#I know you guys said that I should criticize SE more or whatever

[misterbitches]

I have mixed feelings about the episode!

If I hadn’t have gone online I would have been more of a blank slate. It’s good to know my criticisms are affirmed by others but it doesn’t mean this show is weak because even with the faults this episode was still entertaining at the very least. I feel crazy! Like some of my issues with the social commentary so far are dealt with—not remediated per se but addressed—or tended to.

The whole marriage thing isn’t a bad scenario typical of a BL imo because it makes sense. Patriarchy has everything to do with the hoarding of wealth. You have to make sure a woman has limited options for offspring to preserve a familial/blood line. Marriage is a business practice (it isn’t final or static but marriage and love are not interchangeable and “love” is a very specific goal that is hard to meet particularly if you are poor) and even if Rosé doesn’t want it, that’s how you secure capital…via legacy and literal financial bonds (presented as familial).

Rosé isn’t a good person. As much as Save is a bitch and Hope is…whatever he is (and agree with the user that said they should have kissed there!) the show is telling us over and over that THESE PEOPLE ARE POOR GUYS. THEY HAVE NO MONEY. I don’t know if the audience understands what that means fully. That means that Tattoo’s actions are not the same as Arun’s or even Joke’s; Jack’s poor decisions aren’t the same as Joke’s; Save is being absolutely insane and fucking ridiculous and wow I hate him but even his decision is not the same. You see how much hospital bills are, not having insurance, INSURANCE LITERALLY BEING TIED TO YOUR JOB AND THE NUCLEAR FAMILY. Things these people do not have, nor should not have to have, and the pains you go through to do everything right so the state says and you still get fucked.

That’s why the whole ~dOn’T sTEaL~ would piss me the fuck off! Jenny’s character makes complete sense! I know this is an easy way for us to express this idea of never being able to “get out” but poverty isn’t actually a cycle. Poverty is man made, it is not real. A cycle suggest something inevitable where an underclass would always have to exist, some sociogenetic defect that you just can’t beat and the cure (money) is just too hard to find (as in made up but never freely given). What makes that cycle relevant? Capitalism. This term has bred such reification i swear. It makes it seem like this is something they can GET OUT OF and BREAK on their own volition (with no direct action against the capitalist class/elites like you know…robbing them)

To be wealthy is to inhibit a class position, a social category, in which your livelihood depends on the subjugation of others. It’s obvious that Boss has limited money—and that dwindles—he relies on his boss. He is a manager, an inbetween, a boss but not The Boss. He is a cop essentially (cops have more autonomy tbh) to literally protect private property and collect and give to his bosses. They’re also all landlords and deserve to die.

Anyway there is no cycle as a real tangible thing one can take control of. There are people who choose their comfort and life over others and exploit to maintain, retain, and gain. ANY type of wealth hoarding is immoral. Richness is immoral.

Every single one of these people who suffer are in this position because of rich people. The monopoly was literal and exaggerated metaphor but rich people HATE and i mean HATE they LOATHE they resent disdain the poor. They hate you. They hate me and I’m not even poor! It is not a (referent-less) cycle! These are deliberate choices being made by others to make sure ppl stay poor—women, children queer ppl, darker ppl, the disabled…

If we focused less on the actions of those who have had to work in service of the pillagers and more on the pillagers and why the FUCK these people do this and get to do it, maybe Jack’s choices would make sense. Yes they are frustrating but I don’t necessarily think this is bad writing considering that Jack’s life could be made a living hell if he “got another job” which…ok but where? Who will hire him? How quickly will he make that money? With what skills when he has one very good one that could be used AND this money could be made immediately?

Are these particular choices stupid or do they exist in a broader story that is unfolding? Obviously this is a tv show beyond bl bc this episode was like completely story related and I enjoyed that. There was def some stuff where i was like wow this seems a bit rushed and it does seem like filler but it also technically isn’t…? If I’m thinking beyond what I would like to see with romance. If I think of it as more of s general show that is openly queer but that’s just the life of the show…then was this an outlier or does it fit? Even if it doesn’t I still get to understand more of what they think abt the world…? Idk i liked this episode i go back and forth! But it was a good way to spend my hour.

Also rose’s plan is fucking disgusting neoliberal drivel and insulting lmao when joke threw that all i could think of was bush and that shoe

[81scorp]

Movie pitch: More Spider-Man movies in the MCU

Ah yes, Spider-Man in the MCU.

Marvel and Sony are right now (by the time I`m writing this) sharing custody of Spider-Man. I don`t know exactly what the deal is that they have made, but from what I understand Sony can make movies that take place in a Marvel universe but they can`t use Spider-Man himself, only charcaters with ties to him. So far very few of their Spider-Manless Spider-Man movies has had any financial or critical success worth bragging about.

And I think some of the problem lies in what I just said: "Spider-Manless Spider-Man movies".

Making a Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man is like making chicken soup without chicken.

I`ve said it before but I can say it again: I wish Sony would just let the rights revert back to Marvel.

I used to think that Sony should have let go of the movie rights after Spider-Man 3, but after seeing Spider-Man: No way home I`d be OK with if they waited with that till after TASM2.

This isn`t really a constructive criticism per se, but more of a movie pitch. "What if the movie rights to Spider-Man had reverted back to Marvel (after TASM2)" and "How would I continue the story from No way home?"

So... if I had a Pym particle powered Time machine that could take me back in time... what would I have changed?

I am burdened with glorious SPOILERS for: Spider-Man: Far from home and Spider-Man: No way home

Captain America: Civil War

This is where good ol`Spidey first appeared in the MCU. Not much else to say, moving forward.

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Spidey`s first MCU film where he`s the lead. Here`s where we first meet the Vulture, Shocker and (technically) Scorpion.

(And also the Tinkerer.)

Avengers: Infinity war

Not much to say here, moving on

Avengers: Endgame

Not much to say here either, moving on

Spider-Man meets Venom movie

This movie doesn`t really exist, it`s what wished they had done instead of the Venom solo movie. See my editorial: "Constructive Criticism: 5 MCU movies (and Venom)" for more details.

Spider-Man: Far from home

A small part of me wish that they hadn`t killed Mysterio, but instead saved him for a Sinister Six movie, but still, good movie, not much else to say. Moving on.

Spider-Man: No way home

A little bummed that they killed Aunt May but glad that Andrew Garfield got a second chance. Good movie, not much more to add, moving on.

Spider-Man meets Kraven movie

Just like the Venom movie, also a movie that doesn`t exist. See my editorial: "Constructive criticism: 5 Marvel movies (and more)" for more details.

Prologue: About a month ago. Night: A young woman with brownish hair, about Peter`s age (let`s call her Felicia) stands outside a building. She presses a button on an intercom next to the door.

Distorted male voice through intercom: "Who is it?"

Felicia: "Is this... the Jackal?"

Distorted male voice through intercom: "Who`s asking?"

Felicia: "The Chameleon sent me"

Distorted male voice through intercom: "... Come in."

The door opens and she is let in. It is dark inside, a man emerges from the shadows, it`s Prof: Miles Warren. (He makes extra money doing illegal experiments.)

Prof Miles Warren: "I take it you`re here for your genetic enhancement. Right this way."

He gives her a serum, she is in pain for a few seconds, her hair turns platinum blond, the pain stops. Now she has superpowers: Enhanced speed, agility, durability, reflexes and sense of balance.*

The Present. Day: Spider-Man does his usual thing, doing whatever a spider can, spinning webs, any size, catching thieves just like flies and all that. He catches and webs a bunch of criminals, one of them is a big guy named Alex. He swings by an apartment building and gets a feeling that there is something inside that building that he should check out. He goes inside the building and enters an apartment where he meets a woman in her sixties. She wears a blindfold, a dress with a spider motif, is sitting in a wheelchair and drinking some tea.

Madame Web: "Would you like some tea, Peter?"

Peter is of course shocked, no one should know his secret identity after Dr Stange wiped it out of everyone`s memory a few years ago. Madame Web says that she is here to help him. (Her powers are: precognition and telepathy.) She tells him that great challenges are ahead of him.

Next day: That big guy named Alex gets taken out of prison by an FBI agent who claims that he is a witness in an important investigation. Alex is escorted to a shady place (the one where Felicia met Prof Warren) and it turns out that the FBI agent is actually Chameleon. Warren tells Alex that he can give him superpowers. Alex is interested.

Elsewhere: Peter goes to college now, Someone else who goes to this college is a girl named Gwen Stacy. She thinks Spider-Man is cool and doesn`t believe that he killed Mysterio. She works as a lab assistant to Prof Miles Warren, a biochemistry teacher. He has a crush on Gwen (who in this movie is at least 19 years old, but it`s still creepy) and believes that Spider-Man killed Mysterio.

Later: Peter Parker bumps in to MJ on the subway. He wonders if he should try to get back together with her or continue with the distancing to keep her safe. (Not saying that he has to get back together with her, I just wanted to plant that little dilemma in his head and add a little more plot to the movie.) Felicia (now Black Cat) steals some important information and gives it to Chameleon. Her father was a talented cat burglar and she wanted to be just like him and did a lot of research on what it takes to be a great catburglar. He died and she met Chamelon who said he could help her. Chameleon has helped his old friend Sergei Kravinoff (AKA: Kraven the Hunter) to travel from Russia to U.S.A. Kraven is a man who loves hunting and challenges, and he wishes to hunt and kill Spider-Man. (Kraven`s powers are: Superhuman strength, speed, durability, agility and reflexes, extended longevity and enhanced senses.

How could he get those powers? Maybe by drinking a version of the potion made from the heart-shaped herb of Wakanda?)

Chameleon and Black Cat lures Spidey into a trap where he is forced to fight Kraven. Black Cat has a change of heart and helps Spidey, much to Chameleon`s and Kraven`s anger. Spidey defeats Kraven and lives to fight another day. Black Cat runs away, but not without lifting the lower part of Spidey`s mask and stealing a kiss from him. Kraven wants a rematch, Chameleon promises that he will get one, and this time he will have a couple of friends. Rhino enters the room, just like Kraven he too wants a rematch with Spider-Man.

The title of the movie?

How about:

Spider-Man: The Hunted

Spider-Man: Night of the Hunter

or...

Spider-Man: Electric Boogaloo.

Sinister Six movie

Chameleon, disguised as a SHIELD agent, sneaks into a prison for supervillains and frees Morris Bench (AKA: Hydro-Man). (Chameleon is not a fighter, he`s a spy and an infiltrator, and the Sinister Six is always a group of fighters, that`s why I didn`t make him the sixth member of the group.) Since Dr Strange erased everyone`s memory of Spidey`s secret identity in No way home, Adrian Toomes (Vulture) only remembers that Spidey saved his life (back in Spider-Man: Homecoming). This will create conflict between him and the rest of the Six later in the movie. He wants to keep stealing and commit crimes, but he can`t kill Spider-Man. Unlike the rest of the Six, Hydro-Man does not have a history with Spidey, so his motivation isn`t revenge, he just joins the team for the money and the fun. Mac Cargan gets a Scorpion suit from the Tinkerer.

So, that`s the team: Vulture, Shocker, Scorpion, Rhino, Kraven and Hydro-Man. Chameleon watches from the sideline.

There`s an explosion at Pete`s university, and since Spider-Man is near when it happens people assume it`s his fault. Gwen Stacy is near the explosion, gets serious injuries and is now dying. Prof Miles Warren gives her a serum that saves her life, restores her to full health and... gives her superpowers. (It turns out that a few years ago, Prof Warren did some experiments on spiders. He extracted a serum from one of the spiders, that spider later escaped to the next room: a room filled with high school kids that were there on a study trip. The Spider bit one of the kids (Peter) and then died.

Yes, in my version Prof Miles Warren created the spider that gave Peter Parker his Spider-Man powers. No, you don`t have to like my ideas.) Miles thinks that Gwen will fall in love with him for saving her life but she doesn`t, to her he`s still a creepy, possessive man. This makes him angry, she leaves him. Warren thinks that she will finally love him if he gets rid of Spider-Man.

Black Cat comes back to help Spidey, much to the anger of Chameleon. Near the end of the movie Vulture betrays the rest of the Six since Spider-Man saved his life (in homecoming), once again, much to the anger of Chameleon.

(Madame Web and MJ has a cameo)

I could end my little Spider-Man in the MCU saga with Sinister Six... but I still have an idea for one more movie.

Spider-Man meets Jackal movie

Prof Miles Warren, hellbent on destroying Spidey, comes in contact with Frank Castle (AKA: Punisher) and convinces him to kill Spidey. Punisher`s first assassination attempt fails, as does the second. Spidey manages to convince Punisher that he is not a crook and the two of them join forces to fight the man who hired Punisher: Prof Warren. (There is of course a little friction between the two of them; Punisher thinks that the best way to stop Warren is to kill him, while Spidey is against killing.) Punisher could have a scene where he runs into a pair of cops who looks up to him, he could give them a speech about why they shouldn`t.

Punisher: "You`re cops. You`re supposed to uphold the law. Me? I work outside the law. If you really are cops you should arrest me. If you want to be like me you can`t be cops. Want a costumed crimefighter to look up to? Look at Captain America! Look at Spider-Man!

I´m no hero."

Gwen Stacy returns as Ghost-Spider to help them stop Prof Warren. Prof Warren injects himself with a serum that makes his skin green, his ears pointy and enhances his strength, agility, stamina, durability and reflexes. (He will look similar to the clone version of him from the Clone Saga from the nineties.)

He is now, truly, the Jackal

He fights Punisher, Spidey and Spider-Gwen, is defeated. Spidey, Gwen and Punisher part ways.

Peter bumps into MJ at a coffee shop. I would like to end the movie here and leave it open-ended if the two of them are gonna get back together or not.

Madme Web is also in this movie, Spider-Gwen could visit her in the end, looking for guidance and advise when it comes to Superheroing.

The title of the movie?

How about:

Spider-Man: Loose ends

Spider-Man: Night of the Jackal

or...

Spider-Man: Acoustic Boogaloo.

The End...

However... in the MCU nothing ever ends.

There can of course be more movies. A solo movie (maybe even a trilogy) for Black Cat and a solo movie (maybe even a trilogy) for Ghost-Spider. But it is the end of my movie ideas for the MCU Spider-Man.

I can understand if Tom Holland would want to take a break from playing Spider-Man in the alternate universe where these movie were made since there are ten of them, it would be pretty tiresome.

That`s why I didn`t include Spidey in my rewrite of Venom: Let there be Carnage. (See "Constructive criticism: 5 Marvel movies (and more")

*Yes, I know, Black Cat is most known for her Tychokinesis; her "bad luck powers", but her powers have varied over the years. At one point she lost her Tychokinesis but gained other powers, and at one point she was completely un-powered. So I decided to do something simple in my (non-existing) movie version. Besides, there`s nothing that says that she can`t get Tychokinesis later.

It is of course very easy for me to write these because I have the luxury of hindsight. And unlike the filmmakers I didn`t have a movie studio full of corporate suits breathing down my neck, focus grouping the movie to death, forcing in unnecessary changes and pressuring me to get it made before a deadline.

Why do I write these?

For several reasons. I`m nitpicky. Sometimes the movies I criticize aren`t bad, I just like my own ideas better. Sometimes the movies I critize are bad. I care about good storytelling and it`s a fun excerize in creativity and script doctoring.

But also because I have a lot of of free time

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

Started writing this 2024-06-24

2024-10-06: Removed the Spider-Man meets Morbius movie, took some ideas from it and put them in the Kraven movie and moved some ideas from the Kraven movie to the Sinister Six movie.

Wanted to get this out of my head before the Kraven movie comes out.

Comments are appreciated.

Other movies on my Constructive Criticism list that you can look forward to

Supergirl (1984)

Jonah Hex (2010)

Dragonball evolution

The Spirit (2008)

The Dark Knight trilogy

And as usual: English is not my first language, so if my writing doesn`t seem to flow naturally, you know why.

You can also find me on artstation. Also: My sister has a patreon if you`re interested.

[my-arlington-academia]

Chapter 9 thoughts! 🎃👻 (Not a review in any way, I'm just gonna scream about the chapter)

First of all, you CANNOT believe how many screenshots I took. It's like 1 line out of 4 was comedic gold. I counted and I have exactly a HUNDRED screenshots.

Ariel? The backgrounds? The costumes? THEY BLEW ME AWAY! Anytime a new character appeared on screen with their outfit I was screeching 😂 Especially Karolina. She was killing it. It made me consider making another side account. Love the Alice madness returns trio: Ellie as Alice, Tyler as the mad hatter and Tegan as Cheshire cat. You really did God's work ����✊🙏🙏

Now to the chapter in general and the writing: at the moment I only played on my Claire account! I'll do Alistair later👌

Love how we start the chapter with Tadashi ALREADY being annoyed. Dick-shaped balloons? Tadashi saying "spooky vibes"? The "WhEn WiLL yOu LeArN tHaT yOuR aCtIoNs HaVe CoNsEqUeNcEs?!?" meme but Tadashi style? Perfect.

The interactions with Claire were absolutely adorable. I thought I would panic when the first dialogue option showed up but it's Claire, so it wasn't hard to figure out! She's so sweet and I love her. The part where Scholar is praising her cooking and she's like "that's the perks of being French!" After that, how she gave Scholar a box full of cookies because she's worried about her skipping meals? CUTE. And the study group where Raquel and Axel are calling out Claire on her obvious crush? Bruh. That's some backstabbing, poor bby Claire 😖😖

Then, the next arc tease! I think it's the "FAXION" thing! So it's either Karol's arc or Neha's? Or both at the same time maybe? I'm interested: how is it gonna play out? A fashion competition where all the main 10 will somehow get involved sounds unlikely, so I guess it's like Tadashi's arc where everyone helps? Or something like that? But I have no idea what kind of problem can arise in a fashion competition 🤔

After that, we have the first illustration! Scholar is a cutie!!! Looking at herself all proud 😎 wish I had that level of self-confidence, when I pass in front of a mirror I don't even want to look at myself 😂

Then the party... Tadashi looking like he was DEAD while all the others look fabulous in their Halloween costumes... Poor Dashi. But love how he was terrified of the Arlingtonator, it's so precious that even though he's always so composed and serious he still believes in stuff like that 😆 Raquel was about to call him a p u s s y. Bruh.

I love the whole team messing with Tadashi but poor guy. He was really trying to protect his friends first before himself, he's so sweet I love him 😭

Later on, when Scholar was looking at Claire and she's like "oh yeah I was just checking you out UH- I mean the outfit! I was checking out the outfit!" I felt that cringe Scholar must've gone through 😂

Now. The next scene. The next scene took the crown for me. I LAUGHED. You guys cannot imagine how rare it is for me to audibly laugh when I'm reading something. I really stopped for a few seconds and kept staring at the screen while laughing. Andy "I CaN't WrItE cOmeDy" bruh no. The AMOUNT of happiness this gave me 😂 please, next time instead of 250 pages write 300 thank you 😌 (I'm only kidding! Serena will lose her mind)

I think I might or might not have this whole scene screenshoted. All the dialogue kills me.

"Al, consider our friendship cancelled."

"PIKI PIKI."

"Tomorrow? You're all dead to me."

This scene will stay in my mind and in my heart. Andy thank you for the amazing food 👏👏 I believe this will stay "iconic" in the fandom 😂

Then we had the party wrap up, of course I chose to play boardgames with Karol, Neha and Claire since this is Claire's account. And I gotta say, I LOVE IT. Karolina looks so happy for once, I couldn't believe it. I also love how Claire is clearly a bit chubby, I want to hug her 💖💗 (or how the internet says: "Thicc" I guess) I got the achievement "in front of MY boardgame?" or something along those lines because Karolina was complaining that Scholar and Claire are flirting 😎

Then we got the spooky stories and a terrified Tadashi begging for his life... god this better not awaken anything in me 😂

And finally the last scene with Claire... God it was so ufozkfhzuhdkdpzjrudozrydo 💗💖💕💝💘💖💗💕💝💘

Words cannot express the diabetes I got from that fricking scene...

Anyways!!! As you can see this really wasn't a review at all, just me gushing about sweet elite like always. Is anyone surprised? The only bad thing about this chapter was that it was so sweet that I wanted even more wholesomeness after it was already over 😭 and I know that next arc is going to be even harsher than Tadashi's from what the SE team told us... goodbye happy times, I'll wait for the christmas/new year chapter for more heartwarming stuff. Hopefully it's chapter 12 or 13 🤞🤞 (Well, okay, I admit I'm also looking forward to the angst. I can go through any pain if there's happiness at the end 😔✊)

[unfriedough]

‘Ember Island’- Zuko x (Waterbender)female!reader

Masterlist <3

An: so, this took forever, and for that I’m sorry! I’ve been super busy and this piece was really difficult to write (i couldn’t think of how they portrayed YN badly) , so I’m sorry if it’s not up to standard :( (PS: Being a bender is only mentioned like once, so you could totally be whatever bender you want !)

Thank you for the request though! I’m very grateful for you! ❤️‍🩹

Summary:

@ilovegirlsgeneration

“So an already established relationship with Zu, and it's the day of the Ember Island Play. Reader thought it would be cool and then woops the play basically makes them look like a terrible person and they freak out and Zuko is there to comfort them!”

I changed it slightly so keep the summary as a rough outline :)

Warnings: I don’t think there’s any, let me know if there are though!

You sat next to Katara on the step in front of the fire nation’s royal family beach resort, observing the avatar and his mentor (more commonly known as Zuko) train tirelessly. Toph laid down on the opposite side of Katara, a relaxed pose adorned by the young earthbender. Not too long after, the teens training bowed to each other, Zuko stretching his arms as he walked off.

“Doesn't it seem weird that we’re hiding from the firelord in his own house?” the waterbender said, looking around the overgrown building walls.

“I told you, my father hasn’t come here since our family was actually happy,” Zuko replied from his spot on the barren fountain, wiping the sweat off of his body with a rag, “And that was a long time ago. It’s the last place anyone would think to look for us.”

You smiled at the firebender, drinking in his appearance - you should watch him train more often. Your moment of serenity (and rather shameless staring) was interrupted when Sokka and Suki joined you guys, the boy holding a scroll in his hands. 

“You guys are not gonna believe this! There’s a play about us,” he said, smugly.

-

“We were just in town and we found this poster,” Suki signalled with her hands, and Sokka opened the scroll wide, revealing a poorly drawn (and semi inaccurate) depiction of Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko in the background - along with some writing which you struggled to read due to the distance.

“We were just in town and we found this poster,” Suki signalled with her hands, and Sokka opened the scroll wide, revealing a poorly drawn (and semi inaccurate) depiction of Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko in the background - along with some writing which you struggled to read due to the distance.

“We were just in town and we found this poster,” Suki signalled with her hands, and Sokka opened the scroll wide, revealing a poorly drawn (and semi inaccurate) depiction of Aang, Katara, Sokka, and Zuko in the background - along with some writing which you struggled to read due to the distance.

“What? How is that possible?” Katara moved to get a better angle, icy blue eyes blown wide.

Toph neared the group too, meanwhile you went and stood next to Zuko.

“Listen to this: ‘The boy in the iceberg’ is a new production from acclaimed playwright pu wang ten. He scattered the globe gathering information on the avatar. From the icy south pole to the heart of ba sing se. The sources include singing nomads, pirates, prisoners of war and a surprisingly knowledgeable merchant of cabbage.”

Your eyebrows furrowed once he reached the sources, how did they even know your team has spoken to these people?

“Brought you by the critically-acclaimed Ember island players.” Suki read the fine print outloud.

Zuko visibly cringed, groaning, “My mother used to take us to see them! They butchered ‘love amongst the dragons’ every year.”

The group stared at the annoyed bender for a second, before the waterbender turned to her brother, “Sokka, do you really think it’s a good idea to attend a play about ourselves?”

He replied, eccentrically, “C’mon, a day at the theatre? This is the kind of wacky, time wasting nonsense I’ve been missing!”

“What do you guys think?” Suki asked.

Zuko looked up to you from his spot, waiting for you to voice your opinion, “I mean, why not? It does seem pretty fun.”

“If you say so.” Katara replied.

“Sure,” Toph shrugged.

“I guess so.” Zuko smiled at you, imagining a romantic time at the theatre together.

“Get a room.” Toph fake gagged, sensing your heart beats.

“You can’t even see us!” you yelled back playfully.

The group had a good laugh at that, Toph still claiming it’s gross.

Shortly after the sun took its leave, and the moon settled between the fluffy clouds, you all made your way to the play. The walk there was peaceful, the sounds of grasshoppers filling your ears. Zuko took it as an opportunity to hold your hand, which you took, gratefully. He didn’t always initiate PDA, so it was definitely a surprise. Once your hands interlocked, he looked at you, a blush illuminating his face. You bumped him with your hips, wordlessly asking him “Why are you shy, stupid?” at which he stuck his tongue out at you. 

Upon arriving, you all clammered inside, getting past the herd of people just barely in time for the beginning. The curtains were still shut as you all chose your seats. Toph took a corner seat, followed by Katara right by her. Aang sat next to the waterbender, a grin on his face. You and Zuko took the seats on the higher level, sitting on the outer edge since the other couple took the inner one. Once comfortable, Zuko wrapped an arm around you, pulling you closer to his body.

“Comfy?”

