In reference to my last post, I just had the idea of making a poll to see what people choose (I tried to reblog my previous post but you can't add polls to reposts). Here you go! :)
10 notes
·
View notes
I think more people should go back and either replay or rewatch (.... or forbid, play or watch them for the first time) aa1, even if it's literally only case 1
fanon phoenix is so completely disconnected from the actual character that at this point they basically share a wacky hairstyle and a name to me. In the actual games, Phoenix is almost always depicted as the "straight man", even in comparison to Edgeworth: he's somber, dry, sarcastic, and often very tired of shenanigans and bullshit. He's a very ordinary "everyman", and that's like 80% of his appeal to me, tbh. It's not to say that he can't be silly or nonserious, but we have a unique look at the inside of his head and all the things he COULD say, but most likely does not.
He goes on to become a literal world renowned defense attorney, and so many people want to boil him down to a silly stupid little rabbit of a guy when he's anything but
243 notes
·
View notes
it's so funny to me that caleb and veth really did just trade off the job of intensely pining for the other at like the halfway point of the campaign. like, imo, nott in the early days did not behave in any real romantic or even romance-adjacent ways toward him--I imagine it would be very hard to even think in that way when you hate what you look like so much, have such low self-esteem, and are actively lying about your entire past, including a secret husband. caleb, on the other hand, is kind of diving directly back into the sort of relationship he had with astrid and eadwulf. very close, very intimate, we-huddled-for-warmth-together-and-oops-it-led-to-something-else sort of thing. he is the one who expresses that he's fine with it if people think he and nott are romantically together when they're talking to keg. nott is the one who pushes back on that. he calls her his life partner. unknowingly, he compares his feelings for nott to nott's feelings for yeza. his behavior only really starts to change after he finds out about veth's husband because suddenly all of that other stuff is rendered inappropriate in retrospect. but even then he compliments her to yeza over dinner in the most awkward of ways, he admits to being jealous, he calls yeza "a lucky man" to have her, he stares at veth and yeza closed bedroom door for far too long, he creates an entire arcane tower with room for her family just so she'll stay with him. in general, his behavior is not, um, totally and completely platonic about it, you know?
like, veth's feelings for caleb are canonical and therefore indisputable in their existence, but caleb in the early days was not that dissimilar to how veth was acting near the end of the campaign. it really paints a picture of "right person, wrong time" in the way things just didn't line up for them. or, as veth would say: "in another world, maybe"
348 notes
·
View notes
I'm curious about something... (and fucked up the last poll. if u saw no u didnt)
*As in, you enjoy listening to it, like it aesthetically, think of it as attractive, whatever. This is NOT about whether or not you understand the language or if you like whatever you associate with it or whether or not it's "useful" (e.g. If you do not speak a single word of japanese but really love how it sounds, vote for it. if you think italian sounds sexy but don't really care about visiting Italy, vote for it. If you like the look of the hebrew alphabet but not how it sounds, DONT vote for that. It's about the sound.)
Before you come at me: These categories are not perfect. Some of them are sub-categories of a bigger family (Indo-European), some languages are in the same category but sound really different etc etc. I had to leave out or group some of these together in a way that I felt made most sense for what I wanna know & the demographics of this site. I'm not a linguistics expert.
Feel free to share your thoughts in comments or tags! 👍
62 notes
·
View notes
I've been moving and navigating further departmental nonsense etc (my pseudo-dissertation got approved for defending, though! l o l). But it was interesting to see the Worst P&P Takes poll I reblogged accumulating more results and the general tenor of responses in the notes.
I mean, the results are definitely to be expected if you're familiar with the side of Austen fandom doing a lot of the reblogging etc. But still, interesting!
Many Tumblr polls specify that they're asking about personal preferences that may be irrational—favorite/least favorite, coolest/most annoying, or something like that. This one, though, asked for the worst interpretation of P&P, not the most annoying one—and the current leader is "Darcy is never really proud, he's just shy and probably has anxiety" against some very steep competition on the Bad Takes front.
I was thinking about why that seemed a kind of tediously predictable choice even though I agree that the take is wrong, and realized that while I do disagree with the shy Darcy interpretation and I particularly disagree with the specific formulation where he is never proud at all, it ultimately feels to me like a failure of nuance rather than just completely wrongheaded like some of the others. And this is probably my fundamental difference with a lot of Darcy takes I see!
In my opinion, a character who is introverted and who feels awkward in various social situations and who doesn't like common social activities and who has to work himself up to talking to his crush and who is repeatedly suggested to behave very differently in contexts where he's more comfortable being interpreted as shy and anxious is not that big of a leap.
Yes, it's important that he is actually fundamentally confident and haughty, that he makes his personal feelings of discomfort other people's problem, and that he thinks he's such a unique and special butterfly that he doesn't need to even put in an effort outside his personal social circle. But it's a misreading that is easy to follow (and long predates the 2005 P&P, as I've mentioned before!).
The additional misreading that a shy and anxious Darcy is also never proud at all is a much more drastic leap, and in my experience, condemnations of shy Darcy interpretations rarely differentiate between "Darcy is shy as well as arrogant" and "Darcy is shy rather than arrogant" as interpretations (although their basic arguments are quite different). But even that as the worst possible misreading of P&P when Darcy is not even the main character is ?????????
I mean, for one alternative (not even the one I voted for!), the idea that Elizabeth is an author avatar Mary Sue seems a far worse misreading of P&P than basically anything to do with Darcy at all. The center piece of the entire novel is Elizabeth's epiphany of self-knowledge about her own shortcomings that do not particularly resemble Austen's at all, but were ethically a concern for her, and she's a complex, interesting character in general whom Austen correctly regarded as a major achievement. Inverting that into Elizabeth as an improbably perfect, reality-warping self-insert is deeply wrong and frankly pretty misogynistic as well.
(ngl though, it's a little funny to see such a blatantly terrible reading of Elizabeth rank so far behind the shy Darcy votes. I've gotten "does anyone actually think/say that?" so many times on my posts about Austen fandom's prioritization of Darcy's character development over Elizabeth's and yet...)
And even just going with the Darcy-centric misreadings, the idea of Darcy as a "bad boy" seems easily the most absolutely wrong take on him. His pride is at least complicated and the finer points can be fairly debated and it's a quality that actually changes somewhat throughout the novel, and you can have discussion over what happened when, whose testimonies should be weighted more, etc. But there is no point at which "bad boy" isn't utterly wrong for him. However, there's definitely a tendency in some wings of the fandom to find the idea of Darcy being misread too favorably more objectionable than him being read too unfavorably, regardless of the particulars, so it's not a surprise.
I suppose you could argue about what "worst" means in the context of variously bad interpretations. Like, is an interpretation that is about a fairly trivial aspect of the book but extremely wrong about it "worse" than an interpretation that is pretty bad but at least comprehensibly so about something very important?
78 notes
·
View notes