, as it could not be more relevant to the premise of the show, but no one cared!

[graviton-lance]

oh hell yes you fell for my trap

So, little known fact! It's very likely that the Bosmer and the Khajiit are related, alluded to in Words of Clan Mother Ahnissi.

Now this isn't the only account of the origin of the Bosmer, there are at least two others. Their own is very vague, speaking of the Ooze- a primordial shape-shifting formless force they came prior to the Green Pact. The other is published by the Imperial Geographical Society (and was likely sourced from a scholar named Archivist Endaranande, from around the Second Era) that claims they are descendants of Aldmer settlers from "Old Ehlnofey" (another name for Aldmeris). Neither of these accounts discuss the Khajiit at all. So let's break it down.

I'll start with the "Aldmer settlers" theory first, since it's the one that's often repeated as the whole truth by fans (in my experience) and the one that bothers me the most. From what I can tell, the earliest record of this theory within lore was published circa 2E 582 by an Altmer named Archivist Endaranande in a very short essay titled Valenwood: A Study. This document is essentially a small propaganda piece that touts the necessity of the Bosmer's inclusion in the First Aldmeri Dominion while simultaneously referring to them as "unruly and naive", and "willing to bend to the will of others" compared to their more "dignified" Altmer cousins.

The Bosmer welcome those who come to Valenwood seeking refuge from other lands. In this regard, they are quite unlike their pure Altmer cousins. While we seek to retain our dignity, the Bosmer are quite willing to bend like saplings to the will of others. Though they are unruly and naive, these Wood Elves are an integral part of the Dominion, and must be retained in order for our alliance to flourish.

Easy to dismiss, given the tone, but this theory is then also referenced in Pocket Guide to the Empire, 3rd Edition, both in The Wilds Remain: Valenwood and All the Eras of Man: A Comprehensive History of Our History, published circa 3E 432, over seven-hundred years later. Now to be fair, if we follow release order, Pocket Guide to the Empire came first, published as a physical book with the Collector's Edition of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. Valenwood: A Study was published as a base game lore page in The Elder Scrolls Online, almost exactly eight years later. A textbook retcon, but an interesting one, as it creates an assumed narrative about how this idea came to be so widespread and turns it into a perfect example of unreliable narration. What had started off as a small piece of wartime propaganda eventually snowballed into something entire historical societies (initially in service of Tiber Septim, by the way) considered to be unadulterated truth and used in the education of the wider Imperial population.

So what do the Bosmer think? Well, truth be told, that's... complicated. People are never a monolith of culture, a reality often reflected in the Elder Scrolls, and such remains true for the Bosmer, who cannot agree on even the meaning of the tenets the Green Pact, never mind their origin. This is further complicated by the fact that they largely do not hold the same significance for written records that other Tamrielic cultures do (their histories being kept by Spinners, often mired in metaphor and fable-like storytelling) and that they at one point had assimilated a large majority of the Ayleid refugees fleeing the Alessian Slave Rebellion in the First Era, likely adapting aspects of their culture in the process. Their agreed-upon history tends to be this: Y'ffre first shaped the Ooze into the Green (Valenwood) and then shaped the Wood Elves, giving them the gift of story and the Green as their home, so long as they kept to the Green Pact (a good iteration of this story can be found here).

[Quick note: Aurbic Enigma 4: The Elden Tree gets an honorable mention here because it goes into the growing of Green-Sap and the nature of the Perchance Acorn, but I am not including it in the current discussion because that document's true focus is actually Anumeril and the Towers, the founding of Elden Root and the Bosmer serving more as a backdrop.]

Let's circle back to Clan Mother Ahnissi.

This is one of my favorite lore documents in the Elder Scrolls, mostly because I'm a sucker for a good creation myth and have a soft spot for the Khajiit, but also because according to this version of the Khajiiti creation myth, the Bosmer were shaped from the same group of Ehlnofey as the Khajiit, specifically in this paragraph:

But Y'ffer heard the First Secret and snuck in behind Azurah. And Y'ffer could not appreciate secrets, and he told Nirni of Azurah's trick. So Nirni made the deserts hot and the sands biting. And Nirni made the forests wet and filled with poisons. And Nirni thanked Y'ffer and let him change the forest people also. And Y'ffer did not have Azurah's subtle wisdom, so Y'ffer made the forest people Elves always and never beasts. And Y'ffer named them Bosmer. And from that moment they were no longer in the same litter as the Khajiit.

Now, I could get into this being reinforced by several details threaded in both Khajiit and Bosmer lore (such as one of the Khajiit furstocks so closely resembling Bosmer that they are often mistaken for them, or the Bosmer's inexplicable worship of Baan Dar- a Khajiiti trickster spirit), but I already sound like a conspiracy theorist nutcase.

I don't think Words of Clan Mother Ahnissi is the pure truth, either, but I do think it helps paint a broader picture of the histories of these two groups of people. The actual truth is probably somewhere in between, the likely scenario being that the Bosmer and Khajiit share a common ancestor in a specific group of Ehlnofey before being split off into the Khajiit and what I call the proto-Bosmer. These proto-Bosmer then mix with the Aldmer when they arrive on Tamriel in the early Merethic Era, and later with the Ayleids in the First Era, and their connection to the Khajiit is lost to the Wood Elves through time and colonization, while being preserved in Khajiiti oral tradition.

There's no grand revelation about TES in here, it's just a bit of world building that I find really interesting and wish people discussed more, so make of it what you will. If nothing else, I appreciate you taking the time to listen to me ramble!

everytime someone asks me about the khajiit/bosmer relation its like activating sleeper agent except instead of killing someone i turn into a tes anthropologist