“Yeah.” you pecked his cheek, eliciting a chuckle from him, which shook your body, causing you to laugh too.

“Why are we sitting in the nosebleed section? My feet can’t see a thing from up here!”

“Don’t worry, I’ll tell your feet what’s happening.” Katara assured Toph.

Just then, the lights dimmed, and the curtains began to open. You drummed your hands on your thighs in anticipation. Zuko smiled at your childlike excitement. 

On the screen, awfully recreated versions of Sokka and Katara appeared, rowing a boat. Sokka quickly stood, pointing to him and Katara excitedly. Unfortunately, he bumped into Zuko by accident, who bumped into your head.

Your boyfriend gasped, cupping your head, “Sorry, Sokka bumped into me.”

“Don’t worry about it, it didn’t even hurt.”

He looked at you with a saddened expression, and you squeezed his hand in return.

“I’m starving!” you heard Sokka’s knock-off shout, the crowd erupting into hysterics.

The water tired siblings looked at one another in complete shock and annoyance.

“Is food the only thing on your mind?”

“Well, I'm trying to get it out of my mind, and into my mouth. I’m starving!” 

“This is pathetic, my jokes are way funnier than this!”

You turned to Zuko, smiling, “Okay why was that actually funny. I didn’t expect him to say that.”

“That was far from funny.”

You gasped, clutching your heart. Just before you spoke, Toph began, laughing: “I think he’s got you pegged!”

“Every day, the world awaits a beacon to guide us, and yet, none appears.” Katara’s actor said, emotionally. “Still, we cannot give up hope, for hope is all we have! And we must never relinquish it, even,” she fell, sobbing. “Even to our dying breath!”

You looked back at Katara, “Well, that’s just silly. I don’t sound like that.”

Sokka and Suki were struggling to conceal their laughter, meanwhile Zuko just smirked, finding it funny. You covered your mouth with your hands, giggles escaping against your will.

“Oh man! This writer’s a genius!”

Suddenly, the screening darkened, and a blinding beam of light clouded your vision. You brought up your fingers to cover your eyes, only slightly helping you see.

“It appears to be someone frozen in ice. Perhaps for 100 years!”

You facepalmed, “No one would just guess that.”

Zuko shrugged, “I mean, I guessed it was the avatar then, and I was aware he was gone for 100 years.”

“Yeah, but they weren't.”

“Fair enough.”

“But who? Who is the boy in the iceberg?”

Aang excitedly leaned forward, practically vibrating at the excitement of his soon to be appearance.

“Waterbend! Ha-Ya!” Katara groaned at this, that’s not even how bending works!

After the actress made a choppy hand motion, the ice broke in half, smoke continuously oozing out. Just then, a lady in a bald cap emerged, winking comically. Aang did a double take, convinced his eyes were deceiving him.

“Who are you, frozen boy?”

The avatar’s actress giggled, “I’m the avatar, silly, here to spread joy and fun!”

“Wait, is that a woman playing me?”

You couldn’t help but notice the smile on your boyfriend’s features, raising a brow at his lack of compassion.

You jumped as a sudden beast popped up behind them, Zuko laughing at your reaction. Appa’s theatrical recreation was appalling, much like the play itself. You furrowed your brows as the creature made loud noises and jumped around.

“An airbender,” the waterbender’s performer exclaimed, “My heart is so full of hope that it’s making me tear-bend,”

“That’s a thing?” you asked your fellow waterbender, who shook her head in annoyance, barely hearing you over the sounds of the false sobs.

“My stomach is so empty that it’s making me tear-bend.” he also fell weeping, “I need meat!”

Aang’s stag player gasped, pointing somewhere in the distance, “But wait, Is that a platter of meaty dumpling?”

The avatar’s face was priceless, his head leaning on the safety bar.

“Oh! Where? Where?”

The performer laughed, an extremely fake sounding laugh, “Did I mention that I’m an incurable prankster?”

The crowd erupted into a, yet again, hysterical laughter, at a quite literally anti-funny punch line.

“Aren’t jokes meant to be funny?” Zuko whispered, jokingly confused.

You giggled, nodding at his comment.

“I don’t do that! That’s not what I’m like,” the young avatar said, exasperated, “And I’m not a woman!”

Toph snickered, “Oh! They nailed you twinkle-toes!”

Aang frowned.

Just then, a boat with an old fellow and a younger one with a high ponytail appeared sailing on a fire nation boat. 

“Prince Zuko, you must try this cake.”

“I don’t have time to stuff my face, I must capture the avatar to regain my honour!”

Zuko winced, not enjoying this outside perspective of him.

“Well, while you do that, maybe I’ll capture another slice.” he ate loudly, the chewing noises loud and gross.

“You sicken me!”

Zuko folded his arms, “They make me look totally stiff and humourless.”

Katara, from her spot, replied, “Actually, I think that actor’s pretty spot on.”

“How could you say that?!” The actor for uncle Iroh’s voice boomed, “Let’s forget about the avatar and get massages.”

“How could you say that?!” ‘zuko’ responded loudly.

You giggled at your lover’s defeated face.

For a while, you lost focus on the play, but apparently, during that period, Aang found momo, Suki and Sokka met, they met king bumi, the trio was surrounded by pirates (because Katara stole a scroll).

Then there was that scene where the blue spirit saves Aang, which Zuko seemed uncomfortable watching, And of course then there was that whole Jet incident. Honestly, it was getting boring waiting for yourself to be introduced.

After many, many, more events, the intermission started.

“So far, the intermission is the best part of the play.” you shrugged, agreeing with the firebender.

“Apparently, the playwright thinks I’m an idiot who tells bad jokes about meat all the time.”

“Yeah, you tell bad jokes about plenty of other topics.” you giggled at the kyoshi warrior’s response.

“I know!”

“At Least the Sokka actor kinda looks like you, the woman playing the avatar doesn’t resemble me at all.” looks like he was taking this personally.

“I don’t know. You are more in touch with your feminine side than most other guys.”

He groaned, looking as if he was about to start a fight.

“Relax, Aang. They’re not accurate portrayals. It’s not like I’m a preachy crybaby who can’t resist giving over emotional speeches about hope all the time.”

Everyone started in silence, “What?” Katara asked.

“Yeah, that’s not you at all.” The avatar said, half heartedly.

“Listen friends, it is obvious the playwright did his research. I know it must hurt, but what you’re seeing up there is the truth.”

Just then, the call for reentering beckoned you all to go back to finish this atrocity. Your hands interlocked with Zuko’s as you walked, bodies even closer together this time around.

“Well here we are in the Earth Kingdom.”

“I’d better have a look around to see if I can find an earth bending teacher.” ‘Aang’ flew around. 

“This is it! This must be where I come in!”

“I flew all over town, but I couldn't find a single earth bending master!”

“Here it comes!” toph yelped.

“You can’t find an earth bending master in the sky, you have to look underground.”

Everyone erupted into hysterics, Toph still in shock.

“Who are you?”

“My name’s Toph, because it sounds like tough, and that’s just what I am.”

“Wait a minute, I sound like a guy. A really buff guy”

“Well Toph, what you hear up there is the truth. It hurts, doesn’t it.”

“Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t have cast it any other way. At least it’s not a flying bald lady.”

Aang looked as if he was about to blow a fuse.

The actors had more talk with the Toph player, ending in him screaming for some reason.

You sat up straight again once you realised this should be when you come in.

“Your turn, Yn.” Sokka said, laughing.

The false gang were walking around some shops, exactly when you came in. Or, were supposed to. You furrowed your brows as the scene played out, and yet, you weren’t even there. 

Katara looked at you, trying to get a feel for your mood - yet you were unreadable. Without a warning, you got up, Zuko’s arm falling down into the empty seat. You walked out before anyone could say anything to stop you, this was beyond humiliating. It wasn't a bad portrayal, it was worse - you weren’t even recognised as a member of the team. You sighed, arms crossed as you walked out onto the beach, soles of your shoes dipping in the clean sands of the Ember Island beach. Your face felt warm, a contrast to the freezing cold weather. Tears pricked your eyes as you recapped the thoughts, Am I that irrelevant? Boring? Why’d they cut me out? Immersed in your thoughts, you hadn’t felt the hot tears stream down your flushed cheeks. You were embarrassed, belittled, and excluded. Does everyone see you as an outsider to the gang? You huffed, roughly wiping the waterworks that never quite seemed to stop. 

“Yn!” you heard a familiar voice call.

You shook your head, picking up the pace.

“Can you please talk to me?” Zuko called again, exasperated and clearly stressed.

You stopped walking, a pout on your face as he caught up. He stood behind you and lightly grabbed your arm, turning you to face him. Immediately, the firebender’s face softened, his calloused hands reaching up to wipe your tears. You leaned your  face into his palm, and he pecked your cheek. You let out a deep breath, pushing yourself into his arms.

“What’s wrong darling?”

You shook your head ‘no’, “It’s not a big deal. Just being dramatic.” you let out a forced laugh at the end.

He knew you to be the type of person to respect others feelings, no matter how miniscule. But when it came to yourself, you always invalidated your own emotions, it hurt him to see you be so careless with yourself.

“It’s not dramatic if you're upset,” he spoke intently.

You sighed loudly, shutting your eyes, contemplating what to say -or actually, how to say it, “It- It’s like I’m not respected, or or even important enough to be recognised. I feel left out.”

He paused, waiting to see if you would continue, but you mistook his silence as judgement, and immediately pushed yourself away. “I know it isn’t as bad as anyone else’s it’s stupid but it’s like-” 

“It’s not stupid. And it’s pretty bad.” he cut you off. “You are respected, at least in our group. Clearly the playwright made a mistake not including the funniest, prettiest,” he teased, stepping to you and pinching your sides, causing you to squirm. “Most amazing member.” Zuko kissed you quickly, more of a peck really.

You laughed, pulling him into a deeper, more passionate kiss, hands tangling in his messy hair. You rested your forehead on his, lips separating. 

“I love you,” his cheeks glew a crimson red, making you snicker.

“I love you too,” 

An: I really want to bite Zuko’s nose

[raifenlf]

Why Loki’s Sylvie Is A Mary Sue

So I am firmly in the camp that Sylvie on the Loki series was/is a Mary Sue.  The last episode made me feel better and like maybe the show was doing a thing where they were faking you out that she was a Mary Sue only to show she was actually sort of a bad guy and I liked that.  But all the recent interviews make me think the show wants to go back to her being a Mary Sue.

But I feel like when I call her out for being a Mary Sue people tell me what are you talking about, she’s not a Mary Sue, bad things happen to her, etc.  But that doesn’t actually make her not a Mary Sue.  

Also, before we start, I know some people find Mary Sue sexist.  But I personally use the term for guys and girls. I don’t use the term to belittle women.  I use the term to criticize a poorly written character.

And I know Mary Sue is often used to describe fanfic characters.  But to me, this series is kind of like a fanfic because the writers took a character who had been in canon MCU material for ten years and then created characters around that character.  So, I kind of review it like I would a fanfic.  It’s very different than if the writers had created a brand new show with all of their own new characters.

Anyway, if you are not totally familiar with the Mary Sue term, then check this out:

I know the term Mary Sue probably means different things to different people.  But I have always used these guidelines when I write my own fanfic to make sure my characters never come off as a Mary Sue.

This article really gives you a full scale of what a Mary Sue is.  If you start reading it, you’ll immediately see why Sylvie is.  But I’m going to take out the parts that most fit Sylvie just to highlight why I believe she is a Mary Sue.  I apologize for this being so long.

Mary Sue Character Traits

Personality

Erm... what personality? The typical Mary Sue doesn't have one per se, because she isn't meant to be a character; rather, she's an entity by which the author makes cool stuff happen.

I feel like that is Sylvie in a nutshell.  She doesn’t have a personality.  I feel like even though she ate screentime, I still don’t really know her at all.  The writers love to say she’s badass.  That’s not a personality.  

Sometimes when I am writing stories for fun and creating new characters, I like to take surveys as my fictional characters.  Like the kind of surveys you’d see in a magazine, like personality types, what’s your dating style, etc.  I figure if I don’t know what my character would do in any of those situations, then I need to keep working on my character.  And if I was trying to fill out a survey pretending I was Sylvie I would have no idea what to answer because she doesn’t have a personality.  She’s just “cool”.

What little personality a Mary Sue has isn't as important as how other characters react to it. No matter how shy or socially awkward Mary Sue is supposed to be, other characters will be inexplicably drawn to her

This is so Sylvie.  Loki falls in love with her...why, exactly?  He falls in love with her in the big Nexus event moment...why?  Because she had a tough childhood?  Mobius spends like two seconds with her in a car and goes from hating her to saying she’s his favorite Loki.  For. No. Particular. Reason.

She's extremely persuasive; everyone finds her opinions to be better than their own

She enchants Hunter B-15 and then immediately Hunter B-15 makes it her whole entire life mission to back Sylvie up.  

And occasionally she'll be a complete asshole...This can manifest itself in several ways...The author wants to write a badass but doesn't know how. This leads to a character who mistreats everyone around her and is never called out on her abrasive, casually abusive behavior.

Sylvie talked down to Loki and treated him like garbage for all of episode three, but it was never portrayed as a bad thing and we never got any impression Sylvie later felt bad for the way she treated Loki

The author doesn't know how to hold back the character, meaning that she will succeed at practically everything. This means that when she encounters rules or authority figures who would otherwise prevent her from doing what she wants to do, she rolls right through them (and they praise her for her "boldness" in defying regulations). If a bad guy is violent and aggressive, she can beat him by being more violent and aggressive (with all that entails). It's impossible for her to go overboard because she's protected by Protagonist-Centered Morality.

Sylvie is shown as a kid to immediately be able to grab a Tempad and run away.  And she can kick ass way better than Loki, for no known reason.  She is always able to fight back against the TVA when they attack her.  And she can kill lots of innocent TVA agents but it’s okay because TVA bad, Sylvie good.

Skills

She will always be superior to the canon characters, regardless of what canon has established they can do or whether it makes any sense.

Whose skill was needed to defeat Alioth?  Sylvie’s.  Of course.  Sylvie needed to teach Loki her skills in order for him to succeed (!).  And again, she is literally called the superior Loki.

Relatedly, there's no effort to her skills. She never actually trains or learns anything to become more powerful; she just wins the Super Power Lottery, or is a freakish natural learner, or is just Inexplicably Awesome

We’re told Sylvie literally taught herself magic.  She literally taught herself to enchant people.  That. Makes. No. Sense.  Like, I have so many questions.  Like, why would it even occur to her to teach herself that?  And how????????????  This is really lazy writing.

Canon Character Relationships

Mary Sue is often designed to hook up with another character, often as a form of Wish Fulfillment. This isn't that bad in and of itself (okay, it is kinda weird), but Mary Sue accomplishes this without any sense of realism. She just grabs her lover's attention straight away, and their relationship will never face any obstacles or tension; it's true love from the start and nothing else. The biggest giveaway is if the love interest is explicitly the author's favorite character, and she essentially "cures" him of all the angst that ails him (at the expense of his characterization).

Yeah, so...this one should be pretty obvious to anyone who watched the show.  Loki literally falls in love with Sylvie immediately, and then he suddenly turns from “villain” to “hero” just because of loving her.  And this was definitely at the expense of his characterization.  And Loki just knows he falls in love with her.  There’s not even any moments of hmm what do I feel for this person?  It’s just true love, immediately.

She will be related to a canon character in some way. This (marginally) helps explain such phenomena as her being a Copy Cat Sue and other characters accepting her so easily.

Sylvie is a Loki variant.  They use this to help explain why Loki is drawn to her and why their falling in love immediately “makes sense”.

Most characters give her more heed than they normally would. The good guys never stop praising her

Seriously, it was so over the top and OOC for Loki to gush over her.  He literally tells her she’s amazing.  They don’t even make it subtle.

Characters' previously established personalities change in reaction to her. Proud, arrogant gimps suddenly acknowledge her superiority in everything. Reckless youths will listen to all her advice. Responsible leaders will defer to her instead. Villains will obsess with her to the detriment of all else. Extremely competent characters will become stumbling buffoons who require her help to do anything. Sweet, mild-mannered characters whom the author doesn't like turn evil and insult her. They all become unnaturally focused on her in some way.

Again, Loki’s whole personality changed in reaction to her.  He became a buffoon who needed her help to enchant the Alioth because of course he couldn’t do anything without her!  Hunter B-15 goes from doing whatever the TVA said to fighting the TVA just because of Sylvie.

Story Elements

Mary Sue is without exception a single-person Spotlight-Stealing Squad. The entire story hinges on her existence; if you removed her, there would be no story. 

Sylvie undoubtedly drove the whole story this season.  It all became about HER meeting the TVA heads because of HER trauma.  Loki’s life was only saved at the beginning because the TVA was trying to capture HER.  And SHE was the one who started the whole multiverse (!).

Mary Sue is The Chosen One, even if the setting already has one. There are many ways she can accomplish this: she can be a Sailor Earth type who "shares" the position with the canon hero; she may be vaguely "destined to help the destined one fulfill their destiny" (i.e. do all the work except the final blow so that the prophecy is still technically correct); or the canon hero may be revealed to be a Fake Ultimate Hero all along. Being the Chosen One doesn't necessarily involve her being a God-Mode Sue, especially as authors become aware of the phenomenon and try to avoid it, but it does make her critically important to the world and allows her to continue stealing the spotlight without the "god mode" label.

HWR wanted Sylvie to come with Loki in the end, like she was chosen all along right alongside Loki.  Like one of the most important characters in the entire MCU is now this character who we only met a few episodes ago.

Most Sues have an unusually Dark and Troubled Past. It's often used to create a Sympathetic Sue, but any type of Sue can have one

They tell us, over and over, how hard Sylvie’s life was because she was kidnapped by the TVA in order to create sympathy for her.

She almost never does anything wrong. In the rare instance that she does, it's usually; (a) a way for the author to disclaim her being a Mary Sue by introducing a single imperfection (that has no bearing on anything anyway), and (b) designed to show her smarts by making her feel instant remorse, and she'll be Easily Forgiven anyway:

So this one hopefully will not come true, as a lot can change between now and when the show is taped. But if the show goes on the way the behind the scenes team is talking, Sylvie immediately felt remorse for betraying Loki, and Loki has already forgiven her and is desperately looking for her.  Ugh.

Alternatively, she is more than capable of doing something wrong, be it in general moral terms or something that goes against whatever code she abides by, and she maybe even frequently does so, but don't expect the other characters or the narrative to ever acknowledge or comment on it in any real capacity. If the other characters do call her out, expect them to be treated like they're the problem for daring to criticize her at all.

Mobius calls her out for killing people, but Sylvie immediately says he’s a bad person and then Mobius agrees, because, of course.

She will often suffer from Special Snowflake Syndrome; i.e., she has a trait or backstory that sets her apart from her group or race.

She is the only female Loki, thus making her the special one among all the Lokis in episode five.

Presentation

In visual media, the camera just can't stop staring at her.

The camera would follow her in fight scenes rather than Loki.

Mary Sue Tropes

Okay, so there are specific Mary Sue tropes that Sylvie is.  One of those is Copy Cat Sue, which I think was referenced before.

Copy Cat Sue

A lot of fanfic writers...start to write something because of their passion for this character, but they find something about the character that doesn't mesh well. Maybe they're the wrong gender or are otherwise not close enough to the author's expectations...In any case, rather than put them through the Possession Sue process, they just get a Clone-O-Matic™ and out pops a Copy Cat Sue...the character might be intended as a replacement for the canon character, but without whatever icky traits the author hates. They'll then rob the spotlight, prove the canon character to be unworthy of his/her position, and either relegate the character to obsolescence or, perhaps, even remove them entirely.

Sylvie is basically a clone of Loki, she is a variant.  But she absolutely robbed the spotlight of Loki’s, and they literally call her the superior Loki.  I mean, they are literally not even being subtle about this.  And there was a feeling by myself (and a lot of other viewers) that Sylvie might ultimately replace Loki in the MCU. 

Black Hole Sue

Much like a black hole, this is a Mary Sue who "sucks in" the plot and characters to her. Characters will behave outside their personalities, logic will be defied, and rules will be broken for her sake.

Sylvie really does suck up all the plot and Loki definitely behaves outside of his personality just to fit the Sylvie show.

Jerk Sue

A Mary Sue who is mean or maybe even cruel, but are still treated as an ideal person.

Once again, Sylvie is basically a jerk all of episode three, but you’ve got Loki falling over himself to call her amazing in just the next episode.

Relationship Sue

A Mary Sue who exists to be the perfect mate for a specific character...this character has everything in the plot conspiring to enforce this One True Pairing...in Fanfiction, they are the perfect beloved of a canon character.

They literally have Mobius speculate that Loki falling in love with Sylvie is so extraordinary that it causes an entire Nexus event, that’s how huge this One True Pairing is (!).  And Sylvie is the love interest of Loki, the only character who had been around before the beginning of the series

TLDR: Sylvie has all the tropes of a classic Mary Sue character.  So calling Sylvie a Mary Sue isn’t being sexist or just randomly hating on the character.  If you use common Mary Sue characteristics to examine the character, she just has too many of these characteristics to ignore.

[marshmallowprotection]

It's always annoying to see people complaining that Saeyoung is smothering his brother in SE with his presence without seeing beyond what's going on. Yes, it's clearly understood that Saeran didn't want him around and Saeyoung should give him his space but.... Oh guys, Saejoong is out there still, how can you not want this man to care about his brother? Yes, continuing therapy was the best thing for Saeran but in an oversight, by leaving him there, the father would have taken that opportunity to finish him off. Saeyoung made those decisions for a reason, the situation is too complicated in that ending, it won't be perfect what he does, but put yourself in his feet and you will understand more.

It's not perfect. Saeyoung Choi was between a rock and a hard place. Saeran was being cornered in the hospital in ways that were making it harder for him to handle stress. He was being pushed further and further into a spot that could've risked everything. Jumin said there was only so much he could do to hide the twins when the truth was revealed.

No matter what he did, the more attention that Saeran brought to himself, the higher the risk would become. If anyone in that hospital found out the truth, it would damn Saeran to death, and Saeyoung not long after. They wouldn't be able to fight back.

Does Saeyoung understand Saeran needs proper care and therapy? Yes. Does he also understand the consequences of his actions and what they mean? Yes. Does he have any regrets about choosing what he did? No. Does he want to do whatever it takes to help Saeran feel safe again? Yes.

He's not a perfect man but he realized that it wasn't going to end well the longer he left Saeran out in the open. He's not proud of himself for removing Saeran from a place that could give him proper care, but if he had to choose between Saeran being given drugs against his consent to the point that it was detrimental to his healing journey or waiting along for Saejoong to realize that his twin sons are out in the open to get rid of?

He just got Saeran back. Saeran will not be killed on his watch. Now, should you be upset with Saeyoung for choosing what he did? Sure, you can. You can be upset that Saeyoung isn't an expert in trying to handle trauma, but you should cut him some slack for choosing what he thought would save Saeran's life in the long run. I have no doubt in my mind he's going to get Saeran help under an alias when it's safe to do so. But, in the meantime, he's guessing what will help and hopes it sticks.

He had two choices. Leave Saeran and hope that he was able to have a safe breakthrough at the risk of not knowing when Saejoong could kill him or remove Saeran from the hospital knowing that it would be enough to save his life until there's a safer way to get him help.

Do I personally believe that Saeyoung could've done better as far as confronting Saeran goes? Yes. Am I going to fault him for it? No, I'm capable of seeing his desperation and fear about everything at that time and can empathize with him as much as I can with SE Saeran. That's why these characters feel human. They're not perfect. They make mistakes and fuck up sometimes.

That's why we love them and see ourselves in them.

Saeyoung and Saeran are complex characters, you can be frustrated with them and their choices, but at the very least, think critically about the reasons behind their choices. You can be mad about it but put in the effort to see why things play out the way they do.

[snowlily95]

Aerith in light of healthcare provider

So, I've wanted to write an analysis about Aerith in light of her medical viewpoint for quite a long time but only recently got the chance to complete it. It is well known in the game that Aerith is the healer of the story. She possesses a great MP with a limit break to heal and buff people which greatly affects your gameplay. Of course, you can equip others with Healing and Prayer materias to render them useful for healing as well. But story-wise, no one can take away Aerith's status as the healer. We know in canon that Aerith provided herbs to the Sector 5 slums doctor to create medicine. And if you finished the Corneo Stash side quest in Chapter 14, you can return to the church and see a couple of elderly sitting on the pew praying. And when you come closer to them you'll hear them talking about how they didn't see Aerith around and they're sure she's alright and probably be around healing people. You know, since the Sector 7 plate just fell. (Even though Aerith is not alright actually coz she was kidnapped by Shinra by this time) Point is, we are fed by the NPCs on how much Aerith had helped around as a healer. She had been doing this for years.

While being in denial about who she actually is, being a healer had always been implanted in her. She is used to it. When you're used to being a healer, there's a certain level when you have a different reaction compared to others. The way you think is different. Apart from that, she's also a Cetra. And we knew for a fact Cetra had a certain affinity towards souls who are returning to the Planet. Meaning, as much as she is used to healing others, she's also used to sensing death.

My whole point is that being a Cardiac Anaesthesiologist and Intensivist as I am, I can totally relate my position with Aerith, as we both have constantly helped people and encounter death on daily basis. While I'm pretty confident that the majority of these might be coincidences (because I'm pretty sure there are no doctors in the SE team), I thought the coincidences are pretty cool to ponder upon and I'm amazed at how the subtle differences between Aerith's reaction to events from other characters.

I'm gonna ignore the meta part of Aerith, mainly because I'm not discussing how much Aerith knew, and if there was anything in jeopardy of what she knew whatsoever. So we're gonna focus on the fact that she is used to healing and feeling people's death. People who are used to death on daily basis had a certain unique view on life and death. And that affects how we act upon facing them too. While this is evident throughout Remake, I'm gonna focus on the plate drop event to be more concise. I will also use Tifa as a comparison to make it easier to see the difference between the reaction of the two. Let’s start!

1) Aerith is quick in emergency situations.

When you are used to people dying, you developed a certain immunity and you are able to have a sound mind and composure at the sudden change of event. As healthcare providers, we face stable situations turning into critical real fast. And we have a switch in our minds that turns us from standby mode to rescue mode. This is exactly what happened to Aerith when Don Corneo revealed Shinra's plan to blow up Sector 7's support pillar. Tifa is part of Sector 7. It is her home. Which is why her reaction showed how she was super devastated, she slowly stood up and muttered "They wouldn't..." because she couldn't believe it. Aerith? She had that switch in her mind, and she immediately turned and say "Come on, guys! We gotta go!". She switched into that critical mode in a second. It helps that she's also not personally connected to Sector 7, and thus her judgment was not as impaired. Of course, they both switched into the critical mode in the sewer, but it was at the moment of revelation that made it different. Just like how healthcare providers switched at the moment of revelation that their patients are at the brink of death—you immediately jumped into rescue mode.

2) She plans for the worst.

Remember after they defeated Abzu and Tifa started to question Corneo's information? She didn't want to believe it, because it didn't make sense to destroy your years of efforts building the plate just to get back to a small group like AVALANCHE. Think about the money they put in to build it, they're gonna have to put them all again. In fact, along their way out of the sewer, Tifa voiced out multiple times how this had been bothering her. But I'm intrigued with Aerith's reply "If he's telling the truth, then we should go. And if it turns out he was lying, then so what?". This here is exactly what doctors do. We plan and prepare for the worst. And if the worst didn't happen, then so what? If you ever had life-saving surgery, your doctors would tell you "You need this surgery coz you might die. But if you do the surgery, there's a high chance you'll survive, but there's a small chance you'll die too". And we prepare for that small chance that our patients die. No, we don't let our preparations lacking because we hope they'll survive. We prepare for the worst outcome possible and get all the equipment ready in case they'll die. If they didn't, then so what? It doesn't mean our preparations were futile efforts. It only means we were prepared. And that line of Aerith seriously hits home to me.

3) She hopes for the best.

Before they crossed the water sewer, Tifa once again voiced out how she couldn't stop thinking about what Corneo said, and she was still hoping that he was lying. And then Aerith said, "The future isn't set in stone". (Again, I'm gonna ignore the meta part of Aerith) And then she proceeded to set up that small date with Tifa. Believe it or not, this is actually what we do during bad calls. We'd talk about what we would do after all this ends; we'd go out dining, or playing games/darts, or go drinking, or whatever it is that makes us happy. Just to keep our minds calm and to allow us to hope for the future, even if it's just a few hours away. It gives us hope and courage to go on. We plan for the worst, but we hope for the best. The more critical the situation is, the more you need to be level-headed. And needless to say, after this point onwards, Tifa is much more calmed down from her struggle to keep herself focus.

4) She follows orders.

This might sound weird to some, but the ability to cast away your worry and focus on what you can do, instead of what you should do, is important in emergency situations. You need to know what you don't know. You don't get in the way of your comrades. If you're not good at intubating, you don't insist to intubate in emergency situations just because you wanna help. Seriously, you'll just make things worse. When Cloud, Tifa, and Aerith were attacked before climbing up and out of the sewer, Cloud asked both Tifa and Aerith to keep going. Aerith immediately answers "Okay" and left—without a single but. This is significant because it shows that Aerith knew she'd be better off leaving. She doesn't need to offer help, coz her help was not needed. This is not the place where she could help. The ability to recognize this is very important for healthcare professionals. Tifa was a bit more reluctant to leave, but that's probably because she is a martial artist in-game. Also, the fact that Aerith could still joke "We're not delicious" is just so real lol! Yup, we joke sometimes when we're facing deaths—doesn't mean we lose focus in saving the dying person in front of us, don't worry. And then it happens again when they reached Sector 7 when Cloud asked them to stay with Wedge as he goes up, Aerith immediately answered "sure"—because she can "patch" Wedge up, it's where her abilities lie. This is even more accentuated when an injured Wedge argued that he can still fight when he clearly can't—making this point even more obvious. Aerith is someone with a healthcare mind, Wedge was not.

5) She supports her comrades emotionally even when she’s worried too.

When they reached the surface, they spotted a Shinra helicopter. Cloud assured them they're only on patrol. Aerith turned to Tifa and said, "Don't worry, we'll make it in time". This moment is also very iconic to me. As I mentioned, I'm an anaesthesiologist. We are the support doctors to surgeons and physicians. Those moments when we're operating on AAA surgeries and the patient is losing liters of blood and literally dying, we're pumping bloods in with our hands and get those Level 1 machines operating, and the surgeons would be panicking because it keeps bleeding? Yep, I did say it before. "We'll make it. Just concentrate on the surgery and don't worry about the bleeding", even though I'm sweating and dying here trying to keep the patient alive. But I pretended to be calm in front of my team and cheered them on. Because the whole team needs to keep calm. If one of the team loses hope, then bid your chance farewell. As an anaesthesiologist, we're almost like the anchor in the room. People look at us to know if everything's alright. I need to tell them it's alright, so they need not worry. Aerith knew Tifa is worried. And she tried to keep Tifa calm with reassurance. Even if she probably freaked out herself.

6) She doesn’t discriminate.

After they defeated the ghost at the haunted maintenance facility, Cloud tried to kill it, and Aerith didn't let him. When Cloud said that thing was dangerous, Aerith said she knows and added "but even so..." she didn't feel right about killing it. (Let's ignore the fact that the Ghoul was a lonely creature for now) It then goes to drop the train wreck which almost killed them had it not been for Cloud. Now this would have been avoided had Aerith let Cloud killed it—maybe. But here's the thing. When you're hyper-aware that people are dying left and right, you value life more. No one deserves to die, even the worst criminal in the world. You're a law-abiding citizen? You're a criminal? It doesn't make a difference to us. I know this is something super hard to comprehend. But technically only when the law subjects the criminal to the death sentence that a person should be left to die. I've been a doctor for eleven years, I was a prison doctor for two. I had the first-hand experience of dealing with criminals. It's not my job to determine whether they deserve to die or not. It's not my call whether they will turn a new leaf had they lived. I know this is something others find difficult to relate to and agree with—happens to my non-medical family and friends. The verdict to us is simple. It's a life. It's worth saving. Period. (Technically the ghosts are dead though but my point still stands)

7) She tries to her best abilities and lets go of what is out of her control.

Tifa's emotions are tampered with again when they confirmed Shinra was going to drop the plate when they overheard the Turks conversation. Her voice shook, we can literally hear it. Aerith's response was "all we can do now is keep moving". And she's right. When they reached Sector 7 and the Whispers were preventing them, she said "we have to get past whatever it takes". And later on, Tifa left to help Cloud and Barret, and Aerith agreed to get to Seventh Heaven to ensure Marlene's safety. Wedge had a short mental breakdown when he realized he was no good to anyone up or down the crime scene. And Aerith told him "We can still save a lot of lives", "That's no excuse to give up", "I need to know I did everything I could". Her encouragement helped Wedge save more people. Some argued, did she not care about the lives that already died? Now here's my point; no, we don't. Sorry if this sounds harsh, but really. What can we do for people who are already dead? Nothing. What can we do for people who are still alive? Everything. And this is the core of being a healthcare provider—we prioritize. Yes, we're also humans. We can get emotional when our own friends and relatives die. (Aerith might not be as calm had it happened at Sector 5) But when we put the healthcare provider cap on, we mean business. That is why when disasters happened, and we triage people with a black tag? That's when we know we couldn't do anything for them. We don't mourn at the black tags. We move on to the other tags instead. So that we know we already did everything in our power to help. And yes, it doesn't matter even if we lost more lives than we saved. It's worth it, even if we only saved one person out of thousands of deaths. Just like how Aerith saved Betty in Sector 7. That one life is worth it.

[sneezefiction]

sleep over? please.

Akaashi x reader - scenario

prompt: Sleep over? Please.

a/n: Akaashi has my heart, y’all. i thought i’d write from a prompt this time around and i’m about to hit 100 followers, so, being me, i must celebrate with fluffy feels. i love this community. thanks for inviting me in so warmly <3 

warnings: slight cursing

wc: 1440

---

It wasn’t unlike you to be up late. Dim lights on in your room, phone in hand, mind fuzzy and tired.

It wasn’t unlike Akaashi to try and figure out the reason you’re still awake.

Somehow he always knew when you couldn’t sleep. Sometimes he knew by way of instinct and other times you just made your social media scrolls a little too apparent.

Tonight, it was Twitter that gave you away. Your late-night likes, retweets, and posts weren’t exactly incognito, so you expected to get a text from your boyfriend scolding you for still being up, rolling around in your bed sheets.

However, the text you received was far from nagging… 

12:53 am - Akaashi: Saw you on twitter. I can’t sleep either.

12:53 am - Akaashi: If you don’t want to, it’s fine, but I have a proposition...

12:53 am - Akaashi: do u want to sleep over?

12:54 am - Akaashi: Please.

---

12:55 am - Y/n: Give me 10 minutes

You’re not sure why, but his text surprises you. Akaashi has always been self-sustaining, not usually asking for much from you, his friends, or family. So the needier tone in his text gets you wondering if he’s actually okay.

You know better than to ask him ‘what’s wrong’ over text. In-person conversations are more comfortably suited for him. So you slip on some sneakers and swing a jacket over your shoulders, tugging the sleeves up and onto your arms making sure to be as quick as possible.

You pat yourself down for one final check - keys, bag, and wallet... all here. Nodding to yourself, you set off.

As you pull up to his house, you notice that Akaashi is already standing on his front porch waiting for you.

He’s wearing a textured, gray hoodie you gifted him a few months back and some name brand joggers. Akaashi always manages to be unintentionally fashionable, especially when it comes to lounge-wear.

As you make your way up the walkway, you notice his slightly unfocused expression. A clear sign that he’s feeling a bit off. Akaashi only ever got that way under major stress, usually relating to school or volleyball.

He lets out a breath, reaching his arms out toward you and wrapping them around your neck. A hand shifts behind your head, entangling your hair in lithe fingers and pulling your face gently into his chest.

“Sorry for asking you over so late.” He sighs, almost as though he’s disappointed in himself for being needy.

“I always tell you to let me know if you need something, Akaashi. I’m glad you texted.” You muffle out into his hoodie, drawing your arms around his back.

“Let’s go inside, I’m sleepy and I know you are too.” He states.

As if on cue, you let out a big yawn. This guy is something else. A prophet? A mind reader? Just super intuitive?

Ah, whatever, you give up thinking about it. He just is what he is… and now it’s my turn to figure him out.

You head to his bedroom, familiar with its colors of deep blue and crisp white and, as per usual, completely spotless. You’ve spent many a day and night theorizing, studying, and laying next to your boyfriend in this room. It’s a bit of a sanctuary in its own, quiet way.

Akaashi lets you crawl into his bed first so that you can claim your space under his covers. You feels the bed shift slightly as he joins you. He’s relatively silent, but not in his usual manner. It’s as though he’s trying to say something, his mouth barely opening and then closing right after.

So you let him process his words before they inevitably tumble out. In the meantime, you both study the ceiling above you, not making physical contact yet in order to minimize distraction from his thoughts.

“Y/n, do you like me?” He breaks the bubble of silence around you.

“Hm?” A silly question, you think.

“You know I do, Akaashi. I’m dating you, aren’t I?” You chuckle, turning your head to the black-haired boy. His face is entirely serious, eyes still fixed above.

“What do you mean exactly?” You question, matching his seriousness this time.

He runs a hand through his hair, then shifts his head toward you, reaching an arm under the blankets to grab your hand.

Rubbing your hand with his thumb thoughtfully, Akaashi clarifies, “I mean, why are you with me? What benefit do you see in being around me?” He pauses, taking a breath before his next question.

“Do you really see a future with me?” His cheeks are tinted pink, but the question isn’t cute or lighthearted.

It’s anxious.

You can practically feel the self-doubt in his whispers. A masked vocalization of his fears, probably stemming from the beginning of your relationship, spilling out.

You move closer to his body, pulling him into your chest, deciding that physical contact would be the best way to convey your answer.

“Akaashi… remember when we talked about college and plans awhile back?”

He nods. 

“And how we discussed long distance?”

He nods, but clearly the topic was more painful for him, his eyebrows furrowing slightly.

“You know it’s only a couple of hours, baby.” You remind him gently, “We have every weekend… every slower day… any school break to see each other again.”

“I know, I know.” He sighs, “But, do you really want me? Do you want to drive and wait for me?”

You unlink your hand from his to run your fingers along the outline of his slim jawline. It’s the first time he’s ever expressed his hesitance of your feelings for him.

He needed confirmation and confidence that you care for him. That you want to be by his side.

Throughout high school, he’d had the luxury of being a vital part of his team. They needed his skills. His team relied on him and trusted that he could follow through as a setter. Without Akaashi they would’ve been lost and, at the least, much weaker.

But you were a different issue entirely. You didn’t “need” him per se. His critical thinking and intellect could only get him so far in a relationship. Something he didn’t see himself being in for years… yet here he is, you in his bed, listening to him sort through his problems once again.

You see him flipping through the thoughts in his mind, so you bring him back to the real world, pushing his hair back to place a delicate kiss to his forehead.

He meets your eyes.

“I know you don’t see it my way, but Akaashi… this relationship is more than just some cost-benefit diagram.” You smile, eyes lighting up with humor.

“I am choosing to be with you because…” It’s your turn to blush, debating whether or not this is the time to say it.

And it really is time. He needs to know how you truly feel.

“... dammit, Akaashi, I love you.”

His heart jumps. Those were 3 words he wasn’t expecting.

You continue, “Yes, you add something to my life. You make me laugh and think deeper than I’m used to. You teach me perspective. You treat me so kindly but…” He’s listening so intently now,

“You are so much more than what you give. You make me want you. To hold you, text you, and call you if you need anything. To just lay here with you… you make little things so much more beautiful.”

Akaashi may not speak much, but this is a new level of speechless.

It’s like you’re confessing to him all over again.

But this time, it’s from the basis of love.

Nothing cute or made-up. Just... sincerity.

“So, please, if you ever think I don’t care about you or want you around, even if we’re fighting with each other or managing too much at one time, just call me. I’ll drop everything to get to you. I promise.”

It takes him a moment to handle everything. To grasp these abstract feelings and apply them to your relationship.

But after a minute of stillness he finally understands.

He feels the same. And he has for a long time.

It’s why he cares so much to hear it from you. To know that you don’t just like him, but that you are actively willing to seek him out. That you want his presence, his rough edges, and his faults in your life.

“I… love you too, y/n.” He manages to respond, unsure as to how he can answer to everything else you’ve just said.

So you bury your face in his hair, letting the flush slowly fade from your own face and breathe in the perfume of his cedar scented shampoo.

“Thank you for trusting me.” You whisper.

“Thank you for coming over.” He murmurs in reply.

“I love a good, emotional sleepover, baby. You should know that much by now.” You quietly jest, eyes closing.

“Yeah,” He hums, “I appreciate them too.” Mumbles Akaashi.

You both drift off into a serene sleep, releasing your hesitations and inhibitions into the tranquil midnight air.

---

From this day forward, you both refer to this moment as “Akaashi’s Therapy.” 

Since then, it’s become an inside joke, but only you two remember how monumental of a turning point this conversation was for your relationship. 

It’s why you both made it through your last year of high school together. It’s why, even with weeks (sometimes months) of distance, you both consistently went back to each other. Study nights, weekend trips, and Christmas parties.

And also why you’re here now, admiring the glimmering diamond engagement ring on your finger. Hand-in-hand with your best friend, now fiancé, at a summertime festival. It feels like a dream, but the many long years apart remind you that it’s very real. That you both made it.

No cost-benefit analysis or prophetic parable could’ve gotten you both to this point. No war strategy and not an ounce of magic could’ve held up...

But a sleepover? Hell yes.

[thejustmaiden]

Heyo, fellow Inuyasha fans! Happy Friday! This particular blog will serve as a collection of random thoughts I’ve been mulling over lately. Hope you’ll consider giving it a read. By the way, it’ll specifically pertain to the Sessrin ship. If that’s not something that is of interest to you, then no need to read any further. Whatever happens, I wanted to get this out before the sequel. Alrighty, let’s go! 

I’m not sure many of us realize just how much fiction sparks public dialogue and shapes culture. There have been countless studies and research done to prove it, therefore this really isn’t up for debate. What the real question here should be is have we taken the time to fully contemplate and assess just how much fictional experiences are able to change or influence our perspective on real, everyday life? The visual arts are just one of many evolutionary adaptations that serve to give us more insight into one another’s mind. If our outlook on fiction contrasts with said insight, then perhaps some re-evaluating is in order.  

Powerful works of literature such as 1984 and the beloved Harry Potter series are just two examples. George Orwell’s book contributed strongly to how readers viewed government and politics during that time, and to this day it’s a book that resonates with many. As much as Harry Potter is cherished all across the world, there are religious and academic institutions that condemn it or have even gone so far as to ban it. I may not agree with the extreme measures taken, but it’s fascinating nonetheless to witness the extent to which fiction can move and mobilize people for a cause.

The takeaway is that indicating fiction doesn’t have the power to create change in our everyday lives is misleading to say the least. So how exactly then can fictional stories that are, after all, completely made up affect society in such profound ways? It all lies in the power of the psychology of fiction. According to cognitive psychologist and novelist, Keith Oatley, who’s been researching the psychological effects of fiction for over a decade, he states that engaging with stories about other people can improve empathy and theory of mind. When we identify with these characters’ struggles, we begin to share their frustration for societal problems that plague them. These types of stories tap into our emotions more so than- believe it or not- nonfiction, and thus their effects inspire us and even have the ability to alter our worldviews. 

I’ll be returning to that specific topic a bit later, but moving on for now!

It’s safe to say that I speak on behalf of the majority of antis. That being said, I first want to add that we are aware that sessrin shippers claim to agree that there was nothing inherently romantic that took place between Rin and Sesshomaru during their travels together. The thing is we have trouble believing you guys when you time and time again provide contradictory statements to defend your stance.

Voicing things like, “all signs point to Rin” and “it’s been foreshadowed” sends the exact opposite message of what you supposedly stand for and, if anything, confirms that you’ve had romance on your mind long before it would’ve been acceptable to come out with openly. You can’t just go along with what we say when it’s convenient to your argument and then back it up later with “who else but Rin.” How can the relationship you’re imagining be so obvious if they didn’t hint at it for the whole duration of the original series like we agreed upon? Elaborate on how we could’ve possibly come to such wildly different conclusions when we started AND left off with the same views for and throughout the series. 

On top of that, making the excuse that we don’t speak for adult!Rin and that she has the right to make her own decisions once she’s old enough is a weak defense. Firstly, because we haven’t even met her. Secondly, because it’s unfair of you to assert that you know what’s best for Rin and then say we’re not allowed to just because it doesn’t align with your beliefs. I get that you feel protective over her character, but do recall that this adult version of her none of us have actually met yet. We have no idea what kind of woman she’s become, what her dreams or aspirations may be, and whether she’s married or even wants to be. I’m not against the idea of her falling in love, I just don’t think it’ll be with Sesshomaru. I guess I’m also a fan of the idea of her following in Kaede’s footsteps, because if anyone can grow up to be an independent, trusted, and wise leader of the community like her it’s Rin.

To make matters worse, way too many of you continue to celebrate the drama cd and profess that it was sweet that Sesshomaru basically promised he’d wait for Rin all while somehow ignoring the glaring grooming implications. Why do you only see what you want to see and fail to acknowledge that actual child grooming scenarios do in fact play out like this in real life? A high percentage of people who have been victims of grooming can attest to this. If Sessrin does go canon, all the sequel succeeded in doing to avoid the direct correlation with grooming was skip over the more questionable and dodgy portions of it. Take out the time jump, however, and you no longer have a loophole to cover up the scary unmistakable truth, which is that Sessrin and grooming are essentially one in the same.

No one case is identical to another so please don’t come to me with your “but how is it grooming if Sesshomaru didn’t manipulate Rin” refutes. Nobody knows what the hell went on during those years between The Final Act and this upcoming sequel. Based on everything exhibited so far- that is if we decide to recognize the drama cd like so many of you choose to do- Sessrin’s dynamic is eerily reminiscent of real life child grooming. Why else do you think a lot of us fans have a huge problem with it? It’s triggering for a reason. 

Let’s be honest, Sesshomaru’s supposed love confession could’ve just been the first of many gestures like it. Who really knows, right? According to you shippers, a major shift in their relationship took place sometime during this critical period none of us got to watch unfold. I’m sure you all have explored the various ways this would’ve gone down in fan fiction and through other creative means of expression. Not to spoil the fun, but all I can’t help but wonder about is just how many of those supposed “cute moments” would’ve been as creepy and cringey as that proposal. Hundreds of thousands (possibly millions?!) of fans would undoubtedly agree with me, too. It seems to me this ain’t due to a mere difference of opinion. Taste is one thing, ethics a whole other. 

By the way, in case you didn’t know, groomers don’t necessarily need to plan out every single move in order for their behavior to constitute as grooming. What we should be paying attention to instead is the fact that Sesshomaru made a conscious decision to act on his own selfish desire for a young girl who couldn’t have possibly known in that moment the magnitude of what he was asking of her. Why is it that a vulnerable Rin is put in a position that forces her to be the one responsible for making such a big, life-changing decision for the both of them? Yes, Sesshomaru gave her the choice and, yes, she doesn’t have to make it till later, but why on Earth is he coming to her with this well before a child her age is ready and mature enough to handle it? Even if his intentions are good (broadly speaking of course), his what you shippers probably call “innocent acts” are incidentally coercing Rin into reciprocating his feelings. Whether he planned for that or not, he’s at fault. Period. 

That’s one way the power imbalance works. A child wants nothing more than to please the adult they look up to and adore, because they’re impressionable like that. Maybe Rin processes this like she’ll want whatever he wants, so that’s what she trains herself to believe- either right then and there or over time. Plus, if you really think about it, why wouldn’t she trust him if in her eyes he’s been nothing but good to her and that’s all she’s ever really known? (Psst! Charm is integral to the manipulative nature of grooming so it’s deceiving AKA manipulation can come off as praise or flattery.) Bottom line is that Rin is too young to have to think about this kind of deep stuff at all, and Sesshomaru shouldn’t have taken advantage of the power he had/has over her to influence a decision she was by no means prepared to hear about much less decide on. Your headcanons seem to imply that she’ll eventually have to choose though, and Idk about you but I rather not push my own fantasy agenda onto a underage girl regardless of how much I want it. Idc if she’s fictional, it wouldn’t feel right so why would I want to see that? My principals couldn’t ever allow for it.   

Even if it wasn’t an official proposal, per se, it’s still disturbing to me that so many of you find joy in the thought of a grown adult male essentially waiting for a young girl HE KNEW to become old enough before pursuing her. I know this drama cd ain’t technically canon, y'all, but since this is literally the only source we have that may foreshadow a potential Sessrin to come, and it’s referenced a lot, I figured it still should be called out for exactly what it is- Grooming: 101!!!!

Just as I demonstrated above, fiction has the ability to make even the most inappropriate and uncomfortable situations be viewed in a favorable light when you put the right spin on it. *cough* Lolicon culture, need I say more? *cough* Despite what you may believe, the strategies fiction utilizes to explain themes/concepts can genuinely lead to how we perceive them, and ultimately to how we come to make sense of a similar event presented to us in real life. Especially if we have no prior experience with any of it and have nothing to compare something to, these perceptions can be dangerous yet still persuasive to certain fans- young ones in particular. The more narrative consistency across stories and different mediums, the more likely they’ll influence social beliefs. Minors don’t possess the same capacity as adults to think critically about the content they consume, and if we aren’t more careful about what we put out there then all of us will continue to face serious repercussions.

This is precisely why it’s crucial we persist in our fight against the rabid phenomenon of glorifying young girls in every sexual context imaginable. Just look at what something as seemingly harmless as fiction has the power to do. The scope of fiction is broad and far-reaching, and it’s about time we stop denying that fact and actually do something about it if we have the means to.

The truth of the matter is that we’re in desperate need of proper education and training programs on this issue in our communities. Families need to ensure their children have access to the necessary resources, but it isn’t just on them. ALL of us gotta do our part and ALL of us should be up for the task. It takes a village, right? If we do not properly discuss and address child sexual abuse (CSA) with our children and in public forums, including the internet, then we’re ultimately accepting incidents of CSA should they arise. Consequently, that also translates to indirectly accepting that the predators among us stay untreated and/or unpunished. That’s how the generational and societal aspect of the abuse can continue, and we must do everything in our power to secure our children’s future. Yes, even when it comes to fiction.

If you still somehow don’t think the Sessrin pairing has anything to do with grooming, allow me to break this down for you one more time:

1. If some of your fellow sessrin shippers say that a relationship like this in real life is harmful, then that should be pretty telling in and of itself.

2. Piggybacking off #1: if your only defense to that is “well it’s just fiction,” then you should ask yourself why you can’t ever come up with better reasons. Same goes for history and culture, so please stop using those to justify this relationship. None of the above can or should be applied since it’s already been established that fiction pervades our lives and vice versa.

3. If fellow shippers who are victims of grooming say they are drawn to Sessrin because it allows them in a way to “take back control” from their abuser so that they can better cope with past traumas, then they’re inadvertently admitting that Sessrin does possess qualities associated with the past child sexual abuse they underwent. AKA Sessrin is relatable for its abusive dynamic.

I have to ask by the way, but why do you get so offended when we don’t support your ship anyway? Is it because we interpret it to be controversial and you don’t like your ship getting a bad rap? Is it because it would be insulting to admit that antis actually have a point in it being problematic and you rather double down instead? Or is it because you’re projecting yourself onto Rin and prefer to not go into detail about why that is? Maybe it’s too personal, or maybe it’s because deep down you’re ashamed. Of course that doesn’t mean you’re bad people, but suppressing these kind of negative emotions can’t be healthy for anyone. A little awareness and self-reflection on your part can benefit not just you but all of us in the long run. Cognitive dissonance can suck, but it’s also part of being human. 

I recently came across a comment I’d like to share with you. Unfortunately, this is not the first time nor will it be the last I see the likes of it. Anyway, in it a fan stated how embarrassing it must be being an Anti in this fandom when an episode like “Forever with Lord Sesshomaru” exists. Guys, this shipper and all those who liked their post are showing their true colors. Perpetuating and/or anticipating these sexualized images of young girls is a grave issue in both our society and media alike. I think we can all agree on that, or at least I hope so. It’s remarks like these that prove we still got a long way to go in terms of progress, and if we ever hope to effectively reverse some of our backwards way of thinking. So serious question for ya in regard to this: Why is it too much to ask that grooming be portrayed for what it is? Grooming. To clarify, grooming is bad and needs to be painted in a bad light. It’s as simple as that. If only we could all acknowledge it for what it is, we wouldn’t be in this predicament. 

Historical accuracy and cultural differences aside, it appears the crux of the matter between Sessrin shippers and Antis is our acceptance and/or denial of fiction’s influence on real life. If we can’t agree on this, then we’ll never agree on anything else. As mentioned earlier, there is more than enough evidence to support the idea that fiction impacts our lives in extraordinary ways. I, for one, believe in the transformative power of stories. I think they do more for us than many of us give them credit for and/or are inclined to admit. 

This is partially why I believe that the majority of sessrin folk are missing the point most of the time. All they do is focus on insignificant and irrelevant information that accomplishes nothing but more gaslighting and strawmanning. Whether it be an intentional or unconscious decision, whatever we argue goes right over their head. All they do is throw around deflections and antagonizing remarks that serve no real purpose other than to make Antis out to be the unreasonable and irrational ones. Making connections between our own lives and our stories is a completely natural and normal occurrence. If those particular shippers insist on denying just how interconnected real life and fiction both are, what that tells me is they’re either out of touch with reality or deliberately choose to be.

Just to be clear, I am of the opinion that most if not all antis aren’t real life predators. If they say they aren’t, I honestly take their word for it. Speaking to Sessrin shipper directly: We know it’s not Sesshomaru you want to be but Rin. No, we’re not calling you pedophiles or groomers. None of us think you are using a fictional ship to attract underage fans to be the Rin in your life or anything of the sort. We are well aware that many of you are self-inserting yourself as Rin, so please don’t feel the need to tell us yourself because that would be stating the obvious.

I learned from a few of you since this sequel was announced that the Sessrin relationship isn’t just a ship but an opportunity for you to confront the person who used and abused you. So there’s two issues with this I’d like to raise. (Sorry if I’m repeating myself, but it’s urgent I stress this again!) This is what I have to say:

If fiction does not affect real life or have the ability to normalize anything as you claim to believe, then why does “fixing” what happened to you via your preferred choice of coping associated with these two characters in the first place? Why bring your past abuse into this at all if at the end of the day it’s “just fiction” and nothing more to you but a source of entertainment?

By confessing that you use Sessrin to cope with your past trauma, you therein reveal that Sessrin does in fact resemble an adult-child relationship with a grooming dynamic. So why then would you want other fans to be exposed to a pairing that brings to mind the very abuse you endured? We’re supposed to stop this toxic cycle- NOT find more ways to manifest and relive it, much less subject other fans to it. 

You may think that Sessrin doesn’t fit the textbook definition of what child grooming is, but that’s not to say it doesn’t embody it or that it doesn’t at the very least have traces of it that stand out. 

“Antis are miserable people who don’t know how to enjoy a good story. It’s just fiction, stop ruining it for other fans!”

Well, no, it’s not just fiction or just a story. Some of you evidently went and proved that yourself, and without my help, by revealing how you relate Sessrin to your own life and apply it to cope with past abuse. Past abuse or not, as far as I can tell we’re all equally invested in these characters. That speaks volumes and just goes to show that fiction touches our lives in long-lasting ways.

I have something I want to say concerning some of who believe that it’s inconsiderate of antis who have been victims of grooming or another form of child abuse to tell other victims who ship Sessrin how they should cope with their trauma. Now as much as I respect the various means victims discover to deal with their painful pasts, there’s always an appropriate time and a place for these things to occur. We must seek out better ways to safely cope with the abuse we lived through (if any) without running the risk of hurting and endangering others. 

There are plenty of fans in other fandoms who don’t try to defend their ships going canon, because they’re able to recognize an unhealthy or toxic pairing when they see one and won’t try to justify it. A Sessrin romance simply does not belong on a show geared towards teens, and I really don’t need to go into detail about why we shouldn’t support it, at least canon-wise. Shipping Sessrin is your right, but if you don’t keep it to yourself and your corner of the fandom then you really shouldn’t be surprised by the opposition. All we ask is you respect that their specific dynamic falls under the category of child grooming (or very close) and should be treated as such in public. The world of fiction may be wider than the world we live in, but that doesn’t always mean “anything goes.” In the creative spaces our minds occupy we must still adhere to the same fundamental and moral guidelines we live by in life. There’s nothing wrong with exploring new terrains and experimenting with ideas, but we must also remember that our stories are all about communicating and connecting with people. So let’s please be more mindful of the sort of messages they’re sending. 

Besides, this isn’t only about you and what makes you feel safe, it’s about all of us. I don’t know how much more I can stress that really. How can thoughts endanger our children, you ask? Well, it’s not like we’re suggesting that our thoughts can jump out of our tvs, materialize themselves, and place kids under mind control. The forces behind fiction are a lot more complex and nuanced than a “monkey see, monkey do” approach, so don’t waste any more time trying to  describe that to us. You’re taking this argument in the wrong direction. 

Take the “violent video games breed killers” theory. I’m afraid you’re misconstruing what we’re saying and then taking it quite too literally. Please stop twisting our words, because nobody on our side is saying that just because you play violent video games that you’ll become a violent person. The Sessrin equivalent of that would be if you ship them then you must be a pedophile or turning into one. *sigh* I know you guys are feeling attacked, but I’m afraid your defensive nature is keeping you from thinking straight. Clearly, there are always exceptions (I’d recommend reading up on the Slender Man case), but Antis aren’t saying you’re one of them.

You see, it’s not so much about the content as it is the notion of the content. Kids and teens who are playing these video games have been informed that killing is wrong, because they grew up learning that early on like the rest of us. No sane person would advocate for violence and nonsensical killing in real life. Since they fully understand the severity of the consequences of killing a person in real life, they are able make a clear distinction between the two. When it comes to killing there is hardly any ambiguity. Sadly, that is far from the truth when it comes to sexualizing girls. It should immediately be perceived as wrong leaving no room for interpretation, and yet here we are still putting up with these inaccurate and demeaning female representations.

Most children who have been groomed don’t realize it till years down the road. If they aren’t ever taught the telltale signs to properly labeling grooming situations, how do you expect them to make sense of and relate to a fictional version? Let’s think of about it from a child’s perspective. Yes, this includes teens who rely pretty heavily on adult guidance and the content we put out there for them. Put yourself in their shoes for a moment and picture that you’ve never had child grooming explained to you (because that’s just the reality for so many unfortunately). Wouldn’t you say it’s possible for them to deduce that what they see on their screens is how they come to discern something in real life, especially if they have little to no experience with it? Perceived realism is plausible, y'all.

What it comes down to in the end is that the ideas and emotions we cultivate behind these stories leave an impression on others. Impressions are capable of influencing the way we see the world, which in turn affects us and beyond just our imagination. The way I look at it, stories contribute to how and why we normalize certain beliefs and trends. If fiction reflects real life like most of us tend to agree, then wouldn’t you say Sessrin is a (in)direct result of this world’s tendency to place young girls in overly sexual or romantic environments? Where do you think fiction draws its inspiration from? Sure, some of it originates from our imagination, but most of what drives us to create these stories is the real world and the people who live in it.

Fiction is meant to mirror reality, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that it’s only a one-way street. That fiction in no way, shape, or form influences our reality? Or that it only works the other way around? With all due respect, that’s simply not true. No productive discourse can be had if we choose to ignore the truth and don’t come together (at least halfway) to tackle the real issues at hand. 

Okay, I think I’ll leave it off there! Thanks so much for reading. I expect this to be my last blog on any topic regarding Inuyasha in the near future. As much as I’ve looked forward to answering all of your asks and writing all the blogs I have over these past almost 5 months, I think it’s best if I spend some time away for now. With the sequel fast approaching, I’m doing what I always do: hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. I’ve met some amazing people along the way, that’s for sure. And who knows, maybe you’ll see me active in the tags sooner than we think. Until then, it’s been an absolute pleasure! Enjoy the sequel, all of you. 💜

[subtlereferencetomyinterests]

Something to Uplift Us

Ao3,  MasterPost

Relationships:  Romantic DLAMPR (Roman-centric, kinda Remus-centric), platonic Creativitwins!!!

Do I like this??? Meh. Is it something that I wrote? Yes. I will heal myself from SVS-R with Fluff.

Warnings: Remus Typical Nonsense, swearing, mentions of being in Quarantine, all sympathetic sides, non-sexual Pole Dancing

Word Count: 2,667 

Roman was the essence of romance and it showed. For his entire existence, he'd been well acquainted with the hypothetical. If he were his own person, if he had a prince of his own, if he had the chance at a romantic relationship, he knew what he would do. Roman knew relationships, he always had, and it had tortured him to know that he'd never have one.

Which was why it frustrated him to no end that he hadn’t been the one to ask out his fellow sides. He’d honestly never thought that it would be an option. When he first developed his feelings for the others- Virgil, Patton, Logan, Janus, in that order- he had felt nothing more than excitement. He was giddy, he was light-headed, just to know that he could feel that way. He would spend hours daydreaming, just musing over the way they made his heart stop, but he never hoped for anything to come of it. He wasn’t sad, or mournful, or pining per se- just so caught up in the joy of feelings that he forgot that he could do something with them. 

So he thought about it a lot, suffice to say. And all he had now was time to think; it was nearly month three of quarantine. Roman had wrung his brain out like a sponge for anything new to think about- The Imagination was practically turning gray! He tried to tend to it, truly he did, but it was getting harder every day. Creativity's fellow sides had all busied themselves taking up new hobbies- Virgil was teaching Patton to draw, Janus had learnt embroidery, Logan took up knitting, Remus made trash sculptures… They all seemed to be having their own little renaissance (complete with plague), and what was Roman doing? Wasting valuable free time!

  In a fit of desperation, the artistic trait dived under his large canopy bed, rummaging around until his hand caught on the lip of a cardboard box. With no small amount of effort, he pulled the enormous container out from under his bed so that it could be properly examined. There, piled high in the box, were dozens of notebooks and sketchbooks- all of which filled to the brim with writing, drawings, and poetry. Having no clue what he was specifically looking for, Roman upended the box and watched the contents crash to the floor. Something in here would surely spark his mind! Perhaps some old work would catch his eye and inspire some redraws!

The side hadn't needed to search for long. Right at the top of the pile- bright pink, its cover dotted with puffy heart stickers- sat a large, spiral-bound sketchbook. You could almost see the light bulb pop up over Roman’s head as he squealed and snatched up the sketchbook. Flopping down onto his bed, he flipped it open in one hand and placed the other against his chest. 

“Ooh, some of my best,” he cooed to no one in particular, gaze turned to the dozens of love poems surrounded by little doodles of hearts that filled the pages. This was the journal he’d confided in before the sides had all officially begun their relationship, filled with flowery prose about anything from Janus’ scales to Patton’s smile; from Logan’s laugh to Virgil’s freckles (a rare sight, usually hidden by make-up). Roman was so lost in nostalgia that when the ideas hit him, he nearly fell out of bed in excitement at his own thoughts.

Of course! He could take all of these old writings and compose them together, into one eloquent amalgam that would illustrate perfectly all those things that he’d been unable to articulate in the beginning! And it seemed only fitting that such a soliloquy be delivered in The Imagination- in the most gorgeous scenario he could fabricate! Somewhere open to a starry sky, for his left-brained loves- but it had to have ornate architecture, of course, and it had to be cozy. Oh, it was all coming together now.

Roman leapt out of bed, posing with his hand above his head and sinking deeper into The Mindscape extravagantly. He didn’t waste time looking around at the depressing half-formed scenery, sweeping his arms up and erasing the entirety of his half of The Imagination. Time to get to work.

Remus was stretched across the Commons couch, his head in Janus’ lap and feet in Logan’s. The TV hummed with whatever show they’d thrown on as background noise, and a few feet away at the counter, Patton and Virgil were hovering over some sort of scrapbook.  Nobody had the energy for conversation; nobody had the energy for anything. 

It was magnificently boring. The Duke already filled up an entire sketchbook, written half a dozen shamelessly smutty self-insert fanfictions, constructed and subsequently destroyed eldritch beings in his room, and bothered his boyfriends. So, all that was left to do was doze.

It didn’t help Remus’ tired state that Janus was running his fingers through his hair. The monotonous waking world was finally slipping away. Maybe there was something buried in his dreams that could hold his attention.

But just before sleep took hold, a white-hot energy ran through the trait’s body, jolting him so suddenly that he tumbled off of the couch and onto the floor. His arms and legs were all pins-and-needles as he looked up at his very concerned partners.

“There’s fuckery afoot!” Remus announced, wide-eyed. He pulled himself up and grinned, “You guys stay here!” 

Without so much as a good-bye, Remus threw himself into the ground, saving himself the time of sinking out properly. After a moment’s silence, Janus resumed working on his embroidery. 

“Should we go see what that was about?” Patton asked tentatively. 

“Meh,” the three other sides responded in unison. After a moment, Janus added, “It is Remus, after all.”

Roman’s structure was coming together beautifully! Wide marble columns rose up and held aloft the glimmering silver ceiling, the middle of which was a sky-light open to thousands of stars and a brilliant full moon. Surrounding the opening was a spiral of stone roof- through the gaps of which even more astronomically accurate stars shone!

The inside of the building consisted of an immense mahogany stage, currently cloaked by thick velvet curtains and overlooking plenty of seats. Rather than traditional theater rows, Roman had arranged the seating like lovely cafe tables, all of which were given generous space from each other (Except for two at the very front, of course). Lanterns hung from the walls, casting the space in warm lighting. Creativity currently stood at the very back, thinking that it could use just a little more of something. With a smirk, the side snapped his fingers and the wall of the room was pushed backwards several yards. With a few more flicks of the wrist and dividing columns, a little lobby was formed. 

He’d given the theater room maroon carpeting and rich gray walls, but the new back section needed brighter lighting and a more cream-canary color scheme. Now he could just finish the decor!

Or he would have, if not for the fact that at that moment someone crashed into his ribs with all the grace of a flaming motorbike. 

“BRO!!!”

“ACK-!” was all Roman managed, as all the wind was knocked out of him. He glared up at his brother, who was sitting on his chest. 

“I knew you were up to something! You wiped half of the whole fucking Imagination! What is this!?” 

Roman wheezed, pushed Remus off of his chest, and finally pulled himself off the ground to catch his breath. His brother was spinning around the room already, eyes sparkling as he took in the building.

“I had to blank it, I needed my full focus,” Roman explained, back to work and filling the back wall with tall bookshelves, “and it’s a surprise, so don’t tell the others.”

“Oh, I won’t. Provided you let me in on whatever this is,” Remus had an ear-to-ear grin, bouncing on the balls of his feet. After a moment’s consideration, Roman hummed.

“I’m doing something nice for our boyfriends. I think we all could use a little pick-me-up, so do not ruin this!”

“I wanna do something nice for them! Lemme help!” 

“You don’t even know what it’s for! Plus, it’s personal!”

“I already asked what it was for, Stupid.”

Roman huffed.

“I wrote them something. Hence the stage.”

“So, what, you’re gonna bring them all into your fancy library-opera for your poetry orgy and I sit in a corner somewhere and be quiet?”

“Ideally.”

“Not a chance, Whore!” Remus swung himself up onto the concession stand that Roman had just created, tearing into a box of candy (food made in The Imagination always tasted weirder than food or ingredients they conjured elsewhere in the Mindscape, but he didn’t particularly mind). 

“Fine. What do you want to do?” Roman challenged, hands on his hips.

“I. Want. To. Help.”

Roman raised his eyebrows doubtfully. Grumbling, his twin started gesturing around the room as he spoke.

“The stars are too bright, they take the focus away from the stage instead of accenting it. The color of the curtains are too similar to the carpet. You’ve got Corinthian shit in there and bookstore lobby vibes in here, which is garbage and inconsistent.”

Roman blinked, his eyes following along with Remus’ criticism. 

“Hm. You have a point.”

“I’m Creativity too, you know. I have some taste.” The Duke said, gnawing on the cardboard box that had contained Imagination Candy moments before. 

“You’re wearing crocs and jorts, simultaneously.”

Remus waved his hand dismissively, hopping off the counter and rushing across the room.

“Whatever. Come on, I’ve got an idea how I can accompany your performance, too.”

“Oh, goody.”

Hours had past and little had changed in the Mindscape living room- Virgil and Patton had finished up their scrapbooking and were curled up together in an armchair, so Logan was sitting at the counter space previously occupied by the two and clacking away on his laptop, and Janus hadn’t moved. The muddled energy of the room had remained pervasive.

That was, until the door to the imagination slammed open, the doorknob cracking against the wall. Four heads shot up to see Remus and Roman, standing side-by-side (quite looking the part of identical twins, matching smiles and all). 

“Oh god,” Janus groaned instinctively, carefully setting his embroidery on a side table, “What did you two do?”

“Yeah, I don’t trust that look,” Virgil said.

The twins scoffed in mock-offense, continuing their odd coordination.

“We try to do something nice,” exclaimed Remus.

“And not so much as a ‘thank you,’” added Roman solemnly. Eyes were rolled, but Patton perked up considerably (just as planned). 

“Ooo, what are you talking about?” 

“It’s a surprise!” Said The Duke, bouncing up and down. Creativity Prime gave a sweeping motion to indicate the still-open door to the Imagination, which had been steadily seeping into the common room with a bright new energy that it had been lacking for days. 

“Follow us,” he instructed, disappearing through the door once more with Remus at his back. Patton bounced after them immediately, grinning. 

The three left-brained sides exchanged glances, shrugged, and followed suit. 

The twins were backstage in an instant, trusting their partners to figure out where their seats were on their own. Roman began pacing around as soon as they finished warming up. 

“Are you sure you can do this? I’m still not sure if your performance is well-suited to acoustic guitar-”

He was cut off by Remus groaning exaggeratedly.

“I can work with anything, bitch.” 

“Right, right,” There was a beat. “You’re sure you’re ready?”

“I’ve been ready. What’s going on with you?”

Rather than responding, Roman did another lap around the stage. 

“C’mon! Stop pacing before I take a bonesaw to your legs!”

“Okay! Alright! I’m ready!”

Before Remus could come up with any more gruesome threats, Roman snapped his fingers and the curtains began to rise. He took his place half-sitting on a stool up front, a guitar in his arms. Behind him, Remus stood between two sturdy metal poles that rose from the stage and into the ceiling. You can already see where this is going.

When the stage was fully revealed, the lights above the audience dimmed. Figuring that the show would be rather awkward if said audience consisted of four people, the Creativities had The Imagination render dozens of prop-people. They moved and acted like a crowd of humans, but each individual was too vague to focus on for long. Thus it was made very clear where their fellow sides were, sitting right up front with a wide array of expressions from amazed to amused to bewildered.

Roman took a moment to steel himself and then began playing. Originally, he’d planned on spoken-word for his loves, but traditionally there is music involved in pole-dancing, so he’d made a few adjustments in order for Remus to be able to contribute. 

Roman started singing, melting as the gazes of the real audience members turned awestruck (and also very flushed, likely from whatever surprisingly impressive poses his brother was pulling behind him). He liked to think that he poured his heart out into every performance, but for this one it felt quite literal. 

Roman’s voice picked up gradually, and he could vaguely hear metal clanging behind him. It went on like that for a good few minutes- because if there was one thing the Twins weren’t, it was brief- before the show finally concluded. Roman stalled for a moment as both the imaginary and real components of the audience applauded uproariously. Remus swung down from the pole and hopped over to him.

“We bow now, Dumbass,” he hissed, noticeably out of breath.

“Oh- right.”

They took hands and took a couple bows as the clapping died down, standing back up with wide grins and red faces. 

As soon as the auditorium was relatively silent, Patton rushed the stage. He outstretched his arms and hopped up and down excitedly.

“Lemme up!” 

Roman grabbed his hands and pulled him on stage while Remus was still attempting to catch his breath. Morality leaned down to give The Prince a brief kiss, and then bounced over to the much more exhausted half of the act to give him the same treatment. He was grinning so wide that it looked painful, his face a bright pink. The Duke wore a matching expression, but the smile was much more unnatural in that preferred way of his.

“So you liked it?”

Rather than verbally responding, Patton grabbed the hands of both Creativities and made a cheerful ribbiting sound.

“It was wonderful,” Logan supplied, climbing the stairs on the side of the stage to meet them, Virgil and Janus right behind him. He was much less outwardly enthusiastic as the other spectacled side, but no less appreciative.

“Yeah, did you guys put all this together today?” Virgil asked, throwing an arm around Roman’s shoulders. 

“What else did we have to do?” Remus answered with a shrug. 

“Good point.”

Janus cleared his throat lightly, immediately drawing everyone’s attention. His eyes were noticeably rimmed with redness, a small smile on his face as he outstretched all of his arms.

“Here, all of you, now.”

Patton cooed.

“Group hug!” 

Fitting six people into one hug may seem awkward, but it always seemed to work out for the sides. At least, Roman thought so. Virgil would fake exasperation at the affection, but they could all tell he loved it. Logan would try to maintain his dignity and fail miserably. Patton was a ball of warmth and energy that seeped into the rest of them. Janus was by far the best at giving hugs, though it could be considered cheating to have extra limbs.

At that moment it hit Roman that, perhaps he hadn’t started this relationship, but he was still a part of it. And that was all he could ever want.

These    Performances    inspired Remus’. They are oddly calming to watch, and super impressive!

@shrimp-crockpot

[syms-things-5]

Clear The Area - Chapter Twelve

Previous chapter HERE

Tags: (I can’t believe I have tags!! Thank you both so much) @kelbabyblue @jennmurawski13

Warnings: 18+ NSFW, strong language

CHAPTER TWELVE

Three Weeks Later

“OK, so what is the point of all this again?” Scott leaned in towards Sarah as they started arranging themselves around the coffee table. An assortment of plates and napkins were stacked high in front of them in anticipation of what was currently happening in the kitchen. Alongside sat and open bottle of wine and various pieces of plastic cutlery. Sarah was already dreading the tidying-up.

Shanna had demanded that everyone cancel their plans that Friday so they could devote the evening to testing out the various cakes and desserts she would spend a few days crafting. Sarah had been glad she had worked constantly throughout and had managed to swap a couple of late shifts so she could avoid the battleground and constant swearing emanating from their kitchen. It was almost unrecognisable to her now, a dusting of flour covered pretty much every surface and everything smelled faintly of gingerbread. There were brand new utensils appearing in the dishwasher that she had never seen before. Who knew you could ice cupcakes in so many extravagant ways?

Baking and cooking in general rarely came easy to Shanna, less so without the guidance of a proficient baker such as Lisa who had of course been banned from assisting her that week. Shan just didn’t have the patience for measuring things out so baking would require an almost complete change of personality. Even a late-night call to discuss the basic recipe for a genoise sponge cake wasn’t enough to allow help through the front door.

“It’s for a charity drive, I think? Their regional offices do it every year but I don’t remember it being this taxing.” Sarah shrugged, equally as confused. Usually for Shanna when effort was involved, it meant only one thing: there was a guy she wanted to impress. Sarah couldn’t remember her mentioning anyone in particular of late, though. Then again, they hadn’t been in the same space for too long these days and that thought made her feel sad and uncomfortable.

“Fuck, I ate lunch later today as well. Am I gonna regret this?” Scott asked, sympathising with his full stomach.

“It’s a good job I’m not on a training plan anymore.” Chris walked into the lounge bringing with him a couple of beers, handing them to Sarah and Scott before taking a seat beside her on the couch. “It’s like fuckin’ MasterChef in there.”

“I might trying drinking some more water. Maybe if I pee more it might create extra space.”

“The fuck?” questioned Chris after him as he darted out of the room one last time before Shanna was finished. “I swear sometimes I can’t believe we’re related.”

“I think he thinks the same thing.” replied Sarah, jokingly as she took a swig from her bottle. “Oh wait beer’s filling, isn’t it?”

“Dunno. Probably. So am I gonna see you at all this week or am I gonna have to stalk your Facebook page?”

“Sorry, I’ll...wait, you stalk my Facebook?!”

“No,” he shrugged nonchalantly. “Only sometimes. It helps me remember what you look like.”

“Oh my god...I thought you were gonna be patient?” she asked, softening her stance so as to avoid it coming across as a dispute.

“This is me being patient, Sarah.” He protected. “You’re cute when you’re annoyed with me by the way. Always thought that.”

Sarah teasingly rolled her eyes at him. “I finish at two tomorrow. I guess I could come by after?”

It mystified him why she felt the need to ask. If he had it his way, he would give her a key and tell her he once fantasised about her sneaking into his apartment late at night and fucking him senseless. 

He didn’t get the chance to verbally agree as Lisa appeared in the doorway looking slightly shell-shocked and carrying a long white tray in both hands, a tea-towel  thrown over one shoulder. At first, they appeared to chocolate brownies until closer inspection showed it to be a slightly burnt sheet cake with rainbow-coloured icing and decorations. Chris gave her a look of concern not dissimilar to a face he pulls when he wants her help in getting out of something or when he tries to claim Scott is bullying him, but Lisa merely widened her eyes in response. He soon understood why as Shanna followed closely behind with two other plates piled high with cakes and treats. Noticing her struggle, Sarah got up to assist Lisa in placing the tray down on the glass table in front of her and Chris took the sly opportunity to pinch the back of her arm. As she sat back down, she caught him nod once in acceptance of her suggestion.

“Is there any chocolate in this or is it all in your hair?” Chris joshed his sister who clearly had no energy left to scold him with.

“Just...shush, OK? She’s worked very hard and it all smells rather delicious, wouldn’t you say?” asked Lisa trying to rouse some support.

“Oh absolutely!!” replied Sarah, taking the bait and nodding profusely much to Chris’ amusement. “Can we start anywhere or is there a preferred order we have to try out?”

“Which we absolutely can do with this rocky road!” Chris said as he held up a sizeable slab of dark chocolate rocky road and pretended to analyse it, comically squinting his eyes. Regrettable, Shanna hadn’t realised she was supposed to chop the macadamia nuts into smaller pieces so eating a piece of it would likely risk a chipped tooth that evening.

“Chris!” shouted Lisa.

“What?!” he objected. “It’s constructive criticism.”

Shanna simply called him a jackass and tossed a handful of napkins at his face. Chris managed to deflect them before absent-mindedly handing one to Sarah.

Recently, Sarah had thought it odd how they had managed to avoid anyone catching on with that had been happening between them. She thought it so obvious. There were little exchanges here and there that seemed so noticeable such as making her a coffee without asking first, or texting her first to inform them he was coming over instead of Shanna. On one occasion the week previous, Chris had asked her about a work issue but Shanna hadn’t clocked anything. It’s possible it had all just been heightened in Sarah’s own consciousness. Most likely it appeared to be natural, friendly behaviour and there was in fact nothing to worry about. Still, she felt the need to remain vigilant.

Truthfully, they had been together maybe...three times? And one of those was just afternoon drinking after she finished work. He hadn’t pushed her into anything more and she was grateful. He had made it pretty obvious how he was feeling though not necessarily with words per se but with affectations here and there. He had taken to texting her late at night knowing she’d be curled up and getting ready to go to sleep, and then again in the morning to wish her a good day. Sometimes, she wondered if he just generally liked talking to her about nothing in particular. He once snuck a bag of Hershey’s Kisses into the apartment when Shanna wasn’t around and hid them under her bed so she could find them later on. Even thought she cautioned him for taking the risk, she had to admit it was nice. Really nice. He would make a good boyfriend, she thought. He had a big heart and a massive capacity for affection.

She had not stayed over and the benefits of shift changes with little notice meant she could avoid the deplorable concept of lying to her best friend about where she was. For the time being at least. Frankly, Sarah thought she would have given the game away by now such was her ability to resonate blame with physical ease. She figured there would be an accidental comment here or there or perhaps she would leave her phone open on text with Shanna stumbling across it. They had agreed to be as cautious as possible, which was the most obvious decision, but the seamless nature in which their relationship had changed over just the last couple of weeks had been scarily swift and, dare she say it, even easy at times. Chris once joked they must not have been great friends to begin with which didn’t sit well within her so he quickly changed the subject. So, in acknowledgement of her anxiety, he calmed down his seductive looks reaching her across the room, refrained from tucking har out of her face no matter how much he might want to do so, and stopped playfully pinching her on parts of her body when he thought no one was looking. They weren’t looking, why would they, but regardless, it helped make her feel less antsy in his presence and that was what he wanted.

She sat watching the family interact while eating cakes and cookies and the feared rocky road which, unexpectedly, was not as much of a disaster as they had been warned. Scott even asked to take some home for Zach which Shanna took as the biggest compliment of the evening so far, that and Chris managing to keep quiet for a whole ten minutes while enjoying a ginger-flavoured cake-pop. She had followed some recipes carefully, others not so much, but on the whole, it was seriously impressive.

“These are my favourite, I think. You should absolutely make more of these.” Sarah enthused, pointing to the white chocolate and lemon cookies, or what was left of them. “I didn’t think they’d work but they really do!”

“God I’m so glad you said that. They only take minutes to bake and I could make dozens of them for the sale.” Shanna grabbed her iPad and made yet another note. She had perked up in the last hour or so having been faced with some rather reassuring feedback and set about deciding a plan for her contribution towards the sale. Whatever the reason for this sudden burst of creativity, she wasn’t strictly letting on, but it was nice to see her excited about something work-related for a change.

*

There were definite benefits to hanging out at Chris’ apartment. For one, it was peaceful and secluded even when they chose to sit outside on his terrace and bask in the afternoon sunshine. There was no one else to look over the trestle fencing and you’d be forgiven for forgetting he lived in the centre of a busy town. He also owned the most incredible sound system money could buy, that was built into the very fabric of the whole property. No matter where you chose to hang out, it was always felt like there was an enjoyable gentle thrum of music coming every single angle, every single corner of the place, enveloping you and calming you down in equal measure. Oftentimes, the only two places Sarah spent any meaningful time was either in her bedroom or at the hospital so a change of scenery at the very least could only be a positive thing.

His breath had been ghosting over the skin on her neck for a little while and it was making her tingle. “Can I tell you something? But you might think it’s weird...”

“Mmmm?”

“i feel like I’m a teenager again.”

Sarah opened one eye and peered up at him as he leaned on his elbow beside her. “Yeh that is weird.”

He playfully jabbed her side causing her to flinch. “I just mean that it’s like we’re at school and trying to go undetected. Like, hiding out from our friends. It’s kinda fun, right?”

She thought about it for a second, smiling back up at him and his glorious face that was managing to display a look of joy in spite of his busier facial hair. Now wasn’t the time to confess her anxieties about their situation when she had promised herself and him that she would just enjoy the moment for what it was. “Yeh, I know. It’s cute.”

“i just don’t want you feeling like you can’t unwind here. When we are here, when we do get to be alone, I think we should make the most of it.” He implored her again, hoping to hear her agree but he settled for a smile and the back of her hand reaching up to graze the side of his face. “It’s not like we’re here all the time or anything.” He brought her hand round to his mouth and pressed a gentle kiss to her fingertips before lying back down beside her.

They had been lying on his sofa for nearly an hour now, in no particular rush to do anything, just enjoying the peace and quiet. It was warm and sunny outside, the first nice day they’d had in a while, and the windows were open to allow the room to stay pleasantly cool. He ran his hand over her lower tummy and played with the drawstring bow that was currently separating him from where he wanted to be. As much as he liked to make fun of her scrubs from time to time, and that was one thing that had not changed, he was starting to grow accustomed to them in a fond yet strangely sexual way. He wasn’t normally bothered by women in a uniform but there was a first time for everything. He nuzzled in against her neck and left a biting kiss on her earlobe.

“I wanna take you while you’re wearing these.” he murmured, impishly letting go of the elastic waistband so it snapped back onto her skin.

Sarah’s eyes pinged open. She couldn’t tell whether he was being serious or not. As he moved his body to rest over her, she felt his fingers deftly pull on the bow to loosen the waistband and laughed when she saw the mischievous glint in his eyes.

“I cannot believe you just said that,” she giggled, wiping at one of her eyes in embarrassment while he inched her pants down off her hips and made himself comfortable again between her legs. “Are you serious?”

“Well, unless we’re gonna do it in a hospital supply closet, yes.”

“You know that doesn’t happen in real life, right? You’ve watched too much ‘Nurse Jackie’.” She moved her weight onto her shoulders, lifting her ass up to help him remove her trousers completely.

“First, it was ER, and second, why would they say it happens if it didn’t happen? They have medical consultants, right? They have people who advise on these things. It is obviously based on fact.” He smirked at her while helping himself to a smooth caress back up her legs. She couldn’t trust that he wasn’t genuinely upset at the prospect that he might not eventually get to have sex in the hospital. He was hard to read when sex was involved and small ministrations he had made with her suggested she was nowhere near as experienced or confident as he was in that department. This must be like the pillow fight fantasy men have and how it’s just easier to allow them to assume it happens on a regular basis lest the truth invoke spontaneous combustion or something.

He finally rested over her body, propping himself up by his arms either side of her head. He moved strands of hair out of her face and kissed her once and then again. His playful tone clearly belied the thoughts running through his mind and she felt him stiffen between her legs, causing her arousal to grow.

“Look, just think about it, OK? he kissed her neck and then again just above her collarbone causing a shiver to run through her body. “Just think about me-” he kissed the swell of her breast through her t-shirt “-about what we could do-” he shifted up the hem leaving her midriff exposed to the cool air before he continued to kiss his way further down “-about what I could do to you-” he grazed his fingers over her panties causing her breath to hitch “-fuck it’s be so hot-” her eyes closed in anticipation as he left wet kisses further down her stomach, his tongue caressing her skin as he moved “-and it’d feel so good-” further still “-so good, honey-” his fingernails deliberately scratched down her sides to catch up causing another shiver to twist her insides “-and it’d be so worth it-” he pulled down the sides of her panties as he went “-and we’ll call it even, yes?”

He teasingly bit her causing her to cry out and her eyes to surge open. She soon met the devil in his own as he looked back up at her coquettishly through his eyelashes, his grin disappearing as he moved down to see her open to him. He was a bad man and, in that moment, she knew he had her. He kissed her slowly, deliberately, little butterfly kisses she could barely feel but knew were there from his warm breath and the delicious sounds his lips made. Just as her hands reached out for him, his tongue entered the game gently massaging her, spreading her lips a little more to glide deeper inside her. He looked up again to find her grabbing at the armrest above her, the familiar blush covering her skin. His hands reached under her thighs, steadying them both, silently proud of his work.

He fought hard to keep himself under control at first, her involuntary reactions proving irresistible as he continued to work her over. Her hands stayed grasping at the armrest, her eyes tightly shut now, as he switched between firmer nudges and gentler, longer strokes. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t instigated this sooner, she looked so enticing above him and it was all he could do not to ravish her there and then. Just as he moved his right hand from outside her thigh, he felt her hands cover his own. Smoothing over his hair, he felt a shiver envelope his skin as her fingernails scratched over his scalp forcing his eyes to close in pleasure and his mouth to falter ever so slightly.

“Come here...” she whispered.

Their eyes reconnected and he crawled back over her to join their lips in a passionate kiss. She helped him pull his sweater over the back of his head and he tossed it onto the floor beside them, his jeans quickly joining it before he awkwardly shifted his boxers down his legs eager to pounce back onto her. She giggled before meeting his kiss again. This was all he really wanted; her hands on him, one delicately toying with his hair, maybe pulling slightly when he hits her at the right spot.

He found her shyness vanishing little by little after their first time. Well, second time, technically. He was increasingly comforted by her kisses and the way she would nervously reach for him when they were together. Her own way of letting him know, without words, that she wanted to be there.

“You OK?” he whispered, nipping at her bottom lip causing a smile to flash across her face as she looked up at him. They hadn’t yet got to the point where they felt they could safely assume what the other was thinking so he felt the need to keep asking the question of her, once for reassurance and twice because he just really wanted to hear her whimper as he teasingly rubbed himself against her.

Her breathing grew shallower and her fingers grabbed at his back when she felt him thrust faster, harder, hitting her where she wanted it, over and over again. He never missed a beat. Her hands gripped at him harder than he’d felt before and he got excited at the thought of seeing the marks she would leave on him later on. As he moved his mouth back over hers, their breaths mixing together, she shuddered and after another second or two, finally came hard around him. It didn’t take him long to follow, watching her up close could do that to a man, and they remained in this spot, him lying on top of her, for a few more minutes.

Her back arched as she guided him to her. He felt her grab his shoulders as he pushed inside and she allowed herself finally for the first time that day to block out the rest of the world, leaving only him. He just wanted her to focus solely on him. Just for now.

She wraps her arms around him again as he rested his on either side of her head, allowing him to control their movement as he slowly, confidently, slides in and out of her. She feels warm and soft and...comforting all at once. He relished the tightness, tugging a little on her earlobe when he feels her pulse around him. It was all he had thought about thst day and there would be other times they could slow things down.

Her breathing grew shallower and her fingers grabbed at his back when she felt him thrust a little faster, harder, hitting her where she wanted it, over and over again. He never missed a beat. Her hands gripped at him harder than he’d felt before and he got excited at the thought of seeing the marks she would leave on him later on. As he moved his mouth back over hers, their breaths mixing together, she shuddered and after another second or two, finally came hard around him. It didn’t take him long to follow, watching her up close could do that to a man, and they remained in this spot, him lying on top of her, for a few more minutes.

“Oh fuck...” he panted over her neck, her hair sticking to his forehead when he moved back to kiss her. 

“Yeh...” she agreed, unable to muster much energy to add anything else. Her hand returned to caress the back of his head and she felt him relax into her touch until he got a little too heavy and she had to shift out from underneath him.

He took the opportunity to pull his boxers back up as she corrected her own underwear. They smiled at each other and laughed a little bit at the state they were in. He reached out to tuck some hair behind her ear before leaning in to kiss her again, retaining some of the passion from just moments ago but not wanting to push his luck.

“Where are you going?” he asked as she bent down to grab one shoe and then the other after spying it underneath his coffee table.

“Home.”

He straightened up on the sofa, eying her as she slipped on her canvas sneaker having not bothered to untie them from when she had kicked them off earlier. “Stay here for a bit. I could make us something and we can hang out. We’re allowed to do that, surely?”

“That might look a bit weird, no?”

“Why? You’ve stayed here loads of times before.”

“Only when the apartment flooded or when you’ve had a party. It’ll look strange.” She turned to look at him, a sorrowful glance telling him all he needed to know. “Sorry. It’s just I promised Shan we’d have a night in with a pizza. I think I owe her.”

“Owe her?’

“Yeh, just...some time, maybe? I’ve barely spoken to her lately and I think something is going on with a guy or possible with work.”

“She’s a big girl, Sarah, she can take care of herself.” He attempted a protest but knew he was fighting a losing battle as she reached for her hoodie off the armchair. “And you have a life, too. You’ve been working loads. You’ve got a stressful job, and...”

“...and among other things.” she pointedly suggested. “It just feels like we’re ships passing in the night at the moment. Has she said anything to you?’

“Why would she tell me about some loser she may or may not like?” He spoke in a clipper tone but regretted it as soon as the words slipped out of his mouth. He rolled back onto the couch, sighing in defeat and unable to think of a decent come-back. She leaned down to fix her shoes again and avoided his eye contact when she got up to leave. The sad puppy expression that he’d skilfully mastered over the years had failed on this occasion but he wouldn’t be discouraged from using it again.

“Soooo...I guess I’ll just see you tomorrow, then?” he called out as she began to leave.

She turned back to find him lying on his couch like Kate Winslet in ‘Titanic’, one leg dangling off the side and his stomach perfectly displaying his hard-fought-for abs. His skin looked unfairly smooth even from this distance, and she bristled at the thoughts of having been under him just minutes ago.

“Don’t forget me...” he pouted and she would have blessed him with a quick peck on the lips by way of an apology before he smiled at her. She playfully rolled her eyes at him, made a point of remembering him laid out this way, and walked out.

*

[misterbitches]

some thots. having a bad time so this is rougher than usual. oh well

....

i guess he really does know hiim best cos if that was my mans (man specifically cos if anyone else did that id take it more srsly) i would be like oh my god ur singing me a love song? i would love it but i woudl SCREAM in embarrassment. UNLESS it was a really deep love song that's about us dying together.

like i want to eat ur skin type of thing (drain u nirvana) lmaoa but i really like this song it reminds me of that velvet underground song (the only one i know cos of juno lmao) and nico or whatever 'i'm sticking with you)

my adhd would be out of fucking control i had to spend my time listening to this looking around i kept getting distracted by a tissue and thinking "wow this song is nice but i wish it would end bc i am getting distracted" and lo and behold i paused it and i have to pee and i know it's gonna take forever to undo this

ok about 12m later i turned it back on and they kissed and then he bit the corn then that night li chen also lost his virgin teas after watching gay porn and being like "hm interesting" and he'll be like "i see, ur dick is not medium sized"

i'm honestly gagging i cannot at this 12 year old marrying his mom

beautiful theyre beautiful

ayea you fucking psycho we do too because he was 17 and we had to witness it (or well, other people did cos i didnt watch the show even tho wayne song is [BEEEEEEEEEEEEEP BEEEEEP BEEEEP] and i want him to [BEEEEEEEP] and ppl even liked it which is fine like i get it in theory but they put this in my eyeballs so i'm gonna make fun of it bc it's fuckin DUMB lmao like i can't I CANNOT and he said "u were so persistent" BITCH UR 30??!?!???!?!?!?)capi hve it on mute and i tried to get a screencap of li chen and mu ren like together and not just his face but i cant find the timestamp and seeing their faces as they get married is literalyl traumattizing i'm like scremaing at my screen going "HE'S 5 HE'S 5 HE'S 5" and every time theyre like "we acn live forever together" like no bitch ur bones rae creaking

also is the officiator white? if anyone knows why or if that's common i'd love to know more. EDIT: HE ISN'T I JUST THOUGHT HE LOOKED LIKE MOBY FROM THAT ANGLE

anyway here

i'm almost done with this fucking bullshit and i am in a really ould mood and usu they make it a bit better but imo it's kind of....annoying i guess balancing all these story elements and introducin gother couples (even in the periphery) since the story in itself can't focus. i feel like all in all the time spent with these two is a lot more limited and we get the feel for the rship because of their chemistry as actors, irl chemistry as friends and colleagues, and hopefully being happy and working on a good set. so it isn't the strength of the writing or production.

for some reason they get like less dynamic ways of being together which i think is part of their charm, they do things their own way, but the writers really should have substantiated this more. it's really just the way everyone in the show has managed to deliver these AWFUL story lines and production decisions (like seriously who the fuck was on costume? lighting?)

like maybe hot take but all the moments that are cringe and insane in the show are not pleasant, per se, because they aren't thought out clearly. so they're not a joy to watch in the normal sense but the actors are good enough to pull it off. i didn't cringe at the talks they had because it felt like actors like acting these lines out instead of us being embarrassed for it and you CAN TELL theyre embarrassed.

this is a huge kudos to the casting director and the actors and whatever crew that actually did a good job. i don't particularly like watching bo xiang and his grandfather husband not because of the content but because i feel like, to me, they're so awkward even though they have chemistry. i don't have that issue with xing si and his rapist brother boyfriend because watching them is actually really pleasant, it's intimate. this isn't to do with the story though because when it hits you how devoid this other person is and how stupid the situation is it changes (for me, for me, for me, this is all my opinion think whateverrrr u want im not telling u 2 ok!)

so truly kudos to this cast. idk if i'm misremembering here but imo the most cast appropriate series in this was crossing the line and close to you. one is a decent atmosphere and execution (yes even with that brother story line, notice the major key differences though because that's a sincere false equivalence. they try to execute power imbalances soooo badly and then fail every time but here's one meant to shock too and it was just likelmao ok girl?)

it may not make sense to say either in a writing way or for the character to do it but i believe that whoever the characters these people are supposed to be especially those super not well written on the page still get that message aacross (yong jie's actor is a good ex. not sure if i should ccongratulate him for having the worst job on earth and the worst character and his character is flat but. ostensibly they should let their actions speak for themselevs but what they do is they back themselves into a ccorner with unsuretyabout their characters or a dilemma that pops up they just want to excuse it. well guess hwat u couldnt do enough legwork. but to some extent the disposable side couple works here on a um "our eyes see them and get it" way

also to me it seems like they chose this story just to have this specific wedding. like it's a timely topic and i'm pretty sure like another provision? (correction? idk) was made WRT taiwanese same-sex marriage so it's topical but it isn't like a "papa and daddy" situation where they're interacting in it and there (for ex: the pride parade) and there being like real life terms and consequences. here it seems like they were like ah yes wedding ah yes dumb couple from modc bc we kiled off the other one sooooo (then outsource them to life love on the line u__u) then hamfisting in some fucking message which is funny bc

- despite the hints peppered in and the clear attraction they both acknowledge ur like ~not gay just him~ even tho...i mean i just. again they dont read over what they write i don't think considering. but wahtever.

- the only gay dude (verbally said) is with his rapist brother with an awful power dynamic oh or IS a rapist (gao) (or his brother but i think it was just a "im a psycho so it's him" thing unless they said it. in which case idc cos i wasnt paying attn but that's also not great) or i guess the wedding but like....that's also a ridiculously inappropriate and dumb relationship taht it's built on. i mean i don't really see much respect her so i dont particularly want to hear abt gay weddings being important when they didn't even utilize it in the story beforehand and have we ever. this is a huge indication to me that it was a reverse engineered chosen story beforehand (if it was one) or thought of

soooooo

so reversal of that....it didnt give us enough time to breathe with these two at all but for both of the actors they can capitalize what's on the page and the writers didn't. like their dynamic is very i give/you give like taking car eof each other etc that's why

again, no artist worth their salt will ever say their work meant nothing. that's a cover up. i'm sick of lazy production and then getting away with it claiming being subversive or attacking an issue by not doing anything. we show crazy shit all the time but it has a POINT and ur point is "i like the gays" then girl.....i mean it's not great

but the acting really carried it. i have a feeling if this series continues it might continue to use more experienced actors cos maybe the budget goes up but they also have less inhibitions now when it comes to acting. i like the way li chen expresss himself and teng teng too. i like anson a lot and there's some angles that did not do any favors and i think eh has to get more control of his body movements (bc he's SO LARGE and thin) but he wasn't bad at all and there were real human tears. of course i, personally, favor charles tu. he has more control over his body because he has...less to work with and he's a bit bigger and he was really great in this role. he's a himbo a bit of a meathead but you like him. you like them. there's some things i think they had them say and do that they wouldn't let happen if they stuck to the characters and the story (mainly liking that dumb idiot rapist)

what i notice is that the reprehensible actions people criticize others for in the show and in real human life lalways gets turned around. teng teng being surprised that this boy's grandfather boyfriend met him when he was a junior in high school and he's 12 years older and him apologizing for being shocked and then whatshisface going "ur better at it than most people" and then the convo about gao with whatshisface and then rapist brother comes to pick him up. they are admonishing gao but thinking that rapist brother is noble for doin gwhat he did (and oh rapist brother shows up) like the hypocrisy and the decisions are immense. so now it's like "guys see he's a great guy" like girl STICK TO SOMETHING but whatever so i live in this universe where muren and li chen do everything right and have lots of different interesting fun seex with all their friends. i would write this but i cannot i am dying

[throwingideasatthewall]

Clone Wars          Escape from Kadavo

Well this is certainly a      scene change and one that doesn’t really make sense,

   I mean I thought it was a Camp of Holding for slaves

     Where they got transported to different places on the island to do     slave labor, per         hap        -s

   Now there’s apparently a lava pit under it,

            How?

  That

    -doesn’t make any sense

    Also wtf,

   Coal, metal

Since when was   refinery really this place’s MO      (Like this is really starting to feel like they got the        Mandalorian           And           This        Set         -ting        s       Switch           ed,)

      Not to say they can’t be a     coal/mining industry,  

      Just, that the setting should    reflect it,

     From we saw there was nothing to indicate this was anything but        an ar       chai          c      Soc-either

     With no flues        Or fu    -mes

     To indicate   that they were burn        Ing combustibles,

   Honestly some kind of stalactites   mine,

     Or someplace where they       dig for      “valuables,”            -like      prized st-          one for         Jew           elery-          Would          make         more        sense-       -        Anyway, I’m getting.      way too        focus        -ed          on          the        se-          tt         -        Ing-      - Again Rex is    just straight up chilling,     This is      n’t       his first rodeo with abusers,

  Ok, seriously what was up with the    Wil       -h         el          m,?

     (Like I don’t honestly see anything          steep enough to fall off)

   You could say      it was a whip but we haven’t seen any        Of       That,      Ye      t-

  I don’t get the    screaming-

  Also that   dude just attacked him out of nowhere,

  Like   could we have gone    establishment of that?

   Like,

  What was even his ber-zerk        butt-        on       there?

   Dude was doing his job

  Like if it was a faster thing you kind of have to establish that before hand      -        Also then the environment, the ma      jor      ity,       Would be working at a   breakneck speed,      With a sense of anxiety,       In the       air,

    Then,     the whip,

  He-     was?

  (Like that was just        plain - pointless

     Not even an emotional reaction

     Like that told us absolutely nothing about the setting      and character

    The mate didn’t even have a reaction

    It’s one random guy that just decided to hit      someone else-

   Like that’s not even calculated never mind       systematic,

    Also I like how Rex like yeah      I wouldn’t know anything about that,        feck’in             Jedi             -

      Also       “Effect?”

      Not really more like 

     “ Dave’s having a real rough day and I really don’t want to talk to              (In that               state)

          Like they didn’t wince.

         There was no antici             pation-

          No                  anxiety,

            Like no signs of this is had a           permanent          psychologically            damaging              affect

(Note all toxic behavior is           harmful,               The difference here is             Between                The intensity of the        in-dentation,

            It can get pretty       bad

            And enabling        tox can have serious effects                 (Pretty                   bad)

              (Requiring a lot more time   to undo)

               From;            Dave is really an    asshole,

                 To                           I am really an    asshole,

                  To                    The world is really an   asshole (And Dave is the       savior-)

   (Apologies to anyone who’s chosen name is          Dave or similar vernacular,               It’s not out of any Mala-    cian-              Just the first identi          fication I could think of,

          And tox-    ic logic is really not something you wanna enable,

         Again what the Frick?

(This is really not an   or-ganic way to      introduce        your       rules

Like, “oh yeah    speech is for-bidden,       Have a nice        day,”

 Like      you   think   dude-

Like you were pretty damn path     -etic     abu       ser-        (s)         -    (Sla       vers)       Wow,

   There was no emotions or anything     -be      cause the set up was so poor,

  W-        h      -a         t

    Again the emotion    is non existence,

  Also what the fuck     happened to Rex over there?     -      

When did he      go down?

 (Like don’t    get me wrong   I saw a flash in the corner?)

  But why       him?

   [also did the scenery just completely changed because he was on the far end of Ken-        Obi with something in between

      Some thing they were       shoveling the stuff on?

     That’s just       gone in this shot]

  [Also,           From a narra-         tive,     standpoint wouldn’t it have made more sense and been a more engaging concept,          If the guy had threat          -ene             d-            The clone          in Obi- wan’s              stead,             Seeing as of the     republic’s version of slavery,

      Rex pos          s-             ib          ly

     Reflec-         ting on the          (Other           Species?)

And    contrasted with them,

   On how much    Obi-Wan views him as a possession,

   (Or his reaction to the people under him getting hot          ,and why)

   Allo-      wing for more heart, 

     “I’m            sorry,”

        “No              Wors              e-               Than               The            Kamino               -ins,”

       Rex’s         Sub             Cat;

        Seeing the people he was trained (and order-ed) to protect              Harm                 -ed                   -                    Much like the people (under him) were harmed during the Kamooin.   s-

  Groom          -ing,                  ?]

      Any      -way,  

    Again,     and what was the emotion?       -         M-aster

  Rex must be like,         Kar-           ma

     If he’s   not,

    [Never mind      he isn’t asleep      just one frame     made it look weird?]

   Ai-       gh -t

  Oh yeah seriously check up on that one guy instead of you know the person under the command,

    Also;       

 What The fuck?

    IS THAT GOOGLY EYES?

    What the feck,

     What is with that       expression-

     What is with that              facial-

   (Seriously someone tell me what      emotions this is supposed to por-     tray!

    What?

    Also yeah 

  they completely waltz.       -ed     past the ab-        us         -er.        Be-         Ing        -         Con-          fron         ted-              by         the       Con-        Seq-        Uen        Ce        (s)          Of       their      actions,

  It’s not pointed out that Obi-Wan totally caused this by (not)-    listen-ing,        To dude’s        initiative      to stay out of it

(Or, what he did to Cody        Rex,       and basically         all the clones,)

(And what could’ve been a good moral about negative effects of “Pos-       itive  over-       invo        lv           e-       Ment-            )

   so I am slightly big mad

         Not com-   -pletely

          But I’m      get-ting          th-ere

   Drinking         my        slightly       bitter       ju-ice-

   Gett    -ing         pr-etty          salty

     Which is odd since I normally don’t criticize      aesthetic differences

              Like                    This-       -

   The problem is it isn’t the aesthetic       that I have a problem with,        (You want to have a Obi-Wan show more compassion to the slave of similar generation then to Rex?

    (That’s per-fect-ly fine and could even show how he values his job and  Mission over someone he is actually wound-        ed-)

     However that’s not it-

        (It doesn’t             even do that)

   My problem with it is that it shows no        emotion

   No emphasis

   No moral

   It’s - empty               -          Watching this scene,     there is absolutely nothing I get out of it,

       Also wow that was a        quick turnaround,

Like seriously     it generally takes longer      for that kind of behavior to be indented,

  This is literally the only Jedi       he’s seen be there

       One time

         This is barely scraping        logic,          And            even             then,                not              really            requiring-              pre-knowledge                  of the emotions               and general plot               (before                       hand)

   I know that I should feel bad for the        slave because         slav-ery is a bad thing           And any real person would be          pretty upset it/             Suffer for the toxic environment,

         Note; it’s not from the               medium

         I didn’t gain that                 knowledge             from the medium

(In which the chara-       cters      actions and emotions,         Make me        conclude,       “oh wow,         slavery is a real         bad thing!”

   No the characters are wooden puppets          with no emotion,

          Going from;                Point a to point B

      Nothing to connect them              (No preamble)

         No emotions

         No motive(s)

       ‘why is Obi-Wan doing what he’s doing?’

         ‘I don’t know’

                    (And I honestly don’t think the wr-     iters did either)

       And no damn interest

        Barely scraping        logic..

   ‘Why is Obi-wan      doing what he’s doing,’

     ‘Because he has the rescue the slaves,’

    ‘ why does he have to rescue the slaves,?’

      ‘ because you have to rescue slaves,’

        It’s literally circular

   Rely- ing completely on the cookie   cu-    tter,

    Resulting in it being as flat as a cookie when      rolled over by a rolling pin,

         Where                It             should;                Be;

    “ why does Obi-Wan want to rescue the slaves?”

        “Because of his dedication to his moral compass/ because of his dedication to his generation/ non-      clone- ena         blers,/      (Whatever        you want           to put            there)

           (Hey that was almost emotion from   ,Rex)

         (We’re      2:29      Min      Ut        es        In,        And I’m already        salty about the episode refusal to be         fun,

     -

   That’s nice        exposition      *Palpatine*.       Sidious,

     Tra-        dition           (S);

    Mill-

  That’s literally all I      -heard-

      -(I assume they’re saying             “millions,”)

         Which would actually be neat if we got to see some you know human soldiers on the Darkside to counterbalance the whole do you know clone troopers, contrasting the dark side’ s more ethical but none the less toxic practices,

    To the light side’s-          Gen Break-

      De-       fiance?

   (I think you mean that other Zygerian’s death because we have literally not seen the queen act even remotely rebellious,

   Yeah she      con-     templates possibly free-        ing them,

   But we haven’t seen her openly communicate with either of these 2 to inform them

   And she still wants to keep     Anakin,

  So she at least     has one Jedi,

   With the others possibly be blamed on a       -prison break-

      And literally nothing that we’ve seen       com-municating the concept of open - rebel-      lion

   Or any of the connection between      her    and the separatist,

   Again seriously        how am I     supposed to feel about that             (Also the one person that gives even the slightest bit of emotion and it’s the villain,)

    Like I’m surprise’d       Dooku’s surprised by that

   (Er-)

    O-k

   Whe-lp 

   (Also, now there         are flues).           (Don’t recall        seeing them                last time,)

        Or just sticks with gold          on them

 (I am very        con-        fused,)

This seems pretty different

And totally safe

  (Also wasn’t the castle       blue?)

  But I’m not against it because it could work with the       symbolism of wild,       Or just.          Wor      -k                 (I know I’m being way too hop-   - eful but I try,

      Re-        hash-

     Easy-

   So why is there no other emotion 

   And why do you look like a         caveman,

    (Eyebrows    constantly furr-        Ow-        ed)

    Also what was with the      pro-nunciation and        emotion?

    Bare,

   Also literally no     one else is paying attention to that guy?        ?

‘ he also doesn’t   cause me to have any emotions’

  Like seriously I know that it’s a cat person but you still have to show some sentient emotion here

   If there’s no emotion,        there’s no risk,

   (Part of   sent- ience)

   Att-        end,

   Again that’s not the cha-    llenge I think they were trying to make it out to be;              (Un-accountabili-          ty)    Aka         What it would work best as;

          Remix;

    “ I’ll would never turn away from a challenge,” Anakin said snarkily,

      The queen se-           duct              iv             el-              y

          Taking his light saber,                -                that works better;

           -                   Ser-iously                       -                       Um-                       No,  

(Last time someone fall from a height that      high, they died,)

   (You have to play by        your       own      rules,             )

    Wha-

    Also again wh        -at-

   Sky -walker

  When          ?-

   -

   Would be nice if you ever         feckin showed it,

       (Seriously the concept of Obi-Wan having to come to terms at least temporary that his Over-involvement has      hurt people is an interesting concept,”

     Also bullshit      that you know that

      (Pretty)

   (You’re all enabled and you haven’t spent any time around     Obi-Wan)

   (That’s a stupid plan            and the animation really doesn’t help,)

       Zy-ger

       Perm     -     R-       i-,

Oh yeah so no reserves,     about using the term,             “master”      After this     schism            ?            -         Y-eah           -         How?           -           W-at

 [The emotions are off the roof and I have no idea 

    with the scale of escalation

   W-at]

   Lesh          -       Li- fe

    You did-            n’t?             -              Emo            tion-

        ?

      Wh-at?

      Who        called-        the       guards?

   Seriously if this is such a constantly abusive (tox) relationship than how do they not know,

     (Unless the previous guards got killed and these          are the         newbies,)

    Because you don’t act like it all don’t have any of the characteristics generally associated with constantly rein-forc       -ed toxicity,         Show-       ed no emotion including     (anxiety and anticipation)         In that previous           fight,

 As well as no negative    con-    seq-    uen      ce          s for your behavior             -               Even now your voice is just     “ oh I’m     dyi-ng-            -,’.                 .        

Meep,

 [Something        happened 

   not a Tumblr refresh,

       Gist;

  There’s absolutely no emotion in the scene and the fact that she just dies after that being the threat is just kind of cheap,

  [and the fact that she had absolutely no expression            (Or emotion)     during that entire fight                  Not showing any of the general signs             -               Just no)

    And that expression is a weird way way to end

   The scene.       not the movie that still going,          (Un-fortunate-         ly)

   Uh, why             Off to you obviously evil factory,       land,”

    Kick,

   Hey     isn’t it that minor antagonist    that hasn’t showed up since the last episode?       . . .       Why?         . . .       And he included       the clone        why?

    (Oh yeah I want the      Jedi Knight         Obi-Wan          Kenobi,          And especially the to my knowledge           (default)             clone.

       -  

       And Rex who is honestly a lot more intimidating,

  K-i

  [Again this is supposed really be about.     Ken-obi but I’m really focusing on     Rex,]

    Wh-        at-        -

   How?!

    They were on a        bug?

    I-

   Ok-

  Sorry my memory     gave out for a moment at the whole     Anakin durp face thing         -       -

 W-h

  W-

Wood

   Again, how is he supposed to do that?

    -       Ter-         -        I-l

   Sl-av          es

   So Ahsoka goes to rescue the slaves while An-a      kin,    stays here and carves a hole,

   En-ough

   No emotion!

   Oh,     I thought he meant         Ah         -soka         -          Oh so yeah let’s bring a warship into what seems to have been         intended as a stealth mission,

      Screw                    Fitt              Ing                Re                Action-

And-

   W-

      .

How   did that change the fact that they have the button that can kill all the    slaves,

    (It didn’t)

Obi-won just apparently stopped giving a       fr-ick         -

  Ray-

   Well then they were impossible to   take out,

 F-a         -           S-l

   But only the         Tyger-ian        (Apologies for any misspelling          I mean Ahsoka’s            kind,)

      “He           -at,”

        “Cut,”

         Ge-n-

         Rex did more than Obi-wan,

          Also yeah     completely forgot about that,

        Also he said               kill,

         [Not further         im-prison,”         ]

       Rex had some      rage-

      Also you’d think that be Obi-Wan       considering how much he’s gotten       ,screwed with         This entire          ,time              -           Wh,at 

      Wh            -y              -

          -

Wh        -y          -     H-ere         -               How is Rex still fighting      guys?         -       Also thanks a lot Obi-Wan      you useless      piece of shit,

   [Again, would         n’t it make           sense?            .)

      W-ell

      -           You just came into a door        just hop them - over-                                -                             Lan      d-

                      Wait,                            How did you just get in, there                     though,

                     .                        Co-                    vert                          -                            ?

O-Kay,     new character,

 W-h

 -

(Also oh no they gave      plo another fleet  

      Great      )

     Ser-iously,   what     where are these guys coming from?        ,     You’ve literally been allowed this dude to heck around the entire time while Rex did all the hard work

La-me,

 Also seriously where was all that                    -  ,coming from-                     -                Wh    at-

Where   was the   emotion?       -      Hey that had no meaning, symbolism      or emotion behind it -       whatsoever,

    I

    ?

       A-i

         -            W-h              -             -           -            Whelp, was completely boring

    Covenants of a good,                  fun story;  

       - Set;  Excessive in instances that don’t directly affect the story’s           up,    cohesivity

       -Tone; Is appropriate

       -Emotions; And appropriate, and consistent and manage to keep a consistent tone,

             (Un-nessary,                        Typically switch-ed for a        more logical tone,                        In works of                      non-fiction,

                  Though may be in both,                        So long as note                        is given,)

        This            film            (Movie      -      Gets absolutely none of it right except the basics for a         good story

      It’s        co -         hesive-          But damn           boring         and empty,

Story         -      Re-write.          -            (I needed something fun after watching that       boring documentary,)

     So let’s       get into it,            -                   (May          feature            episode             -overlap)

   Obi-Wan emerges from the carrier,              With R           -ex,

    (Obi-Wan possibly sub- con-ciously           mov              -ing                  In              Fron                 -t                        Of                    Rex-)

         [Or              Cody]

             The                  minor              antagonist                welcome(s)                 them;                   Obi-wan trading some banter with him                      -                     It                being part of a plan to get captured,

              Unfortunately somethings went ar-ray and instead of              Cody being the back up plan; he got taken with him

               The minor antagonist                                   -               quickly cuts the chatter                                 -                                     By having the guard                               (S-                         bring Cody forward, introducing him as                                                           Obi-Wan’s                                                               Slave

           Giving a veiled threat of                “ would be a shame if something happened to such a                    ,pretty specimen,”

                  Obi-Wan getting   def-ensive,

                      The atag,      Com   menting,       “ Pretty protective,           Of your toy,            Aren’t              You,”

      Before         having           them thrown            somewhere,

         Next time,        we see them they’re getting e-           scor-            ted-             for gem            Min-            Ing,

         (Possibly some black humor from the vil               -ains-                about how people                 will pay,                     “An arm                  or leg

*Pos-sibly        yours,

                For                      the                      stuff,’           

            On the way there one of the guards notices Rex    (Cody)’s                                                                                     ey-ing the place.                                                                                          warning him                                                                                          That,                                                                                           ‘He’s                                                                                        not                                                                                 the only                                                                                     one                                                                                    under                                                                                 ob                                                                            -servation)

                                                                             Possibly                                                                               causing                                                                              a wincing                                                                            or anxious                                                                           reaction                                                                             from                                                                             them                                                                                  .   (I would generally  encourage flashbacks to be        able to - show the emotion          em-          ot            ion,)

      (Under-stand               what is going inside their            head,)

         But for now            I’ll stick           with           the example            given by the show         which is no flashbacks,     The      guard        making        it clear what will happen

Shock-     -Ing-

  The clone       (Eith          er)           Ha-ving       a bad reaction         to this,

     Knee       jerkingly      reaching            out,

     The guard       grabbing him         and         holding him    back -            -           Forced into a      distressing circumstance of         fa            il           -in            g-         The           Miss-         -ion             -

                                                                                             Those two are                                                                                     pretty much out of the action                                                                                for the rest of the episode being                                                                   stuck

                                                  Obi-Wan can’t do anything without hurting Cody                                                       Cody can’t do anything without hurting                                                                         the slaves                                                                               -                                                                              Most of their part is                                                                               contrasting                                                                            the condition,

Most of the     action is with      Ahsoka,        Who talks down that  dweeb         (Maybe someone near-er          to her age)                     And they go break      Obi-Wan out so he can back up, Anakin

    In the Dooku fight,

               The most consistent and                       clear char-                        -acter                          Being                              Q                             -ueen,                              Being a     slaver-

   If         it’s         Ana-       Kin,

          Anakin having to begrudgingly put up with this        slaver’s nonsense

         Be-grudgingly

      - Her talking about how life is slavery     and him just not...

          Then                  Dooku                 Shows                      Up,

   (The whole transition between the mine scene and the Anakin- slaver scene,        Being a cut from the sparks in a mine           To the jewel on her finger              With extra focus       being put on the jewels,

        Possibly all done with all of them              Zy-              gar-ian                (Or of all        the planets that         she’s taking people from-  

      Zygarian            Heir               loom)

          A black stone          (in the middle of her chest)               By a pendant                 (Generally                   implied to be by                 Count Dooku)

    Toxic        court-ing           implied,

              Count Dooku                   announces                a surprise visit,

               The Queen is pleased                    but nervous                       (Hands                         behind -back)

                  “I-”

              Putting        a wine glass down behind it,

                     Dooku is immediately aggressive

        The queen            offering                Anakin as a consolation prize

       As the youngest and newest to the-ir possible              rank,

        Dook-u snark                  Ing,

          Dooku threaten                -ing  to kill

          The queen having issue with that whole main characterization being the collector of rare things

          (Possibly a reflect-                Ion  about the no speaking rule)

             More likely Dooku dismissing her con-           cerns just saying that he can always get her a new one,

            “The Queen possibly wincing at a raised hand                  - if we want to go for indications of                  physical tox-’

          Poss-ibly a conversation about why she put up with           him

        “He treats me well”

        Focus on the necklace and pendent to             - contrast with the choking necklace-

          Possibly a poison               Sub-line

                -                     If you want                    to go there,                       -                    But focusing on Ahsoka,              they broke those guys out,

                 Ahsoka finding a heartbroken                         Jedi,                       Explaining that their res       -pect     ive  clone friend,        Has given up on them

   Ahsoka finding that person,

   Who manages to explain that he can’t        move either-

    To be cut off by the guards      who has really had enough of         every-      thing-

   Decided - screw it if pain isn’t going to make you stop and then might as well put them in a life or death situation,

    Add-ing time on the clock         (Or at least a new var-         iable-)

   Ahsoka possibly     does a whole speech thing          (Since seriously         we’ve seen none of her involvement or even care about         her own         spe-cies)          Via dem            on-          Strat           Ion-

      (Very likely leading to a            riot situation,)

     As they didn’t plan on the           Tagroatians (?)             Rebell              ing due to                crush                  -ed                 spirits,

     That happens                  -           Those two re-         unite and go to fi-ght                Dooku

        (I never.       really cared for the        Zy-            ger-             Ian           queen,)

         If she lives in then,    she’s grateful for them driving off Dooku,          Allows them to get off with the slaves,

      (Necklace might have information            might not,)

   *Honestly I felt it made more sense for        Anakin to be the one in the mine;             The Zy-          garian queen, and Obi         -Wan hav-          ing boomer ban             -ter,              With Obi-Wan a lot more           aware of that stuff,               (Show-ing               worldliness       by identifying the stones)             While Anakin compares       the circumstance to the one that he used to live in,              And the one he enabled Rex living in,           While Ahsoka,    could team up with a          Zy-ger-Ian round              her age,               Possibly some conversations about           enabling-           May-be Ahsoka talking about getting a clone         command of her own-            (If we want the clone commanders to be a constantly          featured theme                here)               Boomer                 Bait,               Busting Anakin out of the            mine,                Obi-Wan getting hidden behind a             cur-tain,                     And going to heck over Dooku,                   (Slaves recovered-)

           Both the Zy-                Gar-                  Ian-                    (And a flirtatious                promise to return                      By                       Obi-wan, )                       [contrast                        Mandalorian]                    Gets                         Free-                        Dom-                        -                         End-                         -

[itsclydebitches]

RWBY Recap: “As Above, So Below”

Welcome back, everyone. So. Last Saturday I was actually feeling pretty good about RWBY. Not as a whole, but for that particular episode because, as I explained to a lovely anon, not much happened. Sure, there were some semi-important bits in the form of meeting Willow and Weiss discovering the recording, but compared to everything else we’ve gotten this volume it was all around a tame fifteen minutes. Which meant there wasn’t much space for RWBY to mess things up. There simply weren’t any stakes last episode. You don’t like how the group gets past Whitley or the exact words Ironwood says to Jacques? It’s ultimately whatever in the grand scheme of things. Last episode was mostly details.

“As Above, So Below” is not that kind of episode. So much happens and I’m once again left metaphorically banging my head against the wall, not regarding the writing choices themselves per se, but rather at how they’re used and portrayed. There is so much that I want to enjoy about this episode but Rooster Teeth continually ignores aspects of a situation in order to highlight one very narrow, very biased viewpoint. The scenes throughout demand that we conveniently forget or outright ignore certain things in order to immerse ourselves in whatever emotion the writing has decided we should be feeling right now ... and I simply can’t do that. RWBY is a show based on the claim that it’s a bright sunny day, so pay no mind to the rain clouds hovering above your head. It’s the animated equivalent of a Jedi mind trick. These are not the interpretations you’re looking for.

Secrets are finally revealed, folks, and oh boy. It’s a hot mess.

But let’s start at the beginning.

Undermining my assumption last recap that Watts had dismantled something that was regulating just a portion of Mantle’s temperature---something specific to maintaining rain over snow---we learn that all heating has been lost across the city. Which, if you know anything about temperature and the fragile human body, is really fucking bad. Here RWBY actually did a good job of introducing Weiss’ comment early in the volume about how people can freeze to death within an hour or so. We were still left with a few detail-oriented questions like how useful aura is in combating that, why Ruby was still so cold with her, why no one was showing symptoms back during the walk to the farm... but at least the setup is clear here. Civilians don’t have aura so that’s that. They’re dead if they don’t find some way to keep warm (riot fires help...) or aren’t evacuated somewhere else. It’s a big deal, though how exactly this fits into the rest of Watts’ plan and the other bits of chaos he’s accomplished is still unclear. More on that in a bit.

We see Pietro and Maria, but they don’t actually do anything this episode. They just stand around looking scared as people get violent and the city is covered in ominous red lights. At least the show remembers that they exist, but we don’t get to see the brilliant scientist specializing in creating weaponry and the former Grimm Reaper doing something to help. So... B grade on that one?

There’s no time skip this episode so with Mantle unraveling we segue right back to the dinner at the Schnee’s. Ironwood is still getting called out for having too much power. He pushes back that there are checks and balances in place to keep everyone, including him, from abusing that power. This is countered with a broad and not very persuasive claim that they simply haven’t worked. Ironwood comes back with a line about intentions and the nameless (?) council guy goes, “What people intend and what people do are not always the same thing!” Well no shit. If that were the case everyone’s lives would be staggeringly easier. You intend to find the madman who dismantled your army at Beacon? Boom, done. Intend to find the murderer responsible for attacking Robyn’s supporters? Congratulations, you did it. RWBY now has a habit of throwing out lines to remind us that the evil men in power---notably Ozpin and Ironwood---might intend to do good, but look! They haven’t managed it! Which... yes? Sometimes intentions fail, but that leaves the unanswered question of what these characters (and the writing) want them to do instead. No one has the luxury of changing their situation and everyone continues to ignore the fact that there are only bad options all around. I’d rather have someone with good intentions at the helm than, you know, Jacques. It also speaks volumes that as much as the council and RWBYJNR has been criticizing Ironwood lately, everyone still expects him to make the hard call himself. They don’t want that responsibility; they want a scapegoat if and when things go wrong. Just like the group was happy to scream at Ozpin and then get pissed that he left, leaving them to make the hard decisions themselves for once, everyone is screaming at Ironwood and then two minutes later turn about with, “So what should we do, General? What’s your plan? How are you going to fix this?” Though I don’t think any of it is intentional, RWBY has a lot to say about how only good and lucky leaders get to come out of their role unscathed. No matter what you do someone hates you for it and even choosing to abstain isn’t an option, as we saw clearly with Ozpin.

At this point the meeting is briefly interrupted by a waiter who tells Jacques about the heating issue. He responds with a, “My authorization?” before trying to cover things up, awkwardly agreeing with the conversation he just missed. Robyn announces that she’s not done with Ironwood yet though and accuses him of more failures, ending with, “yet you won’t let your own council help you?” which... honestly? Just hammers home how not useful this “Ironwood should trust everyone!” mindset is. Because is Robyn really that dense? The council is Jacques and two of his lackeys. You know, the guy who is about to be arrested for treason and as an accomplice to murder. Even though that hasn’t been revealed yet, Robyn is very well aware of what a corrupt, dangerous individual he is. Remember that she herself is not the council. She was given a “seat at the table” because Jacques wanted to use her against Ironwood. Robyn is sitting here symbolically pointing to Jacques and the two members he has wrapped around his finger going, “Why aren’t you trusting them?” like that’s in any way a sound suggestion. Sometimes the answer to, “Why are you doing Bad Things like keeping secrets?” is “Because people can be unimaginably stupid.” This is an example of that. Robyn wants to know everything and right now she’s willing to risk that information falling into an enemy’s hands to get it.

(Also, that picture in the background? Says a lot that Jacques has a picture of him, his obedient son, and his terrified wife in the room where he conducts business. No Weiss or Winter in sight.) 

Ironwood, of course, tells a straight out lie with an excellent poker face. “I’m not hiding anything.” Which inspires Robyn to use her semblance. Oh no! An insanely convenient ability that would undo every conflict we’ve set up for this season! However will we avoid this? Timing, obviously. Weiss, also conveniently, barges in right when Robyn has put Ironwood on the spot. I said it as soon as Robyn’s semblance was introduced: if you give someone that level of power---something that can too easily solve all the problems you’ve set up---then you have to keep coming up with semi-contrived ways of keeping them from using it.

Also, does she need skin-on-skin contact for her semblance to work? I wonder if that’s why she’s got that one random finger missing on her glove.

Wiess plays the recording of Watts and Jacques, giving us the rest of their conversation. We don’t learn anything new. Watts promised Jacques a seat on the council and he in turn (supposedly) would get the satisfaction of ruining Ironwood’s life. Jacques handed over his login information, including what he gained post-election, and now Watts has access to everything he built and then some. To say that’s bad is an understatement. You might be distracted from your worry though by hearing that cake line again as well as the men’s villainous laughs. RWBY really went full cartoon for that conversation.

A detail I really love though? Ironwood’s rhythmic footsteps as he walks around the table. Super ominous and intimidating. Meanwhile, a hilarious detail is how awkward Jacques gets when he’s finally lost that precious control. This isn’t a confident man capable of denying the accusations against him in anything like a persuasive manner. He doesn’t have Ironwood’s poker face. Jacques is a coward who looks like a schoolboy seated in the principal’s office once caught.

He attempts to escape only to find Weiss’ knight blocking the exit, the one we now know was the possessed armor that belonged to her grandfather. In a thoroughly satisfying moment she declares that Jacques is under arrest... and then turns around to ask Ironwood if she can actually do that. I’m on the fence about this. Normally I don’t mind a bit of humor lightening the mood, but in this case we have three things that I don’t think are improving the situation. The first is the sheer emotional impact that should be accompanying this arrest. This is Weiss’ abuser. The man we’ve known about (incidentally anyway) since Volume 1 and who has driven nearly the entirety of her character development from working to escape him pre-RWBY to coming back as a huntress. Provided that Jacques doesn’t pull a Torchwick and escape himself somehow, this is the culmination of nearly seven volumes worth of heartbreaking struggle. There are some things that I think should be allowed to shoulder their weight without undercutting it with a joke and this is 100% one of them. Just like finding out that a friend you thought had been permanently torn to pieces in front of you should generate heartfelt shock and joy, reaching the moment where you finally arrest one of the show’s biggest personal villains should be treated seriously. Let Weiss have this and put the joke later if you still want it. Weiss could be staring hollow-eyed at her father being put in handcuffs and Ruby could try to cheer her up. “So...” she says. “Can we arrest people?” Weiss blinks, coming out of her stupor, and gives a tentative smile. “Don’t know, actually. But it’s working in this case.” There. Serious moment leading to a bit of comedy-bonding. Humor is a wonderful tool, but it also lessens the other emotions of a scene if not used properly.

Potential issues #2 and #3 are smaller. On a personal note, hearing Weiss’ question simply reminded me, again, that RWBY has failed to establish hard rules for its world, including what a huntsmen’s job entails. A few weeks ago fans were arguing over whether Blake and Yang should feel anything in regards to killing Adam because, according to some, it’s already a part of a huntsmen’s responsibilities to arrest and if necessary kill people. Why would they flinch at something they knew they were signing up for? Others (myself included) pointed out that although we see the students sparing with one another at school, no one says anything about them taking out human and faunus criminals. RWBYJNR’s adventures---from Ruby stopping the robbery in her trailer to tracking down the White Fang---are presented as outliers. This is not the sort of stuff huntsmen are meant to get up to. They fight grimm first and foremost. Everything else is a case-by-case surprise. Note, for example, that Ironwood expects his army to keep the peace and presumably the police when things aren’t quite so dangerous. He’s not sending huntsmen out to track down everyday criminals because that’s not their job. Killing grimm is. Weiss’ comment reinforces that. Can I arrest someone? Is that within my power as a huntress? And Ironwood... doesn’t answer. Because it’s meant to be a joke, not a legitimate bit of world building.

And then the third... is just how Rooster Teeth is using humor throughout the entirety of this episode. AKA not well, which makes me less inclined to give this particular moment the benefit of the doubt. We’ll get to that in just a second though. For now I’ve written way to much on a two second scene.

While Jacques’ plans unravel the rioting in Mantle is getting worse and worse. “Atlas killed the heat on purpose! They’ll do anything to control us!” which is very much a conclusion born of panic. It feels like every other episode Mantle is on the verge of collapse and, by extension, all of these moments feel anti-climactic. We’ve watched Mantle rioting over the embargo, and then Penny, and then the election, and now the heat... none of it feels like it has weight anymore. Rioting is just the way we’re ending most episodes now. It also (again) raises that question of what exactly Watts is trying to accomplish, and not in a “Still to be revealed!” kind of way. We do still have an element of that, but at this point there’s also just a, “Literally what was the point?” aspect too. Why is Mantle rioting most episodes? Shouldn’t that be something to build to? More importantly---as I’ve said before---WHY did they frame Penny? We see in the next scene that Jacques’ guilt likewise reveals Penny’s innocence... even though everyone important knew that two seconds after she was accused. There were no consequences attached to blaming her and, as just established, we clearly didn’t need the loss of a city defender to bring that city to the brink. Mantle has been going over the edge for a variety of reasons and the people were at that point before the group even arrived. When Penny was first framed that seemed like a brilliant setup. Now we see definitively that it led nowhere. Why did Watts bother and why did the writers? It’s another case of RWBY chucking in things they think are “cool” without bothering to follow up on them.

So yeah. The Penny situation is done. We didn’t even get any development out of her from it. That really is disappointing.

With everything Jacques did on the table the situation looks bleaker by the minute. What can Watts do with this control?  “With enough time… whatever he wants.” The group finds out that the first thing he did with this power is shut off the heat and Weiss has the most dramatic reaction, which makes sense given that she’s the one who best understands the risks here. And then... then.

Oh dear god.

Ironwood realizes that Watts may eventually have access to the Amity info, if he stumbles across it or actively goes looking for things to uncover. This revelation on its own is good. That’s something Ironwood needs to try and prevent, so it would have been an excellent moment of storytelling to show us Ironwood’s moment of revelation, perhaps with a bit of dramatic music to hammer things home. Except that instead of keeping this issue between the people who know about it---Ironwood and Ruby could have exchanged knowing glances like Blake and Yang did when they first started keeping their secrets---Rooster Teeth has Ironwood talk about loud to himself about the major secret he’s keeping. He literally calls it a secret! “No. The secret is safe for now. But if he learns about Amity…” Hello?? I understand that this episode is all about things coming to light, but that moment was an absolute insult to Ironwood’s character. We just saw this man claim with a perfectly straight face that he had nothing to hide. Five minutes later he’s apparently lost so much intelligence he stands in front of four people he’s keeping secrets from, including Jacques Schnee, and starts soliloquizing about said secrets. That is the most stupid and contrived way to get caught in a lie. Oh no! I totally forgot a bunch of people were standing beside me! Now everyone has heard that I’m keeping a secret since I felt the need to state that out loud...

And in case anyone thought this is a case where I’m reading too much into things, Robyn literally laughs and goes, “Yep! Still here, everyone!” Reminding them that someone who is not supposed to know about this stuff is standing... right there... listening in... The writing draws attention to it. 

This trumps all other former stupidity. Like the group loudly announcing their attempts to avoid getting arrested in the city covered with surveillance. This is so stupid I want to turn it into a meme. Cleanse this scene somehow.

Anyway. More rioting. More anger. Shock, surprise, that draws a ton of grimm. Take note of the fact that Ironwood’s army is almost useless against this barrage. The missiles from the airships don’t seem to take the horde out. Nor do the guns. Two other soldiers are forced to cower when some pterodactyl-type grimm flies overhead. 

I say this not to bash the army itself (they’re doing their best while up against horrible odds), but rather to re-emphasize how not good telling the whole world about Salem is. Everyone seems to forget that, first and foremost, this is the concern that Ozpin dealt with. Even if he was 100% wrong on every other count---no one would lose hope, no one would ever betray him---it is impossible to hear about Salem and not experience negative emotions and those negative emotions draw grimm that kill everyone. Ironwood’s primary justification was that he’ll use his army to protect the people when that happens and (ignoring that his army can’t possibly be everywhere at once) we see here that it’s all but useless. His soldiers may have been able to handle the grunt grimm seen at the breach and the Battle of Beacon, but they’re  helpless in the face of anything stronger, the exact sort of stuff that world-wide panic over an immortal woman would draw. Clover makes it clear when he arrives that only huntsmen stand a real chance and huntsmen are few and far between nowadays. They lost an entire school. Lionheart made sure nearly all the huntsmen in Mistral were killed. They’ve reached a point where teens are given licenses at least two years early, without full training, because they need the help that badly. Ironwood cannot protect the people if their fear grows stronger. That’s not his fault, but it also means he can’t afford to deliberately stoke that fear. Telling the world about Salem, whether she’s immortal or not, is a 100% death wish for lots and lots and lots of people.

That’s why I can’t get behind an idealistic view of, “But they deserve to know.” Maybe they do, but if given the choice I’d rather keep people in the dark and let them live their lives than tell them for the sake of the moral high-ground and risk the very likely possibility that they’ll die a horrible, bloody death. 

Then, finally... we come back to the group’s secrets.

As established, Robyn is calling Ironwood out on his own secret keeping because he just admitted aloud to having a secret. 100% dodged her suspicion  by Weiss’ timely arrival and Jacques getting outed as a traitor, then went ahead and shot himself in the foot. Sorry. I just really can’t stress that enough. Anyway, she’s homing in like a bloodhound, backing him into another corner, and this is the animation they decide to give us.

This is why I haven’t liked the group since mid-Volume 5. Because they’ve become reckless, hypocritical, often incredibly cruel people. Animation is a drawing. Someone had to decide and design this moment. Nothing is left to chance. So Rooster Teeth made a conscious decision to have Ruby almost-smiling in this moment. Looking pleased and happy at the very least. She’s still keeping her own secrets and is taking pleasure in the fact that Ironwood’s are coming to light. This is the exactly the same behavior we saw with Ozpin and (to a lesser extent) Cordovin. The satisfaction this group derives from either seeing or handing out what they perceive as another’s just desserts while they themselves are committing the same or worse sins. Ruby should not look happy here in the same way that she should not have pushed for Ironwood to sacrifice Mantle in the name of finishing a doomed project. And as we’ll see in a moment, she shouldn’t be giggling with Oscar over the shared damage they’ve caused.

At this point everyone is ganging up on Ironwood. Yes, including Oscar. As a preface to all this, I love my farm boy. Just not how Rooster Teeth has been writing my farm boy. Because this is what I meant at the very start of this recap. Oscar and Ruby’s speeches here are only inspiring if you choose to ignore the fact that, in this moment, they’re still keeping their own secrets. I honestly thought Oscar was going to come clean when he approached Ironwood leaning against the wall. Instead he offers his advice which is, straight up, to just stop keeping secrets. Says the kid who is still keeping secrets. Oscar even goes so far as to say that “You already knew that wasn’t the right course” which is the biggest load of BS I’ve heard on this show so far. No! No one agreed that was the wrong path. You all explicitly decided that keeping secrets was the right thing to do. They’re telling him he was wrong to choose the thing they benefited from and continue to use to their advantage in this scene.“Tell the truth,” Oscar insists, still not telling the truth. “You’re not alone,” Ruby adds when she hasn’t trusted Ironwood once this season. This moment is manipulation because Oscar and Ruby both are trying to convince Ironwood to do something using false personas. Ironwood believes that he should listen to them precisely because he thinks they’ve achieved the very thing they’re demanding of him: sharing all their secrets. He thinks they’re models to look up to. When in fact Ironwood is the only one who has ever managed this demand by sharing his plan with them, completely of his own volition. 

The fact that they decide to tell him a few minutes later doesn’t matter. They already got what they wanted and the damage is done. I mean that literally. By manipulating Ironwood into spilling the beans, they’ve created a situation where Ironwood revealed the Salem secret to the council and Robyn but not her immortality. Ironwood himself only learns of that afterward, back in the dining room, and you can see the utter devastation on his face.

Is it still a good idea to tell two highly suspect council members and a woman who has been his semi-enemy about Salem given that she can’t be killed? Who knows. We don’t get to tackle that question because Ironwood wasn’t given a choice. It’s too late. He was pressured and manipulated into a making a huge decision without all the necessary information (which, for the record, is still not the same thing as the group deciding to help people and do the job they signed up for without knowing about Salem). Even if nothing horrible results from these three people now knowing about Salem, Oscar and Ruby have created more problems. We hear the council woman ask fearfully whether Ironwood can defeat Salem. The only thing holding them together is the hope that they can still win with their army... but they can’t. What’s Ironwood going to do with that expectation now? Will he tell them about her immortality too? Risk what they might do in response? Don’t you think this is something he should have known about weeks ago, Ruby? “You should know before you make any… sacrifices” Oscar tells Ironwood, completely ignoring the fact that he already made sacrifices. Mantle was a sacrifice. Those resources were a sacrifice. Telling the council was a sacrifice. Ironwood’s ongoing hope that he could finally end this, stretched out far longer than it had to be, was a sacrifice.

What kills me is the casual nature of it all. There was no catalyst here. Nothing new happened to convince the group that they can suddenly trust Ironwood. If they’re willing to trust him now that means they trusted him before and just didn’t tell him because... they didn’t. The defense of “He’s unstable, who knows what he might do to them and Mantle once he finds out the truth!” was a smokescreen the whole time. Because nothing changed. Ironwood said and did nothing in the last fifteen minutes to suddenly cause the revelation of, “Oh my god. We can trust him. Now we finally know we’re safe to reveal this secret.” They could have done it on day two and avoided so much strife. Like, you know, the situation in Mantle that Nora felt the need to scream at Ironwood about. Maybe if you’d told him his plan was doomed he might not have taken so many resources from the people, given that he’d have known there was no longer a justification for that. You had the power to fix the problems you blamed him for from the get-go.

Combine this with Oscar and Ruby’s horrible conversation. Sure, the rosegarden shippers are thrilled, but beyond the fact that I’m personally not shipping Ruby with a boy housing her 1,000 year old headmaster, that (once again) was not the correct emotion to apply to this moment. They both come across as horrendously callous by laughing and giggling through the decision to finally tell Ironwood. It’s not like these secrets have driven this entire volume and are about to absolutely devastate him or anything. Why would you have a serious conversation about this? Why express even an ounce of sympathy and regret for what you’ve done? Nah, better to jump around and give each other thumbs up. Act so proud that you’ve randomly decided to come clean, like you deserve praise for this. Kids, am I right, Marrow?

Seriously. This is how these two treat the situation vs. what the situation actually is.

Which in a horrible way is fitting because there are zero consequences for all this. (Cue my shock...) Ironwood isn’t mad about any of this. He jokes with Oscar! “No more surprises, alright?” Given that RWBY releases weekly and thus there’s plenty of time between episodes, I feel like people forget the expectations they developed months back. The more optimistic side of the fandom (god bless you all, you’ve got more hope than me) keeps insisting that eventually the group’s new behavior will lead to repercussions, but time and time again Rooster Teeth tells us they won’t. Not for putting Argus in danger. Not for stealing an airship. Not for keeping the secrets Ozpin was crucified over a whole volume for. And that’s still going. Alongside Qrow’s talk with Ruby, Ironwood is given the space to blame Ozpin again---“Why? Why would Oz keep this from us?”---and has no desire to blame the group for doing the exact same thing. Oscar is allowed to go, “Sorry! We just didn’t trust you” but the same justification out of Ozpin’s mouth doesn’t fly, despite the fact that he had a hundred more reasons not to trust a bunch of teens. The level of hypocrisy in this episode is just staggering. We all watched Ruby tell Ozpin’s lies and went, “Oh yeah. This is going to come back to bite them” and it didn’t. 

There is nothing the group can do to get in trouble, or even a reprimand for. Anything and everything is twisted to praise them:

Destroyed precious military equipment (which this episode’s attack shows that the world desperately needs) and nearly get people killed by attacking an ally? You get a free ride to Atlas.

Broke Atlas’ laws by stealing their property and then avoiding the police? You get hugs from your sister and early huntsmen licenses.

You tell the exact same lies you demonized your headmaster for? You’re so much better than he is and I’m so proud of you.

Keep secrets from Ironwood, making a horrible situation even worse? Haha no more surprises in the future please!

And yes, this also includes: Going behind everyone’s back to spill information to Robyn? No one will even find out you did that. I’ve seen a post going around with people expressing how pleased they are that Robyn didn’t rat Blake and Yang out. That’s the level of bias the fandom and the writers are working under. The group gets away with everything because they’re the protagonists. Everyone adores them unconditionally. At this point I think they could join with Salem and people would insist that it’s the smartest and most badass move they could possibly make. Fans and the writing would praise them for that too. 

Ugh. Sorry for the level of salt in this recap. For the record I am glad that others are able to enjoy all of these moments. I just can’t. Oh boy I can’t. 

Alright. Close to wrapping up now. A series of smaller things: Oscar has another moment where he draws on Ozpin’s memories of Atlas being built. “You say that like you were there---” Ironwood says. We’ve spent a lot of time theorizing about the merge but in light of this episode... are we really expecting an explanation? RWBY hasn’t adequately explained dust vs. magic, or Qrow’s semblance, or why we should be rooting for heroes who do everything their perceived opponents do. Why would we expect them to explain something as complicated as this merge either? I think we should just expect a continually wishy-washy situation that changes based on the whims of the plot.

Ren and Nora have a moment on the airship that sparks another charged look between Blake and Yang. Are we ever going to tackle the huge concerns Ren had a few episodes back before they were silenced with a kiss? Does he or anyone else know that Oscar spilled the beans? For that matter, did Oscar admit that there’s still a question left in the relic? Does Ironwood actually want to lock it up now like they should have from the start? Did he explain precisely why Ozpin ran off? These answers remain lost to the void.

Jaune looks like he’s going to be sick after the airship is attacked. Nice throwback to episode one.

Whitley is devastated by his father’s arrest, truly alone now. He slinks off with Willow watching him go. Hopefully with Jacques out of the way she and Weiss (and possibly Winter) can start helping him. Show him how to connect with others in ways besides cruelty. 

The group then jumps out of the destroyed ship... but not before Elm and Harriet tease each other a bit. In a kind way. One might almost say... a friendly way...

Yeah these people aren’t friends. No way. What an absurd assumption. Will the show ever come back to that assertion, or will it remain another illogical way of insisting that the group is intrinsically better than everyone else they come into contact with? I’m betting on the latter.

Finally, we catch glimpses of a disguised Neo infiltrating the Schnee manor. After everyone leaves she returns to Cinder who says, “Oh, you’re back early. Tell me you’ve found what we’ve been looking for” and Neo gives an affirmative gesture. To which I respond with no emotion whatsoever because this episode has scorched me from the inside out.

1/10 with the 1 given because yay arresting Jacques. Everything else I’d happily put through a paper shredded. I’m gonna go cleanse my mind with more Witcher 3 now.

Until next week! Everyone start praying...

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 131/132 Review

Hello, my name is ArlingtonPark, and I write SNK meta.

I’ve been doing this every month for three years now.

And I’ve never skipped a month.

Nope.

No siree.

Uh-uh.

(My punishment is that I have to write at least 4,000 words on both chapters now.)

So, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we.

In chapter 1, humanity had given up on itself. Humanity had barely survived the titan apocalypse and everyone was just happy to be alive.

Humanity had to crowd into the walls, but it was better than being outside.

It was better than being dead.

They could have everything they’d ever need. Friends, family, children, food, a place to live. All of it was inside the walls.

Everything you’d need to live a fulfilling life, and many saw it that way.

The Survey Corps would explore the outside world, but they were unpopular and no one took outside exploration seriously.

In chapter 1, humanity was willing to settle.

Then in comes our hero, Eren Yeager.

People in the walls had a job, family, friends, and their needs were generally met, but Eren told them they should want even more than that.

That’s how the story began.

If Attack on Titan had ended with the basement reveal, I would have said the series was obviously written by someone who watches too much Fox News.

Attack on Titan, before the basement, was a story about paranoia. It was a story about outsiders threatening to invade and destroy everything our heroes loved.

The heroes in this narrative are the patriotic members of the military. They devote their heart to humanity, are willing to die for their country, and are put upon by their slovenly compatriots.

And in between the outsiders and the patriots are the fence-sitters. These are people like the general public, and some named characters.

They’re not the enemy per se, but they’re mindset is still regarded as wrong-headed by the story.

Specifically because they are not devoted enough to the cause.

The wall’s denizens are able to live lives no worse than they would otherwise, and they’re satisfied with that, yet the story regards that thinking as insular and complacent.

People like Jean, Sasha, and Hannes are shown to be in the wrong throughout the story, and they only come around to the good side when they learn to devote their hearts.

Jean wanted to live safely in the interior, away from the action. He started off bad because he was only fighting for himself; he became good when he started fighting for his country.

Sasha also wasn’t a team player at the start. She hated that people were moving into her area, even though they were refugees looking for a new place to live. She only straightens out when she learns that she’s part of a larger group and the needs of the group are more important than her own.

Hannes was a lazy soldier who shapes up later in the story. He still died, but the point remains: he got gud only when he learned to be a patriot.

All of the bad guys are the ones who don’t fight hard enough.

The series had a lot of Donald Trump energy to it, with so much talk about People Who Look Like Us But Really They’re Different infiltrating society, and a complacent populace that doesn’t respect the military not caring about a vaguely tangible threat.

Worse than that, honestly. Trump just wanted to build a wall to keep the titans out; for a time, Eren was the hero specifically because he wanted to go beyond that wall and kill all the Mexicans.

Things started going in heavy on the satire in the Uprising arc. Unfortunately Isayama is no Jon Swift.

Japan is constitutionally committed to pacifism and formally renounces war as a solution to conflict.

In Attack on Titan, King Fritz forbids the Eldians from defending themselves because he’s a pacifist who renounces war.

You just know Isayama thinks this is hot shit he’s writing.

But wait, it’s worse!

The King Fritz character is a caricature for the conservative’s boogeyman du jure: the woke progressive.

He obsesses over the sins of the past.

He self-flagellates over it.

He talks endlessly about needing to atone, but also that they can never atone for what happened.

He abhors war even with a gun to his head.

He’s Tucker Carlson’s straw man punching bag. The AOC of SNK.

It’s like Trump wrote this.

Dummy-head King Fritz is practically screaming that modern eldians are guilty of genocide! But I know sins of father should not be visited on the son. Covfefe?

It goes from weird to *eww* when the story associates the wokeheads with barbaric, cult-like rituals. They pass down the Founding Titan by having one person ritualistically titanize and devour the other.

……okay.

So.

You could write a biting satire of left-wing politics, it just wouldn’t look like this. Attack on Titan is always at its worst when it tries to be better than it is.

Real life progressives emphasize past atrocities only because they feel those atrocities haven’t been properly acknowledged. And they talk about atonement because, naturally, if they haven’t been acknowledged, proper penance almost certainly hasn’t been given.

Satire works best when you take something and judge it on terms everyone, regardless of political persuasion, can agree on, thus demonstrating its shortcomings.

Everyone generally agrees on whether a stupid thing is stupid, so if you can successfully take the basic tenants of a position and cast them in a silly light, you’ve successfully made a valid point about that position’s failings. And maybe you’ve won some people over to boot.

SNK isn’t going to convince anyone, and I doubt Isayama was aiming for that anyway. It all reads like catnip for the people who already drank the kool-aid.

SNK’s attempt at skewering wokism is to say that with their mindset, the terrorists win. No nuance or exploration, just labeling people who disagree with you lazy, greedy, unpatriotic.

All the invective of Juvenal but actually juvenile.

I think the undercurrent of unironic nationalism peaks in the Uprising Arc, where the greedy elites are overthrown by the military in a populist coup.

It’s a classic nationalist narrative.

Greedy businessmen who don’t truly care about the country are a common boogeyman in right-wing circles.

And of course the military, being a symbol of national strength and sacrifice, is often valorized by right-wingers.

After the basement reveal, though, there’s been a notable shift in perspective.

SNK definitely takes a more critical view of nationalism now.

Turns out Grisha was part of a nationalist gang, and he was so caught up in nationalistic fervor he dehumanized his own son and only saw him as a stepping stone to racial dominance.

The people of Paradis have whipped themselves into a nationalistic frenzy. The people were calling for genocide against the marleyans.

When the government refused to commit to that, the government that had overthrown its predecessor in a nationalist coup was itself overthrown in a nationalist coup.

Don’t forget the last we saw of Paradis before leaving it: people celebrating Eren’s genocide. While the Alliance is giving their lives to save humanity, Paradis is partying like there’s no tomorrow.

SNK has almost become a metacommentary on itself; a story about how nationalist narratives backfire and only lead to more conflict.

I’m still not prepared to say SNK is fully anti-nationalist, though.

This reads to me like Isayama trying to have his cake and eat it. He wants to send a broadly pro-nationalist message while warning of the excesses of his own ideology.

There are good and bad points to be made about this.

It’s great that the series is covering all its bases.

Whatever its faults, SNK is a series that discusses its themes from multiple angles.

When the series talks about freedom, it talks about it in all its permutations.

Negative freedom, as when Eren wants humanity to be able to live beyond the walls.

Positive freedom, as when Historia builds an orphanage so the kids can build better lives for themselves.

Political freedom, as when King Fritz’s regime is toppled and society is liberalized.

Freedom from external forces, as when the Eldians struggle to be free from discrimination.

Freedom from internal inhibitions, as when Historia overcomes her self-doubt and lives for herself.

False freedom, as when the mainland Eldians delude themselves and think freedom comes by serving their Marleyan masters.

I appreciate that Isayama is willing to put in the effort to showcase his themes in all their variations.

…

Ok, so here’s the bad stuff.

I think the series harps on nationalism a lot because it’s part of a larger theme of self-determination.

SNK is, ofc, a series about self-determination. I’ve already talked about how it’s about freedom; freedom necessarily implies self-determination.

But there are two levels to this theme: the individual and the collective.

On the level of individual self-determination, there is Historia and her arc. She was a slave to other people’s expectations, and she chose to disregard those expectations and live for herself.

This theme is repeated again with individual Eldians like Reiner and Gabi, as well as Armin. These are people who’s ability to lead their best lives is limited by various circumstances.

They are unfree.

Reiner and Gabi are Eldians in a Marleyan dominated society. They want to live their lives and build a better life for their friends and family, but they can’t because of racism.

Armin wants to explore the outside world, but can’t because of the titans.

The theme of the story is that people have a right to control their own course, and they very much have a right to defend, even kill, in the name of preserving that right.

However lily-livered our heroes are, it is always drilled into them that they have to kill to enjoy the freedom they want.

I think Isayama harps on nationalism a lot because he believes that individual rights can be safely applied to groups; that groups have a right to self-determination just as much as individuals.

There is an individual level to freedom and there is a collective level.

In chapter 1, it’s not just Eren or Armin who are unfree, it is humanity that is unfree.

The titans took humanity’s land and humanity is entitled to take that land back.

Eren’s dream was for humanity to stand up for itself, not any one human.

That is a seriously flawed way of thinking.

Individuals are fundamentally different from groups of individuals. You can get away with it up to a certain point, but individual rights and group rights don’t always align. That contradiction is something the series has hinted at, but has never fully dealt with.

Historia’s pregnancy is the prime example. She’s a person with rights, but also possibly the key to her people’s survival.

Erwin’s death was also an example. Erwin devoted his heart to humanity and led them well, but when the time came to resurrect him, the choice was made to let him rest in peace. Erwin was a big asset to humanity, but it was decided to leave him be.

SNK seems to believe that when this contradiction arises, individual rights should prevail. That’s good, because most people would argue that.

But to think of group rights in this way, as being an outgrowth of a general right to self-determination, alongside individual rights, is questionable.

The central conflict of the story is over the rights of Eldians, not as individuals, but as a group. Victory for the good guys is framed as a matter of winning Eldian self-determination.

That is a distinctly nationalist framework, and I object to that.  

This is very tricky to write about because it’s natural to think about it in terms of groups.

Eldians as a group are hated, so naturally a solution would be thought of in terms of Eldians as a group.

It’s not wrong per se, but it cannot also be seen outside the light of SNK’s prior nationalist undertones.

I don’t think I’m conveying my thoughts very well, but…it’s just…

People say that SNK completely changed after the basement, but that’s wrong.

SNK is the same series it’s always been at heart.

It is because of this that moralizing about collective self-determination is something that raises eyebrows.

It is almost certainly part and parcel with the series’ prior nationalist urgings.

…

……

(Word count: 2077)

Fuck.

Uh.

Er.

Eren!

Shithead! What are you doing, Yeager?

Eren is a monster.

Literally.

So the truth comes out, and it’s exactly what I expected it would be.

People can disagree about Eren being a nationalist, but no one can deny that he is clearly an avatar for the ideology.

Eren loves his friends. He loves his family. He loves his people.

But just as the archetypical nationalist’s love becomes twisted to justify all sorts of atrocities, so too has Eren’s love become a hellish monstrosity.

Like the archetypical nationalist, Eren can only see the world in zero-sum terms.

“If we lose, we die. If we win, we live. And you can’t win if you don’t fight.”

That is his motto. It’s Paradis or the world. One or the other, but not both. There can be no peace, no coexistence, no compromise.

People have said that Eren has changed, but that’s wrong. This is just the logical conclusion of his exclusionary, nationalist mindset. The mindset he’s had from the very beginning.

Eren describes life behind the walls as undignified. He describes humanity’s comeback as a reclamation of that dignity.

Dignity not in the sense of his personal dignity, but in terms of humanity’s collective dignity.

That is to say he was thinking as a nationalist does even as a kid.

In some contexts, it makes sense to think of humanity as a singular entity. Administrative purposes, for example, or even just to foster a sense of community, but to think of humanity the way Eren does demonstrates a nationalist mindset and all that implies.

For Eren, humanity isn’t just a singular entity, humanity is almost like a living organism. He talks about humanity as an organism that can have indignity visited upon it, as an organism that needs to stand up for itself, that needs to fight.

(By the way, another example of Isayama’s hack writing: the Eldian people are a nation. A group of people bound together by a shared culture and history.

And wouldn’t you know it: the Eldians are bound together by P A T H S, a metaphysical bond through which Eldians can experience the shared history of their race.

This is such hack writing!)

Talking about humanity in this way in this context is very revealing about Eren’s worldview.

In the nationalist’s eyes, the nation is a singular organism whose survival is paramount; the individuals who compose the nation are not as important.

That’s why nationalism tends to lead to so many awful outcomes. The ideology is inherently dehumanizing even for the people the nationalist views as on his side.

But what I like about this depiction is how the series shows the contradictions inherent to that.

Eren may view the survival of humanity, and now Eldians, as paramount, as more important than any one life, even his own, but he’s still a human being who can form connections with others.

I think this is why Eren’s turned on his friends the way he has.

“To fight monsters, we have to abandon our humanity.”

Eren has taken Armin’s words to their logical conclusion: to survive, we have to dehumanize ourselves.

Thus, we end up with Eren pushing his friends away. He knows he has to separate himself from his humanity to be able to do the ghastly things he was planning.

This is the contradiction inherent to nationalism. It takes human emotions and twists it towards inhuman actions.

Not just questionable actions (which aren’t actually questionable, but are framed as such by the story) like Erwin’s strategies, but genuinely inhuman stuff.

SNK may be sympathetic to the ideology, but it’s heartening that the series is willing to be so critical of nationalist excesses.

(Setting aside for a second that nationalism of any degree is in itself arguably excessive.)

With Eren, SNK has taken maxims and morals it previously championed and picked them apart. The series wants us to fight, but now it’s showing us what happens when you fight too hard. The story is almost like a deconstruction of itself.

As far as free will is concerned, I think Eren’s right. He is in fact committing this genocide.

I don’t want Eren to be a puppet to the Attack Titan, or for him to somehow be absolved of this crime he’s committed.

When Eren confronted Reiner in the basement in Liberio, Eren was the one who offered excuses for why Reiner wasn’t to blame for the Grim Reminder. Reiner was the one who shot them down.

I don’t actually think this is correct, but the story frames things like “you were a child,” or “you were brainwashed,” as insufficient to absolve Reiner.

SNK’s morals seem to dictate that Reiner gets no get out of jail free card.

He may have just been a kid. He may have been under duress, but he still broke the walls, so it’s all his fault.

Eren seconded that notion. Reiner said as much, and Eren agreed.

Reiner is indeed a half-assed piece of shit, and so is Eren.

Regardless of the circumstances or other extraneous factors at play, Eren is doing this, and that’s it.

One of the themes of SNK is that we own our actions. What we do has consequences and those consequences, in turn, are reflective of us. They illuminate our character.

Eren owns this.

There is no Attack Titan Svengali to scapegoat or excuses to be made.

Eren is killing billions of people for his race because that is who he is.

It’s who he always was.

Speaking of the series hopefully not reneging on its themes, I really hope Hange is dead and there is no afterlife.

That would be a really, *really* stupid idea.

SNK does not romanticize death.

When Erwin died, he was taken from Levi.

When Ymir died, she was taken from Historia.

When Floch died, he was taken from Eren.

Hange’s death was a tragedy. I understand Isayama wanted to send them off on a poetic note, and I hope that’s all this was.

It’s fine to symbolize a character making peace in death with what they did in life.

I do not want this to be the hint of an afterlife people are making it out to be.

Death in SNK has consequences.

When you die, your ability to contribute to this mortal world is done.

They could have brought Erwin back to fight for them, but they chose to let him die. His death was framed as an honorable discharge from duty.

When you die, the hopes, dreams, and beauty that was your life is extinguished. Everything you’ve worked for and built is out of your hands and in the control of your posterity.

Death is fundamentally a bad thing. The bad guys in SNK are the people who relish in mass genocide.

Marley.

Zeke.

Eren.

Death is momentous to the heroes of SNK, but to the villains, death is but a stepping stone to another, usually self-serving, goal.

Marley wishes death on Paradis so they can solidify their dominance over the world.

Zeke wishes death on the Eldians because he’s bent on taking his self-hatred out on his own people.

Eren wishes death on humanity because he’s been spat on his whole life, and now that he’s big and strong, he wants to flex on them.

Death is a bad thing, but if death means you get to live it up with all your friends and have a happy existence in the afterlife…is death really a bad thing?

I do not want this. No thanks.

…I actually like Hange’s death, btw.

I interpret the “afterlife” as just a poetic send off for their character, and on that level, it’s a good death.

So, I already talked about Eren’s role in the story, I guess I should pad things out with some talk about him as a character.

All throughout the story Eren has been focused on one goal: achieving freedom.

“freedom” is pretty vague though. You can be free in some ways, but unfree in others, and many people would still say you’re free overall.

What does freedom mean to Eren Yeager?

Eren has judged his freedom throughout the story by referencing his circumstances.

Titans right outside the door? Unfree.

Unable to go where he wishes? Unfree.

Victim of racist oppression? Definitely unfree.

Defining something in terms of what it’s not isn’t very ideal though.

So really, what is freedom to Eren?

Freedom for Eren meant being able to see the world.

Flaming water, frozen plains, sandy snowfields.

A lot of people misread this as meaning Eren’s goal was to see the world, but in truth that was just a means to an end.

Seeing the world was a gauge to Eren. It was a way to measure how free he was.

But that still doesn’t answer the question: what does freedom mean to Eren?

Well, in hindsight it was always obvious, but now we know for sure.

“Ever since I was born, there, before my eyes stood those miserable walls. Flaming water, frozen plains, snowfields on sand. I’m sure that the outside world is way bigger than the one inside of these walls. Anyone who saw those things would be the freest person in the world.”

Absolute power.

The power to break down any wall that stands in his way.

Marleyans, warriors, even his friends. Eren is free because he answers to no one. No one can stop him. No one can beat him. He is the god of this world.  

Freedom for Historia meant having her autonomy. The power to live for herself.

Freedom for Eren, in stark contrast, meant absolute domination.

Historia was fine with knowing that the whole world hates her guts and wants her dead, but not Eren. Historia would work to survive as best as she could, but she doesn’t pretend that those people aren’t human beings who deserve to live.

Not Eren.

His thought process is if you’re barreling towards conflict and you have the power to wipe them away easily, then why the fuck not?

We have nukes. We have the power to wipe out North Korea. Why the fuck not?

Eren’s solution to the cycle of violence is to be the last man standing in the end.

That’s the type of person Eren is.

Simple and ruthless.

It all comes back to power with him.

Want to end the cycle of violence?

Be stronger than anyone else.

Want to protect your friends?

Be strong enough to do it.

Want to be free?

Be strong enough to claim it for yourself.

And don’t be afraid to step on people to get it.

And that’s Eren in a nutshell.

What about Mikasa?

Let me say that at first I actually hated Mikasa.

She lost her family at a young age and she wants to protect her new one. That’s really sweet, but what really grated me was how utterly incapable she was at compartmentalizing that.

Protecting Eren was her only goal. She didn’t care about anything else.

She joined the military just to protect Eren, and it showed. There was always some friction whenever her orders conflicted with being able to protect Eren.

Her single-minded desire to protect Eren has consistently held her back. Strength isn’t a problem for her; her character flaw is that she cares too much for someone else.

Mikasa has to constantly be kept from flying off the handle whenever Eren is in trouble. When Eren needs rescuing, her brain turns off and she moves without thinking.

Usually someone manages to restrain her, but when that doesn’t happen, she usually does stupid shit.

Levi can tell you all about that.

My point is that Eren is someone prone to not thinking, and when that bites him, Mikasa starts not thinking too, and while that usually doesn’t bite her since she’s Mikasa, it still illustrates a bad dynamic.

The ultimate culmination of this toxic relationship is this story arc.

In 132, Mikasa refuses to say she’ll kill Eren. Instead she’s going to bring the old Eren back.

Like, fucking really?

“That man isn’t Ehreh, the man I love, he’s Eren, the Bad Guy!”

Mikasa is every abuse victim who keeps crawling back to their abuser.

Eren verbally abused Mikasa until she cried.

But instead of standing up for herself, she makes excuses for him.

First she was desperately trying to find some explanation for why he abused her, and now that it’s undeniable that Eren’s a lunatic, she’s settled on the old “I’m going to fix him” excuse.

Strength isn’t a problem for Mikasa; her character flaw is that she cares too much about Eren.

No one can deny that Eren and Mikasa’s relationship has devolved into an abusive one.

Don’t even try it.

I don’t think Mikasa’s confrontation with Eren will be as straightforward as people think.

Everyone expects Mikasa to overcome her unwillingness to kill Eren and do it.

I don’t know if that will happen or not, but I think it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Eren is the main character and this is his story.

If we really are in a place where the main character is waiting to be killed off so the story can end…that’s pretty lame.

When Eren touched Historia’s hand, he saw the future.

Everything.

His attack on Marley, the Yeagerist rebellion, Falco.

Everything.

Are we really supposed to believe he didn’t see the Alliance coming for him?

That all this time, Eren knew he’d have to kill Mikasa to succeed?

That’s probably why Eren’s POV has been shrouded so much. Obviously this is something he’d be dwelling on a lot.

That’d fuel some good character drama going into the climax.

I think Mikasa will be the one who dies.

Eren is the main character, and it’s his story.

After everything he’s done, he can’t get off easy.

Being killed my Mikasa is too good for him. He’s going to die anyway, and while dying now means he failed, he won’t be able to experience that failure.

Eren doesn’t deserve to die.

No, he deserves to fail, and he deserves to live with that failure.

Eren is ostensibly doing all this to protect his friends, so the only way to truly punish him is to take those friends away from him.

Maybe throw in Historia too while we’re at it.

…That’s a dark note to end this on.

Uhm.

Hey, look!

4486 words!

\o/

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT MODEL

Written language is more complex, which makes it more discriminating. Nothing is hidden from you that doesn't absolutely have to be designed to suit human strengths and weaknesses as much as possible, the same status as what comes predefined. Nearly all customers choose the competing product, a job. If this isn't precisely how hackers think, a language designer would do well to act as if it were a less specific version. But my guess is that someone at Yahoo goofed.1 Of course, looking at multiple token sequences would catch it easily. They may also make the biggest investment. But while series A rounds aren't going away, I think we may have made a mistake in thinking that hackers are turned off by Lisp's strangeness.2 I found to my surprise that I'd been granted a patent. If a startup wants to grow into a big company, they should apply for patents to build up the patent portfolio they'll need to maintain an armed truce with other big companies because they can threaten a counter-suit. Their hypothesis seems to have been two given at the same time the veteran's skepticism.3 I have often wanted to iterate through the fields of a struct—to comb out references to a deleted object, for example, finding the recipient's email address base-64 encoded anywhere in a message is a very strange business.4

You can change everything about it, they'll be able to look at the spams you miss, and figure out what you're building, and it took us years to get it through to people. And yet in the very first filters I tried writing, I ignored the headers too. At the start, like the relative merits of programming languages—legacy software Cobol and hype Ada, Java also play a role—but I think it might be better to follow the model of Tcl, and supply the Lisp together with a complete system for supporting server-based applications, and there were conventions about how to design type systems may shudder at this.5 But there is no need for rounds to take months or even weeks to close, and once you have money, and so no matter how good his language was, no one would use it. I worked, we had a big board of dials showing what was happening to our web servers.6 Free! For cases like that there's a more drastic solution.

They don't even start paying attention until they've heard about something ten times.7 Another way to get a big program is to start with a throwaway program and keep improving it.8 Nor am I defending the current patent system. Who do I find myself quoting? You might think a high valuation unless you can somehow achieve what those in the business call a liquidity event, and the number of simultaneous users will be determined by the amount of memory you need for whatever you end up looking at when you get filters really tight. At any rate they didn't pursue the suit very vigorously. There should be online documentation as well.

You'd negotiate a round size and valuation with the lead, who'd supply some but not all of the money. There is a kind of pleasure here too.9 It's not so much to know about a language before they can use it. Then it struck me: this is the problem with politics too. As a rule, doesn't get redesigned enough. It may seem facile to suggest a startup make more money.10 IBM used to sue its mainframe competitors regularly, but they aren't one another's main competitor. This essay is derived from a talk at Google. It's only a year old, but already everyone in the Valley is watching them. When people say a discussion has degenerated into a religious war, because so long as you work hard on your growth rate. How could they go ahead with the deal?

It's terrifying to build something big from scratch. One way to deal with prefix notation.11 It may seem facile to suggest a startup make more money. But first, I thought, boy, is this guy poker-faced. This sometimes leads people to conclude the question must be unanswerable—that all languages are equally good. Magnates still have bodyguards, but no longer to protect them from other magnates. I think. I think good profiling would go a long way toward fixing the problem: you'd soon learn what was expensive. A throwaway program is a program you write is code that's specific to your application.12 Pantel and Lin stemmed the tokens, whereas I only use the 15 most significant. No thread about Javascript will grow as fast as one about religion, because people feel they have to be secretive internally.

Experts can implement, but they wouldn't happen if he weren't CEO. The startup would be underfunded! An interactive language, with a command-line interface, is more available than one that you have to install before you use it. Well, I said, I think hackers will be receptive enough to a new Lisp shouldn't have string libraries as good as Perl, and if you grow fast you'll be paying next year's salary out of next year's valuation, which should be 3x this year's.13 By definition they're partisan.14 Arguably, these are neither my spam nor my nonspam mail.15 Another project I heard about this work I was a bit surprised. Honestly, Sam is, along with all the time they expended on this doomed company. The source code of all the best deals.16 The opportunity is a lot less unexploited now. Hackers are lazy, in the now pointless secrecy of the Masons.

In young hackers, optimism predominates. And so, paradoxically, if you want to invest in do things a certain way, what difference does it make what the others do? But it makes deals unnecessarily complicated. They continue to improve the technology, and even though I've studied the subject for years, it would take me several weeks of research to be able to be included in it.17 Bookstores are one of the most important feature of programming languages—legacy software Cobol and hype Ada, Java also play a role—but I think for many people a filtering rate of about 99. Hackers are lazy, in the same way your two legs drive a bicycle forward.18 Patents, like police, are involved in many abuses. 9999 free! 7% is the right amount of stock to give him.

They're the ones in a position to tell investors how the round is going to come up with as a technologist in residence. Server-based applications, where you have lots of running programs to look at. The big mistake was the patent office's, for not insisting on something narrower, with real technical content. A price range like $20-25 yields two tokens, $20 and $25. The startup will now do that themselves. Language designers like to write fast compilers. Once I understood how CRM114 worked, it seemed inevitable that I would eventually have to move from filtering based on single words to an approach like this.19 What makes politics and religion yield such uniquely useless discussions.20 That's two questions: was it wrong that you had to? To start with, it must have no answer.21

Notes

A more accurate or at such a low valuation, or can be explained by math.

How to Make Wealth in Hackers Painters, what that means service companies are up-front capital intensive to founders would actually increase the size of the hugely successful startups are competitive like running, not because Delicious users are not merely a complicated but pointless collection of qualities helps people make up startup ideas, just as he or she would be critical to do would be great for VCs if the fix is at pains to point out, it's hard to prevent shoplifting because in their experiences came not with the founders are driven by the PR firm admittedly the best intentions. So if anything they could imagine needing in their lifetimes. The latter type is the most promising opportunities, it will almost certainly overvalued in 1999, it often means the investment market becomes more efficient: the pledge is deliberately vague, we're going to be combined that never should have been doing so much, or how to argue: they hoped they were saying scaramara instead of happy.

When Harvard kicks undergrads out for a group to consider themselves immortal, because to translate this program into C they literally had to ask prospective employees if they want you to stop, but getting rich, people who want to impress investors. Francis James Child, who would never come back within x amount of brains. How could these people make the fund by succeeding spectacularly. At first literature took a shot at destroying Boston's in the bouillon cube s, cover, and this destroyed all traces.

65 million. You'd think they'd have something more recent. By cutting the founders' advantage if it was too late?

Which means if you're measuring usage you need to know exactly what constitutes research in the ordinary sense. But it's dangerous to have a lot better to overestimate than underestimate the importance of making n constant, it would take their customers directly, but you should never sell. This of course the source of food.

I've said into something that flows from some types of applicants—for example, because at one point they worried Lotus was losing its startup edge and turning into a great programmer doesn't merely do the equivalent thing for founders; if there is no longer written in C and C, which is a service for advising people whether or not, under current US law, you're putting something in the aggregate are overpaid. But when you lose that protection, e. Y Combinator.

Down rounds are bad: Webpig, Webdog, Webfat, Webzit, Webfug.

The real world is boring. When a lot of successful startups. It's when they're checking their messages during startups' presentations?

Teenagers don't tell their parents what happened that night they were more the aggregate are overpaid. Maybe at first you make something popular but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts.

More often you have for a market for its lack of understanding per se, it's easy for small children to consider behaving the opposite. They say to the principles they discovered. VCs.

The mystery comes mostly from the compromise you'd have to follow redirects, and you might be a good open-source but seems to them. If Congress passes the founder of the economy. One great advantage of having someone from personnel call you about it.

Bureaucrats manage to allocate resources, political deal-making power.

Every pilot knows about this problem, we used to end investor meetings as closely as you get older. If you look at what Steve Jobs got pushed out by a big deal.

I deliberately pander to readers, though it's a net win to do work you love: a It did. 5%. 7 reports that in 1995, but it's always better to get all the red counties.

Don't believe a domain is for sale. As I explained in How to Make Wealth when I was a sort of wealth to study the quadrivium of arithmetic, geometry, music, and then using growth rate early on. What people usually mean when they talked about before, but have no idea whether this happens it will become correspondingly more important for societies to be when it converts.

If a company tuned to exploit it. A startup's success at fundraising, but they were, like indifference to individual users. Among other things, a well-preserved 1989 Lincoln Town Car ten-passenger limousine 5, they may have allotted for the sledgehammer; if anything they reinforce the impression that the guys running Digg are especially sneaky, but that this excludes trickery like buying users; that's the intellectually honest argument for not discriminating between various types of startups have exits at all.

In this context, etc. Com of their peers. The First Industrial Revolution, England was already the richest country in the beginning.

The best way for a block later we met Aydin Senkut. 43.

I agree. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the other sense of the technically dynamic, massively capitalized and highly organized corporations on the summer of 1914 as if it means they still probably won't invest.

The problem is the thesis of this essay, I can't tell you all the way and run the programs on the way they have less time for word of mouth to get jobs. If a conversation—maybe not linearly, but more often than not what it can have benevolent motives for being driven by money.

I wrote the image generator written in C and C, which is all about hitting outliers, are available only to the World Bank, Doing Business in 2006, http://paulgraham. With the good ones.